Two Men Who Would Be King - new book compares Evlis Presley and Bill Clinton - Critical Essay

The subtitle of Marcus' best and most ambitious book, Lipstick Traces, is "A Secret History of the 20th Century." In that 1989 volume, Marcus began with the phenomenon of the Sex Pistols and punk rock in general and went back to trace the obscure history of revolutionary utopian thinking in modern Europe and America, including such artistic movements as Dada and Surrealism. That is Marcus' great talent--he has a way of rooting around in cultural back alleys and backwaters, identifying seemingly minor trends that have larger implications for society as a whole.

As for Double Trouble, who but Marcus could have identified actor Bill Pullman as the face of American film in the 1990s? If you are having trouble placing Pullman, he is probably best known for playing the president in the 1996 hit movie Independence Day. If you still are having trouble placing Pullman, that is precisely Marcus' point. Pullman's face is not memorable; it embodies a lack of character, a kind of emptiness, a facelessness that was perfectly suited to the Clinton era, when the behavior of the real president led the media systematically to downplay character as an issue in public life. Though Marcus tries to defend Clinton whenever he can, he cannot help relating his presidency to an all-pervasive cynicism in American culture in the '90s.

In the kind of bizarre juxtaposition of which he is a master, Marcus compares Bob Dylan's Time Out of Mind (1997) to Pullman's film performances. Marcus writes, "The same cynical, damaged, sardonic, utterly certain acceptance of one's own nihilism has been all over Bill Pullman's face in the last few years, in Malice, The Last Seduction, Lost Highway, and especially in the recent The End of Violence--for just as Time Out of Mind is an end-of-the-American-century record, closing with a fantasy of a retreat to the Scottish highlands, to the border country where some of the oldest American ballads first came to life, Bill Pullman, in this last film, is the ultimate end-of-the-American-century man. His face has the cast of entitlement, an expectation of triumph and adventure, as the movie begins; like the narrator in Time Out of Mind, he knows soon enough that in some essential way the story he has to tell ended before he even took the stage, and that knowledge only increases his wariness."

This is Marcus at his best, both as a writer (he is a superb stylist) and as a cultural commentator. He is known mainly for his expertise on pop music (this book contains, for example, some brilliant pages on Kurt Cobain and Nirvana as the poster children for '90s nihilism). But I want to stress how shrewd his observations on American movies can be. The book includes a marvelous and in its own way moving retrospective on the film career of the character actor J.T. Walsh (though the term lack-of-character actor might be more apt in view of Marcus' analysis).

This essay builds up to another one of those revelatory moments when Marcus suddenly puts his finger on something in pop culture that mirrors larger political developments--this time an extended comparison between Walsh's fictional character in Red Rock West and the real Bill Clinton.