Doing Harm for the Sake of Entertainment?

With all the buzz filling the media over James Cameron's new film, Avatar, I found Libby Purves' piece for the London Telegraph a pleasure to read. Basically, she decided to have it out with Cameron for all the distortions perpetrated by Titanic in the name of better entertainment for his designated demographic of ten-year-old girls:

Titanic traduced the British characters, and falsified the treatment of third-class passengers to score points. It invented a working-class hero for Leonardo DiCaprio to play, but ignored the real worker-heroes, the engineers who kept stoking the boilers to run the pumps and give the rest a chance, even when they must have known they themselves would die. Worst of all, it libelled First Officer William McMaster Murdoch. In Cameron's version, he is a posh git who takes a bribe, shoots a passenger, panics, and commits suicide. In reality, he gave his lifejacket away, drowned, and has a memorial in his home town of Dalbeattie.

The film company had to admit its wicked slur and contribute $8,000 to a prize fund in his name. But the popcorn-munching Kate Winslet groupies won't know that.

I don't care how much money it made: that film stank. I'm glad Mr Cameron has moved on to imaginary blue-faced computer-game critters. At least he can't do them any harm.

Purves' punch line is probably correct. It is hard to imagine Avatar doing anything that would bring harm to virtual denizens of a virtual world. However, that is not necessarily the scope she should be considering. Hollywood has built up a rather impressive track record in creating misconceptions about computers, what they do, what people who use them do, and what people who program them do. I doubt that any advance material will help us forecast whether or not Avatar will offer up a new batch of such misconceptions. After all, establishing too secure a sense of reality might erode its box office potential!

Given that ignorance of history is now part of our culture, it is unclear whether Purves wanted to take Cameron to task for causing that ignorance or simply exploiting it. Avatar, on the other hand, will have an impact on how we view the present, regardless of how much we choose to neglect the past. The funny thing about Titanic is that I have no trouble living in a world in which I can assume it never existed; but, given the impact the Internet has on most of our lives, awareness of Avatar may turn out to be both more likely and more hazardous.

Holy [your noun here]!

Having worked as a dance critic in the world of print journalism, I know that I never had the luxury of choosing my own headline; and I fondly remember one editor who seemed to enjoy the game of coming up with something that would make me wince (usually in a good-humored way). I suspect that editors for the few remaining print outlets in this country are having a field day (if not a last hurrah) coming up with headlines for reviews of the opening of Angels & Demons; but that is only fair when it seems as if the critics themselves are having a field day, too. It is as if the quality of critical writing has to rise the occasion of compensating for the mediocrity of the subject matter.

We thus have an interesting comparison between the treatment this film has received from The New York Times and SF Weekly. A. O. Scott was granted the honor of reviewing the film for the Times; and his editor decided to give him the headline, "Holy Mystery!" SF Weekly, on the other hand, true to their reputation as an "alternative" (read "free") newspaper felt that "Holy Crap" was more appropriate, although ironically this was not the headline that graced the Web-based version of their review. (This left me trying to remember what headline they had used for their review of El baño del Papa.) As far as the review itself was concerned, Ella Taylor decided to have fun with Robert Langdon (the role played by Tom Hanks), referring to him as "ace symbologist" and later trying to establish his reputation among those in the real world who know a thing or two about symbols:

The incumbent pope has died, his tongue has turned suspiciously black, and four of the extremely red cardinals most likely to succeed him have been abducted for medieval branding and/or burning by a wild-eyed predator named the Assassin (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), whose most attractive quality is that, unlike the mad albino Paul Bettany in Da Vinci, he isn't into mortifying his own flesh. His rimless glasses bespeak a man of intellect, and Langdon, tossing off deconstructed signifiers like Roland Barthes on steroids, strongly suspects him of membership in the Illuminati, a secret society with Galileo among its past members, whose fondness for science has drawn the ire of the Catholic Church for hundreds of years.

Scott, however, is less interested in semiotics and more occupied with the plight of the audience. So he reserves his best language for addressing that plight:

The only people likely to be offended by “Angels & Demons” are those who persist in their adherence to the fading dogma that popular entertainment should earn its acclaim through excellence and originality.

All this persiflage reminds me of a recent post in which I quoted Vladimir Nabokov's description of reading Dostoevsky as "a mischievous but very healthy pleasure, as you stamp and groan through a second-rate book which has been awarded a prize." Whether or not Angels & Demons wins any prizes, it is clear that both Scott and Taylor (which happen to be parallel streets in San Francisco) both appreciate and enjoy Nabokov's "mischievous but very healthy please;" and the rest of us should enjoy their exercise of that pleasure at the expense of what Taylor called "the Dan Brown franchise!"

