To the Last Man (1933)

In Aeschylus’s Oresteia, the point is made that revenge is never ending, whereas justice can bring things to a final resolution. To the Last Man turns that idea on its head. In this movie, which is about a feud between two families, whose principal names are the Haydens and the Colbys, the head of the Hayden clan, Mark Hayden, decides to end the feud by bringing in the law, which Granny Spelvin objects to as not honorable, because blood will not be spilled for blood. Nevertheless, Mark goes to the sheriff and charges Jed Colby (Noah Berry) with the murder of Granpa Spelvin. Even the sheriff thinks it is a bad idea to let the law interfere with a feud, but he arrests Jed, who is tried and sentenced to fifteen years in jail. To get away from Kentucky, Mark takes his family out to Nevada. But when Jed’s fifteen years are up, he and what is left of his family follow the Haydens to Nevada, along with a gang of criminals, headed by Jim Daggs (Jack La Rue), whom Jed met while in jail.

While things are heating up between the two families, Lynn Hayden (Randolph Scott) and Ellen Colby (Esther Ralston) accidentally meet and fall in love. They plan to marry as the feud swirls around them. And so, this is a kind of Romeo and Juliet story, except that this too is turned on its head. Whereas Romeo and Juliet died, leaving their families to regret the feud that led to their deaths, this “Romeo” and “Juliet” survive, get married, and live happily ever after, while everyone else in the two families dies (except for a few women and children on the Hayden side). Moreover, unlike justice, which ended nothing, revenge carried out to its ultimate conclusion, when there is only one man left, is the only thing that finally puts an end the feud.

The Mark of Zorro (1920, 1940) et al.

We all know who Zorro is, along with his secret identity, Don Diego Vega, his character having been featured in movies going back to the days of silent films. And so it comes as a surprise when we find out that he was not specifically mentioned in the title of the serialized novel in which he was introduced in 1919, that title being The Curse of Capistrano by Johnston McCulley. Another surprise that comes from reading this novel is the depiction of Diego’s native servant Bernardo, who is said to be deaf and dumb. And if you think that expression is politically incorrect, the portrayal of Bernardo is vastly more so, because Bernardo is dumb in both senses of the word. His value to Diego is such that we wonder why he didn’t just get a dog:

“Bernardo, you are a gem,” Don Diego said: “You cannot speak or hear, cannot write or read, and have not sense enough to make your wants known by the sign language. You are the one man in the world to whom I can speak without having my ears talked off in reply. You do not ‘Ha!’ me at every turn.”

Bernardo bobbed his head as if he understood. He always bobbed his head in that fashion when Don Diego’s lips ceased to move.

While visiting his father, Diego has Bernardo sleep on the floor just outside the door of his bedroom.

The first movie version of this story wisely changed the title to The Mark of Zorro (1920). The mark in question refers to the scar that Zorro (Douglas Fairbanks) sometimes leaves on the face of an enemy. As in the serialized novel, the movie begins with Zorro already in existence, and we see a man with a “Z” permanently etched as a scar on his face. Later on in the movie, he carves a “Z” on the neck of Captain Ramón during a sword fight, and in a subsequent fight at the end, carves a “Z” on his forehead. The first fight occurs because Ramón was sexually assaulting Lolita, with whom Zorro is in love.

We are used to seeing more consumption of tobacco in old movies than in modern ones, but I admit to being taken aback by its presentation in this movie. It is one thing to see Don Diego taking a pinch of snuff as part of his routine of being a fop, along with his listlessly performing magic tricks and saying he is fatigued, but it is quite another thing to see Zorro himself smoking a cigarette. But there he is, wearing cape and mask, taking a big drags on his cigarette, while confronting enemies, smiling broadly as he exhales large plumes of smoke.

The above-mentioned expressions of fatigue, by the way, are an essential attribute of Don Diego, beginning with the novel, where he proposes to Lolita and then says he finds the whole business fatiguing. Speaking of Lolita, I have to wonder what her marriage with Diego will be like, considering that he thinks Bernardo is an ideal companion.

It’s hard to know what to say about silent films. It’s almost as if they have to be rated against one another rather than compared to other movies in general. As for this one, it is a bit corny. When Sergeant Gonzales (Noah Berry) enters what appears to be a saloon, he is rude and offensive to a degree that is preposterous. However, the movie does have its moments. In any event, it made a major improvement on the character of Bernardo. In the movie, he only lacks the capacity for speech, and he is intelligent enough to help Diego conceal the fact that he is Zorro.

There is one more difference deserving special attention. In The Curse of Capistrano, the climactic duel is between Captain Ramón and Zorro, whereas in The Mark of Zorro, the duel is fought between Ramón and Diego. More about that later.

My introduction to the character Zorro was in an old serial they showed on television in the early 1950s when I just a kid, to wit, Zorro’s Fighting Legion (1939). As serials go, this is one of the better ones, though I suppose that is not saying much. Set in 1810, Juarez has led a successful revolution in Mexico, which is quite an accomplishment, since he was born in 1806. Anyway, the United States of Mexico needs gold from the mines, but a mysterious figure, Don del Oro, controls the Yaquis who work the mines, and who is one of the corrupt counselors who want to keep the gold themselves, but…. Oh, it’s all too confusing to go on with the plot. There is no Bernardo character, by the way.

It was made with a juvenile audience in mind, and so it might seem inappropriate to take it seriously enough to criticize it, but having watched it again recently, I just have to make a brief comment. Zorro (Reed Hadley) rides a white horse, the only white horse apparently in the entire area. And so, I found myself wondering where he stabled it. You can almost hear people saying to themselves, “Gee, Don Diego and Zorro are the only two people that have a white horse.” Actually, Diego never rides the white horse, riding a black one instead. Nor does he keep it in his stable. When something comes up needing Zorro’s attention, Diego rides out to the hills where his white horse is standing there by himself, saddled and ready. Needless to say, you can’t treat a horse that way. That aside, it occurred to me that it would have made more sense if Diego rode the white horse, since it would go with his pretense of being a fop, while riding a black horse when he donned his Zorro rig. Clearly, this juvenile serial wanted Zorro to have the pizzazz that goes with riding a white horse, instead of doing it the way I suggest, which might appeal to a more mature audience. But I was just a kid when I first watched it, and so the white horse for Zorro was just what I wanted. Furthermore, I was fascinated by the parts where Zorro was all decked out in his black outfit, complete with cape, sword, pistols, and whip, though it now strikes me that this panoply would be rather cumbersome.

The television station followed up by presenting an earlier serial, Zorro Rides Again (1937), and though I didn’t care for his mask, I still paid more attention to the parts where he was in costume and not so much to the parts where he was in ordinary dress pretending to be weak and lazy. And I was thrilled when the Walt Disney Studios produced a television series entitled simply Zorro (1957-1959). As before, it was the parts where I got to see Zorro (Guy Williams) gallivanting about that I was interested in, not so much the parts where he was Don Diego de la Vega. Bernardo reappears, playing the role of a man who cannot speak and only pretends to be deaf.

Whether I preferred the parts where Zorro was doing stuff was because I was a child, or it was because these two serials and the television series were juvenile in nature, I cannot say. But it was quite a surprise for me when, as a college student, I saw The Mark of Zorro (1940) for the first time. Of course, it had the star quality of such actors as Tyrone Power and Basil Rathbone, as well as the production values of a major studio, all of which were bound to make it much better than what I had seen previously. But what really struck me was the fact that the parts of the movie featuring Zorro constituted a relatively small amount of screen time, which was greatly exceeded by the amount of time devoted to Don Diego. The emphasis on Diego in this movie even went so far as to have him fight the climactic duel as Diego and not as Zorro, as in the 1920 version. Most movies do not do this, choosing instead to have any climactic sword fight fought by Zorro in his outfit, just as in the novel. Notably, in the 1974 made-for-television production starring Frank Langella, the movie is basically a remake of the version with Tyrone Power, even using the same music. The major difference between the two, aside from the inferior quality of the 1974 version, is the way the story was altered just enough to allow Langella to be in full Zorro regalia in the final showdown.

The amount of screen time given to Zorro versus Diego determines the kind of movie it is. A costumed character is exciting to watch, but he is all action and external appearance. He must be in constant motion, running, riding, and fighting. If he stands still for too long, he begins to look silly, especially if he is wearing a cape. In fact, one of the ways the television show Batman (1966-1968) would amuse us was by having Batman and Robin doing just that, standing around and talking in their costumes. On the other hand, it is with his secret identity, Diego in the case of Zorro movies, that we get to know the man, to learn what he thinks and feels. Moreover, we get to watch him acting a part in order to keep people from suspecting that he is the one who wears the mask. In this case, the part is that of a fop. It is a pretense also used in The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), starring Leslie Howard as the title character and as Sir Percy Blakeney, but Howard’s performance in that role was over the top. Diego’s foppery as performed by Tyrone Power, on the other hand, is so good that we find ourselves impatiently waiting for the Zorro scenes to end so that we can have more Diego.

There is no Bernardo in the 1940 remake of The Mark of Zorro, although there is a gesture in his direction. When the movie starts, Diego is enjoying himself as a military man in Spain, where his only problem is having his love life interrupted by the need to fight duels with men that are trying to prove themselves with a sword. He gets called home by his father, who Diego believes is still the alcalde of a town in California. Before he finds out otherwise, everyone recoils in fear of him when he says his father is the alcalde, including a coachman who says nothing when Diego speaks to him. Angry, Diego threatens to cut out his tongue if he doesn’t answer him, but he is told that his father already had that done when the man spoke out against the taxes at a meeting, after which the coachman makes unintelligible sounds with his mouth. At the time, I thought he would be the Bernardo of this movie, but we never see him again.

