N a recent Wednesday afternoon, the studio on West 23rd Street where Kehinde Wiley lives and works was a maelstrom of activity. Near the door, three art handlers were packing five of his large canvases for shipment, hammering supports and loudly tearing through fat rolls of cellophane tape. The paintings, which were barely dry, were to be shipped that night to the contemporary-art fair Art Basel Miami Beach, where they would be installed in the booth of Mr. Wiley’s New York dealer, Jeffrey Deitch.

Several young assistants breezed in and out of the studio, talking on cellphones about travel arrangements and trying not to collide with the packers. A couple of cleaning women in white uniforms stepped gingerly around the large potted palms and the half-finished canvases leaned against the walls, collecting abandoned coffee cups and emptying trash cans. The artist’s two Italian greyhounds – a breed he first noticed in late-Renaissance portraits of Italian noblemen – scurried across the hardwood floor on toothpicklike legs, vying for attention.

At the center of the commotion sat Mr. Wiley, an amiable man with a round face and a sturdy, compact frame. Leaning forward in his chair, elbows on his knees, he tried to focus on his interview. “Sorry things are so crazy today,” he said, then laughed. “Actually, it’s like this pretty much every day.”

Just three years out of art school, Mr. Wiley has achieved the kind of meteoric success that most young artists only dream about. He is represented by major galleries in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. His shows have been covered by the art press, as well as by mass-circulation magazines like Vibe, Vogue and Essence. His work has already found its way into several museum collections, as well as into the mansions of celebrities like Russell Simmons, Elton John and Denzel Washington.” If you want to buy one of his newest paintings, which sell for up to $20,000, you’ll have to put your name on a waiting list.

Now, at 27, he’s having his first solo museum show, “Passing/Posing,” at the Brooklyn Museum through Feb. 5. The exhibition features 18 large-scale paintings, all depicting young black men in urban street clothes – sports-team jerseys, hoodies, baseball caps, baggy jeans, puffy jackets – floating in front of lushly colored decorative backgrounds. In the back room is a chapel-like installation, first shown at last year’s Miami Beach Basel art fair, which includes four cupola-shaped paintings and an enormous ceiling panel that the Brooklyn Museum recently bought for its permanent collection.

Still dressed in his work clothes – a paint-encrusted “wife-beater” tank top and cotton shorts, which serve as wearable rags for wiping off his brushes – Mr. Wiley described his process. His models are young men whom he approaches on the streets of Harlem, Los Angeles and Detroit, inviting them back to his studio. “Having an attractive woman with me helps,” he added with a laugh. (He also pays them for their time: $100 an hour.)

Together, they leaf through art history books – usually monographs on old masters like Tiepolo, Titian, Ingres or Raphael. The subject selects a pose from one of the paintings, which he imitates while Mr. Wiley photographs him. “I’ve seen people choose small figures in large paintings, not even the stars of the show,” he said, “and I’ve seen people who directly want to see themselves as Christ in heaven.”

Later, using his photographs for reference, the artist paints the figure, adding background threaded with ornamental patterns derived from a variety of sources, including Celtic manuscript illumination, Islamic metalwork, and Baroque and Rococo architectural designs. Sometimes he transforms the ornate filigree patterns into a sea of stylized spermatazoa, which he renders in gold or platinum – a sly reference to the hyper-masculine posturing of hip-hop culture.

Mr. Wiley was born and raised in south central Los Angeles. When he was 11, his mother, a linguist, enrolled him in an art program that supplemented weekly studio classes with visits to local museums. At the Huntington Library galleries, he was particularly drawn to portraits by the 18th-century British painters Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds.

“They were so artificial and opulent,” he said. “There was this strange otherworldiness that, as a black kid from Los Angeles, I had no manageable way of digesting. But at the same time, there was this desire to somehow possess that or belong to that.”

After getting his bachelor’s degree at the San Francisco Art Institute, he went on to the graduate program at the Yale University School of Art. There, he came up against his instructors’ expectations that his work would deal explicitly with the politics of black identity. “There was this overwhelming sense of, ‘O.K., Kehinde, where’s your Negro statement?’ ” he recalled.

His response was to paint a series of ironic images of watermelons in the style of Magritte or de Chirico. These works are now installed in the back of Mr. Wiley’s closet. “While they’re not some of the most sophisticated or beautiful paintings I’ve made,” he said, “they’re some of my favorites because they remind me of a point in my life that felt absolutely desperate and lost and powerless. I don’t want to romanticize that too much, but it’s interesting to look at.”

It was in 2001, when he was an artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, that Mr. Wiley hit upon his current melding of late-Renaissance prototypes and hip-hop street style. “With the work I’m doing now, I’m interested in history as it relates to bling-bling,” he said in an interview with Christine Y. Kim, a curator at the Studio Museum. “In places like Harlem, people ornament their bodies, love Gucci and Versace … I’m interested in certain types of French Rococo ornament that end up as faux décor in shopping malls or in Michael Graves’s faux neo-classicism, for that matter.”

Ms. Kim sees Mr. Wiley’s style in relation to the work of his contemporaries, like Yinka Shonibare, a British artist of Nigerian descent who reinterpreted Fragonard’s “Swing” (1767) using African textiles. “They’re taking elements from two very distinct, divergent histories and cross-referencing the image and iconography to create an explosive and compelling collusion of histories and ideas,” she said in a telephone interview.

