Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 274

Don't Insult a King's Dog

One of the perks of American life is the freedom to comment or speculate wildly about the pets of the head of state. Like The Daily Show, which first suggested Bo Obama’s sexual preference or the many outlets that raised alarm when Barney Bush bit a Reuters reporter.

In Thailand, where The New York Times has recently been blocked and where protesters have been detained for channeling The Hunger Games salute, disparaging the king’s dog is not a right. The military won’t divulge what Thanakorn Siripaiboon, a factory worker, said about the dog that Thai King Bhumibol Adulyadej adopted years ago, but the “sarcastic” post appears to have landed Siripaiboon in serious trouble.

According to the AP, he is charged with sedition, in addition to “two counts of lèse-majesté, or insulting the monarchy, for posting an apparently inappropriate photo of royal dog Tongdaeng and for clicking ‘Like’ on a Facebook page with a derogatory photo of King Bhumibol Adulyadej.” He could face up to 37 years in jail.

“I never imagined they would use the law for the royal dog,” Siripaiboon's lawyer told the Times. “It’s nonsense.”

The enforcement of lèse-majesté laws has expanded in Thailand in recent years, particularly as the health of the 88-year-old king has raised the possibility of a succession crisis in a country that has suffered 19 separate coups since the 1930s. Last year, an 82-year-old Thai scholar faced a charge for reportedly defaming Naresuan the Great, a king who died in 1605.

On Tuesday, a woman, described as a “single mother,” was sentenced to seven years in jail by a military court for defaming the monarchy.

Can Trump Stay on Cruz Control in Vegas?

Nine Republican candidates will squeeze onto a Las Vegas debate stage on Tuesday, but the lights seem to be shining brightest on two of them at the moment: Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.

While Trump has expanded his lead in national polling to new heights over the last two weeks, Cruz has surged in Iowa and edged ahead of the billionaire boaster in the crucial first-in-the-nation voting state. Vying for the same set of conservative voters, the two for months have had something of an informal nonaggression pact. But that has frayed in the last few days, and it may be shredded in Las Vegas.

First, Trump seized on reports that Cruz criticized him in private and referred to the uncompromising Texan as “a little bit of a maniac.” Cruz initially responded in jest to Trump’s taunts, tweeting clips from Flashdance and Tommy Boy. But as a former college debating star occupying center stage for the first time on Tuesday night, he might have something bigger planned for Trump.

While the last GOP debate took place just over a month ago, the contest in Las Vegas—airing on CNN at 8:30 p.m.—will be the first since the terror attacks in San Bernardino. And it will occur on the same day that a bomb threat caused officials to shut down the entire Los Angeles public school system. Moderator Wolf Blitzer will undoubtedly press both Trump and his rivals on Trump’s widely-condemned proposal to bar Muslims from entering the United States. And they will—hopefully—be forced to speak with more clarity and specificity on what other measures they would take to protect the homeland and how, or whether, they would expand the war President Obama launched against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

Now that voters have seen them repeatedly and gotten used to their debating styles, it may be harder for any one performance to move the needle.

What about the seven other candidates on the main stage? Marco Rubio and Chris Christie have also climbed in the polls over the last several weeks, apparently benefitting both from solid previous debate performances and from the heavy recent focus on foreign policy and national security. Yet while both are contending for a strong finish in New Hampshire (and Iowa for Rubio), they are nowhere close to Trump’s level of support. Neither anymore is Ben Carson, the neurosurgeon who briefly topped Trump in the polls earlier in the fall but who, by his own admission, has struggled to demonstrate that he has the foreign-policy chops to win the voters’ trust as commander-in-chief. Cruz has supplanted Carson as the main conservative threat to Trump both nationally and in Iowa.

Tuesday night will be the fifth Republican primary debate, and the challenge for any of the second- and third-tier candidates may be one of familiarity: Now that voters have seen them repeatedly and gotten used to their debating styles, it may be harder for any one performance to move the needle. That is likely to be especially true for John Kasich, Carly Fiorina, and Jeb Bush, who have seen little upward movement in the standings for months. (Bush has already acknowledged that debates are not his strongest format.) Rand Paul barely made it into the main debate this time at all, and he is now at the unenviable stage where his campaign was forced to deny reports that he would drop out of the race. Expect some taunting from Trump on that front, although Paul’s differing views on foreign policy could liven up the debate over the right balance between national security and privacy right.

It may have long since lost its novelty, but there will once again be an undercard debate starting at 6 p.m. featuring Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, Lindsey Graham, and George Pataki. Fairly or not, these long shots will be looking for a viral moment or two just to capture enough attention to climb back into the campaign.

During the prime-time contest, one of the more interesting dynamics will be whether the trailing candidates go after Trump or Cruz. Attempts to take down Trump have generally backfired, and rivals like Rubio, Christie, and Bush might try instead to rattle Cruz and leapfrog him as the chief alternative. Rubio and Cruz have already been jousting over their votes on legislation to limit the NSA, while a play by Christie against Cruz’s hard-right positions could appeal to independents who can vote in the New Hampshire primary.

Six weeks remain until the Iowa caucuses, and the seemingly invincible—and extraordinarily healthy—Trump has held the top perch for months. The lectern beside him, however, has been a revolving door of challengers. Cruz will have his turn on Tuesday night, but at least for contenders like Rubio and Christie, there’s plenty of time for another shakeup.

The Ballad of Admiral Piett

Firmus Piett’s most memorable scene in the Star Wars series is the moment of his promotion. Standing silently in the background, he watches nervously as his boss, Admiral Ozzel, gets telepathically strangled by Darth Vader, the homicidal sadist everyone in the Galactic Empire has to answer to. Vader summons him forward, gives him his orders, and intones, “You are in command now, Admiral Piett,” as Ozzel collapses on the floor. So goes life in the Empire: There’s plenty of upward mobility, but job turnover is high, and workplace safety truly abysmal.

Related Story

Darth Vader 2.0?

Piett, played by Kenneth Colley, is a minor character in both The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, but he has the strange distinction of being the only Imperial officer to recur in any of the Star Wars films (excluding Vader, who seems to occupy quite nebulous territory on the Empire org chart). After rising to command thanks to the incompetence of Admiral Ozzel, he manages to hold on to it through the end of the Empire, dying in a blaze of glory during the last space battle of the original films. To the end, he emblematizes the peculiar, banal evil of George Lucas’s Empire: English, white, slightly stuffy, and firmly task-oriented, a functionary in a bureaucratic galaxy governed by evil space wizards. As Star Wars returns to theaters this week with a new entry, my wildest hope is that it can recapture that sense of the larger world Piett belonged to, and the dark humor playing out in his rise to power.

As with many aspects of the franchise, it’s hard to tell just how much thought George Lucas put into all of the details that littered the Star Wars movies. But the Empire is a particularly curious beast. It’s heavily coded as a stand-in for Nazi Germany, with Stormtroopers running around and atrocities committed at the touch of a button. As in many Nazi movies of the era, everyone is English and has a slightly ineffectual air. In fact, outside of Vader, whom everyone else seems to regard with a mixture of horror and disgust, the Empire is basically just a bunch of pencil-pushers. Its named officers (Ozzel, Needa, Motti) exist only to defy or disappoint Vader before he chokes them out. All except for Piett, busying himself away in the corner, managing to make it all the way to the top by following orders and keeping quiet.

It’s fun to imagine a strange Rosencrantz and Guildenstern-like saga playing out in the background as Piett manages the vast civil service of a galactic dictatorship while fielding orders from Vader and his Emperor. Colley, who’s otherwise most famous for playing Jesus in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, is a model of order throughout the series. When Ozzel dies next to him, he motions with his head for some officers to remove the body. When Vader hires bounty hunters to try and track down Skywalker, Piett quietly registers his distaste. And when commanding the fleet against the Rebels in Return of the Jedi’s climactic battle, he’s stoic to the end, perishing when a starfighter crashes into his ship’s bridge.

Piett stands for the peculiar, banal evil of George Lucas’s Empire: English, white, slightly stuffy, and firmly task-oriented.

Piett was a creation of Lawrence Kasdan, the screenwriter who wrote both Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi and who returned to write The Force Awakens, a coup that could help the new series avoid the more grievous mistakes of the prequel films. One of the biggest was the loss of any tactile sense of character or a larger, breathing world. Where the Empire had once been imposing on a grand scale and endearingly foolish on an individual level, now there were only CGI Clone Troopers and uncomfortably racist alien villains like the Neimoidians (who spoke with exaggerated Japanese accents). Kasdan knew there was fun in giving some grist to his background characters, not only to help viewers identify them, but to remind his audience that most of the Empire was just people doing their jobs. That doesn’t make them any less scary, of course—if anything, it makes the whole enterprise all the more distressing.

