Gore Vidal…can you believe this country?!?!?
“GORE VIDAL: THE UNITED STATES OF AMNESIA” My rating: B (Opening July 25 at the Screenland Crown Center)
83 minutes | No MPAA rating
Gore Vidal was pissed off by so many people and things that you wonder he could get out of bed in the morning.
He was contemptuous of the ruling class (into which he was born), identifying it as a pack of scheming, manipulative greedheads. At the same time Vidal could only shake his head in dismay at the boneheadedness of the average citizen, so lazy and distracted by life’s diversions that he cannot discern where his own best interests lie.
Given this, Vidal should have been an insufferable misanthrope.
But as Nicholas D. Wrathall’s documentary makes clear, just the opposite was true. Gore Vidal — novelist (Myra Breckenridge, Lincoln, Burr), social observer (The Rise and Fall of the American Empire), essayist, screenwriter and playwright (“Ben-Hur,” “The Best Man”), gadfly, twice a candidate for Congress — made affrontery charming. With that patrician delivery, his cool analysis of facts and personalities, and his wonderful way with a verbal harpoon, he was hugely entertaining. Even if you didn’t much like what he was saying.
“Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia,” begins shortly before the writer’s death in 2012. He’s touring the cemetery where he will be laid to rest, pointing out the graves of old acquaintances, the plots of prominant families with whom he has been familiar his entire life. Finally he stands over his own grave. A marker already bears his name and the date of his birth in 1925. It just awaits the addition of the day he will die.
Vidal was lucid to the end and seems not to have forgotten anything he experienced in his 80-plus years. Which stands in stark contrast to his belief that mankind — especially Americans — “miraculously forget everything.” He thought we were children so taken with a new toy that we don’t notice the unmanned car rolling directly at us down the driveway.
Vidal’s colorful life gets a remarkably detailed treatment here, from his childhood as the son of FDR’s aviation chief (Vidal’s father had an affair with Amelia Earhart) to his position as America’s most prominent gadfly and iconoclast.
He was openly gay long before it was fashionable (or safe). Gore was an intimate of the Kennedys and Roosevelts — though in his later years he regretted falling for political charisma. He called JFK “A charming man. A disastrous president.”
His bestselling novels made him very rich, allowing him to live much of his life in a breathtakingly beautiful Italian villa overlooking the Mediterranean. As a self-made man, he answered to no one. That independence is what made him such a valuable observer.
Told mostly in chronological order, “The United States of Amnesia” benefits from the hundreds of televised interviews Vidal gave over the decades. Particularly wonderful are the sniping TV commentaries he and conservative pundit William F. Buckley gave during the 1968 Presidential campaign. This sideshow of barely-civil debate culminated with Buckley calling Vidal a faggot and threatening to beat him up. Vidal responded by calling Buckley a crypto-fascist. On live network television.
Vidal could be angry, but that wasn’t his dominant mood. His view was more fatalistic than furious, and he had the good sense to revel in life’s pleasures. He was a bon vivant, a hugely social animal.
His love life was curious. He lived for several decades with Howard Auster, who for all intents and purposes was Mrs. Vidal, managing the writer’s day-to-day life and publicity. But while Vidal and Auster were soul mates, they were not lovers. “Sex ruins relationships,” Vidal states. Both men were happily promiscuous. When Auster died a decade ago, he was buried next to Vidal’s plot. They are now covered by the same marble slab.
Throughout the film director Wrathall peppers the film with graphics reflecting some of Vidal’s most memorable observations. Here are just a few:
* “All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.”
* The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.”
* “Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.”
* “The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.”
* “There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices.”
* “There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.”
Why is Vidal such a compelling figure? I think it’s because of the battle between hard-nosed pragmatism and unabashed idealism fought out in his soul. He loved the idea of America, but was tormented by the discrepancy between the country’s possibility and its tawdry reality.
That’s what makes him a true patriot. Most of us are content to shrug and go with the flow.
| Robert W. Butler
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