The Couple Next Door Should Be Pornography - But It Isn't (Quite)

 

I have to hand it to the Brits. The basic setup of The Couple Next Door, currently airing on Starz, is pretty much the setup of show much of the soft core kind of programming one got from Showtime and Cinemax from the 1990s until roughly 2010. It tells the story of a long time married couple, moving into a suburban community in England, being welcomed the most warmly by another long-time married couple and within the first half-hour we know one of the couples are in an open marriage (they use the more refined term ‘non-monogamous relationship, of course, but the wife is in lingerie in the opening episode welcoming another couple in). Eventually as the two couples bond, the new one learns about the old ones relationship and eventually they become inviting into it. This is a scenario that never ends well in most films or shows about the subject (even the openly erotic ones) and indeed in the teaser to the series we hear a gunshot with both couples running from a cabin so we know this will end badly. I’ve seen my share of stories like this, most of them in direct-to-video movies and I have a feeling with the best actors from American television this story would just be trash.

But that’s the thing about the British. They have this ability which can’t truly be explained to elevate with their writing, acting and – let’s not kid ourselves – those accents to often make the most lowbrow material more than it should be. I do get this very clear impression from the first two episodes of The Couple Next Door. No one’s ever going to mistake this for The Crown or Slow Horses but there’s something invariably watchable about it that several times see a series that manages to elevate it slightly about the level of what should be prurient material.

The couple who moves in are Evie (Eleanor Tomlinson) and Pete (Alfred Enoch). At the time of the series premiere Evie is pregnant and there’s clearly some tension there. We will learn the child was the product of IVF and that Pete in particular has had motility issues. Both Pete and Evie are working professionals: Pete is a journalist in a local paper that is on the verge of bankruptcy, Evie a grade-school teacher. Early in the first episode, tragedy unfolds when we learn Evie has miscarried and can’t reach Pete on the job. Evie ends up turning to her neighbors who we met in the first episode: Becka (Jessica De Gouw) and Danny (Sam Heughan) for comfort.

An interim goes by when both are understandably emotionally wrecked. During this same period Evie goes to meet her very religious family, led by a patriarch who is a perfect bastard. He’s made it clear he thought that the IVF was an offense to natural order and there seems to be this understanding that he doesn’t think much of his daughter marrying a black man. He also seems to be the kind of bully who holds everyone under his thumb and Evie’s sister is clearly terrified when Evie rebels at a family function. Pete and Evie have been together since they were in university and each is the only person the other has been with.

Danny is a local motorcycle cop who works primarily doing security at a hospital. He’s clearly dealing with a shortage of money for reasons we’re still not clear on but has something to do with his past. He agrees to moonlight with a colleague ‘doing security’ above something that is clearly involving something criminal and may very well be connected with the kind of illegal activity that Pete is investigating for his paper. In the second episode we see just how dangerous this gets as gunfire explodes and the truck is robbed.

Becka is a yoga instructor and has a very popular women’s group. In the opening it has one male member – Alan, a man who couldn’t be more clearly a pervert even before we see him at a telescope overlooking their house. He is the basic cliché of the dirty old man and Couple barely makes an effort to humanize him: he’s married, his wife can’t go upstairs and he’s been delaying buying her a stairlift so he can keep spying on the hot woman next door. This is a leaden story that I hope pays off because Hugh Dennis, who plays him, is so heavy handing you expect him to be wearing a dirty raincoat every time he goes to his computer.

The more intriguing part of Couple – the one that elevates it more above the kind of soft-core that it should be – is that in both couples, the female is the more dominant figure. Becka came from an unconventional family and in every discussion that happens about the couple swapping, she is the alpha and Danny hangs back. In the second episode Becka makes it clear that she wants to have Evie and Pete become their new friends. Danny is troubled by this: there are rules in place and the clearest ones are that they only do this with strangers. We already know by this point that Evie is clearly attracted to Danny and that it’s also bothering Pete. But Becca makes it very clear that she finds this more amusing than problematic to the point she will eventually say ‘f---the rules.” Fans of Heughan from Outlander (the Starz series that made him an international sensation) might either be amused or unsettled to see that sweeping Scottish rogue so under his wife’s thumb.

The same is equally true in Evie and Pete. Evie clearly comes from a household of repression and the last several years have taken things out of her. But it’s clear very quickly that Danny’s presence arouses something in her that she barely bothers to hide. Pete isn’t troubled by this initially; he’s glad to see his wife happy – and sexually aggressive, one should appear. And the series makes it clear he knows about what his neighbors are doing before they reveal it. But while he considers himself open-minded Evie’s clear attraction to Danny unsettles him and not even the idea of sleeping with the gorgeous Becka is enough to stir him.

I have to say on a separate level Enoch is for me the draw of this show. I was curious to see if, as with Aja Naomi King in Lessons in Chemistry, whether he was a good actor or his appeal was based solely on his work in Shondaland. And in a series with a completely different kind of sexual dynamic than How To Get Away With Murder Enoch shows a capability with this material that I didn’t think possible. There’s also something promising about him being, at least at the start of the show, the one character with a moral compass both at work and home.

Now I won’t pretend for a moment than Couple Next Door is at anywhere near the level of so much of the brilliant drama I’ve seen on Starz in the past year. It isn’t anywhere near the caliber of Three Women (which dealt with a similar storyline) or Sweetpea. And frankly I’m not sure what I think about the fact that its been renewed for a second season already or if I’ll even like it at the end of the first. But watching this kind of drama and seeing it neither go immediately towards exploitation and actually be willing to explore the moral dilemmas in it, I have to at least give it marks for effort. Everyone on the show, being from Britain, is familiar with Samuel Johnson and his remarks about a dog walking on its hind legs: “It is not done well, but one is surprised to see it done it all.”  The Couple Next Door takes a subject that not even cable would have tackled a few years ago and tries to do it in a way that is more ambitious than the kind of thing I (I mean, of course, other viewers) saw Cinemax do so many times for the purpose of exploitation. And it is doesn’t done well, but it isn’t done badly. It may end up playing out like a Lifetime movie but it seems to be trying harder. Maybe it is the accent.

My score: 3. 25 stars.

Foreign Film Directors and The Oscars, The Strange Relationship, Part 1: The 1960s

 

One of those endless debates by film lovers and fans of the Academy Awards has been the relationship between Best Director nominees and the nominated Best Pictures. You would think that after 2009 when the Oscars officially expanded the field of nominated movies to ten while keeping nominees in every other category to five that this debate would finally be over with, if for no other reason that in that same period three different films – Argo in 2012, Green Book in 2018 and CODA in 2021 – have since won Best Picture with no corresponding Best Director nomination. But the debate still rages every year, nevertheless.

It should be noted that between 1944 and 2008, the period when Best Picture nominations were capped at five, the Academy Awards history of both Best Picture and Best Director was incredibly spotty to say the least. Indeed during that period the two categories only correlated perfectly five times. (Interestingly enough, the last time that happened was in 2008 – and everyone was so pissed that The Dark Knight was ignored for Best Picture that the Oscars didn’t get any credit for it.) No one seemed that irked by it during the first eighteen years or so, I should add even though many of the greatest directors of this period such as Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock and King Vidor, were getting nominate for Best Director without corresponding Best Pictures. It was just something that happened.

I think that the problems really began with the rise of so many foreign films (as the Oscars referred to Best International Feature for most of its existence) started to get nominated in the Best Director category. Hollywood had been perfectly fine letting international actors from all over the world star in its studio films earn Oscar nominations and awards. They were more than willing to let immigrant directors and writers win as long as they were for American movies. But around the time the studio system started to collapse in the 1960s many of the more important categories – especially directing – started to get invaded by ‘foreigners’. And Hollywood spent much of that period  - in fact pretty much to the start of the 21^st century –  with a not always subtle case of xenophobia. I’ve discussed this in my series on British actors and directors but they at least had a common language. The creative forces in Hollywood reacted as poorly to movies with subtitles being part of ‘their awards’ – which they considered an American institution – as if they wanted to tear down the Hollywood sign and build a wall. There are many ways to illustrate that point but I think the Director nominations are by far the clearest way.

