Author Page for SEK

Fighting the good fight

To the ever-loving shock of all concerned, Bérubé does just that:

First, it is going to be very hard to tell people that many college faculty members are exploitatively underpaid. It’s going to be a particularly tough sell in communities already devastated by prolonged economic hardship. But it might be possible to play on the still-widespread belief that college professors are professionals and that parents who are sending their children to college should have some expectation that professors have the professional resources — offices, phones, mailboxes, e-mail and library access, meaningful performance reviews, participation in department governance — that make it possible for them to do their jobs. Let’s say you need an attorney, I suggested, and you go to a firm that fobs you off on an associate who has to consult with you in a hallway because he doesn’t have an office. Who would stand for that? Is it O.K. that your kid is going to a college that treats its faculty that way?

Second, it is going to be even harder to tell people that non-tenure-track faculty members need a measure of job security and academic freedom if they are going to be able to do their jobs. It amounts, I suggested, to telling parents, students, administrators, and legislators that they have to fight for the right of professors to challenge their students intellectually, free from the fear that they will be fired the moment they say something unfamiliar or upsetting about sexuality or evolution or American history or the Middle East. This argument will resonate with people who understand what higher education is all about. They are a subset of the American electorate, but they know why academic freedom is essential to an open society, and they believe in the promise of higher education. The question is whether they can be persuaded that the promise of higher education is undermined when three-quarters of the professoriate is made up of los precarios.

Buckling the frame

(This isn’t only one of them posts, it’s the bastard child of this and this one.)

I feel this post nips too obviously at the heels of previous ones, as I’m not going to be discussing anything I haven’t discussed before. Creating a claustrophobic environment is a technical accomplishment that can be done irrespective of the environs in which one shoots a scene. Cramped quarters help, obviously, but they’re not necessary. That said, the quarters in the second half of the Doctor Who episode “Time of Angels” are quite cramped, so the fact that director Adam Smith chose the default shots of his principles to be medium- and medium close-ups exacerbates what would’ve been a feature of every frame anyway. To wit:

That’s the Doctor discussing the impending arrival of the Angels with the soldier-clerics assigned to assist him. Important here isn’t merely the framing—though compositionally, the soldier-clerics bookending the Doctor can’t be considered insignificant—but the tightness of it. The shallow focus leaves only those three in focus—although Amy’s still visible by virtue of her ginger dress, not unlike a certain someone else—but the shot’s overstuffed with folks in a way that completely obscures the background. Given that that the imminent threat isn’t any of these three shot-stuffers, obscuring the background denies the audience access to whatever it is that might be lurking in the dark.

Point being, it’s not just that this shot is claustrophobic, but that the claustrophobia it elicits is deliberately obfuscatory: by focusing, shallowly, on these three, the dangerous statues currently spooky-fishing* their way towards them are perforce crushed from the frame. They’ll be revealed in shot/reverse shot sequences shortly thereafter, but the tight framing here makes the situation in which the Doctor et al. find themselves seem all the more hopeless. Consider:

This is the Doctor coming up with one of his patented plans, but the framing still indicates that whatever trap he’s in still possesses the upper hand. It’s entrapping him, not the other way around. Of course, this entrapment is but a preface to a spectacular escape, and the way in which Smith films this desperation is but a means to increase the glory that said escape entails, but the heightening of this effect is a significant moment in this season.

Rarely do the Doctor’s plans include genocide, no matter how malevolent the species he’s dealing with. Daleks and Cybermen he traps in other universes or the empty space between them, but this Doctor? He disappears his enemies like a Chilean dictator—erasing them from history—or outright murders the last of them if they pose a threat to Earth.** There’s much more to say, but for now I’m focusing on the abreaction of Doctor and audience to the claustrophobia he and it encounter. It’s cathartic, most certainly, but there’s purging and then there’s purging, and only one of them is just and healthy.

*I can’t directly link because Comedy Central is a … but the relevant material’s at 3:58.

**As in “The Vampires of Venice,” which I’m also teaching today. Stupid three hour classes.

They can (mostly) hear those whistles blowing. (Mostly.)

Juan Williams wrote a column on conservative dog-whistles in which he points out the obvious:

The language of GOP racial politics is heavy on euphemisms that allow the speaker to deny any responsibility for the racial content of his message. The code words in this game are “entitlement society” — as used by Mitt Romney—and “poor work ethic” and “food stamp president”—as used by Newt Gingrich. References to a lack of respect for the “Founding Fathers” and the “Constitution” also make certain ears perk up by demonizing anyone supposedly threatening core “old-fashioned American values.”

