Errata
Filed Under Cinema, Comics, Domestic Politics, In the News, Politics, Porchy, The Arts | Comments Off
Entertainment:
RIP Harvey Pekar. I was never a huge fan. I went through a spurt of interest in the autobiographical, confessional, protoblogger comics of the early nineties, which spurred an interest in R. Crumb almost immediately. I remember Joe Matt, and Seth, and Chester Brown. Which is to say that I basically bypassed Pekar but was a fan, for awhile, of several cartoonist that were deeply, deeply indebted to him.
Truth be told, I didn’t get into that particular brand of…the auto-grotesque(?) …until I read Bukowski’s Ham on Rye and Factotum in late 1997. I devoured all of Bukowski’s stuff after that including the Mickey Rourke movie Barfly. And even that was a brief love affair. Nevertheless, Pekar was a source of inspiration for many and I would be foolish not recognize that, doubly so since Purdue’s comic pedagogy group is designing lesson plans around Our Cancer Year for the coming term.
Russian Spies. A friend and I were talking about this today, and I admit I’ve been behind in my news reading, and we came jointly to the conclusion that there was no way that this whole thing wasn’t orchestrated from the get-go. Turns out that basically, yes, it was. It seems the charade was sped up a little in final stages when Anna Chapman got a little froggy but, yeah, basically we get rid of some failed, decade-long sleeper cell and we get back…something. Sometimes pure reason still works.
Mel Gibson. Fired from humanity. Can’t say I’m surprised. Surprised that anyone cares, but not surprised he’s a froth-mouthed loon.
Politics:
Deficits: This is a big deal. Or at least the fact that people keep saying “deficit” is a big deal. There’s a lot of realities out there. Some of them have to do with Democrats, historically, voting for smaller deficits than Republicans. And some of those realities are that Republicans like to cause deficits through tax cuts to rich people and, to the extent they cause deficits, Democrats like to do it through entitlements that help poor people. Pick your poison. Readers of this blog will know where I sit. But the important reality here is that nobody really cares about deficits. Politicians don’t really care about causing them and voters don’t really care if they exist.
Politicians that talk about “decreasing deficits” tend to mean they would prefer to “decrease spending that helps people that won’t or can’t vote for them;” this can be interpreted to refer to poor people or anybody from another state. Voters that mention deficits generally just either 1) don’t know what they’re talking about at all or 2) think that military spending is off limits or that +25% of current deficits are welfare and +25% of deficits are from foreign aid. They are horribly wrong on both accounts.
The only thing that matters in getting (re-)elected is the state of the economy as understood in discretionary income (by voters). If you increase that, you make people happy and they will pull the lever for you (if you are an incumbent). If it’s low, they will pull the lever for the new guy. It’s always been that way and I don’t see sign of that being differing in 2010 or 2012. If Obama wants to help his party he will stop listening to Karl Rove and other pundits saying that “deficits poll high as a concern for voters.” Fatten they’re wallets and the votes will come.
Obviously some people are against more government stimulus for more ideological and less policy/political reasons. I am not in their camp. The original stimulus was too small and poorly directed. Not that I have high hopes that any new stimulus would be high enough and well-directed but that’s what I root for anyway.
Tea Baggers. I want to be fair to libertarians. I’ve softened considerably on them over the three years I’ve written Porch Dog and found that their perspective helps me restrain my knee-jerk progressive response to government intervention. On the other hand, the Tea Baggers are largely what I remember of the libertarians I used to talk to when I formed my initial opinion of the ism. It’s a sometimes rigorous ideology that separates empathy and common human decency from how a society should decide to run itself. I know the Tea Baggers are not good (let alone typical) examples of pure libertarianism, but they are an example of where the ism can lead people.
That is not an excuse to discount libertarianism, nor is it a reason to disregard the arguments of the Tea Baggers out of hand. Arguments, offered in good faith, should always be considered. But when Sharron Angle starts dismissing the problems of girls impregnated through rape or incest using the kind of advice one offers when a planned picnic is delayed for inclement weather, it’s time to reevaluate the line of reasoning that got them to that point intellectually.
