Archives for April 2007

This is part of a piece I wrote for Crisis immediately after the Columbine massacre:

It is not enough simply to say that violent movies drive young men mad, since people have been killing other people on the silver screen ever since The Great Train Robbery. Nor is today’s violence uniquely explicit. When Lee Marvin hurls scalding coffee at Gloria Grahame in The Big Heat–and when, later on, you see her hideously scarred face–the effect is as shocking as anything in Pulp Fiction. Yet no one has suggested that such films permanently warped the psyches of Eisenhower-era children. Clearly, there is something fundamentally different about the way violence is presented in contemporary movies. But what?
As it happens, Marvin himself offered a partial but nonetheless compelling answer to that question. “When I play these roles of vicious men,” he told an interviewer, “I do things you shouldn’t do and I make you see that you shouldn’t do them.” Today, any actor or director who dared say such a thing would sound hopelessly naive, but Marvin had earned the right to speak plainly: an ex-Marine who was grievously wounded in combat in World War II, he knew that violence has consequences. Not so his jejune successors, in whose morally weightless films violence is an unreal presence and acts of butchery are no more consequential than Wile E. Coyote’s eternal pursuit of the Road-Runner. Automatic weapons are emptied blithely, BMWs driven off cliffs, handsomely coiffed heads blown to pieces–but there are no funerals, no weeping widows, no innocent bystanders imprisoned forever in wheelchairs because they happened to be standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I still feel that way.

Pat Buckley died on Sunday. She is said to have been one of the models for the “social X-rays” portrayed in Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities. I knew her slightly, but not as a New York socialite–I don’t move in those circles. Our acquaintance was of a different kind: Pat was the wife of William F. Buckley, Jr., whose National Review-related dinner parties she superintended. We met twenty years ago at one of those gatherings, an experience I wrote about for National Review Online‘s condolence page, which also contains links to various other tributes posted on NRO:

The first time I sat at Pat Buckley’s dinner table, I found her…well, more than a little bit intimidating. I was fresh out of the Midwest and had never met anyone quite like her. She seemed to have stepped out of a Louis Auchincloss novel. No sooner were we introduced than I started wondering whether my socks matched–but then she went out of her way to make me feel at ease, and before I knew it, I’d lost my heart. Was the elaborate hauteur of her public manner a game she played to amuse herself and her loved ones? I’ve no idea–I didn’t know her well enough–but to me she was never anything but charming, caring, and wonderfully kind, and I adored her. I can no more imagine a world without Pat than I can imagine a world without champagne.

Her New York Times obituary is here.

“Those I’m not fond of have not, as a rule, considered ‘warmth’ my distinguishing quality. I never could serve myself up in the same sauce to friends & to acquaintances.”
Edith Wharton, letter to Mary Berenson (Oct. 17, 1920)

David Lindsay-Abaire’s Rabbit Hole won the Pulitzer Prize for drama yesterday. Here’s part of what I wrote about it in The Wall Street Journal last year:
“It’s a family drama with punch lines, a genre that at best runs to glibness, and Mr. Lindsay-Abaire sweetens the loaf of his characters’ suffering with a double spoonful of sugar. Not that their plight is less than deadly serious. Becca and Howie are a nice suburban couple whose son was killed when he darted in front of a car. Izzy, Becca’s kid sister, is a spunky ne’er-do-well who suddenly finds herself pregnant without benefit of clergy. Nat, their mother, is no stranger to sorrow: her third child, a heroin addict, hung himself. All this might have been the stuff of domestic tragedy, but Rabbit Hole fails to scratch the surface of Becca’s decorous middle-class grief. Instead, we spend too much time chortling at Izzy’s haplessness and Nat’s tactlessness–and we’re never surprised by anything anyone says or does.
“Such are the comfortable, comforting ways of post-Oprah TV drama, and the familiar presence of Cynthia Nixon and Tyne Daly in the cast serves still further to make Rabbit Hole the kind of show you can see any day of the week in your very own living room….”
Go figure.
UPDATE: For the scoop on how Rabbit Hole won the Pulitzer, go here.

“The use of the guillotine becomes an addiction.”
C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism