Category: Television

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A Visit to Ottawa – Part II

Bill’s Trip to Canada’s National Capital: Part II

I stayed in Ottawa recently to take a course in Oracle, the world’s most powerful and expensive data base. I stayed at the Lord Elgin, which is really pretty fancy, though I assure you it is priced very competitively with Holiday Inn. They took my car away from me from the moment arrived– I haven’t even seen my keys in four days– so I was forced to walk everywhere.

I walked down the Rideau looking for a Wendy’s. There were two Burger King’s, a McDonald’s, a Dairy Queen, and a food court in the Rideau Centre, a giant shopping mall. I ended up with a Mozza burger from A&W and New Yorker Fries and a complete waste of dinner.

On the way back, I stopped in at Chapters to try to find a book on humor by Gershon Legman. The staff were not helpful. Well, I’d never heard of him either until recently. The computers they have scattered throughout the store are supposed to help you find books. It found Legman’s book but it declared that not only was it not in stock, but it wasn’t even “available”. This is a book that some people with opinions I respect think is a very, very important book.

On the way back, I dropped into the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography. There is a long staircase descending from Rideau St. to a long, empty hall, and then another staircase that descends to the main hall. On the upper hall is a display of photographs of images from a television set of an 8mm camcorder video taken by a guy named Ho Tam. In these images, Ho “moves between the roles of observer and participant” and produces a series of “grainy yet sensitive pictures”. Ho reflects on his schooling experiences (the shots are taken in a Catholic school he attended in Hong Kong) and, “most importantly, the ‘lessons’ learned during those formative years— love, desire, discipline, trust, fear, and loss of innocence”.

To me, they looked like a bunch of badly lit, badly aimed Kodak Instamatic photographs. What’s in them? What did you think would be in them, given the description above– “loss of innocence”? They consist of a bunch of images of the buildings, the kids playing soccer or hanging around, and the toilets, and foliage.

Well, that’s the problem with modern art, you know. I say I wanted to see some very sharp, specific images of faces and people acting upon each other and their environments. The artist asserts that I am oppressing him with a paternalistic and fascist sense of structured literalistic meaning.

But let’s think about this. Why do we have modern art? Because artists since 1920 have been so wildly inventive and imaginative that they have single-handedly struck upon a mode of expression that contains the unparalleled potential to illuminate the zeitgeist of our own era? No. Modern Art exists because photography came along and removed the figurative, representational purpose of painting and sculpture. With nothing else to do, art turned in upon itself and became self-referential, drawing attention to it’s methods and material elements and structure. The next thing you know, it is mocking those very self-referential elements, and then it is trying to draw attention to the fact that it is mocking itself, and then it tries to be so cool that it doesn’t even seem to be mocking itself, all the while demanding that patrons pay outrageous sums of money in order to exhibit these products upside down in their living rooms.

So you have Jackson Pollock with his splatter-paintings, and Andy Warhol with his soup cans. So you have the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York fighting bravely for the honor and respect of modern art now caught in it’s own theological disputes over whether or not post-modernism really exists and should have a place to display itself.

And you have Ho with his deconstructed photographs. What is he doing?

He is using a technology to imitate an art form that is a revolt against his technology.

Is he a genius?

No, because he doesn’t understand what he is doing. What he thinks he is doing is making his photographs “artistic”. How do you make them artistic? Well, good heavens, not by finding interesting subjects and photographing them accurately. You make them artistic by finding uninteresting subjects and photographing them in uninteresting ways, with uninteresting angles, in degraded colour and low resolution, and then you mount them on the wall and point to them and tell people–you have to tell them, or they won’t know– that this is art.

Your artlessness camouflages the fact that you have no creativity to offer, that you didn’t do the hard work of composition, lighting, camera angle, colouration, and so on.

Most importantly, you ban cameras from the building.

I’m not kidding. I’m looking at these awful illustrations on the wall and reading a sign and the sign says that anyone trying to steal these images will be prosecuted for copyright violation. God help us, someone might try to steal a photograph of your bad photographs! It makes me think of an old, fat, diseased whore: “Don’t you even think of trying to get me to pose nude for you, my boy!”

Down the hall, in the main hall, don’t you know, are more mature works by a more respected visual artist– Pierre Boogaerts.

I am reading the program notes on Pierre Boogaerts. Is there any greater testimony to the bankruptcy of modern art than phrases like this: “… belongs to the generation of artist who adopted photography as their preferred means of expression in the early 1970’s”. Isn’t that bizarre? It sounds like elevator conversation– you have to say something, so say something inane. Anyway, his work is “marked by a conjunction of influences from Pop Art, Land Art, and conceptual art, and called into question the formulation and function of the work of art itself”.

