“The Help” falls into a long line of “problem pictures” running from Elia Kazan’s “Gentleman’s Agreement” and “Pinky” to Paul Haggis’ “Crash.” They’ve proven popular with Oscar voters, but while they purport to expose racism and other prejudices, they often subtly reinforce stereotypes in the guise of dismantling them. Whatever their virtues (usually as showcases for actors), such films tend to suffocate on their own earnestness. That can’t be said for “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” which falls into another tradition. It’s no B-movie, but it moves along like one. Its depiction of the fine line between humanity and the animal kingdom owes a lot to George Romero’s “Living Dead” trilogy and David Cronenberg’s films. Genre films benefit from being irresponsible, which I mean in the most positive sense. By talking about animals and monsters rather than speaking more directly about race and class, they have the freedom to escape from received wisdom about the latter subjects.

Scientist Will Rodman (James Franco) injects several chimps with a wonder drug he believes has the potential to cure Alzheimer’s, a disease his father, Charles (John Lithgow), suffers from. He adopts the baby of a chimp named Bright Eyes, who was killed in a rampage through his bosses’ offices. Charles names the chimp Caesar. Caesar proves to be quite smart, and Charles, after receiving injections of his son’s drug, recovers from Alzheimer’s. However, this happy state of affairs doesn’t last.

Last month also brought the release of a film dealing directly with the civil rights struggle: “The Help.” If “Rise” can be seen as an allegory of the struggles of people of color. “The Help” offers up saintly heroes and easily identifiable villains. No human with any power in “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” is as benign as “The Help’s” white heroine, writer Skeeter (Emma Stone). The African-Americans in “The Help” need her to teach them how to express their anger, with the exception of one maid who serves her former boss a pie made of shit. (The film refers back to this scatological moment obsessively.) It concludes with a fired maid (Viola Davis) deciding to follow in the footsteps of Skeeter, whose book is appropriated from her experience, and become a professional writer, a far cry from the insurrection and mad rush to freedom that close “Rise of the Planet of the Apes.” The kindest interpretation one could place on “The Help” is that it depicts the very early beginnings of a revolt.

“Attack the Block” hit American screens a few short weeks ahead of the riots that tore up England. It’s full of the rage underpinning them, sharing a populist skepticism of authority with “Rise of the Planet of the Apes.” It shows an alien invasion landing in a housing project laden with drugs and guns, and its main narrative arc shows how its gangsta protagonists, who mug a woman in its opening scenes, swerve from being antiheroes to heroes. To them, aliens may be just one of the Man’s tools against poor people, like crack and the widespread availability of weapons, and the police are more of a threat than protection. The alien invasion brings its characters together across gender and racial barriers as they have to protect themselves. It showcases the vibrant, multiracial but violent British urban culture reflected in grime and dubstep music that is missing from most of the British films Americans get to see. While it deals more bluntly with race and class than “Rise,” it uses the metaphor of an alien invasion to address these subjects in fresh ways.

The environmentalism of “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” isn’t particularly new; as critic Manohla Dargis has pointed out, the ’70s brought us disaster films about all kinds of mutant animals. What’s different this time around is the frank misanthropy with which Wyatt indulges it. Caesar’s time in a primate center doesn’t seem much different from a particularly run-down jail. Through bars, he’s fed slop that looks like vomit. He gets to see the worst of the human race, and only the most cold-hearted people would side with us. These scenes don’t go as far as the images of real-life experimental chimp Nim Chimpsky in a hepatitis vaccine lab in James Marsh’s documentary “Project Nim” (released earlier this year), but they justify Caesar’s anger. In a key moment, an orangutan tells Caesar (via sign language) “human no like smart ape.” The film’s action bears this out.

The original “Planet of the Apes” series cast actors in makeup and costumes. “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” uses elaborate CGI instead. Wyatt seamlessly integrates computer-generated apes into real locations. The film wouldn’t have such pull if there wasn’t an element of recognizable reality behind it. It seems to be taking place in our world, not a distant futuristic construct.

“Rise” never idealizes Will, a nice guy whose actions show the limits of liberal good intentions. Initially, he refuses to take care of Caesar and only does so when told that the chimp will be killed otherwise. The two develop a real bond, and the first third of the film is genuinely sweet. However, after Caesar attacks a neighbor arguing with Charles, Will is forced to send Caesar to a primate center. He makes empty promises to free him. By the time he’s finally in a position to do so, Caesar prefers the company of ape society. Worst of all, Will’s “wonder drug” turns out to be deadly to people.

