In Which This Was A Spectacularly Misguided Educational Experience

Fascists In Disguise

by JACOB SUGARMAN

Every week in elementary school, my class would gather for a period ambitiously titled “ethics.” Our teacher was a gentle woman named Elizabeth with a lazy eye and a swab of frizzy, red hair. I’m sure we tackled more sophisticated exercises as we got older, but I remember spending each period doodling a scene in which a person behaved “unethically.”

Beneath our crude illustrations, we’d scribble a caption that revealed the lesson learned from the incident—sort of like a New Yorker cartoon gone horribly wrong. For a predominantly upper-middle class, Jewish student body in the early 90s, this often read something along the lines of: “never steal your classmates’ pogs” or “don’t make fun of someone for losing to Piston Honda in Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out.”

We’d present our drawings to the rest of the class and Elizabeth would beam with approval, her errant eye straightening to match the moral rectitude of her students. No matter how esoteric our messages were, the core principle of the class (and arguably the progressive, private school institution as a whole) was that we must be true to ourselves and resist the pressure of our peers.

This is an admirable lesson to instill in a preadolescent taking his first steps towards forging his own identity. After all, the alt rock on Z100 could only take us so far. But the road to perdition is paved with good intentions or, as the case may be, sheets of oak tag decorated with Crayola-colored stick figures. If I had my elementary school ethics exercise to do over again, I would have drawn a sketch of my 6th grade social studies teacher showing his class the 1981 made-for-TV movie, The Wave — the most spectacularly misguided educational video of my childhood.

For the uninitiated, The Wave is based on the real life experience of a high school class in Palo Alto, CA that, if we’re to accept the events of the movie, was transformed from a group of chipper, all Americans into militant fascists in the span of roughly three weeks. History professor Ben Ross (played by Bruce Davison, an inductee in film and television’s “that guy whose name I can never remember” hall of fame) is instructing his students on the atrocities of the Holocaust when he’s asked a question he can not easily answer: how could the Germans say they knew nothing of the concentration camps?

Hijinks ensue when Ross recruits his class for a social club called “the wave,” the symbol for which is a cross between the old Atlanta Hawks logo and ‘Inky,’ the blue ghost from the Pacman videogames. Rooted in the principles of “strength through discipline” and “strength through community,” the group develops its own nifty salute, bullies students who don’t want to join and decks the school hallways with colorful posters. If history has taught us anything, it’s that fascists love to decorate. The movie ends as Professor Ross gathers the group into the school auditorium for a video message from their new political leader—a certain fascist dictator with a Charlie Chaplin moustache. In one fell swoop, professor Ross exposes his class for the totalitarian thugs they’ve become. Let’s just say a lot of David Cassidy look-alikes and a chick named ‘Cheryl’ with a bodacious perm are left feeling punked.

As a 12-year-old, the only lesson from this movie that truly resonated was that redheads are hopeless, social outcasts with an untapped wealth of violent rage (for real life examples, see Lambert, Molly). One of the wave’s principal leaders is a ginger-haired loser named ‘Robert’ whose mere presence, by the laws of suburban, high school drama, makes his classmates lose their appetite and seek other tables in the cafeteria. He (completely understandably) bursts into tears when Professor Ross exposes the wave as a hoax, spelling his return to the role of class whipping boy. Our school’s mission of ethics prevented us from teasing our red-haired peers, but ‘Robert’ provided a sterling reminder that they were fundamentally icky.

Fourteen years later, The Wave and the way its message was co-opted by my school seem far more insidious. That the dangers of fascism can be reduced to an after-school special is offensive or sort of amusing depending on your angle of viewing. As a 12 year-old, it’s a little difficult to wrap your head around the horrors of National Socialism when they’re presented in what amounts to a glorified episode of Beverly Hills 90210 (although I think we can agree that Ian Ziering would have made a fabulous member of a modern-day Hitler youth movement). How can you not giggle when ‘David,’ the school jock tells his girlfriend, ‘Laurie,’ to “stop writing those articles and keep your mouth shut about the wave!” Really, Laurie, what’s your damage?

