I don’t really have to convince you that Easy Rider is a reactionary picture, do I? The only characters depicted as unqualifiably virtuous are the homesteading family, living on their own acreage, raising their own food, teaching their young. If they’re not Treichlers then Dennis Hopper is playing Ron Ziegler. The only American Dream worth the snores is based in liberty and a community- (or family-) oriented independence, which the filmmakers associated with the country’s founders. Dennis Hopper (an admittedly unorthodox Kansas Republican) and Peter Fonda (a gun-loving libertarian) did not make a movie glorifying tripping hippies and condemning the southern gun culture; rather, as exasperated Fonda explained, “My movie is about the lack of freedom. My heroes are not right, they’re wrong. … Liberty’s become a whore, and we’re all taking the easy ride.”

“The best radicals,” Bill argues, “are reactionaries at heart. They despise the official order, be it state capitalism, militarism, communism, or what have you, but wish not merely to remove the malignancy but to replace it with an organic system, rooted in human nature and human affection. However angry, theirs — ours — is a politics of love.” There are shades of Rousseau in that, but so what? Even Irving Babbitt allowed a little room for something like romanticism, especially in an age of ideological frigidity.

This is a film that will appeal to no one, as its dismal box office is proving. You don’t need a graduate degree in “X-Files” lore to get the plot, but if you didn’t watch a decade’s worth of the television show, you’ll spent your 104 minutes staring at the screen wondering why you should care about any of these talky, self-important characters — who seem to have very little character and a whole lot of back story. If, like me, you have seen most or all the of television show, you’ll wonder what makes this a sequel to the “X-Files” rather than, say, a poor knock-off of “Seven” circa 1996. There is not an ounce of suspense in the film, never once anything to quicken the pulse or raise a fear for any of the protagonists. Nor, unlike the classic TV series, is there ever any interest in whatever it is the villains are up to. None of the themes that made the series intelligent are present. (No, all the crosses and nuns and child-hating priests don’t count: the series usually handled agent Dana Scully’s Catholicism with a bit of sympathy and tact. What’s on offer in the theaters is a parody.)

A common complaint about the show was that it carried on too long, past the point of diminishing returns. I don’t really agree with that — the later seasons might not have been as good as, say, the second, but they were still better than almost anything else on the air (then or now), and the final episode, which effectively parodied the War on Terror while still remaining true to the series, was superb. To follow it up with this cinematic atrocity is a crime.

Is there nothing to be said for “X-Files: I Want To Believe”? Well, it has Billy Connolly in it, and I found myself wishing Agent Fox Mulder would ditch Dana Scully and investigate the spacemen and monsters with Amanda Peet’s Agent Dakota Whitney instead. Come of think of it, if Carter wanted to do something really daring and transgressive, he’d dump Mulder and Scully both and start a new series with Peet and Connolly. At least then even if the results were dire, it wouldn’t tarnish the memory of the “X-Files.”

Peter Bradshaw, writing in the Guardian, calls “Iron Man’s” opening scene, “an exhilarating, even brilliant wish-fulfilment fantasy dramatising America’s yearning for a virile exit strategy.” Slate’s Dana Stevens thinks “Iron Man” “may be the first movie about the conflict in the Middle East and Afghanistan to become a box-office blockbuster. But if it does, it won’t be because of its Afghan bad guys or somewhat incoherent musings on the immorality of the military-industrial complex.” We’ll have to wait for the inevitable sequels to see just how incoherent. At the end of the film, Stark is on good terms with a government agency, SHIELD, which furnishes him with a secret identity (though there’s a twist to that in the movie’s last line). At one point a SHIELD agent almost literally says, “We’re from the government and we’re here to help.” We’ll see whether or not that’s really the case.

The movie is remarkably faithful to the comic books I read by the long-box full in the 1980s. The geekgasm moment of the flick for me was recognizing Stark’s cliff-side Malibu mansion — they’ve actually used for the film the same design that appeared in the comics twenty years ago. This is obscure stuff: Stark’s California mansion is not exactly as iconic as the Batcave or the Fortress of Solitude. But it was a pretty cool design all the same, so I’m happy to see the film make use of it. (I was similarly impressed that the Ian Curtis biopic that came out last year, “Control,” got Curtis’s bookshelf in the opening scene of that movie exactly right. Curtis cultists know what the man read — though I did notice a copy of Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song amidst the Ballard and Burroughs. I hadn’t known Curtis was a Mailer reader.) A recurring theme from the comics back in the 1980s was the government trying to gets its hands on Stark’s Iron Man technology and Stark doing whatever he had to do to keep them from having it — including sinking all his spare suits of armor to the bottom of the ocean, then detonating them when even that didn’t stop SHIELD from going after them. Though I hear the Stark of the comic books has a cozier relationship with the agency these days.

The film has been getting generally positive reviews from critics embarrassed to admit how much they liked a comic-book movie. To salvage their integrity, they mostly praise leading man Robert Downey Jr. (who indeed is good) and disparage the special effects. The latter are actually rather impressive as well, or so I thought: grittier and more textural than expected, perhaps because they’re not primarily CGI. Gwyneth Paltrow’s as Stark’s secretary Pepper Potts — I wish they’d used her less comic-book-y proper name, Virginia, rather than “Pepper” — and Jeff Bridges as a halfway-between-avuncular-and-psychotic Obadiah Stane (the film’s villain) are well-suited to their roles. Terrence Howard didn’t seem tough enough as Stark’s military liaison James Rhodes (Stark’s pilot, and substitute Iron Man, in the comics), but he’s set up to have more presence in a sequel.

