Notes on some tv police procedural styles

Law and Order: Hand-held camera; no extra-diegetic score; New York location shooting with ambient sound; simple transitions and titles without effects; chronological with temporal ellipses; aesthetic of liveness; aesthetic of realism; "gritty." Opening credits sequence: bass guitar and blues riffs (almost retro, reminiscent of a dangerous 1980s downtown New York), still b/w photos with grain showing and red/blue tint, images of cast.

CSI Miami: steady camera; expensive/licensed score; elaborate, semi-fantastical sets with little to no attempt at realism (mansions, super high-tech police depts); flash transitions with freeze frames, white-outs, and sound FX; subjective imagery (flashback, imagined flashbacks/hypotheticals); "glossy." Opening credits: soaring helicopter shot, the Who, MTV-style, promises some elements of a prime-time soap as well as a procedural.

The Wire: steady camera; frequent long shots emphasizing figures' placement in landscape; diegetic music but no extra-diegetic score; Baltimore location shooting; seamless continuity editing/no punctuation as in L&O; however, cross-cuts often editorialize or suggest complex relations between one scene and another, one group of characters and another. Slightly stagey/theatrical aesthetic at times. Frequent pov shots (surveillance), but no subjective imagery as in CSI, and no shaky hand-held pov as in L&O. Opening credits: variations on the theme song w/difference performers, montage condenses the season and anticipates events that have not yet happened (creates a game of identifying the shots from the credits sequence as they arrive in the season). Also does not show cast members; rather, fragments of bodies, objects, the city.

Sicko

The final post about Sicko, and my actual review of it.

Michael Moore has perhaps one of the most readily recognizable signature styles of contemporary American directors. This is interesting in part because he works primarily in documentary. Here's a list of some of his signature elements, as I see them, after having seen Sicko during its opening weekend.

1. Moore's dominant affect is incredulity.

Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11, and Sicko all begin more or less with the same question: How could this have happened? How could this be? Bowling for Columbine starts with a vignette about the bank that gives away free shotguns when you open an account: surely you must be joking, we think. Fahrenheit 9/11 ups the ante, beginning with a montage about the 2000 U.S. election: did this really happen? How could America let this happen? (Moore: "Look, there's Ben Affleck, and that guy from Taxi Driver!") Similarly, Sicko starts with a set piece about an uninsured patient who had to choose between re-attaching his ring finger and his middle finger, each for a hefty price, and goes on to a story about a couple with health insurance who were nevertheless bankrupted by an illness. Moore prompts us to be more incredulous about things many may have bitterly accepted as necessary or even unavoidable evils: election fraud, gun violence, poor health care.

At other times, Moore plays up a crocodile incredulity for effect, as in Sicko when, in a dumbfounded tone, he repeatedly asks people at Canadian, British, French, and Cuban hospitals whether the services are really free of charge. He becomes like a reverse American Borat in these moments. There's a layering of irony: "I know that you know that I actually already know the answer to this question, but humor me anyway."

2. Moore is master of the pathos appeal: the appeal to raw emotion.

The grieving mother appears as often (if not more) in Moore's films than the evil corporate executive. High melodrama. His films also incorporate slapstick elements, "stunts" that are grand and political in nature, but with all the daring-do and glee of Charlie Chaplin kicking the boss-man in the pants. We are meant to hiss and cheer, get indignant, feel empathy and shame. The pivotal stunt in Bowling for Columbine: the K-Mart protest, where injured teenagers successfully lobby the corporation to change its ammunition sales policy. In Sicko, the main stunt is Moore taking a group of sick 9/11 responders by boat to Guantánamo Bay for health treatment, only to find that they are more welcome in Cuba. (The Bush administration, not surprisingly, has played right into the hands of this situational irony by attempting to prosecute the rescue workers for violating the Cuba embargo.)

Moore urges us to feel outrage at situations that we have come to accept as facts of contemporary life. Doctors in Britain are given bonuses for getting patients to quit smoking or lower their cholesterol, while HMO employees in the U.S. are given bonuses for denying treatment ("it's not denying care; it's denying payment"). There are people who are paid to find inconsistencies in your declarations of prior conditions so that they may retroactively deny your insurance policy. Congress is fully in the pocket of the health care and pharmaceutical industry. In France, government-employed doctors make house calls, five weeks of vacation per year is standard, and neuro-surgeons will wash your dirty skivvies for free. Such scenes are meant to arouse indignation and jealousy: blunt-edged emotions, to be sure, but they certainly do stick to your ribs.

