Anthropocene Imaginaries: Climate Fiction as Communication Infrastructure

Early reviews for Adam McKay’s new film Don’t Look Up are out, and they are decidedly mixed. This new movie seems to continue McKay’s trend of real-world-oriented comedies that engage with current socio-political events. McKay has transitioned from broad comedies including notable collaborations with Will Ferrell to a series of based-on-a-true-story/ripped-from-the-headlines entertainments. His films adopt a left-adjacent critical stance even though their output is often ideologically specious (the much-lauded The Big Short recapitulates a narrative of outlier exemplars of greed rather than recognizing the contradictory logics inherent to capitalism, and the otherwise impressive Vice contains a baffling scene where Steve Carell’s Donald Rumsfield laughs off the notion of ideology itself). Don’t Look Up is being received as a thinly-veiled climate change fable, which makes it the latest entry in the growing genre of climate fiction.

Writing for the L.A. Review of Books, Katie Yee outlines the language of climate fiction:

“The landscape of climate fiction is populated by Greta Thunbergs. It features eerily mature kids, left on their own. While our instinct should be to protect and pacify the children, ironically, in these novels they are forced to be the purveyors of cruel truths as the adults around them are lulled into a state of passivity. The roles are reversed. The alarm here is new, electrifying, contagious. Just as Greta Thunberg speaks directly to you in the ads, these characters invite you into the fold of these stories. They warn us not only with the tragedies they face but with the careful words they use to recount them. Climate fiction is just as much about the tales we spin, the way we talk about our actions.”

This past July I watched The Tomorrow War. Attempting to justify my rationale for doing so reminds me of Bill Hicks’ explanation for eating at a Waffle House: “I’m not proud of it, I was hungry.” In my case it was because I was days away from a major move and was eager for distraction as I packed boxes. I had anticipated that the movie would provide some alien invasion schlockery but was surprised when the opening sequence featured the interdimensional arrival of soldiers who announced themselves as “your children and grandchildren.” These soldiers emerged into our present day to deliver a warning of humanity’s imminent destruction. Watching these scenes it was impossible to not think of Greta Thunberg, the climate change activist whose impassioned pleas for her generation’s future have thrust her to the forefront of the climate culture wars. Did The Tomorrow War’s scenes of soldiers interrupting the World Cup to deliver a message of impending doom from the future not evoke a remediated echo of Thunberg’s famous “how dare you” address to the United Nations?

It was an invigorating metaphor for contemporary climate anxiety, and I was interested to see whether the filmmakers would lean in to this angle or if it was an unintentional veneer on this science fiction story. To my surprise, there were persistent allusions to the climate crisis throughout the film. The protagonist, played by Chris Pratt, is an ex-military operative now teaching high school science. When we first see him in his classroom he is trying to engage his students who have lost all interest in their studies in light of the revelations from the future war soldiers. They wonder: why study for exams, or apply to college, or hope for any future at all when they have received confirmation of humanity’s ultimate demise within the next thirty years?

It’s an evocative illustration of climate despair, the pervading melancholia that has particularly affected younger generations who are not only facing the specter of a transformed world, but also reconciling with the associated employment prospects. The scene dramatizes the “eco-anxiety” that may even become a diagnosable condition.

Pratt’s character attempts to counter his students’ existential apathy by arguing that science is more important than ever: it will take scientific ingenuity to meet and hopefully overcome this looming challenge. His speech about the importance of science would seem on-the-nose even if it wasn’t being delivered in front of images of polar bears precariously perched on pint-sized ice floes.

Global warming also plays an integral role in the resolution of The Tomorrow War’s plot. Our heroes ultimately realize (spoiler alert) that the spacecraft carrying the alien invaders is not destined to arrive in Earth’s future but rather crash landed more than a thousand years in the past. Initially submerged in ice, the gradual warming of the planet eventually thawed the aliens out, thus precipitating their attack on humanity.

Many reviewers found The Tomorrow War’s climate change metaphor to be wanting. For some, the metaphor fell flat. Others thought the dull action movie trappings failed to live up to the challenge. The discourse around The Tomorrow War reminded me of the chatter surrounding TENET when it was released last year. A brief exchange of dialogue during that film’s climax suggests that environmental catastrophe is the primary motivation for the temporal war that fuels the plot. Many commentators seized onto this brief bit of backstory as the key to unlocking the labyrinthine narrative, with reviewers referring to the film as a climate change allegory, “Christopher Nolan’s statement on climate change,” and a treatise on intergenerational justice. Like The Tomorrow War, critics also derided the fact that TENET eluded the climate crisis rather than confronting it head on.

These commentators are touching upon the potential for climate fiction to shape political imaginaries, and suggesting that these films can elucidate an agenda for addressing the climate crisis. Manjana Milkoreit has written about the potential for climate fiction to influence societal responses to climate change by depicting imaginaries of the future. Yet the imaginaries depicted in these science fictions seem insufficient for addressing political realities. Returning to The Tomorrow War: this film imagines the climate crisis as an alien invasion, and the solution to the problem is to go kill the aliens with guns and bombs. There is something effective in how the film posits that the “war” cannot be displaced or projected to the future, but rather must be fought in our own time, yet the solution it imagines is overly simplistic and individualistic. As Matt Christman noted in one of his CushVlog entries, The Tomorrow War overlooks the fact that everyone is aware of the threat yet lacks the mechanisms of collective action that would enable them to do anything about it.

Similar critiques are emerging in reviews of Don’t Look Up. One largely negative review ended by asserting that “if the movie helps to do something about climate change, such critical objections are unimportant.” The potential of climate fiction to function as infrastructure for political imaginaries seems like a salient area of inquiry, but perhaps we’re asking too much of our entertainments.

Belcourt Appreciation & Pandemic Media Memories

For the Thanksgiving break last week I visited my family in Nashville. My parents have only been in Tennessee for a few years, so there’s not much personal history connecting me to the place, but after having lived there through the first 18 months of the pandemic returning this time felt like a true homecoming. That house feels like home to me now in a way it never did before, and revisiting the rooms and spaces where that incredibly surreal and disruptive period of my life played out was poignant. So it was good to be back in the house, and to see my family, and even the ornery dog. I was content to stay in the house for the duration of my visit but we did embark on a few outings including to a local cultural institution that has become a Nashville tradition for us: the Belcourt Theatre.

Movie theaters have always been among my favorite fixtures of urban environments. I lived in the Los Angeles area for more than a decade and the Southland featured a multitude of venues from multiplexes to repertory theaters. I have a great many fond cinema recollections from that time: seeing Donald Sutherland answer audience questions after a screening of Fellini’s Casanova in a small Santa Monica theater; sitting directly behind Christopher Lloyd while watching Back to the Future part III at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood; going to the famous Cinerama Dome for a press screening of Harold & Kumar Go To Guantanamo Bay (as a staff member for my college radio station); seeing a 70mm print of 2001: A Space Odyssey at the Laemmle Royal Theater in West L.A. Even attending concerts in former movie palaces like the Orpheum or Wiltern.

After graduating from college I moved to Austin, Texas. I had never actually been to Austin so my sense of the place was entirely informed by mediated impressions. My arrival to the city first felt real to me while driving down the highway from Amarillo when I spotted an illuminated Alamo Drafthouse sign amid the neon nightscape of urban sprawl rushing past my driver side window (I believe this was the Alamo Village location in North Austin). I had been a regular reader of Ain't It Cool News since high school and thereby knew the Alamo through the site’s reports of film festivals and celebrity screenings that Harry Knowles hosted at their venues. This was also years before Alamo expanded outside the Austin area (save for a couple of San Antonio satellite locations that existed at that time), so the theater chain still possessed an aura of exclusivity. My apartment in Austin was just down the street from the South Lamar location, and while I went to movies at various Alamo locations and attended premiere events at the Paramount Theater downtown, my favorite outlet for cinephilic patronage were the many excellent video stores in the city. I had been surprised that Austin had a more robust independent video rental scene than Los Angeles; in L.A. I was only aware of Vidiots, while in Austin I could patronize multiple locations of both Vulcan Video and I Luv Video.

When I lived in Orlando I enjoyed attending the Enzian Theater, which featured excellent programming but wildly uneven seating and service. One of the first places I visited upon moving to Pittsburgh was the Manor Theater in Squirrel Hill, which remains my favorite movie house in the city. Other film venues in the city are hit-and-miss: the Harris theater downtown is a stalwart location for independent/art house films and documentaries, while the Row House Cinema caters to the hipster clientele evoked by its gentrified environs with an on-site bottle shop, but otherwise squanders any cinephile cred or general goodwill with their uncomfortable seating and predilection for projecting DVDs rather than proper film prints.

My parents have been living in Nashville for the past six years or so, so while I have been visiting them in their new home I have also been exploring the city itself. Much of my appreciation for the area is culinary: my lifelong love of fried catfish has been supplemented by an appreciation for hot chicken and fried baloney sandwiches. But one of the greatest early discoveries in my Nashville explorations was the Belcourt movie theater. The venue opened in 1925 as the Hillsboro Theater, and today the historic building houses one of the premiere independent and historic cinemas in the country. It very quickly became expected that a visit or family reunion in Nashville would include a perfunctory visit to catch a movie at the Belcourt. My family does not have much in the way of long standing traditions, but one of the few things that would qualify is our annual viewings of It’s a Wonderful Life (historically these screenings coincided with Thanksgiving but over the years they have migrated to Christmastime). A few years back we discovered that the Belcourt regularly shows the film around the Christmas season and so we decided to merge these two family traditions into a single event. The first time we went to see Wonderful Life at the Belcourt I maintained a wary skepticism that we might be treated to some digital projection, but I was pleasantly surprised (and immediately won over by the theater) when the film was preceded by a notice that this was to be a screening of a 35mm print.

When the pandemic disrupted business-as-usual last Spring it prompted an existential crisis for movie theaters as we know them. The double-whammy of social distancing imperatives and the explosion of streaming video services called the continuing viability of traditional movie exhibition into question. While movie distributors and exhibitors considered how to adapt to the new reality the temporary covid closures became permanent for some businesses. In April I was heartbroken to learn that Vulcan Video was shuttering its doors after 35 years of operation in Austin. The news came with another sad realization that the Elizabeth Street location – my neighborhood store when I lived in South Austin – had previously closed five years earlier. Former employees penned tributes to Vulcan and I recalled the young video clerks I had known in my time, occasionally running into them at the South Congress H.E.B. while they executed a beer run for the other staff working the store on a late Saturday night. Then in September I Luv Video also closed for good. The store had tried operating curbside service during the lockdown measures but found that the experience of perusing a video store did not translate to pick-up ordering in the way that getting food from a restaurant might. Following the closure announcement the company owner sought a new home for the massive video archive.

One of the more positive developments in that early period of pandemic adjustment was the resurgence or reemergence of drive-in theaters. The shift toward social distancing suddenly made drive-in movies a viable business option; existing drive-ins benefited from increased attendance, and new venues opened to take advantage of the new environment. I had relocated to Nashville by this time and so for my birthday that summer we traveled out to the Stardust Drive-In Theatre in Watertown.

That visit to the Stardust came just days before I realized that my stay in Tennessee was going to be more long-term than I had initially anticipated. When I knew that I would be staying indefinitely, one of the first things I did as a newly-minted Nashvillian was purchase a Belcourt membership. In those early days of the pandemic the Belcourt adapted by first offering programming tie-ins with boutique streaming platforms, as well as offering online panel discussions with film scholars and experts. Later in the summer they began a drive-in film series utilizing an inflatable screen in their parking lot. Their inaugural lineup was a selection of Hitchcock films, and I made it out for showings of North by Northwest and Vertigo. A later lineup was organized around music on film and I returned for a screening of Stop Making Sense.

Those were fun, memorable times and I was glad both to have a welcome distraction amidst the chaotic uncertainty that distinguished those days as well as to be supporting a vital cultural institution. By the time Christmas rolled around that year the Belcourt had resumed theater screenings but my family did not venture out for It’s A Wonderful Life that season.

As I was preparing to leave Nashville to return to Pittsburgh this summer the Belcourt announced that they were going to be screening 2001: A Space Odyssey. 2001 is one of my favorite films and also personally significant, so I try to take advantage of any opportunity to see it on the big screen. It is also a film that seems to manifest in my life at times of transition or realization. For instance, last Fall I had settled into my isolated pandemic existence by immersing myself in esoteric academic study. The intellectual threads I was tracing lead me to consideration of Kubrick’s use of symbolism and imagery in 2001. While in the midst of these theoretical investigations I happened to switch on Turner Classic Movies on a whim one evening only to see the channel host introducing that night’s showing of 2001. Naturally I watched the film in its entirety. The very next day a series of articles triggered my news alert for “Kubrick”: a strange monolith had been discovered in Utah. Over the following months there were similar monolith sightings all over the world.

So it seemed appropriate that 2001 would appear at the Belcourt at this most recent point of transition in my life, just as I was preparing to leave Nashville, as if to commemorate the end of my pandemic exile and the personal transformation that the period entailed.

I was glad to be back at the Belcourt this Thanksgiving. In conjunction with the general spirit of revisiting and recollection that characterized this recent trip it offered an opportunity to reflect on all that has happened in the last year, as well as a reminder of the myriad things – large and small – that I am thankful for.

Thoughts on Nomadland and the 2021 Oscars

I finally got around to watching Nomadland this weekend, just ahead of the film’s anticipated Oscars triumph. My viewing was belated for a number of reasons. For one, the fact that the film was only available to stream on Hulu, necessitating that I create a Hulu account, made it easy to avoid. Secondly, I am generally ambivalent toward any films generating concerted Oscar buzz (this year I watched Mank and Minari despite my usual reservations...Mank was bad, Minari was just OK, and both films had baffling endings). My reluctance to see such films is heightened when the picture in question is reputed to carry social significance or is otherwise considered a “message movie.” The Oscars has a notoriously iffy track record when it comes to awarding Best Picture out of allegiance to some cause célèbre or to course-correct for the Academy’s diversity deficit through performative virtue signalling.

So I didn’t expect much of Nomadland, and what little I knew about the film only served to bolster my skepticism. I recently read a review that suggested the film’s warm reception was mostly carried by Frances McDormand’s acting prowess and abundant images of beautiful sunsets. Based on this appraisal and my own reckoning I anticipated that Nomadland would offer a shallow engagement with contemporary labor precarity dressed in the trappings of prestige filmmaking and wrapped in compelling cinematography.

Having seen the film, I can say that my expectations were subverted in some sense. For one thing, the cinematography is not compelling or even notable. Yes, the film does feature many “beautiful sunsets,” but their beauty lies in the intrinsic grandeur of natural spectacle, not in how they are presented or photographed. The film is often visually captivating because the desert and American West are inherently visually captivating, and Nomadland employs an abundance of on-location shooting to capture these landscapes. There is not much in the way of artful or creative approaches to the cinematography itself. I can’t help but compare the photography in Nomadland to Paris, Texas, another film that I wrote about recently. Paris, Texas features similar landscapes and traveling scenes as Nomadland, but Robby Müller’s evocative cinematography presents dynamic and engaging uses of lighting, staging, and composition in nearly every shot of that film.

To be fair, Nomadland takes a decidedly documentary-style approach to its mise-en-scène that I found very effective. Throughout the film I was often unsure whether the characters in a scene were unknown and amateur actors reciting naturalistic dialogue, or if the filmmakers had candidly captured casual conversations. Ultimately this distinction was a trivial curiosity: the various monologues that provide background on the characters’ lives seemed undeniably authentic and true to someone’s lived experience; whether these accounts had been lived first-hand by the person on screen or were merely informed by someone else’s narrative didn’t really matter, because the veracity resonated regardless.

The documentary-style presentation and obvious real-life inspiration is effective, but the film’s navigation of real world issues also introduces some ambiguous messaging that muddles the ideological overtones. Early on in the film the main character Fern goes to work at an Amazon distribution center. I was rapt throughout this entire sequence. The establishing image of the Amazon-branded warehouse looming over arriving workers felt portentous and vital. From my seat on the sofa it seemed like a glimpse of the Real underlying our current social arrangement; a sudden confrontation with one particular manifestation of the vast infrastructural assemblage that has helped to sustain supply lines and maintain a sense of societal continuity during the pandemic, as well as the ominous economic behemoth with which we seem so inextricably implicated.

I cannot help but consider the PR optics of Amazon’s participation in Nomadland, especially in light of the company’s recent high-profile social media campaigns (and widely-publicized social media gaffes) in opposition to employee unionization efforts. It appears that the company allowed the filmmakers to stage scenes inside an actual distribution center, and ostensibly include actual employees. And why not: the image of the company as conveyed by the film is one of cleanliness, safety, and friendliness. Fern sums up her experience of working for Amazon in two words: “Good money.” If anything Amazon’s participation in Nomadland seems like free publicity for its seasonal employment programs.

And the seasonal aspect of Amazon’s representation is a key component in the film’s murky messaging. Amazon is portrayed as regular and dependable: at one point Fern reassures her concerned sister by stating that she will be going back to work at Amazon in a few months. The Amazon warehouse reappears near the end of the film; its recurrence is presented as part of the rhythm of the nomad lifestyle, an indicator of the migratory cycles and seasonal hirings that shape the nomad’s cartographic course throughout the calendar year. In this way Amazon comes across like an essential component of America’s social infrastructure, a reliable source of employment that is ready to provide for those in need. Amazon comes to represent what passes for a social safety net in contemporary America.

This is where the film’s stance toward Fern’s nomad status becomes ambivalent, particularly in regard to its treatment of structural forces versus individual agency. The film offers some glancing engagements with capitalism early on: introductory text briefly establishes context for Fern’s sojourn by referencing how the closing of a factory had effectively eliminated the ad hoc town that grew up around it, and nomad figurehead Bob Wells is introduced giving a speech about the travails of worshipping the almighty dollar and a corporate culture that exploits laborers unto their death. Yet immediately following Wells’ speech we hear stories from assorted nomads present at the gathering describing the personal circumstances that led to their lives on the road. The common thread across these accounts is that the nomad or vandwelling lifestyle was a personal choice rather than a situation they felt forced into.

I recognize that the dialectic between structural factors and individual agency is complicated; that acknowledging the powerful effects of structural and systemic forces should not preclude consideration of personal autonomy and accountability; that even when our options and actions are determined or constrained by impersonal or impenetrable machinations, we may rationalize or narrativize our experiences through a lens of personal choice. Yet Nomadland frequently casts vandwelling as a personal predilection or act of empowerment in a way that not only elides meaningful engagement with class consciousness and precarious labor under neoliberal capitalism, but also underserves Fern’s characterization.

