"The Candy Men" by Nile Southern

And what's going on in the hunchback's mind during this? "... the most freakish thoughts imaginable -- all about living and broken toys, every manner of excrement, scorpions, steelwool, pig-masks, odd metal harness, etc." And there you have it, a sexual Florence Nightingale meets the hell-spawn of de Sade and Quasimodo.

Candy's descendants were still around when I was in college in the late '70s and early '80s, still as curious as they were naive, still ready to dismiss as cynicism any suspicion of "new" ideas and experiences. The cuter they were, the more willing they seemed to throw themselves to the lions. But are the same type of girls around now? What does "Candy" mean in the age of Britney Spears or the Olsen twins -- or the Bush twins, for that matter?

You can imagine any of these young celebs setting all sorts of comic bells ringing in Southern's imagination. But the frankness of their affect and couture -- porno chic as marketed by Contempo Casuals -- is miles away from the sunny eagerness of Candy Christian. Something in them seems even to resist that favored adjective of dirty old men -- "nubile." You can't imagine any of them possessing innocence, let alone the cheerful naiveté of Candy. Or at least the same sort of naiveté.

Consider the thimble-deep knowingness exuded by Britney, that look of perpetual blahness on the Olsen twins' faces, as if they were always just barely putting up with everyone else, they're not going to be taken in by anything. It also tells you they are not going to be excited by anything. Seen through contemporary eyes, Candy's unsophisticated attempts at sophistication appear almost like the studiousness of the class grind. And though you could perhaps detect some echoes of Candy's emerging "social conscience" -- in Ralph Nader voters, for instance -- its earnestness seems of another time, too.

I don't mean to suggest that "Candy" is past its sell-by date. Any society whose government can fly into high dudgeon at the sight of Janet Jackson's breast is still wallowing in the sort of Puritanism that Southern dragged into the bushes and ravished. But I do mean to suggest that society has caught up with Terry Southern. In its crassness, its lust for celebrity, its pornographication, in the willed yahooism of its politics, America has seemed, for some time now, to be operating according to a Terry Southern scenario. For the last 30 years or so, he has been the Edgar Bergen of the American zeitgeist. I wish there had been more Terry Southern books, but his voice is a constant. For me there is no other writer whose voice is more present in American public life, whose distant cackle can be detected in the (often overlapping) lingo of showbiz and advertising and corporations and politics.

It's the spirit of Guy Grand, the prankster millionaire of "The Magic Christian" who believes that everyone has their price, that presides over reality TV. The people who dumpster-dove in that novel for the money Grand had hidden among the most foul offal now eat that offal on "Fear Factor." When, as New York magazine reported a few weeks back, Condoleezza Rice attends a Manhattan dinner party and says, "As I was saying last week to my husb -- ... As I was saying last week to the president," that's a prelude to some porno Terry Southern fantasy, the White House as setting for "Mandingo." When Ken Starr, with the epicene baby-face of a man who, in his 50s, still lives with his mother, succeeds in turning the national dialogue to blow jobs, cigar dildos, and semen stains, it's a Terry Southern fantasy come true. The only thing that could top it would be the pope having a Tourette's attack during Easter mass.

A few years back in Film Comment, the critic Howard Hampton suggested that the nympho little sister played by Martha Vickers in Howard Hawks' film of "The Big Sleep" is the prototype for every fame-hungry porn starlet making her way to the San Fernando Valley. Candy Christian, with her sherry and her LPs of Gregorian chants and her thesis on "Contemporary Human Love" doesn't seem like much of a prototype for contemporary American girlhood. The new naiveté is of a different sort.

"Candy" feels to me both eclipsed by and cannier than the present time. Teenage girls (and girls not yet in their teens) dressing like porn stars to emulate their idols might have been the product of a Southern fantasy, but they're a long way from Candy's applying a spritz of Tabu as she awaits a midnight visit from the Mexican gardener. Yet the Britney and Christina wannabes don't seem much more sophisticated; they've just learned a more hard-bitten way to be naive. No one has yet figured out how to satirize that. Or even whether you can.

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