You might think, then, that the people who know Fitzgerald’s novel best would have the most disapproving view of the movie. To test that hypothesis, we asked five English professors who specialize in American literature to take in an early showing and share their thoughts. And to our surprise, they liked it. Of course, they had their problems with the movie, too, some of which are less minor than others. But they praised Carey Mulligan for turning in arguably the best version of Daisy Buchanan the silver screen has ever seen, and there was abundant acclaim for Leo as Jay. They also admired the way Luhrmann pulled material from Fitzgerald’s short stories and his first draft of Gatsby in order to create a screenplay that isn’t quite a facsimile (in a good way) of the finished novel.

And, as you can read below, they actually applauded Luhrmann for omitting the most famous line of the novel.

1. Kirk Curnutt, Troy University

What I most hoped Luhrmann would nail is Daisy’s depiction.

Because, honestly, Fitzgerald didn’t, and none of her previous cinematic incarnations did either.

Of course, we have no idea how Lois Wilson fared in the lost 1926 silent. The only thing the trailer reveals is that Georgia Hale as Myrtle Wilson could inflate her eyes as big as this lady. Betty Field in 1949 played Daisy like your best friend’s spunky little sister, while Mira Sorvino in 2000 had nice hair. As for Mia Farrow, I’ll only say that if I play her clips at home my Labrador runs in circles wondering who stole her squeak toy.

Carey Mulligan is as good as we can expect from a character that is even more of a cipher than Jay Gatsby. She conveys Daisy’s forced gaiety at the Buchanans’ estate and doesn’t sound screechy-silly delivering the “beautiful little fool” line. Mulligan’s melancholy in later scenes has a wan as opposed to hysterical quality that I found stirring. I love that Luhrmann lets Daisy attempt to telephone Gatsby at the moment Wilson arrives to take revenge.

It’s time we empathize rather than vilify the golden girl. One minute you’re a 22-year-old overgrown woman/child raised to sit on couches and yawn, married to a philandering slab of roast beef, miserable even if you’re described as not happy but not unhappy either, and next thing you know literary critics are calling you a “bitch goddess” for decades on end.

Maybe I missed it adjusting my 3D glasses, but I was glad Baz cut the “voice full of money” line. I’ve never understood whether coming from Gatsby it’s admiration or an insult. All I know is that I myself have long wanted to save Daisy — though I wouldn’t run out into the road to do it.

2. Michael DuBose, Penn State University

When someone assembles an edition using all the available variants of a text, we call that an “eclectic” volume. These are often put together to unify a book’s textual history. Baz Luhrmann does something similar with his Great Gatsby. Instead of slavishly adhering to Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, Luhrmann takes cues from an early version of the novel, some of the short stories, and Fitzgerald’s own life. The result is a movie slightly different from its source, but no less authentic.

This comes through most clearly in Leonardo DiCaprio’s portrayal of Jay Gatsby. DiCaprio seems to take his inspiration from Fitzgerald’s first draft of the novel, Trimalchio. In that text, Gatsby is edgier, more mysterious, and more neurotic. DiCaprio’s Gatsby is equal parts vulnerable and calculating. His character’s mannerisms are carefully crafted and rehearsed, but that poise belies an imposter complex that DiCaprio acts to perfection. The ubiquitous “Old Sport,” for example, totters between casual endearment and desperate refrain. It’s the lynchpin keeping Gatsby’s whole identity from unraveling. DiCaprio almost swears it out as an incantation against the façade crumbling.

There are echoes of Fitzgerald’s “Winter Dreams” and “Absolution” along with Trimalchio, and even a nod to the “Rich girls don’t marry poor boys” line from the author’s youth. Most of it works, but sometimes the concept falls flat. (The “rich girls” line, specifically, is blurted without any context.) However, we know what we’re getting with Luhrmann; he’s going to execute the grand set pieces to perfection, but will stumble with the nuanced stuff. The director clearly shares Jordan Baker’s enthusiasm for large parties: whenever there are more than five people in a scene, the film sizzles. When there are fewer, it drags. Overall, Luhrmann has assembled an eclectic movie that may not be great, but is certainly Gatsby.

3. Joseph Fruscione, George Washington University

He did it innocently, but a student gave me a spoiler a few days before. I knew that the framing device would be Nick Carraway — in a sanitarium. Whether it was for physical or (more likely) mental health I wasn’t sure, but this colored my expectations.

I was cautiously optimistic. Gatsby is not easily adaptable, yet Luhrmann — like his style or not — is skilled and creative. We know we’re going to get edginess, hyperactive visuals and sounds, and the same “grand vision” that Nick ascribes to Gatsby’s entire persona.

The film is very impressive. I knew Luhrmann was drawing from the novel and draft, Trimalchio, such as during the second party. And the institutionalized Nick frame? It’s bold, but it smartly conveys his unreliability and shows him writing the story. Except for a few disappointing cuts — say, Gatsby’s father and the funeral — Luhrmann deftly merges his style with Fitzgerald’s, such as in the first Gatsby party or the alcohol-fueled tension at Myrtle and Tom’s apartment. Luhrmann excels in adding visual details in the spirit of the novel: the “JG” insignia adorning virtually everything in Gatsby’s home, or the “ad finis fidelis” (“faithful to the end”) on the property’s main gates that echoes Fitzgerald’s description of Gatz–Gatsby.

The strongest scene was the Gatsby–Daisy reunion. It was awkward, funny, garish — and spot on. DiCaprio and Mulligan captured the reunion’s tense yet tender nature, and Maguire just as nicely played the straight man in Gatsby’s engineered scene. Equally strong was Joel Edgerton as Tom, who embodied his smug, entitled, and controlling personality, particularly during the Plaza confrontation.

Separating the teacher-scholar in me — especially one who specializes in American literature and adaptation — from the reader–moviegoer is tricky. Yes, Luhrmann’s Gatsby is dynamic, loud, different, and vibrant. It changes scenes and language, leaves out some, and adds others. It’s also brilliant.

4. Sara Kosiba, Troy University; Program Director of the 12th International F. Scott Fitzgerald Conference

Critics have said for years that The Great Gatsby is an un-filmable book, and I’ve largely been in agreement.  My love for Fitzgerald’s book stems from the poetry of language and the descriptions on the page. When word of Baz Luhrmann’s new film began to circulate and included the detail that it would be filmed in 3D, my fellow Fitzgerald aficionados and I began to joke of “Eckleburg eyes” leering out from the screen. I am pleased to say that my recent viewing of the film was not nearly the potential nightmare I envisioned.

Luhrmann’s film maintains a strong sense of the highs and lows in Fitzgerald’s original. Unlike the well known 1974 version starring Robert Redford (which I always found washed out and flat), this new incarnation of Gatsby captures the vibrancy and richness of Fitzgerald’s fictional world. The 3D technique adds to this richness by never seeming gimmicky or false.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan do an outstanding job of capturing the inner conflict within Gatsby and Daisy. One of my quibbles would be with Tobey Maguire’s Nick. I think it may be more the script than the acting on Maguire’s part, but one of the details I love in the novel is Nick’s unreliability as a narrator, something that does not come through as clearly in this version (although the sanitarium framing device works well, and the insider reference to celebrated editor Max Perkins in the title of it is a nice touch).

Despite seeing other pros (the costumes) and cons (some of the settings), I do find this the best film version of Gatsby to date. Luhrmann’s intentions are in line with the soul of the novel, although I hope that it will not become a modern replacement for the actual poetry of the original.

5. Doni M. Wilson, Houston Baptist University

Baz Lurhmann’s The Great Gatsby delivers in the categories that viewers might expect: the settings, the costumes, the slick and stylized look that accompanies all of Lurhmann’s visual pyrotechnics. All of the hype about the music faded away as the film progressed: it just seemed to underscore the excitement of the Jazz Age without being an anachronistic distraction. It wasn’t your parents’ Gatsby, but why should it have been?

Once I got through the shock of Nick Carraway writing his retrospective book from an institution, I was able to concentrate more on the entire reason I was excited about this film: Leonardo DiCaprio. Now let me say, no one can pull off a pink suit like Leo, and he looks the part, but I just did not understand the accent. What was the accent? Why did it change from scene to scene? Why did he have to say “Old Sport” like “Ol Spore,” dropping his ds and ts? Why why why? Other than that, he was perfect. I don’t think he should have screamed quite so loudly in the Plaza Hotel scene, because it made it seem like Daisy was rejecting him for anger management problems, but perhaps I quibble here.

Carey Mulligan’s Daisy Fay Buchanan was definitely a step up from Mia Farrow, but she didn’t seem to command the attention of the other actors, and it made me want to see more of Jordan Baker and Myrtle Wilson on the screen. Tobey Maguire as Nick was a pleasant surprise, and his understated portrayal made sense.

But the absolute, hands-down, best actor in this film is Joel Edgerton playing Tom Buchanan. His physical presence and spot-on delivery convinced me that he understood Fitzgerald’s vision the most acutely, and he should win an Oscar for this role.

Three years prior, I had demanded that my parents take me to see Strictly Ballroom (again) on my birthday, with classmates in tow. The brooding Paul Mercurio paved the way for Leonardo lust, at a confusing fifth-grade time when I just wanted to do a coltish paso doble in front of a Coca Cola sign, but was also strangely agitated by the sight of glistening chest hair against white tank. Fast-forward to college, when I spent stretches of my freshman year listening to the dance remix of “Come What May” (from Moulin Rouge!) while playing a computer game called Snood and smoking cigarettes until my index finger turned yellow.

It’s safe to say that I have kind of a thing for the films of Baz Luhrmann.

I had basically forgotten this thing until the meditative days leading to the release of The Great Gatsby, when, it is equally safe to say, I got into a kind of weird place. That I had arrived at said place was clear when I decided to listen to the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack for the first time in many years and, upon hearing the jangling guitars of Everclear’s “Local God,” burst into tears at my desk.

