Compete Your Way to Mental Health . . . and Everything Else

December 23, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross-posted at Sociological Images

“Silver Linings Playbook,” the new David O. Russell movie, starts off by making the audience uncomfortable.  We want to like Pat (Bradley Cooper).  We root for him to overcome the internal demons that landed him in a mental hospital for eight months.  We do like him.  But he keeps doing things we don’t like.  He is socially insensitive and often offensive, utterly absorbed in his own deluded ideas and obsessions, and although we know that these emanate from his psychiatric condition, it’s impossible to separate the personal from the psychiatric.  He is his mental illness, and it’s often not pretty.   We’re actually glad to see the cop who shows up to enforce the restraining order.  (Usually in American films, when a uniformed cop restrains the hero, the moral question is so clear the cop might as well be wearing a Nazi uniform.)

At some point, the film takes a turn away from the complicated and difficult.  It calls on a smooth, familiar recipe and gives us comfort food –  sweet chocolate pudding, spoonful after spoonful.  It’s made from good chocolate, but it’s predictable pudding nonetheless.
                       
It all leads up to a climactic scene that we all know from countless other movies.  In this case, it’s a ballroom dancing competition:

The movie plays on one long-standing idea in American movies and TV: all moral questions, all questions of character, can be settled in a contest. Typically, the story sets out some difficulties for the hero — conflicts with the society, conflicts with some other person or organization, conflicts within himself. It all leads up to some climactic contest.  Usually the hero wins, occasionally he loses. But the outcome doesn’t matter so much as the nobility of the fight, for win or lose, the hero has fought, and that seems to resolve all issues. Rocky is the obvious example . . . .

That’s from six years ago in one of the first posts on this blog.  (I’ve edited it lightly.)  That post was about the first episode of “Friday Night Lights.”   But it could have been about “Silver Linings Playbook” – “Rocky” meets “Dancing With the Stars.” 

For a nearly complete plot summary, watch the trailer.

The contest seems to melt all problems no matter how complicated, no matter how seemingly unrelated to the competition itself – problems between a man and a woman, a son and father, friend and friend.

“Silver Linings Playbook” hits all three of those plus husband and wife, brother and brother, and maybe some others.  Other seemingly insoluble problems – from Pat’s obsession with his estranged wife to the side effects of medications – vanish.  And in case the pudding wasn’t already sweet enough, there’s an added Hollywood-ending bonus involving a large bet on the Cowboys-Eagles game, an outcome so predictable I’m not even putting in a spoiler warning.

And they all live happily ever after.

These themes are not inherent in movie contests.  In British films of the sixties – “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” or “This Sporting Life” for example – athletic contests bring a heightened consciousness of the class system.* But in American movies, regardless of the setting – the boxing ring, the pool hall, the poker game, the karate dojo, the dance floor, etc. – competition works its magic and allows the heroes to overcome all personal and interpersonal problems. 

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* The more recent “Bend It Like Beckham” is much more Americanized, with its Hollywood-like resolving of all conflicts and its theme of social mobility. 

Doubling Down on Guns

December 21, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Addiction is what happens when your solution to a problem is the same thing that caused the problem in the first place. 

This defintion is not original with me, and I can’t remember where I heard it.  But I was reminded of it again when I heard the NRA’s official response to the massacre in Newtown. 

Decades ago, I spent a lot of time hanging around compulsive gamblers.  For most of them, gambling had started as something that was exciting and fun and often social.  The trouble began when losses started to mount up.  Instead of cutting back, these gamblers would bet even more.  They would, to use the currently popular phrase, double down.  

From a distance, it might seem irrational – man who earns $1,000 a week betting $5,000 on a football game when he’s already $5,000 in debt.  But for the gambler in that situation, the bet is perfectly logical and rational.  For one thing, he knows that winning is always possible.  He knows this from his own experience – even losing gamblers win some of their bets.  In fact, if only he had bet the Falcons last week, as he had been thinking of doing, rather than the Giants, he wouldn’t be in this mess. Besides, given his salary and expenses, there’s no other way to get out of the hole.  So betting several thousand on the games this week is a logical solution to the problem caused by his betting in previous weeks. 

