I’m posting this picture of Rachel McAdams, Odette Annable, and Amanda Seyfried for no reason.

Cool About ‘Undercover Heat’

Somewhere, there’s a good movie waiting to be made about a policewoman who turns to prostitution. The concept suggests an intriguing character arc, as it questions this society’s criminalization of irregular forms of sexuality. So, the concept is a good one. But sadly, Undercover Heat (a.k.a. Undercover, 1995) doesn’t deliver a satisfying approach to this promising premise.

This is largely because the film aims itself squarely at the soft-core porn market, which undoubtedly limited its budget. Some rough edges are laughable: the male lead (Anthony Guidera) looks more like a pony-tailed porn star than the cop that he’s supposed to be, and a plot-pivoting car crash is kept eye-rollingly off screen. A bit more attention to character and budget would have been appreciated.

But perhaps the film’s biggest drawback is that its policewoman protagonist, Cindy (Athena Massey), doesn’t grow that much. When the audience first sees her, Cindy is getting dressed, and we watch her bare body gradually being covered by civilian clothes — a convention of sexploitation cinema. Imagine what a greater character arc might have been conveyed if Cindy started the film as a sexless uniformed officer with hair in a bun and, through her encounter with prostitution, came to liberate her more womanly side. Her entry into hooking would have felt more severe, and it could have built up audience expectation for the nudity. (If there had to be nudity in the first shot, the title sequence could have focused on a supporting character.) But since Cindy starts the film as a sensual/sexual being, there’s not as much room for her character to develop.

Athena Massey (left) and Meg Foster in ‘Undercover Heat’

Not to give too much of the ending away, but Cindy finishes the final scene of Undercover Heat in a rather conventional situation. You wonder why she had to experience such a legally transgressive form of sexuality (prostitution) to end the film in such a non-transgressive position. Maybe Undercover Heat was just catering to its audience's expectations. But the film’s premise of a policewoman prostituting herself — in other words, having an upholder of the law break the law — raises very intriguing issues of legality, sexuality, and the positive aspects (such as they are) of prostitution. Cindy might have ended up quitting the force or adopting more of prostitution’s unconventionality to her own sex life. Undercover Heat doesn't maximize its material’s best potential. It would be intriguing to see how this concept would be handled by a more visionary director like Pedro Almodóvar or Kimberly Peirce.

In the midst of all this disappointment, the film’s copious nudity (in the unrated version) is one of its few redeeming features. So is Meg Foster’s performance, whose understated viraginity as the bordello madame beats the direct-to-video woodenness of other actors like a dominatrix flogging a masochist. It’s like watching a professional thespian slumming in a community theatre.  Also deserving a good word is Jeffrey Dean Morgan, whose quiet, unaffected intensity as Cindy’s unexpected ally likewise seems to inhabit an alternate dramaturgical dimension.

If all you want to see is Athena Massey naked, then you probably won't care about my opinions. And if all you want to see is Athena Massey naked, more power to you. But the film’s concept merits something weightier than a cheap, by-the-numbers erotic thriller. As a film about a policewoman enmeshed in prostitution and its paradoxes, Undercover Heat is a bust.



Originally posted at Amazon.com in 2004

Thoughts on ‘Twelfth Night’

A Viola Quartet (clockwise from upper left): Joan
Plowright (1969), Imogen Stubbs (1996), Felicity
Kendal (1980), Parminder Nagra (2003)

When discussing William Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night, or What You Will, “realism” isn’t the first word to spring to mind.  The play is so chock-full of outlandish improbabilities — not the least of which is the female lead, Viola, successfully pretending to be a man — that one’s disbelief requires strong suspension.  But this story of gender confusion (and secondarily, that of an egotistical killjoy getting his comeuppance) is so rich with comic possibilities that we willingly turn off our flapdoodle filters and enjoy the revels.  However, this largely unserious play also raises some very serious questions about gender identity and gender ambiguity: Where does maleness end and femaleness begin, and vice versa?  On what do we base romantic and sexual attraction?  And to what degree might sexual identity be an artificial construct?  Still, despite these sharp questions being intrinsic to Shakespeare’s text, they are often blunted in performance by the unattainability of the play’s central conceit, which I’ll discuss later. For this reason, Twelfth Night’s utterly incredible story can be enhanced by a dose of credibility elsewhere in its production.

I hope that I don’t need to recount the story of Twelfth Night to anyone:

• how the young woman Viola shipwrecks on the shores of the fictional (in Shakespeare’s time) country of Illyria;

• how she disguises herself as a boy to act as go-between to a countess, Olivia, on behalf of the duke that Viola serves, Orsino;

• how Olivia rejects Orsino’s suit but falls in love with the disguised Viola, who is herself in love with Orsino but dares not tell him;

• how confusion erupts when Viola’s “identical” twin brother, Sebastian, appears and is mistaken for her, and contrariwise. 

