State of purpose

In Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government, James T. Sparrow brings to life a lost world of liberalism (and its lingering discontent)

The following review was posted recently on the Books page of the History News Network site (and is currently its home page for the 8/29 edition).

In the lifetime of most contemporary Americans -- in the lifetimes of most Americans, period -- the prevailing opinion has been that when it comes to federal government intervention in the lives of ordinary citizens, less is more. Those of us with an even passing familiarity with U.S. history are aware that this has not always been so, and think of the middle third of the twentieth century in particular as a time when Big Government did not simply prevail, but was the prevailing common sense. And that this common sense took root during Franklin Delano's Roosevelt's New Deal of the 1930s.

In this important new book, however, University of Chicago professor James T. Sparrow corrects that perception in a significant way. It was not FDR's New Deal that really transformed Americans' relationship with their government, he says. It was FDR's Second World War. In the words of the title, what we think of as the welfare state was really a warfare state. Sparrow is not the first person to make such a case; scholars like Michael S. Sherry (In the Shadow of War, 1995) and Robert Westbrook, Why We Fought, 2004), have explored similar terrain. But Sparrow traverses it with a touch that is at once deft, informed, and imaginative. Rarely is so comprehensive an argument delivered in so concise a manner (about 260 pages).

The facts of the case are relatively straightforward. When it comes to things the scale of government spending, the breadth of federal taxation, and the role of bureaucracies in reaching shaping realms that ranged from advertising to surveillance, World War II dwarfs any previous moment in American history. One of the great ironies of this development, as Sparrow makes clear, is that it occurred at the very moment the New Deal was headed for political eclipse. Even more ironic, as he also makes clear, is that this assertion of state power was made by people who simultaneously affirmed liberal values of individual aspiration and political rights and who plausibly contrasted themselves with totalitarian powers whose hold on their citizenry was absolute.

But Sparrow's case is more subtle still. In a mode of analysis that harkens back to insights of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, he's interested in the complex interaction between a national state that seeks to mold opinion and a public which resists and adapts, as well as accepts, the logic of a ruling elite. The U.S. government made demands on people -- by drafting them, regulating what they could be paid, and rationing what they ate. But to a remarkable degree, it enforced assent to such policies by relying on a combination of volunteerism, peer pressure, and propaganda.

At the same time, however, the the government and its people were involved in a complex negotiation over the price of such assent. That price could be understandable, even laudable, when it took the form of expectations that war veterans would be well cared for, literally and figuratively, when they came home. It could also be much less laudable, as when the government condoned racism against African Americans in the South or Asians in the West by avoiding fights over such issues in the name of Getting the Job Done.

Sparrow illustrates his argument with approaches that combine political, economic, and, especially, cultural history. He does a nice job with a 1943 Kate Smith broadcast, explaining why the singer was uniquely positioned, by virtue of her experience and persona, to persuade millions of Americans to defer gratification by buying war bonds. There's a particularly good chapter on how racial and ethnic humor gave those who indulged in it a way to criticize the government that might otherwise be considered unfair or even unpatriotic ("You kiss the niggers / and I'll kiss the Jews / and we'll stay in the White House / as long as we choose," went one piece of anti-FDR doggerel). He also does a lot with the House of Labor, tracing the way workers aligned themselves as extensions of soldiers at the front, even as they parried criticism at home -- and from many of those soldiers abroad -- that they were overpaid, greedy, or both.

Sparrow concludes the book by asserting that while the end of the war also meant the end of some of the most expansive dimensions of government intervention in the economy and U.S. society, its legacy would prove profound in shaping the collective persona of mid-twentieth century Americans, particularly a strong sense of institutional commitment that would be the touchstone of Baby Boomer as well as Neoconservative rebellions later in the century.

There are aspects of Warfare State with which one could quibble. Actually, Sparrow's argument is so nuanced that there are times he seems to flirt with capsizing it -- one could use much of the same evidence to show the limits of adherence to the federal government rather than emphasizing the degree to which it took root. (This, in effect, is the argument Barry Karl made in his 1983 book The Uneasy State.) It might have also been helpful if he did just a bit more with a comparative dimension -- how, for example, affirmations of war workers in the United States were similar to or different than virtually simultaneous Stakhanovite celebrations of labor in the Soviet Union, for example. But one finishes Warfare State with an appreciation of how beautifully wrought a piece of scholarship it is --   meticulously researched, gracefully written, and politically resonant. Notwithstanding the drawbacks of the era Sparrow chronicles with scrupulous attention, it is nevertheless hard not be be moved, if not nostalgic, about a moment of national purpose and hope whose absence has been replaced with one defined by a worrisome, and worsening ache.

Elephants' memory

In Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization, Richard Miles surveys the rise and fall of a superpower.

The following review was posted recently on the Books page of the History News Network site. 

England and France. Greece and Persia. Hapsburgs and Ottomans. Imperial rivalry is as old as history itself, but some rivalries can truly be said to have changed the world. The great contest between the Mediterranean city-states of Rome and Carthage falls into that category. At the end of three Punic Wars stretching over a century (264-146 BC), Carthage was literally wiped off the face of the earth. But in this fascinating new history, University of Sydney historian Richard Miles re-constructs a civilization whose memory continues to stir imaginations -- particularly among those who suspect that their own is not immortal.

History, as we all know, is written by the victors (or the ancient Greeks). As Miles explains, most of what we know about Carthage is second-hand, and most of that is anti-Carthaginian. But he is deft in deconstructing such sources. As he also makes clear, he doesn't always have to: the truth is that the Romans needed the Carthaginians, at no time more than after they had been vanquished. There could be no myth of Roman power without a legendary adversary on which to justify it. If you're careful, patient, and epistemologically humble, the truth has a way of surfacing, like pottery fragments from an archeological site.

For the lay reader, one of the more surprising aspects of Carthaginian civilization is its syncretic character, deeply rooted in the Levant. The North African city was founded by Phoenician traders who had deeply imbibed Greek as well as Persian culture. A maritime people whose trade stretched from modern day Lebanon to Spain, its peninsular position right smack in the middle was just about ideal for dominating the Mediterranean oval. For centuries, the island of Sicily was a key staging base for such operations.

Perhaps inevitably, such a position engendered conflict with the Greeks. The Carthaginians were fortunate that Macedonian Alexander the Great looked east rather than west when he began his colossal string of conquests. But they didn't need him to Hellenize them; that process had begun long before. Miles pays close attention the the mythology surrounding the Greek god Heracles, who was fully integrated into a religious order alongside Persian-based deities like Melqart and Baal.

For a long time, Carthage and an an ascendant Rome -- which also enjoyed a fortunate slot in that Mediterranean oval -- cooperated in trade as well as in navigating the geopolitics of Magna Greacia (particularly the Corinthian colony of Syracuse). But by the third century BC their antagonism led the First Punic War (264-241). This conflict broke Carthaginian naval dominance of the central and western Mediterranean and destabilized Carthage from within, but was not completely ruinous. In its aftermath, the so-called Barcid faction launched a highly successful Iberian adventure that effectively became a new power base -- and a new threat to Roman hegemony.

It was the Second Punic War (218-201 BC) in which the legend of the Roman-Carthaginian rivalry really took root. And it was this war that gave the world one of the most remarkable leaders it has ever seen: the Carthaginian general Hannibal, who achieved the stupefying feat of leading a huge army, complete with elephants, over the Alps and embarking on a 15-year occupation of of greater Italy. As one might expect, Miles explains how Hannibal achieved military mastery in the most catastrophic defeat in the history of the Roman republic, the Battle of Cannae (216 BC). But he also does an exceptionally good job of illuminating Hannibal's political gifts. A Hellenically-educated Greek speaker, Hannibal brilliantly exploited the religious mythology of the ancient world in ways that challenged the basis of Roman power ideologically no less than militarily. Miles pays careful attention to Hannibal's rituals, pronouncements, and evidence like coinage to document his strategy, vividly bringing him, his countrymen, and the notably multicultural society that spawned both into focus.

