Sarah Silverman stands against an overexposed white background, addressing the camera (and her boyfriend of five years, talk show host Jimmy Kimmel). "Hey Jimmy," she says, "It's me." It's the quintessential Silverman line delivery: faux-awkward, sweet and self-consciously cute, but so sharp and precisely targeted that it almost hurts a little. Of course it's her. But where is she?
Well, she's in some netherworld hotel, neither here nor there -- been on the road so long, you know, she's not even sure what city she's in, to be honest -- and she has something on her mind, something she's been meaning to tell Jimmy, that she's been carrying around with her like excess baggage. Dressed in a snug, lipstick-magenta/pink shirt, she stands out, flush and ripe, from the soft pale light that envelops her. She strolls to the right, from one lush, clean-green tropical split-leaf philodendron to another, a sexy and innocent Eve in the unspoiled Garden of Eden (or a hotel lobby facsimile thereof). Her delicate fingers stroke a wistful figure on her guitar, again and again, as she works up the backbone to expose her true feelings. (Insert what we imagine to be a typical candid photo of the happy couple: Silverman draped adoringly over the shoulders of a drunken, blurry-eyed Kimmel.)
View image In the primeval Garden: The moment of first release, the revelation of Knowledge in the Biblical sense.
The segue, if you call it that, is abrupt, jarring. Cut to a close-up of her guitar ("Here it goes...") and a crunching electric riff begins. Medium shot of Silverman as she sings the first line (and the title), with an expression of "Omygod!" on her face, like a teenage girl at a slumber party confessing a crush on the cutest boy in school: "I'm f***ing Matt Damon!" This is inappropriate. Not only is she singing this to her boyfriend, she's doing it on his fifth anniversary show on network TV. She has not only swallowed the forbidden fruit, she has swallowed the serpent: Matt Damon!
Cut to... Damon himself, in tight black t-shirt (like snakeskin!), arms stretched cockily over the back of a white couch as if in post-coital repose. He's been seated just outside the frame, all the time, and he gives the camera a knowing, testosterone-fueled smirk: "She's f***ing Matt Damon!" He's got the cat-with-the-canary grin. The knowledge that he's avenging Kimmel's repeated, disrespectful scheduling slights is written all over his face. He is no longer the butt of the joke, he gets to deliver the punchline. Repeat. Silverman shoots him a naughty-girl look, then shifts her expression to one of rue and sorrow for: "I'm not imagining it's you." Next, in an instant, she grits her teeth and turns into Joan Jett. On cue, Damon launches into a Henry Rollins punk growl and threatens to lunge at the camera, seizing it the way we imagine him grabbing Silverman's waist before they do the nasty title phrase. It begins in a two-shot, with Silverman cheerily bending down into the frame:
On the bed, on the floor
On a towel by the door
In the tub, in the car
Up against the mini-bar
One can't help but recall Theodor Geisel's seminal "Green Eggs and Ham," in which Sam I Am pesters an increasingly exasperated, unnamed character who does not like the titular dish. In this case, however, Damon and Silverman are turning the tables: The song is an expression of rapacious appetite, and the way Damon delivers it -- with a mad glint in his eyes and a leer on his lips -- is a volatile mixture of lust and vengeful glee. He likes them apples....
WARNING: Adolf Hitler uses objectionable language, above.
This YouTube clip puts the whole HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray thing in perspective, all right. From press reports you may have gathered that the competition for an HD standard on little plastic discs (remember CDs? CD-ROMs? DVDs?) was a fight to determine the future. It still seems to me -- and most consumers, apparently -- that it's a case of refighting the last war. Or several wars before that.
As of last fall, somewhere between 13.7% (Nielsen) and 36% (Consumer Electronics Association) of American households were estimated to have "tuners capable of receiving HDTV signals" -- and somewhere between 40%-60% of those are "still being fed exclusively with standard-definition content" (from the trade magazine Broadcasting & Cable, October 30, 2007).
The revised deadline for switching all over-air television broadcasting from analog to digital is February 17, 2009 (it had originally been in 2006). But that's not HDTV, it's just a digital signal. It doesn't apply to cable (although many cable systems are now all-digital, as are satellite services like DirecTV and DishNetwork). All TVs sold since March, 2007, have to be digital-capable, and older TVs can be upgraded with the addition of an add-on digital tuner.
According to Nielsen, DVD players, which were introduced 11 years ago (1997), finally surpassed VHS players in US households... a little over one year ago, in the third quarter of 2006. And DVD (its path to acceptance having been prepared for by CDs) is one of the most quickly adopted technologies in history.
So, how compelling is the incentive for upgrading to a high-definition DVD technology, requiring new players (or player-recorders) and new discs? Most consumers can't get the benefits of it yet, and most people with HD televisions (especially the majority with sets less than 50 inches wide -- 42-inch models being the most popular) don't think the quality improvements between standard DVD and HD-DVD or Blu-Ray are all that significant, especially if they already use regular players that upconvert to 720 or 1080 resolutions (though not to true HD).
By the time high-definition television (even at the current standards) is widely accepted, will we still be relying on plastic discs -- that have to be physically transported, whether bought or borrowed -- to deliver the "content"? How sad if that proved to be the case.
Meanwhile, congratulations Blu-Ray. Perhaps you are not the Betamax of 2008. But you are the CD-ROM of tomorrow.
(tip: Jeff Shannon) (thanks to Kristin Thompson for the new link!)
View image The Man From Another Place (Michael J. Anderson, that is) with The Man From Spokane (David Lynch) in the Red Room. Photo by Richard Beymer.
The owls are not what they seem. And Richard Beymer has the photos to prove it, in this beautiful online gallery from the set of "Twin Peaks." The shot of Hank Worden ("Grateful to the hospitality of your rocking chair, ma'am!") with Lynch makes me very happy.
Written in the Flesh: A Crash Course in David Cronenberg
No filmmaker has more daringly and relentlessly explored what it means to be human than David Cronenberg.
Two weeks ago, critic Robert Horton and I discussed Cronenberg's work as part of Robert's Magic Lantern Series at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle. This short film, conceived as a self-contained critical essay/appreciation, has been expanded and refined from the seven-minute version I assembled the night before that occasion, tracing Cronenberg's thematic obsessions and the development of his artistic vision across 40 years of filmmaking. "From the Drain" to "Eastern Promises" (neither of which are included here), it's all one big Cronenberg movie, no matter what the genre: horror, science-fiction, fantasy, biography, crime thriller...
