Jody Rosen: Various Artists

For record executives who have been worrying about the future of their industry in the iPod age, 2006 is shaping up as an annus horribilis. Sales of CDs have plummeted for the fourth straight year, down by 12 million units in the first half of 2006 compared to the same period a year ago. By the midyear point in 2005, 50 Cent's The Massacre had sold 4 million copies; this year's top-seller, the High School Musical original soundtrack, has sold only 2.6 million. Things hit a new low a few weeks back, when the nation's No. 1 album, Johnny Cash's American V: A Hundred Highways, recorded the lowest single-week sales (just 88,000 copies) of any chart-topper since Soundscan began keeping track in 1991. Meanwhile, digital downloads are up by 77 percent, and there's good reason to suspect that the 300 million-odd songs legally downloaded thus far in 2006 are but a fraction of the number obtained through illegal peer-to-peer file sharing and other means of online skulduggery.

Just about the only bright spot in this summer of discontent is a record titled Now That's What I Call Music! 22. Now 22 has sold more copies in its first week than any record in months, has topped 550,000 units sold, and has held the No. 1 spot on the Billboard charts for two straight weeks—the closest thing we've seen to a legitimate hit album all summer. Of course, strictly speaking, Now 22 isn't an album at all. Like the 21 previous Now CDs, it's a collection of big radio hits from recent months, slapped together and hustled into stores: a 2006 version of one of those old K-Tel compilation records—Original Hits! By the Original Artists!—minus the cheesy late night TV advertisements.

The Now series has generated little discussion outside of the music trade press, but it's one of the great success stories in the record business over the last decade. Since launching eight years ago, the Now CDs have sold nearly 60 million copies in total; all of the records have made the Billboard Top 10 and gone platinum, and eight have debuted at No. 1. In other words, these ticky-tacky compilation albums—with garish cover graphics seemingly designed by a rave kid turned loose on some clip-art software—may well be the most reliable cash-cow in pop. And they hold some surprising lessons, at a moment of intense music biz agita, about the industry's most coveted consumers.

Like a lot of other bright pop music ideas, Now That's What I Call Music! comes from England, where the series has been going strong for more than two decades, spawning 64 hits collections and numerous spinoffs: Now Dance; Now-The Summer Album; Now That's What I Call Christmas! In 1998, a group of American record executives from Sony, Universal, and EMI joined forces, dipped into their various vaults, and released the first stateside Now album. It was a business no-brainer—a dirt-cheap way to wring some extra dividends out of last month's hit records and to reach the cherished teen-and-college-age audience. (Advertising for the CDs is focused entirely on MTV, teen magazines, and other outlets that reach the young.)

Musically, the Now series is defined by the eclecticism of Top 40 radio, where thumping hip-hop beats rub up against guitar-powered rock, pop songs, and, lord help us, the lovelorn bleatings of Nick Lachey. Now 22 features a broad cross-section of current pop: Kelly Clarkson's slick, catchy "Walk Away," Keith Urban's soppy country ballad "Tonight I Wanna Cry," some Houston hip-hop, some Britpop, some loud and grumpy post-grunge rock. Adults like to imagine that they're more aesthetically sophisticated than their kids, but the Now records are a reminder that the average MTV-addled teen is by definition a musical cosmopolitan.

The real surprise, though, is that kids are buying CDs at all. According to the conventional wisdom, the CD market is being kept afloat by older shoppers who maintain a sentimental attachment to records that can be purchased in stores and other 20th-century relics. Young music fans, the theory goes, are comfortable with new technologies, are used to receiving their popular culture in virtual form, are surgically attached to their iPods and, at this very moment, are having cybersex on MySpace while downloading the new Pimp C album from a file-sharing site you've never heard of.

There's no doubting the direction in which the music business is heading. (Those spiking digital download statistics speak volumes.) But the continued success of the Now series suggests that the young and wired may be less eager to part with their old-fashioned compact discs than industry analysts suspect. For one thing, CDs are convenient. It would take fewer than 30 mouse-clicks for an 18-year-old with an Internet connection to download the songs on Now 22 to his computer, and a moderately Web-savvy youth could accomplish this task at a discount of 100 percent off of the album's retail price. But by buying the CD in the store he saves himself the hassle, and he can stick the disc right in his car stereo. Most important, unlike a digitally downloaded song, a CD is a three-dimensional object that can be held in the hand and stored on a shelf right next to copies of Now 8 and Now 17. Record buyers have always been fetishists—they want their music in smart, shiny packages—and why should Generation Y be any different? The world may be collapsing into bytes all around them, but kids today still like stuff.

So, young listeners are OK with CDs—but what about albums? If the Now phenomenon tell us anything about changing taste, it may be that collections of songs by a single artist are losing their cachet. (Prior to Now, no non-soundtrack, multiartist compilation had ever topped the Billboard chart.) The album, of course, is the supreme icon of the rock era, and albums' diminished stock may signify a real loosening of rock culture's grip on the public imagination. Or, the success of Now may simply be a response to an era of great hit singles and middling albums. After all, the Now series duplicates what kids do already: They use technology that permits the a la carte poaching of individual tracks from a given album—the so-called "unbundling" that has record labels freaking out. In the first half of 2006, there were 281 million legitimate downloads of individual tracks and only 14 million complete albums.

The success of the Now CDs also suggests one way that the beleaguered music business might respond to the shifting landscape: with more compilations. In Europe, compilations account for fully 25 percent of the record market. American major labels have invested barely any energy in compilations, but with a little imagination they might easily catch up. (For some pointers, a record executive need only hop a cab to Manhattan's Canal Street, epicenter of the thriving gray-market trade in hip-hop mixtape CDs.) As someone who listens to CDs for a living, I can attest that, by and large, comps are good value, and albums usually disappoint: When you do the hard math, precious few albums offer more than one or two decent tracks. We all might benefit—you, me, the president of Columbia Records, and the half-million fine American youths who bought Now 22 in the last fortnight—if the industry threw a little more weight behind that up-and-coming talent, Various Artists.

Jody Rosen is Slate's music critic. He lives in New York City. He can be reached at slatemusic@gmail.com.

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David Edelstein: So Far Away

Deadpan can be a spiritual state, a kind of serenity, as in the acting of Buster Keaton, but it can also be emotional cowardice masquerading as cool. It's often the latter, I think, in the early work of the director Jim Jarmusch and the actor Bill Murray. That's not meant to be dismissive. I treasure Murray's ironic (and hilarious) detachment in Stripes and Ghostbusters and Jarmusch's static frames in Stranger Than Paradise, a masterwork in which itty-bitty form and itty-bitty content coalesced into something that captured an '80s East Village anomie that had saturated the culture. But there's only so far you can go in that direction before you run out of variations—before that immaculate little room begins to feel like a prison.

While neither man has forsaken deadpan altogether (it's in their creative DNA), both continue to evolve. In Jarmusch's work in the visionary neo-Western Dead Man and in Murray's gorgeous performance in Lost in Translation, a still protagonist is surrounded by frenetic activity: The deadpan suggests a profound alienation from a world that makes no sense. In their new collaboration, Broken Flowers (Focus Features), Jarmusch and Murray have transcended their limitations. They've made a deadpan movie that quivers with feeling.