Ultimately, however, Hannibal was unable to break the Latin hold on Italy, or to crash the gates of Rome. Partly this is a matter of predictable logistical strains. Partly, too, it was a matter of internal Carthaginian politics, in which Hannibal's provincial power base in Iberia proved to be a handicap. But his ultimate defeat was also a matter of the worthy adversary who learned from, and adapted, Hannibal's own tactics. In carrying the war back to Carthage, this general pried Hannibal out of Italy and earned the title that made him famous: Scipio Africanus.

Unlike the first two, the Third Punic War (149-146 BC) was a tawdry afterthought that generated significant internal dissent within Rome. Unwilling to tolerate the truly remarkable resilience of its former rival, expansionist senators consistently sided with Numidian aggression on the African coast and ultimately demanded capitulation so draconian that the Carthaginians effectively felt they had no alternative but to fight to the death. Miles argues that it was not coincidental that the similarly storied city of Corinth was also destroyed by the Romans in 146 BC; a voracious hegemon would no longer contemplate the existence of even a symbolic rival.

Ironically, this victory would haunt the Romans long afterward. They had pledged to destroy Carthage (in the famous words from which this book takes its title) and swore it would never be resurrected. But Julius Caesar considered founding a new Roman city there before his assassination, and his adopted successor, Augustus, followed through on the plan (cleverly displacing his ambitions beyond the politically fraught terrain of Italy).  By that point, the history of Rome was being written by Romans in Latin, not Greek. And by the end of the second century, a bona fide African, Septimus Severus, would found a dynasty within what had become an empire. The Mediterranean world was Roman. Everyone else just lived in it.

Would Western civilization turned out differently had Carthage prevailed rather than Rome? Yes, but not that different. In part, that's because, as Miles shows us, Carthage was far from the Other that historians like Polybius and Livy would have us believe. It's also because as an empire that also began as the colonial pod of a seafaring people, the United States is less exceptional than we might imagine. Hail, Hannibal.

Bush tales

In Bush's Wars, Terry H. Anderson tells a very familiar story (but keeps it brief)

The following review was posted recently on the Books page of the History News Network site.  

It is often said that journalism is the first draft of history. Bush's Wars is presented as the first major comprehensive study of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, an effort to weigh the legacy of President George W. Bush. This is how the blurbs and publicity for the book position it, and the way Terry H. Anderson puts it in his introduction: "to 'figure out,' in Bush's words, the history of the defining policies of his presidency -- and to do it during his lifetime."

But Bush's Wars is more a report of the journalism on those wars than a scholarly assessment in its own right. Strictly speaking, a piece of academic scholarship would draw on primary source research and advance an argument that had never been systematically articulated before. Bush's Wars distills an already voluminous literature into a 240 page narrative (whose footnotes are batched a little too aggressively to track sources all that easily). Its point of the view, that the Afghan war was bungled, and that that Iraq was both launched under false pretenses and bungled, has long been the conventional wisdom in U.S. society at large. So the book doesn't really have a lot to offer in the terms on which it presents itself.

Perhaps I should be praising it with faint damnation. Bush's Wars is actually a useful little volume that may well have a long shelf life for two reasons. The first is that there is indeed nothing like it: a piece of one-stop shopping that surveys its subject in a way that manages to be both wide-ranging and succinct. The second is that while there's little here that your garden-variety news junkie wouldn't already know, there are undoubtedly a large number of people who lived through the era without knowing much about it, and a growing number of people who were too young to really remember it. It is for those people -- i.e. college students -- with whom the book should find a home as what it really is: a course adoption text.

To wit, Anderson, who teaches at Texas A&M, starts the book off with two introductions: the first a 16-page overview history of the Islamic world; the other a longer one that covers the regime of Saddam Hussein, the rise of the Taliban and al Queda, and U.S. policy in the region. From there, he offers chapters on 9/11 and the Afghan War, the efforts of the Bush administration to justify the overthrow of Hussein, the invasion itself, and the rise of an insurgency. Only after that does he return to Afghanistan, which gets much less attention than Iraq does. This is nevertheless a well-paced narrative that touches on all the major bases.

What it doesn't do, and what we still need, are studies that are less about what Bush did than ones which examine why his administration was able to get away with it. Did changes in the structure of American journalism allow the administration's mendacity to succeed in ways that it might not have otherwise? (Consider, for example the record of the BBC relative to to that of U.S. networks and newspapers.) Was the American electorate more credulous than it had been since the Vietnam era? What larger geopolitical shifts occurred while the United States exercised is unipolar hegemony? What does the way the war was ginned up and fought suggest about the state of the U.S. armed forces? My guess is that we will get ambitious efforts to answer such questions. But they will probably take more time than Bush's Wars took to write. "The Iraq story post-2003, this is still chapter one," former U.S. ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker said (metaphorically) in 2009. "This is a very long book."

In the meantime, we have Bush's Wars. It should prove handy.

Jim is on his annual summer family vacation, which, as usual, involves some corner of New England (this year it's slated to be Massachusetts and Vermont). One of the pleasures it affords, in addition to the structured opportunity for leisure activity with friends and loved ones, is the chance to catch up on reading that's not work-related, in particular books that have slipped through the cracks amid a teaching/writing/reviewing regimen. This year, that means the opportunity to finally get to at least one of the three books in Stieg Larsson's celebrated "Milennium trilogy," featuring the mysterious Lisabeth Salander and her sidekick, Mickael Blomkvist, two investigators of civic corruption. Larsson, who never lived to see the global phenomenon his work has become (after being rejected by multiple publishers, the books have sold nearly 30 million copies) is clearly a master of the thriller genre.

Best to all for a relaxing respite as the intimations of summer's end emerge over the calendrical horizon. Future posts in this site will include a new book about the ancient Carthaginian empire, the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, and a continuation of the "Sensing the Past" series on the work of Jodie Foster as historian.

Machine dreams -- and nightmares

In Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, Sherry Turkle explores the downside of our networked lives

The following review was posted recently on the Books page of the History News Network site.

Over the course of the last quarter century, Sherry Turkle of MIT has become the sociologist-cum-philosopher of human-computer relations. This inquiry began in 1984 with The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, which was published just as personal computers were entering the collective bloodstream. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet arrived in 1995, and was again ahead of the curve, talking in depth about the "Multiple User Domains" (MUDs) that we've come to know as chat rooms. Alone Together is presented as the final installment of a trilogy of what Turkle calls "the inner life of devices." It works well as a point of entry to Turkle's body of work in tracing the questions -- she's less good on answers -- raised by the advent of our digital lives. It also suggests that in some ways, she's played out the string.

Alone Together is really -- and may well have been best published as -- two books. The first is in effect an inquiry into the coming age when robots will be a practical, and, perhaps, pervasive, part of our everyday lives. As she's done all along, Turkle pays particular attention to children's toys, not only because devices like Tamogotchis and Furbies were harbingers of more sophisticated devices, but also because she's keenly aware that the technological socialization of the young will have important implications for society as a whole. But she's (now) especially attentive to the other end of the demographic spectrum: the use of robots as devices, particularly psychological devices, for the care and company of the old. At least superficially, the logic seems irresistible: machines can perform tasks more efficiently and cheaply than people, and in many cases (like that Alzheimer patients, for example), artificial care, and caring, makes sense.

Turkle, however, is deeply skeptical of this approach. She notes a kind of slippery slope logic: technological options that seems like they're better than nothing become positive goods and then inevitable. She wonders whether whether such devices will let younger generations off the hook emotionally and corrode our collective sense of humanity. And she worries that even raising such questions will increasingly fall into the realm of understandable but unrealistic, before they become simply irrelevant.