The US has the highest rate of gun death of any industrialized country.  The NRA’s solution to this problem is more guns.  The logic is clear.  As their statement said, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”  More guns – unrestricted manufacture and sale of them – means more good guys with guns.  Just as the gambler looks at all debts from his past gambling losses, America looks at all the guns piled up from its past gun policies – guns so available that bad guys have no trouble getting them.  And just as the gambler sees the solution as more gambling, the NRA sees the solution as more guns.  After all, you can’t make 300 million guns disappear.  What else is there except for everyone to carry gun? 

I remember the gambler who one afternoon tried to coax me into lending him $2 so he could make a bet at the track.  He told me he had been laid off from his job, he had family difficulties (a child with serious medical problems), and he was deeply in debt.   But with $2 to bet on a horse – and he knew how to handicap the horses, he was certain of that – when the horse won, he’d have a little more capital to bet on the next race, maybe an exacta, and so on. I questioned his logic and the likelihood of that happening.  “What else can I do?” he said.       

This Time It’s Different . . . Or Is It?

December 20, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston
   

Immediately after the Newtown killings I wrote a despairing post with the title, “Game Over - Guns Win.”  Peter Moskos, who had a post with a similar title - “Gun Rights? Your Side Won” – reminds me  that nearly two years ago he had basically the same post (here) with this cartoon by Tom Tomorrow.

(Click on the cartoon for a possibly more legible version.)

This time it’s different, but only in the sense that columnists and politicians are at least talking about guns and gun laws.  Even the NRA says it’s getting into the act (“prepared to offer meaningful contributions to help make sure this never happens again”). 

Will the results be different this time?  Apparently some people think so. Which people? The ones buying AR-15s and other weapons like there’s no tomorrow.  Or like there’s an actual gun law tomorrow.  Maybe they’re right.  Or maybe, as in the past, the familiar kabuki play will run its course.  (See this Tom Tomorrow cartoon of the generic debate – or as we now say “conversation” – that used to follow each massacre but then went out of fashion till Newtown brought it back.)

“In Which” Craft

December 20, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Student writing.  I’ve gotten used to the random apostrophe that makes it’s appearance in some plural’s but not others.  But now, in the last couple of years, I’ve been seeing a rise in the gratuitous “in which ” where “which” would do.  On the final exam Monday one student wrote.

The workers had a specific task in which they did and left.

I get a half dozen or more of these “in which” constructions each semester.  Montclair students are not the best writers, and I thought that this might be a local thing.  But I recently came across a blog post by a graduate student in a writing course at an expensive private university.*

It seems that memes and videos of violent and/or grotesque images are constantly posted to social media sites in which people find humorous and are quick to like, repost, retweet and share.

Maybe she meant to say, “sites in which people find humor” and then changed it to “humorous”  and forgot to delete the “in.” If so it’s just a proofreading error.  But maybe it isn’t.  The examples I see from my students are not proofreading errors.  The students apparently like the way “in which” sounds. But why?

My guess as to the origins and appeal of “in which” is the same as my guess about “for Robert and I.”  It sounds more upscale, more sophisticated.  If you’re taught that educated people say, “It is I” instead of the more common, “It’s me,” and “Robert and I went swimming” rather than “Robert and me went swimming,” you might assume this more general rule: if you’re not sure, and if the objective pronoun sounds ordinary, switch to the subjective pronoun.**   

In the same way, educated people also say “in which.”  Stiffly formal English required “in which” so that speakers and writers could avoid ending a sentence, or even a clause or phrase, with a preposition.***  Not “the town I live in” but “the town in which I live.”  The first one sounds like the way ordinary people talk, but the second, with its “in which,” sounds like the way educated people talk.

My hunch is that this use of “in which” will not catch on.  But then I would have said the same thing about “between you and I”  (or in the Easy Aces’ version, “entre nous and me”).

(An earlier post on talking sophisticated – duplicity instead of duplication, idyllic instead of ideal, etc. – is here )

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* The course is taught by a good writer who, I think, emphasizes clear and simple language and warns against pretentious sounding writing.

** The real problem is that English does not have a disjunctive pronoun – the equivalent of the French moi.  “C’est moi”  and “pour Robert et moi.” In strictly correct English, we would have to use I in the first phrase and me in the second.

***A silly rule probably based on the silly idea that English is really Latin.