Moviebloggin'

6/1/2004 | link

I did, in fact, get outside this weekend (though with a group such that we couldn't go boating without someone bringing a copy of The New Yorker along to read aloud while we swam), but I also saw quite a few movies. The less said about Matrix Revolutions the better. Saved! had its moments, but ultimately fell flat. It occasionally seems to be trying to pass as a Heathers style black comedy, but it can't manage to slip off the kid gloves in time, and soon enough descends into Hollywood schmaltz. Even earlier on, the satire isn't really sharp enough to realize its potential—making fun of rabid homophobia is just a little too easy—you get a lot ballsier lampooning of religion on an average episode of The Simpsons. (Cf. Ned Flanders: "I've followed every part of the Bible! Even the parts that contradict the other parts!")

The only really worthwhile one in the bunch, courtesy of Comcast's "On Demand" was Shattered Glass, which I'd meant to see when it came out in theatres but never got around to. Now, the events in the movie took place in 1998, so I don't know any of the principals, but there was still the weird sensation of seeing a film semi-recognizably about my world. (Err.. the world of a D.C.-based political magazine journalists, that is. Not the world of a brownnosing fraud.) To say nothing of the shock of seeing Hayden Christensen, who broke cinematic ground by sending a mannequin to play Anakin Skywalker on his behalf, put in a geuninely solid performance. If there's one quibble, it's that the film makes Glass seem so obviously oily—rather than genuinely charming—from the outset that you don't really end up seeing how all those very sharp people could've been snowed for so long. (I hope it's not hubristic, incidentally, that one of my first thoughts was: If there had been anything like the blogosphere in 1998, this guy wouldn't have lasted two articles.) But that's the director's choice, not really Christensen's goof, and probably exacerbated by the filmmakers' need to impress upon outside-the-Beltway, apolitical viewers that The New Republic is, indeed, a big deal. The folks I know at TNR do not, thank God, walk around saying (as Christensen's Glass does): "And now I work at The New Republic magazine, in Washington D.C." in the awed-at-oneself tone of someone who's just shit a solid gold krugerrand. Perhaps surprisingly, this is one of a handful of movies (All the President's Men comes to mind) in which political journalists, Glass excepted, come off as genuinely sympathetic people with a deep commitment to getting things right. Kind of nice to see in a profession where people's "mixed feelings" often consist of an uncertainty about whether you're malevolent or merely retarded.

 

Ah, Crap

5/28/2004 | link

My hopes of seeing Watchmen on the silver screen are apparently dashed for the time being.

 

Everybody Say His Own Kyrie Eleison.

5/28/2004 | link

The Pope says Americans are in danger of succumbing to a "soulless vision of life." One hopes. The article has him arguing that "the U.S. church must study contemporary culture to find a way to appeal to youths." Have these guys talked to Tom Lerher?

 

Catfight!

5/28/2004 | link

Wonkette sarcasto-fisks the shit out of Michelle Malkin. Snarkalicious.

 

The Benefits of Being Wrong

5/28/2004 | link

Amitai Etzioni makes a point about public intellectuals that's occasionally flitted through my head, with respect to the academic as well as the punditocratic realm. It seems that, from the point of view of establishing a reputation, you're sometimes better off for being interestingly wrong than exactly right. I think part of Rawls's fame has to do with there being so many intriguing little nooks to poke into and tweak or poke at. And certainly, Nozick's not well known because very many other academics thought he was right—but it provided a rich source for liberal writers looking to prove him wrong, again, partly owing to the dense layering of provocative tangents and intriguing thought experiments. To take a wider view: consider how much less controversial scientific findings are than philosophical arguments. Then try to think of a science class where you actually read a paper more than a few decades old—Newton's Principia, say, in the original the way you still read Aristotle or Kant in philosophy classes. Within philosophy, the less controversial an idea is, the less apt it is to be associated with its originators: A student in a logic class will often not even hear the names Frege or Wittgenstein, except perhaps as a brief aside.

It makes pretty good sense: Something that's agreed to be right gets absorbed into our background knowledge and forgotten. There's not a lot more to say at that point: "That sure is right, Bob." "Sure is." There's probably a potentially interesting memetic analysis here about different clusters of memes "reproduce" differently, may be worth thinking about and returning to later.

 

The Movie the White House Should Want You to See

5/28/2004 | link

I just saw a midnight showing of The Day After Tomorrow, the mother-of-all-disaster-flicks that MoveOn is billing (with help from Al Gore) as "the movie George Bush doesn't want you to see." Cato's house global warming contrarian Pat Michaels took it seriously enough to pen a Washington Post piece denouncing the flick.

