The little girl on the record label, the character Paulette in René Clément’s masterpiece Jeux Interdits (Forbidden Games) , is the actress Brigitte Fossey. Now 64 years old, she has had a lengthy and productive career in French cinema.
The theme song from the film, which would be haunting in any context, is a shattering musical backdrop for this film about the impact of World War II on a French peasant family. The composer and performer was Narciso Yepes, an acclaimed classical guitarist from Spain. You very well may have heard the theme without knowing its origin. I have noticed that it is a standard part of the street/subway guitarist’s repertoire.
I won’t spoil the ending of the film, but I don’t know anyone who has watched the film’s final few minutes who hasn’t experienced either run of the mill sadness or complete despair.
I am a big fan of the writer Chris Hedges, especially his stunning and disturbing book War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. Hedges has been a reporter for both the New York Times and the Christian Science Monitor.
Chris has written a short provocative essay about the negative consequences of objectivity in journalism. I strongly recommend it.
I am still playing around with it and, because Hedges is not one for understatement, I suspect that I might come out with a slightly more moderate take on the issue.
But, as usual, he has challenged a taken for granted orthodoxy with passion and insight. What, he asks, is so great about slavish attention to objectivity if we use it almost ritualistically to avoid, and not face, complexity and nuance. What about the cases in which fairness might not be justified, when a journalist’s best judgement is that only one, and one side alone, holds up?
I always need time to digest Hedges, but I never need time to be provoked.
For many years, I rarely read much about politics and government that really captured the craziness, the reversals, the betrayals, the hypocrisies, and the deal-making of politics.
Then, in 1991 , I saw Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. Of course, the primary topic was HIV/AIDS, but that issue was so skillfully embedded in the politics of 1980s America that I left the theatre stunned at how perfectly the play “got” the workings of power and influence. At one point Roy Cohn – played that night by the magnificent Ron Liebman — delivers a brilliant and cynical monologue about who matters and who doesn’t at the highest levels of political combat.
I wanted to share another take on government in fiction that I find comparably compelling and gut-splittingly hilarious. Check out Chapter 10 from the Charles Dickens novel Little Dorrit. Dickens delivers an angry and biting satire on the incompetence of government called “Containing the whole Science of Government.” He does this through the creation of a fictional government entity called the Circumlocution Office.
My personal political beliefs are not a big secret. They are firmly and passionately held.
As a Professor, though, I have always done my best to create a classroom in which students are comfortable expressing diverse views. I am not sure I have always succeeded. Talking about fairness is one thing, but body language and tone of voice can tell quite a different story. I try.
Media and Mayhem, though, is not primarily a political blog. That does not mean it does not deal frequently with politics. It is that imparting my political views is not its main purpose. It has always been primarily for my students and other students of media and culture. But I am fully aware that nothing can really be extricated from the political.
All of this is to say, in a much too windy way, that when I watch an event like today’s face-off between President Obama and House Republicans, it would be a little dishonest for me to claim neutrality. I am a Democrat, probably left of President Obama, who admires the president enormously. Having worked in politics, though, and having thought a lot about political and communications strategy, I can generally watch a politician appear before an audience and give a pretty fair evaluation of who won a particular skirmish. I am more than willing to concede that a politician I admire may have performed horrendously. And I have often had the uneasy experience of watching debates in which people with whom I disagree perform infinitely better than those representing my point of view.
Having said that, and with full awareness that that the president faces close to impossible challenges, I would like to suggest that this week’s State of the Union address by President Obama, followed by today’s face-off with the group of hostile House Republicans, was as good as political communications gets.
Yes, I know that success is usually measured by how many minds you are able to change. Sadly, this does not seem to be an era in which any minds are changed very easily, regardless of argument or evidence. But simply as a strategic attempt to increase his advantage in the battle for public opinion, and as an attempt to speak to a larger audience of citizens whose support he will continue to need, these were two memorable days in the history of the presidency. They also illustrate many principles of persuasion and argument that we should all keep in mind as we make our cases for how we wish the world would work.
The president was neither apologetic nor defensive about his views. At the same time, though, he used words and tone and body language to make clear that he was clearly aware of, and had been chastened by, his failure to enact some of his key initiatives. He conveyed a sense of urgency, but did it without the kind of intensity that suggested fear or panic. He seemed to say: “I’m here. You’re going to have to deal with me. I have deeply held principles that guide my actions. But we are all in this together and I’m not going to be a jerk about it.”
He also used what appeared to be spontaneous humor to disarm opponents who looked more than a little strange when, at first straining to keep poker faces, they sat on their hands and almost refused to acknowledge that the president was in the room. I respect their right to disagree and to employ whatever political strategy they think is best, but I’m not sure they realized how strange it looked to be stubbornly refusing to acknowledge anything positive about the president.
The president saw those poker faces, but looked them straight in the eye, suggesting that he had just made a proposal that they certainly should be able to applaud.
Come on, he seemed to ask, you can give me a little bit of applause, can’t you?
