Category Archives: Entertainment

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?

Statistics learning opportunity: “Hunger Games Survival Analysis”

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Fun with statistics: a survival analysis of The Hunger Games (quick reviews of the books and movie). According to the final analysis, the only significant factor is the rating of each participant:

My interpretation of this is that the Gamemakers know what they’re doing when they assign the ratings. They’ve been doing this for years, so they give scores that are so accurate that they’re actually better predictors of survival time than whether a tribute is a volunteer, a Career, male or female, or forms an alliance. Pretty impressive.

An alternate and more cynical interpretation is that the Gamemakers are concerned about their own reputations and thus engineer the games so as to confirm their ratings, occasionally killing off players who do better or worse than expected based on the ratings, all so that the Gamemakers can look like they knew what they were doing all along. Unfortunately, the political system of Panem ranks so slow on Freedom House’s annual scores that we simply can’t tell what’s going on behind the scenes at all. To cut through their lies we simply need more data.

If you read this, you just also learn something about survival analysis and event history analysis. Bonus: the data and Stata code is also available for download!

Thinking about the event history class I took during grad school, we didn’t look at any data that was remotely close to popular culture.

Also, why not include the data from the second and third books? Granted, the games change a bit in the sequels to ratchet up the tension but that would provide more data to work with…

The sociologist director of the Natural Hazards Center discusses how sociology helps us understand responses to disasters

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While disasters seem to be a growing area of interest across academic disciplines, a sociologist who is the director of the Natural Hazards Center talks about how sociology approaches the topic:

What’s sociology’s role in emergency management?

Sociology is a broad area, and sociologists are interested in a variety of things related to disasters and emergency management. They certainly do research and know a lot about individual, group and organizational behavior in disasters; a good deal about warning processes and warning systems; risk perception; the social factors that are associated with preparing for disasters, disaster recovery and some of the social factors that contribute to differences or disparities in the recovery process and outcomes; the politics and economics of disaster mitigation. These are some topics sociologists are interested in.

Have you done any research on what motivates people to prepare for disasters?

There’s been a lot of research on preparedness, especially household preparedness, and the research has [found] that being better prepared is associated with having higher levels of income, homeownership, to some extent with previous disaster experience, and having children in the home. These are all sociological factors that help to explain preparedness…

During your research, has there been a finding that most surprised you?

I found a lot of things that are contrary to common sense or the way most people might think about disaster behavior. One is the overwhelming altruistic pro-social response that most people engage in during disasters. It’s not like the disaster movies. I also think there are many important findings about the importance of volunteer groups and emergent groups in disasters. Ordinary community citizens can be very resourceful and can engage extensively in self-help and mutual aid when disasters happen. They don’t need to be told what to do by others. I’m seeing growing recognition that while we need experts in emergency management — we need well trained, well educated people — that the whole community is involved in mitigating, preparing for and responding to and recovering from disasters. That whole community approach was a big focus last year and will be this year from FEMA and other agencies. But it’s what sociologists have been saying all along.

I like the reference to how disaster movies tend to play up the atomistic responses to disasters. Movies, books, and TV shows tend to play up the image of the lone wanderer (typically a male?) or a few people trying to pick their way through issues with other people and the natural environment. Some of this seems to underlie recommendations about disaster preparedness: you can’t count on others to help and indeed, you might need to protect what you have from others. Granted, a large enough disaster will disrupt the response of organized government but ordinary citizens can still help each other.

This reminds of a humorous scenario I’ve discussed with several family members. In this hypothetical situation, family members would live on some sort of large piece of property where everyone could have a house yet still have some space. On this “compound,” different people could carry out different tasks that could serve the group in the event of some large disaster in the larger world. For example, being a nurse would be really useful here. However, when the conversation turns to what I could contribute to the larger group as a sociologist, I’m left suggesting something like I could help “enhance critical thinking skills.” Now I know I can contribute something else: I can help everyone work together and can helpfully point out the social factors that will aid or hinder our efforts.

