“The morbid urge to gaze”: How the Chelsea Clinton wedding is connected to stylish movie murders

I haven’t got the slightest bit of interest in the recent wedding of Chelsea Clinton to Mark Mezvinsky. However, if you can hook that over-examined and discussed media event in with one of the best thrillers ever made (strike that, and just say one of the best films ever made), Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960), THEN I’m interested.

It was reported today that the love poem that was read by Clinton and Mezvinsky at the wedding was a sweet little bit of verse that goes “The life that I have is all that I have/And the life that I have is yours/The love that I have of the life that I have/Is yours and yours and yours….” The poem was written by Leo Marks, a man of many talents whose poems were the product of his work as one of England’s leading cryptographers during WWII. Marks had felt that the codes that had been up to that time secreted in the poems of Tennyson, Keats, and Racine (among others) could be easily broken. Thus, he began writing his own verse and using it as the vehicle for “unbreakable” codes.

And how exactly does all this relate to Powell’s masterpiece about a man afflicted by “scoptophilia”? (Described by one character so memorably as “the morbid urge to gaze…”) Well, Marks’ work as a code-maker and poet was only part of his legacy (besides the fact that he grew up as the son of the man who ran the famed bookstore located at 84 Charing Cross Road). In the 1950s, he became a playwright, and then began writing movies (including the blissfully titled Twisted Nerve, which I hope very much to catch up with some day). His masterpiece without question is the screenplay for Peeping Tom, which is commonly thought these days to be a perfect thriller, but was in fact the work that completely ruined the reputation of the well-regarded Powell (the most-quoted contemporary review said that the best way to dispose of the film would be to “shovel it up and flush it swiftly down the nearest sewer. Even then, the stench would remain.”).

The film was hailed in its time by French critics (yeah, the same perceptive ones who get lots of grief from doltish Americans for enjoying the comedies of Jerry Lewis, but first cemented the reps of Ford, Hitchcock, Cassavetes, Altman, et al, et al), including Bertrand Tavernier. By the late 1970s the film was being restored and “presented” by one of its biggest fans, Martin Scorsese (who borrowed liberally from its final tableau for the big shoot-out in Taxi Driver).

Thus, a lovely little poem read in an innocent way at the insanely over-scrutinized wedding of a President’s daughter to a guy no one has ever heard of (or cared about) was indeed the work of the same man who gave us the single grimmest depiction of a life ruled and ultimately destroyed by filmmaking — plus one of the single coolest murder weapons in the history of cinema (if you haven’t seen the film, you owe it to yourself to watch it as soon as possible). A nice little daydream news event linking to one of the best filmic nightmares of all time. Now THAT’s the kinda story I’m interested in….

The best news for those who haven’t seen the film is that it is currently available in its entirety on YouTube in the restored version that was released by the Criterion Collection. The yobs who put it up decided to disable embedding (a better way to force you to see YT’s ads on the page), but the film is available for instant viewing here.

Oddly enough, yet another upload of the film is available here:



Here is the original British trailer for the film. No one in England knew what Powell was unleashing upon them...:

Lionel returns!

They just don’t make brilliant social commentators of the curmudgeon variety like they used to. Time was, you had guys on the radio like Henry Morgan and Jean Shepherd (who sounded warm and friendly, but his take on modern culture was always acidic) who could summarize the social scene in a few carefully chosen put-downs and do it with style. That, sadly, is a thing of the past — we now have the occasional comedian who will venture into that territory (Lewis Black is performer who comes the closest), but they are stand-ups first and foremost, and don’t have (or most likely want) a daily forum for their disquisitions on modern life. (And no, I’m not going to put Andy Rooney into the category that once contained leading lights like Morgan and Shepherd….)

There is one gentleman, though, who has taken on the mantle of smart social commentator with a cranky (or, as he puts it, “contrarian”) outlook. It is Lionel, the “logodaedalus and expert” radio host who was last heard on the late, lamented Air America (curse you for the Montel stunting, Mark Green!) and is beloved by NYCers for his stints on WABC and WOR. Lionel is unafraid to tackle literally any topic, from the loftiest of philosophical notions to The Real Housewives of New Jersey. He has now reappeared in two guises: on his own site, doing audio commentaries and writing blog entries; and as a commentator on the WPIX nightly news here in the NYC metro area.

I really can’t describe what it is that Lionel does — the man should speak for himself. So I’ve linked here to a bunch of his best recent commentaries on WPIX, as they are posted on YouTube, since that site allows for easy embedding. If you’re interested in the full range of the topics he’s covered, you can go to his page on the WPIX site, which offers every commentary he’s done thus far on PIX (I’d recommend the bit he did this past Monday on the issue of the “Wikileaks” about Afghanistan). They are tight little pieces that, like most good humor, hit the target and then vacate the premises quickly. Three minutes may seem like too little time to develop a thesis on television, but Lionel has the rhythm — and he most definitely has the vocabulary.

Perhaps it’s best to start out with the family reminiscence, a genre that Shepherd of course did to perfection. Here, Lionel offers us a reflection on funerals and wakes:



A kind of urban personal-madness piece that is done with good pacing, about a stolen wallet:



There can be no greater perfection than a man complaining about the insanity of the NYC subway system:



On a subject dear to Lionel’s heart, the life lessons one could learn by watching pro “wrasslin’”:



And just so you don’t think that politics and policy aren’t explored, a piece from last week on the latest airport outrage that will just become a regular ol’ part of life, the new “nude” full-body scanners:



I recommend Lionel’s writing (including his book, Everybody’s Crazy Except You and Me (and I’m Not So Sure About You)). He is currently blogging on a regular basis on his site, Lionel Media. The audio commentaries are good, with the ones that come in under 20-30 minutes being best. On a popular radio message board it had been noted that Lionel’s politics have changed over the years, from seemingly conservative to Libertarian to progressive and back to a centrist viewpoint. I can say without qualification that whether or not I agree with his take on a specific issue, he definitely holds my attention and, most thankfully of all, doesn’t insult my intelligence. I’d love to see him back inhabiting the radio landscape in NYC (god knows we need something besides the two good interview shows on NPR and the idiosyncratic folks of Pacifica). Here’s hoping these current endeavors last for a long time to come!