[Note added 31 January 2018: YouTube has removed all the full-length (5mins+) videos of Patti LuPone's performance at the request of the Grammy people (The Recording Academy), ever on the edge of kicking public discourse in face. You can find some shorter clips still on YouTube, and if I can find the complete performance on video anywhere online, I'll post it here. In the meantime, here's a video of Patti singing "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" a few years ago.]
That's Patti LuPone singing "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" a few hours ago at 2018 Grammy Awards. Tina and I missed her when we went to see Evita on Broadway in 1979 - she was off that night, though we did see Mandy Patinkin as Che - but we've always loved her performance as the very peak of peak in this musical, and, for that matter, in any other.
And here she was tonight, somehow, magically, better than ever. Not only in the finest voice, pleading, tender, powerful - but acting to the hilt. Look at what she does at the very end of the performance - at 4:27 into the song. Evita beseeches the audience, sees she has them, raises her arms and flings back her head in vulnerable thanks and triumph, then puts her head down, possibly spent, modest, but raises it one more time in cool, powerful conquest, defiant and satisfied. Soaking in the cheers and applause from the audience, both in Madison Square Garden tonight, and in Buenos Aeros, when the crowd was Evita's shirtless ones, all those years ago. LuPone manages to convey all of this after singing her heart out and bringing herself - and anyone listening with a soul - to tears.
But there's a darker side to this - not in LuPone's incandescent performance and in Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's incomparable song. But in the message it conveys about propaganda, or deceitful appeals to the emotions that masquerade as logic.
I teach my classes at Fordham about this, and use this song as a searing example, every time I talk about propaganda. The Institute for Propaganda Analysis, striving many years ago to understand how Hitler and the Nazis gained power in Germany, still then a democracy, called it "just plain folks". Though the dictators have all the money and power, they tell their powerless subjects that they, the dictators, are just like the people - one of them. Hitler was "the Leader" - der Führer - not the King. Don't be jealous of me, Evita sings in "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" - I'm just like you. I came from you, I am you, standing up here in my gleaming gown and jewels. I'm you who has succeeded, so love me, as you should love yourselves.
This "just plain folks" is one of the prime ingredients of fascism. It shouldn't matter, in a democracy, where the elected official came from in life. FDR and JFK were both great Presidents, and swimming in wealth. And maybe one of the reasons they were so good for our country is they didn't pretend to be something they weren't, someone just like us.
That's an important lesson to keep in mind, especially these days, with the President who tweets to be closer his supporters, as we're moved to tears along with Patti LuPone in her extraordinary performance.
Counterpart was back tonight with episode 1.2 - via Amazon Prime, for me, because Starz is no longer on Cablevision in my area, which I suspect is Cablevision's fault, at least in this reality. As for the episode, it was quite good, and moved the story forward in at least one big way.
One of the best Knightfalls of the season - 1.7 - on air tonight, with twists and turns and highly significant developments at every turn.
Well, I said in my review of last week's episode of Vikings - 5.9 - that I was hoping to see Rollo again, and .... I'll say no more about that now.
An Angel for May just showed up on Amazon Prime. I just saw it, and think of it as a YA (young adult) Outlander.
Kill All Others has these characteristics par excellence, and is also the closest to the very time we're living in right now. That makes it closer to Black Mirror than The Twilight Zone, though it feels a lot like a Twilight Zone episode, too. Philbert Noyce sees a political candidate on television - the only candidate running for President - introduce a slogan, "Kill All Others". At first it seems he's the only one who saw this - the real vs. illusion quandary - but soon confirms that others have seen this, and inevitably comes to think of himself as an "other" and then becomes an "other" himself. This is where the paranoia comes in, with the inevitable Dickian question of whether what Noyce is feeling and seeing is real, or his over-active mind - a reversion, as often happens in Philip K. Dick's stories, to the "is it real" dilemma, which never really goes away.
Jack Thorne does a fine job bringing it to the screen in 2018, greatly assisted by Timothy Spall whose Ed has one of those quintessentially British faces. His "Willoughby" is "Macon Heights," a stop on a train line that doesn't quite exist - literally. So here the "real or not real" thread is woven around a town, replete with a diner that serves great pie, which, when you add in the attractive, talkative waitress, also resonates with another real-or-not multiple reality classic, Twin Peaks. David Lynch, Rod Serling, and Philip K. Dick do have a lot of uncommon in common.
