Thomas F. Cook

This will probably be a long rambling entry, which only means that you can be sure it wasn’t written by an AI bot.

(On Facebook, I get these entries about dead movie stars, or sometimes closeted dead movie stars that have perfectly written and very long mini-biographies, and though they are readable and clear, it doesn’t feel like there is a person behind them. It’s something most people don’t think about, but the narrator of a written work is always present, and how you read something depends a lot upon what that narrator “sounds” like. This is an issue that affects women more than men, and is different for fiction and non-fiction and perhaps poetry — and it’s right there in the word “author.” Author, authority, authorize. Maybe we’ll save this for another essay.)

But I want to write about Trans and raise a few questions. This is in part a response to this New York Times essay that appeared in its magazine section on June 19 and which I just got around to reading a few days ago. The article (is probably behind a paywall) is called “How the Transgender Rights Movement Bet on the Supreme Court and Lost.” And although it sounds kind of trivial, the loss of that case “U.S. v. Skrmetti,” could have many more long range implications than it might seem. It threatens gay marriage, the right to serve in the military, job discrimination issues and it could possibly elevate “religious exemption,” to become a new constitutional right. (This is the ultimate goal, anyway, of the fundamentalist Christians on the Supreme Court, which include John Roberts, the superspreader woman, Neil Gorsuch, the man who overturned Roe, and the beer guzzler. But this case may have started that train rolling.) The trans issue didn’t win the presidency for the current usurper, but issues like “pronoun ownership,” certainly didn’t help Kamala or Biden or anyone on the left for that matter. Not that I think this Supreme Court could have cared 2 cents for the Biden administration, but Biden was somewhat forced to support this very questionable case on behalf of the left, which many gay rights activists didn’t support. And as soon as the new administration took office, it switched to the other side and was completely against it.

The first thing to remember is that trans rights and gay rights are a subset, or a child branch, of feminism. The attack on trans and gay people is basically a subset of the attack on women. A lot of gay people don’t like to think this, but there is a direct line between women questioning their role in society: “Wife, mother, home maker, emotional support for the husband,” and gay men and women questioning their supposed illness. In 1968 — I was 8 or 9 — Homosexuality was declared a mental illness in the DSM (the psychiatry diagnostic manual). A compromise was developed 5 years later which then labeled it a “disturbance.” — I was 13 or 14, and it wasn’t until 1987 that homosexuality was removed altogether as a mental diagnosis. I was 27 or 28. But this questioning of society — which more or less meant questioning of the white male-dominated religious and political institutions beliefs about the rest of us — began with the women’s movement. And it began a long time ago before the 60s and the “sexual revolution.” Someone, somewhere, has probably linked the rise of the women’s movement to industrialization. Farmwork has this natural tendency to separate men and women into different jobs. Both roles are exhausting and torturous. But I remember reading an interview with a hippy dippy trippy family — back to the earth types — who said, “Nature quickly sorts out who does what.”

The quest for racial equity began also a very long time ago too, long before the 60s civil rights movement, but the events leading up to the civil war probably had a closer relationship with religious belief: that enslavement was an affront to God. And of course the south thought exactly the opposite: that God wanted white men to enslave black men. And then you had South Africa and The Mormons that kept this religious idea going until the 80s I think — can’t remember when The Mormons finally removed racism from their dogma.

Anyway, after a hundred plus years, what women achieved, in a few parts of the world, was that women deserved equal treatment, pay, the right to vote, serve in the military, and so on. Later, gays — and I’ll just talk about gay men for the moment — gays lost their quest to have gay sex decriminalized in the 80s, by a Supreme Court that was not even remotely as conservative as this one. The argument in Bowers v. Hardwick was based on a “right to privacy” that was found earlier when it came to using contraception. Five members of the court found that they could not locate a right to privacy for an “immoral act” that was worse than rape. (Yes, one of the justices actually said that a consensual blow job by a man for a man was worse than rape.) Four of the justices dissented, strongly, that anyone with any sense could see that what goes on in a bedroom is between the two consenting adults. [Personally, I remember feeling more despondent about this country than I ever had before, at the ripe old age of 27. I did not feel like I was an American. The decision permanently hardened my attitude toward the U.S. Until then I had felt kind of like Woody Allen, that it was a mess but it was better than most alternatives. After that, I no longer cared, and started to believe that living in another country would be better.]

Fast forward to 2003 and the case Lawrence v. Texas. There were only 13 states that had sodomy laws remaining on the books. Most were in the south: Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma. 1 was in the north: Michigan. And the other was Mormon: Utah. Missouri also had a partial ban but I don’t know what that entailed. The court ruled in our favor this time, and found that a “right to privacy” does exist in the 4th Amendment (protection of the home from search and seizure) as well as the 14th Amendment’s due process clause, and the 9th Amendment’s assurance that rights ‘not specified’ in the constitution are retained by the people. This was important because the “right to privacy,” is one of those rights not specified in the constitution. Therefore, it can only be an implied right, and therefore falls into the realm of subjectivity, bigotry, bias, religious persuasion, disbelief, and so on.

After the right to sodomize each other was affirmed 6-3 with Scalia, Rhenquist and the vile Thomas dissenting, activists first set about making sure that the states followed the law. This is sort of where I came into some of my knowledge about these things, because I started working at Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund (now known as Lambda Legal), and they would talk to us during the weekly meetings about where our cases stood, what we were working and doing, and so on. And I remember very specifically Suzanne Goldberg talking about suing to remove sodomy laws off the books in the states that still had them. It was all well and good to get the supreme court ruling, but states were not required to remove those laws from their books.

Around the same time, at Lambda anyway, gay marriage became the “next” big thing. And in fact, it probably was much bigger than the right to have consensual sex. Young people, especially, took to it — a lot more than older gays, because older men tended to see it as imitation rather than a simple civil right that was being denied to us based on the gender of our attraction. I remember an Irish friend (straight female) who did not support same sex marriage said, “They are allowed to get married. They just have to marry a woman,” — perhaps one of the first times I encountered such stupid twisted logic. Anyway, the history of the marriage movement is very long. It’s so long a 928 page book was written about it. It’s hard to tell, but it was felt by some that gay marriage was kind of like the cross beam you could hang everything from — that once straight people saw that gays could live in committed relationships — all other rights and privileges enjoyed by the heterosexuals would fall into place. And I think there probably was a sense in all queer communities that we had achieved it. We had made it.

