The Chutry Experiment

Both Jim Emerson and Jonathan Gray have mentioned the extremely funny “Generic Movie Trailer,” which parodies conventions from Oscar-bait movies.  The parody works, in part, because the dialogue is reduced to paint by numbers plot terms, but it’s also fun to identify the films the fake trailer is referencing, such as Good Will Hunting, Rain Man, and Dangerous Minds (or any number of teacher-as-hero films).

But as Emerson suggests, it’s also predicated upon the recognition that so many of these films seem to play it safe rather than taking creative (or marketing) risks.

Hey, this is pretty cool.  Here is a very nice pullquote from the review of my book in the December 2009 issue of Choice:

Expanding film studies beyond traditional boundaries, Tryon explores how cinema affects and is affected by developments in technology and culture that have altered the way movies are consumed, produced, and perceived. The book is readable and well researched, offering students an excellent opportunity to go beyond more traditional film studies. Highly recommended.”

For those of you who are curious, here is some interesting data on how Choice reviews books.

Although I was happy to see Kathryn Bigelow win for Best Director and Jeff Bridges for Best Actor, for the most part I found this year’s Oscars show to be uninspired, a perception that seemed commonplace, at least in my scene on Twitter.  The reactions from Ken Levine were similar to those that I saw in real time on Twitter throughout the entire broadcast.  The John Hughes tribute montage was pretty touching and then things got a little awkward when Judd Nelson and Macauley Culkin joined in.  The Best Picture award was rushed, perhaps due to the new rule that included ten nominees rather than five, but why not give each filmmaker an extra five seconds in the sun at the end of the ceremony?   And I found Baldwin and Martin to be remarkably banal as hosts.  I doubt I’ll remember any of their lines by tonight.  It’s also odd to think about the disconnect between an awards ceremony that nominates a number of independent films, even while the distribution channels that disseminate those films are increasingly endangered, as Ted Hope points out.

But despite these missteps (and despite the fact that much of New York City couldn’t watch the Oscars until around 8:30 PM), ratings for this year’s show were the highest in several years, with significantly more viewers tuning in this year.  As the Variety article points out, the last time numbers were this high, Titanic was one of the nominees, suggesting that the show benefitted from having a popular film as one of its most visible films.  Others have pointed out that “event TV” in general has been garnering high ratings.  It’s tempting to suggest that social media is a factor here in the “return to liveness.”  The real-time water coolers on Twitter and blogs would seem to encourage more people to watch simultaneously, but I’m guessing that even with a large volume of Oscar tweets, the percentage of people who were “watching Twitter on TV” was probably relatively small, at least compared to the vast “silent majority” who watched the show without tweeting about everything from Sarah Jessica Parker’s dress to the uncanny ability of the Oscar producers to find a black audience member every time a nominee from Precious won an award.

Which gives rise to a number of questions: First, I wonder how much Twitter affected my response to the awards show.  I’ll admit that I enjoyed live-blogging with everyone, but I wonder if the online snarkfest helped contribute to the Twitter consensus that the Oscars sucked?  Or whether the “trending topics” on Twitter reflect cultural biases that already exist on Twitter?  All I know is that my Twitter feed had almost 100 Oscar tweets for every tweet on another subject.

It’s hard to measure how this Oscar buzz fits within the overall hype that the Oscars are supposed to produce, especially when the expansion from five to ten nominees seemed to water down the ability of film companies to market films based on the prestige of getting nominated.  As Patrick Goldstein notes, the “Oscar bump” did not seem to have a measurable effect on the box office for a number of the films that were up for best picture, and the marketing of those films may have even cost more than the financial benefits of being nominated (note: Jonathan Gray and Henry Jenkins discuss some of these issues in a recent interview).  I’m skeptical about whether Oscar wins can tell us much about current cultural tastes or prevailing attitudes, as Goldstein suggests.   Although it was warmly embraced by critics, The Hurt Locker still hasn’t done significant box office.

I don’t have a tidy conclusion here.  Social media have obviously become a crucial element of Oscar coverage, providing real-time reactions from a (self-selecting?) group of fans and even anti-fans.  And the Oscars themselves continue to be one of the more significant hype machines for generating interest in and discussion of movies out there.

One of the highlights for me at this year’s Oscars was the discovery of this year’s winner for Best Animated Short film, Logorama, and thanks to the power of streaming video, you can view the film in its entirety at both the official website and the Wreck and Savage blog.  Logorama takes place in a world composed almost entirely of corporate logos.  Skyscrapers are Colgate boxes, while Pringles guys order food at a diner from the Esso girl.  The lion at the local zoo is an MGM logo, and security is provided by the not-so-jolly Green Giant.  It would be easy for such a world to become tiresome and preachy, but the logos are given quirky, often belligerent personalities, giving the film a humorous and somewhat NSFW edge.

