October 31, 2012
September 18, 2012
May 11, 2012
HBO Girls: Hipsterism gone awry
Dunham’s Jugs A-Flashin’ Ain’t Gonna Save Girls
The HBO series Girls misfires again in this week’s episode that has viewers pulling their hair out wishing the characters would just stop their whining, grow a spine and grow up. In the wake of the recent backlash, it’s curtains for the series for this viewer (and many others) as the backlash grows.
{Note: I admire all who create. Creating is not easy. Still, when you put something you create into the world you open yourself up to criticism. Girls has been getting a fair share of it as of late, some of it deserved. The following is my opinion, take it for what it’s worth. I believe that Lena Dunham can do better.}
The problem with the HBO series Girls (by creator & star Lena Dunham) isn’t so much the backlash and controversy against the show, although that was on an epic scale. (In case you missed it, one of the show’s writers tweeted insensitive comments that were deemed “racist” which lead to a critique that for a show set in Brooklyn, a very diverse borough, it lacked diversity.) The problem in addition to that is — the show isn’t as funny as it thinks it is. The characters are so pathetic while being so arrogant at the same time that it’s hard not to feel they deserve every horrible thing that happens to them. In short: They act like idiots.
And not the endearing kind.
“Hannah’s Diary” doesn’t show them changing anytime soon. They’re still clueless girls who want us to revel in their cluelessness. They are the kind of moronic idiot that is hired as a nanny, goes to the park to talk down their nose at actual (multi-cultural) nannies, and then loses your kids. Then said nanny goes home to flirt with your husband who tells said nanny that losing children in public “happens to all of us.”
God bless and god help us all but um, cough, no — it does not.
full: http://www.sheknows.com/entertainment/articles/959665/hbo-girls-episode-recap-hannahs-diary
April 19, 2012
Girls
One of the most heavily hyped HBO shows in ages premiered last Sunday night. Written and directed by, and starring the 25-year old Lena Dunham, “Girls” is an obvious bid to reap the kind of fortunes generated by the network’s highly successful “Sex and the City” by appealing to a certain demographic: urban, well-educated, female and white. The main difference is that this show is about struggling young people living in Greenpoint, Brooklyn whereas the female protagonists of “Sex and the City” were rich and living in the fabulous Upper East Side. It is the difference between the Cosmopolitan cocktail that the women in “Sex and the City” favored and a $1.99 bottle of Charles Shaw wine from Trader Joe’s.
If I had known nothing in advance about Lena Dunham, I would have looked forward to it with great anticipation. But having seen her “Tiny Furniture” and knowing what to expect (the HBO show is obviously based on the mumblecore feature), I watched it warily, all the more so since it was produced by the execrable Jude Apatow.
In a bid to build the buzz around the show, HBO took the fairly unprecedented step of putting the premiere episode on Youtube that is worth watching, at least as a cultural biopsy:
Dunham plays Hannah, the daughter of college professors, who learns in the opening scene that they will no longer be providing financial support. Since Hannah works as an intern at a small publishing house, this means that she will have to find a paying job. When she tells her boss that she needs a salary, he replies that he will be sorry to see her leave. Obviously Dunham is informed enough to know that the exploitation of interns is a major problem facing recent college graduates like her. She might have even had a look at Ross Perlin’s new book from Verso titled “Intern Nation” that decries the unpaid jobs that so many are forced to take during the ongoing financial collapse. Or at least a book review—undoubtedly not in the sort of newspaper that has been giving the show rave reviews.
But “Girls” is not really about economics, politics or society. By her own admission, Dunham has very little inkling about such matters:
I am woefully unread in the areas of history and politics and have a grand plan to read “A People’s History of the United States,” “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York” and some other books that might hack away at my ignorance.
It is much more about sex but in the spirit of a depressed economy handled in a rather depressing fashion. After leaving the publisher’s office, she stops off at a boy friend’s apartment to give him the news. Within five minutes of her arrival, they decide to have sex on his sofa which involves him mounting her from behind. Neither one of them seem to be enjoying themselves particularly. By contrast, the hedonistic approach to sex in “Sex in the City” was what made the show work. The character Samantha, played by Kim Cattrall, was a female Lothario who bedded any man she had the hots for, including plumbers and delivery boys.
Now if Lena Dunham had considered trying to convey the joie de vivre of Samantha and her pals in a situation shaped by dire economic circumstances, “Girls” might have worked. After all, Puccini’s La bohème is a delight to watch, even as the main character dies from poverty-related illness in the third act. But Dunham’s mumblecore aesthetic precludes such an approach.
Rule number one of mumblecore is that the characters must be undramatic, which is a contradiction in terms. If one of the chief dictates of theater, including screenplays, is the creation of memorable characters with larger than life personalities, then mumblecore fails right from the starting line. That possibility never occurred to the men and women who work in this genre. Their primary goal is rather narcissistic, namely to show anybody who’s interested how they and their pals live. Personally I don’t find the prospects of sitting through a 2 hour movie or a half-hour TV show featuring a bunch of 23 year olds talking about nothing that inviting. Of course, Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld arguably were up the same thing but they knew how to write jokes.
This leads me to the next problem with “Girls”. It is not funny at all. For Dunham, a typical attempt at humor is fat jokes taken at her own expense. One does not know how long it will take for this sort of thing to become tiresome but for this viewer it was just 10 minutes after the show started.
Teaming up with Judd Apatow must have seemed a no-brainer to the suits at HBO since this producer’s films, often starring the talentless Seth Rogen, have generated mega-millions based on sophomoric plots, dialogue and performances. In a dinner party hosted by Hannah’s friends in the premiere episode, they are discussing getting high. When cocaine is mentioned, one of her girlfriends says that she never touches the stuff. When asked why, she replies because it makes her shit in her pants. This is pure Judd Apatow, but mercifully we are spared the spectacle of one of the character’s mishaps through flashback. The essence of an Apatow or a Dunham comedy is the character being degraded. Why this is so typical of contemporary comedy is a question that I have explored in the past, but will only state at this point that it reflects a decline of humanism in Hollywood. Charlie Chaplin’s movies embodied humanistic values to the highest degree while Apatow serves as their nadir.
In a half-hour filled with such cringe-inducing elements, you might be surprised to learn that all the leading characters come from privileged backgrounds and likely shared none of their character’s misfortunes—starting with Lena Dunham. In my review of “Tiny Furniture”, I noted:
Laurie Simmons [Lena Dunham's mother] is married to Carroll Dunham, a painter whose work is in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection. Would their daughter’s movie, the first she ever made, have gotten the financing and attention it has if she was not born into this family? The answer is obvious.
A story about “Girls” appearing in Gentleman’s Quarterly lets us know that the other actors were also born with silver spoons in their mouths:
Lena Dunham’s new HBO show, Girls, is centered on—you guessed it— four girls. Each is trying to find herself and, more pressingly, gainful employment, in New York. The comedy was created by Lena Dunham, who stars in it along with Zosia Mamet, Allison Williams, and real-life friend Jemima Kirke, all daughters of famous New Yorkers. (Dunham’s parents are artists; Kirke’s dad was the drummer for Bad Company; Zosia’s dad is playwright David Mamet; Allison’s father is NBC’s Brian Williams). As one friend put it, the cast is like “a graduating class of Yale.”
In other words, the show is a kind of exercise in going “slumming”. In the 1920s, rich white people used to go to Harlem to see how the other half lived. For Dunham and company, this show offers a chance for them to pretend that they are like most college graduates nowadays– forced to live at home, take jobs as interns, or eat at McDonald’s to make ends meet. In the dinner party, one of the male characters riffs about how wonderful McDonald’s is. Anywhere you go in the world, the food tastes uniformly great—as if any of these people ever stepped foot in a restaurant that was not rated at least 2 stars in the NY Times.
