Good call, Dove

Dove's released this here video, which shows the dizzying process that a normal person undergoes to become a billboard spectacle. It's a pretty cool video for a pretty amazing campaign... not directed at an issue that too far away to comprehend, like world hunger, or too abstract to really care about, like globalization. This is a campaign that's directed at the everyday lives of men and women, who pass from mass media experiences to lives in the home and the office, carrying around the baggage of confused standards and unrealistic self-images. We all do it, people... men and women... and Dove's right. It's stupid.

I think, at ten years old, a lot of us males generated a sort of ideal fantasy woman who we imagined seducing us as we got more comfortable with masturbation. TMI? Too bad. She looked a lot like the women in fashion magazines and hair product commercials, and she was an internal experience that the advertising world has spent years manipulating and trying to capture. Girl X, the unrealizable perfect woman, stands as a theoretical limit for a scale of beauty that we all carry around with us, men and women alike, and it's perpetuated by the old boys of fashion and advertising, who still think their popularity depends on approaching this limit as closely as possible.

Here's my abstract representation of the scale, as we tend to culturally understand it. Don't read too much into this... it's subconscious, and a lot of us spend tons of time trying to fight it, but it's still a ubiquitous cultural model that infects our thinking.

And I've noticed something strange. Almost every woman I've ever been intimate with, whether sexually or emotionally, from the shy to the sexually-secure, sees herself as part of the "Normal" section of the scale, but every one sees herself as being at the bottom of that section... like, right where "average" turns into "mediocre."

And it's not because I tend to like women with low self-esteem. This is also true of female friends who were smart and aggressive, and who are more than capable of well-informed reflection. Somehow, by taking away our control of our criteria for attractiveness, the media has caused a universal self-image pandemic. Every woman looks around her and sees the world teeming with girls who are prettier than she is. Maybe it's the ubiquitous "neurotic mom" syndrome... that's another trend I've noticed. All moms inadvertently transmit their habitual neuroses to their daughters in their earliest years.

At any rate, women have to realize something about the people who fantasize about them (I include in this category straight men, gay women, and all varieties of bisexual). First, we've given up on... no, in fact, we've literally lost interest in Girl X. We've realized she's as flat as the billboards she adorns, and if she were real, and we were dating her, she would probably ditch us to go to the gym and the tanning salon. We don't think about her when we masturbate any more. We think about our girlfriends and strangers we saw on the subway, because Girl X got REALLY BORING.

Second, even though we tend to see this scale as universal, it takes on a unique hue in every person's head. There are no identical scales of attractiveness... one gentleman prefers women in size 11 to 15, another likes girls with really strong cheekbones, a girl likes women with big thighs that taper down to small feet. A few select people, like Miss Amp, understand this, and she says it with a lot more attitude than I can muster.

Any self-respecting girl can, and WILL, find somebody who places them toward the "very attractive" end of the spectrum, and who will be overjoyed to date them, especially when they find out about the awesome personality that goes with that great body.

I don't know who I've really been writing this to, so I'll assume it's to everybody. Here goes...

GUYS: Don't be ashamed to like whatever it is you like in a woman. If you really like skinny girls with bags under their eyes, then go to the fucking Calvin Klein studio. But if you're like me, and you find a girl attractive because she's got fucking brilliant curves and a warm smile, then make it clear to everyone around you. Idle man-talk is standing squarely in the way of anybody having any perspective, because in idle man-talk, everyone is supposed to agree that the skinny chick with blonde hair is totally bangin'. More often than not, it's a goddamn lie that only one in twenty of us actually believe.

GIRLS: I know it's hard, but don't get suckered into this body-image shit. Whether something is listed as being "healthy" or not, whether it's talking about "self-image" or not, if it's telling you to lose weight or smooth out your skin tone, ignore it. When you look at other women, try to look directly in their eyes before you decide that they're too chubby, or overdressed, or boring-looking. We need to extract "health" and "self-esteem" from "looking your best" and "fitting" into anything, because we're at a point in history where improving your looks is directly at odds with improving your emotional health. There is no open space between indifference and neurosis... when you force your belt one hole tighter, the judgement train has already left the station.

300 Trailer and Acts of Rage

There's this trailer I just discovered on Apple.com... it's for a movie called 300, based on Frank Miller's graphic novel of the same name about the Battle of Thermopylae. It looks REALLY pretty, with a piercing, metallic color scheme, gratuitious use of slow motion, and some fantastic cinematography. It's also obviously a violent movie. The media critic in me wants to reprimand this, but at the same time, the consumer in me is mad excited to watch it all go down.

Don't mistake... the trailer makes this film look ruthless. Looking through Frank Miller's comic, it seems that King Leonidas is a stone-cold warrior king. In the film, he seems to be seething with proud rage, and Gerard Butler's hard-edged delivery makes me really happy. So what makes this violence seem distinctive, different from all that cops-and-robbers shit in Scorcese's new film, different from the uninhibited vigilanteism of Boondock Saints, a thing unto itself?

Well, let's look at the dialouge. The trailer is short, so I can transcribe it all.

King Leonidas: "SPARTANS! TONIGHT... WE DINE IN HELL!"

Persian ambassador: "Be afraid. Sparta will burn to the ground. ... (King Leonidas draws sword) This is blasphemy. This is madness!"
King Leonidas: "Madness... THIS IS SPARTA! (kicks him into a well)"

Persian lord: "The thousand nations of the Persian Empire descend upon you. Our arrows will blot out the sun."
Spartan soldier: "Then we will fight in the shade."

King Leonidas: "THIS IS WHERE WE FIGHT! THIS IS WHERE THEY DIE!"

King Leonidas: "Before this battle is over, the world will know that few stood against many."

That's all of it... beautiful, emotional, hyper-dramatic little snippets of rage and defiance that boil through this little preview video and make me DESPERATE to watch the film. But there's something interesting about this dialouge that you won't see in transcriptions from other action films. Where are the references to honor? Truth? Heroism? Legacy? Even freedom?

This is about rage and violence of a primal civilization that wrote the book on explosive emotionality. There's no moralization... no couching this battle in terms of the greater good, or the sovereignty of free people against tyrants. That's how it's different, at least as I read this trailer, and I hope the film itself doesn't disappoint. This isn't about the "democratic world" against the "axis of evil." It's about a small city-state that had so much rage and such a sense of self that a tiny band of warriors would stand alone to defend it with no hope of coming out alive.

Is that bad? We're suddenly tolerant of pure, unabashed violence that doesn't seem to have a point... kind of like GTA, right? Where's the value in that? But honestly, there is value in facing that primal instinct every so often, watching it divorced from all the bullshit justification and pretensions to "civilized war." This movie is a hyperkinetic fantasy, and I can enjoy this world because it's an idealized hell that I would never want to live in. And in the meantime, the masturbatory propaganda of world governments looks like a crock in comparison. We're fighting a war for humanitarianism? You're promising a better life to the country we're tearing apart?

As twisted as it may be, that rhetoric sounds more unbalanced than a Spartan king screaming for blood in the face of an unbeatable enemy. At least one resonates, if only romantically and emotionally... the bullshit cries of Iraqi freedom, echoing from the pedestals of the wealthy and evangelical?

So my violent side will go watch a movie next year. I keep it so well under wraps, at least I can give it that one gift.

Queen David versus tokenism, the bane of good intentions

A comment on a news story... perhaps more elaborate than some of the other 36 comments on the site, most of which read like this: "It's ridiculous." "No, it's not. Go David!" "No, it's ludicrous." "No, it's fine. Go David!"

So this gay teenage boy, David, auditioned for the role of Carnival Queen in the town of Axbridge, UK. In the headline, they call him "the only gay in the village," as if "gay" is a noun. Maybe it is in the UK. Anyway, they didn't feel comfortable giving him the actual title, so they created an "Alternative fete queen" title for him and let him ride in the parade in a lilac dress and tiara.

I certainly don't have a problem with a boy getting the title of "Queen" in a carnival parade. I also don't really have a problem with them creating a new category for him... if they want to respect the tradition of having a female "queen" but they still want to give the boy a chance, then it makes sense to put him up on his own float, so he can contribute something to the event.

What I have a problem with is the tone of the news story. Listen to this stupid statement by Robin Goodfellow, one of the committee members who helped make the decision:

"We had to decide which would offend people least - including the boy or leaving him out.

"It was felt we couldn't eliminate him just because he was male. This was the best solution on the day.

