The Medium play at Pittsburgh's City Theater

This past weekend City Theatre in Pittsburgh’s South Side began staging The Medium, a performance inspired by the work of Marshall McLuhan.

The production was developed by New York-based SITI Company beginning in 1993 and was first presented at City Theatre in 1996. This means that The Medium was created during a unique moment in McLuhan’s legacy, in the early days of the Internet when technological optimism predominated and McLuhan’s media theory was retrieved for its perceived explanatory power. This was the era in which WIRED magazine named McLuhan the patron saint of the Internet Age, and even published dialogues with a McLuhan simulacrum. 

I was interested in the play for a number of reasons, one of which was the opportunity to see McLuhan’s persona and ideas remediated in a new form. The mediation of McLuhan’s figure (as a personality, not just his ideas) is part of what drew me to his theories in the first place. I first remember being introduced to McLuhan as a college undergraduate in a Communication Theory course. When we got to the class covering McLuhan the professor included a range of pop culture artifacts to illustrate the public impact that McLuhan’s media notions had. We read the transcript of the scene in which he cameos in Annie Hall, listened to a cowboy-style song called “The Ballad of Marshall McLuhan”, and watched some sort of choreographed performance on the theme of “the global village” that I haven’t been able to find online.

The mediation of McLuhan is of course a testament to his ability to tap into the zeitgeist of the emerging electronic media age and the sixties counterculture trends with his “far out” media guru proclamations. It is an idea of McLuhan, rather than McLuhan’s ideas, that has proliferated so vastly through pop culture. The “global village” has currency as a buzzword or marketing slogan. And “the medium is the message” has endured not only for its neatly encapsulated central insight but its form illustrates its key idea: an ideal soundbite perfectly attuned to transmission in the electronic media age, a precursor to theories of memetic cultural transmission.

So I went for the first night of preview performances of The Medium, not really knowing what to expect. In that way the performance unfolded as a pleasant surprise, and I was thoroughly engaged for the duration. One of the first things that struck me was the impact of hearing words and phrases that I was familiar with, but hearing them delivered as dramatic performance for the first time. The primary way that I’ve interfaced with McLuhan’s work is literate, through reading books and essays. While watching the play I realized how powerful and evocative it was to hear this words about oral culture, or speech as the primary mode of communication prior to the phonetic alphabet, or how the hot ear is hyperaesthetic compared to the cool eye, in the form of live performance rather than on the printed page. In fact it seems like a necessary way of engaging with his ideas in as many different mediums as possible, to experience how the content is transformed when the form of delivery is changed. The play also does a great job of evoking the all-at-once-ness of acoustic space through the repetition of phrases and instances of overlapping dialogue.

It was a really cool way of revisiting and engaging with McLuhan’s legacy, and the performance is particularly well suited for playing with his ideas about spoken communication and oral culture. I had wondered beforehand how “intellectual” and distanced a play based on McLuhan’s ideas might be, but The Medium was engaging throughout due to the excellent performances and a dynamic choreography and physicality.

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.

Thoughts on Pittsburgh's "Parts Unknown"

News came out this summer that Anthony Bourdain was in town to film a Pittsburgh-based episode of his Parts Unknown program. I like Bourdain and his tv shows, and I am weirdly passionate about Pittsburgh, so I was eagerly awaiting the episode, especially after we learned of his visit to our favorite local bar (I say that like it's some overlooked hole-in-the-wall; I'm talking about the Squirrel Hill Cafe, aka "The Cage," which is an East End institution and deservedly so). Ahead of the episode's premiere last night I saw several articles online calling Bourdain's trip to Pittsburgh "inevitable." Pittsburgh was an inevitable stop, they argue, because the city's booming food scene and consistent ranking as a most-livable city has put it in the national spotlight. Pittsburgh has gotten a fair bit of national attention the last few years, but let's not kid ourselves. Bourdain and crew came to Pittsburgh because he's on the 10th season of his show and they've already gone to the exciting cities, so the only thing that made a Pittsburgh-centric Parts Unknown inevitable was the show's continuation.

When word broke last June that Bourdain's crew was filming around town user rockandrollcityplan posted this forecasted episode rundown on the Pittsburgh subreddit:

"Once downtrodden steel town (que shot of the Carrie Furnace) now changing in the face of gentrification that is creating a burgeoning food scene based on tradition (visit to Pierogies-Plus and then Apteka). Talk about a tradition of pushing out the city's African American population with a visit to the Hill District (shot of the arena site and then new construction in East Liberty as a juxtaposition). Walk around Squirrel Hill and remark how one of the country's largest Jewish enclaves is filled with a new Asian population (Everyday Noodles) but some vestiges of old Pittsburgh remain in its dive bars (Squirrel Cage). Something, something, filler in the Strip District... interview with Fetterman."

