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Is this Halloween costume racist?

Jim Emerson

This “Illegal Alien” costume has been pulled from a number of stores because, in the words of one immigration rights activist, it is “distasteful, mean-spirited, and ignorant of social stigmas and current debate on immigration reform.” I don’t know what its designers and manufacturers intended, but I can see how it could be viewed that way.

On the other hand, this particular costume (unlike some others that have been removed from shelves) doesn’t single out any particular ethnicity. As someone who is unabashedly pro-immigrant rights, I can also see it as a scathing satirical comment on the mindset of those who view immigrants as non-human. When I saw a photo of this costume, my first thought was of this summer’s science-fiction hit “District 9” (and 1988’s “Alien Nation”), which used extra-terrestrials as a metaphor for the treatment of illegal aliens and the ghettoization of black South Africans under apartheid. Roger Ebert wrote:

On acting, authenticity and Robert De Niro

Jim Emerson

Just started Tom McCarthy’s novel, “Remainder,” in which the first-person narrator is recovering from some kind of mysterious brain injury (which may just be consciousness itself). He and his friend Greg go to see Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets” — just as the characters played by Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro in “Mean Streets” go to see John Ford’s “The Searchers.” Then comes this page-and-a-half passage that I found enthralling:

The other thing that struck me as we watched the film was how perfect De Niro was. Every move he made, each gesture was perfect, seamless. Whether it was lighting up a cigarette or opening a fridge door or just walking down the street: he seemed to execute the action perfectly, to live it, to merge with it until he was it and it was him and there was nothing in between. I commented on this to Greg as we walked back to mine.

“But the character’s a loser,” Greg said. “And he messes everything up for all the other characters.”

“That doesn’t matter,” I answered. “He’s natural when he does things. Not artificial, like me. He’s flaccid. I’m plastic.”

“He’s the plastic one, I think you’ll find,” said Greg, “being stamped onto a piece of film and that. I mean you’ve got the bit above your eye, but…”

“That’s not what I mean,” I said. I’d had a small amount of plastic surgery on a scar above my right eye. “I mean that he’s relaxed, malleable. He flows into his movements, even the most basic ones. Opening fridge doors, lighting cigarettes. He doesn’t have to think about them because he and they are one. Perfect. Real. My movements are all fake. Second-hand.”

“You mean he’s cool. All film stars are cool,” said Greg. “That’s what films do to them.”

“It’s not about being cool,” I told him. “It’s about just being. De Niro was just being; I can never do that now.”

Greg stopped in the middle of the pavement and turned to face me. “Do you think you could before? Do you think I can? Do you think anyone outside of films lights cigarettes or opens fridge doors like that? Think about it: the lighter doesn’t spark the first time you flip it, the first wisp of smoke gets in your eye and makes you wince; the fridge door catches and then rattles, milk slops over. It happens to everyone. It’s universal: everything fucks up! You’re not unusual. You know what you are?”

“No,” I said. “What?”

“You’re just more usual than everyone else.”

Ten Best: Ethics, politics and tokenism in critical list-making

Jim Emerson

When the editors of Publishers Weekly came out with their lists of the best books of 2009, they divided them into several categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Mystery, Lifestyle (?), Comics, Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror, and so on. Out of 50,000 eligible titles, they chose 100 best and topped it off with a “Top 10.” The problem: Although women writers were represented in the other lists, none were among the authors of the Top 10.

“We wanted the list to reflect what we thought were the top 10 books of the year with no other consideration….” explained PW’s Louisa Ermelino. “We ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz.”

Headline in the UK Guardian: “Fury after women writers excluded from ‘books of the year’.”

From a “Sexism Watch” item on the blog “Women and Hollywood”:

Brüno is WWE wrestling

Jim Emerson

If those screwball lovers Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner ever hooked up and had sex, they’d do it the way Brüno and his “pygmy” paramour do in “Brüno”: with ACME slingshots, projectiles, champagne bottles and a customized Rube Goldberg device that appears to have been built with materials from Home Depot by George Clooney’s character in “Burn After Reading.” The matinee audience with whom I saw “Brüno,” Sacha Baron Cohen’s partially improvised Üniversal Pictures remake of RW Fassbinder’s “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant” (with a happy ending!), howled at the grossness, the perversity, the preposterousness of it — the same way audiences laughed and groaned at the explicitly cartoony perv-sex in John Waters movies of the 1970s. “Brüno” is rather tame compared to “Pink Flamingoes” or “Female Trouble” — in part because it’s 2009 and not 1974, and the experience of “shock value” has changed considerably. Truth is, it’s hard to be too terribly shocked by anything in the bland, artificial cocoon of the mall-tiplex, no matter what’s playing.