One of the House leaders did applaud, and then laughed. This is rhetorical combat fought at its highest level, and at that moment the president at least temporarily snatched their weapons away, as if in an old Errol Flynn sword fight.
Then, even more shrewdly, he proceeded to list a series of proposals that the House Republicans simply could not have afforded to ignore. They had to applaud. Even when he proposed something for which there is a reasonable counter argument, he stated it in a way that virtually forced the audience to register at least some enthusiasm.
These events, even at their best, are more combat than careful discussion. Each side’s views are inevitably caricatured by the other side, and impressions matter more than intellect.
But even judged this way, I think it’s fair to say that the State of the Union was a tour de force, and that the president resuscitated and revitalized his presidency as well as any political leader I have ever seen. Of course, in our current frenzied news cycle, this will probably be quickly forgotten. This, though, was a night when many were watching to see whether his recent defeats would make him a little more defensive and a little less bold. He wasn’t.
It is one thing to be tough and unwavering. It is quite another to be warm and humorous. I have known politicians who were superb doing one or the other. But to do both at the same time, and to do it when the stakes are high and when millions of people are watching, is an extraordinary accomplishment.
When I was 14, my Mom left a copy of Catcher in the Rye on a table in the living room. Mom had returned to finish college and the book was required reading in one of her classes. I picked it up, went to lie on my bed, and knew that anything left around “accidentally” was probably at least a little steamy. Fourteen year-olds place a high premium on steam.
I was right, although I stopped expecting steam in Mom’s textbooks just several weeks later when, ready for something along the lines of Harold Robbins’s The Carpetbaggers, I found myself searching for the “good parts” in something called The Critique of Pure Reason. No good parts. But I still remember the night I picked up Catcher in the Rye.
I know that the “I never felt understood until Holden Caulfield” trope long ago morphed from iconic to trite. Over the years, as I would hear others recount the same experience, I would feel less and less like anything special or unique had happened to me that night. I even remember years when my insecurity led me to believe that it was “literary” to dump on Salinger, to consign him to the bin of the obvious and the superficial.
That I was the one who was obvious and superficial would never have crossed my mind. Thank goodness Salinger held up longer than my pretensions.
The first killer-moment I remember in “Catcher” was a hilarious school assembly. I choked with laughter as Holden described a pretentious speech by a bloviating school benefactor being interrupted by a thunderous explosion of flatulence. (Hey, give me a break. I was in 8th grade!)
But even more, I remember experiencing the rest of the book as story after story of a kid whose cynical bravado only slightly, and usually ineffectively, masked his guilt and sadness. It was a revelation discovering that I wasn’t the only smart-ass struggling to keep loneliness at bay. In fact, simply learning that night that I wasn’t so peculiar was enough to lift some of that loneliness.
One episode in particular has stuck with me: After having been kicked out of school, Holden is on a train going home when he meets the mother of one of his classmates. His cynical side comes first and we learn that the classmate was more than a bit of a jerk. But almost immediately, Holden – afraid to hurt the mother’s feelings – goes into an insincere riff about how great the kid is. And the mother beams. Holden may be filled with disgust at the kid himself, but – when it comes to talking with the kid’s mom – he can only launch into one of his bouts of phoniness. Again and again, Holden’s disgust and rebellion fight it out with his “feeing sorry.”
That’s why I have always felt that the power of the novel lies, not in Holden’s cynicism, but in his losing battle to present himself as a cynic. His effort to play the part of a sophisticated smartass is constantly sabotaged by his inner turbulence and insecurity.
He fails as a jerk.
I know that some view the “feeling sorry” part as naive, as taking the edge off Holden’s justified disgust with hypocrisy. Why not pass guilt and go directly to alienation? Fair point. That would not, though, have made as much sense to me, not during an adolescence when the rapid-cycling between anger and insecurity, between certainty and complete confusion, was dizzying.
In the intervening years, I have sometimes succeeded and sometimes failed as a cynic. I have hurt others and been hurt myself. I have sometimes wrapped sadness in a veneer of jokes and put-downs. I have also occasionally been smart enough to share rather than hide my scars.
But never, in the years since I first read Catcher in the Rye, have I forgotten just how much I am capable of fooling myself and just how much, regardless of how I might occasionally act like a jerk, I will always be rooting for that jerk to fail.
This morning, in that twilight between sleep and wakefulness, when hallucinatory dreams are in full force, I started to hear the last movement of Beethoven’s 9th symphony. It was magical. Then I woke up.
A few hours later, I was still thinking about the incredible 9th when I remembered Leonard Bernstein’s performance in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It took only a few seconds of googling to be reminded that it was performed at Berlin’s Königliches Schauspielhaus exactly 20 years ago this evening, December 25, 1989.
It was an amazing performance. So much came together in one extraodinary moment – Bernstein’s career, the crumbling of the corrupt, authoritarian East German government, and a piece of music celebrating joy and freedom that culminates with the words of the poet Schiller, somewhat modified by Beethoven:
Be embraced, you millions!
