Chateau Lloyd

I'm once again binge-watching the early seasons of Miami Vice and I'm thinking it would be fun to set the next installment in the World Series Championship year of 1984.  It's an interesting year for a variety of reasons.  Obviously there is the George Orwell angle, but 1984 marked a rare moment of unity in American politics.  The notion of a a presidential candidate carrying 49 states is inconceivable today.

Whether looking at Cold War politics, cultural differences and of course the far superior music and entertainment, I think it would be fun.

As to the plot...well, that's yet to be determined.  I've got a couple of ideas and I'm sure some of the same characters will be represented. 

Of course, nothing may come of it, but that's the fun of being a novelist - not just the ideas that are completed, but the ones that are tossed around for fun.

Over the weekend I decided to re-watch Desperado as something of a time-waster.  I have to say this is one of my favorite movies - it's not profound or anything, but it is great at what it strives to be: a fun, witty, sexy, Mexican shoot-'em-up film with a superlative soundtrack.

Everything just clicks and it's the kind of movie where you can just drop in and enjoy what's coming next.

However, as is my wont, I noticed that there's also a subtext of faith in the story.  This was there from the beginning, but given Hollywood's implacable hatred of Christianity, and stands out much more now than it did in 1995.  I'm planning on doing a writeup on this for Bleedingfool.com because it would also dovetail nicely with my Geek Guns column about it and my recent article on Robert Rodriguez's Spy Kids.

A year ago I did a post on how the snakes have come back to Ireland.

By curious coincidence, First Things has an article with almost exactly the same title on the same topic.

The secularization of St. Patrick's feast day is kind of fascinating.  I'm seeing all sorts of promotions for corned beef and cabbage, but of course it is a Friday in Lent, which means that meat is forbidden.  Yes, there are some jurisdictions where dispensations have been made, but it's plain that the concept of the day is now getting drunk and eating bland food.

This is not by any means unique.  Christmas is famously secular these days, mostly pagan myths about a fat old man and flying reindeer.  Still the fall of Ireland is sad to behold.

England has also embraced the same empty, soulless materialism that fascinated the United States.  The allure is powerful.  Who doesn't want to cast aside the restrictive morals of the past to indulge in every form of sin and gratification?  It is a tale as old as Sodom and Gomorrah.

On the positive side, I think we are rapidly reaching the limits of what decadence can even permit.  This was one of the themes of The Vampires of Michigan - at a certain point, you simply can't debauch yourself any more.  There are finite ways of gratifying lust, each carrying progressively greater risk and damage.  Just as with drugs, there is a law of diminishing returns, where each new transgression brings less of a high.

We see this with music and entertainment - stuff that was shocking in my youth is boring today.  Madonna masturbating with a cross in the late 80s is as distant to us as the Elvis Presley swinging his hips was back then.

J.R.R. Tolkien understood this, that the ultimate end of evil must be nihilism.  Evil is all about pulling things down, whether they be moral boundaries or degrading the human spirit.  When at last all depravity has been experienced, there is nothing left but the void.

This is why I am hopeful, because darkness ultimately cannot triumph.  Clearly it is my task to keep the lamp burning through the night until the dawn inevitably comes.  St. Patrick showed us how it was done and we will have to do it again.

My recent perusal of Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels brings out another critique of post-war America, which is the erosion of religion in public life.

Today much of this blame falls on the Baby Boomers, but Thompson himself was born in 1937, and I think much of the loss of faith can be blamed on the unprecedented prosperity in America following World War II.

A general historical principle is that affluence and prosperity breed decadence and depravity.  Being afflicted by the mortal sin of pride, humans naturally turn from the divine and attribute their success to their own cleverness and intellect.  Only fools still follow the old ways, which limit both human imagination and the scope of available pleasure.

The Old Testament is chock full of examples, and records of other peoples in different cultures confirm the same tendency.  Contemporary accounts of prosperous reigns almost always include a lamentation that the gods and their morals are being neglected.

It this was true of the US, but with two key additions.  The first was the sheer scale of wealth, which gave common people a quality of life beyond the reach of the super-rich as recently as a half-century ago.  While the Robber Barons of the gilded age might have had a luxurious estate and gold utensils, they didn't have x-rays, antibiotics or radios.  To evade the heat, they had to retreat to an estate on the lake or in the foothills, but by the 60s and 70s, air condition was something middle class people had.

