The Mumpsimus

After Jimmy Carter's timid efforts to make America adjust to late-twentieth-century realities, Reagan installed fantasy as the motor of national consciousness, and it's still pumping disastrously along. —Alexander Cockburn I wouldn't wish the eighties on anyone, it was the time when all that was rotten bubbled to the surface. —Derek Jarman In March of 1985, President Ronald Reagan gave a speech to a business association and quoted Clint Eastwood’s most popular line from the 1983 “Dirty Harry” movie Sudden Impact:   "I have only one thing to say to the tax increasers: Go ahead, make my day." As a former Hollywood actor and head of the Screen Actors Guild, the 40th president relied on movies to help him communicate his ideas and emotions, and to help him understand the world and his place in it. Biographer Lou Cannon wrote that "Even when he was gone from Hollywood, Hollywood was never gone from him. He watched movies whenever he could, and the ...

This essay originally appeared in t he Spring 2012 issue of Rain Taxi . Elements were also used in my video essay "Profane Love: Derek Jarman & Caravaggio " , which I began work on shortly after writing this piece. Derek Jarman and the Memory Palace Of Life by Matthew Cheney Smiling in Slow Motion Derek Jarman University of Minnesota Press ($18.95) Jubilee: Six Film Scripts Derek Jarman University of Minnesota Press ($18.95) Derek Jarman: A Biography Tony Peake University of Minnesota Press ($24.95) Derek Jarman died in 1994, leaving behind him one of the most important bodies of work of any artist or filmmaker of his generation, an oeuvre that challenged orthodoxies of sexuality, politics, and aesthetics. Though best remembered for such films as Jubilee , Caravaggio , and Blue , Jarman was also a prolific writer, particularly as a diarist. The University of Minnesota Press has been reissuing many of his p...

The question is not whether Red Dawn is a good movie. It is a bad movie. As the crazed ghost of Louis Althusser might say, it has always already been a bad movie. The question is: What kind of bad movie is it? (Aside: The question I have received most frequently when I've told people I went to see Red Dawn  was actually: "Does Chris Hemsworth take off his shirt?" The answer, I'm sorry to say, is no. All of the characters remain pretty scrupulously clothed through the film. The movie's rated PG-13, a designation significant to its predecessor, so all it can do is show a lot of carnage, not carnality. May I suggest Google Images ?) My companion and I found Red Dawn  to be an entertaining bad movie. I feel no shame in admitting that the film entertained me; I'm against, in principal, the concept of "guilty pleasures" and am not much interested in shaming anybody for what are superficial, even autonomic, joys. (That doesn't mean we can...