Conspiracy theories and confirmation bias in film and photography:
UPDATE: "Why People Believe in Conspiracy Theories" -- ScientificAmerican.com, April 30, 2013
Stanley Kubrick faked the Apollo 11 moon landing. The Newtown massacre and Boston Marathon bombings were "false flag" government conspiracies designed to take away our guns. Also, black is white, rich is poor, Obama is a foreign-born Muslim, work is freedom, freedom is slavery and Mona Lisa was a man.
I've always been fascinated with why people insist on believing weird things. (Michael Shermer wrote a whole book about it: "Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time.") In most cases it's not necessary to refute those beliefs themselves. All you need to do is examine the flimsiness of the thinking behind them. Don't waste time speculating about sketchy, erroneous media reports in the aftermath of a crime (those are inevitable). Ask instead how those discredited rumors and reports lend any credence to the existence of a vast government conspiracy.
When faced with a choice between facts and feelings, our natural inclination is to believe what we want to believe. Astrology or psychic experiences, racist fantasies or Holocaust denial — they all stem from the same warped, delusional thought processes, usually driven by insecurity, paranoia and a desire to exert control over events that make the believers feel impotent, frightened, angry.
Of course, there's a world of difference between religious beliefs (based on faith) and rational ones (based on empirical evidence). Both have their places, but it's dangerous and destructive to confuse one with the other. The scientific method, for instance, is a rigorous procedure that subjects its findings to endless re-evaluation, not a religious substitute; and there are facts about religions (such as the origins of biblical texts) that are not disputable, regardless of whether you believe those scriptures were divinely inspired.
As Brother Sam (Yasiin Bey, f/k/a Mos Def) says in season 6 of "Dexter": "We don't have to believe in the same thing, but you got to keep an open mind. You may say I can't prove that God exists, but [science] can't prove He doesn't." The trouble, as he implies, comes from people either not knowing, or being unwilling to admit, that they don't know what they don't know. A belief based on a guess or a whim is always wrong — because it's simply based on chance. (If intuition tells you that the roulette marble will land on 28 black and it does, that doesn't make you "right"; it just makes you lucky — unless you cheated and had some way of knowing in advance that the game was rigged.)
Which brings us back to "Room 237," a movie I reviewed for RogerEbert.com and the Chicago Sun-Times a few weeks back, and one of the "theories" it puts forward: that "The Shining" (1980) contains secret messages from Stanley Kubrick about how he'd faked the Apollo 11 moon landing video we saw on TV in 1969. Jay Weidner, the proponent of this theory in the film — as well as a whole bunch of other conspiracies — says on his web site:
"Whatever ideas are the most suppressed are most likely to be the closest to the truth."
— Weidner's First Law of the Universe "
If a picture is worth a thousand words then a symbol is worth a thousand pictures."
— Weidner's Second Law of the Universe
"The only people who call conspiracies 'theories' are the conspirators."These "laws" illustrate the critical thinking skills behind Weidner's ideas. I won't get into his reading of "The Shining" here (for that, see the aforementioned review), but in the video below, SG Collins explains why he can't prove that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin didn't walk on the moon in 1969 (something Weidner doesn't contest), but he can prove that the televised images of them couldn't have been faked: "Did people go to the moon in 1969? I'm not totally sure; I wasn't on the moon then. Did they fake going to the moon? No. I'm pretty sure they didn't. Because they couldn't."
— Weidner's Third Law of the Universe
Among the elements conspiracy theories and other forms of "magical thinking" have in common are the logical fallacies of "affirming the consequent" (interpreting observations to support conclusions they don't, in fact, necessarily support) and the "argument from ignorance (claiming that something that hasn't been proved false is evidence that it must be true).*
You can see those processes at work in another kind of conspiracy theory that operates on a more personal scale. In a piece on Salon that generated a lot of discussion last week ("Pictures of people who mock me"), a Memphis photographer named Haley Morris-Calfiero wrote about posing for pictures in public in an attempt to capture people making fun of her because she's fat. Like the theories related to "The Shining" above, you can call this a "self-fulfilling prophecy" or "confirmation bias" or "motivated reasoning" — and I have no reason to doubt that she's been cruelly humiliated in public because of her obesity — but the photos themselves don't show conclusive evidence of that. They capture an instant, and can be interpreted in a number of ways.
One shows a pair of cops coming up behind her as her assistant prepares to take her picture. Now, maybe one officer was mocking her (and her corpulence?) by placing his cap over her head as he walked by. Or maybe he saw that a photo was about to be snapped and impulsively photobombed her in good fun. Is he being mean? Is he reacting to her weight? I can't say he isn't, but I can't say he is, either.
Like it or not, the reality is that there's no way Morris-Clfiero is going to be inconspicuous in a crowd -- any more than a 7-foot-tall, red-headed guy I know. (Try watching people's reactions to him sometime.) Several of her carefully selected pictures show people who appear to notice her — but who wouldn't? Are they simply not supposed to look? Are they making fun of her? The photos themselves don't document that one way or another.
This is how the Bush administration bulldozed the United States into invading Iraq. They didn't have conclusive evidence regarding WMDs one way or the other; but they acted as if they did. And, as is so often the case, the proponents of the invasion may have begun as liars but they wound up as fantasists, many of them believing their own propaganda.
As Errol Morris, in his New York Times Opinionator blog posts and in many interviews, what we think we see in photographs "can be so easily changed by the context that we place around them, the new story we place around them — the caption that we put under them can change everything." (See his book in his book "Believing is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography.") Morris-Cifiero wants to have it both ways, though. On the one hand, she writes:
I do not know what the strangers are thinking when they look at me. But there is a Henri Cartier-Bresson moment when my action aligns with the composition, the shutter and their gaze that has a critical or questioning element. Even though they are in front of a camera, they feel they have anonymity because they are crossing behind me. […]
I only get angry when I hear someone comment about my weight and the image does not reflect the criticism. That’s frustrating: when I didn’t get the shot.It's arguable whether she got the shot in any of the three photos that accompany her piece. On the other hand, in the same article, she says:
I suspect that if I confronted these narrow-minded people, my words would have no effect. So, rather than using the attackers’ actions to beat myself up, I just prove them wrong. The camera gave me my voice.But what is that voice saying?
In another one of her photos she claims that a guy behind her is "smirking at me. He clearly does not approve." And maybe that's the case, but maybe it's not. I can't tell for certain. Can she? Can you? What does he see from back there? For all I know, he might just be blinking. Cameras often catch people with weird expressions nobody noticed but the lens. Is he smirking at Morris-Cifiero or smiling for the woman who's taking his picture? In the background is a billboard that reads: "Anonymity Isn't for Everyone." Maybe the image conveys more than she realizes …
ADDENDUM: From the ScientificAmerican.com article mentioned above:
Instead, the research team, based at the University of Kent in England, found that many participants believed in contradictory conspiracy theories. For example, the conspiracy-belief that Osama Bin Laden is still alive was positively correlated with the conspiracy-belief that he was already dead before the military raid took place. This makes little sense, logically: Bin Laden cannot be both dead and alive at the same time. An important conclusion that the authors draw from their analysis is that people don't tend to believe in a conspiracy theory because of the specifics, but rather because of higher-order beliefs that support conspiracy-like thinking more generally. A popular example of such higher-order beliefs is a severe “distrust of authority.” The authors go on to suggest that conspiracism is therefore not just about belief in an individual theory, but rather an ideological lens through which we view the world.
_ _ _ _ _
* Before the invasion of Iraq, it was well-known -- by the press and the intelligence community -- that there was no reliable evidence that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons. Indeed, his repeated denials and reluctant cooperation with inspections were taken as evidence that he did have them. (As Donald Rumsfeld said: "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, or vice versa." He just forgot to add that it's not evidence of presence, either.) But everybody seemed to be pretty sure that Iraq had them, nevertheless. (Rumsfeld again: "We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south, and north somewhat.") And they might have been right. All that was certain was that nobody knew for certain, because the evidence did not indicate what some claimed it did. (Another classic Rumsfeld quote -- and the smartest thing he ever said, in February, 2012: "Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones." Yes indeed.) But if WMDs had been found, that still wouldn't change the immutable fact that the evidence cited by the Bush administration -- from the "aluminum tubes" to the "uranium from Africa" -- known to be false before the invasion, remained false afterwards. It's a simple concept. Yes, water is wet. But if you're going to attribute that fact to a government conspiracy involving unicorns, then let's see the evidence.…
"I believe he's not guilty."
"Are you sure?"
"No, but I have a reasonable doubt."
The last words spoken in David Mamet's HBO feature film "Phil Spector" are "reasonable doubt." The first words appear in white letters on a black screen:
This is a work of fiction. It's not "based on a true story." ... It is a drama inspired by actual persons on a trial, but it is neither an attempt to depict the actual persons, nor to comment upon the trial or its outcome.
I'm not quite sure what that means (beyond "Don't sue us") -- but it sounds a little like one of Mamet's nonsensical latter-day post-right-wing conversion rants. (Read Mamet's 2008 Village Voice essay, "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal'" and see if you can figure out how he went from an unthinking, ignorant knee-jerk lefty to an unthinking, ignorant knee-jerk conservative. It has something to do with NPR, but what was he listening to? "Car Talk"? He doesn't say -- only that he believes in choosing one's political positions and convictions the way you would choose a sports team to root for, based on your affection for a place and whatever colors you feel are the most flattering this season.)
On the other hand, maybe Mamet was trying to avoid the trap the makers of "Zero Dark Thirty" set for themselves when, in interviews and pre-release publicity, they positioned it as the "inside story" of the bin Laden manhunt and began the film with: "This is based upon first-hand accounts of real events." That may be strictly true, but what does it actually signify -- especially when we know that "first-hand" eyewitness accounts are about as factually reliable as dreams?
"Phil Spector," though, isn't about facts; it's about doubts. It's a tabloid morality play with a trashy sensibility and a first-class pedigree: not just Mamet but Al Pacino, Helen Mirren and Jeffrey Tambor. But it feels personal, too. I get the impression Mamet rather identifies with Spector, a short man and famously eccentric artist with a massive ego who is persecuted (and, in Spector's case, prosecuted) simply for being who he is. Or, at least, that seems to be the way Mamet perceives it.
"Phil Spector" can be seen as a companion to Mamet's 1992 play "Oleanna" (incendiary stage piece; tepid film), itself inspired by the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings. So, did he or didn't he? Whom do you believe? And why? Only Phil Spector knows (or, at one time, knew) what really happened, since Lana Clarkson was the only other person in the room at the time of her death from a gunshot wound caused by a snub-nosed .38 Special revolver going off in her mouth.
The movie essentially takes the form of a trial -- not just in the courtroom, but as a case argued by the defendant himself before his own lawyer, Linda Kenney Baden (Helen Mirren). The jury is You, The Viewer, and everyone watching the fictionalized Phil Spector and the fictionalized "Phil Spector." Baden (who was a consultant on the movie) is introduced as someone who's initually sure Spector is guilty, but after meeting him and taking another look at the evidence, she changes her mind. He may be crazy, volatile and even violent (he has also a "gun nut"), but, even taken all together, those things don't add up to a case for murder.
The case against Spector (as presented in the movie, anyway) comes down to this: The famous, freakish, reclusive Wall of Sound record producer had a history of erratic, violent and threatening behavior (particularly with women) and liked guns more than dames. Very early on the morning of February 3, 2003, a struggling 40-year-old actress named Lana Clarkson ("Deathstalker," "Barbarian Queen," "Amazon Women on the Moon"), who was working as a hostess at the House of Blues on Sunset Blvd., met Spector and accompanied him back to his Alhambra home, the 33-room, 1926 castle formerly known as Dupuy's Pyrenees Castle, which Spector bought and renamed for himself in 1998.
While Spector's Brazilian chauffeur, Adriano DeSouza, waited, Clarkson went in with Spector. About an hour later, DeSouza heard a gunshot and said his employer emerged moments later holding a pistol and told him "I think I killed somebody."
Spector's lawyers claimed he'd actually said, "I think you should call somebody," and that DeSouza's understanding of English was not very good. (The 911 call operator had difficulty understanding DeSouza's thick accent.)
It's not true that a prosecutor must prove "means, motive and opportunity," or that they are sufficient to convict someone of a crime. What's needed is evidence to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Spector's first trial ended with a hung jury, 10-2 for conviction; in his retrial he was found guilty of second-degree murder. "Phil Spector" is about the first trial but -- being a "work of fiction," remember -- it may also include some details from the second.
In emails and other "diary-like writings," Clarkson reportedly wrote of being in dire financial straits, discouraged, depressed and even suicidal. The defense also speculated that Clarkson, if she'd been playing around with the gun and had put it in her mouth, could have been startled when Spector re-entered the room, saw her, and shouted, "No!"
But all of this speculation about Clarkson's state of mind is immaterial. The defense doesn't have to prove she was suicidal; the prosecution has to prove that Spector killed her. The defense doesn't have to show that somebody else might have done it, or even that their client didn't do it; the burden is entirely on the prosecution to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he did. The defense doesn't have to demonstrate anything at all -- though it helps if they can establish an alibi or marshall other exculpatory evidence. Sure, he could have killed her -- he was unstable, maybe drunk, possibly insane -- but where's the evidence that he did? (Hint: It's not in this movie.) A trial isn't about determining whether somebody might have been capable of breaking the law; that's a form of " thoughtcrime." (Noah Cross, "Chinatown": "Most people never have to face the fact that at the right time, the right place, they're capable of anything.")
