Within months of Donald Trump’s January 2017 inaugural address and the MAGA wave it represented, another wave arrived, crashing against screens big and small, with the kind of long-anticipated surrealist discernment only David Lynch could deliver. We would inevitably “fall in,” the late director’s expression for the unseen whirlpool cinema (and apparently television) can produce: “Plunge into the gulf!”, as his surrealist forebears used to say.

Not bad advice for Spelunkers of the American Infinite.

May 21, 2017 witnessed Lynch holding a brightly lit seance, the largest gathering of its kind, an apparently unbroken circle, equal parts kitschy and ominous. The event and its ensuing installments taught us at least one thing: The dead are never entirely dead. They have will. They have agency. We give it to them as an investment. This is not a conventional notion of the undead. These are wraiths composed of mass memory — a vox populi of the spirit realm, responding to otherwise forsaken democratic impulses. In short, the dead are not dead until we say they are.

In Twin Peaks: The Return there is a moment that on its incandescent surface could have been lifted, weightless, from the great post-war dream of materialist deliverance: The top on the convertible is down, the radio on; The Paris Sisters are singing I Love How You Love Me as a reincarnated Laura Palmer lifts her face to a cloudless sky. Within the tapestry of this early Phil Spector production — his trademark wall of schlock eternally associated with AM Romance and Death (conditions Spector knew all too well) — the voice of Priscilla Paris could be a dream goddess lullaby from the whispering gallery, or sweet nothings from the crypt. We don’t know. We’ll never know. Amanda Seyfried’s Becky, scanning the sky with her enormous blue eyes, belongs to a more layered and mysterious realm since her director passed into that self-same whispering gallery.

Throughout our history, we’ve always been instructed to be terrified of one diabolical  group of outsiders or another. Pick any era, and it can be identified in part by who or what we were fretting over—anarchists, communists, the Japanese, the Italians, Satanic child molesters, terrorists. But over that same period, as all those other fears came and went, one remained constant and true, and only one: we have always been absolutely terrified of our teenagers. Why do they act like that? Why do they talk like that? Why are they so rebellious and sullen? What the hell have they got to be sullen about? And that godawful music! Time was these were all undeniable symptoms that our kids were using drugs, experimenting with sex, or hanging out with a tough crowd. Nowadays the dominant unspoken question seems to be “When is my kid gonna shoot up his school?” The context has changed, the methodology has changed, but ultimately that question is merely a slight variation on the same question American adults have been asking all along.

To Jaroslav Zaoralek

Saint-Malo, [May] 12[,1937

Dear friend,

Your critics’ reaction doesn’t surprise me: I was expecting this. The Austrian Soviet Masonic Jewish clique in power in your country couldn’t but slobber the way they did. Anyway, I don’t think that even in good faith they could have understood. The fate of criticism is to unfailingly be full of shit. In reality, “Death on the Installment Plan” is in ever way superior to “Journey.” It is direct expression and “Journey” was still literary, that is, full of shit in more ways than one. Like the public, critics above all like the fake, imitation, imposture. They flee the authentic. We won’t change them.

So be it. After all I don’t give a damn. I’m willing to share the fate of all true creators. I’m willing to be alone against all. I’m even perfectly pleased to have reached this point. There is something degrading and base in approbation. Applause makes the monkey. In these times of the herd I find it agreeable to shit on every authority. As for optimism, don’t make me laugh. All charlatans are optimists. What would they be without good humor? This says it all.

The credits of Hotel du Nord ripple on moving water; images of circulation and fluid connection flow through the film. It is set on the banks of the Canal St. Martin in Paris—not a river like those that run through Renoir’s work, but a quiet backwater, a workaday artery that offers passage and movement but not escape or purification. In the film’s opening scene, guests at a dinner party talk about blood transfusions, a subject brought up by Prosper (Bernard Blier), an overweight and comically self-serious man who picks up extra money by selling his blood. One woman says she would be disgusted by the thought of her blood in someone else’s body, while another retorts that blood is blood. With heavy irony, a third person objects that the topic is inappropriate conversation for a First Communion celebration. The communion hints at something no one in the film ever quite achieves: transformation.

