The Zeitgeist

 

The Season two cast of True Detective, Colin Farrell, Rachel McAdams, Taylor Kitsch and Vince Vaughn. 

Season one starred Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey

Un-True Detective:

HBO Noir Series Misses the Mark

Although the second season of True Detective on HBO has a lot of the same names attached to it behind the camera, the new iteration of the title which just premiered bears scant resemblance to last year’s bravura bayou noir mini-series.

Season one was strikingly original – set in hazy, humid and swampy Louisiana – a venue unfamiliar to most Americans, it starred a Southern tag team so captivating that even if Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson had Confederate Stars and Bars license plates viewers still would have loved them. McConnaughey and Harrelson played incredibly intense, driven and seriously flawed police detectives and human beings. Awash in cheap bourbon, cheap women and even cheaper beer, their reprehensible self-destructive behavior was both pitiful and pitiable. And there is difference number one between season one and season two. That McConaughey and Harrelson were on a crusade to find the creepy ritual killers of young girls made you root for them every step of the way. That you couldn’t see the plot twists coming made for riveting television. Season two has no such redemptive underpinnings.

In Season two the producers have also spared no expense to bring us a group of big Hollywood stars – probably too many and not the right ones. Where McConaughey and Harrelson were a believable couple, season two has four key characters seemingly only connected by the murder of someone we probably will never care about. In season one, rescuing virginal girls being flayed alive for a pseudo religion is something everyone can get behind. Punishing their captors and killers is something everyone can root for. In Season two we have a dead corrupt City Manager of a tiny industrial Southern California armpit. Why become emotionally invested in that?

Series Creator/Writer Nic Pozzolatto dishes out three troubled dissolute Southern California cops played by Colin Farrell, Rachel McAdams and Taylor Kitsch. Thrown into the mix is a quasi-legal casino owner and would be shtarker (tough criminal mastermind) played by Vince Vaughn. On paper, this should be a winning quartet, but the instruments are out of tune and the metaphorical musical score, i.e., the plot and the script is never going to make the Billboard Top 10.

Farrell, who was brilliant in 2008’s In Bruges as a damaged neophyte incompetent hitman is plunged in True Detective into the depths of self-despair and self destruction after selling his soul to Vaughn. Wallowing in Johnny Walker Blue Label, there’s nothing about his character that is remotely redeeming or worth rooting for. Farrell’s American accent just isn’t as interesting as when he speaks like a Brit or an Irishman.

McAdams is also asked to wallow in a self-loathing so palpable that it’s just shocking. The producers took the glam Queen Bee from Mean Girls and butched her out to an almost unrecognizable degree – and also to a non-credible level. She’s hard to believe in the role and is stretched well beyond her many talents. She can’t pull off the Charleze Theron mud-and-blood slathered tough trash role.

Kitsch seems to have peaked dramatically as Tim Riggins in Friday Night Lights, nothing he’s done since evinces the same level of passion and pathos. His beefcake starring roles in 2012’s John Carter (the Water World of its time) and Battleship ran aground faster than a deep keeled yacht in three-foot waters. In True Detective he’s suffering (naturally) from the psychic after effects of military service and is also looking for ways to punish and even maybe even kill himself. Kitsch is so remote and introverted that even his steamy hot girlfriend can’t crack through, so why should the audience bother?

Finally, Vaughn, utterly likeable and believable in such wonderful comedies as Wedding Crashers, Dodgeball and Old School is as miscast in a “heavy” mob boss role as Tom Hanks would be if he were also asked to play a gangster.  Vaughn is a terrific comedic actor because of his easy sardonic wit and everyman demeanor. Henry Fonda could convincingly play evil (and against type) in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In The West. Vaughn is no Henry Fonda, but then Fonda really couldn’t do comedy that well either and he didn’t try very often. In suppressing his natural likeability, Vaughn becomes not just unlikable but also uninteresting.

Pozzolotto in situating season two in Southern California begs comparison with scads of other L.A.-based noir classics such as L.A. Confidential, Chinatown and Double Indemnity, to name but a few – and True Detective comes up short and wanting in comparison. Where season one nailed rural Louisiana, season two misses the mark in Southern California. Season two is the wrong story, with the wrong characters and the wrong actors playing against type unsuccessfully. Let’s hope that Pozzolatto wasn’t a one-hit wonder with season one.

