Every Vote Counts: A Celebration of Democracy (Global Citizen, CBS-TV, aired October 29, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 9 p.m. CBS-TV showed another hour-long special encouraging people, especially young people, to vote. It had a typically awkward title -- Every Vote Counts: A Celebration of Democracy -- and it began engagingly with a marching band from an historically Black college doing a spectacular routine as their music was talked over by unseen voices celebrating the virtues of democracy and voting as a means to preserve it. Actually, the United States is a republic, not a democracy, and much of the success of the Republican Party over the past few decades is their shrewdness in exploiting the anti-democratic features the Founding Fathers put into the U.S. Constitution -- the Electoral College, the equal representation of every state in the U.S. Senate, the near-total power of state legislatures to determine election laws, and the power (not in the Constitution but baldly asserted by then-Chief Justice John Marshall in 1803) of the courts in general and the Supreme Court in particular to invalidate laws as unconstitutional -- to get their candidates in office and advance their agenda.

Though the show remained ostensibly nonpartisan and didn’t make a forma endorsement of one side or another in the current Presidential election, it was pretty clear what the biases of the producers were from whom they chose to include. Most of the participants were either women, people of color, or both. A lot of them were Queer, including quite a few Transgender people, and there were also segments devoted to U.S.-born young people who were voting even though their immigrant parents still can’t, as well as families whose parents have naturalized and therefore will be voting in a U.S. election for the first time. One particularly haunting young man said he was an immigrant from Iraq and he recalled what “elections” were like there -- with only one candidate at the top of the ballot -- and I joked, “That’s the beauty of America! You still have a bloodthirsty dictator running for re-election as President -- but you don’t have to vote for him! You can vote for someone else!” Another person was a 102-year-old woman who noted that she was born two yers before women won the right to vote nationwide -- and it occurred to me that while I’m reading a book about Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill and their relationship during World War II I’m watching a TV show featuring a woman who might well have cast her first Presidential vote for FDR.

The heavy domination of women and people of color, and the issues they mentioned as important to them in deciding how they would vote, definitely “tilted” this show towards the Biden camp -- it’s hard to imagine that we were watching very many people on this show who would be likely to vote for Donald Trump -- though it did feature some Republican former officeholders, including former Ohio Governor John Kasich (the last man standing against Trump for the 2016 Republican Presidential nomination, and this year an endorser of Democrat Joe Biden), former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, and former Tennessee Senator Bill Frist -- who had just published an op-ed in the Washington Post co-authored by former Democratic Senator Tom Daschle saying that we should be patient and not expect a winner to be announced on election night but should wait until all the mail-in votes come in. It was a plea not only to the Trump administration to stop their insistence that whoever is ahead in the count on election night should be declared the winner, but also to the media not to call a “winner” on election night and therefore build up an impression that if the other side comes from behind in late-arriving mail ballots it’s not a legitimate result.

The show also featured various musical guests, including Bille Eilish (who didn’t perform but announced that she is casting her first-ever vote this year -- I hadn’t realized she was so young she hasn’t been eligible before, especially since she seems so mature as a musical artist -- now, if she’d just lose the green birdshit from her hair … ). Shawn Mendes (whom I haven’t been particularly impressed with before) played a beautiful song called “Wonder” that was both a love song and an oblique social statement about equality and the universality of human experience, and Mendes sang it with a level of power and soul I hadn’t expected from him). The country doo Dan & Shea in a nice ballad called “When I Pray for You” that, like the Mendes song, was primarily a love ballad but also had a subtle message that we are all one and God loves all of us. The one song that rubbed me the wrong way was the Black-Eyed Peas with guest artist Maluma doing a horrible piece called “Feel the Beat,” though “Feel the Butt” would have been a more appropriate title since the song was one of those sexist, objectifying odes to women’s body parts (maximally displayed, at least by network-television standards, by the women on stage with the performers).

Oddly, earlier on the show there’d been a rap number I’d actually liked -- “Lick” by Offset, which came at the end of a segment advocating for the right to vote for convicted felons as soon as they’re released from prison. Offset said he was an ex-con himself and hadn’t realized he could vote until this year, and the song “Lick” was rapped to a soft, subtle beat and was about the singer rejecting the thug life and the mistakes that had put him in prison -- a rare expression of human dignity and social responsibility from a form that usually celebrates murder, rape, robbery, drug dealing, Queer-bashing and greed! (Also, you could actually understand most of what Offset was saying, which is surprisingly not true for most rap performances.) The last song was a duet by Alicia Keys and Brandi Carlile -- the Black woman was at a white piano and the white woman was at a black one -- on s song called “Beautiful Noise” that, like the Mendes and Dan & Shay pieces, at once was a love song and an ode to human commonality. If nothing else, the dominance of people of color on this show and the repetition of the message of human equality put this show definitely on the Democratic side of America’s political divide; though neither the names “Trump” nor “Biden” were ever mentioned, it was pretty clear who would win the election if the people on this program were the only ones voting!

Game of Thrones, season eight, episodes 3 and 4: "The Long Night," "The Last of the Starks" (Television 360, Startling Television, Bighead Littlehead, HBO, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Charles and I took a break from MS-NBC’s repetitive news coverage last night (all about the impending -- and actually already in progress -- Presidential election and its outcome) and watched the third-from-last and second-from-last episodes of Game of Thrones, which we started our progress through in June 2019. (It almost seems like that was so far back the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros were still going concerns then.) Series producers and show runners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss -- who won the rights to Game of Thrones’ source material, a still-unfinished multi-novel saga by George R. R. Martin called A Song of Ice and Fire, by promising they would do it as a TV series rather than a feature film -- or even three feature films of such bloated dimensions as the movies of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings -- made the last four episodes of season eight all an hour and 20 minutes long when most of the predecessors had been just an hour, so we had to turn off the news early to get to squeeze two into one evening.

I can see why season eight disappointed so many online commentators when it first debuted in 2019 -- two years after season seven was shown -- and I suspect the reason is that Benioff and Weiss got tired of waiting for Martin to finish the cycle (he still has the last two books unfinished on his computer, or his typewriter, or his hand-built wooden writing table and quill pens, or whatever he uses) and decided to write their own ending instead. Thus you have phenomena like the marvelous, if way underused, character of the butch female knight Brienne of Tarth (played by six-foot-tall actress Gwendoline Christie, who’s given interviews complaining that she has a hard time getting cast in anything because not many screenwriters create parts for women six feet tall) fall so madly in love with Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) -- even though he’s just on the rebound from having broken up with his sister/lover Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) -- she even cries when he leaves her to go on some errand or another. To quote Anna Russell’s marvelous like about Brunnhilde in Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, “It sure seems like love has taken the ginger out of her!”

Maintaining plot consistency is always a problem in a long-form series, especially one in which the ultimate person in charge of the writing changes over time; when Christopher Meloni left Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Michael Chernuchin took over from Neal Baer as show runner, he tried to “humanize” series star Mariska Hargitay a series of on-screen boyfriends of increasingly outrageous unsuitability for her -- or at least the version of her character Baer and overall producer Dick Wolf had spent the 12 years of the Meloni era creating for her. I’ll once again quote the online imdb,com synopses and then do my glosses:

The Long Night: “The allied living meet the vast Army of the Dead outside Winterfell. Despite swords ignited by the Red Witch, the initial Dothraki charge is decimated, and the Unsullied are quickly overwhelmed, despite the dragon-fire assist. Edd is killed saving Sam. Survivors retreat into the castle. Melisandre ignites last-minute the fire trench surrounding Winterfell to delay the advancing horde. Jon and Daenerys aerially engage the Night King, all three riding dragons. The wights fill the fire moat with corpses to invade Winterfell, storming at great effort the walls, then easily overpowering line after hideout of defenders. Jon and Rhaegal knock the Night King off Viserion, and Daenerys and Drogon burn him with dragon-fire in vain, the Night King raises the slain Winterfell defenders, including the dead entombed in the crypt, which attack the sheltered non-combatants. Wights pull Daenerys from Drogon, and Jorah is fatally wounded defending her. The Night King arrives at the Godswood and kills … “

The Last of the Starks: “After the funeral for the dead, there is a feast at Winterfell. Gendry is recognized as a Baratheon and asks Arya to marry him. Brienne and Jaime have a love affair. Daenerys asks Jon to keep his roots secret, but he decides to tell Sansa and Arya. Daenerys, her dragons, and her fleet are ambushed by Euron's fleet and are defeated; Missandei is taken captive. Daenerys decides to go to King's Landing to ask Cersei to surrender, but Cersei makes a tragic decision.”

Reading the above synopsis of “The Long Night” I’m tempted to think, “Oh, so that’s what’s supposed to be going on!” After the beauty and nobility of “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” dealing with the lead-up to the big battle against the White Walkers (zombie-like creatures made from the bodies of dead normal humans by the supernatural powers of their leader, the Night King. played by Vladimir “Furdo” Furdik), the battle itself proved a major disappointment. Despite director Miguel Sapochnik’s claim that he spent 7 ½ months on this long and elaborate sequence, it falls pretty flat on screen for one big reason: it’s too dark. For some reason Benioff, Weiss and Sapochnik decided to have the entire battle take place in the dead of night. Real medieval battles always took place during daylight, for a clear and obvious reason: in the age before artificial illumination, you needed to fight during daylight because you needed to be able to see what you were doing. “The Long Night” descends into a murky blackness that makes it virtually impossible to figure out who’s doing what to whom and why.

There are a lot of swords that erupt into fire (the synopsis makes it clearer than the film itself that this is the handiwork of the Red Witch Melisandre, played by Nathalie Emmanuel, who suddenly appears after having been absent for most of the last two seasons) and a lot of shots of Daenerys Targeryan (Emilia Clarke) and her lover Jon Snow (Kit Harington) riding her two remaining dragons and at one point engaging in a dogfight with the third dragon, which the Night King killed and turned into a zombie dragon in an earlier episode. Since one of the premises of the White Walkers is that anyone who is killed by one becomes one themselves, there are a few scenes -- but not as many as there should have been -- of members of the human armies fighting them realizing they’re going to have to kill a former friend or comrade because he’s gone over to the other side.By far the best sequence involves the invasion of the White Walkers into the Crypt, the part of Winterfell castle in which the people running the battle decided to have the lesser characters, including Samwell Tarly (John Bradley), who even though he began as a comic-relief character has developed and happens to be the first normal human ever to kill a White Walker permanently; Sansa Stark (Sophie Tucker -- oops, I mean Sophie Turner), who’s supposed to have been in charge of Winterfell in Jon Snow’s absence; and even Brienne of Tarth, whom one would think they’d want to have fighting the White Walkers. Sapochnik gets some quite good suspense editing in the sequences in which these unlucky humans are being stalked by the White Walkers, and the scene is genuinely frightening in ways most of the self-consciously “horrific” moments in Game of Thrones haven’t been.