Perhaps the reason for this also has to do with the maturity of the intended audience. The function that Bernardo serves in The Curse of Capistrano is that of allowing Diego to reveal his thoughts. He has someone to talk to who isn’t able to say anything in reply, which Diego would have found irritating, because he doesn’t care for what most of us would call a conversation. He prefers to be the only one to do the talking. I suppose we’ve all had the misfortune of knowing someone like that. In any event, this allows us to know what Diego is thinking. Of course, McCulley could have told us what Diego was thinking, but that is an inferior solution. It is better if we learn what someone is thinking by seeing or hearing what we would if we were in the room: observing his body language and facial expressions; listening to his dialogue with others. In the case of the novel, it is not so much a dialogue that Diego has with Bernardo, but a monologue in the presence of a dimwit. But in any event, a mature audience will have no trouble understanding what Diego is up to without someone like Bernardo for him to talk to, and he is certainly not missed in this 1940 remake.

In addition to allowing Diego to reveal his thoughts, Bernardo also seems to exist to provide for some silly humor. We no longer laugh at people that are mentally impaired, but I suspect that a hundred years ago, those that read The Curse of Capistrano thought Bernardo was funny. In the 1920 version of The Mark of Zorro, Diego uses a fake mustache as part of his Zorro disguise. At one point in the movie, he puts the mustache on Bernardo while he is sleeping. And his character in the Disney production of Zorro was just the sort that would amuse children. Therefore, such a character is not really suited for a movie intended for a mature audience. Hence his absence in the 1940 remake.

The 1940 remake of The Mark of Zorro, then, is the only serious Zorro movie intended for an adult audience, and it is the best Zorro movie of them all. Of course, Zorro: The Gay Blade (1981) is intended for an adult audience too, but it is a parody. With that qualification, however, I would rate it as the second best Zorro movie ever made. A Bernardo character belongs there, of course, though under the name “Paco.” Early in the movie, while Diego (George Hamilton) is sword fighting with a woman’s cuckolded husband and his five brothers, Paco hand-signals what is in a letter that just arrived ordering Diego to return to California.

Other than that, it is standard for Zorro movies to appeal to juveniles. The Mask of Zorro (1998), however, takes this to the next level. Not only is it intended for children, it has children playing roles in the movie as well. This is in keeping with the unfortunate trend, beginning in the 1980s, of thrusting children into movies that would once of have been made with adults only.

Eyes Without a Face (1960)

In Eyes Without a Face, mad scientist Docteur Génessier, whose specialty is transplanting tissue from one person to another, is working to overcome the tendency of the recipient to reject the foreign tissue. He also has a practical purpose, which is grafting a new face on his daughter, Christiane, who was disfigured in an automobile accident that was his fault. His Igor is Louise, played by Alida Valli, whose disfigured face was restored by Génessier, for which reason she is extremely loyal to him and willing to aid him in his evil doings. In particular, Louise picks up young women who look the way Christiane did before her disfigurement, takes them to Génessier’s house so he can remove their faces and transplant them onto Christiane. Unfortunately, he has thus far been unsuccessful, the result of which is that a bunch of dead women’s bodies without faces keep turning up, all of whom seem to be of the same physical type. In fact, we see Louise dump one such woman into a river at the beginning of the movie. One way in which all the women are similar is that they all have blue eyes. Now, this makes no sense, because Christiane’s eyes are fine, hence the title: she has the eyes; what she needs is a face. So why the women whose faces are being removed have to have blue eyes is a mystery.

Génessier identifies the woman found in the river as his daughter so that people, including her boyfriend Jacques, a doctor who works in Génessier’s clinic, will think she is dead and not wonder where she is, for only Génessier, Louise, and Christiane know of her horribly burned face. In the meantime, Christiane wears a mask around the house so as not to gross everyone out including herself. The mask is an immobile version of what she used to look like. One of the amazing things about this mask, which allows us a clear view of her eyes, is how expressive her “face” is. We have all heard the expression, “The eyes are a window to the soul.” This movie really demonstrates it. We get a good sense of what Christiane is feeling and thinking as she walks around the house owing only to the expressiveness of her eyes.

Louise’s next victim is Edna. She tricks her into getting into the car with her, and the next thing you know, Edna is strapped to the operating table having her face lifted, so to speak. We actually get a glimpse of her face after the skin has been removed, squarely placing this film into the category of Grand Guignol. At first the transplant seems to be a success, but eventually it becomes necrotic and has to be removed again. Back on goes the mask. For some reason, Génessier keeps Edna alive, as if he is doing her a favor, but she leaps to her death. Adding to the creepiness of this movie are all the big, howling dogs Génessier has locked up in small cages to be used for his transplant experiments.

One of Edna’s friends reports her missing. She tells the police about the woman that Edna said she was going somewhere with, but all she can say by way of identification is that Edna said the woman wore a pearl choker (Louise wears a choker to hide the scar on her neck). Later, Jacques receives a strange phone call from Christiane, who misses him terribly. She only utters his name, but he recognizes her voice. He goes to the police, and when Inspector Parot mentions the pearl choker in passing, Jacques thinks of Louise. As a result, she and Dr. Génessier become suspects.

A woman named Paulette, who fits the profile of missing girls, blue eyes and all, is picked up by the police for shoplifting. Parot and another inspector threaten her with prosecution unless she acts as a decoy. She agrees to go to Génessier’s clinic and fake an illness. And here is the point in the movie where police incompetence becomes so absurd that it is laughable. Do they have a plainsclothes officer watching the clinic to see what happens to her when she is discharged? No. And so, when Paulette is released late at night and walks down the street to get a bus, she is offered a ride by Louise and accepts. Too bad nobody is around to see her get in the car.

Jacques calls Inspector Parot to let him know Paulette has left the clinic. Parot concludes that this puts Génessier and Louise in the clear, since they obviously did not kidnap Paulette, but let her leave the clinic instead. However, Parot decides to make sure she got home all right. Gosh! She never got home. So the two inspectors drive out to Génessier’s clinic just to be sure. They ask Génessier if Paulette was released from clinic. Yes she was, he tells them. The inspectors shrug and go home, concluding it was just a false trail and the choker was just one big coincidence.

Before Paulette’s face can be peeled off, Christiane releases her from the table, stabs Louise in the neck right through the choker, and releases the dogs, who then go after Génessier, ripping half his face off. Christiane wanders off into the woods with one of the doves she also released perched on her hand, just to give the movie a little symbolism. You see, this is a French film, so you can’t expect it to make sense the way a Hollywood production would.

Defending Your Life (1991)

Defending Your Life is a new-age reincarnation movie, which means it has a sappy premise that only someone that has led a pampered existence could possibly relate to. Daniel Miller (Albert Brooks) is an advertising executive who buys himself a BMW as a birthday present to himself. Then, when trying to pick up a bunch of CDs that have fallen on the floor while driving, he runs head on into a bus, dying instantly. When he wakes up, he finds himself in Judgment City, where a tribunal will decide whether he will be able to “move forward” (presumably to some higher plane of existence), go back to Earth to be reincarnated so he can try to do better next time, or be discarded as so utterly worthless that he is not worth saving.

Now, you may think this tribunal would be concerned with Miller’s self-centered attitude or his thoughtlessness. Or possibly it would be concerned with some darker sins, like being mean and selfish. No, the only thing the tribunal cares about is fear. According to prosecuting attorney Lena Foster (Lee Grant), Miller cannot be allowed to move forward, because he never overcame his fears.

Let’s stop right there. Fear is a normal, healthy reaction to danger. It is the emotion that makes you take precautions to avoid dangerous situations, and when that is not possible, to hide or run away. The absurd premise of this movie, that fear is something that must always be overcome, makes sense only in a world where one is sheltered from danger. This is a movie for people who live in the nice part of town, not in the bad part where gangs terrorize the neighborhoods. It is a movie for people who have never been to war, who never had to fear having their legs blown off by an IED. It is basically for people who have lived relatively healthy lives in middle-class America.

During the trial, we see scenes from Miller’s life of which every second has been recorded. We see, for example, a scene in which he is being harassed by a bully when he is in grade school. This is presented by prosecuting attorney Foster as evidence that Miller has not overcome his fears. The idea, presumably, is that he should have fought that bully instead of backing down and being humiliated. Fine. But what I want to know is, When the bully died, did he get to move forward? One would think so, because the bully sure wasn’t afraid. And as I noted above, the tribunal in Judgment City seems to care nothing about moral worth, only whether one has overcome fear.

This is not addressed in the movie, no doubt because of the self-satisfying myth that so many people cling to, which is that bullies are cowards. But this is just an imaginary revenge against bullies. I knew a few bullies when I was young, and none of them were cowards. Sure, they often picked on kids who were smaller and weaker, but they were just as likely to take on someone twice their size and even beat the crap out of him. So, from what I could tell, these bullies would definitely have been allowed to “move forward,” because they had undeniably overcome their fears.

