Wednesday, March 27, 2024

Progressive Presidential Campaigns, Part 6: Wallace's Doomed Campaign And The Long-Term Consequences

 

For the rest of his life George McGovern, who had been a Wallace follower and attended the Progressive Convention insisted that not only was Wallace not a communist but that 95 percent of the delegates were ‘church people and right out of the soil of America’.

This was not the opinion of journalists. Hearst columnist George Dixon reported: “I am aware it is not cricket to dwell upon the physical infirmities of people, but I have never seen so many obvious defectives gathered together before.” They insisted on going into dining rooms unproperly attired where the dress code demanded formal wear and tried to force entry. They seemed determine to cause a fight in elevators whenever they got a chance. Alistair Cooke, reporting for the Manchester Guardian, said that the men dressed like emancipated clerks in Atlantic City or fledgling Los Angelenos. “ Both men were appalled by them.

The speakers at the convention including Leo Isacson, who said the new nation of Israel would ‘commence the affair of making itself submit to Anglo-American tutelage. Their addresses. All three minutes, were speeches on ‘the arts’, the Negro’, Women and Science.” The keynote address was delivered by Charles Howard, a longtime Republican, a citizen of Iowa – and had lost his license to practice law for six months because of misappropriation of funds.

3240 delegates assembled in a conventional hall to a half-empty gallery. One police sergeant joked that half of those present were FBI agents checking on Communists.

H.L. Mencken, present for the entire thing, observed that while he didn’t think the affair was being maneuvered from the Kremlin he added that there were ‘not many dark faces spotted in the hall, no Jewish faces, Chinese, Malays, Eskimos or Arabs.” In other words this party of the people was populated by mostly artists and dilettantes.

When this article was published a member of the Maryland delegation offered a resolution condemning Mencken’s reporting and his ‘Hitlerite references to the people of this convention…The fighting spirit of equality is entirely lost to Mencken…He Red baits, Jew Baits, and Negro baits.” (The delegate who put forth this motion was an overt Communist.)

The resolution got nowhere because as a Philadelphia newspaper observed: “Rumors spread that they decided if there were to be any martyrs to come out of the convention they would be Wallace and Taylor. No mere reporter was to be wafted off to glory on the wings of martyrdom.”

While he was initially outraged Mencken would ultimately laugh it off. “I’m only sorry the resolution was not passed.” He was one of the few people at the convention who was treating it with the seriousness it deserved.

The nomination was practically a family affair: Glen Taylor’s nomination was seconded by his sister and brother. It was followed by a fundraising affair at Shibe Park, where the moribund Philadelphia Phillies and A’s played baseball and was about as much fun as most of those games were. A band led by Pete Seeger struggled to be heard. Vito Marcantonio, the original Wallace, gave  what would be an unintelligible speech. (The sound system barely worked). Glen Taylor’s speech in the aftermath of his nomination was followed by a rendition of ‘When You Were Sweet Sixteen’ sung horribly by the Taylor family.

Wallace’s speech was little more than a formation of his old platitudes, excoriating Truman and blaring down the Republican Party. Like Thomas Dewey in his acceptance speech, however, he spoke in generalities on domestic policy. However, he made an exception for Germany and the crisis in Berlin. He assured those in the stadium and listening over the radio: ‘IF I were President, there would be no crisis in Berlin today.”

The nominations took place before the platform was finally adapted at the end of the convention. The New York Times compared it line by line to the Communist Party platform – and found many similarities. The platform denounced the Nationalist movement of Chang Kai-Shek, opposed the Marshall Plan, damned HUAC and advocated the creation of a Cabinet level department of Culture. The party agreed to supported Moscow’s refusal to recognize the state of Macedonia entirely in lockstep. Even when a minority amendment was proposed simply not giving a blanket endorsement of the Soviet Union, was ‘interpreted as an insinuation against a foreign ally.” The man who proposed the Amendment was shouted down, led off-stage and then nervously said majority rule would be fine. The Chairman had already ruled there was not going to be a vote on the amendment.

In every possible way the Progressive Party convention was taken on the model of the leftist model that we see reflected today: refusing to listen to any dissent, taking a criticism of them as something that needed to be publicly excoriated and with a major presence of prominent celebrities.

One of the ironies of the 1948 campaign was that both major parties were in bipartisan accord over the international situation. During 1948, what was unfolding Germany and Berlin was becoming so dangerous that James Forrestal was certain that World War III might break out any day. Yet despite having a major issue to campaign on Thomas Dewey did not make it an issue of the fall campaign. In part it was because of past experience, four years earlier he had tried to make failures at Pearl Harbor a campaign issue against FDR and it had backfired. On July 24, Dewey spoke alongside Arthur Vandenberg and John Foster Dulles and told Americans that: ‘We shall not allow domestic partisan irritations to divert us from indispensable unity.” Wallace was the only candidate willing to challenge Truman on foreign policy – and because of the clear links to Communism, no one could take him seriously.

Perhaps the most genuine move of Wallace during the fall campaign was when he had a campaign tour through the South. Since Reconstruction the South had been solidly Democratic and in all the years since no standard bearer from either party had bothered to campaign there. Considering that what votes weren’t going to go to Truman would almost certainly go to Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrat Party, it seemed a futile cause.

Wallace was determined to do so. There was the calculation that if he did so he would reinvigorate his African-American support in the North, perhaps take votes from Truman. But he genuinely believed that the inequities of Jim Crow needed to be challenged by a man of national stature. It was a noble gesture that one can’t believe today’s leftists who disdain the South’s existence would have considered making.

Wallace spent two weeks in the South, addressing 30 integrated audiences in 28 cities in seven southern states. There was immense outrage from Southerners. In North Carolina, one of his bodyguards was cut eight times with a knife – and threatened with arrest from the police. Wallace and his party were pelted garbage. In Burlington, a father held an eight year old on his shoulders so the boy could fling tomatoes and ice cream at him. An outraged Wallace placed his hands on an elderly resident with a livid look on his face. A supporter described what happened next:

“…As suddenly as that emotion had been aroused, something miraculous happened. His grip relaxed. The anger went off his face….And with a composed gesture that seemed almost messianic, he waved to the crowd. ‘Goodbye friends. I’ll see you again.”

He received protests and threats in Alabama and Louisiana. And some of his speeches were the most genuine of the campaign. A journalist wrote that: “he said a good many things that needed to be said about the brotherhood of man. He may even have jolted the complacency of a few citizens who never doubted that the lord preferred them to those born with darker skins. He established in at least a dozen places that unsegregated meetings could be held without civil war.”

It was the moral highpoint of the campaign. Almost everything else was a disaster. The lion’s share of Wallace’s most prominent supporter were celebrities past and present. They included S.J. Perlman, Aaron Copland, Linus Pauling, I.F. Stone, Clifford Odets, Frank Lloyd Wright, Arthur Miller and the young Leonard Bernstein. But none of this could relieve Wallace’s many blunders prior to the campaign and his continued embrace of Communists during it. It didn’t help that HUAC was now in full force and they would occasionally bring in Wallace campaigners – who chose to take the Fifth.

Even some of Wallace’s early followers began to realize just how Communist he was. Lillian Hellman lunched with Wallace and he asked her if much of the central core of his campaign was Communist. She told him it was true. “I thought you must have known that. The hard, dirty work in the office is being done by them and a good deal of the bad advice you’re getting is given by the higher ups. I don’t think they mean any harm, they’re stubborn men.” Wallace said. “I see.”

Nothing changed. Hellman eventually had to chaperone Wallace’s wife, Ilo around. Ilo had little use for Communists, Jews, or even her husband’s campaign. For a month Hellman hosted her at her house in Martha Vineyard to basically shut her up. In October, she fled the campaign to go to Yugoslavia to witness the premiere of her play The Little Foxes in Belgrade. She went to interview Marshall Tito about his break with Moscow. He wanted to ask her about Henry Wallace.

Always at the heart of the campaign was a question they could never easily answered: did it make sense to punish Democrats only to replace them with retrograde Republicans? The Progressive Party decided to oppose many very liberal Democratic nominee for elected office, including Helen Gahagan Douglas in California, Minnesota Senate hopeful Hubert Humphrey and Illinois nominee for governor Adlai Stevenson.