The final gimmick is that though the fires emitted by Daenerys’s dragons eliminate a lot of the White Walkers, as do the swords of so-called “dragonglass” (actually obsidian) with which at least some of the human warriors are armed -- fire and obsidian are the only things the White Walkers are vulnerable to -- the Night King is ultimately taken out by Arya Stark, who despite her seemingly meek and vulnerable appearance is actually a trained assassin with a high body count to her credit from previous episodes. The victory at Winterfell -- it seems we’re supposed to assume that the various phases of the human attack felled all the White Walkers (either that or they simply couldn’t survive without the direction of the Night King, like the drooling, defecating, bestial warrior-hordes of Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream, a fantasy satire on the fascistic elements Spinrad saw in sword-and-sorcery fiction in general and The Lord of the Rings in particular; the gimmick of The Iron Dream is that it’s supposedly the text of Lord of the Swastika, a novel written by Adolf Hitler in an alternative universe in which he fled Germany in 1919, settled in the U.S., got work as an illustrator for science-fiction pulps and then, once he learned enough English, started writing for them as well), so the concerns of the series can move back to the human characters and in particular the whodunit-like suspense of who’s going to be on the Iron Throne, the supposed seat of power of all Westeros, at the end of it. (I say “supposed” because the Iron Throne has changed hands so often, and with little behind it but an assassination or a show of force, that it’s hard to imagine this rather brutal tale coming to a complete and definitive ending because whoever’s on the Iron Throne today could easily be overthrown by either a rival claimant or a Genghis Khan-like thug tomorrow.)

We’ve learned in these later stages of the series that Jon Snow isn’t who both he and every other cast member thought he was -- the illegitimate son of Ned Stark, head of the Stark clan, which is now down to sisters Sansa and Arya and their brother Bronn, a.k.a. Brandon, but is in fact the son of the last member of the Targeryan family to rule Westeros, the “Mad King” Jaime Lannister assassinated in the backstory, whom Ned Stark hid out and raised as his own. This means that Daenerys is either his sister or his aunt (the two degrees of consanguinity with which Richard Wagner gave his incestuous characters in The Ring of the Nibelung) -- either way, they shouldn’t be having a sexual relationship, though when Jon tells this to Daenerys (after he’s just discovered it from Bronn and also from Samwell, who found it out in an old scroll he stole from the library where he was training to be a “maister,” Westeros’s term for a professional intellectual), she couldn’t care less and wants to keep it a secret from everyone else so she can ultimately rule Westeros and have Jon as her prince consort.

The big action in “The Last of the Starks” is the decision by Daenerys and Jon to approach Queen Cersei Lannister, the current occupant of the Iron Throne, and demand that she surrender the throne and the big palace/castle at King’s Landing to Daenerys, or else her army will attack and take the place. As things turn out, Daenerys’s armies, largely depleted and totally worn out by the battle against the Night Walkers, are in no position to take anything -- especially once Cersei’s forces deploy their own secret weapons, the “ballistas,” which they developed as an anti-dragon weapon -- sort of the Westerosian version of an anti-aircraft gun. Not only do they shoot down one of Daenerys’s dragons with the ballistas (they tried and failed to do so earlier, but that was because they only had one; this time they have multiple ballistas and fire barrages of large metal projectiles at once) but they destroy much of Daenerys’s navy with their new super-weapon and they capture the woman who was formerly a slave until Daenerys freed her and hired her as an interpreter (she also became the girlfriend of one of the Unsullied, the castrated warriors Daenerys captured in some of her earlier conquests, because even though he couldn’t fuck her it occurred to both of them that he could eat her out and give her sexual pleasure that way). They threaten to kill her and use her new captivity to mock Daenerys’s pretensions as the freer of slaves.

That’s pretty much the standoff that exists two episodes before the series’ end, and I suspect it’s the fact that David Benioff and D. B. Weiss had to fill in the end of the story with their own inventions instead of having George R. R. Martin’s material to draw on is responsible for the enraging inconsistencies in some of the characterizations (especially Brienne’s -- if you’re going to create a butch woman I want you to keep her that way instead of having her fall for some damned man, especially a scoundrel whose previous girlfriend was his own sister!) and the already apparent (and widely damned online after the final episode aired in 2019!) failure to maintain the tone and the level of dramatic and emotional complexity of the previous seasons.

Game of Thrones, season eight, episodes 1 and 2: "Winterfell," "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms" (Television 360, Startling Television, Bighead Littlehead, HBO, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Charles and I continued our progress through the last season of Game of Thrones, an outlier in the series because while the previous seven seasons had been issued every year from 2011 to 2017, this one jumped two years and didn’t come out until 2019. Also, while the first six seasons had 10 episodes each, season seven only had seven episodes and season eight only had six -- though we were still startled when the first Blu-Ray disc went into a third episode after the first two. Apparently the Home Box Office (which is what “HBO” stood for lo those many years ago when it was founded as a premium cable channel showing recent movies) video department decided to cram the six episodes onto two Blu-Ray discs, which makes me wonder what the third disc in the box contains. The episodes here were titled “Winterfell” and “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” but they pretty much blurred together into a whole: the story of the combined forces of Daenerys Targeryan (Emilia Clarke) and Jon Snow (Kit Harington) along with the existing population of the North of “Westeros” (the overall locale is pretty obviously an analogue of medieval England and the Wall that separates the people of Westeros from the “White Walker” monsters that dwell north of them is essentially Hadrian’s Wall, built by the Roman emperor of that name who conquered England and added it to the Roman Empire but got his ass kicked by the Scots and built the wall to keep them out and block them from interfering with Roman rule of England) in a sort of ultimate battle against the White Walkers.

These monstrous menaces, depicted as mindless masses much like John Ford’s Indians or Peter Jackson’s Orcs, are dead people revived into a semblance of life, but they keep the cult going vampire-style by changing everyone they kill into one of them … which suggests that one possible ending for the Game of Thrones cycle is that the White Walkers conquer and/or “zombie-ize” the entire population of Westeros and the rest of the world has to quarantine that island to make sure they don’t take over the entire world. (That’s how it would have ended if it had been written by dystopian science-fiction writer John Brunner -- whose 1972 novel The Sheep Look Up I just read to comment on for a podcast a friend of mine is doing and which seemed to me a beautifully written but also very depressing and all too likely as a prediction that human assaults on the environment are going to lead to the total or near-total destruction of the human species in 100 to 200 years, maybe even sooner.) Anyway, I’ll go with my usual strategy of copying the online synopses on imdb.com and then riff on them:

Winterfell: “Jon and Daenerys have a cold reception in Winterfell. Jon meets his brother and sisters and rides the dragons with Daenerys. Then she discloses to Sam the fate of his father and brother. When Jon meets Sam, he discloses who his parents are. Euron Greyjoy meets Cersei to collect his recompense for joining to her army. Theon rescues his sister Yara and decides to go to Winterfell. Jaime arrives in Winterfell and sees Bran Stark.”

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: “Jaime is faced by his past mistakes. Tyrion's decisions are seen with doubt. The Battle of Winterfell is discussed tactically. Sansa and Danaerys discuss the future. The remaining Night's Watch are reunited. Everyone prepares emotionally with thoughts of their fate.”

I thought these were two of the most powerful episodes in the whole series even though series creator David Benioff and D. B. Weiss had to do without the guidance of George R. R. Martin, who created the Game of Thrones universe for a cycle of novels he called A Song of Ice and Fire and still hasn’t finished (though in the interval he’s written a series of prequels in the “Westeros Universe”). I suspect the two-year wait between seasons seven and eight was because Benioff and Weiss were waiting on Martin to give them more material, and then gave up and wrote their own conclusion -- which was greeted with withering scorn online. To tick off some of the points made in the synopsis, the reason “Jon and Daenerys have a cold reception in Winterfell” is that the residents of the North had elected Jon Snow as their king, only instead of maintaining his full-fledged royal status he agreed to “bend the knee” to Daenerys and support her claim to the overall throne of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros. The resentment comes from the fact that in order to get Daenerys’s armies to come north and fight the White Walkers instead of going after Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey), current holder of the Iron Throne, and heading south towards the capital, Jon agreed to “bend the knee” to her and so he left as a king and came back as at best a provincial governor.

The Greyjoys are the mercenaries who have aligned themselves with Cersei for money, and Cersei agrees to a sexual affair with Euron because her long-term incestuous affair with her brother Jaime (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) has got her pregnant again and she needs another man she can pass off as her baby-to-be’s father. Meanwhile there’s apparently been a final falling-out between Cersei and Jaime even though it’s not to terribly well explained in the script -- Cersei denounces “my traitorous brothers,” plural, and the plural had me flummoxed for a bit. We already know about Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage), who was born a little person and grew up to drink and screw a lot (sort of like the poet Charles Bukowski, of whom I liked to joke, “All he ever did was drink, fuck, and write about drinking and fucking”). He was accused of killing his father (which he did) and his nephew, psycho king Joffrey Baratheon (Jack Gleeson), which he didn’t, whereupon he was sold into slavery (and I loved the irony that Tyrion and his fellow slave were white and the slavers were Black), whereupon he rose again and is now the “hand” (the prime minister) of Queen Daenerys. What’s amazing in these episodes is that almost nothing happens -- there are no big action scenes and only one heavy-duty dramatic revelation. Jon learns from his brother Bronn, formerly Brandon Stark, and from the ex-librarian Samwell Tarly that he isn’t an illegitimate child of the Stark family after all, but the legitimate son of the late “Mad King” Targeryan whom Ned Stark, his supposed father, rescued from near-certain annihilation.

That means that he and Daenerys, whom we saw having intense, mutually joyous sex at the end of season seven, are brother and sister -- meaning that, like their sworn enemies Cersei and Jaime Lannister, they’re an incestuous couple. So Game of Thrones has the same number of incestuous relationships (two) as Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung -- and Jon Snow has at least one other thing in common with many of Wagner’s heroes: it’s not until he’s actually well into adulthood that he’s finally learned his real name, lineage and identity. (Wagner himself was called “Richard Geyer” well into his teens -- his stepfather was Ludwig Geyer, a boarder in his mom Johanna Wagner’s home, who married Geyer just six months after Wagner Vater died; the implication was that Geyer was Wagner’s biological father and Wagner hated the name because it sounded like the German word for “vulture” and much of the anti-Semitic propaganda of the time depicted the Jews as vultures feeding on the carcasses of dead or dying Aryan civilizations. So Wagner’s uncertainty about his own lineage not only helped him create all those beautiful and remarkable scenes in which his heroes suddenly discover their true identities and destinies, but also fed the anti-Semitic prejudices Wagner picked up from his time and place.)

