Of Job Titles and Mind Games

One old guy says to the other:

“Max, you’ve been my best friend for 30 years. You’re a fine human being. But you have always had one very big fault.”

“And what, pray tell, would that be?”

“You are very pretentious!”

“Pretentious? PRETENTIOUS? MOI?”

 

My sermon today, brothers and sisters, is pretentious job titles and related marketplace obfuscations.

In Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Mikado,” Pooh-Bah, an insolent courtier, is ranked “Lord High Everything Else.” The name quickly passed into the vernacular, embodying a puffed-up bureaucrat or dignitary whose self-regard far exceeds his worth. pooh-bah-ism thrives today. Some instances stem from old-fashioned or contemporary narcissism. Others have a more sinister cast. Take the pooh-bah strategy now being used by some businesses to nickel and dime job applicants in our sputtering economy.

A friend’s daughter was fired from a lucrative public relations position after her firm’s major hedge fund client went under. She trod the usual headhunter and networking path, to no avail. Her nest egg dwindling, she replied to a newspaper ad for an “assistant public relations manager” at a small electronics company.

She submitted her resume and was pleased to get a quick response. She was even happier when a jovial interviewer, after quickly glancing at her CV, declared that she was just who they were looking for. He was pleased to offer her $23,000 per – with no benefits! Since he hadn’t been exactly forthright about her duties with his company, she asked him to define what earning her meager bread actually involved.

“Oh, you’ll be sitting at our front desk,” he replied airily. “You’ll greet clients, answer the phone, take messages.”

“Isn’t that what a receptionist does?”

“Not in your case. With your terrific background in public relations, you’ll be expert at interfacing with our clients. You may even be a potential client’s first interface!”

“Would I ever get paid more, or do more?”

“More of what? Think of yourself as laying a foundation for us. The sign on your desk says it all.” (He bracketed each word with double-handed “air quotes.”) “ASSISTANT! PUBLIC!! RELATIONS!!! MANAGER!!!!” As for more pay, who could tell what good things time eventually might deliver in the interfacing line?

She declined the offer, restraining the urge to tell him where he could insert his quotable fingers.

Anecdotal research into similarly tarted-up job descriptions revealed titles like “executive clerical assistant” for straight-up secretary or “assistant floor maintenance manager” for pick-up-that-broom-and-push janitor (“assisting” and “managing” evidently are deemed strong employment lures).

I expect that most applicants recognize these high-falutin’ appellations as scams pitched at seducing them into accepting wages that were slavish even before the current recession. Given the current job famine, people are willing to work for menial pay without having to be gulled. The woman of my tale heard that someone from her former firm had signed on with the above firm. She totally knew her coworker was being punked out. She trashed the sign and is perversely proud to call herself a mere receptionist to her boss.

The only would-be employees I’ve heard about who poignantly hug pooh-bah titles to their bosoms are recent college graduates who work for little or no money as “interns,” often for legal, financial, and entertainment firms. They eagerly embrace positions of “assistant reader,” “assistant researcher,” or “assistant talent agent,” because their titles are about all the material reward they will ever see. The promise of permanent high-profile employment, held constantly just out of reach like the donkey’s carrot, largely goes unfulfilled. As per my previous piece about the HBO series “Girls” (“Girls Captures Angst of 20-Somethings,” these terrific kids are being shamefully exploited as a willing source of cheap, fungible labor.

There’s villainous antipretentious pretense in the pervasive practice of relabeling a personnel department as the “Human Resources” department. I don’t know exactly when the first HR division went up, but it seems to have been sincerely convened to make employees feel that knotty work issues could be handled with sensitivity and compassion. Political correctness at its best, as it were.

These days, a communiqué from Human Resources breeds fear and anger, since its chief resource is often a pink slip, and its main mission is delivering it in a gentler, kinder fashion so as to discourage the soon-to-be ex-employee from going postal. Devious artifices used to warn people that the ax was about to fall would be laughable if they weren’t so repellant.

Thus, one is not getting one’s !!@@**!! fired but is participating in a “workforce reorganization” (usually sans any further cushion other than 2 weeks’ severance, and you should feel grateful for the generosity). A British correspondent described what is surely the most absurd of these malignancies: Folks at his firm were informed that they might be facing a “synergy-related headcount restructuring.” One recalls the Circumlocution Office in Dickens’s “Little Dorrit.”

The pretentious titles of those lucky enough to have secure, if not high-end work, might reflect the culture of narcissism Christopher Lasch described as far back as 1979. But an inflated job title does not necessarily spring from the employee’s vanity. It might rather reflect an employer’s bloated self-regard or some bureaucrat’s misguided notion of political correctness or cultural diversity. This reflects a mentality that insists that a grade school baseball game should have no winners or losers and that every player must get a prize to avoid potentially bruised feelings.

Whatever the cause, bartenders have become mixologists; garbage collectors provide environmental waste transportation. Another English acquaintance who works at a chamber of commerce found himself listed as a “town centre manager.” Small businesses get haut pretense monikers. The 1942 Ginsberg Bra and Girdle Factory becomes the Ginsberg Lingerie Group. Dan’s morning donut-and-java diner is transformed – poof! – into La Brasserie Danielle. Movie end credits, once confined to a few frames and names, now extend into infinity, proclaiming the Best Boy’s Best Boy. (Granted, these particular cases can involve money as much as ego: a lion’s share of Lalaland legal time is consumed wrangling at $700 per hour and skyward overscreen credits, be they ever so humble.)

I confess to knowing little about pooh-bah titles in the higher echelons of corporate America. I grew up with Bob Hope’s chronic radio jibes about Hollywood vice presidents. According to Hope, a studio VP chiefly competed with fellow “yes men,” parroting whatever crazed notion his mogul was floating that day. Otherwise, he practiced his golf swing in a palatial office or stroked his narcissism to an even higher gloss by savoring his journal of unanswered calls. (This sort of thing can’t be made up. If you don’t believe me, see Robert Altman’s “The Player” [1992].)

The few CEOs and CFOs I’ve met through my work are fine people who’ve succeeded through talent and industry. But I have it on good authority that pooh-bahs like Hope’s Wilshire Boulevard VPs inhabit the boardrooms of our day. Proud over petty acronyms,* they savor their ultimate pretentious moi prize: a corner office with football field square footage and at least two windows looking down on the peons toiling in the Gotham canyons below.

*e.g., VPOOJAE: Vice President of Outsourcing Just About Everything. All right, I made that one up. But not by much.

Pretty Woman Rescrewed:

                   In A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1950, film scholar Robert B. Ray argued that mainstream American film often addresses one or another social ill by reducing it to a personal problem. The impact of  racism, anti-semitism, et cetera on one or a few individuals is portrayed, then a tidy reconciliation between  offensive and offended parties is effected by one means or another. The unwary viewer may thus be lulled into believing that complex social conflicts can be cured just as magically outside the local Simplex.

Simplistic answers notwithstanding, the better “problem”/ reformist pictures of the 1940s and 1950s  – e.g., Gentleman’s Agreement (1949), Home Of The Brave (1947) – at least managed to give red-hot social issues a reasonable public airing. No so Pretty Woman (1990), in which director Garry Mashall slickly sidesteps substantive questions about prostitution and the unequal treatment of women that persist to this day.

Pretty Woman depicts the unlikely romance of Edward Lewis (Richard Gere), a ruthless, acrophobic corporate raider, and Vivian Ward (Julia Roberts), a leggy young hooker with the requisite heart of gold and a supposedly refreshing vulgarity (it would, I believe, gag a goat). Edward is visiting Los Angeles to pirate a shipyard away from its crusty owner, James Morse (Ralph Bellamy — so crusty as to seem terminally sclerosed).

At a lavish party of fellow one-percenters, Edward’s latest live-in-lover calls to tell him she’s bailing out because of his monumental selfishness.  Edward throws a narcissistic fit, exits the party, and swipes his lawyer’s Lotus with the astonishing notion of driving himself  to the Regency Beverly Wilshire instead of sulking in his limo.

He promptly gets lost on the Sunset Strip and asks street-walking Vivian for directions. She takes him on a madcap excursion to the ultra-posh hotel; winds up in his penthouse, hired for the night. By the morning he’s been taken with her off-beat beauty, kooky candor, and bedroom skills (inferred through the conventions of soft-core porn). Rationalizing that he’ll need a decorative lady on his arm at some point in his relentless pursuit of pelf, he proposes to lease her services for a week at $3,000 (a serious chunk of change in 1990),  plus whatever glad rags she buys. She accepts – purely business on her part, too, in the world’s oldest business.

When Viv attempts to exchange her garish hooker outfit for the latest fashionista-wear, Rodeo Drive salesladies cruelly shame her out of their shops. The stern but kindly hotel manager takes her under his wing, gets her properly kitted out, and teaches her to distinguish between a salad and desert fork. Hector Elizondo plays the sort of fussy facilitator regularly encountered in  classic Forties screwball comedies (Edward Everett Horton specialized in such roles.) Marshall knows his film history, and cannily references the screwball genre throughout  Pretty Woman.

A revamped Vivian proceeds to transform Edward from corporate predator into liberal empath through ‘vegging out’ in front of the TV, barefoot walks in the park, and other witless pleasures. The generous spirit concealed by Viv’s crass facade likewise blossoms as Edward whisks her to four-star restaurants, decks her in diamonds, and flies her to the San Francisco opera in his private jet. Viv proves her ability to assimilate high culture by weeping buckets over her fictional alter ego in La Traviata.

At the end of the week, Edward is so gentled up that he decides to partner up with Morse so he can build “things” instead of tearing them down, Banes fashion. He also proposes to set Viv up as his mistress. It’s an enormous step for him towards healing his formidable self-preoccupation. For Viv, however, his offer is a painful putdown.

Turns out that when she was a kid her mother often locked her in the attic for ornery behavior, a punishment she bore by imagining herself  as a princess imprisoned in a tower by an evil queen, awaiting rescue by a handsome prince. Being Edward’s mistress doesn’t fit Viv’s script: it just makes her feel like his whore, which is pretty much what she’s been all along.

Viv’s pragmatic roommate (Laura San Giacomo as a saucy sexpot a bit worse for wear). urges Viv to take Edward’s deal and forget about her moonbeam fantasies: the only woman ever rescued by a handsome prince was “Cinderfuckingrella”.  But Viv protests – “I want the fairy tale!” Then Edward actually does rescue her – from his sleazoid partner (Jason Alexander). The latter, seeking revenge because Viv wrecked the shipyard takeover by airing out Edward’s parched psyche, attempts to rape her.