But that acceptance (which I think was probably an illusion anyway) did not include, for example, private discrimination. Say, for example, a church learned that one of its workers married someone of the same gender — they could fire that person because workers basically have no rights. Just about everyone is an “at will” employee. The only counter to being fired just because your boss doesn’t like you, is a discrimination lawsuit based on attributes like age, gender, handicap, etc., and issues like sexual harassment or physical abuse. So (and I know a little about this because I own some businesses with my brother and sister), it’s perfectly legal for a boss to fire an employee because they don’t fit in, or they’re too fat, but you will automatically open yourself up to a lawsuit if you do. This isn’t really worker protection; it’s just a creative use of the law with a hint of blackmail. The same Irish woman I mentioned who, in her twisted logic, thought that gays already had the right to marry, also wanted to quit her job as a receptionist, but couldn’t just give notice, get a letter of recommendation, leave with the usual false smiles and move on. She wanted money to leave — and ultimately stayed there and made everyone’s life miserable until they gave her a year’s salary and paid for her COBRA insurance.

Gay marriage also did not address the problem of transsexuals, who had complained for decades that they were forgotten in what was essentially a white and wealthy civil rights campaign — an elitist issue. I’m specifically calling it “the problem” because in some ways, what transsexuals want is exactly the opposite of what gay men and women had fought for. Gay men and women, but especially men, did not want to be punished for their behavior. We wanted the right to behave as we wished — to have the sex we wanted and to love who we wanted. What we wanted was to express ourselves in a way that “did not match” our physical appearance. What transsexuals wanted (and this may have changed somewhat) was to change their physical body to “match” what they felt.

(I really wish html allowed for indents. There’s probably code somewhere on the internet I could copy and use but you shouldn’t have to know coding to be able to write.)

In other words:

Gays feel that their body does not match what they feel inside and that’s okay.
Trans feel that their body does not match what they feel inside and that’s not okay.

This is a highly selective filter and doesn’t take into account so many other issues, but I think it can help explain why many gay men and plenty of allies, including people like my friend Bonnie and J.K. Rowling can support one but not the other. How can gay men and our allies not support our transsexual brothers and sisters? It’s the same question when you encounter a gay person who is also a racist. When you have been marginalized, attacked in papers and pulpits all your life, treated like a non-citizen or someone who doesn’t matter, or criminalized, how can you then turn around and discriminate against someone else — even if it’s just by having the thoughts that you have?

This is where Identity rears its ugly head and by extension, identity politics and even “context” when it comes to the study of literature. Because now we have to start considering the subjective nature of experience and feelings. Gay men were essentially unified in what they wanted. “I am what I am,” is that song in La Cage Aux Folles, the gay musical which is, ironically, about a drag performer who, in the real world off stage, couldn’t be “masculine” to save his life and ultimately gives up and throws on some drag in order to make his outward presentation “match” his real self. Gay men have always said, “I am what I am,” and it was the backbone, you could say, of the struggle for gay civil rights. Trans men say, “I am not yet what I am,” or, “I am what I have not yet become.” The message is harder to understand, and you can’t sing it. Plus, it’s, in most cases, completely subjective and has nothing to do with biology.

But so is being gay. And I think this is where we have to accept that trans identity and trans issues may appear like different issues, but they are not. They are both identities rooted in the subjective experience of being alive — walking around with thoughts and emotions — seeing and incorporating the world out there into one’s sense of self. The rejection of trans issues by many gay men, a la, “I support the LGB part but not the T,” doesn’t properly acknowledge that it’s all feeling and that approaching these issues from the outside will fail and provide no answers, and also will not change anything.

Much more to come… but I want to publish this now so I remember to finish it later. Basically, the rest will be about the folly and stupidity of one particular trans activist at the ACLU.

But as people get more and more frustrated they start to devolve into the usual homophobic, female-phobic tropes, and they start using the same insults as conservatives. So we get JD Vance prettied up as a fat woman drag queen. Other stuff that implies Trump’s toadies are effeminate. And the one that’s currently irking me, that Epstein, Trump and the others were pedophiles.

The definition of paedophilia is a sexual attraction to prepubescent children. That means BEFORE PUBIC HAIR. That is very different to the age of consent and it’s an important difference because being attracted to someone who is under the age of consent is not a mental illness. Being attracted to undeveloped and hairless children IS a mental illness. They are both illegal under the law, but they are not the same thing. But you wouldn’t know it anymore, based on the constant screaming that both Epstein and Trump are pedophiles.

They weren’t pedophiles — although I wouldn’t put it past either one to actually try it out. Epstein was a sex trafficker. Trump had sex with women under the age of consent. Those are crimes, but not crimes of pedophilia. I have yet to see a single accusation of trafficking or having sex with prepubescent child. (Epstein trafficked girls as young as 14, [and I recently read 12, but I haven’t been able to verify it with accurate info] but because girls start puberty as young as 8 and sometimes 7, and menarche happens generally around 12, 14 is still probably not prepubescent.)

The age of consent exists because we recognize, in this supposedly advanced society we live in, that young people are not capable of making a consensual decision. This always comes up when, like in the brilliant Todd Haynes movie “May December,” the victim says he wanted it or that he was in love, at the age of 13, with the older woman. Young people do not have the legal right to make that decision, even if they are precocious and horny as hell. They do not have the right to choose a sexual partner until they reach and pass the age of consent.

Even then, if a young woman has reached the age of consent (over 18 — but I’m not even sure if that’s the age) — and decides to become a boy toy for wealthy men like Epstein and Trump — people will still refer to her as underage or to the men as pedophiles or child rapists.

Woody Allen, for example, ended up getting into a life-defining mess by marrying his girlfriend’s daughter. She is constantly referred to as his “step daughter.” (She never was. She is, in fact, Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter with Andre Previn. Her full name was Soon-Yi Previn. Additionally, but irrelevant, Mia Farrow destroyed his marriage and Soon-Yi’s mother went into an almost suicidal depression. because of it.) Soon-Yi was 22 when they began to date, but Allen is still referred to as a pedophile or child molester. He was never married to Mia Farrow and in the 12 years they were “together,” they never lived in the same place. They also, apparently, had a pretty awful relationship. But none of those details matter anymore, when people talk about Woody Allen or Soon-Yi. He’s a pedophile who married his wife’s daughter; or he’s a child molester who married his step daughter. He made a somewhat lame joke with Kathy Griffin when they were sitting next to her and he said, “This is my child bride.” (Soon Yi is in her 50s now.)

