Patriotism Goes to the Movies

November 7, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Patriotism,” says Paul Krugman. “is about making sacrifices for the national good, not serving your personal motives or interests.”  Krugman (in his blog, here ) was citing Michael Lind’s Slate article about “The Patriot,” the 2000 film starring Mel Gibson.  Lind complains that the Patriot of the title, “sits out the American Revolution, until a sadistic . . . British commander kills one of his sons. whereupon he spends the next two days – oops, I mean two hours – avenging himself.”

That’s not patriotism, harrumphs Lind, it’s “amoral familism”*

It appears that today's audiences can't imagine any cause that could justify political violence other than injury to a child or wife.
This movie is deeply subversive of patriotism. Indeed, patriotism is a concept that neither the screenwriter . .  nor the director . . . seems to understand.

Maybe so.  But the writer and director do understand something that Lind apparently does not:  movies are not real life.  If they are, then  “Singin’ in the Rain” is deeply subversive of rational reactions to meteorological events. 

Patriotism may be the last refuge of a scoundrel, but it’s no refuge at all for a filmmaker. Real-life Americans are patriotic, sometimes to an extent others find offensive. But that kind of patriotism doesn’t make for good movies.  In the American movies that I know, good guys never do their good deeds out of abstract idealism. Their motives are always personal. (Even better than a non-ideoogical hero is the character who has an ideology but abandons it in order to kill bad guys – e.g., Grace Kelly in “High Noon”).  

America movie-heroes often take up arms against bad guys, but we would mistrust a hero whose actions are purely ideological and not rooted in personal revenge. Our heroes, even when they are fighting for Good, have the decency to deny any ideological motive. Here’s one familiar (I hope) example:

I’m afraid Michael Lind would be disappointed in Rick, and in Grace Kelly shooting the bad guy to protect her husband.  “[In] the Zeitgeist in the United States in A.D. 2000 . . . American national patriotism is giving way . . .to the perennial rival of patriotism at all levels: amoral familism.”

If that’s the Zeitgeist, it’s a Geist that goes back a long Zeit.  “Casablanca” was made in 1942, “High Noon” in 1952.  Or take another classic from the early 1950s, “On the Waterfront.”  Marlon Brando winds up doing the right thing in ratting out the racketeer union boss (the right thing according to the film’s construction of morality).  But it’s not until he has a personal reason – the union boss has his brother Charley killed – that he takes action.  

You gave it to Joey, you gave it to Dugan, and you gave it to Charley who was one of your own.. . and I’m glad what I done to you!

The film’s attempts to make stevedores spout lofty motives ring embarrassingly false, as when one of the longshoremen urges Brando to defy the boss in order to

give us back our union, so we can run it on the up and up.

(I still cringe when I hear that line.)

Is this bias towards the personal and against the political an aspect of American culture?  Or is it the medium?  Maybe political ideals – socialist realism, capitalist realism, patriot realism, etc. – don’t make for compelling movies.  Movies are first about characters, not ideas. The medium washes out the message.  

---------------
* The term comes from Edward Banfield’s 1958 book The Moral Basis of a Backward Society.  Amoral familism, according to Banfield, was that basis.

The Sweet Smell of “The Help”

September 14, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

A stirring black-empowerment tale aimed squarely at white auds . . .

So begins Variety’s take on “The Help.”

Really?  White auds, yes.  But is this movie really about black empowerment? 

Years ago, I speculated here that all American films were about success.  O.K. not all of them, of course, but many of them – even movies that seem to be about something else. Love and romance, for example. Or race relations. 

Variety continues

 “The Help” personalizes the civil rights movement through the testimony of domestic servants working in Jackson, Miss., circa 1963. . .

Civil rights?  As I’m sure others have pointed out, “The Help” is civil rights lite if at all.  It does personalize things. That’s what movies are good at. They’re not so good at showing us larger structures and forces. “The Help” not only reduces political and social issues to the individual level, but even the individuals seem less like real people than like caricatures.  It’s all very simple – good guys and bad guys. Or in this case good women and bad women (men in this film are an afterthought).  Bad woman really – just one, the mean girl (Hilly). The other white women may be a tad ignorant, but they’re well-intentioned. And the black women are nearly perfect. 

As is typical in American films, all conflict is external. Nobody has to face any truly difficult problems or dilemmas that have only imperfect solutions.  Right and wrong are simple and clear.* That’s the way we like our movies.

But what “The Help” is really about is success.  The central character is the White girl Skeeter, and the story that arches over everything else is her career.  The problems and triumphs are the ones she faces in her pursuit of success – landing a job, getting an idea for a book, securing the cooperation of the help, keeping the work a secret, writing the book, meeting her deadline.  She plugs away, finishes the book, and sees it become a best-seller.  Ultimately she moves on and up to the New York literary world. 

It’s The Little Engine The Could chugging through Mississippi, and it requires about the same depth of thought.**  If you do see this movie, when you’re done, go watch “Nothing But a Man” (your local library should have a copy) for a grown-up version of the South in the early sixties. It also has a much better soundtrack. 

-------------

* A minor sub-plot that takes a few minutes of screen time involves a real moral dilemma faced by Skeeter’s mother. She too turns out just fine. 

** The movie does have its virtues.  It looks good, and some of the actors are excellent (Viola Davis will probably get an Oscar nomination; maybe Allison Janney too).  It was made without big names and without special effects, so it cost a pittance by Hollywood standards.  It has brought in $130 million gross and counting, five times its cost, so maybe it will nudge Hollywoods’s blockbuster mentality, and we’ll get more small films.

Conservatives at the Movies

August 7, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

In the recent conflict over the debt ceiling, the GOP impressed the country with its willingness to tank the economy – and in the process hurt a lot of people – in order to get their way. Their Senate leader likened their strategy to the threats used by hostage takers.

