Ludicrous Headline of the Week - "Morgan Fairchild: Badass Foreign Policy Wonk"

I read with interest and amusement The Daily Beast's piece earlier this week titled, "Morgan Fairchild: Badass Foreign Policy Wonk."  (To borrow a phrase from the author of the piece, Asawin Suebsaeng, "I sh-t you not."  That is indeed its title and thesis.)  I have acknowledged in the past my general disdain of Fairchild's efforts to paint herself as an intellectual and political activist.  Since Fairchild has never really projected warmth or humanity, onscreen or off, I have always questioned her sincerity on such matters.  She's barely sincere or believable in her recent TV commercials trying to hawk pre-paid burial plans, so it's even less credible when she tries to sell herself as an authority on foreign policy.  It strikes me as an effort to improve her public image because she knows she'll never be respected in her own, proper field of acting.  Even though the piece makes a case for reevaluating Fairchild as some sort of foreign policy expert, it never does enough to establish what exactly are Fairchild's credentials to be considered as such.

While I allow that Fairchild appears to have enough knowledge to have impressed the people quoted in the piece, who share their positive impressions of Fairchild, I am still curious to know what exactly are her qualifications to be called a "Badass Foreign Policy Wonk."  Even though she has testified before Congress and participated in panel discussions with esteemed scholars and intellectuals, all of which she has lovingly documented on her own official website, that sort of activity seems to be de rigueur with being a celebrity these days.  What I want to know is, what degrees (Associates, Bachelors, Masters or Ph.D.?) does she have?  If she has any degrees, what subjects are they for?  What scholarly pieces has she written?  What organized research studies has she spearheaded?  What think tanks and foreign policy institutions is she formally affiliated with in an official capacity?

Fairchild mentions having taken anthropology classes at UCLA in the early 1980s, during the time she was filming the night time soap "Flamingo Road," but she never discloses if she earned a degree for her studies, or whether the classes were taken for a degree program, or for UCLA Extension (where most classes allow for open enrollment so that virtually anyone can attend as long as they pay the requisite fee).  The Daily Beast piece also overstates her celebrity credentials by touting her roles in the original CBS "Dallas" (where she guest starred in one episode in 1978), and "Mork and Mindy" (where she appeared in only three episodes in 1978-79).  It's like referring to a temporary employee or consultant as if they were an executive of an organization.

To establish her credibility, the author mentions her tour of war-torn Bosnia in the mid-1990s while she was there making a film.  However, she wasn't in Bosnia, nor taken on a tour of the region, because she was working in an official capacity with any government or non-profit organizations.  Her celebrity status as an actress starring on location in a film, not any official title or function, was what gave her access to scouting the area.  While her curiosity appears to be genuine, what did Fairchild do with the knowledge she purportedly gained from this experience?  Did she publish pieces in scholarly journals analyzing the situation, or use her celebrity status to help bring attention and perspective to the destruction and human suffering she was witness to?  Did she ever return to Bosnia, to continue her study and understanding of the situation there, or was that her only trip to that region?

The piece also mentions that Fairchild visited East Germany in the late 1980s before the Berlin Wall fell, and says the experience was "very scary" but I wonder if this trip occurred while she was in West Germany making the film "Midnight Cop" (1988)?  Moreover, she mentions visiting Israel and Palestine around 1986 (most likely during the making of Cannon Films' low-budget "Sleeping Beauty," which was shot in Israel in May 1986 and briefly released in 1987) and makes the pat comment, "It was interesting to me to watch the Palestinian movement with Arafat, because he didn't seem able to govern...He could be a good terrorist leader...but he couldn't govern."  Aside from these brief blips, Fairchild offers little in the way of substantive insight and analysis as to what she witnessed during these excursions.  What did she base her opinion on Arafat's governing abilities upon?  (And if her trips to East Germany, as well as Israel and Palestine, occurred because she happened to be on location making a movie, it affirms my point that her status as an actress and celebrity, and not any so-called foreign policy expertise, are her true calling cards.)  If she is going to lay the foundation for her street credentials on these experiences, she has to give us more than that.