What I liked about these episodes, especially “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” was their elegiac quality: through much of these episodes the characters are shown just talking, either reminiscing about battles they’ve been involved in before or speculating about their likely fates. The mood is especially downcast because not many people there hold out much hope for their ultimate victory against the White Walkers, who not only vastly outnumber them but have broken through the all-important Wall (because they killed and zombie-ized one of Daenerys’s dragons in the last episode of season seven and the dragon’s breath, which somehow seems to mingle fire and ice, has torn out huge sections of the Wall and left the Northern humans essentially sitting ducks for their supernatural opponents) and are ready to pounce -- indeed, the final shot of “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” is a chilling one of the live armies advancing and the dead ones coming at them in the other direction, ready for the final battle.

During these last stages of Game of Thrones I’ve been reading some of the blog posts I’ve done about its predecessors -- George R. R. Martin has admitted that the 15th century Wars of the Roses between the Lancaster and York families for control of the English throne -- notably An Age of Kings, the 1960 British TV miniseries that took William Shakespeare’s history plays (eight of the total 10) and told a continuous story from the fall of Richard II at the hands of his cousin Henry Bolingbroke (Lancaster) in 1399 to the troubled reign of Bolingbroke as Henry IV, his son Henry V and the war of conquest he led against France, his early death and the weak King Henry VI who followed him and triggered the rival York family to try to seize the throne by civil war, which eventually they did, only to lose it again to Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, who defeated Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. Not that any of the writers on Game of Thrones are anywhere near Shakespeare’s class, but “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” comes close to one of the most remarkable scenes in Shakespeare’s history canon: the eve of the Battle of Agincourt, in which Henry V disguises himself as a common soldier and walks among his army, trying to figure out how their morale is and getting a sense of who they are and why they’re there. Though there are overhanging issues raised in these scenes -- including Daenerys’s reaction to the fact that a male has appeared on the scene whose claim to the Iron Throne is at least as strong as hers -- for the most part these episodes, especially “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” have a beautifully elegiac quality that’s a wide departure from the action-filled mayhem we’ve come to expect from Game of Thrones.

Essential Heroes: A Momento Latino Event (Momento Latino, CBS-TV, aired October 26, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I was anxious to get home by 9 p.m. so I could watch a show on CBS that had looked interesting from the promos: the awkwardly titled Essential Heroes: A Momento Latino Event. The show was somewhat surprisingly only about an hour long -- given the depth of talent in America’s Latino/a community (I HATE, LOATHE, DESPISE AND DETEST that horrible term “Latinx” -- apparently pronounced “Latin-Ex,” to rhyme with “satin sex” -- that’s become beloved of the Thought Police of Politically Correct Language even though only 3 percent of Latinos/Latinas/Latinxes use it) one could readily imagine this running twice as long -- and for something billed at least in part as a musical special there were only four songs: an opening number by rapper Pit Bull called “I Believe That I Can Win” (it wasn’t quite as awful as, say, the Pulitzer Prize-winning garbage of Kendrick Lamar, but I still wish, hope, pray for and would like to see the day when this rap-crap ceases to be popular); a Spanish-language number by Juanes (ironically the commentary he made after he sang was subtitled but his -- or their, since Charles assures me that “Juanes” is the name of a group and not just an individual singer -- song wasn’t; about all I could make out as a recurring line was “Yo quiero pensar,” and I’m clueless as to just what he wants to think); a nice duet by Luis Fonsi and Kelsea Ballerini called “After the Rain Comes the Sun” (I’m ashamed to admit that I hadn’t realized Kelsea Ballerini is Latina; I’d always assumed the name “Ballerini” was Italian); and a closing number, filmed in Brazil before the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic (you could tell because there was an audience and the performers weren’t “socially distant”), starring Gloria Estefan in one of her typical dance numbers, “Get On Your Feet.”

There wasn’t any audible influence of Brazilian music, but who cares? Estefan has her groove and she knows what to do with it, and the song is infectious even though it’s one of those dance tunes that instead of making you want to dance leaves you feeling like you’re being ordered to. (One of the things I liked about ABBA was their skill at making truly infectious dance records that made you want to get on your feet.) Early on in the show there was a nice comedy routine between George Lopez and Rita Moreno (still looking good!) framed as an argument over that ghastly term “Latinx,” with Lopez joking about how ridiculous it is and Moreno throwing shoes at him while insisting that “Latinx” is needed as a way to describe Latinos who don’t fit into traditional gender categories and as an outreach to “LGBTQIA” Latinos. (That’s using one horrendously ghastly P.C. perversion of language to defend another; had our Viral Dictator not intervened and canceled the 2020 Pride events, along with just about every large-scale public event except for Trump’s Nuremberg rallies, I had planned to wear a T-shirt saying, “I AM A GAY MAN, NOT AN ‘LGBTQ+ PERSON.’”)

In some ways, the presentations of community heroes were more interesting than the songs. They included Jose Rosario and Nora Vargas,who work to build awareness of mental health issues within the Latino/a community (Rosario described himself as “Afro-Latino,” though he looked more Black than Latino to me, and Vargas acknowledged her own history as a mentally ill person who had once been in an institution); John Leguizamo doing a potted version of his “Latino History for Dummies” routine about all the major breakthroughs in science and medicine Latinos had been responsible for (including the Aztecs for inventing chocolate -- which is sort of true; the original Aztec chocolate drink was a bitter-tasting alcoholic beverage and it was the Spaniards after La Conquista who thought of taking the alcohol out, adding sugar and making it into a solid candy); DACA recipient Sarahi Esperanza Salamanca, the first of her family to attend college; Lin-Manuel Miranda paying tribute to chef Jose Andres of World Global Kitchen, a worldwide relief effort to supply both food and people trained to cook it into disaster spots (it’s a favorite charity of Stephen Colbert’s and he’s had Andres on his show several times to promote it); and a tribute to the Dictor family of Los Angeles, both for their resourcefulness in keeping their restaurant open during the pandemic and because the family patriarch had finally naturalized as an American citizen and can therefore join his U.S.-born (or not, but already naturalized) family in voting in the 2020 election.

Game of Thrones, season seven, episode 7: "The Dragon and the Wolf" (Television 360, Startling Television, Bighead Littlehead, HBO, 2017)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Charles and I watched the seventh and final episode of season seven of Game of Thrones, “The Dragon and the Wolf,” which was an unusual episode first because it was the season closer even though the first six seasons had had 10 episodes each, season seven only had seven and season eight only had six. The second unusual aspect of this episode was its length -- 80 minutes (most of the shows were just a shade under an hour, though there’d been a 75-minute episode earlier in season seven) -- and the sheer breadth and scope of it, which encompassed some pretty dramatic changes in the overall Gestalt of Game of Thrones and some radical transformations of the assumptions we’ve been making about the overall universe of “Westeros” (i.e., England, though with admixtures of continental Europe and even the Middle East) and how the various contenders for the Iron Throne, the overall rule of Westeros (and the throne is literally iron; its back looks like a whole bunch of swords stuck together, and that’s a pretty obvious metaphor for the amount of mayhem the various contestants are willing to wreak on them for the right to sit on it). The imdb.com synopsis, which is surprisingly short given how much happens in this episode (apparently no reader contributed a more extensive one, as has sometimes happened) reads:

The Dragon and the Wolf: “In King's Landing a grand meeting takes place. Theon makes amends and rescue plans. Sansa punishes those who wronged her family. Jaime confronts Cersei. The complete truth of Jon's lineage is revealed. The army of the dead reaches the Wall.”

The “grand meeting” is between Jon Snow (Kit Harington, to my mind the sexiest male in the dramatis personae -- had this been a 1930’s Warner Bros. swashbuckler his would have been Errol Flynn’s role), who’s approached the incestuous couple Jaime (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who’s also a pretty hot piece of man-meat) and Cersei (Lena Headey) Lannister, who currently more or less sit on the Iron Throne. Cersei is the widow of Robert Baratheon and the mother of Joffrey and Thommen -- the last three kings, in that order -- though we’ve long since known that Jaime was Joffrey’s and Thommen’s biological father, and they’re planning not only to have a third kid (Cersei is pregnant again) but openly proclaim it as theirs. The sibling-loving Lannisters are at the meeting, as are Daenerys Targeryan (Emilia Clarke) and Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage in the performance of his -- or just about any other little-person actor’s -- lifetime), who’s become Daenerys’s principal advisor (her “hand,” as he’s called in the Game of Thrones universe) and who shows up to confront the brother and sister who hate his guts because he’s a little person and he’s killed their father (which he did) and their older son (which he didn’t) -- for some reason they even blame the death of their younger son Thommen on Tyrion even though he wasn’t even in King’s Landing, the seat of government to the extent Westeros has a unified authority, when Thommen committed suicide after his mom literally blew up the religious cult of the High Sparrow, which he had adopted.

The purpose of the meeting is to call a truce in the Westeros civil war between the Lannisters and Daenerys’s army, which includes the Dothraki warriors (who come off as sort of like Genghis Khan’s Golden Hordes, basically having their hooked swords drawn and ready to mow down any passers-by they think are in their way) and the so-called “Unsullied,” soldiers who look vaguely Black and are called that because they were castrated by their former slaveowners before Daenerys set them free. The purpose of the meeting is so these forces can make common cause against the White Walkers, a.k.a. the Wights, a group of undead warriors who’ve formed a sort of vampire cult north of the Wall across the island to separate “Westeros” from -- oh hell, it’s pretty obviously supposed to be Scotland and I suspect Game of Thrones author George R. R. Martin (his book A Game of Thrones was supposed to be the first entry in a cycle of books called A Song of Ice and Fire, but he hasn’t finished the last two books in the series and appears to be blocked on them, though he’s written and published novels on the backstory of Westeros and some of its leading families; this forced series producers David Benioff and D. B. Weiss to concoct their own ending for the cycle) was inspired by Hadrian’s Wall, the real-life barrier across the main British isle he built to keep England (which this Roman emperor had been able to conquer) from Scotland (which he hadn’t).

