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Mitt Romney's Problem Isn't Being Rich. It's Being Mean.

Ah, the "Bain Story". It's the campaign narrative that simply refuses to die, no matter how Republicans try to wish it away. Mitt Romney's experience as the head of Bain Capital are both his attempt to prove his business savvy, and his opponents' attempt to paint him as the evil example of the 1%.

I'm not sure a lot of people - even the people who are trying to use Mitt's Bain experience as a cudgel against him - entirely understand why the attacks are working. And working they are. As much as "pro-business" types would like to turn Romney's business acumen into a net plus, as much as some private sector types want to paint Obama as an anti-Capitalist at least (or "socialist" at worst)... the protestations about "demonizing Mitt Romney" tend to underline that the attacks are working and something is sticking, though no one, exactly, can seem to say what it is.

One obvious point is that criticism of Romney, or of Bain more generally, is not, by itself, anti-business. One investment firm's choices are not some stand-in for the entire field private equity, and if there are aspects of the private equity world that trouble people... well, that's probably an ancillary benefit - possibly the only good thing - to come out of this debate. Private equity could stand more scrutiny, and certain practices deserve more consideration, both from a business perspective, and a more human one.

 

It's that "human perspective" that's probably the real story here, and why these stories of Bain's business practices are resonating with the voting public. It's not that Bain's key stakeholders made millions that really gets people down (bringing me back to an old, and apparently upsetting point for others that being rich and making money, by themselves, ae not bad things, necessarily), but it's the practices they employed to get that money. Specifically, what I think is resonating about these stories is simple and human.... it's the part about the layoffs. And the fact that laying people off seems mean.

One of Mitt Romney's main flaws as a candidate - and there are, after all, so many - is that he seems intent on a cerebral, logical argument for his election. He seems awkward and uncomfortable with direct emotional appeals to voters; he comes off, often, as cold. I'm not even sure these perceptions are accurate, yet they do seem to prevail.

And really, Romeny would be in worse shape if President Obama himself had a real strength in emotional appeal, but really, he lkind of doesn't. As we've all observed on the left... he's no Bill Clinton, in ways good and bad. And one of the bad is that, unlike Clinton, he doesn't establish the kind of immediate emotional connection that Clinton still does, almost effortlessly. 

I don't think elections should be won or lost on emotional appeals... but these are difficult, emotional times, filled with uncertainty. Appealing to people's logic and clear thinking isprobably a waste of time. Across Europe, across North Africa and into the Middle East (the "Arab Spring"), it's clear that emotions are driving a lot of people's political judgments. Out with the old. Out with the insensitive. And out with the people who insist we have to think practically, above all else.

 

Bain's business decisions may, in the B-School sense, make perfectly logical sense. And I don't think "capitalism" is under any threat as a result of ads against Mitt Romney about Bain. Lots of people, even lower level workers, understand that business leaders make hard decisions when it comes to growing and sustaining a business. In practical terms, what's best "for the business" at a particular moment may include retrenchment, closings, firings. But on a personal level, those deciions are, almost always, painful ones. People will be hurt. Lives will be up-ended. There will be pain and suffering.

Mitt Romney isn't suffering bad perceptions about his work at Bain Capital because he seems like a bad businessman or not smart; rather, he's been hurt by these ads because he seems mean, unconcerned with the real-life consequences of firings and reversals and how they affect ordinary workers. And he's lousy at expressing empathy; he continues to talk about life changes and reversals with the distance of abstraction, and the cavalier superiority of someone who has, most likely, never known one. President Obama, no, doesn't do mcuh better; but when the focus is on Bain and Romney's business decisions, the quesiton isn't whether Obama can empathize more. It's whether Mitt Romney can empathize at all.

Conservatives are lousy with this stuff; they see Democrats and liberals as little more than sensitive wet rags, crying for trees, yelling about the poor, hugging the downtrodden and disdaining those who are normal, successful. Conservatives look to emotional appeals as a last resort, and even then, the emotions thay appeal to tend to be anger and superiority. You're better than they are. Be a winner. Let people in need learn to take care of themselves.