The characters in Hotel du Nord (1938), all residents of the eponymous boarding house, are frustrated dreamers in cramped, confining quarters. But their lives and identities have fluidity and mutability; despite their tendencies toward suicide and romantic passivity, they’re not automatons of fate. Neither are they independent agents or authors of their own lives. They just muddle along.

At the center of the film lies a bungled double suicide. While the First Communion party grows livelier, a morose young couple, Pierre and Renée (Jean-Pierre Aumont and Annabella), check into the hotel intending to die together. Pallidly beautiful, they lie on the bed in an ecstasy of morbid romanticism, imagining their deaths as a honeymoon trip, an escape to freedom, a crossing over to “the other side.” Throughout the film, characters dream of travel and departure, but never go anywhere. The prostitute Raymonde (Arletty) says that the happiest day of her life was when she “embarked” on a boat ride on the Seine. Later, when she and her lover Edmond (Louis Jouvet) are packing for a trip to Toulouse, she tells the maid in lavish detail about the pleasures of traveling with Edmond—then reveals that she’s never been anywhere with him. Much later, Edmond travels to Marseilles with Renée, who survived the botched suicide attempt, and as they plan to take a boat to Port Saïd, she repeats the speech about escape and crossing over that her lover made before shooting her.

Pierre, a self-confessed coward, loses his nerve after shooting Renée, and believing that he’s killed her, flees the hotel. Despite his shame and self-loathing, he can’t bring himself to leap off a railway bridge either, and he turns himself in to the police. (The bridge scene, with its tangle of rails shining in the dark and steam from a locomotive engulfing the thwarted jumper, is a template for similar scenes in Act of Violence and Night has a Thousand Eyes.) Renée is surprisingly ready to forgive his failures, pointing out sensibly that it is easier to be shot than to shoot yourself. It’s Pierre who can’t live down the incident, telling her through the wire mesh of the prison visiting room that “It takes two to forget.”

When it is said that someone lives in their own world, it is often not meant kindly or admiringly, but Beatrice Lillie lived and worked very much in her own world like a child does at play, seemingly impervious to outside reaction or convention. If you “got” her no one was funnier, and in her heyday she was actually billed as “The Funniest Woman in the World,” all by herself. Why is someone funny, especially if you are not an easy laugher? Because of an element of surprise, or the swift introduction of something unexpected, and Lillie’s comic style was nothing but unexpected, aberrant, capricious.

On the afternoon of Monday, October 22nd, a staffer working at the Katonah, NY estate of liberal billionaire George Soros discovered a suspicious package someone had left near the mailbox. Opening the package and gleaning it contained a six-inch pipe bomb, he scurried it out to the nearby woods and called the police.

The following evening a similar package addressed to Hillary Clinton’s Westchester County home was intercepted before it could do any damage, and the following morning two more pipe bombs arrived at former President Barack Obama’s Washington, D.C. office, as well as the Manhattan offices of CNN. By week’s end, similar mail bombs, twelve in total, were aimed at prominent Democrats including Maxine Waters, Eric Holder and former Vice President Joe Biden, as well as actor Robert DeNiro. All the bombs, it was reported at the time, consisted of six-inch lengths of pipe packed with black powder, wrapped in black tape, with a timing mechanism attatched and wires protruding from both ends. No one was injured, and none of the crude explosive devices detonated by themselves.

Americans haven’t always hated mimes. In the nineteenth century clowns and pantomimes, imported from Europe at first, were enormously popular here, and the American pantomime George L. Fox was one of the very most successful entertainers in the land during the decade after the Civil War. Although he was inspired by French pantomimes, his act was nothing like the Marcel Marceau whimsy we came to know and loathe in modern times. The Three Stooges in whiteface comes closer to the mark.

