“Avatar” Makes Me Blue Over Our Dumb Discourse

Sam Worthington and Zoë Saldana in Avatar. Photo: Twentieth Century Fox

When I launched this blog a year ago, one of my hopes was that it would support the tendency of our popular culture to serve as a medium of discussion through which people of all ideological stripes comment on issues of the day. Unfortunately, it seems that pop culture is no longer serving this function. Rather, according to a recent Newsweek cover story, our movies, TV, music, and books have ceded this function to our ongoing obsession with celebrities’ private lives.

The article’s author, Neal Gabler, who wrote despairingly of this trend a decade ago in his book Life the Movie, seems entirely too sanguine today about conceding that the morality plays that make up celebrities’ personal lives have become more compelling to us than movies or TV or books as a way of having a national conversation about what matters to us. According to Gabler, our tendency to privilege celebrity gossip is more a function of our fascination with new media (and our boredom with old media) than a reflection of increased shallowness on our part, or on the part of our professional storytellers. But it seems to me that even our best storytellers have fallen down on the job here, and exhibit A is James Cameron’s visually stunning, well-meaning, ultimately unsubstantial message movie Avatar.

Finding Myself in the Awkward Position of Defending Glenn Beck

Posted with Vodpod

AOL asked me to write a blog post this week on all the comic invective directed recently toward Glenn Beck, knowing that both his defenders and detractors would come out of the woodwork to wage war in the comments section.* And come they did, by the tens of thousands, thanks in part to a headline on the AOL welcome screen that overstated my concern about some of the more below-the-belt spoofs. (“Attacks on Beck Crossing the Line: Our Writer Says Recent Parodies Are Anything but Funny: Skits Under Fire”)

Now, I’m not a Beck fan, as even a cursory reading of the article would make clear. If anything, the assignment gave me an excuse to embed videos of several Beck-lampooning sketches, some of which I think are perfectly fair. The best of these was the Stephen Colbert monologue embedded at the top of this post, which perfectly mimics Beck’s performance style, calls him on his BS, and does so without resorting to ad hominem attacks. What I objected to was those sketches that got personal — Jon Stewart appearing to make fun of Beck’s recent health woes, Andy Cobb taking Beck’s icky incest fantasy from his book The Real America: Messages from the Heart and Heartland out of context to imply that Beck really meant it (he did not; he was merely making an offensive analogy to gay relationships), and The Onion wishing for Beck to die a violent and gory death (a video that contains some NSFW language).

Nicole Kidman, Expert Witness

When Hollywood stars testify before Congress, does anything ever get accomplished? Does either the star or his or her interrogators ever come off looking smarter or better informed about the issues?

Yesterday, Nicole Kidman testified before a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee. She was seeking funding for a United Nations initiative to thwart violence against women throughout the world via humanitarian grants to local organizations. But all the headlines talked about was her offhand comment, prompted by a Congressman’s fatuous question, in which she appeared to endorse the notion that movie violence has contributed to the real-world violence against women that she is trying to reduce. (See headlines here, here, and here.)

The question by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) deftly shifted the blame onto Hollywood; Kidman was equally deft in deflecting the blame away from herself, insisting that she, at least, doesn’t make the kind of movies that portray women as weak sex objects and targets of violence. (Watch the whole exchange here.) But the damage was done. Not only did the media focus shift to the most tangential part of her testimony, but she seemed to concede a point long argued by censorious types on both the right and the left, that Hollywood violence is somehow responsible for real-world violence.

For Ted Kennedy, a ‘Ray of Hope’

Ted Kennedy endorses Barack Obama for president in January 2008. Photo by diggersf, licensed via Creative Commons

Most of us in America, including me, are too young to remember the Camelot era firsthand, so we hold little brief for the Kennedy mystique. Many of us wonder how he got re-elected to the Senate, term after term, for 47 years, despite his well-documented failures of character. Surely there had to be more to it than his name.

Well, one reason might be the long parade of stooges who were his opponents. During the few years I lived in Boston, I was privileged to vote for Kennedy just once, when he ran against a hairdo named Mitt Romney. I remember thinking that Kennedy, then 62 years old, seemed enervated and out of touch until the debates, when the old lion roared back to life, fought with vigor, and easily wiped the floor with his empty-suit rival. This is why I voted for him, and why Massachusetts citizens kept doing so: he never stopped fighting, fighting for us, and fighting against those who did not have our best interests at heart.

