Jane Mayer on 24 in the New Yorker (via zp, chuck) is a Fast Food Nation for liberal TV junkies. Those Chicken McNuggets might be delectable, but the conditions of their creation would make any sensible person think twice before dunking them in honey, and their consumption exacts an unreasonable cost. Mayer's piece subtly makes the case that the brain behind 24, Joel Surnow, is a wingnut, and that U.S. military personnel who watch the show model themselves on Jack Bauer, the heroic torturer. Every sentence of Mayer's piece seems designed to make any leftish 24 viewer blush a little redder. Nice Jewish boy...raising his three kids Catholic. Calls his show "the Hollywood television annex to the White House." Buddies with Limbaugh and Coulter...wants to rehabilitate the good name of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Thanks to Surnow, everyone in the U.S. military wants to be like Jack Bauer and extract vital info from terrorists by injecting mysterious pain-inducing drugs that get carted around in a silver suitcase. I made up the last bit but you get the idea. It's a right-wing show having a right-wing effect. No surprises there, just occasion for a gut check. But what makes 24 so popular among liberals? Everyone I know seems to watch and like it, and my peeps are hardly the magnetic yellow ribbon crowd. Here are some thoughts on why, as Mayer notes, the show is popular with folks like Barbara Streisand and Bill Clinton.

-We like it for the narrative conceit and the suspense, and in spite of the politics (or without much reflection on the show's message). This is me, sometimes. Other times I find the narrative conceit tiresome, the situations excessively contrived, and the suspense cheap and repetitive. I always have the sense that they're making it up as they go along (which is the problem with Lost for me too) and I hate having that sense--I like to feel I can trust my TV storytellers. When I'm bored by the narrative conceit (or find it excessively familiar now in season 6), not gripped by the suspense, and attentive to the right-wingness of it all, why do I continue to watch?

-We like it as a wish fulfillment: if only the war on terror were being fought by people like Jack, a courageous hunk with a preternatural pain threshhold and a perfect moral compass. In other words, we oppose the "war on terror" as framed by the Bushies but wouldn't mind a war on terror carried out by the likes of Jack and Chloe and President Palmer. This is a suspended-disbelief stance that allows for enjoyment without endorsement. This stance describes me too, sometimes. More often I feel that it may be wish fulfillment for others, but it's worst-fear fulfillment for me. Maybe there is a masochistic pleasure in realizing your worst fears, a kind of thrill you get from entertaining a paranoid fantasy.

-We use it as cultural slumming. Many leftish sorts (like my brother) apparently like to listen to conservative talk radio, too, not to hear their opinions voiced but for that "can you believe he said that?!?" feeling. For a sense of moral superiority. And to know what they other side says so that we can beat them in arguments. I don't like right-wing talk radio, but I do sometimes find the politics of 24 fascinating in a freakshow sort of way. Other times, it just leaves me aghast and I say, no more! Then, this season, I keep watching.

And...

Heather Havrilesky, funny as ever, compares Jack's torture methods with childbirth and praises the show for jumping the shark. It's not a bug, it's a feature! I love.

Nikki Finke wants to organize a boycott. Do these things ever work?

Jennifer Holt's In Media Res entry offers a vid clip and commentary. She says she would argue that the notion that the show is right-wing is too simplistic but doesn't make the argument. Jennifer: I want to know!

LAT.

Yahoo News.

24 Bingo.

"The Orwellian Ideology of 24", a slightly overheated essay by Matt McCaffrey, who says that the show's politics "almost makes [him] want to root for the bad guys."

Happy Darwin Day! Charles Darwin was born on this day in 1809, and now many people observe February 12 as "an international recognition of science and humanity." This is supposed to be an antidote to our excess of bogus, commercialized holidays. Speaking of which, "There's nothing more deadly to romance than Valentine's Day," according to the host of This American Life, Ira Glass.

(Wikipedia)

For my Principles of Media Studies class, I have created a glossary of terms on copyright. Feel free to use it, remix it, adapt it to suit your needs. Leave a comment here if you have thoughts about how it might be improved.

24: Aqua Teen Hunger Force



(via)

39 Second Single, about a woman's experiences going on dates, is a nice change from the typical videoblog. Its star is neither young nor male, and she wins your sympathy.

Things you CAN'T do when you're NOT in a pool is excellent physical comedy from the online troupe Don't Be That Guy.

The daily podshow GeekBrief.TV with Cali Lewis has become an unexpected pleasure during my video iPod-enhanced workouts. I have tried watching TV shows on the iPod (no movies yet, though I do want to give it a shot) but I'm happiest watching content made for the very small screen on the very small screen (like The Show, above). GeekBrief.TV is about gadgets and I'm not that into gadgets, but I like Lewis's casual charm and, I guess, I'm kind of getting into gadgets. Thanks to GeekBrief, I really want a Nokia N800.

The Machine is Us/ing Us is a video that puts the ideas behind web 2.0 into a compelling visual form. I might show it in my Principles of Media Studies class when we get around to talking about the web and participatory culture.

In Media Res, at the Media Commons site, has been around for a few months; as of this week the curated video series is offering new entries daily. See for instance the press conference with the Aqua Teen clowns and accompanying discussion by Jeffrey Sconce.

Jonathan Lethem has an inspired essay on plagiarism and artistic creation in Harper's called "The Ecstasy of Influence." He writes:

appropriation, mimicry, quotation, allusion, and sublimated collaboration consist of a kind of sine qua non of the creative act, cutting across all forms and genres in the realm of cultural production.

and

industries of cultural capital, who profit not from creating but from distributing, see the sale of culture as a zero-sum game. The piano-roll publishers fear the record companies, who fear the cassette-tape manufacturers, who fear the online vendors, who fear whoever else is next in line to profit most quickly from the intangible and infinitely reproducible fruits of an artist's labor. It has been the same in every industry and with every technological innovation. Jack Valenti, speaking for the MPAA: “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone.”

and

Artists and their surrogates who fall into the trap of seeking recompense for every possible second use end up attacking their own best audience members for the crime of exalting and enshrining their work.

and

Kenneth Koch once said, “I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.” It was a charming confession, and a rare one. For so many artists, the act of creativity is intended as a Napoleonic imposition of one's uniqueness upon the universe—après moi le déluge of copycats! And for every James Joyce or Woody Guthrie or Martin Luther King Jr., or Walt Disney, who gathered a constellation of voices in his work, there may seem to be some corporation or literary estate eager to stopper the bottle: cultural debts flow in, but they don't flow out. We might call this tendency “source hypocrisy.” Or we could name it after the most pernicious source hypocrites of all time: Disnial.

and

Any text is woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The citations that go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read; they are quotations without inverted commas. The kernel, the soul—let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances—is plagiarism.

The essay is itself a tour de force of literary sampling. Don't skip the ending.

link

if:book blog on the academic conference:

the traditional conference which is structured around the presentation of papers might be putting the emphasis on the wrong aspect; focusing on the presentation of the author/speaker while leaving the discussion for the hallways, dinner tables and cocktail lounges. conferences officially capture the one thing which you don't need a conference to capture - the written record of the formal paper. we can do better than this.

Indeed.

Like academic publishing, academic conferencing is stuck in an old mode and needs to get with the information age. The twenty-minute paper, read word for word off the page, is the standard format for conferences in film and media studies and many other fields in the humanities. Courtesy aside, listening to these papers is often boring. It’s hard to deliver a paper well when reading off the page. (It’s probably even harder to present a paper well when not reading off the page, so I’m not advocating that everyone start speaking extemporaneously.) Worse yet, presenting papers in this fashion uses our time and resources inefficiently. As the if:blog suggests, perhaps circulating papers electronically is preferable to having them read aloud.

