Provocations

by Camille Paglia

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  Malcolm Johnson, “Strange, Fascinating ‘Henry Fool’ Is Hal Hartley’s Best Film Yet,” The Hartford Courant, July 17, 1998. “ ‘Henry Fool’ is the name of a literary blowhard, a would-be Kerouac and ego-swollen drifter who finds an acolyte in a poor, bullied garbage man named Simon Grim….Through his constant extolling of the commitments that must be made by poets, Henry turns the hopeless Simon into an international celebrity, a poet damned by the Right and embraced by Camille Paglia (who hilariously parodies herself on camera).” [Paglia rewrote her dialogue in the original script by director Hal Hartley.]

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  “Behavior, Beliefs, and Betrayal,” The Los Angeles Times, August 20, 1998. “The Times asked women writers to talk about what messages were sent to women and girls by President Clinton’s admission Monday night [about misleading the nation for seven months about his affair with Monica Lewinsky] and his wife’s public reaction to it.” Paglia: “Women are groupies or nannies. If you are a wife, you will be sent out to lie like a rug. If you are a daughter, you will be used as a family values stage prop.” The Times headlined this paragraph “Mops, Props, and Nannies.”

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  Angela Phillips, interview, “At War with the Sisters,” “The Guardian Profile: Camille Paglia. Is she the Emma Peel of the women’s movement—duffing up the right-on ‘feminazis’ on behalf of bad girls everywhere? Or is she, as they would say, peddling outdated, simplistic views completely out of touch with the Nineties?” The Guardian (U.K.), September 19, 1998. Pull quote: “I have always been convinced that I was right. I don’t come from a line of self-doubters.” “Camille Paglia’s longtime friend Robert Caserio says, ‘She doesn’t want dialogue, she wants conflict. She sees dialogue as a sentimental term for coercion.’ ”

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  Paglia, “The New Morality,” Penthouse, October 1998. Penthouse requested an expansion of CP’s “A Call for Lustiness” in Time magazine, March 23, 1998.

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  “You ask the questions (Such as: Camille Paglia, feminist icon, how do you feel about being described as a misogynist?),” The Wednesday Review, The Independent (U.K.), October 7, 1998. “Why do you think some people find you scary? Because I think for myself and don’t seek approval. Most people are trapped by habit and fear.”

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  Bryan Appleyard, interview, “Mouthtrap: Camille Paglia, fastest-talking feminist in the West, speaks her mind,” The Sunday Times Magazine (U.K.), October 18, 1998. Jack DeWitt, Paglia’s friend and colleague at the University of the Arts: “Her hyperboles are, in her mind, understatements. Values and beliefs are not, for her, intellectual games. They may not be a matter of life and death, but they are certainly a matter of life.”

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  Leslie Felperin, interview, “Beauty and the Beasts: Camille Paglia on nature and civilization in Hitchcock’s The Birds,” Sight & Sound, October 1998. Paglia: “The main problem with so much feminist film criticism, as well as post-structuralism and postmodernism, is that they’re obsessed with words. Film critics for the past 25 years have tried to impose verbal categories on film. But film works choreographically; it uses body language, for which Hitchcock had tremendous feeling….I was very impressed in his silent films by his skill in photographing crowds. My theory is that because his father was a greengrocer, Hitchcock in his early years directly experienced the crowds in London moving in surging rhythms. So he learned how to show crowds moving through the streets or going down subway stairs—as in the title sequence of North by Northwest, with its crowds rushing across the screen. Hitchcock has the ability of a great stage or opera director to manage groups of people. Italians can do these giant, Fellini-like crowd scenes, but you don’t expect that from someone emerging from British culture. The sense of space is so constrained in England that people learn to live within narrow borders….

  “One of my favorite scenes in The Birds is the one at the jungle gym near the schoolhouse. Tippi Hedren is anxiously smoking and looking over one shoulder, while over the other we see crows beginning to land on the jungle gym. For me, the jungle gym is a symbol of civilization—the framework, the grid—and the birds are nature. Soon the jungle gym is heaving and rippling with birds, which look very evil, very dark and almost shapeless. Then you have Hedren sitting there smoking in this amazingly sophisticated manner, fantastically elegant. That combination—the primitive horror of the rippling black birds, and the beauty of the woman staring off alone, with no male, staring off into space, very composed—is to me a symbolic depiction of human life, both nature and culture. I took from Hitchcock this view of the frame of culture, the invisible skeleton of civilized life. I regard myself as someone who is climbing and groping and trying to find the rungs of the invisible jungle gym of contemporary society and Western culture. It’s an enormously important image to me.”

