To paraphrase Martin Niemöller’s famous admonition about complacency with totalitarian fascists:  “First they came for Rush Limbaugh and called his satire racist, and I didn’t speak out because Rush Limbaugh is a conservative.  Then they came for Dr. Laura and called her commentary racist, and I didn’t speak out because Dr. Laura is a conservative…”

Well, this time they came after a high school drama program in far-from conservative Westbury, CT.  The Arts Magnet School in that city planned a production of August Wilson’s 20th century classic “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” until the district’s Superintendent, David Snead, tried to pull the plug because the play’s characters use the word “nigger”.

First, a little bit about the play and the playwright.  August Wilson was arguably the finest American Playwright of the past thirty years.  His monumental “Pittsburgh Cycle” of plays (of which “Joe Turner” is a part) represents a canon of literary and historic significance that will be studied and performed for centuries.  The group of plays include the Pulitzer Prize winning “Fences” (1987) and “The Piano Lesson” (1990) – yes, two Pulitzers three years apart .  All but one of the ten plays are set in the same neighborhood in Pittsburgh and focus on the African-American experience throughout the 20th century.  Each of the plays take place in a different decade, “Joe Turner” representing the 1910’s and primarily focusing on the experience of Southern Blacks’ migration to urban Northern cities looking for economic opportunities and promises of a more tolerant environment.

It’s obvious at this point, to any reader with a basic high school education, that it would be impossible to truthfully tell the stories that Wilson does in these plays without the word “nigger” escaping the lips of his brilliantly drawn characters.  Of course, if the reader happens to have more than a high school education, or worse, an advanced degree in education and school administration as I’m sure Mr. Snead possesses, you’re probably tossed into a vicious conundrum, torn between the virtues of artistic freedom and politically correct “sensitivity” to “hate speech” language codes.

So, Mr. Snead did what educated, tolerant, quasi-fascists always do:  He tried to use his power to silence what he personally found objectionable.  Even better, he used race-hustling activists as his shield against criticism.  “The use of the N-word is something all civil rights leaders around the country want us to stop using,” Snead said. “I don’t think we should be doing anything to encourage our students to use it.”

Thankfully, the school board that hired Mr. Snead (and now should fire him) saw fit to take up the issue in a public hearing this week and over-ruled the over-zealous Mussolini-wannabe.  The show will go on. And, to the great credit of the vastly left-wing theatre community, much support and advocacy was provided by producers, directors and writers who saw this move for what it was, a repudiation of the basic tenants of free artistic expression, and a not-so-veiled suggestion that future plays should be careful not to use language that “civil rights leaders” might find objectionable.

But, this story should not end here.  This can be a “teachable moment” for Americans who still find it challenging to remember the latest politically correct way to refer to their neighbor who happens to be a  2nd generation son of a Chinese mother and Guatemalan father (hint: you call him an American).

Left-wing activist groups like Media Matters and Al Sharpton’s National Action Network seek to silence voices like Dr. Laura and Rush Limbaugh under the guise of politically correct language codes that they invent and enforce to fit their needs.  It’s the classic “Al Capone” approach to political activism.  They can’t defeat Rush on intellectual grounds.  They tried and failed miserably to defeat him with competing left-wing radio programming.  So now, they lie about Rush’s supposed racism in an attempt to have the FCC remove him from the air.

Soros-funded Media Matters openly brags about forcing Dr. Laura off the air (although she’s now thriving on Sirius/XM radio) because she dared to use the same word found in Mr. Wilson’s play.  And one can argue that the political and artistic goal of Mr. Wilson’s use of “nigger” is in perfect harmony with Dr. Laura’s use.

So, what’s a lefty to do?  The same left-wing groups who fought to allow high school productions of “Rent” to go forward despite reasonable protestations from parents over its glorification of drug-use and sexual behaviors not suitable for many fourteen-year-olds are now forced to choose between those same free-speech standards and the argument they continue to use to justify silencing conservative commentators on radio, television and the internet.

It’s very instructive for all Americans to witness these events and to bear in mind one inescapable truth:  Whether it’s re-writing Mark Twain or passing laws against the use of cross-hairs on a map or banning a classic play by one of our country’s greatest writers, the knee-jerk instinct to silence speech is consistently and insidiously coming from the political left.

I pray that soon, artists in our community will start re-examining why they continue to align themselves with these speech-squelching totalitarians instead of the freedom-loving center-right Tea Party that they often find so abhorrent.  They better wake-up soon.  Remember, Niemöller’s famous statement ends with: “Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out for me.”

———-

Enjoy this excerpt from August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson” as your Sunday Matinee from Big Hollywood:

Dr. Gribben is afraid that the language in the book has stopped people from reading Twain. I am sure this brilliant move will encourage students everywhere to put down the video game controller. It will also save overworked teachers from actually having to teach the context of the use of the word. In order to do that, they might have to do some research and, heaven forbid, read the books themselves. What teacher has time for that when there are condoms to be distributed and prayer circles to be broken up?