Inevitably, in all comedy, the joke comes down to: What is the joke? I’ve had a grand old time reading bewildered critics — amused, disgusted, even shocked — try to puzzle out what Borat and Brüno (the characters and the movies) are really saying. The most entertaining explanations are by writers who don’t necessarily know they’re bewildered, or how much they’re revealing about their own prejudices when they claim the movie is revealing the prejudices of the “real folks” on screen. (Hint: Even more so than in “Borat,” the butt of the joke is the title character, not the “real people” with whom he interacts. Tricking people is not exactly the same as making fun of them — and most of those who get punk’d react about the way you’d expect them to.)

An insult every 6.8 seconds…

Jim Emerson

View image Bilious Bill.

I realized as I was posting this that I’d assigned it two categories: “TV” and “Journalism.” Well, I haven’t associated those two terms for years — with the exception of “Frontline,” last week’s definitive and indispensable “Bill Moyers’ Journal” (“Buying the War,” which you can watch/explore here), “The Daily Show,” “The Colbert Report” and the occasional “60 Minutes.” An Indiana University School of Journalism analysis reminded me of what passes for “journalism” on TV these days — particularly on the Fox Skews Channel. The study finds that Fox comedian Bill O’Reilly uses an insult on the average of once every 6.8 seconds during the “Talking Points Memo” segment of his TV show. (I, on the other hand, use a mere 1.5 insults per sentence when writing about O’Reilly.)

From a summary of the report, “Villains, Victims and the Virtuous in Bill O’Reilly’s ‘No Spin Zone'” — which offers a hilarious chart tracking O’Reilly’s use of various propaganda devices and rhetorical fallacies:

Bill O’Reilly may proclaim at the beginning of his program that viewers are entering the “No Spin Zone,” but a new study by Indiana University media researchers found that the Fox News personality consistently paints certain people and groups as villains and others as victims to present the world, as he sees it, through political rhetoric.

The IU researchers found that O’Reilly called a person or a group a derogatory name once every 6.8 seconds, on average, or nearly nine times every minute during the editorials that open his program each night.

“It’s obvious he’s very big into calling people names, and he’s very big into glittering generalities,” said Mike Conway, assistant professor in the IU School of Journalism. “He’s not very subtle. He’s going to call people names, or he’s going to paint something in a positive way, often without any real evidence to support that viewpoint.”

Maria Elizabeth Grabe, associate professor of telecommunications, added, “If one digs further into O’Reilly’s rhetoric, it becomes clear that he sets up a pretty simplistic battle between good and evil. Our analysis points to very specific groups and people presented as good and evil.”

For their article in the spring issue of Journalism Studies, Conway, Grabe and Kevin Grieves, a doctoral student in journalism, studied six months worth, or 115 episodes, of O’Reilly’s “Talking Points Memo” editorials using propaganda analysis techniques made popular after World War I.

A 2005 Annenberg Public Policy Center survey found that while 30 percent of Americans viewed Washington Post and Watergate reporter Bob Woodward as a journalist, 40 percent of respondents considered O’Reilly to be a journalist. […]

Using analysis techniques first developed in the 1930s by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, Conway, Grabe and Grieves found that O’Reilly employed six of the seven propaganda devices nearly 13 times each minute in his editorials. His editorials also are presented on his Web site and in his newspaper columns.

The seven propaganda devices include:

* Name calling — giving something a bad label to make the audience reject it without examining the evidence;

* Glittering generalities — the oppositie of name calling;

* Card stacking — the selective use of facts and half-truths;

* Bandwagon — appeals to the desire, common to most of us, to follow the crowd;

* Plain folks — an attempt to convince an audience that they, and their ideas, are “of the people”;

* Transfer — carries over the authority, sanction and prestige of something we respect or dispute to something the speaker would want us to accept; and

* Testimonials — involving a respected (or disrespected) person endorsing or rejecting an idea or person.

