"What 'American Pie' betrays is not good taste but any notion that privacy could matter to these kids or to us. Everything in this picture is out front: whatever humiliates the characters most is precisely what everyone in the school learns about them, and the movie views this as proper and humane. For we are all swimming in the same soup of confusion and embarrassment, voyeurism and malice. But without some feeling for privacy as a value, a movie about teen sex and romance can't be made with any grace or style. The idea that everyone should know everything, however productive of comedy, links the movie to the kind of daytime talk show in which neighborhood friends betray one another's secrets and the audience howls at them in mock disapproval and open pleasure. The new hit comedies make us join that audience, whether we want to or not."
-- David Denby, The New Yorker (July 12, 1999)
Andy Warhol got it almost right. Everybody is a "Superstar" (in the Warholian sense) already, or at least everybody behaves like one. And in the future -- that is, 10 years after "American Pie" and 22 years after Andy's death -- everybody's also a self-publicist, using sophisticated technology to manage a public image that masquerades as a mutant form of privacy. Blogs, Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter -- these and so many other powerful promotional tools can be used by anyone, kids or mega-corporations, to create an illusion of intimacy with (in Facebookspeak) "friends" and "fans."
So, on the one hand you have people pushing pieces of their privacy online as if they were celebrities, and then you have celebrities who keep trying to re-draw the lines between their public and private selves at their convenience. In an essay under the headline "The fame paradox: Pay attention to me, on my terms," AP culture writer Ted Anthony described a syndrome familiar not only to movie stars and reality TV stars, but now to anybody with a web page (which is to say just about everybody):
Look at me. Look at my life, my body, my antics, my kids, my home. It's OK -- come on in. It's a fair deal: I'm getting famous, you're getting entertained. Everybody's happy. What's the problem?
But ... whoa. Wait. Stop. I didn't sign on for THIS. Why are you looking at me? How dare you look at me! Go away! Can't you leave me and my family in peace? At least until next season?
A monthlong eruption of celebrity anger over unwanted attention -- everyone from Miss California USA Carrie Prejean to Brooke Shields to the stars of the reality show "Jon & Kate Plus 8" -- suggests a new, oddly paradoxical dimension to the way we look at famous people.
In short, Americans who traffic in the commodity that is their lives -- Hollywood actors and reality-TV stars alike -- aren't at all happy when their carefully calibrated reality bursts out of the cages they have built to contain it.
You can argue about how much privacy a professional performer is entitled to. Somebody who talks about his religion and love life on Oprah's couch is inviting and encouraging public scrutiny and speculation about those aspects of his life, making it harder to build a case that they're private matters and therefore off-limits. He's using them to market himself as a co-branded product (along with a movie or a book or TV series or a chain of restaurants...) and how much he's willing to give away may have a direct effect on his next paycheck -- or his career bankability.
Politicians, like movie stars, are public figures under the law. Even more so, because they are elected officials with public responsibilities. So, when (now-former) Idaho Senator Larry Craig is arrested for soliciting sex from an undercover officer, he can hardly claim that the media has "outed" him. And when a documentary filmmaker like Kirby Dick ("Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist," "This Film Is Not Yet Rated") compares politicians' public voting records with their private behavior in his film "Outrage," he has grounds to argue that his subject is not outing but political hypocrisy -- and, in some cases, outright demagoguery.
(See the NPR Ombudsman's column about Nathan Lee's review of "Outrage," in which New York Times critic A.O. Scott is quoted about his use of names in his review: "None of my editors objected to this, since everything I wrote was strictly and narrowly factual. In my opinion it would have been unduly coy, in the manner of 'blind item' gossip, not to mention the names, though I understand the argument that to mention them is to further the rumors. But it is important for a critic to be able to discuss what a movie is about...")
Reality TV stars go even further, inviting cameras into their private lives in exchange for publicity, money and other favors -- like free vacations, teeth-whitenings, even houses. (I'm told. I don't actually watch that show, but I've read some stuff about it.) I admit I laughed when I saw a Facebook comment about Kate Gosselin's evolving 'do, claiming that the back of her hair was trying to eat the front. That's not a gratuitous crack about her camera-tuned personal appearance; it's a pretty incisive critical observation -- and a good metaphor for what some have said is happening to her head/psyche on the show. Apparently, both the fertile Gosselins have been accused of cheating (isn't adultery the favorite passtime of heartland America?), he with a 23-year-old teacher and she with her bodyguard. You read that right: her bodyguard. Like Whitney and Kevin. And now they're blaming the media for the Faustian bargain they struck four seasons ago. If only they could go back to their cozy little TLC cable show and everyone would just leave them alone! That, however, might mean forfeiting a lot of wealth, freebies and public validation. Besides, they've got a contract for 40 more episodes. (I see three series being spun off from this: "Jon," "Kate" and the joint-custody adventure series, "Plus 8.")
