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Peter D. Kramer and Andrew Solomon

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from: Peter Kramer

Send Out the Clowns

Posted Thursday, July 12, 2001, at 10:55 AM ET

Andrew,

Came across the pan of the stage revival of A Thousand Clowns. Too bad. But the angels could have consulted me and saved themselves a bundle.

I tried to show the movie to my kids on the VCR a few years back. Mass rebellion. Too slow, not funny. (And, of course, black and white.) More recently, I tried again and got one taker, willing to humor Dad through half of a sexist period piece. Then we shut it off.

Before that, I saw the movie only once while in high school. It stuck with me. The lines--"Is this good news or money?" O.O.W. as a euphemism for bastard. And, of course, Jason Robards; I followed his career, saw him in three Jose Quintero productions of Eugene O'Neill plays. The casting of Clowns was stunning. The film captured what each actor had to offer. Jason Robards' casual, naked honesty. Barbara Harris' sweet ditziness. William Daniels' unthreatening fussiness, which he rode through any number of TV dramas and sitcoms. And, of course, Martin Balsam's all-purpose earthy humanity; this was the role for which he won his Oscar.

I know there's nothing new to be said about the pace of life, or of entertainment for that matter, but there does seem to be a discontinuity that took place in the last few decades. In childhood, I read Dickens and Thackery, and certainly Mark Twain, and I thought they were writing for me, children's books--as generations of kids had before. There was no sense of reading a classic and no preciousness in the act of reading, no special achievement. Now even reading Dumas seems like a deed well done rather than a natural pleasure. It's not television alone that did this, at least not the existence of television; we've had television since before I could read.

On the upside (and maybe there's only an upside, maybe little has been lost beyond the illusion of connection to Dead, mostly White Males), if you look at A Thousand Clowns today, you are embarrassed at the mildness of eccentricity that once passed for rebellion. What we've lost in continuity, we've gained in exoticism--so much more freedom to be different.

Peter

the breakfast table
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from: Peter Kramer

Send Out the Clowns

Posted Thursday, July 12, 2001, at 10:55 AM ET
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Peter D. Kramer is a professor of psychiatry at Brown University and author of Listening to Prozac and the new novel Spectacular Happiness. Andrew Solomon is the author of The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression (read a "Book Club" discussion of it here) and also of the recently reissued novel A Stone Boat.
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Reader Comments From The Fray

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[Notes from the Fray Editor... or perhaps we should call them footnotes. There was a recommendation for David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest here, and a splendid line from Tim Button here: "Footnotes are justifiable in philosophy, but philosophy as a whole is very hard to justify." KC is expecting footnotes to these exchanges. The Fray team would like to recommend Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as having the best footnotes ever. We were glad to see that the poster Shark agreed with us: he is looking like the new star of the "Breakfast Table" (eat your hearts out Neill Hamilton and Amber) with his cutting-edge offer of a Kaus-like Star Poster skipping service. Find it here, on the WillV post below, and here.]


You wrote about anarchists who capture the popular imagination? Obviously, you didn't know about the merry band here in the Fray, a group that perfected popular anarchy long ago. Come join us as those from the left, center, and right are terrorized for intellectual pretensions, grammar and punctuation, and bourgeois status symbols. Your sequel could write itself.

--WillV

(To reply, click here.)


It has been suggested that liberals backing down on their opposition to nuclear power is equivalent to conservatives backing down on the rights of children who cannot yet defend themselves against abortions. I'm not going to bother with the actual debates, but I would like to say that liberals and conservatives alike view the nuclear power question as a balance of risk vs savings. Nuclear power is cheap, plentiful, and the electricity is the same either way. The only questions are these: can the plants be run safely, can the waste be disposed of safely. These are practical concerns, and as the need for power increases, the risks seem less ominous. If we were to suddenly find unlimited sources of sulfer free oil, or a way to cheaply produce reliable solar energy, conservatives would find the risk of nuclear power unpalatable. Nobody opposes nuclear power on moral grounds, everybody has practical concerns.

Abortion, infanticide, pornography, etc: These are moral issues, not practical issues. No conservative would say that he opposes abortion because there are too few babies being produced. Moral issues are fundamentally different from practical concerns.

In any case, conservatives and liberals frequently change their positions on practical issues, as things become palatable or circumstances change. When they start giving up moral positions, there had better have been a revelation, because abandonment of a moral position out of expediency is ... immoral

--Ben Kirkup

(To reply, click here.)

 (7/9)

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