tag:www.artsjournal.com,2008-02-19:/popcorn//26 2011-05-25T21:08:45Z Martha Bayles on Film Movable Type 4.31-en tag:www.artsjournal.com,2011:/popcorn//26.45656 2011-05-25T20:59:19Z 2011-05-25T21:08:45Z

Martha Bayles http://www.artsjournal.com/popcorn/ NOH HAO, at 25 the social media's youngest - and first female - multibillionaire, explains her meteoric success in an exclusive interview with MARTHA BAYLES.

Cambridge, MA, March 15, 2014 - "Meet me at the Harvard Square Peet's!"  The suggestion evokes a legend.  Only three years ago, Hao was sipping chai in that same Peet's when she got the idea for Bod-E, the ultra-hot social networking site that recently topped Google, Facebook, and Twitter in user volume and revenue.  On Monday Bod-E rocked global markets by gaining access to China, using the same sales pitch that had already helped it penetrate Burma (Myanmar), North Korea, Belarus, and the military dictatorships of Egypt, Iran, and the Persian Gulf Republic.  According to SeeNoEvil.com, the essence of that pitch is: Bod-E means stability.

Breathless from dodging traffic, Hao arrives and settles into her favorite corner.  Asked to describe her Eureka moment, she says, ]]> "I was sitting right here, reading Sherry Turkle's Alone Together, when I was struck by the line: 'Today, our machine dream is to be never alone but always in control.'  Glancing up from my Kindle, I realized that wi-fi cafés speak to the same dream. In that crowded space, no one was talking, except for an older couple in the corner.  People were alone, engrossed in their laptops, smart phones, and tablets.  Yet they seemed content, even happy. I wondered: if our online lives are so satisfying, why do we bother to cram into Peet's and Starbuck's? Why don't we just stay home?"

Hao majored in math and cello at Harvard, so while her intellect tackled the problem, her ears attuned themselves to the atmosphere in Peet's.  The answer, when it came, was embarrassingly obvious.  Human beings crave the physical presence of other human beings. "When Twitter first took off," she explains, "no one could figure out why it was so addictive."  By one measure, more than 40 percent of all Tweets were "pointless babble" - or, in the words of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, "short bursts of inconsequential information."  Over time, it became clear that what mattered were not the individual Tweets (micro-messages of 140 characters or less) but the constant flow.  "It was comforting," says Hao.  "Like being surrounded by the people you care about."

In Peet's, one is surrounded by strangers. And it is definitely not the custom to strike up conversations.  But the strangers serve a purpose: they produce a steady stream of bodily noises -  breathing, digestion, rustlings, bustlings, sub-vocal burblings - that, combined with the flow of micro-messages on one's screen, create the tranquil mental state described variously as "co-presence," "peripheral awareness," and "ambient intimacy." "Think of a cave," says Hao,

    "For thousands of years, caves were the only safe place for humans. And the best times were when nobody was hungry or fighting; everybody was just hanging out, full of food and warmed by the fire, watching the shadows on the wall. Nobody felt lonely, but nobody felt hassled, either. That's the state re-created by Bod-E."

Bod-E's chief innovation was to introduce a radically different data stream that, rather than compete with the glut of online text, images, video, and music, simply flows underneath it. "Advertisers talk about 'top-of-the-mind awareness,'" explains Hao,

    "but Bod-E provides bottom-of-the-mind connectedness.  A continuous non-verbal, non-visual flow of sound between us and our friends, evoking the feeling of being together in the same physical space.  It's better than Peet's, because the sounds are produced by bodies we care about."

To join Bod-E, the user subscribes online, then buys a ChipKit consisting of six tiny transmitters and two receptors, all attachable to jewelry or embeddable in the skin.  The transmitters, typically placed at the neck, chest, and abdomen, pick up the user's bodily noises, called Emits, and combine them into the Outflo stream.  The receptors, located in or around the user's ears, import the Inflo stream - a blend of Emits received from the user's ComZon (short for "comfort zone"), a select group of individuals similar to Facebook Friends.  There are several different Inflo settings, depending on user preference.  For example, the PHW setting, popular with the young male demographic, allows users to enjoy the sound of their friends breaking wind.

