Wendy Doniger, circa On the Road.

Wendy Doniger makes a cameo in a Time arti­cle about Fran­cis Ford Coppola’s new movie Youth With­out Youth:

One friend who sent Cop­pola encour­ag­ing notes on his Mega­lopo­lis script was Wendy Doniger, the first girl he had ever kissed and the one who gave him On the Road when they were stu­dents at Great Neck High School in Long Island, New York, in the ’50s. (Cop­pola has optioned the book.) He flew his pri­vate plane to Chicago to pick up Doniger, now a Uni­ver­sity of Chicago pro­fes­sor of Hin­duism and com­par­a­tive mythol­ogy, and bring her back to Napa to dis­cuss her ideas with him and his wife Eleanor. Over the house wine and Coppola’s cook­ing, they talked about his career. “He was stuck,” says Doniger. “For the first time in his life, he could finance a movie, and there­fore he didn’t have to do what any­body else said, and that par­a­lyzed him. He had no excuse this time if the film was no good. What froze him was having the power to do exactly what he wanted so that his soul was on the line.”

Hoping to help him with some of the themes he was strug­gling with on Mega­lopo­lis, Doniger gave Cop­pola some of Eliade’s works, includ­ing Youth With­out Youth.

…Read More…

With char­ac­ter­is­tic lucid­ity, and allow­ing him­self more right­eous anger than his print per­sona nor­mally lets in, George Packer goes after Brian De Palma’s new movie Redacted on Inter­est­ing Times, his blog at The New Yorker:

So “Redacted” doesn’t merely offer a fris­son of Godar­d­ian self-​consciousness; this is irony with a rev­o­lu­tion­ary point, a return to De Palma’s ori­gins in the New Left cinema of the late six­ties. And what is the point? That we’re all the same, Zar­qawi, Lyn­ndie Eng­land, the rapists in Mah­mudiyah, CNN, Ashley Gilbert­son, the read­ers of the Times, yours truly—we’re all accom­plices in the great act of vio­la­tion that is the Iraq war. The dis­tinc­tion between per­pe­tra­tor and wit­ness, crime and its doc­u­men­ta­tion, has been oblit­er­ated. And you thought you were just trying to find out what’s hap­pen­ing over there? Pas du tout! Hyp­ocrite lecteur—mon semblable—mon frère.
…
“Redacted” is an act of voyeurism that becomes a part of the thing that it claims to denounce. If the pic­tures from Abu Ghraib and Zarqawi’s home­made videos are war porn, “Redacted” is film-​theory porn—a styl­ized snuff film inside a meta-​critique of the media.

I’ve never seen the show, but Emily Nuss­baum has my vote for Stuart Gilbert of The Sopra­nos. It’s like read­ing Martin Amis on Lolita, and with a sim­i­lar point: caveat lector.