There were several factors contributing to this outburst, but part of it was the appearance of residual shreds of feeling, artifacts from a time when sights and sounds and Leonardo–the Baz Luhrmann trifecta–went straight into the viscera.  (You had better hope you don’t spend your teen years taking in total garbage, because that’s formative garbage.) When I read San Francisco Chronicle critic Mick LaSalle opine recently that Romeo + Juliet was “too contemptible even to be called a desecration,” I know that he never lay in virginal bed with headphones and discman, listened to Thom Yorke utter the eternal invitation “I’ll be waiting, with a gun and a pack of sandwiches,” and just felt so much.

I have been waiting for The Great Gatbsy.  I have been waiting, and listening to Des’ree sing the theme from Romeo + Juliet (and weeping), and admiring the new film’s fabulous geometric gold-and-black title credits. I have been basking in the surge of enthusiasm for Art Deco, which happens to be my favorite among the Arts. In the past several weeks, I have seen a lot of commentary about not liking The Great Gatsby (the novel), followed by a second wave of tweets saying that saying you don’t like the novel makes you seem like a douche.  And I felt very above it all, because I have a void where the strong feelings about The Great Gatsby should be. A novel that all school-children read is a public benefit, like a park — anyone can have a concert there or rent it out for a wedding.

I love movies, but always forget to see them, and usually end up making some miscalculation where I miss every single good one and then see Fast and the Furious VI in the theater (or recently, the appalling Trance). But I was ready for Gatsby, ready for abandon and riots of feeling. And I went to the movie, even paid the extra dollars for 3D (I have never seen a 3D movie and had some anxiety about it, but really trusted the vision of Baz), and I left dry-eyed and just a little bit disappointed.

Baz Luhrmann is so faithful to the text, in his way, and all the huge sets in the world cannot expand the essential narrowness and economy of Fitgerald’s novel. By the time Daisy and Gatsby got together, I knew there weren’t going to be any more parties.  And as they neared the end of their doomed affair, I was actually sort of bored. I became resigned to watching Leonardo’s strange orange glow and the stunning curve of Carey Mulligan’s eyebrows.  (For the record, I loved Carey Mulligan, and not just for her bewitching eyebrows and flawless skin.  I liked Toby Maguire too–he achieved a good level of flaccid goodness and faint corruption.)

There is such a thing as too much fidelity.  What I enjoyed the most in the movie were the anachronisms and departures (which, of course, are largely embodied in the music). Is that Frank Ocean I hear? Yes, please. Is that Amy Winehouse as sung by Beyoncé and André 3000? Vibe, while Lothrop Stoddard rolls around in his unvisited grave. But I think Luhrmann’s extravagant style needs something really sentimental at the back of it, and The Great Gatsby is a totally unsentimental story full of unsympathetic people. If there aren’t going to be a lot of feelings, I needed more spectacle, more choreographed dance scenes (and ideally, fewer shooting stars and floating letters). As Fergie counsels on the soundtrack, “a little party never killed nobody.” I still don’t really understand what the 3D glasses were for.

I did two things on an impulse today. I spent money (silly money, all things considered after the popcorn and aforementioned 3D tickets) on The Great Gatsby soundtrack, and I spent the afternoon at work shimmying and experiencing the terrible majesty of Lana Del Rey: “All that grace, all that body. All that face makes me wanna party.”  And then, back at home, I watched Romeo + Juliet again. Nothing in my life thus far has made me feel my age quite the same way–has made me feel that staid, ungenerous phrase, “I’m a married woman”–as that first glimpse of an absurdly young Leonardo DiCaprio. It made me go slightly cold, like realizing that I had experienced lustful thoughts for a Bieber.

O, Leonardo! Of all the boy gamines whose faces I tore out of Seventeen and put around my room, only he remains on the screen, year after year. A candle still burns for him, in the dark windows of my heart–but not for his curiously bronzed Gatsby. As a character, Gatsby is unconvincing. As a Gatsby, Leonardo is unconvincing. I’m not certain whether that means he was successful or not.  But I was not feeling it.

Re-watching Romeo + Juliet, it amazed me how much I remember about that movie , how I recognized even the minor characters as old friends. When Leonardo or Claire Danes cocked an eyebrow, I knew all about it, because my best friend and I once catalogued all of their facial expressions and gestures.  Thanks to that movie, I can today quote select words of the Bard with 100 percent more accuracy than from any other work of his I might name. You can’t repeat the past, but at the end of the movie, I cried. Who knows if it was those rogue adolescent icebergs breaking off and ramming the oceanliner of adulthood, or if it was that deathless story, or the fact that Baz Luhrmann did a bona fide super job making it come alive. I kind of think all three.

I cannot make an objective assessment of this new film, because the Season of Gatsby found me in my rowboat, attempting bold experiments in time travel and sensory recollection.  But you have to save some sensations for the next generation.  I made it through Gatsby with nary a tear shed. When the lights went up at the end of the show, however, the two girls in front of me turned to one another.  One said simply, “That was emotional.”

And so we beat on.

About halfway through the screening of the new documentary Herblock: The Black and the White, one of the closing entries in this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, it occurred to me that you haven’t really made it in America until someone has made a movie about you.

Three of the many talking heads in this documentary — reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, and former executive editor Ben Bradlee of The Washington Post – have already been the subjects of a movie, the much-praised 1976 feature film All the President’s Men, which was based on Woodward and Bernstein’s book about the fall of President Richard Nixon. What’s more, the actors who played the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters in that movie — Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman – are the subjects of a new documentary about the making of the original feature film and the enduring fascination with Watergate. This new documentary is called, appropriately if unimaginatively, All the President’s Men Revisited. Stop the presses! Hollywood people never tire of talking about themselves and their achievements!

But back to Herblock. It’s a heartfelt, uplifting documentary about the legendary Washington Post cartoonist Herbert Lawrence Block, known universally by his nom de guerre, Herblock. Peppered with the predictable talking heads — though not Redford and Hoffman, mercifully — it tells the story of a self-effacing artist from Chicago whose patriotism, prescience, and deft pencil led American journalism’s charge against such bogeymen as Hitler (even before he was elected chancellor), the gun lobby, Sen. Joseph McCarthy, segregationists, big oil, big business, big military budgets, big money in politics (as early as 1950), the arms race, Stalin, the Vietnam War, and, most famously, Richard Nixon. Herblock drew McCarthy and Nixon with swarthy mugs, sweating, frequently crawling out of mud puddles or open sewer holes. Herblock coined the pejorative “McCarthyism,” and he hated Nixon’s guts and wasn’t shy about saying so. In our watered-down, fair-minded times, such venom is bracing.

In addition to all those talking heads, the documentary consists of many pictures of Herblock’s cartoons, interspersed with a long on-camera interview with him in his cluttered office at the Post. Dressed in his trademark baggy sweater, he comes across as a wise, witty uncle. “He worked until he died,” says one of the talking heads. Not quite. Herblock’s last cartoon appeared on Aug. 26, 2001, and he died six weeks later at 91, after working at the Post for 55 years and winning three Pulitzer Prizes, the Medal of Freedom, and an uncountable number of enemies among the rich, the powerful, and the corrupt.

The film makes the points that Herblock was always looking out for the little guy, that he was an ardent believer in the importance of a free press in a democracy, and that he enjoyed complete editorial freedom. This last point was not always the case. During the 1952 presidential campaign, the Post editorial board supported the Republican candidate, Dwight Eisenhower. Herblock drew scathing cartoons of Ike, portraying him as an out-of-touch lightweight. When the Post started pulling his anti-Eisenhower cartoons, readers howled — and pointed out that Herblock was syndicated in hundreds of other papers and they would take their business elsewhere. The Post editors caved in, and Herblock was forevermore off the leash.

After the Herblock screening ended and the applause died, the documentary’s director and co-writer, Michael Stevens, stepped onto the stage to answer questions. First he introduced several people in the audience who were involved in making the movie, including Alan Mandell, who, it turns out, is an actor who played Herblock in those interview scenes in Herblock’s office. This bit of legerdemain was jarring — I had assumed I was watching the real Herblock on the screen, not a convincing look-alike. Was it dishonest of Stevens to put words in the mouth of an actor in a documentary, without alerting the audience? And where did those words come from — the dozen books Herblock published in his lifetime?  Interviews he gave? Stevens’s imagination? I raised my hand but never got to ask my questions.

[Editor's Note: Filmmaker Michael Stevens has pointed out to us that this question is answered in the film's credits, which state: "starring ALAN MANDELL as HERBERT BLOCK based on the writings and speeches of HERBERT BLOCK"]

As I headed home from the theater, those unsettling questions were crowded out of my mind by a memory. One of my most prized possessions is a photograph that was taken in The Washington Post newsroom on election night in 1952, when I was three months old and an out-of-touch lightweight named Dwight Eisenhower was in the process of defeating Adlai Stevenson for the presidency. The photograph depicts a scene of great hubbub — reporters crowding around a messy table full of old newspapers and sandwiches and coffee cups, while a man pours coffee from a big white hobo pot. It’s not hard to imagine the clatter of typewriters, the screaming of telephones, the distant murmur of a police radio, the cigarette smoke bluing the air. It’s a man’s world, and for me there is only one man in it: the guy pouring the coffee: my father.

I love the details of that photograph. The map of the world on the wall. The copy spike on the cluttered table. The milk in glass bottles. The lovingly wrapped sandwiches. The stacks of china cups and saucers. And, above all, my father’s patent-leather hair, his French cuffs, the dainty way he holds the coffee pot’s lid with his left pinkie as he pours for his fellow newsmen. That picture seems like an artifact from some prehistoric age.

My father was a respected Post reporter and rewrite man at the time — “the fastest typist in the newspaper business,” as Bradlee, then a hard-charging fellow reporter, would later put it in his memoir, A Good Life. (Upon reading those words in the 1990s, my father, a proud man, had sniffed, “I like to think I was the fastest writer in the newspaper business.”) Bradlee does not appear in that election-night photograph. Neither does Herblock, who had his own office down the hall. But the most noticeable absence, for me, was not the men who have now been immortalized by movies; it was an old-school police reporter named Alfred E. Lewis who worked on a series of articles with my father that nearly won a Pulitzer Prize. Lewis spent 50 years as a lowly cop reporter at the Post, nearly as long as Herblock, without acquiring a fraction of the cartoonist’s fame or fortune.

