Convergences: Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis's Dallas 1963

Fifty years later and the assassination of President John Kennedy still hasn't been settled. Besides those who feel that there are questions remaining to be answered, people continuously reflect back to that November day as if they could change its outcome. Phil Dyess-Nugent suggested the other day in his sharply observed piece on JFK conspiracy films that our comfort zone gets severely rocked when a loner, a virtual nobody, can walk into history and completely alter it, as Lee Harvey Oswald most likely did. Yet the true mystery of the murder is that we can't resolve one simple question: How is it possible that our larger than life figures are never safe from the alienated souls who walk our city streets? Many of us found out on November 22, 1963 that they're not. These underground men and women who choose to change history by killing those who are making it go unnoticed, and they are lethal shadows we never see coming. Of course, political conspiracies do exist, but they operate more often in a chaotic world where plans are never so easily acted out. They emerge as much by accident as they do in the dark rooms where devious schemes get hatched. (Brian De Palma's 1981 conspiracy thriller Blow Out provides a perfect illustration of how happenstance undermines our ability to control and execute plans.) Nevertheless, Mark Lane, in his otherwise speculative JFK conspiracy book, Rush to Judgement, was correct in saying that the variables in the murder of JFK delve into the primal taboo of parricide, where the father is murdered and we need to seek closure. This desire for quick and easy resolution as a means to appease our guilt over this family crime can be just as applicable to those who insist there are shooters on the grassy knoll as it is to folks who exalt the Warren Commission's findings.

One lingering query that does still emerge out of the assassination – by those who believe Kennedy's death was part of a plot and also by those who didn't – is why did the murder happen in Dallas? Arthur Penn thought he answered it in his 1966 politically paranoid assassination thriller The Chase, which takes place in a corrupted Texas town (obviously standing in for Dallas) that's overrun by right-wing zealots and Klansmen and climaxes with a political murder. Film critic Pauline Kael, though, in seeing through the literal metaphor, dismissed that idea and panned the picture while saying, "Many people all over the world blame Texas for the assassination of Kennedy – as if the murder had boiled up out of the unconscious of the people there – and the film confirms this hysterical view." There's no doubt that The Chase, made three years after the Kennedy killing, wallows in delirium and self-hatred. Still, Texas scholars Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis in their new book, Dallas 1963 (Grand Central Publishing), suggest that there might be good reasons why the murder of the President boiled up in Dallas, where a fermenting climate of violent right-wing extremism was consuming the city.

Mirrors: 9/11 and the New Media

One night, about four years ago, I was sitting in front of my computer at work, just killing time and finishing some e-mails. As I was about to head home, a Chinese employee in her mid-thirties just happened by my office to chat. In no particular hurry to leave, I asked her to sit and soon we began talking about her short time in Canada as well as the journey that brought her here from Beijing. Our conversation quickly got around to world affairs and some of the historical events that touched, perhaps even changed our lives. After I rhymed off some of the key ones for me – from JFK's assassination to 9/11 – I suggested that for her the massacre of the students at Tiananmen Square in 1989 had to be a seminal event. Instead of nodding in full recognition of the terrible slaughter of that June, she looked at me with the puzzled expression of someone left out of the loop of a conversation.

Certainly I must be confusing this horror with some other place, some other country, some other time, her face told me. While I insisted on what I knew to be historical fact, she was adamant that Tiananmen Square never saw such a calamity. For her, not only had Tiananmen Square never happened, student leader Chai Ling never existed, nor did the iconic sight of the sole protester standing in front of the tank; an image that, for many, stood for both the resiliency of human defiance as well as its futility when it's up against enormous odds. In her mind, there never were such odds at stake. Her expression of denial proved wrong the hopeful young female student speaking to the BBC who, in the middle of the protests, told the reporter, "What can they do to us? We have our whole future ahead of us, and we've seen it." The student obviously didn't see a future where one of her own citizens had no knowledge, or even a recognition of the events that prompted her to see a better future, a time she saw ahead as a period of democratic freedom that China has yet to attain.

Vicious Circles: The JFK Conspiracy Films

Immersing oneself in the conspiracy mythology that has grown up around the assassination of President Kennedy means hearing, again and again, confident assertions of things that have been repeatedly shown to be untrue. Oswald couldn’t shoot straight, they say, and no one could get off the number of shots he supposed fired in the space of time he had using the weapon he would have used. There's also exhaustive, detailed arguments that completely unravel upon close inspection (such as all the mocking elaborations on the impossible trajectory of the bullet that passed through the bodies of Kennedy and John Connally that fail to take into account the fact that, as you guess just from looking at photos of the two men riding in the presidential limousine, Kennedy’s seat was a few key inches higher than Connally’s).