This is consistent with George Haidt’s research on conservative and liberal morality. Liberals, he says, base their morality mostly on two dimensions: Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity. They ask, “Will people get hurt?” and “Is it fair?”

Conservatives add the dimensions of Purity, Authority, and Loyalty. As an illustration, consider the choice of motivational films. House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), was trying to motivate the Tea Party types to join with the rest of the party. So he played a clip from, “The Town.” In that clip, Ben Affleck, who robs things like banks and baseball stadiums – he also shoots people – says to his friend, “I need your help. I can’t tell you what it is. You can never ask me about it later. And we’re gonna hurt some people.” (Complainers about “the liberal press” please note: The Washington Post, which first reported the story, decided to leave out that last line.)

The friend’s only question is whose car to use.

According to the Post,

Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.), one of the most outspoken critics of leadership among the 87 freshmen, stood up to speak, according to GOP aides.
“I’m ready to drive the car,” West replied.

The point McCarthy was making with this clip is that loyalty to the group outweighs the harm to others.

Perhaps “The Town” was not the wisest choice. When word got out, Sen Schumer filled in some of the rest of the plot.

In the scene they chose to inspire their House freshmen, one of the crooks gives a pep talk to the other, right before they both put on hockey masks, bludgeon two men with sticks, and shoot a man in the leg!

(Schumer omitted the fact that later in the film, the Affleck character kills someone by shooting off the guy’s penis. What a role model for the GOP.)

In a post nearly four years ago (here), I referred to this morality based on Authority and Loyalty as “Mafia morality,” and I noted its apparent appeal to conservatives. As if to confirm this, the recent Rupert Murdoch Newscorp flap revived the nice detail (from a 2005 Forbes article) that the head of one of its marketing divisions, Paul Carlucci, “once rallied his sales force by showing a film clip from The Untouchables in which Al Capone (played by Robert DeNiro) beats a man to death with a baseball bat.” Capone is emphasizing loyalty, much like the motivational clip Rep. McCarthy used, though the DeNiro/Capone level of cruelty and violence is such that I’m not going to embed it here.

Carlucci left little doubt as to how his ideal motivational strategy fit in the liberal-conservative spectrum.

Mr. Carlucci said that if there were employees uncomfortable with the company’s philosophy — “bed-wetting liberals in particular was the description he used” Mr. Emmel testified — then he could arrange to have those employees “outplaced from the company.” (from The Gothamist)

On a different issue, regulation of banks, the Republicans could have used John Ford’s classic Western, “Stagecoach.” One of the people in the stagecoach is a banker, Henry Gatewood, who has just embezzled $50,000 from his bank. (I don’t know how much the Affleck character netted in his bank robbery – probably less than $50K in 2010 dollars, certainly less in 1880 dollars. As someone said, the best way to rob a bank is to own one.). Gatewood offers his views on financial regulation.

The film is set in 1880, but this has a contemporary ring, just as it did in 1939 when bankers, whose unregulated banks had failed disastrously a few years earlier, were resisting FDR’s proposals on banking regulation.

The audio isn’t too clear, so here’s a transcript.

I don’t know what the government is coming to. Instead of protecting businessmen, it pokes its nose into business! Why, they’re even talking now about having bank examiners. As if we bankers don’t know how to run our own banks! Why, at home I have a letter from a popinjay official saying they were going to inspect my books. I have a slogan that should be blazoned on every newspaper in this country: America for the Americans! The government must not interfere with business! Reduce taxes! Our national debt is something shocking. Over one billion dollars a year! What this country needs is a businessman for president!

Living in the Past/Future

July 30, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Last night, I saw Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris.” This morning I read Gabriel Rossman’s cold critique of an ABC poll that Robin Hanson recently discussed. It was about cryonics. Not so different, really.

Nostalgia is a longing for the past. From that feeling grows a set of ideas and beliefs – that the past was better than the present, more comfortable and comforting. Cryonics feels the same way, but about the future. We are frozen in the present and thawed in some warm, ideal future. (Is there’s a word for this future-nostalgia?)

“Midnight in Paris” is all about nostalgia. It is nostalgia. The main character Gil (Woody Allen in Owen Wilson’s body) is a writer on vacation in Paris with his fiancee. At the stroke of midnight, he is magically transported back to Paris in the 20s. He hangs out with Hemingway and the Fitzgeralds, Gertrude Stein reads a draft of Gil’s novel-in-progress, he wins the heart of a beauty who has been posing for (and sleeping with) Picasso.

The scenes of Paris of the present are filmed in the very harsh light of day. Paris of the past is Paris at night, dark with romantic lighting. That’s where we want to be.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

Cryonics plays on the same idea, but it reverses the time line and replaces romanticism with science. The fantasy is the same – being transported to a much better world – but that world is in the future. There’s a group version of this fantasy – the dream of society setting up shop on some other planet or space station, starting a whole new civilization free from the frustrations of the world we actually live in.

In the end, “Midnight in Paris” suggests that the nostalgia it has been promoting is not only futile but false and impossible even on its own terms. The beautiful model, who lives in the 20s feels nostalgic about the Belle Epoque, and when she manages to travel back to that period – Toulouse, Gauguin, Degas – she find those artists to be nostalgic for the Renaissance.

Come to think of it, Woody Allen gave us a critique of the future-nostalgia fantasy as well – “Sleeper.”

The Ad That Wasn’t

May 30, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Bringing in new customers is a challenge for any organization, especially museums.

In the first season of thirtysomething, Michael and Elliot, who run a small ad agency, have to come up with a campaign for the local arts center, which is trying to broaden its base. They struggle, they founder, they fail. The best they can do is a poster with a photo of a hard hat guy and the caption, “Yo, it’s my arts center.” The city, sensibly, rejects their proposal.