Edward decks the partner. After performing like a prince, he still can’t bring himself to do better than install her as his courtesan.  Viv refuses: she now loves him so much she can’t even sleep with him. So he ponies up the $3000 retainer and leaves for the airport. Saddened but  chockful of new self-respect, Viv is packing her bags to depart for a new life off the streets. Then Edward pulls up in his limo, ascends her fire escape despite his fear of heights,  and shakily sweeps her off her feet. Pretty Woman concludes with Edward asking Viv what’s supposed to happen to the prince after he rescues Cinderella. “She rescues him right back!” chirps the happy ex-hooker.

 

Viv’s rejoinder is a summary example of how Pretty Woman weds its’ exploitative agenda with fashionably feminist leftoid blather. My mentor in psychoanalytic film criticism, Dr. Martha Wolfenstein, wrote that cinema is pervaded by false appearances: one can discover the actual content of a movie’s ‘unconscious’ scenario by examining what the film is trying to reassure viewers never really happened, or happened for a ‘good’ reason. For instance,  in Casablanca (1943)  Ilse Lund explains to Rick Blaine that she only indulged in a flagrantly adulterous affair with him because she thought her husband had been killed by the Nazis.

When he first meets Vivian, Edward smugly exclaims – “You and I are such similar creatures – we both screw people for money.” The film then ‘reassures” us that Edward’s cynicism masks a bruised but beautiful soul. He’s really a prince of a guy. His barracuda business practise stems from a post-traumatic stress disorder – the stress being his childhood abandonment by a ruthless CEO father after a nasty divorce. Edward has become a corporate raider by identifying with the agressor: his first hostile takeeover  was of his  father’s company. As for his previous callous manipulation of women, he simply cannot bear the possibility of repeating his parents’ traumatic divorce.

Viv, for her part, is ‘really’ a plucky, offbeat lady whose life-affirming possibilities withered on the vine because her mom chronically rated her a bum, creating a bummed out self image and a yen for bum boyfriends which somehow brought her to walk Los Angeles’ wild side. Her harlotry is clearly provisional, serves to keep men at a distance until some  prince arrives to climb her tower and jump on her bones. Unable to exercise her talents in the business world because of her lousy self image, she’s still managed to turn prostitution into street-level venture capitalism; has no pimp; carefully choses her clientele; doesn’t use drugs; persistently flosses her teeth – presumably after fellatio; and otherwise practises impeccably safe sex – offering customers a choice of colored condoms.

The raw truths Pretty Woman seeks to cunningly anesthetize audiences from recognizing is that prostitutes and raiders do indeed screw people for money, but most Romney-ish raiders get away with it – in 2012 even more so than in 1990. Nor are will the shuck and jive of whoring and raiding be quickly surrendered after a mite of pop-psych parent bashing. With rare exceptions, and despite the pop-culture platitudes surrounding prostitution, the world’s oldest profession is hardly fun; is not a victimless crime, rather a humiliating, sometimes deadly enterprise. It thrives on collusion with corrupt authority; is ridden with sordid victimization,  human trafficking the worst example.

One further pierces the film’s sinister cloaking devices to discover that in the end Edward is little changed from the crude emblem of unprincipled patriarchy he initially embodied.  His Trumpish vulgarity actually eclipses Viv’s, with his parvenu pursuit of the ‘best’ room, meals, digs, and other empty signatures of boardroom triumphalism. His facile identification with Morse/Bellamy’s benevolent elder patriarch merely leads him to cease dismantling companies (at an appalling cost to workers, one assumes), in aid of building destroyers for the military-industrial complex.

Pretty Woman’s notion of the sexes rescuing/redeeming each other is essential to its devious work of disavowal. Despite Viv’s  concluding speech, Edward actually doesn’t  much crave rescue from his megabucks and extravagant lifestyle; he merely needs to become a trifle humanized by Viv’s  beauty, vitality, and the ‘special’ qualities he never fully articulates. Intelligence certainly can’t be an attributes  Although Edward claims she’s bright, she’s consistently depicted as a decerebrate ding-a-ling. Other women in the film are likewise painted as bimbos, bitches, or both. One is reminded of Sigourney Weaver’s ‘bony-assed’ corporate predator in Working Girl, a film which bears many instructive comparisons with Pretty Woman, including its’ meritricious portrayal of the Nineties sensitive ‘new man’.

Vivian, on the other hand, clearly needs to be extracted from her tawdry circumstances. Her rescue fantasies are wickedly construed as a ‘natural’ given of feminine psychology, as native as the  desire for the dazzling consumer goodies Edward provides with his phallic Mastercard.

Pretty Woman cleverly positions the audience, women in particular, in Viv’s place as she plays pixillated Jane Eyre to Edward’s junk-bond Rochester, undergoes ritual testing of her worth by her raider Pygmalion.

A repellant adulation of masculine domination informs this post-Reaginite reinvention of the Pygmalion myth. Pretty Woman emphasizes Edward’s charisma and power compared to his creation’s degraded status. The cockney heroine of Shaw’s Pygmalion sold flowers. Viv hawks her body. (In this regard, someone pointed out that we actually see more of Edward/Gere’s naked flesh than of Viv/Roberts’.) With Vivian, we goggle at the fabulous accoutrements of Edward’s loot; are stunned and humbled by the splendor of the Beverly Wilshire and other fabulous habitats of the unreprentent wealthy; participate vicariously in her triumph as Edward redeems her from her mean streets.

While token potshots are taken at Rodeo Drive conspicuous consumption, the most crucial – and cynical – test Viv had to pass in  1990 is whether she can consume as elegantly and endlessly as The Housewives of Beverly Hills.  Pretty Woman preaches that once tutored, then backed in classy spending by the man of your dreams, you too, can be transformed into the princess of every rich lout’s lustful, predatory fantasies. Presumably, your job in his script would be to abide cheerfully at home, ever ready to service the sahib at the end of his predatory working day.

In Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Enemies: A Love Story, the ironic wife says: “If men had their way, every woman would lie down a prostitute and get up a virgin.” Pretty Woman garnered huge box office by selling a dubious vision of woman as hooker cum handmaiden, madonna and whore simultaneously made flesh.

A large constituency of women who ought to have known better were seduced into buying the film as a harmless fantasy, particularly appealing to women who have it all at the price of terminal exhaustion. Daphne Merkin, in a much discussed New York Times piece, notably testified to the untenability, indeed downright speciousness of the film’s premises, yet could still conclude: “…it appears that in the post-modernist, post-feminist closing decade of the 20th century, we still need our myths; our amatory fictions – they help us endure.” God forbid.

The need fulfilled by these fictions is regressive; what endures in them is the demeaning patriarchal practice which the feminist ‘revolution’ has yet to really revolutionize, at least not with respect to the Neanderthal ideology of the contemporary male American lunatic right. In chosing her prince and the tainted fairy-tale he incarnates, Vivian has simply exchanged one form of whoring for another.

An earlier version of Dr. Greenberg’s review appeared in the Psychiatric Times, December 1990, pp. 41-2.

 

 

‘Mike’ Taps Into a Complex Subculture

Taking it off, taking it all off, whether for eros, profit, art, or any combination thereof might just be the world’s fourth oldest profession. Throughout history in song and story, it’s usually an infernal female who works her wiles upon some hapless male, by shedding her duds. To the West, Salome is arguably the most famous belly dancer of yore. What the West does not generally know is that the East’s most entrancing belly dancers were often male.

In the 20th century, the female stripper was an American vaudeville icon before dancers like Sally Rand and Gypsy Rose Lee turned stripping down to pasties and a G-string into rowdy performance art, by baring their all – or nearly all – behind plume or balloon. The humorist/scholar of American English H.L. Mencken coined the term “ecydysiast.”

I doubt the Sage of Baltimore had a guy in mind when he handed out that accolade. In my Big Apple youth, male strippers were automatically assumed to be homosexuals, cavorting in a netherworld club or sleazoid private parties, then hawking their sexual services afterward. Of course, there were male “gigolos,” always had been. But in the public’s perception, the gigolo was straight sexually, if a tad ethically bent. He didn’t undress for work but dressed – and elegantly. One envisioned him immaculately tuxedoed as he glided a bejeweled dame across the waxed floor.

In fact, male strippers were well-regarded performers in the Manhattan ’60s and ’70s “downtown” gay and lesbian performance art world, with its own Ab-Fab dance and dress conventions. The scene at first drew little attention from the “uptown” straight press. Everything changed with the advent of the gay liberation movement and the mainstreaming of gay culture, mediated by the groups like the Village People. The People came out of the sizzling gay disco world, scored big-time success with recordings like “In the Navy,” “Macho Man,” and their signature hit – “Y.M.C.A.” On stage, they paraded gay stereotypes like the Cop, the Sailor, the Cowboy, Construction Worker, so forth. In due time, the audiences for their records and shows frequently was more straight than gay.

The Village People’s popularity was paralleled by the rise of the Chippendales, an all-male song-and-dance review aimed squarely at straight women. The Chippendales, with their tightly programmed mock licentiousness, became a Las Vegas staple, then a worldwide franchise. The group consisted of sculpted guys dressed in a bowtie, white cuffs over bared torso, and radically tight pants. Their act was confined to the stage. Mingling with clients was verboten. Although their principal fan base was female, the group had a following among gay men, who were attracted by their hard-body look and amused by their chintzy glitz.

It would take a major pop culture dissertation to anatomize how we got from the Village People and Chippendales; from gay, fem, transgender, S&M, and every other species of sexual lib; through the culture of narcissism and celebrity, to the now-widespread practice of men stripping for women at public clubs, private events, bachelorette parties, sorority bashes, or what’s become a new edition of the old-fashioned girls’ night out.

Until the academic “full monty” is published, I’ll happily make do with Steven Soderbergh’s fascinating, if skin-deep, “Magic Mike” (skin aplenty on display). Since his 1989 debut art-house prizewinner, “Sex, Lies, and Videotape,” Soderbergh has consistently scored indie and mainstream triumphs, no easy task in contemporary film-making. He moves fluently across genres, for example, 2001’s “Ocean’s Eleven,” a witty reprise of the classic caper film. Wherever he comes to rest, Soderbergh maintains his abiding affection for rogue spirits dwelling on the legal/moral margins. In this regard, “Magic Mike” comprises a candid exploration of the contemporary male strip joint’s funky mise-en-scène, where bawdy choreography prompts cheering women to shed their inhibitions, get down and get lap danced into an erotic trance state, personally or by proxy.

Magic Mike is Michael Lane (Channing Tatum), by night a lead dancer at Tampa’s Xquisite club and an off-the-books laborer by day. (The average male stripper doesn’t make much from dropping his pants, of which more presently.) Mike meets 19-year-old Adam (Alex Pettyfer) on a roofing job. Adam promptly gets himself fired for stealing sodas.

