Ever since Donald Trump was first elected in 2016, people have been talking about the “two Americas.” Namely, the working class, poorly educated, white, xenophobic America that voted for Trump and the middle- and upper-class, highly educated, “elitist,” multi-cultural America that voted for Hillary Clinton (and, later, Kamala Harris).
This perception of two Americas—and, indeed, of a “cold” Civil War that is currently being waged between them—is warranted and realistic. America is more polarized than it has been since the 1860s, and there is a very real possibility of the country tearing itself apart (not militarily, I think, but politically, in the same way the USSR erased itself in 1990).
However, I’m not sure we are in a battle between two Americas, per se, as in one between two worldviews. In one worldview, America is under threat of racial dilution, socialist revolution, and religious transgression, all of which will create an evil, perverse America, which its adherents would rather be dead than live in. In the other world view, America is under threat of nascent Fascism, corporatism, kleptocracy, and the climate apocalypse that will inevitably result from all these things.
As usual, the Germans have a much better word for this: Weltanschauung, a term that encapsulates the philosophical and cognitive underpinnings that define a social group or generation (or both). As an English major in the 1980s, I was obliged to read Eustace M. Tillyard’s classic The Elizabethan World Picture, which explores the conscious and subconscious belief system of Britons in the time of Shakespeare. More recently, I read Robert O’Niell’s memoir The Operator, which recounts his years as a Navy Seal fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. In this book, he describes the weltanschauung of the Afghani locals whom he encountered, some of whom—quite literally—believed in dragons.
Well, it took us a while, but my great friend Margaret Luongo and I finally finished George Eliot’s Middlemarch! (Hey, give us a break–it’s almost 900 freakin pages long!)
Here is our discussion of the second half and heart-stopping conclusion of the book for our Read a Classic Novel…Together channel. And, guess what! We both agree that it’s a truly great book (and probably should have been LONGER!).
I learned many things from reading the excellent nonfiction book Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial? For instance, I learned that the Vatican has its own astronomical observatory, which is run, in part, by the authors, Guy Consolmagno and Paul Mueller. Both men are also Jesuits. (The current Pope, Francis, is also a Jesuit—that’s another thing I learned).
Now, I was raised Catholic, and I thought a knew a thing or two about the religion. But not only did I learn from this book that the Vatican has its own observatory, but that it has had one for hundreds of years. In fact, I was so taken by this discovery that I Googled “Vatican observatory” and, to my amazement, found that the Vatican also runs an observatory in Tucson, Arizona.
Talk about synchronicity! When I was twenty-two years old, I went off to attend grad school at the University of Arizona, in Tucson, and I distinctly remember the first night I spent there. I impressed by the size of the city—much larger than my little hometown of Gainesville, Florida—but also by how beautiful the desert sky was. Even in the downtown area, the stars were clearly visible. This was no accident; the city, I was told, purposely kept the streets relatively dark, in deference to the many astronomical observatories that surround the valley, which could not function if too much light pollution bled from the metro area.
Apparently, the Vatican’s observatory is one of them.
When most people think of the archetypal techno-thriller writer, they probably think of Tom Clancy. He didn’t invent the genre, but with the publication of his 1984 mega-hit The Hunt for Red October, he took it to a whole new level of mainstream popularity. Henceforth, the pop lit shelves in bookstores and airport gift shops across the countries would be filled with works by Clancy and an army of his imitators.
And why not? The techno-thriller novel combines aspects of several other genres, including “caper” fiction (a group of determined men taking on a seeming impossible mission), science fiction (the “techno” part is often so cutting-edge that it is more like sci-fi), mysteries (there is always a hidden bad guy in the mix), and, of course, thrillers (duh).
I kept thinking of The Hunt for Red October as I read an excellent history book recently, Codename Nemo: The Hunt for a Nazi U-Boat and the Elusive Enigma Machine by Charles Lachman. It recounts the fantastical story of a visionary naval captain, Daniel Gallery, who comes up with a hare-brained plan to capture a German U-boat. He developed the idea while stationed at a naval base in Iceland, seeing the damage that U-boats could wreak. He also learned how to sink them.