Asked for the secret of Bod-E's success, Hao smiles: "Timing. When we introduced the prototype in the fall of 2012, people went crazy, because it was seen as the cure for everything that was wrong with the social media, from the Other People Problem to the User Overload Problem."

Regarding the first, Hao recalls,

     "The Other People Problem didn't exist in the days of the old-fashioned land-line telephone.  You could avoid calls by not picking up, or by telling callers you'd been out.  Then came the answering machine and caller ID, which made it harder to cook up come up with excuses.  The last straw was the cell phone. Suddenly you were at the mercy of everybody, from parents to bosses to old flames, who felt like calling and making inappropriate demands.  To escape, people began forgetting to charge their cell phones or just plain losing them. Email, instant messaging, and texting came as a relief, because they let you control the process, shaping your outgoing messages and filtering your incoming ones."

Facebook and Twitter proved even more popular, because in addition to insulating the user from the annoying tug of friends' and family's demands, they catered to the user's own craving for attention.  The one-to-one message gave way to the one-to-many broadcast, as users devoted lavish amounts of time to updating an ever-increasing flow of personal micro-messages.  On the receiving end, the unintended consequence of all this attention-getting behavior was the User Overload Problem, as the incoming flow became a tsunami.

Despite a popular film about Facebook and headlines congratulating Twitter for its role in the Middle East revolts, a backlash began to form in 2011.  "Twitter hate is the new black," quipped one prominent blogger.  Experts like Turkle confirmed what the public already suspected: social media were distorting social life, not to mention family life.  Horror stories abounded: the teenager who starved to death in her room, obsessing over which headband to wear in her Facebook profile photo; the father who ran over his toddler while scrolling through his BlackBerry; the priest who was caught sending text messages while administering the last rites. In early 2012 Oprah announced she was going off Twitter, and other celebrities followed suit. This movement, dubbed Cut the Connection, made headlines for a while, but as Hao notes, "Most non-celebrities couldn't do it.  The human need for attention is just too strong."

Clearly, the Other People Problem and the User Overload Problem were intertwined.  Bod-E solved them both with a single brilliant strokeinvention: the Emot, a type of Emit that expresses the kinds of emotion - need, pain, disappointment, sorrow - that make us seek the comfort of others.  When asked about the ensuing controversy, Hao laughs. "It was insane.  Some blogger at Wired freaked out and began posting flaming denunciations of me for giving women a new way to whine to men.  It was so sexist.  Thousands of users cancelled before we could get the word out that the Emot doesn't require a response, the response is automated."

The automated Emot response was the brainchild of Hao's techie boyfriend, Yuri Ality. "When we introduced the Emot," Hao recalls,

     "we assumed users would want to produce their own comfort sounds - you know, coos, clucks, and "'there-theres" [a rare violation of Bod-E's non-verbal rule].  But we got a lot of complaints.  Some people wanted all the Emots filtered out of their Inflo.  Others liked the idea of sending comfort sounds but found it a hassle to produce them in the middle of their busy day.  So Yuri tweaked the receptors to respond to each incoming Emot by uploading a comfort sound from the user's own archive and adding it to the user's Outflo. We weren't sure how people would react, because the system doesn't flag the individual origin of each Emot and comfort sound.  But people loved it, because the principle is really beautiful: the amount of pain circulating in a given ComZon is always matched by the equivalent amount of sympathy."

