Merle Streep

From the sublime to the ridiculous…. last night, in a motel room in Iowa, I turned on the TV and watched news of Walter Cronkite’s death. I felt moved to write about it, and did. Tonight, in another motel room in Wisconsin, I turned on HBO and witnessed not a death but a life. I watched a weirdly talented display by Merle Streep in possibly the worst production in which she has ever appeared.

It’s a cliché to say that Merle Streep is good; it’s a given, like the fact that trees grow toward the light. It’s a cliché to say she is the best, and it’s hard to keep saying that when she keeps proving it over and over and over again. Her avant garde work of decades past—in, say, a BAM staging of Alice in Wonderland , a performance any of us would be proud to claim—have been only exercises for her, a warm-up. Kramer vs. Kramer would have sealed her place in history, but that was before Sophie’s Choice. I was pretty sure she’d reached her apex in Angels in America—a male orthodox rabbi?! as only one of a fascinating chorus of characters?—but no, I’ve seen an even greater achievement tonight.

I didn’t expect Mama Mia to be particularly good; I watched it because it was free and it was on, and I love Streep and Christine Baranski and Julie Walters and Colin Firth. I thought it might be mediocre, neither good nor bad; the music certainly fits that rough definition. I didn’t expect it, despite the reviews, to be so truly, genuinely, awfully bad.

I most certainly didn’t expect Merle Streep to be so good. To fall on this work with the same frank appetite she might have unleashed on Gertrude or Medea or Hedda Gabler. Her energy made me ashamed of my own existential ennui, my difficulties in engaging in a world that seems so out of whack, at the same time violent and banal, and ultimately so pointless. Who am I to wail at the velocity of modern-day cruelties when Merle Streep is so willing to give her heart to disco-era pop music of no redeeming value whatsoever?

She put her soul into every single moment of that film. Into every line, every moment, every verse in those terrible songs and that dreadful staging and the awful choreography and tired story line and one-dimensional characters. The movie takes place on a Greek island, and somehow, she found ways to bring Greek drama—yes, pity and awe and terror and catharsis—to this meaningless little money machine of a movie.

I’ve seen good actors do bad work, from Hoffman to Olivier. I’ve never begrudged them for it. On the other hand, as a playwright, I’ve experienced the rescue by actors of prose that should have had a good editor—or dustbin. I’ve witnessed the enactment of that old saw about reading the phone book—as in, he’s such a good actor he can make the phone book entertaining. Literally: my father reads the TV listings every Tuesday for a radio station that ministers to the blind. He always frets about making them interesting. They don’t have to be interesting, I assure him, it’s just reference—the reading isn’t interesting either, we just want to know what’s on and when. But he works hard to make it interesting, and he damn well does.

Still, I have never ever seen the kind of energy and diligence that Merle Streep put into Mama Mia, a movie she made at a time in her career when she hardly could have needed the work or the money. I have never seen such humilty and such rigor and such elegant transplendence.

Because that’s the other thing: her hard work wasn’t evident, it wasn’t what you see so often in actors like DeNiro and Cage and Nicholson, where you are painfully aware of how strenuosly they are Acting, you are so bloody aware of it that you can’t watch the damn movie. No, no. Streep was doing her usual invisible thing, where she is simply and organically engaged in the character she is portraying. It was just simply all the more awe-inspiring to see such fine work in a vehicle that by any form of measurement didn’t deserve it.

In a strange way, I have witnessed the work of two masters of their mediums in as many nights. Both spoke the truth, whether through storytelling or journalism, and both were the best at what they did because of that—they sought the truth no matter how much work it took, and they hewed to it like a lifeline, and it repaid them well in good Work.

I am on my way to a workshop about church leadership. I’m leery of all the worship activities in our agenda, because I am not sure I believe in what these activities assume about me, about us as human beings. I became involved in this work as a payment to my mother, a payment I will consider completed at the end of my year as president of my church. I am glad to pay her this respect.

But part of me has been sated by what I have felt and seen in the past 48 hours, just getting to this place for the work to being. Part of me feels as though the workshop—my own personal journey—has already begun.

Walter Cronkite

He was 92, my God it shouldn’t have been a surprise, it happens to us all, even those who ought to have been beyond mortality, who created and maintained standards that defined Art or Social Contract or Mathematical Truth. Gauss, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Budda, Weill, Einstein, Beckett, they died.

But the death of Walter Cronkite, in our modern currency, is tantamount to the end of the universe, and I say that pretty close to literally.

The significance of his place in human history perhaps won’t be understood by the generation that sucks up its “news” via new media, in little MacBites, in-between homework and Twittering. Try to understand what it was like when Gallileo claimed the Earth rotated around the Sun rather than the other way around. That was Cronkite, in both substance and style. Early 20th century print journalism consisted of the same yellow nonsense that now passes for reporting (except that it actually sold papers); late 20th century and early 21st century broadcast performances aren’t even journalism—they are a peculiar form of entertainment that neither informs nor entertains.

Walter Cronkite, more than anyone other than perhaps Edward Murrow, defined television news at a standard it has not upheld before or since. Even the best of print journalism has never achieved the levels he reached in intensity or scope. He defined Vietnam, space, Watergate… but most important: he defined what journalists do. He determined that objectivity was tantamount, and what that meant was that when he did step in, that rare moment when he interjected his perspective—that beautiful acknowlegement of the legitimacy of informed human interpretation that further trajected American journalism forward in the 1960s and1970s by Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Normal Mailer, and others who noted that human beings bring, for better or worse, their interpretations to the pinnacles of Truth—he moved mountains by what he said. When Cronkite came forward with his beliefs about Vietnam, LBJ famously noted that he had just lost the American public.

Walter Cronkite changed American history. And he did so not through the strategies of American politics or corporate tactics, but by aligning himself with the truth at all times. His death is an enormous loss to us not just of a human being—which in the end is the worst loss that any of us suffer—but of a way of interpreting and reporting the truth that I believe we all will bear, not just now, but as citizens of America.

Nobody really believes what anybody says anymore. With Cronkite’s death, there is scant reason to do so. With Cronkite’s death, we lay to rest not one person, but an entire wayof examing American life—a viewpoint that makes assumptions of a certain sort of grandeur and honor that I am not sure we can claim anymore. I grieve not only the loss of the man, but also the loss of his blessing on us all as Americans in the great, but still perilously young, experiment in democracy that we all are trying to make happen.