You don’t exactly care about him, but you do feel for Piett as he tiptoes around Vader. Kasdan even allows him a quiet scene of triumph at the end of The Empire Strikes Back. Vader’s Star Destroyer, helmed by Piett, is closing in on the fleeing Millennium Falcon but loses it again, allowing Luke, Han Solo, and the rest to slip through the Empire’s grasp once more. As he did at the start of the film, Piett stands tensely as Vader watches the scene unfold from the bridge. But this time, Vader doesn’t strangle him like his predecessors; he just stalks off silently. In a series with many moments of triumph, it’s probably the smallest, but you can’t help but pump your fist for Piett as he breathes a sigh of relief. Life in the Empire is hard, and he’s managed to avoid the boss’s wrath to fight another day. Who among us can’t sympathize with that?

What's Happening at Los Angeles Schools?

Updated on December 15 at 1:38 p.m. EST

The second-largest public school system in the nation shut down Tuesday morning after officials received a threat against an unspecified number of its more than 900 campuses.

Ramon Cortines, the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), said that an email was sent to members of the school board Tuesday morning, threatening “many schools” of the system. He advised parents and families to not bring their children to school and ordered searches of all school locations.

The New York Police Department said shortly after Los Angeles officials announced the closures that it too received a similar threat via email against the city’s schools Tuesday morning. But officials determined it was not a credible threat and will investigate it as a hoax.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said the threatening email was sent to “a number of different places simultaneously,” according to CBS New York.

The message was “written in a fashion that suggests that it’s not plausible, and we’ve come to the conclusion that we must continue to keep our school system open,” de Blasio said. “In fact, it’s very important not to overreact in situations like this.”

New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton said the message mirrored recent episodes of a Showtime series about the war on terrorism. “I think the instigator of the threat may be a Homeland fan,” he said.

Cortines defended his decision to close the schools at a press conference Tuesday afternoon.

“I could not take the chance as it relates to one student or our staff that serve our students,” he said.

Los Angeles officials hinted at their New York counterparts at the same press conference.

“I would say this to people who are critical: It is very easy in hindsight to criticize a decision based on results that the decider could have never known,” said Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck. “It is also very easy to criticize a decision when you have no responsibility for the outcome of that decision.”

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti appeared to distance himself from the superintendent’s decision to close the schools.

“The decision to close the schools is not mine to make, but it is mine to support as mayor of the city of Los Angeles … it is easy for people to jump to conclusions, and I have been around long enough to know that what people think in the first few hours is not necessarily how it will play out in later hours,” he said.  

Cortines said the school district receives threats “all that time” that prompt evacuations or lockdowns of particular schools. The threat officials received Tuesday morning, however, was “rare,” he said.

LAUSD has more than 640,000 students in kindergarten through 12th grade, according to its website. Schools are scheduled to close for the holidays on Friday.

Cortines cited growing concern over terrorism threats after deadly attacks in California, Paris, and elsewhere in his decision to shut down the school system. The threat came less than two weeks after a husband and wife shot and killed 14 people, allegedly in the name of the Islamic State, at a center in San Bernardino, just over an hour’s drive east of Los Angeles.

“I think the circumstances in neighboring San Bernardino, I think what has happened in the nation, I think what happened internationally—I, as superintendent, am not going to take the chance with the life of a student,” he said.

Steve Zimmer, the president of LAUSD’s Board of Education, said at a news conference Tuesday morning that the decision to close the schools for the day was “appropriate given the situation we are in.”

“We need the cooperation of the whole of Los Angeles today,” Zimmer said. “We need families and neighbors to work together with our families and employees to make sure our kids are safe throughout the day. We need employers to show the flexibility that a situation like this demands. And we ask you to show the maximum possible flexibility with your employees who are primarily mothers and fathers and guardians today in this situation.”

Bratton said the NYPD is working with Los Angeles police and the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force to investigate the threats.

This is a developing story and we’ll update as we learn more.

Fargo: Life’s Not so Pointless After all

Absurdity is everywhere in Fargo—in the original Coen brothers film as well as the the FX television adaptation. The second season, though, really doubled down on that theme. The episode titles all came from works that explore the idea: “Rhinoceros,” “The Myth of Sisyphus,” “Did You Do this? No, You Did It!” A UFO sighting led to a historic massacre. A hapless butcher unknowingly gained a reputation as a feared assassin. So it was fitting when a teenage girl told the cancer-stricken wife of a state trooper about Albert Camus’s belief that knowing we’re all going to die makes life absurd.

