Poor Skyfall, it deserved better

Sam Mendes is the Don Delillo of contemporary cinema, in that he’s as beloved as he’s banal and otherwise right-thinking people seem incapable of recognizing him as such. A few years ago I wrote of my hatred of the flat affect (or affected flatness) that characterizes Delillo’s prose, and I’m going to be making a similar argument about Mendes. I can make that argument directly, in that both blame the postmodern condition for the flattening and both think that finding meaning in meaninglessness is the proper aesthetic response to it. To wit:

To understand all this. To penetrate this secret. The mountain was here, unconcealed, but no one saw it or thought about it, no one knew it existed except the engineers … a unique cultural deposit … and he saw himself for the first time as a member of an esoteric order, they were adepts and seers, crafting the future, the city planners, the waste managers, the compost technicians, the landscapers who would build hanging gardens here, make a park one day out of every kind of used and eroded object of desire.

To understand Delillo. To penetrate his secret. The appeal is there, everyone sees it when they think about it, everyone knows it is “a unique cultural deposit,” taken by Delillo on the chest of Americans who want to believe they belong to an esoteric order, that they are the adepts and seers of literature. Only they aren’t. They read a big book full of moments, as above, in which characters look at “garbage” and are struck by an epiphanic bolt named “recycling.” Don Delillo writes “deep” thoughts for stupid people. Mendes traffics in similar crap:

I don’t care if it could be mistaken for a two-shot of people in a museum, that thing they’re looking at is still a plastic bag, not a reminder that everything is connected. Or if it is a reminder that everything’s connected we’re back to the profundity that it is modern recycling. It’s not evidence that there’s “this entire life behind things, and this incredibly benevolent force that wanted me to know that there was no reason to be afraid.” It’s not an ontological proof of the existence of a non-denominational Kindness that communicates through gusts of trash. It’s a fucking plastic bag. But it gets worse. It’s a plastic bag “that was just, dancing with [Ricky], like a little kid begging [for him] to play with it—for fifteen minutes,” meaning that it’s a plastic bag that Ricky didn’t recycle. He befriended it in the name of the non-denominational Kindness who speaks through trash and filmed the encounter so we all could meet said Kindness through Art. It’s first-order Art in the film, when Ricky shows it to Jane, but it’s second-order Art when Mendes presents us Ricky showing it to Jane, so we experience their experience of Art because in the postmodern world one can never experience The Thing Itself only mediated versions of It through Art. This is a Baudrillard-bruised insight from ’70s masquerading as profundity and everyone fell for it. The Academy declared it the Most Unique Cultural Deposit of 1999 and Mendes the Most Unique Cultural Depositor of the same.

Which brings us to Skyfall. I watched it last night and thought it a fine little Bond film. But it was not the Art it thought it was. Mendes comes from a theatrical background and directs his movies like old episodes of Masterpiece Theater: he positions the camera at some distance from the action, checks that every element of the frame is in focus, then walks away. The result is a reliance on shots that are longer than they need to be:

He seems not to know that when every element of a shot is in focus, the result is a flatter looking shot. There is foreground only in the literal sense that some people are closer to the camera, but because the people in the background as are crisp those in the foreground, the frame feels short and flat, like someone learned how to stage a scene in a theater. Just so you don’t think I’m unfairly knocking filmed versions of theatrical productions, here is a screen capture from something you know I’m inclined to love:

The Doctor and Captain Picard in Hamlet. Brilliant! Marvel at the spectacular set design! Glory in the deftly composed theatrical lighting! Are you done yet? Good. Now look at the shot itself: the spectacular acting and stunning design and artful lighting are all undermined by the manner in which they appear on film. That’s not a criticism, just an acknowledgment of difference. Plays must be filmed at this scale (an extreme long shot here)  because the alternative is that the performance is halted every time an in-frame element or the camera needed adjusting. In which case the play would cease being a play and become a movie. Saying that Tennant and Stewart’s Hamlet looks like a play isn’t an insult, merely an acknowledgment of what it is. But Skyfall is not a play. It’s a film too often shot like one. Even the action scenes:

Read more…

Kohen on Yahoo’s Authoritarian turn

Ari Kohen has an excellent post today discussing Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s new policy prohibiting working from home:

I don’t even think about this issue from the perspective of someone who is devoted to family-friendly or feminist arguments (though these are not minor considerations by any means); for me, this is all about flexibility and productivity.

There are certainly some people who benefit from the traditional work environment and there are undoubtedly jobs where “being together” is important. But there are just as certainly some people who do faster and better work when they are in a different environment.

In my own case, there are some times when it’s absolutely critical that I’m physically present at work — either in the classroom, in my office, in a meeting. But there are other times when I benefit a great deal from being able to make use of technology and forward-thinking colleagues to work from home and participate in group work.

As an (obviously idiosyncratic) example (because my job is admittedly not a traditional office job): I’m currently involved in several collaborative research projects with other faculty members and with students. Occasionally, if our schedules allow, we’ll meet in person. More often, though, we’ll meet together on Google+ and share documents via Dropbox. It’s certainly nice to sit down together, but it’s absolutely false that doing so somehow produces better or faster work than meeting remotely.