Aside from Everyday Noodles and the Strip District, which did not appear in the episode, this prediction ended up being pretty spot-on. Now, the basic narrative beats of the episode can be inferred from Bourdain's approach across the last 9 seasons of his show. I would characterize the overriding theme of Parts Unknown as old-vs-new: how places have changed, what has emerged, what has disappeared, and what it all means to the people who live there. And within this overriding theme I think there are 2 sub-categories that an episode of PU can fall into: (1), charting the (ostensible) erosion of local culture and tradition in the wake of globalization ; and (2), defying audience expectations about a place by showing that their stereotypical views are outdated and do not reflect modern conditions. There are other threads that run through many of the shows, like "the price of success" (new local businesses are doing well but they're sowing the seeds of gentrification!) and "accepting the transience of existence"  (tradition diminishes but a new generation emerges). 

So now that I've seen the episode, what do I make of it? Overall I was very impressed with the episode, and by the people and places the producers' decided to include. I have to qualify my take on the program by saying that I am not a native Pittsburgher, have only lived here for four years and will likely move away in the not-too-distant future. But I have loved this city from my first day here, embracing its wonders and its flaws, and a great deal of my scholarly research centers on the city's past, present, and future. Based on my experience here I thought they did a decent job of representing Pittsburgh, showcasing scenes of everyday life along with glimpses of the extreme ends of the economic divide, and was ultimately a more nuanced portrayal than I anticipated (not that I expected much in the first place). My criticisms of the presentation have to do with what was included rather than what was left out (Pittsburghers will surely argue endlessly about the episode's grievous omissions), so let me run through some of the things I did and did not like about the show. 

• The opening teaser featured hand-made pierogie production, which might seem hackneyed to Pittsburghers but it's also unavoidable.
• The first sequence took place in Bloomfield, the neighborhood nearest and dearest to my own heart. I spotted some familiar neighborhood characters in the background and the sausage and peppers are all-too-familiar. Coming home across the Bloomfield Bridge I see the bocce players there regularly, even late into the evening. As I said I like the neighborhood, but a table of meats and sauce being overturned and spilling onto the ground seems like an apt representation of Bloomfield.
• Wasn't sure they would feature the Hill District, very glad that they did. An integral part of this city's history and character that far too many Pittsburghers pass by unawares on a daily basis. 
• Bourdain's ride-along with Sala Udin captured one of the most characteristic aspects of the Hill District: the neighborhood's vocality, the call-and-response culture of friend and neighbors acknowledging one another on the street (even when passing in cars, as was seen in the episode). 
• The Hill District sequence also featured my favorite image of the entire episode: a woman ordering lunch at Grandma B's wearing a Penguins jersey and a hijab .
• The neon lights of Kelly's at night seemed particularly telegenic.

Gripes and omissions:

• No Liberty Tunnel shot. This is the biggest omission for me, way more than any bar or restaurant that went unmentioned. Arriving in Pittsburgh through the Liberty Tunnel is one of the great unique experiences that this city offers. From my first time careening through the tunnel in a U-Haul truck, to every time I return home after a trip, it is always a spectacular sensation to have the world open up upon exiting the tunnel as the city and river valley bursts into being all around you. 
• A small pet peeve, but Fetterman's addressing Bourdain as "chef" is anachronistic considering Bourdain's current full-time gig. If anything his honorific should be "TV Producer Tony," or is it like the Presidency where you carry the title even after you leave office?
• Other folks seem very upset at the wrestling sequence's inclusion; it didn't bother me, as a non-native Pittsburgher and non-wrestling fan I recognize the wrestling angle as an idiosyncratic quirk of the local culture.
• The demolition derby, on the other hand, seemed out of place and served as a particularly weak ending to the episode. After traveling well beyond the Pittsburgh city limits, the show closes with scenes of automotive carnage underneath some banal closing narration from Bourdain. I'm paraphrasing from memory but this captures the gist:

"What will become of Pittsburgh? How do we welcome the promise of change while preserving what we love about our past? There are probably no easy answers, so for now, let's just wreck some cars."

I mean, I get that this show is essentially 'food & place porn' that airs on the wince-inducing middle-of-the-road CNN, but even with these measured expectations in mind, that's a strikingly sophomoric and flippant sentiment to go out on. You're already equivocating, so why use even more unnecessary weasel words? I mean, "probably" no easy answers? Why not just say that there are no easy answers? Would that risk offending the viewers who believe that there are easy answers, whatever their personal brand of myopic small-mindedness might be?

