Why Jon Stewart Is America's Most Trusted (Fake) Newsman

Will Bunch on the media's failure to cover ... the media's failure.

Jon Stewart and his outstanding team of "Daily Show" producers and writers not only "get" the importance of media manipulation and propaganda, but they can take it a step farther because they also have something that most bloggers do not --resources. Their access to large film libraries is what helps them to take down Fox, CNBC, and all the other media types (and politicians, too) when they say the polar opposite of what they were saying a year ago or even a month ago.

You know who else has those kinds of resources? Mainstream, big media newsrooms. But big media pathologically refuses to think of itself as a part of the national narrative, even as the millions of people who watch Jon Stewart or read your top political blogs know better. And until we in the old media can comprehend that, the new media will continue to leave us in the dust. So will the "fake" media.

What I'm Reading

Notes on Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates.

But first, a word about spoilers.

I like them. I like seeing the way a writer or filmmaker puts things together, the artful dodges that conceal or hint at a story's direction, even when the work hinges on a surprise. I knew the surprise that was coming in The Crying Game, and delighted in the knowledge I had that characters in the film didn't. On the other hand, I didn't know what was coming in The Sixth Sense when I first saw it (though I was aware there was a gimmick), and I enjoyed the movie more on a second viewing, watching the way Shyamalan staged Bruce Willis's interactions with the living.

So this is a warning: There is no way I can write intelligently about Revolutionary Road without alluding to what happens at its end, so if you are a spoiler-phobic who hasn't either seen the film or read the book, you may want to stop right here. Nice to see you. Come back again.

This is not to place either the film of Revolutionary Road or the book in the same category as The Crying Game or The Sixth Sense. They don't depend on withheld plot in the same way. While April's death is shocking, it's not -- in terms of characterization -- a surprise. (I realize I'm being a little unfair to The Crying Game, a comparatively realistic film, by lumping it with a ghost story. What they really have in common is that both films were much discussed for their "twists.")

I saw the film version of Revolutionary Road before I read the book. And in a curious way the book made me more appreciative of the film, and the film made me more critical of the book. Specifically, the book made me better appreciate the skill demonstrated by Kate Winslet at drawing a character who is, I think, somewhat underdrawn in the book. Winslet's April is, I think, bipolar, swinging from the low of her failure in The Petrified Forest to the high of her scheme to drop out of the rat race and move to Paris. The April of the novel is more enigmatic, partly because Yates doesn't narrate from her point of view until the very end, as she's contemplating the suicidal self-induced abortion. We see events through Frank's point of view, through Milly and Shep's, through Mrs. Givings's, and once even through the children's. But we don't enter April's consciousness until it's too late.

Is this a narrative flaw? I hesitate to call it that: A writer has the prerogative to tell his story any way he wants. And by staying distant from April's point of view, Yates makes her even more the isolated, alienated figure in the novel -- a counterpart to the mentally disturbed John Givings. (We don't need to see events from John's point of view, however; he's perfectly willing to tell us what he thinks.) That April is the archetypal alienated 1950s housewife is perfectly obvious. Though she longs to escape to Paris, she couches it in terms of allowing Frank to "find himself." In service to her husband, she has given up her ambitions for a career, the pleasures of urban life, and even dominion over her own body.

Frank, of course, remains oblivious to what's eating away at April. His embrace of the Paris scheme is ambivalent at best -- he lacks the imagination either to conceive of such a plan himself, or to see what it represents for April. Though initially he thinks of his life as a sad carbon copy of his father's -- meaningless work for the same soulless company -- once a new pathway in that life opens up when his talent is recognized by Pollock, he's eager to settle in that routine, greatly relieved when April's pregnancy stymies the Paris escape.

One thing we sometimes forget in thinking about the man-in-the-gray-flannel-suit conformity of the Fifties is that Frank's generation is also the one lately celebrated as the "Greatest Generation." They had been to war, and were quite happy to settle into the routines of peace -- at the expense of becoming boring, as is revealed in the scene in which Frank embarrasses himself by recounting the same war story he had told the same people before. The wartime home-front service and sacrifices of the women of that generation have not been similarly celebrated, and that fact underscores the dissatisfaction of an April.