As of the time of this writing, “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” has grossed $160 million in the U.S. It’s gotten mainstream audiences to embrace a startling degree of schadenfreude, cheering on the demise of their on-screen counterparts. It encourages the spectator to recognize that if another intelligent species were to emerge, they would be horrified by our treatment of animals. No doubt some of the film’s audience would reject such an argument if it were stated directly by an animal rights activist or environmentalist, but the filter of metaphor makes it far more palatable. “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” ends with a successful rebellion of the apes, hinting at a full-fledged revolution to come in the sequel. Could Hollywood — or even Indiewood — imagine such an uprising with people in place of apes? You might have to turn to the Egyptian documentary “Tahrir,” about to play the fall film festivals, for its real-life equivalent.

Everyone understands that at the moment the true subject of this election is not the next president but the current one. As the Republicans would have it explicitly, and as the Democrats have agreed implicitly, from the open wound known as the Clinton Conscience there oozes across the body politic an unstaunched flow of moral infection. This past week, when they weren’t squabbling with a Southern California congresswoman over a prospective fundraising bash at the Playboy Mansion — not because the Playboy Mansion is a silly place to be doing anything except silly things, but because it might offend the angels of rectitude passing over the Staples Center — those who run the Al Gore campaign were literally issuing press releases on who was praying with whom how often. At the same time, the party was nominating for vice president a man whose most noteworthy distinction besides his religious faith is his role as President Clinton’s Great Repudiator, except for a moment last week when, before an audience of clergy, Clinton became his own great repudiator.

When all the various candidates from Gore to George W. Bush to Richard Cheney to Joseph Lieberman allude to the president’s immorality, to be precise they mean his sexual misbehavior, since they can mean nothing else. After eight years in which the most investigated chief executive of all time was hounded to little avail by special prosecutors, independent counsels, inquisitorial congressional committees and every major newspaper in the country about an array of alleged transgressions from crooked real-estate deals to the strange violent deaths of close advisors, blow jobs and the lies told about them are what remain. Let it be acknowledged these are not minor. The president did a shitty thing to his wife, and what he did to his country wasn’t so hot either. Dispatching Cabinet members across the country to defend what he knew to be indefensible was craven to say the least; and if one might advance some moral justification for lying in response to profoundly unjust questions that violate basic freedoms of association, to most people perjury even in a civil deposition still sounds suspiciously like a breach of the oath of office. But the implication of the president’s political opponents, now not so subliminally conveyed by his supposed allies as well, is that the other nonsexual infractions must be true too even if they can’t be proved, though more objective minds might ask why not, given the effort and resources that went into trying to prove them.

Gore’s selection of Lieberman was the deftest political move of the summer. But whether it trumps the Republican right in the New Sanctimony or capitulates to it is another question. As unseemly as the GOP may have found Pat Buchanan’s Bavarian reveries of 1940 a couple of years ago, the present Republican campaign’s thematic template is no less the speech he delivered at the 1992 GOP convention, which itself was only a high-spirited version of more respectable, long-standing arguments by George Will and William Bennett that the ’60s were American history’s great abyss. In his remarkable new book, “Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in a Land of No Alternatives,” Greil Marcus makes a passionate and persuasive case for Clinton as the Elvis Presley of American politics; and even Mary Matalin at the Democratic Convention sighed ruefully on CNN, “These delegates are crazy for Clinton — they think he’s Elvis.” But if Uma Thurman was right in “Pulp Fiction” that deep in your id you’re either an Elvis Person or a Beatles Person, for all his white-trash heritage and hound-dog impersonations on Air Force One, in fact Clinton is a Beatles Person: the ’60s Walking Like a Man, to paraphrase a Robert Johnson song about the devil. This is why his presidency has always been fundamentally illegitimate to people who value propriety over democracy. Because it gave full expression to the pleasure principle once coined the “pursuit of happiness” by an early American subversive rewriting John Locke’s three basic natural rights of life, liberty and property, the ’60s was the most American of decades, thus engendering loathing and disgust among those who adore the name of America but despise the idea of it.

To be sure, Clinton is a rather pallid embodiment of the ’60s, not even really much of a Beatles Person — more “Up, Up and Away” than “Tomorrow Never Knows.” Still, only out of the ’60s could such a sensibility have emerged. At almost the very moment he was a teenager shaking John Kennedy’s hand on the White House lawn, 6,000 miles away four young, fairly clueless Brits were unleashing what would become the cultural equivalent of thermonuclear holocaust, atomizing all the geopolitical structures and philosophical verities that civilization believed it had resolved barely a generation before. Losers from a scuzzy English seaport that produced pop bands by the hundreds — almost any of them, according to accounts of the time, better than the lamely monikered Silver Beatles — they migrated to an even scuzzier German seaport to play epic amphetamine shows before Deutsche kids reading Camus. The children of England, in other words, were learning French existentialism as mediated by the dispossessed children of a Germany that just 20 years before bombed English cities to rubble, while Hitler’s children were absorbing an updated black American slave music as mediated by the dispossessed children of an England that just 15 years before bombed the Reich to rubble.