This kiss for the whole world!
Brothers, beyond the star-canopy
Must a loving Father dwell.
Be embraced,
This kiss for the whole world!
Joy, beautiful spark of divinity,
Daughter of Elysium,
Joy, beautiful spark of divinity
The whole thing is available on You Tube. These are the last six minutes as they were performed 20 years ago this evening.
Music borrowed for use in a film does not remain unchanged in the process. Oh, the notes on the page stay the same, but the way the public perceives and hears a piece of music can be affected for decades by one high profile appearance in a film. Skilled filmmaking can fuse with great music in a way that elevates both.
On the other hand, great music can be diminished simply by its association with an atrocious film. I won’t tell you what atrocity of a film used Ravel’s Bolero, in the event that some of my younger students have been fortunate enough not to see it. It is a film that truly gets worse by the year.
I will, though, share with you this amazing outdoor performance of the piece by Daniel Barenboim and the Berlin Philharmonic. Part one is followed by part two. Watch how Barenboim lets the succession of soloists get ever so slightly bluesy. Watch the percussion section that, over the length of the piece, moves slowly from being virtually inaudible to all-out thunderous. Watch an audience that seems stunned into absolute stillness. And finally, watch Barenboim conduct with incredibly minimal movement of his body.
If film X buried Ravel’s Bolero, this 1998 performance is its rebirth. I just regret that it took me ten years to hear it.
P.S. Any comments naming the atrocious film will be deleted.
William Dieterle’s 1948 film Portrait of Jennie, starring Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotten, is one of my problem films.
As a kid I found it haunting and romantic before I even knew what the word “romantic” meant. For almost 50 years, I have “heard” the music of Claude Debussy that was borrowed for the film’s score, and adapted by Dimitri Tiomkin. It was perfect for a film about a man who falls in love with a ghost, a painting. Ghost music.
The problem is that I tried to watch it sometime this year and many, but not all, of the moments that gave me the shivers years ago had become trite. It did not hold up. It crumbled. It was dumb.
I was sorry I didn’t leave well enough alone and let the film remain a part of the magic of my childhood. But no: Mr. Smart Guy had to ask that riskiest of film questions: Did it hold up? I got my answer.
But the star, Jennifer Jones, was a beautiful, magnetic performer, and Song of Bernadette and Duel in the Sun are just two of the films in her considerable legacy.
But as I watch all the “Best of 2009″ lists include Dave’s amazingly insightful and thoughtful book, I wanted to make sure that my students know just what is possible when an immensely talented journalist and scholar takes the time to understand an event sometimes dismissed as inexplicable.
Dave’s Columbine is the virtual opposite of the standard shlocky true-crime book. In fact, I hate to even mention it in the same breath as those overnight rush-jobs by self-styled criminologists who throw in every rumor and sensational news story and call it a book. Dave examines — with uncommon care and empathy – all of the many lives and social forces that came together at that horrible moment and the result is easily the best work about a sudden act of mass violence I have ever read.
I deal with enough difficult topics on Media and Mayhem that, to keep myself sane, I occasionally come up little features that are fun, all fun, and nothing but fun. Today I will start to occasionally share some of my favorite complete songs sung in films.
Warning: Very few of the songs come from musicals, but from films in which a full song with lyrics had a legitimate place in a script and moved a story forward.
My first choice is one of my favorites, maybe my favorite of all. “You Made Me Love You,” written for the musical The Honeymoon Express in 1913 by Jimmy Monaco and Joseph McCarthy. Judy Garland sings it to a photo of Clark Gable in Roy Del Ruth’s film, Broadway Melody of 1938. (MGM, 1937).
One of my undergraduate classes, Myths and Images in Mass Media, regularly explores the complex and extremely valuable structure of licensing, endorsements, tie-ins, and ancillary rights that can be built around some celebrities. At the same time that the celebrity’s image is created, nurtured, and protected, deal after deal is negotiated to exploit that image and profit from it.
This doesn’t require sainthood. There are celebrities cashing in whose carefully crafted and valuable image includes everything from outlaw to oddball. All that is required is that the celebrity outlaw or oddball have influence with some demographic group that a commercial interest would like to reach and exploit.
There are even a whole group of serious celebrity earners whose images are shaped and reshaped and exploited long after their absolutely final and irrevocable retirement, if you get my drift. In other words, Humphrey Bogart still does commercials.
Which of course leads to Tiger. Not much to say yet, but this will really be something to watch. How much will his personal problems tarnish the brand and how much of a price will he pay? Might we be on the verge of watching the ultimate case of celebrity brand fragility? Could his problems really bring down a brand this valuable?
Watch closely. There will be a lot to be learned here about celebrity, image, and commerce.
I see films depicting all sorts of human activity and culture and ritual. I see people engaging in incredibly diverse practices that they use to try and make sense of a sometimes confusing world.