I think this tendency to label everything pedophilia is ultimately the vilification of the older man who dates or marries a younger woman. Women hate this — they call it creepy. However, it happens all the time, hence the jokes about “Who is Leonardo DiCaprio dating?” “Someone under 25.” Or the greatest offender of all time, I suppose, Jerry Lee Lewis.

[And as far as Leo goes, he has stated repeatedly that he does not want a family or children. Almost universally, around 25 or 26, women start demanding marriage, family and children. So of course he has to break it off with them. I also read from an extremely reliable source, ages and ages ago, that he’s gay but like Tom Cruise, they are too famous for the truth to ever be told. Who knows, but this person had listed just about every single gay actor/actress in Hollywood, many before it was known, like Zachary Quinto. I’ve never been able to find that site again.]

Anyway it’s also, I suspect, an easy way to vent rage and anger that doesn’t, in fact, force you to choose a side. You can be progressive or ultra conservative, neutral or an independent with or without leaning to one side or the other — you can be anywhere on the political slide ruler — and be opposed , even violently, to the molestation and sex trafficking of children. If you have a violent nature, or if you have some sort of Travis Bickle like need to rescue someone, making that victim a child, instead of a young teen, is almost a no-brainer. It’s one of the reasons I hate what Taco has done, with apparent ease. To bring down the level of discourse from one of simple disagreement, to something that resembles one of his favorites venues, the staged wrestling match. He’s said as much, in interviews, that he wasn’t a good student and the only thing that he enjoyed was when the boys got into fist fights.

Anyway, the blurring of the definition of sexual predation downward to pedophilia, plus the retreat to homophobic taunts and queer baiting, plus the usual mysogyny — insulting men by implying there is something girlish about them — and the almost ubiquitous “fat shaming” they do of Trump is a sad reminder that no matter how far we think we advance, we can always be brought down to name calling and childish insults.

I think that I’ve always harbored a fear of the Christian need to proselytize from having grown up in a “Born Again” fundamentalist family (only 1 of whom, by the way, believed it — the patriarch of course.) But living in a fundamentalist home also meant that we were constantly surrounded by fundamentalist people, and it wasn’t really my own family that scared me, it was “the group” of them. Their fake piety gnawed at me, relentlessly, from a very early age — probably 12 or 13. I never believed their smiles or their constant references to the Lord and to God, etc. Even when my dad died, only about 3 hours dead or so, one of them started talking about how my brother suddenly cut off in the middle of a conversation and went upstairs to where my dad was living out his last moments in his deathbed. He died about a half a minute later with my brother in the room, and he shouted for my sister and mom to come from the office, where they were looking at computer stuff, and then the crying and the mourning began.

This woman who would have been about my age at the time, 40 or so, didn’t understand why my brother would just leave in the middle of a conversation, Unless It Was God. She said to all of us, sitting around 3 hours after he died, that it must have been God who told my brother to break off that conversation.

The man was unconscious, his breath rate was collapsing, but it could only have been God that caused my brother to go upstairs and check on him. This is the kind of absolute stupidity that being a rigid fundamentalist causes. The inability to understand even the basics of living and dying are lost on these people. And what’s more, they’re scared. Trying to believe that she had witnessed God in action is a perfect example of how frightened they are, and also why they’re so dangerous.

Anyway, to get back, I first became aware of my fear of fundamentalists when a group developed in the 80s and got a little notice on television shows which I think was called Fundamentalists Anonymous. A quick search on the internet reveals that it was founded in 1987 by a man named Richard Yao, ran for several years, and then was destroyed by Fundamentalists. But I remember the purpose of it was not as political as it sounded. It was not their goal to destroy religion and I vaguely remember the guy talking about this. It was meant to help people through the trauma of losing their religion — people who have left it because fundamentalism is ALWAYS dogmatic and fascist and cannot tolerate dissent.

When I was desperate to have a book published before I was 40 I decided to self-publish because at the very least that would be something in print. So I had been working on this novel called Illyria in around 2005 and I decided, mistakenly, to write a prologue. A 100 year old retaining wall in the Way-UWS area had collapsed. I rode my bike back then, and when I was riding around up there, I stopped to look at the wall and because of the height of it (65-90 feet) and the way it had this huge gash right in the center, I couldn’t help but feel that it was like a castle that had been hit with a boulder from a trebuchet. And then I began to imagine that it was the Christians attacking New York City, the center of all sin, vice and criminality. And I thought to myself, “They’re here.” And I even wrote this in the prologue, that the character was living comfortably behind the New York City walls and thought, erroneously, that he was safe. That is the reason the character gives for deciding to sit down and write what happened to him and his friends because of the so-called Christians.

Prologues have no reason to exist, other than to allow the person not to read the rest of the book. So I deleted it in an “updated” version. But I never forgot that deep down, I have always been concerned about the Christian nationalists.

And now, with the news that they are going to try to do away with any global warming initiatives, I’ve realized that they are, in fact, here. And their wish — which is to die — may be met at our expense. I think that’s what’s bothering me most about that horror of a person I’ve loathed for as long as I can remember — that life as we know it might be destroyed by a degenerate, in the name of God, but really, in the name of a Death Cult. Christians think that Rome collapsed because it allowed homosexuality. (This is a constant quiet belief they don’t talk about too much, but it’s there.) The fact is that the Roman Empire collapsed because of widespread corruption. And that, alas, is what we’re facing here, brought to you, once again, by the barbarian Christians.

I saw this was re-issued for its 40th Anniversary, having spawned a now-considered Camp classic movie, a musical, a sequel or two, a Joan Crawford fan club which doubles as a Christina bashing free for all, the destruction of one of our finest actresses, plus thousands and thousands of commentaries, reviews and a huge cultural shock that caused people to wake up to the existence of something called “Child Abuse.”