Broken Flowers is Jarmusch's most conventionally entertaining film, but it's still visually rigorous, swimming in pregnant silences, and un-filled-in in a way that's tantalizing. The movie is a haunted meditation on solipsism that's full of extraneous life, that hints at a world elsewhere. Murray is Don Johnston (that's John-ston, as he always has to remind people), a guy who made a pile of money in software but whose hobby was girlfriends, one after another. On the day his latest squeeze (Julie Delpy) decamps because he can't, you know, commit, Don sits watching The Private Life of Don Juan on his widescreen TV on his leather sofa in his huge, soullesss house; and then this aging Don Juan (or is it Don Juan-ston?) opens a letter from an ex of 20 years ago with no return address or postmark. It says Don has a 19-year-old son who has run away to find his father.

It's likely that a man like Don would "forget" about the letter, but his pal and neighbor Winston—an expansive Ethiopian played by that soulful chameleon Jeffrey Wright—won't let him. Winston lives in a house that's brimming with kids and pets and stuff. He also has a passion for solving old-fashioned Sherlock Holmesian mysteries. For all kinds of reasons, Winston pushes Don to go out into the world and find the letter writer. He even books the airline tickets, motels, and rental cars. He orders Don to bring flowers.

Jessica Lange, Tilda Swinton, Frances Conroy, and Sharon Stone play the recipients of those flowers. What a group, huh? They respond to Don's surprise visits in different ways, but every sad, awkward, and bitterly funny meeting gives Don a glimpse of someone he damaged, a life he didn't build, a love forsaken.

Sharon Stone is impossibly delightful. She plays Laura, a widow who organizes closets for a living—a "together" activity if ever there was one. Yet there's something heartbreaking about that cheerful façade, about her obliviousness to the underlying mess and to the nymphet tendencies of her daughter (named Lolita, and buoyantly played by Alex Dziena) who parades before Don in the buff. That's an example of Jarmusch's technique: He takes an obvious joke and lets it hang until you squirm. That's also a dividend of his noncommittal style. He's king of the have-it-both-ways, of the funny and the forlorn.

Conroy is Dora, a former hippie love child who's now a fragile, neurasthenic prisoner of pre-fab McMansions that seem to mock her utopian dreams. The camera holds on her pinched features, and on her look of dread at the feelings that Don elicits—and then we see a snapshot of her easy, happy, Earth-mother young self and want to cry. Her most vivid scene, a dinner with Don and her real-estate husband (Christopher McDonald, who's peerless at this sort of hearty insincerity), is an essay in agony—screamingly funny agony. This is familiar ground—Alexander Payne mined it in About Schmidt. But in Broken Flowers, there's a sense of mystery, a feeling of souls struggling beneath the too-placid surface.

Lange plays Carmen, an animal therapist, apparently in hiding from the verbal deception of humans and protected by a hotcha (lesbian?) guard-dog receptionist (Chloe Sevigny). It's a troubling sequence, made more troubling by the way in which Lange has aged. I'm afraid it has come to this with regard to actresses these days: You think, "Nature? Cosmetic surgery? Bad cosmetic surgery?" Only her plastic surgeon knows for sure. But until we have sexual parity (Why should Murray be credible with Julie Fucking Delphy?), we're going to have to grapple with the problem of great actresses whose faces have gone slightly haywire. It's not an issue for the still-youngish Tilda Swinton, whose rural biker-chick Penny is an essay in rage. Her encounter with Murray's Don is ferociously brief.

There's something a tad egocentric about Broken Flowers' scenario. We'd like to think we left a mark on our ex-lovers, but most if not all are probably fully engaged by their present lives and glad to be rid of us. As glimpses of unfulfilled dreams and roads not taken, though, these scenes are small miracles of pain and longing. They have a comic surface and a riptide of despair. When Don passes young men in airports or on the street, they hold his gaze. The world is full of sons he never knew. In the last scene, there's an encounter with a kid played by an amazingly hypersensitive young actor named Mark Webber (last seen in Todd Solondz's Storytelling and the sadly unseen Winter Solstice) that is as momentous in its monosyllables as anything Jarmusch has done.

This is the crowning performance in what I call Bill Murray's Loneliness Trilogy, which consists of Broken Flowers, Lost in Translation, and The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. In his melancholy, he's funny; in his funniness, he's at sea: The ironic hipster clown has become God's loneliest man. Jarmusch holds on Murray's face—and, in truth, it's not the face of a great actor. In some ways, Murray is still an amateur. As an actor, he's not fully broken in: His features don't always conform to his emotions. But that clearly resonates with Jarmusch, who doesn't go for emoters. Nothing can be too plain.

In Broken Flowers, the roads that Don Johnston drives all look the same—anonymous, like his inner life. The music, especially a jazz tune called "Yerkemo Stew" by Mulatu Astatke, suggests a private-eye movie in which the gumshoe is going in circles. Will we get the Sherlock Holmes resolution that Don's friend Winston craves? I'll tell you this: The ending is madly unsatisfying—yet dead perfect. This is a remarkable film. ... 4:51 p.m. PT

David Edelstein is Slate's film critic. You can read his reviews in "Reel Time" and in "Movies." He can be contacted at slatemovies@slate.com.

Posted Thursday, Aug. 4, 2005, at 7:50 PM ET

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Anthony Bourdain: Watching Beirut die

Jul. 28, 2006 | From where I'm sitting, poolside, I can see the airport burning -- the last of the jet fuel cooking off like a dying can of sterno. There's a large, black plume of smoke coming from the south of the city -- just over the rise, where the most recent airstrikes have been targeting the Shiite neighborhoods and what are, presumably, Hezbollah-associated structures. My camera crew and I missed it the first time they hit the airport. Slept right through it. Woke up in our snug hotel sheets to the news that we wouldn't be making television in Beirut (not the show we came to do anyway), and that we wouldn't be getting out of here anytime soon.

Any hopes of runway repair followed by a flight out disappeared two nights ago, when we watched from the balcony of my hotel room as missiles, fired from offshore, twinkled brightly for a few long seconds in the air, then dropped in lazy parabolic arcs onto the fuel tanks.

We knew by that time what was happening in the south: Hezbollah rocketing Israel, the Israeli army mobilizing along -- and even crossing -- the border, firing artillery, reserves being called up. Frightened visitors from other Gulf states and the Lebanese -- including our local fixer -- had headed for Syria, but planes had been hitting that route out repeatedly, making the already unattractive option of camera-bearing Americans crossing into that unwelcoming country even less attractive. An exit by sea was out of the question in light of a total naval blockade. We were stuck. The other American guests -- at first secure in their "This doesn't concern us" and "They won't target us" and "We're just waiting for word" mode, were now visibly worried.