No, this is not the kind of story that you would expect to be told by a history book or documentary film.  In fact, the goings-on get so far-fetched — such as Olivia marrying Sebastian before learning his name — that one of the play’s characters seems to wink at the audience by saying, “If this were played upon the stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction” (III.iv.126-27).  Perhaps because of this never-in-a-million-years story line — and its evoking topical issues of gender identity — Twelfth Night has become one of Shakespeare’s best-loved and most frequently performed plays, so much so that one New York theatre critic once called for a moratorium on its staging. 

So, I was surprised to discover that Twelfth Night was not made into an English-language feature film until Trevor Nunn’s enjoyable version in 1996.  Yes, there have been some television versions, and there was even a stagy, stilted Russian-language film adaptation in 1955.  However, unlike numerous other Shakespeare works — Hamlet, King Lear, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It — there was never any straightforward big-screen adaptation of Twelfth Night in Shakespeare’s own language until the last decade of the twentieth century.  (There exists a 1986 Australian film of Twelfth Night, which I haven’t seen, but from what I can tell, it’s merely a filmed stage production.)  Given the enormous popularity of the gender-bending comedy throughout the years of the talking motion picture’s existence, I thought this was a very curious state of affairs. 

‘Двенадцатая ночь’: A. Abramov and Jan Frid’s 1955 Russian film of ‘Twelfth Night’

Then it hit me:

Perhaps the biggest imaginative leap that an audience member of Twelfth Night needs to make is to accept the premise that a masculine-attired Viola — as “Cesario,” her male alter ego — and the vigorous soldier Sebastian can be mistaken for each other.  When casting an actress as Viola and an actor as Sebastian, as the play is usually cast, this effect is never achieved to a truly credible degree, although valiant attempts have been made.  The actress playing Viola will usually (and understandably) affect an androgynous appearance.  The play itself tells us that Viola hasn’t perfected her masculine masquerade when Orsino says to her:

[T]hey shall yet belie thy happy years,

That say thou art a man: Diana’s lip

Is not more smooth and rubious; thy small pipe

Is as the maiden’s organ, shrill and sound,

And all is semblative a woman’s part.  (I.iv.29-33)

By contrast, Sebastian is usually portrayed as more classically masculine.  In the productions that I’ve seen, Orsino’s speech would never be used to describe Sebastian.  The performers in the roles of the twins — by height or build or facial features — always look so different that the audience must suspend its disbelief yet again and accept that to the other characters in the play, Viola and Sebastian look identical (or in a more modernist reading, that those characters are mentally oblivious to the twins’ different appearances).  So, when one character says of the siblings, “An apple cleft in two is not more twin/Than these two creatures” (V.i.220-21), we don’t really believe him, and we must adjust how the two characters look in our mind’s eye to make them so.

The reunion of ‘identical’ twins Viola and Sebastian in the 1980 BBC production of ‘Twelfth Night’...

...and in the 1996 Trevor Nunn film.  Can you tell them apart?

Another casting strategy, one uniquely suited to film and television, is to fill the roles of Sebastian and Viola with the same performer and use a split screen to put the two characters in frame at the same time, when needed.  But in the productions of this kind that I’ve seen (including the 1955 Russian version), a single actress playing both Viola and Sebastian may achieve an androgynous appearance for the sister, but this mien doesn’t adequately reflect the brother’s aggressive and athletic qualities, such as his not shying away from a duel.  In the instances that I have seen, the double-cast performer — who was always an actress — doesn’t convincingly pull off Sebastian.  Cast either way, Twelfth Night’s scrambling of gender identity is somewhat muted because the audience is clearly aware of the sex of the thespians, so the issues of gender ambiguity inherent in the text don’t go as far as they could when performed.

The 1969 ITV production of ‘Twelfth Night’: Joan Plowright plays both Viola and Sebastian

As all Shakespeare enthusiasts know, the playwright resorted to putting his female protagonists in male attire in five of his 38 plays: The Two Gentlemen of Verona, As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice, Cymbeline, and Twelfth Night.  And his English stage could successfully effectuate this contrivance because all of his female characters were played, in his lifetime, by boys dressed in female costume.  Consequently, Shakespeare’s original audiences first needed to accustom themselves to the convention of men playing women.  Once this was accomplished, accepting a boy playing a girl disguised as a boy must have been a piece of cake.  Of course, women now play women’s roles in mainstream entertainment, but a recent high-profile production of Twelfth Night was staged in both London and New York which, as in Shakespeare’s time, cast male actors in all of the roles.  By adopting the outdated Elizabethan convention, this production was able to boast a more passably identical Viola and Sebastian — and to give the gender issues more punch.