Having seen it, I now want to be the first to say: are you fucking kidding me? George Bush should be buying people tickets to this movie. It's preposterous from start to finish—maybe the D.C. audience has an unusually ironic sensibility, but the crowd was laughing from start to finish, during many of the ostensibly most dramatic scenes. Partly it's because of the movie's hyperformulaic, throw-in-everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach (A wave of hypercold is about to descend, freezing our heroes, and then... wolves! Words fail, seriously) and logic-defying plot contrivances (one of the world's most brilliant climatologists is required to act like a thorough moron to get the final act's drama going). But the movie's earnestness provoked some of the loudest howls, as when the film's Dick Cheney character issues a mea culpa for his previous skepticism about global warming, followed by a chastened, misty-eyed thanks to "what we formerly called the Third World" for taking in refugees from North America.

The catalyst for the movie's meteorological mayhem is an ice age brought on practically overnight by a vaguely specified disturbance in the Atlantic current caused by melting icecaps. But the effect is not to deliver some kind of chilling, potentially mobilizing warning about the perils of our current environmental policy. Instead, the fantastic and sudden global catastrophe turns a genuine issue into a sci-fi threat: It puts global warming in roughly the same category as attacks by Godzilla or The Blob. In the film's context, a debunking of the film's "bad science" comes off like one of the Comic Book Guy's cavils about the use of polarity-reversal on a Star Trek episode, or a fervent insistence that radioactive spider bites are not, in fact, likely to imbue people with a quasi-psychic danger sense. In short, the movie makes a genuine (if tractable) problem into high camp. It's about as likely to spur political pressure for more environmental regulation as the X-Files movie was to prompt demands for an alien invasion defense force.

Update: If Dan Drezner's roundup is at all representative, it seems my reaction was a pretty common one.

 

Adventures with Patrick Stewart

5/26/2004 | link

Now I now how Alex in A Clockwork Orange felt having to listen to lovely lovely Ludwig Van during the Ludowico Treatment. An ad for some cholestorol lowering pill called Crestor features Patrick Stewart reading doggerel, Dick-and-Jane style rhyming couplets about the drug.

To compensate, a story, definitely third-hand and possibly apocryphal, about Mr. Stewart. He's in Manhattan doing Prospero in The Tempest. His limo is seen to pull up, late at night, near a club. A young lady is unceremoniously ejected. He pokes his head, gleaming in the moonlight, through the sun roof and announces in a stentorian voice:

I am Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Federation starship Enterprise. Who wants to fuck me?

Someone leaving the club promptly takes him up on the offer. That may well be fabricated (in fact, if Mr. Stewart's lawyers are reading, it's pure fiction), but it's still entertaining.

Addendum: Colleague Jesse Walker adds another secondhand story, about Mr. Rogers.

 

Click It or Ticket

5/26/2004 | link

Maryland's running a series of public service announcements encouraging drivers to buckle up (or be ticketed). In one bit, an officer encourages people to comply with the law so that officers can devote their attention to other, more important tasks. Which, of course, makes one wonder: If they acknowledge that it's stupid for cops to be wasting their time enforcing seat belt laws... why make them do it?

 

Raffishness

5/26/2004 | link

The infamous Matt Welch was in town last week and mentions having met "the raffish Julian Sanchez."

raff·ish (adj: 'ra-fish)
1 : marked by or suggestive of flashy vulgarity or crudeness
2 : marked by a careless unconventionality : rakish

I'm shooting for definition 2 here, though since most of our interaction involved a variety of bars, 1 might very well be the more applicable.

 

Goodbye to All That

5/25/2004 | link

So, when I've written about music here of late, it's been about opera and indie rock mostly. But as folks who've known me for a while know, I was a hippie in a former life. So I felt a bit of nostalgic sadness when I was forwarded news by an old friend that uberjamband Phish has announced they're breaking up. Over the course of high school and the first couple years of college, I saw the band somewhere between 25 and 30 times. I followed them up and down the east coast one summer with a couple of friends, sleeping in the van and living on lot food and Waffle House. One friend was a bootleg geek in the same way some people are sports geeks: We would sit around for hours with his vast live-tape collection, debating the relative merits of different versions of "Harry Hood" or "Harpua." In the summer of '96, I drove up to Plattsburgh, NY for the Clifford Ball, the first of a series of of massive summer camping festivals held at decomissioned air bases. (I returned for The Great Went and Lemonwheel up in Limestone, Maine.) It was as good an example of a Temporary Autonomous Zone as I've seen, a temporary tent city with spontaneous markets in goods licit and illicit forming and finding equilibrium prices almost immediately. It's still also one of the best few concerts I've ever attended. Maybe later I'll throw on a few old bootlegs in honor of the boys.

 

Oy

5/24/2004 | link

I've disagreed with Instapundit plenty since the war started gearing up, but this post, which Yglesias links, is truly pathetic. Months after it's been clear to everyone that the WMD rationale for the war was bogus, a couple shells of sarin, source unclear, show up... and those of us who are still connected to reality and don't count that as a vindication of Bush are "moving the goalposts"? Sad and desperate.

