Category Archives: Entertainment

Argos hints at the negative foreign actions of the United States from the 1950s through the 1970s

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I recently saw the movie Argo (95% fresh reviews at RottenTomatoes.com) which was quite well done for a movie for which you know the outcome. One part of the movie that intrigued me was an early timeline scene where the relations between the United States and Iran were described. The events of 1979 shouldn’t have been a complete surprise; the CIA had helped install the Shah through a coup in 1953 and the US supported the regime even through its abuses. This is the back story through which the events of the movie take place. (See the story of Iran-United States relations.)

However, the actions of the United States in Iran were not an isolated incident. Indeed, following its rise to superpower status after World War II, the United States was involved in a number of countries. Some of these actions are more well-known. A war in Korea which ended in a stalemate and reaching the brink of war with China. A war in Vietnam which became unpopular and the US didn’t reach the result for which it entered the war. The Bay of Pigs where the US hoped to depose Fidel Castro. But, there were plenty of actions that were not as well-known. Here are a few places to find out more about these actions:

1. The Church Committee was a Congressional committee that operated in 1975 and uncovered and reported on US foreign actions. The committee produced a number of reports that included information like this:

Among the matters investigated were attempts to assassinate foreign leaders, including Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, the Diem brothers of Vietnam, Gen. René Schneider of Chile and President John F. Kennedy’s plan to use the Mafia to kill Fidel Castro of Cuba.

2. Former CIA operative Philip Agee wrote a 1975 book titled Inside the Company: CIA Diary where he detailed what he knew about CIA actions to influence politics in Latin America. For his actions, Agee’s passport was revoked and he became a persona non grata in some countries friendly with the US. In 2007, Agee described why he came forward with what he knew:

“It was a time in the 70s when the worst imaginable horrors were going on in Latin America,” he says. “Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Guatemala, El Salvador – they were military dictatorships with death squads, all with the backing of the CIA and the US government. That was what motivated me to name all the names and work with journalists who were interested in knowing just who the CIA were in their countries.”

Watching Argo in light of this information may just change the interpretation of the final scenes. At first glance, these scenes can be viewed as yet another American success story: American ingenuity and hard work again fights off the forces of darkness. But, with the more complete back story, the final scene might appear more bittersweet.

Tom Wolfe and Max Weber’s ideas about status

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In the wake of the release of his new book Back to Blood, Tom Wolfe talks about his “sociological approach to writing”:

On his sociological approach to writing

“This attention to status … started when I was in graduate school and I was in a program called American Studies, which was a mixture of different disciplines but one [in which] you were forced to take sociology. I had always looked down on sociology as this arriviste discipline that didn’t have the noble history of English and history as a subject. But once I had a little exposure to it, I said, ‘Hey, here’s the key. Here’s the key to understanding life and all its forms.’ And the great theorist or status theorist was a German named Max Weber. And from that time on, I said this obviously is the way to analyze people in all of their manifestations. I mean, my theory is that every moment — even when you’re by yourself in the bathroom, you are trying to live up to certain status requirements as if someone were watching … It’s only when your life is in danger that you drop all that.”

If you have read any of Wolfe’s novels, you know his characters are constantly worried about status: what do people think of me? In The Bonfire of the Vanities , Sherman McCoy starts at the top of the world as a bond trader but the story traces his path to the bottom as he loses his job, his family, and, most importantly, his previous status as “Master of the Universe.” On the other side, the title character in I Am Charlotte Simmons comes from a more humble background and has to learn how to negotiate within an elite university.

Weber built upon Marx’s ideas about the means and modes of production by adding the dimension of status. Marx argues social class was determined by economic factors; you either had access to and control of economic resources or not. But Weber suggested status, or prestige, was also tied up with economic resources. Thus, one might be high status but relatively lower on the economic ladder or vice versa. An example of this in today’s society would be a measure of occupational prestige where Americans are asked to rate different occupations on a prestige scale from 1-100. Here is one such table from Harris Interactive in 2009:

Firefighters don’t make the most money nor do nurses but both are considered more prestigious, probably because they involve caring for people. In contrast, look at the bottom of the list: occupations where the actors may be perceived as looking more for money or their own interests are considered less prestigious.