Clips from nine chapters in the ever-mutating cinematic saga of David Cronenberg ("The Brood" to "A History of Violence") are interwoven to illuminate some of the director's major themes: technology (and art) as an extension/expression of the mind and body (guns, game pods, television, cars, computers, typewriters, eyeglasses...); the human appetite for extreme sensations; violence as sex, and sex as violence; the evolution of humankind beyond biology, and the inevitable dissolution of the flesh through mutation, disease, aging; corporate co-option of the intellectual property behind new technologies... all in only 12 minutes!
View image Woody Allen (foreground, center) in "Stardust Memories."
Regarding issues raised by Brian De Palma and "Redacted" (see below): Here are two frame grab from Woody Allen's 1980 feature "Stardust Memories," a United Artists release. The movie is a Felliniesque comedy (it starts right off as a parody of "8 1/2"), not a documentary. The blown-up image on the wall was taken a dozen years before "Stardust Memories" (February 1, 1968) during the Tet Offensive by Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams in Saigon.
The man with the gun is South Vietnamese National Police Chief General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan. The man in the plaid shirt, who is or is about to be shot in the head (his death is shown in NBC News footage taken at the same time), is thought to be Nguyễn Văn Lém (or possibly Le Cong Na), and was either a Viet Cong officer or a political operative. His face was disfigured because he had been beaten. The title of the photo, which became instantly famous around the world, is "General Nguyen Ngoc Loan Executing a Viet Cong Prisoner in Saigon" and it won a Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography in 1969. It was widely reprinted and was used as a symbolic image by the anti-war movement.
Adams later wrote in Time magazine:
The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths... What the photograph didn't say was, 'What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?'
Although a number of "galleries and artists" are acknowledged in the end credits of "Stardust Memories" for the use of photos and artworks in the film, the source for this picture is not cited. The film does contain a standard disclaimer, reading: "The story, all names, characters and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons is intended or should be inferred."
The late Merv Griffin (July 6, 1925 - August 12, 2007) was in "Cattle Town" (1952), "So This Is Love" and "The Boy From Oklahoma" (both 1954) and Paul Simon's "One Trick Pony" (1980). He played (or voiced) himself in other movies, including George Cukor's underrated "Rich and Famous" (1981) and two Steve Martin comedies, "The Man With Two Brains" (1983) and "The Lonely Guy" (1984). Backed by Freddy Martin & His Orchestra, he had a #1 hit in 1950 with "I've Got A Lovely Bunch of Coconuts." His popular daytime TV talk show, where the likes of Orson Welles used to stop by for a chat, ran (with a few brief interruptions, including an abortive shift to late-night) from 1962 to 1986. Not only was he nominated for Emmys (he also won some) and Golden Globes, but he owned the Beverly Hilton Hotel (among others) where the Globes and other award shows were mounted and telecast.
He was one of the richest people in Hollywood, but for a while he was perhaps most famous for "dating" Zsa Zsa Eva Gabor, if you can believe that. He was also the subject of a recurring impression by Rick Moranis ("Show us your lining... We'll be right back!) on "SCTV" -- perhaps most memorably the "Special Edition" episode in which "The Merv Griffin Show"" metamorphosed into "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."
But Merv's most enduring legacy (somehow it seems right to call him "Merv") was that he created game shows: "Wheel of Fortune" and the king of 'em all, "Jeopardy" -- both of which remain on the air today.
I love "Jeopardy." But back in early April, I was greatly disturbed by the disgraceful (lack of) contestant responses to a Double Jeopardy category called "Foreign Cinema." First, guess which two (TWO!) they got right. Then let me know how you scored:
1) This Taiwanese director's films include "The Wedding Banquet," "Pushing Hands" & "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon."
2) The submarine models for this 1981 German film were also used in "Raiders of the Lost Ark."
3) In this 1957 Ingmar Bergman film, a knight back from the Crusades challenges Death to a chess game for his life.
4) Truffaut provided the story for this 1959 Godard film in which Belmondo plays a hood who kills a cop.
5) This 1963 Fellini film was the basis for the 1982 Broadway musical "Nine."
View image Brad Dourif as a doc with a dark turn of mind.
Since I've been feelin' poorly, I have spent the odd evening and weekend with a book (including some fine ones: Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" and "No Country for Old Men," Paul Bowles' "The Sheltering Sky" [now one of my all-time favorite novels], Graham Greene's "The Heart of the Matter," among them) and -- alas, most belatedly -- have been catching up with the first season of David Milch's "Deadwood." How to describe my feelings? "Blown away" would be one accurate, but inadequate, way to describe my response thus far. Unfortunately for me, I was so spellbound by my introduction to the program that I exhausted Season One in but a few days, and now must wait for the goddamn, c-----cking US Post to bring me f---ing Seasons Two and Three. (All due respect, and no offense intended.)
For the moment, I'm pleased to share with you -- gratis free -- some words of wisdom from creator Milch (on the DVD extras) and Doc Cochran. Somehow, I think they're all interconnected:
"Reason is about seventeenth on the list of the attributes that define us as a species." -- David Milch
"They say in certain rooms today, you can't think your way to right write action, you only act your way to right write thinking." -- David Milch
"I find that most moral codes are kind of elevated expressions of economic necessities." -- David Milch
"I see as much misery outta them movin' to justify theirselves as in them that set out to do harm." -- Doc Cochran (Brad Dourif)
(P.S. And I would never have known, from "An Inconvenient Truth," that Oscar-winner Davis Guggenheim was a f---ing movie director!!!)
For years, the go-to guys for this thing of ours ("The Sopranos") have been Alan Sepinwall at Tony's hometown newspaper, The Newark Star-Ledger ("The Voice of New Jersey"), and his former Star-Ledger colleague, Matt Zoller Seitz. (Be sure to see Seitz's terrific column on the final episode and the fine comments it inspired. And, while you're at it, check out the newly built archive of "Sopranos" Mondays at The Bada-Bing Next Door.) As the TV critic for the paper at the end of Tony's driveway, Sepinwall managed to score an interview with series creator David Chase, who has gone away to France for a little while until this series ending thing blows over.
Chase says:
"I have no interest in explaining, defending, reinterpreting, or adding to what is there," he says of the final scene.