"Some people might be offended but we would rather be inclusive than exclusive. It's hard enough to get people involved as it is."

I won't blame this on the town, because it could equally well be a result of bad news reporting, but this is the kind of remark that fucks up the whole thing. Feel free to elect a boy queen, or "alternative queen," but don't defend the decision on the basis of "inclusion" and "not offending people." That's exactly how stigmas get attached to rising movements... it's a sad display of tokenism, and should be kept out of the decision-making process.

If you're going to make a boy the Carnival Queen, judge him on real criteria... criteria that make sense for a Carnival parade. Does he show good character? Is he enthusiastic and charismatic? Does he do the community a service by representing it at a local event?

If he does all these things, then a few locals throwing eggs won't bother him, and the world will revolve a little smoother and more tolerantly. But if he's chosen so people aren't offended, as a sacrifice on the altar of tolerance and tokenism, then those insults and bad vibes will wreck the occasion, and the positive spirit of a small town's progressive decision.

Unleashed: Jet Li on memory, agency, and aggression

Saw Jet Li’s Unleashed not too long ago, and it was a surprising departure from what I expect of a kung-fu movietruffle. Sure, it had the stylized karate, with lots of jump cuts and acrobatics and people dressed like characters from The Matrix, but those things were just specks of glitter on a much bigger canvas. This might have been Jet Li’s real acting debut, as he portrayed a well-developed character with a convincingly child-like, pathological naivety. So here I am, claiming that there was something insightful in this movie… what was it?

The central theme (as I see it) in Unleashed hinges on Jet Li’s character. He’s a bit bipolar… through the course of the film, we see two different incarnations of “Danny,” one in the care of Bart and one in the care of Sam. There are four primary associations that constitute the gap between violent Danny and non-violent Danny, and I’ve already given one of them away.

1) Violence: With Bart, Danny is raised to be violent. He’s manipulated into being a thug, and when he’s “unleashed,” he acts out an enigmatic rage on his adversaries. This contrasts starkly with reformed Danny, in the care of Sam, whose most important mission is to renounce his violence. Not only does he refuse to exact violence on his new caretakers… when he changes into “reformed Danny,” he refuses to enact violence on ANYONE, including the man who forced him to live by its law.

2) Slavery: With Bart, Danny is a pawn. He’s violent, and he’s used for the purpose of violence… he’s conditioned in a very Pavlovian sense (always with the canine references), and this conditioning is used for the objectives of Bart. With Sam and Victoria, Danny is given the tools and the power to be an active agent, and he’s allowed to make his own choices. There’s an absolutely key scene in this regard: Sam gives Danny the money from his first job, and when Danny asks what to do with it, Sam tells him he can do whatever he wants with it. This discovery seems convincingly shocking to Danny, who is making his transition out of a pathologically submissive role.

3) Culture: With Bart, Danny is a product of contemporary British/American crime culture. The bars where he fights are full of slinky women and people decked out in high fashion, and everybody’s wearing an insane double-breasted leisure suit. Sam reintroduces Danny to classical Western culture, which, it turns out, is part of Danny’s personal history. Piano virtuosity is one of the hallmarks of the classical European tradition, and Danny’s non-violent identity revolves entirely around the piano. In Bart’s dungeon, there’s a ruined piano… a revealing metaphor for the humanity of which Danny has been deprived.

4) Memory: This is probably the most important link in this chain of associations. Bart systematically denies Danny any access to his past, distorting his memories of his mother and lying to him about his upbringing. As I noted above, Danny is boiling with undirected rage, and as long as we don’t know about Danny’s past, we don’t realize that all this violence is probably related to that fundamental event, the murder of his mother… the scene where Danny first appears violent, and that Danny seems to be acting out over and over under Bart’s influence. Only reformed, autonomous, classical, nonviolent Danny can retrieve his history, and he can only fully integrate into society by doing so.

This movie can be read as a defense of 19th century philosophical positions. One of the foremost themes in German idealism, Hegelianism, Marxism, and later social theory is the importance of history, and the construction of an identity through a consciousness of that history. History and memory, duty as the essential moral criterion, and development of rationality and consciousness through cultural progress… in the course of Unleashed, Danny goes through his own renaissance and becomes a true enlightenment European.

So what does this have to do with American foreign policy?

WOAH! Didn’t expect that one, did you? Well, I’ll tell you how I made that jump: I recently read a selection of writing by Edward Said wherein he compared American and French (a.k.a. continental European) coverage of an uprising in the Middle East. He talked about the reductivism of the New York Times, which (according to Said) treated Islamic fundamentalism as though it was an isolated crisis. The Times, and other newspapers like it, refused to acknowledge the political and religious history of Islam, or the history of Middle Eastern interaction with the United States. He compared this with Le Monde, the French newspaper, which ran detailed reporting on Islamic culture, incorporating expertise on the Arabic language and the political history the contributed to the upheaval in Iran.

Said’s point here is that the Times is serving an American agenda of aggression, so it can’t acknowledge the history or bring to bear a complete perspective on Islamic culture. To rephrase: America has to forget the past, deny the roots of its relationships, and fixate on the current “crisis” to maintain its aggression. We’ve come a long way from our rationalist enlightenment roots, where we saw our ideals as a product of our cultural history.

Anyway, I’m kind of digressing. The point is less about the United States and more about the movie. Splitting things into two categories (classical vs. contemporary, violent vs. nonviolent, master vs. slave, memory vs. amnesia) isn’t always a good idea (as per, for instance, Derrida). Even so, there’s something well-constructed and intelligible about the model that Unleashed offers.

And Jet Li kicks Jason Statham’s ass. What more could you want?

Semantics, Politics, and video games: Nintendo versus the world

In the spirit of mass market analysis, today's rant is going to be about the semantics of persuasion... in this case, I'm going to consider spin-doctoring in the marketplace. The free-market competition is for dominance in video game console sales, and the competitors are the X-Box 360, the Playstation 3, and the Nintendo Wii.

For the purposes of this discussion, I'm going to lump the X-Box and the PS3 into the same category. These are the old-guard game systems, competing on the basis of classic qualifications like franchise acquisition and processor speed. The Wii represents a different paradigm entirely, and at the moment, it seems to be shaping the debate over the next generation of consoles. Where the X-Box and the PS3 are in a race for power, the Wii is struggling to innovate... where the old-guards are selling their new processors, the Wii is selling its concept.

The unconventional Wii controller is at the nexus of this debate, and its success depends on whether it's cast as an innovation or as a novelty. This is a marketing game, and it's become a critical issue on gaming message boards. The old-guards claim that the gaming experience hasn't changed, and that it's based on good games, not on a gimmicky control scheme. Nintendo wants to prove that even in a die-hard realm like the gaming experience, the hegemony can be overthrown.

Thus, the primary semantic issue: novelty versus innovation. Novelties are attention-getting but transient, where innovations are ideas that produce lasting effects in their markets.

Most old-guard loyalists (read: fanboys) claim that a system withough an armor-piercing processor simply isn't "new generation," and their reliance on this term is telling: these gamers' criteria for games is established by the history of gaming, from the 8-bit Ataris to the dual-core 3.2 GHz PS3 powerhouse. These gamers expect an upgrade in graphics, speed, and dynamic simulation with every new system, and this means Nintendo has failed, because it's not building on the tradition of its supposed predecessors.

Nintendo isn't so concerned with the "generation" of this system, and in a sense, Nintendo has taken on the task of subverting this linear paradigm. Its new system was originally called the "Revolution," and this is another revealing semantic choice. "Next Generation" is progressive... "Revolution" is Marxist. Where Sony and Microsoft are competing to dominate an established field, Nintendo is attempting to redefine it entirely. Revolution is a risky business, but for the dedicated developers at Nintendo, it's the only way to overthrow the corporate video game hegemony.

I seem to be creating a political metaphor here, and I'm going to recognize it and dispense with it before it gets out of hand. The twentieth-century political environment was split into Communism (defined by socialism, revolution, and the enforcement of "equality") versus free capitalist democracy (defined by traditional individualism, competition, and the securing of "freedom"), and these two seemed irresolvable at times. Even so, they were united by a grand design, the ultimate struggle for social harmony and human happiness. Sometimes the only way to get perspective is to look at the total field, the ultimate domain that ties you and your opponent to the same end-goal.

