Somehow I’m not surprised by this bit of news. At least McClellan is willing to admit he was wrong about something.
In other, happier news: Lost finale tomorrow! I have high hopes for another mind-blower. Don’t let me down, writers. The finale of The Office was uninspiring, so give me something to love on TV again.
Also, I went to see Barbara Walters tonight. She is promoting her new book. It was awesome.
Categories: america · media · politics · television
This is a paper I wrote on the book The Things They Carried for my U.S. history class. I got a really good grade on it so I figured I’d share it with the blogosphere. Be warned: it’s a little long.
“A true war story is never moral,” writes Tim O’Brien in his book The Things They Carried. Indeed, if there ever was a hard lesson learned by the United States, its citizens and, most importantly, the soldiers during the Vietnam War, it was that war was without morals, no matter how Hollywood depicted it. The stories that came out of the war, therefore, could teach no uplifting lesson nor create heroes without being a complete farce.
O’Brien’s collection of short stories about his war experience that became The Things They Carried has no unifying purpose, no gallant protagonist, and no respect for the fall-back traits of a ‘war novel’; he simply tells his story as he knew it. Whether his stories of war and its aftermath are factual realities makes no difference. But when thinking about what effects the Vietnam War had on its veterans after they returned home, one must first understand how it affected them even before they arrived in the dense, sweaty jungles of Vietnam.
To the millions of young American men in the late 1960s, a draft notice seemed imminent. Some readily accepted their conscription as a patriotic duty; others vocally and violently protested it. But all of them—the doves and hawks alike—feared it in some way. The teenage Tim O’Brien was no different. However, in his youth and naïveté, believed that “if the stakes ever became high enough… [he] would simply tap a secret reservoir of courage that had been accumulating inside [him] over the years…in preparation for that day when the [courage] account must be drawn down.” It is a common belief among young men, which for O’Brien, sadly, did not hold up.
In the chapter “On the Rainy River,” O’Brien describes in fascinating detail the deepest and darkest secret he had kept completely to himself until he wrote it down. He received his draft notice in the summer of 1968, during the height of the Tet Offensive, and was thrown into a moral and psychological whirlwind; should he flee to Canada or resign to his conscription? “It was a kind of schizophrenia. A moral split. I couldn’t make up my mind. I feared the war, yes, but I also feared exile.” Already, before he had picked up a gun and shot at another human being, he was at war with himself.
He lists off every reason why he thinks he shouldn’t have to go to war: he was too smart, too compassionate; he hated camping out and the sight of blood. Though, in reality, the secret account of courage he thought he had was short on funds. This becomes evident when he decides to bolt for the border, eventually making it to a small motel in the wilderness directly across a lake from Canada. He stays there for nearly a week with the innkeeper, stuck in his very own purgatory.
He gets the chance to jump from a boat and swim to the Canadian shore, to live a life of physical freedom but moral handicap. But he can’t do it. “[It was] a moral freeze. I couldn’t decide, I couldn’t act, I couldn’t comport myself with even a pretense of modest human dignity.” He tries to force himself to jump, but the thought of embarrassment overtakes him. He would go to war.
O’Brien acknowledges up front that he waited so long to tell this story simply because of the embarrassment of not being able to act heroically when it mattered. It was a coming-of-age moment in his life, which reflected the same process the country would go through during its decade long engagement with Vietnam. The classic heroics and sturdy platitudes of World War II—that America was inherently good and right and honorable—faltered because of Vietnam. O’Brien’s personal crisis, a crisis of moral confliction rather than simple cowardice, embodied every other fighting man’s.
The Things They Carried could be considered a post-modern novel. There is not one main character that the reader follows throughout the book, nor a single narrative arc that connects each character and each plot point, and no chapter is necessarily dependent on another. It is important to consider this style of writing because the way O’Brien chooses to write about Vietnam reveals how he values and what he feels about his Vietnam experience.
Writing about his pre-war life, O’Brien stays more or less on a clear, singular path. But when he describes the war itself, the writing structure becomes disjointed, like fragments of memory mashed together. In this way, the content informs the structure. His pre-war days were smooth and straight. Then, he enters Vietnam, and his life’s structure and path are blown off course. Once he leaves Vietnam and continues his life, things slow down and take form again, but not without bumps in the road.
