Month: August 2011

I think I know the answer to David’s question yesterday — I would suggest that there has never been a pivot at all. They don’t believe in pivots. The administration maintains the same attitude so widely admired in the campaign — it refuses to let whatever’s happening in the moment change their strategy. They make a plan and never deviate regardless of the circumstances unless it is entirely obstructed and they are forced to veer from their course.

The administration’s overarching strategy for governance has always been conciliation. I think it is a surprise that it is conciliation at all costs, but they have never been shy about saying they are conciliators by nature and intent. And there should be nothing surprising about deficit hysteria —-it was the plan since before the inauguration in January 2009:

Obama’s anti-ideological talk is not just a vehicle for progressive inclinations but the real deal. Obama regularly offers three telltale notions that will define his presidency — if events allow him to define it himself: “sacrifice,” “grand bargain” and “sustainability.”To listen to Obama and his budget director Peter Orszag is to hear a tale of long-term fiscal woe. The government may have to spend and cut taxes in a big way now, but in the long run, the federal budget is unsustainable.That’s where sacrifice kicks in. There will be signs of it in Obama’s first budget, in his efforts to contain health-care costs and, down the road, in his call for entitlement reform and limits on carbon emissions. His camp is selling the idea that if he wants authority for new initiatives and new spending, Obama will have to prove his willingness to cut some programs and reform others.The “grand bargain” they are talking about is a mix and match of boldness and prudence. It involves expansive government where necessary, balanced by tough management, unpopular cuts — and, yes, eventually some tax increases. Everyone, they say, will have to give up something.Only such a balance, they argue, will win broad support for what Obama wants to do, and thus make his reforms “sustainable,” the other magic word — meaning that even Republicans, when they eventually get back to power, will choose not to reverse them.

There’s been no pivot. It’s been a straight line from the very beginning. The rhetoric’s exactly the same as it was the week before the inauguration. And to the extent they’ve changed it’s only in some snall details — carbon pricing, for instance, has been jettisoned in return for asking for a tax on corporate jets.

I get that it seems baffling that the administration wouldn’t be more flexible in the face of changing circumstances, particularly when it comes to something as major as this ongoing economic crisis, but that does appear to me to be the case here.

Brad DeLong, who presumably has access to the thinking at the upper levels of the administration wrote this the other day:

Back at the end of 2008, our questions (at least my questions) were: “What if the downturn is bigger than we currently think it will be? What if worries about a jobless recovery and the absence of labor-market mean-reversion turn out to be true? What if–as has happened in the past–this financial crisis turns into sovereign crises and the world economy gets hit by additional shocks? Then your polices will not be bold enough. What is Plan B?” And the answers were all along the lines of:

You are a pessimist. We are already doing unprecedented things to stabilize the economy–and odds are that in a year we will be worrying about inflation and unwinding the stimulus rather than about unemployment.

Obama is genuinely post-partisan, and won’t have anything like the trouble Clinton had negotiating with Republicans: our policies will evolve as the situation evolves.

Back in the late summer of 2009, our questions (or at least my questions) were: “You aren’t getting any cooperation from Republicans–they appear to have doubled down on the Gingrich-Dole strategy that you win the next election by making the Democratic President a failure. The economy really needs more stimulus. What are you going to do? Isn’t it time to use the President’s powers more aggressively–to use Fed appointment powers and the Treasury’s TARP authority and Reconciliation to do major stimulus?” And the answers were:

We are doing all that we can.

This is really hard.

Things will probably still work out all right.

If worst comes to worst, we will trade long-run budget balance via a spending cut-heavy package of long-run spending cuts and tax increases for short-term stimulus to get us out of the short-term unemployment mess.

Hippie punching.

By the late summer of 2010, our questions (or at least my questions) were: “You are in a total war with the Republican Party. They aren’t giving you anything. It is time to seriously push the envelope of executive authority to put policies in place that will reduce unemployment.” And the answers were:

The best policy is to achieve long-run fiscal discipline so that the confidence fairy will show up.