In contrast to Miller, there is Julia (Meryl Streep), who breezes through her trial, during which we see her getting her children safely out of a burning house and then rushing back in to save the cat. Needless to say, she gets to move forward.

Meanwhile, back in the jungle. That is, Miller and Julia go to a place where they can see what they were in their past lives. Miller sees himself as a black African primitive who is running through the jungle from a lion. I guess that is why Miller had to be reincarnated instead of being allowed to move forward, because when he was that primitive man in Africa, he was unable to overcome his fear of lions. He should have stood his ground and kicked its ass.

Foster presents more evidence against Miller. A friend of his once gave him some inside information about a new watch company, telling him to invest $10,000 in the company, which is all the money Miller had at that time. We won’t quibble about the fact that it is illegal to profit from inside information, because most people don’t really regard that as a crime, especially when they stand a chance to take advantage of such information. More to the point, when someone gives you some “inside information” about a company and tells you to invest all you have in it, that is a damn good time to be afraid. Sure, the company turned out to be Casio, so with hindsight we can see he would have made 37 million dollars on the deal, but most of the time such information turns out to be worthless. Nevertheless, Miller is accused of letting his fear keep him from making a killing in the stock market.

It gets worse. It is pointed out that Miller subsequently invested the $10,000 in cattle and lost it all. But does he get credit for having the courage to invest the money in cattle? No. Apparently, you only get credit for having the courage to make good investments, not for having the courage to make bad investments. Well, I’m glad they cleared that up. Now we all know how we should invest our money.

As the pièce de résistance, Foster presents a scene from what Miller did while in Judgment City. In particular, on the previous evening, Julia and Miller confessed their love for each other. She invited him to spend the night with her. But he didn’t want to, because he believed their relationship was just perfect the way it was, and he was afraid that sex would spoil it. Once again, Foster points out, Miller has failed to overcome his fears and he does not deserve to move forward. Well, all I can say is that I have known several women who did not want to have sex with me because they said it would spoil our friendship, so I guess they will not be moving forward either. I, on the other, was fearless in the matter, more than willing to risk the friendship to satisfy my lust, so I guess I will be moving forward.

On the Need for Separate Restrooms

Back in the 1970s, I used to read “Dear Abby” in the newspaper. On one particular day, someone had written a letter to her saying that he was a transvestite. He asked her which public restroom he should use when he was dressed as a woman. Abby’s answer was short and to the point: “Use the ladies’ room.” That made sense to me. I figured that was all there was to it. I guess I figured wrong.

Now it is a big political issue. I have noticed that those defending the rights of transgender people always talk about restrooms only, whereas those who want restroom use to be determined by anatomy also talk about locker rooms and showers. After all, restrooms have stalls for privacy, whereas all is exposed when people shower together. I suppose it’s just a matter of time before some smart ass in high school says, “Coach, I feel like a female today. I guess I’ll go shower with the girls.” But for now, let’s just stick to restrooms.

I said that there is privacy in the restrooms on account of the stalls. Actually, that is not always true. I have been in several department stores where the doors of the stalls had been removed, presumably to discourage shoplifting (i.e., with doors on the stalls, a man could stuff items into his pants or under his shirt without fear of being seen). That meant that if you went into a crowded restroom and sat down on a toilet, the next guy in line would be standing right in front of you waiting his turn. Those in line were always polite enough to look the other way, but it really puts you out of the mood.

In fact, I used to work in a department store where the doors on the stalls had been removed. In front of the stalls, just above the sinks, were mirrors, and to the left of the stalls was the door. That meant that if you were sitting on either of the first two toilets when someone opened the door, you could see the people out in the store reflected in the mirrors. And that in turn meant that the people out in the store could see you sitting on the toilet. Granted, they could only see you from the chest up, given the angle of reflection, but it was still a most unpleasant experience.

One day, I happened to pass by the ladies’ room just as a woman was coming out. I only got a brief glance of the interior, but I was able to take in the essentials. Instead of seeing the open toilets, as was the case with the men’s room, I saw an antechamber consisting of a vanity, at which one woman was putting on her makeup, and a couch, on which another woman was lying down. There was even a nice rug on the floor. In the present debate about restrooms, it is said that forcing a person to use one restroom rather than another is discrimination. I have to agree. Though we seldom get a chance to compare them, restricted as most of us are to one or the other, there is no separate-but-equal when it comes to men’s and ladies’ restrooms.

Still, as envious as I was of the women who got to use the nice ladies’ room, I would never assert my right to use that restroom on the basis of discrimination were I to find myself in that situation today, because there are some things it is better not to know. The romantic idealization of the eternal feminine does not stand a chance in the face of bathroom sights, sounds, and smells. I once knew a guy, somewhat older than I, who had grown up on a farm where they still did not have indoor plumbing. His conception of women was such that he just could not square it with the excretory functions he knew they must have just like men. It bothered him and bothered him until one day he decided he just had to know. He finally got his chance when his girlfriend came over to visit one night. For a while, she, he, and his parents sat around conversing until at one point she said she had to use the privy. She was gone for fifteen minutes. When she came back, my friend excused himself, went outside, picked up the flashlight he had secreted away for just this purpose, and headed for the outhouse to have a look. It was many years later that I knew him, but his face still looked strange when he told the tale. “Oh God, John,” he said, shaking his head. “It was awful. Just awful!”

Well, they never got married, and I cannot say that that was the reason, but it would not surprise me if it were. I remember being at a family reunion when I was sixteen, where I happened to be sitting next to my cousin, just a year younger than I. I know she was my cousin, but I still thought she was cute. Then, suddenly, someone farted. It was silent, but deadly. Rationally, it was impossible for me to know who the culprit was, but the olfactory sense is most primitive and visceral. Something deep inside me was convinced that she was the one. I am an old man now, but whenever I have seen her or talked to her in the years that followed, I always think of that fart.

Actually, the whole problem concerning privacy and separate restrooms in America is nothing compared to France. A woman I knew said that when she was in France back in the early 1960s, she once had occasion to use a public restroom, which was open to both sexes. There were no stalls, only toilets without so much as a cubicle. She was the only one in the restroom at the time, so she sat on one of the toilets. To conceal herself as much as she could just in case a man should walk in, she used the newspaper she had bought to form a kind of cover over her body below the waist. Sure enough, a Frenchman walked in and had a seat on the toilet next to hers. After he got himself comfortable, he looked over at her, smiled, and gently tugged at the newspaper, as if to show his amusement at her modesty. Then as now, I found the story hard to believe. All I can say is that she was not the type to make up stuff, and so I pass this on as she told it to me.

And so, however this issue for transgender people works out, I hope that I never have to use the same restroom that women do, because I do not want my romantic illusions contaminated by intimate knowledge of harsh reality. Of course, as a confirmed bachelor, who has never even lived with a woman, I have been able to hold on to these illusions longer than most. As a married friend of mine once said, “You know the honeymoon is over when you are in the bathroom brushing your teeth, and your wife comes in, sits down, and takes a dump.” For that reason, I think separate bathrooms for the sexes would be a good idea even in private residences.

I said that I have never lived with a woman, but there were times when I let a girlfriend spend the night. I prefer to sleep alone, sprawled out in the bed like a big old swastika, but I figured that letting her sleep over was the least I could do. However, she had a bad habit of getting up in the middle of the night, using the toilet, and then leaving the seat down. That was inconsiderate, because later, when I had to go myself, I ended up peeing all over it. I didn’t realize it at the time, of course. But in the morning, being the gentleman that I am, I would always let her go first. As soon as I heard her scream, I knew what had happened. Well, it was her own damn fault for not lifting the seat when she was through using it.

With separate restrooms, that would never have happened.

The Perfect War for an Antiwar Movie

I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier,
I brought him up to be my pride and joy,
Who dares to place a musket on his shoulder,
To shoot some other mother’s darling boy?

Well, it is Mother’s Day, after all. And since we naturally think of mothers as being opposed to war, this seemed like a good day to reflect on antiwar movies. But while I was pondering which antiwar movie was the best one I had ever seen, it occurred to me that some wars are more suitable as a setting for an antiwar movie than others, and this led me to wonder what the perfect war is for an antiwar movie.

First of all, the war should take place since the Age of Reason, which began in Europe in the 17th century. Though wars were probably more ghastly in ancient times, what with Joshua’s genocidal slaughter of everyone in Canaan, the routine putting-men-to-the-sword in the Peloponnesian War, the destruction of Carthage, and many other atrocities too numerous to mention, yet we just have a hard time working up antiwar sentiments when watching movies set in those days. There are a few antiwar movies set in the ancient world, such as The Trojan Women (1971), which involves mothers again, but they are the exception. More common is a movie like 300 Spartans (1962), in which we enjoy watching some real manliness in the face of overwhelming odds. When King Leonidas is told that so many Persian arrows will fill the sky that they will blot out the sun, he calmly replies, “Then we will fight in the shade.” But what really sets the mood is when a Spartan mother tells her son, “Come back with your shield or on it.” Now, how are you going to have an antiwar movie when Mom has an attitude like that?

The Mediaeval Period is not much better, perhaps because romantic figures like King Arthur, Richard the Lionhearted, and Charlemagne are not conducive to making a good antiwar movie. Apparently, we need to be in the Modern Period, where men are expected to be a little more civilized and educated, in order to find wars suitable for the making of an antiwar movie.

