The Tweetstorm of Donald J. Trumprook

Scusate i perdenti e gli odiatori, ma il mio I.Q. è uno dei più alti e lo sapete tutti! Per favore, non sentirti così stupido o insicuro, non è colpa tua.

      Let us go then, me and you,
As the scandals crowd out all the other news
Like a porn star paid and splayed upon a mattress;
Let us read, within these rumpled crumb-strewn sheets,
The incoherent tweets
Of sleepless nights upon the throne of ease
While pinching out my message by degrees:
Tweets with which I push and pull the government
With criminal intent
But I’m not capable of much reflection...

I don’t regret, or still less rue it—
When you’re a star, they let you do it.

In the House the members congregate
Thinking back on Watergate.

      The Democrats will try to stop construction of my wall,
So beautiful, so perfect, so unclimbable, my wall,
That keeps the rapists, gangs and dealers out of here,
The border camps where wetback babies crawl...
Babies. Yeah, that Epstein guy—a loser, that’s for sure
Nabbed at the airport, made his last farewell,
And once the prison guards had fallen fast asleep,
Was left (who knew?) to hang around his cell.

      And indeed they will serve time,
The yellow cowards who still ignore my tweets,
Copping their pleas like Cohen in open court;
They will serve time, they will serve time
Or if they play it safe and decide to be discreet;
There will be time to perjure and negate,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That go into a first-class license plate;
Time for thee but not for me,
And time yet for a hundred indiscretions,
And to evade another hundred questions,
Like in the days of Sarah Huckabee.

In the House the staff attorneys huddle
Plotting further trouble.

      And indeed there will be time
To wonder, ‘Do I dare?’ and, ‘Do U care?’
Time to descend the escalator,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
(They will say: “What’s that thing upon his head?
Some animal, some possum, must have crawled there: is it dead?”)
My necktie, made in China, polyester, red and shiny—
(They will say: “How is it that his fingers are so tiny?”)
Is it fair
My press is so adverse?
It’s called executive time.
For decisions and rescissions which a court will soon reverse.

But I have blown them off already, blown them all—
The courts, the Congress...enablers and buffoons!
I have measured out my life with cofveve spoons;
I’ve heard the voices leaking, leaking with an eye
Upon the main chance there in the green room.
            So how dare they presume?

      And I’ve denounced the spies and traitors, slammed them all—
The whistleblowers trilling with their same old songs,
And when I’m called upon it, called on CNN,
When Fake News flacks will not excuse my gall,
Then how—heaven forfend—
To spin all of the revelations of my wrongs?
            And can we just assume

      That I have sold the Russians secrets, let them pick?—
As I am perfectly entitled to
(It says so right there in Article Two!)
Is it semen on a dress
That makes me such a mess?
No, that was what’s-her-face, that Monica Lewinski chick.
      And should I cop a plea?
            And what’s in it for me?

      Shall I say, I have golfed all day on well-mown greens
The only thing that makes my putter rise
And dropped the ball routinely some two feet from the hole?...

I should have stayed a star on pay TV
Hustling my brand to easy dimwit marks.

      And the rubes who watch the news, they take it placidly! Soothed by Fox TV,
Tucker Carlson...or Hannity
Always dependable, always for me.
Should I, having satisfied my vices,
Rouse myself to instigate another crisis?
But though I have gorged and bloated, binged and purged,
Though I have seen my pate (grotesquely bald) the object of some laughter
I am no statesman—not now nor hereafter;
I have seen the needle of my ratings wiggle,
And I have seen the Secret Service roll their eyes, and giggle,
            And in short, I was betrayed.

      And would it have been worth it, do you think,
After Moscow, the prostitutes, the pee,
The commentariat, who’ve been routinely mean to me,
Would I have gone too far
Once I’d given DOJ to William Barr
And made it just another arm of Trump, Inc.,
To kick the Constitution into flinders,
To say: “I’m the Donald, you’re the Apprentice,
I’m here to tell you that you’re fired, you’re fired”—
Yet, Stormy paused before she gave me head,
      And said: “That is not what I want at all.
            That’s not it, Sir, at all.”

