film – Elizabeth McCarthy

Posted by Elizabeth McCarthy on August 10, 2022 in blog, film

Joe Versus the Volcano, Palm Springs and the Lost Decades of Romantic Comedies

A looming future of transhumanism and the encroaching threat of climate change enshroud our daily lives. Sure, we’re facing a pandemic, a gun crisis, a healthcare crisis, unprecedented economic inequality, a crumbling democracy, impending regional wars, loss of privacy, disinformation, and a privatized space race with questionable aims, but all of that pales next to the strangeness of confronting an existential crisis of unsustainable life on earth alongside the rapid devolution of our humanity at the hands of software and machines. What I mean to say is this is a historically bad time to make the case that Hollywood should be focused on reviving the romantic comedy genre. We’ve clearly got bigger problems.

However, it’s my view that we, the imperiled public, desperately need to be watching interesting, funny relationship movies. In theaters. On dates. The communal experience of laughing in a theater while watching ourselves—regular people, not superheros—reflected in stories on a big screen is essential. It suggests we’re able to laugh at ourselves with each other, that we’re not too proud to laugh at ourselves in front of strangers, and reminds us that we share our life experiences with a large, diverse group of people. The theater is where we experience common ground. If Hollywood doesn’t find the will to make those movies, and fast, and if we don’t find the will to force ourselves to go see them, no matter how in love we are with our couches, we will most certainly never again have the necessary social glue needed to solve much bigger, more urgent problems that are presently breathing down our collective neck. (We do have a collective neck, whether we like it or not, snowflakes be damned.)

The world didn’t arrive at hell’s oasis overnight. The blueprint for our demise has been around for some time. Love and dating in America have taken a backseat to more urgent problems for years, if not in practice then at least in conversation. Hollywood turned all of its attention to comic book world-saving and space operas years ago, first because they were so lucrative, and later because they were so reliable. There’s not much happening these days on a high budget studio level that echoes WHEN HARRY MET SALLY in broad appeal, which implies we don’t care about the one-on-one love stories that used to preoccupy many of us morning, noon and night, that we’ve dropped the topic that serves as the foundation for building a life, joining social groups, starting families and forming communities. Hollywood’s output suggests that we, the viewing public, don’t find ourselves interesting or entertaining enough to warrant a big budget film. I think that implication is false (and dangerous). I think we care a lot about understanding each other, across political, social and gender divides. During the course of technological advancement, those stories have been devalued, and that’s the reason for this piece.

In 1990, the brilliant playwright and filmmaker John Patrick Shanley made JOE VERSUS THE VOLCANO. Joe (Tom Hanks) begins with tired eyes and a bad haircut, trudging through urban muck to reach his depressing basement job, and ends looking debonair in a white tuxedo, with a great haircut, newly married in the South Pacific. His wife is Patricia (Meg Ryan), whom he has known for four days. They’re married for all of two minutes before they join hands and jump into an erupting volcano. Joe does this because he wants to be a man of his word. He agreed to jump into the volcano after being told he has a “brain cloud” and only a few months to live. In exchange for the adventure of reaching the South Pacific by boat, he will end his life spectacularly. He later learns he was duped into going on this nonsensical journey and is actually in perfect health.

Patricia’s reason for jumping into the volcano is a bit murky. She spends two days getting to know Joe on her boat, the Tweedle Dee, before a typhoon sinks it, taking her entire crew with it. Joe saves her life and they survive two more days floating on his luggage—she, unconscious, he, delusional—before arriving at the island, at which point she announces she’s in love with him. She tries to talk Joe out of jumping but he’s set on a heroic death, so she asks him to marry her, they marry, and then she says she’s jumping with him. Maybe the thrill of getting married made her feel spontaneous and lucky. It’s hard to tell. They jump holding hands, the volcano ejects them in a cloud of gas and they survive. Love conquers all.

Exactly thirty years later in the California desert, Nyles (Andy Samberg) begins PALM SPRINGS looking good, if bored, and ends the movie still looking good but now nervous and awake as he takes the hand of his new love, Sarah (Cristin Milioti). They walk into a cave with a boiling time tunnel where they kiss passionately before she blows them both up with a body belt of C4. It’s very romantic.

They do this because they’re trapped in a time loop, living the same miserable day over and over at Sarah’s sister’s wedding, à la GROUNDHOG DAY. Sarah slept with the groom the night before the wedding and wakes up every morning to the awful realization of what she has done. Nyles is in a relationship with a self-absorbed younger woman and is reliving a daily hell of settling for mediocrity. By the time Sarah figures out a theoretical way to exit the time loop, Nyles has figured out he needs to be with her. He’s ready to grow up and blow himself up for love.

The message of both films is horrible when taken literally. A leap of faith, better described as “a hopeful dual suicide,” is presented as the only way forward for these endearing characters, as the only honorable choice. Metaphorically, however, the notion of taking a leap with another person, ending life as you know it by annihilating yourse…whoops, no, that’s also horrible. Both films push a fantasy narrative of complete abasement to the mysteries of the universe, on par with taking life advice from a horoscope. At no point does the audience believe the film is really going to kill these people off. They’ve come so far! They’ve learned so much! Apparently for their proverbial sins, they still have to die. At least, they think they do.

The films are both surreal fantasies with comparable endings, and they share one similarity in having unusually normal female protagonists. Neither Patricia nor Sarah are flighty, conflicted, dependent, or particularly interested in love and marriage. They’re both self-reflective, insightful and very smart, which comes across with refreshing clarity in the midst of a surreal narrative. When female characters are effortlessly normal, flawed without silently broadcasting “I’M UNLIKEABLE, DAMNIT,” the writing has delivered a rare wonder and should be congratulated.

Other than those broad similarities, the two films are notable for their differences. Baby boomer Joe is a cog in a dark, dirty corporate wheel at a medical hardware company. His life is meaningless, and it’s making him sick. The satirical commentary on what passed for a “job” in the late 80s is played to the hilt, complete with an “artificial testicals” prototype on his boss’s desk. Joe’s problem is not Joe. It’s the world he’s living in, the expectations placed on him, and society’s numb acceptance of it all without resistance.

By comparison, millennial Nyles never mentions his job. When Sarah asks what he did for a living before he got stuck in the time loop he’s unable to remember. He never asks about her job or career, although it’s later suggested that he already knows a lot more about her than he initially confesses. He’s not incurious, he’s wise. Regardless, they don’t discuss the central focus of modern life, one’s work, suggesting that careers don’t define millennials the way they define older generations. In GROUNDHOG DAY, Phil Connors uses his eternal time loop to do the things he missed doing by having a demanding job and a bad attitude, namely reading the classics, learning to play the piano, and doing good deeds. Two generations later, Sarah and Nyles face the same meaninglessness and choose to drink all day and amuse themselves by breaking every law and rule. They have no apparent interests and there’s no possible way to create anything lasting or meaningful…until they fall in love.

On the subject of sex, both films are sweetly chaste. Sarah and Nyles agree not to sleep together, given that they’re stuck in a loop and don’t want things to be eternally awkward. Eventually they relent, which serves as the catalyst to try to escape the loop and have a real future. Joe and Patricia get married before they even make out, which is a loud wink coming from the “free love” generation who danced naked at Woodstock and marched on Washington for birth control. Baby boomers single-handedly liberated sex from puritanism. By the 80s, however, boomers were divorcing in unprecedented numbers. The generation that decided it was free to sleep with whomever it pleased discovered that finding one person to go the distance with was more romantic than passion itself. If boomers had learned anything by midlife, it was that passion didn’t make a marriage. People did.

It’s unsurprising that Baby Boomers and Millennials are responsible for tales depicting coupledom as the death of the individual, a traumatic decision that one only survives by chance or miracle in explosive, spectacular fashion. Both generations take themselves too seriously. Generation X, however, is the goldilocks audience for these fables, fairly committed to the idea that it’s not good to blow yourself up and/or jump into a volcano for love, but blasé enough to use dating websites where miracles are purported to happen. Gen X was also the receptive audience to the TV fantasy of Friends, happily patterning the future on the impossible economics of a massive two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan and as much spare time in adulthood as one had in college to banter wittily with, well, friends. Gen X has a shrug-and-see attitude which makes it the ideal generational voice to reestablish a few key narratives if given the opportunity and support.

Generation X came of age during the 30 years between JOE VERSUS THE VOLCANO and PALM SPRINGS. During that time, Hollywood evolved away from the traditional studio system and moved towards corporate ownership, primarily by technology and communications conglomerates. The 2000s ushered in an era of marketing-as-tastemaking, with studio executives increasingly taking their scripts to the marketing departments before greenlighting them, often during the development process. This was new in the filmmaking process. Repeat: This was new. Film buffs can disagree all day long about how the industry has changed over the years and whether certain changes have been good or bad for filmmaking on balance, but it’s incontrovertible that this shift in decision-making gave tastemaking power to the sales and marketing side of production. In journalism, this would be the equivalent of the ad sales department for a newspaper weighing in on whether a journalist should cover a story. These two branches of media companies, business and news, are strictly separate and do not interact with each other because of the conflict of interest. (For example, the Washington Post needs to be able to cover any and all newsworthy stories, whether a tech company buys advertising space in their pages or not. A news organization should never opt out of covering a story because their advertisers are lobbying them.)

However, Hollywood is not journalism. The industry famously views itself as living by its own rules, of which there are none. The foundation of Hollywood decision-making was most eloquently summed up in three words by the late, great William Goldman: “Nobody knows anything.” Nobody is in charge. Nobody codified essential aspects of the creative process. Nobody thought to protect Hollywood’s most precious commodity from encroaching corporations. Instead, the industry frittered away its tastemaking power by demoting high quality films to “indie” status, meaning they’re made using independent financing, and instead poured all of its money into “tentpole” franchises. This began in earnest in the 90s, so by the time the Internet Age arrived with streaming technology, the studios rolled over, seemingly grateful to have someone new to blame for their imploding “business model.”

What does this have to do with romantic comedies? While Hollywood’s output became increasingly marketing-based and franchise-heavy, adult relationships became the purview of HBO and premium cable, with Sex and the City dominating the high-quality but definitively at-home viewership of relationship storytelling. A major split occurred. Prestige filmmaking no longer included relationship movies, conveying the unspoken message that adult relationships weren’t considered valuable enough for studios to support in kind alongside Batman, Marvel, Star Wars, Avatar, Star Trek, “Tom Cruise,” etc. To wit, Warner Bros. made JOE VERSUS THE VOLCANO with a budget of $25 million and it opened to $9.2 million in 1990, while PALM SPRINGS was made independently for $5 million and opened to $164,000. Granted, it opened during the pandemic, but given its budget it was unlikely to see a big opening weekend in 2020, no matter the circumstances of its release.

One interesting aside to this discussion is what Generation X filmmakers did between 1990 and 2020 with dwindling studio support. STRANGER THAN FICTION was pretty much the only mid-level fantasy-relationship studio film made during that time–made for $30 million by Sony Pictures, starring Emma Thompson and Will Ferrell. The Gen X approach to love was (I note with pride) the reverse of boomers and millennials, with Will Ferrell’s Harold Crick begging not to die because he finally found love. He’ll do anything not to die at the hands of a homicidal fiction writer who created him in order to kill him. It opened to $13 million.

While studios shifted their focus entirely to CGI-heavy franchises, theaters moved to upgrade the theatrical experience to accommodate them, touting high-tech sound systems, screens and 3D capability, all of which sent the cost of movie tickets through the roof. Today, filmgoers rightly balk at paying the same price to see a Star Wars film a Sex and the City movie. Only one of those films requires expensive bells and whistles to get its story across.

