September Capsules

sometimes the rain comes down so hard you forget you've ever been dry: alan dershowitz, batman, elmer fudd, honor levy, camilla cabello

Reversal of Fortune (1990)

Reversal of Fortune is a 1990 legal thriller directed by Iranian born Swiss director Barbet Schroeder. Jeremy Irons won a best actor Oscar for his role of almost-certainly wife murderer Claus Vön Bulow. It was a deserved award. It is an icy and uncanny performance of a very strange man.

Plotwise, diegetically, the movie is more or less a straightforward legal thriller, one culminating in a theatrical courtroom performance by the heroic (?) defense attorney. A lawyer is hired to defend an extraordinarily wealthy man accused of murdering his wife. The accused, Claus Vön Bulow, is adamant of his innocence. The lawyer defends him, despite his ambivalence, despite the pangs of conscience. Because the lawyer doesn’t believe his client is innocent. But that’s the job isn’t it?

Straightforward legal thriller. Here’s the thing. The lawyer is Alan Dershowitz, attorney for Jeffrey Epstein and recurring figure in the Epstein saga. Every time the movie lingers on the dark nights of the protagonists soul, every time another character assures our protagonist he is fundamentally good, every time he pulls brilliant and heroic legal maneuver, you know that it is Dershowitz doing these things, and you know what Dershowitz will go on to do.¹

Dershowitz is more than a character though. The movie is based on a book the same name by Dershowitz, about the real life Vön Bulow case. It was this case, the book, and the movie, that cemented Dershowitz’s status as an A-list celebrity lawyer. The movie doesn’t just depict Dershowitz but has a material affect on the trajectory of his career. As such, I think it is fair to bring in extra-textual material into an engagement with the movie. As a movie it is a perfectly fine, if uncanny, legal thriller. As a vector it is something more interesting. There are a lot of layers between the text and material.

Reading people’s thoughts on the movie, a recurring theme is a dismissal of this movie as hagiographic of Dershowitz. But I’m not sure it is. Schroeder of course couldn’t know about the coming decades of Dershowitz’s career or the Epstein nexus. At the same time, there is something else going on under the movie.

Vön Bulow is a strange man (“you have no idea” he says in response to Dershowitz telling him exactly that). He is icy and distant, and Irons plays him with his own private sense of humor. He is funny. Not in the world of the movie, not to the other characters (“what do you get a wife who already has everything?.. a vial of insulin” he says to complete silence.) But he is funny in his strangeness. He is operates in distance, and that distance is funny. He is always ironic in demeanor.

The movie is pitched, tonally just a little off. The flashback scenes, the scenes of the possible murder, are shot in icy icy blue and take place largely in austere marble bathrooms. The scenes of Dershowitz and his law students² taking over his family home, eating spaghetti dinners, riffing, shooting hoops (there is a scene of Dershowitz playing basketball in his driveway in short shorts) are warm, almost too warm. The scenes in the house, the comradery and playfulness and the warmth and even the way the rooms feel— reminded me something like a Disney channel original movie. There was a tonal discordance, which suggests an intentional discordance of text and subtext.

Irony is a cheapened device. Maybe it’s cheap to say the movie is ironic. But the last line of the movie is Vön Bulow saying “just kidding” while looking directly into the camera.

The movie is is an engagement with text outside of itself: by using Dershowitz’s memoir and referencing court documents in that book, intertextuality is unavoidable.

I haven’t seen Schroeder’s other films, but I have read about them after watching this. He got his start in the French New Wave³ and collaborated with all the big names there. He has directed something called the “Trilogy of Evil” a cycle of documentaries on terrorists, violent religious leaders, dictators, and lawyers. The trilogy includes Terror’s Advocate (2007), about a lawyer for terrorists (Algerian nationalists, Khmer Rouge members, PLO members, and various Marxist- Leninists but also out-and-out Neo-Nazis.) [This is to say, the depiction Alan Dershowitz and his defense of Vön Bulow is perhaps complicated by its juxtaposition with a lawyer defending terrorists.] Another movie in the trilogy is General Idi Amin Dada: A Self Portrait (1974, and thus 15 years before Reversal of Fortune) about the brutal Uganda dictator. The movie was made with participation from Amin Dada, who acted, at least in his mind, as a co-director of the movie. Two versions of the movie were made: one that was given to Amin Dada and one that was released in the world, one positive one negative

However, and I’ll just quote from Wikipedia for a moment

According to Schroeder, Amin asked Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi to send his agents in Britain to watch the film and write down a full transcript of its contents. Amin soon sent a letter to Schroeder requesting additional cuts to the film, but Schroeder refused. In response, Amin rounded up almost 200 French citizens living in Uganda and confined them to a hotel surrounded by the Ugandan army, supplying them with Schroeder's home telephone number and explaining that their release was conditional on Schroeder's acquiescence. In the face of this dilemma, Schroeder made the requested cuts, replacing the 2½ minutes of excised footage with title cards crediting the gaps to Amin. On Amin's fall from power, Schroeder restored the missing material, and most versions seen today contain the full footage.⁴

That is to say, there is a very distinct permeability between subject and film here. The subject is able to shape the film, to change the film. The subjects takes hostages and demands the film be changed. It also suggests Schroeder’s ability to “collaborate” with the subject of the film and to take a source text and subvert it while seemingly remaining faithful.

