Mickey Spillane interview – “The best inspiration is an empty bank account.”

washingtonpost.com
Man of Mysteries
It’d Been Years Since Spillane Pulled a Job. Could We Find Him? Yeah. It Was Easy.
By John Meroney
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, August 22, 2001
MURRELLS INLET, S.C.– For a man who has the reputation as the toughest tough guy in all of mystery fiction, Mickey Spillane really isn’t all that hard-boiled after all.
These days, at age 83, the writer of the classic 1947 detective novel “I, the Jury,” containing the famous line by gun-wielding private eye Mike Hammer, “I’m the jury now, and the judge, and . . . I sentence you to death,” is more obsessed with justice than vengeance.
Now living in this South Carolina fishing village, Spillane and his wife have spent the past 10 years questioning the verdict of a high-profile homicide case — a brutal murder in which a high school student was convicted of stabbing his girlfriend to death. Most observers saw it as open-and-shut. But the Spillanes believed an innocent man might have gone to jail. Spillane’s reluctance to render judgments in real-life crimes even extends to O.J. Simpson. While the conventional wisdom may be that the ex-football star is a guilty man, Spillane has always given him the benefit of the doubt, and only now will reluctantly admit that Simpson might be a murderer.
But next month, the other side of Spillane will again emerge. The New American Library is publishing two volumes of the best of his novels, from the late 1940s and early ’50s. In books like “I, the Jury,” “One Lonely Night” and “Kiss Me, Deadly” (all included in the collections, and all starring Mike Hammer), Spillane secured a permanent place for himself in the pantheon of such mystery greats as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald.
A fall rollout is being planned for “A Century of Noir” (also from NAL), a volume containing some of Spillane’s rare magazine stories from the same era, which he edited with mystery writer Max Allan Collins. An independent documentary of Spillane’s life was recently completed, and Jay Bernstein, producer of a Mike Hammer TV series that ran on CBS during the ’80s, is gearing up to sell prime time on another incarnation of the private detective, with a twist worthy of some of Spillane’s best shockers.
“I never thought anything big would come of all my writing,” says Spillane. “I just always wrote the kind of stuff I like to read.”
Others liked it, too, although it had a slow start. Spillane’s first book, “I, the Jury,” published in hardcover by Dutton, is the story that introduced Hammer to late-’40s America. In it, the detective is avenging the murder of an old Army pal, and the novel ends with three words that rank as one of the most famous — and unforgettable — conclusions in all of mystery fiction. But the book wasn’t a success until it appeared a year later in paperback. By 1951, Spillane had written the three best-selling mysteries of all time. According to today’s industry estimates, his 26 books have sold more than 200 million copies. Long before Jacqueline Susann, Mario Puzo, Stephen King and John Grisham, long before the blockbuster bestseller, there was Mickey Spillane, toiling away in I-like-Ike America.
“While Hammett and Chandler were successful and well known, they never approached the kind of success in terms of readership and recognition that Mickey has had,” says Otto Penzler, founder of the Mysterious Bookshop in New York.
But selling books wasn’t the only area where Spillane cornered the market. He is the only mystery writer to portray his sleuth on film: 1963’s “The Girl Hunters” has Spillane outfitted in a trench coat and porkpie hat, playing opposite Shirley Eaton in a screenplay based on his book. During the ’70s, Spillane went a step further and appeared in TV commercials for Miller Lite, parodying his reputation and helping make a name for the new beer. One spot, shot film noir style, showed Spillane in his office on a rainy night, pounding out his next bestseller on a manual typewriter. The story heard in his voice-over: “Chapter 9. I kicked in the door and shouted ‘Freeze!’ to the lone figure in the room. Even in the dark I could see she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever met. Then I saw a Lite Beer from Miller. ‘It’s got a third less calories than a regular beer, and it’s less filling,’ she whispered. ‘But the best thing is it tastes so great.’ Suddenly, all the pieces fell into place and I knew I’d come to the end of a long, long road. She poured. We drank. To be continued.”
In the books, Mike Hammer was no Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe. And he was certainly no sophisticated Nick Charles. Hammer was always a man on a mission, righting a wrong, settling a score. He was Dirty Harry long before Clint Eastwood was even in “Rawhide.” As Hammer explains to the head of police homicide in “I, the Jury”: “You’re a cop, Pat. You’re tied down by rules and regulations. There’s someone over you. I’m alone. . . . No one can kick me out of my job. Maybe there’s nobody to put up a huge fuss if I get gunned down, but then I still have a private cop’s license with the privilege to pack a rod, and they’re afraid of me. Some day, before long, I’m going to have a rod in my mitt and the killer in front of me. I’m going to watch the killer’s face. I’m going to plunk one right in his gut, and when he’s dying on the floor I may kick his teeth out.”
Spillane never really wrote sex scenes; he wrote about sexuality in a way that was unapologetically sensual and often seemed more provocative than the act itself. In “I, the Jury,” it’s all in the line of duty: “She was making no attempt to keep the negligee on. . . . I wondered how she got her tan. There were no strap marks anywhere. She uncrossed her legs deliberately and squirmed like an overgrown cat, letting the light play with the ripply muscles in her naked thighs. . . . I was only human. I bent over her, taking her mouth on mine. . . . She quivered under my hands wherever I touched her. . . . My hand fastened on the hem of her negligee and with one motion flipped it open, leaving her body lean and bare. She let my eyes search every inch of her brown figure. I grabbed my hat and jammed it on my head. ‘It must be your sister who has the birthmark,’ I told her as I rose. ‘See you later.’ “
The Absolutist
As popular as Spillane became with readers, it’s probably safe to say that in the decade or so after World War II, no writer of fiction incurred the wrath of the intellectual elite the way he did. Life put it pretty accurately in 1952 when it said that “no major book reviewer, anywhere, ever said a kind word about Mickey Spillane.” Some critics claimed to be horrified and revolted by his work. They labeled him gruesome and shocking. From afar, critics psychoanalyzed Spillane and asserted that the way he wrote about women revealed that he hated them. One review of “I, the Jury” said the book may soon be “required reading in a Gestapo training school.”
Just as famous, though, were Spillane’s rebukes: “I pay no attention to those jerks who think they’re critics,” he would say. “I don’t give a hoot about reading reviews. What I want to read are the royalty checks.” Today Spillane still laughs about it, and tells the story of the dinner party where “some New York literary guy” walked up to him and said, “I think it’s disgraceful that of the 10 best-selling books of all time, seven were written by you,” to which Spillane replied, “You’re lucky I’ve only written seven books.”
But it wasn’t just prudery about sexuality and violence that motivated Spillane’s critics: The political ideology and philosophical content of his novels also seemed to cut against the grain of the prevailing ethos. Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s excesses were giving anti-communism a bad name. Spillane opted to forge ahead and make defiant anti-communism a staple of several of his novels.
There is little moral ambiguity in Spillane’s work. Mostly, Mike Hammer sees the world in black and white. Often he looks at his cases in biblical terms, and once articulated his philosophy this way: “There’s no shame or sin in killing a killer. David did it when he knocked off Goliath. Saul did it when he slew his tens of thousands. There’s no shame to killing an evil thing.”
In the 1951 novel “One Lonely Night” (which Spillane says is one of his favorites) Hammer’s investigation leads him to the Communist Party, which he believes may be behind a murder, as well as the kidnapping of his secretary, Velda. Along the way, Hammer changes from an apolitical man who jokingly admits that “I haven’t voted since they dissolved the Whig party” to one who sees to the harsh realities of the Cold War, and equates the Soviet regime and Communist Party to Nazi Germany in white-hot if not purple prose:
“I could laugh now and think rings around them all because I was smarter than the best they could offer. Torture, Death, and Lies were their brothers, but I had dealt with those triplets many times myself. They weren’t strangers to me.”
Mickey and Ayn
Spillane’s effectiveness at tailoring that political message for the masses made him the envy of intellectual conservatives and won him affection from another best-selling novelist who also endured critical skewering: Ayn Rand.
Spillane smiles when the writer of “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged” is mentioned. “We were good friends,” he says. Rand was an atheist and Spillane was devoutly religious, but they found common cause in their opposition to communism, a theme they agreed should be championed in literature. Rand also liked Spillane because her concept of an ideal man was similar to the Mike Hammer character: tough, strong-willed, independent. She admired the way Spillane dramatized themes of moral absolutism in his detective plots. In 1961, partly as a publicity stunt, their publisher helped arrange a dinner meeting between them in New York. Spillane still recalls the affair: “It lasted four hours,” he says. Later, Rand wrote to Spillane privately, explaining what happened when she got home: “I wish I could have brought you in with me that night, after our meeting, because you might have been pleasantly shocked, as I was: When I entered my apartment, six young people (my students and close friends) were there, with my husband, waiting for me — and had been waiting for several hours — to hear what Mickey Spillane is like in person. The news that I was going to meet you had spread through our own grapevine — and there they were.
“All of them are enthusiastic admirers of yours — all of them (including me) had been disappointed too often, when meeting famous people — and so it was an enormous pleasure for all of us that I could give them a report on you (on any publicly reportable issues) which, for once, confirmed and raised, rather than lowered, our enthusiasm. You are the only modern writer with whom I do share the loyalty of my best readers — and I am proud of this.”
Rand appreciated Spillane’s precision as a writer, and in an essay on literature (which appears in her book “The Romantic Manifesto”) quotes from Spillane’s description of New York at night as an example of his skill — “The rain was misty enough to be almost foglike, a cold gray curtain that separated me from the pale ovals of white that were faces locked behind the steamed-up windows of the cars that hissed by. Even the brilliance that was Manhattan by night was reduced to a few sleepy yellow lights off in the distance” — and then compares it to a passage by Thomas Wolfe — “The city had never seemed as beautiful as it looked that night. For the first time he saw that New York was supremely, among the cities of the world, a city of night. There had been achieved here a loveliness that was astounding and incomparable, a kind of modern beauty, inherent to its place and time, that no other place nor time could match.”
To Rand, “there is not a single emotional word or adjective in Spillane’s description; he presents nothing save visual facts; but he selects only those facts, only those eloquent details, which convey the visual reality of the scene and create a mood of desolate loneliness.” Wolfe, she argued, used only estimates, “and in the absence of any indication of what aroused these estimates, they are arbitrary assertions and meaningless generalities.”
Rand’s letters to Spillane (reprinted in the book “Letters of Ayn Rand”) appear to indicate she was taken with more than just his writing. On one occasion, she mailed him a gift and wrote, “I am waiting eagerly to see you again. As you say, ‘Time ran out on us the other evening.’ But is there any reason why time should run us, rather than the other way around? Love, Ayn.” Later, when Rand missed seeing Spillane after “The Girl Hunters” was published, she wrote to him: “Why have you vanished? I was hoping to hear from you when you were in New York, but I understand that you have been rushing in and out of the city and that one can never catch you. If you want me to be a ‘Spillane Hunter’ — take this as part of the pursuit.”
When asked whether Ayn Rand had a crush on him, Spillane just smiles. “I really liked her,” he says, noting that much of their camaraderie came from an “us against them” view of the critics. “They hate us, don’t they?” Spillane would say to her.
The Case Next Door
In recent years, it is real-life crime that has captured Spillane’s attention. He is an avid viewer of Court TV, and it was the cable network that caused Spillane and his wife, Jane, to become involved in a nearby 1991 murder case. Johnnie Kenneth Register was convicted of a killing that sounds like one that would have spurred Mike Hammer to action. Register, then an 18-year-old high school student, was found guilty of raping his girlfriend, Crystal Faye Todd, stabbing her at least 30 times, slashing her throat and finally disemboweling her.
The Spillanes met with Register and interviewed him, but despite DNA tests that prosecutors said proved his guilt, they came to the conclusion that the young man was incapable of committing such a heinous act. The Spillanes believed Register was the victim of a corrupt legal system, and argued that the prosecutor for Horry and Georgetown counties, Ralph Wilson, had tampered with evidence to frame him. Jane Spillane even mounted her own political candidacy to challenge the prosecutor in 1998, and although she didn’t win, many feel that it was her entry in what was a two-way race that caused the incumbent prosecutor to ultimately lose his bid for reelection. Nevertheless, both the South Carolina and U.S. supreme courts have upheld Register’s 1993 conviction. While the Spillanes still maintain the case was botched from the beginning, they now admit the weight of evidence against Register is enormous, but argue there is no way Register was the only one involved in Todd’s death.
Mostly, though, Mickey Spillane’s days are free of the kind of controversy that his novels generated. The man who penned sexually provocative scenes is actually a family man, married to the same woman for almost 20 years. This afternoon he has returned from taking his grandchildren to the amusement park rides in nearby Myrtle Beach. He is also deeply religious, committed to the Jehovah’s Witness faith, and attends meetings at Kingdom Hall five times a week.
Those most familiar with Spillane’s work say that his novels softened after his 1951 conversion, a notion that Spillane dismisses. But in 1952 he told Life: “There are more books on the way, but they won’t contain the things that bolster the excuses for the moral breakdown of this present generation. I’ve changed my work and course of action to be in harmony with Jehovah’s Kingdom.”
Missing from the Spillanes’ rambling house are the kinds of mementos that come with a 60-year writing career — Hurricane Hugo destroyed many of them when it hit in 1989, destroying their previous residence. He completely rebuilt the house on the same site where he’s lived since moving here from Newburgh, N.Y., in 1953. One thing that was salvaged, and which visitors can’t miss seeing, is his vintage Jaguar XK-140, which John Wayne surprised him with after Spillane wrote part of the Wayne-produced film “Ring of Fear” in the 1950s. “He didn’t know what to give me because I told him not to pay me,” says Spillane. “But he knew I liked cars. I used to look around when I was out in Hollywood — ‘Boy, I’d love to have one of those’ — but knew I’d probably never buy any. One morning I opened the front door and there was this car with a big red ribbon wrapped around it and a card that said, ‘Thanks, Duke.’ “
The Final Word
In the documentary “Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane,” which Max Allan Collins produced and is readying for film festivals and a possible TV premiere, Spillane tells about a $1,000 wager he made with an editor, betting him that an entire novel could be built on a one-word climax occurring on the final page. Spillane calls that the perfect book. “My idea was that if you took the last word away you wouldn’t know what the book was about. When I turned in “Vengeance Is Mine!,” I turned it in with the last word missing,” says Spillane. “The editor said, ‘What was the word? What was the word?’ I said, ‘Give me a thousand bucks,’ and I gave him the word.” As readers know, it made the book.
The phone rings. It’s Hollywood producer Jay Bernstein on the line, updating Spillane on his concept for a new Mike Hammer series that he wants to sell to an industry enamored of “Sex and the City.”
Bernstein has a plan to remake Mike Hammer into something even Mickey Spillane could never have dreamed up.
A woman.