Before this book, I’m not sure people were aware of child abuse and psychological torture. Now, of course, if you even dare to touch a stranger, you can practically be thrown in jail (doing nothing, I might add, for the problem of parents abusing their children.)

But ultimately I think she did a great service, albeit unknowingly, by blowing the lid off celebrity adoptions (there have so many: Tom Cruise, Angelina Jolie, Madonna, to name three) and child abuse in general — although what I think she describes is probably more like psychological abuse or even psychological torture. The one thing abusive people do is completely destabilized the ground that the abused person lives on. If you are abused or bullied, you never know what will cause the next outburst from this person that you love. That’s why abused people often stay in the situation. Because it can be calm and even loving between the storms.

I think she describes the feeling of feeling trapped by a parent particularly well, and how once she was able to find a small amount of independence, her mother continued to try to shake the foundation of her being, for whatever reason Joan Crawford. The ultimate, or penultimate time this happened, very close to the end of the book, was when Christina moved to Los Angeles to try to look for work and some people she knew, probably through her mother, asked her to look after their car, or offered it to her since nobody can do anything in Los Angeles without a car. For some reason, this enraged her mother, and she insisted that she return the car immediately. Christina couldn’t return the car because there was no one there to take it, so she was ordered by her mother to return the car as soon as they were back. From that point on, it’s not clear that her mother ever spoke to her again, though they exchanged a few short letters. Christina never found out why her mother was so angry, and shortly after this offense, she was told to vacate her mother’s empty West Hollywood apartment because her mother was coming in to do a show. Well once she was out, the locks were changed and Christina stopped getting work which she thought, but couldn’t prove, had something to do with the fear people had of offending her mother. And her mother, who had claimed she needed the apartment for some sort of acting job, never used it. It was a lie to get her out.

To be clear, also, the abuse hurled at Christina by Joan Crawford was abusive of deprivation. Hiding her in a boarding school. Then locking her away in a convent. Always giving her an allowance of just about half of the exact amount she needed. (Sending a child to a boarding school or a convent doesn’t absolve you of your responsibility to care for them by paying for them.)

My big complaint about the book is that it is not well written which is a minor issue for a memoir. It’s written as though a lot of it was dictated, especially at the start of the memoir which jumps around so quickly in time it’s almost as if one memory is triggering another so it’s like she could start off talking about something that happened in the 40s and then that would remind her of something that happened in the 60s and so on. As the book continues, especially after she is sent to boarding school, it hews much more closely with the timeline and the writing also gets better.

The other complaint I have had to do with a number of the most important scenes in the movie — some of which made it the camp classic that it became. One was “Bring me the axe!” In the memoir, this moment is not anchored in a specific time — it’s just presented as ‘one time, I heard noise coming from our beautiful rose garden.’ Joan Crawford was, indeed, cutting down all the rose bushes in the middle of the night, but this fury was not directed at Tina. And when Tina went to see what was happening, Crawford yelled at her to go get the saw. Well, “Tina, bring me the saw,” doesn’t have the same heft or oomph, as “Tina, bring me the axe.” But the latter is melodramatic and camp. Also, I think Faye Dunaway was, as is almost always the case in her work, absolutely brilliant on so many levels in this scene. She understood that Joan Crawford was a fighter and an enraged fighter, but she was also an actor, so when she issues that demand, to “bring me the axe,” she’s not just asking for something to chop down the tree, she’s acting. She’s delivering a line — acting for herself and acting for her daughter and maybe an invisible audience that is always present — (many actors have this invisible audience, and nowadays, with so many people trying to accumulate fans and followers — even more people think constantly about what they will look like when broadcast to their fans). So I think Faye Dunaway was playing that scene on multiple levels: both genuinely enraged and artificially enraged; melodramatic like many of her movies but deadly serious: she absolutely intended to kill that tree, but she also knew how dramatic it was. (If you think about Joan Crawford’s part in “Whatever Happened To Baby Jane,” it is a perfect description of the manipulation that lurked deep inside Joan Crawford herself.) In any event, Christina never said the rose garden incident it was about being labeled “box office poison.” She simply didn’t know why it was happening and though frightening, she didn’t lay a hand on Tina.

There were three more huge scenes in the movie that were also unmoored in the memoir: the Bon Ami cleaning scene, the no wire coat hangers and the most important one, the scene where she got on top of Tina and choked her — tried to murder her. As Christina says now, she was 80 in the interview I read, Joan Crawford wouldn’t be diagnosed with a mental illness, she’d be in jail for attempted murder. (But that, as we know now, is wishful thinking, in this age of “Justice for Thee, but not for me.”)

But for the vast majority of the memoir, there is little contact between mother and daughter. After she sends her away to the Chadwick School, most communication is by letter. After the Chadwick’s she was sent to a convent. After the convent she went to the Carnegie School, then switched to the Neighborhood Playhouse in NYC, then quit that and started working fairly regularly, and then some time after the car incident in West Hollywood, quit the business altogether. She was, as is famously known, disinherited from what remained of her mother’s measly estate. 70,000 1978 dollars (about 340,000 today) went to the twins, who completely denied all Christina’s allegations, and another amount went to some charities and I believe a trust was established for one of more of the grandchildren. She made this will about 6 to 8 months before she died, so it was calculated and a big fuck you to Christina and Christopher when she wrote that she did not want them to have any money “for reasons that are known to them.”

Crawford knew this would make the news and that phrase “for reasons that are known to them,” would evoke gossip and speculation and also make her two oldest children the bad guys in this never ending quest to abuse. FFS, she tried to have her son Chris sent to a Switzerland boarding school and to have his passport taken away so that he could not return to the United States. Chris was ultimately disowned by his mother while Christina, like many abused children, kept trying to find love in the volatile relationship.

I think it’s significant that anyone who knew Joan Crawford on a professional level tried to smear Christina, and did the same sort of thing that people did to Anita Hill for telling the truth about Clarence Thomas: attributing all sorts of speculation to “why” Christina wrote the book. The movie, and her memoir, both imply that she would make more money telling the truth than being cut out of the will. But having been cut out of my father’s will — he told us so that it wouldn’t be a surprise — was a gut punch. Your last will and testament is supposed to be your final words on earth: the last things you want to do and say, and if the last thing you want to say is, “I hate you,” and the last thing you do is make that obvious, revenge could have been a reason she wrote the book. “Let’s tell everyone just how warm this iceberg was.” The book sold millions of copies and more after the movie came out, plus the release of the 20th year anniversary as well as the 40th anniversary version I just read. The internet (the all knowing garbage pile) claims she is worth 5 million. I hope so.