I’m glad to see that, despite his death last week, the fight continues for causes he believed in, particularly for universal health care. After all, his opponents didn’t waste any time after he died trying to recast his legacy as one of compromise (Kennedy was, indeed, known for reaching across the aisle to befriend and make deals with Republicans, but he compromised only on means and tactics, never on ideals or policy goals), or shrugging that his absence from the Senate chambers in recent months is the reason Republicans have yet to be presented with a health care bill they can sign off on (as if Kennedy’s recent absence, after 40 years of fighting nonstop for health care reform, were the reason, rather than Republican intransigence and bad faith), or threatening that to urge passage of health care reform as his dying wish was to crassly politicize his death (as if to argue against reform would not be an even more crass politicization of his death). Kennedy’s dying wishes on the matter were pretty clear, as he laid out in this Newsweek essay a month before he died: he wanted universal coverage and a government-run public option so that individuals who can’t afford or obtain private health insurance can still get affordable coverage. (Note to Blue Dog Democrats: Passing a health bill with Kennedy’s name on it that pays lip service to reform while not actually including a public option that would make coverage affordable for everyone is no tribute at all.)

One more way to remember Senator Kennedy, courtesy of the Rascals, after the jump.

O’Reilly and Olbermann Muzzled

Tiresome as the Bill O’Reilly-Keith Olbermann feud has become, the two are within their rights to criticize each other and each other’s employers. Now, however, their respective bosses at Fox and MSNBC have forced them to silence their mutual criticisms so as not to rock the boat for either corporate parent. This New York Times story lays out how, despite the fact that the feud was ratings manna for both channels, their CEOs decided that it had become an embarrassment to both corporate parents, so each side agreed to muzzle its own attack dog.

There are often complaints that the mainstream media are too biased toward the left or the right, but they’re really biased toward the corporate interests of the companies that own them. Usually, journalists working for big media outlets don’t have to be told by their bosses what news to downplay or ignore so as not to embarrass the parent company; they simply do so automatically. It’s rare for the bosses to have to admonish the reporters directly; rarer still for them to acknowledge such self-censorship in the pages of, say, the New York Times. Remarkably, the Times story presents its account of the gag order as if it were a sports or gossip story, about the feud between two colorful personalities, rather than as a cautionary tale of how two big rival corporations, out of mutual self-interest, shut down the free expression of each other’s employees and silenced possibly newsworthy criticism of each other. Well, maybe it’s not that remarkable; the Times, too, is pro-corporate, so it’s not going to present the story in a way that recognizes that the free expression rights of reporters at all major media outlets, including the Times, are at risk.

Michael Jackson: Have You Seen My Childhood?

Photo: Anwar Hussein/WireImage; courtesy of Life.com

I’m sad, but not that sad, about Michael Jackson’s death. To me, it seemed like he’d passed from us a long time ago. The Kane of Pop had long since retreated into his isolated Xanadu, a bubble that not even massive debt, legal ordeals, and endless tabloid scandal could penetrate. His chart-topping years as the world’s favorite entertainer had long since segued into self-inflicted freakishness and cultural irrelevance. When he announced in March a long-running comeback engagement in London scheduled to start in July, his reappearance seemed that of a vampire or a ghost, hovering on the fringes of fame, hoping to drain one last bit of energy from a pop world that he had helped create but which had long since abandoned him to the wax museum.

But, oh, to think of him back then, back when he was remaking both music and television in his image, via the singles and videos from Thriller. The man’s ubiquity was rivaled only by that of the Beatles and his one-time father-in-law Elvis in their day. Lots of mourners have referred to Jackson’s music as the soundtrack of their youth, but in his case, it’s not a metaphor. For about two years in the early ’80s, you couldn’t turn on a radio anywhere in the world without hearing a snippet of a single from Thriller. (How cruel that Farrah Fawcett should die on the same day; if Jackson’s music was the soundtrack to our youth, Fawcett’s poster was the wallpaper.) It was a rare moment of cultural unity, one of the last ones before cable TV, the Internet, and the culture wars fragmented us into a billion different niche audiences. As Lester Bangs noted when Elvis died, what we’re mourning is not really the loss of the man or the artist (like the King of Pop, the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll had long since become a reclusive travesty of his former self by the time of his early death), but rather, the loss of our childhood, and the loss of our connection to each other.