Haiku

“So how is Social

Security different from

Madoff’s ponzi scheme?”

Ever wonder what would happen if a proton beam warping through a super collider slammed into your brain? – the story of the Soviet science towns.

The Future Ruins of the Nuclear Age 
By Masha Gessen 

In pursuit of superpower status during the Cold War, the Soviet Union built 60 science boomtowns. Then in 1990, the Soviet Union collapsed, and funding for the cities ended. Masha Gessen reports from Russia on this grand experiment in failure.

 

 

When two protons collide in an accelerator, they are transformed into muons and other particles. One Russian physicist offers this analogy: it’s like two Soviet Fiats colliding to produce a bus and a Mercedes Benz 600. That’s the thing about high-energy physics: the total is different than the sum of its parts.

So it was in 1978 that when the proton beam entered Anatoli Bugorski’s skull it measured about 200,000 rads, and when it exited, having collided with the inside of his head, it weighed in at about 300,000 rads. Bugorski, a 36-year-old researcher at the Institute for High Energy Physics in Protvino, was checking a piece of accelerator equipment that had malfunctioned – as had, apparently, the several safety mechanisms. Leaning over the piece of equipment, Bugorski stuck his head in the space through which the beam passes on its way from one part of the accelerator tube to the next and saw a flash brighter than a thousand suns. He felt no pain.

From what we know about radiation, about 500 to 600 rads is enough to kill a person (though we don’t know of anyone else who has been exposed to radiation in the form of a proton beam moving at about the speed of sound). The left side of his face swollen beyond recognition, Bugorski was taken to a clinic in Moscow so that doctors could observe his death over the following two to three weeks.

Over the next few days, skin on the back of his head and on his face just next to his left nostril peeled away to reveal the path the beam had burned through the skin, the skull, and the brain tissue. The inside of his head continued to burn away: all the nerves on the left were gone in two years, paralyzing that side of his face. Still, not only did Bugorski not die, but he remained a normally functioning human being, capable even of continuing in science. For the first dozen years, the only real evidence that something had gone neurologically awry were occasional petit mal seizures; over the last few years Bugorski has also had six grand mals. The dividing line of his life goes down the middle of his face: the right side has aged, while the left froze 19 years ago. When he concentrates, he wrinkles only half his forehead.

Because virtually everything connected with nuclear energy was kept secret in the Soviet Union, for more than a decade Bugorski observed an unspoken ban on talking about his accident. About twice a year he went to the Moscow radiation clinic to be examined and to commune with other members of the brotherhood of nuclear-accident victims. “Like former inmates, we are always aware of one another,” he says. “There aren’t that many of us, and we know one another’s life stories. Generally, these are sad tales.”

Bugorski thinks of himself as a fortunate exception: a man in reasonable health, able to continue living a full life. For years, he was a poster boy for Soviet and Russian radiation medicine, which was entirely content to take the credit for his good fortune. Last year, though, when Bugorski finally decided to apply for disabled status, which would allow him to receive his epilepsy medication free of charge, the doctors chilled on him.

For his part, now that his fate is no longer secret, he would like to make himself available to Western researchers, but he doesn’t have the money to leave the science town of Protvino and go west. He thinks he would make a brilliant object of study for someone: “This is, in effect, an unintended test of proton warfare,” he claims. More to the point, he believes, “I am being tested. The human capacity for survival is being tested.”

 

This is the thing about science towns. They should all be dead by now, but they limp along, half frozen and half hopeful. The unglamorous miracle of their survival might indeed make a brilliant object of study. It is, in effect, an unintended experiment in grand failure, an eerie test of the ability of people to live and work after death. That they manage to do it is, perhaps, in part good fortune and in part the nature of the beast: the end result is always different than the sum of history, people, and money.

In the postwar drive to harness the atom, the Soviet government built little towns charged with various scientific tasks. About 60 of these towns were created between the late 1940s and early 1980s. Some of them, towns where new weapons were designed, were not even on the map. Other towns worked on what the Soviets called “the peaceful atom” and were considered “open,” which meant that access to them was highly restricted for foreigners and that the residents themselves were closely monitored by the secret police.

 

In exchange for their isolation – these towns were generally situated at least a couple of hours outside major cities – the researchers enjoyed a standard of living significantly higher than elsewhere in the Soviet Union. The towns, usually built in beautiful wooded areas, boasted better town planning – well, any town planning was better than the haphazard warehousing of the citizenry that went on elsewhere – higher salaries, and, paradoxically, a sort of cloistered freedom. The scientists in some of the open towns were allowed to organize performances of singers or exhibits of artists considered too ideologically unreliable for a wider audience. For the intelligentsia living outside, science towns held the allure of romantic impossibility. When I was 8, my translator grandmother married a nuclear physicist living in Dubna, one of the science towns – and it seemed my family’s entire Moscow social circle was struck by the glamour of it.