At several points in the film Fern rebuffs various characters’ offers of assistance. Family and friends offer her accommodation or point her toward charitable organizations. In each case Fern turns down the offer in a way that suggests resentment that her resolve and tenacity would be underestimated (she also pushes back against being labeled “homeless.”). I’ve never been unhoused, and my exploration of vandwelling has never progressed beyond conceptual contingency planning. However, in the past several years my life has been uncertain and austere. I have been profoundly moved by generous offers from friends and colleagues: to sleep on someone’s couch; to live in someone’s basement; or simply being welcomed into a friend’s social contact circle so that I wouldn’t have to endure pandemic lockdown in isolation. Regardless of my intention to accept any of these invitations, the offers deeply affected me because I knew the generosity was genuine, and I recognized how desperately I craved compassion. Fern’s responses to similar offers in the film lacks a sense of vulnerability or gratitude in a way that seems to bolster an implicit conservative critique of welfare in general.

There is a notable exception in the film’s treatment of vandwelling as lifestyle choice. Later in the film Fern attends a backyard cookout at her sister’s house. Her sister’s husband explicitly casts Fern’s nomadic existence as a personal choice and even privilege, saying that “not everyone can just chuck everything and hit the road.” Fern bristles as the assessment: “Is that what you think I’ve done?” The point is not elaborated on further, but Fern’s sister interjects, romanticizing Fern’s nomad existence as carrying on the proud tradition of America’s frontier pioneers.

The film ultimately seems overly long in light of its modest ambitions. In what was perhaps intended as a metareflexive approximation of the restless and perpetual movement of road life, the film drives past three suitable ending points and just keeps going. The first potential ending point comes just after Fern has left Dave’s family’s home, spurning his offer to live in the guest house. Fern stops her van along the side of the road, on what looks like a stretch of coastal highway in Oregon. She dances on a cliffside overlooking a stormy sea. I expected the film to conclude with this visualization of Fern’s commitment to unfettered freedom and life on the edge of a precipice. But the film keeps rolling and Fern keeps driving, back to the desert gathering of vandwellers. The assembled nomads sit around a campfire, tossing stones into the flames in remembrance of a recently departed comrade. Bob Wells casts a rock into the fire and intones: “See you down the road.” The camera pans up, tracing the rising red embers against the black night sky. This is a second ostensible ending but the film continues. 

Fern travels to Empire, the now deserted factory town from which she had earlier been displaced by the caprices of capitalism. Glimpses of a road sign with the town’s designation of “Empire” recalls Ozymandias’ ominous admonition. Instead of trunkless legs of stone sunk into the sand we see abandoned playgrounds and empty lots dusted with snow. Fern returns to her former house and walks into the backyard. The camera stands fixed to capture the backyard view from the house that Fern had described earlier in the film: the small yard is enclosed with a low chain link fence, but beyond it a vast and uninterrupted expanse stretches out to a horizon of mountains. This shot would offer another suitable conclusion for the film, and I think it would’ve been particularly poignant: the impressive landscape more than lives up to the images conjured up by Fern’s earlier description of her backyard view, and the vista compellingly conveys how the meaning of home or the specialness attributed to any particular place can often be attributed to the frame it offers us on the wider world.

The film gives us one more shot after the backyard view: Fern’s van back on the road, driving on the points unknown. I liked Nomadland more than I expected to, and it does offer a lot to appreciate. Ultimately the film never matched or recaptured the visceral fascination I experienced watching those early scenes at the Amazon warehouse. As the credits rolled I couldn’t help but think of Kelly Reichardt’s film Wendy and Lucy. That 2008 film has a lot of thematic similarities with Nomadland: the eponymous Wendy lives in her car with her dog Lucy; on her way to Alaska to seek work in a cannery the car breaks down in Oregon. The film presents the often harrowing and heartrending challenges that Wendy faces as she figures out how to continue her journey while being unable to afford the necessary vehicle repairs. In my estimation Wendy and Lucy offers a much more compelling dramatization of precarity through one woman’s navigation of life on the road. Reichardt’s film manages a nuanced characterization of Wendy that honors her spirit while avoiding an outright romanticization of her plight. It was also released right in the midst of the Great Recession, an era that Nomadland briefly name-checks but seems otherwise disconnected from; Nomadland is set in 2011 and 2012 (the timeline sometimes seems inconsistent) which makes it feel further distanced from contemporary issues and current events.
Ultimately I think Wendy and Lucy is a superior film to Nomadland that covers similar thematic (and geographic) territory. The comparison of the two films exacerbates my disappointment that Reichardt’s First Cow was completely overlooked at this year’s Oscars. That film received ample coverage a year ago because its March 2020 theatrical release made it one of the few Oscar hopefuls to be screened in theaters prior to the pandemic. It seems a shame that it didn’t garner a single nomination. I have to wonder how Nomadland’s fortunes would have fared without a renowned actor in the leading role.

Paris, Texas: Cinematic Space, Emotional Landscapes, and American Environments

Paris, Texas is a film about space. Space that you move through and space that you move beyond. The spaces between people, both inner and outer. It is a film utterly fixated upon landscapes: geographical landscapes, symbolic landscapes, and emotional landscapes. It offers one of the most evocative depictions of American environments in narrative cinema. It is a film about how the emplacement of memory provides a foundation for our identity and self-understanding, and how our imaginations of the places we want to end up provide conceptual and affective orientation for our forward movement into the future. It’s about the power of naming places and the power of a nameless place.

The film evokes dichotomy and duality at multiple levels beginning with the title itself. In addition to its dichotomous construction as two words separated with a comma, the title conjures contrasting spatial imaginaries. The disparate associations elicited by “Paris” and “Texas” respectively stage a conceptual distinction between elegant urbanity and rugged frontier. This polarity is reflected throughout the film in the juxtaposition between geographic landscapes and built environments, and in the way the cinematography frequently captures natural light and artificial illumination within a single frame. It is also reflected in the depiction of the two brothers, Travis and Walt. One brother wanders out of the desert and silently conceals his mysterious past, embodying a sort of wild unknowability. The other brother is immersed in civilization and domestic life, rooted in commerce and materiality by virtue of his trade. They are like a postmodern Cain and Abel, with one tending the flock and the other tilling the ground.

The film’s all-encompassing thematic and visual spatial concerns are established in the opening shot: an aerial view of a vast desert topography composed of rugged mesas, sloping escarpments, spindly buttes and jutting shafts of stone beneath broad blue sky. The airborne camera sweeps across this arid landscape until it finds a lone figure traversing the tableau. We cut to a closer view for our first look at Travis. Dressed in a dust-covered navy pinstripe suit, gold necktie, and red baseball cap, he casts an incongruous visage as a solitary testament to contemporary civilization amidst the timeless natural backdrop.

Travis soon wanders into a human settlement. He staggers into an apparent cantina housed in a small standalone building and collapses.

“The DUST has come to stay. You may stay or pass on through or whatever.” - Sign in Terlingua cantina

Glimpses of identificatory signage in the area establish the location as Terlingua, an actual town in Texas. Some historical context from Legends of America:

The name “Terlingua” actually applies to a mining district, and there were three different settlements located here in southwestern Brewster County. The name derives from two Spanish words, tres, and lenguas, meaning “three tongues,” called such for one of two reasons. Still debated today, some say “three tongues” refer to the three languages spoken in the area long ago – English, Spanish, and Native American. The second reason refers to the three forks of Terlingua Creek.

The notion of “three tongues” evokes the production of the film itself: a German and French co-production shot in the United States. The narrative also features many multilingual and international elements: there is a Spanish thread woven throughout the film, with Travis’ recollection of his mother’s Spanish lineage, his use of Spanish language and pronunciation as subtle indicators of his time in Mexico, and in the brief bilingual sequence with Carmelita; Walt’s wife Anne is from France and teaches French words to Hunter; and the Terlingua doctor who tends to Travis, Doctor Ulmer, speaks with an evident German accent. When Ulmer’s diagnostic inquiries are wordlessly rebuffed by Travis’ persistent silence, his response offers another lingual allusion:

Doctor Ulmer: Guess something must have cut your tongue off.

The lighting in Doctor Ulmer’s office presents the first example of the distinctly green fluorescent light that will be a persistent visual element in the film. Having received no information from his patient Doctor Ulmer dials a telephone number that he discovered in Travis’ pockets, a number that is revealed as belonging to Travis’ brother Walt.

Our first glimpse of Travis depicted him as a miniscule figure dwarfed amongst the vast desert landscape surrounding him. The first time we see Walt he is framed in medium close-up against the backdrop of a slate-black high-rise office building. While we can discern a field of blue sky in the distant background along the left and right edges of the frame, Walt’s figure is entirely encompassed within the borders of the tower, its monolithic surface defined only by orderly rows of opaque windows.

The scene cuts to a wide shot to reveal that Walt is not standing in front of the building after all but rather an oversized photograph of a building propped up against a wall behind him. He appears to be in a sort of industrial workshop and we see other massive images scattered around the area. This is our first introduction to Walt’s business of creating billboard advertisements. The initial image of Walt juxtaposed against the modernist office building visually establishes the character’s association with urban environments, and the subsequent depiction of his workspace strewn with oversized images further concretizes his connection to artificial landscapes. Walt populates the physical environment with images, and the interconnections between images in space and images of space will be a recurring theme throughout the film.

Walt flies to Texas to find Travis. A short scene of Walt sitting in an airplane with blue sky visible through the porthole window behind him dissolves to a shot of him at a gas station. It is a stunning shot and one of the greatest examples of how the film’s photography evocatively captures the contrast between natural and artificial light within a single frame. Walt is positioned in the mid-foreground standing beside and behind his parked car. He stands beneath the gas station overhang and everything in Walt’s immediate environment is awash in the green-blue pallor cast by the station’s fluorescent lights. In the background, electrically-illuminated signs and street lights trail off along a silhouetted landscape to the horizon line where the last remnants of twilight glow orange against the darkening dusk sky. 

Walt studies a road map that lies open on the roof of the car. He reads out highway numbers and place names as he plots his route to Terlingua:

“10 to Van Horn, 90. To Alpine, 118 South.”

As Walt verbalizes these numeric route designations he is visually embedded within a tangle of arithmetic iconography: a “99¢” sign on the ice machine behind him, the fuel prices listed on the gas station marquee, and the highway road signs visible in the background.

Walt arrives in Terlingua only to be told by Doctor Ulmer that Travis disappeared that morning. He sets out in his car to continue the search. Soon enough he comes across Travis, who is not walking along a road but rather only occasionally bisecting the paved paths as he cuts through open fields. Travis marches resolutely through grazing livestock and across glistening blacktop as if tracing out some invisible line guided by an unseen lodestar. He strides right past Walt’s stopped car without seeming to notice the vehicle at all.

“You look like 40 miles of rough road.” - Walt to Travis upon their reunion

Walt takes Travis to a motel. When Walt goes into town to buy his brother some new clothes Travis marches out of the motel room. He heads down a gravel road past a billboard advertising the “Marathon Motel and Trailer Park,” and sign poles bearing notices for “TV” and “vacancy” and embellished with the stars and stripes.

Walt once again gives chase and this time he finds Travis walking along railroad tracks. After looking down the stretch of tracks and telling his brother that “there’s nothing out there,” Walt coaxes Travis into the car.

The scene cuts to a POV shot looking out through the car windshield, past the sweeping wiper blades. The car travels across a rain-slicked road toward the fading embers of sunset beneath a canopy of dark cloud. The shot holds as the vehicle moves toward another neon-lit oasis of roadside rest stops and restaurants, illuminated marquees for establishments with names like “El Rancho Motel” and “Silver Saddle Lodge.” It is another of the film’s stunning landscape shots: the horizon line that constitutes the meeting point between the vast stretch of highway and the endless sky is rendered in the liminal luminosity between the setting sun and the neon nightscape.

In their motel room Travis sits on the bed and gazes at his reflection in the mirror, presaging the film’s climactic confrontation and emotional apex.

The next morning Walt stops at a gas station down the street from the motel before getting on the highway. While they sit parked at the gas station Travis speaks for the first time in the film: the word “Paris” spoken three times in succession. When Travis asks if they can go to Paris Walt assumes he is referring to the French capital, but the camera cuts to reveal that Travis is studying a map of Paris, Texas. The homonymous confusion remains unresolved for the time being.

When the brothers arrive at the airport Travis seems skeptical about the change in their mode of transportation:

Travis: Where are we going?

Walt: We’re gonna fly to L.A. You’re not afraid of flying, are you?

Travis: We’re leaving the ground?

Walt: Yeah.

Travis: Why?

Travis does not seem persuaded by Walt’s assertion that flying is “faster” and “easier.” Indeed, the plane stops in the midst of taxiing on the runway so the brothers can disembark, evidently at Travis’ insistence. After apologizing to the flight attendant for delaying the departure Walt admonishes his brother’s erratic behavior, explaining that he’s “not in the wilderness anymore” and can’t behave in such a way in civilized society.

When they go to rent a car to continue the journey to L.A. Travis insists on having the same vehicle that Walt initially had. After some discussion Walt eventually convinces the rental service representative to provide him with the license plate number of his original vehicle so they can search the lot and find the car.

Travis: How are we gonna go in another car?

Once returned to their rental car Walt drives while Travis sits in the backseat regarding something in his hand. Walt asks what his brother is holding and Travis responds that it is: “A picture of Paris. A picture of a piece of Paris.” The photograph shows a plot of land, mostly bare dirt, with a small “For Sale” sign embedded in the earth. Travis explains that he bought the lot of land “a long time ago.” Walt looks at the picture of the vacant lot again and says “there’s nothing on it.” Travis laughs and says: “Empty.”

Further along in their journey Travis tells Walt that he remembers why he purchased the plot of land. Based on something his mother once told him, he believes that he may have been conceived in Paris, Texas.

Travis: So, I figured that that’s where I began. I mean me: Travis Clay Henderson. They named me that. I started out there.

As Travis and Walt continue this conversation in the car their exchange is presented in a sequence of intercutting shots. Rather than filming the characters together in a two shot from the front of the car, the scene cuts between individual shots of Walt driving and Travis in the passenger seat. The shots are angled in such a way so that each man is positioned in a lower corner of the frame, while the opposite-upper portion of the frame shows the surrounding highway traffic and the roadside sprawl stretching beyond. The resultant effect is a multi-level depth of image where our characters in the car are in the foreground, the passing traffic of other vehicles on the highway occupies the middle ground, and the background is a swiftly-moving landscape of billboards, light poles, and McDonald’s arches. It is a visually dynamic way to shoot a car conversation, and an evocative depiction of highway travel through the material landscape of the American built environment.

As the brothers enter greater Los Angeles Walt explains that he lives in the suburbs but has his business “in town.” Travis asks what his business is and Walt explains: “I make billboard signs for advertising.”

Here again one of the key thematic distinctions between the brothers is emphasized. Through his business of outdoor advertising Walt is centrally implicated with the construction of the built environment, with the creation of material and symbolic landscapes. He installs signs and images in space. By contrast, Travis carries an image of space. His photograph of the plot of land in Paris, Texas represents a complementary inversion of Walt’s relationship to space. Travis’ clarification that his photograph shows only “a piece of Paris” indicates an awareness of the image as a fragment, rather than a totalizing abstraction of a place. (It is worth noting, however, that Travis’ photograph also contains an example of signage in space by virtue of the “for sale” sign; this detail reveals the overlap between the brothers’ spatial associations, and also demonstrates an additional dimension of how space is fragmented and parceled out.)

The brothers arrive at Walt’s home which sits on a hill overlooking the L.A. urban sprawl and the constant air traffic of the Burbank Airport. The first morning after their arrival Walt’s wife Anne finds that Travis has collected all the shoes from the house during the night. She finds the footwear laid out neatly along a low brick wall in the backyard where Travis sits with a pair of binoculars watching the planes taking off and landing at the airport. As he observes a plane’s departure a POV shot reveals that Travis is tracking not the aircraft itself but rather the shadow cast by the plane; he is following the part of the plane that does not “leave the ground” during its flight.

In addition to reuniting with his sister-in-law Anne, Travis also reconnects with his 7 year old son Hunter, whom he has not seen for the past 4 years. On this first morning as Anne is getting in the car with Hunter to take him to school Travis offers to walk Hunter home that afternoon. Anne seems enthusiastic about the idea but Hunter balks at the suggestion, telling Anne: “Nobody walks, everybody drives.” Evidently the son shares his father’s particularity about modes of transportation.

When Hunter sees Travis waiting across the street after school that day he ignores his estranged father and asks his friend if he can ride home with him instead. Later that evening Travis, Anne, and Walt sit around the kitchen table worrying about Hunter’s whereabouts. Walt soon finds Hunter hiding out in the garage, sitting in the driver’s seat of a parked car with his hands gripping the steering wheel. He explains that he is “just driving,” and avoids Walt’s questions about Travis by asking: “When are they going to make spaceships like they make cars?”

This scene is followed by the splendid “home movies” sequence, a superb centerpiece moment in the film. With the acoustic accompaniment of Ry Cooder’s slide guitar, the characters wordlessly watch silent Super 8 footage of a family vacation from years earlier when Hunter was only 3 years old. Well, almost wordlessly: the scene features a solitary exchange of dialogue between Hunter and Travis after the Super 8 footage shows Travis driving an RV while toddler Hunter sits in his lap pulling on the steering wheel:

Hunter: That’s me driving.

Travis: I know. You’re gonna be good.

Cars and driving provide an obvious throughline in Paris, Texas, not only as part of the overall travelogue themes and “road movie” motifs, but through salient dialogue and persistent character associations. Travis and Hunter’s shared preoccupation with cars and driving suggest something about motor vehicle operation as a rite of passage. There is also a semblance of automobility as autonomy, a tangible realization of control and self-direction.

The “home movies” sequence marks a turning point in the film. It stages a development in the relationship between Hunter and Travis, who demonstrate closer affinity following the scene. It is also the audience’s first glimpse of Jane.

In a subsequent scene the Henderson’s housekeeper Carmelita observes Travis rapidly flipping through the pages of a magazine. He explains that he is looking for an image of “the father,” and she discerns that he is searching for a visual archetype of fatherhood that he can emulate. She helps him try on outfits from Walt’s closet, and asks whether he wants to appear as a rich father or poor father. After Carmelita asserts that there is no in-between, only a binary distinction between “rich father” and “poor father,” Travis opts for “rich.”

Carmelita: OK, one thing you must remember: to be a rich father, Señor Travis, you must look to the sky and never at the ground, eh?

Newly adorned in his “rich father” garb Travis is waiting across the street when Hunter leaves school that afternoon. Father and son walk along together on opposite sides of the street, until finally coming together in the middle of the street at the top of the hill. It’s a charming sequence with Harry Dean Stanton channeling silent film-era physical comedy and pratfalls, and a wonderful piece of visual storytelling.

