Links for the Day (May 27th, 2007)

Links for the Day (May 27th, 2007)

By Keith Uhlich on May 27, 2007 in Links for the Day Jump to Comments (0)

1. "All Entertainment All the Time ": Ray Carney dedicates Page 74 of his website's "Letters" section to a fascinating essay excerpt by Mark Edmundson.

["More and more, we Americans like to watch (and not to do). In fact watching is our ultimate addiction. My students were the progeny of two hundred available cable channels and omnipresent Blockbuster outlets. They grew up with their noses pressed against the window of that second spectral world that spins parallel to our own, the World Wide Web. There they met life at second or third hand, peering eagerly, taking in the passing show, but staying remote, apparently untouched by it. So conditioned, they found it almost natural to come at the rest of life with a sense of aristocratic expectation: "What have you to show me that I haven't yet seen?".... The classroom atmosphere they most treasured was relaxed, laid-back, cool. The teacher should never get exercised about anything, on pain of being written off as a buffoon. Nor should she create an atmosphere of vital contention, where students lost their composure, spoke out, became passionate, expressed their deeper thoughts and fears, or did anything that might cause embarrassment. Embarrassment was the worst thing that could befall one; it must be avoided at whatever cost."]

***
2. "Paul Newman says he's given up acting": More time to focus on Newman's Own Lemonade.

["Paul Newman says he's given up acting. "I'm not able to work anymore as an actor at the level I would want to," Newman, 82, told ABC's "Good Morning America" on Thursday. "You start to lose your memory, your confidence, your invention. So that's pretty much a closed book for me." Newman, star of films such as "Hud," "Cool Hand Luke" and "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," added: "I've been doing it for 50 years. That's enough.""]

***
3. "Celine & Julie: the typeface": Pat Graham's first encounter with a Jacques Rivette masterpiece.

["Sometimes it helps not to know anything . . . Coming to Celine and Julie Go Boating at the Film Center two weeks ago with "fresh eyes," so to speak (see post and comments for May 15), I wondered what I could possibly find there that hadn't already been analyzed to death—written about, pontificated on, etc. Obviously not a lot, since if someone like yours truly can come up with an idea, then somebody else already has. So surprise, surprise, from the very first frame: that art nouveau lettering in the titles and credits. Where's it coming from, what's it all about?"]

***
4. "Dreamgirls (USA, 2006, Bill Condon) and Blood Diamond (USA, 2006, Ed Zwick) are given the old one-two one-two, snicker-snack, and then we all go galumphing back": Dan Jardine and Ben Livant suffer for their art.

["I am postponing the cooking of supper to be followed by the watching of... Dreamgirls... sigh; goddamn wife hit the video store. She also brought home Blood Diamond, about which I am considerably more enthusiastic. Seen it?"]

***
5. "Plug-Ugly": Andrew Tracy on 28 Weeks Later and the state of cinema.

["The smugness that emanates from these films is only fitting considering that they've appointed themselves de facto textbooks of twisted civic duty, of moral instruction in the "realities" of an ugly world. Watching these films, it is implied, is good for you, the "bleaker" and "darker" the better. It's the kind of mindset that leads reviewers to praise children being hung and limbs being hacked off in kiddie studio fare like Pirates of the Caribbean 3 for being "uncompromising" (uncompromising of what?). Ugliness, pointless and unrevealing ugliness, is the coin of this new realm, and like currency, it simply circulates around and around on its mercenary way. The unnerving and terrifying cinematic power of the original Chainsaws and Living Deads transcended their generic packaging and filtered into the world at large; their inheritors package an unnerving and terrifying world and serve it back in consumable portions. 28 Weeks Later and its ilk do not make one reflect on the ugliness of the world, but on the needless ugliness of the far narrower film world. To look away from this garbage is not to refuse to face reality, but to look towards more rewarding films."]