They meet later outside a joint where Mike is flogging tickets for the club. Mike takes him there, introduces him to Dallas (Matthew McConaughey), its charismatic manager/impresario. When one of the leads is too stoned to go on, Adam stumbles through a perfunctory strip. His feckless hunkiness evokes a storm of lusty applause, and Dallas hires him on the spot.

Mike brings Adam home to the latter’s none-too-pleased sister, Brooke (Cody Horn). She tells Mike that her brother is an inveterate screwup who recently dropped out of college and a promising football career after a fight with his coach. He’s been living in slacker mode from Brooke’s couch and pretty much out of her purse ever since. She’s instantly put off by Mike when she discovers the questionable gig he’s gotten Adam into. But she’s also clearly drawn to Mike’s wry humor and unassuming dignity, qualities they both share. (Mike’s astonishing good looks don’t hurt, either.)

Turns out that Mike, at age 30, is growing dissatisfied with his party-hardy, casually promiscuous lifestyle. He hopes to leave stripping for handcrafting furniture, once he can assemble a grubstake from the grubby fivers fans stick in his thong. Until then, he must keep on dancing, literally and figuratively. Dallas fancies himself America’s premier strip choreographer and is about to realize his ambition to open a major strip space in Miami, perhaps even go international. He’s promised Mike a heavy percentage of the action but has a shabbier cut in mind.

The film devolves around Adam’s ascent – or descent – into his Xquisite career. Dallas tutors him in the profession’s idiosyncratic aesthetics, light years beyond crude bumping and grinding. Selecting the outrageous costumes and props appropriate to the crowd at hand is as crucial as pitching them away. Adam eventually becomes the “Kid,” an ur-symbol for his ravished fans of pumped-up late-adolescent eroticism. He reveres Mike as his liberator from middle-class conformity; revels in the questionable perks of his notoriety – a cornucopia of nubile women, booze, and major substance abuse.

Mike, who promised Brooke he’d watch Adam’s back, fails wretchedly. After Adam overdoses, Brooke angrily rejects Mike, then has a predictable epiphany that Adam is beyond her redemption. From now on, she realizes, he’ll have to follow his own fallen star.

It’s Mike who redeems himself in the end, bails Adam out of mortal danger from heroin hooligans with most of his savings, recognizes Dallas as an arch exploiter and second-string legend in his own mind, and quits stripping forever. Presumably, he’ll attain authentic selfhood carving Bauhaus barstools. The film concludes upon Mike’s and Brooke’s first kiss.

Soppy stuff, easily tossed off as a soft-core coming-of-age tale, but genuinely touching in Soderbergh and his leads’ capable hands. Channing Tatum, himself a stripper in his late teens, captures the muddled distress beneath Mike’s cool facade. His character senses, but can’t yet consciously admit that he’s edging past his prime, in a dubious profession where he’s seen the skull beneath the smile.

Alex Pettyfer renders Adam’s callow adolescent rebellion achingly palpable. Cody Horn vividly depicts Brooke’s anguish over her brother’s obtuse, refractory vulnerability, as well as her painful struggle toward accepting that she must distance herself from Adam’s draining dependency if she’s ever to move forward with her own life. Her dilemma, tragically common in clinical practice, rarely achieves such a tidy, unambivalent resolution, except – of course – at the multiplex, and in less than 2 hours.

Now in his early 40s, McConaghey’s range and depth grow with each new role. He’s a pitch-perfect Dallas, oozing with oily charm, cozening his devotees with smarmy insinuations of the lewd delights awaiting them – a small man with a big tawdry dream and an utterly ice-cold soul.

“Magic Mike” has been received well, critically, and done well at the box office. It’s attracted female audiences and generated a solid gay male following as well. My older gay patients and friends – including a gay studies academic – admire the film’s homage to the ribald exuberance of the Village People, and other kindred spirits from the ’60s-’70s downtown performance/disco scene. My professor added tartly that the film’s lavish hard-body display might have something to do with Magic Mike’s appeal to his crew.

The film has received fire from combatants on the right and left sides of the culture wars. Arch-conservatives rage at its supposedly debased vision of womanhood, in which even the most wholesome wives and mothers can be transformed in a wink into voracious painted Jezebels by viewing the strippers’ satyric gyrations.

I don’t propose taking your kids or grandkids to “Magic Mike.” But I submit that this puritanical thunderblast is exemplary of perennial male angst about aroused feminine sexuality that reaches back to Homer’s Helen of Troy and beyond. Many men, even of liberal stripe, are ignorant about, and would be scandalized by the extravagant bawdiness of the feminine equivalent of male locker room trash talk.

However, given the inequalities women still face today – namely, the underpaid and badly used girls of “Girls” – I do sympathize with the frustration I’ve heard expressed by older feminists about the male striptease mise-en-scène. It would indeed be a sad and sorry thing if Xquisite club bachelorette parties were the signal achievement of their courageous marches back in the day.

“Magic Mike” also has been critiqued by male strippers themselves, variously for not accurately portraying their art or failing to document the degradations and dangers of the profession. Male ecydysiasts claim the film’s footwork is clumsy and the dancers aren’t buff enough, and complain bitterly that one gets no sense of just how down and dirty it gets when the thongs come off (they routinely do). The strippers assert that women often treat them like “objectified” slaves, badly act up and act out, particularly at private parties.

I am far more concerned about reports that some men – although clearly not the majority — become involved with the trade, especially on the seamier private side, not for sex or art, but because they simply can’t find any other work in this devastated economy. Like the Kid, they own the requisite looks, abs, and butt to have 5 bucks shoved into their thongs night after night. They live an iota above the subsistence level, lulled by the spurious glamour of their demeaning labor.

Yet another testament to the betrayal of youthful America’s hopes.

‘Compliance’: First, Do No Harm

Film scholars have commented upon the native power of the documentary medium to convey the impression of unmanipulated reality. The intimation of “truthiness”– Stephen Colbert’s delectable mot– becomes especially pernicious in what I’ll call the “ill-intentioned” documentary. In this thankfully rare subgenre, the maker’s attitude toward some painful psychosocial problem is subverted by the very images that are supposed to promote one’s compassionate understanding.

For example, in a film about Mexican American street youth several decades back, most of the Latinos sported gross acne, scraggly mustaches, gold teeth, and copious off-putting attitude, while their girlfriends were slovenly dressed and spoke like Tijuana trollops. Despite the off-screen narrator’s earnest lament about the subjects’ dismal lives, their appearance projected an aura of disreputable entitlement. For an unwary viewer, it could evoke distaste rather than sympathy. One would like to believe that the maker did not consciously create the prejudicial dissonance between word and image.

Courtesy Magnolia Pictures
A photo from “Compliance.”

“Compliance,” written and directed by newcomer Craig Zobel, has received rave reviews from knowledgeable critics. The New Yorker’s David Denby and Peter Travers of Rolling Stone have hailed Zobel for baring the dreadful ease with which ordinary people abdicate moral choice in the face of authoritarian pressure. Nevertheless, I rate “Compliance” an ill-intentioned “mockumentary,” in which the audience is the chief victim of the disparity between its noble aims and ignoble ends.

The opening titles state that “Compliance” is based on true events, an assertion one views with misgiving. I don’t doubt that the tragedy upon which the film is based did occur in 2004, at a McDonald’s in Mount Washington, Ky. It’s Zobel’s exploitative repackaging of that occasion’s grim realities that spur one’s mistrust and aversion.

Zobel has changed the Kentucky McDonald’s to a “ChickWich” in a small Ohio town. It’s a Friday afternoon. The usual bustling crowd is about to descend, and Sandra, the evening manager, has just arrived. She’s a stocky woman in her late 40s or early 50s, touchy about her attractiveness. You empathize with her defensiveness when she tells a pair of employees gabbing about sex that she, too, enjoys a robust love life with her fiancé.

Sandra is a tough but not unkind boss; totally dedicated to her customers; thoroughly knowledgeable about her operation down to the last French fry. She presides over a staff of several people nearly her age and a gaggle of minimum-wage late teens. The young people have no great affection for the job, yet do it well enough under Sandra’s ever-vigilant eye – except for one slacker who may or may not have left a freezer door seriously ajar. The weekend’s meat supply is threatened; a bacon shortfall is going to be a big problem – no laughing matter.

Sandra wants to be a rising star in ChickWich’s tatty firmament. Her anxiety about blame from above about the costly food spoilage is palpable, escalating her pressure on her crew to stay on top of their game. In this already taut setting, she gets a call from a police officer who says a female customer has just filed a complaint that a waitress, Becky (Dreama Walker), filched money from her purse earlier in the day. He wants to avoid hauling Becky off to the station, and asks Sandra to hold Becky in the back of the restaurant pending his arrival to clear up the problem.

Sandra complies uncomfortably. The cop next conspiratorially intimates that Becky’s detention may be part of a larger investigation into a boyfriend’s sale of illicit drugs. Sandra buys his unlikely tale. Through a subtly orchestrated regime of wheedling, praise, and menace, he chivvies her into interrogating the hapless younger woman, beginning with a mutually humiliating strip search.

Becky’s ensuing Golgatha endures into the small hours of the night. By this time, the “investigation” has turned definitively perverse, and Sandra has swept several employees and her boyfriend into it. Others in the know stand by with varying degrees of discomfort.

I won’t go into the ghastly details. Suffice it to say that rape is in the air when an old male employee flatly refuses to join in Becky’s degradation. Sandra and staff suddenly wake to the horrid realization that they’ve been scammed. (Viewers have known the “cop” is bogus for some time. He’s a disturbingly ordinary family guy, weaving his sicko web from a comfortable home.)

Three months later, a brief sequence shows Sandra in the midst of a TV interview, the program’s nature undisclosed. A subtitle describes her as a fired fast food worker. She chats uneasily about the weather during a break. Scant words are exchanged about the ChickWich debacle, but an 800-pound gorilla is clearly in the room. A laconic sentence states there have been 70 such incidents in America; then the screen goes black.

“Compliance” is competently acted. Ann Dowd, as Sandra, adroitly excites one’s pity and revulsion, as she becomes ever more unglued in her absurdist endeavor to hold the fort while supervising the obscenity unfolding in back. The mise-en-scène artfully captures the sense and sensibility of a dumbed-down hick backwater. Zobel’s direction is credible – too credible.

What does he really want us to make of, or take from this deeply suspect project? Are his objectives honorable – to tutor and warn that anyone, given the right – or vilely wrong – circumstances, can be intimidated by abusive authority? Indeed, that all of us may harbor an innate yen to submit?