Again, I know that Angle is a bad example of libertarianism. And, for that matter, she doesn’t seem to be a great Tea Partier either. She uses an incoherent blend of modern Evangelical Conservatism and Tea Party-ism to derive her host of inane policy ideas, but she’s somewhat popular in her state and, to my eyes, she’s indicative of a movement that just keeps giving us an endless stream of incoherent garbage which is more related to libertarianism than it is to anything else. Rand Paul is another example and he’s even more of true libertarian than Angle and that hasn’t made his inanities any less severe than hers. Beck is on air making Road to Serfdom an instant Amazon best seller even though it appears from all the commentary that’s cropped up sce in the book’s newfound success than no one has bothered to read it, a speculation that I also levy on Beck himself.
Whatever. This is what happens when I don’t post frequently enough and then do it at midnight on a Monday.
Mel "You should just fucking smile and blow me" Gibson
O Ebert, Where Art Thou?
Filed Under Cinema, Comics, Dale Cooper, Entertainment | 6 Comments
O Ebert, where art thou? Surely not in this embarrassingly knee-jerk review of “Kick-Ass.”
Now, let’s make clear: I am not the enraged fanboy voice. I haven’t read the “Kick-Ass” comic(s?). I haven’t even seen the movie yet, though I plan to. What I’m trying to be here is the all-purpose voice of reason.
Ebert comes at “Kick-Ass” with two execrable arguments:
1. If you are into this stuff, you are a bad human being. This is how Ebert starts his review:
Shall I have feelings, or should I pretend to be cool? Will I seem hopelessly square if I find “Kick-Ass” morally reprehensible and will I appear to have missed the point? Let’s say you’re a big fan of the original comic book, and you think the movie does it justice. You know what? You inhabit a world I am so very not interested in.
Heather Havrilesky, is that you? When did it become such a popular critical approach to level moral condemnation at everyone who finds value in art that you yourself don’t care for? Has Ebert been pod-replaced by the ChildCare Action Project? I dealt with this subject at length before so I won’t get into it too much again – suffice to say, much art deals in complexity and ambiguity, and invites interpretation. We take away its very status as a work of art when we proclaim its meaning and declare its defenders to be morally bankrupt. We make it equivalent to pornography, snuff films, propaganda. That is a dangerous road for a critic to go down.
2. Won’t somebody please think of the children? This is really the meat of Ebert’s one-star blasting:
I’m not too worried about 16-year-olds here. I’m thinking of 6-year-olds. There are characters here with walls covered in carefully mounted firearms, ranging from handguns through automatic weapons to bazookas. At the end, when the villain deliciously anticipates blowing a bullet hole in the child’s head, he is prevented only because her friend, in the nick of time… [spoiler excised]
This movie regards human beings like video-game targets. Kill one, and you score. They’re dead, you win. When kids in the age range of this movie’s home video audience are shooting one another every day in America, that kind of stops being funny.
The second section alone could offer the hope that Ebert merely finds the material too grotesque and dark in light of real world events – although it makes me wonder how he can find any black comedy funny, given the subjects it routinely uses as a source of humor. Did he laugh when Vince Vega shot Marvin in the face in “Pulp Fiction”? (Oh yeah, he really, really did.) And yet, criminals are shooting various people in the face every single day in America! How dare he make light of the end of someone’s life? Does he think accidental deaths resulting from unlicensed, illegal firearms are funny? What a horrible person! (End sarcasm.)
But of course he gave the game away already. He doesn’t just find it personally repugnant – he worries that it is warping children’s fragile little minds. Is he aware that the crime rate is in a long-term, steady decline? (I just read Freakonomics - hurray for happy coincidences and, apparently, Roe v. Wade.) Is he aware that the homicide rate of child offenders has been dropping as well? Is he aware, in short, that much of our fear of crime, violence, and the moral degradation of the young is media-manufactured and has no basis in statistical reality? In the era of “Grand Theft Auto” and “Kick-Ass,” kids aren’t killing each other at unprecedented rates – just the opposite is actually happening. Any argument that these morally inappropriate entertainments are damaging young minds is based on individual cases and not on measurable trends in violent crime, which – not to be callous, but it needs to be said – is what should really matter when we try to pass judgment on this issue. Roller coasters kill an average of two people per year but we aren’t racing to shut them down because statistically they are quite safe (1 in 1.5 billion chance per ride of being fatally injured). I’m sure someone who saw the media report on the ‘coaster decapitation of a teen and was in a certain frame of mind might become convinced that roller coasters need to be done away with, for all of our safety. Especially for the kids.