The series my father and Lewis collaborated on was called “The Charmed Life of Emmett Warring,” about a powerful and slippery D.C. racketeer, a prime target in the Post’s campaign to root out police corruption. The articles ran on the front page every day for a week and jumped to two full inside pages, an astoundingly detailed and literary collaboration between a gumshoe street reporter and a lightning-fast rewrite man. Years later, after he had left the newspaper business, my father showed me a typed, single-spaced, two-page memo from his editor, spelling out the kind of detail he wanted in the series, right down to how many pairs of shoes Emmett Warring owned, what his house looked like, what brand of booze he drank, and how much of it. That memo is still astonishing to me — the realization that people cared so much and worked so hard at putting out a daily newspaper.

Bradlee, in his memoir, called Al Lewis “the prototypical police reporter, who had loved cops more than civilians for almost fifty years.” My father told me that Al Lewis had a hard time writing coherent English prose, but he knew every cop and every criminal in D.C., and he frequently beat the cops to the scene of a crime. In other words, he was an invaluable asset to the paper’s city desk. Twenty years after Ike’s victory, Lewis hadn’t lost a step.

On Sunday, June 18, 1972, the Post ran what appeared to be a routine breaking-and-entering story. It opened like this, straight, no frills:

5 Held in Plot to Bug Democrats’ Office Here

By Alfred E. Lewis, Post Staff Writer

Five men, one of whom said he is a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency, were arrested at 2:30 a.m. yesterday in what authorities described as an elaborate plot to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee here.

It turned out that when Lewis arrived at the Watergate complex with the acting police chief several hours after the bungled burglary, he sailed past the roped-off reporters outside the building and went right up to the crime scene, where he gathered vital color and details. Eight other reporters contributed legwork to Lewis’s report in that Sunday’s paper. One was a hungry young hun named Bob Woodward; another was “Peck’s bad boy,” in Bradlee’s words, a renegade named Carl Bernstein. At the time no one appreciated the story’s implications. But it’s a safe bet that the Post’s first Watergate story would not have had such punch and detail without the contacts and legwork of an old-school cop reporter named Al Lewis. And no one connected the mushrooming scandal’s dots more quickly than Herblock.

Herblock is a welcome reminder that there was a time, not so very long ago, when American newspapers were stocked with people like Herb Block and Al Lewis and Dick Morris, men and women who were passionate about producing quality journalism and didn’t give a thought to ratings, celebrity, blog hits, or search engine optimization. Today, even a superb investigative reporter like Bob Woodward has been neutered by the seductive fame and money that fester inside the Beltway. People in America are still producing quality journalism, but, like serious fiction, it is being pushed deeper and deeper into the margins of the culture by forces that seem unstoppable.

All the more reason to remember and celebrate faceless foot soldiers like Al Lewis. I say he deserves to be the subject of a documentary or feature film at least as much as the far more decorated Woodward and Bernstein and Bradlee and Herblock. I have a strong hunch that Herblock, that great champion of the unsung little guy, would have agreed with me.

Image Credits: Bill Morris and Wikipedia

I went to work for the film industry in 1994. I’d never done it. Oh, I’d dabbled — as a teenager, I’d worked in the mailroom of Creative Artists Agency for a summer — but past that, not really. I was a child of Hollywood, my father was and still is a successful talent agent, and my mother was a well-produced screenwriter. Everybody I knew, every last person I’d grown up with, it seemed, had dutifully entered an industry that’s much like the Mafia in this respect. Casa Nostra runs in the blood. Having scrupulously avoided the movie business for most of my 20s — I was a schoolteacher, in San Francisco, had exiled myself in search of work that had meaning — I found myself in that most cinematic, and criminal, of positions. They made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.

Director of Literary Acquisitions. That was the title I was offered. It came about, I think, because I had a reputation among my family’s friends for being well-read, and because there was a moment — it’s a little hard to remember it now — when books were a particularly hot commodity in Hollywood. Adaptations were the wave of the recent past (The Firm), and so, quite possibly, the future. I was approached first by Francis Ford Coppola, for whom I’d once read a handful of scripts. He had the somewhat nostalgic notion that 1940s films had often been predicated upon short stories, so why not do the same thing now? Soon after that, I began talking to Danny DeVito, whose company, Jersey Films, was producing a soon-to-be-released movie called Pulp Fiction. Might I consider moving to New York to scout books? Robert De Niro piled into the mix as well. Surely one or all of them could persuade me to take a 200 percent pay raise to move to New York City and read? My 20s had been full of difficult decisions, but this was not one of them.

I went to work for Danny and De Niro, combined — they partnered to hire me, while Francis went on to revise his idea, eventually, into the magazine Zoetrope: All Story, which would launch in 1997. But for a moment it seemed plausible to believe literature and film were in alliance, that one could simply pounce on books — there were so many of them! — that would “make great movies” and have at them. After all, what did you need besides a bankable box office star to make this happen? (I was, indeed, green.) I figured I had the ear of two of such stars. What was going to stop, say, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History from hitting the big screen now?

Before I left, however, I was given a word of advice. One of DeVito’s partners, a shrewd, literate woman who’s since enjoyed a highly successful career of her own, called me into her office.

“You have excellent literary taste,” she told me.

“Thank you.”

“That’s not entirely a compliment,” she said. “Remember. Great books make bad movies. And bad books often make great ones.”

Hmm. I’ve since heard this bit of folk wisdom from many sources over the years — it isn’t untrue — but at the time it was new to me. I left the room thinking, Ha. So I’m supposed to be looking for bad books?

Once again, and not for the last time, I’d underestimated the film industry, and the elegance of the people in it.

This is not a story of the injustices of Hollywood. I’ve heard that one before, and honestly, there’s no need to reiterate the notion that the movie business rewards mediocrity, treats excellence with contempt, and that producers, specifically, are idiots who don’t read. Occasionally, this is true, but no more true — and no more often so — than it is in the world of finance or accupuncture. What people don’t really consider, I think, is that people in film are gambling with vast amounts of money. If the $80 million were your own, would you feel comfortable staking it upon something you simply felt was “good?” Or would you look for patterns of past performance? Confronted as I was with a dispiriting number of books that were described to me as “Die Hard in a ______” (i.e, “Die Hard in a submarine;” “Die Hard in a public school.” The idea being that something was set to explode and someone was set to stop it, the basic pattern for Jerry Bruckheimer’s blockbusters at the time), I found my bosses more receptive to those than they were to, say, Rick DeMarinis’s The Year of the Zinc Penny, or Jennifer Egan’s The Invisible Circus (which nevertheless did get made several years later). They weren’t foolish, though, or vulgar. They just understood what I didn’t. That making a movie is a ground war, and an enormous risk of capital, and that it’s just as hard to make a big, dumb thriller as it is to make an intelligent film of quality. So why not put the effort, at least most of the time, where the reward is more likely to equal or exceed it? Why work harder for less?

I sound like a corporate stooge. I was a schoolteacher (and I am a novelist), so I know perfectly well why. Because aesthetics and ethics both matter, and if all you’re trying to do is profiteer off a steaming pile of crap then you belong in a different business, if not in prison. The difficulty was, during the 1990s, there was no business to which this condition didn’t seem to apply. I worked cheek-to-jowl with people in publishing, in fact my job had a great deal more to do with the world of publishing than it did with the world of film. I saw my bosses in Los Angeles a couple times per year. I spent every day on the phone with literary agents, all my free hours taking editors and writers to lunch, drinks, and dinner. I witnessed the rise of the “literary thriller,” and saw first hand the explosion, the wild proliferation of the gargantuan advance for stylish, usually young, writers unlikely to earn out. Just weeks before I started working for my two actors, Nicholas Evans’s The Horse Whisperer stirred up an enormous sensation by selling, on the basis of a slender proposal, for $3.15 million at the Frankfurt Book Fair. In other words, the book business, that fabled bastion of intellectual integrity, seemed to me to behave exactly as the film industry did. To be driven by hype, and hot air, and to involve the placement of outsized bets on individuals perhaps a little more glamorous than they were talented. It was the nature of business, and not even any particular business, that it be so. The ’90s were of course a decade of mergers, and so a number of independent publishing houses were smushed together under one German umbrella. I saw this too. Eventually, I got picked off by a corporation. One of the studios invited me to come work for them instead. More money, bigger office, better furniture: why would I say no? And when I noticed that my new digs were in the same building as one of the Big Six publishers, this didn’t surprise me either. We were owned by the same multinational conglomerate, and played by the same rules.

Is there a moral to all this? Well, even today, people seem to complain about Hollywood. Or, they’ve given up complaining, because the patterns by now are so established. Every Memorial Day, and throughout the summer, studios roll out their tentpoles: films based on comic books and graphic novels, sequels to superhero franchises and adaptations of popular children’s stories. The beginning of the year is a dumping ground for Jason Statham and Mark Wahlberg movies; Judd Apatow gets two or three comedies salted throughout the next 12 months, and come November there’ll be “quality” from Spielberg, Scorsese, and at least one director named Anderson. It hurts to sound so cynical, but I can’t imagine anyone wonders anymore what’s coming. The movies roll around, the same ones, every year. So what’s left to learn from Hollywood? (Besides, you know, you’d best re-develop that spec into a pilot script while you can.)