The second thing that is needed is a war in which many people were killed. It is fortunate that since World War II, the number of soldiers dying in American wars has been decreasing, but the fact remains that the relatively fewer casualties make these recent wars less than ideal for an antiwar movie. It is not that I have forgotten about MASH (1970), Apocalypse Now (1979), Full Metal Jacket (1987), Black Hawk Down (2001), and others, good antiwar movies all. But the wars in which these movies were set just don’t have the numbers needed to make it to the top of the list.

At this point, I cannot help but think about the Civil War. It certainly has the numbers, for with 620,000 deaths, it by far is the deadliest of all the wars America has fought in. Deadliest for Americans, that is. America has fought in wars where many more people died, such as World Wars I and II, but American deaths were less than that of the Civil War. This American element is important. Hollywood still dominates the movie industry, and is primarily geared toward an American audience. Therefore, a good war for an antiwar movie should be one in which Americans are involved, or failing that, Europeans. In other words, no matter how many people might be slaughtered in a war in Africa or Asia, if neither Americans nor Europeans are involved, it just will not hold our attention. So American or European involvement is the third condition that must be met for the setting of a good antiwar movie.

The fourth ingredient for a perfect antiwar war is that there should be a lot of naïve optimism and dreams of glory on the part of the young men in the beginning, only to be crushed as the war progresses. And here again, the War Between the States would seem to be a good candidate, as in Gone With the Wind (1939). Several scenes come to mind: The Tarleton twins becoming horrified when Scarlett tells them there isn’t going to be any war; the talk about licking the Yankees in six weeks; the young men hollering with glee when news comes that war has finally broken out; Scarlett in the hospital, where a woman writes a letter dictated by a dying soldier to his mother (mothers again); and Scarlett walking across the railroad yard to find the doctor to help deliver Melanie’s baby (another mother), as the camera pulls back, revealing a panorama of wounded men.

But while the Civil War meets all the conditions considered thus far, it has one unfortunate flaw. It had a noble purpose, which was ending slavery. A perfect war for the setting of an antiwar movie must be one that is pointless. Of course, it was pointless from the southern point of view, which is why the antiwar theme works in Gone With the Wind, but the larger context of ending slavery makes the Civil War less than ideal for an antiwar movie. Wars that either were fought for a noble cause or had a beneficial outcome just do not make for good antiwar movies. Correct me if I am wrong, but there has never been an antiwar movie set during the American Revolution. I guess the British could make one from their point of view, but even so, if there is such a film, I have never seen it.

The Napoleonic Wars might be a good candidate. Americans were not involved, but Europeans were. There was an enormous loss of life, the most pointless of which was the invasion of Moscow, where Napoleon started out with 500,000 men, was easily victorious, and then lost all but 50,000 men trying to get back home in the freezing weather. And in War and Peace (1956), one of the many screen adaptations of Tolstoy’s novel, Prince Bolkonsky (Mel Ferrer) says of his participation in the Battle of Austerlitz, “I delayed, for ten minutes, a retreat in a battle that was lost, in a war that was lost.”

There is just one problem. Because the Russians and the British were victorious in their war against Napoleon, who was clearly an aggressor, the war seems morally justified from their point of view. The war is more suitable for antiwar treatment from the French point of view. But that won’t work either. Remember earlier when I said that even if a war did not have American involvement, it might still be worth considering as a good antiwar war if it involves Europeans, because we readily identify with Europeans? Well, that is certainly true, unless they are French. Then we just don’t identify so well.

I must no longer tax the reader’s patience. He or she has known for several paragraphs running where we would end up. The war to end all antiwar wars is obviously World War I. Set in the Modern Period, on the European continent, it involved a great slaughter, and even though I have read several books on the subject, I still can’t figure out what the fighting was all about. It had something to do with entangling alliances, imperialism, revanchism, and assassination, as best I can tell. But it all adds up to one big pointless mess. Woodrow Wilson said it was to make the world safe for democracy, but the Europeans didn’t know what he was talking about. I sometimes think that is why they changed the name from the Great War to World War I: by making it seem like a prequel to World War II, which had the noble purpose of defeating the Nazis, it seems to acquire some purpose and justification by the association of ideas.

Furthermore, WWI began with the required naïve optimism and dreams of glory. I remember reading somewhere that one of the generals observed that there had been a definite change in attitude on the part of the troops from one world war to the next, saying, “The doughboys sang songs, but the GIs made wisecracks.” If that is true, then this cynicism is another reason why the Second World War is not suitable for an antiwar movie. And it is also a reason why the Vietnam War cannot be the perfect war for an antiwar movie either.

In All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), we see young men being inspired to go to war by their teacher. Since they are WWI Germans, it is all right for Americans to identify with them. In Gallipoli (1981), the main character sees the war in terms of a great moral purpose, and he is most apprehensive lest he will miss out on something that is larger than life. Since he is an English-speaking Australian, we even more easily identify with him. Paths of Glory (1957) is a good antiwar movie, but since all the soldiers are French, identification is difficult. This difficulty is overcome by having the bad officers played by actors that are obviously French or at least foreign, while having the good officer and the unjustly accused defendants played by American actors.

Actually, this brings out the fact that some distancing is a good thing. A good antiwar movie must be full of fools and knaves. In particular, the fools are the young men who vaingloriously march off to war, while the knaves are the officers who send them to their death. Americans don’t like to think of themselves as being either fools or knaves, so it is better to let the Europeans take those roles. That is why the best WWI antiwar movies do not involve Americans at all. Regarding All Quiet on the Western Front, Danny Peary makes the following remarks in his Alternate Oscars:

My feeling is that the film has always been well received in America because it shows Germans—our enemies in World War I—coming to their senses in a losing war effort. (Importantly, none of their victims is identified as an American.) … I doubt if American audiences would have received it so well over the years if, with few script changes, these soldiers who question giving up their lives for uniform, flag, and country were Americans.

In other words, one of the things that makes WWI the perfect antiwar war is that Americans were involved, but only as reluctant warriors, as in Sergeant York (1941), while it is the Europeans who get to play the parts of idealistic young men being sent to their death by callous officers.

Finally, since we are talking about movies, there must be memorable imagery. It is not enough to just pile up the bodies. The destruction of human life must have cinematic value. The Crimean War provides us with the Charge of the Light Brigade, giving us one poem and two movies. But while the imagery is right, its significance varies from being noble and glorious to being insane and futile.

The imagery in WWI, however, is unequivocal: men climb out of their trenches, run toward the enemy line, and are cut down by machinegun fire. When it comes to antiwar movies, it doesn’t get any better than that. In Gallipoli, my favorite part is when the commanding officer tells the soldiers to remove all the bullets from their rifles before they charge. “Bayonets only!” is the command. I guess the idea is that if you have bullets in your rifle, you might want to take aim at the people who are shooting at you, thereby slowing down the charge. But with an empty rifle, your only hope is to run as fast as possible toward the machine gun and stab the man who is firing it. That was the plan. I don’t suppose I need to tell you how the plan worked out.

By the way, just as a side note, has there ever been a movie set in WWI in which it is the Germans who climb out of their trenches, run toward the French or English positions, and get massacred by machineguns? The Germans in the movies never seem to do that, not even in All Quiet on the Western Front. Surely they must have actually done so from time to time, but not on the big screen. Presumably, because the Germans were our enemy, watching them get killed in great numbers might not instill the same antiwar feeling that we have come to expect from a WWI movie. And so, when it comes to the movies, it is the fate of the Allies to climb out of their trenches and charge toward the Germans, never the other way around.

In any event, World War I is the perfect war for an antiwar movie. And so I’ll end where I started, with a mother’s lament in fearful anticipation of that war:

What victory can cheer a mother’s heart,
When she looks at her blighted home?
What victory can bring her back
All she cared to call her own?
Let each mother answer
In the years to be,
Remember that my boy belongs to me!

Happy Mother’s Day.

Executive Action (1973) and JFK (1991)

In 1957, I encountered my first conspiracy theory. According to my father, American intelligence had broken the Japanese code six months before the attack on Pearl Harbor. And so, by the first of December, 1941, they knew that the attack was imminent. But they did nothing about it. The reason, my father said, was that the American people were against entering World War II, and so Roosevelt, who wanted to get America into the war, let the attack happen, knowing that an inflamed public would then demand retaliation. I was in the sixth grade at the time, and so naturally I believed what my father told me.

I no longer believe that story, of course. But what I now find interesting is that no one has ever made a movie about it, one that dramatizes the conspiracy, in which we see Roosevelt conniving with his fellow conspirators to suppress the intelligence that an attack on Pearl Harbor was imminent, motivated by all the profits that will be had by makers of munitions, who in turn will contribute to his re-election campaign. More importantly, there is glory in being a wartime president, most conducive to holding on to power. Conspiracy-theory movies can be fun, so why not a movie like that?

But first, I suppose I must define a few terms. As we all know, conspiracies go on in the world, as when some Roman senators conspired to assassinate Julius Caesar. But that’s an historical fact. On the other hand, it is only a theory that the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko was the result of a conspiracy involving Vladimir Putin. But we do not call it a “conspiracy theory,” for to do so would not only imply that the theory is false, but also that those that believe it are goofy; whereas this is a theory that may be true, and one in which it is reasonable to accept.