Liberalism, too, could probably stand to learn to be tougher, and rely less on these soggy emotional appeals. But by keeping the "Bain story" focused on the sense of bewilderment and loss, the suggestion that we can't turn our government over to someone so incapable of understanding the actual, practical impacts of layoffs and bottom line thinking... Democrats are on to something. It's something that can win this election. The problem of course is... once they win, there's no indication that these Democrats, however sensitive, will be any more help than those useless, cold business types.

Articles We Never Finished Reading: The Myth Of Mr. Nice Guy

From the beginning, the president's reelection campaign has taken a brutal, no-holds-barred approach that's sharply at odds with the conciliatory image that was the central predicate of Obama's entire pre-presidential political career. Whether or not the specific issue of Bain Capital ought to be off limits -- Booker has taken pains to clarify he doesn't think it should be -- there's no denying that Obama's 2012 campaign has seized every opportunity to turn the campaign toward sharply personal attacks of a type that the 2008-vintage Obama would surely have recoiled from. From Romney's treatment of his onetime pet dog to his high-school pranks to his income-tax rate, from the "war on women" to the "war on caterpillars," from "I like being able to fire people" to "I'm not concerned about the very poor," no potential controversy has been too petty, too rhetorically overblown or too out-of-context to be exploited to the hilt.

None of this is shocking -- it's how the game is played. But Obama once ostentatiously refused to play it. In June 2007, for example, when Obama's primary campaign distributed a memo titled "Hillary Clinton (D-Punjab)" detailing Clinton's connections to India, Obama publicly upbraided his staff, calling it "a dumb mistake" and "unnecessarily caustic." As the New York Times put it at the time, "The memo...raised quesitons about Obama's claims that he is above attack politics, which are epitomized by secretly distributing opposition research about a rival."

 - Molly Ball "The New, Nasty Obama Campaign," at The Atlantic Online.

It may be nasty... but there's nothing "new" about the Obama campaign running vigorously against its opponents. If anything, Democrats are a bit relieved that a primary challenge never materialized, and that Mitt Romney is rising to every expectation of being the lousy campaigner we knew him to be.

This notion of that "hope and change" meant "nice and kind" is a fantasy that played mostly in the heads of Obama's most youthful, or most ardent, believers in 2008. The "can't we all just get along" arguments, the "he's the only one that can bring us together" notes of the pro-Obama hymn, were pretty (and about an inch deep), but they belied the reality that the Obama campaign's approach to beating Hillary Clinton was often brutal and desperate. And while his supporters moutheed words of Kumbayah and World Peace, privately they tended to gripe that Obama should be even rougher and tougher... hardly the notion of gentle niceness that was meant to be projected.

The "India memo" cited above (which is news to me, all these years later), is really more of a prime example of the hamhandedness and neophyte campaign mistakes of the Obama team, lessons they only seem to have partially learned and dealt with since. There is still the inordinate faith in his speeches, still the part where they get caught flat footed when news breaks that's out of their control, and still a kind of amateur quality to their attempts to go hard and mean against opponents. It's not that Mitt Romney's "Bain problem" should be off liits, it's that the message of that Bain problem needs to be spelled out correctly. As far as I can tell, the Obama people get it about half right (and then seem skittish when suggestions arise that they "go too far"). Still, they suffer from the liberal anxiety of being seen as actually believing the things they claim to find important.

The President would be in much rougher shape if Republicans had fielded a candidate - arguably Rick Santorum was closest - who actually appealed to a wide swath of voters who are actually indifferent to the President's record thus far. These are largely the sorts of people who found Hillary Clinton interesting as well - working class people, often white, but also many of color, as well as other distinct minorities, like gay men and lesbians. Instead, because he and Romney are fighting over a fairly narrow percentage of a small part of the overall electorate - educated, but non partisan voters in the middle and iupper middle class - things are bound to be ugly, and charges thrown around. 