I am of two minds of this, I should add. On the one hand one can’t deny that the nominated films were among some of the greatest movies of all time, helmed by some of the greatest directors in history. In recognizing them the Directors branch was showing a growth that the rest of the industry has never truly been able to demonstrate. On the other hand, far too often the presence of these directors in these categories excluded incredible talents for incredible films. It was a trade-off that I’m not sure ever worked perfectly.

The first time this became very clear was in 1963. As I mentioned in my series on British films and filmmakers Hollywood was already upset because of the presence of Tom Jones, a film that they found morally offensive winning every award for Best Picture. They had been hoping that Ralph Nelson’s Lillies of the Field – a movie that was inspirational and more important, American – would be able to stop it in its tracks that year. Then the Oscar nominations came out. Lillies of the Field was nominated for Best Picture, Actor and Supporting Actress and Screenplay. However Ralph Nelson was ignored for Best Director.

Only Tom Jones and Elia Kazan’s America, America had Best Picture and Director nominations. What enraged Americans was the presence of Federico Fellini getting a directing and screenplay nomination for his masterwork 8 ½ which had also been nominated for Best Foreign Film. Up until this point since Best Foreign Language Film was created in 1948, by and large the majority of international films were nominated in this category, might receive a few technical nominations but nothing of consequence.

Fellini, however, had been challenging the status quo for a while. He had already been nominated for Best Screenplay four separate times. In 1962 he had received his first Best Director nomination to go with his writing nomination. By and large, however, no one seemed to mind because the Academy Awards had been deservedly focused on three masterpieces: The Hustler, Judgment at Nuremberg and West Side Story. No one was really that annoyed that Fanny was nominated for Best Picture and Joshua Logan was ignored for Best Director. The following year Pietro Germi was nominated for Divorce, Italian Style for directing and won for Best Original Screenplay. That was another strange year for the Oscars but no one was that irked either. However when Fellini crashed the party for Director in 1964, a lot of people in the Hollywood guard were angry because it met that Tom Jones was going to win all the major awards and there was nothing they could do to stop it. Fellini, undeterred, attended the ceremony trying to see if he could convince Mae West and Groucho Marx to play the leads in his next film Juliet of The Spirits. (He failed, obviously.) 8 ½ won Best Foreign Film – no one was that shocked by this – and Fellini left as much in love with America as anyone.

In 1965 another invader came, this time not even having the dignity of coming from Europe. Hiroshi Teshigahara became the first Japanese director to received an Academy Award nomination in that category for his landmark film Woman In The Dunes. No one in Hollywood was happy about this, however, because Teshigahara had robbed a brilliant American filmmaker of a nomination. Ship of Fools, another in a long line of Stanley Kramer’s masterpieces during the 1950s and 1960s was nominated for Best Picture and had received seven other nominations. The movie boasted an international cast – Oskar Werner, Simone Signoret and Michael Dunn all received acting nominations but Kramer was excluded and many in Hollywood were unhappy about it.

The biggest invasion to date came with the 1966 nominations – and in the case of such film, the repercussions were beyond its present at the nominations. Claude LeLouch’s A Man and A Woman his simple story about how a widow and a widower begin to form a relationship had become a critical and box office hit. LeLouch tied for the Palme D’Or at Cannes and Anouk Aimee, the female lead was an overnight sensation like so many great French actresses – Signoret, Bridget Bardot and Catherine Deneuve – were becoming in America. The film would receive four Oscar nominations, including two for LeLouch for directing and writing. He won the latter along with best Foreign film.

The other film is known as one of the great masterpieces of all time: Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup. His first film in English, the film tells the story of a fashion photographer (played by David Hemmings) who unknowingly captures the death on film following two lovers in the park. The film was very free in its nudity and is considered a model for the giallo genre that would become immensely popular in Italy.

And for the Legion of Decency, the Catholic organization that had been the official censor for Hollywood for thirty years making sure not a scrap of sex or violence got into movies, it was a bridge too far. Their power had been flagging during the 1960s as American films were testing them more and more but here they drew a line in the sand. If America was going to release Blow-Up it would be without their official seal of approval. MGM defied it and when it became a critical and commercial hit despite that, for all intents and purposes the Production Code Hollywood had in place was dead. It stumbled along for a couple more years but in 1968 it was abandoned  in favor of the MPAA film rating system – something the religious right and the moral majority have never recovered from when it comes to Hollywood since.

Antonioni received nominations for Best Director and Original Screenplay – the only ones the Oscars would ever give him in competition. There’s a good argument the old guard never forgave him for what he did to their product.

By 1968 Hollywood could no longer deny the impact of the rest of the world but that didn’t make them any happier. One of the clearest examples of this came with the Best Director nominations that year – and there was an argument for their unhappiness.

In 1966 Gillo Pontecorvo made one of the greatest masterpieces in cinema history: The Battle of Algiers. An almost documentary type film, it tells the story of a terrorist group in Algiers fighting for independence from the French government. It had been nominated for Best Foreign Language film in 1966, losing to A Man and A Woman.

And then in one of the biggest mistakes in Oscar history, the film was nominated for Best Director and Screenplay two full years after its release. This technicality in the rules infuriated Hollywood for many reasons, not the least of which was Pontecorvo’s nomination for Best Director had pushed Paul Newman out of the director’s race for what was his directorial debut Rachel, Rachel. He had already won the Golden Globe for Best Director and has been nominated for the Director’s Guild award, to exclude him from the nominations – especially since the film had been nominated for Best Picture and three other major Oscars – in favor of Pontecorvo seemed the most grievous of insults to a man who even in 1967 was sorely lacking for honors from the Academy.

Then the following year history was made – and it clearly bothered Hollywood. Costa-Gavras made one of the greatest critical and box-office international films today, the political thriller Z. In it the public murder of a prominent politician and doctor amid a violent demonstration is covered up by the military and the government. Modeled after the military takeover in Greece Gavras didn’t even bother to hide what he was writing. In the credits he wrote: “Any resemblance to actual events, to persons, living or dead, is not the result of chance. It is DELIBERATE.” The film won the Jury Prize at Cannes and Best Actor for Jean-Louis Trintignant. In a move that showed true shift, the New York Film Critics for the first time gave Best Picture and Director to a non-American film. (They would do so quite a bit more often in the decades to come.)

When the Oscar nominations came out Z was the first film nominated for Best Picture and Best Foreign Film in the same year. It would also be nominated for Best Director, Adapted Screenplay and Editing. The movie won Best Editing and Best Foreign film, considered a consolation prize.

But the presence of Z in this category panicked the Academy. Not long after they introduced a rule change. A movie that was nominated in the category Best Foreign Film would only be eligible to contend for other ‘official awards’ the following year. The producers had not accepted the Golden Globe prize for Best Foreign film because Z had not been considered for Best Drama and many had been angry when Hollywood seemed to give in to the demands of these actors.

Perhaps by doing so the Academy thought this would resolve things for good: they were offering a carrot to the International film community by making  a promise that they were sure would never happen again. They had no idea they were about to open a floodgate of new problems for them.

In the next article I will deal with how some of the greatest international directors stormed the Oscars during the 1970s – frequently at the expense of some of the greatest American directors.

 

Did The 26th Amendment Fail? Conclusion

 

For the better part of two centuries the left of America have believed in some version of the same theory. It is held deep among fringe elements of many of its groups – African-Americans, women, in recent years the LGBTQ+ community, the LatinX and the youngest members of all these groups.

It breaks into two disparate elements that, for all their academic writing, historical facts and complicated vocabulary, are at their core as utterly lacking in reality as those that one can find on Info Wars and Newsmax. Because of that, it has historically gained less traction in society at large than the right wing’s because theirs is horribly simple as to the cause and has an easy remedy. For that reason it would easily be dismissed. However given the presence of social media in society as well as the utter devotion it has in certain elite circles – particularly academia and Hollywood – it is very likely going to gain a permanent toehold in our society that with each generation will be more likely to have those who believe and if they continue to follow that logic will inevitably make things incrementally worse in the years to follow. It is therefore important to understand both what this generation believes and how they think it can be fixed, so one can realize how flawed they are going forward.

