Esoteric Brezhnevism

  In Steven Seagal’s first film vehicle, 1988’s Above the Law , he portrays Nico Toscani, a mob-connected Italian-American who trained in aikido in Japan, where he was recruited by the CIA to carry out top-secret missions in Southeast Asia before becoming disillusioned and abandoning intelligence work to join the Chicago Police Department. Since then, uncertainty has surrounded Seagal’s background, the degree to which Above the Law mirrors the impiously Jewish Seagal’s own origin story being a matter of dispute, alleged fabrication, and ridicule from elements of the press. Barna William Donovan, author of The Asian Influence on Hollywood Action Films , writes that “the actor did participate in spreading a colorful line of rumors and insinuations in his early rounds of publicity interviews,” continuing: Since the plot of Above the Law involves a CIA drug-running conspiracy, Seagal and the Warners publicity department started suggesting that, while in Japan, the future actor work...

  Andrei Zhdanov (1896-1948) In 1979, with the Soviet gerontocracy having entered what is today regarded as its debility and dotage, it was clear that a changing of the guard was inevitable. At that time, however, the new direction that government and culture would take in the 1980s was not at all a predetermined outcome. In 1979, political scientist and recipient of Ford Foundation largesse Dina Spechler published her speculative misgivings about a resurgent “Zhdanovism” in a paper published through the Soviet and East European Research Centre of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “On March 10, 1976, […] three Soviet newspapers carried lengthy, highly laudatory articles on former Party Secretary Andrei Zhdanov,” Spechler observes with concern: Zhdanov, it will be recalled, was the chief exponent and probable architect both of Stalin’s foreign policy and of his domestic cultural and ideological policies after World War II. […] These three articles were followed two days later by...

Oliver Stone wrote what was to become one of the most beloved and most frequently quoted screenplays of the eighties when he scripted Brian De Palma’s Scarface (1983). Insufficiently appreciated is that Stone is responsible for two of that decade’s epic organized crime films, the second being Year of the Dragon (1985), which he wrote in collaboration with director Michael Cimino. Like Scarface , Year of the Dragon depicts an immigrant criminal underworld, with Mickey Rourke starring as Stanley White, a New York City police captain determined to put an end to official complacency in Triad domination of Chinatown. As in The Pope of Greenwich Village , Rourke’s character is a tough guy “from the old neighborhood”. In this case, however, he is a “crackpot racist” with “a thing for chinks”. Year of the Dragon courted controversy with its unflattering depiction of Chinese-Americans, and viewers of the Blu-ray released by Warner Bros. this year are confronted with a hokey di...