A year in the making...

...and I mean that in every way it can be taken. Year-end lists are part big-picture synthesizing, part score-settling, part opinion-shaping and part reminder of what happened in the last twelve months or so. As I started Confidential Report only a few months ago, I can't be too upset not to make the Blogs of the Year list, but I can get a bit upset that I've never heard of the number 1 pick.

If you want to get silly, check the List of Lists for 2004.

Media Review - The Aviator

Despite Martin Scorsese's status as the Dean of the Hollywood renaissance filmmakers (I'm sure Coppolla, Spielberg and the like could be given other titles from academic administration) I've not been much interested in his films since the early 90s. I haven't really enjoyed a Scorsese picture since Goodfellas and didn't even see Gangs of New York. Worse, I'm never inclined to watch the films of his I recall liking anymore.

I guess I never saw Gangs because it looked to me like another of the overstuffed prestige pictures that Scorsese is inexplicably drawn to. Whether I was right about that one or not, The Aviator is just one of those pictures. Curiously, Scorsese is not especially interested in aviation, despite the title of the film. Aviation is dealt with in two ways in the movie: as an excuse for gigantic setpieces and aerial photography (in which case, he should have just remade Hell's Angels) and as a device for Hughes' "innovativeness." Hughes is depicted as captivated by aeronautics, but Scorsese treats it as a distraction, something Hughes is called upon to deal with occasionally in order to acquire the means for his more interesting pursuits. To Scorsese, those pursuits are Hollywood starlets and moviemaking, things that Scorsese himself is interested in. Even though writers and filmmakers are often advised to focus on what they know and love in their work, the blinkered focus on writing and filmmaking that it produces in a lot of gaseous products like this demonstrate the limits of that advice.

Critics seem quite taken with The Aviator, but they too are more interested in movies than the average moviegoer. As for me, I left the theater wondering why I should care about the figures and events chronicled in this three hour movie. In Goodfellas, Scorsese allows the Henry Hill character to show to an audience the attraction of gangsterism along with the tremendous risks that attended that life. There's no insight into the entrepreneur, tycoon or engineer that Hughes might have represented; he has no colleagues and the qualities of his successes and failures are depicted as singularly his own. We also don't get any of the institutional insights, the look into how collective expectations shape people's lives, that made Casino bearable. The embarrassing childhood episode that passes for a psychological explanation of Hughes' OCD is nothing more than a pointless and wrongheaded allusion to Citizen Kane.

We might take away several "lessons" from The Aviator, but all of them are superficial and many are drawn from other movies. The obvious analogue is Citizen Kane, but even as references to Kane mount, Scorsese demonstrates no appreciation for that film's insights. Hughes' struggles with OCD blatantly evoke the psychotic episodes of the John Nash character in A Beautiful Mind (another movie that didn't have enough respect for its main character to pay any attention to what he cared about.) Good reviews describe the movie as entertaining, and maybe a movie can be entertaining without having any worthwhile substantive content. OK, but in order to be entertaining a film should engage, and the only thing engaged in The Aviator is its director's continued quest for cinematic pedigree and exactitude. In perhaps an unintendedly autobiographical scene, Scorsese shows the first and only flight of the Spruce Goose, which he depicts as a success. Of course, in reality the plane flew once accidentally during a taxiing run and traveled about a mile. The flight and the plane itself were entirely impractical, much like The Aviator, but the gadget itself is vast and impressive.

The Year of Doom ahead

Well check me out... I wonder in print why Doom hasn't collaborated with Ghostface and sure enough, news comes out that such a thing is in the works. As reported (if that's the right word for it) on Hip Hop DX, Ghostface is set to work (separately) with MF Doom and Def Jux producer/MC/entrepreneur El-P. This story was posted last week, so I'll credit myself with the uncanny ability to predict the recent past.

The Doom/Ghostface collaboration is a natural fit and has me downright excited. Working with El-P isn't as predictable, although I can see where their mutual interests might lie. To me, the fact that they're both working with Prefuse 73 is at least as promising as putting Ghost and El-P on a track together.