Hippie punching.

And now it is the late summer of 2011. Our big question still is: how is Obama going to use executive branch authority to reduce unemployment? There are lots of options: adjourn congress and do some recess appointments to get the Federal Reserve more engaged in actually pursuing its dual mandate, quantitative easing via the Treasury Department, shifting Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from their do-nothing position by giving them a microeconomic stabilization mission, talking about how a weak dollar is in America’s interest.

And this time what I am hearing back is only:

Hippie punching.

It is difficult to read this in any way but as a group of people inside a bunker who (1) have been wrong about the situation, (2) are scared to use the powers they have to try to make things better, and (3) really do not like being reminded that they were wrong about the situation.

That seems to me to mean that the Obama administration right now has one and only one macroeconomic policy idea: hope that the country gets lucky.

I suspect that’s right. Economic disaster wasn’t in the original plan and they just don’t have the capacity or desire to change course. After all, the 2008 campaign was allegedly the apotheosis of human organizational achievement because they ignored all “distractions.” It proved their strategic brilliance. Why ever “pivot”?

I’m being glib. But I do think they have stuck to their plan because they are essentially control freaks who think they can mold the world to their vision of what they want it to be instead of recognizing and adapting to changing circumstances. What that adds up to in reality is “hope the country gets lucky.”

Two Unrelated Stories

by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)

The Obama Administration is once again showing their appreciation for the common man and rule of law:

Eric T. Schneiderman, the attorney general of New York, has come under increasing pressure from the Obama administration to drop his opposition to a wide-ranging state settlement with banks over dubious foreclosure practices, according to people briefed on discussions about the deal.

In recent weeks, Shaun Donovan, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and high-level Justice Department officials have been waging an intensifying campaign to try to persuade the attorney general to support the settlement, said the people briefed on the talks.

Mr. Schneiderman and top prosecutors in some other states have objected to the proposed settlement with major banks, saying it would restrict their ability to investigate and prosecute wrongdoing in a variety of areas, including the bundling of loans in mortgage securities.

In other news, Democrats are having a hard time getting motivated to vote for some reason:

There’s been plenty of bad news for Barack Obama this month in the form of his approval numbers, but our polling finds that his problems go deeper than that. Democratic enthusiasm about voting in next year’s election has hit a record low this month.

Only 48% of Democrats on our most recent national survey said they were ‘very excited’ about voting in 2012. On the survey before that the figure was 49%. Those last two polls are the only times all year the ‘very excited’ number has dipped below 50%.

In 13 polls before August the average level of Democrats ‘very excited’ about voting next year had averaged 57%. It had been as high as 65% and only twice had the number even dipped below 55%.

It had seemed earlier in the year like Democrats had overcome the ‘enthusiasm gap’ that caused so much of their trouble in last year’s elections. But now 54% of Republicans say they’re ‘very excited’ about casting their ballots next year, indicating that the problem may be back.

The debt deal really does appear to have demoralized the base, and the weird thing about it is that this is one issue where if Obama had done what folks on the left wanted him to do, he also would have had the support of independents. The deal has proven to be a complete flop in swing states where we’ve polled it like Colorado, North Carolina, and Ohio. And in every single one of those states a majority of voters overall, as well as a majority of independents, think new taxes are going to be needed to solve the deficit problem.

Nobody panic or anything, though. The country wants to look forward, not backward, and what Americans really want is more compromise, not accountability. The people at the top know what they’re doing, so no need for

Deficit hysteria

by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)

Dave Dayen has a must-read post again today:

I might pinpoint the source of the problem a bit earlier – the pivot to the deficit occurred with the 2010 State of the Union, when the first Catfood Commission was enacted. That started to move public opinion and focus media attention on deficits, at a time when the economy was still weak. But in general, this is correct. We’re having the wrong conversation. And we’ve been having it for some time. You could argue that having this argument squarely on GOP turf led to their sweep of the 2010 midterms, ensuring that the conversation and the policy outcomes would tilt in this direction for at least the next two years.