And even if people are still going to read their papers, why not also circulate them on the internet? They all exist in electronic form, so let’s get them into each other’s hands--let’s make them avaialble not only to people who happen to show up at the conference panel, but to anyone out there at any time who might have an interest in the work. Scholarship belongs online. What is avaialble online will increasingly be the scholarship of first resort for anyone doing research. This might be regrettable in some ways, but it is the new reality. I am more likely to read things if they are online. I am more likely to assign them for my classes if they are online. And since putting things online is so easy, so fast, and so inexpensive--practically free--I can’t think of a good argument against it. And yet I'm willing to bet that almost none of the conference papers I have heard in the past few years exists in an easily accessible online form.

There is another way of applying digital technology to updating the academic conference. I haven’t participated in one (yet), but there are online conferences like this one on the convergence of web culture and video sponsored by the New Media Consortium to be held March 21-22, 2007. They're taking applications until February 23. The conference will convene entirely in what used to be called cyberspace. Here is part of the call for papers:

Video as we know it, produced by experts and consumed by viewers, is metamorphosing into a different genre altogether, blurring the lines between producers and audiences. New video-based forms of self-expression are emerging, with notable examples like video mashups, jumpcuts, and video blogging. Nonlinear narratives abound in this format, in which stories unfold across a series of 1 to 3-minute clips and web viewers are drawn into mysteries such as the story of Lonelygirl15. Brand-new forms like machinima are emerging that bridge virtual worlds, gaming, and storytelling, all through the medium of the small video.

The singular focus of the Online Conference on the Convergence of Web Culture and Video, part of the NMC's Series of Online Conferences, is to consider how these developments are impacting our lives, and how they are affecting the ways we work, learn, collaborate, and even socialize.

The conference is designed to spark an examination of this phenomenon that explores both the positive and negative aspects of it on learning, social interaction, self-expression, and more.

Conference Format

The conference will be conducted entirely online. Sessions, which will be conducted live, can incorporate a variety of visuals and rich media, and are generally about 45 minutes in length, with about half that time devoted to dialog with participants using voice over IP.

Designed for both synchronous and asynchronous participants, the event was conducted entirely online using an innovative conferencing environment provided by NMC Distinguished Partner LearningTimes. Attendees of NMC's online meetings enjoyed a wide range of features commonly associated with their traditional face-to-face conferences, including interactive sessions from engaging presenters, "hallway" conversations, chances to ask presenters questions, and more.

I imagine that the problem with an online conference is that the hallway is a "hallway," but having never stood in a conference "hallway" I will hold off on judging the idea. And if I participate, I'll be sure to let you know how it goes.

Film History Fakelore

The linguists at Language Log are fond of picking on journalists who make fallacious claims about language. One hobbyhorse is the notion that the Eskimos have a hundred (or however many) words for snow. Not only is it incorrect, but its typical deployment in formulations like "if Eskimos have dozens of words for snow, Germans have as many words for bureaucracy" is a cliché. (Here is a nice list of such statements.) Thus they have two complaints about this kind of journalism: it is based on a misconception about language, and it is a kind of bad writing.

Film and media scholars might be equally irritated by mainstream writing about their field, and on similar grounds. Popular prose about media is often full of clichés and some of these clichés are based on misconceptions about film and media history. The passage that caught my eye most recently was in an article in the Washington Post by its film critic Ann Hornaday about YouTube:

One hundred years ago, the first moviegoers ran screaming from a French theater while watching a train pull into a station; they were transfixed by quotidian scenes of a baby eating lunch, a man being sprayed by a sprinkler and workers leaving a factory. Today we have a baby passing gas in a crib, and teenagers mixing Diet Coke and Mentos and cats, cats, cats.

Conditioned by "magic lantern" slide shows and serial comics of the 19th century, the earliest filmgoers at first didn't see film as more than just a series of still images. But then -- and fairly quickly -- out of the random, the daily, the incidental, a cohesive aesthetic emerged, born of film's distinct visual grammar and narrative power.

Here are two claims about early cinema, the former far more common than the latter, both based on no credible evidence that I have seen.[1] It is convenient for Hornaday's point to recycle these myths about the introduction of cinema. It helps make her discussion of web video appear to be grounded in an historical context for understanding the emergence of new media. But it doesn't excuse her offering bogus facts that we are expected to accept as though they are just part of common knowledge. (Aside from this passage and some other regrettably glib phrases--she calls the audience for YouTube "an eagerly narcotized booboisie"--the article is full of useful insights into the web video phenomenon and I recommend it.)

Popular writing that makes references to the history of film often relies on such an unofficial body of common knowledge about the topic, and much of it is at best partly true. You might have your own roster of favorite dubious notions about film history; these are some of mine.

-Moviegoers in the 1890s were panicked by the train's approach in the Lumière film L'Arrivé d'un Train.

-The Great Train Robbery was the first film to tell a story.

-D.W. Griffith invented or discovered "film language."

-The Jazz Singer was the first sound film.

-Citizen Kane is the undisputed heavyweight champion of cinematic masterpieces. This one generated its own saying: "X makes Y look like Citizen Kane."[2]

-John Cassavetes (or Sam Fuller, or Andy Warhol...) is the "father of independent cinema."

-Jaws was the first summer blockbuster and its success killed the more authentic auteur cinema of everyone's beloved early 1970s.

There are at least three problems with these assertions as they are typically made. First, they are historically inaccurate, are based on too little evidence, or simplify something rather more complicated. The Jazz Singer, for example, was not the first film with sync sound or the first feature film with a soundtrack. It was a hit feature film made with some synchronized dialog and singing and it had some role in influencing the creation of more sync sound features--a role abetted by promotional puffery from the film's own producers.[3] It marks one significant event among many in cinema's transition to sound. Putting it that way makes it more difficult to slip in as a factoid along the way to making some other point. It is rhetorically more effective to treat film history as a before and and an after, with The Jazz Singer marking the passage.

Second, these formulations are based on fallacies of historical reasoning. Popular discussions of history often fall back on certain habits of thought that professional historians consider highly problematic. In film history as in history generally, these include the "great man" theory that gives more credit to individuals than to other causes (structural ones, for example, such as economics, technology, and society). It makes a more compelling story if you put a great man like Edison or Griffith or Cassavetes at the center of it. But "great man" history often slights many important issues. Griffith's contribution to the development of cinema into a narrative art, which he himself advertised in the early 1910s, has too often been grossly overstated. Great man history makes the error of assuming that events may have a single cause.

Another historical fallacy we often find in journalistic film writing is the emphasis on firsts. It seems to make some kind of intuitive sense to try to identify the first instances of important things, but ultimately it is of limited value to the historian because firstness is not an explanatory notion. It doesn't often tell you anything about a category to know which instance of it came first. If Jaws was seen as innovative in various ways (e.g., in the way it was advertised and promoted), that is a significant fact. But naming it "the first summer blockbuster" is like pinning a ribbon on the movie. What does that gain us?

Finally, like the clichés about Eskimo words for snow, these bits of fakelore are evidence of bad writing. Good writing avoids facile analogies and conventional wisdom. Good writing is built on good ideas and respects the complexity of complex things.

As for the notion that early cinema spectators saw "a series of still images": does this not contradict the notion that early cinema spectators were afraid of an onrushing train? Who would be panicked by a series of still images of a train?

[1] Martin Loiperdinger, "Lumière's Arrival of the Train: Cinema's Founding Myth" The Moving Image 4/1 (Spring 2004), 89-118, discusses the centrality of this story to film history. Loiperdinger writes on page 94, "Are there credible reports from eyewitnesses that document the panicked behavior of the spectators? Apparently nothing of the sort exists." The article goes on to describe the film and its reception in terms not of confusing image and reality, as the myth suggests, but of offering the thrill of a "fantastic image of familiar reality."