There’s been a backlash brewing against “Girls” brewing, especially from the Black community. An unnamed contributor to the Womanist Musings blog (as might be expected, the blogosphere has bought into the show’s hype much less than the bourgeois media) has this to say:
I missed the Sex & The City phenomenon and so I decided to tune into HBO’s Girls. It was not high on my priority list, so I didn’t actually watch it until yesterday. It can best be described as 35 minutes of my life that I will never get back. As a thirty something, Black, disabled mother of two, I am not the target audience for Girls, but if I were to wait from something to actually appear on television to be marketed specifically to me, I wouldn’t need to own a television. Being marginalized means having to deal with dominant bodies being universalized as typifying the human experience, no matter how ridiculous the roles they take on are.
As she leaves the hotel you finally see the first Black person. A homeless Black man in New York after just being inundated with thirty-five minutes of the most navel gazing, spoiled nonsense I have seen in a long time. According to Huffpo, in an HBO live chat, Dunham has the nerve to claim that “the racially homogenous cast was a “complete accident.” Is anyone buying that? Ooops, they did it again. It’s yet another all White show, but because they didn’t mean for that to happen it’s okay. Why am I even complaining, when they did after all find a Black man to act as a homeless person in New York City, one of the most diverse cities on the planet? I suppose I should feel thankful that they managed to scare up a Black man ’cause they most certainly didn’t find a single GLBT person.
Frances Latour, an African-American reporter who blogs at the Boston Globe, had an identical reaction:
With Girls, Dunham has been catapulted from indie-film darling to Hollywood It-girl, heralded by culture critics as a fearless visionary capturing the zeitgeist of young cosmopolitan womanhood in a post-Carrie-Bradshaw age. But the problem I have with Dunham is that the vision of New York City she’s offering us in 2012 — like Sex and the City in 1998 and for that matter Friends in 1994 — is almost entirely devoid of the people who make up the large majority of New Yorkers, and have for some time now: Latinos, Asians and blacks.
It’s a zeitgeist so glaring and grounded in statistical reality that Hollywood has to will itself not to see it: America is transforming into a majority-minority nation faster than experts could have predicted, yet the most racially and ethnically diverse metropolis in America is delivered to us again and again on the small screen as a virtual sea of white. The census may tell us that blacks, Latinos and Asians together make up 64.4 percent of New York City’s population. But if you watch CSI: NY on a regular basis, you’d think the only person of color you’re likely to meet in Manhattan is a forensic scientist who works in a high-tech basement. (God bless you, Harper Hill).
Much of Girls is actually set in Brooklyn, a borough where just one-third of the population is white. Yet as Dunham’s character, 24-year-old unemployed writer Hannah Horvath, and her friends fumble through life with cutting wit and low self-esteem, they do it in a virtually all-white bubble.
Now none of this would matter so much if the show was even slightly entertaining. After all, I used to enjoy an occasional Bruce Willis or Arnold Schwarzenegger movie from time to time even if it embodied a xenophobic machismo ethic.
The biggest problem with “Girls” is that is dull. But that’s what happens when you live a life of privilege. You really can’t absorb what it means to be the classic underdog, who knows best how to make other people laugh in the spirit of tears of a clown. From the wiki on Charlie Chaplin:
Chaplin’s childhood was beleaguered by poverty and hardship, prompting biographer David Robinson to describe his eventual trajectory as “the most dramatic of all the rags to riches stories ever told.” His early years were spent with his mother and brother in the London district of Kennington; Hannah had no means of income, other than occasional nursing and dressmaking, and Chaplin Sr. provided no support for his sons. Because of this poverty, Chaplin was sent to a workhouse at seven years old. The council housed him at the Central London District School for paupers, which Chaplin remembered as “a forlorn existence”. He was briefly reunited with his mother at nine years old, before Hannah was forced to readmit her family to the workhouse in July 1898. The boys were promptly sent to Norwood Schools, another charity institution.
In September 1898, Hannah Chaplin was committed to Cane Hill mental asylum—she had developed a psychosis seemingly brought on by malnutrition and an infection of syphilis. Chaplin recalled his anguish at the news: “Why had she done this? Mother, so light-hearted and gay, how could she go insane?” For the two months she was there, Chaplin and his brother were sent to live with their father, whom the young boy scarcely knew. Charles Chaplin Sr. was by then a severe alcoholic, and life with the man was bad enough to provoke a visit from the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. He died two years later, at 37 years old, from cirrhosis of the liver. Hannah Chaplin entered a period of remission, but in May 1903 became ill again. Chaplin, then 14, had the task of taking his mother to the infirmary. He lived alone for several days, searching for food and occasionally sleeping rough, until his brother Sydney returned from the navy. Hannah Chaplin was released from the asylum eight months later, but in March 1905 her madness returned, this time permanently. “There was nothing we could do but accept poor mother’s fate”, Chaplin later wrote, and she remained in care until her death in 1928.
August 11, 2011
Random notes on television comedy
On July 29, an article titled “Curb Your Racism” appeared on the widely read Mondoweiss, a blog devoted to “the war of ideas in the Middle East”. Written by Eleanor Kilroy, it expressed dismay at the most recent Curb Your Enthusiasm episode on HBO:
Larry David’s right to exist in his homeland, America, seems ‘pretty, pretty’ secure. Slandering all Palestinians as anti-Semitic on an irreverent and popular TV show like this is a new low, and is an example of cultural and ethnic arrogance; it is no joke to imply that the Palestinian people’s ongoing struggle for justice poses an existential threat to privileged, Jewish men. Antony Loewenstein’s comment on the clip: “Is it possible for even liberal Jews on mainstream American TV to not frame Arabs and Palestinians as all anti-Semites? Apparently not”. Meanwhile, Haaretz is grinning like a fool at Larry’s joke that this is best place for Jews to cheat on their wives – since they would never be seen. If you side with the oppressor, you won’t be seen dead in the company of the oppressed.
This led to a heated discussion on the article with many comments claiming that Kilroy did not “get” the show:
You guys are misinterpreting this completely. It’s ironically pointing out how absurd those fears are in the context of Larry’s life.
When the guy looks at the posters and says they’re anti-semitic, that’s clearly the writers saying that claim is overblown. When Larry worries about women not recognising his right to exist, that’s clearly Larry getting over-wrought within a Jewish victim-complex.
It’s actually a smart comment on the Jewish mentality. Irony, people!
On August 1, there was a follow-up article titled “The Larry David Peace Plan“ that concurred with the comment above. Written by Jesse Benjamin, it recommended a more subtle reading of the show that required a deeper sense of irony:
My argument is that beyond the serious cultural limitations we sadly have come to expect on US television, there is also something else in this episode, something subversive, which is not common at all, and which casts light on the significant cultural moment we are living through. In this sense, I think too many critical thinkers with good politics have moved too quickly to throw the baby out with the bathwater on this one. Amidst the gross but predictable equalizing of two profoundly asymmetrical “sides” in this very real conflict, David and crew actually showcase Jewish racism in both its extreme and its liberal forms, and this is something truly rare on television. They also give us brief flashes of otherwise censored concepts like “occupation,” “settlements,” or even just the real-life restaurant posters which show an Israeli tank facing down children, or declare: “Right –vs- Might,” and “Visit Palestine” – things we never see on tv.
HBO has a synopsis of the episode here. As should be obvious, the inspiration for the show was the NYC mosque controversy in which rightwing protesters challenged the right of Muslims to build a Islamic cultural center a few blocks from the World Trade Center.