During the last of my time at the studio, I went to a corporate retreat. I’d been dispirited by my time as an executive. It was a fun ride, and I seemed to be endlessly promoted precisely because I had no fear of being fired, but I was tired of doing a job that had no need for me to do it: my own sensibility never came into play. I was ready to quit, but I had no plan for what I’d do after I did. But first, I listened to a speech — no, an admonition — from the head of the company. He told us, the assembled executives of the three feature film divisions of the studio, that we were permitted to make a certain kind of inexpensive movie. The Full Monty, which had recently been a big hit, was the example he used. At the other end of the spectrum, it was okay to spend big on epic spectacles. Titanic was set for release at the end of the year, and he argued that this was a good bet. In-between, however, were the middling expensive vehicles for not-necessarily-bankable stars. “Middle class movies,” he called them. And we were not to pursue those under any circumstances. Forty, 50 million dollar budgets? The kiss of death.

“No more middle class movies,” we were told. “Never. Ever. None.”

I will admit that this assertion sent chills through me. In part because I understood that my own job (which I still needed) would soon go. But also because I understood what it meant for the culture. If there were no more “middle class” movies, then in what other arenas would an ostensible middle class suffer? Publishing, for sure. But what about . . . everything else? An economic disparity, which was being sketched out for us in terms of what we could spend, seemed to have an obvious corollary in terms of what we, or at least the movies, could hope to earn. Or rather, the “middle class movie” was being told it could no longer justify its continued existence. It wasn’t difficult to extrapolate from there. After all, the movie business had already proven itself a reliable bellweather for the behaviors of other sectors.

It turns out the movie business, just like the rest of it, has survived. The wealth gap has gotten about as wide as it possibly can — I suppose Occupy Wall Street can stretch itself to accommodate the 99.5 or the 99.75 percent if it must. Art has fled to television (it’s no accident that the well-heeled novelists who used to moonlight for studios now do so for American cable networks), and Hollywood gimps along in bloated and predictable fashion. But it would be wrong to imagine the lessons of the industry have finished, even if, as the writer Michael Tolkin remarked when I asked him why the movies were so terrible, “they’ve run out of myths.” No, these lessons are sadly ecological in nature. They apply to every system, and every business, and have something to do with a finitude of resources. You can build your blockbusters — and your skyscrapers — ever higher, but as you do they sustain fewer people. And eventually, of course, they will come down. Bad habits die hard, apparently, but customs? Truly fossilized institutions? These, it would seem, die even harder.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

How much of a mirror are we willing to let Spring Breakers be? In indulging in a nauseating, exhilarating, and absolutely familiar fantasy of American fun, Harmony Korine might be offering the unflinching depiction of rape culture that our national conversation has been needing.

Five days after Ma’lik Richmond and Trent Mays were convicted of raping a minor, with Mays also charged with the dissemination of child pornography; 20 days after The Daily Princetonian reported the results of a 2008 survey about sexual assault at Princeton that revealed that about 28 percent of female students had been “touched in a sexual manner or had their clothes removed without consent;” a few days after Girls Gone Wild filed for bankruptcy; the month before Sexual Assault Awareness month; and following, or joining, a new national conversation about rape culture, Harmony Korine released Spring Breakers. If you manage to sit through the whole film — 5 people walked out of the first screening I attended — you will see a vision of the world in which all of this is possible, a world that holds together in a terrible, perfectly-packaged union: gun culture, consumerism, wealth inequality, college culture, American Christianity, racism, our global obsession with underdressed young girls, rape culture, and Britney Spears.

If there is anything like a common theme explored in Spring Breakers, it might be the question of how much any of us are willing to do, watch, or endure, in the name of or search for fun. Sliding from the beaches swarming with college kids testing their limits to a lifestyle apparently unconstrained by limits of any kind, untouched by the larger culture’s moral codes, the hinge around which both of these worlds pivot are four young girls in bathing suits. If we’re going to place this film in our contemporary conversation about rape culture, its contribution will be in revealing our unchecked appetite for female bodies, and the role played by these bodies — as mere bodies — in our culture of fun.

The film begins with manic young people pumping under the sun on the beaches of St. Petersburg, Fla., an explosion of headached colors, terrifyingly exalted faces, and endless, perpetually topless girls, their skin splashed with beer. The plot follows four female college students as they devise a quick-money scheme to make it to Spring Break (“spring breaaaaaak 4eva!”) and, once there, revel in the suffocating, hyper-sexual, round the clock party, nightmarishly disconnected from any other reality, and energized by the clench-jawed commitment to experience everything within a limited life span. After being arrested for being in the same room as drugs, the girls are sprung from jail by Alien (James Franco), and spring break gives way to Florida’s year-round criminal underworld, which itself gives way to what the critics have roundly agreed is a “fever dream;” some of the girls make these transitions seamlessly, others reach a limit in terms of how much fun, how much experience they are able to live with.

Perhaps at the sight of the first bikini being thrown off, or when a muscly 20-year-old male swings that same bikini above his blond head, lasso-style, or when a young woman lies passed out on a mattress surrounded by partiers who are either utterly indifferent to or lasciviously interested in what will happen to that unconscious human, at some point the veneer on all of this fun peels off, and suddenly the only phrase that seems adequate to what’s being shown is “rape culture.” The phrase comes to mind, and if the images had been hard to stomach before, they are, from this point on, nearly unwatchable, numbing, excessive to a violent degree. But what is most unsettling, is that it is possible still to be seduced by them, to thrill at them, all that color, all those bodies. When not utterly nauseating, the film achieves a kind of pop harmony, sweeping us all up in the rush of spring break, making us know it from the inside. Where we might imagine a more European filmmaker, perhaps one practicing the tradition of the “New French Extremity,” would have exposed us to what’s awful about this youthful rite of passage, Korine adopts a different, properly American tactic, demanding that we see what those very youths see: the exhilaration, the colors, the fun.

This is precisely what makes the film work, the very thing that will threaten to drive you from the theater in protest: Korine presents this culture, not for the assessment of knowing outsider — within, for example, ironic quotes marks or a moralizing narrative — but through the eyes of its most ecstatic participants, the camera roaming through the seas of anonymous dancing body parts, palpably elated by the unhinged, unparented energy. When Faith (Selena Gomez), the film’s vague outline of a moral center, begs in confusion and panic, “I feel uncomfortable, I want to go home,” it’s like having one’s mind read: Yes, I feel uncomfortable and want to go home. But when these four girls sing Spears’s well-loved “Hit Me Baby One More Time” in a convenience store parking lot, you realize, of course, you are home, this is home turned up.

One possible, totally appropriate response to this film is wild rage. With an art director’s name attached to this big-budget exploitation romp, it can, at times, feel like the film simply indulges in the very culture it should be critiquing, or like Korine is banking on us reading the film as critical, rather than as the worst and most familiar brand of cinematic misogyny, simply because he directed it.

Anyone familiar with Korine’s other work, though, will know that while his films are challenging, thoughtful, almost impossible to endure, they don’t aspire to be critical, if that means offering some kind of privileged commentary; if anything, Korine’s consistent cinematic aim seems to be to reject the position of privilege that directors tend to enjoy and to offer to their audiences. In Spring Breakers – with sounds, colors, and a budget more luxurious than any he has enjoyed before — Korine pushes this effort further, accompanying characters into a space that they very much want to explore, leaving it up to the viewer to determine to what degree we will join them, take pleasure with them, or try to resist. And though Julian Donkey Boy, Gummo, or Trash Humpers each challenge the capacity of the viewer to separate herself from what she sees, to ask herself what it means to feel entertained by such a film, this task is taken to new heights of difficulty when the world one wants to remain distanced from, the thing one can take no pleasure in, is pop culture, our culture, perfectly distilled.

So “critique” in this sense is not Korine’s aim at all; the viewer is never invited to join in anything like critique, there is no external vantage on this world, there is rarely anything like an assuring wink. We are rather swallowed whole by spring break, by its nonstop terrifying energy, and asked to revel in it. The closest we get to critique are the repetitious shots of various degrees of debauchery paired with the whimsical, hollow voices of the girls talking to their mothers about the life-affirming experiences they’ve been lucky enough to have; its impossible to take this seriously, and through this we are, perhaps, given a kind of distance from the screen. But for the most part this world is presented in utter sincerity, nowhere better realized than in Alien’s soulful, seaside rendition of Britney Spear’s “Everytime” — which, to be sure, is an oddly moving ballad, in a ghostly kind of way.

In interviews, Korine has emphasized that his goal was to achieve, in contrast to an arced plot and developed characters, “liquid narrative,” that he wanted to make a film that looked like it was “lit with Skittles;” “its meant to be candy…there’s no right or wrong way of viewing the film.” While it may be unproductive to insist, as some offended critics have, that this film was not worth making or showing because of its candied presentation of rape culture, it seems wildly irresponsible to insist, as Korine does, that a movie about a culture structured largely around the drugging, undressing, filming, and habitual assaulting of women should be easily consumable, or that there is no wrong way to view it. There is of course the question as to whether Korine means this seriously or if, by insisting on the emptiness of his film, he is just goading the moralizers in the audience. Still, though, if someone could watch Spring Breakers and not experience a moment of fighting rage or bleak sadness, I would say they haven’t seen it rightly.

And indeed it turns out Korine wants it both ways: in the same interviews in which he’s insisted on his achievement of cinematic substancelessness, he’s also tossed off comments about Spring Breakers as a movie about “female empowerment.” What this means is he’s either pandering to the audience’s need for a message or suggesting that the idea of female empowerment is a kind of candy, a junky fantasy. While we might get some rush from their ruthlessness, the realization of a feminist vision is hardly his goal. If female empowerment was actually the issue, maybe the girls would have massacred, not the black gang members and rivals of their boyfriend-collaborator, but instead their grinning, eager, white male peers from the beach, the ones who’d been yanking off bikinis and circling passed out women like sharks (its not insignificant that Korine’s climactic image of power is Vanessa Hudgens gunning down Gucci Mane in his hot tub). Korine’s vague idea of feminism is ultimately nothing more than a marketing gimmick for the film; putting his “girls” as he affectionately calls them in balaclavas seems less a nod to real-life empowered females Pussy Riot, and more of a smirk. And truly, what could be more marketable than this hysterical, well-trodden male fantasy of female power: interchangeably beautiful, half-naked girls, dancing with rifles; these are women without identity, incapable of much emotion other than excitability, “sociopaths,” as Korine himself has said.