But how can a museum reach people other than those they usually reach? Among current museum-goers, according to a survey of 40,000 households,

• 92% are white
• 70% are over the age of 30
• 81% have college degrees
• 82% have incomes above the national median
• For history museums, age was even more skewed – only about a third were under 50.

Enter Jenny Burrows and Matt Kappler and their “Historically Hardcore” Smithsonian campaign.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

I wish I could report on the success of this campaign in bringing a younger and more diverse audience to the museum. But unfortunately, this campaign, like the one in thirtysomething, was fictional. They did it as an exercise, and the posters lived only in cyberspace, where they flourished briefly. Reddit put them on their front page. Burrows was thrilled at first, then cautious. As she writes on her blog,

I decided it was probably time to get in touch with someone from Smithsonian, just to cover my ass. Well, they were less than pleased about the attention the posters were getting and requested that I take them down immediately.

She scrubbed the posters of any Smithsonian traces. You will never see them on the sides of buses or the walls of the Metro. The Smithsonian, apparently, has no desire to appeal to a hardcore constituency. Our great national institution will continue to round up the usual subjects.*

HT: Total Drek

*thirtysomething was great TV, but it played to the same demographic as museums, though perhaps a bit younger. The show often seemed to be written about, by, and for English majors from elite universities. Here’s a bit of script I found. Gary and Susannah, new parents, are talking with two couples whose children are slightly older – Michael and Hope, and Elliot and Nancy.

GARY
Why would I make something like that up?
Seriously. I swear. I put them both in
front of her, right? Runaway Bunny and Ulysses.

MICHAEL
And let me guess: she went right to Ulysses?

GARY
Right.

SUSANNAH
And put it in her mouth. You
forgot to mention that, right?

MICHAEL
So big deal. Listen. Janey, by the
time she was five months old had
eaten most of the major early work
of Saul Bellow,up to and including
Henderson the Rain King, but hey,
I don't like to brag.

HOPE
Oh, I'm sure Emma's as bright as a button, Gary.

NANCY
Hey, hey, what was that woman on the Lucy Show
that was always bragging about her kids?

SUSANNAH [definitively]
Caroline Appleby. The kid's name was 'Stevie.'

GARY [turning to her, clearly surprised]
I... I thought you hated pop culture?

SUSANNAH
Lucy isn't pop culture. Lucy is God

Lumet – First and Last

February 18, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

“12 Angry Men” (1957) was Sidney Lumet’s first film, “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead” his last, a half century later. “Devil” had gotten good reviews, so I recorded it a while ago. I intended to watch it last night. But when I turned on the TV, “12 Angry Men” was just starting on TCM. I’ve seen it a few times, maybe more, but I had a hard time turning it off. After a half hour or so, I switched on the DVD and went for “The Devil.”

Things change in 50 years.

In “12 Angry Men,” jurors deliberate, exploring the details of a murder case. In the room, personality, emotion, and position affect reason, memory, and perception. We see the group dynamics, the interaction and persuasion. The film is in black and white and has essentially one set, the jury room. There is no “action” (except a moment when one angry man threatens to hit someone but is easily restrained). Characters occasionally stand up and walk to another spot in the room or to the window. That’s the action

[Spoiler Alert]

“Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead” centers on a jewelry store robbery. The store proprietor, a seventyish woman shoots the robber. Then he shoots her. Later, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke (they are brothers) beat a heroin dealer in his apartment, Hoffman shoots the heroin dealer’s customer (nodded out on a bed in the apartment) and then shoots the dealer. They go to the house of a man who is blackmailing Hawke. Hoffman shoots the man, then points the gun at Hawke’s head. While the two brothers are trying to decide whether Hoffman will shoot Hawke, the blackmailer’s wife shoots Hoffman. Later, Hoffman lies in a hospital (the shooting was bad but not fatal). Albert Finney (Hoffman’s father) kills him by suffocating him with a pillow.

Six shootings, one asphyxiation, mostly all in the family, and all shown explicitly on the screen.

Both are good movies, but what a difference. And oddly enough, even though the Angry Men are confined to a single room for nearly the whole film, it’s “Devil” that has more an air of claustrophobia. The characters are trapped in their lives, trapped by their own decisions.

A Public (Television) Affair

December 24, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

The sociologists of media/culture will tell us what’s going on here. But me, in my naivete, I did a double take when I saw the TV listings for WNET, the local PBS outlet for us liberal elitists.

(Click, click now, on the image for a larger view.)

Yes, PBS is showing “Jessica Simpson: Happy Christmas.”   Jessica Simpson in the PBS line-up.  As they say on Sesame Street, one of these things is not like the others.

I even checked the WNET website to make sure someone hadn’t pranked the Times. But there it is (“. . . guests Willie Nelson, pop sensation (and sister) Ashlee Simpson, and more. New tracks from Simpson's upcoming album . . .”) With Charlie Rose and Gwen Ifill joining Jessica to sing “The Little Drummer Boy.”

Ashes and Allegories

November 11, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Firemen’s Ball,” (1967) was the last film Milos Forman made in his native Czechoslovakia. Many critics see the film as satire, a critique of communist society.  They credit Forman for his genius in being able to make the film at all, given the stodgy communist censorship that prevailed in the Soviet bloc at the time.

If the movie is allegory, it’s about the mistrust, dishonesty, cruelty, and above all incompetence built into the state bureaucratic system. The firemen, with their committees and bickering and attention to silly aspects of the ball, can’t seem to do anything right. At one point, there’s an actual fire at an old man’s farmhouse, but the fire engine gets stuck in the snow, and there’s no water pressure, and the house burns down. The only help the firemen can offer the old man is to suggest he keep warm by moving his chair closer to the fire. Then they thoughtfully turn the chair around so he doesn’t have to watch his house burn down.



I hadn’t thought about “Firemen’s Ball” in a long time, but my son e-mailed to ask if he should go see it when it was shown at his university’s film series.