Enthusiasm should remain muted until reports start to appear in more creditable sources, but it is good news. Actually, given the rate at which hip hop collaborations fail or turn out to be internet inventions, enthusiasm should be muted until you're actually listening to the thing.

The Year of Doom

Since I'm not a professional critic, I don't get to see every movie or hear every CD released in a given year. For that reason, making a list of "ten best" films or CDs or whatever is just silly, even if I granted that many of the choices I make about what not to sample because they're likely crap are accurate. For that reason, I'm ending the year with some comments on "notable" releases of the year. This will also allow me to repackage a bunch of half-finished posts from the past few months that're so cold I'm putting them in drinks.


This has been the year of the Metal Faced Villain, MF Doom, aka Zev Love X, aka King Geedorah, aka Viktor Vaughn, aka Daniel Dumile. Not counting guest or compilation appearances or the Special Herbs series (his beats-only collections) Doom released three albums this year. After dropping the first Vaughn album (Vaudeville Villain) in the Fall of 2003, the much-hyped Madvillainy followed in March. The Madvillain project saw Doom collaborating with fellow underground giant DJ/MC Madlib (aka Quasimoto, or Lord Quas, and Yesterday's New Quintet) and built directly on his obsessions with movie dialogue samples from the 40s to the 60s and Jack Kirby comics. Another Viktor Vaughn LP, Venomous Villain, arrived in August and MM..Food? was released under the MF Doom moniker about three months later. Usually, MCs have to die (Tupac) or go insane (Kool Keith) before a flood of material like this comes out. Unlike Tupac or Kool Keith, however, Doom's avalanche of releases is of consistently high quality and thematically linked. It's almost like a quarterly audio comic book.

The metal-faced villain's saga begins with Vaudeville Villain. As any True Believer can tell you, Victor Von Doom is the given name of Doctor Doom, the archnemesis of the Fantastic Four, whose origin story Dumile appropriates for his diabolical alter-ego. Doctor Doom's origin story serves only as a loose framework for the story, however, and as an excuse for Doom to plunder cartoons and records for terrific soundbites for extensive, sensational sonic collages. Vaudeville Villain features a collection of dense, action-packed stories of underground hip hop survival and fiendish plots to take over the rap game. The centerpiece of the VV album is the open-mic night skits, hilarious sketches featuring an opinionated host (who reminded me a lot of Star, the morning host at Hot 97 in NY at that time) introducing a variety of MCs and slam poets undoubtedly based on Dumile's experience as a masked and anonymous battle rapper upon his reemergence from the underground. Most of the production is handled by nobody I've heard of (King Honey, Heat Sensor) along with one excellent RJD2 beat ("Saliva") while Doom focuses on the rhymes and cartoon dialogue edits. The rhymes are alternatively tricky, funny and stimulating, but always highly listenable.

Venomous Villain, the second Viktor Vaughn album, seems a bit gratuitous at first. VV1 tells the story of Vik's reappearance after his bitter scarring at the hands of the industry (the story is recounted in a New Yorker review of Madvillany) but VV2 seems more openly subversive, almost like the Lost Tales of the masked villain. Doom again relegates production to others (mostly from Insomniac Records) and the appearance of more prominent guests on and off the mic makes this more like a posse album, maybe the Legion of Doom. Vaughn himself actually doesn't spit too many rhymes, but serves more as a traditional "MC" for a bunch of really off-the-chart mad scientist electronic noise tracks. Kool Keith, who released an album as Dr. Dooom in 1999, the same year the MF Doom alias first appeared on record, contributes a characteristically scatalogical rhyme on "Doper Skiller." Keith's cadence is as unerring as ever, something Doom slips on occasionally, but he has far less interesting to say these days.