Toss into that mix both presidential assassination and the mass media of television, and in the decade’s resultant American anarchy Tom Paine pinned Cotton Mather to the mat and held him down to the count of nine. A political right in the process of degenerating from Goldwater libertarianism to Reagan authoritarianism was appalled, all the more so when history almost immediately proved the counterculture correct on the two great issues of the day, civil rights and the Vietnam War. So in the ’70s the right began efficiently directing its rage at the pursuit of happiness and private behavior in particular, slowly but surely divorcing questions of morality from matters of public policy altogether, except whenever, as in the case of abortion or gay rights, public policy was a consequence of people getting it on and liking it too much. A quarter century later the biggest triumph of the right is that public morality and social justice are barely vital subjects of discussion at all, among either Republican or Democratic candidates. To an extent this is a victory of ideology itself, of the argument advanced by people like Peggy Noonan that by definition a nonideological man like Clinton has no true principles and thus whatever social justice he speaks for can be dismissed. To an ideologue like Noonan, who shapes the truth to suit her biases, the man who shapes his biases to suit the truth is a nihilist.

In the last year or so, a widely reported survey of historians ranking all the presidents placed Clinton last in terms of moral character. Last behind the 15th president so beguiled by an abominable slave economy that he blithely allowed his country to lurch into its most terrible war. Last behind the 29th president so beset by public scandal and private mistresses alike that he literally didn’t survive office. Last behind the 35th president who, if you really want to talk blow jobs, juggled women about as carefully as plutonium, including a Mafia mistress and the world’s fragile blond who drugged herself into the cinemascope of modern mythology, assuming it was suicide at all. Last behind the 37th president so contemptuous of the Constitution that he was compelled to resign for trying to destroy it. Last behind the 40th president, for whom Noonan wrote elegant speeches, the paragon of family values incapable of having an emotionally meaningful conversation with his own children, who exalted as virtue a greed he barely bothered to euphemize.

In contrast Clinton, the depraved lout, levied higher taxes on the very wealthy in his 1993 budget so that, among other things, an expanded earned-income tax credit might raise millions of people, maybe tens of millions, above the poverty line. Clinton is the man who always takes a poll to decide what he wants to do — except the poll he ignored when he invested the first year of his presidency in passing NAFTA, opposed by the public. Except the poll he ignored when he advocated a military open to homosexuals, opposed by the public. Except the poll he ignored when he sent troops into Haiti, opposed by the public. Except the poll he ignored when he sent warplanes and troops into the Balkans, opposed by the public. Debauched by the ’60s, he lacks the integrity of the governor of Texas, whose moral fortitude allows not a shred of doubt about the guilt of more people executed in his state than all the other states put together. Debauched by the ’60s, Clinton lacks the Christian spirit with which the Republican redeemer mimics the pleas of the condemned in the pages of Tina Brown’s magazine.

Last in morality, last in integrity, last in the hearts of his historians — that doesn’t seem too unreasonable, does it, as long as we’re not too distracted by the fact that these historians are the same well-credentialed liars who routinely discounted two centuries of oral history, circumstantial evidence and eyewitness testimony as to whether the author of the Pursuit of Happiness was the sort who would sleep with a slave. That the third president of the United States shouldn’t have been the sort to have slaves at all was regarded as a moral inconsistency so trivial and tedious that for 200 years good manners compelled the country to ignore it until the bad manners of science made it as impossible to ignore as Stendhal’s gunshot at the opera — or maybe it’s a fart in church, I’ve never really gotten the quote straight. Just as the Noonans and the Bennetts and the Lynne Cheneys would have us be an America where making money is more righteous than having sex, so we would be an America more offended by the idea of Thomas Jefferson fucking a black woman than owning one. Bad luck or just plain poor political sense on William Jefferson Clinton’s part not to have owned Monica as he diddled her, in which case we might be able to rank him on a more Jeffersonian level.