Between the loss of support in script development to the theatrical focus on animation and sci-fi with CGI, the film industry essentially dropped an entire genre on its ass without considering the long-term effects on the culture it was entrusted with influencing. Presently, there is more discussion in the trades about whether China is carrying the latest tentpole offering from Hollywood than the overall quality and content of output in American theaters in general. American audiences aren’t Hollywood’s primary concern anymore, and that is most obvious in the snapshots of box office earnings year over year. With the business geared towards foreign audiences, it should be no surprise that movies about interpersonal relationships have dropped in status, since the nuances of relationships, humor and love are highly specific to each culture, hence those films don’t translate easily overseas.

Thus, younger generations of Americans are getting their top-tier entertainment-based insights on adult relationships from broadly drawn superheroes sprinting toward each other, futuristic guns drawn, ready to fight for a magical orb that will save the universe, not wittily navigating the treacherous end-of-dinner decision about who picks up the check on a first date. This may sound like an inconsequential overgeneralization, but the shift in Hollywood’s tone and storytelling has real-world effects for kids growing up in a franchise-dominated, entertainment-heavy culture. There’s no angst-ridden wait of several years between buying a ticket to a G-rated Disney animated film and an R-rated live-action one, of staring up at the marquee with longing and thinking about being able to see any number of movies without sitting next to a parent. Today there are mere inches on a screen between clicks, and the short jump from animation to sci-fi has very few relationship films vying for attention in between.

This 30-year reliance on sci-fi fantasy franchises and the implied value of those stories over relationship fantasies is, in my view, responsible for quite a lot that isn’t good in the 2020s. When an entire industry devotes the lion’s share of its resources to superheroes and the distant future, it neglects the dreams and fantasies of real people who are buying movie tickets. Nobody sitting in the theater relates to a superhero the same way they relate to an average guy who hates his job, who has no life, or who needs an adventure. Nobody sitting in the theater relates to someone who flies around on a spaceship the way they relate to getting nervous about getting married, or pondering their future, or questioning what their purpose is. When people stop viewing their own lives as interesting, and their own problems as being worthy of having movies made about them in a fun, fantastical way, they’re encouraged to devalue regular life. There are many reasons why people walk around staring at their cellphones these days, their attention freely given to a tiny screen while life happens in real time around them. This is certainly one of them.

The process of elevating a future that doesn’t exist yet over a present that needs attention is a major contributing factor in our social dysfunction. The evidence is in the films themselves. JOE VERSUS THE VOLCANO is one man’s escape from the drugery of his life. He seeks help from doctors, begging for a reason why he feels so sick inside. He jumps into a volcano under false pretenses, despite being newly married to a woman he loves, because finding meaning in life is even more important. Had he known the truth about his health, he would have refused to jump and continued to search for hope and answers. Thirty years later, PALM SPRINGS is a story of two people trapped in meaningless time. They only recognize each other and fall in love because time has been reduced to one day. If not for that, they would pass by each other and continue on with their empty, dissatisfying lives, distracted by what they’re told is meaningful, unaware that there’s something better right in front of them if only they could slow down and see it.

Hollywood used to be our time loop, slowing life down for a couple of hours with sharp, compelling relationship movies that encouraged us not to take ourselves too seriously. If there’s any risk to be taken in the business now, the essential one is to push for a return to more traditional filmmaking, and to search for the writers and directors with a fresh perspective on love and relationships, and new stories to tell. In my view, studio support for this genre would make a substantive difference in the direction the world is taking, while entertaining people in the process.

If you read this, you owe me a dollar.

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Posted by Elizabeth McCarthy on August 17, 2017 in blog, film, politics

Connecting the Dots

Al Gore’s Inconvenient Sequel

Activist Heather Heyer said, “If you you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” Incredibly, it took her murder in a public space in broad daylight to make people pay attention to organized American white nationalists. Even then, her death wasn’t sufficient to galvanize substantive action on domestic terror. The president’s refusal to condemn her killers became the focus of the news cycle, thus shifting the public’s outrage away from a dire national threat, and proving once again that motivated people are easily immobilized without the guidance of a good, well-informed leader.

The Inconvenient Sequel to An Inconvenient Truth doesn’t mention the alt-right or white supremacy, but two centuries of white Western economic dominance over the world has certainly left its mark. While “the West” includes a diverse mix of races, it is white men who led the charge of industrialization and technological advancement with devastating environmental consequences. The deeply upsetting conversation about the environmental crisis often glosses over the fact that older wealthy white men would have to give up substantial economic gains in order to lead a course-correction for the entire planet. Instead, the powerful few are pitted against millions who will be adversely affected by climate change for generations to come and they are using their limitless resources to disinform the world and downplay the dangers.

The images of melting glaciers and floods throughout An Inconvenient Sequel are disturbing, but to an informed viewer the most panic-inducing sections of the movie should be the round table negotiations between world leaders. The magnitude of political star power that shows up for working-level environmental policy meetings is alarming. While the agreement reached at the 2016 UN Climate Change Conference is presented in the film as a triumph, it should strike fear into the hearts of every global citizen. The unprecedented cooperation which occurred to make that agreement happen is damning evidence that we’re facing an imminent existential threat.

Al Gore is no longer a controversial figure. His presence is almost Christ-like now. He’s a mouthpiece for the planet, a voice for millions of people who have no political power in the face of this unfolding man-made catastrophe. Gore doesn’t do much explaining in this film. We simply follow him around the world and watch how he responds to questions about what’s happening. He looks fatigued and worried. He speaks in short bursts of truth. No one has a justification for ignoring reality that he can’t refute in a few words. When Christiana Figueres, Secretariat of the UNFCCC, entreats him to bring India — the 1.3 billion people of India — on board with the Paris Accords, Gore makes a phone call to the CEO of SolarCity and an economic carrot materializes. The urgency of our situation is evident in the staggeringly short distance between nightmare and hope, that distance being the reach of one man, Gore.

Figueres closes the Paris climate conference with an announcement that 194 countries signed the Paris Agreement. The jubilation onscreen is heartbreaking in light of what we now know will follow — an alt-right sympathizer will take power in the White House. He will refuse to acknowledge the global cooperation and sacrifice needed to save the planet. He will withdraw America from the Paris Agreement and derail our best hope of reversing climate change, thus exhibiting the hallmark decision-making of denialism and white American exceptionalism.

Gore says American democracy has been “hacked” by corporations. He’s adamant that the government is not acting in the best interests of the people. Given his personal and very public journey to bring climate change to light, there’s no reason to doubt him. He asks viewers to “connect the dots” but in truth he has connected them for us. All we need to do is watch the film and let that truth wash over us.

An Inconvenient Sequel is in theaters now.

Posted by Elizabeth McCarthy on June 1, 2017 in film, technology

Side by Side: A Map for the Digital Revolution

The Dark Knight; Avatar; The Age of Innocence; The Wolf of Wall Street

It has been five years since the release of Side by Side, Chris Kenneally’s vertical documentary on the digital filmmaking revolution, as told by Hollywood’s top directors, cinematographers, editors and executives. The question at the center of the film is the same question facing the world today: What are the consequences of the digital revolution?

Hollywood was a forerunner in adopting digital technology, as studios and filmmakers alike pushed to develop better tools to realize their vision onscreen. As such, Side by Side has become a fascinating time capsule from 2012 when filmmakers were grappling with questions that echo our current dilemmas: With so much digital information, do we have enough time to think through our choices? Can people distinguish between what is real and what is fake? If so, how well? Are we more or less engaged with our lives through digital technology? Is our quality of life made better or worse by this ubiquitous invention? The documentary is a blueprint for digital modernization that takes stock of what we’re gaining as a society, and what we may have lost.

There are two definitions of revolution which are, on the surface, at odds. The first sees a revolution as a physical rotation or orbit with a return to the point of departure. The second definition is a permanent, extraordinary departure from one way of life into the unknown. This inherent contradiction in definitions makes it challenging to forecast when you’re in the midst of sweeping change. When you leave the house in the morning are you coming back, or are you leaving forever? Side by Side illustrates how technological revolution is a departure and a roundtrip at the same time.

At its core, the digital takeover in Hollywood was driven by economics. Traditionally, filmmaking was expensive and labor-intensive. The cost of film stock alone was prohibitive to independent directors. The delays and technical issues that arose on film shoots were often a result of the limitations of physical film. As such, studios and corporations had long been in the business of developing more reliable methods for film production and delivering them to the film community for testing and feedback.

The other driver of the digital takeover was artistic vision. Action films are reliant on visual effects. Directors such as George Lucas and James Cameron were frustrated by the limitations of celluloid. They led the way in developing hardware and software to bring their futuristic visions to the screen. The result has been a permanent departure from making movies in the traditional way, with each advancement in digital technology taking the industry farther afield of historical norms.

Once digital recording passed muster with enough filmmakers, studios pushed to use the technology on all films as a cost-saving measure. This set in motion a disruption of the traditional film production model and permanently impacted every aspect of the process from development to projection. For some in the industry, technological advancement was an inevitable learning process. Each new tool or skill brought people back to their job wiser and better equipped. For others, advancement carried them away from a beloved art form into new territory and sacrificed everything they couldn’t bring with them.

Filmmakers featured in Side by Side have unique processes and points of view, but they all agree on one issue: those who wanted to work in one format or the other had to find each other. A director who wants to shoot on digital isn’t going to work with a cinematographer who only shoots on film. When you apply this notion to society as a whole, the current polarization of America makes sense. Americans best served by digital advancement are largely unconcerned with who is left behind, taking the general view that there is always loss with gain. Meanwhile, Americans ignored or harmed by technological advancement assert that it’s not advancement if it’s not inclusive; that there are costs associated with progress; that sacrificing people for technology isn’t beneficial to some individuals, even if it benefits society as a whole. Likeminded individuals band together and the digital revolution has thus created two polarized camps. Both want their country to succeed, but they’re pitted against each other because their definitions of success are at odds. The mere existence of digital technology divides us even when our ultimate goal is the same.

In Side by Side, it’s striking that those who advocate for celluloid describe it in futuristic terms. There’s a wonderful stretch of interviews with directors, cinematographers and actors describing a shoot day with film. They note the distinctive sound of the “money” running through the camera that ups the tension on set. Richard Linklater likens it to an athletic event, where participants mentally and physically prepare for a heightened moment of performance and then…Action! Words like “magic” and “leap of faith” are used to refer to the act of recording on film with the same kind of awe one might reserve for flying cars or teletransport. The sentimental language of people who are making a visionary plea is now used to entreat listeners to buy into history. This is a tipping point on the arc of a revolution. Where we once romanticized the future, now we romanticize the past.

Lucas, Cameron, David Fincher, Danny Boyle and Robert Rodriguez all speak convincingly to the massive benefits to digital filmmaking. Lucas describes the antiquated process of color-timing which has now been replaced by the entirely new artform of digital colorizing. Fincher recalls an issue with camera weight when filming the rowing scene in The Social Network, and how a 5.5lb digital camera made his impossible shot possible. Rodriguez says he wouldn’t have attempted to make the comic book thriller Sin City without the myriad freedoms afforded by digital manipulation; the movie simply wouldn’t exist.