What I'm trying to say is that all this stuff... innovation, progress, next-generation, and revolution... are taking place within a certain domain, and despite the fuzzy focus of the new marketing push, this is a total field that can't be bought, redefined, or subverted. This total environment is defined by the consumers themselves, the gamers, and its central term isn't "graphics," "development," "innovation," "market share," or "novelty"... its central term is gameplay, and it's something the three competitors have to keep sight of if they're going to win, or even survive, the next skirmish in video game politics.

The 5-year anniversary: five responses

I found five media responses to September 11th. Here's what I think of them. If you see this as the malinformed opinion of a gushy blogger grad student with too much free time, then feel free to dismiss it. If you're capable of seeing it as a social, communicative, and aesthetic critique, feel free to respond to it, or just to give it a quick glance to see if it resonates with you.


TACTICAL RHETORIC - President Bush

"Since the horror of Nine-Eleven, we have learned a great deal about the enemy. We have learned that they are evil and kill without mercy – but not without purpose. We have learned that they form a global network of extremists who are driven by a perverted vision of Islam – a totalitarian ideology that hates freedom, rejects tolerance, and despises all dissent."

"We saw what a handful of our enemies can do with box-cutters and plane tickets. We hear their threats to launch even more terrible attacks on our people. And we know that if they were able to get their hands on weapons of mass destruction, they would use them against us."

"... the war is not over – and it will not be over until either we or the extremists emerge victorious."

Bush's words are so transparent they're invisible. He goes through a predictable series of steps: he engages the susceptible listener with empowering words, and within a few paragraphs, he turns his focus to the emnity that he's spent the last five years constructing. He makes a sharp, over-dramatic generalization about "the enemy" and he links them to the Islamic faith, and he injects a few words of alarmism and political self-aggrandization. If any single theme can be drawn from this monolouge, apart from the simplistic anxiety-mongering, it's that since September 11, America is defined by its enemy.


LINGERING SENTIMENTALISM - Rudy Giuliani on CBS News

"I'm thinking right at this minute that the twin towers used to be right behind me for the longest time, and I'm also thinking about how when they came down, this chapel where George Washington prayed was spared..."

Giuliani is the quintessential New Yorker, so he has the right to be sentimental. Unfortunately, mass media sentimentalism, broadcast over a major news network, is bound to distance us all from the event. Some of us don't have nostalgia, and don't want it... we want to move forward and find solutions. Others of us remember the event sentimentally, but when we're confronted with an onslaught of pre-packaged tragedy, appropriating and reselling our emotional response, we're forced to turn off our receptors and live in the silence of our apartments. Finally, the third group of us feels the weight of emotional memory, and Giuliani's sentimentalism is satisfying, but then we become vulnerable to the vast baggage of political rhetoric, advertising, and partisan manipulation that inevitably comes with any mass media package. Rudy should be sad and meditative. He should also keep all those things closer to himself, so we can keep them personal too. (see: entry #5)


LIBERAL BACKLASH - Keith Olbermann, live on MSNBC

"Who has left this hole in the ground?
We have not forgotten, Mr. President.
You have.
May this country forgive you."

Olbermann's words are ballsy. Such confrontational overtones are rare in popular media (see John Stewart as the notable exception), and it's almost unheard of in a major news outlet. As always in media studies, it's important to consider the relationship between for(u)m and content, so we find ourselves at an impasse: how appropriate is it to use the 5th anniversary of September 11th as a political battlefield?

Maybe it's disrespectful. This kind of political rant may come across as opportunistic and soapboxy when it coincides with the anniversary of a national holiday. It seems almost trite, and as such, it may also discredit the very valid points that Olbermann is bringing up. And creditability aside, is a day of rememberance the right day to lash out?

Or maybe, on this day when we commemorate America, Olbermann is the very image of an American voice. Once we give him credit for being right, then the pieces of his monolouge start falling into place... being outspoken is the first form of Americanism. Olbermann is offering his strong political opinion as a tribute to an important historical event, like calling out an opponent on his own appropriated, but still disputed, territory.

I reserve final judgement on this one.


META-CRITIQUE - Benefit of the Doubt

These guys are smart... in light of a great tragedy, it's always a good idea to step back and account for the general outlook. Benefit of the Doubt shows that the media is the psychological vector for the culture, and that through it, a pathological complex like American terrorism PTSD can unfold for an uncannily long time. The only disadvantage of Jesse's acute coverage is that he occasionally embarks on bizarre self-referential tangents.


PERSONAL GESTURE - Ze Frank

Ze Frank is probably one of the subtlest guys distributing digital media right now. That's not necessarily saying much, but in Ze's case, there's a mastery of form and message that you just don't get anywhere else. His video is irreverent, in a sense... there's a sort of avoidance in the long sequence of shots of the Brooklyn promenade, where you look across the river at Lower Manhattan. His song isn't somber, but it's sprinkled with relevant thoughts, distantly-connected meditations put to a funky beat and a repetitive chorus. In a sense, the pedestrian music video seem like Ze is making the event insubstantial and impersonal.

Then you realize what he's saying, and what he's up against... his thoughts follow their own form because he's not interested in manipulating rhetoric, or manufacturing sentimentality, or voicing opposition, or in critical analysis... he just wants to return to the situation with perspective.

Then you watch one of his last few videos and realize that this is the same walk he took on September 11th, 2001... and you discover that this is truly personal for him. You just have to dig a little to find that he's constructed that personal meaning from fragments of history and reflection. Whether we like it or not, it's what we're all going to have to do in the end.

Idlewild and Remix Narrative

Up until about ten minutes ago, I would have given a thoroughly mixed review of Idlewild. I came out of the movie satisfied with the excitement and the style, but a little skeptical about the narrative, whose first hour seemed a broken record of drama film clichés. But if there’s anything film studies has taught me, it’s that thinking about a movie can improve the overall experience, and that a film becomes a lot better when its themes have been identified, even retrospectively.

Idlewild featured the acting debuts of Outkast (“Andre 3000” Benjamin and Antwan “Big Boi” Patton), and it was the first big-screen endeavor of Outkast’s music video director, Bryan Barber. I was initially attracted to the movie because I love the word “Idlewild”… it’s a pair of syllables that affects my brain like a code word. The word “idle” suggests a sort of compulsive laziness and libertarian apathy, and the addition of the word “wild” makes me think of a maritime anti-hero whose fury is spontaneous, unreasonable, but perfectly appropriate to the way he lives his life. I also happen to love the band Idlewild, a Scottish rock outfit.

I also liked the stylistic decisions embodied in this movie, which were apparent in the trailer. I love the rogue spirit of hip-hop (especially when it subverts the urban thug paradigm), I appreciate the class and hustle of the prohibition-era underground, and I fully support their synthesis. Idlewild didn’t let me down… the crackling big-band aesthetic and the halting improvisation of vinyl found a compelling common ground, securing my admiration of Idlewild’s fresh-faced director.

Unfortunately, where Idlewild’s aesthetic was well-executed, its narrative was a little green around the ears. The conclusion worked fairly well, first in the speakeasy and then in the darkness of Percival’s living room, but the road was paved with tired filmic clichés that became comical at times. There was a slow-motion walk through the rain (a la The Shawshank Redemption, The Matrix), a bullet-stopping bible (a la Disney’s Three Musketeers), a timid performer empowered by the gaze of her True Love (a la Save the Last Dance), booze transported in a coffin (a la Some Like It Hot), and all sorts of smaller-scale film tropes. Every scene seemed to be a music video, building up to its own short-term conclusion.

So I liked the synthetic, derivative style of this film, but I was skeptical about the artificial, derivative plot. I’ve only just come to realize that this is a double-standard. If I’m content with music that samples and shuffles and remixes the climaxes of classic tunes, and I can accept the same aesthetic in Idlewild’s stylistic choices, then why am I so hesitant about accepting a patchwork plot of film trivia? Honestly, I kind of enjoy going back through this movie and figuring out why each narrative moment seems familiar.

Turns out I was looking for a film in a pure pastiche… a remix movie, plastered together from a series of tried-and-true ideas, musical, aesthetic, and narrative. Barber dropped the Shakespeare (slightly misquoted) in between beats of magical negro and Harold and Maude, stitching together a sharp-edged answer to Moulin Rouge’s ballad sentimentality. When I think too hard, I come to the erroneous conclusion that I dislike derivative media. Isn’t that ridiculous?

