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The White Lotus, or, the dissociation of everyday life

There is a scene in the 2^nd episode of HBO’s The White Lotus that struck me as both jarring and familiar. It occurs at lunch time at the Hawaiian vacation resort that is the setting for the mini-series. Rachel Patton (Alexandra Daddario) a freelance journalist on her honeymoon, stops by the table of Nicole Mossbacher (Connie Britton), the CFO of a popular search engine, there on vacation with her family.

Rachel is worried. She has just gotten hitched to a real estate mogul who urges her to give up her career (it’s just “disposable garbage…clickbait” he tells her) and enjoy all luxuries that come with marrying into wealth. Though her job is low-paying and, as she puts it, “mediocre”, she fears abandoning it will relinquish whatever personal autonomy she has achieved. She looks up to Nicole, a successful professional woman with a family, and, after introducing herself, asks for her wisdom.

Nicole is happy, and somewhat flattered, to be approached as a mentor. “You’ve got to keep your own orbit going,” she advises, “don’t give up your power.” Rachel thanks her, and Nicole adds, “Women have a lot to navigate and I just think it’s really important to support women."

Then, like a bolt out of the blue, just as this warm encounter is about to end, the interaction between these characters darkens dramatically. Rachel shares that she wrote a piece praising Nicole, naming the publication where it appears. “That was a fucked-up piece,” Nicole tells her.  She feels the article made her “come across as some Machiavellian gorgon, using the victimization of the other women in my company just to further my own craven ambitions.”

Rachel is taken aback, thinking her piece did nothing but praise her idol, though she admits the profile was “re-purposed content”, based on another publication’s work. “That’s bad journalism,” Nicole snaps. Then, without missing a beat, the two smile warmly, wish each other a happy stay, and part.

Seamless dissociation

What struck me about this scene is that it captured an experience rarely portrayed in popular entertainment. There are those moments, especially in working life, when the person you are speaking to transforms without warning—almost like a friendly dog that turns vicious. Then, just as suddenly, perhaps out of social convention, the situation goes back to friendliness. You’ve witnessed a shift from one to personality to another, but the person you’re speaking with seems unaware that the switch has occurred.

There is an amusing story Liza Minnelli tells about such an abrupt change of persona. She describes an early experience performing on stage with her mother, Judy Garland. At first, she felt the warmth of motherly affection. But once the performance got going, her mother “was like a lioness that owned the stage and suddenly found someone invading her territory…the killer instinct of a performer had come out in her.”

Minnelli relates that later she and Garland howled with laughter about this twist in personality. It was as if another self had overtaken her mother in the midst of their duet. “You’re a force to be dealt with,” Garland commented. “I created it and now I’ve come up against it.”

A self for every social role

What accounts for such momentary schizophrenia? In both of these examples, one of the characters shifts from one social role to another. In each, the bonding, nurturing self gives way quickly to the professional one. Both Mossbacher and Garland have images they need to cultivate. Their public selves, concerned with reputation management, play by competitive rather than the cooperative ethics.

In my own experience working for various employers, such shifts result from similar causes. The natural social bonding that occurs between people who work together can grow cold quickly when a professional imperative intervenes. A typical scenario: a person you work for, and are friendly with, announces there will soon be “restructuring” or “downsizing.” Your previously warm interactions grow cold; the boss adopts a game face.

New forms of class animosity

One of the impressive aspects of The White Lotus mini-series is the fact that, underneath the requisite melodrama, there is a sophisticated awareness of contemporary class alliances and antagonisms. At the resort, we see interactions between the wealthy clientele and the service staff, as well as the staff and the employees they supervise and other social dynamics.

This aspect of the series makes the clash between Nicole and Rachel particularly contemporary. Each is representative of a relatively new class created by the information economy. Nicole, as the CFO of a major search engine, is a member of what media theorist McKenzie Wark has named the “vectoralist class.” These are new members of the ruling class. They are distinguished from, say, the real estate barons that populate the show, rather like old money is from new. One is based on property; the other, on the control and/or ownership of information.

Rachel, the freelance writer, is from what Wark terms “the hacker class.” These workers earn their precarious living through supplying not just the code or programming, but “content” that populates the networks the vectoralists control. In Wark’s words, hackers “turn the same old information into new.” Rachel’s article about Nicole is a case in point: her piece “re-purposed” an older article, rewriting, tweaking, supplementing, etc., to make it new.

In this light, you can almost read Nicole’s scolding of Rachel as the super-egoic voice of the Google algorithm; it’s no secret that the search engine’s technology ranks totally original “content" higher than the “re-purposed.” Of course, Rachel was probably ordered to reuse the older story by her employer. The person who assigned the piece, no doubt, didn’t have the budget for the labor time involved in original research or interview. Rachel's low pay is probably the standard for “hack work.”

In any case, though Nicole, as vectoralist, is in a more powerful position than Rachel, the animosity the former displays hints at the small power the precariously paid freelancer nevertheless possesses. What Rachel writes contributes to the public image the powerful CFO presents. Those who live by information can also die by it. How investors perceive the C-suite executives of a corporation can affect stock recommendations.