***
Clip of the Day: Paul Martin points us to our Clip of the Day, a more than brief profile of filmmaker Errol Morris.

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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

TAGS: links for the day

Not only in the last 45 seconds, jim, but at the very biginning as well: Robert Carlyle leaving his wife to the crazies to save himself...then Carlyle lying to his kids about her "death" to make it easier for himself...that not selfish?!?

Apart from that there are several scenes in the movie that I found just sadistic for sadisms sake: in the scene where Carlyle kills his wife, for example, or later on when the sniper gets burned alive by his fellow soldiers, or when Caryle kills the doctor . in all those scnes the cameras shows way more than is neccessary to make the point. By doing this the filmmakers show us what they are really after - there is no "humanism", no decency in those scenes, the filmmakers want us to get off on their "clever violence" ("wow! great idea - the camera inside the night vision smashing the girls' head to pieces...!!").
Just remember how romero handled comparable moments, never taking away the victims dignity - at least if it was one the characters we were supposed to identify with. But then again: what "characters" were there in 28 WEEKS anyway?!

I also I didn't like the impression that those crazies are kind of "stand ins" for rioting terrorists, especially since there is not a hint of the ambivalence romero gave his creatures in the LIVING DEAD-movies or in THE CRAZIES.

Oh yes, and: was I the only one to find it just silly that Carlyle seems to be an "intelligent" crazy/zombie, popping up everywhere his kids are...
Posted by kai on 2007-06-05 10:49:00 Here's my problem. I'm fascinated by that whole zombie metaphor thing. I'd like to see 28 Days Later - it looks very intelligent and scary and well made. But I just don't want to live with those images afterwards. What does that make me?
Posted by W P on 2007-06-05 01:49:00 "28 Weeks Later" is filled with images of people doing the right thing and being killed almost immediately. But not for a second does the film suggest they should have behaved selfishly.

Yeah it does. For the last 45 seconds. If the "good guys" had just followed their orders, Europe wouldn't have been infected.
Posted by jim treacher on 2007-05-31 05:26:00 The operative word is "conditioned." I was particularly interested in this bit:

Am I wrong to think that the kind of education on offer in the humanities now is in some measure an education for empire? The people who administer an empire need certain very precise capacities. They need to be adept technocrats. They need the kind of training that will allow them to take up an abstract and unfelt relation to the world and its peoplesâ€”a cool relation, as it were.

That resonates with this, from Spengler's Decline of the West:

All that remains in the post-history of a Culture is the struggle for mere power, for animal advantage per se. Unreason, biology, begins to dominate. Questions are no longer felt as questions and are not asked.

There is no need now, as there was for Baroque princes, to impose military-service liability on the subject -- one whips their souls with articles, telegrams, and pictures until they clamour for weapons and force their leaders into a conflict to which they willed to be forced. This is the end of democracy. If in the world of truth it is proof that decides all, in that of facts it is success.

But then:

Men are tired to disgust of money-economy. They hope for salvation from somewhere or other, for some real thing of honour and chivalry, of inward nobility, of unselfishness and duty. And now dawns the time when the form-filled powers of the blood, which the rationalism of the Megalopolis has suppressed, reawaken in the depths.

Caesarism consists of the unchained might of colossal facts. Caesarism grows on the soil of Democracy.
Posted by sargent on 2007-05-29 03:55:00 Ben and I are somewhat relieved that the Dreamgirls/Blood Diamond-lovers don't haunt these halls, though I have heard say that a scrap can be good for the blood.
Posted by Dan Jardine on 2007-05-28 18:10:00 Anon writes: "I hear Edmundsonâ€™s criticism about university trends from people I know to be inspiring, wonderful teachers, too. Whatever his particular deal might be-â€”and you seem to have been bothered by his tone and approach far more than I was-â€”you canâ€™t write off what he says." And adds, "If the best thing that can be said about the compromises is that they donâ€™t make learning impossible, shouldnâ€™t we be questioning them? The changes that Edmundson describes perpetuate passivity by plugging universities into business models where arts and literature are not something special and sublime, to say the least."