I’m emo af about all these lost futures

Every generation has their own millenarian moment/ movement/ current. People have thought Christ was going to return since his crucifixion. Boomer’s and their parents had the constant cloud of nuclear annihilation hanging over them. Every generation has thought the end of the world was imminent. And they were right. The cold war ended 35 years ago. That is not very long ago in any sort of historical scheme. 68% of people alive now were alive during the Cold War. Nearly a quarter of Americans were alive in the 50s. Those nukes never went anywhere. 2000 marked the second Millennium since Christ’s birth but the second Millennium since his death is not until 2033. Scientists have predicted horrific deterioration of environmental conditions by 2033.

I remember this series of books called “The Internet Girls”. I never read them. I remember seeing their cover at all the Scholastic book fairs I went to in the 2000s. They are about a group of teen girls navigating high school told entirely in instant messaging slang. I never read them. They felt distinctly not for me. The boy/girl divide, yes, but they also felt a part of a scarier, older world. The internet overall felt that way, if I engaged with it at all as a kid. Maybe there are people who feel this way about Honor Levy’s My First Book, that is a dispatch from some inaccessible, cooler, more mature world, one they are desperate to be a part of, a world of online micro-celebrities and college and adderall and ketamine. An Emma Bovary grasping at a world made up of tweets.

For all the cheekiness and zoomer posturing, their is an emotional core to the collection, the pain of growing up, of leaving childhood behind, of childhood being replaced by adolescence only to find that will be taken away too. A very real pain there.

For a book so highly touted as a fresh new internet fluent gen-z voice, their is a surprisingly heavy amount of leet speak in. Levy is barely on the the zoomer side of the generational divide. (I am barely on the millennial side.) Many of these stories, as such, involve tween girls engaging with the internet sometime between 2004 and 2008. These are kids that will grow up to be zoomers but I don’t think we called them that then. I don’t think we used the term gen z then either. I don’t remember thinking of myself as a “millennial” until I was 20. Certainly not in high school. Gen Z and especially now Gen Alpha are defined generationally from a younger age than I remember being. That can’t be healthy. Especially with the nominative determinism that comes loaded with something like generation Z.

Boomer is used as a catch all insult for being old, out of touch, washed, set in outdated modes. But really, it’s not something you can age into. If you weren’t born a Boomer you will never be a Boomer. You will never experience that world historic moment of prosperity. The Boomer generation is still the generation the others are defined against. Millennials and zoomers are just variations of Gen X, crashing at the shores of the Baby Boomers.

Sometimes The Wain Comes Down So Hawrd You Forwget You’ve Ever Been Dwy

I was early for an appointment downtown yesterday so to kill time I stepped into Graham Crackers comic book store. I find comic book stores overwhelming. I feel out of place. I don’t know where to start. It’s like stepping into an ongoing conversation. All the lore, all the decades worth of development. I also have residual resentment of superheroes over the late 2010s domination of the market, the marvelheaded beef with Scorsese, the Russo brothers complete antipathy for art. But that, superhero movies as all consuming cultural black hole absorbing all capital in the movie industry, seems to be receding, and besides I never had any issue with comic books, or the arcane nerd hobbyists, as much as Marvel movies as hegemonic cultural force.

Batman has always been my guy, as far as I’ve had a superhero. The very rare times I was able to convince my parents to let me rent a superhero cartoon from Blockbuster were animated Batman movies. I loved the Dark Knight (2008). The gritifficiation of cultural products, dark, troubled, superheroes and all that, has probably gone too far but I’m still a sucker for the gritty version of the silliest possible characters.

That is to say, when I saw “Batman Elmer Fudd” I knew I found what I was looking for. It’s what it says on the tin. Elmer Fudd is hunting a disturbingly human Bugs “The Bunny”, Bugs sends him to hunt Batman, he and Batman team up to go hunt Bugs. Bat season/ rabbit season. Gritty lines are said in Elmer Fudd’s comic speech impediment (“you ate what you hunted… you didn’t find your pway you starved…so you wearned to find your pway… i weft the dirt when thewre was nothing elwse to kiwl” and “one day you wook up and you wealize the season is youwrs.”)

I ate a falafel sandwich at the Mediterranean restaurant in the back a jewelry shop then read the the book in Millennium park.

Veep Season 7

(I will say, quickly , that a line that caught in my throat was “being young is so cool. we are crazy and stupid and full of ideas. everyone who has ever been young knows this”. On the one had, that has started to feel like something that is now in the past for me, but even more so it feels like that my experience of that was truncated by illness and depression.)

