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サマリー
あらすじ・解説
Late at night last week in another country, my family and I talked with a Canadian couple about what America has come to. We agreed that what’s happening is bad, and I listed the good things that come to mind when I think of Canada: the Kids in the Hall, Alice Munro, Sidney Crosby, Leonard Cohen. “Where would we be without Leonard Cohen?” I said—though, to be honest, without Leonard Cohen I wouldn’t be different. Probably not at all. I like his songs, but I don’t know them well, not like I know the work of, say, Dave Foley, Bruce McCulloch, and the other Kids in the Hall. If you could take everyone who is currently dismantling what passes for our federal government, and force them to watch one movie, read one book, listen to one album, spend an hour with one painting, or engage with an artifact from another artistic medium, in the hope that it might fix them somehow, and pull their souls back from the brink of hell—which is where they are currently going, and trying desperately to pull us all with them—then what would that book, movie, album, painting, poem, or whatever, be?I, for one, would make them watch this 1982 film of a Randy Newman show that features appearances by Ry Cooder and Linda Ronstadt.The government dismantlers would have to watch the whole thing. The only way it works is if you watch the whole thing.Would it work? Would it solve the problem of them? No, not most of them. I know that. Maybe the better question is this: when this is all over—and it will be over, someday, after more people die, and we all suffer a while longer, maybe a lot longer—how do we fix those who are responsible for all that is currently going down? Let’s imagine they can be fixed. Let’s project a future in which there are consequences for those who do what are truly the worst things. What does rehabilitation look like, for the lunatic who wants all our kids to get measles, so that only the strongest of them survive? If they put me in charge of trying to fix our current Secretary of Health and Human Services, I would force him into detox for six months and subject him to mandatory viewings of that Randy Newman show and the 1966 John Frankenheimer film Seconds, in which an unhappy man is given another chance at his adulthood, and can pursue his dream of being an artist, rather than a guy behind a desk at a bank. Mere days into his new life, he finds that despite how he now looks like Rock Hudson and can paint all day long and have all the passionate sex he wants, he is still miserable. The cabinet member in my care would have to read “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” more than one time. He would have to read Song of Solomon and do chores.I would probably not, in the name of solving his poisoned soul and mind, show that broken man the hottest new TV show on Netflix, the British show that's called Adolescence. I don’t think it would help get the job done.If you don't know, Adolescence is a scripted show about a young teenage boy who murders a young teenage girl. The show spends its four episodes contemplating what led him to do that. It points fingers at the culture at large, the rhetoric that adolescent boys are exposed to via Instagram and elsewhere. Andrew Tate’s name comes up at least one time. Andrew Tate, if you don’t know, is an ugly man who brags online about treating women horribly in real life. I doubt he can be fixed.Adolescence is, if nothing else, an interesting TV show. I don’t regret watching it. There is no denying the feats that it performs, with every hour-long episode consisting of one continuous shot. In the first installment, we start with a couple of detectives in a car, discussing apples, and follow them to the suspect’s house, where a SWAT team, or something like it, battering-rams the door and holds the family at gunpoint. They take the kid to the police station and interrogate him. As they go from place to place, via car, there are no cuts in the action. It’s really something. The creators of the show must have had to choreograph everything the actors did with great meticulousness, especially on that first episode, with its police station full of people who walk through the frame in one direction or another. If even one of those blokes made a wrong move, like at minute forty-seven, they would have had to start all the way back again at the beginning. The fourth episode shows us the family of the adolescent boy, who is away in prison, a year after he committed the murder. They are getting by and still trying to wrap their heads around what happened. In some of the final minutes, the mother and father do their best to determine where they went wrong, how they brought up a kid who would commit murder at age thirteen, and what elements of the outside world must have guided his hand as he stabbed his victim many times. When that last episode ended, I felt a little bit like I had just watched an extended and technically impressive version of the anti-drug public ...