It's worth remembering that the 2008 campaign, against McCain had an undercurrent of ugliness that never entirely went away; it's mainly that it was so clear, early in October, that McCain was doomed that the Obama team was much better positioned to stay on the high road, and did so most of the time. It's clear that many conservatives, still, think that they lost because McCain didn't go harder and uglier; but at the same time, they are also the ones who complain, still, that Sarah Palin was subjected to all kinds of ugliness, from the press and from the Obama team. True or not, both ideas miss the point that McCain failed mainly because he was a lousy candidate, and Sarah Palin's selection was Example A (or possibly B after McCain flopped on the economic meltdown in the fall of 2008) of the kind of bad decision making that did him in. The obama didn't so much "play nice" as they simply ignored him, for close to a month. And this year, they may indeed get a similarly luxury option towards the middle of October as well. That won't be a win for "niceness", merely an expression of the reality that Republicans remain in spectacular disarray. There's nothing "new" about the Obama team's "meanness"; and still, nastiness may not define his presidential victories. Either of them.

Sunday Singalong: You'd Be Amazed How Much I Love You So

From the time spent reminiscing:

Donna Summer, Dim All The Lights. It's not even my favorite song, but it's a prime example of the kind of disco music that came to define the era: the slow jam opening to an extended sped up note, the percussive rhythms, the connecting bridge, followed by repeats of the chorus to the end. It's Summer's longest held note (a pop music record at the time for number of bars held), and lyrically, it's arguably one of the best of her songs from that era, sexy without being sleazy, a clear idea expressed from start to finish. For me, it's a reminder of the weird, wonderful sophistication of my childhood: the things we were exposed to at 11, 12, 13... gee whiz. They played this at junior high school dances, for goodness sake. I keep saying we were the generation that was 40 before we were 25. One other thing - it's this song, in many ways, that also turned the "disco" concept into pure formula; in many ways, this song is simply an improvement on the structure, lyrics and instrumentation of Last Dance. From there... you could list a raft of songs that essentially did the same thing (for artists such as Cher, Streisand, France Joli... I could go on). And that, as much anything, goes a long way to explaining why disco kind of wore itself out.

Donna Summer and Barbra Streisand, No More Tears (Enough Is Enough). Neither of these women did all that many duets; even more rarely were they ever paired with a singer anywhere near as strong (Summer may have married Bruce Sudano, but she could sure outsing him). Aretha Franklin has always had a similar problem. So this duet is remarkable, if nothing else, for how well matched these two are, both technically and in terms of range. Indeed, it's rare to have a duet where both the voices are fairly high sopranos. And the song is a marvel - never mind the pyrotechnics, just listen to them harmonize on "and we won't waste... another tear," with complete care and precision. Technically, I'm among those who think Summer wins this one, if we have to judge a contest; she's more naturally suited to the material, and Streisand can get strident. But it's a close call, and calling it a contest is to miss the point: this is just an amazing song, a remarkable duet, and it holds up amazingly well (consider how theatically similar it is to "I Will Survive" and how that song has been more or less been played into the ground.

Donna Summer, Last Dance. There's this moment, towards the end of every version (Casablanca edited the song a number of ways over the years), when Summer is doing the final repeat of the refrain "I need you by me, to guide me, to guide me..." (she apparently forgot "beside me"), and it's a long song and she's working it hard... and still, she sounds amazing. More than that, over a complicated orchestral arrangement (listen to the way the strings swirl, and the horns climb), she never gives the impression of the arrangement leading her, instead she's focused, in control, and very much in charge of where all this energy is headed.There's a reason this song became, commandingly, the song that sums up the end of an evening of dancing: it's not just the universal notions of the lyrics, or the obviousness of the title; it's that Summer gives it the authority it deserves. When she says "I need you..." and all the rest, the sense of need is actually palpable, and only one more dance can possibly satisfy. And so, come on baby... there's that dance. Yeah....

