The writer Lynn Phillips, who a few days ago requested a copy of the article “When Disney Ruled America” that I wrote for Spy, has written with her comments: “The article does indeed live up. Particularly once Eisner gets into power.The writing has an antic energy – a feeling of rushing faster and faster down the slope of its premise.And many of the details are still killah today – the selling of social distress as lucrative spectacle is particularly thrilling –Harlem theme park especially, yo, Dre, bro.
“I also like the ways the piece has proved prescient, but obliquely. Instead of the Harlem Disneyland we have single teen mothers from the Lohan and Palin families re-packaging black teen “degeneracy” as clean, white, life-loving family responsibility.
“The piece is long by today’s rules, but it’s a relief to read a humor piece that hasn’t been geometrically shaped and smoothed out, New Yorkered into dull submission. It reads as a TRIP, a process rather than some ZirconTM gem, a thinking-one’s-way into the puzzle of being American in the era when entertainment became our most important export after weaponry. The delight and the horror.
“I like the squirminess of trying to find a place in a mass culture just as one is realizing that mass culture, pop culture, is becoming the ONLY culture and that there’s no place for what used to be called ‘the authentic self’ in it. I like the way the satirist falls in love with his own absurd solutions to his society’s problems, gets a bit giddy with his own ingenuity. I think many of us have had the experience of imagining how to make America happy — a project soaked in both affection and contempt — then gotten excited when we thought we had succeeded, before realizing that we had created ourselves clear out of the picture.
“It’s interesting, too, the way your premise is evolving. . .I don’t think I’m the first to observe that Obama is in some ways a Disnification of 60’s radicalism – race and revolution with the danger taken out — the clean black guy with cute ears, black-but-not, like Mickey is a rodent-but-not. A guy who calls the working poor “The Middle Class” because they don’t like to be spoken of too accurately, who keeps his little red pants on, as it were, and handles us with white gloves. And he gives us HOPE. He inspires us. He cheers us up, sings “Mighty Mouse is on the waaay” with tax cuts! Health care! International respect! He’s not all crazy and torqued out with anger and self-rejection the way the 60’s kids like Jesse Jackson or John McCain were — and still are. And I like Mr. O. a lot. I work for his ascendancy. But his vision of America fills me with unease– a land that idolizes The American Dream of striving, sacrificing, moving up, working, working, working. It’s good, clean fun, but I’m not sure that to me Obamaland sounds like any kind of fun at all.”
I’d say somethig here, but it would probably sound stupid and ruin the afterglow. So I’ll just say Thanks, Lynn.
Casino Royale did so much to refurbish and rehabilitate James Bond, but A Quantum of Solace does not advance the effort nearly as much. Daniel Craig’s portrayal of Bond was a major element in the restoration, but it was really the character of Vesper Lynd, played by the wonderful Eva Green) that made the greatest difference. In Lynd, the film makers gave us a beautiful and intelligent woman whose growing attachment to Bond endowed his character with more depth and interest than he ever previously enjoyed. Unfortunately, there is no similar person in the new film, so what we get is Craig and Judi Dench and the splendid villian Mathieu Amalric and a lot of up-to-the-minute Hollywood mayhem. (Maybe too up-to-the-minute: I loved Marc Forster’s The Kite Runner, but he overcuts his action sequences to the degree that you can’t follow the conflict, something that never happens with Paul Greenglass, the maestro of the last two Bourne movies and United 93.) Giving Bond some genuine emotional jeopardy in Casino Royale was significant, but right now, Bond is very much like Bourne, too much so; the challenge in the next Bond film will be to find a way to restore and reinterpret his typical wit and verve.