The Daily Beast piece links to a 1995 Spy Magazine article that covers the making of the movie Fairchild was working on in Bosnia.  The author of the Spy piece glowingly describes Fairchild's "admittedly impressive grasp of the conflict," but the piece contains little in the way of substantive quotes from Fairchild to underscore this assertion.  Instead, the reader is inundated with nearly a dozen photos of Fairchild posed fetchingly with uniformed military personnel, as well as standing in front of the ruins of bombed structures and communities.  In one photo, Fairchild appears to be solemnly praying while attending a Croatian funeral.  Nevertheless, in these photos, Fairchild rarely appears to be substantively interacting with the people from the region she has come to observe.  She seems totally disconnected with what is happening around her, so that she comes across as little more than a tourist, or a fashion model on a photo shoot, safely ensconced in her ivory tower.  Her hair and makeup and attire in these photos are as glamorous and attractively manipulated as ever.  Fairchild appears completely conscious of the camera in all of these photos, and makes herself the center of attention, not the people nor the situation swirling around her.

In contrast, take a quick Google search of Mia Farrow from her extensive work as a humanitarian activist and UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador in Africa.  Farrow appears totally unaware of her own looks and physical appearance (often wearing her hair in pigtails, with no makeup, wearing jeans and T-shirts) as she joyfully interacts with the people and children she is there to work with and help.  The photos of Farrow seem natural and spontaneous, with Farrow seemingly unaware of the lens focused on her, in contrast to the photos of Fairchild in Bosnia.  Mia Farrow is clearly taking a hands-on approach to try and bring attention to the suffering she is actively working to combat, while Morgan Fairchild appears to be a detached observer, overly impressed with having access to situations that the normal, average, every-day individual who isn't a celebrity would never be able to experience.  I believe it when Farrow is engaged in this work in an effort to try to help improve the situation of people around the world with little in the way of power or influence, especially since she has put her money where her mouth is and adopted children from around the world and devoted her life to giving them a good home (the situation involving her adopted daughter Soon-Yi not withstanding).  Even though Morgan Fairchild claims to The Daily Beast that "I think it's important that people know what's going on in the rest of the world, and not become isolationist," she appears to be dabbling in activism and foreign policy as part of an elaborate publicity campaign to enhance her public image as a celebrity.

As I've said before, Fairchild sounds like a shallow, gushing starlet--demonstrating absolutely no insight or humility whatsoever--anytime she discusses her trip to Bosnia.  As she told the Washington Post in 2005, Fairchild recalls how she "got to go into . . . Serb-held territory, and stuff like that, which is always kind of fun...And so one day I said, 'You know, if you're going anywhere that I would be allowed to go, a refugee camp or anything like that, I would love to go.' And (the American ambassador) was very sweet and called up and said, 'Well, you know, I'm going over into this no-man's land today, there's a big meeting of generals and stuff, and we can go to a refugee camp, and I can show you a couple of cities.'...And this Polish U.N. guy comes over, and he speaks English -- 'Oh, Morgan Fairchild, we have your series in our country -- what are you doing here?' And all these press people, because it was a meeting of generals -- 'Morgan, what are you doing here?'...a lot of the other actors, when we're in Zagreb, you know, they'll be at the casinos every night, and I'm hanging out with the war correspondents to find out what's really going on. So you may not have seen the movie. I had a good time making the movie because I learned a lot."  Anyone who can use terms such as "fun" and "good time" in the face of human suffering while describing her experiences visiting refugee camps in Bosnia should not be validated the way The Daily Beast has attempted to do.

