THE 9/11 FILES. After all the bluster and hype about Over There, it's time to focus on what really is the best series on television, a show that could easily be named Over Here. Denis Leary's Rescue Me is probably the finest work yet produced for the small screen. The credit belongs to Leary because he writes, produces, and stars in the show and does all three jobs with brilliance and subtlety. The view he gives us of New York firefighters is comical, pitiless, scathing, and yet -- to use a word much abused in recent times -- realistic. In the landscape of Leary's creation, firefighters are dumb as rocks, juvenile in their relations with women, borderline sociopathic in their personal lives, and ridiculous when they attempt to explain their stupid behaviors to civilians. They are also the men who charge into burning buildings to save anyone and everyone inside. Despite a long string of attempts by Martin Scorsese and HBO, the holy grail of a riveting story based on asshole characters had seemed unattainable to me.  Somehow, Leary seems to achieve this impossible goal with ease. He's not a stand-up comic who does other things. He's a master.

Tommy Gavin, the character Leary plays in Rescue Me, is selfish, choleric, violent, abusive to women, friends, and family, almost incapable of self control in any setting, and -- on top of this, not because of this -- irretrievably damaged by the events of 9/ll, in which he lost firefighter family and friends in large numbers. I didn't see the first season, but it hardly matters. What he succeeds in showing us is that there are men for whom every minute not spent in the life-and-death situations they were born to face is simply killing time, including marriage, fatherhood, and everything else the rest of us consider all of life.

The miracle of Rescue Me is that Leary's writing and acting seduce us into accepting the appalling personal frailties of firefighters and even understanding them. He doesn't use music to gloss over the rough spots or to highlight the heroism. He uses humor, an intuitive razorlike skill with dialogue and delivery, and patience -- the willingness to let the pathos or absurdity of any situation make itself felt over time rather than under trick lighting or ham-handed theatrics. To find a counterpart to the writing in these scripts, one must look all the way back to Evelyn Waugh, who possessed the sublime nastiness to inform us of the death of Lord Tangent (son of Lady Circumference) in a dependent clause dozens of pages after the glancing shot of a starter's pistol dealt him a mortal blow. That's the esthetic at work here. Big events can be trivial, and trivial events enormous. Gavin's jilted girlfriend confronts him in front of the firehouse and threatens to scream in order to embarrass him. He tells her to go ahead. She lets loose like the heroine of a horror movie and -- eventually -- firefighters come outside, greet her merrily, and disappear inside. None of them ask Tommy for an explanation afterwards. Emotional fireworks are routine and unimportant here. But a firefighter who overhears his son having gay sex is stunned into speechless fury -- not by the sex, but by the discovery that his son is not, as he had been promised, the "man" of the couple. In Rescue Me, all depends on the perspective of the lunkhead characters, who talk with one another in stark but stupid terms about even the most intimate and embarrassing incidents in their lives.

A mentally challenged firefighter develops a morbid fear that his penis is somehow deadly after two successive girlfriends die. His supervisor in counseling him begins by remarking that the firefighter has a small sliver of brain matter floating around somewhere in his skull and hopes the observation doesn't give offense. "No offense taken," responds the young man, without the least change of expression. He is still waiting for advice, which comes quickly. The problem, the supervisor tells him, is his dating pool, which should be drained dry, filled in, and paved over with asphalt.

"Then there's nothing the matter with my cock?"

"No. Get back out there."

The next step is absolutely typical of Rescue Me, which includes in its regular cast a hallucinated Jesus who haunts Leary's character but is refreshingly tongue-tied about the meaning of life's constant tragedies. Jesus torments Leary for a buffoonish performance at an AA meeting, but there's nobody on hand to chastise the dumb firefighter when he accompanies a Vicodin-addicted colleague to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting and discovers that it's an "ocean of pussy," a panoply of ex-models, hookers, and party girls, all vulnerable to the charms of a firefighter willing to make up stories about a crack-addicted past. Which he immediately proceeds to do.