But we have made a general, unspoken social agreement that roller coasters contain a very slight acceptable risk, when compared to the massive amount of entertainment they give. We don’t shut them down. We just put up bigger safety fences and install better belts and harnesses. Likewise, I have no problem with trying to keep “Grand Theft Auto” out of the hands of young consumers… or selling fewer tickets for “Kick-Ass” to six year olds. But of the probably hundreds of thousands that will slip in, how many will be influenced in any appreciable way? We really don’t know, but the numbers seem to tell us it’s very, very few. And an esteemed critic having a scaredy-cat reflex doesn’t change that.
–
The author of this piece saw “An American Werewolf in London” when he was younger than ten and still remembers it, and he plays Grand Theft Auto constantly. However, his personal body count remains at zero.
A Thought on the Meaning of Hurt Locker
Filed Under Big Ideas, Cinema, Iraq, Porchy, Review, The Arts | 4 Comments
I finally saw Hurt Locker this past Sunday, on the evening it would later be awarded the Oscar for Best Picture. Since then I have read a lot of discussion on what the movie meant. Indeed, seconds after my roommate pushed the Open button on the DVD player we bandied about the question ourselves.
Our conclusion was that Sgt James’ character was desperately searching for meaning and being thwarted at every turn. But the ending to the movie called that into question and seemed to push the movie into being lumped into the genre of “well done character sketch.”
After a few days of consideration I think that undersells the movie and I think it does have a broader statement about war and the human condition and that from the very first frame of the film Bigelow is as upfront about her message as she can be without pulling out her Oliver Stone hammer.
"The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug."
The movie opens with an epigraph, “The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug.” I recognized its source immediately because I read it in my War and Conflict class a few years ago. The source of that quote is Chris Hedges’ book War is a Force that Gives us Meaning.
I don’t have to tell you what his argument is because Hedges graciously inserted it into the title.
I also shouldn’t have to tell you what a controversial argument it is either. It calls to mind Robert E. Lee’s famous quote, “It is good that war is so terrible, lest we should grow to fond of it.” It is one thing to look at yourself in the mirror and see someone who has come to terms with the necessity of war. It is quite another to suggest that war might also be meaningful.
Hedges doesn’t say that war is good but it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that that’s what he’s saying. After all, having meaning can’t be bad and Hedges is a journalist not a philosopher; he’s not going to dive into the Foulcaudian world where having meaning may be bad because it limits us and stunts our personal evolution. Meaning, after all, is as much about what something is not as it is about what it is. And once we say what something is not, it is hard to consider that that is what it may be. (You gotta love the verb “to be.”)
So the movie starts with a quote from a book called “war is a force that gives us meaning” and from there begins to tell us the tale of Staff Sergeant William James—named after America’s first important philosopher known for his theory of pragmatism. Not to be brief or overly dismissive, pragmatism is a narrow utilitarianism that shuns metaphysics. I don’t know if the philosopher William James offered thoughts on war or not, and I don’t know whether Hurt Locker screenwriter Mark Boal is familiar with those thoughts if they exist. But I do know that a cursory reading of James’ works on pragmatic truth could lead you to believe that “William James” is a good name for a guy who at first futilely grasps for meaning before deciding that the true meaning lies in doing, not thinking.
But that’s not entirely accurate either. Sgt James is a man seeking enlightenment. We know that from his first appearance when he removes the plywood from the barrack window because he “likes the sunshine.” Indeed, like Plato’s cave escapist, he seems mad in his pursuit of meaning but his pursuit is not always futile.
James’s first on-screen disarmament is the establishment shot for his character. Danger, in the form of IED’s, at first seem like a straightforward and easily defeated foe, but closer examination forces him to realize that danger is, in this case literally, all around him. Saying it that way undermines the power of the moment of discovery in that shot.
In this first suspense sequence we see James as just plain mad, whereas the direction of his madness begins to be seen in his second mission, the embassy car bomb. Here James risks his life, and the life of his teammates, when he tries to figure out how to disarm the bomb even after the building has been evacuated and the risk has no reward, other than the personal reward for James of being the king problem solver. “I will figure this out,” he mutters to himself as he attempts to puzzle it out.
In this second scene, perhaps as foreshadowing to the end, he is actually successful. In deciphering the bomb rigging James is able to provide meaning to the bomb and he is able to provide a definition of himself as a guy who disarms bombs, 873 of them we learn immediately after. James has been counting because if he stops disarming bombs, he stops being.
