Professional Left Podcast Episode 1011: Not Sending Their Best

“One must imagine Sisyphus happy."  -- Albert Camus.

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 1010: WHCD WTF?

“What is dead may never die."  -- the Drowned God.

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 1009: The Wall

“What benefits the enemy, harms you; and what benefits you, harm the enemy."  -- Niccolo Machiavelli 

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 1007: Happy Birthday Blue Gal Retrospective, Part I

“The chief weapon of sea pirates, however, was their capacity to astonish. Nobody else could believe, until it was too late, how heartless and greedy they were."  -- Kurt Vonnegut

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 1006: Pump Up The Venom

“You ever get the feeling that everything in America is completely fucked up? You know that feeling that the whole country is like, one inch away from saying, 'That's it! Forget it!'."  -- Mark Hunter, Pump Up The Volume 

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MAGA is a Genre

You want to know why all the savvy people -- every one of them -- were baffled and confused by the rise of Trump and MAGA, and still are?

Well, because I like you, I'll tell you.  And I do this in the full knowledge that none of this secret intel will leak to the savvy people because the savvy people do not read Liberal blogs.

Ready?

Ok...but first we have do a thing.  What the kids call a side-quest.  

You love Westerns, right?  Anyway, I do, so there we are. 

So, Westerns.  What defines a Western?  Well, even if you're not a professional deconstructor of films, if you watch enough Westerns from every era, you can see clear themes and commonalities, some of which remain fairly constant across time, and others which change and morph into something else entirely.  

For example, in early Westerns, the heroes and villains were mostly two-dimensional.  Often literally White Hats versus Black Hats.  Or White Hats versus The Savages.  But over time this changes.  For example, John Ford's landmark 1939 Western Stagecoach (The Canterbury Tales with Stetsons) is all about inverting social hierarchies, with John Wayne's Ringo Kid and Claire Trevor's Dallas characters -- the Outlaw and the Prostitute -- emerging as the heroes of the tale.

30 years later, in Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, the recognizable tropes of the Western were mostly still there -- heroes, villains, hats, horses, guns, saloons, etc. -- but their meanings had all been scrambled.    The villain was no longer the Savages or the Black Hats, it was the crippled railroad baron.  The Black Hat gunslinger was now reduced to the status of a hireling: the henchman of capitalism.  

To make the point absolutely clear -- that this was about the closing of the frontier and the end of the traditional Western -- Leone hired iconic American good guy actor Henry Fonda to play Frank, the murderous, amoral tool of capitalism.   

And sticking with Once Upon a Time in the West for just one more minute, the opening scene does what all great opening scenes do: it sets the tone for the rest of the tale.   In Fred Zinnemann's High Noon, the entire story is about a train that's due to arrive at...when?  When?  Don't go simple on me now, it's the title of the movie.  Four bad men -- Frank Miller and his backup singers -- are due to arrive in town at noon and they are out for revenge.  Everyone in town knows it,  and as the fateful hour approaches (the director keeps the audience apprised of the time by placing clocks in nearly every scene) the townspeople slowly desert their sheriff, leaving him to face the four bad men all alone.

Then, at last, the clocks strike twelve.

Once Upon a Time in the West completely inverts this.  Instead of an arrival by train being the event towards which all plot lines are moving, Once Upon a Time in the West starts with an arrival by train.

Instead of four bad men getting off the train and marching into town to hunt down the hero, three bad men are waiting at the train for the hero to arrive.  

To drive home the point that this movie was to be the end of the Western, Leone originally wanted the stars of his Dollars Trilogy --  Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach -- to play the three gunmen.  But they declined, so Leone cast Woody Strode, Jack Elam, and Al Mulock instead.

At this point I was going to go on a long thing about how awesome The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is, but this isn't a movie review post, and if you didn't already know how awesome The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is, well, I just feel sorry for you is all.

Obviously Once Upon a Time in the West wasn't the end of the Western genre, because the archetypes the genre developed are too sturdy and too firmly rooted in human nature to disappear.  And so, every year or two, someone comes along to mix and match the same elements in different way.  In Silverado you find a classic Western done very well, even ending in a gunfight in the street with the church behind our hero.  In Lonesome Dove, a sweeping epic.   In Quigley Down Under you get the Western in Australia.  In No Country For Old Men, you get the Western in the West Texas of 1980 because the Coen brothers love Westerns.