Ultimately, The Wave is just a clumsy morality tale disguised as a history lesson: always follow the beat of your own drum and never succumb to the will of the group, be they a gang of German fascists or a posse of preppy white kids with side parts and cable sweaters. How an institution devoted to fine-tuning its students’ moral compass can couch the brutality of the holocaust in a fable about the importance of being yourself is less explicable.

Jacob Sugarman is the senior contributor to This Recording. He last wrote in these pages about A Serious Man.

"I Felt The Chill Before The Winter Came" - Elvis Costello (mp3)

"My All Time Doll" - Elvis Costello (mp3)

"How Deep Is The Red?" - Elvis Costello (mp3)

"Red Cotton" - Elvis Costello (mp3)

In Which The Coen Brothers Return As Serious Men

A Goy Walks into a Dentist’s Office

by JACOB SUGARMAN

Since the 1984 release of their neo-Western, Blood Simple, the Coen brothers have made a career of ironic detachment and outright snark. Even their finest films are marked by an irksome air of superiority towards their characters, viewers and mankind in general. As David Denby observes in his New Yorker feature, “Killing Joke,” the Coens are “masters of chaos, but one still has the feeling that, out there on the road from nowhere to nowhere, they are rooting for it rather than against it. Their latest, A Serious Man, is hardly a Whitmanesque celebration of human potential, but it constitutes their funniest and most affecting offering since the stoner classic, The Big Lebowski.

The film centers on helpless schlemiel, Larry Gopnik, a Jewish physics professor at an anonymous, mid-western university whose life has spiraled out of control. His wife is leaving him for Sy Abelman, an unctuous windbag that looks like a Hebrew yeti; his son, Danny, smokes too much pot and busts Larry’s chops when the TV reception of F-Troop is fuzzy; his daughter, like so many pubescent Jewesses, compulsively washes her hair and pleads for a nose job; and last but not least, his deadbeat brother spends his days lying around the house with a suction devise to aspirate a cyst on his neck. If life with the Jewish Adams family wasn’t miserable enough, Larry’s being blackmailed by a dimwitted student and his tenure application has been jeopardized by several anonymous letters that characterize him as a man of poor moral fiber. In short, he’s fercockt.

Like The Book of Job, A Serious Man follows its protagonist’s quest for wisdom from his friends and colleagues—or in the case of Larry, a cadre of nitwit rabbis. Each offers advice more mystifying than the last, the most memorable of which belongs to Rabbi Nachtner, played with aplomb by George Wyner. Nachtner spins a yarn that owes more to the fiction of Woody Allen than the Torah or the Old Testament.

The story goes something like this: a Jewish dentist named Sussman is giving a check-up to a man described only as “the Goy” when he discovers several Hebrew letters carved into the back of his lower teeth. Together, they spell out the phrase, “help me.” Is this a sign from Hashem that the dentist must offer his aid to this man, or perhaps all men in need? The discovery shakes Sussman to his core and he begins rifling through his patient records for further messages. After a few weeks of anxious hand-wringing, however, he abandons his pursuit for the day-to-day routine of dentistry and domestic life. So much for burning bushes.

What does this have to do with Larry’s tenure application and his impending divorce? Not a damn thing and therein lies the metaphysical weight of A Serious Man; life is a tale of Jewish dentists and goyish teeth, signifying nothing. No sooner does their protagonist’s luck start to change then the Coens, presiding over the narrative like their own vengeful Yahweh, hit the viewer over the head with a chair like The Ultimate Warrior in a WWF Battle Royale. Either we're alone in the universe, subject to the cruelties of the absurd, or we’re at the mercy of a sadistic God who will punish us despite our best efforts to pay our taxes, feed the goldfish and do our homework--to behave like serious men. Hashem, if he does exist, is the town bully chasing Danny down for a $20 debt. As the film’s final scene reveals, he always collects.

However grim a vision of the universe its filmmakers present, A Serious Man is levied by the pitch-perfect performances of its lead players and the Coens’ irreverent humor. Danny’s stoned-out torah reading easily vaults the Star Wars theme-party in Deconstructing Harry as the greatest bar-mitzvah sequence in film history.

