When the Oscar nominees came out, I suggested that this had been a good year for movies. But that snap judgment notwithstanding, I’m in complete agreement with Mark Harris, who has a long essay in the latest GQ arguing that we shouldn’t let a good run of highbrow movies obscure what a derivative wasteland the middlebrow movie market has become, and seems likely to remain. Harris frames his piece around the immense box office success of Christopher Nolan’s “Inception,” which for a time seemed like it might actually send Hollywood studios on a hunt for (gasp!) original material. Not so much, he reports:

… let’s look ahead to what’s on the menu for this year: four adaptations of comic books. One prequel to an adaptation of a comic book. One sequel to a sequel to a movie based on a toy. One sequel to a sequel to a sequel to a movie based on an amusement-park ride. One prequel to a remake. Two sequels to cartoons. One sequel to a comedy. An adaptation of a children’s book. An adaptation of a Saturday-morning cartoon. One sequel with a 4 in the title. Two sequels with a 5 in the title. One sequel that, if it were inclined to use numbers, would have to have a 7 1/2 in the title.

And no Inception. Now, to be fair, in modern Hollywood, it usually takes two years, not one, for an idea to make its way through the alimentary canal of the system and onto multiplex screens, so we should really be looking at summer 2012 to see the fruit of Nolan’s success. So here’s what’s on tap two summers from now: an adaptation of a comic book. A reboot of an adaptation of a comic book. A sequel to a sequel to an adaptation of a comic book. A sequel to a reboot of an adaptation of a TV show. A sequel to a sequel to a reboot of an adaptation of a comic book. A sequel to a cartoon. A sequel to a sequel to a cartoon. A sequel to a sequel to a sequel to a cartoon. A sequel to a sequel to a sequel to a sequel to a movie based on a young-adult novel. And soon after: Stretch Armstrong. You remember Stretch Armstrong, right? That rubberized doll you could stretch and then stretch again, at least until the sludge inside the doll would dry up and he would become Osteoporosis Armstrong? A toy that offered less narrative interest than bingo?

Amid this depressing diagnosis, Harris deserves particular credit for avoiding the predictable, “it’s all been downhill since ‘Jaws’ and ‘Star Wars’” line that so many critics of a certain age trot out. Instead, he has a different inflection point in mind, and a more distinctive theory of where it all went wrong. Read more…

James Kirchick has a good piece exploring the divide that’s opened between American neoconservatives and many Israelis over the revolutions and protests currently roiling the Middle East — with neocons welcoming the fall of Hosni Mubarak and the promise of democratic change throughout the region, even as the Israeli leadership classes wax more pessimistic about the likely consequences of replacing despots with more popular regimes. “Could there be a starker illustration of just how mistaken the neocon-Israeli conflation always was?” Kirchick asks, and he’s right: The last few weeks should bury, once and for all, the foolish idea that neoconservatism’s rhetorical commitment to democracy promotion is just a smokescreen for Likudnik dual loyalties or U.S. imperialism.

There’s a reasonable case to be made that at least in the short term, the Arab revolutions will reduce American influence in the Middle East, weaken Israel’s strategic position, and empower Iran — which is presumably why the Obama White House has been proceeding with an exquisite caution that’s shaded, at times, into unseemly passivity. Yet from ur-neocons like Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan, and Reuel Marc Gerecht to fellow travelers like Christopher Hitchens and Leon Wieseltier, American neoconservatives have spent the last month united in the conviction that the virtues of toppling tyrants trump whatever perils may come next. Indeed, the responses to the Arab 1848 have showcased neoconservatism at its most idealistic, dismissive of crude machtpolitik concerns and insistent that the aspirations of oppressed peoples should take priority over what may seem at first like the immediate interests of both Israel and the United States.

Read more…

Speaking of the Tea Party, I enjoyed this Will Wilkinson post analogizing the ongoing public-sector union rallies in Wisconsin to the right-wing protests of the last two years. And I especially enjoyed his follow-up defending the analogy:

… Reading the comments, the comparison seems to have pleased no one. But I’m especially interested in the reaction from the left. The tea-party movement, you see, is an “astroturf” movement, financed by billionaire puppetmasters, fueled by hatred, agitating for rank injustice. The labour movement, on the other hand, is the real deal: a bottom-up coalition of working Americans courageously standing up against the thuggery of bought-and-paid-for Republicans and their shamelessly insatiable plutocrat bosses.