There was never any valid intellectual reason for doubting that Lee Harvey Oswald was the president’s killer, just as there’s never been any valid intellectual reason for doubting that the plays and poetry credited to William Shakespeare were written by William Shakespeare. Arguments that somebody else wrote Shakespeare’s work always come down to snobbery; they’re emotionally necessary for people who can’t deal with the fact that the greatest English writer was a mutt. The belief that Kennedy must have been the victim of a conspiracy must be very reassuring to people who can’t wrap their minds around the idea that some mutt with a mail-order rifle changed the course of history. That helps to explain why high-profile conspiracy proponents – people who claim to think that powerful forces, maybe even the government itself, murdered the president and got off scott free, never seem to be as furiously angry and despairing as you’d expect them to be. Given the chance to spout off, an Oliver Stone or Mark Lane is more likely to come across as remarkably at peace, even smug. Unlike the rest of us, they don’t live in a world where chaos reigns and things are out of man’s control. They know something you don’t know.

The Tracks of Our Years

Most coming of age movies that examine the tracks of our years often let the music of the era do the walking for them. George Lucas's American Graffiti (1973), for instance, provided a softer, more genial look at the past and so he provided a perfectly programmed jukebox of iconic songs from the late Fifties and early Sixties in order to wax nostalgic. Lucas was displaying his marketing savvy, as well, even before Star Wars (1977), in creating a merchandising scheme to sell albums filled with hits for those needing to drift back happily to their good ol' days. Barry Levinson's Diner (1982), however, gave the lie to the Archie comics sensibility that Lucas trafficked in, and also let the songs of Elvis Presley ("Don't Be Cruel"), Fats Domino ("Whole Lotta Loving") and Bobby Darin ("Dream Lover") simply become the air the characters breathed. The Del Vikings' propulsive "Come Go With Me,"for example, is used in both films but is much more memorable in Diner. As Tim Daly's Billy Howard, a reticent Wasp, arrives at the Baltimore train station to be best man at the wedding for Steve Guttenberg's Eddie Simmons, and he's greeted by all his old friends, Daly strides confidently towards them in perfect time to the Del Vikings. It's as if the tune's seductive swing and rhythm provided a casual sway that only his old hometown awakened in him. The music in Diner essentially interacts with the characters, like an ambient intoxicant, that seems to imbue the comic patter that keeps them up all night in their favourite roadhouse dig.

What We've Got Here is Failure to Communicate...: Excerpt from The Johnson Era in Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors

Vice President Lyndon Johnson taking the oath of office on November 22, 1963

Back in 1994, when I was just beginning a free-lance career, I had an idea for a book about American movies. That year, I'd seen Ivan Reitman's sentimental comedy Dave, starring Kevin Kline as a conservative President who falls into a coma and is replaced by a look-a-like (also played by Kline) so the public won't be sent into a panic. Of course, the new President is more liberal and ultimately alters the policies of the true President. To my mind, it was as if we were watching George H. Bush morph into Bill Clinton. From that comedy came the idea for Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism.

I wanted Reflections to examine how key American movies from the Kennedy era onward had soaked up the political and cultural ideals of the time in which they were made. By delving into the American experience from Kennedy to Clinton, I thought the book could capture, through a number of films, how the dashed hopes of the sixties were reflected back in the resurgence of liberal idealism in the Clinton nineties. After drawing up an outline, I sent the proposal off to publishers who all sent it back, saying that it would never sell. One Canadian press almost squeaked it through, but their marketing division headed them off at the pass. From there, I went on to co-write a book (with Critics at Large colleague and friend Susan Green) on the TV show, Law & Order, and later my own books about Frank Zappa, Randy Newman, the album Trout Mask Replica and The Beatles. All the while, though, I kept updating Reflections, seeing my idea change in the wake of Monica Lewinsky, Clinton's impeachment, the 2000 election of Bush, 9/11, and finally the rise of Barack Obama. For the past number of years, Reflections has also been a hugely successful lecture series.The following is an excerpt from the chapter on the key films of the Lyndon Johnson years, 1963-1968.  

At the 1964 Democratic National Convention that August in Atlantic City, the nomination of President Lyndon Johnson and Vice President Hubert Humphrey to the party ticket was merely a formality. On the last day of the event, however, former Attorney General Robert Kennedy came onstage to introduce a short film made in tribute to his late brother. While the legacy of JFK filled the Boardwalk Hall, LBJ seethed at seeing his bid for a Great Society now being eclipsed by the grief and nostalgia the country still felt towards the former president who was gunned down a year earlier in Dallas. It didn't help either that as soon as Robert Kennedy appeared on the convention stage, the delegates erupted into an uninterrupted applause. It lasted nearly twenty minutes and left the sibling of the fallen leader almost in tears. When Robert Kennedy spoke about JFK's vision of the country, he also decided to quote significantly from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet: "When he shall die, take him and cut him out into the stars, and he shall make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night and pay no worship to the garish sun." In that brief moment, there was no question in LBJ's mind that the country remained "in love with night" and that he was "the garish sun." The bigger irony, though, was the positioning of John Kennedy as the dashed liberal hope of the Party, especially when it was Johnson who would live up to that liberal banner by creating legislation that upheld Medicare, civil rights, aid to the arts, public broadcasting, urban and rural development, and his War on Poverty. But there was something of an unspoken need to position Kennedy to the left, even if in his short term as president he was more of a hawk. It wasn't so much a national conspiracy that made this transformation possible as it was an unconscious need to avoid a more troubling consideration.

