Category Archives: Entertainment

Upcoming film about a unconstructed 90,000 square foot mansion

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I’ve seen several references to the film The Queen of Versailles which comes out later this summer. Here is what the movie is about:

A Florida real-estate tycoon and his appealing, immensely flawed wife try to build the country’s biggest McMansion in photographer-turned-filmmaker Lauren Greenfield’s documentary, which is stranger than any work of fiction. Surrounded by controversy since well before its Sundance premiere (when subject David Siegel tried to sue the festival), “Queen of Versailles” veers from profound human compassion to domestic horror as Siegel’s wife Jackie wanders through her enormous but trashed home scraping dog crap off the carpets. It’s like a Theodore Dreiser novel for our time, infused with the vivid, vulgar spirit of reality TV. (Opens in theaters July 20; VOD release is likely but has not been announced.)

There is one problem with this: the home at the center of this film is not just a regular American McMansion.

At 90,000 square feet, it will be America’s largest single residence, boasting ten kitchens, a private ice-skating rink, and enough tacky antiques to make Michael Jackson blush. It’s telling that while the couple’s dream house was inspired by the famed palace, it was most directly modeled on a Las Vegas theme-park imitation of French grandeur.

A home that is 90,000 square feet is far beyond a McMansion. There are not many homes in the United States that are 90,000 square feet so it is difficult to argue that this home is mass produced. The home is named “Versailles,” referring not to some builder’s model but rather the well-known French palace. The home may be tacky and not have a lot of architectural merit but this is home is way beyond the size of anything that can be reasonably called a McMansion.

In reading several early reviews of this film, it seems like critics think this film is about more than just the vanity of a few wealthy people: the uncompleted mansion serves as a metaphor for the excesses of the early 2000s.

TV programmer: Real Housewives series is “sociology of the rich”

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The programmer behind the Real Housewives shows suggests they might have some sociological value:

Andy Cohen should know as the programmer behind “Top Chef,” the various “Real Housewives” series and his own “Watch What Happens Live.” Cohen, a former producer at CBS News, weighed in on the Bravo success story in an interview with Howard Kurtz on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” Sunday morning.

In picking programs, Cohen said he looks for “something that hasn’t been done before” and a personality different from what viewers have seen…

“In the case of ‘The Housewives,’ I call the ‘Housewives’ sociology of the rich,” Cohen told Kurtz. “I think it’s just fun to watch. It’s guilt-free gossiping that you can have. It’s like the modern-day soap opera, in my mind.”

I would be interested to have a sociologist chime in about whether shows like these reflect an increased interest in the lives of the wealthy and famous say compared to thirty, fifty, or one hundred years ago. When sociological studies like The Gold Coast and the Slum were written in the late 1920s, lower- or working-class residents may have known about the rich or run into them occasionally (and part of the intrigue of this study is that the wealthiest and poorest residents of Chicago lived within blocks of each other) but did they have the kind of vicarious interest in the rich that TV shows today try to promote?

Also: I imagine there are plenty of wealthy people who would argue that these shows only display a small segment of the wealthy lifestyle. What about shows about the millionaires next door or about people who scrimp and save to get their money? These shows seem to encourage people to live a more “wealthy lifestyle,” combining spending (conspicuous consumption, anyone?) and celebrity status.

A second note: it is hard to argue that an edited show about the wealth, a modern-day soap opera, can impart a whole lot about reality or a sociological understanding of the world. It can tell you something…but perhaps more about what Americans like in entertainment than about how people really live.

Ph.D. degrees are pretty rare, The Five-Year Engagement notwithstanding

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In the movie The Five-Year Engagement, one of the main characters has a post-doc at the University of Michigan in social psychology. I wondered how many people know what a post-doc is and this pushed me to think more broadly: just how common is a Ph.D. in the United States? According to the 2012 Statistical Abstract, there were 49,562 PhDs awarded in 2009, up from 42,437 in 1996. According to the National Science Foundation, here are some additional figures on the number of doctorates awarded:

-In the first year of their data, 1957, there were 8,611 PhDs awarded.

-The greatest years of PhD growth (measured by % change from previous year) were clearly in the 1960s with peaks of 14.1% in 1965 and 14.6% in 1970.

-There were 48,069 doctorates awarded in 2010.

(Unfortunately, these tables do not break down how many doctoral students graduated with degrees/concentrations in social psychology.)

Census figures from 2010 say 27.9% of Americans have a bachelor’s degree or higher. Figures from 2011 show that 7.95% of Americans have a master’s degree and 3% have a doctorate or professional degree.