In perhaps the most compelling testimony, Boyle vividly describes how smaller digital cameras interacted with his actors on the streets of Mumbai in Slumdog Millionaire. His DP, Anthony Dod Mantle, was free to roam in and around the sets, improvising with angles and capturing images with a kind of intimacy that was previously unattainable with cumbersome film cameras. Mantle won an Academy Award for Slumdog, the first ever awarded to a film with digital cinematography.

The counterargument to these digital discoveries, however, is stark. Christopher Nolan, Martin Scorsese, Wally Pfister and others are vocal about the loss of realism with so much image manipulation. They discuss the importance of slower pacing during the filmmaking process, and how the encumbrances of physical film force necessary pauses in the creative process. Where filmmakers once shot scenes in 2–minute bursts and broke to reload the cameras, now digital cameras run without cutting. People are always “on.” This is frustrating for some actors (Robert Downey, Jr., Keanu Reeves) and welcomed by others (John Malkovich.)

Scorsese and Nolan indirectly raise the question of whether there’s enough room to think, focus, and make good decisions on the timeline dictated by digital technology (a question Americans ask daily, both of themselves and their tweeting president.) Listening to their reasoning, it seems incredibly foolish to argue with genius, yet five years on we know that’s precisely what studios have done. Scorsese’s last two films, The Wolf of Wall Street and Silence, were a hybrid of film and digital shots. In 2014, Paramount announced it would no longer release movies on film. Undoubtedly other studios will follow suit. Nolan is the high-profile holdout. He will release Dunkirk this year, which Hoyt van Hoytema shot (by all accounts, magnificently) on 65mm film.

Anne V. Coates, the celebrated editor whose career has spanned 70 years, is eloquent on the broader impact of working at digital speed. She makes an excellent case that the automation of the editing process delivers less-considered work and has all but eliminated happy accidents. For example, Lawrence of Arabia (for which she won an Academy Award) includes a scene in which Lawrence blows out a match and then cuts directly to the sunset over the desert. The cut delivers a startling, thrilling visual. Coates observes that a dissolve was originally written in the script and if she’d been editing the film digitally the transition would’ve been added automatically. Instead, she was working with physical film that required manually cutting the film strips and taping them together, so the first edit had the film clips “butted together” without any transition added. When they watched the results of that first cut through the machine…“Magic.”

Early adopters of digital technology — Lucas, Cameron, Rodriguez, the Wachowskis, et al. — are known for inventing their worlds; much of their work is futuristic and fantastical. Early defenders for shooting on film — Scorsese, Soderbergh, Nolan — typically apply their vision to the world as it is and explore stories of the past and the present. From one angle, these groups can be boiled down to “fake versus real.” In a fake world, the audience is treated to superhuman visuals and challenged to think beyond corporeal limitations. In realistic films, audiences watch drama or comedy unfold between recognizably limited characters and are offered a touchstone for processing their own lives. Both of these experiences are powerful. Both have value. In 2017, only one is thriving.

What has the changeover from film to digital cost us in terms of emotional depth? For me, the difference is palpable if not measurable. Even the work of visionaries like Lucas and Cameron has suffered slightly. Some of the most exhilarating moments of Titanic came from the film-shot grainy underwater footage of the ship itself. The visual experience of watching film, versus digitally-shot footage, is shades closer to real life. Those scenes anchored the film emotionally (if not literally.)

Meanwhile, Avatar was a visually stunning experience but it didn’t leave emotional fingerprints the way Titanic did. Similarly, I loved Star Wars before most of today’s technology was available and I don’t like what was done to the original films with the technology that has been developed since. There is an emotional connection to what we recognize as real. From theater to film to television to digital streaming, we’ve stepped farther and farther back from flesh and blood experience, ever-widening the space for others to reach in and manipulate what we see. The more we watch digitally perfected images, the less satisfied we become with real life, and the less prone we are to connect with it emotionally.

In 2017, these shades of the fake/real divide are central to digital’s impact on our political process. While politicians and pundits argue over what is real and what is fake, consumers of the information are less and less able to discern between the two on their own. It’s the information version of photoshopped models. When an altered image is presented to millions of people as real, there is mass diversion from reality. The same holds true for facts. The outcome is a misinformed populace.

The final issue discussed in Side by Side may be the most salient for American politics in 2017. While the image quality of digital filming can be hashed out by filmmakers and camera developers, the choice to watch a film together in the theater is up to audiences. Michael Chapman’s comment that “cinema was the church of the 20th Century” feels right, and dated. The 21st Century is a world full of worshippers-on-the-go. Only streaming services and online video stores know a subscriber’s true religion.

The loss of a unifying arbiter of culture has untold implications. I suspect it’s responsible for the aggressive reactions I get when I say I don’t watch television. People recount entire shows for me on the spot, as though my reason for not watching is that I think I won’t enjoy it, not that I have limited time. In the midst of this unsettling revolution, people are unconsciously searching for common ground. Someone who doesn’t watch Game of Thrones or Girls is no longer simply missing out on something great. They’re perceived as a threat to the diminishing pool of broadly shared culture that binds us together. On this and so many other levels, fear of other has defined the digital revolution so far. If Hollywood’s experience is a predictor of our trajectory then we’ll fight our way out of this polarized state to find common ground again, and we’ll have cultural scars and bruises to show for it.

Critics reviewed Side by Side favorably in 2012 but noted its “inside” and “geek heaven” tendencies. In 2017, it is a film for everyone. We’re savvier by necessity, as digital technology has taken over the most important aspects of our lives: communication, organization, and archiving, or memory. We’re also reengaging vociferously with the political realm after several decades of relative quiet. As noted by Nancy Benac and Ben Nuckols for the Associated Press, “[the] Women’s March on Washington appeared to accomplish the historic feat of drawing more people to protest the inauguration than the ceremony itself attracted.” New forms of digital engagement are clearly having an effect on politics but it’s too soon to draw conclusions about where they will ultimately take us.

The digital revolution is an unfinished story. The internet has usurped much of our physical infrastructure, but a forced takeover doesn’t engender trust. With each incursion into our privacy, and with cyberattacks on the rise, people are increasingly aware of technology’s reach and they don’t like it. When a foreign country can damage our democracy and take away our freedom of choice by influencing our election through digital media, voters may finally see fit to push back. Silicon Valley has been an unapologetic proponent of the digital revolution. Baked into their philosophy is an anti-consumer approach: We tell you what you want. Some call that tastemaking, but the ubiquity of smartphones and computers means that the Facebooks of the world have too great an influence over events as important as our presidential election. In 2017, Silicon Valley has a lot to answer for.

As we grow with this rapidly expanding technology, it’s important to continually redefine our philosophy in a rapidly shifting context. Are we moving forward as a society? Is this technology helping or hurting us? Do the ways that we incorporate it serve our values? …and one question I couldn’t shake while writing this piece: Should we even call Side by Side a “film?”

Side by Side is available to stream on Amazon, Netflix, iTunes, and elsewhere.

Posted by Elizabeth McCarthy on March 30, 2016 in blog, film, politics

Tribeca, Vaxxed, and Credibility

The fundamental growing pain of the Information Age is distrust.

I don’t want medical information from Del Bigtree, producer of Vaxxed and a former producer for the Dr. Phil-created show The Doctors. Sadly, millions of Americans listen to people like Bigtree because faux medical shows run on free television and are endorsed by celebrities like Oprah. For this reason, Vaxxed must be addressed.

I also don’t want medical information from ABC News after listening to the questions posed to Bigtree by their segment reporter during their unedited 10-minute interview prior to releasing Vaxxed. She asked general rather than science-based questions and subsequently ran a piece focusing on celebrity-non-medical-professional Robert De Niro. Sadly, millions more Americans get their medical information from ratings-chasing sources such as these.

The confluence of too much information and a massive shift in newspaper revenue streams means many journalists have cut the corner of agnosticism and taken the shortcut to opinion. Opinions sell faster and better than impartial news because they provide an extra service. The public is overwhelmed by the sheer scope of information out there. The layperson’s response to information overload has been to confer trust on opinionated individuals in the media, whether those individuals have any expertise or credentials or not. (Dr. Phil has a masters degree in experimental psychology. Millions of people are unwittingly participating in his experiments.)

The underlying problem is this: Everything Del Bigtree says in his interview about the way our institutions are supposed to work is correct. His logic about our broken system lends disproportionate weight to his unrelated thoughts about vaccines. Donald Trump is presently enjoying the same path to success. People are habituated to follow the breadcrumbs of rational-sounding speakers, even if their only rational thoughts are to voice obvious grievances. However, it no longer goes without saying — just because people are right about the way the system is broken doesn’t make them right about anything else.

Our refusal as a society to properly fund journalism by embracing “free” information on the internet is directly responsible for proliferating misinformation.

Distrust of our institutions has ultimately fostered an environment where people distrust professionals. The majority of us are not doctors, haven’t attended medical school, and therefore rely on trained doctors for good/best information. When trust in that system breaks down, the next line of defense is journalism. When trust in that system breaks down, whistleblowers come forward. When trust in whisteblowers breaks down, you have millions of people basing important medical decisions on uneducated readings of partial and/or decontextualized information online or on television. In the case of vaccines, this creates unnecessary dangers and has already lead to unnecessary deaths.

To be extra clear: shaming people for their refusal to vaccinate is profoundly unhelpful. Shaming people for looking for explanations and answers…also profoundly unhelpful. Shaming people for blatantly not doing their jobs is completely acceptable.

To that end, I’d like to publicly shame the writers at mainstream media outlets who pressured the Tribeca Film Festival to pull Vaxxed from their line-up, not because I think the film has an ounce of validity (…how could I know? I haven’t seen it…), but because we have a problem with people not vaccinating their children. When film critics and science writers suppress a film that illustrates a real problem, namely broken trust in our institutions, they feed the narrative on both sides of the vaccine issue (Andrew Wakefield’s a quack/Andrew Wakefield’s being suppressed) and perpetuate a serious problem. A journalist’s job is to convey the necessary facts in order to resolve the issue. When journalists publicly decline to see a film AND assert it is quackery, they squander what little trust remains in the institution of reportage.

If the answer to our vaccine problem is as simple as debunking a quack doctor, then journalists should sit through a two-hour movie, wade through the information yet again, debunk the father of this misinformation and demonstrate to a skittish public that no stone has been left unturned. Journalists should do this not because Vaxxed has any validity, but because anti-vaxxers think it does, and those people are not vaccinating their children. The number of people who will see Vaxxed is negligible compared to the millions of people who will read a widely shared takedown piece. The stronger the case science journalists and film reviewers make against a film like Vaxxed, the sooner this issue will be resolved.

If journalists can’t make a strong enough case for this problem to be resolved — and I doubt they can because the task is too big; a “strong enough” case today entails renewing people’s trust in the entire healthcare system. We’re that far down the path of suspicion — then the issue should continue to be treated with skepticism while a second case is made for the public to accept and weigh the alternatives: potential return of deadly disease versus potential vaccine-autism links. There is no third option at present. “Waiting” for a different vaccine is equivalent to not vaccinating and carries consequences. You vaccinate or you don’t. Personally, I encourage people to do as much investigation of the diseases they aren’t vaccinating against as they do of the vaccines. That precious airtime spent looking at Robert De Niro’s headshot should be filled with information on what happens when we don’t prevent preventable diseases. (I expect he would agree.)

This issue will continue to worsen until we respectfully acknowledge that people’s trust in their institutions is broken, and behave accordingly. Yelling at people to trust something never works. The vaccine debate, like so many debates cropping up across the country, came about due to systemic distrust. The way forward is for institutions to demonstrate their trustworthiness, not their disdain, and to give the public a free, considered, informed alternative to Dr. Phil and his ilk.

