Andrew O'Hehir of Salon.com on what Gibney's torture documentary makes him want to do after seeing the film: "I wanted to get stinking drunk in some dead-end bar (not the actual ones available on 23rd Street, where the drinks come in funny colors and cost $14) and scream at strangers, tell them that if this country had any f***ing stones we would drag these people out of Washington, strip them of their citizenship and their clothes, and drive them white-baby naked across the Rio Grande to fend for themselves in the Sonora desert."

I don't even know how to respond to that, except... Bravo Alex Gibney!.....?

Full review here: http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2007/04/30/tribeca_2/index.html

Posted by Joe Posner at 07:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This movie has received overwhelming praise recently in both class and discussions I have had outside of class. It has been referenced so much that I finally watched it tonight. After watching the film for its two hour run time, I have little praise to give. The film is intriguing for the way in which it deals with surveillance- it can be said the growth of the surveyor is a bit more important than that of those surveyed. But the film doesn't do anything earthshaking. One could argue, perhaps, that the movie is made intriguing by fact that Georg is so wrapped up in worrying about whether others are being watched that he neglects the likelihood that he, himself is being surveyed. For me, this was just infuriating, as Georg had every reason to be hyper-cautious, given his plays and his various chats with the Minister of Art. Georg's carelessness in this regard corrupted the realism of the film and made the plot movement rather uninteresting. Also, I took issue with the blatant sexism in the movie. How can Georg's wife's infidelity/weakness be explained? Is the point that you can't trust anybody, even those you love? Is she only out to save herself? This question is further complicated by her implicating Georg and subsequently committing suicide when the agents come to the house. Perhaps she was actually testing Georg's belief that she would never betray him? Or is it too much to assume that she even understood the wiretapping agent's intentions during her confession? I know this isn't exactly related to the class itself, but it has been highly referenced in recent weeks. I was hoping to hear other people's takes. Perhaps I am missing the more subtle notes of the film, but for me, it was sexist and character roles left a lot to be desired (save Wiesler, the wiretapper, of course). Hopefully others have seen this and have strong views on it.

Posted by Daliso Ngoma Leslie at 03:40 AM | Permalink

In light of Eugene's presentation, I thought this song by Jim Jones (of Ballllliiinn fame) would be of note. Go down to the song titled "Rockefeller Law" the link I have provided.

Enjoy:
http://www.hiphopgame.com/index2.php3?page=tracks1

Posted by Joshua Rosenthal at 10:32 PM | Permalink

Andrew Jorecki’s film Capturing The Friedmans, a picture of a suburban family torn apart by accusations of child molestation and the media and legal circus that results, is edited in such a way as to confuse the audience as to whether Arnold Friedman and his son Jesse committed the crimes of which they were accused. It does this in a way that is manipulative of its viewers, revealing a new fact about the case every few minutes and thus preventing the viewer from fully forming an opinion. The film is rich in subtext; it examines the myth of suburban family perfection, the nature of the justice system in investigating and prosecuting sex offences, and the reliability of child witnesses. Nevertheless, Jorecki’s editing cheapens the effect of this otherwise effective and nuanced movie, forcing the viewer to engage the film’s controversial subject matter through gut response rather than through full rational comprehension.

From the very beginning the film toys with the viewer, establishing a sense of place that dares the viewer to subscribe to the stereotypical image of suburban calm before exploding it. Jorecki presents the Friedmans as a respectable middle-class family, albeit one with a secret—not quite the Brady Bunch, but perfectly likeable and functional nonetheless. As the movie progresses and the family is torn apart by scandal, the director exposes the dysfunction hidden beneath the surface: Arnold’s troubled marriage, Elaine’s alienation within the family. A powerful contrast is shown between what had been established earlier and what is revealed later; the image of a family at peace is replaced by that of a family at odds with itself. Yet even in showing the breakdown of the family, Jorecki allows hints of the “old,” jocular Friedmans to appear (dancing to Latin jazz in the living room, clowning on the courthouse steps), creating not only nostalgia in the viewer but also a sense of confused humanity; because one cannot figure out whether the “real” Friedmans are the friendly family of the beginning of the movie or the dysfunctional family of its end, one must conclude that neither contains the whole truth.

The treatment of the Friedman family dynamic exemplifies a process that Jorecki uses throughout the film: he establishes a set of characters or an issue as being simple and direct, reveals an uglier side, and then sets the two in contrast. The viewer, confused about which to believe, believes both and neither simultaneously and is forced to confront the complexity of the characters and issues at hand. Jorecki uses this approach not only to depict the breakdown of the Friedman family but also to address the reliability of the child witnesses upon whom the case against the Friedmans was built, the possible bias of the investigators, and, most notably, the truth of the pedophilia charges themselves.

Jorecki’s process of choice is effective in showing the complexity of difficult issues in an accessible manner; it becomes problematic only when the director chooses to mislead the audience to make his point. By revealing a new fact about the case or about Arnold’s past only every ten minutes or so, Jorecki lies by omission; he allows the viewer to form an opinion based upon the information he or she has at the moment, which then becomes moot when new facts are revealed. This repeats itself numerous times throughout the film, so that by the end, the viewer is unsure of what to believe. While the strategy is effective in driving home the uncertainty of Arnold and Jesse’s guilt, it feels cheap; particularly onerous is Jorecki’s choice to hold back, until the final third of the movie, the revelation that Arnold had relations with underage boys in the past.

Perhaps the film would not be as effective if it did not manipulate the viewer as much, but it would also feel more honest. Moreover, a more straightforward approach would allow the viewer to process the facts and events of the film through high-order reasoning rather than gut response even while presenting the same material. The metaphor of a train track may be useful to describe the effect of Jorecki’s editing. In building a train track between two points, one can build the track in a straight line, or one can build a track that swerves back and forth. The first is a train, while the second is a roller coaster; the first conveys passengers from one point to another as effectively as possible, while the second leaves the passengers thrilled, disoriented, and a bit queasy. Jorecki’s movie is the latter.

A 2003 Village Voice article describes how “[Jorecki] was struck by how [viewers at Sundance] were split over Arnold and Jesse's guilt. Since then, he's crafted a marketing strategy based on ambiguity, and during Q&As and interviews, he has studiously avoided taking a stand. (http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0321,nathan,44228,1.html)” According to the Capturing The Friedmans Wikipedia article—admittedly not the most reliable source—Jorecki had publicly defended the Friedmans’ innocence. One must wonder why he did not do the same in the film. Perhaps he knew that the “strategy based on ambiguity” would make a more effective movie. His editing choices reflect that view—sacrificing an impartial presentation of the facts in exchange for a roller-coaster ride.

Posted by Jonathan Russ at 10:11 PM | Permalink

I just knew there was a reason I hated mimes. The panhandling, the bad jokes, the frightening make-up, the….silence – they all swirled together into a perfect storm of annoyingness. The great philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche shared my sentiment. He viewed mimesis as a strategy of the weak against the strong – a threat to life, passion, and power. As a budding übermensch, I took Nietzsche’s prescribed defense against mimesis – to rely on one’s creative instinct – to heart. And my instinct always told me that those quiet bastards were responsible for the sorry state of our doomed 21st century.

So it came as no surprise to me to find that one of humanity’s greatest thinkers, Plato, had a similar attitude towards the ancient “art” of mime. The Greek philosopher denounced overly imitative representation, which he deemed “mechanical accuracy,” and called instead for a “rightness of mimesis” in the arts. In class last Wednesday, another great thinker, Professor James Der Derian, again invoked…I won’t say “repeated”…the dangers of mimesis. He observed that, less than two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union (and I note as I write this that the media is currently buzzing with news of Boris Yelstin’s death) it seems that we are again fighting a global war against a monolithic ideological enemy who wants to defeat us and destroy our way of life. Let’s call it the “mimetic quandary” – somehow, we continuously find ourselves haunted by the ghosts (or the zombies) of political, economic, and social history. Despite our best efforts to learn history, we still seem doomed to repeat it.

