David Thomson's essay on Marlon Brando comes very close to summarizing my own feelings about this dead colossus, this amazing wreck of an angel. Two lines in particular stand out:

He made many very bad films, too many; he often seemed to lose interest in a film before it was finished. Yet even when the movie itself was dreadful, his performance could be exquisite. And four or five times in his life, he found himself cast in roles that were emblematic of the inner confusions of his nation.

And:

It is striking — and not entirely beyond the bounds of great dramatic timing — that his death comes at a moment when America's maturity is tragically necessary yet tormentingly distant. If only, we feel, now that he is gone, if only he could have tried again.

If only, indeed. Brando's death, with so much left unfinished, makes me wonder if an artist can really have an impact on the lives of nations. There was a time when I truly believed that the history of the world would have been different if Brando had played Hamlet. I'm not sure if I feel the same way these days. It might turn out that Brando secretly reinvented us, as completely as Harold Bloom claims that Shakespeare did...but it still seems likely that no artist, no matter how fearsome, strong, and brave, can have a fraction of the impact on people's lives as one pathetic Commander in Chief of no particular strength or ability.

This all reminds me, somehow, of something that David Crosby once said about Sgt. Pepper: the good vibes created by that album should have been enough to stop the Vietnam War, but somebody just wasn't listening. The sentiment is echoed in a beautiful comment left on the Amazon.com page for an album by The Postal Service: "...so good that, in a just world, it would stop the war on its own." Yeah.