The Emot system remains controversial, but as Hao remarks,

     "Today most of the critics are older family members and non-adaptors who cling to the notion that every cry for help deserves a real-time, personal response.  Many of these individuals still use the telephone, which means they are accustomed to an intolerably high level of emotional expression conveyed by spoken language.  When their calls are not returned, or increasingly, when their targets no longer own telephones, these people occasionally resort to Emots.  But the automated response doesn't satisfy them.  Back when we had Baby Boomers in our focus groups, one grey-haired gentleman complained, 'When my wife died, I wanted to talk to our son'."

Needless to say, Bod-E is not designed for the elderly consumer.  Or for the type of foreign activist who made Facebook and Twitter famous in 2011.  Most of those people have either disappeared or accepted lucrative posts in their countries' new military dictatorships.  The remnant who still agitate for democracy have little use for Bod-E, with its focus on non-verbal, non-visual communication.  To Hoa, this poses a marketing challenge.  To idealistic Americans, the most effective approach is to depict bodily noises as the universal language.  "No Translation Needed," reads one popular ad.  But to attract young consumers in the world's growing number of anti-democratic regimes, requires a different approach.

Here Hao credits her first big investor and now friend, Solon Tentakles, CEO of the Octopus Group.

     "It was Sol who figured out what was going on in the overseas youth market. The elation is gone.  The democracy movements are dead, and people are back to being cynical, doing whatever it takes to survive.  But there's also a huge nostalgia for the spirit of Tahrir Square.  So we put together an ad campaign that focuses on the purely physical side of what happened, the excitement of being together with all those other people.  We tracked a compilation Bod-E stream over 'Sout Al Horeya,' the song by Egyptian pop star Amir Eid that became a sort of anthem.  The title means 'I'm not turning around,' which obviously taps into the nostalgia.  Or maybe it speaks to the fantasy that the movement made a difference.  Either way, our subscription rate shot up."

Hao would not discuss the company's approach to China.  And asked about the percentage of profit that would go to the PRC government, she demurred.  But on the basic fact of Bod-E's acceptability to repressive regimes, she concedes no moral ground.  "After the counter-revolutions of 2011-12, all Western social media were banned in China, Egypt, Iran, and the Persian Gulf Republic," she points out.  "But all those companies - Google, Facebook, Twitter, and the rest - were so desperate to get back in, they knuckled under and signed Charter 2013," the Beijing-sponsored document that openly rejects the American definition of freedom and democracy, and states that each nation has the right to define these ideals according to its own unique civilizational characteristics.  "Say what you will about Bod-E," Hao exclaims, "we never signed that document!"

It's impossible to predict the future, but one thing is certain.  The same apolitical content that makes Bod-E acceptable to police states also makes it useless to them.  Amid the giddy atmosphere surrounding the Facebook and Twitter revolutions of 2011, a few voices sounded a more somber note.  One such was Evgeny Morozov, the Belarusian-American author of The Net Delusion, a book chronicling how state security services from Central Europe to North Korea use social media to gather information about dissidents.  Since then, it has become all too evident that such information can also be used to crush democracy movements.

In America, Morozov's message resonates mainly with cyber-libertarians concerned about having their privacy violated by advertisers - as in the case of Facebook selling user data to marketers advertisers.  This may sound trivial by comparison, but it must have looked pretty serious to Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg in August 2012, when the company's Palo Alto headquarters were was the target of a massive pro-privacy "nude-in" that, according to the Wall Street Journal, started the exodus of advertisers that led to the company's near collapse.

In both foreign and domestic markets, Bod-E refuses, for obvious reasons, to include ads in its content stream.  Instead, it earns all its revenue from its website, a decision based on the Facebook experience.  In 2011 it became clear that Facebook users were ignoring the ads on the right of every page, being much more interested in the personal information elsewhere. Indeed, the only ads people watched were the ones they had to watch in order to access videos posted by friends.  By the same token, users were found to spend much more time editing their own profiles than visiting the pages of others.