Read the whole thing, etc. In addition to the obvious benefits for feminism and families, I would add the ecological benefits; driving is easily the most ecologically harmful activity most of us do in our day to day lives, and cutting down on commuting is one of the most obvious ways to reduce one’s environmental footprint. Kohen’s experience isn’t idiosyncratic; there’s evidence (follow the links in the second link) that flexible work arrangements and productivity gains go together. My own experience is a bit different; I don’t always find I’m more productive at home. I am occasionally prone to procrastination and time-wasting, and I often find the best way to address this problem is a change of scenery–from home to work or work to home or either to a coffee shop or the library. (Since I commute exclusively by bicycle, I suspect the productivity boost from a change of scenery may actually be a result of the 15-20 minutes of moderate exercise I get from changing location). But whatever: people respond differently to different environments distractions, the notion that taking away people’s ability to know an manage their own distractions is likely to improve productivity is transparently silly.

It’s difficult for me to interpret Yahoo’s policy shift (and resistance to workplace flexibility more broadly) as anything other than an example of the irrational authoritarian mindset (despite assurances from our libertarian friends that such a thing is logically impossible) many employers and managers implicitly adopt: the fear that someone somewhere might be getting away with something, and that surrendering any control is a loss in this battle. And having spent my life working mostly in the university setting, I see a distinct class element to this. At most universities, faculty are presumed to have maximum flexibility: aside from classes, they are mostly free to set their own schedule, declare multiple days of the week as off limits for meetings, and so on. Virtually all non-academic staff, however, are expected to do adhere to a something approximating a 9-5 schedule. This is often irrational, of course. I have a friend who has a complex and pretty high level administrative job at a university. As positions have been cut around her, she’s absorbed more duties and responsibilities, and her day-to-day tasks often overwhelm her ability to accomplish crucial long-term tasks that require uninterrupted concentration for several hours. And while according to the ideology that prevails in the university setting, the following admission is a sort of heresy: I’m confident her job is more important and quite a bit harder than mine. She’s allowed, informally, to work from home 2 days a month, a highly irregular arrangement that makes her boss nervious, and she rarely manages to get both of them in practice. On the days she actually does work from home, she’s vastly more productive than she could ever be at work, because she’s able to do the tasks her office environment render impossible (and I say this without considering the stress/time/resources saved by not commuting). As a member of the faculty class, I can take 2-3 days a week working from home if I wish, without seeking anyone’s permission, but it’s actually less important for my productivity to do that than it is for hers. As a member of the faculty class, I could declare a long block of time my “writing time”, close my office door, and for the most part not be bothered. But her boss is reluctant to give her the work from home time she needs to do her job, and HR is reluctant to craft policies that incentivize partial work from home arrangements for staff, despite the obvious and significant benefits, (in addition to the usual ones, this campus has a massive parking shortage) because at bottom the working assumption is there are employees the university is meant to control, and employees the university is meant to support, and she falls in the former group.

A Public Service For Misogynist Trolls

It is always a depressing experience to read a comment thread having anything to do with feminism and find out what professional and amateur misogynists think feminism consists of. For example, our newish troll curmudgeon:

Meanwhile, the historical arc of feminist argumentation on the Internet has reached its bimodal zenith with…the argument that any woman who believes that being spoken to by a man seeking consensual sex is not an objectifying act is pro rape.

The reference, as Mr. Mudgeon confirmed later, is to the Rebecca Watson elevator incident that revealed Richard Dawkins to be a world-class concern troll. Dawkins’s apologists have generally distorted Watson’s unassailable argument beyond any possible recognition, but rarely in this purely dishonest a form. Let us compare the troll summary…

any woman who believes that being spoken to by a man seeking consensual sex is not an objectifying act is pro rape.

…with a summary that actually attempts to bear some resemblance to what Watson actually said, with the crucial differences highlighted:

Being hit on by someone following you into an elevator late at night in the immediate aftermath of giving a talk in which you explain how you’ve been affected by the tendency of men in the skeptic movement to view women as sexual objects regardless of the context is creepy and inappropriate.

Note also that there is no suggestion that “seeking consensual sex” is wrong in any context, and also no argument that what happened to her was “rape.” You’re welcome!

The Next Front in the Republican War on Women: The War on Orgasms

Hmm, I’d have to say that if the hot new young Republican position is to oppose (female) orgasms, this is excellent news for Democrats.

A colleague at Allegheny notes that the talk taking the highly controversial pro-orgasm position — why wasn’t someone invited to give the opposing view!?!?!?!?!?! — didn’t actually take place in a “church”; it’s a former chapel that is used for all kinds of programming, secular and religious. But it’s beside the point; no matter what the setting, the fact that Fox and the Daily Fail seem to agree that college students hearing experts talk about sex is somehow problematic speaks for itself. Speaking of fail, William Jacobson’ auxiliary site “Reports on College For Wingnuts Who Find David Horowitz Too Measured and Highbrow” is all over this important story as well. I mean, first you have a discussion with college students about sex, and next thing you know they might find out that there are other condiments out there besides French’s mustard and Miracle Whip, and it will be anarchy. Won’t someone please THINK OF THE CHILDREN?