It's one thing to be characterized as an "activist" advocating for a cause and expressing one's opinions (which is certainly within her right), it's another to build a case that someone is a foreign policy expert or "wonk" on the basis of being well-read and continually Tweeting articles covering a wide range of issues.  Anyone can Tweet articles that interest them.  The Twitter feeds mentioned in the Daily Beast article simply demonstrates Fairchild's purportedly wide range of interests, but offers very little in terms of original thought or insight.  As I've said before on this blog, I always feel that Fairchild has so many "interests," she doesn't have time to be genuinely sincere or serious about anything.  I look at her Tweets and I go, "So what?"  Social media is a great tool to work with, but it has to be accompanied with a sound strategy for it to be of any real substance.  Throughout the Daily Beast piece, Fairchild discusses the issues she is interested in, but the impression you are left with has little to do with the subjects themselves, than with the novelty that Fairchild appears to be interested in them.  There are a lot of knowledgeable, deserving, unheralded people in Washington, DC who have spent their education and careers devoted to studying foreign policy in a full time capacity, people who are much more accomplished in this field than Fairchild could ever hope to be.  However, the chances of a long Daily Beast profile ever being written about them is probably slim unless they also happen to be glamorous blonde starlets.

I think the reason why the Daily Beast writer who penned this piece, as well as the various people he quotes (such as David Corn of Mother Jones, Mark Hosenball of Newsweek and Ambassadors Peter Galbraith, who allowed her to tour Bosnia, and Samantha Power, who wrote the Spy Magazine piece) are impressed with Fairchild is because they are bowled over at the novelty of an actress who appears to be intelligent and well-read.  The quotes attributed to each of them, and how they are blown away by Fairchild's knowledge, comes across as condescending to actresses in general, and Fairchild in particular.  There are a lot of actresses who are indeed intelligent, well-educated people capable of doing more than playing characters other than themselves.  However, many of them do not try to actively paint themselves as someone who is indispensable in the field of foreign policy.  I'd be a lot more impressed with Fairchild if she stopped being a dabbler in these areas and really put her money where her mouth is and gave up her show business life to completely devote herself to the subject areas she claims to have a passion for.  But she hasn't, probably because she'd lose whatever so-called "clout" she has.

In my opinion, Fairchild wants to have it both ways--she wants to continue her glamorous acting career, while at the same time hob nob with the DC intelligentsia.  Fairchild is particularly laughable about her motives when she expresses false humility and says "I don't like to throw names around" at being asked what elected officials in Washington she has associated with.  She doesn't have to.  She already dropped the names of Dianne Feinstein, as well as Al Gore and Alan Cranston, with the Daily Beast, and her own official website shamelessly posts photos of her with political and news figures in a thinly-veiled attempt to have their esteem and luster rub off on her.  Morgan Fairchild hasn't put her money where her mouth is and given up her acting career like other actresses who have found a higher calling, such as Dolores Hart (who became a nun); Constance McCashin (who became a psychologist); Shelley Hack (who worked as a media consultant in pre- and post-conflict countries and produced the first ever televised presidential debates in Bosnia-Herzegovina, as well as worked as a registration and polling station supervisor in that country--she did more than just tour Bosnia like Fairchild did); Chris Noel (who runs a shelter for homeless American veterans of the Vietnam, Gulf, Iraq & Afghanistan Wars); Nancy Allen (who is now the Executive Director of weSPARK Cancer Support Center, a non-profit organization in Southern California dedicated to providing free-of-charge assistance and resources to cancer patients and their families); and Fairchild's former "Flamingo Road" colleague, Cristina Raines, (who is now a registered nurse caring for dialysis patients), to name a few.  They walk the walk, while Morgan Fairchild continues to talk the talk.