In its fixation on sexual behavior to the exclusion of any other moral consideration, the New Sanctimony is a kind of ethical autism. It’s a tacit surrender to the Tom DeLays of American politics who complain bitterly about what they call “moral relativism.” Obviously not all morality is relative. Obviously there are people and events and values that are absolutely good and absolutely evil. But that isn’t really what DeLay and others mean; what they really mean is that all morality is absolutely good and evil. If moral wisdom lies in the capacity and willingness to make distinctions between the good and evil that are absolute and the myriad gradations in between that are relative, these are distinctions the DeLays and Noonans and Bennetts find psychologically threatening or politically inconvenient or beyond their moral imaginations; only they can say which. DeLay and Noonan and Bennett don’t represent a renewal of values, they represent a totalitarianism of values; and more and more they dominate the political debate in this country on both the right and the left, on issues like abortion that by their very nature are ethically ambiguous and morally uncertain, unless you’ve got that direct pipeline to God that’s off-limits to the less cosmically evolved among us, who can only try to work such things through as best we can in good faith.

This raises the great imponderable of the New Sanctimony, of course: How do the people feel about it? Remember the people? Naturally they tell pollsters they don’t personally approve of Clinton, even as they give him the highest job-performance rating of any president ever at this point in his term; what else are they going to say? “Getting sucked off in the Oval Office? Yeah, I can get behind that.” There’s a whole clandestine America out there that at one time or another has done what Bill and Monica did, and we know who we are; you don’t have to raise your hand if you’re doing something better with it at the moment. Except on the issue of the environment, for all his recent rhetoric about integrity and independence and boldness, the number of times in his 24-year political career Gore has incontestably demonstrated these qualities is exactly one: a week ago when he chose a Jew as his running mate. This is why some who will vote for him in November would have voted for the flawed John McCain against him, conservative as many of McCain’s positions are, because in his primary campaign McCain dared to accuse the nation’s politics of an immorality deeper than sensuality, of having become a system of the powerful, by the powerful and for the powerful — and if you don’t think his indignation was authentic, look at how feared and hated he was by all the right people, especially in his own party. This is why in November some would happily trade a Gore White House for a Gephardt House that relegates DeLay, his dark heart and constricted spirit betraying on an hourly basis every Christian value he professes, to the catacombs of the American soul.

The political problem for Gore in the election of ’00 is that he’s not quite as good at his hypocrisy as the instinctively more nimble Bush. The single most brilliant line of Bush’s generally brilliant convention speech two weeks ago was, “I believe in forgiveness, because I have needed it,” by which he meant: I’m no better than Bill Clinton. By which he really meant: Actually, I am better than Bill Clinton. At this moment, the only really good news for Gore is that Bush has since gotten more strident, caught up in a frenzied moral brinkmanship triggered by Lieberman’s selection. This is a trap for Bush because ultimately the loser of this election will be the one who makes it too much about Clinton, whether it’s in the form of Bush trying to avenge his father or Gore, with all the aplomb of George Costanza flinging women and children from his path to escape a burning building, fleeing the man without whom he wouldn’t be the nominee at all.

It’s not that the American people will rally to vindicate Clinton. It’s not that our dirty little not-so-secret secret is that we like Clinton rather more than we know we’re supposed to, or that he embodies our own life experience more than we’re willing to confess to our sons and daughters of the ’90s. It’s that we’re done with him, we’ve already moved on, even if we haven’t yet decided where to move on to, which is something those both driving and reporting the current political drama haven’t yet registered. The public has disposed of the matter of Bill Clinton, the relative goods and relative bads, calibrating the private immorality of his infidelity and his lies against the public morality of his empathy and larger intentions, which are the only things about him we’ve ever really believed. At least I think so; but then I’m a little naive that way. I’m a son of the ’60s.

“Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said” by Philip K. Dick (1974)
Possessed by a vision his erratic voice could barely keep up with, Dick confronted the meaning of reality before moving on to the bigger question: the meaning of humanity. In the L.A. of the future — 1988 — Police General Felix Buckman flies over a city that awaits his judgment, where he lives in a depraved marriage with a woman whose appetite for sex and drugs is limitless; she also happens to be his sister. Her life disgusts him only slightly less than her death shatters him, and as night chases him across town, he slowly comes apart — the inherent meaningless of reality overtaking whatever meaning humanity still holds.

“The Black Dahlia” by James Ellroy (1987)
All the dreams of postwar paradise distilled into one hallucinatory horror show from Hollywood Boulevard to the Tijuana border, compared to which the debauchery at the heart of “Chinatown” is about as shocking as a convent whisper. In the only city where murder is interchangeable with lust, where the unspeakable is confused with ecstasy, its final pages barely withstanding the heat of its own fever, this is a black epic of all L.A.’s obsessions — what they buy and what they cost.

