How to Tell a Workaholic

A workaholic's the kind of person who can't tell whether he's had a busy week or not. I have no idea. On Monday, Kate and I went to see the movie "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle." It was very funny, and I particularly liked the main characters. After twenty years of white, frat boy protagonists (thanks, National Lampoon), having main characters from different backgrounds is great new territory.



Speaking of National Lampoon, on Tuesday Kate and I popped in a DVD of "Animal House," the 1978 ur-college comedy. In addition to being a stroll down Memory Lane (I remember seeing AH at a drive-in with my folks when I was nine), I had a couple of thoughts on why this movie is really a brilliant comedy:

1) It's multi-level: stupid-funny but also well-observed and satirical. As opposed to say, "Old School," AH actually addresses its time period (1962 in America) in a consistent, and satirically relevant way. There is a point to it, which was ignored by the media when it came out; the media preferred to talk about food fights and toga parties The story of the Deltas versus the Omegas is the story of the Sixties, one of those rare times where Delta-types had their day. This makes what John Landis said somewhere recently even more ironic. Landis, the film's director, said that people who are clearly Omegas--like the Bush family, for example--tell him, "In college, me and my buddies were totally Deltas!" And that, my friends, is what makes satirists kill themselves.

2) Its attempt at a central story--the love affair between Boon and Katie--adds depth to the movie without slowing it down. You can't say the same thing about Caddyshack, for example; and the romance in Stripes is completely at odds with the spirit of the movie.

3) It's surprisingly old-fashioned; I was surprised at how much physical comedy there is in the movie, which works. Belushi was a talented physical comedian, when he was pushed. (Most of his career, he was allowed to coast on his persona, but at the time of AH, Belushi was still busting his ass to become famous.)



Finally, on Thursday Jon came over to pick up the manuscript of my college novel, and we watched "JFK," which he had never seen. What a great piece of filmmaking; I think that's precisely why Oliver Stone got torn a new one when the movie first came out. JFK works on such a visceral level that the Lone Nut theory looks like the foolishness it has always been--and the Warren Commission defenders take this personally. If Stone is an irresponsible polemicist, what does that make people like Scotty Reston and Anthony Lewis, columnists for the Times ca. 1963, who convicted Oswald before any investigation had been done? Or Tom Wicker, who still believes that the press got it right? JFK made the mainstream media mad because it showed that, when the chips are down, they suck at their jobs. Not only did they miss the biggest story of the century, they actively worked on the side of NOT investigating it properly, making it an open question for all time. Does this sound like pre-Iraq coverage to anybody else?



But my main thought on watching the movie was this: whoever pulled the trigger(s), JFK's murder came out of a time of paranoia, secrecy, unbridled military power, and governmental corruption on a grand scale. In other words, a time much like today. Malcolm X was excoriated for calling JFK's murder a case of "chickens coming home to roost," but after what happened in the rest of the Sixties, can we really say that he was wrong?