"No one was trying to be audacious, honest to God," he adds. "We did what we thought we had to do. No one was trying to blow people's minds, or thinking, 'Wow, this'll (tick) them off.' People get the impression that you're trying to (mess) with them and it's not true. You're trying to entertain them.... Anybody who wants to watch it, it's all there."
Sounds a lot like the Coen Brothers in the piece I posted yesterday.
Sepinwall summarizes the ending succinctly and perfectly:
Since Chase is declining to offer his interpretation of the final scene, let me present two more of my own, which came to me with a good night's sleep and a lot of helpful reader e-mails:
Theory No. 1 (and the one I prefer): Chase is using the final scene to place the viewer into Tony's mindset. This is how he sees the world: every open door, every person walking past him could be coming to kill him, or arrest him, or otherwise harm him or his family. This is his life, even though the paranoia's rarely justified. We end without knowing what Tony's looking at because he never knows what's coming next.
Theory No. 2: In the scene on the boat in "Soprano Home Movies," repeated again last week, Bobby Bacala suggests that when you get killed, you don't see it coming. Certainly, our man in the Members Only jacket could have gone to the men's room to prepare for killing Tony (shades of the first "Godfather"), and the picture and sound cut out because Tony's life just did. (Or because we, as viewers, got whacked from our life with the show.)
I read a comment somewhere today that pointed out the B-side of the closing song (Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'") is listed on the jukebox as: "Any Way You Want It." Yeah, and whatsa matta wit dat?
P.S. Yes, I'm more interested in the last few hours -- and particularly the last hour -- of "The Sopranos" than in any movie I've seen since "Zodiac." I'd like to do a shot-by-shot of Episode 86....
"In the midst of death, we are in life, heh? ... Life goes on..."
-- Paulie Walnuts, Episode 86
Meantime life outside goes on all around you.
-- Bob Dylan, "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)"
Some will win, some will lose
Some were born to sing the blues
Oh, the movie never ends
It goes on and on and on and on
-- Journey, "Don't Stop Believin'"
Have another onion ring. Pop the first DVD of Season One into the player and press "play." "The Sopranos" is... I'm not going to say "over." Think of it as complete at last, a perfect whole. It's finished but it's not over. Life goes on.
It's not uncommon for a long-running show to get self-reflexive in its final episode: "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," "St. Elsewhere," "Newhart," "Seinfeld," "Six Feet Under," to give a few famous examples. And no show has ever displayed more awareness of itself as a show than "The Sopranos." Not even "It's Garry Shandling's Show," the sitcom about being a sitcom. "The Sopranos" has always been a serial mob movie about being a serial mob movie in a culture where everybody's seen a lot of mob movies (and remakes of mob movies) and even low-level Jersey mobsters imagine themselves acting like the mobsters in the movies. And in its last seconds (which made my heart leap and had me laughing and crying at the same time), "The Sopranos" accomplished what I hoped it would, as I wrote earlier: "... I want [series creator David] Chase to come up with something I didn't anticipate, but which feels right for "The Sopranos." He's done it before. But now I'm afraid in a different way: I really, really want the ending to live up to the show."
"I'm afraid I'm going to lose my family. Like I lost the ducks."
-- Tony Soprano, Episode 1, January 10, 1999
" _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _"
-- Tony Sproano, Episode 86, June 10, 2007 (TBA)
"The Sopranos" didn't look terribly promising to me back in 1999 when I saw the first promos. Another Italian-American mob show? What could be more of a cliché? Of course, I was hooked after the first episode (the ducks, the shrink's office), and it continued to astound me week after week with how smart and savvy and rich it was. It took the pop gangster mythology of "The Godfather" and "GoodFellas" (and "Miller's Crossing," though I don't recall any characters specifically referencing it) and turned them inside out.
"The Sopranos" is about a small-time mob family in Jersey for whom "this thing of ours" is "trending downward," and who long for the legendary status of movie gangsters. They're shmucks, losers, the very definition of a dysfunctional family, and subconsciously they may even know it. But petty and corrupt as they are, they're still clinging to the American Dream, right down to the characterless and strangely empty McMansion in the suburbs. In "The Sopranos," the mob is a metaphor for contemporary capitalism and consumerism and those treasured illusions of "family" that seem like vestigal instincts. That's why I think the final tableau of the first part of Season Six was one of the series' most brilliant and haunting moments. All the trappings were there -- the festive decorations, the lovely home, the extended clan gathered 'round the hearth -- but we knew then that the greeting-card Christmas image was a sham. The tension was stomach-clenching because we (and perhaps they) could feel that this hollow moment was merely the calm before the storm of the final eight episodes. And now it's all coming down.
Since the third season or so, "The Sopranos" may have lost much of its ability to astound, but that's mainly because we now know anything is possible. Other shows kill off significant characters or rupture the storylines' major arteries, too. By the time Adrianna was wacked, it didn't seem so shocking. As with the best drama and comedy (and "The Sopranos" is an operatic tragicomedy), it seemed inevitable in retrospect. I hated losing her, but whaddaya gonna do?
"The Sopranos" made acclaimed shows like "The Wire" and "Deadwood" possible. I have friends who think "The Wire" is "better than" "The Sopranos," but that seems like a silly and fruitless comparison to me because they exist in entirely different dimensions. "The Wire" is consistently brilliant and thrilling to watch, with its teeming cast of characters and long, tangled narrative threads. I love it. But "The Sopranos" is much bigger, more deceptively complex, because it can work a meta-metaphor, make a satirical observation about contemporary politics or history or popular culture, and keep you absolutely in the moment with these characters in this particular set of circumstances. It makes your heart race, your eyes water and your head explode. It lives up to the word "masterpiece." And this single series has probably been more consistently excellent than all the rest of the American cinema over the last eight years. It hasn't just made a subscription to HBO indispensible (and an unbelievable entertainment bargain for the money), it's helped make watching television as essential as going to the movies.
I'm embarrassed to admit it, but there have been times when I didn't want to watch the next episode, because I was too fearful for the characters. I feel incredibly apprehensive about Sunday night, because I'm afraid of what I'm going to see, and how I'll feel about it. And I don't want it to be over. Maybe I should just TiVo it and then, when I'm feeling a little less vulnerable... Well, that's not going to happen. That's part of what the show is about: Having to face things you'd rather were kept out of sight (like the stashes of cash and guns around the Soprano household), and having to know that everything comes at a price.