Psychological abuse is so much harder to depict, and that may be one of the reasons most of the great scenes from the movie are physical rather than emotional. But, as Andrew Sarris wrote in his headline to his review of the movie in The Village Voice, “I Believe Christina.” The fact that the twins didn’t agree with her, and later sued for defamation (they got a whopping $5,000), just shows that people don’t understand how one child can be abused while a second child can be the apple of daddy’s or mommy’s eye.

I wrote a story about it once. I’ve got to try to find that, because it was a good story. This young girl realizes, while working her shift at a Starbuck’s and after witnessing a young man trip and hit his chin on the floor, that she had lived an enchanted life and conveniently ignored the bruises on her little brother’s body, etc., until he wasn’t there anymore and her “daddy” was in prison.

Writing’s quite bad for the most part, though it gets better as it goes on. It’s long, but memoirs always seem to be too long which is why I don’t often read them. The editing is very poor (do we really need to know how pretty some flowers were? Flowers, dear editors, are always pretty, unless their wilted or dried). But it’s a good read and important, too, because it brought child abuse and psychological torture to our consciousness. Plus she put up with so much anger after it was published. Myrna Loy must have been particularly annoyed.

The poster for Eddington vaguely resembles the famous Apocalypse Now poster, (which I used to own, until I sold all my movie posters to Posteratiti.)

In this apocalypse, the apocalyptic event is, basically, Covid and our horrific response to it. I’ve been through 2 pandemics: HIV and Covid. Our collective responses to both were absolutely horrible and incredibly selfish. Every time I see or hear the word “selfish” I think of Ayn Rand, a self-proclaimed writer and philosopher who I abhor. But the response to Covid was especially Randian, with so many right wingers like her complaining that their rights were being violated simply because they were forced to wear a mask in public spaces.

I think at one point in this movie there is a naive person who thinks she or he (I can’t remember the scene) can use reason and facts to argue with the depressed sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) about why people should wear masks. (Transmission drops to 3% with masks, from 90% with no masks.) He doesn’t care. Similarly, when he is texted with the results of his Covid test, he decides not to read them. By that point in the movie, everyone is lost.

No one gets away with being purely free of the insanity with the exception of the Pueblo cop who is investigating a murder committed from an Indian reservation on U.S. soil. If Ari Aster were following the 3 act script formula that I was ranting about in an unpublished post, that man would have been the Marge Gunderson of the story, and figured out from putting various clues together, like handwriting and gun ownership, who the murderer is. But that is not the point. The point of the movie is the chaos and I was reminded of Oliver Sack’s comment in The New Yorker essay, that “What we are seeing—and bringing on ourselves—resembles a neurological catastrophe on a gigantic scale.”

He was talking about cellphone addiction and cellphones are certainly a part of what’s happening in this little town in New Mexico.

At the end of the movie — and I couldn’t understand this until now — there is a fairly long series of short clips on a phone, but sideways. And to actually read the text that goes along with these clips, you have to turn your head. The clips are actually like the end clips from “Taxi Driver” and (later in Scorsese’s career) “The King of Comedy.” The clips are of someone who thrived after all this mess, but they are being watched by Phoenix, who is on his side.

I haven’t really given any spoilers or even tried to say what the movie is about, because I admire Aster in that he simply writes what’s in his head, and his movies have so far, always been a surprise. They do not follow the Syd Field formula, but they are still interesting, scary and, even more deeply, disturbing in a way that you can’t quite identify. His movies reach you in a place that most people would rather think doesn’t exist — the shadow self in psychology, perhaps or the Lilith Moon in astrology.

May have more to say later.

More to say. I’m simply stunned at some of the reviewers who apparently don’t understand this movie, or are viewing it through a personal lens of their own. I recently had to deal with a judge in a guardianship case, and after it was all over I realized that “judges exist in a bubble of their own expertise.” (I put that in quotes because that is what I told someone.) The biggest flaw of judges is that they a) don’t understand their own prejudices which may come from years of judging cases and seeing the same types of people come in and out of their courtroom, or b) genuine personal prejudice. The worst is religion. Probably second worse is skin color. And third would be… stupidity maybe? In any event, the reviewers that I’ve read seem to either understand the chaos of this movie or they see it through the prism of race and self-righteousness.

For example, in this small town of 2500, with 1 sheriff and 2 deputies, one of whom is black, there is a black lives matter protest of about 25 young people. There isn’t a black person among them, but these students and young people are adamant that George Floyd’s murder was the most important thing that’s happened in their lives. It reminded me of Macklemore when he said the defining issue of his generation was gay marriage, an issue that was never going to affect him either way (though, caveat, there’s nothing wrong about being an ally.) Later in this movie, one of the kids (the one who ends up a right wingnut living in Florida and running for office) tries to explain to his dad how they can destroy white privilege. His father screams, “But you’re white!” It’s a joke that works on many levels: the father is kind of saying, “We want white privilege,” at the same time as screaming about the obviousness of skin color.

Anyway, the New Yorker reviewer took some of these moments and conflated it into a movie that was about destroying and satirizing people who have sincerely held beliefs. That is ludicrous, because the right wingers are satirized even more brutally, mainly through Joaquin Phoenix’s behavior, but also the white sheriff who refers to the tepid 25 person BLM march through their town as “the riot.”

[And if you think back on how this “riot” actually was, there was a lot of milling about, some pushing and shoving, but basically the 3 authorities walked through the crowd and kept trying to tell the young people to go home. And that was the end of it.]

Later, some real racists fly in in some sort of private jet: echoing rumors going around at the time, that Black Lives Matter protests were being infiltrated by moles or troublemakers, who were trying to make the protests look like black people were arming themselves and killing whites. They are dressed like ICE agents, wearing masks and full body armor, but it’s clear their skin is white.

All of this is to say that although there are many people giving it bad reviews for one reason or another, most of those reasons are based on “confirmation bias.” That is how being offensive works. Go in front of a judge who has no true broad understanding of the issues and call her a “fucking bitch,” and see how fair that judge will treat you and how hard that judge will work to try to understand a little bit more than what she or he knows from their limited perspective.