Of course, elitists who have jumped up to protest this censorship. Movie reviewer and social gadfly Roger Ebert made the mistake of using the word that shall not be spoken or written in a tweet opposing the new edition. He thought because of his lifetime of liberalism and marriage to an African-American woman he was on the white guys allowed to use the word which shall not be spoken or written list, but alas he was not and was roundly “critweeted.”  (This is a new word I have invented to describe the criticism of a tweet by tweeting.)

Now that the looming “Huck Finn” controversy is finally behind us, we can get to the business of creating jobs. Think of all of the unemployed and underemployed English majors we can busy doing the task of politically “correcting” the rest of the great and not so great works of literature. We could hire half a Bryn Mawr graduating class just to edit the works of Toni Morrison.

Think about it: just by editing the word which may not be spoken or written out of  “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “The Heart of Darkness,” “Go Tell it On The Mountain,” “Lord of the Flies,” and a thousand other works of literature, we could drop the unemployment rate a point or two. Then we could start on other ethnic insults which are more subtle. I see full-employment on the horizon.

The real problem is when we get to books like Dick Gregory’s autobiography.  Its title is… The word that shall not be spoken or written: An Autobiography.

Maybe we should ask him?

Gregory has said that the word that shall not be spoken or written should not be censored nor should euphemisms be used. He finds it intellectually dishonest. The same sentiment has been expressed by Professor Randall Kennedy, a Harvard Law School instructor and writer of books and essays on the use of  the word which may not be spoken or written.

Ahhh, what do they know?

Vive la censorship! Vive la revisionism!

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Hollywood is a competitive place to live and work.  People who live and work there know that it might be the most competitive place to live in the entire world.  The drive to succeed, to find an edge that propels you to the next level can be very compelling for those who are weak.  Of those who crave the sort of attention that might compel them into the snake pit that is Hollywood, psychologists could agree that components in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs are lacking in key areas such as confidence, friendship, and even morality.  All of these mid-level needs should be met for healthy development of creativity, intellect, problem solving, and other high-level needs.  Maslow might reason that in the desperate setting of Hollywood, the underdevelopment of needs like morality, confidence, respect of self and from others might lead to the malformative finding of one’s self at the top of the triangle, with many of the more basic needs still lacking.  In Abraham Maslow’s terms, this is a recipe for disaster of philosophical incorporation.

Other factors contribute to misintegration of philosophical synthesis, as well.

Artists are often dependent on state funding.  This may elicit a reactionary response whereby an artist who might otherwise be conservative is immediately comfortable with the idea of government finance and control in order to meet her basic needs as enumerated in the physiological component of Maslow’s needs (food, water, sex, sleep, survival).

Artists know that success is often found in pushing boundaries.  Art is usually only cutting edge once, and genres tend to have a shelf life.  There is only one O’Keefe, only one Eastwood, only one Bach.  Those genres, recomposed for today, would not have the impact because they already did.  The easiest way to create a niche is to push a boundary (for example, Ke$ha, Katie Perry, Madonna). Preserving tradition often results in preserving the status quo, and taking that to a level of marketable creativity is only for the artistic genius (It’s a Wonderful Life; The Passion; The Blind Side; Amazing Grace).  The reality is that not all artists are geniuses.  Therefore, they will be tempted to crutch on breaking norms to accomplish notoriety, rather than rely on genius they don’t have, or hope to have.

Erich Fromm said, “If I am what I have, and I lose what I have, who am I?”  His ominous warning told a tale of the reality of someone who does not properly and systematically actualize.   

Creativity is usually born of deep emotional angst.  In order to tap into the deepest of creative ability, it is often necessary to dwell on emotions others have the convenience of glossing over.  We are all sad when we experience the death of a pet.  The creator of King Kong had to not only experience the death of an animal, he had to think of every complexity, and focus in depth on the emotional trauma in order to invite his audience to experience it on film.  While we all at some point are witness to the death of an animal, the writers and producers of King Kong had to delve into every painful portion of those experiences, contemplate it, ruminate on it, and experiment with it in order to assure that his audience would live the most compelling parts of that loss in the movie.  The result of all this is that the artist dwells in the realm of emotion.  While all of us experience emotion, the rest of us have the luxury of moving on.  Not the artist.  He has to dissect it, magnify it, and live it for months on end.  Then, like some cruel joke, the artist is often rewarded for his attention to detail in describing for all of us the precise most painful components of pain, loss, grief, insecurity, and other emotional parts. Thus, the artist is conditioned in a Pavlovian way to act based on emotion. It would seem natural that he would then transpose that action on other elements of his life, including his marriage, his friendships, and his politics.

Artists are not paid for tapping into the power of rationale, but rather, the power of emotion.  Therefore, they have no real reason to exercise or even acknowledge the rational argument of a situation.  Much of art is fantasy to begin with, for example, one would not appreciate the movie King Kong if the artist explained how a giant gorilla couldn’t really do what his movie depicted.  The Harry Potter films would flop, Poe would be a side note, Monet would have sunk right into his pond, and the Twilight would be bankrupt.   When an artist takes a look at how to “fix” a social or economic problem, it shouldn’t surprise us that they are looking for heroes and villains, for victims and perpetrators, and for bigger than life fantasies that aren’t based in reality (and therefore won’t work).