I think the Daily Beast piece is representative of the worst aspects of our celebrity obsessed culture, and reflects the privilege and entitlement of starlets like Morgan Fairchild, rather than a genuine demonstration of a unique and substantial human being.  The quotes from the people testifying on her behalf only serve to prove that even intelligent men and women can become dazzled in the presence of a glamorous, blonde starlet.  I'm the last person in the world to pooh-pooh the importance of actors, stars, and celebrities in our culture.  They provide a certain escape and distraction from the mundane aspects of our daily lives that cannot be underestimated.  I also acknowledge how a celebrity activist can bring attention to an issue that needs to be addressed, such as how Elizabeth Taylor's commendable activism helped raise money--and bring attention and understanding--to sufferers of AIDS and the efforts to fight the disease.  However, in discussing her AIDS activism, Taylor never made herself the central protagonist, but merely spoke of herself as a conduit to help bring the appropriate parties and resources together.  The less-than-humble Morgan Fairchild never fails to drop names nor overstate her importance on all the issues she dabbles in.  Personally, I would rather get my news and information from a proven individual who has both the intelligence and, perhaps more relevantly, the credentials to be able to discuss and analyze an issue.  It's dangerous to give credence to a shameless, self-promoting dilettante on issues of vital importance, especially when the article which attempts to give her validity provides no genuine analysis as to whether she has any business to be dabbling in these affairs.  The Daily Beast's "Morgan Fairchild: Badass Foreign Policy Wonk" isn't a piece of real journalism.  It's a press release.

The Pros & Cons of Robert Redford's version of "The Great Gatsby" (1974)

With the imminent release of Baz Luhrmann's 3-D version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's prohibition-era drama "The Great Gatsby," it seems appropriate to take another look at what was, up until now, the most famous movie version of the book, 1974's "The Great Gatsby" starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow.  I saw the movie in my high school English class when we read the novel and distinctly remember how the class laughed throughout the film.  Because the movie slavishly recreated the novel without any appropriate sense of perspective or interpretation, the scenes Fitzgerald had created in his book came across to everyone in my class as campy and mannered.  The odd thing was, the movie seemed campy, but it lacked any heart or passion to it.  Director Jack Clayton created a visually beautiful film, but its beauty is undermined by a cold detachment that never allows you to become fully engaged with its potentially rich characters and situations.  I think that's the reason why the movie seemed campy and laughable to our class--we never grew to care about the characters the way we are supposed to and, as a result, we are left with little else but to chuckle at the seemingly strange actions and declarations by the characters because the movie never quite captures the subtle nuances that enriched the novel.  (For instance, the movie excludes the character of "Owl Eyes," the bespectacled party-goer at Gatsby's house impressed by the books in the library who, touchingly, proves his friendship to Gatsby by attending his funeral.  The character is nowhere to be found during the movie and his absence is particularly felt during the funeral scene.)  It's the perfect example of a Cliff's Notes movie version of a classic novel--hitting all the key plot points of a novel without ever fully capturing its essence.

I think the casting of the film is at the heart of the problems with this version of "The Great Gatsby."  Robert Redford is dashing and handsome as Gatsby, demonstrating his charm and charisma, but he seems too refined to convince us that he came from the poor, working class background that he was supposed to have come from.  Gatsby is supposed to be a self-made man who puts on a good act of being a sophisticated host, but whose rough, modest edges can still be discerned by perceptive eyes.  Redford comes across as someone who was to the manner born, from the same aristocratic world as Tom and Daisy, and never fully convinces us that there was a level of struggle and desperation to get where he is.  Moreover, there is never that air of mystery attached to Redford's performance that people continually attribute to Gatsby's character.  You never sense what it is about Gatsby that makes Nick Carraway (Sam Waterston) so intrigued with his neighbor as to tail him throughout the novel.  Redford looks good, as ever, but plays Gatsby with an air of detachment that never truly brings the character to life.  Even though Redford's acting is perfectly competent in "The Great Gatsby," I think James Caan, Steve McQueen, Warren Beatty, or Jack Nicholson would have been more interesting in the role.