The exchange of talent for the good life made for an extraordinarily productive relationship between the state and the scientists. The science towns helped ensure the Soviet Union’s standing as a military and intellectual superpower, and the state paid them back by ensuring their continued comfort.

The top graduates of the country’s famous math and science high schools and high- pressure technical colleges were assigned to the science towns, where they received good pay and, usually, an apartment – while their peers had to make do with dorm rooms or communal flats. They were the chosen people.

In 1990 science funding suddenly dropped about 90 percent. With the country on the brink of collapse, international prestige finally had to take a back seat to economic emergencies. Construction in the science towns froze and the trickle of young science graduates dried up. By 1993, many institutes could not afford to keep their electricity turned on, and the life in most labs had ground to a halt. While the economic disaster of the early ’90s hit the entire country, the science towns were arguably in the worst position to adjust. Unlike military-factory towns, which also lost their funding overnight, the science towns had no industry to convert to civilian production. Unlike their colleagues living in other cities, the scientists in science towns could not switch to careers in finance or the service industries: most of them lived hours away from anything that wasn’t a research institute, and they had no money to move.

While a small scientific lobby is pushing a hopeless bill in the Russian parliament to secure full federal funding for at least a dozen of the towns, salaries and pensions in some science towns are held up for months, even more than a year at a time. When the wages are paid, they generally range between about US$70 and $200 a month. The head of one nuclear institute at the heart of a science town shot himself last year – his colleagues are convinced it was over the lack of funding. For a few years, starting around 1992, various Western foundations, led by American financier-philanthropist George Soros’s organization, gave out small grants to Russian exact scientists. Now most of that funding has dried up: Soros, for one, has said he will no longer single-handedly attempt to save Russian science if the Russian government plans to do nothing to help.

Many scientists find occasional teaching gigs in the West: if they are frugal during their semester of lecturing in some Midwestern town, they can save enough money to finance the following year at home. Some get financial infusions from more fortunate relatives living elsewhere. Many find ways to procure cheaper produce, even to live off the land with tiny plots they stake out outside the towns.

But even if each individual survival can be explained separately, the mechanism of the towns’ collective endurance remains largely a mystery. Without the infusions of money and people, the towns and their populations are aging steadily, slowing down, and losing their old buzz, but the buildings are not crumbling and the residents are not deserting. In fact, the “brain drain” that has been the bugbear of post-Soviet science and technology, whose best and brightest are lured to the West, has barely affected the science towns. A recent survey of science towns’ residents conducted by the Russian Labor Institute found that most young people would like to stay in the towns and in the sciences. Perhaps they are incurable romantics.

Or perhaps, being the best and the brightest among the best and the brightest, they know something we don’t; perhaps they are right in believing that they are in possession of something so unique and precious that they should spend the rest of their lives propping up – and touching up – these 60 giant monuments to the power of science, the future ruins of the Nuclear Age.

 

 

Protvino, population 40,000, is one of the youngest science towns. The Institute for High Energy Physics was founded in 1963 and its accelerator completed in 1967, with the first experiments run in 1968. The town is built in a moderately impressive pine forest about 100 kilometers outside Moscow, where the small Protva River meets the larger Oka. The problem is, it is haunted. Subterraneanly, that is.

It could have been foreseen: the town was founded on a bunch of dead bodies. In 1941 the southern front line outside Moscow cut through this area, and before the Germans were finally forced out, they retreated and returned seven times. World War II continued for another three and a half years, and, it seems, no one really bothered to clean up the bodies and the ammunition both armies left behind. When the first scientists moved here in the late 1960s and ’70s, their kids kept dragging home rusty helmets and unused ammo ribbons they’d found while digging around the old trenches. Construction workers still find human remains.

Too modern to fear bad omens, Soviet scientists and bureaucrats had big plans for Protvino. They built the largest particle accelerator in the world and imported a group of artists and designers from around the Soviet Union to make it into the prettiest of towns. “There was no architecture then in the Soviet Union,” remembers Vitaly Gubarev, who headed up the beautification task force until its demise in 1991, “just prefab concrete boxes.” It’s a wonder, he says, that Protvino has buildings designed especially for the town: two pyramid-shaped brick high-rises and two “saw buildings,” long zigzags in gray concrete that may look like a typical Eastern bloc monstrosity to the untrained eye but in fact consist of split-level apartments – an unheard-of luxury. The master plan called for the cluster of these apartment buildings with stores and schools to create a pedestrian-only zone. A miniature beltway around the town, with no exits into Protvino itself, would keep out cars and accidental tourists.

The plan behind the master plan was to win the State Prize – the highest Soviet honor – for the best town plan. But in the mid-1970s construction engineers made a horrifying discovery: this area was what geologists call a karst, a limestone region that contains giant underground hollow caverns. The master plan had to be revised again and again as more caverns were found; the original cluster idea had to be abandoned. A few years later another small town, just outside Moscow, was refashioned as a pedestrian cluster and promptly received the State Prize.

Thus began the tradition of failing to be the first. Other countries, too, were building accelerators, so that by the middle of the 1980s the Protvino machine was only fourth-largest in the world, trailing accelerators in the United States, Switzerland, and Germany. Plus, the US was starting to build the supercollider. To save the prestige of Soviet high-energy physics, in 1987 the government launched the construction of a new accelerator, the biggest ever at 21 kilometers in length. It would in fact be three accelerators in one extralong channel: one “warm” accelerator – that is, one made with regular magnets – and two “cold” accelerators, created with superconducting magnets. All over the Soviet Union, wherever there were large building projects, signs went up inviting construction workers and engineers to come to Protvino. They needed hundreds of people just to create the channel: you’d think the planners would know better, but they were going to put it underground.

Starting in 1990, when science funding was cut, the big project was gradually revised down from three accelerators to the one warm one. As the staff of the institute continued to assemble giant magnets for the accelerator at an ever-decreasing rate, it gradually became clear that the accelerator had no chance of being completed before it became obsolete.

Big dreams leave big traces. Enormous warehouses filled with thousands of magnets and hundreds of generators stand as giant monuments to the accelerator that never was. Most of the equipment is useless for any other purpose and wouldn’t be worth much as scrap metal, but ultimately it could be disposed of. The creaky mechanism of assembly, storage, and upkeep of the accelerator parts could ultimately be forced to stop churning.

The problem, of course, is the tunnel. The circle was completed in October 1994, and it now haunts the town from below. Left alone, engineers estimate, it would be destroyed by water in four years. The way of the land is such that the level of groundwater to one side of town is higher than the street level in Protvino itself. In other words, if the tunnel were left to fill with water and collapse, in four years the earth would open up to swallow the town of Protvino.

 

Alexander Vasilevski, a large, bearded man in his 40s who came to Protvino as a college graduate, is the chief engineer of the accelerator project. He has calculated that it would cost nearly as much to fill in the tunnel as to complete the accelerator: about $200 million. For the last few years the project has been receiving seemingly random amounts ranging anywhere from $3 million to $30 million a year, which Vasilevski has been using to maintain the tunnel and continue, little by little, to assemble the magnets. He does not have any choice but to keep going: it seems the government will never be able to fork up enough cash at one time to make it possible to fill the tunnel. That, of course, is irrelevant: whatever the needs of the scientists, Vasilevski believes the tunnel ought to be built. “The accelerator would only be in use for 20 or 30 years anyway,” he argues. “But if we build it right, the tunnel will be there for another 250 years. A structure like this should be used.” Yes, it could be the world’s longest underground shopping arcade. Or the world’s only subway in the woods. Or a nuclear fallout-shelter for forest dwellers.

 

It is time to stop thinking so big. Protvino may have some trouble coming to terms with this imperative, but 20 kilometers down the road, in the biologists’ town of Pushchino, small has come to mean survival. Granted, unlike Protvino, Pushchino was never meant to hit it big: it was too secret for that. Yuri Bespalov, the official local historian, even claims, with some pride, that the town plan was devised to make it impossible to add on to Pushchino. It would always be three finite zones: Zone A for the scientific institutes (all nine of them), Zone B for greenery, and Zone C for living (in any one of three types of nine-story concrete-block buildings). Nearly 30 years after the town was built, its population still only about 20,000, the experiment in stasis can be deemed successful: the new era has managed to insinuate itself into the Pushchino look in just two ways – the glass panes that residents have now been allowed to put on their balconies (in the old days this was believed to spoil the gorgeous uniformity of the façades), and the retirees who gather in front of the store in the morning to find out when their pension might be paid and to beg shyly.

With no money for the institutes, the answer to the townpeople’s problems clearly lies outside of Pushchino. About a mile outside, that is. Residents have turned the tracts of land that once guaranteed their isolation into tiny garden plots – 20 or 30 square meters a person. Weekends and evenings year-round, half the town is working the land. The more enterprising types have put up miniature houses – half tool shed, half status symbol – on their plots; others just spend their time pulling old nylon pantyhose onto tiny year-old apple trees.

“People were suffering unnecessarily trying to work on their garden plots,” explains Gennadi Bulatkin, head of the Laboratory of Bioproductivity of Agricultural Ecosystems and a chief instructor at the school. “What they needed was scientific knowledge to make their work efficient.” Researchers at the Institute of Soil and Photosynthesis have organized the School of Practical Fruit and Vegetable Gardening. Most of the students are scientists – biologists, astronomers, and physicists. Bulatkin plans to devote this year to the study and practice of basic gardening, with instruction on tree-wrapping and crown-trimming, then eventually graduate to beekeeping. “Every plot should have at least two or three beehives,” he says emphatically. “That’s good for pollination and teaching your children, both.”