But it was Betsy Solverson’s response in Monday’s finale that crystallized what made Fargo’s second season so spectacular. “Well I don’t know who that is,” she said of the French philosopher. “But I’m guessing he doesn’t have a 6-year-old girl.” Nearly 20 years after the Coens’ film, the writer and creator Noah Hawley has both elevated his source material and made it his own. Yes, humor in the face of pointless tragedy defines the spirit of Fargo. It’s funny watching ordinary people deal with extraordinary and brutal circumstances, especially when those people have Minnesota accents. And the show’s second season had plenty of that, but chose to end by letting much of the irony, goofiness, and bloodshed melt away. What was left? People trying in earnest—out of fear, anger, love—to impose order on chaos, to apply meaning to senselessness. In other words, it was a surprising, understated, and beautiful ending to a near-perfect season.

All this was despite the fact that Fargo’s second season boasted an even higher body count than its predecessors. It began with a slaughter in a diner, ended with a climactic event known as “The Sioux Falls Massacre,” and still managed to squeeze in dozens of murders in between. The violence, though, never fully veered into cartoonish or nihilistic territory, even if it often managed to be humorous. Viewers were always reminded of the human fallout, the ripple effect of a single gunshot, tires skidding on ice, or a knife to the gut. Even the most hardened perpetrators—Mike Milligan ( Bokeem Woodbine), Hanzee Dent (Zahn McClarnon), Dodd and Bear Gerhardt (Jeffrey Donovan and Angus Sampson)—were allowed their moments of humanity.

Credit for broadening Fargo’s moral center this season goes largely to Patrick Wilson, whose fantastic portrayal of State Trooper Lou Solverson was something my colleague Chris Orr called “a mild revelation.” Lou and his father-in-law Sheriff Hank Larssen (Ted Danson) played the season’s much-needed “good guys,” old-school gentlemen whose fearlessness is tempered by sheer decency. Lou is the kind of guy who calls “family” the “rock” all men must push uphill—but who adds, “We call it our burden, but it’s really our privilege.”

The supporting cast also featured some of the year’s most memorable characters, especially the smooth-talking, bolo-tie-wearing, afro-ed Milligan and the steely-eyed Native American former enforcer for the Gerhardts, Hanzee. Ed and Peggy Blumquist (played by the wonderful Jesse Plemons and Kirsten Dunst) also shone as the season’s well-meaning but infuriating fools in way over their heads.

Throughout the season, viewers were reminded of the human fallout, the ripple effect of a single gunshot, tires skidding on ice, or a knife to the gut.

On the more technical side of things, Fargo’s second season delivered some of the year’s most adventurous, stylish cinematography. The show owned its more confident flourishes: the typewriter text that slowly punched out “This Is a True Story” every episode; the literal storybook that frames “The Castle”; the horror-movie shot of a wounded Rye Gerhardt hiding in the Blumquist’s garage; Hanzee charging out of the flames to Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs.” At times the show’s cinematic prowess threatened to distract from the story, but it almost always knew when to pull back and focus on the characters.

For all its heavy action and farcical situations, Fargo has always been a show unafraid to lean on dialogue. Characters love to trade long jokes, recite aphorisms, and tell each other eloquent stories whose purpose isn’t clear until the very end. It’s the kind of series where even if you have no idea what’s going on, you can still enjoy the music of Hawley’s writing—sometimes a little too polished to feel truly realistic, at other times heartbreakingly relatable.

Its this relatability—this unexpected identification with characters in such hopeless circumstances—that felt most fully realized in the second season. At one point in the finale, a cop started crying, overwhelmed at the thought of writing a police report about a gunfight that left dozens of his colleagues dead. Lou gave the simple answer: “Just start at the start, and work your way to the end.” Monday’s episode drove home the idea that carnage is traumatic, but it’s secondary to how people move on once the bodies are buried and the reports are written up.

And yet the season nourished this warm, humane side from the very start, which made the (mostly) happy ending feel that much more deserved. In the final shot of Lou and Betsy wishing each other goodnight before going to sleep, I kept waiting for a flicker of a UFO outside their window, a winking reminder of all the mysteries left unsolved, that perhaps not all is well. I waited for the punchline before realizing that sometimes the joke is that there’s no joke at all.