That kind of consummate gobbledygook may have been excusable once upon a time, when the philistines were upon us, or when Stravinsky almost started a riot in Paris with “Rites of Spring”, but to write that kind of crap in 2001 of a mediocre artist like Boogaerts raises the question of whether the curators of this museum themselves must realize that it sounds like a joke.

There’s more:

“The Exhibition is selected from the entire body of work donated to the CMCP by Boogaerts in 1994. Poetry, an essential dimension of Boogaerts’ production, which is frequently masked by its conceptual art trappings, is highlighted in the structure of the exhibition through the use of analogy. This approach focuses attention on the visual beauty and associative processes inherent in the medium, which influenced the development of the artist’s ideas.”

Maybe you can rationalize away the word “entire”, as if he had another body of work that wasn’t “entire”, or the coy link to poetry, and maybe even “conceptual art trappings”, but I defy any sane person to excuse, in the name of literacy, “associative processes inherent in the medium”.

If you’re still interested, his photographs consist mainly of repetitious shots of leaves and buildings, arranged in various uninteresting collages or shapes and sizes.

I was the only person in the museum for the first ten minutes of my tour. Four or five other people came in while I was there. The staff, three people, well-dressed, behind the main counter, seemed discernibly alarmed when I came in. A security guard tried to follow me but I think she didn’t want to appear to be too suspicious so she hung back and tried to look nonchalant while making sure I didn’t stick a photograph of a leaf under my coat. They didn’t check me for anthrax or bombs or anything– does Osama Bin Laden know that the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography is a sitting duck?

It reminded me of a moment in Europe, in 1977. I toured the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which was great, and very busy, and the Van Gogh Museum, also in Amsterdam, and the Louvre in Paris. At either of the latter two, I could easily have walked out with any painting, including the Mona Lisa. Shortly afterwards, a mad Dutchman sliced Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch” and that was the end of that era.

Everybody jaywalks in Ottawa, even the police. Well, perhaps I exaggerate. I didn’t actually see any police jaywalk, but I saw several of them sitting in cars or Jeep Cherokees near busy intersections and not one of them tried to arrest me for jaywalking.

Being the law-abiding sort, I wanted to wait for the lights to change, but this young girl who looked like she knew what she was doing blustered ahead of me and charged through the red “Don’t Walk Sign” so I followed. In fact, she demonstrated a convincingly degree of leadership, so I followed her for several blocks, at a discrete distance of course. She was good at it. She knew exactly when you could charge safely through a red stop sign and when it might not be safe.

We passed a demonstration near the National Arts Centre. I didn’t notice what it was for. I was instantly sympathetic with their cause…. until they started chanting. That’s when I am forced to tell myself that I could never be one with the poor and oppressed of this earth. I am genetically programmed to become nauseated at the first sound of a sing-along, group chant, slogans, and such. I would be a lousy demonstrator. When the woman with the bullhorn demands, “what are we going to do about it?”, I would shout, “I don’t know. What? Can we think about it?”

There was some kind of diplomatic gathering at Hotel Laurier. There were about twenty limos there with various chauffeurs standing around, shaking hands and gabbing. It looked like a United Nations get acquainted party. The cars, each with a distinctive red license plate, were parked all over the place, including on the sidewalks. I noticed that some of the “limos”, probably from poor third-world countries, were Neons and Jettas.

I saw something on the sidewalk and picked it up. It was some kind of identity card, which must belong to someone important. This person is so important, he doesn’t need his name or any other identifying marks on his card. It just has a magnetic stripe., and it is attached to some kind of belt clip with a yoyo type wire that reels back into a little disc. Very cool. I looked around at the chauffeur drivers but none of them met my eyes, so I walked off down the street with it. A few blocks later, I passed a cop and thought of turning it over to him, but then I thought it might arouse suspicion in these paranoid times, so I tucked it into my pocket and walked back to my hotel.

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CTV Mutilates Another Film

For about 5,000 little reasons, I have always disliked CTV. It has always seemed to me to be the most “American” of the big three Canadian Networks, and the most commercial. By “American” I mean that it seems populated by editors and programmers who never forget for even one second that the bottom line is profitability.

Even the investigative journalism on CTV smacks of ABC’s “20/20”, one of the worst journalistic television programs in existence. What’s it called? W5? Sensationalistic and specious.

The CBC, of course, is a prize. Non-commercial radio and semi-non-commercial television. The truth is, in the last few years, CBC television is starting to show too many commercials. But it is still the last hope in Canada for television that is not controlled by corporations and the imperatives of advertising.