Still, it's Madvillainy that has gotten the bulk of the attention, and not without reason. It's the kind of album that tends to stay in your player, or at least returns every other spin. The tracks (22 in all) never outstay their welcome, and you can always play them again. Doom's thematic concerns expand from the story of one villain in particular to the compelling qualities of villains in general, with samples dropped throughout the record about the popularity of supervillain characters (seemingly Bond villains and their like.) As an enthusiast of the title character from Mr. Arkadin and the original mad villain, Dr. Mabuse, I can sympathize. Provocative ideas, metaphors and images leap out of Madvillainy faster than you can keep track of them. The CD has a keen cartoon video for "All Caps" explicitly drawn to evoke Jack Kirby-era Fantastic Four comics.

Doom ended the year with Mm..Food, his follow-up to 1999's Operation: Doomsday (the cover of that album shows a cartoon Doctor Doom holding a mic.) Mm..Food is surprisingly light-hearted with even more skits and tracks built out of samples from Fantastic Four cartoons and records (along with some Herculoids and other stuff I didn't recognize.) Doom handles the beats and recycles some stuff from underground releases for other folks, but it's all great stuff; many of the beats feature clever use of cartoon themes (including one from the Electric Company) and the lyrics are pleasantly left-field. The theme of the album, apart from world conquest, is food and cooking (duh) with track titles like "Potholderz," "Fillet-O-Rapper," "Kon Queso" and "Rapp Snitch Knishes."

What this album could really have used is an appearance by Ghostface Killah. It seems natural; Ghostface adopted the Wu-Gambino name Tony Starks (of Starks Enterprises, of course) back in the mid-90s and used extensive samples from the Grant-Ray-Lawrence 60s Iron Man cartoon on his masterpiece, Supreme Clientele in 2000 (his solo debut album from 1996 was called simply Ironman.) He also laces his tracks with references to food; a diabetic since childhood, he clearly thinks about diet a great deal and it shows through all the literal and figurative invocations of food in his lyrics. There's even a Scooby Doo sample on "Who Are We?" a new track off of Ghostface's new Theodore Unit album.

I'll continue later with other notable releases of 2004.

Often amusing and occasionally a bit sad

Earlier this year I suggested to a colleague that he use excerpts from Jay-Z's "99 Problems" in his Civil Lib section on automobile searches, well now the section in question has been posted to the Volokh Conspiracy.

Following up, another post offers a civil procedure take written by a Harvard law student about Rule 12(b)(6). The student may have many problems, but lack of a claim upon which relief may be granted is apparently not one of them.

My thoughts exactly...

from Ghostface's The Pretty Toney Album:

Voice: Hey yo Ghost, man, they got a new insurance company out there, man, called AFLAC with a fuckin' duck!

Ghostface: I hear ya, bro. Stop eatin' that pork.

It's exchanges like this that made TPTA the release of the year.

Neat idea

Ed Park, in the Village Voice, offers a comparison of The Life Aquatic and The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie. It's brief, but the idea of contrasting a well-reviewed "serious" film with an "entertainment" movie is a really good one. I often think that the difference between films that are supposed to have deeper resonance, those taken seriously as art, are at best no different than and often shallower and stupider than movies made, so we are led to believe by their critical reception, as "mere" entertainments. After seeing Lost in Translation, I recall wondering whether I wouldn't have gotten more out of seeing the similarly-themed Lizzie McGuire Movie. I never got around to seeing that, but imagine it would have been pretty much the same, perhaps less flattering to middle-aged men.

Park promises next to explain why he prefers Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow to The Aviator. Sounds interesting.

Not satire or parody, but funny anyway

A disgrunted litigant posted a judge for sale on eBay.

Tweaked again

The Court has accepted another 9th Circuit opinion for review, this one in favor of two peer-to-peer file sharing services. Judge Steven R. Thomas, who wrote the opinion for the 9th Circuit, is a Clinton appointee, but marshals a traditionally conservative argument to oppose legal intervention against file sharing: that government intrusion into markets threatens technological innovation. Once again, this case represents an arguably liberal outcome (a ruling against large business interests) supported by a traditionally conservative doctrine, leaving the high court with a choice between allowing the former to stand or blemishing the latter. In this case, I'm not even sure the Court will reverse.