Back to the Future

The future isn’t what it used to be, said Yogi Berra. It’s certainly not, now that I’m its beat reporter. All this week, through June 12, I’m guest editor/blogger at io9, Gawker Media’s sci-fi/pop futurism blog. Whether or not you’re a sci-fi fan, please stop by, geek out, and have fun.

Conan O’Bama

more about “Conan O’Bama“, posted with vodpod


Remember when George W. Bush became president, and the pundits said that, at last, the grownups were now in charge? (And how did that work out, by the way?) It’s a lot easier to imagine that the grownups are in charge now that the cool, seemingly unflappable, roll-up-your-sleeves Barack Obama is president, and when he took office, I felt a surge of almost familial pride. At last, the reins of power were passing to someone roughly my age (Obama is about five years older than I am.)

I felt a similar emotion this week when Conan O’Brien took over The Tonight Show. Johnny Carson had made the forum into the voice of national consensus; Jay Leno tried to maintain that role even as consensus crumbled around him (we’re a much more fragmented, factionalized people now, not just in terms of our politics, but also in our tastes in pop culture and our countless entertainment options). Now that desk was passing to someone of my generation (Conan is four years older than I am), and it felt like a momentous, torch-passing occasion.

The president himself seemed to acknowledge the similarity between these two transitions in his interview with NBC’s Brian Williams this week (see above video). It was a puzzling moment; Time columnist James Poniewozik seemed to find it crass that Williams spent valuable face time with the president getting Obama to plug an entertainment event on Williams’ network, and O’Brien himself wondered why the leader of the free world should be devoting any attention to Conan’s career move. But such pluggery is standard procedure these days for TV news (which is more entertainment than news anyway, with the cotton-candy puffery throughout Williams’ primetime special as just another example), and the fact that Obama responded to Williams’ prompt not by saying, “You’ve got to be kidding me,” but by deadpanning a good joke about it without missing a beat indicates that, not only is Obama as media-savvy a chief executive as we’ve ever seen, but also is thoroughly conversant with the ironic, absurdist humor that is Conan’s (and our generation’s) preferred mode of expression.

Rattlesnakes Amid the Crabgrass

I’m a little worried about my neighbor. He recently mounted a large flag like this one (left) over his garage, and, just so his neighbors wouldn’t miss the message, put two more little ones in the tree in his front yard. Now, somehow, I don’t think he’s telling us to stay off his lawn, or that there might be rattlesnakes amid the crabgrass.

Students of American history will recognize the “Gadsden” flag as a banner of Revolutionary War-era rebellion and solidarity. Still, the sudden reemergence of this flag in recent months is about more than being a history buff or a garden-variety patriot. It’s about anti-Obama paranoia, plain and simple.

Film Criticism Is Torture

Twenty years ago, conservative scholars like Allan Bloom and E.D. Hirsch were complaining about the decline of cultural literacy; today, conservatives are on the other side, egging on anti-intellectualism. Witness the twin posts this week from John Podhoretz and Rod Dreher, who, noting the death of film criticism (a topic I’ve been writing about for the last couple of years as virtually every major newspaper and magazine critic not named Ebert has lost his or her job), gleefully stomp on criticism’s grave. After all, both seem to argue, film criticism is just snooty liberal elitists who care more about “the condition of Finnish cinema” than reaffirming populist taste by championing market-tested big-studio blockbusters. It’s a pretty strange take on the trade, especially since both Podhoretz and Dreher have worked as film critics themselves.

Podhoretz argues that all it takes to review movies is an “interesting sensibility,” not specialized knowledge. This very low standard, of course, opens up the field to anyone who wants to post an opinion at IMDB, but as anyone who’s read the reviews there knows, having an opinion is no guarantee of literacy, well-reasoned argument, expertise, persuasiveness, or even taste. (Then again, getting paid to write criticism is no guarantee of those qualities either, as Podhoretz and Dreher’s own reviews prove.) Podhoretz insists that amateur reviewers, writing out of pure love for film, are more reliable barometers than professional critics writing for a paycheck. If that’s true, I hope he’s writing his reviews for The Weekly Standard for free. At least then, Rupert Murdoch would get what he’s paying for.