Okay, let’s wait for the liberal outrage to begin
Don't hold your breath, though.
Aren't these libs just the funniest folks alive! They are a barrel of laughs! Ha ha ha.
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11 comments to Okay, let’s wait for the liberal outrage to begin |
      
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See, George, the problem is we're too stupid and ignorant to understand Gore Vidal's wit and nuance in his "murder" comment.
Well, I think that Gore and Obama should go to a remote island far awya from us the stupid people, and there, Gore can be the itelligent citizenry, and Obama can be his too intelligent president, and the world will be a happy place.
What a fat f*cking POS toad.
And don't get me started on Gore Vidal.
Lori
Send all these socialists, NEOCON RINOS, the banking globalists, and the federal reserve assholes, over there.
The biggest joke is that if we had to fight them here instead of there, Vidal would be a prime victim because he is so blatantly gay.
This is so sickening. drillanwr, I loved your comment.
Gore Vidal's Obama worshiping is over-the-top and therefore vomitous. What is it with Obama? Is it because he's black? Because he's a "liberal?" Is it because, he is both and therefore irresistible to so-called intellectuals who want to prove to the world how liberal and totally unracist and open-minded they are?
It reminds me of Fidel Castro when he first rose to power, and "intellectuals" like Jean Paul Sartre carried on about him in the same manner setting the tone for the way that he is viewed today when someone like Steven Spielberg can say [with a totally straight face] that the 3 hours they spent with Fidel Castro were the most important hours of their entire lives!
What this repellent asshole is really saying is that Obama is too much for the common people to really grasp. He (Vidal), on the other hand, is one of the elect, one of the superior and enlightened ones, so of course he gets Obama. I suppose there's nothing a dried-up and washed-up old queen won't say or do to get some sort of notice. Pathetic.
Gore Vidal has ever been thus. It has amazed me for decades that liberals found this man clever and witty. I always found him revolting and without anything substantial to say. Remember that argument with Buckley? Vidal offered insults (crypto Nazi and such) and Buckley was, well, Buckley.
This is like when Maher said that we are too stupid and will have to be dragged to the truth.
Well, Honey, he can only sell what he's got on hand. The real problem is that he ever found people willing to put up with and swallow his little act.
Honey (et al) -
This is all part of the herding of the American people to the corral and slaughtering our freedoms and the republic. Make us 'poor', make us believe we're just too dumb to understand what's going on is for our own good.
However, while it might work on some within our population, on whole it simply will only succeed in pissing off the American people.
We don't take too kindly to being told we're dumb (unintelligent), and too rich. And we NEVER have liked being told what to do, for something as simple as wearing a helmet while riding a motorcycle to handing over the majority of our hard-earned money to the government. They are picking a 233 yr old scab, and they really are going to regret that sudden rush of blood they release.
BTW, I wrote a commentary over at 'my house' yesterday about "vampires" past and present y`all might find interesting.
http://tinyurl.com/ykufhd4
As vampires go, celebrity ones are nothing more than body fetchers for the real ones sucking us dry in every aspect of our liberties and freedoms.
Maggie
drillanwr,
I read your piece and loved it. Coincidentally, there was a similar thing today in NR online. It's long, but coincides with much that you had to say. It is about Herzog's Nosferatu.
The Borgomeister
Werner Herzog’s interpretation of Nosferatu stands the test of time.
By Andrew Stuttaford
There’s a long, unrespectable tradition of vampires’ being unable to decide whether we humans are lunch, lovers, or a bite of both. My irritation at coming across a pile of Twilights and their no-less-sensitive kin heaped under the heading “undying love” in a neighborhood Barnes & Noble was thus curmudgeonly and somewhat unfair. For those who can understand my reaction (well, you are reading NRO, so you just might), and are themselves getting a little sick of the simpering-emo-tofu undead, here’s a recommendation: This weekend, celebrate both Halloween and the 30th anniversary of the release of the finest — and grandest — vampire movie of them all by watching Nosferatu the Vampyre. It’s a 1979 film by the German director Werner Herzog that transforms genre into art and an old story into something new. It never goes near a high school and rarely goes bump in the night.