3. Moore prefers anecdotal evidence to ironclad data.

Pathos is generated at the expense of logos: we are meant to feel rather than to think, even to glide over factual errors — or so say some of Moore's critics. But what if feeling and thinking are not opposed to one another? Could it be that we are meant to think through our incredulity, grief, and anger rather than putting them aside? Moore's arena has always been the court of public opinion; he is a filmmaker, not a researcher at the World Health Organization. But in the case of Sicko, the anecdotal strategy makes a curious kind of logical sense. If even one, just one human life is deliberately sacrificed in accordance with an insurance company policy for the purpose of maximizing profit, well, shouldn't that be all we need to know to say that there's something wrong with that policy? Anecdotes documenting 10 or 20 similar stories, and email records revealing 25,000 more, are only icing on the cake at that point, as are the missing statistics that would likely show that those numbers are in fact greater.

4. Moore uses old-school film propaganda techniques in a self-conscious way.

Michael Moore seems fully aware of how his films use propaganda techniques: leading voice-over, emotionally manipulative and commentative music, syllogistic editing and montage sequences, caricature. He's not ashamed — after all, he is fighting fire with fire, and these are the same techniques deployed by mainstream media. But his use of them is much more self-conscious, as demonstrated in Sicko by the inclusion of archival Soviet and Eisenhower-era propaganda footage, a gesture toward campy humor that seems both mocking and self-mocking. In the final scene of Fahrenheit 9/11, the woman standing outside the White House in protest over her son's death in Iraq says, "This is all staged!" No matter: the strength of the image is that it can be propagandistic, reveal this to us, and still move and persuade.

5. Moore's films offer epiphanies about the big picture that would have been impossible had he stuck strictly to the facts at hand.

Moore offers a very simple observation in voice-over at the end of Sicko (I paraphrase and expand it here). The reason we are scared to change the system is itself a fault of the system: we are drowning in debt caused by education and health care expenses, the very things that are socialized in other countries. We cannot afford to protest, go on strike, or try to shift the balance of power, because the retaliation could literally be fatal to ourselves and our families. If someone in my family is sick, I simply cannot afford to lose my job; if I am saddled with tens of thousands of dollars in debt, I am effectively enslaved to my employer. Moore has claimed that his films are ultimately less about their purported topical issues than about fear. It is by straying from universal health care to digress through 9/11, war, French ways of life, and GITMO, that the film stays most on task.

Addendum to the previous post

The third of four posts after seeing Sicko. Read the previous posts first if you haven't.

Apologies to HR personnel and benefits administrators; you are not the real target of the satire in the previous post. The target is the insurance and finance industries that design these systems in the first place. American retirement and health plans essentially require customers to stake their own lives as a precondition of service – and they do so under the guise of freedom, choice, and individual agency. When they work, they do so not by design, but by the sheer dumb luck of the planholder who never gets sick or who retires at exactly the right moment in the stock market cycle.

Imagine how many of life's most onerous stresses would vanish if we were relieved of these so-called choices: through universal, single-payer retirement and health care plans.

The previous post is meant to be humorous, but my outrage about these issues stems from a sad personal experience (warning: downer below). My mother passed away 12 years ago, at the age of 52, at Kaiser Hospital in Santa Clara, CA (an HMO). She had been treated the previous night in the emergency room of the same hospital, and was sent home with the assurance that her condition was not life threatening. She died less then 24 hours later. An autopsy ruled that she died of natural causes, but the causes of death listed on the coroner's report were not backed up by solid medical evidence. Subsequent conversations with doctors and attempts to interpret the report revealed nothing. One physician — a physician! — even chided us for probing too deeply, suggesting that sometimes, "it's best just to accept God's will."

To this day I have the nagging suspicion that it was not God, but rather the managed health care plan that was to blame for my mother's passing. I worry that therefore, I am to blame for not having understood what an inferior product it was and urging her to get different insurance. Would it have made a difference? Perhaps not. Should we have sued? We couldn't: Kaiser requires planholders to agree to mandatory arbitration through its own offices and waive the right to litigate through the courts.

A few days later, Kaiser sent us a bill. Apparently, emergency medical treatment when you are dying is not a covered benefit.

Your Benefits Elections

Post two of four after seeing Michael Moore's film Sicko. The previous post is supposed to be the epigraph for this one, à la "Shouts & Murmurs."

Let's pretend I've just started a new job — with benefits, yay! — and now I get to make my benefits elections. So, which plans should I choose?

