I saw “Shattered Glass” last night in Manhattan. I went with one TNR alum and bumped into another. The beginnings of the movie were so freakish I kept squirming in my seat. It’s extremely, extremely odd to see your own tiny part of the world – complete with all the right names, all the right locations, all the specific contours of human character you know and recall, even magazine covers you commissioned and designed – splayed out on a movie screen. Of course, I was lucky enough to miss all the events described. But still … My basic verdict is that it’s a very effective movie. It’s most effective because it forces someone like me to realize that Steve was and probably still is a sociopath. I know it’s strange for me to say, but I was so fond of him, so grateful to him for the year he spent as my personal assistant (before the drama starts in the movie), so charmed by him that even after the events took place, I couldn’t believe he was that irresponsible. His genius was far deeper than Hayden Chistensen manages to convey (but he does a great job, nonetheless). I still don’t have a clue why Steve did it; he probably doesn’t either. The smartest move in the movie is to avoid that subject. My main criticism? The Mike Kelly character is unrecognizable as Mike Kelly. Hank Azaria gives a good performance, but it’s already been put through the sieve of Mike’s tragic death, and so the character seems almost holy. Whatever he was, Mike wasn’t holy. Marty would also never call Chuck at home and introduce himself as “Hi, it’s Marty Per-ETZ.” He’d pronounce his last name right or just say “Marty.” Actually, he wouldn’t introduce himself at all. He’d just launch into whatever it was he wanted to say. But these are quibbles. What’s astonishing is how much the movie got dead right (although it minimizes Chuck’s ambition). It also elevated the story into a tale of ambition and deceit that gives perspective to a lot of Washington lives and careers. It was chastening, because it was so close to the bone. And remarkably, it didn’t glamorize Steve. It made him seem like the self-centered traitor he was. I got mad at him all over again.
“HIPOCRISY”: It’s the liberal’s curse, argues Julie Burchill in the Guardian:
It seems to me that far too many liberals believe that once you’ve ticked the Brotherhood Of Man box on your spiritual census, this gives you the right to be as big a bastard as you choose to be in your private life. The sexual duplicity of “enlightened” men is legend; be it the liberal lawyer Michael Mansfield with his wife and mistress installed in the same hotel or the Tory-hypocrisy-slaying Angus Deayton snorting cocaine off the bodies of hookers in seven-star bunk-ups when his partner was pregnant with their child. And the Alpha Male role model of these awful males is, of course, good ol’ Bill Clinton, sticking cigars up the help between bleating on about human decency.
It is partly my suspicion that if you scratch a member of the Brotherhood Of Man, you’re likely to find a woman-hater, which makes me suspicious of the current alliance between socialism and extreme Islam. Being anti-racist is admirable, but if one is not equally anti-sexist, then it makes a nonsense of the argument, and leaves one woefully wide open to accusations of hipocrisy of the silliest, sleaziest kind.
Yes – the alliance between socialism and extreme Islam. Things are getting weirder and weirder.
The Dish 