Aperil 11, 2012 at 1:50 P.M. A previously corrected "error" was restored to the text. I have corrected it again. I will be spending another night in the box.
March 19, 2011 at 1:26 P.M. "Errors" restored to the text after my latest corrections have now been corrected, again. These violations of the text insult the memory of a great actor.
September 28, 2010 at 7:14 P.M. "Errors" inserted and corrected.
July 28, 2010 at 7:05 P.M. Over the past month, especially during the past two weeks, numerous essays have been vandalized and other attacks against me have been launched from New Jersey. This may mean that people there are desperate to inflict harm on me because they are concerned about their own "asses." I plan to keep kicking those asses.
I am unable to access Critique, my MSN group (if it still exists), and efforts are always underway to deface or destroy these writings and to deny me access to the Internet. I doubt this sustained effort would be possible without governmental cooperation. Bloggers in China, Cuba, and many other places seem to experience less hostility from their governments than I receive from New Jersey, which continues to ignore my requests for torture documents dating from 1988-today. I will persist in my struggle. Only one "error" was inserted in the foregoing paragraph since this morning. Not bad.
All international publicity is welcome. I am told that media in other countries are interested in this situation. American media (plural) are mysteriously "absent" from the controversy. Please see Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent.
Aljean Harmetz, "Paul Newman, A Magnetic Star of Hollywood for a Half-Century, Is Dead at 83," in The New York Times, Sunday, Section A, September 28, 2008, at p. A1.
Manohla Dargis, "An Actor Whose Baby Blues Came in Many Shades of Gray," The New York Times, Sunday, September 28, 2008, at p. 34. (She's amazing. "'The Reader': A Movie Review" and "'Revolutionary Road': A Movie Review.")
Manny Fernandez, "Leading Man Was 'Simple and Direct,' " in The New York Times, Sunday, September 28, 2008, at p. 34. (I wonder whether "Manny Fernandez" knows "Patricia Cohen"?)
Books Mentioned:
Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons (New York: Vintage, 1962).
Donn Pearce, Cool Hand Luke (New York: Fawcett, 1965).
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1975).
Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions (New York: Citadel, 1957).
Gore Vidal, Palimpsest (New York: Random House, 1995) (Vidal was a great friend of both Newmans).
On Friday, September 26, 2008, Paul Newman died at his home in Westport, Connecticut. I had no idea that Mr. Newman was suffering from cancer. Unlike many "celebrities" -- a word Newman rarely used, since he had little interest or concern with the Hollywood bullshit ("bullshit" is a word he did use!) -- Paul Newman did not engage in public self-love or explorations of his emotional health.
Mr. Newman communicated his deepest feelings in his art, where -- much to his surprise given his early efforts -- Newman managed to place on screen several performances that are masterpieces. His work is meaningful for people all over the world from all social classes because of its universal concerns and discoveries. Melanie Griffith's first movie was "Harper" with Paul Newman.
I will discuss some of those Newman movie roles because it is the best way to remember one of our great stage and screen artists in the twentieth century. It is certainly what Mr. Newman would have preferred by way of tribute or recollection.
Discussions of his "blue eyes" (The New York Times) at the hour of his death would not have surprised him. In fact, he predicted it. However, it saddens me that this sort of People magazine drivel is among the first things mentioned about this gifted and kind man. I recall a 60-Minutes profile of Paul Newman when the actor was shown film of an interview that he gave to Edward R. Murrow as a very young man. Newman shook his head and said: "I don't know that guy."
My heart breaks for Joanne Woodward and all of those persons fortunate enough to have known Paul Newman who called him a friend, including the great Melanie Griffith and Robert Redford. Redford's transformation into a magnificent actor as well as director dates from Redford's films with Newman and their friendship. I am sure that this friendship is significant to Redford's development, artistic development and human "evolution."
Paul Newman was among a handful of living actors who "experienced" or lived through the Second World War and its aftermath, as a child. I believe that this contributed to a moral seriousness in their work that, otherwise, may not have been there. This generation of actors and an earlier group that included Tony Curtis, Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum, James Dean (all too briefly), Marlon Brando, Montgomerry Clift and a few others shared a special sense of moral responsibility for their work and audiences.
Marilyn Monroe, Joanne Woodward, Elizabeth Taylor (Taylor is one of the very best screen actors you will ever see, as Richard Burton insisted, before and after their marriage), or Shirley McLaine in that elevator with Jack Lemmon in The Apartment, and so many others on the big screen at the time were mindful of the power that they wielded in an era when television was negligible. With few exceptions, American television is still negligible.
These actors and artists were not only America's royalty, they were (and still are) royalty or mythic figures for people all over the world. They symbolized America's beauty, genius and strength in a way that may no longer be possible for today's movie stars. Most of these talented people discharged that awesome responsibility with great honor and humility. No one displayed more of those qualities or virtues than Paul Newman.
Paul Newman -- you can get the dates and facts of his life from the Times obituary, most of the facts listed are accurate -- embodied a virtue no longer fully appreciated among critics and film-viewers. Newman managed to capture some of the quintessentially American spirit of rebellion for a moral cause, independence, concern "for the little guy," regard for the dignity of every human soul. Courage, intelligence, unpretentiousness, ethical struggle were key features of his screen persona as well as defining Newman's life. Tim Olyphant is a Paul Newman-like screen actor today, but there are not many others. ("'Justified' -- A Review of the FX-Television Series.")