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  “Bombs Away: More views of the president, the impeachment, and the bombing of Baghdad,” The New York Press, December 23–29, 1998. Roundtable about bombings ordered by Bill Clinton. Paglia: “I was outraged by the timing of the bombing of Iraq. It was so absolutely tied to the onrushing impeachment debate the next day in the House of Representatives. As far as I’m concerned, this was proof positive that the missile raids Clinton ordered from Martha’s Vineyard in August were similarly tied to political events….Where was the Left?…Utter silence….Meanwhile, in London, protestors threw red paint symbolizing blood on the Foreign Ministry. There were attacks on the U.S. embassy in Syria and riots in Moscow—in Amsterdam there were riots against the bombing! In Amsterdam!”

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  Paglia, “Millennium Reputations: Which are the most overrated authors, or books, of the past 1,000 years?,” The Sunday Telegraph (U.K.), February 14, 1999. Paglia nominates Samuel Beckett, whose work is “shot through with callow wordplay and oafish low comedy, the defense mechanism of clammy, adolescent males squirming before the complexity of biology.” States that the “cultural chasm between generations of intellectuals” is shown by attitudes toward Beckett. Michel Foucault and Susan Sontag are “on the record as Beckett worshippers,” but Paglia’s post-war generation sought “sensuality and passionate engagement” in art: “Hence Dionysian rock ’n’ roll, based in African-American rhythm and blues, is our pagan ode to life.”

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  Ros Wynne-Jones, interview, “Hitchcock’s Birds,” The Express (U.K.), February 27, 1999. “As we celebrate the centenary of the birth of Alfred Hitchcock, Camille Paglia talks to Ros Wynne-Jones about his portrayal of women. Was he really a misogynist?”

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  Paglia, “Camille Does the Oscars,” Salon.com, March 22, 1999. “Whitney Houston is fabulously elegant in a slim white gown and early 1930s hair, but Mariah Carey, heavily girdled in a white dress with a broad halter strap, looks like a St. Pauli beer-garden waitress missing her tray of suds. The two hold hands as they wail a nominated song, while a columnar gold drape unfurls behind them like a rushing fountain or a Morris Louis tapestry painting. But less definitely isn’t more at this show: suddenly the two gals are attacked by a gospel choir so badly filmed as they descend symmetrical staircases that they look like a giant flock of deranged geese….

  “At last an adrenaline rush as Sophia Loren, her massive, buttressed bosom leading like the prow of a battleship, comes out to introduce the clip for the Italian film, Life Is Beautiful. She looks a bit like Anouk Aimée these days. What star power! Loren puts all the smirky ingénues to shame. When Andie MacDowell schleps out after Loren, I literally have to turn my head away. Can’t American actresses get their damned act together?…An x-rated joke about ‘beavers’ is an odd segue into the dreaded Anne Heche, whom I thought we got rid of last year in Psycho. Heche’s radio mike, clamped to her bodice, keeps flickering out, but whether this is accidental isn’t clear. Cutting-edge technology poisoned by her mushroom-like clamminess? Ellen DeGeneres, another victim clamped to the Heche bodice, had a si
milar fate….

  “Renée Zellweger, a minor actress who somehow ended up on the cover of Vanity Fair last year, clunks out hobbled by an elaborate purple-and-gold gown that she hasn’t the foggiest clue about how to wear. ‘What a big bag of oats!’ I cry with disgust. Doesn’t she have any gay guy friends to shop with? Someone should slap that girl up and down Rodeo Drive until she learns what fashion is….I close my eyes when Nicolas Cage appears, since I can’t stand his eternal pose of beady-eyed earnestness….

