Where is the censorship, the brutality, the shunning, the repression, the severe scolding and sometimes even the ruining of people’s lives, the trashing and burning, the punishment for diverting from the party line, the gangs of roving goons yelling at diners in outdoor cafes?

When we think of classic fascism we think of the enforced uniformity of Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy in the ’30s and early ’40s. When we think of political persecution we think of HUAC and its allies blacklisting lefty screenwriters in the ’50s. But right now fascism is entirely owned and administered by the American wokester left. Just ask Dave Chapelle. Hell, anyone who isn’t afraid to say what’s what.

I’ve been on the Vertigo Home Video Upgrade Journey for God knows how many years. I’ve been watching it theatrically since forever. At least eight or ten times since the early ’70s. I remember my first viewing of Robert Harris and Jim Katz’s 1996 70mm restoration on the Universal lot. I remember looking at a DVD version on a high-def monitor at Tower Video about 20 years ago and thinking “wow, that really looks amazing.” Little did I know. And then came the Bluray improvements in 2012…wowed all over again.

Last night I watched the new 4K Vertigo, and I was thinking over and over “Jesus, this is soooo beautiful…so much more vibrant and alive than what audiences saw in 1958…hell, that even Hitchcock himself saw in the Paramount lot screening room.”

The details are to die for…the penetrating, half-glowing colors, the soothing greens, deep blues, reds (especially the walls inside Ernie’s) and creamy ambers in Midge’s apartment…the bizarre unreality of James Stewart‘s brownish-gray toupee, the eyeliner underneath his baby blues and that beyond-weird aubergine suit (I described it years ago as “a mood suit, solid brown in sunlight or shaded-sunlight scenes and aubergine-tinted when he’s indoors”), the astonishing granular details, the hair and wardrobe fibres, the textures in the adobe walls lining San Francisco’s Mission Dolores and especially Mission San Juan Batista…I could go on and on.

How will it look when I watch it in 8K on my 85-inch home screen, four or five years from now? Bigger, of course, but better than what I saw last night? Doubtful.

…to write and perform a scene like this…a nice ‘n’ easy, no-sweat beginning-of-a-relationship scene between two whipsmart recognizables…no muss, no fuss, no bullshit…poking, prodding, teasing…figuring each other out. And then you throw in a little pre-dawn urban grandeur and just let the camera settle into it.

Last night I finally saw Michel Franco‘s New Order, a dystopian theatre-of-cruelty film that reminded me in some ways (certainly tonally) of Ridley Scott‘s The Counselor.

New Order premiered on 9.10 at the just-wrapped Venice Film Festival, and last weekend won the Silver Lion Grand Jury prize.

Set in Mexico City, it’s about a violent revolution against the wealthy elites by an army of ruthless, homicidal, working-class lefties. Director-writer Franco (After Luca, Chronic) is clearly tapping into all the insurrectionist anger out there (Black Lives Matter protests over the summer, the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement, last year’s French Yellow Vest demonstrations) and imagining the ante being raised a couple of notches.

Remember those rightwing thugs (“Los Halcones”) murdering leftists during that Mexico City demonstration in Roma? New Order is a roughly similar situation but with the lefties pulling the trigger, and with a lot more ferocity. Rage against the swells.

It struck me as a nightmare vision of what could conceivably happen if the ranks of our own wokester shitheads were to dramatically increase and anger levels were to surge even more.

New Order, trust me, is brutal, vicious and cold. But it’s so well made, and so unsparing in its cruelty. Franco is definitely the new Michael Haneke. He’s a very commanding and exacting director, but the film is ferocious and vicious, more so than even The Counselor (and that’s saying something).

I’ve sorry to admit I’ve been been derelict with Franco’s work before this. I’m going to try and catch up at the earliest opportunity.

I’m figuring that any serious fan of The Counselor would definitely be down with New Order. Especially given its Mexico City location, the fact that it deals with hostage-taking and exorbitant demands, and the fact that it has the same kind of cruel, compositional decisiveness and clarity of mind that Scott’s film had, only more so.

Franco is a very strong but, on the face of it, heartless director. Personally, I’m sure he’s personable and affable and humane and whatnot.

A filmmaker friend assures that Franco “is a nice fellow…he has a very surgical mind and his dramatic construction seems to veer towards the inexorable.”

Critic friendo: “I love those kinds of filmmakers! I feel their vision is actually quite compassionate — they’re just trying to be honest about a cruel world.”

What kind of publicist-protected, reality-defying bubble is Kate Winslet living in? Four days after sharing her “what the fuck was I doing working with Woody Allen and Roman Polanski?” remark with Vanity Fair‘s Julie Miller and generating a fair amount of head-shaking and accusations of award-season opportunism (at least on social media), she’s doubled-down on her discomfort and condemnation with Variety‘s Kate Aurthur.