Similarly, Mia Farrow is also miscast as Gatsby's object of unrequited love, Daisy.  I like Mia Farrow and respect her work as an actress with an offbeat, otherworldly quality exemplified by her fine work in Roman Polanski's "Rosemary's Baby" (1968).  But Daisy should have been a character filled with charm, good-humor, and thoughtless narcissism for Gatsby to have pined away for her all these years.  Farrow instills Daisy with a nervous, neurotic hysteria that makes us wonder what Gatsby ever saw in her.  The scene when Farrow hysterically cries out in panic when she sees George Wilson (Scott Wilson) arrive at her house to question her husband about who drove the car that hit his wife epitomizes why she was all wrong for this role.  It gives Daisy a sense of uncertainty that is at odds with the rest of her character.  I always felt that Daisy was so blithe to causing Myrtle's death, and secure in Gatsby's promise that he would take the blame for it, that she would never lose her cool like that.  Tuesday Weld, who I understand it was on the short list of candidates to play the role, would have been the perfect Daisy for Gatsby to have been obsessed about through the years.  Weld was always perfect at playing charmingly malevolent characters, too wrapped up in self-absorption to care about anyone but themselves.  She had already perfected this type of character years earlier playing Thalia Menninger on "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis" (1959-60) TV series during its first season.  In that series, Dobie (Dwayne Hickman) spends every waking hour thinking of ways to become rich and successful to win Thalia's heart, only to have Thalia continually set the goal higher and higher for him to reach.  And, yet, we always understood why Dobie would break his back to please Thalia.  Her charm continually outweighed whatever drawbacks that straining to please her would entail.  We needed somebody like that playing Daisy to make us understand the nature of Gatsby's obsession for her.

1970s icons Bruce Dern and Karen Black are also awkwardly cast as Tom Buchanan and Myrtle Wilson.  In contrast to Redford, who seems too refined to play Gatsby, Bruce Dern never seems refined and aristocratic enough to play Tom.  You wonder why the status-conscious Daisy would think that marrying Dern's Tom was more socially acceptable than marrying Redford's handsome and charismatic, if poor, Gatsby.  Tom is supposed to be an arrogant, racist who graduated from Yale, yet Dern makes him look like an alum from the local junior college.  The casting of Tom also suffers from virtue of the fact that Dern can't help but come off creepy and psychotic in almost every role he plays.  When George Wilson shows up at Tom's house at the end of the film to find out who owned the car that ran down his wife, Myrtle, Dern has such a brutal quality about himself that you wonder why Tom didn't just beat George up and kick him out of his house without having to implicate Gatsby in his wife's death.

The less said about Karen Black's Myrtle Wilson, the better.  Myrtle is supposed to be a character desperate to escape her stifling existence with her husband George at his modest service station.  When I read the book, I found her sympathetic and tragic and felt sorry for her and her husband.  In Karen Black's hands, Myrtle comes across as simply vulgar and pathetic.  The scene early in the film at the small party Tom and Myrtle throw in their apartment in which they rendezvous where Myrtle shares with Nick her memories of how she met Tom should have been poignant, because it expresses Myrtle's hopes and dreams, but Black comes across so swarthy and sweaty in the scene that Myrtle seems self-indulgent and delusional.  Later in the film, when George has Myrtle locked upstairs at the service station, while Tom is filling up his car with gasoline, Myrtle smashes her hand through the window to try and alert Tom to her confinement.  This is a scene that was not in the book and was clearly created for the movie.  What does Black do, with Myrtle's hands and finger bleeding from putting them through the window?  She shoves it in her mouth and sucks on it.  Whoever thought that was a good idea for a scene should have had their heads examined.

Which leaves us with the two actors in "The Great Gatsby" who I think were well-cast in their roles.  As I have blogged about before, Lois Chiles has the right air of cool detachment and self-possession in the role of pro-golfer Jordan Baker.  Chiles brings an assured, low-key quality to Jordan that makes her the most interesting and appealing woman in the story.  Unlike Farrow or Black's misinterpretation of their respective roles, which are so shrill and overt that you never wonder what's going on inside of them because it's all spelled out for you, Chiles makes Jordan charming, mysterious, and even sympathetic.  By design, she's a shallow character, but Chiles plays Jordan as if she's aware of these shortcomings and has simply chosen not to do anything to improve herself.  Even though she associates with Tom and Daisy, she's not as cruel or thoughtless as either of them and I always sensed that the attraction of Chiles' Jordan to Waterston's Nick was genuine.  In this interpretation of the story, I always got the feeling that Jordan was drawn to Nick's inherent decency because it contrasted with her own selfish shortcomings as well as the shortcomings of the people she typically associated with.  Chiles and Waterston have a natural chemistry in the movie that makes it a shame they have not worked together again.  Chiles' Jordan is such a good sport that she isn't even offended when Nick breaks up with her at the end of the movie because of her continued association with Tom and Daisy, and the fact that she's too much like them for him to ever fully be in love with her.  I always felt that, in that scene, Jordan accepts Nick's judgement of her without any resentment or disappointment because she ultimately knows he's right.