Donna Summer, Love Is In Control (Finger on the Trigger). J, my best friend, was the first person to point out to me that thinking of Summer as a "disco died" casualty was a mistake: even as disco vanished from radio and clubs, Summer was back in the Top 40 with The Wanderer, a fairly adventurous album that was actually well received. That was followed by a self titled album, including this single. Objectively, Love is in Control isn't necessarily great - you can hear the heavy hand of Quincy Jones in the instrumentation which borrows heavily from the similar work he was doing for Michael Jackson, and I realized, today, that Summer's voice is barely present for half the track. But she wins again, because her growling, fearsome delivery of lines like "you better raise your sights up high..." offer no room for hesitation. 

Donna Summer and Musical Youth, Unconditional Love. It's also easy to forget that Donna Summer was actually a very versatile singer who could easily handle a wide variety of genres and styles; on top of disco, she was actually one of the artists to help bring reggae into mainstream pop musical culture, both with State of Independence, and with this charmer, done with the then trendy, kind of a flash in the pan act Musical Youth. The song lopes along genially, and Summer's "ya mon" diction may be somewhat mannered, but underneath it all... she gets it, and it shows. Plus, the duet softened her image tremendously, taking her from the saucy siren image of the seventies into a more wholesome, Earth Mother type presentation (which was probably the most natural fit).

Donna Summer, This Time I Know It's For Real. When word began to drift out that Donna Summer was in London working with producers Stock, Aitken and Waterman, the anticipation, especially among knowledgable gays, was palpable. Proven hitmakers, S-A-W had already made dance music stars out of Rick Astley, Bananarama, Kylie Minogue, and a number of others. And when "This Time" showed up, the wait was worth it. However lightweight lyrically, the song was a revival of the kind of upbeat dance music not seen since disco's heyday, and as it turned out, lots of people liked it, and missed it. Summer's so in her elements, it's hard to know where to begin about why this song is simple perfection. You'd be amazed... how much I love you so. 

Donna Summer (with Bruce Roberts), Whenever There Is Love (the Junior Vasquez mix). In the early days, a disco track wasn't really a "remix" effort, not in the way we see them today. Producers started out recording long tracks, and simply cut them down for radio, editing out instrumental breaks, and even verses. Go back, and you can hear an enormous difference from the seventies era songs (they're fuller, more fully arranged), then a lot of the early "remixes" where songs were lengthened or sped up artificially after the fact of their initial recording. That means that much of Donna Summer's hits were never touched, at the time, by the deejays who became remix stars. It was years before Summer joined the ranks of artists with multiple remixes of one song by different deejays... and naturally, they all wanted the chance to work with the Queen. This song, for the forgettable film Daylight, was the first time Junior Vasquez (legendary, dear) worked his magic... and magic it is. At his best, Vasquez plays with the dynamics of the singer, but never loses sight of the song's overall structure, and here, he's in top form. So is Summer, and it hardly matters that Roberts (who wrote it) is more or less blown away as a result.

Donna Summer, Love Is The Healer (Thunderpuss mix). But the part that kind of defies explanation is buried, deep down, in Summer's success: it's the connection she made, on the dance floor, with the dancers, in their hearts, down to their souls. Oh sure, maybe you just danced to Last Dance at your cousin's wedding. Fun... right? That's not the half of it. It's that late night, 2 in the morning moment when a group of ecstatic revelers - probably gay men, but whoever - were lifted that much higher by the voice of a Goddess who spoke to their deepest feelings. The place where love is eternal, we are all one, and everything is possible. This is not stuff for amateurs. It's dance as a religion, the communion of true believers. I am on a mission... a mission of love. "Love is the mission, baby," Summer says in this song's spoken break, and it's the priestess, speaking to her flock, open and ready to receive. Thunderpuss, a remixing duo, are naturally up to the challenge of translating this into the realm of anthem - there's similar ecstasy to be found in their remix of Whitney Houston's "It's Not Right, But It's Okay" - but it's Donna who reigns. That's why she was Queen.

