A British Honest Abe

Film/TV, , , , , , , ,

Steven Spielberg and Jared Harris discussed Daniel Day-Lewis’ exhaustive preparation for his role as Abraham Lincoln for the film Lincoln, which opens today:

To hold on to Lincoln’s voice, he used it all the time, between takes and even after the filming was over. Mr. Spielberg said he couldn’t remember for certain whether Mr. Day-Lewis used his Lincoln voice in their private conversations but then added: “I just came to see him as the character. I assume he didn’t change the voice. Why would he?”

Jared Harris (better known to most Americans as Lane Pryce in “Mad Men”) plays Ulysses S. Grant in the movie. He recalled that like other British cast and crew members on the set, he was asked not to throw Mr. Day-Lewis off by speaking in a British accent, so Mr. Harris too stayed in character.

“It was sort of an extended improvisation,” he said in a telephone interview. “You didn’t go up to him and say, ‘Hey, did you see the Pirates game last night?’ It was important for him to retain the attitude, if you like, and the dialect he had created. So we would sit there and joke, for example, about the Vicksburg campaign.” He added, “At the end of the day sometimes we’d ride back in the car, and he’d stay in character but talk about ‘Mad Men,’ which of course he couldn’t know about, because television hadn’t been invented then.”

How Occupy Wall Street got it wrong

Politics, , , , , ,

Thomas Frank (of What’s the Matter With Kansas? fame) laments the failure of Occupy Wall Street to coalesce into a genuinely effective movement:

Measured in terms of words published per political results, on the other hand, OWS may be the most over-described historical event of all time. Nearly every one of these books makes sweeping claims for the movement’s significance, its unprecedented and earth-shattering innovations. Just about everything it does is brilliantly, inventively, mind-blowingly people-empowering.

And what do we have to show for it today in our “normal lives”? Not much. President Obama may talk about the “top 1 percent” now, but he is apparently as committed as ever to austerity, to striking a “grand bargain” with the Republicans.

Occupy itself is pretty much gone. It was evicted from Zuccotti Park about two months after it began—an utterly predictable outcome for which the group seems to have made inadequate preparation. OWS couldn’t bring itself to come up with a real set of demands until after it got busted, when it finally agreed on a single item. With the exception of some residual groups here and there populated by the usual activist types, OWS has today pretty much fizzled out. The media storm that once surrounded it has blown off to other quarters.

Pause for a moment and compare this record of accomplishment to that of Occupy’s evil twin, the Tea Party movement, and the larger right-wing revival of which it is a part. Well, under the urging of this trumped-up protest movement, the Republican Party proceeded to win a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives; in the state legislatures of the nation it took some six hundred seats from the Democrats; as of this writing it is still purging Republican senators and congressmen deemed insufficiently conservative and has even succeeded in having one of its own named as the GOP’s vice-presidential candidate…

Occupy did lots of things right: It had a great slogan and a perfect enemy and it captured the public imagination. It built a democratic movement culture. It reached out to organized labor, a crucial step in the right direction. It talked a lot about solidarity, the basic virtue of the Left. But in practice, academic requirements often seemed to come first. OWS was taken as a proving ground for theory. Its ranks weren’t just filled with professionals and professionals-to-be; far too often the campaign itself appeared to be an arena for professional credentialing.

Mitt Romney faces the wrath of the Washington Post

Politics

Or at least the wrath of its editorial board:

Through all the flip-flops, there has been one consistency in the campaign of Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney: a contempt for the electorate.

How else to explain his refusal to disclose essential information? Defying recent bipartisan tradition, he failed to release the names of his bundlers — the high rollers who collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations. He never provided sufficient tax returns to show voters how he became rich.

How, other than an assumption that voters are too dim to remember what Mr. Romney has said across the years and months, to account for his breathtaking ideological shifts? He was a friend of immigrants, then a scourge of immigrants, then again a friend. He was a Kissingerian foreign policy realist, then a McCain-like hawk, then a purveyor of peace. He pioneered Obamacare, he detested Obamacare, then he found elements in it to cherish. Assault weapons were bad, then good. Abortion was okay, then bad. Climate change was an urgent problem; then, not so much. Hurricane cleanup was a job for the states, until it was once again a job for the feds.

The same presumption of gullibility has infused his misleading commercials (see:Jeep jobs to China) and his refusal to lay out an agenda. Mr. Romney promised to replace the Affordable Care Act but never said with what. He promised an alternative to President Obama’s lifeline to young undocumented immigrants but never deigned to describe it.