Well, that depends on how much risk you can tolerate. Are you the gambling sort? Well, then the Aggressive Plan is for you, please walk over to the high-stakes table. How about upping that amount to half your monthly salary, and investing it all in high-risk equities? That's the only way to get rich in this country, you know. Heck, that's the only way not to end up on Skid Row! Not comfortable with risk, you say? Well, here's a geriatric investment plan that might be more your style [chicken noise, chicken noise]. Oh, and p.s., you're going to kick yourself later when you're forced to sell your home and retire in your children's basement. Because you should have invested in Finance Flavor of the Month XYZ. It went from zero to $200 a share in under two hours! Diversification is for losers. And Americans are not losers.

So, when would you like to retire? When you're 65? Well, if you're over 30, tsk tsk, I'm afraid you're going to need to go double or nothing. Here, try the Super Aggressive Plan. Who knows, you might end up living the high life, no worse off than if you had started socking it away at age 15! But you could also lose everything. Just so you know. So in case you do lose everything and end up old and broke, remember that it was your own fault. It's true, some people aren't comfortable with that level of risk [chicken noise]. But you know what? You should probably just go ahead and do the Super Aggressive Plan anyway. If the stock market crashes, you won't be able to retire no matter what, so you might as well at least give yourself that faint kernel of hope that you could strike it rich.

What, you say it isn't fair? You know, you're lucky to have this at all. Sheesh, Americans are so spoiled. There's a starving child in China who would be thrilled, just thrilled, to have that Super Aggressive Plan. Plus, we have to turn a profit: did you ever think of that? And the more your invest, the more profit we turn. How else do you expect it to trickle down to you, the consumer? And look, if you think it's that bad, why don't you try Social Security? You say it's broken, all gone? Well, good riddance to those commies. Now, aren't you glad we have real choices? Ok, sign here to authorize your monthly deduction.

Ok, now it's time to choose a health plan. Lucky you, getting insurance! We have two wonderful plans for you to choose from. Plan A costs around $9000 a month. You can go to any doctor you choose, any time, any where, no pre-approval required, and everything is covered, no questions asked. But the deductible is high, about $10,000 a year. Oh, and prescriptions aren't covered, nor are certain routine lab tests. And preventative care isn't covered either (it's considered experimental). Also, you can't have this plan if you've ever been sick before. So, this plan is really only for very cautious people with zero tolerance for risk. You're a tolerant person, right?

So, let's just turn to Plan B. Plan B is for normal, active Americans who don't foresee any major health crises. You're not planning to get into a car accident, right? Or get cancer? Of course not, what fool would want to do that. You've got great genes, by the way. And you're willing to bet on it? Good, then Plan B is for you.

So, Plan B represents a significant savings for you, with a cost of just $200 per month. All prescriptions are free, and there's a low deductible of $1500. You can only see in-network doctors, and all visits and treatments have to be pre-approved by your Primary Care Physician (PCP). The PCP you will be assigned to is very busy with the 800 or so patients on his roster, many of whom are deathly ill. So you may have to wait 6 months for an appointment. But don't worry, you're very healthy! And if you need treatment fast, you can always go to the emergency room. But don't go without calling us first. Failure to notify your insurance company prior to an ER visit constitutes grounds for non-payment (sign here, please).

Also, with Plan B it's standard procedure for us to dispute each charge you incur. Don't worry, it's just a formality. It's easy to figure out how to work the system; just read this 10,000 page benefits guide and provide the required documentation. The reading gets a bit tedious at times, I'll admit, but think of it like counting cards: there's a potentially big payoff at the end if you stay alert and informed (and some consequences if you don't!). We'll also send you a 600-page update to your benefits guide each month, free of charge. You're welcome! Don't throw it away. It's mostly about miniscule changes in how we administer claims for drug formularies that you'll never be prescribed. But one day, when you least expect it, buried deep within your benefits update, there will be a hidden clause that legally authorizes us to cause your bankruptcy or death. Only if you get sick, of course, which you said you weren't planning to do anyway. And of course you'll get to choose which one you want, bankruptcy or death. You always get to choose in America. Congratulations on your wise benefits elections. And good luck.

Huey Newton was a Kaiser

One of four in a series of posts after seeing Michael Moore's film Sicko.