The BBC Gives THE WIRE Some Respect

Following the British press has often left me with the feeling that The Wire had a stronger support base in England than it had in the United States. This was just affirmed by a "feature piece" on the Telegraph Web site reporting that "BBC Two is now showing all 60 episodes nightly, Monday to Friday, starting tonight." I like to think of this as "literary television;" and it reminds me of when the Philadelphia PBS station ran the episodes of The Forsyte Saga nightly and totally hooked me into the unfolding drama with an intensity that is sorely lacking in the stuff now being obtained for Masterpiece Theatre (which seems to have become Masterpiece Classic, under a more general Masterpiece rubric, without my noticing). I do not hesitate to call The Wire "literary," because this is precisely the stance that co-creator David Simon wanted to take:

Our models are the big Russian novels. We’re trying to do with modern-day Baltimore what Balzac did with Paris, or Dickens with London.

Back in the day the BBC did precisely this kind of number of War and Peace; and that particular instance of "literary television" sustained me through several months of the time I spent working in Israel.

Simon has never been shy about why the general public never followed most of the critics in getting hooked on The Wire:

The average Emmy voter has the attention span of a gnat.

Vladimir Nabokov had chosen somewhat more elegant language when he lectured about reading Dostoevsky as "a mischievous but very healthy pleasure, as you stamp and groan through a second-rate book which has been awarded a prize" (a pleasure which I had experienced at its greatest when I had to write a review of Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach); but Simon basically hit the nail on the head. Babylon 5 fought the same battle against viewer attention span, and not too long ago my wife and I indulged in the complete DVD collection to give the entire narrative the close reading it deserved. We plan to do the same for The Wire, now that we have all the episodes on DVD.

Meanwhile, the attention span problem remains with us. Brian Lowry's initial review of Dollhouse for Variety was politely dismissive at best, concluding that it was difficult to rate the show on the basis of its first two episodes. Well, Brian, would you have rated War and Peace at all, if you had never gotten any further than Anna Pavlovna's party? Would you have bailed on Proust before he dipped that madeleine in his tea? Lowry seemed willing to grant that the Dollhouse narrative was complex, but he felt a need to pass judgment on the "authenticity" of that complexity by summoning connotations of pretension while that script was still unfolding its characters and their motives at a pace that would not have troubled either Tolstoy or Proust.

Reading a narrative is not just a matter of recognizing the plot line and following it. It is also a matter of reflecting on where the plot is going and how other factors, such as the settings and the characters, contribute to the course of that plot. "Literary television" played out in episodes supports such reflection simply by virtue of the temporal gaps between the episodes, just as we reflect on where Tolstoy or Proust is taking us each time we put down the book we are reading. I grant Simon his sarcasm and recognize that "literary television" will never acquire the "competitive numbers" that determine success in what Edward Jay Epstein calls "the new logic of money and power in Hollywood;" but I am glad that there are production organizations like HBO that are still willing to satisfy the needs of those of us who never seem to be satisfied with anything less than "literary."

Better Late than Never

Almost exactly a year and a month ago, I wrote a post entitled "The Best Movie We May Never See," based on a review I had read through my Variety RSS feed. The topic of this post was The Betrayal (Nerakhoon), a joint project directed and written by Ellen Kuras and Thavisouk Phrasavath. It is probably worth reproducing what the Variety review wrote about Phrasavath:

Back in Laos, Phrasavath's father had worked for the CIA choosing targets inside the country for U.S. bombing runs. Following the fall of the CIA-backed Royal Lao Army to the Communist Pathet Lao in 1975, the Phrasavaths became personae non grata, with Thavi's father being shipped off to a re-education camp and his mother fleeing the country with eight of her 10 children in tow.

After a brief period in Thailand, the family applies for asylum in the U.S. and lands on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, where their vision of a gold-paved promised land quickly gives way to the harsh realities of poverty, street gangs and a cramped tenement apartment shared with a Cambodian family of six.

In the time since I wrote my post, the film received an Oscar nomination for best documentary; and it is now finally ready for theatrical release, having opened in both San Francisco and Berkeley yesterday. Here is how Jonathan Curiel introduced his review in yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle:

There are a smattering of commercially successful films - feature or documentary - that can truly be called riveting works of humanism. Wim Wenders' "Wings of Desire" and Errol Morris' "The Fog of War" are two that come to mind. They may soon be joined by "The Betrayal (Nerakhoon)," which was an Oscar nominee for best documentary and is now, in theatrical release, making its way across the United States.