I wonder if to say I care deeply about these characters is to say I love them, when I feel I shouldn't. I know how horrible they are. But I guess they're like family. And as we know from Season One, that doesn't guarantee love, either. (I'll admit it: for all her avarice and denial, I'm probably in love with Edie Falco's conflicted Carmella. Hey, one of the show's consistent themes is that you can't help who you fall in love with. And if I ever met James Gandolfini I would want to hug him -- the actor, for creating such a tremendous character, not Tony.) I'm sure they deserve whatever's coming to them. But series creator David Chase doesn't necessarily think that way. As he says on page 163 of "The Sopranos: The Book" (which I haven't even begun to read) in the article called "What We'll Never Know": "If you're raised on a steady diet of Hollywood movies and network television, you start to think, Obviously there's going to be some moral accounting here. That's not the way the world works. It all comes down to why you're watching...."
Television network and cable "news" in a nutshell. From The Onion today, the Wall Street Journal tomorrow:
ATLANTA—Last week, after a reported 65 million Americans learned of the bipartisan immigration bill with the breaking news report "Mexicans Stay," it became apparent that the much- ballyhooed 24-second news cycle had come into its own. [...]
CNN is widely credited with initiating the acceleration of the modern news cycle with the fall 2006 debut of its spin-off channel CNN:24, which provides a breaking news story, an update on that story, and a news recap all within 24 seconds. In addition to creating its groundbreaking format, CNN:24 broke many important stories with reports such as "Ford No Money Everyone Fired," "Iraq Bomb Kill Truck," "Country Hates Bush," "Dow High Now," and "Squirrel Water Skis."
"TV news reporting has always been about breaking the story down into only the barest, most salient facts, but the breakneck pace of contemporary reportage doesn't allow for that anymore," said Professor Robert Kubey, director of the Center for Media Studies at Rutgers University. [...]
A typical [MSNBC] News Moment segment includes seven seconds of lead stories, four seconds of developing news, the "International Second," "Weather on the 00:00:13s with Bob Van Dorn," "The Fastest Four Seconds in Sports," a two-second top stories recap, and wraps with four seconds of mixed entertainment and lifestyle pieces. In larger markets such as New York and Los Angeles, this last portion may be preempted by local news.
Frances and Edith have idiosyncratic licking problems, too. (Frances obsessively licks a hot spot on her foot and Edith obsessively licks Frances's face.) DISCLAIMER FROM DREWTOOTHPASTE (author of video): "The licking is not a serious medical problem. Charles is under regular veterinary care, and was not harmed during the making of the video. He is just a weird dog." In other words, Charles does not do this all the time. Evidently he is stimulated by the sight of something (tasty treats?) outside the frame.
I realized as I was posting this that I'd assigned it two categories: "TV" and "Journalism." Well, I haven't associated those two terms for years -- with the exception of "Frontline," last week's definitive and indispensable "Bill Moyers' Journal" ("Buying the War," which you can watch/explore here), "The Daily Show," "The Colbert Report" and the occasional "60 Minutes." An Indiana University School of Journalism analysis reminded me of what passes for "journalism" on TV these days -- particularly on the Fox Skews Channel. The study finds that Fox comedian Bill O'Reilly uses an insult on the average of once every 6.8 seconds during the "Talking Points Memo" segment of his TV show. (I, on the other hand, use a mere 1.5 insults per sentence when writing about O'Reilly.)
Bill O'Reilly may proclaim at the beginning of his program that viewers are entering the "No Spin Zone," but a new study by Indiana University media researchers found that the Fox News personality consistently paints certain people and groups as villains and others as victims to present the world, as he sees it, through political rhetoric.
The IU researchers found that O'Reilly called a person or a group a derogatory name once every 6.8 seconds, on average, or nearly nine times every minute during the editorials that open his program each night.
"It's obvious he's very big into calling people names, and he's very big into glittering generalities," said Mike Conway, assistant professor in the IU School of Journalism. "He's not very subtle. He's going to call people names, or he's going to paint something in a positive way, often without any real evidence to support that viewpoint."
Maria Elizabeth Grabe, associate professor of telecommunications, added, "If one digs further into O'Reilly's rhetoric, it becomes clear that he sets up a pretty simplistic battle between good and evil. Our analysis points to very specific groups and people presented as good and evil."
For their article in the spring issue of Journalism Studies, Conway, Grabe and Kevin Grieves, a doctoral student in journalism, studied six months worth, or 115 episodes, of O'Reilly's "Talking Points Memo" editorials using propaganda analysis techniques made popular after World War I.
A 2005 Annenberg Public Policy Center survey found that while 30 percent of Americans viewed Washington Post and Watergate reporter Bob Woodward as a journalist, 40 percent of respondents considered O'Reilly to be a journalist. [...]
Using analysis techniques first developed in the 1930s by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, Conway, Grabe and Grieves found that O'Reilly employed six of the seven propaganda devices nearly 13 times each minute in his editorials. His editorials also are presented on his Web site and in his newspaper columns.
The seven propaganda devices include:
* Name calling -- giving something a bad label to make the audience reject it without examining the evidence;
* Glittering generalities -- the oppositie of name calling;
* Card stacking -- the selective use of facts and half-truths;
* Bandwagon -- appeals to the desire, common to most of us, to follow the crowd;
* Plain folks -- an attempt to convince an audience that they, and their ideas, are "of the people";
* Transfer -- carries over the authority, sanction and prestige of something we respect or dispute to something the speaker would want us to accept; and
* Testimonials -- involving a respected (or disrespected) person endorsing or rejecting an idea or person.
The same techniques were used during the late 1930s to study another prominent voice in a war-era, Father Charles Coughlin. His sermons evolved into a darker message of anti-Semitism and fascism, and he became a defender of Hitler and Mussolini. In this study, O'Reilly is a heavier and less-nuanced user of the propaganda devices than Coughlin.
Oddly, this precis does not mention one of O'Reilly's favorite methods, the Straw Man argument in which he presents a preposterous argument, attributes it to someone else, and then shoots it down, as in: Democrats hate America and want the US to be ruled by Islamofascists -- or would, if they actually believed in God or Yaweh or Allah! That's just wrong!
"A path is formed by laying one stone at a time."
-- The Giant
The robin, the mill, the saw blades, the road, the waterfall, the surface of the water. These are the markers down the path to "Twin Peaks," David Lynch's television town full of mysteries, nestled in the deep, dark woods of the Pacific Northwest. From April 8, 1990, to June 10, 1991 -- as the ABC show rapidly metamorphosed from hypnotic oddity to pop-culture phenomenon to baffling shaggy dog story -- these images in the opening credits (accompanied by the twin keyboard scales of Angelo Badalamenti's lush and ghostly score) provided the ritual entrance to Twin Peaks.