The same techniques were used during the late 1930s to study another prominent voice in a war-era, Father Charles Coughlin. His sermons evolved into a darker message of anti-Semitism and fascism, and he became a defender of Hitler and Mussolini. In this study, O’Reilly is a heavier and less-nuanced user of the propaganda devices than Coughlin.

Oddly, this precis does not mention one of O’Reilly’s favorite methods, the Straw Man argument in which he presents a preposterous argument, attributes it to someone else, and then shoots it down, as in: Democrats hate America and want the US to be ruled by Islamofascists — or would, if they actually believed in God or Yaweh or Allah! That’s just wrong!

Summary and full report here.

Sarah Silverman, critics & the new PC

Jim Emerson

View image Sarah Silverman in “Jesus Is Magic.” Her Comedy Central sitcom, “The Sarah Silverman Program,” begins Thursday at 10:30 p.m. (9:30 Central).

I love Sarah Silverman and A.O. Scott all the more for this, from today’s New York Times:

While most actors are reluctant to discuss critics’ opinions of them, Ms. Silverman addresses them head on, particularly a 2005 review of “Jesus Is Magic” by A. O. Scott, a film critic for The New York Times.

“It totally hurt my feelings and was like a kick in the stomach,” but, she said, she found it fascinating.

In the review Mr. Scott said her act was “the latest evidence that mocking political correctness has become a form of political correctness in its own right.”

“She depends on the assumption that only someone secure in his or her own lack of racism would dare to make, or to laugh at, a racist joke, the telling of which thus becomes a way of making fun simultaneously of racism and of racial hypersensitivity,” he wrote. In short, he added, “naughty as she may seem, she’s playing it safe.”

Ms. Silverman said the review articulated a point that she had felt, but had been struggling to express. “That was something that always festered in the back of my mind that I never talked about,” she said. Her crowds are usually liberal ones, “and we know we’re not racist,” she said. “But the whiter the crowd, the more that kind of voice in the back of my head comes toward the front, and I feel grosser doing that kind of stuff.”

“At the very least, it’s made me assess the choir,” she continued. “Context is everything, and I don’t think he would be pondering all that stuff if I was doing the material in front of an all-black crowd or a very mixed crowd,” which, she said, she regularly does.

Still, she added, she is reassessing at least part of her work.

“It was rebellious to be politically incorrect now and in the past couple of years,” she said. “But I don’t know how rebellious it will be when everybody has that point of view. It becomes hackneyed and it becomes irrelevant and it turns into something else.”

I’ve been arguing for several years now that, especially since 9/11, “political correctness” has evolved into a mostly reactionary phenomenon. The lefty PC that began as a way of showing sensitivity to minorities and those who had been discriminated against for years (women, the disabled, etc.) eventually turned into a form of monolithic, euphemistic denial of reality, where questioning was verboten and anything that could be interpreted as doubt or dissent was denounced as “fascist.” Now we see the same thing coming from the right. The terminology has changed but the brainwashed thinking hasn’t.

The inevitable backlash to liberal PC came in the form of the right-wing, talk-radio rebellion, in which uppity women were “feminazis” and liberals were “terrorist sympathizers” (even when they were too timid and spineless to oppose the administration’s foreign policy blunders, which, ironically, flagrantly violated traditional conservative principles). Fox News took the talk-radio attitude mainstream, appealing to its viewers’ PC biases so that it appeared, at least to the network’s partisans, “fair and balanced.” (If somebody already sees the world in black and white, and you show them a black and white image, they won’t notice it’s not in color.)

Anyway, even though I was a fan of Silverman’s “Jesus Is Magic,” I appreciate Scott’s warning about where this is all going in the era of so-called “‘South Park’ Republicans.” And I admire Silverman for questioning her own (and her audiences’) underlying assumptions, as well.

Robin Wood: He was as good as they say

Jim Emerson

I was in high school when I picked up a hardback copy of the first edition of Robin Wood’s “Hitchcock’s Films” (1965) from a remainder table at a depressingly small, sterile, fluorescent-lit Crown Books in an old-fashioned, long-gone outdoor mall (called Aurora Village) in North Seattle. That was in the mid-1970s and now I’m writing this and Robin Wood died last week at the age of 78.

