TV

Harper's ran an interesting story last month on the filmmaker Michael Haneke. (I actually posted about him recently too.)

The Harper's article had three interesting insights, only two of which were related, but each of them stirred my interest in film, and pointed out, in some ways, why I find it so rewarding.

The first quotation is from the author of the article, who discusses the uses of television.

My father, who would regularly read five or six novels a week, spent the last six weeks of his life in a hospital, watching the miniature television set that dangled from a crane beside his bed. He couldn't concentrate enough to read, he would say, with the surprise of somebody who was used to having a mind that did what he told it to do. Watching television allowed him to stay on the surface of things; without it, his thoughts would invariably turn inward, to what was happening to him, to what the doctors said was going to happen to him. Television was company and comfort; its distraction was welcome.

Anybody who knows me knows how I feel about television. I don't watch it, and I feel, for the most part, it's a colossal time waster. I especially hate the ads--they are getting so brazen and foul. I would be willing to bet kids get exposure to worse content on ads than they do on the shows.

But this quotation interested me not because it took a commonplace stance against TV. Instead, I realized why I am attracted to TV, because I am attracted, very much. I tell my students the reason I don't have cable is not because I can't find anything good to watch--if I had cable and a Tivo, I am so interested in so many things that I would find much too much to watch and I'd never get anything done.

When I do watch TV, after I'm finished a sense of (for lack of the ability to think of a better word) disorientation takes over. I snap off the TV and think "where did the time go?" Not in the sense of "time flies when you're having fun." That type of timebend allows you to look back and remember all the fun things you just did, and to realize that fully living life, for a short time, defies the tyranny of time. (It's almost like, for that time, you are deathless because you are living.)

Reading a great book or watching a great movie has a similar effect. It's effect, though, is on the future. When you surface from a great work of art, the world looks different. You are changed. A great work of art sticks with you--you have taken it in and assimilated it into yourself. You can't undo it--it has become part of you forever.

TV is the opposite. (I play video games too, and the effect is the same as in TV.) The time flies because life is denied. I cannot look back after playing a video game and remember much of anything, nor can I say the experience was enriching for my future. The action, as the quotation above said, is entirely on the surface. Time flies not because you are living life; time flies because your are killing time, not living at all.

The act of "vegging out" in front of a screen is common to all of us. I am not denying the exquisite pleasure of plugging myself in and losing myself. But it's pleasure is more akin to a drug. Drugs are not necessarily bad...in moderation. The problem arises when, as a nation, we watch 145 hours a month. For perspective, a full-time worker puts in 160 hours a month.

I'm rambling, as I usually do, and I've strayed from my point. Let me bring it back. The pleasures of film can be much richer than the pleasures of network TV. For instance, could you imagine any TV producer from any major network saying the following, as Haneke did?

I consider myself a realist. That doesn't mean I'm a pessimist. The pessimists are those who make purely escapist films, because they believe people are so stupid that it's useless to make a film about anything serious. But someone who points to wounds in society is also trying to change things, even just a bit.

Non-escapist films ask us to think, something we spend 145 hours a month of leisure time trying to avoid. Non-escapist films treat us like we're NOT stupid. Today, though, even many of the critically-acclaimed movies we watch are designed to tell us what we already know to be true.

With many other films we are bludgeoned with the "truth": the images and the narrative are so overburdened by what the filmmaker wants to tell us that any emotion is pushed to the surface, hardening into a thick crust of sentiment. Even those movies that are supposed to be smarter than the usual Hollywood fare get mired in this condescension. In The Constant Gardener, for instance, which is based on Jon Le Carre's novel about greedy pharmaceutical companies and their malfeasance in Africa, the villains kill, Ralph Fiennes cries, the music swells, and we feel sorry for him and disgusted with the evildoers. A. O. Scott of the New York Times, one of many critics who praised the film for its intelligence, declared that The Constant Gardener was "likely to linger in your mind and may even trouble your conscience." I suspect that the only people who left the theater with their consciences genuinely troubled by what they had just seen were executives a Pfizer or Roche. If, like most of the critics, you had even a trace of antipathy toward the pharmaceutical industry going into the film, you left it feeling that your suspicions had been confirmed: angry at the world, perhaps, but reassured of your assumptions about that world.

Looking back over this post, I'm looking for a thread, and the thread seems to be this: as many of my posts have done, I realize now that this one is simply a plea for people to stop seeing media simply as a commodity, as a pastime, as an entertainment, but also to see it as a way to possibly elevate ourselves, to teach ourselves, to emerge from our interaction with it changed people, ones who can then take the questions raised (for great art rarely gives answers) and use them to live our lives more fully, more deeply. That doesn't mean turn off the TV (though that's not a bad idea). It means put something good on your TV. You'll know it's good because it makes you feel more, not less, alive.

