"I was fascinated by the movies," he says. "We all were, my generation." Fascinated, in past tense. "The problem with movies is that they're not for encouraging argument, for the mind," Vidal says. "It's for emotions. And you can excite people to a point.... Well, a medium that has that trouble is in deep trouble. And I think one of the problems of today is that literature has no prestige, while movies have all the prestige. And movies cannot do argument, they cannot do the mind, they cannot do anything -- except get your pulses going a little faster."
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Despair and dreams
MOVIES, in other words, cannot do change, or at least cannot do it effectively enough. It was change that Vidal was after through politics, as well; in one way or another, he's always been after changing society, under many auspices, wearing his many hats. He is credited as the first to label the United States an empire, back in the 1970s, and has long been an outspoken critic of what he sees as American stupidity, greed, reliance on archaic moral structures. It's as bad now as it ever was, Vidal says, with Bush and the neoconservative agenda running the White House. "Did you see that story in the New York paper?" he asks. "All the money that Halliburton owes the government, and they're being forgiven this vast debt, because it's Cheney. In a well-run country, that wouldn't happen, a country of law. But we're now lawless."
"I don't see any optimistic signs on the horizon," Vidal says. "It's just, how much money can we wring out of the public, before all the oil has dried up and before soybeans can be properly processed? So we're at a curious point; obviously there are intelligent people who do have solutions, but not one of them will ever get inside the White House, not one of them is going to get to Congress, and God help you if you take on the bench. So all doors are shut at the moment."
Even in liberal Hollywood, after a year in which gay sheepherders fell in love, a preoperative transsexual reunited with her son and CBS reporter Edward R. Murrow took a stand against Sen. Joseph McCarthy, all in front of audiences' eyes, even after this, Vidal sees little reason to rejoice. After all, "Brokeback Mountain" failed to win the Oscar for best picture, exactly as Vidal predicted. "Nobody believed me," he says, relishing his prescience. "I said there's not a chance in the world the older members of the academy, the carpenters, the grips, the this's, the thats, living over in Van Nuys, they're not going to vote for that."
It seems hopeless, really, and yet, at 80 years old, Vidal continues the fight. "I have no choice," he says. "I have no selfish interests. All of my selfish interests are public interests." Under the weight of the world, at the apex of his frustration, Vidal is wont to smile. There is satisfaction in the muck, somewhere. "I'll never forget the joy," he says, and trails off, and pauses, and sips. "The four greatest words on Earth are 'I told you so,' " he says. "I have seen to it that I'm able to say that at period intervals, like a cuckoo clock."
One of the few people Vidal speaks with regularly on the telephone is Barbara Epstein, his longtime friend and editor at the New York Review of Books. "Like many people in Los Angeles, he's in exile," she says of Vidal. "Los Angeles is a place of exile. In a way, I think the one fits in the other very nicely."
Perhaps home, for Vidal, is exactly that -- exile -- a home that is not a home, from which he spies, somewhere in the nowhere of the distance, a better world.
But Vidal is not sentimental. The closest he comes is in his dreams. On good nights, as he sleeps in a second-floor bedroom down the landing from his study, he dreams of his father. "I'm always happy to see him again," Vidal says. "He starts climbing up a hill, and I follow him up, and it gets more and more full of bushes and so on. And then he vanishes." The landscape is not Los Angeles and not Ravello. "It's placeless," he says. "It's just a hill. It's wild country. When you dream of your father after a certain age, you're having a death dream. Any more of these doctors, and it won't be a dream."
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Contact the writer at steven .barrie-anthony@latimes.com.