In fact, every single kind of bad and unfair treatment of women is on constant display in Rescue Me, and the firefighters' understanding of this unending quest in their lives never rises above the level of eighth grade boys. But then Tommy Gavin gives mouth to mouth to a little boy who has stopped breathing after receiving third degree burns to his face, and he registers no emotion when another firefighter tells him the boy's lips are still glued to his own. The show then resists the temptation to play for sympathy when Gavin goes to the hospital to sit by the critically burned boy's bed. Instead, when the mother leaves for a moment, Jesus appears in her chair, ducks the question about what such tragedies mean, and offers to "put in a word" for the boy's life if Gavin will reconsider his dismissal of God.

In response to the proposition, Gavin says, "I want full use of the hands."

Nothing is sacred in Rescue Me. Not even the PC standards of our day. A supervisor berates a female probationer who disregarded orders at a fire by calling her a "stupid twat." Predictably, she threatens legal action when he refuses to apologize.  Then she is made to realize that namecalling is a part of the life of a firefighter, and the offender makes everyone pay for his crime by refusing to lie about what he said. All the firefighters, including the "victimized" woman, are sentenced to sensitivity training.

That's how the show strikes me overall -- as a kind of sensitivity training about a kind of man who has become unfashionable and even despised, despite the fact that we need and depend upon him. He's rude, crude, often drunk, frequently obtuse, coarse in even the most rudimentary social occasions, but when the terrible thing happens, he's the one who will disregard the danger and battle his way into further danger to pull our sorry asses out of the fire.

I'm getting the lesson because it's being delivered with such flawless timing and unflinching honesty. I urge all of you to enroll for the rest of the course, no matter how long it lasts.

HOLLYWOOD. Just moments after the latest Air America scandal, Steven Botchco Productions is beginning production of the film epic liberals have been waiting for. At last, the true story of heroic resistance against the evil fascists who rule America is being told with the full power of Hollywood stars and special effects. As principled as the West Wing, as exciting as Con Air, and as up-to-the minute as Over There, Air America the Serial will thrill you and amaze you. The list of stars is as long as your arm -- Nicholas Cage, George Clooney, Al Franken, Janeane Garofalo, Randi Rhodes, Michael Moore, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Charlton Heston, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, and many many more.

But the best news of all is that InstaPunk readers won't even have to wait for the TV debut. We have the storyboards (just as we did with Valerie Flame, DC Undercover), and we're publishing the first episode HERE today.

Enjoy. And stay tuned.

UPDATE. Mr. Austin Bay has new information about Air America's, er, financing problems. You can catch up on that here.

UPDATE 8-5-05. Besides starring in our dramatic version of the story, Michelle Malkin is taking the lead in pursuing the facts of Air America's funding shenanigans.

 

Tuesday, August 02, 2005

SOLDIERS. There's a new TV show on the FX Channel. It's called Over There and it purports to show us what it's really like for our service men and women in Iraq. The producer is Steven Bochco, father of Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue, among other television projects. Given the famous Hollywood antipathy to the Iraq War and to the Bush administration's policies in general, we might be excused for wondering just how Bochco would choose to tilt our perspective on the military. Like many, I watched the pilot episode and -- not having been in Iraq -- experienced a vague sense that we were being invited to see the conflict as an urban Vietnam and the soldiers fighting it as somewhat helpless victims of their own leadership.

I had expected to come away with a sour taste in my mouth and I did. That's not much of a basis for doing a review. So, I was glad to see that a milblogger had analyzed the show from a professional viewpoint at some depth. He cited at least one plus, the uniforms, "which, right down to the black socks used to cover goggles, were spot on. "

He didn't like much else, though:


The reason it's a valuable review to read in full is that he is extremely specific about the differences between the show and reality. He assesses the scenario, the characterizations of soldiers and officers, and then systematically enumerates the errors in tactics. I'll offer one representative excerpt:


And so on. Over There is supposed to help educate us about the real war. Maybe it can help do that if we take the opportunity to study critiques like this one in depth.

