In Which We Search In Vain For The Dragon

Waif in Ascent

by DICK CHENEY

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
dir. David Fincher
158 minutes

At my age it's very difficult to follow The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Facts refuse to cohere, statistics are my only refuge. After my second viewing of David Fincher and Steven Zaillan's adaptation of some Swedish novel, I was able to put together numbers that come close to representing the whole. Don't see the movie, just read this list. You'll save over two hours of your life, and when an enterprising detective asks if you have ever witnessed a rape, you'll be able to truthfully say, "Only metaphorically."

Number of times:

Rooney Mara raises her rear end ever so slightly in the air: 7

Rooney Mara acts like something doesn't hurt at all when it really hurts a lot: 24

Rooney Mara acts like something hurts a lot when it really hurts a lot: 1

David Fincher makes a character wear Nine Inch Nails merchandise in order to fatten his lover Trent Reznor's bank account: 2, but an annoying 2

Number of times:

You are reminded that Rooney Mara isn't a victim of sexual abuse and is actually heir to one of America's oldest fortunes: almost constantly

Robin Wright Penn's neck looks like what you might see inside the Grim Reaper's hood: 1, she wears a turtleneck for the rest of the movie (Sean Penn did this to her)

I whispered to Lynne, "the patriarchy did it" while we sat in the movie theater: 12 and once in the bathroom after the movie

Rooney Mara helpfully notes, "Harriet isn't a Jewish name" and Daniel Craig meaningfully nods: more than I could count

Number of times:

Lynne asked me what libel was: 1

A child appears in the diegesis: What's a diegesis?

Lynne made me revise my fanfic description of the sex between Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara before she would admit it was better than the original: 5 ("His coarse face brushed her face, and her face touched the place where she had stitched him up with dental floss, and she whispered, "The patriarchy", and his hands lingered on a copy of Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, and he told her of how his hands had felt as they had gripped Robin Wright's neck, and how he would, in a moment, flip her into missionary because it was the only way he could come...")

Millennium magazine favorably compares itself to a print version of The Awl: 3 (it's also implied twice)

Number of times:

Rooney Mara gives a fawning interview about how Daniel Craig is super cool because he let her keep pens and lipstick in the massive crevices of his dimples: 161

David Fincher succumbs to the vicissitudes of Scott Rudin's verbal tirades ("YOU FUCKING MUSIC VIDEO SHITFACE!") and prominently features McDonald's product placement: 4

Mark Zuckerberg's Asian girlfriend cries herself to sleep: never

David Fincher regrets the third Alien movie: always

Number of times:

Daniel Craig smokes a cigarette and looks off meaningfully in the distance as if he is just newly apprised of the fact tobacco is a laxative: 15.5

I myself wept while thinking about what Daniel Craig did to Darren Aronofsky: 76

Lynne asked me "If that was libel, why isn't David Corn in jail?": 1

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is the former vice president of the United States and a writer living in an undisclosed location. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

"Impossible Spaces" - Sandro Perri (mp3)

"How Will I" - Sandro Perri (mp3)

"Changes" - Sandro Perri (mp3)

In Which We Ride On God's Great Motorcycle

Love of Leather and Country

by DICK CHENEY

Sons of Anarchy
creator Kurt Sutter

I always wondered what happened to the British kid in Undeclared. (I assumed porn.) Then I was gchatting with Grover Norquist last year, and he was telling me about his favorite show, Sons of Anarchy. On Sons Charlie Hunnam portrays Jackson Teller, the vice president of his motorcycle gang and the practitioner of the worst American accent outside of Simon Baker. Grover bought me the show's first three seasons on DVD as a thank you present for a bunch of jokes I wrote him about Ezra Klein. That gift changed my life.

where are all the girls, did they attend West Point or something?

At base, Undeclared and Sons of Anarchy showcase essentially the same concept. Both concern groups of friends a little too overeager to explain how virulently heterosexual they are, adding up to something of a these ladies protest too much, methinks type situation. Each show concerns a counterculture not commonly exposed to the mainstream light; in the case of Undeclared the fact that college is a gigantic scam perpetuated by Fredric Jameson and Judith Butler, and in the case of Sons of Anarchy the fact that a motorcycle gang is basically an enigmatic cover story for a bunch of guys to ride on big metal phalluses.