To demonstrate what they’re up against, Daenerys’s crew has brought a living White Walker they’ve captured, which they let loose from its cage until it’s finally subdued with a weapon made out of dragonglass, which essentially is to the Whire Walkers what Kryptonite is to Superman -- and explains that the only other force that can kill them is fire. But the attempt at an alliance goes haywire when Jon insists that he can’t swear loyalty to Cersei, even if only temporarily, because he’s committed himself and “bent the knee” to Daenerys. The big secret of Jon’s parentage has been a running gag throughout Game of Thrones, but it was only in this season that the writers started hinting that Jon may not be what we’d been told he was throughout -- a product of Ned Stark, grand old man of the Stark family until he was lured into a trap and he and most of his family were killed, having sex outside his marriage -- but a legal heir to the throne because he’s descended from either Robert Baratheon or the Targeryan who sat on the Iron Throne even before him, Daenerys’s grandfather (or was he her father?) by Jaime Lannister, giving him the nickname “Kingslayer.” Jaime and Daenerys end up in bed together (which, if he’s a descendant of the former Targeryan king who was Daenerys’s father, would mean Game of Thrones has the same number of incestuous relationships -- two -- as Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung).

There are also peripheral characters involved in the action, including Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner) and her younger sister, trained assassin and master of disguise Arya (Maisie Williams), who had been feuding for years but at this juncture more or less make up; and Bronn (Jerome Flynn), t/n Brandon Stark, who years before became disabled after he climbed the tower of a castle wall (not the Lannisters’ own castle, Charles recalled after I’ve said it was in previous posts to this blog, but one in the Starks’ home base in the northern realm of Winterfell -- though that still begs the question of what the Starks’ hated rivals the Lannisters, were doing visiting and fucking in the Starks’ home domain) and has been dragged around the northern regions, at first in a sort of sled but more recently in a wheelchair (a surprisingly modern-looking one, too), and whom we see here in a cut-in of such apparent irrelevance to the rest of the action I couldn’t resist my Anna Russell impression and went, “Ya remember Bronn?”

But the big thing that happens at the end of this episode is that Daenerys’s third dragon, killed during her attempt to rescue Jon Snow and his raiding party from the White Walkers, but resurrected by the White Walkers and now ridden by their leader, the Night King (Vladimir “Furdo” Furdik) as a sort of zombie dragon (they not only zombify any humans they kill but can turn other animals into zombies -- we’ve seen them do that before with other wild creatures and now they have their own zombie dragon) which breathes something that isn’t quite fire and isn’t quite ice but is powerful enough to destroy the all-important Wall that for centuries has kept the menaces of the far North at bay. This is one of the most powerful and exciting sequences in the entire cycle even though it also makes nonsense of much of the way the series had previously played out (one wonders just when in the story arc the inventions of George R. R. Martin ended and Benioff and Weiss were forced to do their own fill-ins -- including the series’ controversial ending, which according to online feedback disappointed a lot of Game of Thrones buffs) -- but it certainly made for a powerful cliffhanger ending to the next to last season!

The Big Picture: Army in Action: The Cobra Strikes (U.S. Army Informaton Service, 1965)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I happened upon a surprisingly interesting 30-minute movie produced by the United States Army in 1965 as part of a series alternatively called The Big Picture and Army in Action. This was marked as episode 10 of a series and it was called The Cobra Strikes. The subject was the Korean War and the movie was obviously aimed as agitprop for U.S. soldiers about to be shipped off to Viet Nam for America’s second go-round in less than 20 years fighting a land war in Asia against the despicable anti-freedom forces of godless Communism (you know). It was being shown as part of a series of documentary films on American history on the C-SPAN 3 channel and was succeeded by something that actually had happened five years before the start of the Korean War: the signing of the United Nations Charter by the original 50 member countries in San Francisco in 1945. (Today there are 193 U.N. member states, many of them countries that were still colonies of European nations in 1945.) It was ironic, to say the least, to see Lord Halifax sign the charter on behalf of Great Britain when he was Winston Churchill’s principal political enemy in the early days of World War II -- after Neville Chamberlain stepped down the choice for the House of Commons was between Halifax, who wanted to cut a peace deal with Adolf Hitler; and Churchill, who wanted to fight Germany, Hitler and Nazism to the death -- and interesting that of all the people in Stalin’s government it was the relatively moderate Andrei Gromyko who signed on behalf of the Soviet Union.

The 1965 film The Cobra Strikes -- incidentally imdb.com doesn’t list this but does list another film with that title, a 1948 “B” from Ben Stoloff Productions released by Eagle-Lion just after it was formed by J. Arthur Rank after he took over PRC, which sounds interesting and potentially noir -- was pretty much what you’d expect a documentary on the Korean War to be from the U.S. government at the height of the Cold War. It begins with the post-war division of Korea into northern and southern occupation zones which, like the similar divisions of Germany in 1945 and Viet Nam in 1954, wasn’t supposed to create two separate countries. In 1948 Koreans were supposed to hold an election to determine what form of government they would have, but those dastardly Communists in North Korea wouldn’t allow the election to be held and so only the South Koreans got to vote. (Whatever they voted for, in practice they ended up with a Right-wing military dictatorship and it was only in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s that South Korea loosened up and became a multi-party republic with a relative degree of political freedom and human rights.)

In 1950 North Korea invaded South Korea and seemed on the verge of overrunning the entire country until the United States asked the United Nations to authorize a so-called “police action,” actually a full-scale military counteroffensive. At the time the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, any one of whom could have vetoed the “police action,” were the United States, Great Britain, France, Taiwan (who held the seat for “China” not only in the Security Council but the whole U.N. until 1972, when they were replaced by mainland China while Taiwan was thrown out of the U.N, on the basis of the “One China” fiction) and the Soviet Union. Inexplicably, instead of vetoing U.N. involvement against the North Koreans, the Soviet delegation walked out of the Security Council and the other four members all voted for the action -- though it was mostly American troops doing the fighting (and the dying). There were a few British units involved but almost nobody from the rest of the U.N. took part.

The Korean War was, at least according to the portrayal here, a see-saw battle in which North Korean forces pushed all the way to the South Korean capital, Seoul (phonetically spelled “Soul” on the maps shown in the film) until the U.S. and other U.N. forces pushed them back and all the way to the Northern capital, Pyongyang, before the U.S. soldiers started noticing that some of the people they had killed or captured were wearing the distinctive knit uniforms of the People’s Liberation Army of China. The show depicts the amphibious landings at Pusan and Inchon and the difficulty of holding the beachheads against North Korean opposition (though they probably didn’t have anywhere nearly as tough a time as the Allied invaders had had at Normandy six years earlier), and while the film shows General Douglas MacArthur assuming command of the “United Nations Police Force” in 1950 it doesn’t mention President Harry Truman’s firing of MacArthur over a year later. The narrator just names different generals in charge of the U.S. Army and the fighting goes on.

The show mentions that peace negotiations began as early as 1951 but got hung up on questions of prisoner exchange -- it doesn’t mention the fascinating routine of criticism/self-criticism the North Koreans and Chinese put captured Americans through that eventually, when they got released and talked about their experiences in ways that sounded like they’d absorbed their captors’ point of view, they were denounced as having been “brainwashed.” (In the late 1970’s I read a fascinating book called Prisoners of Liberation by Allyn and Adele Ricketts, who had been U.S. academics on a study tour of China in the early 1950’s when they were arrested and put through the process, and the main point was that when they tried to explain what they had learned about the world and the U.S.’s imperialistic role in it when they came home, people shrugged their shoulders and said, “Brainwashed.”) And of course the film’s narrator can’t resist making the comment that a lot of the captured Chinese prisoners didn't want to go home because they'd rather live in the relative freedom and prosperity of the South.

One of the many issues unaddressed by this film is that though the elements of a peace deal were in place as early as 1951 it took two years of more fighting, killing and dying before the agreement was reached -- and the Korean War was ultimately the first in U.S. history at least since 1815 that didn’t end in a convincing American victory. Instead the Korean peninsula returned to the status quo ante and North and South Korea became two separate countries with two very different economies -- South Korea a capitalist powerhouse (though, like Japanese capitalism, South Korean capitalism is organized largely along feudal lines, with a handful of families forming cartels that between them own pretty much everything; unlike Britain, France and the U.S., Japan and Korea went from feudalism to capitalism without a revolution or a civil war, and it shows) and North Korea so ill-developed that famous pictures of that region of earth from space show huge lights from China and South Korea at night, while North Korea is almost totally dark.

Indeed, as I pointed out to the friend I was watching this with, North Korea today remains a basket case economically; for all its pretensions to be running its economy on juche (“economic self-sufficiency”), North Korea is kept alive only by massive amounts of aid from China. If China ever decides for whatever reason to shut off the spigots of aid to North Korea, North Korea will collapse almost overnight. The Cobra Strikes is an historically interesting summary of the Korean War, obviously made from the point of view of a fighting force which had lost men in Korea and aimed at the people whom they were about to send into another Asian quagmire in Viet Nam -- which would end not just in a “stalemate” but an actual defeat for the U.S. despite our massive investment of time, money and lives. The Cobra Strikes, available on archive.org at https://archive.org/details/TheCobraStrikes, is at once an O.K. summary history of the Korean War and a fascinating glimpse into an American attitude that would lead us into considerably worse misadventures around the world, from Viet Nam to Afghanistan and Iraq.