These films are so arch and stylized that they can grow distracting when they feature movie stars like Brad Pitt or Catherine Zeta-Jones. With a cast of unknowns and semi-recognizable character actors, the viewer doesn’t have to peel through too many layers of disbelief. Most importantly, the film represents its directors' first venture into their personal history and religious ancestry. Raised on the Great Plains by Minnesotan academics, Joel and Ethan were little Gopniks once too, lighting up and fighting their sister for access to the bathroom. Coen Brothers’ characters always verge on caricature, but there’s an undercurrent of affection in their depiction of these chosen misfits that’s so often lacking in their other movies. A Serious Man cements the Coens’ place in the continuum of great Jewish auteurs and offers proof positive that even Hashem affords the occasional mitzvah.

Jacob Sugarman is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in Manhattan. He last wrote in these pages about Michael Jackson.

"Before You Leave" - Mary Gauthier (mp3)

"Between the Daylight And The Dark" - Mary Gauthier (mp3)

"Can't Find the Way" - Mary Gauthier (mp3)

In Which We've Been Struck By A Smooth Criminal

Through the Looking Glass

by JACOB SUGARMAN

What Michael Jackson has achieved is a tribute to 20 years of hard work, energy and a tireless dedication. (His) success is an American dream come true.

Such was Ronald Reagan’s message to the public during Jackson's visit to the White House in 1984 — a fitting tribute to our country’s most spectacularly decadent entertainer from a president who presided over arguably the most decadent eight years in our nation’s history.

Yet judging from the orgy of sorrow that has enveloped the country since the singer's death, Reagan’s words might just as easily serve as his eulogy. Together we’ve chosen to celebrate his musical achievements unabashedly rather than confront his lunacy of the past 20 years.

What we're loath to admit is that his weirdness was essential to his appeal. Much as we’d like to compartmentalize the billboard-topping hits from his disturbing, private behavior, the two are inextricably braided into Jackson’s personal narrative. To try and understand the man who would be king, one need look no further than the 1988 film, Moonwalker, a work of meta-fiction that offers its viewer a window into the mind of its star and a prescient glimpse of his psychological collapse.

Penned by Jackson with the aid of David Newman and released in conjunction with the debut of his album, Bad, Moonwalker is part acid-infused autobiography, part paranoiac science fiction of Philip K. Dickian proportions. We open with Jackson performing the song, “Man in the Mirror,” to crowds of adoring fans, the film subtly announcing itself as a form of self-portrait. What follows is a kaleidoscopic collection of images from Jackson's youth displayed on 60's and 70's style TV sets, the suggestion being that the Jackson 5 were beamed into the American conscience via satellite.

But peel away its glitzy presentation and your left with a montage that presents Jackson's childhood as a fragmented, televised event. Chief among these clips is a video of young Michael eulogizing his pet rodent in a performance of "Ben." In a recent interview with Details, Producer Quincy Jones notes that he gave Jackson the song, "She's Out of My Life," because he: "just wanted to hear him deal with a romantic relationship with a human being rather than a rat...I wanted to hear him get in touch with a real human relationship."

Jackson's quasi-autobiographical feature suggests that Jones' wish may have gone unfulfilled. After a brief detour through the hits of Thriller, the director lands his camera on Michael’s inimitable leather boots. But these shoes belong instead to Brandon Quintin Adams, who’s credited in the movie as "Zeke 'Baby Bad' Michael." Zeke's footwear, in turn, cues a shot by shot remake of the music video for “Bad” with children cast in the rolls of each dancer.

With the benefit of hindsight, this seems like a transparent expression of Jackson’s desire to recapture the youth he never really had. And because show business is the only universe he has ever known, even his wish fulfillment fantasies assume the shape of a music video.

If the re-imagined video, “Badder,” foreshadows the more insidious manifestations of Jackson’s Peter Pan syndrome, then the music videos for “Speed Demon” and “Leave Me Alone,” both stitched into Moonwalker’s larger narrative, suggest he may have suffered from a pronounced form of persecution complex.