Tonight I watched a movie called “Something About Mary” on CTV. “Something About Mary” is a vulgar but sometimes hysterically funny movie about a guy who decides to look up the girl of his dreams 12 years after an incredibly disastrous first and only date with her.

I’ve seen the movie before. It’s not really very good, but a couple of scenes are actually pretty funny and sometimes I just want to veg out and go along for the ride.

There was no ride. First of all, there were more commercial interruptions than scenes in the movie, and the commercials went on and on and on. I guess I’m not as used to them as I used to be– we do a lot of video in this house– but it is also a fact that tv networks, desperate for new revenue as the internet begins to suck away their advertising dollars, are showing more commercials than ever before.

Did you know that “The Dick Van Dyke Show” presented 28 minutes of actual program for the half-hour slot. Two minutes of advertising! Today, your so-called 1/2 hour comedy presents about 22 minutes, if you’re lucky.

Anyway, we have seen “Something About Mary” and were familiar enough with it to notice that, in addition to interrupting the movie about every six minutes to show another batch of ads, CTV had edited or removed scenes and language that, one supposes, it deemed to be offensive to viewers.

And it went one amazing step further. The one scene that “saved” the movie from mediocrity in my view was the ending, where the entire cast exuberantly sings “Build Me Up Buttercup”. All right– it’s kind of hokey, but it’s a pleasant, good-natured hokey and keeps the film in perspective: it’s just fun.

I guess the CTV thought this sort of fun was dangerous or unprofitable– it was deleted. The film ended on CTV with Stiller kissing Diaz in their final embrace, after she turns down the hunky football quarterback. Then– the credits roll.

The obvious reason was so CTV could squeeze in some more commercials. The judgment of where the cuts should occur was obviously left up to a stock boy or janitor.

The decision to cut a portion of the film out is so unspeakably barbaric, stupid, and offensive, that I am almost speechless.

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Infodiversity

You are going to hear this word a lot in the next few years.

I hope..

Biodiversity is good. We know that if there is biodiversity in a certain geographical region, that the region is generally healthy. There is a balance of interests that allows all species to thrive and propagate within the same habitat.

However, if one species gains advantages as the result of human intervention or mishap, the entire ecosystem can become polluted or barren. Some species, for example, will consume all the grass and leaves, because of a reduction in the population of the carnivores that prey on them. The entire habitat can become a disaster zone.  (See Yellowstone Park and wolves.)

Information technologies are the same way. If our environment is balanced with news and information from a diversity of sources– labour, management, government, academia, women’s groups, men’s groups, capitalists, socialists, environmentalists, even conservatives– we will have a healthy habitat that represents a balance of all the competing interests.

But what happens if the wolves take over all of the information technologies and begin to control the message. That is what is happening in the news and entertainment industries. Big corporations like Time-Warner are taking over more and more other media companies, including AOL and CNN.

So when you watch your newscaster and read your paper and think that you are getting information from honest people who have drawn their own conclusions about various events and are relating them to you– think again.

When Adbusters tried to show a documentary on deforestation in British Columbia on TV– even offering to buy the air time– they were turned down flat. No television station would broadcast their documentary. Why not? You can buy air time to sell cars and panty hose and diamond rings and even tampons. You can even buy air time to show ads for pharmaceuticals that provide relief for non-existent illnesses.  Why can’t you buy air time to tell people about an ecological disaster in the making?

Because these media companies are not objective or neutral when it comes to interpreting events for you, the consumer. They want to decide what you should or should not see and they serve the interests of the moneyed class.

In practice, their standards seem pretty broad. They are always excited about showing you something that is “cutting edge”. But there are some things that they will never show you. And that is anything that challenges the idea that personal fulfillment and happiness can only be found in the purchase of more and more branded products and services.

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The “High-Quality” TV Show

The networks argue that there have been fewer and fewer local programs and that viewers much prefer to watch what the networks have to offer anyway. The networks, also noting the continued loss of their audience to cable TV, say they need to accrue more control to be able to afford the high-quality shows the viewing public expects of them. NY Times, April 23, 2001

I love that last line: “The high-quality shows”… like the Bette Midler Show? Two Guys and Girl? The Geena Davis Show? Donny and Marie? “Veronica’s Closet”? Mr. Ed? “Family Law”? “Survivor”? “Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire”? Reminds me of Eli Lilly’s claims that women and physicians simply demanded that they repackage Prozac as pastel-coloured “Sarafem”, as a treatment for a mythical disorder called PMDD (PreMenstrual Dyphoric Dysfunction).

What people want? Or what insiders demand? What friends and cronies can arrange?