Recent film history surveys either ignore the story of spectators frightened by the onrushing Lumière train (Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, Film History: An Introduction; Douglas Gomery, The Movies: A Short History), or make clear that its veracity is questionable:

-"Apocryphal tales persist that the onrushing cinematic train so terrified audience members that they ducked under their seats for protection." Roberta Pearson, "Early Cinema" in Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Ed., The Oxford History of World Cinema (Oxford UP, 1996), 17.

-"From the platform, the camera observes the train in the distance approaching the station (legend has it that some spectators panicked as the engine appeared to come closer)." Robert Sklar, Film: An International History of the Medium (Prentice Hall, 1993), 30.

An earlier generation of film historians was less careful in evaluating claims of this sort and are among those responsible for spreading this story, as Loiperdinger discusses. "[T]he audience shrieked and ducked when it saw the train hurtling toward them," writes Gerald Mast, A Short History of the Movies (Pegasus, 1971), 33. Now even Wikipedia says that the story of the panicked spectators is bunk.

[2] These were on the first page of hits when I searched Google for "look like citizen kane":

-"[Kumbha Mela] makes Zabriskie Point look like Citizen Kane."

-"This cinematic Chernobyl [Millenium] made Gigli look like Citizen Kane."

-"[Dead Poets Society] was bad, but The Emperor's Club made it look like Citizen Kane"

-"[Blow Out] makes the San Pedro Beach Bums and Pensacola NAS look like Citizen Kane and Forrest Gump."

-"[The author's video of himself during Trial Skills Weekend] makes my commercial for the Awesome B and C Alarm Clock look like Citizen Kane."

-"Armageddon makes Deep Impact look like Citizen Kane."

-"[Britney and Kevin: Chaotic] made Crossroads look like Citizen Kane"

[3] For more on The Jazz Singer, see Donald Crafton, The Talkies: American Cinema's Transition to Sound 1926-1931 (U of California P, 1997), especially 516-531.

Videovideovideovideovideovideo...

Watch the R-rated trailer for Knocked Up, Judd Apatow's forthcoming comedy. All your favorite Freaks, Geeks, and Undeclareds are going to be movie stars. Katherine Heigl too, probably. If you click on only one of these links, make it this one. (via)

I thought I would never see another recut trailer parody worth watching till the end, but I was wrong. This is really good: When Harry Met Sally as a horror film by John Piscitello. The conventions of the scary trailer are all here: shifts in music tempo, stylized titles, ambiguous facial expressions. The orgasm scene in Katz's Deli doesn't exactly work but they couldn't very well have left it out.

Speedometer videos scare the crap out of me. (via)

A surreal Golden Girls theme remix from Fatal Farm, with the girls reincarnated as cookies and then eaten. See also the more disturbing Happy Days theme from the same twisted minds.

Lots of funnies in the Battlestar 3rd season gag reel.

3D Morphable Model Face Animation, a demo to make you go Wow.

***

Some more sources for online videohounds: Morbidly Amusing, Viral Video Chart, The A.V. Club's Videocracy, Salon's Video Dog. Happy sniffing.

Ars Techinca, a site I discovered only very recently and now cannot live without, has a survey of the advanced technologies used in broadcasting the Super Bowl. It's another reminder that today just about all media are new media. If you watch the game's broadcast over the air on a conventional set with a tube, you are still experiencing the product of numerous advanced digital technologies.

For instance, the yellow first-down line requires a detailed digital model of the stadium that syncs with computers to track each camera's position, zoom, and tilt data. The cablecam, strung up over the top of the field for overhead shots, is controlled using a Linux-based computer that updates its position 200 times per second. Supervision replay cameras shoot in HD, 2400 x 1800, and up to 480 frames per second. The cameras require so much memory (24 gigs) that they can shoot only a few seconds at a time. Even if not cranked to full capacity, the cameras still shoot "fast enough to make even a center's gut jiggle a thing of slo-mo beauty."

Unfortunately, this year we will not see EyeVision, which configures 33 cameras around a stadium's perimeter to create a "Matrix" effect. The producers can "pause the action, rotate 180 degrees around it, and resume viewing from the other side." But switching from standard to HD cameras, among other issues, meant that this option would be off the table this year.

Finally, NFL Films still shoots many thousands of feet of 16mm every year. That's old media. But to watch it, you probably need cable TV. Or better yet, YouTube.

Everything is Miscellaneous:

Helvetica is a movie about a font.

Lawrence Lessig says that Congress needs to do something about the internet.

There is an X motif in The Departed. I didn't notice it when I watched the film. To me this says that the filmmakers did a bad job of exploiting the motif. That or I wasn't paying attention the way some people do.

Jonathan Lethem wants you to adapt his short stories into plays or short films; you pay him $1.

Goodstorm is an online t-shirt design app.

All the press for The Sarah Silverman Program is making me eager to watch tonight: The Watcher; an interview on NPR's Day to Day; Tad Friend in The New Yorker (more on that here). Watch it.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project has released a report on tagging which is as good an introduction as you will find to the topic. It includes an interview with David Weinberger, whose book-to-be is has the excellent title Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder.

Torontoist: "Famous YouTube Bridezilla Revealed." It's a performance. The hair is a wig. This is great work. "It looks cute! It looks like Shirley Temple or something!" "Can you put away the camera!" The surest sign of a hoax is that someone says to stop shooting.



What I liked best about the "Bride Has Massive Hair Wig Out" video was that it made you wonder if it was really real. Some of these YouTube sensations trade on that ambiguity, familiar from Reality TV and P.T. Barnum, between the authentic and the sham. The pleasure is in the wondering. And having the word "wig" in the title of the video, hiding in plain sight, just adds to the effect.

My new splitscreen:



I have been experimenting with Firefox's Split Browser add-on as a way to watch videos online while doing other things at the same time. Before today I was often clicking on other tabs while listening to the audio from a vid clip. This way, I keep keep an eye as well as an ear on what I'm watching when my attention is divided. You can split any tab off right, left, above or below by right-clicking on the tab and calling up a "split tab" menu. The open tabs can be expanded or shrunk quite easily. Lifehacker notes that this add-on would be especially useful for people who have ample "screen estate" (i.e., really big monitors).

The pages you see above are an article at TeeVee about how some current shows are adding extra scenes of this season's episodes for viewing online (eps of The Office are available in extended versions from iTunes; Battlestar Galactica has an extra scene of its most recent ep up on its website); and a video of sand art by Dato and Ilana Yahav on YouTube (via MeFi).

Expanded Cinema is a blog curated by Joao Ribas that collects videos of short films, mostly avant-garde/experimental. (via Girish)

What's new in new media?

Rupert Murdoch: "News Corp. will try to concoct the next YouTube on its own." Good luck!

YouTube 2.0: We're going to rape your eyes and ears with advertising! We're going to share our revenue with you!

MTV is now, among other things, a 3D virtual social network. (Yeah, the NYT had this story four months ago.)

A kind of manifesto-cum-rant on "vernacular video": "the vernacular domain is a noisy torrent of immense proportions." Can't argue with that.

Some people are making money from web video. Some are even managing to be funny.

Fun with Amazon! ZonTubeß mashes up Amazon (music) and YouTube; Amapedia is Amazon's new wiki.

Does the Long Tail apply to the television industry? A debate begins.

Studio B on Wilshire Blvd.



From The Soup on E!. (via)

The first episode of the CBC sit-com Little Mosque on the Prairie (previously) is online. It has the same earnest, multi-culti sensibility that makes Degrassi seem so endearingly Canadian. And it's the only contemporary instance of North American pop culture I can think of that makes a Muslim woman in a headscarf and long sleeves seem sexually alluring. This pilot episode is full of double-entendre terrorism jokes and there's no way they can keep up that kind of humor, but the writing and acting are both competent and there's a sizable audience watching, so the show should be given a chance to find its groove. I hope to see more.