      And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the hearings and the subpoenas and the sprinkled sheets,
After the scandals, after the phone calls, after the House decides to vote me out—
What the hell is that about?—
It is impossible to know just what I knew!
But as if a TV camera spewed some hacks to blather on the tube:
Would it have been worth while
If one, waking up at three and tossing off a tweet,
And turning toward the TV, should say:
“Lock up Crooked Hillary,
      Lock her up for good and all!”

      Yes! I’m a stable genius, clear for all to see;
Am a compliant dunce, one that will do
To pack the courts, pass a tax bill or two
And serve the rich; no doubt, I’m always down,
Presidential, glad to be on board,
Impulsive, reckless, occasionally profane;
Abused, insulted, frequently ignored;
At times, indeed, almost insane—
Almost, at times, the Clown.

I’m senile…infantile…
I shall serve my sentence stably in denial.

Shall I leave my hair behind? Do I dare to join a gang?
I shall wear a bright orange jumpsuit, and walk along the yard.
I have heard the inmates singing to the guards.
I do not think that Pence will pardon me.

I have seen the prosecutors on the case
Looking for backups on the White House LAN:
It won’t be good when all this hits the fan.

We have frolicked on a mattress soaked with pee
In opulent hotel rooms trimmed in gold—
Until we face indictment, and we fold. 

When in Rome

(Another in a series of repurposed film reviews from 2016. tl;dr version: On a state visit to Rome a bored and exhausted European princess escapes from her handlers and stumbles into the keeping of an opportunistic American reporter, who sees in her the newspaper story that will make his career, provided he is prepared to be caddish about it. Aw, hell, who are we kidding? It’s Gregory freaking Peck, and you know that he’ll do the right thing in the end because, after all, he falls in love with Audrey Hepburn. So, beginning with this picture, have a couple of generations of moviegoers. Photographed in creamy black & white on location in the Eternal City, Roman Holiday might have been a mere piece of fluff in lesser hands, but a magical confluence of director, screenplay and cast makes it, on the contrary, a piece of fluff for the ages.)

Even the casual fiilmgoer will have noticed from time to time a convention in movie title sequences that goes something like this:

[Really Big-Name Star]

(and sometimes)

[Equally or Almost as Big-Name Star]

in

[Movie Title]

with

[Actor Name]

Actor Name]

[Actor Name]

(and sometimes)

[And Another Big-Name Star]

as

[Character Name]

The Hollywood film industry is one of the more rank-conscious fields of human endeavor, and for many, many decades the placement of an actor’s name before the film title was a signifier of very high status indeed. Gregory Peck was nominated for an Academy Award in his second film, in 1944, and by his nineteenth, Roman Holiday, he was an A-list star routinely granted the coveted top-o’-the-title slot in the credit sequence. Audrey Hepburn, by contrast, was just starting out in 1953—she’d had what amounted to a couple of walk-on parts before she was cast, largely on the strength of her stage performance as the title character in Gigi on Broadway the previous year, as the female lead opposite Peck. Because she was virtually unknown to the moviegoing public, the most she might ordinarily have expected would have been an “and Introducing Audrey Hepburn,” which was the sort of token recognition studios were in the practice of giving first-time actresses whom they hoped might become better-known over time. Peck, however, before the film’s release, went to the studio chiefs and said in effect, “Look, you know and I know that Audrey’s going to bring home the Best Actress Oscar for this, and the rest of us are going to look like complete clowns if her name isn’t above the title.” And so, rare for a fledgling starlet, her name appeared up front. The studio never regretted it.

Some have said that the movie’s Princess Anne was the role that the actress was born to play. What they meant was that Audrey Hepburn was the role Audrey Hepburn was born to play, and she incontestably did so to perfection, although this also limited from early on the range of roles she’d be offered, and perhaps she never did reach her full potential with so many gamine roles stacked up waiting for her to perform them: lazy directors just wanted her to be herself, or at least her image.