Back at home Travis and Hunter look through a family photo album, and we learn that Travis and Walt’s father was killed in a car accident. The revelation evokes not only the recurring references to automobiles, but also Doctor Ulmer’s questioning Walt back in Terlingua whether Travis had ever been in a car accident.

Some time later Anne reveals to Travis that Jane has been depositing money into an account for Hunter. Using the bank account information, Anne had the wire traced to a bank in Houston. With the knowledge that Jane makes a deposit on the 5th of every month, Travis determines to travel to Houston in search of Jane.

This is followed by an interlude sequence: a lateral tracking shot following Travis as he walks along the sidewalk at dusk. The camera keeps pace as Travis passes in front of a car wash where latin music can be heard playing from a radio, then across a freeway overpass. As he crosses the span a voice is heard shouting from off camera, growing louder as Travis draws nearer. The voice bellows an apocalyptic jeremiad over the din of the rushing traffic below:

Screaming Man: They will invade you in your beds! They will snap you from your hot tubs! They will pluck you right out of your fancy sports cars! There is nowhere, absolutely nowhere, in this godforsaken valley -- I’m talking about, from the range of my voice, right here, clear out to the Mojave Desert, and beyond that! Clear out past the Barstows, and everywhere else in the valley all the way to Arizona! None of that area will be called the safety zone! There will be no safety zone! I can guarantee you the safety zone will be eliminated! Eradicated! You will all be extradited to the land of no return! It’s a navigation to nowhere!

When Travis reaches where the Screaming Man is standing near the center of the overpass he pauses momentarily to regard the man, then steps off the sidewalk to walk around him. As Travis passes he reaches out one hand to lightly brush the man’s back and shoulder in an ostensible gesture of sympathy and perhaps understanding.

Travis tells his brother about his intentions to leave in search of Jane as they are standing atop a billboard while Walt’s latest advertisement is installed. In spite of his earlier aversion to leaving the ground, Travis expresses appreciation for the change in perspective afforded by the higher elevation:

Travis: Too bad things don’t look the same on the ground. 

Walt: What do you mean?

Travis: Well, things are clearer up here. Might clear things up.

Travis informs Hunter of his upcoming quest as they are sitting in the bed of his newly acquired pickup truck. They eat lunch parked along the side of a freeway beneath the sweeping spans and towering concrete columns of highway interchanges. Hunter tells Travis that he wants to come along to Houston, and so the two head out together.

Once they are out on the open road Hunter regales Travis with a brief history of the universe:

Hunter: This whole galaxy, this whole universe, used to be compressed into a tiny spot this big. And you know what happened?

Travis: What?

Hunter: It went *pchoo* and blew up! All the spark, everything went flying all over the place and formed space. It was just gas, it was floating around.

Travis: The earth was?

Hunter: Yeah, the earth was really gas. And the sun formed, and it was so hot that the earth just formed into one hard big ball of oceans; nothing but ocean. So there were sea animals, and under the water a volcano went *pchoo* and the hot lava hit the water and formed rock to make land.

This vignette expands the film’s spatial concerns from local landscapes to the cosmos itself; from the daily spaces of quotidian life to galactic timescales of evolutionary development. It provides further evidence of Hunter’s fascination with outer space: he wears a silver bomber jacket emblazoned with NASA patches and the space shuttle emblem; he sleeps in Star Wars sheets; he asks Walt when space ships will be as available as cars; he recognizes Houston as the location of the Space Center. It also offers another link between spatial concerns and questions of origin, reflecting Travis’ preoccupation with Paris, Texas as the site of his conception, the place “where he started.”

The duo stop at the Cabazon Dinosaurs tourist spot in Riverside County, just west of Palm Springs. Hunter calls home to let Walt and Anne know what he is on the road with Travis. The sequence provides another striking example of the film’s evocative photography of neon lights and illuminated road signs reflecting off the glass of a phone booth, another instance where the fluorescent lights emit a particularly green hue.

Further along on their journey Hunter rides in the truck bed and uses their newly purchased walkie talkies to explain special relativity and time dilation to Travis.

Once they’re in Houston Travis and Hunter track Jane to a peep-show club where customers can observe sex workers through a one-way mirror and communicate via telephone intercom. The peep-show setting continues the film’s occupation with gaze, image, and spectularity. I’ve already commented on how Walt and Travis are engaged with images in and of space. But Jane’s presence in the film is also always rendered through a mode of observation and imageability. She is first glimpsed in the silent Super 8 footage of the “home movies” sequence. Afterward Hunter tells Anne “that’s not really her, that’s just her in a movie.” Later in the film Travis gives Hunter a strip of photobooth pictures of Jane so that he can recall his mother’s face. When Travis finally sees Jane again for the first time in four years it is through the window of the one-way mirror; she is framed for observation and he remains unseen to her.

Yet the peep-show booths also reflect the film’s abiding interest in space, and in particular the kinds of spaces the characters have been moving through. Each viewing cubicle is themed around a particular generic location and outfitted like a stage set. The first booth Travis enters is designated “Poolside” and features set design and props intended to evoke an indoor natatorium. When Travis finally sees Jane she is in a “Hotel” themed booth decorated with the accoutrement of a scaled-down simulacrum: a mini-sized bed; a lamp and red telephone resting on a small dresser; a faux window partially obscured by drapes; the ubiquitous television set propped in a corner. When Travis sees Jane for the second time it is in a “Coffee Shop” themed booth.

These viewing booths are themed after spaces that we’ve seen throughout the film: hotel rooms, coffee shops, roadside diners. Liminal “non-places,” virtual spaces of transit, the generic spaces of transition between places of meaning and dwelling.

Paris, Texas is a film about space. Of course, it is about a lot of other things, too. The dramatic core centers around relationships that have become strained by emotional and geographic distance. The character arcs are about hurt and loss, about coming to terms with a traumatic past or narrativizing one’s personal history to make meaning out of chaos. The story slowly reveals underlying elements of abuse and addiction and rage. When Travis finally narrates the events that led to his solitary sojourn through the desolate desert the story is almost unbearably sad and evokes haunted histories and legacies of inhumanity.

So the film is about more than mere space and should not be reduced or essentialized to its surface elements of picturesque landscape photography or evocative imagery of urban sprawl. Yet even the film’s most personal articulations of the deepest human experiences find their expression through spatial language and imaginaries.

Travis: And for the first time he wished he were far away, lost in a deep vast country where nobody knew him. Somewhere without language or streets. And he dreamed about this place without knowing its name.

Travis conveys his desperate flight away from the calamitous despair that had overtaken his life. This flight led him into the desert, away from the maddening markers of civilization that reminded him of his own inhumanity. It is as if he intuitively sought solace or salvation in a primal existence apart from the intrinsically corrupting forces of society.

Travis: For five days he ran like this, until every sign of man had disappeared.

Travis tells Jane that Hunter is waiting for her at a hotel called The Meridian. The film once again asserts the geographic imagination through the name of the hotel. A meridian is a cartographic feature and suggests boundary, dividing lines, a point of passage or transition. The name is appropriate because Travis is providing Jane with coordinates: a hotel name and a room number that will lead her to her son.

The concluding scenes feature a recurrence of my favorite visual motif in the film: Travis stands beneath the greenish glow of a light post on the roof level of a parking garage, gazing out at a twilight sky cast in transitional bands of color from the fading orange of the setting sun up through hues of deepening blues. From this vantage point Travis observes Jane and Hunter’s reunion through the hotel room window. As with every encounter between Travis and Jane in the film he is observing her through glass, gazing from a removed and distant position. In the final shot of the film Travis’ truck drives away from the downtown Houston skyline, just another anonymous vehicle caught in the flow of freeway traffic underneath a darkening sky.

I had heard acclaim for Paris, Texas for a long time, usually framed as a signal example of Wim Wenders’ masterful directing and a rare leading role in Harry Dean Stanton’s capacious filmography. For whatever reason I had never encountered the film in the wild nor been drawn to seek it out. My exposure to Wenders’ work overall has been limited. I’d seen Buena Vista Social Club, which is a fine documentary. Wings of Desire provoked a mixed reaction: I loved the “city symphony” aspects and existential evocations of everyday Berliner’s internal monologues in the first part of the film, but the latter shift into romantic melodrama left me feeling disconnected.

Then a couple of weeks ago Turner Classic Movies aired a block of Harry Dean Stanton films. I tuned in to catch the end of Wise Blood, then kept the TV on in the background while I worked, with the volume turned down low. Paris, Texas was the next film in the night’s programming. Every now and then I would glance over at the TV and be captivated by the images. It was immediately evident that this was a major work. After some time I increased the volume to hear the dialogue. I was getting drawn in to the narrative, but it was late and I couldn’t stay up to finish the film. I went to bed thinking about the images I had seen and the associations they evoked. When I woke up I was still thinking about them. That morning I turned off all the lights in my windowless home office and watched Paris, Texas in its entirety.

I cannot imagine what this film would’ve meant to me if I had watched it earlier in my life. My experience of it now is inextricably bound up with having spent the last several years thinking about visual communication, representations of place, and spatial imaginaries more broadly. But it is also colored by the personal tragedies of my life experience. Paris, Texas doesn’t just capture a sense of moving through physical environments, it conveys the subjective resonance of these environments with the inner sojourns of one’s life. It speaks to those moments when a bleak personal journey calls out for an accompanying barren landscape. When space defines the horizon of possibility for escape, and solitude offers the only semblance of refuge. It evokes the melancholy recognition of the inexorable incarceration of incarnation. Of the desperation to discard your old maps and seek a new territory. Of being lost in every way that a person can be lost.

TENET Redux: 22 Theses on Nolan

Some responses to my previous TENET post have complained that the essay is bloated, confusing, and pretentious. Ironically, these are also some of the most common criticisms of the film itself. In acknowledgment of this feedback (and as an exercise in padding my post count with repurposed content), I have prepared the following “Twitter thread” re-imagining of that essay comprised of only the first sentences of each paragraph from the original post. I think it works rather well.

You can still read the unedited director’s cut of the essay here.

1. TENET is a preposterous film.

2. Nolan is a paradoxical filmmaker.

3. It is fitting, then, that Nolan has consistently engaged with the notion of paradox in his films.

4. In many ways TENET seems like the most “Nolan” movie yet, a distilled concoction of the filmmakers defining thematic and technical proclivities.

5. Interstellar played with the idea of time dilation but also revisited the nested parallel timeframes of Inception, to greatly diminished effect.

6. Nolan took another crack at nested timescales and intercutting across parallel chronologies in Dunkirk.

7. If Dunkirk can be seen as an attempt to expand the Inception dream collapse climax to feature length, then TENET represents the effort to build an entire movie from the opening credits of Memento.

8. As was the case with past Nolan films, TENET’s release was met with a chorus of complaints that the movie was “hard to follow.”

9. I must admit, I love the idea that Nolan is deliberately trying to instill the effect of a McLuhanesque cool medium, as conveyed in the quote from this blog’s About page:

10. Perhaps this is why Nolan’s characters mumble so.

11. I’ve already mentioned that I’m predisposed to grant Nolan ample leeway with his filmmaking choices.

12. Now, a more generous interpretation of Westworld, one more willing to grant the creators the benefit of the doubt, might consider the series’ apparent shortcomings outlined above as some sort of savvy meta-commentary on contemporary culture and entertainment.

13. The problem is that Westworld simply doesn’t seem that smart.

14. Christopher Nolan’s films have received similar criticisms to those I just levied against his brother Jonathan’s work, namely that they are pseudo-intellectual spectacle with pretensions to profundity.

15. Whereas Inception imagines the filmmaking process as dream weaving, Prestige poses the metaphor of “moviemaking as magic trick.”

16. Inception expands the meta-fictional thesis statement from The Prestige beyond an emphasis on ephemeral audience reaction to a suggestion of enduring emotional impact.

17. If The Prestige envisions pop cinema as an audience-enchanting illusion, and Inception explores the medium’s potential as a psychological dreamscape for working through personal emotions, then TENET stages the cinematic experience as a battleground between competing futures.

18. So how might we go about disentangling the text of the film from the subtext?

19. The significance of the Protagonist gambit is further muddled when trying to discern a political proposition in the film.

20. Reviewers often approach Nolan’s films as a stark contrast between cerebral storytelling and slick special effects, but TENET’s narrative complexity is compounded by a corresponding confusion in its action scenes.

21. As I stated at the beginning of this essay, TENET is a preposterous film.

22. Oh, and the soundtrack slaps.

TENET: Christopher Nolan vs. Entropy

TENET is a preposterous film. The central conceit of the plot, the rapid-fire delivery of exposition through muffled dialogue, and the mixed-chronology action set pieces are all jaw-droppingly confounding. The fact that it functions as a movie at all is a testament to something, though I’m unsure how much that something has to do with Christopher Nolan’s intentions. I think it has much more to do with the intrinsic narrativization of the human species, the spontaneous application of story to organize a chaotic experience into coherent reality, and of course our conditioned reception of visual storytelling. Yet Nolan has earned enough good will from me as a viewer that I am inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Nolan is a paradoxical filmmaker. He’s an IMAX Auteur: his films evince a recognizable artistic vision with clearly telegraphed thesis statements, while also being inextricably rooted in big budget, blockbuster myth making. Nolan has garnered a reputation for making films with overly complex, even inscrutable plots, yet that really isn’t fair. It is true that Nolan is fond of high concept stories that explore big ideas through intricately plotted narratives. Yet Nolan is also unabashedly a popular filmmaker, and he goes to great pains to carefully communicate each twist and turn so that the plot points won’t be lost amongst the popcorn noshing. The tendency to over-explain plot points in Inception was widely noted when that film was released (I love Inception, but the ratio of expository to other dialogue in that film is deliriously high...this is not a bug, however, but a feature of Nolan’s particular style of filmmaking). Inception so cemented the public perception of Nolan’s films as labyrinthine mindbenders that when Interstellar was released the perfunctory reactions that it was “hard to understand” seemed baked in to the film’s reception. Yet like Inception, Interstellar also featured ample exposition to help keep the audience on track (i.e. the characters explain the concept of time dilation, then provide their temporal position relative to Earth at relevant points).

It is fitting, then, that Nolan has consistently engaged with the notion of paradox in his films. Logical, ontological, and temporal paradoxes are lampshaded in both Inception and TENET. Memento explores paradoxes of free will through the unreliable memories and self-perpetuating delusions(?) of Leonard Shelby. The duality of vigilante superhero and anarchist supervillain forms the thematic crux of The Dark Knight. Nolan himself came to embody the tension between hero and villain in the controversy surrounding TENET’s theatrical release. Nolan has positioned himself as a stalwart defender of traditional cinema, both of the medium itself in his insistence on shooting on celluloid, and his dogged determination to preserve the theater-going experience. Why wouldn’t he: after all, his preferred aspect ratio is IMAX; his movies aren’t just made to be seen on the big screen, they’re meant to be projected 7-stories high. And the stakes for TENET’s release were just as towering. With the film’s original release date impeded by the coronavirus pandemic, Nolan’s self-appointed status as cinematic savior was no longer framed by the debate between 35mm versus digital but rather an actual existential crisis for moviegoing as we know it. It was not a question of audience preferences or consumer trends, but whether the traditional system of theatrical distribution and exhibition would be either economically viable or ethically defensible in a world where social distancing is a public health imperative. Nolan’s unwavering commitment to a theatrical release was derided as quixotically misguided at best to dangerously irresponsible at worst (i.e. “to save cinema, Nolan will kill his fans”). With the less-than-stellar box office performance commentators are suggesting that TENET didn’t just fail to save cinema it outright killed theaters for good. Some of this seems like unduly harsh criticism, some of it seems like plain old schadenfreude, but it’s also understandable that Nolan opened himself up to these reactions.

In many ways TENET seems like the most “Nolan” movie yet, a distilled concoction of the filmmakers defining thematic and technical proclivities. Nolan’s preoccupation with time and chronology has been present since his debut film Following, which employed a non-linear narrative intended to keep the audience on unsure footing. Memento upped the stakes considerably, intercutting a reverse order central narrative with forward-moving vignettes, tying the two threads together in the final sequence. Inception introduced the notion of variable time scales running parallel to one another, culminating in a climax where several temporally distinct set pieces are stacked up and then collapsed. 

Interstellar played with the idea of time dilation but also revisited the nested parallel timeframes of Inception, to greatly diminished effect. The intercutting of Coop’s travails in space and Murph’s earthbound crisis simply does not produce the intended degree of tension and suspense, in part due to the in-universe logic that Nolan had established by that point of the story: as an audience, we know that the events of Murph’s story have already played out years before the events of Coop’s story that they are intercut with. Nolan tries to create a sense of urgency through intense editing and music but it just falls flat because, unlike Inception, there’s no interdependence among the plot threads. This disconnect is only compounded by the extreme temporal and narrative distance between the two stories: the fate of humanity hinges upon Coop’s mission, and he is operating in a timeframe where Murph is likely long dead and gone, so intercutting with Murph dealing with local effects of the corn blight just doesn’t resonate. Frankly, the attempts to establish high stakes in the Murph segment feel silly (“These people are coughing...we have to get them away from the corn immediately!!”).

Nolan took another crack at nested timescales and intercutting across parallel chronologies in Dunkirk. Essentially, Dunkirk is an attempt to build an entire movie out of the climactic falling-dominoes-of-collapsing-dreams sequence from Inception. It’s a cool idea, taking one of the most exciting and dazzling scenes from his filmography and expanding it to feature length. Dunkirk is technically impressive, of course, and mostly succeeds at creating and sustaining tension for its entire runtime. Yet ultimately the movie left me cold, and I found it to be a disposable entry in Nolan’s canon rather than essential. Dunkirk contributes nothing new to the War Film genre, it merely recapitulates the same bombast and patriotic bromides that we’ve seen countless times before.

If Dunkirk can be seen as an attempt to expand the Inception dream collapse climax to feature length, then TENET represents the effort to build an entire movie from the opening credits of Memento. Those credits culminate with a reverse motion scene of a bullet casing rolling along the floor before jumping back into Leonard Shelby’s handgun. In TENET, Nolan takes this most basic of cinematic special effects techniques, along with Memento’s essential structure of dueling forwards-and-reverse narrative threads, and spins a yarn about a generational temporal cold war waged across a series of spectacular action set pieces. It’s not particularly heady stuff but rather visceral, marrying the most fundamental of narrative stakes with the oldest techniques of photographic trickery in the history of the medium.