I've watched all of Bourdain's tv series and enjoy each of them to varying degrees (Cook's Tour is a grainier grungier early cut and The Layover is the underappreciated peak-travel-tv Bourdain), and his Zero Point Zero crew do excellent work but their reliance on certain templates becomes evident once you've seen enough of their productions. One of their favorite go-tos (more evident lately in their non-Bourdain projects) is the technique of editing around a big laugh. Need to transition to the next scene? Insert a clip of everyone having a nice big laugh then cut. And the derby finale sequence represents this sort of "big laugh" thinking on a larger scale: throw up some noise and spectacle to distract the viewers so we can make the big out. And Bourdain's perfunctory closing narration plays a part in this as well, since who's going to notice the utter vacuity of your parting words with all that slam-bang car crashing and little-kid-American-flag-waving going on?

I get it: Pittsburgh is so uninteresting the film crew had to drive 30 miles outside the city to film an *ahem* rural, all-American crowd enjoying a demolition derby. Television is a visual medium, after all, so perhaps they couldn't find sufficient visual spectacle within the city limits. It is important, too, to recognize that Pittsburgh can't represent all of the greater region, and the rural population is an important part of the contemporary political condition as indicated in the episode's discussion of the state turning Republican in the last presidential election. But without any semblance of full-circle denouement or contextualization within all that had preceded it, this closing sequence was muddled and disappointing.

After the episode aired I went back to the Pittsburgh subreddit to gauge reactions. Initial responses were overwhelmingly negative, which is perhaps to be expected. Every place means many different things to the people who live there, and it is impossible for a 40 minute TV program to fully capture and represent the essence of a city from even a single individual's perspective. The user-base of reddit probably skews young, and a number of the negative comments seemed to be responding to perceived attacks upon their generation and lifestyle choices. Among the perceived slights were dispersions cast on millenials, bicyclists, craft beer aficionados, and suburban residents who travel into the city for sports and other entertainment. What these commenters are overlooking, and others in the forum have pointed out, is that the show is called Parts Unknown and aims to represent the sort of lived experiences that are usually absent from mainstream media discourses. I mean, people actually expected a Rick Sebak-style milquetoast promotional showcase of the city? The bottom line is that if these self-identifying millenials want to be constantly catered to and reassured in their lifestyle choices they have no shortage of outlets. 

Another theme in the negative reactions, and one I find much more troubling, is indignation that the Hill District was even featured in the episode at all. Apparently this historic neighborhood "doesn't represent our city." One commenter particularly criticized the depiction of the deleterious effects that the Civic Arena's construction had on the Lower Hill. This person characterizes the Hill District's development as sacrificing "a dying neighborhood in exchange for economy". Ignoring the obvious vapidity and implicit racism of this statement, I have to ask what "dying neighborhood" this person is invoking? The vibrant Hill District of the 40s and 50s that was destroyed by this malign urban renewal scheme? The neighborhood which was among the most culturally verdant African American communities in the country? The neighborhood that produced August Wilson, Teenie Harris, and Gus Greenlee's Crawford Grill? Or is it the Hill District of today that is "dying"? The one that remains cut off from the rest of the city (spatially, racially, economically, etc.) 60 years after the Civic Arena project? The one that is so far removed from the eyes and minds of most Pittsburghers we are angered when it appears on our television screens?

Make no mistake: the history of the Hill District, both good and ill, is integral to Pittsburgh's identity and to its place in the history of this country. Pittsburgh mills may have contributed to the building of skycrapers and the defeat of tyrants, but the razing of the Hill District is just as significant to the history of our national consciousness. It is a history of residential segregation, uneven development, the destruction of black homes and neighborhoods, racial ghettoization, concentrated poverty, and discriminatory policing. More than 100 years ago the journalist Lincoln Steffens wrote about political corruption in Pittsburgh in his book The Shame of Our Cities. Pittsburgh's industrial production and pollution may have earned the city's nickname of "hell with the lid off," Steffens said, but the city's political landscape was "hell with the lid on." The sprawling parking lot on the former Civic Arena site that once connected the Hill District to downtown Pittsburgh, and the bungled attempts at redeveloping that land, are continuing sources of shame for this city.

As Anthony Bourdain has pointed out, there are no easy answers. But who needs answers when we can go watch the demolition derby? Let’s go wreck some cars.

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”?