562
The Nation.
November 24, 1984
Gift
Fund
^
^^'t
-, Method* and liu invUcathnui
•
nSlfl
of tivin« Away Money
;
Not
^„
the Pentagon
On April 15th, how muchmoney will you sendto
the
Pentagon?Hundreds
of
dollars?Thousands?
Anyway
you
slice
it,
more than
of
yourfederal taxes goes
to
military spending.
A
defense budget
of 1.5
trillion dollars overthe next 5 years is
a
dramatic representationof priorities gone haywire. Priorities hadly
in
need
of
change.That's why we say.
Fund change, not
the
Pentagon.*'
Redirect your
tax
moneythrough tax-deductible contributions
to
organizations working
to
end militarism
and
promote peace.Or to any number of tax-exempt projects do-ing what
our tax
dollars should
be
doing.Empowering
the
disenfranchised. Protect-ing the environment Redressing discrimina-tion. Alleviating injustice.A
new
book—the
Gifl-Civing Guide—
tellsyou everything-you-need-to-know-aboutcharitable giving:• Dozens
of
ways
to
make tax-deductihiecontributions• Multiple savings through gifts
of
stock• Write
off
volunteer expenses
or
loans• Prepare wills• Take advantage
of
carryovers, lower taxbrackets,
and
once-in-a-lifetime givingopportunitiesBut tax savings aren't everything. The wholepoint
of the
Gift-Giving Guide
is to
helpyou give
more
money
to the
organizationsand causes
you
helieve
in.
Because less
of
your
tax
dollars
for
militaryprograms means more money directly
for
programs
of
community activism
and
socialchange.To order
the
Gift-Giving Guide,
send$7.50. plus your name
and
address
to:
Funding Exchange,
80
Fifth Ave., Room1204-K New York. NY lOOlIFebruary 24, 1983,
was a
cold
day in
New York City. Kate Quinion,
a
pale,thin elderly woman,
sat in a
wheel-chair
in her
apartment
in
Brooklyn.While she and Jasmine Pagano, whomshe
had
come
to
regard
as
highly
as
Mrs
Lawson
had
once regarded
her,
watched
Another
World,
a
few rays ofsun illuminated
the
living room.
By
the time
Fantasy
was over, the sky hadclouded
and
darkened. Snow
had
been predicted
for the
following
day.
Mrs
Quinton
had
never liked snow.At five o'clock, KaEe Quinion
sat in
her kitchen sipping sherry
and
ginger
ale
She listened
to the
ticktock
of
thegrandfather clock
she had
first heardas
a
child in the kitchen
of
the house
in
Kirkintilloch. Time
was.
passing
as
agreeably
as she
could expect.
She
looked forward
to
walking
in the
spring.
Such
is
the symmetry and poetry
of
nar-rative,
and
from such symmetry comesthe impact
of
Sheehan's journalisticstatement.
D
FILMS.
ANDREW KOPKIND
Body DoubleThe Times
of
Harvey Milk
In
my
reverie
I am
working
on a
scriptfor Brian
De
Palma
s
next movie, called
Overkill.
It may be
considered
a
thirdremake
of
Scarface
or a sixth update
of
Vertigo,
and
it
will contain frontal nudi-ty, telekinetic torture
and
organ-trans-plant surgery from the point
of
view
of
the donor.
The
plot concerns
a
youngVietnamese boat person who rises
to the
top
of a
Beverly Hills crime triad
by
dressing
as
a female gorilla
and
killingteen-age girls
in the
shower with
a den-
tist
s
drill mounted on his privates.
I
amplanning
to
borrow some bits fromHitchcock. There are certain loose ends,but
the
fade-out
is
already
set: De
Palma s
own
hands reach through
the
screen
to
strangle preselected adherentsof Women Against Pornography
at
every performance. Brian
and I
hopefor
a
Christmas release.
B
ian
De
Palma stands,
or
rather lies,
in the
great tradi-tion
of
self-destructive film-makers
who
cannot help
but
kill
the
thing they love: their movies.With animal abandon,
he
tears into
the
sets and sensibility
of
the genre
at
hand,drawing blood
and
provoking anger.The animal
of
choice
is the
hedgehograther than
the fox, the
beast with
a
built-in shotgun over
the one
with
a
single cunning bite.
De
Palma comes
at
his movies fully loaded, with plots
of
exquisite Gothic tracery, characters
of
tortured sexuality, scenes washed
by
blood-dimm'd tides
and a
technique
of-,
dazzling complexity.
His
tracking shots-^seem endless, his dollies are
in
perpetualmotion
and,
overall,
his
films
are
filledwith visual
set
pieces that look choreo-graphed rather than merely directed.The long, excruciatingly silent openingof
Dressed
to
Kill,
the
prom night
in
Carrie
and the
cocaine Armageddon
in
Scarface
(all
shot M.O.S., withoutsynchronized dialogue) make muteoperas
and
raucous ballets.