Is Unforgiven a Western?  Obviously.  But is Firefly a Western?  You bet.  It's whatchacall a "neo-Western", but c'mon.  

Is Justified?  Damn right it is.  

So what is all of this to do with Republicans and their MAGA headgear?

Well, since you asked, getting back to explaining why all the savvy people -- every one of them -- were baffled and confused by the rise of Trump and MAGA, and still are... don't go simple on me now, because it's the title of this post.   

MAGA is not a set of policy beliefs or checked set of ideological boxes.  

MAGA is a genre.  MAGA is a vibe.  

Which is why, when the savvy crowd sees Republican voters appear to casually and completely reverse what they swore were their bedrock beliefs (and then do it again... and again) the savvy crowd are flummoxed.   They have no theory to fit the facts, because they had always taken as gospel that what Republican mopes say they believe on any given day was something akin the hammer throw at a track and field event: momentum is built up, then released, and the hammer follows a straight tangent line from the point of that release.

But Republican voters do not behave that way.  At all.  Because the policies they'll swear by on a Monday because Sean Hannity said so... and then drop like first period French on Wednesday because Sean Hannity said so...are just props.   Just plot devices.  

This is why MAGA mopes not only don't give a shit that Trump lies constantly, they're thrilled by it.  Since, in the MAGA genre, everything is treated as a plot device that either advances the MAGA narrative, or threatens it, who cares whether an individual story element is true or not?

Now for a quick bit of genre hopping.  

You love Film Noir, right?  Well anyway, I do, so here we are again. When Howard Hawks was filming The Big Sleep, his writing team couldn't figure out who killed the chauffeur, Owen Taylor.  So Hawks fired off a telegram to the author of the original novel, Raymond Chandler, asking him to clarify.  Here was their exchange.

Hawks:  "Who killed the chauffeur?" 

Chandler: "Dammit, I don't know either."

Even though the murder of Owen Taylor is central to the plot, Chandler didn't know or care who killed him because that wasn't the point of the novel. The Big Sleep is about atmosphere and characterization, not nailing down every detail, and since it didn't really matter who offed the chauffeur, Chandler didn't bother with it.  

From the MAGA perspective, asking whether or not this is true...

... or this is true ...

Trump repeats false claims that children are undergoing transgender surgery during the school day

Trump’s remarks escalated conservatives’ claims that educators are “grooming” or “indoctrinating” children to become gay or transgender.

...or this is true ...

Trump:  “It’s a tremendous difference... We’re going to get the drug prices down… Not 30 or 40 percent… No, we’re going to get them down 1,000 percent, 600 percent, 500 percent, 1,500 percent — numbers that are not even thought to be achievable… and it will be, you know, serious. It will be numbers that nobody can even imagine.”

... or the 10,000 other lies Trump has spewed are true is irrelevant.

As irrelevant as who killed Owen Taylor.   

Because all those lies are just plot devices designed to advance the MAGA narrative.  

Ergo understanding which way the MAGA mob will jump next is not (and never had been) a matter of sifting through the mountain of self-contradicting bullshit that constitutes MAGA dogma.   This is what the savvy crowd always gets wrong.  

Understanding the wild oscillations of MAGA dogma only makes sense when you understand the Republicans mythos being served by those lies: a mythos that long pre-dates the rise of Trump. 

And it's really pretty simple.  As simple as the earliest Westerns.  Their world is a world of Black Hats and White Hats.  They -- white Conservative Christian nationalists and their fellow travelers-- are the White Hats and pretty much everyone else are the Black Hats.  

They're the real Americas.  They are "righteous" in the original meaning of that word: just, upright, and in accord with divine law.  And since, to MAGA, this is all self-evident -- that they and only they are properly aligned with God's moral order -- then it follows that whatever they feel to be true and good must be true and good.

Instead of "Cogito ergo sum" -- "I think therefore I am" -- the MAGA way is (pardon the rough Latin translation) "Sentio ergo est" -- "I feel therefore it is".  