There but for an overpowering lust for riches and notoriety go you or I.
Former LA Times film critic Carina Chocano, in a Salon.com essay called "Join the shame parade," writes:
This year, according to a British poll, nearly half of all people under the age of 21 and 18 percent of 22- to 30-year-olds have publicly dumped someone by announcing it on Facebook, Twitter or something similar...
"Self-righteousness makes people feel superior," says Pauline Wallin, a psychologist in Camp Hill, Pa., and the author of the book "Taming Your Inner Brat: A Guide to Transforming Self-Defeating Behavior." "People always find a logical reason for what they want to do -- like, that company fired me, the world needs to know what they're really like. We decide emotionally and justify rationally. We decide first, justify later." In other words, there's nothing like getting screwed over to bring out the smugness and moral superiority in everybody. And, these days, who isn't getting screwed over? The fact that we're all just an angry e-mail, late-night status update, drunken text message or hormonal tweet away from more disclosure (self- and otherwise) only adds to the already considerable anxieties of the age. Technology doesn't cause lack of impulse control, it just creates a nice, dark, moist and warm environment in which it can thrive.
Privacy and shame. One keeps the other in check. A little confession is good for the soul. But compulsive self-revelation can become a form of shameless, invasive exhibitionism -- a lack of respect not only for one's own privacy (and individuality), but for others'. Shame and humiliation can be crippling when linked to things beyond someone's control. On the other hand, they also provide a healthy check on human behavior. That's why -- last year, at least -- "too much sharing" could get you "unfriended."
In Doug Block's penetrating (auto-)biographical documentary "51 Birch Street," the filmmaker finds himself faced with the question of whether to read his mother's journals, and whether to include some of their contents in his film. Her best friend, aware of her tumultuous struggles to become her own person (especially in the 1960s and 1970s when gender roles were in upheaval), says she thinks his mother would, above all, want to be known for who she really was.
To be known, or not to be known. Those are the contradictory impulses we're acting out -- on- and off-camera, in fiction and "documentary," on Facebook and Twitter -- all of it shaped by somebody's ever-shifting notion of what makes a good show. Interactions with other people have always been, to a great extent, about acting -- about creating compelling scenes and adjusting your presentation to fit others' demands and expectations. (See "La Dolce Vita," the film that gave birth to the term "paparazzo." Every interaction is a form of public or private performance.)
Now, in the Cronenbergian sense, technology extends our nervous systems wirelessly into a Borg-like network through which we are all connected. Resistance is futile. A sense of civility and decorum is your only shield against assimilation and the resulting loss of self.
* * * *
"They can say I'm a fat old cunt, they can say I'm an untalented bastard, they can call me a poof, but they mustn't tell lies about me."
-- Elton John, on a British tabloid libel suit he won in the 1990s (quoted in The New Yorker)
What do you think? Is privacy overrated? Is shame always a bad thing? If somebody makes a living off selling a public persona (including physical appearance), where does legitimate criticism cross over into malicious John Simonism? (For example, if Nicole Kidman is an actress, and her surgically taut face is no longer capable of conveying human emotions, is that not relevant to a discussion of her craft?) Libel laws aside, are there any limits to what can be said or reported about public figures? And who's a public figure these days? Was Levi Johnson one when he had a MySpace page and impregnated the daughter of Alaska's governor? Or did he only become one when his girlfriend's mom chose to run for Vice President of the United States? Where do you draw the line in your own blog/Facebook/Twitter revelations?
It is impossible to imagine anyone I admire having a facebook or Twitter account.
Can you picture Orson Welles getting into an argument on a messageboard? Or Kurosawa scheming up ways to get more twitter followers?