 

Samuel Barnett as Sebastian (left) and Johnny Flynn as Viola
in the 2012 Apollo Theatre all-male production 
of ‘Twelfe [sic] Night’ in London

Film’s foremost attribute, of course, is that it can replicate the world we live in with intricate exactitude.  Throughout the decades, motion-picture film and equipment have evolved to capture the world with increasing veracity: sound on film, faster film stocks, location filming, etc.  This sense of “realism” — or as academics like to say, “naturalism” — is the mainstream of feature films (although movies heavily reliant on computer-generated effects are now giving it a run for its money), so much so that anything artificial-looking, anything not in keeping with the sense of verisimilitude established by the movie, tends to have the undesirable result of taking us out of the story, however momentarily.

Why hasn’t there been an English-language feature film of Twelfth Night before 1996?  Because, it seems to me, the imaginative leap needed to accept Viola and Sebastian as identical — or to accept an actress as Sebastian or actor as Viola — is too great to make for mainstream cinema audiences, audiences accustomed to a greater amount of verisimilitude in their movies.  One may argue that an audience for a film in iambic pentameter isn’t exactly “mainstream” in the first place (and this may be why Nunn’s movie was distributed in the U.S. as a niche “independent” film), but one comes to a theatrical feature expecting an engagement with a more verisimilitudinous world than one would expect in a stage play.  Why commit to realism-biased film a play utterly dependent on a convention that works better on the stage?  (To illustrate my point: imagine how disastrous Neil Jordan’s film The Crying Game [1992] would have been if the audience could have told from the start that the transvestite character was male.)  I’m sure that a few movie producers asked themselves that question when contemplating a Twelfth Night feature. 

Historically, television has functioned as a medium “in between” the cinema and the theatre: its smaller image size and its place inside the home allow for the intimacy of a small stage, while its faithful reproduction of the outside world rivals the naturalism of the big screen. On television, stage conventions, such as the ersatz “identicality” of Viola and Sebastian, are more readily accepted.  For this reason, television has been more conducive to productions of Twelfth Night: the Internet Movie Database lists more than 20 TV productions of the Shakespeare play since 1939.  So, it’s no wonder that Twelfth Night has thrived on the small screen, while it went missing from the big screen.  (However, with today’s wall-sized sets and high-definition images, TV’s historically “in-between” status may be changing into something closer to the feature film.) 

From the 2009 Shakespeare in the Park production in New York:
One of these two is Anne Hathaway as Viola, and the other is
Stark Sands as Sebastian.  Can you tell which is which?

All of this is a very long way of introducing my main thought: with today’s advances in special effects and make-up, I’m surprised that no filmmaker has challenged him- or herself to make a Twelfth Night movie where Viola and Sebastian are believably (but not necessarily totally) identical to each other.  I would like to see a film, preferably on the big screen, where I can believe that Viola-as-“Cesario” would be reasonably mistaken for Sebastian and vice versa.  And I would like to see this done in a way in which the viewer never forgets that within the world of the work — whatever the filmmaker’s reality might be — Viola is a woman disguised as a man.  In other words, I don’t want “Cesario” to resemble Sebastian so completely that I forget an unknowing Olivia is pursuing a woman in disguise.  And if the filmmaker chose to cast both twins with the same performer, CGI, given the visual miracles that they can create, would be able to pair two images of the single thespian in ways unavailable to a mere split screen: Viola and Sebastian helping each other when their ship wrecks, narrowly missing each other on the streets of Illyria, embracing each other in the last act, and so on.

If a Twelfth Night film could make Sebastian and “Cesario” truly alike in appearance, that would make the play’s already perceptive questions about gender identity more pointed: these questions would be harder to answer without the reassuring presence of a clearly feminine “Cesario.”  How many film- and theatre-goers attend a performance of Twelfth Night to see its sexual issues put into play — because they still nag our historically heteronormative culture — all the while believing that these issues have already been safely resolved because Viola-as-“Cesario” is so patently played by a woman and Sebastian by a man?  Or because the same inadequately masculinized actress (or inadequately feminized actor) is obviously performing both roles via easily discernible special effects?  Such perennial flaws in enactments of Twelfth Night, I believe, undercut the importance and urgency of the gender issues so central to the written play, issues that would be more visibly unsettled and unsettling without these flaws.  In other words, this highly unbelievable story’s more serious aspects could be greatly enriched by making the identicality of Sebastian and “Cesario” more believable. 

But would the typical Shakespeare audience (perhaps unlike the one for the recent all-male production) go for this?  Maybe most Shakespeare fans like Twelfth Night precisely because its explosive questions about gender are defused by the audience’s ability to tell Viola-as-“Cesario” from Sebastian.  How many watch productions of the play expecting and enjoying a clear and comforting sexual dissimilarity between the brother and his sister’s alter ego?  How many relish a sense of superiority to the other characters in the play because these spectators can readily tell the twins apart?  If the answer is “a lot,” the incisive interrogation of gender and sexual identity within Twelfth Night, despite the play’s many productions over the centuries, has yet to be fully realized in performance.  