“What About Raymond” is produced by a company owned by David Letterman. “Veronica’s Closet” is owned by the makers of “Friends”. Disney, which owns ABC, also owns Touchstone Television, which produced “Once and Again”. All of these shows might well have been cancelled had it not been for the connections to the right people. What about all the children’s shows with tie-ins to toy manufacturers and fast-food outlets and record companies? What about idiotic “reality” shows that are simply extremely cheap to produce?

It’s one thing to be a greedy corporation. It’s one thing to be greedy and dishonest. But when corporations try to tell us that we really want the tackiest, most exploitive, and stupid products– nay, that we demand these idiocies… It reminds me of when I complained to the post office about the crap they stick in my mail box every day. They actually tried, with a straight face, to tell me that most people actually want the information in those fliers.

My response is always this: if you really believe that, would you agree to abide by the results of a poll of what people really want?

The question is, should people have a choice about the crap that gets stuffed into their mailboxes, or on their tv screen, or their computer desktops?

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Bugs in Lingerie

Have you ever seen Bugs Bunny in black lingerie? He sidles up to some Arab sheik and bats his false eye-lashes and giggles….

I’ll bet you’ve never seen it.

I’ll bet you’ve never seen the horse’s ass that turns into the face of Adolf Hitler in an old Popeye cartoon either. Actually, I’m not sure if it was Popeye. I seem to remember that it was Donald Duck’s three nephews who were trying to hoist the horse into their bedroom. It spun around as Donald Duck or Popeye or whoever it was turned to look and with a swish of it’s tail, there it was, Adolf Hitler’s face.

Now, you probably don’t think it is very important that you or your children ever see Bugs Bunny wearing sexy black lingerie. You probably even think that it is a rather perverse idea, after all. What on earth is Warner Brothers doing showing that stuff to our vulnerable impressionable children? You may have seen the great documentary, Crumb”, in which the celebrated underground artist admitted to an unhealthy sexual infatuation with Bugs Bunny.

But that is not the point at all. You can take Bugs Bunny in his black lingerie or leave him, but the problem is that you did not have a choice. Some flunky at some big corporation simply decided that, from now on, you were not going to see Hitler as a horse’s ass or Bugs Bunny as Mae West or Al Jolson. They decided that it would not be appropriate or suitable or honorable or profitable for Warner Brothers to continue to issue the cartoons as they were created by those renegade Disney animators who couldn’t stand Uncle Walt’s control-freak mentality.

These cartoons, incidentally, were not necessarily originally intended for mass audiences in the uncontrolled environment of the family living room. They were shown in theatres, before the main features. They were shown in glorious Technicolor projection, forty feet high and sixty feet wide (or 16:9 or whatever…).

Did those early audiences storm out of the theatre when Bugs showed up in black garters and panties, trying to seduce an Arab sheik? Did people of Arabian descent start picketing the Warner Brothers’ studios in protest against the crude stereotypes?

Yes, it must be admitted, that it is not only the humor and sexual content that have been edited out of these cartoons. The original animators were not, as it were, sensitive, by modern standards, to racial stereo-types. Native peoples, blacks, Italians, women– we might squirm today at the broadness of their humor.

A few years ago, Disney produced an updated version of “Huckleberry Finn”. In the modern version, the word “nigger” was completely expunged from the text. Disney didn’t want to offend anybody– except for the broadly caricatured racists.

This is ridiculous. Does it really need to be explained to anyone? Mark Twain recreated the language of his day. He brilliantly imagined the dialogue between Huck and the runaway, slave, Jim, as it would quite likely have sounded, including the word “nigger”. What is the point of removing it from modern versions of the story? To deny that we ever used that word? To pretend that white Americans in the 19th century referred to African-Americans as “blacks”, “coloured”, or “negroes”?

The point is to re-imagine history in a way that is flattering to ourselves, that panders to our sense of personal worth, that sells.

It is important that we know that, in the 19th century, most white mid-westerners referred to blacks as “niggers”. It is important to know that people used to smoke in offices. It is important to know that women used to breast feed babies. It is important to know that children of all ages and genders often slept in the same bed. It is important to know that there was no indoor plumbing. It is important to know that people trapped together in a life-boat occasionally had to urinate.

It is important to know that Bugs Bunny’s creators thought it would be funny if he wore black garters and panties. If you don’t want to watch– fine. Don’t.

But please allow some of us the freedom to have our history without blinders.

Update (2001-05-03]

AOL/Time Warner is holding a Bugs retrospective on The Cartoon Network next month, but don’t look for those rare original Bugs cartoons I was talking about. Warner Brothers, concerned, apparently, about the commercial value of the Bugs “property” won’t let those cartoons be shown. In other words, this retrospective will be anti-historical. It will deny history. It will pretend it never happened. Without a doubt, these are the same minds that would decide to do “Huckleberry Finn” without once using the word “nigger”, as if white mid-westerners in the 1880’s didn’t use the word.