The plot centers around a couple of foul-mouthed cops (played by Michelin Men) chasing a bank robbing Ronald McDonald, and as the chase unfolds, the entire world of Logorama begins to fall apart quite literally–a couple of defunct or near defunct corporations even make appearances to great effect–until we get one of the funniest concluding tracking out shots I’ve seen in a long time.  I’m trying to avoid giving away too many of the sight gags because this is one film you should see for yourself, a great illustration that short films are not necessarily apprentice projects, as Taylor Hackford seemed to imply during last night’s Oscars, but an art form unto themselves.

For a number of reasons, I’ve been more fascinated than usual by the Oscar chatter.  Although some of the “scandals” and controversies over The Hurt Locker have begun to get a little tiresome, they have, in some cases at least, provoked some highly pertinent questions about cinematic realism, especially when it comes to depictions of war.  But, aside from prolonging public discussions about some films that I find thought-provoking, the Oscars (and the anticipation of them, which may, in fact, be more important) are also worth thinking about because they offer us one of the more explicit and privileged public narratives available about the film industry.  They are, in short, Hollywood’s best opportunity to represent itself to a movie-consuming public (while remaining mindful of any number of other audiences, including film industry personnel and film journalists).

I addressed this issue briefly in Reinventing Cinema when I discussed a couple of Oscar sketches and speeches, one of which featured Jake Gyllenhaal telling the audience to see movies on the big screen.  A comedy sketch featuring Jon Stewart mocking the “wide screen” on his video iPod had a similar effect.  This is also why the Hollywood history montages, even if they often feel like filler, are so important by selling Hollywood as a popular art (and as a quick search through my blog illustrates I’ve been thinking about these issues for a while).

But the Oscars are also fun because they invite the same water-cooler discussions associated with other forms of “event TV,” such as the Super Bowl and, to a lesser extent, the Emmys and Golden Globes, an issue addressed in Sheila Seles’ Convergence Culture Consortium blog post.  Like her, I enjoy live-blogging (or, more likely in our evolved social media climate, live-tweeting) the Oscars and sharing my fascination about the awards with others.  Seles mentions in passing a New York Times article that reports that many of these TV event shows have been receiving record ratings.  This past Super Bowl even surpassed the final episode of M*A*S*H for total number of viewers, a fact that would likely bother me slightly if I wasn’t a huge Drew Brees fan.  The New York Times article attributes this reversal–TV ratings for top shows have been declining for some time–to the “water-cooler effect” associated with social media tools like Twitter, a phenomenon echoed in Max Dawson’s discussion of “watching Twitter on TV.”

The Oscar producers have been thinking about these social media issues quite a bit and have created an Oscars Facebook page and an iPhone application in support of the show, while also seeking to make the awards more “relevant” by having ten Best Picture nominees rather than five.  I have to wonder if the latter move will have any significant effect once viewers catch on to the fact that usually the race boils down to two or three films (this year, The Hurt Locker or Avatar).  It’s also less than clear what effect a Facebook page might have on attracting younger audiences.  Now that having a Facebook profile is becoming common across generations, I wonder if the people who “become fans” of the Oscars will be the same people who were already fans when it was just a 4-hour annual TV show.  Also, as with the death of film criticism, concerns that the Oscars aren’t relevant to today’s youth is an ongoing complaint.  Still, the tension between old media and new media is an interesting one, especially when it’s connected to Hollywood’s ongoing narrative about itself and the movies it creates.

Update: To some extent, I’ve been trying to think through the relationship between the Oscars and fandom in this post.  Obviously, the Oscars tow a fascinating line between traditional fandom and what Jonathan Gray has called anti-fandom.  The Oscars are, in many ways, a celebration of stardom and celebrity (”ooh…look at Julia Roberts’ dress”) and a way of mocking some of these institutions of celebrity, whether through celebrity-watchers like Joan Rivers or through political screeds like those at Big Hollywood.  Gray is especially attentive to the pleasures of being an “anti-fan,” and the Oscar water-cooler invites both kinds of responses equally successfully.