In Mamet's movie, the prosecution speculates, based on Spector's past loony behavior, that Clarkson may have wanted to leave and Spector was trying to force her to stay at gunpoint. Again: What if he did? That could be attempted kidnapping or maybe unlawful restraint and/or assault with a deadly weapon. But where's the evidence that he put the gun in her mouth and pulled the trigger?
In the movie, the overwhelming forensic evidence indicates Spector could not have fired the shot that killed Clarkson, because if he had, his white jacket would have been covered with blood and brain matter. It was all over her, but he had only a few splatters on his blazer, consistent with someone standing 10 feet away or so. (Again, I'm talking about the evidence as presented in the movie; I haven't studied the trial transcripts.) [Update: After posting this, I came upon an LA Times article summarizing the actual evidence and Mamet's selective distortions.] The movie's Spector exhibits a certain amount of paranoia about the judge, the jury and the public, whom he feels simply don't like him ("What happened to 'innocent until proven guilty'?"), but, well, you know the saying: Just because he's paranoid ... What's at issue in the trial, according to the movie, is not what Spector actually did or did not do, but the fact of his fame and his freakiness. (One room in his castle -- see above -- places him in the context of a carnival arcade or a circus sideshow.)
I don't want to make this appear to be a review of the HBO movie, because it's not. I will say a couple things, though, about the writing, the performances and the use of scale. "Phil Spector" takes place mostly in large, more-or-less public spaces -- offices, hallways, conference rooms, hotel rooms, studios and, notably, the courtroom (with TV cameras), a rehearsal courtroom built on a soundstage, and a vast, open, empty office space where defense counsel is headquartered. (You can't hear the reverb from the Wall of Sound echoing within these walls, but you can almost see it.) The shooting itself takes place in what feels like Spector's inner sanctum, a kind of throne room devoted to Abraham Lincoln memorabilia ... and guns, where the shooting occurred. His Xanadu even has a massive fireplace that's photographed to remind you of Charles Foster Kane's. When Baden visits the castle for the first time, on a dark and stormy night (the place also feels like the Bates house in "Psycho"; there are all-seeing owls mounted on the walls), she creeps through a labyrinth (where does the minotaur live?) of darkened chambers and hallways as if wending her way deep into the private recesses of Spector's convoluted mind.
I don't know how much the stylized verbiage known as "Mamet-speak" has evolved in recent years, since "Glengarry Glenn Ross" and "House of Games," but you can certainly hear the echoes of it, especially in the rat-a-tat rhythms of Pacino as "Phillip" and Jeffrey Tambor as attorney Bruce Cutler. If you only know Tambor from his priceless characters Hank Kingsley ("The Larry Sanders Show") and George Bluth ("Arrested Development"), you owe it to yourself to see what else he can do.
(The worst of Mamet is also on display here. At one point hhe turns into a third-rate Aaron Sorkin and has poor Mirren deliver a rant about 45rpm record adaptors. A Young Fellow in the office thinks a seven-inch vinyl single is a floppy disc from the early days of computers. It's a bad, bad scene -- flatfooted and phony -- and I don't know what it was supposed to accomplish. OK, yes, Spector is some kind of genius -- an accomplished artist who created a distinctive form of popular music: It was about the records, not just the songs or the performers. But what do people's memories of him and his reputation, or the lost technology of the 45, have to do with whether he committed murder? Why bring it up except to exaggerate the ignorance of viewers under 40?)
Of course, everything and everybody is eerily, enjoyably exaggerated here; I mean, you don't go to Mamet for underplaying or under-writing. I've seen a few reviews in which Pacino has been criticized for turning in a standard-issue Pacino hambone performance, but that misses the point. If you've seen Vikram Jayanti's not-at-all-subtle 2009 documentary "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector" (and you really should -- the full-length feature is embedded below), which consists primarily of interviews with Spector conducted during his first trial, you'll see that Pacino is not overdoing his character's craziness. Pacino and Spector share a middle name, and that's "Excess." But, come on: For his entire career Pacino has swung intemperately between tamped-down canned ham ("Glengarry Glenn Ross," "Carlito's Way," "Donnie Brasco") and the fully smoked variety ("Scarface," "Scent of a Woman"). His work in the "Godfather" films runs the gamut, from "That's my family Kay, not me," to "IN MY BEDROOM! Where my wife sleeps! Where my children come and play with their toys."
He wears the wigs (sometimes he really does look uncannily like Adam Sandler), he sputters and rants, he trembles and explodes, but honestly, he doesn't overdo it. He gets him, and gives his interpretation of him. Remember: This is the nervous, frightened, insecure, arrogant, socially maladjusted little man who wrote "Spanish Harlem," one of the loveliest and most complex pop songs of the century, who produced the gargantuan-sounding singles "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' " (Righteous Brothers) and "River Deep, Mountain High" (Ike and Tina Turner) among many others, who compares himself to Da Vinci and Galileo and has been known to sport hair more ginormous than all of them put together. There's no such thing as "too big."
In the end, Mamet characterizes Spector as a minotaur who kept himself holed up in his castle because he knew he was a danger to others and to himself. Clarkson was the faded beauty and Spector was the beast -- a monster who was also an artistic genius, and who knew he contained both within him.
P.S. For what it's worth (and I'm not sure it's worth much), both Clarkson's friends and Spector's wife have denounced the film for portraying their loved ones unfavorably and inaccurately.
]]>But what really matters is the Muriels. You know, that time-honored annual movie award that is not named after Bette Davis's Uncle Oscar, but after co-founder Paul Clark's guinea pig. Throughout the month of February (the 6th through the 23rd), the winners have been announced, as you know because you've been regularly clicking on the Muriels link right here on Scanners. Anyway, you know what "Argo" can do; the Muriel voters, on the other hand, chose to give the year's top prize to what, for me, was obviously the most rewarding movie experience of the year: Leos Carax's "Holy Motors."
Now, I'm not saying the membership of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences got everything wrong. (Seth MacFarlane was sure wrong, but he did pretty much exactly what the producers hired him to do. And, admit it, to come across as simultaneously unctuous and nasty is a pretty remarkable feat. His recycling of Bob Hope's and Johnny Carson's old jokes, though, missed their essential irony: Those guys knew when they were telling bad jokes, and that was essential to the jokes. Unlike the disastrous James Franco, host MacFarlane appeared unaware of how bad his material was -- he's the maker of "Family Guy," after all -- though at least he invested in it some of the time.)
Where was I? Oh yes, credit where due: The nominees for Best Actress were almost all really good, although I haven't seen the Naomi Watts tsunami movie and, OK, maybe that cute little nine-year-old girl who The Onion called the c-word on Twitter precisely because nothing could be more inappropriate, transgressive and gratuitously offensive* seemed just a smidgen too adorably confident, on- and off-screen. (She's just been cast as the lead in a re-tooled version of the 1977 Broadway musical "Annie," so there you are.) But, hell, she's nine. Solipsism is her world. Where were your agents and publicists booking you when you were nine? Plus, she wants to be a dentist, and I like that.
But, really, the Muriels: Let's compare lists. Here were the Academy membership's choices for the nine best movies of 2012, some of which have yet to be released in home video formats:
"Amour" "Argo" "Beasts of the Southern Wild" "Django Unchained" "Life of Pi" "Lincoln" "Les Miserables" "Silver Linings Playbook" "Zero Dark Thirty"
Overall, really, I don't think that's such a bad list for the MOR tastes of the Oscar clique -- especially compared to last year, when the only Brad Pitt movie that might have made my own list was "Moneyball." And, of course, at least four of these films' directors have to be snubbed because that's the way the Academy planned it. You know: math. Even Harvey Weinstein can't spin it.
Now let's look at the Muriels (ranked by votes):
1) "Holy Motors" 2) "Moonrise Kingdom" 3) "The Master" 4) "Zero Dark Thirty" 5) "The Turin Horse" 6) "The Deep Blue Sea" 7) "Django Unchained" 8) "Lincoln" 9) "Looper" 10) "Amour"
There are four titles on both lists ("Amour," "Django Unchained," "Lincoln" and "Zero Dark Thirty"), but which set of movies do you think is more likely to make a lasting impression on you -- to affect you deeply, to take you to places you've never been, to show you things either didn't know or didn't know you knew? Provided that you like that sort of thing. I'm asking -- not answering for anyone but myself. Art and entertainment are personal, not ballot-based, and I would never expect to be in full concurrence with any poll-based ranking -- but I at least considered every one of those Muriel winners for my own personal Top 10 list (which I have yet to annotate for publication). And, best of all, those who follow the Muriels know that individual voters have written essays about each of these films at co-founder Steve Carlson's blog, Our Science is Too Tight, which is where the above links will take you.
Me, I wrote about the Best Director winner this year: Leos Carax. Here's what I said (ever-so-slightly amended/expanded):
The two best-directed, most thrillingly cinematic movies I saw in 2012 were Leos Carax's "Holy Motors" and Michael Haneke's "Amour"** -- both films in which most of the "action" takes the form of conversations held in compartments -- apartments, car interiors, empty buildings. Mostly, they just show people sitting around talking, singing, living, dying. But there's not much in the way of superheroes, chases, fights (gun- or fist-), explosions and all that. Yet, moment-by-moment, I found them to be dynamic, electrifying experiences. Their cumulative power comes from their organic seamlessness. In a climate where so many films feel like they've been pieced together by committees from unrelated fragments (because they have been), these movies are striking because of the wholeness -- the relentlessness, you might even say -- of their vision.
Both films are also from writer-directors, which isn't surprising because it's hard to imagine the writing and directing of them as separate processes. "Holy Motors" begins with a man (played by Carax himself) getting out of bed and walking into a forest, which is a mural on a wall. His finger is the key that unlocks an invisible door. He passes through it, appears to be in the corridors of a ship at sea, and wanders into a movie theater. From the balcony, he sees a child running down the aisle; later, a dog runs in slow-mo toward the camera, like the fever-dream phantom of death in Buñuel's "Los Olvidados."
Then we see a man leaving his house in the morning, a house that looks something like a nautical vessel. His children bid him goodbye and he climbs into a white limo (see also David Cronenberg's "Cosmopolis"), where his driver informs him that he has nine appointments for the day. The movie is structured as a to-do list, a daily calendar. The car drives around Paris, and for each appointment the man prepares himself with make-up and costume to assume a particular role: a homeless old lady, a special effects actor, a subterranean madman (aka M. Merde), a dying old man, an assassin... Each is the star of his/her own movie (genres include crime thriller, science-fiction, monster movie, coming-of-age drama, musical, romance...); each is an actor playing a role; and each is the same person. The idea is inseparable from the execution. As in all great movies, the images, the words, the performances, the themes -- they're all one.
"Holy Motors" is about movies -- about making them and watching them and living them -- and it's about acting, not just for the camera but the roles we all play every day, the faces we put on and take off for different audiences, and for ourselves. No movie surprised and delighted me more in 2012; none made me laugh harder (dig that accordion entr'acte!) or gave me such melancholy chills. As you watch it, "Holy Motors" seems to wind down to its terminal destination ("FIN" -- "The End"), slowly dying before your eyes -- and that's not a criticism, but a fitting description of the long day's journey into night it spans. ("La Dolce Vita" and "Mulholland Dr." -- other movies about playing roles, assuming identities and staging scenes -- have a similar draining-yet-exhilarating effect.) It's a movie that captures what it feels like to be fully alive and dying at the same time -- which is the state we're all in, more or less. And no film made me clap and shout with such joy over being alive and getting to witness something as moving and exuberant, coherent and surprising, eloquent and off-the-wall crazy as "Holy Motors."
PS - Yes, the headline is also a Resnais pun.
- - - - -
* The Brits use the word differently. In my opinion, the best public use of this taboo term was the famous quotation from Elton John printed in The New Yorker in the 1990s, referring to a tabloid libel lawsuit he had won: "They can say I'm a fat old cunt, they can say I'm an untalented bastard, they can call me a poof, but they mustn't tell lies about me."
** With Steven Spielberg a close third for "Lincoln," for many of the same reasons.
]]>Another brawl in the square Another stink in the air! Was there a witness to this? Well, let him speak to Javert! -- Javert, a character in the musical "Les Misérables"
I was an eyewitness to "Les Misérables."
After repeated exposure to that dreadful theatrical trailer-cum-featurette about how the singing is all done live on camera! -- It's live! It's Live! IT'S LIVE! -- I had no intention of seeing Tom "The King's Speech" Hooper's film version of the 1980s stage musical. But when it finally came out, some of the reviews were so bad that part of me wanted to see what the stink was all about. Still, I'm not a masochist; I don't enjoy going to movies I know I'm probably predisposed to dislike just so I can dump on them. On the other hand, there's nothing better than having your low expectations upended. I did enjoy that Susan Boyle YouTube video back in 2009, but that was all I knew about the musical. I remained curious but skeptical. And then ...
... I read this, by Stanley Fish in the New York Times, under the headline: "'Les Misérables' and Irony." Fish recalls an interview with Hooper in which the director proclaimed: "[We] "we live in a postmodern age where a certain amount of irony is expected. This film is made without irony." And so it is. Fish contends that the movie's persistent, much-derided close-ups are -- literally -- designed to defeat irony...
