Quotulatiousness

January 3, 2014

It’s time to say goodbye to “strong female characters”

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:08

No, I don’t mean get rid of strong characters … but lets move on from the patronizingly token “strong” female character who is just physically strong:

… Hollywood has taken our love of strong female characters and converted it into something dully literal. Strong female characters have become Strong Female Characters, a mutant sub-genus that has less to do with actual women than T-Rexes: physically intimidating, but mentally nonthreatening. But muscle strength isn’t all that interesting on its own — otherwise, Sylvester Stallone and Jean-Claude Van Damme would be where George Clooney and Brad Pitt are on the Hollywood A-list. As Sophia McDougall argued this summer in the pop culture feminist critique of the year, strength is too often a substitute for personality where female characters are concerned.

The Mary Sue points out in yet an interview with Neil Gaiman about — you guessed it, “Strong Female Characters,” because he and Joss Whedon are apparently the world’s only authorities on writing interesting women — that “strong female characters don’t necessarily have to have Hulk strength, they need to be strongly written.” Well, sure, we all want female characters to be strongly written, but the problem is no one knows exactly what that means anymore.

[…]

Like the Bechdel test, the “female characters with agency” solution is an imperfect one. But we humans really enjoy our one-stop solutions and easy fixes, and plot-driving female characters is the one we need right now. Because the problem with the representation of women on screen isn’t just that there are almost five times as many male characters as there are female ones, but also that the relatively few women characters who do appear are constantly reduced to roles of passivity and, thus, inconsequentiality.

Female characters don’t always have to win, but we’d like to at least see them try. The time has passed when we are satisfied with a woman character holding a gun or kicking butt as a cheap, insincere nod toward equality. We’re done with strength. Now we want to see the struggles.

H/T to @Elisabeth for the link.

January 2, 2014

QotD: Why progressive policy ideas get more media attention

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:34

When it comes to crafting winning political narratives, progressives have a natural advantage over conservatives. That’s because progressives have a free hand to project rosy visions of the future while conservatives must constantly defend against progressives’ distorted depictions of the past.

Two fundamental techniques undergird progressives’ success at narrative spinning. The first is skillful framing of the debate through investing heavily in public opinion making machinery. This disarms critics while giving lawmakers cover to vote for bills they’ve neither read nor understood. Thus framed, policies are judged only by their stated intentions, never their actual results. This allows politicians to promote new pieces of legislation named for their lofty objectives, even if the thousands of pages of vague and contradictory content deliver just the opposite.

The second is dodging all responsibility for failure. This is accomplished by blaming insufficient resources, the prior administration, the greedy 1 percent, sabotage by Republicans, or even the people’s obdurate failure to appreciate the progressive benefits conferred upon them. When the going gets tough, reality can be dismissed with a slogan. Forward!

Bill Frezza, “2013: The Year The Progressive Narrative Collided With Reality”, Forbes, 2013-12-30

John and Sherlock

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:26

The first episode of Sherlock season three was aired in the UK yesterday. On this side of the pond, we won’t get to see it until later in the year, so we have to rely on media reaction to the show, and Tim Stanley wasn’t over-pleased with the producers’ efforts, calling it a “roller-coaster ride” that “leaves you confused and nauseous”:

Holmes has always been a wonder, but here he is wondrous to the point of smug and irritating. How can Watson love him? Presumably because they are such good friends and one of Sherlock‘s strong points is the genuine chemistry between Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch. But even this comes with an irritating postmodern twist. Everyone presumes they’re gay. Because of course if two men spend more than five minutes in each other’s company they’re obviously candidates for some Brokeback-style hot cowboy action in a tent.

One of the saddest things about our culture is the death of brotherhood. Watch any of the pre-Millennium Sherlocks and you’ll be in no doubt that these men would take a bullet for one another. In the excellent Murder By Decree, Christopher Plummer and James Mason’s heroes are so tender that they share a blanket on a carriage ride — Sherlock gently tucking Watson in. When Vasily Livanov’s Holmes “dies” in the Russian version of The Final Problem, Vitaly Solomin’s Watson collapses against a tree and weeps uncontrollably. But no one ever questions their sexual preference. There’s no need to. They’re just friends.