So when you read that this could be one of the longest and most difficult recessions in history, and that it’s due to the “unusual nature” of the financial meltdown, essentially the Ken Rogoff/Carmen Reinhart “This Time Is Different” analysis, understand that such an analysis ignores the self-inflicted wounds from Washington at a time when the economy could have been revitalized. We have a demand problem, and government didn’t do what was necessary to boost that demand. What’s more, to the extent that this is a balance sheet recession (and it is), reducing household debt, particularly through the largest source of such debt, mortgages, would be the appropriate response, and yet the housing policies have been utterly useless if not actively harmful. You can talk about structural factors, the particular past performance of financial crises, and what have you. Government had the ability to fix this – at the absolute least ameliorate this – and they chose not to.

In short, there is no deficit that cannot be plugged except for our political deficit. It sustains the defeatism of years of no growth, stagnant wages, high unemployment. The political tendency toward right-wing and corporatist policy ideas over the past 30 years, tied up with the cost of running campaigns, the failure of traditional media, the conservative movement’s public relations machinery, has widened that political deficit between what government can provide and what it will provide.

Continuing this morning’s theme, again this is a failure of leadership from the White House to even try to have the right conversation about what needs to be done.

The point here is not to endlessly criticize the President, nor is it to ignore the very real constraints placed on him by the right wing propaganda infrastructure and the Republican House, as well as his need to look forward to re-election in 2012 with independent voters who are wary of “government spending” and desirous of “compromise.”

It may be that between the S&P shakedown and the GOP House’s willingness to take the entire economy hostage, some version of austerity was necessary, and that a real jobs program in the wake of the 2010 elections would not have been possible. The counterargument by Administration defenders against Krugman and progressives is that we lack the political savvy to understand what is politically possible given realities in Washington. That we’re political rookies, so to speak.

But let’s say the defenders of the Administration are right on the political realities of the situation. That doesn’t mean the President had to embrace austerity with open arms. He could just as easily have laid out his jobs program and his desire to put America to work, while warning about the effects austerity would have. He could have called out House Republicans for taking the country hostage, and made clear that he was signing austerity measures under duress. He could have demanded real concessions in exchange for the austerity measures put in place.

We’ve all been stuck in no-win situations before, where our only options are bad or worse because our hands are being forced by others. Smart people know that the way to handle those situations is to get everything we can out of the bad deal, while making it clear that it isn’t how we would have preferred to handle it. When things go wrong, we make clear why they went wrong, and hopefully we get more leeway to make the right choices next time. This is basic politics–and not just Washington politics. It’s basic family politics, office politics, organizational politics.

But the Administration didn’t do that. It chose to embrace austerity. Even if austerity was inevitable, the embrace of austerity was an unnecessary slap to the face of the progressive base, of intelligent followers of Keynes’ economic ideas, and of working people everywhere, while doing little to shore up the President’s credibility with independents or feed the confidence fairy in the markets.

The reason that many progressives are so over the top in suggesting that the Administration is corrupted and acting in bad faith is because it’s an easy answer to a hard question: what is going through the heads of the policy and political advisers at the White House? The embrace of austerity seems so basically stupid from both a policy and political standpoint that people looking in on the situation from the outside are left with either corruption or weakness as an answer.

If there’s some brilliant strategy involved here, perhaps it’s time White House advisers shared it with the rest of us.

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Gaddafi going

by digby

You can follow the (apparently imminent) fall of Gaddafi on AlJazeera.com, if you don’t have access on your cable:

The latest from Reuters:

Muammar Gaddafi’s government is ready for immediate negotiations with rebels seeking to oust him, and has asked NATO to convince the rebel forces to halt an attack on Tripoli, a spokesman said on state television on Sunday.