The basic part of the theory has not changed much since the days of William Lloyd Garrison. It has progressed from the days of the antebellum south but by and large it is unchanged. It argues that all of the freedoms that we as Americans are granted by the Constitution are somehow tainted irrevocably because of the undeniable fact they were borne out of the conditions of the necessity of the founders to acknowledge slavery’s existence in order to form the United States. This has been added to by each successive minority group who has argued because the founders were all white men, every single right is tainted by white supremacy and misogyny and it not merely irrevocable but in the beliefs f many young people, are non-existent. The everyday freedoms that we take for granted in our society are not actual freedoms by their definition.

Because of the cudgel of racism and the often sordid realities of our history, none of the coalitions ever ask to next obvious question: what would their definition of freedom be? The most equality any democracy – any society  - can grant its citizens is equality under the law. In that sense while America is hardly the shining city on a hill the conservatives claim it to be, it is hardly the oppressive dictatorship the left claims it is. They demonstrate it even as they say hateful things about their own government, see the criticism published on line and related on TV, have the ability to peacefully assemble within reason and express the claims of our society’s oppression on the internet with no real repercussions. Yet that never seems to be mentioned among the publications or journals online.

The problems that so many minorities have are based in different kind of problem; one that has no real remedy. How do we protect our society from people’s racist behavior towards them and the frequently violent outbursts that come from them? The answer is simple: no society can. When a society attempts to regulate any of its citizens way of thinking, when it clamps down on dissent and argues that those who think differently from you are less than human, when it decides to define what one groups thinks as immoral or hateful based on another group’s vision of it, then it is not a democracy but rather a dictatorship. The left deserves credit for pointing out the right ‘s effort to bring this about in America. They neglect to mention that the ideal society they seem to be hinting at is little more than a mirror image of that.

In the argument of the left which the young are increasingly adopting, the institutions that we as Americans have spent decades involved in, from our schools to our law enforcement to all three branches of government, are built in propagate the Big Lie: that America is a free society. They do so by argue that all of the imperfections in our government, by virtue of being designed hundreds of years ago, are ill-suited to today’s society largely because the founders were not clairvoyant. Essentially they have collectively found the past guilty of the irrevocable crime of being the past. That the Founders had no way of foreseeing a world with steam powered engines or automobiles, much less the Internet, never enters that way of thinking either. The left has always known these things; therefore everyone else does, therefore everyone else did. That everything they have learned comes on the shoulders of each successive generation is something they will either not accept or say because of the circumstances of the founding, should be ignored outright.

By and large a fair amount of the left’s thinking is designed around deconstruction and despair. This is in large part because for all of the left’s moaning about the inequities of society, they have nothing better to replace it with. And this leads to the contradiction. Much of their thinking and marching is about the evils of capitalism. There is much to be said about its inequities and its flaws and how much of its is broken. The problem is society is fine with it. No one – not even the harsher detractors of it – wants to go back to an era you had to grow your own foods, build your own goods, provide your own transportation and everything else associated with it. Even its fiercest detractors never deny that they benefit from its advantages. That they spent so much time ranting about the evils of Silicon Valley while using the devices and forums those same Silicon Valley designed would seem the biggest contradiction in their own eyes. That there is a cottage industry built on the derogatory nature of capitalism is another contradiction no one acknowledges.

And the fact that even before the rise of Donald Trump many influential people denounced the presidential primary – designed in large part to bring more democracy to the people  - and seem more inclined to embrace the power broker system that previous generations denounced as oppressive  - makes it very clear of their own frequently elitist belief. To paraphrase Clemenceau, to many democracy is too important to be left in the hands of the voters. That this a step backwards for democracy, not forward, is something that none of them are willing to acknowledge.

This is fundamentally clear in the behavior of those enfranchised by the 26^th Amendment: they are less inclined to be politically active than they were before they were enfranchised even though they actually have the only power that allows them to advocate for the issues they care about. And having had a half century to think about it, they still have nothing better to replace democracy or capitalism with. So a great deal of their arguments – among themselves – is to regurgitate the leftist talking points and keep saying the same thing a hundred different ways. It is regurgitated in liberal magazines, academic journals, certain cable news networks, even some late night comedy shows and endlessly on social media. Basically it is countless intelligent people telling you how screwed society is and that there’s nothing we can do – so keep reading, buying, watching or liking my next piece of work that will tell some variation on this. It’s not exactly a call to the barricades.

The other part of this argument – the one that is seemingly constructive – takes a different perspective, albeit one just as historically skewed and in fact even more convoluted. In this narrative the programs of the Great Society and all of the social constructs argued by for the left were working perfectly fine with no flaws. The corporate interests saw this and they advocated the Republican Party to act in those interest. They have spent the last half century using their ill-gotten gains – built on the backs of all hard working Americans – to divide America by white against black. They also rigged the judiciary, created think tanks, and used the electoral system to subvert the will of the people, especially the ones who voted Republican. These hard workers would know this truth like those of us in the left were it not for the manipulations of the right – and it is implied, the fact that they lack the means to get the kind of education to know everything the left does now.

Now they are victims of this as much as anybody else but because of the fact they have lived under Republican rule for decades they don’t deserve to be uplifted the way the rest of America – by which they mean the city dwellers, the educated, the African-American, the LatinX, the women voter, the LGBTQ+ community – do. In this part of the narrative they have been indoctrinated so much by the far-right that they are beyond redemption. By and large they also live in the South, which in this narrative is no different since the Emancipation Proclamation was passed, and therefore ae the most backwards of them all. (Just the people in rural sections; those who live in cities are fine.) They don’t recognize America anymore but since their version of America was bigoted and a lie propagated by the right wing, they are best left behind. Besides they are getting older  and will eventually go extinct. It is up to us, the enlightened ones, to enact a series of progressive policies that will save us and in the long run, eventually trickle down and save future generations of these hayseeds from themselves. This will be in part because they will become more educated, more enlightened, more progressive. And eventually they will vote Democratic, driving the Republican party out of existence, finally creating an effective democracy.

Even the most charitable reader of this theory – which is implied, if not stated directly on progressive blogs like Daily Kos – can see the bigoted and often dictatorial thinking of this writing. This is hardly a coincidence. Just as if one goes far enough to the right one gets a fascist dictatorship if one goes far enough to the right one gets a Marxist dictatorship, something that AOC and the Squad all but acknowledge when the call themselves ‘democratic socialists’. Because of the obvious connotations with both of these terms the progressive tries everything in its power to avoid them – though the fact that there are publications devoted to Marxists and socialists indicates they do still have a following.

Instead they try to argue a more benevolent kind of democracy, one that has to do with the worst elements of American history and the very real ways the GOP has spent much of the last half century rigging the system to favor them in every branch of the government, from redistricting to winning two Presidential elections despite losing the popular vote to the way the Senate has rigged the judiciary in the past twenty years. And when one combines the myriad other ways the right has corrupted so many aspects of our everyday life to taking on increasingly dictatorial overtones, the appeal of the progressive vision certainly sounds like a better one to many. But at its core its just a different kind of dictatorship, one where the minority has no real rights in it except to voice its opposition and then being ignored. (And considering how the left has recently taken the attitude that one should never push back against them, there’s clear an authoritarian note to that as well.)

Much of this argument goes to the left’s strengths which have always been more towards the urban and educated than the rural. And in doing so they engaged in the kind of cherry-picking that they have become masterful at. Paramount among it is how the small, rural states have a ‘disproportionate amount of power’. This is essentially a euphemism for “the ignorant people who live in states we would not be caught dead in are all in the same place.” (For those of you who think this is too harsh, far stronger and more profane language is often found in progressive journals and is all but gospel among late night comics such as Bill Maher and John Oliver.)

Frequently they talk about the states such as Montana, Idaho, Wyoming and the Dakotas combined have a smaller and far less diverse population than California and yet all of those get the same number of Senators. That’s true of course. It’s also true that Delaware, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Vermont combined have a smaller and less diverse population then Texas – or for that matter, Florida or Ohio. Yet one will rarely hear arguments on the left arguing that the five states I mentioned in the previous section have too much representation in the Senate and that Texas and Florida too little. The logic is obvious, of course – those five states are among the most Democratic in the country when it comes to representation in the Senate. Yet no one ever argues ‘nobody’ lives in Vermont and ‘everybody’ lives in Texas the same way they say that ‘nobody lives in Wyoming and everyone lives in New York.”