Anthony BourdainEverything had begun so beautifully. Our fixer, Lena, was bursting with enthusiasm when she met us at the airport. After months of preproduction, finally we were here! Finally, the American television crew had arrived -- to show the world how beautiful her country was, how lovingly restored, how hip and forward thinking in the years since the bloody civil war. On the first day of filming, we'd had a sensational early lunch of hummus, kibbe, stewed lamb and yogurt at Le Chef, a local, family-style joint in a charming neighborhood. The customers at the tables around us in the tiny, worn-looking dining area chattered away in Arabic, French and English. Stomachs full, my crew and I headed over to Martyr's Square and the Rafik Hariri memorial; a few blocks away, our fixer and friends pointing out old scars and new construction, trying to explain how much Beirut and Lebanon had changed since the man's death in 2005. They spoke effusively of the calm, the peace, the relative tolerance that had followed the galvanizing effects of Hariri's assassination. Each smiled and pointed at the giant photographic mural of the million-person demonstration that had led to Syria's withdrawal from their country; Ali, our unofficial tough-guy escort, pointed at a tiny dot among the hundreds of thousands in the photo and joked, "That's me!"

They were so proud of how far they'd come, how much they'd survived, how different and sophisticated Beirut was now. They spoke of all the things they had to show us, the people we had to meet. Significantly, the word "Syria" was still spoken in slightly hushed tones. Speaking too long, too loud or too harshly of their former occupier, it was suggested, could still get you killed. (An outcome not without precedent.) We walked along the road leading to a cordoned-off area by the St. George Hotel, where Bardot, Monroe and Kim Philby had once played -- back when Beirut was called the "Paris of the Orient" without a hint of irony. The buildings in the area were still in ruins, a roof torn off, the old hotel -- under construction when the targeted blast that killed Hariri occurred -- still empty. The Phoenician, across the street, which had also been destroyed, had recently been completely rebuilt. A modern hotel like any other, but they were proud of that too. Because, like Beirut, it was still there. It was back.

Then, in the blink of an eye, everything went sideways: Relaxed smiles froze and disappeared. Suddenly, there was the sound of automatic weapons firing randomly in the air from a nearby neighborhood. And fireworks. Then cars -- a few of them -- teenage kids, women and adults, some leaning out the windows and waving Hezbollah flags and flashing the "V" for victory sign, celebrating what we were told, after a few quick cellphone calls, was the grabbing of two Israeli soldiers. Our fixer, a Sunni; Ali, a Shiite; and "Marwan," a Christian, who'd just minutes ago been pointing proudly at the mural -- all three looked down in embarrassment, a look of sorrow, shame and then resignation on their faces. Someone muttered "assholes" bitterly. They knew -- right away -- what was going to happen next.

Not that that stopped the party -- initially anyway. Beirutis like to tell you (true or not) that they partied right through the civil war. That it wasn't "cool" to seek shelter during an airstrike. That we "shouldn't worry. All the nightclubs have their own generators." That night, we continued to shoot (and drink heavily) at the opening party for the newly relocated Sky Bar, a rooftop nightclub with a view of the Mediterranean. Moneyed Beirutis -- all of them, it seemed, young, sexy and ridiculously beautiful -- drank vodka and Red Bull, and swayed (if not exactly danced) while Israeli jets flew menacingly low overhead. Were it not for the warplanes, it could have been Los Angeles or South Beach, Fla. The crowd was English speaking -- with the kind of West Coast, television accents you hear on sitcoms. Many were Lebanese Americans, returned to the country of their parents, or émigrés to America and Britain who'd left during the civil war and only just come back. I met and talked with Ramsay Short, the young editor of the newly launched Time Out Beirut, and he bragged effusively about their recent "Sex Issue," its cover depicting a woman's bare legs, panties bunched around the ankles. The issue -- provocative, to say the least, in a largely Muslim country -- had sailed through without censorship or even major complaint. Ramsay was happy about that. As he was happy that his town had rated its own edition of the snarky, urbane city guide. "There are only 15 cities in the world with a Time Out," he told me happily, "and Beirut is now one of them!" He did not look up at the planes. Later, we hit Barbar, a late-night post-nightclub shawarma joint where his mood became more pensive. Even then, before the first airstrikes, I think he too knew what was coming.

Any pretense that the "party never stops in Beirut" was gone by the next morning when the airport was hit with what would be the first of many strikes. A naval blockade precluded any escape by boat. For those who could, the road to Damascus was the only option -- and Lena, and Ali, urged us to take it. But the network and our production company were reluctant to sign off on what -- even then -- seemed a dodgy undertaking.

We found ourselves in my hotel room, watching the airport get hit again: Me, camera people Tracey, Todd and Jerry, field producer Diane, our fixer -- and Ali. Our fixer, at the urging of her father in Syria, tearfully agreed to join him there. Our driver, an hour earlier waiting outside, gassed up and ready to go, disappeared. Ali alone remained. Refused to leave us. "I am with you," he said. But after observing numerous calls to and from his family in South Beirut, and seeing the way he was working the prayer beads between his fingers, the sword tattoo on his arm flexing and slackening nervously, we insisted he join them. (We later heard his house was flattened.) We were left to ourselves, emptying my mini-bar and trying to keep a stiff upper lip, telling stupid jokes, while the orange glow from the airport flared and subsided and finally died.

After a series of very worried calls from the States, we are told to "stand by for 'the Cleaner,'" a "security expert," "like the Harvey Keitel guy in 'Pulp Fiction,'" the man who will "get us out," take us to a "safe house," a "secure location," "exfiltrate us" to safety. We are told to be packed, to be ready. To expect a call from "Mr. Wolfe."

At 3 a.m. I get the call. Shortly after, I meet the man in the lobby. I'd been expecting an ex-Green Beret -- somebody with a thick neck, steel grey eyes, a tattoo saying "He Who Dares Wins," an aged Dolph Lundgren type, all business and mysterious past. We're expecting a midnight drive in a flatbed truck, maybe hidden under a tarp. Bribes at the border. A next-day rendezvous with a blacked-out helicopter. The man I meet is a short, nebbishy type -- he looks like someone you'd meet at an office supply convention. He has two cars out front -- his, and another driven by a woman associate. We load out quickly and race through empty streets, blowing through traffic lights -- no directionals, last-minute turns -- to the other side of town, to Le Royale, a mammoth hotel on a hill in the Christian section, fairly close to the American embassy. This, as it turns out, will be our home for the next week.

Nearly a week later, they've brought in a polka band to play in the dining room of the "Mexican"-themed restaurant at Le Royale. Outside, on the pool deck, though the bar is unattended, they keep the radio cranked up to drown out the sounds of bombing -- so as not to scare the kiddies. We wake up to molar-vibrating percussions and go to sleep to distant thunder. Afternoons, we watch as Beirut is dismantled. Bit by bit. First the sound of unseen jets flying overhead. Then silence. Then a "Boom!" Then a distant plume of smoke. Black, brown, white ... the whole city south of us slowly growing more indistinct in the midday light under a constant, smoglike haze.

It's called "Kwik-Clot," Mr. Wolfe tells us. And in case of arterial bleeding, it's essential gear. He's thinking of issuing us some -- in case one of us should catch a bullet or shrapnel to the femoral artery. Mr. Wolfe has lived in Fucked-Up Country One and done work in Fucked-Up Countries Two and Three. He lives in the Most Legendarily Fucked-Up area of Lebanon -- where they have a Hezbollah gift shop, for chrissakes. So we take him seriously -- though this is not the kind of morale-boosting patter we want to hear. "Just pour in wound!" he tells us cheerily. It's not, however, that harsh a segue from the "Know Your Exits" lecture, in which we are advised to "casually" explore all the nooks and crannies and "avenues of egress" from all points in the hotel.

