I regret that I had not previously put into full form here the thoughts I had been emailing around to some old mentors, some weeks ago, about a Sarah Palin spot on the Republican ticket.  Well, I have only private emails to assert my claim to history to having "got there" before most everyone else did, but I won't bother to stop to revel in the distinction.

 

     Instead, I'm reveling in the excitement of this truly Out-of-the-Box choice on Sen. McCain's part, a choice that actually makes great sense for his ticket-- and the governance of this nation in 2009 and beyond.

 

     This is one of those beautiful times when a non-cynical position nevertheless has the delightful quality of fulfilling all sorts of goals a cynic would, standing in McCain's shoes, hope to accomplish.  It dropped a bomb on top of Obama's acceptance speech in Denver.  It changes the whole "mandate" of diversity that the Obama Democrats and their media enablers have assumed and promoted throughout this campaign.  It makes a possibly irresisitible pitch to millions of disaffected "PUMAs" in the Democratic party who are furious at the cavalier treatment Hillary Clinton received from so many pundits and activists who should fairly, given their policy goals and principles, have been at least understandingly supportive of Sen. Clinton's bid for the nomination-- but who instead seemed bent from the start on sabotaging it.  Palin's selection simultaneously changes the whole narrative of "change", putting a fresh, youthful face on the ticket who  radiates an authentic folksiness miles away from Obama's arugula-chomping upper-middle-class  elitism while also having a bearing (and the resume to back it up) that demonstrates real chops in the leadership department.

 

     I won't hesitate to admit that, nominally speaking, Palin's resume is "thin" by the usual requirements of the job-description.  If she were already into her second term as governor, it might be easier to immunize her, and McCain, from the charges that are coming in about her "inexperience."  But then, the Democrats are the ones who have thrown caution to the wind by nominating a man who began his Presidential campaign only two years flat into his Senate term.  By nominating Obama, they have changed the narrative, and the GOP can hardly be equitably blamed for putting someone of similar age and nominal years of service to Obama in the second slot on their ticket! 

 

     What's more, Palin's experience is executive, not only as governor but as mayor and, importantly, in her role as the state's oil commissioner.  Her road to the governor's mansion (if that's what they call it in Alaska!) was certainly harder than Obama's path to the US Senate, and her actions there have been more noteworthy.  She has demonstrated expertise in at least one area of policy that is of more vital interest-- and political viability-- than ever:  Energy.  On this topic alone her formidable background may grant her a decisive impact in her debate with Joe Biden. 

 

     Better still, her corruption-fighting and fiscal purging prove her to be a real soulmate for John McCain, in a way that Mitt Romney (whatever his charms) could never have been.  For all the advantages she brings to the ticket in terms of the ancillary excitements of her gender, youth, and outsider status, the best thing of all is that, shockingly, McCain has managed to put together a ticket that redoubles those qualities that are best in himself.  By selecting Palin, McCain proves anew that he is indeed the rule-breaking maverick who goes by his gut rather than by simple calculation.  That the pundits are acting more thunderstruck than they should be (Palin's name, after all, had at least been in early mention!) doesn't ruin the fun, though it's a nasty (if predictable) turn that some of them are taking up the Palin pick as sudden proof of "desperation" in the McCain campaign.  Rubbish.  Everyone knows the roll McCain has been on of late, and how increasingly sweaty the brows inside the Democratic fold are getting.  When all the stars are supposed to be aligned for the Democrats this fall, where's that big Mike Dukakis-style 17 point lead Barack's supposed to be basking in?

 

     The Republican Convention is suddenly going to be big.  America will tune in to learn something about this right-wing Tina Fey.  Suddenly, everyone finds, there's a real future for the Republicans in this election after all.  At first glance, it's because McCain is offering voters an alternate chance to "make history."  But upon deeper inspection, voters will find that they have the opportunity to put two radically individual people in the executive branch who will bring a level of independence, integrity, competence, and practicality to government that we truly have not seen in a very long time.  History making, indeed.

 

     Animation is not my cup of tea.  Neither, under usual circumstances, is what we might as well call "sentimental movies."  Let no one confuse cineastes, however snooty, with the "sensitive."  Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa will stir your feelings, your beliefs, your very soul like nothing else in film, but they don't go for "soft."  Neither, generally speaking, do Orson Welles, Otto Preminger, Hawks, Ford, or other deities of classic Hollywood film.