Artists are not trained to delve into the gray.  They are trained to define the absolutes such as living, dying, good, bad, heaven, and hell in ways that most of us never really have to face.  Therefore, when it comes time for an artist to consider possibilities, and rational conclusion in areas like politics that they don’t know, their mind immediately goes to the dramatic—the victim, the hero; the winner, the loser; the angel, the demon.

To further complicate matters, man has an innate need for God, or religion.  Conservatives argue that such needs are God breathed, but liberals have to try to push those needs aside.  Artists, who tend to be deeply emotional, sociologically less adept, and psychologically needier than the basic population, arguably have a deeper need for God than any other professional population. Liberalism, in it’s cult-like compulsion toward legalistically defined behavior as dictated by leaders (bankers, producers, dealers, funders) in Hollywood, and one that provides a sort of moral promise of victory, can be very alluring.  This allure meets the higher level Maslovian esteem needs that the artist may not be prepared for if he has not met the lower level needs, as he has not in many cases.  Thus, liberalism becomes a pseudo religion whereby answers to other unmet Maslovian needs promise to be met somehow; some way.   As the expectation continues to exceed the outcome, the artist may grow weary of their religion of “Liberalism,” and make the switch!  This may explain why many artists become conservatives later in life (Mark Twain, Charlton Heston, Ronald Reagan).

This predisposition toward emotionality and validation would make the most sound minded, conservative-leaning artist somewhat reactionary.  The combination of gratification for emotional response to stimulus, and the fact that most artists deal in a fictional depiction of absolutes would naturally lead to a skewed perception of how people really work.  Artists are not rewarded for reality.  They are rewarded most often for their dramatic, condensed representation of what reality could be.

So the question becomes then—why do artists feel compelled or qualified to delve into the political when they have no training for it at all, and even their life experience lacks credentials necessary to relate to real Americans who don’t live in Hollywood?  Should they not simply exclude themselves, much like a judge does when she knows she has conflicting experience that might impede her rational judgment in a case?   Well, no, because we believe in freedom under the US Constitution—even under the knowledge that freedom could result in loss of liberties for having them.

In Frontpagemag.com, John J. Ray has a theory about fame and ego that is too good to paraphrase:

My basic proposal, then, is that most (but not all) Leftists/liberals are motivated by strong ego needs — needs for power, attention, praise and fame. And in the USA and other developed countries they satisfy this need by advocating large changes in the society around them — thus drawing attention to themselves and hopefully causing themselves to be seen as wise, innovative, caring etc. Rightists by contrast have no need either for change or its opposite and may oppose change if they see it as destructive or favour  change if they see it as constructive.

We will see below why one of the most consistent themes to emerge from the Leftist’s love of change is the claimed need for “equality”. And the belief in “equality” also tends to lead to support for such things as redistribution of wealth generally, heavily “progressive” income taxes, inheritance taxes, foreign aid, feminism, gay rights and socialized medicine. Again for reasons explored below, Leftists also tend to oppose religion and the churches and this in turn tends to mean that they favour abortion and oppose or obstruct religious schooling in various ways. So let us now briefly look at some of these characteristic Leftist/liberal themes to see how they relate to basic Leftist motives.

And he concludes:

But in all cases, bitter experience has shown that Leftists in power are very dangerous and destructive people. Where their power is effectively unchecked, they generally seem to resort sooner or later to mass murder (as in the case of the French revolutionaries, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Jim Jones and many Communist regimes and movements worldwide) and where they are partially thwarted by strong democratic traditions and institutions, they at least bring about large-scale impoverishment (as in post-independence India and pre-Thatcher Britain).

All people including artists want to believe that their work is meaningful and significant.  For artists, this propels their belief that human nature is changeable with proper “education” which thereby gives credence to their work.  Thus, to believe in their own meaningful output of work product, they must fancy themselves “educators” capable of changing people in important ways.

If you believe, as I do, and as John J. Ray does, that liberalism is inherently destructive and conservatism, while imperfect, is the far better alternative, then you need to know that my psychological training perceives hope on the horizon, because of the current liberal artists’ dilemma: the liberal artist is marketing today to a glowingly conservative consumer.  Conservatives are crying out for family oriented, morally compelling, traditional values that once graced the silver screen and our television sets.  The heart of America is sentimental for a turn back to the roots of Hollywood.  If the market is demanding enough, it just might result in the artists resorting to Maslow’s Hierarchy to make a living to meet their basic needs, and that might look a lot like the recent mid term elections when we just threw the bastards out and changed the course of history.

Bravo, Hollywood.  The best is yet to come.

Just as bad as the news contained in the story itself is that the person reporting on it — Entertainment Weekly’s Keith Staskiewicz – actually uses the phrase “on the other hand” to excuse the censorship and outright vandalism of one of the all-time classics in American literature.

This is what happens when no on watches the pop culture Watchmen, they become as corrupted as those they’re charged with holding accountable:

According to Publishers Weekly, NewSouth Books’ upcoming edition of Mark Twain’s seminal novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn will remove all instances of the “n” word—I’ll give you a hint, it’s not nonesuch—present in the text and replace it with slave. The new book will also remove usage of the word Injun. The effort is spearheaded by Twain expert Alan Gribben, who says his PC-ified version is not an attempt to neuter the classic but rather to update it. “Race matters in these books,” Gribben told PW. “It’s a matter of how you express that in the 21st century.”