He was born in Boston on July 3 1826 and named George Washington Lafayette Fox, the eldest of six kids. The family prophetically nicknamed him Laff, which they pronounced Lahf, like the first syllable of Lafayette. His parents worked backstage at the Tremont Theatre, for a while the only one in Boston. They put their kids to work on the stage as the Little Foxes, singing, dancing, acting in their own variety shows and in others’ productions. Laff was considered less skilled and charismatic than some of his siblings and relegated to comic buffoonery. The Foxes later intermarried with another theater family, the Howards, to form a popular company that toured morally uplifting programs like The Drunkard to New England’s Puritan and temperance towns.

When Laff was six the Ravel Family came to the Tremont. The French troupe was in effect the Cirque du Soleil of their time. An evening with the Ravels combined circus acrobatics (tumbling, rope-dancing, feats of strength), ballet numbers, and a pantomime play, often with a storybook theme. Their marvelous stage transformations in the pantomime part of the program had American audiences gasping and laughing for the next forty years. Startling appearances and disappearances abounded; performers seemed to skate on ice, walk through walls, sail in balloons, row boats across the stage. The Congregationalist minister and author Lyman Abbott describes a charming bit of Ravel stage magic in his Reminiscences: “The lover was captured and set up against a wall; soldiers filed in and shot him; he fell upon the floor in three or four pieces, a leg rolled off in one direction, an arm in another, the head in a third; the irate father marched off in triumph; friends of the lover came in, picked up the pieces, stood them up against the wall; one of the friends blew a blast on the magic whistle, and the recovered lover stepped down from the wall and executed a gay pirouette before our eyes.” Their comedy was broad but never low, and unlike much theater at the time it was considered suitable for respectable family audiences. Henry James, who saw them a number of times, praised their “pure grace and charm and civility.” They had come from Paris to New York’s Park Theatre in July 1832. Driven out of Manhattan by one of the city’s periodic cholera outbreaks, they took their show to Philadelphia and then to the Tremont that November.

They must have made a lasting impression on Fox, who would become their chief homegrown competitor, not to say shameless imitator. He triumphed by Americanizing – critics said coarsening – European clowning and pantomime for the working-class audiences on and around the Bowery. He arrived there in 1850 to take low comic roles at the New National Theatre, a variety house on Chatham Square run by “Captain” Alexander Purdy, whose rank was evidently as fanciful as Colonel Tom Parker’s a century later. A rather dour Yankee in private life, Fox didn’t look like a jolly comedian. Bony and gawky, his face narrow and pale and his nose long and thin, he did all his pratfalling and other silliness with a straight face, as though not in on the joke with his audience. Think Stan Laurel. His whiteface makeup didn’t obscure his features, the way a circus clown’s does, but accentuated them. On the Bowery he seemed an underdog playing to life’s underdogs, and they loved him for it. He was soon the National’s star, in an era when stars made or broke a theater.

In 1852, the National staged New York’s first dramatic interpretation of the most widely read and hotly contested novel of the era, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Even with the great minstrel Thomas Dartmouth Rice appearing in an afterpiece, the show closed after only two weeks. The National’s heavily Irish audience was generally against abolition, often violently so, but the real problem seems to have been that it was simply a bad production.

Meanwhile, the Foxes and Howards were staging their own adaptation in Troy, New York, written by family member George Aiken. It made Laff’s four-year-old niece Cordelia Howard, playing Little Eva, an overnight sensation. Laff convinced Captain Purdy to bring this version to the National. It opened in July 1853, with Laff taking a small role. It was a sensation, playing to packed houses and much ballyhoo in the city’s several newspapers. To satisfy the demand Purdy added regular Wednesday and Saturday matinees, the first theater manager in New York to do so. Everyone came to see the show. The great Edwin Forrest was moved to tears by little Cordelia’s performance. Black audiences flocked to a segregated section of the balcony. Other impresarios in town threw together their own versions, including Barnum at his American Museum, where he got T. D. Rice to play Uncle Tom. But the Fox-Howard production remained definitive, breaking records with 325 consecutive performances at the National, then touring the U.S. and England to similar success. Cordelia would continue to play Eva and other tearjerking kid roles until 1861, when she voluntarily gave up the stage at the age of thirteen.