In aid of corroborating such propositions, the film’s admirers have alluded to the shameful willingness to surrender the moral responsibility of participants in the notorious Milgram experiment at Yale, or of German citizens during the Nazi era. But the reliability of Milgram’s evidence has been seriously questioned. And the anti-Semitism pervading Nazi Germany rendered much of its population exquisitely susceptible to approving the Jewish persecution if passively – neither wanting nor caring to know about the Holocaust’s brute reality.

I don’t pretend to fathom Zobel’s unconscious motives. But I must wonder if he intuited at whatever conscious level that his aims were questionable, pitched at inflaming the emotions rather than edifying the mind; encouraging contempt for the characters as well as ourselves.

“Compliance’s” protagonists aren’t morally bankrupt, just deeply stupid. You can’t generalize from them about generic humanity. With the exception of the sadistic prankster, the director paints them as well-intentioned but utterly witless good people, charter members of journalist H.L. Mencken’s heartland “boobocracy.” (Sandra’s boyfriend is particularly doltish.)

They fundamentally hate what they are doing or witnessing.

Zobel’s voyeuristic camera takes us into their midst, into the very belly of the beast they’ve collectively created. I feel there’s a subtle implication that some may even have begun enjoying Becky’s debasement, in some corner of the id where the snakes and lizards writhe.

Step by step, Zobel invites us to linger over the transgressive violation of Becky’s body and spirit. One wants to turn away, overcome by shame and loathing. Fans of torture-porn cinema savor the atrocities of the “Saw” and “Hostel” they’ve paid to attend. Zobel’s semitorture porn ambience took me utterly by surprise, even though I knew something about the film in advance.

While estimable critics like Travers and Denby praise “Compliance,” most of the viewers I interviewed felt ill used, as did I. I’ve always maintained that primum non nocere, the physician’s first duty not to harm, should be the credo of the documentarian and now the “mockumentarian.” It should pertain to subject and audience. Deliberately seeking out horror/terror cinema’s scarifying impact raises far more complex issues, which I’ve dealt with elsewhere (“Screen Memories: Hollywood Cinema on the Psychoanalytic Couch,” New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

Zobel, I fear, hasn’t taken the oath. It came as no surprise when several people walked out of the movie. I would have left, too, but had to stay to review this noxious piece of work – and now urge you not to see it. This is advice I’ve never tendered to readers in decades of reviewing. But I don’t give money to phony charities, either.

‘Mike’ Taps Into a Complex Subculture

Taking it off, taking it all off, whether for eros, profit, art, or any combination thereof might just be the world’s fourth oldest profession. Throughout history in song and story, it’s usually an infernal female who works her wiles upon some hapless male, by shedding her duds. To the West, Salome is arguably the most famous belly dancer of yore. What the West does not generally know is that the East’s most entrancing belly dancers were often male.

In the 20th century, the female stripper was an American vaudeville icon before dancers like Sally Rand and Gypsy Rose Lee turned stripping down to pasties and a G-string into rowdy performance art, by baring their all – or nearly all – behind plume or balloon. The humorist/scholar of American English H.L. Mencken coined the term “ecydysiast.”

I doubt the Sage of Baltimore had a guy in mind when he handed out that accolade. In my Big Apple youth, male strippers were automatically assumed to be homosexuals, cavorting in a netherworld club or sleazoid private parties, then hawking their sexual services afterward. Of course, there were male “gigolos,” always had been. But in the public’s perception, the gigolo was straight sexually, if a tad ethically bent. He didn’t undress for work but dressed – and elegantly. One envisioned him immaculately tuxedoed as he glided a bejeweled dame across the waxed floor.

In fact, male strippers were well-regarded performers in the Manhattan ’60s and ’70s “downtown” gay and lesbian performance art world, with its own Ab-Fab dance and dress conventions. The scene at first drew little attention from the “uptown” straight press. Everything changed with the advent of the gay liberation movement and the mainstreaming of gay culture, mediated by the groups like the Village People. The People came out of the sizzling gay disco world, scored big-time success with recordings like “In the Navy,” “Macho Man,” and their signature hit – “Y.M.C.A.” On stage, they paraded gay stereotypes like the Cop, the Sailor, the Cowboy, Construction Worker, so forth. In due time, the audiences for their records and shows frequently was more straight than gay.

The Village People’s popularity was paralleled by the rise of the Chippendales, an all-male song-and-dance review aimed squarely at straight women. The Chippendales, with their tightly programmed mock licentiousness, became a Las Vegas staple, then a worldwide franchise. The group consisted of sculpted guys dressed in a bowtie, white cuffs over bared torso, and radically tight pants. Their act was confined to the stage. Mingling with clients was verboten. Although their principal fan base was female, the group had a following among gay men, who were attracted by their hard-body look and amused by their chintzy glitz.

It would take a major pop culture dissertation to anatomize how we got from the Village People and Chippendales; from gay, fem, transgender, S&M, and every other species of sexual lib; through the culture of narcissism and celebrity, to the now-widespread practice of men stripping for women at public clubs, private events, bachelorette parties, sorority bashes, or what’s become a new edition of the old-fashioned girls’ night out.

Until the academic “full monty” is published, I’ll happily make do with Steven Soderbergh’s fascinating, if skin-deep, “Magic Mike” (skin aplenty on display). Since his 1989 debut art-house prizewinner, “Sex, Lies, and Videotape,” Soderbergh has consistently scored indie and mainstream triumphs, no easy task in contemporary film-making. He moves fluently across genres, for example, 2001’s “Ocean’s Eleven,” a witty reprise of the classic caper film. Wherever he comes to rest, Soderbergh maintains his abiding affection for rogue spirits dwelling on the legal/moral margins. In this regard, “Magic Mike” comprises a candid exploration of the contemporary male strip joint’s funky mise-en-scène, where bawdy choreography prompts cheering women to shed their inhibitions, get down and get lap danced into an erotic trance state, personally or by proxy.

Magic Mike is Michael Lane (Channing Tatum), by night a lead dancer at Tampa’s Xquisite club and an off-the-books laborer by day. (The average male stripper doesn’t make much from dropping his pants, of which more presently.) Mike meets 19-year-old Adam (Alex Pettyfer) on a roofing job. Adam promptly gets himself fired for stealing sodas.

They meet later outside a joint where Mike is flogging tickets for the club. Mike takes him there, introduces him to Dallas (Matthew McConaughey), its charismatic manager/impresario. When one of the leads is too stoned to go on, Adam stumbles through a perfunctory strip. His feckless hunkiness evokes a storm of lusty applause, and Dallas hires him on the spot.

Mike brings Adam home to the latter’s none-too-pleased sister, Brooke (Cody Horn). She tells Mike that her brother is an inveterate screwup who recently dropped out of college and a promising football career after a fight with his coach. He’s been living in slacker mode from Brooke’s couch and pretty much out of her purse ever since. She’s instantly put off by Mike when she discovers the questionable gig he’s gotten Adam into. But she’s also clearly drawn to Mike’s wry humor and unassuming dignity, qualities they both share. (Mike’s astonishing good looks don’t hurt, either.)

Turns out that Mike, at age 30, is growing dissatisfied with his party-hardy, casually promiscuous lifestyle. He hopes to leave stripping for handcrafting furniture, once he can assemble a grubstake from the grubby fivers fans stick in his thong. Until then, he must keep on dancing, literally and figuratively. Dallas fancies himself America’s premier strip choreographer and is about to realize his ambition to open a major strip space in Miami, perhaps even go international. He’s promised Mike a heavy percentage of the action but has a shabbier cut in mind.

The film devolves around Adam’s ascent – or descent – into his Xquisite career. Dallas tutors him in the profession’s idiosyncratic aesthetics, light years beyond crude bumping and grinding. Selecting the outrageous costumes and props appropriate to the crowd at hand is as crucial as pitching them away. Adam eventually becomes the “Kid,” an ur-symbol for his ravished fans of pumped-up late-adolescent eroticism. He reveres Mike as his liberator from middle-class conformity; revels in the questionable perks of his notoriety – a cornucopia of nubile women, booze, and major substance abuse.

Mike, who promised Brooke he’d watch Adam’s back, fails wretchedly. After Adam overdoses, Brooke angrily rejects Mike, then has a predictable epiphany that Adam is beyond her redemption. From now on, she realizes, he’ll have to follow his own fallen star.

It’s Mike who redeems himself in the end, bails Adam out of mortal danger from heroin hooligans with most of his savings, recognizes Dallas as an arch exploiter and second-string legend in his own mind, and quits stripping forever. Presumably, he’ll attain authentic selfhood carving Bauhaus barstools. The film concludes upon Mike’s and Brooke’s first kiss.

Soppy stuff, easily tossed off as a soft-core coming-of-age tale, but genuinely touching in Soderbergh and his leads’ capable hands. Channing Tatum, himself a stripper in his late teens, captures the muddled distress beneath Mike’s cool facade. His character senses, but can’t yet consciously admit that he’s edging past his prime, in a dubious profession where he’s seen the skull beneath the smile.

Alex Pettyfer renders Adam’s callow adolescent rebellion achingly palpable. Cody Horn vividly depicts Brooke’s anguish over her brother’s obtuse, refractory vulnerability, as well as her painful struggle toward accepting that she must distance herself from Adam’s draining dependency if she’s ever to move forward with her own life. Her dilemma, tragically common in clinical practice, rarely achieves such a tidy, unambivalent resolution, except – of course – at the multiplex, and in less than 2 hours.

Now in his early 40s, McConaghey’s range and depth grow with each new role. He’s a pitch-perfect Dallas, oozing with oily charm, cozening his devotees with smarmy insinuations of the lewd delights awaiting them – a small man with a big tawdry dream and an utterly ice-cold soul.

“Magic Mike” has been received well, critically, and done well at the box office. It’s attracted female audiences and generated a solid gay male following as well. My older gay patients and friends – including a gay studies academic – admire the film’s homage to the ribald exuberance of the Village People, and other kindred spirits from the ’60s-’70s downtown performance/disco scene. My professor added tartly that the film’s lavish hard-body display might have something to do with Magic Mike’s appeal to his crew.

The film has received fire from combatants on the right and left sides of the culture wars. Arch-conservatives rage at its supposedly debased vision of womanhood, in which even the most wholesome wives and mothers can be transformed in a wink into voracious painted Jezebels by viewing the strippers’ satyric gyrations.

I don’t propose taking your kids or grandkids to “Magic Mike.” But I submit that this puritanical thunderblast is exemplary of perennial male angst about aroused feminine sexuality that reaches back to Homer’s Helen of Troy and beyond. Many men, even of liberal stripe, are ignorant about, and would be scandalized by the extravagant bawdiness of the feminine equivalent of male locker room trash talk.