This is a territory circumscribed by ritual and repetition -- of daily life and cryptic clues and incantations. These iconic introductory images are Twin Peaks' Stations of the Cross, representing landmarks in the life of Twin Peaks' sacrificial lamb and lioness, Laura Palmer: high school beauty queen by day, tormented naughty girl by night. The Passion of Laura Palmer, murdered during Lent, the penitential season of grief, was lamented, reconstructed and re-enacted ("It is happening again") in one two-hour television pilot, a seven-episode first season, a 22-episode second season and a feature film prequel/coda, "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me."
Seven years after the DVD release of the first season of "Twin Peaks," the second and only full-season has at last appeared. (The two-hour pilot, mired in a tangle of rights issues, has never been released on DVD in North America.) Looking back over the series, with a sense of the overall terrain, it's clearer than ever how "Twin Peaks" was meant to be experienced. A hybrid of supernatural murder mystery and soap-operatic melodrama (and, though genuinely terrifying and disturbing, simultaneously a parody of both), "Twin Peaks" was never quite a serial, in that it did not lay its stones, sequentially, one at a time. It dumped pebbles and boulders all over the place. This is Lynchland, after all.
As the titles (and the title) suggest, Twin Peaks (and "Twin Peaks") is a set of geographical and psychological coordinates -- a spatial and temporal map like the one that, in the series' final hours, reveals the entrance to the Black Lodge (containing the red room with the dancing Man From Another Place) in space and in time. "I just know I'm going to get lost in those woods again tonight," a doomed Laura wrote in her diary. And that's the invitation Lynch extended to viewers: "Let's get lost."
So, OK, like I was over at The House Next Door because it's like one of my favorite blogs, right? And I was making an observation that, in the last episode of "LOST"-- it was called "The Man From Tallahassee" -- when Ben tells Locke the story about a big box on the island where you could imagine anything you want inside, that it was really like a reference to Schrödinger's Cat in quantum physics, eh? It's like quantum indeterminacy, 'cause anything could be in the box but you don't know until you open it, right? OK then, so until you can see what's in the box, all the possibilities exist at once. Whatever's in there is in a superposition because it's there and not there at the same time. And, like, so is everybody watching "LOST" because we don't know what's in the big box; we just know what's in the little boxes, like the hatch and the Virgin Mary statues and stuff. And the box factory. So, then I thought I should put in a link to something about Schrödinger's Cat and I Googled it and I found this awesome video that's, like, the best thing I've ever seen on the Internet! Especially when a dog like enters the equations. The guy is Gary Burgess (but not like the guy who played Radar on "M*A*S*H" because he was Gary Burghoff, OK) and I think he's like Canadian, like if Doug and Bob McKenzie were quantum physi-cizists -- oh, Jeez! -- or something like that. So, the topic is Schrödinger's Cat and this is the video, so click on it and that's all, so g'day. And hose off, eh?
Plus, Ben is like Henry Gale, too, so he's in two states at the same time, eh?
View image Here is Lil. She indicates that this is one of Gordon's blue rose cases.
When I saw David Lynch's "Inland Empire" for the first time a few weeks ago, I knew I was going to be reviewing it for the Chicago Sun-Times and, given the quintessentially Lynchian, fractal nature of the three-hour film, I didn't know how I was going to do that. It's just not a movie that you can summarize in the usual terms of story, character, cinematography, direction, etc., and still convey a sense of what it's about, and what it's like to watch. The first thing I thought of was a scene near the start of Lynch's radically underestimated "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me," in which a complex set of coded information is conveyed entirely through pantomime, involving facial expressions, gestures, dance and dressing up. I wish I could have reviewed "Inland Empire" by doing something like what Lil does in "Fire Walk With Me." (If I could, I'd try dressing up like Grace Zabriskie and contorting myself into a writhing human mobius strip...)
Please consider this article my contribution to The Lynch Mob at Vinyl Is Heavy, where this week you'll findt lotsa Lynch links and criticism. What follows is a slightly revised and updated version of a piece I wrote about nine or ten years ago for my Twin Peaks site at cinepad.com.
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"Break the code, solve the case."
-- Agent Dale Cooper
"Twin Peaks" was conceived as a series (like "The Fugitive" before it) in which the central "mystery" (Who killed Laura Palmer? Who killed Dr. Richard Kimble's wife? And what of the one-armed man?) would spin off new complications, week after week, but would never really be solved -- at least (in the case of "The Fugitive") until the end of the series. (I like to think of it as sort of the TV series version of Buñuel's "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie," where the characters keep on walking but never seem to get anywhere. Instead of preventing these people from eatinga meal, "Twin Peaks" would continually deny the audience and the characters a solution to the mystery. I still think that's a great idea.)
But soon (or finally, depending on how you look at it), public and network pressure forced the hand of "Twin Peaks" co-creators David Lynch and Mark Frost, and they revealed Laura Palmer's murderer a few weeks into the second season. Lynch said recently (2007) in Seattle that, for him, the series was basically over once identity of Laura's killer was exposed. Ratings dived and creative ennui set in shortly thereafter. But a year later Lynch released a feature film (hissed and booed at the Cannes Film Festival) that promised to go into explicit detail (certainly more so than you could do on network television in the early 1990s) about exactly what happened on the night of Laura Palmer's death.
It was a typically perverse Lynch move -- belatedly rehashing details about a year-old, already-solved murder on a TV show that had been cancelled by the time the movie was released. Even more perversely, Lynch and co-writer Robert Engels began this feature-film prequel with an absurdist prologue that -- in case you hadn't caught on by know -- pretty much explained the spirit, and method you should have invoked to watch "Twin Peaks" in the first place. (The film -- originally sub-titled "Teresa Banks and the Last Seven Days of Laura Palmer" -- was supposedly re-cut before release; Lynch's full shooting script is available online here.)
Lynch himself reprises his role as FBI Bureau Chief Gordon Cole, standing in front of a woodsy photorealistic backdrop in his office that recalls the tropical mural used for trompe l'oeil effects at the house of Dr. Jacoby (Russ Tamblyn) in the series. Gordon, as you may recall, can't hear too well. He is accustomed to communicating in other ways -- through signs, signals, symbols, omens, clues. And he expects his agents to speak his language.