Not many actors paid their dues for as long and as hard as Boris Karloff did. Born William Henry Pratt near London in 1887, he was the self-described black sheep of his family (both of his parents were Anglo-Indian). In a photo at age three-and-a-half, he already looks alarmed by something, or by someone.

Pratt traveled to America to become an actor and changed his name so as not to embarrass his family. He played on stage in stock and learned through make-up how to become any character he wanted to be, much as Lon Chaney did. In between plays—and later in between films in the 1920s when he was slotted into many small and usually villainous roles—Karloff had to sometimes work as a day laborer or ditch-digger, which meant that he had problems with his back when he was an older man.

His 1920s villains were usually of Arab or Indian extraction, and his staring eyes and molded features lent themselves to glowering wickedness. Karloff very often didn’t get enough to eat in these years, which added to his impression of aesthetic gauntness. As a mesmerist in The Bells (1926), his best part in silent pictures, Karloff does mesmerize with abrupt gestures that he somehow slows down even before we have taken them in. Just watch the way he manages a very false slow smile, moving the corners of his mouth up and then tossing the smile contemptuously away. This shows an actor in tune with what the camera needs, and what it needed from him was menace.

What made Karloff such a distinctive screen player was the slow, lingering way he moved through space, which created its own atmosphere of dread. In Howard Hawks’s The Criminal Code (1931), which he had played in on stage, he is a convict named Ned Galloway, a man bent on revenging himself on the stool pigeon who got him sent back to prison just for taking a drink. Karloff has a way of suspending his words here—creating a whole little protective world around them—but it is the slowness of his movements that really makes the strongest impression.

Stealing up on the stool pigeon, Karloff approaches this man with slow and almost slow motion physical grace. The man turns and sees him and gives a start, and Karloff gives his own little start, as if to say, “You’re done for, and you must accept it.” There’s something almost tender about the way Karloff does that, something lyric and inevitable, like a movement out of a Martha Graham dance.

The judgment on the Trump administration’s war on Iran is already largely settled across mainstream media, public opinion, and much of the analytical sphere.

What remains supportive of the war is limited to two predictable camps: official government discourse and the president’s most loyal supporters, along with entrenched pro-Israel constituencies.

Beyond these circles, the war is widely understood as reckless, unjustified, and strategically incoherent.

In 1910, a boisterous, charismatic, and very funny15 year-old named Irving Lahrheim dropped out of high school in New York to join a burlesque comedy troupe. Everything about him was large, from his body to his personality. Combine that with his round face and flat features, his exaggerated accent, his pronounced lisp, and his broad, theatrical gestures, he was a presence ready-made for comedy—especially the kind of loud, obvious comedy that could hold a drunken, rowdy audience’s attention in between the strippers. Shortening his name to Bert Lahr, over the next 15 years he came to earn top billing around the Columbia Burlesque Circuit thanks in no small part to a routine he’d developed with actress and comedian Mercedes Delpino.

(This collage by André Breton, made up of phrases cut out from newspapers and assembled to make up a poem, was pasted into a copy of his book “Les Pas Perdus” which is now in private hands.)

Denise

Your eyes

The loveliest spot in France

Three stars on a

Submarine

Reveal

The harvest

Of turners

Whether damned with faint praise or hidden away like baby cine-monsters in the attic, early talkies go largely unloved nowadays.

Is it a function of “class” (every iteration implied), this ghetto we’ve made, this undeservedly obscure and cramped compartment of moviedom?

Yes, I’ll defend the jangled rhythms and febrile mood swings of America “on the bum” merchandized, albeit unconsciously most of the time, by ‘30s Hollywood.

And later brushed aside by even more insidious machinery…

Canonical thinkers apparently haven’t any room in their social imagination for squalling. The cheapest magazine story on celluloid may suddenly evoke its Depression-era audience (unwashed bodies, injured pride, volcanic anger and all).