This mid-century fairy tale begins, as so many fairy tales will, with a princess: “Princess Anne” is touring the capitals of Europe on behalf of her unnamed country (presumably not the United Kingdom, since London is one of the capitals she is depicted visiting in newsreel footage), and her entourage has tightly scheduled every waking hour for her. She’s getting bored, tired and cranky. Sure, first-world problems and all that, but after all, being a princess in European royalty has been known, even in living memory, to be a bit of a drag, with the princesses in question being treated variously as trade goods and as brood mares in the service of dynastic succession. It’s not all musical numbers and singing animals, let me tell you. Anyway, after she pitches a mild tantrum, Anne’s handlers stuff her full of tranquilizers to calm her down. These appear instead to have the unanticipated effect of parting the princess from a normal person’s fear of falling from a great height, and she nimbly escapes from an upper floor on the embassy grounds and onto the streets of Rome (smuggling herself to freedom disguised as a load of soiled laundry inside a delivery van, if I recall aright) before she passes out. If she tried such a stunt today, of course, Audrey/Anne would likely find herself in a Tunisian brothel when she came to, but this is a fairy tale, remember, so instead she doesn’t completely lose consciousness until she has first run into stand-up guy Joe Bradley (Gregory Peck), a lazy reporter for an American wire service who, initially unaware of Anne’s royal identity, reluctantly takes her to his small apartment, where nothing untoward happens. He draws the line at giving up his narrow bed, and makes the girl sleep on the divan—there are limits to knight-errantry!—but before she revives in the morning he has checked in briefly at work, where he realizes to whom he has extended his hospitality. He rushes back to his flat and moves the sleeping princess onto the bed so that she won’t know that she only rated the divan. A favorite scene, early on: Anne, still a bit groggy from the drug, wakes up in Joe’s apartment, in Joe’s bed and in…”Are these your pyjamas?” “Umm-hmmm.” A look of panic crosses her features, and her hands dart under the covers. Joe, drily: “Lose something?” Anne (with visible relief): “No.” That was pretty racy stuff for 1953.

There follows an enchanted interlude of cross-purposes as Joe, his photographer pal Irving, and the princess tool around Rome, visions of Pulitzer prizes dancing in the men’s heads, with Irving surreptitiously snapping photographs of the royal, who is innocently unaware that her incognito has been compromised, or that she is being squired around the city by a couple of jackals of the press. Meanwhile, of course, everyone’s in a panic back at the embassy, and badass-looking truant officers are flown in from home to track down the country’s delinquent princess. Anne has only a few hours out from under her professional responsibilities (“I’m in public relations,” she tells Joe at one point), but Joe and Irving help her make the most of them and ultimately cannot bring themselves to betray her trust.

Certain films appear to have been made under a supremely favorable alignment of the stars: there’s a reason that Casablanca (the cast and crew of which didn’t realize they were working for the ages) is beloved today. Carol Reed’s The Third Man is, albeit on a higher level of artistry, another one that clicks on all cylinders, and I submit that it’s tough to conceive how Roman Holiday could have been any better than it was. Gregory Peck used to joke that for years it was certain that any role he was considered for had first been offered to Cary Grant. So it was with Roman Holiday, and you know what? It wouldn’t have worked as well. True, Peck had to stretch a bit to portray his character’s raffishness, which Grant could have communicated in his sleep, but by the same token it’s hard to imagine Grant matching Peck’s bedrock solidity and decency: there would inevitably have been a knowing smirk to spoil the illusion. The producers wanted Elizabeth Taylor to play the princess: I do not think that the film would be remembered today had they got their way.

Fortunately, posterity has been delivered a perfect movie, shot on location(!) in Rome(!!), a romantic comedy overlaid with a poignant fable of of duty, escape, responsibility, renunciation and decency, in which a princess sacrifices freedom and perhaps love for the obligations laid upon her, conjoined with vast privilege, by rank and birth, and an ambitious reporter foregoes professional success and a nice bundle of cash as chivalry summons him to the better angels of his nature. And to return for a moment to the subject of movie credits, the screenplay was written by one Dalton Trumbo, a gifted victim of the Hollywood “blacklist” whom no one in 1953 would hire because of his supposed communist affiliations. Upon the original release the script was credited to another writer, a common practice at the time, and won an Oscar for best screenplay, which Trumbo of course could not acknowledge or accept. His name was finally restored to the credits in the 1990s, and the Academy at last gave him that Oscar, a gesture he would doubtless have appreciated had he not been, like, dead for a couple of decades by then.