Also, perhaps sociology majors would be uniquely suited to work in the area of emergency management?

Lost Star Terk episode was to feature Milton Berle as a “messianic sociologist”

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I’ve noted before that sociologists are rarely featured in television shows or in movies. Alas, it looks like CBS won’t allow the creation of a new online Star Trek episode based on a long-lost script featuring Milton Berle as a “messianic sociologist.”

Last fall an unused script for the cult 1960s television show turned up after being forgotten for years. Its author, the science-fiction writer Norman Spinrad, announced that it would become an episode of a popular Web series, “Star Trek New Voyages: Phase II,” which features amateur actors in the classic roles of Capt. James T. Kirk, Mr. Spock and other crew members of the starship Enterprise.

But then another player stepped in: CBS, which said it owned the script and blocked a planned Web production of it. Trekkies were appalled. “These executives should be phasered on heavy stun,” said Harmon Fields of Manhattan, who called himself “a ‘Star Trek’ fan of galactic proportions.”…

The story begins in 1967, after Mr. Spinrad wrote an acclaimed episode of the original series, “The Doomsday Machine.” “I did ‘The Doomsday Machine’ fast,” Mr. Spinrad, 71, said by phone from his home in Greenwich Village, “and then they said: ‘We’re in a hole. Can you write something in four days?’ ”

The result was “He Walked Among Us,” which the producers envisioned as a dramatic vehicle for the comedian Milton Berle. His character is a well-meaning but messianic sociologist whose conduct threatens to destroy the planet Jugal. The crew of the Enterprise must remove him without disrupting the normal development of the culture.

Spinrad’s script was set aside and he recently made it available online.

Milton Berle as a “well-meaning but messianic sociologist” sounds very intriguing. How much did Spinrad intend this as commentary about sociologists and social policy in the late 1960s? Perhaps sociologists should be glad this show was not made as it probably doesn’t put sociologists in the best light. In fact, it sounds like it could feed into some common stereotypes of sociologists: they may care about some important issues but in the end they are academics who don’t know how things work in the real world. At the same time, how many sociologists are Star Trek fans and would love to see their discipline discussed in an episode?

McMansion = a “home [that] had a heart and it was ripped out”?

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The award-winning play “Rabbit Hole” includes an interesting view of the McMansion:

A child dies, a mother grieves, a father agonizes and a family is changed forever…

For “Rabbit Hole,” set designer Susan Crabtree has created a house that outwardly reflects an upper-middle-class lifestyle, yet frames a troubled family within.

In notes for the press, Crabtree says of her inspiration, “We wanted to create an impression of a ‘McMansion’ — a well-appointed home. But, as the story evolves, we discover the home had a heart and it was ripped out. In the end, the house is just a house — people are the real home. They have to find their family again as they turn to each other.”

The play earned the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for drama. The playwright was sure to include doses of comic relief along with thought-provoking lines to further draw in the audience. Its 2006 debut on Broadway earned “Sex and the City” actress Cynthia Nixon a 2007 Tony Award for Best Actress in a play, among three other Tony nominations. Her cast included fellow actors John Slattery of “Mad Men” fame and Tyne Daly from “Cagney and Lacy.”

Maybe this play isn’t really about the suburbs or certain kinds of homes but the description sounds like it builds upon some common ideas. I wonder if McMansion critics would like this depiction of such a house: it is place that may look nice but it has no heart. In other words, a McMansion doesn’t create or help develop a family – rather, it may even hinder them from forming deeper relationships. Put another way, you can buy the impressive looking house but that is not what really matters in the long run. This play also seems to draw upon common critiques of suburbia, the land where everyone acts like they have it together but the nice homes and communities hide desperate tales.

 

Translating the dystopian world of The Hunger Games…into 1930s scenery?