In the second half of the book, Turkle shifts her gaze away from humans' interactions with machines and instead on their mediated relations with each other. So much of her work has involved peering around corners from her perch at an elite institution at the cutting edge; here she seems immersed in the world of Blackberries, texting, Facebook, and the related phenomena that seem thoroughly embedded into contemporary life. Here her concerns parallel those about robots: that tools like texting that once seemed as useful substitutes for direct communication have now replaced it. That social networking is a mere shadow of the real thing. That innovations designed to make our lives easier have instead become the source of slavish addictions. Turkle frets that young people don't like to make phone calls anymore. She frets that Facebook, which presumably connects people, actually fosters loneliness. She frets that people take refuge in games and avatars and chat rooms rather than deal with their problems. She frets . . . .

"There is a danger that we will come to see these reductions in our expectations as the new norm," she writes of our tendency to displace our interactions with people through social media. "There is the possibility that chatting with anonymous humans can make online robots and bots and agents look like good company. An there is the possibility that the company on online bots makes anonymous humans look good." To which one finally feels compelled to say: "Duh." It's sort of like reading a book about about the impact of the automobile that has chapters on the dangers of car crashes, high insurance costs, the impact on the environment, and teenage entitlement. All real enough, and worth talking about. But the picture here seems a bit lopsided, and after a certain point one becomes impatient for concrete suggestions, which are largely lacking. Turkle thinks workers in geriatric care should be better paid. But that's not exactly dazzling public policy advice. Actually, I'm less worried about robots providing unsatisfactory medical care to the elderly or disabled than a where regime decides such people are just too much trouble, period. Such scenarios are hardly unimaginable, because they're rooted in history, not futurology.

And history is change over time. That almost always means trade-offs. At times it seems Turkle, trained as a psychoanalyst, believes that technological change should not have a potential negative impact on people. But of course it must; the power for good, which is stinted here, almost always means the power to do harm. For the moment at least, we have the freedom to act on our own behalf as it concerns our networked life. Discretion has always been and remains a deeply human attribute, albeit one difficult to achieve. Let the surfer beware.

Symbolic revolt

In Clothed in the Robes of Sovereignty: The Continental Congress and the People Out of Doors, Benjamin H. Irvin describes an American Revolution that didn't quite work out

The following review was posted recently on the Books page of the History News Network site. 

Clothed in the Robes of Sovereignty tells the story of an unsuccessful experiment: the attempt by the infant government of the United States to create a semiotics of the American Revolution. We all know that the Founding Fathers were masters of the English language (one part of their patrimony they could never forsake). The attendant attempt to create a national system of symbols and rituals to go along with manifestos like the Declaration of Independence preoccupied figures no less than John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. From the mid-1770s to the mid 1780s, a period spanning the formation of the First Continental Congress to the Treaty of Paris, government leaders declared holidays, struck medals, built monuments, created currency, and took other steps to culturally institutionalize their government. But while some of these steps toward creating what Benedict Anderson has famously called "imagined communities" had an effect temporarily, very few of them ever took root.

As Benjamin Irvin, assistant professor of history at the University of Arizona, explains, there are a number of reasons why. Perhaps the most important in his view is that that the people -- make that the People -- had an unofficial vote in the adoption of collective symbols, and didn't passively accept what their leaders handed them. So a parade might turn into a riot, for example. Ordinary people could also send messages of their own. Irvin's first chapter describes an episode when Congressional leaders were forced to cancel a ball to be held in Philadelphia to mark the arrival of Martha Washington, because they were warned that such frivolity, which appeared to contradict Congress's own pronouncements about frugality, led to threats that the tavern where the event was to be held would be attacked. Irvin uses the phrase "the people out of doors," which has become something of a buzz phrase among scholars of the period, to describe such dynamics.

Perhaps the most vivid of Irvin's case studies involves Franklin's creation of U.S. currency. A former engraver, he was the obvious choice for the task, and one to which he brought a distinctively Poor Richard sensibility. Franklin's bills included hands trying up uproot thorny bushes (of oppression), harps with thirteen strings, busy beavers, and thrift-minded phrases like "Mind Your Business," all reprinted in the book. Alas, the American people didn't buy them, literally or figuratively. Continental currency depreciated rapidly, and ultimately had to be replaced (under contentious terms) because its image had decayed so severely.

A second reason why Revolutionary symbolism came up short is that opponents of the new regime had resources of their own. Irvin describes the efforts of clergymen, poets, and other Tory figures who satirized, lampooned, or otherwise attacked efforts to create language and symbols for the new nation-state. Such opponents often resorted to racial, class and gender imagery, casting Patriots as henpecked husbands, uncouth hillbillies, or people little more civilized than savage Indians. (An early emblem of the United States had a frontiersman with a tomahawk; that was soon dropped.) 

Finally, the leadership elite of the Revolution had their own internal tensions, even contradictions. Though Irvin believes it was sometimes exaggerated, lingering Puritan strains in New England culture lent a spartan air to Revolutionary imagery, and led to injunctions against cultural practices like theater and gambling, which were more common and acceptable in the South. And republican notions of simplicity often clashed with the imperatives of foreign policy, where the Americans grappled with unfamiliar French opulence and a desire to be taken seriously that required demonstrations of grandeur on their part.

By the closing years of the Revolution, Congress had largely exhausted its resources, financial and otherwise. Its attempts to buy goodwill from the Continental Army with swords and commendations proved no substitute for adequate pay, and the strains between the military and politicians were dangerously near the breaking point. When victory came, it was the army and the French, not Congress, that led the way in celebration.

In years to come, the defining symbols of American life, such as the National Anthem, imagery of Uncle Sam, and other pieces of iconography would emerge more indigenously. Ironically, the one durable cultural practice of the Revolution -- commemorating Independence Day -- had gone into eclipse when before war was over, and there was uncertainty about just when to celebrate it. (Adams believed July 2 would be the day that would be immortalized.) It would have been helpful for Irvin to run this story a forward a bit more, and help us understand a little more clearly how a national semiotic order finally did take shape. He also might have done more with a surprising obvious omission here: the evolution of the American flag.

Clothed in the Robes of Sovereignty is nevertheless a carefully researched and elegantly executed book. The individual chapters are usefully segmented and can stand on their own, but the whole also adds up to more than the sum of its parts. This is a fine addition to the cultural history of the American Revolution.

Non-fond farewell

In A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan, Artemy M. Kalinovsky explains that wars sometimes take a while to end, because occupiers can afford to take their time

The following review was posted recently on the Books page of the History News Network site. 

There appear to be people who would like this book to be, in effect, Why the U.S. Will Fail in Afghanistan. Such people include the publicity department at Harvard University Press, whose press release for the book cites the "suspiciously familiar" set of reasons Artemy Kalinovsky cites for the Soviet debacle there. They also include investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, whose blurb for the book suggests he did not actually read it, since his remarks focus on this angle, which comprise about three (very good) pages on the subject. There are of course very good reasons, in both marketing and intellectual terms, for viewing The Long Goodbye through that lens (it is, after all, why I picked it up). But such a perspective also distorts what this book is and why it is valuable.

A more relevant, if still somewhat nationally narcissistic,  historical analogy is more relevant: The U.S. and Vietnam. Before a few years ago, the comparison was downright proverbial: the Soviet decade-long (1979-89) adventure in Afghanistan was the USSR's Vietnam, the imperial incursion that brought a hegemon to its knees. Some would say it was actually worse, since it precipitated the end of the Soviet Union itself.

Kalinovsky does engage this analogy (a little). And he sees merit it. Certainly, he would agree that both Afghanistan and Vietnam posed knotty military problems (though he is among those who believes that the Soviet 40th army acquitted itself well). And that both generated dissent at home and disenchantment abroad. But the emphasis here is the reverse of what one typically sees in discussions of Vietnam: for the Soviets, maintaining credibility with its allies and the Third World were primary, while managing public opinion was not a serious issue until the war was almost over.