As was the case with past Nolan films, TENET’s release was met with a chorus of complaints that the movie was “hard to follow.” In this case the criticism centered not only on the convoluted plot and loopy linearity, but also on the sound mixing. Issues with audibility had cropped up in previous Nolan releases (i.e. Bane’s mask-muffled dialogue in The Dark Knight Rises, and Michael Caine’s deathbed confession being drowned out by bass reverberations in Interstellar). A preponderance of TENET reviewers reported that the confusing nature of the film’s high concept plot was compounded by dialogue being overtaken by the score or drowned out by other audio elements. Nolan’s sound design choices were alternately dragged as a careless lack of attention to detail or an exacting application of the director’s idiosyncratic auteur instincts. One of Nolan’s longtime sound editors described the filmmaker’s audio aspirations as a dense “punk-rock kind of vibe.” A Dunkirk sound designer suggested that the barely-audible dialogue was a calculated maneuver intended to force audience members to pay attention:

Although he concedes that “small dialogue details” may be difficult to catch as a consequence, he likes the fact that everything isn’t “served up on a plate” for the viewer. “You have to be on your toes to really get all the details,” he says.

I must admit, I love the idea that Nolan is deliberately trying to instill the effect of a McLuhanesque cool medium, as conveyed in the quote from this blog’s About page:

“A cool medium, whether the spoken word or the manuscript or TV, leaves much more for the listener or user to do than a hot medium. If the medium is of high definition, participation is low. If the medium is of low intensity, the participation is high. Perhaps this is why lovers mumble so.” – Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media

Perhaps this is why Nolan’s characters mumble so. If Nolan really is designing the sound mix so that the audience has to more actively listen in order to follow the plot, or to prioritize visceral or emotional engagement with the story rather than intellectual comprehension, then I have to commend the ambition purely on principle. At the very least, Nolan’s divisive sound design does seem to accord with another McLuhan maxim, that “art is what you can get away with.”

I’ve already mentioned that I’m predisposed to grant Nolan ample leeway with his filmmaking choices. I’m inclined to interpret his output generously based on his consistent track record, and in spite of more recent efforts that fell flat for me personally. I struggle to muster the same generosity of spirit toward Jonathan Nolan, his brother and frequent co-collaborator. Jonathan has contributed his screenwriting talents to several Nolan films, and received an Oscar nomination for his “based on a short story by” Memento credit, but his latest industry credits are as showrunner of HBO’s Westworld series. Westworld is a bad show, and has been bad from the beginning. But the third season of Westworld is an audacious exercise in empty spectacle. Westworld season three answers the question: what would a television show look like if it had no real characters, merely a semblance of dialogue, and only the barest suggestion of plot? It is a stunning realization of style over substance. It has all of the superficial trappings that we’ve come to associate with prestige television -- a stellar acting ensemble, exorbitant production values, cinematic presentation -- and none of the compelling character study or storytelling that defined the greatest examples of the latest television renaissance. Westworld season three seems almost avant garde in its decision to eschew traditional characterization and dialogue in favor of cardboard cut-out caricatures spouting cliches and claptrap. 

Now, a more generous interpretation of Westworld, one more willing to grant the creators the benefit of the doubt, might consider the series’ apparent shortcomings outlined above as some sort of savvy meta-commentary on contemporary culture and entertainment. Perhaps the paper-thin characters and meandering narrative are intended to critique the banalization of cultural expression in a media-saturated world. They may even betray an implicit deconstruction of the series’ origins as a re-imagining of a 1973 science-fiction movie, a subversive dig at the Hollywood trend of recycling existing properties and established brands. The show clearly seems to want to engage with genre conventions: the debaucherous amusement parks at the heart of the first two seasons are based around fictional worlds as presented in Western, Samurai, and World War II films. The third season even introduces a recreational drug called “Genre,” a plot contrivance that is both laughably insipid and frustratingly under-developed (like the proverbial restaurant whose food is terrible and portions too small). The writers also make obvious attempts to connect the escapism of genre entertainment to historical legacies of exploitation and colonialism (one of the amusement parks is themed around the British Raj). 

The problem is that Westworld simply doesn’t seem that smart. The narrative arc of the third season feels like the creators read Shoshanna Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and decided to ham-handedly insert her core ideas into their story about Audio-Animatronics gone wild. Yet these ideas -- along with the ideas about sentience and artificial intelligence from the first two seasons -- have been explored better in other works. Just as the series can only mimic the style of prestige visual media without being able to deliver the goods, it also can only suggest the form of critique without providing the requisite content. It’s a glittering simulacrum whose ostentatious superstructure belies its underlying insecurity that it has nothing to say. 

Christopher Nolan’s films have received similar criticisms to those I just levied against his brother Jonathan’s work, namely that they are pseudo-intellectual spectacle with pretensions to profundity. Yet I think that Nolan has demonstrated the ability to engage with ideas and evince a coherent thesis in his films. To be fair, the singular and self-contained nature of a movie allows for this sort of thematic focus much more so than an ongoing television series. Yet when Nolan pulls off his particular blend of big ideas and big budget action, the results are among the most engaging escapism that mainstream cinema has to offer. I saw Inception at a midnight opening day screening, and even on that initial viewing it was evident that the film was operating at multiple levels. The surface level story functioned as a slick fusion of high-stakes heist theatrics and mass consumption mindbender. The film’s psychological elements offer surprising breadth, from a dream-bound staging of the primal domestic drama, to blurring the line between perception and creation, along with admonitions against an overreliance on memory when dreaming up potential futures. Inception represents Nolan’s most successful synthesis of cerebral speculation and populist pyrotechnics. I think that the film’s most significant contributions to the Nolan canon concern the author’s attitudes toward his own artistic endeavors. This can be delineated by comparing the moviemaking metaphors of Inception with those offered in The Prestige.

Whereas Inception imagines the filmmaking process as dream weaving, Prestige poses the metaphor of “moviemaking as magic trick.” Here the stage magician’s tripartite illusion sequence of pledge-turn-prestige corresponds to the traditional three act structure of narrative filmmaking. Read in this way, Prestige suggests that in both cases an artist stages an illusion for the purpose of dazzling and delighting the audience. Yet there’s something unsatisfying about this formulation, it seems incomplete or even disingenuous. When Hugh Jackman’s Angier intones at the film’s conclusion that his obsessive pursuit of magical one-upmanship was motivated by “the look on their faces,” the moment feels unearned. It comes out of left field like a last minute retcon of the preceding plot. Throughout the film Angier’s and Borden’s rivalry is evidently fueled by passion, resentment, and personal ambition. At no point does the story convey that the dueling magicians derive a significant sense of satisfaction from the audience’s response. I don’t believe that Angier was driven by the looks on audience members' faces, and I don’t believe Christopher Nolan is either. He puts far too much effort into provoking thought when mere spectacle would be sufficient for eliciting wide-eyed gawking.

Inception expands the meta-fictional thesis statement from The Prestige beyond an emphasis on ephemeral audience reaction to a suggestion of enduring emotional impact. Nolan’s thesis evinced by Inception is that the filmmaker’s work is to create an immersive and convincing dream world which the audience populates with their own subconscious projections and leads themselves to cathartic release and personal revelation. When Fischer experiences atonement with his father and realizes that his perceived failure to live up to Senior’s expectations are a self-imposed limitation of his own potential, the moment lands with the full weight of all the momentum accumulated by the film up to that point. The moment feels justified not only by the preceding plot but also within the broader context of Nolan’s filmography. Nolan is arguing that even though the melodramatic chills and thrills provided by the movies are objectively artificial -- illusory dream worlds -- the affective responses they stimulate in viewers are just as subjectively real as those triggered by real life events.

If The Prestige envisions pop cinema as an audience-enchanting illusion, and Inception explores the medium’s potential as a psychological dreamscape for working through personal emotions, then TENET stages the cinematic experience as a battleground between competing futures. I was immediately intrigued by the revelation that John David Washington’s character name in TENET was “Protagonist,” as it signaled Nolan’s intent to double down on his meta-investigations of film’s cultural facilities. After seeing the movie I am unable to discern a cohesive mission statement like his earlier films seemed to present. The Prestige suggested that the deeper justification for Angier’s covetous pursuit of the “look on their faces” was to make the audience forget the inherent misery of their daily lives through a temporary suspension of belief. TENET ups the ante to a war with the fate of the entire world at stake. 

So how might we go about disentangling the text of the film from the subtext? I’ve seen several reviews of TENET that suggest the character name of Protagonist is an indication of Nolan’s lack of attention to the human element in his films, evidence of his preoccupation with conceptual and visual acrobatics at the expense of grounded characterization. As if he couldn’t be bothered to come up with a name for his main character because he was too busy choreographing the special effects sequences. This is ludicrous. The main character of TENET is not called “Protagonist” due to some oversight or laziness on Nolan’s part. It’s a deliberate (and rather brazen) choice. It communicates that Nolan aims to draw attention to the artifice of the story at the level of the text itself, perhaps even to boil the story elements down to the most fundamental narrative components. It suggests an interrogation of traditional story construction, or a more psychologically inflected examination of how individuals are interpellated into subject positions within their personal narratives.

The significance of the Protagonist gambit is further muddled when trying to discern a political proposition in the film. On an ideological level the film recapitulates standard tropes of clandestine government agencies and elite military operatives working tirelessly to preserve the world as we know it. The central antagonist of TENET is a billionaire Russian arms dealer, and the film flirts with class consciousness when the Protagonist infiltrates the insular world of tax evading art collectors. Yet the film offers no explicit comment on economic inequality beyond repeated assertions that the 1% are much better dressed than the hoi polloi. A single line of dialogue delivered in the plot’s third act seems to suggest that the future’s war-on-the-present is retribution for the catastrophic effects of man-made global warming. This nominal gesture to the climate crisis could either be a key to unlocking the story’s political implications, or a banal and perfunctory concession to one of this generation’s great existential threats. On the Why Theory podcast Todd McGowan and Ryan Engley offer an extremely intriguing appraisal of the film’s philosophical merits vis-à-vis imagining a politics premised on re-interpreting the past to create the future.

Reviewers often approach Nolan’s films as a stark contrast between cerebral storytelling and slick special effects, but TENET’s narrative complexity is compounded by a corresponding confusion in its action scenes. The staging and editing of Nolan’s action scenes has been a noted weak point in the director’s repertoire since Batman Begins. The choreography and shot composition of fight scenes in particular has steadily improved across Nolan’s subsequent films. On paper, TENET’s ambition to build action setpieces around a forwards-and-backwards ballet composed of pieces moving in opposite directions through time is eminently alluring. Yet in execution these sequences are often frustrating and befuddling. The “freeport” fight scene that occurs twice during the film pits two opponents with inverse-entropy into close-quarters combat, an escalation of the shifting-gravity hallway fight from Inception. Again, the set-up is exhilarating but the execution is almost impossible to follow. It is a sort of visual corollary to the audio mixing issues mentioned earlier, requiring audience members to strain in order to make sense of what is unfolding.

As I stated at the beginning of this essay, TENET is a preposterous film. It represents a pinnacle of Nolanesque puzzle-making where the complexity of its narrative is matched by the inscrutability of its spectacle. Regardless of the issues I have with the film, I remain charmed by the fact that Nolan framed the stakes of the storytelling as a battle against entropy. There is something irresistibly romantic about waging a war as foolish and futile as a fight against entropy. It is far easier to tear things down than to build them up. And I think that this thematic element of TENET offers wide-ranging resonance with our contemporary culture. We are inundated with opportunities for attempting to reverse entropic processes, however fruitless those efforts may ultimately be. There are many potential battlegrounds for these struggles to play out, whether we are talking about climate catastrophe, personal decrepitude, pernicious political plots, or our ubiquitous online culture of cringe posting and hate tweeting. It’s a battle that I’ve attempted to recapitulate throughout this essay, attempting to avoid reactionary critiques and instead search for redeeming qualities in the works I’ve discussed. If TENET ultimately falls apart in its endeavor I am inclined to consider it a commendable failure. I also think it is significant that TENET establishes entropy not only as the basis of the struggle but also as the means of engagement, the weapon with which the war is waged. Several commentators have noted that TENET offers greater rewards upon subsequent viewings, that it is a magic trick that works better once you know how it was done. I like that idea and I hope that further contemplation will yield deeper insights. As it stands currently, TENET might just represent a tantalizing puzzlebox whose ultimate confoundment is the utter lack of underlying mystery. 

Oh, and the soundtrack slaps.

City Space as Projective Medium: From Coronavirus Quarantine to Urban Uprisings

The current confluence of the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic and popular political demonstrations has provided strikingly urgent examples of how city space may be actualized as a projective medium. By “projective medium” I mean to describe a repurposing of urban environments wherein public space serves as a canvas not only for the circulation of artistic representations or political slogans but for the staging of interventions of imagination, a testing ground for potential futures. Within the past few months we have seen dramatic and unprecedented reconfigurations of public space: first in the widespread “lockdown” and “stay at home” measures designed to mitigate the viral transmission of COVID-19; and secondly with irruption of mass protests against police brutality and extrajudicial killings of people of color. Both of these “moments” have offered profound illustrations of the social production of space, as well as ways in which the physical infrastructure of the built environment is an inherently politicized terrain. 

In the early days of the Coronavirus quarantines reconsiderations of urban space focused on absence and withdrawal. Photographs of unoccupied Los Angeles freeways and deserted downtown districts circulated widely online. At the end of March the New York Times published a photo essay documenting quietude throughout the five boroughs with the title “New York Was Not Designed For Emptiness.” The fascination with emptied city spaces is certainly linked to visual tropes of apocalyptic fiction and representations of humanity’s end depicted so often in popular culture: the silent streets and vacant plazas served as visual confirmation of the otherwise “unseen” virus, and visceral reminder of our ultimately precarious civilization. The allure of these images may also be linked to a desire for (psychological) distance from the biological threat. Writing in the Verso Books blog, Rob Horning credited such photographs with reinforcing a sense of “exemption” from the vagaries of the natural world and from the virus itself:

“Our ability to appreciate these images doesn’t underscore our ultimate harmony or interconnection with the natural world and the life that purportedly re-emerges when the highways are finally vacated. Rather it lets us use mediation (our ability to consume representations) to rearticulate our exceptionality. We can assume the subject position of the camera and pretend that makes us immune to being objects in the world.”

The onset of “social distancing” induced an attitudinal shift in how we related to the shared spaces of everyday life. The withdrawal from public places to the atomistic dwelling of self-isolation created a sort of vacuum, opening up a space in which new meanings and relations could be introduced. In many cities around the world residents rediscovered the balcony as a link between the individual and communal worlds. Balconies have always served as liminal spaces between the publicity of the street and the privacy of the home. During quarantine these sites gained renewed significance as spaces for performance and communication. Neighbors socialized from across their respective railings, and a new routine developed where residents would gather to applaud medical workers from their balconies at appointed shift-change times.

The mass migration indoors prompted rediscovery of the built environment as communication medium in other ways. I am particularly fond of the various projects that involved projecting films onto the sides of buildings. In Rome the cinema organization Alice nella Città began scheduling regular projections of classic films, and encouraged any citizens with the ability to do so to implement their own screenings. In Berlin the Windowflicks project hosted screenings by projecting movies on the walls of residential courtyards. (On a somewhat related note, I was disappointed to learn that Vulcan Video, a beloved DVD rental business in Austin, TX and one of my most frequented locales when I lived in that city, did not survive the Coronavirus outbreak.)

At the end of May the insular isolation of “stay at home” measures reversed into a dramatic reclamation of the streets. In the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands police, residents of Minneapolis turned out en masse in the neighborhood where he was killed. The initial days of the demonstrations saw vandalism and destruction of corporate businesses in the neighborhood beginning with an AutoZone store. (In addition to semiotically presaging the eventual advent of “autonomous zone” in popular discourse and U.S. urban imaginaries, the prominence of the AutoZone and other automotive businesses in the subsequent unrest throughout Minneapolis and St. Paul testifies not only to the dominance of car culture in U.S. spatial design, but also to the legacy of highway expansions and car-centric development that decimated predominantly Black urban communities throughout the 20th Century.)

During the first two days of protests a Target store nearby the site of Floyd’s death was thoroughly looted and vandalized. In addition to the store’s interior being effectively gutted, the exterior walls were blanketed with spraypainted messages. In the days that followed political graffiti and anti-police slogans became a ubiquitous visual element of the demonstrations unfolding in cities throughout the United States, even occupying part of the backdrop for Donald Trump’s infamous bible photo-op in Washington D.C. Here again the latent potential for the built environment to serve as a projective medium was dramatically actualized. The pervasive presence of political graffiti messages recalled the spraypainted slogans of the May 68 demonstrations in Paris, just as the scenes of civil unrest evoked the 1968 U.S. urban riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

Over the past three weeks the urban uprisings have continued to spread throughout the U.S., perhaps reaching their temporary apogee with the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ). The CHAZ designation refers to the occupation of a six-block area in central Seattle centered around the vacated East Precinct police headquarters. Since it’s emergence in popular discourse the message and meaning of the CHAZ has been the subject of public debate. Authoritarian discourses have demonized the occupation as a terroristic takeover, while more amicable readings of the space have characterized it in terms of a festival atmosphere with arts and music. Several early accounts featured images and accounts of a film screening in the CHAZ: participants watching Ava DuVernay’s “13th” on a projection screen set up in an occupied intersection.

As with the aforementioned outdoor cinema projects implemented under Coronavirus quarantine, the urban reimagining of the CHAZ features film screenings in urban space, a repurposing of city streets as movie theaters. It thus offers another opportunity to consider the built environment as a projective medium. Again, this sense of “projective medium” extends beyond merely repurposing urban infrastructure as a material support for communication. Yes, the occupied urban space of the CHAZ features murals, spraypainted slogans, and other forms of artistic and political representation. But the greater “message” of the occupation is a radical rethinking of the logics underlying the organization of urban life itself. The various artistic interventions launched in response to the COVID-19 outbreak similarly call into question certain unspoken assumptions undergirding collective dwelling.

 (In distinguishing between the “form” and the “content” of these creative repurposings of urban space it is important to recognize that the content in the respective cases is obviously significant. The CHAZ occupiers were screening a documentary about racial inequality in the United States, a subject clearly connected to the broader socio-historical context and political intent of Black Lives Matter protests. Would we interpret the scene differently if the CHAZ audience was watching “The Wizard of Oz,” or “Trolls 2”? Similarly, how would our understanding of the outdoor screenings in Rome and Berlin be altered if the organizers were projecting political documentaries instead of classic films?)

Both the Coronavirus pandemic and the urban demonstrations have prompted a reimagining of the structures that shape our daily lives. Rather than idle speculation or “mere” philosophical musings, the emergent issues underlying these provocations present themselves as urgent and unavoidable. They reveal the necessity of the radical reassessment of social reality.

Most of the questions prompted by the Coronavirus have to do with resuming “business as usual” in a way that will prevent another outbreak. What will work and schooling look like after the lockdown? Will telecommuting become the new norm? Should theaters and concert venues reopen to full capacity? Will any area of life return to its pre-pandemic state? The questions and demands voiced in the ongoing anti-racism protests feature a different focus, but they also call for sweeping structural reforms. Calls to “defund the police” have been explicated as a “reimagining” of what public safety and community-oriented state initiatives can look like. These twin crises thus raise awareness of infrastructural and social failures (of the healthcare system, of adequate preventative measures, of policing procedures, of systemic racism, etc.), but they also draw attention to failures of imagination. Questions about what kind of world we want to live in are increasingly superseded by questions of what kind of world will enable us to survive.