In the former, a collection of fiendish, claymation journalists, paparazzi and autograph-seeking fans chase Jackson from the real-life streets and highways of Los Angeles to a cartoon desert landscape. There he finds a few moments peace dancing with his costume cum alter ego, 'Spike,' a motorcycle-riding rabbit, only to have a police officer ticket him for dancing in a no moonwalking zone.

While the initial impulse may be to dismiss the video as pure kitsch, it’s revealing to watch Jackson eschew the real for the imagined, particularly in lieu of his self-exile to the phantasmagoric Neverland ranch. Equally significant is his willingness to radically transform his appearance to escape the dogged scrutiny of his fans, only to have that transformation take on a life of its own. Is this an instance of Jackson’s art imitating life or vice versa?

This sense of doggedness is actualized in the video for “Leave Me Alone” as a group of menacing hounds dressed like button men from a 40’s-style gangster movie chase the singer across the Neverland theme park and the singer’s imagination. It’s dark inside Michael’s head; think Dante meets Monty Python.

After riding his rollercoaster car through a set of gnashing teeth, Jackson enters a universe of carnival barkers, wild animals, fractured images of Elizabeth Taylor as well as the bones of the Elephant Man, with whom he also shares a few dance moves. It’s unclear whether Jackson is poking fun at the media’s fascination with his strange proclivities or embracing his newly forged identity as a social outcast and grotesque. Over the course of the ride, he splashes his viewers with newspaper headlines both real and imagined—“Michael’s Cosmetic Nose Surgery,” “Michael Confides to Pet Chimp,” “Michael Weds Alien.”

The video ends as the Neverland ranch collapses in a heap, the singer emerging from his slumber like the hero from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, freeing himself from the Lilliputians visible only to his mind’s eye. Midway through, the film abruptly shifts from personal videology to narrative fiction, perhaps belying its star’s own conflation of fantasy with reality.

Like the music videos that precede it, the defining mood in this segment of “Moonwalker” is paranoia. In its very first scene, Jackson exits his brownstone apartment to a hail of machine gun fire from a futuristic, para-military outfit. Why? Because Jackson and pre-adolescent 'Katie' (Kellie Parker) have stumbled upon ‘Mr. Big’s’ (Joe Pesci) plot to hook the world’s youth on drugs. Where to begin? There’s the Lewis Carroll-like sequence in which Jackson and his ward (?) enter the haunted woods. It’s uncertain whether the viewer is meant to view Jackson as this story’s ‘Alice’ or a strange creature from Wonderland, but either way, he’s managed to find his way down the rabbit hole.

Then there’s the villain, Mr. Big, whose violent tendencies towards children might reflect Jackson’s own feelings about his tyrannical father, Joe — the same man who when asked by a CNN reporter how he and his family were dealing with Michael's death, tenderly replied: "we just lost the biggest superstar in the world." Perhaps most telling, though, are the ways in which Michael’s body mutates to escape and ultimately vanquish his pursuers.

Jackson transforms into his very own autobat —a flying space ship that destroys Mr. Big’s army in a blaze of fire. Watching his features assume a metallic glow, his kinky hair straightening in a pool of mercury, you can almost see the synthetic creature into which he’d metamorphose.

As cultural artifacts like this film reveal, the seeds of Jackson's self-destruction were sewn long ago; his passing was simply the final headline in a life turned spectacle and the realization of our celebrity-obsessed culture’s basest, most voyeuristic desires.

For all intents and purposes, the music star whose fedora and sparkling glove helped launch Music Television in the 1980s has been dead now for some time. But as we pore over his public and private history, let’s try to remember that the pop God on display in Moonwalker and the mere mortal recently laid to rest were one and the same. 

Jacob Sugarman is a contributor to This Recording. He last wrote in these pages about Robert Mitchum.

"Remember the Time" — Michael Jackson (mp3)

"I Just Can't Stop Loving You" — Michael Jackson (mp3)

"The Girl Is Mine" — Michael Jackson (mp3)