Will Talks on the Yemeni Conflict End the Fighting?

The nine-month-long conflict in Yemen, which has killed nearly 6,000 people, pits the government against Houthi rebels, and serves as a microcosm of the wider regional conflict between Saudi Arabia, which backs the government, and Iran, which supports the rebels. But on Tuesday, the government and Houthis began talks in Switzerland after a seven-day cease-fire took effect.

The UN-backed talks near the town of Biel are aimed at finding a lasting settlement to the conflict, establishing a permanent cease-fire, improving the humanitarian situation, and returning to a peaceful political transition in the poorest country in the Arab world. The talks bring together representatives of Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, the president, former President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s General People’s Congress party, and the Houthis. The BBC reported the talks are expected to last all week.

Troops loyal to Saleh and the Houthis are fighting the government’s forces, which are supported by a Saudi-led military coalition and backed by the United States. The conflict is complicated by the presence of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group.

“The cessation of hostilities which was called today should mark the end of military violence in Yemen and the transition to progress based on negotiations dialogue and consensus,” Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, the UN special envoy of the secretary-general for Yemen, said in a statement. “Making peace is a fundamental requirement to rebuild Yemen, rehabilitate the basic infrastructure, address the consequences of the war, provide the necessary environment to normalize life in all governorates, and resume economic activity.”

The New York Times adds:

To try to avoid distractions that could derail the process, the United Nations has not disclosed the location of the talks, arranged any news media access, or released details about who is attending the talks.

There were pockets of violence Tuesday despite the announced cease-fire. Shelling by rebels, as well as clashes on the ground, continued in Taiz province, in the country’s southeast. Separately, two military officers from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, both of which are supporting the Yemeni government, were killed in fighting on Monday.

An Arrest in Maryland

The Justice Department announced Monday it had charged a Maryland man with “attempting to provide material support” to ISIS in a case that involved money transfers from Egypt, a pledge of allegiance to the terrorist group, and a possible plot to launch a terrorist attack in the United States.

Prosecutors say that Mohamed Elshinawy, a 30-year-old man from Edgewood, received nearly $9,000 from an ISIS operative in Egypt and that he told investigators he was only planning to defraud the group.

“When confronted by the FBI, he lied in order to conceal his support for ISIL and the steps he took to provide material support to the deadly foreign terrorist organization,” Assistant U.S. Attorney General John P. Carlin said in a statement.

According to the complaint, investigators also claim that earlier this year, Elshinawy told his brother he pledged support to ISIS and sought “to die as a martyr for the Islamic State.” His arrest last week was the culmination of a five-month FBI investigation and comes amid heightened terror concerns in the wake of the San Bernardino attack earlier this month.

“While officials said they had uncovered no specific plans by Mr. Elshinawy for an attack,” the Times reported, “the case against him appears to be one of the most serious because of the extent of his contacts with overseas militants.”

His case is among the more than 75 cases brought against Americans in the past few years for purported support of terror groups.

“We consider this to be at an early stage of the process, and we hope the public withholds judgment,” Elshinawy’s attorney said.

Home Alone: Beloved Holiday Torture Porn

Here is an incomplete list of the physical traumas that befall the burglars Harry and Marv in Home Alone:

Harry grabs a white-hot doorknob, resulting in a red and blistering and probably-third-degree burn on his right palm Harry gets shot in the groin with a BB gun Marv gets shot in the forehead with a BB gun Harry’s hat, hair, and head-flesh get singed with a blue-flamed blowtorch that’s been rigged to trigger when he opens a door   Marv gets a hot iron to the face (the iron has fallen on him from the floor above) Marv, his shoes having been forcibly removed by an attempt to climb stairs that have been coated in hot tar, impales his foot on a metal file folder prong Marv, barefoot on account of the tar-stairs, cuts the soles of his feet on shattered Christmas ornaments Harry slips on a set of iced stairs, flipping onto his back (twice) Marv slips on a different set of icy stairs, landing on his back and sliding down the entire staircase Marv gets a tarantula placed on his face Both men slip on Micro Machines that have been scattered around the floor, flailing and landing on their backs Both get hit in the face with full paint cans—with a force so hard, in Harry’s case, that it knocks out his gold tooth

Home Alone, which was released in 1990 and has since become an It’s a Wonderful Life-caliber Christmas classic, is on the whole a heartwarming object lesson about the sanctity of the home, the value of family, and the power of forgiveness. (That scene at the end! When the old man hugs his granddaughter in the snow! As “Somewhere in My Memory” plays! I’m tearing up just thinking about it!) But here is the other thing—the awkward thing—about Home Alone: It is weirdly violent. Actually pretty sadistically violent. And the agent of all the mayhem is an adorable 8-year-old named Kevin McCallister. Who, yes, may have been forced, by wacky circumstance, to defend his house against two bumbling thieves—but who defends that house, again and again, in pretty much the cruelest, grossest ways possible. That foot, impaled. That scalp, burned. That face, tarantula-ed.