As William Davies points out, in an information economy “reputation” becomes a kind of social capital—one that has economic consequences. Davies comments: “If a reputation can be invested in and grown over time, it is equally possible to be ‘shorted’ by this quasi-financial market—harmed by trolling or concerted online attacks.” Though Rachel’s piece is by no means an attack, in a reputation-intensive economy Nicole is sensitive to even the possibility that this portrayal could provoke sneers.

The future is dissociated

Such dynamics lead me to wonder, as we all become increasingly sucked into the information economy, whether our own dissociation will increase. Science fiction tales are already envisioning a future where our private selves become public to such a degree that even casual conversations are regularly invaded by “the professional self” and take on an artificial, promotional tone. How can they not? After all, we’ve got reputations to manage.

Reason or Resentment? "Feud" (the miniseries) and the political mood

I was mad at Susan Sarandon because of some of her comments during the last election. Recently, though, I was so charmed by her portrayal of Bette Davis in the new miniseries “Feud” —alongside Jessica Lange’s equally charismatic Joan Crawford—that my annoyance evaporated. Thanks to their bravura performances, I found myself totally absorbed in this tale, which portrays the tumultuous backstory behind the making of “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?”

Just a powerful as the acting, though, was the ideological debate embedded into the script. This is captured in a provocative interchange that takes place in a scene early on in the series. Studio head Jack Warner (Stanley Tucci), after seeing the film’s early rushes, tells director Robert Aldrich (Alfred Molina) that he believes it will be a hit because of the explosive interaction between Davis and Crawford. Such an authentic portrayal of emotion is only possible, he argues, because the two actors really hate each other in actual life.  Aldrich is skeptical; he tells Warner that he’s reacting to artistry. They are brilliant actors, after all.

Warner won’t hear of this. Instead, he offers an unusual theory about why real hate will make the film a true cultural event. “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” will be powerful because it embodies the psychology that drives our economic system. “What you’re seeing,” Warner remarks (as I remember it), “is Capitalism.” The fighting in the film, he explains, exemplifies the competition that makes our system run. Each actor, motivated by a fierce envy of the other, will seek to outshine her rival. Following this logic, the more each “hates” (his word) the other, the greater their performances, for their mutual resentment will set off a kind of arms race of talent, ratcheting up the intensity to new heights.

In essence, Warner is saying that what makes for a powerful performance isn’t the actor’s rationality (i.e. the intelligent choices she makes for her role) so much as her resentment.

The Jack Warner Theory of Politics

I don’t know whether the real Jack Warner ever propounded this theory of acting. What I do know is that that it shares an eerie resemblance to a theory of political performance that’s popped up in the wake of the last election. That theory goes like this…

Once we believed candidates needed to appeal to voters on the basis of economic reason (“it’s the economy, stupid), to win their support. Nowadays, things don’t work that way. The most effective politicians are those who appeal to voters' resentments (their envies, hatreds, prejudices and the like), rather than their rational self-interest. Much of this buzz, of course, is the result of the election of a figure who’s believed to embody populist rage.

Pankaj Mishra, author of The Age of Anger (a hot new book on the politics of resentment) offered an overview of this theory in an essay for The Guardian. The idea that people were primarily moved by their economic interests, he tells us, was simple-minded, for…

“…it neglected many factors ever-present in human lives: the fear, for instance, of losing honour, dignity, status, the distrust of change, the appeal of stability and familiarity. There was no place in it for more complex drives...Obsessed with material progress, the hyperrationalists ignored the lure of resentment for the left-behind, and the tenacious pleasures of victimhood.”

A Robert Aldrich Theory of Politics?

The importance of what might be called culturally-based (rather than economic) antagonism is obvious. As many have pointed out, it’s not always easy to see economic hardship as driving the actions of terrorists, for example. Nevertheless, something bothers me about downplaying “rational” economic interests in favor of “irrational” ones such as envy and resentment. What this suggests is that voters are not only misinformed but totally unreasonable--and unreachable. As such, this attitude replicates the condescension said to give rise to resentment in the first place.

Also, you have to ask yourself if it’s true? A recent piece by Conor Lynch put it this way:

“…it is smug…to disparage people for ‘voting against their interests’ when in reality both parties have failed to adequately address the real problems facing poor and working-class communities…While there can be no doubt that Hillary Clinton would have been a better president for the working and middle-classes, it is also true that Trump was better on certain issues that are important to blue-collar workers, such as free trade and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. (Even though Clinton opposed TPP during her campaign, she didn’t have much credibility…)

Lynch goes on to praise Bernie Sanders who recently, through Town Hall meetings, warned of the Right’s betrayal of these voters, exemplified in the botched health care legislation. The unpopularity of the proposed bill, and plummeting presidential approval numbers that accompanied it, suggest “hyperrationalist” arguments like Sanders presented to his rust belt audiences still packed a punch.  All of which makes one wonder if all the noise about “populist resentment” has made us forget about the potential for popular reason.

Put another way, just because the “Jack Warners” of our political world currently own the studio and are running the show, it doesn’t mean that the Robert Aldrich forces may not win out in the end.

 

Art as Experience and Vice Versa: Thoughts on Jerry Lewis and John Dewey

Ever since I watched a documentary on Encore  about the career of Jerry Lewis -- Method to the Madness -- I haven't been able to get one of the comedian's iconic bits out of my mind.