Kalinovsky notes that the Soviet regime of Leonid Brezhnev was ambivalent at best in its decision to intervene in an internecine quarrel between two leftist factions in Afghanistan in late 1979, neither of which commanded a popular majority in that fractious country. Ironically, most of Soviet experience in there involved trying to temper the excesses of the ruling regime and steer it in a more pragmatic direction that involved power sharing among themselves and outsiders. The Soviets realized almost immediately that they'd made a mistake, and by 1982 were already formulating strategies to leave. But -- and this is important to Kalinovsky -- it took a long time for the withdrawal to actually take place because the Soviets could afford, literally and figuratively, to bide their time. The war may have been, in the memorable words of Mikhail Gorbachev, "a bleeding wound," but it was not a fatal one.

Actually, Gorbachev is the pivotal figure in The Long Goodbye. He inherited the war when he came to power in 1985 and was determined to end it. But "determined" in this context is a decidedly relative term, whose pace was contingent on other circumstances, primary among them the U.S.-Soviet relationship, which took a frosty turn in the years after the invasion but began to improve once Gorbachev took the helm in the second half of the 1980s. Soviet diplomatic strategy had been to tie a withdrawal from Afghanistan to an agreement that Pakistan and the United States would revoke their (overlapping) support for the mujahadeen forces attacking the Afghan regime. But in the negotiations that led to the breakthrough Geneva Accords of 1988, Gorbachev decided in effect to make Afghanistan a loss-leader, to announce his seriousness in resolving general Cold War tensions in the form of a unilateral Soviet withdrawal.

It would be too strong to suggest that this strategy backfired, because it's far from the clear that the alternative was any better. It's safe to say, however, that it didn't turn out the way Gorbachev hoped. The U.S. interpreted the Soviet move as a sign of weakness, and refused to budge on the mujahadeen. Gorbachev, in turn, felt compelled slow his pace and make counter-moves in withdrawing, both to shore up the sinking morale of allies in Europe and (especially) the Third World, and to parry the thrusts of a building conservative reaction on his right in Moscow. He also had to contend with long-term tensions between the military and the KGB in Afghanistan, whose conflicting agendas became more acute and paralyzing in the closing years of the war. But while Afghanistan was paradigmatic of Gorbachev's problems generally, it was never really more than a pawn in his losing game before getting pushed aside by Boris Yeltsin, who felt no obligation to prop up Afghanstan once the USSR dissolved in 1991.

Kalinovsky believes Gorbachev pretty much did the best he could under the circumstances, though thinks the last Soviet leader got something of a free pass as domestic criticism of the war as a senseless waste of life grew in an increasingly free media environment. He also believes that the Soviet invasion was, as imperial adventures go, relatively moderate and understandable: Afghanistan, after all, shares a border with the Soviet Union, in a Muslim corner of the world that was increasingly volatile in the last quarter of the twentieth century. (He does not, however, think that Muslim minoriites within the Soviet Union itself were ever really a serious problem.) Moreover, the Soviet occupation was hardly the ideologically driven crusade Cold War conflicts sometimes appeared to be. Real nation-building went on, even if the Soviets did more harm than good.

Still, at the end of the day, the moral of his story holds as true for the 20th century as it does the thirteenth, nineteenth, or twenty-first: you just can't win in Afghanistan.  In his conclusion, Kalinovsky notes that like Gorbachev, Barack Obama is a reformer who inherited a war he wants to end, and who, like Gorbachev, is dallying in doing so. If ever there was a case where history is destiny, this would appear to be it.

Wild, Wild Universe

Foster in a zesty Western, and a soggy Sci-Fic flick


The following post is part of a series of on Jodie Foster specifically, and Hollywood actors generally, as historians.

Foster followed Sommersby with another historical movie, this one the comic western, Maverick (1994), based on the old TV series from the late fifties and early sixties that starred James Garner as the title character. This time Garner, who acted with Foster in One Little Indian, plays the father of that character, whose role is filled by Mel Gibson. Maverick was written by a past master, William Goldman, and it’s exceptionally deft in its light quick pace, and a series of plot twists that resemble a card trick, which is appropriate, since the plot concerns a set of poker-playing grifters. Foster plays Annabelle Bransford, a sexy con artist who keeps pace with a fast pack of players that also includes Alfred Molina as Gibson’s antagonist. Indeed, she wins the trump card in the final scene of the movie, a good-natured feminist ending for a movie that is by far the lightest of Foster’s career, and one that she has remembered with great affection ever since. It was during this movie that she befriended Mel Gibson, a man she cast, and stood beside, seventeen years later amid the publicity surrounding The Beaver.

            Maverick was a popcorn flick; Foster’s other movie of 1994 was considerably more ambitious, and ranks among her best performances: the title role in Nell, for which she received her third academy award nomination. (In a bravura performance, Foster manages the arresting task of emptying her face of expression for much of the movie.)  Though this was a pedigree project with major talent – including Liam Neeson, his wife Natasha Richardson, and the esteemed British director Michael Apted – Nell is a fairly predictable undertaking most notable for the way it once again manifest’s Foster’s emphasis on the malignant forces that subvert the designs of even the best intentioned people. Nell is the story of a young woman who has lived her whole life in the remote woods of North Carolina, insulated from contact with modern civilization. She was conceived as a result of rape, and had a twin sister who died in childhood. When her mother dies, and her death is reported to an unscrupulous grocery delivery boy (Jeremy Upham), Nell’s existence is discovered by local authorities. A local doctor, played by Neeson, tries to assist her, and to do this, he enlists Richardson, a specialist in autism. They realize, however, that Nell is not mentally handicapped; instead her strange language is a combination of emulating her stroke-stricken mother and the special language she shared with her twin. Yet their attempt to serve as surrogate parents for Nell is complicated by medical professionals who seek to institutionalize her, as well as people (like the grocery boy) who wish to exploit her vulnerability. In other words, institutions do not only do more harm than good, they also fail to protect the vulnerable from those who operate outside and against them. After a dramatic hearing in a trail-like setting, Nell wins her freedom and can return to the wild with her new family, the Rousseau-like logic of the film finally affirmed.

            Foster essentially repeated that message in a different form three years later in Contact, a tedious science-fiction movie in which she stars as an astronomer who teams up with Matthew McConaughey, unconvincingly cast as a theologian. They battle the skepticism – and, more importantly, the greed and hatred – of those, inside and outside their fields, who reject their fervent belief that alien life exists. The soggy New Age overtones of the film, which include the astronomer’s contact with her long dead father, suggest something of a dead end in Foster’s career-long assertion that goodness and decency are locked in mortal combat with irrational malice. Fortunately, in the ensuing years, her work began to texture this paradigm and portray characters and situations with more internal complexity.

Next: The King and Jodie
 

 

Reconstructing Jodie

Foster followed Silence of the Lambs with a series of projects that widened her range.


The following post is part of a series of on Jodie Foster specifically, and Hollywood actors generally, as historians.

Jodie Foster came out of the post-Silence of the Lambs gate with Little Man Tate (1991), her directorial debut. Although it’s namesake is a precocious, Salingeresque little boy (Adam Hann-Byrd), in a screenplay written by Scott Frank (a newcomer at the time who went on to have a successful career), it’s not hard to see an oblique autobiographical subtext this story about a brilliant child and the tug-of-war he engenders between two powerful women. Foster plays Dede Tate, working-class mother of the seven year-old Fred, who loves him fiercely but lacks the resources, intellectual and otherwise, to develop his prodigious talents. Enter Jane Grierson (Dianne Wiest), who runs an institute for gifted children, but shows startling deficits in nurturing them. It is to Foster’s credit that she chose to tell this notably fair-minded story, which shows sensitivity to some of its specifically gendered dimensions (Harry Connick Jr. does nicely in a brief role that shows the possibilities and limits of male role models for the boy). Little Man Tate is also a hopeful movie in that it suggests that conflicts between adults over children may actually contribute positively to their development when those adults come to realize the important, if incomplete, roles they can have in the life of children. (In this regard, Little Man Tate is a bit like Denzel Washington’s The Great Debaters, a film in which an argument between two men helps forge the strong character of a Civil Rights leader.)