And it’s not like every single ruby red state is entirely made up of Republicans – it’s not as though Trump won every single vote in Utah anymore than Biden won every single vote in Minnesota. For all the argument about red states and blue states, democracy is purple. The left’s version of how many Americans are on the wrong side of history has in this century alone including at least 45 to 48 percent of the electorate. That’s a very large part of the population to ignore the will of – and yet that seems to be the ‘left’s strategy for victory’.

I use quotations because the strategy falls apart the moment you look at it. For the executive branch, they want to have elections determined by national popular vote. To break the filibuster in the Senate, they want statehood for DC and Puerto Rico. For the conservative supermajority on the supreme court, they spent all of Biden’s term demanding passage of a Judiciary Act that would enable him to put four new liberal justices on the Court.

But according to their own arguments the Republicans have gerrymandered the Senate so that none of this legislation could pass without convincing Republicans to vote for it – which based on their own arguments they will never do. The only way to get Congress to agree to any of this would be to try and win Democratic seats in the very Republican states that they say are unwinnable – and which they are arguing for the passage of these same bills in order to countermand them.

And even one were to engage in the kind of magical thinking where somehow Congress or a Democratic President got all these bills passed, none of this considers what happens after that. The most generous interpretation is that the Democrats than pass all of this sweeping leftist legislations that helps the masses. Then the argument is that somehow all of the bits of Justice Democrats platform will be enacted without a word of dissent or opposition from so many of the Republican governed states that have spent the last twenty years opposed every bit of that same legislation. We’ve already seen how that played out with so many Republican states refusing to use Obamacare and so many of the programs of the Great Society and beyond have been badly handled in states, red and blue. Just the idea of universal health care led to the creation of the Tea Party and eventually the rise of Donald Trump. Does anyone really think that all of those legislators in states the progressives love to mock in their fundraiser will just enact them without a word of disagreement?

Even the idea of the sweeping reforms discussed by the left are based on the idea that after that the Republicans will never win back Congress or the White House. Say Biden had passed the Judicial Reform Act and appointed four new liberal justices to give a 7-6 majority? What would have stopped the next Republican congress to pass another reform act enabling them to put two new conservative justices on the Supreme Court to give them the majority back? How long would it be before Puerto Rico and DC elected Republican Senators or Congressmen to the states? The leftist version of America is basically being able to have more voices to outshout the opposition and therefore claiming you can’t hear them. It is no more healthy for a society then the minority rule the right has been arranging for years.

The danger I feel is coming with the current generation, raised entirely on its cellphones and never knowing a Republican who isn’t named Donald Trump. Just as social media has been the best thing to happen to the GOP and the worst thing for America, it has been a different version of it for the left-wing.

The internet has raised an entire generation of people who think that everything that they rely on can be provided for them with a push of  a button on their phone, have no understanding of how America works beyond what they see on the internet and genuinely can’t understand why you can’t pass a bill as quickly as you can download the newest version of an app. They are also in bubbles that isolate them from dissenting thought beyond the wildest dreams of academia. And they will be more open to the appeal of the left’s narrative than ever.

A citizen’s relationship to America should be symbiotic. The country gives many things to its populace – far more than one gets in a dictatorship – and asks for very little in return. The left’s relationship to society has always been closer to that of a parasite to a host. They believe they should be able to suck it dry of everything it can possibly offer and give nothing back in return. This is why it fundamentally has had a greater appeal to certain parts of society –  particularly the young who with each generation have wanted for less and less and have parents who don’t demand that much of them. Now in addition to that an entire generation will have been raised to think that everything in the world can be provided on your phone and can pick and choose what they want to find out about the world online without even having to read the books about it.

There has been a part of me, particularly in the age of Trump, who wonders whether the left’s outrage in him is based in a combination of envy and the vague thought that he has stolen their talking points. It’s not that he has a hold on the Republican party and the electorate that none of them are capable of; it’s that so much of the things that he says and thinks that shock so many people are things that they themselves believe in. For all the derogatory remarks Trump has made about the military and veterans over the last decade, one can’t forget that this has been very close to the attitude of the anti-war marchers in Vietnam who spit on soldiers and forced the sitting President out of office. Whatever loyalty the left has, it is towards causes far less than institutions which it considers by and large corrupt and racist. Ideas of loyalty to anything – certainly a political party – is something they’ve never understood and there has been a large part who have never had any respect for serving the country in any form. “What’s in it for them?” some of them outright say to those who serve public office or the military. “They’re suckers.’

The only solutions I can suggest – at least for future generations – is to limit as much contact as possible with the internet with whatever children are born in the years to come. This will no doubt lead to huge resistance among the children themselves and I can’t pretend it’s a perfect solution. But the fact remains that internet and social media need some kind of intense regulation. And since neither the government nor the industry has intention of doing it or the means to do so,  it must fall upon us the citizens.

Considering how easily it has come to be manipulated and how untrustworthy it has proven to be, future generations will have to be kept their access to it for as long as possible and to an absolute minimum. As they grow older they should be allowed to have incrementally more of it and even then, it should be monitored as much as possible.

The harder part will be given children a different kind of freedom: less structure in their lives, more ability to fail on their own. One can’t pretend it isn’t a frightening world out there and no one’s going to say it will get less so in the years to come. But the fact remains that parents have to accept that there is only so much that they can do to protect their children against the outside world. I’m not a parent so I can’t pretend to know what that’s like. But I have been a child and I know that no matter what kind of parenting you do at some point your child is going to rebel against it, get angry with you and have fights with you. It happens with free-range parenting and helicopter parenting alike.

We will also have to have children do more work for themselves and that will be going to places they can find information rather than looking on the Internet. While I am opposed to keeping your children off social media as long as possible, I believe the opposite is true for giving them a public library card. I also think going forward letting children fail has to be allowed when it comes to their grades. Sad as it is for parents to accept, not every child in the world can be an A student. The majority of us are B and C students. This will be a hard fact of life for both parents and children to accept but considering that previous generations are increasingly getting higher grades with no ability to understand what they learned; it has to be accepted.

And the hardest part is going to be to teach your children that technological savvy and intelligence will not now nor ever equal common sense. This may be the most difficult lesson for any person to learn. And the easiest way to learn it means accepted what can be done to fix it. And that means being more active in the world by living in it.

It means learning that the history of our nation has not been written yet because we have no idea how it will end. It means being able to read and process multiple sources and never taking one single view of the world as ‘real’ just because it fits your experience. It means accepting the often bitter truth that democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others.

And it means realizing that the sticker you get for having voted is the only participation trophy that really matters.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Oscar's Not Always Special Relationship With Britain, Conclusion

 

One of the myths of Hollywood that is basically considered gospel was that the aura of the auteur in 1970s ended almost immediately after Star Wars. The story goes, the studios saw how much money you could make by marketing films exclusively to teenage boys and before you could say: “Let the force be with you,” Hollywood wasn’t making directors create masterpieces any more.

Apart from the basic fallacy of that statement (Hollywood is a business and the only reason any film is made is to make money) there are some minor facts that get in the way. The first is that even had the studios wanted to immediately do that, there was no way to tell it would work because in 1977 there was no rating between PG and R. The PG-13 rating didn’t come into existence until July of 1984 and the first movie to get that rating was John Milius’s Red Dawn. Even then it took a very long time before and after that rating was developed before studios decided to exclusively market to teenage boys and there was a lot of trial and error before they hit that sweet spot. (Any child who saw Labyrinth or so many of the Don Bluth cartoons during that decade knows what I am talking about.) As someone who has lived through much of that period I don’t think Hollywood seriously considered that as an economic possibility until Tim Burton’s Batman in 1989 and even past that point, there was a lot of marketing movies towards teenagers of any gender with no idea of making it more than box office. (If anyone doubts me I would simply ask if anyone thought of making action figures for The Breakfast Club.)