Lewis pretends to be typing (on an invisible typewriter) to the sounds of classical music.  He performs a sort of hand ballet, looking a bit like a conductor at times.  As the bit goes on, he gets  goofier as he becomes  exhausted by his efforts:

 

One of the things that fascinates me about this  gag is how it mixes the codes of high art with everyday life to such a delightful effect; it's part an elegant display of nimble dexterity -- and part slapstick.

In fact, this little concerto brought to mind a comment the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey made in his classic book on aesthetics, Art as Experience.  Dewey cautions against drawing too fine a line between the creative arts and everyday life.  As he puts it:

"The intelligent mechanic, engaged in his job, interested in doing well and finding satisfaction in his handiwork, caring for his tools and materials with genuine affection, is artistically engaged."

Is not part of the humor of Lewis' skit found in the degree of "genuine affection" his typist exhibits for what we conventionally think of as a mundane task?

If Life Can Become Art, So Art Can Become Life

Another reason the Lewis routine grabbed hold of my thoughts is that it exhibits an impulse that I've seen mirrored in interesting ways by the world of high art.  If Lewis suggests that there's something about everyday life that's artistic, the history of the avant-garde is replete with examples of poets and visual artists who have sought to make artistic culture part of everyday life.

Lautreamont, the prose poet and predecessor of Surrealism, insisted, for example, that "Poetry must be made by all..."  Among the ways this idea found expression in the art movements of the 20th century was in the recipes for cooking up poems that Dadaist and Surrealist poets offered to make it theoretically possible for "anyone to be a poet."

Tristan Tzara's famous instruction for making a Dada poem, for example, was to cut out words from a newspaper, shake them up in a paper bag, splash them onto a table, and record the results.

Surrealist seer Andre Breton's "psychic automatism" offered a a formula to get your unconscious to write the poem for you:

"Put yourself in as passive, or receptive, a state of mind as you can.  Forget about your genius, your talents, and the talents of everyone else...Write quickly, without any preconceived subject, fast enough so that you will not remember what you're writing and be tempted to re-read what you've written."

Following this method religiously, Breton states later, should enable you to write entire books on subjects you know nothing about.

Perhaps you could even say that some aspects of the Slam Poetry movement pursued dissolving art into everyday life -- and vice versa.  For in that format, as I remember, not only anyone can get up, "be a poet", and compete -- but all can be judges/critics who canonize the list of winners for the night.

In any case, it's no surprise that I associate Lewis' bit with certain modes of avant-garde art.  Both offer examples of how conventional thinking and experience can be transformed in pleasurable and even liberating ways.

Of course, once such techniques have been around in the culture awhile, the more traditional aspects of the social order usually move in to mess with them.  In our so-called free market society, such experiments are not so much repressed as standardized for money-making purposes.

Tzara's Dada poem is marketed as "Magnetic Poetry."  Surrealism becomes a preferred method for drawing charisma to rock videos and ads, and its techniques featured in self-help books to aid in overcoming  "writer's block" (and "unleash the voice within").  Slam morphs into movies,  TV and Broadway shows and rap records.  And "Jerry Lewis" is now a studio, a brand, a corporation -- an entire industry.

But before this process takes place, when low can still be high and vice versa, the joy  that comes with the sense of new possiblities can still be felt.

Perhaps part of the appeal of this strain of culture is that it supports the belief that things can still transform in exciting ways.  Maybe even that they can change.  Thoughts?

Related Interest:
More on art dissolving into life in my review of Nick Piombino and Toni Simon's Contradicta, now up at Evergreen Review Online. 

 

Of Games and Nightmares: the American Horror Story TV Show Meets the PlayStation 3 Commercial

The other week, while watching the last few episodes of the wonderfully creepy American Horror Story TV series, I had a suitably jarring experience.

If you haven't seen the show, it's about an American family that moves into a house that turns out to be haunted -- and ultimately destroys them all.

In the penultimate episode, Violet, a younger, likeable ghost, is attempting to rid the house of an extremely nasty member of the living dead.  She learns a spell for banishing bad spirits and tries it on him.

She flings the evil ghost's watch into the fireplace and untters a mystic word.  In response, he quivers ironically, and then bursts out laughing.  Violet gasps: "the spell didn't work!"  The bad ghost tells her that they never do.  People make up these rituals, he explains, to make them feel in control.  "But guess what," he mutters, "they're not."

This pessimistic vibe lingers throughout the episode.  A little later, Violet's mother, Vivian (who's still alive at this point), has the misfortune of going through childbirth in this freaky abode.  As you might expect, things don't go right -- and she starts to hemorrhage severly.

Her husband begs her to fight on.  But Vivian can also see Violet's spirit, who tells her, "mom, if you're in pain, you can let go."  Fading at this point, she replies: "I don't think I have a choice."

Unusual as it was to see a TV show where the stars don't ulitmately "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" and "take control", what was just as surprising, in this context, were some of the commercials that paid for it.

The most striking to me was one for PlayStation 3, which praises a young hero named "Michael":

 

At first viewing, it seems as if American Horror Story and PlayStation 3 come from completely different universes.  One ruled by defeat -- the other by conquest.

The Horror of the Real Estate Bubble

The "horror" in American Horror Story, in addition to the phantoms and spooks, is the seeming helplessness of the family stuck in this nasty home.