However, much in the way that the demeaning expression “colored person” has been transformed into the acceptable “person of color,” so too can we eliminate the pejorative connotation of “conspiracy theory” by changing the order the words to “theory about a conspiracy,” which can be regarded as neutral as to whether the theory is true or not, and without disparaging those that might embrace it.

That being done, however, we must now distinguish between conspiracy theories that are real from those that are fictional. It may seem that by definition, all conspiracy theories are fictional. However, by “real conspiracy theory,” I mean those that a lot of people believe to be true, whereas by “fictional conspiracy theory,” I mean those that are made up simply for our entertainment in the form of a novel or a movie, usually bearing some similarity to a real conspiracy theory.

For example, there is a real conspiracy theory that the moon landing was faked. It inspired the fictional conspiracy theory in Capricorn One (1977), in which a mission to Mars is faked. Likewise, there is a real conspiracy theory that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the man that killed John F. Kennedy, and it inspired the fictional conspiracy theory in The Parallax View (1974), in which Warren Beatty plays a reporter who investigates one political assassination only to end up becoming an Oswald-like patsy in another.

However, the distinction between real and fictional conspiracy theories is not absolute. There are real conspiracy theories concerning Area 51 and UFOs, in which the government is thought to know all about aliens from another planet, but is determined to keep us from learning about it. The movies Men in Black (1997) and The X-Files (1998) are based on these real conspiracy theories, but involve fictional characters and events.

Most real conspiracy theories are never made into a movie in the classic Hollywood sense, the kind that is shown in major theaters in the United States, featuring well-known stars, the kind of movie that might even be considered for an Academy Award of one sort or another. They do find an outlet, however, in other forms. For example, there are the straight-to-video movies, such as The Death of Vince Foster: What Really Happened? (1995). There is Horseman Without a Horse (2002-2003), a television miniseries in Arabic and shown in the Middle East, based on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is about the Jewish plan for global domination. And there is Paul Is Dead (2002), a movie made in Germany in which a young boy gets all into the conspiracy theory that Paul McCartney died in the 1960s and was replaced by a double. And a lot of such second-rate movies are documentaries, as opposed to dramas.

The conspiracy theory that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the assassin of John F. Kennedy is the grand exception, having been made into two mainstream movies. In 1991, Oliver Stone wrote and directed JFK, a movie about New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) and his investigation into the assassination of Kennedy, which provoked strong negative reactions from politicians and journalists alike. Many books have been written arguing that Oswald was not the assassin of Kennedy, including the two on which this movie was based, but the negative reaction people had to JFK proves how much more powerful a movie can be than the written word. The movie is populated with major stars, not just those playing the leading roles, but also small roles as well. This makes the characters they portray seem important in a way that lesser known stars would not, which in turn makes their role in the conspiracy seem more believable. Such is movie logic.

The movie touches on all the standard elements of the conspiracy theory. There is the faked picture of Oswald holding a gun, the reference to the live oak that would have blocked his view, the fact that it would have been difficult for him to get off three shots that quickly and accurately with a bolt-action rifle, the single-bullet theory, Oswald’s calling attention to himself at a shooting range, the grassy knoll, the Zapruder film, and more, much more. It does so quite effectively.

At the same time, the movie is exhausting. Have you ever known someone that was into a conspiracy theory? You quickly learn never to bring the subject up, kicking yourself when you accidently touch on it, for you unleash a torrent. As an example, let us consider the theory that the moon landing was faked, and let us imagine a hypothetical friend who is all into that theory. If you are old enough, you probably saw the moon landing live on television, were impressed, and then went on with your life. If you are younger, you nevertheless saw the footage, but at a later time. And that’s about the extent of your knowledge of the event. But your friend has about six or seven books on his bookshelf, telling of how it was all faked. He has read them at least three times. They are underlined with notes in the margins, full of cross-references.

Do you think you have any chance of winning an argument with him about the moon landing? That’s a silly question. You can’t even hold up your side of the conversation. All you know is what you saw on television, whereas he is overwhelming you with “facts.”

“And that’s why the Bilker report was suppressed,” he asserts in the middle of his tirade.

“What’s the Bilker report?” you ask.

He is appalled. “No wonder you believe we put men on the moon. You just accept whatever you they tell you. You probably believe that Judith Crenshaw’s death was an accident.”

“Who is that?” you foolishly ask.

“Oh, my God! You don’t know who she is?” he exclaims with exasperation. “She was the one who was out there in Arizona where they filmed the whole thing. She was supposed to testify at a congressional hearing, but drowned in her bathtub the day before.”

That is what it feels like watching JFK.

There is a Mr. X (Donald Sutherland) who is a Deep Throat character. When he starts talking to Garrison, we are presented with a fusillade of “facts” that will make your knees buckle, so it is fortunate that most people watch this movie sitting down. He makes the point that the “How?” and the “Who?” are of secondary importance. The real question is “Why?” The principal answer to that question parallels the Pearl Harbor conspiracy theory I referred to above. Just as allowing Pearl Harbor to happen got America into World War II, which meant big profits for the weapon manufacturers, and secured Roosevelt’s re-election; so too was the assassination of Kennedy intended to prevent him from getting us out of Vietnam, for there was much money to be made by getting us into a war over there. Kennedy had already cost the business community a lot of money by refusing to invade Cuba, and they didn’t want him to do the same with Vietnam. That is why the movie begins with Eisenhower’s farewell address, warning of the military-industrial complex, and ends by noting all the money that has been spent in fighting the Vietnam War. Mr. X makes the ultimate declaration:

The organizing principle of any society, Mr. Garrison, is for war. The authority of the state over its people resides in its war powers. The state needs war in order to exist.

It sounds as though Mr. X might have been the author of the notorious book, Report from Iron Mountain, which transcends even the profit motive in arguing that war and the threat of war meet the needs of society to such a degree that it would be difficult for society to exist without it.

But mostly it’s about money. From that point of view, the movie argues that when those on the right accused Kennedy of being soft on communism, their real concern was that he was likely to sign peace treaties with adversaries rather than go to war with them, thereby cutting into profits.

But there is another motive, connected with the first, expressed by Guy Banister (Edward Asner). “Goddamn peace treaties!” he says. “That’s what happens when you let the niggers vote. They get together with the Jews and the Catholics and elect an Irish bleeding heart.” In this way, the war-profits motive is connected with that of Protestant white supremacy.

And this second motive blends with a third, which also angered Banister: resentment over the Bay of Pigs, consisting of anti-Castro Cubans, of course, and American intelligence agents that felt betrayed when Kennedy failed to follow through on that invasion.

Right-wing animosity toward African Americans and Jews is still with us, but the one about the Catholics seems quaint. Looking back, it is hard to believe how much anti-papist sentiment there was in those days. The fear was that the Pope would tell Kennedy what to do, on pain of excommunication if he refused to obey. Kennedy even had to give a speech, declaring that he would resign the presidency should he receive an order from the Pope that was inconsistent with America’s best interests.

Today, conservatives love Catholics, at least when it comes to putting them on the Supreme Court, where there are now six Catholic justices, vastly exceeding their proportion in the general population. The reason is clear. Catholics believe that birth control is a sin, so a fortiori they believe abortion is a sin. Now, a given Catholic may nevertheless be pro-choice, being unwilling to impose his religious beliefs on others. But as far as conservatives are concerned, there will remain a residual sentiment of sin. And so, regardless of the political stance that may have been taken by any of the Catholic justices on the Supreme Court, conservatives are content in their supposition that the prevailing attitude of those justices is that abortion is evil.

JFK is a movie about a real conspiracy theory in its pure form, for all the characters in the movie are based on real people. It looks at the Kennedy assassination from the outside, from the standpoint of an investigator trying to piece together the elements of the conspiracy. An earlier movie, Executive Action (1973), looks at it from the inside. Whereas the number of people in on the conspiracy in JFK is beyond our ability to count, the number of conspirators in Executive Action is small. At one point in the movie, they are all in one room, apart from those that will eventually be hired to do the shooting. In JFK, you sometimes get the impression that in order to put all the conspirators in one place, you would have needed a football stadium. The characters in Executive Action are fictional. However, they are presented as representing the men that actually did conspire to have Kennedy assassinated, and so the movie still qualifies as a real conspiracy theory. The conspiracy-theories dramatized by these two movies are almost the same, but there are slight differences. In both movies, people quote Shakespeare, giving these movies the proper tone.

For the most part, Executive Action works and is entertaining. First, there is the introductory part, which shows us the motivation of those that want to kill Kennedy. We see a montage consisting of a refinery, an oil field, a factory, a commodities exchange, a bank, safe deposit boxes, and a board room. Personifying these business interests is Ferguson (Will Geer), who will be putting up the money to fund the assassination if he gives his OK. He is the one the other conspirators have to persuade. Therefore, as with JFK, money is the primary motive for Kennedy’s assassination.

The persuasion begins with a prediction that must have been a conservative’s nightmare in the early 1960s: three successive presidencies, each lasting eight years, consisting of John F. Kennedy, followed by his brother Robert, who in turn would be followed by Edward. Whichever Kennedy was president, the other two brothers would occupy positions of power, based on a coalition of “big-city machines, labor, Jews, Negroes, liberals, and the press.” The ideological agenda of this coalition would be socialism at the expense of business interests, a weakening of American military might by making nuclear arms deals with the Soviet Union, loss of influence in foreign affairs by pulling out of Vietnam, and loss of white privilege. (Dalton Trumbo must have enjoyed writing the screenplay for this movie as a form of retaliation for what the right put him through earlier in his career.) And so, as in JFK, we have the same secondary motive concerning race and religion, except for the absence of any expressed concern about Catholics. The third motive, resentment about the Bay of Pigs, is present as well.