Or the "Vary Your Routines" briefing, where we are instructed to use a different elevator or service stairway when going to breakfast or meetings or heading to the pool. We are to eat, drink, swim at unpredictable times as we wait for news. "It takes three days of planning and surveillance to set up a kidnapping" says Mr. Wolfe, lowering his voice suddenly when a lone gentleman in casual clothes enters our area of the balcony and sits at a nearby table. "Amateur," says Mr. Wolfe. "Look at how he's got his face pointed straight out at sea, his ear cocked in our direction. Clumsy. Obvious." Sure enough, the guy does seem suddenly suspicious, the way he moves closer to snap a few panoramic vistas with his cellphone camera. "Probably ISF," sneers Mr. Wolfe. "Local boys." Mr. Wolfe's amusement -- and pleasure in scaring the living shit out of us -- rises in direct proportion to our paranoia. A room has been reserved for armed security -- should we need it, he assures us. And our own rooms moved around so as to be close to each other -- with one of them designated as a meeting point should we have to assemble at short notice. "We don't want to be meeting in the lobby with everybody else." We've practiced running down and through a rabbit warren of service exits, stairwells and passageways to Mr. Wolf's "vehicles" in a sub-level of the parking lot. A security guard has been taken care of so as to lift the gate of a back entrance should circumstances require our fleeing through a back way. We are to stay close together -- and be on time for meetings and briefings. There's even a pop quiz: Mr. Wolfe hands out photographs of various design features and landmarks in the hotel and challenges us to tell him where, exactly, those locations are, and how we might exit from each. When Mr. Wolfe is not within shouting distance, his female associate keeps a close eye on us -- even when we're by the pool.

And we're by the pool a lot. We sit. We play cards. We tell the same dick jokes -- halfheartedly, for sure. But by now, that's all that keeps us from going crazy or bursting into tears. Our irregular "intel" (Mr. Wolfe's favorite word) consists of printed analysis from a faraway corporate security company (useless speculation), BBC News (pretty good), local TV (excellent -- though in Arabic), the Hizballah Channel (scary), Sky News (shockingly up-to-date and thorough), Some Guy From the Pool (almost always on target. He accurately predicts locations and times of airstrikes and seems to know which countries' citizens are getting out and when), Somebody's Mom Back in the States (excellent source), and Mr. Wolfe's printouts from the AOL News Web site (always discouraging). We've heard the Israeli prime minister talk of knocking back Lebanon 20 years. And we believe him. We hear of pleasure boats filled with European nationals being turned back by Israeli ships. We call the embassy day after day and get no response. Nothing. Officially -- after days of war -- the State Department advice is to visit its Web site. Which contains nothing of use.

We watch the city we'd barely begun to know -- and yet already started to love -- destroyed, seemingly (from where we're sitting) without sense or reason. We watch Blackhawk helicopters fly in and out of the embassy and hear panicked rumors that they're evacuating the ambassador (false) and "non-essential personnel" (true, I believe). Around the pool, the increasingly frustrated, mostly Lebanese Americans exchange rumors and information gleaned from never-ending cellphone conversations with we don't know who: relatives in the south, friends back in America, people who've already made it out. Friends who've spoken to their congressman. Guys who work at CNN. The list goes on. The news maddening, incomplete, incorrect -- alternately hopeful, terrifying and dismaying.

The hotel empties and fills and empties again. We hear:

"The Italians got out!"
"The fucking Romanians got out!"
"The French are gone!"

What is clear -- as far as we're concerned -- from all sources is that there is no official, announced plan. No real advice, or information, or public exit strategy or timetable. The news clip of President Bush, chawing open-mouthed on a buttered roll, then grabbing at another while Tony Blair tries to get him to focus on Lebanon -- plays over and over on the TV, crushing our spirits and dampening all hope with every glassy-eyed mouthful. He seems intent on enjoying his food; Lebanon a tiny, annoying blip on an otherwise blank screen. I can't tell you how depressing that innocuous bit of footage is to watch. That one, innocent, momentary preoccupation with a roll has a devastating effect on us that is out of all proportion. We're looking for signs. And this, sadly, is all we have.

And every day we hear worse. Cellphone towers, power stations, land lines are being targeted, says Mr. Wolfe. And we're frankly terrified of the seemingly imminent moment when we can no longer stay in touch with the outside world, make or receive calls to the States -- or more important, be notified by the embassy (should that ever happen). They've run out of bread and food in downtown stores.

And yet, at the hotel, still safe and fed and liquored up in Bizarro World, we sit by the pool and watch the war. And wait, impotently -- shamefacedly. As the hotel empties again -- and only a few of us are left. Expectations fade and then die. Just bitterness and a sense of disgust remain. What to expect anymore? One hopes only for the little things: that they'll fire up the pizza oven today. That they'll open the bar early. That we might just maybe get an English language newspaper or magazine -- or even a French one.

A few miles away, of course, hopes are similarly downscaled -- yet far, far more urgent:

Will there be bread?
Will there be water?
Will the power come back on?
Is my family OK?
Will I die today?

They've hit the little lighthouse by the port. While on one hand insisting that the Lebanese government do "something" about Hezbollah, they've shelled an army base, the main bridges and roads. The last roads out to Syria, says Some Guy by the Pool. An end or a pause is too much to hope for. Of that we are certain. And certainty -- however terrible the truth -- is something we cling to, an all too rare commodity. It's uncertainty that's the enemy, the thing we know will make us all crazy.

In the end we are among the lucky ones. The privileged, the fortunate, the relatively untouched. Unlike the Lebanese Americans who make it out, we don't leave homes and loved ones behind, we will get out and return to business as usual. To unbroken homes, intact families, friends and jobs. After a hideously disorganized cluster fuck at the eventual "assembly point" -- a barely under control mob scene of fainting old people, crying babies, desperate families waving pink and white slips of paper, trying to get the attention of a few understaffed, underprepared and seemingly annoyed embassy personnel in baseball caps and casual clothes -- we are put in the charge of the sailors and Marines of the USS Nashville who've hauled ass from Jordan on short notice to undertake a mission for which they are unrehearsed and inexperienced. Yet they perform brilliantly. The moment we pass through the last checkpoint into their control, all are treated with a kindness and humanity we can scarcely believe. Squared away, efficient, organized and caringly sensitive, the Marines break the crowd into sensibly spaced groups, give them shade and water, lead them single file to an open-ended landing craft at the water's edge. They carry babies, children, heat-stroke victims, luggage. They are soft-spoken, casually friendly. They give out treats and fruit and water. They reassure us with their ease and professionalism.