While the twin events represented by the global pandemic and anti-oppression uprisings therefore share significant similarities, they may be productively differentiated by the directional orientation of their respective inciting elements. The shock and disruption of the Coronavirus outbreak can be characterized as a movement inward driven by an outside impetus, whereas the protests represent an outward movement compelled by inner antagonisms. Social distancing and “safer-at-home” self-isolation measures were restrictive responses to an outside foreign force (foreign or alien in the sense that the virus is not human, not in any sort of xenophobic or Sinophobic sense as conveyed by the “Chinese virus” and “kung flu” dysphemisms). The mass occupations of city streets and other urban spaces was an expansive outwardly-directed response to failures and contradictions within the society itself, including inherent racial injustice, class antagonisms, and a generalized precariousness engendered by neoliberal capitalism. The two movements thus represent two imperatives to reimagine our world: one compelled from without, the other incurred from within. (There were, of course, many interrelated and exacerbating factors connecting the pandemic response with the protests, such as the economic disruption, soaring unemployment, disproportionate health outcomes along racial lines, etc.)

One way to interpret the sudden transition from vacant, socially-distanced public spaces to massively occupied city streets is to view space as a blank slate onto which various forces or groups project their politicized messages. However, it would be misleading to consider the urban as an empty signifier, or city space as a neutral container subject to contestations over who gets to fill it with meaning. The built environment is always already a politicized terrain, shaped by value-laden design decisions and governed by policy and force. Urban space emptied of content does not reveal the material landscape as a merely objective fact or value neutral background for social life. Instead, both the images of emptied city streets in the time of Corona and the scenes of massive demonstrations in public space attest to a fact that the urban form shares with all communication media: the medium is the message.

Sick of Serial Killing: The Virulence of Hate in a Time of Contagion

The following reflections were originally written several years ago for a graduate seminar. I’ve decided to share these thoughts here because they seem highly resonant with the current moment. For one thing, the essay links metaphors of contagious disease with activist rhetoric deployed against public apathy and racialized violence. These connections take on a renewed relevance in the context of the massive ongoing demonstrations against police violence which are occurring amidst the COVD-19 global pandemic. Secondly, the brief essay develops the connection between virulence and hate by thinking through the polemical rhetoric of Larry Kramer’s AIDS activism. This provides another confluence with current events in light of Kramer’s death two weeks ago on May 27th.

Larry Kramer’s association with AIDS activism stems not only from the duration and determination of his involvement, but also from his impassioned rhetorical style. Erin Rand identifies Kramer’s style as polemical, and identifies four rhetorical features unique to the polemical form: alienating expressions of emotion, non-contingent assertions of truth, presumptions of shared morality, and the constitution of enemies, audiences, and publics (p. 301). Rand distinguishes Kramer’s polemical style from other uses of anger in rhetoric or public address in that Kramer does not “attempt to elicit anger from the audience, unite the audience through their shared sense of anger, or move them to action based on emotion; rather, Kramer performs his own anger at what he perceives to be the audience’s failure to behave in the way that he desires” (p. 302).

Rand cites as characteristic of Kramer’s polemics the building through a succession of factual statements that culminate in “a climactic display of fury and frustration” (p. 302).

“Hence, polemics refute dominant ideologies and modes of thinking by rejecting the primacy of reason and invoking explicitly moral claims. In polemics a moral position is not simply advanced through rhetoric, but morality actually does rhetorical work.” (p. 305)           

Similarly, West considered the function of emotion in productions of the Kramer-penned play The Normal Heart:

“To realize a future different from the past, the producers had to take steps to motivate their audiences to translate their emotions into action once they had left the show. If the play was merely cathartic and enjoyed as a terrible chapter of history, then surely they had failed.” (p.100)

“Through the explicit targeting of younger audiences and distributing Kramer’s plea for help, the producers enabled rage, anger, and outrage.” (p. 101)

Feminist writer and activist Audre Lorde also saw anger as potentially productive. According to Olson: “Lorde distinguished between anger and hatred, and she salvaged the former as potentially useful and generative” (p. 287). Lorde’s distinction between anger and hatred is developed in a quote from her remarks: “Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change” (p. 298).

In a quote from her “The Uses of Anger,” Lorde uses the metaphor of the virus to describe hatred:

“We are working in a context of oppression and threat, the cause of which is certainly not the angers which lie between us, but rather that virulent hatred leveled against all women, people of Color, lesbians and gay men, poor people - against all of us who are seeking to examine the particulars of our lives as we resist our oppressions, moving toward coalition and effective action.” (emphasis added)

Other authors have connected hatred with disease. This thematic link is made, for example, in Spike Lee’s film Do the Right Thing. While the film’s characters never state the distinction between anger and hatred as explicitly as Lorde does, the film makes many associations that establish a difference between the two. The action of the film takes place in a roughly 24 hour period, during the hottest day of the summer in Brooklyn, New York. The temperature is referenced throughout the film, and the link between the heat and character’s emotions is made early on. Anger is associated with heat: characters talk about “getting hot” as a euphemism for getting angry. By extension then, the hottest day of the summer could also be understood as the angriest.

Hatred, on the other hand, is continually linked with sickness and disease. Early in the film, when pizzeria owner Sal arrives with his two sons to start business for the day, his son Pino says of the pizza shop:

“I detest this place like a sickness.”

Sal admonishes his son, saying: “That sounds like hatred.”

This connection returns at the end of film, again in front of Sal’s Famous Pizzeria, which at this point has been reduced to a smoldering shell. Mookie seeks Sal out to ask for the wages he is due from the previous week’s labor. Angrily, Sal throws $500 in $100 bills at Mookie, twice as much as he is owed. Mookie leaves $200 on the ground, telling Sal that he only wants what he has earned. There is a stalemate as the two men stare off, the $200 between them, and each of them waiting for the other to pick it up. Apparently not understanding why Mookie would leave the money lying on the ground Sal asks him:

“Are you sick?”

Mookie: “I’m hot as a motherfucker; I’m alright, though.”

Mookie’s response here should not be understood merely as a comment about the weather. Yes, he is hot because of the summer heat, but the associations presented by the film make clear the deeper meaning of this exchange. Mookie is angry, angry as a motherfucker; having endured the ordeal of the hottest day of the summer, culminating in his throwing a trashcan through a shop window, and now he finds himself the following day with his various responsibilities still in place, but now without a source of income. But he does not hate Sal. He is not infected by hatred. He is not sick.

If the film associates hatred with sickness and disease, how does it relate or portray love? The radio DJ character, Mister Senor Love Daddy, seems like an obvious connection. Another important component is the name of Senor Love Daddy’s radio station: We Love Radio 108 (“Last on your dial, first in your heart.”). The name of the radio station not only presages Clear Channel Communications’ eventual rebranding to I Heart Radio, it also establishes a connection between love and another of the film’s characters: Radio Raheem.

Radio Raheem is arguably the character most closely associated with the concepts of love and hate. Raheem has custom brass knuckles on each hand: the word “LOVE” on his right hand, and the word “HATE” on his left. Through the presence of these words on his knuckles, and his performance of the accompanying story about the struggle between love and hate, “the story of life,” Radio Raheem recalls Reverend Harry Powell from the 1955 film Night of the Hunter. Reverend Powell has the words “love” and “hate” tattooed on his knuckles: love on the right hand, and hate on the left. He also tells “the story of life,” which, although using different language than Raheem, tells essentially the same account of a struggle between hate and love, where hate has the upper hand for a while but is eventually beat out by love.

In Night of the Hunter, Reverend Powell’s performance of pious geniality conceals a dark secret: he is a serial killer, traveling the country seducing widows whom he soon murders before absconding with what wealth he can steal. In Do the Right Thing, Radio Raheem is not revealed to be a serial killer, but he is done in by a sort of serial killing: the recurring killing of men of color perpetrated by police officers. The characters of the film react to Raheem’s death in a personal way (“They killed Radio Raheem!”), but it is clearly also a reaction to this serial killing of black men that contributes to the crowd’s reaction (someone is heard exclaiming, “They did it again!”). The rage at serial killing is evident also in Larry Kramer’s AIDS activism, as seen in his essay “1,112 and Counting,” and his exhortations to audience members at his plays that their inaction was responsible for the real life deaths of the characters portrayed.

A final question: Is Do the Right Thing a polemic? I find it interesting to consider the question in light of the definitions offered by this week’s featured authors. Rand traces the meaning of “polemic” to the Greek polemikos, meaning “warlike,” and when Lee’s film was released many reviewers and commentators were concerned that it amounted to a call for violence. I am not sure the film satisfies Rand’s four elements of rhetorical form, but I do believe it satisfies the rhetorical move that Olson calls shifting subjectivities:

“An advocate articulates a shift in the second persona of an address, wherein the auditors or readers occupy one kind of role initially and then, drawing on what is remembered or learned from that position, are repositioned subsequently into a different role that is harder for them to recognize or occupy, but that might possess some transforming power.” (p. 284)

As film critic Roger Ebert recounted in an essay about the film:

“Many audiences are shocked that the destruction of Sal's begins with a trash can thrown through the window by Mookie (Lee), the employee Sal refers to as ‘like a son to me.’ Mookie is a character we're meant to like. Lee says he has been asked many times over the years if Mookie did the right thing. Then he observes: ‘Not one person of color has ever asked me that question.’ But the movie in any event is not just about how the cops kill a black man and a mob burns down a pizzeria. That would be too simple, and this is not a simplistic film. It covers a day in the life of a Brooklyn street, so that we get to know the neighbors, and see by what small steps the tragedy is approached.”

Some critics and audience members objected to what they interpreted as Lee’s call for violence, and at least an implicit approval of property destruction. We heard similar rhetoric in the last year, when protests in response to the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner became characterized by media emphasis on incidents of property damage and looting. The state response to protests is always characterized by a tolerance so long as demonstrations are peaceful and “civil,” and when this line is broached it functions to demonize and dismiss the “protestors” at large. Is this not evocative of the white woman who purportedly said to Audre Lorde, “Tell me how you feel, but don’t say it too harshly or I cannot hear you”? 

References

West, Isaac. "Reviving Rage." Quarterly Journal of Speech 98, no. 1 (2012): 97-102.

Olson, Lester C. "Anger Among Allies: Audre Lorde's 1981 Keynote Admonishing the National Women's Studies Association." Quarterly Journal of Speech 97, no. 3 (2011): 283-308.

Rand, Erin J. "An inflammatory fag and a queer form: Larry Kramer, polemics, and rhetorical agency." Quarterly Journal of Speech 94, no. 3 (2008): 297-319.

2001: 50 years later

2001: A Space Odyssey had its world premiere 50 years ago today. I plan to have much more content commemorating the Semicentennial of this masterwork throughout the year, but in the meantime and in order to mark the anniversary of the premiere, check out 2001: A Book Odyssey from Paolo Granata which showcases 2001 book cover designs  created by more than 180 students from the University of Toronto. 

Of course, my take on the Clarke book is summed up by Heywood Floyd in the film: "More specifically, your opposition to the cover story..."

Filmic Vision in Blade Runner: A Montage

I haven't had time to write my thoughts on Blade Runner 2049. I've seen the film three times now, and I'm still digesting the film and its implications. In the meantime, however, I've made a short montage of scenes from the original Blade Runner (though set to a piece of the new movie's score). It's something I've had in mind for a long time: a compilation of all the eye imagery, representations of vision, and related elements in the film. There's nothing worse than an itch you can never scratch, so I'm relieved to have finally scratched this one. It's about five minutes long and you can watch it below.

Also, last week I successfully tracked down the IMDB user review of Blade Runner from back in high school. I wrote it in 2003 when I was 17 years old. The review title declares Blade Runner the "epitome of film as an art form". It was cringe-inducing for me to revisit after all these years, but I'm glad IMDB has maintained the reviews. You can read my Blade Runner review (and all my other IMDB user reviews) here. 

Take the Movie and Run #2

The second episode of Take the Movie and Run is now available on PodBean. In this installment Caroline and Curry delve into Woody Allen's Celebrity. Visit the podcast site here!

An Urban Media History

A Media History of the City

            A media history of the city could take on any number of forms. The shape of this history would largely be determined by how we defined its key terms. How should “the city” be understood? Such a history could begin in ancient or pre-historical times, starting with the earliest human settlements and urban agglomerations. On the other hand, it would also be possible to select a single moment along this vast timeline and analyze this temporal snapshot to see how various media are intersecting with urban life. This history could even be a contemporary history of modern media practices and institutions and their role in the urban experience. The other key question is how “media” should be understood. What media should be included in our study? How inclusive or exclusive should our definition be? Depending on how expansive our definition is, our history could begin by looking at human settlements established in pre-literate societies where spoken language was the primary communication medium. Our history could also look at the development of alphabets, and the role of various writing media such as tablets, papyrus, and parchment in facilitating the construction and governance of cities. Our history could instead follow a traditional mass communication view of modern media. In contemporary New York City place names such as Radio City Music Hall and Times Square attest to the impact that media of mass communication has made in urban spaces.

In order to limit the scope of this essay, I will frame my response as a curriculum overview for an imagined undergraduate course on media and the city. Framing the response in this way provides a framework and rationale for defining the terms of our analysis and the range of history we can reasonably attempt. A typical U.S. undergraduate introductory course in media studies approaches its subject using the “big 5” traditional media: newspapers, magazines, film, radio, and TV. For the sake of this essay, and imagining a potential undergraduate course based on this subject, I will structure my response around these “big 5” traditional media. Also in following the structure of a typical undergraduate media course, the history I present will correspond to the history of mass communication in the United States. The history I offer here is mostly confined to the 20th century, and focuses on U.S. cities. As such, this imaginary course I am outlining could be called “History of U.S. media and urbanization.” In what follows, I offer five key moments in this “media history of the city,” with each moment corresponding to one of the big 5 traditional media. Each entry will offer some historical information on the development of that media form, and a case study that illustrates the intersection between media use and the life of city. Finally, I will offer a sixth moment and case study that accounts for more recent developments in digital media and technological convergence, as well as salient aspects of urban life in the 21st century metropolis.

Moment One: Penny Papers and Newsboys on Strike

Early colonial newspapers tended to be political in nature, what were called the “partisan press” as opposed to commercial papers. In the 1830s, technological developments associated with the industrial revolution allowed for new paper production practices. Expensive handmade paper could be replaced by cheaper mass produced paper. Before this change in production, newspapers cost about 5 cents to purchase, which was relatively expensive for the time. Therefore newspaper readers tended to be affluent. Using the less expensive production techniques, publishers could sell papers for as cheap as 1 cent. Thus the “penny press” or “penny papers” were born, and this is the moment when newspapers truly became a mass media. Newspaper publishers had long relied on subscription service for reliable purchases of their papers, but in the penny press era individual street sales became an important part of the business model as well. One of the major penny press papers was the New York Sun owned by Benjamin Day. Under Day’s stewardship, the Sun privileged accounts of the daily triumphs and travails of the human condition, what are now known as “human interest stories.”

The penny papers introduced many innovations that remain part of the newspaper industry today, including assigning “beat” reporters to cover special story topics such as crime, and shifting the economic basis for publishing from the support of political parties (as in the “partisan press” era) to the market. The penny press era gave rise to an increase in newspaper production with an emphasis on competitive, profitable papers. This economic environment set the stage for some of the most famous newspaper barons to enter the scene. For instance, Joseph Pulitzer bought the New York World, and William Randolph Hearst bought the New York Journal shortly thereafter. Pulitzer pushed for the use of maps and illustrations in his papers, so that immigrants who were not fluent in English could understand the stories. Both Pulitzer and Hearst used bold headlines and layouts to attract reader attention. These practices became emblematic of the yellow journalism period, a term that also connotes sensationalism and even unscrupulous journalistic standards. Pulitzer and Hearst papers did call for social reforms and drew attention to the poor living conditions of poor immigrants in the cities; however, the papers also embellished stories, fabricated interviews, and staged promotional stunts in order to increase reader interest and boost circulation. In 1895, a conflict began that would go on to boost both papers’ fortunes. The island of Cuba had been a colony of Spain since the arrival of Columbus, and in 1895 an insurrection began against Spanish rule that would become known as the Cuban War of Independence. At the time Hearst and Pulitzer were engaged in a war of their own: a circulation war. Hearst’s and Pulitzer’s papers used the conflict to sell papers and boost circulation, deriding Spain in headlines and calling for U.S. intervention. In 1898 the U.S. ship the Maine was sent to Cuba and exploded and sank in Havana harbor, with hundreds of sailors killed. The World and the Journal ran headlines like “Spanish Murderers” and “Remember the Maine,” and the Spanish-American War is still remembered as a prime example of propaganda in the U.S. media swaying public opinion in favor of war, even when facts were misrepresented or embellished.

Benjamin Day’s New York Sun did not offer a subscription service, and instead relied solely on individual street sales to make a profit. To better distribute his papers, Day placed a wanted ad seeking workers to sell the newspapers on the street. Day expected adult workers to respond to the ad, but he found instead that children inquired about the job instead. The first vendor he hired was 10 year old Irish immigrant who would take bundles of papers onto a street corner and shout out the most arresting headlines to get reader interest. Soon this became a new and pervasive method of selling newspapers on city streets. These newspaper vendors or “hawkers” were also called newsboys or paperboys, although girls were often found in their ranks as is evident in many of the photographs taken of children news vendors at the time. These children worked long hours, often through late nights and early mornings, and even sleeping on front stoops or in the street, something also attested to by photographs of the period. Vendors would buy bundles of newspapers from the publishers, and they were not refunded for unsold papers. In 1899, in the wake of the boost in circulation numbers precipitated by the Spanish-American War coverage, many publishers raised the price of newsboy bundles from 50 cents to 60 cents. In response, in July 1899, newsboys refused to sell Pulitzer and Hearst papers. Newsboys demonstrated in the thousands and broke up newspaper distribution in the streets. One gathering blocked off the Brooklyn Bridge, disrupting traffic across the East river as well as interrupting news circulation throughout the entire region. Pulitzer tried to hire adults to vend his newspapers but they were sympathetic to the newsboys’ plight and refused to defy the strike. He did hire men to break up newsboy demonstrations and to protect newspaper deliveries. The newsboys asked the public to not buy any newspapers until the cost of bundles was lowered and the strike was resolved. Eventually the publishers relented: although the cost of bundles was not decreased, the publishers agreed to buy back unsold papers from the newsboys. The strike ended in August 1899, two weeks after it had started.