What commentators on the show seem to miss is that–leaving aside the politics–it was not very good satire. While nobody would ever expect good satire to be “obvious”, the show was so unmoored from current events and from social reality, that it failed to register as social commentary—other than making religious Jews look foolish, a rather commonplace occurrence on “Curb Your Enthusiasm”. Rabbis have gotten sent up on the show more times than I can count and much more effectively than the vastly overrated Coen brother’s movie “A Serious Man”.
The biggest problem is the utter failure to make the Palestinians seem even slightly plausible. To start with, the notion that there is such a thing as a Palestinian chicken restaurant festooned with political posters in Los Angeles is absurd. First of all, when Arabs—whatever their nationality—open a restaurant in a major American city, the last thing they are interested in is making a political statement. The posters on the wall of the restaurant opposing the occupation, etc. were a gimmick dreamed up by the Curb Your Enthusiasm writers in order to create a context for the conflict between the feckless Jews who came to protest the restaurant and the equally feckless Palestinians, symbolized by the young and attractive Palestinian woman who decides to become Larry David’s lover (I am afraid that he is succumbing to the Woody Allen syndrome) after he plucks the yarmulke from his friend’s head.
After the people in the restaurant watch the confrontation between Larry David and his newly observant friend in the parking lot as seen in the Youtube clip above, they decide to hail him as some kind of anti-Zionist exemplar. Who in their right mind could possibly connect this to a real-life situation? While I don’t think that the show could ever be interpreted as Zionist propaganda, it is unsettling to think that Arabs could ever act so foolishly. Why in the world would Muslims care about an observant Jew eating in a Palestinian-owned restaurant? The net effect of this scene is to portray them as anti-Semitic, and as equally intolerant as Larry’s friend who sought to “provoke” them. This is classic Hollywood liberalism but turned on its head. Instead of Paul Haggis “let’s all try to get along” pieties, Larry David aims at an “Arabs and Jews are equally stupid” message.
I first wrote about “Curb Your Enthusiasm” back in 2004:
When Seinfeld’s Executive Producer Larry David launched a new TV show on HBO playing himself, it might have been anticipated that “Curb Your Enthusiasm” would retain some of the characteristics of the Seinfeld show. This it does. Not only is the character Larry David just as self-centered and obnoxious as the Seinfeld regulars, he has the same whining Queens inflection as Jerry Seinfeld himself.
Unlike most Americans, I could not stand the Seinfeld show. I thought the show relied too heavily on shtick, a Yiddish word meaning gimmick–especially in the comic sense. For example, Jack Benny’s cheapness was shtick, as was Chevy Chase’s pratfalls on SNL. It also had the mandatory laugh-track, which has the same effect on me as the sound of a garden rake being scraped across a blackboard.
“Curb Your Enthusiasm” does incorporate the same kinds of convoluted plots as Seinfeld, usually putting one of the main characters into an excruciatingly embarrassing situation. Since they are not constrained by network requirements to keep Bible belt figures like Donald Wildmon happy, these plots tend to be a lot rawer and a lot funnier. For example, in one show, Larry David performs oral sex on his wife only to get a pubic hair stuck in his throat. For most of the episode, he is seen gagging and choking in polite company trying to dislodge the troublesome hair.
Now in its eighth season, the show has exhibited a kind of exhaustion that you tend to expect from those that are long in the tooth—the Saturday Night Live problem, so to speak. You get the sense that “Curb Your Enthusiasm” episodes are cooked up in writer’s sessions that put a premium on being “outrageous” rather than witty. Watching a thirty-minute episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” nowadays is a frequently exhausting experience as you try to find dialog and situations that are even distantly related to the experience of real-life human beings. (Please don’t ask me about my own experiences with oral sex.)
In utter contrast to what “Curb Your Enthusiasm” has become, I strongly recommend “Louie”, the show produced, directed, written by and starring Louis C.K. (The comedian’s last name is an approximation of his Hungarian surname Szekely.)
Louis C.K. is a standup comedian who has also written for David Letterman and other big name entertainers. His style is an admixture of Bill Cosby and Sam Kinison. From the former, he derives home-spun subject matter, like interacting with his kids. From the latter, he derives a savage misanthropic view of the world, reserving the greatest loathing for himself. So in a typical bit, he might make some cute reference to his daughter and in the next breath saying something like he wishes she had never been born.
And above all, Louis C.K.—like Kinison—is deeply misogynistic. Much of his material dwells on what is like being divorced and how hard it is to find love. Mostly he blames himself for being overweight, a creep, a liar, etc. But more than enough blame is assigned to women who seem to get their greatest joy in humiliating him.
Some of the episodes of the thirty-minute FX show “Louie” can be seen at http://www.hulu.com/louie. I particularly recommend “Bummer/Blueberries” that follows the same format as Seinfeld, another about a comedian that blends on-stage performances at the beginning of each episode, followed by a “situation”.
Unlike Seinfeld, these situations are much darker and much more realistic, cutting close to the bone. In the aforementioned episode, the blueberries are a reference to a shopping expedition that Louie is sent on by a woman who has invited him to have sex—and virtually nothing else. She runs into him at his daughter’s school and after a precursory conversation about school affairs suggests that he might come over to her place sometime for some casual intercourse.
After he drops by, she asks him what kind of condoms he brought with him. When they turn out to be lubricated, she frowns and tells him that they will not do. They irritate her vagina. She instructs him to go to a pharmacy down the block and pick up unlubricated condoms, some lotion for her vagina just in case, and some blueberries. The blueberries, it turns out, have nothing to do with sex games but just something she wants to eat later. Throughout the entire experience—first meeting her, finding out about the shopping trip, and a truly alienating sexual encounter—Louie is held back by a hair’s width from aborting the mission. He wants the sex, but everything else leaves him depressed.
While all of this is completely amusing, at least to me, it is also very painful and very truthful. If this sounds like it is worth your while, I suggest tuning in to “Louie” on FX Thursdays at 10:30pm.
You also might want to check out “Wilfred”, the show that comes on just before “Louie” at 10pm, even though once might be more than enough.
Elijah Wood (Frodo Baggins in the Ring movies) plays Ryan, a depressed lawyer who after trying to commit suicide relies on the companionship of a dog named Wilfred to raise his spirits. After seeing Wilfred in action, you wonder why Ryan doesn’t rush out and buy a gun to blow his brains out. I guess this is the comic conceit that is supposed to sustain your interest.
Wilfred is a dog in name only. Dressed in a Halloween-type costume, Australian actor Jason Gann, who created the original “Wilfred” on Australian TV, is an obnoxious pot-smoking creep who is constantly getting his master in trouble by doing all sorts of anti-social things like pissing on one of Ryan’s friend’s living room floors, etc. His “uplifting” message, repeated to the point of tedium to Ryan, is to “let it all hang out”.
I can’t vouch for the original Australian show, but I am afraid that it is probably much more inspired by “The Family Guy”, an American show that was created by David Zuckerman, the producer of “Wilfred”. Like “Wilfred”, “The Family Guy” features a talking dog and situations carefully calculated to make you squirm.
Like “Louie”, you can watch some episodes of “Wilfred” on Hulu. (http://www.hulu.com/wilfred) I more or less decided to put the kibosh on the show after watching the episode “Respect” the other week.
Set in a hospice, where Ryan has begun volunteering in order to impress a woman who has a thing about men with a social conscience, Wilfred—who has tagged along—demonstrates a talent for detecting when someone is about to die, a supposedly “spiritual” gift.
The show derives most of its guffaws from showing people near death looking and acting like human refuse. All I can say that having spent a couple of years visiting my mother in exactly such a place, I found it callow and tasteless. Just the sort of thing that television comedy is mostly about nowadays, I’m afraid.
July 18, 2011
Mann V. Ford
If someone asked you what came to mind when a huge multinational corporations was dumping toxic waste on indigenous peoples’ land, you are likely to think of far-off places like Ecuador where Chevron refuses to pay for the damage to land, water and the health of native peoples caused by oil run-off. This conflict between Indians and Chevron was documented in the film “Crude” that represented advocacy film-making at its finest.