Blood is sucked, not shed, there’s no gore, and there’s none of the ripping and tearing so characteristic of another type of modern vampire, those ill-bred ones oafs who choose to adopt the revolting table manners of their loutish zombie counterparts. (If you saw 30 Days of Night, you know what I mean.) The sentiments that run through Herzog’s film owe nothing to either psychotic rage or prom-night angst, but a great deal to German Romanticism, ancient profound weariness, exhausted fatalism, and hysteria — complete with a grotesquely parodied danse macabre-in the face of onrushing death. Naturally there’s also a moment of supremely noble, erotically charged self-sacrifice. Inevitably it is pointless. Yes, Nosferatu is a German film, a very German film.
Shot in Holland, Czechoslovakia, West Germany, and, in its eerie opening sequence, Mexico, Herzog’s film, which was made on a budget — under $1 million — almost as incredible as its subject matter, is a slow, stately, hallucinatory, unexpectedly lavish, unexpectedly lovely “free version” of the first filmed Nosferatu (1922’s Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, Friedrich Murnau’s German expressionist masterpiece).
Owing to his studio’s failure to secure the rights to Bram Stoker’s then-still-within-copyright classic, Murnau’s movie was itself something of a reinterpretation. The count lost all his hair and all his wives but gained long, claw-like fingernails, the B-movie-alien name of Orlok, and a face that was part bat, part rat, and all ugly. Unlike Dracula, Orlok’s bite lacked even the gift of twisted immortality: It was permanently fatal to others and, in what was to become a familiar addition to vampire lore, sunlight was fatal to him. Additionally, some of Stoker’s characters were edited out or jumbled around, and the narrative was shifted in time (to the 1830s from the 1890s) and place (from England to the fictional Wisborg, a blend of Wismar and Lübeck, in north Germany).
These changes were not enough. The widow Stoker successfully sued the studio (which promptly went bankrupt), and all prints of the film were ordered destroyed. By then, however, copies had already circulated across the world. The film lived on, legendary, indestructible, and illicit, ready to reappear in the form of Herzog’s allusive, elusive, and dreamlike reworking.
In Herzog’s view, Murnau’s Nosferatu is the greatest German movie ever shot. Remaking it was his attempt to reconnect with an earlier generation of German filmmakers, the “grandfathers” untainted by the Third Reich (Murnau died two years before Hitler rose to power), and, through them, to an older, better national cultural heritage. Herzog may have borrowed much of Murnau’s storyline, but the earlier Nosferatu was merely a starting point for what the later director was trying to achieve. To be sure, some of Herzog’s shots are almost exact recreations of Murnau’s, and there are instances when the modern cast adopts the mannered acting style of Weimar expressionism, but the later film has a grandeur almost entirely missing from the slightly crabbed original.
Herzog’s Dracula (“Orlok” could now be safely dispensed with) may resemble Murnau’s in his loathsome appearance, but (as played by a mesmerizing Klaus Kinski) he is a predator — not vermin, never remotely a hero, but an oddly tragic figure nonetheless: “Time is an abyss a thousand nights deep. Centuries come and go. To be unable to grow old is terrible. . . . Can you imagine enduring centuries, experiencing the same futility each day?”
Herzog’s Nosferatu is, in its very specifically German way, a highly romantic film. Defined by an extraordinarily beautiful cinematography, much of it of mountain, mist, forest, and waterfall (Herzog hails from Alpine Bavaria), it is frequently reminiscent of nothing so much as the vast, visionary landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, the leading artist in Germany’s 19th-century Romantic movement, even as its eerie, not-quite-right grays pay tribute to Stoker’s own swirling imagery:
Everything is grey — except the green grass, which seems like emerald amongst it; grey earthy rock; grey clouds, tinged with the sunburst at the far edge, hang over the grey sea, into which the sand-points stretch like grey fingers. The sea is tumbling in over the shallows and the sandy flats with a roar, muffled in the sea-mists drifting inland. The horizon is lost in a grey mist. All is vastness; the clouds are piled up like giant rocks, and there is a “brool” over the sea that sounds like some presage of doom.
