We have three new pieces by Roger Ebert on RogerEbert.com this week:
Ebert’s review of “The Queen”
An interview with director Michael Apted regarding “49 Up”
PLUS: Roger’s latest recovery update
(And I have a review of “Infamous,” the new Truman Capote movie.
I saw Oliver Stone’s “W.” a week or two ago, and I almost forgot. Believe me, it felt even more worn out before the election. I kept thinking I’d seen it before in some other form. Not just as in every day for the last eight years, or as in some other slab of Stone. This one reminded me of Woody Allen’s “Zelig” or Robert Zemeckis’s “Forrest Gump” — about a nobody who stumbles into history. Then I realized it was more like a reworking of Hal Ashby and Jerzy Kosinski’s “Being There” — the story of a vacancy.
That impression was magnified Tuesday night as I watched Barack step up to fill it. In that one solemn but hopeful election night speech in Grant Park he did more to steady, strengthen and solidify the union for tough times than I’ve seen any president do in my lifetime. It wasn’t just a matter of commanding screen space or being ready for his close-up (although the camera loves him). But after so many years of looking at a skittish hamster-in-the-headlights, squinting or staring blankly into the lens, how dramatic it was to see somebody there at last — a solid somebody with a firm sense of who he is, and what it means to lead and to strive and to inspire. No smugness, no self-congratulation, no condescension, no desperation. A grown-up. I felt an enormous sense of confidence and relief. And I didn’t feel alone in feeling that.
Which brings me back to the hollowness of W. and “W.”…
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.)
This appreciation is a slightly revised-for-2012 version of an article originally published online at Microsoft Cinemania in 1996. It was just one of several pieces in a package celebrating the 70mm restoration release of “Vertigo” that year.
Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” is one of the most ravishing Technicolor films ever made — all the more so in its VistaVision-to-70mm restored version. And color plays a key part in the mystery, emotion and psychology, of the film. Colors evoke feelings, and while Hitchcock liked to say that “Psycho” (made two years later) was “pure cinema” in black-and-white, “Vertigo” is a symphony of color, its multi-hued themes and motifs as vividly orchestrated as Bernard Herrmann’s famous score.
I first saw “Vertigo” on network television in the late 1960s or early 70s, shortly before it was withdrawn from release. I think I was somewhere between 12 and 14 years old — I know I saw it by myself on my parents’ new 19-inch color TV one night when mom and dad went to some neighborhood grown-up party — and I’m sure I didn’t understand the half of it. But it stayed with me — haunted me, you might say — between that fateful evening and its re-release in the mid-80s. By then, “Vertigo” had become, if not quite the Holy Grail of the American Cinema (after all, “Rear Window” and “The Manchurian Candidate” had been unavailable for years, too — and a great deal of “The Magnificent Ambersons” is still at the bottom of the ocean), then at least one of its most coveted (and fetishized) treasures.
From Richard T. Jameson, Editor, Movietone News, 1971-81; Editor, Film Comment, 1990-2000:
The opening credits of Richard Lester’s “Juggernaut” (1974) play over a neutral backdrop that can just barely be detected as an undefined image rather than a simple blank screen. Whether it’s an out-of-focus image or something more elemental — say, the granules of the film emulsion itself — is hard to say. The basic color is a beige-y grey, with now and then the merest hint of a diagonal band of something warmer attempting to form across the frame. On the soundtrack are noises similarly difficult to ascertain; some suggest hammers falling, an unguessable project under construction, while in other select nanoseconds we seem to be listening to something beyond the normal range of hearing — the mutual brushing of atoms, perhaps, in an unimaginably microscopic space. In short, nothing; and the essence of everything.
The first shots cut in after the (swiftly flashed) credits have ended, and we get our worldly bearings. An oceanliner is preparing to depart an English port and, among other things, a dockside band is tuning up. I say “first shots,” but we won’t cheat: there can be only one opening shot, and it’s over with before we barely register it. And indeed, why register it? It’s nothing dramatic. Indeed, it’s barely informational. There are streamers, fluttering limply and unremarkably in the breeze. Send-off streamers; bon voyage and all that. Most of their brief time onscreen, they’re out of focus, because that’s a gentle way of easing us from the shimmering nothingness behind the credits and into the coherent imagery of a movie we are obliged to pay attention to. Besides, this is 1974, five years after cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs and “Easy Rider” had made rack focus a fashionable, sometimes almost fetishistic aspect of self-consciously contemporary moviemaking. (Not that Kovacs worked on “Juggernaut”: the DP is Gerry Fisher, working with Lester for the first and last time.) So out-of-focus and then in-focus streamers, no big whoop. And the movie moves on.
It’s only on a second viewing that these streamers may hit us like a fist in the chest. For the essence of the shot is that there are two streamers in particular traversing the frame in clarity. And one is red, one is blue.
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.
It’s the question you dread, at least from total strangers, but it’s unavoidable at a film festival — kind of like “What’s your major?” in college:
“Seen anything you like?”