I also liked the part where the chief conspirator, Farrington (Burt Lancaster), points out that whereas Europeans will readily believe that there is a conspiracy behind an assassination of a major political figure, Americans are used to the idea that assassinations of presidents are carried out by mentally unbalanced individuals. With that in mind, Farrington conceives a plan that will point to just such an individual as being the lone assassin, fitting right into what the American people are predisposed to accept.

The men trying to persuade Ferguson seem to have a lot of knowledge about intelligence agencies, most prominent of which are Farrington and Foster (Robert Ryan). When they are alone, Foster expresses his concern to Farrington about the population explosion:

The real problem is this, James. In two decades there will be seven billion human beings on this planet, most of them brown, yellow, or black. All of them hungry; all of them determined to love. They’ll swarm out of their breeding grounds into Europe and North America. Hence Vietnam. An all-out effort there will give us control of South Asia for decades to come. And with proper planning, we can reduce the population to 550 million by the end of the century.

Needless to say, you could not get the population in South Asia down to that number in that time frame by birth control alone, even if you sterilized every female in the region, so we have to figure he is planning on more drastic means of population reduction. He continues:

Well, someone has to do it. Not only will the nations affected be better off, but the techniques developed there can be used to reduce our own excess population: Blacks, Puerto Ricans, Mexican-Americans, poverty-prone whites, and so forth.

Meanwhile, we see scenes of Ferguson watching television, in which he sees Kennedy talking about the test-ban treaty with the Soviets and getting out of Vietnam, and in which he sees Martin Luther King giving his “I have a dream” speech, followed by black people marching and singing “We Shall Overcome.” He slowly becomes angrier and angrier until finally he gives the OK.

In planning the operation, the conspirators set out to make Oswald, who apparently has some mysterious connections with intelligence agencies, their “sponsor,” which is to say, their patsy. He will take the fall while three real assassins make their getaway. They even get an Oswald look-alike to help create incriminating evidence. It is interesting to see the mechanics of the operation being planned and carried out. Some of it strains credulity, however, as when the conspirators sneak into Oswald’s garage, that conveniently happens to be unlocked, in order to steal his rifle, so that one of the assassins can use it and then leave it behind in the book depository.

Another weak link in the movie comes when Oswald shoots a policeman. Watching the report on television, Tim, an associate of Farrington, says, “That wasn’t in the scenario,” indicating that they did not expect Oswald to do that. Farrington tries to explain why Oswald would kill a policeman, but it is a bit lame. After all, according to this movie, Oswald did not shoot Kennedy, so it is hard to believe that he would panic and kill a policeman, whereas that is precisely something a man might do who had just assassinated the president.

But I was willing to let that one slide. It is the part about Jack Ruby that constitutes the weakest part of this conspiracy theory. The explanation Ruby gave as to why he shot Oswald was that he was upset that Oswald killed Kennedy. This movie should have let it be just that. Instead, we get a scene in which Tim goes to talk to Ruby, so as to make Ruby part of the conspiracy, but we are not privy to their conversation. Nor do Tim and Farrington refer to whatever it was Tim supposedly said to Ruby when they watch him shoot Oswald on television. We can’t help but conclude that the reason we do not get to hear what Tim says to Ruby is that Dalton Trumbo could not come up with anything that would make sense. The whole point of this movie is to show us in detail what might have happened and to do so in a way that makes the theory credible. By leaving the conversation between Tim and Ruby out, the movie as much as admits that it cannot explain this part, which detracts from its believability.

At the end of the movie, while enjoying a game of pool, Foster receives a phone call from Tim. After he hangs up, he tells his companions that Farrington just died of a heart attack, while he continues his turn at the pool table. Now, Farrington is a fictional character. Therefore, his death and Foster’s nonchalance in hearing about it were put into this movie as a matter of choice. This leads us to ask, what purpose does it serve? Inasmuch as this movie has us in a frame of mind as to suspect that nothing happens by chance, that all events are guided by sinister purposes, we cannot help but suspect that Farrington’s death was arranged as a way of guaranteeing the security of the remaining conspirators.

This is followed immediately by an epilogue, in which we are told that eighteen of the material witnesses to the assassination died within the next three years, many of them violently. The implication is that the conspirators saw to it that these people died so as to impede any investigation into what really happened. One wonders if the witnesses to those deaths were then killed off. You can never be too careful.

But now let us address the observation made above that most real conspiracy theories are never made into mainstream American movies like JFK and Executive Action. Given this relatively small sample, it is difficult to draw any conclusions with certainty. Nevertheless, I cannot help but wonder if making these two movies was acceptable because the villains were on the right, whereas having the villains be on the left would preclude turning a real conspiracy theory into a mainstream, dramatic film. This would explain why the Pearl Harbor conspiracy theory was never made into a movie, since the chief villain would have been Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democratic icon, even though the motive of getting the country into a war for the profiteering that would ensue would be the same as in the Kennedy movies.

In both Kennedy movies, the villains on the right express anti-Semitic attitudes, in which they regard the Jews, among others, as causing them problems. But we know we will never see a movie in which the Jews are the conspirators. For example, there is no way a movie producer in Hollywood will get himself a copy of Holocaust Denial for Dummies and make a movie dramatizing the way the Jews fabricated the holocaust, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Scarlett Johansson.

In JFK, there is the suggestion that the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy are a continuation of the conspiracy. When Garrison wakes up his long-suffering wife (Sissy Spacek) to tell her that Bobby Kennedy has just been shot, she finally becomes convinced of the conspiracy too. “You were right,” she says. “It hasn’t ended yet.” Then they proceed to have the best sex they’ve had in months.

At the trial of Clay Shaw, Garrison argues that Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were killed because they were also opposed to war, threatening the war-profiteering that was in progress, while it was made to appear that they were “also killed by such lonely crazed men.” But he’s not through. “How many more political murders,” he asks, “disguised as heart attacks, suicides, cancers, drug overdoses? How many plane and car crashes will occur before they are exposed for what they are?”

But the conspiracy theories that have been promoted concerning the assassination attempts on George Wallace and Ronald Reagan will probably never make it to the big screen. It’s not that the villains are said to be on the left. Rather, the alleged conspirators are on the right, just not the far right where Reagan and Wallace were. But since they are to the left of Reagan and Wallace, that’s left enough to preclude a conspiracy-theory movie about either of these two assassination attempts. Or maybe there is simpler explanation: failed assassination attempts just aren’t interesting enough to warrant the production of a major film.

However, were this the sole consideration, we should expect to have seen a mainstream 9/11 trutherism movie by now. One version of this theory is that George W. Bush and other politicians on the right knew that the attack on September 11, 2001 was imminent, but they let it happen so that America would invade the Middle East, with the usual war-profiteering motive underlying that, along with the glory of being a wartime president. There are the various versions of Loose Change 9/11, beginning in 2005, but they are basically internet videos and documentaries besides. Therefore, even if I am correct in my supposition that right-wing villains are a necessary condition for the making of a Hollywood movie about a real conspiracy theory, it is not a sufficient condition. In fact, so few are the mainstream movies depicting real conspiracy theories that the sufficient condition, whatever it is, must be difficult to attain.

A birtherism movie, on the other hand is out of the question, as the villains would have to be on the left, creating a phony birth certificate so that we wouldn’t know that Obama was really born in Kenya, thereby allowing him to become president of the United States. And that’s too bad, because I can envision a scene in which some right-wing politician says, “Of course, Obama was born in Kenya. That’s why he believes in Kenyansian economics!”

Consensual Sex and the Double Standard

Back in September of 2014, California enacted a law requiring college students to get consent before they have sex. The language is couched in gender-neutral terms, so that technically the law applies to men and women, either gay or straight. But the primary intent of the law is directed toward heterosexual couples, and it is only the consent of the woman that is of concern. In other words, the law is written in such a way that it appears to grant equal protection under the law to both sexes, even though we all know that a double standard will and ought to be applied in its implementation.

It is women that need protection against rape, even in the case where force is not used. This is for several reasons: First, men are bigger and stronger than women. Not only is this true on average, but men and women tend to select each other on the basis of size as well. Although the law is not intended to cover cases where force is used, for that is already illegal and does not need additional legislation, the size and strength of a man compared to a woman can be a factor in cases where consent is ambiguous. That is, a man can simply wear a woman out physically, until she becomes too tired to resist.

Second, it is the woman that can become pregnant. This puts her at a severe disadvantage compared to the man. Though birth control may make pregnancy unlikely, and abortion may be available to terminate it, yet it is a big problem for women nevertheless. And while the man may find himself forced to pay child support if she has the baby, she will still have the greater burden in caring for it and raising it.