The second issue I have is how many of the major box office hits during the 1980s were still of the kind of adult films that were being made in the 1970s. Steven Spielberg started to dip his toe into ‘the deep end of the pool’ with The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun and many of the best directors of the 1970s were making movies that were critical and box office hits. The reasons we might not acknowledge that is that the majority of them (Norman Jewison, Mike Nichols, Sidney Lumet) don’t fall under the label of auteur the way that Kubrick or Scorsese and Hal Ashby do. Nevertheless movies such as Moonstruck, Working Girl and The Verdict were both Academy Award nominated movies and box office successes. And during this same period a new wave of directors were coming into filmmaking, bringing a combination of grownup studio movies and box office success. These included such brilliant talents as Barry Levinson and Peter Weir (who had worked mostly in Australia before Witness brought him to the attention of American audiences. One of the biggest names in directing box office during the eighties was Oliver Stone who managed to win Best Director twice in four years for going even deeper into the horrors of the Vietnam War in Platoon and Born On the Fourth of July then even Michael Cimino had been willing to do in The Deer Hunter. After a slow opening weekend Platoon would gross over $130 million (in 1986 dollars) and while Born didn’t gross that much, it still made more than five times back its $14 million budget.

A large part of the reason Hollywood turned away from directors being able to control every aspect must be laid at the feet of the directors themselves. Despite what the David Mamet’s and their ilk might argue about their work in Hollywood,  their ability to produce the movies they want is directly proportional to how much someone is willing to go and see it. And during the 1980s in particular a lot of the directors from the 1970s were burning up whatever goodwill they had in making films that were critically acclaimed but kept losing money. Francis Ford Coppola may have been the biggest abuser of Hollywood’s trust during that period; I suspect the blame he has put on the studios for the failures of such films as The Cotton Club and Peggy Sue Got Married or Tucker is because he can’t blame the people he wants to: the audience. And he’s just the most extreme example: Robert Altman spent most of the 1970s and 1980s making brilliant dramas that either barely made money or lost money. Studios spent a ridiculous amount of money on Kubrick’s vision for Barry Lyndon and got almost nothing in return. A lot of directors got a lot of rope for a long time during the 1980s to try and prove that the studio’s faith in them was not misguided. And by the time I was a teenager (the mid-nineties) they’d pretty much used it all up.

And it should be noting the British were given as much an opportunity to do so during this same period, and there’s an argument they may have done much to hurt the Oscars brand as well during the 1980s and perhaps beyond. By far the most notorious example of this is Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi a movie that has been going on the list of worst Oscar choice in history pretty much as long since I’ve been alive and probably  always will.

Richard Attenborough may be one of the worst examples of what happens when an actor decides he wants to direct in history. Even before Gandhi was greenlit he was getting the reputation of making pretentious films that were extremely long. His most well known film to that point A Bridge Too Far was so controversial one of the cast members Dirk Bogarde took a huge amount of heat from friends of the General he portrayed. Many believed had General Browning lived to see it he would have sued Attenborough and screenwriter William Goldman for libel and Browning’s son thought his father was made the fall guy because the writers could not have gone after Field Marshal Montgomery. The movie cost a fortune by 1977 standards  - $27 million and it was only because it made money in America that Attenborough was given cover.

One gets the feeling that Gandhi was given so much praise and record more for the effort involved in the filmmaking. For the funeral sequence alone 300,000 extras appeared and 20,000 feet of film where shot by eleven crews in what was pared down to little more than two minutes on the screen. The film is clearly inspired by the work of David Lean (we’ll get to him in this by the way) but it is lugubrious and bloated by comparison even though it is shorter than some of Lean’s movies. That’s in large part because Bridge on The River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia are epic movies in the kind of stories their telling: both films tell multiple stories aside from the man in the center of it. In what would become a frustrating pattern of Attenborough’s career, he decided that he could make lives that frequently were less about action then about men (and it was always men) the kind of sweeping sagas.

And there’s  no contest when it comes to comparing Gandhi to ET when it comes to which is by far the better film. Hell, there’s an argument that Gandhi was, at the most generous estimate, the seventh most worthy film of a Best Picture nod in 1982, behind not just ET and Tootsie, but also The Verdict, Sophie’s Choice, Das Boot and maybe even Victor/Victoria. All of these movies flow, having compelling stories with brilliant technical aspects and engaging characters. Gandhi is a three hour effort by Attenborough to turn a man (who in Britain was never thought of that highly) into a saint.

The only thing that works about the film is  the incredible performance by Ben Kingsley at the center of it. Considering that among everything else this was Kingsley’s film debut (he’d work in British television and the theater but had never appeared on the silver screen before that) it is the demonstration of a chameleon at work. Kingsley did what he has done in every major role I’ve seen him onscreen since: he is Gandhi and he embodies it. It took far too long for Hollywood to realize Kingsley’s brilliance again (he spent much of the aftermath of his Oscar win basically acting in British films and theater) before Barry Levinson cast him as Meyer Lansky in Bugsy. (As Billy Crystal joked about it at the Oscars that year: ‘Gandhi and Lansky. Two men with vision and neither ate pork.) After that Hollywood finally figured out how to use Kingsley’s formidable appearance properly and he’s been one of the greatest character actors of all time ever since.

I think Hollywood could have lived if they had given the Oscar for Best Actor to Kingsley and given Best Picture and Director to any of the other four nominees in either category. Instead by giving it to both Gandhi and Attenborough it began a trend that may have done more damage to the Oscars that has been difficult to recover from: giving Best Picture to movies that appear to be Oscar worthy picture because they are big in scope and appearance but in reality are just bloated movies overshadowing real art. There are so many examples of this that would follow Out of Africa beating movies like Witness or Kiss of The Spider Woman in 1985; The Last Emperor, Bernardo Bertolucci’s bloated historical film triumphing over Moonstruck and Broadcast News in 1987; The English Patient utterly crushing Fargo in 1996…well, you get the idea. And that’s without counting all of the bloated films that seem to be epic but actually aren’t that have been nominated in all the decades since – Gangs of New York; The Thin Red Line; The Revenant  (my opinions, I admit) So many of the wins that the Oscars are the kind of film I can imagine Hollywood collectively waking up the next day and going: “We did what last night?” And part of me does think we have to blame Gandhi for that.

Now to be fair there were some British directors still making different kinds of masterpieces during this same period and for those who might have thought Attenborough was aspiring to be David Lean, in 1984 they would finally get the real thing again.

After the disastrous reception for Ryan’s Daughter and a horrible luncheon with Pauline Kael and other critics where he was publicly shamed Lean had essentially retreated from filmmaking during the 1970s. Then in the 1980s he began work on another epic movie; this time based on E.M. Forster classic novel A Passage to India.

Age had done little to change Lean’s attitude as a filmmaker; he was now more rigid and petulant then ever before. During the film making his relationship with Alec Guiness who had been part of Lynch’s movies for nearly forty years deteriorated and finally fractured when Guiness learned many of his scenes  had been edited out. The two men never met or spoke to the other again. He also did much to isolate one of his leading ladies, Peggy Ashcroft, who played Mrs. Moore, shunning her from his table during meals. Ashcroft took it better than Guiness, thinking it was just Lean being Lean.

Compared to his previous epics Passage to India was short: 2 hours and forty five minutes. Still considering the length of Forester’s novel, the movie would be accused of having many of its scenes being stretched too long. Nevertheless, most critics hailed it as a brilliant return to form, capturing the essence of Forster’s novel. Set in the 1920s, it tells the story of Adela Quested (Judy Davis in an early role) and her possible future mother in law as they travel to India to visit Adela’s unofficial fiancée. A story of colonialism and racism, it involves the meeting between the two women and a local Indian physician (Victor Banerjee). The three go on a trip to the Marabar Caves where something horrible and undefined happens.

A Passage to India was one of the most well regarded films by critics in 1984 with the movie sweeping the four major awards (Picture, Director, Actor for Bannerjee, Actress for Ashcroft) and the National Board of Review) and winning everything but Best Actor at the New York Film Critics. Ashcroft would win multiple awards for Best Lead Actress and Supporting Actress, earning the latter from the Golden Globes. The film would receive eleven Oscar nominations, including three for Lean, for writing, directing and editing.

Another British film maker of note also made himself known to the Oscars that year. Roland Joffe had worked almost exclusively in television before Columbia Pictures agreed to have him helm an adaptation of New York Times journalist Sydney Schanberg’s experiences covering the civil war in Cambodia,, for which Schanberg won the Pulitzer prize. The Killing Fields tells the story of Schanberg’s relationship with a local Cambodian journalist Dith Pran and how after the American evacuation, the two men were separated and Schanberg’s effort to find him.