I suppose what comes next is the big question.

The world will mourn the loss of this particular violent dictator’s ridiculous costumes if nothing else.

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Jobs schmobs

by digby

Well here’s a shock. We know that after a year of shrieking about deficits, if Democrats propose anything that might actually create jobs the Republicans will have a hissy fit They don’t care about the suffering of the people and they only believe in Keynesian economics to the extent they can use it to keep anyone from raising taxes on the filthy rich.

And it turns out that even if President Obama proposes conservative programs they won’t be the right kind of conservative:

Following a few dismal weeks on Wall Street and talk of a double-dip recession, President Obama will soon announce a new jobs plan that is expected to include an extension of payroll tax cuts, new revenue for transportation projects and an extension of emergency unemployment benefits for the 9.1 percent of Americans who still can’t find a job. Obama’s campaign advisor, David Axelrod, said on Sunday that there’s nothing in the proposal “that reasonable people shouldn’t be able to agree on” — but many fired-up Republicans are already preparing to reject whatever the President puts on the table.

“This is the seventh or eighth or ninth time we’ve heard the president talk about producing a plan,” Republican strategist Karl Rove said on Fox News Sunday. “And each time that he’s gotten around to tossing an idea out on the table, it has included only more spending, more deficit, more debt and the American people are fed up with it.”

If people still think the Republicans aren’t making the case that deficit reduction will result in more jobs, they need to listen a little bit more carefully.

The GOP is also coming out against extending the payroll tax cuts. Yes, I know that takes some special chutzpah considering that they have made the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy a sacred cause. But giving tax breaks to workers will cost

“It’s always a net positive to let taxpayers keep more of what they earn,” Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) told the AP, “but not all tax relief is created equal for the purposes of helping to get the economy moving again.”

Rep. David Camp (R-Mich.), chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, said he also opposed the 12-month tax cut because it would cost the government about $120 billion next year if it were renewed.

I’d laugh if I I didn’t think they will get away with it. After all, nobody’s making a coherent case for anything so why should they even try to make sense? Axelrod called them hypocrites, which I’m sure was very painful for them to hear. But in the end, we’re left with an argument between Democrats as to which tax cuts are preferable at the same time they are both saying the looming deficit is the greatest threat the world has ever known. And Democrats are complicating this even more by insisting that we also must “invest” for the future. I think they’ll have to forgive the average person for not understand what the hell they are all going on about.

And as for the inevitable critics who say that i’m being cruel and unfeeling by saying that Republicans don’t care about the pain of the average person, get a load of this:

Republicans are also pushing back on Obama’s plan to extend emergency unemployment benefits. Gov. Bob McDonnell (R-Va.) said on Sunday that, while he would “consider” supporting the payroll tax cuts, he is less enthusiastic about unemployment insurance.

“I don’t think that creates jobs,” he said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “It lessens the pain. The problem is we need to have things that create jobs, not just promote benefits for people that are not working.”

The last thing you’d want to do is “lessen the pain” of the American people. Makes ’em weak. Maybe we could institute a prospective tax for these lazy malcontents, in which we bill them later for taxes they should have been paying when they were unemployed. It’s the least they can do to repay the largesse bestowed upon them by the job producers who are being asked to pay taxes even though they feel oh so uncertain about the future.

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Fergawdsakes:

Who, exactly, do the Democrats hope to have vote for them in the next election? For the moment, billionaires only get one vote.

Supposedly, the nation’s corporate CEOs are all holding on to their huge profits because they are “uncertain” about the economy. But the real problem is that all these budget slashers are making average Americans uncertain, worried about whether or not they’re going to have jobs and health care and social security. I think you can forgive people for feeling a little insecure when everyone in public life is calling for more sacrifice and “skin in the game” and constantly saying “everything’s on the table.” You’d be a fool not to hang on to every penny you have in a world that seems to be ever more dystopian.