I heard a moaning and a groaning, and I went over and it was — this Negro fellow was there. He had been shot in the stomach and at the time he didn't appear in any acute distress and so I said I'd see, and I asked him if he was a Kaiser, if he belonged to Kaiser, and he said, "Yes, yes. Get a doctor. Can't you see I'm bleeding? I've been shot. Now get someone out here." And I asked him if he had his Kaiser card and he got upset at this and he said, "Come on, get a doctor out here, I've been shot." I said, "I see this, but you're not in any acute distress…" So I told him we'd have to check to make sure he was a member…And this kind of upset him more and he called me a few nasty names and said, "Now get a doctor out here right now, I've been shot and I'm bleeding." And he took off his coat and his shirt and he threw it on the desk there and he said, "Can't you see all this blood?" And I said, "I see it." And it wasn't that much, and so I said, "Well, you'll have to sign our admission sheet before you can be seen by a doctor." And he said, "I'm not signing anything" and a few more choice words…

This is an excerpt from the testimony before the Alameda County Grad Jury of Corrine Leonard, the nurse in charge of the Kaiser Foundation Hospital emergency room in Oakland at 5:30am on October 28, 1967. The "Negro fellow" was of course Huey Newton, wounded that morning during the gunfire which killed John Frey. For a long time I kept a copy of this testimony pinned to my office wall, on the theory that it illustrated a collision of cultures, a classic instance of an historical outsider confronting the established order at its most petty and impenetrable level. This theory was shattered when I learned that Huey Newton was in fact an enrolled member of the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, i.e., in Nurse Leonard's words, "a Kaiser."

— Joan Didion, "The White Album," 32-33.

Top 10 Films of 2006

10. Follow My Voice (Catherine Linton)
9. Love for Share (Nia Di Nata)
8. Little Miss Sunshine (Dayton and Faris)
7. Shortbus (John Cameron Mitchell)
6. Stephanie Daley (Hilary Brougher)
5. Inside Man (Spike Lee)
4. Madeinusa (Claudia Llosa)
3. The Curse of the Golden Flower (Zhang Yimou)
2. Inland Empire (David Lynch)
1. United 93 (Paul Greengrass)

Exercise and the Nutrition Paradigm

Food writer Michael Pollan has written about the nutrition paradigm, and how it’s resulted in changed notions of what counts as food. The story goes: once upon a time, we ate breads, butters, beets, and other food items. Then, sometime in the 1970s, we started to eat from “food groups”: starches, meats, dairy, fruits and vegetables. Today, our food is yet more abstract: we consume calories, grams of protein, percentage-based intakes of vitamins, minerals, and other “nutrients.” Pollan’s advice: if your grandmother wouldn’t recognize it as food, then it’s probably not.

There is a scientific argument against the nutrition paradigm. It goes something like this: “nutrition” is poor science, for we do not ultimately know whether it’s the nutrients and calories in themselves that create health benefits, or whether there are properties within the original foods that exceed the sum of their quantified parts. We do not know for certain why a fresh potato is “better for us” than an energy bar or processed meal containing an exactly equivalent amount of vitamins, fiber, protein, calories, and so on. But common sense and the evidence of thousands of years of human eating habits suggest as much.

There is also an argument that pertains to pleasure: actual foods are not only better for you; they also taste better. There is pleasure in the culture surrounding these foods: buying and carefully preparing (or even growing) them, reading about them, going to restaurants where they are served, is a leisure activity with a yield of value far in excess of putting something in the microwave. A possible counter-argument: not everyone has the time and money to cultivate pleasure and knowledge around their food consumption, or perhaps only on holidays or other special occasions.

Finally, there is a political and philosophical argument. I think we have moved toward a cultural paradigm in which what Marx called the General Equivalent has been applied to food. The concept of “nutrition” abstracts and quantifies the experience of eating concrete foods: it alienates us from food, from the complex characteristics of living bodies, from the senses of taste and smell, which used to be a barometer of what was good to eat. It’s analogous to the alienation that Marx attributes to assembly-line and clock-punching systems of labor. I am no longer making a car; I am logging hours and quantifiable units of work. I am no longer eating a pizza; I am intaking caloric value. The current culture in one in which, in many cases, the numeric breakdown of a food’s nutritional content is strangely more recognizable than the actual ingredient list.

With exercise, a similar critique can be made. How do we know that burning X number of calories over Y duration of time spent on a treadmill in an air-conditioned gym is equivalent to burning the same amount of calories working in a garden or hauling firewood? The question seems absurd to contemporary ears: if the goal is to burn calories, why should the activity matter? And yet it is analogous to the argument Pollan makes about nutrients vs. food. There may be health benefits in the different types of motion, the exposure to sun, the state of mind one achieves when performing an actual task, that are not quantifiable in calories burned or minutes logged in exercise. Benefits that we lack the means to quantify, but that thousands of years of human experience prior to the invention of the treadmill might suggest.