By contrast, contemporary British culture has become so pornified and sex-obsessed that the running gag in Sherlock is that everyone thinks Cumberbatch and Freeman are in a civil partnership. Don’t get me wrong — I’m sure there’s an enjoyable version of Holmes yet to be written in which they’re at it like knives. But the constant snickering that goes on in Sherlock just adds to a sense of the show’s lack of maturity. It’s knowing, clever-clever, hip, ironic, tech-obsessed, geeky, hipster and just about everything else that gets in the way of a sophisticated yarn well told. For that, you have to go back to the Jeremy Brett Sherlock, which was distinctly lacking in action but high on good prose. Most episodes were an hour of Jeremy sitting in the gloom in Baker Street complaining that he’s got nothing to do. Compulsive viewing.

Green Bay playoff game at risk of TV blackout in home market

Filed under: Business, Football, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:39

For some reason, I had the impression that NFL blackout rules didn’t apply in the post-season, but Dan Zinski says there’s a real risk that the Green Bay Packers may not sell all of their tickets for this weekend’s game against the San Francisco 49ers:

Packer fans are the greatest, most loyal and diehard fans in the world. Which explains why, as of Wednesday afternoon, there were reportedly still 7,500 tickets available for Sunday’s home playoff game against the San Francisco 49ers.

Huh?

Yes it’s true. Amazingly, the Packers are struggling to sell out their home playoff game. Despite their fans being better than everyone else’s fans.

[…]

The tickets must be sold by 3:40 PM Thursday to avoid a blackout. But if history is any indication the NFL will give the Packers an extension.

If the Packers still can’t sell the tickets and the blackout goes into effect? Look for a mass exodus out of Green Bay and Milwaukee and into all the towns where the game is on television. That will be a bad time to be traveling anywhere in Wisconsin.

And just wait until Sunday night when everyone is driving home, totally wasted. In the name of public safety, maybe the state government should buy up the tickets.

My guess is that the nightmare scenario won’t come to pass, that the tickets will get bought up and everyone will be able to see the game. And what an enjoyable game it will be…for people who hate the Packers.

On the other hand, I’ve seen predictions that the game-time temperature could be as low as -15F, which would be the coldest game in NFL history (the current record is -13F at the “Ice Bowl” in 1967). I wouldn’t blame the fans quite as much for not wanting to be part of that kind of historical event.

Update, 3 January: Earlier this afternoon, the Packers announced that they’d sold all the tickets to the game (a local business apparently stepped in to buy the remainder), so the game will be available on TV in the Wisconsin area. The weather reports are looking worse, however, as the temperature could go as low as -18F (or -25F) with a potential windchill of -53F. Brrrrrrrrrrrr.

December 24, 2013

Brendan O’Neill on how to become a cause célèbre

Filed under: Media, Russia — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:25

It may sound rather cynical, but it does seem to capture the essential elements:

Yesterday, as the world cheered the release of two members of the punk band Pussy Riot from prison in Russia, 450 members of the Muslim Brotherhood went on hunger strike in jails in Egypt. These political prisoners, whose ‘crimes’ include supporting deposed President Mohamed Morsi and taking part in protests calling for his reinstatement, have received rather less global sympathy than Pussy Riot. Even when, last month, 14 women and seven girls were sentenced to 11 years’ imprisonment in Egypt for taking part in an unauthorised pro-Morsi protest, still there was little global outrage. The women and girls (whose punishment has since been reduced to a one-year suspended sentence) were not emblazoned on trendy Westerners’ t-shirts; Madonna didn’t demand their release; Amnesty didn’t pump vast amounts of its resources into calling for their sentences to be squashed, as it has done with Pussy Riot, who have been its main campaigning priority over the past year.

So what does it take for political prisoners to become a cause célèbre among influential Westerners? How can political prisoners overseas win the attention and flattery of human-rights groups, celebs and the concerned commentariat? Here’s an invaluable guide for any locked-up man or woman of conscience who craves the support of human-rights activists.

December 21, 2013

QotD: Baldrick and the workhouse Nativity play

Filed under: Britain, Humour — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Baldrick: I’ve been helping out with the workhouse Nativity play.

Ebenezer Blackadder: Oh, of course. How did it go?

Baldrick: Well, not very well. At the last moment, the baby playing Jesus died!

Ebenezer Blackadder: Oh, dear! This high infant mortality rate’s a real devil when it comes to staging quality children’s theatre. What did you do?

Baldrick: Got another Jesus.

Ebenezer Blackadder: Oh, thank goodness. And his name?

Baldrick: “Spot.” There weren’t any more children so we had to settle for a dog instead.

Ebenezer Blackadder: Oh, dear. I’m not convinced that Christianity would have established its firm grip over the hearts and minds of mankind, if all Jesus had ever said was “woof!”