Could there be a similar allegory about American capitalism? Socialist collectivism can lead to bad outcomes. But what about individualized and privatized systems? Could the rules of such a system result in a man’s house burning down while firefighters on the scene did nothing?



This incident happened over a month ago, and it got much coverage in the media and the blogosphere. But as far as I know, nobody saw a parallel with “Fireman’s Ball,” perhaps because Forman’s film was so different in one important respect. It was fictional.

If you see “Fireman’s Ball,” be sure to get the version with Forman’s own spoken introduction in English. When the movie was released in Czechoslovakia, he says, 40,000 firemen resigned in protest. So he explained to them that the movie was not really about firemen and that “the firemen in the film are merely symbols of the whole society.” This, he says, made the firemen “peaceful and happy.” Then Forman adds for the movie audience, “But the film is about firemen.”

Forman says this almost with a wink, so in the end you don’t really know if he intended the movie to be a simple story, poignant and funny, or whether he was going for  larger meanings.  Maybe it is, as he says, just a story about firemen. But as with the Tennessee fire, the intent of those who created the story has little to do with whether that story can serve as a more general commentary on the society.

The Kids Are Always Right

July 26, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

In American movies and TV, the kids are usually more than all right. They are superior to adults in every way. As I tried to show in an earlier post, they are more intelligent, more sensible, and more competent.

“The Kids Are All Right” offers a variation on this theme. The film uses an old device – a stranger arrives into a group, and his relationship with each of its members makes for tectonic shifts, exposing fault lines in the group structure. In this case, the group is a family – a lesbian couple (Annette Bening and Julianne Moore) and their two teenage children. The movie plot is set motion when the daughter having just turned 18, uses her new legal status, at her brother’s urging, to find out who their biological father is. So in comes Mark Ruffalo with a special relation to each member of the family. He is sperm donor to both mothers, biological father to both kids.


[For a better plot summary, watch the trailer.]

The movie isn’t “Ferris Bueller” (foolish, vindictive adults continually outwitted by clever teenagers), but here too, for the most part, the kids are right, and the adults are wrong. Brother and sister make the right decisions – each starts the film with an offensive friend, and each deals with the problem decisively. It’s the moms who can’t sort out the difficulties in their relationship. Jules (Moore) has never stuck with a career, and in the course of the movie she gives in to impulsive lust. Nic (Bening) is jealous and controlling and tends to drink a bit too much wine. Even their sex life keeps hitting snags and interruptions. Paul (Ruffalo) is cute and likable, but ultimately not much of a grown-up.

The kids are really a proxy for the audience here. Like the audience in the theater, the kids find out about all the adults’ missteps (they are constantly overhearing the grown-ups, either by accident or by design). And like the audience, even when the kids say nothing, they seem to be standing in moral judgment. The adults sense this too. If you see the movie (and it’s certainly worth seeing) try counting the number of times that the adults apologize to the teenagers.

Still, “The Kids Are All Right” departs from the usual child-adult scenarios of comedy (children outwit adults), romantic comedy (children manipulate adults), or drama (children redeem adults).* Instead, the kids learn that grown-up life is complicated and that relationships and people are not perfect. Or as Julianne Moore declaims to the family at the end, just in case someone missed the point, “Marriage is hard.”

*Only very rarely do we get an American film like “Parenthood,” where kids are just ordinary kids, and our sympathy lies with the parents who must endure and try to cope with their children’s shortcomings.

Million Dollar Quartet

July 20, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Broadway musical “Million Dollar Quartet” seems to have been based on a photograph – this photograph.


Memphis, December 4, 1956 – Elvis, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash at Sam Phillips’s Sun Record studio .

The set of the show is the studio – an open stage with piano, drums, and microphones, a control room in the rear



The musicians are the stars, but Phillips narrates the play, coming downstage to address the audience, then slipping back into the studio or control room to be part of the scene. So it’s his play, and its message seems to be that this was the end of an era. Elvis had already left Sun for RCA, and Cash and Perkins, as Phillips discovers in the course of the play, were about to sign with Columbia.

But while this date might have marked the end of an era for Phillips and Sun Records, these performers, this studio, and the music they made epitomized the new era in music that had just begun – the era of rock and roll. It was equally a new era for the media that delivered the music, the era of records and radio.

The historical perspective of “Million Dollar Quartet” is disappointingly narrow. A more socio-historical Sam Phillips would have reminded the audience that only a few years earlier, most of the music people heard was not on records, it was live. Even the music on the radio was a live broadcast:

“Coming to you from Frank Dailey's Meadowbrook on Route 23, just off the Pompton Turnpike in Cedar Grove, New Jersey, we present the music of Charlie Barnet and His Orchestra.”

In fact, Sam Phillips had done just this kind of “live remote” in the 1940s from the Peabody Hotel in Nashville.

Nor were the songs so closely identified with particular singers. In Million Dollar Quartet, Carl Perkins voices his resentment at Elvis for stealing “his” song “Blue Suede Shoes” and turning it into an even bigger hit. That was something new. Before records became dominant, when the music business was live shows and sheet music, songs didn’t belong to singers. The Tin Pan Alley tunes, by masters like Gershwin and Kern, or lesser talents, were there to be performed by anyone.

But by the mid-50s, in the era of records, audiences for rock and roll wanted only the singer whose record they knew, and only that performance. On the old-style show “Your Hit Parade” (on radio, then TV), the top tunes of the day were performed each week by the same in-house singers (where have you gone Snooky Lanson?). But on new TV shows like American Bandstand, only Paul Anka could sing “Diana,” only Jerry Lee Lewis “Great Balls of Fire.” And they lip-synched to their own records. Audiences wanted it just the way they’d heard it so many times on the record or the radio.