Foster followed Little Man Tate with a bit part in Woody Allen’s Shadows and Fog (1992) one of the better-realized projects of that prolific director. Shadows is Kafkaesque fable set in an unnamed city—think New York or London in the second quarter of the twentieth century—about a man (Allen) ordered to find a serial killer abroad on a foggy night. Mia Farrow plays a circus performer angry with her unfaithful companion (John Malkovich) who finds herself in a whorehouse whose employees include a genial prostitute played by Foster. “There’s only one thing men will brave murder for,” she says in a moment of wry levity with her companions. “The little furry animal between our legs.” Though thoroughly gothic in its black-and-white cinematography, the movie has an upbeat ending that gets about as close as Foster ever does to buoyancy in her movies.

Her next project, Sommersby, is really the only one in the Foster Hollywood canon that can truly be said to be a historical epic. Given its French source material, it’s a bit surprising that co-star, Richard Gere was executive producer, though he probably had more money and clout than the Francophile Foster did at the time. Sommersby is based on the life of Martin Guerre, a sixteenth century man who became a source of folklore in French life and culture. Guerre, who hailed from the Basque country, left his wife to fight for the Spanish Habsburg King Philip V, in a Europe wracked by religious conflict (Spain of course was arch-Catholic; Guerre hailed from a region with strong Calivinist tendencies.)  Years later, the returning soldier resumed his place in his village. But suspicions grew that he was an imposter, and those suspicions grew substantially when the real Martin Guerre returned and claimed he had been robbed of his identity by a man who was really Arnaud du Tilh, nicknamed Pansette (“belly”). Pansette was eventually tried, convicted and executed. A 1982 cinematic version of this story, starring Gérard Depardieu, was co-written by Princeton historian Natalie Zemon Davis, who later published the definitive scholarly account of the tale.[1] The inspired conceit of Sommersby involved taking a different period of intense warfare and ideological conflict—the American Civil War—and telling an analogous story rooted in local events and relationships.

Though nominally a conventional romance—the only one Foster ever made—it’s not hard so see how Sommersby held appeal for her beyond simply establishing her as a leading lady. Though presumably a struggle over identity between two men, it’s really the woman—Bertrande du Rols in life, Laurel Sommersby in the movie—who functions as the keystone of the story. It strains credulity to believe that du Rols failed to recognize that that the returning soldier was not her husband, but this was nevertheless her stance as long as she could possibly maintain it, largely because her actual marriage was an unhappy one (partly the result of Guerre’s impotence, which brought their union to the brink of annulment before his departure).

Sommersby feels compelled to stack its deck beyond simply having dreamboat Gere as the fraudulent title character by having him champion agricultural self-sufficiency for poor farmers and having an almost laughably enlightened view of race relations in the Reconstruction South. Yet there is a modicum of historical truth in his trial being presided over by a black judge (James Earl Jones), for the story is set in that brief interregnum between slavery and the imposition of a segregated Jim Crow regime. In one of his many fine performances, Jones manages to both endow his character with dignity and an implicit recognition of how fragile it is. Which really goes to the heart of one of the most important meanings of the Martin Guerre saga: that in times of social upheaval, it becomes tantalizingly possible to plausibly imagine a different, better personal life.

No one makes this point better than Foster, who manages to convey it solely on the basis of her facial expressions at the start of the movie. We first see her tilling the family field, accompanied by another farmer (the ever-game second fiddle, Bill Pullman), who is in love with her. Informed that her husband has returned from the war, she runs to the house, grabs her son and goes inside to watch his approach with an excited crowd. Obviously guarded—is it because she’s unhappy to see him or knows he’s an imposter?—the two go out to the front steps, awaiting the veteran’s approach. “Go say hello to your daddy,” she finally says to her son, clearly too young to really remember his father, and we sense she’s playing for time, not ready to embrace the man or call him a fraud. But he’s playing his part to the hilt; “I’d forgotten how beautiful you are,” he says, taking the hands that she had just been rubbing nervously. Foster’s faint half-smile seems to suggest amusement with the performance, but after she closes her eyes and two embrace, she opens them briefly, suggesting nervousness about where this ruse is headed.

Mrs. Sommersby nevertheless proves skillful in parrying her “husband’s” advances, “reminding” him that they had not been sleeping together at the time of his departure and would not now, either. Over time, of course, the two fall in love; the great irony of Gere’s character is that his identity theft cannot disguise his irrepressible optimism and sincere generosity. The couple’s happiness is ineluctably temporary, but no less precious for that. The thin but heartfelt smile Foster renders as she watches Sommersby on the scaffold at the end of the movie suggests a joy that not even his death can take away, and the final image of the movie, of black men repairing the steeple on a damaged church, suggests that such small islands of hope become the basis of new and better worlds.

Unwarranted speculation

In When Wall Street Met Main Street: The Quest for an Investors Democracy, Julia C. Ott describes the early 20th century moment when shareholding replaced stakeholding

The following review was posted recently on the Books page of the History News Network site. 

Once upon a time, Americans believed that economic success was a matter of hard work and thrift. The word "investment" was commonly understood to mean the expenditure of resources in an enterprise directly controlled by its owner. Even corporate titans like Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller understood their success in these terms (though not their critics). An avowed Social Darwinist like William Graham Sumner counterposed "the simple honest laborer, ready to earn his labor by productive work" with "the vicious, the idle, and the shiftless." In the popular imagination going back to the time of Alexander Hamilton, those who sought wealth through financial instruments like stocks and bonds were scarcely more than barroom gamblers. Such a view may have been simplistic, but it was certainly widespread, an article of faith in the Democratic party from the Age of Jackson to the Age of Roosevelt.

Ah, the good old days.

The story of how finance capitalism was transformed from a marginal element of modern industrial society to the inescapable imperative of contemporary life -- even after its demonstrable failure in 2007-2008 -- is the story Julia C. Ott tells in When Wall Street Met Main Street. The core of this story is a historical hinge, a crucible of about twenty years between the Progressive era and the stock market crash of 1929, when the logic of modern economic life snapped into place. It's a tale of contingent events and unexpected consequences of intended events, but it's also one of a determined elite successfully manipulating regulators and public opinion through the creation of a concept Ott dubs "an investor's democracy": the idea that replacing a nation of stakeholders with a nation of shareholders would stabilize and extend an American way of life in ways more meaningful than votes, unions, pensions, or self-governance. What's more astounding than the mere fact of this marketing strategy is the degree to which it succeeded.

One of the great ironies in the emergence of investor democracy ideology is that it was to a great extent the creation of those who presumably sought to contain and regulate capitalist excesses. The Pujo Committee of 1913 (a staple of SAT II U.S. History exams) made the first step in this direction, seeking to legitimate trading by reforming the market. Organizations like the New York Stock Exchange, which stood to benefit from such legitimacy, nevertheless parried a potential loss of prerogative by arguing that better results would be achieved through self-regulation and reporting. But it was Progressives themselves who demonstrated just what mass investment could do in the bond drives of the First World War, which used sophisticated marketing techniques (as well as less subtle ones of coercion) to finance the cost.

The federal government was strikingly good at this, and the early postwar featured even greater capital flows into the national state as well as proposals for nationalizing the rail system. But increasing impatience with Progressive policy as well as a full-bore mobilization of private interests led to a rejection of such approaches in favor of allowing capital to flow toward private enterprise. An emergent ideology of "New Proprietorship" promulgated by advocates like Thomas Nixon Carver and William Z. Ripley worked tirelessly to convince policymakers that mass investment by workers and consumers in private companies would serve as an excellent hedge against socialism as well as a modern incarnation of the family farm or small business that had previously been the core aspiration of republican ideology.