From the Los Angeles Drama Club:
Okay, that’s another way to do it, I guess.

Cleverly Hidden

Phil Everly died yesterday.  As you probably know, he was one half of the musical duo the Everly Brothers.  I grew up familiar with their big hit singles of the 1950s and ’60s, but I primarily remembered the Everlys as the hosts of the summer-replacement series for The Johnny Cash Show in 1970.  I didn’t really come to recognize the Everly Brothers’ historical standing as rock & roll trailblazers until much later.  For example, rock-music historian Michael Campbell credits the brothers for defining the rock ballad in 1958 with their song “All I Have to Do Is Dream.”  Also important is their direct influence on such equally influential musical acts as the Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel.

I’d like to write an appreciation of Phil Everly and the music he and his brother, Don, created in those formative years of rock & roll.  However, I’m probably not the best person to write it, and many appreciations will no doubt be written in the days to come by music experts and aficionados more knowledgeable than I am.  So, instead, because this is a trivial blogpost, I’ll pass along a piece of trivia.

As I said, the Everly Brothers were a major influence on many big-name acts over the years, and those performers would sometimes in their work tip their hats to the brothers, such as Simon and Garfunkel covering the Everly hit “Bye Bye, Love” on the 1970 album Bridge over Troubled Water.  On Paul McCartney’s album Wings at the Speed of Sound (1976), his song “Let ’Em In” has a chorus that goes:


Sister Suzie, Brother John,
Martin Luther, Phil and Don,
Brother Michael, Auntie Jin,
Open the door, let ’em in.


I wonder how many people over the years have heard or sung that song, to themselves or to others, without realizing that the names “Phil and Don” in the lyrics refer to the Everly Brothers.

Anyway, I just thought I’d share that tidbit while the Everly Brothers were on my mind.  Yes, I know: this is a very boring blogpost.  If it were a movie, it would probably be the soporific one sung about in “Wake Up, Little Susie.”

Re: ‘Bristling with Hostility’

My recent post “What War on Christmas?” brings to mind other discussions that I’ve had regarding religious issues and what I see as severe intellectual dishonesty by those arguing that the Christian religion is unduly disadvantaged in the United States.  One such discussion is an exchange that I had with Phil Dillon on his conservative blog Fires Along the Tallgrass (formerly Another Man’s Meat) back in 2007.

Reprinting a post of his from the previous year, “Bristling with Hostility,” Phil wrote of his dismay that the Chief Judge of the Iowa Circuit Court, Robert Pratt, made a ruling against Prison Fellowship Ministries, a religious group that worked to convert inmates in Iowa prisons to Evangelical Christianity as a means of reforming them from their criminal ways.  Prison Fellowship received public tax moneys to fund their evangelizing.  This government subsidy of sectarian religion was challenged in court by the organization Americans United for the Separation of Church and State (A.U.).  Judge Pratt ruled in A.U.’s favor, saying that Prison Fellowship’s brand of religion was a sectarian one whose evangelizing of inmates ought not to be publicly underwritten.  

Phil blogged about this case in an effort to make Prison Fellowship look persecuted.  For one thing, in describing the case, Phil never once mentioned the inciting issue of Prison Fellowship receiving tax dollars.  Phil made it sound as though what was on trial was Prison Fellowship’s very existence, and that Judge Pratt’s ruling in the case was against the ministry itself, rather than its eligibility to receive tax moneys.  As Phil wrote, mischaracterizing the judge’s ruling: “The net effect of the ruling was to declare Prison Fellowship’s faith[-]based ministry unconstitutional.”  Phil continued:

Judge Pratt’s primary rationale for the ruling was that: 

“The program was ‘pervasively sectarian,’ requiring participants to attend worship services, weekly revivals and religious community meetings. Participating inmates also were ordered to ‘engage in daily religious devotional practice.’ 

Barry Lynn, American’s [sic] United for Separation of Church and State’s executive director, couldn’t contain his joy over the rendered decision: 

“There is no way to interpret this decision as anything but a body blow to so-called faith-based initiatives.” 

The decision, if upheld, will have a major impact, there’s no doubt about it. For example, out [sic] nation’s prison recidivism rate is, according to Prison Fellowship’s president Mark Early, currently running at fifty percent. With 600,000 inmates being released from prison annually, it means that we can count on 300,000 doing something within three years to merit re-incarceration. The recidivism rate among those inmates who have worked their way through Prison Fellowship’s program is, while it’s still functioning, running at eight to eleven percent. The potential of that number is enormous. Think of it. Prison Fellowship’s number, applied to the current release rate, could mean that thousands fewer former prisoners would find their way back into the prison system. It could also mean that thousands and thousands fewer Americans might become victims of crime. 

