Klaus Lowitsch in Fassbinder’s Welt am Draht

Welt am Draht (World on a Wire), Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder 

Few, if any, film careers come close to the star-crossed wonder and terror that was the life and work of German auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who burst onto the scene in the late 1960s and who blazed, a baleful, maleficent, darkly beautiful comet across the nighttime sky of ’70s cinema, making a little over forty films in some thirteen years. These numbers alone are extraordinary, all the more so when looked at against the energy and turbulent life of the work, the high quality of so many of the films, and their daunting formal and generic diversity, ranging from the dramatic character studies of Fassbinder’s early and middle periods—Katzelmacher (1969, literally, Cat-Fucker) and Angst Essen Seele Auf (1974, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul)—to Fassbinder’s reinvention-by-destruction of the gangster film (Liebe ist kälter als der Tod: 1969, Love is Colder than Death), the Western (1971’s Whity, a Gothic-Western-family-incest-with-torture drama), and the historical-pastiche classic-novel-adaptation film (Effi Briest, 1974, from Theodor Fontane’s novel of the same title), to the great, definitive Bundesrepublik Deutschland, or BDR, trilogy, the crowning work of Fassbinder’s late period and career: Die Ehe der Maria Braun (1979, The Marriage of Maria Braun), Lola (1981, a retelling of Josef von Sternberg’s 1931 Der blaue Engel [The Blue Angel]), and Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss (1982, Veronika Voss). 

Along the way Fassbinder created a genre of film reminiscent of Douglas Sirk’s but uniquely his own, the camp psychosexual melodrama, aided by a rotating cast drawn from a commune of actors, friends, and lovers. These films are devoted, unsurprisingly, to the troubled lives of flawed, conflicted people, many marginalized by outlook, habits, and desires (Fassbinder’s favorites, in art and in life, rampant drug use and all kinds of paraphilia and fetishism), all of them touching (and touched) in the manner of Warhol’s Superstars and People You Know: the film-scene trash of Warnung vor einer heiligen Nutte (1971, Beware of a Holy Whore), the fashion divas in Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant (1972, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant), and the gullible, innocent Fox in Faustrecht der Freiheit (1975, Fox and His Friends). Fassbinder wrote all of these films, as well as the others, and acted in many of them, even starring in some, further adding to his legend. Along the way he managed to turn out the fourteen television episodes of his adaptation of Alfred Döblin’s Berliner Alexanderplatz (1980, at 894 minutes, some fourteen-and-a-half hours long, one of the longest narrative films ever made), plus a number of plays and short films,—a demonic, almost satanic, output, redolent of folklore and myth, like the damnation of Faust, who traded his soul for unlimited knowledge, or Paganini’s rumored-at trading of his soul for a fiendish virtuosity with the violin. Unlike the breakout careers of many auteurs—Jean-Luc Godard’s unprecedented ’60s films, which yielded to his less-celebrated work in the ’70s and ’80s, come to mind, as does Robert Altman’s defining ’70s work, which ended with Popeye in 1980—Fassbinder’s meteoric successes kept on coming until he died, from an overdose of cocaine and sleeping pills, at the age of thirty-seven. 

One of Fassbinder’s works for television is the three-and-a-half-hour 1973 science-fiction Welt am Draht (World on a Wire), recently restored and on view at the Museum of Modern Art. While certainly not Fassbinder’s best work, World on a Wire has enough interesting and diverting moments that make it worth viewing; its style (if not its subject matter) and technique, in addition to its obscurity (it wasn’t screened in the United States until the MOMA run), make it a fascinating, if flawed, addition to his canon, a radiant cinematic gem, multifaceted and shimmering. A lot of this glitter is quite literal, a product of the film’s meticulous, on-a-television-budget set design: as with so many of his films, Fassbinder fills his interior spaces—here, largely a suite of offices and the private homes and playgrounds of the technocrats who staff the IKZ Cybernetics Institute—with all manner of mirrors, windows, screens, glassware, and other reflective and refractive surfaces. Often we see the actors’ faces and bodies broken into many shards by these image-making props, a formal quality that mirrors one of the film’s dominant themes, the fracturing and shattering of the human psyche and humanist philosophies of the self, language, and knowledge, by the assault of mass media and modern technology and by the challenges posed by twentieth-century philosophies and movements usefully labeled postmodernism. This theme, which displays several key postmodern concepts—the self as a performance, the contingency of identity, the instability of memory and perception; the constant presence of technology as a mediating agent between humans and the world; the challenging or discarding of enlightenment, humanist, and democratic values—is also reflected in the film’s plot, which centers on the scientist Fred Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch), who becomes increasingly paranoid after the mysterious death of his former superior at IKZ, Dr. Henri Vollmer (Adrian Hoven). Vollmer’s death is somehow connected to IKZ’s current project, the construction of Simulacron 1, a virtual-reality world that houses nearly a thousand electronic lives, all programmed by the doctors and scientists at IKZ to provide a dynamic model by which to predict future political, social, and economic events and long-term trends. As Stiller desultorily investigates Vollmer’s death—World on a Wire is part picaresque police procedural, a genre dear to many postmodern narratives—he begins to suffer an increasingly disturbing sequence of events: he first imagines the disappearance of IKZ’s security chief Günther Lause (Ivan Desny), only to learn that no-one, not even the firm’s computer, has ever heard of Lause; he cannot recognize, and cannot trust, the “real” security chief, Hans Edelkern (played with silky menace by Joachim Hansen); he suffers hallucinations, acts erratically at work and at home, and is almost killed in a bizarre construction accident. Worst is Stiller’s growing dissatisfaction with IKZ and its head, Herbert Siskins (Karl-Heinz Vosgerau), who has been promising private test-runs of Simulacron 1 for private corporations looking to make a killing in the brave new market of the cybernetic forecasting of the future: Stiller sees Simulacron 1 as having untapped social benefits that would be traduced by commercial co-optation and the dominance of his research by profit imperatives. 

Fassbinder (second and third from left)

Stiller, like so many postmodern antiheroes trapped in worlds and narratives not of their own making—one thinks of Pynchon’s Tyrone Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow, also from 1973, or any number of Philip K. Dick’s slouching, addled, incompetent protagonists (of which Jason Taverner, whose official identity disappears, all records of his life gone, in 1974’s Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, is not a bad example)—is quite clearly losing it, but the film is clear from the start that “it” wasn’t much to begin with, a bit of neural smoke and mirrors, linguistic computations, false memories stored and looped again and again, but nothing approaching a stable, whole, grounded human psyche or soul, as earlier generations had maintained. Many of the scientists are aware of this, and discuss epistemological issues while tinkering on Simulacron 1 or sitting in meetings—“You are nothing more than the image others have made of you,” is one such chestnut, a line both dorkier and more portentous than most water-cooler chatter, but one that nevertheless serves to reiterate the film’s themes. If all of this “Do-We-Have-Souls” chatter begins to sag a bit during Stiller’s quest—along the way he learns that his reality is itself a computer simulation inside the “actual” Simulacron 1, a fun idea but one that’s been drained of its shock by later films like The Matrix and The Thirteenth Floor (both 1999, the latter based, like World on a Wire, on Daniel F. Galouye’s 1964 novel Simulacron 3)—one has to give Fassbinder credit for trying, and on television, no less: the film is a bit dutiful in its exposition of the ills of postmodern, corporatized, mediated life, but it’s a beautiful dutifulness, all chrome and fluorescent lights and long echoing corridors (themselves an echo of the long echoing corridors of Godard’s 1965 film Alphaville, an important predecessor for World on a Wire and whose star, Eddie Constantine, makes a brief cameo here, a nice film-geek mise-en-abyme), with chunky, bright-colored plastic telephones and thick glass ashtrays, each meticulously arranged object seeming somehow weightier, more solid and real, than the humans moving and speaking among them. Seen in its cultural contexts, among novelists like Pynchon and Dick, or critical and cultural theorists like Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard—whose The Society of the Spectacle and Simulacra and Simulation, published respectively in 1967 and 1985, thematically and temporally bookend World on a Wire—the film is both of its time and uncannily prescient, an anticipation and dress-rehearsal, if not for the total affective heat-death of the modern world, then for the various challenges to (and opportunities for) life and survival that are posed by our own post-postmodern, post-human, post-everything present. 

If anything, World on a Wire is a sunnier, more naïve version of post-humanism than the ones we’re steadily being acclimated to, with our apocalyptic visions of anthropogenic climate change, the Pacific and Atlantic Garbage Gyres, resource wars, economic crises and looming energy crunches: if the world of the film is only a simulation, at least it’s one in which the omnipresent, sinister security staff (one of whom is played by Fassbinder regular El Hedi ben Salem, who is unforgettable as Ali in Angst Essen Seele Auf) wear immaculately-tailored pinstriped suits and echt-’30s-gangster fedoras. Fassbinder’s vision of an icy, mortified, denatured future is infinitely preferable to our own present’s rape camps and forced migrations, paramilitary assassination squads, and illiterate child soldiers. This is a vision of a weightless, gleaming postindustrial information age before cyberpunk—in the form of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984)—came along and finished it off with its edgy haircuts, body mods, leather jackets, and mirrorshades. World on a Wire presents postmodernity without the crumbling cities and the ubiquitous grime and drip of these later works: a kinder, gentler dystopianism, a vision of the world as an endlessly gleaming shopping mall-cum-office park, as if the city-in-a-dome of Michael Anderson’s Logan’s Run (1976) had been populated with the dissolute elites and murderous professionals of J. G. Ballard’s High-Rise (1975) and Super-Cannes (2000). Fassbinder’s ruling passions—gay sex, cruelty, drugs, transgression—may be largely absent from World on a Wire, but his directing, all sinuous glides and quick close-ups, and the overall look of the film make it compulsively watchable; while not his best work (a fraught notion with a director as prolific as Fassbinder) there are nevertheless brilliant glints of fire and light at the heart of this icy diamond.

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The Magnetic Fields

Back When I taught comp, my last observation fell on a day for which I turned out to have assigned really boring reading. I don’t know

how many of you use the McQuades’ Seeing and Writing, but it has a little portfolio of bathroom signs from around the world that caught my eye as I was franticly scanning the pages on the subway up to campus trying to find something more interesting to talk about than what I had already assigned. After thinking about it I decided to ditch my lesson plan and instead have the class talk and write about these signs. Thankfully, it turns out that there’s a mountain of things to talk about with bathroom signs. How do we distinguish male and female bodies, for instance? How much of that is perfo

rmative, an assertion of requirements rather than description of reality? How do we communicate that this is a place to pee, etc?