Technology has created a generation of insubstantial shadow people
JE: People use these tools in a whole range of ways. Who marketed himself more aggressively than Orson Welles -- in interviews and on TV talk shows? Veteran publicist Reid Rosefelt has an interesting piece here, called "What Happens to the Filmmakers Who Can’t Market Themselves?": http://budurl.com/9yfe
A little story . . . one morning about five years ago a live news piece of a man being rescued from the rapids of a flooded culvert played in the dining area of the place I work. Riveting, dramatic footage. We all watched, maybe fifty of us in all. This man had already helped his two young daughters to safety and now he was desperately fighting for his life, clinging to a branch while a copter overhead lowered a rope his way. He unsuccessfully pawed at the rope a few times before finally snatching it. As the copter lifted away to haul him to safety the force of the rapids ripped the man's pants clean off. The dining area erupted in laughter and chuckles. Now, if that same story had played in 1960 I doubt anyone would have laughed. Nor would they have laughed in 1970 or 1980 for that matter. But then in the mid-eighties the hand-held camcorder arrived and the powers that be began to offer reality as entertainment, and in my mind people have been confusing the two ever since. You see, those people didn't laugh because they were bad people, they laughed because they had been conditioned to think that a man losing his pants was comedy, regardless of the circumstances . . . . . and so I'm gazing into my crystal ball right now, trying to get a bead on the next five or ten years. And I'm not sure what it's going to look like exactly, but I suspect that it will be quite funny.
As a writer by trade (or at least as someone who's trying to be a writer by trade... stupid economy), the notion of using social networking sites as a means of self-presentation is a little skewed to me. Because as a writer, my very vocation is dependent on expressing a unique voice and personality already -- what I do on FaceBook doesn't feel to me much different than what I do anywhere else that requires written communication (including commenting here).
I do indeed have a FaceBook page, but I only started it just recently and after much resistance (which was, in the end, futile...). But I only have a very small contingent of "friends," and they're all people who I consider actual friends in "real" life, making the entire notion of being on FaceBook in the first place feel weirdly redundant and pointless. (Which is basically how I view texting, the most backwards invention in decades. "Sweet, here's a devise that allows me to vocally communicate with nearly anyone on the planet. Lemme use it instead to slowly and awkwardly type tiny messages!")
On the other hand, one unexpected result of being on FaceBook is that it has allowed my family and friends to see on a more consistent bases what I do -- write. Maybe I should feel more dejected that it took being on FaceBook to have them finally read anything I've written (even if it's status updates), but eh, I take what I can get.
Ah, but now I've drifted into making calculated public confessions. And that, fundamentally, is a process of taking calculated risks. As you write, the act of having a FaceBook page -- even if we're not consciously aware of it all the time -- is an act of deciding just how much about ourselves we're willing to reveal. "Should I actually admit I recently watched Stardust... and enjoyed it?" (I did.) "Should I let everyone know those garbage Real World/Road Rules Challenge shows on MTV are kind of a guilty pleasure of mine?" (They are... but you won't know it from reading my "Info" page.) It's the people who don't bother with the "calculated" part that throw all notions of privacy out the window... be it out of naivete, or for deliberate notoriety.
Either way, the entire FaceBook process is completely bizarre and ridiculous, but then again, there's never been any accounting for human behavior.
(Speaking of which, and speaking of monstrous hair, what the goddamn hell is up with that Robert Pattinson guy already? His hair is not sexily disheveled, it's just stupid and insane. If I walked around with hair like that, people would think I just escaped from a mental hospital. So why does he get to get away with it? Damn it, it makes me so mad, I'm going to status-update the s*** out of this on FaceBook right now...)
Most of us want to be wanted. Even if we don't want everyone to know our slightest movements, it can be nice to think that they do want to know.
Part of what bothers me about our attitudes towards privacy is this: most people (on television, facebook, in magazines, etc. etc.) have pretty uninteresting private lives. The whole idea of selling your private self strips the magic of privacy away very quickly.
I have a facebook account, mainly as a way to keep contact with people I went to school with or worked with, and it just about drives me insane to know that people feel the need to update me on what they had for dinner or when they're going to bed. I'm also a bit turned off by some people who feel the need to confess every emotion that they have, or break-up, or fight.
As for celebrities, I have only the certain amount of sympathy. There are celebrities that seem to attract attention, and while they may not act like it, they enjoy that attention. Others manage to maintain a professional, no frills profile. The latter group won't interest most people, and that's because they aren't trying to interest anyone. They've kept the privacy they need, and have accepted the natural spotlight that being an actor or actress will bring them.