In fact, I’ll do Professor Der Derian one better, and charge that the Cold War itself was just another example of political mimesis – an ideological aping of World War II. In that war we really were engaged in a global conflict against monolithic ideological enemy who wanted to defeat us and destroy our way of life – barely comparable to the hardly monolithic and often over-estimated enemy we faced in the Cold War. The fact that televised news and mass media took off in the United States around this period gels nicely with Professor Der Derian’s assertion in class that the “mimetic quandary” is fed and perhaps even created by the media. He went on to cite “poesis” – creative expression – as the alternative and the solution to the “mimetic quandary,” and proposed that new technologies may soon put this ability into the hands of the masses. Ten minutes later, after class, he assigned me a thematic essay in which I had to find a “media solution” to the “mimetic quandary.” Always eager for a chance to beat up on mimes, I got started right after Spring Weekend (hangovers help me study).

The first question, naturally, is: “How does the media feed the mimetic quandary?” In fact, I think someone asked this in class but I wasn’t really paying attention and it’s not in my notes. Anyway, the way I see it, the news media, by its very nature, is pledged to mimesis. The holy grail of “objectivity” pushes journalists to merely report the “facts as they happened” – to give the most exact, neutral, thorough account of what happened in the world. The New York Times proudly labels its paper, “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” as though the news is reproduced exactly on its pages, without any intermediary journalists or filters. To an American journalist schooled in the necessity of objectivity and the evils of media bias, the ideal form of reportage would allow the audience to personally experience the events themselves. Some kind of advanced, alien-technology from the 30th century, which tapped into users’ brains and directly stimulated the correct nerve endings in order to recreate the news. Mimesis in its purest form.

The second way in which the news media tends towards mimesis is that it is their job to explain very complex, confusing, and often foreign concepts and events to the American people. The media’s natural reaction – in fact, most peoples’ reaction to such a difficult task – is to simplify and to explain in terms that the audience will understand. The American people understood World War II, so, in the news media, “Nazis” became “Communists.” Almost 60 years later, “Communists” have become “terrorists” or, in an even more striking form of mimesis, “Islamofascists.” The news is also over-simplified by a media eager to attract an audience and afraid of alienating or confusing their customers. The complexities of the Sino-Soviet relationship and the differences between Maosim and Stalinism were deemed too confusing and complicated for the “average American,” so instead there was a vast and monolithic Communist menace. Though the civil war in Iraq has forced many Americans to learn the hard way about the realities of the Islamic world, news coverage of the events, especially in the first few years after 9/11, remained very much in the “us versus them” mentality. Saddam Hussein was a secular, nationalist, oppressive leader whom the United States supported throughout the 1980s. Al-Qaeda was a revolutionary, fundamentalist, internationalist terrorist group (many of whose members the United States also supported throughout the 1980s). In reality, the two were bitter enemies, but were quickly lumped together in the media’s desire to simplify the complexities of international affairs following 9/11 (people who want to kill us vs. people who don’t want to kill us…yet).

The dangers of the “mimetic quandary” are twofold. On one hand, mimesis blinds the American people to the realities of the international situation. One can almost hear the droning chant of “It’s just like the Cold War…It’s just like the Cold War…It’s just like the Cold War” reverberate from the White House. Neoconservatives have only just begun to recognize their mistake in believing that the “liberation” of the Arab world would work just like the end of Communism in Eastern Europe. At the same time as it distorts one’s perspective, mimesis warps reality to fit itself. This seems to contradict the first danger of mimesis, and it does, but, unfortunately, rather than cancel out its harm, it merely complicates it. By viewing the “War against Terror” as another “Cold War,” Americans manage to recreate all the bad bits of the Cold War – the fear of internal subversives, the global and monolithic threat, and the terror of imminent destruction. Edward Said notes that, if one believes that all lions are fierce, then it is more likely that the ways in which one would handle a lion will actually increase its fierceness (Said 94). In the same way, the more new media mimesis makes the American people feel as though we are in an “us vs. them” situation, the more the world really will become “us vs. them.” The more we tell ourselves that terrorists hate our freedom and want to exterminate us, just like the Communists, and just like the Nazis, the more we engender that reality.

The topics for this week’s class, 9/11 and the “Al-Jazeera Effect,” come into play as failed media solutions to the mimetic quandary – to again invoke the ancient Greeks, both 9/11 and the “Al-Jazeera Effect” are “pharmakons,” potential cures for the mimetic quandary that ultimately became poisons which only added to the problem. The terrorist attacks on September 11th, in their horror, devastation, and cruelty, were, to again invoke Professor Der Derian, events too big for our theories. In fact, they may also have been too big for our news media. For a brief period, the attacks seemed so heinous, so enormous, and so terrifying that the news media could no longer resort to mimesis in order to explain them – just as in academics, September 11th shattered the American people’s notions of history, of ideology, of global culture, and of international affairs. Yet soon enough, 9/11 was churned through the new media’s mimetic machine, re-emerging as the return of Pearl Harbor, the return of a global conflict, and, even to Osama bin Laden, as the return of the pain of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon to the complicit United States. Bin Laden invoked this mimetic view of the attacks in his October 2004 recorded message to the American people, “While I was looking at those destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me to punish the unjust one in a similar manner by destroying towers in the United States so that it would feel some of what we felt and to be deterred from killing our children and women.” Sadly, on top of all its physical horror, 9/11 served to only worsen the mimetic crisis by sparking another wave of “us vs. them/Nazis/Communists/terrorists” mimesis.

With the actors on both sides of the conflict blinded and driven by the mimetic quandary, even in the wake of the potentially discourse-shattering events of September 11th, Al-Jazeera seemed to offer hope for an end to mimesis. Before 9/11, the U.S. government routinely praised the Arabic television network, headquartered in Doha, Qatar, as an uncensored, independent, progressive voice in the Arab world. To those frustrated by the mimetic quandary, Al-Jazeera promised not to be restricted by the traditional perceptual frames of the American media, because its principle audience, its newscasters, and its journalists were Arab. Thus, they would not continuously draw on World War II and Cold War paradigms to present contemporary issues, but, rather, would offer an “Arab” perspective that could free Americans from the binds of mimesis. Ah, if only it were so easy. Instead, Al-Jazeera became a pharmakon – a cure but also a poison. First of all, Americans don’t read or watch Al-Jazeera. It’s not completely the nation’s fault, either, as, following 9/11, the Bush administration and American media outlets such as FoxNews repeatedly smeared the Arab network and casted it as the “terrorist” news station. No cable networks are currently willing to carry the Al-Jazeera channel for dread of appearing sympathetic towards “the enemy” and, by this point, I fear that many Americans are probably too afraid or too hateful to watch it. What happened, sadly, is that Al-Jazeera itself was also sucked into the American news media mimetic machine, becoming just another character in the 21st century’s new Cold War. Though the network has an excellent English language webpage which I encourage everyone to read, this has had little impact on political discourse in the American media. Additionally, Al-Jazeera is also trapped by the mimeticism inherent in the journalistic pursuit of objectivity – their motto translates as “The Opinion and the Other Opinion.” Their mimesis may draw on different sources than does the American mimetic quandary. However, just looking at the history of 20th century relations between the West and the Arab world (conquests, imperialism, exploitation, terrorism), Al-Jazeera’s mimesis does not portend to be any more pleasant an experience than our own.