The cover of the Magnetic Fields latest album, Realism (Nonesuch 2010), which sports the outline of a ladies’ room symbol on a paper bag colored background, would have been a perfect addition to that discussio

n. It is also the perfect image for this new album, which is, in a strange way, the completion of a diptych when combined with their previous album, Distortion (Nonesuch 2008), with its solid black men’s room symbol in the middle of a shocking neon pink cover

Distortion drew out the always-latent noisepop, shoegaze, Jesus and Mary Chain side to the Magnetic Fields music—classic pop buried under massive, echo-y guitar fuzz, with affectless vocals generally pretty low in the mix. Realism, on the other hand, sounds more like the band’s live shows—folksy, mostly acoustic, not so big on traditional percussion. Stephin Merritt, the dictatorially micromanaging, songwriting genius and sometimes lead singer, actually suffers from hyperacusis, a condition

that makes loud noises intolerable. Restrained as the band’s performance is, he nevertheless must wear earplugs to play live and covers his left ear whenever the audi

ence applauds. I’ve never felt more like a grown-up than when I joined the polite clapping between songs from my

comfortable seat at Town Hall at

their last New York appearance. Taken together, the two albums continue the Magnetic Fields’ decade-long practice of structuring albums around loose concepts, which began with their three-disc magnum opus, 69 Love Songs (Merge 1999) and continued with i (Nonesuch 2004), all of the songs on which started with the letter, and generally the pronoun, “I.”

This is not a review, but I do want to say here that I think this new album is incredible—among their best—and is fast becoming a nonexpendable part of my whole body, not excluding its suburbs.

Let’s go back to the two recent album covers, because I think they reveal—this is what I really want to talk about—some of the persistent characteristics that make the Magnetic Fields wonderful. As Michel de Montaigne wrote, “Even on the most exalted throne in the world we are only sitting on our own bottom” (I’ve also seen it translated “Even kings sit on their arses”). Realism and Distortion make this point pretty clearly—as the bathroom icons were designed to do. Dry wit: satirical, even cynical, sometimes loving, always hilarious. That’s one continuous thread running through the Magnetic Fields’ discography, and one that implicates themselves. For example, as against the hot pink, Pop Art slickness of Distortion’s cover image, Realism’s cover is a visual pun that undermines the title. Its trompe l’oiel details make the background look like parchment—a self-consciously artificial signifier of realism. Punning titles themselves are a band tradition. Does Get Lost (Merge 1995), for instance, mean Merritt & Co would rather we leave them alone, or are we supposed to read the writing on the cover straight through: “The Magnetic Fields Get Lost”? The title i is even closer to the irony of called the latest album Realism, since, as Merritt has insisted, all of his songs are sung from the point of view of characters he’s created. No direct, big-R Romantic self-expression from him!

Merritt’s songs have always seemed to enjoy moving between two poles of the same ironic spectrum: artifice and realism, dreamy enchantment and disappointed cynicism—although it’s these latter songs that often sound the most upbeat. “I Don’t Believe You,” for example, from the album i:

So you quote love unquote me.
Well, stranger things have come to be.
But let’s agree to disagree,
Cause I don’t believe you.
…
You tell me I’m not not cute.
Its truth or falsity is moot,
Cause honesty’s not your strong suit,
And I don’t believe you.
It’s an effortful cheerfulness and a hard-won freedom from expectations, as the bridge reveals.
I had a dream and you were in it.
The blue of your eyes was infinite.
You seemed to be in love with me,
Which isn’t very realistic.

Hope and hopelessness go together in these songs. Without romantic illusions, disillusionment would be neither such a dangerous wound nor such a self-preservative necessity.

The two tendencies, nourishing and puncturing illusions, come together most marvelously in what may be the Magnetic Fields’ most popular song—certainly the one I’ve found people who know nothing else about them generally are familiar with and enjoy—“The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side,” from part one of 69 Love Songs. The song is written to an unnamed woman (presumably), and every verse of it cheerfully enumerates the hopelessness of the singer trying to compete with all her other admirers: “Andy would bicycle across town in the rain to bring you candy, / And John would buy the gown for you to wear to the prom / With Tom the astronomer, who’d name a star for you.” But the singer has an edge: “I’ve got wheels, and you want to go for a ride.” And that’s why he’s the luckiest guy. He acknowledges all the limits and caveats on his luck—“But when the sun comes out, / and only when the sun comes out, / I’m the luckiest guy…”—but to the very end he maintains his sustaining, pathetic, undeluded but illusory joyfulness:

I know Professor Blumen makes you feel like a
woman,
But when the wind is in your hair you laugh like a
little girl.
So you share secrets with Lou, but we’ve got
secrets too.
Well, one: I only keep this heap for you.
Cause I’m the ugliest guy on the Lower East Side,
But I’ve got wheels, and you want to go for a ride.
Want to go for a ride?

The last line gets two more repetitions, with the final word drawn out longer and longer until, every time I try to sing along, I hope against hope that the sustained last note is somehow digitally manipulated.

Merritt’s lyrics never let things rest, and each of these tendencies finds itself undercut at least once in his songbook. The earnest romanticism turns out to be a sham in 69 Love Songs’ “I Think I Need a New Heart,” in which the persona singing admits that

… I always say I love you
When I mean turn out the light,
And I say let’s run away
When I just mean stay the night.

On the other hand, the character who sings “Save a Secret for the Moon” from Get Lost uses his hopelessness as a seductive lure:

I can show you sadder poetry
Than you ever thought there could be.
I know all the saddest people.
Most of them are dead now.

Let’s go back to the girls’ room/boys’ room album covers.

Talking about gender is pretty much unavoidable when talking about symbols distinguishing the gents’ from the ladies’. There’s the paranoid reading of bathroom signs—which ideally becomes the resistant, or in a slightly older vocabulary, subversive one—that sees the interpolative violence of these reductive, standard-enforcing symbols. For example, neither gender is ever represented as fat. Would it confuse the message of the sexual binary to show them as such? I drew for my class what I thought I would look like as a bathroom symbol. It turned out kind of like a silhouette of Mr. Potatohead with an extra circle on top. I guess the Mrs. version would have a bow in her hair.

But then there are more lovely relationships with bathroom signs. One of my most delightful students that semester, who had only started learning English a few years before, explained that he’d never considered what “WC” might stand for; he’d always just read it as “welcome”—“don’t worry”—“it’s going to be okay”—“here’s what you need for relief.” That’s definitely a message that any bathroom sign can communicate to me in moments of distress, no matter what my gender at the time. (That last phrase makes me sound much more interesting than I am: my gender is pretty much always masculine.)

The radical politics version of paranoia is entirely too earnest for the Magnetic Fields. These two albums’ ironic play on realism and distortion and the gender politics of the loo encapsulates much better the band’s queerness, as does Merritt’s wonderful songwriting practice of having other singers of other genders ventriloquize his personae, sometimes making the sexuality of a song impossible to untangle. Take “Come Back from San Francisco,” from the first volume of 69 Love Songs. Shirley Simms, perpetual “guest vocalist” (though I’m sure she has a much better deal than we adjuncts do), sings Merritt’s lyrics: “Should pretty boys in discos / Distract you from your novel / Remember I’m awful in love with you.” Girl singing to boy who likes boys? Boy singing through girl to—someone? Any which way, the relationships can’t be fit into categories.

Which suggests a comparison to “Girls & Boys,” the Britpop scene-maker by Blur (Parklife, Food/SBK 1994). The two songs are not kindred. Instead of a stadium new-wave-disco beat and the repeated, earnestly ironic proclamation that it “always should be someone you really love,” The Magnetic Fields here give us subtlety and artfulness:

You need me
Like the wind needs the trees
To blow in.
Like the moon needs poetry,
You need me.

Is that a compliment? Or a plea? Or a scornful warning meant to cut “you” down to size? Dry, undramatic presentation, sexual and emotional complexity, and a never-explicit undercurrent of anxiety that the San Francisco boys may be more satisfying in bed than the woman singing “kiss me, I’ve quit smoking / I miss doing the wild thing with you” are the key elements of this song. In fact, low-key delivery, nuanced emotions, dry wit, and romantic despair characterize almost every Magnetic Field song.

Of course, there are levels to Blur’s anthemic mega-hit, too. The eurotrash synths make you think sexual fluidity is delightful. (I should say: I love listing to this song.) Turns out that it’s actually irresponsible decadence. Satire! The real problem is that there aren’t any jobs to keep these kids occupied. All they can do to fill the time is get confused about whom they’re fucking. It makes me wish American youth could just go on the dole after college.

And of course there’s simplicity to The Magnetic Fields’ song as well. Stephin Merritt keeps fanatical control over all the lyric-writing in his many bands and projects. (Others include the 6ths, the Future Bible Heroes, the Gothic Archies, and the songs for the musical adaptation of the Neil Gaiman novella Coraline.) And Merritt is gay. So, on paper, “Come Back from San Francisco” is a song written by a guy to another guy who also likes guys. And there are songs written and sung from just such a direct and uncomplicated relational position. Take for example, “When My Boy Walks down the Street” from 69 Love Songs part 3. Merritt himself sings, and the lyrics include some of my favorite love-song celebrations of a significant other: “Butterflies turn into people when my boy walks down the street,” for example, or “There are whole new kinds of weather when he walks with his new beat.” But the terms of the relationship are clear enough: “he’s going to be my wife.”

But the whole complicated spectrum of sexual subjectivities—and of fannish identification, of the needy projective and introjective love that comprises fandom—has always been an explicit mainstay of the band’s personality. “I was straight when Stephin met me, and I’m gay now, which may have been influenced by the openness of hanging around with so many gay people,” founding, full-time (tenured?) band-member Claudia Gonson said in an interview with the Advocate in 2000. “When we started Magnetic Fields we purposely had one lesbian, one gay guy, one straight woman, and one straight man. The audience could identify with whomever they wanted.”

This is not much of a surprise. Gonson has been a PhD student right here at the CUNY Graduate Center, and was dearly close to our late Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, whose antihomophobic scholarly and personal project had at its center the goal of vastly expanding and complicating the available understandings of “sexual identity,” of multiplying and nurturing the possibilities for different, individual ways of desiring, identifying, and being in relationship. “People are different from each other” is famously the first axiom in Sedgwick’s extended introduction to Epistemology of the Closet, one of the original big bangs that generated the space for academic queer studies to come into existence.

(There’s a little shout out to academic palaver on the new album in the form of a song called “Always Already Gone.” It’s not the first. 69 Love Songs includes “The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure.” Both songs are about loneliness and romantic disappointment, as most Magnetic Fields songs are. And for the avant-gardists, when Merge reissued their first two albums on one compact disc, they were separated by a track called 4’33’’, which was just that—a “cover,” so to speak, of John Cage’s famous silent composition.)

My own founding document, I think, is an essay which Sedgwick gave the witty, pop-inflected title “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think this Essay Is about You.” In it, she suggests that—in addition to the paranoid style of theory inflected criticism, which puts its faith in the transformative power of exposing the sinister workings our heterosexist, emotionally impoverishing, late-capitalist society—another perspective is both necessary and available: the reparative. Reparative criticism pays close attention to practices of art and living whose creativity is motivated by love, difference, and need. “The desire reparative impulse,” she writes “is additive and accretive. Its fear, a realistic one, is that the culture surrounding it is inadequate or inimical to its nurture; it wants to assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self.”