I never understood the appeal of a motorcycle before, and I still don't. For a show concerned only with people devoted to the speedy vehicles, Sons of Anarchy hardly ever shows the members of the Sons of Anarchy Motorcycle Club Redwood Original (SAMCRO) admiring or enjoying their motorcycles. As transport, the devices are convenient because they can be ridden fast and hidden easily, but these jockeys don't seem to care much for their steeds. They're more into quietly serving out jail time and absolute monogamy.

"Do they force you to read The Daily Beast in here?"

Hunnam's Jackson Teller had a high school relationship with Tara (Mad Men's Maggie Siff) that engendered a love that never abated. Despite the fact that he turned into a drug-running, guns-abusing freak like his father, she's still attracted to his hard pecs. Even after he cheated on her with an adult film performer, she was still fine with it and raised his children without complaint, then went to her job as a hospital surgeon. And that's not all!

Listening to the British Hunnam pridefully spout the various details of the arms trade is about as believable as imagining that a University of Chicago educated doctor would ever copulate with him, but that's part of the fun of Sons of Anarchy. As the show's current season came to a close, the union has been so insanely ludicrous that the Sons of Anarchy writing team has the couple communicate only through cliché, as with this charming exchange from the penultimate episode of the season:

TARA: Tell me you love me.

JACKSON: I love you, Tara.

(pause)

Do you love me?

TARA: If you make it stop I will.

(pause)

I love you Jackson.

Jesus, did none of these people watch Tell Me You Love Me? Clearly not, or they would have cast Adam Scott as a rogue biker named Frederick de la Santos and I wouldn't have to watch him tongue kiss Amy Poehler anymore. Why not embark on a crossover episode, like when Urkel hit that girl on Step by Step with his car?

the fact that Ed Bundy remarried is the cherry on top of this situation

Jackson's mother Gemma Teller is played by Married... with Children's Katey Sagal as an aggressive, controlling presence in the lives of her son and husband. She reminds me of my wife Lynne if every third sentence out of Lynne's mouth was, "Don't hurt my baby." Her ongoing feud with Drea de Matteo was the highlight of the show's first season, although the fact that Drea did not get naked and that they never showed her shooting up heroin or bearing Jackson's baby somewhat lessened my interest in the storyline. 

"Tell me what you really thought of the second Hellboy."

Sagal's first serious dramatic role is a mixed bag. (I'll be scrambling my metaphors a lot in this paragraph.) Her ongoing marriage to show creator Kurt Sutter has hardly engendered goodwill among the fanbase, and including her original music was another fly in the ointment. The fact that her husband (Ron Perlman) beat the shit out of her and all she did was frown a lot constituted the final straw for me, however. Sagal actually enlists her son to kill her husband, but he has to leave him alive because of the CIA. Fortunately this storyline doesn't seem likely to go all Boardwalk Empire but I still get kind of creeped out by the way she looks at Hunnam.

just tell everyone you got into INXS there for awhile juicyEven when Sons of Anarchy gets silly, like when they debuted Tom Arnold as a wacky pornographer, the show usually redeems itself. There are actually many moments when Sons of Anarchy crosses conventional lines, such as when valued club member Juice tried to hang himself from a tree with a steel chain. You don't often see a suicide attempt on cable television these days, although god knows the British host of The X Factor should give it a shot. Also, there should be a specific viewer warning for having to see Ron Perlman's exposed belly.

To join the Sons of Anarchy, a member has to get a back tattoo. If they leave the group, they have to get it inked over or removed. I believe the Church of Scientology and the Heritage Foundation have a similar policy. The most common method of leaving the SoA is by death, and this season's death march has already claimed club founder Piney (William Lucking, not that it matters now). Ron Perlman shot him in the chest with a shotgun because he had an incriminating letter, setting up the weathered veteran as the show's biggest heel.