It’s not difficult to understand why Mr. Wiley’s work would appeal to curators and collectors of contemporary art. His paintings are big and bold, and the colors are exquisitely rich; their iconography is hip, savvy and spiked with references to the European high-art tradition.

But this artist is also eager to reach a more general audience. “I want my work to look as familiar to young kids as it is to seasoned art historians who know all the references,” he said. “What appeals to me about painting is something that has cultural fluency.”

Another undeniable aspect of Mr. Wiley’s appeal has to do with his penchant for showmanship. For the opening of his show in Brooklyn, he hired a drag queen trained in Italian opera, sporting a wig and Venetian-style ball gown and backed by a string quartet in black tie, to perform a version of the Kelis song “Milkshake.” This was followed by an extravagant banquet at Grand Prospect Hall, a Victorian-era ballroom in Park Slope.

“He knows how to make life big,” said Mr. Deitch, known for his high-octane, youth-oriented gallery program. For his next show at Deitch Projects, “Rumors of War,” Mr. Wiley plans to create a series of large-scale equestrian portraits, using live horses as models.

“We’ll probably have to hire stunt doubles for some of the poses,” he mused. He has also commissioned a composer to transpose hip-hop songs to be played by an all-black military brass band and has applied for a permit to hold an opening-night parade somewhere in Manhattan.

Mr. Wiley’s new paintings made it safely to the Miami Beach Basel art fair, and after a brief detour to go fishing in the Gulf of Mexico, so did Mr. Wiley – with 100 pounds of fish in tow. “He found the hottest restaurateur in town to cook up all the fish and threw a huge banquet for all his friends,” Mr. Deitch said. “It was the most fun thing going on in Miami Beach on Sunday night.”

ONDON

SHORT of Davy Crockett and some of the other characters in John Wayne’s oeuvre, it’s hard to think of a more obviously all-American hero than Batman, Bruce Wayne’s caped alter ego. As for Batman’s fictional hometown, Gotham City: has anyone ever doubted that it claimed far closer kinship with the darker corners of New York City, which sometimes shares that nickname, than with the Nottinghamshire village of Gotham?

Even so, “Batman Begins,” which opens in American theaters on June 17, will arrive as the product of a startlingly British alignment of talent and location, though the intended setting of the myth hasn’t changed. The film, from Warner Brothers, was shot largely in Britain by a young London-born director, Christopher Nolan. And the cast includes Christian Bale, a Welshman, as Bruce Wayne/Batman, along with British mainstays like Michael Caine, Liam Neeson (born in Northern Ireland), Gary Oldman, Tom Wilkinson and Linus Roache in supporting roles.

Some exterior scenes for “Batman Begins,” now in post-production, were shot in downtown Chicago (at least on the right continent); but Gotham City was recreated in an unlikely spot in the heart of the English countryside, at R.A.F. Cardington, a former British air base some 35 miles north of London. Cardington is best known for two gigantic hangars that once housed the pre-World War II-era airships R100 and R101. The larger hangar was transformed into Gotham for “Batman Begins.”

Whether audiences will actually sense Britishness in the finished movie remains far from clear. Mr. Nolan, after all, successfully cast Guy Pearce, who was born in Britain and grew up in Australia, as a memory-challenged American insurance investigator in his trademark film, “Memento,” which was shot in Southern California.

Among the new movie’s many British actors (and Cillian Murphy, an Irish-born London resident, playing the villainous drug peddler, Dr. Jonathan Crane, a k a “The Scarecrow”), at least one should seem a natural presence: Mr. Caine, who plays Bruce Wayne’s British butler, Alfred Pennyworth, succeeding the British actor Michael Gough, who took the part in the previous four Batman films. But Mr. Neeson plays Henri Ducard, Bruce’s distinctly non-British-sounding mentor and trainer; Mr. Oldman is Lt. James Gordon, a friendly Gotham City cop who helps Batman fight crime; Mr. Wilkinson plays a Mafia don, Carmine Falcone; and Mr. Roache is Bruce’s father, Dr. Thomas Wayne. Indeed, Morgan Freeman, as Lucius Fox, a Wayne family friend, and Katie Holmes, as Rachel Dawes, Bruce’s childhood friend and adult love interest, are the only Americans in the 10 leading roles.

Mr. Bale, for his part, handily mastered an American accent for his portrayal of Patrick Bateman, the sociopathic Manhattanite in “American Psycho,” and the rest of the cast appear to have learned the same trick at one time or another. (Mr. Neeson most recently did so in his well-received performance as the sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey in “Kinsey.”)

But these fine actors are clearly in for some extra work, which perhaps speaks to the importance of Mr. Nolan. Although he has never directed an action film, he was given wide latitude by Warner Brothers in its push to revive a faltering franchise that hit the wall in 1997 when its fourth iteration, “Batman & Robin,” directed by Joel Schumacher, took in just $107 million at the American box office.

“I think it’s about Chris Nolan’s power as a director, and his vision of what he wants to do,” said Ian Thomson of the U.K. Film Council. In re-envisioning the franchise, Mr. Nolan decided to return to the story’s genesis, as outlined in “Batman: Year One” comics: as a child, Bruce Wayne saw his parents murdered and vowed to avenge all evil.

Warner Brothers, which declined to discuss the new film’s casting or make Mr. Nolan available to do so, need not feel uneasy about associating “Batman Begins” with more typically British products – the romantic comedies of Hugh Grant or the endless string of period costume dramas with bewhiskered men in frock coats and maidservants, eyes cast downward, bobbing and curtsying obediently.