And you can see why this program became the new water cooler show: in an age of foreclosures, it captured an element of the zeitgeist.

The haunted house genre is after all, sometimes seen as an allegory about the anxieties caused by real estate -- and how sometimes, when a house goes bad, it can threaten a family's financial and emotional existence.  Here's literary critic Walter Benn Michaels on the Amityville Horror:

"Think of the plight of the Amityville couple as investors in real estate: having risked everything to get themselves into the spectacularly inflationary market of 1975, they find themselves owning the only house on Long Island whose value is declining -- the only one for a few years, anyway, until rising interest rates, as intangible as ghosts only more powerful, would begin to produce a spectacular effect on housing prices everywhere."

The Triumph of the Gamer's Will

But if American Horror Story is a fable about being overpowered by mysterious (perhaps ultimately economic) forces, is not the PlayStation 3 ad its mirror opposite?  In it, Michael, the gamer (whose portrait we see at the end) rather than get overpowered by phantoms, anxieties or crisis situations, is instead, their total master.  The "ghosts and goblins" in the spot worship the guy like a god!

All of which makes me wonder if there's not a sort of cause and effect relation between these two spectacular forms of entertainment.  It's as if the godlike pleasure of the video game has been invented as an antidote for the grim realities the TV show brings to mind.

You can see why young people -- especially males -- would love PlayStation 3.  In a world where mom and pop may be over stretched, perhaps stuck with responsibilities and investments (real estate or otherwise) that are going south fast, a game like this at least creates a fantasy where a little personal heroism is still thinkable.

And the tag line "Long Live Play" suggests something else.  Perhaps the reason the act of playing (like ritual) has been around as long as human culture itself is that our awareness of a potential disaster, always seemingly lurking around the corner, creates the need for mastery of some sort -- over some domain or reality.

Even if it's all only a game.  Thoughts? 

 

Drive She Said: Thoughts on Emily Dickinson, Kate Winslet and HBO's Mildred Pierce

Recently I came across a poem by Emily Dickinson that speaks of confinement:

I never hear the word "escape"
Without a quicker blood,
A sudden expectation,
A flying attitude!

I never hear of prisons broad
By soldiers battered down,
But I tug childish at my bars
Only to fail again! (1859)

Such lines support the most common image we have of Dickinson -- as a secluded poet, who experienced moments of only private joy.

But it's fascinating also to think of this poem as having to do with her lack of audience and publication -- as if what can't escape the confinement of her room are her poems themselves.

Dickinson published less than a dozen of her nearly 1800 poems.  Of these, many were horribly rewritten by editors, to rid the work of its disruptive rhythms and dissonant slant rhymes -- precisely those qualities that make her the Thelonious Monk of poetry.

Judging from the dates of the poems in my book, this is one of Dickinson's earlier ones.  What's striking is that even here, there's ultimately little hope of "escape"; her attempts at freedom are "childish" she says.  But, one might ask, if her work seemed doomed to confinement from the start, what drove her to write so much?

A hint, I think, might be found in the repetitive quality ("only to fail again") to which this poem alludes.  This brings to my  mind a distinction made by the cultural critic Slavoj Zizek between "desire" and "drive".

Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, Zizek tells us that "desire" is motivated by the hope of achieving some end (e.g. fame, publication, an audience, etc.).  Drive is what happens when such a goal becomes so elusive (or simply hopeless or impossible), that one keeps going just for the hell of it.  As Zizek puts it,

"...let us imagine an individual trying to perform some simple manual task -- say grabbing an object that repeatedly eludes him:  the moment he changes his attitude, starts to find  pleasure in just repeating the failed task [squeezing the object, which again and again eludes him], he shifts from desire to drive..." (p. 10)

The "driven", according to this logic, are often characterized as rebels -- for what motivates them are not the standard-issue rewards that society doles out, but something weirder, more eccentric.

But if driven-ness can have such alienating qualities, why not re-channel one's desire toward something more recognizable and achievable?  The problem with this, according to Zizek, is that, paradoxically, this can be profoundly unsatisfying.  For our desires are often not really our own, but, as he puts it, "desire for the desire of the Other."  That's why they leave one open to humiliation.

Is not the pursuit of fame, for example, often rooted in a desire to create an image of oneself that others will not just approve of, but desire themselves?  A wonderful example of this can be found in HBO's mini-series Mildred Pierce.

Artist as Social Climber

The Todd Haynes version of Mildred Pierce accomplishes something rare in U.S. films.  Haynes captures, better than any recent director, the intense desire to rid oneself of class shame.

Early in the film, Mildred takes a job as a waitress; not only is she reviled by her daughter for this "disgrace", but thanks to Kate Winslet's masterful, nearly excruciating performance, you know that Pierce hates herself for "stooping so low."

Later, we see that Vida, Mildred's daughter (and the externalization of Mildred's own ambitions for the good life), does find a route out of the reviled service industry (and a way to look good): she sings opera.  Mildred is so taken with this that she spends the profits she's made in the restaurant business on buying fine outfits for Vida, for her debut at the Hollywood Bowl.