 

     Still, I have to make allowances for films that elicit pure emotion through the combination of visual mastery and storytelling simplicity.  D. W. Griffith's movies are sentimental in the extreme, yet epically moving-- think Broken Blossoms or Orphans of the Storm.  The man knows how to touch, how to thrill a nerve in the most jaded viewer.  So do a handful of the best children's films (the ones for all ages) like Annaud's The Bear or Cuaron's A Little Princess.  Spielberg-- a problematic filmmaker if ever there was one!-- pulled it off with AI.  And Pixar has finally done it for me with Wall-E.

 

     I can't surrender to the temptation to call it an out-and-out masterpiece as Joe Morgenstern does, but I can heartily endorse his follow-up suggestion that it be shopped for a Best Picture nomination from the Oscars.  Rare would be the year that produces two commercial films to rival it in visual ambition and narrative charm.  If Wall-E makes a few concessions to entertaining the kiddies with its second half, they are neither so many nor so ill-advised as to dissipate the film's overall enchantment.  In fact, Spielberg's AI suffered a far more drastic decline in its second act and was shot through with inconsistency (to say nothing of implausibility) in its denouement, yet managed to be frighteningly immediate in its emotional resonance.  Sitting in the theatre, you knew already how haunted you would be.  And so it is with Wall-E, which always manages to introduce a new piece of comic invention or sweet reverie to console us for the loss of the haunted enchantment of its desert Earth.

 

     With all due respect to the many great Catholic thinkers, past and present, who have deeply influenced me, let me admit straight-up:  I absolutely refuse to deny characters like Wall-E or the robot-boy in AI their souls.  I'm not carrying over the metaphysics of the film-story into my waking universe, but neither will I be a Cartesian deadbeat and hold my heart aloof from these beings as though they were mere "machines."  Nor should the optimistic finale of Wall-E distract us from the fact that Wall-E has maintained his spirit far better than any of his human compatriots in their bovine exile.  Returning our planet to its lost organic splendor should be swell, but for the audience, it's the meek little robot who has truly inherited the earth.

 

     Wall-E is simply the great character of American movies in 2008 (Heath Ledger's Joker is a terrific performance, but the character, besides being obviously unlovable, even in a Nicholsonian way, is simply not as remarkable, unless you're one of those Flowers of Hell types who always thinks Evil is more fantastic than Good).  The Chaplin comparisons are apt; like the Tramp, Wall-E tugs at our hearts even as he delights us into laughter.  Smitten with the oddities he finds among humankind's detritus, he is curious and easily smitten, not only by EVE but with so many of the tokens of our own inventiveness, however banal they might seem to us.  From his lonely vantage, Hello, Dolly! functions much the way the Collected Shakespeare did for Huxley's John Savage, but with much more edifying results (perhaps in a cultural vacuum, musicals might give someone a more balanced and benign view of what it means to be human than the abysses of Othello and Lear, however alloyed by the comedies, the majority of which, after all, are rather tart?).  Wall-E tries so gamely to make a little garden of his blighted, lonely world, and it's clear how very much he deserves, as well as desires, to find his EVE.  That his quest to keep her takes him on a spirited odyssey full of heart-tugging reversals comes as no surprise; but thankfully, our suspense is repaid not only with a happy ending, but with so many stardust-sprinkles of lovely magic between these two along the way.

     Christopher Nolan's blockbuster The Dark Knight has reignited the old "vigilante justice in movies" argument that has raged off and on since Dirty Harry and Death Wish.  Those visceral 70s films consciously provoked that argument, whatever the filmmakers real politics were.  But here, we're dealing with a comic-book hero blockbuster, a film awash in subtext, certainly, but can it carry all the significance critics claim to find in it?  Sure, it's a compelling entertainment that glows darkly upon the screen like a gem (one that swoops and swoons off of skyscrapers, that is!), but can it carry all the moral weight of a Thoughtful Drama?

 

     Nolan has carried the art-house gameiness of his breakout thriller Memento to his Batman pictures, investing them with a sober gravity far removed from the dark but campy aesthetic of the Tim Burton films with Michael Keaton.  Both sets of films are rather grim, but in very different ways.  The Burton films, if not exactly nihilistic, seem rather more preoccupied with their off-kilter villains and pop-Expressionist visuals than with crimefighting itself-- let alone the ethics of fighting crime.  Nolan has tried to ground his Batman, by contrast, in something recognizable as our lived-in reality, particularly with The Dark Knight which uses a basically unadorned Chicago as its stand-in for Gotham:  Gotham as Everymetropolis, USA.  Forget that high-rise Amtrak thing in Batman Begins.  This film is sleekly compelling to look at, all the more because it doesn't try to convince us we're looking at some kind of Blade Runner futuristic neverland.

