David Weigel thinks it unusual that the people who ginned up the proposal for the Joe Ricketts Super PAC attacks on "Barack Hussein Obama" seemed to be obsessed with the theme of "chickens coming home to roost." It makes sense to me. For angry, terrified white men of a certain age who can't figure out where their country went, one of the most iconic real-life super-villain lines ever spoken is Malcolm X's public reaction to the murder of President Kennedy, that it was a case of "America's chickens coming home to roost." The whole point of the Ricketts project is to make America understand that President Obama, being a black man in a position of power who isn't Clarence Thomas or Allan West, must think like Malcolm X. Using the phrase "chickens coming home to roost" in a way that turns it against Obama is supposed to be a terrific act of syntactical jujitsu, partly because people like Ricketts probably think that everybody goes around all day with the Malcolm X quote pounding in their heads, feeding their nonstop migraine.
Actually, the weirdest thing about the whole Ricketts project is the way that, in search of an inoffensive, one-word meme they can pound away at to express their hatred of Obama, they've settled on "spending." I think most rational people would guess that if you go out of your way to call the President "Barack Hussein Obama", the thing that really gets under your skin about him being president has nothing to do with his actual policies, least of all how much he spends. I was alive in 2008, so I know how this works. Yes, Rush, it really is his full name, how clever of you to point this out. The fact remains that when people were tearing apart the kitchen trying to find anything they could to throw at Bill Clinton, nobody ever thought of smugly calling him "William Jefferson Clinton," as if mentioning his middle name would somehow prove some great point. Liberals in the '90s didn't try to get a tenth as much mileage as this out of referring to George H. W. Bush as "Poppy.'
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Saturday, May 19, 2012
Thursday, May 17, 2012
P.C. for Me but Not for Thee
Matthew Yglesias makes a point here that's worth keeping in mind if you're genuinely curious about just how unhinged all the people who were preparing attack ads against Barck Obama reminding everyone about Reverend Wright must be: "Lots of political spending is basically a business proposition. Businesspeople make donations to support the re-election of politicians who are friendly to their interests and to broadly maintain privileged access to legislators who they may call on for specific favors. But the kind of spending [Joe] Ricketts is contemplating here is simply too large to be driven by a narrow calculation of profit and loss. It only makes sense for Ricketts to cut that check if the campaign it underwrites has a lot of expressive value for Ricketts personally. And while I don't know any objective observers who think a focus on Jeremiah Wright is damaging to the president (it's hard to sow doubts about someone who's been in office for four years and every day the campaign isn't focused on mass unemployment is a win for an incumbent running amidst mass unemployment), it's obvious that a lot of hard-core Republicans do think this way. It's psychologically comforting to many conservatives to believe that Obama won in 2008 not because of the extremely unpopularity of the GOP, but because the media failed to "vet the prez" and expose his links to black radicalism. If you're Fred Davis or any other consultant eager to help himself to a slice of Ricketts' $10 million investment, coming up with a cost-effective plan for damaging Obama's re-election campaign is pointless. What you want to do is come up with a plan that appeals to Ricketts' sensibilities and makes him want to spend the money."
That said, it is amazing how many Republicans really believe that Barack Obama was only elected President—at a time when his opponent, who was far from beloved by his own party base, was pledging to continue the policies that had gotten the country bogged down in multiple wars and led to a global economic crisis—only because the media had failed to tell the people who this guy really was, and John McCain was too much of a wimp to do the job himself. It's a staggering demonstration of what can happen to your sense of reality if you have your own news outlets, which will flatter your every delusion and never tell you anything you don't want to hear. (I'm sure there are liberals who choose their news outlets selectively and are just as disconnected from reality, but I can't help thinking that there are many more conservatives who are careful to draw their view of the world entirely from what they see on Fox News, hear from Rush Limbaugh, and read on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal, and who think of themselves as normal.) In the real world, Obama's connection to Jeremiah Wright dominated the news cycle for a couple of days in 2008, and ended with Obama giving a speech about race that was widely covered and generally seen as having cleared the air. (He also went farther in disassociating himself from Wright than most white politicians who'd ever supported segregation went in renouncing their own views.) But Joe Ricketts and others on his wavelength must find it insupportable that a black man who ever attended Wright's church could be acceptable to many voters, at least white voters.
A few months back, conservative media tried to blow that "suppressed"—i.e., previously disseminated and widely available, but nobody gave a shit—video of Obama introducing and embracing Derrick Bell, and the fact that this failed to set off the kind of shock waves that Andrew Breitbart's disciples thought it would has no doubt already been chalked up, in their minds, to the failure of the lamestream media to do its job and promote the story. Funny thing: in the months leading up to the 1972 presidential election, the Washington Post couldn't get any other major news outlets to pick up its stories on Watergate, but then, even after Nixon had been elected in a historic landslide and had the power of a mandate to go with his most vindictive instincts, damned if the story didn't break big and wide, maybe because there really was a story there. It's in the schizoid nature of Fox News that the network can brag, with some justice, that it's the biggest and most influential media organization in the country, yet at the same time take the position that if it pounds away at a story but other media outlets don't join in, then the story hasn't gotten any attention.
Now that Ricketts' PAC has announced that it won't be doing Wright-centric attack ads after all, since Mitt Romney has publicly distanced himself from the idea, we can expect a lot of whining about how the media and Republican politicians are afraid to confront Obama on the subject of his hatred of white people, and his connection to other black people who make Joe Ricketts especially nervous, because of the vile scourge of "political correctness." That's the term conservatives are most likely to use when someone declines to say something about a black man's character that strikes a lot of people as below the belt or just basically grosses everyone out. The funny thing is, any suggestion that a white conservative might guilty of racism is also routinely condemned by these same people as "political correctness." It would be the height of political correctness to presume to guess at what's in a white person's heart regarding race, especially if the guess is based on things he's said or policies he's supported or whites-only clubs or organizations he's belonged to in the past. On the other hand, It's okay to insinuate the Barack Obama must have a problem with white people, not because of anything he's ever said or done, but because of his having frequented a church led by a man he's denounced and repudiated, and having been part of a crowd that gave a warm welcome to a professor who believed that racism is endemic in our society, and because of whatever beliefs may have been held by the father he never knew, and because of whatever Newt Gingrich has come to believe about the corrupting influence of ever having set foot in Kenya.
Mitt Romney has been a devout Mormon all his life. He was 31 years old in 1978, when the church announced that, thanks to a timely divine revelation, its traditional position on blacks—i.e., that they were the direct descendants of Cain and a "cursed race" whose skin color and "flat noses" marked them as inferior to other human beings, and so could not join the priesthood or marry non-blacks—was now, as Ron Ziegler used to say, inoperative. Romney, like all good Mormons, does not now believe that black people are inferior and "wicked" by nature. Did he believe it for the first 31 years of his life, when his church literally dictated that he should? After Things Changed in 1978, one church leader, Bruce McConkie, shrugged off the church's history of holy racism by saying, " It doesn’t make a particle of difference what anybody ever said about the Negro matter before the first day of June of this year." It could be argued that this line could be the motto for the Republican party on the issue of whether whites who've used positions of power to enforce racist policies and express racist views should be held accountable for it, and that the thought that Romney could have believed something that ridiculous and offensive and turned on a dime when he was given permission to is exactly what creeps many people out about him. Of course, to ask anything at all about what we can tell about a white Republican's moral values would be the height of political correctness. But Jeremiah Wright may be the scariest of all the black-power boogeymen who've been cast in the role of Obama's evil mentor, because of the honorific "Reverend" in front of his name, which reminds some whites of so many other black men of God who, as they see it, just wanted to start some shit. The rule for white Republicans now seems to be that it's wrong to ever suspect a white person of harboring ill feeling towards blacks, even if he's expressed it at some point in his reckless youth, but a black person has to prove every second of every day that he isn't plotting against whitey, and if he's ever seen in the company of someone that a discerning fellow like Joe Ricketts may have his doubts about, then his cover's blown, forever. To just call this a double standard would be very kind indeed.
That said, it is amazing how many Republicans really believe that Barack Obama was only elected President—at a time when his opponent, who was far from beloved by his own party base, was pledging to continue the policies that had gotten the country bogged down in multiple wars and led to a global economic crisis—only because the media had failed to tell the people who this guy really was, and John McCain was too much of a wimp to do the job himself. It's a staggering demonstration of what can happen to your sense of reality if you have your own news outlets, which will flatter your every delusion and never tell you anything you don't want to hear. (I'm sure there are liberals who choose their news outlets selectively and are just as disconnected from reality, but I can't help thinking that there are many more conservatives who are careful to draw their view of the world entirely from what they see on Fox News, hear from Rush Limbaugh, and read on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal, and who think of themselves as normal.) In the real world, Obama's connection to Jeremiah Wright dominated the news cycle for a couple of days in 2008, and ended with Obama giving a speech about race that was widely covered and generally seen as having cleared the air. (He also went farther in disassociating himself from Wright than most white politicians who'd ever supported segregation went in renouncing their own views.) But Joe Ricketts and others on his wavelength must find it insupportable that a black man who ever attended Wright's church could be acceptable to many voters, at least white voters.