If you want to read more on the connection between Tom Wolfe, sociology, and the concept of status, Joel Best wrote an interesting 2001 piece titled “‘Status! Yes!’: Tom Wolfe as a Sociological Thinker. I also wonder if there isn’t a hint of Goffman in Wolfe’s work as well. What he describes above also could play out through the concept of impression management and the constant need to change our behavior to fit the changing social situations.

 

Is a McMansion truly a better scary movie setting than a smaller, older house?

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In the last few days, I’ve seen a few stories about horror movies that take place in McMansions (see here and here). Are McMansions inherently scarier than smaller and older houses? I’ll offer a few arguments for each.

On the side of McMansions:

1. Bigger houses allow more room for weird things to happen and more space for bad creatures to pop out of. The victims have room to run away and utilize rooms they may not have entered in weeks (because the house is just that big!).

2. Perhaps residents of McMansions and all of their faux wealth (according to critics) are more deserving of bad things happening to them or are more naive and innocent. Either way, there is something about McMansion owners that makes them better targets for these films.

3. It is really about a commentary on the foolishness of buying and living in McMansions. Perhaps the horror is the inevitable result of American individualism and consumerism.

On the side of smaller and older homes:

1. They are more claustrophobic. There is nowhere else to go.

2. They are older so there is more potential for odd backstories (think of all of those old owners) or odd places (unused cellars, crawlspaces, attics, etc.).

3. The homeowners may be of a different demographic – they don’t have the wealth to live in McMansions or new homes – so there is potential for different kinds of story lines beyond wealthy and pampered teenagers or young couples who have “made it.”

I think McMansions are an easy target for horror movies and other cultural critics. Most Americans don’t live in them but they symbolize the kind of well-off life that contrasts with darker stories. Of course, dark things can happen in all kinds of houses…

Argument: George Lucas is the “greatest artist of our time”

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Camille Paglia explains why she believes George Lucas is “the greatest artist of our time”:

Who is the greatest artist of our time? Normally, we would look to literature and the fine arts to make that judgment. But Pop Art’s happy marriage to commercial mass media marked the end of an era. The supreme artists of the half century following Jackson Pollock were not painters but innovators who had embraced technology—such as the film director Ingmar Bergman and the singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. During the decades bridging the 20th and 21st centuries, as the fine arts steadily shrank in visibility and importance, only one cultural figure had the pioneering boldness and world impact that we associate with the early masters of avant-garde modernism: George Lucas, an epic filmmaker who turned dazzling new technology into an expressive personal genre.

The digital revolution was the latest phase in the rapid transformation of modern communications, a process that began with the invention of the camera and typewriter and the debut of mass-market newspapers and would produce the telegraph, telephone, motion pictures, phonograph, radio, television, desktop computer, and Internet. Except for Futurists and Surrealists, the art world was initially hostile or indifferent to this massive surge in popular culture. Industrial design, however, rooted in De Stijl and the Bauhaus, embraced mechanization and grew in sophistication and influence until it has now eclipsed the fine arts.

No one has closed the gap between art and technology more successfully than George Lucas. In his epochal six-film Star Wars saga, he fused ancient hero legends from East and West with futuristic science fiction and created characters who have entered the dream lives of millions. He constructed a vast, original, self-referential mythology like that of James Macpherson’s pseudo-Celtic Ossian poems, which swept Europe in the late 18th century, or the Angria and Gondal story cycle spun by the Brontë children in their isolation in the Yorkshire moors. Lucas was a digital visionary who prophesied and helped shape a host of advances, such as computer-generated imagery; computerized film editing, sound mixing, and virtual set design; high-definition cinematography; fiber-optic transmission of dailies; digital movie duplication and distribution; theater and home-entertainment stereo surround sound; and refinements in video-game graphics, interactivity, and music.