When Vida appears on stage, Mildred, in the audience, can hardly contain herself.  She gasps with excitement and begins sobbing when, at the end of the performance, her daughter sings "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows" directly to her. (Winslet's mastery of facial expression here is incredible).  It's touching but pathetic.

And it gets worse.  Vida runs off with Mildred's "classy" husband -- leaving her mother bankrupt and even more humiliated than when she worked as a waitress.

Poetry vs. Prose

Of course, our Reality TV culture, which insists there is something wrong with us if we don't really want (conventional) success, understands the motivations of Mildred Pierce better than those of Dickinson.

But the beauty of Haynes film is that it suggests that cliched narratives of "the good life" are at least as confining and alienating as being driven to follow an eccentric path.

Perhaps Dickinson was hinting at her own disinterest in such conventions -- more the stuff of novels than of poetry -- when she began one of her most well-loved poems with the lines: "I dwell in Possibility -- /A fairer House than Prose --".  Thoughts? 

Looking (at Nike) Through Gary Gilmore's Eyes: Thoughts Inspired by the Film "Art and Copy"

The other night, I watched Art and Copy, a documentary about the Ad people who created the most memorable campaigns over the last 30 years or so. 

In it, you get the behind-the-scenes story on mega-hits like "Got milk?", "I want my MTV", and those spots done for the Reagan campaign by Hal Riney: "It's morning in America again," and the ominous one that began, "There's a bear in the woods."

"Memorable", though, is too puny a word for one campaign they covered: Wieden and Kennedy's "Just Do It", for Nike.

Since its inception over 20 years ago, I don't know that there's another commercial phrase I've heard in common parlance more often -- and applied to such a wide variety of contexts.

There are entire books written about this campaign, from both the marketing and the cultural studies perspectives.  It almost seems as if there's nothing left to say about the way it linked the longing for self-improvement with getting in shape -- and associated this all, starting with Michael Jordan, with the era's most sensational athletes.

Nevertheless, the documentary revealed something about what inspired Nike's tagline that got my mental wheels turning.  Writer Dan Wieden, who is credited with coming up with "Just Do It", mentioned the story of famed murderer Gary Gilmore.

Gilmore, it might be remembered, when asked for last words when he was about to be executed by firing squad, replied, simply, "Let's do it."

Gary Gilmore Is Not a Role Model.  Or is he?

You can see why Wieden's "Just Do It" grew out of Gilmore's "Let's do it."  Both phrases communicate impatience with procrastination -- mixed with bravado.  This may be why Gilmore's line itself, before the Nike slogan appeared, enjoyed its own viral circulation throughout pop culture.

Gilmore himself was sort of a folk anti-hero.  By waiving his own rights to appeal, and begging the Utah Supreme Court to kill him (rather than consider life imprisonment), he earned a sort of populist respect; how many times have you heard grumbling about spending "tax money" to keep killers fed?

He also donated his corneas to science (which were used shortly after his death -- and led to the great punk song, "Looking Through Gary Gilmore's Eyes" by the Adverts).

At the same time, his impulsiveness and swagger have been read as contributing to his downfall. Here's how True Crime writer Karen Ramsland puts it:

"...he hadn't the patience to earn what he desired.  From a young age, Gary Mark Gilmore just went out and took whatever he wanted -- beer, cigarettes, cars, money.  More times than not (according to him) he was successful, but when he wasn't, he landed in the slammer.  He'd just get an idea into his head and do it."

With this self-destructive quality in mind, you might say that Nike's and Gilmore's "tag lines" contradict each other.  For me, in fact, they bring to mind the old Freudian idea of the two drives:

Nike's phrase is emblematic of Eros.  In its endorsement of fitness, self-transcendence and positive achievement, it's life-affirming.

Gilmore's phrase, by contrast, hurries his own demise.  What better signifier of Thanatos, or the death drive?

But a contradiction also implies a relationship.  And what both "slogans" share in this case is the connotation of a defiant individualism.  That's why this pairing speaks, for me at least, to one of the key traits for which U.S. culture is both loved and hated.

On the one hand, stubborn "individuality" is often portrayed as necessary to protect freedom: muckrakers stand up against governments, corporations and institutions in the interest of "keeping democracy safe".

On the other, when "individuality" appears in more mundane situations, it's often seen as devolving into mere narcissism -- a narcissism not only harmful to society, but even the planet.

Check out this rant by Al Pacino from the movie Devil's Advocate.  In it, Pacino (Satan himself!) complains about an athlete of sorts -- a jogger (who, for all I know may be wearing Nikes) named Eddie Barzoon or "God's special little creature":

 

Lebron James: Rugged Individual or Narcissist?

The ambiguity around the idea of "the individual" nowadays, sometimes makes it difficult to read Nike's usually masterful TV spots.  Here's a controversial one which aired right after Lebron James announced that he'd leave the Cavaliers for the Miami Heat:

 

Judging from web comments, it appears many people disliked this spot, perhaps because they resented all the hype around James' decision to switch from his hometown team.

Not being a Cleveland or Miami fan, I know I found myself a bit irritated when I saw it.  Despite all its irony (parodying other sports spots) and even self-deprecation, I thought the superstar still ended up looking kind of vain.  So much so, that I found myself muttering mentally, "But Lebron, I don't care what you do."  Thoughts?




