Ken Tucker’s Pop Culture

The salutes to Paul Newman’s eyes have ranged from 20/20 (Manohla Dargis’ sharp squint in the Times) to blurry-teary (Bob  Mondello’s drippy evaluation on NPR). As far as filmographies go, no one will best my colleague and friend Mark Harris’ remarkably concise yet complete look at Newman’s work at EW.com.
My only disagreement with Mark is that he doesn’t give greater credit to Newman’s Slap Shot, the ferociously funny, profane 1977 hockey film that has been given a typically impassioned yet meticulously observed appreciation by Kim Morgan here.
When I was a teenager, my Favorite Film Of All Time (you can have those when you’re an adolescent) was Cool Hand Luke, the martyrdom of whose title character suited my teen self-pity so perfectly I saw it 16 times the year it was released including once in Copenhagen when I snuck off from a church-group trip to see it once again (from the silence in the audience, I could only deduce the Danish subtitles didn’t do justice to Newman’s witty line-readings).
If I had to pick one Newman film to gaze upon over and over these days, however, it would be The Verdict (1982), his last great role and by some accounts his favorite. As the rhuemy-eyed rummy lawyer Frank Galvin, Newman did what he loved doing in the second half of his career—which was to do his best to demolish the first half. By which I mean, this least narcissistic of beautiful men seemed to enjoy suggesting what the ultimate fates of  characters such as Hud, John Harper in Hombre, and the Lew Archer surrogate in Harper would have been had they lived to late-middle-age.
Working with co-conspirator director Sidney Lumet, Newman turned himself into a shambling wreck held up by an expensive-turning-threadbare lawyer’s suit. The early scenes in which Newman leans over a pinball machine for drunken support as much for the purpose of playing the game, and—even more chillingly, repulsively, movingly—attends the funeral wakes of people he doesn’t know to press his dog-eared business cards into the hands of the bereaved are marvels of actorly control. Newman played cynicism and dissipation with even more of the commitment he brought to his lovely light comic turns in bigger hits such as The Sting and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Lesser actors would be content merely to have sketched a portrait of an alchoholic making one last stand for dignity; Newman let you know that, in the end, this was no mere proto-episode of Law & Order, ending with the attorney pulling himself together for redemption. After the credits rolled, you knew that Frank Galvin would probably, eventually, end up looking closely at a bottle for the rest of his short life.
There’s another whole piece to be written about Newman’s other life as a public personality—I expect David Letterman, his fellow race-car buff, will summon his usual humble grace to salute the numerous appearances Newman made on Letterman’s show over the years, content to sit in the studio audience and wave silently, humorously, once again subverting his celebrity with bright-eyed enthusiasm.
And some time I’ll have to tell about the day my construction-worker dad shared a beer with Newman and confirmed everything you may have thought about the man when he was off-camera…
–Ken Tucker

You can watch me and Craig discuss “Runway,” “Fringe,” “90210,” and hug it out here.

You can listen to me radio-review Zwerling’s new album here.

Mad Men, I find, is intelligent, lovingly crafted, and yet often irritatingly mannered and obvious. Why is it, for example, that whenever a Mad character turns on the TV, he or she just happens to come upon, say, Jackie Kennedy giving a tour of the White House? The regular historical coincidences strain credulity, and are cute, not acute.
But I have been enjoying the second season of Mad Men more than the first because the cracks are beginning to show in the porcelain foreheads of important smoothies like Don Draper, and I found the episode in which he appeared at the bedside of post-natal Peggy, advising her to forget about the baby she’d just birthed to be at once shocking and thrilling (yes! Don is the only person independent-Peggy would take advice from!).
This past Sunday, art intruded upon the business of Madison Avenue in two ways. Robert Morse’s Cooper had acquired a Mark Rothko, and the painting, mounted in his office, became a deep-orange litmus test for his underlings, its saturated colors seeping into their workaday minds. Everyone immediately supposed its abstraction was some kind of test of whether they “got it” or not, and by extension, were able to understand and fawn more effectively over their frequently inscrutable boss.
And then there was the wining and dining of Cooper Sterling Accounts Manager Ken Cosgrove by the excruciatingly closeted art director Salvatore. Ken, you may recall, has had a short story published in The Atlantic Monthly, which immediately made him the envy of many copywriters at the ad agency. (As someone whose first job was as a proofreader at Ogilvy & Mather straight out of college, I can tell you this rang very true. At the time I was also freelancing for Rolling Stone, and I had more than one copywriter tell me to flee the ad biz before I got promoted, and one middle-aged fellow who closed the door behind me and asked furtively how one got published in Jann Wenner’s magazine. I think my response was an eloquent, um, you just have to like a lot of punk rock, send in your clips, and say yes when asked to review crap like Black Oak Arkansas.)
Ken the published literary writer is pure catnip to the sensitive, unhappily married Salvatore, and the scene in which Salvatore had Ken over for dinner—gazing longingly into the younger man’s averted eyes as Ken lit his cigarette, while Salvatore’s wife looked on in quiet agony—was one of Mad Men’s… most clunkily obvious moments. Sometimes I think of series creator Matthew Weiner as Daffy Duck, banging us—whom I imagine he sees as a collective Elmer Fudd–over the head with a baseball bat, screaming, “Get it? Get it? Boy, they were repressed in those days! These people were desthpicable!”
Weiner has upped the art-versus-life quotient this season, starting with the earth-quaking Frank O’Hara reference in the season premiere. I’m not sure it’s really working. I’m much more caught up in the inter-office politics involving head secretary-queen bee Joan, and, on the homefront, the way Don’s wife Betty has become so mercurially, cavalierly cruel to their son. These subplots strike me as being, if anything, more “literary” than the overt art-referenced scenes. Among the secretaries and the children, Weiner and company are evoking similar themes in the work of writers such as Richard Yates, John O’Hara, and Christina Stead the best way you can on television: by not overreaching for profundity. Perhaps you disagree?
–Ken Tucker

I’ve been attacked by a Brent Bozell stooge for the lede of my 90210 review. I couldn’t be more pleased, especially since the stooge naturally had to distort the meaning of my writing to work in his agenda. That’s the way stooges operate…