A review in the Vancouver Courier makes the point that the non-Muslim characters are hardly recognizable as small-town Canadian prairie folk--they come off as rubes. Well, rubes hardly bother me in a sit-com. Actually, the realism issue that I found confusing is that the Muslims in the show come in too many ethnicities. Some are white, one is black, and others are shades of brown. Some seem Middle Eastern, others South Asian. One central role is played by Carlo Rota, the same Canadian-English-Italian actor who is Chloe's BF in the current season of 24, fighting Muslims in one show while playing a Muslim in another. Of course Muslims do come in many ethnicities, and this is a good point for the show to represent, but it seems preposterous that one small community of Muslims in Saskatchewan would be so diverse. Some socially progressive representations (including Degrassi) sacrifice certain kinds of realism in order to promote a positive message.

(For more detailed thoughts about the first two episodes' writing and execution see Dead Things on Sticks, a blog by a Canadian TV writer.)

Woody Allen appeared on The Dick Cavett Show on October 20, 1971. These clips are from the Cavett "comic legends" DVD which I haven't seen, and are probably out of order.

In this one, Woody discusses the upcoming shooting of Play it Again, Sam and the writing of Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex. "I like my movies to be sloppy." But he likes his writing "to be "perfect." Talks about whether movies are art or not. Names three artistic films that rank with any other art form: The Seventh Seal, L'Avventura, and an Andy Hardy film, which gets a laugh. Cavett says that when he asked Welles the same thing, he answered Grand Illusion. It's a bit astounding that people had this conversation as recently as the 1970s, fifty years after the European avant-gardes of the 1920s and in the heyday of auteurism.

In one segment, Woody plays clarinet, bluesy, for laughs. It's so gratifying now to watch him please an audience. Then after a commercial he plays seriously and passionately.

Dick and Woody talk about food and health offers a kind of diet humor that seems totally unfunny now. Woody knocks over a table, then talks about avoiding cholesterol. Reminds me of the scene in Annie Hall when Alvy, out in L.A., orders a bowl of mashed yeast.

"Dick and Woody Debate Particle Physics" is the continuation of the last segment. Woody: "I would marry again, I think..." Yikes. Dick asks if Woody has a type. "I like pretty girls...and earthy looking...straggly earth mother sexual kind of animal disgusting types..." Then after the commercial: "My ex-wife is suing me because I made an amusing comment about her." This part is offensive by today's standards, which makes it all the more delightful as an object of nostalgia. Near the end Woody describes visiting Freud's house in Vienna.

The next clip picks up with Woody's discussion of his thirteen years of Freudian analysis, real intimate stuff. And a clip from Bananas. And Woody talks about being a college dropout, having failed out of NYU's motion picture production program and then City College's.

Then Woody plugs Getting Even. Lots of casual sexism in this one.

***

More Cavett:

Groucho Marx in 1969 singing "Lydia the Tattooed Lady." His lascivious eyes didn't suffer with the passage of time.

Mel Brooks is introduced as "one of the world's weirdest men." He discusses his Oscar, his mother, his wife; does a bit of his borscht belt act (they call the Catskills "the mountains"), and around 5:30 does a little Man of a Thousand Faces. In another clip after the commercial break, Mel calls Dick an "extravagant Gentile" and does bizarre impressions: Humphrey Bogart's sister, James Cagney's Aunt Hilda. Then he sings an impression of Sinatra doing "America the Beautiful" which is as good as it gets (just the song part is here).

John Lennon and Yoko Ono is quite odd. Cavett speaks Japanese, Lennon speaks Yiddish. That's chapter 2 of the DVD. Another clip offers the true story behind "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and "Happiness is a Warm Gun." Yoko doesn't talk a whole lot. In another episode, John discusses the origins of "Woman is the Nigger of the World," and he and Yoko perform it with their band. You can find other segments if you poke around.

Cavett interviewed by Charlie Rose in 2001. At 12:41 they roll a clip of a very young Cavett doing The Ed Sullivan Show. At 16:45 he talks about why he loved Groucho and then we get a clip of Groucho being interviewed on Cavett's show. 20:38 brings a clip of Katherine Hepburn talking about not wanting to be interviewed on a talk show. Around 24 minutes Cavett starts talking about stalking Greta Garbo. At 29:20, a clip of Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer being nasty to one another with New Yorker writer Janet Flanner and Cavett in the middle. Flanner blows Mailer a sarcastic kiss around 31:05 and Cavett starts to laugh one of those genuine private laughs you don't often see on talk shows. Then Mailer calls the other three "intellectually smaller" than himself! What a shmuck! He patronizingly tells Cavett to ask the next question on his question sheet, and Cavett comes back with a perfect line: "why don't you fold it five ways and stick it where the moon don't shine."

Ron Moore's Battlestar Galactica Podcast for "Rapture" (which aired Sunday, January 21) contains all manner of insights into the mechanics of television narrative. Moore discusses how telephone calls can cover for patches in exposition (a Hitchcockian trick), how plot points have to work around production constraints (avoiding location shooting in favor of studio shooting), and how scenes are moved around during writing and editing to get a good rhythm and avoid having acts shorter than six minutes. He says that the teaser and first and second acts are extended to keep audiences from changing channels during commercials (though DVD viewers won't care about this), so later acts end up being short. At the same time, every act ideally should culminate in a cliffhanger act-out, with the third act-out having the strongest moment of suspense. (I have found that many shows have weak third-act endings, but this observation is totally casual.) The podcast humbly points out various ways that the episode could be stronger and many of his points address the ways that writers have to manage audience expectations. Some plot inconsistencies he mentions might be the sort of thing that most viewers won't catch, but "if you're listening to the podcast," he says, "you want to know how the sausage was made."

In an interview on Fresh Air, Guillermo Del Toro discusses his interests in fairy tales, magic and fantasy, the Spanish Civil War, insects, monsters, dreams, his childhood, symbolist painting, and other topics. I saw Pan's Labyrinth a few nights ago and was wowed by the power of its storytelling and the imaginativeness of its visuals.

I have been collecting sources on The Daily Show for a point I want to make in my ongoing project on videoblogs. So here they are. If you know of interesting scholarly discussions of fake news that I don't mention below--especially from cultural/media studies approaches--don't hesitate to send them my way. (Basically I'm interested in the way that some videoblogs adopt conventions of fake news: adopting a parodic tone of mock seriousness; using comic techniques like when Jon Stewart has a conversation with news clips, answering politicians' sound-bites with critical retorts; functioning as a filter for the day's stories.)

-Wikipedia: The Daily Show. All Wikipedia entries should be so comprehensive.

-Ars Technica: "The Daily Show is as substantive as the 'real' news." This is a report on a study by Julia R. Fox, who teaches at Indiana University, of coverage of the 2004 presidential campaign. Fox found that TDS showed longer campaign-related segments and devoted more of each half hour program to campaign issues than the network news shows.

-A.V. Club: interview with Steve Carrell about various topics including the process of working as a "correspondent" for TDS.

-Columbia Journalism Review: interview with Jon Stewart from 2003, mostly about appealing to young people. Ends with this zinger: "I think you can make really exciting, interesting television news that could become the medium of record for reasonable, moderate people. And I think it hasn't even been tried, quite frankly."

-Transcript of Bill Moyers's interview with Jon Stewart: Moyers asks whether TDS is an old form of parody and satire or a new form of journalism.

-The Daily Show and the Reinvention of Political Journalism (pdf) is a conference paper by Geoffrey Baym, who later published a longer version as "The Daily Show: Discursive Integration and the Reinvention of Political Journalism" in Political Communication 22: 259-276. Baym argues that rather than accepting the notion that TDS is "fake news," we should think of it as a form of alternative journalism that allows for greater criticism than standard news formats and promotes deliberative democracy.