“Are you looking at me?” – One-Eyed Jacks

I’m going to go out on a limb here and call One-Eyed Jacks incontestably the finest western ever shot in Big Sur. This troubled production, helmed by star Marlon Brando after original director Stanley Kubrick quit or was fired (accounts differ), had gone way over schedule and over budget by the time the would-be auteur grew bored with the project and left it in mid-edit for the studio to assemble (the Paramount executives opting, not surprisingly, for the most conventional of the several endings Brando shot, some under duress).

The final product, though scarcely without flaw, nevertheless remains after half a century a compelling if undisciplined piece of work. Karl Malden (”Dad” Longworth) and Brando (”Kid” Rio) portray bank robbers working the lucrative Mexican market who are parted by mischance and meet up again in California after half a decade, having in the meantime followed dramatically different career paths, with Dad pursuing a career in law enforcement while the Kid busies himself for most of this period crafting artisanal license plates. Their reunion is, to put it mildly, fraught.

Beautifully photographed (the Death Valley and Big Sur sequences particularly), with several memorable set pieces. The marvelous supporting cast includes a lot of John Ford regulars, including Ben Johnson and Slim Pickins, and the love interest is the luminous and tragic Pina Pellicer, whose reputed on-set romance with the charismatic leading man turns out to have been a publicist’s cynical fantasy: Pellicer played on Team Sappho. Long neglected, the film fell into the public domain, and has hitherto been available for home viewing only in atrocious no-name “budget” editions which, as an industry informant told me once, “look like they’ve been mastered by someone’s dog.” It has now been meticulously restored for the 2016 Criterion release. 

I have inexplicably grown old

A tale of two adaptations

In considering Andrew Davies’ brilliant 2005 adaptation of Bleak House, it seemed appropriate to revisit both the earlier 1985 television version with Diana Rigg and Denholm Elliot, and also to reread the novel itself as the baseline from which to take the measure of the two productions.

On the evidence so far, long-form television is the best medium yet devised for translating the novel—or at least any novel of significant depth and complexity—into dramatic form. We may perhaps take the recent tendency in motion pictures to draw upon comic books for their source materials as a tacit acknowledgment of this truth. To bring a perfectly faithful rendering of Charles Dickens’ sprawling novel to the screen would likely require an undertaking approaching the brute duration of The Sopranos or Game of Thrones, and since on both occasions, 1985 and 2005, the BBC elected to tell the story in eight hours, a certain amount of judicious pruning of the author’s mad proliferation of subplots, a culling of the minor characters who scamper through his pages, was perforce required. Both versions preserved and ably presented the meat of the tale, although each naturally differed from the other in points of emphasis and of omission.

It seems to me that any dramatization of Bleak House will absolutely require the four principal parts to be competently written and performed, and this requirement has been met for both. The roles to which I refer are Lady Dedlock, the haughty aristocrat with the tragic past (Diana Rigg, 1985; Gillian Anderson, 2005), John Jarndyce, the nicest man who ever lived (Denholm Elliot/Denis Lawson), Tulkinghorn, the baleful, censorious lawyer who has it in for Lady D (Peter Vaughan/Charles Dance), and Esther Summerson, the waif grown to young womanhood, and the beating heart of the story (Suzanne Burden/Anna Maxwell Martin). The lovers Richard Carstone and Ada Clare, “the wards in Jardyce,” are capably portrayed in each series, but not, I think anything like as essential to dramatic success as the first four named roles.