As it turns out, a similar drama unfolded not 40 miles from New York in the 1990s when the Ramapough Mountain Indians sought damages against Ford Motor for dumping the toxic waste from their Mahwah plant into the soil, water and abandoned iron mines where the native peoples lived. A documentary titled “Mann V. Ford” that is every bit as powerful as “Crude” tells their story tomorrow night at 9pm on HBO, the premium cable channel that is one of the best places to go on television for hard-hitting political material. It is a sad commentary on the state of PBS’s Frontline that you need to go to cable TV to see such a film.
When you think of American Indians and environmental racism, you are likely to visualize reservations in New Mexico or Arizona where nuclear waste material is dumped. But the Indians who lived in suburban-style tract housing in New Jersey suffered more than any Indians in recent history. As children, they swam in nearby streams and rolled around on fields that contained paint and other toxic waste, including PCBs, Freon, heavy metals, lead and arsenic. Now in their forties and fifties, they are suffering cancer rates triple those of other people in New Jersey, a state infamous for environmental health hazards. Today, almost every home in Upper Ringwood, the town where they are based, has someone who died from cancer, or is suffering from diabetes, kidney stones, miscarriage, asthma, gastrointestinal disease or skin disorders.
Ford decided that these people were not worth worrying about since the general perception—racist to the core—was that the Ramapough Mountain Indians, who are descended from the Lenapes, were “trash” that deserved everything they got. They were seen as backward hill people who were culturally akin to other mountain peoples in the Ozarks or West Virginia. The assumption is that anybody who kept a car seat on his or her porch deserved to get cancer from Ford Motor toxic waste.
The documentary focuses on Wayne Mann, the lead plaintiff in the case. Mann is an articulate and passionate spokesman for his people. Like other members of this ethnic group, Mann obviously has African-American as well as Indian roots. This is the case for the Seminole people in Florida as well. He is advised by one of the lead attorneys, a feisty Blond-haired woman named Vicky Gilliam who hails from rural Louisiana and who had seen the impact of agricultural chemicals and oil spills on her own farming community. She is their Erin Brockovich.
Back in 1958, when I was in 8th grade, we went on a field trip to the Mahwah plant that had opened up three years earlier. The Ford employee who escorted around the plant kept making the point that this was the most modern and efficient auto plant the world had ever seen. Little did we suspect that 9 years later the plant management would decide to dump their waste in Upper Ringwood, obviously to save money. This was at a time when the reputation of American corporations was at an all-time high. The General Electric Theater aired on Sunday evening at 9pm, considered one of the most prestigious shows on television. Speaking for GE, Ronald reminded us that progress was their most important product. And all the while GE was dumping PCB’s in the Hudson River, the same way that Ford was dumping it in Indian country.
As is customary with HBO documentaries, they can be viewed on-demand from Time-Warner and other cable providers. If not, you can watch them on your computer if you are an HBO subscriber—a new feature available at www.hbogo.com.
May 1, 2011
Exit Through the Gift Shop; Cinema Verite
I have finally gotten around to seeing “Exit Through the Gift Shop”, which received New York Film Critics Online award for best documentary of 2010 even though some critics view it as a mockumentary in the style of “Catfish”. The movie has been described as a satire on art world trendiness, one of my favorite topics. Since it addresses the question of “truth and fiction” in documentary film—the chief obsession of Jane Gaines, the self-described Marxist film professor whose class on documentary film I dropped like a hot potato after finally realizing where she was going—I felt I owed it to myself to have a gander.
After weighing in on this highly regarded film that has a 98 percent Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, I will say a few words about “Cinema Verite”, the HBO fictional treatment of the making of “An American Family”, the 1973 PBS documentary about the Louds of Santa Barbara. If cinéma vérité implies a detached fly-on-the-wall approach to its subject matter, then “An American Family” was anything but. As is the case with “Exit Through the Gift Shop”, you are dealing very much with a staged reality, even if director Banksy would never admit it as such.
Perhaps the biggest problem for me was the presence of Thierry Guetta in practically every moment of Exit. Guetta is a Frenchman who shortly after opening a vintage clothing store in Los Angeles became obsessed with videorecording. He began recording almost continuously but without any clear purpose in mind. Eventually he became focused on street art after learning that his cousin Invader was working in this idiom. To describe Guetta’s observations as banal would be the understatement not just of the century but from the time when the universe originated.
Soon afterwards he hooks up with Shepherd Fairey, the artist whose Obama Hope poster was credited for generating broad support for the politician now understood to be nothing more than a swindler. In keeping with the tainted character of the 2008 campaign, the Associated Press sued Fairey for using one of their photos without permission. In the world of street art, such “sampling” has generated legal complaints on the same scale as in the hip-hop world where it originated.
Even Fairey has seen fit to call in the law when his own intellectual property is at stake as the Boston Globe pointed out in February 2009:
What do you do if you’re a street artist turned marketing phenom who uses other people’s images when someone uses one of your designs? If you’re Shepard Fairey, apparently, you call your lawyers.
Fairey, of Obama HOPE poster fame, is defending himself against charges he infringed on an Associated Press copyrighted photo in making the poster. He’s also been criticized by artists for using others’ work without attribution (see background here and here). His lawyers claim in the AP case that he is protected by fair use provisions of the copyright law.
It turns out, however, that the activist art appropriator is a wee bit more sensitive when it is his images that are being “repurposed.” An Austin, Texas, artist named Baxter Orr made a parody of Fairey’s Andre the Giant design, adorning it with a SARS mask and the title “Protect Yourself.” Last April, Fairey mobilized his legal team to send Orr a cease and desist order threatening legal action against him.
It should be added that left-of-center politics, even if it is of the tepid pro-Obama variety, is de rigeur for the ambitious street artist. Fairey has built up a resume that shows he is against the Evil Corporate World, although one critic is less than impressed.
http://nyc.indymedia.org/es/2008/06/97988.html
Shepard Fairey’s Image Problem
By Liam O’Donoghue
As if Wal-Mart didn’t have enough controversies to deal with, imagine the consternation in the PR war room when news hit that the retail giant was selling t-shirts bearing a Nazi SS skull. As the story unraveled, it turned out that Wal-Mart’s designer had ripped off the image from pop art superstar Shepard Fairey, whose reference for the Gestapo logo was 1960’s “biker culture.” Oops.
Using the international notoriety of his global “Andre the Giant has a posse” street art campaign as a platform, Shepard Fairey has leveraged his prolific output and iconic, anti-authoritarian style into a mini-empire. Through his ObeyGiant company (Motto: Manufacturing Quality Dissent Since 1989), he churns out screen-printed posters, clothing, and limited-run merchandise including skateboards and laser-engraved watches. His other design company, Studio Number One, specializes in branding, promotional campaigns and “identity systems” for corporate clients including Mountain Dew, Virgin, and Honda. He is also founder and creative director of Subliminal Projects art studio in Los Angeles and uber-hip Swindle magazine. His audience and the value of his work has surged in recent months on the popularity of his now-ubiquitous Obama posters.
Although Fairey “didn’t get bent out of shape” about Wal-Mart ripping him off, he originally launched his ObeyGiant clothing line because he saw that the Urban Outfitters chain was selling “bootlegged” shirts with his Giant logo. “To see it in there, just ripped off, knowing that somebody just made a bunch of money selling the t-shirts to Urban Outfitters, and here I am, just barely being able to pay my rent was definitely upsetting to me,” Fairey told me during an interview for Mother Jones. “The reason I get pissed off about stuff like that is because I didn’t build up the resonance for that image just to hand it off to someone to exploit.”