Imagine!: Jeff Greenfield’s If Kennedy Lived

Photo by Walt Cisco/Dallas Morning News

I was only four years old when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, fifty years ago today, also on Friday. Though I don’t remember that event I've always admired the man, despite the later revelations of his philandering before and during his years at the White House. I’m Canadian but like so many people I felt that JFK symbolized a promise for a better future for his country and by extension the rest of the planet, which also took to his fresh, youthful vigour. His was a promise, of course, cut tragically short when he was still in his prime. And I, too, have wondered what a two term John F. Kennedy presidency would have meant, in light of America’s continuing presence in Vietnam and its challenges surrounding race relations. In that vein, Jeff Greenfield’s new speculative book, If Kennedy Lived: The First and Second Terms of President John F. Kennedy: An Alternate History (Putnam) is a welcome imaginative journey into a world that so many of us wish had come to be and a timely reminder that one man can make a huge difference in the world.

Greenfield, a veteran journalist who has already made a previous, effective foray into presidential alternate history with his book Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternate Histories of American Politics: JFK, RFK, Carter, Ford, Reagan, keeps to a modest tone throughout. He never overstates his points, but emphasizes that a continuing Kennedy presidency would have been significantly at odds with the Lyndon B. Johnson one we actually lived through.

Sinatra’s Sinatra

Sinatra: All or Nothing at All aired on HBO in April. (Photo by William Gottlieb, 1947)

For those of us who adore Frank Sinatra, Alex Gibney’s comprehensive two-part documentary Sinatra: All or Nothing at All, which aired on HBO earlier this year, is a gift. I watched it in a kind of rapture, held by the dense, varied narrative and the amazing footage (much of it rare) and the intelligence of both the analysts and the interviewees from different stages in Sinatra’s life and career. Most of all, though, I was held by Sinatra himself, not just the singer and the personality but the chronicler of his own story. A few seasons back, an otherwise misguided Broadway revue of Stephen Sondheim’s music called Sondheim on Sondheim intercut footage of interviews with the composer-lyricist from different decades, and the results were unexpectedly moving: while he aged, his lucid and insightful glimpses into his own thoughts about his work provided a continuum for it. Relying on a number of interviews given at different phases of Sinatra’s career, Gibney does something similar, and when he adds commentary by his children, Nancy and Tina and Frank Jr. (whose vocal patterns are oddly similar to those of the comedian Paul Reiser), and the words of his wives Nancy Sinatra and Ava Gardner, read by Christine Baranski and Gina Gershon respectively, the effect is not unlike that of a bank of mirrors with planes that reach inward for as far as the eye can see.

Run Through the Jungle: Ken Burns & Lynn Novick's The Vietnam War

"I said: ‘Yes, my son is dead … One of the reasons he died was so you’d have the right to do this, so go ahead and demonstrate. Have at it. No, I won’t be joining you. But I tell you what, if you ever ring my doorbell again I’ll blow your damned head off with a .357 Magnum." 

– Country singer Jan Howard of Tennessee speaking in The Vietnam War about an anti-war protester she addresses at her door in 1969 

“I think the Vietnam War drove a stake right into the heart of America. . . .  Unfortunately, we’ve never moved really far away from that. And we never recovered.” 

– Veteran Phil Gioia in The Vietnam War

By the time you arrive at the end of Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's staggering 10-part and 18-hour documentary, The Vietnam War, you may feel so emotionally devastated by the experience that you won't find it easy to sum up its impact. Nevertheless, many on the left and right have already attempted to do so. They seem to share common ground in their belief that the series, in its desire to capture the war from all sides, cancels out any strong subjective opinion of it. From the left, you get the impression that they lament the absence of Noam Chomsky, as if Burns and Novick didn't go far enough in their condemnation of America's war policy. As for the right, there is a discomfort that if only William F. Buckley were still around he'd be able to put those liberal intellectuals in their place and we wouldn't be seeing so many North Vietnamese soldiers drawing moral equivalences with the American experience. Yet one thing is certain in all this contentious debate: the Vietnam War continues to divide and polarize Americans to the extent that maybe no film could fully heal the breach. The Vietnam War, with all its flaws and virtues, goes further than any other documentary toward mapping out its tragic course, clarifying the poor policy decisions that needlessly cost altogether millions of lives, and illuminating the traumatic experiences of those who fought in it. Unlike many of the confused attempts by dramatic films as varied as The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket to definitively define the conflict, The Vietnam War delves right into the political hubris that created the war rather than rendering it mystical (Apocalypse Now), turning it into a rites-of-passage parable (The Deer Hunter), or reducing the specifics of war trauma to systemic and sadistic conditioning (Full Metal Jacket). At its best, The Vietnam War fully lays out what Burns calls in a recent profile in The New Yorker his "emotional archaeology" so that viewers can come to their own conclusions. But its flaws, some of which grow out of that need to be fair and even-handed, also reveal an unvarying tone which – over such a long stretch – overwhelms the senses.