On the flight deck of the USS Nashville they've set up a refugee camp. I wake up on my folding cot and look around. With every group of traumatized evacuees -- with every family, every group of children, there's a Marine or two, chatting, exchanging stories, listening. They open their ship to us. They look so young. All of them. None looks over 17. "Where you from?" one asks me. I say, "New York" -- and he tells me, "I ain't ever been there. I'd like to." His friends agree. They've never seen New York either. The mess serves tuna noodle casserole and mac and cheese and corn dogs. A sailor or Marine in a bright green dragon suit entertains children. We are kept informed. We are reassured. We are spoken to like adults. On the smoking deck, a Marine shows off a Reuter's cover photo -- taken only a few hours earlier -- of himself, nuzzling two babies as he carries them through the surf to the landing craft. His buddies are razzing him, busting his balls for how intolerably big-headed he's going to be -- now that he's "famous." He looks at the picture and says, "You don't know what it felt like, man." His eyes well up.

The last group from the beach is unloaded from the landing craft into the belly of the Nashville, and we're off to Cyprus. Two battleships -- including the USS Cole escorting us. A Lebanon I never got to know, a Beirut I didn't get to show the world disappears slowly over the horizon -- a beautiful dream turned nightmare. It's not what I saw happen in Beirut that I feel like talking about, though that's what I'm doing, isn't it? It's not about what happened to me that remains an unfinished show, a not fully fleshed out story, or even a particularly interesting one. It feels shameful even writing this. It's the story I didn't get to tell. The Beirut I saw for two short days. The possibilities. The hope. Now only a dream.

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Daniel Byman: Proxy Power

Iran and Syria, Hezbollah's foreign sponsors, may hold the key to resolving the violence in Lebanon, or they may play a part in the escalation of the conflict. Syria has received the lion's share of international attention, but Tehran's role in supporting Hezbollah and other terrorist groups is also crucial. Even though Iran is hundreds of miles away from Lebanon, it helped nurture Hezbollah in its early years and even today exercises considerable ideological and operational influence. The Lebanese terrorist organization is the most deadly creation of the clerical regime in Tehran, but it is only one of the many groups that Iran supports. Confusing this picture further, Tehran's backing of terrorist groups has changed considerably in the last decade.

After the 1979 Islamic revolution, Tehran used a wide range of terrorist organizations to export its revolution and to assassinate Iranian dissidents around the globe. Tehran played a major role in forming Hezbollah and helping it conduct attacks in Lebanon, including such devastating strikes as the 1983 bombings of the U.S. Marine barracks and embassy, which together killed more than 300 people. Indeed, before 9/11, Hezbollah had killed more Americans than any other international terrorist organization. Iranian-backed groups also regularly attacked dissidents in Europe, countries that backed Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war, and the governments of pro-Western Arab states. Ten years ago, on June 26, 1996, Iranian-backed terrorists exploded a massive truck bomb outside the Khobar Towers military housing project in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 Americans and one Saudi and wounding almost 400.

On the surface, not much seems to have changed with regard to Iran and terrorism in the last 10 years. The U.S. State Department still lists Iran as the world's "most active" state sponsor of terrorism, and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad regularly fulminates against Israel and sings the praises of groups like Hamas. (For more on how U.S. policy is involved, see "Made in the USA," by Daniel Benjamin.)

Today, as the latest round of violence suggests, Israel is the biggest target of Iranian-backed terrorism, with Tehran supporting several Palestinian groups as well as Lebanese Hezbollah. These groups' attacks against Israel serve three purposes: They support Iranian leaders' opposition to the existence of the Jewish state; they give Iran prestige in the Muslim world; and by keeping violence alive, they undermine the peace process (admittedly, an easy task these days), which in turn reduces the chances that Iran will be isolated in the Middle East.

Although evidence is lacking, past behavior suggests that Hezbollah wouldn't conduct an operation as significant as the July 12 kidnappings without Tehran's approval. Indeed, the close ties between Hezbollah and Iran's theocrats have probably emboldened the former. Even if Israel manages to destroy much of Hezbollah's missiles and facilities, Iran will replenish its stocks. But Hezbollah is more than an instrument of Iranian foreign policy. Its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, enjoys far more prestige in the Arab world than any of Iran's current leaders. What's more, the organization's increased strength in Lebanon since the Syrian withdrawal has boosted its confidence.

While Iran's backing of anti-Israel violence has grown in recent years, it has cut back its interference in other parts of the world. Attacks on dissidents have decreased significantly since the mid-'90s, and Iran appears to have tempered its enthusiasm for exporting revolution. Most important, Tehran has not struck at the United States directly in the last decade. Iran has a healthy respect for U.S. military power, and after 1996 its leaders appeared to realize that the United States might be able to use additional Iranian terrorist attacks on U.S. facilities to gain international support for comprehensive sanctions on the regime. Sky-high oil prices and a new set of Iranian leaders who are less interested in international investment have lessened U.S. economic clout, but Tehran has remained cautious about direct attacks on the United States.

Iran instead uses terrorism as a way to deter Washington. Terrorists give Tehran a way to strike at the United States in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere. Iran has cased U.S. embassies around the world and has off-the-shelf options for striking American targets. Washington recognizes that if it pushes Iran's leaders, they can push back. Terrorism thus complicates U.S. planning for stopping Iran's nuclear program and other top priorities.

The extent and nature of Iran's contacts with Sunni jihadist groups linked to al-Qaida is unclear. Immediately after 9/11, Iran appeared to be cooperating with the United States and its allies, transferring many jihadists to their home countries to face justice. After the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and U.S. refusal to turn over anti-Iranian terrorists of the Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization—a terrorist group that mixes Marxism and Islam and fought on the side of Saddam in the Iran-Iraq war—Tehran became more recalcitrant. Several senior al-Qaida figures, including Osama Bin Laden's son Saad, are in Iran, and some reports linked them to May 2003 attacks in Saudi Arabia. Iran claims to have the Sunni extremists under close watch, but the refusal to turn them in suggests that Tehran at least wants to use them as a bargaining chip and at most wants the option of a partnership should tension with Washington grow.

Iran could also use terrorism to raise the heat on the U.S. presence in Iraq. Iranian intelligence officials are active throughout Iraq but, for now, they have caused only limited problems for the United States. After all, the Shiite leadership taking power in Baghdad includes many leaders with close ties to Tehran. Still, the large U.S. presence leaves the United States vulnerable to Iranian-inspired violence. Iranian commentators speak openly about holding thousands of hostages in Iraq, suggesting that they view the troops as more of an opportunity than a threat. Even a small number of additional trained and motivated fighters could greatly complicate already dimming U.S. hopes of imposing order in Iraq, particularly as they would be likely to strike in Shiite parts of Iraq, where U.S. forces are particularly thin.

An Iranian-backed terrorist attack on the U.S. homeland is less likely but far from impossible. In the past, Tehran's leaders, often as prudent in policy as they are scathing in rhetoric, recognized that killing Americans in Saudi Arabia or other countries overseas was less risky than a strike on U.S. soil—a caution no doubt reinforced by U.S. regime-change efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nevertheless, the FBI has uncovered Hezbollah cells dedicated to fund raising in the United States, and it is reasonable to suppose that additional cells or at least individual operatives might have slipped beneath the bureau's radar screen.