I am reluctant to go further with this discussion without reading the book from which Edmundson's rant is excerpted, 2004's "Why Read?"

But for whatever it's worth, I don't think any changes short of a state of war, famine, extreme poverty, etc., make learning impossible.

True, many students are just occupying chairs and running out the clock till they graduate -- that has always been the case. Many teachers are so frustrated by indifference of various sorts -- and lack that spark that ignites curiosity in students who might not otherwise care -- that they blame an entire generation and culture, rather than zero in on the handful of students who do give a damn. And that has always been the case, too.

I didn't mean to suggest that everything's hunky-dory or that we shouldn't be talking about the anti-intellectualism that pervades nearly every aspect of American life and to some extent always has. (It's endorsed right at the top, in the White House -- the latest in a long line of politicians who flatter yahoos by declaring war against eggheads and "elites.")

But I am wary of directing even a sliver of outrage at those young slabs of meat with names that want only to be entertained, because I am not convinced they're as indifferent and unreachable as complainants would have us believe. Am I naive, or just optimistic?

I agree that good and bad teachers both bond over this presumption that The System makes teaching difficult and rewards brats who don't care about anything but keeping their GPA's up. But as I noted in my first comment, I heard variations of the same complaints twenty years ago, and if you go back and read writing about academia in the 1960s, you'll hear similar complaints.

My point is that every generation, the means of interacting with life changes to the point where teachers feel threatened by it, and think they're being rendered irrelevant, neutered, turned into corporate wage slaves, etc. And I remain suspicious of that. My touchstone for this mentality is my late grandfather's declaration that there was no good popular music made after 1950. That might have been true from his POV, but others can, and should, beg to differ.

The under-30 generation is not passively consuming media -- YouTube, mash-up short films and songs, homemade animation, sample-reliant hip-hop, do-it-yourself indie filmmaking, online literary, film and music magazines, the proliferation of bloggers (a few of whom are on this site's contributors masthead, and who are appallingly young to be such good writers), the ongoing argument over downloaded and cracked software, music, movies, etc., -- all these things point to a curiousity, a self-starter mentality, a dissatisfaction with how things are, that is the opposite of the passivity and blandly thuggish entitlement Edmundson describes. Maybe he just ended up with an unrepresentative sample of entitled goons in his courses; if so, that's too bad. But I also wonder if he's just at a loss as to how to communicate with them, and thinks any deviation from the processes that shaped his teaching style amounts to a capitulation. (I wonder, if Edmundson were writing this book today, rather than in 2003 or 2004, would he have made the same complaints? Was he extrapolating a generational characterization based on the classes he was teaching, and his conversations with other teachers?)

By all means, let's talk about ways to make the university experience more challenging, more conducive to real conversation and thought. But starting the discussion with what sounds like an elaborate variation of, "These damned kids today don't care about anything but having fun" is not constructive.
Posted by Matt Zoller Seitz on 2007-05-27 21:05:00 MZS: preferring instead to front-load blame for the college's popularity-contest teacher rating system and Club Med-style brochures, and for that matter, the systemic failure to educate students in critical thinking, onto the students. The students are the symptom, but the way Edmudson unloads on them, you'd think they were the cause.

Itâ€™s very much a systemic problem, where itâ€™s hard to pinpoint causes and effects. But his criticism correctly points out how the educational capacity of universities-â€”their primary purpose-â€”suffers because of â€œcompromisesâ€ that cater to consumerist student demands. If heâ€™s frustrated with students who hungrily embrace a way of business without regard to how it affects their learning and a societyâ€™s educational institutions, I can certainly understand that. Itâ€™s precisely because these students are obviously bright, thinking individuals that it is so disheartening.

To make the inevitable comparison to movies, however, you wonâ€™t find me blaming audiences for bad movies or something. Thatâ€™s in some ways a harder discussion. With universities, itâ€™s simpler because theyâ€™re a different animal than the culture-market chimera of cinema: part of a good universityâ€™s value lies in being a privileged place of engagement and potential unbeholden to the latest business model, not in becoming just another attractively presented service.