And, while many good documentary films tell the stories of people who have acted nobly, sometimes they tell the stories of characters who engage in sense-making practices or rituals that seem to me to be everything from foolish to frivolous to downright despicable.
My bias, though, (and this is something that sometimes sets me apart from those who seem to dwell permanently in ridicule and cynicism), is that I always try to watch those practices from the standpoint of empathy, understanding, gentleness, and a serious attempt to see the world as the characters see it. And I also have a bias toward films that take this perspective. This is not the kind of empathy that condones actions, but the kind that struggles to see the world as someone else sees it.
I can think of many examples of films that resist using a sledgehammer and instead depict characters and their actions with empathy, even when most people would correctly find those actions to be unacceptable. I want to know why people do things, what world they see that makes those actions seem logical. I don’t mind an occasional film that ridicules the ridiculousness of some people’s actions, but for the most part I favorite insight over ridicule. In fact I find that filmmakers who strive for insight and empathy often end up with films that more completely and fairly condemn someone’s action than those filmmakers who set out simply to make fun.
Just off the top of my head, one recent example is Rose Rosenblatt’s and Marion Lipschutz’s marvelous The Educationof Shelby Knox. I love this film because it came to each character with humility, knowing that they each had constraints, responsibilities, and a whole life story that brought them to a given moment.
One fundamentalist minister, in particular, expressed views that could not be farther from my own. Yet because of the filmmaker’s attitude towards their subjects, and because they completely resisted making him look like a jerk, I was left with a real understanding of how this man sees the world and why he sees his fundamentalism as an antidote to forces that scare him. I still disagree with him, with more vehemence and anger than ever, but it seems to be a more informed and nuanced disagreement than the queasy feeling I had when Michael Moore ambushed Charles Heston.
Yes, Moore ambushed an impossibly foolish man and made him look — surprise! — impossibly foolish. Congratulations, Michael. But I did not find that to be even remotely insightful. I want to know more about the motivations and impulses, the historical and social contexts, that lead to such foolishness. And I am not saying that I want this in even a slightly didactic way. Audiences deserve this insight, and they deserve it in the context of an elegantly crafted and edited film.
You really should check out The Education of Shelby Knox. The forces that this courageous young woman confronts are considerable. Many of those who oppose her effort to disseminate good information about sex in secondary schools seem narrow and even venal. But this is the kind of extraordinary film in which even the actions of the ostensibly venal are presented with incredible insight and context.
However the new media economy shakes out, however the money is made, I am most hopeful that some successful format will be found that will allow the actual writers and creators to be paid for their labor. MBAs and assorted media gurus call this the monetization question: Who makes how much and how do they make it?
Snow of the northeast, how much do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways.
Oh, I know. I’ve heard the speech for 35 winters.
“You’ve lived here all these years and California is in the distant past and the sun and waves and all that nonsense was a big illusion and you forgot that the California dream was a fantasy that hid all the ugliness and sprawl and freeways and earthquakes and you get to live in such an exciting place so why can’t you shut up about a place called Laguna Beach that was the center of the world and stop playing the darn Beach Boys music and just settle back and enjoy the:
Change of Seasons!
Yes, that is the much-touted pathetic alternative to sunshine back here. The change of seasons. I am told I should believe that the mystical “change of seasons” is actually something more profound than what it looks like — a depressing moment when we change from a warm and sunny and hopeful world to a cold and overcast and hopeless world.
So I ask again: Snow of the northeast, how much do I loathe thee?
You see, it really doesn’t matter that I have spent more than half my life in New York and New Jersey. Every year I try to get myself in the frame of mind for a real hot-chocolate, fire-place, and wool sweater winter. Every year I tell myself that I won’t just love the movie Fargo, but that I will also love traipsing around in ice and snow and even love the pitch black of night that comes at around 4:40 PM in the afternoon.
I will nest. I will turn on the stupid Crockpot and put on sox. Maybe I’ll even buy one of those idiotic zip up blankets they sell on the infomercials, the ones that look like straight-jackets. I will turn inward.
And every year I loathe it.
Thank goodness for one exception: We have friends down the block who punctuate winter with a beautiful and moving celebration of Christmas, an observance they center more on the lessons of the nativity than the crowds of the mall. But that’s not for a few weeks.
Today we are having our first snow.
So feel free to join me in welcoming the first snowfall with my traditional celebratory ritual, the viewing of the web cam.
This is Poipu Beach on the Island of Kauai, where the sun shines and the waves break , a place where you turn inward as a spiritual exercise and not because it’s too disgustingly wet and cold to open the front door.
That is why I want to call your attention to The Taxi Takes on Terror, an ambitious effort by a talented young artist to confront terror and find common ground between diverse people through the surprizing lens of a taxi in crowded Mumbai. Vandana Sood is a graduate student in our MFA program in Integrated Media Arts at Hunter College. Her thesis project is a mesmerizing use of both video and other new media tools to examine the aftermath of the Mumbai massacre.