Also on the death list was poor Herman (The Shield's Kenneth Johnson) whose main crime was being cast on the doomed NBC version of Prime Suspect. Most of The Shield, Deadwood and Oz have taken their own place in Sons of Anarchy; you'd be surprised to know how few actors there actually are in the world, maybe 600 total not including Tom Cruise or his wives. They get thawed out of cold sleep every Tuesday.

get it????

Last night the show's many concurrent storylines converged in a not-so shocking season finale. When we had last left club president Clay Morrow (Ron Perlman), he was lying motionless in a hospital bed after being shot in the stomach by Piney's son Opie (Ryan Hurst). Instead of actually having the balls to kill off the most famous actor on their show, Sons of Anarchy creator/actor Kurt Sutter (below as incarcerated member Otto Delaney) chickened out and left Clay alive.

Jackson Teller had long calculated a plan to leave his club in the dust, move to Portland and start up a bed & breakfast with his wife. Instead, in the season's climactic finale scene, he ascended to the presidency of his little club. He explained the change of heart by saying that it would be one thing to simply abandon his club, but another to destroy it completely. I sympathized with him for the first time then because it's the same way I feel about having to watch the second season of Game of Thrones. Then again, how could it be as bad as A Dance With Dragons?

Jackson's tough decision is the exact same as Kurt Sutter's. When you make a beautiful piece of art, the second hardest thing to do is to leave it behind entirely like Larry David and Seinfeld, but the most painful thing to do is turn it into something unrecognizable. Sons of Anarchy lost its way a little bit this year by not changing enough in seasons past. Any character, no matter how finely drawn, becomes stale after we see them in identical situations over and over again. Consciousness change through repetition is only another myth perpetrated by the American political process.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He last wrote in these pages about The Walking Dead and Boardwalk Empire. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

"Honey Girl" - Jolie Holland (mp3)

"Little Birds" - Jolie Holland (mp3)

"The Devil's Sake" - Jolie Holland (mp3)

In Which We Were Pretty Much Dead To Begin With

White Flight

by DICK CHENEY

The Walking Dead
creator Frank Darabont
Sundays at 9 on AMC

Only white characters are permitted backstories on AMC's The Walking Dead. If you are white, you have a beautiful child who looks exactly like you and a charming meet-cute story about how every other person you know died from a bacterial infection but you made it out alive. Should you be hurt in the days that follow, never fret. Your pallid Caucasian exoskeleton will survive direct gunshot wounds without complications. You are basically invincible and impervious to pain. If you're a person of color on The Walking Dead, you'll probably just end up killing yourself by accidentally slashing your wrist.

the buddy system

The show's currently surviving characters of color, who have never exactly been named, are portrayed by Anthony Anderson and the little Chinese kid in the second Indiana Jones. He even has the same hat. Anderson, for his part, seems to have done well in recent years. (He also hosts a show on the Golf Channel.) These young men aren't allowed to go about with the other white characters. They have a buddy system, like little kids on a field trip to the aquarium. Someone asks them condescendingly, "Did you close the gate?" as if they would forget and leave it open to the undead.

be there for her, Glenn

The Korean fellow, Glenn (Steven Yeun), can't even close out an attractive woman's attentions on him as she mourns the passing of all her male friends. All her dead ex-boyfriends are immortalized on her refrigerator in a haphazard shrine to her loneliness. Glenn just sits there, he doesn't even put his arm around her. When the saddened young woman Maggie (Lauren Cohan) showers him with attention, he refuses her advances and suggests she take up sex with a whiter member of his party. Not since Newhart has open racism been given such a prominent forum on American television.

You can't have pity sex on The Walking Dead, but you can get excited by Georgia's amazing values on new homes. A raised ranch in a nice neighborhood is absolutely free. Should you desire actual meaning from watching white people shoot zombies in the head with bullets and arrows, don't bothering looking in Robert Kirkman's comic books. They look like they were drawn by a four year old, with a litany of "BAZOOOM" and "GURGGGL"s in place of actual dialogue and drama.

