“As Long as We Keep Talking, We Stay Alive”: Michael Keaton’s Platonic Love Affair with Helena Bonham Carter in “Live from Baghdad” (HBO)

I remember watching this movie repeatedly, about ten times over a two year period, from 2003 to 2005 on my VCR in the horrid, truck route Lebanon apartment about which I have written many times in my FB notes. It was large and as they say, “big for the money,” on Hope Avenue across from the big cemetery. It was not a convalescent home, but 80% senior citizens. The joke, after I moved in and told other grad students where I lived, was that it was desirable for old people due to its proximity to the cemetery–“a short ride across the street.” By some miracle, though I do not believe in miracles, if by this is meant some act of a supernatural force or deity as opposed to simply an amazing stroke of luck, I somehow avoided taking that short ride at a few points in my miserable grad school existence, becoming a resident of Cavalry Cemetery rather than Hope Gardens (a misnomer if ever there was one).

I say Lebanon (but feel free to substitute any godforsaken hot, loud, unpleasant country in the Middle East), both because it was obscenely hot–afternoon sunlight beating down on the wall of windows in both the bedroom and the living room–and incomprehensibly loud. In fact, at my nuttiest, I wore earplugs 24/7. My various errand persons (EPs, as I explain in the prior note on Victorian Chick), when my favorites were discontinued, were entrusted with the laundering of my earplugs, along with the clothing I refused to send to the various fluff-and-folds in town because at the time I had an extreme aversion both to detergent–even the green kind–and worse, fabric softener.

Nothing could take me from 0 to 60 in the sobbing department like Bounce on my gray Gap sweats and t-shirts, pretty much my uniform for 6 years. I did not do the laundry myself because as I said, I so hated the apartment the neighborhood (on the corner of Hope and State are three banks–Bank of America, Montecito Bank and Trust, and Wells Fargo–so it’s not exactly a nice residential area and worse, it’s just depressing and dead and not at like living in an urban center like Manhattan or Philly with banks and other businesses). Of course, at the time, I used to shower a great deal, not out of OCD, but of necessity. It was so damned hot five months a year, I had to shower more than once a day just to keep myself dry. No portable air conditioner worked–that’s a story for another day, funny now, not at all funny at the time–and fans were useless. I also swam 5 to 6 nights a week and there are few more disgusting sensations in life than wet earplugs (up there with sand in a bikini but arguably worse).

I did not want to roam around that rambling two-story complex built in the 1960s at all, but particularly not during business hours and the laundry rooms, all four, closed at 8 PM. So it was not that I was a pampered girl who grew up with a housekeeper doing the laundry–though that is true–but that it was emotionally agonizing for me to confront the reality of where I lived. The reasons I stayed were two: 1) I was estranged from my parents and felt that the apartment was all I had in life by way of a home, and 2) I felt that to leave this apartment would make me feel homeless, probably my greatest terror on earth on an emotional level (the notion of home or at-homeness-in-the-world in German Idealism became a huge focus of the dissertation on Eliot in fact, but that too is a story for another day). I could have afforded a nice apartment and eventually moved to a two-bedroom in San Roque, which I still rent, though I am never there, which was several hundred dollars more. This was not about money.

So shortly after 9/11, though the fourth year of grad school (a fellowship year after the completion of coursework with no teaching and therefore no need to leave the apartment) was pretty hermetic, I just stopped leaving the apartment. If I could stay indoors most of the day, until the two hour session at the gym at 8PM (pool, steam room, stretching, long shower), I could create an internal reality not disturbed or threatened by the geographical and emotional reality of my life at Hope–or Death–Gardens. I believe the movies I saw on HBO and Cinemax, as well as basic cable shows like Rescue Me have an inconceivably deeper hold on me emotionally as a result of the context in which I experienced them. I just blocked out the world.

At the time, I still shopped every Sunday at Lazy Acres, a pretentious, overpriced, wannabe Whole Foods for which I have nothing but contempt. It doesn’t even have normal frozen food like Lean Cuisine, just some dreadful organic no-anything Ethnic Gourmet. The salad bar sucked; there was no real sushi, just California rolls; the deli was limited. I hated it but when Gelson’s came in 1999, I refused to patronize it because I intensely disliked Loreto Plaza, something a young professor I knew briefly, a Yale Ph.D., called “funky.” I go there all the time now, of course, and Chaucers, a wonderful independent bookstore, has been in the strip mall for decades, but at the time it was simply not possible emotionally for me to drive past Loreto Plaza, much less park, get out of the car, and shop there.

Lazy Acres became the market of choice because Vons of course sucked at the time. And it had the advantage of being on the Mesa, with a parking lot overlooking the ocean. It was aesthetically pleasing inside and out, as well as geographically desirable and not “haunted” as Gelson’s and Loreto Plaza were.