Articles We Never Finished Reading: Survey Says... Misogyny Is Bad (Thank Goddess)

"There was one description of the president that truly seized me:

'The metrosexual black Abe Lincoln has emerged as a hyper-partisan, hyper-liberal, elitist politician with more than a bit of the trimmer in him.'

This sentence is just so deliciously ridiculous, insulting and incendiary — perfect Republican fodder.

Let’s dissect it, shall we? Scalpel!

First, there is the word metrosexual. It is usually defined as a man keenly interested in grooming and preening. Despite the sexual root, the term isn’t rooted in sexuality. In its truest sense, President Obama of mom jeans infamy — as he told the 'Today Show' in 2009, 'I’m a little frumpy' — is far less metrosexual than Mitt Romney of the perfect hair, copper tan and Gap skinny jeans.

But this term is rarely appropriately applied. On the contrary, it’s often delivered with a snicker to question sexuality and feminize the subject, and femininity in a misogynistic culture is the greatest of sins. Metrosexual has become a roundabout homophobic taunt."

 - Charles Blow, "Dirty Racial Politics" in today's New York Times.

I give Blow credit for identifying a "misogynistic culture" that makes feminization of men an insult; I'm a little more perplexed that Blow seems to suggest that this insult is, well, really insulting. If we're trying to end a misogynistic culture, rather than just admit its existence (powerlessness... there's another good issue to discuss), then it doesn't help to just identify emasculation and then complain about it. That, it strikes me, is just giving the tactic all the more credence. Making a man seem woman-like wouldn't be an insult if we stopped treating being a woman as insulting.

"Metrosexual" is a dopey word and its use in the Ricketts material was, obviously, telling; in the context of that extreme sentence, a volume of assumptions and dislikes of the President certainly were made clear, and who wouldn't expect an Obama cheerleader like Blow (who later admits that Obama is a "moderate left centrist" who can anger "devout liberals", as if liberal ideas were religious dogma) to defend him? Blow is meant to represent a fresher, younger approach to opinion writing, and it's things like identifying anti-woman biases that add to that formulation; but Blow is, in most ways, more of the same on the NYT Op Eds - a supportive Democrat who wants the simplicity of two party distinctions and shows his contrariness by blaming Lefties who Go Too Far.

In general, I never really finish Blow's pieces - his hook is to accompany his pieces with some element of recent survey data, data that invariably shows him to be absolutely riight about his conclusions, which in turn our usually that some Democratic friendly idea, proposal, or candidate is good or right (or both). His opening paragraphs are lively enough (that "scalpel!" reference, however trite, is bracing), but he devolves into boilerplate and statsical citings pretty quickly, and it's prety much downhill from there.

I'd be more impressed if Blow was braver, if his opinion on a particular subject wasn't so obviously telegraphed by whatever graph accompanies his column, or at least if he'd question the whole reliance on poll driven opinionating a lot more than he does. Being more adventurous - which he seems readily capable of - would lift his op-ed writing out of the ordinary, and beyond partisan boilerplate. Or is it too girly of me to point that out?

Articles We Never Finished Reading: Money Talks... Or Something

At its {Buckley v. Valeo, 1974] center is a distinction between expenditures and contributions. The Court said that, under the First Amendment, Congress could not restrict campaign expenditures. Spending money was like speech itself, because “every means of communicating ideas in today’s mass society requires the expenditure of money.” That included printing handbills, renting halls, and buying ads on television. It is a result of Buckley that wealthy candidates like Mayor Michael Bloomberg can spend as much as they want of their own money on their campaigns; it would be unconstitutional to limit their expenditures.