The second was the pervasive influence of the Puritan founding.  Though their religious practice is all but forgotten, their beliefs regarding individual success and failure endure.  Put simply, people who are doing well are seen as morally superior to those who have failed.  Whereas this was once seen as a sign that they were among God's Elect, it has increasingly been folded into the secular concept of the "meritocracy," the notion that the best and brightest should be accorded more prestige and therefore power.

This no doubt fueled Thompson's hatred of the middle class, since he keenly felt the stigma of not achieving conventional measures of success.

He also detested what he considered their primitive and dull-witted adherence to the old moral codes.  His writing (and that of his contemporaries) generally sneers at organized religions.  In this telling, religious people are either hypocrites (and often running a racket) or simply too stupid to sin. 

Thompson himself is something of an aesthete - sampling drugs like rare vintages of wine.  It's interesting that he regarded the Kentucky Derby as "decadent and depraved" but felt much more at home among the Hell's Angels or various hippie communes.

The problem with society wasn't immorality, but morality itself.  If people would just back off, stop judging and enjoy life, everything would work out fine.   It was the stuffed shirts who ruined everything.  This is the ethos of Caddyshack.

That's all when and good when one is young and carefree, but it ultimately doesn't satisfy the soul.  The significance of The Big Chill was that it was the first warning to the Boomers that the party would eventually end.

At that point, it was the rubes who went to church who were having the last laugh while the materialists frantically try various cosmetic and health procedures to preserve their youth.

I've written about Carly Simon's semi-conversion, but John Voight's change is even more profound and striking.  In the 1970, he was making edgy fare like Midnight Cowboy and Coming Home, but he's now offering public prayers for the salvation of the nation. 

There's a hint of Evelyn Waugh about that, and one of the great might-have-beens is if Thompson had a similar conversion.  Alas, he shut himself completely off from God.  Even his funeral was a mockery of religious observance.

Ultimately, that's where materialism leads.  At some point the drugs no longer produce the same highs, one's possessions seem old and tawdry and the end of football season looms (Thompson's suicide note actually cited this as part of his depression).  At that point, the god of the two-car garage falls silent.

In a rare departure from my normal practice, I  am actually streaming a show rather than owning it on physical media.

This is because my previous 80s TV exploration was not very satisfactory.  While The Equalizer had its good points, it didn't lend itself to binge viewing and I doubt I will get through the whole thing any time soon.

That's why there is a place for streaming, especially if it incurs no additional cost.  That's how I am watching Remington Steele.  This is yet another 80s production I was too young to watch (it aired at 10) or understand (most of the references would have been lost on me).

For those who don't know, the premise is that Laura Holt, a young, beautiful and ambitious private detective (played by the delightful Stephanie Zimbalist) decides to set up her own agency under her own name.  As the intro credits explain, it turns out that an agency with a female's name is considered too feminine, so she invents a man - Remington Steele - who will be the titular head of her new enterprise.  There is of course no such man, and the pilot episode centers around how she and the other employees have conspired to make him invisible but ever-present.  "Mr. Steele never involves himself in cases," is their boilerplate excuse.

In the course of that episode, a mysterious debonair thief enters the scene and cleverly assumes the identity of Remington Steele.  This was Pierce Brosnan's big break and he's remarkably good.

The focus of the series for its first few episodes is trying to determine "Mr. Steele's" true identity, but by mid-season , there are cases to solve and so the focus shifts to how Steele helps or hinders these. 

Because Steele is something of a con man and international rake of mystery, this allows Brosnan to assume different roles, further exploiting his dramatic skill.  The writing is generally excellent, and in addition to clever wordplay regarding romance, one of the running gags is that Steele is the ultimate detective movie buff, and his "investigative technique" is chiefly trying to find which movie he's a part of at any given time.

Not only is this satisfying for film nerds, it's a clever way of poking fun at the genre, because by the early/mid-80s, just about every detective plot had been used at least once.

And that gets us to one of the weaknesses of the detective format, which is the lack of an overarching plot.  This became apparently late in the first season of Remington Steele, because with Brosnan's character now contributing to the agency, the initial dynamic of cast had changed.

At the start of the pilot episode, the core cast included Zimbalist, James Read as her co-investigator Murphy Michaels, and receptionist Bernice Fox (Janet DeMay).   Brosnan's addition therefore crowded out the other two.  For a brief time Fox (invariably called "Miss Wolf" by Steele) was a rival for his affections, but this faded as his relationship with Holt heated up.  Similarly Read's character went from being loyal, competent and somewhat envious to a spiteful try-hard, and what we would call today a "beta orbiter." 