On September 21, Beanie Baldwin told major supporters that they would be backing Chester Bowles for governor in Connecticut and that they might back Douglas in California. Wallace, who was next to speak, openly told them that they couldn’t endorse Bowles which led many to think they had split. On September 30, thirteen Progressive candidates withdrew from key congressional races, including Bowles, Humphrey and Douglas. Even before October began, the new party was raising the white flag.

When the election was over and Harry Truman had been the surprise winner it was a disaster in every possible way. They received little more than 1.1 million votes. They’d never had anything resembling a strategy for victory, unlike the Dixiecrats. It was telling the States Right Party, which was on the ballot in just thirteen states to Wallace’s 50 gathered slightly more popular votes than Wallace: Thurmond got 1,176,125 to Wallace’s 1,157,326. The Thurmond campaign carried 4 Southern States with 39 electoral votes. The lion’s share of Wallace’s votes were from New York, where he got nearly half a million votes and California, where he got two percent. All his campaign accomplished was to take enough votes away from Truman in New York and Michigan to give them to Dewey.

The consequences were infinitely worse for progressives long-term. All they had wanted was to defeat Harry Truman. The cost came to their ranks in both the Democratic party and labor. Worse by goading Truman to counterattack by labeling his anti-Communist protocols which would lead pretty much directly to the McCarthy era. And for decades many on the left would be tarred with the label of Communism.

In 1950 when Helen Gaghan Douglas attempted to run for the Senate in California, she was labeled the ‘Pink Lady’ by a 37 year old two term Congressman who had shot to prominence during the meetings of HUAC in August of 1948. In part this Congressman used Douglas’ association with the Wallace campaign to label her with Communist leanings by association.

Less then three years later Richard Nixon would be sworn in as Vice President.

 

In the final section of this article I will summarize the commonalities between all three failed Progressive campaigns for President and what they haven’t learned from them in all that time.

 

 

Tuesday, March 26, 2024

Homicide Appreciation Series: Giancarlo Before He Was Gustavo

If you have been a fan of Peak TV over the past fifteen years then you have been, quite naturally, fallen in awe of Giancarlo Esposito.

It’s not like Esposito had been invisible before that. He has been acting practically since he was out of the womb. He worked in Children’s TV like Sesame Street and The Electric Company. He had roles in Miami Vice and then was launched into notoriety for his work with Spike Lee from School Daze, Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X. He made his mark in independent films such as Fresh, The Usual Suspects and the Paul Newman version of Twilight (no sparkling vampires but a lot of immortals).

But much like Bryan Cranston and Bob Odenkirk he did not find superstardom until his path crossed with Vince Gilligan on Breaking Bad and he became Gustavo Fring, the owner of the Los Pollos Hermanos franchise who just happened to be the biggest drug kingpin in the Southwest. And from the moment we saw him button his suit, Esposito has never left the stage.

He has never stopped working in television since then. After his character met the most memorable demise in history, he moved on to the undervalued Revolution. He had a recurring role on Once Upon A Time before Gilligan brought him back to Albuquerque in Better Call Saul. Despite his recurring role he was everywhere, narrating Dear White People, staring in the Cinemax series Jett, playing Adam Clayton Powell on Godfather of Harlem having critical roles in The Mandalorian and The Boys. He has been nominated for five Emmys for three different series but has never won once. My fellow Critics have been kinder to him. The Critics Choice Awards have given him two prizes for Best Supporting Actor, one for Breaking Bad, one a decade later for Better Call Saul. The HCA gave him the Best Supporting Actor prize for the final season of Saul as well. The previous year he competed against himself for Best Supporting Actor in a Streaming Drama for both The Mandalorian and The Boys. And as he enters his sixties there is no sign of him slowing down. Next week he will take on the title role of Parish a getaway driver in New Orleans while this month he is taking the role of Mr. Johnston in the Netflix series based on Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen.

I could not be more thrilled for Esposito because I have marveled at his work for decades. But because his career has lasted for so long and had so many varied roles that some have forgotten that his first debut as a series regular came more than a decade before he was cast as Gustavo Fring.

When Andre Braugher departed Homicide, it left a huge void. Frank Pembleton had been the center of the show for more than four seasons and it left a gap in it that it would have taken a huge actor to fulfill. Esposito at that point in his career was nearly as talented a performer as Braugher, if not nearly as significant a name. Unfortunately because the seventh season of Homicide was the final one and because it dropped immensely in fans estimation, Esposito’s role has been forgotten. This is understandable if unfair because while there were many flaws in the final season, none of them could be laid at the feet of Esposito or the character he played.

So before we get to see him take the driver’s seat in Parish, let’s talk about Esposito’s work on Homicide, how it was a vastly different role that most of the ones he played on television as well as one of the most human. And to do that we have to begin with his character’s origin.

Back in the 1990s one of the sloppier aspects of network procedurals was to make their token African-American character the lieutenant running the unit. Significant examples were Anita Van Buren on Law & Order and Lieutenant Arthur Fancy (James McDaniel) on NYPD Blue. While on many occasions their characters would be developed over time it was noted, not kindly by critics, that they were essentially the ‘affirmative action character’ there to fill quotas and deal with the white detectives bigotries. Fancy’s sole purpose for much of his tenure on Blue seemed to be to get into clashes with the bigoted Andy Sipowicz.

Al Giardello actually proceeded both characters (Homicide debuted in January of 1993; months before either character made their original appearances) but even from the start it was clear Giardello was not going to fit in any mold. This was actually clear when we first met him. Tim Bayliss is looking for Lieutenant Giardello walks over to two men in suits and talks to the white one. It is the African-American who tells Bayliss gently: “I’m Al Giardello.”

Giardello was as much an iconic character of Homicide as Frank Pembleton or John Munch, the show’s greatest legacies were. Played memorably by the great character actor Yaphet Kotto (in what would end up being the last major role he ever played before retiring) Al was not like any police boss we’d seen before – and in a way, very few have been like him since. Kotto was tall and imposing – one man he interviewed said benignly: “You know you’re very frightening.” And he could be. We got the sense of it in the second episode. Tim Bayliss is investigating his first case as a primary. That case is the murder of eleven year old Adena Watson and will be the foundation of both Bayliss’ character arc and the Rosetta Stone of Homicide.

Giardello spends much of the episode gently guided the overwhelmed Bayliss from scene to scene. He defends him to his fellow detectives – most notably Pembleton – and to the bosses in private who doubt a case of such importance should be assigned to a rookie. “That rookie’s going to surprise us all,” he tells them. However he has little patience for some of the problems. When Bayliss who is drowning from the pressure practically shouts: “I’m trying to solve a murder and I don’t even have a desk!” Giardello looks at him. He silently walks to a nearby desk and in swift motion knocks all of the bric-a-brac off it. “There’s your desk,” he says simply.

Al Giardello was the radiation shield between his detectives and the bosses. He would always stand up for them and he would always do anything for them. But despite his great presence and the clear layers he had Kotto would complain that his character had never been fully explored the same way the other characters had been. Perhaps that the reason that when Giancarlo Esposito was cast, the writers chose the role they did.

We knew that Al Giardello had been married but his wife had died years ago. We knew that he had three children who he loved very much but that the job had come first. His favorite child was his daughter Charisse and by the end of Season 6 she was the only family member we had met. In that episode, however, there was clearly awkwardness between them and it did not change when Charisse told him that she was getting married to a man he’d never met and that she was moving to Los Angeles. He was clearly hurt that he was learning about this now and more so when she told him that he had always been distant. In an episode that same season Al was planning to go to his daughter’s wedding in LA but another investigation kept him in the office. At one point he was at a stakeout with Frank, who at the time was waiting for his child to be born and he expressed his own frustration. “Parenting is a pain in the ass. It is a pain in the heart.” He told Frank that even though his entire family would be there, part of him didn’t want to go. Frank persuaded him to leave for the airport to catch the noon flight. Never outwardly demonstrative Al actually hugged Frank before leaving. But once he got to the airport he learned his flight had been delayed due to inclement weather and the episode ended with us uncertain he’d actually gone.

That was the last we heard of Al’s family in any detail until the seventh season premiere La Famiglia. A series of what amount to eviscerations take place in Little Italy and Al knows the first two victims. He goes to visit his cousin Mario, who knew both men and walks into his home to find his cousin dead in a pool of bloody water.