In fact, the studio need only look at its own output lately. Of the major American film companies, Warner Brothers has been the most aggressive in working on British turf, Mr. Thomson noted. Much of the “Harry Potter” franchise is being shot at Leavesden, another abandoned British air base. Recently, acres of soundstage space at another studio were given over to shooting “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” starring Johnny Depp and set for release by Warners next year. Within the last year, moreover, interiors for two other ambitious productions, “Phantom of the Opera” and “Alexander,” both distributed in the United States by Warners, were shot on stages here. (Not to mention the first “Batman” in the current series, which was shot in Britain.)

All of this comes in a year when, even allowing for tax breaks, the weak dollar has made Britain forbiddingly expensive. So why not go to, say, Eastern Europe, which is cheaper? Much of the Civil War film “Cold Mountain,” for example, was shot in Romania. Technical expertise is one reason; Britain justifiably boasts of outstanding behind-the-scenes filmmaking talent, including a cluster of world-class special effects houses in the Soho district of London. “Studios know they get value for money here,” Mr. Thomson said.

And there are other attractions. If American film executives are faced with a long shoot abroad, and the choice is London or maybe Bucharest, they’re apt to choose London, where the language is familiar and a dizzying range of entertainment and culture compensates for absence from home. Few countries, moreover, have soundstages as big as those in Britain. Visitors to Cardington have said that the Gotham City set is vast enough to encompass a freeway and an elevated rail track like the El in Chicago. (This Gotham is in a state of decay, ravaged by corruption and organized crime, its look influenced by the now-demolished slums in Kowloon, Hong Kong.)

Finally, one wonders whether it even matters that British actors will dominate a classic piece of Americana. It’s certainly been done before: In “Gone With the Wind,” the main Southern belles were played by Vivien Leigh, born in British India, and Olivia de Havilland, daughter of a British patent attorney in Tokyo, while Leslie Howard’s Ashley Wilkes never quite shook off Howard’s native London.

More recently, there was much harrumphing in the British news media when an American actress (a Texan, even) was chosen to play that essentially English heroine, Bridget Jones. But the iciness of the British thawed when they finally saw Renée Zellweger’s portrayal.

Certainly, the two enthusiastically received “Batman Begins” trailers being shown in theaters betray no sign of the film’s British provenance. So Americans now face some choices. They can be gravely insulted that the British have appropriated an all-American icon. They can be amused by the whole farrago. Or they can view it as subtle revenge by the British on Hollywood for foisting Austin Powers upon them.

N anonymous bootlegger enters a multiplex and takes a seat at the back of the theater. He mounts a small digital camcorder to a tripod and plugs a microphone into the hearing-impaired audio jack. With a more or less unobstructed view, from a more or less straightforward angle, he records the movie and will later burn it onto blank DVD’s. Packaged in plastic sleeves with photocopied cover art prepared beforehand, the pirated discs are rushed to street vendors, who sell them for half the price of a movie ticket.

I found out on Dec. 4 just how quickly pirated movies hit the streets. That was the day I spied a pirated copy of “Closer” for sale on West 125th Street in Harlem, one day after it had opened in local theaters. This wasn’t an entirely innocent observation; I was shopping for bootleg DVD’s.

No, my family isn’t getting video coal for Christmas. But other families are, and I was on a quest to find out exactly what they’re getting. It’s an unavoidable fact that a large number of people now experience movies through the illicit medium of pirated DVD’s. The Motion Picture Association of America estimates that the movie industry “loses in excess of $3 billion annually in potential worldwide revenue due to piracy,” according to the association’s Web site, mpaa.org, and that doesn’t include illegal downloading from the Internet. While consumers are developing ever more sophisticated tastes in their home viewing experience (as in the preference for widescreen DVD’s and enthusiasm for flat-screen televisions), the black market for cheap bootlegs is flourishing.

“Some people get a kick out of owning a copy of, say, ‘The Incredibles’ before anyone else,” says John Malcolm, director of worldwide antipiracy operations for the movie industry association. “They want to show their friends they have a copy while it’s still in the theater. They don’t care about who gets the money, and they don’t mind the quality of what they pay for.”

Pirated movies come in many forms, including the grubby camcorder copy, the low-resolution digital file for downloading, and the relatively high-quality version duped from official DVD’s. “The experience is incredibly inconsistent,” says Darcy Antonellis, senior vice president of worldwide antipiracy operations for Warner Brothers. “In some cases you don’t get what you think you’ve paid for.”

Ms. Antonellis recalls the time a Warner Brothers sales employee went to buy some of the company’s new releases on the street. “But when he got back to the office, there was nothing on the discs,” she said. “He went back to the vendor and asked for a replacement. He refused and offered his money back. Eventually the vendor confessed that everything he was selling was blank.”

From a strict intellectual-property-rights standpoint, a blank DVD is preferable to an actual bootleg, but in the eyes of studio executives, it’s still part of an enormously vexing problem. To the antipiracy executive, a faux fake is just one more example of the bootlegger’s implacable greed. As for the unethical consumer who finds contraband sans content, it’s five bucks down the drain, an irritating trip to the video store and a smudge on the conscience.

But that blank DVD is something else to the film critic, particularly one versed in other marginal kinds of cinema. By a mischievous twist of logic, couldn’t that blank Warner Brothers DVD be thought of as the most avant-garde movie ever “released” by a major studio? Isn’t that shady street vendor also an inadvertent artist of site-specific dada? You imagine that the Andy Warhol who made an eight-hour film of the Empire State Building would have appreciated the blank bootleg as an endless portrait of the video void.