Read the entire interesting argument.

Four quick thoughts:

1. This broadens the common definition of artist. It acknowledges the shift away from “high art,” the sort of music, painting, and cultural works that are typically found in museums or respectful places to “popular art” like movies and music.

2. The argument doesn’t seem to be that Lucas is the best filmmaker or best storyteller. Rather, this is based more on his ability to draw together different cultural strands in a powerful way. Paglia argues he brought together art and technology, combined stories from the past and present, promoted the use and benefits of new technologies that were influential far beyond his own films.

3. Another way to think of a “great artist” is to try to project the legacy of artists. How will George Lucas be viewed in 50 or 100 years? Of course, this is hard to do. But, part of creating this legacy starts now as people review an artist’s career though it could change with future generations. I wonder: if technology is changing at a quicker pace, does this also mean the legacy of cultural creators will have a shorter cycle? For example, if movies as we know them today are relics in 50 years, will Lucas even matter?

4. How would George Lucas himself react to this? Who would he name as the “greatest artist” of today?

A new off-Broadway play criticizes making the American Dream about buying mini-McMansions

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It has become common in recent years to link the economic crisis to the purchases of McMansions. Here are a few lines from the new off-Broadway play “Heresy” illustrate this:

Chris’ college roommate, Pedro (Danny Rivera), and tarty call girl lady friend Lena (Ariel Woodiwiss) appear as witnesses for the persecuted campus radical. With the help of Pontius’ blowsy socialite wife, Phyllis (Kathy Najimy), the negotiation for Chris’ freedom devolves into a boozy cocktail party and a well-meaning but exasperating political debate. The characters spout off arguments like, ”The American Dream has been reduced to mean a mini-McMansion bought with an unaffordable mortgage,” and ”The American dream has dwindled into a vulgar, materialistic view of life.” And so on.

A lot of commentators have argued that the American Dream has become equated with consumerism. I remarked recently to one of my classes that this seems to be an odd interpretation of the “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” suggested in the Declaration of Independence.

But, there is little doubt that owning property was an important consideration for the American colonists and that owning a home today is one key marker of “making it” in America. I suspect the real issue here could be two things:

1. Buying and consuming more than one needs. It is one thing to be self-sufficient or comfortable and another to be excessive.

2. There are issues when individuals care more about acquiring and protecting their own possessions as opposed to caring about and contributing to the larger community. This has been a tension throughout American history.

Another note of interest: what exactly is a mini-McMansion and how does it differ from a McMansion? McMansions are usually thought to be quite large, probably somewhere between 3-10,000 square feet. Thus, a mini-McMansion would be smaller but the average new home in the United States is around 2,500 square feet so is this typical new home automatically a mini-McMansion?

Games about infrastructure: street cleaning and the construction of power plants

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Perhaps everything can go through the gamification process: I recently ran into two games that tackle issues involving infrastructure.

1. Here is a new street cleaning game recently released in Germany:

The game – known as Kehrmaschinen-Simulator 2011 in its homeland of Germany – puts the player behind the wheel of a street cleaning truck and promptly serves some of the dirtiest gutters and asphalt surfaces a city could provide.

Sadly, racing your sweeper at high speeds is not an option. What you can do is drive slowly, move the sweeping apparatus in a wide variety of ways, and – like a good street sweeper must – keep the streets clean. You can also get intimately familiar with the more mundane aspects of the street sweeping profession, from filling up the water tanks to turning on the truck’s various lights to checking your email…

Overall, the game provides what it promises: the player gets to clean city streets. How appealing that is depends on your personality.

“They say war games teach kids how to use guns and kill people and be violent; I don’t really believe in that,” one reviewer notes. “But if you do, maybe you should feed your kid some street sweeping games so he can get ready for his future job.”

The 15 minute video will give you a better idea of what the game is about.