Now, after all this pretentious, academic posturing, is there a media solution to the mimetic quandary? I believe there is. And it comes, surprisingly, waving an American flag, proudly “supporting our troops,” and riding a bucking Bill O’Reilly. That’s right – FoxNews. The FoxNews Channel’s producers seem to grasp the concepts of post-modernism better than any other media outlet. There must be a few Brown grads working there, hiding deep within the steaming bowels of the FoxNews Manhattan headquarters. No other news media outlet has managed to harness post-modern concepts like the impossibility of objectivity (Fox insists that it’s “Fair and Balanced,” but it does so with a wink and a smile), the influence of perceptual frameworks, the power of media effects, and the phenomenon of virtual immersion like FoxNews does – it’s just that Fox uses those concepts to advance the hegemonic, Bush administration agenda. Call it the “FoxNews Effect” – watching Fox, you don’t see the news, you experience the news, with hip headlines, flashy presentations, cinematic sensibilities, self-conscious framing, and attacks on media competitors. And FoxNews journalism is only half the story. If you’ve been watching FoxNews just for the reportage, you’ve been missing the whole point. Pundit shows like “The O’Reilly Factor,” “The Big Story with John Gibson,” “Your World with Neil Cavuto,” “Hannity’s America,” and “Special Report with Brit Hume” (all conservatives...sorry, O’Reilly, “traditionalists,” which I also encourage everyone to read) are what make Fox work. Although the phenomenon is also present in the standard FoxNews reportage, it is on these shows that the news isn’t just reported, it’s produced. Here the “objective facts” take on flesh – they become something dynamic and living and potentially revolutionary (were they not so pro-administration). Like a good student of continental thought, FoxNews understands that journalists can never simply neutrally recount “the facts as they happened.” Instead, Fox sees how the media creates, and often even impacts, the news. Rather than remain dedicated to objectivity and mimeticism, FoxNews pursues poesis and embraces the ways in which media effects and virtualism allow journalists to create. The sad part of it all is that they use it merely to ape the Bush administration’s worldview and to promote its policy – a perspective that relies heavily on the continuation of the mimetic quandary.

So, in the words of Che, I hope for two, three, or many FoxNewses to flourish as the media solution to the mimetic quandary. Naturally, these “post-FoxNewses” should apply the techniques of the FoxNews channel but not its politics – they should embrace journalistic poesis as a counter-hegemonic tool. Naturally, there should be more than one of them, as the fractionalized post-modern condition on which they are based demands a multitude of perspectives from which viewers can glean to form their own perspectives. They shouldn’t all be liberal, either, as any kind of ideological hegemony is dangerous and a diversity of news-media-experiences, even that offered by FoxNews, is essential to maintaining an informed, educated, and alert populace. With many FoxNewses producing journalistic poesis, there may just be a chance to escape the mimetic quandary and finally see the world in a new way. Accepting the notion of journalistic poesis and praising FoxNews may be difficult and painful, but I believe it is the best media solution to the mimetic quandary. Unless you want to live in a world full of mimes.

Posted by Jacob Schuman at 08:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Please note that there will be NO screening on Tuesday (tomororw.) You are instead urged to spend this time working on your projects and attend Cindy Weber's noon seminar where there will be FREE FOOD.

Tuesday, April 24, 2007 at 12:00 PM

Innovating Global Security Lecture Series

"Designing Safe Citizens: Experiencing Citizenship in the Contemporary United States," with Cynthia Weber, Department of Politics and International Relations, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK.

Cynthia Weber is Professor of International Studies at Lancaster University. She is the Convenor of the New Securities Forum at Lancaster University, which will sponsor (with the Lancaster Institute for Advanced Studies) a year-long series of projects on the theme 'New Sciences of
Protection: Designing Safe Living'. Professor Weber's talk, 'Designing Safe Citizens: Experiencing Citizenship in the Contemporary United States', explores one aspect of the New Sciences of Protection project.

Location: McKinney Conference Room, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street.

Posted by Ellen Darling at 06:52 PM | Permalink

With the wonders of technology our potentials grow ever greater...and so do our potential difficulties! Thank you for your patience as Katie and I worked with YouTube's Help Center.

Here's the Global Media Lab IV vBlog which features Gar Alperovitz (America Beyond Capitalism) and Andrew Jarecki (Capturing the Friedmans).

Posted by David Nickels at 12:14 AM | Permalink

Interesting article in the Baltimore Sun about a woman who has taken the x-rays of victims of terrorism and turned them into what she calls a "documentary photography project".

Read: Looking into the bones of terrorism

Posted by Christina Kim at 12:12 PM | Permalink

Did anyone see the Bill O'Reilly debate over the Cho video? I was attempting to watch the Colbert Report on iptv and accidentally clicked on Fox News instead. Perhaps more luck than accident. O'Reilly was in the midde of facilitating a debate between news analysts Bernard Goldberg and Jane Hall. It was an interesting debate, and more pertinent to our class than what I discussed in my previous Cho blog. I'll keep looking for a clip on youtube, hopefully it'll be up soon!

Basically the three were discussing whether or not the media should have aired the tapes Cho sent to NBC. Some of the points they brought up were, does showing the tapes glorify Cho, make him a celebrity, and encourage other potential killers? And what responsibility does the media have in this situation? Goldberg argued that it was less important that the tapes had been shown, but instead why they were shown. All three agreed that showing the tapes was simply covering the news responsibility. Goldberg noted two possible reasons for showing the tapes: the "public consumption" answer, that maybe we can learn something from the "good news story," and the ratings component, that "there is nothing more fascinating than a demented human being looking into a camera and talking." Goldberg then went on to say that yes, he would have shown the tapes, but that he "would have for the news reasons." A difficult call to make, as the ratings component would seem to be inescapably connected to the news component. Whatever NBCs reasons may have been, all also agreed that not airing the tapes was not even an option so there is no point in debating that possibility.

Some other questions asked were, are we simply being 'entertained' by these tapes, and are we giving into what Cho wanted? Or does seeing them somehow give us a better understanding of the killer? O'Reilly repeatedly pressed the point that "evil will find a way unless we are very vigilant," and that airing the tapes would help that cause. He believed that seeing the tapes and giving Cho exposure would help shock the nation into passing laws that would protect people from potential future tragedies.

The question of copycat killers was also brought up. Goldberg, O'Reilly and Hall agreed that clusters of similar incidents tend to surround news coverage of such events, but that this cannot be a reason not to air Cho's tapes. It is no longer a question of Cho's tapes specificaly, but a question of media responsibility. Not airing the tapes is equivalent to not reporting the news. Goldberg, continuing with his news component argument stated of news stations, "they make a news decision, it is a proper news decision." Less euphemistically, copycat events are unfortunate, but should not act as deterrents to editors.

Finally, how, exactly, do seeing the tapes affect the viewer? Other than copycat killers, are most people who see these kinds of images inspired to positive action (petitioning for new gun control laws, etc.) as O'Reilly believes, or are we numbed now to the shock value of such images? (I apologize for skipping around, I'm still watching Fox while writing this out.) We've asked some similar questions when discussing the merits of showing images of, for example, Abu Ghraib. About how images and/or sound effect the viewer. Is omission more powerful at times than seeing an image? Or, like our discussion in class about the different effects of radio reports of 9/11 versus TV coverage, in a society where we are constantly overwhelmed with images, is just-sound no longer effective? O'Reilly, Goldberg and Hall agreed that one problem with news station use of Cho's tapes is the quantity; repeated and excessive showings take away from the original impact.

Last class, we talked about how Osama Bin Laden spaced the two attacks on 9/11 to ensure that the second plane would be on TV. Cho - securing a similar insurance policy - taped his manifesto, took pictures, and sent all these materials to NBC. There has been some discussion on Cho's religious motivations (pictures with his arms raised in Christ-like pose, Ismael-AX on his arm...), and also debates how showing the tapes and glorifying Cho leads, in a way, to his martyrdom. I don't think Bin Laden and Cho had similar reasoning (religious or otherwise) behind their attacks, but their desire to manipulate the media to serve their respective agendas was, I believe, similarly motivated.

As a final thought, a quotation I typed down while watching Fox, "The suspect is pulling our strings from his grave...this is what he wanted us to do."