The 1899 Newsboy Strike is a significant moment in the history of U.S. media, U.S. urban life, and U.S. labor relations. New York City was built by a great deal of immigrant labor, and many of these laborers were children. It is important to remember and acknowledge this important part of U.S. urban history. The 1899 strike was credited for inspiring similar newsboy strikes in Butte, Montana and Louisville, Kentucky. It is an important story in the history of labor law reform in the U.S., even though it is not as well-remembered as landmark events such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. While the newsboy strike did not lead to the sort of immediate reforms that the Shirtwaist factory disaster did, it did impact the implementation of child labor laws in the city over the following decades. Furthermore this case illustrates the practices of distribution and circulation that newspapers relied on, as well as the political economy of the media and its relationship to national and global politics.

Moment Two: Muckraking Magazines and the Shame of the Cities

            The modern magazine has decidedly “urban” roots. The word “magazine” originally referred to a storehouse for munitions. The first use of the term to refer to a publication was in 1731 by “The Gentleman’s Magazine” published in London. The publisher of “The Gentleman’s Magazine” used the pen name Sylvanus Urban, and this is what I meant when I said that magazines had “urban” roots. As with newspapers, developments of the industrial revolution such as conveyor systems and printing processes allowed for less expensive manufacturing practices, and therefore magazines could be sold cheaper and reach a wider audience. Another significant development was the Postal Act of 1879, which reduced the postal rates of magazines to the same price as newspapers, making the cost of a magazine subscription affordable for more Americans. Additionally, more and more jobs and people were moving from rural areas to cities. As increasing numbers of immigrants came together in urban cores, national magazines helped facilitate the formation of national identities as opposed to local or regional identity. Relatedly, the increase in the number of dime stores, drug stores, and department stores created new venues for consumer items, and magazines offered new venues for advertising these items. Ladies’ Home Journal was known for running the latest consumer advertisements, and became the first magazine to reach a subscription base of one million customers, reflecting the growth of the female consumer base.

In addition to sustaining and reflecting the growing consumer economy in the country, magazines also played an important role in social reform movements. Jane Addams reportedly first read about the settlement house movement from a magazine article (possibly from an article in Century magazine). With her interest piqued by the article, Addams and a friend soon travelled to London to visit the first settlement house, Toynbee Hall. The settlement house movement advocated the establishment of “settlement houses” in poor areas where middle class volunteers would come and live, with the goal of alleviating conditions of poverty and creating solidarity among the social classes. Two years after visiting Toynbee Hall Addams opened the first U.S. settlement house, Hull House in Chicago. Addams also wrote articles about the settlement house movement for magazines such as Ladies’ Home Journal and McClure’s. Another important role of magazines in social reform movements was related to photojournalism. Magazines had the ability to reproduce high quality photographs, giving them a visual edge against other media of the day. In the late 1880s an emigrant to the U.S. named Jacob Riis became shocked at the living conditions in the New York City slums and purchased a detective camera to document life in these areas. Riis exhibited his photographs as part of a public lecture presentation called “The Other Half: How it Lives and Dies in New York.” The lectures became popular and Riis wrote an article based on his lectures for Scribner’s Magazine. His project was eventually published as a book.

The aforementioned McClure’s magazine was a hotbed of reform-minded journalism at the turn of the 20th century. At the end of the 1800s the magazine had published exposes on the working conditions of miners and corporate practices of the Standard Oil Company. In 1901 journalist Lincoln Steffens published the first article in a series on corruption in U.S. cities. Steffens first went to St. Louis and reported on the machinations of the local political machine. Next he went to Minneapolis, and found the mayor and police chief colluding to take bribes for local houses of prostitution. Then he went to Pittsburgh (Pittsburg at the time), writing that “if the environment of Pittsburg is hell with the lid off, the political scene in the city is hell with the lid on.” The final entries in the series were based on visits to Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York. The series was eventually published in book form in 1904, titled The Shame of the Cities. The articles made Steffens a national celebrity and inspired a trend of similar expose articles in magazines, including Cosmopolitan’s “The Treason of the Senate”. Steffen’s magazine articles became icons of the muckraker movement, so called by president Roosevelt because they climbed through society’s much to cover the stories. The muckraking journalists are an important part of U.S. media history, and the social reform movements are an important part of U.S. urban history.

Moment Three: Movie Palaces and a Tale of One City

            As with newspapers and magazines, the development of motion pictures was closely tied to technological and social developments occurring as part of the industrial revolution. Developments in celluloid film, electric lighting, and the mechanical gears to turn film reels all contributed to technological underpinnings of film as a mass media. In France the Lumiere brothers invented one of the earliest film cameras, and the first film they shot was of workers leaving their family factory in Lyon. In the U.S., Thomas Edison developed the kinetograph, and shortly thereafter established an association of film and technology producers called the Trust. The Trust was a consortium of U.S. and French producers who agreed to pool film technology patents. Edison had also made an arrangement with George Eastman to make the Trust the exclusive recipient of Eastman’s motion picture film stock. To escape the control of the Trust, independent film producers left the traditional motion picture centers of New York and New Jersey. They went west, eventually settling in Southern California which offered cheap labor, ample space, and a mild climate that allowed for year-round location shooting. Southern California became the center of the U.S. film industry, and Hollywood became a toponym for the U.S. studio system (and remains metonymic of that industry today). The Hollywood studio system was built on vertical integration, which meant ownership of every means of the movie production process. This included production (everything involved in making a movie), distribution (getting movies to theaters), and exhibition (the process of screening the movies). Edison’s Trust tried to get the edge on exhibition by controlling the flow of films to theaters. The Hollywood studios instead decided to buy theaters themselves. The Edison Trust was eventually ended due to trade violations, and the Hollywood studios controlled every part of movie production and circulation. Paramount studios alone owned more than 300 theaters. During this period of film exhibition, movie studies built single-screen movie palaces, often ornate architectural achievements that offered a more hospitable viewing environment. Some of the most ornate and expansive movie palaces were built in Chicago. The architectural firm of Balaban and Kurtz designed many of the most famous, including the landmark Chicago Theatre (originally called the Balaban & Kurtz Chicago Theater). Other Chicago theaters built by the firm included the Oriental, the Riviera, and the Uptown theaters. The Uptown theater was the largest movie palace built in the United States.

In 1906 of a group of Chicago officials, designers, and business interests met to discuss the various problems facing the city. The Columbia Exposition a few years earlier had been received as a great success, but now problems of overcrowding, congestion, and the growth of manufacturing in the city were causing concern. This group of stakeholders met over a period of 30 months, and in 1909 they finalized their agreed-upon plan. The Chicago Plan proposed sweeping improvements to the city including rehabilitating the waterfront, redirecting railroad traffic in the city, and redesigning streets to permit better flow in and out of the business district. The mayor signed off on the proposal and then ordered a massive public relations campaign to promote the plan. Informative lectures explaining the plan were held throughout the city, articles and editorials were published in the newspapers, and the proposals were even summarized into a textbook that was taught in city schools, and a generation of Chicago school children grew up learning the values of the Chicago Plan. Also produced as part of this campaign was a two reel film titled A Tale of One City. This film was screened in city movie theaters continuously as part of the vigorous PR effort. Communication scholar James Hay has written about the role of the film in promoting the Chicago Plan as a significant moment in the history of urban renewal projects. The role of the film’s exhibition in the promotional campaign demonstrates the significance of the networks of film distribution and exhibition in reaching a mass audience, but also how the architectural design and location of downtown theaters in the city center made movie theaters important sites for engaging the public and shaping the vision of future urban development.

The Paramount decision of 1948 ended vertical integration and required studios to give up their theaters. This ended the era of studio control, but opened up new venues for film screening such as art houses that exhibited foreign films and documentaries, as well as hundreds of drive-in movie theaters for the millions of filmgoers who now had automobiles. As Americans moved to the suburbs, the movies did, too, building new forms of theaters in multiplexes and then megaplexes. While industry expressions such as “blockbuster” harken back to the role of downtown theaters in film exhibition (the term refers to patrons lined up “around the block” to get into a movie theater), most of the movie palaces have been repurposed, disused, or destroyed. Methods of film distribution and exhibition have significantly changed, and the downtown theaters and movie palaces have been largely replaced by suburban multiplexes. The example of A Tale of One City shows, however, that for a time downtown movie theaters played an integral part in the public life of the city.

Moment Four: Radio Remotes and Mediated Urban Nightlife

            The groundwork of popular broadcast radio was being established during the late 1800s. Developments in telegraphy and the theoretical proof of electromagnetic waves were among the chief developments in this early history of the medium. The rise of the new medium of the airwaves was soon reflected in the built form of the U.S. metropolis, which was also turning increasingly skyward. By the 1920s and 30s radio broadcasters were transmitting from the Metropolitan Life building in Manhattan, and the Chrysler and Empire State buildings were designed and built with spires to serve as antennas for broadcasting radio transmissions.

In 1923 a nightclub called the Cotton Club opened in the Harlem neighborhood of New York. The Cotton Club was a whites-only establishment, even though the club featured many of the premiere African American performers of the time. In 1927 Duke Ellington and his band the Washingtonians opened at the Cotton Club. Not long after, a Manhattan-based radio station began broadcasting Ellington’s performances live from the Cotton Club. Scholar Tim Wall has written about the Ellington remotes (the radio industry term for these live, on-location broadcasts) as occurring during a moment of transition for both radio and jazz. The technological, organizational, and cultural futures for the new medium were still being explored and negotiation. The broadcasting of jazz music was significant during this period as well. In 1929, radio network WABC began broadcasting the Ellington performances. WABC broadcast nationally, so now Ellington was being transmitted coast-to-coast. As Wall argues, the national broadcasting of jazz music represented the intrusion of urban life and culture into the country. In 1930 another radio network picked up the Ellington broadcasts, and now the performances were heard on the flagship stations of NBC’s Red and Blue networks. These broadcasts grew Ellington’s fame, and he recorded more than a hundred compositions during this period. The Ellington broadcasts represent a significant moment in the regulatory history of radio, but also the attempts of the young medium to establish a cultural role for its programming. The case of the Ellington Cotton Club remotes also represents how urban culture and performance, and especially African American culture, was being mediated through the shifting systems of national radio networks.

Moment Five: Sitcom Suburbs and the Urban Crisis

            Television truly became a mass medium in the years following World War II. Housing subsidies and entrepreneurial real estate developments privileged private suburban construction. Many Americans left urban centers to move to the suburbs, which had a lower tax base. Home ownership doubled between 1945 and 1950. As Americans left cities, and therefore also left the downtown movie theaters, music halls, and other urban venues of recreation and entertainment, radio became a cheap alternative to the movies. The years 1948 and 1949 saw peak radio listenership. After that, television replaced radio as the dominant medium in the home.

In addition to the role of housing policies and subsidies in spurring suburban development, there were also many discriminatory housing policies designed to keep U.S. minorities from moving into suburban communities. This practice has been referred to as American apartheid, and is one of the driving factors of the “urban crisis” that developed in U.S. urban life and discourse during this period. The scholar Dolores Hayden has used the phrase “sitcom suburbs” to refer to the homogenous developments that were also depicted in many of the nationally popular sitcoms during this period. One early flare up of these tensions happened in the Los Angeles area. In 1965, California voters passed a proposition that effectively repealed a fair housing act designed to alleviate discriminatory policies that prevented black and Mexican Americans from buying and renting in certain areas. Shortly thereafter, riots began in the Watts district and lasted for 5 days. More riots occurred in U.S. cities in 1967, and again in April 1968 following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. In each of these cases, the U.S. news media broadcast TV images that have become iconic of these riots and the overall “urban crisis” that came to dominate discourses on U.S. cities for decades.

Following the riots President Johnson appointed a special commission to investigate the causes of the unrest, and suggest how to prevent further unrest. The Kerner Commission detailed several factors that contributed to the urban riots, including explicit and implicit racism and housing discrimination. The commission also called attention to the news media for coverage that misrepresented facts of life in these cities and contributed to a deepening of divisions between white and black Americans. The Kerner Commission’s concerns were echoed by media theorist George Gerbner in his cultivation theory of television, which posits that increased exposure to violent TV programming cultivates a worldview in the viewer in which they perceive reality to be more dangerous than it really is. This period of urban fear and flight, the move to fortified homes and gated communities, has analogous developments in media coverage and development up to today.

Moment Six: Oppa Gangnam Style

            Our history so far has taken us from 1899 to 1968. In this last section, let us catch up on some of the developments that occurred in the last 60 years or so. Developments in microprocessor technology led to a computer revolution. Beginning in the 1980s, home computers became more popular and were predicted to revolutionize daily life. Developments in graphical user interfaces allowed everyday, non-technical users to approach computers. In the late 1960s the U.S. defense department began researching a redundant communication system that could remain intact following a nuclear attack. The project. ARPAnet, eventually developed into the Internet. Web browsers and HTML, such as Tim Berners-Lee’s “worldwideweb” launched in 1990, have enabled the Internet to become a mass medium. The computer revolution has also lead to unprecedented technological convergence. Computers connected to the internet have access to the full array of media content. Developments in smartphone technology have changed what was once merely a phone in a mobile device and site of media convergence, and increasingly the favorite device for media consumption and production.

On December 21, 2012, a milestone was reached. The music video for Psy’s “Gangnam Style” became the first video on YouTube to receive one billion views. The case of Gangnam Style can tell us a lot about the state of mass media industries, as well as the state of cities, in our present moment. Psy is a K-Pop musical act, which stands for “Korean Pop,” a genre originating in South Korea. His global popularity points to the importance of transnational media flows in the contemporary media environment. For instance, the increasing importance of the Chinese box office market for the Hollywood studio system. Also, the fact that his popularity spread globally via the Internet indicates the significance of media convergence, as well as how digital platforms for media circulation have upset the traditional forms of media dissemination, as well as changed our metrics for gauging media success (i.e. YouTube views versus box office, Nielsen ratings, or circulation numbers, etc.).

Gangnam Style also tells us a lot about cities in the early 21st century. The title of Psy’s song refers to the Gangnam district in Seoul, South Korea. The Gangnam district is known for its affluence, and is a hip and trendy neighborhood. This association, and the apparently mocking portrayal of lavish lifestyles in the music video, have led some commentators to interpret the song as a satirical and subversive critique of conspicuous consumption. It should be noted that Psy’s own comments about the meaning of the song do not support these interpretations. Regardless, the Gangnam Style example can help illustrate the valorization of cities that has been a trend of post-industrial economics and post-modern cultural practices. In the 1970s New York City went through a fiscal crisis. City services were sparse, the city government almost went broke, and crime and visible disorder in the city reached peak levels. As part of the city’s recovery and repositioning, the I <3 (love) NY branding campaign appeared. This campaign has remained hugely popular, and is representative of a postmodern consumption of the symbolic capital of cities. Another salient example would be the tote bags sold by American Apparel that just list names of global cities (Madrid, Tokyo, London, etc.). These cultural products, and the Gangnam Style song, are indicative of a revanchist return of capital to city centers. These examples, and indeed neighborhoods such as Seoul’s Gangnam, also point to the role of gentrification as a global urban strategy for development. In this way, Gangnam Style can serve as a vehicle for addressing some of the most pressing issues facing urban citizens today.

Urban Change and Moving Images in London

I've recently returned from London where I attended a workshop on Urban Change and Moving Images hosted by the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image. It was intellectually gratifying to engage with scholars of film, media, and cities over several days, as well as personally refreshing to indulge my lifelong passion for cinema. In addition to the screening sessions in the BIMI cinema, we also enjoyed multiple sojourns across the city to tour historic cinema sites and contemporary production locations. There was also a "mediated city" walking tour, particularly relevant to my research interests, that highlighted various media and communication infrastructure embedded in the urban environment. I relished the opportunity to discuss film and visual culture with scholars and colleagues, and also to share perspectives on urban change and space/place between London and Pittsburgh. 

One of the Pitt film students presented on skating spaces in Philadelphia and London, so after the workshop the doctoral students made a pilgrimage to the Southbank skateboard mecca. The Southbank skate park is notable for its decades-long history as part of London's urban fabric, as a locus for urban art forms, and also as an example of successful opposition to redevelopment. In 2013 the Long Live Southbank coalition successfully prevented a redesign that would've removed the extant skating space. It's a rare example of anti-redevelopment victory (similar campaigns against the redevelopment of Love plaza in Philly were not successful), and raises significant questions about the various factors affecting such movements in cities around the world. The iconic 5 Pointz mural space in Queens possessed at least as much claim to cultural and historic significance as Southbank, yet these claims were challenged in court and ultimately the space was demolished. 

It was a great trip and a much needed rejuvenating jolt of creative energy as I begin working on my dissertation project in earnest. The only downside is that I've had to reevaluate and overhaul my current research projects in light of the insightful feedback and innovative scholarship offered during the workshop. In addition to critical theories of film and visual culture my major takeaways from the event included ways of historicizing and theorizing media infrastructure in urban space, perspectives on the role of film in mediating experiences of space and place, and new (to me, at least) models of participatory research praxis. It can be tough coming back to Pittsburgh after spending some time in a such a rich and endlessly fascinating city as London, yet trips like these are a reminder of the global flows and phenomenons of development that can be seen manifesting in cities around the world, and a realization of the fecund opportunities for research and exploration waiting to be actualized. And, of course, it's always good to come home.

Take the Movie and Run #1

My partner Caroline and I have launched a new podcast, Take the Movie and Run. We're watching and discussing every film directed by Woody Allen, one at a time and in random order. The tenor of our conversations so far has been irreverent rather than academic. The first episode features the most recent Woody, Café Society. This is tangential to the usual focus of the site but I'll be linking future installments as they are produced, and you can also visit the podcast home page here.

Transit transitions: Thanking the bus driver

Last week two topics seemed to predominate in my news browsing: end-of-the-year "best of" film lists, and the Pittsburgh Port Authority's bus service changes. I didn't see many new films this year, so most of the titles on the critics' top ten lists were unknown to me. One film title that kept appearing on the year-end lists was Paterson.  I gleaned from these mentions that the movie starred Adam Driver as a bus driver-cum-poet in Paterson, New Jersey. In a subsequent review I read that Paterson was directed by Jim Jarmusch, who's made some of my favorite films.

The other big news of the new year (in Pittsburgh, at least) was the many changes to our city buses.  The port authority instituted several new policies and practices beginning on January 1st, including changes to how bus fares are priced and paid for.

In an editorial for the Pitt News, Amber Montgomery surveyed some of these changes and how changes to fare pricing in particular will affect riders: 

“Perhaps the most important change coming is the new flat fare system and the few stipulations that go along with it. In 2017, riders using a ConnectCard will pay the new fare of $2.50 for a ride and $1 for a transfer, whereas riders using cash will pay $2.75 with no option for a paper transfer — meaning if you’re paying in cash, you must dole out an extra 0.25 cents per trip, and if you need a transfer, it’s an additional flat fare of $2.75.