Is the computer-programmed exercise machine the equivalent of nutrient-enriched foods? Is there a movement among exercise professionals analogous to the slow foods movement, the organic foods movement, and the “eat local” movement? If so, what is it?

One alternative form of exercise would be yoga, pilates, and so on — types of movement that address the whole body and mind, where the goal is not simply weight-loss, calorie burning, an aesthetically conforming body, and so on, but mind-body awareness, organ health, injury prevention, and so on (to paraphrase yoga instructor Bryan Kest, “Which machine at the gym is for your spine? Your kidneys? How many machines at the gym are for your butt cheeks and biceps? Is that really a health club, or is it an aesthetics club?”). Still, in its current American form, yoga too easily becomes a type of “exercise,” packaged and sold in commercial classes and how-to books, often obeying the same logic as the timed treadmill. Power yoga, which emphasizes cardio workout value, is an example of this. It is difficult to escape the exercise mentality, which has been naturalized to the point of appearing obvious.

Another alternative is more traditional and less trendy: organized sports, whether professional, intramural, or just loosely organized in a group. In sports games, calories are burned and people break a sweat. But there are goals (no pun intended) beyond exercise for exercise’s sake: to win in competition (agon), to improve one’s skills and strategy (techne), to experience working as part of a team (the polis, the social aspect).

There are also sports that emphasize the “fun” aspect (what Roger Caillois calls ilinx or vertigo), what we might loosely term “extreme sports.” Skateboarding, surfing, rock climbing, and so on have the benefit of strengthening the body and burning calories, but as with organized sports, few practitioners would say that this is their main reason for playing.

I imagine a new business model for the “health club” or gym that would promote ends other than just burning calories or building aesthetically valorized muscle groups. Sports and other physical activities that involve a social, mental, or skill-building aspect (dance, some forms of yoga, exercises like swimming that reward technique-building, etc.) offer one way. But another way would be to offer activities that resulted in a product, that emphasize creativity, service, and making things (what Hannah Arendt calls homo faber) rather than the brute labor of logging hours at the gym (what Arendt calls animal laborans). What if instead of spending one hour running on a machine, every gym member spent one hour raking leaves, shoveling snow, or building public housing? Or even just walking or riding a bicycle somewhere? How many people drive an hour to work, only to spend an hour that evening walking or riding a bicycle in a gym going nowhere? How many people circle endlessly around a parking lot so that they do not have to carry their bags of groceries too far, only to go lift weights in a gym? Gyms could partner with community organizations to promote and design initiatives that would channel all this Sisyphean human energy.

These remarks are part of a larger, very loose set of new ideas about the relationship between games, play, and labor in contemporary human experience.

Be Here to Love Me vs. Walk the Line

Notes on Margaret Brown’s documentary about Townes Van Zandt, guest-starring the Johnny Cash biopic in the role of Straw Man

First off, let me warn you that diehard fans of either of these musicians will probably find this review deeply unsatisfying, as I’m writing neither about the music nor the accuracy of the depictions, but rather (as usual) about the films’ modes of story-telling and aesthetic choices. Still, hopefully these remarks will provide food for thought.

In my review of the Cole Porter biopics De-Lovely (Winkler, 2004) and Night and Day (Curtiz, 1946), I made the following observations about the biopic genre, and what happens when it meets the genre of the musical:

Biopics about musicians, artists, or other types of creative geniuses…tend to portray extraordinary talent as a mixed blessing. They celebrate the artist's life as a full and exceptional one, but also contain requisite, even iconic scenes of the artist's suffering. Composer biopics like Amadeus and Immortal Beloved stress the havoc that musical genius wrecks upon a human life. Recent biopics about great scientific brains like Kinsey and A Beautiful Mind likewise portray their heroes as brilliant men who are nevertheless psychologically tormented. Finally, these films tend to depict their subjects' creative pursuits as rivals to their personal relationships, and to show the patient sacrifice endured by their wives…[But] whereas the artist biopic demands a depiction of suffering, the musical genre demands that this suffering be alleviated. De-Lovely approaches this double task by tempering its melancholy moments with old-fashioned, large-scale song numbers and sweeping camera movements. Ultimately, it also gives us what essentially amount to several different endings back to back, in varying shades of celebratory and bittersweet.