This zanily Manichean way of characterising the situation I think rather confirms my suspicion that the equivalence I drew is sound. Michelle Malkin, a zanily Manichean right-winger, is delighting in the chore of cataloguing the many scandalous rhetorical sins against propriety committed by the pro-union crowds in Madison. Ms Malkin’s ridiculous point is that the pro-union rabble is guilty of the racism, sexism and homophobia of which the courageous tea-party movement has been falsely accused. My point is that when folks get angry, they get stupid, and stupidity knows no party or clique.

It’s remarkable how hard it is for people to admit this truth. During the long and tedious debate over whether right-wing rhetoric was somehow responsible for Jared Loughner’s Tucson rampage, I sometimes had liberals say to me: “O.K., sure, people on the left get overheated and irresponsible from time to time, but no prominent left-winger would ever make an obviously violence-inciting comment about seeking ‘Second Amendment remedies,’ the way Sharron Angle did.” This narrow point is true enough, but it’s true because liberals, as a rule, don’t share the conservative habit of romanticizing the Second Amendment or gun culture in general. What the left does have, though, is a tradition of romanticizing street protests and riots — and sure enough, all it took was one big left-wing street protest to induce a Democratic congressman to issue the distinctly Angle-ish call for public employees to “get a little bloody” if necessary in their war against Wisconsin’s Republican governor. No party or clique, indeed …

But the partisan mind sees what it wants to see. Somehow it’s always easier to insist that the other side’s crazy posters and Hitler analogies and intimations of violence (or even banalities about “saving the Constitution” and “taking back” the country) are evidence of crazy insurrectionist eliminationist madness that threatens to drown the republic in blood, whereas your own side’s excesses are just, well, excesses — the work of a few bad apples, no big deal, nothing to get excited about, and probably blown out of proportion anyway. Somehow there’s always a reason why your side’s counter-majoritarian maneuvering is the very essence of democracy, whereas when the other side does it it’s a sign that American government is hopelessly broken. And so the Manichean beat goes on.

There were a lot of surprising developments during the weeks I just took off from writing (who knew Charlie Sheen had so much to offer the world?), but the “what entitlement problem?” evasiveness of President Obama’s 2011 budget wasn’t one of them. What was a surprise, though, and a pleasant one, was the House G.O.P.’s response: A politically-gutsy pledge that their forthcoming budget would tackle entitlements head-on. And while how all this plays out remains to be seen, it seems fair for the Tea Party movement to claim a measure of vindication from the way Congressional Republicans have conducted themselves to date.

By this I don’t mean that the Tea Partiers have been proven right on the great issues of the day, necessarily. Rather, I mean that their own self-understanding — as a movement aimed at pushing the Republican Party toward real fiscal austerity and greater skepticism of government power — has been at least partially vindicated in the votes that a Tea Partified G.O.P. has taken and the positions that its members have staked out.

This wasn’t a foregone conclusion by any means. Read more…

My already-intermittent blogging will cease for most of this month. Real posting will resume once I’ve figured out how to successfully juggle punditry and fatherhood.

The State of the Union has been (appropriately) eclipsed by the events in Egypt, but before it fades entirely I want to take up something Matt Yglesias said, explaining why he doesn’t find the entitlement evasions of both the president and Paul Ryan particularly worrying:

… to further defend feckless politicians, not only is evading the entitlement challenge politically smart but economically speaking there’s no reason to focus on the deficit right now. Imagine a car driving on a very straight patch of empty highway at 45 miles per hour. Thirty miles ahead comes a very steep curve that’s dangerous to take any faster than 20 miles per hour. You’re going too fast. You’re going to have to slow down soon. But right now you’re going too slow. There’s no reason to be driving 45 mph on an empty straight highway. The fact that in the future you need to slow down and take a tricky turn is neither here nor there.