Bulatkin should know. He has spent his life in science studying complex ecosystems; he claims to head the only lab in the world to study the relative energy consumption and production of natural and agricultural systems. A believer in the efficiency of agricultural ecosystems, he says two thirds of his family’s sustenance comes from their little plot. Walking through the gardening tract on a December Saturday, he examines his colleagues’ and students’ efforts, praising the fir-tree-branch coverings here (they help create a layer of snow to insulate the soil), criticizing the evident lack of attention there. We pass a couple of abandoned plots – an institute director and his grown children have moved abroad – and greet the assistant director of another institute in his garden. This PhD, decked out in a gray cotton quilted jacket and tall rough soldier’s boots, clearly relishes his back-to-the-land persona. He poses for the photographer, smoking one of those foul hollow-filter cigarettes found in Russian villages and prisons.

 

 

There is something outrageously subversive about staking a small project against the grandeur of Soviet science. Soviet science set itself up for it, though, by creating its little havens: the blueprints for a cozy individualism the residents would eventually come to claim. Long before the state left its scientists to fend for themselves, popular Soviet mythology already portrayed the science towns as oases of progress, modernism, and comfort.

The generic symbol of all the science towns was Dubna, a nuclear physicists’ town two and a half hours northwest of Moscow. Here the popular fascination with the romance of science towns got to run wild. One well-known writer waxed sentimental upon visiting the town: “In our days, when even the poles of the earth are becoming inhabited, it is rather difficult to become known for youth and novelty. Yet the young town of Dubna did. The interest in this town of nuclear physics is now universal…. Its streets are cuttings in the forest. Its squares are forest glades. The prevailing sound is the forest stillness. Probably, such will be the towns of the future.” Yuli Kim, a quasi-underground singer-songwriter, crooned of Dubna. Alla Pugacheva, the megapopular pop star, sang of future geniuses who “study the Synchrophasotron in Home Ec.”

Dubna’s Synchrophasotron, a light-nuclei accelerator constructed in the 1950s, captured the imagination of many Russians. Its neoclassical building with a flattened round dome became the symbol of Dubna’s Joint Institute for Nuclear Research. Not that many people from outside the institute had ever seen the mythical structure: though Dubna was an open town and its institute was international, the Synchrophasotron itself hid in the woods behind several fences and a tall embankment. This, of course, only added to the mystique.

As a kid, I spent all my school holidays in Dubna – friends and I killed entire vacations lurking around the Synchro-phasotron fence. Kids elsewhere may have lived for legends of their football or fishing exploits, but all our adventures focused on the Synchrophasotron.

Along most of the inside of the Synchrophasotron fence ran a strip of turned soil, off-limits even to employees: its inside perimeter was marked with barbed wire. This, we were convinced, was like the neutral zone at state borders – an area specially designed for gunning down trespassers. In fact, it appears, it was sealed off to make sure that trespassers left footprints. The summer I was 9 we discovered a small patch of the strip that the guards used for shooting practice. My most trusted friend Anton and I took a few days to dig a tunnel beneath the wooden fence and spent all summer making triumphant, if nerve-racking, forays into the shooting range to collect spent bullet casings (the guards, it turned out, used handguns with tiny copper bullets and shotguns with blanks weighed down with dried peas). We shared the secret passageway with a few other friends with whom we then traded casings and adventure stories.

When all nine years of your life have unfolded against the background of the world’s grandest dream, you need a mythology that makes you a part of it. There was never much doubt in our minds that we’d become scientists: we were all attending math schools, the rebel among us wanted to become a geologist.

But making career plans was not enough. We needed romance, and romance was in the Synchrophasotron. We needed conflict, and conflict was in the imaginary gunfire. We performed our job of trespassing on adult territory with the determination and literalism of future scientists. (The rebel did become a geologist and moved to the Russian Far East; his brother, my old friend Anton, is a scientist at the Dubna institute. I lost touch with them when my family emigrated to the US when I was 14. I haven’t looked for them in the four years I have been back.)

Pavel Zarubin, the plump youthful scientific secretary – a sort of scholarly PR rep – for the Laboratory of High Energies, which oversees the Synchrophasotron, refuses to believe a bunch of kids managed to breach the accelerator’s security 21 years ago. “But we got shot at,” I claim in an irrational reach for credibility. “Well, my friends did.”

Born and reared in Dubna, Zarubin is, I suppose, either what I would have become had I settled in this town or, alternatively, what I would have had to be to stay. He is a fountain of variously mystical metaphors. In a single run around the dimly lit Synchrophasotron – the institute has to save on electricity – Zarubin manages to compare it to a castle, a monastery, and an abbey. The point is, the Synchrophasotron was built to stand for centuries – not unlike the Protvino tunnel except, of course, that it was actually completed.

 

The moment of the Synchrophasotron’s obsolescence more or less coincided with the end of science funding, so the local researchers, who’d been counting on conducting future experiments in Protvino, came up with the brilliant idea of putting a new accelerator right where the old one was. The Synchrophasotron could not be dismantled, mind you – if the hundreds of tons of steel that comprise it were shifted, the entire castle just might slide into the nearby Dubna river – but they had learned to miniaturize, so they put the Nuclotron, a superconducting accelerator of nuclei and heavy ions, just below the Synchrophasotron. The first Nuclotron experiments were conducted in 1994.

Thus Dubna, population 68,000, became the first and possibly only success story among the struggling science towns. Constructing the Nuclotron, the scientists and engineers had to invent cheaper ways of doing their thing. The traditional way to make the tube that holds the beam, for example, is prohibitively expensive: a high-pressure chamber is generally used to force the metal alloy to conform to the complex shape required of the tube. In Dubna they used water frozen with the aid of liquid nitrogen to do the work of the pressure chamber.

“This is the innovation level of a guy working in his garage,” Zarubin claims with a folksy pride. “Guys need their garages. Russian monasteries were always the repositories not only of spirituality, but also of skills. And technical culture, engineering culture, the belief in scientific values – all this has almost a religious quality. In times of trouble Russia often lost its churches, but never its monasteries.”

Yes, I say, still sore over his refusal to believe my shooting story, but in Soviet times a lot of the monasteries were turned into prisons. “They became only more sacred for that,” Zarubin retorts. One has to cultivate an enlightened disregard for history in these science towns. If Protvino was built on the bodies of soldiers, then Dubna rests on the bones of labor camp inmates. The town sits on an island shaped by the Dubna and Volga Rivers and the Moscow Channel, which connects the Volga with the Moskva River. The channel, a utopian dream of Russian rulers for centuries, was built in the 1930s by prisoners – as many as 700,000 of them, according to sources.

After the war, prisoners were used to build the first accelerator here (the world’s biggest, naturally), the Synchrocyclotron, which became operational in 1949. The entire project was the province of the Ministry for Mid-Range Machinery, as the Soviet ministry of atomic warfare was euphemistically named. It was a state unto itself, with Lavrenty Beria, Stalin’s police chief, as its czar, and labor camp inmates as its citizens. The first scientists, who moved to Dubna in the 1940s and ’50s, remember that the large green between Dubna’s luxurious (by Soviet standards) hotel and the Volga used to be the campgrounds. They remember too that the inmates were escorted by armed guards to the Synchrophasotron construction site.

It was all top secret then; the physicists were not even allowed to publish their findings. But then in 1954, Western European physicists joined forces to create CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, now known as the European Laboratory for Particle Physics and the place where the World Wide Web was invented) on the Swiss-French border. Soviet Science had to retaliate with a Warsaw Pact center, and in 1956 the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research was inaugurated around the Synchrophasotron (then the world’s biggest) in a freshly built town full of yellow Hungarian-style cottages (for the top scientists) and gray Bulgarian-designed apartment buildings (for the rest). The only memory of the labor camp inmates lay in their unmarked graves. “Where the prisoners’ graves are, there is a stream,” Zarubin tells me. “Local men use the water for pickling cucumbers, and they don’t have to boil it first.” He pauses. “It is holy water,” he explains. This man can put a good spin on anything.

 

Even with a correction for Zarubin’s PR prowess, the picture that emerges from our circular tour of the venerable Synchrophasotron and the defiant Nuclotron is one of folksy ingenuity riding in on a good old workhorse to save Soviet science. At a time when, in most science towns, salaries have not been paid in months and institute directors have resorted to hunger strikes and even suicide, the mere fact of functioning can be a source of boundless pride. In 1996, the year of the science town’s 40th birthday, Dubna put on a lavish celebration of its continued existence. Façades were painted, roads repaved, and new streetlights erected to greet visiting dignitaries. The money ran out before some of the repairs were completed, though; at the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions, for example, the front entrance is sealed off. This lab, the source of Dubna’s greatest prestige, is also the recipient of the largest part of the institute’s budget.

Thanks to the Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions, all of Dubna hopes to immortalize itself in the name of element 105 (one of those blank spaces in the periodic table), which, if all negotiations among international agencies go as planned, will become officially known as dubnium. The Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions, with its four small accelerators, synthesizes the nuclei of new elements. It is a source of great pride in Dubna that elements 102, 103, 104, and 105 are generally acknowledged to have been synthesized first in Dubna, and elements 106, 107, and 108 are said to owe a sizable debt to Dubna as well. It is element 114, however, that the lab is pinning its hopes on.

“It has been predicted,” explains director of the lab Mikhail Itkis, “that element 114 will live a long time. The nuclei of other elements we have synthesized have been short-lived, dying after milliseconds or microseconds, while this one may live for days or even months.” Led by the theoretical predictions, scientists have been looking for it. The prediction, explains Itkis, is that element 114 will have a magical nucleus – that is, a nucleus with magical numbers of neutrons and protons. Like lead, for example: it has 114 protons and 184 neutrons, which makes it doubly magical. The point is, a nucleus possessed of magical numbers is extraordinarily resilient. “We are looking for a new island of stability,” says Itkis. Aren’t we all. Measured against other science towns, though, Dubna seems to have come closest to finding the magical combination, the correct relationship between scaling down and insisting on the dream. It’s just lucky not to be saddled with a dream that’s 21 kilometers long.