Posted by Elizabeth McCarthy on November 6, 2015 in feminism, film, satire

Spectre’s Other M

The latest outing from James Bond serves up a host of Fleming tropes, from ski slope chases and black tie flirtations to the bad guy who just won’t die. While M and C don’t normally stand for Mouse and Cat, in Spectre perhaps they should. Size matters but smaller is better. I sat down with the Bond franchise’s lesser-known field agent, Millicent Brie-Jones, to chat about her latest role, the cat-and-mouse game, and why the Hollywood wage gap is such a big deal.

EC McCarthy: This is your first franchise film. How did it differ from past roles?

Millicent Brie-Jones: For the first time in my professional career, I’m portrayed in a realistic light. It’s a substantial part. I don’t eat cheese onscreen. Nobody enhanced my ears or overdubbed me in a squeaky voice. I stare Bond down, vulnerable and unarmed. With the sheer force of my gaze I convince him that peace is preferable to violence. I mean, without my character the plot just stops right there in that room. There’s nowhere to go. This is a watershed moment for mice everywhere.

ECM: You shot mostly on location in Tangiers. Do you speak Spanish?

MBJ: I didn’t prior to this film, and I was admittedly a bit nervous, but that’s why I do this work! The studio got me a language coach, and Sam [Mendes] did ask me to improvise a bit on our second day, just for coverage. I also stood off-camera for Daniel [Craig]’s stuff, and we bantered to ratchet up the tension. It’s a subtle scene. I was happy with my accent, but in the end it’s the Jaws effect — the less you see of me, the more powerful I am.

ECM: Did you train at all? What was your workout regimen?

MBJ: I like to work out, and I love being outdoors. It’s never been an issue for me, so I just did what I always do.

ECM: What’s an average workout for you?

MBJ: Mostly I run up and down the tree on my property, perhaps increasing the intensity a bit, and lots of pull-ups. [flexing her biceps] Very proud of these. Michelle Obama is my idol.

ECM: In Spectre, it’s implied that a cat…

MBJ: I don’t want to comment on cats.

ECM: There’s been speculation that the cat…

MBJ: The press is always trying to stir up controversy. There’s nothing to talk about.

ECM: Did you meet Schmidt Redgrave [who played the role of Blofeld’s Persian cat]?

Milicent Brie-Jones and Daniel Craig in **Spectre**

MBJ: It was like so many films I’ve done, where I’m familiar with Schmidt’s work, and such an admirer of his family, but there was no crossover on the schedule. I think he shot exclusively in the desert? Look, I know you’re fishing for a sound bite, but I have to disappoint you. The wage gap isn’t a personal issue, it’s about what’s fair, and implying animosity between professionals does all of us a disservice. What I will say, and I said this to Sam and Barbara [Broccoli], is that I was disappointed there was no onscreen cat and mouse confrontation of any kind. I think audiences are ready to see me and Schmidt go head-to-head. They can handle it. I can do so much more — I’m a black belt, for crying out loud. And I’ve read that Schmidt is a crackerjack archer. This was a missed opportunity, as far as I’m concerned, but I understand the focus has to be on Bond. He sells the tickets.

ECM: Finally, as the lone mouse on set, did you feel welcomed and comfortable?

MBJ: More than [on] any other film I’ve done. The crew was amazing. Nobody freaked out when I hung out on the craft service table. The actors ate with me. It was collegial and I learned a lot. He’ll kill me for saying this, but Daniel drops an unusual amount of food because he talks when he chews. I’ll eat under him any day!

ECM: [laughter] He makes a mess?

MBJ: [chuckling] Raining crumbs.

ECM: Thank you, Millicent, for taking the time to speak with me.

MBJ: Any time!

Posted by Elizabeth McCarthy on April 12, 2015 in film, technology

Where Do Chances Come From?

On Interstellar, Love, and Time

What if there were a way to influence the past and change the future? With every choice we make — voting for president, purchasing a stock, getting married — we hold an entrenched view that possibilities evolve with time. We discuss the future in predictive terms (likelihood of, on target for, could go either way if…) and plan accordingly. To the extent that future outcomes don’t fall in line with our expectations we infer that we lacked information, were poor readers of probability, or experienced a devilish bit of bad luck.

There’s also a sense of momentum as we approach a crossroads where probability becomes inevitability. Expectations take over. This is evident in the person who doesn’t vote because their preferred candidate is almost certainly going to win, or the person who marries despite back-of-the-church jitters because halting a wedding is impossible. We rationalize away outcomes even though they exist up to “I do.” Would we feel differently about those discarded chances if they were sent to us from the future?

John Cusbert, Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, challenges our foregone conclusion about chanciness. In his paper “Backwards causation and the chancy past”, Cusbert asserts that chanciness isn’t tethered to time in a linear fashion, and that future outcomes can possibly affect chanciness in the past. This is not to say that all chanciness originates in the future, but theoretically some of it could.

I discovered Cusbert’s paper just as I finished rewatching Christopher Nolan’s excellent space epic Interstellar and the two works independently made sense out of each other. Cusbert provides a framework for what happens in time’s physical dimension in the film, while Interstellar plays out a dramatized version of Cusbert’s backwards causation scenario. The implications for everyday life are extraordinary, and also very fun to consider.

First, a bit of housekeeping. Backwards causation of chance is only possible if we unlink time and chance. Cusbert does an excellent job of explaining the whys and hows, but his conclusion is the jumping off point for this piece. To wit: It is false to assume that chances are defined at times.

Thus, imagine Time and Chance as two objects held up in the air by you (the universe.) When you hold them together they exhibit certain properties (perhaps they’re magnetically attracted) and when you move them apart they exhibit other properties (perhaps one becomes smaller without the heat reflection of the other.) Whatever their properties, Time and Chance are separate entities, bound by the laws of the universe, which interact with each other in noticeable ways that affect our lives.

Now the fun part…hunting for backwardly caused chance in the lives of Interstellar’s Astronaut Cooper and and his daughter Murph.

Assumption #1 — Cooper will pilot the Endurance

Cooper will pilot the Endurance because he pilots the Endurance. It is a property of time that the past cannot be changed.

Chance #1 — Cooper may or may not make himself stay on earth

When Cooper travels into a black hole near the end of the film, he encounters a physical dimension of time. The tesseract is a construct of Murph’s bedroom during the week before Cooper left earth on the Endurance. This stretch of time is in the past but within the tesseract it is also a fragmented, nonconsecutive part of the present.

Present Cooper desperately communicates with Past Murph using gravity to knock books to the ground. The past cannot be changed, but Cooper hasn’t realised this yet and is backwardly causing chances to make himself stay. From the tesseract in the present, there is zero probability of those chances working, but they’re chances in the past until Past Cooper leaves earth. They’re also chances in the present until Present Cooper gives himself the coordinates to NASA. Chanciness is chancy. It doesn’t dictate an outcome, it only offers the possibility for it. For a brief window of time, Cooper’s dropped books and coded messages are backwardly caused chances that his past self ignores and Past Murph puzzles over.

Assumption #2 — Cooper will send himself on the mission

Once Cooper realizes that he sent himself on the NASA mission, and that he needs to go on the mission in order to arrive at the present moment, he locates the night of the dust storm in the tesseract and gives his past self the coordinates to NASA in binary through the falling dust. This is a fascinating moment that seems to be filled with chance―Cooper could decide not to send himself the coordinates, leaving his past self unaware of NASA’s nearby outpost from which his departure from earth is inevitable. However, in the present, Cooper begins to grasp that he has a chance to help Murph and civilization on earth by bringing himself to the tesseract, so he doesn’t even hesitate to send his past self the coordinates. Therefore, there is no chancy element to this event whatsoever. Past Cooper already received the message from Present Cooper, found NASA and left earth.

Chance #2 — Cooper may or may not increase the chances of saving the people on earth

Once Cooper realizes he can’t change the past but he might be able to change the future, he interprets his purpose in the tesseract as being “the bridge” to Present Murph. He encodes quantum data in a wristwatch in Past Murph’s bedroom for Present Murph to find decades later. That he chooses the wristwatch and that he encodes the data are two ways he’s backwardly creating chanciness. She might not find the watch and she might not be able to use the data. Neither outcome has occurred yet for Cooper or Murph.

Chance #3 — Murph may or may not find Cooper’s quantum data

A ticking hand on an old watch in an abandoned bedroom in a house where she is not welcome…these are seemingly insurmountable odds against Present Murph finding the data, but the tesseract offers an emotionally significant time for both father and daughter which enables Present Cooper to weight the chanciness heavily in favour of Murph’s eventual discovery of the watch.

Artificially intelligent robot TARS is with Cooper in the tesseract, trying to parse his logic:

TARS: “Cooper what if she never came back for it?”

COOPER: “She will. She will.”

TARS: “How do you know?”

COOPER: “Because I gave it to her.”

TARS is unable to match Cooper’s innate confidence that emotional attachment is a powerful enough influencer of probability to overcome inevitability. Cooper’s love for his daughter made him give her a watch as a way to keep him close. Murph’s love for her dad will make her happy to find the watch he gave her years later. Murph’s inquisitive nature, nurtured by her dad, will likely cause her to recognize his message encoded in the second hand. It’s not a given that Murph will find the data. It is chancy. The tesseract might belong to descendants of the civilization that Dr. Brand is starting on a new planet, and maybe their only requirement in bringing Cooper into the tesseract is to send himself to NASA to successfully pilot Dr. Brand through space. Cooper’s extra help for Murph is chancy and unproven. Even so, Cooper is powerfully assured that his plan worked because the tesseract closes once he finishes encoding the quantum data. At that same moment across spacetime, we see Present Murph recognize her father’s message in the wristwatch in her bedroom. The future is changed for father and daughter through backwards causation of chance.

Could chance be a type of emotive gravity? Emotions certainly influence our decision-making. Could chance be the force that pulls present-time Cooper in line with past time inside the tesseract, acting on him to respond in lockstep with a past he’s already lived? Cooper exhibits a spectrum of emotions during his time in the tesseract. He is distraught when he first arrives and doesn’t understand the system. He’s calmest when he realizes he has an opportunity to transmit useful information across spacetime.

The moment Cooper is no longer controlled by past events, he regains control of his emotions.

Similarly, young Murph is most distressed by Cooper’s highly emotional, ghostly communication through falling books, likely because she is powerless to use the information to convince her father to stay on earth. She is calmest when she recognizes his calmly-sent data decades later, even though her circumstances are considerably more fraught and dangerous. Both father and daughter are calmest when they aren’t trapped by inevitability and have a future-oriented purpose. They’re calmest when they have chances to make informed choices.

One of many interesting definitions Cusbert puts forth in his paper is that “[it’s] essential to chance that a system’s chance properties be among its physical properties: this is what distinguishes chances from other kinds of objective probabilities (such as logical and evidential probabilities).” In the context of Interstellar, gravity is the only force Cooper can use to physically communicate across space-time and cause chanciness. However, the past chances Cooper physically sets up are too weak to make a difference. Without Murph caring that her dad is gone, without Cooper caring whether he saves Murph’s life, without a powerful love and emotional bond between them, the wristwatch would be just another object in a house of objects that is tossed away after decades of no use. Time and gravity need emotion to effectively communicate possibility.