With that idea in mind, the stories from the war zone make more sense. Everything O’Brien knew as an ordinary young man was scrambled in with the chaos of Vietnam. The personal crisis he fought through before he became a soldier was nothing compared to the deeper dilemmas that soldiers experience. He describes his reaction to killing a man: “I did not hate the young man; I did not see him as the enemy; I did not ponder issues of morality or politics or military duty.” He didn’t weep softly or have a nervous breakdown after killing the man; he wasn’t so mentally disturbed that he couldn’t function as a soldier; he simply slips into a vast, unquantifiable gray area.
Within this gray area, what really happens becomes jumbled with what seems to happen. This is why, O’Brien explains, war stories should never be trusted with the truth. “The angles of vision are skewed…there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.” Because of this dichotomy, O’Brien admits to a loss of firm, absolute truth in war stories and, consequently, the war itself: “Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate…and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity.”
The veterans carried this feeling with them from the swamps of Vietnam all the way back home to America. This disillusionment with the old ways—the eternal truths taken for granted—defined the era. The lives the soldiers lived before the war, before their draft notices, was black-and-white, but no more. The overwhelming ambiguity of war became the controlled chaos of civilian life. O’Brien writes about Norman Bowker, his comrade in the war, who returned home and found that his life had no particular purpose. Bowker drove aimlessly around a lake as if he was caught on a broken record. He was idling, literally and figuratively, between his former life as a soldier and his uncertain future. He wrote O’Brien to describe the feeling: “[T]here’s no place to go… My life, I mean. It’s almost like I got killed over in Nam.” Whatever part of him Bowker felt was killed in Vietnam was soon joined with the rest of him; he hanged himself a few years after returning home.
O’Brien had a different post-war experience. He wasn’t driven to suicide, but the over-whelming ambiguity he described stayed with him. When he returned to Vietnam with his daughter about twenty years after the war, he visited the place where his best friend Kiowa died —the one event that haunted him and that he blamed himself for. He waded into a lake and dropped Kiowa’s moccasins in the place he thought was where Kiowa died. He was trying to find some sort of emotional solace, and found it: “In a way, maybe, I’d gone under with Kiowa, and now after two decades I’d finally worked my way out.” O’Brien found the peace Norman Bowker and many other Vietnam veterans could not find.
The pre- and post-war experience of Vietnam veterans like Tim O’Brien and Norman Bowker were intrinsically linked by the war itself. Like a magnet, Vietnam pulled those young men away from their home, willingly or not, to battle; likewise, Vietnam in the theoretical—the lifelong physical and mental battle scars—kept its unbending and unseen hold on the young men as they returned home. They, along with the rest of the country, would not be able to shake off the uneasiness of the times. Everyone from the shores of Maine to the streets of Los Angeles, in a way, carried the same weight O’Brien and Bowker and countless other veterans carried through the “ghostly fog, thick and permanent” that was Vietnam.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tell me I’m not crazy.
It seems like after the writers strike-induced hiatus, LOST got a whole lot better and The Office got a whole lot worse.
LOST’s entire 4th season has been, overall, pretty fantastic. They’ve taken a new yet exciting direction with the implementation of flash-forwards and they now have an end date for the series, so they’re able to write towards that finale with some confidence.
The Office, on the other hand, has lost something. The first half of the season, before the strike, was strong and moved the story along well enough and remained consistently funny, with both their trademark painful awkwardness and crazy hysterics from Michael or Dwight.
After the strike, nothing was that funny. Most of the story lines became borderline depressing and staid. The Jim/Pam arc was going okay even though they were together, yet in recent episodes, I keep expecting Jim to propose and every he doesn’t take the chance, the excitement for their relationship wanes a little more.
There are little moments that are funny; mostly the Jim/Dwight pranks, but that is quickly becoming a tired element of the show. It can’t produce all of the laughs. I realize and respect the need for drama in a comedy. I think it makes The Office a more mature sitcom if it can handle darker material. But recently, it hasn’t been doing that well.
The finale failed to inspire any more confidence. While I recognize the need to set-up the stories for next season — Dwight and Angela still going hot ‘n’ heavy, Jim and Pam still unable to seal the deal, Michael and Jan still trapped in a horribly destructive relationship — I didn’t laugh once during the finale. There were a few smiles and an occasional half-hearted chuckle, but that’s it.