All this suggests that PhDs are relatively rare in the United States meaning that many Americans may not be able to relate to this story (plus, how many movies or TV shows focus on academia?). However, the movie is set in San Francisco and Ann Arbor: 51.2% of residents in San Francisco have a bachelor’s degree or higher (with a California state figure of 30.1%) and 19.7% of residents have a graduate or professional degree (ACS estimates). In the college town of Ann Arbor, 71.1% of residents have a bachelor’s degree or higher (with a Michigan state figure of 25%) and 42% have a graduate or professional degree (ACS estimates).

So is Judd Apatow aiming for a more educated audience with his latest film?

When will more romantic comedies reflect living alone, cohabitation, and women getting more education than men?

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The world of romantic relationships is changing: more people are living alone, cohabitating (maybe or maybe not marrying in the long run), and more women are obtaining college and graduate degrees than men. So when will romantic comedies reflect this?

I bring this up because I recently saw The Five-Year Engagement. This movie tackles the latter two issues I mentioned above: the couple lives together roughly 3-4 years before they get married (there is a clear period when they live separately). Also, the woman is working on a post-doc in social psychology at the University of Michigan while the man is a chef who has taken some classes as a culinary school. They end up having to try to compromise between their two jobs but little is mentioned about the relative status of the two professions. (A side note: how many people seeing this movie even know what a post-doc is? Is this mainstream? Also, I am undecided whether the film makes the field of social psychology look good or bad.) Yet, in the end, the couple still gets married. In fact, much of the plot of the movie is driven by the idea that the couple wants to get married but circumstances keep getting in the way. Additionally, the other main couple in the movie gets married quickly after they find out the woman is pregnant.

In the future, can the genre of romantic comedies survive without marriage at the end? Marriage is a nice plot device to end the film: they invariably show happy couples finally going through a marriage ceremony. It wraps up the story nicely. However, fewer American adults are married (51%) so are these films now more aspirational than ever and/or do they reflect the interests of a shrinking subset of the population? This also reminds me of the film (500) Days of Summer where marriage is not in the cards for the couple involved but movie viewers probably don’t get the same happy feeling at the end. I suspect romantic comedies will subtly or not so subtly change in the coming years to reflect these new realities and still try to provoke happy feelings even if marriage is not seen as much as the end goal.

New documentary “Mansome” look at the rise of metrosexuals

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A new documentary titled Mansome (see the trailer here – and features Morgan Spurlock, Will Arnett, and Jason Bateman) examines the “metrosexual revolution” in the United States:

“I don’t highlight my hair, I’ve still got a pair,” [Brad] Paisley sings in his hit, “I’m Still a Guy.”

But a new documentary called “Mansome” finds that more men care about what they look like. And for them, getting pampered the way women have for so long doesn’t mean being any less of a man…

Many men are throwing out the rigid definition of masculinity — “avoiding femininity, emotional restriction, avoiding of intimacy, pursuit of achievement and status, self-reliance, strength and aggression, and homophobia, ” Latham wrote in his 2011 Psychology Today article, “Where Did all the Metrosexuals Go?”

“There is a growing body of research showing that men are rejecting these narrow gender stereotypes and exploring different ways of expressing what it means to them to be a man,” said Latham. “One way of doing this is men’s increased focus on personal appearance.”

There could be a pretty interesting story here. I would be interested in seeing how the documentary ties in marketing and advertising to these changes. Isn’t Spurlock’s ironic moneymaking ability tied to discussing/exploiting particular social issues for marketing purposes – look no further than his documentary The Greatest Story Ever Sold. I’ve been particularly amused by the Dove commercials about “manhide.” Imagine marketers salivating at the idea of selling products to a whole other gender.

At the same time, this sort of documentary seems like it could end up being hokey and only travel in gross stereotypes rather than really tackle the profound gender issues in our society in recent decades. Spurlock, Arnett, and Bateman all have the potential to be mawkish rather than profound…so perhaps I’ll have to check out this film and report back. Thus far, the reviews at RottenTomatoes.com are not good: only 24% fresh.

How does this “metrosexual revolution” fit with arguments that males are encouraged to be violent in our society through means like movies and video games? Has the “gentler male” view won out?

RIAA: all of everything are belong to us

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Correction:  Techdirt is now reporting that this story is bogus and that the RIAA never threw out a number in the trillions.