Tony Curtis mentioned to an interviewer than when male actors came to Hollywood in his youth their goal was to become Cary Grant, Clark Gable, William Powell and/or James Stewart. They wished to appear as one of the flawless leading men of an earlier generation, in a tux perhaps. Newman did not fit this mold. Newman wanted to be an actor.
Newman's transformation into the young Rocky Graziano was weird and uncanny, suggesting all that this man might yet become. Among the most important common characteristics found in his best roles is a fierce individualism (Luke, Harper, that lawyer in The Verdict) and his passionate yearning for freedom with social justice.
Newman's musical artist in the classic Paris Blues (with Sidney Portier) anticipates many of his later roles playing characters struggling to be free in unfree situations. Joanne Woodward's star turn in that movie offers the first glimpse of women as they would live and express themselves two generations later in America. Something about Ms. Woodward in that little black dress in Paris Blues will stay with me until I die.
This yearning for freedom and justice expressed itself in Newman's personal life, as I say, where quiet efforts on behalf of civil rights and friendship with Dr. King were inseparable from his "true" identity.
The products placed on supermarket shelves all over the world bearing Newman's picture have done much good for many people today. The inward struggle for meaning and purpose, after the loss of his son -- where Newman faulted himself as a father -- together with his attempt to say something true about American men before they (no, we) became objects of universal derision and hatred are also on screen. ("'The Verdict': A Movie Review.")
Newman's humor, wit, literary knowledge, capacity for friendship is seen in both Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid and The Sting. Nothing comes close to those "buddy movies." Those are the ultimate "guy movies."
If The Silver Chalice must be remembered as "the worst movie made in the fifties" (Newman's opinion), then Cool Hand Luke deserves to be called one of the great masterpieces of world cinema, achieving an archetypal status in a global mythological and religious language of images that echoes the Christian story, of course, but also America's political odyssey in coping with the new challenges of an era when psychology and social science displaced humanism from the center of social ideologies or policy thinking. Perhaps "Luke" is only another a reaction to the Holocaust.
"What we've got here," as spoken by the brutal warden of a southern prison serving as a model of the society the U.S. was turning into, "is a failure to communicate." Against impersonality, militarism, regimentation, control hidden in the jargon of social science "conditioning" that was coming into vogue, Newman's "Luke" asserts the playful and doomed freedom of America's Jeffersonian subject demanding creative expression, self-determination, most of all, the redefinition of human boundaries without end: "I can eat fifty eggs." I can, too! Compare Don Pearce, Cool Hand Luke (New York: Fawcett, 1965) with Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons (New York: Vintage, 1962). Today, Luke would be tortured at Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib.
Luke shakes his fist at power, law, even God -- because he is a man, one human being, a single person and, therefore, of infinite value. This humanistic-existential protest against mass-generated slavery and inescapable death resonates throughout Western civilization and is the "meaning" of Michelangelo's "David," Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Shakespeare's "King Lear," Virginia Woolf's "Room of Her Own" and Edith Wharton's "Lilly Bart" in "The House of Mirth," or James Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time." Myra Breckinridge would have understood and loved Luke:
"I am the being which is in such a way that its being is in question. And this 'is' of my being is as present and inapprehensible. ..."
Then,
"[I am] a being which is compelled to decide the meaning of being -- within it and everywhere outside of it. The one who realizes in anguish his condition as being thrown into a responsibility which extends to his very abandonment has no longer either remorse or regret or excuse; he is no longer anything but a FREEDOM which perfectly reveals itself and whose being resides in this very revelation. ... most of the time we flee anguish in bad faith."
Jean Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions (New York: Citadel, 1957), pp. 58-59.
Unfortunately, this obituary was defaced by hackers this afternoon. Perhaps they did not approve of my comments concerning Ms. Pelosi. I will now make necessary corrections, until next time. I am going to play it real cool.
Facing a jury stacked against him, a crooked judge, a corrupt and biased legal system (New Jersey?), without resources and fighting for a woman with nothing ("they killed her and now they're trying to buy it!"), Newman asked jurors for what he forced his audiences to consider -- an examination of their consciences and the nation's history, then he insisted that we decide whether we can live with atrocity and evil, with loss of humanity and reduction of persons to the status of laboratory animals or robots.
Newman decided that he could not live with such things without fighting against them. Newman fought these evils in his psyche and the world. Think of Muhammad Ali, Robert Kennedy, Dr. King, Jane Fonda (Klute and Coming Home) making similar or parallel journeys through American history.
"If there is an overall political issue around the prison" -- also surrounding the lives of those who must live beyond the boundaries of normality -- "it is not therefore whether [prison] is to be corrective or not; whether the judges, the psychiatrists or the sociologists are to exercise more power in it than the administrators or supervisors; it is not even whether we should have prison or something other than prisons. At present, the problem lies rather in the steep rise in the use of these mechanisms of normalization and the wide-ranging powers which, through the proliferation of new disciplines, [tortures and manipulations,] they bring with them."
Michel Foucault, "The Carceral," in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1975), p. 306. ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture.")
Paul Newman created lasting and important artistic works that will outlive all of us. Each of the artists named in this appreciation has done the same. I never met or knew Paul Newman. However, I am deeply sad as I type these words. I will miss you, Luke.
"There's going be some world shaking tonight, Luke."