 

 

Do You Have to Go Nuts to Be a Great Dancer? Thoughts on Black Swan, Ally McBeal and the Tortured Artist

A few days ago I saw the film Black Swan, in which Natalie Portman offers a convincing portrayal of a ballerina obsessed with, not only pleasing her director, but getting the lead role in Swan Lake just right.

The film is worth seeing, if for no other reason than to marvel at the sheer virtuosity and athleticism of the dancers.  It's also incredible to look at -- from the stunning play with color, to the sheer painterly beauty of its shots.  And then there's that marvelously  hallucinogenic quality that director Darren Aronofsky has been refining since his Requiem for a Dream (2000) -- one of my favorites.

But it's in connection with this last quality that the movie ended up disappointing me.  Portman's character sees things.  Many of her visions are spurred by a nervous concern for artistic mastery.  The movie captures these paranoid states of mind through a suspenseful double-register, forcing you to continually ask yourself, "was that real or not?"

But despite their craziness, the anxious feeling tone of these visions is not that alien from mind states anyone freaked out about accomplishing some major task might experience.  

Yet, Portman's visions come to be much more than that. In fact, little by little, they kill her.  To me, this was an over-dramatization that strained my ability to suspend disbelief.  I asked myself why this might be so ...

The Rise and Fall of the Mad Artist

Certainly, the idea of the creative person who loses it in pursuit of her art has a rich pedigree.  Plato famously insisted that madness was required for writing good poetry.  As he put it, "there is no invention in him [the poet] until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him: when he has not attained to this state, he is powerless and is unable to utter his oracles."  Horace added that it helped to be drunk too.

Such doctrines are seemingly renewed continually.  In my favorite century, the 19th, Rimbaud pursued "the systematic derangement of the senses."  And, starting with the Romantics and proceeding through their Pre-Raphaelite, Symbolist and Decadent successors, not only was the attainment of a nearly psychedelic artistic vision required, but, as catalogued by Frank Kermode, that vision had to cost you something to be credible.  Swan Lake, of course, is a product of music's "great Romantic Age."

Yet, as much as I'd like to believe in this mini-religion of art, today it all seems corny.  This may be because, in part, in the poetry world (the art form I've been personally involved with), such notions seem passe; we live in a distinctly anti-Romantic moment.  The last time poets were driven mad by their art, it seems, was at the beginning of Ginsberg's Howl.

The transformation of a few other attitudes come into play as well.  Addiction, for example, once the accoutrement of the tragic artist, is now seen as a mere pathology in need of a 12-step program. Likewise, today mad visions are considered psychological, rather than artistic, problems.  As such, they too can be domesticated away. 

The Visions of Ally McBeal

This may be why, despite the malefic quality of the visions of Black Swan, the film brought to mind the use of fantasy in TV shows of the past few years.  Coincidentally, reruns of Ally McBeal (the show that seemed to pioneer the use of fantasy imagery on TV), have been playing lately.  Here is perhaps the program's more famous scenes, where Ally -- a dancer in this instance too -- encounters a hallucination of her own:

 

As I remember it, this vision had something to do with McBeal's nervousness over her "ticking biological clock."  But, not being an artist but a mere lawyer, seeing things like this doesn't kill her.  As if informed by a New Age version of pop psychology, during the rest of the series she speaks to her vision, makes peace with it, "respects its right to exist", lets it be.

All of which is a way of saying, I guess, that the process of secularization in our culture demystifies not only the potentially mystical, but the arts and creativity as well.  But if that's true, why might an extremely sophisticated  filmmaker still expect these motifs to carry such dramatic weight?

I wonder if Black Swan might not represent a longing, not for a time when artists went mad for their visions exactly, but for one in which their visions mattered.

And to bring those somewhat more purist sentiments back to life -- in an age of action flicks, blockbusters and rom-coms -- is the type of ambition that would drive anybody nuts.

 

 

Sometimes You're Better Off Faking It: Old Navy TV Commercials Enter the Twilight Zone

One of the more memorable lines I've come across in ads this year was in an Old Navy TV spot I saw a number of months ago:

 

The line "never give up your dreams of being fake" seems wonderfully perverse and even admirable -- especially in the context of our time, where personal authenticity is often defined by the forced emotions you see on "Reality" TV.

In fact, this spot seems like a parody of a reality show -- America's Next Top Model -- where young women competing to be models are often scolded, by Tyra Banks and her crew of judges, for seeming "phony" in their self-presentation.

And, as I found out on YouTube, it turns out that this particular spot was part of a whole campaign that awarded prizes for "getting in touch with your plastic side".  Here's the commercial that kicked it all off:

 

The Twilight Zone of Identity

I think what makes these images stay in my mind is a memory I have an older story about the relationship between humans and mannequins.  There's a Twilight Zone episode I've seen a number of times in rerun over the years (it originally aired circa 1960) that offers a haunting, even poignant, comment on this theme.

In it, Anne Francis (who later starred in the TV series Honey West), portrays a person lost in a department store.  It seems she's trying to return a scratched golden thimble, and can't find where in the store to exchange it.