Update 2: Just a few minutes after my first update, I came across this Auteurs post that compiles some of the recent Oscar chatter, including Armond White’s entertaining (or eye-rolling, take your pick) New York Press article about how the annual awards are contributing to the media’s effect of ensuring that “the public stays culturally illiterate, intellectually docile and aesthetically numb.”  Talk about anti-fandom.  The Oscar-bashing is utterly incoherent politically (the Auteurs post nails its politics as a surreal cross between Guy Debord and Milton Friedman), but I do think his read of The Hurt Locker as an investigation into constructions of masculinity has some merit.

As I glance across my snow-covered lawn, only one thought crosses my mind: Spring break! But to keep myself warm until Friday, when the weather should magically change, here are some of the things I’ve been reading (in between grading papers and midterms, of course):

• My critique of Thomas Doherty’s lament about the state of film criticism seemed to generate quite a response.  The Columbia University Press blog offered a relatively straightforward citation, while Keith Uhlich of The House Next Door caught my Kenneth Branagh reference.  Meanwhile Jim Emerson, citing a 1990 article by Richard Corliss, emphasizes a point I wish I’d given more attention: the long history of social critics decrying a new technology’s effect on film criticism.  Dozens of people, including some of my commenters, pointed out the absurdity of characterizing David Bordwell as a “postmodern” Harry Knowles.
• In other news, I participated in a roundtable on religion in the blogosphere at the Social Science Research Council’s Immanent Frame blog.
• Friend of the blog, and the filmmaker behind Clean Freak and The Proper Care and Feeding of an American Messiah, Chris Hansen has a trailer for his latest movie, Endings.
• Matt Dentler points to the new OK Go video for their song, “This Too Shall Pass,” which features one of the most impressive Rube Goldberg machines I’ve ever seen.
• Ted Hope has a discussion of the Tribeca Film Festival’s decision to make some of their films available through video on demand (VOD).  Hope points out that the failure of the Sundance-YouTube model was avoidable and offers some suggestions for making the festival-VOD model work better for festivals and filmmakers.

The latest paean to print-based film criticism, Thomas Doherty’s Chronicle of Higher Education article, “The Death of Film Criticism,” surveys the recent history of film criticism and concludes that today’s digital “young punks” are happily supplanting all pretense of literacy and seriousness in order to pour out their “visceral and emotional” responses to films all over the (digital) page.  Doherty is weighing in on a debate that has been circulating for several years now online and in print–I weighed in on this very debate about film blogging in Reinventing Cinema–and reaches a not terribly surprising conclusion that the internet age has threatened a form that featured such luminaries as Carl Sandburg and that reached its apotheosis with the debates between Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris.  It’s a powerful and persuasive narrative, especially when juxtaposed against job market crises in academia and in journalism, but in treating film criticism as a genre, it obscures quite a bit.

To be fair, Doherty acknowledges that a number of prominent traditional film critics have found new voices on the web, citing examples such as David Bordwell and FlowTV, but even there, the suggestion is that Bordwell is a reluctant blogger, “feeling the…heat” of the digitalization of everything rather than recognizing that Bordwell and others have found a medium that allows for a more conversational, and yes, potentially obsessive, focus on film analysis.  Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s blog posts, like those produced by many other film bloggers, are like mini-seminars in film analysis.  Even more curious, Doherty seems to imply that all film bloggers, including Bordwell, seek to have an influence on box office numbers, a goal that seems rather marginal, at least in my corner of the film blogosphere.

Perhaps more frustrating is the generation-gap baiting that permeates the entire article.  Web-based critics are “young punks who still got carded at the multiplex” or “a man-boy of the people, visceral and emotional, a stream-of-consciousness spurter with no internal censor or mute button.”  The “gnomish” Harry Knowles is our “poster boy.”  In short, internet based film critics are young, chubby anti-social males who don’t get out much.  And we pour our thoughts onto the page without any reflection whatsoever.  Doherty is thus falling victim to what might be called the “immediacy fallacy.”  Just because blogs can be published instantaneously doesn’t mean that bloggers necessarily publish ideas without hours or even days of reflection, and even if they post quickly, their posted work is often the product of years of research and reflection.

Finally, Doherty sets in opposition blogs, with their conversational immediacy, and scholarly journals, with their significantly slower publication rates.  As a number of academic bloggers have pointed out, this logic represents a misunderstanding of the scholarly ecosystem where ideas can be tested in the blogosphere before being expanded, developed, and reconsidered before finding final form in a book or scholarly article.  That was my experience not only with my book but also with an article I co-wrote with Richard Edwards on viral videos.