A few months back, conservative media tried to blow that "suppressed"—i.e., previously disseminated and widely available, but nobody gave a shit—video of Obama introducing and embracing Derrick Bell, and the fact that this failed to set off the kind of shock waves that Andrew Breitbart's disciples thought it would has no doubt already been chalked up, in their minds, to the failure of the lamestream media to do its job and promote the story. Funny thing: in the months leading up to the 1972 presidential election, the Washington Post couldn't get any other major news outlets to pick up its stories on Watergate, but then, even after Nixon had been elected in a historic landslide and had the power of a mandate to go with his most vindictive instincts, damned if the story didn't break big and wide, maybe because there really was a story there. It's in the schizoid nature of Fox News that the network can brag, with some justice, that it's the biggest and most influential media organization in the country, yet at the same time take the position that if it pounds away at a story but other media outlets don't join in, then the story hasn't gotten any attention.
Now that Ricketts' PAC has announced that it won't be doing Wright-centric attack ads after all, since Mitt Romney has publicly distanced himself from the idea, we can expect a lot of whining about how the media and Republican politicians are afraid to confront Obama on the subject of his hatred of white people, and his connection to other black people who make Joe Ricketts especially nervous, because of the vile scourge of "political correctness." That's the term conservatives are most likely to use when someone declines to say something about a black man's character that strikes a lot of people as below the belt or just basically grosses everyone out. The funny thing is, any suggestion that a white conservative might guilty of racism is also routinely condemned by these same people as "political correctness." It would be the height of political correctness to presume to guess at what's in a white person's heart regarding race, especially if the guess is based on things he's said or policies he's supported or whites-only clubs or organizations he's belonged to in the past. On the other hand, It's okay to insinuate the Barack Obama must have a problem with white people, not because of anything he's ever said or done, but because of his having frequented a church led by a man he's denounced and repudiated, and having been part of a crowd that gave a warm welcome to a professor who believed that racism is endemic in our society, and because of whatever beliefs may have been held by the father he never knew, and because of whatever Newt Gingrich has come to believe about the corrupting influence of ever having set foot in Kenya.
Mitt Romney has been a devout Mormon all his life. He was 31 years old in 1978, when the church announced that, thanks to a timely divine revelation, its traditional position on blacks—i.e., that they were the direct descendants of Cain and a "cursed race" whose skin color and "flat noses" marked them as inferior to other human beings, and so could not join the priesthood or marry non-blacks—was now, as Ron Ziegler used to say, inoperative. Romney, like all good Mormons, does not now believe that black people are inferior and "wicked" by nature. Did he believe it for the first 31 years of his life, when his church literally dictated that he should? After Things Changed in 1978, one church leader, Bruce McConkie, shrugged off the church's history of holy racism by saying, " It doesn’t make a particle of difference what anybody ever said about the Negro matter before the first day of June of this year." It could be argued that this line could be the motto for the Republican party on the issue of whether whites who've used positions of power to enforce racist policies and express racist views should be held accountable for it, and that the thought that Romney could have believed something that ridiculous and offensive and turned on a dime when he was given permission to is exactly what creeps many people out about him. Of course, to ask anything at all about what we can tell about a white Republican's moral values would be the height of political correctness. But Jeremiah Wright may be the scariest of all the black-power boogeymen who've been cast in the role of Obama's evil mentor, because of the honorific "Reverend" in front of his name, which reminds some whites of so many other black men of God who, as they see it, just wanted to start some shit. The rule for white Republicans now seems to be that it's wrong to ever suspect a white person of harboring ill feeling towards blacks, even if he's expressed it at some point in his reckless youth, but a black person has to prove every second of every day that he isn't plotting against whitey, and if he's ever seen in the company of someone that a discerning fellow like Joe Ricketts may have his doubts about, then his cover's blown, forever. To just call this a double standard would be very kind indeed.
Thursday, April 19, 2012
Two-Headed Dog
Last week, David Weigel, who does a better job of presenting himself as a rock snob than most political reporters of a sensible-except-that-he-respects-Ron-Paul conservative bent, did a little item about which musicians were most like which Republican presidential candidates. I'm not sure that anybody else would have thought to associate Rock Perry with Jobriath, but it's hard not to appreciate the gesture, considering how apoplectic Perry would be if someone read the article to him and then, perhaps using a combination of YouTube clips and puppet animation, managed to give him some rough idea of who Jobriath was. But this business of comparing Buddy Roemer to Roky Erickson won't wash, as a current resident of Texas who was living in Louisiana during what passed for Saint Buddy's glory days, I'm perfectly qualified to be outraged by it. Seriously, "undeniably talented" and "undeniably eccentric"? This about a boll weevil Democrat who rode Ronald Reagan's wave to the governor's mansion, only to lose his bid for a second term when he failed to attract as many voters during the primary as a former grand wizard of the KKK?
I figure the secret to Roemer's attraction for a sensible conservative political junkie must be that, being a born loser, he was unable to get any traction or gain admission to many (any?) of those thousands of debates. This is one thing that sets him apart from the likes of Jon Huntsman, who Weigel gently scolded for not understanding that "You work with the party you have, not with the party you may wish you had." of course, like any sensible anything, Weigel can barely stomach the Republican party we have the one where monsters, con men, and loonies like Perry, Santorum, Gingrich, and Bachmann inspire small but passionate followings and the establishment hacks fall in line behind an erasure-covered walking blackboard like Mitt Romney. But it still can't be easy for sensible conservatives to see less conservative establishment-media types patting someone like Huntsman on the head for being so "mature" and well-behaved; isn't it just a sneaky way of making fun of the main body of the party for being such a joke? If the hapless Roemer never inspired anyone from the other side of the aisle to treat him with that level of condescension, it's not because he was operating on some higher plane of thought or political jujitsu, it's because they never noticed he existed.
Before anyone praises him as talented politically, I feel confident, from having watched his pathetic, flailing attempts to hang onto his office in 1991 by switching parties and to return to power four years later as a single-issue candidate--the issue, featured in his round-the-clock TV and radio commercials, was his pledge to bring back chain gangs--that Roemer's presidential non-campaign was not some abstract philosophical exercise whose real point was not to get noticed, though I wouldn't put it past him to try to sell it as that, to friendly reporters, now that he's trying to wipe the egg off his face. If Roemer had earned any kind of attention during the primaries, he still would have been, say, Phil Collins, a technically accomplished but bland cog in a freak show (I'm thinking of Genesis when Peter Gabriel was still in the band) who, branching off for himself (via the solo career and the post-Gabriel version of that band) proves himself to be less interesting and personally appealing than anyone could ever have guessed, but somehow hits the jackpot. Since Roemer never enjoyed any popular success, the best I can come up with is to compare him to the frontman for a Phil Collins tribute band that barely scrapes by on the Hernando's Hideaway circuit.
I figure the secret to Roemer's attraction for a sensible conservative political junkie must be that, being a born loser, he was unable to get any traction or gain admission to many (any?) of those thousands of debates. This is one thing that sets him apart from the likes of Jon Huntsman, who Weigel gently scolded for not understanding that "You work with the party you have, not with the party you may wish you had." of course, like any sensible anything, Weigel can barely stomach the Republican party we have the one where monsters, con men, and loonies like Perry, Santorum, Gingrich, and Bachmann inspire small but passionate followings and the establishment hacks fall in line behind an erasure-covered walking blackboard like Mitt Romney. But it still can't be easy for sensible conservatives to see less conservative establishment-media types patting someone like Huntsman on the head for being so "mature" and well-behaved; isn't it just a sneaky way of making fun of the main body of the party for being such a joke? If the hapless Roemer never inspired anyone from the other side of the aisle to treat him with that level of condescension, it's not because he was operating on some higher plane of thought or political jujitsu, it's because they never noticed he existed.
Before anyone praises him as talented politically, I feel confident, from having watched his pathetic, flailing attempts to hang onto his office in 1991 by switching parties and to return to power four years later as a single-issue candidate--the issue, featured in his round-the-clock TV and radio commercials, was his pledge to bring back chain gangs--that Roemer's presidential non-campaign was not some abstract philosophical exercise whose real point was not to get noticed, though I wouldn't put it past him to try to sell it as that, to friendly reporters, now that he's trying to wipe the egg off his face. If Roemer had earned any kind of attention during the primaries, he still would have been, say, Phil Collins, a technically accomplished but bland cog in a freak show (I'm thinking of Genesis when Peter Gabriel was still in the band) who, branching off for himself (via the solo career and the post-Gabriel version of that band) proves himself to be less interesting and personally appealing than anyone could ever have guessed, but somehow hits the jackpot. Since Roemer never enjoyed any popular success, the best I can come up with is to compare him to the frontman for a Phil Collins tribute band that barely scrapes by on the Hernando's Hideaway circuit.
Sunday, April 08, 2012
He Is Risen!
It struck me that now might be a good time to dig up something I wrote years ago about my favorite Easter movie.
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Face Value
Time to 'fess up: I haven't been around here much writing about politics very much because most of what I might have wanted to write about just depresses the hell out of me, so badly that I don't want to deal with it. And thanks to the self-immolation Olympics that the Republican primaries have turned out to be, I haven't felt much of a need to. (I have to wonder, though: does it kill Rick Perry or Michelle Bachmann, never mind Tim Pawlenty, to look at Rick Santorum's spree and realize that hostility to Romney as the designated nominee is so widespread that whoever managed to stay in the race past New Year's was going to benefit from it?)