It’s either astonishing or perhaps only natural that this description could easily be applied to Walk the Line, James Mangold’s 2005 chronicle of the life of country music legend Johnny Cash, a film that is more or less true to biopic form. There are the requisite scenes of drug abuse, fractured relationships and tortured isolation, presented alongside June Carter’s patient loyalty and Vivian Cash’s not-so-patient uxorium. Scenes of Cash’s suffering at the hands of a physically and emotionally abusive father, and in particular the flashback to the death of his brother, provide the psychological explanation for the artist’s temperament, implicitly arguing, as most films of this genre do, that suffering is a primary cause and source of his creativity. The film is told in a flashback the reconnects precisely at the moment of its most highest-energy musical number, the concert in Folsom Prison, where Cash spies a circular saw that reminds him of his brother’s accident. The concert thus serves as a neat vehicle for Cash’s cathartic moment of exoneration: he has been psychologically “imprisoning” himself for his brother’s death, but at Folsom he will direct rage at his father and be redeemed through musical performance. Musical numbers serve, in a compensatory way, as the setting for the film’s moments of emotional reconnection (another example is the scene in which June Carter finally accepts Cash’s proposal of marriage). The scenes about the song “Ring of Fire” resemble those in Night and Day about its title track, with the little frissons of anticipation as we get a private glimpse into the genesis of the artist’s most well-known and beloved composition.

In calling attention to the formulaicness of this film genre, I don’t mean to suggest that the version of the Musician’s Life Story these films tell is wholly invented. It may well be true that suffering, childhood or otherwise, does indeed account for many kinds of creative brilliance, and that art is often the product of sublimated pain. It may also be true that musicians are genuinely more prone to substance abuse, spousal neglect and the like due to the exigencies of the profession. Still, what is remarkable is how frequently musician biopics seem to tell this story in precisely the same way. They mete out cause and effect to the rhythm of a clichéd series of plot points, and orchestrate life’s crescendos according to pre-programmed narrative lines. Rather than take their inspiration from the vast array of existing musical forms, they predictably mirror the sonata: exposition, development, recapitulation.

Margaret Brown’s excellent documentary Be Here to Love Me: A Film about Townes Van Zandt (Margaret Brown, 2004) depicts a subject that has, in spades, all the requisite elements that we have come to expect from a film about a musician’s life. Van Zandt’s life has psychological torment, addiction, a string of failed marriages and fractured personal relationships, isolated creative intensity. But this film is not a biopic, either literally (it is a documentary) or in spirit (it does not adhere to the conventions of that genre). More than anything, it is the narrative style — the relative lack of editorializing with regard to the content that is presented — that differentiates this film from its commercial narrative counterparts.

We learn of Van Zandt’s marriages, and tally their growing number, not through scenes of romantic bliss or domestic turmoil, but through matter-of-fact identification of interviewees as spouses and ex-spouses. His drug use is likewise presented with a minimum of explication. Walk the Line makes sure that its audience understand why Johnny Cash always wore black: it was a coincidence, a practical choice because this was the only color shirt that all Cash’s musicians owned, and it only later came to be viewed as a symbol of counter-culture. In Be Here to Love Me, we see Townes Van Zandt perform in crazy-quilt patchwork leather garments time and again, but without the tidy explanations of how the icon came to be.

Fairly early in the film, we learn that Van Zandt was institutionalized and given shock treatments. Whereas the traditional biopic would likely sensationalize this information and burden it with a great deal of narrative import (à la the death of Cash’s brother), Be Here to Love Me presents it at a remove, through an interview with a friend who was given the same treatments and suffered amnesia as a result. His testimony of amnesia paradoxically makes him all the more credible, in that it functions as a kind of proof. During this scene, moreover, I found myself thinking not so much of the horror Van Zandt’s individual suffering — much less attributing his musical prowess to this traumatic incident — than of the horror of shock treatments in general, which during this period seem to have been prescribed not so much as a treatment for depression, but as a punishment for rebellious behavior. Along similar lines, the film’s many interviews with prominent musicians and certain features of Van Zandt’s career prompted reflections on the phenomenon of the American singer-songwriter, and how so many of the most talented writers of this era were not in fact the best performers of their own compositions.

It is not simply a question of realism or accuracy, or the notion that the documentary is more true than the fictionalized film. Rather, there is something about the form and use of footage in Be Here to Love Me that allows for and invites these connections to broader social and historical issues — just as there is something about the form of Walk the Line that discourages such thoughts in favor of on insistence on the uniqueness of the individual. Both genres have their uses. But it is the documentary in this case that somehow gets us away from the cliché of the tormented, rebellious musician — remarkably, since the facts could have easily fallen into this mould.