What next? Will they digitally remove the smoking from offices in 1950’s movies? How about the the rape in “Water Hole #3”, the James Coburn flick that suggests the woman enjoyed it? And should we really allow Nazis to appear in “The Sound of Music”?

If you can find an original copy of The Wabbit Who Came to Supper (1942).  Wait a minute– where?

That Wascally Wabbit

More information about cross-dressing Bugs.

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The West Wing

Just about the only television show I watch semi-regularly nowadays is “West Wing”. And The Simpsons. But let’s stay with “West Wing” for a minute.

I have to note here though that the only reason I don’t watch very much television is not because most television is crap, though it is. The fact is that there is a lot of good shows on television too. The trouble is that there are way too many commercials. Did you know that the Dick Van Dyke Show, in the early 1960’s, was about 28 minutes long? The average sitcom today is about 20 minutes. Where did the other 8 minutes go? You need to ask?

In tonight’s episode of West Wing, the President had to make some fateful decisions about possible military action to rescue hostages in Columbia. The story, which parallels reality rather closely, develops after the government gives Columbia $15 billion to fight the drug trade. After a remarkable speech about the utter futility of the drug war, the waste of money, the 80% of the U.S. prison population that consists of drug users, and so on, the dialogue takes a turn on Viet Nam. One of the President’s top advisors warns that he should not repeat the mistake of Viet Nam, which was… what? What was the mistake? The advisor said the mistake was that the U.S. entered the war on the side of a corrupt and unpopular government, and that it did not have clear objectives, and did not have a clear exit strategy. That was the mistake of the Viet Nam War.

The West Wing is one of the few television shows that really is unabashedly liberal. Don’t believe for one minute all that nonsense from Conservative commentators on the so-called “liberal” media– it simply aint true. West Wing is the exception, not the rule.

But the advisor’s explanation about why the U.S. lost the war in Viet Nam buys into a conservative revisionist position that is itself a desperate attempt to rehabilitate the idea of U.S. subterfuge of foreign governments for its own self-interest.

The Viet Nam War began because the U.S. and France refused to accept the results of an election in 1956 which produced a socialist government of a united Viet Nam. With both French and American encouragement, a group of rebels seized power in the South and created a pro-capitalist regime. When the new regime proved unpopular– after all, the people elected the socialists– the U.S. was forced to step in to support the government, and fight a proxy war against the North Viet Namese government, which, reasonably, was determined to reunite the country.

Where did France go? Those silly Frenchmen! They decided that backing a self-seeking, corrupt, illegitimate government against the popular wishes of its own people was a losing proposition! The fools!

The North did not remain democratic, really, but we don’t know what would have happened if the South had not seceded and the U.S. had not involved itself. It doesn’t really matter– the fact is that the U.S. interfered in the domestic policies of a sovereign state and paid the price for it. That’s why they lost Viet Nam. It had nothing to do with unclear objectives. The objective was, in fact very clear: the maintenance of a pro-American proxy state in the region at whatever cost to civil rights and democracy. The problem was not that the Americans did not have an exit strategy: given the objectives, there was no need for an exit at all. And the problem was not that the government of South Viet Nam was unpopular and corrupt: that was at least partly a consequence of U.S. policy, not an impediment to it. Had the U.S. stayed out, chances are quite good that that corrupt government could never have sustained it’s position.

The writers and producers of “West Wing” should know better.

But it’s a great show. It’s subtle, sophisticated, topical, and relevant. That’s rare in television. What’s even more rare is the overt political nature of the program: it is quite frankly Democrat in perspective. The Democrats should be proud.

The Republicans, if they were really smart, would be working on their own television drama by now. On the other hand, they already have a dozen: Law and Order, NYPD Blue, and just about every other cop show on television. They almost all show that respect for civil rights and the assumption of innocence is an impediment to justice and fairness. They almost all propagandize for unlimited police powers. They almost all feed into the right wing paranoia that has led to the creation of America’s idiotic drug and gun laws.

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Baptized Banality

The Banner, a magazine of the Christian Reformed Church, reports that a Christian screenwriter and a Christian actor have put together a company called “Act One” which is designed to provide Christians with training in screenwriting for Hollywood Movies. Barbara Nicolosi and David Schall are the two entrepreneurs– or missionaries– depending on your point of view.

Some of the teachers in this program have writing credits for shows like “Batman Forever”. I’m not kidding.