For an actor as talented as Read, this was an unacceptable role and I'm sure he was afraid of becoming typecast, so he departed the show.  This was probably the right decision because it opened the way for him play George Hazard in all three "seasons" of North and South.  This was his best and most famous role and also introduced him to his second (and current) wife, Wendy Kilbourne.

I should note that the Reads (she took his name) are remarkable not only in the longevity of their marriage, but their low profile.  Read works intermittently, chiefly doing guest spots.  Presumably this is because they both made a bundle doing North and South and Mrs. Read is now a practicing attorney.

The second (and most successful season in terms of ratings) has just started and Doris Roberts has been added to the cast as receptionist Mildred Krebs.  Unlike her predecessors, she has no knowledge of Remington Steele's background and simply takes him at face value.

Thus we have a core cast of the two investigators and their loyal clerical assistant - a dynamic that will be repeated in Moonlighting, which is my next show on tap.

In addition to the exceptional writing, there show has considerable romantic tension between the two leads, a tension heightened by their clashing roles.  It is hard to imagine something like this being done today, but the 80s was still capable of having a push-pull romance where a woman in charge found herself at risk of being subordinated by a strong man she was passionately attracted to.

Another nice element is the music.  The show features a theme by Henry Mancini and then incidental music by Richard Lewis Warren.  When Warren isn't reprising Mancini's theme, he's using a similar style of music, a throwback to 1960s smooth jazz and vintage detective movies.

As is often the case, this is something of a rough draft for a future Bleeding Fool column, and there I'll explore that dynamic more fully.

I saw Lisa Marine Presley died the other day.  It was all over the supermarket tabloids.  I don't generally pay attention to the news, sot that's where I get most of my pop culture information.

Seeing the pictures of her with her father reminded me how pervasive Elvis Presley once was in American culture.  Almost every month a tabloid would report an "Elvis sighting" because of course the King of Rock 'n Roll wasn't dead, he was merely in hiding.  Like James Dean, he's supposed to have faked his death to escape the pressure of celebrity.

I never understood that line of logic - celebrity status isn't a lifetime entitlement.  It has to be constantly shored up, and that's what generally makes famous people succumb to drugs and depression.  If you want to stop being a celebrity, stop doing anything.  There are lots of celebrities who did just that and no one talks about them.  Heck, Olivia de Havilland lived for decades in obscurity and was one of those people about which it was said:  "She's still alive?!  Amazing."

Not to digress, but James Dean would easily have vanished.  His whole persona was that of an alienated youth, and without that, I'm not sure what he would have brought to the table.  Yes, I'm sure the long slow retreat into either "Where are they now?" or "famous for being famous" would have been annoying, but it takes a lot less effort than faking one's death. 

I'm reminded here of Dirk Benedict, who achieved considerable notoriety in the 80s as the One True Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica and then starred in the A-Team.   Having made his money, he retired, surfacing briefly to denounce the feminization of his old character.

The point is that just quitting show business is pretty easy.  There's always some new face for the press to fixate upon.

Anyway, not only have the Elvis sightings stopped, but I couldn't remember the last time I heard his music.  The "oldies" stations these days rarely go back into the 1960s.  When they do, it's to play songs recognizable through commercial licensing.  Even "classic rock" formats ignore the King, which is weird because I should think his rock is about as classic as it gets. 

My life only briefly overlapped his, but I know his music well because it was pervasive throughout the 80s.  Indeed, one of the strange games memory plays on us is that we often associate music with events that happened years after its release because while a given song may have peaked in one year, it may well enjoy heavy airplay for many years afterwards.

In putting together playlists based on decades, I've found that the change of a calendar is pretty meaningless, and that well into (for example) the 80s, 70s music was getting plenty of use. 

(As a sidebar, there's also the issue that music is continually evolving, which is why 1981 sounded very different than 1985 or 1989.)

Anyhow, it's strange how something that was once pervasive can vanish entirely.

My foray into 80s entertainment continues, and I have to say that while I had been putting off watching Tootsie, it is a pretty funny (and insightful) film.

Like all good movies, there are several layers of humor involved.  The core of the plot is an unemployed (and unemployable) actor (Dustin Hoffman) who decides to audition as a woman to get a job on a daytime drama.  It works, and his character becomes a national sensation and feminist icon.

