American Cinema of the 1990s: Themes and Variations

1998 Movies, Dying Fathers, and a Few Survivors

1998 Movies, Dying Fathers, and a Few Survivors KRIN GABBARD Even the alignment of the stars predicted this would be a bad year for father figures. Early in the year, astrologers foresaw trouble for the powerful in the positions of Uranus and Pluto. In June, Chiron and shocking Uranus clashed, carrying the energy of Scorpio, the sign for secrets and sexuality. The conflict between Uranus and Chiron was massively magni- fied by a solar eclipse that soon followed, a classic warning to leaders. And all year long, Saturn, the traditional father figure, moved in and out of the sign of its debility. This particular weakening of Saturn occurs only once every twenty-nine years, and it too means that leaders are in for trouble (Beversdorf). ■■■■■■■■■■ There’s Something about Monica Indeed, Bill Clinton, the leader of the free world, did not have a good year. He should have paid more attention to Scorpio. On 26 January, after months of rumors, Clinton declared, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” He was responding to reports that Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr was investigating his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, suddenly America’s most notorious White House intern. Starr had found nothing illegal in the involvement of Bill and Hillary Clinton in the Whitewater land deal, the original impetus for his appointment as special prosecutor. But after Paula Jones claimed in a sexual harassment suit that Clinton had propositioned her and shown her his penis when she was an Arkansas state employee and he was governor, Starr switched gears and sought evidence that Clinton had perjured himself when he denied Jones’s charges in court. In order to build his case, Starr turned to Lewinsky’s claims that she had fellated the president and that he had inserted a cigar into her vagina. When Clinton testified before Starr’s grand jury that Lewinsky’s account of their relationship was largely true, 203 after having denied it in a 1997 deposition, the special prosecutor recommended that articles of impeachment be filed. On 18 December, the Republican -controlled House of Representatives voted out two articles of impeachment against the president. In spite of his troubles with Starr and the Republicans, Clinton consistently scored high in popularity polls. And no wonder. Most Americans saw the cries for impeachment as nothing more than the worst excesses of partisan politics, which they were. Meanwhile, the Clinton administration could claim an American budget surplus for the first time in almost thirty years. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 16 percent for the year, setting a record of four consecutive years of double-digit growth. As a large percentage of Americans watched their portfolios rapidly grow, very few regarded the stock market bonanza as a bubble about to burst. Americans were inundated with details of Clinton’s private life and public fortunes throughout the year, but other penises and other presidential affairs also made news. The pharmaceutical giant Pfizer experienced a windfall after the Federal Drug Administration approved Viagra, a pill that helped men gain and maintain erections. The drug sold briskly in spite of early reports that a few men died of heart attacks soon after taking it. The newly perfected use of DNA as evidence led researchers to conclude that Thomas Jefferson had indeed fathered a son by his slave Sally Hemings, as some historians had long surmised. The richest man in America, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, who had made his Windows operating system an essential part of Americans’ burgeoning dependence on computers, was at the center of an antitrust suit because Microsoft had rigged Windows so that only its own Internet browser could be loaded. In an unrelated confrontation, a man struck Gates in the face with a pie at an appearance in Belgium. Gates scarcely suffered from the antitrust suit. As for the pie, he mildly observed that it “just wasn’t that good.” He could not have foreseen the competition he would soon face from Google, which first appeared on computer screens this year. In Texas, Karla Faye Tucker became the first woman to be executed in prison since 1863. Tucker had declared herself a born-again Christian, a claim many took to be sincere. Texas governor George W. Bush refused to stop the execution and publicly ridiculed the woman when asked about her pleas for clemency. In Amherst, New York, a sniper killed a doctor who performed abortions. The Supreme Court refused to hear Robin Shahar’s...