However, given the inequalities women still face today – namely, the underpaid and badly used girls of “Girls” – I do sympathize with the frustration I’ve heard expressed by older feminists about the male striptease mise-en-scène. It would indeed be a sad and sorry thing if Xquisite club bachelorette parties were the signal achievement of their courageous marches back in the day.

“Magic Mike” also has been critiqued by male strippers themselves, variously for not accurately portraying their art or failing to document the degradations and dangers of the profession. Male ecydysiasts claim the film’s footwork is clumsy and the dancers aren’t buff enough, and complain bitterly that one gets no sense of just how down and dirty it gets when the thongs come off (they routinely do). The strippers assert that women often treat them like “objectified” slaves, badly act up and act out, particularly at private parties.

I am far more concerned about reports that some men – although clearly not the majority — become involved with the trade, especially on the seamier private side, not for sex or art, but because they simply can’t find any other work in this devastated economy. Like the Kid, they own the requisite looks, abs, and butt to have 5 bucks shoved into their thongs night after night. They live an iota above the subsistence level, lulled by the spurious glamour of their demeaning labor.

Yet another testament to the betrayal of youthful America’s hopes.

‘Luck’ Got Dealt a Bad Hand

The history of high art abounds with towering work left incomplete. Throughout the ages, death is obviously the most common cause of unfinished masterpieces, from Virgil’s “Aeneid” to Bach’s “Art of Fugue,” from Gaudi’s “Cathedral of the Holy Family” to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Last Tycoon.” Failed or withheld financial support comes next. Last is the creator’s often enigmatic unwillingness or inability to conclude the job.

In popular, no less than high culture, plenty of outstanding work has been left incomplete. Sometimes it stands on its own; often it teases but does not satisfy. Jimi Hendrix was creating a double album, “First Rays of the New Rising Sun,” when he died from an overdose; one can hear flashes of his amazing grace in reconstructions, but flashes only.

To the despair of fans, many terrific, or at least promising, TV series have been canceled after a season, or further down the line – most notably “Star Trek” and “Arrested Development,” but also and more recently “The 4400” and “Firefly.” The continuing popularity of such shows in syndication and DVD release attests to the deep shortsightedness of executives or sponsors who clamored for their termination.

HBO’s “Luck” is the latest series to be axed after a single season. In this case, feckless network executives can’t be blamed so conveniently. As far as I have been able to determine, worry about profitability was not the sole cause. Whatever the reasons, the decision to abandon “Luck” was particularly unfortunate. The pilot was not always easy to follow, but the series quickly gathered dramatic force with each new episode. By its conclusion, “Luck” was receiving the kind of praise from most critics lavished upon past shows like “The Sopranos” and the recent “Boardwalk Empire.”

“Luck” is the brainchild of David Milch, who has enjoyed a successful 30-year run on network and cable TV as writer and creator of, among other things, “Hill Street Blues,” “NYPD Blue,” and “Deadwood.” I did not know until now that Milch also is a major horse racing enthusiast and, by his own confession, a heavy and, at times, compulsive gambler.

In interviews, Milch has said that his father starting taking him to the racetrack when he was 5. One intimates that over the years the track became as important as his writing. He’s tremendously knowledgeable about every aspect of this idiosyncratic milieu – its bright and shadowy side, and its people of the highest and meanest class. Its scams and hustles are ubiquitous across the social order. Milch savors them all.

He has a special admiration not only for trainers and riders, but for those of the backstretch, so to speak: those who do the daily down and dirty care of the horses for poor pay and poorer lodging. His respect is tempered by appreciation of their flaws. Above all, he treasures the breathtaking creatures themselves, their poignant combination of power, grace, and fragility. He also harbors no illusions about the crass exploitation of their inherent vulnerability.

Milch also is thoroughly acquainted with the vicissitudes of compulsive gambling, by his account gained at first hand – not merely the disorder’s signs and symptoms, but its peculiar action-addicted lifestyle, eternally perched between dizzy hope or desolating despair, wherever and whatever the action, on the rail, or at a poker table. (The most accurate depiction of compulsive gambling on film, sans sermonizing, is Robert Altman’s “California Split.”)

In creating “Luck,” Milch employs his formidable artistic and experiential skills in the fashion of the great director Robert Altman, himself no stranger to gambling. Aided by the superior direction of Michael Mann, Milch spreads a broad canvas of disparate personalities, each of whom epitomizes a different aspect of the track milieu. One comes to recognize that each also is a hologram of a mysterious wholeness, pulsing with subtle psychological resonances. Hollywood has repeatedly tried to bring off Altman’s artful layering of story and character since “Nashville.” Milch is one of the few to succeed.

His Santa Anita racetrack not only is an imaginary palace of dreams, where fantasies of supreme wealth and glory seem always to lie achingly within one’s grasp but are never realized. Milch depicts it as the actual fading palace it is. Here, as elsewhere across America, attendance is dwindling as thoroughbred racing is threatened not only by off-track betting, but the rise of the real and virtual casino industry.

The central figure in Milch’s elegant tapestry is Chester “Ace” Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman), a gambling/gangster kingpin of the old school. He’s been released on parole from 3 years of incarceration on a drug rap rigged by his associates, who now fear vengeful retaliation. Hoffman plays him as a Jewish Godfather, impeccable even in his prison uniform. He’s a small man of few, carefully measured words, radiating enormous authority, with massive gravitas a Don Corleone would envy. He continues to preside over a powerful, semilegal empire, and has sanctioned criminal and even bloody deeds, but always has kept to his own rigorous code of honor, choosing not to inform on those who betrayed him.

Ace is joined by a companion from the bad old days, Gus Demetriou (Dennis Farina). Gus is far more than Ace’s bodyguard. He’s his dearest friend and confidant – although dear would not be a word in the Bernstein dictionary. From jail, Ace fronted the purchase of a horse through Gus (he can’t legally own one). The buy is crucial to his Machiavellian scheme to exact revenge on his partners, even as he appears to be courting them for a new project: acquiring, then resurrecting Santa Anita into a “racino,” or combination racetrack/casino.

A quartet of ragtag horseplayers has occupied the same table in the trackside cafe since Moses descended the mountain. Typical of such affiliations, these men are extravagantly unsocialized, not introspective, and chiefly relate to gamblers who share their marginal way of life. The group is presided over by Marcus (Kevin Dunn), a paraplegic misanthrope with a rancorous gibe for all comers and occasions.

Perennially short on cash but long on hope, the group reveres the so-called gambler’s fallacy – that Lady Luck only stays south for so long. Redemption rides on a “Pick 4” – choosing four successive winners. As “Luck” begins, Marcus’ scruffily handsome protege, Jerry (Jason Gedrick), dopes out a $2 million Pick 4 payout. It alters the quartet’s Motel 6 existence not one whit; indeed, it provides Jerry with the means to ruin himself even more disastrously at the poker tables (prodigies like this rarely excel at more than one game).

Jerry’s triumph pivoted around a long-shot nag owned and trained by Turo Escalante (John Ortiz). Turo, a former street urchin, clawed his way into the barns, and after years of grueling labor became successful at his craft. He could easily have become the kind of celebrity trainer who hobnobs with jurassically wealthy patrons. However, he prefers to avoid the limelight so he can stay true to his own disagreeable and contemptuous self. One wouldn’t ever want to be on the sharp end of his displeasure.

Turo practices every sharp trick in the trainer’s manual to disguise the talents of cheap or otherwise questionable horses, then bets just enough to earn a comfortable livelihood without having the animal claimed away. He’s thus none too happy when Jerry susses out his entry’s hidden form in the Pick 4 – too much notoriety. He’s even unhappier when Ace chooses him to take on his horse. Turo hates to be under anyone’s thumb, especially the thumb of an implacable Ace.

Walter Smith (Nick Nolte) embodies thoroughbred racing’s halcyon days. The star trainer of a bluegrass Kentucky stable owned by “The Colonel,” Walter was gifted a prized colt on a handshake by the boss before he died. The Colonel’s heirs subsequently ruined the stable, and murdered the colt’s sire for the insurance. Taking the colt with him, Walter fled Kentucky and finally settled at Santa Anita, his glory days supposedly behind him. But he’s quietly training the colt to become a champion, concealing its potential after Turo’s fashion, but for nobler purposes. Nolte plays Walter as an elder thoroughbred savant, speaking a sort of gravelly voiced equine Shakespeare.

The minor characters in “Luck” include apprentice and seasoned jockeys, perennially wrestling with weight and substance abuse; Turo’s exasperated lover, the astringent track vet; an Aspergerish jockey agent, suicidally depressed over his failed marriage; Ace’s Borgia-like betrayers; and Claire Lachey, a mysterious woman who runs a farm where ex-cons rehabilitate traumatized horses toward the recovery of human and animal alike.

The major and minor characters (many well-known actors in small parts) are palpably “there” for us, even when fleetingly, as in Altman’s and Fellini’s character-dense movies. A case in point is Claire, whose self-effacing, luminous presence begins to touch Bernstein’s stony heart, long armored against intimacy. She’s played by the estimable Joan Allen. Allen can’t be cast against type, because she’s never confined herself to any type.

Then, of course, there are the horses themselves. The racing sequences in “Luck” are simply the best ever lensed, compelling the viewer to viscerally identify with the terrible dangers of maneuvering through a thundering wall of competitors. Milch also captures the ineffable sweetness that emanates from these magnificent animals when they’re at rest.

All the chief characters, and most of the minor ones, are deeply affected by this potent sweetness, which in turns shapes our deeper and often kinder perception of them. Walter Smith seems to have it in his marrow – he could be part horse. Turo Escalante’s irascible exterior conceals a tenderness that one speculates stems from a childhood identification with his charges. Echoing Ace’s attraction to Claire, that same sweetness touches and unsettles the aging mobster. In an especially lovely sequence, Ace, to Gus’s consternation, decides to sit through the night in the barn with his ailing horse. As he drifts off, it gently rests its neck on his shoulder, nuzzles his cheek. It’s a scene of purest cinema gold.

The last episode of “Luck” artfully knots together the series’ narrative strands. Like all well-crafted cliff-hangers, it both stands on its own and establishes the premises for another season. This was not to be. The second season was supposedly already in the works when HBO abruptly canceled the series.

On a dark and stormy night in 1797, Samuel Coleridge awoke from a febrile opium dream and immediately began scribbling it out. He was suddenly called away on business by a person from the nearby town of Porlock. When he returned, his dream had completely vanished from his mind, leaving 200 lines of “Kubla Khan,” one of the greatest poems in English romantic literature. No one knows who Coleridge’s visitor was, or his business. But ever since, “the person from Porlock” has been a symbol of the devastating intrusion of grubby outsiders into the sacred domain of art.