Sam Waterston was cast as Schanberg and in a work of symmetry Joffe would cast Haing S. Ngor, a Cambodian native as Dith Pran. Ngor had been a physician and medical officer in the Cambodian Army who was captured by the Khmer Rouge and imprisoned and tortured. To escape execution, he denied being a doctor or having an education. He escape to the United States in 1980. Though he had no formal acting experience Joffe cast him in this critical role. The film was one of the most awarded movies of 1984 and received seven Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Director, Actor for Waterson and Supporting Actor for Ngor.

By and large the Oscars basically got everything right in 1984, giving eight Academy Awards to one of the all-time great films, Amadeus. Lean didn’t win a single Oscar in what would be his final Academy Awards but Peggy Ashcroft did prevail for Best Supporting Actress for her work as Mrs. Moore. The Killing Fields took three Oscars, Best Supporting Actor for Ngor, Adapted Screenplay and editing. There were quite a few other British Actors nominated in 1984, though few attended the ceremony. One of them Sir Ralph Richardson, nominated for Best Supporting Actor for Greystoke, had a decent excuse – he had passed away two months before the film made it to theaters. Albert Finney, who received his fourth nomination for Best Actor playing one of the great performances of an alcoholic in Under the Volcano reacted the same way his previous three nominations – no comment. And Vanessa Redgrave nominated for Best Actress for The Bostonians showed the better part of valor and didn’t show up. (We’ll be dealing with the filmmakers in a bit.)

The British had actually been in force in the acting categories the previous year, indeed when Robert Duvall was nominated for Best Actor for his work in Tender Mercies he said, “I guess it’s me against the Limeys.” (He won.) One of the surprise nominees for many awards that year was Peter Yates’s The Dresser, a film about the complicated relationship between an actor known only as Sir (Finney) and his personal assistant Norman (Tom Courtenay). Courtenay and Finney were both nominated for Best Actor and the film earned nominations for Best Picture, Director and Screenplay.

Michael Caine was nominated for his work in the working class comedy Educating Rita as was Julie Walters for the title role. The film would sweep the Golden Globes winning Best Foreign Film , Actor and Actress in a Comedy. Asked what an Oscar would mean Caine said: “I might get more scripts with less coffee stains on them.” He acknowledged that when the time came for the Oscars to be presented Dolly Parton’s presence was a sign that he wasn’t going to win. Perhaps that was part of the reason that, after three consecutive nominations and no wins he decided not to show up for what would be his biggest night.

There’s a good argument that the special relationship with Britain was cemented in Hollywood in 1986 as many of the most critical actors and creative forces that would be prominent among the Academy Award nominees and winners came in that year. Much of it had to do with Michael Caine.

Caine would joke upon accepting a Golden Globe a decade later that there was a time “when I made a lot of crap…and a lot of money.” That was certainly true during the 1980s but there was a lot of excellent work in there as well. It was definitely true of two of his biggest roles in 1986 both of which were supporting.

One couldn’t have been more American if he tried: his role as Elliot in Woody Allen’s masterpiece Hannah And Her Sisters. One of the best movies in Allen’s long career and certainly the highpoint of his collaborations with his then-partner Mia Farrow who plays the title role her husband is played by Caine in one of his performances.  As the financial advisor who has the first lines in the film which he uses to justify the affair with Hannah’s sister Lee (played by Barbara Hershey) the role was a feather in Caine’s cap from the start. Caine received many nominations for Critics’ Awards, usually in conjunction with another critically acclaimed masterpiece.

Neil Jordan was relatively unknown when he made what would be his breakthrough film in 1986. Mona Lisa tells the story of an ex con named George released from prison. His time in prison has reduced his stature into the underworld of London. The only job he can find is being a driver for a high priced call-girl, with whom he slowly bonds and then falls in love with her. What he doesn’t know is the dangerous game she’s playing and that by helping her he will end up in trouble with the local kingpin.

Caine’s work as Mortwell was the draw but the breakout sensations of the movie were the performances of Bob Hoskins as George and Cathy Tyson as Simone. Hoskins’s appeal was a shock to himself as he knew he had no sex appeal – “Me own mum wouldn’t think of me as pretty.” But he had built a reputation in England as one of the best character actors in the country, particularly on television officially becoming a sensation for his work as Arthur in Dennis Potter’s masterpiece Pennies From Heaven.. Not long after that he became beloved for his work in a similar dark masterpiece The Long Good Friday. He had worked steadily and to acclaim in some American films of note – Francis Ford Coppola’s The Cotton Club and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil but Mona Lisa introduced him to American audiences in a big way.

He would win Best Actor at Cannes which would be a preview of how the awards season would go for him. From New York to LA, from the National Society of Film Critics to the Golden Globes he would win nearly every Best Actor award in  sight. Tyson did well herself, tying with Dianne Wiest for Best Supporting Actress in LA and receiving a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Mona Lisa looked sure to be a major contender for every award in the book and it might well have been – had it not been for another British import that would have a far wider appeal and a more far-ranging impact for America.

Ismail Merchant, James Ivory and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala had formed a production company in the 1960s. Ivory and Jhabvala were the creative forces, Merchant was mainly involving producing. Their films were period pieces and their more successful works had been literary adaptations, certainly in America where their adaptations of Henry James’s The Europeans and The Bostonians had received Oscar nominations. The latter had been earned Redgrave her first Oscar nod in seven years.

In 1985 they became work on an E.M. Forster novel, which had already brought multiple Oscar nominations and acclaim to David Lean the previous year. But A Room With A View was far more intimate  - in both scope and budget – than Passage to India had been. And it was even more ambitious in casting performers making their film debuts. Helena Bonham Carter made her movie debut as the lead role of Lucy Honeychurch. Rupert Graves made his theatrical debut as her brother Freddy. And a young Irish actor named Daniel Day-Lewis was cast in the critical role of Johnny, even though it was only his second major role of any significance.

The majority of the other leads were acting royalty in Britain but with the exception of Maggie Smith they were basically unknown in America – and honestly if it hadn’t been for Smith’s two Oscars I doubt Hollywood would have known who she was. Judi Dench would play the role of Eleanor (and still wouldn’t become a household name for another decade) Denholm Elliott, basically known for his work in Raiders of the Lost Ark, played Mr. Emerson and such talents as Julian Sands and Simon Callow filled out the other leads. The film was a sensation in Britain but that was meaningless in America. Then it opened in March of 1986 – and became the biggest independent hit of the year, making nearly seven times it budget back in America.

The movie won Best Picture prizes from the National Board of Review. The major sensation in the eyes of critics was Day-Lewis, who won Best Supporting Actor prizes from the New York Film Critics and the National Board of Review. Strangely enough he would be one of the few people associated with the movie NOT to get an Oscar nomination. (He’s done okay since then.)

On the day of the nominations both Hannah & Her Sisters and A Room With A View were among the most nominated films, each receiving eight nominations including the first nominations for Merchant for producing, Ivory as a director and Jhabvala for Adapted Screenplay. Denholm Elliott was nominated for Best Supporting Actor and Maggie Smith received her fifth nomination for Best Supporting Actress. The news was not as great for Mona Lisa which received just a single Oscar nomination – Hoskins for Best Actor.

Part of the reason it may have been excluded from the nominations was Roland Joffe’s follow-up to The Killing Fields. The Mission told the true story of eighteenth century Spanish Jesuits trying to protect a remote South American tribe from falling under the rule of pro-slavery Portugal. Robert De Niro played the lead role of Mendoza, a slave hunter who was converted and a relative unknown named Jeremy Irons as a Spanish Jesuit who went into the wilderness.

While it was well-regarded at the time The Mission is the Best Picture nominee of 1986 that holds up the least well. Much of the movie is based on the ‘white savior trope’ that would increasingly become called out in the years to come: the two leads have ‘saved the savages’ and are risking their lives to protect them from a greater evil. One also gets the feeling, as with Gandhi, that the Academy was giving the film and Joffe nominations for the effort put in rather than the quality of the film – the movie was shot on location in the Amazon jungle and the majority of those associated became ill of dysentery. It looks incredible on the big screen and it has a great spiritual message – both of which lead the Academy to give films like this recognition and ignore smaller, more quality films like Mona Lisa.