As I previously wrote, this project interested me for two reasons. First of all, living in Singapore provided me with a wealth of opportunities to understand the context and impact of the Vietnam War far better than I could from any of the books and films (both documentary and fictitious) that emerged from that period of American history. Secondly, and more specifically, it was clear from the Variety account that, while this film was a documentary, it was also very much a narrative about consequences, that concept that I keep exploring but seems to be in the blind spot of contemporary American culture. My guess is that the theatrical run for this film will be neither long nor profitable, but hopefully it will serve as a precursor to distribution through DVD and cable. At least it is no longer consigned to that limbo that the "logic of money and power in Hollywood" usually provides for such films.

Treating IN TREATMENT

The new HBO series In Treatment was barely out of the gate when Huffington Post blogger Adam Baer was already declaring its failure. This is certainly consistent with the way things work under what Edward Jay Epstein has called "The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood." Under this logic any film that does not command the lead in box-office revenues during its opening weekend is automatically declared a failure; and plans are immediately engaged to recoup expenses through international and DVD distribution. So, confronted with a new series in which the episodes play out every week-night in half-hour doses, Baer seemed more interested in the scheduling as a strategy for HBO to get its viewers back "on the hook" than he was in what viewers would actually be watching. His bottom line came down to this:

The one thing I didn't like about it as a formal experiment is that observing just one session of a patient with one therapist at a time isn't satisfying.

Now I certainly think it is fair to call In Treatment an experiment (even if it happens to be an experiment that has already been run in Israel) and just as fair to recognize that not all experiments succeed. However, before declaring failure, we should first step back and recognize what the experiment is and why it is, at the very least, so challenging.

As I see it, the problem comes down to this: We pretty much take it for granted that narrative is a linear structure. That structure tends to follow the linear flow of time; but there are no end of literary and cinematic forms that have experimented with departing from the "direct time line" approach. The narrative structure of In Treatment, on the other hand, is two-dimensional. While the series has been structured in such a way that the episodes follow one another in the normal order of time; the structure also allows (and, to a great extent, encourages) us to view each doctor-patient engagement as its own narrative with its own time-line. This is achieved by giving each such engagement its own day of the week; and, beginning in the coming week, each new episode will be preceded by the episode for the previous week's session for the same patient. We are thus brought into a web of multiple linear flows, all of which are then woven together by the "natural" passage of time.

Does this work? I think the honest answer is that it is too soon to tell. Baer admitted that he used On Demand to take in the first week of sessions in a single sitting. My own feeling is that, if HBO decided to make it possible for us to watch the series this way, then there is nothing wrong with doing so; but I wonder if something might be lost in experiencing that two-dimensional structure this way. Also, Baer's strategy struck me as a quest for immediate gratification that stands to undermine the narrative by interfering with the way it was designed to unfold.

My own feeling about the series is that those half-hour "doses" fit very well with the intensity of the text, the way in which nothing is superfluous because every word and phrase is charged with both denotation and connotation. This demands far more attention than most viewers expect (or want) from television scripts; and this is probably why the ratings numbers for this series are some of the worst that HBO has ever experienced. It also reflects that Baer is far from alone in his desire for instant gratification, refusing to grant that understanding will only emerge after several of these episodes (or, perhaps, the entire series of episodes) accumulate. (This was certainly the case with Tell Me You Love Me. This was far from my favorite television viewing, but I was still fascinated by what the production team was trying to do.) There is even the possibility that understanding will not emerge, that, at the end of the series, we are deprived of "closure" or "answers" and are left only with questions. This is how I felt at the ending of John From Cincinnati; but I did not feel that lack of closure was sufficient to write it off as a failure (knowing full well that the HBO bean-counters probably disagreed with me very firmly). The thing is that there is nothing wrong with being left with questions, if those questions impact our own introspective reflections; but, in an age in which the unexamined life is the status quo, such an approach is never going to score at the box office or on the machinery of television ratings.

So, at the very least, I am now ready to embark on my second week of In Treatment. When I watch the episodes will have to do more with our household schedule than with a preference for On Demand over scheduled airings. I do not even know yet if I shall honor the strategy of preparing for any individual session by what happened exactly a week ago. This is the kind of narrative that invites the "reader" to work out his/her own strategy; and I have no problem with doing that. I know that what I say and do will not register with HBO when the next round of decisions gets made; but, as I said in my reflection on Jimmy Breslin, one of my more important life lessons is "Keep reading the good stuff." That applies to the movies and television, too; and, having found some "good stuff," I intend to stick with it!