A more sociological Sam Phillips might also have shown us a 45 r.p.m. record and reminded us that this recent bit of technology made records something teens could afford. You could take dozens of them to a party to play over and over again, something nobody would have dared do with the heavy and brittle 78s. The new 45s were light, cheap, and virtually indestructible.

But “Million Dollar Quartet” is not about that. The show is merely a vehicle for a greatest-hits medley. The other boomers in the audience may have been thinking about that yellow Sun label and remembering the first time they heard “That’s All Right” or “I Walk the Line.” I was also remembering when I was a very new assistant professor, opening the red-and-white issue of ASR and reading Richard Peterson’s article “Cycles in Symbol Production,” to which this post owes a huge hat tip. Ditto for his “Why 1955” (in the British journal Popular Music, 1990) which is more specifically about the coming of rock and roll and which you should read immediately if you can find a free download.

Company Ways

July 1, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

“How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” was on TMC Tuesday night in honor of the centenary of Frank Loesser’s birth. The Broadway show opened in 1961, sort of a musical comedy version of William H. Whyte’s 1956 best-seller The Organization Man.


Loesser’s musical was light satire; Whyte’s book was sociology. But the message of both was that corporations were places that demanded nearly mindless conformity of all employees. Or as Mr. Twimble tells the ambitious newcomer (J. Pierpont Finch), “play it the company way.”

FINCH:When they want brilliant thinking / From employees
TWIMBLE: That is no concern of mine.
FINCH: Suppose a man of genius / Makes suggestions.
TWIMBLE: Watch that genius get suggested to resign.

Conformity was a topic of much concern in America in those days, in the popular media and in social science (as in the Asch line length experiments). Today, not so much.

the Organization Man, if he ever existed, is dead now. The well-rounded fellow who gets along with pretty much everyone and isn’t overly brilliant at anything sees his status trading near an all-time low. And all those brilliant screwballs whose fate Whyte bemoaned are sitting now on top of corporate America.

So wrote Michael Lewis in Slate 1997.

That’s one version. I don’t really know if the corporate climate is different today (where’s an OrgTheorist when you need one?). No doubt, “brilliant screwballs” can find save haven in corporations, at least in areas that require technical brilliance, and some may wind up at the top. But I wonder how such quirkiness survives in other areas like sales. Barbara Ehrenreich, in her recent book Bright-Sided, looks at corporations today – with their motivational speakers and “coaches” – and sees the same old demand for cheerful, optimistic obedience, especially in this era of outsourcing and downsizing.

The most popular technique for motivating the survivors of downsizing was “team building” – an effort so massive that it has spawned a “team-building industry” overlapping the motivation industry. . . .
The literature and coaches emphasize that a good “team player” is by definition a “positive person.” He or she smiles frequently, does not complain, is not overly critical, and gracefully submits to whatever the boss demands.

Or as Frank Loesser put it,

FINCH: Your face is a company face.
TWIMBLE: It smiles at executives then goes back in place.

Here’s the whole song from the 1967 film version:

The movie has another uncanny resemblance to today. The costumes and even the sets look like “Mad Men” – not surprising since both are set in the New York corporate world of the early 1960s. But there’s more. In the Broadway show and then the musical of “How to Succeed,” Robert Morse (Finch), rises to become head of advertising. Fifty years later, in “Mad Men,” Robert Morse (Bert Cooper) is the head of an advertising agency. (And he’s still wearing a bow tie.)

I asked my son, a “Mad Men” watcher, to look at the 1967 movie and try to identify the actor playing Finch. He couldn’t, at least not without a hint or two.

Capitalism, the Movie

February 4, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Oscar nominations were announced, and Hollywood columnist Michael Medved is perturbed that two of the nominees, “Avatar” and “Up in the Air,” paint an unfavorable portrait of US corporations.

How could Hollywood continue to turn out these anti-business films when Americans, according to Medved, are so pro-business?

In a 2009 Gallup Poll about the “biggest threat to the country in the future,” 65% selected “big government” or “big labor,” while fewer than half as many (32%) fingered “big business.”

I’d just picked up Joel Best’s Stat-Spotting: A Field Guide to Identifying Dubious Data, so it occurred to me that if government, business, and labor were equally perceived as threats, lumping any two of them together (government and labor), would leave the third with half as many. But Medved didn’t have to put his thumb on the scale. Here’s the graph from Gallup.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

People who see big government as the biggest threat do in fact outnumber those who point the finger at big business. But business beats out labor as a threat by three to one.

So why, when offered films like “Wall Street” or “Wall-E” do Americans not stay away in droves? If Medved had browsed more of the Gallup data, he might have found that American feelings about big business are more complicated than his own unconditional love. Even in the one question he does cite, nearly a third of us see big business as “the biggest threat to the country’s future.” That proportion had increased since the previous time Gallup had asked the question. In fact, suspicion of corporate influence was growing throughout the Bush years, perhaps because corporate influence itself was growing.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

Hollywood has been making movies about greedy capitalists ever since nasty mustachioed landlords were tying poor damsels to railroad tracks. Some of these were successful; others bombed.*
As William Goldman famously said of Hollywood (and Medved quotes him), “Nobody knows anything.” That includes Michael Medved.

(The photo is not a still from a movie. It’s a scene I happened upon in Brooklyn last fall.)

* Thirty years ago, Ben Stein seemed similarly perplexed by this same anti-business tendency among very well-paid Hollywood writers. Stein has a more sensible explanation than does Medved, at least as far as screenwriters are concerned. See my post here.

Man on Why

January 31, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Man on Wire” is the documentary about Philippe Petite walking a wire stretched between the two towers of the World Trade Center a quarter-mile above the ground. The tagline for the film is “The Artistic Crime of the Century.”

As that implies, the movie takes much from the “caper” film genre, and Fabio Rojas had a great post sketching the social organization dimensions of Petit’s operations. Petit is the center of attention, but his feats (he’s done this sort of thing more than once) are made possible only through extensive planning and coordination with a team of others.