I bring this up not just because I love and miss Eve, and I take every opportunity to quote that sentence I can, but instead because the reparative, the anti-depressant impulse at the heart of Eve’s scholarly and personal work is deeply relevant, I think, to the Magnetic Fields’ style of music. The ironic, distant, ventriloqized emotions of Merritt’s lyrics are somehow still entirely relatable and even vulnerable. His vacillation between puncturing illusions and sustaining them—so familiar to any depressive, I would imagine—resonates beautifully with Sedgwick’s observation that the most paranoid artists are also often the most wonderfully reparative ones. His campy, retro, innovative cannibalization of classic pop forms and tricks and subject matter could fit right into her list of the defining, reparative features of classic camp performance, which includes “‘over’-attachment to fragmentary, marginal, waste, or leftover products,” “rich, highly interruptive affective variety,” and “irrepressible fascination with ventriloquistic experimentation.” The Magnetic Fields do that. That’s what they do!

And, as stand-offish as they can seem—or so people tell me; I’ve never experienced them to be so—the Magnetic Fields are and have always been lovely, and loving, and deeply loved by their fans.

P.S. Now seems as good a time as any to say that the teaching observation I opened this meander with went great. It might have been crass, and a different observer might have hated it. But, as Merritt advises in the new album’s “Everything is One Big Christmas Tree,”

Why sit in your dark and lonely room?
Must your every word be sincere?
Here’s a vial of laughing gas perfume:
See that people smile when you’re near.
If they don’t like you, screw them.

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Benjamin Walker in Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson

Since 2002, Les Frères Corbusier has been building a reputation as a company able to marry the anarchic energy and scattershot intellectualism of groups like Radiohole and the International WOW Company with a more accessible, populist aesthetic. Their mission statement describes the company’s work as “aggressively visceral theater combining historical revisionism, multimedia excess, found texts, sophomoric humor, and rigorous academic research,” asserting that they seek to “speak directly to the mainstream audience continually ignored by the American theater,” rejecting “the shy music, seamless dramaturgy, and muted performance style of the 20th century in favor of the anarchic, the rude, the juvenile, the spectacle.”

All of which is to say that, led by artistic director Alex Timbers, Les Frères has created a series of shows that are akin to live-action South Park episodes with avant-hipster cred. In 2006 alone, (the year I first became aware of the company) they mounted Heddatron (written by Elizabeth Meriwether), in which a Michigan housewife is kidnapped by robots and forced to repeatedly perform Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler; Hell House, their version of the infamous haunted house-style spectacles staged by Evangelical churches throughout the United States; and A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant, a deadpan musical satire (written and composed by Kyle Jarrow) featuring a cast of eight to twelve-year-olds celebrating the life and work of L. Ron Hubbard.

Les Frère’s shows are marked by clever writing, strong performances, confident direction, and a subversive sense of humor, but they also tend to be marred by an undertone of smug self-satisfaction, rarely achieving in performance the political sophistication and intellectual rigor suggested by their publicity materials. While it has often been said that the company plays its irony straight, never winking at the audience, the truth is that Timbers tends to set up structures and situations that have so much irony built into them that it is impossible to read them in a nuanced way. Even Hell House, which was conceived as reconstruction rather than parody, could not be taken seriously when mounted in one of the city’s hippest theatres, with skilled actors pretending to be amateur actors and an audience made up almost entirely of NYU students giggling at every reference to heaven or hell.

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, currently enjoying a twice-extended run at the Public Theater, re-imagines our seventh president as a post-punk, emo pop-rock star whose emotional scars drive him both to greatness and to genocide. There’s a touch of genius in framing Jackson as an emotional adolescent who overcompensates for both his own insecurities and his distrust of authority by adopting a swaggering, hypersexual confidence. As played by the ridiculously sexy Benjamin Walker, this Jackson wears skin-tight jeans and form-clinging long-sleeved t-shirts, brandishing his pain (and a holstered revolver) as a rallying cry against “Washington elites” as he rides his war-hero status and his populist rhetoric all the way to the White House. He wears black eyeliner, he massacres the Creek and Seminole tribes, he cuts his arm in the manner of a bipolar teen, he balances the budget, and he sings power ballads.

The tone of the show, and the brand of postmodernism it employs, are summed up nicely in its signature song, “Populism, Yea, Yea!”

Why wouldn’t you ever go out with me in school?
You always went out with those guys, who
thought they were so cool.
And I was nobody to you, nobody to you, nobody to you
But it’s the early nineteenth century
And we’re gonna take this country back
For people like us who don’t just think about things
People who make things happen
Sometimes with guns, sometimes with speeches too.
And also other things.
Populism, yea, yea! This is the age of Jackson.

The link between populism and anti-intellectualism is made even more explicit in the song’s second verse, sung not by Jackson but by a couple of his adoring constituents:

Take a stand against the elite
They don’t care anything for us
And we will eat sweet democracy, let them eat our dust
‘Cause it’s the early nineteenth century
We’ll take the land back from the Indians
We’ll take the land back from the French and Spanish
And other people in other European countries
And other countries too, and also other places
I’m pretty sure it’s our land anyway
Populism, yea, yea! This is the age of Jackson.

The song encapsulates the strengths and weaknesses of BBAJ nicely. The lyrics and music, by Michael Friedman, are catchy enough, and allow the performers to jump head-first into the sentiments of their characters, even while forcing the audience to maintain an ironic, critical distance. And, frankly, the show is fun, entertaining in a way that theatre—particularly theatre with a political bent—too seldom is.

Unfortunately, though, BBAJ is also a little smug, a little glib, and a little pat. While it pretends to challenge viewers to reexamine their preconceptions, it is actually designed to elicit self-congratulatory laughs and knowing nods from an audience that already shares its point of view. Its humor is almost entirely derisive and dismissive, particularly (but not only) when directed against Jackson and his admirers. Jackson is presented as without redeeming qualities, not only anti-intellectual but downright stupid. His persuasiveness and charisma are reduced to, and dismissed as, a result of the fit of his jeans and the cut of his pecs, a genuinely amusing conceit that cuts off any possibility of real engagement with the strength and appeal of his persona and his rhetoric. The show’s vision of Jackson also leads to a certain amount of musical confusion, conflating emo with cock rock, and emo fans with frat boys. Neither of these genres is executed particularly well; some of the songs are catchy, but the ridiculousness, the intentional badness, is painted on in thick layers.

There is a pressing need for theatre and other art forms to engage with American populism and anti-intellectualism in the age of both Obama and the tea party movement, and Les Freres should be praised for taking up that gauntlet. However, while the show has played to cheering audiences and received rave reviews in both New York and LA, it’s difficult to imagine bringing BBAJ to, for example, Jackson’s home state of South Carolina. Americans continue to vote more for those with whom they identify than those who show signs of being able to govern effectively; given this, the greater challenge for a piece of political theatre is not to mock those who identify with Jackson, or W., or Palin (or Obama), but to try to engage with, relate to, and THEN deconstruct that sense of identification.

That said: the show really is fun. Go check it out if you can get a discount.

•  •  •

Toshiki Okada, one of Japan’s most fascinating young playwrights, writes dialogue so vernacular, so hyper-realistic, that it comes to feel stylized. Sentences circle back on themselves in aborted attempts to articulate unfinished ideas. His characters are smart but largely inarticulate and without ambition, disenfranchised slackers who came of age during Japan’s “lost decade” and have since been unable or unwilling to join in the country’s subsequent resurgence.

Enjoy, which is just finishing its English-language premiere in a production by the Play Company, follows a handful of temp workers at a manga café as they drift through their lives, careers, and relationships. They over-think the trivial in order to distract themselves from more pressing matters, including the identity crisis brought on by entering one’s thirties while working part time in a manga café.

Aya Ogawa’s remarkable translation seems to capture Okada’s tone perfectly (think Waiting for Godot meets Clerks or Slackers, only in Tokyo.) This is a very Japanese play, but American generations X and Y will find much to relate to if they allow themselves to relax into the show’s static pacing. Director Dan Rothenberg (of Pig Iron) directs a solid, occasionally extraordinary cast with a deft hand. Okada’s work is poised to take on a higher profile in New York’s experimental scene (his 5 Days in March, which Okada’s company presented at the Japan Society last year, is about to open in English at LaMama); consider this your chance to know about him before all your friends do.

Also: it’s worth noting that this is the fifth of Okada’s plays to be translated into English by Ogawa. I can think of a couple of presses who should be publishing these plays post-haste. Anyone listening?

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, written and directed by Alex Timbers; music and lyrics by Michael Friedman; sets by Donyale Werle; costumes by Emily Rebholz; lighting by Justin Townsend; sound by Bart Fasbender choreography by Danny Mefford; fight director, Jacob Grigolia-Rosenbaum. With: River Aguirre, James Barry, Michael Crane, Michael Dunn, Greg Hildreth, Jeff Hiller, Lucas Near-Verbrugghe, Maria Elena Ramirez, Kate Cullen Roberts, Ben Steinfeld, Benjamin Walker, Colleen Werthmann, and Emily Young. At the Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street. Through May 30.

Enjoy by Toshiki Okada. Translated by Aya Ogawa; directed by Dan Rothenberg; set by Mimi Lien; lighting by James Clotfelter. With Jessica Almasy, Steven Boyer, Frank Harts, Kris Kling, Joshua Koehn, Mary McCool, Joseph Midyett, Kira Sternbach, Alex Torra, and Stacey Yen. At 59e59, through May 1.

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Marina Abromovic “The Artist is Present”

We’re just past the halfway point of the run of Marina Abramović’s retrospective at MOMA, “The Artist is Present,” and chances are good you’ve already seen it, or maybe seen one of the blogs that has materialized in response. Abramović, born in Yugoslavia in 1946, is arguably the most enduring and prolific performance artist currently working. She has proven over the past half-decade that in the midst of reflecting on her past work and speculating on the possibilities of preserving and restaging past performances by herself and other artists, that she will soldier on (and I do mean “soldier”) in the production of performance work that brings herself, and her tests of the limits of body and mind as close to audiences as she can. The works presented begin with transcripts of her early instructions for theoretical (in some cases impossible) performances and photographs of her developing solo work (the “Rhythms”), through videos of her collaborations with Ulay, her former lover and collaborator of twelve years, and up to the present moment’s performance at MOMA, which is intended to extend through the duration of the exhibition. The retrospective occurs just four years past her widely praised 2005 Guggenheim show “Seven Easy Pieces,” in which Abramović performed five previously performed works by other artists, one of her earlier works, “Lips of Thomas,” as well as a new work by her, over the course of seven consecutive days, each work performed for seven hours.