Game of Thrones, season seven, episodes 5 and 6: "Eastwatch," "Beyond the Wall" (Television 360, Startling Television, Bighead Littlehead, HBO, 2017)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Charles and I continued our progress towards the end of Game of Thrones -- which we started watching in June 2019, so it’s taken us nearly a year and a half to reach the penultimate stages of the series -- and though there are still some pretty arbitrary cutbacks to characters and story lines I’ve since forgotten in last night’s episodes, numbers five (“Eastwatch”) and six (“Beyond the Wall”) of season seven. For some reason, though the first six seasons of Game of Thrones had 10 episodes each, season seven only had seven and season eight only had six. I wonder if that has something to do with the fact that George R. R. Martin, author of the original novels on which Game of Thrones was based (he called the entire series A Song of Ice and Fire and the first novel in it A Game of Thrones, but the series creators, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, decided to go with Game of Thrones -- without the article -- as the series title), didn’t finish his projected last two movies in the sequence, The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring, in time to supply Benioff and Weiss with an ending for their series. Thus the producers were forced to concoct their own ending, which may or may not match either what Martin originally intended or what his final books -- assuming he ever finishes them and they’re published -- will contain. (Martin has writing prequels to the Song of Ice and Fire books dealing with the backstories of some of the families contending for the Iron Throne of “Westeros” -- obviously the British Isles, though with some admixtures of continental Europe and even the Middle East; Martin acknowledged that the real-life Wars of the Roses between the Lancaster and York families for the English throne were among his inspirations -- he gave it away by calling two of his contending families “Lannister” and “Stark” -- and another influence was Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, about the takeover of England by King John after his brother, Richard the Lion-Hearted, left to join a Crusade but then was kidnapped by Prince Leopold of Austria and held for ransom, which John was unwilling to pay because Richard’s captivity meant he could continue ruling.) Once again I’m going to quote the official synopses of these episodes from imdb.com and then make my own comments:

Eastwatch: “Bronn saves Jaime from the lake and he is surprised with the power of Daenerys' dragon. Daenerys offers the prisoners to bend their knees and join her army, or to die. Randyll and his son Dickon from the House of Tarly refuse to serve Deanerys and her dragon turns them into ashes. Arya confronts Sansa at Winterfell and suspects of Littlefinger. Samwell has a deception with the Maesters and decides to leave the Cidatel with Gilly and their child. Tyrion advises Daenerys and Jon Snow to bring a Wight to King's Landing to prove that the Army of the Dead and the White Walkers do exist. Jaime tries to convince Cersei that they do not have any chance fighting Daenerys and her three dragons, but she plots a scheme to destroy Daenerys. Then Jaime has a surprising encounter. Jon and a group head to the Wall and meet prisoners of the Night's Watch that accept to join them in their journey to capture a Wight.”

Beyond the Wall: “Jon and his band of men go beyond the wall in search of a Wight to capture and return to Kings’ Landing. Arya’s and Sansa’s relationship continues to derail with the help of LittleFinger. And Tyrion and Daenerys discuss the future of her reign.”

One of the annoying aspects of Game of Thrones is the sheer multiplicity of names given to some of the characters, reminding me of Dorothy Parker’s quarrel with a play based on Tolstoy’s Resurrection in which the adapter preserved the Russian habit of sometimes referring to characters by their first and last names, sometimes their first and middle names (in Russian the middle name is called a “patronymic” and refers to the name of your father), sometimes by their first names alone and “sometimes by a nickname that has nothing to do with any of the other names.” The character described above as “Bronn” -- the boy who discovers Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and his sister Cersei (Lena Headey) fucking each other in a bedroom in a tower of Lannister Castle, got knocked out of the open window by a back-handed slap from Jaime but survived, albeit disabled, and develops supernatural visions and powers that led Charles to compare him to Paul Atreides in Frank Herbert’s Dune) -- is really Brandon Stark (though if he was a Stark, why when he was still a kid was he allowed near the Lannister castle in the first place? Those families are supposed to be bitter enemies!), and he’s abandoned the woman who’s been trundling him around as he’s grown up, first in a sort of sled and later in a wheelchair that looks like a quite modern design even though it’s supposed to be 15th century technology.

Also, “LittleFinger” is really Peter Baylish (Aiden Gillen), who’s quietly and bureaucratically evil -- I’ve likened him to Mitch McConnell, who in the destruction of American democracy has basically been ice to Donald Trump’s fire. Unashamed and undeterred by allegations of hypocrisy and willing to ally himself with anybody if it gets him more power and influence, he’s one of the most thoroughly despicable characters in Game of Thrones even though he avoids the sort of outright brutality most of the other people in leadership positions practice. And it was amusing to note in the above synopses that the race of revivified monsters who live north of the Wall (i.e., in Scotland) are known collectively as “White Walkers” but they’re referred to individually as “Wights.” And it took me a long time to figure out that the order of knights charged with maintaining the Wall and keeping out the White Walkers are the “Night’s Watch” -- not “Knight’s,” singular, possessive. At the start of episode five Daenerys Targeryan -- who, despite her pretensions as a liberator of slaves is turning out to be as power-hungry a monster as anyone else in the Game of Thrones dramatis personae -- demands that the surviving stragglers of Jaime’s army (as noted in the synopsis, Jaime himself barely escaped drowning in a frozen-over lake, though I wasn’t quite sure who rescued him) “bend the knee” and accept her as their overlord, or she will kill them.

Since she won the battle at the end of episode four by having her dragons incinerate the Lannister forces -- it was like seeing a group of people with Middle Ages weapons attacked by modern incendiary bombers -- it isn’t like these people have much of a choice, and Randyll and Dickon Tarly continue to defy her and indeed get put to death … leaving Samwell the Librarian, along with her girlfriend and their son (though as I recall the kid is not biologically Samwell’s offspring), the only survivors of that once-influential household. Samwell gets fed up with life as an apprentice maister (the “maisters” are apparently the only intellectuals in Westeros and they behave like medieval monks, living in seclusion, sworn to chastity and spending most of their time copying books) and he steals the few scrolls that he thinks contain information on how to deal with the White Walkers (remember that Samwell actually killed a White Walker in a previous episode, even though he’s not exactly an heroic action figure) and escapes the monastery with his girlfriend and son. Meanwhile, Jon Snow is in Daenerys’s court trying to convince her that the White Walkers are a mortal danger to all Westeros and she should lead her army and her dragons against them instead of continuing her march to the south to claim King’s Landing, dethrone Cersei Lannister and assume the Iron Throne. There’s already been a conflict between Daenerys and Jon over whether the two can ally as equals (Jon’s preference) or she will make him “bend the knee” and swear fealty to her, with him no more than a provincial governor of the North.

Meanwhile, Jon has left the government of the North to his half-sister Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner), who’s having problems of her own maintaining authority not only with the (male) Northerners but her sister Arya (Maisie Williams), who in previous episodes trained to be an assassin for the cult of the Faceless Ones and who gets slipped by Baylish a manuscript containing an incriminating note in Sansa’s own handwriting (though at this point I can’t recall just what the note said). In turn Sansa discovers Arya’s secret: her collection of faces, which quite frankly look like the latex masks they no doubt are but are supposed to be the faces of various victims her cult has killed and, like Eleanor Rigby, keeps in jars by the door until they’re needed as disguises so Arya can assume anyone else’s appearance and voice -- which is how she lured an entire family to drink poisoned wine in season seven, episode one as revenge for that family having killed most of hers earlier on in the action. (As I keep saying, though most of Game of Thrones was filmed while Barack Obama was still President, the show definitely fits the Zeitgeist of the Trump era in the utter amorality and cruelty of all the characters -- the ones who pretend to some higher goal in holding power, like Daenerys, keep getting exposed as hypocrites.)

The big event that happens in episode six is the ill-fated (to say the least!) attempt of Jon Snow and his raiding party to capture a White Walker and bring him (her? it?) back to Daenerys’s court to prove that the White Walkers exist and are an existential threat to Westeros. Daenerys takes the threat of the White Walkers seriously enough that she gets on the back of one of the dragons -- which is a good thing for Jon and his party, because they’re surrounded by them in a chilling scene in which thousands of White Walkers surround them, looking like a cross between John Ford’s Indians and Busby Berkeley’s choristers. Daenerys manages to airlift Jon and his party out of danger, but the Night King (Vladimir “Furdo” Furlik), leader of the White Walkers and apparently the founder of the cult in the first place, manages to throw a glass-tipped spear at one of the dragons. This accomplishes what the metai arrow fired at a dragon by the Lannister armies in episode four didn’t -- it kills one of Daenerys’s three dragons -- and it gets worse: the final cliffhanger scene of episode six shows [spoiler alert!] the White Walkers dragging the dead dragon out from under the frozen lake where it fell, raising it and turning it into an undead zombie dragon, part of their cult.

This follows a surprisingly tender (for Game of Thrones) scene in which Daenerys is clearly moved by the loss of one of her dragons -- she explains that since she can’t bear any children (though if Messrs. Martin,m Benioff and Weiss ever gave us an explanation of why she couldn’t have children, I missed it), the dragons are her children and she’s grieving the loss of one literally like a mother. Our lovably cynical old friend Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage, who got top billing in virtually all the Game of Thrones episodes from season three on and deserved it: even in episodes like this where he gets precious little screen time, Dinklage dominates the screen in every scene in which he appears and, as I’ve said before, here got the role every little-person actor who’s ever lived has dreamed about all their lives) is in the unusual and uncomfortable position of trying to offer empathy and emotional support, rare qualities indeed in the relentlessly cruel world of self-serving moral monsters that is Game of Thrones. As I said in my last post about this show, Donald Trump would be right at home in Westeros except for his total lack of physical courage!

Game of Thrones, season seven, episodes 3 and 4: "The Queen's Justice," "The Spoils of War" (Television 360, Startling Television, Bighead Littlehead, HBO, 2017)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Charles and I continued with season seven of Game of Thrones, screening episodes three and four, “The Queen’s Justice” and “The Spoils of War.” The imdb.com synposes of these seem a bit more complete (and more confusing!) than usual, giving a lot of information about the backstory that given my low tolerance with following the details of a serial have me thinking, “Oh, that’s what that was about.” Anyway, here are the synopses so I can riff on them:

The Queen’s Justice: “Jaime and Cersei welcome (later celebrate in bed) Euron Greyjoy's victory parade and appoint him admiral in reward for capturing chained Yara and the Dirnish Sand Snakes, enabling Cersei to punish Ellaria, forced to watch in chains how her daughter dies from the same slow poison as Jaime's. Despite Tyrion's mediation, Jon gets a cold welcome from Daenerys, who gives chasing Cersei priority over stopping the Winter army and demands feudal homage from Jon to 'his queen' to become her warden of the North, yet Tyrion convinces her to allow the 'potential ally' mining the dragon glass. Archmaester Ebrose releases cured Jorah, Sam only gets a congratulation and no formal punishment. The Unsullied land and successfully storm Lannister home Casterly Rock, using the secret tunnel Tyrion added to the sewage system for whoring purposes, but find the garrison tiny, while they are stranded as their ships are burnt and Jaime's army lays siege knowing supplies won't last, then marches on Tyrell … “

The Spoils of War: “Daenerys seeks advice from Jon and Tyrion to win the war. Theon returns to Dragonstone asking his queen for help rescue his sister. Jaime faces an unexpected encounter while transporting the Red Keep's gold. Arya returns home to Winterfell.”