I liked the movie quite a bit — the smartest but also the most faithful comic-book adaptation that I’ve seen. And that it happens to be an adaptation of the super-hero who made me a Marvel Zombie back in the day is all the better. I might write more about it later.

Addendum: The Weekly Standard likes the movie too, but don’t let that put you off. “Few scenes in recent memory give off the visceral glee of Stark, as Iron Man, ripping through the terrorist forces like tissue paper,” Standard assistant editor Sonny Bunch enthuses. Well, it is a rousing scene — but then, it represents the comic-book ideal of heroic individual combat with absolutely no civilian casualties. Anyway, Bunch has a good take on the film’s ideological ambiguity:

This is not a “conservative” movie, per se, but it is the film equivalent of a Rorschach test. If you go into Iron Man seeking right-wing imagery, you’ll find it: Tony Stark is a patriot, pro-military, and likes unilateral intervention. If you go into Iron Man looking for left-wing imagery, you’ll find that, too: The true villain here is Stane, representing an out-of-control military-industrial complex. Still, it’s refreshing to go to the multiplex and find a universe where terrorists are despicable and Americans are heroic.

“Director Jon Favreau goes to great lengths to portray [the terrorists IM fights in Afghanistan] as an odd international band,” Bunch writes, “one of the terrorists speaks Hungarian, for example–but they’re a clear stand-in for al Qaeda and the Taliban.” Yes and no: they’re stand-ins for the Vietnamese Communists who capture Stark in the comic-book origin, which is well adapted in the film, right down to the fat Afghan warlord substituting for Wong-Chu. But their multinational character seems to refer to something else: the terrorists are fleeting named as “The Ten Rings,” which alludes to Iron Man’s comic-book archenemy, the Mandarin. I wouldn’t be surprised to find in future installments of the film franchise that there’s a non-Arab enemy behind the group.

(Googling around a bit, I see that Faran Tahir, the actor who plays Raza, the leader of the multinational terrorists, addresses this: “The way this is set up is that Raza is the only connection to the Mandarin that you have in the movie. Hopefully there will be more Iron Man movies and this film will be the groundwork for those. In this Iron Man movie, Mandarin is a faceless identity, we don’t know who he is or where he is. Raza is his right hand man. Is he the conduit for Iron Man to find Mandarin and have a show down? Does Raza become the Mandarin? We don’t know. They needed an element to tie everything to a larger story of Iron Man versus the Mandarin, yet they didn’t want to give it all up in the first movie and have a massive showdown right now. They needed to stretch this into a trilogy — hopefully.”)

I think I’ve described Hess in the past as a “crunchy libertarian.” You’ll see why in the documentary:

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-574553336386396499&hl=en]

For good measure, here’s a link to Hess’s best-known essay, “The Death of Politics.”

Was 2006 as dismal a year at the movies as I think it was?  Things picked up a bit toward the end of the year with “The Departed” and “The Good Shepherd,” but over all there wasn’t much I wanted to plunk down $10 for.

In describing its portrait of a civilization in decline, Gibson said, “The precursors to a civilization that’s going under are the same, time and time again,” drawing parallels between the Mayan civilization on the brink of collapse and America’s present situation. “What’s human sacrifice,” he asked, “if not sending guys off to Iraq for no reason?”

Reading:

Look Homeward, America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchists. The latest from Bill Kauffman. We've lined up a very apt reviewer for TAC, and I'll be taking part in another project involving the book in a few weeks. But right now I'm reading Kauffman's tributes to Dorothy Day, Gene McCarthy, and other decentralist heroes just for the pleasure of it. (An excerpt from the book runs in the new TAC, by the way, which should find its way to bookstores and subscribers' mailboxes in a week or so.)

Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism. A short new collection of essays from the University of Chicago by a Straussian writing about Strauss. In light of recent controversies, perhaps I ought to review it.

Listening:

"Rise & Shine" and "Sick & Tired," by the Cardigans, a band I'd have dismissed for their irritatingly catchy one hit from a decade ago except, that I'd recently heard their later single "Erase/Rewind" and quite liked it. Better yet are the two tracks I bought from iTunes yesterday from their first album, Emmerdale. I should have checked out a few selections from the band's back catalog earlier, since I've always liked their producer Tore Johansson's work on St. Etienne's Good Humor. "Rise & Shine" and "Sick & Tired" are prime jangle-pop specimens — the latter somewhat the better for having stronger lyrics and an undercurrent of melancholy.

Watching:

I've never seen "Easy Rider," but I think I'll have to now that I've read what Bill Kauffman has to say about it –

… the best radicals are reactionaries at heart. They despise the official order, be it state capitalism, militarism, communism, or what have you, but wish not merely to remove the malignancy but to replace it with an organic system, rooted in human nature and human affection…. They are not mere rebels without a cause. Instead, they value the importance of "doin' your own thing in your own time," as those two deeply American filimmakers Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda (our Kansas-Nebraska Act-ors) said in their druggy paean to the pioneer virtues, Easy Rider.

I don't really have to convince you that Easy Rider is a reactionary picture, do I? The only characters depicted as unqualifiably virtuous are the homesteading faimly, living on their own acreage…. The hippies and the small-town southerners gathered in the diner; the small farmers and shaggy communards: they were on the same side. The side of liberty, of locally based community, of independence from from the war machine, the welfare state, the breaucratic prison whose wardens were McNamara, Rockefeller, Bundy…