For Good or Ill, What Might Have Been: Jeff Greenfield's Then Everything Changed

 "President Robert Kennedy", speaking on August 3, 1969

As a lifelong science fiction buff I must confess that my favourite sub-genre in the field is the alternate-history novel. Likely stemming from my interest in history and its many ramifications (I have a minor degree in it, to go with my major in Political Science) I’ve always been gripped by stories of the Nazis winning the Second World War – being Jewish makes that one more understandable, of course – or of the South triumphing in the US Civil War, among many other tropes. (Clearly I'm not alone, as these two “alternate realities” are the ones that have appeared most often in alt history novels.) That’s because, in my view, history can turn on a dime and one deviation from the norm can trigger any number of side effects or alternate history scenarios, which is absolutely compelling to someone who also likes reading SF as much as I do. (Imagine if Archduke Ferdinand had not been assassinated when he was; or if Adolf Hitler had not attacked the Soviet Union when he did, to name two of the most obvious examples of history changed by one specific action.) And now that the pivotal crucial American presidential election is merely two weeks away, it’s worth examining Jeff Greenfield’s latest book, Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternate Histories of American Politics: JFK, RFK, Carter, Ford, Reagan (G.P. Putnam and Sons, 2011) for a fresh take on the what-if basis of alternate history.

Greenfield’s book differs in significant ways from such classics as Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, or more recently Philip Roth’s (not quite classic) The Plot Against America – alternate American histories revolving around aspects of a different WWII timeline – in that Greenfield is not a fiction writer, but a political reporter who’s long toiled for television news, covering all the vagaries of American politics. So his book brings a more grounded, perhaps less fanciful look at a particularly pertinent present-day subject: the character of the man who would become President of the United States, or more specifically an imagining of a world where different men became President or were either catapulted into office earlier than expected or won elections that they lost in real life. The results of his literary musings are both fascinating and thought-provoking.

Critic's Notes & Frames, Vol. X

Singer Joe Cocker, who sadly died over the holidays at 70 after a battle with lung cancer, could get to the bottom of heartache in a song like no other. Listening to him perform, with his gravel voice, was like hearing Louis Armstrong cured in a blue funk. Containing a melancholic soul that rivalled Billie Holiday, Cocker's ecstatic surrender to the naked emotion in a romantic number, at its best, could transcend masochism. Of all his memorable tracks from "Hitchcock Railway" to his soulful take on "With a Little Help from My Friends," his gospel tinged "Do I Still Figure in Your Life?" asks with maybe the greatest urgency the most poignant demand of his audience.

Film director Carlos Saura has made many dazzling dance pictures before, from Carmen (1983) to Flamenco (1995), but Iberia (2005) may be his most erotic work. Using a studio outfitted with minimalist backdrops of scrims, curtains and mirrors, Saura adapts sections of composer Isaac Albeniz's "Iberia" suite for a number of the biggest stars in the Spanish dance and music world to perform. Yet like Jonathan Demme in Stop Making Sense (1984), Saura makes us conscious of the artifice he's creating, letting us see the cameras, the lights, and the recording equipment, only then to employ the magic of performance to evaporate the artifice. Saura isn't content just capturing that alchemy, though, he goes further inside the process of performance art itself and, while using expressionistic techniques, reaches the purest essence of dance to create a fully realized expression of love for the sensuality of movement.

Walking into History: Jennifer Stoddart & Paul Fusco's 1000 Pictures: RFK's Last Journey

Photo by Paul Fusco.

When Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June 1968, while campaigning to be the Democratic Party's choice for President, you could feel the air going out of the culture. At the time, I was a Grade 8 student about to write my final exams. But when I woke the morning after the California primary to find out that he had both won and was mortally wounded by an assassin, I walked to school and promptly failed every one. Getting into high school just didn't seem to matter anymore. JFK's assassination might have been a seismic shock to the system in 1963, but this was a murder that curdled and darkened the nation.

