This interview with Jeffrey Wright is predictably wonderful and thoughtful. And I think this observation, “that’s rare among white writers, white directors that I’ve been involved with, that they’re willing to have a vulnerable conversation about race. I mean, that’s a function of the hackles and defensiveness that all too often get in the way of a real clear and productive communication,” is quite true. It’s what made David Mamet’s Race so bad. Mamet wanted the play to be rawand confrontational, but he forgot somewhere to make it honest, to understand that provocation isn’t the same as empathy. 


It’s one of the reasons I think Belize, the role in Angels in America that helped make Wright famous, is so well-done. Belize cares deeply about his white friends, most important among them Prior, but Kushner isn’t afraid to have him deliver devastating set-downs to white characters who cannot respond to them, and to make it clear that some of his white characters don’t understand Belize at all as a person, much less as a black man. There’s this great scene in Perestroika, the second half of Angels, when Belize tells Louis, the man who walked out on Prior Walter when he learned his lover had AIDS:

Just so’s the record’s straight: I love Prior but I was never in love with him. I have a man, uptown, and I have since long before I first laid my eyes on the sorry-ass sight of you…you never bothered to ask. Up in the air, just like that angel, too far off the earth to pick out the details. Louis and his Big Ideas. Big Ideas are all you love…The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word “free” to a note so high nobody can reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on earth sounds less like freedom to me.

What I love about that scene is Kushner’s refusal to give Louis an opportunity for a comeback, his utter comfort with giving a black man the last word on the matters of race. That scene is not about Louis’s correction and redemption by a saintly black man. It’s a tough, honest conversation between friends, one of whom is finding out that he isn’t nearly as good a friend to the other as he thought he was. What writers of any variety owe the issue of race is honesty. 

Matthew McConaughey is such a paradox to me. He’s a sufer-dude in life, and on-screen, he often plays someone who hasn’t quite grown up (epitomized by the awful-looking Failure to Launch). But in a world of boys, he’s got really manly looks, he’s one of the most grown-up looking actors of his age, outside of George Clooney. And he’s so often best in movies where he’s angry, frightened, pretending to be masterful, even where he has to be physically powerful. Such appears to potentially be the case in The Lincoln Lawyer:

The concept is window-dressing, the point is McConaughey going toe-to-toe with another actor who is often better when he’s under pressure or dissembling for a part, Ryan Phillipe. McConaughey has a terrific, expressive mouth: it can flare into a brilliant smile or purse into an expression of tightly-controlled rage or suspicion. Phillipe has those angry, hooded eyes, too: they interfere with him being a slight romantic hero, but they’re very good for putting insincerity into a smile, or in making him look very serious when he’s telling a substantial lie. He was good in Stop-Loss but great in Breach, a role that required more control.

I hope both men will embrace a Clooney-like strategy, and look for roles that are about the challenges of being a complete man. Love is part of it, like knowing how to confront a snow leopard when your katana is frozen in its scabbard. But there are other things in life, and in the movies, than being some broad’s method of self-actualization.

I realized that the guidelines I was using to say where we should be up to in Cryptonomicon vary based on editions and formatting. Let’s read up to the section break titled Nightmare. I’ll discuss up to there, but not beyond, on Friday.

I think ABC is very smart to follow NBC’s lead and create a block of comedy shows on Wednesday nights. I have absolutely no question that NBC’s decision to tie Community, 30 Rock, The Office, and Parks and Recreation (I refuse to acknowledge Outsourced) is the reason I watched The Office at all even though I find awkward humor extremely painful; that I kept watching 30 Rock through what I believe was a precipitous decline in the show’s quality; and that I checked out Parks and Recreation at all. There are very few nights where I’m actually going to sit down and devote several hours, in real-time, to television shows that aren’t the Patriots or the Red Sox. Making it easier for me to do it is a big selling point for me to tune into a network. I’ve said before that I would probably pay as much as I do for cable now for access to a couple of networks and shows if I could get them selectively, and whenever I wanted them. Scheduling changes like this make it easier for me to live with the old system.