(Or a Betty Draper. The comparison of "Mad Men" and Revolutionary Road is by now a familiar one -- and a little misleading, since the action of the TV series takes place five to eight years later than that of the novel. And Don Draper/Dick Whitman is a rather more ruthlessly aggressive figure than Frank Wheeler. Don knows what he wants from life and reinvents himself to achieve it. He's also not one to dwell on war stories, since his are not really his own. But even though Matthew Weiner may deny the influence, April looks a lot like the pattern for Betty. Both are caught in the same suburban trap, and even had the same kind of children -- older girl, younger boy -- before unanticipated pregnancies thwarted their potential liberation from child-rearing. Betty studied archaeology only to find herself joking about it while looking at antique furniture; April aspired to be an actress but wound up in a disastrous amateur production of The Petrified Forest in a high school auditorium. And both fell decidedly out of love with their philandering husbands, and wound up having furtive casual sex. But unlike April, Betty has survived the fall. At least so far.)

The novel's beginning, I think, is stronger than its ending. In fact, this is one place where I prefer the film, which condenses the hospital scene and the redundant scenes at the Campbells and the Givingses. I think the inclusion of a shot of Frank playing with the children softens the film a little too much -- the novel almost leaves the impression that Frank farmed the children out to his brother and sister-in-law, an ironic recapitulation of April's scattered childhood. But I do like that both novel and film end with Mr. Givings turning off his hearing aid.

Of course, what makes the novel far superior to the film (even though the film is remarkably faithful to the book) is the fluency of Yates's prose and the keenness of his insight into the characters. We know where we are and where we're going with the Wheelers from the beginning, or at least when we experience with Frank the disaster of the production of The Petrified Forest:

[N]othing had warned him that he might be overwhelmed by the swaying, shining vision of a girl he hadn't seen in years, a girl whose every glance and gesture could make his throat fill up with longing ("Wouldn't you like to be loved by me?") and that then before his very eyes she would dissolve and change into the graceless, suffering creature whose existence he tried every day to deny but whom he knew as well and as painfully as he knew himself, a gaunt, constricted woman whose red eyes flashed reproach, whose false smile in the curtain call was as homely as his own sore feet, his own damp climbing underwear and his own sour smell.

It's a process of illusion and disillusionment that recurs throughout the book; only a few pages later Frank recalls a postcoital April "whispering: 'It's true, Frank. I mean it. You're the most interesting person I've ever met.'" And then only three paragraphs after that the present-day April is saying to him, "All right, Frank. Could you just please stop talking now, before you drive me crazy?" Has a more savagely anti-Romantic novel ever been published?

The key to Frank, I think, is his desire to be a man, not the scared boy he's afraid he really is. Working on the stone path to his house, he prides himself that "At least it was a man's work," and drifts into a reverie about his own masculinity:

At least, squatting to rest on the wooded slope, he could look down and see his house the way a house ought to look on a fine spring day, safe on its carpet of green, the frail white sanctuary of a man's love, a man's wife and children. Lowering his eyes with the solemnity of this thought, he could take pleasure in the sight of his own flexed thigh ... and of the heavily veined forearm that lay across it and the dirty hand that hung there -- not to be compared with his father's hand, maybe, but a serviceable good-enough hand all the same -- so that his temples ached in zeal and triumph as he heaved a rock up from the suck of its white-wormed socket and let it roll end over end down the shuddering leafmold, because he was a man.

And then his daughter asks why Mommy slept on the sofa last night.

No film can be as searching and probing as that passage is about the tyranny of masculinity and the narcissism it inspires, or as revelatory of the human gap between who we are and what we want to be.

Snobbier Than Thou

Michael Bérubé beautifully takes down Benjamin Schwarz's critique of "Mad Men."

There really should be a name for this kind of criticism. Begging Amanda’s pardon, this is not merely about “feeling superior to the writers of ‘Mad Men,’” though it certainly is that. It’s also about feeling superior to the rest of the show’s audience, who are clearly insufferably middlebrow, like that Charlie Rose fellow, “who can always be counted on to embrace the conventional wisdom”: “not just Rose but also Mad Men’s affluent, with-it target audience are particularly susceptible to liking what The New York Times’ Arts and Style sections tell them to like (30-plus articles in two years!).” Unlike the Arts and Style sheeple, however, Benjamin Schwarz likes this extraordinarily accomplished show—but for the right reasons.

Californicated by the Right?

Paul Krugman makes a disturbing point:

If Tea Party Republicans do win big next year, what has already happened in California could happen at the national level. In California, the G.O.P. has essentially shrunk down to a rump party with no interest in actually governing — but that rump remains big enough to prevent anyone else from dealing with the state’s fiscal crisis. If this happens to America as a whole, as it all too easily could, the country could become effectively ungovernable in the midst of an ongoing economic disaster.

Bugged

It's not the flu, swine or otherwise. I know from flu. I think it's a head cold, but whatever it is, it has me slugging around the house in my robe and pajamas in the middle of the day. Fie on it.