Yet Herzog is too smart to believe that history’s dark ghosts can be kept at bay for long. When Jonathan Harker (nicely played by Bruno Ganz, a gifted actor best known in the United States, ironically under the circumstances, as Adolf Hitler in Downfall) makes his way through the thin space of the Borgo Pass into the nightmare that lies beyond, he does so to the cascading, tumbling prelude to Wagner’s Das Rheingold. It’s a choice that appears designed to extricate the composer from the clammy adoration of his most notorious fan, but it cannot help reminding us that Wagner’s work was the musical accompaniment to a people’s descent into a pagan intoxication — an intoxication that was in many respects an extreme, perverse expression of the German Romantic tradition that Herzog so loves.
It’s equally worth noting that before she turned to Nazi propaganda, Leni Riefenstahl, the most infamous exemplar of the filmmaking generation Herzog wished to bypass, was best known for starring in Bergfilme (mountain films), a typically German genre in which the mountainous landscape was as much a star as the actors and that finds some strong echoes in Nosferatu. Riefenstahl’s debut as a director was a mountain film named The Blue Light. The next movie she directed was Triumph of the Will. It is, it seems, almost impossible to return to the roots of Germany’s cultural heritage without acknowledging the evil shapes into which they were to grow.
So it’s perhaps fitting that the consequences of that evil resonate in the very locations where Herzog’s movie was shot. The sequences filmed in then-Communist Czechoslovakia were a reminder of an Eastern Europe torn apart and cut off by the catastrophes of the 1930s and 1940s. In 1979, this region seemed irrevocably lost as, in a different way, so much of the Lübeck and Wismar of Murnau’s Nosferatu were; many of those cities’ centuries-old buildings had been devastated by Allied bombing and, in Wismar’s case, the malice of the East German state. Despite one notable sequence featuring the same row of Lübeck buildings that Murnau had, Herzog’s Wismar (he dropped the idea of “Wisborg”) was largely represented by the Dutch city of Delft — gorgeous, intact, and, by its very architectural survival, a pointed comment on all that Germany had lost.
But destruction isn’t only physical. When Dracula brings an army of rats (Herzog imported 11,000 of them from Hungary, painting each of them gray) and, with them, plague, into Wismar, its buildings endure as the city empties out. Among the most striking characteristics of Herzog’s Nosferatu is the way the director uses images of great beauty to tell a story of great horror. This is never more so than in the film’s depiction of Wismar’s losing its elegance as its people lose their lives; the shreds of their civilization are shown unraveling in astounding, merciless sequences of ravishing desolation.
Up until and including its finale — a glimpse of apocalypse complete with a pale rider disappearing into an immense horizon of sand and cloud — Nosferatu is saturated with a sense of impending, relentless doom. The atmospheric and impeccably chosen soundtrack features a repeating motif redolent of a death knell, while the film’s heroine, Lucy (a marvelous Isabelle Adjani in a role closer to that of Stoker’s Mina) has a pallor that hints at the grave. Her languor is echoed by almost all the rest of the cast in a series of subdued, sotto performances that underpin the sense of helpless, hopeless melancholy that persists throughout the movie.
Even Dracula himself is soft-spoken, his words slow, deliberate, and almost hesitant, his voice sometimes caressing, sometimes menacing, and always weary. He comes across as an exhausted figure, still powerful, yes, but tired of his own power. He is at the crossroads of human, demon, animal, and even insect, but he is still painfully conscious of the traces of humanity within him; he is alienated, isolated, lonely, envious, and resentful. Check out the scene in a night-struck Wismar where Dracula (illuminated an almost electric blue) peers through a window that reveals a cozy, candle-lit domestic scene: Satan gazing at a Vermeer interior, and mourning, and wanting and craving. To watch Kinski’s evocative face for just those few moments is to understand how the loneliness that envelops Dracula will lead this iron-willed predator into vulnerability and danger, and to watch Kinski in this role is also to be rewarded with the sight of one legend playing, and transforming, another. If Lugosi is operetta, Kinski is opera.
And best enjoyed, I think, with a little . . . wine.