Such a version of history conveniently overlooked the fact of slavery, tenant farming, and wage labor, which always lacked such a stake in enterprises. By contrast, the boosters of New Proprietorship were very mindful that giving investors a piece of the action was hardly the same thing as control of a company, which remained firmly in the hands of corporate elites. Ott injects a gender motif into this analysis, contrasting a "feminized" vision of collective investment in instruments like pensions and social welfare with a "masculine"one of individuals empowered to amass wealth in the form of a diverse portfolio, typically in the service of a romanticized vision of retirement as a time of painless leisure. Even though women were in some cases important shareholders in AT&T -- known for decades as a blue-chip "widows and orphans" stock, a masculine, libertarian vision of trade and finance took root; hence the instinctive, dismissive description of liberalism as "the nanny state" by contemporary radio talk show hosts.

The truly astounding fact of the ideological regime that Ott limns here is how durable it has proven. The Great Depression shook it, but left the self-policing core of the NYSE intact. The primacy of the shareholder over the consumer, worker or even the manager, which first took shape early in the century, became increasingly central to the logical of modern business, achieving unquestioned supremacy in the Reagan era. Even now, when the literal and figurative bankruptcy of an investor-driven regime has saddled taxpayers with bills whose scale is only beginning to be felt, it seems almost impossible to imagine an alternative financial universe in which banks and other financial institutions are not too big to fail. As Ott notes, every major presidential candidate since Reagan has proposed some form of Social Security privatization, and even Barack Obama, who opposed the efforts of George W. Bush in this regard, nevertheless continues to insist that individuals should pursue higher risk investment strategies in order to achieve financial security.

The clarity and force of Ott's message is sustained by its medium: this is a sterling piece of scholarship. Its 225 succinct pages are buttressed by another 70 pages of notes, scaffolded into chapters that are sturdily framed with clear introductions and conclusions, as well as carefully chiseled topic sentences. The utter solidity of the volume is itself a form of force. The final irony is that it leaves you badly shaken.

You may want to miss this thing

Steven Tyler has a little trouble drawing the line in Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'n' Roll Memoir

The following review was posted yesterday on the Books page of the History News Network site.  

Like a meal at McDonald's, reading autobiographies of pop culture artists always seems like a better idea before I begin than after I'm finished. I start out wondering how particular works of art I've always loved got made, but by the time I'm done reading I find myself amazed that the person I've read about was actually capable of such achievements. Their tics, stories, and laments seem to demystify them to the point that putting down the book feels as if I'm finally parting after spending too long on vacation with someone I thought I liked. If familiarity doesn't breed contempt, it does engender impatience.

I've long been a fan of the rock band Aerosmith, and I've long liked its lead singer Steven Tyler, no time more so than recent stories about the graceful way he handled a wheelchair-bound woman as one of the talent judges of American Idol. Though long regarded as Rolling Stones knockoffs -- Tyler's autobiography arrives in the wake of Keith Richards' widely acclaimed Life -- Aerosmith was responsible for some of the memorable songs of the 1970s: "Dream On," "Sweet Emotion," and, of course, "Walk this Way," which received a new lease on life when it became a hip-hop hit for Run DMC in 1985. After struggling with drug and alcohol addictions, Tyler and his bandmates enjoyed a renaissance with a string of pop hits in beginning in the late 1980s, greatly aided by some classic MTV videos (like "Crazy," starring Liv Tyler, a daughter from one of his three marriages), and had a #1 hit in 1998 with "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing." In recent years, the term "rock star" has become a metaphorical term for someone who's celebrated in his field. But back in the day when rock was king, Tyler was a bona fide rock star, and a title he's riding into a celebrity retirement.

For a while, the noise in Tyler's head didn't bother me at all. You understand going into a book like this that you can't expect a carefully sequenced story line, much less self-aware appraisals, though it's a bit disappointing that Rolling Stone veteran and co-writer David Dalton couldn't impose more order on the material. I was charmed by Tyler's recollections of his summers in New Hampshire and his teen years in Yonkers, New York, though it would have been nice if he had explained his father was a music teacher a chapter or two before he did, for example. I particularly liked Tyler's description of his day-to-day life on tour, which gives readers a glimpse of the intriguing rhythm of a performing career and how different it is from most workaday routines. Tyler mentions blowing through a million dollars on hotel bills on a typical tour, and the millions of dollars that went up his nose. Knowing more about his relationship to the business as he experienced it would have been interesting, as would more details on songwriting and fewer excerpts from his largely forgettable lyrics.

But after a while the pleasures wear thin. Particularly because they're crowded in with a whole lot of narcissism: Tyler's laments about how his bandmates don't understand his constructive advice, how his wives don't understand his need for additional female companionship, how his managers and therapists don't understand his addictions, and so on. His children seem to wander in and out of the narrative like groupies. And the accounts of his various physical ailments and operations make you long for the good old days of youthful self-indulgent excess.

Actually, I thought the most arresting material in the Does the Noise in My Head Bother You? was ancillary, notably its many photos. I bought the "enhanced edition" Kindle edition of the book, which came with a series of supplemental audio and video files. They include a clip of Tyler talking with Dalton, which gives one a pretty good idea about how the book took shape. They also include a series of brief videos with Tyler talking about aspects of his life and work. These were quite compelling; hearing his actual voice and watching his gestures was more vivid than words on a page (his words, anyway). I suspect that the autobiography makes for a pretty good audio book. I also suspect this package points the way toward the future of e-books as a medium, at least when intellectual property issues don't stand in the way of illustrative excerpts and clips as part of a written narrative.

In any case, print is not Tyler's medium. It cheers one to see him and hear him, not read him. Keep your day -- make that night -- job, Mr. Tyler. Rock on.

The Good Shepherd

With The Silence of the Lambs, Jodie Foster gave her work an enduring moral vision

The following is part of an ongoing series about Jodie Foster's vision of U.S. history.

I remember vividly the night I went to see Jonathan Demme’s 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs. All day long, I dreaded it. I’ve always hated horror movies; only a compelling reason like a sense of professional obligation will lead me to do so. But as a lifelong movie buff, I’ve always tried to stay up with what’s current (like the Best Picture contenders in any given year), and the buzz on Lambs was too great to ignore. On that winter night in February, my wife and I threw a dinner party as a prelude to a trip to the movies. I was uneasy the whole time, looking ahead to the movie the way one does a trip visit to the dentist.

The movie begins somberly, and takes a little while to get truly frightening. The first such moment occurs when Foster’s character, an FBI agent in training, walks down a long hallway toward a waiting folding chair to visit the high-security cell of the psychiatrist-turned-cannibal, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, played by the unblinking Anthony Hopkins. It’s one of the great strengths of Lambs that one’s sheer fascination with Lecter almost overcomes one’s fear of him. If nothing else, Lambs is a great movie because it – by which I mean the 1988 novel by Thomas Harris, Ted Tally’s screenplay, but above all Hopkins’s thrilling performance – utterly crushes the shopworn liberal piety that evil arises from mere dysfunction or lack of understanding on the part of those who would otherwise be good. Maybe that’s true of the nominal villain of the piece, a serial murderer by the name of Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) who skins women so that he can live out his transvestite fantasies. But in his in his alternatingly courteous and dismissive, understated manner, Lecter is far more troubling in his cell than many criminals are outside it, because he represents a cunningly intelligent malignance that simply cannot be destroyed, only contained (temporarily). So it is that in the first scene together, an annoyed Lecter cuts Starling down to size. “You know what you look like to me? In your good bag and cheap shoes? A rube,” he tells her. “You’re not more than one generation removed from poor white trash.” As he continues his deconstruction, you watch Foster’s face begin to crumple from the verbal barrage and yet somehow maintain its shape: she’s already flinched more than once, she’s being toyed with, and yet she refuses to entirely surrender, making a not entirely convincing, but still resilient riposte that Lecter should focus his insight on someone his own size.