[...]

The changes themselves are vital and will make using buses quicker, easier and more efficient, but the new system will only work best when it is likewise simple and efficient for all users. The priority needs to be on making it so cash can be converted into ConnectCard funds easily through a plethora of retail locations and machines at nearly all bus stops.”

While reading up on these changes and their impact I came across Buses are Bridges, a blog dedicated to "mapping the blueprint for transition in Pittsburgh." They have been writing about the impact that these and other urban developments are having on Pittsburghers. The provocative title of a post from new year's day caught my attention: "A bus is in itself a city." The author referenced William Carlos Williams, so I sought out the source of this evocative quote. The original quote is "a man is in himself a city," and it comes from William's epic poem Paterson. The poem was Williams' effort to do for Paterson, NJ what Joyce had done for Dublin in Ulysses.  In addition to discovering a fascinating work of city poetry and urban romanticism to add to my reading list, I also realized that Jarmusch's Paterson film references and is likely inspired by Williams' poem.

But back to the transit transition in Pittsburgh. Blog co-author Helen Gerhardt relayed some conversations overheard at a bus stop on the day the changes went into effect:

“On the Ellsworth sidewalk across from my bus stop, I could hear three people figuring out the new bus fare payment system that just had gone into effect for New Years Day. Not being practiced at poetic distance, but instead a grassroots organizer and loud-mouthed Pittsburgher for Public Transit, I walked across the street and butted right into the information transfer.

“Yeah, everybody gotta pay as you get on the bus from now on,” the guy with glasses was saying.

“And get off at the back door?”

“Yeah, that’s what I heard. But lots of people still getting off up front. And some of the bus drivers, they encouraging people to do just like before unless the bus is crowded.””

The changes to fare prices and how they're paid are significant, and it is important to consider how these changes will affect low income Pittsburghers and other vulnerable riders who are reliant on Port Authority service. But I want to focus here on the change to the bus entry and exit system, because it directly impacts our local transit culture. 

Like public buses in many other cities, Pittsburgh city buses have two sets of doors, one near the front and another set at about the midpoint of the vehicle. Unlike buses in other cities, the rear doors are rarely used on Pittsburgh buses. With the exception of stops at the busy downtown transit hub (and at times when the bus is crowded to capacity), riders boarding or disembarking from the bus only use the front doors. Accordingly, commuters during busy periods typically have to wait for departing riders to exit the bus before being able to board.

This situation affects the 'Burgh bus riding experience in several ways. For one thing, it means that virtually every rider files past the driver when they depart the bus. This in turn has an associated effect on public transit behavior in Pittsburgh: it is common for riders to thank the driver as they leave the bus. For comparison, consider Philadelphia, our big city neighbor on the eastern side of the state. Buses in Philly operate on the same entry and exit protocols that Pittsburgh just adopted, where all riders enter at the front and exit at the back. For most Philly transit users, thanking the bus driver would be an unnecessary and even impractical gesture. Visitors from bigger cities often find our provincial customs quaint and frivolous: to the average New Yorker, saying "thank you" and "bye" to the bus driver seems like a profligate waste of time and energy. Yet thanking the bus driver is a quirk of our local culture that I relish, and I fear it is a quirk I am fated to be nostalgic for.

It occurred to me riding home last night (after the driver hollered "Back door" as I was making my way up to the front) that the Pittsburgh transit "thank you" is going the way of the dodo. If riders are to be exiting by the back doors, and no longer passing by the driver on their way out, then the customary expressions of leave-taking are surely on their way out. While I was initially excited about this change, especially as it seemed to update our transit policies in line with how things are done in"real cities," I  will also miss what is lost in the transition. Is the new system more efficient? Almost certainly, and in many ways the new boarding system makes a lot of sense and seems like a long overdue change. But every gain is accomplished through an accompanying loss. Innumerable elements of local culture, folk knowledge, and vernacular practice have been eradicated by the inexorable march of order, standardization, and efficiency. In the larger scheme of things the loss of the "driver thank you" may be inconsequential, but it is indicative of the countless small things lost and forgotten in the wake of progress and unending urban transformation.

Thoughts on polemics, Audre Lorde, and Do the Right Thing

Radical black feminist writer and activist Audre Lorde found productive potential in anger. According to Lester Olson, in his article "Anger among allies": “Lorde distinguished between anger and hatred, and she salvaged the former as potentially useful and generative” (p. 287). Lorde’s distinction between anger and hatred is developed in a quote from her remarks: “Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change” (p. 298).

In a quote from her address titled “The Uses of Anger,” Lorde uses the metaphor of the virus to describe hatred:

“We are working in a context of oppression and threat, the cause of which is certainly not the angers which lie between us, but rather that virulent hatred leveled against all women, people of Color, lesbians and gay men, poor people - against all of us who are seeking to examine the particulars of our lives as we resist our oppressions, moving toward coalition and effective action.” (emphasis added)

This thematic link between hatred and disease is also present in Spike Lee’s film Do the Right Thing. While the film’s characters never state the distinction between anger and hatred as explicitly as Lorde does, the film makes many associations that establish a difference between the two. The action of the film takes place in a roughly 24 hour period, during the hottest day of the summer in Brooklyn, New York. The temperature is referenced throughout the film, and the link between the heat and character’s emotions is made early on. Anger is associated with heat: characters talk about “getting hot” as a euphemism for getting angry. By extension then, the hottest day of the summer could also be understood as the angriest.

Hatred, on the other hand, is continually linked with sickness and disease. Early in the film, when pizzeria owner Sal arrives with his two sons to start business for the day, his son Pino says of the pizza shop:

“I detest this place like a sickness.”

Sal admonishes his son, saying: “That sounds like hatred.”

This connection returns at the end of film, again in front of Sal’s Famous Pizzeria, which at this point has been reduced to a smoldering shell. Mookie seeks Sal out to ask for the wages he is due from the previous week’s labor. Angrily, Sal throws $500 in $100 bills at Mookie, twice as much as he is owed. Mookie leaves $200 on the ground, telling Sal that he only wants what he has earned. There is a stalemate as the two men stare off, the $200 between them, and each of them waiting for the other to pick it up. Apparently not understanding why Mookie would leave the money lying on the ground Sal asks him:

“Are you sick?”

Mookie replies: “I’m hot as a motherfucker; I’m alright, though.”

Mookie’s response here should not be understood merely as a comment about the weather. Yes, he is hot because of the summer heat, but the associations presented by the film make clear the deeper meaning of this exchange. Mookie is angry, angry as a motherfucker; having endured the ordeal of the hottest day of the summer, culminating in his throwing a trashcan through a shop window, and now he finds himself the following day with his various responsibilities still in place, but now without a source of income. But he does not hate Sal. He is not infected by hatred. He is not sick.

If the film associates hatred with sickness and disease, how does it relate or portray love? The radio DJ character, Mister Senor Love Daddy, seems like an obvious connection. Another important component is the name of Senor Love Daddy’s radio station: We Love Radio 108 (“Last on your dial, first in your heart.”). The name of the radio station not only presages Clear Channel Communications’ eventual rebranding to I Heart Radio (kidding, of course), it also establishes a connection between love and another of the film’s characters: Radio Raheem.

Radio Raheem is arguably the character most closely associated with the concepts of love and hate. Raheem has custom brass knuckles on each hand: the word “LOVE” on his right hand, and the word “HATE” on his left. Through the presence of these words on his knuckles, and his performance of the accompanying story about the struggle between love and hate, “the story of life,” Radio Raheem recalls Reverend Harry Powell from the 1955 film Night of the Hunter. Reverend Powell has the words “love” and “hate” tattooed on his knuckles: love on the right hand, and hate on the left. He also tells “the story of life,” which, although using different language than Raheem, tells essentially the same account of a struggle between hate and love, where hate has the upper hand for a while but is eventually beat out by love.

In Night of the Hunter, Reverend Powell’s performance of pious geniality conceals a dark secret: he is a serial killer, traveling the country seducing widows whom he soon murders before absconding with what wealth he can steal. In Do the Right Thing, Radio Raheem is not revealed to be a serial killer, but he is done in by a sort of serial killing: the recurring killing of men of color perpetrated by police officers. The characters of the film react to Raheem’s death in a personal way (“They killed Radio Raheem!”), but it is clearly also a reaction to this serial killing of black men that contributes to the crowd’s reaction (someone is heard exclaiming, “They did it again!”). 

A final question: Is Do the Right Thing a polemic? I find it interesting to consider the question in light of the definitions offered by various authors. In her article on Larry Kramer's polemical form, Erin Rand writes of polemics: 

“Hence, polemics refute dominant ideologies and modes of thinking by rejecting the primacy of reason an invoking explicitly moral claims. In polemics a moral position is not simply advanced through rhetoric, but morality actually does rhetorical work.” (p. 305)

Rand traces the meaning of “polemic” to the Greek polemikos, meaning “warlike",  and when Lee’s film was released many reviewers and commentators were concerned that it amounted to a call for violence. I am not sure the film satisfies Rand’s four elements of rhetorical form, but I do believe it satisfies the rhetorical move that Olson calls shifting subjectivities:

“An advocate articulates a shift in the second persona of an address, wherein the auditors or readers occupy one kind of role initially and then, drawing on what is remembered or learned from that position, are repositioned subsequently into a different role that is harder for them to recognize or occupy, but that might possess some transforming power.” (p. 284)

As film critic Roger Ebert recounted in an essay about the film:

“Many audiences are shocked that the destruction of Sal's begins with a trash can thrown through the window by Mookie (Lee), the employee Sal refers to as “like a son to me.” Mookie is a character we're meant to like. Lee says he has been asked many times over the years if Mookie did the right thing. Then he observes: “Not one person of color has ever asked me that question.” But the movie in any event is not just about how the cops kill a black man and a mob burns down a pizzeria. That would be too simple, and this is not a simplistic film. It covers a day in the life of a Brooklyn street, so that we get to know the neighbors, and see by what small steps the tragedy is approached.”

Some critics and audience members objected to what they interpreted as Lee’s call for violence, and at least an implicit approval of property destruction. We heard similar rhetoric last year, when protests in response to the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner became characterized by media emphasis on incidents of property damage and looting. The state response to protests is always characterized by a tolerance so long as demonstrations are peaceful and “civil,” and when this line is broached it functions to demonize and dismiss the “protestors” at large. Is this not evocative of the white woman who purportedly said to Audre Lorde, “Tell me how you feel, but don’t say it too harshly or I cannot hear you”?

Zagreb, Croatia: a travelogue - Part 1

I’m not sure what I expected Croatia to be like. I knew about the Dalmatian coast, renowned for its natural beauty and Mediterranean character. It’s the most visited part of the country, having been a tourist hotspot for decades for precisely those reasons. I knew about the Istria region, where residents of the seaside towns are as likely to speak Italian as Croatian, but only through the lens of Rick Steves’ TV show. I had seen the ancient and lovely walled city of Dubrovnik, but only in its role doubling for King’s Landing on Game of Thrones. Compared to the coast, cities like Dubrovnik or Split, or even the national parks with their awesome waterfalls, the capital city of Zagreb is unexplored country. So I really didn’t know what to expect from Zagreb, and I had intentionally avoided learning much about the city before my trip. But if I’m being honest, I did have preconceptions about what I’d find in Zagreb: I expected it to be a bombed-out socialist shit hole. The first shock to my presumptions arrived before even setting foot in Croatia; it was the surprise of seeing Zagreb from the air.

My first surprise was how big Zagreb was. Although a relatively small urban center, the metropolitan sprawl of Zagreb was vaster than I had anticipated. This was Europe, but a part of Europe I had never visited before, and throughout my stay in Croatia I experienced a mixture of the strange and the familiar, and overall there abided a feeling of otherworldliness, an invigorating sense of being in uncharted territory. When we landed at Zagreb airport, the only other planes on the tarmac were an Aeroflot flight (Russian airlines) and an Abu Dhabi carrier. 

I’ve detailed before the series of Croatian connections that have crossed my life throughout the last decade. Well, the synchronicity police seemed determined to mark the occasion of my trip, and the coincidences continued right up to my departure. The week prior to my trip, the European migrant crisis became headline news around the world. At first I was just seeing consistent coverage on BBC World News, as the Hungarian government began hurriedly constructing border fences to shut out the stream of refugees. Soon the story was getting daily coverage on CNN, with live reports from Zagreb and throughout Croatia. Based on the stories typically covered on American TV news, a viewer could be forgiven for thinking that the world ended at the United States’ borders. So to see Croatia mentioned daily on mainstream cable news, right on the eve of my journey, was quite a surprise.

Through following the migrant crisis news coverage, I had learned about the Schengen Zone, wherein travellers can move through western European countries without passing through passport control. It is the Schengen Agreement that has robbed me of much-desired stamps in my passport during recent European sojourns. Luckily, the Schengen rules wont be fully implemented in Croatia until next year, so I enjoyed the pleasure of waiting at passport control to receive the coveted stamp.

As previously mentioned, I’ve married into a family with deep Croatian roots, and now have an extended network of in-law relatives living in Zagreb. Because I was the first representative of the American side of the family to visit the ancestral homeland, my mother-in-law asked if I would take some gifts with me to give to the Croatian relatives. I had to pack the gifts in their own box and check it as luggage. Upon arriving in Zagreb, I awaited my parcel at the baggage claim, only to eventually be directed to file a claim for lost luggage (a “baggage irregularity” in airline parlance).

While my package wasn’t awaiting me at the airport, my aunt Z was. The excitement about my visit was evident on Z’s face; smiling broadly, she embraced me the moment I was clear of customs control. Z helped me file the baggage irregularity report, giving her own local address and phone number as the contact information. Once that was finished, we were out of the terminal and into her sedan, speeding toward central Zagreb.

Traveling from the airport the city center, you pass through “Novi Zagreb,” or New Zagreb. This is the area outside the historic center, the realm of the socialist housing blocks built between the 50s and 80s, and home to other modern developments. Then you cross the Sava river and enter central Zagreb.

This was a European city center, and I was surprised. Again, I don’t know exactly what I expected to find, but I was caught off guard to find Zagreb a properly European capital city. Historic Zagreb often reminded me of Italy, and I learned that locals refer to their city as “Little Vienna”. And, as a jaded Pittsburgher, I was immediately envious of the public transportation in Zagreb: not just buses, but also trams! And the streetcars are all painted in Zagreb-blue.

As Z steered us through the city she was constantly pointing out landmarks and giving some background information. She pointed out the controversial Academy of Music building, a modern structure completed in 2014, and a point of contention among locals who tend to either embrace it as a contemporary addition to Marshal Tito Square, or loathe it as an out-of-place architectural aberration. We also passed the National Theater, where Z and her husband spend much of their time (both work in the theater), and where we would later end up that evening.

We arrived at Z’s flat, in a modern building near the city center, and situated on a hill with an expansive outlook on Zagreb. It was a spacious and beautiful apartment; I was particularly in awe of her study, which she lamented not being able to spend much time in on account of being busy in the theater. We repaired to the balcony to take in the view and toast my arrival with some fine varieties of rakia. 

Soon more members of the family arrived. I met Z’s father, sister, and nephew. Z’s husband, a theatrical actor and director, had prepared lunch. It was humbling to receive such generosity from people I was meeting for the first time, and to be in the presence of such happy and loving people. They were the very image of the archetypal European zest-for-living and appreciation for life’s simple pleasure…it was enough to make you sick!

The first course was anchovies, one variety called regular and one called “super-salty,” though both tasted thoroughly salinated. 

Next was marinated salmon with capers.

The main course was a seafood stew, a type of brudet with eel, grouper and rockling. 

Dessert was vanilla ice cream with wild berries that had been picked that morning. 

Before taking me to my lodging, Z informed me that there was to be a movie premiere in the National Theater that evening, and we would be attending. She explained that it was rare for the national theater to host a film premiere (she knew of only one previous occasion), but this film was receiving special treatment. The film is Zvizdan, translated into English as The High Sun, and is a Croatian production (with some Serbian and Slovenian backing) that received the Jury Prize at Cannes earlier this year, and has been submitted as Croatia’s entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards. Z had asked the event organizers if the screening could include English subtitles, for my sake, but it was not possible. 

As it sounded like a special occasion, I decided to dress up and wear my blazer. It was a good thing that I did. When I walked from my apartment to the theatre that night, I found that the front entrance had been given the red carpet treatment, literally. TV news crews interviewed the film’s stars as they arrived, and the Zagreb majorettes flanked the front steps. It was somewhat overwhelming for me, especially since I hadn’t slept for nearly 36 hours at this point, but Z knows everyone of note in the Croatian film and theater world, and was constantly introducing me to Croat stars of the stage and screen.

The inside of the theater was ornate and beautiful; you can get a sense of the building’s baroque style from the exterior. From our box seats we had an excellent view of not only the movie screen that had been erected on the stage, but also of the lavishly painted ceilings, and of course the who’s-who of Croatian art and politics who had turned out for the premiere. Z surveyed the crowd and pointed out people of interest: there’s the film’s producer, there’s the son of the most famous Croatian actor, and a whole host of ministers from the national government. 

“Ah,” Z said, “even the prime minister has come out tonight. It’s only because there’s an upcoming election, of course. He wants to be seen everywhere.”

“Milanovic is here?” I asked.

“You know Milanovic?” She said. “Oh, you know everything!”

Of course, I had just learned the name of Croatia’s prime minister just days before, through the news coverage of the migrant crisis. Only two days earlier I was learning Milanovic’s name through his announcement that refugees would be welcome in Croatia, and then there I was sitting in sight of the prime minister at the home field premiere of the nation’s biggest film in years. 

It was a struggle to remain awake during the screening; I was sleep deprived and trying to follow a film in a foreign language. I nodded off several times, but managed to make it the entire screening without snoring. I was able to grasp the broad strokes of the plot; Zvizdan is an artistic exploration of Serbo-Croat relations as modeled through three stories of forbidden romance. It was a good film, I look forward to seeing it with subtitles.

After the film screening, and the perfunctory adulation for the assembled cast and crew, the party started. It was absolutely packed, elbow-to-elbow, both inside the theater and especially out on the veranda where revelers attempted to smoke cigarettes without scorching the surrounding smokers with their burning butts. As we wove our ways among the crowd, Z introduced me to even more artists, industry icons, and politicians. I didn’t get to meet Milanovic, but it was no matter; it had been more than enough excitement for one day.