It's a pre-Enlightenment way of thinking, where faith doesn't merely beat facts all day long, but facts that conflict with the One True Faith are the darkest heresy.  Something to be rooted out and destroyed. 

For decades Conservative media and Republican politicians have been making fortunes and winning elections reinforcing this mythos by feeding the base an endless supply of Black Hats to hate and vote against.  Liberals.  Mouthy women.  Brown people who don't know their place.  Urbanites.  The gays.  Immigrants.  Unions.  Trans people.  Pointy-headed intellectuals.  Government employees.  Hollywood.  "Rootless cosmopolitans".  Socialists.  You know the drill.  

And once the base came to accept as axiomatic that is was perpetually under siege by the Black Hats, everything became existential crisis.  Deficits were an existential crisis...then they weren't...then they were again...then they weren't again.  Every Democratic president was somehow illegitimate and also  simultaneously a feckless weakling, a jackbooted tyrant and the Worst President in History.  

Everything was a battle in a forever war for the survival of real America where the salvation of the nation was always hanging by a thread.   And gradually, the fascist "blood and soil" language that has been thrown around on Hate Radio since the 1980s -- constantly framing the press as the "enemy of the people", slandering any opposition as deranged parasites, speaking of the nation as something that needed cleansing and purification -- filtered up from the base, where it was the common tongue, and into Conservative teevee, Republican political ads, Conservative think tanks and publications and Republican politicians.  

And in that environment, what does it matter if what the Dear Leader says is true or not?  What does it matter if what fascist state media says is true or not?  Who cares if slander about eating the pets is racist bullshit?  Who cares if trans people are no threat to anyone?  The only thing that matters is the utility of the words coming out of the Dear Leader's mouth. And since us Black Hats are so dangerous -- "the face of pure evil" (Liz Cheney, 2019) -- any and all weapons and tactics are permitted.  

Which is why we can carefully pack up all our facts -- our mountains of irrefutable facts stretching back decades --  and lay them aside for another day, or for when we talk among ourselves.  Conservative media and Republican politicians worked very hard for many decades engineering a voting base for whom facts are irrelevant and anyone who tells them anything they don't want to hear is dismissed as treason and Fake News.  This how Conservative media and Republican politicians paved a road for Donald Trump to win the White House.

Did lies about Obama's birth certificate feel true to the racist Republican base?  Did lies about Somalis eating people's pets feel true to those same bigots 15 years later?  Did lies about cafeteria castrations feed the MAGA moron's hysteria about trans people?  Does the torrent of lies that Trump vomits out on a daily basis tickle MAGA's ganglia and reinforce their myths about apocalyptic struggle, heroism and destiny?  

Yes.  And in the end, to them, that's all that matters.  

Because MAGA is not a set of policy beliefs or checked set of ideological boxes.  

MAGA is a vibe.  MAGA is a genre in which it's just Black Hats versus White Hats, all day long.

And all those lies are the necessary story elements that move the plot along.  

I Am The Liberal Media

Professional Left Podcast Episode 931: Democrats Must Heed The Wisdom Of...Patrick Swayze

"You're too stupid to have a good time." -- Dalton, Road House

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The Professional Left is brought to you by our wholly imaginary "sponsors" and real listeners like you!

Once Upon a Time in American Cinema...

...there were countless, low-budget films about oppressed minorities kicking the shit out of corrupt cops.

It was part of the Blacksploitation genre and it was glorious.  

And I am moved to wonder, as the Trump administration turns masked goons loose in American cities to go full Gestapo, if we might not also be looking forward to a renaissance of indie films about urban heroes, spin-kicking and cock-punching ICE thugs until, at last, they face off against a cowering, sniveling Mr. Big Forehead, who will be played by Pauly Shore 

Fun Fact:  Believe it or not, before they ran out, one could buy a (reproduction) Superfly movie poster at Bed, Bath & Beyond.  Because capitalism.  

I Am The Liberal Media

Professional Left Podcast Episode 908: The Big Clock Is Ticking

"I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man" -- Thomas Jefferson.

 

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The Professional Left is brought to you by our wholly imaginary "sponsors" and real listeners like you!