It only cost $1800 U.S. for one month, including room and board. That’s pretty steep, in my view. A red light goes off in my head. Aren’t there a lot of scams in Hollywood? So many people want so badly to become celebrated Hollywood writers, directors, actors…. there’s a lot of snakes out there quite eager to take advantage of them. This couldn’t be one of those scams, could it? Do Mr. Schell and Ms. Nicolosi give their students a realistic assessment of their chances of actually selling a script to a Hollywood producer?

And what are their chances? About a million to one?

The truth is, if you don’t know somebody in a key position at a studio in Hollywood, your chance of selling a script is almost nil.

Schell says, “I know Christians on the sets of several sit-coms and soap operas who make a positive difference in what is shown on the screen by creatively intervening in productions whose messages or stories are heading into areas that run counter to a Christian worldview.”

That’s the key right there. That tells you a lot about where Schell and Nicolosi are headed.

When, I asked myself, does a sitcom or soap opera begin to head into areas that are counter to a Christian worldview?

1) at the moment they insert advertising?

2) at the moment they promote their actors as “celebrities” who deserve our admiration and emulation because they are famous for being famous?

3) at the moment they engage in escapist fantasies that allow viewers to avoid confronting real life issues?

4) at the moment they pass off inane and repetitious formulaic plot devices stolen from “Mr. Ed” and “Gilligan’s Island” as “original” work?

5) at the moment they add a laugh track, to convince the audience that these tired mindless jokes are actually funny?

6) at the moment they eliminate every brand name, political party, identifiable religion, pop song, television show, social issue, and financial concerns from every episode of every show, in order to appeal to the lowest common denominator?

7) at the moment they select only actors who are physically beautiful or colorfully ethnic or comically fat?

Who knows?

Well, I suppose we do know. We know that what they mean is that when the script editors of a soap opera want to have two of the characters commit adultery with each other, the Christian on the set will pipe up with, “Whoa Nelly!” and put a stop to it immediately.

The main problem with Christians and the arts is that most Christians see art has having a function beyond the revelation of things seen and unseen. This function is propaganda. The trouble with most Christians who see themselves as more sophisticated than that is that they see art as having another potential function: to entertain and make money.

What we need are more Christians who, like Bruce Cockburn, see art as the revelation of things really seen and unseen– a very biblical standard that most great atheist artists and almost no Christian artists adhere to religiously.

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Survivor: Fake TV

Well, Survivor II is in full swing now. In case you missed it, a group of individuals are placed in a primitive, uncivilized location and forced to fend for themselves for three months or so while relying strictly on their wits, skills, and courage– and the generosity of the camera crew– to survive. Once a week, they have a “tribal council” meeting and vote one member out of the club. The last remaining member wins $1 million.

The movie is called “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They” based on a novel by Horace McCoy (1935) and filmed by Sydney Pollack in 1969 (starring Gig Young, Bruce Dern, Bonnie Bedelia, Michael Sarrazin and Jane Fonda).

What? How can that be?

The movie is about a dance marathon. During The Great Depression, various organizations, including radio stations, would host these crazy dance marathons to attract an audience, and, I suppose, to distract people from their problems. Couples or individuals would sign up and dance and dance and dance, non-stop, until only one couple was left on the floor. That couple won some money. The prize was never really very big, but it was the depression. People were desperate.

Gig Young, in one of the great roles of American cinema, plays the MC of this particular dance. His performance is dazzling. He is a mixture of Dick Clark, Billy Graham, and Satan, cajoling the dancers onwards, promising them extravagant rewards and fame, ruthlessly weeding out the half-hearted, the weak, and the indifferent. When a beautiful young girl offers to have sex with him on the understanding that he will help her win, he smiles slightly, takes the sex, but delivers nothing. The girl mistakenly believed some kind of obligation would exist, when she knew full well that she had no power to compel it.

Some medical care is provided for the dancers, but they are generally brutalized, ruthlessly weeded out, and cruelly disposed of when they give up.

When it becomes clear that not enough dancers are falling fast enough, they hold “sprints”. The dancers race around in a big circle, and the last couple is eliminated. During one of these sprints, a sailor (Red Buttons) has a heart attack and dies. His girl continues dragging him along and over the finish line ahead of one other couple. As medical personnel attend to him, Gig Young orders the band to play to distract the crowd– the party goes on. And now a word from our sponsor.

The similarities between “They Shoot Horses Don’t They” and “Survivor” are uncanny. Except that Jeff Probst is to Gig Young what Dean Jones was to Laurence Olivier. But the message is the same. Survivor is about our system, our society, and what makes you a winner or loser in the general scheme of things by which most of us live. As such, it is a remarkably amoral scheme. There are no rewards for virtue, honesty, or integrity.