 

In Rotation

5/20/2004 | link

Trip to Borders this week netted a bunch of albums I'd been meaning to pick up for some time but hadn't gotten 'round to yet:

• Modest Mouse: Good News for People Who Love Bad News
  
• The Vines: Winning Days
  
• TV on the Radio: Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babies
  
• Franz Ferdinand: Franz Ferdinand
  
• Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Fever to Tell

Happy with all of them so far, and also a bit heartened to see that the music I'm listening to is now apparently pretty mainstream: All these albums were prominently displayed as featured recent-releases above the music racks. While I wasn't actually a big fan of the whole Nirvana/Smashing Pumpkins/Pearl Jam axis that was flooding the airwaves back when I was in high school, it was at least (in retrospect) interesting, moderately original music. The kind of stuff you can recognize the value of even if it's not to your taste. It seems like pop music was a kind of wasteland for a few years after that, though: A steady diet of boy bands, Britney clones, fratboy bullshit, and unimaginative hip-hop for the better part of a decade. If albums like those listed above are the new face of pop, count me a happy camper.

 

Real Love?

5/20/2004 | link

When last we saw Jenny Roback Morse, she was holding forth on the link between marriage and human nature, undeterred by her complete scientific illiteracy.

Now she's produced another farrago of a piece on the subject—one of those that's so confused in so many different ways, you barely know where to begin. The central argument (or "argument," to mirror the conservative penchant for refering to "gay 'marriage'") is that:

[T]he legal definition of gay couples as married actually enshrines into law two presumptions about marriage. These first is that marriage is best understood as a contract between people who love each other; the second is that love is best understood as mutual affection. These are not neutral ideas; in fact, these presumptions aren't even true.

The first supposed premise is a little bizarre. Sure, marriage isn't just a business arrangement, it's a special commitment and a generous sharing of the self and a part of the great ineffable mucus that bonds society together and a dozen other things I'll inscribe on Hallmark cards to friends about to wed. But civil marriage considered as a legal relationship is more or less a contract, for the simple and good reason that the state can't and shouldn't inquire into any given couple's ineffable social mucus quotient. Whether or not any particular marriage ends up being "a generous sharing of the self" isn't something the state has much hand in and, more to the point, there's no reason to suppose that the denial of this premise has any special relation to gay marriage. In short, Roback Morse seems to imply that only heterosexual couplings can result in the kind of "generous sharing" she describes, and so a businesslike, contractual view of marriage is some kind of necessary presumption of recognizing gay marriages. She provides no argument for this because, of course, it's preposterously false.

Then we get Jenny's musings on the true nature of love. There's not much to say about that, except that, first, precisely the same symmetry applies here: We get no good reason to think her ideal of love is less possible or prevalent among gay couples than straights. More to the point, do we really believe that state recognition of couplings should turn on some contentious notion of what "real" love looks like? Does anyone want the clerk at the marriage license poking into whether their affective bond involves mere "mutual affection" or some kind of deeper "decision...to will and to do the good of the other"?

Even the repulsive Stan Kurtz at least makes a show of opposing gay marriage on the basis of claims that it will somehow undermine the child-rearing function of marriage. This piece is based on the infinitely more offensive, condescending premise that homosexuals are somehow incapable of any bond more meaningful than the equivalent of puppy love, or a schoolboy crush. (I initially puzzled at how the article was supposed to constitute an argument against gay marriage at all until I reached the end and spotted this assumption.) Employing her heretofore-unknown powers of telepathy, Morse tells us that "Most gay activists do not share this view of marriage. This is not what they are arguing for, nor what they seem to want." You see, it's really all about getting insurance benefits before another night out looking for anonymous sex partners at Kurfew. Of course, plenty of the rhetoric in the debate has focused on the unequal legal benefits afforded gay and straight couples, but then, that's what you'd expect from a legal argument. If the state suddenly decided to dissolve Morse's marriage—which would be rather poetic, actually—would she complain that she was no longer able to truly love her husband, or rather that she was being denied access to a set of legal relationships that are extremely useful when you're trying to share a life with someone? One hopes it would be the latter, though you never know. Gay marriage proponents seem to realize far better than Morse that those crucial intangible aspects of marriage, unlike the legal benefits it affords, aren't a gift from the state.

 

Guilt and Luck

5/20/2004 | link

I'm never surprised to come across some tendentious self-congratulatory piece of the "if you're not a liberal at 18..." variety, wherein some conservative muses on what kind of personal pathology might induce people to persist in the immature "liberal" phase past the age of reason. But it's always a little disappointing when philosophy professors stoop to it. In this case, the idea is that liberals are those who never had to work terribly hard, feel guilty about their undeserved wealth, and infer that success and failure in general are the result of luck.