"I've got a surprise for you. Something interesting I would like to show you," Gordon yells into the phone at Special Agent Chester Desmond (Chris Isaac). When Desmond and Sam Stanley from Spokane (Kiefer Sutherland) ("Sam's the man who cracked the Whitman case") meet Gordon at the private Portland airport, they're treated to a peculiar, ritualistic display of body language by a woman in a reddish-orange dress with flaming hair to match. Gordon introduces her as Lil, "my mother's sister's girl." Lil makes faces, blinks, sashays around, and waddles away.
Afterwards, in the car, Sam asks the questions that all good "Twin Peaks" devotees are meant to ask again and again: "What exactly did that mean?" And Desmond matter-of-factly ("I'll explain it to you") deciphers a bizarre series of signs and signals and symbols and omens and clues that Lil's little "dance" conveyed about the case they were about to embark upon.
The details don't really matter much (a sour face indicates trouble with local authorities, one hand in her pocket suggests they're hiding something, walking in place means a lot of legwork, tailored dresses are code for drugs, etc.) -- it's the manner in which this info is coveyed that's important. In its secret heart of hearts, "Twin Peaks" is an epistemological thriller about perception and the ways that we assemble information about the world around us (see Mystery Without End, Amen). We humans may be capable of certain higher brain functions, but Lil's dance conveys information in a sophisticated, ritualized way that isn't that far evolved from, say, the dances of cranes. In "Twin Peaks," dreams and Tibetan rock-throwing rituals are just as vital and valid forms of detective work as forensic science. Maybe more so.
View image Me at the Double R Diner (aka the Mar-T) in the spring of 1990, with a waitress who looks suspiciously like Laura Palmer.
Oh, and the most important sign was that Lil was wearing a blue rose. But, Desmond says, "I can't tell you about that."
"You can't?" asks Stanley.
"No," repeats Desmond. "I can't."
And here we have a little mystery. The conundrums without answers are, of course, the most intriguing of all. Suddenly, all the other stuff evaporates from our consciousness -- OK, drugs, legwork, local authorities, fine. Got it. Let's move on: What about the blue rose?!? All we ever really learn about it in the rest of the movie is a remark Agent Cooper makes to Diane that this is "one of Gordon's 'blue rose' cases" -- whatever that may mean. I can't tell you.
The power of images: A conscious attempt was made to answer the indelible destructive images of 9/11/2001 with a healing one in this Ground Zero memorial that was seen all over the world via the media (and could actually be seen by satellites from space).
As we approach the fifth anniversary of the atrocities of 9/11, I still think one of the most important yet least explored aspects of the day's attacks is how they were carefully designed and staged for the cameras. Deadly spectacles that everyone kept saying was "like a movie" actually were directed that way, as a horror/disaster movie with unforgettable psychological impact -- because it wasn't just a movie, it was real. The "terror" in "terrorism" is about spreading fear and panic, and the World Trade Center towers weren't just chosen because they were symbols of American riches and hubris, but because they were visual symbols that would make for spectacular and terrifying footage. The first plane guaranteed that the second would come as an even greater shock -- and would be caught by thousands of cameras. That was the way the perpetrators spread their murderous message: they intended to terrify not just the government but the population. And, initially, they succeeded. (Nobody looked more terrified on that day than Brave President Sir Robin, who bravely ran away, away, for most of the day: "When danger reared its ugly head / He bravely turned his tail and fled...")
So, the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (who called the WTC attacks "the greatest work of art ever" -- later changing it to "Lucifer's greatest work of art") was pilloried for being insensitive (and he was), while his larger point was ignored.
British artist/provocateur Danien Hirst elaborated a bit more in 2002, but it was still "too soon" for many, who thought his words sounded flip:
"The thing about 9/11 is that it's kind of an artwork in its own right. It was wicked, but it was devised in this way for this kind of impact. It was devised visually."
No matter what you think of his tone or his timing, I don't see how one can contest that.
Lawrence Wright's new book, "The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11," explores this in greater detail than any reporting or analysis that has come along so far. A piece in Salon.com cites Osama bin Laden's role as "director":
At the heart of Wright's wide-ranging narrative is America's arch nemesis. "One can ask whether 9/11 or some similar tragedy might have happened without bin Laden to steer it," he says. "The answer is certainly not."
That's why I'm skeptical that a plot to blow up airliners somewhere in the middle of the Pacific is really the biggest plan out there. It's missing the visual aspect that is so effective at creating the fear and panic that lead to hysterical, reckless, wasteful, counter-productive and even self-destructive decision-making of the sort we've seen since 9/11. Politicians, no matter what their party affiliation (or lack of one), still haven't come to their senses.
Borat (Sacha Baron Cohen, currently appearing as Jean Girard in "Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby") has a movie coming out in November with a title as good as "Ricky Bobby." It's called "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan," and people who have seen it are raving about how subersively smart and revealingly funny it is.
Cohen and his characters (particularly hip-hop dimwit Ali G) are huge in Great Britain, and Naomi Alderman has an analysis of what makes Borat run in the UK Guardian:
Sacha Baron Cohen's latest film is due for release in November, but the storm of protest has started early. Already the film, in which Borat, a fictional Kazakh reporter, spits out food given to him by Jews on the ground it may be poisoned, and refuses to fly "in case the Jews repeat their attacks of 9/11", has been called "disgraceful" and "disgusting".
I first encountered the character of Borat in a clip from his HBO TV show which has circulated widely on the internet. Baron Cohen, as Borat, stands in front of an audience at a redneck bar in Arizona and announces that he will sing "a song from my country". He then sings, "In my country there is problem, and that problem is the Jew. They take everybody money and they never give it back." The chorus is particularly catchy: "Throw the Jew down the well (so my country can be free)." [Clip and lyrics here.]
I am a Jew. I've written about my community in a way that is critical but none the less, I hope, affectionate. I love the Jewish community with all its flaws and insecurities. And I think that Borat's song may be the funniest thing I have ever seen in my life. It is funny because it is ridiculous, because it parodies the most stupid kinds of anti-semitism, because the viewer is in on the joke. And, like the best humour, it is funny because it is viscerally, nauseatingly terrifying. It contains images every bit as unsettling as Leni Riefenstahl's "The Triumph of the Will." It is funny because it is true....
