The New Yorker & Me: The Ides of March: Lane v. Wood

Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Friday, January 20, 2012

The Ides of March: Lane v. Wood

Last night’s South Carolina debate’s mesmerizing, nasty, opening moments, which saw Newt Gingrich and John King try to cut each other up over Gingrich’s ex-wife’s “open marriage” allegation, affirmed the truth of Michael Wood’s interpretation of The Ides of March: “politics is not about good deeds but about dirty business, a matter of getting down in the muck with the elephants, as one of the movie’s campaign managers puts it” (“At the Movies,” London Review of Books, December 1, 2011). It’s interesting to compare Wood’s piece with Anthony Lane’s review (“Primary Suspect," The New Yorker, October 10, 2011). Incredibly, Lane construes The Ides of March as a love story. He says, “The quirk of this movie is that, for all its pretensions to topical soothsaying and its somber machinations of plot, it remains, in essence, a love story.” The love that Lane detects is between the Governor (George Clooney) and his press spokesman (Ryan Gosling). Lane says,

There are small shimmers of gay longing on display here – Myers getting ‘all goosebumpy,’ as Horowicz [a Times reporter] points out, at the very thought of Morris, or tearing up slightly as he watches his boss breeze through a Q.&A. – but further than that the movie fears to tread.

Lane’s take strikes me as totally wrong-headed. The Ides of March is about as far from being a love story as you can get. Wood gets it right; the movie is about politics’ rottenness. But I’ll give Lane credit for his inspired description of the Governor’s campaign manager (Philip Seymour Hoffman): “the human equivalent of a smoke-filled room.”

Credit: The above artwork is by Robert Risko; it appears in The New Yorker (October 10, 2011), as an illustration for Anthony Lane's "Primary Suspect."