Saoirse’s Choice

February 20, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

In a course I taught long ago, I would give students the set-up of a movie – act one – and ask them to write a plot summary of the rest of the film. When they had finished, I would tell them how the actual film went. It unfolded to something completely different from what they had thought up. That’s because it was French.

The students were very bad at thinking like a French cineaste, but they did a top-notch job of filling in the predictable character types and plot elements of American movies.

I remembered this after I saw “Brooklyn.” It’s certainly a pleasant hour and fifty minutes. The film is set in the early 1950s, but it cleaves so closely to America’s immigrant-story cliches that it could be taking place any time.  The trailer summarizes the story.



Eilis (Saoirse Ronan) must decide between two countries, Old Ireland and New America, and between two men, one in Enniscorthy, one in Brooklyn. In Ireland she lives in a small town and works for a particularly nasty shopowner, a snoop who uses her knowledge of everyone’s secrets as weapons. Eilis comes to America, an open land of opportunity where she works hard at her job and takes classes to improve her abilities. Predictably (i.e., just like in the movies) she keeps moving up.

The man she meets on her return trip to Ireland is at the top of the town’s social ladder. The man she meets in America is a working-class Italian, a plumber, but he has plans to start his own construction company (to build what we know will become the new suburbs). Like Eilis, Tony too is on the path to success.

In a post nine years ago (here) I speculated that all American movies, even romantic comedies, are really about achieving success. “Brooklyn” is firmly in that tradition. The movie presents both men as ideal, someone any girl would want to marry, and Saoirse Ronan is able to convince us that the choice is agonizing. But while Eilis may feel torn between the man who has already inherited a life of comfort and the man who is getting there through honest work, we in the audience, schooled on scores of American movies, know immediately who is preferable.

“Brooklyn” lays out its cards in such a familiar arrangement that the movie’s real achievement is in making us believe that the sides in this choice are nearly equal. It does that mostly with the pull of family obligations.  Eilis’s mother needs care, and now that Eilis’s sister has died, Eilis is the only family she has left. But that also means that an aging mother is the only family that Eilis herself has, her only real human bond to Ireland. Even if we weren’t Americans rooting for America, we know what the right choice is, and “Brooklyn” does not disappoint. To its credit, the movie avoids the impossibly perfect solution, the “Hollywood ending,” which might have been for Eilis to bring her mother to America to live happily ever after.

On the podcast “Culture Gabfest,” Julia Turner comments that “Brooklyn” could almost be a silent movie. This is said in praise of Saoirse Ronan’s acting – her face tells so much. But it could be a silent movie also because the plot and characters are so familiar – the spiteful shopowner, the kindly priest, the Italian family – that the dialogue doesn’t add anything to our understanding of them.

That said, the film is very good for what it is. It looks terrific, the story is well told, and Saoirse Ronan deserves her Oscar nomination. But “Brooklyn” is the movie equivalent of comfort food – familiar, pleasant, and easy to digest.

Polish Joke

February 16, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

I am not all familiar with Freeman beauty products, but I am somewhat familiar with the French language. So I wonder: how did this happen? (Note the English and French lines below “Goyave.”)

(Click on an image for a larger view.)

The translation gaffe was soon corrected (I assume that the Salt Scrub on the right is the later version*). But how could polishes ever become les polonais (Polish people)?

Google Translate had no problem with it, though it preferred softening the skin to smoothing out the wrinkles.

The linguists at Language Log haven’t checked in on this one, and until they do here’s my guess: Freeman is a privately held company. I imagine it as a family operation – a mom-and-pop beauty products company. Old Mr. Freeman, the founder, ponders the new product, and says, referring to his grandson, “Little Ryan is taking French – they start ’em in fourth grade nowadays – let’s give him a shot at this one.” So Ryan, a not-so-adept student in Beginning French, looks up polish and finds le polonais, pl. les polonais.


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My keen-eyed colleague Lois Oppenheim points out that in the somewhat-corrected version the accent on protége [sic] is aigu when it should be grave.

Hat Tip: Polly-vous Français

Margin of Error – Mostly Error

February 14, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

It’s the sort of social “science” I’d expect from Fox, not Vox. But today, Valentine’s Day, Vox (here) posted this map purporting to show the average amount people in each state spent on Valentine’s Day.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

“What’s with North Dakota spending $108 on average, but South Dakota spending just $36?” asks Vox. The answer is almost surely: Error.

The sample size was 3,121. If they sampled each state in its proportion of the US population, the sample in the each Dakota would be about n = 80 n = 8. The source of the data, Finder, does not report any margins of error or standard deviations, so we can’t know. Possibly, a couple of guys in North Dakota who’d saved their oil-boom money and spent it on chocolates are responsible for that average. Idaho, Nevada, and Kansas – the only other states over the $100 mark – are also small-n. So are the states at the other other end, the supposedly low-spending states (SD, WY, VT, NH, ME, etc.). So we can’t trust these numbers.

The sample in the states with large populations (NY, CA, TX, etc.) might have been as high as 300-400, possibly enough to make legitimate comparisons, but the differences among them are small – less than $20.

My consultant on this matter, Dan Cassino (he does a lot of serious polling), confirmed my own suspicions. “The study is complete bullshit.”

UPDATE February 24, 2016: Andrew Gelman (here) downloaded the data did a far more thorough analysis, estimating the variation for each state. His graph of the states shows that even between the state with the highest mean and the state with the lowest, the uncertainty is too great to allow for any conclusions: “Soooo . . . we got nuthin’.”

Andrew explains why it’s worthwhile to do a serious analysis even on frivolous data like this Valentine-spending survey. He also corrects my order-of-magnitude overestimation of the North Dakota sample size. 

More Good News About Kids

February 12, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Five weeks ago I asked

When’s the last time you read an op-ed or magazine article that began, “Kids today are just so much better than kids of a generation or two ago.”

 
That post (here) had some data showing that in crime, drug use, unwanted pregnancy, and other categories, today’s youth were doing much better than their counterparts of earlier generations.
           
Now, the answer to that question (“When was the last time you read . . ?) is “Today.”

Today, Vox has an article called “Today’s Teens Are Better Than You, and We Can Prove It” (here). It has data on the variables I mentioned plus meth and other drugs, carrying guns to school, fighting, and other things most of us are glad to see less of. There’s even an interactive function where you can compare kids today against your own cohort – if you are under 45.

The article begins, “The kids are all right,” an obvious line that I had to try very hard to avoid in my post. But take a look at the data.

The article makes no attempt to pinpoint the causes of these changes, so feel free to attribute the good news to whatever factors you favor.