Related Story

How Home Alone Ruined John Hughes

Home Alone, overall, is a John Hughes movie that reads like a Tarantino: Its violence is artful, and theatrical, and extravagant, and unapologetic. It delights in the punishments it doles out to its villains by way of its pint-sized protagonist. Its plot points verge into full-on torture porn. Kevin carries his BB gun slung, over a single shoulder, like a rifle. He grins at the men he shoots with it. He taunts them. (“I’m down here, you big horse’s ass,” he yells at Harry. “Come get me before I call the police!”) His traps are designed not just to injure Harry and Marv, but to humiliate them.

One of those traps covers a scald-headed Harry (by way of a glue-covered piece of plastic wrap, a jury-rigged fan, and the contents of a down pillow rigged) in feathers. There is precisely no logistical point to this; it’s a tar-and-feathering joke meant only to add insult to injury. And when Kevin’s fun-house of horrors baits the burglars into venturing out on the zipline he’s strung from his attic to his treehouse, Kevin—rather than taking advantage of the thieves being caught in midair to get a head start in running away from them—decides instead to mock them again. “Hey, guys, check this out!” Kevin yells at them, flashing a taunting grin. He looks down dramatically at the pair of hedge-clippers he holds in his hand. Then he cuts the rope.

This kind of thing—Kevin taking sadistic delight in the traps he has set for his intruders—becomes a refrain throughout the movie. “Have you had enough?” he asks the burglars he has shot/stabbed/scalded, as yet another sly smile spreads across his face. “Or ya thirsty for more?”

20th Century Fox

All of this—the 8-year-old, fending off the criminals!—is meant, in the moral terrain of Home Alone, to be ironic and dramatic and hilarious and, all in all, justified. (The movie suggests that Kevin doesn’t do the obvious—call the police—because of some combination of his house’s phone lines being down and his not wanting outsiders to know that he is, in fact, home alone. The real reason, of course, is that a 911 call would negate the need for Home Alone to exist in the first place.) The film, throughout its proceedings, walks a tightrope that is approximately as thick as Kevin’s zipline: It’s a story whose plot revolves around shootings and stabbings and scaldings, but that presents itself as light-hearted comedy. A holiday romp! With probably-third-degree burns.

Home Alone walks that line—and downplays its own violence—in part through its upbeat music (“White Christmas,” “Run, Run, Rudolph,” “Jingle Bell Rock”) and its many chipper interludes (its iconic after-shave scene, Kevin’s Christmas Eve blessing of “this highly nutritious microwavable macaroni and cheese dinner and the people who sold it on sale”) and, in general, the precocious charisma of Macaulay Culkin. It also engages in some ends-justifying-the-means stuff by emphasizing Kevin’s status as an underdog. Home Alone is a classic story of David and Goliath, except here the power discrepancy comes down to “kid versus adult.” Everyone in the movie—parents, siblings, cousins, grocery store clerks—underestimates Kevin, not just on the grounds of his Kevin-ness (“you’re what the French call les incompé​tent”), but also on the grounds of his kid-ness. “He’s so little and helpless,” Kevin’s sister, Megan, reminds their brother, Buzz, when Buzz fails to see why they should cancel their Paris trip to retrieve him.

Everyone in the film underestimates Kevin, not just on the grounds of his particular Kevin-ness, but also on the grounds of his general kid-ness.

The thieves, too, fall victim to a kind of ageism, and to the assumptions of a culture that thinks extremely little of children and their abilities. Their “he’s just a kid” thinking forms another refrain in the movie. “We’re getting scammed by a kindie-gartener,” Harry tells Marv, when he realizes Kevin’s home-alone status. “He’s a kid,” Marv reminds Harry, later on in the proceedings, adding: “Kids are stupid.” Later, Marv will reemphasize the point: “He’s only a kid, Harry,” he reminds his partner, concluding, confidently: “We can take him.”