  “Val Kilmer walks out, leading a gorgeous bay horse, who has more beauty and style than three-quarters of tonight’s actresses. Its splendid black-and-silver saddle and tack deserve the award for best costume. Then the horse turns its ass to the audience—which may be the perfect comment about the evening….Dreary, hunch-shouldered Helen Hunt is back. ‘She looks like Jan Brady,’ Alison remarks. ‘She looks like Patty Hearst,’ I reply. Oh, I’m so tired of that generic kind of pallid, decorous WASP anemia. Take her away!”

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  Paglia, “Propelled by Earhart’s Soaring Spirit,” The Los Angeles Times, March 24, 1999, article on Amelia Earhart for Women’s History Month.

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  Paglia, “Madonna and Her Sensational New Look,” Harpers & Queen (U.K.), May 1999. “Camille Paglia interprets her latest guise—the Geisha.” Photos by Patrick Demarchelier. Paglia: “Madonna Dominatrix, grandly making her queen’s progress through costume history, has now entered her Japanese period….Madonna has a positive genius for sexual personae.”

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  Paglia, double book review, “Back to the Barricades,” The New York Times Book Review, May 9, 1999. Christine Wallace, Germaine Greer: Untamed Shrew, and Germaine Greer, The Whole Woman.

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  Paglia, “Overrated and Underrated” special issue, American Heritage magazine, May/June 1999. “Most Overrated Feminist: Gloria Steinem”; “Most Underrated Feminist: Faye Wattleton.” Paglia describes Wattleton’s “brilliant” performance at the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearings on the nomination of David Souter to the Supreme Court.

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  Leslie Fiedler, “Hubbell Acceptance Speech,” in Steven G. Kellman and Irving Malin, eds., Leslie Fiedler and American Culture (1999). Fiedler’s 1994 speech on receiving the Jay B. Hubbell Medal for Lifetime Achievement in American Literary Studies, awarded by the American Literature Section of the Modern Language Association of America. Fiedler: “Even more disturbingly, I am now routinely quoted in jargon-ridden, reader-unfriendly works I cannot bring myself to read, and am listed honorifically in the kind of footnotes and bibliographies I have always eschewed. But most disturbingly of all, as a result (in a culture where nothing fails like success) some younger, future-oriented critics have begun to speak of me as old-fashioned, a member of a moribund establishment. I was, however, heartened when Camille Paglia, the most future-oriented of them all, the enfant terrible, in fact, of her generation, as I was of mine, was moved by a new edition of Love and Death in the American Novel, to write, ‘Fiedler created an American intellectual style that was truncated by the invasion of faddish French theory in the ’70s and ’80s. Let’s turn back to Fiedler and begin again.’ Her words not merely reassure me that I am, still, not P.C. They also make me aware that whatever I have written about has always been from an essentially American point of view and in an essentially American voice; and that therefore I am in the deepest sense an ‘Americanist.’ ”

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  “Camille Does the Movies,” National Film Theatre, British Film Institute, June 2–17, 1999. Film series chosen by Paglia, who introduced seven films in person: Darling, Butterfield 8, The Philadelphia Story, All About Eve, Orphée, The Ten Commandments, La Dolce Vita, Auntie Mame, Suddenly Last Summer, Persona, Accident, Valley of the Dolls (shown with Glennda and Camille Do Downtown), and Niagara. Accompanied by representatives of the BFI, Paglia lectured on Persona at screenings in the north of England, including Sheffield. From her keynote statement in the BFI’s program brochure for June 1999: “Films for me are life experiences. They have formed the way I see the world, and they have populated my mind with mythic personae. As a scholar and critic, I can trace my guiding ideas, emotions, and tastes to the first films I saw in early childhood (such as Walt Disney’s Snow White and Fantasia).”

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  Paglia, “Camille Paglia Tells Why Kids Want to Blow Up the World,” conversation with Ingrid Sischy, Interview magazine, July 1999. “One of the biggest problems is that there has been a suppression of the masculine in our culture, and not just because feminism has been questioning it, but because there is no room in our service-sector economy for anything genuinely masculine.”

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  Paglia, “Letter from Philadelphia” (featured series), The Times Literary Supplement (U.K.), July 16, 1999. From the Center City performing arts district to Termini Bakery and Pat’s King of Steaks in Italian-American South Philadelphia.