It seems several persons from Porlock were involved in the disastrous termination of “Luck.” Three horses died in the course of the series, in at least one case from an injury sustained during a routine walk. Both the animal rights organization PETA and the gossip show TMZ nosed it about that HBO had been grossly negligent, charges that were persistently denied, even when the show was canceled.

Despite favorable reviews, the viewership of “Luck” failed to measure up to the network’s high expectations, escalating rumors that the equine deaths were used as a pretext to shut down the series. I believe Milch may very well have been too close to his material to realize that unknowledgeable viewers might be turned off by a pilot heavily laden with obscure racing procedures and lingo. HBO apparently had the same impression, because subsequent episodes contained skillful introductions by way of effective clarification.

Mozart’s “Requiem” and Puccini’s “Turandot,” left incomplete by their composers’ deaths, had reasonable endings fleshed out. But fine TV series like “Luck” are not likely to be rehabilitated, if only because of the economics involved. As any gambler would tell you, that’s the breaks of the game. You can play the hell out of a poker hand, be dead certain the pot is yours, only to have a little old lady with blue hair from Porlock draw out on you. So in that spirit, let’s just say we’re supremely lucky to have one season of “Luck,” when there might have been none.

The series is still running on HBO per view and will doubtless be available on DVD within a year or so.

Originally published on Clinical Psychiatry News

‘The Master’ Explores Extremes of Human Behavior

“You’re a very bad man!” says “The Wizard of Oz’s” Dorothy Gale, after she discovers that the Wizard is actually an old carny flimflam artist.

“Oh, no,” he replies. “I’m a very good man. I’m just a very bad wizard.”

Dorothy’s Oz adventure interprets as a fantastic reworking of puberty’s rite of passage. The arc of adolescence is completed when one has transitioned from the necessary dependency of childhood into the dawning autonomy of young adulthood. Dorothy believes she needs an omnipotent power to get back home – in psychoanalytic terms, to construct the foundations of a coherent adult identity.

The Wizard explains that she’s owned the heart, brains, and courage to accomplish this task all along. (By the same token, her avatars – Tin Man, Scarecrow, and Cowardly Lion – already possess the respective capability each imagines he lacks.) To realize her latent strengths, she must undertake the hazardous, exciting journey down puberty’s Yellow Brick Road.

We all need our Wizards, first for sheer survival as infants, later to thrive as children. Freud wrote tellingly about the “magnificence” with which the child endows his parents. During adolescence, these “Wizards” must inevitably be cut down to size, as we recognize – often painfully – that the mightiness of parents and other adults is illusory. They are, after all, ordinary, flawed mortals.

But what if the trajectory of adolescent development miscarries? Then the adult may seek to redress unresolved yearnings for childhood’s comforting dependency through a symbolic substitute – lover, spouse, mentor, even a cause – unconsciously glorified to redeem the parents’ “lost” magnificence. Psychoanalysts infer various factors that might predispose one to evoke this magical aggrandizement: innate constitutional difficulties, prolonged debilitating childhood illnesses, unfortunate cultural circumstances, a pathologic parent-child symbiosis.

Searching after an omnipotent parental surrogate as a consequence of miscarried adolescence may be a mildly neurotic affliction – resolved through emotional growth later in life, sometimes through therapy. But those severely predisposed to seek and never find a lavishly idealized Other may become perpetual unmoored drifters – or become consumed in the quest for psychic integration through the agency of the exalted Other, or a succession of Others, as idols fail and fall. Clinical work with such a pilgrim reveals that his or her fantasied aim is to achieve power by paradoxically relinquishing it to a proxy.

Woe betide the seeker who finds someone who imagines he possesses such power! This dire dynamic lies at the core of cults – and of Paul Thomas Anderson’s ambitious, unsatisfying new film, “The Master.” Written and directed by Anderson, “The Master” is set in postwar 1950s’ America. Its drifter/pilgrim is Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), a broken survivor of the Pacific theater’s bloody beaches. There are no scenes of actual combat. Quell’s participation in the horrific carnage of that war is disclosed through a short, strong establishing close-up: His eyes are seen peeping fearfully through the gate of a landing craft about to disembark troops into battle.

Jump cut to Quell on an atoll beach, miming intercourse with a female sculpted from sand while fellow sailors cheer him on, then masturbating furiously into the ocean waves, then returning to the sand woman alone, to lay his head on “her” breast with eerie tenderness.

There’s something unhinged about Quell from the start. Whether achieved through lighting, make up, or sheer acting art, Phoenix’s face often resembles the dysmorphic visage of a leering gargoyle. His speech is restricted; his voice oddly strangled, forced through clenched teeth. His movements are odd, dystonic. His limbs are all right angles; his arms akimbo; his walk a disjointed shamble. Yet, he can be oddly attractive. He projects a brutal sensuality that easily attracts women.

Quell is hospitalized for posttraumatic stress disorder. His signs and symptoms suggest multiple serious comorbidities. His punctuate hallucinations, unsocialized and intermittently explosive antisocial behavior, and schizoid, marginal lifestyle probably existed before the war. As did his gross double-diagnosis alcoholism. Phoenix gives one of the most accurate depictions of the disorder ever lensed. The immensity of his thirst for booze from any source is frightening. He creates and imbibes toxic concoctions from anything available: cleaning fluid, Lysol, photo-developing solution.

 

Of his past, we know little: a mother psychiatrically hospitalized for years; paternal alcoholism and desertion; a tentative relationship before the war with a teenage girl, who he briefly visits after his discharge and flees as from the plague. Again, in a series of jump-cut sequences, he descends the social ladder, unable to hold the most menial jobs. Finally, in the abyss of end-stage alcoholism, he stumbles through a decrepit waterfront, tumbles over the rail onto a brightly lit yacht, and passes out.

A wealthy patron has lent the yacht to Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), charismatic Master of a cult called “The Cause,” for a celebration of his daughter’s wedding. Dodd professes to be “a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher.” His character is loosely based on the young L. Ron Hubbard; his theories are likewise distant relatives of Scientology’s early praxis.

Dodd’s agenda for “getting clear” involves a bizarre meld of hypnotic regression, gestalt, and group-therapy techniques. One is “guided’ through millennia of past lives, so as to shed mental and physical disorders (even leukemia) along the way, and reach a state of godlike perfection. Acolytes are blissfully unaware that the Master’s ever mutating master plan appears (to this clinician) driven by hypomanic mood swings.

The film reveals virtually nothing of Dodd’s background. He is presented, as it were, out of nothing, a man of air. He’s handsome, if a bit porky; dresses impeccably; and moves with suave, almost effeminate grace. He’s a witty, captivating speaker, with his hands beautifully sculpting the rise and fall of his nuanced phrases. His enormous charm entrances one into belief, no matter how dubious the premises.

Dodd would seem the reverse of Quell’s debased medal. But there’s a dark affinity between the two. Their bond is sealed over alcohol. Introducing himself, Dodd says he’s sampled Quell’s latest brew – it stunned him literally and figuratively. Immediately diagnosing Quell a dissembling rogue, he’s also addressing his own wild side – which one speculates is sublimated through his outré doctrines.

A whiff of brimstone rises from Dodd’s subsequent inebriated “clearing” session with Quell. When he intently asks whether Quell ever committed incest – he had been a victim – one somehow glimpses Dodd’s wanton, possibly debauched sexuality (further insinuated by a grotesque party in which the clad Dodd cavorts among nude female devotees).

“The Master” centers on the increasingly ambivalent, symbiotically charged relationship between Dodd and Quell. In this sinister saraband, Dodd, ever the consummate actor, alternately plays solicitous guru-cum-therapist to Quell’s traumatized psyche, and angry Prospero to Quell’s soused, defiant Caliban. Dodd uses every technique in his cracked repertoire to “clear” Quell – except for past-life regression. It seems the wicked, self-deceitful Quell must first acknowledge who he is to Dodd before he can fathom who he ever was.

 

Individual sessions consist of Quell ceaselessly repeating his name and naming his transgressions to Dodd. Before an assembly of the faithful, Dodd makes Quell shuttle back and forth for hours between touching a wall and window, relating his sensations in minute detail. It’s moot whether this is meant to ground Quell in a Zen-like recognition of “suchness” or merely torture him into submission.

At length, Quell does become Dodd’s disciple. But his acceptance of the Cause is ever precarious, punctuated by spectacular lapses into drink, fornication, and violence. He possesses no understanding of Dodd’s arcane philosophy but is profoundly solaced by the Master’s stringent devotion. It’s not Dodd’s words, but his tune that promises the end of Quell’s inarticulate suffering.

Dodd meets Quell when the latter’s life has sunk into extremely dark depths, and the former’s fortunes are on the rise: Dodd has begun to attract the affluent people who are perennially drawn to whatever esoteric practice is in fashion – mesmerism, theosophy, Bikram Yoga. After Quell joins Dodd, the Cause runs out of steam and support over an unspecified time. (Once more, jump cutting between sequences is Anderson’s signature means of narrating Dodd’s decline and fall, as it was in documenting Quell’s deterioration.)

Dodd’s methods and integrity come under increasing fire. He’s sued for misuse of a patron’s funds. At a threadbare Florida “congress” of the movement, now much reduced, Dodd’s long-expected second book, supposedly even more transformative than the first, is revealed as fatuous blather.

Paranoid insinuations were already being made about “outsiders” invading the movement to destroy it, well before Quell joined up. Dodd’s zealot wife (Amy Adams) is now thoroughly convinced that Quell has been a spy of some secret agency all along and demands his expulsion. Dodd will have none of it. He insists that saving Quell is vital to the Cause’s mission: If this damaged miscreant can be rescued from “unclarity,” anyone can. It’s therefore not Quell who has failed the Cause, but vice versa.

Quell’s anarchic sociopathy has in fact infected Dodd’s project, by seducing Dodd into deeper corruption. Whenever Dodd is disparaged, Quell savagely attacks the critic, causing the movement even greater problems. Dodd may remonstrate that he eschews violence, but one intuits Quell is acting out Dodd’s disavowed violent proclivities. I’ve frequently encountered this “superego lacuna” in the parent of a delinquent adolescent.

 

Quell finally flees the Cause and resumes his perpetual wandering to the ends of despair. His desolation escalates when he finds the young woman he idealized, as he would later elevate Dodd, has long since married. After several months – or years – Dodd summons Quell to England, promising him a definitive “cure.” Quell finds him flourishing, dapper as ever, reinvented as the headmaster of a progressive school. (Charismatic scoundrels like Lancaster Dodd frequently manage to recover their stride.) His cure for Quell turns out to be a scam infinitely worse than the disease.

