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David Edelstein and Nell Minow

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Van Gogh and Other Earfuls

By David Edelstein
Posted Thursday, July 30, 1998, at 3:19 PM ET

Nell,

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I wouldn't want to agree with you too often, so I'll say that I think the West Side Story movie--and everything about the musical except Bernstein's sublime score--has dated embarrassingly. Apparently, there's a revival somewhere in these 50 states that's in no special hurry to arrive in New York City, for fear of having critics reassess its quaint dissonances and mothballed sociology. This is, I admit, uncharitably revisionist, and I'd love to have seen Robbins's original production--to have been able to ogle those "joyously athletic" bodies in motion without the intrusion of all that obnoxiously athletic editing.

Before I go any further, I want to apologize to readers for something in the last dispatch. My wife, Rachel, points out that in the name of a cheap-joke segue to the ongoing fat-soprano dispute in rec.music.opera, I did indeed appear to be making fun of Linda Tripp on the basis of her weight. This was deeply unfair to Ms. Tripp, whose unpalatability has nothing to do with her appearance. And anyway, her problem isn't that she's fat but that she's hatchet-faced.

Your admission that the local library might not offer any of "the fringe material" that we discussed yesterday is so ludicrous an understatement that I'm going to let it pass without further comment. Also, your declaration that you're not going to "weep any tears for the dimming artistic vision of anyone whose vision can be dimmed by a studio deal" misses the point. Nobody's crying for the executives of, say, October Films, who were forced to unload Todd Solondz's Happiness by Universal owner Edgar Bronfman: as you say, they chose to make that Faustian bargain. My tears are for filmmakers who have fewer outlets for the kind of chancy material that the indie movement ought to be fostering. Will they soldier on, somehow finding a way to realize their visions as great artists do? What Van Gogh said above is certainly valid if the only things you need to make a work of art--aside from a roof over your head and food--are canvases and oils. But with very few exceptions, you can't make a movie these days that more than the teeniest sliver of the audience is willing to see for less than a quarter of a million dollars. The problem is not that the vanguards of the market you celebrate are bottom-line-oriented; it's that they're more dimwitted than the mass audience they cater to. They don't understand that, as the Lolita screenwriter Stephen Schiff told the Times, because you depict something doesn't mean that you endorse it.

It doesn't surprise me that Professor Turley is fearful of having his own weapons turned against him. But I think that some of the other pundits, especially the ones who agree with me, are doing an outstanding job of laying out the issues surrounding Semengate. Toobin I extolled yesterday. Jeffrey Rosen and Nina Totenberg need no endorsement. Then there's Lars-Erik Nelson, whose "Make My Day" column in the Daily News (calling for Clinton to demand impeachment) was a brilliant, if nutty, wake-up call to common sense. Nelson appeared today on Brian Lehrer's terrific New York talk-radio show, On the Line, and pointed out that "you can convict anyone of anything if you target an individual"--as Starr has relentlessly, and in violation of normal judicial restraints, targeted Clinton. In the August 13 issue of the New York Review of Books, Nelson has a haymaker of an article on books by Jim McDougal and Webb Hubbell. Beyond pointing out that every charge against the Clintons with regard to Whitewater, Vince Foster, the F.B.I. files, and the travel office, has been discredited or come to nothing despite years of fanatical digging (the Little Rock grand jury is out of business), Nelson identifies two principal culprits: McDougal, a "self-serving, self-pitying conniver who preyed on others and yet [saw] himself as a victim," who went public about Whitewater because he wanted Bill and Hillary Clinton to "feel [his] pain" (and who thought Bill was having an affair with his wife--that again!); and the press, which even at its most seemingly innocuous, will file a "work in progress that, just by its length and detail, implies that it is worth reading even though it actually proves nothing at all." OK, maybe tomorrow I'll listen to Rush and see that his point of view is fairly represented in this space. And speaking of fat tenors...