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OCT
07 2004I know I'm going to get in trouble with the English majors who read me, but I have to air a gripe about political fiction. This particular rant was prompted by seeing the new WB drama "Jack and Bobby" the other night. First of all, who the hell approved this show? Jack and Bobby "McCloskey" will grow up to be President and Attorney General in 2025 or something like that, but in the meantime they're being raised by their caricature ultra-liberal academic mother. Somewhat unclear as to why they bother to call them "Jack" and "Bobby," no? Anyway, the show is really annoying. It occurs to me that one of the reasons I don't enjoy political fiction in general is that the arguments tend towards the 'strawman fallacy' (note, this does not apply to political satire, because what's great about satire is that it's totally open with its biases). Our friends at Wikipedia say it fairly succinctly: "The straw-man rhetorical technique (sometimes called straw person) is the practice of refuting weaker arguments than your opponents actually offer." When you construct a dialogue between two imaginary characters, often there is the temptation (or, in many cases, limitation) to weaken your rhetorical opponents' case even as you offer both sides in an argument. And because the author controls both sides of the debate, this technique might not even technically qualify as a strawman because the arguments themselves are crippled. This is one of the tricky things about bringing reality into fiction. You have no idea how much it bugs me when somebody says something on "The West Wing" that wasn't properly fact-checked. Not because I rely on the show for information, but because a) perhaps other people do even though they shouldn't, and b) it's a disruption on the smooth surface of the narrative when you happen to know it's not true. In a strawman fallacy, you construct a different person (hence the name) with different views than your rhetorical opponent so that you can more easily refute their argument than if you directly addressed them. Isn't that the essence of political fiction? AUG
23 2004Today was a proud day for me, because I made a pertinent McLuhan reference at work and it was accepted at face value. I’m working on a piece for PBS’s Frontline as an assistant editor, and I was talking with the editor about interviews (of which I have seen many, many hours at this point). We were talking about Thomas Friedman’s show, where he goes around the world in an attempt to prove that globalization is just the greatest thing ever. “That’s one of the problems with documentaries,” I said. The filmmakers sell the network on a pre-conceived notion (e.g., ‘Bush is the worst president ever’, or ‘Bush is the greatest president ever’) and then we cull relevant footage from the interviews and news clips and vox pops material. “That’s McLuhan for you–the medium is the message.” Lots of people don’t really understand what this little snippet of McLuhanism means. For example, the website Marshall McLuhan Was Wrong; which begins with the foreword
What McLuhan was saying is that the peculiar constraints of various media shape the content being delivered. For example, you are never going to be able to make a cogent argument about, say, economic policy in the form of a three-chord pop song. But you can talk about the emotional impact of policies on an family, or even a whole community. Consider, for example, the film American History X, which is one of my favorite films of all time. The movie is full of people making speeches that sound reasonable and contain figures, but it’s only the neo-Nazis who are allowed to express themselves this way. The message of the film is in the emotional content, the human aspect of real (imaginary) people which shows our equality. It makes an argument against Nazism without having to debate on the facts. Now, that’s fine for a movie, but I was writing a book about the neo-Nazi movement, that certainly wouldn’t be the tack I would take. That’s OK–movies have certain limitations inherent in the medium. You can’t hold up a pie chart during the course of a radio single, you can’t hear a mother’s cry for her dead child in a newspaper article. So, for example, when you’re making an argument against McLuhan (to be fair, “McLuhan Was…” takes issue with another utterance, namely “people will not accept a war on TV”) in the form of an animated GIF, you can’t, for example, play a sound clip. You can’t ever hear McLuhan say anything at all, for that matter. McLuhan wasn’t saying that everything you say in a particular medium means the same thing, only that things said in a single medium all sound kind of the same. I invite you Woody Allen-types to correct me about McLuhan, because I haven’t read everything he wrote, I admit. MAR
15 2004I was eating at my local pizzeria last week, and one of those DVD pirate guys came in, offering a pirated copy of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. Now, I had heard that the film was anti-Semitic, so I figured I this was my chance to find out without giving a potentially anti-Semitic movie a ticket sale. I get the DVD home, and immediately I’m struck by the subtitles. It seems they were translated from Latin and Aramaic to English to Chinese to English again. This makes for some rather amusing subtitles, for example:
Elsewhere, elephants and Dutch people are mentioned. It’s pretty funny. So, I saw the film as Mel intended for me to, which is to say without subtitles. Fortunately, I do have a rudimentary understanding of Aramaic (from Talmud class in junior high) and Latin (I speak Italian, too). The first thing I have to say about The Passion of the Christ is that Jim Caviezel’s Aramaic is awful! He’s like the William Shatner of Aramaic-speaking actors, which is ironic because William Shatner himself appeared in an Esperanto movie, and Shatner couldn’t speak that language either. Anyway, the movie is ultra-violent and ultra-boring (I fell asleep during the flogging scene). Someone brought up the point that no one could have survived all that beating; at the end of the cat-o’-nine-tails scene, you hear the Romans finish couting the lashes at 300. I wasn’t keeping tally, but basically Jesus gets whipped, beaten or kicked about 700 times. He’d have been dead before they nailed him to the cross. So, I know the big question is, is The Passion of the Christ anti-Semitic? The answer is, yes. It’s classically anti-Semitic. It’s as much the script as the portrayals of the Jews themselves. We’re talking the visuals, not just the Aramaic. Someone pointed out to me that the evil Jews seem to have bigger noses (and darker circles under their eyes). There was also some controversy over the line “his blood be on us and on our children.” From what I had read in various articles about the movie, Gibson had removed the line from the film, then it came out that he had merely removed the subtitle. He definitely left it in–the interesting thing is that the line is said off-camera (the camera is close in on Barabas’ face at that point), which means he included it deliberately. Any film student understands what’s going on in the film as a whole–it’s a concerted effort to portray the Pharisees and the Jews in the courtyard as evil and bloodthirsty. What did I get out of the movie? I think I understand Christianity a little better. Jesus’ death, while amazingly embellished in the movie (based on what I read in the gospels), definitely entailed lots of suffering. The human instinct is to want to believe that all this suffering had a larger purpose. The thing is, the Romans had much worse ways of killing people, and they tortured millions of people to death over the course of the empire. And as for Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin, I’m going to make it very simple: Jesus claimed he was the King of the Jews and the Messiah, and he clearly did not qualify as either under Jewish law. Now, if you flip back a few hundred pages in your New International Version, you’ll find the penalty for blasphemy is pretty much death by stoning. Don’t feel bad, that’s the penalty for playing a musical instrument on Saturdays, too. They didn’t really have a lot of options back then. OCT
14 2003Ever since I heard about The Brown Bunny, the Vincent Gallo tour-de-force which premiered at Cannes (garnering the distinguished “Worst Film at Cannes Ever” award from the critics), I have been obsessed with a single idea. That idea is to remake The Brown Bunny shot-for-shot, but with an all rabbit cast (a la Night of the Living Bread). If the critics think Brown Bunny was bad*, wait until they see my opus–uncooperative actors, dialogue completely out of sync with the actors’ lips, the directors’ hands in the shot (turning the bunnies around to face each other when they wander away from their marks), all that.
Dammit! At least I got a chuckle out of the continuation of his “contact” page:
Makes you wonder what else he gets in the mail. Oh well. Back to toiling in obscurity. *No, I have not seen the movie yet. It hasn’t been released in the States yet, as far as I know. |
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