But, according to Buckley, limits on contributions were constitutionally permissible. The Court said that a campaign contribution served only as “a general expression of support for the candidate and his views, but does not communicate the underlying basis for the support.” In the Court’s view, limiting contributions did not significantly inhibit political expression by the person giving the money. This was why the Court concluded that it was permissible for the law to limit how much an individual could contribute to any particular campaign.

In the 1974 law, Congress had tried to set up a tightly controlled system for financing campaigns: the government would monitor and regulate both the inflows and the outflows of money. It is not clear that the proposal would have worked as intended, but at least it made holistic sense. Congress could essentially select a number for the over-all price of a congressional or Presidential campaign, and then force candidates to live within that number. Buckley ended that system before it even started, and imposed a different one, of the Justices’ own creation. The court declared that contributions could be limited but expenditures could not, and for two generations that distinction has been the central feature of the constitutional rules of campaign finance. The bottom line was that money is speech.

 - Jeffrey Toobin, "Money Unlimited," an analysis of the Citizens United case, in the May 21st issue of The New Yorker

The "bottom line", of course, is Toobin's; he himself has just written, in the prior two paragraphs that the "bottom line" is not nearly the bright (and in the paragraphs preceding it, he points out that Buckley v. Valeo is a contradictory, complicated, and extremely long decision that's hard to understand). But "bottom line'... Toobin's happy to shorthand it for you.

And shorthand that, and much else, Toobin does, for pages and pages in The New Yorker. Poorly written, sloppily fact checked - somewhere, the ghosts of the old New Yorker staff are spinning in mausolea - Toobin's exercise is mainly one of Supreme Court soap opera, full of (unverified, as far as I can tell) postulating on who does what to whom and how the Important Work of the Law gets injured in the process. Toobin's take is catnip for liberals, and blasphemy to conservatives, but both reactions give Toobin too much credit. Toobin's lazy assertions, like the breezy (and popular) sum-up of Buckley, tend to show that his investigation of campaign financing, never mind its "reform" are secondary to scoring political points and cheap shots (his disdain for Roberts, Alito, Scalia and especially Clarence Thomas are glaring). Though Toobin attempts - and he'd have to, because otherwise the article is little more than gossipy fluff - to ground his storytelling in a historical and theoretically detailed historical perspective, his retelling is slapdash, lazy, and lacking in useful specifics. For instance, he breezily sums up Watergate and the campaign reforms out of it - which led to the Buckley case - without really laying out why Congress approached the reforms as it did, or which aspects of Watergate were the real drivers for reform). This matters, I swear. He's equally lazy, and curiously vague, when describing the even earlier aspects of the Gilded Age-era practices that first led to some attempt to regulate campaigns; and he acts as if problematic campaigns, never mind questionable campaign spending, suddenly became an issue after 1870 (try looking up "Ma, Ma, who's my Paw?" for just one earlier example).

All of which makes soggy, slippery ground for Toobin to try and ground the discussion of Citizens United, though mostly Toobin can't be bothered to lay out the specifics of McCain Feingold, why they were seen as problematic from before the law even passed, and why the Supreme Court started looking askance at the law soon after it became law. And Toobin can't really avoid the fact that First Amendment issues were a concern for the Court well before the specifics of Citizens United were brought to it (a case called FEC vs. Wisconsin Right To Life in 2007 made clear that the Court was concerned about speech restrictions), but he insists that it's a "crusading" Court, led by John Roberts, that's trying to eviscerate Campaign Finance Reform. I'm at least pretty sure that's not how they would puit it; but you'll never know from Toobin, since he makes virtually no attempt to get perspectives from anyone who seemingly disagrees with his assessments.