... by not allowing the distance it requires. If you're looking right down the throats of the characters, there is no space between them and you; their perspective is your perspective; their emotions are your emotions; you can't frame what you are literally inside of. Moreover, the effect -- and it is an effect even if its intention is to trade effect for immediacy -- is enhanced by the fact that the faces you are pushed up against fill the screen; there is no dimension to the side of them or behind them; it is all very big and very flat, without depth. The camera almost never pulls back, and when it does so, it is only for an instant.
Of course, I didn't have to actually see "Les Misérables" to recognize the self-evident flaws in that interpretation of irony (and filmmaking). But I did anyway. And while I think it's far from a good movie (and even farther from a good musical), I didn't take it as a personal affront.
If you recall, two years ago "The King's Speech" was also criticized for its overly literal use of close-ups and wide-angle lenses -- but Hooper seems defiantly intent on making it his directorial signature. (Perhaps in an effort to literalize the Hollywood phrase "too on-the-nose," he either plants the actor's face right in the center of the frame, or off to the right.) Having bragged about putting the camera "maybe 18 inches from Colin [Firth]'s face in the closeup on the very first day" of shooting "The King's Speech" because he "wanted the nervousness of the first day to percolate into his performances," he now (as some have put it) crams the camera down the throats of the actors in "Les Misérables" for reasons that have nothing to do with their, or their characters', performance anxieties.
Instead, according to Fish (or, perhaps, Hooper via Fish):
Endless high passion and basic human emotions indulged in without respite are what "Les Misérables" offers in its refusal to afford the distance that enables irony. Those who call the movie flat, shallow, sentimental and emotionally manipulative are not wrong; they just fail to see that what appear to them to be bad cinematic choices (in addition to prosaic lyrics that repel aesthetic appreciation, and multiple reprises of simple musical themes) are designed to achieve exactly the result they lament -- an almost unbearable proximity to raw, un-ironized experience. They just can't go with it. And why should they? After all, the critic, and especially the critic who perches in high journalistic places, needs to have a space in which he can insert himself and do the explicatory work he offers to a world presumed to be in need of it. "Les Misérables," taken on its own terms, leaves critics with nothing to do except join the rhythms of rapt silence, crying and applause, and it is understandable that they want nothing to do with it.
Reading the first part of that paragraph you might feel that with friends like Fish, "Les Miz" needs no critical enemies. But that is part of Fish's point -- that criticism is superfluous in the face of such "raw, un-ironized experience." But I quibble with his final sentence, which contradicts everything he's built his argument upon. Far from belong left with "nothing to do except join the rhythms of rapt silence, crying and applause," critics (and members of the audience) do, in fact, have another option, and it is to reject it -- not because it's "raw" or "sentimental" or "emotional" but because it's specious.
There comes a time when too much gets to be too much, and we all have our own thresholds of tolerance. Stephanie Zacharek (who said she could review it in fewer than 50 characters: "Call me Bessie, 'cos I've been thoroughly milked") wrote that the "weeperific musical extravaganza" is "designed to make us feel every emotion fortissimo - because pianissimo is so 1862." Fish equates raw emotion exclusively with Bigness -- and yet there's something to be said for the virtues of modulation in a musical or dramatic work. He quotes Dana Stevens in Slate, who wrote: "We're all familiar with the experience of seeing movies that cram ideas and themes down our throats. 'Les Misérables' may represent the first movie to do so while also cramming us down the throats of its actors."
Well, that's just it. She isn't just turning a phrase; she's describing Hooper's own stylistic logic. There's a mismatch between the movie's visual approach and its performances that, I think, has a lot to do with its stage roots. On the most obvious level, the actors are playing to the balcony while the camera (and those wide-angle lenses) push their faces into ours. It's like "Full Metal Jacket: The Musical!" with all the parts played by R. Lee Ermey. What Fish describes as "endless high passion and basic human emotions indulged in without respite" is exactly what felt so airless and suffocating to me. (Maybe it was a lack of oxygen that caused me to doze off -- or, perhaps, begin hallucinating -- somewhere in the second hour.)
Then there's the style of the musical itself, which I've seen described as a "sung-through musical play," a "pop operetta" and a blockbuster Broadway mega-musical (from the 1980s blockbuster era of "Phantom of the Opera," "Miss Saigon," "Cats" and "Starlight Express"). And "Les Misérables" is probably all those things at once. What's notable, though, is how it makes extensive use of recitative. The dialog, or that portion of the libretto that isn't lyrics, is delivered in a manner that's somewhere between speaking and singing, and although notes are sung, there's no identifiable melody. While recitative is found in operas, cantatas and even Broadway musicals, it's a strange thing to see in cinematic mega-close-up (even when sung live!). This kind of stylization requires "distance" -- not of the ironic kind, but a physical and emotional remove. Having somebody shriek into your face eventually becomes wearing, then numbing. (Maybe it was shell-shock that caused me to shut down and drift into a stupor.)
What's more, when we witness so many extreme facial contortions at such close proximity, there's no room left for our own emotions because the actors are filling every square inch of screen space with theirs. This is, I think, a fatal miscalculation on Hooper's part. You know the expression, "How can I miss you if you won't go away?" The movie of "Les Misérables" prompts the musical question: "How can I feel anything for you if you won't shut up about how much you're feeling?" The picture starts with an aerial variation on the infamous CGI shot through the carafe handle in "Panic Room" (though here the CGI slips through an opening formed by the CGI figurehead on the prow of an enormous CGI ship). CGI waves splash over the "camera" (if that's what it is). In retrospect, this appears to be Hooper's not-too-subtle metaphor for tears to come.
Before we get to the music and the lyrics themselves, one more thing about the ways Hooper's Complexion-Cam™ undermines his actors' performances. I loved what Stevens said about Anne Hathaway's prize-winning rendition of "I Dreamed a Dream": "She nails the song, no doubt about it, but it's a performance that, to me, is too much about the awesomeness of its own nailing. (And it doesn't help that Hooper's camera won't stop asking is she nailing this or what?)" Yes, there's a studied self-consciousness that becomes impossible to overlook when you're forced to gaze at somebody's face under the scrutiny of the macro lens. We get distracted from the characters' emotions because the focus shifts to the actors' acting! (Did you see that twitch, that well-timed tear?)
At 158 minutes, this is a long musical film (it's was a long book, and I'm talking about Victor Hugo's, not the libretto) but I was shocked to find that it has only one song, and that's the "Dream-de-Dream-de-Weem-de-Weem" song. The other musical numbers seem to draw their melodic inspiration from the recitatives, the kinds of tuneless tunes you might absent-mindedly whisper under your breath while you vacuum -- only here, of course, they're belted out at the tops of the actors' lungs.
What's worse are the lyrics, which consist almost entirely of minor variations on "I am this character and this is my situation and this is my feeling about that." (Has "South Park" done "Les Miz"? Come to think of it, yes: It was in 1999 and it was called "South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut.") The songs, like the performances, are aimed directly and almost exclusively at the audience -- whether it's the soliloquies, the duets or the group numbers (in which, for example, poor people working in a factory explain to us en masse that they lack money, work in a factory, and how they feel about those things, philosophically and existentially). Maybe its the translation from the French that makes the language sound so stilted, but the way the songs are conceived and deployed -- not to dramatize the story or develop characters, but simply to point out their existence -- it's as if Rodgers and Hammerstein never happened, not to mention Stephen Sondheim.
And as for Javert, he'd become the villain if only for constantly singing about himself in the third person:
Tell me quickly what's the story Who saw what and why and where Let him give a full description Let him answer to Javert! In this nest of whores and vipers Let one speak who saw it all Who laid hands on this good man here? What's the substance of this brawl?
It's even more painful coming out of Russell Crowe -- though it's not his fault. Hugh Jackman makes a slightly better go at it, but even he is sentenced to proclaim "I am Jean Valjean!" every six or seven minutes. And nobody could do much with leaden exposition like:
This is a factory, not a circus! Now come on ladies, settle down I run a business of repute I am the Mayor of this town
(Somebody call in Dr. Seuss for a punch-up!) You'll notice a pattern here: It's never enough to simply show a brawl or a factory; somebody has to come in and sing that there is one, or was one, and explain his relationship to it, including his title or job description, as the case may be.
OK, that's probably unfair, a little like shooting fish in a barrel. (Cue Javert: "Do not forget Javert! For I have a gun for fish-shooting. Now tell me -- I insist! Where can Javert find this fish?") Speaking of which, Fish's question is actually a good one: Why do some people (not just critics) dislike this "Les Miz" so intensely? You might believe, as Fish does, that's it's because they can't handle close contact with raw emotions. Or perhaps they feel they've been brutally mugged by a film, and a musical, that brandishes its dramatic-prosaic-musical-cinematic literalism like a bludgeon. ("What's the substance of this brawl?")
But the truth is, the critical responses were all over the place, but averaged out to be generally favorable. Some reviewers were impressed (Peter Travers, Kenneth Turan, Claudia Puig, Lou Lumenick, Richard Roeper, Justin Chang...), others were turned off (Manohla Dargis, Richard Corliss, Wesley Morris, Michael Phillips, Lisa Schwarzbaum, Anthony Lane, Todd McCarthy...). But at least there seemed to be general agreement about what was up on the screen. People love it or loathe it, but they don't disagree about what it's doing. They're responding to the same things:
David Edelstein (New York Magazine): "The tasteless bombardment that is 'Les Misérables' would, under most circumstances, send audiences screaming from the theater, but the film is going to be a monster hit and award winner, and not entirely unjustly. [...] [Hooper] ... films every actor--heroic, villainous, beautiful, ugly--from the same vantage, which I'd chalk up to the democratic spirit of 'Les Misérables' if I thought Hooper knew what he was doing. He loves his actors to death."
Christy Lemire (Associated Press): "Tom Hooper's extravaganza, big-screen telling of the beloved musical 'Les Miserables' is as relentlessly driven as the ruthless Inspector Javert himself. It simply will not let up until you've Felt Something -- powerfully and repeatedly -- until you've touched the grime and smelled the squalor and cried a few tears of your own. It is enormous and sprawling and not the slightest bit subtle. But at the same time it's hard not to admire the ambition that drives such an approach..."
And those excerpts were from positive reviews. Like it or not, "Les Misérables" makes an impression. Near the beginning (and seemingly in every scene thereafter), Javert says/sings: "And I'm Javert! Remember my name." I do.
- - - -
P.S. David Edelstein quotes the late Nora "You've Got Mail" Ephron (who, generally, I think is about as funny as Jean Valjean) on Fantine's showstopper (aka, "The Only Actual Song in the Whole Show"):
]]>: "That song is worse than all of Andrew Lloyd Webber, and it's worse than 'It's a Small World After All.' [It's] the all-time most horrible song ever in history, and the reason is simple: It sticks in your brain and never stops playing ... And just when you think it's gone, you see the title in print, and it starts playing again." Here, it comes at you via Anne Hathaway after her character, the unwed mother Fantine, is persecuted ("You play a virgin in the light / But need no urgin' in the night"), shorn of her locks, and raped. She does it in a single take in a ghoulishly tight close-up, and although her plucked-chicken appearance is frightful, I was filled with admiration when she hit the big notes and stole the song back from [Susan] Boyle. I even joined in the applause. Hathaway will win many awards for this performance, if for no other reason than the image of her giant mouth will imprint itself indelibly on millions of brains, some belonging to Oscar voters.
Near the end of her remarkable Golden Globes speech, a monologue overflowing with teasing language and sly pop-culture references, actor-director Jodie Foster mentioned a dog whistle. Although she sometimes seemed to be speaking extemporaneously, while also incorporating pre-crafted phrases designed to say exactly what she intended to say (and, equally important, what she had no intention of saying), I thought the message, addressed primarily to those who have pressured her to publicly acknowledge her lesbianism for so many years, was clear and unambiguous -- except for the parts she deliberately wanted to leave ambiguous. And it's pretty much the same message she's been repeating since she was in college:
I value my privacy. Everything about being a performer makes it difficult to protect and maintain that privacy. I've been pressured to talk about my private life as a woman, formerly in a same-sex relationship with Cydney Bernard, who is raising two sons. And this is as much of a public "coming out" statement as you're going to get from me.
The unequivocal heart of her otherwise semi-coded message was this:
There is no way I could ever stand here without acknowledging one of the deepest loves of my life, my heroic co-parent, my ex-partner in love but righteous soul sister in life, my confessor, ski buddy, consigliere, most beloved BFF of 20 years, Cydney Bernard. Thank you, Cyd. I am so proud of our modern family. Our amazing sons, Charlie and Kit, who are my reason to breathe and to evolve, my blood and soul.
After watching the Globule broadcast (a guilty pleasure that is more guilty than pleasurable for me), I mentioned that I was impressed with Foster's rambling, ambivalent speech -- especially because she did it in a way that was uniquely her own -- and I had never seen anything like it. Especially on a televised awards show. But an exasperated friend said, in effect: "What's the big deal? Why didn't she just come out and say it: 'I'm gay'? Why all the beating around the bush?"