Despite the fact that it’s Lecter/Hopkins who in many ways steals the show, in an important sense Lambs is really a Clarice/Foster movie. And that’s because the creation of such a powerfully credible evil character simultaneously opens the possibility of redemptive good. At a couple points in the story, Lecter guesses that Clarice was abused by her policeman father or the rancher who temporarily served her foster parent after she was orphaned following her father’s death in the line of duty. But here he is wrong. Her father, as we see in flashbacks, was a good man; so, we’re told, was the rancher. So why is Starling so hell-bent on catching Buffalo Bill before he kills his next victim – who, it turns out, is the daughter of a powerful female (Republican) U.S. Senator? Ambition? Surely. But Lecter is smart enough to sense there’s more involved, and insists on knowing as the price of his cooperation in capturing Buffalo Bill (whose name, incidentally, is a mordant parody of a mythic American figure). Starling, who has been repeatedly warned about the dangers of self-disclosure with such an exploitative figure, is desperate enough to agree to his demands.

Starling and Lecter have a series of discussions in the course of the story, the most important of which occurs about an hour into the movie. In a rapid series of quid pro quo exchanges, Lecter relinquishes tidbits of analysis in the Buffalo Bill case and then presses her on why she suddenly left the home of the rancher. Starling describes a night when she woke up to the sound of screaming, and went to the barn from which it emanated. “I was scared to look but I had to,” she says, a remark that also encapsulates her behavior in this grisly case. Lecter correctly speculates that what Starling saw was the rancher engaged in the annual slaughter of the spring lambs. “First I tried to free them, but they just stood there,” Starling muses, her vacant stare suggesting she’s reliving that terrible moment. She grabbed one and ran. “I thought if I could just save one,” she says, her hushed voice trailing off, “but he was so heavy. So heavy.” She reports that only made it a few miles (!) before she was caught. What became of the lamb, Lecter asks. “They killed him,” she informs him. Lecter grasps the implications quickly: “And you think if you can save poor Catherine [the Senator’s daughter], you can make them stop, you think if Catherine lives, you won’t wake up in the dark ever again to that awful screaming of the lambs.” Starling replies, “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

That night in 1991, and ever since, I’ve always found Lecter’s final remark breathtaking: “Thank you, Clarice. Thank you.” Lecter understands and appreciates Starling’s honesty, which has characterized their relationship from the very beginning. But you get the sense that what he also appreciates is a sense of mystery. It’s possible to reduce Starling’s actions to a form of neurosis, an irrational belief that following by her father’s professional footsteps and apprehending a serial killer, she will somehow repair the psychic wounds of her childhood. But this only begs the question as to why her behavior takes this form and not some other, far more destructive course, which after all is the more typical response to psychic trauma. Lecter, it’s clear, is fascinated by Starling – he draws a gorgeous pencil drawing of her holding a lamb – and we sense he’s right to be. She enlarges the world with a sense of moral possibility. In the process, she enlarges Jodie Foster’s career  by giving us a character who’s not simply forced to respond to the malice of the wide world, but who can take proactive steps in giving herself and other people a real reason to live.

Which brings me to one of the most exciting moments in my cinematic life, which occurs when Starling unexpectedly finds herself in Buffalo Bill’s house, and decides to she must descend the stairs into his dark basement alone and try to apprehend him. Foster literally shakes with fear, in one of the most authentic representations of terror ever committed to the screen. It has long since become a horror movie joke that characters defy all psychic logic by entering situations that will prove catastrophic, because if they don’t there won’t be a scary movie. This is the opposite of that: Starling knows full well she shouldn’t go down those stairs, and she does so anyway so that she can save Catherine, a woman she’s never met. Soldiers at the front have to muster courage, but in part that’s because wars create situations where scared men have little effective chance for survival but going forward and hoping for the best. This, too, is the opposite of that: courage as the decision to experience fear. Starling’s descent is just the beginning; she finds herself plunged into pitch darkness while Buffalo Bill gazes upon her in night goggles. (In an eerie move, director Demme shows us Starling from his point of view, implicating us in his gaze.) But she will prevail.

There, anyway. For Hannibal Lecter has his own agenda, and while Starling and her colleagues are in hot pursuit of Buffalo Bill, he ruthlessly engineers his escape from prison. The movie will ends, as its moral logic dictates, with Lecter abroad, as evil eternally is. But he can’t resist a call to Starling at her moment of triumph. “I have no plans to call on you Clarice,” he tells her in what is not quite an entirely reassuring locution. “The world’s more interesting with you in it. You take care now to extend me the same courtesy.” Starling responds by saying, “You know I can’t make that promise,” which of course is the essence of her character. Lecter responds with one of the movie’s memorable jokes: “I do wish we could chat longer, but I’m having an old friend for dinner.”

The Silence of the Lambs pulled off a rare coup, becoming one of only one of only three movies to sweep the five major Oscars for Best Picture, Actor, Actress, Director, and Screenplay (the others were It Happened One Night in 1934 and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1975). Never again would Foster have to re-credential herself in the industry. Indeed, she consolidated her position by founding a production company, Egg Pictures, and moving into directing and producing. But while both would remain facets of her career, and while she would repeatedly claim that both were where her future lay, Foster would continue to work primarily as an actor. Fortunately, as she did so, her vision widened, and became more psychologically generous in ways that extended to her depiction of historical subjects. 
 Next: Foster heads toward Reconstruction, by way of the Reformation.

 

Turning a "Corner"

Jodie Foster, non-exceptionalist 

The following is part of an ongoing series about Jodie Foster's vision of U.S. history specifically, and Hollywood actors as historians generally.
 

Jodie Foster is not really a historical filmmaker. Yes, over the course of making some forty odd movies, she’s made a few set in the past. But most of those take place in her lifetime (perhaps not surprisingly, the 1960s are well represented). Of those that handful which be considered genuinely historical dramas, the most important are French, like the 1984 World War II Claude Chabrol production The Lives of Others, or the beautifully made, yet graphically realistic, 2003 film A Very Engagement, an Audrey Toutou vehicle in which Foster has a small but compelling part as a Polish woman who becomes unwillingly enmeshed in a tragic love triangle between two soldiers on the Western front. Even her most prominent U.S. historical drama, Sommersby (1993), has French origins as a transposed version of the 1982 classic The Return of Martin Guerre, moved from the sixteenth century Basque countryside to the nineteenth century Reconstruction South. Among Foster’s first post-collegiate releases – one that marked an early foray into the role of producer – was Mesmerized (1986), based on a real-life 1882 New Zealand case in which Foster plays an emotionally abused orphan-turned adolescent bride acquitted of murdering the her sexually deviant husband (John Lithgow), which she actually does by hypnotizing him into drinking poison.  Shot in New Zealand while she was still at Yale and given the alternative title My Letter to George, it was not a particularly impressive piece of filmmaking (I think of it The Little Girl Who Lives Down Under, albeit less satisfyingly gleeful in its villain getting his just desserts.)

But when thinking about these projects in the context of the movies Foster has made and set in the United States, there’s something real implicitly embedded in her choices as they reflect her vision of American history: She’s an anti-exceptionalist. There are bad people everywhere, and bad things happen to good people at all times. Not even the land of the free and the home of brave is exempt from the capricious – or not so capricious – hand of fate. What’s particularly striking about his message is that it surfaces in movies set during periods that are often viewed as moments of hope, even optimism, like the sixties (1860s no less than 1960s).