They are making the wrong argument. I’ll let Rick Perlstein explain:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Chris, forget the word left. Ronald Reagan, let’s quote him. “There is no left and right. There`s only up or down.” Up for the middle class means some kind of protection of their economic interests. I mean, Obama is worried that if he talks about this stuff, he`s going to sound divisive. History suggests that people who talk about this stuff aren’t divisive. They’re uniters. I mean, look at — look at Franklin Roosevelt. This is the guy who said the kind of stuff you — you heard in that clip. This is also the guy who built the strongest, the biggest, the most diverse political coalition in American history, and then he united the whole country to defeat Hitler. The idea that talking about malefactors of great wealth, about — about people who are taking away the birthright of every American, is going to make people think that you`re somehow creating class war, history doesn’t suggest it. It`s just not there in the record. This is the kind of stuff that makes people feel that the Democratic Party is on their side, that Democratic leaders are going to lay down the tracks for their interests

If you listen to our current leaders you’d assume that the real malefactors of wealth are the moochers who are ruining the country with their expensive illnesses and lavish old age pensions. The enemy, according to Democrats like Warner, are veterans who are unwilling to lay down in the tracks for the interests of Wall Street.

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Slouching toward Weimar

by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)

John Cole takes a brief look at the criminal corruption within Moody’s and asks the relevant question:

Again, I am not a lawyer, but what exactly has to happen before this stuff falls under RICO. How is this not an organized crime situation?

It is an organized crime situation. The SEC covering up Wall St. crimes for 10 years pretty much qualifies as an act of organized crime. Goldman’s big short on products it was selling as high-quality investments to its clients qualifies as an act of organized crime. The attempt to settle the MERS fraud for pennies on the dollar qualifies as at least organized pseudo-criminality. Heck, the circumstances of the entire bank bailout itself above and beyond the official TARP monies is a story of probable criminal behavior by itself. Matt Taibbi has been documenting Wall St. organized crime for years now.

Ultimately, what defenders of the Obama Administration have to understand is that the refusal to hold even a single one of these criminals to account for their actions (much less the organizations themselves) has been the most damaging decision the Administration has made both with the progressive base and with independents. One can argue the motives for that decision until the cows come home (be it corruption, lack of political power, a desire to instill confidence in a rocky financial system on the brink of collapse, etc.), but in the end it doesn’t matter.

The American public knows that something is deeply, deeply wrong with the system. We have seen three consecutive wave elections, which is unprecedented in modern American politics. What that means is that people are lashing out, looking for answers from someone. Anyone.

Somebody is to blame for the fact that the system is broken. Not just the political system as President Obama is keen to emphasize, but the economic and social system as well. Not everyone is clear on who broke it, why or how, and the effect of rightwing propaganda on a wide swath of the public is immense. As Digby has often noted, compromise is difficult because most of the public is divided between two very different theories of how society should be organized, and who precisely is responsible for the problems in it. But what both sides can generally agree on is that someone is responsible. This mess isn’t happening on its own, and it’s not happening because elites in Washington just aren’t chummy enough with each other like they used to be. The American people on both the left and the right know better than that. Maybe a few low-information swing state independents haven’t quite caught on yet (another reason the national popular vote act would have a positive impact on democracy), but even they’re more aware of how broken the system is than pollsters would have us believe.

If the President in his desire to be the Compromiser in Chief doesn’t point a finger at those responsible for the mess, the public won’t just give up and forget about the crime. They’ll find a scapegoat instead. Ultimately, someone will be punished for the destruction of the middle class in America, and the punishment will be as severe as the crime–whether it falls on the head of the guilty or not.

This sort of situation is the wellspring from which fascist movements originate. In the 1930s FDR saved capitalism and prevented America from falling to the same temptations as Germany and Italy by placing the blame on big business and monied interests as appropriate, rather than on racial and religious minorities.