I understand what she (my friend) meant, but from what I know of Jodie Foster the Public Figure, that just wouldn't have been her style. Instead, what she did seemed like a perfect expression of her image/personality: proud, tough, indignant, defensive, conflicted, not so good at humor. It occurred to me that, while the crowd in the Beverly Hilton knew what she was saying (hasn't this been common knowledge for years?), my friend was probably not among the primary target audience for Foster's remarks. And I was surprised at how many people professed to wonder what she was talking about. To me her subject was clear from the opening: "Well, for all of you 'SNL' fans, I'm 50! I'm 50!" -- as if, I thought, she was mocking the tired spectacle of the public confessional, like one of Scott Thompson's characters in "Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy," by saying "I'm 50!" instead of the anticipated, "I'm gay!" The use of the term "modern family," for instance, invoked the title of a hit television sitcom that features a gay couple is raising a child. That's why my ears perked up when I heard "dog whistle." This was an exercise in showbiz LGBT dog-whistling.
For example:
So while I'm here being all confessional, I guess I have a sudden urge to say something that I've never really been able to air in public. So, a declaration that I'm a little nervous about but maybe not quite as nervous as my publicist right now, huh Jennifer? But I'm just going to put it out there, right? Loud and proud, right? So I'm going to need your support on this.
As an actress, she didn't quite pull off the moment (she did appear nervous, as actors often do when having to appear before an audience as themselves), but each sentence played on unspoken expectations of the dog-whistle crowd. I have no idea how it played in Peoria, as they say, but all those Foster Watchers knew exactly where she was going.
Or, rather, where she was feinting to go ("Loud and proud, right?") because she built up to a false punch line:
I am single. Yes I am, I am single. No, I'm kidding -- but I mean I'm not really kidding, but I'm kind of kidding. I mean, thank you for the enthusiasm. Can I get a wolf whistle or something?
There's a big difference between a wolf whistle and a dog whistle, of course. And at that moment the audio cut out -- for seven seconds, according to the L.A. Times. She continued: "Seriously, I hope that you're not disappointed that there won't ..."
[audio returns] ... be a big coming-out speech tonight because I already did my coming out about a thousand years ago back in the Stone Age, in those very quaint days when a fragile young girl would open up to trusted friends and family and co-workers and then gradually, proudly to everyone who knew her, to everyone she actually met. But now I'm told, apparently that every celebrity is expected to honor the details of their private life with a press conference, a fragrance and a prime-time reality show.
Again, she was Doing It Her Way -- refusing to give in or apologize, while acknowledging the reality of what certain people have been clamoring for all these years -- including picketers at the Oscar ceremonies when Foster was nominated (and won) for "The Accused" (1988) and "The Silence of the Lambs" (1991). (Kelly McGillis, Foster's co-star in the former, came out publicly in 2009.)
So, before she got to the part about "one of the deepest loves of my life, my heroic co-parent, my ex-partner in love but righteous soul sister in life," she lamented the death of privacy in a media-saturated world:
But seriously, if you had been a public figure from the time that you were a toddler, if you'd had to fight for a life that felt real and honest and normal against all odds, then maybe you too might value privacy above all else. Privacy. Some day, in the future, people will look back and remember how beautiful it once was.
I have given everything up there from the time that I was 3 years old. That's reality-show enough, don't you think?
Well, yes, I do, and I don't think she owed this to anyone, but awkwardness aside, I like the way she did it. (My friend complained that the speech failed because it "wasn't funny." But, I said, Jodie Foster isn't funny. She has no sense of humor that I know of. So I did not hold her to that standard. The parts of her speech that were ostensibly "funny" were the most awkward.)
A couple days later, I read a column in the New York Times analyzing Foster's "skittish," "rambling, raw, semi-confessional speech":
But even her speech on Sunday was too elliptical for many gay activists and bloggers who reacted in much the same way that several Hollywood liberals have in attacking "Zero Dark Thirty" for not emphatically denouncing torture: they were irked that Ms. Foster didn't more clearly indicate that she was gay.
Ms. Foster has not discussed her love life in interviews or made a political point of being a lesbian. At the Golden Globes, of all places, she changed her mind. Several times.
All true. But what was important was that she said what she wanted to say in the way she wanted to say it. Whether anyone else thinks her remarks could have been made with greater finesse or clarity or directness is largely beside the point. Because what seemed clearest (to me, at least) was that those things didn't interest her as much as striking a balance between public and private that felt right to her. And coming from Jodie Foster, this speech was, as ABCNews.com put it, "surprisingly personal."
Somewhat more ambiguously, she seemed to be saying that she was retiring from acting and/or making mainstream Hollywood movies. Near the beginning, she thanked Robert Downey, Jr., for the introduction and for "continually talk[ing] me off the ledge when I go on and foam at the mouth and say, 'I'm done with acting, I'm done with acting, I'm really done, I'm done, I'm done.'" (The question is where the end-quotes really belong in that passage: after "I'm done with acting" or after the last "I'm done." And were they intended to be in the past-tense or the present-tense?):
This feels like the end of one era and the beginning of something else. Scary and exciting and now what? Well, I may never be up on this stage again, on any stage for that matter. Change, you gotta love it. I will continue to tell stories, to move people by being moved, the greatest job in the world. It's just that from now on, I may be holding a different talking stick. And maybe it won't be as sparkly, maybe it won't open on 3,000 screens, maybe it will be so quiet and delicate that only dogs can hear it whistle. But it will be my writing on the wall. Jodie Foster was here, I still am, and I want to be seen, to be understood deeply and to be not so very lonely.
I hope she doesn't stop acting. We need more opportunities for terrific actresses over 50, and Foster might be someone who could realize some of them. She's a creative person and wants to express herself (to write "Jodie Foster was here"). I happen to think she's a far more accomplished actor than writer or director. But whatever she does, I wish her well.
ADDENDUM: And now for something completely different: "The False Equivalencies of Jodie Foster by Alonso Duralde:
]]>And don't give me that "everyone comes out when they're ready" excuse; Foster, by her own admission, has been out to the people in her life for years. She has very intentionally remained publicly enigmatic, well past the point when being more forthcoming would have had the slightest impact on her private or her professional life. There was a time when having someone of her stature speak out could have made a huge difference, and she chose to spend that time being silent.
Quentin Tarantino has found his actor in Christoph Waltz -- someone who can speak Tarantinian fluently and still make it his own. When Waltz uses a self-consciously ostentatious word like "ascertain" (as in, "I was simply trying to ascertain..." -- the kind of verbiage QT is as likely to put in the mouth of a lowlife crook as a German dentist, or a Francophile plantation slavemaster, for that matter), it sounds right. As someone to whom Tarantino's dialog often sounds cliche-ridden and cutesy, it's a pleasure to hear Waltz saying the words in character rather than simply as a mouthpiece for the writer-director.
Oh, stop. This isn't sounding the way I want it to.
When I first sat down to write about Quentin Tarantino's "Django Unchained" I kept discarding paragraphs like the one above because they all seemed to turn into backhanded compliments. And while I reckon that more or less reflects my feelings about this movie, a mixture of appreciation and dissatisfaction (and my favorite critical sentence formation is always: "On the one hand this, but on the other that"), I didn't want to approach "Django Unchained" that way. I wanted to start unambiguously with what I see as the highlights and later segue into discussing the reservations I have about the film in its current form.
And that brings up a caveat I'd like to toss in right up-front: Remember when the theatrical version of a movie was pretty much the finished thing? No more. Tarantino has already announced that he plans to release an "extended cut" of "Django Unchained," and that he and Harvey Weinstein considered putting out the movie in two parts, like "Kill Bill," but decided against it. At the New York press junket, Tarantino said:
"I'm going to wait until the film goes around the world, does what it does. And then I'm going to make a decision. I make these scripts that are almost novels. If I had to do this whole thing over again I would have published this as a novel and done this after the fact."
Of course, you can't judge any work by all the options that were considered but ultimately not chosen -- and virtually every screenplay (Tarantino's included) has scenes or sections that don't make it into the final cut, or that aren't even shot. But I think taking the screenplay into account is particularly important when it comes to "Django Unchained" for several reasons. Tarantino has repeatedly said that he sees his screenplays as "novels" and that they should be considered as works of their own, apart from but in addition to the movies based on them. His screenplays are published separately, alongside the movies made from them, and "Django Unchained" has already being issued in alternate forms, not only as a screenplay available online but as a six-part comic-book, which QT says incorporates the entire script. In the forward, he writes:
So even though things might have changed from the script to the finished movie -- I might have dropped chapters or big set pieces -- it will all be in the comic. This comic is literally the very first draft of the script. All the material that didn't make it into the movie will be part of the finished comic book story.
So, before I delve further into this, let me, as a former president used to say, make one thing perfectly clear: A movie is not a script and a script is not a movie. It is not necessarily the goal of any movie to be faithful to the script. And filmmaking, like any creative endeavor, is the product not just of planning but of trial and error, happy accidents, last-minute problem-solving and spontaneous invention.
Also: While filmmakers' original designs and stated goals can be fascinating and shed some light on the creative process, those things don't change what's actually there, in the movies themselves. Many a filmmaker has wound up making a movie that thoroughly undermines its creators' own proclaimed intentions. I try not to read much of anything -- reviews, publicity features, interviews, certainly not scripts -- before seeing a movie, so that I can experience it fresh, on its own terms. But if, while watching the picture itself, you feel that, say, a scene or a character feels underdeveloped, or that something feels odd or out of place, you can sometimes dig up some interesting clues about how a movie came to be the way it is.
Take Dr. Schultz's dental wagon with the big wobbling tooth on top, for instance. That was something devised out of necessity by the late production designer J. Michael Riva after Waltz had an accident and was unable to ride a horse for a few months. Tarantino loved it. As he told Tim Appelo in The Hollywood Reporter: "It changes the character and provides some interesting non-corny levity at the beginning of the movie, right when you need it."
My first impression was that "Django Unchained" was uncharacteristically sloppy -- not at all what I'd expect from a Tarantino movie. When I came home after seeing it I immediately looked up the screenplay (.pdf here), which I was sure would be available online "For Your Consideration" at The Weinstein Company web site. And there it was -- complete, as usual, with QT's hand-scribbled title-page (this time with conventional spelling, unlike "Inglourious Basterds"). There were a number of things I wanted to check -- like how much character development had been chopped out (a lot, as it turns out); if the movie had been re-structured (yes, significantly -- especially toward the end); and if the use of deliberately ostentatious language such as "ascertain" (in a cliched phrase: "I was simply trying to ascertain...") by both Christoph Waltz's and Leonardo DiCaprio's characters had been scripted (yes in both cases).
What I learned more or less confirmed what I felt while watching the movie, which reminded of the line Harvey Keitel says to Julia Sweeney in "Pulp Fiction": "Just because you are a character doesn't mean that you have character." This time, there are plenty of characters, but few with much character. Tarantino's eccentric personalities tend toward the caricaturish and/or archetypal, but they're usually embellished with colorful, individualized pieces of flair. Few in "Django Unchained" get the opportunity to make much of an impression, with the obvious major exceptions -- Dr. King Schultz (Waltz), Django (Jamie Foxx), Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson). It's not the choppiness of the filmmaking and storytelling that bugs me so much (more about that later), but that the characters are missing a considerable amount of their character.
Jackson and Foxx have said as much in interviews. In fact, their favorite scene together (a charged encounter when Stephen, the House Negro, shows Django, the Freeman, to his room at Candyland) isn't in the movie. Foxx told The Playlist:
"I still look at Quentin and go like, 'You should have kept it in the movie. Because me and Sam have this moment of black men -- the house servant, the field servant. And how are they going to get along? The house servant who is a manipulative person, and me, the field servant, who just wants to kick ass and kill everybody....
Also: Walton Goggins' character Billy Crash was folded into Kevin Costner's and then Kurt Russell's Ace Woody after Russell left the movie, and he still doesn't get to become much more than a generic henchman (although he does memorably take a glowing hot knife to Django's nutsack). And he's Walton Goggins, one of my favorite character actors from "Justified" and a spectacular guest appearance in "Sons of Anarchy" (and, I'm told, "The Shield," which I haven't seen). Candie appears to have some kind of weird relationship with his Looney Tunes sister, a seemingly brain-damaged Southern Belle named Lara Lee Candie-Fitzwilly (Laura Cayouette), but it isn't developed into anything. (She's cartoonishly disposed of -- gone with the wind, you might say, though the angle of the shot isn't quite right.) Other actors in small roles and bit parts are either unrecognizable (by me, anyway), or gone much too quickly: Bruce Dern, Don Stroud, James Russo, James Remar, Russ Tamblyn, Ted Neely, Michael Parks...
At times, the movie seems to run low on imagination or inspiration -- as in a long, bloody shootout that's nothing but long and bloody because you can't tell and don't care who the swarms of faceless, gore-gushing expendables are. Two characters are eliminated in almost exactly the same way, shot off their galloping horses from a great distance just as they are about to go out of range. The blood of the first one splatters the plantation cotton bushes; the blood from the second one splashes across the neck of his white horse. The dramatic point might have been that Schultz shoots the first one and Django takes over sniper duties for the second one -- except Schultz doesn't give Django shootin' lessons until the obligatory montage sequence that comes later, followed by another scope-sight assassination scene. (The latter, in which a man is picked off while plowing a field with his young son, just feels recycled, like we've seen it a hundred times before. And even though we know the bounty hunters have to retrieve the body, we never get close to the dead man or his family so the killing business remains "clean." There's an important dramatic/thematic note to strike here -- about Django learning to master his emotions, to stay "in character" and separate his professional role from his personal reactions -- but the movie doesn't reach it. Not here, at least.)