 

     Both Liam Neeson in the first picture and, here, the late Heath Ledger, traffic in some kind of popcorn "Nietzschean" schtick.  Neeson's villain stood for a seemingly--aristocratic code gone bonkers, ready to torch Troy so that an Aeneid could get written.  Ledger's Joker has no similar notions of nobility, however spurious.  His war is not against "decadence" but the very notion of order itself.  He'd burn Aeneids so that, well, so he could carve up people's faces and/or make them do nasty things to each other.  As he insists himself, he's not that complicated.

 

     This presents an issue to be taken up with the screenplay by the freres Nolan.  The Joker's reign of terror (or should it be called a "rain of terror" in deference to the Joker's ambition to become some kind of asymmetrical force of nature?) seems to throw all kinds of moral connumdrums at the protagonists and the audience itself.  Yet the very philosophical blankness at the Joker's heart gives the film a representational headache.

 

     After all, how the devil is The Joker to keep his crime-spree running at all?  He always has available henchmen for whatever attack he has planned next; yet his wear-it-on-my-sleeve nihilism has to be off-putting to more than just his Mob frenemies, the guys who represent Old School crime-- the people who might be the Soviet Union to The Joker's Al Qaeda in the film's subtextual scheme.  If the opening bank heist is any indication, his hired help ought to catch on quickly to the fact that working for The Joker isn't really a career with prospects.  I mean, the guy burns money with impunity!-- you might have to wonder if his crew isn't composed of some kind of--

 

     Ideologues?  I wonder if Nolan means us to take that hint.  There's the hospital scene where The Joker completes Harvey Dent's moral transformation into Two Face.  There's the zonked-out guy with the sewn-in bomb and his incoherent babble about how The Joker promised to replace the pain with lights--Joker as cult-leader?  His shifting stories about his deformed face show him fishing around for psychologically impressive material-- mining fear and numb curiosity for an opening into the victim/opponent's psyche?  All of these methods indicate his status as terrorist (and the word itself gets bandied about a couple of times).  But while the real-world terrorists create chaos, they have (at least initially) 'reasons' for doing so.  One can argue very well that, in the end, any terrorist network that survives indefinitely will inevitably become something very like The Joker here-- bent on destruction for its own sake, out of habit, once the ostensible rationales for terrorism, whether religious, ethnic, or political, have been forgotten.  Look at the FARC, the IRA or the Khmer Rouge.  But if we can't know how The Joker started, at least we should have some sense of how he operates.  Burton's Batman, no marvel of plot-construction, at least gave us that.  His henchmen weren't required to behave as irrationally as Jack Nicholson did.  This Joker seems to have an endless sea of goons ready to line up to take his bullets in the back of the head.

 

      Alas, there's nothing to go on here.  For all of the tautness Nolan wishes to bring to his sprawling epic, it's undone by the fact that The Joker has to be everywhere and nowhere.  And that is facilitated by his ability to buy off or blackmail anyone into betraying the protagonists.  Which means, of course, that The Joker has to function in a much more "rational" way (however sub-basement the quality of this reason) than the film wants to credit him for.  We see Batman resorting to some kind of wiretapping/sonar-mapping McGuffin of dubious constitutionality in order to track The Joker down-- but what exactly made him so difficult to find in the first place?  I mean, how did he get so good at hiding?  Michael Mann would have found some way to show us how The Joker just couldn't be accessed by all the best footwork in the world.  Nolan demands we take it on faith.

 

     For all of its entertainment value, The Dark Knight isn't the morality play it aspires to be.  There's a diminishing of the film with every new "moral dilemma" it seeks to invent, reaching a sad low with the grimly underwhelming boats-and-bombs denoument.  If it's true that Spielberg can't resist using his editing rhythms to let the audience know when somebody is or isn't going to be killed in Schindler's List, then Nolan hasn't even begun to make the effort.  I'm not complaining about the overall outcome  [SPOILER ALERT:  both boats survive!]; rather, it's that there's little drama on the prisoner's ferry, and none at all on the civilian one.  If Nolan wanted to make us believe this moral crisis, he needed to turn those civvies on like the angry mobs that feared and loathed Christ or Socrates.  The prisoners-- well, I would've expected at least some of them to come on like Natural Born Killers.  Nolan can't just throw this thing in the audience's lap and then not be expected to turn up the suspense to a fever pitch.  Even if one accepts the exceptionally nominal sense of tension, anger and grief on the boats, Nolan still hasn't even worked to cross-cut the situation on the river with what's going on in the climactic duel between Batman and The Joker.  The noisy, incoherent finale is a waste of celluloid compared to the opening robbery, or the big chase sequence on the streets.