But there’s a cultural note as well – that good old American automatic reflex, the utilitarian assumption (see here for another example). After Petit is captured by the police and brought to earth, a news reporter interviewing a cop at the scene asks, “Did he say anything about why he was doing it?” The question occurs again and again.

In the film, we hear Petit remembering back 30 years, still incredulous, describing the immediate response of the Americans:

And you know, “why, why.” . . . I did something magnificent and mysterious, and I got a practical ‘Why, why?’ The beauty of it is that I didn’t have any why.

That’s what makes it an artistic crime. Art for art’s sake, a concept that seems almost un-American.

“Funny People” – Making Hard Choices Easy

August 15, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

“We make extremely right-wing movies with extremely filthy dialogue.” Seth Rogen was talking about “Knocked Up,” and by “we” he meant the Judd Apatow repertory company.

Ross Douthat, the New York Times’s new right-wing columnist, included the quote in his op-ed on Apatow’s most recent film “Funny People.” According to Douthat this movie is more “grown-up” and “realistic” in its family values. “Doing the right thing comes harder.”

I saw a movie called “Funny People” last week, but it must not have been the same one Douthat saw. The one I saw twisted itself out of shape to make doing the right thing come easy.

Spoiler alert: I’m going to reveal the plot and ending,

George (Adam Sandler) is a very successful comedian who contracts a potentially deadly disease but then, miraculously, recovers. When he thinks he’s facing death he phones his ex-girlfriend Laura, who left him twelve years earlier because he was cheating on her. She is now a wife and mother. He realizes that he messed up back then and wants to rewind the tape.

She comes to visit, and later, when George is healthy again, he goes to see her in her Marin County home (her husband is, as usual, out of town). Both meetings show that they still love one another and that they still have a certain something. George wants her to break up her marriage and be with him.

The conservative message comes at the end, when Laura is faced with a family-values dilemma: should she leave her husband and get back together with George?


At first, the film tips the scales towards divorce. She and George still have that chemistry, and besides, her husband isn’t much of a husband. He’s macho-obnoxious and frequently out of the country on business. And he cheats on her.

Whichever she chooses, love or family, she will lose something. If she stays with her husband, she will lose George’s love, humor, etc. If she chooses happiness with George, she will lose her family; her children will suffer as well.

It’s a real dilemma, a grown-up problem. True love or family. You can’t have it both ways. But wait.

American movies and television have a long tradition of presenting a real problems and then conjuring up magical solutions. It’s called “the Hollywood ending.” “Funny People” is no exception. At first, Laura decides to split from her husband and go with George. But no sooner does she nod in his direction than he is suddenly transformed, and not for the better. Five minutes ago, he delighted in playing silly games on the floor with her kids and dogs; now he can barely bring himself to stay in the same room with them. Before, he was attentive to every nuance of Laura’s feelings. Now, he ignores her, flipping open his cellphone to read text messages about movie deals and money.

Her husband has a similar transformation though in the opposite direction, renouncing his extramarital affairs (just two), vowing to get a job that will keep him close to his family, and declaring his love and devotion to his wife. Surprise, surprise – she decides to stay with her husband.

See, the decision only appeared to be a hard one. In the end, doing the right thing brings no sacrifice at all.

The real cheating in this film is not men’s infidelity to women; it’s the director Apatow’s infidelity to the story he himself has created.

This is not a perfect film. The “lonely at the top” theme is a bit of a cliche. The movie is long, nearly 2½ hours, because it tries to paste together three different movies: the ex-girlfriend dilemma; George facing death; Ira (Seth Rogen) the virtuous, innocent schnook, hanging around with the super-successful George.

But the movie is often funny, and it’s at its best when it’s about comedy. It makes you appreciate how difficult stand-up is, with its strange relationship between performer and audience. The key to success is not to tell a funny joke but to capture the audience. The same jokes that seem lame when done by an unseasoned, aspiring performer (Rogen) become good material in the hands of a pro like George, partly because of his ability, his craft, but also because the audience is already on his side. The film also shows how much these comedians rely on “dick jokes,” which don’t bring much admiration from colleagues but can get laughs, especially with unsophisticated audiences.

And then there’s James Taylor, whose two spoken lines in the film (he also sings one song) are hilarious – playing completely against his usual persona.

Innocents Abroad

February 18, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

And speaking of stereotypes in movies, Penelope Cruz is nominated for an Oscar for her role in Vicky Cristina Barcelona. She’s a wild artist – hot-tempered, passionate, impulsive, sexy, sensual, dangerous – oh those Spaniards, those Latin types.

The movie is based on the stereotypical contrast between Americans and Europeans, and when it comes to love, it’s like soccer – the Americans don’t really know what they are doing, while the Europeans are on very familiar turf.

Two American girls in Spain – Vicky (Rebecca Hall) is sensible and careful, engaged to a good prospect; Cristina (Scarlett Johanssen) is more daring. But neither seems capable of any depth in a relationship. Sex yes (at least for Cristina) but no passion. They don’t know what they want. They don’t even know what they can want.

The other Americans, the older couple the girls are staying with, have a marriage that is emotionally empty. The woman is disappointed, unfulfilled, stuck with a husband who seems to care only about business and golf. (It’s pretty clear that he represents what Vicky’s fiancé will become.)

Then the girls meet Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem), and they both eventually wind up sleeping with him – first Cristina, who moves in with him, then Vicky, who now understands genuine passionate involvement, even if it is fleeting.

Penelope Cruz is Juan Antonio’s ex-wife. She enters the picture about halfway through, and their tempestuous relationship becomes the center of the film. She’s crazy – she has tried to kill Juan Antonio and she has tried to kill herself – and Cruz’s performance is appropriately and hilariously over the top (do they give Oscars for this sort of thing?). But the point is that even though the Spaniards are crazy in their passions, they are still aware of their own feelings in a way that the Americans are not.