It is the funeral for Mario that Bayliss mentions to Munch that Al had a son named Michael Giardello who he had not talked to in years. Munch looks up and says: “Here comes the son.” That’s our introduction to Esposito’s character.

Mike is an FBI agent who has been stationed in New Mexico for a long time and it’s clear that not only are he and Al estranged but that he was closer to Mario growing up then his own father. The scenes between Kotto and Esposito are emotionally fraught as they will be for pretty much the entire series. You get the feeling that Mike hasn’t even talked to his father for years before this and honestly wants to get home as quickly as possible.

As the investigation unfolds we learn the murders were part of a vendetta by the family of a man all three men knew Carlo Roletta. All of them worked on the waterfront, there was union corruption involves, and eventual all of the men ratted Rolette out. We also learn in the final scenes that Al was the one who persuaded Mario to come forward. Mike is instrumental in helping the Baltimore P.D. catch the victims but because they can only find the blood of two of the victims in their homes Danvers will only try them on two of the three murders. Al and Mike must accept that their cousin’s name will be on the board in red forever.

At the end of the episode Mike decides that he’s not going to go back to Arizona immediately. He has decided to try and heal old wounds between him and his father and applies for a job. He decides to work as FBI agent liaison for the department in Baltimore. The problem is Captain Gaffney (the gadfly of the show) tells Al before Mike can and this leads to a bitter argument. Sadly the tone for their relationship on the job has been set almost from the start.

Homicide had a terrible track record when it came to dealing with cast members who were not assigned to the squad. Megan Russert (Isabella Hoffman) Al’s counterpart as shift lieutenant was never well defined and spent the next two seasons, first being promoted to captain and then double demoted back to homicide. J.H. Brodie (Max Perlich) was a videographer who the squad hires to shoot crime scenes but he never fit in with the squad at all and over two years he always seemed extraneous to the action. And Chief M.E. Juliana Cox (Michelle Forbes) was always showing up at crime scenes and places she shouldn’t be. All of these characters were written out within two seasons.

Mike Giardello was probably the closest they came to the gimmick working, mainly because the other detectives were willing to accommodate him but his immediate superior never was. The fact that the two of them were father and son added a level of tension that had been absent from Homicide in a while. What’s worth noting is that Al fundamentally thought that the idea of having an outsider who was, in his words, serving two masters was going to end up hurting the squad. As was the case so much of the time, Al was proven right.

This came to a head in what ended up being the Law and Order/Homicide crossover ‘Sideshow’. While investigating the murder of Janine McBride, a government employee who had been hiding her sexuality,  ADA Jack McCoy eventually came on the radar of William Dell, the independent council (George Hearn, leaning into Roy Cohn with all his might) McCoy was eventually held in contempt of a grand jury because he refused to give up the name of a witness in the investigation. The police eventually managed to catch the killer of McBride but before they could prosecute her, Dell gave an order of extradition. Reading that order, the prosecutors learned that Dell actually knew everything about the case – because Mike Giardello had informed them.

At the start of the second part Al calls Mike into his office and is infuriated. “You pimped us,” he snarls at his son. Mike had given his information to his superior. Even though he tells his father he had no idea this would happen, Al is infuriated beyond words. A few episodes later he makes it very clear he wants Mike out of the unit.

Near the end of the series, Mike is betrayed again by his bosses when in order to learn if Witness Protection has a fugitive living in Baltimore he contacts his superiors. The detectives arrive on scene just moments before the Feds arrive determined to roll their witness up. The suspect confesses to the murder but the Baltimore feds make the decision to sentence him to thirty years, all but three suspended. He will serve at most a year. Mike tries to convince the lawyer not to do so but he is interrupted by his superior. That day, he decides to resign from the FBI before he is shifted to billing.

But there are also moments throughout the final season when Mike makes it clear he wants to help his father. In ‘Self-Defense’, an episode authored by Kotto,  Mike is trying see that his father finally receives his long overdue promotion to captain. When it seems that the promotion is condition on the squad letting the daughter of a councilman walk on what is clearly cold-blooded murder, Al interferes in the investigation. When Mike tries to lay off Al asks why are you hiding something. Mike says simply: “Because you’re my father and I love you.” It’s the first time all season he’s gone that far.

Aside from the interactions with his father, the writers were willing to give Esposito more than his chances the shine. In my opinion the two best moments he had on the show occurred in the second half of the series.

The first came in ‘Shades of Grey’ which is one of the angriest – and after a quarter of a century, most relevant episodes Homicide ever did. In it we witness a fight break out on a Baltimore bus and by the time Homicide is called on the scene, a riot has started. Mike and Stu Gharty (Peter Gerety) far from the most enlightened cop, investigate the murder of Patrick McCusker, a white bus driver who his regular passengers all considered a bully and monster. Most of the passengers are African-American; the driver is white.

Like most times Homicide dealt with race, it flipped the script. Mike Giardello didn’t believe the murder was racially motivated; Gharty was certain it was. The two men bicker throughout the episode and it explodes when Gharty points out some of the riots in Baltimore, including one in April of 1968. Mike says quietly but coldly: “As I recall, that started in a motel room in Memphis.” Gharty snarls that maybe black people are just angrier then others. And then Mike snaps: “What do white people have to be angry about…are the mortgage rates too high?” They nearly come to blows themselves.

As the investigation unfolds, we learn of the subtleties. McCusker had hit a Jamaican immigrant who had been in the country little more than a week and didn’t know she was walking on the wrong side of the road. He had received dozens of complaints over the years from other passengers. And when we learn the cause of the fighting – a Jamaican who played his radio too loud – he tells both men that the riot is his fault. “Over a radio, a man is dead.” When the episode ends both Mike and Gharty admit their mistakes. And Mike acknowledges that this city has become more ‘subtle since I left. Not different, subtle” and that all of this is just waiting below the surface. Not even writer David Simon could have known just how he was presaging 21st century America – or indeed later incident in Baltimore itself.

Esposito’s other great moment comes near the end of the season in ‘Lines of Fire’ (directed by Kathryn Bigelow) Mike and Gharty are called in because of a police shooting, albeit a non-lethal one. The cop who is wounded is joking about the benefits he will get. However the shooter Emmett Carey (a brilliant Ron Eldard) is holding his stepdaughter and son hostage and refusing to come out. He sees Mike on TV and says he will talk to him. QRT (the Baltimore equivalent of SWAT) says to Mike that they have to get him out of his apartment or they will put him down.

The episode is essentially a series of conversations between Mike and Carey. Mike is trying to talk Emmett into letting his children go and is willing to get them breakfast if Emmett will give up his gun. Then Emmett’s wife shows up and begins to scream derivatives at her husband, causing him to retreat.

The detectives try to convince his ex-wife not to make things worse but she remains hostile. She wants her kids back and she doesn’t believe Emmett capable of violence. She breaks past QRT twice to call him names and the second time, to shut her up, Emmett fires wildly – and ends up killing her. (Bayliss and Lewis, who are called in, are astounded he was able to hit him from so far away.)

Even at that point, Emmett Carey’s fate is not yet sealed. Though the negotiation team is pissed at hell at what has happened, Mike still thinks there’s a chance to get the hostages out alive. When he goes back in for the second time, he now has to keep telling Carey that his wife his alive in order to get him out. Emmett knows that things are bad – he’s not educated, but he’s no fool – but he wants to believe Mike. So he agrees to hand over his gun for a pizza. Mike agrees.

Mike comes in with a pizza, a soda and a candy bar. The situation ekes along slowly. Emmett is still resistant. Then he needs a stiff drink. He walks towards Mike, QRT prepares to deliver the kill shot – and Mike gets in their way, handing him a Coke. This may be Mike Giardiello’s defining moment with the squad, and like so many on this series, it doesn’t end well. The two of them manage to keep up their conversation, and Carey agrees to surrender his stepdaughter – whom he has made very clear in the episode isn’t really his child. The second the girl is clear of the gun, Mike turns around, and three shots ring out – two killing the younger boy, one killing Carey. Mike’s immediate reaction is one of sure hatred – “Kill yourself fine, but you don’t kill your kid, you son of a bitch!” and then quiet despair. He knows there was a moment, and the fact that he let it pass will probably haunt him for the rest of his life.