Even though I was a Canadian, I was fervently following RFK's campaign as if caught up in the passion of a political dream, the quixotic idea that one could remake a country. Since Martin Luther King Jr. had just been murdered that spring, it seemed even more urgent that those ideals be realized through Robert Kennedy. Kennedy seemed to galvanize the nation by imagining a country built on the inclusion of its citizens; where rich and poor, black and white and Mexican-Americans could share in its possibilities. They would line the streets daily during that campaign clamoring to shake his hand while stepping forward as if they were walking into history, wanting to be a part of its making. There was a true sense, even with the horrible war going on in Vietnam, that the country could still be truly remade into something resembling the ideals set forth in its founding documents. In the absolute worst of times, you felt a keen sense of anticipation. But RFK's death seemed to kill any desire to hope for anything better.

Giving the Gift of Culture: Presents for the Holiday Season

Being Jewish I don’t celebrate Christmas, but I often feel sorry about the financial pressures the holiday imposes on so many of my friends and co-workers. They simply cannot afford to purchase gifts for so many different people on their gift list. Fortunately, I do sense that the trend of late has seen them cutting back on spending, opting for inexpensive books and the like. In that spirit, I herewith offer some suggestions, many off the beaten track, for presents that won’t break your bank account.

Shock of the Unexpected...Excerpt From the Prologue to Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors

Back in 1994, when I was just beginning a free-lance career, I had an idea for a book about American movies. That year, I'd seen Ivan Reitman's sentimental comedy Dave, starring Kevin Kline as a conservative President who falls into a coma and is replaced by a look-a-like (also played by Kline) so the public won't be sent into a panic. Of course, the new President is more liberal and ultimately alters the policies of the true President. To my mind, it was as if we were watching George H. Bush morph into Bill Clinton. From that comedy came the idea for Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism.

I wanted Reflections to examine how key American movies from the Kennedy era onward had soaked up the political and cultural ideals of the time in which they were made. By delving into the American experience from Kennedy to Clinton, I thought the book could capture, through a number of films, how the dashed hopes of the sixties were reflected back in the resurgence of liberal idealism in the Clinton nineties. After drawing up an outline, I sent the proposal off to publishers who all sent it back, saying that it would never sell. One Canadian press almost squeaked it through, but their marketing division headed them off at the pass. From there, I went on to co-write a book (with Critics at Large colleague and friend Susan Green) on the TV show, Law & Order, and later my own books about Frank Zappa, Randy Newman, the album Trout Mask Replica and The Beatles. All the while, though, I kept updating Reflections, seeing my idea change in the wake of Monica Lewinsky, Clinton's impeachment, the 2000 election of Bush, 9/11, and finally the rise of Barack Obama. For the past number of years, Reflections has also been a hugely successful lecture series. In light of the fact that this week is the 53rd anniversary of JFK's assassination, here is an excerpt from the book's prologue.

- Kevin Courrier

At the end of The Godfather, Part II, in the dead of fall, Michael Corleone makes the comment that history teaches us you can kill anyone. Most people heard in those remarks echoes of the assassination of JFK, even though the murder under discussion takes place three years after the mob leader's observation and Kennedy isn't yet president. For all we know, Michael might be referring to seeing Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho the previous summer, for not only did Psycho teach us that you can kill anyone, but the murder of Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) in a motel shower before the halfway point of the picture also flew in the face of what film history taught us – and the frisson of that moment, that shock of the unexpected, would come to foreshadow the events of the sixties. Director Martin Scorsese recently referred to Psycho in that manner in the Kent Jones documentary, Hitchcock/Truffaut. Phillip J. Skerry in his 2009 book, Psycho in the Shower: The History of Cinema's Most Famous Scene, talks about how the film "ushered in a shift in the cultural paradigm from the bland decade of the 1950s, with its emphasis on togetherness and family values, to the 1960s, that cataclysmic decade of political assassinations, student protests, free speech conflicts, race riots, Vietnam protests, and, above all, violence – in our streets, in our political institutions, in our culture, and most vividly in our media, especially in our films, and in our music." But how could one low-budget thriller with a turbulent twist send such a ripple through the next decade?

Another America: Remembering Dick Gregory 1932-2017

I arrived home this past week from a short holiday in Florida to the sad news that activist and comedian Dick Gregory had gone to spirit at the age of 84. Although in recent years, Gregory existed more on the periphery of mainstream culture, a barely remembered figure of an earlier era of Civil Rights reforms and anti-war ferment, he was nevertheless still being sought out by eager young videographers who'd visit his home as if on a pilgrimage. With the goal of consulting with a famous relic of another America, they sought him out for help in making sense of the current one. But often the Gregory you'd find on YouTube of their quests from those endless sojourns was a ranting hermit caught up in Truther campaigns who saw conspiracies in everything including "faked" moon landings, 9/11, Prince's death (which he believed was murder), the Rodney King beating tapes (the C.I.A. and the Australian "secret police" were behind the people who filmed it), Bill Cosby being framed for sexual assault because he was attempting to buy a major media company, etc. Yet Dick Gregory's flights of fantasy, often painfully funny to watch (especially since his proteges didn't possess his knowledge and experience of history), did little to diminish his authenticity as a powerful advocate for justice. Whatever outlandish tale Gregory would tell those budding militants, he seemed to speak for the idea of a country that they felt was in jeopardy of disappearing, and it was that very notion of a nation, containing a citizenry that he was once a prominent part of, that these willing apprentices appeared to see rapidly vanishing before their eyes. The fact that Gregory died as white supremacists and American Nazis marched freely and candidly in Charlottesville makes their view even more vividly painful to consider.