SEE! he closed the gate

In fact, The Walking Dead is drama devoid of all its modern components. It's just people, not usually in conflict, walking around in woods that could be anywhere on Earth, trying to find something interesting to talk about. A full ninety percent of their conversations begin with either the phrase "Dark's coming on soon" or "It'll be dawn in a moment." Talking about the weather is truly the lowest form of conversation. Perhaps what these desperate survivors really fear is the rising and setting of the sun?

We think of the bubonic plague as a singular outbreak, but in reality the black death emerged for the first time during the age of Justinians. It took a break of a few thousand years, waiting for people to experience new sins. No one was white then, they were mostly tan. As in The Walking Dead, every survivor spoke in exactly the same vernacular, with identical intonations, despite wildly disparate backgrounds. We were all alike, witnessing the onset of something we could not fathom — except the Korean kid and the black man who finds himself unable to deviate from the dialogue Danny Glover was given in the first Lethal Weapon. 

The cliffhanger in The Walking Dead's season premiere consisted of the white boy named Carl getting shot in a hunting accident. It's a law of the jungle that if someone gets shot, they probably had it coming. As if a young boy's bullet wound weren't upsetting enough, the incident is re-lived constantly by every single person involved, as if no one else had died in this Georgian landscape.

"Approach me, white boy!"

Rick Grimes (the British thespian Andrew Lincoln) muffles his accent with a throaty growl, his wife (Sarah Wayne Callies) doesn't have to fake an accent; she puts all her energy into overacting. Her anguish is so over the top at this point, given that she is hardly the only person to have lost someone, that we find ourselves wishing her face eaten off.

Last night's episode featured the far more disturbing image of a man (Jon Bernthal) with hair shaving himself bald, a disturbing sequence which should have merited a TV-MA warning in and of itself. Bernthal's character is not only stricken with guilt for sexing Rick's wife Lori when he was in a coma, but he's also genuinely upset about losing an intra-cast overacting competition to her. On top of that, he had to sacrifice his fat friend Otis to save her son from that hunting wound. Killing hundreds of diseased people merits no sorrow or sadness, but allowing one healthy person to die is a haunting, inescapable crime.

soap is inexhaustible during the end times

In fact, the unfortunately named "Shane Walsh" (the handle doubles as Jon Bernthal's porno name) has nothing to be ashamed of. Sure, he originally made a mistake that caused his best friend Rick to become catatonic. Correct, after that he made sweet love to Rick's wife and treated the man's child as his own. And yes, after Rick showed up from the dead he got very drunk and scared the shit out of Rick's wife. And then to save Rick's son from death, he had to sacrifice another innocent. So basically, yeah, nothing to be ashamed of.

The man I shot while hunting quail was 78 years old — he also survived, although he now has about 30 pieces of birdshot lodged in his chest for the rest of time. When you shoot someone by accident, to show the slightest bit of regret or disappointment gives the entire game away. And don't shoot children when you're out hunting — it's frowned upon, even when there is no intent. Don't hunt deer, either. That deer could be someone's mother; a fresh quail tastes like Linda Hamilton.

So what is there to enjoy about The Walking Dead? I have no idea, can only speculate. From time to time it is emotionally profitable to become lost in a place and time not of your own making — that is the therapeutic importance of the dream world. The men and women of The Walking Dead have wandered so far from civilization that they can identify no useful landmarks. One highway begins to look like a lot like another road.

At every destination, they find the same leering disappointment — no matter how useless their new lives are, they experience each sadness as if it were the first, as if everyone they knew had just then become undead, instead of things having been that way for awhile. The advantage of remaining tragic, instead of gradually feeling better about yourself, is that when the next bad thing happens, you are no worse off than you were before.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is the former vice president of the United States. He last wrote in these pages about Boardwalk Empire. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

"Tomorrow is a Long Time" - Elvis Presley (mp3)

"Blue Jeans" - Lana Del Rey (mp3)

"Space Junk" - Wang Chung (mp3)