MZS: I would not be terribly surpised to learn that the author's evident contempt for his students and their generation radiates off him in class, and that's a big part of the reason why he finds it so difficult to get them to care what he has to say.

I hear Edmundsonâ€™s criticism about university trends from people I know to be inspiring, wonderful teachers, too. Whatever his particular deal might be-â€”and you seem to have been bothered by his tone and approach far more than I was-â€”you canâ€™t write off what he says.

MZS: Beyond that, yes, grade inflation, university pandering to potential students, teacher ranking systems, etc., are all compromises that came about because of the business competition between universities. But I find it difficult to believe that these things make learning, or real teaching, impossible -- that the kids are just there to be entertained. That sounds like a cop out to me.

If the best thing that can be said about the compromises is that they donâ€™t make learning impossible, shouldnâ€™t we be questioning them? The changes that Edmundson describes perpetuate passivity by plugging universities into business models where arts and literature are not something special and sublime, to say the least.

(Of course, to be fair, that doesn't always actually apply to cinema in uniersities. Outside of cinema studies, movies are often treated as a kind of indulgence, a lite illustration of some other point.)
Posted by Anonymous on 2007-05-27 20:24:00 MZS: "The subtext is, doing the right thing is its own reward, and observance of the golden rule, especially when it costs us personally, is what truly makes us human." That's a beautiful articulation of some of what I took out of the movie. At this point I consider it the best 9/11-themed movie (and I came close to loving War of the Worlds); I agree with Tracy to an extent, but I think he's on the wrong witch hunting path with 28 Days Later (just like I think Ebert completely missed the point of Wolf Creek).

Btw, thanks for the editing work on the Holiday Special piece. It was fun but very difficult to write (what you see started out as a fourth original draft).
Posted by rob humanick on 2007-05-27 18:51:00 Anon: "The next time we gripe over this or that film's distribution, remember how some of that has to do with the decline in audiences brought up to consider arts and lit important and not another form of school."

I agree with that -- and I think it's the crux of the whole problem, such as it is -- but Edmundson doesn't really address it, preferring instead to front-load blame for the college's popularity-contest teacher rating system and Club Med-style brochures, and for that matter, the systemic failure to educate students in critical thinking, onto the students. The students are the symptom, but the way Edmudson unloads on them, you'd think they were the cause.

On top of that, you can rest assured that at the author's school, indeed at every school, there are packed classrooms full of attentive students who hang on a particular teacher's every word. I suppose it's possible that every single one of the popular teachers is, in some way, pandering to these idiotic consumerist swine the author loathes and fears -- that the combination of a fucked-up system, anti-intellectual students and popularity-seeking teachers and an enabling administration has made true learning impossible. But somehow I doubt it. I would not be terribly surpised to learn that the author's evident contempt for his students and their generation radiates off him in class, and that's a big part of the reason why he finds it so difficult to get them to care what he has to say.

Beyond that, yes, grade inflation, university pandering to potential students, teacher ranking systems, etc., are all compromises that came about because of the business competition between universities. But I find it difficult to believe that these things make learning, or real teaching, impossible -- that the kids are just there to be entertained. That sounds like a cop out to me.

Re: "28 Weeks Later" -- What I love about this movie, and its predecessor, indeed many zombie films, is that they are existential morality plays that amp up the world as we know it. Death is all around us every day, but it comes running after us in zombie pictures. We're all going to die eventually, but we'll probably die sooner in a zombie movie. God is almost certainly nonexistent, or he has a sick sense of humor. So why be decent? "28 Weeks Later" is filled with images of people doing the right thing and being killed almost immediately. But not for a second does the film suggest they should have behaved selfishly. The subtext is, doing the right thing is its own reward, and observance of the golden rule, especially when it costs us personally, is what truly makes us human.
Posted by Matt Zoller Seitz on 2007-05-27 18:44:00 Paul Newman, say it ain't true. Say it ain't true . . .
Posted by Nomi on 2007-05-27 18:39:00 I can't stand Andrew Tracy's writing, even though I often agree with him (The Departed, Hou Hsiao-hsien). I still remember being insulted after reading his piece on Pan's Labyrinth. He sounds like just the sort of smug and disdainful cinephile that I hate trying to converse with.
Posted by Anonymous on 2007-05-27 18:18:00 I've been intrigued with "28 Weeks Later" ever since I saw it.