I don’t think there’s any question that the government of the United States can respond to a real debt crisis, if and when it comes, with some sort of bipartisan deficit reduction package. The question is whether last-minute twists of the wheel (to borrow the Yglesian metaphor) are a good way to make public policy. The examples of TARP and the stimulus, both of which were pushed through Congress in what felt like crisis situations, don’t exactly inspire confidence, and the idea of following the same model to determine the size, scope and funding for the welfare state writ large seems like a recipe for a policy train wreck. (Lots of progressives didn’t care for the Simpson-Bowles deficit proposals, but even Nancy Pelosi would probably regard them as a model of good government compared to the mix of spending cuts and tax increases you’d get if Congress was forced to balance the books in a hurry.) And also a recipe for massive public backlash: If you thought the cynicism and anti-government sentiment inspired by TARP was bad, wait until Washington reforms Medicare and Social Security in the same mood of crisis-inspired panic.

This is where our political class is failing. Yglesias is right (I hope!) that significant spending cuts or tax increases don’t have to happen right this instant to avert calamity. But they probably do have to happen relatively soon, however gradually you phase them in, and it’s clear from polling that the public is completely unprepared for this reality. It’s a good thing that responsible figures in the Senate, from Tom Coburn to Claire McCaskill, are laying the inside-the-Beltway groundwork for deficit reduction. But at some point the realities of the situation need to be explained, and sold, to the American people. And because the State of the Union and the Republican response offer a rare chance to do some of that explaining, it strikes me as unfortunate that the president and Paul Ryan chose evasions instead. I understand all the political reasons why Barack Obama sounded like a C.E.O. putting the shiniest possible face on his company’s insolvency. But there has to be a better way to govern a republic.

In the midst of last year’s Iranian uprisings, I made the following point about the likely political consequences of the Great Recession:

In 1930s Europe, [an] economic crisis toppled democratic governments, and swept dictators into power. Liberal societies seemed ineffectual; authoritarianism was the coming thing.

The crash of 2008, though, may end up having the opposite effect. Over the last few years, both American alarmists and anti-American triumphalists have emphasized the disruptive power of populist, semi-authoritarian political actors — from Ahmadinejad’s Iran to Vladimir Putin’s Russia to Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. But these regimes, which depend on petro-dollars for stability at home and influence abroad, may prove far more vulnerable to economic dislocation than their democratic rivals.

Amid the wreckage of the Great Depression, intellectuals and policymakers looked to fascist Italy and the Soviet Union for inspiration. But it’s hard to imagine anyone seeing a model in the current crop of authoritarian governments. It’s much easier to imagine them being swept away, if the recession endures, by domestic discontent.

Read more…

If you were a visitor from Mars, watching tonight’s State of the Union address and Paul Ryan’s Republican response, you would have no reason to think that the looming insolvency of our entitlement system lies at the heart of the economic challenges facing the United States over the next two decades. From President Obama, we heard a reasonably eloquent case for center-left technocracy and industrial policy, punctuated by a few bipartisan flourishes, in which the entitlement issue felt like an afterthought: He took note of the problem, thanked his own fiscal commission for their work without endorsing any of their recommendations, made general, detail-free pledges to keep Medicare and Social Security solvent (but “without slashing benefits for future generations”), and then moved swiftly on to the case for tax reform. Tax reform is important, of course, and so are education and technological innovation and infrastructure and all the other issues that the president touched on in this speech. But it was still striking that in an address organized around the theme of American competitiveness, which ran to almost 7,000 words and lasted for an hour, the president spent almost as much time talking about solar power as he did about the roots of the nation’s fiscal crisis.

Ryan’s rejoinder was more urgent and more focused: America’s crippling debt was an organizing theme, and there were warnings of “painful austerity measures” and a looming “day of reckoning.” But his remarks, while rhetorically effective, were even more vague about the details of that reckoning than the president’s address. Ryan owes his prominence, in part, to his willingness to propose a very specific blueprint for addressing the entitlement system’s fiscal woes. But in his first big moment on the national stage, the words “Medicare” and “Social Security” did not pass the Wisconsin congressman’s lips.

None of this was particularly surprising. It’s clear that both parties have decided that a period of divided government twelve months before a presidential election is the wrong time to make big moves on entitlements and the deficit. Better to wait, jockey for position, and hope that the correlation of forces after 2012 will be more favorable to their preferred solutions. And it’s clear, too, that they’ve decided (with honorable exceptions) that it’s too risky to even begin building support for the unpopular cuts or tax increases ahead. The bet, on both sides, is that there’s still time to work with, and that the other party will blink, or at least give ground, before the real crunch arrives.