The Zeitgeist

 

A typical Jewish tombstone (left) and a Yahrtzeit (memorial) candle.

The End of Mourning:

Closure on a Year of Remembrance 

The Ba’al Tefila (prayer leader) was old, probably in his 80s, his complexion wan, his hair snow white and thin, his posture stooped, but his voice was strong enough to reach every part of the large main sanctuary. You could hear a pin drop as he commenced the haunting Yizkor (remembrance) prayers on the last day of Passover. What emanated from his essence was the sound of long ago, the echo of days and worlds that are no more – the cadence, accent and pronunciation were forged as a youth in some long vanished shtetl in Eastern Europe, most of who’s residents are now but dust and ash.

As the Kail Ma’aleh Rachamim (merciful G-d on high) wafted around the room, the deep Yiddish-inflected words penetrated the hearts and entered the souls of all those assembled to pay honor to their lost parents, siblings, spouses and sometimes their children. You see, the old man was a Holocaust survivor – one of the dwindling few who still tread this earth and the grief in his every note was tangible and palpable – an authentic cri de coeur that punctured the stoic reserve of most present and set the tear ducts in motion.

Attending Yizkor for a relatively recently deceased parent can be a gut-wrenching experience as it was with me last week. In a few days will be the Yahrtzeit (anniversary of passing) for my late mother. The Yizkor service so close to the end of my year of mourning dredged-up a matrix of emotions that thankfully have dramatically receded, especially over the last six months. Judaism demands that parents be honored in death as well as in life, even if it makes you uncomfortable or if it’s inconvenient.

The ancient Jewish stages of mourning have been engineered to help you process grief, help you deal with it and then help you move on and have closure. At the end of the year one is expected to completely rejoin the world of the living and lock the door to your sadness over the demise of a close loved one, at least until the next Yizkor service.

Mom has been gone for nearly a year now. As an observant Modern Orthodox Jew, that has meant saying a whole lot of Mourners Kaddish. When I mean a lot, we’re talking about at least six times a day, seven days a week for 11 of the 12 months of the year-long mourning period. It means showing up for three prayer services a day, the shortest of which can still last 15 or 20 minutes. It means saying the Kaddish prayer so often that you can recite it in your sleep, and sometimes you do.

The Mourners Kaddish is a prayer for the dead but it’s really for the living to affirm their belief in God in the face of great sorrow and loss – and affirm you do day in and day out come rain, sleet, snow or dark of dawn or night – you affirm it in ancient Aramaic with at least nine other Jewish men above Bar Mitzvah age. Business calls, emails and meetings have to be put on hold at midday, breakfast will have to wait in the mornings and working out will sometimes have to take a third back seat. Kaddish means that quite often you lead the whole prayer service from beginning to end, you’re not just a spectator, you’re the main actor on the stage (bima) and the star of the show.

It needs to be said that for my entire life I always assiduously avoided doing anything as outlandish as leading services (davening), but thrust into the footlights, somehow I let my anxiety over leading the services compete headlong with my anxiety over the loss of my mother – and those dueling anxieties, in time, miraculously and thankfully nullify one another for the better on both fronts. Teach a kid how to swim? Just throw him in the water.

Like any thespian in the spotlight, there are going to be critics of your performance. No end of early bad reviews came from my New York rabbi who scolded me for my lack of “choreography” (Bob Fosse should have been consulted, clearly) and “dry delivery,” meaning no Eastern European Yiddish-accented sing-song cadence to my recitation of the prayers (I use an arid Israeli Hebrew style with an American accent, the worst of everything in some religious circles). Initially I had many words pronounced incorrectly, not looking at the punctuation vowels (dots) below the letters. A gabbai (sexton) in New York asked me, “don’t you read the vowels?” I replied, “no, I go by word recognition the way Israelis do.” So, I had to look at vowels again to avoid brickbats and tomatoes from the crowd. Eventually, I got every word right. Two-thirds of the way through the year I relocated to Florida to escape the Polar Vortex and thankfully the clergy and congregation at the synagogue there was hyper-Americanized, very Zionistic and consequently tolerant of my Hebrew style.