The Best Movie We May Never See

One of the reasons that I maintain an RSS feed for the film reviews on Variety is that they give me a chance to read about the films that no one else takes the trouble to cover. Even when a film gets screened at the Sundance Festival, as is the case with the review I just read, the sheer volume of the Sundance program means that much of that program is likely to slip through the cracks. However, Variety is a "trade publication," which means that distributors can count on it to let them know all of their options and offer up a bread-and-butter account of each option, rather than an extended essay that shows off how much the reviewer has learned about film theory. Since I am not "in the trade," though, I derive an entirely different benefit from these reviews, which is that they give me a chance to refute Walter Benjamin.

In was Benjamin, after all, in his essay on the works of Nikolai Leskov (entitled "The Storyteller"), who had declared (in 1936) that "the art of storytelling is coming to an end;" and, on this morning when San Francisco Chronicle Movie Critic Mick LaSalle seems primarily occupied with the complementary nature of the personalities of Rocky Balboa and John Rambo, it is not that difficult to appreciate what was bothering Benjamin some seventy years ago. It is only by seeking out such things as the films that fall through the cracks of the commercial production and distribution processes that we can see that, even if the art of storytelling has suffered no end of neglect, it is still far from dead; and Variety is one of the best windows available for keeping track of what has fallen through those cracks. So it is that I encountered a review of The Betrayal (Nerakhoon), a joint project directed and written by Ellen Kuras and Thavisouk Phrasavath. Kuras is primarily a cinematographer; and I first encountered her work when I saw Unzipped, Douglas Keeve's excellent documentary about Isaac Mizrahi and the nature of work in the world of high fashion. Like Kuras, Phrasavath has an IMDB page; but it is nowhere near as interesting as the account given by Variety reviewer Scott Foundas:

Back in Laos, Phrasavath's father had worked for the CIA choosing targets inside the country for U.S. bombing runs. Following the fall of the CIA-backed Royal Lao Army to the Communist Pathet Lao in 1975, the Phrasavaths became personae non grata, with Thavi's father being shipped off to a re-education camp and his mother fleeing the country with eight of her 10 children in tow.

After a brief period in Thailand, the family applies for asylum in the U.S. and lands on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, where their vision of a gold-paved promised land quickly gives way to the harsh realities of poverty, street gangs and a cramped tenement apartment shared with a Cambodian family of six.

Kuras had originally contacted Phrasavath to serve as a Lao tutor for a documentary she was planning about a Lao refugee family; but her appreciation for that art of storytelling alerted her to the fact that Phrasavath, himself, was an excellent subject. So began the project that resulted in The Betrayal. Those results interest me for two reasons.

First of all, one of the side-effects of my time in Singapore, which I neglected to mention in my recent account of "non-Western modernization," was the wealth of opportunities it offered for learning more about and visiting those countries that provided such a great embarrassment in foreign affairs: Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. I visited both Cambodia and Vietnam while living in Singapore and engaged the skills I had acquired from those trips in planning a trip to Laos after I had returned to the United States. Indeed, had I not acquired the basic skills of getting around in Vietnam and Cambodia by hiring a car and driver, I probably would not have appreciated that the easiest way to get from Laos to Vietnam was overland, since going by air involved a Byzantine chain of transfers involving both Phnompenh and Bangkok; and, had I not ridden the highway that descended from the terraced highlands of Vietnam along the Laotian border into Hue, I would have missed the opportunity to see the memorial erected at Khesanh, best described as a "fiasco" in Stanley Karnow's history of the Vietnam War. Put another way, this was the land of Presidential decision-making at its worst, at least until 9/11. Whether it was stopping to survey the grounds of Khesanh, driving across the Ho Chi Minh Trail, or seeing the building that used to be the American Embassy in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), from which we saw all that news footage of desperate evacuations, these visits taught me as much about American history as those trips to Independence Hall and Valley Forge. Like it or not, we owe it to ourselves as American citizens to see what we look like through the other end of the telescope.

This bring me to my second reason, which is what actually resulted from the collaboration between Kuras and Phrasavath. Here is the core of the description (in Foundas' Variety-speak, an argot I am pleased to see is still maintained):

The wounds inflicted by the U.S. military's covert Vietnam-era operations in Laos still run deep, as evidenced by "The Betrayal" ("Nerakhoon"), which details one Lao family's harrowing efforts to start a new life in America. More than two decades in the making, this heartfelt debut docu feature by veteran cinematographer Ellen Kuras brings an affecting personal dimension to a sprawling sociopolitical narrative, intimately detailing how the agendas designed to advance the interests of nations can destroy individual lives.