The scheme of Survivor is sold to us as a contest in which the most talented and strongest are the likely winners. But it soon became clear that the most talented and strongest were the first to be voted off the island, and the most devious and manipulative dominated the proceedings. It is a tribute to the endless resourcefulness of our culture that this state of affairs was readily absorbed and adapted. Richard Hatch, the cleverest and most cunning of the contestants, quickly became a celebrity.

It is interesting that, while selling us the program as a test of survivor skills (even the name…), the producers didn’t have the guts to stay with the original concept for very long. First of all, emergency medical help was always readily available. Secondly, food had to be flown into the island on a regular basis in order to keep the contestant’s alive. Thirdly, scenes were regularly staged or re-enacted to improve on camera angles.

But most importantly, contestants were routinely manipulated in order to provide more conflict– and better television.  Left to their own devices, they were quite likely to have cooperated, something that could only be allowed in the worst nightmares of the sponsors.

But the most important element of phoniness in the whole thing is the rather bizarre ritual of voting someone off the island at the end of every episode, as if this process is analogous to some indispensable element of human society. Think of the possible alternative ways of determining a winner. A simple vote by all the contestants at the end of three months. A vote by the audience. A skills contest. Or they could even have split up the million among anyone who could survive one year without any outside help.

What might have happened is that the group would have pulled together, built a society that works for them, and learned the value of cooperation and sharing. But hey, even Sesame Street has advertising nowadays.

On the other hand, they might have broken down into competing factions, started bickering, and ended up killing each other.

What is clear in “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They” is that the entire contest is rigged. The participants are urged to believe that, “in this great country of ours”, the rules are fair, the rewards are just, and anyone can win. The belief in this system is what propels people to join the marathons, and what provides the owners of the marathons with their wealth. The climax of the story is when the contestants find out that the cost of all of their “expenses” (food, water, bedding) are deducted from their winnings. Not only are they exploited and cheated– they are obliged to finance the very means by which they are exploited and cheated!

In the same way the Capital Gains Deduction takes money out of the revenue stream and hands it over to the rich, so that middle-class taxpayers– who can’t afford personal accountants, and can’t make the huge investments that are eligible for capital gains exemptions– are essentially funding the very system by which they are cheated.

The weekly tribal council idea is propaganda for the right wing. There are only so many goodies to go around, and the best way to distribute things is to have a system that rewards the greediest and most ruthless among us, and punishes the nice. It’s George Bush Jr.’s tax cut in the flesh.

But I’ll bet the producers of Survivor didn’t consciously think that they were providing the right wing with free advertising. I’ll bet they just thought that a bunch of people cooperating and helping each other would be pretty boring to most viewers. And as much as I despise them, they got the viewers, and the headlines, and the talk shows, and the book deals.

They are the real survivors.

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This Crazy Millenium

This Crazy Millennium

Well, I’m sick of the Millennium, so I’m just going to talk about the century for a moment instead. No other century is remotely comparable to the 20th in terms of significant changes to society and technology and religion.

Now that we are at the beginning of the last year of this century, it is an appropriate time to consider what the really significant events were of the past 100 years. It’s not that hard. Here they are, in chronological order.

  • The Development of Cinema
  • Industrialization
  • The 1917 Communist Revolution
  • The Automobile
  • World War I
  • Radio
  • Flight
  • The Depression
  • Government Intervention in the Economy following the Depression
  • World War II
  • The Development of Atomic Weapons
  • The Birth Control Pill
  • Television
  • Feminism
  • Rock’n’Roll Music
  • Personal Computers
  • The Internet
  • Biochemistry and Genetic Engineering

Now, what was the most significant development of the past 100 years? I mean, in terms of sheer, brute influence on all of our lives. Surprise—none of the above. We hardly notice the most significant development because we don’t notice the forest for the trees: urbanization.

What happened was this: with the invention and development of automobiles and other technologies, people were able to move to cities in massive numbers. In 1900, we were an overwhelmingly agricultural, small-town society. In 2000, we are overwhelmingly urbanized.

How significant is that? All of the other important developments of this century were radically shaped and influenced by the simple fact that most of us began to live in cities instead of small towns and villages. Anyone who has lived in a small town or village understands this immediately. The city is huge. It is anonymous. It is economically powerful. It is commercial. It is rich. It is filled with competing interests. It is sophisticated, fast-moving, complex. It is concentrated, organized, chaotic. It is full of people, cars, buses, buildings, devices, police, stadiums, hospitals, universities. It is, in the minds of many people, utterly empty and devoid of human values.

Christians like to point to rock’n’roll or the movies or literature or comic books or the Internet or whatever as being responsible for the “decline” of public morals in this century. First of all, there never was a public morality like they imagine it. Secondly, it was never those things anyway. All of those things were only possible because of urbanization, and all of them were given content and meaning by the insurmountable fact that we all lived in cities and had developed an urban mentality.