The history of Abramović’s experiments in instruction, sound, rhythm, and partnership laid out through the galleries in photographs and videos possesses a beautiful and terrifying capacity to render the processes of comings-together indistinguishable from the processes of comings-apart. Somehow she manages this in both individual works and those with Ulay. In “Breathing In / Breathing Out” Abramovic and Ulay kiss, only breathing through the exchange of deep air from one pair of lungs to the other, until the action suffocates them for lack of new oxygen. In “Light/Dark” they casually and rhythmically tap one another’s faces with the soft parts of their open hands, almost like a children’s game, and gradually as the rate of touch increases, and the tempo of the sounds of their hands on faces and laps accellerates, the quality of their contacts shift from friendly acknowledgment to formal action, to percussion, to affront—faces that are initially impassive predict the impact in expressions something like concern, maybe indicating pain, but also commitment and determination, foolish or brave.

The naked bodies in the reperformance of 1977’s “Imponderabilia,” poised in near relation to one another at a passageway, are isolated in their vulnerability. In iterations of two women, two men, or a man and woman, they stand face to face to allow gallery visitors to pass between them to enter the next gallery. They are always about to come together, and constantly separated, the space between theoretically functional, forced into use. Fatigue here intensifies their relation, over time suggesting a desire for an inward collapse that would close off the traffic between them, but mark a kind of failure as well. In 1997’s “Luminosity,” the naked performer climbs a ladder into a box of projected light to perch on a bicycle seat, her feet placed on padded metal brackets, and her extended, taxed arms express a magnanimous benediction, wholesome stretch, and something nearing the “hands up” of a police arrest, one sense seeming to feed another over the course of the performance.

Live, unitary performances do ask that viewers acknowledge the human body in a way that documentation of such performances does not, and, I would argue, in a way that the witnessing of the reperformances here in the gallery challenges. These reperformances in the gallery do feel like iterations, echoes or layers of previous or future acts or encounters. The context itself makes the experience in the present very difficult. While the careful, if a bit clinical seeming, “changing of the guard” ritual allows the active performers to retire and new performers to take up their roles with a certain amount of gravitas, it seems to preserve an underlying sense of containment infecting these performances that ultimately undermines their impact. Accompanied by video or stills of their original stagings, surrounded by the chorus of sounds produced by so many videos, not to mention the bodies angled in multiple directions against the grain of your own, one feels invited to imagine the effects more than to actually experience them. The hollow bongs of Abramović and Ulay’s bodies striking the pillars outward along with the intermittent applause and “bravos” emitted by video of 1977’s “Expansion in Space,” become background for the two people framed in a kind of window box performing 1977’s “Relation in Time.” Their sag, their half-opened eyes are read through these sounds and through the dim wails and mumbles from the other room. The place of touching at their shoulder blades and down their backs begins to feel as incidental as the more violent collisions of Abramović and Ulay playing in loops all around. But ultimately, determining the success or failure of the live reperformances included in “The Artist is Present” seems less the point than realizing that each is staged as a kind of form, that one might, given permission, allow oneself to stand in the place of the standers, to point as a pointer, to lay with one laying, and lean and sweat with another who leans and sweats against you, to accomplish the
art’s function.

But let me end with what was the beginning, with what has become the main event: the opportunity to seat yourself at a table with Marina Abramović and look into her eyes, her face, meet her gaze with your own, offering her your eyes, and your face. This encounter is difficult to describe. What is suggested by its terms? Very public, streaming live, each sitter documented and web-published by photographer Marco Anelli, one is left with a somewhat curated series of faces suggesting nothing less than the fact of the loneliness of human interaction. Abramović is herself the concomitant illustration of our collective fatigue and the paragon of our potential to acknowledge, in transcendence and suffering, the endlessness of need that brings us to the silent stranger’s table. What do we see there, in those faces? How many conversations have I heard about jewelry, facial hair, iris color, and makeup? And her face—a stark and soft mask-mirror which shows the extent to which we, what we bring to our encounters with others, produce that encounter and that other. Whatever sense we make of it, using our knowledge of Abramović as an artist, whatever motivations we find to fund the ex post facto hermeneutics, the story of self and other that arises in this silent face-to-face is enormously private, individual, speculative.

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Unfortunately, the skies are not the only thing in Shutter Island, which for the most part is a cold porridge of a movie, a lumpy, unpleasant goo that one forces down unwillingly, hoping for a stray raisin or two before the mess is finished. The film is chiefly bad in that it’s a bore, a tedious, self-important exploration of that hoariest of Hollywood clichés, the troubled mind of the noble hero who fights against all odds a corrupt, unseen force that conspires to destroy him. Scorsese has swum in similarly unpromising waters before, in his neo-noir masterpiece Cape Fear, but whereas that tiny, tawdry gem was illuminated from within by its baroque flashes—Max Cady’s catalogue of tattoos; the overpowering air of fear, guilt, violence, and sex; the delirious ending (that 360-degree camera spin when the out-of-control houseboat hits the big tree branch in the river!)—Shutter Island is weighed down by its own, from the rusty catwalks and dripping pipes and peeling walls of the island’s mysterious insane asylum to the frequent, Technicolor, wholly sappy dreams of Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio), a US Federal Marshall who is first sent to the island to investigate the disappearance of a female patient. Along the way he must investigate a conspiracy he thinks lies behind the patient’s disappearance, and also plumb the recesses of his soul, this latter a frequent Scorsese trope, familiar from films like Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Casino, etc., but one that here is flattened into banality by an over-earnest, over-talkative script by Laeta Kalogridis (based on a novel by Dennis Lehane), and a sense of heaviness and portentousness that ill fits the film’s deliciously schlocky premise. At times the feeling is uncannily close to those old ’40s and ’50s b-noirs, where an entire plot hinges improbably on a jury-rigged, deus-ex-machina folderol of the screenwriter’s, reeking of third-rate Freudianism and a leadenly deterministic view of the human psyche: one might be tempted to say of Shutter Island that “it’s just another manhunt story wrapped up in pseudo-psychoanalysis,” as Alfred Hitchcock said of his own Spellbound. For right from the start Daniels’s quest for the missing patient dovetails too conveniently with his exploration of his own inner demons, and we sense that the conspiracy he’s investigating is really the product of his own warped imagination: it isn’t long before we understand that Daniels is himself insane, an inmate on the island condemned to repeat, forever, his memories of having once been free. While the silliness of the concept might have been redeemed by some combination of virtuoso imagery, sound, editing, all working to create a portrayal of the inner experience of madness—think the recursiveness of Last Year at Marienbad crossed with the stark imagery of Claire Denis’s The Intruder, and scored by Bernard Herrmann—Shutter Island insists on an incessant literalism, a reconfiguration of the psyche’s unnamable monsters as so many seen-before cinematic props and mannequins: the lost wife, the madman in the cell, the doctor who might be evil. (At the film’s climax, Daniels actually has his madness spelled out for him via chalkboard, a new low in the cinema of mental-illness-as-cheap-plot-device.) When Daniels’s insanity is finally formally “revealed”—anyone not asleep in the audience has guessed it long before, likely within the first fifteen minutes—I couldn’t help but think of another Hitchcock film, his 1950 misfire Stage Fright, in which a false flashback that has provided the bulk of the film’s plot is finally, disastrously revealed as being false, thus invalidating the viewer’s entire experience of the film in favor of a hastily-tacked-on (to us) “real” ending. (Hitchcock called it “one thing … that I never should have done,” a rare admission of aesthetic failure from a notoriously imperial, mandarin director.) Shutter Island’s final revelation is even more objectionable in that we’ve seen it coming for some hours, have long since stopped caring about the plot’s tortuous (read: torturous) efforts to surprise and beguile.

There are actually some quite wonderful things in Shutter Island, moments of light and levity that sidle up uncomfortably against the taxidermied ghouls and goblins. Mark Ruffalo is great as Daniels’s partner/therapist Chuck Aule: rumpled yet earnest, Ruffalo brings a seedy gravitas that’s yet another of the film’s borrowings from the visual landscape of noir from half a century ago. John Carroll Lynch is suggestively creepy as Deputy Warden McPherson, and Ben Kinglsey as Dr. Cawley, Shutter Island’s head doctor, is occasionally terrifying, especially when he’s not expounding upon this or that treatment or theory. At times, the film’s investment in Daniels’s madness reaches operatic heights, offering indelible images—Daniels entering the asylum in a truck, the walls and towers soaring over him like a vast medieval castle, the home of evil giants; or Daniels rising from Boston Harbor and approaching the asylum’s iconic lighthouse, where he’ll either find the final truth behind the conspiracy or die trying (in a sense, he does both, as his madness is revealed to him here): with these images Shutter Island reaches for, and achieves, a visual poetry that shows, rather than merely tells, the heroic dimensions of Teddy Daniel’s lurid delusions. And there’s a bravura overhead tracking shot that seems to come straight from the opening of both The Night of the Hunter and They Live By Night, as we see from far off Daniels entering the asylum, and zoom in on him with a vertiginous, dreamlike speed: more of these shots—where the visuals do the work of advancing the narrative, embodying its themes without the need for tendentious exposition—would have been better. Unfortunately, these moments pass by in fits and starts, and we’ve lurched off once again into another long scene rife with dialogue, extraneous characters (Max von Sydow as a perhaps-once-a-Nazi-doctor? But why?), faux-symbolist dream montages (in which Michelle Williams as Daniels’s dead wife doesn’t have much to do, despite her ravishing ’50s housedresses), and yet more dialogue (the Warden, played by Ted Levine, delivers a particularly unconvincing “life is violence, killing, and death” speech that reads as if cribbed right out of the Judge’s great paean to violence, killing, and death in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian) and more dialogue again. The bathetic apotheosis of all of this comes during Daniels’s final, traumatic flashback, in which we learn that it’s he who is responsible for his wife’s death: that Daniels killed her in retaliation for her murder-by-drowning (she was mad, alas) of their children. Cradling the sodden corpses of his children, standing chest-deep in the lake in which they’ve drowned, Daniels rears back and lets forth with a bloodcurdling “Noooooooo!” that’s a perfect gloss—both shining example and absurdist deconstruction—on all other bloodcurdling “Noooooooo!”s ever bloodcurdlingly “Noooooooo!”ed on film. The moment made me and my companion chortle uproariously, easily my most honest, most heartfelt response to the film: such a necessary catharsis, such a purgation through laughter of pity and fear!

It’s a bit of a drag to have Shutter Island come on the heels of Scorsese’s wonderful late-period work, after the luridness of Gangs of New York, the glittering surfaces and frank cinemaphilia of The Aviator, the lean-and-dirty nastiness of The Departed: even compared to the Rolling Stones’ concert-film Shine a Light (which is hardly The Last Waltz but is still completely watchable), Shutter Island seems like a bloated, misshapen mess. What strikes most about the film is its irrelevance: let’s call it Scorsese’s Marnie (with DiCaprio as Tippi Hedren), another long and drasty psychodrama that reads today as either an attempt at a final masterwork or as its maker’s artistic cenotaph and mausoleum. Shutter Island is thankfully neither, but it’s bad enough to make me feverishly await the next good Scorsese film.