Unsurprisingly, there are already those who are yelling “Censorship!” as well as others with thesauruses yelling “Bowdlerization!” and “Comstockery!” Their position is understandable: Twain’s book has been one of the most often misunderstood novels of all time, continuously being accused of perpetuating the prejudiced attitudes it is criticizing, and it’s a little disheartening to see a cave-in to those who would ban a book simply because it requires context. On the other hand, if this puts the book into the hands of kids who would not otherwise be allowed to read it due to forces beyond their control (overprotective parents and the school boards they frighten), then maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to judge

Staskiewicz wouldn’t think of judging, but he’s sure not above the snark that’s come to define his profession — not above the snark employed to immediately dismiss and make light of those who might disagree. After all, we just don’t understand how this is all for the greater good, how timeless classics must be edited and altered in order to be more appropriate and appreciated  in these sensitive times of ours.

First question: Why is Mark Twain’s name still on the cover of a novel he didn’t write?

Second question: Now that the “Newspeak” door has been successfully opened with no less than Entertainment Weekly’s approval, what’s next? Don’t underestimate what it means to the PC-police to have the approval of a major voice in popular culture stand by this kind of word-policing. And you can bet that if it were sex or drug abuse being edited out of “On the Road,” EW would be at the front of the bitch-pitching brigade.

As would I.

But what’s happened here with “Huckleberry Finn” and the acceptance of it is going to be precedent setting. As with everything when it comes to the left, we are merely seeing the tip of the PC iceberg.

What’s next? Blazing Saddles? Rap albums?

You don’t update and whitewash Mark Twain, you teach Mark Twain. You have your students read the novel and then teach them the context of the times and the context of the words.  Twain was no racist and the words he used were deliberate. But again, what’s most troubling isn’t one idiot publisher making a moronic decision, it’s that those like EW who should be at the head of the line protesting this are instead the primary PC Palace Guards defending it.

Didn’t anyone teach Orwell’s “1984″ to the Entertainment Weekly staff or to NewSouth Books? Sadly, I think they did. They just see it as more of a blueprint than a warning.

After much arguing, Griffith grudgingly agreed to raise the character’s age from twelve to fifteen, while still insisting that she play the part as a child. Lillian wasn’t convinced she could pull it off: “Virgins are the hardest roles to play. Those dear little girls — to make them interesting takes great vitality.” But seven years together had given the director full confidence in her abilities: “I gave her an outline of what I hoped to accomplish, and let her work it out in her own way. When she got it, she had something of her own.”

Sometimes events that look like setbacks prove to be fortuitous. On the way home from being fitted for her costumes, Gish collapsed with Spanish Influenza, a deadly pandemic then spreading throughout the United States which ultimately killed over thirty million worldwide. By the time she rallied and recovered, her already svelte frame had degenerated so dramatically that her costumes had to be refitted. But in hindsight, this pathetic and emaciated look proved perfect for the role.

Rehearsals for Broken Blossoms began just as the clangor of America’s church bells announced Armistice Day (the end of World War I), and lasted for a magisterial six weeks. “Everything was planned and timed to the second,” Gish said. “We were craftsmen. We weren’t allowed the luxury of improvisation. But we tried these things out in rehearsal. If it was good, Griffith said, ‘Keep that in’.” There were no scripts to reference, no pages of dialogue to remember. If words were required, the actors made them up on the spot. “In the end,” Gish said, “the cutter would come in with his little paper and take down what we were saying, because later on they would become subtitles.”

The reason for their intricate preparations lay in the nature of silent film — every emotion was translated into a very subtle pantomime. Karl Brown, Griffith’s young boy Friday, remembered how, “A simple scene, apparently meaningless in itself, possibly a mere ‘bridge’ to carry the story from one phase to another, would be tried two, three, five, or a dozen different ways to settle at last into the one pattern that would work for everyone concerned: camera, setting, lighting, the placing of props, everything.” This allowed the principal photography of Broken Blossoms to be completed with astounding alacrity — eighteen days all told, with many of those night shoots. “Griffith conditioned her to the part she was to play,” said Broken Blossoms’ cameraman, Billy Bitzer, “and once she had the action in mind, she wouldn’t forget or deviate by so much as a flicker of the eye.”

Much of that footage was imbued with a previously unfathomed beauty due to a happy accident of fate. One day Lillian Gish went to the Hoover Art Company, a local Hollywood photography studio, and asked them to take a picture for her passport. She expected to sit for the usual head-and-shoulders mug shot, but what she received was destined to change the face of moviemaking.

When she later proudly showed the result to D. W. Griffith, he was deeply impressed. “Her eyes were alive with beaming life,” remembered production assistant Karl Brown about that luminous photo. “Her dimpled smile was so real and so rounded that you could reach right into the picture and touch it, while her lips were incomparably delicious just to look at. Her hair was in glowing tendrils, so alive that it was actually real, and not a picture at all.”