If you were to ask a music lover to name the most iconic pop band of the 1970s, their answer would probably be The Bee Gees. And they’d be right–mostly. For about three years, The Bee Gees bestrode the world like a collosus, leading the musical and cultural era that was disco.
But, for my money, it was the Electric Light Orchestra that most defined 70s pop. The creation of musical genius Jeff Lynne, E.L.O. was hit machine that cranked out gold records with regularity. Their songs were all over the radio here Gainesville, and their records were coveted.
And expensive. I remember looking at Out of Blue in the record store and was shocked to see that it was priced at $14.99. (This was back when ten bucks would get you a decent dinner in a real restaurant.)
My favorite E.L.O. song is, of course, “Turn to Stone”, which is the perfect fusion of pop and rock. Cinemaphiles will note that it was this song that P.T. Anderson ended his great film Boogie Nights with.
Back in the dot.com boom of the 1990s, I was lucky enough to work for an IT company based in New York City. I was a remote worker, writing software eight hours a day in my spare bedroom in Gainesville, Florida. It was a win-win situation. I got to work from home, and my bosses got a good developer for country-boy wages (and I was still in the same time zone).
Occasionally they would fly me to the city for a meeting and I would spend my evenings wandering the streets of Manhattan, which is surely the most beautiful and bewitching cities of the earth. My favorite spot is the Met. Like a lot of introverts, I love museums, and the Met is the greatest of them all. I mean, how many museums have their own Egyptian Temple? Indoors?
Once I spent an entire weekend roaming its halls, barely scratching the surface of its vast collections. I tend to gravitate toward the Modern period from the early- and mid-twentieth century. From guys like Matisse and Picasso all the way to Hopper and O’Keefe.
From a historical perspective, my interest stopped after that. I never much got the whole Post-Modern thing—Abstract Expressionism and all that. It seemed too theoretical. A joke that high-brow art critics had played on the rest of us, as Tom Wolfe wrote so wittily in The Painted Word.
I was born in the 1960s, which means I am among the first generation to grow up with color TV. This also means I am also among the first Americans who are able to see their past in color. Or, at least, the urban landscape of our past. Maybe that’s why I love old TV shows like The Rockford Files—shows with a lot of exterior shots of working class cities and suburbs from back then. Once in a while, Rockford will race through Los Angeles and there, flashing by in the background, a McDonald’s from 1976 will appear. Or maybe a Woolworth’s or a Wash King. (Yes, I do realize that most people have never heard of Woolworth’s or Wash King.)
These were the places I would visit with my parents when I was a kid, and it’s kind of neat to see them again, if only on a TV screen. Seeing them today, forty years later, I am often struck by how different the architecture was back then, especially the fast-food joints and coffee shops, many of which were getting on even when Rockford was in his prime. These vintage buildings from the 50s and 60s often had weird, playful curves and tilted walls, all of it stitched together at crazy angles. I remember one restaurant in particular that my mom used to take me to every weekend. It had plastic booths nestled under a rocket-red awning with trippy lights hanging down. It looked like something straight out of The Jetsons.
Anyone who follows this blog knows that my two primary obsessions are movies and history. So, you can imagine my excitement whenever I encounter that rare intersection of these two interests: a well-written film history book. And, still further within this category, there is the vaunted production-of-a-classic-movie book, which is a special favorite.
The supreme example of this sub-sub-sub-genre is Mark Harris’s Pictures at a Revolution, which recounts the making of not one film but four, all of which marked the changing nature of Hollywood—and America—at a specific moment in time, 1967. But if Harris’s book is the touchstone of this subject, then Sam Wasson’s The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood is a very close second. Put simply, I enjoyed the hell out of it.
Where Harris’s book describes the making of four movies, Wasson’s reveals the making of four men, the principal creators of Chinatown. These were the producer (Robert Evans), the screenwriter (Robert Towne), the director (Roman Polanski), and the star (Jack Nicholson).