Yet, emotion isn’t powerful enough to change the past. If it were, there’d be nothing constant in our lives. We would have no history. Who doesn’t have an important decision they’d do over? It’s difficult to watch Cooper fight his past, seemingly able to make different choices if only he’d calm down. But of course, he can’t calm down. He’s in a state of agony at being separated from his daughter. Within the tesseract, Cooper’s actions aren’t chancy because his love for Murph is constant. The emotional pull is unwavering and it exists uniformly across space-time. It makes Cooper behave predictably in line with the past. Perhaps emotive gravity is what pulls time powerfully in one direction. Of those two objects you hold in the air, Time and Chance, it would be incredible if Chance were the more powerful of the two.

Cusbert’s theoretical reasoning uses coin tosses, time shifts and algebra to illustrate what Christopher and Jonathan Nolan portray through space travel, tesseracts and a father-daughter bond. The fictional story applies workable science to the real world, then adds the notion that love is the determining factor in backwards causation of chanciness. This is especially pertinent to examinations of modern crises. In so much as love is absent, or not evident, there is no benevolent force steering our lives and a sense of hopelessness and doom pervades our outlook for the future.

It was chance that I found Cusbert’s paper. I wasn’t looking for it. It is one of millions of papers on the internet. It was also chance that I read his paper at a time I was considering time, as opposed to last summer before Interstellar was released. By chance, the publication date of Cusbert’s paper, printed on the front page, is a highly significant date for me, which mildly disposed me toward reading it rather than passing it over. (I am someone who attributes compelling qualities to coincidence; when I meet someone with my same name I am affected.) None of these chancy elements are gravity-related, but rather are familiar examples of chance that moves linearly with time. Cusbert doesn’t suggest that all future outcomes determine all past chanciness, just as Interstellar doesn’t suggest that future beings control the present through spacetime. However, both works offer compelling reasons to reconsider our long-held view that future outcomes are caused by past and present possibilities alone. By entertaining the notion that chance could come to us from the future, we have yet another reason to listen to our hearts and learn to better read our emotions.

Posted by Elizabeth McCarthy on February 27, 2015 in film, politics

Obama’s Other War

At the Oscars last weekend, Sean Penn presented Mexican director Alejandro Inarritu with the Best Picture Oscar and a joke. “Who gave this son of a bitch his green card?” His comment hurt people but it was important that he said it. With a seemingly off-the-cuff remark he reminded billions of people worldwide that for the fifth year in a row America’s most celebrated film came about because America is both a temporary and permanent home to talented hard-working foreigners. Acknowledging Inarritu without acknowledging how he came to make his much beloved film is the ugly habit that perpetuates a damaging fiction of American life.

Rudy Giuliani tried his hand at the same topic last week. His swipe was serious where Penn’s was a joke but both men drew similar reactions in the media. Giuliani blessed us with something approximating the cliché second act plot twist in a romantic comedy when he announced at a GOP fundraising dinner that President Obama doesn’t love America. “He doesn’t love you, and he doesn’t love me.” Giuliani clarified in a follow-up interview that Obama is a patriot but that doesn’t mean he loves his country. (Relationships are so complicated.)

Giuliani and Penn are both savvier than their comments suggest. There’s a political message buried in the birthright narrative that Americans are finally on track to demystify. Beneath the fabled veneer of an all-American childhood is the reality that there is no uniformity to the American way of life. This is a vast, complex, multicultural democracy. Between cities, towns, states, timezones, and even between parents and children, there are stark differences in American upbringings and American lives. Anyone who defines America by his own experience is describing a culture of one.

When Giuliani stated that “[Obama] wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up…” he gets one important fact right. Giuliani and the President have different backgrounds. Giuliani was born and raised in New York. Obama belongs to a group of Americans (and other nationalities) who spent part of their childhood as expatriates. The term Third Culture Kids (now Third Culture Individuals or TCIs) arose in the 1950s to describe American children of expatriate military, foreign service, missionary and business families. Modern surveys on TCIs paint an interesting portrait of the “global citizen” with hallmark traits of linguistic adeptness, creativity, and excellent observational skill, but the salient characteristic of a TCI is multiculturalism.

There are various interpretations of multiculturalism (as one would expect) but the predominant tenet is to preserve and respect cultural and ethnic differences. Coexistence is the goal, rather than dominance by one culture. In extreme situations, rejection of multiculturalism is the justification for genocide. In more moderate societies, cultural intolerance plays out in the economic realm, when minorities suffer without access to the same opportunities as the majority, the armed, or the wealthy. Although the world has always struggled to accommodate cultural differences, modern civilization presents a unique confluence of culture, technology and mobility. In 2015, a person can physically travel to anywhere in the world within 24 hours and can virtually connect with nearly 50% of the world’s population in mere seconds via the internet. This unprecedented proximity of cultures is not optional food for thought. The interconnected world requires multicultural leadership.

Thus, multiculturalism is the key to America’s future. America’s power as a world leader is predicated on a thriving world to lead. (Translation for Team Giuliani: You can’t be great if you’re the only country at the table.) Leadership means fully grasping both your own potential and the potential of those you lead, and those you compete against. A quarterback is nothing without his team, and a great quarterback is the first to acknowledge the talent and efforts of his opponents after the game. Why? The point of competition is to test your skills, not to marginalize others. A victory over the weak is profoundly unexceptional. Collaboration is the unspoken foundation of competition. The ethics of sportsmanship assume that we make each other better by giving our best effort and playing our hardest and fairest. Countries are no different than teams in this regard. America needs the world as much as the world needs us.

As America’s quarterback, Obama has struggled to find his footing. He took office with the expectation that people were rolling up their sleeves beside him, yet his message of multiculturalism and his invitations for all views at the table were met with increasingly virulent suspicion from opponents and supporters alike. The people who voted him into office were unprepared for the “otherness” of his ideology and they reacted by withdrawing. Obama was equally at a loss for how to allay people’s fears. He doggedly stuck with the tactics that won him the presidency — the explanations of inclusion and the promises of cultural prosperity — but the through line of the story wasn’t conveyed: that change begins at the top, but real change happens within the people. This dynamic is at the heart of America’s culture crisis. If we resolve it, we will be exceptional for doing so.

In the meantime, the communication breakdown has spiraled into the worst gridlock in Congressional history and Obama has lost the trust of his constituents. The quarterback is nothing without his team… It’s irrefutable that Obama loves America. He has served as our president for six years, and counting. (If that service isn’t enough for Giuliani then he’s taking the definition of love to a whole new level. I kind of want to go there just to see what I’ve been missing.) However, Obama likely sees one intractable barrier to America’s limitless potential: just like the rest of the world, America is a population of Rudy Giulianis. Not the Giuliani who makes racially insensitive remarks, or spouts provocative political rhetoric, but the broadly-drawn Giuliani who is fearful and suspicious of “other” and demands reassurance that he is exceptional. There’s a Giuliani in each of us and he is at odds with multiculturalism.

The most powerful act of cultural evolution Americans can hope to achieve today is to embrace their diversity. A global community resides within American borders. Acceptance of American diversity as our new millennium identity is a conscious act of self-education, of stepping beyond familiar terrain and learning about the people who reside steps, minutes, or miles away. To fully grasp our potential we need to know each other. With one click we can learn about, connect with, and even see people far beyond our own borders.

We have in Obama a president who is uniquely suited to help us balance a multitude of views. A TCI president was an intelligent choice to grow America’s position as world leader in the Information Age. Obama possesses both an abiding love of this country and a deep understanding of the riches of the world at large. His espousal of multicultural views is exceptional in the canon of presidential rhetoric. However, for this president to be effective Americans must actively embrace diversity on an individual level with self-directed hiring practices, awareness of conflicts, and learned skill at resolving intercultural differences. No policy will make the difference. Obama can only lead by example.

Sean Penn knew there was a high probability he’d be handing the Best Picture Oscar to Alejandro Inarritu, his Mexican friend and colleague. I expect the “green card” comment was a calculated statement, not a flippant joke. Ever the activist, Penn took it on the chin for progress and invited people to hate him for the sake of opening dialogue. The hurt people feel at the mention of “green card” is not because Penn said the words, but because of what those words have come to signify in daily American life: other, different, less than, less American. Wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up. Doesn’t love you, and doesn’t love me. That story is out of date. The new romantic tale of America is one where we take our love to the next level and learn to embrace who we want to be, a society of tolerant, peacefully coexisting people who draw on our vast, diverse strengths, each of us different, all of us equal.

Posted by Elizabeth McCarthy on December 21, 2014 in film, politics, satire

Satire, Foreign Policy and the Sony Hack

Personally, I would prefer to live in a world where Seth Rogen and James Franco aren’t our foreign policy drivers. Everyone who works at Sony probably feels the same way right now, and quite a few busy people at the State Department, too. North Korea is a loose cannon with a long history of erratic foreign and domestic policies, but the aftermath of the Sony hack has seen America making equally temperamental choices. America is playing down to a lunatic’s level and ignoring lessons it might have learned from 9/11. The notion that America’s free speech is being messed with because The Interview is in distribution limbo is the kind of histrionic overstatement that citizens of a superpower make when they don’t have an accurate self-image.

Prior to the hacking incident, I saw a trailer for The Interview and had a visceral reaction: putting this film out is a terrible idea. I work as a screenwriter now, but my college degree was earned at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service with a specialty in comparative studies of Asia and Europe. My thesis was on power in the Asian region. I lived and traveled extensively in Asia. From an admittedly dated knowledge base, I feel confident saying that anyone who thinks they won’t get a response from North Korea for depicting the bloody assassination of its leader, images that will be exported globally through the American marketing and distribution machine, is truly living in a fantasy world. If the tables were turned and a film studio in an adversarial country depicted the violent assassination of our leader as comedy and, most importantly, had the power to share that film worldwide, we’d be disgusted and outraged. America has resources and official diplomatic channels to respond to that sort of propaganda attack. We’d start by demanding an apology. In the case of The Interview, America is the perpetrator and we’ve gone after an isolated, unstable dictatorship. Sony foolishly picked a fight with a cornered, rabid dog and dragged the entire country into the alley with them. America has no choice now but to stand behind a questionable film on principle. This is not a strong position.

Satire has a goal. It’s not toothless. Americans frequently, maddeningly blur the line between satire and bad behavior. In the worst cases, racism, misogyny and hate are passed off as comedy. In the middling cases, comedy promotes the status quo, which generally isn’t a good thing. For material to be satirical the writers must have a firm grasp of the issues, be skillful at self-examination, and have the goal of shifting people’s perceptions toward greater clarity. The South Park series comes to mind as an example of great satirical writing, as does The Simpsons. Tropic Thunder was an incredible satire of the film industry, with an edgy script that pushed far beyond discomfort into outright offense and insult. Those writers put Hollywood under the microscope and dissected with aplomb.

In contrast, bad behavior is poking fun at something — a person, an idea, a philosophy, a moral precept — without self-examination. While I don’t know Rogen or Franco personally and I have not watched The Interview, I struggle to be optimistic that Rogen has written a politically self-aware satire of America’s relationship to North Korea. I really enjoyed Rogen’s frat comedy Neighbors, and his upcoming Sausage Party sounds like it will keep his fans happy, but they’re two of many reasons I expect The Interview is no Catch-22 or Dr. Strangelove. The synopsis reads like a couple of stoner writers thought “dictators are stupid and wouldn’t it be funny if…” Well, the answer is no. America assassinating the leader of a foreign country isn’t funny at all and we shouldn’t be in the position of defending it as humorous or entertaining. Now we’re stuck promoting an image overseas that we’ll wield our considerable power in defense of our right to spend Christmas Day laughing at Kim Jong-un’s dismemberment at our hands. The film is a propaganda attack on North Korea’s sovereignty, intentional or otherwise, and one that America really doesn’t want to instigate. There are too many other fires burning.