Griffith promptly hunted down and hired the previously unknown photographer, Hendrik Sartov, and gave him a single job on Broken Blossoms. “All Sartov had to do was make close-ups,” says Brown, “nothing but close-ups. . . The magic lens that performed his miracles was quite long of focus, six or eight inches, and in order to make a full-head close-up he had to back away over almost to the other end of the stage, while his lens shade seemed eighteen inches long. Specially made, of course, and specially mounted.”

When Brown finally snuck a closer look at this magic lens, he couldn’t believe his eyes. It was

nothing in the world but a yellowed old spectacle lens with all its imperfections on its head. It wasn’t much more than the bottom of a beer bottle, and its great virtue was that it was full of all the bad faults that optical scientists had been working for decades to eliminate. It could form an image, yes, but only in the middle part. From that one inch or so of recognizable image, the rest splayed out like a raw egg dropped on the kitchen floor. And this image part was all loused up with chromatic and spherical aberration.

However, if you’d stop it down far enough [cinematographer-speak for using more light and then contracting the lens iris to compensate, the same way your pupils shrink when exposed to bright light -- LG] these defects would diminish. . . Adjust the stop until the two aberrations can be just barely sensed but not actually seen, make your exposure, and what you get is pure peaches and cream.

In the wake of Sartov’s uncredited work on Broken Blossoms, film cinematographers the world over strove to emulate his wonderful diffusion effect. Some pulled pantyhose over their lenses to soften the image, others smeared a thin layer of Vaseline on the glass. By the 1930s, just in time for Hollywood’s Golden Age, many had perfected ways to trick the camera lens into taking years of wear and tear off a starlet’s face, thus giving audiences prodigious helpings of cinematic “peaches and cream.”

While Sartov did much to make Gish look younger, it was in the memorable nuances of her performance that she really managed to bring off the illusion. The most famous of these is now known as “The Smile.” In the story, Gish’s monstrously cruel father, sick of her incessant gloom and despair, orders her to give him a smile. Griffith and his cast thought long and hard about some meaningful response Gish could give her father in that moment, some bit of pantomime that could expose the depths of sorrow permeating her soul. But it was Gish who came up with the answer, a perfect gesture that has since gone down as an iconic image in the annals of filmmaking. As she explains it:

Suddenly it came to me: in the midst of the scene, and while the camera was grinding, I lifted my hand, spread my index and second fingers, and pushed up the corners of my lips into a ghastly, fixed-mouth smile.

“Mr. Griffith leapt to his feet,” Gish remembers, “and shouted: ‘Hold it!’ We did the scene many times until he was satisfied, and then he said to me: ‘Lillian, that is the only original piece of acting I have ever seen in the pictures’.” Griffith would have Gish repeat that ineffably sad and pathetic gesture at several points in the film. (So much for Gish’s claim that, “We weren’t allowed the luxury of improvisation.”)

Just as The Smile became a universally known shot depicting sorrow, the famous “Closet Scene” from Broken Blossoms became a benchmark for scenes of sheer terror in cinema. Its preeminence in that regard would not be seriously challenged for over forty years, until Hitchcock gave us the “Shower Scene” in Psycho. In the movie, Gish’s father has dragged Gish home and is preparing to horsewhip her. Terrified, she dives into the closet and locks the door against him, listening in raw terror to his angry ravings before completely falling apart as he begins battering down the door with a hatchet, Shining-style.

On the day it was to be shot, Griffith ran Gish ragged until 2 a.m., trying to get her into an exhausted state conducive to losing herself in the moment. What he didn’t know was that she had been rehearsing the scene in private “almost without sleep” for three days and nights, striving to come up with the perfect pantomime for terror, some action or gesture that would pierce the audience like a knife in the heart:

I worked that out myself. I never told Griffith what I was going to do. You see, if I had told him, he’d have made me rehearse it over and over again; and that would have spoilt it. It had to be spontaneous, the hysterical terror of a child.

Well, when I came to play the scene in front of the camera, I did it as I planned — spinning and screaming terribly (I was a good screamer; Mr. Griffith used to encourage me to scream at the top of my voice). When we finished, Mr. Griffith was very pale.

It remains, for all the advances we’ve had in technology, an electrifying scene. “I have seen every actress of America and Europe during the last half-century,” the famous stage actor Rudolph Schildkraut said at the time. “Lillian Gish’s scene in the closet, where she is hiding in terror from her brutal father, is the finest work I have ever witnessed.”

Normally during a shoot, Griffith’s highest praise after a scene was to murmur with soft content, “That is very fine.” But on this night, after Lillian Gish had screamed for long minutes like a banshee and twirled around in the enclosed closet space like a feral animal, Griffith’s response was a shocked “My God — why didn’t you warn me you were going to do that?” One suspects that he said this with a huge smile, for cameraman Billy Bitzer reports that, while Gish was immersed in her throes of terror, he snuck a glance over at Griffith, who was “leaned forward in his director’s chair, relishing every moment of it.”

Broken Blossoms debuted at New York’s George M. Cohan Theatre on May 13, 1919, and the accolades for Lillian Gish were off the charts. The critic covering the premiere for The New York Evening Telegram wrote that, “Miss Lillian Gish, as the girl, is so sweet and charming, and withal so touching that the presentation actually moved spectators to tears.” The Tribune added that, “Her work is so tender, so convincing that there comes a time when you just can’t watch any longer.” The Morning Telegraph spoke for many when it declared that “She gives a performance so finished and so appealing and pitiful it will be recorded among the remembered characterizations in this uncertain art of the unspoken drama.”