And this is the kind of decision that Barry Lynn is hailing! Apparently, higher recidivism was a much more favorable outcome in his mind than excoriating a fellow Christian. Its anti-faith bias is much in keeping with the 2000 Santa Fe School Board vs. Doe decision that brought [a] withering dissent from Chief Justice William Rehnquist....

This prompted a series of responses from me.  Below, I have reprinted the entirety of my responses to Phil’s post, occasionally quoting Phil himself.  Because I don’t want to infringe on his copyright, for the complete texts of what Phil has written, please see his original posts.


FIRST RESPONSE:

Phil’s post ... is very disingenuous.  It never once mentions the reason for the trial in the first place: tax funding of a religious organization.  The entire tone of the post gives the impression that a religion itself was on trial.  That is clearly not the case.  The trial was about whether American tax dollars should go to a religious organization that advocates one sectarian view to the exclusion of others.  Judge Pratt wisely answered no.  Phil is spinning this decision into legal and cultural “hostility” toward a religious belief, when it is obviously no such thing.

The issue isn’t which religions are “normative” and which aren’t [as Phil said].  The issue is government funding for sectarian religion — something that the First Amendment prohibits.

Judge Pratt was not characterizing Evangelical Christianity the way he did in order to stigmatize it [which is Phil’s opinion].  He was merely specifying the differences between that version of Christianity and others in order to counter the argument that Prison Fellowship was non-denominational.  Judge Pratt found that Prison Fellowship was indeed denominational and thus ineligible for tax funding.

I am a member of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State (A.U.), although I am not writing on behalf of that organization.  As such, I question [Prison Fellowship’s] prison recidivism rates that Phil quotes.  In his book Piety and Politics: The Right-Wing Assault on Religious Freedom, A.U. executive director the Rev. Barry Lynn mentions Prison Fellowship:

“In 2003 the group Prison Fellowship, run by ex-Watergate felon Charles Colson, released a study indicating that prison inmates who had gone through his InnerChange program in Texas, which is steeped in fundamentalism, had a lower rate of recidivism, returning to prison less often than members of a control group.

“The media eagerly picked up on the study and reported it as a great success for [President George W. Bush’s] faith-based initiatives. But it wasn’t all that. The study simply did not hold up under scrutiny. Two months after it was released in June of 2003, Mark A.R. Kleiman, University of California-Los Angeles professor of public policy, debunked it. Kleiman noted that Prison Fellowship started out with 177 inmates. Along the way, 102 of them were kicked out of the group or left for various reasons. That left InnerChange with only success stories.

“When Kleiman added all 177 inmates back into the study, he found that InnerChange inmates actually did slightly worse on recidivism than the control group. Observed Kleiman in Slate magazine, ‘That result ought to discourage InnerChange’s advocates, but it doesn’t because they have just ignored the failure of the failures and focused on the success of the successes’” (pages 126-27).

Some religious activists have adopted a kind of victim mentality. Religion is alive and well in the United States, but some activists apparently feel that if the government doesn’t specifically endorse their belief system — and only their particular belief system — something is wrong.  So, activists have spun governmental neutrality toward religion into governmental hostility toward religion.  They constantly use the phrase “religion in the public square” when what they really mean is tax money in support of Christian sectarianism.  I’m tired of this intellectual dishonesty.

SECOND RESPONSE:

“IK [sic] understand what the rationale was. I understand the need to ensure that government doesn’t endorse one type of religion over another. My point was that in this case Evangelicals were being singled out, not on the issue of taxes, but based on system of belief.

“In pointing out Justice Rhenquist's opinion in the Santa Fe case I was identifying the same tone of hostility in the case against Prison Fellowship.” —Phil Dillon

And I don’t see the hostility.  To be frank, I think that you are trying to create “hostility” where none exists.  Why don’t you mention the instigating issue of taxes even once during your original post?  After all, it was Prison Fellowship’s eligibility or ineligibility to receive tax dollars — not the ministry itself — that was on trial.  Moreover, the outcome of the trial did not say that Prison Fellowship should be penalized while other religions should be funded.  This is something that your original post doesn’t acknowledge, and to my eyes, not acknowledging such a central subject smacks of willfully ignoring it in order to misrepresent the legal case.

Your original post goes on to say: “The net effect of the ruling was to declare Prison Fellowship’s faith-based ministry unconstitutional.”  This is absolutely untrue.  What was declared unconstitutional was the ministry’s ability to accept tax dollars and continue its sectarian religious practices in the name of public service.  No legal punishment was meted out to the ministry itself.  (And I do not regard the denial of federal funds to a religious institution as punishment.) 