Among the secondary characters the actors portraying Smallweed, the moneylender, Krook, the gin-soaked hoarder, Snagsby the stationer, Bucket the detective, Guppy the unctuous striver and Skimpole, the odious freeloader, all acquit themselves honorably (well, obviously dishonorably in Skimpole’s case). The “Jellaby” and “Turveydrop” subplots are scanted in the Davies screenplay and omitted altogether in Arthur Hopcroft’s 1985 treatment, to no great detriment of either dramatization. Dickens purists might object to Davies’ creation of a new character, Clamb, out of, as it were, whole cloth, but this minor figure deftly and economically discharges a few narrative functions that might otherwise have required some cumbersome exertions on the part of the screenplay.

I find no fault in the 1985 Bleak House, and yet in almost every particular it seems to me that the 2005 model wins on points. Taking performances to begin with: Diana Rigg inhabits her role with properly aristocratic icy hauteur, and so conveys her character’s air of condescension in some matters and indifference to the rest that it is a little difficult to see in this fortyish jaded patrician the passionate young woman who gave herself half a lifetime before to a dashing young officer. As thespian craft, and in fidelity to Dickens’ conception, without fault, but as Lady Dedlock’s doom inexorably descends upon her, that remoteness infects us with some of her own detachment, and the resonance of her fate is diminished in like degree. Anderson, equally proud, equally languid, equally brittle, permits us glimpses of the buried grief and remorse she carries within her, and the scene in which she opens her heart briefly to her lost daughter is borne upon the viewer with considerably greater emotional force. I might mention that Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, seems a little too decrepit in the newer production as against the older.

As to John Jarndyce, the preternaturally beneficent master of the eponymous Bleak House, there is little to choose between the performances of Denholm Elliot and Denis Lawson, although the character is better developed in the latter production. Either man could have been swapped into the other script, and would have performed with distinction.

The two portrayals of the malefic Tulkinghorn, legal advisor of long standing to the venerable Dedlock clan, present a fascinating contrast: the writing of the parts, drawing as it does upon the authorial dialogue, is not so very different, but the performances could scarcely stand in greater contrast. I think Dickens might have preferred Peter Vaughan’s portrayal: his Tulkinghorn is dried-out, all dust and stale paper, an embalmed, desiccated presence in the story, whose menace is of the creeping, inexorable kind, like a wasting disease. Charles Dance, by contrast, carries himself with a coiled tension, an icy malevolence, a deadly readiness to strike in a moment—he’s Dracula to Vaughan’s Mummy. I assign Vaughan’s turn, with its musty reek of mildew clinging to buried secrets, points for a greater resemblance to and a very effective depiction of the character as originally conceived, but Dance’s interpretation, carrying with it that whiff of cordite suggesting those same secrets’ imminent detonations, makes for better television, I think.

The character of Esther Summerson is, as I have described her above, the heart of the story in the novel as in both television adaptations, and here each of the dramatizations stand head and shoulders above the source material, because as written Dickens’ Esther, IMHO, is a narrative miscalculation. My wife once remarked how seldom it was that male writers seemed to be able to inhabit female characters. She made this observation in the course of being pleasantly surprised to find an exception to this trend in one of Ward Just’s novels. Bleak House would not have surprised her: those portions of the novel (mercifully not all of them) consisting of Esther’s first-person narration are almost howlingly unpersuasive, and her self-portrayal is timid, mousy, irritatingly self-effacing—one wants to drown her in treacle. When we first meet her, Esther is approximately twenty. The two television Esthers, Suzanne Burden and Anna Maxwell Martin, were twenty-seven and twenty-eight respectively when the 1985 and 2005 dramatizations aired. Both women give more spirited performances than one might have expected, rescuing Esther from the almost sanctimonious self-effacement her original author assigned to her. This said, Burden’s performance is studied and workmanlike. She is the more conventionally pretty of the two actresses (on the page, Esther makes much of her supposed plainness), and also looks somewhat older. Martin, at that point in her career, could have been mistaken for a girl ten years younger, and her unconventional features—in interviews she has lamented a lack of prominent cheekbones—persuade the viewer that Esther might imagine without affected self-deprecation that “my face will never be my fortune.” At the same time, it is equally easy to see how her visage might captivate the lovelorn Guppy, whose initially comic wooing of her gradually shades toward outright stalking.