Magical Retreat: Sgt. Pepper After 45 Years

The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which was released in June 1967, is a lovely confection, a beautifully self-conscious neon sign that celebrated with ample imagination the romantic ideal, where the possibility of true love could transcend all of our problems. (If only.) And in that summer, which came to be termed 'The Summer of Love,' Sgt. Pepper's seamless and mellifluous tone made it appear as if that possibility was indeed well within our grasp. However, the idea for the record, following up on their concept single “Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever” (two radically different renderings of childhood and originally destined for the album) came out of the opposite sentiment, a 'Summer of Hate' that took place the previous year.

That particular summer, American cities (as they had almost every summer in the mid-Sixties) were burning in reaction to the continued racial unrest. The escalation of the war in Vietnam had also all but diminished President Johnson's War on Poverty. In short, the tenor of violence was becoming exactly as black activist H. Rap Brown had described it then – as American as apple pie. Amidst this chaos, with the mounting frustration over the dashed ideals of the New Frontier of the early Sixties, The Beatles became easy targets for the angry and the disillusioned. You could say they were even, to a large degree, at the apex of those very ideals being dashed. So their 1966 tour, filled with torpor and turmoil, reached its bottom end with record burnings in the Deep South after John Lennon had remarked that The Beatles were more popular than Jesus. In that summer, The Beatles found themselves no longer in control of their meteoric success. When they first chose to engage their audience in 1962, with their first single “Love Me Do,” the goal wasn't simply to become entertainers, but to put new demands on the pop audience. They set out to take popular music and their fans to another place. And in the coming years they did just that – and more.

Hurricane of Love: The 50th Anniversary of The Beatles Appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show

The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show 

When The Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday, February 9, 1964, it was the night America stopped mourning the murder of President Kennedy a few months earlier. At first, shortly after that tragedy, record producer Phil Spector thought he had the answer to America's sorrow. He had released a joyous Christmas album filled with great rock 'n' roll holiday songs by The Crystals, The Ronettes and Darlene Love. Perhaps in a better time, The Crystals singing "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" would have provided the appropriate yuletide spirit, but the album bombed. During the Christmas of 1963, one month after the murder of JFK, nobody cared if Santa ever came to town. But that Sunday evening in February, over 74 million American viewers were finally ready to move on, and share in The Beatles' exhilarating appearance. They tuned in and bided their time with the cast of the Broadway production of Oliver!, impressionist Frank Gorshin (who would ultimately play the Riddler on the 1966 spoof TV series Batman), and singer and banjo player Tessie O'Shea – but, who would remember them fifty years on? From the moment Paul McCartney opened his mouth to sing "All My Loving," everyone else became irrelevant. What came before, or what was to come after, wasn't a consideration. What people heard was astonishingly new, a fresh vision of America coming right back to them. The spirit of the New Frontier, which many felt was left for dead in Dallas, was again sparkling with intensity.‘

If History Has Taught Us Anything....Excerpt from the Introduction to Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors

Al Pacino as Michael Corleone in The Godfather, Part II.

Back in 1994, when I was just beginning a free-lance career, I had an idea for a book about American movies. That year, I'd seen Ivan Reitman's sentimental comedy Dave, starring Kevin Kline as a conservative President who falls into a coma and is replaced by a look-a-like (also played by Kline) so as not to send the public into a panic. Of course, the "new" President is more liberal and ultimately alters the policies of the true President. To my mind, it was as if we were watching George H. Bush morph into Bill Clinton in one movie. From that comedy, came the idea for Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism.

I wanted Reflections to examine how key American movies from the Kennedy era onward had soaked up the political and cultural ideals of the time they were made. By delving into the American experience (from Kennedy to Clinton), I thought the book could capture, through a number of films, how the dashed hopes of the Sixties were reflected back in the resurgence of liberal idealism in the Clinton Nineties. After drawing up an outline, I sent the proposal off to publishers who all sent it back saying that it would never sell. One Canadian publisher almost squeaked it through, but their marketing division headed them off at the pass. From there, I went on to co-write a book (with Critics at Large colleague and friend Susan Green) on the TV show, Law & Order, plus later do my own books about Frank Zappa, Randy Newman, the album Trout Mask Replica and The Beatles. All the while, I kept updating Reflections, seeing my idea change in the wake of Monica Lewinsky, Clinton's impeachment, the 2000 election of Bush, 9/11, and finally the rise of Barack Obama. For the past number of years, Reflections has also been a hugely successful lecture series. Here is an excerpt from the book's introduction.