-Entertaining Politics: New Political Television and Civic Culture by Jeffrey P. Jones, a book about TDS, Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher, and Dennis Miller Live.

VideOh!

Frontal reactions of girls getting waxed mostly is much too pedestrian a title for this montage of women framed head to mid-torso as they lean back in the salon chair in preparation for having their pubic hair waxed, and then as the wax is torn from their flesh. Their faces express their feelings with vividness and intimacy and a swinging electronic dance track makes their fear and pain seem a little less awful. It was directed by the British music video director Matt Kirkby, who also made Basement Jaxx's U Don't Know Me, starring Queen Elizabeth II.

How to Poop is a Japanese potty-training video starring animated cats and a dancing cartoon turd.

Parcheggio perfetto is four-plus minutes of the worst effort at parallel parking you have ever seen, with hilarious (unintelligible to the non-Italian speaker) commentary by the people around the camera, perched on a balcony above the street. Around 2:00 the driver has a shouting match with someone offscreen and the people by the camera crack up.

The Ten Stages of Opening a Jar is another comic short film by Aaron Yonda, of Madison, WI, one of the talents behind the celebrated Chad Vader series.

All the James Bonds sit at one poker table in this inspired remix called Casino Royal II - Let's Play Again by JMY. This would be a good one to show if you ever happen to teach the Kuleshov effect the same week that you teach fandom and participatory culture.

This interview in Written By with the writers of Borat includes discussion of how the film was conceived as a narrative rather than just as a string of improvised scenes. Every bit was staged with a plot point in mind, and Cohen had lines for various alternate scenarios during each encounter, to use depending on how the "real" people responded to his provocations. At the end, they also talk about how each talk-show appearance during the film's promotional campaign was scripted.

See also:

-Kristen Thompson's discussion of Borat's creation and her earlier comparison of Borat to Snakes on a Plane.

-Deleted scenes: Borat in a supermarket, at a doctor's office, trying to adopt a pet, crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, and talking with a police officer who "don't high five nobody."

Last Thursday's musical episode of Scrubs fits well into the patterns I discussed recently in writing about contemporary film and TV musicals. "My Musical" motivates the numbers by having a patient with a neurological condition that causes her to hear singing, thus confirming for the audience that there is something odd about song and dance. The musical numbers are all available on YouTube. "Guy Love," sung by J.D. and Turk, brings the sexual subtext of their relationship to the fore (as often happens on Scrubs). The group number "Everything Comes Down to Poo" is cheerfully scatalogical. And Dr. Cox's Gilbert-and-Sullivanesque" Rant Song" shows off John C. McGinley as the showman he is. Also worth checking out: Bill Lawrence's interview in TV Squad. Among many fun tidbits, we learn that the "jocky" writers on the show are actually secretly "metrosexual" musical theater lovers.

A long interview with Rob Thomas, creator of Veronica Mars, has appeared at TV w/out Pity. (Aside: when will TVWP make its website act like it's 2007? Loading 20 pages to read one interview verges on obscene.) I haven't read the whole thing yet but RT begins with a discussion of how each episode is written. This relates to an article of mine about television storytelling called "From Beats to Arcs: Toward a Poetics of Television Narrative"; here is a pdf). Thomas talks about working backwards from suspense-building "act outs" (the scenes that end with a commercial break), which is something I discuss in my article. In a nutshell, I argue that TV storytelling exploits television's need to break for commercials to craft norms of exposition and dramatic development around the commercial breaks. The medium's detractors might consider the commercial breaks an aesthetic liability; I argue that television writers have turned this constraint into an opportunity to make their stories more engaging.

Zeitgeist monitor: a diagram of "is the new" phrases like "non-fiction is the new fiction" and "Laguna is the new O.C." and "RSS is the new www" and "digital is the new film." Of course, the largest number of things are the new black. (via Language Log)

Listen up: podcast-interview with David Bordwell at Zoom In Online on film blogs, web video, academic film studies...

MySpace pages of Idol rejects from this week's episodes: Tuesday, Wednesday. I wasn't going to watch until it was down to the twelve finalists but...well, you can figure out the rest. (via)

Ze Frank is going Hollywood. Specifically, feature films.

When I have a quick reaction to this kind of news (in this case, mixed feelings), my impulse is often to keep thinking it over. Blogs thrive on the fact that many seem to have the opposite impulse. To wit:

-Jossip:

Ze is Internet famous. Not MySpace royalty, but he hosts a vlog show that attracts about 25,000 viewers a day. Now he's going all Hollywood, has agent-ed up, and is trying out extensions in to the big and small screen.

“There was a pilot with CBS that almost went to deal, but we had to kind of pull out of that,” said Mr. Frank. The show had been a sitcom with a “tie-in to online space as well.” So Mr. Frank has decided since then to focus on feature films for his first foray into the mainstream. But don’t worry, netizens! He swears he’ll never ditch the Web.

At least until he can figure out how to farm out his vlog hosting duties to an intern while he makes the shift to a screen Americans actually know how to navigate. Which will happen in exactly never years and not a chance months.

-Buzzmachine:

The Observer profiles Ze Frank and reports that he is going Hollywood with an agent and a plan to break into movies. I’m a fan and wish he’d stick with the small screen. Ze had created his own unique visual voice and his own comedy HQ; too bad he’ll be abandoning both in March.

I've seen the first two hours of this season's 24, a show I have quit watching at least five times. My thoughts are pretty much the same as The Nation's Jon Wiener's: "The show is much more successful than the White House at making the case for torture."

What everyone else seems to be talking about in the world of audiovisual technology:

-Netflix to offer streaming video service, "free" to subsribers (with a time limit, a limited library of available titles, on Windos/IE only...).

-The bloom is off the iPhone.

-Joost, formerly known as The Venice Project, is to be a rival to YouTube (it hasn't been released yet except to an exclusive group of beta testers). NewTeeVee has a few screenshots and last week had background info including lots of techie details I don't really get about how the thing is supposed to work. (The new site: Joost.)

-HD-DVD has the edge on Blu-Ray, say the tech-trackers, because the porn industry likes HD better. Here's an interview with porn director Robby D. The favored historical analogy is Beta and VHS: Like Beta, Blu-Ray is Sony's format and Sony is apparently threatening to take away licenses from replicating houses that do Blu-Ray if they do adult.

Notes on Web Video Form

I have been thinking a lot about the form of the new web videos, especially The Show With Ze Frank. These are some of my notes. My ideas are in a formative stage, so any thoughts you have in response are most welcome.

When I say “web videos” I am first of all talking about short-form streaming videos from free-upload hosting sites like YouTube, Revver, and blip.tv. I am not talking about long-form streaming video on TV network websites, videos shared using BitTorrent, or TV show or movie downloads on iTunes. For the most part I am talking about videos made for web distribution rather than content whose primary distribution is not on the internet. (The exception is user-uploaded clips of movies and TV shows, to which these observations should apply.)

(In referring to these short-form streaming videos, I am generalizing about a huge category and trying to make some sense of it by identifying some key features. Like any generalizing, this emphasizes some aspects of the category over others and might seem to leave some examples out. I think this is how we generally use categories. Some instances of short-form streaming web video might be peripheral to the discussion, but our notion of the category’s contours is shaped more by prototypical instances than by outliers. For more on this notion of categorization see this Wikipedia stub.)

Three key characteristics of recent web video, all of which are points of contrast with mass media moving-image forms like movies and TV shows:

1. Web videos are ideally short and “sweet” (in the slang sense): they have to fit into their viewers’ patterns of internet and computer use, typically characterized by scarcity of time and attention. Many are video blogs and like blogs they tend to be brief, personal, and topical. Web videos seem eager to please, to appeal to viewers and engage their attention right away. The ideal length might be around three minutes. This is what I like best about these videos (the good ones, anyway): they capture my attention, make me go Wow, and never let me go until they’re over. E.g., Ask A Ninja Question 29 "BBQ".