This irony is not lost on Lincoln Cushing, an art historian and author who recently brokered a royalty agreement between Fairey and the estate of deceased Cuban artist Rene Mederos over a design of Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos that Fairey essentially swiped and slapped his “Obey” logo onto. When confronted, Fairey was quick to cut a check to Mederos’s family, but Cushing described the Mederos episode as a common dynamic. “Many U.S. artists don’t seem to treat the intellectual property rights of third world artists the same as fellow U.S. artists,” Cushing said, and added that artists aren’t the only ones willing to steal from those still isolated from the U.S. economy. “For many years the web-based sales catalog of Barnes and Noble marketed over 30 unauthorized digitally-reproduced ‘Cuban posters.’ I contacted them many times about dealing with this properly, and they never responded.”
Eventually Guetta hooks up with Banksy, the super-secretive British street artist who is credited with having directed the film. Throughout the film, Banksy’s face is obscured underneath the hood of a sweatshirt and his voiced is altered as well. After Banksy allows the obsessed fan Guetta to follow him about on his nightly graffiti expeditions with a video camera, he warms up to him all the while sensing that Guetta is a fairly shallow person more enamored of the “scene” than the ambitions of the people involved with making art. It must be said that between the two men, it is a nose-and-nose race to determine who is the winner in a banality contest.
When Banksy sees a moment or two of Guetta’s utterly unwatchable documentary on street art based on his voluminous collection of tapes, he proposes a reallocation of responsibilities. Banksy will now make the movie (hence, “Exit Through the Gift Shop”) and Guetta will transform himself into a street artist.
The final half-hour of the film recounts Banksy’s well-publicized splash into the Los Angeles art scene with a 2006 show titled “Barely Legal”, a reference to the constant threat of arrests for defacement that such artists have to put up with. It is also a reference to the “outlaw”, and even revolutionary self-image, that people like Shepherd Fairey and Banksy cultivate as the NY Times reported on the show:
Earlier this month Banksy surreptitiously placed a blow-up doll dressed as a Guantánamo detainee inside the fence of the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad ride at Disneyland, where it apparently remained for more than an hour before park officials shut down the ride and removed it. Recently he also smuggled 500 altered versions of Paris Hilton’s new CD into record stores around Britain and placed them in the racks.
All of those stunts are featured in a video that loops continuously at the show, which also includes two large rooms displaying stenciled images on canvas, sculptures and mixed-media productions, like the panel van with the notice on the back, “How’s My Bombing?” and an 800 number that links to a Navy recruiting office in Phoenix.
All of this is arranged around a sort of mock-self-loathing, elephant-in-the-room theme, or, as Banksy puts it in a handout: “1.7 billion people have no access to clean drinking water. 20 billion people live below the poverty line. Every day hundreds of people are made to feel physically sick by morons at art shows telling them how bad the world is but never actually doing something about it. Anybody want a free glass of wine?”
It turns out that Guetta accompanied Banksy to the Disneyland expedition and was detained by security guards for his effort. In keeping with the generally low-level intellectual quality of the film, much more is made of the melodrama of being interrogated than the purpose of putting a blown-up doll dressed as a Guantánamo detainee on Disneyland property. One supposes this is in the nature of street art subversion, to make people ask, “what was that about?” than to really change minds.
All in all, the street art of people like Banksy and Shepherd Fairey has the same aspirations as the Biennial Exhibits at the Whitney Museum in New York that is filled with all sorts of “transgressive” flourishes that are meant to establish the bona fides of the artists while remaining marketable to hedge fund managers.
I am always reminded of my stint at Goldman-Sachs in 1986 when the dining room was filled with such artwork, including Barbara Kruger’s photos with messages like “I shop, therefore I am.”
In no time at all, Guetta learns the street artist ropes and begins his new career as Mr. Brainwash (MBW). After his “work” attracts attention, he decides to mount a major exhibition in the style of Banksy’s “Barely Legal”. Called “Life is Beautiful”, it displayed mostly works by experienced artists who created works according to Guetta’s specifications. In fact, Guetta is never seen once making art in the entire film and many critics assume that Banksy is the real creator, using Guetta as a stand-in for his own persona. What conclusions can be drawn from this? As the Times article above reported, there is an element of self-loathing in Banksy’s ongoing project. If you are going to satirize the market-driven art world, a shmuck like Guetta does provide a certain usefulness since he detracts attention away from the real conmen like Fairey and Banksy.
For Roger Ebert, the possibility that Exit is a hoax only serves to heighten its fascination. I, on the other hand, grew weary with the whole premise. For me it was just another exercise in post-modernist irony that is as dated as the overheated art market of the mid-1980s and the Wall Street super-profits that kept it going.
“Cinema Verite” was co-directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, the same team responsible for the memorable “American Splendor”, based on Harvey Pekar’s work, as well as the not so memorable “The Extra Man” that I reviewed recently.
It recreates the making of “An American Family”, a PBS documentary series on the Loud family of Santa Barbara that aired in 1973 and that literally spawned “reality TV”. Arguably, there would be no “Housewives of…” today without the PBS antecedent, for better or for worse obviously (I am a fan of The Housewives of Atlanta–Orange County housewives forget about it.)
The show was watched by millions, including a number of 1960s radicals who saw it as a symbol of the breakdown of the traditional nuclear family that could not hold up under the pressures of the Vietnam War, gay liberation, feminism and all of the other deep changes occurring in American society. In a NY Times article on the show, the philosopher Jean Baudrillard is cited as having described the PBS series as “a symptom of our altered relationship with reality, characterized by ‘dissolution of TV in life, dissolution of life in TV.’” As is the case with reality shows today, the people being filmed don’t matter how degraded they appear, as long as the camera is rolling.
The patriarch was Bill Loud, a Republican voter who cheated on his wife Pat both before the filming began and during. Tim Robbins plays him ably and Diane Lane is also very good as Pat. Lance, their eldest son (played by Thomas Dekker), was an out-of-the closet gay and the first gay ever to appear on television and who died of AIDS in 2001 at the age of 50.
The main connection this worthy film has with the “truth or fiction” preoccupation of film school critical studies is its revelation that producer-director Craig Gilbert (James Gandolfini) manipulated the Louds in order to create compelling television. For example, after Bill Loud drags him along to meet one of his lovers, an aspiring actress who might be impressed with Gilbert’s show-biz credentials, Gilbert tattles on him to Pat, thus leading to a series of escalating incidents that would lead to her announcement on the show that she wants a divorce. It turns out that Gilbert also manipulated her into making that announcement despite her intentions to keep it off-camera.
As a sign of how far we have progressed since the original airing of “An American Family”, its useful to recall how a NY Times article by Ann Roiphe described Lance Loud’s “flamboyant, leechlike, homosexuality” and openly wondered why his parents showed no “open horror” at his sexual orientation.
It took a gay liberation movement to finally put a stake in the heart of this kind of open homophobia.
“Exit Through the Gift Shop” can be rented from Netflix, “Cinema Verite” is available on-demand from HBO; “An American Family” unfortunately is unavailable.
April 19, 2011
The Extra Man; Hung
Before long I will have completed viewing over 60 screeners for movies made in 2010 that I received as a member of NY Film Critics Online. Some I have written full reviews of (“Last Train Home”); others I plan to deal with in a “consumers guide” that will include brief commentaries on some very good films (“Hereafter”) as well as some that are dreadful.
Having seen one of the most dreadful last night—“The Extra Man”—I intend to deal with it in some length since it is about male prostitution after a fashion and lends itself to a comparison with “Hung”, a far more successful treatment of the same subject. Kevin Kline plays Henry Harrison, either an asexual man or a repressed homosexual—it is not articulated, who has a job as a “walker”. He escorts very old women, widowers most often, to social functions in the same manner that Jerry Zipkin accompanied Nancy Reagan.