She ends up on a mysterious  floor  seemingly inhabited only by mannequins.  Much to her terror, they come alive and speak.  What's even more freaky, though, is that her contact with them leads to a realization about her own identity. Her discovery occurs a little over a minute and a half into this clip:

 

You can read this episode of Twilight Zone in many ways -- one of which would be a comment on the alienation of humdrum, 9-5 work in retail (or what's now called "the Service Industry").  If one spends one's life working in a department store, the episode implies, one only feels really human on vacation.

But what fascinates me is how in the older Twilight Zone clip, you have mannequins trying to be human -- while in the Old Navy spots of today, you see just the opposite.  In one, it's sad to be fake. In  the other, it's a bummer to be real.  Why the radical shift?

Are We All Part of the Service Industry Now?

One fact cultural critics point to when explaining changes in contemporary social attitudes is the transformation of the types of jobs found in our economy.   In the old days, the story goes, the work world was dominated by a large blue collar (manufacturing) sector and a smaller, white collar (professional) one.

Now, as manufacturing recedes, the so-called Service Industry is said to be taking its place.  These are jobs where people provide services rather than make things -- and involve a range from retail sales to healthcare to many types of office and professional work.  Naturally, such gigs demand that you display at least a passably attractive demeanor to whatever public you serve.

To over-generalize a bit, more of us than ever are expected to sell now -- and not only our services, but ourselves.  Cultural critic Jim McGuigan, in a fascinating book titled Cool Capitalism, writes about the identity issues this more commericalized version of the self brings up: 

"We all signal our emotions in social situations, by smiling and so on.  When this is done at work -- for a wage, to please the customer in the interests of smooth operations and ultimately company profits -- how does it impact emotionally upon the person who is self-manipulating?  Do we become the roles we play for pay?   Is there an authentic self beneath the surface display ... Is the acting done at work only on the surface or does it run deeper, transmuting our emotional selves into that which we pretend to be?" (p. 171)

The Art of Cool Capitalism

The Old Navy spots have fun with such questions.  As they put it: "Who can hold a big plastic smile the longest?"  And in suggesting people who like the Old Navy brand are hip enough to manipulate their masks with ease, these spots offer a perfect example of how "Cool Capitalism" expresses itself, and what it looks like.  Big bucks may come your way, they kid, if you manage not to flinch.

All of which makes me wonder if the angst about authenticity you see in the Twilight Zone episode might not be a product of the relative abundance of its own era.  Perhaps you only worry about becoming a mannequin if your livelihood is secure.

Maybe today finding out you're human is what's scary.

 

The Mystery of the Social Network Decoded (by Zadie Smith, William Carlos Williams, John Dewey and Seinfeld)

Reading Zadie Smith's essay on The Social Network, I was surprised to find out how willfully inaccurate this film about Mark Zuckerberg actually is.

The movie presents Zuckerberg's motivation for inventing Facebook as having something to do with loneliness and lost loves.  Early in it, his girlfriend breaks up with him -- and at the end, even after becoming a billionaire at an absurdly young age, he obsessively tries friending her, as if, as Smith puts it, she were an "idee fixe" -- his own private "Rosebud."

But, Smith informs us, "the girl motivation is patently phony -- with a brief interruption Zuckerberg has been dating the same Chinese-American, now a medical student, since 2003, a fact the movie omits entirely."

So, why turn to fabrication just to make his life into a movie cliche?  Noting Zuckerberg's "apparent indifference to money", Smith suggests other possible motives were either incomprehensible or decidedly un-cinematic:

"If it's not for  money and it's not for  girls -- what is it for?  With Zuckerberg we have a real American mystery.  Maybe it's not mysterious and he's just playing the long game, holding out: not a billion but a hundred billion dollars.  Or is it possible he just loves programming?  No doubt the filmmakers considered this option, but you can see their dilemma: how to convey the pleasure of programming -- if such pleasure exists -- in a way that is both cinematic and comprehensible?  Movies are notoriously bad at showing the pleasures and rigors of art-making, even when the medium is familiar."

The analogy here between Zuckerberg's love of programming for its own sake, and being an artist, reminded me of something I came across recently in John Dewey's classic Art as Experience (1934). The great American Pragmatist points out, in a refreshingly democratic way, that aesthetic experience cannot be separated from daily life: 

"The intelligent mechanic engaged in his job, interested in doing well and finding satisfaction in his handiwork, caring for his materials and tools with genuine affection, is artistically engaged.  The difference between such a worker and the inept and careless bungler is as great in the shop as it is in the studio." (p. 5)

Dewey's book  suggests another reason why the makers of The Social Network may have been reluctant to portray Zuckerberg making things with code the way an artist makes things with materials. 

He tells us that what makes it difficult to grasp the aesthetic aspects of daily life is the fact that (at least since the museum was born) art has been segregated from common experience.

In the light of this separation, it sort of makes sense that anyone who isn't a citizen of Mount Parnassus is assumed to be ruled by baser motives: money, power, neurosis, loneliness, etc. 

