Screening History

National Review, Nov 30, 1992 by David Klinghoffer

Screening History, by Gore Vidal (Harvard, 96 pp., $14.95

THOUGH he turned 67 last month, Gore Vidal looks and acts more and more like an oversized baby. In the movie Bob Roberts, where he plays a pompous liberal senator, Vidal appears to have gained weight and has surely lost hair, leaving his head a puffy, pastrycolored oval, not quite as soft and dipilated as a baby's: the Pillsbury Doughboy of the Left. Of the two books he has published lately, readers will have to decide for themselves which is more infantile in its self-indulgence.

My money is on Live from Golgotha, marketed as a wicked satire on the origins of Christianity. The plot can be briefly summarized: It's the end of the twentieth century and, for unclear reasons, all the rounding texts of Christianity are disappearing or, in alarming ways, changing. Stored on magnetic tape, they have become vulnerable to a mysterious computer jock, called "Hacker." So, by means of time travel, NBC hopes to send a camera crew to the Crucifixion in order to capture the event for live TV. Simultaneously, a network representative has traveled back to find a surviving disciple of St. Paul, Timothy, and urge him to write his own version of the Gospel, to be discovered, intact, two thousand years later. Paul himself, called "Saint," is revealed as a liar, master fund raiser, and pederast.

Vidal's notion of wicked satire is so lame, though, that the book's true purpose quickly becomes clear. Basically, it's an occasion for him to indulge a range of perverse fantasies. Freud taught that the sexual fantasy world of infants is every bit as perverse as that of adults, while being unrestrained by morality or taboo. Vidal proves him right.

In this extended homoerotic standup-comedy act, not just Paul, but almost all the early Christians are depicted as ravenous gays. In leering prose which, from a 67-year-old, is more embarrassing than offensive, Vidal has St. Paul tweaking Timothy's nipples and running his hands through the boy's "golden hyacinthine curls." Their activities 'in the sack" are frequently remarked on, as is the size of Timothy's reproductive organ ("the largest ... in Asia Minor').

If Vidal's treatment of homosexual themes arouses him ("Tighten the buns. Like white marble globes. Too gorgeous. Now spread them . . ."), it also serves a strategy he has been pursuing since The City and the Pillar, his 2948 novel about one boy's longing for another boy. Unlike a baby, Vidal is very much aware that his desires are looked on by grown-ups with displeasure. His reaction to the burden of this guilty knowledge is to deny the source of the guilt.

Susan Sontag has written that gay culture embraces the pose of camp because, in mocking the seriousness of certain types of overly sentimental art and entertainment (Judy Garland movies are the classic example), camp surreptitiously negates the seriousness of all judgments and categories, moral and aesthetic. The payoff is obvious. If all the world is a big joke --with the exception of funding for AIDS research--then moral standards which proscribe intercourse between men are a joke, too. If Vidal can undermine the seriousness of Christianity-in particular St. Paul's strenuous denunciations of sodomy--then, bingo! He need no longer feel guilty about his behavior in the bedroom, whatever that happens to be.

The same motivation, I think, must partly account for Vidal's strong feelings about Jews and Judaism, to which he also gives unrestrained expression here. All of Vidal's familiar Jewish-related hobgoblins are present and accounted for: the Mossad, the "Jewish Lobby," Jews who are "Jews first," "self-loving' Jews, "narrow-minded Temple Hebrews." Jesus himself turns out to be the malevolent Hacker, with plans to blow up the world and/or launch a worldwide Zionist revolution. Identified as "Lucifer incarnate," he appears to Timothy wearing "a beanie on the back of his head in the best--that is, pious-Jewish fashion." A puzzled friend asked recently whether Gore Vidal isn't himself a Jew. I told him he must be thinking of Vidal Sassoon.

When it's not anti-Jewish or antiChristian, much of the humor in Live from Golgotha depends on the reader's enjoyment of formulaic anachronism. Vidal lards the conversation of these first-century Jews with references to everything from "cyberpunks" to "Zionists." In employing this type of gag, Vidal leans heavily on a single rhetorical model, which consists of one phrase or sentence of relatively straight narration or dialogue, followed by an anachronism. A typical example, from the mouth of the Emperor Nero, goes: "I can never know if people truly hate me for myself or because I am emperor. Worse, I can never fulfill my dream to be a musician, to have a group, to travel--to have groupies!"

Vidal has said he composed this short novel on a manual Olivetti over ten years, but the thing gives instead the impression of having been improvised over several rushed evenings on a word processor. It is a measure of the ineptitude of this gassy little book that, in the two months it has been out, it has yet to produce so much as a burp from the likes of Pat Robertson. "Gore Vidal," Robertson might say if you asked him, "isn't he that Jewish fellow who sells shampoo?"