Money Changes Everything

I don't know when it happened, but some time since the last Seinfeld show and now, Jerry Seinfeld became an asshole. My wife first pointed it out--his guest appearance on 30 Rock derived its humor from the fact that Jerry was so rich he could buy his own island. Then, his wife plagiarizes a cookbook, of all things, and Jerry makes the accuser look like a stalker on Letterman (it's on YouTube, and even Dave doesn't think it's funny). Behold, now, video proving what an arrogant jerk he is. (Oh, and another thing...he's not funny any more.)

And The Winner Of the Emmy For Greatest Actor Of All Time Is...

David Caruso

Amazingly, TV Does Not Make You Smarter

From the New York Times

I know I shouldn’t admit to playing baby videos for my children, but allow me to embarrass myself. “Baby Mozart” was part of my first child’s life when she was all of 3 months old. She was a colicky baby, despite my hours of walking her, nursing her and singing to her. The video didn’t always work — and the calm never lasted much longer than 15 minutes — but I was desperate.

Back then, in 2002, there was no research on whether these videos lived up to their billing of being good for babies’ cognitive development. But now a survey by researchers at the University of Washington, just published in The Journal of Pediatrics, has found that for every hour of baby-video viewing per day, children ages 8 to 16 months knew six to eight fewer words than those who watched no videos.

Read the story here.

Twin Peaks

Maybe this clip will remind you of what a profoundly weird show Twin Peaks was.

As Slate Magazine said, It's still hard to believe that something like this was on American broadcast TV, sharing a network with America's Funniest Home Videos.

News?

We all know that Fox News has never been a paragon of objective journalism. Now, hard-hitting Fox News has started to show signs of...well...not being a news organization any more.

When unexplained violence takes center stage, we tend to turn to modern psychology to explain it.

But there is an alternative explanation, one that has been played out in film, stage and writings since the beginning of history.

Was Cho Seung-Hui schizophrenic … psychotic … manic-depressive? Or were the shooting deaths of 32 people, including Cho himself, at Virginia Tech University part of the ongoing struggle between God and Satan … good against evil … lightness and darkness?

Could Cho have been possessed by the Devil? Could that explain the massacre at Virginia Tech?

Dr. Richard Roberts, president of Oral Roberts University, shouts an unequivocal “Yes!”

“Based on what I’ve seen in the news," Roberts said in an interview, "there’s no doubt that this act was Satanic in origin."

With "news" like this, is satire possible any more? Read the article here.

"24" and torture

Joel Surnow, friend of Rush Limbaugh and self-professed "right-wing nut job," is the creator of 24. He was profiled in a recent New Yorker magazine. The profile begins by establishing the fictional world Jack Bauer inhabits:

Since September 11th, depictions of torture have become much more common on American television. Before the attacks, fewer than four acts of torture appeared on prime-time television each year, according to Human Rights First, a nonprofit organization. Now there are more than a hundred, and, as David Danzig, a project director at Human Rights First, noted, “the torturers have changed. It used to be almost exclusively the villains who tortured. Today, torture is often perpetrated by the heroes.” The Parents’ Television Council, a nonpartisan watchdog group, has counted what it says are sixty-seven torture scenes during the first five seasons of “24”—more than one every other show. Melissa Caldwell, the council’s senior director of programs, said, “ ‘24’ is the worst offender on television: the most frequent, most graphic, and the leader in the trend of showing the protagonists using torture.”

I haven't watched 24 before, so I was a little surprised by this statistic. I didn't really see that this was a big deal, though. Viewers know it's just a television show, right...?

Throughout the series, secondary characters raise moral objections to abusive interrogation tactics. Yet the show never engages in a serious dialogue on the subject. Nobody argues that torture doesn’t work, or that it undermines America’s foreign-policy strategy. Instead, the doubters tend to be softhearted dupes. A tremulous liberal, who defends a Middle Eastern neighbor from vigilantism, is killed when the neighbor turns out to be a terrorist. When a civil-liberties-minded lawyer makes a high-toned argument to a Presidential aide against unwarranted detentions—“You continue to arrest innocent people, you’re giving the terrorists exactly what they want,” she says—the aide sarcastically responds, “Well! You’ve got the makings of a splendid law-review article here. I’ll pass it on to the President.”