The final episode of the series ‘Forgive Us Our Trespasses’ shows the visit of the second Giardello daughter (Audra McDonald). She is there to see her father receive his promotion to captain which, in an unrealistic manner, Al refuses to accept. The last scene between the two men on the series deals with Mike trying to figure out his next steps. “I’ve spent my entire life not trying to be like you. And here I am. You say that you belong to the streets. So do I. Now I just have to find a way to get back there.” Al says: “Let me know if I can help.”

In February of 2000 Homicide: The Movie debuted on NBC. In it Mike has become a Baltimore police office “bottom of the totem pole’, he tells Russert. While reporting on a murder he learns that his father, while campaigning for Mayor, has been shot.

While the movie is flawed, one of the things it gets absolutely right is Esposito’s performance as Mike. He spends the entire movie waiting for his father to come out of the OR. He drives to the hospital, doesn’t bother to mark and knocks a reporter asking questions ‘ass over teakettle” This footage plays over and over on the news.

He spends the entire episode angry and trying to get answers from the doctor about his father’s surgery. In the midst of the operation someone comes into the OR and fires shots at the doctor operating on him. QRT has to clear the hospital and while they are doing so Mike berates everybody – including Colonel Barnfather for even suggesting the killer had nothing to do the attempt on his father’s life.

Eventually when the surgery is over, the second doctor gives him a status report. (Though his name is never mentioned, he is Victor Ehrlich, played by Ed Begley Jr on St. Elsewhere, the show written by Tom Fontana before he wrote Homicide).After Ehrlich tells him everything calmly Mike snaps at him and the horrible treatment he has received form this entire hospital.

Ehrlich listens and then coolly gives one of the highpoints of the film. “I’m two under par with a four foot put about to go three under when my beeper goes off. I drop the club; I don’t even take the shot. I get there, the OR’s a war zone, Kosovo on ice. You want us to hold your hand or do you want us to save your father’s life?” He doesn’t even stop to see if Mike apologizes before walking away. Mike is left speechless for the first time all day.

Esposito spends the entire episode in the hospital, trying to deal with everything that has happened. When his father comes out of surgery all right, we really think there might be a happy ending. So in typical fashion in the final act, the writers pull the rug out from under us when Brodie comes to the bar when the entire squad, past and present is celebrating  to tell them that Al has died of an aneurysm. As the squad mourns, Meldrick walks out of the Waterfront and sees Mike standing on the balcony, looking despondent. He gives a signal of respect. Al’s name is the last one to ever go up in black on the board.

Mike is walking through the squad into his father’s old office and stops by the board. Frank walks up to him. In typical fashion the man who solved his father’s murder has had nothing to do with the action in the hospital. Frank introduces himself to Mike, who thanks him for catching the man who killed his father. “I’m good at catching the bad guys,” Frank says. “Caught me a couple tonight.” There is a significance to this (I won’t spoil it) but Mike doesn’t ask. Mike asks Frank, who retired a couple years back, if he misses it. “It’s not like you can avoid it,” Frank says. “Death goes on and on and on.” Mike interrupts: “Because life goes on and on and on.”

Now I must reveal the ending. Mike and Frank walk out of the squad room…and Al walks in. But it’s not the same squad room. There are cops from different eras walking by and as Al walks into the coffee room, an eleven year African-American girl skips past him. Al pauses: “Adena?” he says in surprise. And in the coffee room are Beau Felton (Daniel Baldwin) and Steve Crosetti (Jon Polito), the two men who Frank told Mike were dead – Felton in the line of duty, Crosetti by his own hand.

Crosetti is dealing poker to the three of them but Al notices that there’s a fourth chair empty. “Who’s that for?” he asks. “It’s not carved in stone,” Steve says. Al suddenly says that he’s worried about his son. “You taught him well,” Beau tells him. “The thing about this is, once you’re dead, you’re long time dead,” Crosetti says. “All the old worries don’t matter.” “Rest in peace. Means what it says.” Felton adds. Al is clearly afraid about his son but he knows that he has to let go. The final images are flashes of the squad from previous episodes – including one with Mike and Al together.

Esposito had to do the impossible when he joined the case of Homicide and while he never quite filled Andre Braugher’s shoes (who could?) he gave a demonstration of a great nuanced character. He’s rarely gotten a chance to play that type of character on TV in the past fifteen years – most of his characters are generally evil, though they do have layers. Now, as his face graces the cover of TV Guide this week, he is about to take on the role of someone more heroic than he’s gotten the chance to in nearly a quarter of a century. I look forward to seeing him play it as brilliantly as all the others he has played in his great career.

 

 


Monday, March 25, 2024

Why Are People Always Disappointed By Oscar Night - And Why Do We Think Awards Show Must Meet The Same Standards As All Other Entertainment?

 

In 1979 Johnny Carson hosted the Oscars for the first of five times in six years. In his opening monologue he gave one of the most memorable quotes in the shows history.

“Welcome to the Academy Awards, two hours of sparkling entertainment spread out over a four-hour show.”

It’s worth noting that while today Carson is considered one of the greatest hosts in the history of the Academy Awards, at the time his performance was viewed by critics as disappointing and mediocre. That was hardly strange: from the 1970s until Billy Crystal hosted the Oscars for the first time in 1990, the opinions of critics about the Oscars was so universal you almost wondered if they wrote their reviews before the actual ceremony. Even in the Silver Age of Cinema (the 1970s) the Oscars were viewed as a mediocrity, self-indulgent and overlong.

As someone who has been seriously watching the Academy Awards for nearly thirty years and has been studying their history for nearly as long, I know how many changes that they have made to every aspect of them just in this century. It used to be the last Monday night in March; it’s moved from February to March countless times in the last twenty years and now it’s always on Sundays. Its start time has been moving backward, first to 8:30 P.M., then 8pm and this year to 7 pm. Starting in 2008, it has moved the number of nominees for Best Picture from 5 to 10 and now it fluctuates from eight to ten. It has increased the number of voting members of color and gender in every category. It has spent the last twenty years doing everything in its power to make itself more ‘relevant” hiring comedians such as Jon Stewart and Ellen DeGeneres to host, and on more disastrous occasions, James Franco and Anne Hathaway and (just as horrible) Seth MacFarlane. It’s had no host at all three years in a row. It has increasingly been dropping dead weight over the years. Some of it we can live without – all of the tribute sections to how great movies are; some I have genuinely disliked, the decision to have lifetime achievement awards and honorary awards in different ceremonies, sometimes just having highlights of it and this year not even showing that. Only the ‘In Memoriam’ segment remains.

None of these changes, whether cosmetic or deeper, have ever made anybody happy. The people who complain the loudest are the ‘traditionalists’ who look on any change to the Oscars as some kind of violation the way some people consider desecrating the American flag. Even Roger Ebert was not immune to these decisions: he called the decision to increase the number of nominated movies as destruction of the Academy’s integrity. This is laughable in a way that so much of the jokes on Oscar night never are because even if you set aside the institutional racism, sexism and all the other isms that have plagued the Oscars to argue that the Academy Awards is the ultimate authority of great films has always been questionable. This is the same organization that genuinely believed The Greatest Show on Earth and Around the World in 80 Days were films deserving of being called the Best Picture of the Year, decided that Gandhi was deserving of Best Picture but E.T. wasn’t and truly believed Crash was a better film than Munich or Good Night & Good Luck. (I never liked Brokeback Mountain. Let’s keep on point.)

But the one constant in my life for the past twenty years is that none of this has changed the masses opinions of the Academy Awards ceremony itself one iota. I mean, let’s consider this year. The show ran so efficiently that it actually finished early. Has that ever happened in the history of the Oscars? The ceremony had pomp, circumstance and some genuine humor throughout. Ryan Gosling’s performance of ‘I’m Just Ken’ went viral probably while it was going on. The awards show had no dead time; had only one, maybe two political moments. It did everything critics have been asking the Oscars to do for years. And it had the highest ratings of any Oscar show since the pandemic.

And you know the kindest reviews I’ve read for it anywhere basically amount to “It was okay. For the Oscars.”  ( I’ve read nastier reviews for the record, but I’ll get to the specifics later on. )

For twenty years my expectations for the Oscars have never been that high. Perhaps it’s because my focus has been so much more on TV the last twenty years that I don’t take it as personally as I do say the Emmys or the Golden Globes. But now that I’m established as a critic I think its time we ask a question that as far as I know has never truly been asked: why do the Oscars, as entertainment, have such a terrible reputation no matter what they do?