Perhaps Barack Obama will win re-election in 2012, and perhaps he won’t. Certainly, whoever ends up as his Republican opponent will be even less likely to hold Wall St. accountable than the President has been. And they will do untold damage besides. Allowing the likes of Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann to stride into the Oval Office is not an option.

But either way, the failure to hold this class of organized criminals to account has weakened not only the President and the Democratic Party, but also American democracy itself. By attempting to paper over criminal behavior in the interest of bipartisan compromise and corporate investment, President Obama is only making the day of reckoning that much more ferocious down the road, and endangering the very vulnerable people who are likely to make the easiest scapegoats for a scared and angry citizenry led by the Pied Piper of Fox News.

Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt knew what had to be done in this situation. One can only hope that Barack Obama and his advisers will learn from history before it’s too late to save the country.

Saturday Night At the Movies

Double Feature: Criterion peddles Kubrick’s noir cycle

By Dennis Hartley

“I like a slow start, the start that goes under the audience’s skin and involves them so that they can appreciate grace notes and soft tones and don’t have to be pounded over the head with plot points and suspense hooks.”-Stanley Kubrick

To someone completely unfamiliar with the oeuvre of Stanley Kubrick (and they do exist, dear reader…I’ve met a few), a cursory glance at his career stats (13 movies in 46 years; including one that has essentially been relegated to the dustbins of history) might prompt some head-scratching bewilderment as to what all the fuss is about concerning his purported impact on the medium and continuing influence on countless other filmmakers. But you know the funny thing about great artists. They are defined by the quality of their work, not the quantity (it’s easy to forget that James Dean only starred in 3 feature films). Indeed, a lot of filmmakers (alive or dead) should be so lucky to have but one entry in their entire catalog that could hold a candle to, say, a Paths of Glory. Or a Spartacus. Or a Lolita. Or Dr. Strangelove. Or something like 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, or Full Metal Jacket. Even Stanley Kubrick on a relatively “off” day (The Shining, Eyes Wide Shut) handily blows the majority of current titles playing at the multiplex out of the water (i.e., technically, artistically and aesthetically speaking).

Granted, when compared to his subsequent work, Kubrick’s $40,000 (independently financed) 1953 feature debut Fear and Desire, does, I fear, leave much to be desired from a narrative standpoint; but everybody has to start somewhere. That being said, the film (shot, edited and post-synched by Kubrick and scripted by his poet friend, Howard O. Sackler) does feature many masterfully composed shots that hint at the then 25 year-old Kubrick’s already highly developed visual aesthetic. As he gained cachet over the years, Kubrick did his best to distance himself from the film, famously suppressing any attempts at revival showings (allegedly even hunting down any locatable prints and destroying them). A rare public screening in Los Angeles last fall has created some internet buzz that a restoration and long-awaited DVD could be in the works; but in the meantime we’re stuck with a blurry YouTube posting (the only version I’ve ever found).

Some much better news for Kubrick completists (guilty) arrived earlier this week in the guise of Criterion’s “2-fer” reissue of the director’s second and third films (previously unavailable in Blu-ray editions), Killer’s Kiss (1955) and The Killing (1956). The latter film gets star billing on the package, and the former is “demoted” to one of the supplements on the disc; but it’s still great to see both of these early Kubrick gems receiving Criterion’s traditionally fastidious “clean-up” and supplementation (MGM’s SD issues have been available for several years, but were “bare bones” editions with so-so transfers). These two films also represent Kubrick’s own sort of mini noir cycle. The most renowned of the pair, The Killing, is considered by many to be the director’s first “proper” film, as it was his first with well-known actors and to reach a sizable audience. This was also Kubrick’s first adaptation from a book (from Lionel White’s Clean Break). Legendary pulp writer Jim Thompson was enlisted to work on the screenplay (according to a supplemental interview on the Criterion disc with poet-author Robert Polito, Thompson never forgave the director for the “screenplay by Stanley Kubrick, with additional dialog by Jim Thompson” billing given him in the credits, when it was Thompson who reportedly contributed the lion’s share of original dialog to the script).