I’m not suggesting that film criticism isn’t changing.  The demand to publish quickly, to get scoops over competing web publications, can encourage writers to make provocative claims or to rush their analysis just to collect page views.  Assessing the place of a film blog in a tenure file still remains a sticky subject.  And the wide-open nature of the film blogosphere fragments the audience for film criticism, making it less likely that we will ever have a rivalry that matches the epic battles between Sarris and Kael,  but I don’t think anyone benefits when we place the present in competition with the past without seeing the connections and continuities between them.

Now that Kathryn Bigelow’s verité-style war film, The Hurt Locker, has achieved front-runner status for Best Picture at this year’s Oscars, the publicity for the film has directed renewed attention to the politics of representing war.  As Vadim Rizov argues, this is one of the benefits of this year’s awards season, allowing us to discuss these issues in a potentially rewarding way, even though he seems to back down from this claim when he suggests that political discussions give the awards season an “undue importance.”  In thinking about this debate, I’m less interested in coming to a conclusion about the film’s politics than I am in interrogating the grounds by which we try to determine them.  Although it’s tempting to accept the comments from director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal as definitive, it’s also important to place the film against some of the other paratexts–including the DVD itself–that help to define how it will be received.

As Rizov points out, The Hurt Locker had been pitched, until recently, as an apolitical treatment of the experiences of a unit of soldiers specializing in defusing improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and for the most part, the film seems to conform that on a formal level.  The experiences of the soldiers are depicted in a non-judgmental way, a perception reinforced by the use of a hand-held camera that seems to emulate the footage seen in a number of Iraq War documentaries ranging from Gunner Palace to The War Tapes, and the lack of an explicit narrative (hinted at via the in media res opening sequence in which one soldier is killed) only serves to reinforce that.  The realism effect produced by the film is powerful, making it easy to read the film as an apolitical observation of what it’s like to be in combat.  Here, even the Chris Hedges quotation that serves as the film’s epigraph, telling us that “war is a drug” can be read as politically neutral, an updated formulation of the “war is hell” cliche, to acknowledge the adrenaline rush produced by combat.

However, in a number of recent interviews, Bigelow has argued that the film is intended as a critique of the Iraq War, suggesting at one point that she hoped the film would help bring “closure” to the war before later adding that war is “completely dehumanizing” and that the depictions of violence against children should tell us that the film is taking a specific position against the “futility” of war.  Add in the recognition that Hedges, whom she cites favorably, has been an outspoken critic of the war, and it becomes tempting to read the film as anti-war, a reading that might be reinforced by the final scene when Jeremy Renner’s SSG William James is unable to cope with the tedium of returning home to a life of grocery shopping and taking kids to school.

But I think this reading–based primarily on the artists’ intentions–misses quite a bit.  A number of observers, including Jarhead author Anthony Swofford, have argued that no combat film is ever fully anti-war.  And although I am not prepared to agree with her, Martha Nochimson, isolates this “pro-war” reading, arguing in Salon that we are  aligned with James’s “expertise in defusing bombs and dealing with invisible enemies that our capacity to think about the larger context of the American presence in Iraq is replaced by nuance-free instincts more characteristic of the tea party movement.”  In fact, although the film details James’ expertise in defusing bombs, he is also seen as making dangerous and often risky choices that endanger himself and his fellow soldiers.  And, yes, we fail to see the Iraqi civilians clearly, but that’s partially because the soldiers themselves cannot see the Iraqis clearly.  The one attempt to bond with an Iraqi boy ends, as we likely anticipate, in tragedy.  And asking every war film to deal with “the larger context of the American presence in Iraq” seems to be calling for a political lecture, precisely the kind of film that most audiences have rejected, usually because they are too reductive.  But it’s not impossible to see the film as endorsing some version of our presence in Iraq, especially when you view the DVD, which includes a trailer for Jake Rademacher’s Brothers at War, a documentary that essentially offers a pro-war argument while telling the story of Jake’s experience being embedded with his brother’s military unit.

A much more insightful critique comes from prominent war critic, Paul Rieckhoff, the executive director and founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, who criticizes the film for its failure to depict combat realistically, particularly when it comes to James’ maverick behavior (although Rieckhoff commends the film’s depiction of adjusting to life after combat).  In fact, Rieckhoff suggests the film lacks “respect” for US soldiers and cites another that calls the film “insulting” to the soldiers whose job it is to defuse IEDs.  Rieckhoff’s complaints about the lack of realism are certainly hard to dispute, and even without any combat experience, I was well aware that many of James’ actions would have gotten him in trouble with his superiors or, worse, led to him getting shot.  But given that the film asks us to balance two forms of realism–a documentary realism that depicts actual combat and an emotional realism that depicts the addictiveness of war–I’m tempted to accept some looseness when it comes to depicting combat.