2. We recently played the board game Power Grid for the first time. The idea of the game is that you have to build power plants, power them with resources you have to purchase, and then expand to new cities (which costs you) and also buy more powerful power plants (which also costs you more) to power more cities at a time. For an involved board game, the Amazon reviews are positive (4.5 stars out of 73), the review from Dice Tower is positive, and Board Game Geek offers a lot more information.

My takeaway comes with a caveat: anything can be made fun if done well. However, I do like thinking about infrastructure and city-building anyway so I may have more interest in such games.

Why not also pitch these games as learning opportunities? Give people the idea that playing a game might also be educational and these things might fly off the shelves. Power Grid requires a good amount of math to balance out how much new plants, resources, and city connections will cost versus how much a player will take in each turn based on their number of powered cities. While it is difficult to model complex events exactly in a game, these sorts of games could give kids and adults a better awareness of what it takes to clean streets or provide power. These are not unimportant tasks; I don’t think most citizens want dirty streets and dark houses.

Reality TV is making us smarter and turning us all into “miniature anthropologists”

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Here is a summary of a recent argument that reality TV makes us smarter as well as turns all of us into anthropologists:

Reality TV has long been the bastard child of the television industry. Ever since its highfaluting sociological roots with PBS’ The American Family, MTV’s groundbreaking The Real World, and even CBS’ watershed Survivor, the viewing public has treated reality television as if it is going to end civilization even as they tuned in to watch in droves. The general animus in the public spirit and the media (even the entertainment media) is that reality TV would somehow cause every museum to go bankrupt, every opera to close its curtains for good, and every breathing American to start desperately launching into fisticuffs like they were trying to be cast on some sort of exploitative documentary program. All these years later, we still have Survivor and, while there may be more useless step-and-repeats at insignificant events, thanks to all the Real Housewives and Mob Wives and Basketball Wives and the rest of the sundried wives that grace our tube, the world hasn’t ended.

What if reality TV is making us smarter? That’s the argument Grant McCracken makes in Wired magazine. In an excellent essay, he says that watching reality shows, no matter how massaged by producers and edited for effect, turns us all into miniature anthropologists. Not only do we learn things from different cultures other than our own (he uses learning about fashion via Project Runway), but it also makes us look beyond the surface of what we’re watching to find the true meaning. “Culture is a thing of surfaces and secrets. The anthropologist is obliged to record the first and penetrate the second,” McCracken says. “Once we’ve figured out what people believe to be true about themselves, we can begin to figure out what’s really going on in this culture. In this case, the surface says, ‘reality TV is a dumbing down.’ But the secret says ‘not always.’ Sometimes, reality TV contributes to a smartening up.”

From the original article, here is how McCracken thinks ethnography will help us figure out what is really happening when watching TV:

A key feature of anthropology is the long, observational, “ethnographic” interview. Anthropologists believe one of the advantages of this method is that no one can manage appearances, let alone lie, successfully for a long period of time.

So while the Kardashian sisters may wish to create an impression – and the producers edit to reinforce that impression – over many episodes and seasons, the truth will out. Whether they like it or not, eventually we will see into Kardashian souls. That these souls are never as beautiful as the sisters themselves is, well, one of the truths that reality TV makes available to us, and here it performs one of the functions normally dispatched by religious or moral leaders.

I don’t disagree that reality TV can be a decent place to see sociological and anthropological ideas and concepts. However, I think there are a few assumptions made in this argument that aren’t necessarily true:

1. That TV can show how complex the real world is. Editing cuts out a lot but even then, there is only so much that can be shown or taken in through one screen. The social world is incredibly complex and difficult to understand even when living in it, let alone in viewing it.

2. That viewers are watching in a critical way and not just for entertainment and spectacle. Lots of cultural products, such as television, can be viewed critically and viewers can learn something (even if it is about a small part of the world, as suggested in #1 above), but I’m not sure most are. People aren’t going to pick these things up by osmosis and they need to learn how to look for them.