Korine’s insistence on superficial fun repeats, of course, the mantra of the very culture in which Spring Breakers is absorbed, and it is this commitment to superficiality and fun that inspires people, in real life, to threaten rape victims who come forward. If Spring Breakers can have any place in our culture, if it can be something worth seeing, its worth must be located in its frightening capacity to capture a world we dismiss as “just fun,” to capture the seductions of a world we refuse to understand. And there is potentially something valuable about being subject to this world without the assurances of critique, without being able to congratulate ourselves on knowing that we are well outside that environment, morally and experientially. There might even be something valuable about coming to the film expecting a play of surface and light, and instead glimpsing something profoundly real and deep and present.

The scenes that are most difficult to watch are not the more spectacular scenes of violence and revenge, but the ordinary, familiar parties on the beach that could be pulled from any Google image search of “spring break” or from any music video; what is hardest to stomach is so much “fun.” In making the party scenes, some of the most difficult to endure moments in American film history, Korine effectively brings rape culture, masked as ever in the guise of party culture, into the bright sunny dancing daylight. Which is to say that what’s most compelling and infuriating, what ought to leave any viewer deeply unsettled, is simply seeing the world we live in, the world in which spring break is an experience of a lifetime, a world scored to Britney Spears and fueled by blue Kool Aid.

Credit: Publicity photo.

[Spoilers abound for the most recent season of Downton Abbey, including the Christmas special, “A Journey to the Highlands,” which aired in the U.S. this past Sunday.]

The first stage of television grief is rejection: when a favorite character is killed off, the desire to distance yourself from a show you love, to disown it, even, is powerful. “I’m done,” you declare firmly. “I’ve had enough of this crap. They’ve gone too far this time.” I’ve seen it in a lot of fan communities; I’ve said it (half-heartedly) myself. In the past decade or so, I’ve developed a bad habit of falling in love with a certain type of BBC series, whose writers seem to be collectively united by slim budgets and streaks of cruelty: on one of my favorite shows, three of the five major characters are killed in the span of five episodes; on another, the entire cast of four kicks it in under a season — and it might be worth noting that most of them go violently, too. After rejection is anger, then grief, or just denial, denial, denial, because television arcs can feel sort of flimsy, lacking the sturdy finality of plot decisions in books and movies. If a character can be knocked off by a writer’s whim, perhaps it’ll be just as easy to resurrect him in time for mid-season sweeps, or to wash it all away, à la Dallas, with the cheap dismissal that it was all just a dream. It’s not terribly surprising that none of my favorites have ever come back from the dead.

Outside the realm of sadistic BBC showrunners, it seems that characters usually get killed for reasons far less noble than the pursuit of unshakable dramatic tension — it’s often the simplest way to fulfill contract obligations, to remove an actor from the equation. Around the time that the second season of Downton Abbey finally limped to a finish on American televisions last winter, producers began to leak spoilers for the third season, slated to air in the fall on ITV and on a similarly baffling several-month delay in the U.S. We were soon told that some characters wouldn’t make it to season four, and later, we learned exactly which actors had declined to renew their contracts. It was relatively easy to put two and two together. A pair of well-loved characters were about to bite the dust.

First up was Lady Sybil, played by Jessica Brown Findlay, who was able to bow out gracefully mid-season, after spending most of the first few episodes off-screen, which served to prepare us for her departure. But poor Dan Stevens wasn’t so lucky — by the end of it, I was all but waiting for him to just go, in what the LA Times called “the most internationally anticipated death since Little Nell’s,” and finally, he went, flung unceremoniously from a car in one of the sloppiest plot twists in a show founded on sloppy plot twists, 90 seconds from the end of the Christmas special. Merry Christmas! Here’s a fatal head wound and some heavy-handed dramatic irony.

And then Julian Fellowes — creator, head writer, and the object of as much scorn as praise amongst fans, if not more — put out two completely warring explanations in the weeks that followed: one, that he was as bummed as we were that Dan Stevens wanted off the show (and, to be fair, part of the suddenness must be chalked up to Stevens’s late decision to officially leave), but then elsewhere, that Matthew absolutely had to go, because, after getting Mary, losing Mary, nearly dying in battle, becoming paralyzed, being able to walk again (God, can you believe we’re all watching such a goddamned soap opera), hooking up with Mary for real, inheriting the fortune that saves the estate, and finally, having a baby, he was just too damn satisfied with life, and, in Fellowes’s words, “nothing is harder to dramatise than happiness.”

Christmas had long-since passed by the time PBS aired the American edit of the 90-minute special. On the arts pages of British news websites in late December, fans seemed split: for some, it was that classic last straw, spurring on the rejection stage of television grief — in The Guardian’s comments section, echoes of “And then, they went and ruined Christmas;” for others, it was just one more reason to gripe about the show more generally, a pastime that seems to get a lot of currency — in the same thread, one person who was a day late watching wrote, “I missed being able to hop over here and read all the bitching though, that’s the best thing about Downton.” The dialogue across the Atlantic is largely different, and kind of strange and excruciatingly self-aware: we spend a lot of time talking about why we watch this show, about its muddled politics, about our suppressed yearnings for simpler times and rigid class systems, and about whether or not the show is good historical fiction or just a guilty pleasure. But when it came to Matthew’s death, people seemed to have been reduced to the same dichotomy: rage and sadness, or general disgust. A woman on an LA Times thread said it well: “To raise viewers up so high and then suckerpunch them right before the credits roll was incredibly manipulative. It pulled me right out of the fantasy and I’m not going to bother with season four.”

There is something notable about the backlash when a television character is killed: fans take the opportunity to tear apart the writers’ choices beyond the decision to bump off an individual: across the show, all the indignities they’d have suffered through if everyone had been permitted to live. I wasn’t heavily invested in Matthew as a character — I’m not interested in most of the upstairs at this point, really, and after hearing Bates and Anna have the same goddamned conversation across a table in prison for nine episodes in a row, I’m running out of downstairs characters, too. But I am interested in why this show seems to work when it continually feels like it’s not working at all, on a writing level — do we all have Stockholm Syndrome or something? I watched the very first episode again recently, and marveled at the sharp, subtle tension — the plot twists feel like they’re actually set up, rather than just clumsy blunt jabs, and the divide between the staff and the household felt fantastically uncomfortable — remember the moment when Bates catches Mary and the Duke of Crowborough breaking into Thomas’s room, the complicated dynamics of shame and privilege at work in that exchange? I’m not sure when we said goodbye to all of that, but it seems to be gone for good.

I vastly preferred this season to the previous one, as did, it sounded like, basically everyone; there was nothing even remotely as painful as the Canadian burn-victim cousin storyline, after all, and I liked the shifting arc of sympathy for Thomas, stripping him of his status as mustache-twirling bad guy and turning him into a complexly screwed up individual. But Fellowes is plagued by the same shoddy pacing, the same weird relationship with passing time, and the same old paradox of a deeply conservative show whose characters are becoming increasingly progressive — more progressive, it often feels like, than the time period should warrant, like Lord Grantham giving everyone a pro-gay rights lecture in his cricket whites. If anything, it all feels a bit stagnant: in a smart piece for The New Republic this past week, Lili Loofbourow likens Fellowes to Pachelbel: “themes and variations are his medium, and this is the season of the reprise.” She goes on, “In the absence of real conflict, it’s unsurprising that Fellowes flirts with anticlimax this season like never before.” Previously, every plot twist imaginable was thrown at the wall to see what would stick; now, that wall has been moved slightly out of range.

I’ve been reading one of Fellowes’s novels recently, Past Imperfect, which was published in 2009, nearly a decade after Gosford Park and a year before Downton was first aired. The common threads between the novel and the show aren’t surprising, exactly, but they’re notable. The basic plot: the protagonist, a Londoner in late-middle age, is reunited with Damian Baxter, an old enemy who was once his friend. Baxter is dying of pancreatic cancer, and he’s got a self-made fortune of half a billion pounds waiting for an heir — a child whom he has never met, doesn’t even know the exact identity of, really, fathered illegitimately 40 years prior. Baxter tasks the narrator with hunting down the child by whittling away at a list of ladies that he remembers sleeping with in the late ’60s. There are moments that remind me a little of A Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes, because of the surfacey details — a thoughtful man towards the end of life trying to piece together a falling out in his youth — except it’s less meditative and haunting and subtle, and more…well, more like Downton Abbey.

How strange it is, to read the protagonist’s moaning about the passage of time, and the way things used to be and how all the good days are behind us: this must be Fellowes’s chief M.O., whether the Dowager Countess is waxing nostalgic about the ’60s — the 1860s — or Lord Grantham about the Edwardian era, or Carson, who seems more invested in tradition than all of the aristocrats combined. “There’s a danger in it, obviously,” the narrator of Past Imperfect says early on, “but I no longer fight the sad realization that the setting for my growing years seems sweeter to me than the one I now inhabit…I suppose what I miss above all things is the kindness of the England of half a century ago. But then again, is it the kindness I regret, or my own youth?”

So perhaps herein lies the problem. On Downton, characters are always looking backwards, but to move them forward, Fellowes is left hurtling them along against their will, with big, dramatic plot points and soap-opera staples. They acquire more generous perspectives to please the fans — I was delighted by Lord Grantham’s pro-gay rights speech in his cricket whites — but they don’t, for the most part, truly develop. He doesn’t give them space to do so. Characters fall out and we leap ahead to the end of the fight. Major changes happen against the characters’ wills, and we hear that it has changed them, for better or for worse, after the fact. Does this matter? Maybe not. But it feels unsustainable. That might not matter though — because in the stages of television grief, after denial, denial, denial comes grudging acceptance. We’ll all keep watching.

