Production Memorandum 2: THE LUBYANKAN CANDIDATE

TROTfilm
Novograd Republic

From: Richard D. Erlich, Director of Development

To: Boris Badenov, Writing Team Coordinator & Executive Producer

Subject: Trump Project (working, "Lubyankan Candidate") Draft 6

            cc: Natasha Fatale, Extra-Special Thanks

Boris, sweetheart!

            Congratulations on your upgraded title, improved credit, and the draft for Acts I and II The Lubyankan Candidate. I talked with Natalia from the Money people, and she loved it, loved it.

            Now about your team's suggestion for "opening up the film for an international epic of apocalyptic proportions, ending with the live-action/CGI destruction by massed artillery fire and/or nuclear bombardment of Seoul, Pyongyang, Tokyo, Kyoto, most of Guam, Burbank, Beijing, and Vladivostok, climaxing a neoMabley/McKee five-act structure." Natalia says she is happy your team has read a book — I pointed out it was at least two books — and she says she'll appropriate the budget if we can attach the Strugatsky Brothers for the final draft and Eisenstein and Kubrick to co-direct. I pointed out they were all dead, and she responded with "Da" and a long silence while she glanced through your team's receipts for "development," especially the research into Kompromat by "honey trap." (And, by the way, my name is spelled "Erlich," not "Ehrlich," and you and your crew have one week to pay back the 500,000 rubles I did not approve for "Sonia Shlyukha, consultant.")

            Anyway, you're not getting blockbuster budgeting, so figure one more act, giving a Beginning, Middle, and now End. Let me suggest, very strongly, a climax where Fearless Leader decides the point of the exercise was to show the world he can make an American President — and then, pardon the pun, trump that by unmaking him.

            You've already established some "buyer's remorse," in a manly sort of way, in Comrade Supreme Commander. The peripeteia, as the Greeks said, will be an intimate but powerful (and cheaply shot) scene of the Leader's watching one last meandering speech by Trump, taking a thumb drive out of a secret compartment and holding it up — and handing it over while saying quietly but manfully to The Aide, "Destroy him."

            We test-marketed some of the actual Kompromat (with faces masked) and got thrown off X-Tube for violating community standards, so tone down glimpses of the salacious stuff. What remains is an expandable or contractible "procedural" and "courtroom drama" as Mr. Trump's money affairs are spread over the Internet, and steely-eyed accountants "follow the money." This could become boring, but given the sheer chutzpah of the scams it will be fascinating … or will be unless your crew really are as dumb and untalented as Natalia thinks you are. (Get that money back, or heads will roll figuratively and knees broken literally.)

            The denouement — the final tying up of loose ends — can be a large-ish or small scene of the swearing in of the former VP as President Pence, or the former Speaker of the House, as President Ryan, depending on how many people you want implicated in the "procedural" and "courtroom drama." It should be in the Oval Office, watched on television by President Putin, with the last shot of Putin watching the show in his private office, and the preceding shot making clear that there are no cameras visible in the Oval Office.

            I have tremendous enthusiasm for this project, and I'm sure you and your team will come up with an End of The Lubyankan Candidate every bit as fascinating as the Beginning and Middle.

            Or else.

High Theory and the Crotch Shot in Paul Verhoeven's ROBOCOP (1987)

            I had a colleague who was into capital "T" Theory of the literary, cinematic, and cultural-feminist variety. We didn't interact much, but for a brief while we both worked, separately, on analyses of Paul Verhoeven's fine 1987 film, ROBOCOP. I got to look over her presentation on the film and noted to her a "proof-text" for her main point on gender: in the scene at the nightclub (or disco) where Robo goes into "ARREST MODE" and hauls in Leon Nash for questioning.

            During the arrest, Leon pulls a gun, which Robo knocks from his hand, to be caught be a young man who dances with it, as the dancing generally continues.

            Part of the satire here is the obliviousness of the "civilians" — those neither cops nor criminals — to the altercation between a suavely thuggish man and a police cyborg who is unmissably large and far more machine than man; and I probably should've paid more attention to that skewering of obliviousness. In Mass (1971), Leonard Bernstein and Paul Simon noted that even during that more activist period, "Half the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election. / Half the people are drowning and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction." The partiers in near-future Detroit are part of the stoned half, and, as always, a major part of the problem: all those people far, far too cool and sophisticated to, as we used to say, "get involved."

            Apathy, though, wasn't what either my colleague nor I would be dealing with, so I'll forgive myself for concentrating on what comes after Leon pulls the gun on Robo: Leon's kicking Robo in the crotch with a mighty "Clang!" followed by a scream not by Robo but by Leon, as Leon goes down, to be pulled toward the exit by Robo by the hair on Leon's head, with a continuing scream by Leon and Robo's line, "Let's talk."