Imagined States

Photographs by Eric Baudelaire (see link for images)
Winner of the Prize of the Fondation HSBC pour la Photographie
Phillips de Pury, New York, October 2006

The title of Eric Baudelaire’s photo installation may bring to mind Benedict Anderson’s book Imagined Communities. Anderson traces the origins of the modern nation-state: how the territorialization of religions, the decline of monarchical systems, the rise of mass print culture, and changing conceptions of historical time gave rise to new senses of national belonging and patriotism. But some regions still struggle to achieve this sense of nationhood. Abkhazia, an area on the shores of the Black Sea, and a republic in the former Transcaucasus, is one such place: with a population of two hundred fifty thousand people, it was destroyed by a war that no one reported. When Abkhazia proclaimed its independence in 1992, no one recognized its sovereignty.

Eric Baudelaire’s photographs seem to capture both the destruction of this place and its precarious and uncertain emergence. Just as we are not born into the world with a clear sense of where we end and others begin, so places seem to require acts of perception, will, and the recognition of others in order to assume a semblance of unity and cogency. In a photograph called Wait, the temporal paradox that accompanies this process is evident: is this a ruined old train station in the foreground, neo-classical in style, no longer a way station for travelers? Are the power lines that dip into the horizon new, old, functional or not? What about the factory in the background, can it be used? Has the destruction of this region created a past for it and denied it a future, or has it eviscerated the past such that only the long wait for the future remains?

A photograph called Foundations suggests a similar indeterminacy: are these reinforced concrete pillars merely the remains of bombed-out Stalinist architecture, or will they be used to create something new? Are they a memorial to the dead, or the first sproutings of recovered life? In Jetty (perhaps the title recalls the temporal loop in Chris Marker’s film of the same name), wooden columns proceed into the sea with no jetty on top of them. Will this jetty ever be on its way somewhere, or has it already come and gone?

A landscape called Interruption also explores the paradoxical temporality of this liminal place. In the foreground, cows lie about in a grassy field sparsely dotted with evergreens. Across a pond in the distance, there are signs of construction: steels frames, the skeletons of large buildings, with two large cranes hovering over them. If we were to cut the image in two, the foreground could be a pastoral John Constable landscape, with the associations of connection to nature, farming, and the working classes. The background could be an advertisement for a development company. But what has been interrupted? Is culture interrupting nature? Or has the construction been interrupted for lack of funds? If so, is this shell of a building a ruin or a foundation, or both, neither? Perhaps the connection between the two halves of the picture itself has been cut, interrupted by war.

In an artist statement, Eric Baudelaire notes that Imagined States

is not reporting in the sense that its content is not informed by transitive logic (information, messages, speech). It is not anthropological research seeking documentation to explain the stakes of the place and the people. Nor is it a self-centered voyage of initiation where Elsewhere is simply a foil to describe how one understands oneself. Everything here is considered in a manner that combines the state of things as they are and the artist's intervention.

This genre of image that combines documentary and fiction (yet creates something utterly new from them) is particularly well suited to places like Abkhazia. Reportage and research, with the aim for accuracy of information, tends to make things appear distance and past, as already accomplished facts. Fiction, by contrast, makes things appear non-present, not of this world, and merely possible, or as the internal musings of a single person. The Italian neo-realists understood this when they set their fictional stories in actual locations, and did not strive to eliminate those telling details that might “date” their films or mark them in some way that would prevent them from being “timeless and universal” (on the contrary, they sought out such details).

There is something to be said for an ethics of representation based on the information model (would Abkhazia be in this state today if its plight had been more widely reported?). But it is through the mixture of reportage with fiction and artistry that these images solicit a sense of uncertainty, thoughtful reflection, and possibility, all of which allow this location a continued existence, and capture its transition as transition rather than as a done deed, too late. This sense is similar to what Gilles Deleuze calls “belief in the world,” which is different from belief in facts:

Only belief in the world can reconnect man to what he sees and hears. The cinema must film, not the world, but belief in this world, our only link...Restoring our belief in the world — this is the power of modern cinema (when it stops being bad)...we need reasons to believe in this world.” (Deleuze, The Time-image, 172).

Sometimes the reasons we need to believe in the world, to believe in a place like Abkhazia (and perhaps officially to recognize it), come in the form of data, legally filed documents, money, and so on. Sometimes we need other reasons, like those in Baudelaire’s images: the face of the black-clad puppeteer, the green shoes worn by the comic actor in his sparse room, the blue Soviet-style car filled to bursting with oranges in One Ton of Mandarins. Another reason: the painterly, beautiful water that blurs over long exposure in Tide and Jetty, and washes up against the shores of a place that is still waiting for those shores to come into focus.