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Tahir Rahim in A Prophet

In the final sequence of Jacques Audiard’s engrossing crime drama, A Prophet, the attentive viewer will notice a deft choice of soundtrack.  The tune is a familiar one, Brecht and Weill’s ubiquitous classic “Mack the Knife,” but the rendition is obscure: a droll country arrangement sung by Jimmie Dale Gilmore (who himself achieved screen immortality as “Smokey” in The Big Lebowski).  Gilmore’s “Mack the Knife,” with its mixture of the familiar and the unexpected, is a nice emblem for Audiard’s film, which is able to refresh some of the most conventional aspects of the American gangster film—the improbable rise to power, the double-cross, the camaraderie amongst criminals, and of course, the charismatic anti-hero—by relocating them to contemporary multicultural France.

The film follows the survival, education, and triumph of one Malik El Djebena (played with understated aplomb by Tahir Rahim), a young man we meet at the beginning of the film on the first day of his new life in the French penal system.  His crime is vaguely defined and like everyone else in jail, he proclaims his innocence.  The rest of Malik is equally inchoate.  He doesn’t know his parents and has no connections in the outside world.  He can’t read or write.  He’s Arab, but when asked what language he learned to speak first, French or Arabic, he answers, “Both.”  In response to questions about his religion at the beginning of the film, Malik is similarly divided.   When a prison guard asks him if he has dietary restrictions, Malik appears not to understand the question.  When the guard simplifies it to “Do you eat pork?”  Malik first answers “No” and then hesitantly “Yes.”

In Mike Judge’s Office Space, we learned that in order to survive in prison you either have to kick someone’s ass or become someone’s bitch.  To play it safe, Malik does both.  The Corsican mafia that dominates the other inmates with the help of the corrupt prison guards is ordered by its home office to liquidate a new prisoner and underworld rival due to inform at a trial within weeks.  Reyeb (Hichem Yacoubi), the informant, is Arab and gay.  Malik is handsome and conveniently located on his cellblock for temporary stays and new entries.  For these reasons and because they prefer not to risk one of their own for the mission, the Corsicans, led by their diminutive, Napoleonic elder statesman Cesar Luciani (Niels Arestrup), decide that Malik will do the killing for them.  The short story of Reyeb’s assassination is a cinematic tour-de-force.  Malik is in way over his head, and thanks to Audiard’s visceral direction, so too are we the viewers.  In the yard when the proposition is made to him, his fear is unrefined.  He shakes and shifts his eyes unsteadily amongst his “protectors,” especially as he’s warned that any attempt to shirk responsibility will result in his death rather than Reyeb’s.  Foolishly, he tries to back out anyway.   But rather than meeting with the warden per his request, the Corsicans visit his cell to remind him of the extent of their power with a mock execution.

What follows is the beginning of Malik’s education.  Getting to justly suspicious Reyeb will not be easy.  Malik must learn to put a razor blade in his mouth and act natural; then call it forth into his teeth at a second’s notice to slash his target’s throat.  It is one of cinematic murder’s more athletic forms.  Malik’s training sessions, in which he first pretends to stimulate his instructor’s genitals and then leaps up and puts the blade to his throat, are thorough and he practices diligently, but he lacks talent.  In the event, he’s shaking with fear and adrenaline, which Reyeb seems to mistake for nervousness about their impending sexual encounter.  But when Malik realizes blood is dripping from the side of his mouth that contains the razor, he gives up waiting for his victim to enter a more vulnerable state.  The struggle that ensues between them is contained by the film, but just barely.  The murder is a chaotic masterpiece and the audience is more witness than spectator.  The scene recalls the realisms of Hollywood’s greatest contemporary purveyor of violence, Paul Greengrass, and its greatest critic, Michael Haneke.  But Audiard manages to surpass them both: not so much in the way the event is depicted, though arguably there too, but in the way it inflects the rest of the film.  In dreams, in waking life, Reyeb obstinately haunts Malik’s coming-of-age.  The idea that murder afflicts the murderer’s conscience is one of the least represented in all of cinema.  Just before Malik offs him, Reyeb encourages Malik learn to read while in prison.  After he learns that his deed has earned him Corsican protection, the first thing Malik does is enroll in the prison’s language arts class.

That Malik’s journey from anonymity to the French equivalent of Michael Corleone is improbable is an accepted convention of the film’s genre.  But advances in the complexity of crime and police procedural genre television, such as The Sopranos and The Wire, are beginning to make the arc of cinematic storylines like A Prophet’s seem strained.  On The Wire, for instance, there is no need for one character to remain in an impossible state of grace while the criminal world explodes around him.  If it is logical or probable that a lead character should meet his demise, the show has plenty of other plot lines to follow through on, given its multivalent narrative structure.  Audiard’s genius in A Prophet, however, resides not in apologizing for the improbability of his hero, but in the way he magnifies the unlikelihood of Malik’s success.  It is literally a divine circumstance.  Malik is a prophet (and a Muslim one at that).  He has visions of the future and a guardian angel in the form of Reyeb’s ghost.  He undergoes a spiritual transformation while in solitary confinement for forty days and forty nights.  In the final battle sequence, his opponents’ bullets travel in slow motion while he playfully hides under a corpse.  Perhaps most notably, at the moment when Reyeb’s criminal partner deduces Malik’s part in his friend’s murder, Audiard resorts to a kind of secular deus ex machina.  Their car strikes an antelope that Malik has seen in a dream, at which point his enemies begin to believe.

But the real miracle of the film is the care that goes into its moving parts.  The camera work is often astonishing.  The film score is moving but unobtrusively atmospheric.  Reyeb’s intermittent and surreal presence is a distant allusion to the work of David Lynch; but rather than terrorizing Malik, Reyeb’s ghost adds depth to Malik’s character.  He is living for them both now.  Audiard uses surrealism to do the most difficult thing in storytelling: to show the inner life of his hero rather than merely recite it.  But above all, the film is carried by its actors.  Tahar Rahim plays Malik with an awkward grace best exemplified by the strange boyish mustache he wears for most of the movie.  It is the one part about him that is equally French and Arab.  But it is Niels Arestrup as Cesar Luciani, Malik’s protector, mentor and archenemy, with his virtuosic oscillations between unflappable calm and rage, who supports the film where it otherwise lacks foundation.  At each step in Malik’s journey toward criminal mastery, Cesar is there to remind him, quite violently in fact, who it is that guarantees his existence.  And yet with each one of these tirades one notices the emperor’s robes looking a little more threadbare.  Of course it doesn’t help that the Corsicans’ numbers in the prison are dwindling while the Arab population swells.

One scene in particular is a testament to both actors, but particularly Arestrup.  With the help of a recently released friend and another who is an experienced hash dealer on the inside, Malik has been using part of the release time Cesar bought for him to begin smuggling hash into the prison and controlling its distribution.  Then in an instance of what business professors call “the curse of competitive markets,” rival hash dealers are angered by the newcomers and kidnap Malik’s closest friend, Ryad (Abel Bencherif).  Malik responds by kidnapping the rival gang leader’s mother and ambushing his brother inside the prison.  When the hostage exchange is made and Malik is riding high on his success, he has the misfortune to happen upon his old boss, who has recently gotten wind of Malik’s new, independent operations.  With a cup of coffee and a fatherly curiosity Cesar masterfully draws out Malik, who is only too happy to confess his recent accomplishments.  Then Cesar shows why he needs anger management courses.  From across the table, he seizes Malik by the neck and forces the spoon he had been harmlessly cleaning with his tongue under his protégé’s eyelid, all while explaining to him that he has risked losing his leave days that Cesar counts on to negotiate his business affairs in Marseilles by proxy.  After this interview Malik never lets his guard down again.  Cesar’s final lesson serves his pupil only too well.

“Mack the Knife” has perhaps the most unlikely history of any American pop-song of its era.  In 1958, more than two decades of The Threepenny Opera premiered and a little over a decade after Brecht improbably cooperated with the House Un-American Activities Committee despite being blacklisted anyway, Bobby Darrin rode the “communist” murder ballad to the top of the Billboard charts and a Grammy Award at the height of the Cold War.  Similarly, if the quality of a film is any indication of its box-office potential, then Malik, a Muslim gangster who weakens the Corsican mafia while consolidating Arab organized-crime, is destined to endear himself to audiences on the opposite side of “The War on Terror.”  But then again, cultural differences aside, Americans have always loved a good criminal.

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Kevin Mambo in “Fela!”

it’s an ecstatic phenomenon.” Critics for New York magazine, while acknowledging that the musical glosses over some of its subject’s more problematic facets, goes on to say “But seriously, who cares? As an evening’s entertainment, Fela! is without peer.”

All of this sounded like a bit much, but I was hearing similar reports from friends who had seen the show. When it came time to celebrate my mother’s birthday, I gave her choices of a few different Broadway musicals, hoping she would choose Fela!, and she did. And damned if it wasn’t the most exciting thing I’ve seen on Broadway, probably ever.

Fela! is named for its title character, Fela Kuti, a Nigerian musician, activist, and night club owner who died in 1997 but whose legend has grown in the ensuing couple of decades. The play is set in the Shrine, the club where Kuti holds court. The conceit is that the audience members of the show are attending a concert at the club. Most of the book is made up of Kuti’s pointed banter with his audience and his band, though the structure is kept fluid enough to allow for some flashbacks and other dramatic devices as parts of Fela’s history are unfolded for the audience’s edification. Some of these scenes work powerfully, while others fall a little flat, but the point of this show, really, is the infectious, groove-based Afrobeat music. Oh, and the dancing: the most astonishingly athletic, committed, sensual, full-bodied dancing I’ve ever seen in a Broadway theatre.

The title role is played at alternate performances by Sahr Ngaujah, who starred in Fela!’s downtown run at the Public last year, and Kevin Mambo, who performed in the show I saw.  The actor of this role is given no choice but to shoot for a tour-de-force performance and Mambo, thankfully, succeeds. Fela jokes, teases, rages, sings, and weeps, dancing the whole time. He also leads the onstage band and the show’s extraordinary ensemble, who take many of their cues from him. The actor only pretends to play the saxophone (astute spectators will notice that the band’s sax player is upstage wailing while the show’s lead struts about miming the solos), but he has to be a real band leader in order for the show to work. A lot of actors have tried and failed to own the stage in the same way a rock star does, but Mambo’s Fela holds court convincingly.