Baldrick: Well, it went all right until the shepherds came on. See, we haven’t been able to get any real sheep, so we had to stick some wool…

Ebenezer Blackadder: On some other dogs!

Baldrick: Yeah. And the moment Jesus got a whiff of them, he’s away! While the angel’s singing “peace on earth, good will to mankind,” Jesus scampers across and tries to get one of the sheep to give him a piggy-back ride!

Ebenezer Blackadder: Scarcely appropriate behavior for the Son of God, Mister Baldrick! Weren’t the children upset?

Baldrick: No, they loved it! They want us to do another one at Easter. They want to see us nail up the dog!

Blackadder’s Christmas Carol, 1988.

December 20, 2013

QotD: (Almost) Winter in Maine

Filed under: Humour, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:44

I love the weather channels. Hair farmers and dime-store Kardashians waving their arms over an imaginary map, talking about WINTER STORM FABIAN or WINTER SEMI-BLIZZARD OSAMA or WINTER ARCTIC DEATHSTORM INGA. The least you could do is explain what the hell I’m suppose to expect on Monday on that forecast there. Is the weather going to be serrated on Monday? Will I be expected to swim laps in some sort of frozen pool? Is frozen angel hair pasta going to be made available to me? What are those squiggly weather lines? Should I make out a will, and make out with my wife one last time on Sunday night?

I got up this morning and it was fifteen below zero, car wouldn’t start, because the car is smarter than a person, and we were still shoveling a foot of “partly cloudy” from the day before. I didn’t really mind, exactly, because I didn’t move to Uppastump Maine expecting palm trees and grass skirts on the babes, but there is one aspect about it that rankled. Listen to me, you weather idiots. It’s not the winter. It won’t be winter for four days or so. The average nighttime temperature here in December is fourteen degrees Fahrenheit. That makes last night thirty bleeping degrees below normal. Thirty degrees is a lot, don’t you think?

Sippican Cottage, “I Was Considering Putting On A Sweater”, Sippican Cottage, 2013-12-17

December 19, 2013

Changing perspectives of gender

Filed under: Education, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:19

Christopher Taylor on how women’s views of boys and men change as they grow:

Something interesting happens to most women when they get married and have a boy: they change their perspective on men. I think its not unreasonable of girls to get a certain grrl power men-are-dumb point of view in modern culture, we’re constantly bombarded with this message. It would take a pretty strong and unusual girl to resist the education that music, film, television, books, and education all imprint on her.

In college, young women are told all men are rapists at heart, and their denials is simply proof of the rape culture that menaces women constantly. Advertisements continually portray men as hapless idiotic children. With few exceptions, television shows almost always show the male characters as barely-literate frat boys and cave men. Music and movies promote the image of the all-powerful kung fu genius girl who looks hot constantly and always has the right put down to make men look bad.

But when a woman marries, she finds out guys aren’t all like that. Her husband has [his] faults, but strengths as well — or why would she love and marry him to begin with? She finds out that he’s no more immature and childish than her, just in different ways. She learns that men have strengths and abilities that women lack, just as they lack things women have.

And when she has a son, she sees things from a different perspective. That shirt that was so cool and empowering that said “Boys suck throw rocks at them” when she was 12 seems horrible and abusive when her son is the target. She finds out that her school treats boys as if they are some awful imposition that need to be drugged into submission and silenced in class. She learns that all the girl-power stuff she grew up with was at the expense of the boys.

But with a culture that so strongly tries to repress and shunt aside boys and treats men like knuckle dragging brutes, its even tougher for a boy to grow up as a man. I feel for the boys of today in school where they learn they should shut up and stop being masculine, that its awful and wrong to be a man and beautiful and good to be a woman. Growing up in the face of that can’t be easy.

Reason.tv – 3 Reasons Anchorman 2 is The Most Important Movie of The Year

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:32

I didn’t see the original Anchorman, and I may or may not watch the current version, but I do find Nick Gillespie’s arguments to be compelling:

As Anchorman 2, the long-awaited sequel to 2004’s Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, hits theaters, it’s worth pointing out Will Ferrell’s fake newscaster is not just wildly entertaining but hugely instructive in our media-soaked age.

Here are three reasons why Anchorman 2 is already the most important movie of the year.

1. It Foregrounds Media Cliches and Pat Formulas.

When Ron Burgundy and team create ridiculous, over-the-top news features such as “Rip the Lid Off It!,” it’s impossible to ever take a special report or interruption for breaking news uncritically ever again.