What an irony that in a country founded on principles of freedom and the dignity of the individual has reared a culture so contemptuous of privacy. Is there even any such thing as privacy laws in the United States?
If you look at Western Europe, in particular Switzerland which has the strictest privacy laws of any country in the world, there is in the culture a sense of respect for the privacy of the individual. Just take, for example, how the issue of homosexuality and gay marriage manifest themselves so differently there. It is not at all a public subject. That is because people see it primarily as a privacy issue. As in, it is none of your business IF someone is gay or straight to begin with. Therefore, you're 'right' to an opinion on the matter is nonexistent.
Because no one will point out the blatant hypocrisy of the above article and post I feel I must. Jim Emerson's article decries the vapid technology-enabled exhibitionism of our modern era and yet propagates the behavior it attacks. Emerson's articles serve to promote his own sense of superiority over true artist as he obsesses over minutiae such as a poor shot or an ill-handled edit. Like a child who discovers the attention iconoclasm garners Emerson attacks people of merit while he begs for the masses to pay attention to his cleverness.
The above article demonstrates an almost unfathomable absence of self-awareness.
JE: Good example of the ad hominem nature of flame culture! Notice that there's nothing specific I can respond to here, and no evidence that you've actually read what I wrote. Perfect!
I do my best to avoid the whole Media/Gossip machine, and when I saw the JK situation on the local news last week, I was unable to change the channel in time. As soon as I saw it though, I suspected they had a new season of their show to promote. Modern celeb-culture really annoys me, and I'd put publicists up with the lawyers as the first people to shoot if civilization comes to an end.
I've been running a blog for over 5 years now and I was even on a "reality TV" programme last year.
On the former I used to be a lot more forthcoming about thoughts and feelings, a true public journal of reactionary nature, offering, I guess, insight into my psyche based on what's affecting me at the time. More often than not, though, I was just talking about movies, music, comics, pop culture and whatnot, as more people care to read about these things than myself. Over the years, as I've gotten into and out of relationships, married, now expecting child, my blog is less personal, and anything I share of a personal nature is calculated and/or safely biographical. There's only so much you can reveal about yourself and your life, thoughts and emotions, before they start causing problems in the real world.
My blog is a habit and somewhat an experiment at this point, sometimes one I enjoy, and sometimes something I loathe. But I do it for myself, which I think is essential. I don't keep track of stats, and my audience, if there is even one (besides my wife and my mom), rarely makes themselves known. In the face of Facebook and Twitter, blogs are a dying breed (when I started in '02 there grew a rather large and social community of bloggers locally, the majority of whom have disappeared from blogging in the years since), a fad fading away for the layman.
On the reality TV front, I went on a Canadian cable debt management show with my wife, airing our dirty financial laundry, which, at this point (a year+ later), almost every co-worker, friend and family member has seen it in repeats and commented on it. We went on the show to get help with our debt situation, and we got it, and our lives today are dramatically different than they were. So what we exposed of our personal life then isn't relevant so much anymore to our life now.
Those Reality TV shows that follow families that aren't already famous (Little People, Big World/ Jon & Kate) I think have some merit, to show curious people how they actually live a different lifestyle. In the same respect going on Supernanny or a debt show is educational for yourself and others, and absolutely worth it despite the little bits of your life that are being exposed to a mass audience. But once the attention level exceeds the purpose, once the people start becoming personas, once fame hits, then the merits of those shows, the ability to relate at all to them as people and not celebrities diminishes.
That, I think, is the difference between a performer (actor, musician, artist etc) and a "celebrity". Performers want to be appreciated for their work and will control their image from the start to compliment or promote that work (of course controlling your image requires self control... a lesson people like Sean Penn and Mickey Rourke learned over the years). "Celebrities" just want to be recognized, they want to be famous and lack any shame in doing so. Once they learn the lesson that fame is fleeting, it may be too late to start controlling their image (*cough*lohan*cough*spears*cough*)
I saw 51 Birch Street a few years ago. It made me really uncomfortable. Partially because I couldn't fathom why anyone would want to know intimate details about the mother's sex life, to say nothing of why it would benefit strangers to know these things.
JE: I think that is one of the movie's strengths that it allows for those feelings. Doug Block felt them, too, and you feel what a difficult decision it was -- whether you think you would have made the same one or not.
Of course, all this (and my recent surrender to Facebook) reminds me of the end of "1984":
"But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother."