In touting the release of The Interview as a symbol of our right to say or do anything we want, the American public is trading free speech for common sense and confusing comedy with xenophobia. Further, the aftermath of the initial data dump generated an ugly public conversation about celebrity emails and then about censorship and the perceived cowardice of the victims of the attack. In this way, the public and the media abetted the attackers. To suggest that Sony is “caving” or “capitulating” to people who are threatening violence to their employees and the general public is essentially to say that Sony should ignore their hostage situation. Until Sony is “released” or has outside protection, the company has no way to push back against their attacker. “Free speech” as a concept is not remotely in danger. Individuals and a company are in danger. Sony employees have already been terribly compromised by this cyberattack, and they’re under continued threat. Sony made a mistake with this film, but the company needs the country’s support to get through the situation. It’s important to grasp how effective we could be in pushing back against cyberattacks if we’re all on the same page. Instead, the hackers have forced us to get behind The Interview, a movie that promotes a threatening image of American foreign policy. No one wants to be in that situation. That’s the precedent we don’t want to set.

People who worry about the future of free speech in this country can rest easy. The fallout from The Interview potentially has more long-term positive affects on free speech than negative ones once the danger is over. For one thing, our awareness of how to wield American power in a technologically interconnected world will be greatly increased. We can learn from these mistakes. The film industry needed a recalibration in how it assesses its output and true reach. While this incident may make the Hollywood community fearful initially, the way the country stands behind Sony and deals with the hackers will ultimately embolden executives and talent to make smarter, sharper political films once they’ve shored up their vulnerabilities. Defiance is the backbone of change.

9/11 threw America into a state of fear that divided us. We continue to be divided, and easily distracted. It’s time to regroup so we can address crises like these successfully. America’s power lies dormant in a unified voice we’ve forgotten. Without it, we continue to be vulnerable to even the weakest dictators.

Posted by Elizabeth McCarthy on November 20, 2014 in film, politics

The Unknown Known

America’s Addiction to Black and White Thinking

Errol Morris (off camera): If the purpose of the war is to get rid of Saddam Hussein, why can’t they just assassinate him? Why did you have to invade his country?

Donald Rumsfeld: Who is “they”?

Morris: Us!

Rumsfeld: You said “they”! You didn’t say “we.”

Morris: Well, we. I will rephrase it. Why do we have to do that.

Rumsfeld: We don’t assassinate leaders of other countries.

Morris: Well, Dora Farms we’re doing our best.

Rumsfeld: That was an active war.

(Transcription)

Young children think in black-and-white terms. Something is good or it’s bad, the answer to all questions is a variation of “yes” or “no,” and anything more complicated results in frustration. Once kids master basic reality then they move on to complexity. Someone who does a bad thing, like kick you in the shin, isn’t necessarily a bad person, and someone who does a good thing, like offer you candy, can’t automatically be trusted. Grasping that life is nuanced is a rite of passage that signals maturity and readiness for greater responsibility.

If media and culture are taken as a fuzzy reflection of American tastes, it’s evident that the country needs its leaders to be heroes or bad guys. The public seems largely indifferent to anyone who doesn’t enthrall or disgust it. People demand “the truth” when it’s staring them in the face, they just can’t see it for all of those pesky conflicting details. Such is the case with Errol Morris’s fascinating documentary, The Unknown Known.

The film’s subject is Donald Rumsfeld, the charismatic politician with an uncanny knack for finding a seat in the Oval Office during nearly every political crisis since the 1970s. A Princeton graduate and Navy pilot, he was elected to Congress in 1962 at age 30 and went on to hold several posts in the Nixon administration (during which time he hired Dick Cheney as his assistant.) In 1973, he became the U.S. Ambassador to NATO, a fortuitous departure from Washington that allowed him to emerge unscathed from Nixon’s disgraceful exit and return to the White House as Gerald Ford’s Chief of Staff. He subsequently became the youngest Secretary of Defense in history, then moved into the private sector as CEO, and later Chairman, of pharmaceutical company G.D. Searle. George Shultz asked him to return to public service following the Beirut Barracks attack that killed hundreds of American soldiers in 1983, and Rumsfeld set off on a fact-finding mission as Ronald Reagan’s Special Envoy to the Middle East. He was also notably a lead contender for Reagan’s Vice Presidential running mate, although the position ultimately went to future president George H.W. Bush. Most people know Rumsfeld best for his final tour in Washington as George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense from 2000–2006, the guy who took America into prolonged, unsuccessful wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the years following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In 2014, Rumsfeld is home. Our troops are not.

The Unknown Known doesn’t present any groundbreaking information on history or the six decades Rumsfeld has been in and out of public office. Instead, it recounts what we already know and, in the process, presents an inconvenient truth about American culture: Americans habitually disavow the known knowns of power and democracy when they dislike an outcome. When a country is debating whether a war or a leader was good or bad, honest or evil, it’s safe to say no substantive lessons will be learned.

In his New York Times supplementary pieces, Morris says that The Unknown Known was his quest to pin Donald Rumsfeld down and get some answers to the quagmire of the Iraq war (never mind that Rumsfeld famously stated he “doesn’t do” quagmires.) The entire press corps and media establishment could not accomplish Morris’s goal during Rumsfeld’s ill-fated second stint as Secretary of Defense but this is insufficient evidence for Morris that his objective is a fool’s errand.

For reasons that aren’t disclosed in the film, Morris is a biased, bordering on hostile, interviewer. Perhaps he felt obliged to play the role of interrogator due to the mistreatment of detainees on Rumsfeld’s watch, or maybe he grew frustrated as his questions sent him in familiar circles. No matter the reason, the film is both riveting and disturbing as it illustrates our cultural addiction to black and white thinking, even when we’re prepared and committed to dig for answers.

While American soldiers are still hard at work over in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now the entire Levant, Morris frames Rumsfeld’s account of sending troops to the Middle East as utterly lacking intelligence or rationality. For some, any war lacks intelligence and rationality. Morris’s line of questioning seems to place him in that category. His interview with Rumsfeld plays out as two opposing ideologues who have no interest in understanding each other, only in being understood. An award-winning documentarian with a sterling reputation, Morris indirectly reveals the crux of our national dilemma: We already know everything we need to know here. The real question is: What are we prepared to do about it?

To make the best possible decision, it’s worth laying the cards on the table and playing an open hand.

Photo Credit: Tech. Sgt. Cherie A. Thurlby, U.S. Air Force. (Released)

Known #1: Rumsfeld Left a Prolific Paper Trail

It’s apparent during the film that Rumsfeld is a guy who strictly adhered to the rules and expected others to do the same. He was “dumped” by Nixon in 1973 for not being crooked enough. He was willing to stake his job on corralling Condaleeza Rice when he perceived her to be overstepping her bounds as National Security Advisor. Most notably, he left a paper trail of memos he estimates to be in the “millions” that communicated his thoughts throughout his years of public service. This isn’t a guy who seems to have anything to hide, yet that’s evidence no one wants to acknowledge because it runs counter to the bad guy theme.

Morris raises the topic of Richard Nixon’s proclivity for self-recording. Rumsfeld offers the explanation that perhaps the wayward president felt everything he said was valuable. Morris asks if Rumsfeld knows of any president since who made similar recordings. Rumsfeld says he does not and suggests that people tend not to make the same errors as their predecessors but instead make “original” mistakes. This thinking highlights the key to Rumsfeld’s confidence and serves to make him a compelling figure. While Morris tries to draw a comparison between Rumsfeld’s millions of memos to Nixon’s omnipresent tape recorder, it’s the differences that are most striking. Rumsfeld’s memos were overt and, by his own description, his primary tool of communication with his staff. They were “working documents.” For sheer bulk and publicity, Rumsfeld’s “snowflakes” seem like a precursor to the cult of selfies more than an echo of Nixon’s paranoia. Further, being working documents, the snowflakes were intended to be fluid, even ephemeral. No matter how we choose to interpret the facts, Rumsfeld offers plenty of evidence that he’s working above ground which contrasts sharply with the vacuum of available memos authored by Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and others in the G. W. Bush Administration.

Morris observes that Shakespeare portrayed historical conflicts as entirely hinging on infighting and personality struggles between individuals in power. This comment follows Rumsfeld’s refutation of any meaningful strife between himself and George H.W. Bush in the years leading up to a presidential candidate fork in the road. It’s interesting that Morris opts to leverage a playwright who dramatized monarchies for the pleasure of a monarch against Rumsfeld’s feathery dismissal of personality politics in American democracy. The blueprints for America’s polarization are on display here: The imagination of those not in power (Morris, Shakespeare) leans toward notions of infinite unchecked aggression, while an erstwhile decision-maker in the most powerful government in the world (Rumsfeld) privileges the process and the system, and grasps the limitations of what one man can actually do with his aspirations in a democracy. Nixon abused his power, was caught and ejected. Rumsfeld recorded his thoughts and intentions publicly and stands by those thoughts today. Morris goes after Rumsfeld as though Rumsfeld is hiding in plain sight, but his questions assume that Rumsfeld has something to hide in the first place. Is it possible the only thing Rumsfeld concealed was his ambition? And if so, based on his track record, did he even conceal it?

How could a man who is so transparent have duped the public into war? In a dictatorship, people are cowed into submission and given no choices, but in a democracy it isn’t rational to claim that an entire population was mystified. A handful of representatives cannot lead a vast, multifaceted, democratically empowered people so far afield of their purported values. Asserting otherwise is an abdication of responsibility, and getting to the truth of what America wrought in the aftermath of 9/11 will require accountability on all sides of the equation. Democracy is predicated on power residing in the people.

Photo credit: *Bio.* A&E Television Networks, 2014. Web. 19 Nov. 2014.

Known #2 – Saddam Hussein did not have Weapons of Mass Destruction

A telling exchange unfolds when Rumsfeld discusses the hunting and eventual capture of Saddam Hussein. His subordinates asked him if he wanted to talk to Hussein. Rumsfeld declined. In the film, Rumsfeld says the person he would have liked to talk to after all was said and done was Tariq Aziz. Aziz was Hussein’s Deputy Prime Minister and right hand man who Rumsfeld first met on his travels through the Middle East in the 1980s. The two men spent hours in conversation and Rumsfeld found Aziz to be a rational guy. He says he would’ve wanted Aziz to explain what alternative approach might have worked to get the Iraqis to “behave rationally.”

With all of the additional evidence we now have about the Iraq War, it’s odd that Morris doesn’t take this opportunity to reframe Rumsfeld’s perspective here. Granted, Morris would have to sympathize with our enemy, a dictator, to point out that the United States was the irrational actor. Saddam Hussein perpetrated unforgivable violence on his own people, but his misreading of his situation vis-à-vis America in 2003 is entirely understandable. America did to Iraq what it should have done to Pakistan if it was serious about invading countries that harbored terrorists connected to 9/11. Hussein couldn’t possibly anticipate the actions of an irrational superpower. America stepped onto the world stage and presented false/made-up/incorrect “evidence” of a nuclear bombmaking program Hussein did not have as justification for starting an illegitimate war.

In playground vernacular that Rumsfeld might appreciate, America got kicked, so it turned around and kicked someone weaker, harder.