At two hours and 45 minutes, "Django Unchained" is a long movie, and feels even longer. But I suspect it's one of those pictures that would seem much shorter and faster-moving if certain missing scenes were restored. Although this is by nature a quest movie, a road movie, with a picaresque, episodic structure, the set-pieces (such as they are) don't build suspense and the overall narrative feels haphazard and dramatically slack -- which is really uncharacteristic of the usually energetic and focused Tarantino. The movie really feels unfinished -- like a hastily thrown-together work print. (I later learned that, despite eight months of production and 18 weeks of post-production, things came right down to the wire and the first screening at the DGA was delayed two days for last-minute mixing tweaks.)
You may recall that "Inglourious Basterds," a movie I thoroughly enjoy and admire, retains a few residual scraps of discarded material (like Samuel L. Jackson's narration), but it's structured around four lengthy, impeccably constructed suspense set-pieces, each of which has ample time to intensify until the suspense is almost unbearable: the opening interrogation of LaPadite by Col. Landa, culminating in the slaughter of Shosana's family; Shosana's coffee and strudel with Frederick, Goebbels and Landa; the basement tavern scene with Bridget von Hammersmark and Lt. Hickox; and the apocalyptic revenge climax at the cinema.
(spoilers)
"Django Unchained" has one pretty good suspense standoff in a saloon near the beginning and never tops it -- or even comes close to it. That's Schultz and Django's first stop, and they easily find and take their quarry at the next one -- and re-use basically the same trick to escape from a tight spot that's never that tight to begin with. The climactic suspense piece s a dinner-table scene which consists of conversation about "mandingo fighters," a barbaric fictional bloodsport named after the 1975 exploitation film starring Ken Norton, a favorite of Tarantino's. There's a brutal and horrific death-match that, preposterously, takes place in front of an upstairs fireplace at Candie's brothel.
When it comes up that Django's wife (Kerry Washington) is named Brünnhilde (only she's not, because she's "Broomhilda" -- apparently, for reasons unknown, after a newspaper comic strip that started in the 1970s), Schultz tells Django the Norse legend of Brünnhilde und Siegfried. Waltz/Schultz is such a splendid storyteller that I wondered how Tarantino had matched the story to the actor/character. Later, I found out. Waltz was planning to take QT to an LA production of Wagner's Ring Cycle, but Quentin missed the first opera ("Das Rheingold"). As Tarantino told Taylor Hackford:
Before we went to the second opera, he took me out to dinner and told me the story of the first opera. I'd seen the Fritz Lang "Die Niebelungen." I was fairly familiar with the legend, but there was nothing like Christoph telling you the story of Siegfried and Brunhilde, he was born to do that, he was terrific, there's no way the opera will be as good. While I was watching the second opera, I realized the stories were parallel. She's already named Broomhilda, a coincidence. As I was watching the story I'm realizing how similar it was actually, when I was breaking it down to the story told in the movie.
So, in the second half of the film, the goal becomes finding Broomhilda (which turns out to be really easy to do, what with slave sales records and all), who turns out to be at the aforementioned Candyland. Django comes to see himself as Siegfried, rescuing his beloved. Sadly, Boomhilda's own story has been all but eliminated from the theatrical release, so she isn't much of a character. Just when you think we might finally see some interaction between her and Django, she drops in a dead faint. End of scene.
The movie features two racist, paternalistic plantation owners (is that redundant?) -- Don Johnson's Big Daddy DiCaprio's Calvin Candie (I wish he were Col. Candie, seeing as how he presides over a property inspired by QT's board-game fetish, Candyland).* Unfortunately for us, there isn't much to distinguish one from the other, apart from their appearance. Both men are temper-prone Southern "gentlemen" who can be persuaded, for the right price, to offer Schultz a slave girl for his private delectation. But Johnson's character barely gets a chance to register (except for his final scene on horseback, where we barely even see him).
It seemed to me that there were two big scenes that really didn't work, tonally and structurally -- and it turns out that both were huge chunks that had been moved from one place to another in the film. The first is the bag-mask scene, which plays like an outtake from Mel Brooks' "Blazing Saddles" (yes, there has been a western about racism before!). The scene, which QT calls his "fuck you" to the KKK heroics in D.W. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation," also recalls the Robert's Rules of Order adopted by the People's Front of Judea in "Monty Python's Life of Brian." Anyway, it's the funniest scene but it's risky because the jarringly different tone can throw the movie out of whack. And something's off, because the raid starts, we see clearly that it's all been staged (Schultz and Django are supposedly "sleeping" under the wagon, apparently don't hear a thing when surrounded by raiders on horseback). The bag-heads unaccountably retreat nearby for no good reason, have their comedy scene, and then resume their raid, which turns out exactly the way we already knew it would. (Again: Poorly conceived set-up, devoid of suspense -- not Tarantinian by a long shot!) [NOTE: See comments below. Did I miss something?]
Later, I read QT's explanation -- which acknowledges the challenge, although I don't think the movie adequately tackles it:
In the script they had the whole bag scene before the charge. I had a trepidation about doing the bag scene. I thought it was one of the funniest scenes in the script, but it played so funny on the page that I was positive I'd fuck it up, it was too funny. I did it, felt ok about it, was scared about editing it. "Lets do the charge first, get our feet wet." So we did the charge, so fun to shoot, it was my "fuck you" to D.W. Griifith. So I did that, and they're actually scary, if I show that they're fucking idiots right at the beginning, I'm going to kick the whole sequence in the shins, right now. So I thought I'd get away by going back in time, and you'd figure it out. I wasn't sure if it worked, we had a research screening, and we showed it. "Are we going to keep it in?" And everyone laughed more than they did throughout the film, and it's everyone's favorite scene. I guess we're going to keep it in.
A bigger problem is that the climax has been chopped into two anti-climaxes -- the first a giant-sized bloody blow-out and the second a half-hearted, by-the-numbers "showdown." Again, in the script it's all one scene. The dining room scene begins with a tense kitchen encounter between Stephen and Broomhilda before the meal, which properly sets up their escalating confrontations over the course of dinner. The deal-signing between Candie and Schultz is suspenseful, as each man tries to conclude it on his own terms. But when everything erupts into protracted chaos, the movie just bleeds out. The shooting goes on and on and on, and the Candyland manse is well and truly shot up (only to be miraculously restored a few scenes later). But with one major character dead at the beginning of the gunfight and another at the end, Django is the only one we have any emotional investment in. (At least Jamie Foxx looks ultra-cool -- but not, god forbid, "Kool and the gang" -- in his Eastwoodian hat, round sunglasses and suave green jacket.)
Tarantino movies have a reputation for being "violent," but as the filmmaker has been saying ever since "Reservoir Dogs," his movies are basically "gabfests" in which the worst violence is more often implied than shown. Until now. As he's pointed out in numerous interviews, what really happened to slaves in America is a thousand times worse than anything in the movie. And "Django Unchained" isn't so much violent (most of the shooting has little impact; this isn't Sam Peckinpah visceral violence, it's more like a Tom Savini special effects show). The aforementioned gun battle is disappointing because it's so obviously a display of firepower, meat geysers and blood gushers designed to substitute for drama.
Then there's the torture scene and a conversation between Django and Stephen that carries little weight because (thanks to the missing confrontation scene) there's not much of a personal dimension to their relationship. Django is sent away, but then comes back to retrieve Broomhilda, anti-anti-anti-climactically gun down the remaining Candyland clan as they return home from massah's funeral, blow up the impeccably restored Big House, and do a little dance on his horse with Broomhilda leading the applause. The moment feels to me misjudged and unearned. (And, yes, in the script the dinner scene ended with Schultz's death and the big shootout happened at the end of the movie, during which the characters who matter were also gunned down.)
I always try to remember, when watching a Quentin Tarantino movie, that he likes to make movies he would like to see. That is, he makes movies that are mostly about other movies he's seen combined with things that have made him go, "I'd like to see that in a movie!" Which is why just about every scene reminds you of some other movie, sometimes with a Tarantinian twist. How much you enjoy a Tarantino movie, then, may have something to do with how much you like the kinds of movies that he likes.
QT says his favorite movie is Sergio Leone's 1966 "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," and "Django Unchained" is commonly described by fans and detractors alike as a "Spaghetti Western about slavery." But I think that makes the movie sound heavier than it is, or is meant to be. This is basically just an old-fashioned, blood-and-gutsy revenge picture (like all of Tarantino's movies since "Pulp Fiction" "Jackie Brown") -- a juvenile showpiece in both the positive (cheeky) and negative (puerile) senses of the word. It features some of the things I love about Tarantino movies (off-the-wall-crazy choices, like a horseback montage set to Jim Croce's 1973 "I Got a Name" that's so anachronistically unexpected -- unlike the obligatory James-Brown-"Payback"-sample rap track -- that it made me laugh), and some of the things I don't (the over-reliance on cutesy, cliched and possibly anachronistic figures of speech: "Yes siree bob," "no muss, no fuss," "your goose was cooked," "the price of tea in China," "I like," "tasty refreshment" [see Jules' awkward "tasty beverage" Letterman line from "Pulp Fiction"], "right as rain" [intentionally misused?], "adult supervision is required," "pleasure doing business with you," "confidentially, 'tween us girls" [said by Candie to Schultz], and so on).
In the New York Times, Tarantino said: "I still love "Death Proof." It is the lesser of my movies though, and I don't ever want to make anything lesser than that." But "Death Proof," simple as it was, was lean and tautly constructed, with momentum, suspense, thrills, energy to burn. "Django Unchained," I think, is more, but less.
P.S. One more obligatory comment about Spike Lee tweeting that he's not going to see "Django Unchained": "American Slavery Was Not A Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It Was A Holocaust. My Ancestors Are Slaves. Stolen From Africa. I Will Honor Them." OK, nobody's forcing anybody to see the movie and if that's the way you feel, then you sure won't want to see this one. I can respect that. But personally, I think that it's possible to make any kind of movie about anything -- which doesn't mean I'd rush right out to see an action movie about carpeting, but anything's possible.
But c'mon: We already know this has been presented as a cartoonish, cathartic revenge epic (possibly the second, after "Inglourious Basterds," in a trilogy of historical revenge fantasies -- see some possibilities here). The tongue-in-cheek tagline is: "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Vengeance." It's as much about slavery as "Duck, You Sucker" was about the Mexican Revolution.
As for the "daring" idea ("Could a black director have made 'Django'?") of showing a persecuted black action-hero taking revenge on Whitey: Anybody ever seen "Sweet Sweetback's Badasssss Song"? It came out in 1971. It was written and directed by an American black man named Melvin van Peebles.
_ _ _ _ _
* When our bounty hunters cross from Tennessee into the Deep South, the title MISSISSIPPI fills the screen in white capital letters and a Western typeface, scrolling from right to left. Tarantino describes it in the script as appearing across the screen one letter at a time "(ala 'Rocky' and 'Flashdance')" -- which made me chuckle because it speaks to QT's obsessive affection for 1970s and 1980s pop culture. There's another, older movie about slavery in the American South, I think it was from 1939.... What was it called?
ADDENDUM (01/04/13):
• Samuel L. Jackson on the unnecessary multiple endings of Spielberg's "Lincoln":
"I don't understand why it didn't just end when Lincoln is walking down the hall and the butler gives him his hat. Why did I need to see him dying on the bed? I have no idea what Spielberg was trying to do.... I didn't need the assassination at all. Unless he's going to show Lincoln getting his brains blown out. And even then, why am I watching it? The movie had a better ending 10 minutes before."
I kind of felt the similarly.
• Odie and Boone (that would be Odie Henderson and Steven Boone at Big Media Vandalism) loved "Django." Literally.
Odie:
"Django Unchained" isn't my dream scenario's epic statement, but it is the loud noise atop the snow-covered mountain, the sound that will hopefully cause the avalanche. You asked for my falling-in-love moment, and I've many to choose from, but I'll go with QT's placement of Jim Croce's I Got A Name. It's both blatantly obvious and surprisingly touching. Django is surprised King Schultz would allow him to pick out his clothing ("and you chose THAT?" asks the slave girl giving Django the tour of Big Daddy's Bennett Manor estate), and put him atop a horse of his own. Croce's lyrics resonate in ways I hadn't given thought to despite my familiarity with the song. As subtly as Tarantino can muster, he presents the gift of humanity to a former piece of property. I daresay I was profoundly moved.
That's the polite Negro in me speaking; the hoodrat would go with the moment Django opens fire on the Brittle brothers. "SHOOT THOSE F--KERS!" I heard my inner voice yell. You can take this boy out of Blaxploitaion, but you can't take the Blaxploitation out of this boy.