The reason it is unsettling to hear Borat sing "Throw the Jew down the well" is because of the reaction of those listening. Some sit in mute astonishment and horror. But some join in. Some sing along, smile and stamp their feet. One woman even - unprompted, mind you - puts her fingers to her forehead to make horns when he sings, "You must take [the Jew] by his horns." Borat is unsettling not because his opinions are outlandish but because he reveals how many ordinary people share them....
Borat is shocking because we cannot help but imagine ourselves in the place of his hapless victims and because we understand - though not, perhaps, consciously - that we might have acted precisely as they did. We too might have remained silent when Borat suggested "hanging" homosexuals, or nodded politedly at the suggestion that a Humvee is suitable for "running over Gypsies." Not because we fear for our lives if we disagree but, perhaps, to avoid embarrassment. Borat is funny because he is shocking, and he is shocking because he reveals the truth.
After watching the clip, I'm not so sure that at least some of the people in the crowd weren't in on the joke -- particularly the lady who makes the horns, because she seems aware she's on camera and has evidently decided to play along. Complete "Throw the Jew Down the Well" lyrics after jump...
This Sierra Mist commercial featuring Kathy Griffin ("It's Pat," "Pulp Fiction," "My Life on the D-List") and Michael Ian Black ("Ed," "The Baxter," "Stella") ran on Thursday night's edition of "The Daily Show," which featured a brilliant report about the foiled British bomb plot involving the use of liquid explosives aboard airliners. Correspondent John Oliver on the sudden ban on carrying liquids aboard passenger jets: "I'm afraid these terrorists have struck at what we in the West hold most dear: our beverages. They resent our wide array of fluid refreshment options. We live in the most easily quenched part of the world and they hate that.... Unfortunately, the men arrested were British citizens, which means the form of government here in Britian must not be democracy, for as you know, democracy is the only known antidote to extremism... It means regime change, Jon. America must topple the British government."
The premise of the ad is that airport security guard Griffin detains Black and pretends her wand is beeping when she passes it over his bottle of Sierra Mist. Don't expect to see this spot in heavy rotation much longer....
Hooray, for America! On Monday's "The Colbert Report," M. Night Shyamalan made #2 on the "ThreatDown," thanks to my diligent review of "Lady in the Water." I wrote:
The key to deciphering M. Night Shyamalan's fractured fairy tale, "Lady in the Water," is to remember that it is rooted in the mythology of Stephen Colbert and "The Colbert Report." It is a warning to Mankind about the dire threat posed by ferocious topiary bears in America today, and a salute to the gigantic, soaring eagle who swoops in to rescue Wet Ladies from pitiless ursine jaws and claws. Colbert oughtta sue.
Colbert had the perfect topper: "Well, I am suing... Spoiler alert: I was fatally shot in 1995 and I'm a ghost." Thank you, Mr. Colbert -- you will never be Dead to Me. As a proud citizen of Colbert Nation for years (going back to "The Daily Show"), I could not be more honored if I'd received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Wait a minute, let me think: George Tenet, Paul Bremer, Tommy Franks... To get that medal these days you have to commit fraud, perjury and/or war crimes. No, I'm more honored to be cited by Stephen Colbert!
Readers responding to the news that the banned "South Park" episode "Trapped in the Closet" is scheduled (again) for its first repeat showing since November of 2005 have also tipped me off (in Comments -- thanks, DVC) that the "Super Best Friends" episode was rebroadcast this week, and the world failed to end. In this 2001 show, various religious figures (including Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, Joseph Smith, Krishna, Moses and Lao Tsu) were depicted as superheroes who team up to fight the evil David Blaine, except for Buddha who doesn't believe in evil. According to Wikipedia, it was also repeated in syndication in April 2006 -- despite Comedy Central apparently refusing to show a cartoon depiction of Muhammad in "Cartoon Wars, Part II," which premiered the same month. (Sorry, Danish cartoonists. Next season I would like to see Trey and Matt actually incorporate those Muhammad cartoons into the show: "Cartoon Wars, Part III"?) And the "Bloody Mary" episode, which was withheld from re-airing after protests from the Catholic League (see "Vile 'South Park' Episode Pulled," the League's own take on the matter) is now scheduled for repeat August 2. C'mon folks, this is a show that began as a cartoon Christmas card about Jesus duking it out with Santa. Could the other kind of "market pressures" (i.e., audiences that actually want to see these shows -- and will endure the ads that accompany them as the price of doing so, unless they have DVRs and can zip through them) emerge triumphant at last? Hail, freedom!
I just love a Xenu joke. But, seriously, this just in from reader Ali Nagib:
I just noticed on my TiVo that it claims that Comedy Central will air "Trapped in the Closet" on July 19, in their usual "new" episode timeslot, at 10 and 12 PM Eastern. Go, Freedom! (I think)
Great news, Ali! I went to Comedy Central's web site and it confirms your TiVo. The episode is scheduled for the 19th (immediately following "Casa Bonita," another great one), with a repeat the next day. Will Viacom and Comedy Central have the intestinal fortitude to follow through this time? Or will they cave again at the last minute and whisk the Emmy-nominated episode back into the Comedy Closet, along with Tom Cruise, John Travolta and R. Kelly? We shall see, we shall see... Meanwhile, set your TiVos!
"If they hadn't put this episode back on the air, we'd have had serious issues, and we wouldn't be doing anything else with them," cocreator Matt Stone tells Variety....
While Comedy Central failed to publicly disclose its reasons for yanking the program (which is also credited for leading Scientologist Isaac Hayes to jump ship as the longtime voice of Chef), creators Stone and Trey Parker didn't shy away from broadcasting what they claimed was the network-sanctioned reason.
As the conspiracy theory goes, the Cruise's camp had a hand in deep-sixing the episode, with the litigious actor reportedly threatening threatened to pull out of promotional duties for "Mission: Impossible III." (Viacom is the parent company for both Comedy Central and Paramount, the studio that was releasing Cruise's film.)
Cruise's reps vehemently denied such allegations, but the "South Park" brain trust stuck by its guns.
"I only know what we were told, that people involved with 'M:I:III' wanted the episode off the air and that is why Comedy Central had to do it," Stone says in Variety. "I don't know why else it would have been pulled."
Now, Cruise's saturation-level publicity tour is over (and proved fairly ineffective, with the sequel grossing a disappointing $133 million domestically) and he is apparently in hiding with his new baby.
Have the evildoers been vanquished? Here's hoping...
"... the evil galactic warlord who made all of this possible."