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  Paglia, “Smashed Wine Bottles, Hairpin Bends, Formidable Brassieres, and My Other Favorite Moments,” The Observer Review (U.K.), August 8, 1999. For the Alfred Hitchcock centenary: Paglia’s favorite scenes in Hitchock films.

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  Paglia, Salon.com column, September 7, 1999. “My summer report begins with my enormous sense of satisfaction and relief over the renewal of public attention to the Waco disaster, which was so foul an affront to American civil liberties. The abortive investigation into the 1993 incident, in which more than 80 members of David Koresh’s Branch Davidian religious sect died in a fire at their Texas compound, is currently being blamed on the FBI’s withholding of crucial information from Attorney General Janet Reno, who had just assumed office.

  “But the major media, with their strongly liberal bias, are equally guilty, for in trying to protect the new Democratic president, Bill Clinton, they let Reno get away scot-free with her blatant mismanagement of the Waco stand-off. At the quickly convened congressional hearing into Waco in 1993, Reno’s self-righteous invocation of the child-abuse card deserved to be derided and rejected by the media, who were already in a state of collective amnesia over the appalling spectacle of government tanks knocking down the buildings of a private citizen.

  “Where were America’s leftists after Waco? Diddling their thumbs in their urban and campus coteries, as usual. The shocking absence of protest about this incident drove the issues underground. It reemerged two years later on the lunatic far Right, in Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the federal office building in Oklahoma City on the anniversary of Waco, at a cost of 168 lives.

  “This is a good example of what I have described as the principle of rightward drift in populist thought. When authentic critique is silenced or censored on the Left, issues drift subliminally to the Right, where they burst out again full-formed as fascist violence. Government authority was illegitimately used at Waco—and one fascism begot another.”

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  Paglia, Salon.com column, September 20, 1999. “The recent repeat TV airings of Titanic (1998) have enraged me anew about the injustice done to Kate Winslet, who deserved the Oscar for her emotional bravura and physical fortitude in that film. The tense footage of Winslet carrying an ax as she fights her way through the cold flood of seawater in a dusky corridor will be one of the few canonical moments of 1990s cinema, equal to cigarette-flaunting, leg-crossing Sharon Stone’s flouting of the police from her interrogation throne in Basic Instinct (1992). Retchingly vanilla Helen Hunt, who walked off with Winslet’s Oscar, goes on piling up undeserved awards, as at last week’s Emmys. But a quarter century from now, when people are still admiring Winslet in Titanic, no one will remember who the hell Helen Hunt was. Hollywood, get your priorities straight: please reward artistic merit, not popularity in your chummy entertainment elite.”

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  “The New Gate,” Suddenly Susan, NBC TV situation-comedy, Season 4, Episode 1, aired September 20, 1999. Susan Keane (
Brooke Shields) is a magazine writer in San Francisco dismayed by the arrival of a new boss, Ian Maxtone-Graham (Eric Idle of Monty Python), who plans to turn the magazine into an upscale men’s publication. Ian says, “You’ve heard of Camille Paglia….Paglia says, ‘Sex sells.’ ” Susan briefly quits after being assigned to write what she sees as a sleazy sex piece.

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  Paglia, Salon.com column, December 8, 1999. “I was delighted to hear that Matt Drudge is leaving his Fox News Channel talk show, since I’ve longed for him to focus full attention on his historic creation, the Drudge Report, which at its best is an effervescent mix of politics, science news, crime stories, Hollywood gossip, and plain old-fashioned scandal. Last week was a classic Drudge moment: into the humdrum monotony of midday came blazing on the Drudge site a just-posted Reuters article entitled ‘Daredevil jumps off Rio Christ in Bond-style stunt.’ In the magnificent color photo of the 98-foot-tall colossus of Cristo Redentor on Corcovado Mountain overlooking the misty green slopes of Rio de Janeiro, an Austrian parachutist who had fired a cable from a crossbow over the statue’s arm at dawn could be seen about to jump from its outstretched hand. (He had left flowers on the shoulder of the Christ ‘as a mark of respect.’) Thank you, Matt Drudge, for a sublime moment of beauty and awe. Art has migrated from the museums to the Web.”