Third, a woman is more likely to feel violated by a man than a man would feel violated by a woman. A major reason for this difference is penetration. Though a woman may be disgusted by the unwanted kisses of a man, or by his groping her, nothing can compare to being penetrated. Furthermore, an erection is prima facie evidence of consent regarding the man, thereby undermining his ability to claim that he was similarly violated. Apart from this, there may be psychological differences as well. Some men think of sex as a matter of conquest. And it is part of nature of sexual conquest to have a “love ’em and leave ’em” attitude, resulting in one night stands, which can make a woman who surrenders to such a man feel betrayed, especially if he whispered words of love as part of the seduction. In fact, whether a rape has occurred may depend in part on the subsequent behavior of the man. If a man refuses to have anything to do with a woman after they have sex, and possibly even insults her, she may feel violated; if he calls her up the next day and asks to see her again, thereby beginning a long-term relationship, that is another thing altogether. In other words, whether a rape has occurred may have as much to do with the subsequent behavior of the man as it does with what happened just before and during sex.

Fourth, alcohol has one legal implication for women and a different implication for men. People drink, in part, simply because it feels good. But they also drink in order to get carried away. I once had a girlfriend who, by her own admission, had been quite promiscuous in college. During some pillow talk one night, she told me about all the one night stands she had when she was young, and I expressed amazement. “I don’t think I could have a one night stand,” I said. “In fact, I don’t think I would want to. I have to get to know a woman first before I would feel comfortable having sex.” Without the slightest hesitation, and through half-closed eyelids, she said, “That’s because you don’t drink, John. Standing there cold sober, no one could do it. But when you drink, you feel like you’re in love. And it’s easy to have sex with someone you love.”

Alcohol not only lowers our inhibitions, it also gives us cover for inappropriate behavior. Drinking gives us a license for license. We are more likely to misbehave if we know that others will excuse this misbehavior as being the result of intoxication. Therefore, a lot of people drink knowing it will not only make it easier to have sex, but also will be a prophylactic against shame the next morning.

The problem lies in judging when someone has consumed enough alcohol to get carried away, but not so much as to no longer be able to consent to sex. And here the double standard may strike some people as unfair. If the woman is drunk, her saying “yes” to sex does not constitute consent, but if the man has sex with her, he cannot use the fact that he was drunk as a legal justification against a charge of rape. So we end up with the situation in which if a man and woman who are equally drunk have sex, she can claim to have been raped, because the legal implications of being drunk are different for men and women.

But even if the woman is sober and only the man is drunk, their having sex will not be construed as her raping him. No one has ever watched The Way We Were (1973), and thought that Katie (Barbara Streisand) deserved to go to prison for raping Hubbell (Robert Redford), even though she had sex with him while he was too passed-out drunk to know what he was doing.

The double standard here regarding alcohol, not holding a drunk woman responsible for saying “yes,” while holding a drunk man responsible for not realizing that she was too drunk to consent, is justified on account of the reasons given previously: the size and strength of the man, the possibility of pregnancy, and the difference in the male and female psyches.

It is peculiar that the law seems to apply only to college students. Although I support a double standard for men and women when it comes to sex, I hope we do not have a double standard for college students and all other adults. Presumably, women who are not in college are not fair game, and the “yes means yes” standard applies to them too. It is only on account of the unique circumstance of young women living away from home and under the protection of a university that special legislation for coeds has been enacted.

Unfortunately, a double standard is a two-edged sword. In affirming a double standard for sexual activity, we run the risk of having that double standard leach out into areas where it is inappropriate, such as in the workplace. By saying men are more responsible for their drunken behavior than women, by saying women are psychologically more likely to feel violated and be traumatized by sex than men are, we run the risk of suggesting that women cannot be trusted with responsibility in the workplace, and that they are psychologically weaker than men. It is partly for this reason that the law is stated in gender-neutral terms. Although gender-neutral language allows the law to apply to gay couples too, I suspect that this gender-neutral language would still be there anyway, as if to suggest that a man has the same protection against being violated by a woman, and could thus bring charges of rape against her. So, to keep from having a double standard for men and women in the workplace and in other contexts where sex should not matter, we pretend not to have a double standard for men and women in the matter of sexual activity. I don’t doubt that someday a man will bring rape charges against a woman, saying he was too drunk to consent. In anticipation of this event, allow me to smirk preemptively at such a claim.

This is our dilemma: either we deny the existence of a double standard in matters of sex as being repugnant to egalitarian principles, and end up being forced to accept conclusions that are absurd or paradoxical; or we admit to the need to have a double standard in matters of sex, which leaves an opening for those who want a reason to discriminate against women elsewhere.

Blaming the Victim or Counseling Prudence?

John Kasich, when asked by a female college student what policies he would promote as president that would help her “feel safer and more secure regarding sexual violence, harassment and rape,” made some general remarks about confidential reporting and rape kits, but then ended with this: “I’d also give you one bit of advice. Don’t go to parties where there’s a lot of alcohol. OK?” As a result, he was accused of blaming the victim.

Just prior to making that remark, Kasich made reference to his two sixteen-year-old daughters. The idea was to show that he had empathy for young women like the one that asked him the question. But that was undoubtedly what led him astray. He was thinking about the advice he likely has already given his daughters regarding parties they are invited to in high school, and it is only charitable to imagine that in giving that advice he is counseling prudence, not blaming his daughters in advance if they are raped. So, part of Kasich’s problem lies in confusing his role as a politician hoping to become president of the United States with his role as a father trying to protect his daughters.

In like manner, President Obama confused his roles regarding the Morning-After Pill. Although his administration eventually quit blocking the sale of that pill to minors without a prescription, his administration resisted for some time, as noted in an article in The New York Times:

Mr. Obama had expressed personal concern about making the drug more broadly available last year and offered support to Kathleen Sebelius, his secretary of health and human services, when she blocked a decision by the F.D.A. that would have cleared the way for nonprescription distribution to all girls and women regardless of age. He said that as the father of two young girls, the idea of making the drug available to them without a prescription made him uncomfortable.

I never was sure what to make of that. Did Obama expect his daughters to come to him and say, “I had sex last night without a rubber. Could we go to the doctor and get a prescription for the Morning-After Pill?” Let’s face it. It was not the availability of the drug that made Obama uncomfortable, but the thought of his daughters having sex. And this brings us back to Kasich, who said, “I have two 16-year-old daughters and I don’t even like to think about it.” Of course, Kasich was thinking about his two daughters being raped, not merely having consensual sex, which is what bothered Obama. But they had this in common: they were both confusing their roles as fathers with their roles as president.

Another thing they had in common was voluntarily bringing their families into the subject of public policy. Sometimes consideration of a politician’s family will be forced upon him in the context of a discussion about public policy, as when Bernard Shaw, the moderator in a presidential debate in 1988, asked Michael Dukakis if he would favor the death penalty for a man who raped and murdered his wife Kitty. Unlike Obama, who allowed his personal feelings about his daughters having sex to influence his public policy regarding the Morning-After Pill, Dukakis made the opposite blunder of insisting that even the rape and murder of his own wife would not change his feelings about the death penalty. With the wisdom that comes from hindsight, most people believe that Dukakis should have first said how he would have felt personally in such a case, perhaps saying that though he would want to avenge his wife’s rape and murder by killing the man who did it, yet the death penalty is still a bad idea as a matter of public policy. It is part of the social contract that the individual gives up the right to revenge in exchange for which the state takes on the responsibility to see that justice is done.

Separating one’s personal feelings from what would make for good public policy is not always easy. I sometimes suspect that if Moses had been a bachelor, there would have been no commandment to honor one’s mother and father, and in its place would have been something like, “Thou shalt treat thy children with respect.” After all, bachelors do not know what it is like to lose control of their willful children, but they do have painful memories of being mistreated by their parents. In fact, it may have been Moses’s exasperation with his two sons that caused him to send them and their mother Zipporah back to her father (What a great return policy!). On the other hand, had Jesus been married to a nagging wife who was always after him to get a job, he might have had more liberal views on divorce.

Returning to the present, it is clear that in the case of Obama, his personal feelings about his daughters led to bad policy. One almost suspects he tried to block the availability of the Morning-After Pill in order to block the idea of his daughters having sex. In the case of Kasich, however, his giving the same advice to women in general that he gives to his daughters led to a charge of blaming the victim.

Does it make sense to say that private advice given to daughters about how to avoid being raped is counseling prudence, while that same advice given to women in general is victim-blaming? The difference in our feelings about the two different situations may lie in a presumption of intent. We assume that a father loves his daughter and thus is only counseling prudence when he advises her on how to avoid being raped, whereas when a politician makes such a remark to women in general, there is no such presumption.

Even when advice on how to avoid rape is offered publicly, however, we can still distinguish that which is clearly victim-blaming, as in, “Don’t wear tight, revealing clothes that might provoke a man’s sexual appetite,” from that which is clearly counseling prudence, as in, “Don’t walk across campus by yourself late at night,” advice recently given out at a university where a young women was murdered, as reported by The Washington Post:

University and law enforcement officials have repeatedly warned students to be careful on campus and be aware of their surroundings. Students should walk in groups, especially at night, officials said. And they should stay vigilant and think twice about focusing on their phones or wearing headphones.

Surely, we wouldn’t want to say that the school officials were blaming the victim.

Part of the problem with Kasich’s advice is that it is not realistic. A female college student may think she is going to an ordinary party and only later find out that it borders on an orgy. But once there, she may hate to leave and be thought of as a party pooper. So, rather than be rude, she figures she will just stick it out. And in most cases, nothing bad will happen to her. But what if Kasich had given the woman who asked him the question that same advice as that of the school officials: “Be aware of your surroundings. Walk in groups and avoid walking at night or while distracted with cellphones or headphones.” I suspect he would still have been accused of blaming the victim by those that take an absolutist position in this matter. One wonders if that advice just sounds better coming from school officials than it would from a politician, especially a pro-life conservative.