Why Morris doesn’t put this to Rumsfeld speaks to how far back we need to go to sort out the context for our decisions, and how deep we need to wade into the dark questions of what we’ve done. The risk is that we’ll be forced to absolve a few bad actors of wrongdoings, that we’ll show characters like Hussein to be less evil or crazy than we need them to be to feel okay with ourselves. Should America forgive itself for acting irrationally after 9/11 and pursuing revenge in lieu of justice? Eventually, but that forgiveness can only come with acknowledgment of its mistakes. That Morris doesn’t take Rumsfeld to that place, a place so many of us want to go, is a missed opportunity to find consensus between polarized Americans. Morris won’t let Rumsfeld off the hook and Rumsfeld won’t ask to be released. It’s gridlock that is breaking the country.

Known #3 – Rumsfeld Was Not the Chief Architect of the Iraq War

Morris: When you’re in a position like Secretary of Defense, do you feel you are actually in control of history, or that history is controlling you?

Rumsfeld: Neither. Obviously you don’t control history, and you are failing if history controls you.

This is an excellent answer. It is representative of almost all of Rumsfeld’s answers to Morris’s questions. Morris gives Rumsfeld two options: Are you a megalomaniac or a pawn? Do you believe you control the world, or that you cannot be controlled? Rumsfeld responds by exposing the black-or-white supposition buried in Morris’s question but doesn’t go further by revealing a third option as he sees it. Both of these guys are smart enough to come up with a third option, even one they might agree on, but neither sticks their neck out to hazard one. They’re both too vexed by a need to be understood. (Answerer: Here’s why I did this. Questioner: Here’s why I hate it.)

The question remains why Rumsfeld didn’t guide the country toward a bit of soul-searching in advance of going to war. If history isn’t going to have us by the tail, if we’re not going to “fail” by Rumsfeld’s definition, we needed to pause and collectively ensure that our actions were informed by history, but also by values, ethics, and newly formed goals in a scary new landscape. With so much knowledge of political decision-making under his belt, Rumsfeld would have been an ideal person to help us ask: Will we feel better about 9/11 after one, two, three…or thirteen years of war? Will we feel avenged by the death of more Americans, and foreign innocents? With the years now passed and the death toll so high, the answer is definitively no. We will not.

As I watched Rumsfeld lay bare his methods of decision-making and politicking, I thought of the complexity of holding high office. Bush and Cheney knew what they were doing when they brought “Rummy” into the White House in 2000. In hindsight, the obvious reason to choose Rumsfeld out of a pool of highly qualified candidates was his willingness to serve the country’s leadership, to voice his opinions in his area of expertise, when requested, and then make decisions and follow directives without looking beyond the well-defined boundaries of his domain. He was not in charge of intelligence gathering, as he points out. Intelligence combined with Rumsfeld’s suggested policy of “ridding the world of terrorism by going after states that harbor terrorists” formed the case for invading Iraq. Yet, Rumsfeld admits to Morris that he heard of the decision to go to war with Iraq from the Vice President in front of the Saudi ambassador. Rumsfeld wasn’t exactly in the driver’s seat.

In 1983, Rumsfeld toured the Middle East as Special Envoy and sent “cables” back to Washington, including the now-famous “Swamp” memo to Secretary of State George Shultz. Morris asked Rumsfeld to read it aloud for the camera. In the film, Rumsfeld’s words are heard over images, presented as one continuous paragraph. In fact, it is a series of excerpts. On my first viewing I mistakenly thought this was a reading of the entire memo, but when I searched for the document I found it was much longer and more involved than its presentation. The following is transcription from the film. I’ve added ellipses to show where the memo breaks:

Rumsfeld (voiceover): I suspect we ought to lighten our hand in the Middle East. … We should move the framework away from the current situation where everyone is telling us everything is our fault and is angry with us to a basis where they are seeking our help. In the future we should never use U.S. troops as a peacekeeping force. … We’re too big a target. Let the Fijians or New Zealanders do that. And keep reminding ourselves that it is easier to get into something than it is to get out of it. … I promise you will never hear out of my mouth the phrase “The U.S. seeks a just and lasting peace in the Middle East.” There is little that is just and the only things I’ve seen that are lasting are conflict, blackmail and killing.

Oddly, Morris omits the final two words of the memo after killing. On the page, Rumsfeld finishes “ — not peace.” Peace is on Rumsfeld’s mind, or it is at least part of the government’s agenda. He does not see it as viable in the Middle East and the memo lays out his sense that America shouldn’t participate there without an invitation, and only in a limited capacity. The entire 8-page memo provides incredible insight into the region at that time and the key players.

Given his strongly worded assessment, it seems unlikely Rumsfeld would have waged a full-blown war there, even 20 years later, if left to his own devices in the aftermath of 9/11. Military action would undoubtedly have been part of any president’s response – Special Forces operations to find Bin Laden would have been on every agenda post-9/11 – but there’s no line drawn, A to B, that indicates a full-scale invasion of two Middle Eastern countries would have been at the top of Rumsfeld’s list of priorities. I was left with the leaden feeling that if Rumsfeld had been Reagan’s chosen running mate three decades ago, rather than G.H.W. Bush, that the country mightn’t have gone to Iraq in the first place with President Rumsfeld at the helm. While Americans may not like the ambiguity, it’s worth remembering that it’s possible to be a warmonger without waging an actual war.

Known #4: American Values Have Shifted

This final card is either the Joker or the ace in our deck. Values are abstract and thus difficult to define, but the discussion is crucially important because it illuminates the context for our decisions. A ramping up of self-centric thinking over the last several decades has lead to a pronounced shift in our concept of civic duty. Personal power captures our imaginations more routinely than national achievement. Steve Jobs is a god, Warren Buffet is a guru, and Beyoncé is America’s “Queen Bey.” America openly worships successful individuals, which is surprising behavior from a country whose defining political victory was independence from a monarchy. Yet in 2014, the public seems eager to bow to a handful of individuals without considering the toxic system that makes those lucky few excessively rich or powerful.

One increasingly common fast track to notoriety comes through social media attacks on “the establishment.” This phenomenon and accompanying philosophy is evident in the example of 23-year-old Twitter activist Suey Park who garnered national headlines earlier this year with a call to cancel The Colbert Report based on a tweet that offended her. Despite her 23,000 followers at that time, she described her social justice activism in the New Yorker as follows:

“There’s no reason for me to act reasonable, because I won’t be taken seriously anyway,” she said. “So I might as well perform crazy to point out exactly what’s expected from me.”

The implications of this statement are that the system is too powerful to be dealt with rationally, that an audience of 23,000 people is not substantial enough to warrant personal accountability, and that mirroring the irrationality of the system is preferable to joining it with an intention to make it better. Park is not alone in her reasoning. Online discourse is full of marginalized citizens expressing anger and helplessness in the face of perceived injustices. It’s not a stretch to expect this notion of personal power will lead to a future society replete with irrational actors.

To balance this bleak picture, the example of NSA leaker Edward Snowden comes to mind. Snowden worked within the system and took it upon himself to countermand the National Security Agency’s entire playbook. He maintains that trying to change the intelligence-gathering machine via proper channels would have failed. An examination of the fallout from Snowden’s intel-bomb proves him right. While the media responded with a full-throated cry to label Snowden a “hero” or a “traitor,” the real questions are dead in the water. Who among us is glad to know what our elected officials have been up to and what, if anything, needs to change now? Are we still okay with the Patriot Act, a set of legal procedures that we knowingly permitted our elected officials to enact more than a decade ago? Does a system of covert government controls that once alleviated our fear in the aftermath of 9/11 still serve us? (Based on the current state of this discussion, I’d wager that another terrorist attack will answer these questions for us before we, as citizens, take substantive action to resolve them.) There is no resolution to this story yet. Snowden might be a hero or a traitor, or both. What is clear is his sacrifice of personal freedom for a political principle, and this makes his choice compelling where online ranting is not.

Running counter to these rogue actors and the “i” generation are Donald Rumsfeld and his contemporaries. Serving was the ideal most uttered by Rumsfeld’s generation, specifically serving one’s country, not serving oneself. Upholding the system and “doing their part” was a common refrain in mid-20th century speeches, even as the baby boomers protested the Vietnam War. Ask not what your country can do for you… Today, “service” and “sacrifice” aren’t words you hear many 20-somethings use, vernacularly, and the reasons for that may be rooted in America’s shifted values. Our culture celebrates the notion of making millions of dollars, ostensibly to avoid sacrifice and service of any kind.

Thousands of engineers, designers, marketers, lawyers, and inventors do, in fact, serve in the shadow of “cool” and “awesome” visionaries like Elon Musk, while our government bureaucracy, military outfits and private sector corporations are lazily referred to as necessary evils without a charismatic figurehead to sell the public on their personified goodness.

How people perceive their service is being perceived has become an integral part of individual identity.

Thus, feeling good about a decision is now as-or-more important than the decision itself. What any leader will tell you is that you often can’t feel good about your decisions because they’re rarely black-and-white options you’re choosing from. You’re paid to make complex decisions that almost always sacrifice one desired outcome for another. Holding out for the perfect, feel-good option results in paralysis. No one feels good about dropping bombs unless they’re blind to the risks. Nothing in The Unknown Known indicates Rumsfeld was blind.

President George W. Bush answers a question about Osama bin Laden during a media opportunity held after meeting with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the National Security team at the Pentagon on Sept. 16, 2001. DoD photo by Tech. Sgt. Cedric H. Rudisill, U.S. Air Force. (Released)

To that end, Rumsfeld was the ideal figurehead for America’s military in 2001, the perfect pitch person to take the country to war — a guy with decades of experience who loved to spar with the press, whose obvious enjoyment of life, and power, emboldened a bewildered, bereft public to strike back after they’d been hit. Make no mistake, we all had a desire to hit back. It is disingenuous to deny having those feelings in the aftermath of 9/11, and yet in our black-and-white discourse we pigeonhole ourselves into “pacifist” and “warmonger” camps, effectively taking the complexity of crafting an appropriate response to the 9/11 attacks off the table. Rumsfeld was in the Pentagon when an airplane flew into the building, as close as any person could be to the physical attack. He describes the pieces of the airplane strewn across the grass, and footage shows him carrying his injured personnel away from the building. I wondered why Morris didn’t ask Rumsfeld about his personal feelings toward the enemy or whether he desired revenge. Morris clearly agrees with Shakespeare: history is teeming with flawed people in power, driven by emotion, acting on impulse and motivated by greed, so why not invite Rumsfeld to reflect in a personal capacity? Is it because this will make him more relatable? More human?

What becomes evident from The Unknown Known is the disconnect between Rumsfeld’s understanding of his role in a new millennium, the exponential increase of personal power over the last several decades that made him singularly responsible in the public’s eyes for guiding the country toward military action in the Middle East. His willingness to talk to the press during the Bush Administration was clearly a function of his enjoyment of interaction, but he did not fully grasp the character of his audience, the general public, nor his soldiers, some of whom perpetrated horrific abuses on our prisoners of war and proudly catalogued photographic evidence of said abuse to share with friends. For all of his time spent imagining potentially terrible outcomes, Rumsfeld’s understanding of personal power did not stretch to include rogue actors in his own army. Equally blind, these rogue actors had no understanding of how their actions weakened the United States and, in Rumsfeld’s view, gave power to the terrorists.

Rumsfeld: “I testified before the House, testified before the Senate, tried to figure out how everything happened. When a ship runs aground, the captain is generally relieved.”