 

Tito Pontecorvo is one of Dubna’s most famous residents. His father Bruno, the brother of Italian film director Gillo Pontecorvo, studied with the great Enrico Fermi, then fled fascist Italy, emigrating to Canada and disappearing with his wife, a Swedish communist. As it turned out, the man who was dubbed the Hydrogen Traitor (though he maintained he’d never worked on the H-bomb) went to Finland and crossed the border into the Soviet Union, where, apparently by prior arrangement, he was hidden – in Dubna. A couple of years after Bruno Pontecorvo disappeared in the West, he reappeared at a press conference in Moscow, his transformation into Soviet scientist complete. He lived in Dubna for the rest of his life; his wife, they say, lost her mind.

Dubna myths feed on the memory of Bruno Pontecorvo’s flamboyance: he is said to have delivered April Fool’s Day lectures and to have ridden his horse through Dubna at midnight wearing a wide-brimmed hat. The latter story, though, seems to conflate his image with that of his youngest son: Pontecorvo the father is most fondly remembered for introducing the Soviets to snorkeling; his son is the one with the horses. Tito Pontecorvo started out as a scientist in oceanology and spent most of his time at sea – but as the son of foreigners, he was not considered reliable enough to disembark in foreign lands. finally, Pontecorvo quit, declaring to anyone who would listen that he had been forced out of science.

Since he was a child, Tito Pontecorvo had had a thing about horses. Enough of a thing, apparently, to do the unimaginable: launch a private enterprise not just anywhere in the Soviet Union, but in one of its showcase towns. In 1979 he built a barn right where the town of Dubna met the forest and started offering riding and horse-grooming lessons.

 

Having a local riding school appealed to the Dubna ambition for the finer things in life. Tito Pontecorvo and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research entered into a mutually beneficial relationship that lasted a dozen years and produced hundreds of Eastern bloc city kids uncommonly good with horses. In 1991, when Russia legalized private farming, Pontecorvo set about building the dream of his lifetime. He spent more than a million dollars of borrowed money to build the biggest palace the Volga has seen. He situated it on the opposite side of the river from Dubna, where the gray-brown of dilapidated villages unexpectedly gives way to the spectacle of a red-brick rendition of a sugar castle, with tiny turrets and silver-topped towers stretching as far as the eye can see. The castle lies low in a valley, surrounded by the green pastures rolling down to the river, dotted with Pontecorvo’s 200 Akhal-Teke, some of the world’s most exotic, most expensive and, possibly, most beautiful horses; there are only 2,500 of them on earth.

But the Russian nouveau riche have not rushed to buy these fine animals. And the state is in no hurry to fork over half a million dollars in farming subsidies that Pontecorvo figures he is due. Pontecorvo’s plan now is to use his natural charm, native English, and Canadian citizenship to popularize the Akhal-Teke in North America, “so that American snobs start saying to one another, ‘What, you still have not bought an Akhal-Teke?’” For now, though, he has sold off most of the farm equipment. His telephone has been turned off for nonpayment. His six employees, his family, and his 200 Akhal-Teke are living in the castle, gates closed tight against the creditors.

 

The moral of this story, then, is that ambition can trap you – indeed, that if science was among the Soviet Union’s greatest ambitions, then the science towns were its best-built traps. As these things go, of course, it is better to be trapped in a castle, like Tito Pontecorvo, than in barracks, like the builders of Protvino’s ill-fated accelerator tunnel. When miners and construction workers were called in from all over the country, some of them were temporarily settled in barracks on the outskirts of Protvino. In the years since the money stopped, the 200-family barracks settlement has turned into a town of its own, rife with the complaints, the smells, and the rumors bred by hopelessness and poverty.

As soon as I declare myself as a journalist, the women of this shanty town flock to me and interrupt one another with complaints. “Our children have to travel to school in another town.” “The sewers leak everywhere!” “The rats are as big as a soccer ball!” “We were tricked!”

True, they were tricked. They were lured here with high salaries – about the same as a physics PhD’s then – and the promise of an apartment in a few years. When the construction came to a standstill, all hope for an apartment vanished. A couple of years ago the local sanitary commission deemed the shanty town unsuitable for living. Some of the wives in the town formed an activist group, and last summer they finally succeeded: they obtained permanent residence registration stamps for all the barracks’ residents. Now they have more rights, including the right to stay indefinitely in a place unsuitable for living, playing the raggedy ghosts of Protvino’s ambition.

The town retaliates by putting on an aggressively happy face. Protvino is holding a town-anthem contest, in which the front-runner is local celebrity poet Alexandra Kurbakova.

In a scene too heavily symbolic for even the most exploitative of journalists, Kurbakova greets me from her bed in a cramped first-floor studio apartment in the “saw building” by saying she doesn’t have long to live. Reclining beneath a wall of portraits of great Russian poets – Alexander Pushkin, Sergei Yesenin, and Kurbakova herself – she performs her hymn to Protvino, a waltz that I present here in my own faithful translation:

Where the scientists are free Like the birds in the trees, Hear the sounds of science In the forest’s green silence. You can feel antimatter And the scientists had better Take you down the stairs To the tunnel that’s theirs.

Kurbakova’s husband, also a local poet, has lit candles and cranked up a crackly mono tape recorder for this performance. I sort through my embarrassment at being the recipient of this ritual, my disgust at this filthy little apartment, my squeamishness at the sight of Kurbakova, who really does not look like she has much time left – and discover that I am not only touched, but also vaguely envious.

 

There was a time, albeit when I was 9, when I would have been willing to be shot in the butt with a salt bullet just to stake out a place in the science-town mythology. How glamorous it is to be going out as a science town’s tragic living classic.

That’s the thing about science towns: their projects are so grand they are absurd, their residents are so stubborn they have tunnel vision, their artists are so gloriously provincial they are pathetic, but somehow, even now, the total is different than the sum of its parts.

 

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Masha Gessen is a Moscow journalist. She is the author of Dead Again: The Russian Intelligentsia After Communism. She wrote “The Day After Technology“ in Wired 4.03.

Eric Rohmer, master of mise en abyme

TALKING PICTURES

Screenwriters on the films of Eric Rohmer.

 

Zou Zou as Chloe in Chloe in the Afternoon (1972).

 

ERIC ROHMER REMAINS one of the most revered and enigmatic directors to survive the French New Wave. His films rarely exhibit the revolutionary fervor so often associated with that cinematic movement. Indeed his chamber comedies of bourgeois desire and disappointment could easily be mistaken as nothing more than pretentious talk fests. But what keeps his feather-weight dramas and supercilious characters infinitely engaging is how their actions serve to illuminate complex philosophical and ethical dilemmas. In Rohmer’s films the focal points are never on what the characters say or do, but in the distance between those two, in that netherworld between language and action in which we all try to make sense of the world and of ourselves.

Having first been a journalist, then a novelist, Rohmer never lost sight of the power — as well as impossibility — of words. He entered the French New Wave through the journal Cahiers du Cinema, serving as its editor from 1956 to 1963. When Rohmer started making films in the ’60s, he framed them as cycles (“Six Moral Tales,” “Comedies and Proverbs,” “Tales of the Four Seasons”) emphasizing their reliance on literary, rather than cinematic, genres.

In 1969, My Night at Maud’s catapulted Rohmer to international fame, even garnering Oscar nominations for Best Screenplay and Foreign Film for this comedy of inaction centering around a man failing to take advantage of a sexual situation. In his next two films, Claire’s Knee and Chloe in the Afternoon, what characters do not do is always more telling than what they do. His (male) characters, bound by social convention and place, create exquisite comedies of repression just to see how far they could take their desires.

In the ’70s, Rohmer experimented with historical allegory before returning in the ’80s to the breezy philosophical love stories that made him famous. In his “Comedies and Proverbs” series — The Aviator’s Wife, Le Beau Marriage, Pauline at the Beach, Summer, Full Moon in Paris, Boyfriends and Girlfriends — Rohmer made his protagonists women, examining the consequences of them trying to take control of their lives and romances. With the novelistic skill reminiscent of Henry James or Jane Austen, Rohmer turned the most banal social settings — beaches, summer vacations, a weekend of windsurfing — into the thorniest and most demanding ethical arenas.

This winter Winstar Cinema has collected a select retrospective, “Tales of Rohmer,” with new 35mm prints set to tour over 30 North American cities, beginning in New York City on February 9. In tribute to Rohmer, we asked three screenwriters (and sometimes directors) — James Schamus, Larry Gross and Ira Sachs — to write about their own sense of Rohmer and why he matters. –P.B.

 

 

Jean-Claude Brialy and Laurence de Monaghan in Claire’s Knee (1970).

 

Ira Sachs on Rohmer’s toughness

I admire Eric Rohmer for many of the same reasons I love Henry James: both find drama in the precise observance of shifting emotions. Every scene in a Rohmer film is taut with possibility; every character, on the verge of falling — falling in love, falling into melancholy, or just falling from their own sense of high and stable ground. His protagonists are an arrogant lot — his women are particularly surly — and that is what gives the films their subtle tension; we are always wondering how the mighty will fall.

Rohmer’s films are made up of conversations; they are filled with nervous, talky people, who act as if language could protect them from experience. With continual attempts at self-description (“I was born to be unhappy,” says Laura, typically, inClaire’s Knee), his heroes and heroines imagine that they can talk themselves out of anything, and thus be saved from pain, or even more specifically, the surprise of emotion. And they, like all of us, are wrong.

In almost all of Rohmer’s films, his characters run into themselves — they discover, or are made to discover, their own precariousness — and the result of this reckoning is always extraordinarily moving. At first glance, Rohmer seems like a very soft filmmaker. He works gently, but always, by the last reel, he has tightened the screws. Like the coming of seasons, with which Rohmer is clearly obsessed – witnessLe rayon vert (Summer) and Autumn’s Tale — we almost don’t notice the arrival of strong emotions. And then, like winter, they are upon us.