Wound Culture and Public Space: Mark Seltzer's concept of the pathological public sphere

Mark Seltzer: Serial Killers (II): The Pathological Public Sphere

Critical Inquiry, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Autumn, 1995), pp. 122-149

Seltzer’s essay on serial killers and the pathological public sphere immediately calls J.G. Ballard to mind. Eventually Seltzer does cite Ballard, but it is in reference to Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition, a selection that renders the author’s omission of Ballard’s subsequent novel, Crash, all the more conspicuous (Crash was adapted into a film by David Cronenberg in 1996, the year after Seltzer’s article was published). The article’s introductory anecdote about Sylvestre Matushka, who engineered train wrecks and claimed to only achieve sexual satisfaction when witnessing these accidents, is obviously evocative of Crash. Ballard’s story follows characters who are sexually excited by car crashes, and stage car accidents and recreate famous wrecks. Seltzer cites The Atrocity Exhibition in order to borrow Ballard’s phrase and relate it to his own notion of the pathological public sphere: “spectacular corporeal/machine violence, a drive to make mass technology and public space a vehicle of private desire in public spectacle: the spectacles of public sex and public violence” (p. 124). Though he never refers to Crash, Seltzer’s language here could have come direct from the book’s dust jacket: “The coupling of bodies and machines is thus also, at least in these cases, a coupling of private and public spaces” (p. 125).

Seltzer’s argument is also evocative of a different Crash: the identically-titled but textually-dissimilar Crash, a 2004 film exploring race relations in contemporary Los Angeles through the interweaving of multiple characters and plotlines. Los Angeles is famous for its iconic freeway system, and the city is often regarded as the apotheosis of car culture, an alternatingly visionary or dystopic manifestation of car-dependent society. The film Crash uses the city’s freeway network as a thematic device, beyond the relation of the story’s interweaving plot threads and intersecting characters to the on-ramps and cloverleaf interchanges of L.A.’s freeways as seen from above. The film opens at the scene of a car accident one of these L.A. freeways, and the first lines of dialogue (spoken by a character riding in a car involved in the accident) establishes the thematic significance of the film’s Los Angeles setting:

Graham: It's the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something.

Compare this sentiment with these words of serial killer Ted Bundy quoted in Seltzer’s article:

“Another factor that is almost indispensable to this kind of behavior is the mobility of contemporary American life. Living in a large center of population and living with lots of people, you can get used to dealing with strangers. It’s the anonymity factor.” (p. 133)

Seltzer does cite a Los Angeles-based film in his discussion of public and private space: the action-thriller Speed, a sort of wish-fulfillment Hollywood fantasy for Angelenos where the city’s congested freeways are cleared of all traffic and the hero’s speedometer never drops below 50 miles per hour. Seltzer notes the film’s use of “public vehicles of what might be called stranger-intimacy” (p. 125): elevators, buses, airplanes, and the city subway system. Seltzer’s highlighting of transit systems to illustrate the collisions of public and private space resonated with my own research in this area. Seltzer cites urban sociologist Georg Simmel’s account of “the stranger” in urban life; Simmel’s theories have influenced a great deal of urban studies, including theories of transportation and public space.

Toiskallio (2000) applied Simmel’s sociability to an analysis of “the interaction between the taxi driver and the fare as an example of an intensive urban semi-public situation where feasible and face-saving social interaction is needed” (p. 4). The term “semi-public” refers to that are neither public nor totally private, as taxicabs are neither public nor private transportation, but “paratransit” (p. 8). Such distinctions are further complicated by the recent advent of “car-share” or rideshare services such as Uber and Lyft. These services are essentially hired car services, and function much like taxicabs, but with significant differences. Most relevant to the current discussion is the fact that rideshare drivers do not drive company vehicles as taxi drivers do, but operate their private vehicles to transport customers. This situation transforms a person’s private car into a space of stranger-intimacy. There are consequences here not only for transformations of public and private space, but also the coupling of bodies and machines, as well as implication for affective labor and transportation services.

Ender's Game analyzed, the Stanley Parable explored, Political Economy of zombies, semiotics of Twitter, much more

It's been a long time since the last update (what happened to October?), so this post is extra long in an attempt to catch up.

• I haven't seen the new Ender's Game movie, but this review by abbeyotis at Cyborgology calls the film "a lean and contemporary plunge into questions of morality mediated by technology":

In a world in which interplanetary conflicts play out on screens, the government needs commanders who will never shrug off their campaigns as merely “virtual.” These same commanders must feel the stakes of their simulated battles to be as high as actual warfare (because, of course, they are). Card’s book makes the nostalgic claim that children are useful because they are innocent. Hood’s movie leaves nostalgia by the roadside, making the more complex assertion that they are useful because of their unique socialization to be intimately involved with, rather than detached from, simulations.

• In the ongoing discourse about games criticism and its relation to film reviews, Bob Chipman's latest Big Picture post uses his own review of the Ender's Game film as an entry point for a breathless treatise on criticism. The video presents a concise and nuanced overview of arts criticism, from the classical era through film reviews as consumer reports up to the very much in-flux conceptions of games criticism.  Personally I find this video sub-genre (where spoken content is crammed into a Tommy gun barrage of word bullets so that the narrator can convey a lot of information in a short running time) irritating and mostly worthless, since the verbal information is being presented faster than the listener can really process it. It reminds me of Film Crit Hulk, someone who writes excellent essays with obvious insight into filmmaking, but whose aesthetic choice (or "gimmick") to write in all caps is often a distraction from the content and a deterrent to readers. Film Crit Hulk has of course addressed this issue and explained the rationale for this choice, but considering that his more recent articles have dropped the third-person "Hulk speak"  writing style the all caps seems to be played out. Nevertheless, I'm sharing the video because Mr. Chipman makes a lot of interesting points, particularly regarding the cultural contexts for the various forms of criticism. Just remember to breathe deeply and monitor your heart rate while watching.

The Escapist : The Big Picture : Baggage

• In this video of a presentation titled Game design: the medium is the message, Jonathan Blow discusses how commercial constraints dictate the form of products from TV shows to video games.

• This somewhat related video from mynextappliance contextualizes Valve's Steam machine place in gaming history.

• This video from Satchbag's Goods is ostensibly a review ofHotline Miami, but develops into a discussion of art movements and Kanye West:

• This short interview with Slavoj Žižek in New York magazine continues a trend I've noticed since Pervert's Guide to Ideology has been releasing, wherein writers interviewing Žižek feel compelled to include themselves and their reactions to/interactions with Žižek into their article. Something about a Žižek encounter brings out the gonzo in journalists. The NY mag piece is also notable for this succinct positioning of Žižek's contribution to critical theory:

Žižek, after all, the ­Yugoslav-born, Ljubljana-based academic and Hegelian; mascot of the Occupy movement, critic of the Occupy movement; and former Slovenian presidential candidate, whose most infamous contribution to intellectual history remains his redefinition of ideology from a Marxist false consciousness to a Freudian-Lacanian projection of the unconscious. Translation: To Žižek, all politics—from communist to social-democratic—are formed not by deliberate principles of freedom, or equality, but by expressions of repressed desires—shame, guilt, sexual insecurity. We’re convinced we’re drawing conclusions from an interpretable world when we’re actually just suffering involuntary psychic fantasies.

• Wired UK reported on university students who turned maps of seventeenth century London into a detailed 3D world:

Following the development of the environment on the team's blog you can see some of the gaps between what data was deemed noteworthy or worth recording in the seventeenth century and the level of detail we now expect in maps and other infographics. For example, the team struggled to pinpoint the exact location on Pudding Lane of the bakery where the Great Fire of London is thought to have originated and so just ended up placing it halfway along.

• Stephen Totilo reviewed the new pirate-themed Assassin's Creed game for the New York Times. I haven't played the game, but I love that the sections of the game set in the present day have shifted from the standard global conspiracy tropes seen in the earlier installments to postmodern self-referential and meta-fictional framing:

Curiously, a new character is emerging in the series: Ubisoft itself, presented mostly in the form of self-parody in the guise of a fictional video game company, Abstergo Entertainment. We can play small sections as a developer in Abstergo’s Montreal headquarters. Our job is to help turn Kenway’s life — mined through DNA-sniffing gadgetry — into a mass-market video game adventure. We can also read management’s emails. The team debates whether games of this type could sell well if they focused more on peaceful, uplifting moments of humanity. Conflict is needed, someone argues. Violence sells.

It turns out that Abstergo is also a front for the villainous Templars, who search for history’s secrets when not creating entertainment to numb the population. In these sections, Ubisoft almost too cheekily aligns itself with the bad guys and justifies its inevitable 2015 Assassin’s Creed, set during yet another violent moment in world history.

• Speaking of postmodern, self-referential, meta-fictional video games: The Stanley Parable was released late last month. There has already been a bevy of analysis written about the game, but I am waiting for the Mac release to play the game and doing my best to avoid spoilers in the meantime. Brenna Hillier's post at VG24/7 is spoiler free (assuming you are at least familiar with the games premise, or its original incarnation as a Half Life mod), and calls The Stanley parable "a reaction against, commentary upon, critique and celebration of narrative-driven game design":

The Stanley Parable wants you to think about it. The Stanley Parable, despite its very limited inputs (you can’t even jump, and very few objects are interactive) looks at those parts of first-person gaming that are least easy to design for – exploration and messing with the game’s engine – and foregrounds them. It takes the very limitations of traditional gaming narratives and uses them to ruthlessly expose their own flaws.

• An article at Techcrunch looks at how the Twitter-acquired Bluefin Labs "took the academic subject of semiotics and made it something "central" to the future of Twitter's business":

Roy’s research focus prior to founding Bluefin, and continued interest while running the company, has to do with how both artificial and human intelligences learn language. In studying this process, he determined that the most important factor in meaning making was the interaction between human beings: non one learns language in a vacuum, after all. That lesson helped inform his work at Twitter, which started with mapping the connection between social network activity and live broadcast television.

• Nathan at metopal posted their paper posing the question: What happens when we stop thinking about videogames as cinema and instead think of them through other media, like fashion, dance, or architecture?

Aspiring to cinematic qualities is not bad in an of itself, nor do I mean to shame fellow game writers, but developers and their attendant press tend to be myopic in their point of view, both figuratively and literally. If we continually view videogames through a monocular lens, we miss much of their potential. And moreover, we begin to use ‘cinematic’ reflexively without taking the time to explain what the hell that word means.

Metaphor is a powerful tool. Thinking videogames through other media can reframe our expectations of what games can do, challenge our design habits, and reconfigure our critical vocabularies. To crib a quote from Andy Warhol, we get ‘a new idea, a new look, a new sex, a new pair of underwear.’ And as I hinted before, it turns out that fashion and videogames have some uncanny similarities.

• John Powers at the Airship posted this great longform piece on the political economy of zombies:

Zombies started their life in the Hollywood of the 1930s and ‘40s as simplistic stand-ins for racist xenophobia. Post-millennial zombies have been hot-rodded by Danny Boyle and made into a subversive form of utopia. That grim utopianism was globalized by Max Brooks, and now Brad Pitt and his partners are working to transform it into a global franchise. But if zombies are to stay relevant, it will rely on the shambling monsters' ability to stay subversive – and real subversive shocks and terror are not dystopian. They are utopian.

• This article at The Conversation addresses the "touchy subject" of Apple's Touch ID:

Ironically, our bodies now must make physical contact with devices dictating access to the real; Apple’s Touch ID sensor can discern for the most part if we are actually alive. This way, we don’t end up trying to find our stolen fingers on the black market, or prevent others from 3D scanning them to gain access to our lives.

This is a monumental shift from when Apple released its first iPhone just six years ago. It’s a touchy subject: fingerprinting authentication means we confer our trust in an inanimate object to manage our animate selves - our biology is verified, digitised, encrypted, as they are handed over to our devices.

• In the wake of the Silk Road shut down last month, Chloe Albanesius at PC Mag asks: What was Silk Road and how did it work?

Can you really buy heroin on the Web as easily as you might purchase the latest best-seller from Amazon? Not exactly, but as the FBI explained in its complaint, it wasn't exactly rocket science, thanks to Tor and some bitcoins. Here's a rundown of how Silk Road worked before the feds swooped in.

• Henry Jenkins posted the transcript of an interview with Mark J.P. Wolf. The theme of the discussion is "imaginary worlds," and they touch upon the narratology vs. ludology conflict in gaming:

The interactivity vs. storytelling debate is really a question of the author saying either “You choose” (interaction) or “I choose” (storytelling) regarding the events experienced; it can be all of one or all of the other, or some of each to varying degrees; and even when the author says “You choose”, you are still choosing from a set of options chosen by the author.  So it’s not just a question of how many choices you make, but how many options there are per choice.  Immersion, however, is a different issue, I think, which does not always rely on choice (such as immersive novels), unless you want to count “Continue reading” and “Stop reading” as two options you are constantly asked to choose between.

• Finally, GamesForChange has uploaded video of Ian Bogost's keynote address from this year's Games for Change Festival. Bogost extolls the virtues of "earnestness" over "seriousness" in game design:

Inside Korea's gaming culture, virtual worlds and economic modeling, Hollywood's Summer of Doom continued, and more

• I've long been fascinated by the gaming culture in South Korea, and Tom Massey has written a great feature piece for Eurogamer titled Seoul Caliber: Inside Korea's Gaming Culture. From this westerner's perspective, having never visited Korea, the article reads almost more like cyberpunk fiction than games journalism:

Not quite as ubiquitous, but still extremely common, are PC Bangs: LAN gaming hangouts where 1000 Won nets you an hour of multiplayer catharsis. In Gangnam's Maxzone, overhead fans rotate at Apocalypse Now speed, slicing cigarette smoke as it snakes through the blades. Korea's own NCSoft, whose European base is but a stone's throw from the Eurogamer offices, is currently going strong with its latest MMO, Blade & Soul.

"It's relaxing," says Min-Su, sipping a Milkis purchased from the wall-mounted vending machine. "And dangerous," he adds. "It's easy to lose track of time playing these games, especially when you have so much invested in them. I'm always thinking about achieving the next level or taking on a quick quest to try to obtain a weapon, and the next thing I know I've been here for half the day."

• As a cyberpunk/hyperreality aside, the city of Hong Kong has put up a blue-sky backdrop for when the real sky is too smoggy for tourist photos.

• In yet another cyberpunk dystopian tangent, I recently came across Chris Rogers' site Fragments of a Hologram Rose: Re-seeing Blade Runner, with an assortment of content and analysis relating to the film.
• And one final cyberpunk diversion: this video is the first part of a lecture by University of Michigan professor Eric Rabkin covering cyberpunk, postmodernism, and beyond:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kue_gd8DneU&w=420&h=315]

• Writing for The New Economy, Aaran Franda examines how the virtual economies seen in games like EVE Online provide valuable perspectives on real world economic activity:

Creation and simulation in virtual worlds appear to offer the best domain to test the new ideas required to tackle the very real problems of depravation, inequality, unemployment, and poverty that exist in national economies. On that note the need to see our socioeconomic institutions for the games that they really are seems even more poignant.

In the words of Vili Lehdonvirta, a leading scholar in virtual goods and currencies, the suffering we see today is “not some consequence of natural or physical law” it instead “is a result of the way we play these games.”

• Jon Evans at Tech Crunch looks at jobs, robots, capitalism, inequality, and you:

The global economy seems to be bifurcating into a rich/tech track and a poor/non-tech track, not least because new technology will increasingly destroy/replace old non-tech jobs. (Yes, global. Foxconn is already replacing Chinese employees with one million robots.) So far so fairly non-controversial.

The big thorny question is this: is technology destroying jobs faster than it creates them?

[...]

We live in an era of rapid exponential growth in technological capabilities. (Which may finally be slowing down, true, but that’s an issue for decades hence.) If you’re talking about the economic effects of technology in the 1980s, much less the 1930s or the nineteenth century, as if it has any relevance whatsoever to today’s situation, then you do not understand exponential growth. The present changes so much faster that the past is no guide at all; the difference is qualitative, not just quantitative. It’s like comparing a leisurely walk to relativistic speeds.

• This recent episode of Radiolab focused on talking to machines:

We begin with a love story--from a man who unwittingly fell in love with a chatbot on an online dating site. Then, we encounter a robot therapist whose inventor became so unnerved by its success that he pulled the plug. And we talk to the man who coded Cleverbot, a software program that learns from every new line of conversation it receives...and that's chatting with more than 3 million humans each month. Then, five intrepid kids help us test a hypothesis about a toy designed to push our buttons, and play on our human empathy. And we meet a robot built to be so sentient that its creators hope it will one day have a consciousness, and a life, all its own.

• This video shows a demo of using Google Glass for interactive augmented reality:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHCwaaactyY&w=420&h=315]

• A recent Guardian article by Juliette Garside warns that our digital infrastructure is exceeding the limits of human control:

"These outages are absolutely going to continue," said Neil MacDonald, a fellow at technology research firm Gartner. "There has been an explosion in data across all types of enterprises. The complexity of the systems created to support big data is beyond the understanding of a single person and they also fail in ways that are beyond the comprehension of a single person."

From high volume securities trading to the explosion in social media and the online consumption of entertainment, the amount of data being carried globally over the private networks, such as stock exchanges, and the public internet is placing unprecedented strain on websites and on the networks that connect them.

• In an "anti-videogame manifesto," Keith Burgun argues for intrinsic rewards and against grinding in videogames:

What I want is systems that have intrinsic rewards; that are disciplines similar to drawing or playing a musical instrument. I want systems which are their own reward.

What videogames almost always give me instead are labor that I must perform for an extrinsic reward. I want to convince you that not only is this not what I want, this isn’t really what anyone wants.

• This video from PBS Digital Studios' Off Book looks at the rise of competetive gaming & e-sports:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpO76SkpaWQ&w=560&h=315]

• Will Luton at GamesIndustry International writes about the celebrification of game developers:

This 'celebrification' is enlivening making games and giving players role models, drawing more people in to development, especially indie and auteured games. This shift is proving more prosperous than any Skillset-accredited course or government pot could ever hope for. We are making men sitting in pants at their laptops for 12 hours a day as glamorous as it could be.

Creating luminaries will lead to all the benefits that more people in games can bring: a bigger and brighter community, plus new and fresh talent making exciting games. However, celebritydom demands storms, turmoil and gossip.

• The ongoing survey of Hollywood's Summer of Doom continues with Isaac Chotiner's New Republic article, Hollywood is in trouble and we're all going to pay:

Spielberg's theory is essentially that a studio will eventually go under after it releases five or six bombs in a row. The reason: budgets have become so gigantic. And, indeed, this summer has been full of movies with giant budgets and modest grosses, all of which has elicited hand-wringing about financial losses, the lack of a quality product (another post-apocalyptic thriller? more superheroes?), and a possible connection between the two. There has been some hope that Hollywood's troubles will lead to a rethinking of how movies get made, and which movies get greenlit by studio executives. But a close look at this summer's grosses suggest a more worrisome possibility: that the studios will become more conservative and even less creative.

• Finally, video of Slavoj Žižek and Paul A. Taylor discussing the difficulty of conveying philosophical ideas in today's media:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4mDNMSntlA&w=420&h=315]