From a purely ethical standpoint, the bootlegging of movies is in no way justifiable. But from a disinterested, purely aesthetic point of view, bootlegged pseudo-movies reframe the art form in interesting ways. In the spring of 2003, the artist Jon Routson installed his own covert recordings of movies at Team Gallery in Chelsea: a classic gesture of postmodern appropriation. Examining the phenomenon in the pages of Film Comment, Edward E. Crouse imagined the contents of a bootleg holy grail, in which “the surreptitious camcordist is recording at the moment that he’s busted by a multiplex security guard and kicked out of the theater – an inept studio movie that abruptly shifts gears to become a first-person surveillance documentary.”

Tantalized by the possibilities for slipped meanings and strange new content, I began my investigation of the bootleg at the Union Square subway station, a major nexus of transportation in downtown New York. On an underground platform patrolled by the police, you can buy three churros for $1 or five DVD’s for $20. After I had made my selection, the vendor nervously offered a black plastic bag to conceal the sale, but as bootlegs are slimly packaged in about half the plastic of a store-bought DVD, I slipped the small bundle into my shoulder bag and rode home to Brooklyn.

First, “Team America: World Police,” the most outrageous parody of a Hollywood movie ever made in Hollywood and surely the nastiest puppet show of all time. Officially released in October, the film was widely available for sale as a bootleg throughout November.

Appropriately enough for a movie featuring superhuman acts of projectile vomiting, this was the messiest bootleg I watched. The right-hand third of the image was blocked by some dark, curving object (a finger?), and the tinny soundtrack was full of static hiss. The bootlegger shifted the lens a couple of times, clearing the first blockage but introducing a smaller one on the upper left. From beginning to end, the image was swarming with digital fuzz and fat, square pixels, and everything seemed covered in a scrim of chunky dust.

These defects undermined one of the most subtle aspects of the movie’s subversive humor: its ingenious mimicry of the slick, corporate cinematography of a blockbuster action film. Watching the bootleg, you wouldn’t know “Team America” had been photographed, quite beautifully, by Bill Pope, cinematographer of “The Matrix” films. In fact, with its illogical blockages, spontaneous glitches and overall look of having been dragged through an alley, “Team America” played like nothing so much as a film by Guy Maddin, the idiosyncratic Canadian experimentalist who specializes in deranged pastiches of crusty old movies (“The Saddest Music in the World,” “Cowards Bend the Knee”).

About 30 minutes into “Team America,” I had my first close encounter of the bootleg kind. Dressed in a hilariously inept “Arab” disguise, an American undercover agent is trying to infiltrate the Egyptian terrorist hideout and comes face to face with a pair of Somali thugs. As he nervously stutters his introduction (“My name is Ahmed. I’m a terrorist.”), the words “no card” flash over the agent’s face in red. While the bootlegger’s camera is signaling a technical problem, the bootleg movie seems to be commenting on Gary’s lack of proper identification.

No such meta-commentary could be found on my copy of Oliver Stone’s new epic, “Alexander,” although for a minute I thought the squiggly lines of static might be part of the movie’s laughably animated credit sequence. Sitting through one legitimate screening of “Alexander” was chore enough; I confess to scanning past innumerable Colin Farrell wig changes in search of weirdness. Pausing to watch the climactic charge of the elephants, I found myself captivated by an intense psychedelic distortion. In the original version, Mr. Stone digitized the sequence in violent shades of red; on the bootleg, it looked as if some crazed toddler had mashed radioactive cranberries all over the action.

The chromatic distortion in “House of Flying Daggers” was less enjoyable. Discreetly bought in a Canal Street phone booth, my bootleg was copied from what appeared to be a semi-official Chinese original. But while the framing and sound were acceptable, the image suffered a decline in contrast. Deadly dull but glorious to look at, this Zhang Yimou martial arts extravaganza is nothing but color, so when reduced to soap-opera size on television and drained of visual information, there wasn’t much to hold my attention. In the bamboo thicket chase, a marvel of green-on-green photography, the bad guys skipping overhead lose definition and blend into the foliage as if trying to go invisible, a supernatural skill they have yet to master.

My bootleg of Mr. Zhang’s “Hero,” however, turned out to be a minor masterpiece of chop-socky kitsch. Movie buffs frustrated by the delayed release of this 2002 film have long been able to find imported Asian discs before the official American release. My version was a street copy of one such import, whose original manufacturer decided that the American viewer would be happier if the dialogue were dubbed: everyone in this “Hero” sounded like the Kim Jong Il puppet from “Team America.” Better yet, the first kung fu sequence was full of the silliest possible grunts and squawks, a cornball symphony of “yee-chaws!” “hee-yahs!” and what I can only transcribe as “heeee’yeeeeeee-yuh eeeeeeeYEEE-WAAAH!” The whole scene takes place in the rain, which the overdubbers approximated by sticking their microphone near a dripping faucet.

On West 125th Street in Harlem, the bootleg superstore, I chose from thousands of discs the only one I hadn’t previously seen in the theater, “The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie.” I don’t think that the pirated version was much spongier than the original, but it was definitely squarer. With varying degrees of success, all my other bootlegs had replicated the widescreen ratio of theatrical projection, but “SpongeBob” filled the whole screen. Did the bootleggers think children might have more fun if it looked like the TV show? In any case, what was lost from the edges of the picture was made up for by the irrepressible zaniness of everything else. You could watch “SpongeBob” through a damp sweater and still get the giggles.