The Accidental Prophecy of March 15, 1967

"People I've never even heard of are placed in key positions, new faces everywhere. Even the date of my hearing postponed. I tell you, if Flint is right...and we've been infiltrated, we're in real danger." -- Lloyd C. Cramden, In Like Flint, March 15, 1967

Don't wave the flag in the bathroom. 

Just come to the point.

Ethical Movie Titles

Call Things By Their Right Names

Relic of a Bygone Era

Today, the sentiment expressed in the promotional text on this poster for Warner Brothers' `1944 film, "Passage to Marseilles" is almost literally unimaginable: a mainstream movie company marketing its film to the general public on the explicit claim that it is every freedom-loving person's duty to fight fascism whatever the cost.

That was 1944, when patriotic Americans were fighting fascists, not 2025, as patriotic Americans watch in horror as tens of millions of our fellow citizens are either proudly showing themselves to be fascists, or cravenly capitulating to them.

Anyway, the text is a little hard to read, so here you go:

"PASSAGE TO MARSEILLE", starring Humphrey Bogart, is the story of an outcast ... forgotten by, but not forgetting, the land that banished him ... and of how jungle and shackles and mutiny could not stop him from going home.

Entertainment? Certainly! For entertainment is our business - a business in which Warner Brothers is a widely-recognized leader.

And that leadership is based on this Company's ability to make one picture satisfy two values!

One value is entertainment.

The other is best expressed in a long-standing Warner Bros. policy ... of producing films that will help to champion the basic freedoms of democracy.

You've seen that policy applied in "This Is The Army", "Air Force", "Princess O'Rourke", "Destination Tokyo", "Watch On The Rhine", "In Our Time", and many other Warner Bros. pictures

Be sure to see it again in "PASSAGE TO MARSEILLE", "THE ADVENTURES OF MARK TWAIN" "UNCERTAIN GLORY" and other Warner pictures soon to come! Then you'll know why the New York Times referred to this Company's "enviable record for combining good citizenship with good picture-making".

WARNER BROS.

JACK L WARNER, Executive Producer

A media corporation Selling a movie based on the fundamental virtue of killing Nazis... and winning praise from The New York Times for it's good citizenship?

What a concept!

Especially considering that, 81 years later,  media giant Netflix -- which streams some of Warner Brothers most popular movies -- is trying to sell the public on the virtue of not taking sides against fascists because, y'know, Both Sides.  

Both Sides Don't

Professional Left Podcast Episode 877: Resistance Theater! (1940's Movies And This Week's News)

“I don't mind a reasonable amount of trouble” -- Sam Spade, The Maltese Falcon.

Links:  

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Felt Wrong as I Was Making It

 Made it anyway.

Tip Jar

Hari Seldon After Binging Season One of Foundation

#SaveThePlan

Woke Up This Morning, Jumped On Shai-Hulud...

Mama always said you were the Chosen Dude.

She said, "You're one in trillion,

It's our house blood line."

Reborn under the small moon

With those Fremen blue/blue eyes...

The Spice Must Flow

"Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" is Quentin Tarantino's Rebuttal to "Sunset Boulevard"

"There's nothing tragic about being fifty. Not unless you're trying to be twenty-five." 

-- Joe Gillis, Sunset Boulevard

Because most of you are hardcore nerds, you are no doubt aware that Howard Hawks’s “Rio Bravo” (which I love) was made as a rebuke to Fred Zinnemann’s "High Noon" (which I also love).

Yes, you can love both, because they're movies.

Hawks believed that no "good sheriff was going to go running around town like a chicken with his head off asking for help” and his "Rio Bravo"  leading man, John Wayne, reportedly thought it was "the most un-American thing I’ve seen in my whole life."

So, y'know, fuck John Wayne.

But that's the thing about movies. Like any other art form, the people who create movies come out of a peer group which is in constant conversation with itself, even when some of those peers are long dead. They borrow each other's structure and pacing.  They root through each other's tool kits looking for new ways to solve old problems.  Because "Notorious" is my wife's favorite movie, her favorite example of this is "Mission Impossible II" lifting much of its plot directly from that Hitchcock classic. 

After "Star Wars" hit big, every screenwriting class in America made it virtually obligatory to build your script as a variation of "the hero's journey".