Posted by Ann Kidder at 08:48 PM | Permalink

Historian Gar Alperovitz rehearses some Gramscian pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will with filmmakers/brothers Eugene Jarecki and Andrew Jarecki.

Posted by Watsonblogs at 02:38 PM | Permalink

Today's HI2 lecture was on the decolonization of the post-WWII world. Our professor mentioned Vietnam and China and the proxy wars that occurred in both those states, but said nothing about Korea. I leaned over to a classmate and said something along those lines. He laughed, turned to me and said, well, I'm sure nobody's want to talk about Korea after one of yours shot up a university. First off, I was furious that he would say something so thoughtless, but I was also extremely puzzled about the ethnicization of the Virginia Tech tragedy.

I first noticed this when reading a BBC article on Tuesday titled "Virginia massacre gunman is named." The subtitle went on to say, "Police have named a student who shot dead at least 30 people at a US university on Monday as Cho Seung-hui, a 23-year-old South Korean." I found this particularly interesting since, upon further reading, I learned that Cho had immigrated (legally) to the US when he was 8 and been raised in suburban Washington DC. Subsequent articles such as "Koreans shocked and saddened" added to my confusion.

Perhaps I haven't read enough about the situation, but I couldn't understand why this man's nationality, that for all intents and purposes was American, was so important. Is it more comforting to the families and victims for the perpetrator to be a foreigner?

Posted by Ann Kidder at 12:36 PM | Permalink

Shveta Raina
Thematic Essay
IR 180 (95)

Q. Is it possible to make a documentary about ‘big ideas'?

Based on discussion from 4/11/2007.

A.

The discussion between Gar Alperovitz and Andrew Jarecki in last week’s Global Media Lab prompted the question – “Is it possible to make a documentary about ‘big’ ideas?”

The reason this theme became especially central to the discussion was that Alperovitz wants to make a documentary about one such ‘big’, and rather abstract idea. He is pitching the idea of potential political reform and experiential development through grassroots movements that will collectively drive a systemic change in the coming years. Alperovitz has written a number of papers exploring his theme, which can be found at http://www.garalperovitz.com/gar_auth.htm and a very interesting working paper that discusses the paradigm of asset-based community-building and its relation to 21st century development, http://www.americabeyondcapitalism.com/;section=2&part=1.pdf. While he believes that America should have a future “beyond Capitalism”, it is unclear whether he can project his beliefs and ideas in a successful documentary.

Andrew Jarecki, on the other hand, seems to use a completely different approach to documentary film-making. In Capturing the Friedmans, he does not begin the movie with the intention of leaving the viewer with his ‘big idea’. In fact, I left the screening with the feeling that I was forced to think of my own conclusions to the documentary based on the evidence that was provided to me. No opinions were thrust upon me at all, instead both sides of the issue were presented, evidence was put forth, and the viewer was left to decide for himself whether the Friedman duo were guilty of some very heinous crimes.

The class seemed divided on whether a movie can be made about ‘big ideas’ like those of Alperovitz. I believe that a movie like this can be made. I have watched some brilliant movies that argue a certain point – and sell their point – knowing that about half the viewers will probably disagree with them. The reason that such movies do well is because people often go into a movie because they want to hear about somebody else’s viewpoint, and don’t want to actually come up with their own opinion. While Capturing the Friedman’s was an outstanding movie, it was a lot of work for me – both while I watched it and after I watched it – because it has left me to think a lot and make up my own mind on the issue. A specific idea about a certain kind of systemic change, as pitched by Alperovitz on the other hand, might leave a viewer to think, but perhaps could leave a viewer to act on the idea instead of ponder it. It could be ideal for a viewer that is tired of the status quo and is looking for change, is looking fort an ideology to mentally guide him out of the problems as he sees them and provide him with the necessary hope for action.

So to answer the question after providing some background, I would have to say yes. It is definitely possible to make a documentary about big ideas, even abstract ideas, because in order to make a movie you need a filmmaker who is excited about his ideas and an audience who wants to learn more about the idea. In most cases, you will have both. It is just a matter of what the motive of the filmmaker is – and if the idea has enough support.

As far as Alperovitz is concerned, it seems like he definitely has a clear picture of his idea. The issue is that he is not talking about a historical, or even a very current event. Instead, he is using his skills as a visionary to project a future occurrence that may or may not happen. This could definitely be made in a variety of ways, and the filmmaker could really get creative, in fact someone in the class even interpreted the futuristic angle as an indication that the movie should be a science fiction flick! However, I personally believe that someone like Alperovitz who is such an academic should not try and script the movie or decide on the exact medium to put his idea across himself. He should focus on developing his thesis, making it clearer within his mind and explaining it better to people around him, until this complex thesis is simple enough and easy enough to be put forth to the general public. And that is when he should bring in an experienced film producer/director and together they should work on the documentary. I believe this would work because academic papers are most successful when they pitch complex ideas that no-one has heard of before. However, it isn’t the same for documentaries. Even if they explore big ideas they should be able to touch every viewer and leave some sort of impression on him. This is important especially if the goal of this documentary, like many others, is to create awareness and perhaps spark action along the lines of the theory that it discusses.

I believe that there are many big ideas to talk about – and it is not only possible, but absolutely essential to make documentary films about them. Working with Rob Jensen and understanding his thesis on missing women has alternately shocked, stressed, confused and inspired me. I say shocked because I live in India, but I had absolutely no idea that the number of women missing was on such a large scale. And recently I read an article by Amartya Sen, dated December 20th, 1990, that already highlights this theme in great detail and explores it. I wished then that someone had looked into the future and made a film about what could happen if this problem was not contained, about why its happening and how we can stop it. Ultimately almost seventeen years later, we are still debating the same ‘big ideas,’ female infanticide and gender discrimination. With the television revolution sweeping through India and parts of South Asia, it seems like film is the medium to reach out to general people with about these big ideas, to use easily put a stop to unjust practices on a mass scale, to tell people that the world is changing – there is this world out there and it is very different than how you see it in your village where one in four girls is missing.

A major worry for a person making a documentary on big ideas though, is that ideas can be shot down, they can be ridiculed, they can be shelved, even before they have been fully understood, because people don’t like to listen too long if they have already decided that something is wasting their time. On the other hand, a documentary on an event, or a person, will have always have viewers unless it is really badly made. When it comes to ideas, people need proof, and they need explanation. It is not only the way the documentary has been made, but also in large part the content that is up for speculation, debate, and dreaded criticism. In class a few ideas were shot down before they had even been fully explained, perhaps because they seemed ‘contrived’ to a few. That is the danger of making a documentary about ideas – the story line will risk seeming contrived in order to pitch a certain idea.

Despite the above risk, and the need to combine an academic with an experienced filmmaker when making a documentary about big and abstract ideas, we still need to do these films. It’s because these ideas need to reach the general public so they are thinking, they are listening, they are aware and they are acting. And film is too widespread a medium to miss out on. So forget possible, I would conclude that it is imperative to make documentaries about big ideas. You just need a little conviction, a lot of courage, and a very thick skin.

Posted by Shveta Raina at 11:31 AM | Permalink

Rachel Boynton’s Our Brand is Crisis at first seems like a straightforward critique of a team of American political consultants attempting to export a “particular brand of democracy” to Bolivia against the popular will. Many critics have indeed branded it this way and left it at that. The title refers to a scene where the firm’s advertising consultant is explaining the need to frame or brand the country’s staggering economic crisis in the advertisements for their candidate. It can be read as a disconnected foreign consultant using the nation’s real, human suffering for his own political ends, or perhaps just his own financial ends (getting the paycheck for the consulting job). However, there’s a lot more going on in the film than a simplistic critique (an “anti-”, as discussed in class). The consultants are completely aware of their situation, their actions, and the implications of their work. As Ms. Boynton commented in class, the real critique, often overlooked, is of the consumers of these brands, the public (foreign AND domestic) that keeps the consultants employed.