“The Incredibles” was also full-frame, but whereas the flat, 2-D animation of “SpongeBob” played O.K. in degraded form, the more sophisticated art of the Pixar movie suffered terribly. Gone were the deep, voluptuously modeled spaces, the exquisitely tactile textures, the handsome harmonies of color. For the first time in my study of bootlegs, I found myself unable to watch, and I felt bad for anyone unlucky enough to have “The Incredibles” ruined this way.

Personally, I’ll take “The Incredibles” looking incredible, my “Hero” with subtitles and “Alexander” – well, you can keep that one. I already own three copies of “Team America” on DVD, but I’ll buy one more when it’s officially released, especially if the notorious X-rated sex scene is restored.

Though I never did come across one of those minimalist masterpieces, let alone Mr. Crouse’s hypothetical holy grail, my peek into the bootleg underground was not without its peculiar charms: it’s amusing to watch such obsessively controlled entertainments slip into total aesthetic chaos.

Nathan Lee is the chief film critic for The New York Sun.

he Juilliard School in New York City has trained some of the world’s most prominent singers since opening its opera department in 1930, including Leontyne Price, Simon Estes, Renée Fleming and Audra McDonald. The school continues to attract undergraduate and graduate students pursuing specialized music educations.

“By high school I had decided to go into music instead of taking the easy way out, like becoming a dentist or accountant,” said tenor Ross Chitwood, 20, who grew up on a dairy farm in Sulphur, Okla. “When I walked into the lobby of Juilliard, I knew it was the right place for me.”

A typical day for Mr. Chitwood begins at 9:30 a.m. with ear-training class, one of the musical subjects the singers study alongside classmates who are instrumentalists. Other courses include musical dictation, theory, conducting, music history, piano proficiency, and electives that cover specific composers and genres. Vocal arts students must also sign up for two foreign languages.

After lunch, the singers concentrate on theatrical skills in the Juilliard Opera Studies program. Here, they learn acting, movement, improvisation, stagecraft and stage makeup application. They also receive individual coaching for voice and diction to refine their vocal technique. “In drama workshop, we work with masks to create a character without using our faces,” said Rebecca Saslow, a 21-year-old mezzo-soprano from Boston, who praised the training as crucial to her education.

The students say they are energized by New York’s cultural life, and by exposure to world-class faculty and a student body whose musical tastes range from Bach to Beyoncé.

“Juilliard focuses on putting you together as a professional,” said Marquita Raley, 22, a mezzo-soprano. “ They want you to have the language, they want you to have the voice, they want you to have the analytical side.” The singers also study the business side of opera with a performing arts publicist. They learn how to find agents, write resumes and navigate the areas of public relations, audition protocol, professional etiquette, appearance and dress.

“The eventual goal is that we won’t have to be working in a gas station while trying to be singers,” said Ryan McKinny, a 20-year-old bass-baritone. He said he was surprised that so much went into a singing career aside from the music.

After classes end at about 6 p.m., some students go to the practice rooms. Others attend performances at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall and at downtown nightclubs. Ms. Raley works during the off-hours teaching children in Juilliard’s precollege division.

The Juilliard vocal program focuses on detailed practice rather than performance. Yet when the students are showcased in the school’s two annual opera productions, the pressure can be intense.

“It’s terrifying that opera greats like James Levine or Beverly Sills could be watching you,” said Patrick Cook, a 19-year-old tenor from Pasadena, Md., who thrives in the school’s demanding environment. “But you could have this incredible performance, and boom, someone’s deciding to launch your career.”

Brent Murray contributed to the reporting of this article.

ASHINGTON, Dec. 22 – Military investigators believe that a suicide bomber touched off the explosion that killed 22 people and wounded dozens of others Tuesday at an American base in Iraq, the Pentagon said today.

“At this point, it looks like it was an improvised explosive device worn by an attacker,” Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a news briefing with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. “We will take appropriate steps to prevent potential future attacks of this nature.”

The explosion ripped through a mess tent at Forward Operating Base Marez at lunchtime, killing at least 13 American soldiers. The base is on the edge of Mosul.

Today, American troops swept through Mosul, backed up by armored vehicles, jets and helicopter gunships, hunting for suspects, western news agencies reported. The city’s streets were described as deserted.

The casualty figure from the explosion was lowered slightly today, from the 24 dead reported late Tuesday. In addition to the 13 American troops, five American civilians and three Iraqi National Guard members were killed, and one unidentified person described by the Army as a “non-U.S. person.”

The militant Sunni group Ansar al-Sunna issued a statement over the Internet Tuesday taking responsibility for the attack and claiming that one of its fighters had carried out a “martyrdom operation” against forces it described as unbelievers and occupiers.

Mr. Rumsfeld and General Myers declined to go into detail today on the physical evidence that points to a suicide bomber.

Immediately after the explosion, it was clear to observers that the holes blasted into kitchen equipment were very round, at least suggesting the use of ball bearings, which have been a favorite weapon for suicide bombers in Israel and elsewhere.

A single foot-wide hole found in the tile floor of the mess hall, in the vicinity of the line where troops lined up with their trays, also seemed to suggest the presence of a bomber.