- Kevin Courrier.

American films in the last fifty-odd years have come to soak up the political and cultural ideals of the time in which they were made and they often reflected a turbulent quest to define a nation. From the dashed optimism of the Kennedy era through to the renewed idealism that led Barack Obama to the White House, American movies, good and bad, were tissue samples of their age. Many of these pictures – from The Manchurian Candidate (1962) to The Butler (2013) – helped create a hall of mirrors that resembled the climatic shootout in Orson Welles's The Lady From Shanghai (1947) where you had to shatter a lot of glass to see what was going on. The construction of a hall of mirrors, however, isn't usually a conscious act although sometimes there is intent. You can see a deliberate version of one in Live Free or Die Hard (2007), the fourth installment of the Die Hard action franchise starring Bruce Willis as the terrorist fighting New York cop, John McClane, when he goes up against a group of cyber-insurgents who have hacked into the government's computers. To announce their desire to start a "fire sale," they launch an attack designed to target the nation's reliance on computer controls. To convey this, they edited together a video montage made up of segments of Presidential speeches from Roosevelt to Bush to put their message across. In creating a hall of mirrors effect, where various Presidents end up unwittingly uttering threats to the nation rather than the assurances their original speeches intended, the terrorists simply pull off a clever gag. ("I tried to find more Nixon," says one key hacker with an air of disappointment.) Their distortion of history turns into an obvious stunt, and one that we can see right through. It doesn't make a rent in our consciousness. We are still assured, despite the terrorists' initial control over American cyberspace, that John McClane will come to the rescue to get control back. But there are other hall of mirrors moments that aren't assuring, or designed as stunts, and instead seem embroidered into the fabric of a narrative that creeps out of its corners to spook us.

An Ear to the Ground: The Criterion Collection Release of Robert Altman's Nashville

When he died in 2006, Robert Altman was one of the most prolific and idiosyncratic of contemporary American directors. Always with an ear to the ground, he didn't follow fashionable trends, or cater expediently to public taste. Instead, he was gallantly intuitive in an open quest for authentic engagement, the quality of which was often revelatory. Most movies over time – good and bad – fit comfortably into genres with recognizable rules that defined them as genre pictures, so we could easily distinguish a film noir from a screwball comedy. But Altman defied those categorizations by delving into exactly what makes a genre tick. He did this by stripping away a movie's pedigree without losing the flavour of the genre itself. Whether he was doing a combat satire (M*A*S*H), a western (McCabe & Mrs. Miller), a detective story (The Long Goodbye), a murder mystery (Gosford Park), or stage drama (Come Back to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean), Altman keenly re-defined our idea of what makes a genre picture by treating moviegoers, as critic Paul Coates once wrote about Jean-Luc Godard, as critics rather than consumers.

Talking Out of Turn #47 (Podcast): Sidney Lumet (1988)

A scene from 12 Angry Men (1957), directed by Sidney Lumet.

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts at CJRT-FM in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to artists from all fields. In 1994, after I had gone to CBC, I had an idea to collate an interview anthology from some of the more interesting discussions I'd had with guests from that period. Since they all took place during the eighties, I thought I could edit the collection into an oral history of the decade from some of its most outspoken participants. The book was assembled from interview transcripts and organized thematically. I titled it Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the '80s. With financial help from the Canada Council, I shaped the individual pieces into a number of pertinent themes relevant to the decade. By the time I began to contact publishers, though, the industry was starting to change. At one time, editorial controlled marketing. Now the reverse was taking place. Acquisition editors, who once responded to an interesting idea for a book, were soon following marketing divisions concerned with whether the person doing it was hot enough to sell it.

Tom Fulton, host and producer of On the Arts.

For a few years, I flogged the proposal to various publishers but many were worried that there were too many people from different backgrounds (e.g., Doris Kearns Goodwin sitting alongside Clive Barker). Another publisher curiously chose to reject it because, to them, it appeared to be a book about me promoting my interviews (as if I were trying to be a low-rent Larry King) rather than seeing it as a commentary on the decade through the eyes of the guests. All told, the book soon faded away and I turned to other projects. However, when recently uncovering the original proposal and sample interviews, I felt that maybe some of them could find a new life on Critics at Large.