2. Web videos are produced not only by creators but also by communities. Web videos are an instance of participatory culture: viewers are also creators, or at least potential creators. Because of their episodic nature and the frequency of newly updated material appearing online (practically continuously), creators are able to respond to each other and to their viewers more or less in real time. This has been essential in many of the most talked-about web videos, including lonelygirl15 (which presumably pursued the occultish elements of the story in response to viewer interest in them) and The Show With Ze Frank, which according to Frank takes the form of “a conversation between the host and the viewers."

3. Web videos have an amateur aesthetic. They are made outside of the major media industries -- even if they are remixes of mass media -- and by people who lack not only formal skill and training but also the technological and economic means available to professionals. Their production is artisanal rather than industrial. Like punk and other DIY movements, web video has a democratic spirit that insists on authenticity and is suspicious of anything that looks too good. Amateur means not only non-professional or untrained; more importantly, it means passionate. An excellent statement on the amateur aesthetic comes from Ze Frank's defense of his ugly MySpace contest. Frank reclaims "ugly" as a quality that's "pretty cool" in the hands of amateurs teaching themselves to use media authoring tools. He celebrates the anyone-can-do-it mentality as essential to the new participatory culture.

Why do web videos have these characteristics? Two concepts I find useful in answering this question are functions and constraints. Form tends to follow function and I see the short-and-sweet form of web videos as a response to the function they have of offering their users a diversion from some other activity. Much blog reading and web video viewing occurs in the context of work--in the context of what corporate America calls “stealing time”--and so videos function as little breaks from studying or crunching numbers or doing whatever it is people in offices do all day. It’s for this reason that some people refer to watching these videos as “snacking.” The viewer wants something fast and dirty and doesn’t have time to watch something ten or twenty minutes long. If it’s a clip from The Colbert Report, it’s just the best few moments. Thus web videos are an interstitial form--they are for filling in time between other activities.

Another way of thinking about functions is as affordances to the user. New media scholars often talk about the internet’s social affordances: e.g., social networking sites afford people the opportunity to make friends. The internet, as a network of users rather than a channel that sends media only in one direction from producer to consumer, affords interactivity. This means that YouTube videobloggers can post response videos that have a link from the video to which they are responses. And in the case of Ze Frank, the audience can become a collaborator in producing content for the show: introductions that fans shoot and upload to the site, projects they participate in like making an earth sandwich, and even a whole episode that the community scripts collectively on the site’s wiki. Fans of mainstream media poach and remix and some movies and TV shows allow for a kind of minimal fan input, but the participation going on with web videos can be of a different kind--there may be considerably more of it, it has the possibility of occurring in real time during the process of production and consumption, and it is built into the very structure of the distribution channel. Web moving-image media affords community in a way that other forms do not.

Constraints come in many varieties: economic, technological, cultural or social. Conventions of form (like genre conventions) are also constraints. The maximum running time on YouTube videos is ten minutes; that is a technological (and for YouTube an economic) constraint. The consumer-grade apparatus and budget available to many creators is a constraint. The convention of amateurism is a constraint, too. What’s most interesting about constraints on creativity is how they are made into opportunities, how working within them produces something good. Web videos are short and sweet because people who make them don’t have unlimited time (after all they can't pay their rent making web videos), aren’t professional media producers and don't have the means available to professionals, and want to produce a regular output for episodic release online rather, as in the professional mode, than working for a long time to produce one long video. A constraint becomes an aesthetic advantage when the short-and-sweet form produces the Wow response and the tightly seized attention.

The web itself might also be a constraint because of how people use it. When I watch videos online I am typically doing a number of things at once. At any given time I typically run three or four applications (Word for writing, Firefox for web browsing, NetNewsWire for tracking RSS feeds, iTunes for music, and sometimes Photoshop or PowerPoint or Preview for reading PDFs). In Firefox I generally have multiple tabs open: e-mail, news items or blogs I opened but didn’t get to read, etc. The typical online experience involves multi-tasking, and if my attention for a video flags I might click on one of those other tabs as I continue to listen in on the audio track. Since web video creators are also users, they know about how users’ attention is potentially divided; this feeds back into their assumptions about how to make their videos. Again: it creates the conditions for short and sweet.

A lot of talk about these new web videos is about their potential to be a threat to big corporate mass media's domination. A lot of talk is addressed to the potential for user-generated media to create a democratic revolution of media production by anyone and everyone. While I share the hope of the new media evangelists, my interests as a scholar run more toward analyzing what already exists than fantasizing about what might come to pass. I'm interested in figuring out what makes this new form compelling much more than in trying to divine its implications for the future of society.

I expect to share more of this work here in the near future. Stay tuned.

***

Recent faves of the web vids:

-World Freehand Circle Drawing Champion--I love little movies shot in classrooms.

-Silent Star Wars--eps 4-6 condensed and silentized.

-Season 4 of 24 in 2mn30sec--24 frames play simultaneously; eat your heart out Mike Figgis.

-101 Impressions--in four minutes!

-Puehse Twins Skateboarding--eight years old, mad skillz.

-Windows 386 Promo Video--skip to around the 7 minute mark.

Bonus: one way to feed your hunger for all this stuff is the aggregator site vidmeter, but you have to be willing to be your own vulgarity filter (or--better yet--not!). Another good way is The Daily Reel, which exercises taste and judgment rather than ranking by popularity.

Random:
+Apple: Kottke rounds up the iPhone buzz on the web. Pronounces the Zune dead, bitches (persuasively) about the sorry status quo for celphones, asks some provocative questions, and links all over.

+Annals of globalization: new Bombay movie Guru is having its world premiere at Toronto's Elgin Theater (where Cats will always be playing in the Toronto of my idealizing nostalgia), with top tickets at $500. (via Cinematical)

+On the indie trail: Sundance is the hipster's Disney, reports Wired News (what else is new?); The Hwd Reporter rounds up a year of "seismic changes" in independent film--hits, misses, new kids on the block, money money everywhere; Variety reports that IFC will move away from independent film, toward original programming--its first drama, Pornopolis, "revolves around an average family in the L.A. 'burbs -- whose parents happen to run a porn business." (That sounds like something I've heard before--have I?)

+Telly: Les Moonves says that CBS is transforming itself into "an audience company"; in an apparently unrelated story, CBS's sit-com The Class will offer live video of its table reads online.

+Futurology: Robert Scoble predicts that Netflix will be killed by new, improved p2p video delivery using Flash; The Truetalk Blog describes how YouTube is having a hard time maintaining a good community...loyal users are turning away...some say YouTube can't last.

Today I finalized the syllabus for my Principles of Media Studies course, which is an introduction to basic issues in the field. I'm offering it to you here because I have benefited from reading other people's, e.g., Chuck Tryon's Technology and the Language Arts Curriculum (tentative at the time) and Cory Doctorow's Pwned, on copyright in the digital age.

(I decided to make a course website using Google's page creator instead of using the university's "Desire 2 Learn" software partly because I don't like D2L's interface and partly because I wanted the site to be accessible to anyone. Someday perhaps I will learn how to design for the web for real, but for now Google will do--it's free and easy.)

Here is a video shot, edited, and uploaded to a blog using nothing but a Nokia N93 phone. The topic, of course, is shooting, editing, and posting using nothing but a Nokia N93 phone. The camera is the star. (Bonus: an ad for the product; a thorough review.)

Ad Age: "a year ago this would have been every TV executive's nightmare." CBS will encourage viewers to put clips of CBS shows online.

Since I hate spoilers, I have not read this interview with Battlestar Galactica honchos Moore and Eick. But I am eagerly awaiting reading it when I am no longer spoil-able. Apparently, it contains details of a straight-to-DVD BSG movie to be released between seasons 3 & 4. Read at your peril.