Without American westerns, there might never have been an Akira Kurosawa.  And without Kurosawa reinventing the American western as samurai high art, there would be no Tarantino as we know him.

And what I am bringing to you today is not the case that Tarantino has used the outline of  "Sunset Boulevard" to tell his own Hollywood fairy tale, but rather he has masterfully deconstructed "Sunset Boulevard" and remixed its constituent elements to tell the opposite story.

From now on there will be spoilers, so proceed at your own risk.

"Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" is shot like a Western.  Within a Western.  Within a Western.  It is a story of New Hollywood -- young and beautiful and fashion-forward and aware of the counter culture humming all around -- emerging from the chrysalis of an older Hollywood.  And that older Hollywood is, in turn, layered on top of a dead Hollywood, bones drying in the desert, inhabited now by feral children and a blind old man living in a hovel. 

"The whole place seemed to have been stricken with a kind of creeping paralysis—out of beat with the rest of the world, crumbling apart in slow motion."

-- Joe Gillis, Sunset Boulevard

In the New Hollywood, everyone drives far too fast, casually zipping in and out of traffic and up and down dark, hairpin mountain roads.  The imminence of a fatal crash hovers over the story at all times, and yet the only actual vehicular damage is done when stuntman Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) tosses Bruce Lee (Mike Moh) into the side of a car.

Nice bit of misdirection and subliminal ominousness-building, Mr. Tarantino :-)

You'll find a million words about Tarantino's mastery of his craft elsewhere and I'd probably agree with most of it.  I'm a fan, and here his recreation of 1969 Hollywood is lush and thick with gorgeous detail.  Every button and belt is in place.  Every bus bench and license plate on every cross-street we breeze past is fully realized, with a depth of field that extends as far as the eye can see.  The illusion is complete.

And within that completely realized world, like a compounding chemist, Tarantino takes the elements of the real-life Hollywood nightmare of the Manson family murders and the celluloid Hollywood nightmare of "Sunset Boulevard" and recasts them as dream of Hollywood with a happy ending.

(I will pause now while you go re-watch Billy Wilder's 1950 classic so I don't have to begin every damn sentence with "And just like in 'Sunset Boulevard'...".)

We find fading Hollywood star Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) rattling around his nearly-empty, too-big, house that was probably perfect for entertaining back in the day, but that day has passed.

You know, this floor used to be wood but I had it changed.  Valentino said there is nothing like tiles for a tango.  

-- Norma Desmond, Sunset Boulevard

All around him the memorabilia and film clips of his glory days are turning into the memento mori of his dying career.   He's not really "old" by any conventional standard, but almost before he realized it  his industry had passed him by.

Of course, unlike Norma Desmond, Rick is neither independently wealthy nor is he entirely cut off from reality;  he still talks to people out in the world and still finds work playing the heavy on other people's programs.  But they are both on the same trajectory of failure, Desmond is just further along.  Where Rick is "going, going...", she is "gone".  And they both dream of a return to their former glory.

Rick has a sort-of live-in sidekick, the aforementioned Cliff Booth, who is also in the business and is also watching his career guttering out.  He's charming and smart and poor (he lives behind a drive-in theater, next to an oil derrick, in what appears to be a smaller, shittier version Bud's trailer from Kill Bill 2.) They get along and he bucks up the star when he's feeling old and blue.  He enjoys the perks of being a celebrity gofer, but at the end of the day he is an employee who is (often literally) along for the ride.

There is also a fresh-faced young woman named Trudi (Julia Butters) who is not bitter or cynical about the movie business at all.  Instead she is an enthusiastic pragmatist who takes her profession seriously and loves doing what she does.

Above all,  "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" is about the loving little details of the machinery of the Hollywood Dream Factory, and all the people who labor long hours behind the scenes to keep the factory running smoothly.  The movie is shot on-location, and on sets, and on Hollywood sets which are shown to be Hollywood sets, both active and abandoned.

It's a story where the point-of-view changes, but not promiscuously.  We see the world through the eyes of our leading men -- Rick and Cliff -- and when we need a little more information than their perspectives can provide, a more omniscient voice-over narrator pipes up to get us where we need to go.  In "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" it's stunt man Randy.  In "Sunset Boulevard", it's dead man Joe.