I said that the basis of the movie was the contrast between Americans and Europeans. The other basis for the movie is Truffaut, especially “Jules and Jim– friends who love the same person yet remain friends. The parallels to Truffaut are obvious if sometimes annoying – the extensive use of a narrator, the impulsive, dangerous woman who looks good in men’s hats, and probably others I missed.  (The bicycle rides on dirt roads are from an early Truffaut short, “Les Mistons.”)

A Book by Its Cover, A Movie by Its Poster

February 14, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Whose Heart Is in the Right Place?


You know this movie without even seeing it, don’t you? And that may be the problem. The message in the poster is already raising hackles. The movie’s not scheduled for release until July, but Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon, knows that it’s a bad film.

Katherine Heigel[’s] . . . talents are being wasted on this shit. . . .

But obviously, this poster just about beats all. It’s the classic modern attempt to mollify women about vicious gender stereotyping

Marcotte already knows who the characters are – their motivations and the assumptions that drive the plot. She even knows how the film ends. (Duh – it’s a romantic comedy.)

Marcotte agrees with the movie’s title that the stereotype is ugly. It’s the truth part where they disagree. Of course, even if the idea in the poster were generally true, Marcotte would still object to its “vicious gender stereotyping.” Other stereotyping is O.K. It’s only this particular stereotype that outrages her. She herself has no problem stereotyping the people who go to movies like this. (“The audience for those has been whittled down to women who buy into this sexist crap, probably because they live in communities where they really don’t get much respect.”)

Lisa at Sociological Images also blogs this poster in terms of stereotypes. The trouble with stereotypes is that even when they may be generally accurate, they do not apply to all people. This poster tells us to think in terms of stereotypes. It doesn’t give us people. It gives us those universal figures that are designed explicitly not to look like real people. They’re intended to be recognizable the world over for a single characteristic – gender – so that we don’t go into the wrong rest room at the airport.

For all I know, “The Ugly Truth” may turn out to be as bad as Marcotte says. But maybe not. It might wind up giving the characters a more realistic and complicated relationship to this conflict between lust and love. (Interestingly, two recent films that used simple, monochromatic, comic-book-like drawings – “Persepolis” and “Waltzing with Bashir” – were intellectually complex and challenging.) With any luck, the characters in the movie will seem more like people than like stick figures. And we’ll get a different poster.

Happy Valentine’s Day

Good Girl, Naughty Picture

May 2, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston


The New York Times headline calls it “A Topless Photo.” “RACY MAG PIX,” screams the Daily News. “Exploitative semi-nude photo spread,” says the Toronto Sun. In the London Times headline, it’s “Half-naked Photos.”

It wasn’t what Miley Cyrus was showing – a beach photo of her in a scoop-back, one-piece bathing suit would have shown more skin – it was what she wasn’t showing but that the viewers knew was there. “Seemingly bare breasted,” was how the Daily Record put it (just under the headline “It’s not Art – It’s Porn.”). What made the photo “racy,” at least to these observers, was not the sight of her bare breasts but the thought that she either had just bared them or might be about to.

The problem for Disney seems to be how to have their teen-age girl stars be attractive without being sexual. That was hard enough in the 1950s, when Annette was prima inter pares among the Mouseketeers, and as Dave Barry put it, some of the letters on her jersey were closer to the screen than others.* Still, like a good Disney kid, she acted happily unaware of the changes puberty had brought. Not till she left Mouseworld did she go on to make all those beach films. (“Hi, I’m Annette, and these are my breasts,” cooed Gilda Radner in the SNL parody.)

That was then. Now, girls younger than Miley Cyrus are eager to be “grown up,” that is to be attractive in some sexualized way. They don’t get this idea from nowhere. It’s certainly out there in the culture, and it’s especially visible when someone – clothing manufacturers, for example – can make a profit from it. One September a few years back, the New York Times ran an article on back-to-school shopping in which the mothers of middle-school daughters described much of the available clothing as “hookerwear.”

Miley Cyrus the TV character was the perfect antidote. Several of the recent news stories cited both the character and the actress as a “role model.” But how difficult it must be for a 15-year-old girl working in television in Los Angeles to resist the lure of being just a little bit sexy. The problem may also be that we want our public figures to be one dimensional – sexy all the time or innocent all the time. We don’t want to accord them the complexity of feelings and desires that we take for granted in ourselves.

---------------------

*It’s a good line, but it isn’t accurate. Google a picture of Annette in her Mouseketeer outfit, and you’ll see that Disney had placed the kids’ name letters just below the neck, probably for the very reason Barry alludes to.

Who You Callin' Sophisticated?

April 15, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

“We are all ashamed,” he said, about the president’s lack of interest in culture . . . . “Look, we need a president who is cultivated.”

Obviously, the speaker is not American. He’s French, a writer, and he wistfully “recalled the sophistication of earlier presidents.” (The story is here in today’s New York Times.)

Sophistication doesn’t play well in American politics and culture. Consider Obama’s recent gaffe in saying that some Pennsylvanians were “bitter.” The attacks by critics who most wanted to score points claimed not that Obama was incorrect (which he may have been) but that he was “elitist.”

Here, being sophisticated, cultured, or intellectual translates to negative qualities – snobbishness and phoniness. “Puttin’ on airs,” as a distant generation might have said. In America we have to think that all tastes are equal, that none is superior to another. Since everything is equal, the person who pretends otherwise, the person who prefers Chateau Margaux to Bud Light, is being a phony and doing so only for purposes of making himself seem superior. And that’s just un-American.