3. That the goal of the producers of reality TV is to really tell a story versus to make money. From a more Marxist point of view, why shouldn’t we just assume reality TV, like the rest of TV (news, sports, scripted shows, etc.) is solely about making money?

4. That these shows are heavily scripted/edited/intentionally pushed in certain directions. If this is “reality,” it is a very skewed and not “natural” reality. And there are lots of stories about how producers and participants intentionally create scenes and images.

5. That ethnography is the same as sitting in a chair watching TV. Indeed, there is a name for this, armchair anthropology, and it is not the same as experiencing something personally. Imagine the difference between being in the crowd at a political rally and watching it on TV. There is a different level of understanding and interaction available in the embodied activity versus the more passive viewing from a distance. It is not that you can’t learn from this more distant viewing but it is not the same as being there ethnographically.

Reality TV is not a substitute for real sociological and anthropological research. If reality TV does become the last word for most people on social life, that is when we should be worried.

Young children should avoid secondhand TV watching but what about adult secondhand media consumption?

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A new study in Pediatrics suggests there are detrimental effects to young children from secondhand TV:

The study, which appears in the November issue of the journal Pediatrics, finds that a child between the ages of 8 months and 8 years takes in nearly four hours of this “secondhand TV” which could have consequences on his or her well-being.

“Too much television can stop children from learning how to entertain themselves,” said Rutgers University Sociology Professor Deborah Carr. “And if they get used to having that background noise all the time, it’s very distracting. It’s distracting when they’re working on their homework, it keeps them from sleeping and stops them from engaging in conversation and and doing other things, like playing outside. The children, and the parents for that matter, can never invest 100 percent in what they’re supposed to be doing if the television is on in the background all the time.”

According to the study, background TV was especially common in certain populations. Children under the age of 2, African-American children, youngsters living in poverty and kids will less-educated parents had the highest levels of exposure, up to five hours a day. Meanwhile, exposure ranged from two and a half to three hours per day among white children and those from more affluent families.

Aside from the obvious distraction television can create for children, there are other consequences of too much “secondhand TV.” “If the television is constantly on in the background, children may absorb lessons that are not age appropriate,” said Carr. “Also, another issue is if you watch a half-hour of television, ten minutes of that time is going to be advertisements. Those advertisements are usually for unhealthy foods or toys that parents can’t afford or things of that nature. So, I think another problem is not just the programming, but this exposure 24/7 to advertisements.”

I suspect a lot of people today consume “secondhand” media. For example, here are some 2010 figures from the Kaiser Family Foundation:

With technology allowing nearly 24-hour media access as children and teens go about their daily lives, the amount of time young people spend with entertainment media has risen dramatically, especially among minority youth, according to a study released today by the Kaiser Family Foundation.  Today, 8-18 year-olds devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes (7:38) to using entertainment media across a typical day (more than 53 hours a week).  And because they spend so much of that time ‘media multitasking’ (using more than one medium at a time), they actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes (10:45) worth of media content into those 7½ hours.

The amount of time spent with media increased by an hour and seventeen minutes a day over the past five years, from 6:21 in 2004 to 7:38 today.  And because of media multitasking, the total amount of media content consumed during that period has increased from 8:33 in 2004 to 10:45 today.

Is multitasking that different from secondhand exposure? Recommendations in a reputable journal like this notwithstanding, this sort of media usage is becoming more normal for lots of ages. For those beyond young childhood, if such exposure doesn’t lead to more distraction, at the least, being bombarded with advertisements is a potential issue.

Just wait till we all get our Google glasses and then see how much media we can consume…

What television show will assume the role of “sociological experiment of our time”?

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MTV’s Jersey Shore will run only one more season. This reminded me that I have seen several sites refer to the show’s sociological nature. Two examples:

1. From Gawker.  A number of their recaps have included this claim about the show (including this March 9, 2012 post): “the greatest sociological experiment of our time.” As it is probably meant to be, this is quite hyperbolic.