Whatever the reason The Mission received seven Academy Award nominations almost all of them technical. (None of the cast or the screen play were nominated that year.) It would have made more sense to nominate Mona Lisa or other masterpieces from that year for Best Picture: Blue Velvet, Aliens or Salvador.

Michael Caine, who was nominated for Hannah and Her Sisters, chose not to attend arguing his obligations for shooting Jaws: The Revenge were too demanding. (He took a lot of ribbing for that later on.)  Maggie Smith, his co-star from California Suite and a heavy favorite for Best Supporting Actress, chose to stay home as well perhaps thinking it highly unlikely she would win Academy Award number 3. Bob Hoskins was there on Oscar night and he spent it royally unhappy.

Paul Newman had received his seventh Oscar nomination for Best Actor for The Color of Money, the unofficial sequel to The Hustler. While a superb movie no one even pretended that it was Newman’s best work but by 1986 the fact that the Oscars had never given one of the greatest actors of all time an Academy Award was too glaring to overlook. Newman had only won a single award in the leadup to the Oscars from the National Board of Review: everything else had gone to Hoskins. Four years earlier Ben Kingsley had won every award in sight for Gandhi while Paul Newman had been ignored for his extraordinary performance in The Verdict. The Academy was not going to let history repeat itself.

During a commercial break on Oscar night William Hurt, nominated for his work in Children of a Lesser God, gathered with two of his fellow nominees for Best Actor – Dexter Gordon for Round Midnight and James Woods for Salvador – and toasted Paul Newman. Hoskins hung back and would be brutally honest afterward. “It wasn’t his best work by any measure.” The fact that Newman had decided to stay home that night – he would later acknowledge it was ‘too little, too late’  - compounded the insult in Hoskins’s mind. Hoskins would go on to be one of the better character actors in Hollywood and Britain but he would never even be nominated for an Academy Award again.

Neither of the other major winners for British films – Michael Caine or Jhabvala who won Best Adapted Screenplay – were their to pick up on their Oscars. Because not only Newman but Woody Allen was, as per usual, absent, it wasn’t noted upon as  a bigger sin.

From 1986 on the floodgates for British director and actors were open and have never closed. Merchant/Ivory would be among the constant producer of British masterpieces for the next decade and Neil Jordan would go on to make several major masterpieces, finally getting the recognition he deserved for The Crying Game in 1992 for which he would win for Best Original Screenplay.

Other filmmakers of that era would soon follow. Stephen Frears, the director of My Beautiful Launderette would receive his first nominations for Dangerous Liaisons in 1988 and has been a major force in both British and American films and TV ever since. Jim Sheridan would make his film debut with the extraordinary My Left Foot the story of Christy Brown. Daniel Day-Lewis was officially introduced to America and immediately entered the clique of the greatest actors of all time, winning the first of three Best Actor Academy Awards. (After the standing ovation, he told the theater: “You’ve set up the makings of a great weekend in Ireland.)

And completing the circle of the original British invasion that year saw the first Shakespearean adaption of Kenneth Branagh, Laurence Olivier’s godfather. Fittingly he also adapted Henry V but while he was as much of an artist as Olivier, he was far more of a guerilla filmmaker. It took him just two months to shoot the entire film – Olivier famously spent that much time shooting Agincourt alone – and his film was received to enormous acclaim. He received the Best Director prize from the National Board of Review and won Best new director from the New York Film Critics. That year he would be nominated for Best Actor and Best Director. One of the smaller roles would be played by Emma Thompson, who Branagh would briefly be married too. It wouldn’t take long for the rest of America to fall in love with her either.

Not long after American studios would start to move away from the kind of director’s visions that they had allowed in the past. In a sense the British filmmakers managed to fill that void in the Academy Awards. But having seen all of the struggles they have gone through to get respectability from the Academy over the years – and honestly, how brilliant the majority of their performances and movies are – it is hard to begrudge them their seat at the table these days. The British Empire is no more and Britain itself facing a tumultuous future but it is hard to look at their body of work then and now and argue that as far as the Oscars are concerned, there will always be an England. (Sorry I couldn’t resist.)

Did The 26th Amendment Fail, Part 6: How The Democrats Decision To Appeal To Future Voters May Have Damaged Them Irrevocably In The Present

 

Only the stunning upset of Donald Trump in 2016 is an explanation for the Democratic Party’s actions in its aftermath when it came to the strategy it has followed – off a cliff, some might say – to the present day. In the aftermath of previous electoral defeats the party had attempt to move away from strategies that had led to defeat. Bill Clinton had won in 1992 because of his decision to find ‘a Third Way’ and eventually had built a coalition of Blue Dog Democrats. After John Kerry’s electoral loss in 2004 Howard Dean had adopted a 50 state strategy that would lead to the Democrats winning control of Congress for the first time in twelve years in 2006 and Obama’s victory two years later.

By contrast the strategy that the Democrats adopted was one that had already failed in 2016 -  Bernie Sanders’s insurgent attempt to win the Democratic nomination by appealing to the left. As illustrated above this strategy mirrored almost exactly George McGovern’s attempt to win the Democratic nomination and then the Presidency in 1972; the latter had led to the most resounding electoral defeat in the history of the party and Sanders hadn’t even been able to win the nomination in his attempt. The Democrats for the first time in their long history seemed determined not to win voters that had been part of the coalition that had worked for them but to win voters that might be part of it. Rather than lean on the present and the past, they were gambling that they could win potential voters.

It was a ridiculous tactic because history already proved it had failed. While the percentage of 18-21 years olds had increased slightly since its nadir of 32 percent in 2000, it had by and large remained low compared to the rest of the coalition. During Obama’s run for the Presidency he had managed to get 44 percent in 2008 but it had dropped to 38 percent four years later and had only marginally increased in 2016. In the forty-five years since the passage of the 26^th Amendment the young had made it very clear that they viewed the electoral process as irrelevant to bring about the change they claimed to want.

And it was still vastly unclear what they wanted. They marched against big corporations polluting the environment; they marched in meetings of the WTO; they marched against the War in Iraq and the War on Terror; they gathered in Occupy Wall Street and they marched against police killings across the country. But just as with the anti-Vietnam protests, they did so regardless of whether a Republican or Democrat was the President and they frequently saw everyone in power as part of the problem. They didn’t think the system could be fixed and they made no effort to argue for what they wanted in its place. They didn’t like reform and they were too lazy for revolution. The idea that one could form an electoral coalition with a group that, by and large, thought elections could change nothing was one of the most foolhardy ideas any political party has ever tried in the history of the world.

And the Democrats got the biggest of warning signs in the leadup to the 2018 midterms. Three days after Trump was sworn in, two leaders of Sanders’ failed presidential campaign formed the Justice Democrats. It aspired to elect ‘a new type of Democratic majority in Congress that will create a thriving economy and democracy that works for the people, not big money interests.” It made clear it would only endorse candidates who promised to refuse donations from corporate PACs and lobbyists. Sanders, it should be noted, has never identified with the Justice Democrats.

Refusing to accept corporate donations was noble and also foolish. They knew the only way to win elections was with money but by refusing to accept the major source they guaranteed they would always be underfunded. Indeed it was only after merging with two other progressive groups that they were able to compete at all.

By July of that year, they had what amounted to platform and almost from the start it was very clear what the Justice Democrats wanted: they were in favor of the Green New Deal, ending the death penalty, ending the War on Drugs, ensuring universal education, universal health care, expanding anti-discrimination laws, expanding background checks on firearms, campaign finance reform, and larger electoral reform, abolishing ICE and reforming police, renegotiating world trade, stopping reductions to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Notably absent from the platform is how one would pay for any of these huge reforms.

And there is almost nothing in this platform that would help the working class voter or indeed anything that isn’t related to some form of minority rights or protection. The closes they come is a federal job guarantee (not far removed from some of the more ridiculed elements of McGovern’s campaign) and making the minimum wage a living wage and tying into inflation. There is much for the future and nothing for the present. None of it could be passed without sweeping majorities in both houses of Congress as well as a Democratic President, none of which they were going to have any time soon.