Here in the land where more is better, it’s O.K. to have more money, a lot more money. It’s O.K. to have bigger and more expensive stuff (cars, houses), a lot bigger, a lot more expensive. It’s even O.K. to have a lot more power. But it’s not O.K. to suggest that what you have might be inherently better, at least not if that implies sophistication. If you argue that Timbaland is better than Celine Dion, that’s cool. But if you prefer Brahms to Celine Dion, you’re a pretentious snob, an elitist.

I was reminded of this anti-elitism last week in class when I asked students to bring in artifacts of American culture for show and tell. One girl brought the DVD of “The Nanny Diaries.” She clicked on the scene where we see Annie (the nanny) in the kitchen struggling to prepare the complicated French recipe that her haughty employer has demanded. It’s the Cinderella scenario basically, but in the US version what makes the wicked stepmother figure really wicked is that she affects sophisticated tastes.

Annie also has to take care of the woman’s son, an insufferable brat (what else could he be with a mother who has such pretentious tastes?). Yet, in the span of this three-minute scene, Annie manages to transform the brat into a good , plucky American kid. How? She has him eat peanut butter. None of this fancy French food, and no plate or bread either – just peanut butter directly out of the jar. The moral is clear (though it’s spelled out again later in the film in case you didn’t get it): simple American kid-food, good; sophisticated French adult-food, bad.

Of course, things change – cultures are not monolithic, nor are they static – and there may some gradual movement towards convergence on both sides of the Atlantic. In France, they elected Sarko l’Americain, President Bling-Bling, who, shortly after taking office, married Carla Bruni, a pop singer with a relaxed-fit relationship to pitch. More recently, he visited the Vatican in company with “an exceptionally crude French stand-up comic.” For our part in the US, we now have Starbuck’s just about everywhere selling expensive coffees with names that we once might have rejected as too foreign sounding. “Latte” is becoming as American as pizza.

Smart – and Successful – People

April 13, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston
“Smart People” is not a great movie, but if you’re an academic, I guess you have to see it if only for Dennis Quaid as a paunchy, pompous, florid, self-absorbed, dyspeptic, ill-groomed, and thoroughly unlikeable English professor at Carnegie Mellon. (If they can do this to Dennis Quaid, is anybody safe?) It’s not like looking in the mirror (I hope), but it might be like looking around the Faculty Senate meeting.

The movie is full of improbabilities. How could such a man ever have attracted a woman pretty as the wife, now deceased, whose pictures we see and whose memory he clings to, Adrian Monk style? And what could Sarah Jessica Parker, an emergency room doctor, now see in him?

The substance of the movie is in the characters – how they are revealed to us, how they interact, how they come to some self-awareness, and how they even change. But then why inject the element of career success into everything? American movies have a concern with success that borders on obsession or compulsion. About a year ago, I noted that “Music and Lyrics” a romantic comedy, pretended to be about love but was really about success.

The people who made “Smart People” felt compelled to make it about success, not just for the professor, but even for two supporting characters. (Sarah Jessica Parker is already a success.) I don’t want to give the plot away, so I’ll just say that in the case of the professor and his son, the success is both improbable and not at all necessary for the story. (The same improbable, unnecessary success haunts Steve Martin’s “Shopgirl,” which starts off being about very ordinary people, as the title implies, but eventually even the secondary characters become stars.) Only Thomas Haden Church, as Quaid’s ne’er-do-well adoptive brother, remains resolutely unsuccessful. (And what’s with Ellen Page in yet another film about an unplanned, unwanted pregnancy carried to term? I guess she’s not going to be NARAL’s woman of the year.)

Give the professor a less successful, less pretty love interest, give him a more modest bit of success, take away the improbable accidental pregnancy and let the relationship develop on character rather than circumstance, and you’d have a better movie. Of course, such changes might be downright unAmerican.

Ivan Dixon

March 20, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

A few years ago, I was stuck in a motel room one morning. My son,14, was flipping through the TV channels and hit upon a Twilight Zone marathon on F/X or Sci-Fi. The episode when we turned on the TV had only about ten minutes left, but at once I realized, in some Twilight Zonish dejà vu way, that I had seen this episode long ago when I was fourteen. It was about a small-time boxer at the end of his career, a man facing the reality of the limitations of his life. Not the sort of thing that a kid would understand, certainly not a kid like me. The twilight of a career was not the “twilight” that the the show had in mind. On the contrary, the message of this episode, delivered by a young boy who looks up to the fighter, is that he should believe in the impossible and keep boxing.

But there was something about the performance, the way the actor conveyed the sense of exhaustion and acceptance. Here was a man, a real grown-up, coming to grips with the realities of his life and his situation. That was the message that came through, not the call to ignore reality and live in the fictional Zone. The actor’s performance transcended the silliness of the scripted plot, making the character so real that I still remembered him decades later.*

BOLIE: You know, a fighter don’t need a scrapbook, Henry. You want to know what he’s done and where he’s fought? You read it in his face. He's got the whole story cut into his flesh. St. Louis, 1949. Guy named Sailor Leavitt. A real fast boy. And this, Memorial Stadium. Syracuse, New York. Italian boy. Fought like Henry Armstrong. All hands and arms, just like a windmill on the wind. . . .

The actor was Ivan Dixon, who died Sunday.

I never saw him in Hogan’s Heros, but I did see “Nothing But a Man” when it was released. I didn’t recognize him then as the boxer I had seen on The Twilight Zone just a few years earlier. That realization didn't happen until decades later in a motel room in western Massachusetts.

If you haven’t seen “Nothing But a Man,” you should rent and watch it immediately. If you teach sociology, you should use it in class – for what it says about race in the US, for what it says about how social arrangements affect the interior life of marriages and of individuals. You should watch it for the performances by Dixon, Abbey Lincoln (who doesn't sing a note), Yaphet Kotto and others.

When I first saw “Nothing But a Man,” I thought it was the best black-themed film I’d ever seen. I still do.

* Another blogger has linked to the Twilight Zone episode on YouTube. If you want to see it, you can find it here.