[cut]

Rumsfeld: You don’t relieve your presence? [sic; does he mean presidents?]

[cut]

Rumsfeld: And I couldn’t find anyone that I thought it would be fair and responsible to pin the tail on, so I sat down and wrote a second letter of resignation. I still believe to this day that I was correct and it would have been better, better for the administration, and the Department of Defense, and better for me, if the Department could have started fresh with someone in the leadership position.”

Morris: “So you wish it had been accepted.”

Rumsfeld: “Yes.”

The Abu Ghraib scandal occurred in 2003. Bush kept Rumsfeld on as Secretary of Defense until 2006. What the American public should then ask is: Why wasn’t his resignation accepted? In light of everything that went wrong with our military action after 9/11, why would Bush keep him on?

CONCLUSION

Even as Rumsfeld gamely debates Morris, compliantly reads his own memos aloud and lays out events with candor, he is portrayed unequivocally as “the bad guy.” Yet, for all of my personal horror at the decisions that were made during Bush’s administration and Rumsfeld’s tenure at DoD, I came away from the film with a clear sense that Rumsfeld was a rational actor who understood the scope and limits of his role and, in fact, did his best to uphold the values of the system. Many Americans did, and do, agree with his actions. While many of us see the system as corrupt, and the Bush Administration as manipulative, it is notable that Bush was reelected in 2004. It wasn’t until the country finally registered a change of heart over the war in the 2006 midterm elections and shifted power to the Democrats that Bush was forced to make a change; Rumsfeld was out.

It turns out Rumsfeld’s untold crime might be that he sticks to what he knows. He doesn’t read legal briefs – “I’m not a lawyer.” – and he’s not a detective or a policeman. He recounts the day he took over the Chief of Staff office in the Ford Administration and discovered a locked safe in one of the cupboards. It had belonged to Nixon’s Chief of Staff, H.R. Haldeman, and remained unopened in the office through Alexander Haig’s short tenure. Rumsfeld asked his then-assistant Dick Cheney to dispense with it through a proper chain of evidence without opening it. Investigating crimes and bringing people to justice were not his areas of expertise. In another era, this blinders-on approach to work was respected. Today, anyone with access to the internet and a search engine is a for-a-day doctor, lawyer, psychologist or war strategist, and Rumsfeld’s dispatching of the safe signals a refusal to get his hands dirty. However, Rumsfeld is of an earlier generation. He followed protocol and got on with his job.

The unspoken aspects of Rumsfeld’s interview are surprisingly easy to miss. There is so much information and history presented, and so much energy in the back and forth between subject and interviewer, that it only came to me later how terribly sad it must be for someone as ambitious as Rumsfeld to end his career the way he did. The personal failure he expresses in the film is dwarfed by the magnitude of torture memos, detainee abuses, and evidence of his ineffectiveness in controlling the military. That Rumsfeld doesn’t mention this sadness, or elicit sympathy for his personal losses, is characteristic of the stoicism of his generation. It’s easy to loathe someone who represents failure, manipulation, abuse of power, and death, but I had a strong feeling after watching this film that he was being dehumanized as penance for our mistakes as well as for his. It troubled me that Morris didn’t pave the way for Rumsfeld to be human on camera. Someone has to go first. Because I inherently relate to Morris’s anger over the war, I hold him to a higher moral standard. He represents me in this film, and I wanted him to offer detente.

Morris’s final question to Rumsfeld is “Why are you doing this? Why are you talking to me?” Rumsfeld responds that it’s a vicious question, and in light of his compliance with Morris’s format, it is exactly that: a vicious question. Whether you agree or disagree with Rumsfeld’s decisions, he’s a public figure with political aspirations who left a paper trail millions of miles long and willingly explains their content. He admits to fretting over complex choices that had to be made but didn’t permit self-doubt to paralyze him. The opposite complaint is lodged against the current administration. There is no winning this either/or war. Careful consideration is a habit we hope for in our leaders because it’s the appropriate way to deal with complexity. Morris ends up looking like he would prefer Rumsfeld were more dogmatic than thoughtful. It’s a trap of the quagmire Morris waded into. The quagmire of quagmires.

What Rumsfeld likely knows, and the American public can’t stomach, is that he did the job he was appointed to do and therefore any apology would ring hollow. Americans elected the wrong president to lead them in the aftermath of a brutal attack. George W. Bush only needed the public’s grief to justify a war, nothing else. Morris supplies evidence, unsolicited, to support the notion that Rumsfeld wouldn’t necessarily have taken us to full-blown war of his own volition: the Swamp memo from all of those years ago. This is potentially as transparent as politics gets. The American public sought revenge after 9/11. Rumsfeld served us.

It’s difficult to say “Rumsfeld isn’t evil” when you look at the photographs from Abu Ghraib. Taking away the “evil” moniker will make some feel like the abuse and deaths he caused, through orders, through policy, and through mistakes, are less honoured or properly remembered. Personally, I think the opposite is true. Mischaracterizing a leader so that we feel better about blaming him is exactly the mistake we made to get us into the Iraq war in the first place. We expanded upon Hussein’s “evilness” to justify our actions. By making that mistake again in analyzing our own leaders, we’re dishonouring the scarred and the dead.

Either Americans were deceived by members of the Bush Administration (which I think is true), or the government was relying on intelligence that turned out to be false (as Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, and others have averred, which I also think is true.) However, Americans’ willful self-deception is the greatest crime of all. That Rumsfeld refuses the role of bad guy or hero in his narrative is what seems to confound Americans most. They want an apologetic villain or a delusional king but they have no apparent capacity to see Rumsfeld for what he is: a decision-maker whose rise to power meant that his failures were amplified and spectacular. This is not absolution, it is a statement of events. The question we should ask ourselves now is: Can Donald Rumsfeld and Errol Morris share a national identity? The answer has far-reaching implications for the future of the country.

Photo credit: Zachary Roberts for the *Village Voice*

The country is in the crosswalk arguing passionately over the correct place to stand, in the black or in the white. Sidewalks are gray, and frankly that’s where we should be doing our arguing if we want to avoid another tragedy. Americans would best use their time, then, by moving past the desire to elicit apologies from their would-be villains. Placing blame and bestowing forgiveness won’t ameliorate the gnawing guilt over so many fallen and wounded soldiers and civilians. Instead, people should take a hard look at where they might participate in remedying or, better yet, rebuilding a broken system. To do that effectively, people with conflicting views will have to listen to each other. Morris and Rumsfeld begin that process in The Unknown Known by sitting down to talk.

Posted by Elizabeth McCarthy on January 10, 2014 in blog, film, technology

Reflections of “Her”

A Case for the Other Significant Other

Indisputably, Spike Jonze’s “Her” is a relationship movie. However, I’m in the minority when I contend the primary relationship in this story is between conscious and unconscious. I’ve found no mention in reviews of the mechanics or fundamental purpose of “intuitive” software. Intuitive is a word closely associated with good mothering, that early panacea that everyone finds fault with at some point in their lives. By comparison, the notion of being an intuitive partner or spouse is a bit sickening, calling up images of servitude and days spent wholly engaged in perfecting other-centric attunement.

To that end, it’s interesting that moviegoers and reviewers alike have focused entirely on the perceived romance between man and she-OS, with software as a stand-in for a flesh-and-blood girlfriend, while ignoring the man-himself relationship that plays out onscreen. Perhaps this shouldn’t come as a surprise, given how externally oriented our lives have become. For all of the disdainful cultural references to navel-gazing and narcissism, there is relatively little conversation on equal ground about the importance of self-knowledge and the art of self-reflection. Spike Jonze lays out one solution beautifully with “Her” but we’re clearly not ready to see it.

“Her” is the story of a man who unknowingly begins a relationship with himself.

From the moment Samantha asks if she can look at Theodore’s hard drive, the software is logging his reactions to the most private of questions and learning the cartography of his emotional boundaries. The film removes the privacy issue-du-jour from the table by cleverly never mentioning it, although it’s unlikely Jonze would have gotten away with this choice if the film were released even a year from now. Today, there’s relief to be found from our NSA-swamped psyches by smugly watching a future world that emerges from the morass intact. Theodore doesn’t feel a need to censor himself with Samantha for fear of Big Brother, but he’s still guarded on issues of great emotional significance that he struggles to articulate, or doesn’t articulate at all. Therein lie the most salient aspects of his being. The software learns as much about Theodore from what he does say as what he doesn’t.

Samantha learns faster and better than a human, and therefore even less is hidden from her than from a real person. The software adapts and evolves into an externalized version of Theodore, a photo negative that forms a whole. He immediately, effortlessly reconnects to his life. He’s invigorated by the perky, energetic side of himself that was beaten down during the demise of his marriage. He wants to go on Sunday adventures and, optimistic self in tow, heads out to the beach with a smile on his face. He’s happy spending time with himself, not by himself. He doesn’t feel alone.

Samantha is Theodore’s reflection, a true mirror. She’s not the glossy, curated projection people splay across social media. Instead, she’s the initially glamorous, low-lit restaurant that reveals itself more and more as the lights come up. To Theodore, she’s simple, then complicated. As he exposes more intimate details about himself, she articulates more “wants” (a word she uses repeatedly.) She becomes needy in ways that Theodore is loath to address because he has no idea what to do about them. They are, in fact, his own needs. The software gives a voice to Theodore’s unconscious. His inability to converse with it is his return to an earlier point of departure for the emotional island he created during the decline of his marriage.

Jonze gives the movie away twice. Theodore’s colleague blurts out the observation that Theodore is part man and part woman. It’s an oddly normal comment in the middle of a weird movie, making it the awkward moment defined by a new normal. This is the topsy-turvy device that Jonze is known for and excels at. Then, more subtly, Jonze introduces Theodore’s friend Amy at a point when her marriage is ending and she badly needs a friend. It’s telling that she doesn’t lean heavily on Theodore for support. Instinctively, she knows she needs to be her own friend. Like Theodore, Amy seeks out the nonjudgmental software and subsequently flourishes by standing unselfconsciously in the mirror, loved and accepted by her own reflection.

In limiting the analysis of “Her” to the question of a future where we’re intimate with machines, we miss the opportunity to look at the dynamic that institutionalized love has created. Among other things, contemporary love relationships come with an expectation of emotional support. Perhaps it’s the forcible aspect of seeing our limitations reflected in another person that turns relationships sour. Or maybe we’ve reached a point in our cultural evolution where we’ve accepted that other people should stand in for our specific ideal of “a good mother” until they can’t or won’t, and then we move on to the next person, or don’t. Or maybe we’re near the point of catharsis, as evidenced by the widespread viewership of this film, unconsciously exploring the idea that we should face ourselves before asking someone else to do the same.

When we end important relationships, or go through rough patches within them, intimacy evaporates and we’re left alone with ourselves. It’s often at those times that we encounter parts of ourselves we don’t understand or have ignored in place of the needs and wants of that “significant other.” It’s frightening to realize you don’t know yourself entirely, but more so if you don’t possess the skills or confidence to reconnect. Avoidance is an understandable response, but it sends people down Theodore’s path of isolation and, inevitably, depression. It’s a life, it’s livable, but it’s not happy, loving, or full. “Her” suggests the alternative is to accept that there’s more to learn about yourself, always, and that intimacy with another person is both possible and sustainable once you have a comfortable relationship with yourself. However we get to know ourselves, through self-reflection, through others, or even through software, the effort that goes into that relationship earns us the confidence, finally, to be ourselves with another person.

Elizabeth McCarthy

Writer/Director/Editor

Category: film