..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

April 25, 2003

It’s happening again, like it always does. For all the millions of people living in this vibrant city, New York seems a ghost town. No matter that spring has nearly sprung, hormones run high and the indignities of winter are fading; when there’s a war on, people get weird. They ride the subway to work, but they won’t look you in the eye. They go out less. Whoever was taking life hard before takes it harder; sad men carrying signs that say, “I’m a marine: please help me get something to eat” play to the numbed sympathies of an already-disdainful city; veteran junkies nod off in laundromats between cycles, themselves barely living reminders of past wars. And, however entertaining the industry’s offerings, the people selling them get scared, and decisive opinions get scarce.

When the leading hard body in pop entertainment goes soft on the offensive quotient of her product, you know we’re doomed to the platitudes of mediocrity. First, Madonna went Kaballah-mom, toning down her buff biceps and tough truck driver attitude by offering softer videos featuring happy, sexy cowboys in chaps. Now, with a missing video for the song “American Life,” which showed a hand grenade landing on a George W. Bush-a-like’s ballistics -- an image that she rightfully felt could run the “risk [of] offending anyone who might misinterpret the meaning of this video.” A smallish bomb lobbed into anyone’s lap could certainly be considered incendiary, but Madonna has never been one to worry about offending people, particularly with her adaptive version of an English accent. Who knows if the offending material made any particularly intelligent statement about war, or peace? She put her yoga ass on a fence, and sat there.

We have lost the shizit of our faculties. Being outspoken has earned celebrities a sometimes hard-earned spot on the poo-poo deck of current partisan pride: witness Michael Moore’s slightly moldy Oscar repast, whatever you thought of it. Our ability to tell the difference between making an offensive socio-political point – or any point at all for that matter – has suffered, and we are jumping off into an abyss where the First Amendment swan song sings.

Well, most of us anyway: there are those actors who will still show up and say what they think about things. Philip Seymour Hoffman is always good at distinguishing the subtext of his plots from what they appear to be. Last night at the Guggenheim Museum’s “GuggenheimFILM” series screening of his forthcoming Richard Kwietniowski-directed film, Owning Mahowny Hoffman sat in the chilly sub-basement level Peter B. Lewis Theatre (which is not entirely unlike a bomb shelter, I noted with the impossibly blithe irony I suspect only post-9/11 New Yorkers and denizens of countries in conflict have), fingering a faded baseball cap. He talked about his character, Dan Mahowny, modeled on a fellow who at 26 pulled off the largest bank fraud in Canadian history. “It’s not a film about having a gambling problem – the guy has a PROBLEM, a problem that a lot of us have,” Hoffman said of the emotionally frozen and largely uncommunicative “Mahowny”, who at the time of his conviction was nicknamed the “Iceman”. “How do we get back to our life? How do we get through the unbearable sameness, sitting up late night watching TV?” he wondered, especially now that reality TV-style war coverage pervades what was once the after midnight boobs n’ himbos programming lovingly provided by FOX.

The time is now: get off that fence and watch something thoughtful, whether you’d rather lie down naked in the snow in an earnest if humorous attempt at a statement, like some wacky frostbitten peace-seekers in New York City (whose balls didn’t need a grenade to desensitize) did a month ago -- or wear your grandfather’s service flag as a dress. Hurry, before the latest Hitlerathon airs during May sweeps – or doesn’t. Called a “cautionary tale” by producers, a few of whom compared the dictator to President Bush, Gary Levin’s Hitler: Origins of Evil stars Robert Carlyle as the young führer. Originally written from Hitler’s perspective, protests made CBS network heads retract like mad and soil their marketing shorts. Les Moonves, never a shy guy, scoffed at critics back in January, "If you want to play it safe and put on milquetoast, then you get criticized...There are times as a broadcaster you do take chances," he said. The sympathetic Hitler move is a chance indeed, but let’s just see if this thing airs after all.

Hitler or no Hitler, this is the stuff of entertainment media flip-flopping. If you live in a culturally remote place where there’s no independent cinema, perhaps there’s only one solution to the embedding of retraction and silence – the true crimes here -- in the media. See Bringin’ Down the House for an apolitical laugh, curl up with some bad gin, and read Kafka until you’re so depressed you realize why the media bigs’ ability to pick a spot and stand on it has shriveled. As far as for-air material is concerned, Madonna can keep her grenade. But bring back the late night boobs.

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