Image Credit: The Chicago Maroon

I’ve read Anna Karenina countless times, published articles, and dedicated two chapters in my book Understanding Tolstoy to the novel. So it is particularly exciting for me when an adaptation comes along that allows me to see the novel in a fresh light and even stirs me to tears over moments I thought I knew by heart. That happened to me a number of times while watching Joe Wright’s 2012 adaptation of the work. Which is why I was disappointed when the movie was nominated for Oscars in what amounts to the consolation prize categories, the ones having to do more with the style than the  substance of the film: Cinematography, music (original score), costume design, and production design.

But then, I’m not surprised. Most criticisms of the movie have focused on the idea that it’s long on style, short on depth. Robert Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times writes, “This is a sumptuous film — extravagantly staged and photographed, perhaps too much so for its own good.” “Visually stunning, emotionally overwrought, beautifully acted, but not quite right,” claims Betsy Sharky of The Los Angeles Times.  And yet, I would argue, that it is precisely by means of its stylistic prowess that Wright’s film captures the deeper truths about Tolstoy’s novel as successfully as any other adaptation I’ve seen.

One of the most controversial aspects of the movie is the filming of the whole thing in a dilapidated theater. In making “the radical artistic choice to tell the story as if it were being enacted by players on a stage,” writes Lisa Schwartzbaum of Entertainment Weekly.com, “Wright falls passionately in love with his own fanciful artifices.”

Maybe, but he also gets at one of the novel’s central ideas: that this is a spectacle society concerned more about show than substance, with tragic consequences.

Two thirds of the way through the novel Anna goes to the opera. By this point, she’s deep into her affair with the juicy cavalry officer Vronsky and has left her husband Karenin, who refuses to give her a divorce, making it impossible for Anna to remarry legitimately. A woman without social standing, Anna is the talk of the town, and, apparently, the main attraction at the opera that night. A woman sitting in the box next to her makes a scene after the woman’s husband exchanges a few polite words with Anna.

Here’s what Wright does with that moment: A hush comes over the theater and all eyes turn from the stage to Anna, illuminated by a spotlight as she sits there in her light-colored gown of silk and velvet with a low-cut neck, in her glittering necklace, with expensive lace in her gorgeous, black hair — and utterly humiliated. That shot says it all: There sits the real diva of the night, the grand dame of Petersburg high society whose titillating story of adultery, self-destruction, and pariahdom those leering theater-goers thoroughly enjoy from behind their lorgnettes. That they, too, may be complicit in Anna’s sad tale is a possibility none of them bothers to consider.

But if Wright doesn’t demonize Anna, nor does he glamorize her, as is so often the case with filmmakers and readers alike. When Tolstoy first started working on the novel, he envisioned Anna as a kind of empty tramp, but the more he wrote, the more sympathetic he became to her plight. Still, at no point does he absolve her of moral responsibility for her own decisions, as some readers are too apt to do. Anna is a tragic figure, not merely because she is an emotionally deprived woman in a loveless marriage surrounded by empty hypocrites. She is also a victim of her own her romantic illusions, of making, in Tolstoy’s words, “the eternal error people make in imagining that happiness is the realization of desires.” By giving herself over to the fantasy of complete liberation, Anna becomes a slave to her passions, a star in a tragic story partly of her own design. She is a stark illustration of  Tolstoy’s belief that one of the central problems of modern social life isn’t just that we’re all playing roles on a stage, but that those roles often end up playing — and destroying — us.

Wright (and Stoppard) might have made a safer bet by focusing exclusively on the sexy Anna-Vronsky plot, as other movies have done, but they instinctively understood this to be counter to Tolstoy’s intention. Anna and her tragic story reflect the truth that broken families, ungrounded passions, and human isolation are central to the modern experience. It is against these realities that the autobiographical rural landowner Levin, with his questing spirit and commitment to higher ideals, must fight. He belongs to a minority in his time — as he would in ours, which is why his story is vitally important today. Levin strives for meaning that neither the social artifice, the reductive scientific world view, the moral relativism, nor the pseudo-religiosity of his era can provide. Dostoevsky called him one of those “Russian people who must have the truth, the truth alone, without the lies we unthinkingly accept.” The director’s choice to film the Levin scenes at his estate in the countryside in a realistic as opposed to a stage setting is actually quite brilliant in communicating the impression Tolstoy gives in the novel that Levin is one of the few characters in his world who is connected to something real and authentic.

Then there’s Karenin, whom Wright correctly senses is a lot more like Levin than most readers ever suspect, at least when it comes to his uncompromising belief in ideals and principles. Wright doesn’t reduce him to the mean-spirited, rational machine so many filmmakers have made him out to be. Karenin is a deeply principled man who is simply incapable of accessing or expressing his emotions. But they’re there, all right, and Jude Law makes us feel them. When Karenin is sitting alone at the front of the stage before the dimming flood lights, having just learned that Anna is pregnant with Vronsky’s child, he turns slightly towards his wife (and the viewers) and says, “Tell me what I did to deserve this.” That heartbreaking moment reveals all the depth of his confusion. Like everybody else in Tolstoy’s novel, he has been thrust into a tragic situation beyond his capacity to understand.

Do I think this is a perfect movie? No. Keira Knightley is a little too young-looking and too thin for Tolstoy’s voluptuous, 28 year-old Anna. The movie could have made the connection between Anna’s and Levin’s storylines even more explicit, as Tolstoy does when he has the two meet near the end. There are moments here and there where the acting doesn’t quite ring true, as in that scene when Vronsky reacts to the news that Anna is pregnant with his child. And maybe the British tabloids had a point when they wondered why Wright decided to turn the dark-haired Vronsky into a blond.

But to criticize is easy. To create is hard. And Wright has shown himself to be every inch the creator, not on the level of Tolstoy, of course, but certainly on the same emotional and philosophical wave length.

A literary adaptation, in my view, shouldn’t be an imitation, but an interpretation. And a good interpretation, as any literature teacher or literary critic knows, is one that doesn’t cover a book, but uncovers it. For me, Wright’s film did that. The power of this movie isn’t merely in the fact that the director has willfully re-shaped Tolstoy’s classic according to his own bold, wacky conceit, but that in his very stylistic quirkiness he has actually brought us surprisingly close to the philosophical vision of the original work. For that even the most dedicated Tolstoy aficionados can be grateful. The Academy should have looked a little bit deeper.

Tolkien snubbed an invitation to meet with Jackson, and, as his father’s literary executor, he has sworn not to allow adaptations of material over which he has control (like The Silmarillion). Had it been his choice, Jackson’s blockbusters would likely never have been produced, and certainly not in their present form. But it wasn’t his choice. In 1969, United Artists made a prescient purchase from the elder Tolkien: £100,000 for full rights to movies and derived products for The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. And that was that.

The result, according to Christopher Tolkien, was nothing less than disastrous: “[J.R.R.] Tolkien has become a monster, devoured by his own popularity and absorbed into the absurdity of our time. The chasm between the beauty and seriousness of the work, and what it has become, has overwhelmed me. The commercialization has reduced the aesthetic and philosophical impact of the creation to nothing.”

Admirers of Jackson’s work may find such comments a touch melodramatic, if not downright inaccurate. Salman Rushdie, for instance, appears to favor the films over the originals: “Jackson’s cinematic style, sweeping, lyrical, by turns intimate and epic, is greatly preferable to Tolkien’s prose style, which veers alarmingly between windbaggery, archness, pomposity, and achieves something like humanity, and ordinary English, only in the parts about hobbits.”

Then again, there’s A.O. Scott on The Hobbit: “Tolkien’s inventive, episodic tale of a modest homebody on a dangerous journey has been turned into an overscale and plodding spectacle.”

Taste is a difficult thing to arbitrate, making debates like these fun but virtually irresolvable. Nevertheless, it’s worth noting that the participants all share a common assumption, which often remains unexamined. Rushdie puts it simply: “Everyone accepts that stories and movies are different things.” Indeed. But how, exactly? Is one a higher art form than the other? More illuminating? More demanding? Does one strengthen children’s brains while the other is more likely to rot them?

Perhaps it would be best to leave pronouncements of relative quality to the critics, and instead take this opportunity to reflect on the objective differences between books and movies.

2.
There is no better place to start than with J.R.R. Tolkien himself, who analyzes precisely this issue in his essay “On Fairy Stories,” which appears in Tree and Leaf. Concerned about the potentially deleterious effect of illustrating fantasy, he devotes a long footnote to the difference between “true literature” and all art (including drama and the “cinematograph”) that offers a visible presentation:

Literature works from mind to mind and is thus more progenitive. It is at once more universal and more poignantly particular. If it speaks of bread or wine or stone or tree, it appeals to the whole of these things, to their ideas; yet each hearer will give to them a peculiar personal embodiment in his imagination. Should the story say “he ate bread,” the dramatic producer or painter can only show “a piece of bread” according to his taste or fancy, but the hearer of the story will think of bread in general and picture it in some form of his own. If a story says “he climbed a hill and saw a river in the valley below,” the illustrator may catch, or nearly catch, his own vision of such a scene; but every hearer of the words will have his own picture, and it will be made out of all the hills and rivers and dales he has ever seen, but especially out of The Hill, The River, The Valley which were for him the first embodiment of the word.

This is strong language from a man whose color illustration of The-Hill-at-Hobbiton served as the frontispiece for most early editions of The Hobbit. Was Tolkien ruining his own book, forcing impressionable readers to accept his picture, denying them the opportunity to exercise their imaginative capacities?

The idea that books leave more room for the imagination is a commonplace, and this quality is usually understood as a virtue. Books, even trashy ones, require some effort from the reader, while movies allow for unadulterated passivity and laziness. Tolkien’s so-called “dramatic producer” does the work for you, making the artwork easy and less personal.

Yet the notion that movies are by nature limiting needs to be nuanced. Sure, there are no visuals in an unillustrated book. But it is not therefore true, as Jen Doll asserts at The Atlantic Wire, that books are simply “a compelling descriptive outline,” which you can “play your own way, seeing the characters and their motivations exactly as you like.” One virtue of books is that authors can reveal characters’ inner motivations in great detail — a virtue that limits the readers’ ability to speculate about those motivations. (Proust’s Narrator isn’t exactly up for grabs in In Search of Lost Time.)  Another virtue of books is their length — which allows authors to narrate scenes that in films must be left to the readers’ imagination.