This tension regarding cinematic realism was recently addressed by Chris Cagle, who argues that The Hurt Locker’s documentary aesthetic makes us feel as if we are “watching a slice of historical reality.”  Although the film is deconstructing the war film (and, arguably war video game) aesthetic, much like many of Bigelow’s older films deconstruct film tropes, whether the buddy film (Point Break) or masculine visual pleasure (Strange Days), the reality effect is hard to shake.  But even with this deconstructionist approach, I’d argue that the film should instead be read as politically ambivalent, as sustaining both pro- and anti-war readings, and in some sense, that ambivalence depends almost entirely on the “war is a drug” theme.  In fact, the recognition that war is addictive works because of the adrenaline rush we get vicariously through James, the excitement at saving lives and the thrill of facing life-and-death decisions.  In a sense, we are torn between indentifying with James and seeing him as symptomatic of a war gone wrong.  Either James’ experience of combat offers an unrivaled form of excitement, allowing us to vicariously experience a watered down version of war, or the film invites us to recognize him as an object of analysis, with both approaches and readings potentially, perhaps even equally, available.

The Hurt Locker is a fascinating film, especially because of its treatment of the issue of representations of war, but it is not unequivocally pro- or anti-war, an ambiguity that is suggested not only by the reviews the film has received but also by the paratexts that help shape our interpretation of it.  The film’s realism effect is also complicated by its engagement with the politics of representation, making it an incredibly difficult film to pin down.

Update: By the way, Patrick Goldstein addresses the debate over the military response to the film’s accuracy in an interesting post on his Big Picture blog.  I think he’s right to point out that feature films, including those about historical events, often include inaccuracies, but given the film’s overall aim, I wonder if I’d take it as a compliment to hear that The Hurt Locker has “too much John Wayne stuff.”

I forgot to mention this yesterday, but Jon Reiss has pointed to an incredibly useful resource for people interested in how independent films are financed, while pointing out how how “stars” and film festivals function in the indie film economy. The survey, known as the AKA Report, was compiiled by Jeremy Juuso Consulting, and it is available for free here.

I’ve got a post percolating on the politics of The Hurt Locker, but for now, here are some quick pointers to some recent articles that are worth a click-through:

• Filmmaker Magazine was the first to announce that B-Side Entertainment, which specialized in providing website services to film festivals, is closing.  The Filmmaker blog post provides an incredible overview of the company and the services they offered.  Founder Chris Hyams sums up this history saying that “We find ourselves at a time of great upheaval in the film industry. We are somewhere between the old and the new world. Technology is altering the way films are being made, and there are new avenues for how films can be consumed.”  Unfortunately B-Side was unable to make a financial model work for their company.  Bad Lit and The IFC Blog also react.
• Responding to an LA Times article on Avatar’s “animated acting,” Kristin Thompson has a thoughtful assessment of whether motion-captured performances, such as Andy Serkis’ Gollum and Zoe Saldana’s Neytiri should be considered for acting awards at the Oscars (or similar ceremonies).  Thompson concludes that the digital changes to actors’ facial features transform the original performance too much to make judgments about what to consider as the actual performance too fuzzy.  I don’t really have strong feelings here.  I’m not invested enough in the awards to care, but I’m also not sure where we draw the line given the long history of prosthetics, makeup, and other “artificial supplements” to an actor’s performance.
• On his indispensible Twitter feed, Roger Ebert pointed to a Wall Street Journal article reporting that three major theatrical chains have now secured funding to convert as many as 14,000 screens from celluloid to digital projection, thus enabling them to project digital 3-D movies, thanks in part to the success of Avatar.
• One of the fascinating aspects of Redbox’s rise to dominance has been the attempts by Blockbuster to reinvent themselves, a process that seems to entail throwing things against the wall and waiting for something to stick.  They are reportedly exerimenting with cell-phone movie rentals (so you, too, can have tiny, hypermobile movies in your pocket), moving toward online rentals (probably too little too late), and hoping that they can benefit from getting many Hollywood features for rental one month before both Redbox and Netflix.

I just received a reminder that registration for the 2010 version of the International Documentary Challenge is now open.  Registered participants are given a general theme and then have five days to make a 4-7 minute non-fiction film.  The top twelve films are screened at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival and other theatrical and TV screenings possible as well.  Winning films are also placed on a DVD compilation.  In addition, many past Doc Challenge winners are now available for viewing on their SnagFilms channel.  I was a judge last year and very much enjoyed watching the creative works of so many filmmakers.