What's new in bar and bat mitzvahs?

CONCEPT VIDEOS: Today's teens are forgoing the traditional video montage and channeling their inner reality star by creating concept videos. With themes like the Academy Awards or the Olympics, these preproduced videos reflect the child's personal interests and feature creative cameos from their closest friends and family. After guests are seated for the party, a screen (or screens) will emerge and a video plays introducing the Bar or Bat Mitzvah child into the room. What a way to make an entrance!

(via Ypulse)

Apple's new widescreen media player, which is also the new iPhone:



Lots more pics at Engadget; flashy demo at Apple's website.

Stephen King in EW--in the snazzy 24 pull-out section--gives us the formula for high-concept serial TV:

24 is a perfect example of why some serial TV works and some doesn't. The audience will come along for the ride, but it requires certain things as a quid pro quo. One is an element of believability (which ABC's Invasion never supplied). Another is what producers sometimes call ''a clear through-line.'' What this high-toned bit of jargon actually means is simplicity (NBC's Kidnapped threw that out in the first five minutes of its abortive run). Another is a high emotional temperature (which ABC's The Nine managed for exactly one week before lapsing into soap opera torpidity). Continuing stories have to run hot. How 24 has managed this kind of heat for six seasons is beyond me.

Last — and here's the genius part — continuing series must provide some degree of closure; the audience must feel they are getting somewhere. One of the reasons Lost may have suffered in the ratings this season (although suffering in TV is relative, and many struggling shows would kill to have Lost's ratings) is because it somehow misplaced that sense of things rushing toward some sort of conclusion. Even Fox's Prison Break (a column on this wonderful and hilarious show is forthcoming) provides that sense of closure; at the end of the first season, the main characters broke out of prison (well, duh). Now that the actual prison break's over, season 2 should be titled Show Me the Money.

eFilmCritic: film reviewing blurbwhores of 2006, exhaustive. The long, long lists of inane praises are a kind of found poetry.

I Tube:

Classical Music: Adam Fulara plays a Bach Prelude and Fugue tapping on two necks of a guitar. (via)

Indie music: This Sony Ad uses the song "Heartbeats" by The Knifes covered by José Gonzalez. The Knifes released Pitchfork's album of the year, which includes the original of the track. (via)

Sports: "That does not belong in the National Hockey League!": Ales Hemsky scores for the Edmonton Oilers with two seconds left. I love that I can appreciate the beauty and drama of sports on YouTube without being a sports fan, without having to watch entire games, without having to read the sports section, and without suffering the obnoxious voice-overs and music on ESPN.

Lonelygirl15: I stopped watching after the big reveal (here's an article about lg15 I wrote at the time for Flow), but this recent episode, "Bree's Dad is Dead," is quite haunting in its combination of music and images.

Paranormal rom-com: "Love Corner," by the Boston-based comedy troupe Zebro. (via)

Memento lite: Previously, a short murder mystery that actually goes backwards--not in reverse order, but in reverse. Winner of four awards in a 48-hour film competition.

Musicals Classic and Contemporary

In which I show American Idol more love than Dreamgirls

Every few years a Hollywood musical attracts unusual fanfare and some enthusiasts hope it might mark the genre's return to significance. In 2001 there was Moulin Rouge! and in 2002 Chicago. This year it's Dreamgirls. But a real return to the way it was seems like awfully wishful thinking, and none of these big films really aims to revive the style of the classic musical which was, in its day, the equivalent of our summer blockbusters, raking it in at the box office by offering spectacle, melodrama, and the biggest stars in the stratosphere.

The problem with making Hollywood musicals today is the audience. The core ticket-buying group for American movies, young males, does not just dislike musicals but is apparently made uncomfortable by them. Some spectators titter at the moment characters break into song. One guy in the front row at the Dreamgirls screening I saw last week in Toronto got up and wandered out of the auditorium a few times when characters began to sing. When I used to screen Meet Me in St. Louis on the first day of a film history class, some of my male students would exhale loudly and shift uncomfortably in their seats as the numbers were beginning. I asked one group of students why people had that response, and some earnestly answered that it's just not realistic for characters to sing. Not realistic for characters to sing! This from a generation that has grown up on South Park, Star Wars prequels and first-person shooters!

What's really going on, I surmise, is that musicals have become a challenge to heteronormative masculinity. Over the past few decades, gay male culture has made showtunes into a signal of gayness, and as gay culture has gained visibility so has the musical as its emblem. According to a widespread cultural cliché, there is no better evidence that a man is in the closet than a stack of Sondheim cast recordings. As a generation has grown up more aware than in the past about "alternative lifestyles," it has protected itself from seeming gay by disavowing its comfort with the genre. Some high schools apparently now can mount a musical production only if all the parts, male and female, are played by girls. And let's give gay culture some credit: among the things gay men like about the muscial are its overwrought theatricality, its heightened mode of performance, its intensity of emotion. These qualities are the opposite of those associated with straight masculinity in contemporary western societies (and probably in many others too).

Many new musicals seek to defuse the problem audiences have with the genre by tinkering with the way that the numbers are worked into the story. This is a clear case of an aesthetic program being dictated by a social constraint, a sense filmmakers have that audiences prefer certain kinds of representations. As Bill Condon says in his interview with Michael Sragow, the spectator has to be eased in. In the process of easing us in, the makers of many new musicals are giving up the distinctive character that gives musicals their appeal. In particular, they are sacrificing the convention of characters breaking into song, singing rather than speaking their thoughts and words. These new musicals are compromising some of the pleasures of the genre.

The musical has always exploited a tension between its two modes of performance, drama and song-and-dance. When one shifts into the other, the audience is supposed to experience a kind of lift, an emotional charge. The moment when a number begins can be transformative. The challenge for filmmakers is to manage the transitions from one mode to the other, from narrative to number. How do you combine the two? Many early musicals had a revue format in which the songs were not well connected through an overarching narrative, but the genre coalesced around movies in the 1930s that departed from that convention and integrated song and story together, much as forms of musical theater (opera, operetta, singspiel) had done for many years. The point was not to subordinate the song to the drama but to achieve a balance between them and ideally to make them mutually reinforcing by having numbers that arise organically out of narrative demands and that also reward the drama by developing plot, character, or theme through music and dance. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers's RKO pictures are often thought to be the epitome of the "integrated" musical, and in their numbers they often continued to tell their movies' stories about boy-girl romance through flirtatious, competitive, quarreling, or making-up songs like "I Won't Dance," "Pick Yourself Up," "The Way You Look Tonight," "A Fine Romance," "Never Gonna Dance," "I'll Be Hard to Handle," "They All Laughed," and "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off." Even Busby Berkeley films--often thought to put spectacle way ahead of narrative--have narrative integration, as Patrick Keating argues in a recent article in The Velvet Light Trap (no. 58, pp. 4-15), "Emotional Curves and Linear Narratives."

In various ways, recent film and television musicals have found alternatives to having characters who feel a song coming on. Chicago has numbers as Roxie Hart's subjective fantasy sequences, which makes clear that in the narrative world of the film, characters do not break into song. There are many precedents for these psycho-numbers. Fosse himself also used them in All That Jazz. There is a dream sequence number in Oklahoma! Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective is full of fantasy numbers, too. Another option is that of Moulin Rouge!, which makes the narrative seem so outlandish and fantastic that having characters sing doesn't seem like a "break" into a different register of experience. In Moulin Rouge!, characters singing and dancing doesn't come off as a departure from dramatic realism.