The biggest criticisms when leading the davening (prayers) arise from speed or the lack thereof. In the mornings especially, people are rushing off to work, to catch a train, to conquer the universe or what have you, so speed is of the essence. On an average weekday you get kudos for plowing through something like 60 or 70 pages in the siddur (prayer book) in well under 30 minutes. On Mondays and Thursdays when the Torah (bible) is read, you’ve got around 85 or 90 pages and 35 minutes is the max before you hear audible shuffling and groaning in the pews. So, not only are you reciting a lot of Hebrew and Aramaic aloud, you’re doing it at warp speed. It reminds me of the vocal velocity employed by cattle auctioneers or that fast-talking guy in the old FedEx commercial from 1981 where business was conducted at the speed of sound.  Speed and accuracy are the prized skills of a mourner. You try to be like Jesse Owens on the track and Mark Spitz in the pool – average velocity doesn’t cut it, especially with the tough morning crowd. After leading services for enough months you’re so busy and focused on the task at hand that your grief gets pushed to the back burner, which is probably the main point of it all.

The famous 1981 FedEx commercial where business is conducted at the speed of sound. Leading morning prayers in synagogue can be analogous to this experience and speed skills are highly prized.

Then, suddenly, you stop – like slamming on the brakes at high speed. At the end of 11 months you are to lead the services no more, you are to recite the Kaddish no more. What had been an integral part of your consciousness has to cease and you return to being just a face in the synagogue crowd. You get one more shot at the Yahrtzeit to lead again, but then you retreat to the back benches thereafter.

The end of the year means you can now go hear live music, you can attend celebrations like weddings and bar mitzvahs, you can buy new clothes, you can let your mother go. The Angel of Death ensures that a steady supply of mourners will take your place at the ammud (podium) and you try to be there for them as the other congregants were there for you in your time of intense pain and sadness. You come to appreciate the kindness of strangers and hope you can give back in turn.

I’m proud to say that I didn’t miss a single day of davening during this past 12 months.  I’d committed to be there for Mom as she’d been there for me during my whole lifetime – but more importantly, I renewed my commitment to live my life in a way that would be a credit to her memory and give honor to the effort she put into me. It sure wasn’t easy at times to extricate myself from bed or a business meeting but it was probably the most meaningful experience I’ve had as a Jew. Judaism forces an end to things but it also creates a new beginning for a life rooted in the memory and values of the loved and lost. That their values endure ensures there’s forever a piece of them here on this earth.

The Zeitgeist

 

In Oz, the Lion ultimately found his courage (left) and there really are such things as "Wicked Witches" and "Flying Monkeys."

Lions and Tigers and Bears:

We Need Democrats in the

Fight to Defend the Emerald City

A few weeks ago my local 24-screen stadium-seating mega movie-plex had a special screening of the 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz. Never having seen it before on a large screen (let alone a huge one) I thought I should see what the flying monkeys look like when liberated from the confines of television. I can faithfully report that the monkeys are really terrifying and Margaret Hamilton’s performance as the Wicked Witch of the West is only done true justice when she’s 20 or more feet tall.

Inadvertently, I also came away with some other revelations from the giant screen experience – while Wizard is couched as a children’s story, it actually makes some pretty stark statements about good and evil and what to do about that aforementioned evil.

We are shown that the citizens of Oz, be they Munchkins, residents of the Emerald City or even the Wizard himself are all living in terror of the two Wicked Witches, those of the East and the West – so much so that when Dorothy (spoiler alert if you never grew up as a kid in America) upon her arrival to Oz kills (or her house kills) the Wicked Witch of the East; the Munchkins lay on a spontaneous parade of joy – hailing Dorothy for killing the former owner of the ruby slippers.

When towards the end of the movie Dorothy (with the help of Toto, the Lion, the Scarecrow and the Tin Man) “liquidates” the Wicked Witch of the West, even the witch’s own soldiers are beside themselves with relief and happiness. There was no relativism or ambiguity about the bad guys (or gals) and no guilt in rejoicing at the witches’ demise.