In a recent post on his blog, Jay Rosen has raised some important questions about the nature of contemporary journalism, arguing that in the attempt to remain objective, many journalists evacuate the truth-telling role historically associated with reporting.  Rosen has been making a similar argument for some time, correctly castigating journalists for falling into the “he said, she said” pattern of reporting controversial events, in which reporters seem to dutifully take down the two primary interpretations of a current event and place them into competition without ever checking whether one side has a stronger hold on the truth, creating what Rosen refers to a “false balance” between competing points of view.  In some cases this kind of reporting can lead to a kind of epistemological paralysis in which it is unclear where the truth lies.  In other cases, it can lead to the cynical manipulation of historical memory that Jeffrey Jones has recently discussed in a must-read column for Antenna. Or, as Jim Emerson observes, “Without reality-based reporting, nobody’s accountable for what they do or say, and democracy itself doesn’t work.”

Rosen’s specific complaint is about one single line in a larger article by David Barstow tracing the history and philosophy of the Tea Party Movement.  As Rosen observes, it is an outstanding piece of political reporting, a detailed observation about the nature of the movement and its participants, and with many newspapers struggling with their bottom lines, one can only hope to see more journalism just like it.  But Rosen also notes that Barstow leaves unexplored a guiding characteristic of many people involved in the movement, noting that at one point, Barstow writes that “it is a sprawling rebellion, but running through it is a narrative of impending tyranny.”

Rosen’s complaint is that such a claim can be placed under scrutiny and tested as to whether or not it’s verifiable.  If the country faces “impending tyranny,” he asks, shouldn’t we know about it?  If it’s not, he implies, should the claims of the tea partiers be taken seriously?  The obvious answer is, of course, that we should be worried about the possibility of tyranny, but a slightly longer answer, at least from my perspective, is that things are a little more complicated, specifically when it comes to defining precisely what we mean by “impending tyranny.”

On the one hand, it would be easy to conclude that Barstow is assuming the narrative is wrong.  After all, he’s writing for the New York Times, and he can, perhaps, safely assume that the vast majority of his readers already assume that it’s a bogus narrative, the reaction of a significant, vocal minority.  As one commenter suggested, Barstow may simply be taking for granted that “by simply describing their belief, he is telling the typical reader of the Times that they are nuts.”  To some extent, I think there may be some truth to this observation.  The article reads like a sociological study, and here is what the Tea Party Tribe believes.  But in terms of assessing why the Tea Party people believe this way, it’s not very satisfying, and it leaves quite a bit open to interpretation.

But as commenter Robert Morris points out, many of the changes that are taking place–restrictions on smoking in public places or even the requirement to obtain health insurance–look like tyranny to many of the people who disagree with these policy changes.  Growing up in the south and attending an evangelical college, I heard countless references to other forms of “tyranny:” affirmative action policies, bans on school prayer, legalized abortion.  Although these policies seem to be rather unlike traditional notions of tyranny, they are quite often felt that way, making any simple interpretation or measurement of that claim a little more complicated.  Morris’s comment helps to flesh out why the Tea Partiers may believe the “impending tyranny” narrative, but he still takes us back to the “he said/she said” paradigm when he suggests that taking a position on whether tyranny is imminent would be “a slap in the face” of Tea Partiers.  We are still stuck with the debate about the nature of government rule and whether our liberty is threatened.

To that extent, I absolutely share Rosen’s belief that the Times article could have gone further in testing the validity of that narrative, of unpacking that claim a little further.  But instead of seeing that phrase–however calculated–as illustrating a gap in Barstow’s reporting, it could be read as a productive lens through which the politics of the movement can be read. If Tea Partiers feel a sense of “impending tyranny,” why do they feel that way?  What are the cultural, social, or political factors at play here?  This line looks to me like the beginning of a deeper analysis, not necessarily an endpoint.  As Barstow observes in a CJR interview, the Tea Partiers are the product of a number of social forces, and many of their views have a much longer history.  In fact, the article seems to be a “productive” one in that it has inspired a deeper conversation about the current political movement, and in that sense, I don’t think that the article (or a single line within it) should be read in isolation.  It is a keen insight and, hopefully, a launching point for further dialogue.