James then suffers through a series of setbacks in his quest to find meaning. For the first time viewer, this part of the film is something that looks like a plot and seems to have more importance. So by the time we get to the supermarket scene near the end, it seems that the plot of the movie has been a man searching for meaning and failing to find it. Bigelow’s point then must be the horribly banal “war is confusing” because knowledge is limited…blah blah blah, fog of war…blah blah blah…
The success of finding the meaning of the embassy bomb, because it is anomalous in its success, is ignored.
From here other themes expose themselves. But this is enough for me to say that Bigelow’s point is ontological not political. People reading liberal or conservative narratives into Hurt Locker are creating a less important and less powerful film. Bigelow is attending to a much more inward looking film with a really contentious thesis worthy of a lot of discussion. Is war a force that gives us meaning. What is that meaning? Does that present an ugly truth about ourselves as a species? If it is true that man can innoble himself through violent conflict what are we to take away from James’s two teammates, one who spends the entire movie on the verge of emotional collapse and the other who desperately wants to find meaning not in war but in a family life he doesn’t even have?
These are for more interesting question than whether Bigelow supported the surge or not.
There will be blood, or: Don’t watch a show about a serial killer if you don’t want to see people get killed
Filed Under Dale Cooper, TV | 2 Comments
Warning: this post contains a big fat spoiler for the fourth season finale of “Dexter,” which aired Sunday night, but which perhaps some of you have not seen. I know my benefactor here at the Porch is a latecomer trying to get caught up on the show, so I warn him first and foremost: the spoiler I’m about to discuss is major. If you don’t want to know it, turn back now. (There are also less major spoilers for the resolutions and overall arcs of previous seasons.)
Salon.com’s TV reviewer Heather Havrilesky is supposedly a new mother. Good for her. She also seems like a sensitive human being, someone who requires humor and light in her art, and is repulsed by (if not outright rejects) nihilism and amoral grotesquery. Again, good for her. What I have to wonder, though, is why Salon has her watching and reviewing “Dexter.” Did she start down this path of her own accord, or was it an assignment? Either way, why hadn’t she found an excuse to bail long before the finale upset her so?
Havrilesky goes out of her way to give us the answer in the above-linked article:
But somehow, despite several nihilistic seasons before it, the fourth season of “Dexter” felt more like a cross between a murder mystery and a very, very dark comedy. …Dexter seemed to be changing his stripes, making choices that were less about his own homicidal compulsions and more about an abiding need to serve the other people in his life.
And the tone of the episodes during the first half of the season was unabashedly comedic… The whole show started to feel like an off-kilter procedural slapstick comedy. Plus, wasn’t Dexter ultimately trying to do the right thing by ridding the world of killers who were roaming free, looking for their next victims?
“Dexter” has always been a bleak show that still managed to balance its darkness with light…
To the astute viewer (i.e. the one who agrees with This Guy), it may seem like Havrilesky was misreading the show, badly and often. Yes, “Dexter” mixed a little light into its darkness and yes, there were times that it played like a dark comedy or a straightforward pro-vigilante story like “Dirty Harry” or “The Punisher.” But it’s a show about a serial killer. Regardless of who he chooses to kill (murderers and irredeemables), he does so because he has a NEED to kill, not because he is trying to make the world a better place. If that’s even on Dexter’s agenda, it’s a secondary item, in 8 point font. Dexter alludes frequently to his “Dark Passenger,” the thing inside him that makes him need to kill. He gets sloppy and unfocused when he hasn’t taken a life in a while. He was close-to-literally “born in blood,” in an infamous flashback that showed young Dex in a shipping container, awash in his dismembered mother’s blood. This was a dark show from the outset. It had all the makings of a tragedy – not a comedy (even a dark one) or a superhero story. How did an allegedly professional TV critic miss this?
Havrilesky summarizes her objection to the finale here:
…[Y]ou know what isn’t an artistic choice? Pouring a gallon of fake blood on the floor and then sitting an infant down in the middle of it. I’m still struggling to get into the minds of the writers who could stand around on the set that day, snickering to themselves and shaking their heads and saying, “Oh, this’ll get them! They’ll never forget this one, no sir! No one has ever seen anything quite so shocking as this before!”
Tune in next season when Dexter lops off a dog’s head and eats it, and then Debra unknowingly falls in love with Pol Pot. I’m sorry, but provocation on this level is as artful as hurling shit with the chimpanzees.
…[O]nce you set the baby into a big pool of his mother’s blood? Personally, I’m out. Because not only did the show snuff out its last ray of sunshine, it did so in a way that felt like a direct act of hostility against the audience itself.