One of the consultants, Jeremy Rosner, comments early on that the firm believes in and promotes a “particular brand of democracy,” which is progressive, social democratic, and market-based. But, he acknowledges that there are “conditions democracy ultimately can’t deal with.” That is not the statement of an ignorant or dogmatic person. He is very well aware of the problems with democracy in Bolivia – he outlines them concisely as indigenous under-representation in the political system, globalization “have-nots,” and regional division. Later, the consultants point out that democracy needs to tangibly benefit the people to work. As Ms. Boynton said in class, these consultants are rigorously logical and rational men.

The interesting questions surround the issues raised when it becomes clear that the consultants are supporting a candidate who does not reflect the popular will. They acknowledge that the country desperately wants change, but that they are attempting to convince it to vote back in one of the old guard. Goni is clearly disconnected from the people, most visible in the dinner scene where a well-dressed woman complains about the peasants attacking the suburbs. Boynton asks Rosner at one point whether it is arrogant for Goni to pursue policies that the majority clearly doesn’t want, and he responds that “that’s a tough one.” But ultimately the blame does not lie with the candidate or the consultants. They all believed in the policies, they all believed in Goni, they were not knowingly or willingly hurting the Bolivian state in any way. And while intention is not necessarily a moral excuse, the greater blame here lies with the public which makes it necessary for a candidate like Goni to hire American political consultants. At one point, Rosner comments on the feeling he gets seeing people voting, positing that they never have more power than in that one action. The real critique arising from that statement is not of Rosner’s arrogance or idealism, but of the fact that, with all that power, the voters ended up only legitimating the need for him, for that “particular brand of democracy” and the consultants that come with it, in Bolivia.

In a documentary about “spin doctors,” the inevitable question is how much are we as the audience being spun? Boynton limited the direct influence of the consultants on the film, but what about Boynton’s influence? She said that she became involved in the campaign on a certain level, just by filming it – she wanted Goni to win too. So, just as the consultants believed in Goni, Boynton believed in the consultants (and Goni). This creates an interesting layering of presentation. As we discussed in class, the consultants seemed to be shaping Goni, giving him form, “filling the empty vessel.” But Boynton to a great extent was shaping the consultants in the film – just as every film shapes its subject, or the audience’s perception of the subject. This parallel was very evident as Boynton talked about the process of filming the documentary. She emphasized going in and listening with an open mind. She talked about being an outsider in the campaign, assuming that they knew more about the subject than she did because they were involved in it. In the film itself, Jeremy echoes these sentiments, but with reference to running the campaign. He said they “listen very hard, very closely, with no preconceptions.” He discussed their position in a foreign country, highlighting the fact that they “come in as outsiders.” In this sense, it is a documentary about itself – the form illustrates the subject, documentary as spin, spin as documentary.

Posted by Daniel Bowman at 08:50 PM | Permalink

Global Media Project participants have a chance this week to see films by director Milcho Manchevski, and also attend a conversation between Manchevski and Visiting Fellow Deborah Scranton.

Manchevski, a professor in NYU’s film program, directed the genre-defying Dust (2001)—in his terms, a “Balkan Western” which screens Wednesday April 18th in the Joukowsky Forum at 6.30 pm, His first feature film, Before the Rain (1994) won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film festival and an Oscar nomination for best foreign film, and screens on Thursday April 19 at 6.30 pm in Smith Buonanno 101.

Manchevski shot his third feature film, Shadows, last year, and is finishing production. He will be on campus Friday, when Deborah Scranton (who describes the structure of The War Tapes as a homage to Before the Rain) and he will talk about film-making, the role of art in society, and violence in a conversation in the Joukowsky Forum on Friday April 20th, 2007, starting at 6pm (NOTE EARLIER TIME)

The films and conversation are also linked to a conference on “Balkan Literatures of Dissent,” with paper presentations on Friday April 20th.

More details at www.brown.edu/Departments/Modern_Greek_Studies

*** Please note that the conference organizers are looking for a student who'd be willing to videotape the event using the robotics in Joukowsky. If you are interested, please contact Keith_Brown@brown.edu or Ellen_Darling@brown.edu.

Posted by Ellen Darling at 03:36 PM | Permalink

Ever since the pictures of the abuses at Abu Gharib spread through the news in 2004, torture by the United States military and CIA has been everyone’s favorite topic for a documentary. These films and exposés range from a television special run on the the BBC, to HBO’s documentary entitled “the Ghosts of Abu Ghraib” to Alex Gibney’s “Taxi to the Dark Side.” Indeed, this horrifying topic deserves all of the exposure that the media can devote to it. Unfortunately, the sheer shock factor does not necessarily make up for the quality of these documentaries. Frontline’s 90 minute feature called “the Torture Question,” provides its viewers with important information on the U.S.’s use of torture, but does so in a very conventional way, complete with a stereotypical male narrator voice.

“The Torture Question” begins with night-footage of Abu Ghraib. As way of introduction to the movie, the narrator tells us that one prisoner asks Frontline’s cameraman “is this Abu Ghraib?” after which the narrator points out in a grave tone that “they have heard about the Americans at Abu Ghraib... Many have seen the pictures... No doubt, these men expect the worst.” The documentary then takes the viewers in chronological order through the events leading up to the torture at Abu Ghraib, beginning with the September 11th attacks on the Pentagon, guiding us through the military strike against Afghanistan and the creation of the Bagram prison, extraordinary rendition, Rumpsfeld’s attempt to “get Geneva out of the way,” the creation of Guantanamo and the subsequent escalation of “interrogation techniques” that happened there, the bombing of Baghdad and the increasing insurgency attacks in Iraq, and finally back to Abu Ghraib. All this happens in 90 minutes.

Compounding this overload of information are clips of thirteen different interviews with different people, ranging from the infamous John Yoo to Tony Lagouranis, a U.S Army interrogator at Abu Ghraib. Each interview was interesting in and of itself, and certainly a wide range of views is useful in fleshing out this controversial issue. However, there were so many different voices being heard and so many different stories to follow that the end result was that viewers found themselves lost in an excess of narratives.

Unfortunately the visuals did not help this documentary either. Slow zooms into various arbitrary objects were overly bountiful, including many a shot of the Whitehouse and various statues in front of the Whitehouse, as well as seemingly random clips of helicopters and hummers. Worst of all were the clips of declassified documents. Multiple times during the documentary, our very serious male voice would read us sections of declassified memos and reports as the camera would slowly zoom in on these documents, and a yellow “highlighter” line ran across the sentence that was being read. Unfortunately, the camera always ended up zooming in so close that not only would we find ourselves staring at only two or three words, but the letters were so close they became blurry. To its credit, Frontline did its best to incorporate news footage, and the now-familiar images associated with the war on terror all made their way into the documentary, including footage of bombings in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Iraqi crowd dragging a the head of a statue of Saddam Hussein through the streets of Baghdad, and of course the photos recording the sexual abuse that happened at Abu Ghraib in, as our narrator puts it (in between overly long pauses,) “the prison within the prison.... the hard site... “ (This is followed by what is perhaps my favorite line of the entire documentary. Our narrator points out that “it was inside cell blocks A and B... that the bad things happened.”)

For all of its faults, however, “the Torture Question” did have a few poignant moments. For example, there is footage included of a “home-video” of U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib reenacting what they do to prisoners, using a stuffed duffle bag as the prisoner. In this video they end up stabbing the duffle bag multiple times with a large knife, as well as utterly destroying several collapsible chairs in the same room. This episode ironically helps to show us the humanity of these soldiers stuck in a high-stress and inhumane environment. Furthermore, the photos of Abu Ghraib are shown at the beginning of the movie in black and white, then again at the end of the movie in color, signifying that it is only after learning about the entire sequence of events that led to this terrible lapse in humanity that we can truly see these photos for all that they are worth. “The Torture Question,” therefore, does a very good job of laying out a basic historical storyline, so as to leave its viewers more fully informed of both why the U.S. government felt they needed to use such hardened “interrogation techniques” as well as knowledge of the many people along the way who felt their government was going too far. Where the film fails, however, is in engaging its audience.