My dulled response while immersed in this cinematic maelstrom (my brain runneth over) is to say something like: “Yeah…” and then forget where the hell I am in time and space. But I like listening to other strangers trade views on what they’ve seen, whether I have a clue as to what they’re talking about or not. (Yes, I like to eavesdrop: Film is a voyeur’s medium.)
The other night at dinner, for example, some French (French Canadian? Belgian?) fellows were sitting behind us on a rooftop patio. A little mist was falling, but we were protected by table umbrellas. I turned just in time to hear one of them say, I a heavy accent, “Yes, but then the two protagonists…” I can’t really tell you why I liked that so much, but I keep thinking (as I often do): “Oh, that would be so great to put in a movie!” I have loads and loads of fleeting images and snatches of conversation that need to be stuffed into some kind of Altmanesque tapestry someday.
Nicholas Ray’s directorial debut, “They Live By Night” (1949), begins like a trailer and then slams us right into the opening titles of the feature. An attractive young couple (Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell) are nestling in close-up by the flickering light of a fireplace. They smile, they kiss, and then something off-screen (and unheard on the soundtrack, though signaled by an jarring shift in the musical score) causes them to react with fear and alarm.
“They Live By Night” is a prototypical young-couple-on-the-run movie (“You Only Live Once,” “Gun Crazy,” “Bonnie and Clyde,” “Badlands”), and this tabloid-style opening sets it up breathlessly. The shot seems to exist out of time — perhaps an idealized moment they once shared, or would never have. The man who would later direct “Rebel Without a Cause” establishes them as innocents and outsiders, star-crossed lovers who “were never properly introduced to the world we live in…” Dissolve to an aerial shot of a truck barreling through a dusty wasteland.
We soon discover that, at the point the title appears, the boy and the girl have yet to meet. So, the whole film could be seen as a flashback — a noir convention that emphasizes the forces of fate, since the ending of “their story” (even if we don’t know what it is) has already been determined from the opening shot. Or perhaps it’s a flash-forward to a memory they’ll cling to for the rest of their lives. Or an imprint of their fugitive state of mind…
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…
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).
View image “Reservoir Dogs”: Opening credits.
The death of Sherman Torgan, owner and proprietor of the New Beverly Cinema, reminded me of an evening in 1993 when my friend Julia Sweeney and I met up with Quentin Tarantino, Tim Roth, Laurence Tierney, Chris Penn, and Michael Madsen (I think that was the whole crew) at Insomnia (Beverly and Poinsettia, near El Coyote) and did “The Walk” down Beverly Blvd. to the theater, where those guys were going to do a Q&A with the audience after a showing of “Reservoir Dogs.” We were a block down the street before I consciously realized we were re-enacting the opening credits of the movie — in streetclothes. I wondered if anybody on the street had a flash of recognition as they drove by, one of those little “Did I just see that?” moments that happens so often in a moving vehicle, and especially in Los Angeles.
I just had another one of those experiences this evening. Hadn’t eaten all day and suddenly I knew I just had to have a club sandwich: crispy bacon, turkey, ham, lettuce, tomato, Swiss cheese — maybe a slice of red onion — on rye or wheat toast. It became my holy grail, the focal point of my existence. I went to a nearby sports bar-type restaurant near the University of Washington, a place I remembered from college, where I knew I could get just such a sandwich, quickly and painlessly. I was sitting in the bar and just before the waiter appeared, a song started playing and — again, before I was even aware of it — I was lifted out of the book I was reading and transported somewhere else.
View imageLast scene of the last episode of “The Sopranos”: Best movie of 2007, so far.
It was Journey: “Don’t Stop Believin’.” And I got goosebumps. How the hell did that happen? Two months ago I wouldn’t even have recognized the song. I still don’t remember it existing before the last scene of “The Sopranos.” But now, it was invested with a power that transformed my awareness completely. I felt a tension, an excitement, a wistfulness that had nothing to do with the song as it had previously existed and everything to do with the context in which I’ll now hear it forever. I sat, a little bit dazed, and soaked up the atmosphere, pretending it was a diner in Jersey. When the guy arrived to take my order, I got a club. And onion rings.
Got any stories of moments when you suddenly felt you were in a particular movie? If so, I’d love to hear ’em….
The other night, I had dinner with some film-critic friends — people I’ve known for much or most of my life — and the subject circled around to 2010 ten-best list obligations. Two of us immediately said we’d rank episodes of “Mad Men” on our lists. I did not see (m)any theatrically released motion pictures this year that I thought were superior to, say, “The Rejected,” “The Suitcase,” “The Beautiful Girls,” “Tomorrowland”… In fact, out of the 13 episodes shown between July and October, I could list ten titles and not feel terribly guilty about the feature films I’d be leaving off.
This video essay, “The Ladies and the Boxes,” draws upon several episodes from Season 4, culminating with the final one, “Tomorrowland.” Sally Draper says she gets upset when she thinks about “forever” — the concept of death that most troubles her, but also the promise (if not the reality) of marriage. Sitting outdoors in a vacant lot, with the remnants of a old, overgrown shed behind her — as unlike the rigid, rectilinear architecture of SCDP as possible — she likens it to the Indian girl on the Land o’ Lakes butter box, holding a box with her picture on it, holding a box…
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.