In other news, the Court also accepted a property case out of the 9th circuit involving 5th Amendment takings doctrine, although it appears that the Court has limited its inquiry into the collateral estoppel question.

The flypaper court gets some vinegar

A recent piece by Sheryl Gay Stolberg in the NYT addresses the battle for the court, the next major fight likely to be seen in Washington. A lot of people get stressed out over the "politicization" of judicial selection, but reducing the political dimension of choosing judges and justices would require a lot of changes in and outside of the judiciary that are unlikely to happen anytime soon. Stolberg spoke to Jay Sekulow, chief counsel for the Pat Robertson-founded ACLJ, who describes the plans being made in anticipation of CJ Rehnquist's retirement. These plans include all the sort of things you'd expect with any major legislative action, including grassroots efforts directed at Senators facing reelection soon. They're preparing position papers on potential nominees, which are part guesswork on the policy impact a particular candidate will have if given the seat and part propaganda intended to make the choice palatable to President Bush or moderate Republicans in the Senate.

Of course, it may all be for nothing. Last weekend, the magazine section carried another piece by Jeffrey Rosen about the fruitlessness of pursuing social change through the judiciary. Rosen's points have a long tradition in social scientific study of American courts, going back to Robert Dahl's 1950s article arguing that the Supreme Court tends to support the national governing coalition at the time. However, Dahl's article is probably most well-known now among political scientists who study courts for being incorrect. Many scholars have taken issue with Dahl's conclusions and an article published about twenty years later pointed out a variety of mischaracterizations and exclusions from Dahl's analysis that Rosen doesn't acknowledge.


Although he doesn't mention it, Rosen's argument also echoes that made by Gerald Rosenberg in The Hollow Hope, which I've alluded to before here. Rosenberg argues that civil reformers waste their time with litigation, getting stuck in "the flypaper court" that has no real power to affect social change when their efforts would be better made in other arenas. Although Rosenberg's work makes some interesting points about the powerful myths surrounding Brown v Board of Ed, his evidence and conclusions about the lack of impact Brown had on desegregation and more generally about the ineffectiveness of courts to produce social change have been challenged, most notably by Michael McCann. He also alludes to work on the Supreme Court and public opinion, which has found that the Supreme Court is not often too far out of step with the public.

Still, there's a big gap between observing that "Brown v. Board of Education was actually popular with a narrow majority of the country" and concluding that institutions of government outside the national judiciary were prepared to do something about segregation in the mid-1950s. Sure, many of what are supposed to be the bravest steps the courts have taken aren't as unpopular as one might think, but with the political branches as slow to act and political agendas as resistant to progressive campaigns as they are, courts' impetus for change can make a big difference. The Massachusetts same-sex marriage case (Goodridge), for instance, led to the passage of state initiatives opposing same-sex marriage in other parts of the country, but in Massachusetts itself led to a constitutional convention that ended up recommending a "reversal" of Goodridge by permitting same-sex civil unions with all the benefits of civil marriage but the name itself, something that wasn't really on the legislative agenda beforehand. Now, with a net gain for supporters of gay marriage in the 2004 elections, there's some doubt about whether any reversal amendment will pass a necessary second time.

I think Rosen and many others are still smarting from what has been perceived as the widespread values backlash that put President Bush back in the White House for another four years. Sure, getting same-sex marriage in one state may seem like a bad trade for another Bush term and a swing against the Democrats in Congress, but that's no reason to conclude that courts have no power to effect positive social change. The House's impeachment of President Clinton in 1998 led to an electoral backlash against the Republicans, but that doesn't mean that Congress has no power to effect social change either.

Like it or not, progressives are not unified; even had they been able to clearly anticipate the response, there's no guarantee that same-sex marriage proponents in Massachusetts would have abandoned their efforts to change the state of the law through litigation. I don't care if Rosen or others want to be bitter about the political consequences of judicial activism in the 2004 election, but be open about your bitterness.