More Tomato Nation: Insights into Dorkiness

Okay, now I've started reading Tomato Nation, and I'm finding more to comment on. Having just recently disagreed with Sarah's review of Grizzly Man, I now find myself agreeing wholeheartedly with her account of dorkiness, and I'd like to throw in my however-many cents about it.

Here's where she hits the nail on the flat fucking head, articulated so perfectly that I'm probably naive to think I have anything more to say: "...it's that idea of looking to that thing, that signifier, to let you belong because that thing belongs to you, horses, baseball, Broadway, Harry Potter, Risk, loving it as though it will love you back, without apologizing for it or winking at anyone who might be watching you."

I'm going to repeat that, just so everyone gets it: true nerdhood is about loving something you do so unabashadly that it can't possibly make you cool. "Cool" is always about image and perspective, and it requires constant mediation to make sure you distinguish yourself without actually annoying or alienating the majority of your audience. Nerds can't be this kind of cool. They don't even HAVE a fucking audience. They can't be ironic, because irony is a way of talking about something in a way that distances you from it. Sarah is absolutely spot-on correct... nerdiness is about your attitude toward the things you're enthusiastic about.

Two people in my academic career have exemplified nerdiness to me, in all its sublime excitement.

One was a middle-school teacher I worked with in my extracurricular activities. He busted his ass to teach seventh-graders, those kids who refuse to think about anything but establishing superficial social lives, about the importance and excitement of poetry. He told me I would like Jorge Luis Borges' cerebral fiction, because The Library of Babel and The Garden of Forking Paths are simply sick-ass awesome stories, and when I read Borges a couple years later, I found he was absolutely right. The same thing happened with the rock-and-roll zombie flick he recommended to me, Wild Zero. Oh, and he LOVES drunken trivia, and he kept score for his team pretty strictly.

The other was a college professor who I never worked with very closely, but who exemplified the kind of passion you need to be a bona-fide nerd. He was an IR professor, and he presented a series of screenings and critical discussions of Star Wars: Episodes IV to VI. At the end of these discussions, he said something that's been with me ever since: "Next semester, I'll do these discussions of the Matrix movies, and not only will I show you that they aren't as bad as you think... I'll also convince you that they actually got BETTER, one after another." In a world that's obsessed with disparaging the second two Matrix movies, that's a ballsy statement.

Honestly, I think these professors might like this very blog, because it's my expression of enthusiasm about the movies and Internet memes that I love. The Rundown, Pirates of the Carribean, Wikipedia, and Cyberpunk... if you really want to know, this blog is a window into my soul. I'm glad someone like Sarah managed to put that into such clear terms for me.

A response to Tomato Nation on the topic of The Grizzly Man

Here are two things I like:

1) Tomato Nation (and generally, bloggers who write involved commentary, rather than just blurbs and offhand references to online curiousa)

2) Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man

So I'm a little thrown off by Sarah's commentary on the film. She and I agree on all the particular points of character... we both see Treadwell as a madman, we both find ourselves slightly off the sympathy track, and we both laughed occasionally. Yet, we manage to disagree on the effectiveness of the movie as a whole. I loved Grizzly Man. She seems... mad at it, for some reason.

Here are her complaints, as far as I can sort them out:

1) "The man died, and his girlfriend died, and for their families and their friends, of course it's a genuine loss and I'm not trying to make light of that fact. But as awful as a bear attack is in practice, in theory, 'getting eaten by a bear'…sounds funny. "

2) "It's probably considered in poor taste even to hint that Treadwell 'asked for' that grisly end (no pun intended), but I think we have to acknowledge that, in a way, he did -- he behaved recklessly, he refused to get that the bears didn't love him back, he didn't take precautions, and if you go out into the Alaskan wilderness ... and you follow the bears around and fuck with them, sooner or later your number is going to come up."

I think, to Sarah's credit, that the central anger she is expressing is at the character (the actual person) of Treadwell. She spends a lot of her essay repeating, over and over, one of the central themes of the movie, that you can't just join nature and discover some sort of primordial harmony. Treadwell's life is obviously a testament to that, and it's one of the clearest messages in Herzog's documentary.

Sarah's anger at Treadwell doesn't interest me much. I know I'm never going into the woods to poke bears in the ass with sticks, so I see no real reason to be mad at him. If anything, I respect his dedication, I pity his self-inflicted downfall, and I raise my eyebrows at his sheer lunacy. In a way, I'm not interested in Sarah's condemnation because it flattens out an on-screen personality that Herzog really managed to fill out with some depth. A lot of idealism requires a certain naivety and a certain idiocy, and Treadwell's obsessive pathology makes him funny (as Sarah points out), but it also makes him sad, disturbing, and unpredictable.

However, Sarah isn't just mad at Treadwell. She also seems ambiently mad at Herzog, who she implicitly accuses of over-sentimentalizing an absurd life and a violent death. This is where I think Sarah falters in her interpretation, moving from disapproval of Treadwell to disapproval of his portrayal. By over-emphasizing Treadwell's naivety in her review, Sarah seems to suggest that Herzog was totally ignorant of it in his film, and this simply wasn't true.

When she's introducing the movie, Sarah says, "And then I may have chuckled a little. And this is the issue, with the movie and with Timothy Treadwell and with his demise." If Sarah thinks she's the only person who laughed at Treadwell's bizarre antics, then she's wrong. And if she thinks Herzog didn't shake his head in incredulous disbelief at Treadwell's behavior, then she underestimates his capacity to understand his own material. Herzog is placing his sympathy within a context of the character's comical ignorance, and by rejecting Treadwell's emotional presence on the basis of his personal flaws, Sarah spends her review stripping away the extra dimension that Herzog worked so hard to add to Treadwell's demise.

Through the Heart (Steve Irwin and Elliott Smith)

Steve Irwin died on September 4th, victim of a stingray barb through the heart. I wasn't one of the Crocodile Hunter's most devoted followers, but I class him in a group of people who have my respect, simply on the basis of their single-mindedness... with people like Bob Ross and Al Sharpton. He's one of a few strange public personalities, breaks in the mass-produced static of mediated culture, whose sheer force of identity and personality elevate them above the cesspool of the entertainment industry.

Irwin's death makes me think of another recently-deceased entertainer, who I would also place in the above category. This is Elliott Smith, who I associate with Irwin because he died in a similar way: pierced through the heart at the height of his career in a movingly tragic and surreally fitting spasm of mortality. Both Smith and Irwin died in the throes of their own passion, and the cardiac trauma seems almost a badge of their parallel tragedies.

Even as I write this, I ask myself: how can I talk about these deaths as though they have some sublime meaning? Is it possible for any death to be "fitting"? Is it deeply cynical to make such a tenuous connection between two unrelated entertainers, a connection based on the similar circumstances of their deaths? Am I being profoundly trite by making such a big deal out of "death by pierced heart"?

I hope not... what really characterizes these two, and ultimately connects them, was their passion and single-minded devotion to a way of life. Their deaths were the culmination of their lives, and these two individuals spent their prime years creating new meaning and diffusing ideas into the slipstream. I suppose it's only natural that I try, however artificially, to attach a meaning to Irwin's death in the fevers of nature, and to Elliott Smith's death in the tremors of his own epic emotional swings.

I feel almost overwhelmed by cliche at this point, so I'm going to draw this meditation to a close. I'll just throw my last thought out there: an individual can face death as the final spark in a long chain of circumstance, or they can face it as a part of a life fully-lived, built around a broadly-constructed personal experience of the world. Steve Irwin managed the latter, and when my time comes, I hope I'll do the same.

The Next Wave (Julia Stiles on the digital revolution)

This video showed up recently on YouTube, and it's pretty brilliant. The 12-year old Julia Stiles as a hacker prodigy, covering the digital underground for the school paper in Ghostwriter. .. forget Marshall McLuhan and Neo. This is the Internet messiah that we all overlooked.

(in case you can't understand the multi-jigawatt decibel oscillations of this Internet hyperstream, scroll down... I've done the best I can to make a transcript, and I put it at the end of this entry.)

Anyone remember 1993? Some bloggers probably don't, and even for me it's hardly more than a pair of tail-lights in the fog of memory. It was two years before Hackers, and the infamous Time Cyberporn article, both of which brought a seedy infamy to the circonicum tubes of the Interweb. It was before iPods and the Star Wars Kid and All Your Base, before wiki and blogs and Penny Arcade, before anyone had heard of the RIAA or thought of free Internet music, before CSS and Flash and VRML (okay, so that one never caught on).