As you may have noted, I dislike judges intensely. They are vain and they automatically think that when a case lands before them, the parties haven’t already gone through months or years of agony, trying to solve their conflict. The judge steps in at the end, not the beginning. But most seem to think the case really begins once they get involved, and that’s how they act and rule.

I guess because Manohla Dargis gave it a wonderful review in the NYTimes and it became a “critic’s pick” in the same newspaper, this play seems to be doing well. Sorry, it’s supposed to be a movie. But it’s a play.

At first I thought it was an adaptation because I didn’t know she had also written it, but there isn’t a single scene in the movie that I couldn’t also see, in my mind’s eye, on the stage. This is primarily because every moment of it is talking — and it inadvertently gets to the core of what the difference is between theatre and film.

First of all — this train of thought was brought about by another idiotic thing that Bill Mahr said, which was that “Magazines are dead.” Sometimes, a form can go dead. The thousands of gods that men have invented over the millenia are mostly dead, except for 2 or 3 now. Jesus’s attempt to kill his father almost succeeded, but God, the Father, still reigns over Jesus and I think most would agree that the Christian God is a god, while Jesus is a chimera or hybrid God/man. Sometimes, when we’re in a bind, we say, “Jesus fucking Christ,” and sometimes we say, “oh God.” But generally, I don’t think they’re interchangeable. Even in my own atheism I would probably say, “Oh God,” if I saw a car bearing down on me and not “Oh Jesus.”

Anyway, when it comes to art, there’s always been a most popular form. Poetry has existed alongside all these forms but has never been “thee” form. For many hundreds of years it was theatre. From the Greeks, Thespus and the Greek chorus, to the morality plays that toured around wearing signs that read, “Lust” and “Greed,” just to make sure the idiots understood what they were looking at, to Shakespeare and all the men and women that came after, theatre was the popular form. Then came the novel. After the novel was the movie. Then movies went to the small screen — the television. And now, probably, the most popular form is the cellphone screen and its snippets of memes and news.

But movies didn’t die. Television hasn’t died. The novel hasn’t died. Opera and Theatre haven’t died. Certain instruments, like the harpsichord, have disappeared, but you can still find harpsichord performances here and there. And in spite of Mahr’s tendency to exaggerate, the magazine hasn’t died either.

But theatre is very interesting because almost every transition from the stage to screen has been, at some level, a transposition of theatre to the new form. So the very early stage of television (think of The Jackie Gleason show) was basically a play, performed on a stage with an audience, and filmed from the audience’s view with a single camera using Cinemascope. Very early movies, like the vile Birth of a Nation, tended toward this setup as well. (Mostly the interior scenes.) But when Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball gave Columbia Broadcasting the number 1 show in America, Desi decided to use film, in 3 cameras, with sets and a studio audience BEHIND the cameras, and changed the way we viewed television. It was still theatre, but there was a little bit of movement in that they could go from one room to the next without much of a break. Every sitcom followed suit, right up to what is considered to be the last and final sitcom: The Big Bang Theory.

The main problem with theatre is that it doesn’t move and all of the action is spoken. A lot of times, the characters are just playing catch up — you can think of some of Shakespeare’s introductory pages and they are often two soldiers catching each other up on what’s happened. Sometimes he would even have a narrator or character come right to the front of the stage and say, “This has happened.”

That is the big problem with this movie. It is not a movie. It is a series of scenes that could take place on a blackened stage with very few props. A beer and a coke. Probably a cellphone or two. The most action that takes place is when two of the characters decide to drive up to “the country,” and then turn around after crashing a wedding party because they have a fight or decide they don’t like each other, or something. I don’t know. I didn’t care.

It’s also very poorly structured. She, the protagonist, goes with the ideal man: super wealthy, tall because he wanted to be, handsome, older, attentive. Then she decides she likes the poor, (also tall), (also handsome), a tiny bit older and (also attentive) guy. The End.

Like almost all movies I see these days, I was left wondering whether anything was going to happen, or when were they going to get into it. I was left wondering why there hadn’t been any conflict, except to a minor character who was mostly on the phone.

This movie supposedly explodes the Rom Com formula which, in my opinion, was just 90 minutes of cringe until the woman gets what she wants, which is a ring on her finger. (“If you liked it shoulda put a ring on it,” sang Beyonce.) Really, in my opinion, the romance or romantic comedy, is always about getting the woman to say yes. It is an extremely difficult genre to write because it looks as if the protagonist is the male, who is always doing the work, or walking away from it, or coming back to it — but in fact, it’s the passive female who is actually in charge — making the man work, or waiting waiting waiting, until the conditions are just right for her to say “yes,” which may mean marriage in the movie’s plot, but ultimately means “child.” And that’s regardless of whether or not the woman can have a child. Landford Wilson, one of America’s great playwrights, demonstrated this in Talley’s Folly.

But in the time tested tradition of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl — or some variation of that: meets, gets, loses, gets again — this didn’t have that. This was, as the title suggests, a shopping trip. She, as a matchmaker, has a set of boxes that her clients have to check: must be over 6 feet, must make $150K a year, etc. And the movie ultimately showed us how that computer based decision making works. Pedro Pascal’s character, once dismissed, never shows up again, not even once. He’s just discarded like packaging around some food. And then we’re on to number 2, Chris Evans. And that’s who she picks. The closing credits, where I was wondering nothing happened, shows the New York City marriage hall, where they are having a “poor” wedding and seem to have forgotten to bring two witnesses.

I suppose if the cynical “marriage is a business and you’re look for a grave buddy,” theme were disproved, somehow, it might have been interesting. But there is only lip service paid to love. and I think the director/writer probably doesn’t have a very strong sense of why it takes women longer to be in love, why she chooses her mate carefully, or sometimes carelessly, or what vulnerability means to women in the first place.

Women and gay men generally get along, not because they like shopping, creativity, crafts, flowers, fashion and so on, which may all be true, but because they both understand the violence of men and our attraction to them.

But ultimately it was just a 2-act play. Act 1: Pedro Pascal. Act 2: Chris Evans.