Holy Foley!

There are so very many things I want to say about Foley Gate, or Page Gate, or whatever we’re calling it.

About the statement by Foley’s attorney, David Roth, at an October 3 press conference. Roth provides three pieces of information: 1) that Foley was molested by a clergyman as a youth, 2) that Foley has identified himself as a gay man, and 3) that he has checked into a rehab center for treatment. The statement is clearly intended to cast Foley as a victim: someone who may not be fully responsible for his own actions due to childhood trauma, mental illness, or substance abuse. But because this is also Foley’s “coming out” declaration, the end result is a deliberate conflation of gayness with all these things: abuse, childhood trauma, and pedophilia (as both victim and perpetrator); disease, mental disorder, substance abuse, and general dysfunction.

Let’s pick it apart a bit.

[WEST PALM BEACH, Fla., Oct. 3 — In another day of revelations about former Representative Mark Foley, his lawyer said Tuesday that as a teenager, Mr. Foley had been molested by a clergyman and had “kept the shame to himself” until now. The lawyer also issued the congressman’s first public acknowledgment that he is gay.

The lawyer, David Roth, who said Mr. Foley had enlisted him immediately after resigning from the House of Representatives on Friday, told reporters, “Mark Foley wants you to know that he is a gay man.”

The “shame” Roth refers to is that of having been molested by a clergyman. This shame, though, slips quite easily into that of Foley being “a gay man.” A legally protected minority, in other words (no thanks to people like himself).

Mr. Roth, who said he had known Mr. Foley for 35 years, called a news conference on Monday to announce that his client had checked into a treatment center for alcohol and mental health problems…“Based upon the experts that I’ve spoken to,” Mr. Roth said, “the combination of alcohol, mental illness can result in inappropriate conduct, which Mark Foley has fully accepted responsibility for.”

What a confounding of issues! Is Foley undergoing treatment for addiction, trauma, mental illness, gayness? All of the above? There’s a deliberate attempt to confuse — and the suggestion that according to experts, these problems are a package deal, that they go hand-in-hand.

He also repeated what he said Monday: that Mr. Foley had never had sexual contact with minors. “Any suggestion that Mark Foley is a pedophile is false,” Mr. Roth said. “Categorically false.”

In fact, Roth is technically correct here, even if some of the pages were minors at the time (and disregarding the possibility that they are not counting instant messages as a form of “contact”). The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the standard handbook used by mental health professionals in the United States) defines pedophilia as “a paraphilic focus [on] sexual activity with a prepubescent child (generally age 13 years or younger).” There is currently a common-sense definition of pedophilia as synonymous with statutory rape or sexual conduct with a minor. This new meaning carries the connotation of boys being molested by members of the clergy, Boy Scout troop leaders, or gay high school teachers. But this new definition is largely a right-wing media creation, and an anxiety over masculinity blown out of proportion.

Whether or not Foley is a “pedophile,” he sexually harassed his employees. Certainly, it makes it far worse that these employees were pages employed by the U.S. House of Representatives, that they were only 16-18 years of age, vulnerable and emotionally immature. But Foley would still be culpable even if the pages were 19 or 20 at the time of the instant messaging. In fact, he’d still be culpable if they were 40 or 50, male or female: the issue is not his sexual preference, but the abuse of power. By making the issue whether or not Foley “is a pedophile,” whether or not he “sexually solicited children on the internet,” as some reports have put it, it makes it seem as though Foley would be innocent if these pages were found to be of legal age and consenting at the time. As if he’d then be just a regular “gay man” legally going about his private business.

In one of the IM transcripts, a former page asks Foley about job possibilities. Foley shrugs off the question and proceeds to talk dirty to him. This sets off a sexual harassment alarm, and is a clear abuse of the power bestowed upon Foley by the electorate.

It would certainly put the icing on the cake of hypocrisy if it turned out these pages were all underage or close to it, and if Foley’s crime were not just sexual harassment, but far worse (in juicy scandal-generating terms). It makes fantastic copy, and the Democrats should run with it. Still, let’s not forget that the core issue is not Foley's sexual orientation or identity, but rather whether he engaged in criminal or unethical activities. I don’t have a problem with Foley being gay (even if I sincerely wish he weren't) -- or even with Foley being interested in younger-looking men who are of legal and consenting age (who aren't his employees). I do have a problem with him breaking the law, lying about his behavior, and making it seem as though being gay is synonymous with being a sexually abusive alcoholic with a mental disorder.

Thanks to HMS for contributing to these ideas.