William Carlos Williams Takes Us Out to the Ball Game

To help us see the aesthetic side of daily life, Dewey points to the artful aspects of common scenes, including "the sights that hold the crowd -- the fire-engine rushing by, the machines excavating enormous holes in the earth ... the men perched high in air on girders, throwing and catching red-hot bolts.  The sources of art in human experience will be learned by him who sees how the tense grace of the ball-player infects the onlooking crowd..."(p. 5)

This comment illuminates for me another reaction to the segregation of art and experience.  For some artists, this separation motivates an aesthetic approach that seeks to re-unite the two.  The modernist poet William Carlos Williams (who wrote poems about fire engines and baseball) is a prime example of this impulse.  Here is the opening to a poem about a ball game:

The crowd at the ball game
is moved uniformly

by a spirit of uselessness
which delights them --

all the exciting detail
of the chase

and the escape, the error
the flash of genius --

all to no end save beauty
the eternal...

You could make the case as well that by throwing out conventional meter, and replacing it with common speech rhythms, the very form of Williams' poems is ruled by a concern with the relation between art and daily life.

Jerry Seinfeld and the Arty Auto Mechanic

The denial of the arty quality of daily life can also result in the aesthetic impulse reasserting itself (like any repressed quality) into unexpected (and normally purely commercial) moments.  As I've mentioned in another post, one of the comic motifs that the Seinfeld show seemed based around was the sudden appearance of an "art-for-art's-sake" attitude in discordant situations.

Here's a clip from "The Bottle Deposit" episode.  In it, the philistine Jerry struggles with an auto mechanic who approaches his "car craft" with the love and care of an eccentric artist:

 

The key moment for me here is when the mechanic gets pissed that Jerry even dares to mention money.  This suggests another reason people avoid all mention of art.

They're afraid it costs too much. 

If You're Mad as Hell, Try Xbox Call of Duty: "Black Ops" for Relief

Thanks to Fritz Wolfmeyer who alerted me to a remarkable TV commercial for Xbox's Call of Duty: Black Ops.  Check this out:

 

Chris Hedges, in his already classic book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, writes that the "myth of war" portrays armed conflict as something that offers us access to "a bizarre and fantastic universe that has a grotesque and dark beauty" -- one filled with "excitement, exoticism, power" and "chances to rise above our small stations in life." (p. 3)  After watching this spot, I started to wonder if it's creators had actually read Hedges book.

The spot also captures another aspect of war that Hedges says contributes to its almost addictive power: the "warm, unfamiliar bond" it creates with other warriors -- those people from whom we're normally alienated. (p. 9)

In fact, the commercial goes out of its way to present its war games as having universal appeal: men and women, of a variety of ethnicities and classes -- construction workers, professionals, blue collar types, NBA stars and even a TV talk show host -- all join together to blast away.

But what really struck me about the spot was the clear presence of an emotion I don't normally associate with war, real or virtual: happiness.  After the characters fire their rounds, some break break out in smiles.

They almost look relieved.  But about what, exactly?

To Keep It Real, You've Got to be Fake

Despite the realism such games promise through their imagery, it struck me that this TV spot also assured you that Black Ops would really be fake as well.  The violence gets so over-the-top at times that it resembles, say, Tarantino films, more than it does any sort of documentary.

The guy with the mustache, dressed in what looks like a fast-food server's uniform, blazing away with a gun in each hand while walking triumphantly from the explosion in back of him, ends the spot with a real comic touch. 

And then there's the presence of the celebrities.  No one in their right mind believes mega-millionaires like Kobe Bryant or Jimmy Kimmel would ever end up fighting in an actual battle.  Aside from mere cool (not enough anymore!) their presence adds a real kookiness to the aesthetics.

This exaggerated, unrealistic -- and funny -- side to the commercial made me think of something else Hedges wrote.  This time, on the appeal of Pro Wrestling:

"The success of professional wrestling, like most of the entertainment that envelops our culture, lies not in fooling us that these stories are real.  Rather, it succeeds because we asked to be fooled.  We happily pay for the chance to suspend reality." (pp. 5-6)

In connection with all this, I remembered something I read about the techniques of promotion that were discovered by that original guru of pop culture entertainment, P.T. Barnum.   Barnum found that the exhibits of his that drew the largest crowds were those whose authenticity was most controversial.

In fact, he would plant letters in newspapers, under assumed names, that accused his freakish people and creatures of being absolutely faked (which, of course, they were).

The fakery of Xbox foregrounds the fact that, as real as all the explosions look, you're entering a virtual world -- perhaps the only place you really can "be all you can be" (or, to paraphrase the tagline, find a little bit of the soldier in yourself).

So, on the one hand, I read the smiles I see as expressions of how much fun it is to escape into an unreal, and because of that, exciting world.  But the relief I sense, I think, resonates with something more socially significant.

For me, the spot revolves around a feeling of tension and release.  As it opens, you see "all walks of life" -- "the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker", not to mention the NBA star -- looking serious as they grip their weapons.

As the spot progresses, each lets off an absurd number of rounds and then experiences pleasure, mock-triumph, or some mix of the two.

Because we're living in what might be called a "populist moment", I couldn't help but think of this scenario as an allegory about "popular rage."  People share a bond; many, it seems, are mad as hell. But, what they're mad at, and who the enemy exactly is -- are seen, if at all, through some pretty strange lenses. 

The spot mirrors this mystery and confusion. For a non-gamer like myself at least, it's hard to really tell who's shooting at who.  Or to see the enemy's faces.  But clear or not, the spot promises viewers a way to discharge some of their angst. Fast.

Thanks to Xbox, anyone can open fire right now.  And you don't even have to wait until you see the whites of their eyes.