It was a triumph, undoubtedly — but also a double-edged sword. “Life is just one long photograph and interview,” the private, retiring actress glumly complained about her post-Blossoms tidal-wave of publicity. Magazines heralded her as “The Madonna of the Shadows,” “Queen of the Silent Drama,” and “The Duse and Bernhardt of the Screen.” Within a few years D. W. Griffith was all but forced to shoo her out of his company, graciously encouraging her to make her fortune with other directors while she was still a hot property. This she reluctantly did, but other directors found her to be too settled in her Griffith-tutored ways and somewhat snobbish about it. What John Nolte calls the “self-consciously showy” School of Acting Affectation (think late Meryl Streep and Al Pacino) actually started ninety years ago with Gish — contemporary reviews from the 1920s frequently accuse her of “playing Lillian Gish” instead of the character, and of using “repetitious mannerisms.”

Everyone wanted her to repeat her Broken Blossoms formula, to the point where critic Herbert Howe wrote in Picture Play magazine that, “When Lillian Gish now appears you know she is due for a beating. . . A Society for the Prevention of Screen Cruelty to Lillian Gish should be organized. This fragile, spiritually illumined girl is a fine tragedienne, ever emotionally true. It is a mistake to let her droop, forever a broken blossom.” Another magazine’s editor joked that “an optimist is a person who will go to the theater expecting to see a D. W. Griffith production in which Lillian Gish is not attacked by the villain in the fifth reel.”

And then there were the changing times. Actress Colleen Moore remembers how “There was a tendency for people and critics during the 20s to believe that anything that came to prominence in the teens was hopelessly outdated and old-fashioned.” The Los Angeles Examiner noted in a review of a lesser Gish film that “People are sick of her in vine-clinging, tragic attitudes. They want something different. We are living in the twentieth century.” James R. Quirk, publisher and editor of Photoplay, put it even more cuttingly: “Even as Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, she proves conclusively that babies are brought by storks.”

She was approaching forty when the advent of sound soured her on acting in movies, and she turned to a successful stage career. Gish only did motion pictures intermittently after that, but worth mentioning is her standout performance as shotgun-wielding Rachel Cooper protecting God’s children from Robert Mitchum’s iniquitous preacher in Charles Laughton’s masterpiece Night of the Hunter (1955). She remained a staunch Republican her entire life, standing by actors like John Wayne in support of the House Un-American Activities Committee, publicly supporting Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan, and being on the right side of most issues. When once questioned about feminism she replied, “I’m not a feminist. I like to think I used common sense most of the time.” My kind of gal.

Lillian Gish died in her sleep in 1993, having lived for 99 years — from President Grover Cleveland to President Bill Clinton. Her first film was made in 1912, and her last seventy-five years later, in 1987. In her foreword to The Films of D. W. Griffith, Gish wrote of her generation that “We are the first to leave a living record of our people, life-style, and certainly our history.”

I give the last word on Lillian Gish to Albert Bigelow Paine, the notable Mark Twain scholar who, in 1932, penned the first full-length biography of the woman who made Broken Blossoms so unforgettable: “To say that [Gish’s acting] is spiritual only partly tells the story. It is that, but it is something more. It has a haunting, eerie quality that has to do with elfland, and lonely moors — the face that seen by the homing lad at evening leaves him forever undone. Scores of men and women, too, have written of it, have felt its strangeness. Some have tried to write of it lightly, but underneath you feel the magic working. They have glimpsed Diana’s silver horn, and they are forever changed.”

Next week, we conclude our study of Broken Blossoms with a cage-fight death match: the critical mores of past audiences versus those of modern deconstructionist academics.

Previous posts in the series “D. W. Griffith, Lillian Gish, and Broken Blossoms”

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Film Theater and Gallery at Bowling Green State University, Ohio. Bowling Green State has long been a friend of popular culture. They have what must be the biggest pop-culture library and archive in the world (housing, among much else, a complete collection of my own literary journal, The Cimmerian), and visitors to their campus can also check out the cool theater dedicated to the Gish sisters, complete with displays of historical artifacts from their lives and careers.

Lillian Gish fulfills a dream of ballet. An old video from May 13, 1984: “Legend of stage and screen, Lillian Gish, appears with Patrick Dupond and fulfills a lifelong dream at the Metropolitan Opera Gala, celebrating 100 years of performing arts at the Met.” She always wanted to be in a ballet, and at ninety she finally did it.

An excerpt from Albert Bigelow Paine’s 1932 book, Life and Lillian Gish. Other biographers criticize this early treatment of Gish’s life for its “enpurpled prose” and its slavish adherence to the Gish legend (with her assistance — unlike many stars, Gish rarely shied away with cooperating with projects concerning her life and work). Me, I like the graceful period language, grammar and sense of decorum that permeated much of that era’s writing. Here’s pages 79-99 from the book, covering Gish’s early career with Griffith, and transcribed and presented by CinemaWeb: The Independent Resource for Independent Film and Video.