Conservatives are pouncing on the idea that “Founding Fathers” could be what Williams calls a “racial code word,” and admittedly, it’s his weakest example. (Though you need not be a Constitutional scholar to understand that everyone who signed that document was not only white but that many of them owned slaves.) The dog-whistle status of the public fellation of  source texts is questionable, but Gingrich’s refrain about Obama being a “food stamp President” certainly isn’t. Because not only is it a dog-whistle, it’s a dog-whistle whose etiology is a matter of public record.

According to a source of unquestionable integrity, on January 5, 2012 Newt Gingrich told an audience in Plymouth, N.H. that if he were invited to speak at the NAACP’s annual convention, he would accept and “talk about why the African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.” Far from being an idiopathic charge arising from some haze of liberal thought, the connection between blacks and food stamps is present right there in the very words Gingrich said:

NAACP + Food Stamps = Dog-Whistle

This isn’t that complicated: Gingrich created a rhetorical situation in which any invocation of food stamps would signal to his intended audience that he was talking about black people. The fact that he dispels this notion is belied by the undercurrent of thought that gave rise to the equation in the first place. If he didn’t associate black people with food stamps, mentioning the NAACP wouldn’t have triggered a canned statement about food stamps.

Conservatives may wish this weren’t the case—that is, they may want to talk about the rise in food stamp consumption under the Obama administration—but Gingrich has made it impossible for them to do so without invoking the racist undertones of his statement.

Claustrophobia, as Wolfgang Petersen recognizes, is a cumulative effect.

(The continuation of the previous post which, like this one, is yet another one of those posts.)

I was going to jump right into the episode of Doctor Who I’m teaching tomorrow, but due to a non-Whovian coup, I’m going to prove my point differently first. To that end, I asked my however many Facebook friends I have the following:

Please name the five most claustrophobic films and/or episodes of a television show you’ve ever seen. If your nominee is chosen, I’ll honor you by naming you by name in the post I’m going to write this afternoon. (Not much of an honor, but hey, it’s better than nothing.)

Patrick Slaven, Kyler Kuehn, Carrie Shanafelt and Gary Farber all recommended Das Boot, and since I own a copy of said film, Das Boot it is. Short plot summary: back when Wolfgang Petersen had talent, he directed a film about a German U-boat and its discontents, and because the majority of the film took place on the boat, it had plenty of shots that approximate the “coffin shots” I discussed yesterday. (Being stuck in a metal tube leagues and leagues below the sea is roughly equivalent to being buried alive.) But unlike the frames discussed yesterday—in particular, the awkward image of Reynolds in his coffin—Petersen relies on standard scaled shots to create a claustrophobic atmosphere for his audience. So long as the audience grants him the conceit that the men in his film live precariously in a long metal cylinder, he need not 1) employ conventional “coffin shots” nor 2) improve upon convention or go whole hog (as Rodrigo Cortés did in Buried).

Petersen’s audience knows that these men are confined behind a brittle shell of metal and will miles below the sea, so the enclosed atmosphere of the film is implicit. But that’s not enough. As I mentioned yesterday, audiences key in to conventions in ways that subvert their effectiveness. A director can put a person in a closed coffin, but because so many have done so previously, the effect is merely communicative. The simple fact of being entrapped comes across, but the sympathetic feeling of entrapment doesn’t.Das Boot is different. It lacks any of the obviously constricted shots and opts instead for a directorial ethos of tight framing (much as I discussed in my counterfactual Bones yesterday):

That’d be a typical dinner shot. It lacks the ostentation of Reynolds in a coffin, but by framing this medium close-up as he did, Petersen’s use of shallow focus indicates that there’s little more to the room than what’s seen here. Typically, shallow focus emphasizes a face (or faces) and blurs the unimportant background into a hazy nothing; here, however, the shallow focus reveals that the walls behind these folks abut them so closely that they can’t be excluded from the shot. There’s simply no way for them to be in focus and the walls around them not, which an audience will realize (even if it doesn’t consciously understand) means that these men are very close to their walls. (Or vice versa.) It’s not a “coffin shot,” merely a medium close-up with a depth of field that reveals, in its entirety, how little there is to see. Stack a few hundred similar shots together and the claustrophobic intent of every director who’s ever buried an actor for effect can actually be realized. Just to prove my point, here are some other shots from the film:

