Clips from his film projects add to a lively mix that also encompasses much vintage news/talkshow footage (including a notable evisceration of an extremely uncomfortable young Jerry Brown during one of the Vidal’s two actual political campaigns), plus interviews with famous friends like Dick Cavett and Tim Robbins.īut the grounding material here is with the elderly Vidal himself, whom we first encounter ruminating atop his future burial plot, shrugging off the fear of death like any other opponent. Pic doesn’t delve deeply into Vidal’s career as a fiction writer, although it’s worth noting that an oeuvre that juggled such high-profile outrages as “Myra Breckenridge” with brilliantly crafted historical novels like “Lincoln” remains undervalued precisely because he was so prolific and popular. Kennedy’s “disastrous” presidency the revelation that he once shared a cottage with fellow pal Paul Newman or the drama of his contentious estrangement from onetime protege Christopher Hitchens (who died in 2011, but is also extensively interviewed here). While much here will be familiar to fans (especially those who have read his memoirs), there are some surprises, like Vidal’s latter-day dismissal of good friend John F. He also critiqued what he deemed the general self-mythologizing of Americans as historically open-minded and resistant to institutional manipulation. Bush’s responses to 9/11 (“We’ve had bad presidents before but we’ve never had a goddamn fool”), and the escalating gap between the wealthy and the struggling (“This is a country of the rich, for the rich and by the rich”) all earned his memorably vivid tongue-lashings. provocations against perceived enemy governments, President George W. The Vietnam War, Nixon, the Reagan era rise of evangelical Christian power brokers, U.S.
(He announced, “Sex destroys relationships … I’m devoted to promiscuity,” while living many decades with platonic companion Howard Austin.)īut it was his willingness to engage with other issues of the day that often enraged conservatives.
Buckley and Norman Mailer, as recalled in some delicious clips here - Vidal made no secret of his own views on sexuality, which were pretty out-there even by later Gay Lib standards. Marvelously indifferent to the notion of tact - yet so articulate he made mincemeat of famed verbal jousters like William F.
0 kommentar(er)