The really indefensible part is that things like "effort" and "hard work" and "discipline" are set up in opposition to luck when, of course, whether or not you end up with a disposition to those things is itself largely a matter of luck. What were your parents like? What kind of community did you grow up in? Surely if anything deserves to be called "immature" it's the comic-book fantasy that each of us is some self-creating Prometheus on a hill of fire. Of all the reasons to be an economic conservative, this adolescent Horatio Alger notion of desert is surely the worst; there's something especially preposterous about seeing it advanced as the most "mature."

 

Scrabble on the Big Screen

5/18/2004 | link

Caught Word Wars this weekend with the Sexy Economist™: It's a documentary about the competitive Scrabble circuit which, like its spiritual cousin Spellbound, is much more interesting than it sounds. The film follows four stranger-than-fiction competitors: a Zen-spouting, Tai Chi practicing trifecta champ; a gangly, Maalox-quaffing nebbish from Brooklyn; a dope-smokin' "pre-Mecca Malcolm" from Baltimore, and a stand-up comic with a penchant for gambling and smart drugs. The film's actually much better than the game, of which I've never been a huge fan. Taboo, on the other hand...

The film also reminded me that someone really ought to make a documentary about the parliamentary debate circuit: plenty of weird characters, if it's anything like it was when I was on, and you could surely cull some fascinating and funny bits from the speeches... if you shot enough hours. Parli's a good candidate because, unlike policy, it's more rhetorical and doesn't require special training to understand the high-speed recitation of stats and evidence. And besides, we need something to supplant the execrable Listen to Me as the debate movie.

 

A Persecuted Majority

5/17/2004 | link

I've always found grating the claims of some pundits that Christians, a huge majority of the American population, are some sort of downtrodden, persecuted minority. Usually what's meant is that in a pluralistic society, it's less and less the case that one group's religious conception is woven into the public legal structure, and that cultural products geared to appeal to a wide variety of citizens will be less likely to consistently embed and celebrate the same set of Christian values. There's a lengthy takedown here of one such screed, David Limbaugh's Persecution.

 

Who grapples with blogs...

5/17/2004 | link

...should take care lest he become a blogger. I take some small satisfaction in noting that a certain Betty-Page-lookalike ex, who made a bit of fun when I started a blog back when we were dating, now has a blog of her own. It's good, though primarily of interest to Fresnans and others on the left coast.

 

Taxing Patience

5/14/2004 | link

In the wake of Brian Doherty's article on the tax protest movement, I've seen a handful of letters from folks with links to a variety of sites pimping elaborate theories showing how, if you pull a sentence here or there from a few statutes and Supreme Court opinions, you can "prove" you're not obligated to pay income tax, contra the pretty obvious intent of both the 16th Amendment and the tax code. This site has quick knockdowns of the popular ones, in case anyone's tempted to take this stuff seriously. What's infuriating about these is that the impetus for most of these guys is, I suspect, a perfectly reasonable normative commitment to the idea that taxes are too high and too complex. But "tax protest" distracts from the project of trying to actually prompt reform by convincing people that there's not "really" a problem because the income tax, in one sense or another, doesn't exist.

 

Of Human Bondage

5/12/2004 | link

My friends occasionally (and justly) make fun of the desperate libertarian tendency to apply the l-word to any work of popular culture that shows even the most meager individualist or pro-market strand. (The protagonist bought something he wanted—a paean to the power of laissez faire! Keanu is "the one"—it's all about the power of the indvidual!) But Secretary—in addition to making you need either a cold shower or a hot... well, anyway—did strike me as fitting the bill when I saw it last night. The story tracks Lee, a not-quite-right young woman with a penchant for automutilation, as she enters into an S&M; relationship (with her employer, no less!) that looks pretty creepy at the outset but, as the movie progresses, is revealed as a pretty thoroughly positive thing for both of them. As Lee puts it late in the film:

In one way or another I've always suffered. I didn't know why exactly. But I do know that I'm not so scared of suffering now. I feel more than I've ever felt and I've found someone to feel with. To play with. To love in a way that feels right for me.

The premise sounds more libertine than libertarian at the outset, but it isn't really, in any kind of shallow hedonistic sense: A central point in the movie is that all the spanking and bondage is a slightly weird but quite genuine way of expressing real love, and that both parties are emotionally healthier for it at the end.

Interestingly, what makes the movie work is precisely that it does (I assume deliberately) seem creepy at the outset: The director wants your initial response to be a certain unease, if not revulsion. That allows it to serve what Richard Rorty sees as one of the core liberal functions of imaginative fiction: It allows us to come to see ways of living that aren't (most of) our own as having a distinctive and real value, whether or not we ultimately want to embrace those modes of living.

/archives

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