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America has long been a source of inspiration for artists around the globe. But at the moment, when U.S. power is unmatched, the view of America from abroad seems suddenly darker and more caustic. A show at New York City's Whitney Museum, a series of short films about 9/11 by international filmmakers and a clutch of stage works overseas all throw a harsh spotlight on the world's sole superpower. TIME's critics report:
THEATER:Transsexuals, guys in diapers -- and a President who sucks his thumb
Fat ladies and opera go together, but rarely has so much weight been thrown around onstage as in Jerry Springer--The Opera. The musical version of the sleazoid TV talk show is filled with big people with big hair wailing about their big problems. A portly fellow with a luminous tenor confesses that he is cheating on his wife with a transsexual. A bridegroom-to-be strips off his clothes to reveal a diaper fetish. A sluttish young woman battles with her mother over her aspiration to become a pole dancer. Running commentary is provided by a studio audience in the heavenly tones of a Bach choir; the crudest of insults are spewed in the sweetest of sopranos. "I wish you died at birth!" a mother sings to her daughter. "I wish you died at birth!" the daughter warbles back. "At least," the host offers helpfully, "you agree on one thing."
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Of all the new musicals that have burst onto the London stage in preparation for taking over the world, Jerry Springer--The Opera may be the oddest. The show, with faux-operatic music and raunchy lyrics by Richard Thomas and Stewart Lee, has been a sellout hit at the National Theatre since April and will transfer to the West End in October. Negotiations are under way for a Broadway production, which could arrive as early as next spring. A movie deal is already cooking. Co-producer Jon Thoday predicts that within three years there "should be 15 productions playing around the world at any one time." And people used to complain about Cats.
The cats at least brought a little glamour to their garbage pile. The America on display in the Jerry Springer opera is a place where white-trash yahoos willingly air their tawdriest laundry in public for a few minutes of TV fame. The show is just one example of a wave of new stage works overseas that put the U.S. in a distinctly unflattering light. In Paris a "savagely satirical impromptu" called George W. Bush or God's Sad Cowboy has been drawing crowds since reopening in late Mayafter closing for two weeks when its writer-director, Attilio Maggiulli, was beaten up by a couple of pro-Bush thugs. (Talk about satirical impromptus.) It portrays the U.S. President as a spoiled 6-year-old who sucks his thumb and plays toy soldiers with his pal Tony Blair. By the end of the play, Bush is trying to annex the entire Middle East as the 51st state. "Not bad," he boasts, "for the biggest idiot in America."
Across the Channel, where our allies are supposed to be, the satire of Bush is only a shade less vicious. The title character of The Madness of George Dubya, a comedy in its sixth month on the West End, is another childish dimwit, who wears red cowboy pajamas and mangles the names of his enemies ("Saddama bin Laden"). Creator Justin Butcher says the play grew out of his outrage at the way Britain was "sleepwalking into war at the behest of the Administration in Washington." Unfortunately, the topical jokes soon give way to a long, obsessively detailed parody of Dr. Strangelove, with a mad general ordering a nuclear strike against the Arab world. Only Peter Sellers groupies need stick around to the end.
Jaundiced views of the U.S. are a proven crowd pleaser in London. Michael Moore, the insurrectionist documentarian, got booed off the Oscar stage for criticizing Bush's foreign policy, but in London late last year, his one-man stage show — with bits like a nightly "Stump the Yank" quiz — was a smash hit. Even the American plays that are increasingly shoving aside Shakespeare and Stoppard on the West End (often with big-name U.S. stars in the cast) seem to be reveling in the worst of the U.S. In the current hit revival of David Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago, Matthew Perry and Hank Azaria leave all their charm at passport control as they add an extra layer of bile to Mamet's caustic portrait of the battle of the sexes in the Midwestern heartland.
So it's not surprising that London's hottest musical is a send-up of America's looniest talk show. Of course, its creators clearly love their trash TV, even as they skewer it. The opera skillfully parodies the TV show's demented-circus atmosphere, and star Michael Brandon does a bang-on impression of Springer's smarmy solicitousness ("Chuckie, I sense you're not too happy about Shawntelle's pole-dancing dreams"). Even the backstage scenes ring true, with Springer trotting out knee-jerk defenses to his critics: "I don't do conflict resolution." At times the musical even makes you care for these sad, dysfunctional guests, who can justify their messed-up lives only by acting them out for the TV camera. "Dip me in chocolate/Throw me to the lesbians," they sing. "This is my Jerry Springer moment."
If the show turns out to be less momentous for U.S. audiences, it may be because its one very cleverly worked-out joke grows old pretty fast. After you get past the shock of hearing arias filled with X-rated insults and recitatif with lines like "A weird thing happened/When I went to take a leak ...," the show doesn't have much of anywhere to go. To be sure, Jerry goes to hell in Act II, where he is host of a show featuring Satan and Jesus — but our hearts are still with those angst-filled transsexuals and diaper fetishists back on earth. Bash our tabloid-TV shows all you want, but a little conflict resolution might be nice.
--By Richard Zoglin. With reporting by James Graff/Paris and Aisha Labi/London
ART: Withering superheroes and Air Jordanski in a reductive show at the Whitney
It's no joke being the only superpower. Not only do you preside over a world that you hold at arms' length, but sometimes the arms are supplied by the Pentagon. You dump industrial waste, bad TV and McDonald's wherever you go. And all around the world, people get very tired of you.
That's the main message of "The American Effect: Global Perspectives on the United States, 1990-2003," the very mixed bag of a survey show now at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. It consists of work about the U.S. by artists from 30 nations, almost all of it made after the fall of the Berlin Wall and much of it since 9/11. Though it includes a few pieces that treat the U.S. fondly, the show is produced largely by artists who are sick of America's rawboned incursions on the world stage, its imperial hauteur, its global misalliances. Some of them don't even like our T shirts.