Let’s hope they’re right.

They’re out! And I’d like to thank the Academy for doing a bang-up job this year.

First, they gave a Best Picture nod to “Winter’s Bone,” even though the smart money had been suggesting that Ben Affleck’s cops-and-robbers entertainment “The Town” would grab the last slot instead. I’m enjoying Affleck’s mid-career reinvention as a director of Bostonian crime stories (“Gone Baby Gone” wears much better on repeated viewings than Martin Scorsese’s Boston-accented Oscar winner “The Departed”), but “Winter’s Bone” was in a different league: Haunting and riveting, primal and genuinely surprising. Also, it’s precisely the kind of film that deserves some Oscar love: An actual little movie that could, with no-name stars and an obscure director, as opposed to notionally “little” movies like “The King’s Speech” and “Black Swan” that enter the lists with star power and studio muscle to spare.

Speaking of star power, the Academy also deserves kudos for declining to issue a Best Director nomination to Christopher Nolan, whose “Inception” was dizzying, dazzling, immersive, entertaining — but ultimately shallow, in a fashion made less forgivable by the self-seriousness that Nolan’s blockbusters always wear on their sleeves, and haven’t yet quite earned. If there were 10 Best Director slots, I wouldn’t begrudge him one, but as it stands the nominators got things right: “Inception” is in with the 10 Best Picture nominees, as a gesture to Nolan’s crowd pleasing inventiveness, but the Best Director category has been reserved for filmmakers with fewer fanboys, but better films.

Finally, this year’s Oscars will feature the best roster of Best Actress nominees that I can remember: In a different year, any one of the five nominees might have cruised to victory. The statue will almost certainly go to Natalie Portman, with Annette Bening as the dark horse; Nicole Kidman already has a Best Actress Oscar, and Jennifer Lawrence hasn’t been at this long enough to have her marvelous turn as Ree Dolly in “Winter’s Bone” rewarded on the big stage. Nor has Michelle Williams, most likely — but her “Blue Valentine” performance would get my vote.

The Academy can’t take all the credit for its choices, though. This was just a flat-out good year for the movies.

If you want to read a serious rebuttal to Michael Lind’s recent argument that America needs a political party that unites techno-optimism, secular utopianism, and a commitment to restoring the mid-century nexus of “big government, big business and big labor,” I recommend Walter Russell Mead’s recent post on the limits, moral and otherwise, of precisely the political and social model that Lind is pining for. For my part, I want to focus on Lind’s case against “Star Wars”:

If there was a moment when the culture of enlightened modernity in the United States gave way to the sickly culture of romantic primitivism, it was when the movie “Star Wars” premiered in 1977. A child of the 1960s, I had grown up with the optimistic vision symbolized by “Star Trek,” according to which planets, as they developed technologically and politically, graduated to membership in the United Federation of Planets, a sort of galactic League of Nations or UN. When I first watched “Star Wars,” I was deeply shocked. The representatives of the advanced, scientific, galaxy-spanning organization were now the bad guys, and the heroes were positively medieval — hereditary princes and princesses, wizards and ape-men. Aristocracy and tribalism were superior to bureaucracy. Technology was bad. Magic was good.

So here’s my question: What did Lind think of the prequels? Because in a sense, George Lucas addressed nearly all of Lind’s issues with the “Star Wars” universe in movies one through three. (I am bracketing the more creative interpretations of those films …) Queen Amidala of Naboo, Princess Leia’s mother, turned out to be an elected queen, who moved on to senatorial duties after serving out her term as monarch. (How a teenager managed to navigate Naboo’s version of the Iowa caucuses remains a mystery …) The once-mystical Force was given a scientific explanation, in the form of the “midichlorians,” the micro-organisms that clutter up the bloodstream of the Jedi and give them telekinetic powers as a side effect. And the lost Old Republic that the rebels fight to restore in the original films was revealed to be , well, “a sort of galactic League of Nations or UN,” with the Jedi Knights as its peacekeeping force and the lightsaber as the equivalent of the blue helmet.

For Lind, then, I can only assume that watching the prequels was an immensely gratifying experience. And for the rest of us, the knowledge that Lind’s prescription for “Star Wars” helped produce three of the most disappointing science-fiction blockbusters ever made should be reason enough to reject his prescription for America without a second thought.