“If it was a rocket, you’d find traces of a rocket,” General Myers said, suggesting that no traces of a rocket, or of a mortar shell, for that matter, had been found.

There were reports earlier in the day, broadcast by ABC, that a human torso and a backpack had been found amid the bloody wreckage in the mess tent. A more specific announcement was to be made later today in Iraq.

Asked whether the “non-U.S. person” among the dead was believed to have been the suicide bomber, the general said: “I think that’s to be

determined. I don’t want to speculate on that because we don’t know.”

The secretary addressed an obvious question: how could a suicide attacker get into a supposedly secure American military base and into an area where the troops might think they can relax and be safe?

A partial answer, Mr. Rumsfeld said, is that United States and Iraqi security forces have to be right every time. “An attacker only has to be right occasionally,” Mr. Rumsfeld said.

One obvious difficulty in detecting insurgent attacks, General Myers said, is that “they can wear, and they do, clothes like any other Iraqi.”

The officials were asked about the vetting that takes place before Iraqis are hired to work at American based. General Myers said a “fact sheet” would be made available.

An Associated Press reporter on the streets of Mosul today described the city as deserted, with most schools closed and traffic police absent from even major intersections.

American forces shut down Mosul’s five bridges, and concentrated their raids in three neighborhoods in the eastern part of the city, the reporter said.

Reuters reported that Mosul’s mayor had warned residents that anyone attempting to use the bridges last night would be shot.

The Army gave little details about the targets of the day’s raids. “We are conducting offensive operations to target specific objectives,” Lt. Col. Paul Hastings told Reuters.

But residents told the news agency that most Iraqis had decided to take no chances in the face of the show of force. “Students went to school but were told to go home. People went to the shops, saw American troops in the streets, and went home,” said Ahmad, 25, a Mosul car dealer too anxious to give his surname.

The explosion at the base wounded 69 people, including 44 American military personnel. Today, wounded American soldiers and civilians were flown to to Ramstein Air Base in Germany, to be transferred to the Landstuhl Army Medical Center for treatment.

The explosion was the deadliest episode for American soldiers in Iraq since shortly after the invasion. Twenty-nine American troops were killed on March 23, 2003.

The largest previous death toll as a result of insurgent attack also took place in Mosul, on Nov. 15, 2003, when two helicopters dodging ground fire crashed into each other, killing 18 Americans.

Mr. Rumsfeld and General Myers said today, as they have before, that the bloodshed in Iraq, however ugly, is not surprising, given the fact that elections in that country are only weeks away, and that people who were rendered powerless by the overthrow of Saddam Hussein refuse to go away quietly.

“We have said all along we expected the violence to increase as we got closer to the election,” Mr. Rumsfeld said. “These folks have a lot to lose,” he said, referring to the insurgents.

Mr. Rumsfeld said his “thoughts and prayers” were with the dead and their relatives, and that seeing the grief of affected families “is something that I feel to my core.”

“Our troops are making a difference,” Mr. Rumsfeld said. “Let there be no doubt.” United States military people – “America’s true treasure,” Mr. Rumsfeld called them – are helping to build a free Iraq and, by extension, spreading freedom into global corners where it does not yet thrive, the secretary said.

“We must do what it takes,” the secretary said. “We must not allow people who chop off heads to control.”

But while saying that the United States must not – and will not – abandon its mission in Iraq, Mr. Rumsfeld said that, in the end, permanent security in Iraq must be enforced by the Iraqis. “It’s their country,” he said.

David Stout reported from Washington for this article and John O’Neil from New York. Richard A. Oppel Jr. and Christine Hauser contributed reporting from Baghdad.

ENVER, Dec. 21 – Americans across the country expressed anguish about the devastating attack on a United States military base in Iraq on Tuesday. But it was the question of where the nation should go from here that produced the biggest sigh from Dallas Spear, an oil and gas industry worker from Denver.

“I would never have gone there from the beginning, but that’s beside the point now,” Mr. Spear said, his jaw clenched. “We upset the apple cart and now there’s pretty much no choice. We have to proceed.”

Mr. Spear’s sentiment was echoed in interviews in shopping malls, offices, sidewalks and homes on a day when the news from Iraq was bleak. With 14 American service members killed and dozens injured, it was apparently the worst one-day death toll for American forces since United States forces defeated Saddam Hussein’s regime in spring 2003.

Many people said they were dispirited or angry, but many expressed equal unhappiness about seeing a lack of options.

Whether one supported or opposed the invasion has become irrelevant, many said – there is only the road ahead now, with few signs to guide the way.

One soldier who has been to Iraq and is soon to go back said he believes the war itself has changed, and that guerrilla attacks like the one in the northern Iraq city of Mosul on Tuesday have constricted the view on the ground about how to proceed.

“When we went to war there was a clear-cut enemy,” said Specialist Richard P. Basilio, 27, of Philadelphia, who leaves for Iraq after the holidays for a 12- to 18-month deployment as an Army computer technician. It will be his third tour to the Middle East and his second to Iraq. “Now the rules have totally changed. You don’t know what’s going on,” he added. “You just have no idea who’s your friend and who’s your enemy.”

Mr. Basilio’s mother, Janet Bellows of Daytona Beach, Fla., said the bombing in Mosul, combined with the prospect of her son’s departure, have left her “absolutely devastated.”

“It’s like watching your son playing in traffic, and there’s nothing you can do,” Ms. Bellows said. “You can’t reach him.”