De
Palma'scamera tricks
and
plot turns inevitablyrecall Hitchcock;
but
that style
is an
hommage
to the
master,
not an
obei-sance.
In
mood, texture and expression,De Palma
and
Hitchcock
are
polesapart. The one is flamboyant, excessive,radical
in
spirit
and
exposed
in
flesh.The other
is
conservative, subdued
and
economical.
De
Palma's nose
is
broadand Italian; Hitchcock's hand
is
fineand English.Few
of De
Palma's progeny survivetheir maker's assaults, but
Body Double
somehow withstands his film abuse
and
comes
out a
witty, chilly, campy
and
surprisingly intelligent entertainment.Its success
is due,
first
of all, to De
Palma's clearly ironic intent:
it is a
movie about Hollywood, about film-making, about
the
culture
of sex and
violence, rather than about
the
awfulevents
of
the plot.
I
grant that much
of
the audience will miss
the
irony
and
have
a
jolly time with
the
sleaze
itself.
There
is
enough murder, mayhem,
sad-
ism, pornography, vampirism
and fe-
male masturbation
for
every taste.
But
no
one
gets
off
scot-free,
for ai
everyturn
the
movie pokes
fun at the
movie-goer
for his or her
lustful fantasies
an^
shocked sensibilities.
I
like
to
watch,""Jake,
the
hero (Craig Wasson), sayson several occasions.
The
reference,
of
course,
is to
Chauncey Gardner's pecul-iar passion
in
Being There.
But he's alsospeaking
for us.
"Body double"
is
filmmakers' jargonfor
a
certain kind
of
stand-in,
the
kindDe Palma used
for
Angie Dickinson'snude shots
in
Dressed
to
Kill.
(It was
the little promotional controversy
sur-
rounding that substitution that gavehim
the
idea
for his
latest project.)
So
November 24, 1984
The Nation.
563we begin with a Hollywood in-jokefrom the first title. Actually,
before
thetitles: the movie opens with a scene froma low-budget vampire film-within-a-film being shot in a studio. Jake is theingenue Dracula, a cub actor trying tobreak into horrible Hollywood, but hiscareer is threatened by a curious claus-trophobia (cf.
Vertigo) that
inhibits his^ability to
act.
He's good at watching,,however, and when a sexually ambigu-ous chance acquaintance (cf.
Strangerson a Train)
sets him up with a sublethigh in the Hollywood Hills, he findsneurotic release peeping at autoerotichootchy-kootchy in a neighbor's bed-room below (cf.
Rear Window).
Hisobsession (cf.
Obsession
and
Osses-sione)
gets him in trouble when he wit-nesses a murder (op. cit. all of theabove) performed on a hot, rich womanin white by an Indian, as you've prob-ably heard by now, with an electric drillplaced where his penis should be. (Thisis new, as far as I can tell, in the Hitch-cock canon, although a Freudian ana-lyst might find a bawdy pun on themaster's name in the material of thescene.)The chase that follows leads Jake intothe world of late-night cable porn, andonto the set of a dirty movie, where he co-stars with the enticing punk slut HollyBody (Melanie Griffith, the daughter ofTippi Hedren, cf.
The Birds).
There aretwo more—no, three more—movies-within-a-movie before
Body Double
ends, with a slight cop-out which makesyou wonder whether everything that hasgone before might be nothing morethan the old actor's nightmare.De Palma has crafted some masterfulscenes that will have filmgoers, filmstudents and filmmakers gasping forweeks to come. I'll mention two. Thepas de deux on a multilevel cliffsidemote as Jake pursues the elusive objectof his desire is at once classical and pop,a sort of
Einstein on the Beach PartySingo.
And the embrace of the coupleJftt the mouth of a tunnel beneath thecliff is a breathtaking example of howhot is the sex that burns but does notconsume.A last, political note. There's a lot tobe said for the view that
Body Double
issadistic, sexist, misogynist trash thatshould be scorned as a cultural artifactand perhaps banned under one of thenew antipornography statutes as a vio-lation .of women's civil rights. Certainlythe bits and pieces of the movie, takenseparately, look like grounds for indict-ment. But as a whole, it has a differentmeaning, and the elements appear notas gratuitous insults but as harsh (andoften humorous) comments on
itself.