Kasich eventually tweeted, “Only one person is at fault in a sexual assault, and that’s the assailant.” Had he said that to begin with, he would have avoided the mess he got himself in. However, by insisting that there is no fault on the part of the victim, we may be inadvertently suggesting that there is nothing women should do to try to protect themselves. If it is legitimate for the school officials to advise women to avoid walking at night, to walk in groups, etc., then does it not follow that a woman who ignores such advice and ends up being assaulted is partly to blame?

Part of the problem in sorting this out is that what one says to a woman who wants to be safe from sexual assault must be distinguished from what one says to a woman that has already been raped. Once a woman has been raped, it is rude to tell her that she acted imprudently. It is precisely in that case that we should insist that she is not to blame, in an effort to make her feel better. After all, she can probably figure out for herself that it was a bad idea to walk across campus at night alone. Unfortunately, public statements, whether by politicians or school officials, cannot selectively deliver their message only to women that have never been attacked, while sending a more consoling message to those that have.

Ultimately, politicians like Kasich should leave the counsels of prudence to parents and school officials acting in loco parentis, while sticking to public policies that will reduce the likelihood of sexual assault on campus. Whatever advice they might give their daughters, however wise and caring it may be, that same advice given out publicly to women in general is going sound like blaming the victim.

Blaming the Victim

Blaming the victim is an old story. One old story in particular is that of Job. In order to test Job’s righteousness, God allows Satan to inflict great misery upon him. Satan begins by killing all Job’s animals, servants, and children, and then eventually covers Job’s body with boils. Notwithstanding this, Job remains righteous and does not curse God as Satan predicted. Instead, with the patience that has become proverbial, Job sits on a dung heap, scraping his body with a shard of broken pottery. And then three friends come along and declare that all that has happened to Job is punishment for his sins, for God would never forsake a righteous man. One of them even says that Job’s sins are such that he deserves more punishment than he is actually getting. In this story, we see that the tendency to blame the victim is an ancient one. Job’s friends unhesitatingly assume he must have sinned because they are anxious to reconcile the existence of an all-powerful God with the suffering of mankind; for if people deserve their suffering, then God is merely being just by punishing them. But even in ancient times, people must have chafed at the sanctimonious attitude exemplified by Job’s friends. We may not be satisfied with the answer God finally gives, but it is clear that the story condemns the tendency to blame the victim.

The belief that people deserve their suffering implies that they have free will, that they are responsible for their actions, a notion that many find unacceptable. Some believe that everything happens necessarily, whether in the form of fate, predestination, or determinism. For them, chance is merely an expression of our ignorance, and free will is an illusion. For others, bolstered by certain interpretations of modern physics, everything ultimately happens by chance, and it is necessity that is just as much an illusion as free will. Whatever the case may be, free will, chance, and necessity exhaust the possible ways in which an event can be understood.

Metaphysics aside, each way of understanding what happens in the world affects the way we feel about things, and such feelings are temptations that even an atheist, who may fancy himself free of all silly superstition, must be on guard against. Though we may never know the truth regarding the existence of free will, chance, and necessity, yet we can at least avoid being deceived. And the great seducer behind such deception is the consolation that such notions can provide.

If believing in free will allows us to blame the victim as bringing his suffering upon himself by having made bad choices, it also allows us to take full credit for whatever good fortune has come our way. It is nice to believe that we have prospered because we made good choices in the past, and that we get full credit for whatever success we may have had. On the other hand, we are loath to invoke free will in the opposite case, usually preferring to talk about chance instead. Confronted with the thought of someone who has been more successful than we have, we prefer to say that he has just been lucky, thereby assuaging the envy in our soul—unless we can attribute his success to lying, cheating, or stealing, in which case we are more than willing to say he acted freely. As for our own misfortune, we prefer to think of that as bad luck, thereby relieving ourselves of the unpleasant thought that we made bad choices in the past and that we are now getting exactly what we deserve.

If free will and chance can each be reassuring notions depending on the circumstances, so too can the idea of necessity. If everything happens necessarily, that takes all the pressure off: there is no need to regret the past, because it could not be helped; there is no need to be anxious for the future, because it cannot be avoided. Compare the tranquility afforded us by a fatalistic philosophy with the stress that comes from a common sense understanding of the world, which tells us there is more than one way things can turn out, and choices sometimes make the difference. “Do you regret the past? Well,” says common sense, “you should! You made bad choices when you were young, and you live with the consequences to this day. There were so many things you could have done, so many things you could have been. All those opportunities were lost, and you have no one to blame but yourself. Do you feel guilty about some of the things you did? Well, you should! What you did was wrong, and you knew it was wrong, but you did it anyway, and there is no way to undo it now. And you will have to live with the knowledge of what you did for the rest of your life. Are you anxious about the future? Well, you should be! However bad things may be now, they can get a whole lot worse. And a choice you make today may well make the difference. In fact, you already know what you should do, but you just don’t want to do it. You would rather tell yourself that everything that happens does so from necessity. It doesn’t matter whether it is fate, the will of God, or the laws of physics, just as long as it gets the job done, just as long as you are not cursed by the knowledge that choices matter. You’d rather tell yourself that whatever will be, will be, that the future is inevitable, and there is no point in worrying about it. Well, go ahead and lie to yourself. It’s your only consolation for a messed-up life.” Thus speaks common sense. Can there be any doubt about the appeal of fatalism as a philosophy with which to hide from such accusations?

Though we may wish to avoid deceiving ourselves in such matters, yet the same considerations can be a guide to polite conversation. Even if we resist the temptation to believe what makes us feel good, it is only proper that we employ exactly such principles when we wish to make others feel good instead. A considerate man will praise someone who has been successful by affirming that it is all his own doing, that he earned it through his own wise choices and hard work. But that same considerate man will realize that if he speaks of his own success in that manner, he will make himself obnoxious to his fellow man, for in so doing he implies that others have only themselves to blame for not doing as well. Instead, he will speak of his good fortune as just being just a matter of luck, by which he will avoid giving offense.

Knowing how much people love to blame the victim, a victim who is considerate of the feelings of others will be quick to blame himself. A victim who says, “It’s my own darn fault,” or, “I got what I deserved,” will make his friends feel so good that they will likely reciprocate with equal courtesy, saying, “No, it wasn’t your fault. There is no way you could have known.” But anyone that insists he is a genuinely innocent victim will make others uncomfortable and even resentful, and they will likely talk about him behind his back.

When it comes to the consolation of necessity, one must act with caution. If someone coping with misfortune says, “Whatever will be, will be,” or, “It is just God’s will,” etiquette requires that we agree with him, or that we at least not contradict him outright. But in the absence of his making such a remark, we would be ill-advised to volunteer one. Otherwise, we may sound smugly dismissive, saying, “You were destined to be poor,” or, “God wanted you to get sick.”

Therefore, when it comes to free will, chance, and necessity, there is the truth, which is elusive; there is the temptation to believe whatever makes us feel good; and then there are the things we say to others in order to be polite. But in addition to these, there are the practical consequences of such notions. As has often been pointed out, a fatalist looks both ways before he crosses the street, seeming to contradict his belief that the time and circumstances of his death will be the unalterable result of an inexorable process of cause and effect; or, if he is religious, that the date and manner of his death have already been ordained by the will of God. On the other hand, the fatalist will answer that he is compelled to look both ways by an instinct for self-preservation, so there is no contradiction. But if someone so thoroughly believed in a philosophy of fatalism that he behaved like Helena Bonham Carter in Fight Club (1999), who routinely walks out into a busy street without looking, we would be horrified. Whatever one’s metaphysical views, whatever consolations one embraces, and whatever polite remarks one makes, we know that as a practical matter, it is important for people to give due weight to choice, chance, and necessity in their daily lives.

And this brings us to the subject of women who stay with men that physically abuse them. When a woman is in an ongoing abusive relationship, we never say this happens by chance. It might have been bad luck on her part that she married a man who would hit her, but it is not bad luck that she stays with him or keeps going back to him. Chance having been eliminated as an explanation for that, we are left with free will and necessity. If we say she stays with him of her own free will, we are saying that it is her own fault, and we have thus put the blame on her. Assuming we wish to avoid blaming the victim in this case, the only remaining alternative is to explain her situation in terms of necessity. The necessity in question is psychological in nature, consisting primarily of fear, love, and guilt.

The fear may be that of economic hardship in the case of a woman with limited resources, who does not know how she can make it on her own, especially if she has children. Or it may be her fear of even more physical abuse, believing that if she leaves him, he will find her and hurt her even more. Love, sad to say, can also be a motive. She may stay with him because she loves him, and because she believes that he loves her. Finally, there is guilt. She may blame herself for making him angry.

Having settled on the idea that these psychological forces compel her to remain in such a relationship, we can only hope that a countervailing psychological force added to the mix will be sufficient to propel her out of that trap. If all we do is offer sympathy and politely tell her she is not to blame for the situation she is in, do we run the risk of weakening her will by inadvertently promoting fatalism and the spirit of resignation that comes with it? If, on the other hand, we tell her that she does not have to stay with him, that she has choices, and that she and only she can get herself out of that trap, might that not be the spur she needs to leave him once and for all, even if it implies that she has only herself to blame if she stays?

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