We get it, John Hughes, we get it. Kid power! The problem is, though, that being an underdog, morally, only gets you so far. Kevin’s decidedly un-avuncular Uncle Frank, early in Home Alone, yells at his young nephew, “Look what you did, you little jerk!” This outburst is the trigger for pretty much everything that follows in the movie. And yet, at a certain point (that point probably being the Marv’s-foot-impaled-by-a-MacGyvered-nail scene), Uncle Frank’s admonishment starts to seem downright prophetic—and downright generous. As Grantland’s Jason Concepcion put it last year, tongue only slightly in cheek: “I can say with certainty that Home Alone is in actuality the origin story of Jigsaw, né John Kramer (obviously an alias), the infamous serial killer and mentor to serial killers from the Saw movie series.” This was on the grounds that “throughout Home Alone and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, Kevin displays anger-control issues, a proclivity for violent fantasies, and voyeuristic tendencies, combined with a fetish for recorded video.”

Yes. And! Kevin’s sadism, it’s worth noting, isn’t limited to Home Alone’s criminals. Remember when Kevin orders himself a pizza (“a lovely cheese pizza, just for me”) from Little Nero’s? The delivery guy comes. Kevin blares Angels With Filthy Souls—the part with the line “now leave it on the doorstep, and get the hell out of here”—so the delivery guy can hear it. Kevin could easily leave it at that: a transaction with an outsider that doesn’t reveal his status as, you know, home alone. He also could leave things at the line “keep the change, ya filthy animal.” But he doesn’t. Instead, he escalates. He continues playing the tape—the part with the threat that the speaker will “pump your guts full of lead.” Shots ring out. The delivery guy runs. The delivery guy thinks he might actually get shot by a machine gun.

Kevin, at all this, grins. Again. Ugh.

This is all quite a turn for a movie that is nominally about the magic of Christmas and the inconveniences of international air travel.

Home Alone does not question any of this. Home Alone, instead, simply delights in all the things its chronically underestimated kid is able to accomplish once he decides that “I’m the man of the house.” The irony of the whole thing, though, is that, if Kevin is ever in any danger at all, it’s danger he has brought on himself—by way of his own jerkiness. Harry and Marv, after all, are non-violent criminals, interested in nothing but TVs and stereos and jewelry. Once subjected to Kevin’s house of horrors, however, they undergo a kind of moral conversion: They transform from petty thieves into violent ones, from would-be robbers into (maybe even?) would-be murderers. Kevin’s sadism begets their sadism. Until: “I’m gonna rip his head off!” Harry, burned and shot and covered in feathers and glue, announces. “I’m gonna kill that kid!” a battered Marv declares. Later, Harry yells at Kevin, “You pound me with one more can, kid, and I’ll snap off your cajones and boil them in motor oil!”

Things escalate to the extent that, when criminals and kid finally meet each other, the robbers thinking they have the upper hand, Harry announces the punishment he intends to dole out to his 8-year-old abuser:

Marv: “What are we gonna do to him?”

Harry: “Do exactly what he did to us. We're gonna burn his head with a blowtorch.”

Marv: “Smash his face with an iron!”

Harry: “Slap him right in the face with a paint can, maybe.”

Marv: “Drive a nail right through his foot.”

This is extreme. It is also, of course, just as Harry says, everything Kevin has done to them. The sadism here is cyclical: It escalates, unnecessarily. And then, finally: “The first thing I’m gonna do,” Harry informs Kevin, having cornered him and hung him by his sweater on a hook in a doorway, “is bite off every one of these fingers, one at a time.”

Which is, uh, quite a turn for a movie that is nominally about the magic of Christmas and the inconveniences of international air travel. And yet, coming as it does off of the tortures Kevin his inflicted on his intruders in the name of underdoggery and stand-your-ground morality, it makes perfect sense. It’s fitting that Kevin spends so much of Home Alone obsessed with his house’s basement, a place of furnaces and shadows and things best kept hidden from public view: The movie has its own dark underbelly. Home Alone, festive and twinkly and brightly lit and enduring beloved, never bothers to treat its central accusation as a central question: Look what you did, you little jerk.

Star Trek Beyond: A Return to Fun?