That shot of the living quarters need not be perfectly centered in such a way as to create a frame whose composition is so damn mathematical as to be oppressive, but Petersen’s got an agenda. Also:

There are many ways to depict a man amongst his crew, but framing his head as Petersen has (in a close-up) and situating it in the composition against many other similarly framed heads limits the scope of the frame to this head and these other ones. The face, again, is in shallow focus and yet because every other head’s within the depth of field the constricted effect is only heightened. Imagine watching a film composed thus for 209 minutes (if you spring for the director’s cut): the knowledge of the predicament of the crew is augmented, visually and viscerally, by the manner in which Petersen frames them.

All of which is only to say that a claustrophobic effect isn’t bound to a claustrophobic situation. Certainly, both coffins and U-boats lend themselves to a claustrophobic treatment, but the reason Das Bootsucceeds where yesterday’s episodes and films failed has nothing to do with the narrative situation. It’s all about the mechanics of how such a situation is filmed.

Tomorrow, I promise, I’ll address this within the dictates of my class and discuss Andrew Gunn’s direction of “The Victory of the Daleks.”

Claustrophobia is a cumulative effect.

(Yet another one of those posts.)

Representing claustrophobic situations on screen should be simple enough: you take a person, put them in a confined space, and then you bury them alive. Doesn’t matter if they’re Buffy (in “Bargaining”):

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What we talk about when we talk about hands.

(Check me out, I’m inadvertently topical!)

As I was writing and writing and writing and writing about Jack London in my dissertation, I noticed something I was never able to fully incorporate into my argument: the man’s obsession with hands. He not only wrote about them regularly in his fiction, but his letters are heavily peppered with references to his own “deformed” mitts. I scare-quote “deformed” because history has no record as to whether his hands were as he believed them to be—the scarred and calloused collection of fingers that his life of hard labor had created. That a leading voice for the working class was embarrassed by the signs that he’d once and long been a member of the same is one of those historical ironies that’s better left for braver souls to judge. I’m more interested in the evidence. For example, were you a photographer taking a profile picture of London, he would present you with this:

Or this:

Decent shots, no doubt, but ones in which the palms of his hands have been deliberately obscured. If you were a different sort of photographer entirely—one who wanted to take pictures of famous authors in diapers, for example—London would oblige thus:

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Why Romney Lost South Carolina

Not much has been written about The Ibogaine Effect as a serious factor in the South Carolina primary, but toward the end of the race—about three hours before the vote—word leaked out that some of Romney’s top advisors had called in a Brazilian doctor who was said to be treating the candidate with “some kind of strange drug” that nobody in the press corps had ever heard of.

It had been common knowledge for many weeks that Gingrich was using an exotic brand of speed known as Wallot … and it had long been whispered that Romney was into something very heavy, but it was hard to take the talk seriously until I heard about the appearance of a mysterious Brazilian doctor. That was the key. Later that night, it was reported that Governor Romney was a known user of a powerful drug called Ibogaine.

I immediately recognized The Ibogaine Effect—from Romney’s near-breakdown on the flatbed truck in Iowa, the delusions and altered thinking that characterized his campaign in New Hampshire, and finally the condition of “total rage” that gripped him in South Carolina. There was no doubt about it:

The Mormon Savior had turned to massive doses of Ibogaine as a last resort. The only remaining question was “When did he start?”  But nobody could answer this one, and I was not able to press the candidate himself for an answer because I was permanently barred from the Romney campaign after that incident on the “Tall Corn Special” in Iowa … and that scene makes far more sense now than it did at the time.  Romney has always taken pride in his ability to deal with hecklers; he has frequently challenged them, calling them up to the stage in front of big crowds and then forcing the poor bastards to debate with him in a blaze of TV lights.

But there was none of that in New Hampshire.  When the Boohoo began grabbing at his legs and screaming for more gin, Big Mormon went all to pieces … which gave rise to speculation among reporters familiar with his campaign style, that Romney was not himself.  It was noted, among other things, that he had developed a tendency to roll his eyes wildly during TV interviews and debates, that his thought patterns had become strangely fragmented, and that not even his closest advisors could predict when he might suddenly spiral off into babbling rages, or neocomatose funks.