Support for terrorism offers Iran what it craves most today: options. Iran is at best a middleweight economic power, and its military is in a state of disrepair. Terrorism, however, gives Iran a role in the fight against Israel, a strong voice in Iraq's future, and a way to deter the United States. In the end, Iran may decide to push Hezbollah away from the brink or to be a constructive player in Iraq. But as the American track record of predicting Iranian moves ranges from poor to abysmal, we must recognize that Iran's ties to terrorist groups also give Tehran options to escalate such conflicts.

Daniel Byman is the director of the Center for Peace and Security Studies in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and a nonresident senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.

Posted Wednesday, July 26, 2006, at 12:22 PM ET

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Daniel Benjamin: Made in the USA

The most frequent criticism about U.S. policy in Lebanon is that we are up a creek without a paddle because for years the Bush administration has not been talking to two of the chief malefactors in this crackup: Hezbollah's sponsors, Syria and Iran. This is true, and it will hinder our ability to achieve a cease-fire and a longer-term resolution. But it is a footnote to a bigger failure, namely that the immolation of Lebanon is the natural consequence of U.S. policy toward Iran in particular and the greater Middle East in general.

How, you ask, could an administration that put Iran smack dab in the middle of the "axis of evil" in early 2002 and that has never relented in its denunciation of the clerics in Tehran be accused of opening the door to this catastrophe? The answer lies in the contrast between the appearance of hostility and the reality that American policy has consistently reduced the pressure on Iran to behave and has thus emboldened it to take a more aggressive course.

First, it is important to understand the Iran-Hezbollah relationship. Yes, Hezbollah is a Lebanese political party and social-welfare organization, but as a terrorist organization, it is an arm of Tehran. Everyone, it seems, has become so accustomed to hearing about the independence of terrorist groups like al-Qaida and its imitators that we have forgotten that some terrorists have state sponsors—and it would be hard to find any that are more creatures of their masters than Hezbollah is of Tehran. Syria provides the group with a supply line to Tehran, and it has an interest in supporting the group's effort to bleed Israel. But it is Tehran that provides the $100 million or more per year in funds and arms, as well as the organization's strategic direction. (For more on Iran's relationship with Hezbollah and other global terror groups, see "Proxy Power," by Daniel Byman.)

As former Middle East envoy Dennis Ross has noted, Hezbollah had respected the Israeli-Lebanese border (save for a contested postage stamp of territory called Shebaa Farms) for the six years since Ehud Barak pulled Israeli troops out of southern Lebanon. Although Hezbollah may have had an interest in carrying out the latest attack as a push-back against internal Lebanese pressure to disarm, it is difficult to imagine that the group would have kidnapped two Israeli soldiers and killed several others without orders from Iran.

The context for Iranian approval for the attacks is five years of unintended U.S. assistance to the theocrats of Tehran. By toppling the Taliban in 2001-02, the United States removed the threat to Iran's east. The Taliban were not a great danger to Iran, but, in a foretaste of the sectarian murderousness of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, they had the habit of slaughtering Hazaras, the Shiites of Afghanistan's western provinces, whose protection is an Iranian concern. The Taliban also murdered nine Iranian diplomats in 1998, almost causing a war.

Dispatching the Taliban was a small favor compared with the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime, which had been the biggest check on Tehran since the two countries' war of 1980-88, in which Iran suffered roughly 1 million casualties in some of the most senseless fighting since the trench warfare of World War I. As home of the Iranian opposition Mujahedin e-Khalq, Iraq remained a permanent thorn in the clerics' side.

The Bush administration believed that the post-9/11 wars would result in U.S. troops and American-leaning regimes on either side of Iran and therefore a more airtight containment of the Islamic republic. With all its prewar talk of "shock and awe," the Bush team was also convinced that the demonstration effect of U.S. military power would have the mullahs quivering in their robes.

It didn't work out that way. No one can say if any U.S. occupation would have worked out, but if the Pentagon had put 400,000 troops on the ground in Iraq, the chances are greater that the Sunni insurgency could have been extinguished early on, and Iran would have felt significant pressure even as a Shiite majority came to power in Baghdad. But the comprehensive botch of the occupation has had the opposite effect. One Middle Eastern diplomat put it perfectly last week when he told me the Iranians have the United States exactly where they want it: tied down in Iraq, overcommitted, and incapable of acting.

As Steven Simon and Ray Takeyh of the Council on Foreign Relations pointed out in a Washington Post op-ed, the 135,000 overburdened U.S. troops are potential hostages—or targets—for Iran should the United States take military action to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities. With many of Iraq's Shiite militias and major Shiite political organizations subsidized by Tehran, life for the U.S. forces could become very unpleasant very quickly. America has waged two wars in five years; Iran has been the big winner.

It's also important to note that the Bush administration did not just put all its military eggs in the Iraqi basket; it put all its diplomatic efforts there too. The administration refused to engage Iran directly after the 2002 revelation of Iran's clandestine nuclear programs, instead sending numerous rhetorical signals that the Islamic republic was also destined for a U.S-engineered regime change. That was not, as Slate's Fred Kaplan has pointed out, a good way to persuade the leadership that it should forswear nuclear weapons.

Washington has also been frustrated by its inability to persuade Russia and China to support a Security Council resolution against Iran under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter, which would make the issue "a threat to peace." Those countries do not want to see a repeat of 2003, when Washington, citing earlier U.N. Chapter VII resolutions against Iraq, appointed itself to enforce them without an additional vote. Moscow and Beijing are not prepared to legitimize U.S. efforts to be a globo-cop, even though the indications of Iran's desire to acquire nuclear weapons are far more numerous and concrete than Saddam's were after 1991.

The sum of all these missteps is that the Iranians feel they are in the driver's seat. When Condoleezza Rice persuaded Bush to commit his about-face in June and offer a package of incentives and direct talks over the nuclear issue, the Iranians felt confident enough to ignore our deadlines and tell us they'd get back to us in late August. Hezbollah's kidnapping of the Israeli soldiers should also be seen as a response to U.S. pressure on the nuclear issue: By having terrorists nab the Israelis, the Iranians both upended the G8 summit discussions about their nuclear program and sent a clear reminder of the tools at their disposal should there be a confrontation. They probably miscalculated regarding Israel's reaction, but the message was unmistakable.

That Iran has broad regional ambitions—to steal the mantle of leadership in the Arab-Israeli conflict, ride the Shiite revival that began with the fall of Saddam, and fulfill its ambition to become a regional hegemon—is increasingly clear. The containment strategy that had held the line on Iran for more than a decade looks to be in tatters.

It is tempting to say that the destruction of Lebanon is the culmination of the administration's failed policy for the region. At this point, though, that might just be too optimistic.

Daniel Benjamin served on the National Security Council staff from 1994 to 1999. He is co-author of The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting It Right," which is being published in paperback in July 2006.

Updated Wednesday, July 26, 2006, at 12:24 PM ET

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David Edelstein: The Truman Show

Janet Malcolm's brilliant The Journalist and the Murderer opens with the provocative and, I think, madly overheated assertion that, "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows what he does is morally indefensible." This idea of the journalist's inevitable betrayal of his or her subject is at the heart of the new film Capote (Sony Pictures Classics), which tells the story-behind-the-story of the writing of In Cold Blood. As directed by Bennett Miller and written by Dan Futterman (who cites Malcolm's work in interviews), the grim story of Truman Capote and his seminal nonfiction masterpiece becomes a tale of duplicity and self-loathing—of the loss of a writer's soul and the beginning of the end of his artistry.