There are still other novel devices that can ease the audience's negative feelings about characters breaking into song. "Once More, With Feeling," the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, has the characters sing only because they are under the spell of a demon. They would prefer not to find themselves stuck, as Willow says, in a "wacky Broadway nightmare":



Another TV example, High School Musical, bases its plot around a character who is reluctant to sing and dance because those things aren't considered cool. By making him gradually warm to the idea, and eventually even be comfortable for his friends to know about it too, the audience is also encouraged to accept the form of the musical and be tempted by its charms (though this audience seems to be predominantly female, so perhaps it is really being encouraged by a fantasy that cute boys might be so tempted). In sum, many recent musicals make their integration of musical numbers an issue; they are not comfortable to adopt the classic musical's basic convention of integration.

The solution Bill Condon has found in Dreamgirls is in some ways the least satisfying of all. For about half of the movie's numbers, he adopts what seems to me to be an original alternative: he cuts away from the singer(s) to montages, some flashing forward and others showing contemporaneous events, that link the ideas from a song to events in the plot. In Dreamgirls, as the characters sing we see images of their rise to stardom. This helps the audience feel that the numbers aren't putting storytelling on pause, Condon says . Unfortunately, it also has the effect of taking the audience's attention away from the music and performance. The signature appeal of the genre, watching virtuosic performances of song and dance, is missing for much of the movie. I kept saying as I was watching: this film has no numbers!

How strange to think that the audience's attention would wander during the songs. This is the exact reverse, presumably, of what many audiences experienced during the musical's heyday, when the plot was often seen as a vehicle for motivating the numbers. I remember being taken to stage musical productions as a kid (My Fair Lady, Guys and Dolls) and being bored during the dramatic portions. Anyhow, in a well made muscial, every few minutes of performance are hardly pauses in the narrative. Narratives are constructed so that the numbers will have significance not only as something to command our attention, but as a way of presenting characters and their interrelations, as when Esther sings "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" in Meet Me in St. Louis, expressing her feelings--and ours--about her family's imminent separation. Numbers introduce and develop characters and settings (e.g., "Jet Song" in West Side Story), clarify conflict ("America," "Gee, Officer Krupke"), deepen emotional expressions and effects ("Maria," "Tonight"), and resonate with a film's themes ("Somewhere"). If the songs are good and appropriate, there is no earthly reason why a director should need to add additional narrative appeals. Taking the camera away from the character singing takes us away from our connection with their story. The characters in Dreamgirls seem flat for various reasons, but not least because their intense expressive moments, during their songs, are often offscreen while Condon flashes his montages. It also doesn't help that Dreamgirls itself, source material and execution, is mediocre: forgettable music (especially compared with real Motown), clumsy exposition, weak performances (especially Beyonce's but also Jamie Foxx's unvarying sourness), and a plot that consistently neglects its main character, Jennifer Hudson's Effie.

***

The cast credits at the end of Dreamgirls give Hudson a certain pride of place, putting her last and giving her a title that reads, "And Introducing Jennifer Hudson." This is ironic considering that not that long ago, Hudson was seen on TV by millions more viewers every week than will pay to see Dreamgirls in theaters. Her apparently slam-dunk Oscar performance as a big black girl who gets passed over for the pretty, skinny one is the happy ending to a story of rise and fall on American Idol, from which she was eliminated unexpectedly early. Hudson has earned the film's loudest raves and it is intensely satisfying to see her "introduced" even as she needs no introduction. Her performance of "And I'm Telling You I'm Not Going" is the opposite of Condon's montage numbers--engrossing as a solo performance, full of rage and yearning, and full of close-ups that betray no reluctance to stay with the singer and song. And her acting is of a different kind than the other women in Dreamgirls. It invites empathy. Hudson makes us root for Effie. Indeed, if she is being promoted in the supporting category for Oscar consideration, the film's producers are repeating the slight done to the character, making Hudson seem like a second-fiddle performer in the movie in which she is undeniably the main attraction, the brightest light, the biggest voice, the most magnetic performer. (This injustice was duplicated when Hudson was left off the D'girls Vanity Fair cover.)

But the ultimate irony is that this role, this Hollywood debut, is supposed to mark Hudson's proper arrival when it should be plain to anyone who likes to be entertained, has a populist-egalitarian sensibility, and watches television that American Idol is in almost every way a more satisfying musical experience than Dreamgirls. Idol isn't a musical in any strict sense, but it does offer many of the genre's pleasures. And despite its obscene product placement and thick layers of musical cheese, Idol is often the most compelling show on television. We get to know the kids trying to make it, cheer them on or love to hate them, and worry as we wait to learn their fates. When a favorite Idol contestant sings well, the audience can feel proud of them. Musicals might be out, but American Idol is the most popular culture in America (with the possible exception of the Left Behind novels). And the central appeal of American Idol is the performances, the singing. Unlike Dreamgirls (and for that matter, MTV), Idol has faith that the audience wants nothing more than to give its full attention to music. You can now tell what parts of a TV show people really like by looking at what they upload to YouTube. Like this clip from the season just past, of Elliott Yamin (just a kid from Richmond, VA, diabetic, deaf in one ear, crooked teeth, worked in a pharmacy, loves his mom...) singing Donny Hathaway's "A Song for You":

Sacha Baron Cohen interviewed on Fresh Air talks about the origins of his "undercover" comedy style, the importance of his personae seeming foreign and stupid, the inspiration for Borat...

Little Mosque on the Prairie is a sit-com about Muslims in Saskatchewan premiering next week on CBC. It has been the beneficiary (?) of an avalanche of publicity: CBC, NYT, CNN, and more. Torontoist reports that to promote the show, the network is giving away 100 kilos of halal chicken shawarma in downtown Toronto. But will any of this matter if Little Mosque doesn't bring the funny?

Variety interviews four high-profile cinematographers on the advantages and disadvantages of shooting with digital cameras and links to fifteen more informative articles about how recent films (including most of the awards season favorites) were shot. (via bigscreenlittlescreen)

David Denby rounds up the usual suspects in an article on the American film business in The New Yorker. The studios make expensive, mass market films for young men and families. They make most of their money from home video and ancillaries, but they're still focused on the big opening weekend. The mini-majors make more sophisticated movies on smaller budgets for an urban élite. Teenagers and young adults often prefer the internet to the multiplex. The experience of movies in the theater can't really be reproduced at home or on an iPod--it is in some ways diminished.

The article contains various false notes. Denby makes it seem like it's a new thing that people watch movies on small screens, but this has been going on for half a century. He describes most movie theaters as rotting relics of the 1970s, neglecting the boom in theater construction in the 1990s and early 2000s that has perpetuated and exacerbated opening-weekend mania. And he suggests at the end of the article that one savior for movie theaters may be having trendy cafés in the lobby, which have been fixtures of upscale exhibition for many years.

Denby is best when comparing film and digital projection/viewing experiences in terms of qualities of images and sounds in the various formats and spaces used to experience them. His description of the sound experience using headphones as opposed to sitting in a room with speakers is a good point I hadn't read elsewhere. These observations make the case for defending film better than his more lyrical and nostalgic passages. For example:

At home, watching an old movie that once engulfed us, we yearn for more emotion, more color, more meaning. If we can’t get it, we have to fill it in from memory, the way someone listening to a beloved piece of music on the beach will fill in instrumental color and rhythms wiped out by a roaring surf.

Who is this "we"? I know what Denby is talking about, but this isn't always my experience. Repeated viewings on video often increase my affection for old films, and the many films I have seen only on video have often moved me emotionally in a way that didn't leave me wishing for more.

(See more discussion + links at the chutry experiment.)

EXTRA: Denby more or less demolished by the Bagger, who links to the NY Observer's Deep Impact to the NYer's Armageddon.

The Boston Globe on the TV season to date: too many serials, too little time. But don't most shows fail every year? If there are going to be lots of any kind of show, most of them will fail. It also compares The Office to The Mary Tyler Moore Show; you know I think 30 Rock is the better comparison. (via Convergence Culture)