Letters to the Editor
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Strange movies, two men in power, Hoffman's line
"As to what else to say about Hopkins' hallucinatory "Slipstream" -- does it actually exist or did I imagine it? Is Hopkins batshit-crazy, or am I? -- I can only express bafflement."
How appropropriate that you said Slipstream evoked David Lynch then. I am still wondering about Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway, etc. Perhaps that is the point for certain filmmakers; that these disconnected images rattle around in dusty corners of our minds because we cannot digest them or put them together. I find this slightly disturbing when Lynch does it, but for some it's a trippy puzzle to be enjoyed. Still, anything is better than the paint by number junk filling most box offices.
Your comparison of Carter's Camp David with Bush's war would actually be funny... if only it were fiction.
Love the line from Before the Devil Knows You're Dead too. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?
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Inland Empire - Lynch as a master of nightmares
People often refer to the dreamlike quality of his films, but I've always found them more nightmarish. Inland Empire - a superb film in my opinion - is Lynch at his most ghoulish. Fear, disorientation, dread, sly malevolence, and anger are the main emotions. It's like a bad hallucinatory drug trip that might never end, or will at least end very badly. It actually ends on an upbeat note, but one still has the feeling of being inside the head of a crazy person (Laura Dern).
I hesitate recommend Inland Empire to others, because I can see how a person could have great taste and hate the film, but I think that it taps one of many people's darkest fears, that is, of losing our mind and existing in a perpetually disjointed dream state. It brought up my fears of everything from drug-induced psychosis to the dreadful toll of Alzheimer. In other words, it made a big scary impression, which is testament to Lynch's genius.
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man from plains
Dear Andrew,
I'm looking forward to seeing "Jimmy Carter Man from Plains" if it comes out my way. I'm still working on the book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid". However, I would suggest that one weakness of the book is precisely the point that Carter emphasizes: i.e., the idea that Israel practices apartheid in the Occupied Territories (which it clearly does) but not in Israel proper. In fact, Israel actively discriminates against its non-Jewish, Arab population within Israel itself. At best, they are third-class citizens. Mearsheimer and Walt in their book, "The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy" make this clear, and anyone following the Palestinian situation will know that this is the case. This is not to say that what happens to Arabs inside Israel is formal apartheid, but it is certainly systemic racism.
Sincerely,
Shaun Narine
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typo on Terri Gross
not meant for publication
Please change "Terri" to "Terry"
Brian Black
Freelance Production Editor
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Jimmy Carter documentary
This makes me want to see the Carter documentary. There's a little irony in this review of it. Carter is "thin-skinned" for not debating Alan Dershowitz? That's statement belies naivete. Carter didn't want to debate Dershowitz, because academia doesn't work like the mainstream media where bogus values like "balance" are not our method for pursuiting truth (we don't teach creationism alongside evolution for "balance," nor do we teach Holocaust denial alongside Holocaust scholarship).
In addition, Dershowitz tried to prevent the publication of a book by the University of California Press. Why would anyone debate a person who practices censorship? It seems, well, "naive," for a journalist to act like someone who works as hard as Dershowitz has to censor, smear, and punish faculty with whom he disagrees, is just promoting "viewpoints" that are debatable. Unless of course you're "thin-skinned."
Academia does include competing points of view but not always, without exception, on the same stage. No other president would agree to submit him or herself to a bogus debate designed not for academic reasons but to appease people who didn't want Carter to have a forum at all. Academics believe in debate but not the kind that turns universities into the political brothels they've become thanks to outside interference in their operations by "pro-Israeli" pressure groups, "Concerned Citizens," etc. Anyone who doesn't like a speaker can protest it anyway. What's wrong with standing outside distributing leaflets with your own point of view? Why isn't that "enough," when it comes to a speaker criticizing Israel?
Put another way, "naivete," on this issue depends on where you're standing. Academics have a responsibility to educate the public and journalists about our institutional conventions, but journalists should also make an effort to learn about our conceptions of "truth" and methods to arrive at it, and why they differ from those of journalists.