The title character, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, is the droll dandy that many of us recall from Capote's TV appearances in the '60s and '70s: a pudgy Southerner with a voice that suggests both suckling and conniving, the voice of a baby mad scientist. A master manipulator, Hoffman's Capote speaks so slowly that his listeners have to stop and hang on his every self-consciously dazzling word. With his books The Grass Harp and Breakfast at Tiffany's, his New Yorker articles, and his screenplays, Capote has a cult following in the boho salons of Manhattan and Brooklyn. But how will his effeminate preening play in Kansas?

That's where Capote heads in 1959—along with his doting friend, the future To Kill a Mockingbird novelist Harper Lee (a drabbed-down Catherine Keener)—when he reads of the inexplicable slaughter of an entire family, the Clutters, in their remote farmhouse. Capote cuts a bizarro figure in the American heartland—the look by Chris Cooper, as Kansas Bureau of Investigation agent Alvin Dewey, is a deadpan howl. But the writer uses his celebrity and the aura surrounding his magazine to open both official doors and jail cells. It's in the latter that he develops an intimacy with one of the Clutters' killers, Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr.). In gentle, understanding tones, he probes Smith's memories, shares his own, and nudges the killer toward the big prize: a moment-by-moment account of what actually happened in the farmhouse on that hideous night.

In a key scene, Smith speaks hopefully of the effect Capote's account of their inadequate legal representation will have on the appeal of the convicted killers' death sentences; and Capote explains that he hasn't started writing and doesn't even have a title. He has and does, of course. He just doesn't plan to finish In Cold Blood until Smith and his cohort, Richard Hickock (Mark Pellegrino), have been hanged. The execution is going to be the book's big finale. And while Capote cares for Smith, maybe even has a whopping crush on him, he becomes desperate to see him executed so he can finish the damn thing. Over the years it takes for the killers to exhaust their appeals, Capote's inner conflict, between his empathy and his opportunism, eats him alive. He begins the heavy drinking that we're told, in an end-title, will kill him.

Capote is dark and slow and gets darker and slower as it crawls to its emotional climax, in which Capote finally extracts from Smith the story of the murders—a climax presented as a triumphant piece of vampirism. It's a fascinating idea—powerful and eerie on many levels (even if, in his book, Capote places Dewey in the room).

But I think something's missing: that Capote transcended that vampirism, so that In Cold Blood fostered more understanding of why people kill than any book I know. The depth of the author's humanity is in every finely-chiseled line. I admit I don't know how Futterman and Bennett could have conveyed this split between life and literature, but a film about the writing of a book that ignores the alchemy of creation isn't telling the full story. Although New Yorker editor William Shawn (a subdued and surprisingly lifeless Bob Balaban) speaks of Capote changing the face of journalism (he did), Capote views its subject's achievement in the context of his celebrity and Malcolmesque exploitation. There isn't a hint that in the end Capote memorialized Smith's (and Hickock's) pain.

The distorted mirror image that Capote told friends he saw in Smith is more talked about than dramatized, but the actors fill in some of the holes. As Smith, Collins finds the perfect mixture of neediness and cunning. And Hoffman: Talk about alchemy! When I heard he was cast, I was skeptical, because he's so much bigger than Capote. But somehow he's framed to look short. (Did other actors stand on platforms? Did Hoffman stand in a hole?) And while you're aware of the nightclub impersonation aspect of the performance in the first few minutes, you quickly forget. Hoffman reportedly listened to many tapes of Capote (courtesy of his biographer, Gerald Clarke), and sometimes when gifted and porous actors faithfully duplicate the stammers and pauses and delicate rhythms of their subjects, they get inside those subjects' heads—they become possessed.

That's what obviously happened here: Hoffman goes beyond the surface mannerisms and diction. He disappears into Capote. There's an extraordinary scene that features a good young actress named Allie Mickelson in which Capote seduces the girl (a close friend of the Clutters' teenage daughter) by confessing to his own embarrassment at being different. It's devious but true. Hoffman lays bare this whiny, wheedling, self-absorbed little man who nonetheless could see more deeply than almost anyone alive. If only Capote did more than hint at the transformative genius behind what he saw.

David Edelstein is Slate's film critic. You can read his reviews in "Reel Time" and in "Movies." He can be contacted at slatemovies@slate.com.

Posted Thursday, Sept. 29, 2005, at 5:18 PM ET

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Stephen Metcalf: The Great American Drama Queen

Along with everyone else who waited to see Capote on DVD, I had heard two things about it. First, of course, was that in playing Truman Capote, Philip Seymour Hoffman had delivered the performance of a lifetime. Second was that though Capote was a superlative film, it was also a small one. About Hoffman, what more needs to be said? To transform himself into Capote, he parted with one of his great natural assets, that oak-and-gravel basso, trading it for Capote's famous lisps and trills with their odd levitations and sudden plunges—a unique instrument, to say the least. But the performance is not an impersonation, and, as Hoffman himself insists on one of the DVD's well-produced featurettes, and in this Slate interview, Capote is not a biopic. Which leads us to the second notion, that it was an accomplished but modest movie. True, in contrast to that awful midwife of race sentimentality Crash, none of Capote's importance shows up as self-importance. But tact should never be mistaken for lack of ambition. Capote is not only an American tragedy, as its director Bennett Miller has said, but an important one, and a little history can help us remember why.

In 1959, Truman Capote traveled from New York City to Holcomb, Kan., under the aegis of The New Yorker and with his childhood friend Harper Lee, to write about the brutal murder of a family of small-town farmers. While Capote worked on his initial magazine articles, the killers, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, were apprehended; as Hickock and Perry were tried, convicted of capital murder, and eventually hanged, Capote spun their story into a full-length book. Capote's creation of In Cold Blood—a masterpiece that made the author of Breakfast at Tiffany's only more famous—is the stuff of legend. Famously, Capote ingratiated himself with the Kansas locals, who had initially looked upon this epicene miniature in a pillbox hat as a kind of freak; and famously, he fell semi-in love with Perry Smith, the more vicious yet more sensitive of the two killers. The extent to which Capote manipulated Smith into believing that he, Capote, a man with money and connections, could help a nobody like Smith win an appeal has long been disputed. So too has the extent to which Capote, a raconteur whose "lies were better than other people's truths," as one friend put it, embroidered reality in creating his nonfiction potboiler.

The misapprehension of Capote as a small movie begins with its own dedication to small moments. Early on it is a comedy of manners, in which a small town adjusts itself to the presence of a New York literary god, even as the New York literary god adjusts himself to the small town, in order to get it to talk. As the film progresses, so does Capote's obsession with Smith, whom he comes to regard as a version of himself. "It's as if Perry and I grew up in the same house," Capote tells Harper Lee (Catherine Keener), "then one day, he walked out the back door, and I walked out the front." (To which Lee, increasingly the moral center of the movie, replies "You kidding?") But Capote is not really a study of Capote's relationship with Smith. As Smith idles in his cell, poring over a copy of Walden given to him by Capote, Capote reads early chapters of his work-in-progress to a rapt New York audience. Later Capote sums up his feeling for Smith, hardly even noticing his words. "Do you hold him in esteem, Truman?" Lee asks him. "Well. He's a goldmine."