Maybe I’ll watch it again and give it another chance, but as of right now, I’m not pining for the return of The Office. On the other hand, Lost has betwixt me heart and soul and I have to resign to the fact that us Losties have to wait another millennium for a new season. That is, of course, if the Screen Actors Guild doesn’t go on strike and ruin another TV season. I could care less about any other show; just let The Office and Lost live.
Categories: media · television
President Bush gave an online interview to Politico.com in the White House last week about his daughter’s wedding and other current events. He’s technically a lame duck president (though I don’t how who is more lame: the President or the Democratic Congress), so it seems like he’s just trying to stay relevant and effective.
Mission not accomplished.
The reporter asked the president whether he felt he was “misled” about the weapons of mass destruction. The president responded, “I felt like there were weapons of mass destruction. You know, ‘mislead’ is a strong word, it almost connotes some kind of intentional—I don’t think so, I think not only our intelligence community, but intelligence communities all across the world shared the same assessment.”
So you ‘felt’ like there were WMD? You felt? So you’re the Feeler-in-Chief now? You’re already the self-proclaimed ‘Decider’ and ‘Commander Guy’—was Commander-in-Chief not enough for you? Stephen Colbert should be choosing gut feelings over facts, not you. You’re the military and political leader of the most powerful nation on Earth. Get your head straight before you consult your feelings.
The reporter then asked if the President’s lack of golfing in recent years is related to the Iraq War. Bush responded, “Yes, it really is. I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the Commander-in-Chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the families to be as—to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”
So the best way of showing solidarity with the 155,000 American troops in Iraq—over 4,000 of which are dead and nearly 30,000 of which are seriously wounded—is to not play golf? How thoughtful of you. So if I give up playing ultimate Frisbee I’ll be supporting the troops? What is wrong with you, sir? Giving up a hobby will not end this war.
And giving up golf is the best you can do to help the troops? Really? Don’t you think ending the war would be a little better? Start by being diplomatic. I know your administration has not favored this approach, but just give it a try. You’re the one person who can get good things done if you just shut up and do something. Then again, you’re great at creating problems you see no need in trying to fix, so I probably shouldn’t hope for too much productivity in these remaining months you have until you can play golf again.
Next, the reporter asked the President to give the Democratic Congress a letter grade for their work. Bush replied, “There hasn’t been much action…and so I would call them stalled. I would call them, so far, good at verbiage and not so good at results.”
Oh, Mr. President, is there no limit to your hilarity? So when you said in 2000, “When America uses force in the world, the cause must be just, the goal must be clear, and the victory must be overwhelming,” you didn’t actually mean it, right? Because the cause for war in Iraq was not just, the goal is anything but clear, and we have barely even survived in the Middle East, let alone win overwhelmingly. (Didn’t see that coming…) So let us know when you have some results. We’re waiting patiently.
We are supposed elect presidents for their political abilities and good judgment. My fellow Americans, those of us who are sick of mindless cowboy “diplomacy” and contempt for anyone else’s opinion; those of us who can’t wait to call George W. Bush a ‘former’ president; those of us who are mad as hell and don’t want to take it anymore; let’s try to get it right this year. I don’t want to be embarrassed by my president for any longer.
Based on real events.
One hundred eighth-graders fill a small gym. It is the required dance at the end of the year. They weren’t grinding and rebellious. It was sanitized and supervised. Strobe lights danced around the room. The bass was overbearing.
Each clique found an area to loiter. Ben lounged on the wooden bleachers at one end of the gym with the boys who didn’t have girlfriends or any other motivation to enjoy themselves. Ben’s peers had been dating since fourth grade, but he never found it in himself to try.
Two cute popular girls had attracted a following. They said they were going to kiss each other, so the boys followed them like puppies. Ben knew nothing would happen, but that didn’t stop him from following for a bit. He resigned back to the bleachers and watched people dance. Ben created conversations over the lips of people talking nearby. Brent the basketball player wanted to dance with someone.
“What about Jessica?”
Luke and Ben were scouting for the perfect girl for Brent. They didn’t have girlfriends of their own, so they needed some way to look cool and confident. Brent disapproved of Jessica.
“Nah, man. What are those, A-cups?”