One can see the outlines of this vision emerging in the one true prestige project Foster undertook at Yale, Tony Richardson’s The Hotel New Hampshire (1984), based on the 1981 novel by John Irving. As a number of observers have noted, the movie, a weird hybrid of Hollywood farce and European art-house drama, falls flat somewhere between the two. (I’d also place some of the blame on the source material, as John Irving’s fiction always seems stuffed with too high a quotient of zany characters and improbable scenarios.) Foster plays Franny Berry, the oldest daughter in a large family whose parents met in Vienna in World War II and later open a New England inn.  But the father’s true American Dream of success is going back to Vienna where he opens a financially wobbly hotel (hence the title). Over the course of the story, Franny will endure rape at the hands of a classmate (Matthew Modine), resist the incestuous entreaties of her brother (Rob Lowe), be held hostage with the rest of the family by Marxist terrorists (among them Modine in another role and Amanda Plummer), and grapple with the tragedy of a suicidal sister who happens to be a dwarf as well as a gifted writer. If ever there was a role written to appeal to Foster’s imagination, this surely was it. Indeed, it’s a virtual compendium of the scenarios in which she’d appear for the next thirty years.

A more compelling variation on Foster’s sensibility is a much more modest project, Five Corners (1988), written the emerging playwright John Patrick Shanley, who would go on to write Joe and the Volcano for Tom Hanks before finding major commercial success with Moonstruck (1987) and the stage and screen versions Doubt (2004/8). Though not autobiographical in any strict sense, Five Corners, set in the Bronx of 1964, is vivid with a strong sense of local color. That color, however, is dark: this is not the sixties of the Beach Boys or the rising tide of the Civil Rights movement, but one of rising urban crime and national backlash hinted at in background television sets that broadcast information about Barry Goldwater and the murder of Civil Rights workers. Early in the film, which also features Tim Robbins and John Turturro on the cusp of their commercial breakthroughs, a high school teacher is killed when an arrow pierces his back, a work of random violence that helps establish a tone of mordant humor. We also see the threatening figure of Heinz (John Turturro), a psychopath recently released from prison, who bullies the owners of a Jewish delicatessen. Now that he’s back, he wants to resume his pursuit of Linda (Foster), a pet store clerk who was only rescued from an earlier rape attempt by Heinz with the intervention of her friend Harry (Robbins), who has since become a convert to non-violence by the example of Martin Luther King, Jr. Linda has a boyfriend (Todd Graff) who wants to protect her, but it’s clear that he will not be a match for Heinz. When Heinz summons Linda, she feels she has no choice but to meet him, and is subjected to his brutality in the form his frustration over her lack of enthusiasm for the gift of two penguins (stolen from the Bronz Zoo). Heinz, who will go on to show himself capable of decidedly more hideous violence, knocks Linda unconscious, and takes prisoner King Kong style. Her boyfriend, Harry, and the police frantically track them to the roof of an apartment building in which Linda is literally rests on the edge of death. Nominally, the movie has a happy ending, but Linda is saved neither by any of these men, but rather another random act of violence in the form of one of those arrows. A strangely quirky yet compelling movie, Five Corners has an indy sensibility (it was made by George Harrison’s company, Handmade Films, and features the Beatles song, “In My Life,” on the soundtrack) that anticipated the breakthrough of the movement the following year with Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies and Videotape.

From one standpoint, it seems bizarre that Foster would choose to make a film about a crazed stalker. It seems even more bizarre that she would claim not to have realized she’d done so until the film began shooting. When the subject came up, as it did repeatedly, she reacted with irritation. “I took this film because it’s the best screenplay I’ve read in a long time,” she said at the time. “It has a very strong narrative – it’s realistic as well as mythic and is about an era that interests me. I’m not of the school where I look for juicy parts, and I don’t do films because psychologically I could learn something about myself or because the character is something I always wanted to play. A lot of people do, but that doesn’t interest me as much as doing a good book. I look for good films.”

Fair enough. But such a response begs the inevitably subjective question about what makes a screenplay “best” or “good,” and here it does not defy logic to believe that Foster defines it in such a way that might also allow her to work through her experience and exorcise it artistically. Still, even if one accepts such a premise, it’s clear her tastes run broader than refracted autobiography. Yet even so, a grim subtext was apparent even in presumably more upbeat stories. Foster followed Five Corners with Stealing Home (1988), a much more conventional Hollywood story in which a lost soul and former baseball player (Mark Harmon) is inspired by the memories of his childhood babysitter, played by Foster. But these memories are prompted by her suicide, which is disclosed early in the story. Foster is credible as a wild spirit and source of adolescent fantasy, but Stealing Home is marred by its clichéd plot and the lack of a credible reason why her character would kill herself.

Again, though, she was still at a stage where she could not afford to be picky. And one, moreover, that she would have to fight hard and even create any opportunities that might come her way. Foster’s third film of 1988, The Accused, was her breakthrough. But it was a movie in which she got the lead only after more prominent actors turned it down, and was forced to audition for the part, something not usually required of an established actor.

The Accused is based on the true story of Cheryl Araujo, a waitress from New Bedford, Massachusetts, who was gang-raped at a local bar in 1983. What was important about the case was not simply that it became a local media circus in which Araujo’s identity and character became matters of public discussion, but that two men were convicted for their role in inciting the rape along with two who actually committed it (two others were acquitted). Besides a relatively trivial change of venue to the Washington state, the movie significantly changes the facts of the case by stripping its ethnic dimension: those tried for the crime were Portuguese immigrants, leading to charges of bias, despite the fact that the victim was Portuguese as well. Instead, the movie inserts college students into the largely working-class mob, simplifying the ethnic politics and replacing it with a more straightforward story of gender violation reinforced by white privilege.  While this seems politically dishonest, it’s also probably the only way an already difficult movie could have ever been made.

That said, The Accused does challenge its audience by giving it a relatively unsympathetic protagonist. Foster would win her first Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance as Sarah Tobias, a hard-bitten working-class woman whose evident appetite for sex and alcohol made her case a difficult one even for the zealous prosecutor played by Kelly McGillis (herself a rape victim) to press. Indeed, Tobias’s behavior in the movie appears to have been more provocative than that of Araujo. McGillis’s character nevertheless drives a hard bargain and cuts a relatively stiff plea deal with the lawyers of the rapists, but Tobias reacts with outrage: she wanted her day in court, and would endure any backlash to get it. This leads McGillis to prosecute the secondary figures for incitement, despite her (male) boss’s resistance, culminating the victim’s testimony in open court.  Foster’s performance is compelling not simply for the profile in courage of her protagonist but also – and this would increasingly become a theme of her career – her ability to convey the terror of women facing brutal treatment, physical and otherwise. While one must be careful not to conflate the agony of Cheryl Araujo (who died a few years after her ordeal in a car crash) with that of the woman who portrayed her, there’s little question that the graphic rape scene in the movie was a serious personal trial. The decision to do it was a professional triumph, to be sure, but also one of solidarity with a victim and one important for calling attention to serious issues of public policy.

The Accused was an important personal milestone for Foster, and as an entrant into the elite club of Oscar winners, put her in the catbird seat for her next role. Characteristically, she did not cash in this chit by seeking a commercial payday, but instead by deciding to take a leading role in the next movie by Dennis Hopper, a Hollywood legend for behavior no less than directing movies like Easy Rider (1969). It would prove to be a move she regretted, as Hopper lived up to his difficult reputation and was never able to complete the film, titled Catchfire (1990), in a form to be exhibited in theaters. It was later issued in DVD as Backtrack (1994). In the movie Foster plays an artist who witnesses a murder that leads the criminals involved to hire Hopper as a hitman to rub her out.  But he falls in love with his prey, and she ultimately with him. It’s surprisingly high concept fare for a man who was always known for pushing the envelope – a weird array of actors from Bob Dylan to Vincent Price make cameo appearances – and the movie was competently executed (notable in particular for its use of Southwestern landscapes). But it was at best unremarkable film, if still one in keeping with Foster’s penchant for choosing roles in which characters find themselves in dangerous situations for reasons not of their choosing.

In her next role, however, Foster would play someone who did find herself in a dangerous situation of her choosing. And in so doing achieved durable greatness.

 

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