If anything, what we have learned in Global Media are the basics of how to make a good documentary; one that will sell. What we have returned to again and again is the concept that a documentary should either be formed around a characterization (tracing one or a small number of characters throughout their “journeys,”) or a specific theme. Frontline’s “the Torture Question” does neither, but rather follows the format of a very long news piece. The narrator’s voice, seemingly borrowed from the “History Channel,” the stale images, and the gratuitous amounts of information and numerous talking heads all serve to lose the viewers attention, and it is only thanks to the incredibly interesting topic that I personally continued to listen. However, as Alex Gibney’s “Taxi to the Dark Side” shows, there are more gripping ways to tell this story. Perhaps it is because my skin has been hardened, due to having previously viewed Gibney’s documentary on the same topic and also having watched an entire semester’s worth of depressing documentaries, but most likely had I flipped across “the Torture Question” on television, chances are I would have kept flipping.

Frontline’s “the Torture Question” is available online, along with transcripts of all of the interviews conducted, at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/torture/

Posted by Caitlin Clay at 01:06 PM | Permalink

I was reading Time Magazine yesterday and noticed a short section on countries where Big Brother has ganged up on our beloved YouTube by demanding censorship of certain videos and subjects. It doesn't mention anything about the US government censoring, but I wonder how long it will be until the US government starts demanding that certain videos are kept off the web (or if that has already happened). I know that there have been a couple of movies that friends have recommended to me, but by the time I have looked them up they are "no longer available" because of copyright issues. Is the honeymoon period of YouTube and true free speech already over?

See the newsclip: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1609803,00.html

Posted by Miriam Altman at 01:06 PM | Permalink

UPDATE (5:50): This is ridiculous. I find myself getting excited because I'm on the news (Fox News recently shared the blog). Each time I hear something else I get a brief moment of selfish joy before I am stabbed in the heart, realizing that I deserve no credit and that lives are gone, destroyed, and in pain. What is the significance of all this? My postings are simply what I always do-- except I left my thoughts for the public instead of just my friends. This run of emotions is hard to bear. I need to go for a walk-- but of course, what good is that since everything is outside my door. There is no escaping. The chains have been tied to the door.

That from Bryce's Journal.

Posted by Henry Shepherd at 10:20 PM | Permalink

Greetings all:

First, kudos to one of our own, Eugene J, on the high honor of receiving a Peabody Award for 'Why We Fight'. Check it out at: http://www.watsoninstitute.org/news_detail.cfm?id=607.

Second, another of our own (Brown alum), Rachel Boynton, will be coming this week to discuss her doc, 'Our Brand is Crisis'. Regular times apply: Tuesday 4 pm screening, Wednesday class discussion with the filmmaker. Bonus points for whoever finds and blogs her 1994-5 IR honors thesis, “Conflict in the Sand: Roots of the Tuareg Uprising in the Republic of Mali” (Neil Lazarus and Anani Dzidzienyo).

Third, if you're interested in Human Rights and Media, hot conference in Cambridge this Saturday, April 21, featuring one of our own....see http://humanrightsandmedia.com/schedule.html

VTY
JDD

Posted by James Der Derian at 08:13 PM | Permalink

One legacy of the scientific revolution is the West’s insistence that everything and everyone ought to be classified and arranged into neat categories. In this system, every human being should identify with a race, religion and most importantly with a state. But, identifying with a single state is problematic for many people for myriad reasons. In “The Hungarian Passport,” Brazilian filmmaker Sandra Kogut highlights many of these problems and shows the viewer how bureaucracy, biology, law and culture all intersect with regards to nationality. Attempting to explain this issue, Kogut documents her endeavor to obtain the supreme material paradigm of citizenship, a passport, from the state that her grandparents left shortly before the onset of World War I. Pleading her case to bureaucrats on two continents in several countries, the filmmaker is able to show how arbitrary and utterly strange the laws and custom of national citizenship have become.

At first, a film that examines and documents bureaucracies might seem tedious and soporific, the hallmarks of paper pushing. Through effective editing and a flair for comic timing, Kogut is able keep the viewer engaged in her quest while stressing the inconsistencies of modern citizenship rules. When viewing Hungarian bureaucrats at a consulate in Paris contradicting the words of their counterparts in Budapest, it becomes clear that citizenship rules are a la carte to some extent and only employed at certain times by certain bureaucrats. At the Hungarian consulate in Paris, Kogut is told that to become a Hungarian citizen, she must pass a rigorous exam in Hungarian (of which she speaks next to nothing). Later on at another consulate, it is revealed that this not the case and that she must simply find someone who speaks Hungarian to fill out her citizenship papers. Kogut’s case for citizenship is dependent more on the office or officer she encounters than whether or not she actually deserves the privilege. As subjective and nebulous as the laws for Hungarian citizenship appear to be, Kogut’s reasons for seeking to acquire it are equally elusive in the film.

Kogut is purposely quite vague in defining why she wishes to have Hungarian citizenship. At several points in the movie she brushes this query aside or says something like “it might help me to work in Europe.” And the viewer never sees a burning desire on Kogut’s part to belong to Hungary. Although she expresses some yearning to reconnect with her roots, Kogut does not emphasize this point at all. This lack of definition fits in well with the rest of the movie. Kogut is able to show how arbitrary her decision to acquire this national citizenship really is. In fact, she is never shown on camera. She is blank and emotionless, trying to show that this process is faceless and generic. For Kogut, the passport is not much more than a piece of paper. It does not define or classify her in any substantial way with regard to her own understanding of identity. Kogut’s identity is further complicated when it is revealed that her maternal grandparents were Hungarian Jews. Winking at biology, Kogut includes footage where an older Hungarian man tells her that she does not “look Jewish” and is dumbfounded to learn that our protagonist is fully a Jew by lineage. Clearly, phenotype is not the best way to understand nationality, culture or religious background. This sequence creates an analogy between the questions of who (or what exactly) is Jewish and what defines a citizen of a state. Both are too amorphous to create an ultimate definition. The culture, nation and state that a person identifies with is then intangible and certainly open to scrutiny. A state’s citizenship law does not always pertain to every person who culturally or ethnically identifies with that state.

At the end of Kogut’s quest, the filmmaker is left with a Hungarian passport. She partakes in an elaborate ceremony in an ornate public building with many other soon-to-be Hungarians. At the ceremony, she takes an oath of citizenship and is issued a passport. Legally, Kogut has become a Hungarian. There is just one peculiar thing about the document she receives: it expires one year from its date of issue. Compounding Kogut’s journey into this hysterical mess, she and the viewer learn that one can actually become a Hungarian for just a single year. According to the law, one day you can be a Hungarian and the next day, you cannot. At the same time, it signifies that anyone can become Hungarian if they are willing to submit the government’s procedure for citizenship. Such legal standing is then not contingent on heritage, birthplace or other aspects of one’s ethnicity. And Kogut is able to obtain this standing with an extremely limited understanding of Hungarian life.

“The Hungarian Passport” can help us understand modern identities. Citizenship is a legal definition and not much more. Yes, it can signify culture or ethnic background, but it still remains a legal standing that almost anyone can acquire. Kogut proves this by avoiding a citizenship test that would have at least proven that she has an understanding of the language, laws, culture and history of the state she wishes to join. Without knowing much about Hungary or considering herself Hungarian, Kogut is able to obtain a Hungarian passport, albeit for just a year. In this sense, legal citizenship is just one of many aspects of a person’s national identity.