A lot of this probably has to do with my being from Mississippi and being just the right age to have grown up thankful that the generation immediately preceding mine dismantled the Jim Crow apparatus and the kind of "literacy test" restrictions designed to keep blacks out of the voting booths. So it's both surreal and disheartening to see this stuff coming back, supposedly as a response to "voter fraud", a subject that, as soon as a black man made it to the Oval Office, suddenly seemed like a major issue to many people who didn't see anything wrong with having the Supreme Court call a stop to a recount that eventually confirmed that the Court and the media had appointed the candidate who got the fewer votes as leader of the free world.
This is probably why I get a migraine from some news stories that most people are content to respond to with a shrug, such as that election-season poll confirming that, yup, only 12% of Mississippi Republicans think President Obama is a Christian, news that comes a year after a different poll found that almost half of them think his parents' marriage should not have been legal. When Yankees clutch their chests over stuff like this, rich conservatives cluck their tongues about how horribly bigoted they are and unworthy to judge these good people of the soul, who are just trying to uphold the values their sweet parents taught them.
Thing is, my daddy, who embodied these values, was and is a piece of shit, and I get to make that call because, unless William Bennett, I had to live with the son of a bitch. I also know what it's like to grow up in a state that consistently ranks number fifty in everything, and I know how it feels to watch the people there agree, again and again, with the scum-sucking power elite bastards telling them that the reason their lives aren't getting any better is that all their money is being siphoned off for the Cadillacs-for-welfare-queens fund, not to mention all that damage wrought to every segment of our society by that health care law that hasn't actually gone into effect yet. You don't have to like redneck racist pea-brains to find this infuriating.
So, as I said, I've preferred to focus on such vital matters as which episode of Being Human does or doesn't deserve to crack the high ceiling above a C-plus. But every once in a while, you come across a single image or gesture that seems to perfectly encapsulate everything that stinks about your particular moment in history. Here's some context, in case you've just stumbled across this post in the year 2086. A few weeks ago, a fellow named George Zimmerman shot an unarmed, black seventeen-year-old boy named Trayvon Martin in Florida, a state that has become to crazy what Mississippi is to poor, ill-informed, and belligerent about it. The cops did not make an arrest, or even conduct an investigation beyond listening to the guy with the gun, looking at the dead kid, and going, "Mmm-hmm." In trying to explain this, they have struggled to hide behind Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law, which marks the very first occasion when any member of the law enforcement community has claimed to find a use for this obscene and ridiculous piece of legislation.
Before the shooting, Zimmerman had been following Martin as he walked to his girlfriend's house in the gated community where his father lives, and kept calling the cops to let them know that there was something "suspicious" about this everyday sight. The cops told him to stop playing Junior Batman and stay in his car. Instead, he somehow wound up on the sidewalk, where he says he had no choice but to murder the kid in self-defense after Martin asked him why the hell he was following him and decked him, which is what I would advise any son of mine to do to any strange man who was persistently following him and this was going down in Florida, because of certain prejudicial and, apparently, accurate assumptions that I'd be likely to make about the quality of police officers in Florida. Martin's body was taken to molder in the morgue under a "John Doe" label. His father found out what had happened to him when he called in a missing persons report and the cops sent someone over to show him the crime scene photos and ask if he saw anyone in them who looked familiar.
All this has inspired a great deal of outrage among people who are quick to see something hinky in a man who wants to be Dirty Harry when he grows up killing a kid whose only crime was looking, to his fevered eyes, as if he were "up to no good", and the local constabulary officially not giving a shit. The case is an outrage on many levels, but race is definitely one of them. Because of this, the backlash to the outrage has taken the form of trying to argue that Martin must have had it coming to him, or at least that Zimmerman's actions were somehow reasonable, because Martin was so scary. People who are inclined to relate to a man who is so alarmed by the sight of a black teenager in his neck of the woods that he wants to keep tabs on him and is not reluctant to kill him naturally think there's something rotten about the fact that the picture of Martin that's appeared in most of the news reports shows a beatific little boy with a friendly smile. That's not how they look! Maybe on Diff'rent Strokes, sure, but not when they're in your neighborhood, in the dead of night, armed with a packet of Skittles, and a hoodie, don't forget the hoodie, and you look out your window and he's looking at your house and oh sweet Christ, your eyes meet! Isn't it just natural to want to kill someone like that, to be on the safe side. If it turns out his father is one of your neighbors, hey, that's kind of weird, but it's a free country, and maybe they'll appreciate your offer to make it up to them by singing at the funeral.
So the important thing now, in a lot of people's eyes, is to show that racism had nothing to do with the shooting. A lot of people think the best way to prove this is to disseminate the photo on the right, which. like the picture of Willie Horton used by the Bush campaign in 1988, is meant to make any reasonable person wet their pants
:
The photo. which spread like wildfire through the Internet, was reported to be of Trayvon Martin. It isn't, and today there have been many sheepish apologies over the mix-up. All of which kind of skirt the real issue, which is, what point would people be making with this image even if the person on the right was the murdered boy? I guess he looks pretty scary to Pat Buchanan, and maybe even deserving of being shot on sight. It's still just a picture, though. I knew plenty of kids in high school who had pictures taken of themselves, dressed in khaki and wielding their favorite guns, looking like Timothy McVeigh at survivalist training camp. John Lewis might well have thought that they looked pretty scary, and could easily have moved a Fox News commentator to indignation and apoplexy by saying so.
A lot of this probably has to do with my being from Mississippi and being just the right age to have grown up thankful that the generation immediately preceding mine dismantled the Jim Crow apparatus and the kind of "literacy test" restrictions designed to keep blacks out of the voting booths. So it's both surreal and disheartening to see this stuff coming back, supposedly as a response to "voter fraud", a subject that, as soon as a black man made it to the Oval Office, suddenly seemed like a major issue to many people who didn't see anything wrong with having the Supreme Court call a stop to a recount that eventually confirmed that the Court and the media had appointed the candidate who got the fewer votes as leader of the free world.
This is probably why I get a migraine from some news stories that most people are content to respond to with a shrug, such as that election-season poll confirming that, yup, only 12% of Mississippi Republicans think President Obama is a Christian, news that comes a year after a different poll found that almost half of them think his parents' marriage should not have been legal. When Yankees clutch their chests over stuff like this, rich conservatives cluck their tongues about how horribly bigoted they are and unworthy to judge these good people of the soul, who are just trying to uphold the values their sweet parents taught them.
Thing is, my daddy, who embodied these values, was and is a piece of shit, and I get to make that call because, unless William Bennett, I had to live with the son of a bitch. I also know what it's like to grow up in a state that consistently ranks number fifty in everything, and I know how it feels to watch the people there agree, again and again, with the scum-sucking power elite bastards telling them that the reason their lives aren't getting any better is that all their money is being siphoned off for the Cadillacs-for-welfare-queens fund, not to mention all that damage wrought to every segment of our society by that health care law that hasn't actually gone into effect yet. You don't have to like redneck racist pea-brains to find this infuriating.
So, as I said, I've preferred to focus on such vital matters as which episode of Being Human does or doesn't deserve to crack the high ceiling above a C-plus. But every once in a while, you come across a single image or gesture that seems to perfectly encapsulate everything that stinks about your particular moment in history. Here's some context, in case you've just stumbled across this post in the year 2086. A few weeks ago, a fellow named George Zimmerman shot an unarmed, black seventeen-year-old boy named Trayvon Martin in Florida, a state that has become to crazy what Mississippi is to poor, ill-informed, and belligerent about it. The cops did not make an arrest, or even conduct an investigation beyond listening to the guy with the gun, looking at the dead kid, and going, "Mmm-hmm." In trying to explain this, they have struggled to hide behind Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law, which marks the very first occasion when any member of the law enforcement community has claimed to find a use for this obscene and ridiculous piece of legislation.
Before the shooting, Zimmerman had been following Martin as he walked to his girlfriend's house in the gated community where his father lives, and kept calling the cops to let them know that there was something "suspicious" about this everyday sight. The cops told him to stop playing Junior Batman and stay in his car. Instead, he somehow wound up on the sidewalk, where he says he had no choice but to murder the kid in self-defense after Martin asked him why the hell he was following him and decked him, which is what I would advise any son of mine to do to any strange man who was persistently following him and this was going down in Florida, because of certain prejudicial and, apparently, accurate assumptions that I'd be likely to make about the quality of police officers in Florida. Martin's body was taken to molder in the morgue under a "John Doe" label. His father found out what had happened to him when he called in a missing persons report and the cops sent someone over to show him the crime scene photos and ask if he saw anyone in them who looked familiar.
All this has inspired a great deal of outrage among people who are quick to see something hinky in a man who wants to be Dirty Harry when he grows up killing a kid whose only crime was looking, to his fevered eyes, as if he were "up to no good", and the local constabulary officially not giving a shit. The case is an outrage on many levels, but race is definitely one of them. Because of this, the backlash to the outrage has taken the form of trying to argue that Martin must have had it coming to him, or at least that Zimmerman's actions were somehow reasonable, because Martin was so scary. People who are inclined to relate to a man who is so alarmed by the sight of a black teenager in his neck of the woods that he wants to keep tabs on him and is not reluctant to kill him naturally think there's something rotten about the fact that the picture of Martin that's appeared in most of the news reports shows a beatific little boy with a friendly smile. That's not how they look! Maybe on Diff'rent Strokes, sure, but not when they're in your neighborhood, in the dead of night, armed with a packet of Skittles, and a hoodie, don't forget the hoodie, and you look out your window and he's looking at your house and oh sweet Christ, your eyes meet! Isn't it just natural to want to kill someone like that, to be on the safe side. If it turns out his father is one of your neighbors, hey, that's kind of weird, but it's a free country, and maybe they'll appreciate your offer to make it up to them by singing at the funeral.