The Recording Industry Association of America sued peer-to-peer filesharing service Limewire for copyright infringement years ago, and it successfully shut down that service back in 2010.  Now, the RIAA says it’s owed a few dollars in damages for those years of Limewire’s infringement.  $72 trillion, to be exact:

According to documents recently filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the RIAA was asking for damages of about $72 trillion dollars, a figure that the judge in the case said is “absurd.” Judge Kimba Wood wrote in a recent decision that, “An award based on the RIAA calculations would amount to ‘more money than the entire music industry has made since Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877.'”

The estimated wealth of the entire world is about $60 trillion, meaning that the RIAA should have known how outlandish its claims were to begin with.

A modest quibble with the AV Club’s figures:  the CIA puts Gross World Product (the combined GDP for all countries on Earth) a bit higher, at $70.16 trillion for 2011.  But any way you slice it, the RIAA thinks that copyright infringement due to one (now defunct) company entitles it to the value of everything in the world.

Literally.

Sociologist is host of “History Detectives”

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I ran into an interesting side job for a sociologist: host of History Detectives on PBS. This involves investigating artifacts like an 1864 military discharge letter signed by President Abraham Lincoln:

The first few hours of filming took place in the Grand Army of the Republic Museum, where Versagi talked about how the artifact was found, and then re-enacted the find by pulling a scrap of paper out of a prop box. Taping continued at a park where Versagi would meet “History Detectives” host Tukufu Zuberi, professor and chair of the sociology department at the University of Pennsylvania, to show him the piece of paper. The “reveal” took place in a Springfield resident’s home, where Versagi listened as the PBS host told her the story of the artifact based on their research.

How exactly does a sociologist get this kind of job over historians? Here is how the History Detectives website describes Zuberi’s contributions:

America has a long history of social upheaval and cultural mood swings. These shifts leave clear signs of their passing. The trick is knowing how to read the signs, and interpret their meaning.
Tukufu is an authority on the subject. Under his scrutiny, even subtle signs can yield vital evidence about the events at a mystery’s core.
He also provides the team with a context for their work, relating descriptive accounts of living conditions in that particular place, at that particular time.

Being aware of the social issues, pressures, and problems of the day can sometimes help the team determine the triggers of a past event, and the motives of the people involved.

I also wonder if there isn’t a lot of room for a sociologist to talk about how mysteries develop and are understood by the public. For example, what is the social significance of an Abraham Lincoln artifact and why is Lincoln still so popular today (see an earlier post about another sociologists who tackles this)? Not everything becomes an artifact and there is a lot of work that goes into creating and supporting cultural narratives.

If you want to see a list of episodes Zuberi hosts, they are listed on his CV.

By the way, I am a supporter of having more sociologists positively portrayed on TV and in movies (see earlier posts on this topic here and here).

Our world: the Beatles can get $250k for the use of an original recording on a TV show

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I’ve seen/heard several discussions of the use of the Beatles song “Tomorrow Never Knows” to close the most recent episode of Mad Men. Here is some of the story behind how the show was able to get permission to use the song – for $250,000:

 “It was always my feeling that the show lacked a certain authenticity because we never could have an actual master recording of the Beatles performing,” Matthew Weiner, the creator and show runner of “Mad Men,” said in a telephone interview on Monday. “Not just someone singing their song or a version of their song, but them, doing a song in the show. It always felt to me like a flaw. Because they are the band, probably, of the 20th century.”…

Near the end of the “Mad Men” episode, titled “Lady Lazarus” and written by Mr. Weiner, the advertising executive Don Draper (played by Jon Hamm) finds himself struggling to understand youth culture and is given a copy of the Beatles album “Revolver,” a new release in the summer of 1966.

But instead of starting his listening experience with the album’s acerbic lead-off track, “Taxman,” Draper instead skips to its final — and, shall we say, more experimental — song, “Tomorrow Never Knows,” contemplating it for a few puzzled moments before he shuts it off. (That psychedelic song, with its signature percussion loops and distorted John Lennon vocals, also plays over the closing credits of the episode.)…

To win the company’s approval in this case, Mr. Weiner said, “I had to do a couple things that I don’t like doing, which is share my story line and share my pages.” He added that he received the approval from Apple Corps last fall, about a month before filming started on the episode.

Several thoughts:

1. Does this show that the Beatles still matter? On one hand, yes: the creator said he wanted to have an authentic Beatles song on his show. On the other hand, this is a show about the 1960s – it is a period piece, a “retro cool” show, not a show about the modern day that would show the current relevance of the Beatles. The creator suggests they are the band of the 20th century, inviting questions about who might be the artist of the 21st century.