            First point here: My colleague thanked me for pointing out the Nightclub Scene and "the crotch shot" (my formulation) and in the final draft of her analysis ignored it. She was doing Theory, "dad gummit"!, and she neither needed for her audience nor wanted for herself the crass empiricism of something we could see and hear in the movie.

            My second point is that she really should have used the two crotch-shot shots for her analysis. Even among advanced students in our program, relatively few could follow the philosophical arguments for capital "T" Theory — I couldn't follow most of the arguments, and I was a full freaking professor — and it's important that young American learn to analyze works in their popular culture.

            And with iMovie and what the antihero in GROSSE POINT BLANK calls "a certain ... 'moral flexibility'" — or healthy respect for the Fair Use Doctrine — a teacher at the end of the 20^th century could find a lot of cinematic examples to test hypotheses and reinforce analyses.

            In the Nightclub Scene, Leon delivers a very hard kick to RoboCop's crotch and Leon goes down howling. Our reaction might well be, "Wow, Robo! What a man! He's got balls of … oh …." Precisely. Robo has neither balls nor penis. His crotch is a crotch, period, and this is made explicit in the film. Robo otherwise has a hyper-masculine body, and on the shooting range, he has the biggest and most powerful handgun of all the cops; but no testicles, no penis, no nuthin' that goes toward the most basic sort of manliness.

            And the mutilation is part of what denies Robo not so much sex as his family.

            In James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd's THE TERMINATOR (1984), the ultimate macho man turns out to be a machine: an almost unstoppable, killer robot, impervious to pain — in all ways unfeeling — merely passing for human. There's a very explicit lesson there, although it is missed by the teens (and older folk who should know better) who take the Terminator for the role-model of the film. ROBOCOP takes a different tack, and it may be more effective for young males (although THE TERMINATOR and Cameron and Hurd's ALIENS are more girl-friendly).

            When I was growing up, a young guy might wimp out of a confrontation with the cliché "I'm a lover, not a fighter" and not lose too much street cred. In RoboCop, we get to see what in this dystopian Detroit is the near-ultimate in macho. And many in the audience will come to identify with him and sympathize with him and note that his macho is intertwined with his maiming, with a loss, at least for a while, of the lover in many senses of the term.

            At film's end, RoboCop has regained his name — "Murphy," literally the last word in the film — and a face and identity; and he achieves a human relationship with his police partner. He can "dispute it like a man," to use a callow expression out of Shakespeare's Macbeth (4.3), but he can again "feel it as a man": i.e., he is still one kick-ass cyborg, but he has regained a large part of his humanity.

            Insofar as we empathize and sympathize with Murphy/RoboCop, and think through the images of masculinity in the film: that far audiences have been invited to rethink some traditional cultural ideals of manhood.

            Insofar as subtlety is rarely a virtue in popular culture, especially in works for young males, it is well that this lesson is driven home with all the directness of a powerful kick to the gonads.

Philosophers are Different (5 Dec. 2013)

             Philosophers are different from the rest of us, even "the rest of us" when they're mostly graduate students and non-philosopher intellectuals. Or, anyway, a lot of the philosophers and "philosophically inflected" people I've encountered have been, well, different.

            I got the first inkling of this factoid in the very late 1960s when an instructor I knew and liked from my time in the University of Illinois Microbiology Department told me about preparing to teach a "science-and-society" type honors seminar for advanced students in Micro. His premise was that the life sciences moving into the 1970s was like physics moving into the 1930s: workers in the life science were about to run into some major ethical quandaries, and he thought it important to get budding biologists to start discussing the sort of questions scientists of earlier generations hadn't resolved until too late (if at all): questions about the social, political, and ethical implications of their work.

            So the Micro. man called the U of I Philosophy Department and asked to be put in touch with a philosopher who could talk to his class. The Head of the department said, more or less, "Well, we could send over Harry Tiebout. You know Harry?" And the Micro. prof responded that of course he knew Harry; everyone knew Harry; Harry Tiebout taught a highly popular course in comparative religions and was chairman of the Champaign County Democratic Central Committee. Harry would be fine for one session, but, he asked, how about an ethicist?

            I only got the microbiologist's side of the story, and I'm reconstructing it from memory — but what I remember is that the microbiologist said the Head of Philo. said, "We don't study those aspects of the field; we're an analytic department" — which I'd write as movie dialog as, «We don't do ethics, sir; we, sir, are a philosophy department!»

            My real introduction to the issue, though, came shortly after that when I went to conferences of Danforth Graduate Fellows, or just Danforth Fellows, as we were called at the time.