The Killing (nicely shot by DP Lucien Ballard, renowned in later years for his work with Sam Peckinpah) is a pulpy, taut 94-minute noir that extrapolates on the “heist gone awry” model pioneered six years earlier in John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle. Kubrick even nabbed one of the stars from Huston’s film, Sterling Hayden, to be his leading man. Hayden plays the mastermind, Johnny Clay (fresh out of stir) who hatches an elaborate plan to rob the day’s receipts from a horse track. He enlists a sizable team, including a couple of track employees (Elisha Cook, Jr. and Joe Sawyer), a wrestler (Kola Kwariani), a puppy-loving hit man (oddball character actor Timothy Carey-the John Turturro of his day) and of course, the requisite “bad” cop (Ted de Corsia). Being a cautious planner, Johnny keeps his accomplices in the dark about any details not specific to their particular assignments. Still, the plan has to go like clockwork; if any one player falters, the gig will collapse like a house of cards. However, as occurs in The Asphalt Jungle, it’s a scourge of human weaknesses (and the femme fatale of the piece, an entertainingly trashy Marie Windsor, as Elisha Cook, Jr.’s belligerent wife) that ultimately unravels the caper.

While certain venerable conventions of the heist film are faithfully adhered to in The Killing, it’s in the way Kubrick structures the narrative that sets it apart from other such genre films of the era. The initial introduction to each of the main characters, and the account of how each man’s part in the heist itself eventually plays out, are presented in a non-linear, Rashomon-style fashion. Kubrick also adds a semi-documentary feel by utilizing an omnipresent narrator. Playing with the timeline to build a network narrative-style crime caper may be cliché now, but was groundbreaking in 1956 (Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs is the best modern example of liberal “borrowing” from The Killing). I’m also pretty sure that Christopher Nolan was paying homage in his 2008 film The Dark Knight, which featured a heist scene with clown-masked bank robbers (in The Killing, a shotgun-wielding Sterling Hayden dons a clown mask to rob the track’s loot).

It’s been fashionable over the years for critics and film historians to marginalize Kubrick’s 1955 noir Killer’s Kiss as a “lesser” or “experimental” work by the director, but I beg to differ. The most common criticism leveled at the film is that it has a weak narrative. On this point, I tend to agree; it’s an original story and screenplay by Kubrick, who was a neophyte at screenwriting at that time (and with hindsight being 20/20, most of his best work was borne of literary adaptations). However, I wouldn’t say that the story is wholly uninvolving. It can be defined as simplistic (and at a 67 minute running time, plays out its plot points like, say, a weekly episode of a high-production value TV crime drama). But when you consider other elements (outside of story) that go into “classic” noir, like mood, atmosphere and the expressionistic use of light and shadow, I believe that Killer’s Kiss has all that in spades, and is one of the better noirs of the 1950s.

The film opens and closes in New York’s Penn Station, with the story’s protagonist, an anxious and furtive looking young boxer named Davey Gordon (Jamie Smith) providing a voiced-over flashback narrative as he recounts a rather eventful and life-changing week or so in his life. Naturally, there’s a beautiful woman involved (it’s a noir rule), and her name is Gloria (Irene Kane). In this case, she’s not a femme fatale, per se, but the quintessential “nice girl next door”. Okay, she is a private dancer, working at a 10 cents a whirl joint called “Pleasureland”. So she is a “nice girl” in the “what’s a nice girl like you doing working in a place like this?” kind of way. Davey and Gloria’s apartment windows face each other across an alleyway; we see them voyeuristically checking each other out in some early scenes (telegraphing to us that sooner or later, the two will be hooking up).