So the important thing now, in a lot of people's eyes, is to show that racism had nothing to do with the shooting. A lot of people think the best way to prove this is to disseminate the photo on the right, which. like the picture of Willie Horton used by the Bush campaign in 1988, is meant to make any reasonable person wet their pants
:
The photo. which spread like wildfire through the Internet, was reported to be of Trayvon Martin. It isn't, and today there have been many sheepish apologies over the mix-up. All of which kind of skirt the real issue, which is, what point would people be making with this image even if the person on the right was the murdered boy? I guess he looks pretty scary to Pat Buchanan, and maybe even deserving of being shot on sight. It's still just a picture, though. I knew plenty of kids in high school who had pictures taken of themselves, dressed in khaki and wielding their favorite guns, looking like Timothy McVeigh at survivalist training camp. John Lewis might well have thought that they looked pretty scary, and could easily have moved a Fox News commentator to indignation and apoplexy by saying so.
One of Zimmerman's surrogate defenders in the media has said that Zimmerman thought this thing "would all blow over", a statement that seems meant to convey that, because he knew he'd done the right thing, he didn't see it as any big deal, and nobody else would have either, if the professional anti-racism rabble rousers hadn't stirred things up. It is, in fact, a bone-chilling thing to say, and gives the lie to other statements insisting that Zimmerman felt just awful about killing Martin. No he didn't; he thought it would all blow over. He took the life of someone who even he, unless he's deranged, must now know that he was harassing and who hadn't done anything wrong, and that doesn't bother him in the least. Knowing what we know, it's the picture of the clean-cut, smiling Zimmerman, a man who must have been itching to kill somebody in the name of neighborhood security, that's scary.
Of course, the people who liked the idea of spreading this photo around, whether they thought it was really Martin or not, don't care about what we know. They expect people to share their indifference to context. What matters, as it did with Willie Horton and the conspiracy theories about Obama's true religion, are the images that are thought to make direct contact with people's gonads and make them react the way the image-sharers want them to. Pointing out that the picture of the fellow posing for a "Thug Life" poster isn't Trayon Martin doesn't change the fact that. even if it were of him, it wouldn't change the fact that Martin was just walking from the convenience store to a house where he was welcome, in a community where, Zimmerman's assumptions and assertions to the contrary, he belonged. Nor do the supposedly face-saving reports that he'd had trouble in school and might have sampled the dreaded marijuana, weed with roots in Hell, change this fact. Nor did Martin look anything like the guy in the photo when Zimmerman started stalking him, no matter how badly you may begin to shake and weep in fright when you see a hoodie. So leaving aside who that is in the picture, what is the point being made by triumphantly waving it around? That if you saw a cat who looked like this, you'd shoot first, too? Seriously, if there's a more nuanced interpretation of what I'm supposed to think or feel when someone posts a picture like that and goes, "See!? Do you think the guy overreacted now?", I'd love to hear it. But I've tried turning it over in my head for a day now, and all I can come up with is that some people think that it ought to be open season on anyone they see in their area who dresses like he's posing for an early 50 Cent cover.
Zimmerman's defenders are whining about perception, which is sort of cute. For more than three years now, I've had to listen to people explaining that it was only bigotry or a failure of perspective to caused some to look at the Tea Party protestors with the misspelled, racist signs, screaming and speaking in tongues and showing up at public meetings with their firearms, and deciding they looked, not just stupid, loud, and unreasonable, but a little scary. I am one-hundred-percent certain that none of the people defending those members of the republic would have changed their tune if a bunch of white senior citizens opposed to health care reform had shown up at a town hall meeting with hoodies on. Meanwhile, people like Newt Gingrich have gone into deep shock over President Obama saying that he wants Martin's parents to know the recognizes their "right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves." This is seen as unacceptable siding with the one on the wrong end of the gun, just as conservatives had a fit when, in his first term, Obama allowed as how he thought it was wrong of a cop to arrest Henry Louis Gates for "disorderly conduct" because the cop investigated a report of a burglary at Gates' house and didn't care for the homeowner's attitude. Many of these are the same people who didn't think the forces of law and order could do anything right when Bill Clinton was President, but then, David Koresh and Randy Weaver were white guys, and so perhaps allowed to have their little eccentricities, such as stockpiling and selling illegal firearms and killing the occasional stray federal agent who they saw on their land, looking suspicious, as someone with a warrant is apt to do.
In trying to explain why it's so important to shit on the memory of a dead kid, in order to show support for a gun nut who doesn't listen to the police when they tell him to stand the fuck down, one of the sites that ran the phony Trayvon Martin photo ran this statement: "And why is this one being so heavily covered? Because of celebrity power assuming the possible guiltiness of one man. This is why we have due process. George Zimmerman may still not be innocent, but it’s up to the courts to decide that, not the media." The only thing missing from this syllogism is the fact that the whole public outcry stemmed from the fact that a man killed an unarmed boy, and the cops didn't do anything about it. This is not an example of someone being tried in the media. It's a case of people using the media to try to get someone tried by the courts at all. So, since these folks care so much about due process, why are they upset that it may yet happen in George Zimmerman's case, and why are they running bullshit on their website in an attempt to fuck with the potential jury pool?
Of course, the people who liked the idea of spreading this photo around, whether they thought it was really Martin or not, don't care about what we know. They expect people to share their indifference to context. What matters, as it did with Willie Horton and the conspiracy theories about Obama's true religion, are the images that are thought to make direct contact with people's gonads and make them react the way the image-sharers want them to. Pointing out that the picture of the fellow posing for a "Thug Life" poster isn't Trayon Martin doesn't change the fact that. even if it were of him, it wouldn't change the fact that Martin was just walking from the convenience store to a house where he was welcome, in a community where, Zimmerman's assumptions and assertions to the contrary, he belonged. Nor do the supposedly face-saving reports that he'd had trouble in school and might have sampled the dreaded marijuana, weed with roots in Hell, change this fact. Nor did Martin look anything like the guy in the photo when Zimmerman started stalking him, no matter how badly you may begin to shake and weep in fright when you see a hoodie. So leaving aside who that is in the picture, what is the point being made by triumphantly waving it around? That if you saw a cat who looked like this, you'd shoot first, too? Seriously, if there's a more nuanced interpretation of what I'm supposed to think or feel when someone posts a picture like that and goes, "See!? Do you think the guy overreacted now?", I'd love to hear it. But I've tried turning it over in my head for a day now, and all I can come up with is that some people think that it ought to be open season on anyone they see in their area who dresses like he's posing for an early 50 Cent cover.
Zimmerman's defenders are whining about perception, which is sort of cute. For more than three years now, I've had to listen to people explaining that it was only bigotry or a failure of perspective to caused some to look at the Tea Party protestors with the misspelled, racist signs, screaming and speaking in tongues and showing up at public meetings with their firearms, and deciding they looked, not just stupid, loud, and unreasonable, but a little scary. I am one-hundred-percent certain that none of the people defending those members of the republic would have changed their tune if a bunch of white senior citizens opposed to health care reform had shown up at a town hall meeting with hoodies on. Meanwhile, people like Newt Gingrich have gone into deep shock over President Obama saying that he wants Martin's parents to know the recognizes their "right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves." This is seen as unacceptable siding with the one on the wrong end of the gun, just as conservatives had a fit when, in his first term, Obama allowed as how he thought it was wrong of a cop to arrest Henry Louis Gates for "disorderly conduct" because the cop investigated a report of a burglary at Gates' house and didn't care for the homeowner's attitude. Many of these are the same people who didn't think the forces of law and order could do anything right when Bill Clinton was President, but then, David Koresh and Randy Weaver were white guys, and so perhaps allowed to have their little eccentricities, such as stockpiling and selling illegal firearms and killing the occasional stray federal agent who they saw on their land, looking suspicious, as someone with a warrant is apt to do.
In trying to explain why it's so important to shit on the memory of a dead kid, in order to show support for a gun nut who doesn't listen to the police when they tell him to stand the fuck down, one of the sites that ran the phony Trayvon Martin photo ran this statement: "And why is this one being so heavily covered? Because of celebrity power assuming the possible guiltiness of one man. This is why we have due process. George Zimmerman may still not be innocent, but it’s up to the courts to decide that, not the media." The only thing missing from this syllogism is the fact that the whole public outcry stemmed from the fact that a man killed an unarmed boy, and the cops didn't do anything about it. This is not an example of someone being tried in the media. It's a case of people using the media to try to get someone tried by the courts at all. So, since these folks care so much about due process, why are they upset that it may yet happen in George Zimmerman's case, and why are they running bullshit on their website in an attempt to fuck with the potential jury pool?
Monday, March 19, 2012
Pretty Scary, Huh, Kids?
[This was originally written for another venue, but it won't be appearing there because of a technical screw-up on my part that caused me to overshoot my deadline, so I'm dumping it here. I'd just like to mention that it benefitted from the editorial guidance of Keith Phipps, who deserves most of the credit for anything in it's that good and no blame at all for the many things in it that aren't.]