Now I'm starting to understand 24 a bit better. The pencil-necked geeks are the ones who adhere to that pesky rule of law. Still though, it's just a show, right...?

This past November, U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, the dean of the United States Military Academy at West Point, flew to Southern California to meet with the creative team behind “24.” Finnegan, who was accompanied by three of the most experienced military and F.B.I. interrogators in the country, arrived on the set as the crew was filming. At first, Finnegan—wearing an immaculate Army uniform, his chest covered in ribbons and medals—aroused confusion: he was taken for an actor and was asked by someone what time his “call” was.

In fact, Finnegan and the others had come to voice their concern that the show’s central political premise—that the letter of American law must be sacrificed for the country’s security—was having a toxic effect. In their view, the show promoted unethical and illegal behavior and had adversely affected the training and performance of real American soldiers. “I’d like them to stop,” Finnegan said of the show’s producers. “They should do a show where torture backfires.”

...

Finnegan told the producers that “24,” by suggesting that the U.S. government perpetrates myriad forms of torture, hurts the country’s image internationally. Finnegan, who is a lawyer, has for a number of years taught a course on the laws of war to West Point seniors—cadets who would soon be commanders in the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. He always tries, he said, to get his students to sort out not just what is legal but what is right. However, it had become increasingly hard to convince some cadets that America had to respect the rule of law and human rights, even when terrorists did not. One reason for the growing resistance, he suggested, was misperceptions spread by “24,” which was exceptionally popular with his students. As he told me, “The kids see it, and say, ‘If torture is wrong, what about “24”?’ ” He continued, “The disturbing thing is that although torture may cause Jack Bauer some angst, it is always the patriotic thing to do.”

Gary Solis, a retired law professor who designed and taught the Law of War for Commanders curriculum at West Point, told me that he had similar arguments with his students. He said that, under both U.S. and international law, “Jack Bauer is a criminal. In real life, he would be prosecuted.” Yet the motto of many of his students was identical to Jack Bauer’s: “Whatever it takes.” His students were particularly impressed by a scene in which Bauer barges into a room where a stubborn suspect is being held, shoots him in one leg, and threatens to shoot the other if he doesn’t talk. In less than ten seconds, the suspect reveals that his associates plan to assassinate the Secretary of Defense. Solis told me, “I tried to impress on them that this technique would open the wrong doors, but it was like trying to stomp out an anthill.”

[Co-creator of 24, Bob] Cochran, who has a law degree, listened politely to the delegation’s complaints. He told me that he supports the use of torture “in narrow circumstances” and believes that it can be justified under the Constitution. “The Doctrine of Necessity says you can occasionally break the law to prevent greater harm,” he said. “I think that could supersede the Convention Against Torture.” (Few legal scholars agree with this argument.) At the meeting, Cochran demanded to know what the interrogators would do if they faced the imminent threat of a nuclear blast in New York City, and had custody of a suspect who knew how to stop it. One interrogator said that he would apply physical coercion only if he received a personal directive from the President. But Navarro, who estimates that he has conducted some twelve thousand interrogations, replied that torture was not an effective response. “These are very determined people, and they won’t turn just because you pull a fingernail out,” he told me. And Finnegan argued that torturing fanatical Islamist terrorists is particularly pointless. “They almost welcome torture,” he said. “They expect it. They want to be martyred.” A ticking time bomb, he pointed out, would make a suspect only more unwilling to talk. “They know if they can simply hold out several hours, all the more glory—the ticking time bomb will go off!”

“In Iraq, I never saw pain produce intelligence,” Lagouranis told me. “I worked with someone who used waterboarding”—an interrogation method involving the repeated near-drowning of a suspect. “I used severe hypothermia, dogs, and sleep deprivation. I saw suspects after soldiers had gone into their homes and broken their bones, or made them sit on a Humvee’s hot exhaust pipes until they got third-degree burns. Nothing happened.” Some people, he said, “gave confessions. But they just told us what we already knew. It never opened up a stream of new information.” If anything, he said, “physical pain can strengthen the resolve to clam up.”

David Nevins, the former Fox Television network official who, in 2000, bought the pilot on the spot after hearing a pitch from Surnow and Cochran, and who maintains an executive role in “24,” is candid about the show’s core message. “There’s definitely a political attitude of the show, which is that extreme measures are sometimes necessary for the greater good,” he says. “The show doesn’t have much patience for the niceties of civil liberties or due process. It’s clearly coming from somewhere. Joel’s politics suffuse the whole show.”

Read the entire story here.