Fifteen years ago I read Mark Harris’s excellent non-fiction book Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of New Hollywood. It recounts five movies that came out in 1968, a kind of annus mirabilis of American film, a pivot point in both cinema and culture when Hollywood reinvented itself for the better.
I was reminded of Mr. Harris’s book last night as I sat in a crowded IMAX theater watching Christopher Nolan’s vaunted new film, Oppenheimer. It is, of course, a terrific movie on almost every level: technically, visually, dramatically, and, yes, historically. Moreover, it marks the second very good movie I’ve seen in the last month (Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City was the other), and both films struck me as indications of turning-point in American movies, similar to the one Harris describes so beautifully. Both Asteroid City and Oppenheimer are gorgeous, inventive, and lyrica films—a dark, nostalgic kind of lyricism in the former, and a dark, horrific kind in the latter. Coming just a few years after the movie industry was declared dead during the COVID pandemic, this new wave of excellent films (I’m guessing Greta Gerwig’s Barbie will continue it) makes me hopeful that a new revolution is afoot.
Regarding Oppenheimer, I sat next to my son, Connor, who is also a film and history buff, and we were both mesmerized by the power of the film, but even more so by its cleverness. For a film based on a non-fiction source (Kai Bird’s fine biography of Oppenheimer, American Prometheus), Oppenheimer the movie feels like a fiction film. Unrelentingly tense and dramatic, it is almost free of exposition. Noland trusts the viewer to figure out what is going on in each scene, whether or not you’re familiar with the actual history.
I am, actually, familiar with it. I read Kai Bird’s book years ago and loved it. So, at one moment in the film when Oppenheimer reads from a sanskrit book and intones the words: “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” I knew that he is reading from the Hindu epic The Bhagavad Gita, and that these are the same words that would come to mind later as he witnesses the first nuclear test in the New Mexico desert. Part of Nolan’s genius, however, is to reframe this quote into a dramatic (um…actually erotic) scene, in which the character is having sweaty sex with his lover (the tormented Jean Tatlow, played with intelligence and verve by Florence Pugh). This is history done right. If you’re going to insert a famous quote by a famous man in a famous moment in history, you’re better off sneaking it into a steamy sex scene.
I don’t mean to brag—oh, who am I kidding; I totally mean to brag—but not only have I read Kai Bird’s book, I’ve read The Bhagavad Gita, too. And while I only read an English translation (unlike Oppenheimer), I gleaned enough meaning from it to know that it’s a story about a man who finds himself caught between duty and humanity, action and paralysis. Which strikes me as the central theme of Oppenheimer, too, both the man and the movie. Like Arjuna, the super-warrior hero of the Bhagavad Gita, who doesn’t want to go into battle against his friends, Oppenheimer was naturally reluctant to use his talents to create a bomb. But, from a moral and existential point-of-view, he finds himself trapped in a cosmic dilemma. As he explains to a friend at one point in the film, giving the Allies an atomic weapon would be dangerous, but giving the Nazis one would be apocalyptic.
But did he make the right choice? The question becomes even thornier when focused on the specific issue of how the bomb was first used, against Japan, an enemy that never had an atomic weapons program of its own and which was pretty much on the ropes by 1945. Personally, I have always found the question of whether or not America was right to drop the bomb on Japan to be mildly ridiculous. If we were fighting a war today in which hundreds of thousands of our soldiers had been killed fighting an implacable enemy, and if someone then told us, “We’ve got a bomb that will insert a colony of mutant spiders into country X, and those spiders will eat the face off everyone there, soldiers included,” I’d probably say, “Drop the friggin spiders.” This was essentially the decision Oppenheimer himself reached when advocating for the use of the bomb on Japan (an event he eventually celebrated, as is shown in the film’s most chilling scene).
But the best thing about Nolan’s film is that it never descends to this level of after-the-fact, arm-chair quarterbacking. Indeed, through Oppenheimer’s own hallucinations and fever dreams about a potential World War III, it makes clear that the decisions made in 1945—like the cosmic forces they unleashed—surpass ordinary human judgment, if not human understanding. Was Oppenheimer right to lobby for dropping the bomb? God knows. Perhaps not even Him.
Ash Clifton, Writer 