            (I received mail from the Danforth Foundation at my department office addressed to "Richard D. Erlich, DF," which got me kidded by colleagues since at the time "DF" meant "dumb fuck," and my colleagues complimented me for using that designation with my name, or the Danforth Foundation's knowing me that well. I passed that story on to the Foundation staff because I thought it was funny — and they changed the initials. But I digress.)

            If you own a pet or a herd of mammals or run a lab, you've contributed to the Danforth family fortune — they're the Ralston-Purina people and make "NAME OF TYPE OF ANIMAL Chow," including, if Futurama got its prediction right, "Bachelor Chow" in the 31^st century. And Danforth folk used to give really nice fellowships that would support graduate Fellows in all manner of fields through the Ph.D. And in the late 1960s and early 1970s they'd have conferences, bringing us DF's together.

            So I got to meet bright young people from across a broad spectrum of disciplines: usually guys at the time, but a few gals, fairly consistently not jockish enough or quite top-drawer enough to get a Rhodes Fellowship or a Marshall, and/but with a good record, good potential, strong interest in teaching — beyond its keeping a guy out of the Army — and at least some interest in religion (William H. Danforth, our Founder, was big on Christianity).

            At the conferences we'd break into groups and do little projects requiring cooperation and compromise, and, for the most part, we did this efficiently and pretty easily. A LitCrit type such as I could communicate and work with an engineer or a zoologist or whatever … or almost "whatever."

            After one particularly frustrating session, someone suggested, "Look, why don't we divide up into just two groups: those who've taken more then thirty hours of philosophy, and those who haven't." It was a good suggestion.

            For whatever reasons, these young philosophers just seemed to think differently from the rest of us. More exactly, they undoubtedly thought human thoughts of the mid-20^th-century, educated-American variety, but with enough differences that they had trouble communicating and cooperating with the rest of us, and vice-versa; and those philosophy students seemed convinced that the rest of us just had thinking wrong.

            Moving into the late 20^th century and early 21^st, the LitCrit field got far more philosophically respectable, and I got increasingly uncomfortable as literary criticism — criticism in the arts generally — decreased in status, and scholarship along with it; for a book or article to earn prestige, it had to have capital "T" Theoretical significance. One had to think Theory.

            Even with Theory that denied certainty and insisted on ambiguities and celebrated fuzziness — even then one needed firm definition of terms and explicit statement of method and self-conscious examination of one's process(es) and, in general, rigor in dealing with ideas. And one needed to deal with ideas.

            What one mostly didn't need was what most of us peasants in other fields thought of as data: evidence from either nature observed or experimented with, from examination of a text or other work of art. Indeed, one of my colleagues only half joked that he rather resented getting to the portion of an article in a literature journal where he was expected to say a word or two about a story or poem, or a play, film, or whatever: "Texts get in the way of my Theorizing." And in one case, I pointed out a place in an excellent feminist discussion of Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop (1987) where the author could cite a shot in the movie that would cinch her point. She thanked me politely and ignored the suggestion: she did what she wanted to do — what I saw as a philosophical disquisition — without needing much about what audiences would see and hear in a theater.

            (She was talking about masculinity in RoboCop. There's a shot in that film where a criminal kicks Robo in the crotch, and the criminal goes down in pain. "Hey, what a man that Robo is! He's got balls of …. Oh …." Indeed. RoboCop only has a crotch: no testicles, no penis. What you see is what he's got: Robo has the biggest, baddest gun on the firing range, and, the ultimate macho body, but he's a eunuch: a fighter only, not a lover. The same point is made in Jim Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd's The Terminator [1984], except more so: there the ultimate Schwarzeneggerian fighting-machine, macho-man isn't a man at all, just the literal ultimate fighting-machine of a Terminator hunter/killer-robot.)

            The times have probably changed already; intellectual fashions move more slowly than fashions in, say, clothes or hair styles, but, by definition, all fashions change — and Theory had had a long run by the time I retired in 2006. Plus, I only encountered a small sample of philosophers, and, more important, the "philosophically-inflected" in my fields were subject to some degree of disdain from a fair number of their philosophy-department colleagues.

            Still, most of us most of the time when we're trying to think seriously are still pretty vulgar empiricists: we like to check our ideas against the world as it can be directly perceived or at least encountered through lab instruments. For most of my professional career, there were robust and influential schools of thought that were pretty solidly sure facts were a myth — and that relying overmuch on evidence was no way to think.


            You may find yourself dealing with students brought up in those schools and now out in the world. For several recent academic generations, the Philosophy Department may've been very small, but Philosophy reigned in many of the big humanities departments. And for good and for ill, such semi-pro philosophers can be really, really different.