During the deepest part of my depression I watched veep repeatedly. At the time there were only three or four seasons. Eventually, I watched it enough times that I decided, to get a little novelty from it, to watch the whole thing backwards, from the last episode to the first. For some reason, I recruited my dad into this and for some reason he agreed. It is one of those little things he has done for me throughout my life that show such unbounding love and care.

I decided to start re-watching Veep with the ascension of Kamala Harris, from start to finish (skipping season 1 because the torrent I found didn’t have it for some reason). By kismet, it lined up so that we watched the episode “Convention” the night of Kamala Harris’ actual DNC speech, back in August. We watched the first block of her speech then, when we couldn’t watch anymore watched Veep.

I had remembered the season 7, the last one, as being Bad. It wasn’t as sharp as the earlier seasons, and the plotting was a lot baggier, but it was still funny, and it was still better than pretty much most other shows. I also remember the season feeling cramped, perhaps even having a slight undercurrent of Russian pop ads, but I remembered that I watched last time hunched over my laptop in my parents room streaming it on a Russian streaming site.

There was a lot of hand wringing in the early years of the Trump administration about the fate of comedy under Trump. Had Trump made something like Veep irrelevant?Like Honor Levy’s stories about cancel culture in 2018, that all feels very far away, like a dream almost. 2019 felt so strong, so much, but the memory of that has been diluted by what has transpired in the five years since. The show was a baggier in the Trump era, but that was also because Armando Iannucci left, concluding his run with the same ending he gave “The Thick of It”, a congressional inquiry into ethics violations. Still, the show had very few outright whiffs. The only inarguable whiff was the shows handling of the #metoo movement. Like Trump, #metoo was something that felt seismic at the time. A lot of talented people tripped up trying to engage with it on an a creative level. Veep’s response was to create the #notme movement of women who denied they ever had a sexual, romantic, or even platonic relationship with Jonah Ryan. A C+ level joke at best, way beneath everything else on the show, maybe a funny or die sketch. Elevating Jonah Ryan to an anti-vax demagogue who weasels his way to the vice presidency is a great move, though.

Julia Louise Dreyfus does some remarkable eye acting.

B.O.A.T.

I’m still listening to “B.O.A.T” by Camilla Cabello on repeat. Their is something about the elegiac interpolation of “Hotel Room Service” by Pitbull that I find so so beautiful. It nearly brings me to tears every time. I never consciously listened to “Hotel Room Service” but I recognized the melody- the faint memory of a melody returning, only this time over new chords, slower minor chords, piano chords, on a synth designed to be heard over computer speakers, not over the sound system at a basketball game. Pitbull’s voice burbling in the background, the party coming faintly from another room, the memory of a party, the hope and change optimism or at least naivety of post-Obama 2009 bubbling up⁵.

I’m emo for all of these lost futures.

1. Anecdote on the subject of quotes from people re-contextualized by their later actions. wife murder Norman Mailer, on attending a dinner party with Vön Bulow:

Let's get out of here. I think this guy is innocent. I thought we were going to be having dinner with a man who actually tried to kill his wife. This is boring

Dershowitz, Alan (2013). Taking the Stand. New York: Crown Publishers. pp. 240–41, 473. ISBN 978-0-307-71927-0.

2. Said students in real life included Jim Cramer of “Mad Money” fame and Eliot Spitzer of sleeping with prostitutes fame.

3. I’m quickly approaching over my skis if I haven’t gotten there already. I don’t know that much about French New Wave. (Or movies in general— after all a post like this is a place where I am practicing if nothing else.) That being said. I highly doubt that Schroeder didn’t bring that sensibility into this movie, if not specific techniques then the sense of irony and absurdity.

4. "The Man Who 'Directed'". The New York Times. 1976-09-12. Retrieved 2021-05-06.

5. Same thing in “I Luv It”, which interpolates Gucci Mane’s “Lemonade”, also released in 2009. That same faint memory of what at least now feel like better times, pitch shifted. “I love it” repeated again and again, becoming less convincing every time. It sounds like something undergoing something, trying to talk themselves through it.

Mark Fisher on Pitbull:

a poorly photoshopped image or a drug that we’ve hammered so much we’ve become immune to its effects. It’s hard not to hear these records demands that we enjoy ourselves as thin attempts to distract from a depression that they can only mask, never dissipate.

The second half of “Dade County Dreaming” meanwhile sounds a lot like the mournfully suppressed piano from Massive Attack’s “Teardrop” (Mark Fisher on Massive Attack: “[Burial] delivers what Massive Attack promised but never achieved”). What begins as a straight forward celebration of Miami club hopping dissipates into JT and Yung Miami exhorting

Real city girl shit, get it poppin' (pop that pussy)
Got bitches showin' ass on Collins (show that ass)
Got bitches shakin' ass on Collins (show that)

over barely there chords and empty space. As youtube user mo7beats976 says

The transition from trap to acoustic piano describes alot of what's going on in cc's mind , she is pretending to be the baddie, pretending she's having fun just to numb the pain she feels , but when the party is over she came back to her grief and pain still trying to numb it but failed .