Let me say here, by way of final introduction to the movie and its significance for me, that I have never been a scaredy cat where personal safety is concerned. In New Haven, I used to walk alone with a laptop, purse, and wallet back from CCL–Cross Campus Library, now Bass–at 1:30 AM when it closed, back to my dorm. I have never been afraid of walking through a sketchy area alone. I’m not afraid of being raped, though obviously it’s not something I desire. I just don’t walk around the world afraid of being raped, assaulted, killed. And I suppose my college habits of walking around New Haven when it was still crime-ridden were somewhat reckless.

I have been told, though the term seems excessive to me, that I was “sexually assaulted” when I was 15, while hitch-hiking in the most expensive part of Pacific Palisades, about 5 minutes from the Reagan ranch on Sunset and Capri. I don’t want to go into it here (I’ll get the PSA against hitch-hiking off my old blog–www.victorias-random-review-blogspot.com tomorrow), but while the man frightened and repulsed me by masturbating in my presence, pulling me over to him, and refusing to let me out before I screamed and hollered and jumped out of the car when he slowed to 3 mph, I wasn’t as terrified as one might think. I was not only a virgin till I was 18.5 years old, but had not up to that point seen, much less touched, a penis, not even on TV, so it was extremely unpleasant and I am sure that influenced my distaste for certain very common non-procreative sexual activities, into my mid-30s.

For me, terror was a major part of life, but it was not a literal or physical kind of terror. The terrors which ruled my life: loneliness, homelessness, and loss/annihilation of personal identity. So when I say that I could not move from Death Gardens for fear of a sense of homelessness, an existential lack of groundedness, I mean this very literally. All this, no doubt, is why my recollection of this glorious film about platonic love and friendship, as well as courage of the CNN journalists who stayed after Bush’s deadline in 1991 for Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait, touched me so deeply.

The movie is based on the Robert Wiener book of the same title, about CNN’s remarkable reporting about Bush’s first attack after the January 15th deadline was ignored by Saddam Hussein. I have not read the book, but it’s an HBO movie, made when Michael Fuchs was still in charge, I think. HBO used to sweep the Emmys every year with the made for TV movies, miniseries and dramas, from The Sopranos to Six Feet Under. Those were the years I was not, shall we say, an active participant in life and I watched a lot of HBO. Hussein , of course, had a habit of kicking out news crews from the networks, as this movie attests. Before the deadline set by George Bush after the horror of Kuwait invasion/occupation, CNN was one of several networks.

As the deadline approached, all the networks left, but due to Wiener’s personal relationship with the Minister of Information, Naji al Hadithi (the proper pronunciation of whose name he was the only journalist, evidently, to bother to find out), CNN got a “four-wire.” (Hadithi later became Foreign Minister, and I must go back and do some reading about this, but he had to have been better than Tariz , the Foreign Minister who has been partners in crime with Saddam back in the 50s, when they were part of the banned Socialist party.) David Suchet plays Naji with dignity, intelligence, and power: an astonishing performance.

The “four-wire” technology, awarded to Wiener and the others in Iraq from Atlanta and other bureaus–Peter Arnett , played by the incomparable and ubiquitous character actor Bruce McGill (the bailiff in My Cousin Vinny, among other things)–allowed CNN to get the story and broadcast to the world, eclipsing all the other networks. It was this coverage which catapulted CNN , and Ted Turner, to the position it has occupied ever since.

So the movie is, on the one hand, an historical account of the months leading up to the January 15 deadline, and on the other, a highly intricate character exploration of the lives of the journalists–Wiener and Ingrid Formanek (Helena Bonham Carter)–who so bravely decided to stay in Iraq for the “fireworks” as Lili Taylor puts it. Taylor is a character actress whose career goes back , memorably, to the 1980s classic teen film, Say Anything, starring John Cusack, Ione Skye and John Mahoney of Frasier fame.

What struck me, of course, as a sentimental, solitary woman holed up in my apartment for those years working on my dissertation, was the platonic love affair between Keaton (Wiener) and Bonham Carter (Ingrid). They had covered stories around the globe, and as we learn at the “We’re Going to Die” party, gotten drunk together, passed out, and yet never consummated their love for one another, a love that encompasses both their shared dedication to journalism, their obvious sexual chemistry, and their war stories from years of professional friendship. Wiener has a wife and two small children, but it is clear that his true “wife” is the job, the story. After that, his great love is his beautiful colleague, Ingrid.