This film does not come out of ahealthy society. But the way to attackthe social context is not to censor thecontents. As Brian De Palma knowsbetter than most, repression—of anger,despair, passion and sexuality—is thetrouble to begin with, and more repres-sion can only make matters worse.Repression is a personal problem thatis also a public issue. Harvey Milk, theSan Francisco city supervisor who wasassassinated along with Mayor GeorgeMoscone in 1978, lived and worked inthat hot and dangerous zone where thepersonal and the public intersect. Con-sciously gay at 14, Milk spent his ado-lescence and young adulthood in theusual social and institutional closets: aLong Island Jewish middle-class fami-ly, college, the Navy, a Wall Street job.Then, like countless other homosexualsof his generation, he began a long es-cape from repression into the counter-culture of the 1960s. Long hair, protestpolitics, pot and a loose life style wereeasy exits. The route opened wider withimmigration to the new gay ghettos onboth coasts: Greenwich Village, WestHollywood, San Francisco's CastroStreet. The hair and the flight were im-plicitly political, but Harvey Milk wentfurther and developed an explicitly ho-mosexual politics. He made the per-sonal issue of gay legitimacy the basis ofhis public campaigns. He ran for office(and lost several times before winningthe supervisory seat). He joined hisstrong base in the Castro with alliesacross the ethnic and ideological rain-bow of San Francisco politics. And hepleaded—rather, in his warm and sup-portive way, he demanded—that gayscome out and announce their sexual iden-tity for the safety of the entire community.Milk spoke to and for his homosexualsupporters, but believed he was workingfor a greater good: the liberation of thesurrounding society. Repressive forcesdamage gay men and lesbians, but theyalso deform the hearts and deiange theminds of the sexual majority, such as it
is.
Some monstrous majoritarian moral-ity found a perfect victim in Dan White,
What sort of people need to (earn a for-eign language as quickly and effectively aspossible?
Foreign service personnel
that'swho.
Now you can (earn to speak French justas these diplomatic personnel do
—withthe Foreign Service Institute's Basic FrenchCourse.The U.S. Department of State has spentthousands of dollars developing this course.It's by far
the most effective way
to learnFrench at your own convenience and atyour own pace.The Basic French Course consists of aseries of cassettes and an accompanyingtextbook. Simply follow the spoken andwritten instructions, listening and repeating.By the end of the course, you'll be learningand speaking entirely in French
This course turns your cassette playerinto a teaching machine.
With its unique'pattern
drill'
learning method, you set yourown pace—^testing yourself, correcting er-rors, reinforcing accurate responses.The FSI's Introductory Basic French Coursecomes in two parts, each shipped in a hand-some library binder. Part A introduces thesimpler forms of the language and a basicvocabulary. Part B presents more complexstructures and additional vocabulary. Ordereither, or save 10% by ordering
both:
D
Basic French, Part A.
12 cassettes (15hr,}, and
94-p. text, $125. •D
Basic French. Part B.
18 cassettes (25hr.), and 290-p. text, $149.(Conn, and N.Y residents add sales iax.lTO ORDER BY PHONE, PLEASE CALLTOLL-FREE NUMBER:
1-800-243-1234,
To order by
mail,
clip this ad and send withyour name and address, and a check ormoney order — or charge to your credit card(VISA, MasterCard, AmEx. Diners) by en-closing card number, expiration dale, andyour signature.
The Foreign Service Institute's Frenchcourse is unconditionally guaranteed.
Tryit for three weeks. If you're not convincedit's the fastest, easiest, most painfess wayto learn French, return it and we'll refundevery penny you
paid.
Order today 6 courses in 39 other languages alsoavailable. Write for freecatalog. Our 12th year.
Audio-ForumRoom
878
On-The-Green.Guilford,CT 06437(203) 453-9794All orders received by Dec. 14will bedelivered beforethe holidays
Or visit our New York sales office: M5 E. 49th St., New York, NY 10017 (212) 753-1783.
564
The Nation.
November 24, 1984
EVENTS
ISRAELI PALESTimAN PEACE
A Reception tor and Talk byMATTI PELEDKnesset Member, Ma|orGeneral (Ret,) Isfaeli DefenseForces, Chairman, Israeli Council (or Israeli-PalestinianPeacePresiding: Art D'LugoWMONDAY, NOVEMBER 26, 6 PH
The Village Gate
Bleecker and Thompson StreetsNew York CityDonation at door
Co-sporsofed by: America Israel Coundl for Israeli Pa I estlniatiPeace, American-Israeli Civil LiDerties Coaliiion, InternalionalJewish Peace Union, Brooklyr and Manriatlan crtaplers Of NewJewish AQeixla.For inlormaliDri cail AlCIPP, (312) 969-758')
The National EmergencyCivil Liberties Committee
sponsorsThe Bill of Rights DinnerHonoring Or. Charles M, Clementswitti theTom Paine AwardSpeaker: Prof. Penn KimbailHost: W. Haywood BurnsDECEMBER 7Sheraton Centre Hotel52nd Street, East o( 7th AvenueNew York CityCocktails 6 to 7 pm Royal BallroomDinner 7 pm Impenal BallroomCouvert S50 per person
Space is limiletl For reservalions conlact me NECLC, 175 FiflhAvenue, New Voik, MY 1D010 (2121 673 2040.