"Now, in the Cronenbergian sense, technology extends our nervous systems wirelessly into a Borg-like network through which we are all connected." Come on. We've been through this. Not Cronenberg. McLuhan. Credit where credit is due. Marshall McLuhan, Mr. The Medium Is The Message/Massage, Mr. Global Village, Mr. Technology Affects Our Evolution As An Organism, teacher of David Cronenberg, model for Brian O'Blivion. McLuhan.
JE: And they're both Canadian. See? All connected.
51 Birch Street was one of the most moving things I've seen in a decade.
Check out "Afterschool" by Antonio Campos if you haven't. It deals with this theme in a very disturbing way.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1224366/
Jim, an excellent piece. I read all the comments here and have been slow to join Facebook and still haven't. But I do blog of course.
Everyone who blogs is in fact famous, to some degree. Fame is not measured by how many know you, just by people knowing you that have never met you personally. I remember Girish asking a question about why people blog that Dennis then picked up for one of his quizzes (see, they're famous because I don't have to use their last names and you know who I'm talking about) and everyone wrote long and thoughtful responses but the one I actually felt was the most honest was Larry Aydlette who wrote "because it's all about me, me, ME!" I think to some degree we all started blogging because we wanted people to hear what we had to say. We may all say we don't expect an audience but we do want one. However, we still might not want the fame.
Look at it this way: How many movie bloggers do we all know who blog under pseudonyms? From the Siren to Harry Tuttle there are plenty out there who don't want anyone to know who they are. Hell, I used a pseudonym (Jonathan Lapper) for two years before I was finally comfortable enough to just tell people who I was, and am. So we want to be heard but we still want our privacy. I don't necessarily think that's hypocrisy or a contradiction.
JE: I don't think it is, either. (And Larry used to be That Little Round-Headed Boy, then The Shamus.) Wanting to communicate your feelings and ideas and passions seems pretty natural to me. I'm just interested in the personae we create -- for ourselves, our family, our friends, our readers in various venues, and so on. And that has nothing to do with whether we use our real names or not (though I've never written under a pseudonym, probably because I started writing for publication before I was in my teens and I was just used to it). A blog gives you a great deal of control over how much you reveal; a TV reality show doesn't.
Ted Anthony says, "We love it." No. We do not love it. I hate it. I'm sick and tired of hearing about Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, and Jennifer Aniston's love triangle. In fact, I'm tired of hearing about Jennifer Aniston period: she's a stupid TV star who nobody actually cares about. And I'm tired of people crying every time Miley Cyrus does anything vaguely sexual, and demanding she be strapped into a chastity belt. And I'm tired of tabloids claiming that Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian are famous for things other than making sex tapes and that they deserve to be taken seriously as celebrities. And I don't wanna hear Bristol Palin preach about abstinence. And I don't want a book by Miley Cyrus that shares her insights about life, because she's 16 and has nothing of any value to offer to anybody. And I'm tired of all the propaganda campaigns that say I have to care and care passionately about the boring things somebody did. I'm sick of the whole damn thing. It's stupid.
You are right JIM EMERSON. Everyone is a SUPERSTAR.
HO KOGAN!
I haven't watched TV for years now - I've luckily come to like my own reality better than the one in the box. But reading this thread makes me wonder - has anyone yet made a meta-reality show about "ordinary" people grappling with the constant intrustion of camera crews, the scripting and editing of their lives, the narrative-based personae devised by their publicists, and the friction between their real selves and their "reality" selves? Not to say that I want this show to exist - I think a few fictional films on the subject are more than enough - but it seems like the only logical direction this can go.
okay so it aint exactly the end of the world.
-isnt america all about self-expression et cetera?
-dont we all love a good show?
-does it kill to be a little self-absorbed?
-dont you find leading a double/triple life ("Bunburying" as Oscar Wilde would put it) in cyberspace web therapeutic?
-doesnt this prove warhol was a freaking genius?
-don't you twitter and like it at least a lil bit? (ive never tried personally)
-arent we risking of seeming (gasp) old-fashioned?
-was warhol a genius or what? (ditto)
Marshall McLuhan once wrote that the medium is the message. By that, he meant that how a thing is said is more important than what is said. What does it say about a person that his or her primary form of social communication is posting online? To me, it means that he or she has few legitimate social skills, is willing to slander people anonomously, has a short attention span, and couldn't hold an interesting conversation to save his or her life.