And then there has been his chronic, baldly dishonest defense of mathematically impossible budget proposals. He promised to cut income tax rates without exploding the deficit or tilting the tax code toward the rich — but he refused to say how he could bring that off. When challenged, he cited “studies” that he maintained proved him right. But the studies were a mix of rhetoric, unrealistic growth projections and more serious economics that actually proved him wrong.

The right to be forgotten

Technology, , , , , , , ,

During my studies in Paris this past academic year, I took a class called “Security and Technology.” My particular project contrasted European conceptions of online privacy with those of their American counterparts. One of the most fascinating elements of the European approach is the recent push for a “right to be forgotten,” as proposed by Viviane Reding, vice president of the European Commission. Essentially, the doctrine stipulates that everyone should have a right to permanently eliminate private information about themselves if they so desire.

So it is in this vein that Simson L. Garfinkel’s article for the MIT Technology Review takes a peek at the possible future of initiatives like these:

In fact, it’s hard to imagine a system that could index all of the world’s information thoroughly enough to allow someone exercising the “right to be forgotten” to track down and eradicate every regrettable message or photo. More likely, the mechanisms to find that data would cause more privacy violations than they would prevent.

A better solution could be a set of standards for labeling the provenance of information on the Internet. It would be somewhat like the way Facebook requires application developers to keep checking back to see whether personal information is still acceptable to use. It would also take advantage of the privacy-protecting steps that other sites like Twitter and Yahoo sometimes are willing to take for their users.

This could be done using the HTML microdata standard being developed. It is still evolving, but this standard will expand the ways that information in Web pages can be represented in their underlying HTML code. For example, the microdata could include tags designed to facilitate privacy tracking and the retraction of privacy-sensitive information. So if you persuaded a website to take down information because it violates the site’s terms of service, that website could automatically notify others that have made copies of your information, informing them that the license to use the data has been revoked.

An unconventional endorsement, and an eye-opening one

Politics, , ,

Today, Michael Bloomberg sprung a November surprise with his “endorsement” of Barack Obama. But it wasn’t exactly…wholehearted. Here’s a segment:

In 2008, Obama ran as a pragmatic problem-solver and consensus-builder. But as president, he devoted little time and effort to developing and sustaining a coalition of centrists, which doomed hope for any real progress on illegal guns, immigration, tax reform, job creation and deficit reduction. And rather than uniting the country around a message of shared sacrifice, he engaged in partisan attacks and has embraced a divisive populist agenda focused more on redistributing income than creating it.

Hm. But that still wasn’t as much of an eye-opener as this one by Likud-maniac Alan Dershowitz:

With regards to Iran, which poses the most immediate threat to the security of the United States and its allies, most especially Israel, the policy of the Obama administration is crystal clear: It has taken containment off the table and kept the military option on the table. Everyone hopes that the military option will not have to be employed, since it would entail considerable loss of life, especially among Israeli civilians who would be targeted by Hezbollah rockets fired in retaliation against any attack on Iran.

But the best way to avoid the need for military action is for the Iranian mullahs to believe that the United States will never allow them to develop nuclear weapons. If they believe that reality then the pain of the sanctions will pressure them to give up their nuclear ambitions. President Obama has clearly stated that he is not bluffing when he says that his administration will never allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons. A secondterm president generally has more credibility than a firstterm president when it comes to threatening military action.

The Obama administration has strongly supported Israel’s security by helping to construct the Iron Dome anti-rocket system, by backing Israel’s responses to rocket attacks from Gaza and by coordinating closely with its military.

When it comes to reenergizing the moribund peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, Romney has said that he would do nothing other than kick the can down the road.

President Obama, on the other hand, would almost certainly try to bring the parties together to achieve a two-state solution that guaranteed Israel’s security while allowing the Palestinians to govern themselves.

So much for Obama throwing Israel “under the bus.”

Responding to Joseph Massad on Homeland

Film/TV, Politics, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

There is little that Joseph Massad got right in his scathing attack on the Showtime TV series Homeland. In a lengthy screed for Al Jazeera, the Columbia University associate professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history left no stone unturned in a scorched-earth assault that ultimately revealed more about him than it did Homeland.