I'm not trying to defend the Citizens United decision, or suggest that money equals speech is a great standard; if anything I don't need to, since Toobin's article, really, does most of that work itself. Though Toobin is incredulous about the path that set the Court towards overturning McCain Feingold, he does, in fact, backhandedly lay out why the decision's logic makes internal sense: trying to separate a biased, provocative, deliberately propagandistic film from other forms of political "advertising" is in many ways a distinction without a difference, and whie the Court is more willing to regulate advertising than other forms of speech, political advertising, because it is a form of speech so central to our Constitutional approach (elections, where people can freely debate ideas and assumptions), gets more than usual protectionunder the First Amendment. That's why "money=speech" is complicated, and difficult. The money Proctor and Gamble spends to sell Tide is not afforded special consititutional protections. But Mayor Bloomberg's ability to spend his own money to advocate for his own election is. And probably should be.

In any event, exploring this fascinating, difficult, and challenging subject would make for a great, thoughtful article one could chew over and debate with friends. The most frustrating thing is that Toobin hasn't written it. Which is reason enough not to bother reading it.

 

Forever Donna

Somehow, I never expected to live through one year where two of pop music's greatest singers died.

Donna Summer was the lifeline of my childhood, the Queen of Disco who made the world safe for teen age gay boys yet to come out. She was beautiful, insanely talented, and she put dance music on the top of the pop charts. 

Of course she was much, much more than that. She was a stage performer. She was a survivor, one of the brightest examples of a seventies cocaine casualty rising from the ashes. She survived the "death" of disco and rode the return of dance music wave of the late eighties and early nineties back to her rightful place in pop history. 

I am blessed, in my life, to have known one of her most ardent fans, my best friend. His love became my love; his joy in her music became mine. I am chocolate... but I don't like the heat.

She was the greatest of gay stars, a career created and supported by gay men, who managed to say "Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve"... and still managed to make it right in the end. It helps that, you know, she wasn't necessarily a genius... but man, could she sing. So that's mostly what she did.

People will talk about Last Dance and MacArthur Park and Dim All The Lights - the longest sustained single note in a number one song by a singer - but my two favorites are earlier and simpler. No one has, or will ever improve on "I Love You" and "Heaven Knows."

I am a dancer. I love to dance, to feel the rhythm on the dance floor. I have been dancing to Donna Summer since I was 12, and almost consistently ever since. And we will dance again to her music. And it will all be all right.

 

 

Dark Shadows: Edward Scissorfangs

To understand Dark Shadows, you have to understand the source material: it's not the fact that it was made on the cheap, or that it was campy, or that it was about vampires and witches and such. It's that Dark Shadows was, first and foremost, a soap opera. A weird soap opera with witches and vampires made on the cheap that became high camp... but soap opera, nevertheless.

If something failed in transferring Dark Shadows to the screen, it appears to be the marketing department of Warner Brothers; which decided, probably out of nervousness, to sell the film as a Tim Burton dark comedy, anchored by yet another campy performance by our currnt superstar chameleon, Johnny Depp. As it turns out, that marketing error may well be costly for the WB, since Dark Shadows turns out to be one of a number of Depp-Burton combinations where a sweet, sad oddball strives to find a place of acceptance in an otherwise cruel world. Start with Edward Scissorhands... and work forward from there.

The amazing thing about Dark Shadows is how Burton manages to put his usual idiosyncratic stamp on the source material, without losing sight of what makes soap operas fundamentally work: the melodrama, the romances, the plight of characters stuck in personal dilemmas of their own making. Ultimately charming and generally satisfying, Dark Shadows is, in many ways, better than what its most ardent fans could have hoped to receive (and I, quite frankly, am not one of them). But people expecting a hoot-y campfest of seventies kitsch and vampy silliness may well be somewhat disappointed.

Dark Shadows opens with a long "origins" sequence for Barnabas Collins, a callow young man from England who travels with his family to Maine in the 1700's, becomes heir to a fishery fortune, and winds up becoming a vampire in his mid-twenties because of an angry witch, eventually hunted down and chained up in an iron casket. That casket is dug up in the early seventies by a contruction crew, and Barnabas hurtles back to life and back to Collinwood, his family's now rundown estate, to resume some semblance of a life. Or an afterlife.