What makes the project so fascinating is that the “frame” she chooses for her exploration are the taxi cabs of Mumbai, spaces both public and private in which drivers and passengers — surrounded by the passing tumult of street life — try to make sense of such painful events. As Vandana asks on the home page of her web site:
“What happens when people from different class backgrounds, literacy levels or religious faiths sit across from each other in a taxi and take a journey together? Can this setting provide fertile ground for a rich dialogue about modern terrorism?”
The results of her journey through the tumultuous streets of Mumbai are at once profound and beautiful. And the temporary coming together of diverse people in a taxi does turn out to be an extraordinary moment for reflection and expression. She captures a number of these interactions on film and also gives us a fascinating glimpse at the taxis themselves, vehicles that — inside and out — are extraordinary objects of art.
I invite you to take a look at Vandana’s The Taxi Takes on Terror. It is a work intended to stimulate discussion and debate. Feel free to leave comments and engage in the discussion she has initiated.
And see just what is possible when a talented video-maker and digital artist – working in the aftermath of an epic act of terrorism — chooses the unique context of a taxi to explore matters of conflict, violence, hope, life, and death.
I bring it to your attention for several reasons. 1) I find it stunning that the Weinermobile, an icon of 1950s hot-dog branding, is still alive and kicking. 2) It summons memories of one of the single greatest days of my life, the day in in 1960 when the Weinermobile visited Grovecenter School in Covina, California.
3) It reminds me of an incident three years ago out in the Jersey burbs. At the time, there was an immigrant family from Northern Mexico in the neighborhood whose 7 year-old son would come over and play with my daughter. One day, he was over when I heard that the Weinermobile was going to be visiting the nearby train station that morning. I had to go and I had to take the kids.
But first I had to call his Mom, who spoke no English, for permission.
And that phone call was the unforgettable memory: In one five-minute phone conversation, I learned that there is no amount of non-native fluency, no number of years of study and immersion, no amount of Mexican music and literature to which you can be exposed that prepares you to even approach explaining a Weinermobile in Spanish. All I remember is saying something about some guy who thought it would be cute to put wheels on a giant chorizo.
I do, though, remember her perfect reaction, which she sort of mumbled across the room to her husband and which she didnt seem to intend for me to hear:
For this we went through years of legal immigration procedures? A giant chorizo with tires?
No shock, of course. ”Cashing-in” after having done something stupid, and having media outlets willing to pay, is a great American tradition that includes all sorts of noble behavior. In fact, I think Michaele and Tareq Salahi have earned themselves a place of honor right up there with people who dump medical waste on beaches, laugh at people when they trip and fall, or bring whoopee cushions with them to church.
We are talking major-league idiocy.
But their stupidity might, I repeat might, be about to be quickly surpassed. Because any media outlet with even a pretense of seriousness that actually does pay the Salahis for an interview, or that in any way enriches these pathetic jokers, will immediately knock them out of first place on the National Registry of Shameless Stupidity.
The world will always have jerks. Many of us, myself included, will on occasion be those jerks. And the world will always have people willing to reward jerks.
But there is no reason that the rest of us have to stand back and be silently complicit.
This is the precise moment when we should be watching, and watching closely, for any evidence that the Salahis have been paid for an interview. If this happens, the name of the offending media outlet should be blogged and tweeted and printed and sung and shouted until the whole world knows who decided that this was valuable news.
Then, only one task will remain: Each of us will have to ask ourselves how and why we might have been complicit members of an audience that, again and again, has proven itself willing to watch these paid interviews with people like Mr. and Mrs. “Even a Tux and Gown Can’t Hide Our Essential Stupidity.’
Moments ago I received the comment above about my last post. I have a response:
Cassandra: If I am interpreting your comment correctly, and you are Dwight’s cousin, I want you and your family to know how very sad I am about what happened. I cannot even begin to imagine the pain that all of you are feeling. I am thinking a lot today about the fragility of life and the speed with which it can be tragically and cruelly ended.
Only the photographer can speak about the photographs themselves and the decision to take them when she did. I reported the story that appeared in the New York Times to students of mine who I thought might learn something valuable.
But I have a confession and an apology: I am not happy with my initial reaction. I did think the incident and the photographs taken were vivid and interesting evidence of the speed and confusion with which these tragic events unfold.
But the minute I saw your email, I realized something else: My first reaction as a news consumer reading about the tragedy should have been concern for Dwight and all of you who today are living with this unbearable pain. My knee-jerk reaction was all too typical: I let the details of the incident obscure the single most important fact, i.e., that a precious human life was lost.
My only thought about the actions of the photographer comes from work I have done studying how sudden traumatic events unfold and how they are covered in the media. Explaining why people act in certain ways under such extraordinary circumstances is almost impossible. What seems logical moments later — and even days and weeks later — often was not as obvious in the moment. Many of us, myself included, look back with regret to incidents in which we acted one way and not another. Our decision may have had tragic consequences. And sometimes we should have known better.