I’ll never forget standing in that store, reading the famous, much-quoted opening words:

Why should we take Hitchcock seriously?

It is a pity the question has to be raised: if the cinema were truly regarded as an autonomous art, not as a mere adjunct of the novel or the drama — if we were able yet to see films instead of mentally reducing them to literature — it would be unnecessary.

Pey or Falin, which is more realer?

Jim Emerson

I can’t get enough of Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin. I feel about her the way I felt about Dr. Evil in the first “Austin Powers” movie. My eyes light up whenever she’s on camera. And then, of course, there are those little starbursts she sends through the screen that go ricocheting around the living rooms of America, as first reported by Rich Lowry of the National Review.

Something strange is happening, though: Fey’s Palin is not only sharper and funnier than Palin’s Palin, she’s also more vivid, more… real (maybe because she’s on TV more). It’s as if she’s the main Palin and the other one is the paler surrogate Palin. In other words, for you baby boomers, Tina Fey’s Palin is the Dick York and Sarah Palin’s Palin is the Dick Sargent. Sure, they’re both bewitching in their own ways, but Fey’s is the real Darrin. If you know what I mean.

I was looking forward to the VP Debate opening sketch on “SNL” as much as the debate itself, and I was not disappointed by either. I’m guessing that former “SNL” head-writer Fey contributes to these because they’re “30 Rock” precise — more pointed than what usually passes for “SNL” political humor. (I didn’t make it through the obviously obligatory finanical bailout sketch in the first half hour of the show, even though Fred Armisen’s Barney Frank was a hoot).

Ingmar Bergman (1918 -2007)

Jim Emerson

View image One of the images everyone will be using today.

Found this e-mail in my inbox from Anna Hakansson of the Swedish Film Institute about an hour ago:

Ingmar Bergman passed away today at his home on Fårö. He was 89.

Astrid Söderbergh Widding, CEO of Ingmar Bergman Foundation:

Ingmar Bergman’s passing away represents a loss of unfathomable magnitude. His artistic accomplishments were ground-breaking, unique – but also of a scope that covered film and theatre as well as literature. He was the internationally most renowned Swede, and just a few months ago his artistic achievement was incorporated into the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. We remember him as a very bold person, always present, often biting in his comments. But he was often one step ahead of his contemporaries. Even when he grew old surprises from Fårö were not unexpected. I believe it will take some time before we fully understand that he is no longer with us, but also the importance of his art to other people. The steady stream of letters arriving here at the Ingmar Bergman Foundation since its inception testifies to that.

View image The other one.

Also read Face to Face’s consideration of Bergman’s work as a filmmaker, here.

Face to Face also offers the possibility to express condolences by e-mailing info@ingmarbergman.se.

Nobody knows criticism, Part 2

Jim Emerson

Bob Balaban (left) plays an Evil Film Critic in “Lady in the Water.”

“Reviews should be objective. Keep your opinions out of your reviews!”

— actual comments from alleged “readers,” sent to Roger Ebert and just about every other critic on every planet in the solar system (except Pluto)

(NOTE: If the above quotation does not bring tears of laughter to your eyes, do not let those eyes tarry here.)

People love to quote William Goldman’s famous saying about the movie industry, which is that “Nobody knows anything.” Most people who quote it have absolutely no idea what it means. The phrase is tossed about as being the wisest thing ever said about showbiz, and fortunately for those who are doing the tossing, it’s just vague enough to sound true under almost any circumstances. So, it is thought to be “right” more often than a stopped analog clock, which is said to tell the correct time twice a day. (The clock is not “right,” of course — it just coincides with external events that allow someone to perceive it as being correct if you check it at certain times. It’s a coincidence. That’s an important distinction.)

I think perhaps the most profound meaning of “Nobody knows anything” (out of all possible meanings) is not just that nobody knows what will be a hit, but that the audience does not know what it wants. They’ll tell you what they want, but if they could really articulate it or quantify it, and if the studios could create some kind of quality control mechanism to manufacture it, Disney and Paramount and Warners and Fox and Sony would be as financially successful as, say, oil companies.