2. From the New York Post:

We are gathered here this evening to celebrate and memorialize the death of an era in MTV history: The Jersey Shore era. As both a former employee of Lord Viacom MTV Networks (full disclosure: from 2008 – 2011) and a viewer, it feels as though a chapter in its life has come to a close. The pages have turned and the sun is setting on our tanned up guido friends. And for a few years, this sociological experiment defined MTV and defined the audience it cultivated. We all watched in slackjawed horror/glee the day it all began, and now we must lay it to rest. And so with it goes the days of MTV’s most polarizing programming. Let us reflect.

I’m not quite sure why this show was repeatedly tied to sociology. Perhaps some simply couldn’t understand why the show had good ratings considering the content. Perhaps it is because a lot of people wanted to hold up the show as a mirror to make claims about the excesses and ills of our larger society.

But we could also ask which shows might take up this spot in the future. I hear that Honey Boo Boo character is getting a lot of attention but there is no shortage of reality TV shows that portray interesting characters in interesting situations. Was Jersey Shore really more emblematic of American life than other shows?

New cultural gatekeepers: paid online reviewers

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After recently discussing buying Twitter followers, the New York Times explores another new online realm: paid online reviewers who only give extremely positive reviews.

In the fall of 2010, Mr. Rutherford started a Web site, GettingBookReviews.com. At first, he advertised that he would review a book for $99. But some clients wanted a chorus proclaiming their excellence. So, for $499, Mr. Rutherford would do 20 online reviews. A few people needed a whole orchestra. For $999, he would do 50…

“The wheels of online commerce run on positive reviews,” said Bing Liu, a data-mining expert at the University of Illinois, Chicago, whose 2008 research showed that 60 percent of the millions of product reviews on Amazon are five stars and an additional 20 percent are four stars. “But almost no one wants to write five-star reviews, so many of them have to be created.”

Consumer reviews are powerful because, unlike old-style advertising and marketing, they offer the illusion of truth. They purport to be testimonials of real people, even though some are bought and sold just like everything else on the commercial Internet.

Mr. Liu estimates that about one-third of all consumer reviews on the Internet are fake. Yet it is all but impossible to tell when reviews were written by the marketers or retailers (or by the authors themselves under pseudonyms), by customers (who might get a deal from a merchant for giving a good score) or by a hired third-party service.

I am most intrigued here by the possible change in relationship between a reviewer and an author. The article suggests there is some sort of “sacred” distance between the two: the reviewer is free to criticize the work without recrimination. Some reviewers have attained elite cultural gatekeeper status, people who guide decision-making for millions of people. Think of critics like Siskel and Ebert and Robert Christgau who are seen as authoritative figures. Hence, people are upset when they learn that a positive review they saw wasn’t an “honest” opinion but rather a business transaction.

However, let’s not forget that these reviewers also make careers out of their thoughts – they may not have sold out to a corporation or a product but they do have a financial interest. I would argue that this distance between reviewer and author/creator has never really been so sacred and there are plenty of areas where we are used to paid reviewers. If you follow a reviewer enough, you can often learn what they do or do not like. Indeed, some reviewers have become outspoken proponents of certain movements and not others. Is this based on a completely rational, detached perspective? Of course not. Don’t many reviewers interact with the people who are producing the products they are reviewing? Think of blurbs on the back of books: are these truly unsolicited comments or from people who are truly judging the merits of the book? More crassly, commercials often present “reviewers” or “real people” or people made to sell certain products. Perhaps this is simply a sign of our times and will become normal as there is clearly a market for good reviews.

It will be interesting to see how websites like Amazon, heavily dependent on user reviews, works through this issue. I always try to read both the five star and one star reviews when considering a product. Additionally, there are other issues: the ratings can be about the product itself or a particular aspect of the product or about people’s expectations for the product or the shipping or the customer service or something else. I think Amazon could include a few extra questions, as other websites do, that would help one sort through the variety of reviews. Overall, the system is not perfect and we should be aware that we may not be getting the “unvarnished truth,” but at least it is better than going off anecdotal evidence from a friend or two…right?