While watching this mess of a film, a disappointment from the same team who made “American Splendor”, it occurred to me how it suffered in comparison to “Hung”, the HBO TV series that stars Thomas Jane as Ray Drecker, a Detroit high school baseball coach who turns to male prostitution to make ends meet. It reminded me that some of the best writing in popular culture today is done within television, and especially HBO.
“The Extra Man” is a typical Sundance type comedy, one in which the creators make the fatal mistake of thinking that eccentricity in and of itself is amusing. The other major character besides Henry Harrison is one Louis Ives who after losing a non-tenured college teaching job decides to move to New York to make it as a writer. Paul Dano, who gets my vote for the worst actor in Hollywood today, plays Ives. He was made for this role, a neurasthenic insecure young man who is a cross-dresser. As is with the case with Henry Harrison, his sexual orientation is not revealed as such although the indications would lead to that conclusion.
Dano is basically playing the same type of character he played in “Little Miss Sunshine”, a maladjusted post-adolescent trying to find himself. Eventually this entails becoming Harrison’s apprentice as an “extra man”.
As is with the case with “Little Miss Sunshine”, he is meant to be “funny” because he does weird things. There are several scenes in which he dresses in drag that are utterly bereft of the kind of sexual madcap energy that you found in “Some Like it Hot” or even “La Cage Aux Folles”. The audience is expected to laugh at him and feel sorry for him at the same time, a miscalculation on the part of screenwriters Robert Pulcini, who worked on “American Splendor” and Jonathan Ames, whose novel the film is based on.
Although I am about to give a ringing endorsement for HBO’s “Hung”, I have to qualify this by saying that Ames is the head writer for the network’s “”Bored to Death”. At the risk of making a cheap joke probably made by every reviewer who has ever endured this show, I was the one who was bored to death. Like “The Extra Man”, this is an exercise in whimsy that must have had the writers in stitches. Everyone else would have to wonder how such crap gets through the front door at HBO.
If you go to Ames’s website, you can get a flavor of his comic sensibility:
Introduction to Michael Wood’s Essay About the Mystery of Henry James’s Testicles
A long time ago, I heard a rumor that Henry James had injured his testicles. In my novel The Extra Man, I used this rumor in the following bit of dialogue between the characters Louis Ives and Henry Harrison (the first speaker is Louis; he is also the narrator):
“It’s really very strange that I’ll be moving to New York. It’s all because I was looking at the cover of Henry James’s Washington Square and I thought I should be in New York.”
“I can’t stand James!” Henry proclaimed. “He’s unreadable.”
“I know what you mean.” I was worried that I had said the wrong thing, but then I stood up for myself and James a little bit by saying, “But the earlier books are quite good, like Daisy Miller, or Washington Square.”
“Yes, that’s true, his style did change. I wonder why. He burned himself, you know. Sat on a stove and shriveled his testicles. That may account for the change in style.”
My reaction. One, it is not Henry James who is unreadable. Two, when it comes to comedy I’ll stick with Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder, thank you very much.
“Hung” is one of the best things coming off the HBO assembly line since “The Sopranos”. More so than anything with the HBO imprint, it casts an unstinting view of the realities of America’s rust belt. Like nearby auto plants from an earlier period, the high school in “Hung” is rife with rumors about layoffs.
Ray Drecker has just gone through a divorce and now lives in the burnt-out shell of the house on a lake that he inherited from his parents. Doing the reconstruction himself, he sleeps in a pup tent on the water’s edge. He has twin children who are as familiar with rejection as him. His son is into Goth culture and sexually unresolved while the daughter is dealing with a weight problem. They could not be more unalike than Ray, who is a handsome and well-built stud of a man.
At a workshop on Becoming Successful, Ray runs into Tanya Skagle (Jane Adams), a contingent worker in a Detroit office who dreams of becoming a poet. After sleeping with Ray, who women find irresistible, Tanya suggests to him that they could Become Successful if they market his main asset, his large penis.
This leads to a fitfully successful business in which Tanya often finds herself trying to keep Ray Drecker half as ambitious as she is. He often fails to drive a hard bargain with the women he “dates” and is leery of her plans to market his goods on the Internet in Craigslist fashion.
Our friends at wsws.org, whose cultural reviews puts their strictly political analyses to shame, had this to say about the show:
Hung is an exploration, through the distorted lens of television, of how far people will go when driven by circumstances to take desperate measures.
The production and marketing of a series such as Hung is a complex business, requiring a combination of ingredients, including humor, an element of impiety, as well as some social insight and a considerable degree of talent. It is no secret that television is a ruthlessly competitive enterprise driven by and with large fortunes at stake.
Hung plays heavily, and valuably, on its viewers’ sense of the uncertainty and instability of life in this era. It can’t be accidental that the industrially, socially devastated city of Detroit is the backdrop for the story. Lipkin’s characters struggle along in the suburbs, largely unconscious of the bigger picture, most of them shallow and self-centered. To what extent the program is criticizing their self-involvement remains somewhat ambiguous.
There’s not much I can add to this except to say that Season One is now available from Netflix and well worth watching.
February 5, 2011
Mad Men
Having finished watching season one of “Mad Men” a week or so ago, I had made plans to write something about it eventually. After reading a rather provocative attack on the AMC series–now in its third season–in the New York Review of Books, I decided to move it to the front burner.
Although this cable TV show has garnered lots of attention, I suppose it would make sense to provide some background on the show for readers who do not have cable. Season one of “Mad Men” begins in 1960 and takes place in the office of a mid-sized advertising agency in Manhattan and in the homes of its major characters.
The main character is Don Draper, who is the creative director of the agency and the most sympathetic member of a largely unattractive cast ensemble. Played to a tee by Jon Hamm, Don Draper is a strong silent type who would have been played by Robert Mitchum in bygone eras. He is the typical alpha male constantly putting down challenges to his authority from those lower in the pecking order.
His nemesis is a sniveling Ivy Leaguer and junior copywriter named Pete Campbell whose sense of privilege collides with his lowly status and constantly brings him into conflict with Don Draper who grew up in poverty but managed to climb his way to the top through dint of his ability to dream up ads that would seduce an American population hungry for consumer goods.
Two equally obnoxious partners, each in their own way, run the agency. Roger Sterling Jr. (John Slattery) is a fortyish roué who suffers a heart attack in season one. Since he is a chain smoker (like practically everyone else in the office) who eats red meat every chance he gets, his heart attack is practically anti-climactic.
The other partner is Bert Cooper, a seventyish character played by Robert Morse, a veteran stage actor. Cooper is an Ayn Rand fanatic who is devoted to everything Japanese. Employees are expected to remove their shoes before entering the office.
Two of the three lead female characters work at Sterling-Cooper and have to endure the sexism of all the male employees that is either expressed either through a smiling paternalism toward the “gals” or through growling viciousness and/or sexual harassment that would get any man fired on the spot today. One is Joan Harris (Christina Hendricks), the voluptuous office manager who has been conducting a long-time affair with Roger Sterling. Her main role is to teach new female employees the ropes; this boils down to pleasing the men in the office.
The other is Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss), a Brooklynite who started season one as Draper’s secretary but who is promoted to junior copy writer after offering some shrewd advice about how to pitch cosmetics to women. Peggy, who is a bit overweight and a frumpy dresser, worships the men at the agency and views her job at Sterling-Cooper with starry eyes. In many ways she is like John Travolta’s dancing partner in “Saturday Night Fever”, a working class girl who idolizes everything about Manhattan even when the objects of her worship are pigs.