2. It (de)humanizes the Production of “News.”

By calling attention to the actual production process of “news” and the often-considerable limitations of the people who make media, the Anchorman franchise underscores that news is invented, not discovered.

3. It Eviscerates the Media’a Hero Complex

Far more than critically acclaimed critiques such as Network, Anchorman brilliantly lampoons the self-importance and deranged egos of media stars.

For these reasons and more — and especially at a time when even venerable media outlets such as 60 Minutes is effectively firing correspondents for inaccurate reports and blatantly sucking up to power — Anchorman 2 and its prequel should be required viewing for everyone who takes media literacy seriously.

QotD: Blackadder greets Queen Victoria and Prince Albert

Filed under: Britain, Humour — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Ebenezer Blackadder: Cork it, fatso! Don’t you realise that this is the Victorian Age, where apart from Queen Piglet-Features herself, women and children are to be seen and not heard!

Prince Albert: Queen Piglet-Features!

Ebenezer Blackadder: Yes! “Empress Oink,” us lads call her. The only person in the kingdom who looks dafter than her is that stupid Frankfurter of a husband. “The Pig and the Prig,” we call them. How they ever managed to produce their one hundred and twelve children is quite beyond me. The bed-chambers of Buckingham Palace must be copiously supplied with blindfolds!

Blackadder’s Christmas Carol, 1988.

December 18, 2013

QotD: Blackadder and Melchet exchange Christmas greetings

Filed under: Britain, Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:51

Lord Edmund Blackadder: I trust Christmas brings to you its traditional mix of good food and violent stomach cramp.

Lord Melchet: Greetings of the season to you, Blackadder! May the Yule log slip from your fire and burn your house down!

Blackadder’s Christmas Carol, 1988.

December 17, 2013

Sherlock Series 3 Launch Trailer – BBC One

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:26

December 11, 2013

The media and the Mandela funeral

Filed under: Africa, Britain, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:29

In the Guardian Simon Jenkins discusses the way the media covered Nelson Mandela’s funeral:

Enough is enough. The publicity for the death and funeral of Nelson Mandela has become absurd. Mandela was an African political leader with qualities that were apt at a crucial juncture in his nation’s affairs. That was all and that was enough. Yet his reputation has fallen among thieves and cynics. Hijacked by politicians and celebrities from Barack Obama to Naomi Campbell and Sepp Blatter, he has had to be deified so as to dust others with his glory. In the process he has become dehumanised. We hear much of the banality of evil. Sometimes we should note the banality of goodness.

Part of this is due to the media’s crude mechanics. Millions of dollars have been lavished on preparing for Mandela’s death. Staff have been deployed, hotels booked, huts rented in Transkei villages. Hospitals could have been built for what must have been spent. All media have gone mad. Last week I caught a BBC presenter, groaning with tedium, asking a guest to compare Mandela with Jesus. The corporation has reportedly received more than a thousand complaints about excessive coverage. Is it now preparing for a resurrection?

More serious is the obligation that the cult of the media-event should owe to history. There is no argument that in the 1980s Mandela was “a necessary icon” not just for South Africans but for the world in general. In what was wrongly presented as the last great act of imperial retreat, white men were caricatured as bad and black men good. The arrival of a gentlemanly black leader, even a former terrorist, well cast for beatification was a godsend.

[…]

Mandela was crucial to De Klerk’s task. He was an African aristocrat, articulate of his people’s aspirations, a reconciler and forgiver of past evils. Mandela seemed to embody the crossing of the racial divide, thus enabling De Klerk’s near impossible task. White South Africans would swear he was the only black leader who made them feel safe — with nervous glances at Desmond Tutu and others.

South Africa in the early 90s was no postcolonial retreat. It was a bargain between one set of tribes and another. For all the cruelties of the armed struggle, it was astonishingly sparing of blood. This was no Pakistan, no Sri Lanka, no Congo. The rise of majority rule in South Africa was one of the noblest moments in African history. The resulting Nobel peace prize was rightly shared between Mandela and De Klerk, a sharing that has been ignored by almost all the past week’s obituaries. There were two good men in Cape Town in 1990.

The overpraising of popular culture

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:37

In the Wall Street Journal, Terry Teachout comes not to praise Leonard Elmore:

… It used to be that we didn’t take popular culture seriously, but now we don’t take anything else seriously.