Much of the time, though, what we should have or could have done only becomes clear after the fact, and we have to be very careful not to judge ourselves too harshly. It is so important to remember just how fragile and human we are.
But what matters today is Dwight. I am thinking about you and your family.
Take a look at the kind of photographs that were taken by a young photographer in the midst of a frenzy of sudden violence on a subway. This will occur more and more in an era when most of us carry around some sort of camera device.
These spontaneous pictures, with all the frenzy and fear they depict, are an unusual window into the precise, confused moment when panic strikes in a public place.
And despite some of the research areas in which I work, I am not a big fan of sadness. I don’t like it at all.
Students and colleagues sometimes laugh when I tell them I love joy and music and gut-splitting laughter. Because there isn’t too much of that in studies of media and violence and catastrophe. I mean, it is only rational for someone to open our college catalogue, see a grad seminar entitled Disease and Disaster in Media and Culture — and wonder if the instructor is rowing with all oars in the water. (Actually, all his oars aren’t always in the water, but that’s another story).
I can only say that my fascination and curiosity about violence was born of an intense curiosity about the effects of crime and violence on society and social institutions, everything from families to nations. I won’t bore you again with childhood experience that planted this seed.
The sad story I want to share is about a murder that turned out not to be a murder.
On September 13, 2009, a US Census Bureau employee named Bill Sparkman was found hanged in an isolated location in rural Kentucky with the word “Fed” scrawled on his chest. This was at a time when anti-federal rage was on fire across the country in the form of health reform town meetings being mobbed by people who find any government involvement ion health care to be a mortal sin. (These , by the way, are overwhelmingly people WITH health insurance.)
It is easy to see why the media jumped on the murder narrative. All of us need to come up with some story that makes something horrible even slightly comprehensible. The murder of a “Fed” was as plausible as any other theory, and the fact that it took place in Kentucky summoned distant memories of the feds who came looking for illegal moonshine during prohibition. The story received enormous coverage.
This is, of course, achingly sad for both Mr. Sparkman and his family. But I raise the story in Media and Mayhem to make an important point. There are times when everything about an incident points to one explanation. But this is precisely the point when a skilled journalist or media consumer or plain old citizen will ask what at the time seems like a dumb question: Yes, it looks like a murder, or yes it looks like a stranger abduction, but what is every other even slightly plausible explanations that has to be ruled out? Why might this NOT be what it looks like?
Supposed stranger abductions, for example, are only very rarely actual stranger abductions.
Very few people did that in this case. And it is a lesson to be learned and mulled over again and again. The obvious and the plausible are often wrong. Sometimes that is because someone wanted to create a false impression to hide their culpability and sometimes no one is at fault. The guiltiest “looking” person can be innocent. And the most innocent looking person can be guilty. The point is that society gets in deep trouble when it jumps to conclusions based on looks and other stereotypes. The single most horrifying story I have ever seen of a “guilty” man who turned out to be completely innocent is detailed in the riveting HBO documentary The Trials of Darryl Hunt.
The trick of responsible citizenship, the kind of citizenship in which we place a high premium on truth, is to never accept the obvious narrative immediately and to always await the inevitably complex and nuanced details that are really what make us human.
Finally, responsible citizenship requires our compassion. Oh, we can be angry at a man whose deception scared a lot of good people . But we also might at least consider feeling compassion, even grief, for a human being in such personal pain that this kind of scheme seemed the only way out.
Don’t ever forget that they very family that may surround you with all sorts of contradictory feelings — everything from love to anger; from dysfunction to support — is also a source of oral hsitory and audio narrative that might someday mean a lot to you, either as a tool for self-exploration or as a way of sharing your family history with generations to come.
I have some miscellaneous and enthusiastic recommendations. They may not be everyone’s cup of java but they sure grabbed me, each wonderful examples of the reach of compelling content being extended by digital tools.
1) The first is outright embarrassing: Because, for a guy who at least tries to convince himself that he is wired, it turns out that this “new” discovery from American Public Media has been around since 2001.
Many of you farther along on the “wired” continuum already know about Krista Tippet’s Speaking of Faith, an American Public Media production billed as “public radio’s national conversation about belief, meaning, ethics, and ideas.” Well, I had no idea. And I simply want to pass on that, if you are someone who at least contemplates matters of the spirit, God, holiness, and compassion, you must give Krista’s broadcast a listen. It moves back and forth between many of the world’s religions and, rather than working the typical extremes of the age of fundamentalism, most of the discussions take place in the messy, complex middle where most of us actually live.
2) I also recommend a new on-line version of a class entitled “Justice: What is the Right Thing to DO?” at Harvard taught by Michael Sandel that has long been one of the University’s most popular courses. The entire course, filmed elegantly with multiple cameras capturing student reactions and questions, can be seen here.
3) A great guide to all of the podcasts and courses and provocative discussion freely available for download can be found at http://www.openculture.com/.