The quality and energy of the ensemble can’t be overstated. The group dance numbers, from overtly sexual hip grinding to a spectacular variation on a Yoruba egungen ritual, are the heart of this show. Director and choregrapher Bill T. Jones has put together an ensemble that rules the stage with grace, power, and spectacular athleticism. As for the singing, Kuti’s songs only occasionally give the lead actor the opportunity to show off his pipes in an American Idol sort of way, but Lillias White, as Kuti’s mother Funmilayo, and Saycon Sengbloh, as the American woman who introduces him to the notion of “black power,” more than make up for it.  Fela!’s design team also impresses, particularly Lighting Designer Roebert Wierzel and projection Designer Peter Nigrini, who each know when to use their virtuosity to dazzle and when to use it in support of the action on stage, helping to make the show as immersive as possible given the venue.

Despite a generally celebratory tone, history and politics play a part in the show, as does Kuti’s complex, devoted relationship to his feminist mother, who was harassed and tortured by police. While some of these sections drag a little, they also manage to leave you wanting more. Fela-as-legend is fun, but Fela-as-flesh-and-blood-activist-and-gadfly is a richer story. One riff describing Europeans and Americans as once-admired guests who have overstayed their welcome (they seemed nice at first, but then things started to go missing: soap, towels, petroleum, people…) is both funny and barbed, and makes you wish the show as a whole had more teeth. A documentary-theatre scene in which actors recite reports of police atrocities while the pictures of the people they are playing are projected onto an upstage screen was profoundly moving and served as a powerful reminder of what it was Kuti was protesting against. I also wish Kuti’s less appealing moments (he famously declared that wearing condoms was “un-African,” and eventually died of AIDS) were included at least in passing.

Politics aside, Fela!’s greatest failing is born of its successes. The show is designed to make us want to dance (indeed, early on Kuti orders the audience to their feet and teaches them some rudimentary pelvis thrusts), but Broadway’s Eugene O’Neill theatre is designed to keep us in our seats. Despite some nods toward audience participation, some dancing in the aisles, and bars that remain open throughout the show (a zombie and two bottles of water cost me $22), this just isn’t a space that encourages movement and interaction. Still, at the end of every song, the audience (my mother included) gave rock concert-worthy ovations, hooting and hollering with an energy rarely felt on the (all too-seldom) Great (all too)-White Way.

Reviews of Alexi Kaye Campbell’s The Pride, as directed by Joe Mantello at MCC’s Lucille Lortel Theatre, haven’t been quite as ecstatic as those for Fela! (Brantley had decidedly mixed feelings about it), but there has still been a distinct buzz around the play. This is in part the result of very smart publicity about Campbell and, even more so, about the cast of young Brits who are widely (and rightly) considered rising stars. Oddly, though, the buzz has also centered on the politics of visibility. This season’s off-Broadway offerings (largely a reflection of last year’s London season), seem rife with “serious” plays about gay men and their pre-Stonewall struggles (as well as what will likely come to be called their pre-marriage struggles).

It’s strange to think that the presence of gay (mostly white) men on New York’s stages should be cause for celebration, consternation, or even much notice, but from The Pride, to The Temperamentals (an historical drama about Harry Hay’s political and sexual awakening), to Yank! (a musical about gay soldiers in World War II)—to name just a few—this season seems to have become what Charles Isherwood called “the city’s unofficial spring festival of gay theater.”

What’s striking about these new plays by relatively young writers is how old-fashioned, and even conservative, most of them are. The Pride is no exception. Set in that mythical version of England where rail-thin Brits with perfect posture spout witty, perfectly formed sentences at a mile a minute, without ever having to pause to search for the right word, Campbell’s play feels like a museum piece laced with just enough profanity and sex to titillate. It is an unapologetically middlebrow play, competently crafted and aimed squarely at an audience of aging, well-off gays who still bear the scars of their formative years and who consider the depiction of that struggle in a well-appointed mainstream piece of theatre to be one more step of bringing their culture out of the closet.

The play is set in 1958 and 2008, the actors playing alternate-reality versions of the same characters caught up in two different kinds of love triangles. In 1958, Philip (Hugh Dancy) is married to Sylvia (Andrew Riseborough) but has secret desires that are awakened by his wife’s new boss Oliver (Ben Wishaw), who longs to be able to love openly. In 2008, Philip has left Oliver after a year and a half live-in relationship in which Oliver has failed to overcome his addiction to sex with strangers (the more menacing—and well-hung—the better), while Sylvia, Philip’s best friend and confidant, struggles to balance the neediness of her pet gay with the demands of her own love life.

Elegantly directed and beautifully acted, The Pride is at turns moving and funny, but it is also puzzling and ultimately disappointing on a number of levels. The dual-decade structure cries out to be read as a statement on the state of gay culture, but whatever message Campbell has in mind is muddled. Is he saying that public, anonymous sex is something to stand up and fight for like the rejection of the closet was fifty years ago? Is he saying that our struggle for sexual openness or equality has arguably taken us a step too far (even as it is not yet finished?) Is he saying that today’s young gays still bear the scars of the struggles of an earlier generation? This last is the most likely, and most reasonable, of course, but the play’s politics are difficult to read. Political inscrutability is not always a liability, but in this case it doesn’t seem to be the result of complexity or individuality or even just disregard for identity politics; it seems rather to be a play that is trying to say something specific but can’t quite get its message across.

A description of a pride parade in one of the 2008 scenes comes closest to clearing things up: “It’s a demonstration, a celebration, and a fashion show, in that order.” Whatever its flaws, The Pride has clearly struck a nerve with its audience, earning an extended run of sold-out houses largely on the strength of word-of-mouth publicity. More than a century ago, Shaw famously claimed that “problem plays,” plays that engage directly with social issues can only hold an audience’s attention for as long as the controversies they’re addressing remain relevant. When there’s no longer a “problem,” the problem play is forgotten. Based on the success of The Pride and its brethren, then, the closet door hasn’t been blown off its hinges quite yet. In the context of true equality, and true acceptance, there would be little need for assertions of “pride.”

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Kiki Smith’s “Silver Bird”

When walking into the Brooklyn Museum’s recent Kiki Smith exhibit, a large panel presents this  brief statement about the exhibit: “The idea of how women found space for creative inspiration in the past is the point of departure for Sojourn, this exhibition by Kiki Smith.” It praises Smith’s “lyrical and highly personal vocabulary of images,” and declares the work a meditation on the “course of a woman’s lifetime marked by struggles unique to female artists and the contemplative exhilaration that defines the moment of creative inspiration.”

The Brooklyn Museum is the home of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. It is also the permanent home of The Dinner Party, a 1979 work by feminist artist Judy Chicago, which features a triangular table with exquisite handmade plates and embroidered place mats displaying the name of famous women throughout history. The Dinner Party was praised by feminist art critic Lucy Lippard, who stated, “My own initial experience was strongly emotional… The longer I spent with the piece, the more I became addicted to its intricate detail and hidden meanings.”

“Singer” (2008)

But The Dinner Party was the source of controversy in the art world. Art critic Hilton Kramer said “The Dinner Party reiterates its theme with an insistence and vulgarity more appropriate, perhaps, to an advertising campaign than to a work of art,” calling it an example of “art so mired in the pieties of a cause that it quite fails to acquire any independent artistic life of its own.” Maureen Mullarkey called the work preachy and untrue to the women it claims to represent. She especially disagreed with the sentiment she labels “turn ‘em upside down and they all look alike,” an essentializing of all women which does not respect the feminist cause (Mullarkey also called the hierarchical aspect of the work into question, claiming that Chicago took advantage of her female volunteers.) Roberta Smith succinctly noted that “its historical import and social significance may be greater than its aesthetic value”.

It is true that Judy Chicago’s feminist politics are essentialist and far from nuanced. Years ago I took a class taught, in part, by Judy Chicago. What I recall of the experience is that Chicago’s insistence on essentialist, “first wave” feminism affected her perspective on second wave, “sex positive” or social deconstructionist feminists (including those important emerging feminist performance artists who engaged in a consideration of sex work—and the ways in which it potentially was or was not empowering—which I was particularly interested in).

The experience left me with a keen and intense understanding of the various battles going on in the feminist art community. I have been surprised to see one theme in the world of feminist art continue since then: it seems a celebration of women’s domestic art is the channel through which contemporary feminist art must pass, in order to be praised as doing the legitimate historical reclaiming necessary to feminist artists. This means turning the spotlight to what had been historically considered “women’s work”—china painting, quilts, sewing, embroidery. Considering the rich and varied tradition in tapestry weaving, samplers, and the like, it is an important tradition to reclaim from the recesses of “low art” categorization. As the Sackler Center website itself notes, “Throughout the history of art, decoration and domestic handicrafts have been regarded as women’s work.… Quilting, embroidery, needlework, china painting, and sewing—none of these have been deemed worthy artistic equivalents to the grand mediums of painting and sculpture. The age-old aesthetic hierarchy that privileges certain forms of art over others based on gender associations has historically devalued ‘women’s work’ specifically because it was associated with the domestic and the ‘feminine.’ That hierarchy was radically challenged in the 1960s by Pop and feminist artists, alike.… In the quest for a ‘female aesthetic’ or artistic style specific to women, many 1970s feminist artists sought to elevate ‘women’s craft’ to the level of ‘high art,’ and away from its derogatory designation as ‘low art’ or ‘kitsch.’”

In keeping with this tradition, Kiki Smith’s Sojourn exhibit is inspired by a late-19th century needlework piece from Prudence Punderson, entitled “The First, Second and Last Scene of Mortality,” included in the exhibit. The piece depicts a room with a woman’s life represented from birth through death. On the far right is an infant in a cradle; the center depicts a woman of middle age, sewing; finally, on the far left is a black coffin, with the initials “P.P.” embroidered on the front. It is a striking work, reminding us of the ways in which “women’s work” incorporated and transcended purely “domestic” subject matter. Interestingly, on the wall in the room is a painting, sewn in fine detail, depicting a woman who seems to be trying to escape or hide from a man with a staff. This image, combined with the coffin, underlines the overall effect of the work, which is a sense of the woman artist in the home, which is simultaneously a place of safety and security, and a place of suffocation.

The rooms of Smith’s exhibit progress roughly according to the “life” of a woman artist. The first room is dominated by a large aluminum sculpture in the center of the room—a woman seated, one hand raised, the other on her lap. The head is disproportionately large for the body, giving it a potentially cartoonish feel; however, the expression on the figure’s face is one of divine and quiet inspiration, and has an eerie quality which pervades the entire exhibit. The piece is called “The Annunciation”—the moment when Mary learns she will become the mother to Jesus. (The Annunciation has long—perhaps too long—been a symbol connecting artistic inspiration to spirituality, particularly for women artists).