(Being tired of wasting my money on movies that are made by people who don’t know how to write and sometimes direct, I think I’m going to start skipping shit I don’t like. I was very curious to see “The Life of Chuck,” because of Tom Hiddleston, and in spite of it being a Stephen King story. But I’ll trust the reviews this time. It is a movie based on a Stephen King story, so it is garbage. The reviews called it Suburban Armageddon.)

I’ve become so bored with movies and television shows, primarily because of the terrible writing, casting, plotting, acting, directing and all the other gerunds. The most interesting recently was Department Q which had only a few drawbacks: one being the lead actor, who I’ve always liked but is just a little bit wrong for this part. Still, even saying that, I would rather have the part rewritten to fit Matthew Goode than to find another actor that is more like the part. It was just a very good mystery and the red herrings weren’t so abundant that it became an exercise in stretching a series beyond what was necessary.

I fell asleep for the first twenty or so minutes of Jane Austen Wrecked My Life. I fell asleep for the first twenty minutes of The Phoenecian Scheme, as well. Bring Her Back was okay. I didn’t find it scary but I stayed awake.

The worst monstrosity was Mountainhead, which I had to watch in small doses. I don’t even know why I bothered to finish it. Toward the end, I started to wonder if maybe all the characters were retarded — I don’t want to say mentally challenged because they all believe they are the smartest people in the room. They are four billionaires — one starts off as a 600 Million-aire but he will go over the billion mark by the time the show is over — and they are meeting up at the poor one’s new mountain aerie of about 23,000 square feet which he has named “Mountainhead.” They speak nonsense words and they talk nonsense. They discuss how they should “Coup it up,” meaning the United States, so that no one, including the president, can mess up their plans. There was something about causing a brownout in Belgium which, apparently, one of the characters did from their cellphone. Watching this show was like watching someone slowly pull a hangnail out of your own big toe.

But I think the writer, whose name is Jesse Armstrong, I believe, has this weird sense of comedy. This was supposed to be funny and kind of zany. And there was that strain of humor in Succession, as well — like when Matthew McFayden swallowed his own semen and then sat in awe over the fact that it was like he had had sex with himself. And going back a ways, a movie called In The Loop also had humor. But instead of being a Three Stooges kind of humor, in that the Stooges were absolutely irrelevant to the world, the humor in his writing happens among people who cause harm in the world. So we end up watching these disgusting people and at the same time are supposed to laugh at their antics and sometimes how stupid they are.

I find it impossible. I could no more laugh at this scum as I could at the real life scum of Trump and his minions. I don’t think Trump is funny — I think he gets people to laugh at him, clown like, but it’s not funny. I can’t remember which president it was — it was probably Bush #2 — when Michael Moore made a movie about him which was filled with all these crazy antics and stupid Bush chatter. And yes the audience laughed and Michael Moore clearly knew that people would laugh but at the end, when Michael Moore implied that we would oust him at the voting booth, I thought, “You just gave everyone a reason to re-elect him. You made him funny. That makes him harmless and that means he will win.” And he did. Not, of course, because of Michael Moore, but because that was Bush’s schtick. He said somewhere in his career that he was never going to let Bubba win again. And that’s when he developed his Texas twang, his mangled use of words, and so on. He appealed to the idiocy of Americans. So does Trump. And like I said to a friend back then, who was laughing about something stupid Bush did, “It’s not funny.”

It’s not funny.

Fortunately, I don’t think many people will watch this. They’d rather watch another wretched piece of drek called “Sirens.”

David Cronenberg invented, apparently, the body horror genre, but I think the word horror is really a terrible description of his fascination. The last movie he made, people were watching surgeries as entertainment. These surgeries would take place without general anesthesia, upon people who had grown strange, unique and apparently superfluous organs. The removal of these organs is what people found exciting and in the case of the hero, his organs had been tattooed while inside his body, so each removal was also a piece of artwork.

But ultimately, what was really going on, and it seems like a subplot for the longest time, is a different group of people who could not eat regular food. If I’m remembering the plot right — does it matter — we didn’t find out until the end that all these superfluous organs and people who couldn’t eat food was because they were evolving to eat and digest plastic. The “horror” of this body focused story is environment disaster, not one’s revulsion to the body.

And I think if you look at most David Cronenberg movies (and perhaps David Lynch as I almost mistyped), there was always “something else” going on that affected humanity in a profound way. Videodrome wasn’t really about James Woods developing a vagina in the middle of his abdomen, into which people would place videotapes and later, a gun. It was about the persistence and overwhelming presence of television in our lives and, a hint in the manner of Olivier Assayas’s Demonlover, that pornography was invading every aspect of life.

The Shrouds could be a warning about technology and, I would add, its corruptibility. Corruption is an interesting word to use here because one of its definitions is decay, putrid, etc. — like the corruption of the body as it decays in a grave. In this movie, a few dead people, including the main characters wife, are wrapped in shrouds — shaped like the cocoon a spider might make — and this allows through wires and screens for people to watch their loved ones’ bodies decay. Some people are comforted by this. Some of the graves are vandalized but it turns out that it is not an accident and then corporate conspiracies and such take over. Not sure how much I cared, but I am sure that most of us do not see what is actually going on in a movie because we are too focused on the plot and can’t weed out the parts from the whole. David Lynch’s Eraserhead, at some level, can be seen as a plea for sympathy.

I think people have been trying to make anti-war movies for just about ever — and have been writing about it even longer. The Red Badge of Courage comes to mind as one of the earliest, but the entire field of history is based on “The Histories” by Heroditus, which was a written documentation of about 5 wars, but attempted to explain the hostility between the Greeks and non-Greeks. Someone, somewhere, wrote that it was created to try to prevent wars from ever happening again, but I think that’s b.s.

There is no way, as some have observed, to make a movie that purports to be anti-war which does not, in some way, feed the human thirst for war. The biggest offender of all the movies I’ve seen, was Platoon — Oliver Stone’s homoerotic take on the Vietnam war. Full Metal Jacket at the very least, pulled away from a specific anti-war message and made you wonder what the hell is going on in boot camps. The Deer Hunter was certainly harrowing but I wouldn’t call it anti-war. In fact, it seemed that he was almost a better person after having survived Vietnam because he had compassion for an animal he was going to kill. Before the war he would have killed it like those awful people do that pay for trophies in Africa — without a thought. And The Killing Fields may have come closest to capturing the horror, unlike Apocalypse Now which captured the absurdity.