As I’ve noted before, as Game of Thrones has progressed it’s become simpler to understand -- though “The Spoils of War” pulled something they haven’t done in a while, which was to suddenly pull back into a set of characters and a plot line they’d been ignoring for a while -- but as the series has progressed it’s also got more gory. As noted above,m “The Queen’s Justice” begins with the brother-and-sister couple Jaime (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and Cersei (Lena Headey) Lannister, who’ve been carrying on an incestuous relationship for decades (which quite frankly seems to be the worst-kept secret in Westeros) even while she was married to the old king Baratheon until he was killed in a mysterious “hunting accident” early on, and it’s pretty clear that Jaime is the biological father of the last two kings, psychopathic Joffrey (Jack Gleeson) and his too-sweet, too-nice brother Thommen, who both got killed -- Thommen committed suicide after the destruction of the religious cult he was into (more on that later) and Joffrey was poisoned at a big tournament and his uncle Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage, who after the first two seasons got top billing and deserved it; it’s the sort of complex, multidimensional role, sinister but also roguishly charming, that probably every little-person actor who’s ever lived has wished for) was the prime suspect. He ended up sold into slavery (I loved the irony that he and another white character were kidnapped and sold by Black slavers), only his wits and resourcefulness have allowed him to rise again and beocme the “hand” (essentially the prime minister) of Queen Daenerys Stormborn Targeryan (Emilia Clarke), whose family held the “Iron Throne” that rules (at least theoretically) all seven kingdoms that make up “Westeros” (i.e., Britain, though my husband Charles seems to think I’m overstating the Westeros=England parallel and notes other cultural and geographical referents in the show that seem to incorporate cultural aspects of continental Europe and even the Middle East) until her father went crazy and was murdered by Jaime, who got the nickname “Kingslayer” for doing the deed.

Now Cersei, as either the widow or the mother of the last three kings, is holding down the throne herself after having obliterated the cult of the “High Sparrow” (Jonathan Pryce), a religious crazy who won a great deal of power before Cersei, who had sponsored him at first (sort of like the Empress Dowager of China with the Boxers at the turn of the last century) but soon lost control and ended up on his hit list before she figured out a way literally to blow him and his whole cult up. (Good riddance, I say, though I’m sure my revulsion towards the cult of the High Sparrow was largely conditioned by my even more visceral hatred of the radical Christian Right of our own time and their similar push to have the government tell people in great detail how they may or may not have sex, with whom and how, and deal with both the good and not-so-good consequences therefrom.) At the current stage of the story the contest for the Iron Throne seems to have narrowed down to three main groups: Jaime and Cersei, who have a strong army and the backing of the Iron Bank (the closest Westeros has to a capitalist institution) but need allies; Daenerys and the renegade Tyrion, who’s created a formidable force out of the “Unsullied” (castrated slave warriors she’s liberated), the Dothraki (a Mongol-like warrior clan she married into several seasons ago and stayed in charge of after her husband died) and three dragons she hatched from eggs even though there hadn’t been live dragons in Westeros for hundreds of years.

The third group contending for power is the Northern army led by Jon Snow (Kit Harington, for my money the sexiest guy in the cast -- it’s the part Errol Flynn would have played if this had been a Warner Bros. swashbuckler in the 1930’s), who wants to ally with Daenerys and who risks his own life to go see her about the possibilities therefrom. Alas, the possibilities for an alliance aren’t great because Jon -- who’s really the illegitimate son of old Ned Stark and therefore the sworn, eternal enemy of the Lannisters -- wants it to be an alliance of equals and wants Daenerys’s army to march against the White Walkers, zombie-like monsters created from the bodies of dead people who have virtually supernatural powers and can only be killed by fire or dragonglass (a rare mineral of which by far the largest known deposit is under Daenerys’s stronghold). Daenerys has no interest in sharing power with an ally: she demands that Jon “take the knee” -- i.e., swear feudal fealty to her -- and acknowledge her as the rightful ruler of all Westeros, while Jon would only be a provincial governor of the North under her ultimate authority. What’s more, Daenerys doesn’t believe the White Walkers are such a menace after all -- and Jon’s protestations that they threaten the entire existence of the human race, or at least that part of it that inhabits Westeros and its surrounding territories, make him sound like a scientist trying to persuade a Republican politician that human-caused climate change is real or that COVID-19 is a threat people should be required to protect themselves against by wearing masks and staying at least six feet apart from each other. We know what a menace the White Walkers are because we’ve seen them in action, but Daenerys and her crew blissfully deny the dangers they pose -- including the ability to increase their own numbers because any normal human killed by them becomes one of them.

This episode also features Samwell Tarly (John Bradley), who started out as a comic-relief character to Jon Snow (sort of Alan Hale to his Errol Flynn) but who’s grown as a character as he’s gone through several events (including a love affair, contrary to the rule of celibacy imposed on the Night Watch, defenders of the Wall separating normal humans from the White Walkers, in which he and Jon were both enlisted -- though, needless to say, Jon broke that rule too) and ended up training to be a “maester,” essentially a librarian and the closest thing the world of Westeros has to an intellectual. (There doesn’t seem to be any sort of organized educational system in Westeros apart from the maesters’ monastery-like abodes which house the world’s libraries -- including secret stacks only the most veteran maesters are allowed access to. In this world the only way to learn job skills is to become an apprentice, and there have been plenty of scenes of young boys and girls learning warrior skills in practice and getting their asses kicked until they catch on how to fight properly.)

Samwell got knowledge from one of those forbidden books of how to cure a nasty disease called “greyscale,” which literally turns human skin into a scaly, stone-like grey substance, despite the ban on the procedure imposed by the head maester of his community because it was considered too dangerous. It involved scraping off all parts of the skin that were infected and the raw skin beneath covered with a special salve -- a process excruciating to watch (I had just about reached my revulsion limit when director Mark Mylod blessedly cut away to something less grotesque) and with the potential for spreading the infection. (Remember this was centuries before anyone in the medical business thought it would be a good idea to keep one’s hands clean before and between procedures. In fact, Joseph Lister got hell from other doctors in the 19th century for daring to suggest that they might want to clean up between patients to prevent themselves from spreading infections from one patient to another.) For his “reward” he’s told by the head maester that instead of being thrown out of the community -- the usual penalty for disobedience -- he’ll be sentenced to a dreary life of copying old, decaying manuscripts to preserve their contents in the pre-Xerox age.

The big thing that happens in “The Spoils of War” is the debate within Daenerys’s camp of whether and how to attack the Lannisters: both Tyrion and Jon argue for a slow, relatively humane campaign aimed at confronting the Lannister army and defeating it while still keeping the allegiance of the people. Daenerys wants to use her three fire-breathing dragons to mount an all-out incendiary campaign against the Lannister army even though she’s warned that will make her look like just another bloodthirsty conqueror only interested in building up her own power no matter how many people she has to kill in the process. Daenerys gets on one of the dragons herself and leads the genocidal campaign on the Lannister army -- which she’s previously tricked into coming out into the open -- and the result looks like a modern army unleashing its full might on a bunch of peasants armed with little more than swords, shields, spears and arrows. According to an imdb.com “Trivia” note, no fewer than 20 stunt people were set on fire to create this sequence -- though director Matt Shakman manages to use some of the usual camera tricks to make it look like even more -- breaking the previous record set by Steven Spielberg in Saving Private Ryan for most stunt people ever set on fire (13) in a single scene. The war is a total rout for the Lannisters -- though we’re quite clearly shown that Jaime escapes the holocaust that literally incinerates his forces -- and it makes a grim ending to this episode and a striking twist of fate in the overall story. At least we’ve finally got to see the much-ballyhooed dragons in action, and even the anti-aircraft weapon the Lannister side had invented to try to shoot down the dragons succeeds only in wounding one.

There’s also another character who gets re-introduced in this episode -- Brandon Stark (Jerome Flynn), who as a child scaled the walls of Lannister Castle and peered into a bedroom where Jaime and Cersei were doing their Siegmund and Sieglinde impressions. Jaime back-handed him out the open window and he survived but became permanently disabled, and for most of the series after that got trundled around by a woman retainer who kept him alive while he talked to tree spirits, had visions and developed an ability to communicate telepathically with wolves and get them to do his bidding. Now he’s grown up and his mobility has improved -- he hasn’t recovered but someone has invented a surprisingly modern-looking wheelchair for him -- and he’s sent away the woman who’s been caring for him all this time (ingrate!) and now insists on being called by his original name (though what a Stark boy is doing at the redoubt of his family’s mortal enemies in the first place is a mystery -- if writers David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, adapting George R. R. Martin’s extensive and still incomplete multi-novel saga A Song of Ice and Fire, supplied an explanation I’ve long since forgotten it.

All in all I’ve liked Game of Thrones as much because of its cheeky immorality as anything else -- it’s the sort of thing you’ll find entertaining if you believe human beings are basically pond scum, but at least occasionally charming and always interesting pond scum, and that’s what’s made it so appropriate for the Zeitgeist of the Trump administration. Donald Trump would fit so perfectly into the world of Game of Thrones -- totally unscrupulous, avaricious, driven only by what will satisfy his greed and his dick, and reigning and staying in power by a combination of inducing awe into enough of the population to remain popular while making everyone else fear him -- though even the nastiest Game of Thrones characters at least have a degree of physical courage Trump utterly lacks!

Game of Thrones, season seven, episodes 1 and 2: "Dragonstone," "Stormborn" (Television 360, Startling Television, Bighead Littlehead, HBO, 2017)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Charles and I broke open the box of season seven of Game of Thrones -- and I was startled to discover that while the first six seasons contained ten episodes each, season seven had only seven episodes and season eight, the last one, had just six (at least if I’m counting the episodes on imdb.com correctly). Once again I’ll quote the imdb.com synopses and then add my own comments:

Dragonstone: “Jon organizes the North's defenses. Cersei tries to even the odds. Daenerys comes home. Arya reminds the Freys ‘the North remembers.’ Sam adapts to life in Oldtown. The Night King makes his way south. Bran and Mera arrive at Castle Black. Jon and Sansa plan the defense against the long night. Cersei forges new alliances. Samwell trains to be a maester. Arya gets her revenge. The Hound takes shelter in a familiar place. Daenerys arrives at Westeros.“

Stormborn: “Daenerys receives an unexpected visitor. Jon faces resistance. Tyrion plans the conquest of Westeros. Cersei gathers her allies. Arya has a reunion with old friends. Sam risks his career and life. Tyrion convinces Daenerys, who gruesomely doubts Varys's motivation, to avoid a bloodbath attacking King's Landing, rather sending Theon and Yara's Iron Fleet to ship the Dornish army from Sunspear and lay siege with the Tyrell troops, while Unsullied are shipped to Lannister home Casterly Rock. Jon Snow is haughtily invited to acknowledge 'his queen' Daenerys at Dragonstone, where Grey Worm and Missandei consummate their love. Cersei summons several lords, demanding fealty, while Jaime offers to elevate Randyll Tarly as Warden of the South, undoing loyalty to house Tyrell. Qyburn shows Cersei a prototype ballista to kill dragons. Cook Hot Pie tells Arya the Boltons are smashed by Jon, the new King in the North, who leaves Sansa in charge at Winterfell as he sails against all Northern lords' advice to request Daenerys' help against the Winter forces after harshly warns Littlefinger to keep off Sansa. Samwell performs a forbidden surgery on Jorah's 'greyscale' infection. Euron's fleet … “

One thing I’ll say for Game of Thrones as it progresses is that as the cast of both individuals and families (“houses”) thins out it’s getting easier to sort out the intersecting plot lines and get a clearer view of who’s allied with whom and which bitter enemies from previous episodes are about to make common cause, whether sincerely or to double-cross each other. I’ve been saying all along that though most of the TV series was produced while Barack Obama was still President, the show very much fits the Zeitgeist of the Trump era. The rulers in Game of Thrones are almost all insane egomaniacs interested in power only for its own sake and for the wealth (in both money and sex partners) it offers them. Episode seven begins with a huge banquet featuring all the surviving members of the Frey family being treated to an unusually tasty wine -- only the wine is poisoned and the Frey leader at the head of the table is actually a woman member of the Stark family in magical disguise (Game of Thrones began relatively realistically but has acquired more supernatural elements as it has gone on).

