The Hanta Virus?!

The sad conclusion to the Gene Hackman story.

Welcome to The #Content Report, a newsletter by Vince Mancini. I’ve been writing about movies, culture, and food since the late aughts. Now I’m delivering it straight to you, with none of the autoplay videos, takeover ads, or chumboxes of the ad-ruined internet. Support my work and help me bring back the cool internet by subscribing, sharing, commenting, and keeping it real.

—

20the Century Fox

This isn’t really a “breaking news” kind of newsletter, but considering I already relayed the strange circumstances surrounding Gene Hackman’s death and I have another thing I just finished writing about an old movie of his going up tomorrow, I felt obligated to share the most recent Hackman update.

Last we heard, 95-year-old Hackman was found dead in the mud room of his house in Santa Fe. His 65-year-old wife (she was 63 in the early reports, then 64, but they seem to have settled on 65) was also found dead in a bathroom, along with one of their dogs that was locked in a crate. Two other dogs were still alive, and there was an open pill bottle with some prescription pills scattered around. At the time I wondered if he had died, then his wife accidentally overdosed on pills afterward, and then the dog starved because it was locked in its crate.

Turns out it was the other way around. Hackman’s wife actually died a week before him… from the hantavirus. I truly did not have the hantavirus on my bingo card. I haven’t thought about the hantavirus since it was a joke on the Simpsons 26 years ago:

Hackman, 95, who had late-stage Alzheimer’s disease likely died roughly a week after his wife from hypertensive and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease and from Alzheimer’s, Jarrell said. [Hackman] tested negative for Hantavirus.

“He was in a very poor state of health,” Jarrell said. “He was in an advanced state of Alzheimer’s disease and it was quite possible he did not know that she was deceased.”

Feb. 11: Arakawa last left her and Hackman’s home. Also the last time she sent out any communications, per sheriff

Feb. 17: Last detected activity on Hackman’s pacemaker, leading officials to believe that was likely when he died

Feb. 26: The bodies of Hackman, 95, and Arakawa, 65, were discovered by maintenance and security workers at their Santa Fe, New Mexico mansion

The medical examiner noted that Hackman was not dehydrated at the time of his death — likely on Feb. 18, the day after his last recorded pacemaker activity. The actor, however, didn’t have any food in his stomach. […]

Hantavirus, which can begin anywhere from a week to eight weeks after exposure, leads to flu-like symptoms like fever and nausea and quickly escalates to trouble breathing. Only 865 cases of the disease have been reported in the US between 1993 and 2022, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. [NY Post]

Again, I don’t know that any way of dying is particularly dignified, but that’s a pretty weird one. RIP to them both.

—

As long as you’re already here reading about death, I also wrote about JD Vance and his fat little face for GQ this week. Specifically, I pondered Trump vs. Ronald Reagan (from whom Trump stole his most famous slogan) and how a guy who clearly wants to emulate history’s most famous Russia-hater could end up being a Russia apologist. Curious, no? Well, it all goes back to suits. Sort of.

I would submit that the best, and possibly the only, way to square the Trump-Reagan circle is to understand them both less as global ideological projects and more as generational examples of America’s recurring masculinity crisis. Are we really to believe that all the War on Terror–era feds and Cold Warrior military administrators that Trump has replaced with Fox News personalities were “too woke”? It’s much more likely that they just didn’t read bellicose—manly and masculine—enough for Trump’s tastes. (There’s a thousand pounds of irony to that coming from Trump, of course, but we’ll get to that.)

Which brings us to Vance, who seems to be trying to do the Trump thing, only much less convincingly.

Trump, maybe because of his years of experience playing a character on TV, seems to play his part well enough. It’s mainly through JD Vance that we can see the most obvious cracks in the façade. The part of the scene that most stuck in people’s minds was arguably Vance’s plea to Zelensky: “I haven’t heard a ‘thank you.’”

It was clearly intended to be straight talk, but it was the pleading part that stood out, and more than a few commentators likened Vance to a nagging girlfriend. Memes of Vance, his already round face artificially be-fattened into Fauntleroy-esque proportions, have metastasized to the point of inescapability. The internet loves turning him into a bug-eyed little piggy.

I won’t say that JD Vance puts the lie to the entire reactionary masculinity enterprise, but it seems clear now that there’s something faulty in his presentation. He wears the same suits as Trump, with the same long, shiny ties (“they point at your dick,” says Sebastian Stan–as–Trump in The Apprentice), but somehow it only ends up accentuating his tight pants, and the way the tapered legs get stuck on his calves when he sits and end up revealing the skin above his socks. He’s frequently accused of wearing eyeliner. He tries to look tough in front of a foreign leader but ends up being ridiculed for sounding like a woman. Above all, he gives the impression of an eager pupil wearing his dad’s clothes, a barely grown Stilwell from A League of Their Own.

Yadda yadda yadda, I enjoyed every single one of these pictures:

Okay, see ya later!