It is implied, but never stated, that Wiener once walked away from a major story, perhaps in Saigon, when he was still very green, and that his decision to put his life at risk by remaining in Iraq past the deadline is motivated by his resolve never to let a story which is the journalistic equivalent of the moon landing ever get away from again. “This is my walk on the moon,” he tells one of the executive producers at CNN, played by a character actor I’ve seen at least half a dozen times, but cannot name. There are scores of such veteran character actors in this film, working consistently in television and movies for 20 years, and the level of acting truly is beyond what you see in most movies made for theatrical release, much less TV (at least network TV).

There are a number of memorable scenes, some of which I have posted on FB. Lili Taylor and this very young, sweet journalist from the US, have a flirtation, though she’s about a decade older. The actor who plays Richard Roth, an observant Jew who says, “If I’m going to die, I want to die in Israel,” is young and compelling , and clearly the intellectual of the group, steeped in the history and politics of the Middle East. Other pivotal scenes include the one when Keaton expresses his guilt about having put a hostage on camera when he kidnapped, though the Iraqis eventually return him unharmed. The film is full of ethical dilemmas for Keaton , as the head guy in Iraq for CNN, in terms of what to report and what contribution the network can make in this terrible situation. Bonham Carter, the voice of reason throughout, constantly reminds Keaton that he is an “egomaniac,” that the story isn’t about him, and that they don’t create the news; they simply report it.

On a personal level, there is a great scene where Keaton asks if they have ever had drunken sex. She says no. He says that everyone thinks they have and she says, coyly and intimately, “Fuck ’em. Fuck ’em.” “Fuck ’em,” he says quietly, “I have a wife and kids.” (Of course back in 2003, I wanted nothing more in life than to BE Bonham Carter and to have that stolen, secret night with Keaton, her best friend and respected colleague. And I remember being in corresponding awe, that two people with such obvious and profound love, respect, and attraction for one another would have the self-discipline not just to spend a night together, when it is a night no one would ever discover.)

The scene from which I take my title comes after Wiener relies on Naji (their first meeting is a high point in the movie, because Keaton has patiently waited some 8 hours for the meeting, while other journalists have stomped out in a rage, his patience earning him major points) and goes to Kuwait to report on the incubator story. There were allegations that Iraqi soldiers were entering Kuwaiti hospitals , taking babies out of incubators and leaving them to die, which is the sort of ghastly barbarism my veteran of the war in Iraq in this decade, told me was typical, par for the course. He said Hussein was a “brute” and a “tyrant” and that it is hard, living in the US, to comprehend the nature and scope of his evil.

Wiener is undertandably very angry because it turns out his “friend” has used him to report the story that he wants to report, casting the situation in a light favorable to the Iraqis. The minister insists that all governments use the press, to which Wiener responds, “That’s too easy.” He persists and tells Naji that he’s “trying to have an honest conversation.” The minister with the impeccable English and faintly British accent, clearly educated abroad, raises his eyebrows at this, and says “Honest? You want honesty? The American people don’t care about Kuwait. This is about oil, for you.” He goes on, ” An English general carved up my country after WWI and called it Kuwait. There’s a history in this region about which you people know nothing.” Keaton is neither dissuaded nor discouraged by this and pushes him, “So straighten us out. If we don’t understand, straighten us out, tell use what we’re doing wrong. Put your guy on the air.”

Naji replies that they already did, on CBS, and it accomplished nothing. And this is the line , the moment in the scene, I remembered and which stayed with me for years, because Keaton says, “But you have to keep doing it. You can’t just stop. You gotta talk and you gotta keep talking. You gotta keep talking till we’re sick of it, because when the talking stops, we’re dead. As long as we keep talking, we stay alive.” Naji is visibly moved by this (Suchet has great control of his emotions and facial expressions, and the great instance of this is when he tells Wiener he can tell him nothing about the kidnapping of hostage Bob Vinton, who had given an interview on camera which did not please the Iraqis, needless to say. But he “nods” at Wiener and when he tells Ingrid that he knows Bob Vinton is safe–due to the nod–she says, “You really trust this guy, don’t you?” )

Undoubtedly, my personal circumstances deepened the scene’s–and the line’s–resonance for me: the notion that keeping a dialogue going, even when it breaks down for so long that dialogue of the most rudimentary kind seems impossible, is essential. This is the movie’s crucial turn, as CNN finally gets the famous interview when Bernard (“Bernie”) Shaw asks Saddam if he plans to exit Kuwait. Saddam draws an analogy to Hawaii, claiming that Kuwait is just as much a part of Iraq as Hawaii is part of the United States. Shaw pressed Saddam: “So the answer is no?” And Saddam answers, “Naturally.”