One consequence of Martin’s more girlish countenance (against which the gravitas of her performance is set off to considerable effect) is that when her guardian Jarndyce at length proposes marriage, there is decidedly something of a squick factor that enters into the scene, largely absent in the 1985 version.

The two Guppies make for an interesting study in similarities and contrasts, having to do principally with the physical differences between the performers. Actor Jonathan Moore, in 1985, is one of those men whose features seem too small for his face. He’s soft, doughy, a veal calf taken human form, where Burn Gorman, twenty years later, is more ferret-like in appearance. The two are equally smarmy and oleaginous in their attentions, and their respective Esthers correspondingly appalled at the unwelcome courtships to which they are subjected. The two performances are on a par, but Gorman’s, as written, is the better developed.

As this brief essay is less a review than a comparison, I’ll conclude merely by saying that both productions are worthy and watchable, but if life’s too short for sixteen hours of Bleak House, then choose the 2005 version.

Little things

This. These.

Paradise Glossed

I have lately revisited Paradise Lost, which I last read with reluctant attention and imperfect comprehension as an inmate in a freshman English Lit survey course nearly half a century ago. Although the work remains tough sledding, not the sort of thing you’d want to take in at a bustling airport in the course of a layover, I found myself at this sere point in my life, with considerably more cultural context under my belt (would that cultural context were all I had accumulated there!), better appreciating it. Milton’s gender politics will not strike the modern reader as particularly or even remotely “woke,” but I’m not a big fan of holding authors long dead to modern standards of belief, if only in the vain hope of soliciting like slack from posterity regarding my own shortcomings. He was a puritan and a republican (as this latter term was understood in the mid-seventeenth century England), having little use for the papacy and monarchy, respectively, as is evident in the poem. His descriptions of the starry firmament, reflecting as they do a cosmology then in flux, are fascinating.

I have taken the liberty of condensing and paraphrasing the “Battle in Heaven” sequence from Book VI, recasting it from blank verse to closet drama:

God: I’m calling this meeting to announce that I’m naming my son—you all know God Junior—CEO. He’s going to be in charge of day-to-day operations going forward. I’ll remain as Chairman, but all you seraphim and cherubim will be reporting to him from now on, which is to say unto eternity. And you know, at this time it might be a good idea for the entire Heavenly Host to do some serious genuflecting, and to sing a few hosannas to Junior, if you want to stay on My good side. Not, you understand, that I have an actual side, being omnipresent and all. It’s, you know, a—what do they call it?—a metaphor. Anyway, just, like, do what he says, and everything will be copacetic. Any questions?

Satan: This is bullshit! You’re jumping your kid up to the executive suite over senior management? What the hell for?

God: Speaking of hell…

Satan: Fuck if I’m going to bow and scrape to this squirt! Who’s with me?

(A full third of the shareholders walk out with him.)

Satan: The Old Man’s losing his grip. We need to mount a hostile takeover, and by that I mean hostile.

(Next day: the dissident faction assaults heaven. They’re outnumbered, and, after a certain amount of cut-and-thrust swordplay, soundly beaten. Plenty of ichor is shed on both sides, but these immaterial spirits have impressive powers of regeneration.)

Team God: Hurrah!

(Overnight: Satan devises cannons.)

(Next day: Team Hell’s artillery routs Team God at first, until TG drops a mountain range on TH. Series now 2-1 Team God.)

Team God: Hallelujah!

(Next day: Team Hell rallies.)

Team God: Jesus, you guys! What’s it going to take?

God’s Son: You rang? [to God] Now, Pop? Now?

God: Sure. Sic ’em, Junior.

(God Junior puts paid to Team Hell, and sends the lot into th’ lake o’ fire.)

God: Good work. Remind me to punish humanity once I get around to creating it next week.

God’s Son: Will do, Pop. Listen, about the whole, you know, “redemption” business…?

(fade to black: “To Be Continued”)