RIP GORE VIDAL

i prefer buckley/chomsky

I'm caught between considering it absurd that a feature film was made of the whole Vidal/Buckley shebang and yet quite wanting to see it at the same time.

Best of Enemies held up great for me. Love the left-field period details: Alan Sues, Streisand, Playboy After Dark, etc. I find the last 10 minutes--these two guys 35 years later--more moving than I ever would have thought possible.

“I am sorry to see Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon’s Best of Enemies being hailed for remembering a golden age when intellectuals fought out profound issues in public,” writes Gary Wills for the New York Review of Books. “There is more intellectual insight and incisive commentary on a single night of Stephen Colbert’s The Colbert Report or Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show than in all of the mean broadcasts of Buckley and Vidal.”

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/aug/11/william-buckley-myth/

Wm F. Buckley used his gaudy vocabulary and his patrician accent and mannerisms to create an aura of intellectualism, but he was just appealing to the class prejudice that believes the rich must be awfully smart or they wouldn't be rich. Nothing he said was particularly intelligent or insightful. George Will works the same side of the street, but a bit more understatedly.

Vidal was nimbler and far better read and the superior writer, but if we're constructing binaries then "The Daily Show" is more fun.

i.e. I don't regard the Buckley-Vidal debates as a reminder of What We've Lost.

Neither does the film, as to the Buckley-Vidal segments (I won't call them debates) themselves. The film, to me, very clearly sees their sniping as the beginning-of-the-end much more than the end-of-the-beginning. I think it does, in a more general sense, deify the '60s as a moment in time when Buckley/Vidal/McLuhan/Sontag/Mailer/etc. had a public presence in the way they wouldn't today.

I've read a few reviews now, and James Wolcott's is the first to address something I really loved about the film: how sad the last 15 minutes are. (He does, though, accept the interpretation of the film that Willis complains about.)

http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/08/best-of-enemies-james-wolcott

Thw Wills essay mentions Murray Kempton, about whom there aren't enough words of praise.

I'd completely forgotten that Wolcott is in the film briefly (one or two clips). So kind of a vested interest.

i've never understood what buckley meant when he threatened to hit vidal and then said that he'd "stay plastered" -- was he saying that vidal was drunk?

Plaster = euphemism for punch

to dig slightly deeper into the rabbit hole, bandages that were designed to adhere were once called plasters. the implication of someone "plastering" his foe in a fight was that they'd suffer injuries requiring bandages, generally on their face. this term was discontinued long before the 1960s, but the idiom based on this lingered on until my childhood.

Not to deify the 60s, but, as Alfred has pointed out on ILB, Vidal, Mailer, Bellow, Updike, Roth, McLuhan, Galbraith, maybe Singer and Malamud, wrote best sellers back then (probably Buckley too, but still).

thanks! i figured it was probably something like that, but couldn't find anything in any online dictionaries.

I see no reason to pay to see BoE in a theater as all these debates are online and the reason the whole 'event' has been neglected to date is that it's extremely minor, no matter what these filmmakers think.

Didn't know you used youtube every now and then.

Anyway this probably should've moved to the way these debates started up the whole culture of punditry and debate that is often more noise than insight or what have you. The 'Epilogue' was certainly going that way. The intellectuals embracing TV, doing it with hatred/contempt (certainly Vidal would rather be known for his books?): like when Buckley takes the mickey out of Vidal for his Hollywood scripts but he is doing it on TV, and the cheap channel too.

I found the Buckely presenting the Kennedy letter more nasty than the trading of insults - has Vidal ever lost his cool on TV? Impressive how he kept it.

That was even nastier, agree--it was an unprovoked ambush (the infamous insult wasn't, notwithstanding how crude and personal it was), zeroing in on a touchy relationship for Vidal. Somehow he got off a couple of good lines as he eyed the letter.

For me, the link between then and now was handled as well as was needed in the end-credit clips, although I'm pretty well versed in the now. Someone unfamiliar with the Crossfire-type shows might need more.

bringing out the letter is simultaneously so ridiculously vicious and so irrelevant i suspect vidal's little smiles are not forced but restrained. eyeing buckley trying to figure out if he genuinely thinks he's scored a triumph here.

Really I was watching and thinking "How Does he get out of that?" Looked effortless.

Over here you get to be well-versed in the emptiness of these arguments on the news/Question Time (which is worse than ever). What I wanted to see is more analysis of a politics gone completely wrong.

Also wasn't that convinced by Vidal's liberalism. They are too pro-elite, and looking back its the 'expat' jibe that probably made Vidal most uncomfortable. Can totally see why he is not v much read.

he's not?

Doesn't feel like it, at least over here.

Vidal's series of novels on American history seem like they'll continue to be read in the USA for at least the next few decades.

Definitely

(Burr is great)

“I am sorry to see Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon’s Best of Enemies being hailed for remembering a golden age when intellectuals fought out profound issues in public,” writes Gary Wills for the New York Review of Books.

Now that I've seen it, I can say Wills is Wrong.

I had a couple problems with Best of Enemies. The first is that it is significantly padded, an obvious consequence of having to structure a feature length documentary around whatever the total running time of the debates was (they seemed short; did the film significantly excerpt them?). Most of what the talking heads had to say was just explaining/mildly elaborating on what had just been shown in the film; the linguist (I forget his name) talking about what constitutes profanity then vs. now was by far the most insightful moment. Second, and seemingly less significant but even more annoying to me, is the way that it presents clips from some of Vidal's work. Obviously it is a lot easier to show clips from Myra Breckinridge than to display passages of the novel on film, but by presenting the film as representative of Vidal's work--which it does, mainly by failing to acknowledge that the film was a notorious flop, which Vidal called "an awful joke"--the film implicitly confirms Buckley's dismissal of it. Even more infuriating is the labelling of a clip from Caligula (accompanying someone or other's speech about moral decay) as Gore Vidal's Caligula, which a) the film was never called, and b) Vidal took his name off of once his original scrip was drastically altered. Whether intentional or not, the filmmakers seem okay with equating Vidal with trash without really examining the content of his writing.

The United States of Amnesia, the other Vidal documentary from a few years ago, was way better.

I finished Parini's mediocre bio a few days. I didn't Vidal the workaholic was also a functioning alcoholic.

Really? "Functioning alcoholic" is the first thing I see when I look at Vidal. Extremely highly functioning yes but it's very clear.