What’s eerie, bizarre, and yet intuitively reasonable, I think, is the sense of camaraderie and triumph that emerges after the completion of the interview, when the journalists/engineers from CNN are celebrating their exclusive with Saddam. Of course, though I haven’t yet mentioned it, the soundtrack is absolutely authentic: Talking Heads, English Beat, Men at Work and other big 80s bands. “Save it for Later,” a song I absolutely adore but could not place until I placed a FB query and have since posted many times, plays while they all drink to celebrate the journalistic coup. I am always drawn to stories of profesional camaderie, whether this camaderie arises in a working-class, professional, or entertainment context.

My lifelong craving for, and attraction to, stories of professional camaderie does not require psychoanalytic training to comprehend. I had very few friends in graduate school and was monumentally isolated in every sense. So, in my “solitude” (a term which the great British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, unlike Freud, could conceive as a “presence” rather than simply an “absence” though it is undoubtedly both) stories of friendship, camaderie, and platonic love always attracted me.

In fact, I delivered my only conference paper at WSECS in Flagstaff in 1998, in the winter and snow, about this very topic. (Sadly, that conference paper is one of many casualties of the lost college laptop I used the first year or two of grad school.) WSECS is the Western Division of ASECS, the American Society of the Eighteenth Century, and I only submitted it because my rock here in SB and at UCSB, Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook , who had left New Haven with her husband and infant for SB a year before I did, in 1996, had been my professor for 18th-C women’s writing . I had written, and become deeply invested in, my seminar paper on Katherine Phillips, a great female poet in the tradition of John Donne’s metaphysical poetry. I have mentioned her before on Victorian Chick but will not re-hash here, except to say that she writes about female friendship and platonic female love. The feminists, the annoying ones at least, want to make it about lesbian love, but I don’t think it is.

It might seem a long way from Katherine Philips to the 15th Precinct on NYPD Blue and the crew of 62 Truck on Rescue Me, but it isn’t. I have since college yearned the sorts of bonds which arise from shared professional activity, whether this takes the form of literary criticism, journalism, firefighting, law, medicine, or police work. I have always, and when I was younger particularly, dreamed, longed, fantasized about being part of a group of people dedicated to literature and philosophy, producing, even if in a somewhat solitary way, a common or at least mutually intelligible object (“communicable” in Kantian terms). As an academic, you’re on your own. Your books, your articles are yours. You are the one who suffers in front of the computer, all alone. But it is a communal activity at the back end, when your ideas get shared through the medium of print (or I suppose, internet, though that’s not how I ever conceived of this communal pool of knowledge).

I found that type of professional commitment which gives rise to a serious emotional investment in the above dramas (also Grey’s Anatomy, whose popularity give me faith in the taste of the American public, something of which I confess I have very little). I find I am most attracted to movies, even most recently Morning Glory, which center around a workplace. I thought Friends was truly a stupid show, though my best childhood friend, whose parents took me to Europe for my first time (London, never been to the Continent), was a writer and then head writer on the show. I find that in a sitcom, I’m only interested in the kinds of friendships which arise from professional interactions, e.g The Job or Sports Night.

Live From Baghad is a great story of professional collegiality, the love that exists between friends, both male and female, and the sexual chemistry which arises between two physically attracted and attractive people, who are devoted to the same things in life (here, it’s journalism). I have no interest in investigative or broadcast journalism. I cannot say enough for this beautiful story of professional friendship, dedication to the truth about a horrifying geopolitical situation, and the enormous pain that such situations engender on both sides.

And it’s not all doom and gloom , since Keaton, Carter and the actor who plays Richard Roth, are masters of sarcasm and there is, as incredible as it seems, a great deal of humor in the movie. This, too, is what I love in film and television. I want a core of drama with a heavy dose of comedy. The baby of the crew, the naive cameraman, collects barf bags from airplanes all over the world. And after the Saddam interview, amidst the boozy celebration, Lili Taylor remarks of the picture with all of them flanking Saddam, “We’re looking into the eyes of a murderer. This man has murdered relatives. I’ve been there, but I’ve never acted out,” which prompts an amused chuckle by Roth, the Jewish journalist.

It’s also hilarious when one of the guys from the Ministry of Information shows up at the airport to take the CNN crew to the AL-Rasheed (this is funny in itself because they were going to a Sheraton which is apparently a dump, and find out from a journalist who has been kicked out–“the Iraqi mindfuck”–that the Al Rasheed is the place to be.) This flunky says he is “here to help” and with classic Keaton sarcasm (cigarette in mouth–I obviously have a thing for brilliant, sarcastic smokers with a heart of gold like Leary and Keaton), he says, “Stunning job so far,” because the guy has done nothing whatsoever to help. And Keaton has to use some serious persuasive skills to secure five or six rooms without a reservation.

The entire film can be watched for free on YouTube but it is well worth buying on Amazon or renting on Netflix.

Happy Friday!

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