"Trapped in the Closet" -- the infamous 2005 "South Park" episode that miraculously combined elements of Scientology, the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, the Second Coming, L. Ron Hubbard, Tom Cruise, John Travolta, R. Kelly, Xenu and Stan -- has been nominated for an Emmy Award, even though it's been banned from showing in the UK, and from re-airing in the United States, reportedly due to pressure from Tom Cruise and/or Scientology, two of the most unpredictable litigious forces on the planet Earth.
David Poland sent me this funny picture (of me) that he took during a panel discussion at Roger Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival in May, called "Not Playing at a Theatre Near You." It is clear that I was lost in thought. What was I thinking? I'm pretty sure it was either: "How can I get more coffee here right now?" or "We'd better stop fussing about how 'superior' the 'big-screen theatrical experience' is and just accept the reality that: 1) more people watch more movies on smaller screens (even big HDTV ones) than go to theaters, in part because home screens and sound systems have improved, while audience etiquette and other aspects of the theatrical experience have deteriorated; 2) theatrical exhibition should be seen as a luxury, not a necessity, since economics prevent many of the best movies being made nowadays from getting the wildly expensive full theatrical release treatment; 3) even critics who tout 'the big-screen experience' often don't see movies on big theater screens, or with audiences; they see them in small screening rooms with a handful of other critics, where the screens aren't appreciably bigger than my 55-inch Sony HDTV -- which, from where I sit, is about the size (and clarity) of your average movie screen to someone sitting in the back half of the auditorium; 4) there's nothing wrong -- or necessarily aesthetically inferior -- about watching movies on a video screen (particularly a rear-projection one, which uses a xenon lamp not unlike a movie projector) in a comfortable room at home, and DVDs are far superior in quality to most of the beat-up 35mm art house prints and 16mm nontheatrical prints (many of them multi-generational dupes) with which those of us who grew up as cinephiles in the '60s and '70s had to content ourselves; 5) there should be nothing shameful about 'straight-to-DVD' releases; that's a perfectly legitimate, and realistic, distribution strategy for the world we live in."
Yes, I'm pretty sure it was that second thing I was thinking about. Because I seem to recall saying it out loud.
I was reminded of this when I came upon girish's provocative posting about "Theater vs. Home" at his always-insightful and stimulating blog:
It is of course a happy truism that watching a movie in a theater is the inarguably ideal way to experience it. For a movie-lover, the theater is a sort of temple, and the experience touched with religiosity. You look up in hushed awe at the screen—in contrast, you look down at a TV screen, as Godard once noted—and the darkness dispatches all distraction, leaving only the light and sound emanating from the screen.
And then there’s the enveloping scale of the image, which you can regulate in relative terms by sitting closer or farther away from the screen. Cinephiles often have their favorite rows and vantage points (when I’m alone: usually fourth or fifth row center; when I’m with others: based upon a process of grumbling and negotiation). Most of all, you relinquish control over the movie by submitting to its (unbroken and continuous) terms, accepting its rules of temporality.
And yet, and yet….there’s a part of me that sees this hushed, worshipful submission to the terms dictated by the work of art as….a tad stifling.
Seven men from now: How many Chicagoans does it take to make up a phony terror cell?
On Monday night's The Daily Show, Jon Stewart reported on the big press conference called by Attorney General (and Pillar of Integrity) Alberto Gonzales to announce the arrest of seven men for "conspiring to support the Al Qaeda organization" -- by, maybe, tossing out the idea of blowing up the Sears Tower. Or something. Except that it turns out the men were a gaggle of losers living in Miami, had no weapons or explosives and no terrorist network connections, and one of them had mentioned the Sears Tower one time. However, one of the, uh, "alleged terrorists," was familiar with Chicago. (As Maureen Dowd described them on Saturday ("We Need Chloe!"): "[The] Miami gang of terrorist wannabes... look like they couldn't find the local Sears, let alone the Sears Tower. These guys were so lame they asked an informant for boots, radios, binoculars, uniforms and cash, believing he was Al Qaeda — and that jihadists need uniforms.")
Observed Stewart: "No weapons, no actual contact with Al Qaeda, but one of them had been to Chicago. By that standard, I believe this [see above] may be a terror cell." No doubt A--- C-----r & Co. would agree. Your Homeland Insecurity dollars at work...
OK, now they've done it. They've shown that they really can take performances from old movies and re-animate them to make new scenes the original actors never did. And make it look pretty convincing. Take a gander at this astonishing UK ad for the VW Golf GTI ("The original, updated."), in which Gene Kelly does a whole new kind of singin' and dancin' in the rain. Sacrilege or marvel? Whatever you make of it, at least it's a hell of a lot better made than the infamous 1997 Dirt Devil spot with Fred Astaire and the vacuum cleaner, based on the famous "dancing on the ceiling" bit from "Royal Wedding"...
Never send a business reporter to do a critic's job.
I'm sometimes amused by the naïveté of my critical and academic colleagues when it comes to the business realities of how movies are made, and why they turn out the way they do. They tend to view movies as a purely creative medium, and dismiss the influences of marketing and commerce on the "end product." But, on the other hand, whenever I read reports about "the biz," I'm equally amazed at how they approach movies as if they were factory-tooled widgets, nothing more than the products of corporate and marketing deals and decisions. The truth is, of course, that most movies are creative compromises, the results of a vast and complex set of inter-related artistic, commercial and economic judgments.
You'd never know that from Jon Fine's series of posts at his Business Week Fine On Media blog about so-called "product placement" in this season's episodes of "The Sopranos." Fine thinks the proliferating brand-name mentions are "suck-uppy" and rates them on a "one-to-ten scale of egregiousness" -- although, he reports, "'The Sopranos,' a show I like very much, does not do product placement in the fee-for-sense. Nor does HBO, although at times they've played footsie with the idea."
Fine doesn't acknowledge that there may be a number of creative reasons why real products and brand names are used on the show -- aside from the usual deals that allow nearly all movies and TV shows to keep their budgets down by gaining access to free consumer goods, from cars to soft drinks, that are used on screen. "The Sopranos" happens to be about people for whom bling means just about everything, despite all their talk about maintaining old-fashioned "family values" (you know, like omerta). It's a show about people in a strictly hierarchical social structure (organized crime, the mob, La Cosa Nostra)who pursue crass, vulgar, conspicuous consumption as a signal to others that they're advancing their station in life. Their lives are all about "product placement."