"We put all this together," say Hao,

     "under a concept we borrowed from Freud: 'the narcissism of small differences.'   We call it 'the vanity of small differences,' and use it to remind ourselves that human beings are primarily concerned with their self-presentation, even when it's just a mix of bodily noises that, from an objective standpoint, sounds no different from a million other people's.  Our users spend hours fiddling with their Outflo settings, and we charge them by the minute.  We also make them watch a commercial every time they access their account.  If only Zuckerberg had figured that out, he'd still be wearing his shirt!"

How will the vanity of small differences play out in the vast new markets that Bod-E is now poised to enter?  Hao's tone is upbeat.  "You can't use Bod-E to organize a protest march," she concedes.  "But by helping the world's young people to focus on themselves more than others, we will, I think, be teaching them something essential about the American way of life.  Let me give you an example."  Blushing slightly, she divulges a big secret, one that may alter forever the way people judge the political relevance of Bod-E.

    "The most popular Inflo setting is OHH, which selects for the panting and moaning sounds of women having orgasms.  This surprised us, because we expected people to turn off their transmitters when having sex.  But they don't. Especially younger users - they seem to have no problem sharing this unique dimension of their personality.  Anyway, we didn't see the significance of OHH, apart from the obvious marketing angle, till we got a call from the new Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, Stefani Germanotta."

Blushing again, Hao confides that Germanotta "sounded so serious and scholarly, we never would have guessed we were speaking to the former Lady Gaga!"

What did the Under Secretary want?

    "Well, here's the amazing part.  She wanted to know if there was some way we could create a compilation OHH stream that could be beamed directly into the ears of every young person on the planet.  That would require full global penetration, which suits us, of course.  But it's not just a question of self-interest. We'd also be doing something for America.  The Under Secretary says this would give a huge boost to the State Department's new Erotic Liberation Agenda, a public-private partnership that pinpoints the erotic oppression of Muslim girls, women, and LGBT individuals.  We're meeting with her next week, and if things work out, who knows?  The next revolution could belong to Bod-E!"

*******************
This essay first appeared in the spring 2011 issue of The Claremont Review of Books.
]]> tag:www.artsjournal.com,2010:/popcorn//26.42756 2010-12-27T18:04:11Z 2010-12-27T18:09:05Z

If you need a few minutes of joy, open this link to a live performance by Straight No Chaser (after the ad) ....

Martha Bayles http://www.artsjournal.com/popcorn/ If you need a few minutes of joy, open this link to a live performance by Straight No Chaser (after the ad) .
]]> tag:www.artsjournal.com,2010:/popcorn//26.42729 2010-12-24T22:28:18Z 2010-12-24T22:29:44Z

Martha Bayles http://www.artsjournal.com/popcorn/

]]> tag:www.artsjournal.com,2010:/popcorn//26.42147 2010-11-27T20:35:27Z 2010-11-27T20:57:34Z

"Later that night I got to thinking about safe sex. We talk about it as something physical. But what about the emotions? Is sex ever safe?" So writes Carrie Bradshaw, trendy newspaper columnist in Sex and the City. Played by...

Martha Bayles http://www.artsjournal.com/popcorn/ "Later that night I got to thinking about safe sex. We talk about it as something physical. But what about the emotions? Is sex ever safe?" So writes Carrie Bradshaw, trendy newspaper columnist in Sex and the City. Played by Sarah Jessica Parker, Carrie is one of four single women in their thirties, living in affluent Manhattan, whose erotic lives are chronicled in the HBO television series (1998-2004) and two subsequent feature films (2008 and 2010).

Each episode in the TV series begins with a question, some more portentous than others. To the one about safe sex, the answer will depend on a conception of the good - or rather, goods - associated with sex ... ]]> For most human beings, these are three: 1) pleasure, i.e., individual gratification; 2) commitment, that is, love and fidelity between partners; and 3) generativity, offspring and concern for the next generation. Every society expects these purposes to conflict - because after all, Eros is a wayward god - and so tries to harmonize them.