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In my review of The Hunger Games movie, I noted that I was not terribly impressed by the futuristic designs in the movie. At The Atlantic, three design critics make similar arguments and note that much of the scenery and design is not from the future but rather from the 1930s. Here are a few of their thoughts:

The props, sets, and costumes are a giant mash-up of visual cues taken from eras when the socioeconomic disparity between classes was so extreme as to be dangerous. The look is sort of cherry picked from influences ranging from the French Revolution to the Third Reich to Alexander McQueen. A more unified or coherent vision, one that took the influences and used them to create something unique, might have served the story better…

The opening scenes in District 12 are atmospheric and period precise. The bleached-out blue palette, the wooden shacks, the muddy roads—you know you are in the 1930s of the Farm Services Administration photographers. There were a couple of moments, like the line of cabins going down into the hollow, or the two scrawny kids looking out of a hole in the wall, that I could almost swear were direct imitations of a photograph. I found out after I saw the movie that those scenes were filmed in Henry River, North Carolina, an abandoned mill town from the 1920s. In District 12, it is coal. In North Carolina, it was yarn…

The overall look of the Capitol was 1930s neoclassicism, an architectural style used by the Nazis and based on Roman precedents. Fascist architecture seems too easy and obvious an equivalence for Panem’s totalitarian regime. I thought Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins was trying to make a trenchant point about what we all like to watch now. Making the Capitol a contemporary skyscraper city, like a forest of Far East towers, would have made a much more pointed contrast with the Appalachian opening. What about the top of Moshe Safdie’s Marina Bay Sands in Singapore, with its mile-high infinity pool, as the setting for Katniss and Peeta’s pre-Games talk? How could you get more decadent than that?…

Maybe oppressive architecture in movies has to be Fascist, in the same way that aliens need to be either robotic, humanoid, or insect-like—otherwise we don’t immediately recognize and fear what we’re seeing. The tributes’ apartment was like an outdated hotel room that was trying too hard to be hip but not quite succeeding; the green chairs were ridiculous in the same way as Effie’s shoes, hats, and makeup…

On the whole, these critics argue that the movie seems to lean on the past a lot rather than casting a new vision for the future. I understand the difficulties of doing this; futuristic settings can be too jarring or cheesy (see the city scenes in Star Wars Episodes I-III). Maybe moviegoers are more invested in the movie if there are scenes they can recognize. For example, the Nazi narrative is clear to many so invoking these ideas in the Capitol is an easy way to make a link between Nazism and the totalitarianism that made the Hunger Games possible in the first place. The movie taps into familiar cultural narratives such as the Depression or Nazism, pointing to the future while also drawing on the past.

Perhaps this comes down to an argument about whether movie makers should always try to hit a home run with design and setting or play it safe. I think The Hunger Games played it safe on this end. Rather than risk ridicule or have to develop a whole new world, they borrowed heavily from known images. Perhaps this could even drive home the possibly commentary even further that we aren’t as far away from this sort of world as we might think. In other words, the future (or the present) might look a lot similar to the pas.t But I think this was a missed opportunity: considering the budget and popularity of the books, the movie could have presented a grand vision of the future that truly captured the attention of viewers and also pushed design and popular imagery of the future further.

Trailer for documentary about tiny houses: “Tiny – A Story About Living Small”

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A supporter of tiny houses has put together a new documentary titled “Tiny – A Story About Living Small.” Read a little bit about the personal experiences behind the film and see the trailer here.

Not Christopher Smith, 30, and his girlfriend Merete Mueller who are building the tiny home of their dreams. 

The couple’s house, set in the mountains of Fairplay, Colorado, is ‘about 125 square feet’ and ’19 feet long wall to wall’…

Apparently a ‘good home’ simply consists of a sitting area, kitchen, bathroom and a queen-size bedroom (set in a vaulted ceiling that makes space for a loft). 

‘The interior looks a lot bigger than the exterior,’ Miss Mueller told ABC News.

Not only is their new home economical in space, it’s also energy efficient and runs on solar power and has a composting toilet…

Mr Smith was so inspired by the miniature buildings he visited that he decided to make a documentary about the project called Tiny – A Story About Living Small.

Visit the official website for the documentary here. I’ll have to get my hands on this when it is released.