Yes, sir, 1993 was the springtime of contemporary culture. The Internet was still a seedling, and do you remember how much hope we had for it? It was going to revolutionize our culture, create a new era of communication and literacy, and break down barriers of age, ethnicity, and ideology. The Internet was an atom bomb whose fuse had just been lit, and we were all right there with Julia Stiles, listening for the majesty of the blast.

The Internet delivered on some of its promises, and it stalled out on others. Is media more democratic? Absolutely, and the phenomenon is only increasing. Is the whole world wired up and spinning in a state of digitally-mediated peace? No, not exactly... like every utopian technology, the Internet was appropriated by the wealthy and privileged, and it hasn't managed to break down that division quite yet. Even so, our lives are vastly richer, and we're vastly more intelligent as a culture, as a result of the Internet.

Even so, it seems harder to commit to the digital age now than it was to be excited for it back at the beginning. The flowering of digital technology has gone hand in hand with a growth of cynicism, the natural by-product of a culture that's suddenly exposed to all its own highs and lows. Images like this "Special Olympics" announcement, and the coining of terms like Godwin's Law (that people just have to bring up Hitler every time they have a fucking debate) are indications of our distrust of Internet discussion. Bloggers spend a lot of time disparaging each other, like in this blogger's post, where he bitches about MySpace users while profoundly misinterpreting Ze Frank's brilliant (and truly optimistic) post on democratization of design. As the Internet's become part of our daily experience, we've also come up with an array of words for our digital pet peeves: spam, trolls, pop-ups, flame wars, and noobs.

Where did our excitement go? Is disenchantment a necessary by-product of experience? Did the Internet live up to our expectations, and if not, where did it fail, and where did WE fail? Is cyberspace still a frontier, or is it a cultural junkyard, like every frontier we try to colonize?

I'm not immune to Internet cynicism... I shake my head in dismay when people disrupt Wikipedia articles, and I'm thoroughly tired of reading arguments where people exaggerate my arguments so far out of proportion that they can compare me to Hitler. But every so often, I feel overcome with appreciation for the digital revolution that's connected me with a world beyond little suburbia. Bloggers like Ze Frank and William Gibson and Lawrence Lessig bring it out, and at those moments, I can relate to that young Julia Stiles, an explorer on a frontier that's still unconquered territory.

If I was that twelve-year old talking to Julia Stiles, you know what I'd say to her?

"Yeah, I've read Neuromancer. Twice."

And then, just before I fainted from the pressure of talking to a pretty girl, I'd manage to get one more thing out. I'd say, "Yeah, Julia, you're right. This is the place where I can say whatever I want, and be judged on my words, not on my wrinkled shirt. As long as we put our faith in those console cowboys... as long as we keep believing in cyberspace, and investing our time and energy into making it more intelligent... then we can also have faith that it'll change the world throughout, and far beyond, our own meager lifetimes."

*swoon* *faint* *Nurse's office*




[transcript of dialouge from YouTube video]

"Do you know anything about hackers? Have you jammed with the console cowboys in cyberspace?"

"What?"

"Ever read Neuromancer?"

"Huh?"

"Ever experienced the New Wave? Next Wave? Green wave? Or cyberpunk? I didn't think so. I'll handle the hacker stories."

"Yeah, I think you should. Where'd you learn about all this hacker stuff?"

[pointing to the computer] "In there. It's a world where you're judged by what you say and think... not by what you look like. A world where curiousity and imagination is a power. [pause to return to real life] We need that paper here, people! Work with me! Work with me!"

[end transcript]

Newspaper critics: The Journey to Irrelevance

Pop Politics recently posted a shot blurb on the obsolescence of movie critics, mainly referencing an L.A. Times article, found here. The decreasing relevance of newspaper critics may be shocking to some people, especially those used to traditional journalism for their cultural commentary, but to this blog editor, this phenomenon is almost too obvious to warrant mention.

Luckily, both the original essay and PopPolitics' commentary elaborate on this phenomenon enough that they prompt a response. The Times' reaction to this "news" is cynically traditional, in my decidedly neophilic opinion. This is the assumption that we're seeing the downfall of meaningful cinema, and I think critics who subscribe to it are the ones going out of date the fastest. Just look at this L.A. Times paragraph:

"But today we're in an era in which shared enthusiasm matters more than analysis, stylistic cool trumps emotional substance. The world has changed. The vanguard filmmakers of the '60s — the era that spawned our last great generation of critics — were Godard, Kubrick and Antonioni, filmmakers under the spell of the intellectual fervor sparked by existentialism and Marxism. The filmmakers with a youth-culture following today, be it Kevin Smith, Quentin Tarantino or Wes Anderson, are largely ideology free, masters of detachment and stylistic homage. Like their audience, they prefer irony to Big Ideas."

This is an unfair appraisal at best, and a spot of messy old-world elitism at worst. Modern cinema is a massive, highly-varied mediasphere with every kind of innovator... from political risk-takers like Michael Moore and Hany Abu-Assad, to passionate storytellers like Jeunet and Aronofsky, to industry personalities like Charlie Kaufman, there's a demonstrable "vanguard" of thoughtful filmmakers at work in the industry.

The fact that these innovators aren't the highest-grossing filmmakers? Irrelevant. In 1968, when Kubrick released 2001: A Space Odyssey, it didn't even make it to the top ten... Planet of the Apes, Rosemary's Baby, and The Odd Couple all beat it out. And do you really think Antonioni's Blowup made it into any top-tens in 1966? Yeah right. The huge junkyard of consumable media is very different from the parched desert of high-art film, and this is how it's always been.

So critics have the choice: on one hand, they could offer their services to the artists, using traditional aesthetic and analytical criteria to isolate the movies that should become genuine classics. On the other hand, they could inhabit the vast world of mass media. That means sorting out and fully understanding the everyday media world of sensory stimulation, rampant reference, and compulsive marketing. It gets messy. I know from experience.

This dilemma is more salient today because the newspaper is losing its mass credibility. Once upon a time, the critics and the newspapers were the only source of authority anyone could depend on, so they had an unrivaled voice of praise or condemnation. Now word of mouth is just so damn available... you can find a massive sampling of opinions, leveled from every preferential and movie-going perspective, and you don't have to depend on the words of a few sanctioned individuals to be your sole source of feedback. At the same time, as the corporate media machine is being lambasted by every political persuasion, the credibility of newspapers is understandably declining. We don't trust reviewers any more than we trust the press corps these days.

So there's a double effect going on: critics are losing popular relevance, and more and more, they're seeing themselves as the sole defenders of artistic integrity. By both their own power and by the sheer volume of modern mass media, critics are being forced deeper and deeper into "traditional cimena" land. The words of L.A. Times critics Kenneth Turan (as reported by L.A. Times writer Patrick Goldstein) are exemplary:

"I'm sorry, but we're not supposed to be applause meters," says Los Angeles Times critic Kenneth Turan. "If you wanted to go to a restaurant for a special occasion and someone said, 'Why not go to McDonald's? More people go there than any other place.' Would that really be enough to convince you?"

And if that wasn't harsh enough, check out this elitist drivel, also reported (not sanctioned) by Goldstein:

Reviewing a collection of critical essays by the long-time Village Voice jazz critic Gary Giddins, Time film critic Richard Schickel contrasted Giddins' work with "history-free and sensibility-deprived" bloggers who regularly "blurb the latest Hollywood effulgence."

Kenneth is right... he, and his fellow reviewers, have an obligation to offer a better perspective than the brute-force box office numbers. But there's a subtext that may or may not be applicable: Turan and Schnickel might also be revealing their unwillingness to see cinema as entertainment. That's how you go from that desert of the avante-garde to the landscape of the popular, and that's how you anticipate, and influence, an ADHD-ridden public. You look at the characteristics, strengths, and weaknesses of a film that make it entertaining.

Everyone who faces a new set of conditions has a choice: change or become outdated. I'm not saying critics should sanction stupid movies, but they have to account for a few new variables in order to stay relevant, and to influence the movie-going public (i.e. in order to do their jobs).

First, they have to expand their reach beyond newspapers, because newspapers are losing credibility... whether they can swim or not, they have to get the fuck off the sinking ship.

Second, if they want to become cultural forces instead of empty voices drifting into the shadows, they have to account for entertainment value and marketing focus. If Kubrick and Antonioni are your standard, you won't be able to tell people what they're going to like.

I'm not saying the film critic has to become a mass media adolescent, but like any character facing a critical juncture, he's going to have to make a choice.