This is revenge for an earlier mass slaughter of the Starks by the Freys of which the only two survivors were women -- plus Jon Snow (Kit Harington), who’s actually the son of old man Stark but by a woman other than Mrs. Stark -- so early on he was read out of the family and forced to join the Knight’s Watch, or the Night Watch, or whatever it’s called, whose main business is to maintain the huge border wall that divides Westeros (i.e., England) from the northern part of the island (the obvious inspiration was the wall the Roman Emperor Hadrian had built to separate England, which he’d conquered, from Scotland, which he hadn’t) and protects the normal human beings in Westeros from the “White Walkers,” zombie-like creatures who are revivified dead people and whose armies continually grow larger because everyone they kill becomes one of them. “Dragonstone” -- the episode is named from the rare mineral that is the only substance that can kill White Walkers once and for all, though they can also be burned with fire and the connection is made that dragons breathe fire and thereby they would be useful as a weapon of mass destruction against the White Walkers.

Alas, virtually Westeros’s whole supply of dragonstone is sitting under a castle, so the only ways Jon Snow and the Northerners he’s leading can get at it is either conquer the castle or ally with the people who already have it, So Jon Snow, who’s biologically a Stark even though as an illegitimate son he’s not allowed to use the name, has the uncomfortable task of approaching Queen Daenerys Targeryan (Emilia Clarke) even though her principal advisor (her “hand”) is Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage, who’s seen precious little in these episodes, although when we glimpse him he’s as overpowering a character as ever) -- and the Lannisters and the Starks have an historical rivalry as intense as the real-life Lancasters and Yorks, whose dynastic struggle for the throne of England in the 15th century, known as the Wars of the Roses, was clearly Game of Thrones creator George R. R. Martin’s inspiration for this medievalist tale of dynastic rivalry and civil war. (Shakespeare wrote a cycle of eight plays about the real Wars of the Roses and in 1960 the BBC filmed them as a 15-part mini-series called An Age of Kings -- and more recently they did it again under the title The Hollow Crown.)

The only problem -- well, there are a lot of problems, not only the historical rivalry between Lannisters and Starks but also the suspicious attitude of everyone in Jon Snow’s court about him going to Daenerys’ castle and her insistence that in order for her to agree to the alliance he would have to “take the knee” -- i.e., assume a secondary role and essentially agree to put himself and his men at her service. Meanwhile, Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey), as widow of the former King and mother of the two previous kings, both of whom are now dead (evil Joffrey assassinated by his half-brother Tyrion and good Thommen a suicide after the mass destruction of the religious cult of the High Sparrow that Cersei had at first encouraged until it turned against her), is openly ruling from the Iron Throne with her brother Jaime (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) pretty openly serving as her consort. (She’s had a long-term incestuous relationship with Jaime and he was actually the father of her two sons, though she was married to the official king at the time and they bore his last name, “Baratheon.”)

Though the reference in the title leads us to think we’ll see more of her, Daenerys doesn’t appear until the very end of “Dragonstone” -- and Tyrion doesn’t appear until she does even though Peter Dinklage (the little-person actor who got the part of a lifetime -- indeed, the part every little-person actor dreams of) is currently being top-billed at this point in the series. During “Stormborn” (one of Daenerys’s honorific titles) we see that the so-called “Unsullied” -- castrated (but still butch-looking) soldiers who are part of her army since she liberated fhem from their former slavemasters -- isn’t quite so unsullied after all: he’s fallen in love with Daenerys’s Valerian-language interpreter and she’s hot to trot for him, though after she realizes he’s got something missing in the physical manhood department (in a bizarrely directed scene -- we get both front and back views of her nude but the camera averts its eye from even the hint of frontal masculine nudity), they end up in bed together anyway and he goes down on her instead. (English professor and early Gay activist Seymour Klineberg recalled hearing a student in a class in which he was teaching Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises ask why Jake Barnes didn’t think of that.)

Once again we get to see precious little of the three dragons Daenerys has -- though we do get a look at a potential dragon-killing weapon (sort of a medieval version of an anti-aircraft gun) -- and “Stormborn” ends with a pitched naval battle I couldn’t make heads or tails of. Charles, who’s more attentive to details like this than I have, said it was part of a civil war between members of the Greyjoy family of the Iron Islands, who have the most extensive navy in this world and whose aid will be crucial to the Lannisters if they want to keep Daenerys from conquering the Iron Throne. We also get quite a few glimpses of Samwell Tarly (John Bradley), who in previous seasons was essentially Jon Snow’s comic-relief character (basically Alan Hale to Kit Harington’s Errol Flynn) but who since has gone into training to become a “maistre” -- essentially a librarian, though his duties include such unpleasant tasks as shoveling the other characters’ shit from their chamber pots into the big latrines and serving them food that doesn’t look all that different from the shit. (Was there something in Westerosian diets that gave them all diarrhea?)

At least the plot lines are getting less confusing as they become less numerous, though as it progresses Game of Thrones is also getting more supernatural, more violent and less sensual -- though there was a promising Lesbian seduction scene between one of the princesses and the Fire Queen Melisandre (Nathalia Emmanuel) that, alas, got interrupted by that naval battle. I’ve enjoyed Game of Thrones but I’m also relieved that there’s less of it remaining as I thought there was -- and I’m not so sure it will still seem relevant to the Zeitgeist if the November 3 election goes as I want it to and next year Joe Biden sits on the Iron Throne.

Who Is Killing the Cheerleaders? (Storyteller Films, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday Charles and I watched what I hope is the last “new” cheerleader-themed movie on Lifetime, Who Is Killing the Cheerleaders? This is a production from Georgia-based Storyteller Films, released to Lifetime through Reel One Entertainment and directed by Jeff Hare (a familiar Lifetime name) from a script by Lauren Balson Carter (whom I haven’t heard of before). What’s amusing about this movie is how many Lifetime tropes it hooks, including the woman who returns to the small town (called Mosier) where she grew up and takes a job teaching advanced placement English at Mosier High School. Ten years earlier a psycho killer knocked off virtually the whole school’s cheerleading squad, stabbing them to death and writing anti-cheerleading slogans on their bodies with the victims’ own blood. The crime was never solved, and Mosier in general and its high school in particular have suffered a kind of collective post-traumatic stress disorder ever since.

Our Heroine is Ellie Oliver (Ella Cannon), who has just returned to Mosier after leaving high school 10 years earlier as the only member of the school’s cheerleading squad who survived -- though she still bears the scars from the killer’s unsuccessful attempt to off her. The main reason she’s returned is to look after her mother Linda (Frances Dell Bendert), who’s just been diagnosed with cancer. But Ellie (short for “Elliette,” according to the imdb.com cast listing, though it sounded like “Elliott” to me -- hey, if you can have women named Alex and Sam, why not one named Elliott?) also lands a job at the local high school and offers to re-start the cheerleading team, which for obvious reasons has been in abeyance since the catastrophe a decade earlier. Ellie starts out with only four potential cheerleaders, and ends up with even fewer as the girls on the squad keep getting abducted and posed in the same positions as the original bodies -- only this time they’re not actually killed and the blood they’re painted with is pig’s blood. (I guess Mosier is supposed to be a sufficiently agricultural community pig’s blood is easy to come by, though I also couldn’t help but be reminded that in Shakespeare’s day actors wore bladders filled with pig’s blood so that when another character was supposed to stab them, they would bleed on cue -- an interesting forerunner to the “blood packs” modern-day actors wear that explode and spurt out blood on cue.)

I’ll say one thing for Lauren Balson Carter: she certainly knows how to write this sort of formula whodunit and in particular how to create a wide range of suspects -- even though, like Agatha Christie (the foremother of this sort of mystery writing), she’s not all that great about motives. Among the potential suspects are Dr. Jonathan Colton (Austin Freeman), a fellow high school student of Ellie’s to whom she’s attracted now even though she wouldn’t give him the time of day then; Forrest Parker (Greg Corbett), a fellow teacher who dated one of the cheerleaders who was killed way back when and, after she died, married her twin sister Brooke but is now planning to cheat on her with one of his students, Chloe Carter (Grace Patterson), who’s also a member of Ellie’s cheerleading squad; Ellie’s friend Zoe Trudell, who hated cheerleaders way back when; another woman named Lisbeth (Kayla Fields); and the person I guessed it was going to be, Dr. Bridget Whiting (Wendy Wynne), the town’s therapist, whom Ellie sees in hopes that Whiting’s therapy can unlock her repressed memories of the attack on her. I thought she might be the killer if only because I’ve seen other Lifetime movies with killer therapists motivated to kill their clients simply because they got tired of hearing about their piddling little problems all day and wanted to show them what real pain was like.

Through much of the movie Ellie is victimized by random break-ins at her home (when Gavin, the tall, bald Black man who seems to be Mosier’s only law enforcement officer, interrogates Ellie and asks why she doesn’t lock her doors, that just seemed like simple good sense to me and helped make up for the character’s otherwise clueless attitude towards the mystery) in which pom-poms and other relics of her cheerleading days are moved around and her cell phone keeps disappearing and reappearing. Gradually -- after Forrest is arrested and then released (his creepy attempted assignation with Chloe was just writer Carter’s way of making him a red herring) -- Ellie realizes she herself is being framed both for the contemporary crimes and the bloodbath of 10 years previously.