“I’ve done volunteer work in the prison system and every one I’ve been in has chapel programs paid for by the state or federal government. I've seen Muslim gatherings, traditional protestant gatherings, etc.  Do you object to these programs as well?  Are you saying that they should be dismantled and that we have no religious influence in the prison system at all?"  —Phil

No, I am not saying that.  But why can’t those sectarian gatherings be paid for by private funds, not tax dollars?  And I would see nothing wrong with a publicly financed prison accommodating a privately financed religious service. 

Also, I would hope that any prison system would not show preferential treatment to one religion or denomination over another, such as giving an inmate a greater opportunity for parole if he attended one religious gathering but not another.  In his book Piety and Politics, the Rev. Lynn says that the Prison Fellowship program in Texas was riddled with perks for the inmates who took part, perks denied to those inmates who didn’t (p. 128).  The government should not be in the business of funding religious favoritism. 


“Are you assuming that since, as you say, I’m being intellectually dishonest, that my religious belief is also intellectually dishonest and out of the mainstream represented by Americans United?  Would that then mean that I have no public standing?” —Phil

I honestly don’t see your reasoning here.  Anyone has the right to hold any religious belief that they choose — as long as that belief isn’t unreasonably imposed upon others — however “illogical” that belief might be.  However, anytime that anyone makes an argument on issues that involve the secular — such as public tax funding for sectarian religions or the standing of religions in the broader society — the person making the argument has the obligation to represent their case as honestly and completely as they can. 

For example, if you make the argument that America must militarily invade another country because its dictator is going to attack us at any moment using weapons of mass destruction, but you rely solely on dubious intelligence while intentionally disregarding sound evidence that doesn’t support your position, that is not an honest argument. 

You, Phil, do the same thing when you ignore — willfully, it seems to me — the crucial issue of taxes in your original post.  You appear to do this in an attempt to portray Judge Pratt’s decision against Prison Fellowship’s eligibility for tax funding as a decision that somehow penalizes Evangelical Christianity itself, when the decision clearly does no such thing.  So, your characterizations of the decision as “hostile” and “anti-faith” don’t hold up. 

In my opinion, if you want to argue that certain forms of Christianity are disadvantaged in this society, you owe your readers a better argument, one that doesn’t misrepresent Prison Fellowship’s legal case or the judge’s decision.  As it stands, your argument seems intent on portraying Evangelical Christianity as a kind of victim, when, as the Rev. Lynn says, that sect actually enjoyed many privileges under Bush’s “faith-based initiatives.” 

I hope that I haven’t sounded rude or disrespectful in my post. But this issue of intellectual dishonesty can really irritate me.  While there is some of it among liberals, I think that it is especially pervasive in conservative circles, ranging from the need to go to war with Iraq to the firing of eight U.S. attorneys for “performance-related” reasons to many of the arguments made by conservative pundits.  I’d respect their discussions more if they weren’t based on false premises.  But too many of them are.  I’m sick and tired of it.

THIRD RESPONSE:

I believe you and I may be closer in thought than you think.  My primary interest is in getting results…. Where we differ is in how the difference in a life is made." —Phil

The Rev. Lynn articulates the problem that I have with faith-based prison reform better than I could myself:

“We could sum up the conflict between fundamentalist and non-fundamentalist views as this: Fundamentalists reject societal causes for people’s ills.  In fact, they often ridicule the very idea.  To fundamentalists, people are poor, addicted to drugs, or homeless because they aren’t in a proper relationship with God.  If they get right with God (by adopting fundamentalist religious beliefs) their problems will be solved.  It’s that simple.

“Thus, any faith-based initiative that leans heavily on fundamentalist Christian providers will end up, by default, including government funding and support of specific religious views.  Fundamentalists do not believe that providing for someone’s physical needs is enough.  There must always be a religious conversion as well or the job remains half done.  The conversion is their end goal.  The providing of a bowl of soup, a bed on a cold night, or a job-counseling program is merely the attractive bait to bring the person to the door.  Once inside, it’s hard-sell evangelism all the way.

“Not surprisingly, I have several problems with this approach.  To begin with, I am appalled by any theology that does not recognize the societal causes of poverty and other ills.  All too often people fall through the social safety net from no fault of their own.  A woman with children who is abandoned by her husband and left destitute has a bigger problem than having chosen to attend the wrong house of worship.  A child who is neglected because his parents are drug addicts is not being punished by God for failing to pray enough.

“Fundamentalists are free to believe such simplistic notions, but I resent having to pay for them” (Piety and Politics, p. 124).