Posted by Joshua Rosenthal at 08:07 PM | Permalink

Some pitch packet logistics: after some juggling it looks like 12.15 this Wednesday is the best time for Project Z to meet, which will include a quick tutorial with Claire on thumbnails of clips for the pitch reel. Telling Terror Tales PP's can join in on the tutorial, in the Jarecki-Santos suite on the second floor of Watson.

VTY
JDD

Posted by James Der Derian at 08:05 PM | Permalink

The main concept discussed intensely in the final chapter of Phillip Knightley’s “The First Casualty” was that of media correspondents being “embedded” with military personnel while covering wars. Media correspondents would get annoyed when they felt like the Pentagon was trying to “manage” them, so instead of managing the media, the Pentagon decided to “incorporate” the media into the national war effort itself (531). Embedding media outlets was not a new concept. In the First World War, the British army embedded six war correspondents with their troops (531). Apparently, though that version of embedding served the interests of the military well, it was a disaster for the integrity of journalism. Indeed, one of the correspondents, Sir Philip Gibbs, said in 1923 that “we identified ourselves absolutely with the Armies on the field… There was no need of censorship of our dispatches. We were our own censors” (532).

While embedding media correspondents may seem like a good short-term solution to keep everyone happy (the media can still do their war stories, and the military does not have to worry about the media leaking potentially sensitive information), it clearly leads to a corruption of exactly the type of “fair and balanced,” “objective” coverage we ideally like to think our media provides. Director General of the BBC, Greg Dyke, commented on this phenomenon, saying that American media outlets had “wrapped themselves in the American flag and substituted patriotism for impartiality” (542). Media correspondents are not oblivious to this danger, but they were disillusioned about their role as “embedded” war correspondents. Initially, they thought that their embedded status would enable them to give an accurate and complete picture of the war – how it was progressing, what mistakes were being made, who was being held accountable, and what false claims were being made (534). Instead, “questions were rationed, follow-up questions were frowned upon, and answers were often evasive” (535). The correspondents were merely pawns in the military’s attempt to control what information the American public was getting about the war.

When the war correspondents caught on to their role in this game, they were still in a difficult situation. Given George W. Bush’s assertion “you’re either with us or you’re against us,” the correspondents either had to present the information the military was comfortable with them presenting or they had to face the potentially awful consequences of presenting a dissenting perspective (537). In fact, since the Pentagon had made it so clear that it did not want correspondents reporting from other perspectives, it followed that independent correspondents had to be acknowledged as enemy targets (541). Thus, war correspondents refusing to comply with all the rules of “embedding” were actually endangering their own lives.

Clearly, the war correspondents had little choice but to follow the guidelines set for them by the Pentagon. And thus they became the version of “embedded war correspondents” that we are familiar with today. Their coverage of the famous toppling of the Saddam Hussein statue and the saving of Private Jessica Lynch followed the mold exactly of what a “good embedded war correspondent” would say and how he or she would say it. As it turns out, the way the embedded correspondents covered these events is far from completely truthful (543-547).

What approach should war correspondents take from here on out? Knightley seems to believe that the question is more what approach will war correspondents be forced to take from here on out. Letting the media have full range of potentially sensitive information is not desirable or realistic. Embedding the media in the way that has happened in the current Iraq war leads to confusion. A letter to the editor published in the Guardian states tellingly that “despite scouring two national newspapers every day, listening to the radio, surfing the web and watching the TV news, I have absolutely no clue how the war is going” (543). Clearly, something needs to change. Either “embedding” as we know it must change and a return to a more objective system of reporting can occur or the entire way in which we view our war correspondents must change.

Knightly ends his book with a fairly bleak outlook as to what the future holds for war correspondents. In keeping with President Bush’s “with us or against us” dichotomy, along with the increasing realities presented by insurance and other institutions, Knightly thinks that future war correspondents will be given the options of becoming embedded with troops or they will be forced to be independent correspondents, whose lives and jobs will constantly be in great danger (547). Given these two dire options, Knightly boldly ends his book by declaring that “the age of the war correspondent as hero appears to be over” (548). In its wake, we come upon the age of the war correspondent as government tool, in the hands the one-sided interests of the government. Thus, we must alter the way we view our war correspondents, questioning the “truth” they present to us time and time again.

Posted by Paran Daria Quigley at 04:52 PM | Permalink

To capitalize on that suggestion / reminder that we could and should use the blog as a format for dialogue about the films we see, here are some of my thoughts on "Capturing the Friedmans" that just resurfaced after coming across an article about the Duke lacrosse team trial...

(The specific article I read can be found at http://www.cnn.com/2007/LAW/04/11/duke.lacrosse/index.html, though I'm sure there are more current and complex articles out there on this...)

The film really wound up leaving me with more questions to ask. Which, as Andrew said in class today, is kind of the point. So thumbs up there... Anyway, many of the bigger questions I kept coming back to were about memory. The argument that a lot of the kids who testified against them had been hypnotized in order to recall memories that they had forgotten about or buried or were ashamed by is incredibly interesting. Especially in this case, employing hypnosis seems absurdly problematic. Does anyone know about this way of inducing memory recall? Is hypnosis a widely administered and respected way of recovering repressed memories? What's the deal with repressed memories anyway? I'm simultaneously intrigued, skeptical, and afraid of the notion.

Another bigger issue that the film kept bringing up and never even attempted to resolve was the issue of the fairness of large institutions (like law enforcement) that we don't seem to question until we are confronted (most often very personally) with what seems to us like an incredible injustice. Here's where the connection to the Duke lacrosse thing comes in. In that article, one of the accused (and today found innocent) players stated that "This whole experience has opened my eyes to a world of injustice that I never knew existed." Indeed, a person (especially an upper-middle-class white person, as all these accused people, in both the Duke and Friedman cases, are) can go through their entire lives not even thinking that things like law enforcement and media coverage can contribute and even entirely comprise a "world of injustice."

Which leads me to my last thought (at least for now, hopefully people will respond), which is that class (often indirectly) came up a lot in the film. All the time-elapsed images of that fancy town clock and all the images of excessively green, over-watered lawns really hammered home the point that the people suffering this particular (potential) "world of injustice" were of a demographic that we're used to seeing in power, not suffering injustice. Does that make their role as potential victim more powerful? (This is a topic that comes up repeatedly in the Duke case articles...)

Posted by Paran Daria Quigley at 07:21 PM | Permalink

I figured this would make Eugene happy — below is the text of George Orwell's "You and the Atomic Bomb," originally published in the Tribune in London, conveniently copy-pasted from Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

You and the Atomic Bomb
by George Orwell, October 19, 1945

Considering how likely we all are to be blown to pieces by it within the next five years, the atomic bomb has not roused so much discussion as might have been expected. The newspapers have published numerous diagrams, not very helpful to the average man, of protons and neutrons doing their stuff, and there has been much reiteration of the useless statement that the bomb "ought to be put under international control." But curiously little has been said, at any rate in print, about the question that is of most urgent interest to all of us, namely: "How difficult are these things to manufacture?"

Such information as we--that is, the big public--possess on this subject has come to us in a rather indirect way, apropos of President Truman's decision not to hand over certain secrets to the USSR. Some months ago, when the bomb was still only a rumour, there was a widespread belief that splitting the atom was merely a problem for the physicists, and that when they had solved it a new and devastating weapon would be within reach of almost everybody. (At any moment, so the rumour went, some lonely lunatic in a laboratory might blow civilisation to smithereens, as easily as touching off a firework.)

Had that been true, the whole trend of history would have been abruptly altered. The distinction between great states and small states would have been wiped out, and the power of the State over the individual would have been greatly weakened. However, it appears from President Truman's remarks, and various comments that have been made on them, that the bomb is fantastically expensive and that its manufacture demands an enormous industrial effort, such as only three or four countries in the world are capable of making. This point is of cardinal importance, because it may mean that the discovery of the atomic bomb, so far from reversing history, will simply intensify the trends which have been apparent for a dozen years past.