Surrounding the figure are various large drawings on Nepal paper (a sort of translucent linen material) with nearly life-size figures drawn in pencil and ink, depicted in various stages of inspiration. Deliberately recalling Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, one piece entitled “Room Enough to Enter” depicts a woman seated, one hand (as with ‘the Annunciation’) raised toward a closed window. Outside is a bird—presumably representing creativity—attempting to enter

The subsequent rooms progress through a woman’s life; drawings of pregnant women, women with children, women whose bodies seem to produce the bodies of other women in a sort of religious transposition. Mirrors of antique glass with flowers, lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling dusted in glitter and gold, cages with birds—all of this has a pretty, delicate quality, quietly undercut by small details which make the items neither wholly innocuous nor peaceful. The lightbulbs are surrounded by broken, sharp wood which hangs above; in one drawing, the ubiquitous chair is knocked to the floor.

Later in the exhibit, the drawings begin to depict women gathered together; no longer romantic,  isolated figures, we see instead real women—women with tattoos and handbags, with bras and trenchcoats and glasses. This move to the real is relieving, giving us the sense that the life of the woman artist in Sojourn is coming into being. Another larger-than-life aluminum sculpture entitled “Singer” depicts a woman standing as though after delivering a great aria—she has her hand raised as though about to bow, and a bouquet of flowers in the other. This sense of triumph and success, of positive reception from the world, is optimistic and lovely. The last rooms include more large drawings of an older woman which seem to represent Smith’s mother’s recent death (one of the pieces is entitled “Mourning”). Finally the visitor enters a room with large drawings of black coffins, identical to the one depicted in the Prudence Punderson piece. In the center of the room a large pine wood coffin rests on a pine wood table; inside are clear glass dandelions, which sprout from the base of the coffin.

Leaving the exhibit one walks through “The Dinner Party.” It is striking to see both the similarities and differences between the two treatments of women and ambition, art, community. Sojourn is exponentially more subtle and interesting, less overtly political—in part because it depicts a life cycle in which one woman leaves (passes away) to make room for another woman’s spirit: “I put aside myself so there was room enough to enter” (as the title of one piece says).

Yet both also root themselves in this archeological dig into “women’s work.” Celebrating domestic art has been a foundational, aspect of feminist art; identifying visionary women artists who did all that they could with the materials available to them is a fine way of demonstrating the triumph of artistic inspiration over political and social oppression. Still, I wondered, as I finished walking through the exhibit, at what point women artists may slough off the perpetual handling of the domestic. Work which centers itself on sewing or embroidery, for example—a dying art, and something I grew up doing—risks romanticizing an art which in actuality, in part, was incredibly stifling. After all, the reality is that women turned to needlework in part because they could not turn to other materials with equal freedom (oil paints, sculpture, etc.).

Like The Dinner Party and its pervasive yonic imagery, Sojourn depicts women artistry as delicate, domestic, life-giving, natural, compassionate, and community-oriented. Yet, as important as it is to celebrate this aspect of female society and history, it seems equally important to avoid essentializing women’s psychology, and to engage more complex representations of being a woman in the world. A forty-five minute documentary on Smith’s exhibit in Venice in 2005, Homespun Tales, screens at the exhibit. It includes interviews with one of Kiki Smith’s assistants. On being asked how to interpret her work, Smith’s assistant used the word “intuitive” four times in about a minute, concluding with the statement, “Kiki’s studio is practically her body.” I cringed at this statement, which seems to center around the idea that women’s art is inseparable from their bodies and (relatedly) their supposed connection to “mother earth.” What does it mean to say her work is “intuitive”? What agency does it take from her, her reason and knowledge of women’s history, to believe that her work comes from animal-spirits (something she herself implies)? 

I became a fan of Smith after seeing her brutal and haunting sculpture “Tale” (1992), which depicts a woman crawling with a “tale” of excrement behind her. It is incredibly disturbing, pulling from motifs of shame of the female body and sexual violence which pervades the Western world and its art. It is unforgettable, and I appreciate the unflinching and yet complex perspective on corporeality which she offers in that piece. In Homespun Tales, Smith hung etched drawings of beautiful flowers, made with ink of her own blood. These pieces, to me, seem a commentary on the history of the “feminine sphere” which have real weight. In retrospect, though, even these two pieces leave me unsatisfied.

 In her book Proofs and Theories, Louise Gluck, former poet laureate, once wrote: “I’m puzzled, not emotionally but logically, by the contemporary determination of women to write as women. Puzzled because this seems an ambition limited by the existing conception of what, exactly, differentiates the sexes. If there are such differences, it seems to me reasonable to suppose that literature reveals them, and that it will do so more interestingly, more subtly, in the absence of intention. In a similar way, all art is historical: in both its confrontations and evasions, it speaks of its period. The dream of art is not to assert what is already known but to illuminate what has been hidden, and the path to the hidden world is not inscribed by will.” I suppose, ultimately, I have a desire for feminist art to move from Woolf’s concept of “a room of one’s own” to a hidden world of one’s own psyche—one which illuminates what has been hidden, one which interestingly, and subtly, depicts what it means to be an individual. Whether one can ever do this with the absence of intention is another question altogether.

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In the context of frequent rhetorical sparring and escalating threats of nuclear destruction, little common ground is said to exist between Israel and Iran. Enmity between the two states is often framed as the product of irreconcilable geopolitical, ideological, and strategic differences. Iran’s support of terrorist organizations that seek Israel’s destruction, the regime’s religious character, and supposedly anti-Semitic leadership all appear to ensure confrontation between the two states. This supposedly self-evident “reality” is commonly invoked by politicians, claims-makers and the media. On the one hand, Israel is often portrayed as an oasis of democracy and shared values in a region supposedly characterized by Muslim extremism. Iran, on the other hand, is generally seen as decidedly “Other.” Governed by a hermetic group of religious radicals, the image most commonly presented of Iran is one of repression, backwardness and a lack of “rationality” with regard to geopolitics. If indeed Israel is seen as the primary exemplar of Western “modernity” in the Middle East, Iran is discursively constructed as a useful binary. It is precisely this seemingly self-evident dichotomy that Haggai Ram seeks to interrogate in Iranophobia: The Logic of an Israeli Obsession, a lucid account of Iran’s place in Israeli society’s social imaginary.

While much scholarly work on Israeli-Iranian relations frames tensions in geopolitical terms, Ram’s innovation is to evaluate the cultural and discursive foundations of those terms. Employing the sociological concept of “moral panic,” Ram takes on the commonly held notion that Iran and Israel are “natural” enemies. Instead, Iranophobia suggests that Israel’s “moral panic” finds its roots in cultural anxieties relating to Israel’s precarious conception of itself as essentially “Western.” Ram’s analysis argues that fear of Iran is in fact deeply connected to tensions generated by the presence of non-Western Jewish immigrants in Israel. These groups are seen as calling into question the state’s Ashkenazi (European) “ethnocracy” and complicating Israeli society’s perception of itself as fundamentally European and “modern.” The conception of Iran and Iranian culture as essentially non-Western, as some kind of “Other,” allows Israeli society to conceive of itself and build an identity in contrast to that country and its people.

Iranophobia begins with a discussion of Israeli-Iranian relations in a historical context, sketching a process of “Othering” that, in Ram’s words, represents the inauguration of Iran’s “radical alterity.” While official diplomatic relations did not exist during the time of the Shah, the regime represented for many Israelis a golden-era in Israeli-Iranian relations. Military cooperation and significant business ties were cemented, while Israeli businessmen frequently spent long vacations indulging in Tehren’s “Western” amenities and nightlife. Ram points out that both the Israeli and Iranian state shared a modernization process that ultimately sought to “transform oriental subjects…into deracinated replicas of Europeans, even while they remained affiliated to their own religious cultures,” later contending that “Israeli-Iranian relations before the revolution therefore rested on mutually constitutive perceptions of each other as carriers of the Western mission in the Middle East.” This point is significant, as it serves to buoy later claims with regard to Israel’s anxiety over Iran in the post-Shah period. If, for a moment, Iran had managed to transform itself into a nation that embodied the “civilizing” effects of Western “progress”—much like Israel—the Iranian Revolution seemed to point to the fact that politics and ideology could transform a country and people “back” into non-Western subjects. Ram explores how the Iranian Revolution seemed to have an important resonance in Israel, where officials and journalists openly despaired that the capitalist modernity and “progress” embodied by the deposed monarch would be replaced by a “regressive,” atavistic revolution. Pointing to the geopolitical shifts of that period, Ram argues that the shared ambition for a united Israeli-Iranian front against their perceived mutual enemies in the Arab world began to shift as Israel made piece with Egypt. Insofar as Ram suggests that Israeli society requires the perception of an existential threat, the concomitant peace with Egypt and unfolding Iranian Revolution witnessed a shift from fear of the “Arab threat” to that of the “Iranian threat.”

In subsequent chapters, Ram sketches the process by which Israel’s perceived “modernity” increasingly requires the amplification of the Iranian threat. This fear allows Israeli society to symbolically exorcize its own “unmodern” elements—which, according to Ram, consist of the increasing number of Middle-Eastern Jewish immigrants (Mizrahim) that are uncomfortably perceived to be questioning the future of secular, Western Zionism. Ram explores the tensions embodied in Israel’s claim to a shared Western culture, consistently undermined both by the possibility of Middle Eastern Jews “assimilating” Israel into the surrounding region, as well as the nascent settlement movement that belies the notion of secular democracy through its state-sanctioned religious mission. Thus, “what lies at the bottom of Israeli anti-Iran phobias is the disheartening feeling that present day Iranian realities are, in effect, actualizations of the Jewish state’s future.”

Later chapters explore post-9/11 relations between the two countries and the treatment of Iranian Jews by Israeli immigration officials and envoys from Jewish organizations. After 9/11, an apparent thawing of relations between the United States and Iran seemed to gain momentum as the countries appeared willing to cooperate in overthrowing the Taliban, a mutual enemy. Ram contends that the prospect of a diplomatic horizon between the United States and Iran was particularly disconcerting to Jerusalem. With somewhat less attention to empirically grounded evidence that for the most part characterizes Iranophobia, Ram suggests that the 2002 Karine-A affair (in which a freighter supposedly bound for the Palestinian territories with Iranian weaponry was intercepted by Israel) may have been an attempt by Israel and her supporters to undermine US-Iranian relations.

Later in the decade, Iran is seen as being used as a cover for Israeli military action. During the 2006 Lebanon War, Israeli leaders frequently invoked Iranian influence as a rationale for the ferocity of the Israeli response to Hezbollah. These invocations of Iranian influence allowed Israel to argue that it was functioning as a bulwark against the supposedly inevitable confrontation between Judeo-Christian values and the dangerous forces of radical Islam. By conflating the war in Lebanon against Hezbollah with the “Iranian threat,” Israeli military and civil leaders sought ideological cover for an extremely destructive war. Ram shows how politicians and commentators sought to associate Iran with the very creation and identity of the forces being fought in Lebanon. Eschewing any reference to political, cultural, and historical factors that might have led to the rise of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the war became seen as a fight between the secular Jewish state and the dark forces of global Islamic extremism. This discourse emphasized the Iranian state’s role in supposedly manipulating its “satellites” in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, while ignoring the historical context in which these groups emerged. As Ram points out, from the point of view of mainstream Israeli public opinion, “Israel’s offensive war on Hezbollah was, in effect, a defensive war against Iran.”