When I was a kid, my tastes in entertainment were, believe it or not, even simpler than they are today. Basically, if it wasn't supposed to either make you laugh or scare you, I didn't know what it was for. I spent a lot of time in front of the TV, in a rural household without cable or a VCR, which limited my choices to vanilla broadcast television. This was fine so far as comedy was concerned, but made-for-TV horror was a dead loss. The Twilight Zone might sometimes get it right, and The Outer Limits and even Night Gallery and the endearingly cheeseball Tales From The Darkside occasionally earned points for trying. But those were anthology shows, which operated on an individual-episode, hit or miss basis. What I wanted was a serialized dramatic series that I could sink my teeth into. I remember a time when I was quite passionate about Kolchak: The Night Stalker, and I'll still sit through an episode if I happen to trip across it, provided it's the one where a headless motorcyclist tries to decapitate Art Metrano.
But while The Night Stalker is often cited now as the inspiration for The X-Files, what isn't often mentioned is that The X-Files struck gold by using The Night Stalker as a model for what not to do. And he constructed the show’s elaborate conspiracy mythology as part of a deliberate strategy to fight against the perception that the series might be another “monster of the week” show. (Never mind that the episodes involving such genetic horrors as the stretchable Eugene Tooms and the murderous clones of Eve 6 may linger in the memory more strongly than all those slow, hushed scenes of well-dressed old white guys exchanging significant looks while hanging out in what looks like an aircraft hangar.) Ironically, the disastrous 2005 reboot of The Night Stalker—which produced exactly one memorable episode, written by X-Files veteran and Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan—failed because it tried to hard to imitate The X-Files at its most self-mythlogizing, overdosing on atmospheric portentousness at the expense of action, humor, and scares.
A decade after it closed up shop, The X-Files remains the model of how to rope the supernatural into a regular procedural show, but--in an aesthetic choice that must have been determined largely by budget constraints--it was a throwback to the cinema of Val Lewton, which was based on an idea The Night Stalker never learned, which is that it's better to hint at something just outside camera range than to stage a clearly lighted fight to the death between a 50-something actor and a guy in a rubber suit with a zipper down its back. And the horror moments were embedded in a sci-fi framework. Growing up and listening to shows like Twilight Zone and Star Trek praised as cultishly superior TV, while a series like Night Stalker was always derided as a stupid "monster of the week" shows, I'll admit to having developed a grudge against science fiction. It got both the good grades and the cool girls at the conventions.
In the '70s, horror movies started changing, blossoming. Serious-minded artists like Brian De Palma and David Cronenberg and inspired crackpot inventors like George Romero and Tobe Hooper were taking genre models and turning them inside out, exploding conventions and using them to address their own personal issues. And thanks to advances in special effects and a new permissiveness about what could be shown on a movie screen, they were able to get their messages across using wilder, more shocking images than anything seen in a commercial American movie since Todd Browning slipped his leash and uncorked Freaks. Down on the farm, where it was easier to read about these movies than to manage to see them, I wanted to see some of that on TV, ideally in a package that offered the pleasures of a regular series with characters I'd get to follow through an unfolding story. That show never came to be, and I assumed that it had a lot to do with the inability to do gore and creature makeup and disturbing subject matter on TV.
But that isn’t the case anymore. People regularly get torn apart and dismembered with brio on The Walking Dead, and graphic violence is just one of the thousands of things about which American Horror Story is blissfully unshy. And a show like The River aims to be cutting-edge in a different way, bringing the found-footage techniques of movies like The Blair Witch Project, The Last Exorcism, and the Paranormal Activity films to a TV series. That show’s a joke, whereas The Walking Dead and American Horror Story have been relative critical and commercial successes. But I don’t know that anyone would ascribe their success to how scary they are. Which makes me wonder whether the kind of horror that makes for great movies can co-exist with the demands of a serialized show.
Although the comic book series that inspired The Walking Dead goes back to 2003, the TV series feels very much of its moment. Like Falling Skies, it’s basically a survivalist fantasy, about developing and honing the necessary skills to keep going after everything collapses. The zombies on The Walking Dead, like the aliens on Falling Skies, are a metaphor for the economic uncertainty that’s now scarier than incoming bombs, and at the same time, a welcome distraction from it. Given that the greatest monster show of all time was really about high school and the other terrors of adolescence, it would be foolish to complain about this, except that Buffy somehow brought the pain that comes from not fitting in and the dissipation of the afterglow of one’s first sexual experience into greater focus. The Walking Dead seems to render what it’s “really” about more unreal.
These shows jump right past the depressing reality of the lingering effects of the 2008 economic collapse and the widening income gap by treating homelessness and futurelessness as an excuse to have an adventure. It may be harrowing, but it separates the heroes who have the right stuff—the pioneer spirit that made this country great, and the Boy Scout skills that go with it—from all those investment bankers who were probably eaten alive in their condos. The zombie attacks on The Walking Dead can be startling, especially given the stupor that the rest of the show seems designed to put viewers in before they happen. The horror scenes are their reward for sitting through what else is there, like the flashy music video firefights on Miami Vice. Most of the show is a post-apocalyptic debating society, but every minute of talk enhances the possibility that, pretty soon, viewers may get to see somebody face-to-face with his own intestines. The fact that the doomed, suffering bastard will likely be one of the boring talkers is gravy.
The Walking Dead has come to parcel out its monster sightings pretty sparingly, which is one way to keep them from getting old. (It also enhances the show’s “age of austerity” feel.) But I think that, especially in its second season, the show has become better as a shocker than it is at being a TV series. I keep watching it, and whenever a regular or prominent supporting character gets killed, I do think, "Hm, didn't see that coming." And a couple of days later, I can remember how effective the surprise was, but I can't remember anything else that happened, or much about the character who was toast. This makes it the exact opposite of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, which sometimes managed to send a shiver through the viewer but was mainly about our involvement with the characters. I know that there were times when it made me jump, but years after it ended, what I can most easily remember are things like Buffy's reaction to being rebuffed by Angel or to the unsupernatural death of her mother, or Xander's feeling dissed or Giles' feeling passed over, or Spike's confusion over his first experiencing shame and guilt, or the way I always wanted to step into the TV and start throwing punches whenever somebody looked at Willow cross-eyed. It was a horror show in the same sense that Deadwood was a Western, which is to say that nobody ever tuned in to Deadwood to see if Sheriff Bullock would bring the stagecoach robbers to justice. The Walking Dead works a lot harder at this end of the playing field, but I can't say that any death on it has ever touched me as much as Willow Rosenberg's hurt feelings. In a TV series, that's a problem.
American Horror Story is much different in the way it uses horror movie imagery, which figures, since its co-creators, Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk (who previously teamed up for Nip/Tuck and Glee) don’t do austerity. They pig out on ghostly murderers, disfigured psychos, lurking killers in pig masks, mad scientists, creepy basements, and an aging glamour queen—Jessica Lange—in a bitchy role that’s like a fabulous update on the wave of starlet-turned-hag movies of the ’60s, such as Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? and Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte. For horror fans especially, the show is addictive, but for the same reason that it’s a hollow debauch. It isn’t scary, partly because it’s trying too hard to scare at every moment by throwing everything including the kitchen sink at the audience, but it’s easy to get caught up in the urge to see what the hell they’re going to do next. After awhile, whether what they do next has any relation to what they’ve done already, or even whether it’s well-executed, becomes irrelevant.
The strangest element of American Horror Story is how unghostly the ghosts are. They look just as corporeal as the people they’re haunting, and unlike those traditional ghosts who can only scare the shit out of you, they can lay hands on people and actually kill them--or have sex with them. Their biggest disadvantage seems to be that, although they don’t age and can apparently do any of the things that living people enjoy doing, they’re tied to the spot where they lost their lives. Compare their lot in life with that of the Jessica Lange character, and the show starts to look like it’s driven by a terror of aging and becoming unsexy and unglamorous, even as it suggests that the scariest thing in the world is to be stuck in place. Emotionally, the show is at its most potent when dealing with the gay couple (played by Zachary Quinto and Teddy Sears) who owned the house before its present occupants. Murdered, they’re condemned to haunt the house forever, which is a rough ride, because when they were killed, they’d been failing to connect in the bedroom and the adulterous Sears had been planning to dump Quinto and move on. Most of the ghoulish excesses of American Horror Story are only good for a laugh, but the wormy sight of Quinto and Sears being passive-aggressive with each other from beyond the grave will throw a good scare into anyone who’s ever hesitated to make his next move with one foot out the door.
Of all these series, The River is the least fun, but it's also the one that's most aware of what innovations have been brought to horror movies in the past several years. This is the show that ABC has tirelessly promoted as being from the people who brought us Paranormal Activity. (It was created by that movie’s writer-director, Oren Peli, and Michael R. Perry, who co-wrote its first sequel.) That credit might cause those with long memories to shudder a little, if they remember one of the disasters of the fall 2000 TV season, Freakylinks, which Fox tirelessly promoted as being from the people who brought us The Blair Witch Project. Freakylinks was a bad monster-of-the-week show intended to have a youthful, with-it vibe, mainly because the monster hunters had their own website, which, as in the case of The Blair Witch Project, doubled as a real-life marketing tool. The River goes the theoretically hipper route of trying to adapt the found-footage gimmick that has worked in film into a TV series.