Boone:
This movie won't leave me alone because I, too, fell in love with it. The first swoon was during the scene where King and Django have a teachable moment over beers in a saloon while waiting for a Sheriff to come arrest them. That sequence is the essence of what a lot of Tarantino detractors deny exists: his restraint. The hilarity of that series of negotiations and killings is all about rhythm, pace and QT's delight in his stylized characters. It's also the first scene to establish Schultz's M.O. of exploiting his own whiteness to the fullest. He uses his race and refinement like a CIA asset whose swarthy complexion and command of Arabic lets him move freely through the Muslim and Arab world. The fact that Schultz's ruse ultimately serves to turn a slave into an avenging outlaw is fucking thrilling to my black eyes.
The second swoon was the entire sequence at Big Daddy's plantation, Bennett Manor aka Miscegeny Heaven. This is just one of the funniest, most exciting pieces of film I have ever seen. If I had to be a cotton-pickin slave, I'd prefer Don Johnson's farm over DiCaprio's Candieland, since it most resembles the world we live in, where folks can live pretty harmoniously so long as there's ample distraction from routine cruelty and injustice. From Hal Ashby to Aaron MacGruder, I can't think of too many exchanges of comic dialogue between races as mercilessly true as the one between Big Daddy and Bettina about how to treat Django. Oh, the many times in my life I have been treated "like Jerry."
JE: I thought the build-up was a little clumsy (Bettina's attitude should have been more naive, unassuming), but the "Like Jerry" punchline was one of my favorite moments, too.
]]>"As a country, we have been through this too many times..." -- President Obama, December 14, 2012
It was a busy week of business-as-usual in the USA:
Tuesday, December 11: A man killed three people (including himself) and wounded another in shootings at the Clackamas Mall in Portland, OR.
Friday, December 14, 2012: 27 people killed (20 of them children) with semi-automatic weapons at an elementary school in Newtown, CT. Also: Two killed in murder-suicide at the Excalibur Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. Two hospital employees and one police officer wounded, gunman with rifle killed, at Alabama hospital. Police thwart a "Columbine-style" high school massacre planned by 18-year-old student in Oklahoma. A man in possession of 47 guns was arrested after threatening to "kill as many people as he could" at an elementary school in Indiana, about 45 miles southeast of Chicago.
Saturday, December 15: The Fashion Island Mall in Newport Beach, CA, was put on lockdown after reports of "10 to 20" gunshots fired; a suspect was arrested.
Many of us have come to accept that this is the status quo in the society we have created. Maybe we'll change it, maybe we won't. President Obama says he wants to see some concrete proposals for legislation (not just regarding access to guns and ammunition, but access to mental health care, too) in January. Even the National Rifle Association, the nation's leading gun lobby, says it will hold a "major press conference" Friday and that it "is prepared to offer meaningful contributions to help make sure this never happens again."
(UPDATE 12/21/2012: Here is a transcript of that NRA press event and a very informative, impartial Poynter article fact-checking what was said.)
Yet we all know it will happen again. And everyone seems to have opinions about what, if anything, should be done to cut down on mass shootings. First, let me offer two opinions of my own:
1) Despite everything you hear about so-called "gun nuts," I do not believe the vast majority of firearm owners are crackpots. Yes, a small fraction are sociopaths, survivalists, racists and anti-government militants (did I leave anyone out?). They are a social menace, but I don't know what can be done about them.
2) I have proposed a Modest Catch-22 (only partially facetious) to address the issues raised above: If you believe that the government is plotting to take away your guns, then you are paranoid and crazy and should have your guns taken away.
But that's just my opinion. Another opinion of mine is that opinions alone should not be legislated. Opinions are a dime a dozen. What we seem to be short of are facts. So, here are some that, regardless of my (or your) past or present opinions, might be relevant to the discussions we've been having, and will be having in the near future. Please note that items contain links to original sources and citations. If you have more facts you'd like to contribute, please post them -- and links for verification -- in comments. Thanks.):
• An appalling amount of information reported in the first 24 hours or so after an atrocity like the one in Connecticut is later found to be false. For example: the killer's older brother was initially identified as the shooter; the killer's mother was said to be a teacher at the school; the AR-15-type rifle used on most of the victims was reported to have been left in the car... and so on... (Read Dave Cullen's 2009 book on "Columbine" and you'll find out how many myths persist even all these years later.)
• You already knew this, but the USA has the highest civilian gun ownership rate in the world.
• US civilians own about 270 million guns, compared to about 3 million by the military and less than 1 million by police.
• A Harvard University study estimated that 20 percent of gun owners possess 65 percent of the guns in the US.
• The National Rifle Association says it has approximately 4 million members. According to the Institute for Legislative Action, which describes itself as "the lobbying arm of the NRA" (established in 1975), the NRA has "nearly 4 million members -- a number that has tripled since 1978."
• According to Gallup (October, 2011), "Forty-seven percent of Americans report that they have a gun in their home or elsewhere on their property." The NRA-ILA's Firearms Fact Card, 2010, estimates that 70-80 million Americans own guns, and 40-45 million own handguns.
• Fewer than 6 percent of gun owners in the US belong to the NRA. (See numbers, sources above.)
Above: A combative slogan from the NRA web site.
• Three quarters of the guns used in mass murders since 1982 were "obtained legally."
• There has always been "gun control" of some form in the United States. As The Atlantic reported in a 2011 piece called "The Secret History of Guns":
"The Ku Klux Klan, Ronald Reagan, and, for most of its history, the NRA all worked to control guns. The Founding Fathers? They required gun ownership -- and regulated it. And no group has more fiercely advocated the right to bear loaded weapons in public than the Black Panthers -- the true pioneers of the modern pro-gun movement. In the battle over gun rights in America, both sides have distorted history and the law, and there's no resolution in sight." [...]
... "The Founding Fathers instituted gun laws so intrusive that, were they running for office today, the NRA would not endorse them. While they did not care to completely disarm the citizenry, the founding generation denied gun ownership to many people: not only slaves and free blacks, but law-abiding white men who refused to swear loyalty to the Revolution.
"For those men who were allowed to own guns, the Founders had their own version of the 'individual mandate' that has proved so controversial in President Obama's health-care-reform law: they required the purchase of guns. A 1792 federal law mandated every eligible man to purchase a military-style gun and ammunition for his service in the citizen militia. Such men had to report for frequent musters -- where their guns would be inspected and, yes, registered on public rolls."
• In District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the US Supreme Court found that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms, beyond that of "a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state."
• The Court's decision also held:
"Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court's opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. Miller's holding that the sorts of weapons protected are those "in common use at the time" finds support in the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons."
• It has been estimated that about 40 percent of gun sales are conducted without background checks.
• The background checks mandated in the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993 are designed to prohibit sales of firearms to anyone who:
1. Has been convicted in any court of a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year; 2. Is a fugitive from justice; 3. Is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance; 4. Has been adjudicated as a mental defective or committed to a mental institution; 5. Is an alien illegally or unlawfully in the United States; 6. Has been discharged from the Armed Forces under dishonorable conditions; 7. Having been a citizen of the United States, has renounced U.S. citizenship; 8. Is subject to a court order that restrains the person from harassing, stalking, or threatening an intimate partner or child of such intimate partner, or; 9. Has been convicted in any court of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence. 10. Has a record of being a felon
• Between 1998 and 2008 about 96 million background checks were made; one percent of purchases were denied. Of denied applicants, eight percent "were not prohibited from lawfully possessing a firearm."
• The "Federal Assault Weapons Ban" went into effect in 1994 and was allowed to expire in 2004. It restricted sales and manufacture of some semi-automatic weapons but was full of loopholes (grandfather clauses, exceptions for gun shows and sales between unlicensed individuals, "military style" components, etc.) that made it relatively ineffective. Also, it prohibited only "18 specific types of semi-automatic weapons" with certain "cosmetic features" (pistol grips, flash suppressors, bayonet mounts, etc.), which, according to a 2004 report commissioned by the Department of Justice, targeted "a relatively small number of weapons based on features that have little to do with the weapons' operation, and removing those features is sufficient to make the weapons legal."
• Still, statistics indicate that the number of people killed in mass shootings was lower during the ban (1994-2004) than it was before or after -- even with the Columbine killings (13 dead) in 1999.
• Most mass murderers are not "mentally ill in the psychiatric sense." According to experts on mass killings and school violence, however, they are often paranoid and angry -- habitual losers who blame others for their failures and "often times feel that they are right and everybody else is wrong."
• Mass shootings tend to be planned, not spontaneously carried out in the heat of the moment.
• Roughly half of mass shootings took place in schools or workplaces; the other half in "shopping malls, restaurants, government buildings, and military bases."
• In 2009, gun deaths outpaced motor vehicle deaths in ten US states.
• Fully automatic weapons (which are legal in the US but heavily regulated) allow multiple rounds to be fired while the trigger is pressed; semi-automatic weapons automatically re-set the weapon after firing, but require a separate pull of the trigger for each round fired.
• Mass murders also tend to be committed with semi-automatic weapons, using high-capacity magazines that allow the killers to shoot many victims in a short period of time. (In Sandy Hook, 20 children, between six and seven years old, were killed, each shot between three and 11 times, in about 10 minutes. The killer fired " at least three, 30-round magazines.")
• Among the key findings in a 2002 study by the Secret Service and the US Department of Education, "Implications for the Prevention of School Attacks in the United States," were:
• There is no accurate or useful 'profile' of students who engaged in targeted school violence. • Many attackers felt bullied, persecuted or injured by others prior to the attack. • Most attackers had no history of prior violent or criminal behavior. • Most attackers were known to have had difficulty coping with significant losses or personal failures. Moreover, many had considered or attempted suicide. • Over half of the attackers demonstrated some interest in violence, through movies, video games, books, and other media. However, there was no one common type of interest in violence indicated. Instead, the attackers' interest in violent themes took various forms. • Incidents of targeted violence at school rarely are sudden, impulsive acts. • Prior to most incidents, other people knew about the attacker's idea and/or plan to attack. • Most attackers did not threaten their targets directly prior to advancing the attack. • Most attackers engaged in some behavior, prior to the incident, that caused others concern or indicated a need for help. • Most attackers had access to and had used weapons prior to the attack. • Despite prompt law enforcement responses, most attacks were stopped by means other than law enforcement intervention. (In "just over one-fifth" of the incidents considered, the attacker stopped on his own.)
• Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer argues that anything short of banning/confiscating all existing firearms would be ineffective because of "grandfather clauses" and other loopholes: The proposed assault weapons ban proposed by Senator Dianne Feinstein, for example, "would exempt 900 weapons. And that's the least of the loopholes. Even the guns that are banned can be made legal with simple, minor modifications."
• Ammunition can also be regulated.
• "Hollow-point bullets" (and plastic-tipped rifle bullets) "are designed to increase in diameter once within the target, thus maximizing tissue damage and blood loss or shock, and to remain inside the target, thereby transferring all of its kinetic energy to that target."
• Although the Hague Convention of 1899 prohibited expanding or flattening ammunition in international warfare, "hollow-point bullets are one of the most common types of civilian and police ammunition, due largely to the reduced risk of bystanders being hit by over-penetrating or ricocheted bullets, and the increased speed of incapacitation."
• The "AR-15-style" semi-automatic rifle used by the Sandy Hook Elementary, Portland mall and Aurora movie theater shooters is a civilian model based on the military M16. (Below is a customized "Hello Kitty" version.)
• The main weapon used in Connecticut was described as a "Bushmaster .223," but many companies manufacture AR-15 weapons, including Colt, DPMS, Land Warfare Resources Corporation, Remington, Rock River, Sabre Defence, Sig Sauer, Smith & Wesson...
• The Bushmaster AR-15, sold at Walmart among other retailers, is reportedly "the most popular assault weapon in America."
• A brief history of "major shooting incidents" in the USA, 1999-2012.
• By the numbers: Guns in America.
A Bushmaster ad in Maxim magazine:
]]>At the heart of Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln" is a quiet scene between President Abraham Lincoln (Daniel Day-Lewis) and two young men, Samuel Beckwith (Adam Driver) and David Homer Bates (Drew Sease), in an otherwise empty telegraph cipher office. Lincoln has to make a crucial decision: Does he consider a peace proposal from a Confederate delegation on its way to Washington, and thus perhaps immediately end the bloody Civil War that has claimed the lives of more than half a million Americans, knowing that it would doom his attempt to pass the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, officially banning slavery in the United States? Or does he try to legally solidify and extend his Emancipation Proclamation by getting the Thirteenth Amendment passed during a narrow window of opportunity (during the lame duck session of Congress between his re-election and second inauguration) at the cost of extending the war?
Invoking language from the Declaration of Independence ("We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal..."), Lincoln thinks out loud, asking the young men philosophical questions and telling a story about... geometry. The movie, written by Tony Kushner ("Munich," "Angels in America") and "based in part" on the nonfiction book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin (you can view/download .pdf of script here -- I highly recommend reading it after you've seen the movie), achieves an exquisite balance of language and imagery:
LINCOLN Euclid's first common notion is this: "Things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other."
Homer doesn't get it; neither does Sam.
LINCOLN (CONT'D) That's a rule of mathematical reasoning. It's true because it works; has done and always will do. In his book, Euclid says this is "self-evident."
(a beat)
D'you see? There it is, even in that two-thousand year old book of mechanical law: it is a self- evident truth that things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other. We begin with equality. That's the origin, isn't it? That balance, that's fairness, that's justice.