We’ll leave aside, for the moment, sentences like these: “This also applies to the more virulent Israeli Jewish racist representations of Arabs and Muslims, not only in the Israeli media, school curricula, and all cultural artifacts that Israeli Jewish society produces, but also by actual and ongoing Israeli Jewish policies towards Arabs inside and outside Israel.” If the man is being paid by the conjunction, all hail the world champion.

I will also disclaim right from the start that I am a devoted fan of Homeland. But this neither precludes me from accepting others’ critiques of the show nor prevents me from making my own (and it has its weaknesses, from melodramatic dialogue to improbable plots and more). But the tenor and, more importantly, substance of Massad’s critique is just wrong — and I mean that in the objective, fact-based way that Mitt Romney is wrong about Barack Obama’s apology tour. As in, what he’s saying is simply not true.

Where to begin? First, there is this discomfiting description of the main characters:

The CIA team monitoring Al-Qaida from Langley, Virginia, is represented by three top figures: the African-American David Estes, the Director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, the American Jew Saul Berenson who is unsurprisingly the CIA’s Middle-East Division Chief, and the white Christian American Carrie Mathison, the female star of the show, who is a CIA intelligence officer assigned to the Counterterrorism Center.

The racialist structure of the show is reflective of American and Israeli fantasies of anti-Muslim American multiculturalism. The African American Estes is divorced and his former wife married an American Jew. She and their children converted to Judaism. He has also had a dalliance with his colleague Carrie that went awry. The Jewish Berenson is married to an Indian Hindu “brown” woman (perhaps cementing the Indian Hindu-Israeli Jewish rightwing alliance against Arabs and Muslims in the minds of the scriptwriters). On the first season of the show, cross racial romance seems to have also infected the character of a white rich American woman who fell in love with a “brown” mild-mannered Saudi professor at a US university and conscripted him in the service of Al-Qaida, which leads to his ultimate death and her imprisonment, though not before the Jewish Berenson tells her how much he identifies with her as two white people who fell in love with brown people.

The bizarre characterization of these three by their race/ethnicity and religion, followed by the off-tangent diatribe on miscegenation, is strange enough on its own. But Massad makes racial difference into something of a leitmotif by the end of his essay. In various passages, he writes of the Ashkenazi-inflected Arabic spoken by Nick Brody, his “suspiciously brown” Caucasian wife Jess, and even the metaphorical symbolism of the CIA director David Estes “[standing in] for Obama, at least as far as racial semiotics are concerned.” He distinguishes between “the Jewish [Saul] Berenson” and his “white colleague,” as if the two are somehow mutually exclusive. And in remarking on the death of an African-American character, Tom Walker, Massad declares it a manifestation of “the racist fantasy that a white American man gets to kill the same black man, not once but twice!”

Forgive me for being unaware of that particular fantasy. But Massad’s unnerving racial obsession is just the beginning, because he misunderstands most of Homeland‘s storyline as well. Here are, in order, some of his dullest moments:

1) Massad writes:

The gender representation is also remarkable for its commitment to 1970s white American feminism by featuring a leading strong white female character as the star of the show (which Hollywood began to champion since the film Alien in the late 1970s) and its equal commitment to sexist representations of white women as hysterics, or at least in Carrie’s case, for suffering from America’s most fashionable commercialised psychiatric ailment of the decade: bipolar disorder (an “ailment” that succeeded clinical depression as the most fashionable American psychiatric disorder in the preceding decade).

Here he misunderstands the show entirely. Carrie’s bipolar disorder is not a convenient demonstration of a “commitment to sexist representations of white women as hysterics.” It is, rather, intended (and sometimes succeeds) as a microcosm of the collective moral ambivalence of post-9/11 America. If the iconic series 24 — which Homeland creators Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa worked on as well — represented the full-blown glory and power of the American id in the immediate aftermath of the 2001 attacks, then Homeland is its natural sequel: an angst-ridden reaction to all that we’ve done in the name of counterterrorism over the past decade to the noisy pulse of a ticking digital clock.

The frantic real-time pace of 24 has been replaced by the more measured, and conventional, storytelling style of Homeland, and in this, too, one can make out the contours of our (achingly slow) evolution of the national conversation on security as well. We are moving from a worldview in which the next threat lurks perpetually just around the corner to one in which the magnitude of the unseen menace itself is an increasingly debatable question. (A piece last week in the New York Times, for example, signaled a growing exhaustion with the endless budget for security measures. The implications of this American tiredness have yet to be realized in actual major policy shifts, however.)