“The Zoo Where You’re Fed to God” by Michael Ventura (1994)
A middle-aged medical surgeon, living in the moors of Echo Park, feels madness blow across him one night in the Santa Anas, and emerges on the other side of the wind as a surgeon of the soul. In a city that disenfranchises people of their identities, he dreams of operating on himself in desperate, exploratory search of a nervous system, until one night he finds the head of a gerenuk inside his own heart, the paw of a tiger inside his lungs, the foot of a chimpanzee inside his stomach. “How strange that his body had become an ark.” Too passionate to be merely ruminative, too anarchic to be merely spiritual, finally this tour de force is too physically unsettled to be merely metaphysical, its conclusions lying far beyond the axis where man meets beast and bliss meets madness.

“Weetzie Bat” by Francesca Lia Block (1989)
Life among the crazees, west of the L.A. River: With the baby she’s had by three fathers, and her gay pals Dirk and Duck, and her lover-man My Secret Agent Lover Man, Weetzie is distinguished as much by her eternally good heart as her wild-child ways. Always hip without ever losing her bracing naiveti, way cool without a cynical bone in her body, she careens across a shimmering ’80s Wonderland of futuristic diners and retro-martini lounges and exotic hot dog stands that’s half Hell-A and half Shangri-L.A., where love is the most dangerous angel in a city full of them.

The current Rat Pack rage coincides with the new swing phenomenon, and both
remind you how little is personal about our culture anymore, how little
personally the culture demands of us. A year or so back, at the
beginning of what was to be a particularly misbegotten assignment for a
national magazine, my editor complained that an early draft of a piece “didn’t
swing,” and at first I thought he must have said “sing,” or maybe “ring,” as
in “ring true.” He couldn’t have really said “swing,” unless he was in his
60s, or maybe his teens or early 20s like Alicia Silverstone’s gay heartthrob
in “Clueless.” But in fact this editor wasn’t 20 or 60, he was my age, in his
40s, for whom over the years things have variously rocked or grooved or gotten
down, but never, absolutely positively never, swung.

This was around the time of Gap khaki TV ads with jitterbugging models. The New Swing is our culture at its most bankrupt and ersatz and manufactured; I assume middle-aged editors in Manhattan started talking about whether a piece “swings” when Esquire started running cover stories on the new lounge movement with frosty martinis hovering before red-smoking-jacket backgrounds, and when the Vince Vaughn movie “Swingers” became to a still-amorphous Swing Nation what “Easy Rider” was to Woodstock Nation. Truth be told, I think “Swingers” is better than “Easy Rider,” though it’s possible Heather Graham could convince me of any old crazy idea. It’s worth noting, however, that the swinger in “Swingers” who is clearly Our Guy (played by Jon Favreau) is also the unswingingest, in part because he can’t keep his own emotions at arm’s length, which is what the New Swing is all about. The Sinatra CD in his collection is likelier to be the melancholy “Where Are You” than “A Swingin’ Affair” or “The Summit in Concert,” which the Vince Vaughn character would no doubt think is so totally money. Their big dance number at the end notwithstanding, Our Swinger gets Heather only when he stops trying to be a swinger.

The New Swing, or lounge culture, or whatever you want to call it, was
fortuitous in its timing. It swooped over Sinatra just as his mortal coil
was beginning to rot in a very obvious way, the carrion of his legend ripe for
lunch. The Rat Pack Sinatra was the Sinatra the world mourned, if that’s
really the right word; it was the Sinatra of surly bombast. “What made him
great was his sense of style and grace,” some actress who wouldn’t know a Sinatra song from Jack Jones burbled on a local PBS station during a fund drive that was cashing in on his death by showing old Sinatra specials. In fact,
Sinatra was, as both a personality and a man, distinctly graceless. If
anything, he cultivated an attitude that said he didn’t give a fuck about
grace; grace, you can practically hear him snarling over a highball during one
of the Rat Pack shows, is something you say over lasagna. It’s hard to say
whether the Rat Pack-era of the early ’60s was Sinatra at his nadir — the
quasi-fascist spectacles at Madison Square Garden were still
in the future — but it certainly had nothing to do with what made Sinatra a
great artist, which was a poetry devoid of ring-a-ding shtick.

The appropriation of Sinatra for all the wrong reasons was Swing Nation’s
biggest victory. It was the final blow for posture over essence, attitude
over vision, swagger over feeling. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when in the
past 10 years Swing Nation was born; in some ways Madonna may have been the
proto-swinger, raising soullessness and narcissism to an aesthetic statement
for which she was duly anointed artist of the ’80s by otherwise intelligent
music critics. Over the last three decades of his life Sinatra and his public
conspired together in a great mutual misunderstanding of his art until the
misunderstanding almost seemed to swallow up the art altogether, until the
epic self-adoration of “My Way” took over everything we had come to think or
feel or know about the man. On National Public Radio a few years back,
anticipating the news coverage of his approaching demise, Sarah Vowell, reprising a piece in Salon,
beseeched the networks of the land, “Ix-nay on the ‘My Way.’” Instead of the
dreaded “And now the end is near …” rolling over the footage at the end of
Peter’s and Tom’s and Dan’s inevitably elegiac broadcasts, Vowell proposed
“What Is This Thing Called Love,” from the 1955 album “In the Wee Small
Hours.”