I have nothing more to say, except that I urge you all to read the whole entry at Faces From the Front, and pass it on to everyone who expresses any interest whatsoever in Over There. It's the least we can do.

Monday, August 01, 2005

DON'T BREAK THE CHAIN. Just over a week ago I wrote a little essay about evolution that produced the results I prognosticated.


Subsequent comments suggest that I am at least scientist enough to make accurate predictions about the responses of the orthodoxy. Then I discovered that InstaPunk was being scrutinized by a high priest of science so archetypal that he will hereinafter be designated Baby Dawk for his intellectual and personality resemblance to the Wild Boor of Evolution, Richard Dawkins. Of course, Baby Dawk is Icelandic rather than English, but he certainly has the sly sneering hauteur down to a tee. Here's what he writes about his relationship with students:


He does all this for Penn State, home of the Nittany Lions, Cuntfest, and five national titles as the number one party school east of the Mississippi.

What put him on my trail was a piece I did months ago about how much fun it would be to reform American colleges and universities with M1 tanks. Baby Dawk was not amused:


With Penn State issuing his paychecks, I could certainly understand why he's terrified of Womens Studies professors. But he wasn't ready to stop there. He had also glanced at my current post for ten seconds or so and therefore understood it and me in pitiless detail:


It would do no good to point out, I'm sure, that he drew his inference from a piece that contained the sentence, "I'll clarify the point I'm making by explaining that I believe the Creationists are dead wrong in their whole approach to the problem, and I believe the evolutionists are substantially wrong about process." Which makes me a creationist. I see. Such reductionism applied to a piece whose principal purpose was to suggest that there might be some worthwhile middle ground between the two polarities of the question was a perfect demonstration of the irrational tunnel vision of both creationists and evolutionary biologists.

So I owe Baby Dawk a huge thank you. Every snide superior wisecrack is another underscore of my point that we are dealing with two rigid orthodoxies here -- both committed less to the truth than to, say, legbreaking.

Today, I dared to write about another subject I don't have a PhD. in  (such nerve, don't you know, from one of the unwashed. It must rankle awfully). That one's here in case you somehow missed it. I had a hunch that it might rub Baby Dawk the wrong way and it did. Here's his take:



The interesting thing about his little potshot is that if he teaches astrophysics (as he seems to) and "doesn't get the jump from Deep Impact to cosmology," he really is part of the problem. I'm not pretending to be a scientist, but he is, and it's his job to know even the wildest speculations in his field. His students, after all, are amateurs and may actually possess enough curiosity to investigate areas of thought he regards as the fringe. When I look at political affairs, I certainly don't pretend that the crazy left doesn't exist and doesn't have a perspective (Sorry, B.D. if I just chunked another of your sacred cows, but, yeah, Papa Dawk qualifies there too).

The other alternative -- there's always more than one, don't you know -- is that he's sandbagging, that he knows damn well what the link is between Deep Impact and the possible result that comets are made of rock rather than ice. Which would mean, of course, that just as with evolution, he's so superior to everyone and everything that he can't bring himself to entertain a different thought for a nanosecond. That's a real intellectual for you.

So I owe him yet another thank you for proving that some stereotypes really are dead accurate and unintentionally amusing to all the punks of the world who don't give a rat's ass what the Swarthmorons think. If they do.

UPDATE 8-3-05. Baby Dawk didn't like me using his picture without linking to the picture-page on his blog. Elsewhere this can be considered sucking up other people's bandwidth. This makes me a coward apparently.. (I'd love to have a dime for every graphic that's been swiped from my site by "friendly" blogs.) Anyway. I hate to distress the toffs. We now have a new graphic, created by me, which makes it a work of art. I think he'll like it. They're both exceptionally beautiful gents. Something about those mischievous eyes and rugged togs, don't you know? Swarthmorons.PS.1-39.

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