4) Finally, and I will understand if you are a little skeptical, is the incredibly rich and fun Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Each week they will send you a podcast of one of the biographical entries read aloud. I can only tell you that they are amazingly absorbing, incredibly entertaining. Yes, I used the word “fun.” One week it is the famed, hard-living UK footballer George Best. And then comes poet Phillip Larkin. These are not standard reference entries. They are brilliantly written short takes on lives, they have a point of view and — sometimes if the subject calls for it — they are hillarious.
Their podcast of the biography of spy Anthony Blunt is a great place to start.
5) Finally, to hear some extraordinary true-life story-telling from an organization doing all it can to keep the spoken, performed story alive, check out the podcasts from The Moth. Real people. Real Stories. Performed live. And a lot of laughter, pain, and everything in between.
Every time I talk about top 10 lists, I always start with the disclaimer that I know how pointless they are.
And then I ask myself: OK, if they are so pointless, why do I have so much fun reading them and doing them and sharing them?
No good answer, In fact, making lists is far from the only pointless thing I do.
Today, I am adding some new films and slightly changing the order. It is not a 10 best list. It is a list of my ten favorites. A list of 10 best films would be beyond nervy given how many films have a legitimate claim to inclusion.
But it seems perfectly fair to make a list of ten favorites since they are, in fact, only my favorites.
My favorites have stayed the same for over a year. But for the last few months I have been mulling over “No Country for Old Men” and “The Lives of Others.” (Now I can really hear you saying: This guy need a life! Who has time to mull anything over?)
Seriously, I want to make some changes to my list. But according to ground rules that some friends of mine and I set up many years ago in a UCLA dorm room, I have to remove one film for each one I add. I posted my last 10 favorite about a year ago. Here is my new one along with a list of contenders.
I am not unaware that there are wide geographical differences in the distribution of the H1N1 vaccine. Some places need more vaccine and others have a surplus. No system of logistics is ever that flawless. But the story this week from multiple sources is that large supplies of the vaccine are reaching the public.
It’s just that vaccine arriving apparently isn’t as compelling a news story as a vaccine shortage.
I took the photo above from the page of one of the free newspapers that are handed out in the NYC Subway system. The story goes on to say that the supply of H1N1 vaccine is now so extensive in NYC that they are offering it to age cohorts that had previously been excluded because of the urgent need to get the vaccine to kids at highest risk.
But in what is a typical pattern of press coverage, the early vaccine shortage got the sensational coverage while the current successful broad distribution of the vaccine has gone relatively unnoticed. The only news story we would be less likely to hear about would be a group of “keep the government out of health care” ideologues now announcing their gratitude because, without the government, many of their children would not have been vaccinated.
To tell you the truth, though, I no longer pay much attention to “get the government out of people’s lives” crowd. Normally it would be a point of view that would deserve fair discussion and debate, and serious libertarians — however misguided — are at least consistent enough to be mildly interesting to speak with — but the hypocrisy of so many of those who complain about government is simply too blatant.
It turns out that a more accurate statement of their philosophy is “keep the government out of our lives” except in all the cases in which we DO want the government in your lives.
PS. I am going to go to Google Earth right now, choosing a random US location with my eyes closed, and then checkng the government web site to see if vaccine is available there. In fact, I’ll do two locations. My question is: At each of the two locations, is there vaccine available and how easy would it be to obtain?
Results:
1. My first random stop was an absolutely gorgeous piece of farmland in Greenville, Kentucky. On checking, every school child in Muhlenberg has been offered a free H1N1 vaccination.
2. Stop #2 was also a beautiful rural location, Hitchcock, Oklahoma. Located in Blaine County, the population of Hitchcock doesn’t quite crack 200. Every Tueday and Thursday in Blaine County, an H1N1 clinic is being offered in Watonga.
It’s not that this problem is fully solved.
It’s the foolishness of those who loathe the thought of the government in health care but who couldn’ t get in line for the vaccine fast enough, the people who griped about a shortage but who will be unwilling to acknowledge the now successful effort that is making it possible for their kids to be protected.
Some of the facts that show up in my blog statistics are real mysteries. And this week there is one that has me fascinated.
All of a sudden my post about Ulrich Mühe – Friedrich Hans Ulrich Mühe: An Actor Who Needed Only One Tear – had an unexpected increase in hits. I’d love to hear from anyone who knows why. (And right at the moment I write this, I realize that — at the 20th Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall — it makes perfect sensed that people would think about him.)
His performance in 2006 as an East German Stasi agent in Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Das Leben der Anderen ( The Lives of Others) is so emotionally shattering that, as I sit here playing it over in my head scene by scene, I find it hard to talk about. Mühe died in 2007 and lived a life inextricably tied to the separation and later reunification of Germany. He should be remembered and his work honored. Much of his early work took place on the stage in East Germany before unification.
Actually I do have one more thing to say: Sometime Media and Mayhem commenter Dominic, my friend from high school and a talented filmmaker and animation artist, once told me something about the film that mortified me so much that I never even mentioned it to him again. Ever since I have been silently trying convince myself that he really didn’t say it.