Off the music video main drag (OkGo and Gnarles Barkley offer alternatives)

The music video is a universally abused form... directors throw visual gimmicks, old tropes, and intense special effects together and shake them, and if they have enough studio backing, they throw the resulting masturbatory vomit onto MTV, where that sort of thing belongs. The ubiquitous tendency of music videos to supernova has overshadowed a little-known fact: music videos can be beautiful and delicate, just like any other developed art form. It's left up to a few thoughtful bands, like Gnarles Barkley and OkGo, to keep proving this by offering alternatives to the overwhelming onslaught of hyperproduced MTV tripe.

Barkley's video, Crazy, and OkGo's music video for Here We Go Again are very different, but I contend that they're both aiming at the same target. By way of very different paths, both videos are stepping off the freight train of music video excess and showcasing a sort of visual minimalism, mobilizing simplicity, symmetry, and continuity to emphasize the strengths of the respective songs.

I mentioned the sweeping differences between these two videos, and I'll examine them from that direction first. The primary difference is production value... Crazy's brilliant, elaborate Rorschach inkblots must have taken hundreds of hours (at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars) to tweak and rotoscope on a high-end graphics machine. This kind of work is painfully detailed and time-consuming... I've tried it. I could hardly make the computer spell my damn name. Whatever the time investment, this production value adds up to a smooth, meditative visual effect with a subliminal edge, something that unfolds the same way Cee-Lo's voice unfolds from Danger Mouse's bassy beats.

OkGo's production value, on the other hand, is basement-dwelling. It looks like the guys spent a few hours messing around with treadmills and a video camera, and that their bizarre, choreographed stroke of genius was the child of their meagerly-funded free time. Note the contrast in the music, and how it reflects in the contrast in production quality... Gnarles Barkley's music is smooth and polished, so the video is the result of a marathon of tinkering and beautification, whereas OkGo's music is freewheeling and spontaneous, so the video is a back-room jaunt of power-pop tomfoolery. In both cases, though, the effect of the minimalism is to distill the essential effect from the visuals so the music is complimented on the most effective level.

Consider some simple similarities, though... both videos are one long cut, with no breaks or interruptions in the cinematic rhythm. Compare that to videos like The Perfect Drug, which jump around madly with no apparent regard for continuity. In the Barkley and the OkGo videos, the image stands on its own, and its pace is enough to keep the watcher's attenion for the whole song. Reznor's video depends entirely on the novelty of each separate image, because no matter how gorgeous your set, you can only watch Trent stand on a statue of a hand for so long.

Another similarity is each video's dependence on symmetry. This one is pretty incidental, but it makes the experience of a video seem more careful, more calculated, and more focused. The unflinching, uncomplicated camera action, designed to emphasize the visual effect of gorgeous symmetrical images, is a welcome change from the flying camera monkey paradigm that we get in videos like Creed's Matrix-obsessed Higher.

Finally (the points are getting less and less interesting) there's the simple fact of sytlistic cohesion in my featured videos. OkGo: one long low-budget camera shot of guys jumping around on treadmills. Gnarles: nothing but shifting monochromatic shapes, drifting in and out according to a surreally intuitive visual logic. These days everybody wants to mix CGI and animation and live shots, which is awesome, sure, like, totally, but it exposes a serious conceptual deficiency in music videos like Freak On a Leash. Korn uses a ton of styles and cinematic gimmicks because they're incapable of developing a visual idea to the point where it makes the overstimulated fans happy.

Now, don't get me wrong... I need my share of aesthetic excess. After all, I'm the guy whose favorite movies include The Rundown and Wild Zero (haven't seen that one? You HAVE to check it out). Still, I want my experience of music to penetrate deeper than my experience of bad film, and music video effects extravaganzas usually make me want to get up and get another soda.

I'm profoundly relieved that there are still innovators, thinking through their aesthetic approaches, making my music video consumption just a little more satisfying.

The Gestalt of Olive and Richard (Psychoanalysis and Little Miss Sunshine)

Heeeey, for once I went and saw an actual movie, instead of just surfing trailers. It was a slick flick called Little Miss Sunshine. I immensely enjoyed it. So did every other reviewer, apparently, and I'm glad they agree with me.

There are a ton of themes underlying the narrative of Little Miss Sunshine. Off the top of my head: the effects of modern complications (drugs, profiteering, homosexuality) on traditional family structure; the embodiment of parental authority in children, including those who are trying to actively reject this parental influence; the power of innocence to subvert cynicism and authority... seriously, this film was emotionally complex, and there were a lot of themes at play. I'm going to focus on what I see as the primary one.

Certain theorists have pointed out a transition in psychology that happens to children when they develop full command of language. That transition is from a lower to a higher order of thought, from something called the Imaginary order to something called the Symbolic order. Give me a sec, and I'll try to explain the difference.

In the Imaginary order, the child is preoccupied with its own self-image, and it defines itself as a whole, opposed to everything else outside it. This causes identification with the mother (i.e. "I am...") and opposition to the father (i.e. "I am not..."). It's a black-and-white universe, self and not-self, where the child is concerned with protecting and asserting his own identity and opposing it to other identities.

That's the Imaginary order: me and not-me. The transition I spoke of happens when the child fully integrates into the Symbolic order, the mode of interaction where everything is mediated through language. Suddenly, there's more than just a "me" and an "everything else". The child realizes that there are other subjects, other interests to balance against its own, and a whole complicated network of personalities and interactions that it has to account for.

Want an illustration? Go see Little Miss Sunshine. At the beginning of the movie, Richard's perspective is: "I need to assert myself as a winner. A winner is what I am. A loser is what I'm not, and what I should not be." Though we don't fully realize it, this perspective has infected his children, as well... Olive is stressed out about the possibility of losing in the childrens' beauty pageant, and Dwayne is so obsessed with his goal of becoming a fighter pilot that he's systematically renouncing all the important teenage experiences in the interim. Frank is a by-product of competition, as well, and by defining himself within a dichotomy of rivalry, success, and faliure, he's already faced his Imaginary breakdown (his castration, in psychoanalytical terms).

So, looked at in a certain light, this movie is about a family's transition from the Imaginary order to the Symbolic order. The artifice of competition, centered around "winning" and asserting oneself, is gradually penetrated by the more complex factors at work in the real world. Winner versus loser is broken up, first by Grandpa, who tells Olive that the only losers are people who are too afraid to compete in the first place. Other factors get in the way of the competition dynamic, as well... Dwayne's personal tragedy is that his efforts are thwarted by factors that are genuinely beyond his control (I hope this wasn't a spoiler), and Richard learns that some goals (getting your kid into a beauty pageant) require you to give up your pride and prostrate yourself in front of an administrator with big hair.

And the climax? I won't spoil it, but suffice it to say that in the end, the competition dichotomy... us versus them, winner versus loser... is broken down entirely by the forces of family and community. In the end, certain members of the family (Dwayne and Richard in particular) have to give up their simplistic ideas of success in favor of a broader paradigm that accounts for family and mental health.

Despite Little Miss Sunshine's indie-film humility and its tongue-in-cheek irony, it's a film that wrestles with one of the toughest issues in contemporary culture. In a profoundly competitive culture, we're coaxed into defining ourselves by the competitions we participate in, and we find ourselves alienated by compulsory standards of success and failure. But as Olive, Dwayne, and Richard himself ultimately discover, it's not our win-loss record that defines us... it's the network of our relationships with the people who are an inevitable part of our lives.

The Rundown versus The Marine = The Rock vs Cena, and I know who I'm betting on

Just found the trailer for John Cena's The Marine.

Anyone else feel like they've been here before?

Seriously, I can't wait to see Cena in character, because The Rundown was one of my favorite movies of the past ten years. It's brainless, brilliant, a pioneer of choreographed sensory stimulation. I wish I had seen it on the big screen, but owning it and watching it once every couple months is at least a reasonable substitute.

So The Rock seems to have set a precedent that John Cena is going to be following. WWE Wrestler with big personality discovers the broken-down world of action stardom, and recognizes it as a niche that needs to be filled. Our current big-budget action stars are sputtering (Van Damme) or governing California (Arnold)... Vin Deisel effectively kicked himself in the shriveled testicles with The Pacifier, which probably wasn't such a good idea just before the transition to serious film. Samuel L. Jackson still does us proud from time to time, but really, the world of testosterone acting is in need of a few new players.