Publish or Perish

According to this article, everybody's about to be an author.

Friday Cat-Blogging

Simon and Nicky

Stewart Does Beck (And How!)

A must-see:

The 11/3 Project

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Sibilant Rivalry

How do cats hiss? It's a very strange sound, sort of sibilant and guttural at the same time.

I ask this because Simon's home and Nicky's pissed off about it. After three days of mewing at every window, making us think that he was missing his brother, the first thing Nicky does when Simon comes back is hiss at him. It seems that he doesn't smell right.

Maggie heard Simon outside last night, and went out with the laser pointer -- their favorite toy: they can chase the lightning bug without stop. He ran off when he saw her, but she sat down on the walk and coaxed him back. He has lost weight, but seems otherwise okay.

A Little Knot-Music

The following review ran today in the San Francisco Chronicle (just below Jon Carroll):

NOCTURNES: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall

By Kazuo Ishiguro

Knopf, 240 pp., $25

Dry without being arid, lean without being starved, the stories in Kazuo Ishiguro's new collection are studies in disjunction. They're full of characters in a state of disconnectedness – miscommunicating, misjudging, mistaking one another's motivations and intent. The trick here is that Ishiguro exploits this state of things for neither pathos nor farce, but for a funny-touching blend of the two.

Four of the five stories are narrated by musicians. A Polish-born guitarist in Venice tells of being hired by a famous American pop singer to serenade the singer's wife. An aspiring singer-songwriter escapes to the country to try to compose, but finds no peace there. A jazz saxophonist has plastic surgery because his career has been stymied by his looks -- his manager tells him he's “dull, loser ugly.” Another saxophonist tells the story of the relationship between a cellist and a mysterious woman who becomes his mentor.

The one story that doesn't feature musicians is also the most wildly varied in tone. “Come Rain or Come Shine” still hinges on the power of music – as the title's allusion to the Harold Arlen-Johnny Mercer standard suggests. In the story, Ray, a middle-aged man who teaches English on the continent, comes to England to visit his old university friends, Charlie and Emily. The reunion is not a happy one: Charlie and Emily not only berate Ray for not making more of his life, but also embroil him in their own marital tensions, which are like something out of Pinter or Albee.

And then the story turns into situation comedy. Charlie leaves on a business trip and, while Emily is at work, Ray discovers that she has called him “the Prince of Whiners” in her diary. He angrily mutilates the book, but when remorse sets in he calls Charlie to ask what he should do about the diary. Charlie concocts a far-fetched scheme to to trash the apartment and blame the mutilation on a dog owned by some of their friends. The story moves from agitato to scherzando, and by the time it ends it has changed mood again, to andante. The healing agent, at least between Ray and Emily, is music.

Music hath charms. Indeed, it's the almost the only real agglutinating force in the lives of these characters, all of whom are – or feel themselves to be -- outsiders. Janeck, the narrator of the opening story, “Crooner,” was raised in Poland before the fall of communism, and now plays guitar in a café orchestra on the Piazza San Marco in Venice. “Anywhere else,” he tells us, “being a guitar player would go in a guy's favour. But here? A guitar! The café managers get uneasy. It looks too modern, the tourists won't like it.” He's also at a disadvantage because of “the small matter of my not being Italian, never mind Venetian,” but as long as he keeps his mouth shut he can get work because “they need a guitar – something soft, but amplified, thumping out the chords from the back.” He is delighted to meet the crooner, whose black-market records Janeck's mother used to play, and thrilled when the man engages him as an accompanist for the serenade, a romantic gesture that turns out not to be exactly what Janeck is expecting.

Ishiguro knows something about musicians and about feeling like an outsider: Born in Nagasaki, he moved with his family to England when he was five years old. As a teenager, he aspired to be a songwriter like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, and at 19 he hitchhiked with his guitar around California and the West. (The guitar was stolen in San Francisco.) But the characters in Nocturnes are no more (or less) autobiographical than the emotionally atrophied butler in The Remains of the Day or the doomed clones of Never Let Me Go.

What gives Ishiguro's fiction its peculiar quality is the sense of things held in suspension, of situations and relationships never quite fated to work out the way they should, rather like unresolved chords in a musical composition. These stories are often quite funny, predicated as they are on odd behavior, misinterpreted actions and false conclusions. But laughter depends on the release of tension, and Ishiguro's skillful avoidance of the expected resolution and his sly refusal to give us a full release of the tension produces a laughter with a melancholy, nervous edge.