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.

A Change Is Gonna Come: The End of the Obama Era

As many of us this week watched President Barack Obama exit the presidential stage with dignity, grace, and even some humour, an inescapable melancholy also permeated the air. Besides the passing of a historic moment in time, one couldn't help but notice the new history about to be made. We were about to watch Donald Trump – a populist demagogue who built his road to the White House by spending years attempting to delegitimize Obama in a Truther campaign that questioned his citizenship – become president. He continued by bullying opponents, toadying up to Russia and hiding his tax returns (which may provide clues to why he plays footsies with Putin), proudly promoting the traits of a sexual predator, exploiting racism and fear, and making promises that pander to anger rather than seeking the means to healing the wounds that stoke that rage. The democratic dream hasn't died and I believe it will survive the man about to be president who has chosen to demean those ideals. But the Obama era, which opened the door to finally laying rest the stained legacy of racism and exploitation, could not close that door on those who sought to ignore it. The idealistic impulse in American exceptionalism is not bathed in light. "America is a place and a story, made up of exuberance and suspicion, lynch mobs and escapes, its greatest testaments are made of portents and warnings," critic Greil Marcus writes in The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice. "The story of America as told from the beginning is one of self-invention and nationhood." He also reminds us that prophetic voices – from John Winthrop to Martin Luther King Jr. – were "raised to keep faith with the past, or with the future to which the past committed their present." That is also true of the popular culture that reflects that covenant.

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?

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.

Pod Culture: The Reagan Era (Excerpt from Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors)

First things first. Although technically yesterday was the second anniversary of Critics at Large, today commemorates when we actually began two straight years (and counting) of daily posts on the arts. We started with only three writers feeding coal into this literary furnace and today we have thirteen active scribes who've taken up the shovel. Thank you and congratulations to all –especially those of you who have been actively reading and supporting our efforts every step of the way.

To kick off our third year, here's an excerpt from Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism, my latest book currently in progress (which also explains my periodic absence from Critics at Large). But it just so happens that I'm also about to begin a nine-part lecture series on Reflections a week from Monday at the Miles Nadal JCC in Toronto (see details here). While I considered posting material from the Introduction ("If History's Taught Us Anything...") which covers the first lecture where I examine The Kennedy Era (through The Godfather, Part II and The Manchurian Candidate), the section was just too long to include here. Therefore, I'm jumping ahead instead to a portion from The Reagan Era where I discuss Phil Kaufman's 1979 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (a post which is still long but I beg your indulgence).

I know that, in the literal sense, Invasion of the Body Snatchers was made in The Carter Era, but Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors is not a literal interpretation of the American movies in each Presidential period. I work from the notion that since movies operate like waking dreams there is an unconscious nation that lies beneath the conscious one. In this post, I've tweezed together the opening portion from the book's introduction and the section on Invasion from the chapter Mourning in America: The Reagan Era. The students from my recent film criticism class, who composed terrific reviews of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, will no doubt recognize most of this material from a review of the movie that I also wrote for the class. 

Excerpt from Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism

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 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.