It is worth comparing this movement to other left-wing parties. The Populist Party in the 1890s, which was based on a combination of rights for workers and many classifications that were part of the New Deal from 1890 to 1894 was becoming an electoral force, eventually gaining 13 seats in the House and four seats in the Senate from the West and the South before the rise of William Jennings Bryan gutted them. Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party managed to gain 10 congressional seats and two Senate seats in 1912. In both cases the party was less concerned with social change but economic changes and was trying to help the working class through economic reform. The Justice Democrats were built on social revolution – much of which was built to appeal to the underprivileged – and had very little to offer in economics to working class voters.

And from the start it was clear how limited this appeal was. The Justice Democrats endorsed 79 candidates in Democratic primaries in the 2018 midterms, five gubernatorial candidates, four senate candidates and the rest in Congress. They were able to elect four new members in 2018 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Taib, Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Presley. All four were represented the bluest states in America  (New York, Michigan, Minnesota and Massachusetts.) And their were limitation even within those states:  four other Justice Democrats ran for Congress or Governor in New York state; none got more than 19 percent in their primary. Rashida Taib barely survived her primary and while two other Michigan Justice Democrats were unopposed both lost. None moved forward in California and none could get off the ground in Texas.

The Justice Democrats had no appeal outside the selected few but the Democratic Party for whatever reason more or less chose to make so much of the Squad and the platform they represented part almost front row center going in 2020. This merger, as one might expect, helped the Justice Democrats more than the national party.

In 2020 they reduced their endorsement to 17 candidates in primaries, including Bernie Sanders for President. (He declined their endorsement. Their biggest push was in the House where they endorsed eight new candidates. Five of them managed to make it past their primary and only three of them -   Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush and Marie Newman of Illinois -managed to win seats. By contrast the Democrats lost thirteen seats in Congress and didn’t defeat a single Republican incumbent.

By any rational interpretation the 2020 election was a mandate on Trump’s mishandling of the Covid Pandemic than any possible mandate for the Justice Democrats. But because the number of 18-21 year olds had jumped from 39.4 percent in 2016 to nearly 48 percent in 2020 the Biden administration interpreted this to mean that the left should be given a seat at the table more prominently than they had in the past. No doubt Biden and his team hoped that this would finally add young voters and members of the left coalition to full throated Democratic supporters.

That did not happen, certainly not among the Justice Democrats themselves. Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush were among the biggest thorns in the Biden administration’s side, refusing to vote for his Infrastructure bill and continuing to advocate for the far left causes they had been a part of. Members of the squad used their seats in Congress to continuously demand their legislation such as the Green New Deal and Medicare for All be passed by Congress even though the administration knew that there was no way they get through even in a compromised form given the makeup of Congress. Biden had famously campaigned as a unifier determined to represent all Americans ‘even the ones who didn’t vote for him.’ For members of the Justice Democrats such as Cori Bush, who once said she ignored the calls of people who disagreed with her, that made his administration as much the problem as anything.

The left and its websites chose to turn its wrath not just on the Republican party but members that had been Democrats longer than they had. Prominent among them was Joe Manchin who had been elected for a full term since Robert Byrd’s passing and had been part of the West Virgina Democratic party since 1982. Throughout his career he was considered by far the most centrist member of the Senate, a necessity for someone trying to be a Democrat in a state that was becoming ruby red.

None of this mattered to the left or the Justice Democrats who constantly show an inability to understand that being a Democrat in an urban state like New York is not the same thing as one in a rural state like West Virginia. And as of the 2020 elections the Democratic Party was running out of red state Democrats at a frightening number. This was in keeping with the attitude of so many members of the left who constantly feel that red states themselves are a foreign country unworthy of the kindness of Democrats. There are, of course, African-Americans, women, members of the LGBTQ+ community and Latinos in these deep red states. But because there aren’t as many of them in these states as in the urban states the Democratic Party had always tried to mandate its message to working class voters.

By 2020, it was clear the working class voter was now almost exclusive Republican: Biden had managed to only win 37 percent of that demographic that year, by far the lowest margin in nearly a century. The Justice Democrats made it very clear that they couldn’t care less and neither did many of their major voters. In their opinion, the working class voter represented the past and they were the future. Best to leave them in the footnotes of history.

This is in keeping with the attitude of the left ever since the Vietnam War and it has only amplified exponentially in the era of social media. Activists can afford to take the binary moral visions of the left; politicians can’t. That two members of the Justice Democrats found this out in 2024  - when their positions on Gaza ran contrary to their own voters – is a sign of their own limitations. Both Bowman and Bush were more committed to the positions of activists in Congress then politicians. Neither seemed that sorry to be primaried out.

As the Democratic Party found out well before Biden had to withdraw trying to win over the young and the left is nearly impossible because they seem more obsessed with what they think they should have then what they actually have. Much has been made about how in the era of Trump, the Republican party has embraced the politics of grievances and rage rather than policy. But the far left is actually worse: they have grievances and rage to spare but find electoral politics beneath them.

Much of this was on full display in an editorial run by the leftwing magazine The Nation last October. Written by the interns of the publications, it ran an editorial counter to the publication endorsement of Kamala Harris. The interns argued that neither Trump nor Harris’s election was likely to bring about an adequate solution in the Middle East – and that neither was good candidate when it came to preserving democracy. To be clear these interns had all lived through the first Trump administration and like so many of the left knew what he was planning to do in his second administration. And yet showing no common sense, they argued that a man who was very clear on what he was and what he intended to was no more danger to democracy then someone who had campaigned on preserving it.

They advocated that the best thing to help the situation in Gaza was to continue demonstrating and marching on campuses, demanded universities divest from Israel. (Only one had in the year since October 7^th.) That these kinds of protests had led to Richard Nixon’s election in 1968 – and by extension four more years of horror in Vietnam – might not have been known to the interns but was certainly known to the editors. Those editors also had to know that the only way to bring about a ceasefire was through political pressure and a willingness on both sides to negotiate: something that the administration had been doing everything in his power to do for months. They also knew it could not happen unless people across the globe agreed to it,  and that the actions of protests around the world was a very minor factor in the corridors of power.

That the editors chose to let this editorial, which was a direct disagreement with their previous endorsement is in a way a larger metaphor for how the left sees so much of the world. In their minds, everything that happens is a moral choice with a simple right and wrong answer of which they the left know what the right one is. Everyone in the world should act solely on that, absent economic, political, or any real world factors and make the morally right decision regardless of whatever the ramifications or consequences might be to themselves or the institution they represent. Doing the right thing is all that matters.

This is not a position that survives in the real world. But increasingly among the young, they live not in the real world but on social media where one can pick and choose ones friends based solely on whether they agree with what you think and one doesn’t have to listen to a single dissenting voice. On the internet one can find any information one wants about almost anything in the world without any real effort. And with no controls or guard rails, opinion and fact are interchangeable and depending upon the viewer, they can find a historical record that fits their own that is relevant to their world view and has nothing to do with reality. And it is far easier in these dissent to shun and dismiss as a monster anyone who disagrees with you than at any time in the history of the world.

And combined with a generation of parent that is both too controlling and too lazy, an entire generation has been raised to trust only themselves and no institutions. Much of the world has become dark and chaotic over the decades – in large part due to the absence of younger generations from the political process –  but the generation that has the power where it will fall on by and large has decided that if it happens, they have no intention of doing anything that might make it better. They will march, they will protest, they will rant on social media but get involved in voting drives? Talk with people who have opposing viewpoints? That’s not their job. The heavy lifting is for someone else to do, not them.

There is a large part of our nation that still believes that this generation is the future, far less because of intelligence and almost entirely on technological savvy. Common sense is not only a dying art, for most of this generation it’s something that never worked in the first place because it was part of the system. That this system provided them with everything they have, including the tools they use to denounce it, is irrelevant. It is not their responsibility to fix what is broken in our society. Their job is to do what the left has always done: denounce it, march against it and not do a think to give guidance as to what might work better. The future and the past are meaningless to the online present they live in. The world owes them everything even if they can’t define it.

In the conclusion to this article I will deal with the myths that the youth  believes can fix America and what may have to be done to actually fix it.