To me, the most interesting thing about this story was the opinion poll sidebar. In the print edition, it only included the nine current justices, whereas here we see the figures for "other" and "don't know any names." Unsurprisingly, more than twice as many Americans couldn't name a single justice whom they admired as named all of the current justices combined. I thought it was amusing that about twice as many people mistakenly named someone who isn't even on the Court as named my own favorite current justice, Stephen Breyer.

It's just a phase...

Cute bit in The Onion this week.

Distractions, distractions

I've got a conference paper to write, two articles to revise for journal submission and tons of finals to grade (and more coming this week,) so naturally I'm spending a lot of time surfing the internet and writing blog posts. Whoever said that the internet was leading to productivity growth (and I believe it was Alan Greenspan) was crazy.

Reasons to live in New Haven

OK, just one. Digital Mix, a "musical event" hosted by the Yale Law School Information Society Project (not Information Society, thankfully) brings together DJ Spooky and Mark Hosler along with some legal folks (including Jack Balkin of Balkinization) to discuss the evolution of digital music and the legal issues implicated.

The Mouse that Roared

No, not this one and I don't have HBO, so I won't get a chance to see the Peter Sellers biopic anytime soon. This one's from Woody Allen, writing in the New Yorker. I haven't seen a Woody Allen film since 2000, but apparently I haven't been missing anything. It's nice to see some more comedic prose from him though, especially since he gets to put all that time spent in court in the last ten years to use. Coincidentally, What's New, Pussycat? was on cable this weekend late at night and I forgot to tape it.

I can't let this go without pointing out the tradition of adult fairy tale and cartoon character references in rap. See Ice Cube's "A Gangsta's Fairytale Parts 1 and 2," "Cartoon Capers" by Kool Keith and Dan the Automator, "The Forest" from Ghostface Killah and "Crookie Monster" by Agallah, which you can listen to here.

The "High" Court - No Mr. Nice Guy

I couldn't help contributing to the litany of jokes that have been made on the occasion of the Supreme Court's recent medical marijuana case, Ashcroft v Raich. Linda Greenhouse gives the conventional account of the oral argument, presenting an amusing collision of the Rehnquist Court's latent conservative Commerce Clause revolution with the Republican Party's conservative War on Drugs. The 9th Circuit, again, faces reversal for ruling that the Controlled Substances Act is unconstitutional as enforced against those taking marijuana under California's Compassionate Use Act.

Cases like this one convince me that the 9th Circuit's record of frequent overturn by the Supreme Court isn't entirely due to their ideological incompatibility with the current Court. In cases like Raich, judges on the 9th circuit seem to take pleasure in tweaking ostensibly conservative high court doctrines, daring the Court to bite the bullet and accept the perverse (ie. sometimes liberal) consequences of the legal principles they create, or abandon them. Of course, ultimately the Justice Department is responsible for this case, so if the Court ends up killing its nascent limits on Commerce power, everyone can thank Ashcroft.

Anyway, Greenhouse's account of the oral argument is backed up for the most part by Dahlia Lithwick's reliably entertaining piece, filed last Monday. She briefly recounts the Lopez and Morrison cases that have promised so much to conservatives and the unpleasant choice faced by liberals and conservatives alike between a federalism jurisprudence that could severely limit Congress' ability to regulate, but give states the ability to be duped into allowing dopers to toke up with a doctor's note, and leaving Congress with the power to pursue the War on Drugs and a lot of other things conservatives don't like as much. The preliminary consensus reached by Court-watchers that even the conservative justices are willing to cripple the Lopez line for the sake of drug prohibition seems to be borne out by the oral argument, but most people anticipated that this is the way it would go before Monday, so I'm inclined to be circumspect.