It's actually a question I think we as critics need to ask about awards shows as entertainment overall. What standard are critics using to measure whether an awards show is ‘good’?’ It sure as hell has nothing to do with the awards that are given or even most of the nominated films or shows. Critics have spent their entire lives always arguing that the awards shows have been nominated the wrong things for decades; if anything, they spend more time and energy arguing about the people who aren’t nominated then the ones that are. Monday morning quarterbacking for any awards show begins the hour after the nominees are announced and, particularly when it comes to the Oscars, will go on years, even decades after the awards are given.

This isn’t really a shock because we all have opinions about what we like and what we don’t. As someone who is as much a fan of television as he is a critic, I take it very personally when the Emmys don’t nominate series or actors that I think are deserving and choose shows and performers I dislike. Anyone who reads my blog knows that I have held grudges for years about Game of Thrones and at a certain point turned against favorites like Veep in its later years. But that never stopped me from watching the Emmys even if none of my favorites were contending or trying to enjoy the awards for what they were.

Maybe that’s why I view awards show through a different lens then so many of my fellow critics. Part of me genuinely feels that the awards show should be about the awards and the winners. I acknowledge the general meaningless of the event but maybe its because I know at the end of the day have more importance to the nominees and winners than the average viewer.  Perhaps that’s why I don’t mind if it takes more than thirty seconds for a winner to give their speech; they’ve earned their moment in the spotlight, they shouldn’t have to care so much about whether the show runs long.

But the rest of the world doesn’t see it that way. And it actually brings up a different question for me. What does the average viewer tune into the Academy Awards for? It can’t be because they care about the films or actors nominated. It’s been one of the great problems the Oscars has always had that they will always nominate the kind of movie that few people end up seeing – or in some cases, can easily see. The fact that the ratings for the Oscars were so high was no doubt because of the Barbenheimer phenomena. Historically ratings for the Oscars are generally higher when a box office hit is among the major Best Picture contenders: the highest rated Academy Awards was in 1998 when Titanic was the big winner. But that was an aberration and even the average critic knows it.

Is it to see the movie stars? A nice idea but not one that really holds up that well. Most of the awards that the Oscars give are technical awards and I find it hard to believe that average viewer would tune in because they wanted to see Ahnold and Danny DeVito give the editing awards. Hell, most time the presenters are kept under wraps until the night of the ceremony.

Perhaps some of it is the passion of watching a live ceremony which does still hold some power in an era where everything is streaming or taped. But even that seems to be mired in the idea of some kind of schadenfreude that we will either see something disgraceful or horrible, such as the case of Will Smith slapping Chris Rock.

This actually brings me to an article I read a week ago from the Marxist publication Jacobin. The ‘film critic’ chose to shit on the entire Oscars for being conventional, humdrum, and of course, a celebration of capitalism. The writer was also pissed that in the midst of this live show, no one bothered to make a controversial political statement about world affairs. This critic chose to say the best Oscar moment came when Vanessa Redgrave, upon winning Best Supporting Actress for Julia, chose to make her entire speech about Israel and Palestine – and was nearly booed off the stage.

If the only reason anything exists for you is the idea of a public spectacle that fits your political leanings I guess the Oscars is the place to find it. That this critic had to go back more than forty-five years is telling; that she chose to make this one rather than highlight Sacheen Littlefeather in 1973 when Marlon Brando declined the Oscar is telling. Redgrave’s remarks were considered virulently anti-Semitic at the time and she hasn’t attended a major awards show since despite nominations for Oscars and Emmys over the last forty years but you know, at least she used her platform to preach a cause this particular critic believed it and we all know that’s what matters.

Anyway those moments have been scarce for decades and they’re not likely to come back soon and honestly, if your watching a ceremony that supposed to be about escapism I don’t think it helps if the bubble is punctured.

So are critics watching Oscars to see ridiculous, humiliating spectacles? Do they want to see Snow White dance with Rob Lowe, ridiculous musical numbers by Debbie Allen, dehumanizing songs by Seth McFarlane – and if they ‘only’ get an awards show they’re disappointed? They loathed all of those aspects of the awards show over the years but they’re often just as hostile when they don’t happen. They always complain the Oscars are too long and bloated, but they knew that going in and its not as if they care even when they finish relatively early or even on time. And they all criticize the speeches as being self-serving and self-indulgent as if the idea of Oscars is based in some kind of altruistic charity rather than involves giving out a gold-plated statue.

Is because of the nitpicking nature that seems to fill the hearts of far too many of my fellow critics? Are they genuinely the kind of people who think that unless every single award is given to who they consider the right person is that they hold grudges? I could see film critics holding this position – they give their own awards, after all – but the average TV critic can’t honestly care if Zone of Interest won Best Sound over Oppenheimer.

And if the average critic doesn’t care, why should anyone watch the Oscars at all? Most people aren’t students of film and certainly not the technical aspects. They couldn’t care less about cinematography or sound editing, much less name one. (To be fair, I couldn’t do much better.) Over the years shows like the Emmys and the Tonys have increasingly given their technical awards in other ceremonies that air on different nights from the main event. The Oscars are basically the last awards show that does this – and they’ve been under pressure to remove them to streamline the show based on the idea that no one wants to hear the speeches of the winner for Best Visual Effects. They got into a major fight with the Guilds on this and they lost, but they’re not entirely wrong about their perception of what they think viewers care about.

Which brings us to the original question: if you don’t care about the films, the nominated actors, most of the winners or the speeches, why are you watching the show? And if you are watching the show as a critic, why are you holding it to the same metric that you would any other TV show? I realize most of my fellow critics genuinely believe that all art that is created only matters if they alone can appreciate it. This is an act of pure ego of course but I’m willing to let that slide. What I find unfair and unreasonable is how many critics can take a night that has nothing to do with art and everything to do with the people that make it – and then constantly find it lacking on artistic standards.

And that’s so ridiculous I don’t get why no one has ever called them on it. Of course the Academy Awards isn’t as entertaining or as powerful as the movies its nominating or giving awards too. It’s not a movie. It is a group of professionals taking three to four hours out of their nights to give themselves shiny statues, give speeches thanking each other and most of them going home empty handed. By definition it involves self-indulgence and self-promotion – the whole event was created to promote Hollywood. Do you really expect it to be as much fun  as Taylor Swift concert or Game 7 of the World Series or, hell, Poor Things?

Like every single aspect of the films they honor, the Oscar ceremony has always been viewed through the same impossible lens that so many critics have. They don’t know what the perfect one is, they just know they whatever they see isn’t it. If we have learned anything from the last twenty years we know that the awards themselves will never make everyone – or really anyone – happy. The same is true of the ceremony.

Maybe the only answer is to stop reviewing them altogether. The Oscars can keep doing everything it can to make an entertaining show but maybe the critics should concentrate on the awards and the speeches, not whether they enjoyed the actual ceremony. There’s a certain logic to it – this night is supposed to be about the people who win the awards. We might as well be willing to report that, considering that we’ll spend eternity arguing that they didn’t deserve in the first place.

Sunday, March 24, 2024

Election 2024: 'Landslide' Edition

 

 

One of the things that you’ve heard so many political commentators and historians say about our polarized and fractured society is that the only thing that might be the solution is for one party to lose in a humiliating landslide that forces them to reevaluate how they conduct business. They say that since we haven’t had a landslide since Reagan carried 49 of 50 states back in 1984 our political system has become irrevocably fractured on party lines. (They’re not historically accurate on their dates, but I’ll get to that below.)

As a student of American history, I can understand why they might think that way. Up until the 21st century, the overwhelming electoral victory was the norm in the American democracy rather than the exception. During the 20th century, after we solidified the number of electoral votes at first 531, then 538, there were fourteen presidential elections since 1912 where the winner received at least 400 hundred electoral votes. In six of these elections the winning candidate received somewhere in the margin of 60 percent of the popular vote. In three of these elections, the winning candidate received more than 520 electoral votes. In the 21st century, the highwater mark for any Presidential candidate was Barack Obama received 365 electoral votes to John McCain’s 172 and won by a margin of ten million votes.