It is Gloria’s boss at the nightclub, a creepy, low-rent mobster sleaze named Vincent (Frank Silvera) who brings the dark elements to her life (and to the story). The two are in a relationship, about which the much older Vincent seems more enthused than Gloria (her behavior around him implies that she wants out but feels trapped). In one particularly sordid scene, Vincent yanks Gloria off the dance floor and makes her watch one of Davey’s boxing matches on TV (he knows that he lives in Gloria’s building). The violence seems to turn Vincent on, and he begins unceremoniously pawing at the reluctant Gloria (thankfully, Kubrick quickly fades to black). A few nights later, Davey hears a woman screaming. He sees Vincent assaulting Gloria, and dashes over to help her. Vincent also gets a good look at Davey before yanking Gloria’s shade down. By the time Davey gets to Gloria’s pad, Vincent has fled. Davey comforts her, and…you can guess the rest. Vincent’s jealously-fueled rage eventually puts their lives in great danger.

There are two things I find fascinating about this film. First, I marvel at how ‘contemporary’ it looks; somehow it doesn’t feel as dated as most films of the era (or perhaps it could indicate how forward-thinking Kubrick was in terms of technique). This is due in part to the naturalistic location photography, which serves as an immersive time capsule of New York City’s street life circa 1955 (in much the same way that Jules Dassin’s 1948 documentary-style noir, The Naked City preserves the NYC milieu of the late 1940s). I think it’s possible that Martin Scorsese may have studied this film before making Raging Bull, as there is an arresting similarity between the boxing scenes in both movies, particularly in the stylized manner that they are photographed, lit and edited.

Second, this was a privately financed indie, so Kubrick (who served as director, writer, photographer and editor) was not beholden to any studio expectations. Hence, he was free to play around a bit with filmmaking conventions of the time. Several scenes are eerily prescient of his future work. A dream sequence, shown in film negative, that features a sped-up tracking shot racing dizzily through Manhattan’s skyscraper canyons, immediately calls to mind the “beyond the infinite” sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey. And a climactic showdown between Davey and Vincent, set in a storage room full of naked store mannequins, takes a macabrely comic turn when they start whacking each other with plastic body parts, recalling the final confrontation between Humbert and Quilty amidst the discombobulated contents of the rundown mansion in Lolita, and to some degree, the scene in Clockwork Orange in which the ultra-violent Alex bludgeons one of his hapless victims to death with a comically oversized “sculpture” of a phallus.

(It’s a bit tough to follow that last bit of imagery with anything, other than to say that for Kubrick fanatics, Criterion’s new edition of these two gems is the reissue of the year!).

Previous posts with related themes:

My Obsession with Ida Lupino

Summer of Darkness

The Art of the Heist Caper

Tony Curtis/Arthur Penn Tribute

The American Assassin on Film

The Killer Inside Me

The Dark Knight

Climate economics

by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)

Record weather problems, record economic consequences:

The weather this year has not only been lousy, it has been as destructive in terms of economic loss as any on record.

Normally, three or four weather disasters a year in the United States will cause at least $1 billion in damages each. This year, there were nine such disasters. They included the huge snow dump in late January and early February on the Midwest and Northeast, the rash of tornadoes this spring across the Midwest and the more recent flooding of the Missouri and Souris Rivers. The disasters were responsible for at least 589 deaths, including 160 in May when tornadoes ripped through Joplin, Mo.

Meanwhile, Republicans nationwide have moved to reject climate science entirely:

The political discussion about global warming has lurched dramatically in four years — even as the scientific consensus has changed little. McCain’s 2007 description remains the scientific consensus: Human activity, including the burning of fossil fuels, is pumping carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and warming the planet.

But that scientific conclusion has become a lively point of debate in the GOP presidential campaign. Joining Perry on the skeptical side, for example, is Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), who suggested Wednesday that “manufactured science” underpins what a questioner called the “man-made climate-change myth.”

Good thing those Republicans are looking out for our economic well-being.

The key question is when the economic overlords decide to try to put their pet Tea Party monster back in the box in the interest of their own economic advantage.

But it may already be too late for that.