Like the rest of the human race, Americans are inclined to pursue pleasure in youth, learn commitment in adulthood, and in maturity, accept the burdens and joys of generativity. When Americans find these transitions difficult, it's usually because we place such a high premium on individual freedom. But even when our lives don't play out as straightforwardly as 1) plus 2) equals 3), most of us still consider this equation the norm.

This fact is easily lost on the 95 percent of humanity who are not American. Indeed, foreigners tend to assume that American sexual norms are off the chart in one way or another.  To Europeans, we are prudes; to many non-Westerners, we are rampant hedonists. When visiting the United States for the first time, foreigners often express surprise that Americans are so polite, religious, and (especially) family-oriented. Asked to explain their surprise, they frequently cite contrary impressions received from our exported entertainment.

On a recent trip around the world I interviewed 133 informed individuals about the impact of American popular culture on their societies, and no topic arose more frequently than Sex and the City. For example, in Dubai I was told by an Arab media executive that watching the series has a "status aspect to it. It means you are educated, tolerant, liberal." Yet, he added, "Arab viewers have a mixed bag of reactions to Sex and the City. In Saudi Arabia, a lot of people watch it but don't like to talk about it."

In China, Sex and the City is officially banned, but pirated copies are widely available, and a professor of communications informed me that many Chinese consider the show "educational." And therapeutic - a Chinese media executive told me that "a great many Chinese people have problems with sex and there is very little psychiatry, so some turn to Sex and the City for help."

Should we be pleased or dismayed by these comments? What sort of message does Sex and the City convey about American life? Is it positive or negative, accurate or inaccurate?

Sex and Sisterhood

At first glance, Sex and the City seems simply to fuel the stereotype of Americans as hedonists who value sexual pleasure above all other goods. The key figure here is Samantha (Kim Cattrall), the oldest of the four friends and the best at beating the predatory male at his own game. Mistress of the ogle, the come-on, the butt pinch, and the one-night stand, Samantha's shamelessness is amusing at first but grows wearisome over time. By the 2010 film, her golden-haired cougar act seems sad and unfunny.

Yet Samantha's outrageous vulgarity is not the whole picture. The first thing a liberated European would notice is the presence of bras and other undergarments in many of the bedroom scenes, reflecting a vestigial concern for decency, in either the actresses' contracts or HBO's upper management.

More important, Samantha's antics serve as a foil to her three friends, who like most human beings, hope to combine pleasure with commitment. Torn between the elusive Mr. Big (Chris Noth) and the intrusive Aidan (John Corbett), Carrie fears monogamy but also yearns for it. Jealous of her independence, lawyer Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) frets about growing old alone. And prim art dealer Charlotte (Kristin Davis) will do almost anything to realize her dream of a proper upper-middle-class marriage.

It's worth noting that the HBO series bears scant resemblance to its source, the New York Observer column written by Candace Bushnell and focusing on the directionless lives of spoiled Manhattanites too jaded to pursue any good, sexual or otherwise. Perhaps judging that a TV show about such people would not be a hit, the creators of the HBO series made their characters saner and more likable than Bushnell's.  Yet Carrie and her friends are not quite sane and likable enough to form lasting relationships with members of the opposite sex. Why is that?

For reply, let us recap American cultural history since the 1960s. First came the sexual revolution, fueled by contraception and the counterculture. Next came radical feminism, pronouncing all heterosexual relationships, including marriage, oppressive to women. Then came the conservative backlash, calling for a return to traditional morality. In the early 1980s, conservatives opposed to pornography joined forces with anti-porn feminists, but the alliance didn't last; and ten years later a new wave of "pro-sex" feminists was defending porn and prostitution, on the ground that "sex work" can be empowering as long as women are in charge.

Hence the underlying logic of Sex and the City: people should be free to have all the sex they want, but for women, heterosexual relationships are fraught with danger. And the greatest of these dangers is traditional morality, condemned out of hand as anti-sex and anti-female. Therefore, the woman who values her freedom is advised to pursue pleasure with men and commitment with female friends. To its credit, the HBO series plays out this logic in ways that are smart, witty, and at times quite affecting.