The Rock was really a winning ticket. He's made a few solid films, including a Conan-the-Barbarian equivalent, and though I haven't seen Walking Tall or Doom, I must repeat that The Rundown was among my favorite movies EVER. I'm also sure that Johnny Bravo is going to absolutely wicked... I can't think of anyone better than The Rock for that coveted role.

I don't really need to dwell on the similarities between these films. It's almost a formula: you cast a muscley dude as a One-Man Army in a jungle-like setting, fighting an international criminal/dictator played by the baddest-looking actor you can find. You have to fulfill a quota of gun-toting action and explosions, but that sort of sequence has to be balanced out with a number of hand-to-hand action sequences. This is especially important when your actors used to be professional wrestlers (read: stuntmen).

So can The Marine supplant The Rundown as the baddest wrestler-cum-soldier-of-fortune movie ever? Let's see what it has to go up against.

First of all, The Rock is almost flawless in this role. In The Rundown, he's a mob enforcer, but he's immaculately classy, even after falling down a cliffside and landing in a mountain spring. Cena looks more like an army brat resurrected as a jock. Not that I really care, since I'm just there for the brawls and explosives, but it's pretty validating to see a guy dressed in a business suit beat the shit out of a professional football team.

The Rundown also wasn't afraid of a little homosexual tension, which I count as a huge mark in its favor. It's a modern joke, and a film criticism trope, that buddy films are rife with repressed homosexuality, but in a scene where Beck unzips Travis so he can pee, the writers aren't even bothering with the repression part any more. Compare this to The Marine, which seems to make a point of the fact that Cena's character is a virile, married young stallion who's plowing through a paramilitary force to save his wife. The shots of a muscle-bound wrestler tied to a chair seem to be more loaded with issues than a tongue-in-cheek buddy picture.

Finally, on villains... while Robert Patrick, of Terminator fame, may be a little more grim as far as criminal masterminds go, he a good choice for a cold-blooded gangster. Still, I think Christopher Walken takes the Badass-muhfucking-CAKE for villian with the best personality. He's a legend, and The Rundown was written for him. Check out the speech:

"I feel like a little boy who's lost his first tooth, put it under his pillow, waiting [weird pause] for the tooth-fairy to come. Only [pause] two [pause] evil burglars have crept in my window, and snatched it before she could get here... [a shot of Brazilians looking confused] Wait a second, do you understand [dramatic pause] the CONCEPT of the tooth-fairy? [more confused Brazilians] She takes the god damned thing, and gives you a quarter. They've got my tooth. I want it back."

Oh my God, it was an awesome filmic moment. And, on the topic of depth, Walken's eccentric dictatorial personality wasn't all self-righteousness. He actually came across as an incompetent narcissist a good deal of the time, as a guy who was great at hiding in a command center but who was destined to fail when it came to looking his victims in the face.

I'm not saying that it's impossible. Cena makes a hell of a marine, and they use a killer stunt that appears to have been pioneered by The Matrix: Reloaded... the car, rotating in midair, getting shot up on the underside and exploding before it lands.

All I'm saying is that The Marine has a lot to live up to.

Red Flecks on a Chess Board (Black Dahlia, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance)

I have to note the branding of Black Dahlia, whose trailer has recently appeared on Apple Trailers. The obsidian black, chalky white, and smear of red may be a gimmicky combination, but they really have an effect on me.

So today I'm going to discuss graphic design, which should be fun, because it was my major as an undergrad. Specifically, I'm going to discuss two functions of design, and how this particular branding scheme works, or doesn't work, in terms of each. I'll call it "Red Fleck Branding." If you want a good idea, take another look at that Splash screen at Apple.com, linked above.

You may have seen this look before. It was used to exceptional effect in a recent indie film called Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, primarily in the opening credits. Seriously, this was one of the most brilliant opening sequences I've seen in a long time. It'll provide a good point of comparison, so I don't have to analyze Black Dahlia in a vacuum.

So here are two things designers think about...

1) Pure aesthetic effect.

A lot of designers are hung up on the fact that they're business people, rather than real artists, because they serve the content and the client they're designing for. Even so, one of the basic skills of a designer is assembling a cohesive look and mobilizing a set of stylistic influences to create something unique. Rendering images that are both novel and attractive is an artist's skill.

What makes the Red Fleck Branding style so effective is that it mobilizes two decorative modes that have traditionally been opposed to one another. On one hand, they're minimalist, allowing them to place emphasis on very specific points of interest, like the red lips and the drip of blood from the mouth. On the other hand, however, they're florid, with a sensual, organic interplay of curves that was once associated with Art Nouveau and people like Alfons Mucha. Minimalist but organic... the extraction and isolation of forms that make a profound subliminal impression... it makes for an effective approach.

Now, I'm not saying that either of these films (Black Dahlia, Sympathy) are the first media to do this, but they make it work really well.

2) Appropriateness to the content.

Paul Rand is quoted as saying "Design is the method of putting form and content together." This is the broadest and most consistent claim that defines design... designers are preoccupied with making a presentation fit the content that's being presented, so the media comes across as a cohesive whole.

Here is where we come to the meat of the design discussion, and it's where these two films start to diverge. Now, Black Dahlia is about a 1940's Hollywood murder and a web of neurosis and obsession that the murder initiates. The trailer makes it look like a gritty, grainy visual composition, referencing the silver screen projection quality from the old film reels. An awesome effect, mobilized brilliantly in the branding of a similar film coming out: Hollywoodland.

As much as I adore the razor-sharp colors and curves of Red Fleck Branding, do they really reflect this time period and this milieu? The use of sans-serif type, the artificially high contrast in the images, and the sharp curves reminiscent of vector graphics all invoke a contemporary, even cyber-punk feel, and the sudden appearance of film grain in the trailer causes some cognitive dissonance.

Consider, by contrast, the use of this theme in Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. It's another gritty film about a gruesome sequence of murders, but the combination of narrative elements... the strong, unabashadly feminine protagonist, the avowed use of colors as symbolism, and the reference to prison tatoos and decorative gilding on the protagonist's pistol... all these aspects serve to tie the narrative to its visual treatment.

If that wasn't enough, take another look at that intense opening sequence. The interlaced themes of the film, violence and stark beauty, are brought together in an unrelated but surreally relevant image: the image of the cake in the bakery, white flour and red glaze, and the knife used to carve it up. In my admittedly humble opinion, it rivals Kyle Cooper's infamous Se7en opening credits.

So props to Hollywood for picking up on a strong visual theme, and for making it work its magic in another gorgeous stylization... but more so, props to Chan-Woo Park for doing it first, and doing it best.

Royal Chic (Sophia Coppola's Marie Antoinette)

The trailer for Sophia Coppola's new movie Marie Antoinette may make you think of a lot of things. It may invoke a mental picture of hipsters taking over the French monarchy. It may make you want to take torches and pitchforks to Williamsburg. It may make you look at modern pre-pubescent girls and shake your head at their pronounced lack of leadership skills.

As for me? It makes me think of social structures.

Marie Antoinette existed at a strange time and place for politics. 18th-century France was one of the first cultures to embrace public politics, and it was the birthplace of the celebrity personality. Okay, so democracy had happened before (ancient Greece?) and politics have always affected the plebian masses... but this process was never so transparent and urgent as it was in France, at this time, with these people.

The resulting phenomena: capricious passion about political personalities, love and hatred and anger that could explode and flatline with no apparent warning or justification. This volatile public opinion was a form of distraction for the masses, who weren't particularly fascinated with their own everyday lives, but it was complicated by the fact that the "public personalities" were burdened by responsibility for state affairs.

As much as we'd like to hold modern celebrity culture in contempt, it's more rational in at least this one respect. These days, celebrities are free to flaunt their personalities any way they want... making statements about international issues or insulting jews and calling cops "Sugartits," it's all par for the course. Ultimately, bad (read: autonomous, irresponsible) behavior can just run down the drainpipe, because Hollywood is basically a strange and irrelevant universe unto itself. The worst an idiot actor has to fear is that people won't watch his or her movies.

Now, admittedly, there's some celebrity status wrapped up in the political world, and it seems like some politicians have coasted on the merits of their personalities. But take note: even if we're only concerned with conformism or charisma, at least we have to pretend we have political reasons for our policy decisions. Ultimately, politicians are held to a certain type of logic.

That's how politics and entertainment have evolved: they now work on separate modes of logic and discourse... reason, responsibility, and accountability (politics) versus spectacle, amusement, and personality (celebrity).