Marci Hamilton, writing for Findlaw, offers another reading of the case and a possible alternative outcome. She suggests that Raich can be distinguished from Wickard, despite suggestions by Scalia (a necessary vote for the plaintiffs, so it seems) and Breyer that they're the same case. Hamilton's arguments are incoherent, however. First, the fact that a state law is at issue in Raich but not in Wickard would only matter if the reach of Congress' Commerce Clause power were subject to a reverse-preemption doctrine of sorts, whereby state regulation of an area, like the cultivation of marijuana, crowds out regulation by the central government, but there's no basis for that (see Gibbons v Ogden, 1824). Even in the limited-Commerce power context of the early 20th century, Congress' authority extended or failed to extend to an activity by light of its nature or the nature of its effect, rather than the presence or absence of coordinate state regulation. In fact, while the Court was enforcing strict limits on Congress' Commerce power it was also using the Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment to prevent regulation of many of the same activities by states. I'm not dead set against this kind of development, as I'll elaborate upon below, but so far there's no ground in Commerce Clause jurisprudence for such a direction. The only orthodox direction for reverse-preemption would be legislative, as in the McCarran-Ferguson Act, and this is what Acting Solicitor General Paul Clement suggests.

Her second and third points contradict each other, indicating that the impact of an intrastate medical marijuana should be negligible, then saying that the impact will be to decrease the interstate black market for marijuana, a speculative policy projection that the Court, as Hamilton seems to acknowledge, shouldn't be making. The justices also seem more inclined to accept the factual claims of the Justice Department regarding the impact of allowing medical marijuana cultivation, or so the oral argument suggests. Hamilton does not, interestingly, raise the claim Randy Barnett does for the plaintiffs, that marijuana cultivation is "non-economic" activity, which would put it in line with the Lopez and Morrison decisions. Even Hamilton, it seems, is not willing to contend that the cultivation and consumption of a substance that moves in a multi-billion dollar market internationally is not economic activity.

Hamilton's other points about the cross-cutting benefits of a robust federalism are well-taken, especially with Republican control of the presidency and Congress. Still, liberals have and should be wary of Court-enforced, categorical limits on congressional regulatory power, since the problems Madison raises in the Federalist in support of a larger Republic that can resist control by localized factions still obtain in an integrated, large scale national economy. Justice Brennan's scheme for liberal federalism, devised for judicial federalism, seems useful for regulatory federalism as well. Brennan's judicial federalism allowed for a baseline of protection for individual rights under the federal Constitution, but permitted independent development of state constitutional law to expand on those rights. The direction offered by Justice Breyer, "medicine by regulation" in his own words, might also be useful in this direction, if it allowed judges to "find" reverse-preemption grounds in statutes and provided courts a way to balance the factual conclusions of federal agencies against those undergirding state regulatory schemes like California's. Breyer's background favors Legal Process school thinking and administrative law solutions and can often be counted on for suggestions like this.

The focus on whether Raich can be distinguished from Wickard assumes that the Court isn't prepared to abandon or limit Wickard, although there's little evidence that they are. Thomas, I'm sure, is ready to go, but even Scalia doesn't seem inclined to revisit Wickard so that long-haired hippie freaks can get high in their communes and run wild in the streets. Like Lithwick, I think it's hilarious to think of the justices, who appear to have learned everything they know about marijuana from Reefer Madness, contemplating state-sanctioned weed usage. If only Douglas Ginsburg had gotten Kennedy's seat.

There's another option, however, unexamined by Hamilton or any of the other commentators I've read, and it would allow the justices to uphold the Controlled Substances Act without killing off any restrictions on the Commerce Clause. Despite his insistence, according to Lithwick, that Raich can't be distinguished from Wickard, Scalia offers a possible ground for doing so on the basis of a much more narrow ground than the nature of activity or size of impact categorical approach. His point that certain items, like ivory and eagle feathers, are subject to prohibition regardless of how they move through commerce due to the prohibitive nature of the market they contribute to could certainly be adapted to create a "drug war" exception. This wouldn't be the first time the Court has contorted general principles to permit government action in pursuit of drug prohibition.

Notes on The Office and TV in general

Over the years, I've gone from watching practically no TV at all (I didn't even have one for a couple of years in college) to following a bunch of television series at once and back to watching very little television programming. Right now, I've been following Desperate Housewives, which isn't bad, although my wife is more of a fan, and Boston Legal, which has many of the flaws typical of David Kelley shows, but has the substantial virtues of James Spader and William Shatner. It may only be a matter of time, however, before I tire of the same legal shenanigans and sexual histrionics paraded out again and again and drop that show, especially if Shatner's appearances continue to be little more than glorified cameos. In truth, I find it hard to commit to a drama since The X-Files, a show I loved dearly that abused my affection. To alienate any X-Files fans, my biggest problem with the show wasn't the marginalization and departure of Mulder and Scully, but that those things didn't happen earlier.