 

     As some critic has wisely pointed out, for all of The Joker's inanities about "chaos" and its "fair"ness, he's really a control-freak.  The average Janes, Joes, and Convicts on the boats abnegate his psychotic hypotheses as a social scientist by doing the 'boring'ly right thing.  That would be a heartening victory for normalicy, expect that, having  put the concept down on paper, Nolan seems so apathetic in bringing it to cinematic life.

 

     As for all the navel-gazing over "vigillanteism":  well, this has become such a kneejerk liberal bugbear that I'm immediately tempted to say, "Lighten up, people!  it's a comic book movie, for goshsakes!"  But, since the film clearly tries to summon the ghosts of Torture, Wiretapping, False Incrimination and whatnot, let's try to take the bait.  What is the film's judgment?:  certainly not, I think, that Batman is an illicit agent of fascism.  He assumes, in the end, the aspect of the Criminal in order to continue his quest for Justice, but we don't believe for a moment that he won't be vindicated in Gotham's eye in the sequel.  Nor, through the words of Gordon, does the film cast a negative glance upon Batman's retreating form at all.  I almost expected his boy to pull a Shane and run after him, so glowing and heroic are the words thrown upon our hero by the taciturn policeman.  Nolan clearly isn't so bent up about his duty to lecture the audience on constitutionality that he can't let Batman be Batman and do his thing, and for that, I'm grateful.

 

     If anything, The Dark Knight's bravest moral insight might lie in its treatment of Rachel's choice of men and her fate.  Her death, of course, is tragically undeserved, but there's also tragic irony in her making the choice of a man who would become, through madness or weakness, a villain bent on throwing all scruples, human or divine, out the window in deference to his awful worship of Chance over the man who would stand true to better convictions-- and must go on, remembering a woman who he believes was ready to give her love to him, who in fact had already decided to retract it in favor of another.  If there's one point on which The Dark Knight seems to justify deception over truth, it's in Alfred's burning of her letter.  To allow Rachel to break Batman/Bruce's spirit from beyond the grave would not only wound our crime-fighting hero, but forever marr her memory.   If Rachel ever gets to return from the grave, she's gonna feel like a lommox for that call.

 

     The essential problem for McCain in picking his veep has a dual nature:  on the one hand, because of a variety of factors, none necessarily a debit in itself-- McCain's age, his laconic manner, his perhaps rather stiff (understandably!) demeanor-- he really needs to find someone charismatic, high-energy:  the kind of person who could be an instantly plausible and palatable standard-bearer for the GOP in four years on the assumption that McCain elects to be a one-term president (or, to put it direly, on the assumption that Mac will lose).  All this is especially keen given the threat that Obama's charisma presents in the Presidential contest-- as well as the fact that, in four years, the Dems may have a strong hand, assuming either that Hillary takes a fallen Obama's place, or that Obama should prove a popular President.

 

     But then, there's the negative side of this proposition:  first, that a charismatic running-mate might accentuate McCain's vulnerabilties in terms of age and apparent energy; and second, that no matter WHO McCain chooses, the media is almost dead certain to find McCain-Blank underwhelming compared to the Obama ticket, unless both a) McCain can snag either Bono, a Roman demigod, or the revivified George Washington, Abe Lincoln, or Harry Truman; and b) Obama picks his grandmother.

 

     So what the devil's McCain to do?  In my view, there's an added factor here:  McCain has to pick someone he can be truly comfortable with, and that the media/public will believe he is comfortable with.  McCain is too obviously prickly and set-in-his-ways to make nice with somebody chosen for pure expediency, probably even if, all things being equal, that somebody hasn't already stood in the way of his ambitions before (i.e. Romney, Huckabee).   Win or lose, I believe McCain dearly wants to make this run his own, wants to do it his way.

 

     And while McCain's own ideological profile is sufficiently mixed  to allow him to plausibly pick someone who is not a perfect mesh with his own political views (and who coult that be?), he can't just pick someone who's an obvious opportunist or a patent ideologue.  Both his own profile and that of Obama with his dreary "change" mantra dictates the choice of someone who sells the idea of political adventure, of not doing things the "old way."

 

     Let me just break form and admit who seems best-suited to me:  I join David Frum in endorsing Rudy Giuliani.  Never mind the talking-points for a minute, just let me put it like this:  McCain-Giuliani = Rambo-Dirty Harry.  The Vietnam War Hero and the Crime-Fighting Crusader.  Two mad-as-hell I-did-it-my-way larger-than-life characters.