Charles wondered why she didn’t surround her bed with mousetraps -- “or,” I said, referencing The Maltese Falcon, “crumpled newspapers on the floor, so no one could sneak silently into her room” -- and it turns out that Carter did indeed rip off The Maltese Falcon for her ending, in which [spoiler alert!] it turns out that the real criminal is Dr. Jonathan Colton (so it’s the woman finding out that the guilty party is her boyfriend -- The Maltese Falcon with the genders reversed), who killed all the cheerleaders way back then because he wasn’t one of the “cool kids” and the cheerleaders laughed at him when he asked them for dates -- sort of like the modern-day “incel” movement in which young straight men can’t find willing partners for sex and take out their frustration online by posting nasty attacks on women generally (as well as the men women are willing to date) and sometimes, as in Santa Barbara a few years ago, end up as mass spree killers targeting people more attractive than they. (I remember writing about the “incels” -- the term is short for “involuntarily celibate” -- a few years ago that I felt sorry that people can’t arbitrarily change their sexual orientation; a lot of “incels” I’ve seen photos of may strike out with women but they’d probably do very well in a Gay bar.)

Director Hare stages the flashbacks effectively as stream-of-consciousness shots with what the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 crew once jokingly called a “Dizzicam,” and the final revelation in which Ellie realizes that she saw Jonathan’s face under the obligatory (for a Lifetime killer) black hoodie just before he killed her friend and tried to attack her, only to be scared into fleeing by the sound of a police siren, is a quite effectively done shock scene. There are no especially cute guys here -- one reason the story fooled me is that when a relatively young male is the villain Lifetime usually looks for a far more gorgeous actor than the rather nerdy Austin Freeman … though maybe they figured a hotter actor in the role wouldn’t have been believable as an “incel”) -- and, while there aren’t any outright bad performances here as there were in Cheerleader Abduction and The Wrong Cheerleader Coach, there aren’t any particularly good ones either (though Grace Patterson has a nice combination of innocence and sleaze that suits her role as the would-be nymphet).

Overall Who Is Killing the Cheerleaders? Is an O.K. movie that suffers from the lack of truly multidimensional characters -- Ellie is accused of a series of murders in which she was actually an intended victim, and all she can muster is a rather peeved sense of annoyance -- which was the main problem with Agatha Christie’s writing, too.

Great Guy (Grand National, 1936)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night, after the Lifetime movie Who Is Killing the Cheerleaders? (something of a misnomer since the only cheerleaders who were killed were offed in the backstory 10 years before the main action) and a decent interval during which I washed the dinner dishes, I ran my husband Charles the last film we hadn’t recently screened in the four-film two-DVD boxed set American Movie Classics put out of James Cagney’s public-domain titles. The film was actually the earliest in the box: Great Guy, made for the independent Grand National studio in 1936 after a year in which Cagney had successfully sued Warner Bros. to break his contract because they had violated the rules on his billing. He actually filed the suit at the end of 1935 but the motion-picture business was so tight an oligopoly that no other major studio dared risk Jack Warner’s wrath by signing Cagney. He had to wait nearly a year before he got another chance to work in films, and the man who gave it to him was Edward L. Alperson, founder and CEO of Grand National, which had launched in 1935 as a small studio with big ambitions. One of their big ambitions was to land a major star and thus produce product that had a chance of breaking the majors’ monopolies on the most desirable (and lucrative) theatres.

Alperson signed Cagney and for his first film with him settled on a vehicle that -- like the movie On the Waterfront 18 years later -- began as a series of articles in a major magazine. The series was written by James Edward Grant -- who later became John Wayne’s pet writer (when you hired Wayne for a film you also had to hire Grant to rewrite the script for him; some directors chafed at this while others reasoned it made sense for a star of Wayne’s caliber to have his own personal writer tailor the scripts especially for him and make sure the lines were comfortable for him to say) -- for the Saturday Evening Post and dealt with Johnnie Cave, fearless and incorruptible inspector for the New York Bureau of Weights and Measures. When Charles and I first saw this film years ago we joked about the triviality of the racket -- as if Warners had taken all the good ones for their Cagney and Edward G. Robinson vehicles and Grand National was left with something as trivial as the Bureau of Weights and Measures.

But the film itself, scripted by Henry McCarty, Henry Johnson and Harry Ruskin (did you have to have the first name “Henry” or a derivative thereof to work on writing this film?) from Grant’s stories, actually does a good job showing both the tricks unscrupulous grocers and other merchants pull on consumers to short-weight them (the box of strawberries with a false bottom, the chicken weighted down by lead slugs with drop out of the bird under the scale afterwards, the secretly rigged gallon indicators at gas stations) and the stratagems by which the Bureau’s agents catch them and collect the evidence needed. Great Guy inevitably cast Cagney as Johnnie Cave, who rises to head the Bureau of Weights and Measures’ enforcement force after his predecessor Joel Green (Wallis Clark) is involved in an accident -- he hit a streetcar with his car but did so only because another car drove him out of his right lane and into the streetcar. He ends up in the hospital for this and doesn’t want any visitors except Cave because he’s fearful that the gangsters who staged his “accident” and ran him off the road into that streetcar may try again and finish the job.

Joel warns Cave that while he trusts him as far as honesty and incorruptibility are concerned, he needs to remember to keep his temper under wraps and do his new job with his brains rather than his fists. Needless to say, Cave is temperamentally unable to follow this advice -- well, it wouldn’t be a James Cagney movie, especially one from the 1930’s, if he didn’t show off his fisticuffs in at least one scene, and the writing committee for Great Guy gave him a lot more than just one. Indeed, they seem deliberately to have knocked off the formula that had made Cagney a Warner Bros. star in the first place; following the lead of Cagney’s 1935 blockbuster hit G-Men (in which Warners had answered the Production Code objections that his and Robinson’s previous films had glorified crime by moving these actors to the right side of the law and casting Cagney as an FBI agent whose big conflict was having to learn to abide by the iron discipline J. Edgar Hoover famously insisted on), it’s a typical Cagney good-guy vehicle in which he faces down the secret organizations that are masterminding the scams that cheat consumers -- out of small sums, to be sure (“a penny here and a penny there,” one character says, back when a penny was real money), but small sums that add up and attract the interest of both corrupt political clubs and out-and-out crooks.

The corrupt political club leader is Marty Cavanaugh (Robert Gleckler), who offers Cave a cushy job as head of the “Seventh District” (presumably of New York’s legendarily corrupt Tammany Hall) at twice what the Bureau of Weights and Measures is paying him, obviously to get him out of the way. When Cave turns it down the gang strikes back and kidnaps him in the one sequence in this film that approaches the noir look (imdb.com lists Great Guy as “crime, drama, film noir, but it really isn’t noir -- other early-1930’s films like William Wellman’s Safe in Hell and Charles Vidor’s Sensation Hunters come a lot closer to what later became known as film noir), in which they carefully keep him and us in suspense as to just what the hell they intend to do with him. We soon learn that Marty Cavanaugh is merely the lieutenant for a “Big Boss” whose identity is supposed to be a huge secret, but it only takes about one-third of this film’s 65-minute running time (about the length of Cagney’s typical Warners programmers as well) before both we and Cave learn who the “Big Boss” is: Abel Canning (Henry Kolker), whose above-board reputation is as a major civic leader and philanthropist but we soon learn is the owner of a food-service company that is consistently bilking an orphanage run by Mrs. Ogilvie (Mary Gordon, later Sherlock Holmes’ landlady Mrs. Hudson in the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Holmes movies).

The city’s mayor (Douglas Wood) is in thrall to Canning, regularly plays golf with him, and fires Mrs. Ogilvie at Canning’s demand -- which provides Cave the clue he needs to figure out what’s going on. Cave’s campaign against Canning is complicated by the fact that Cave’s girlfriend, Janet Henry (Mae Clarke, in her third and last film with Cagney: the first two were The Public Enemy, in which she got the famous grapefruit in her face, and Lady Killer), is also Cave’s secretary, and naturally she admires her boss and doesn’t believe it when her boyfriend tells her he’s a crook. As Cave gets closer to unmasking Canning, the gang retaliates by faking a holdup and an auto accident and framing Cave as having committed robbery and crashed his car while drunk -- a scene repeated three years later after Cagney went back to Warner Bros. (who got his original court victory reversed on appeal) in the quite good and underrated movie Each Dawn I Die.

Ultimately the MacGuffin turns out to be a document Cave was planning to turn over to the district attorney with the evidence needed to prosecute Canning for ripping off the orphanage -- a thug for the gang, Burton (Joe Sawyer), steals it from him and hides it by peeling back some of the ceiling cover in his closet. Burton tries to blackmail Canning by demanding $5,000 instead of the originally agreed-upon $500 for the paper, and in the final confrontation Canning has recovered the paper and is trying to burn it when the police, alerted by Janet (who’s finally realized her boss is a crook), show up in the person of Cave’s friend Captain Hanlon (Edward MacNamara) and arrest him and his stooges. “B” Movies author Dan Miller called Great Guy “a misfire of a film,” but I don’t think it’s that bad even though it would have been a good deal better had it been a Warner Bros. production.

Jack Warner would have assigned a faster, more exciting director than the one this film got, John G. Blystone (who usually did comedies at Hal Roach and whose brother Stanley Blystone was a character actor there), and Warners would also have given the film their usual thundering musical score. Without the infrastructure to produce and record an original score, and without a music library of their own (most Grand National films rented their scores from the Meyer Synchronizing Service, and Abe Meyer’s themes become so hauntingly familiar if you watch a lot of 1930’s “B”’s you practically want to wave to them as you hear them), Alperson and Blystone apparently decided not to use any music at all except over the opening and closing credits and as “source music” during a party being thrown by Marty Cavanaugh which Cave crashes on his way to nailing Canning.

Still, Great Guy is a highly competent film, Cagney delivers the goods, and except for the excruciatingly unfunny “comic relief” character Pat Haley (James Burke) who’s always spouting off blarney about Ireland (where he claims to have grown up) I kept expecting the really Irish-American Cagney to call him on, the acting is generally competent and the action well staged. And it was a blessing to see the beautiful original Grand National logo -- a clock tower whose hands “wiped” in the company’s name across the clock face -- on Great Guy after it was hacked off AMC’s print of Cagney’s other Grand National film, Something to Sing About.