2) Massad refers to an emotional moment between Brody and Jess:

Concern about what Arab and Muslim men do to “their” women is paramount on the show’s scriptwriters’ minds. When Brody’s wife finds out he had converted to Islam, she throws the English translation of the Quran on the floor (very astutely done by the show’s producers who seem to think that only the Arabic Qur’an should not be desecrated) and asks in horror how he could have converted to a religion whose adherents would “stone” his daughter “to death in a soccer stadium” if they found out she was having sex with her boyfriend.

It’s incredible to me that Massad simply assumes Jess’ worldview is the one preferred by the creators of Homeland — or even the one perpetrated by the show itself. To anyone with even a passing affection for the show, it is quite obvious that Jess sees herself as a victim of Brody’s increasingly erratic behavior, but in no way does the show imply that this indignation is justifiably extended to include her concurrent Islamophobia as well. By contrast, Homeland goes out of its way to portray her as a woman with many faults: in fact, part of what attracts Brody to Carrie in the first place is his inability to reveal his thoughts to a wife who is simply unwilling and unable to understand him. Jess similarly repels her teenaged daughter, Dana, and is portrayed as a mostly ineffective mother to Chris as well. The totality of Jess’ persona is one of increasing isolation and incomprehension at a world she doesn’t understand. How Joseph Massad manages to miss all of this and yet stubbornly insist that her primitive characterization of Muslims as bloodthirsty prudes is representative of the show’s own perspective is truly a mystery.

3) Massad again:

On the most recent episode of season two, the Jewish Berenson declares in the context of searching for Brody’s Al-Qaida contact among hundreds of people that: “We prioritize. First the dark skinned ones” should be watched. When a white colleague objects that this is “straight up racial profiling,” Berenson responds that it is “actual profiling. Most Al-Qaida operatives are going to be Middle Eastern or African.” This is being said while the main Al-Qaida CIA target on the show is a white marine. The African-American Estes and Obama stand-in expectedly offers no protests to the Jewish Berenson. He just says “OK!”

Again, it’s hard to believe Massad and I are watching the same series. What he fails to mention is that, following this exchange, Berenson proceeds to identify his top three (Middle Eastern) suspects: a car wash manager, a cabdriver, and a grad student — all three of whom are (at least so far) completely unconnected to the actual plot Brody has been assisting. In fact, Berenson even fails to identify Roya Hammad as suspicious, despite 1) her very real role as an intermediary between the terrorist Abu Nazir and Nick Brody and 2) her private conversation with Brody while Berenson and Co. looked on via surveillance camera. There is a not-so-subtle irony here: in the very same moment that Berenson advocates racial profiling as the most efficient approach, Homeland demonstrates just how completely inaccurate and ineffective the practice actually is. (A similar inversion of conventional wisdom took place in Season 1, when the suburban Caucasian wife was an actual villain while her Arab husband turned out to be a red herring.) Massad, of course, missed all of this entirely.

4) Massad objects to Homeland‘s characterization of Beirut:

Beirut’s nouveaux-riches who spent billions of dollars (of the Lebanese people’s money) making the city look like a fun and modern western city are surely outraged that their city is depicted like some poor remote Afghani village. Indeed the multi-billion dollar Rafiq Hariri Airport looks more like a bus stop in war-ravaged rural Iraq than a modern airport. More recently, Lebanese tourism minister Fadi Abboud told the Associated Press that he is so upset about the portrayal of Beirut on the show that he is considering a lawsuit.

I nearly laughed out loud when I read the part about “the multi-billion dollar Rafiq Hariri Airport.” I spent this past summer in Beirut, and I’ve flown into and out of the airport there four times: if the Rafiq Hariri Airport is truly the final product of a multi-billion dollar investment, I’d be curious to discover just where all that money went. There is absolutely nothing spectacular or even remotely luxurious about the place, and I could probably name over a dozen other airports off the top of my head (including, for example, Budapest’s Ferenc Liszt International Airport) that match or exceed Beirut’s in style, comfort, and luxury. And even if this were not the case, Homeland‘s depiction of the airport was hardly prejudicial: nothing about the portrayal did a disservice to the real-life version. If anything, it may have actually improved upon reality.