Now, and for a couple of years, all my favorite shows are comedies: Chappelle's Show, the Adult Swim lineup on Cartoon Network, The Office, and I've been watching BBC America's reruns of The Young Ones, the Blackadder series and The Avengers with much more enthusiasm than any new series. Actually, in recent weeks I've bought the first seasons of Chappelle, Aqua Teen Hunger Force (my favorite of the Adult Swim shows) and Sealab 2021 on DVD. Just last week, I also picked up the four disc set of The Office, series 1 and 2 plus the special and I'd like to thank them for putting the series together like that, rather than stretching out one six episode series into three discs on its own, as MI-5 did.


I saw an article awhile ago about The Office in the New Yorker, but declined to read it until now. Nancy Franklin, risking hyperbole, calls the series "perfect" and I can't actually disagree with her on that. I do dispute that it doesn't make you laugh, because I've hurt myself watching it. I start laughing just thinking about certain scenes. Alternatively, several scenes documenting the unfulfilled "relationship" between Tim and Dawn, the most sympathetic characters on the show, are so devastating that they're almost unbearable. I actually watched all 12 episodes and the special within a couple of days of buying the discs. I'd seen them all before, not too long ago, but I couldn't help myself.

Franklin's review points out the opportunities taken and lost by the special, which does a good job of building on David Brent's character, showing his reactions to minor reality-TV fame along with a dedication and energy that might just explain how such an ineffectual person became office manager at Wernham Hogg in the first place. The resolution of the Tim-Dawn situation is a concession, but it isn't the outcome that seems so off-key as it is the undisguised artifice that achieves it. The ending of the special, more than the ending of the series, has the contrived neatness that up until then Gervais and Merchant had avoided.

I do not think that comedies are necessarily "less serious" than dramas, if by that one means frivolous. In fact, many comedies are more consequential than a lot of dramas, if only because most dramas nowadays strike me as amazingly thoughtless. I find it easy to scorn a drama for shallowness, but a shallow comedy I'll likely dismiss. Unless I like it, of course. With The Office, I'm inclined to credit my taste. I love the show, but I also think it's excellent. The Office engages me in a way that even some of my other favorite comedies don't.

The New Yorker piece notes that an American version of The Office, with Steve Carell, is on its way. Although I like Carell (of The Daily Show) and wish him success, I hope the American Office is a failure. Not because I relish the catastrophes of American producers' feeble attempts to mimic successful, intelligent product from overseas (well, not this time) but because I doubt that a truly interesting American take on the Office that I would like would be successful. If this new show takes off, it'll probably be because it sucks. Of course, it might suck and be cancelled quickly (see Coupling) which is also good fortune. If, by some chance, The American Office is good or great and is cancelled quickly, then a DVD set will appear in short order that I can buy.

Actually, I predict that Steve Carell's approach to David Brent (or whatever they call Mr. Toad) will be unsatisfying. Gervais' Brent was funny, ie. he did funny things, but what really made that character effective was that Gervais never gave a hint that Brent was aware of how he was perceived, something I don't think Carell is capable of. Despite his painful efforts to engineer his own reputation, Brent was defined by his unselfconsciousness. In fact, self-consciousness is one of the few things separating me (I hope) from David Brent.

Will I ever be able to commit to a dramatic series again? I don't know. I've tried several, but I always find something that irritates me about them. The flaws that found their way into The X-Files, especially the creators' willingness to indulge their primary characters and thereby condescend to an audience who had overinvested in them, pervades prime-time drama. I also need to find the courage to risk being hurt again, as I was by The X-Files. What's the formula for the amount of time it takes to get over a relationship, half the length of the relationship itself? This could take a long time.