I like the internet. When I want to talk sports, movies, money, books, etc. and I need a fresh perspective, I get on the internet. Just as when I want to waste an hour in a pleasant stupor, I watch TV. But both are fast food for the mind.
Jim, you're a smart guy. And you write well. But you're peddling junk food for the mind. People just need to realize that social communication on the internet is not good for you in any real sense. It's an approximation of real social interaction. People who indulge too much become the happy, shiny people of that song.
Most people are self-absorbed to the point they think its a good thing to be on display. You can hardly go through the grocery store without hearing someone else's cell phone conversation. It's funny all the information they give out. Phone numbers, personal problems (this person just got kicked out by their roommate, that person is trying to get custody of their kids), work related issues, sales negotiations, shopping lists, gift ideas and, appointment reminders, and on and on. You hear everything the people are saying, and if the volume on the phone is up enough, you can hear what the other person is saying, too. But do the people seem to mind everybody knowing thier business? No. They've got a phone to their ear. Doesn't that make them look important? No, but they think it does. Their calls are more important to them than any of the strangers around them, even when they're driving. To paraphrase what Mike Figgis says in his book Digital Filmmaking: If you know that you could kill every passenger in your vehicle with just one wrong turn of the steering wheel, why would you not keep your mind on the road and both of your hands on the wheel?
That's the major drawback of technology. The more it connects people, the more they withdraw from each other and settle into their own little circles and cease to care about anyone outside of them.
Jon and Kate may not patch things up, and if they don't, they could probably start a new show about their divorce. The title? Jon and Kate Plus Hate.
Jim, you make an good point regarding 51 Birch Street. I hadn't quite thought of the movie that way.
The film writer Jennifer Merin quipped it perfectly on Twitter: "In the future, everyone will have a private life for 15 minutes."
Also, Jim, I concur with the above poster that you should really check out Afterschool. It didn't galvanize me the way that it did former Esquire/TONY critic Mike D'Angelo (who gave it a 94, the highest grade he's given a film since at least 2002, when he inaugurated his 100-point grading system). But it's definitely a singular work, and on point for this conversation.
It appears there are three or four different issues here, particularly amongst the people providing commentary.
1) reality shows which often create celebrities.
2) the legitimacy of relationships online
3) the legitimacy of communication through "new Media" including text messaging
4) a resistance to change or add to preferred methods of communication
When a person expresses his opinions by subtly bashing the use of texting and denigrating the value of the connections people make online, my opinion of the writer falls into an either/or stereotype:
either
a babyboomer technophobe who sees the value of his/her communications methods but won't embrace vibrant and vital electronic methods.[plus images of the newspaper industry!]
or
an ageing Gen-Xer who is no longer on the forefront of tech but who has solidifying opinions on the value of his expertise.
My apologies to those of you who aren't one of the above, and my suggestion to those of you who may be--please, at least acknowledge that any and all communication has a value to the sender. Additionally, please note that the METHOD is of almost no importance to people younger than you.
A note to parents: your child has an online presence. If you have forced your teen to take this profile "underground," you have lost your ability to educate your child and help him mature.
[and a final note to possible warmongers-- I'm 40 and I have 2 teens, I text, I have fB, and there are couches in a dozen countries that would welcome me and my family because I choose to communicate]
JE: The issue I wanted to address with this post was how the varieties of one-to-many broadcasting technologies have changed our notions of privacy. But I'm with you. I'm a communicator. I e-mail (since the '80s), I write for publication, I blog, I comment on others' blogs, I text, I have fB... The only thing I've never much liked is "chat," because I find it more intrusive than e-mail or text, although I use it to communicate with support at various corporate web sites, because I prefer having a record of that kind of communication (especially when technical issues are involved) rather than spending a lot of time on the phone, and on hold -- but that's just my taste.
I fail to see what the hell "American Pie" has to do with any of this, and the implicit link that is being drawn between (what I see as) a harmless comedy and the trend of Reality TV Celebrity is nonsense, made all the more insulting as there is no particularly meaningful attempt to link the two beyond their most superficial similarities. It's not exactly a new phenomenon to put characters through embarrassing situations for comedic effect. Movies have always been about voyeurism, and voyeurism has always been a part of human nature. It's not something that spontaneously appeared in our genome after watching a kid get walked in on while fucking an apple pie.
JE: Read what Denby wrote.