The term "triangulation," as it is used in politics, is said to be a dirty word, a cynical tactic. But in this case, as one modern strategist phrased it, "isn't about compromising on principles or policies, but about preempting conservative wedge issues by addressing them through progressive policies" -- or, finding a way to accomplish your goals without alienating one side or another, through careful use of language and limits. This may involve strategic tradeoffs or compromises on short-term goals in order to position yourself to accomplish greater ones in the future. Think about the practical, empirical wisdom in those words: It's true because it works.
"Lincoln" weaves images of such triangulation through the entire film. (Spoilers.) It's even there in the visual positioning of the three men in the telegraph room, and in the last sentence of the speech above: balance, fairness, justice. It's there in the House of Representatives, with the Lincoln Republicans on one side of the chamber, the opposition Democrats on the other and the Speaker (or the member holding the floor) at the front, moderating between them. At times, the apex of the triangle is reversed, shifted to a point in the balcony at the rear of the hall, where Mrs. Lincoln (Sally Field) or various Negro citizens might be witnessing the historic proceedings.
And Lincoln must emotionally triangulate between his son Robert (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who wants to join the Union army, and his wife, who fears losing another son. If Robert were to die, she says, "How would I ever forgive you?" And should they forbid him to enlist, Lincoln says, "You imagine Robert will forgive us if we continue to stifle his very natural ambition?"
The movie is essentially about the "political genius" behind the party of Lincoln's maneuvering to get the Thirteenth Amendment through the House. Among the methods employed are barters, bribes, bait, betrayal, backpedaling and blackmail -- or, more or less, tactics redolent of those things. As staunch abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones) phrases it: "The greatest measure of the Nineteenth Century. Passed by corruption, aided and abetted by the purest man in America."
So, is "Lincoln" simply an endorsement of the argument that the end justifies the means? No, it's not that simple. Stevens, for example, is a lifelong advocate of full citizenship rights for black Americans, yet Lincoln asks that he temper his remarks before the House "so as not to frighten our conservative friends?" The conservatives fear that banning slavery is the first step down the proverbial slippery slope, leading to enfranchisement not only for Negro males but -- horror of horror! -- for women! (Sure enough, black men got the right to vote with the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870 -- though Jim Crow laws preventing them from voting in some states were not officially abolished until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Women did not obtain suffrage until the ratification of the Nineteeth Amendment in 1920.)
In the interest in winning the short-term battle, so that the greater ones can be fought another day, Stevens winds up compromising his own views, repeating the carefully worded statement when the Democrats attempt to get him to declare his belief in "full equality": "I don't hold with equality in all things only with equality before the law and nothing more." At least he gets a triumphant rhetorical victory when he turns the tables on his interrogator:
How can I hold that all men are created equal, when here before me stands stinking the moral carcass of the gentleman from Ohio, proof that some men are inferior, endowed by their Maker with dim wits impermeable to reason with cold pallid slime in their veins instead of hot red blood! You are more reptile than man, George, so low and flat that the foot of man is incapable of crushing you! [...]
Yet even you, Pendleton, who should have been gibbetted for treason long before today, even worthless unworthy you ought to be treated equally before the law!
Afterwards, Stevens -- visibly depleted by the compromise he's been forced to make, is accosted by abolitionist colleague Asa Vintner Litton (Steven Spinella), who shames him for denying Negro equality: "Have you lost your very soul, Mr. Stevens? Is there nothing you won't say?" Stevens responds in a rock-solid, measured tone: "I want the amendment to pass. So that the Constitution's first and only mention of slavery is its absolute prohibition. For this amendment, for which I have worked all of my life and for which countless colored men and women have fought and died and now hundreds of thousands of soldiers -- no, sir, no, it seems there is very nearly nothing I won't say."
There's a time to speak out, and there's a time to hold your tongue in service of a larger strategy, greater goals. In one of the movie's most beautiful speeches (delivered with a warmth and subtlety I did not expect from an actor as bombastic as Day-Lewis), Lincoln describes his constitutional predicament and tells a story about having to navigate through several contingencies and to make arguments he did not believe in so that he could affirm greater principles that he did, as when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation:
LINCOLN
... I decided that the Constitution gives me war powers, but no one knows just exactly what those powers are. Some say they don't exist. I don't know. I decided I needed them to exist to uphold my oath to protect the Constitution, which I decided meant that I could take the rebels' slaves from 'em as property confiscated in war. That might recommend to suspicion that I agree with the rebs that their slaves are property in the first place. Of course I don't, never have, I'm glad to see any man free, and if calling a man property, or war contraband, does the trick... Why I caught at the opportunity.
Now here's where it gets truly slippery. I use the law allowing for the seizure of property in a war knowing it applies only to the property of governments and citizens of belligerent nations. But the South ain't a nation, that's why I can't negotiate with 'em. So if in fact the Negroes are property according to law, have I the right to take the rebels' property from 'em, if I insist they're rebels only, and not citizens of a belligerent country? And slipperier still: I maintain it ain't our actual Southern states in rebellion, but only the rebels living in those states, the laws of which states remain in force. The laws of which states remain in force. That means, that since it's states' laws that determine whether Negroes can be sold as slaves, as property -- the Federal government doesn't have a say in that, least not yet --
a glance at Seward, then:
-- then Negroes in those states are slaves, hence property, hence my war powers allow me to confiscate 'em as such. So I confiscated 'em. But if I'm a respecter of states' laws, how then can I legally free 'em with my Proclamation, as I done, unless I'm cancelling states' laws? I felt the war demanded it; my oath demanded it; I felt right with myself; and I hoped it was legal to do it, I'm hoping still.
He looks around the table. Everyone's listening.
Two years ago I proclaimed these people emancipated -- "then, thenceforward and forever free." But let's say the courts decide I had no authority to do it. They might well decide that. Say there's no amendment abolishing slavery. Say it's after the war, and I can no longer use my war powers to just ignore the courts' decisions, like I sometimes felt I had to do. Might those people I freed be ordered back into slavery? That's why I'd like to get the Thirteenth Amendment through the House, and on its way to ratification by the states, wrap the whole slavery thing up, forever and aye. As soon as I'm able. Now. End of this month. And I'd like you to stand behind me. Like my cabinet's most always done.
A moment's silence, broken by a sharp laugh from Seward.
LINCOLN (CONT'D) As the preacher said, I could write shorter sermons but once I start I get too lazy to stop.
There's the triangulation motif again -- using the logic of indirection, not unlike the ways a magician might use skillful distraction to pull off a little sleight-of-hand. It's introduced in the opening scene (after a brief montage of filthy, bloody battle), which finds Lincoln talking with two black Union soldiers, Private Harold Green (Colman Domingo) and Corporal Ira Clark (David Oyelowo)-- the former personable and polite, the latter making full use of the opportunity to push the President for greater equality beginning with equal pay for colored soldiers, then Negro commissioned officers and, maybe in a hundred years, the vote. Lincoln attempts to chart a course between them, to keep the conversation light and convivial by making jokes about his haircut, while acknowledging his awareness that the Union still has a long way to go with civil rights.
Suddenly, the triangle expands as a pair of nervous white soldiers (Lukas Haas and Dane DeHaan) appear on the other side of Lincoln and nervously begin trying to outdo each other in reciting the Gettysburg Address. Corporal Clark concludes the scene, and the conversation, by reciting the rest of the Gettysburg Address as he walks off to rejoin his regiment, letting Lincoln know just how closely he holds those ideals to his heart.
A few more things about "Lincoln":
I can't think of another movie that looks quite like this -- the interiors in cold, dark shades of blue and green, brown and black; hints of sepia in the pale lamplight and wintery, filtered sunlight. These spaces where backroom deals are plotted and struck are shrouded in smoke and shadows. The public arena of the House chamber is illuminated by the light of day, but the hidden agendas at play are no less murky.
Finally, I want to tip my stovepipe hat to Daniel Day-Lewis for what I believe is his finest performance since "My Left Foot" -- which, I think, was the first time I saw him. I have not been a fan of his calculating, showboating, "Look-at-me-I'm-acting!" style (like Olivier, another "great British actor," , but here I felt he was completely immersed in the character. For once, I forgot I was watching DDL, and really felt like I was in the presence of Abraham Lincoln. (Hey, is this what we were supposed to feel in Disneyland's audio-animatronic "Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln"?) Seriously, I think it's a great performance -- tender, sad, warm, ferocious. But that's the character of the man he's playing. It's a breakthrough for the actor, I think -- like when Meryl Streep finally warmed up in "Silkwood." I hope Mr. Day-Lewis wins some prestigious awards for his work in this picture.
]]>First off, I agree with Angus T. Jones -- well, about one thing, at least. The child actor of whose existence I hadn't been aware until a few days ago said on digital video that he was employed on a lousy sitcom that was basically "filth." Who's going to argue? Really, is he wrong? Have you ever seen Two and a Half Men? (I admit I've only witnessed bits and pieces, but that was enough to get the tenor of the show. And I knew there was a "half" involved -- the title tells me so -- but I didn't know Jones was it.) So, the young man says this:
"Jake from Two and a Half Men means nothing. He is a non-existent character. If you watch Two and a Half Men, please stop watching Two and a Half Men. I'm on Two and a Half Men and I don't want to be on it. [...]
"Please stop watching. Please stop filling your head with filth, please. People say it's entertainment ... the fact that it's entertainment ... Do some research on the effect of television on your brain and you'll have a decision to make."
I don't know what "research" he's referring to specifically, but if exposure to Two and a Half Men lowers your standards for "entertainment," then perhaps that's all the evidence of brain damage we need.
But why is anybody surprised that someone should say this? Theoretically because: 1) this guy on the show, and most actors (and above-the-line staff, like writers and directors) aren't supposed to complain that the show they're working on is terrible, because they're earning a lot of money for producing this crap ($350,000 per episode for Jones); if he were underpaid, it might be a different story -- but he could probably get out if his contract and quit if he really wanted to, like Chevy Chase on Community; 2) it's extremely ungracious to the people he works with, many of whom may be in the same position he is; and 3) he's involved with some purportedly Seventh-Day Adventist sect/cult called the Forerunner Chronicles, for/with whom he made the video in which he said what he said about "Two and a Half Men."
But c'mon, all he said was the obvious, that it's a raunchy, lowball sitcom (like so many network and cable shows, past and present). The clips I've linked to in the text here speak for themselves. Isn't the "filth" the point of the show, the reason it exists and why people watch it? I doubt it's for the rich characterizations, moving stories or thought-provoking themes. Or the brilliant comedy writing. (Subjects are pretty much limited to: poop, farts, urine, breasts, butts, penises, vaginas, sex, booze, drugs.)
So, this is another example of the media making a big false "controversy" about somebody saying something that's been patently obvious to everyone for years. But at least Jones' remarks weren't misrepresented in headlines and he was quoted accurately. We've seen how often that's not the case in recent months. Like, for example, when the Fox/GOP™ took President Obama's "You didn't build that" statement wildly out of context and twisted its meaning into something it clearly wasn't. (But then, Al Gore didn't say he invented the Internet and Bogart didn't say, "Play it again, Sam," either. Those memes have entered popular culture, but it's easy to show beyond all doubt that they're misquotations.) What Obama actually said, in part of a speech about what government contributes to our way of life, was:
"Look, if you've been successful, you didn't get there on your own. You didn't get there on your own. I'm always struck by people who think, 'Well, it must be because I was just so smart.' There are a lot of smart people out there. 'It must be because I worked harder than everybody else.' Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.
"If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business -- you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the internet. The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don't do on our own."
Attempts to distort this one were laughably indefensible -- limited to repeating, "If you've got a business -- you didn't build that." Likewise, some SuperPAC-funded pro-Obama ads misrepresented Mitt Romney's statement, "I'm not concerned about the very poor." In context, what he said was:
I'm in this race 'cause I care about Americans. I'm not concerned about the very poor; we have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I'll fix it. I'm not concerned about the very rich, they're doing just fine. I'm concerned about the very heart of America -- the 90, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling and I'll continue to take that message across the nation."
So, he was proclaiming that he was focusing his efforts on neither the very rich nor the very poor, but on the majority of Americans in-between. You might question whether his proposals actually reflected that concern, but you can't deny what he, in fact, said. (He may have been sneaky enough to repeatedly misrepresent his own positions on national television, and to say unguarded things to an audience of private donors about " the 47 percent" -- a statement that was, itself, untrue -- but he wasn't so stupid that he'd simply announce "I don't care about poor people" in public during a presidential campaign.)
And then, last week, I saw variations of this headline all over the Internet: "Alan Simpson: I hope Grover Norquist drowns in the bathtub." Out of the blue, it seems like a wacky thing to say. Salon's kicker was, "In a surreal 'Hardball' interview, the former senator makes the wildest threat yet against the anti-tax zealot." But there was nothing "wild" or "surreal" about it. It was obviously a joke, playing off of Norquist's own infamous 2004 comment, "I'm not in favor of abolishing the government. I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." So, Simpson pays attention to language and metaphor and idiot reporters don't get that he wasn't really advocating murder? Even Chris Matthews laughed when Simpson said it:
Simpson: "So how do you deal with guys who came to stop government, or Grover [Norquist] wandering the earth in his white robe saying he wants to drown government in the bathtub? I hope he slips in there with it. We'll put some soap in the tub."Matthews: I'm with you on the full metaphor."