But Palin ain’t buying it by the barrel, she’s got a whole pipeline of pure grade indigo flowing from the North Slope as she pumps up the volume on her NY Times #1 bestselling memoir.

When I got about halfway through the book I set it down, stepped outside of my Washington, DC townhouse and went for a run around the U.S. Capitol. Listening to the Outlaws, Marshall Tucker Band, and Lil Bow Wow (my daughter slipped that one in there) on my iPod, the recurrent thought in my mind was that this woman is far more qualified to be president of the United States than the current occupant of the White House.

When I completed the journey that is Going Rogue, I wrote down five things:

–She is a positive role model for all Americans
–She is an executive, takes on hard problems and makes tough decisions
–She has tremendous energy, balance and intellect
–America shafted itself in this last election
–Alaska is lucky to have her

Oh, and a sixth, Sarah Palin could be the next president of the United States.

Her book washes away all doubts that any reader might have had about her readiness to be president. She comes across as exceptionally bright, dedicated, and passionate about public service. Her moral compass is strong, pointing true North in this case. And she has a wicked sense of humor.

The most salient take-away from Going Rogue for me was what I admired most in her campaign, which was that she had been in charge as either a mayor or a governor whereas none of the other candidates on either ticket had. Having been a commander several times in the military I know that there is a huge difference between being a hardworking and important staff officer and an ‘alone at the top’ commander. No matter how fancy the title, executive officer or Senator, at the end of the day, you are recommending to someone who actually makes the decision.

As a Governor, mayor or commander, you have the unparalleled responsibility to actually make decisions that have ramifications. There is little training that can prepare you for all those heads turning in your direction when it is decision time. You can’t blithely abstain on a vote or hide behind the guy in front of you, because you own the decision. Case in point is Obama’s inexcusable delay in making a decision on Afghanistan. His indecision, cloaked as ‘sleeves-rolled-up-pensiveness’, is an indicator that he was, at a minimum, unprepared to be commander in chief. What we see in his speech at West Point is a minimally slimmed down version of what General Stan McChrystal submitted to the president on August 30th. So now big Stan has nine months to do what he said it takes 12 months to accomplish.

Palin, on the other hand, demonstrates decisiveness and vulnerability. Is she prepared for the enormous breadth of responsibility of president? I think she’s ready for the hard part, which is making tough decisions. She’s no “Ruminator-in Chief”, that’s for sure, and if the American people think a second year back bench senator was ready to be president, I’m not sure we’ve got the right rubric out there.

Palin is real. She takes counsel of her fears and continuously comes back to her foundation of family, God, state and nation for reassurance and guidance. She has strong moral guideposts that she uses to navigate the shark infested political waters. Reading about the decisions Sarah Palin faced at multiple levels of government reminded me of something my command sergeant major in the 82nd Airborne Division used to say when we faced a tough decision together: “Sir, when you’re right, don’t worry about it.”

Palin is right on many issues such as energy policy, defense, business, and size of government. She gets it and my hope is that she firms up her base and then reaches out to moderates across this country. She has a gritty determination borne in the salmon hauls and caribou hunts that make her pioneer tough.

I am left wondering why the McCain campaign bottled her up and didn’t let the maverick, well, be a maverick. McCain made an unconventional pick and instead of hiring a Wall Street stockbroker to manage her I’m perplexed, and disappointed, that he didn’t let this one-woman campaign juggernaut do her thing. If she was accustomed to traveling all over Alaska campaigning essentially by herself or with her family by her side, surely she could have done without all of the layers of control. I believe that Sarah Palin is precisely what the American people are seeking: an honest, intelligent, passionate, practical conservative who is nonpartisan and a tough decision maker.

Oddly, as I read Going Rogue and learned the real story behind the mainstream media assault upon this patriot, I was briefly reminded of the first time I met Hillary Clinton. She was in her first year as New York’s junior senator and my impression of her was largely shaped by what I read in the newspapers or saw on television, meaning mostly negative. When she came into the Pentagon for a 45 minute briefing from my boss, I was one of four people in the room: the Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, Senator Clinton, her assistant Uma Abedin, and me.

Over the next 90 minutes, she not only ignored her schedule, but she demonstrated a keen intellect, undeniable sincerity, and genuine interest in the many complex topics discussed. I came away from that meeting with an entirely different viewpoint on Senator Clinton than had been painted for me in the media. I tucked away the lesson to always remember that there is a phalanx of reporters, journalists and hate mongers who are trying to tell us all what to think.

And so it was with Sarah Palin, someone I actually supported. I think Palin recognizes that the extreme members of both parties and media put each of them through the Mixmaster, in some part because they are women, and she extends an olive branch to Clinton for a chat over a cup of coffee.

No matter what your political leanings, you better believe that Sarah Palin will step forward when the time is right. She has spine and she is called to public service. She’s been bloodied in the faux battles of presidential politics and yet she’s still standing, making tough decisions. She seems to have an iron core spirit and a will to make our country better.

And like that pipeline of ink, she seems to have an indomitable will that when attacked, unfortunately for her opponents, she doesn’t break. Her resolve seems to strengthen.

As her father said, “Sarah’s not retreating; she’s reloading.”

We should hope so, because she’s precisely the kind of leader America needs.