But I still have to ask: There isn’ t going to be a Hollywood re-make, is there?
Have you ever perused the feature films available for viewing on Hulu? I understand the economics that precludes quality product from showing up as freebies. But the available films look like someone was given the specific assignment of finding the worst films possible.
In fact, it is such a perfectly putrid list of films that only an expert with exquisite taste could compile it. You would have to be so knowledgeable that you could authoritatively and instantly reject any film with even a few seconds of redeeming quality.
I only mention this because I saw a rumor in the trades that ad-supported Hulu was contemplating a pay-wall. I can hear all of you pulling out your credit cards.
But I say let a thousand flowers bloom. If you succeed, guys, I’m buying the rights to Ishtar and Waterworld for national theatrical release.
An hour ago — with full sincerity — I chided my 12 year-old daughter for a comment she made as we were watching the House debate on the health care. She had heard a comment by an opponent of the health care bill and crossed what I have struggled to teach her about the ”civility” line. So I found myself coming up with words that — while sappy and saccharine — I think I still believe.
“It’s true, I said, I don’t agree with what he said either. But this doesn’t mean he is a bad person. In our country we can disagree and still be kind to each other.”
Part of me was gagging with guilt as I said it. I remembered all the distinctly uncivil rage she has seen me express. I knew that she knew that I don’t always live those words. But I still believe that quaint qualities like kindness and decency and civility are anything but quaint.
Then I turned on the television and began to watch the health care debate. And wouldn’t you know that here I am struggling with the civility thing again.
Why is it that, among all the speakers opposing the health care bill, not one representative — not one — started with anything close to the following:
“We rise in opposition to the health care bill. But before we make clear why this is a bad bill, we want to clearly state for the record that we are not blind to the pain of the uninsured and unemployed, we are not blind to the thousands of uninsured children who were taken to emergency rooms today with life-threatening illnesses, we are not blind to productive, employed people who — in a flash — find themselves unemployed and uninsured, we are not blind to the struggles of those in pain. We don’t disagree about compassion, we disagree on how to be compassionate.”
I did not, and have not, heard one opponent say anything close to this. I have not heard one opponent, before launching into his or her argument, give even a tip of the hat to the fact that somebody, somewhere is hurting. Apparently, this wasn’t on the list of approved talking points.
I really do want to hear your argument.
But don’t say anything — NOT ONE THING — before at least one of you makes a simple statement of concern (2 -3 words would count) for all the people who can’t take the time to think about politics when they are busy deciding which of their three kids will get treated first and who will get which medication.
C’mon guys: Say you feel bad. Say you know hurt when you see it. Acknowledge the existence of people who have done everything right but who find themselves uninsured for a whole host of reasons. Then you can dump on the bill to your heart’s content. I’ll even try to listen quietly.
But if you want me or any other supporter of the bill to take your objections seriously, we are waiting to see any sign — OK, I’ll settle for body language or even a wink of the eye — that signals any compassion underlying your obsession with government control.
So far, all I hear about is socialism, the end of free choice, and Nancy “Beelzebub” Pelosi. You think you are right and I think you are wrong. That’s our system. I respect your right to express your views. If you were sitting here now I would listen respectfully.
But I insist on an answer to this question: Why has there not been one opponent today who has who preceded his or her argument with an affirmation of plain, old-fashioned compassion? Couldn’t you have at least lied and pretended that compassion is a fundamental value?
I am still trying to hang in there with civility, but can’t you see how loudly your silence speaks? You have not given us one reason to think your script goes anywhere beyond government control, socialism, and dumping on Nancy Pelosi.
C’mon, compassion isnt controversial, it’s not some rhetorical trick. It is Sunday school stuff and , while I wasn’t always listening during the bible passage, I apparently was awake during the part about sharing and giving and sacrifice.
Your silence speaks volumes. And yes, I grant unanimous consent for you to revise and extend your selfishness.
To watch talking heads, lacking much if any authoritative information, coming to instant, facile conclusions about suspects, motives, and details is not to watch journalism. It is the equivalent of attending a seance or meeting with a psychic. Armed with little knowledge and even less common sense, these hyper-ventilating bloviators fill the air with conjecture that is so uninformed, so embarrassingly foolish, that the only thing clarified is their incompetence. They will dispense psychiatric diagnoses, forensic theories, and all sorts of other expert opinions when the only thing they lack is — whoops — expertise.
I am going to start to cite specific examples so I can then provide names. All I know is that, if there was ever a time when 24 hour cable news performers showed any journalistic restraint and skepticism, that is now history.
One laughable example is a CNN reporter who not only freely offers his strange guesses about what might be going on and compares one incident with another he may have covered a few years back. He also asks questions of witnesses in which he coaxes them, not to inform, but to guess, to imagine, to hypothesize. After what I saw during the Ft. Hood coverage, I am now on a mission to bring you specific examples of just how speculative a talking head can be when hyperventilation rather than reporting is the goal.
Posted by Steve Gorelick 
