media control: The spectacular achievements of propaganda; nobody's perfect; ascending peculiarity

[November 13th, 2002] media control: The spectacular achievements of propaganda
by Noam Chomsky
(Open Media/ Seven Stories Press, 2nd ed., 104 pages, $8.95)

The insurgent tone of this timely new edition of Noam Chomsky's Media Control is established early on: "Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state." He might be right, but if you are looking for a book that substantiates its claims with hard, quantitative evidence, you'd better look elsewhere--this slim work isn't so much a book as an anti-war pamphlet.

Rather than a careful examination of the media's role in the American war propaganda machine, Media Control comes off as an embittered manifesto, spewing out bits on how administrations in the past, from Wilson to Bush I, have manipulated the public into war with unlikely enemies. But even detractors must concede that Chomsky, at the very least, accurately predicted a "revival of the extraordinary international terrorism" that he contended future administrations would use to divert the public's attention from real domestic issues, such as poverty and unemployment.

New to this edition is the inclusion of Chomsky's speech "The Journalist from Mars," given earlier this year in New York City, where he lent a refreshingly dissident tenor to the chorus of patriotism. The 31 new pages are particularly relevant today as Bush II picks up where his father left off, once again calling a fear-ridden population to war. Media Control might sound like a rant, but its ideas are a welcome second opinion at a time when we should be questioning more than ever whether the War on Terror(TM) is really about terrorism at all. Carol Castro

nobody's perfect
by Anthony Lane
(Knopf, 752 pages, $35)

Since becoming resident film critic at The New Yorker in 1993, after years of reviewing literature and plays in his native England, Anthony Lane has made a worthy successor to legendary critic Pauline Kael--no easy task. With savage wit and keen intellect, Lane can cut a film to pieces like an Iron Chef slicing a salmon.

Sometimes his writing is blunt: "This movie is so insistently heartwarming," he says of Forrest Gump, "that it chilled me to the marrow." Other times Lane's prose seems far afield of most mortal film critics. Each sentence in a review for The Prince of Egypt, for example, is constructed to mirror that movie's absurd tagline, "The power is real. The story is forever. The time is now." Commenting on Charlie's Angels director McG, Lane calls it "the world's first motion picture to be made by a hamburger."

On the occasion of his upcoming 10th anniversary at the magazine, Lane's work has been collected into a volume that includes both film reviews and equally estimable writings on other subjects. Of the latter, don't miss his account of visiting Legoland near Copenhagen, or his hilarious survey of cookbooks. If there is a drawback to Lane's writing, it's that he is awfully reluctant to be as forthright when he likes something as when he dislikes it--but that's a common critic's sin. It's also surprising to note just how mainstream Lane's tastes sometimes are (The English Patient is virtually the only film he's ever called a masterpiece).

That said, you'd be hard-pressed to find a contemporary American film critic more deserving of a collection.
Brian Libby

ascending peculiarity
by Edward Gorey
(Harcourt Brace, 320 pages, $16)

Edward Gorey was described as "a man of noble Viking countenance," "a handsome man who looks like a cross between Ernest Hemingway and Santa Claus." He dressed in unusual garb--full-length fur coats to match his full-length white beard, gaggles of gold rings, heavy gold earrings and white tennis shoes. He was a man misunderstood, largely because of his work, a massive collection of illustrations and short stories dealing with the macabre, child death, sardonic humor and the inexorable irony of life--all in children's-book format.

Ascending Peculiarity unravels the complexities of this Harvard graduate to reveal a very humble, obliging, eclectic and intelligent man. Reluctant to refer to himself as an author, Gorey compiled the book's 21 interviews before his death in 2000. Each interviewer shares a fascination with the artist, the enigma he represents, the mere oddity of the man and his genius.

Ascending Peculiarity spans the last 25 years of Gorey's life, covering his obsession with Balanchine and the NYC Ballet (he attended every performance from 1955 to 1979) and his relationship with the cats who cluttered his drawing table while he worked. Other salient biographical material also emerges, such as how he taught himself to read at age 3.

Gorey fleshed himself out only so much in interviews; he remained, in subtle ways, intangible. Said Gorey: "Explaining something makes it go away, so to speak; what's important is left after you have explained everything else. Ideally, if anything were any good, it would be indescribable." Ascending Peculiarity presents a private man and explains everything around him. What's left is indescribably Gorey. Nick Obourn