The show is about the search for Dr. Emmet Cole, who disappeared while exploring an uncharted region of the Amazon. We’re told that Cole was a TV celebrity whose true-nature adventures on his series The Undiscovered Country—the name is a reference to a line from Hamlet about death—made him a legend to kids in the late ’80s and ’90s. As played by Bruce Greenwood--whose previous roles include the worst-ever frontier scout in Meek's Cutoff and the worst person in all of hyuman history in the HBO mishap John from Cincinnati-- Cole was a twinkly-eyed fellow who liked to be photographed standing waist-deep in water with his arms extended crucifixion-style and his back to the camera, and was fond of saying things like “There’s magic out there.” The biggest mystery in the show is, if this guy went missing, why would anyone want him back?
They do, though, and so Cole’s wife, pissed-off son, and a camera crew head off to the Amazon to look for him. There are cameras recording everything that happens aboard the boat, in addition to what the hand-held camera is picking up, and as is standard practice for this kind of thing, a preface tells us that what we’re seeing was cobbled together from “the footage they left behind.” Some of what we see is as static and grainy as security camera footage, while some of it is of the free-swinging handheld variety that caused some people at Blair Witch to reach for the Dramamine. But there are also long stretches that look as calmly composed and brightly lit as anything else on prime time, which tends to mess with the receptive viewer’s ability to buy into the illusion that we’re seeing a messy record of something that really happened and that was eerily caught on film. The fact that the scenes of characters having long dry conversations tend to be models of professional, easy-to-read filmmaking also make it that much more annoying when something scary turns up and resolutely declines to step into the center of the frame or wherever there’s a light source.
Some literal-minded fans of The Night Stalker have been known to express disappointment that the show never got around to addressing what they see as the missing piece of the puzzle: what was the presumably mystical, possibly conspiracy-related reason that Kolchak seemed to be such a magnet for monsters? (The reboot seemed to be have a lot invested in this question, which just never really came up in Darren McGavin’s day.) The River’s solution to this non-problem is to make the show all about its mysterious location, which is meant to account for everything from sea monsters to ghost ships to scary natives sneaking around in the dark to trees that make you go blind.
The River started out as a four-page treatment for a movie, until Steven Spielberg got involved, at which point, according to Oren Peli, Perry announced, “This is a great idea, but why waste it on a movie when you can do a TV show where every season they go to a different place.” Peli also describes Spielberg saying, “There’s nothing like this, something very raw and visceral, on TV. Let’s figure out how to bring the horror nature of Paranormal Activity to TV.” Somewhere between those two statements lies the built-in paradox of trying to use a concept like this for a TV series, and trying to do something “very raw and visceral” at the same time that you need to create a mold that can be used to generate as many hour-long chunks of basically the same thing week after week.
Even with the intensity-and-gore barrier partially dissolved, there may be something in the television medium that’s resistant to the kind of horror that makes for classic movies. People aren’t trapped in their seats in the dark with the images bearing down on them when they watch TV, and the changes in possible methods of TV viewing that have come along in recent years don’t exactly make it any easier to scare people: if The River can’t make you jump when you’re watching it in your living room, it’s not going to do a better job of it if you’re watching it on your phone while waiting at the bus stop. No matter how big the screens get, there remains something small-scale and intimate about TV, which makes it better at creepiness and claustrophobia than at epic shocks. (It might not be a coincidence that one of the most famously unsettling episodes of The X-Files is titled Home.
The River seems like a show whose failure tells us something about the different possibilities for horror in a movie and in a TV series, it may be because, like the movies it takes off from, The River is all gimmick. (In this way, it's a little reminiscent of TV movies like the 1983 Special Bulletin, which used a fake news broadcast to a story involving terrorists with a nuclear device, the Mercury Theater On The Air production of War Of The Worlds having been TV producers' notion of the ultimate horror gimmick until Blair Witch came along.) It also brings the scary-TV genre full circle, back to Twilight Zone, because it feels as if it might almost be an anthology series: the characters aren't strong enough for the viewer to develop any feelings about it that will carry over from week to week. Boiling things down so that things can just carry on after anyone has been picked off once seemed like a shocking strategy for movies, but TV series don't seem to be able to adapt it to their purposes. It's a double-edged sword: when the characters don't matter as much as the gimmick, as in The River, there's not enough incentive to invest yourself emotionally and come back next week. I did have that investment in Buffy and Angel and The X-Files, enough so that I couldn't wait to check back in every week. Those shows lacked the giddy insouciance of some of my favorite horror movies, because every death--every bad thing that happened to the characters, no matter how trivial--mattered. So maybe, on second thought, if there really is a gap between what horror movies and monster shows can accomplish, that reveals something about the limitations of horror movies, too.
When I was a kid, my tastes in entertainment were, believe it or not, even simpler than they are today. Basically, if it wasn't supposed to either make you laugh or scare you, I didn't know what it was for. I spent a lot of time in front of the TV, in a rural household without cable or a VCR, which limited my choices to vanilla broadcast television. This was fine so far as comedy was concerned, but made-for-TV horror was a dead loss. The Twilight Zone might sometimes get it right, and The Outer Limits and even Night Gallery and the endearingly cheeseball Tales From The Darkside occasionally earned points for trying. But those were anthology shows, which operated on an individual-episode, hit or miss basis. What I wanted was a serialized dramatic series that I could sink my teeth into. I remember a time when I was quite passionate about Kolchak: The Night Stalker, and I'll still sit through an episode if I happen to trip across it, provided it's the one where a headless motorcyclist tries to decapitate Art Metrano.
But while The Night Stalker is often cited now as the inspiration for The X-Files, what isn't often mentioned is that The X-Files struck gold by using The Night Stalker as a model for what not to do. And he constructed the show’s elaborate conspiracy mythology as part of a deliberate strategy to fight against the perception that the series might be another “monster of the week” show. (Never mind that the episodes involving such genetic horrors as the stretchable Eugene Tooms and the murderous clones of Eve 6 may linger in the memory more strongly than all those slow, hushed scenes of well-dressed old white guys exchanging significant looks while hanging out in what looks like an aircraft hangar.) Ironically, the disastrous 2005 reboot of The Night Stalker—which produced exactly one memorable episode, written by X-Files veteran and Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan—failed because it tried to hard to imitate The X-Files at its most self-mythlogizing, overdosing on atmospheric portentousness at the expense of action, humor, and scares.
A decade after it closed up shop, The X-Files remains the model of how to rope the supernatural into a regular procedural show, but--in an aesthetic choice that must have been determined largely by budget constraints--it was a throwback to the cinema of Val Lewton, which was based on an idea The Night Stalker never learned, which is that it's better to hint at something just outside camera range than to stage a clearly lighted fight to the death between a 50-something actor and a guy in a rubber suit with a zipper down its back. And the horror moments were embedded in a sci-fi framework. Growing up and listening to shows like Twilight Zone and Star Trek praised as cultishly superior TV, while a series like Night Stalker was always derided as a stupid "monster of the week" shows, I'll admit to having developed a grudge against science fiction. It got both the good grades and the cool girls at the conventions.
In the '70s, horror movies started changing, blossoming. Serious-minded artists like Brian De Palma and David Cronenberg and inspired crackpot inventors like George Romero and Tobe Hooper were taking genre models and turning them inside out, exploding conventions and using them to address their own personal issues. And thanks to advances in special effects and a new permissiveness about what could be shown on a movie screen, they were able to get their messages across using wilder, more shocking images than anything seen in a commercial American movie since Todd Browning slipped his leash and uncorked Freaks. Down on the farm, where it was easier to read about these movies than to manage to see them, I wanted to see some of that on TV, ideally in a package that offered the pleasures of a regular series with characters I'd get to follow through an unfolding story. That show never came to be, and I assumed that it had a lot to do with the inability to do gore and creature makeup and disturbing subject matter on TV.
But that isn’t the case anymore. People regularly get torn apart and dismembered with brio on The Walking Dead, and graphic violence is just one of the thousands of things about which American Horror Story is blissfully unshy. And a show like The River aims to be cutting-edge in a different way, bringing the found-footage techniques of movies like The Blair Witch Project, The Last Exorcism, and the Paranormal Activity films to a TV series. That show’s a joke, whereas The Walking Dead and American Horror Story have been relative critical and commercial successes. But I don’t know that anyone would ascribe their success to how scary they are. Which makes me wonder whether the kind of horror that makes for great movies can co-exist with the demands of a serialized show.
Although the comic book series that inspired The Walking Dead goes back to 2003, the TV series feels very much of its moment. Like Falling Skies, it’s basically a survivalist fantasy, about developing and honing the necessary skills to keep going after everything collapses. The zombies on The Walking Dead, like the aliens on Falling Skies, are a metaphor for the economic uncertainty that’s now scarier than incoming bombs, and at the same time, a welcome distraction from it. Given that the greatest monster show of all time was really about high school and the other terrors of adolescence, it would be foolish to complain about this, except that Buffy somehow brought the pain that comes from not fitting in and the dissipation of the afterglow of one’s first sexual experience into greater focus. The Walking Dead seems to render what it’s “really” about more unreal.
These shows jump right past the depressing reality of the lingering effects of the 2008 economic collapse and the widening income gap by treating homelessness and futurelessness as an excuse to have an adventure. It may be harrowing, but it separates the heroes who have the right stuff—the pioneer spirit that made this country great, and the Boy Scout skills that go with it—from all those investment bankers who were probably eaten alive in their condos. The zombie attacks on The Walking Dead can be startling, especially given the stupor that the rest of the show seems designed to put viewers in before they happen. The horror scenes are their reward for sitting through what else is there, like the flashy music video firefights on Miami Vice. Most of the show is a post-apocalyptic debating society, but every minute of talk enhances the possibility that, pretty soon, viewers may get to see somebody face-to-face with his own intestines. The fact that the doomed, suffering bastard will likely be one of the boring talkers is gravy.