For Dodd has bid his return only to affirm his twisted need for Quell, wants him forever near or gone on pain of death should he attempt to come back. Having passed a psychological death sentence on Quell, he renders more blatant the latent homoeroticism always underpinning their relationship, with a lascivious crooning of: “I want to get you/On a slow boat to China …” It’s arguably the picture’s best and most certainly its weirdest moment.

Quell flees Dodd, and “The Master” comes full circle with the film’s initial shot of his face pressed against the sand woman’s breast. The analyst conceives this as Quell’s return to the plenitude of the maternal breast, which we have seen embodied in his ambivalent wedding to the Master’s illusory “magnificence.”

I’ve probed “The Master’s” intricate dynamics, but psychological complexity does not guarantee artistic potency. Paul Thomas Anderson’s impressive life’s work – such as “Hard Eight” (1996), “Boogie Nights” (1997), ”Magnolia” (1999) – often examines a problematic male mentor/mentee relationship. His last picture, the magisterial “There Will Be Blood,” (2007) comprises the most devastating exploration of this theme. Unfortunately, despite considerable advance buzz and critical acclaim, “The Master” is a cold turkey, a very strange – and estranging – bird, indeed.

For, unlike “There Will Be Blood” and Anderson’s other pictures, no one in “The Master” ever truly engages the heart. Phoenix and Hoffman are remarkable as Quell and Dodd; in fact, too remarkable, eclipsing every other character. Each actor’s eye seems squarely focused on an Oscar to the detriment of Anderson’s customarily excellent ensemble work.

There’s nothing about cult and cult membership one hasn’t seen far better described (for example, the unfortunately neglected “Ticket to Heaven” [1981]). What’s specific about “The Master” is its extraordinarily tedious induction of Quell’s devilish discipleship. Under the lash of Dodd’s relentless interrogation – whatsyournamewhatsyournamewhatsyourname – Quell’s interminable shuffling between window and wall – one eventually feels ground down and crushed like Quell. “The Master,” in effect, becomes what it beholds. On leaving the theater, I felt released, as though I myself had been liberated from a cult, gratefully deprogrammed to savor the cool autumn air.

Woody Allen: Unshrinkable

Not since Danny Kaye’s “Court Jester” and “Knock on Wood” had I laughed through tears – until I viewed Woody Allen’s early madcap farces such as “Take the Money and Run,” “Bananas,” and “Sleeper.”

I was delighted – and moved – by Allen’s bittersweet, autobiographical comedies: winsome “Annie Hall,” but also “Broadway Danny Rose” and “Radio Days.” The latter owned special resonances for me as an affectionate tribute to Brooklyn and Manhattan of my own adolescence.

But starting with “Interiors” in 1978, Allen baffled, then disappointed his admirers by setting aside his comedic gifts for heavy-handed glosses of major “intellectual” European directors. Films like “Interiors,” “September” (1987) and “Another Woman” (1988) essentially were hollowed-out repros of Bergman, Fellini, Antonioni, and Resnais: Allen insipidly parroted their political and metaphysical concerns, without a jot of their genius.

Photo by Philippe Antonello © Gravier Productions, Inc., Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
A photo from Woody Allen’s “To Rome With Love,” featuring Alec Baldwin and Jesse Eisenberg.

“Crimes and Misdemeanors” (1989) was an unexpected exception to Allen’s fatuous assumption of intellectual depth and high moral tone. It encouraged many critics – myself included – to hope that he had recovered his stride; indeed, that he actually might forge a unique blend of comedy and ideological contemplation that would win him the auteur status he so clearly craved.

Sadly, “Crimes” turned out to be a one-off. Allen resumed grinding out tedious knockoffs of “Hannah and Her Sisters“ (1986) (already a lackluster effort), hallmarked by the lugubrious nattering of well-off Gotham narcissists over their guilt-ridden philandering or stale genre replicants like “Manhattan Murder Mystery” (1993).

“Deconstructing Harry” (1997) was Allen’s most maladroit homage to European art-house cinema yet; a self-serving rehash of Fellini’s “8 1/2,” mediated through the director’s tepid counterfeit of novelist Philip Roth’s hotly debated “counterlife” autobiographical devices. One thus got two feeble tributes – or bald rip-offs – of impressive talents for the same ticket.

Speculation inevitably arose that Allen had created his antihero, a failed writer and flagrant adulterer, to process the disorderly scandal his personal life had become. His breakup with Mia Farrow; his affair with her adopted daughter, Soon-Yi, while still living with Farrow; and Farrow’s allegations of other improprieties, had all been notoriously paraded before the public. To me, what mattered was not the peccadillos of his personal life but the validity of his art. “Deconstructing Harry” (1997) was simply crap art.

Allen had famously declared that “90% of success is showing up.” A worthy notion, but after “Harry,” he was dutifully showing up each year with uncompelling second-string work. Many of his pictures were commercial as well as aesthetic duds, featuring Allen’s usual frustrated nebbishes and anhedonic adulterers. As ever, his actors were drawn from the profession’s summit. But whatever their age or nationality, they were perennially afflicted with that peculiar idiom I called “Woodyspeak” – hesitant, stammering, chockablock with petulant psychobabble. Woodyspeak’s wedding with Larry David’s sour kvetching in “Whatever Works” (2009) all was especially unfortunate.

In his European movies over the past few years, however, Allen has begun to show flashes of the wacky surreal wit that hallmarked his early triumphs. The hero of his film “Midnight in Paris” (2011) is a disaffected Hollywood screenwriter who’s joined in the City of Lights by his unempathic fiancée and her parvenu parents. Every evening, an antique limo whisks him back to the 1920s, where he consorts with Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and other artistic luminaries of the period.

In turn, a discontented bohemian beauty takes him 20 years further back to Paris’s Belle Époque, where they hang out with Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, and company. She decides to dwell in that time; he chooses to return to and live permanently in real-time Paris. He rejects the prospect of a deadening marriage and dead-end career to follow his bliss as a struggling novelist.

The story is slim, its conclusions hardly novel, but the film itself has an endearing freshness and surprising beauty. Its stills of the city constitute thoughtful “declarations of camera,” embodying Paris’s allure to the frustrated writer. Allen has blessedly shed his interminable existential ruminations. At base, “Midnight” struck an agreeable note of accepting the joys of things as they are, not whinging over what they’re not.

[SPOILER ALERT! If you haven’t seen this film, you may want to stop here as the plot and themes are explored below in detail.]

Allen’s new film, “To Rome With Love” (2012), is another appreciation of a unique, enduring European urbanity in every sense of that word. His signature comic gifts are before us again, together with an unpretentious – as opposed to his former sententious – contemplation of human transience. “To Rome” begins in the epicenter of the city’s monumental architecture. A prototypical Italian police maestro stands on his platform, conducting the eternally insane Roman traffic. His elegant gesturing precipitates an off-camera crash and howls of profanity. Allen thus deftly introduces us to Rome’s singular blend of the eternal with a frenetic, often crass, absurdist present.

Photo by Philippe Antonello © Gravier Productions, Inc., Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
Another photo from Woody Allen’s “To Rome With Love.”

The cop steps down and tells us his real job is telling stories about Rome’s inhabitants and visitors. He narrates four tales:

• New Yorker Hayley (Alison Pill) is engaged to radical lawyer Michelangelo (Flavio Parenti). Her parents, just arrived in Rome to meet her prospective in-laws, are Phyllis (Judy Davis), an acerbic psychiatrist, together forever with Jerry (Woody Allen), an opera director forever fretting about retirement, mortality, and the critical derision provoked by his avant-garde productions (for example, “Rigoletto” with characters costumed as white mice). As it turns out, Michelangelo’s father (Fabio Armiliato), a mortician, is an astonishing tenor, but his talents have only been exercised in the shower.

• Antonio (Allesandro Tiberi) and Milly (Allesandra Mastronardi), a small-town Italian couple, have journeyed to Rome because he’s been offered a lucrative job by one of his starchy upper-class relatives. Hardly has Milly left to have her hair done when a voluptuous prostitute, Anna (Penélope Cruz), invades his room, mistaking him for the unknowing winner of a bet between two of her wealthy clients. He passes her off as Milly, who meanwhile wanders into an on-location film shoot and her own loopy erotic adventures.

• Leopoldo (Roberto Benigni), an ordinary Roman salaryman, leaves his comfortable bourgeois apartment to be unaccountably besieged by screaming paparazzi. He’s whisked off to national news programs, where he’s interviewed about his breakfast toast and underwear preferences. He attends red-carpet premieres with his dumpy wife. Multiple hotties beg for his bed. Why this lunatic limelighting? His bemused limo driver explains he’s become famous for being famous and should enjoy it while it lasts. (Be it noted that the Romans pretty much invented the concept of fame during the rule of the Caesars and have been madly worshiping it ever since.)

• John (Alec Baldwin), a world-weary noted American architect on holiday, wanders through the picturesque Trastevere district, searching for the street where he lived during his training decades ago. He runs into Jack (Jesse Eisenberg), himself an architecture student, who takes him to his apartment. Jack’s wife, Sally (Greta Gerwig), reveals that she’s about to put up her best friend, Monica (Ellen Page), with them. Monica is recuperating from her latest disastrous love affair and stalled acting career. From his obvious ample experience, John warns Jack that Monica is a pseudointellectual, extravagantly narcissistic man-eater, but – “go ahead, throw yourself into the propeller!”

Allen weaves these diverse tales into an intricate, hilarious, and ultimately poignant dance. Apropos of life in Rome, his tempo veers dizzily between relaxed and accelerando, more often in the latter lane, propelled by buoyant Italian pop hits like the kick off, “Volare.” Allen’s agile camera flies us about and above town. We swoop over the famed Seven Hills, stroll through Rome’s teeming streets and quiet vicolos. Brief shots alternate with leisurely sequences. Associations often float freely across the scenes. Temporality takes on typical Allenesque surreality. The director has an enduring fondness for magic; here, he “magics” us into perceiving his stories as simultaneously occurring on one and over several days.

Whether appropriate to the protagonists’ age, lifestyle, or neurosis, being lost, then found – or finding themselves – informs their dramatic arc. Their off-balance, unanchored status is both existential and amusingly concrete. Hayley meets her fiancé by asking his help to find a piazza. John can’t find the lovely cobbled Trastevere lane of his romantic student years.

In a residential neighborhood, Jerry can’t locate the unlikely funeral parlor in which his prospective son-in-law lives with his family and vocally gifted father. Jerry promptly enlists the latter in resurrecting his own tattered artistic reputation, to the anger of the politically engaged Michelangelo. Utterly confused by the delicious Roman custom of giving impenetrable directions with much exquisite hand waving, Milly wanders ever farther from her husband, eventually into acting out her starry-eyed film-world fantasies.