A fine and insightful alternative, even if I would have picked the next track on that album, “Last Night When We Were Young,” or the obscure, autumnal “When the Wind Was Green,” not to be confused, of course, with Frank’s immortal
version of the Kermit the Frog theme, “Bein’ Green.” Of course the networks
played “My Way.” This is when they weren’t playing the even more odious “New
York, New York.” “My Way” and “New York, New York” were only the ultimate
expressions of Sinatra the Rat Packer grown arrogant and monstrous. While the swinging Sinatra surely made timeless music, lost in the culture’s eulogy to Vince Vaughn’s Frank was Sarah’s Frank, and mine — the Frank of “There’s No You” and “It’s a Lonesome Old Town” and “I’m a Fool to Want You” and “My Funny Valentine” and “Angel Eyes” and the shattering 1957 version of “Autumn Leaves” and the almost unbearable 1960 version of Irving Berlin’s “How Deep Is the Ocean,” a hack piece of songwriting made otherworldly by a singer who invested it with an integrity occasionally equaled in popular music, but never surpassed.

A couple of weeks ago I got an e-mail from Salon inviting me to put my dibs on future famous dead people. I assume this was precipitated partly by my frantic but cruelly thwarted desire to write the Dusty Springfield obit; Dusty was my all-time favorite female singer in the sense that a singer can be an all-time favorite even when you understand perfectly well she isn’t in the class of Aretha or Billie. No singer was ever more unabashed or exposed than Dusty, and it’s partly for that reason she wasn’t cool even in the ’60s; and later when she did become cool, sort of, it was for the same cheap camp value that finally made Sinatra cool. Dusty wasn’t the doll of Woodstock Nation.
You loved Dusty in secret, hiding “Dusty in Memphis” behind the Crosby, Stills
and Nash album that, a couple of years later, you would never listen to again
because you had finally come to your senses. Receiving this e-mail, thinking
about whose celebrated carcass I really cared about eulogizing in the months
or years to come, what obits I could still write out of real passion rather
than some journalistic obligation, I realized that with the passage of time
most of the artists who really meant something to me had slipped away — those
who spoke to me through and over and around the slick New York media blather
about what swings and what doesn’t. There’s still Van Morrison, of course,
and Ray Charles. But hey, I’m not hurrying anyone along.

If there are still examples of true oddball genius out there — and if you’ve heard the 21st century blues of PJ Harvey’s “The Wind” or Björk’s “Hunter” from a few years back, or the new Sparklehorse CD, then you know that there are — they don’t exist as part of the mass culture anymore, at the
intersection of vision and Zeitgeist. They struggle for oxygen somewhere off
to the side, because more and more a ’90s media-culture that “swings” has no
room for such visions; both the culture and the media are now almost
completely about affect. The most remarkable thing about the New Swing is how
untransformed it is by contemporary experience, how unreflective it is of
anyone’s real life. Those who have adopted it have done so wholesale,
resolutely determined not to make it their own; the New Swing’s allure is how
it never threatens to reveal the feelings or values of the times. The New
Swing doesn’t have even the honesty of vulgar nostalgia. If people were
actually sitting around playing Duke Ellington’s Blanton-Webster records, that
would be one thing. But they’re not, they’re playing Brian Setzer, whose last
manifestation of cultural authenticity was as a rockabilly hepcat from Long
Island.

Advertising agents and media mavens and magazine editors to the contrary, this millennium is not going to swing its way out of our lives nine months from
now. It’s going to lurch, slouch, crash or slither, but it’s not going to
swing, and the next time someone comes up and tells you something swings or
doesn’t, you’re under a moral obligation to hit him. And while I can report
to you the good news that the New Swing now seems to be dead or dying, given
the evidence of the newest Gap khaki TV ads, unfortunately the new ads feature
models line-dancing to country music. If you haven’t seen them yet, you can take my word for it: They’re an apocalyptic horror practically out of the Book of Revelation, and even Heather Graham wouldn’t convince you otherwise.