The Walking Dead has come to parcel out its monster sightings pretty sparingly, which is one way to keep them from getting old. (It also enhances the show’s “age of austerity” feel.) But I think that, especially in its second season, the show has become better as a shocker than it is at being a TV series. I keep watching it, and whenever a regular or prominent supporting character gets killed, I do think, "Hm, didn't see that coming." And a couple of days later, I can remember how effective the surprise was, but I can't remember anything else that happened, or much about the character who was toast. This makes it the exact opposite of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, which sometimes managed to send a shiver through the viewer but was mainly about our involvement with the characters. I know that there were times when it made me jump, but years after it ended, what I can most easily remember are things like Buffy's reaction to being rebuffed by Angel or to the unsupernatural death of her mother, or Xander's feeling dissed or Giles' feeling passed over, or Spike's confusion over his first experiencing shame and guilt, or the way I always wanted to step into the TV and start throwing punches whenever somebody looked at Willow cross-eyed. It was a horror show in the same sense that Deadwood was a Western, which is to say that nobody ever tuned in to Deadwood to see if Sheriff Bullock would bring the stagecoach robbers to justice. The Walking Dead works a lot harder at this end of the playing field, but I can't say that any death on it has ever touched me as much as Willow Rosenberg's hurt feelings. In a TV series, that's a problem.
American Horror Story is much different in the way it uses horror movie imagery, which figures, since its co-creators, Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk (who previously teamed up for Nip/Tuck and Glee) don’t do austerity. They pig out on ghostly murderers, disfigured psychos, lurking killers in pig masks, mad scientists, creepy basements, and an aging glamour queen—Jessica Lange—in a bitchy role that’s like a fabulous update on the wave of starlet-turned-hag movies of the ’60s, such as Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? and Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte. For horror fans especially, the show is addictive, but for the same reason that it’s a hollow debauch. It isn’t scary, partly because it’s trying too hard to scare at every moment by throwing everything including the kitchen sink at the audience, but it’s easy to get caught up in the urge to see what the hell they’re going to do next. After awhile, whether what they do next has any relation to what they’ve done already, or even whether it’s well-executed, becomes irrelevant.
The strangest element of American Horror Story is how unghostly the ghosts are. They look just as corporeal as the people they’re haunting, and unlike those traditional ghosts who can only scare the shit out of you, they can lay hands on people and actually kill them--or have sex with them. Their biggest disadvantage seems to be that, although they don’t age and can apparently do any of the things that living people enjoy doing, they’re tied to the spot where they lost their lives. Compare their lot in life with that of the Jessica Lange character, and the show starts to look like it’s driven by a terror of aging and becoming unsexy and unglamorous, even as it suggests that the scariest thing in the world is to be stuck in place. Emotionally, the show is at its most potent when dealing with the gay couple (played by Zachary Quinto and Teddy Sears) who owned the house before its present occupants. Murdered, they’re condemned to haunt the house forever, which is a rough ride, because when they were killed, they’d been failing to connect in the bedroom and the adulterous Sears had been planning to dump Quinto and move on. Most of the ghoulish excesses of American Horror Story are only good for a laugh, but the wormy sight of Quinto and Sears being passive-aggressive with each other from beyond the grave will throw a good scare into anyone who’s ever hesitated to make his next move with one foot out the door.
Of all these series, The River is the least fun, but it's also the one that's most aware of what innovations have been brought to horror movies in the past several years. This is the show that ABC has tirelessly promoted as being from the people who brought us Paranormal Activity. (It was created by that movie’s writer-director, Oren Peli, and Michael R. Perry, who co-wrote its first sequel.) That credit might cause those with long memories to shudder a little, if they remember one of the disasters of the fall 2000 TV season, Freakylinks, which Fox tirelessly promoted as being from the people who brought us The Blair Witch Project. Freakylinks was a bad monster-of-the-week show intended to have a youthful, with-it vibe, mainly because the monster hunters had their own website, which, as in the case of The Blair Witch Project, doubled as a real-life marketing tool. The River goes the theoretically hipper route of trying to adapt the found-footage gimmick that has worked in film into a TV series.
The show is about the search for Dr. Emmet Cole, who disappeared while exploring an uncharted region of the Amazon. We’re told that Cole was a TV celebrity whose true-nature adventures on his series The Undiscovered Country—the name is a reference to a line from Hamlet about death—made him a legend to kids in the late ’80s and ’90s. As played by Bruce Greenwood--whose previous roles include the worst-ever frontier scout in Meek's Cutoff and the worst person in all of hyuman history in the HBO mishap John from Cincinnati-- Cole was a twinkly-eyed fellow who liked to be photographed standing waist-deep in water with his arms extended crucifixion-style and his back to the camera, and was fond of saying things like “There’s magic out there.” The biggest mystery in the show is, if this guy went missing, why would anyone want him back?
They do, though, and so Cole’s wife, pissed-off son, and a camera crew head off to the Amazon to look for him. There are cameras recording everything that happens aboard the boat, in addition to what the hand-held camera is picking up, and as is standard practice for this kind of thing, a preface tells us that what we’re seeing was cobbled together from “the footage they left behind.” Some of what we see is as static and grainy as security camera footage, while some of it is of the free-swinging handheld variety that caused some people at Blair Witch to reach for the Dramamine. But there are also long stretches that look as calmly composed and brightly lit as anything else on prime time, which tends to mess with the receptive viewer’s ability to buy into the illusion that we’re seeing a messy record of something that really happened and that was eerily caught on film. The fact that the scenes of characters having long dry conversations tend to be models of professional, easy-to-read filmmaking also make it that much more annoying when something scary turns up and resolutely declines to step into the center of the frame or wherever there’s a light source.
Some literal-minded fans of The Night Stalker have been known to express disappointment that the show never got around to addressing what they see as the missing piece of the puzzle: what was the presumably mystical, possibly conspiracy-related reason that Kolchak seemed to be such a magnet for monsters? (The reboot seemed to be have a lot invested in this question, which just never really came up in Darren McGavin’s day.) The River’s solution to this non-problem is to make the show all about its mysterious location, which is meant to account for everything from sea monsters to ghost ships to scary natives sneaking around in the dark to trees that make you go blind.
The River started out as a four-page treatment for a movie, until Steven Spielberg got involved, at which point, according to Oren Peli, Perry announced, “This is a great idea, but why waste it on a movie when you can do a TV show where every season they go to a different place.” Peli also describes Spielberg saying, “There’s nothing like this, something very raw and visceral, on TV. Let’s figure out how to bring the horror nature of Paranormal Activity to TV.” Somewhere between those two statements lies the built-in paradox of trying to use a concept like this for a TV series, and trying to do something “very raw and visceral” at the same time that you need to create a mold that can be used to generate as many hour-long chunks of basically the same thing week after week.
Even with the intensity-and-gore barrier partially dissolved, there may be something in the television medium that’s resistant to the kind of horror that makes for classic movies. People aren’t trapped in their seats in the dark with the images bearing down on them when they watch TV, and the changes in possible methods of TV viewing that have come along in recent years don’t exactly make it any easier to scare people: if The River can’t make you jump when you’re watching it in your living room, it’s not going to do a better job of it if you’re watching it on your phone while waiting at the bus stop. No matter how big the screens get, there remains something small-scale and intimate about TV, which makes it better at creepiness and claustrophobia than at epic shocks. (It might not be a coincidence that one of the most famously unsettling episodes of The X-Files is titled Home.
The River seems like a show whose failure tells us something about the different possibilities for horror in a movie and in a TV series, it may be because, like the movies it takes off from, The River is all gimmick. (In this way, it's a little reminiscent of TV movies like the 1983 Special Bulletin, which used a fake news broadcast to a story involving terrorists with a nuclear device, the Mercury Theater On The Air production of War Of The Worlds having been TV producers' notion of the ultimate horror gimmick until Blair Witch came along.) It also brings the scary-TV genre full circle, back to Twilight Zone, because it feels as if it might almost be an anthology series: the characters aren't strong enough for the viewer to develop any feelings about it that will carry over from week to week. Boiling things down so that things can just carry on after anyone has been picked off once seemed like a shocking strategy for movies, but TV series don't seem to be able to adapt it to their purposes. It's a double-edged sword: when the characters don't matter as much as the gimmick, as in The River, there's not enough incentive to invest yourself emotionally and come back next week. I did have that investment in Buffy and Angel and The X-Files, enough so that I couldn't wait to check back in every week. Those shows lacked the giddy insouciance of some of my favorite horror movies, because every death--every bad thing that happened to the characters, no matter how trivial--mattered. So maybe, on second thought, if there really is a gap between what horror movies and monster shows can accomplish, that reveals something about the limitations of horror movies, too.
Sunday, March 18, 2012
Liars, Damned Liars, and Performance Artists
Ira Glass: You're saying that the only way that you can get through emotionally to other people is to mess around with the facts.
Mike Daisey: I'm not saying that's the ONLY way..."
