May 9, 2016

"I had no idea I needed to see photos of Kevin Spacey in giant pants on a scooter..."

"... but I really did need it."
Posted by Ann Althouse at 1:26 PM
Tags: , ,

5 comments:

prairie wind said...

Also: the title of this film is a bit cringe-worthy, no?

Rebel in the Rye might be cringe-worthy but they might have had something if they'd gone with Wry Rebel.

5/9/16, 1:42 PM
William said...

My guess is that Spacey on a scooter will attract less comments than a kneeling Hitler, but ever since Trump won the nomination I have no confidence in my ability to predict such things.

5/9/16, 3:04 PM
Howard said...

That pretty-boy cannot possibly play Salinger, who was an anti-intellectual of the first order. No wonder Trump gets compared to Holden Caulfield.
Trump a Political Caulfield

World War II

In 1942, Salinger started dating Oona O'Neill, daughter of the playwright Eugene O'Neill. Despite finding the debutante self-absorbed (he confided to a friend that "Little Oona's hopelessly in love with little Oona"), he called her often and wrote her long letters.[26] Their relationship ended when Oona began seeing Charlie Chaplin, whom she eventually married.[27] In late 1941, Salinger briefly worked on a Caribbean cruise ship, serving as an activity director and possibly as a performer.[28]

The same year, Salinger began submitting short stories to The New Yorker. Seven of Salinger's stories were rejected by the magazine that year, including "Lunch for Three", "Monologue for a Watery Highball", and "I Went to School with Adolf Hitler". In December 1941, however, the publication accepted "Slight Rebellion off Madison", a Manhattan-set story about a disaffected teenager named Holden Caulfield with "pre-war jitters".[29] When Japan carried out the attack on Pearl Harbor that month, the story was rendered "unpublishable"; it did not appear in the magazine until 1946.[29] In the spring of 1942, several months after the United States entered World War II, Salinger was drafted into the army, wherein he saw combat with the 12th Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Division.[28] He was active at Utah Beach on D-Day, in the Battle of the Bulge, and the Battle of Hürtgen Forest.[30][31]

During the campaign from Normandy into Germany, Salinger arranged to meet with Ernest Hemingway, a writer who had influenced him and was then working as a war correspondent in Paris.[32] Salinger was impressed with Hemingway's friendliness and modesty, finding him more "soft" than his gruff public persona.[33] Hemingway was impressed by Salinger's writing and remarked: "Jesus, he has a helluva talent."[2] The two writers began corresponding; Salinger wrote Hemingway in July 1946 that their talks were among his few positive memories of the war.[33] Salinger added that he was working on a play about Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of his story "Slight Rebellion off Madison", and hoped to play the part himself.[33]

Salinger was assigned to a counter-intelligence division, for which he used his proficiency in French and German to interrogate prisoners of war.[34] In April 1945 he entered a liberated concentration camp, probably one of Dachau's sub-camps.[34] Salinger earned the rank of Staff Sergeant[35] and served in five campaigns.[36] Salinger's experiences in the war affected him emotionally. He was hospitalized for a few weeks for combat stress reaction after Germany was defeated,[37][38] and he later told his daughter: "You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live."[34] Both of his biographers speculate that Salinger drew upon his wartime experiences in several stories,[39] such as "For Esmé—with Love and Squalor", which is narrated by a traumatized soldier. Salinger continued to write while serving in the army, publishing several stories in slick magazines such as Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post. He also continued to submit stories to The New Yorker, but with little success; it rejected all of his submissions from 1944 to 1946, a group of 15 poems in 1945 alone.[29]

5/9/16, 3:05 PM
rcocean said...

The whole Salinger mystique is lost on me. However, i was curious that the website kept talking about how the "40s fashions" looked on the actors. I thought fashions were no different then they are today. I'm mean they're just wearing pants and shirts.

5/9/16, 6:25 PM
mikee said...

Spacey has been riding scooters like this for an awfully long time. Googling "Kevin
Spacey on a scooter" turns up articles going back to at least July 2001, just on the first page.

5/10/16, 1:27 PM

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