Finally, there is Betty Draper, Don’s wife, who appears to have stepped out of the pages of “Feminine Mystique”. She is a former model who spends her day worrying about what to cook for the evening meal or which earrings would go nice with her hat. The emptiness of her life and Don Draper’s affairs with other women have brought on a deep depression that leads to psychoanalysis by a coldly aloof practitioner who advises Don that his wife is making progress when in reality their marriage is falling apart.
I will have a bit more to say about this momentarily but the show is basically a high-class soap opera like some of my other television favorites, including “Desperate Housewives” and “The Sopranos”. The show’s kinship with the latter should be obvious given the fact that the show’s creator—Matthew Weiner—also wrote for “The Sopranos”. In some ways, it is very much “Mad Men” and “Made Men”. If you like colorful characters, broad humor, a modicum of social satire, solid performances, and snappy dialog, then I strongly advise renting the series from Netflix as I plan to do.
Daniel Mendelsohn’s assault in the New York Review seems to be an exercise in knocking the show down to size. Perhaps he felt impelled to do this since tastemakers in all the usual places have hyped it. For example, in a long piece on the show that appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine on June 22, 2008, Alex Witchel spoke for most sophisticated television viewers when she wrote:
Weiner’s achievements with ”Mad Men,” which is produced by Lionsgate, are plentiful, starting with the storytelling. Setting it in the early 1960s, on the cusp between the repression and conformity of the cold war and McCarthy-era 1950s and the yet-to-unfold social and cultural upheavals of the 60s, allows Weiner an arc of character growth that is staggering in its possibilities. It also gives him the opportunity to mine the Rat Pack romance of that period, when the wreaths of cigarette smoke, the fog of too many martinis — whether exhilarating or nauseating — and the silhouettes specific to bullet bras only heightened the headiness of the dream that all men might one day become James Bond or, at the very least, key holders to the local Playboy Club.
Deepening the tension between that fantasy and reality, Weiner has put Sterling Cooper, the fictional ad agency that employs the show’s characters, on the old-school, WASP side of the equation, letting them revel in their racism, sexism and anti-Semitism. It was during that period that the creative revolution in advertising was taking off at agencies like Grey and Doyle Dane Bernbach, where Jews and some women held leadership positions. That Sterling Cooper’s creative director, Don Draper, is played by Jon Hamm, a leading man in the Gregory Peck mold who manages to make his sometimes oblique and often heartless character into a sympathetic figure (and won a Golden Globe for best actor), eases the pain.
Mendelsohn would have none of this. He writes:
As I have already mentioned, the actual stuff of Mad Men‘s action is, essentially, the stuff of soap opera: abortions, secret pregnancies, extramarital affairs, office romances, and of course dire family secrets; what is supposed to give it its higher cultural resonance is the historical element. When people talk about the show, they talk (if they’re not talking about the clothes and furniture) about the special perspective its historical setting creates—the graphic picture that it is able to paint of the attitudes of an earlier time, attitudes likely to make us uncomfortable or outraged today. An unwanted pregnancy, after all, had different implications in 1960 than it does in 2011.
To my mind, the picture is too crude and the artist too pleased with himself. In Mad Men, everyone chain-smokes, every executive starts drinking before lunch, every man is a chauvinist pig, every male employee viciously competitive and jealous of his colleagues, every white person a reflexive racist (when not irritatingly patronizing). It’s not that you don’t know that, say, sexism was rampant in the workplace before the feminist movement; it’s just that, on the screen, the endless succession of leering junior execs and crude jokes and abusive behavior all meant to signal “sexism” doesn’t work—it’s wearying rather than illuminating.
Mendelsohn grudgingly admits: “I am dwelling on the deeper, almost irrational reasons for the series’s appeal—to which I shall return later, and to which I am not at all immune, having been a child in the 1960s…” He also is a fan of Battlestar Galactica and Friday Night Lights, two shows geared to the cognoscenti whose appeal somehow eluded me.
Despite his characterization of the show’s writing as “extremely weak”, he has no problem comparing it unfavorably to “The Sopranos”, a paradox given the fact that Matthew Weiner was a major creative talent in both series. For my money, the writing is the best thing about the show. For example, one of Don Draper’s flings is with a Jewish department store CEO who has come to his agency in search of talent that can help transform the store from a discount house into something more contemporary and upscale. For those who keep track of such ephemera, this was clearly inspired by the transformation of Barney’s. Without attempting to recreate the dialog between Draper and Rachel Menken, those who have tended to trust me on such matters should understand that the combination of attraction and revulsion between the two is sharply conveyed. Although Draper is no anti-Semite, he manages to put his foot in his mouth frequently with Rachel Menken—a function of his unfamiliarity with Jewish sensitivities rather than hatred. Their relationship is finely nuanced and a credit to Weiner’s ability to express psychological depth.
That being said, I don’t think that “Mad Men” is in the same league with “Revolutionary Road” or “Far From Heaven”, two movies that cover the same terrain: 1950s suburban angst, petty prejudices, and the straight-jacket of social convention.
For anybody who is curious about the 50s and early 60s, “Mad Men” is a great introduction. No matter how broad the characterizations and crude the satire, this is a show that will bring a smile to your face almost constantly. While most of us got into politics to oppose the war in Vietnam or fight racism in the 1960s, we should never forget how much our battle was one over the right to define ourselves freely.
The main thing that comes across in “Mad Men” is the invisible chains that drag each character down. Men are slaves to commodity fetishism and women are slaves to men’s expectations. You can’t escape the feeling that the characters are deeply impoverished no matter how much money they are making. All of them appear to be having a great time getting drunk and eating 16 oz. steaks, but they are on a slow march to ruin.
Although I never worked in advertising, this world was still very much the norm in 1968 when I went to work for Metropolitan Life Insurance in New York. Fellow programmers told me that the movie “The Apartment” was filmed there. In season one of “Mad Men”, there is an allusion made to Billy Wilder’s classic since it is very much about the world that they inhabit. “The Apartment” is about executives sexually exploiting women in the office, a norm before women’s liberation put such practices into the ashbin of history.
My boss at Met Life was a guy named John Falzon who came to work in a fedora every day, just like Don Draper’s. He was the kind of guy who referred to “gals” in the office and who probably enjoyed a martini or two at lunch.
But by 1968, the old ways had begun to change. There is nothing about the red scare in “Mad Men” but it would not be hard to imagine it coming up in one of the episodes, especially with a character like Bert Cooper who worshipped Ayn Rand. One day I got a postcard at work that came through office mail. It had been sent to me by the FBI but was written as if by an SWP organizer reminding me to the next meeting. As the FBI put it in the file that I retrieved through the Freedom of Information Act, it was an attempt to “embarrass” me and possibly get me fired (although they did not state this.)
When Falzon heard about the postcard, he called me into his office and told me that if I ever got a postcard like that again, he should be the first to know. He would find out who sent it and have them fired. Things had definitely changed, thank goodness.
August 14, 2010
On the Road with Austin and Santino
Like Vanity Fair’s estimable James Wolcott, I am a fan of On the Road with Austin and Santino, a new Lifetime cable show about a couple of fashion designers who go around the country making couture type clothing for plain janes:
The pleasantest surprise of the television year so far is Lifetime’s underhyped and unheralded On the Road with Austin and Santino, teaming two of the most memorable, personality-plus designers from Project Runway, a creative odd couple that make for a terrific matched set. Outfitted in perfect little outfits, Austin Scarlett, diminutive and fey, looks as if he could be the guidance counselor from Glee’s long lost brother, the one who taught her everything she knows about pastels and jewelry selection; Santino Rice, tall, husky-voiced, and spaniel-eyed, has a more loping presence and loose, layered look. But both are quick-witted and droll, and make a helluva comedy duo as they tool around the country in this fashion-makeover road movie on the installment plan. (Santino at least resembles a road warrior behind the steering wheel–to many of the locals, Austin looks as if he landed from Venus.)