One area of the book concerned the legacy of the sixties. My thinking was (and still is) that it’s difficult taking into consideration the political landscape of the eighties without examining aspects of the sixties. Many ghosts from that period (i.e., Vietnam, the Cold War, civil rights) continued to linger as unresolved arguments that underscored political and cultural actions in the eighties. If cynicism became more the common coin twenty years after the idealism sparked by JFK’s 1960 inaugural address, the voices included in this chapter of Talking Out of Turn set out to uncover what the political lessons of the sixties were. This section included, among others, poet Allen Ginsberg, novelist Ann Beattie (Love Always, Chilly Scenes of Winter), and filmmaker Sidney Lumet.

Director of movies such as 12 Angry Men (1957), The Pawnbroker (1964), Serpico (1973), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), and Network (1976), Sidney Lumet would make many political films in his career, but few of them in the eighties did very well. This includes Running on Empty, a movie that dealt with sixties-era fugitives from the law in the 1980s, that had just been released when I sat down with the director in 1988. In our conversation Lumet ruminates on the problems of making political movies – especially ones that confronted the 1960s – during the Reagan era. Sidney Lumet passed away in 2011 at the age of 86.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Sidney Lumet as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1988.

 

A Masterpiece and its Spiritual Cousins: Rubber Soul, Pet Sounds and Aftermath

Is it possible that The Shirelles best embodied the idealistic spirit of JFK's New Frontier? Perhaps. Especially with one 1960 pop song, "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?" that delicately captured both the assurance of the decade and its secret fears. Written by Carole King, and her first husband, Gerry Goffin, "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?" had an awareness that within every hope lay the possibility of failure, defeat, and maybe betrayal. The singer accepts the devotion of her lover, the light she sees in his eyes, but she's also worried about the future, when that light may refuse to shine. In this enduringly complex tune, the stakes of love get raised so high that the fear of it all falling apart weighs pretty heavy. As Bob Dylan said in 1965, right at the cusp of his greatest glory, "when you ain't got nothin', you got nothin' to lose." The Shirelles had, in a certain sense, laid the ground for the romantic dream The Beatles (who would cover their songs) were about to create. But The Beatles also inherited that possibility of failure that The Shirelles saw coming. When the hopes of the New Frontier were so cruelly dashed in Dallas in 1963, The Beatles had reached into that despair, two months later, to hold our hand. But it was coming up to two years since The Beatles rekindled those hopes, and the question of whether we'd still love them tomorrow was still up for grabs.

Their electrifying early records had sought us out, demanding that we share in the pleasures those songs offered. When John Lennon said in "Please Please Me" that he'd continue pleasing us, if only we'd agree to please him, were offered a definite stake in the relationship. Each song they wrote was designed to be a two-way street, the creation of a romantic bond, which required the participation of the listener in every way. The utopianism heard in "There's a Place" was only viable when we first believed that the place actually existed. But by 1965, The Beatles were starting to grow weary and suspicious of their audience. There's a place, alright, and maybe it's now far away from you. No longer trusting the screams of adoration or enjoying the enduring isolation of hotel rooms and ducking into limos, the group began retreating into the safety of the studio.Within those walls, the sounds they began to create outclassed the sounds from the stage. The songs they wrote and covered, in the beginning, had taken the world by force, by the affection expressed in them. Now their music was more elusive, the pleasures tucked beneath the dense melodies. At this point, though, their retreat did not diminish their work. Instead, detachment took it deeper, farther into the exigencies of love and loyalty.

Over 45 years ago, The Beatles released Rubber Soul which is arguably their best album. Rubber Soul showed that The Beatles, now seeking solace from the madness of Beatlemania, were creating a new music that sought to find the more discerning listener. The songs included reached out to find those who dared step outside the din of the screaming throng. With this record, they asked us to lean forward, listen carefully, and take the doubts along with the hopes and the desires along with the fears. Rubber Soul had all the yearnings and qualms of Goffin/King's "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?" but it didn't stop with the question of the title. Rubber Soul went much further to ask: If you don't love me tomorrow, then what? While taking over 113 hours to record, compared to the one-day they took putting together their debut Please Please Me (1963), Rubber Soul was startlingly innovative taking the R&B genre beyond its purist roots. Unlike many other white pop artists, especially the ones who merely paid reverence to the style and attitude of black blues and R&B, or channelled the essence of the form (as did Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac), The Beatles sublimated rhythm and blues into their continually expanding musical fabric. And the record would irrevocably change the direction and sound of pop music. With a densely intelligent collection of love songs, Rubber Soul confronted a variety of issues: the cost of romantic desire (“I’m Looking Through You”), the power of love to heal (“The Word”), as well as to hurt (“Girl”); contemplation (“In My Life”); and the deep despair of estrangement (“Nowhere Man”). On the record, The Beatles broadened their musical identity, too, by introducing an original interpretation of classic R&B (specifically the Memphis Stax soul sound) while resisting being defined by black music (as many other British blues bands were). The Beatles instead defined their own interpretation of American black music.