On top of which Aurthur, a sturdy journalist who knows the score, decides to not even mention the fact that outside of #MeToo circles, Mia Farrow confidantes, the purview of Mark Harris and the ranks of Hachette employees, nobody on planet earth believes that Allen is guilty. No one informed, I mean.

Aurthur doesn’t even ask, “Uhm, sorry to interject but does the fact that an overwhelming body of evidence including the first-hand observations and convictions of Allen’s psychologist son Moses Farrow…does the fact that there’s absolutely no basis to believe in Allen’s guilt…does that, like, give you a moment of pause in this matter?”

Winslet: “We learn, we grow, we change. I think we should all be allowed to say, ‘Look, I shouldn’t have done that,’ you know? And I think this is a huge, seismic time for all of us, where we’re aware of how many planes we take, for example, or things we have done in the past, or would go back and wish to do differently. And I just want to lead with a bit of integrity, and to just be upfront and say, ‘You know what? I probably shouldn’t have done that.’ And so what I said in that Vanity Fair piece is really true, you know: I do regret it. I do regret it.”

“As soon as I was doing press for Wonder Wheel, it just made me crashingly aware that perhaps I shouldn’t have done this. But what was remarkable to me is that these are individuals who have been feted and praised and patted on the back for decades in this industry. And so by and large, it was presented to actors that these were people who it was okay to work with. But now, of course, I feel I can just say ‘I shouldn’t have done [this].’”

Round number or multiples-of-five anniversaries always seem to matter more in the public mind, and so next year’s observance of the 9/11 massacre will be a heavier thing.

I was thinking this morning about Bill Maher’s remark about the perpetrators not being cowards. He said this in the wrong way and certainly way too soon after the disaster itself. But even at the time I was never able to conclude with absolute certainty that he was dead wrong.

Evil, monstrous, satanic, fanatical, dastardly, sickening…all of these terms certainly apply to the people who delivered the horror. But speaking as a relative coward in terms of my own physical safety, as someone who hasn’t been in a decent fistfight since I was 12 or 13, as someone who shudders at the idea of ending it all or facing the Big Sleep prematurely, I find it difficult to apply the term “cowards.” Because what they did, loathsome and fiendish and demonic as it was, required a certain amount of terrible sand.

Yesterday I had a dispiriting conversation with a friend who believes that the Biden-Harris ticket hasn’t been forceful enough in condemning anarchic lefty street violence, particularly in the wake of yesterday’s shooting of two deputies in Compton, and that the apparent vote-tightening in southwestern battleground states may be a result of this. My response was basically “stop being such a pessimist.” (Our chat was a little bit like “Let’s Fret the Night Together,” that 9.14 Gail Collins and Bret Stephens chat in the Times.) But the dominant polling narrative is that Trump’s support among whites is definitely weaker than it was four years ago. I don’t think the election is “baked” for Biden, but as long as he doesn’t suffer any disasters or super-gaffes I think it looks reasonably good right now. No level-headed assessment is conveying any kind of horse race.

HE to commentariat: If you were Joe Biden‘s most trusted advisor, would you urge him to accept a four-hour, audience-free debate with President Trump on the Joe Rogan Experience? Trump has suggested that he’s down with it, but I were counselling Biden I would insist that two conditions be met.

One, a two-hour debate, not four. Three at the most. Because Biden, I fear, might not be able to keep his energy up and cognitive discipline at peak levels during a four-hour period. He would almost certainly be a less effective communicator during the final hour, and perhaps during the last two. Trump is a lying, run-at-the-mouth moron and would certainly reveal himself as such, but he seems to have more coal in the engine than Biden. If Pete Buttigieg was the Democratic nominee, four hours would be fine.

And two, Rogan is in Trump’s corner (he apparently believes that Biden has cognitive decline issues) so there would have to be a neutral, whipsmart fact-checker participating with an equal voice in the discussion, just as regular debate moderators have been at liberty to point out factual errors during conventional presidential debates. This would obviously put Trump at a huge disadvantage, but he’s an incorrigible liar and nonstop bullshitter and would just blow smoke up everyone’s ass without a fact-checker calling foul when necessary.

I’m not entirely sure if the four-hour format is Rogan’s idea or it’s speculation on someone else’s part, but if Rogan is indeed suggesting this it shows you where he’s coming from. Biden would get through it, course, but he the 78-year-old Democratic nominee would probably have difficulty keeping his best game going for 240 minutes straight, particularly alongside the evil Trump locomotive.

Biden is seemingly healthier (trim, agile, eats well, works out) and Trump is probably a dying animal (obese, McDonald’s diet, may have suffered from a stroke last year) but in a sitdown debate Trump’s health issues would not be an apparent factor.

All that said, there’s something truly exciting about this idea, and I’d like to see it happen. But only under the right conditions.