And while we’re on the subject, what’s intrinsically great about freedom? If we push Tolkien’s logic a little bit further, authors do readers a disservice whenever they narrow the scope of imaginative possibilities. James Joyce turns me into a passive lump of receptivity when he describes his protagonist, Gabriel, in “The Dead”:

He was a stout, tallish young man. The high color of his cheeks pushed upwards even to his forehead, where it scattered itself in a few formless patches of pale red; and on his hairless face there scintillated restlessly the polished lenses and the bright gilt rims of the glasses which screened his delicate and restless eyes.

Better: “He was a young man.” Now my imagination can run wild!

Similarly, dramaturges would be doing us a disservice by putting on plays, directors would be cheating us by bringing screenplays to life, and chefs would be destroying the pure literature of recipes by specifying both appearance and flavor.

One rarely hears complaints about vividly detailed descriptions as such. Nor do people assert that “adaptations” of screenplays into movies or plays into stage productions somehow reduce aesthetic and philosophical impact. The upshot of all this is that exercising the imagination, whatever that means, is not always best, and books aren’t necessarily better at doing it than movies. (Which is a great relief to me, since I don’t want to feel bad about passively populating Roald Dahl’s entire universe with Quentin Blake’s fantastic illustrations.)

3.
Even the most die-hard critics of cinematic adaptation have their own favorite exceptions. I love Miloš Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s nest so much that I don’t want to risk ruining it by reading Kesey’s book. And so, if we accept that books aren’t formally superior to movies and adaptations aren’t necessarily ruinous, a new question arises: what is it about the process of adapting a book that so often leads to disappointment?

Part of the answer is that Tolkien is wrong: when we read about bread, we don’t just think of bread in general. Our minds fashion a specific image of the bread upon first encountering it, and then that image stays with us, in all its specificity, as we continue reading. The Elvish bread known as lembas does not change form each time it appears in Tolkien’s ouevre: my mind decided what lembas looked like when I first read the word, and it supplies that initial vision whenever I read it again.

These fixed images then compete with the fixed images provided by a director, and the power of first impressions is difficult to overcome. For that reason, even skillful novelizations of good movies (like Alan Dean Foster’s Star Wars novels) can feel like they miss the mark. Attachment to original experience is a powerful force.

Another problem is that adaptations are usually inspired by masterpieces. Richard Brody puts it well: “A director is likely to stumble when taking on the work of a writer who is a greater artist. Many directors of moderate merit do well in capturing their own experience or that of others… but when they lay hold of works of genius, they simply aren’t up to the material and reveal not the vastness of the author’s imagination but the limits of their own.” Asymmetry of ability favors the more talented artist, regardless of form. That’s why Orson Scott Card’s novelization of The Abyss is better than Cameron’s original. Arthur C. Clarke + Stanley Kubrick = Great. Arthur C. Clarke + Pretty Much Anyone Else = Doubtful.

That said, there is one quality of films that makes them susceptible to being lousy. They are expensive. Studios must ensure the profitability of their product, and when it comes to good art, the customer — or the product placement sponsor — is not always right. Limiting artists with the demands of consumers often hampers the creative process and product. (In a similar vein, the limitations on filmmakers imposed by MPAA ratings are nicely documented in This Film is Not Yet Rated.)

In this sense, Christopher Tolkien is right to bemoan commercialization. The upcoming adaptation of Candyland from board game to film will undoubtedly fail to do justice to the original. Why? Well, I don’t think I’m remiss in suggesting that Hasbro Studios, the force behind films like Battleship, Transformers, G.I. Joe, and Candyland, might be less concerned with good art than with profit. The same principle explains the frequency of bad film sequels (a phenomenon that is substantially less common with books).

The recent explosion of extraordinary graphic novels is evidence that bias against a particular art form is likely unjustified. (A comic book? scoffs my mother when I recommend Chris Ware’s Building Stories.) Contra Tolkien, “true literature” is not inherently more progenitive. Great art of any kind can work from mind to mind. And, in the end, it is not books but great art that is sacrosanct, and it is great art that is threatened by adaptation.

That’s why the goons at Hasbro would do well to heed Brody’s cautionary words before reducing the aesthetic and philosophical impact of Eleanor Abbott’s Candyland: “Those of us who are standing on the shoulders of giants shouldn’t try to wrestle with them; only giants can wrestle with giants, and adaptation, if it’s any good, is no mere mark of respect but an active and dangerous contention, an assertion and self-assertion that is as brave and as daring as it is potentially catastrophic.”

The first moment I saw that one giant word “GIRLS” flash across the screen in all caps, I became utterly, hopelessly enamored of Lena Dunham’s HBO television show. Yes, I know the endless criticisms, both reasonable and totally unreasonable. No matter. The show speaks to me like no other television show currently on air, and I am beyond excited that it is back for a second season on Sunday.

But while Dunham’s lady-centered wry comedy may be singular in today’s television line-up, the world of literature is home to a multitude of books with the same appeal as Girls, books that feature a certain kind of female protagonist (usually one coming of age) or a certain kind of female narrator (pointed, self-deprecating, and ultimately wise). These are books that — like Girls – explore what it is like to be young and hungry — hungry for love and hungry for sex, but most of all, hungry for recognition and hungry for adulthood. Ultimately, the girls in these books, like the girls of Girls, are hungry to become the women they will one day be.

And yes, of course, the girls in question here, both on the show and in these books, are privileged enough that they are not literally hungry. Many of them are also privileged enough to live on their own in New York and to be more concerned with opportunity costs than financial costs. And yes, the girls in these books — like on the television show — are all white. I am not white (or at least I’m only half), but these happen to be the books that have jumped out at me, that made me feel as if something of my own life had been understood and articulated in a way that was both illuminating and reassuring. I welcome your suggestions for other books in the comments.

How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti: Many comparisons have been made between Heti’s novel and Girls, the most titillating of which obsess about both projects’ frank depictions of sex and shadows of autobiography. Less titillating but far more important are their shared concerns about the process of becoming an artist and also the intricacies of female friendship. The fictional Sheila and her best friend Margaux ostensibly fall out over a yellow dress, and Hannah and Marnie ostensibly fall out over the rent/Marnie buying a book by Hannah’s nemesis/which one of them is “the wound,” but really, both fights are ultimately about boundaries, both artistic and personal. It’s no surprise that Sheila and Margaux patch things up (though I won’t spoil how), and we have yet to see where things go for Hannah and Marnie, but both brutally honest portrayals do full justice to the complexity of a crumbling friendship, whether it’s eventually resuscitated or not.

The Fallback Plan by Leigh Stein: After graduating from college (with an oh-so-useful theater degree), 22-year-old Esther Kohler moves back home with her parents in suburban Illinois, where she takes a gig babysitting for the neighbors in order to pay her parents rent on her childhood bedroom. She quickly becomes involved with her charge’s father (shades of Jessa), as well as a Very Handsome friend her own age (complete with awkward — completely, terribly, realistically awkward — sex scene). Stein’s wry voice shines through the entire short novel, especially in the pages involving the Littlest Panda, a creation of Esther’s imagination that she wants to turn into a Chronicles of Narnia-inspired screenplay. There is, of course, more to Esther’s lethargy and indecision than meets the eye, but her (and Stein’s) self-aware take on the self-pitying recession-grad generation is compelling reading even without the eventual reveal about Esther’s backstory.

The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy: The protagonist of Dundy’s 1958 novel is Sally Jay Gorce, a 21-year-old American girl, straight out of college and living abroad for two years on her uncle’s dime. The cult classic was widely praised (by the disparate likes of Ernest Hemingway and Groucho Marx) when it was originally released, and attained cult status anew when NYRB Press reissued it in 2007 (and not just because of the nude figure on the cover). Of all the girls on this list, Gorce seems most like the proto-Girl — a girl who is self-avowedly “hellbent on living,” getting herself into (and out of) escapade after escapade during her time in France. Many of Gorce’s misadventures involve a heavy dose of slapstick, starting on page one with our introduction to our heroine, who is sitting at a Parisian bar having a morning cocktail, wearing an evening dress because all her other clothes are at the cleaners.

The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume 1: 1931-1934 by Anaïs Nin: When Hannah’s diary got her into a mess of trouble, she probably took comfort in the tradition of great literary diarists before her, of whom Anaïs Nin is the reigning queen. In Volume One (of the six expurgated adult diaries), Nin talks freely — one might say obsessively — about Henry Miller and his wife June, her psychoanalysis, and her relationship with her father. But you don’t read Nin’s diaries for the plot points so much as the arcs of emotion and insight, as well as the searing descriptions of her friends and their relationships, (sound familiar, Marnie and Charlie?). Still, Nin perhaps has more in common with Jessa than with Hannah, as in this entry, reminiscent of the Jessa-ism that is possibly the most famous line from Season One of Girls: “Psychoanalysis did save me because it allowed the birth of the real me, a most dangerous and painful one for a woman, filled with dangers; for no one has ever loved an adventurous woman as they have loved adventurous men…I may not become a saint, but I am very full and very rich. I cannot install myself anywhere yet; I must climb dizzier heights.” Then again, Jessa would never be caught dead “journaling.”

The Lone Pilgrim by Laurie Colwin: In this collection of stories, the women are farther along the path to adulthood than Hannah and her crew — many are married, own homes, have stable careers — but they are no less lost. These are stories about new lovers and ex-lovers and the complexities of romantic love in all its forms, stories in which the women seek love as a form of stability but also rebel against the expectations of a relationship. In a turn that Jessa would appreciate, one of Colwin’s young female characters gets married in order to prove that she’s serious-minded, but meanwhile maintains a constant low-level high throughout the courtship and marriage. Beyond their thematic overlap, the stories are linked by Colwin’s diamond-sharp prose and emotional acuity. At the end of the collection’s eponymous story, Colwin writes of a woman who has married the man she loves and whose life appears to be in place, “Those days were spent in quest — the quest to settle your own life, and now the search has ended. Your imagined happiness is yours…It is yours, but still you are afraid to enter it, wondering what you might find.”