Polls show that many Americans were deeply concerned about the course of the war even before Tuesday’s attack. Out of 1,002 Americans surveyed last Friday and Saturday by the CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, 47 percent said, when asked how the United States had handled Iraq during the past year, that things had gotten worse. Twenty percent said the situation had improved and 32 percent said it was about the same.

Some people said that polls themselves were part of the problem.

Charlie Eubanks, a cotton farmer and lawyer from the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, said he supported President Bush but had been lukewarm about going to war. Now, he said there was no choice but to fight on, and that reports on opinion polls were only “aiding and abetting” the enemy by making opponents think the American will is weak.

“We’ve got to hang in there and get it done,” Mr. Eubanks said.

Some people said that part of what they struggle with is how to square the ongoing violence with their beliefs about human nature and decency.

“How to deal with the rebels and the insurgency – I don’t know. But I believe that people are inherently good and rational,” said Traci Sillick, a financial adviser from Broomfield, Colo. Ms. Sillick said she thought the nation should protect the soldiers, give them a clear mission, and then help the Iraqi people as best it can.

“I still don’t see any good coming from this,” she said. “I’m saddened and angered.”

Mike Lepis, 30, a small-business owner from Portland, Ore., on a visit to Atlanta, said the bombing reinforced the distinction in his mind between the troops fighting the war and the war itself. “I don’t agree with the war, but I support the troops,” Mr. Lepis said. “It leads me to believe we have less control when we can’t guarantee their safety. It’s particularly unsettling when you hear about violence in areas that are supposed to be secure.”

Carolyn Jolly, 50, a civilian employee of the Army in Fort Lee, Va., said the attack did not change her opinion that American forces should be in Iraq. But she is equally firm in her belief that they should get out as soon as possible. And she is worried.

“I think we should stay through the elections,” Ms. Jolly said. “I support the president’s plan up to there. But if we’re going to focus on Iraq without support of other nations, I see the violence increasing. I can’t see a democratic Iraq. So what are we doing there?”

And while some said the attack reinforced their belief that the Bush administration had failed in its goals, others found it hard to place blame.

Stan Joynes, a real estate lawyer and developer in Richmond, Va., said the administration was not upfront about what would be required in Iraq. But maybe, he added, the administration did not know either.

“We know now we weren’t getting the whole picture,” he said. “I don’t think they knew the whole picture.”

One military veteran, Bob Mayo, 73, who served in the Air Force from 1949 to 1957, said that increasing violence in Iraq was just a sign of desperation by the nation’s enemies.

“It tells me that they are worried that they are going to lose,” said Mr. Mayo, of Newcastle, Colo. “They are just trying to make it as painful as possible and they don’t care how they do it.”

Mr. Mayo said he would not characterize the situation in Iraq as getting worse. “There is no worse in war,” he said. “War is the worst thing that can happen.”

Another military veteran who has become active in opposing the war said the message of Tuesday’s attack was not desperation, but greater organization by the insurgents.

“It’s just like Vietnam: the longer we stay there, the more anti-American sentiment will be drummed up, the more organized the insurgency becomes,” said Mike Hoffman of Iraq Veterans Against the War and a former Marine lance corporal who was in Iraq from March to early May 2003. “Unfortunately, the longer we stick around, the more we’re likely to see attacks like this.”

Reporting for this article was contributed by Lisa Bacon from Richmond, Va.; Ariel Hart from Atlanta; Karen Hastings from Harlingen, Tex.; Gretchen Ruethling from Chicago; and Mindy Sink from Denver.

ILL it be the Jews’ fault if “The Passion of the Christ,” ignored by the Golden Globes this week, comes up empty in the Oscar nominations next month? Why, of course.

How’s that? Not quite good enough. Surely Mr. Donohue knows that decorum in these situations requires that he cite a Jew as one of his “best friends,” not merely a friend. For shame.

As we close the books on 2004, and not a moment too soon, it’s clear that, as far as the culture goes, this year belonged to Mel Gibson’s mammoth hit. Its prurient and interminable wallow in the Crucifixion, to the point where Jesus’ actual teachings become mere passing footnotes to the sumptuously depicted mutilation of his flesh, is as representative of our time as “Godspell” was of terminal-stage hippiedom 30 years ago. The Gibson conflation of religion with violence reflects the universal order of the day — whether the verbal fisticuffs of the culture war within America, as exemplified by Mr. Donohue’s rant on national television or, far more lethally, the savagery of the actual war that radical Islam brought to our doorstep on 9/11.

“The Passion” is a one-size-fits-all touchstone, it seems. It didn’t just excite and anger a lot of moviegoers in our own country but also broke box-office records abroad, including in the Middle East. Most Arab governments censor films that depict prophets (Jesus included), even banning recent benign Hollywood products like the Jim Carrey vehicle “Bruce Almighty” and the animated musical “Prince of Egypt.” But an exception was made for Mr. Gibson’s blood fest nearly everywhere. It was seen in Egypt, Syria and Jordan. Among the satisfied customers last spring was Yasser Arafat, who called the film “moving and historical” — a thumb’s up that has not, to my knowledge, yet surfaced in the film’s low-key Oscar campaign.

Arafat’s animus was clear enough; an aide said at the time that he likened Jesus’ suffering, as depicted in “The Passion,” to that of the Palestinians at the hands of Israel. Our domestic culture war over religion is not so easily explained.