Secondly, while the show’s depiction of Hamra Street was indeed quite unrealistic — it is, in fact, a bustling and trendy part of Beirut, littered with bars and coffee shops where the urban restless come to work and play — there is again a bit of tragic irony in the fact that, mere days after Fadi Abboud’s defensive comments (including his preposterous declaration that Beirut was more secure than New York and London), a car bomb exploded in one of Beirut’s wealthier districts, Achrafieh, killing a high-ranking Lebanese intelligence official and seven others.

All of this is not to say that Massad is entirely delusional. For example, he is at his strongest in the section titled “American Fantasies of Race and Sex,” in which he ably compares racist paradigms against African-Americans in a bygone era with the contemporary treatment of homosexuality (and especially Arab homosexuality). He also rightly takes issue with Homeland‘s all-too-easy bursts of self-righteous Western superiority, as when Carrie threatens a Saudi diplomat by implying she’ll send his daughter, a Yale student, “back to Saudi Arabia [where she’ll] get fat and wear a burqa for the rest of her miserable life.”

This latter example is one I find especially disturbing. It is so obviously racist that it seems impossible the show intended for it to be digested uncritically. And yet it seems to serve no greater purpose than to reignite the flames of that old American vengeance so purposefully exploited for years via the revenge porn of shows like 24. Sometimes it seems as if Homeland tries too deftly to counterbalance its (very slightly) liberal reading of the so-called “War on Terror” by interspersing its open self-doubt with some occasional triumphal and vitriolic Muslim-hatred. This not only undermines its message — to the extent that Homeland has an ideology — but is frustratingly typical for modern American liberalism: forever timid of its own beliefs, it tempers its principles with a frequent nod to baser instincts.

Throughout Season 1 and the first five episodes of Season 2 that have aired so far, Homeland‘s greatest weakness is that it falls prey to these crude racial and religious stereotypes that Massad appropriately decries. But he weakens his own critique by mischaracterizing Homeland‘s more defensible aspects in order to fit into his broader narrative of racial hatred. It’s a simplistic and inaccurate reading of an otherwise stellar show, even one whose ideology remains uncomfortably attached to a more Manichean era in American politics.

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May the Force be with Disney

Film/TV, , , , ,

Yesterday brought some surprising news for the Star Wars franchise:

The Walt Disney Company, in a move that gives it a commanding position in the world of fantasy movies, said Tuesday it had agreed to acquire Lucasfilm from its founder, George Lucas, for $4.05 billion in stock and cash.

The sale provides a corporate home for a private company that grew from Mr. Lucas’s hugely successful “Star Wars” movie series, and became an enduring force in the creation of effects-driven science fiction entertainment for large and small screens. Mr. Lucas, who is 68 years old, had already announced he would step down from day-to-day operation of the company.

Combined with the purchase of Marvel Entertainment for $4 billion in 2009 and of Pixar Animation Studios for $7.4 billion in 2006, the acquisition solidifies Disney’s status as a leader in animation and superhero films. And it strengthens the legacy of Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive, who has become known for his aggressive expansion of the company since taking charge in 2005.

But the strange timing of the announcement got the wheels spinning at New York Magazine:

Disney called Star Wars an “evergreen” media property today. But the prospect of keeping the Star Wars series going ad infinitum, and expanding it to regions and age groups in which it isn’t already well known or loved, is far from a sure bet with consumers. It essentially amounts to wagering that die-hards will continue to flock to anything with the Star Wars name on it, while also betting that new movies will draw a younger generation that didn’t grow up on Millenium Falcon references.

Disney can’t rely on old intellectual property — it needs Lucasfilm to keep throwing off cash to justify its $4 billion price tag. But with aging cultural cachet (the first Star Wars came out 35 years ago) and a consumer base that has lots of other popular franchises clamoring for its attention, it’s hard to think that the marketing machine of a decade ago can keep chugging along at pace. As this chart from Box Office Mojo points out, recent Star Wars movies (adjusted for ticket price inflation) have generally underperformed older ones. Why would newer versions, released by Disney, fare any better?

George Lucas, who has seen the Star Wars franchise go from revered cultural touchstone to virtual punchline, may have accepted a lowball bid in an effort to wash his hands of the series altogether. But I doubt it. We won’t know for sure until Disney reports LucasFilm’s financials, but it seems to me that Lucas may have gotten the better deal here.

If Disney can’t keep a parade of Star Wars sequels from suffering diminishing returns, its “evergreen” acquisition may be more like a wilting flower. And if Disney knows it overpaid, or even senses it might have, then burying the news makes all the sense in the world.

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