Of special note is the four-way friendship between Carrie, Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte. Female friendship is hardly a staple of American popular culture, most of which is oriented toward the tastes and proclivities of adolescent males. Nor is it present in Bushnell's columns, which reflect a milieu bereft of the virtues required for sustained human connection. Yet ask regular fans what they value most about Sex and the City, and they will likely mention the loyalty, constancy, and honesty of this foursome.

Cultural Exports

But these virtues are seldom, if ever, extended to any larger sphere. One of the curious things about this TV series full of New York eye candy is its studied avoidance of the momentous event that occurred midway through its six-year production run. Watch carefully during season four, and you will see subtle references to 9/11, such as the editing of a Twin Towers shot from the opening credits, an uptick in heartfelt tributes to Manhattan, and a tender closeup of a snow-globe enclosing a little plastic replica of the pre-attack skyline.

The decision to avoid 9/11 was certainly in keeping with the show's blithe indifference to everything outside the characters' sex lives. It was also a shrewd market calculation, because as mentioned above, Sex and the City remains a viable property throughout the globe. For example, in the first two months since its release in May, the film Sex and the City 2 grossed over $280 million, $186 million of it overseas. It is not uncommon these days for a Hollywood film to earn more overseas than at home. But these figures should remind Americans how powerfully our cultural exports shape foreign opinion about what kind of human beings we are.

Mindful of this, the critics squirmed with embarrassment at Sex and the City 2, which begins with an extravagant gay wedding (in New York) and continues with an even more extravagant junket to Abu Dhabi for Carrie and her friends, now in their forties. Along with the film's over-the-top consumerism, the critics focused - or rather, tried to focus - on the mind-boggling spectacle of Samantha flamboyantly pursuing her next orgasm in the United Arab Emirates, a country where women (and men) dress and behave with extreme modesty.

The UAE is not Saudi Arabia. Emirati women drive their own cars and typically dress in a flowing black abaya and loose hijab, not the face-covering niqab shown in the film. They also attend university, pursue business and professional careers, and (in the privacy of their homes) enjoy all the same consumer goods as Americans. If the film makers understood this, they didn't let their understanding interfere with their depiction of Abu Dhabi as an exotic pipe dream of a place that (in Samantha's words) "is so cutting edge in many ways, but so backward about sex."

The assumption here is that Americans are not backward about sex. But what does that mean? One annoying sentiment expressed throughout Sex and the City is admiration for Samantha's ability to "put her sexuality out there." Since the series ended in 2004, American audiences have shifted their attention away from well produced TV series and toward online porn and tacky reality shows, such as Jersey Shore (MTV) and Real Housewives of Orange County (Bravo). Some of the most telling scenes in Sex and the City are those in which Samantha is shocked by the crude antics of no-class hotties in their teens and twenties. But what are they doing, if not putting their sexuality out there?

Friends without Families

There's no denying that Sex and the City fascinates millions of people around the world. But it also repels them, because despite its many charms, it reduces American sexual mores to a truncated caricature.  In particular, it makes Americans appear alien, even grotesque, in our apparent refusal to acknowledge what for most people is the most important sexual good: not pleasure or even commitment, but generativity.

Sex and the City is strangely hostile to procreation. Of the four main characters, only Charlotte expresses a desire for children; the other three detest baby showers and shudder at the thought of what motherhood would do to their figures and sex lives. When Miranda gets pregnant by her ex-boyfriend Steve, her decision to have the child is hedged about with defenses against his attempts to play a husbandly role. By the end of the series she has become a loving mother, and she and Steve marry. But to judge by the two subsequent films, their happiness is far from assured.