The last episode, which can be seen in its entirety here, was particularly entertaining as the two men end up in Antler, Oklahoma, the self-declared deer hunting capital of the country, to design a 30th birthday gown for Alesha, a mother of two whose wardrobe is filled with hunting camouflage outfits rather than Chanel. There are many funny and charming aspects to their intervention, but especially the way the small town locals accept them on their own cosmopolitan and homosexual terms. Austin Scarlett, the more openly gay of the two, tells Alesha at one point that he has probably worn more skirts than she has over the past year or so.
It is not just the women who accept the two designers with open arms. Alesha’s husband and her father, who look like they could be cast as Klan members, are thrilled to see them working on Alesha’s gown. The other residents of the small town also give them the red carpet treatment. This is not what we would expect in an ostensibly homophobic small town, needless to say. Whether or not this generous and tolerant behavior was staged or not can of course not be determined, although I am inclined to believe that it was genuine. Admittedly, when you are being filmed you tend to be on your best behavior.
Whatever the case, it dawned on me how gratifying the show was when compared to the truly odious last movie by Sasha Baron Cohen that basically followed the same format as this TV show, but to the opposite effect. The gay fashionista Bruno played by Cohen went to the same kinds of small towns in order to catch locals in some kind of homophobic outrage. When Bruno goes out hunting with some men who look and dress like those in Antler, he tries to shock them into bad behavior by provoking them with outlandish sexual advances. To their credit, they largely remain unprovoked. The real lesson of Borat and Bruno, when you really get down to it, is how generally open-minded Americans are despite this British snob’s attempts to convey the opposite.
All this brings to mind Alexander Cockburn’s recent column about how fed up he is with gay marriage:
I’m for anything that upsets the applecart but why rejoice when state and church extend their grip, which is what marriage is all about. Assimilation is not liberation, and the invocation of “equality” as the great attainment of these gay marriages should be challenged.
To buttress his case, he followed up with a letter from a gay activist that stated:
As you might know, only 15 per cent of LGBT are in a relationship circumstance where they would marry. Yet this issue has dominated LGBT activism for the past two decades. Along with gays in the military, which served 1.5 per cent of LGBT, these two conservative issues have crowded out progress on consensus economic issues, housing and job discrimination protections, which would appear to be in the interests of the vast majority, those of us who must compete for housing and employment.
That being said, the activist also told Cockburn that he’s “probably gonna tie the knot in the future when it becomes legal again.” He also thought that:
The issue of marriage is just a vehicle. The payload is the state ending discrimination in all of its practices. It is disgusting to me that marriage ended up getting us here, but I think that I can see daylight through Kennedy.
In other words, gay marriage might involve belief in a reactionary institution (I am married myself, for what that’s worth) but it is a means to a liberatory end.
To some extent, Cockburn’s complaint and that of some gay ultralefts is a kind of counter-cultural time machine journey back to 1971 or so when radicalism and life style were inextricably linked, especially in New Left circles. For gays, this translated into rejection of all aspects of bourgeois society, especially its sexual mores. What a disappointment it must be to them to see so many gays jumping on the bandwagon of an institution that symbolizes bourgeois society. Like pressing for the rights of gays to join the military or become Protestant ministers, this would appear to be a wholesale rejection of “militancy”.
Perhaps the same thing could be said about the civil rights movement of the 1950s that focused so much on African-Americans not being discriminated against. By the 60s the Black movement had reversed course and worried less about discrimination and more about the possibility of becoming separated from a decadent bourgeois white society.
History played a trick when it came to gays. Rather than moving from anti-discrimination to militancy (except for the rather modest efforts of the Mattachine Society), it went from the militancy of the early 70s to something much more like an “integrationist” movement today. It is too bad that some on the left cannot accept the movement on its own terms.
Oddly enough, Counterpunch has published far more articles in defense of gay marriage than Cockburn’s contrarian pieces, a sign of the publication’s health, I would say. If only the “vanguard” press could live up to this example, we’d all be better off. Here’s one item to consider:
On a swing through Baton Rouge, Louisiana last week, John F. Kerry made it crystal clear that he doesn’t care much for gay marriage. The intolerant senator scoffed at reporters when asked whether or not he supported the inclusion of a same-sex marriage plank in the Massachusetts Democratic platform. Kerry answered by saying that such a statement does not represent the views held by most party members, including himself.
“I’m opposed to it being in a platform. I think it’s a mistake,” Kerry huffed, “I think it’s the wrong thing, and I’m not sure it reflects the broad view of the Democratic Party in our state … I’m opposed to gay marriage.”
The senator, who flip-flopped his way through a self-defeating campaign in 2004, can’t get his act together — yet he is still setting himself up for another run in 2008. Supporting gay marriage amounts to electoral death, or so claims Kerry. He must think inflating his political status is more important than standing up for equality.
Indeed Kerry’s statement is the kind of veiled hate speech we were hearing from racist Democrats down South during the civil rights struggles. Fortunately, Dems in Massachusetts aren’t buying Kerry’s line, as they are planning to vote in favor of putting a same-sex marriage plank in their platform later this month. In fact, Kerry is behind the times, as his state’s Supreme Court legalized gay marriage back in May of 2004.
This, of course, is entirely the right tack to take. Hearkening back to Lenin’s “What is to be Done”, it puts the premium on standing up for the rights of a persecuted minority without trying to gainsay the goal being pursued. In illustrating how a “vanguard” functions, Lenin referred to the German social democracy:
Why is there not a single political event in Germany that does not add to the authority and prestige of the Social-Democracy? Because Social-Democracy is always found to be in advance of all the others in furnishing the most revolutionary appraisal of every given event and in championing every protest against tyranny…It intervenes in every sphere and in every question of social and political life; in the matter of Wilhelm’s refusal to endorse a bourgeois progressive as city mayor (our Economists have not managed to educate the Germans to the understanding that such an act is, in fact, a compromise with liberalism!); in the matter of the law against ‘obscene’ publications and pictures; in the matter of governmental influence on the election of professors, etc., etc.
If Lenin advocated that socialists fight for the right of a “bourgeois progressive” to take office in Germany, why is so difficult for some on the left to see gay marriage in the same terms?
Logo, a polling company subsidiary of MTV, asked young gays about their hopes. It found the following:
For one thing, younger gays now expect to stay put: no more running away to be gay. Rather than heading to big cities where gays are more readily accepted, young gays are planning to put down roots and raise families in small-town America.
That means younger gays fully anticipate, and demand, acceptance from their local communities. At the same time, younger gays don’t see a great need to depart from most cultural norms as expressed by their heterosexual peers; while wishing to be open and honest about their core identities, young gays also wish for the support and purpose of family.
The expectation of a spouse and children is common among younger gays, whereas the research indicated that only about a third of gays 35 and older shared that same desire. Overall, gays polled by the study said their top priority was marriage equality, followed by the environment, health care, and the economy.
Get that? Young gays are planning to put down roots and raise families in small-town America. They also said their top priority was marriage equality.
All in all, On the Road with Austin and Santino is an expression of these hopes and dreams. Gay youth want to be accepted on their own terms, even in such a place as Antler, Oklahoma. The desire to express one’s sexual identity without negative consequences is entirely normal. The United States is headed inexorably toward significant demographic changes that will help to undermine the reactionary prejudices of many white males living both in places like Antler and in New York City where gay-bashing still takes place. Socialists have an obligation to strengthen every initiative that moves us away from the prejudices that have taken the lives of Blacks, Latinos and gays. Part of this is fighting for gay marriage, a change that would make gay people and straights equal in the eyes of society, whether or not one or another reactionary has endorsed this demand. As is always the case, socialists should not put a minus where the ruling class—or elements of it—put a plus. As Leon Trotsky once said, we have to learn to think.