Finally, at the beginning we're prompted by our foreknowledge to believe we know that story will end violently.  And it does, with a dead body floating in the swimming pool of our fading Hollywood star.

This is the DNA which both movies definitely share.

But "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" is a dream and "Sunset Boulevard" is a nightmare because Tarantino and Wilder each choose a different villain around which to build their story.  And that choice makes all the difference.

For Wilder, the villain is Hollywood itself.  The relentless demands of the Dream Factory can only be satiated by first creating movie stars and then, inevitably, destroying them and casting them aside to fade away in a cage of their own narcissism and despair. 

"She was still sleepwalking along the giddy heights of a lost career."

-- Joe Gillis, Sunset Boulevard

For Wilder, the threat comes from Inside.

But for Tarantino, the threat comes from Outside.

Despite his reduced-and-still-falling circumstances, Rick continues to hang onto his expensive house based on his faith in a scrap of Old Hollywood wisdom passed down to him by “Eddie O’Brien" that the only real citizens of their community are property owners, and as member in good standing of that community, opportunities will still come Rick's way.  And he's not wrong.  Those opportunities may come in the form of reluctantly flying to Italy to star in the new genre of "spaghetti westerns", or a happenstantial meeting with a Famous Director next door, but they do come.

Tarantino's Hollywood power-elite are not old men in suits.  They're young and attractive and effervescent and kind.  They meet each other with open arms.  They remember and respect each other's work.  The yeomen of their realm are hardworking artisans.  There's ample parking, restaurants enough to meet every appetite and budget, and everyone is getting laid.

The monsters are drifters from Outside, blown into town by the wind.  They squat in the desert, in the ruins of dead Hollywood.  They live as a swarm of parasites on the trash of citizens: indolent locusts full of dumb ideas they believe are profound.  They are set into homicidal motion by the word of a grimy lunatic.  They're so inept they raid the wrong house, and although they are armed and on a mission, are undone by an unarmed, stoned stunt man and his dog.

Wilder's Hollywood is Cronus: a cruel god that devours its own children.

Tarantino's Hollywood is a hazy version of Plato's Just Society: Governed by a class of philosopher kings, defended by capable soldiers, and provisioned with the goods and services the city needs by a caste of skilled artisans.  And in Tarantino's Just Society, the forces of chaos and madness do not carry the day.  The fading Hollywood star doesn't self-destruct, off the sidekick and feed the ravenous Hollywood press one more lurid scandal.

Instead, as in any good Saturday morning episode of Bounty Law, the townsfolk are saved from the outlaws who threatened them by heroic, quick-thinking men of action.

The sidekick and the fading Hollywood star team up Batman-and-Robin-style (see the end-credits) to take down the bad guys.

The damsel is saved.

Order is restored.

Community values are reaffirmed.

The stuntman takes the beating.  And the movie star (sort of) gets the girl.

Behold, a Tip Jar!

Ali Makes His Movie Debut

An obscure bit of Ali's past before he was Ali (that will not let me turn autoplay off, hence the link instead of and embedded video.)

RIP champ.

The Reviews That Time Forgot: The Green Berets (1968)

In which John Wayne wins Disney Vietnam and walks heroically into a sunset on the wrong horizon.

From the New York Times:

The Green Berets (1968)

Screen: 'Green Berets' as Viewed by John Wayne:War Movie Arrives at the Warner Theater

By RENATA ADLER

Published: June 20, 1968

"THE GREEN BERETS" is a film so unspeakable, so stupid, so rotten and false in every detail that it passes through being fun, through being funny, through being camp, through everything and becomes an invitation to grieve, not for our soldiers or for Vietnam (the film could not be more false or do a greater disservice to either of them) but for what has happened to the fantasy-making apparatus in this country. Simplicities of the right, simplicities of the left, but this one is beyond the possible. It is vile and insane. On top of that, it is dull.