You’d think peace might reign in a nation where there is so much unanimity of faith. In Newsweek’s “Birth of Jesus” holiday cover article — not to be confused with Time’s competing “Secrets of the Nativity” cover — a poll found that 84 percent of American adults call themselves Christian, 82 percent see Jesus as the son of God, and 79 percent believe in the Virgin Birth. Though by a far slimmer margin, the presidential election reinstalled a chief executive who ostentatiously invokes a Christian Almighty. As for “The Passion of the Christ,” it achieved the monetary landslide of a $370 million domestic gross (second only to the cartoon saviors Shrek and Spider-Man).

Yet if you watch the news and listen to certain politicians, especially since Election Day, you’ll hear an ever-growing drumbeat that Christianity is under siege in America. Like Mr. Gibson, the international movie star who portrayed himself as a powerless martyr to a shadowy anti- Christian conspiracy in the run-up to the release of “The Passion,” his fellow travelers on the right detect a sinister plot — of secularists, “secular Jews” and “elites” — out to destroy the religion followed by more than four out of every five Americans.

In the latest and most bizarre twist on this theme, even Christmas is now said to be a target of the anti-Christian mob. “Are we going to abolish the word Christmas?” asked Newt Gingrich, warning that “it absolutely can happen here.” Among those courageously leading the fight to save the holiday from its enemies is Bill O’Reilly, who has taken to calling the Anti-Defamation League “an extremist group” and put the threat this way: “Remember, more than 90 percent of American homes celebrate Christmas. But the small minority that is trying to impose its will on the majority is so vicious, so dishonest — and has to be dealt with.”

If more than 90 percent of American households celebrate Christmas, you have to wonder why the guy is whining. The only evidence of what Pat Buchanan has called Christmas-season “hate crimes against Christianity” consists of a few ridiculous and isolated incidents, like the banishment of a religious float from a parade in Denver and of religious songs from a high school band concert in New Jersey. (In scale, this is nothing compared with the refusal of the world’s largest retailer, Wal- Mart, to stock George Carlin’s new best seller, “When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?,” whose cover depicts its author at the Last Supper.) Yet the hysteria is being pumped up daily by Fox News, newspapers like The New York Post and The Washington Times, and Web sites like savemerrychristmas.org. Mr. O’Reilly and Jerry Falwell have gone so far as to name Michael Bloomberg an anti-Christmas conspirator because the mayor referred to the Christmas tree as a “holiday tree” in the lighting ceremony at Rockefeller Center.

What is this about? How can those in this country’s overwhelming religious majority maintain that they are victims in a fiery battle with forces of darkness? It is certainly not about actual victimization. Christmas is as pervasive as it has ever been in America, where it wasn’t even declared a federal holiday until after the Civil War. What’s really going on here is yet another example of a post-Election-Day winner-takes-all power grab by the “moral values” brigade. As Mr. Gibson shrewdly contrived his own crucifixion all the way to the bank, trumping up nonexistent threats to his movie to hype it, so the creation of imagined enemies and exaggerated threats to Christianity by “moral values” mongers of the right has its own secular purpose. The idea is to intimidate and marginalize anyone who objects to their efforts to impose the most conservative of Christian dogma on public policy. If you’re against their views, you don’t have a differing opinion — you’re anti-Christian (even if you are a Christian).

Gary Bauer and James Dobson are also secular political figures, not religious leaders, yet they are more frequently called upon to play them on television than actual clergy are. “It’s theological correctness,” says the Rev. Debra Haffner, a Unitarian Universalist minister who directs a national interfaith group, the Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice and Healing, and is one of the rare progressive religious voices to get any TV time. She detects an overall “understanding” in the media that religion “is one voice — fundamentalist.” That understanding may have little to do with the beliefs of television news producers — or even the beliefs of fundamentalists themselves — and more to do with the raw, secular political power that the press has attributed to “values” crusaders since the election. “There is the belief that the conservative view won, and the media are more interested in winners,” says Frances Kissling, president of Catholics for a Free Choice.

Even more important than inflated notions of the fundamentalists’ power may be their entertainment value. As Ms. Kissling points out, the 50 million Americans who belong to progressive religious organizations are rarely represented on television because “progressive religious leaders are so tolerant that they don’t make good TV.” The Rev. Bob Chase of the United Church of Christ agrees: “We’re not exciting guests.” His church’s recent ad trumpeting its inclusion of gay couples was rejected by the same networks that routinely give a forum to the far more dramatic anti-gay views of Mr. Falwell. Ms. Kissling laments that contemporary progressive Christians lack an intellectual star to rival Reinhold Niebuhr or William Sloane Coffin, but adds that today “Jesus Christ would have a tough time getting covered by TV if he didn’t get arrested.”

This paradigm is everywhere in our news culture. When Jon Stewart went on CNN’s “Crossfire” to demand that its hosts stop “hurting America” by turning news and political debate into a form of pro wrestling, it may have sounded a bit hyperbolic. “Crossfire” is an aging show that few watch. But his broader point holds up: it’s all crossfire now. In the electronic news sphere where most Americans live much of the time, anyone who refuses to engage in combat is quickly sent packing as a bore.

Toss the issue of religion into that 24/7 wrestling match, as into any conflict in human history, and the incendiary possibilities are limitless. When even phenomena as innocuous as Oscar nominations or the lighting of a Christmas tree can be inflated into divisive religious warfare, it’s only a matter of time before someone uncovers an anti-Christian plot in “White Christmas.” It avoids any mention of religion and it was, as William Donohue might be the first to point out, written by a secular Jew.