Similarly, Waterston does a fine job with Nick Carraway, bringing depth to what could have been a difficult role.  Nick is the narrator of the story and the characters that the audience identifies most with in the novel.  Waterston brings the right quality of naivete, sense of awe, and compassion to Nick that the character never becomes a mere storytelling device.  He brings a clean-cut quality to Nick that demonstrates the purity of his soul.  Waterston's Nick has an essential decency about him that allows the audience to continue to be engaged in the story even as we realize that almost everyone around him are awful people.  More importantly, Waterston effectively projects the quietly mounting air of disgust that Nick feels for his cousin Daisy and her husband Tom.  We see how Nick has gone from being impressed by the opulence and splendor of the people around him to being disillusioned and disgusted by their moral corruption looming underneath the pristine surface.  I also like the subtle ways that Waterston plays Nick as someone who was subconsciously attracted to Gatsby and, as such, bestows upon Gatsby the kind of caring, reverence and respect that his cousin Daisy did not.  When Nick and Gatsby's father, Mr. Gatz (Roberts Blossom), are riding out at the end of the film to attend Gatsby's funeral and Gatsby's father asks Nick if he was friends with his son, Waterston projects a telling air of sadness when he tells the father "We were close friends" that suggests his feelings for Gatsby ran deeper than he is willing to admit to himself.  I'm not suggesting that Nick, or Waterston's interpretation of him, was meant to suggest, as some reviewers have indicated, that he was gay, because I think Nick was genuinely attracted to, and enamored of, Jordan.  But I think a conservative reading of the character suggests that the character was probably, at the very least, bisexual and that he was drawn to both Jordan and Gatsby--Jordan for her self-confidence and independence, and Gatsby for his romantic sense of longing.  I think Nick admired Jordan and wanted to be as confident as she was, and I also believe he was touched by how deeply Gatsby remained in love with Daisy all these years that he eventually grew to care about him as a result.  Waterston's performance provides subtle hints that lend support, but doesn't conclusively prove, such interpretations of the character so that Nick remains intriguingly enigmatic as ever.  In fact, in Waterston's skillful hands, Nick becomes a much more interesting character than Redford ever is as Gatsby.

Even though the 1974 version of "The Great Gatsby" remains flawed and uneven, I still like it and find much to appreciate about it.  Like its titular character, it tries hard to please and impress with its lavishness and visual opulence even though, like Gatsby, it is sometimes lacking in substance and purpose.  Despite its flaws in terms of Jack Clayton's direction and the miscasting of many key roles, it still has good performances by Sam Waterston and Lois Chiles, as well as beautiful photography, handsome production design, and stunning locations in Newport, Rhode Island.  The potential was there to make a great film, if only the filmmakers had not compromised by emphasizing style over substance in some essential choices they made.  Nevertheless, its story of unrequited love, empty emotions and thoughtless materialism still has relevance and impact today.  It's a flawed film, but one that is tough to dislike in spite of its missed potential because it has its heart in the right place.  Even though some of the actors and performances are wrong, when I watch it now, I still care about the characters and feel sadness for Gatsby that his dream of happiness with Daisy remains an unfulfilled illusion, and disgusted with Daisy at how her narcissism has thoughtlessly destroyed the lives of the people around her.  F. Scott Fitzgerald's original characters still have power and impact in the 1974 version of "The Great Gatsby" even when they're interpreted incorrectly.  It will be interesting to see how Baz Luhrmann's new 3-D version stacks up against the 1974 version in the long run.