This hostility to generativity is underscored by the truly stunning absence of parents, siblings, or other relatives from these characters' lives. Most glaringly, Carrie seems to have sprung from the pavement of East 73rd Street, like Athena from the head of Zeus. There's one brief mention, in season five, of her father having abandoned the family when she was small. But otherwise, none of these characters has a father worth mentioning, much less bringing onscreen. At one point we glimpse Aidan's father and mother through the window of a diner, but the scene is cut before they can utter a word.

As for mothers, the few who have speaking parts are domineering harridans, like Charlotte's mother-in-law, a Park Avenue matron who effectively castrates her son. Of the four, Charlotte is by far the most devoted to family, as is her second husband, Harry. Yet we never catch so much as a glimpse of the parents who presumably helped to instill that devotion. And while Carrie drops that lone hint about resenting her father's abandonment, she commits her own long-term abandonment by never once mentioning her mother.

It is, of course, true that single Manhattanites often come from other places and have little daily contact with their families. But Sex and the City turns normal distance into estrangement, even at funerals and weddings. Early in the series, Miranda says, "My family lives in Philadelphia and I don't like them." When her mother dies, Miranda's grief seems mainly directed at her family for rejecting her as "a single woman in my thirties." The pastor mis-characterizes her as a sister-in-law, and the only person willing to escort her from the church is her friend Carrie.

Perhaps this strikes a chord in societies where women are supposed to be married by a certain age. But the idea of a well-to-do Philadelphia family shunning a daughter because she has become a successful lawyer instead of a wife is absurd. Every time Sex and the City sounds this note of exclusion, even shame, at being single, it rings false. Why, then, is the note sounded so often? Why is being single held up as the main reason why these otherwise appealing characters have so little to do with their families?

Gay Liberation

The explanation emerges when we consider that single women and straight men are not the only focus of Sex and the City. Both of the show's creators, Darren Star and Michael Patrick King, are gay. And although the gay liberation movement of the last 40 years has followed a different trajectory from feminism, many gay men have ended up living by the same logic: sex is good, traditional morality bad, and the only people you can trust are your friends. Thus, Carrie's homosexual pal Stanford (Willie Garson) longs for a steady boyfriend but in the meantime cruises the bars while relying on Carrie for emotional support.

Stanford eventually finds happiness with the sardonic Anthony (Mario Cantone), and at their wedding (the extravagant one in the 2010 film), Anthony's elderly parents are shown affectionately toasting the grooms. What's remarkable about this scene is not that it occurs at a gay wedding but that nothing like it occurs at any of the straight ones. There are four heterosexual weddings in Sex and the City: two for Charlotte and one each for Miranda and Carrie (the 2008 film ends with her finally tying the knot with Big). But in none of these are the parents of the happy couple given an appropriate role.

This is what I mean by caricature.

By the same token, the awkwardness suffered by Miranda at her mother's funeral would ring truer if, instead of being single, she were a lesbian. Indeed, the estrangement from family felt by all of these characters is best explained as a transposition, onto straight characters, of a gay sensibility that takes familial estrangement as a given until proven otherwise. It is not my intention to belittle the pain of homosexuals who feel excluded from the rituals of the dominant society. But their pain is not the same as that of unmarried women, and the price of equating them, at home but especially abroad, is high.

This essay appeared in the Summer 2010 issue of the Claremont Review of Books.
]]> tag:www.artsjournal.com,2010:/popcorn//26.27196 2010-08-15T23:20:58Z 2010-08-15T23:34:03Z

Martha Bayles http://www.artsjournal.com/popcorn/ If you are still checking Serious Popcorn, you are a true and loyal reader.  You also may have noticed that SP has been estivating (the summer version of hibernating).

Snails do it, frogs do it,
Tortoises and salamanders do it,
Let's do it, let's estivate.