I Was Told There’d Be Cake by Sloane Crosley: Crosley’s first collection of essays covers well-trodden 20-something-living-in-New-York ground, mostly having to do with a privileged class of horrors: the horrible first boss, the horrors of getting locked out of your apartment, the horrors of moving (from one Upper West Side apartment to another), the horrors of being a maid-of-honor. Still, Crosley’s sardonic and self-aware take on those seemingly unremarkable rites of passage elevates them to true moments of insight and recognition. Not to mention laugh-out-loud (or at least smile visibly) lines like: “People are less quick to applaud as you grow older. Life starts out with everyone clapping when you take a poo and goes downhill from there.” And as we know, Dunham loves a good bathroom scene. Hannah Horvath couldn’t have said it better herself.

The Group by Mary McCarthy: When The Group was first published in 1963, Norman Podhoretz dismissed it as “a trivial lady writer’s novel,” the kind of criticism that has dogged female artists — and has already, unsurprisingly, been hurled at Lena Dunham — throughout time. Of course, McCarthy’s novel, which follows a group of eight female friends after they graduate from Vassar and move to New York City in the 1930s, is anything but trivial. At the time it was published, The Group was considered revolutionary — it was banned in Australia while simultaneously spending two years on The New York Times bestseller list. A full 50 years after its publication (and 80 years after the story’s events), the novel’s satire-tinged account of the women’s lives offers a nuanced portrait of love and sex and birth control, marriage and divorce, childbirth and breastfeeding, professional ambition and thwarted dreams, and the fluctuations of female friendship.

The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank: This collection of linked short stories centers around Jane Rosenal, who, like so many intelligent young female protagonists, works in publishing in New York City. The collection does not exactly follow Jane’s personal search for love, though her love life figures largely in the stories; instead, the stories act more like a romantic education, as Jane observes and interacts with different forms of love as she makes her way from teenager to young woman to adult. Last in the collection, the title story descends into rom-com territory, though Zosia Mamet might be able to work the same miracle with its one-dimensional material — a discussion of The Rules and a final moral to Be Yourself — as she has with the hilarious but terribly flat character of Shoshanna. Still, Bank’s sprightly prose and sympathetic voice run through all the stories, making for an engaging, enjoyable read.

Emma by Jane Austen: Lena Dunham has said that Clueless ranks among her influences, and there would be no Clueless (and perhaps no Hannah Horvath) without Jane Austen’s original meddlesome, egotistic, incredibly flawed heroine, Emma. While Hollywood would have you read Emma as a straight rom-com — and Emma as an unimpeachable heroine — it’s better read the classic novel with the same lens of dramatic irony that the discerning viewer applies to Girls. Hannah is not supposed to be a character who makes all the right decisions; we root for Hannah, but we do not necessarily agree with her every move. In Emma’s case, the close reader cannot necessarily even root for her by the end; if you pay attention, Emma is revealed to be much closer to the original Mean Girl rather than the perfect innocent portrayed in the movies. Just like Hannah, Emma is clueless; we can only hope that by the end of Girls, Hannah will have grown up more than Austen’s beloved-but-actually-kind-of-terrible protagonist.

Crazy Salad: Some Things About Women by Nora Ephron: Although a few of the essays in Ephron’s landmark collection are somewhat prohibitively dated (the ones concerning Watergate, in particular, rely on a detailed knowledge of the scandal that is unlikely in 2013), most are as relevant today as they were when Ephron wrote them 40 years ago. The best known in the collection, “A Few Words About Breasts,” tackles standards of female beauty that would ring all-too-true for Hannah (remember that cruel scene in which Jessa and Marnie bond by laughing about how small Hannah’s breasts are?). Ultimately, though, the collection’s real legacy is its examination of the Women’s Movement, a reminder — all-too-relevant in today’s political atmosphere — of the struggle for the gender equality (or at least semblance of it) that many 20-something women have simply grown up with. In the final essay of the collection, Ephron offers a piece of wisdom that might benefit the girls of Girls as they continue on with their belated coming-of-age: “I was no good at all at any of it, no good at being a girl; on the other hand, I am not half-bad at being a woman.”

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Last week, a friend of mine told me he never understood why the government funded PBS in the first place. Sesame Street is marketable and could be bought out by Disney or Nickelodeon in a second. The same goes for all of PBS’s best shows. So why should taxpayers fund PBS?

“Believe” is the most overused buzzword of political rhetoric, so I will avoid it. But I really think PBS should be subsidized by the government. Here’s why.

PBS is a cheap way to educate. There’s way more of your tax dollar going to war machines than to this frivolous arts-n-farts station. Yes, it’s run by aesthetes and Ivy League intellectuals. But that should be a point of national pride. The History Channel now airs “Did Aliens Build the Pyramids.” The Learning Channel airs “Say Yes to the Dress.” If you let the market choose your programming, sooner or later, it will lead to Honey Boo Boo.

Henson Kept Big Bird Safe from For-Profits

It’s true that Sesame Street (produced by CTW, the Children’s Television Workshop) could get bought out by Disney – in an instant. In the 1980s, when Michael Eisner came to Disney and started its corporate expansion into resorts, hotels, cruise ships, Broadway shows, TV networks, stores, sports teams, etc., he also made a deal with Jim Henson to buy the Muppets.

But not the Sesame Street Muppets. Henson created Big Bird for CTW and owned the copyright. Henson refused to sell Eisner the Sesame Muppets, which included Big Bird, Oscar, Bert, Ernie, Grover, and Elmo. Half of all licensing money from these characters went to CTW, for Sesame’s autonomy and survival. Licensing these character was the financial lifeblood of Sesame Street at that point.

CTW’s Sesame Street started in 1969 as a grand experiment to see what would happen if you gave all children (inner city, rural kids, and suburban alike) entertaining pre-school lessons as a head start. When you consider the alternatives, this is an awfully cheap way to educate and unite kids all over the country.

Henson Was a For-Profit


Sesame Street was a great social experiment that came out of the liberal 60s. But in many ways, the show was a product of free market capitalism. Jim Henson, a successful businessman, donated his services to the show. He didn’t get a paycheck for it. For Henson, it was worth doing – for free. The show’s funding came from private philanthropy in the beginning, the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation. They put up the hundreds of thousands necessary to do research, hire education specialists, artists, and so on. CTW was not originally publicly funded. It did receive some public funds later, but then eventually became independent on the sale of toys (remember those $30 Tickle-Me Elmos?). So if private business is responsible for Sesame Street, why do we need to fund PBS?

The thing is, you need both sides – public and private – to make Sesame Street. The show was the brainchild of Rosemary Ganz Cooney, who was at the time an employee of New York’s channel 13, the nation’s first Public Broadcasting channel. Sesame Street was the kind of thing no other network would dream of – clearly – and no network would even air. It is sui generis, original, and produced by a company that doesn’t want to make a profit; it wants to keep achieving its mission of teaching lessons. It wants independence. No other station would offer CTW a home without strings attached. PBS’s lack of economic motives was imperative. PBS offers a home to strange shows that just want to do something positive.

That’s why Jim Henson didn’t let Michael Eisner buy Big Bird. Oh Eisner tried, and he made Jim Henson pretty “annoyed,” according to a 1990 Washington Post article, trying – in Cooney’s words. According to the book Street Gang, when Henson told him Sesame Street characters were not on the table, Eisner relented and invited Cooney and Henson for “a peace lunch.” Cooney said, “Michael was absolutely being just his most charming self… but then out of the blue, he said something that stopped Jim cold… he made some reference to the Sesame Street Muppets…Jim turned to Michael and said, ‘You did it again!’” This was a man who never seemed angry – getting angry.

And according to a 1991 Forbes article, when Disney’s lawyers finally realized they couldn’t get the Sesame Street Muppets, “Disney wanted to limit their use, presumably to enhance the value of the Muppets it was buying.” Disney wanted to see less Big Bird, in order to get more profits for Mickey. That’s the way the free market works, baby. It’s a zero-sum game, and the strong squash the weak. In a 1991 Newsweek article, a Henson source said Disney lawyer Jeffrey Katzenberg countered Henson’s plea for a “fair deal,” by saying, “Fair deal! Get out of the ‘60s, pal. You’re in Hollywood now.”

CTW could sell itself to Disney any day of the week if it wanted to. It pointedly does not want to. It wants to remain independent, to listen only to its creators’ consciences and its panel of educators and researchers. If Sesame Street were bought by Disney, it would be subject to Disney’s shareholders’ opinions. Shareholders of a global entertainment conglomerate like Disney probably care about a lot of nice things but none more than money.

For Innovation, We Need Both



The public television system is above all else an opportunity. You may not like most of the shows on PBS – Downton Abbey or Antiques Roadshow or Jim Lehrer or Barney – but the PBS infrastructure needs to stay available for innovation. For the next Sesame Street. For innovations that will bring us all together as a nation, make us better, stronger, and smarter. We need the potential for informative programming to come into poor neighborhoods. We need the potential for a new big idea that will, perhaps, make our teens decide to major in math and science and stimulate our economy. I don’t know what the next thing will be, but I know the networks won’t air it. They’ll air Millionaire Matchmaker and Real Housewives.



Sesame Street was an amazing moment in our national history, aspiring to unite all kids in a shared love of learning and a shared wonder at what America could do. It came about because of a unique partnership between the free market and a governmentally-funded station. We need both to give us another Sesame Street. If you shut down the public part of the equation, you’re dooming the next generation to a future without that opportunity.

Big Bird won’t get fired. CTW makes its own money. That’s not the issue. The issue is – in 1969, who else would have aired a crazy idea like Sesame Street if not PBS?