Scott Cooper’s lo-fi drama, Crazy Heart (IMDB) focuses on down-on-his-luck country singer, Bad Blake, a hard-drinking but talented singer-songwriter who seems meant to recall the outlaw country musicians such as Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard, and Johnny Cash, a connection that is only reinforced through Bridges’ resemblance to  a slightly less scruffy Kris Kristofferson.  He’s the guy who has tons of musical talent, but thanks to bad luck or his own stubbornness, never made it big. Now he’s playing every low-rent bar and bowling alley in cities all over the southwest.  West Texas, Santa Fe, New Mexico, back to Houston.  Bad seems to stumble from gig to gig, calling his agent, pleading for a final opportunity at the mainstream success that has always eluded him.  And despite his hard drinking ways, Bad does show up at every gig, in one case stopping in the middle of a song to leave the stage and vomit in a back alley before coming back for the big finish.

Although the romance plot with Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Jean, a journalist who knows her country music (she name drops Lefty Frissell) seems to offer him the clearest shot at redemption, Bad seems even more focused on his relationship with Tommy Sweet, an attractive, young, rising country star (played by Colin Farrell).  Bad expresses frustration that Tommy seems to have neglected his mentor, choosing to focus on what “his label” wants rather than on loyalty to an old friend.  And although the film seemed to be derivative of a number of films, including co-star Robert Duvall’s own film, Tender Mercies, I found this conflict between Tommy and Bad to be worth addressing, in large part because it seems to replay, yet again, one of the central thematic devices of contemporary indie cinema: the conflict between indie and mainstream itself.

I’ve been reading Geoff King’s Indiewood, USA this week, and one of the more compelling observations King makes is that many of Charlie Kaufman’s scripts, especially Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, play out this opposition thematically, whether through Craig’s puppet shows or through the challenges of screenwriting for studios. Even last year’s acting Oscar-bait, The Wrestler, seems to offer a redemptive depiction of the pure physicality of minor league wrestlers like Randy, as compared to the fakery of commercial wrestling.  I’m not entirely sure that I should be registering this observation as a complaint: questions about the nature of artistic production are of utmost importance in our culture, and in the world of indie, it only makes sense to interrogate the role of capital in shaping those expressions.

So, yes, I do think that Crazy Heart is derivative, and I’ll even acknowledge that Bad Blake is a pretty watered-down version of the outlaw country singers he’s supposed to resemble (as one or more of my Facebook commenters observed).   But I think many of these films are trying to tell us something about the challenges artists face in navigating the indie-mainstream divide today, whether that’s in music or on film.  I don’t know that Crazy Heart offers anything new to that discussion, but I think it is symptomatic of a certain tendency in indie filmmaking.

This semester I’ve been teaching a master’s-level course for teachers called “Using Technology in the Language Arts Classroom,” and as usual, teaching the course pushes me to think about how digital tools fit into the pedagogical needs of today’s student population.  With that in mind, I’ve been curious for a while to see the PBS documentary, Digital Nation, directed by Rachel Dretzin, with contributions from Douglas Rushkoff, in part because of the attempt by the filmmakers to extend the conversation about the issues presented in the film to the web.  Like Henry Jenkins, who has posted a negative review of the film (but a positive review of the website), I found myself feeling frustrated at how the documentary framed a number of important questions about digital media literacy, but as an example of a transmedia documentary, I think it’s a fascinating case study, something that media scholars and others can use to powerful effect in their classrooms.

Jenkins raises some significant concerns about the frames through which the documentary engages with digital media.  We are presented at the very beginning of the film with scenes depicted addicted South Korean gamers, some of whom undergo a two-week “Internet Rescue Camp” designed to teach them to withdraw from the internet. Other sequences seem to depict family life as transformed with parents and children glancing at each other over a set of illuminated screens in what Dretzin referred to as her “kitchen experience,” while some students (rather anecdotally) report being able to write an “awesome paragraph” but not being able to focus for the length of an entire paper.  Douglas Rushkoff’s “conversion narrative” isn’t entirely convincing, either, and seems to be somewhat imposed on the film to give it a (somewhat tenuous) narrative arc.  Perhaps a bigger problem is the lack of understanding of what it means to “multitask.”  As Jenkins points out, some forms of multitasking have existed for a long time and often involve combining several mundane activities: watching a sporting event or listening to music or talking on the phone while washing dishes, for example.