It has always puzzled me how the media selects “great writers.” I, for one, would consider Frederick Forsythe’s driving, brilliant action novel “The Day of the Jackal” far better literature than Don DeLillo’s pointless and meandering “Underworld.” I think Leon Uris’ “Mila 18″ is far more compelling than the Cormac McCarthy’s purposefully obscure “Blood Meridian.” It isn’t that I don’t enjoy the occasional psychological novel – it’s tough to argue with either Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. But the gauge of authorial greatness shouldn’t be the ability to pen 600 pages of plot-less description of characters who would bore you to death or repulse you in real life.

What, then, makes John Updike such a god to the media? It certainly isn’t his writing, which vacillates from the tedious to the atrocious. His style falls somewhere between Thomas Hardy and Kate Chopin on the soporific scale. Take the opening passage from his highly-praised “Rabbit Redux”:

“Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them. In winter, Pine Street at this hour is dark, darkness presses down early from the mountain that hangs above the stagnant city of Brewer; but now in summer the granite curbs starred with mica and the row houses differentiated by speckled bastard sidings and the hopeful small porches with their jigsaw brackets and gray milk-bottle boxes and the sooty ginkgo trees and the banking curbside cars wince beneath a brilliance like a frozen explosion.”

If you dug that supreme ejaculation of adjectives, there is a good shot you think that “2001: A Space Odyssey” is subtle, understated, and too short. And yet the ‘New York Times’ called this book, which focuses on Updike’s typical target, middle class conservative suburbia, a “novel by an awesomely accomplished writer at his peak.”

While I can admit Updike’s over-utilized power of description, it is clearly a gift that comes and goes. Updike actually won a lifetime achievement award from the UK’s “Literary Review” for his bad sex writing. Take this gratuitous description of oral sex from his latest epic nothing, “The Widows of Eastwick”: “She said nothing then, her lovely mouth otherwise engaged, until he came, all over her face. She had gagged, and moved him outside her lips, rubbing his spurting glands across her cheeks and chin … God, she was antique, but here they were. Her face gleamed with his jism in the spotty light of the motel room, there on the far end of East Beach, within sound of the sea.” This isn’t exactly Herman Melville. In fact, there’s a good shot that Melville would slap Updike around for writing this bit of pathetic purple pornography.

Updike’s characters range from the unbelievable to the unbelievably patronizing. First, the unbelievable. I cannot claim to have read every novel Updike wrote – few can, since he wrote 25 of them – but his major works are stuffed to the gills with characters who speak as no person has ever spoken. In “Terrorist,” Ahmad, an American, half-Irish, half-Egyptian high school graduate seduced by Islamism, states, “There is nothing in Islam to forbid watching television and attending the cinema, though in fact it is all so saturated in despair and unbelief as to repel my interest.” Ahmad is American. No American speaks like this, even an American unlucky enough to fall in with the wrong mosque crowd.

And then there are the patronizing. Rabbit is Updike’s most famous creation, the subject of four of his novels. Rabbit is an adulterous creep, a selfish hedonist who has no concern for his wife or family. And, yes, Rabbit is a political conservative; in “Rabbit, Redux,” Updike makes a point of Rabbit’s support for the war in Vietnam and his flag decal. As Updike stated in a 2004 interview:

“People ask me what would Rabbit think of 9/11, what would Rabbit think of George W. Bush, and I just can’t say … I think Rabbit would probably have the same reaction to the invasion of Iraq that he had to Vietnam, that it may be a mistake but it’s our duty to see it through. If he were alive, he’d probably be in Florida most of the year by now and he might have a stars-and-stripes sticker on his car. After 9/11, he certainly would have put the flag up.”

The rube.

Updike himself was a political liberal. In 2007, he wrote a review of Amity Shlaes’ “The Forgotten Man” in “The New Yorker,” in which he castigated Shlaes for her criticism of FDR: The impression of recovery—the impression that a President was bending the old rules and, drawing upon his own courage and flamboyance in adversity and illness, stirring things up on behalf of the down-and-out—mattered more than any miscalculations in the moot mathematics of economics.” This is tremendous nonsense. There is little doubt FDR was a great politician, a phenomenal PR man. But Shlaes’ argument – that FDR lengthened the Great Depression – does not call for a rebuttal based on anecdotal reminiscences.

Updike was a novelist, not an economist. But the politics with which he infected his craft made him a star.

The media loved Updike because Updike was unsparingly critical of the United States. He castigated it for its greed, its stupidity, its xenophobia. He saw Americans as a group of know-nothing conservatives consumed with money-lust and more typical lust. He saw everyday Americans as hypocrites who thumped both Bibles and the minister’s wife.

Updike has been hailed as one of the great American writers. When it comes to American writers, no one surpasses Mark Twain. In his famously brilliant essay, “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” Twain took James Fenimore Cooper, author of “The Last of the Mohicans,” to the woodshed. His words fairly describe Updike:

“A work of art? It has no invention; it has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality; its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words they prove that they are not the sort of people the author claims that they are; its humor is pathetic; its pathos is funny; its conversations are — oh! indescribable; its love-scenes odious; its English a crime against the language. Counting these out, what is left is Art. I think we must all admit that.”