At a time when we seem to do all we can to avoid thinking about consequences, whether in our own get-rich-quick greed or in the more august settings of the World Economic Forum, it is important that the art of storytelling is still alive enough to remind us of how trying to change the world only makes matters worse. Indeed, there is a certain irony that Sundance should be turning its attention to Southeast Asia at the same time that the World Economic Forum is convening in Davos. After all, Henry Kissinger is still wanted as a war criminal by the Cambodian government; yet there he was on television (at least on the BBC), fat, happy, and introducing Pervez Musharraf (also fat but apparently not very happy), seemingly oblivious to the many charges of blood on his hands.

Needless to say, we should not be holding our breaths for a chance to see The Betrayal "coming to a theater near you." Regardless of any Chomskyan arguments of "manufacturing consent," this film is unlikely to figure in what Edward Jay Epstein has called "The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood." The good news is that the Sundance Channel has become one of the best places to see documentaries on cable. I have no idea whether or not Sundance Festival exposure can lead to an inside track on Sundance Channel programming; but, hopefully, support from Variety will help step in that direction. Meanwhile, we may just have to count on the blogosphere to "build the buzz." If the conferees of Davos persist in their fiddling, we owe it to ourselves to be aware of where things are burning.

Reading through the Buzz

When I first saw the headline for Michael Cieply's story in today's New York Times, "‘The Kingdom’ Gambles That Entertainment Can Trump Politics," I was pretty sure that the article was not going to have anything to do with Lars von Trier or, for that matter, Stephen King's effort to migrate von Trier's loopy tale of old ghosts in a new hospital building from Denmark to Maine. (I was hopelessly addicted to both of these exercises. I particularly liked the way King could pick up on von Trier's ludic antics while always keeping them subtle, as in his self-and-other-referential naming of one of his nurses "Carrie von Trier!") For better or worse, however, the closest that the Kingdom in Mr. Cieply's article gets to these predecessors is that director Peter Berg played Dr. Billy Kronk in Chicago Hope. This particular "kingdom" is Saudi Arabia; and, as Mr. Cieply describes it, the film is "about the F.B.I.’s pursuit of Islamic bad guys in a not particularly hospitable Saudi Arabia."

Mr. Cieply's article is as much about test screenings and focus groups as it is about the film itself. What most interested me was the extent to which his story became one about accuracy (or perhaps I should say "the appearance of accuracy") in content. Even though they are buried in the center of a rather extended piece of writing, for me, at least, these were the paragraphs that cut to the heart of the matter:

Initially several Saudis were retained to provide cultural advice, though one, Mr. Berg said, was distanced from the project after he developed a crush on Ms. Garner. Rich Klein of the Kissinger McLarty Associates consulting firm was a key political adviser.

“It became an exercise in honesty,” said Mr. Klein, a former State Department official who patrolled matters as small as the styling of the characters’ thobes — long-sleeved Saudi robes — or the likely back-story of an American diplomat played by Jeremy Piven.

The Saudi embassy’s press office in Washington did not respond to queries about the film.

The first sentence is just pure irony, the sort of thing you would find in just about any attempt to parody Hollywood-as-business. However, Rich Klein is the "hero" of the mini-narrative embedded in these paragraphs. The idea of a member of Henry Kissinger's consulting firm talking to the press about "an exercise in honesty" is, for me at least, right up there with those representatives of the tobacco industry delivering their straight-faced declarations that cigarettes have nothing to do with cancer. One can hardly be surprised that the Saudi's are trying to distance themselves from this project as much as Mr. Berg distanced himself from his own star-struck Saudi!

Will all this amount to anything? Will The Kingdom really turn out to demonstrate, as the Times headline is suggesting, "that entertainment can trump politics?" Ultimately it will all boil down to how entertaining the movie turns out to be, once the marketing folks are done with their focus groups, test screenings, and other "instruments." After all, politics, itself, has always been a source of entertainment; but it is beginning to look like the people who matter most (who, as anyone familiar with Hollywood-as-business knows, are the people who determine the box office numbers on the weekend when the film is released) are beginning to tire of politics-as-entertainment. Who can blame them? An overcrowded field of Tweedledees and Tweedledums scrambling for the White House with the support of an equally overcrowded field of "Sabbath-day gasbags" (thank you, again, Calvin Trillin) have pretty much sucked the life out of the entertainment factor. On that weekend of release, I doubt that very many ticket-buyers will be thinking about Saudi Arabia. They just want to know if they are going to see a good cop movie; and they have enough unhappy experience to know enough not to rely on any "surge" of buzz aimed at which ticket they choose to buy.