Eric Rohmer has the most consistent career of any of the great filmmakers alive today. There’s not one false note in his huge and expansive body of work. In that way, again, he’s a bit like Henry James. Of no one else but Rohmer could it be said that he is making films at 80 that are as perfectly realized and as emotionally risky as the ones he made 40 years before.

 

James Schamus on Rohmer’s depiction of character

Rohmer uses annoyance to achieve the sublime. His trick: to make us think that personality is a kind of illusory irritant, an encumbrance that keeps us from our presumed moral centers, but which, finally, turns out to be the very register of our moral being. Think of Delphine, the irrititatingly depressed secretary heroine of Le rayon vert (1986) — and one of the great mise en abymes of dialogue in cinema history: she’s at her friend’s summer cottage, an outsider surrounded by solicitous friends of friends, and she refuses the barbequed pork, politely explaining that she’s a vegetarian.

A polite query follows: “Should we prepare you something else?” “Sorry, we didn’t know of your specific dietary needs.” She tries her best to brush it off, but as she talks, and the more she talks, the more absurd, grating, hostile, self-defeating, alienating, tragic, weepy her explanations and excuses become. Rohmer creates an embarrassment so exquisite, a self-consciousness so finely attuned, this little scene takes on the psychic dimensions of a Busby Berkeley musical number, and all in glorious 16mm.

 

Larry Gross on Rohmer’s conception of intelligent masculinity

I went to Rohmer’s My Night at Maud’s, with my 19-year-old brother, the week that it opened in a subtitled version in New York. 1967, I believe. I was 14.

I enjoyed it a lot. The enjoyment was enhanced by a certain bewilderment, which I confess, I haven’t entirely gotten over after all this time.

Here were three adults, who looked like adults you knew from everyday middle-class life, and all they did was what people you knew did. They discussed their past relationships, stuff they’ve read, and they expressed their opinion of things that mattered to them. So little happened, and yet it was somehow entertaining and never boring — but you couldn’t quite tell how it could be so entertaining and avoid being boring.

Obviously some of it had to do with the three central performers, Jean Louis Trintignant, Francoise Fabian and Marie-Christine Barrault. Trintignant in particular does something in the film that has only grown in significance with the years. He supplies a near perfect image of an intelligent man in love. A compelling alternative — and one of the few — to the silent, stoic, macho-killer tradition of Cinematic Masculinity embodied by John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. I would point in particular to the scene late in the film where Trintignant stands on a snowy hill with Barrault and hears about some unsavory details of her past love life. In that moment his expression of tenderness, disappointment, along with his determination to keep loving this woman define for me a type of conscious intelligent masculinity that has all too rarely found embodiment in cinema — or in real life. Indeed if I were to attempt to explain to a super-intelligent alien why the male race shouldn’t be erased from the order of things, I’d start by showing Trintignant in this film.

There are so many great things about this movie. It demonstrates brilliantly one of the iron laws of romantic comedy. When a plot turns on a character’s choice of mates, the stronger the “wrong” one is, usually the better the movie. Other demonstrations of this principle include the temptation James Stewart offers Katherine Hepburn in Philadelphia Story or the alternative Kristin Scott Thomas presents to Hugh Grant in Four Weddings and a Funeral. In the latter case she’s almost “too” attractive an alternative for the movie’s denouement to be entirely credible. Here Francoise Fabian’s Maud truly represents all the mysterious roads not taken by all of us in our romantic lives. I remember my brother being unusually somber and meditative on the subway ride home after the movie. I asked him why, and he explained that it was truly painful to contemplate all the excuses one offered oneself for not having pursued or followed up with certain women. I didn’t entirely get what he was saying at the time, but 30-some years have gone by and I sure do now.

Two other things. This was the first film I ever saw photographed by Nestor Almendros. Although it was almost all interiors and close-ups, I knew without quite knowing how or why that the black-and-white images had a crispness and delicacy fundamental to the film’s mood. It was the beginning of a vague understanding on my part that to be “cinematic” didn’t necessarily mean epic locations, lavish production values or overpoweringly flashy visual mannerisms.

Finally I remember being puzzled and charmed by a unique fact about how this film was edited. Rohmer often chose to stay on the character, listening rather then always cutting back to the person speaking. Once again, without knowing why, I got the feeling that there was something momentous about such a procedure.

Trepanation & some of its advocates

Dear Cecil:

You haven’t had a really odd column in a while–how about an overview of trepanning? Who are some of the people availing themselves of this “earliest known surgery” and why are they allowed to run around loose (if in fact they are)? KIDS, DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME!–hraka

Cecil replies:Sound advice for troubled times, bub. Trepanning, also known as trephination, is the art of boring a hole in the skull for medical, mystical, or, God help us, recreational purposes. Practiced since the Stone Age (hence the “oldest known surgery” sobriquet), trepanning was common well into the 19th century, and a few iconoclasts are attempting to revive it today. One thinks with a shudder: Could this be the next goth fad?

Archaeological evidence of trepanning has turned up all over the world, in the form of skulls with holes bored into them up to two inches in diameter. Amazingly, say researchers, judging from signs of bone growth and the like, perhaps two-thirds of the patients survived. Maybe ancient trepannists were trying to relieve intracranial pressure due to disease, trauma, etc., in the manner of modern surgeons. Or maybe they just wanted to release the evil spirits. Nobody really knows.

Trepanning enjoyed a vogue centuries ago as a treatment for insanity, headaches, and other complaints. This was back in the era of leeching, mercury cures, and so on, when the line between health-care provider and murderer was less clear than it is now. The tools of the trade (seewww.braceface.com/medical/Trepanning.htm) consisted of (1) a sharp knife so you could slice the skin of the skull and pull back the flaps, (2) a corkscrewlike borer with a wicked-looking bit, and (3) files, brushes, and whatnot so you could dress up the job when done. In the old days trepanation was strictly a manual operation and took a long time. Today, with the advent of the electric drill (you think I’m joking?), an amateur can do it in an afternoon.

There are those who say trepanation has much to offer the modern world. You’re saying: Come on, these people are psychos. I’m not arguing with you. However, being a psycho can take you a long way these days. Searching on trepanation in Google we come up with 6,120 hits. There’s even a Web site sponsored by the International Trepanation Advocacy Group. OK, there’s a Web site for everything. But skull boring has also been featured on network television, written up in the Washington Post (www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/features/trepan.htm) and the on-line journal Salon(www.salon.com/health/feature/1999/04/29/trepanation/print.html), even solemnly discussed at academic conferences (“International Colloquium on Cranial Trepanation in Human History,” University of Birmingham, April 7-9, 2000). Perhaps I’m overstating the case here, but if you ask me, trepanation is hot.

I still don’t think it’s a good idea. You could, like, die, you know? Or get meningitis or suffer an accidental lobotomy. Some people who get trepanned, one has the feeling, didn’t have a lot of spare gray matter to start with. A woman on the ITAG site says of her trepanned husband, “He does not appear to be so confused when more than one thing comes at him at once anymore.” Listen, lady, one wants to have an open mind, as it were. But–you can see where I’m going with this–the average person needs trepanation like he needs a hole in the head.

The leading theorist of modern trepanation is Bart Huges, a Dutch research librarian who came up with a concept called “brainbloodvolume.” Huges’s idea is that when we’re babies our skulls are soft (ever watch a newborn’s forehead throb?), allowing our brains room to breathe and grow. But as we age our brains get locked in the old skullcase. Trepanation gives us back that lost freedom. Joe Mellen, an associate of Huges’s, put the matter more succinctly in a book called Bore Hole: “This is the story of how I came to drill a hole in my skull to get permanently high.”

Is trepanation the next big thing? Some indication may be gleaned from the career of Amanda Feilding of the UK, who in 1970 bored a hole in her skull with a dental drill after trying for four years to get a surgeon to do it. Feilding twice stood for Parliament on a pro-trepanation platform (she wanted it to be offered free by the National Health Service). The first time she got 49 votes, the second time 139. Sure, that’s not many. But I don’t like the trend.

–CECIL ADAMS

generate local; grow local; avoid volde-mart

 

MAY/JUNE 2008: DEVELOPING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES

Getting Connected

Why sharing electrons, local produce and Radiohead makes for better communities.

By Bill McKibben

The average visitor to a farmers’ market has 10 times more conversations per visit than the average visitor to a supermarket. That’s important, because a community in which people interact is more likely to offer a better quality of life. Photo courtesy of Vasiliki Varvaki/istockphoto.com

A few years ago, when we were installing photovoltaic panels all over our roof, the question was whether to go off-grid or to tie in. We chose the latter, connecting with our nifty SMA Sunny Boy inverter, but not really for technical or economic reasons. We chose it because we like connections — we like networks, we like community, even when it’s a community of electrons. I enjoy looking over at my neighbor’s house and realizing that, at least metaphorically, he is cooling his beer before the Red Sox game with the sunlight that is falling on my shingles. And I think one of the most important arguments to be made for renewable energy is precisely that it can help build community.

No one has ever accused the traditional electric grid of being much good for community. It’s built on a few vast and centralized power stations, whose product we consume at a distance. In that sense, it’s no different from the calorie grid, in which each
bite of food has traveled 1,500 miles on average to reach our lips. Our only interaction with that electric grid is to pay our bills —our role is entirely as consumers. (In some states, you can also attend hearings about electric rates, but this is more punishment than I can imagine taking on.) Can you say “passive”?

But let’s imagine a grid that begins to build out with more and more small nodes along the way: solar rooftops all over the place, backyard- and cul-de-sac-scale windmills. To get there quickly, we need changes in the law — some kind of national feed-in policy, like the ones pioneered in Germany and recently adopted in California, perhaps. But we also need a subtle change in how we view ourselves. We need to become energy providers — tinyscale utilities. Or at least we need to know the utility next door,
our neighbor with the panels. Once we do, much will change.