However looking back I have come to believe that both historians and commentators alike have far too often been mistaking the term ‘landslide’ for ‘mandate’. The two are similar but not the same. A mandate has always struck me as more significant than a landslide because it is an argument for a specific political agenda rather than simply change. And looking back over our electoral history in the 20th century, there’s a huge argument that we’ve had far fewer mandates in our history than landslide victories.

How do I define a mandate as opposed to a landslide? Coattails. A huge electoral win is significant for a President but it is meaningless unless he receives a similar backing from the voters for a Congress of his party. That doesn’t just mean a shift in control of Congress but rather a wave. And there have been far fewer of those in our electoral history then you’d think.

So in this article I’m going to take a look at some of the more historic Presidential elections in our history, how both parties have far too frequently mistaken landslides for mandates, and most of all how both sides frequently took the wrong lessons. I’m going to be using some maps for guidance going forward.

Let’s start at the beginning with the 1912 election. I’ve written that because of the split in the Republican Party between Taft and T.R., Woodrow Wilson won the election. His win was a huge electoral victory: he took forty states and 435 electoral votes to T.R.’s 88 and Taft’s 8. But it was only because of the split in the Republican Party that Wilson won; Taft and T.R. combined won more than seven million votes to Wilson’s six million.

Still, it’s hard to argue this wasn’t a mandate for the Progressive Agenda. The voters endorsed the progressive cause, considering more people voted for Wilson and T.R.’s Bull Moose Party then the kind of conservatism Taft endorsed.  The Democrats gained 61 seats in the House and the Progressives gained 10 seats. (The Senate is harder to measure because direct election in most states was not allowed yet.)

By 1920 with the end of World War I and fatigue with Wilson, America had its first real electoral landslide from the most unlikely candidate. Warren G. Harding, the dark horse Republican, swept James Cox the Democrat in what was the biggest electoral win of any Republican to date:



What the electoral map doesn’t show is how much worse this was for the Democrats. Harding had received 60 percent of the popular vote to Cox’s 34 percent. Eugene Debs, the Socialist candidate received six percent of the vote. In all the years since 1920, no losing candidate for either party has ever finished with this small a percentage of the popular vote since. It was reflected in the Congressional races as well; the Republicans gained 63 seats in the House and ten in the Senate. They would hold these healthy majorities in both houses until the end of the decade.

The 1928 election for President was actually more significant. I’ll be dealing with that in a later article, so for now I’ll just stick to the basics. The election involved Herbert Hoover against Al Smith, the Democratic governor of New York. The Republicans still had a healthy margin during Coolidge’s time in office but the GOP had been in power for eight years. However because of the general prosperity (as well as other factors), the election was a landslide for Hoover:




Hoover had won with nearly 59 percent of the vote and a margin of eleven million votes over Smith. He had also become the first Republican since Reconstruction had ended to carry the state of Texas, a Democratic stronghold. The Republicans gained 32 seats in the House and another seven to widen their lead in the Senate to 56 seats to the Democrats 39.

I’m going to skip over FDR’s landslides save for one critical detail. After 1936 when FDR won 46 of 48 states and more than 60 percent of the popular vote, the Democrats had majorities in both houses of Congress that were so huge that for the next sixty years, the GOP would control both houses of Congress only twice.

In 1952 the Republicans had chosen Dwight Eisenhower as their standard-bearer. After twenty years of Democratic rule many issues including the stalemate in Korea, the rise of Communism domestically and abroad as well Democratic corruption had led many Americans to argue for a change. Eisenhower carried the Republicans to victory in 1952 with 442 electoral votes to Adlai Stevenson’s 89. He had carried 39 states to Stevenson’s 9. But despite having the electoral margins of an FDR win, there had not been the same kind of coattails FDR had. Indeed in the Congressional races, the two parties basically split fifty-fifty with the GOP only gaining a majority by eight seats in the House and 2 in the Senate. The Democrats regained the majority in both Houses two years later.

Now let me show you Eisenhower’s reelection map:



 


 

It was the biggest win in electoral history for a Republican to that point with Eisenhower carrying over 57 percent of the popular vote to Stevenson’s 42. He had made the most significant inroads into the South for any Republican in a century, carrying seven Southern states and more than 35 percent of the African-American vote.

But the Republican Party lost seats in the House and made no gains in the Senate. For all Eisenhower’s great electoral popularity, it had made no inroads into the Democratic Congressional majority.

The next major landslide came in 1964 when LBJ swamped Goldwater. While much of it had to do not only with the aftermath of Kennedy’s assassination and while the Republicans did make gains in the South, the Democrats still added 37 seats to their House Majority, giving them a two-thirds majority in the House and a grand total of 68 seats in the Senate, the most since FDR. Johnson also won the election with over 61 percent of the popular vote, which broke all the records at the time. Four years later after the Vietnam War had destroyed Johnson’s administration, Hubert Humphrey could only carry 42.5 percent of the popular vote. Nixon and Wallace’s combined total showed one of the most drastic reversals of LBJ’s mandate even though the Democrats still controlled Congress. Indeed, the Democratic Party ran ahead of the Republicans in both Congressional and Senatorial Races.

In 1972, of course, Nixon won the biggest electoral landslide to date in history, carrying 49 of 50 states, 520 electoral votes and more than 60 percent of the popular vote over George McGovern. But as was a major complaint of both House Republicans and the RNC, Nixon was not interested in campaigning for his fellow Republicans. The Republicans gained twelve seats in the House but ran four million votes behind the Democrats nationwide and the Democrats gained 2 seats in the Senate. Nixon might have been the one in 1972 but not his fellow Republicans.

This brings us to Ronald Reagan and the biggest lie that Republicans have been telling themselves for more than forty years. Despite the fact that Reagan managed to landslide his two Democratic opponents in the electoral college a combined total of 1018 to 62, despite the fact he carried 49 of 50 states in 1984 and won more electoral votes than any candidate in history, that popularity never translated to sweeping huge numbers of Republicans into office. Indeed, despite their gaining 35 seats in the House, the Republicans ran three points behind the Democrats in the 1980 election and didn’t come close to taking a majority. There is a chance they only gained the Senate because of Carter’s early concession. The same was true in 1984, only more so: the Republicans ran five points behind the Democrats in Congress and the Democrats gained two seats in the Senate. There were Democrats who voted for Reagan, but only for Reagan.

And by the way that wasn’t the last electoral landslide. Let me remind everyone what happened four years later:



 

George H.W. Bush won 40 of 50 states. Like Reagan, he also had no coattails: Senate Democrats ran six points ahead of Republicans in the Senate and eight points ahead in the House. Indeed Bush bore the dubious distinction of becoming the first President since JFK to have his party lose seats in the House. So I guess in a sense he was closer to Jack Kennedy then he thought.

 

Looking at the history of comparing mandates with landslides, I’ve taken away a few lessons – lessons I think both my Republican and Democrat friends have failed to comprehend. I’ll deal with Republicans first, as I’ve been accused of going too easy on them in the past:

1.   The Republican Party hasn’t been able to win on its message for a very long time. I actually knew this going in. After FDR won a massive landslide in 1932, the Republicans spent much of the next thirty years arguing what was called ‘Me Too’ in regard to the New Deal. Much as they hated it, it was too popular to ignore so they argued they’d just run it better than the Democrats would. It basically didn’t work for twenty years, except for Eisenhower. Goldwater chose to run against everything Republicans had stood for thirty years and when he got landslide, the Republicans took a different tact for sixteen years until Reagan came along. They did well in Presidential elections in the second half of the 20th century, but that never translated to margins in Congress. That brings me the next point:

2.   The GOP has always believed more in personality than issues. The argument I’ve heard over and over from Democrats in the last decade is that ever since the rise of Trump the Republicans have become a cult of personality. The truth is, they’ve always preferred personality more than principles. Why shouldn’t they? It’s the only thing that gets them the Presidency and those huge electoral landslides you historians love to talk about. But none of the personalities – Eisenhower’s amicability, Nixon’s geo-political visions, Reagan’s charm – ever did anything to help them down-ballot. This might explain why Republicans are willing to follow Trump even though they have never been able to win a Congressional election since then. For seventy years they’ve believed in the idea of the man on the horse who will lead to them to the Congressional promised land and time and again it never happens. We might accuse them of abandoning the principles but they must know – deep in their psyche – that most Americans do not agree with them so they keep hoping the personality will do the job. This brings me to a related point.