So we’ve come to the spoiler I talked about. If you haven’t already linked to the article on Salon or haven’t seen the finale in question, it ends with Dexter finding the body of his new wife Rita in their bathtub; she was the last victim of the Trinity Killer, who Dexter dispatched earlier in the episode. Their baby sits in a pool of his mother’s blood, crying. An unsubtle flash layers the image of young Dexter in the shipping container over the near-identical shot of his baby on the bathroom floor.
The general tone and specific accusation by Havrilesky here is irritating enough. A show about a serial killer is going to be provocative by its very nature – definitely a case of “what did you expect?” – but she seems to be making the case that there is no art here whatsoever, simply a giant dose of shock value. She can’t or won’t confront the possibility that such an appalling image is intended to have a deeper meaning. And as if to brush aside any such objection, she simply doesn’t bring it up. Focus on the provocation, ignore the narrative mirroring and thematic meaning. Many commenters wondered (rightly) if Havrilesky even knew that Dexter himself was turned into a monster under nearly the same circumstances, in response to which she clarified:
Yes, of course I remember Dexter’s past. They showed him as a kid, covered in blood, in the last scene, in case anyone missed the parallel.
I’ve watched this show from the start. Repeating a flashback to what makes Dexter the way he is is one thing. Brutally murdering Rita and then having their baby crying in a pool of her blood as a “shocking twist” is another matter altogether.
If she remembered it, the responsible, intellectually honest thing to do would have been to mention it and address it in the article. It’s clearly important to the plot of the show. Instead she swept it under the rug, too bothered by her visceral reaction to engage in actual analysis. You can’t deride a scene as meaningless provocation – as the artistic equivalent of a chimpanzee “hurling shit” – without making ANY attempt to explain away its OBVIOUS meaning. As a rhetorical tactic, this is embarrassing.
I have read a theory online (sadly not mine) that the story of “Dexter” is about the character learning that the Dark Passenger will prevent him from ever having a normal life. In the first season, he learns that he can’t have a brother, having to kill the Ice Truck Killer in the finale. In the second, he learns that he can’t have a lover who fully knows him (the roundly-disliked Lila turned out to be a lunatic and Dexter had to kill her as well). In the third, he learns that he can’t have a best friend either (adios, Miguel). In the fourth, he learns that he can’t have a family. He can’t share himself with others or even intersect with their lives in any meaningful way because no matter how much he tries to keep it separate and contained, the blood has a way of seeping through and getting all over everything. The story of “Dexter” is essentially a tragedy about how circumstances can change you – permanently. Anyone expecting a happy ending for Dex at this point, or expecting him to become a Real Boy a la Pinocchio (and Data of “The Next Generation”) has seriously misplaced hopes for how the series will turn out.
Thus it was wholly appropriate and meaningful that the season would end this way. Regardless of our feelings for the character of Rita, or how much we think little babies shouldn’t be shown on TV sitting in a pool of blood, this was “Dexter”‘s destination all along. It wasn’t a random decision or a shock value thing to boost ratings. It was inevitability, just now realized.
Havrilesky misses (or ignores) all of this, but even worse, she goes after the writers and fans of the show – anyone that might have dared to find virtue in an ending this bleak:
Maybe we deserve it for watching in the first place. Or maybe this is the price those of us who can’t chuckle at absolutely everything under the sun will be forced to pay, over and over again in this spectacle-driven nightmare culture, for still having some shred of humanity deep inside us.
Obviously it’s cooler to think that provocation is, flat-out, worth the effort.
This is where I finally, permanently part ways with this particular critic. She posits an audience full of laughing, callous hipsters who are clearly worse people than she is. There are only two types of people left in the world, in Havrilesky’s view: Grand Guignol-enjoying, corpse-fucking 21st century Marquis de Sades; and new mothers with a “shred of humanity” who draw the line at a baby in a pool of Karo syrup and red dye (but not at any point before that, apparently). There’s no room here for people who were sickened and saddened by Rita’s death, but found it a good artistic choice, and derived meaning from it. There’s no room for me. As such, I don’t think I’ll be tuning in for future episodes of the New Mom Hates Bloody Babies show. She finally went too far. Personally, I’m out.
Let Sleeping Dogs Lie? I Say NO!
Filed Under Big Ideas, Entertainment, Patriotism, Politics, Porchy, The Arts, USA | Comments Off
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