As a new J.J. Abrams sci-fi reboot steers into theaters this week, another franchise he once tried to salvage is soldiering on without him. The trailer for Star Trek Beyond, which dropped online Monday, looks like a simultaneous embrace and rejection of Abrams’s legacy with the property. It’s scored to the Beastie Boys’ blaring “Sabotage” (which featured in Abrams’s first Trek movie),  and is advertising itself as a freewheeling action-adventure, as if trying to avoid the moody tone of the previous entry, Star Trek Into Darkness.

Related Story

Star Trek Returns to a New TV Landscape

There will always be a contingent of Trek fans who tear their hair out at Abrams’s “re-imagined” series starring Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, and Zoe Saldana as Kirk, Spock, and Uhura. His 2009 reboot was largely embraced by critics and was a huge success at the box office. But it leaned hard on action and humor, distressing fans who preferred the more cerebral tone of shows like The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. The sequel Into Darkness was more widely derided, serving as a bizarre remake of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, but not advertising the identity of its villain (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) and inserting a ham-fisted PATRIOT Act allegory. It was recently voted the worst Trek of all time by fans.

Abrams eventually abandoned Star Trek to make Star Wars: The Force Awakens, probably the most-hyped sci-fi film of the millennium. But Star Trek Beyond lives on with the sterling cast he assembled (which also includes Karl Urban, Simon Pegg, Anton Yelchin, and John Cho), and with the director’s reins now in the hands of Justin Lin, who helmed the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth Fast & Furious movies. The trailer also wants you to know this isn’t your dad’s Star Trek: There’s Idris Elba in crazy villain makeup, sexy aliens, and plenty of clever quips.

Nothing about that is new: The trailer for Abrams’s 2009 Trek reboot started with the same Beastie Boys song and featured the same bombastic CGI action beats to try and draw in a new blockbuster audience. (Before then, the Star Trek films had been fairly moderate box-office players and were made with smaller budgets.) One factor in Star Trek Beyond’s plot appears to be the destruction of the U.S.S. Enterprise early on in the film, but that’s something the franchise has played too many times at this point (as the critic Devin Faraci pointed out on Twitter).

Still, it’s worth noting that Star Trek started out pretty silly. In the famed original series of the 1960s, Captain Kirk bedded a new alien ingénue almost every week. The crew traveled back in time with impunity and regularly fought rubber-suited monsters on rocky landscapes. It’s the tone so cleverly mocked in the brilliant 1999 spoof film Galaxy Quest. Beyond seems to be aiming for that looser territory again, perhaps in an effort to get as far away as possible from the chilly drama of Into Darkness. Fans will find out July 22 whether that move paid off.

Bowe Bergdahl's Fate Will Be Decided by a General Court-Martial

The Army will send Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl to a general court-martial despite the suggestion of an investigator, his attorney said in a statement. He faces life in prison if convicted.

Bergdahl, then a private first-class, wandered off his base in Afghanistan in 2009; whether he intended to complain to an officer elsewhere, aimed to join the Taliban, or had some other motivation remains in dispute. In any case, he was captured by Taliban fighters, held until he was exchanged in 2014 for several prisoners who belonged to the organization, and brought back to the United States.

Related Story

Why the U.S. Army Is Charging Bowe Bergdahl With Desertion

In the spring, Bergdahl was charged with desertion and an investigative process began to determine whether to send him to court-martial. According to Bergdahl’s lawyer, Eugene Fidell, the officer in charge of that process recommended that Bergdahl be subject to a special court-martial, a lesser process more akin to a misdemeanor, and not receive any jail time. But on Monday, General Robert Abrams recommended that Bergdahl go to a general court-martial instead. “The convening authority did not follow the advice of the preliminary hearing officer who heard the witnesses,” Fidell said in a statement.

Some military legal experts have expressed doubts the case against Bergdahl can be proven. But the saga has become a political and media fascination. Some Republicans have assailed the Obama administration for making the exchange that freed Bergdahl, saying either the deal was too lenient—it could allow seasoned Taliban fighters to return to the field—or simply ill-begotten, and that Bergdahl should have been left where he was. The White House says it will make efforts to bring home any captured American solider.

“We again ask that Donald Trump cease his prejudicial months-long campaign of defamation against our client,” Fidell said in his statement. “We also ask that the House and Senate Armed  Services Committees avoid any further statements or actions that prejudice our client’s right to a fair trial.”

Bergdahl’s story is also the subject of the second season of the popular journalism podcast Serial, which appeared to break the news of the general court-martial via its Twitter account.