3.   Republicans can only gain control of Congress when they are on the outside. For the last twenty years pundits have mourned the case of perpetual attack that have made up Congressional warfare so that we are always campaigning. I think this is a lesson the Republicans have learned. The only times they have ever been able to make gains is when they are on the outside and attack the insiders. The only times the GOP was ever able to win majorities in the house came in 1946 when they campaigned on the slogan: “Had Enough?” It’s been true of both their major Congressional victories since then: the 1994 Republican Revolution and the 2010 Tea Party sweep. I think Gingrich realized this early and knew it was the only chance the GOP ever had to exist outside of being a permanent minority party – which was what they had been pretty much since 1930. As a tactic for civility in politics, it was eternally damaging. As a tactic for electoral victory, you can’t pretend it hasn’t been a winning concept for Republicans ever since.

 

But it’s worth noting Democrats have also taken the wrong lessons from so many of the landslides in the last quarter of the 20th century.

1.   The Democrats chose to see their loss of the Presidency in 1968 as a rejection of the Democratic order. This was an understandable takeaway in the aftermath of Nixon’s winning but it left out the fact that had it not been for their own infighting and their paralysis of how to deal with the Vietnam War they still very well could have held the White House. The Democrats spent the next thirty years deciding that their candidates had to be outsiders and campaign towards the conservative ideals of the new GOP. They ignored the fact that while they didn’t control the Presidency they still held both houses of Congress.

2.   The Democrats spent the next twenty years increasingly looking for their own man on a horseback rather than sticking to their core. I have made it clear over and over that the idea of the Kennedy legacy has been the biggest obstacle to the Democratic Party ever since JFK’s assassination. They increasingly chose to mistake his rhetoric as his accomplishments and as a result spent much of the next twenty years chasing his brothers. As a result it led to intense internecine warfare in the party and caused gaps for the Republicans to win on. The Democrats spent the next twenty years looking McGovern, Carter and Mondale’s landslide defeats as signs that America had irrevocably turned toward conservatism rather than see it as a triumph of personality (and in some cases their candidate’s ineptitude) which it clearly was. Democrats were voting for Nixon and Reagan in large numbers, but they were voting for Democrats everywhere else on the ballot.

3.   The Democrats have chosen to see their electoral defeats as a sign they must embrace the Republican approach. In this case it means that they find themselves increasingly looking at the extremes of their own parties, first the far right when it still had one, then the far left even though it has been as unaccommodating to compromise as the GOP’s right branch. The fact that Democrats have been able to win elections when they cast their tent the biggest and that their landslides have involved great concepts rather than personality – the New Deal, the Great Society -  should have been a sign that they can win when they try to win over the masses rather than cater to their fringes. If we’ve learned one lesson the hard way the last decade, it’s that the extremists will never be happy.

 

As for how we can resolve the conflicts that now seem deeply woven into our electoral society, I have no easy answers. But I don’t believe a landslide is that because they can be as fragmental as anything else. Four years after Johnson’s victory, he had decided he could not seek reelection. Less than two years after Nixon’s he had to resign. Giant wins have been as ephemeral as the small ones.

The only hope we have going forward is that both sides try to learn that an electoral win is not going to solve the long term problems with our society and that any electoral defeat will not destroy their hopes forever. And we must also realize certain lessons that neither party has learned over the past century when it comes to our politics: it is the policy of the candidate that is more important to the message then the candidate who tries to sell it.

Friday, March 22, 2024

Lost Rewatch On VHS: Whatever Happened, Happened

 

1.     Whatever Happened, Happened

VHS NOTES: We see trailers for Fast & Furious, the fourth movie in that franchise that only now seems to be coming to an end. We also see a trailer for the DVD release of Slumdog Millionaire which just a few weeks earlier took eight Oscars including Best Picture. We’re also told of the series finale of Life on Mars and an ad for the failed Bob Saget vehicle Surviving Suburbia.

 

This is a good time to discuss Kate, not just because this episode centers on her but because from this point on the chatter about Kate on the show, never heavily in her favor, began to tilt decidedly against her.

I feel much of this is due to the often toxic masculinity that fuels so much of the discussion of the great shows on Peak TV. By this point both Mad Men and Breaking Bad were in their second seasons and already both Betty Draper and Skyler White were becoming the focus of the loathing that so often comes of the wives of antiheroes on Peak TV even though in many cases their only crimes are not being supportive of the monstrous behavior of their husbands. We will learn in this episode that Kate’s reasons for the island were by far the most unselfish of those who came back and much of her behavior once she returns to the island this season is that of the moral high ground to the horrible activities her friends are doing. Yet to this day the perception remains that Kate is the monster. I once took this very argument on a Lost message board last year and was met with the line: “Nah. I still hate her.”

Perhaps the reason that this is the case is because of the underlying love triangles Kate has been involved in since the Pilot. Her relationship with Jack and Sawyer was defined in both treks that happened; in the first Kate followed Jack, in the other Sawyer followed Kate. The two men represent the duality of Kate’s own nature: Jack is the ‘good person’ she thinks she doesn’t deserve and Sawyer the outlaw she is closer to in nature. In the first season Kate would always trail after Jack and he would frequently treat her with contempt, while Sawyer chose to pursue her. When Sawyer left on the raft Jack and Kate got along better than before – until Eko showed up with Sawyer draped over his shoulders and we realized why.

The triangle was basically set aside during much of Season 2 as the hatch took priority but it was pushed to the center after the Others took the three of them at the end of the season. Jack was the only one they needed but Ben knew that he had to be able to manipulate him, so he took Kate to keep Jack in line and he took Sawyer so he could keep Kate in a line. When Kate and Sawyer hooked up at a moment of desperation in I Do, it broke Jack’s heart and he told Kate and Sawyer to leave him and never come back. Kate refused to accept this as reality and immediately took a trek across the island to save Jack – only to learn Jack didn’t need saving and that by doing so she’d destroyed any hope of rescue.

By this point Jack had met Juliet and despite himself was clearly attached to her. By the second half of the season he had been willing to trust Juliet enough to bring her back to camp with him even though everyone told him they could not trust her – and it turned out they were right. Kate was now on the outside of a love triangle and she chose to focus her anxiety on Sawyer – who didn’t object that hard.

In Season 4 when the freighter came the triangle came into focus. Jack sent Kate with Sayid to Locke’s camp because he thought Sawyer’s affection for her would stop him from hurting anyone. He was shocked when Kate decided to stay and played house with Sawyer. Kate chose to reject Sawyer’s advances and this time he did take it personally. By this time Jack and Juliet were getting cozy but Juliet knew Jack was in love with Kate. When the time came to get on the helicopter, Sawyer sacrificed his chance as rescue to save Kate – and she never forgot it.

In civilization Kate became Aaron’s surrogate mother,  something she got more happiness from than either Jack or Kate. Eventually Jack and Kate ended up raising Aaron together and Jack asked Kate to marry him. But eventually Jack’s guilt and drinking got in the way and the relationship ended disastrously. Meanwhile on the island, Juliet and Sawyer spent the next three years in Dharma fell in love and seemed to be happy – and now the Oceanic 5 have exploded that. Furthermore any chance that ‘Lafleur’ might be able to contain the situation they’re in having got shot to sunrise when thirteen year old Ben was shot by Sayid.

Much of the comedy in this episode comes from Hurley’s terror of what will happen if Young Ben dies and Miles’ stubbornness that it’ll work out. But let’s look at it from a different perspective and see why each of the four members of the two triangles reacts differently to Ben’s shooting and how they chose to handle it.

Jack’s decision to do nothing is seen as a sign that he has decided to just destiny takes his course and has come around to Locke’s way of thinking. That’s partially accurate but there’s a different context beyond what he tells Kate. (For the record I thought that was a good enough reason in 2009.) Jack met ‘Benry’ the same time Locke and Sayid did and while he never trusted him, his contempt for Locke stopped them from working together to figure it out. He was abducted and held prisoner by Ben and made a deal with the devil himself to get off the island – and had it literally blow up in his face. The next time they met at the end of Season 3 Ben told him that the people who were coming to save the castaways were actually evil and Jack reacted by beating Ben to a pulp. It turns out Ben was right but rather than acknowledge that possibility (or Locke’s agreement) he took his people to be saved, primarily to get away from Ben.