They went back to the hunt. There were girls on the bleachers as well. They looked bored too, but they tried harder to hide their desperation for a mate. The DJ said a slow song was coming up. They would have to try even harder to look self-assured and avoid any potential dance requests from ugly girls. It was a good time for a bathroom break.
The bathrooms were in the hallway outside of the gym. The chaperones had put barriers up at the ends of the hall to avoid misbehavior, but there was still space to mingle in a quieter way. There was only one other boy in the bathroom. Jeff Schmidt was one of the cool boys. The kind that weren’t total jerks but took advantage of their privileged status in the pecking order. Ben didn’t talk to these boys much—he hardly talked at all—but the year’s end provoked conversation.
Ben never started a conversation. He only made eye contact. Luckily Jeff was social.
“Hey, Ben. You hear Jenna and Renee are gonna kiss?”
He remembered his name. “They haven’t yet?”
“Nah, but it’ll happen. Stay tuned.”
Ben tried to look like he didn’t love talking with the cool kids. He didn’t want to geek out when they chose to talk to him. That wouldn’t have been cool. Ben came out of the bathroom with confidence. He didn’t really want to go back to the dance. He wanted to reenter the scene and observe and hope for something cool to happen and watch the cool kids do their thing and sit on the bleachers and share in miserable camaraderie with his friends. But he also didn’t want to go back for all of those reasons. It was tiring, that whole dance of middle school socialization. He didn’t know he was an introvert. It was a chore to look confident while really being desperate.
Ben stood in the hall and looked at the wall trying to decide his fate. Laura walked out of the dance laughing with a friend. She enjoyed being there enough for the both of them. Her friend entered the bathroom but Ben caught Laura’s eyes and she stayed.
“Hey, Ben. What’re you doing out here?”
“Just going to the bathroom. I was about to go back in.”
She studied him like a specimen. He didn’t want to keep up the dance. Luckily she took the next step.
“Would you want to dance with me?”
Holy shit. Wait, let her finish.
“Maybe at the next slower song?”
Ben knew he would botch the delivery, but he had no choice. “Uh…yeah…I guess.”
Her friend reappeared and the girls reentered the darkness. “Okay, I’ll see you in there.”
Ben had never danced with a girl he liked before. He had never even danced before. Maybe her friends put her up to it. He had to get out of it somehow. Maybe he would fake sickness. His innocent affection for her was overruled by his powerful willingness to avoid awkward interaction. Yet there he stood, wondering how he let himself speak without permission from his superego.
Ben slipped back into the dance. The strobes still danced and the bass was still overbearing. He zeroed in to Laura and planed his route to the bleachers accordingly. Luke and Brent were still there scouting.
“Guys, Laura Hall just asked me to dance.”
Luke choked on his soda. “And you said yes?”
Ben nodded. Luke knew he had never dated before.
“Oh, my God. You’re totally fucked. Now she’ll want to date you. You’re so fucked.”
He tried to look amused and in control. He didn’t want to date her. He didn’t even want to dance with her. She wasn’t ugly. Maybe dating wouldn’t be that bad. He had never done it before. It was just a dance. All he could think about was the next song. Please, DJ, just give me more time. He kept his eyes on Laura and her crew. They were laughing and dancing. It was the kind of self-assured dancing girls do. They danced and laughed and drank their soda. Ben cycled through his options. He couldn’t escape to the bathroom again. The chaperones wouldn’t let them leave. He couldn’t hide from her the whole night. He would have to face the music and dance.
The DJ put on “I Knew I Loved You” by Savage Garden. That bastard.
“All right, everybody. Ladies’ choice, ladies’ choice. Don’t be shy, guys.”
Laura broke away from her pack. She knew exactly where he was. She had watched him the entire night. She would finally see the final act of her devious plan to dance with him come to fruition. Ben looked to his friends for something, anything.
“Dude, you’re so screwed. Good luck, man.”
Brent was already dancing with a girl. He had finally decided on one. It was easy for him. He already had his hands at her waist, slowly crawling in. They were swaying like marsh reeds. Ben looked back at Laura. She was closing in fast. His exits were blocked, his friends were traitors, and his crush had found her prey. There was nothing he could do. Unless…
“Hey, Ben. Wanna dance now?”
“I, uh, can’t.”
