A satirical spoof on the pretentiousness of modern art, “Batman” episodes “Pop Goes the Joker” and “Flop Goes the Joker” are side-splittingly out-loud funny while being simultaneously the best exposé of the naked nonsense beneath the Emperor’s new clothes. The secret’s out. My dual identity has been discovered. By day, I spend my time [...]
Mrs. Maisel must decide, like all other men and women who follow a path that separates them from their family, home, gods, and city, whether the allure of a life in the spotlight and the total freedom it promises is preferable to, or reconcilable with, the many good things she risks turning away from… [...]
In December 1971, Dirty Harry appeared on movie screens. Starring the then rising movie star, Clint Eastwood, the film proved as controversial as it was successful at the box office. […]
Pick up a Jane Austen novel, and you will discover that behind the long gowns and country dances, people in her era struggled with the same weaknesses we struggle with today. Well-written stories like Austen’s bring to life the human drama that is played out in every age, in every heart… I’ve been reading [...]
Seinfeld may be the first situation comedy truly to achieve the status of art. It’s a comic study of life after several decades of a counterculture that supposedly upended all the rules of life, definitely obscured the path to maturity, and persistently encouraged doing as one likes… The long-running sitcom Seinfeld has been in frequent syndication on [...]
Black Mirror succeeds at making viewers consider the ways humanity is being changed by technology. In its last season, the show considered the idea of uploading consciousness into a computer-generated world. But can the soul be reduced to a collection of data in this way?…… Apparently starved for new ideas, the popular science-fiction television [...]
The very word “civilization” is now politically charged, implying as it does hierarchies of achievement and value judgments. That someone would say that our culture is better than any other, or that some other culture is deficient in some way, is the kind of thing that causes fainting spells among our intellectual class… Kenneth Clark’s [...]
I would not dream of condemning Mister Rogers for keeping overt religious references out of his broadcasts in order to reach the widest possible audience and provide a valuable public service with his message of love. What I do condemn is the idea that Christian faith does not deserve representation unless first watered down [...]
TV screens are everywhere, seemingly omnipresent; difficult to avoid; gatecrashing our minds and demanding our attention, whether we want it or not; techno-rapists which force themselves upon us… I have long since broken the habit of watching television. We don’t have TV in the house and I relish all the good things that fill [...]
I watched Sherlock with a growing sense of sorrow for the homelessness of Holmes, and for the homelessness of those who wrote it, and for the homelessness of so many of those who watch it. I share their sense that we live in a vale of tears and that we see it through a [...]
One-sixth of all men of prime working age in America are not just unemployed, but have stopped looking for jobs altogether. Why?… The US stock market continues to set new records. Unemployment continues to go down. The United States is now at or near “full employment.” According to a Bloomberg headline last year, “The [...]
Hunting Will Shakespeare will be a continuing pursuit. It is almost as if the hunt for him is a hunt for humanity and a search to understand ourselves… My oldest son, Benedict has rightly observed that TV series are now more interesting than movies. Many of the series are well written, well budgeted, and [...]
The perennial moral that Wonder Woman learns is that evil, and the war which is one of its manifestations, can never be finally destroyed in human history… It’s been many years since I’ve been in the habit of watching films. It’s not because I’ve turned my back on the motion picture as an art [...]
Star Trek is a modern allegory and mythology for late Western Civilization. The series worked best when Captain Kirk stood for willful impulse; Mr. Spock for aristocratic reason; and Dr. McCoy for democratic passions… The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek by Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman (St. Martin’s, 2016) [...]