Sunday, January 11. The Film Forum is a Greenwich Village theater so solemn its lobby is painted black and its fare consists largely of documentaries. Going there seems less like an outing to the movies than a homework assignment, or maybe even a visit to the dentist. There’s a hectoring tone even to the entertaining stuff, like this month’s Chaplin retrospective: You are supposed to laugh, but you are also supposed to come away with breathless respect for a Great Artist who cared deeply about the human condition and was persecuted for his leftist views.
It is out of duty (the homework-assignment thing) that I arrive at the Film Forum to see Arguing the World, a documentary about four New York intellectuals who in the 1930s and 1940s attended City College, where they were members of a Communist cell that met in one of the school cafeteria’s alcoves. They then broke with communism and became writers and editors. One ended up a neoconservative, one stayed a socialist, and the other two ended up somewhere in the middle. For people who know about such things, this is old news, and it’s hard to believe anybody else would care.
So imagine my surprise to find a long line outside the Film Forum and its black lobby stuffed with people buzzing about the film like teenage girls. The theater has only two-hundred seats and this is New York, but still, Arguing the World is a documentary about four old Jews who read a lot of books. Mostly, I expect, the full theater is due to the New York Times, which has devoted a remarkable amount of attention to the film, but there must be something else at work here.
There is. Arguing the World turns out to be a very entertaining movie — an immigrant romance about four boys from the New York slums who lived interesting and exciting lives in the world of ideas. What’s more, filmmaker Joseph Dotman has actually gotten the details right; no easy task when you’re dealing with who said what about whose essay in which quarterly, or what it means to break with communism but stay on the left, or even what “left” means in that context.
Most surprising of all, Arguing the World is fair. This may be the only time in the history of Greenwich Village that “liberal anti-communism” has ever received a respectful hearing. The four intellectuals are Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Irving Howe, and Irving Kristol. Each is given his due, even Kristol, who is shown twice in photographs with Ronald Reagan and is discussed in flattering terms by Jeanne Kirkpatrick (whose appearance on screen provokes the only obnoxious leftoid scoffing from an otherwise polite audience).
The movie is so fair, in fact, that it becomes a sort of Rorschach test. To me, the late Irving Howe seems by far the least attractive of the four — dour, sour, bitter. Bell, Kristol, and Glazer are all amusing and lively; there’s a wonderful bit in which Glazer goes back to the South Bronx tenement where he grew up and has a conversation about Harvard with one of the current residents. Kristol talks about how no parent in his neighborhood ever spoke the words I love you. “You would have been embarrassed,” he says, adding that what they did have was absolute loyalty inside the family.
By contrast, Howe spent his life committed to the ideas he believed when he was seventeen years old, and on screen he clearly yearns to kick Irving Kristol out of the national discussion of ideas — just as he had kicked Kristol out of his Trotskyite cell fifty years before. Even though the movie ends with Howe’s funeral and gives the unctuous Michael Walzer the last celebratory word, I didn’t think of Howe as the hero of Arguing the World. But then I opened up New York magazine and found David Denby’s review, which ends: “I am devoted to Irving Howe . . . ; the movie brings his severe but humane consciousness back into focus with startling force.” Severe and humane? Would that include the scene in which Howe restates, with the blind fervency of a flat-earther two centuries after Galileo, his belief in the nationalization of industry?
Like I said: Arguing the World is a Rorschach test.
Wednesday, January 14. Wag the Dog is a political satire from director Barry Levinson, whose last political satire was a horror show called Toys with Robin Williams (and no, it wasn’t a horror show because it starred Robin Williams, though that helped). Toys was about a happy and wonderful toy factory that gets taken over by the military in order to make toys that fire real bullets and video games that train kids to fight in the next nuclear war.
Those fascists. How chilling.
Toys lost about a billion dollars (okay, not a billion, but grant me my little fantasies), so you might think Hollywood wouldn’t give Levinson another billion to make a second political satire. It did, largely because Levinson agreed to make it on the cheap in one month. Wag the Dog does move quickly, and it has a terrific performance by Dustin Hoffman, but otherwise it’s awful: a comedy with almost no jokes, a satire whose makers know nothing about the subject they’re making fun of.
Here’s the central idea: It’s eleven days before the election, and the president is caught molesting a fourteen-year-old girl in the White House. (Sure.) His advisers, led by Robert De Niro, need to come up with a story that will supersede the story of a pedophile president. (Right.) So they decide to invent a war between the United States and Albania, based on staged film-footage of a girl carrying a cat through some war-torn rubble. They write a few songs, come up with a war hero, and get the president reelected.
The movie, written by the wildly overrated David Mamet, is full of speeches in which De Niro explains that the plot will work because: (a) the 1969 lunar landing was staged, (b) the 1983 war in Grenada was undertaken because Ronald Reagan wanted to get the story of the 240 marines killed in Lebanon off the front page, (c) the American people supported the Gulf War because they saw footage of a smart bomb going down a chimney and thought it was cool, and (d) the public will believe anything as long as a picture and a song go with it.
There is nothing more repugnant than ignorant cynicism. Watching Wag the Dog is like having a conversation with a conspiracy nut who rolls his eyes and smiles contemptuously when you tell him that you don’t believe Bill Clinton personally killed two teenagers near the Mena airport. Even a satire has to get the details right, and the simple fact is that if a president of the United States were accused of molesting a teenager, it would be big news. One of my colleagues at the New York Post pointed out that between a girl in rubble carrying a cat and a girl at a press conference accusing a president, you can guess what front page our paper would go with. Besides which, wouldn’t somebody place a phone call to Albania to see whether there’s a war on?
An honest parody of presidential politics would show how chaotic and stupid most decisions are, how mediocrity rises to the top, how conspiracies exist only to cover up mistakes and crimes. An honest parody of the media would play off their love of salaciousness, not their hunger for patriotic gore: Maybe Barry Levinson didn’t notice, but tens of thousands of people were killed in Bosnia before a single U.S. soldier set foot there.
There is one really disgusting moment in Wag the Dog. The spin doctors put their war hero in a shirt whose tatters spell out “Courage, Mom” in Morse Code. They got the idea from one of the greatest acts of bravery in this century, when, during an infamous press conference staged by the North Vietnamese, Jeremiah Denton blinked a message home in Morse Code. Some things are beyond the pale. This is one of them. Let’s see Barry Levinson spend ninety seconds in a POW camp without praying for deliverance by the U.S. military for which he has long displayed such loathsome contempt.
John Podhoretz, a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is editorial page editor of the New York Post.