“Why not?” She grabbed his arm and tried to rope him in.
“Uh, sorry, but I’m feeling really sick right now.”
He clutched his stomach for dramatic effect.
“What? You seemed fine a minute ago.”
“I know, but I just feel really sick, and I don’t want to throw up on you.”
“You won’t. It’s fine. Just—”
“Seriously. I just can’t dance. Sorry.”
Laura retreated back to her friends, who were already dancing with other boys. Ben didn’t care about hurting her feelings. All he thought about was escape, survival. He held his stomach and looked consternated. He wasn’t enjoying himself anyway.
I think us moviegoers have caught on to the whole Superhero Movie thing. We’ve learned that comic book superheroes are born out of a freak radioactive experiment gone wrong, or out of childhood anger, yadda yadda yadda. We know that evil villains will eventually be outsmarted and killed due to excessive monologuing. We’ve caught on to the formula, which is why the summer Superhero Movie blockbuster was in danger of extinction.
Was. Was in danger of extinction. Thanks to “Iron Man”, the Superhero Movie has returned to glory. And I say, welcome back.
Robert Downey Jr. plays the billionaire engineer, genius, and playboy Tony Stark who runs Stark Industries, a weapons manufacturer and military contractor. After a demonstration of his highly destructive state-of-the-art missile called the “Jericho”, Stark is attacked and captured by terrorists in Afghanistan. He gets hit with shrapnel in the attack, but avoids death by creating a device that keeps the shrapnel away from his heart using electro-magnetics.
Stark’s captors force him to build a new Jericho missile inside a cave completely from scratch, but he instead builds an armored iron suit equipped with guns and missiles a plenty and escapes his captivity. But after seeing his own company’s weapons being used by the enemy against American forces, Stark returns home with a new mindset. He decides to no longer manufacture weapons. This moral transformation is the key to the entire film.
Stark secretly rebuilds the armored iron suit he created with new hi-tech features, intent on using it to destroy the enemy forces from which he escaped and the weapons they were using. The scenes where Stark perfects the design are full of slapstick and wit between Stark and his robotic lab assistants. The final product, the Iron Man, looks something like the Tin Man from the year 3000, outfitted with hyper-intelligent technology and a slick paint job.
Stark’s conversion from being a cocky showboat to a morally-conflicted superhero is what makes these kinds of films interesting to watch. He is tremendously flawed, even with his intelligence, but we still like him and want him to succeed.
Only a few people close to Stark see the transformation: his assistant Pepper (Gwyneth Paltrow), who tries to balance her strong independence and her increasing attraction to Stark; his business partner Obadiah (Jeff Bridges), who tries to hide shady business deals from the newly-idealistic Stark; and Rhodes, Stark’s Air Force Colonel friend who is wary of Stark’s new crime-fighting methods.
Ultimately, Robert Downey Jr. is this movie. He’s funny, quirky, and a terrific actor. He’s also a unique casting choice for a superhero, which is why the film works so well. His troubled real-life back story helps his character seem all the more real. Story-wise, “Iron Man” isn’t revolutionary, but that doesn’t really matter. The characters are strong and relatable, so the story simply falls into place around them.
Downey and the director Jon Favreau, who also directed “Elf” and “Zathura”, allow the film to stretch beyond the normal guidelines of the typical summer action movie. There are the usual high-octane action sequences, of course, but the talented supporting cast makes each character vital and interesting. The last superhero film to accomplish that was “Batman Begins.”
I’ve already heard Oscar buzz for this film, and rightly so. I would fully endorse a Best Actor nomination for Downey. The Academy has snubbed summer superhero movies in the past, and for good reason. They are produced solely to make a profit, so sometimes a quality cast and story are lost between the ridiculous special effects sequences. But not with this film. I was fully engaged with Stark’s moral debate, but I also thoroughly enjoyed Stark-as-Iron Man battling his nemesis at Mach-speed in the Los Angeles night sky.
“Iron Man” is just about the best movie to kick off the summer season. After last year’s lackluster threequels failed to inspire, Downey and Co. have given us something to fully enjoy without sacrificing the crucial elements that make a good film. Two sequels have already been planned—the first is set to release on April 30, 2010—so it looks like we’ll be seeing much more of Stark and Iron Man. And I say, bring it on.