Do I exaggerate? Consider the endless encomia that greeted the airing in September of the final episode of “Breaking Bad,” which the Daily Beast described as “a perfect, A-1 piece of televisual filmmaking…an unparalleled valedictory achievement.” Or Tuesday’s announcement by LA Weekly that it’s cutting back its theater reviews from seven per issue to two. Or the fact that no classical musician has appeared on the cover of Time magazine since 1986. Or…but why go on? You know as well as I do that in postmodern America, pop culture gets most of the ink. It always has, but nowadays it also receives the kind of dead-serious critical attention in the academy and elsewhere that used to be reserved for high art — and increasingly it does so to the exclusion of high art.

[…]

Once again, it’s not my purpose to demean pop culture. I think that most of the best movies made in America in the 20th century were crime dramas, screwball comedies and westerns. But there’s more to life than getting your head blown off in a drug deal, and more to be said about love than can be crammed into a 32-bar ballad. Novels like Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, plays like Tennessee Williams’s “The Glass Menagerie,” ballets like Jerome Robbins’s “Dances at a Gathering,” paintings like Jacob Lawrence’s “Migration Series,” musical compositions like Aaron Copland’s Piano Sonata: These are large-scale works of art that aim higher than their popular counterparts. (In fact, that’s not a bad rough-and-ready definition of high art.) Mere ambition, mind you, is not in and of itself a good thing, any more than bigger is by definition better, but we’re cheating ourselves when we direct our attention solely to less ambitious art.

H/T to Kathy Shaidle for the link.

December 7, 2013

Hitchcock’s MacGuffin in US politics

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:16

At Ace of Spades HQ, Ace explains what the MacGuffin is and why American media outlets don’t care about it and think you shouldn’t care about it either:

In a movie or book, “The MacGuffin” is the thing the hero wants.

Usually the villain wants it too, and their conflict over who will end up with The MacGuffin forms the basic spine of the story.

In Raiders of the Lost Ark, the MacGuffin is, of course, the Lost Ark. Indy wants it; the Nazis have it. This basic conflict over simple possession animates a two hour long movie.

Alfred Hitchcock noted — counterintuitively, when you first hear this — that the specifics of the MacGuffin don’t really matter at all to a movie. He pointed out that the audience doesn’t care at all about the MacGuffin. The hero in the movie itself cares, but the audience doesn’t.

In one Hitchcock film, the MacGuffin was some smuggled uranium hidden in vintage wine bottles. But Hitchcock noted it didn’t matter if it was uranium in wine bottles, or a fragment of a diplomatic dispatch from the Nazi high command, or a hidden murder weapon, or photographs proving a Senator’s affair.

Okay, we’ve got the movie notion down … what’s the US political MacGuffin?

For Obama’s fanbois, this is not politics. This isn’t even America, not really, not anymore.

This is a movie. And Barack Obama is the Hero. And the Republicans are the Villains. And policy questions — and Obama’s myriad failures as an executive — are simply incidental. They are MacGuffins only, of no importance whatsoever, except to the extent they provide opportunities for Drama as the Hero fights in favor of them.

Watching Chris Matthews interview Obama, I was struck by just how uninterested in policy questions Matthews (and his panel) were, and how almost every question seemed to be, at heart, about Obama’s emotional response to difficulties — not about policy itself, but about Obama’s Hero’s Journey in navigating the plot of President Barack Obama: The Movie.

As with a MacGuffin in the movie, only the Hero’s emotional response to the MacGuffin matters.

Again and again, Matthews and his panel focused not on weighty questions of state, but on what toll these important-sounding MacGuffins took upon the Star of the Picture, Barack Obama.

Matthews was not terribly interested in hearing about the problems with Obamacare, or how Obama planned to address them.

But he was very interested in learning how Obama was coping with the challenges.

Matthews didn’t care all that much about disputes over the budget. But he was keenly interested in Obama’s thoughts on his opponents in such struggles.

Chris Matthews’ called Obama’s last answer the most important in the interview, and his entire panel agreed it was simply amazing.

[…]

Note what they’re not talking about: America. Policy. The economy. Obamacare. Actual live political controversies and possible programmatic responses to the difficulties we face (many of which Obama has caused himself, or made worse).

No, American politics is now merely a MacGuffin, an important-sounding but ultimately inconsequential and disposable plot device for holding interest in the Hero’s Journey.

Ultimately the only thing that matters is the Hero itself. It doesn’t matter why the Hero Barack Obama wants the Lost Ark of Sensible Gun Control, or the Shankara Stones of Comprehensive Immigration Reform, or the Democratic Holy Grail of Affordable Health Care. These are very minor details and only matter to the extent the Hero exerts himself to achieve them.

The viewers of this film don’t really care about these things, but only Obama’s frustration at being denied them, or his joy in attaining them.

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