As Jenkins and others have commented, however, many of these changes need to be placed in a historical context, and to be fair to the filmmakers, they did include Jenkins’ remark that these debates about distraction and multitasking and information overload have a much longer history dating back at least to the Progressive era.  Yeah, movies and kinetoscopes aren’t iPods or Crackberries, but it’s reductive to suggest that these problems and debates about literacy are entirely new.  More frustrating for me was the tendency to refer to today’s students as “digital natives,” an assumption that was (from what I can recall) never really challenged in the film.  To be sure, students today barely remember a time when Google didn’t exist, and many can navigate using a mouse in ways that surprise many adults, but that dexterity may not correspond to the more complicated forms of information literacy raised by web search and other activities.

In places, I found the documentary relatively helpful, especially in its recognition that real communities form in the virtual worlds of online games and Second Life, and the segment focusing on “Cooking with Bubbe,” an online cooking show featuring an 80-something Jewish grandmother, showed the power of online communities, as well.  The questions that the film raised about military uses of digital media were timely and important, especially the concerns about using done aircraft, in which pilots operating machines in Las Vegas direct airplanes to drop bombs in Afghanistan and Iraq.  I think it’s well worth asking about the moral implications of this kind of war: what does it mean when we can fire missiles or drop bombs 7,000 miles from any real danger and then go home and have dinner with our families or go to a PTA meeting?  It’s an unsettling question, one that the PBS version of the documentary can only begin to cover.

Which is why I think any critique of the film needs to acknowledge the mediating role of the Digital Nation website. Although it is no doubt true that many viewers will only encounter the film via the PBS broadcast, the conversation has spilled out onto the PBS website and beyond, illustrating the potential of transmedia documentary to create engagements with the world that are not always defined by a single perspective.  Viewers, like me, who are concerned about military uses of digital media can follow that path.  Or, we could learn more about one teacher’s use of a Ning to make Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird more accessible.  Jenkins is absolutely right that the supplemental material (a vast archive of deleted scenes, user contributions, viewer comments, and other material) can offer us a valuable lesson in media literacy: What was included in the PBS film? How was it organized? What might that tell us about the biases of the PBS audience?  For that reason, rather than dismissing the PBS documentary, I think it makes more sense to see it as just one component of a much larger work, one that is contradictory, complicated, messy, and often very compelling, much like the digital age in which we are living.

My first sets of papers and other projects are starting to trickle in, so blog time may be curtailed once again, but I am hoping to see Shutter Island again and may even have time to weigh in with a review.  For now, here are a few links:

• Via the Inside Redbox blog, a discussion from Home Media Magazine of what is now being called the “retail window” that Warner and other studios have instituted in order to protect themselves against perceived losses caused by Redbox and other rental services.  I’ve been speculating for a while that the “retail window” probably won’t do very much to increase DVD sales.  People who are looking to shell out $1 to pass the time on a Friday night aren’t the same ones who will buy a DVD for their collection.  I realize that dollar rentals drive down prices across the board, but are the people who use Redbox kiosks really going to be so driven by the demand for one specific film that they’ll purchase it?
• I’m hoping to write a longer post about the much-discussed History Channel JFK documentary to be made by conservative activist Joel Surnow (best known for his work on the TV show 24), but Jeffrey Jones has an interesting read of the debate over the documentary and how it comments on the contemporary politics of images.  As Jeffrey observes, “With a distrust of elites, a delegitimized news media, a populist-paranoic rise in anti-intellectualism, and a hyper-ideological political culture, what constitutes historical truth (and even contemporary reality) is and will be hotly contested in the foreseeable future.”  And a big part of this conflict is the variety of media platforms where these debates will play themselves out.  Documentary filmmaker Robert Greenwald has been spearheading one of the most visible responses in attempting to depict the Surnow documentary as nothing more than tabloid fodder.
• And if you wanted more evidence that the 60s will never die, even after most of the politicians and many of cultural figures have faded away, Jim Emerson points to Adam Curtis’s six-minute documentary that argues that we have all become Richard Nixon, thus turning us into “increasingly paranoid weirdos.”  The film is at its most powerful in tracing out the extent to which a “culture of fear” (to use Glassner’s phrase) permeates public discourse as well as the degree to which that has accompanied an increasing mistrust of institutions, especially political ones, to make a difference in our lives.  Although compelling, I found it a bit reductive in a few places.  After all, didn’t 52% of us (more or less) vote for a guy who promised to restore hope and to bring change to government?  That being said, as a diagnosis of how “we” have become atomized and skeptical of any public officials, it raises some powerful points.
• I haven’t yet jumped into the Film Preservation blogathon (organized in part by the Self Styled Siren) yet, but I will point to Catherine Grant’s contribution, which starts with one of my favorite meditations on the materiality of film: Bill Morrison’s Decasia.