Let Nation readers know about your event They want la know:WHAT'S GOING ONWHERE andWHEN
EVENTS.
I tiave enclosedcamera ready ad. copy to be set. inches per ad. times ad should run
_
check or money orderNameOfganization _AddressCity, State, ZipPhoneThe Nation is published on Saturdays II reachessubscribers and newsstands 5 days m advance olSaturday cover date.We need your ad or copy by Wednesday, 17 days priorto ccver date We will accept phone in copy. CallGeorge Monaco (212) 242 8400Hates: S35 per column inch Special oHer, limited limeonly 4 ads for the price o( 3.
a young San Francisco fireman whorode the same populist wave as HarveyMilk and was elected to the Board ofSupervisors at the same time. The twoplayed out grand and historic themes ona tiny stage. White proposed a series ofSoftball games between teams represent-ing the supervisory districts, so that"the old-fashioned values that built thiscountry" could be tested on the foggyplaying fields by the bay. Milk pushedfor, and won, an antidiscrimination or-dinance protecting sexual minorities.White's was the only vote against it.Milk was a leader of the successful cam-paign to defeat the Briggs Amendment(Proposition 6), that masterpiece of therepressive genre which would have barredavowed gays and pro-gay heterosexualsfrom teaching in public schools.At last the public clash of political po-sitions between the rivals was resolvedin one intensely personal moment. DanWhite had resigned as a supervisor afew days earlier and was about to be re-buffed by Moscone and Milk in hischaracteristically erratic bid for reap-pointment. He crawled into City Hallthrough a basement window, shot andkilled the Mayor, and did the same toHarvey Milk.Robert Epstein and Richard Schmie-chen have made a beautiful and power-ful documentary around these urgentevents. It is instructive, uplifting, sadand enraging. Friends and political as-sociates of Harvey Milk cry on camera,and it's hard to believe that their tearsare not mirrored in the eyes of many inthe audience. When Dan White is givena light sentence on a lesser charge by ajury impressed with his defense that afeast of Twinkies fired him up formurder, we must share the anger of thecrowd that rioted in response.
TheTimes of Harvey Milk
brings thoseemotions to life, which makes it notonly extraordinary filmmaking but im-portant historical documentation.The homosexual culture is unique inmany ways, not least of all in its lack ofliving history. All oppressed groups areinvisible to a certain extent, for someperiod of time. Their strategies to gainequality and win a share of power are inlarge measure campaigns for visibility.Thus, we have recently seen blacks,women, Hispanics, Native Americans,the aged and the infirm (and other "mi-norities") turn up in the movies, on tel-evision, in books and magazines, in spe-cial-studies programs at universities,and in artworks. But there is pathetical-ly little from and about gay culture inthe straight mainstream. Hollywood hasproduced a few "problem" movies
(Making Love, Cruising)
which ex-plain to wondering audiences what todo when one's husband goes off withanother man, or how to avoid trouble inthe leather-and-chains scene. Severalpsychological and sociological workshave been published which look at gay.life from about the same distance as theLeakeys watched the fossil families ofAustralopithecines in Olduvai Gorge.But living gay history is in exceedinglyshort supply. Without it, gay people canhardly get a sense of themselves; historyis identity. And without it, nobody ofany persuasion can begin to understandthe dynamic of sexual revolution. Weare told, quite rightly, that Americanhistory minus blacks or women or Jewsis dangerously imperfect. Cultural andsocial history without homosexuals isjust as wrong.
The Times of HarveyMilk
joins the short list of filmic andliterary documents about the daily ex-perience and political struggle of gaypeople in the modern age. (Others in thegroup include Epstein's previous film.
Word is Out,
and a public televisiondocumentary scheduled for broadcastnext year,
Before Stonewall,
withwhich I have had some tangential ad-visory connection.) This is not onlyfilmmaking; it enters the realm of lifewhere personal and public issues informhistory and make art. •
Join The Nation Associates, a group ofloyal and committed
Nation
readerswho provide invaluable support forthe magazine through annual con-tributions of $20 or more. Membershipincludes participation in a variety ofAssociates activities and a subscriptionto "The Nation Associate," a news-letter that tells you what's going onbehind the scenes at
The Nation.
For further information write or callCiaudine Bacher,
72
Fifth Avenue,New York, NY
10011,
(212) 242-8400,Make checks payable to The NationAssociates,
When drafting your will, pleaseconsider making a bequest to
The Nation.
For informaiion, write or cali: Oft
ice
of thePublisher.
The Nation.
72 Fifth Aveniic.New York. NY lOOll (212) 242-8400,