“To Rome” again contains many references to European art-film classics. But this time around, Allen’s allusions aren’t meant to garner strokes; they’re consistently apt to the plot point at hand, as are his citations of the iconic pop classics noted above, Commedia dell’Arte and French bedroom farces. Leopoldo’s story evokes the celebrity obsessed milieu of “La Dolce Vita” (1960). The Antonio-Milly thread specifically references Fellini’s 1952 forgotten gem, “The White Sheik.” That movie’s newlyweds visit Rome for a papal blessing. The wife is caught up in the surreal-romantic world of the fumetti, comic books containing photographs and ballooned-in dialogue where Fellini got his first start.

“To Rome” concludes upon a grace note of rueful reconciliation, modest success, and celebration. The lost are found, achieve some sort of worldly recognition, or accept the limitations of a not-always-kind world. I wouldn’t be surprised if Allen were inviting free associations to the graceful, rueful conclusions of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream“ and “The Tempest.”

Leopoldo’s celebrity vanishes like a popped soap bubble, as paparazzi and fans take up their lunatic pursuit of another unknown. Jack returns to Sally when Monica drops him for a shot at a big movie. Antonio and Milly reunite after their harebrained erotic escapades, and choose prudent small-town pleasures instead of Roman wretched excess.

Jerry persuades his mortician to sing “Pagliacci.” The production can only be described as an excursion into aquatic dementia. It’s uproarious, vintage Allen, good as ever was. The singer is hailed but decides to resume undertaking and confine his warbling to the shower. Jerry doesn’t understand Italian, so he greets the critics’ label of “im-be-chill-leh” (imbecile) as a compliment. At peace, the American and Italian families toast the upcoming nuptials (one notes that there are more happy marriages than in any earlier Allen film). In a final wondrous nocturne, Hayley and her fiancé look down from their rooftop, as an uniformed brass band, precisely assembled amid the throng on the Spanish steps, performs a charming reprise of “Volare.”

Allen’s actors, both celebrated and lesser known, are uniformly superb, with the exception of Eisenberg. (His Jack is the only character afflicted with terminal Woodyspeak). Benigni’s meld of hilarity and pity is unutterably poignant, as he dances madly on one foot, in hope of regaining his former adulation. Allen is pretty much the old and very funny Woody. But now that he’s actually old, his whimpering about death seems painfully apropos instead of existential schtick.

Some critics have protested that Allen’s Rome, like his Manhattan and Paris, shows not a whit of urban reality, people of color, so forth. You’d never know Italy was on the brink of economic collapse, abetted by Silvio Berlusconi’s Madoff machinations. I’m impatient with such complaints. If the wretched of the earth never really concerned Allen onscreen, they didn’t much trouble the celluloid Marx Brothers or W.C. Fields, either.

One has also heard speculations that Allen’s taking himself out of his longtime Manhattan milieu might be energizing a creative sea change; that his graceful embrace of common joys in “To Rome” is notably related to the resolution of his own midlife/late-life identity crises. As always, I’m wary of confusing the man with the work. Pathobiography, particularly in so complex and seductive a case, is a dubious enterprise. As Jerry observes, people have been trying to analyze him for decades, without success.

I also make no facile assumption that the new film betokens an ongoing Verdi-like reinvention of Allen’s talents in his old age. I fell into the trap of imagining that Allen’s work after “Crimes and Misdemeanors” would keep striking into bold new territory. He’s neither the first nor the last artist to rise, Phoenix-like, from his own ashes, only to fall back into the dust. One can only hope this won’t happen. But at least, to paraphrase Rick Blaine in “Casablanca,” we’ll always have Woody’s Rome, with love.

Good News From ‘The Newsroom’

Aaron Sorkin’s Oscar-winning screenplay for “The Social Network“ featured a collection of duplicitous wonks backstabbing their way to the top of the Internet heap. (A more accurate, if less artful, title would have been “The Unsocialized Network.”)

Sorkin’s script was blessedly free of the cumbersome liberal pieties – and I write as an impious liberal – which have dogged his work since “A Few Good Men.” His annoying habit of preaching to the unwashed from an Olympian politically correct height intermittently undermined the undeniable pleasures of “The West Wing.” Whatever global or national predicament confronted President Josiah Bartlet and his staff, they always managed to come down squarely – sometimes tediously – on the fashionably left side.

One would think that 7 years of exposure to tawdry Beltway wheeling and dealing would have left Bartlet’s people a smidge disillusioned. Although a few ideological lapses were thrown into the series for dramatic value, most of the team left Bartlet’s White House with their liberal enthusiasm undimmed.

The hero of Sorkin’s HBO series “The Newsroom” is Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels), anchor of a fictional evening cable news broadcast. McAvoy’s substantial popularity resides in his affable charm, trustworthy good looks, and staunch on-air avoidance of controversial issues. Off screen, he’s a stressed-out, intimidating loner, who’s been seething for years over the degeneration of quality reporting into mindless, celebrity-oriented infotainment.

At a college lecture, a fatuous request to anatomize America’s greatness provokes Will into a furious anatomy of the nation’s imminent decline and fall. Afterward, he refuses to apologize for his eruption. Instead, over the objections of the network boss (Jane Fonda in virago mode), he rams through a new show in aid of resurrecting the Ed Murrow glory days of broadcast journalism. He wants strong coverage and searching analysis of vital issues, rather than critiques of the latest Lady Gaga hairdo or Lindsay Lohan contretemps.

He assembles an unlikely cadre of the few pros who haven’t deserted him and idealistic young talents. For his executive producer, he chooses another pro, Mackenzie “Mac” McHale (Emily Mortimer), recently returned from a grueling foreign correspondent stint. Mac’s not only immensely able: she’s also Will’s ex-fiancée. He terminated their relationship several years ago after discovering her affair with an ex-lover.

“The West Wing” afforded the delicious impression that one was getting a fly-on-the wall view of the White House’s hectic milieu and inner circle. The show cleverly articulated Bartlet and his staff’s handling mundane and crisis-ridden events alongside the mundane and stressed-out circumstances of their private lives. In “The Newsroom,” Sorkin has likewise sought to capture the extravagantly hectic milieu of high-profile newscasting, articulating the responses of its participants – notably Will and Mac – to public crises and personal dilemmas.

In poker lingo, a ghost hand is the anemic shadow of your previous cards, resulting from an insufficiently shuffled deck. It’s particularly aggravating when a ghost hand follows a stellar profitable one. The first five episodes of “The Newsroom” seemed like a ghost hand of “West Wing.” Will and Mac were quickly established as strong, attractive personalities, but the subsidiary characters frequently seemed sketchy clones of “West Wing” staffers.

Sorkin intended each episode to pivot around a critical news event. But as the series unfolded, national or world crises increasingly took a backseat to the newsrooms’ plethora of personal conflicts – Will’s being accused of unseemly conduct by a gossip rag; the staff’s trivial romantic imbroglios. Instead of the engaging give and take of true debate, Sorkin served up his usual heavy-handed liberal encyclicals, delivered as received truth. In my case, he was preaching to the choir. I expect many conservatively minded viewers felt they were being talked down to.

Then Sorkin – himself a former script doctor – brought a fictional doctor, psychiatrist Jack Habib (David Krumholtz), on board for the sixth episode, “Bullies.” Not only has it given the series a much-needed boost (the scripting is as fine as the best of the “West Wing”), it has also unexpectedly presented one of the most accurate media portrayals of a modern psychiatrist, savvy about every aspect of our work – medical and psychotherapeutic. In cinema and TV, that’s as rare as a peek at a Romney tax return.

Will visits Dr. Habib because of terminal insomnia. Turns out he’s had a standing, unkept appointment for 2 years since Habib treated him successfully – or so he thought – for post breakup blues. Butthat Dr. Habib is dead. His son Jack has inherited the practice and reviewed his father’s ample therapy notes. Despite Will’s disgruntled disclaimers, he intuits Will wants talk, not hypnotics. Dr. Habib is also blessedly not intimidated by Will’s fame. No VIP syndrome here.

Habib treats Will as a near-alexithymic, ornery late adolescent. He deploys a finely honed mix of confrontation and empathy, leavened by winning good humor. Sorkin adroitly interweaves Will’s therapy session with his neurotic newsroom behavior toward a colleague and the subject of an interview amid unfolding critical events, which triggered his guilt-stricken sleeplessness. In “Psychiatry and the Cinema” (Washington: American Psychiatric Association Publishing, 1999), Krin and Glen Gabbard describe how screenwriters use psychotherapists to facilitate storytelling through enabling flashbacks, dramatic revelations, and so on. In this regard, Habib helps Sorkin out as much as he does Will.

I’ll only reveal that Will’s guilt stems from abhorrence of and complex identification with his alcoholic father’s cruelty toward young Will and his sibs. Habib is crystal clear with these dynamics and their acting out to patient and viewer. He also makes Will realize he’s still mourning Mac’s loss, wins his grudging consent to further sessions, and ends the session by telling Will that his insomnia stems as much from wretched midnight food chemistry as neurosis. A compleat doctor of mind and body, indeed.

A few inevitable cavils: Habib does allow Will to interrupt another patient’s session for a hallway consultation. He’s also accepted payment for countless missed sessions without question. But this is small stuff, compared with the blatant distortions and boundary violations that still abound in Lalaland’s depiction of the dubious profession I’ve elsewhere called “cinetherapy.”

I don’t claim that Dr. Habib’s entry is chiefly responsible for the new vigor of “The Newsroom.” As is often the case, it may simply have taken Sorkin six episodes to get the series’ act together, and Habib’s introduction is a function of that process.

One notes that the subsidiary characters have become far more three-dimensional. Thankfully, Will and his cadre have left off their ponderous platitudinizing, with the intriguing effect that Sorkin’s liberal arguments are more gripping and command more serious attention. In any case, one hopes Dr. Habib will continue to do well for his patient and for our profession, because the second season of “The Newsroom” is already in production.

Originally Published on Clinical Psychiatry News

Car Crash Culture: Machine Dreams

Science fiction cinema has consistently, if unconsciously, manifested an intriguing split in its attitude toward the machine, treating it unabashedly as a dehumanizing oppressor while lovingly lingering over its gleaming gizmos. Crash, scripted nearly faithfully by David Cronenberg from English sci-fi writer J.G. Ballard’s 1973 cult novel, knowingly interrogates this ambivalence in a harrowing exploration of the human/machine symbiosis–specifically the human automotive interface. Note that the director himself has been an amateur racer and car enthusiast.)

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