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A scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” —“Madeleine” at the Golden Gate Bridge, Fort Point, right before she jumps into San Francisco Bay.

'Vertigo' and the idea of the other

June 4, 2023

Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film “Vertigo” has reached what The Washington Post called in its reappraisal ‘Medicare age,’which got me thinking about my favorite movie — one that regularly appears on lists for the greatest, or one of the greatest, films to date. But is it, as The Post suggests, a story for our #MeToo times or rather a more complex tale of the human desire to project onto others our own dreams, fears and desires?

The tombs of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette at the Basilica of St. Denis, the royal necropolis. Note her anachronistic Empire-style dress. Louis appears as he did on his coronation day, while his wife wears a dress in the style of 1815, the year Louis XVIII, Lous XVI’s brother, had the late couple’s remains reburied in St. Denis. *Photograph by Calvin Kramer.*

King and Queen to pawn in a game of love and death

May 4, 2023

We’ve got our teacup all set for the coronation of King Charles III and Queen Camilla on Saturday, May 6, but what we’ve really been obsessing about is a distant relative of the king’s by way of another Charles — Charles I of England.

He was a direct ancestor of Louis XVI of France, whose marriage to a certain notorious Austrian archduchess is the subject of the revisionist, feminist “Marie Antoinette,” finishing its first season on PBS Sunday, May 7. Quite the royal weekend.

Lost opportunity: Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, chats with children during a visit to ActionAid in South Africa in 2019. Judging from photographs like this, you’d have to conclude that she and Prince Harry could’ve been king and queen of the Coomonwealth. It wasn’t enough. Photograph courtesy eNCA.

Lost horizon: Netflix’s ‘Harry and Meghan’

December 16, 2022

In the trailer for “Harry and Meghan,” the new six-part Netflix series that dropped like an H bomb Thursday, Dec. 8, with the final three installments on Dec. 15, Prince Harry observes, “It’s really hard to look back on it now and go, “What on earth happened?”

Boy, ain’t that the truth.

“Elizabeth I (The Rainbow Portrait), attributed to Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, (circa 1602), oil on canvas. *Reproduced with the permission of the Marquess of Salisbury, Hatfield House. Image © Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, UK/Bridgeman Images.*

From upstart dynasty to Tudors Inc.

October 19, 2022

They weren’t England’s most successful dynasty. That distinction belongs to the Plantagenets some 300 years of brilliant, beautiful, bloody backstabbers who would’ve eaten the characters on “Game of Thrones” and “House of the Dragon” alive.

But in many ways the Tudors are as fresh and modern as the Windsors in everything from Lucy Worsley’s “Secrets of the Six Wives” docudrama series to Broadway’s “Six” to Starz’s “Becoming Elizabeth.” And that, as a fabulous, beautifully sited new exhibit at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan demonstrates, has as much to do with their ability to market themselves as it does with the history of their dynastic ambitions and complicated relationships.

The Promethean struggle of Roger Maris

October 4, 2022

Sixty one in ’61. And now 61 years later, 62.

New York Yankees right fielder Aaron Judge has surpassed the American League record of onetime New York Yankees right fielder Roger Maris for most home runs in a single season, which Maris set on Oct. 1, 1961 against Tracy Stallard of the archrival Boston Red Sox. (The Major League Baseball record is held by Barry Bonds, who hit 73 in 2001 amid the steroids era.)

There’s a symmetry in some of the Judge-Maris numbers – Judge wears 99 on his jersey; Maris wore 9 -- but not in their narratives.

John Collier’s “Lady Godiva” (1898), oil on canvas. Herbert Art Gallery and Museum. Hair has long been a symbol of female sexuality in patriarchal society. So it was shocking but not altogether surprising that a callous joke at the Academy Awards about the loss of it should trigger a violent response.

The Oscars' hair-raising moment

March 29, 2022

The adage about the Academy Awards is that nobody remembers who won last year. Will Smith has ensured, of course, that no one will ever forget that he won the Best Actor Oscar for his performance as Venus and Serena Williams’ father in “King Richard” — even as his awards-ceremony performance eclipsed it.

As everyone knows by now, Smith got out of his seat, marched up to presenter Chris Rock — who moments earlier had made a snarky joke about Jada Pinkett-Smith’s shaved head, a response to her autoimmune alopecia — and slapped him. Smith then added insult to injury with an emotional apology/about-face in his acceptance speech a few minutes later. (Smith has since apologized to Rock as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences reviews the incident.)

Nothing about Smith’s behavior is in any way excusable. But I also think Rock is equally culpable in a moment that rolled out every cliché pf America — stupid, classless and violent.

Edvard Munch’s “Vampire” (1895), oil on canvas. Munch Museum. Anne Rice’s romantic vampires and witches have resonated with late-20th and early-21st century readers and writers.

Interlude with the vampire -- Anne Rice (1941-2021)

December 13, 2021

It’s a cliché in publishing that writers who are popular aren’t good and vice versa. There’s a bit of sour grapes to that notion, as if it were a consolation for those acclaimed writers who’ve never found a wide audience.

Certainly, there were those critics who pooh-poohed Anne Rice — who died Saturday, Dec. 11, at age 80 of complications from a stroke . Her prose could be purple, while her plots at times alternated between the meandering and the static. But Rice, whose 30 novels embraced the sacred (Jesus) and the profane (an S and M Sleeping Beauty trilogy, an escapist “Exit to Eden”) would create one of the most seminal novels, “Interview With the Vampire,” and characters, Lestat de Lioncourt, in American literature. By her own standards, her best-selling books (more than 150 million copies sold) were great, because they resonated with the tectonic shifts in our perceptions of gender, sexuality and race in the second half of the 20th century.