Start Connecting Read on: • The Citizen-Powered Energy Handbook: Community Solutions to a Global Crisis, Greg Pahl (Chelsea Green Publishing: 2007) • Deep Economy: The Wealth of Economies and the Durable Future, Bill McKibben (Holt Paperbacks: 2008) • Going Local: Creating Self-Reliant Communities in a Global Age, Michael H. Shuman (Routledge: 2000) • Hometown Advantage: How to Defend Your Main Street Against Chain Stores and Why it Matters, Stacy Mitchell (Institute for Local Self-Reliance: 2000) • Superbia: 31 Ways to Create Sustainable Neighborhoods, Daniel D. Chiras and David Wann (New Society Publishers: 2003)

Linking Up Over Veggie Stalls
We can see this happening already in the food sector, where local farmers’ markets are the fastest growing part of the food economy — their numbers doubling every few years and sales growing 12 or 15 percent. This is good news environmentally — it makes a lot more sense to buy food from your neighbors than it does to ship it across the continent, which in effect requires marinating your dinner in crude oil. But it also makes good sense in other ways. Consider this fact: The average visitor to a farmers’ market has 10 times more conversations per visit than the average visitor to a supermarket. Ten times! It’s not a different way of acquiring calories, it’s an entirely different social experience, one that’s comparable to the way humans have shopped for food since the beginning of agriculture 10,000 years ago. No wonder we like it.

And out of those conversations can grow real possibilities for our future. Ask yourself what kind of community is likely to do the work necessary to build a decent mass transit system: one where people are talking, or one where the usual vested interests
(Detroit, highway builders, property developers) still rule?

Here’s one way of saying it. The abundance of cheap fossil fuel that has governed our lives for many decades has had many effects. It’s made us prosperous; it threatens to destroy the climate that sustains us. And it’s made us the first people on earth who have no practical need of our neighbors. Think about your street. If some plague wiped out the people on your block tonight, you might feel sad (and alarmed!), but your daily routine wouldn’t be interrupted much —your food, your energy, your clothes all come from a distance.

This independence sounds great (except for that pesky global warming stuff), but in fact it has carried high costs. One is that Americans are not all that happy anymore — the number of us who say we’re very happy with our lives peaked in 1956 and has gone downhillever since. Which is odd, because in that time our material standard of living has almost trebled. The economy is not working the way it’s supposed to: More stuff no longer yields more satisfaction.

And the reason for that is fascinating. The data are pretty clear that Americans feel a strong sense of disconnection from their communities, which drives that discontent. If you think about it, it’s not so strange: Since the 1950s, we’ve invested most of our economic might in building suburbs. The American dream was a larger house farther apart from your neighbors. That carried significant environmental costs, of course, but it also came with a social price: We ran into each other less and less. The average American eats meals with friends and family half as often as in the 1950s. We have half as many close friends on average. That’s a pretty big change in a pretty short time. We’ve become, if you want a word for it, hyperindividuals. We’ve become too independent.

Staking a Claim in the Local Economy
It doesn’t do much good to preach about community. All we can do is try to create the local economic institutions that draw us back together. Things like farmers’ markets. Or like shared electric grids.

Click on: • 350.org, a global climate change movement • Creating Deep Economies, billmckibben.com/local-economies.html • Post Carbon Institute, postcarbon.org

Our communities aren’t going to become entirely self-sufficient, of course. Much of our wheat — call it our baseload calories— may come from the Midwest for a good long time. Many of our electrons will come from central sources — hopefully the very big wind farms, solar thermal plants in the desert and so on— until we figure out ways to lick the intermittency and variability problems that come with small-scale renewables. But we can move a long way down the road, and we can do it community by community. (And along the way, of course, we can help our neighbors in other ways, like employing them to climb up on our roofs and put in the panels, or open up our walls and stuff them with insulation. One of the pleasures of solar power is you can’t send your house to China to have it installed). You think about power differently when you’re a utility provider, I think — you may use it more carefully, and you may pay more attention to what’s going on with energy in your town. You have a stake.

Here’s one more example, which at first glance seems entirely dissimilar, but which I think is both alike and hopeful. Think about music. It too has come from a distance in recent years — it was made in Nashville, Tenn., or Los Angeles, stuck in a hard to-open plastic box and shipped to us around the country. But that model is starting to fail under the new technological possibility of peer-to-peer networks, not so different from putting solar panels on your roof. People are sharing music; bands are offering it up directly.

And as a result, something interesting is happening. All of a sudden, the fastest growing parts of the music economy are live performances and festivals — people understanding that part of the pleasure they’re looking for in music is the connection with other people. I think it’s a better model than Sony and its compact discs, just like I think rooftop solar is a better model than Peabody coal and its mines. But only if it’s connected.

About the author: Bill McKibben is the author of many books about the environment, most recently an essay collection called, The Bill McKibben Reader. He is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College in Vermont.

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Cyber Bully Mom Lori Drew indicted in CA for causing 13-year old Megan Meier to croak herself; apparently there’s no justice available in big MO

NY Times May 16, 2008

Woman Indicted in MySpace Suicide Case

By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

LOS ANGELES — In a highly unusual use of a federal law generally employed in computer fraud cases, a federal grand jury here on Thursday indicted a Missouri woman accused of using a phony online identity to trick and taunt a 13-year-old girl, who committed suicide in response to the cyberbaiting.

The woman, Lori Drew, was charged with one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing a computer without authorization and via interstate commerce to obtain information to inflict emotional distress. Each count carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison.

Ms. Drew lives in O’Fallon, Mo., where, according to the indictment, she created a MySpace account under the name Josh Evans in 2006. Prosecutors said she used the social networking account to contact a young girl named in the indictment as M.T.M. with sexually charged messages from “Josh.” The girl, who has been identified by her mother as Megan Meier, was a former friend of Ms. Drew’s daughter.

After a few weeks of chatting, “Josh Evans” began to send Megan nasty messages, via the MySpace account, ending with one that suggested “the world would be a better place” without her. Megan, believing she had been rejected by “Josh,” committed suicide in her home.

Missouri law enforcement officials said they had not found enough evidence to bring charges in the case, and Ms. Drew, who was 48 when Megan died, has repeatedly denied creating the account.

But because MySpace, a unit of Fox Interactive Media, is based in Beverly Hills, Calif., and its server is here, federal prosecutors decided to wield a federal statute that is generally used to prosecute fraud that occurs across state lines.

The statute applies in the case, the indictment says, because by violating the user agreement of MySpace, which prohibits phony accounts, Ms. Drew was seeking information “to further a tortuous act, namely, intentional infliction of emotional distress.”

“To my knowledge it is the first case of its kind in the nation,” said Thomas P. O’Brien a United States attorney in California. “But when an adult violates terms on a MySpace account to gain information that creates this type of reaction, it caused this office to take a really hard look.”

Calls to Megan’s parents, Tina and Ron Meier, were not returned Thursday. Mr. Meier told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch: “It’s a good day. It’s an awesome feeling.”

Ms. Drew’s lawyer, H. Dean Steward, said: “I am deeply disappointed. We thought when the St. Louis prosecutors took a look at the case and decided not to bring charges that was the end of it. I don’t think the statute they used fits the facts in the indictments.”

Ms. Drew is scheduled to be arraigned in Los Angeles in June.

Experts were skeptical that the charges would withstand close legal scrutiny.

“It is an extremely aggressive indictment,” said Rebecca Lonergan, a law professor at the University of Southern California and a former federal prosecutor. “I have never in 18 years as a prosecutor seen the statute used that way. Cybercrimes is a relatively new area, but I am not sure this statute technically covers the essence of the harm.”

Officials at MySpace said in a written statement, “MySpace does not tolerate cyberbullying and is cooperating fully with the U.S. attorney in this matter.”

Various state and local governments have passed or introduced laws that prohibit cyberbullying, often through requirements that school districts have cyberbullying policies.

“I have concerns about the term ‘cyberbullying’ being applied to this situation,” said Nancy Willard, executive director of the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use. “Cyberbullying usually occurs between peers. It is not this kind of action.”

Ms. Willard, who is also a former lawyer, said she also had doubts about the prosecutor’s tactics. “I, like everyone else, would like to see Lori Drew see her comeuppance,” she said, “but I have some concerns. I don’t think the statute was written to apply to this case.”

Client 9 & his 7-diamond ho’s real victims: Elyssa, Jenna & Sarabeth

Bonnie Fuller The Huffington Post

Eliot Spitzer’s Biggest Challenge – Winning Back the Trust of His Daughters!

Posted March 12, 2008 | 08:13 AM (EST)

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Read More: Eliot Spitzer, Eliot Spitzer Daughters, Eliot Spitzer Daughters Pictures, Eliot Spitzer Family, Eliot Spitzer Prostitution, Eliot Spitzer Prostitution Scandal, Eliot Spitzer Silda, Elyssa Spitzer, Elyssa Spitzer Pictures, Jenna Spitzer, Jenna Spitzer Pictures, Sarabeth Spitzer, Sarabeth Spitzer Pictures, Silda Spitzer, Slideshow, Breaking Entertainment News

Silda Spitzer looked about as devastated as any human being could be as she stood at her husband Eliot’s side while he announced that yes, he had patronized a prostitution ring.But as awful as this must be for her, there are three other innocent victims of Eliot Spitzer’s unseemly behavior — his three teenage daughters, Elyssa, Sarabeth and Jenna. Anyone who has ever been through the experience of having their father choose another woman over their mother, especially if it happened when they were a teenager, knows how traumatic this can be. Whether your father has an affair or anonymous sex, it’s all the same and it’s even more devastating when the world knows about it. huffington_post:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bonnie-fuller/eliot-spitzers-biggest-c_b_91078.html

As Dr. Jenn Berman, psychotherapist and author of The A to Z Guide to Raising Happy, Confident Kids, says, “when you’re a teenager, it can be embarrassing enough just to be seen in public with your parent, let alone to have all your friends know about your dad’s sexual escapades.” And in this case, the world knows. There’s no school that you can switch even in Timbuktu to, where your classmates aren’t going to be whispering.”