Lots of social commentary going on here, and while there tons of gender-bending gags, there's some amusing meta-humor as well. 

It should be said at the outset that Hoffman's character is a straight male.  He aggressively likes women and when in his female guise, his reaction to men who try to kiss or fondle him is instinctive and pitiless, which of course makes it even funnier.  The reason why he is perfect for the role is that Dustin Hoffman can only play Dustin Hoffman, and all his roles are about him playing that role. 

This film turns that weakness into a strength, and we get to see the ultimate method actor take on his most demanding role.  This is in many ways the forerunner of the role Robert Downey, Jr. took in Tropic Thunder.

In addition to showcasing (once again) the vapidity of the entertainment industry, Tootsie also examines male-female relationships from both sides.   I didn't realize Bill Murray was in the film, but he is outstanding as Hoffman's flatmate, who is just watching all this nonsense unfold.  It's an usually subdued role for Murray, but he nails it.

In the present age, this film couldn't be made, or Hoffman's character would be gay, but this is yet again a refreshing reminder that Hollywood once produced funny and interesting films.

I remember it being released, that there was a lot of talk about it, and I also recall the signature song in the soundtrack getting lots of airplay.  That's another thing we no longer see - hit songs coming from movies. 

Over the weekend I decided to re-watch Grease with my daughter.  She had never seen it, and got a big kick out of it.

Truth be told, the music still holds up.  It's a great soundtrack.

It's also sort of meta-meta at this point, since we're now looking back 40 years ago to how they saw things 60 years ago.

Heavy.

At the time, it put something of a raunchy spin on the Leave it to Beaver era, but part of that was 1970s affectation - an assumption that things were just as loose then as they were later, it was just that people hid it better.

From an even greater distance, it's shocking how far we've slid from those halcyon days.  At this point, 1978 would be a massive improvement over where we are, and I'd love to live in a country that shared that moral framework. 

Indeed, the shocking thing is how restrictive 70s morality was compared to today's bizarre hierarchy.

It's very much worth a watch and the late Olivia Newton-John is amazing.   Truly a unique talent and I don't think there's a comparable female vocalist active today.

As I bounce around enjoying various vintage movies and TV shows, I can't help but notice an ingredient that seems sorely missing on modern entertainment.

Fun.

The old shows didn't always have much in the way of storylines, tropes were common (indeed, that's where they came from) and continuity was often downright abysmal.

But it was entertaining, and you enjoyed your time with it.  I think a lot of episodic TV worked that way despite whatever shortcomings there were in the show.  I'm not the first one to observe that TV actors were more approachable than those in movies because you saw them at home rather than in a room with a bunch of strangers where they towered over your, larger than life.

The first two seasons of Miami Vice were great not because they were realistic or developed the characters, they were great because they were fun - the music, the look, the characters - all of it got you in a good mood and you looked forward to that mood again.

Most current entertainment is aimed at "educating" (i.e. hectoring) the audience, lecturing them on how they should behave.  Characters are chosen based on wokeness points, not actual charm or relatability. 

Indeed, there's a whole subtext that conventionally affable, pleasant-looking people are bad. 

Maybe part of the problem is that the writers are writing what they know - they are miserable people, so they pour that into their shows.  They have body anxiety, so they write characters who either are filled with self-loathing or get constant unearned praise (Mary Sue).

Whatever the reason, I haven't seen a show in years that would make me want to watch network TV.

My latest vintage film purchase is John Voight's The Odessa File, which is a well-crafted tale about Nazis hiding in plain sight during the 1960s.

The titular "Odessa" is actually an acronym for veterans of the SS who managed to keep a low profile after the initial war crimes trials and used their wartime connections to achieve positions of power and influence.

Voight is an idealistic journalist who pursues a seemingly pointless story through the usual wilderness of mirrors. 

The film itself was made in the 1970s but set ten years earlier, and Andrew Lloyd Webber's soundtrack carries a number of precursors to his score for Evita.  It's based on a book and is not entirely fiction -  certain elements in the story are historically accurate. 

The upshot is that in a time when there's even less reason to trust government than in 1974, it's fascinating that this genre hasn't made more of a comeback.

One thing I'll say for Voight - he actually does a good job of being German.  I'm not talking about the accent, I mean the facial expressions and mannerisms.  Germans are not a particularly vivacious people - they don't get all animated like Italians talking with their hands.  Voight places his role well, by which I mean he frowns a lot, which is something Germans do.  Dated?  Sure, but quite enjoyable.