People like Marie Antoinette had to deal with a world where these two things were mixed up in an irresolvable orgy of public opinion. She was a politician who was watched like she was on reality TV, a victim of the soul-destroying voyeurism that's embodied in modern paparazzi culture. Having a sexually inept husband wasn't just an issue for the tabloids... it was an issue of heredity, of physiological defect, and of bad leadership.

This was the life of a celebrity suddenly placed at the head of a political structure. Just think: you're raised from childhood in a world where you have every privilege, where you're taught that your superiority entitles you to life as you see fit, and then you're thrust into a role of personal responsibility for a country in turmoil... your become the sovereign ruler of a public that's straining at the leash, desperate to blame someone for their discontent, and your life and death depend upon your perceived political success. A life of leisure, suddenly placed under the most intense pressure any individual is ever asked to withstand.

It's hard to cast Marie Antoinette as either a hero (as Sophia Coppola seems to have attempted) or as a villain (as public opinion once held of her) because she was at the nexus of so many uncontrollable forces. It's not that she didn't have autonomy... it's just that her image is a cross-product of vicious gossip, of royalist legend, of decadent socialization, of scandal, of public scrutiny, of a general revolutionary cynicism regarding authority, and of a thousand other things.

And this, I hope, is what Coppola captures: that anyone living in the face of an opinionated public, especially an adolescent female thrust into a world of power and politics, automatically loses control of their own image and identity. In a politically cynical, celebrity-centered culture, public image is torn away from the actual personality and behavior that should ideally determine it. Marie Antoinette's final heroism is simply to have lived her own life in the midst of a world that tried to make her into a thousand things at once.

Balboa versus Meat Loaf: Who Rocks Harder?

It's gonna be the season of brute force nostalgia. Two classic favorites are rolling back in and showing us what made them so awesome in the first place. The fact that they're working in two different media? Irrelevant. Ass gets kicked either way.

In the red corner, we have Sylvester Stallone as Rocky Balboa in a final installment of the famous boxing series that I was too young to appreciate. I grew up in Philly, though, so I knew about Rocky. I knew every time I wanted to visit an art museum.

In the blue corner, we have Marvin Lee Aday, returning as Meat Loaf for Bat Out of Hell III: The Monster is Loose. I keep accidentally typing his name as Meat Load, but it's kind of appropriate, because Aday is gonna bring us a killer new load of theatrical rock and roll.

In a world of shit-faced remakes and bad song covers, this might seem painfully typical. A resurrection of content we're happier to leave in the cradle of nostalgia, to sing along with on the radio and quote to other people our age (or older)... we don't need anyone dragging BOOH and Rocky's I - V out of their resplendent pop culture crypts, right? Is it going to be any better than it was seeing Jessica Simpson blaspheming Daisy Duke?

The answer is YES, people, because there's a critical principle at work here. These may reference our collective childhood, but they're not remakes or revitalizations. The classics always pale in comparison to their imitations, and nothing's gonna change that. But these aren't imitations. There are the original artists, coming back to defend their titles.

If Vin Diesel was to play a new Rocky, I'd be pissed, and the last thing I could ever want to see is a cover of "Life is a Lemon" by some jackasses like Linkin Park. But instead, we have two classic acts coming back, working under new conditions, to show us what they're made of. Agreed, the guitars in BOOH III are marginally updated (as per this demo song), and Rocky is now fighting a young punk who's grown up in the hip-hop generation.

But that's really the essence of the thing. It's not actually Meat Loaf versus Rocky... it's The Originals (aka RockyLoaf) versus The Imitators. That's right, neuvo metal heads and young punk action stars, it's time to pay dues to the people who inspired you. The Rock versus Rocky Balboa. Nickelback versus Meat Loaf himself.

Somebody thought to dig up the roots. And this Fall, they've got me in their corner.

Wikiality

There's a dangerous new initiative, born in the black bowels of the infamous "Internet," that threatens the integrity of our well-oiled universe. This bad seed, of which the dangerous radical Stephen Colbert is a declared proponent, is "Wikiality." Watch the video. Try not to panic.

After all, our society is the culmination of modern technology, a paradise of well-designed intelligence and media integration tailored to keeping us intellectually comfortable. We get our news from the enlightened hegemon, filtered through the six major media outlets, and we're not even saddled with the responsibility of choosing between points of view. If we really want information in so-called "specialized areas of culture" (though I can't imagine anybody is attached to this option), we can always go to the easily-accessible academic journals awaiting us on every magazine rack. We're finally past the dark ages of haphazard experimentation with media, or with the social structures that support it.

And then came Wikipedia, threatening to overturn everything we've worked for. Wikipedia made available more information than the average "Internet user" could ever want, inducing the vertigo, the veritable phantasmagoria, of being able to figure things out... a malignant, addictive condition I like to call "information dizziness."

Now, if Wikipedia had just copied, word for word, the information presented in the Encyclopedia Brittanica, with sufficient editorial input from the Big Six and the U.S. Government, then it would have done a great service to the information age. But Wikipedia's open editorial policy allows the Internet-using public, a social body FAR too large to effectively generate content, to contribute to information that they never had to worry about before. The result was mass chaos on a scale comparable to the LA riots: millions of people, downloading gigabytes of information, and always having to think about where it might be coming from. Suddenly thousands were resorting to devices like "induction," "deduction," "critical reading," and "fact-checking," instincts we thought Mass Media had finally deprecated.

And now, iconoclasts like Colbert advocate a new structure of thought, a tumerous development springing from the cancerous cells of Wikipedia. This social structure would guarantee that every person is cursed with their own autonomy, and people are left paranoid in the dark, scrutinizing every accepted idea to verify its integrity. Farewell comfortable womb of certainty, hello cold universe of critical thought. Colbert calls this new system "Wikiality."

Does Colbert understand the full ramifications of his dangerous rhetoric? A world where the truisms at the very base of society are in dispute? Where each person is responsibile for his or her OWN outlook, and where citizens are forced to doubt the decisions and emotional reactions benevolently dictated to them? A place where people have to think, question, and evaluate practically EVERYTHING they're told by the information apparatus?

You may go gentle into that good night, but as for me... they will not take me alive.

Bigger Than You Can Imagine (The Assassination of Jesse James)

By and large, trailers are afterthoughts. They give a quick glimpse of the stars involved in a movie, give away a couple of the more obvious aesthetic devices, and allow a momentary glimpse of the stylistic choices made by the director. From trailers of arty films - Garden State - to the teasers for action flicks - Miami Vice - the model is pretty standard. A few high-intensity action shots or closeups, one joke to give a vague suggestion of character, and an enigmatic or suspenseful closing cut so we want to go see whether the dude makes it out alive.

So when I see a gorgeous, well-developed trailer like The Assassination of Jesse James, it makes me feel like I just watched a good film for free.

It's so brief, but it's so beautiful... it goes so far beyond the normal "visual stimuli" paradigm, it's not even funny. The video is composed of three shots of the narrator and three shots of Jesse James, his object of fascination. Jesse James never speaks, and he hardly moves, and Robert Ford spends the whole trailer interacting with something just off-camera. In his first shot, he's watching it ominously, and in the other two shots, he's talking to it.

First, a simple formal consideration... overall, three shots of the voyeur, and three shots of his object. The first shot is Jesse James emerging from a bank of fog, distilling himself from the historical setting of the film. The last shot is him blowing out a candle, closing the curtain on his own story. Jesse James is the background, and he's the object of the gaze, as evidenced by his appearance in a photograph. He frames the flow of the trailer, and his ambient presence, set against the verbal and sensory presence of Robert Ford, is the backbone of the experience.

The confessional is a worthy model for this trailer. Jesse James, silent and pensive, is the priest. This sequence of shots, the confessional, is his domain, where he waits in the shadows to hear the testimonial of his assassin. Robert Ford is the sinner, shown behind glass in his first on-screen appearance... in his final one, he's bathed in the garish white light of interrogation. And because James is such an ambient presence, a lurking face that stares from a shadow without speaking, it's hard to tell whether Robert Ford is confessing to the audience, or to James himself.

The trailer drips with so much anticipation, I can't even hold still. After I saw it, I went and looked up the movie on IMDB, and looked up Jesse James on Wikipedia, and my newfound Wild West education only makes me want me to see the film even more.

That's how we do it, people. Good trailers make for good first weekends.