View image Roger Ebert at the 2007 Toronto Film Festival. (photo by jim emerson)
In the middle of the week, while I was away at the Conference on World Affairs so beloved by Roger Ebert, I got my first e-mail (via Treo) from Roger since he underwent his latest surgery January 24. He said he was “Back in the saddle.” The next e-mail, hours later, contained an obit/tribute for Charlton Heston and Richard Widmark. Ebert does not waste time.
Sunday’s New York Times features a appreciation of Roger’s return by A.O. Scott who, as he so often does with movies, gets right to the heart of his subject (“Roger Ebert: The Critic Behind the Thumb”):
For his loyal readers Mr. Ebert’s resumption of reviewing (April 1 happened to be the 41st anniversary of his debut in The Sun-Times) is a chance to pick up an interrupted conversation. For those who labor beside or behind him in the vineyards of criticism it is an incitement to quit grousing and pick up the pace.
Not that any of us could hope to match his productivity. Nor could we entertain the comforting fantasy that the daunting quantity of the man’s work — four decades of something like six reviews a week, as well as festival reports, learned essays on classic films and the occasional profile — must entail a compromise in quality. As A. J. Liebling said of himself, nobody who writes faster can write better, and nobody better is faster. The evidence is easy enough to find: in the Web archive, in his indispensable annual movie guides and in a dozen other books.
“Splice” has the DNA of a really great philosophical horror/science-fiction movie, but in the less-than-fully formed thing that was delivered to theaters, some of its most promising traits remain recessive, under-developed.
You may notice the first sign of this gestational glitch in the otherwise wonderfully gooey in vitro credits sequence, where the title and the names of the lead actors are spelled out in mutant organic forms, like veins bulging beneath the surface of fetal skin. The credits read: “Screenplay by Vincenzo Natali & Antoinette Terry Bryant and Doug Taylor” — which indicates that director Natali worked on it with Bryant, and Taylor was probably either the original writer or did enough of a re-write to merit a screen credit. Someone — or something — almost certainly re-formed the last half-hour of the movie, when it suddenly dies and comes back as the predictable horror clone into which it had successfully avoided mutating up until that point.
You can almost feel the splice at which the erratically paced, action-packed ending to another, lesser scary movie has been grafted onto the genetic horror of this one. It happens right around the time Sarah Polley says something like “What’s happening?” and Adrien Brody (off-screen, looped dialogue?) says, “I don’t know. But she’s dying.” Thank you, Dr. Exposition.
“The images that surround us today are worn out, they are abused and useless and exhausted. They are limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution.”
— Werner Herzog
Dogme 09.8 has the expressed goal of countering “certain tendencies” in the cinema today. In the spirit of Lars Von Trier’s “The Five Obstructions,” it acknowledges a fundamental truth — that new constructive discipline is needed in filmmaking.
Dogme 09.8 is a rescue action!
In 1995 enough was enough. The movie was dead and called for resurrection. The goal was correct but the means were not! Dogme 95 proved to be a secondary ripple that washed ashore and turned to muck. Purity turned to laziness. Obstacles became crutches. Babies were thrown out with bathwater. It was fun but very silly, and the results, filtering into every aspect of filmmaking worldwide, have been counterproductive and deadening.
To Dogme 09.8, cinema is individual!
Or: This IS my beautiful life! How did I get here?
The deaths of Andrew Sarris and Bill Sweeney on the same day last week got me to ruminating about my own life with movies and what drew me to them so strongly from an early age. Yes, there’s that innate childhood desire to escape into new worlds (see “Moonrise Kingdom), and to create them, too (I started writing stories and shooting live-action and animated movies with my dad’s wind-up 8mm Kodak Brownie before I was in my teens). But I think I’ve always known, too, that movies are like dreams, less about escapism or distraction than about getting closer to an understanding of the relationship between your inner self and the world. Tom Noonan said: “I think life generally is a distraction and that going to a movie is a way to get back, not go away.” To me, the best movies have always been more real than real. Life, John Lennon sang, is what happens while you’re making other plans; art gets to the core of what it means to be alive.
I’ve had many life-and-death (and near-death) experiences in waking life that were no more vividly real, memorable, ecstatic, traumatic, or profoundly and indelibly affecting* than certain (sometimes recurring) dreams or, oh, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Sherlock Jr.,” “Sansho Dayu,” “Chinatown,” “Nashville,” “Kings of the Road,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “The Searchers,” “Only Angels Have Wings,” “The Magnificent Ambersons,” “Vertigo,” “Un Chien Andalou,” “No Country for Old Men” — and those are just a few of the titles that popped into my head as I was typing this sentence. (And yet it’s still such a young medium — only a little more than a century old.) There are familiar places that exist only in my dreams, that I remember from dream to dream, and I revisit them often. Movies are those kinds of places, too.
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.
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.
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.