Mike Daisey is a solipsistic narcissist. That's what makes him a performance artist in the mold of Spalding Gray. Gray had been talking about his life onstage for years before he used his supporting role in the movie The Killing Fields as an excuse to wed his aging-privileged-hippie babble about to a report (none too timely in the mid-1980s) on what the Khmer Rouge did to Cambodia in the 1970s and suddenly seemed to have more in his cross-hairs than his own naval. I first started hearing about Daisey four or five years ago when he was writing and performing work about the importance of theater and how difficult it is for serious theater artists to find a large, sustaining audience. In most of the photos I've seen of Daisey, a large man whose face settles easily into a thick-lipped glower, he looks like an alternative-universe Rush Limbaugh with a subscription to The Nation. He comes across a creative person with salt-of-the-earth, blue collar credentials who wants to entertain and educate, someone who wants to make a difference. Part of what goes with that image is that the people who are primed to respond to his point of view are eager to see him as more of a saint than a vulgar hustler seeking attention, like Limbaugh, just as many of Spalding Gray's fans thought he had the trace of a sage about him.
In the work that made Daisey's hardscrabble life in the theater a lot easier was The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, Daisey took a more direct route than Gray had in connecting himself to the larger world. He presented himself as a confessed gadget junkie and amateur reporter who went to China in search of firsthand knowledge about the forgotten people who made his junk. As excerpted on the most popular episode of This American Life in the program's history, it's a powerful performance, largely because of Daisey's mastery of the tone he wanted to put across. He never lets you hear him sounding like a man who wanted to get this story because it would be great material. That would be easy to relate to, and probably put him in the same group as a lot of people who've broken big stories legitimately, but it would also be so crass. he sounds cowed and humbled, a man who just had to know, for his own peace of mind or lack of same, how many underage fingers were worked to death so that he could load up his iphone with shiny little apps.
In its episode-length retraction following the revelation that Daisey fabricated the meetings with underage and mangled Apple workers he described in his monologue. Ira Glass spoke to New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg about actual working conditions in China and how they're known to differ from what Daisey described. Sounding rather crestfallen, Glass said something to the effect that he wasn't sure how bad he should feel about his complicity in Apple's practices, based on what Duhigg seemed to be saying those practices are. "It's not my job to tell you whether you should feel bad or not," said Duhigg. "My job is to find facts and let you you essentially make a decision on your own." The central flaw in Daisey's method, whether you call it journalism or art, is that he went in knowing that he wanted to make people feel bad. He wasn't looking to learn anything, because, as writer-performer, he already had a game plan in his head. The key witness against Daisey in the TAL mea culpa, which was an extension of an expose that ran the night before on Marketplace, was his Chinese interpreter, who made it sound as if Daisey had really wanted to seek out workers who would illustrate the points he wanted to make. But he when he couldn't find them--when underage workers proved to be a rarity at the Apple factory, and there weren't scary armed guards at the plant--he simply made them up. It was a sound commercial strategy, based on a seasoned theater pro's awareness that an awful lot of people don't want to be presented with a series of actual facts and then left to make up their own minds. His only defense is that the stuff he made up reflects a larger truth than the actual facts really do. This puts him in the same group as the people who know perfectly well that Barack Obama is a practicing Christian who was born in Hawaii but who are prepared to argue that the nuts who claim that he's a foreign-born Muslim are getting at something real about how alien his values are to those of the people who count as real Americans.
In his interview with Glass, Daisey confirmed his narcissism by talking mostly about how badly he just wanted to reach people and move them with a "story that captured the totality of that trip." But all his monologue really tried to capture was the totality of his fantasy of how his playing crusading reporter should have gone down. He seemed to expect the audience, and Glass, too, to sympathize with him when he said that he had been force to choose between lying about the factual accuracy of his monologue and limiting the audience for what he regarded as the best work of his life: a show that fulfilled what must have been his ultimate fantasy of being both critically acclaimed and popular and also being hailed as someone who was making a difference on a global scale, At the same time, he wrapped himself in the mantel of theatrical spell weaver, insisting that, while his work doesn't fit the journalistic standards of a show like This American Life, saying that "You can trust my word in the context of the theater." A lot of artists have gotten at something true without strict adherence to the facts, and a lot of callow hustlers have used that precedent as justification to fling bullshit with both hands.
Mike Daisey: I'm not saying that's the ONLY way..."
Mike Daisey is a solipsistic narcissist. That's what makes him a performance artist in the mold of Spalding Gray. Gray had been talking about his life onstage for years before he used his supporting role in the movie The Killing Fields as an excuse to wed his aging-privileged-hippie babble about to a report (none too timely in the mid-1980s) on what the Khmer Rouge did to Cambodia in the 1970s and suddenly seemed to have more in his cross-hairs than his own naval. I first started hearing about Daisey four or five years ago when he was writing and performing work about the importance of theater and how difficult it is for serious theater artists to find a large, sustaining audience. In most of the photos I've seen of Daisey, a large man whose face settles easily into a thick-lipped glower, he looks like an alternative-universe Rush Limbaugh with a subscription to The Nation. He comes across a creative person with salt-of-the-earth, blue collar credentials who wants to entertain and educate, someone who wants to make a difference. Part of what goes with that image is that the people who are primed to respond to his point of view are eager to see him as more of a saint than a vulgar hustler seeking attention, like Limbaugh, just as many of Spalding Gray's fans thought he had the trace of a sage about him.
In the work that made Daisey's hardscrabble life in the theater a lot easier was The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, Daisey took a more direct route than Gray had in connecting himself to the larger world. He presented himself as a confessed gadget junkie and amateur reporter who went to China in search of firsthand knowledge about the forgotten people who made his junk. As excerpted on the most popular episode of This American Life in the program's history, it's a powerful performance, largely because of Daisey's mastery of the tone he wanted to put across. He never lets you hear him sounding like a man who wanted to get this story because it would be great material. That would be easy to relate to, and probably put him in the same group as a lot of people who've broken big stories legitimately, but it would also be so crass. he sounds cowed and humbled, a man who just had to know, for his own peace of mind or lack of same, how many underage fingers were worked to death so that he could load up his iphone with shiny little apps.
In its episode-length retraction following the revelation that Daisey fabricated the meetings with underage and mangled Apple workers he described in his monologue. Ira Glass spoke to New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg about actual working conditions in China and how they're known to differ from what Daisey described. Sounding rather crestfallen, Glass said something to the effect that he wasn't sure how bad he should feel about his complicity in Apple's practices, based on what Duhigg seemed to be saying those practices are. "It's not my job to tell you whether you should feel bad or not," said Duhigg. "My job is to find facts and let you you essentially make a decision on your own." The central flaw in Daisey's method, whether you call it journalism or art, is that he went in knowing that he wanted to make people feel bad. He wasn't looking to learn anything, because, as writer-performer, he already had a game plan in his head. The key witness against Daisey in the TAL mea culpa, which was an extension of an expose that ran the night before on Marketplace, was his Chinese interpreter, who made it sound as if Daisey had really wanted to seek out workers who would illustrate the points he wanted to make. But he when he couldn't find them--when underage workers proved to be a rarity at the Apple factory, and there weren't scary armed guards at the plant--he simply made them up. It was a sound commercial strategy, based on a seasoned theater pro's awareness that an awful lot of people don't want to be presented with a series of actual facts and then left to make up their own minds. His only defense is that the stuff he made up reflects a larger truth than the actual facts really do. This puts him in the same group as the people who know perfectly well that Barack Obama is a practicing Christian who was born in Hawaii but who are prepared to argue that the nuts who claim that he's a foreign-born Muslim are getting at something real about how alien his values are to those of the people who count as real Americans.
In his interview with Glass, Daisey confirmed his narcissism by talking mostly about how badly he just wanted to reach people and move them with a "story that captured the totality of that trip." But all his monologue really tried to capture was the totality of his fantasy of how his playing crusading reporter should have gone down. He seemed to expect the audience, and Glass, too, to sympathize with him when he said that he had been force to choose between lying about the factual accuracy of his monologue and limiting the audience for what he regarded as the best work of his life: a show that fulfilled what must have been his ultimate fantasy of being both critically acclaimed and popular and also being hailed as someone who was making a difference on a global scale, At the same time, he wrapped himself in the mantel of theatrical spell weaver, insisting that, while his work doesn't fit the journalistic standards of a show like This American Life, saying that "You can trust my word in the context of the theater." A lot of artists have gotten at something true without strict adherence to the facts, and a lot of callow hustlers have used that precedent as justification to fling bullshit with both hands.
All the shocking stuff in Daisey's monologue was based on actual journalism or simply common assumptions about the evils of global capitalism; Daisey actually went to China, but he could have written the thing without ever leaving the United States, or even his couch. He has to know that the only thing that made his little anthology of news clippings and tall tales special, what gave it any power at all, was his claim, repeatedly and literally asserted throughout his monologue, that he was there; he himself witnessed this stuff, talked to these people. That was all that set him apart from every other asshole with a pre-digested opinion. Daisey is now reportedly reshaping the monologue, but it's hard to see what will remain of it without the "I was there!" angle. This hasn't been a great week for slick, ego-tripping propagandists looking to set themselves up as the world's saviors. Some people will probably try to argue that criticizing Daisey give aid and comfort to the Satanic force that is globalism, but that's as as crazy as saying that you can't hate Joseph Kony and also ridicule a crackpot organization that uses his name to encourage military action in Uganda even though the son of a bitch hasn't been in Uganda in six years.
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