"Beyond the issue of taxes, the tone of Judge Pratt's decision was clear to me.  First, because it showed an alarming misunderstanding of Evangelicals and Pentecostals (myself).  Second, I'm at a loss to think of why he would have made statements that singled out Evangelicals as being anti-sacramental (which is not true), suspicious of other religious institutions, etc, etc."  —Phil

If Judge Pratt showed a misunderstanding, I fail to see how it is an “alarming” one.  I don’t see any judgemental tone in his writing.  You may take issue with his understanding of particular denominational practices, but I don’t see his decision as pronouncing Evangelical Christianity, in your words, “egregiously out of the mainstream of current Christian thought.”  I merely see him dispassionately listing what he determines are the particularities of Evangelical Christian beliefs that separate it from the practices of other denominations.  Judge Pratt simply concluded that by following the particular practices of Evangelical Christianity, Prison Fellowship was a denominational ministry — not a non-denominational one [as Prison Fellowship claimed] — and therefore ineligible for government funding.  Is that so difficult to understand?

I suppose that is our disagreement: You see Judge Pratt’s characterization of Evangelical Christianity as condemnatory, and I don’t.  In fact, I have read and re-read his words, and I am hard-pressed to discern any judgemental language in what you have quoted. 


“Why wasn't it enough for him to say that it was in his opinion sectarian and leave it at that?” —Phil

Because that would have left his decision more easily open to challenge.  Judges need to be thorough.  If Judge Pratt simply asserted that Prison Fellowship was sectarian and left it at that — or offered only a couple of examples — his decision could have more readily been challenged as arbitrary or lacking in specifics.

Maybe you see more similarities between Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism that the judge does, but you have to admit that Evangelical Christians practice their faith differently than most other Christian denominations do. ...


"Judicial opinions are often based on precedents and it seems to me that in this case Judge Pratt was not only ruling on the tax merits, but also paving future ground to disqualify Evangelicals in this country's courts." —Phil

And I just do not see how one follows the other.  I do not see anything in Judge Pratt’s language that portends anything about the legal standing of Evangelicals, other than their standing in regards to tax money.  I don’t see this decision as a precedent concerning religion and other (non-tax) issues. 


"I've been unable to find the 2003 study on Prison Fellowship you cited. Can you get me a link to the source material and Professor Kleiman's analysis? I'd like to read the transcript and then the professor's analysis." —Phil

I’m not sure about the rest, but you can find Professor Kleiman’s Slate article here:

http://www.slate.com/id/2086617#return

I don’t mean this as a personal attack, but I need to reiterate my concerns about the original post:

First, I think it was very disingenuous to write about Judge Pratt’s Prison Fellowship decision without ever once mentioning the inciting issue of tax money.  It’s like writing a book report about Moby-Dick without ever once mentioning the white whale.  By excluding the motivating issue of tax funding, it was easy to misrepresent the entire Prison Fellowship ministry — the organization itself — as being what was on trial, rather than its eligibility or ineligibility to receive public moneys.

In misrepresenting Prison Fellowship’s court case this way, the original post misleadingly portrayed certain forms of Christianity — if not religion as a whole — as unduly put-upon in this society.  This follows what I see as a certain persecution complex among some religious activists.  They feel, it seems to me, that if the U.S. government (in a massive misreading of the First Amendment) does not recognize their version of Christianity as this country’s official faith — including the ability of that faith to receive tax money — they are being discriminated against.

Where I see governmental neutrality toward religion, they see hostility. I submit that there is no hostility. Religious hostility in America is in the mind’s eye of the religious activist.

*          *          *

In the end, Phil and I couldn’t come to a meeting of the minds: Phil saw Judge Pratt’s ruling as hostile toward Evangelical Christianity itself, while I saw the decision as merely disqualifying one proselytizing sectarian Evangelical Christian organization from public financing.  So, we agreed to drop the issue and move on.  I probably didn’t express myself as temperately as I would have liked — as I acknowledge during my discussion — and I wonder if expressing myself better would have brought Phil and myself closer to a mutual understanding.  Still, the intellectual dishonesty that I see in Phil Dillon claiming “hostility” in this particular legal ruling against a religious organization’s ability to be funded via tax dollars is similar to the intellectual dishonesty of other Christians claiming that there is a “war” on Christmas, when the religious holiday is really only losing a privileged place in society.  But losing a status of favor is not the same thing as persecution.

‘Island of Lost Souls’: Anna May Wong as the Panther Woman?

Although horror movies from the 1930s were the first kind of film that I really got into as a kid, my enthusiasm for them hasn’t withstood the test of time.  Today, they seem rather awkward, overblown, and unintentionally laughable.  Also, I’ve grown a little skeptical of a genre based on the idea that we must fear something, rather than understand it.  However, a few ’30s horror films still hold up. Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) is one.  For different reasons, James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein (1935) is another.  If I were to name a third, it would be Erle C. Kenton’s Island of Lost Souls (1932), based on the 1896 H.G. Wells novel The Island of Dr. Moreau.