At Collinwood he meets his descendants, Elizabeth and her brother Roger, and their children, along with a spooky new governess and a boozy psychiatrist, both on hand to help the Roger's son David, a weird child who has lost his mother. The governess, Victoria Winters, reminds Barnabas of his long lost fiancee, haunting him as he tries to rejuvenate the family's fortunes.

Barnabas is thwarted in his attempts by Anjelique, the witch who made him, who harbors a stalker-like attraction to him (that could never be fulfilled in the 1700s because she was the maid's daughter and he was lord of the manor), who now runs a competing fishery. The two struggle through various twists and turns until an over the top battle ensues at Collinwood, where many secrets are finally revealed.

Burton handles most of this with his usual wit, and sure handed storytelling, though there's a built-in "summer blockbuster"-ness that eventually overwhelms whatever remains of plausibility and good sense (much of the final fight sequence is just too much, and Barnabas and Anjelique's otherwordly coupling to "My First, My Last, My Everything" is largely trite and obvious).  But even so, the grand guignol touches do hark back to the original show too, which tried too hard, often, to do too much on limited resources and limited good sense. And in spite of itself, as with the original, Dark Shadows works best because it is, often, genuinely moving, a reminder that Burton, aided by Depp's layered acting, can illuminate the sensitive side of even the oddest of oddballs.

Depp's Barnabas is every bit what he claimed: a loving nod to Jonathan Frid, the original Barnabas, a lost soul (literally) who mourns the loss of his humanity and finds vampirism bewildering and often sad. Depp's homage is occasionally knocked off balance by dialogue that's pushing too hard for saucy irony (a riff on "balls" is just deadly weak), but he never loses sight of the character's base gentleness and remaining shreds of human decency. A number of current vampire players (Robert Pattinson, surely, and even Paul Wesley on Vampire Diaries) could stand to take note.

Burton has also surrounded Depp with a string of strong players doing some remarkably good work. I'd forgotten the range and subtlety of Michelle Pfeiffer, but her strong good looks (especially now as she's aged into them) and sensitive acting were made for a soap lead actress, and she gives Elizabeth class and panache. Helena Bonham-Carter, too, rediscovers some of her own subtle skills that seemed absent in recent turns (especially Harry Potter and the Red Queen in Alice), giving "Boozy Jaded Bitch" a fresh spin and an underlying sense of unfulfillment. The kids are charming. Bella Heathcote as Victoria Winters may not be quite as charismatic as the original role (a memorable soap heroine), but there's a lot going on in her performance, still. And Eva Green manages to keep Anjelique from devolving into a one note shrill siren song, at least until the final ten minutes. Even Jackie Earle Hailey has a nice turn as the family servant, and poor Jonny Lee Miller simply has too little to do.

Visually, the film is a seventies feast, topped off with a fresh eye to the gothic architecture of classic horror films (gargoyles and wooden carvings have rarely seemed so present, and so necessary). I don't think I've always love Colleen Atwood's costumes, but here she comes through strongly, representing a number of different aspects of seventies dressing without resorting to cartoon or complete heinousness (Depp's modern dress for Barnabas is especially nicely thought through, reflecting the era's fascination with military coats and foppish shirting, nodding to his past without completely stranding him in his present). The scoring is surprisingly inventive, making good use of even the hoariest seventies musical references. The cinematography too, is generally first rate.

Dark Shadows is one more example to the generation of Twi-Hards that it's Twilight that really lets the vamp genre down, not its predecessors and current competitors. Even Burton and Depp can rescue a camp-fest like Dark Shadows, and find more heart, and human soul, in the vampire story than Twilight's lumpy Edward can seem to even dream. It's a shame, then, that Dark Shadows will probably get blamed for not living to a bad ad campaign that misrepresents its true nature, and hides its best qualities. Barnabas, at least, would know how to extract some justice.