Aside from the embarrassment factor, the Spitzer girls no doubt feel like a warm, security blanket has been ripped off their backs. “Teens count on their parents to look out for their best interests and to take care of them and their family. Now they’ve been betrayed,” says Dr. Berman. “They’ve even been betrayed financially. When their father took money that should have been used for their family and instead spent it on his sexual gratification, it’s like spending it on drugs.”

Most little girls grow up worshiping their fathers. Daddies are big and strong enough to pick you up when you fall down and scrape your knee. They carry you inside when you fall asleep in the car. They teach you how to ride your bike.

• • • • • • • • New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer orders some food at the New York State Fair on Wednesday, Aug. 29, 2007, in Geddes, N.Y. With him is daughter Jenna and wife Silda. (AP Photo Empire Expo Center, Mike Okoniewski)

And in this case, Eliot Spitzer wasn’t just any old terrific dad, he seemed like a genuine and “wonderful white knight rooting out evil,” points out Dr. Jacqueline Olds. He put bad guys behind bars. The problem with this is that “it makes him seem like such a hypocrite now and young people have a far lower tolerance for hypocrisy than adults. So it will make it especially hard for them to deal with this,” explains Dr. Olds, McLean Hospital psychiatrist and author of the book Marriage in Motion: The Natural Ebb and Flow of Lasting Relationships.

It could also make it hard for the Spitzer daughters to develop their own positive loving relationships with men as they grow up, warns psychiatrist Dr. Carole Lieberman “They’re at a time — 13, 15, and 18 — when they’re starting to date and finding out that the man they love most has betrayed their mom and family could cause them to distrust any boy they start to get close to, because he may break their hearts,” says the author of Bad Boys: Why We Love Them, How to Live With Them and When to Leave Them.

But they aren’t totally alone in their boat of private family matters exposed in public. Other daughters have survived this situation, thrived and remained close to their fathers. Chelsea Clinton is remarkably adjusted post Monica Lewinsky. Ivanka Trump couldn’t have found it easy when her parents’ marriage imploded on the front page of the New York Post. Today she’s a successful businesswoman who stars on Donald’s hit show, “Celebrity Apprentice.” Actor David Hasselhoff’s two teenage daughters videotaped their father drunk and incoherent, lying on the floor and the tape was aired around the world. Today he has custody of the girls and apparently a close relationship.

“If Eliot Spitzer has been a good and decent father I believe that even teenage daughters can put this experience in context,” asserts psychiatrist Dr. Keith Ablow, author of Living the Truth. In other words, despite the anger and betrayal that his daughters may feel now and for a long time, he can repair his relationship with them. “He must say to them ‘I need to understand why I would have taken this risk not just with my own career but with your feelings and I will be there for you 1,000 percent now.”

So true. Too often dads that disappoint their families make the betrayal even worse, by abandoning them. So Eliot Spitzer, despite the guilt you’re feeling and despite the anger your daughters may express, the last thing you should do is take the “easy” exit from their lives. Even if it means years of personal and family therapy to figure out why you made such a huge mistake, do it. And don’t think your girls are better off without you. They’re not.

Zoning laws inhibit artistic expression

A Man’s 6-Pack Can Serve as His Castle

By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

NY Times, Published: March 7, 2008

HOUSTON — From his front porch, John Milkovisch was able to see the beer truck heading for the local grocery, spurring him into action. “He’d run over there and clean them out,” recalled his son Ronald. “He never had less than 8 to 10 cases stacked up in the garage.”

Enlarge This Image

Michael Stravato for The New York Times

Last-minute preparations are made before the opening ceremony of the Beer Can House.

John Milkovisch, left, with his wife, Mary, spent 20 years at work on what is known as the Beer Can House.

From 1968 until his death 20 years later, Mr. Milkovisch, an upholsterer for the Southern Pacific Railroad, not only emptied 50,000 cans or more of his favorite beverage but also put the containers to good use, cladding his house and workshop with thousands of maintenance-free flattened beer cans (Falstaff was a favorite) and shading the sun with garlands of tinkling beer can tops and tabs.Known to generations of sidewalk gawkers as the Beer Can House, the folk art monument was dedicated Thursday and will open to the public on Saturday for the first time since its purchase from the Milkovisch family and a seven-year restoration project totaling $400,000.“Most people who take the lead in doing something truly innovative are considered a little bit crazy,” said Mayor Bill White, cutting a ribbon and paying tribute to “the hard work of generating all those beer cans.”Inside, a quote from Mr. Milkovisch adorns a wall. “They say every man should leave something to be remembered by. At least I accomplished that goal.”What may now be Houston’s second-zaniest spectacle was bought by the zaniest — the Orange Show Center for Visionary Art, a foundation growing out of one man’s obsession with his favorite citrus fruit.Working alone from 1956 to his death in 1980, Jeff McKissack, a Houston postman, built a maze of connected chambers, balconies and tiled walkways extolling the health benefits of oranges. The structure costs a dollar to tour, the same as the Beer Can House.Marilyn Oshman, the art patron who founded the Orange Show, said it was no accident Houston played host to such attractions. “One good thing about not having any zoning is you can do stuff,” Ms. Oshman said.

Why humans feel compelled to binge, especially at the end of winter

NY Times, March 4, 2008
MIND
When People Drink Themselves Silly, and Why
By BENEDICT CAREY
The urge to binge mindlessly, though it can strike at any time, seems to stir in the collective unconscious during the last weeks of winter. Maybe it’s the television images from places like Fort Lauderdale and Cabo San Lucas, of communications majors’ face planting outside bars or on beaches.

Or perhaps it’s a simple a case of seasonal affective disorder in reverse. Not SAD at all, but anticipation of warmth and eagerness for a little disorder.

Either way, researchers have had a hard time understanding binge behavior. Until recently, their definition of binge drinking — five drinks or more in 24 hours — was so loose that it invited debate and ridicule from some scholars. And investigators who ventured into the field, into the spray of warm backwash and press of wet T-shirts, often returned with findings like this one from a 2006 study: “Spring break trips are a risk factor for escalated alcohol use.”

Or this, from a 1998 analysis: “The men’s reported levels of alcohol consumption, binge drinking and intoxication were significantly higher than the women’s.”

In fact, the dynamics of bingeing may have more to do with personal and cultural expectations than with the number of upside-down margaritas consumed. In their classic 1969 book, “Drunken Comportment,” recently out in paperback, the social scientists Craig MacAndrew and Robert B. Edgerton wrote that the disconnect between the conventional wisdom on drunken behavior and the available evidence “is even now so scandalous as to exceed the limits of reasonable toleration.”

They detailed the vast differences in the way people from diverse cultures behave after excessive alcohol. In contrast to nearby tribes, for example, the Yuruna Indians in the Xingu region of Brazil would become exceptionally reserved when rendered sideways by large helpings of moonshine. The Camba of eastern Bolivia would drink excessively twice a month. Sitting in a circle, they would toast one another, more lavishly with each pop.

In a Japanese island village, Takashima, people knew a drinking occasion had gone completely off the dials if villagers began to sing or, wilder still, to dance. Aggression, sexual or otherwise, was unheard of during these sessions.

Western cultures are more likely to excuse binge drinking as a needed mental vacation. “An awful lot of cultures have institutionalized bingeing as a kind of time out like Mardi Gras or New Year’s Eve, a culturally recognized period where a certain amount of acting out is acceptable,” said Dwight Heath, emeritus professor of anthropology at Brown.

Not to say that would-be bingers, when ordering that first tray of Irish car bombs for the table, think about discharging a cultural tradition. They have their own reasons. And those, too, shape subsequent drunken behavior.

In a series of studies in the 1970s and ’80s, psychologists at the University of Washington put more than 300 students into a study room outfitted like a bar with mirrors, music and a stretch of polished pine. The researchers served alcoholic drinks, most often icy vodka tonics, to some of the students and nonalcoholic ones, usually icy tonic water, to others. The drinks looked and tasted the same, and the students typically drank five in an hour or two.

The studies found that people who thought they were drinking alcohol behaved exactly as aggressively, or as affectionately, or as merrily as they expected to when drunk. “No significant difference between those who got alcohol and those who didn’t,” Alan Marlatt, the senior author, said. “Their behavior was totally determined by their expectations of how they would behave.”

In a repeat of the session performed for a coming documentary, one participant insisted that she could not have been drinking because alcohol always made her flush.

“We told her that, yes, in fact she was drinking it,” Dr. Marlatt said. “She immediately flushed.”

Somewhere between personal preferences and social custom, moreover, the peer group asserts itself. In a recent study, public health researchers in New Zealand conducted extensive interviews with teenage girls in one of two cliques at a high school. Both groups associated drinking with uninhibited behavior — and that is what they exhibited. But one group considered being uninhibited to include making out, and the other considered it to include far more.

In their discussion, Dr. MacAndrew and Dr. Edgerton acknowledged that Western societies, and certainly the United States, send multiple signals on bingeing. At times, the signals cross, as when movies show spring-break binging as sunburned, sexy fun, while health pronouncements make it look like an orgy of near-criminal behavior.

At other times, cultural expectations and personal preferences reinforce each other. The hope that a wild session might “reveal new things about myself” or “allow me to act completely out of character” is widely echoed in literature, pop culture and drinking lore. If the research is a guide, those hopes should be self-fulfilling at some level.

Unless, that is, the binge goes beyond any reasonable definition of excess. Then the amount of tequila consumed matters very much — and poison is poison in any culture.