While The Wizard of Oz is fantasy, like many fairy tales, it was meant to impart to its juvenile audience that evil really does exist (even in a candy-coated place like Oz), that it’s frightening, but that it can be overcome when good people band together to fight it.

Much as there was great evil in the real world of 1939 there is a whole lot of bad stuff going on in the real world of 2015, no matter how much we’d like to sugarcoat it or escape to somewhere over the rainbow to avoid it.

We face the dangerous and devious machinations of a Wicked Wizard of the East in the form of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. He’s just signed a military cooperation deal with Iran which provides for joint military exercises and training along with pledges of cooperation against US “interference.” Putin arms Syria’s genocidal Bashir Assad and through Iran indirectly enables Hezbollah and Hamas, the twin Iranian proxies on Israel’s borders. Iran is also menacing Yemen and the Arabian Peninsula through its auxiliaries there. Mr. Putin also has a sophisticated Russian spy ship in Havana harbor and is planning Russian military bases in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. Let’s not forget his ongoing bullying of the Ukrainians.

And talking about the Hussars of the Wicked Witch of the West’s army and her squadron of flying monkeys – we’re now dealing with the crucifying and decapitating ISIS hordes rampaging across Sunni Mesopotamia; the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan; a resurrected Al Qaeda exporting wanton murder and mayhem across the world and the Nigerian Boko Haram rolling all Pol Pot-style by eradicating whole villages of non-Muslims and other opponents. Let’s not forget the A-bomb seeking Ayatollahs in Teheran – they’ve got intercontinental ballistic missiles sitting on launch pads with guidance systems aimed squarely at the West. It’s always “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” and these people mean it. This is not make-believe, it’s all too real, just ask the Charlie Hebdo survivors in Paris

From 1939 to 1945 advances in technology didn’t deter the forces of evil – in fact technology enabled the more efficient killing of millions. Our web, wifi and cloud-based world of today is not a shield against nefarious maniacs – to the contrary, our new technologies are a boon to their efforts, not a civilizing palliative. In World War II it was only by mustering a greater resolve and greater determination that evil was vanquished – and at great cost to humanity.

For most of the 20^th Century it was the Democratic Party in the US that was at the forefront in the fight for freedom – from Woodrow Wilson through Truman, JFK and LBJ. The Republicans were the isolationists with their heads in the ground.

In January 1941, with much of the West under the thumb of fascism and with external threats against the US mounting each day, Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his State of the Union Address said that “thinking of our children and their children, we oppose enforced isolation for ourselves or for any part of the Americas” because “the democratic way of life is at this moment being directly assailed in every part of the world…We must always be wary of those who…preach the ‘ism’ of appeasement…enduring peace cannot be bought at the cost of other people’s freedom.”

FDR asserted that America needed to be front and center in the fight for what he called “The Four Freedoms.” They are “the freedom of speech, the freedom of worship, the freedom from want, and freedom from fear.” Just as in 1941, civilization is under attack from those who trample upon and make a mockery of freedom and human rights. The difference today is that we’re perhaps at the “1933” place on the dial, not 1941. The key is to ensure our world doesn’t see the equivalent of 1941 in 2017or 2018.

A sure sign that most Americans still believe in good and evil, in the Four Freedoms, in America’s leadership role in ensuring a better world for all mankind is the resounding box office success of the new Clint Eastwood film American Sniper. Yes, it’s a great piece of movie-making and Bradley Cooper turns in a stellar performance reaching way beyond his prior goofy roles, but the film is resonating with Americans in a big way because it shows American leadership in the struggle against the bad guys and portrays what most Americans want our country to stand for. Jack Kennedy would have scoffed at calling this a “Republican movie” as some critics have dubbed it.

Back in Oz the Lion needed to find his courage, and find it he most certainly did because of his love for Dorothy. Since Vietnam vast swaths of the Democratic Party have become averse to the legacies of Harry Truman and JFK when it comes to projecting American force in the world.  Sometimes the only way to save the Munchkins and create security for the Emerald City is by liquidating witches and hobgoblins, however difficult that may be. Democrats need to love liberty as much as the Lion did Dorothy and join arm in arm with Republicans here and our allies abroad in a global effort to protect the yellow brick road so that all of humanity (not just Americans) can enjoy lives blessed with peace and freedom.