In retrospect, however, it is easy to see why Romney fell apart in South Carolina.  There he was—far gone in a bad Ibogaine frenzy—suddenly shoved out in the blinding daylight to face an exuberant crowd and some kind of snarling lunatic going for his legs while he tried to explain why he was “The only Republican who can beat Obama.”

It is entirely conceivable—given the known effects of Ibogaine—that Romney’s brain was almost paralyzed by hallucinations at the time; that he looked out at that crowd and saw gila monsters instead of people, and that his mind snapped completely when he felt something large and apparently vicious clawing at his legs.  We can only speculate on this, because those in a position to know have flatly refused to comment on rumors concerning the Governor’s disastrous experiments with Ibogaine.  I tried to find the Brazilian doctor on election night, but by the time the polls closed he was long gone.  One of the hired bimbos in his Holiday Inn headquarters said a man with fresh welts on his head had been dragged out the side door and put on a bus to Salt Lake, but we were never able to confirm this.

Who does Newt want to kill?

Last night’s debate provided yet another example of Gingrich’s firm grasp of history:

We’re in South Carolina. South Carolina in the Revolutionary War had a young 13-year-old named Andrew Jackson. He was sabred by a British officer and wore a scar his whole life. Andrew Jackson had a pretty clear-cut idea about America’s enemies: Kill them.

He was in South Carolina and had just related an anecdote about Andrew Jackson, so I can see why he’d quote Andrew as the Jacksonian source of the “Kill them!” quotation. Only Andrew Jackson didn’t say it—Stonewall Jackson did. Accounts as to who he said it to vary, but the circumstances in which he said it don’t. Union forces greatly outnumbered Southern forces at the Battle of Fredericksburg, and shortly after the death of Brigadier General Maxcy Gregg, someone asked Jackson how the Confederate forces could win. He responded

Kill them, sir! Kill every man!

Which, of course, refers to the Union soldiers. So America’s enemies are, by Gingrich’s account, other Americans. (Most likely Democrats.) There’s the possibility that his error represents an eleventh dimensional dog-whistle blown for the benefit of the strong neo-Confederate presence in South Carolina, but I somehow doubt it.

Follow that thought!

(Yet another one of those posts.)

The opening credit sequence in Fight Club is a nifty little reverse-literalization of a common directorial device for representing thought on screen. The technique typically works in the manner it does at the end of the film’s first scene. Start with a medium close-up of a face:

Note that the narrator indicates that he’s had a revelation. The camera supports his claim by zooming into a close-up:

Then into an extreme close-up:

By zooming in on his face, David Fincher indicates that the audience is about to enter his mind. It’s as if the camera’s going to continue through his eyes and into his memory, which is why—as is the case here—such zooms are so often followed by a flashback:

Call it an abuse of frontality—that feature of a frame that allows the audience to drink deeply of a character’s eyes and acquire sympathy with or knowledge of what lies behind them—but it’s really just an arbitrary convention. There’s no logical reason zooming in on a face should signal the beginning of a flashback. But it frequently does. What’s interesting about the opening title sequence of Fight Club is that it reverses the convention. Via CGI, the audience sees an idea—represented by an electric flash of blue light—form:

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O’Keefe vs. The State of New Hampshire

Apparently, James O’Keefe’s latest illegal stunt ended up being more illegal than he intended it to be. He only intended to commit voter fraud to demonstrate that voter fraud could be committed, but because he chose to impersonate a living voter and misrepresented himself as that person, he may have:

(a) Pose[d] as another person with the purpose to defraud in order to obtain money, credit, goods, services, or anything else of value;

(b) Obtain[ed] or record[ed] personal identifying information about another person without the express authorization of such person, with the intent to pose as such person;

For those who’d prefer not to watch the tape, O’Keefe’s undercover agent attempted to (a) pose as another person to acquire something of value (Robert William Beaulieu’s franchise), and (b) acquire information (Beaulieu’s address) in order to pose as him. I’m not a lawyer, but it would seem that the only ways O’Keefe avoids being charged with identity theft in the state of New Hampshire is to claim that the right of suffrage has no value — and good luck with that one — or that he never intended to pose as Beaulieu in a voting booth, which he can prove by pointing to the fact that his cameraman walked out before actually voting. More significant, to my mind, is that O’Keefe seems to have sharpened his focus: before, he went after voter registration fraud and called it voter fraud, when in truth there was no fraudulent behavior involved. (You can register as “Donald Duck,” but you can’t vote as him.) Now, he realizes that it’s not the registration that’s the “issue” — such as it is one — and is attempting to commit actual Class-A-felony-type voting fraud.