2. Contra #1 above, the Beatles can still get $250k for the use of their song. Is this about the greatness of their work or because they have been so tight in who is able to license their music? Are the copyright holders of the Beatles music (some combo of Michael Jackson’s estate and Sony?) simply waiting for McCartney and Starr to die so they can reap a windfall from licensing?

3. The article doesn’t discuss this but the selection of “Tomorrow Never Knows” is particularly interesting. This song would never make it on a Beatles “greatest hits” album (it is not on the 1 album or the Red or Blue albums of the 1970s). It is buried at the end of the Revolver album. At the same time, many books and critics acknowledge that this song is a turning point in the group’s career. It was actually the first recorded song for Revolver, an album noted by many critics as the greatest album (or one of the top 3) of all time. It was a sharp departure from earlier Beatles music: in a few short years, the group had moved from “I Want To Hold Your Hand” to Lennon singing about ideas from The Tibetan Book of the Dead with all sorts of studio effects like backward guitar around him. My guess is that the playing of song means that Don Draper’s is about to take an interesting turn (along with the rest of the 1960s).

4. A question about copyright: will the Beatles music ever become part of the public domain? It would be a shame if it does not.

5. How long until we live in a world when nobody knows about or cares about the Beatles? I’m particularly interested in the changes that will happen when the Baby Boomer generation fades away…

The exterior vs. the interior of the Brady Bunch house and architecture in TV and movies

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The managing editor of Entertainment Weekly makes an interesting point regarding a famous house in American television: the exterior shots of the Brady Bunch house don’t match the interior shots.

And I grew up obsessing over a particularly brazen TV blunder: The exterior and interior of the Brady Bunch house do not match. At all. Not one bit. In case you never noticed: The interior set depicts a soaring two-story home with the second story over the structure’s right side; the outside is a low-slung split-level with a second story over the left side. (In fact, the second-floor window was fake.) How could they let this happen? Sherwood Schwartz once explained to the Los Angeles Times that the San Fernando Valley house used for the exterior shots was chosen because “we didn’t want it to be too affluent, we didn’t want it to be too blue-collar. We wanted it to look like it would fit a place an architect would live.” In other words, the exterior struck the right emotional note for audiences, and logic be damned. I can live with that. In fact, audiences will forgive almost any lapse in logic if the story does its primary job well – and that is to move us, scare us, tickle us, and give us characters worth knowing. The Brady house made no sense, but I still wanted to live there. And while it may not be necessary to cross the Golden Gate Bridge to get to the San Francisco Airport (unless you’re coming from Sausalito), it makes for a nice aerial shot loaded with symbolism. The best purveyors of pop culture know that poetic truth trumps literal truth every time.

Six thoughts about this:

1. I’m not someone who looks for or particularly cares about inconsistencies in movies and television shows. And yet, this still seems pretty egregious: the sides of the house don’t even line up?

2. Is this house really befitting of an architect? Would any architect worth his salt really want to admit that he lived in a stereotypical split-level? While some might defend the ranch as an exemplar of post-World War II American life, are there people who defend the split-level?

3. The explanation from Sherwood Schwartz is very interesting: the home is supposed to invoke a certain American middle-classness. Another way to think about it is the home is supposed to invoke a particular emotion and then fade into the background.

4. I bet there would be a fascinating study in looking at TV and movie depictions of American homes. As Juliet Schor suggested in The Overspent American, the “middle-class house” on TV has really gotten big and more luxurious over the years.

5. The exterior of the house is interesting but what about the astro-turf lawn?

6. It can be a little bit strange to visit these television homes on the set. Two years ago, we toured the Warner Brothers studio and saw a number of sets. Here are three shots: the emergency room exterior for ER, Lorelai Gilmore’s house on Gilmore Girls, and their oft-used street scene.

After seeing these in person, I imagine there is some room for commentary about the reproducibility of more modern architecture, the impermanence of place, and how it can easily transition from one film to another TV show to a miniseries and so on…

Movie line: “Victims live in McMansions. You live in a bungalow.”

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A review of the new movie Detention includes an interesting  bit of dialogue spoken to a character who has just survived an encounter with a horror movie villain:

Victims live in McMansions. You live in a bungalow.

Since I don’t watch horror films or a lot of ultra-violent movies, I wasn’t aware that victims are often McMansion dwellers. If this is true: is this simply tied to the idea that the privileged/wealthy/popular/snobby types tend to live in such houses (meaning the setting is not the main point of the scene) or is it a larger commentary about consumption and poor-quality yet large tract housing?