I can even (kind of) understand where Indiana state treasurer Richard Mourdock was coming from when he said that a pregnancy -- no matter what the circumstances -- is a "gift from God." I think he's dead wrong, and he expressed himself badly, but I'm glad he stated what he believes so voters could make an informed decision about whether they wanted him representing them in the Senate. (They didn't. I'm glad he lost, but I don't think his defeat was "a gift from god," either.) What the guy said was:
"The only exception I have to have an abortion is in that case of the life of the mother. I just struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize: Life is that gift from God that I think even if life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen."
And that's just what you'd expect someone who believes that life is god-given and thus begins at conception to believe. It was an insensitive thing to say and he deserved to be criticized (we make laws to protect human society, not to channel somebody's religious notion of "god's will"), but he did not say that rape (which he called a "horrible situation") was "god's will." He said he believed the creation of life was "god's will." And if you think a zygote or a blastocyst or a fetus has a "right to life," and that things happen as a result of "god's will," then there you are. (I'm always curious about those who think god oversees everything, and intervenes to perform "miracles," don't hold god responsible for everyday misery, atrocities and catastrophes. I also find it weird that those who claim they want less "government intrusion" into their lives are so often the same ones who want to curtail individual rights and liberties by legislating more government intrusion into our bodies, our homes, our relationships and private lives.)
Mourdock said later:
"God creates life, and that was my point. God does not want rape, and by no means was I suggesting that He does. Rape is a horrible thing, and for anyone to twist my words otherwise is absurd and sick."
So, criticize the dude for what he actually said, not for something you know he never intended in the first place. Men -- especially old, white Republican men -- probably shouldn't even be allowed to talk about rape or abortion because they can't possibly know what they're talking about. But, no, I do not advocate the introduction of legislation to that effect, or to force my view of morality on others. (That's where the idea of "freedom of choice" comes in.)
Next, there's the case of Jamie Foxx at the Soul Train Awards saying that Barack Obama was "our lord and savior." But is that really what he said? Because even if he was calling Obama "our lord and savior," did anybody think he really meant that? (Go ahead and get mad at him for "blasphemy," for rhetorically equating a politician with Jesus, but the meaning of spoken language isn't limited to the words themselves.) Watch the abridged clip:
First he repeats "It's like church over here. It's like church in here." Which leads him into making a list of entities to whom he wants to give thanks: "First of all, give an honor to god" (or, possibly, "First of all, giving honor to god"). Pause, "and our lord and savior," which is a term many Christians use to refer to Jesus as the son of god. And then he slides immediately into, "Barack Obama! [pause] Barack Obama!" Notice that the inflection goes up with the last syllable, as if it's something he's just remembered (as in: "Oh, that's right, we won the election! Let's hear it for Barack Obama!"), and he repeats Obama's name to elicit more cheers from the crowd. The way I hear it (especially due to the fact that he's making a list, and the tone in which he says, and repeats, "Barack Obama" -- but not "our lord and savior, Barack Obama"), "our lord and savior" and "Barack Obama" were the second and third items on his improvised list and he slurred them together in his delivery: "It's like church in here! First of all, give an honor to god, and our lord and savior -- [and] Barack Obama!"
Maybe not, but given the source (a celebrity known primarily as a comic performer) and the context (a televised awards show, for which he was brought in to introduce other celebrities and pump up the crowd), I'm not inclined to take those words at face value. But I haven't seen anyone acknowledge that it's even possible to hear what he said as anything something other than what the looney "Obama is the/an antichrist" hatemongers are claiming -- that he sincerely meant that the recently re-elected President of the United States was also an honest-to-god messiah.
Foxx eventually told Entertainment Tonight:
"I'm a comic. Sometimes I think people get a little too tight. And, it's getting a little tougher for us comedians. Some people take it and want to make a huge story out of it, but it's a joke."
(ET's transcription has an "and" inserted after "comic" and a "because" inserted after "comedians," again demonstrating how Foxx, like many people, tends to leave out transitional words and phrases when he talks.) So, what exactly was the joke? A comedian's parody of pompous award-show acceptance speeches that inevitably thank god and Jesus? A joke about Soul Train as church? A joke about the election results? A joke about the crazy expectations some people had for Obama? A joke about recent scandals over paintings portraying Obama as Jesus? A joke about right-wing psychopaths who call Obama the antichrist? I don't know. And I really don't care -- but I'm puzzled that anybody would try to make it into such a big deal.
Dumb stuff happens all the time. Sure, that was a funny typo in Romney's iPhone campaign app: "A BETTER AMERCIA." But that's all it was. A typo.
]]>Writer-director-producer David Simon (creator of "The Wire," "Generation Kill," "Treme") has a piece at Salon headlined: "Media's sex obsession is dangerous, destructive," in which he eviscerates Roger Simon (no relation) for his Politico column, "Gen. David Petraeus is dumb, she's dumber." And The Week offers a round-up of trashy "journalistic" misbehavior, " The David Petraeus affair: Why the media's coverage is sexist." I don't know. "Sexist" seems like an understatement. Puerile, snotty, crass, raunchy, snide, scary, onanistic, stupid, instructive, pointless -- it's all those things, too. At the very least.
While some have focused on their own lurid speculation about covert sexcapades (some punning off the unfortunate title of Paula Broadwell's "semi-authorized biography" of her mentor/lover, All In*), R. Simon said Petraeus "never should have resigned as director of the Central Intelligence Agency because he was involved in a sex scandal," but because "If he were any more dimwitted, you would have had to water him." As you can probably tell from the tone of that remark, he doesn't take the "scandal" itself very seriously: "No, not because he committed adultery. Adultery is commonplace in our society. It may someday be mandatory."
D. Simon says the media's fixation on the sex lives of the rich and famous is ruinous, to journalism and to society as a whole:
David Petraeus has had sex outside his marriage, as have many men and many women. Human sexuality and compulsion are not in any way related to intelligence. It's not that the dumb or powerful are more prone to fucking around, or that the intelligent and powerless do it to any greater degree. It's that men in general are hopelessly and permanently prone to contemplate sex and furtive romance and, sometimes, to act on it. The reasons they do so are crude, ordinary and inevitable. Women are also hopelessly and permanently prone to contemplate furtive romance and sex -- and yes, I changed the order, I know -- and the reasons they do so are only marginally less crude, ordinary and inevitable.
I think Simon and Simon are both right in some respects, and both wrong in others. They seem to agree that the real story here, if there is one (besides that the head of the CIA has resigned for misconduct), is not about sex. Yes, they were inexcusably "dumb" (as in foolish, reckless, irresponsible) to write explicit messages to each other in electronic form. And, yes, that poor judgment (as your vice principal used to say) has consequences. I don't care if somebody has an affair -- every marriage has its own dynamics and it's none of my business -- but why would you go online and document it? You couldn't just save it for in-person encounters?
If Petraeus gave Broadwell access to classified information she wasn't cleared to see, it doesn't matter what their relationship was: It's not kosher. Same as if he had told his wife. Or his barber. Or an al-Qaeda operative. Or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. All of those are equally bad, and it's conceivable that the repercussions could have been the same -- somewhere between nothing and catastrophe. At first, the FBI (OK, that's a whole other dimension) said there was no indication that Petraeus had shared state secrets, but now there are reports that Broadwell's computer(s) contained some.
The way I look at it, there are only two other important aspects to this whole affair, and they both have to do with the (mis-)use of commonplace technology:
1) Petraeus and Broadwell used the Drafts folder of a joint Gmail account to exchange sexually explicit messages. They were aware enough to want to hide what they were doing by not actually sending e-mails that could be traced, but apparently naïve enough not to realize that this trick is known to terrorists and teenagers the world over. And, well, one of the parties involved is the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, which means he has great responsibilities to the government and the public. As somebody entrusted with the nation's most closely guarded secrets, the risks and consequences of illicit activity on his part are multiplied exponentially. I'd be curious to know if his professional position and reputation made them feel less vulnerable -- or more vulnerable. Or were they in some particularly dangerous form of denial?
2) Broadwell harassed another woman (whom she is said to have jealously imagined was a sexual threat and rival) and used an e-mail account she shared with her husband to threaten her to stay away from Petraeus, around the same time that Broadwell and Petreaus were breaking up their relationship.
David Simon sees the story as a commonplace tale of adultery among the (relatively) rich and famous, and excoriates the hypocrisy of the press coverage:
I'm neither an admirer nor detractor of Gen. Petraeus. But I am most definitely a detractor of what journalism has become in this country, of what passes for the qualitative analysis of our society and its problems. And I've paid enough attention to the human condition to no longer take seriously the notion that anyone who lets penis or vagina rub against the wrong person, who is indiscreet in doing so, and who then tells the truth about it when confronted by an FBI agent is unfit for either citizenship or public service. I certainly know enough about the human condition to know that all kinds of people -- smart and dumb, powerful and powerless -- are capable of finding themselves in such a circumstance and shaking their heads at just how far they strayed, at just how indiscreet they were in their very ordinary, human hunger, and how they have hurt those closest to them. Sex, done right, is some powerful shit. And when Americans begin to accept the human condition for what it is rather than an opportunity to jeer at the other fellow for getting caught, then we will be, if nothing else, a little bit more grown up....
We've caught some of the smartest and most committed public men and women with their pants at their ankles. Time and again, we've had our fun. We've roundly mocked them for the very weaknesses that are so utterly our own.
I don't disagree, but I also don't think it can be made that simple. These aren't movie actors. They're two consenting adults with high security clearances and military intelligence experience who tried to hide their illicit behavior, but used fairly easily traceable electronic means to do it. That, to me, is just weird. How people use technology, in life and in movies, as extensions and expressions of themselves is something that fascinates me. We spend more time interacting with luminous rectangles than just about anything else, and I hate it when I see movies, or read news stories, that fail to appreciate how the commonplace technology we're all familiar with is actually used by human beings.
Unless you are reading this in a printout (from a computer), you are probably reading it on a glowing screen of some sort. As they used to say down on Avenue Q, "The Internet is for Porn" -- not just for the communication of information and ideas, but for sexuality, and the correspondence between Petraeus and Broadwell was described as "sexually explicit." What beggars belief is not that two people who knew better had an affair (even though Patreus was subject to the Personal Responsibility Program for officials with "pre-nuclear delegation" responsibilities), it's that they used the Internet to conduct (and thus record) it.
D. Simon writes, "It would be one thing if this were a scandal that could have compromised the CIA or American intelligence, if this were some honey trap set by foreign entities." But that's just the thing: It could very well have been. (It might still turn out that security was compromised.) The point is, they didn't have control over, and couldn't have foreseen, the possible consequences. Nobody's accusing anyone of treason or espionage, but who's to say it couldn't have been "some honey trap set by foreign entities" -- or an attempted blackmail scheme or something else out of a spy movie? Maybe one or both of them knew they weren't risking intelligence secrets, but they obviously knew they were taking risks, engaging in behavior they feared could be exposed and that they tried to keep secret. That seems to me more germane, and more egregious, than the adultery itself. It wasn't about "misplacing [a] penis," in D. Simon phrase; it was about taking risks that jeopardized their reputations, and thus the public trust.
That's not OK. Petraeus knew that, and knew he had to resign. It wasn't for his professional behavior, but it was for his unprofessional behavior. That doesn't necessarily make him an evil man, or a moron, or a laughingstock, or a retroactive failure in his military career (he retired from the Army in 2011).
Pehaps, as Andrew Leonard writes, also in Salon:
... there's another, more important lesson to be gleaned from this tale of a biographer run amok. Broadwell's debacle confirms something that some privacy experts have been warning about for years: Government surveillance of ordinary citizens is now cheaper and easier than ever before. Without needing to go before a judge, the government can gather vast amounts of information about us with minimal expenditure of manpower. We used to be able to count on a certain amount of privacy protection simply because invading our privacy was hard work. That is no longer the case. Our always-on, Internet-connected, cellphone-enabled lives are an open door to Big Brother. Just ask Paula Broadwell.
On CBS's "Face the Nation," old Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan said, "This feels a little 'Homeland,' almost. And I just have to ask why do we have to lose him [Petraeus] over this? That actually makes no sense." I wish someone had asked her what she meant by the "Homeland" comparison. (Jon Stewart insisted it was more like "Melrose Place.") The first season of "Homeland" was about a mentally ill CIA agent (Claire Danes) who becomes romantically obsessed with a POW hero (Damian Lewis) whom she also suspects is a sleeper terrorist. So, in Noonan's formulation, which one is who? Is Broadwell the crazy woman or the terrorist? Is Petraeus the CIA agent or the former POW? Or does it even matter? Everything on our screens is either fiction or reality TV, which is mostly fictional.
_ _ _ _ _
* I feel strongly that the target of a joke, and the approach it takes to that target, determines whether it's funny, which is why I always want to know why somebody laughs. Two people can find something "funny" for entirely different reasons. There was a crude mock-up of Broadwell's biography cover which you would most likely have never seen ("All Up In My Snatch" -- and I don't know if it was created before or after the scandal broke) had an editor not used a faked cover he found on the Internet without noticing it had been altered. Story here. Undoubtedly, there are twerps who think the cover itself is actually funny (instead of just vulgar and obvious). What I find mildly amusing is that such a patently offensive thing got past the "gatekeepers" and made it onto the air. The joke, if there is one, is on the TV station, not Broadwell or Petraeus.
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