You purchase Pain with all that Joy can give,/
And die of nothing but a Rage to live.--the last enlightened hunchback
The 1961 Goodbye Again is a masterpiece of my era, still a vibrant, living film. All Night Long, despite its fidelity to Stratford, cleverly embedded in a beatnik improvisation, fails the litmus test of its underlying anxiety, unsure of its own liberalism. Paul Harris does a good job of reversing expectations as the naturally regal chieftain, and McGoohan does as well as my managerial agent Trudy Richardson exaggerating the cowardliness of dissembling, but much like the problem of Othello itself, McGoohan loses hold of Johnny's core, and there is no accountability here for anyone. Des is not in forensics with ligature marks. Cas doesn't press charges, Rex abandons his band with Oedipal guilt, his wife chasing after him submissively, perhaps as an albatross of uncertain omen, and Patrick bangs his drum in insolence. Guess Who's Coming To Dinner?, five years older and nearly as evasive, is nearly down by comparison.
O comes nearly 40 years later, transliterating to the jazz on the court, is more provocative, but at least has a rationale? If Cosby wants the opportunity of a comeback, one way he might do it is by challenging the meandering estuaries of Obama's legacy. We have the 44th president of the US excoriating a comedian who could be his father on the basis of civil court transcripts-- this says as much about our national uncertainty as the controversy over Iran's entry into the nuclear family. We cannot define Bill Cosby as a monster and simply ask Congress to revoke his medal. My attacker was a black addict. I've forgiven him.
I have interacted with Joan Tarshis and could have easily lied to the woman. She thought I was in the Cosby press corp and I gently corrected her, but it was within that interaction that I came to sympathize with Eugene Robinson's dissonance over Cosby's serial accusers. Social shaming has its place, but can rapidly capsize too far leeward.
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