I agree with Matt Zoller Seitz's reading of the movie...but it's interesting how, in the movie, "empathy, decency and love" continuously lead to death and disaster.

The image Matt cited is indeed moving; but it sours when considering that the the kid has become Typhoid Mary. To me, the final montage suggests that he's spread the virus. And if this is true, aren't the people who died to save his life at least semi-responsible for another apocalypse?

(I have no answer to that question but, it certainly makes the movie more interesting and ambiguous)
Posted by Gordon on 2007-05-27 16:59:00 MZS:

Agree on 28 Weeks Later. Understandable gripes, but wrong example. A good movie.

Disagree on the teacher rant. Both things can be true: teachers need to find better ways of relating to students, AND students need to learn things (e.g., close readings, productive skepticism) that they are not currently learning. Also, anyone working in universities now can recognize the consumer slant he's describing; and anyone working in public schools knows how we are now paying the price for the decline in arts and literature education. The next time we gripe over this or that film's distribution, remember how some of that has to do with the decline in audiences brought up to consider arts and lit important and not another form of school. It's easy to point to engaged self-starter communities (like The House Next Door) as exceptions, and yes, that's fantastic, but this is a broader problem.
Posted by Anonymous on 2007-05-27 16:56:00 #1: Edmundson intrigued me at first, but this essay eventually started to sound suspiciously like a rant I heard from one of my creative writing professors twenty years ago. Technological and cultural change has made this generation detached, uninvolved, more interested in surfaces than depths, afraid of their own emotions -- in short, not nearly as in touch with their own emotions as, well, my own generation, back in the 60s (or whenever the professor came of age).

Edmundson writes, "Instead of spending class time wondering what the poem means, and what application it has to present-day experience, students compile information about it. They set the poem in its historical and critical context, showing first how the poem is the product and the property of the pastâ€”and, implicitly, how it really has nothing to do with the present except as an artful curiosity; and second how, given the number of ideas about it already available, adding more thought would be superfluous.

By putting a world of facts at the end of a key-stroke, computers have made facts, their command, their manipulation, their ordering, central to what now can qualify as humanistic education. The result is to suspend reflection about the differences among wisdom, knowledge, and information. Everything that can be accessed online can seem equal to everything else, no datum more important or more profound than any other. Thus the possibility presents itself that there really is no more wisdom; there is no more knowledge; there is only information. No thought is a challenge or an affront to what one currently believes."

All teachers who have done the job long enough start to rant like this. The problem isn't the students. It's the teacher, who needs to either rethink how he relates to the kids (and whether the failure to connect is truly their fault or if he bears some responsibility) or else find a new line of work.

#5. Too much to rebut here. I admire Andrew's writing but disagree with him completely on "28 Weeks Later."

Maybe I'll try to write some kind of extended rebuttal another time, but for now, I'll cite one image: that shot where the young boy and the young girl are crossing that bridge, after total immersion in, and survival of, an evil world, and they hold hands for a bit, and then the boy lets the girl's hand go -- as if thinking, "I know she's my sister but I better not get too close to her." I was as moved by that shot, and by much of "28 Weeks Later." No film containing that image can be guilty of the sins Andrew ascribes to it.

Quite the contrary: "28 Days Later' is not ugly film at all; it's about the difficulty of preserving empathy, decency and love in an indifferent or hostile universe.
Posted by Matt Zoller Seitz on 2007-05-27 14:04:00

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