War and combat excite people. It is written into our dna. I remember one foreign film where this guy was following a trail of clues to find his girlfriend and had to spend a night with some farmers. The mother of the house said, “Tomorrow we’re going to slaughter a pig. That oughta be fun.” Even a writer I loathe wrote a book called, “War is a force that gives life meaning.”

War movies inevitably confirm the excitement of war — as seen from a distance. All the screaming, blood, severed limbs, blindness, concussions and on and on and on don’t make us stop to think, “Maybe we should stop doing this.” Even now, in the 2020s, you can sense the drumbeat of warmongers, itching to get out there and kill others, destroy property, terrorize innocent people.

So it was interesting to watch this movie which is called exactly what it is because it attempts to not indulge our thirst to see bloodshed and fighting. Long periods of the movie are simply about waiting. The movie opens with some bizarre cis male hetero scene where the company is watching a workout video that could have been from the 80s, and screeching and hollering like none of them had ever seen a woman before. It was very bizarre given the amount of porn that exists on the internet. I took it as a forced male bonding scene.

But as a movie, there is literally almost no beginning, middle or end. We don’t know why they have taken over some family’s home — this is in Iraq and somewhere it’s written what battle it’s supposed to be. The only “event” that I could glean from this is that they have to get out, and in their first attempt, one is killed and two are injured, badly. There appears to be “enemies” on all sides of their house and on the roof. They call in some cavalry in the form of tanks and air support. They make their way to the tanks and leave. After that, all the enemies come out of their positions, gather on the street, and look at each other as if to say, “What was that all about?”

It’s 90 minutes but it felt like 15 because of the lack of anything happening. I also fell asleep at the very start of it. Does it give the sense that war should be avoided and that war mongers, like Peter Hesgeth, should be beheaded? No. It’s ultimately as if some people came into a conference room, had an argument with some of the staff, and then left.

War cannot be made unpalatable in the movie experience. We are too visual. It’s like John Krazinsky as Jim Halpert said, “Am I going to tell me daughter that violent video games are objectively more entertaining?”

I think Steven Spielberg, again, saw the absurdity of trying to show “nice cartoons,” in the opening cartoon to “Jessica Rabbit,” where he sort of had a Tom & Jerry character bashing each other and electrocuting each other and chopping each other up with a carving knife. People’s excited reaction and laughter to that cartoon said it all.

After he’s dead and gone — I’d prefer burning at the stake to a beheading, but I’d take either of Henry the VIII’s favorite methods of killing his rivals and the other 80,000 people he murdered — Trump’s era will be called an era of death. Optimists who believe in the myth of the phoenix will look at the scorched earth and think on this new fertile soil, full of ash from a once great civilization, and think that a new, brighter, shinier thing will emerge. Pessimists will look to Easter Island (Rapa Nui) as an example: a once thriving but small Island civilization that destroyed its habitat and starved to death, leaving only large heads of stone.

But the movie, I’m afraid, is gone. Spielberg began it. Lucas amplified it. And then came directors like Michael Bay. Jaws, Star Wars, Transformers. Jaws did something new and extraordinary which, unfortunately, rewrote the way movies had to draw us in. The opening scene. The ominous music, the naked girl in the water, swimming, shot from below. Our knowledge — truly Hitchcockian in the best of senses — that the shark was about to eat her. I remember seeing the movie when I was so young I couldn’t drive. My brother and I rode our bikes “all the way” to the mall to see the movie. The opening scene left me shaking and horrified. And then on the way back my brother had to spoil everything by re-narrating or “mansplaining” the entire thing to me. That opening was the first time in movie history (that I’m aware — and for our purposes, it doesn’t matter if it was done before) that a movie opened with one of the most dramatic scenes — possibly more dramatic than at any other point in the movie — at the beginning of the movie rather than at the climax. After that, it was just a matter of building it into the formula for movie writing.

Star Wars didn’t open quite so dramatically, but it was drama of a different sort. No villain had ever been created that was as scary as ruthless and as heartless as Darth Vader. The scene that gave me nightmares was the scene where he casually chokes (telepathically) someone who has “failed” him while having a normal conversation with the man next to him, who is going to take the soon to be dead man’s place. Continuing the Henry the VIII comparison — in the first adaptation of the first two books, Thomas Cromwell watches the beheading of Anne Boleyn and then walks to the palace where Henry is dressed in his finest, ready to marry his next wife, Jane Seymour. Henry stretches his arms wide as if to say, “What a wonderful day to get married.”

So with these two lead-ins, came comic book movies. Superman, with Christopher Reeve, was first. Batman second. But I think the X Men series really catapulted it above and beyond — mainly because it was such a good stand in for how isolated many people feel — not to mention they are all gays in a straight world. They’re just called “freaks” instead of “fags or dykes.” For me it was proof that a gay theme can be interesting to straight people, including guys.

But then the comic book got stale and so they turned to games — board games and then video games. Tron was the first movie that invented a video game. I remember playing in Times Square video game playlands — this was back in the day when you had to leave your apartment to do just about anything — and there was no “Tron” video game until the movie came out. Then a disappointing version of Tron hit those arcades and I think the game vanished. It just wasn’t fun.

But now all we have left are Minecraft movies, Disney animation, re-animation, live action films of animation and probably, to come, animation of live action, and then who knows what with the scourge of AI being foisted upon us by Zuckerberg, Musk, Microsoft and web browsers everywhere.

We aren’t going to have “Godfather”s or “Place In The Heart,” or “Brokeback Mountain,” anymore. There a few still working who can pull it off: namely Chrisopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve, to name two. But while I used to find at least two to three movies a week worth seeing, now I’m lucky if there’s even one. This is taste of course. I could have gone to see The Minecraft movie last weekend, like millions of others did, but the plot of that movie is this: Tron meets The Karate Kid. Four people get “sucked” into a video game and must find their way back with the help of a master. I know how it ends. They do. But at least with The Wizard of Oz, one couldn’t help but wonder if she would ever get back, because there was a real sense, played right through to almost the end, that she would not make it. And the witch was scary and mean and heartless.

Now we get wicked, which is, in fact, not wicked at all.