It was Wayne who blew my wife away, and if you’ve ever seen “The Searchers” — or, for that matter, “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” or “Red River” — and your mind is at least cracked ajar if not wide open, you already know he’s the most underrated actor in the history of American film. If his range was narrow, his control of every nuance within that range was untouchable. That he is so underrated is partly his own fault; as time went by, he was seduced more and more by his own iconography, and in the 20 years between “The Searchers” and his elegiac final film, “The Shootist,” in 1976, the movies where he was willing to turn that iconography inside out or on its head, such as “Rio Bravo” or “True Grit” or “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” became more and more exceptional.

But that Hollywood underrated him also because it hated his politics is as incontestable as the fact that his politics were indeed pretty stupid; this is, after all, the guy who said in a Playboy interview that the Indians deserved to be wiped out because they wouldn’t share their country with the people stealing it from them. In its artistic assessments over the last four decades, liberal Hollywood repeatedly made allowances for leftist stupidities it never made for Wayne, whether it was Jane Fonda shilling for the Viet Cong (rather than simply opposing a war that was bad for America) or Vanessa Redgrave dancing around with Palestinian terrorists while waving a rifle over her head. The point, of course, is not that Hollywood or film critics or the culture were wrong about Fonda or Redgrave, but that they shortchanged Wayne — a better actor than Jane, though not Vanessa. In the end we make allowances for the philosophical absurdities, left or right, of the Fondas and Redgraves and Waynes because their gift to us is their creativity, not their political analysis; we can embrace their art without, say, electing them president.

None of which changes the fact that Elia Kazan should not be receiving a special Oscar at the Academy Awards this year.

That Kazan should receive this award doesn’t stand up to either moral scrutiny or aesthetic logic. It isn’t persuasively supported either by the arguments of critics whose personal affections have gotten the better of their judgment or columnists whose ideological motivation is so transparent as to verge on intellectual bad faith. Kazan shouldn’t be receiving this award for a number of reasons, having to do with the nature of what Kazan did, and the nature of the award itself.

I don’t write this in rage. As I watch Kazan being honored at the Oscars this year, I’ll even feel a moment’s respect for what he’s accomplished. While I understand director Abraham Polonsky’s bitterness over the award, given what the House Un-American Activities Committee did to him 50 years ago, his recently stated opinion that someone should use the occasion to shoot Kazan was ugly and beneath him. Nor do I write with any particularly romantic view of the blacklist era or the Hollywood Ten. Obviously, during the blacklist era many in the industry were victims of a gross political injustice. But when called before the HUAC in the late 1940s and early ’50s to testify about their alleged communist beliefs, most of the Ten handled the crisis not with eloquence or clearsightedness or even wit but a shrill indignation that was sanctimonious at best and hypocritical at worst, shrouding themselves in freedoms for which the ideology they believed had nothing but contempt.

I hasten to add I know few who would have necessarily handled it better. And I understand that it’s easy for those of us 50 years removed to look back and comment on how others should have behaved. But in retrospect, both the principled and shrewd position would have been to have told the committee anything it wanted to know about one’s own personal beliefs and activities, while drawing the line at informing on others. For the most part, of course, the Ten didn’t take this position. For the most part, they hid behind the Fifth Amendment, in the process revealing their own profound lack of conviction in the First. For his part, Kazan recanted and informed, in the process denying to others that same freedom of expression he had claimed for himself, to great personal success, in his art.

In the current furor over whether Kazan should be receiving this special Oscar, there’s been some obfuscation by his champions of what he did and its consequences. If Kazan had named the names of people selling nuclear secrets to the Russians, such testimony would not only have been justified but morally irresistible. If he had gone before the committee and groveled, apologizing for his own early communist activities and begging congressional forgiveness in a sob fest of mea culpas, he would deserve at least empathy, if not respect; confronted with the imminent annihilation of a career, any of us might be presumed capable of moral cowardice.

But Kazan didn’t simply confess on his own behalf. He didn’t give the committee the names of traitors selling atomic bombs to the Kremlin. In an atmosphere of persecution and hysteria he gave the committee the names of eight friends who had committed no crime whatsoever, and in so doing he helped destroy them. The argument advanced by some that these names were already known to the committee and that therefore Kazan’s testimony was of no real significance lies somewhere between naive and ridiculous: At the time, Kazan was the most respected director in Hollywood, and the HUAC went after him precisely because his testimony was of enormous significance, because it ratified betrayal and thereby lent betrayal exactly what the HUAC wanted and needed — the moral authority of a major liberal filmmaker who had made his reputation with movies about prejudice.