What is an urban mentality? It is the embrace of mass culture and homogenization. In a small town, where everybody knows you, culture and religion and social patterns develop indigenously, influenced by local hierarchies and institutions, and closely monitored by everyone. We all know how difficult it is to go against the grain of a small community. We are held accountable for our behavior by our neighbors and friends and churches. We know the teacher. We know the grocer. We know the local mechanic. We have our own ideas about how to do things. We know what works here.

In a large city, we are anonymous and autonomous. We could go to church or go to another church or not go at all. We don’t even know our neighbors, let alone the grocer or the mechanic. We drive across town to visit our friends.

So how do we learn about our culture? What begins to shape the way we think about things? Mass media. Radio, television, the movies. This is why we have Hollywood and the NBA and Michael Jordan and Stephen Spielberg, and it’s why we had Elvis, and the pill, and the internet, and it’s why we’re going to have genetic engineering.

As much as we would like to flatter ourselves and declare that our ideas are shaped by the influence of other people’s ideas, the truth is that our ideas are also powerfully shaped by our immediate environment and our perceived needs.

The city has produced our culture. Our culture is hysterical. We’re like those little ants running around in circles around the ant hill that someone has just crushed with his big toe. We’re out of our minds, but we have no idea of where else to go.

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Enslaving the Internet

There was a time when television was the grand horizon, the magical future, the focus of mystical wishes about community, education, enlightenment, and the global village.

That was before NBC, CBS, and ABC got a hold of it, of course. That was when television was just an exciting technology.

One of the greatest deceptions of modern times is the myth that television is a conduit for “free expression”. Yes, no matter how different your opinions may be, they are represented somewhere on television.

Right.

Actually, one of the most remarkable things about television, especially in the past twenty years, has been the amazing uniformity of the programming on all the networks. Check out the news. Which television station presented the viewpoint that the Lewinsky scandal was no big deal and everyone should get over it? Right– nobody. Tell me, which television station or network can be identified with a pro-union/labour point of view? There must be one, somewhere. And which television station espouses the view that life is more meaningful when we have turned our backs on acquisitiveness and materialism and learned to appreciate the finer things in life, like friendship, nature, and charitable works? Which television station gives extensive coverage to environmental causes? Which tv commentator consistently advocates for the poor and dispossessed?

Well, we’re lucky up here in Canada: we have the CBC. But in the U.S., the so-called cradle of democracy, the uniformity of public opinion as expressed in the mainstream media is positively nauseating. And, sad to say, the religious channels are no better. In fact, in many ways they are worse. Their glib solutions to social problems and patriotic conservatism are merely the mainstream opinions of 50 years ago.

Well, why is that? The government doesn’t control television. How come television never questions authority?

There are three reasons.

Firstly, television is owned by large corporations. In the U.S., that is the real government: Congress is bought and sold by vast donations to re-election campaigns.

Secondly, television is governed by commercial interests: these corporations don’t want to offend the majority of viewers by presenting any minority opinions.

Third: the “self-regulating” nature of the television industry serves the government’s interest by treating consent in the same way obscenity is treated– television licensees are empowered to preserve good order and decency by preventing us from seeing a naked breast, or opinions that it deems to be “radical”.

Adbusters recently tried to buy time on commercial television to show “anti-ads”, little one-minute fables about consumerism and waste. The networks were able to refuse these ads because they would offend their regular advertisers.

Think about that. I am deeply offended by ads which try to use sex to sell cars, but no television station is going to pull Ford ads off the air for any reason whatsoever. He who has the gold makes the rules.

Which brings me to the Internet. What is happening on the Internet right now is remarkable: dissent is being heard. Alternative view-points are being presented. The unusual, the exotic, the idiosyncratic, is available for your perusal. Because nobody, no networks, no CBS, no Microsoft, no FCC, controls it. Do a search for the word “Clinton” and you will be presented will all manner of opinion.

So what does the government, and the big corporations think about this? Well, they’re not as dumb as they act sometimes. The music industry, for one, has suddenly realized that if the Internet really takes hold, and people begin to have access at speeds of 64K or better, nobody is going to need their slime-ball managerial skills anymore. Artists will have their own web sites through which you can download samples of their work and order the complete CD. The music industry, which presently controls artists by controlling the distribution of music, goes: “Hey! Where’s our cut?” They took one look at MP3, which allows people to freely and easily distribute musical recordings through the Internet, and they screamed bloody murder.

What galls me is the way they go around whining about the poor artists who are going to lose all their royalties. Well, artists don’t get royalties from the music industry because the record companies manipulate the expenses of recording and promotion to make it look like they’re hardly making any money at all.