The film, directed by John Wayne and nominally based on a novel by Robin Moore, has no hero. It is vaguely about some Green Berets, led by John Wayne, trying to persuade Wayne's idea of a liberal journalist (David Janssen) that this war is a fine thing for Vietnam and for America. The movie has human props taken from every war film ever made: a parachute jump; an idea of Vietcong soldiers, in luxury, uniform, champagne and caviar, apparently based on the German high command; a little Asian orphan named Hamchunk, pronounced Hamchuck but more like Upchuck than anything; battle scenes somewhere between "The Red Badge of Courage" and "The Dirty Dozen"; a pathetically dying dog.

There is inadvertent humor: "He's dying," a Negro medic says, thoughtfully spooning Jim Beam bourbon down the throat of an elderly Oriental. "Poor old thing can't even keep his rice down any more." What is clearly an Indian extra in a loincloth somehow straggles in among the montagnards. A Vietcong general is dragged from a bed of sin (which, through an indescribable inanity of the plot, the Green Berets have contrived for him) with his trousers on. He is subsequently drugged and yanked off into the sky on a string dangling from a helicopter. A Green Beret points out to the journalist some American-made punji sticks (the movie is obsessed with punji sticks): "Yup," the Green Beret says, "it's a little trick we learned from Charlie. But we don't dip them in the same stuff he does."

What the movie is into is another thing entirely. What is sick, what is an outrage and a travesty is that while it is meant to be an argument against war opposition—while it keeps reiterating its own line at every step, much as soap operas keep recapitulating their plots—it seems so totally impervious to any of the questions that it raises. It is so full of its own caricature of patriotism that it cannot even find the right things to falsify. No acting, no direction, no writing, no authenticity, of course. But it is worse. It is completely incommunicado, out of touch. It trips something that would outrage any human sensibility, like mines, at every step and staggers on.

The first Green Beret comes on speaking German, to show his versatility in languages. When the VC have just been sprayed with flames, a Green Beret is asked about his apparent affinity for this kind of thing. "When I was a kid," he says modestly, "my dad gave me a chemistry set. And it got bigger than both of us." When the VC, nonetheless, win the Special Forces camp in hand-to-hand combat, a soldier calls in air support. "It'll only take a minute," he says, like a dentist, as the VC are mowed down from the air. The journalist, "the former skeptic about the war," the press kit synopsis chooses to say at this point, "leaves to write about the heroic exploits of the American and South Vietnamese forces."

The point is that Wayne is using spoken German, lunatic chemistry sets, machine killing of men who have won fairly hand-to-hand, without apparently noticing that this is not exactly the stuff of which heroic fantasies are made. This is crazy. If the left-wing extremist's nightmare of what we already are has become the right-wing extremist's ideal of what we ought to be we are in steeper trouble than anyone could have imagined.

Before You Head Out To See "Her"

Take a few minutes to re-read Lester del Rey's 1938 SF classic, "Helen O'Loy":

Two young men, a mechanic, Dave, and a medical student, Phil, collaborate on modifying a household robot, originally meant only to cook and clean. They are more successful than they intended; despite the robot's household programming, it develops emotions. The robot, named "Helen O’Loy", falls in love with Dave. Dave initially avoids her and rejects her advances, but after some time he marries her and they live together on his farm...

Or spin up the ancient VCR and watch "The Lonely":

Or look up the true story of ELIZA:

ELIZA is a computer program and an early example of primitive natural language processing. ELIZA operated by processing users' responses to scripts, the most famous of which was DOCTOR, a simulation of a Rogerian psychotherapist. Using almost no information about human thought or emotion, DOCTOR sometimes provided a startlingly human-like interaction. ELIZA was written at MIT by Joseph Weizenbaum between 1964 and 1966.

When the "patient" exceeded the very small knowledge base, DOCTOR might provide a generic response, for example, responding to "My head hurts" with "Why do you say your head hurts?" A possible response to "My mother hates me" would be "Who else in your family hates you?" ELIZA was implemented using simple pattern matching techniques, but was taken seriously by several of its users, even after Weizenbaum explained to them how it worked.

The question of what it means to be sentient and who does (and does not) count as "human" has always been central to SF. And once you add in loneliness and the human need for love, complicated questions about the true nature of an artifact we ourselves created -- Is it merely mimicking sentient behavior or does it somehow really understands me?  Does it really really care about me? -- immediately arise.

Her might very well be a fine new movie.

It is helpful to remember that it is also a very old story.