Margot goes round in circles

Jim Emerson

View image Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jack Black in “Margot at the Wedding.” No relation. Well, OK, Leigh is married to the writer-director, but that’s not to invite speculation.

The logic that structures Dennis Lim’s New York Times interview with Noah Baumbach (“The Squid and the Whale” (2005), “Margot at the Wedding”) is circularly inspired:

[In the film,] Margot, a fiction writer in the throes of a personal crisis, is at a bookstore appearance, which goes quickly awry when her interviewer presses her on the connections between her life and her work. He brings up a story of hers that concerns an abusive patriarch. She immediately begins to defend her father. He interrupts: What he meant to ask was whether she had based that monstrous figure on herself.

“I wrote that scene in response to the interviews I did when ‘Squid’ came out,” Mr. Baumbach said…. “I was having fun with what people assume when they think something is autobiographical.” […]

“Someone would ask me if something was true, and I’d say no, and then they’d ask me a follow-up question under the assumption that it was true,” he said. “ […]

“Margot is me at my worst, probably,” Mr. Baumbach said. “I try not to analyze the characters when I’m writing, but I’m very analytical in my life.” […]

With Mr. Baumbach the conversation has a way of circling back to autobiography — or, more precisely, to the notion of a writer creating autobiographical work by feeding on family and friends for material. It’s a recurring motif in his films. […]

“My hope is that I will make enough movies that they can’t all conceivably be autobiographical.”

OK, let me take that for one more spin around the block. After seeing “Margot at the Wedding” in Toronto (“The Eastern Inbred Class”), I wanted to address this inbred motif in the reflexive manner of Baumbach’s film: “If I were a character from the movie critiquing the movie, I would probably say something like: “Noah Baumbach must really detest his dreadful dysfunctional family.'” The people in this movie are types who either crib from their friends’ and families’ lives for their New Yorker short stories — or who are mortified and infuriated that details from their lives are appearing in their friends’ or families’ New Yorker short stories. You may assume there’s an “autobiographical” dimension to it…

America’s Top Pundit: Roger Ebert

Jim Emerson

View image

From Forbes.com:But which pundits have the most sway over America? Or, more specifically, which have the most influence by appealing to those most sought after by advertisers?

To find out, Forbes analyzed data compiled by market research group E-Poll on more than 60 well-known pundits who follow and critique the worlds of politics, current events, law, entertainment and sports. This is the same group that conducts the polling for the Forbes 08 Tracker presidential poll each month.

While the results show that plenty of cable talking heads like Bill O’Reilly, Lou Dobbs and Geraldo Rivera score highly, the most powerful pundit in America is veteran film critic Roger Ebert, who appeals to 70% of the demographic and whose long career makes him well known to well over half the population. A longtime writer for the Chicago Sun-Times, he’s been offering up his cinematic views on television with partners Gene Siskel (from 1975-1999) and Richard Roeper (since 1999) for 32 years.

Ebert leads a list we compiled by scoring candidates on awareness and likability measurements among respondents within the demographic gold mine of advertisers–those between the ages of 25 and 54, with a college degree, making at least $50,000 annually….

Popular pundits score with advertisers thanks not only to desirable demographics and an emotionally attached set of viewers, but because they draw largely fragmented audiences that produce consumers with similar tastes. The trick is having wide enough appeal to draw a large audience, while still being focused enough to weed out viewers that advertisers don’t want to waste money trying to reach. Basically the sweet spot is somewhere between a general audience network show and a narrowly focused Web site.

“It’s use of targeted media–you’re reaching people with specific traits,” says Jeff Chown, president of Dave Brown Talent, a unit of research group The Marketing Arm….

Ebert, despite being limited to print reviewing over the past year as he battles cancer, is viewed by the public as intelligent, experienced and articulate, the three most common traits associated with the top 10 list. And his widespread appeal makes sense. Unlike political pundits who bring a liberal or conservative voice to the table, his strong opinions are generally confined to individual movies. Hence, he’s not drawing cheers from half the population and jeers from the other half.

Dias de Los Muertos: Hasta los huesos

Jim Emerson

“Hasta los huesos” / “Down to the Bone”

(tip: Daniel Montiel)