After everything went to hell over the last three years Ben came to Jack at his lowest point and once again he made another deal with the devil, this time to go back to the island – with a promise of no return. He learned just how capable Ben was of manipulating his friends to get what he wanted but he still followed Ben and got on Ajira 316. Jack tells Juliet near the end of the episode why he came back to the island but he admits he doesn’t know why. But for him to have traveled all this way through time and space just to end up back exactly where he started must feel like a cosmic joke.

It's worth noting the one point in this episode where I can have sympathy with those who hate Kate comes when she tells him that she liked the ‘old Jack’, he reminds her, with pinpoint accuracy, that she didn’t like the old him. And he’s dead on. Their entire experience on the island was Kate challenging Jack on every decision he made, whether it involved following him into the jungle after he told her not to, deciding not to listen to advice about not coming back to find him (the right call) or whether to do anything. And it’s worth noting that even though Kate is doing the right thing, it’s still not what Jack is doing.

Sawyer didn’t meet Ben until he was abducted and their first real interaction was when Ben beat him up and tried to con him about a fake pacemaker in his chest that would explode. The con left an impression and it said a lot about how much Sawyer wanted to survive that he chose to go with Locke even though Ben was with him. He spent much of Season 4 either beating him to a pulp, threatening him with violence and when Keamy’s men attacked the barracks intended to throw Ben to the wolves. (The fact that Ben would have left him to die no doubt didn’t help things.) We don’t blame him when he asks Juliet why she wants so badly to save Young Ben, and its clear that the only reason he’s doing this is because she asked him, not Kate. It’s worth noting that since ‘Lafleur’ has lived in the Barracks for three years he knows everything that’s going on between Roger and his son. Given what we know about James and his own parents, you’d think he’d be more helpful towards Young Ben and its speaks volumes that he’s done nothing – and that he has so little sympathy for it when Kate tells him says a lot too.

Juliet’s reaction is by far the hardest to parse because she knows better than any of them what a monster Ben will grow up to be. She’s only on the island because of him and she spent the first three years of that period being emotionally blackmailed by the adult Ben. Indeed, the last time Ben was on a surgical table Jack reminded us that Juliet had said she had offered to help him kill the adult Ben. She later denied it but we never doubted for a moment she meant it. Even when she went on her mission for him at the Tempest she was still in a case of terror because she knew how monstrous Ben was and told Jack that he was better off not being close to her.

Now she is working the hardest of anyone to save his life. Sawyer has just told Miles to lock Jack up to keep them from being asked too many questions. Less than a minute later Juliet tells James that they need a surgeon and Sawyer goes to Jack, even though this will lead to those questions being asked. Then despite whatever Miles and Hurley have been discussing she tells Kate that Ben is going to die unless they receive intervention from the Others. She helps Kate put him in the van and then sends James after her to help. Juliet is clearly taking the Hippocratic Oath very seriously in this episode, even though she knows what will happen to Ben.

Of the four major figures Kate had by far the least interaction with Ben on the island: Ben gave her a dress and had tea with her at the start of their experience and then basically ignored her for the rest of their time on Hydra Island. They barely talked in the two seasons between then. The first time Kate even saw Ben was when she realized very clearly who was responsible for the machinations to have Aaron taken from her. She walked away and clearly had no intentions of talking to Jack or ever getting on the plane.

The flashbacks tell the story of why Kate came back. They start by following two major storylines: Kate’s friendship with Cassidy in Left Behind and Sawyer having father a child with her in the one in Every Man for Himself. Kate goes to see Cassidy with Aaron at one point and its clear that the bond they formed briefly has lasted three years.

Kate is apparently the only member of the Oceanics who never committed to the lie the same way. It’s clear in the second part of the flashback that she’s told every part of what happened to them on the island and why they’re lying about it. Cassidy is not sympathetic to Sawyer; she claims that the sacrifice he made was not done out of some nobility for his friends but because he was afraid to return to civilization and face his responsibilities. Sawyer seems to assent to that when Kate brings it up but considering that Sawyer has always been good at lying to himself it’s impossible to read him.

Regardless of all of the nitpicks as to why it would make no sense in the context of the larger narrative why Kate went to seek Cassidy out; it makes a larger sense: Kate has had her heartbroken by Sawyer and she needs someone to commiserate with. That may be the real reason she lies to Jack about going to see Cassidy in Something Nice Back Home; as much as the two of them are bonding about Sawyer, I don’t think Cassidy would think very kindly of Jack. And when you consider that Kate has spilled her guts about everything that happened on the island, Jack actually had a reason to be angry as to why she was seeing him. He’s dealing with the ghost of his dead father because of the burden of the lie, and Kate’s having playdates with the person who knows every dirty detail. (Considering her reaction when she hears about Jack’s decision to go back to the island, she probably doesn’t think much of him either.) Like most of the survivors Kate has almost no real friends in her life and we all know how messy her situation with her parents are. Everybody has been dealing with the burden of the lie in their own way; this is the way Kate has.

Kate has been trying to convince herself for the last three years that motherhood is the role she is suited for. When Ben tells her that Aaron isn’t really her son, it triggers her to run from the marina and the madness. Then she goes to the supermarket and Aaron runs away from her. Like all real moms she panics – and we’re all thinking this is the maneuver Ben will use: unless you get on the plane, we’ll hurt Aaron. She’s clearly thinking that until she finds her son – and he’s been following a woman who looks so much like Claire it’s frightening.

The scenes that follow are some of the best work Evangeline Lilly does all season, really in the whole series. She visits Cassidy again and she tells her what she’s known almost since this began: that’s she been waiting for something like this happen ever since they came back. In Finding Lost, Nikki Stafford says shouldn’t the real reason Kate lied was because she thought Claire’s mother was dead. That doesn’t hold water because Kate’s known that Carole Littleton was alive since Christian’s memorial and she made no effort to make contact with her.

No Kate did need Aaron. That’s the lie she’s been holding on to even more than the one the Oceanics have been telling, one she stood firm to past the trial, past months in lockup, prioritizing it even over her relationship with Jack. She needed to be Aaron’s mother and she needed Aaron to believe it. But somewhere in his brain he knows who his real mother is. So Kate decides to do something noble and pure. She decides to leave behind the one thing she truly loves so she can reunite him with his mother. The final scene is absolutely heartbreaking because we know that Kate is preparing for the possibility that she may never come back but she needs to risk – maybe sacrifice her own life- to reunite Aaron with his real mother.

And now she’s in the Dharma Initiative with no direction forward. I don’t know if she came here looking to patch things up with Sawyer, but no matter what anyone says in the guide it’s clear from this episode and all the rest that he has committed to Juliet.

So why does Kate focus so heavily on saving the life of the young Ben Linus? I think part of it is because she doesn’t know him as well as the rest of them – and because she meets his father. Jon Gries gives a layer to Roger we haven’t seen in either of his episodes before. In his scenes with Kate at the start, there’s a kind of camaraderie with her that we didn’t think he was capable of. Then he sees his son has been shot and his reaction is pure grief. Throughout the episode Roger looks scattered and broken in a way that we don’t associate with the drunken bully we’ve seen before.

I agree that Roger is not a saint but in a season which is looking at the perspectives of how so many of the children have been changing over the years, we get a different version. Roger shows a self-awareness in grief that we didn’t think he was capable of, realizing that he has failed as a parent in a way he never dreamed. He’s a horrible father, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t love his son. For Kate the wound of losing Aaron is days old. With no clear path forward to finding Claire, she decides that Roger shouldn’t have to lose his son. (Apparently she doesn’t know that Ben will never return the favor.)

So she and Sawyer bring Young Ben to Richard Alpert who we haven’t seen in a while. It’s not clear why Richard has decided to help the young Ben Linus but it’s clear he has the authority to do it. So we follow him go to the Temple we have seen before and walk into it…

…and then we cut to the present. Is Ben in the present having dreams about his past? Dreams about Dharma and his childhood? Or is he sleeping the sleep of the just, thinking that all his sacrifices have been worth it? What is clear is that when he wakes up and sees Locke sitting by his bed, telling him: “Welcome back to the land of the living”, there’s a look of both surprise and terror on his face that seems genuine. Whatever he thought was coming when he returned to the island, it sure as hell wasn’t this. Which makes us wonder: what does Ben really know?