On any number of levels, what Kazan did was a disaster. But true as this is, if Kazan had made a movie in 1998 so good as to warrant a nomination for an Academy Award or, more to the point, a nomination for best director, none of the above would matter. It wouldn’t matter because, leaving aside for the moment the general folly of the Oscars and who wins them, the awards are about artistic competition — picking the “best” — and once you muddy such competition with politics, ideology, history, even morality, artistic integrity itself is at risk. If Kazan were nominated for best director of the year and deserved the award, he should win it notwithstanding what happened half a century ago. Moreover, whatever his past political lapses, if Kazan had never before been honored by the academy, his contribution to film might indeed warrant a special award, for the same reason that Louis-Ferdinand Céline, for instance, should have won a Nobel Prize for literature despite his collaborationist history with the Nazis. Céline was a world-class 20th century writer, and that’s what Nobel Prizes are for, great writers, and once you begin weeding out writers on the basis of whether they’re fine human beings, you can pretty much crowd who’s left into a Motel 6 service elevator. James Joyce, for you literary groupies out there who still have stars in your eyes, was a perfect asshole.

For the moment let’s leave aside the possibility that Kazan isn’t the great filmmaker his advocates suggest. For the moment let’s leave aside that many of his most famous films, from “Pinky” to “Baby Doll” to the Oscar-winning “Gentlemen’s Agreement,” are now hopelessly dated. For the moment let’s leave aside that even “classic” films such as “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “East of Eden” are more compendia of memorable moments than truly transcendent movies. Let’s leave aside that Kazan was a more important director than a great one, and more important for his contribution to film acting than to filmmaking. Let’s agree that revolutionizing film acting isn’t a small thing, after all, and that if “On the Waterfront,” “Viva Zapata” and “Splendor in the Grass” fall short of being truly great, they’re close enough that to quibble is simply ungenerous. For the moment, let’s say for the sake of argument that Kazan is indisputably in the first rank of American film directors — and that his shelf is heart-tuggingly bare of Oscars to show for it.

In fact, this isn’t remotely the case. Kazan has already won two Academy Awards for best director. This is two more than Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Charles Chaplin, Fritz Lang, Josef von Sternberg, Ernst Lubitsch, Preston Sturges, Nicholas Ray, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese have won between them. Let me repeat that, since I know right now you’re saying to yourself, “I’m sure I misunderstood what I just read.” Kazan has won two more Academy Awards for directing than all those other directors — every single one arguably Kazan’s superior — combined. In short, given how Kazan has been lavishly rewarded by the academy in the past, the problem with giving him a special Oscar is that it’s special. It’s not a matter of the academy correcting an oversight. It’s not as though there haven’t been any number of talented people over the years who never received special awards. By its nature this award is an extraordinary gesture, not a little arbitrary, finally gratuitous; and gratuitousness, by its own nature, has an agenda. Gratuitousness is overkill in service of a purpose, in order to make a point, which in these particular circumstances can only raise the question of what is the purpose and what is the point.

In the case of this particular award, the purpose and point is forgiveness. What’s remarkable about this is that the academy can’t forgive Kazan, because Kazan hasn’t asked for forgiveness or ever acknowledged he’s done anything to be forgiven for. He isn’t merely unrepentant but belligerent: Speaking for him recently in response to those who have suggested Kazan use the forum of the Oscars to offer an apology, his wife told the Los Angeles Times, “Too fucking bad … he has nothing to be contrite about.” As far as anyone can tell or has told, the immorality of his actions 50 years ago hasn’t inspired on his part a single instant’s retrospection or contemplation, or even uneasy doubt. What it did inspire was “On the Waterfront,” a powerful film that’s also, in its true intentions, horseshit. Making the case for informing, it analogizes Marlon Brando’s moral dilemma with Kazan’s and renders it heroic. The problem with this analogy is that in the film Brando’s silence costs people their lives rather than the other way around, and that when he finally does inform, it’s on dangerous criminals who murder people (including his own brother), not a lot of hapless Hollywood nitwits who got their heads lodged squarely up their asses searching for Stalinist paradise.

I don’t know who the academy is forgiving, for what; I doubt the academy knows. The only conclusion possible, pathetic and slightly queasy though it may be, is that the academy is somehow forgiving itself — “because Kazan was a victim too,” as though in some metaphorical fashion he died for Hollywood’s sins and now Hollywood is going to make him a saint for it. Hollywood has always had trouble with its metaphors: After all, Kazan didn’t die, nor did his career. After informing on people whose lives and careers were never the same again, he went right on making movies another 20 years, by all accounts growing more and more bitter at how unfairly life has treated him, even as it continues to bestow on him more wealth, more fame, more Kennedy Center honors — everything but what self-justification and special Oscars can’t bestow, and that’s a conscience.