I console myself with the knowledge that should he manage to do that, he’ll be convicted by evidence from his own camera.

I’m a woman?

Caitlin Flanagan seems to think so:

The second reason Metcalf was left flat by this line of reasoning is that he isn’t a woman, and to really love Joan Didion—to have been blown over by things like the smell of jasmine and the packing list she kept by her suitcase—you have to be female.

Admittedly, I don’t find Didion’s discussions of jasmine and packing lists to be the strongest features of her work. Even if I did, I wouldn’t have to be a woman to do so. Flanagan should know better than to argue from a gender essentialist position so intellectually vapid it can be refuted by the existence of stereotypical gay males.

She clearly doesn’t. Her failure to recognize that she’s diminishing Didion by praising her thus leads her to statements like:

Didion’s genius is that she understands what it is to be a girl on the cusp of womanhood, in that fragile, fleeting, emotional time that she explored in a way no one else ever has. Didion is, depending on the reader’s point of view, either an extraordinarily introspective or an extraordinarily narcissistic writer. As such, she is very much like her readers themselves.

Calling the woman who wrote “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” a “girl” does her disservice. Calling her a narcissist and suggesting that any females who read her are similarly narcissistic does them a disservice. That Flanagan does this in an attempt to praise Didion renders it all the more appalling because, in the end, Flanagan doesn’t believe that Didion’s actually a writer:

I can tell you this for certain: anything you have ever read by Didion about the shyness that plagued her in her youth, and about her inarticulateness in those days, in the face of even the most banal questions, was not a writer’s exaggeration of a minor character trait for literary effect. The contemporary diagnosis for the young woman at our dinner table would be profound—crippling—social-anxiety disorder.

Didion emoted her prose onto the page. She didn’t perform an excruciating self-analysis in the service of a journalistic ethos, she was shy so she wrote shyly. The dinner party Flanagan recounts in the article happened after the publication of Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a collection whose titular essay is renowned for its shy lyric:

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“Not suffering like starving 19th-century Norwegian immigrants”

That, according to Victor Davis Hanson, is the contemporary version of “the good life.” From a man who compulsively reminds anyone in earshot that “for 20 years I taught classics,” defining “the good life” as the absence of suffering is surprising. I always thought it had something to do with one of those Greek words Hanson loves so much—but I only studied classics for a couple semesters as an undergraduate and am probably misremembering. That said, Hanson’s certainly correct about one thing: no one suffers quite as poignantly as white people. It’s no coincidence that his first complaint about people who complain about class is:

Meanwhile we see the “poor” near rioting over buying the first few pairs of Michael Jordan $200 sneakers[.]

His argument is entirely about class. Consider the impoverished people at one of those near-riots:

Not a single one of them looks to be a starving Norwegian. That’s because Hanson is talking about class here:

In the car today, I heard the usual con ads on the radio. Got problems with the IRS? No problem, we can renegotiate that away. Too much credit card borrowing? No problem, we can settle it at half what you owe … Lately I heard ads from the Department of Agriculture, reminding me that if I belong to some such minority group, I can sue if I felt I was discriminated against.

Class:

My point again is not to object to magnanimity, but to object mightily to those who slander a system that is more egalitarian and generous than any in civilization’s history. Race-based quotas help as well.

What do they help? They help poor people acquire what Hanson calls “the simulacra of equality.” Here’s the actual example he uses to “prove” that the simulacra of equality is a good thing:

I also say simulacra because few in Selma vacation in Tuscany. But sitting in front of a big-screen TV, with some Italian music on, while watching Rick Steves (with TV sound off) touring Florence seems not all that different from the 28-hour hassle of flying to rural Italy. The former is free; the latter “rich” people alone afford.

Sitting in front of a television isn’t all that different from going to Italy? The mind reels. Hanson’s new definition of “the good life” entails not starving and not having to deal with the hassle of flying overseas. So if you see someone in expensive sneakers who’s neither starving nor vacationing overseas and you still think that class exists in America, you’re probably one of those people trying to “get tenure by writing obscure, clever little essays that few read on insidious class differences.”

And if you’re one of those people, your mother’s most likely a Mexican.