Island of Lost Souls spins the speculative story of one of literature’s prototypical mad scientists, Dr. Moreau (Charles Laughton), on a remote island in the Pacific, transforming wild animals into humans, or each feral beast’s approximation of a human, through the dexterity of his scalpel.  By the time the story begins, Moreau’s isolated island is overrun with half-witted half-man/half-animal creations, which the surgeon, desperate to shield himself from the public eye, tenuously keeps in check with his bullwhip.  Complications arise when a seafarer (Richard Arlen) washes up on the shores of Moreau’s outpost.  The doctor tests his anthropomorphic abilities by introducing his most perfectly realized creation — Lota (Kathleen Burke), an apparently flawlessly formed woman whom he surgically shaped from a panther — to the castaway.  The film queasily implies that Moreau wants to test his transformative abilities by seeing if the human-like animal Lota can mate with the unsuspecting human newcomer, an occurrence which seems promising when Lota falls in love with him.  

Richard Arlen, Charles Laughton, and Kathleen Burke
in ‘Island of Lost Souls’

I like Island of Lost Souls, despite a few drawbacks, not the least of which, as others have noted, is the stilted central performance of Arlen as the square-jawed matinee-idol hero.  Also awkward is the staginess of some scenes, such as the Arlen character’s woodenly choreographed fistfight with a ship’s captain.  But none of this puts off the viewer because Island of Lost Souls seems to revel in its contrivance.  At first, the film’s decor looks a little too artificial, especially to eyes raised on shot-on-location, and everything else about the film, from its plot to its execution, looks equally contrived.  So, it’s hard to take the movie’s far-fetched premise at face value.  But gradually, the eerie artifice evokes a menacing mood that validates the story’s unsettling theme — where does the human end and the beast begin? — with an unnerving credibility.  Furthermore, Laughton as Dr. Moreau throws himself into the goings-on with such magnetic brio that he makes the bizarre twists in the story utterly engrossing and believable.  Is it possible for an actor to be understated and over the top at the same time?  And this mood of danger is enhanced by Karl Struss’s chiaroscuro cinematography.

Dr. Moreau orders one of his creations to do his bidding.

But I wanted to say something about Island of Lost Souls that many will, I’m sure, find absolutely irrelevant: I wish that the role of Lota, the Panther Woman, had been played by Anna May Wong.  No disrespect intended to any Kathleen Burke fans out there, but the Panther Woman would be a fun role in which to see the underutilized Chinese American star, who actually did some work for the film’s studio, Paramount, at the time.  Anna May Wong champions are probably shaking their heads in dismay at my suggestion.  Some exotic, saronged plaything for a leading man, they might say, is not the best kind of role for our Anna.  And they may be right. Still, AMW played worse roles. I’d rather see her claw the scenery as the Panther Woman than see her throw herself into the role of Fu Manchu’s female offspring in Daughter of the Dragon (1931).

Anna May Wong

At any rate, my comment is neither here nor there.  It would have been impractical for Paramount to have cast AMW in Island of Lost Souls, even if the studio had her under contract at the time (I’m not sure if it did, but it may have).  If Paramount had indeed cast Wong, the kiss between Arlen’s character and the Panther Woman would have had to go: kissing between the races was not allowed by the Production Code in the 1930s.

Kathleen Burke (left) and Anna May Wong

Also, AMW in the cast would have brought to the surface something buried within the story: Dr. Moreau’s creatures as stand-ins for the non-white races.  Island of Lost Souls is a thinly veiled cautionary tale about what might happen if minorities ever rose against the white whip-wielders of Western society. In this respect, the hero’s flirtation with the Panther Woman doesn’t so much evoke beastiality, as it does miscegenation — and several influential people in those pre-civil-rights days saw little difference between the two.  By casting the white actress Burke in the role, Paramount was able to keep this theme out of the viewer’s face and in the back of his mind.

Still, I can’t help but wonder how it might have looked to see Anna May Wong’s incandescent face and reed-thin arms atop the Panther Woman’s sarong.  I can’t help but wonder how she might have given the role more grace and gravity.  I also can’t help thinking about all of the other Anna May Wong movies that never came to be.  (Ironically, she did star in an unrelated 1939 movie with a similar title: Island of Lost Men, a revamped remake of the 1933 movie White Woman, another Laughton vehicle.)

Kathleen Burke as Lota the Panther Woman

Anyhow, don’t let my what-ifs ward you away.  If you watch only a handful of 1930s horror movies in your life, make sure that one of them is Island of Lost Souls.


Trailer for ‘Island of Lost Souls’



Originally printed at Amazon.com in 2005