The final chapter of Iranophobia explores the multiple, if somewhat bizarre, attempts by Israeli officials to convince Iranian Jews to immigrate to Israel. Unable to understand the continued presence of Jews in a state supposedly characterized by virulent anti-Semitism, Israeli immigration agencies offer Iranian Jews everything from housing to monetary gifts in order to facilitate their migration. Once again, Ram points out the contradictions that are embodied by Israeli society’s relationship to Iran and its Jews. Ram argues that the Shah’s attempt to “aryanize” Iranians and convince them that they were “really European in their origin” meant that Israelis were willing to lend tacit support and legitimacy to a continued Jewish presence in Iran. After the Shah, bereft of these de-orientalizing forces, Iranian Jews were expected to immigrate to Israel in order to participate in the “civilizing” mission of that state. Though many Iranian Jews have emigrated abroad, a significant number chose not to settle in Israel, but rather in the United States or Europe.

With some 30,000 Jews remaining in Iran today, Ram unpacks the simplistic assumption that their history has been one of unending persecution. Rather, he argues that the trajectory of Iranian Jews has been complex (much like minorities in societies throughout the world), comprising periods of discrimination and violence along with significant periods of cooperation and inclusion into the larger society. While pointing out the unevenness of this trajectory, Iranophobia correctly suggests that recognizing only histories of violence and exclusion appear particularly limiting and are consistently undermined by the historic record.

Though Iranophobia employs Moral Panic Theory in an innovative way through an understudied case, at times the theoretical arguments Ram proposes could benefit from a more sustained engagement. While a fundamental aspect of moral panic is the notion of the social reaction’s disproportionality, Ram does not consistently make the case that the responses are disproportionate to the material threats. This omission reflects Ram’s desire to avoid the danger of sliding into the realm of strategic and security analysis. Iranophobia indeed makes a compelling argument for a reassessment of the basis of Israeli-Iranian enmity; however, Ram elides the geopolitical implications of a nuclear-armed Iran. While his analysis of Israeli responsibility for this threat is quite useful, there are moments when the notion of moral panic does not seem an appropriate metaphor for the possibility of nuclear warfare between two nations. Indeed, Moral Panic Theory—as originally conceived by practitioners at the Birmingham Centre—sought to explain how the social uproar over relatively minor incidents was rooted in deeper cultural anxieties. Thus, Stanley Cohen’s classic work on the social reaction to small-scale disturbances at a British seaside resort is shown to relate more to anxiety over shifting post-war value systems than to the incidents themselves. While in some respects this framework aptly describes the cultural anxiety around the Mizrahim—Israel’s so-called “Others within”—it appears somewhat less analytically robust in describing the reaction to a nation of 65 million.

Whether the threat from Iran is overemphasized or not, it seems somewhat less feasible to assess the relations of two (nearly) nuclear powers within a framework whose very meaning suggests a situation that is not constitutive of a serious threat to society. This is not to say that the threat Iran poses has not been overemphasized by the media and claims-makers (“moral entrepreneurs” in the language of Moral Panic Theory). However, this does not necessarily negate the very real threat of confrontation between the two countries today. In particular, as Ram seeks to analyze the cultural reaction to Iran rather than the geopolitical aspects of this confrontation, it becomes difficult to assert the essential disproportionality of the response without engaging with the geopolitical realities of the relationship. Though Iranophobia covers new ground in articulating the discursive logic of this reaction, at times a more critical engagement with the veracity of Israeli claims would go a long way in proving the disconnect between fears and reality. These challenges aside, Iranophobia presents an innovative approach to studying Israeli-Iranian relations and should be seriously engaged with by anyone interested in the cultural foundations of this relationship. As consent among the local population is essential for any state’s long-term geopolitical strategy, the discursive underpinnings of society’s reaction provides unique analytical insights, as Ram has proved to great effect in Iranophobia.

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Imaginal Machines

At every level, Imaginal Machines is a subversive text. Against the rising tide of complacency, Stephven Shukaitis sketches out new possibilities for political engagement that are at once seditious and savvy. Resolutely anti-disciplinarian (in both senses of the word), he leaps recklessly from philosophy to art criticism to social movement studies. In the book’s opening pages, Shukaitis promises to “connect Surrealism with migrant workers, the Industrial Workers of the World with Dadaism, and back again.” Against all odds, he does so, and with great aplomb. From its non-linear organization to its whimsical typeface, Imaginal Machines courageously defies convention. Throwing caution to the wind, the book explodes the limits of both what can be said and how it might be said.

Stylistically, Imaginal Machines is both entertaining and terrifically complex. The text overflows with prescient metaphors, digressions, in-jokes, and parenthetical observations. But these quips and asides are not merely adjunct to the primary text but rather rival the “main” narrative for attention. The subtext quickly becomes the surface, and in an affront to neo-positivist ways of knowing, Shukaitis bends his lyrical prose sideways and backwards, without ever compromising lucidity. Reflecting the uncertainty of postmodern times, nearly every declarative statement comes paired with a qualifier or a caveat. The result is a text that folds in upon itself with multiple levels of meaning.

The body of the text is centered around a series of case studies (though the notion of a case doesn’t align with the author’s method). Shukaitis takes us on a whirlwind tour of what others have called “alternative institutions” (several of which he was involved in personally) and offers a probing introspective analysis. Yet unlike other recent assessments of the global Left “scene,” which tend to be optimistic to the point of absurdity (for example, We Are Everywhere, NowTopia, Real Utopia), Shukaitis maintains his (self-)critical edge throughout. Indeed, Shukaitis is keenly aware that—by most measures of success—the Left is losing badly. For example, in a chapter on worker self-management (WSM), Shukaitis describes his four-year-long involvement with a worker-owned record label in vivid detail. But ultimately, he concludes that WSM may have limited radical potential (though his argument is significantly more complex), and in the process offers the type of deep self-critique that is painfully absent in most
Left circles.

The term Imaginal Machines merits some explanation. As Shukaitis notes, his title is borrowed from a term coined by Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey), itself a derivative of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s desiring-machine. So the imaginal machine is “a particular arrangement or composition of desires and creativity as territorialized through and by relations between bodies in motion.” The idea of outer space figures prominently here. For Shukaitis, the metaphor of space is relavant precisely because it represents that which cannot be (entirely) known. In science fiction film, the music of Sun-Ra, and the popular imagination, space functions as a zone of limitless possibility. Shukaitis suggests that a politics bounded by the coordinates of the known world is hopelessly constrained. Instead, “an imaginal landscape is a precondition for actually finding a northwest passage in the physical world.” Whether or not space is operating at the level of metaphor here, it is a powerful heuristic device.

Imaginal Machines is often remarkable for what it doesn’t do. Though the concept of “radical imagination” emerges as a dominant theme, Shukaitis self-consciously refuses to mention C. Wright Mills, whose Sociological Imagination is usually considered among the most important contributions to the concept. For a traditional social scientist to write a book on the “imagination” without explicitly invoking Mills would approach blasphemy. But Shukaitis is no traditional social scientist (though he may be a blasphemer). Likewise, Karl Marx appears mainly through his metaphors (the architect and the bee, the old mole, “storming heaven”). Yet Marx lurks in the deep crevices of Imaginal Machines’ pages and his influence is never far from the surface. Though the book is, in part, a critical encounter (rencontre) between autonomist Marxism and poststructuralist theory, this is not Shuakitis’ main intellectual project.

While it adheres to some extent to traditional book-publishing conventions, Imaginal Machines strives to be a rhizomatic text with no beginning and no end—only a boundless middle. Characteristically, most of the book’s conclusions arise from the embedded case studies, while the book’s final chapter (the “actual” conclusion) opens up far more questions than it provides answers to. In the section on work and self-management, Shukaitis at one point recommends a politics based on “the constant immanent shaping and creativity that will not allow itself to ever be totally bound in a fixed form.” There is a sense here that Shukaitis is commenting on the very text he is producing—or better yet, the “work” of book-writing. If there is an enemy in Imaginal Machines, it is the idea of closure—that struggle should at some point cease, that the revolution should be contained, that organizations should seek permanence.
This opens the question of failure, another major theme in the book. For the post-9/11 Left, most of the last decade has been characterized by moods that don’t translate well into English—malaise, ennui, schaedenfreude, and melancholia. Large street protests seem to have quieted down, while, at the same time, the ever-resilient late capitalist state has demonstrated a unique ability to co-opt dissident movements. Of course, as Shukaitis reminds us, this is nothing new. thirty years ago, the threat of worker militancy and factory occupations famously portended the rise of worker participation committees, quality circles, and the team concept—a blow from which most unions have yet to recover. More recently, in continental Europe, widespread protests around (against?) precarious work were “answered” in the form of “flexicurity” (flexible security) regimes—a Phyrric victory at best. Yet accelerated cycles of recuperation—defeat via compromise—may well be a unique feature of post-Fordism. The task then becomes devising a politics that can resist the overarching tendency toward capture—even temporarily.

Here, Shakaitis draws heavily on the notion of infrapolitics, as posited by James Scott and popularized by the cultural historian Robin Kelley. Much like Deleuze’s minor politics, Kelley’s infrapolitics suggest a “hidden transcript of power…or a space that is somewhat encoded or otherwise made less comprehensible to those in power.” Shukaitis argues that in order to avoid recuperation, resistance must operate largely in the sphere of infrapolitics—beyond the watchful gaze of the state—and speak in ways that defy understanding. Perhaps the answer to Guyatri Spivak’s prescient question “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is a definitive “yes”—but not in ways that are universally intelligible.

The audience for Imaginal Machines is sure to be broad. On the one hand, the book is written by a movement insider with extensive knowledge of the contemporary American Left and is grounded in real political struggles. On the other, Imaginal Machines is a sophisticated endeavor, deeply informed by high theory (especially of the Italian autonomist and the French poststructuralist variety). Yet Imaginal Machines is not just another “social movement study” by an academic from the distant perspective of a “neutral” observer. Shukaitis constantly reminds us that actually-existing political practice is already immersed intheoretical presuppositions, just as good theory emerges from real struggles. But Shukaitis transcends and ultimately dispenses with the classic binary between “theory” and “practice” by masterfully weaving both into a seamless narrative. The result is the rare academic book that is certain to appeal to activists and organizers, but does not compromise its scholarly integrity in so doing.

This is a unique and extraordinary text that deserves wide attention. Just as Baruch Spinoza famously posed the question “What can a body do?” Shukaitis seems to ask “What can a book do?” The answer, it appears, is far more than we think.

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