 

     I realize the hurdles here for the conservative base.  Some of them I agree with, some of them I do not.  However, if there are clearly two guys who are going to stand for national security, it is these two.  If any two Republicans can scream, 'We will do what it takes to keep this country alive, safe, and free' it's them.  The resumes are impeccable.  Their fundamental resolve under pressure is absolutely tested.  You can balk at their ideas, but to balk at their character is like demanded Coriolanus to show you his wounds.

 

     If McCain is to have a chance, he has to force an issue in the minds of American voters:  can you really trust an inexperienced academic like Obama to lead this country through war and recession?  Giuliani would redouble McCain's strengths on the war question, and  be an absolute plus on the economic side.  Rudy's  revitalizing New York City from a festering demilitarized zone on a permanent autopilot course from "The French Connection"s rot to "Escape from New York"s dystopia into something actually akin to the urban paradise of Woody Allen's films makes him the best political spokesperson for economic turnaround the GOP has got.  Romney may have business-smarts, but Giuliani is Adam Smith on steroids.

 

     Okay, Rudy ran a poor campaign, but what of that?  If Obama picks an also-ran like Biden, Edwards, or Hillary, what will be made of that?  Rudy's bad choices in the campaign were more strategic than tactical, which curiously carries less embarassment.  Faced with a run of early caucuses/primaries where one or another rival had something of a lock on the vote, he couldn't elbow his way in.  If he'd made some amazing gaffes it'd be different.  As it is, it's almost as if Giuliani is coming in fresh from retirement instead of back from the grave.

 

     I'm not saying I'll absolutely balk at another pick:  I hope to review a few potentials before McCain actually announces.  But for all the excitement a couple of "out of the box" contenders might bring, I think it's unreasonable to bank on any of them commanding the kind of respect Rudy could bring to the ticket.

     You can't blame John McCain for getting hot under the collar.  The MSM seems determined to transform Barack Obama's overseas sight-seeing tour into something with the combined resonance of Nixon in China, Reagan's "Tear down this wall", and Kennedy at Vienna (no, wait:  that one wasn't a keeper!).

 

     But he should ride this storm out rather than try to get ahead of himself by announcing his choice for Vice-President. 

 

     Yes, there are better reasons for doing it than just to change the media narrative.  You could argue that making a pick now would allow McCain to put more states and voters in play-- if he's gonna pick Crist, for example, you have to give Floridians a little time to get excited about it.  Better, if he picks someone who's going to activate enthusiasm in new corners of the GOP coaltion (or even excitement among Independents) then the sooner he makes that pick, the sooner the fires can get stoked, the fundraising accelerates, and the media labels start to get shuffled.

 

     But the fact is, McCain is not hurting too poorly in the polls at all; Rasmussen has placed him within as little as 2 points of Obama.  And so I hardly think it's a bad idea to let Obama's World Tour play itself out.

 

     Suppose Obama finally makes that longed-for gaffe.  Do you want it buried under news about McCain's Veepstakes?

 

     Suppose the public starts to feel nauseous after umpteen images of adoring crowds of foreigners chanting Obama's name-- as if the Germans get to decide for us who our President is going to be!  Why hand the viewers Drammamine just when their gills are starting to turn a justifiable shade of green?

 

     And really, it looks weak to announce your choice just because everyone knows you can't get any airtime.  The media is being grossly unfair.  Obama is really being shameless.  But right now, McCain isn't really flashing the kind of righteous, sarcastic grief he's capable of dishing out.  The media does know it, and they're not inclined to shed favors upon the heads of those they deem "weak"-- especially when there's an ideologically correct Golden One around like Obama.

 

     But not to despair.  The race is still tight, and I think there's some good chance that the narrative is going to change of its own accord.  There's still a long way to go before November.  And McCain can afford to hold the Veepstakes ammo for now.  At the worst, he can wait until his poll numbers are down.  Maybe he can even wait till his own convention.  It might help shift the narrative, just in case Obama  (and his running mate) gives 80,000 screaming fans in Denver that familiar feeling running up their leg.

      Senator John McCain's offer of a drawn-out series of ten townhall-style debates may have been disingenuous, an offer that might have been impossibly dumb to take up.  More to the point, the American public may not have the stomach for it, after the interminable debates of the Democratic primary contest that did so little to prove anything.  Yet at least McCain gave Obama a straight-up chance to hand the American media and public the kind of exhaustively "serious" campaign we've all (supposedly) been pining for these many years-- the sort of thing someone long ago anticipated of a 2000 match-up between Jack Kemp and Al Gore, a policy wonk's dream of civil debate and endless technocratic nerditry.  Obama could easily have refused the bait while rising to the challenge by conditionally accepting the McCain challenge while whittling down the number of actual debates, or mixing up the formats, or what have you.