O.K., we can't chew gum and shoot at the same time. Still, you wish the international art world came at us with better work than this. In the catalog, Lawrence Rinder, the Whitney curator of contemporary art, quotes Alexis de Tocqueville, America's most subtle visitor. Americans live, Tocqueville wrote, "in a state of perpetual self-adoration; only strangers or experience may be able to bring certain truths to the Americans' attention." Actually, American artists have already dissected their homeland to a fare-thee-well. If you want a thoroughgoing refusal of the national mission, you can't do better than James Rosenquist's ferocious mural F-111, 1965, or anything by Leon Golub. By comparison, Gilles Barbier's Nursing Home, 2002, a sculptural suite of elderly superheroes — Captain America attached to an IV and so forth — is a one-liner about aging superpowers that overspends the already deflated currency of Pop.
All the same, pick your way carefully, and there are some surprises here. In the category of deluxe political cartooning, there's Hisashi Tenmyouya, a onetime graffiti artist who updates the 19th century Japanese-warrior block-print pictures called musha-e. In Tattoo Man's Battle, 1996, he pits an outmatched Japanese horseman against a fire-breathing black giant (read, America). How you feel about the picture may depend in part on how you feel about a Japanese nationalism as honking and sentimental as any Charlie Daniels song, but I dare you to peel your eyes off the thing.
Then there's the video projection called Death in Dallas, a lament for John F. Kennedy made three years ago by Zoran Naskovski, a Serb artist who treats the murdered President as a figure of myth. Over footage of the Kennedy years, including the assassination, Naskovski plays a long, keening song-poem about J.F.K.'s death. Written days after the killing, it was recorded by a Serb singer who accompanies himself on the gusla, an ancient string-and-bow instrument. We know that the Kennedy mystique has dwindled, but as we see the dead President being absorbed by this mournful song into a heavenly kingdom we stop caring about the dry newspaper in our hearts.
The deceptively modest video piece Larger than Life, 2000, by the young Polish artist Pawel Kruk, has the opposite effect, ever so gently pulling the rug out from under another American icon. In a mock interview, Kruk channels Michael Jordan, mouthing words (in his Polish-accented English) from Jordan's 1993 autobiography, Rare Air: Michael on Michael. What looks at first like pure homage ends up as a masterstroke of passive aggression that finds the slightly unnerving undertow in Jordan's words. That implacable self-possession of his, so very American, is the kind that can lead to triumph or hubris.
Add to that Kruk's attempt to take on those characteristics himself, literally to be the man, and you have a better deconstruction of the Yankee cultural mystique, of its beguiling contradictions, than you can find in a whole shelf of French theorists. Or for that matter, in most of "The American Effect."
--By Richard Lacayo
MOVIES: An omnibus of short films on Sept. 11 from 11 directors skeptical of American power
As stridently right-wing as political talk radio is these days, that's how left-wing the foreign-film scene is. So when the French producer Alain Brigand looked for 11 international directors to make short films on the reverberations of the World Trade Center attack, he didn't find many in a moistly elegiac mood.
11'09"01: September 11 is full of criticism of U.S. policy, and will be shown in art houses attended by people who can cheer or stomach such criticism; it's the left talking to the left. Still, the abrasive quality has a tonic effect. The movie makes points worth hearing and — since its segments include stellar work from world-class filmmakers — worth seeing. The mix is instructively heady: a Molotov cocktail of storytelling, journalism, personal essay and agitprop about the country that other people love, envy, resent.
Brigand's only stipulation was that each film last 11 min. 9 sec. and one frame, to match the European notation for the date 9/11/01. The segments vary widely in quality, and it would have been O.K. if each had lasted only 9 min. 11 sec. But there are small pearls here.
Some directors find subtlety in far-flung reactions to the event. In an Afghan refugee camp in Iran (the piece by Samira Makhmalbaf), a teacher tries to explain the tragedy to kids who think the worst calamity is when the village well overflows. In Burkina Faso (the director is Idrissa Ouedraogo), some boys spot a man who looks like Osama bin Laden and try to capture him for the $25 million ransom. In Sean Penn's vignette, an old man (Ernest Borgnine) stricken by his wife's death lives in a lower Manhattan flat where the flowers are wilting from lack of sunlight. He gets up one morning and happily finds them in bloom, not realizing that it's because one of the Twin Towers no longer blocks the light.
The dominant mood, though, is finger pointing. Mira Nair's segment describes the agony of a Pakistani-American mother whose missing son was accused of terrorism when he had in fact rushed to ground zero in a rescue effort. Egypt's Youssef Chahine makes the bizarre argument that militants have the right to kill American and Israeli civilians because in democracies the people choose their leaders and thus are responsible for policies that enslave the world.
A few pieces — set in Chile (Ken Loach), Israel (Amos Gitai), Bosnia (Danis Tanovic) — make a single hectoring, helpful point: that many countries have suffered atrocities for years, decades, centuries, sometimes with U.S. connivance. Loach's strong segment is about Tuesday, Sept. 11, 1973, the date of the U.S.-backed overthrow of Chile's Allende government; 30,000, not 3,000, died in that coup and its aftermath.
Segments like Loach's are a slap in the face of American righteousness. The slap is meant not to knock us senseless but to awaken us to the suffering — that is to say, the humanity — we share with the rest of the world. In the view of these filmmakers, Sept. 11 admitted us to a club that everyone else belongs to.
--By Richard Corliss
- Richard Zoglin; Richard Lacayo; Richard Corliss