Capote's enormous power comes from its embodiment of all the virtues Capote the man eventually rejected—tact, self-control, reticence. Bennett Miller's palette is autumnal—one nice nugget from the DVD reveals how the color scheme of the film excluded entirely all reds and blues in favor of muted yellows and browns—and his pacing is deliberate, even stately. The movie argues, as others have, that the experience of courting Perry Smith to write In Cold Blood broke something within Capote and speeded his transition from the boy-sylph of apparently limitless talent, who published Other Voices, Other Rooms when he was 23, to the bitchy society lapdog of the '70s talk-show circuit. As a closing intertitle points out, Capote never published another book before dying of alcoholism in 1984. Within a year of publishing In Cold Blood, Capote had thrown the Black and White Ball, an affair at the Plaza Hotel that established, to the terror-laced glee of the haute mode, who was in and who was out in New York society. It was a harbinger of the Studio 54 Capote. A depressing anecdote dating from the '70s has Capote inviting the gossip columnist Liz Smith and John Berendt—later to write Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil—up to his apartment in the U.N. Plaza. Capote left the room, then returned with a giant bowl of cocaine, which Smith guessed at the time represented $10,000 worth of the drug. As suddenly as he had brandished it, Capote snatched it away, saying, "No. No. I'm not going to give you any. You're not good enough. Neither one of you is good enough."

Capote's surface modesties aside, the moment in which a writer of importance confronts a man of no importance is not a small one, especially in America, and especially if the man of no importance is about to be blotted out forever by forces that lie beyond his comprehension. This Capote at least dimly understood, and the film has him saying of Smith, "The book I'm writing will return him to the realm of humanity." Less dimly understood, by Capote and by (at least in the film's telling) his New Yorker editor William Shawn, is how In Cold Blood instigated a new kind of writing, the so-called "nonfiction novel."

It's an awful locution—as Norman Mailer once said, "Nonfiction novel sounds like a prescription for some nonspecific disease." But the mixing of the high (Capote's refined literary sensibility) with the low (the "true crime" genre) in order to gain access to reality has a long literary pedigree. It extends back to the Gospels and Peter's denial of Jesus, which, as Erich Auerbach famously (and beautifully) argued, destroyed forever the classical connection between the seriousness of high style and aristocratic characters. As Auerbach wrote in Mimesis:

Of course this mingling of styles is not dictated by an artistic purpose. On the contrary, it was rooted from the beginning in the character of Jewish-Christian literature; it was graphically and harshly dramatized through God's incarnation in a human being of the humblest social station, through the existence on earth amid humble everyday people and conditions, and through his Passion which, judged by earthly standards was ignominious.

(What Auerbach said of Peter—"He is the image of man in the highest and deepest and most tragic sense" applies as well to Perry Smith.) The upending of strict canons of high and low runs through Dante's choice—according to Auerbach, a choice that laid the foundation for European literature—to write his epic in vulgar Italian, and not high Latin. It was there when Capote knew he had to go to Kansas; and every time a literary journalist, as heir to Capote, establishes the humanity of his subject through simple detail. All this Capote eventually forsook for "You're not good enough."
Stephen Metcalf is Slate's critic at large. He is working on a book about the 1980s.

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David Edelstein: My Own Private Waterloo

Napoleon Dynamite (Fox Searchlight) was this year's up-from-nowhere hit at Sundance, where "quirky" regionalism plus a sort of East Village zombie deadpan goes over big with the folks who are too cool for school. To me it looked like a Mormon stab at Wes Anderson—which might be, for some people, an enticement. The director, Jared Hess (who devised the script with his wife, Jerusha, both recent graduates of Brigham Young), uses the Idaho farm landscape cannily, as a great blank stage on which affectless nerds move in horizontal lines, like sleepwalkers, or stagger back into the empty landscape toward the horizon line. The movie has some indelible moments, but it tends to put your brain at half-mast.

Half-mast is how the movie's teenage protagonist moves through the world. Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder) is neither Napoleonic nor dynamic, which is, I guess, the joke. (The name, an Elvis Costello alter ego, makes Hess the second Mormon after Neil LaBute, in The Shape of Things, to use Costello to no particular end recently.) He's tall and skinny with frizzy hair, and he breathes through a sea-anemone-shaped mouth nearly filled by two giant front teeth. What you notice, though, are his eyes—or, rather, the lack of them. Most of the time, Napoleon stares under lids three-quarters closed at a spot several inches to the east of his lap. When the new kid at school, Pedro (Efren Ramirez), turns out to be a mouth-breather who stares dopily in the same direction, you know it's a love match. They can look at nothing and trade monotonic non sequiturs all day.

The director loves those non sequiturs. This is the sort of movie where there's a shock cut from the placid farm of Napoleon's grandmother (Sandy Martin) to a buggy speeding toward a sand dune, then an insert to show you it's grandma in the buggy. Then grandma realizes she's about to hurtle into oblivion. While she recovers from a cracked coccyx, the resourceful hustler Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) comes to look after Napoleon and his older brother, Kip (Aaron Ruell), a 30-year-old stay-at-home bed-wetter who spends hours in an online chat room with a Michigan woman named LaFawnduh. Uncle Rico has never gotten over a football loss in 1982, and he makes the brothers watch a video in which he throws one football after another in the direction of the camera. "This is pretty much the worst video ever made," says Napoleon. "Like you would know that," sneers Kip.

I loved that exchange. And after about 40 minutes (of 86), I began to enjoy the one-thing-after-anotherness and the minimalist wit of the actors embodying many different species of nerd. Soon, a plot sort of half kicks in, and Napoleon finds himself half-working to get a date for the prom and the unassertive Pedro elected school president. The wit is in what isn't said—in the paralyzing horribleness of Napoleon's courtship, the revulsion of the girl when he sketches a supremely unflattering portrait, and the sight of the pair entering the prom to the strains of "Forever Young," as if anyone would want to be watching this.

Well, there are blessings. Just when we're sinking into a Todd Solondz morass, Napoleon Dynamite becomes a sort of half-romance, when Napoleon half-expresses affection for the shy Deb (Tina Majorino) by presenting her with a large frozen bass. The climax is the only all-out moment: a triumphant dance number in which the tension between Napoleon's frozen face and suddenly elastic, bopping body is jaw-dropping. Napoleon Dynamite is too low-wattage to be a true nerd anthem, but it's charming in retrospect, when you're freed from the narcoleptic pace to think back on the queerly beautiful tableaux and well-timed gags. It's like Wes Anderson on Quaaludes.

David Edelstein is Slate's film critic. You can read his reviews in "Reel Time" and in "Movies." He can be contacted at slatemovies@slate.com.

Posted Monday, June 14, 2004, at 5:13 PM ET

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