It is a commonplace that the history of civilisation is largely the history of weapons. In particular, the connection between the discovery of gunpowder and the overthrow of feudalism by the bourgeoisie has been pointed out over and over again. And though I have no doubt exceptions can be brought forward, I think the following rule would be found generally true: that ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance. Thus, for example, tanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon--so long as there is no answer to it--gives claws to the weak.

The great age of democracy and of national self-determination was the age of the musket and the rifle. After the invention of the flintlock, and before the invention of the percussion cap, the musket was a fairly efficient weapon, and at the same time so simple that it could be produced almost anywhere. Its combination of qualities made possible the success of the American and French revolutions, and made a popular insurrection a more serious business than it could be in our own day. After the musket came the breech-loading rifle. This was a comparatively complex thing, but it could still be produced in scores of countries, and it was cheap, easily smuggled and economical of ammunition. Even the most backward nation could always get hold of rifles from one source or another, so that Boers, Bulgars, Abyssinians, Moroccans--even Tibetans--could put up a fight for their independence, sometimes with success. But thereafter every development in military technique has favoured the State as against the individual, and the industrialised country as against the backward one. There are fewer and fewer foci of power. Already, in 1939, there were only five states capable of waging war on the grand scale, and now there are only three--ultimately, perhaps, only two. This trend has been obvious for years, and was pointed out by a few observers even before 1914. The one thing that might reverse it is the discovery of a weapon--or, to put it more broadly, of a method of fighting--not dependent on huge concentrations of industrial plant.

From various symptoms one can infer that the Russians do not yet possess the secret of making the atomic bomb; on the other hand, the consensus of opinion seems to be that they will possess it within a few years. So we have before us the prospect of two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds, dividing the world between them. It has been rather hastily assumed that this means bigger and bloodier wars, and perhaps an actual end to the machine civilisation. But suppose--and really this the likeliest development--that the surviving great nations make a tacit agreement never to use the atomic bomb against one another? Suppose they only use it, or the threat of it, against people who are unable to retaliate? In that case we are back where we were before, the only difference being that power is concentrated in still fewer hands and that the outlook for subject peoples and oppressed classes is still more hopeless.

When James Burnham wrote The Managerial Revolution it seemed probable to many Americans that the Germans would win the European end of the war, and it was therefore natural to assume that Germany and not Russia would dominate the Eurasian land mass, while Japan would remain master of East Asia. This was a miscalculation, but it does not affect the main argument. For Burnham's geographical picture of the new world has turned out to be correct. More and more obviously the surface of the earth is being parceled off into three great empires, each self-contained and cut off from contact with the outer world, and each ruled, under one disguise or another, by a self-elected oligarchy. The haggling as to where the frontiers are to be drawn is still going on, and will continue for some years, and the third of the three super-states--East Asia, dominated by China--is still potential rather than actual. But the general drift is unmistakable, and every scientific discovery of recent years has accelerated it.

We were once told that the aeroplane had "abolished frontiers"; actually it is only since the aeroplane became a serious weapon that frontiers have become definitely impassable. The radio was once expected to promote international understanding and co-operation; it has turned out to be a means of insulating one nation from another. The atomic bomb may complete the process by robbing the exploited classes and peoples of all power to revolt, and at the same time putting the possessors of the bomb on a basis of military equality. Unable to conquer one another, they are likely to continue ruling the world between them, and it is difficult to see how the balance can be upset except by slow and unpredictable demographic changes.

For forty or fifty years past, Mr. H.G. Wells and others have been warning us that man is in danger of destroying himself with his own weapons, leaving the ants or some other gregarious species to take over. Anyone who has seen the ruined cities of Germany will find this notion at least thinkable. Nevertheless, looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. James Burnham's theory has been much discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological implications--that is, the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of "cold war" with its neighbors.

Had the atomic bomb turned out to be something as cheap and easily manufactured as a bicycle or an alarm clock, it might well have plunged us back into barbarism, but it might, on the other hand, have meant the end of national sovereignty and of the highly-centralised police state. If, as seems to be the case, it is a rare and costly object as difficult to produce as a battleship, it is likelier to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a "peace that is no peace."

Posted by Sonia Saraiya at 03:44 PM | Permalink

Faced with the erosion of territorial space brought about by the conquest of orbital space, geostrategy and geopolitics will in tandem enter into the artifice of a regime of false temporality, where the TRUE and the FALSE will soon become obsolete, the ACTUAL and the VIRTUAL progressively taking their place, to the great detriment of public credulity … […] the image itself becomes a high-performance weapon more effective than that which it was supposed to represent. (1)

In the continuation of his “virtual road trip” in the second half of Virtuous War, James Der Derian begins to examine how we determine who the enemy is in a virtuous war. And, in an era of increasingly virtual wars, he also begins to interrogate how our enemy, first a “who,” is quickly becoming a “what.” The perpetually changing definitions of warfare during this supposed “Revolution of Military Affairs” witnesses as its first casualty the status of the state as a state, the human as a human. As Der Derian points out, as states “dematerialize and deconstruct, as national identities become more fluid, as simulations and scenarios reach for a credible threat,” and, perhaps, as we grasp for concrete definitions and understandings of the world around us in an unpredictable time, we reformulate the virtuous to “virtualize the enemy, until all that is left as the last man is the criminalized demon” (101). Our dead enemy loses his humanity; his death no longer that of a human, is the death of a sign, of an image, a pixel.

Der Derian is quick to both discover and uncover the relationship between the military with the media, particularly in his analysis of the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR). Describing its role as the “bureaucratically designed code for the identification, preparation, and, if necessary, eradication of the enemy [it] effectively maps, in both the digital and cartographic senses of the word, the operational requirements and global contours of virtuous war” (108-109). As the pinnacle of a series of reviews and reorganizations of the armed forces throughout the 1980s and the early 1990s, the QDR almost completely restructured the basis for funding what would be the most expensive defense budget in the world in 2000. (Nevermind what it has blossomed into since then.) Der Derian is justifiably puzzled by the need for this defense budget: “just where is this enemy who justifies such expenditure?” (110). What he sees as a disproportionately high cost of protecting our security leads to a connection between defense budget spending with the role and ubiquity of simulations, dissimulations in the post-Gulf War I world.

Pulling from Jean Baudrillard’s own connection to Francis Bacon, Der Derian sees the nature of simulations as forcing those at the military’s helm to leave “behind the reality principle that would allow them to distinguish the feigned from the real” (117). The very nature of simulation for Der Derian (and Baudrillard, and perhaps Bacon, as well) is such that despite their falsities, their “always already” connection with un-reality, they produce “real symptoms, hyperreal effects” that further fuel and manipulate “a fear of the future or a nostalgia for a mythical past [dominating] all other forms of representation” (116, 117). Thus, as these war games, war simulations, become increasingly digitized, taking us further away from the reality of blood, guts and dead bodies, the nature of simulations and dissimulations begin to mutate into a precarious area where “distinctions between the simulated and the real begin to break down” (116).

Der Derian’s treatment of the inevitable marriage between the military and technology and the media reveals, as well, a new kind of “race” in the late 20th and early 21st century. However, instead of nuclear arms, now we find ourselves racing (and, perhaps, as Paul Virilio would say: speeding) to secure our position in the world as top dog. The armed forces’ Joint Vision 2010 “full spectrum dominance” emphasized that “everything from the highest intensity conflict down to shows of force and peacekeeping, you should have dominance at every level, to excel at whatever level” (193). If in the past we could rely on the dead body to signal our victory and their defeat, this was quickly changing. Der Derian writes, invoking a kind of nostalgia that:

The dead body—on the battlefield, in the tomb of the unknown soldier, in the collective memory, even on the movie screen—is what gives war its special status, what trumps any lesser issues, such as those expressed in my question. This fact, the material facticity of the dead soldier, can be censored, hidden in a body ba