Apologies to Cole Porter.  What I'm trying to say is, the book is not yet finished, and I am on a publishing diet until it is done.  When I do publish something, I'll post it here.  But for the time being, that and perhaps the occasional mini-post is all I can muster.  Hope to be back soon.
]]> tag:www.artsjournal.com,2010:/popcorn//26.25608 2010-04-02T19:08:09Z 2010-04-02T21:49:23Z

Martha Bayles http://www.artsjournal.com/popcorn/ George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars, once quipped, "Creating a universe is daunting."  This is true, as anyone can tell from a quick perusal of the book of Genesis.  But for animators, being daunted does not pay.  From the painstakingly hand-drawn classics of Walt Disney to the latest performance-capture and 3-D bells and whistles, the prizes in this realm go to the boldest, most obsessed visionaries.  Animation begins in comedy, but by its very nature, it aspires to higher things.

I recently wrote about this for the Claremont Review, and if you liked Avatar in spite of its heavy-handed "message," I invite you to read the whole essay...

]]> ANIMATION  AND ASPIRATION

Hollywood is having a fat year, luring audiences away from video games and home entertainment systems with big-screen spectacles recalling the heady days when sound (or color, or Cinerama) was introduced.  Part of the lure is motion capture: a form of computer-generated (CG) animation that records the bodily movements and facial expressions of human actors, then transfers them to invented characters, such as 10-foot-tall extraterrestrials with blue skin, feline features, and long tails.

I refer, of course, to the Na'vi, the non-human heroes of director James Cameron's juggernaut hit, Avatar.  Photographs cannot do justice to these creatures, because what is most striking about them is their utterly fantastical appearance combined with their utterly lifelike mobility.  This isn't makeup, folks.  Nor is it Mickey Mouse.

As many have noted, the plot of Avatar resembles that of a 1992 animated film called FernGully.  But visually the two could not be more different, because along with motion capture, Avatar uses another cutting-edge CG technology: software able to generate a three-dimensional world, a virtual space through which a virtual camera can move with complete freedom.  (Like a video game, only several gigabytes richer.)

By this means, we are transported to Pandora, a lush inhabited moon in a remote planetary system, whose exotic flora and fauna glow at night like the Sugar Plum Fairy in Vegas, and whose skies are festooned with "floating mountains" lifted from a Song Dynasty scroll.  Project all this in 3-D onto an Imax screen, and you have the main reason why Avatar has become the top-grossing movie of all time, breaking the $1.8 billion record set by Cameron's 1997 blockbuster, Titanic.

Another film released over the holidays uses similar technology: Disney's A Christmas Carol (Although Charles Dickens gets screen credit for the "story,"  the big credits, for writing, producing, and directing, all go to Robert Zemeckis, CEO of ImageMovers Digital, a division of the Walt Disney Company). But the characters, notably Ebenezer Scrooge and the three ghosts, motion-captured from actor Jim Carrey, are all too familiar.  And so is the virtual world: 19th-century London, prettified in the manner of Hallmark cards and mass-produced paintings by Thomas Kincaid.  No wonder Carol has grossed a mere fraction of Avatar's haul.

Highbrow Animation

George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars, once quipped, "Creating a universe is daunting."  This is true, as anyone can tell from a quick perusal of the book of Genesis.  But for animators, being daunted does not pay.  From the painstakingly hand-drawn classics of Walt Disney to the latest CG bells and whistles, the prizes in this realm go to the boldest, most obsessed visionaries.  Animation begins in comedy, but by its very nature, it aspires to higher things.

Walt Disney is the prime example.  By the mid-1930s, his studio was the world's leading supplier of the "cartoon shorts" shown in movie theaters, but already he was dreaming of producing the first full-length animated feature.  That project, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), was the Avatar of its day, in terms of labor, stress, cost overruns, missed deadlines, and predictions of disaster.  It was also, like Avatar, a triumph.  The public loved it; Cecil B. DeMille sent a congratulatory telegram; reviewers across the political spectrum praised not just its cartoon silliness (the dwarfs, the cute forest critters) but also its artistic seriousness (the music, the evil queen, the scenes of terror in the forest).

These kudos went to Disney's head, apparently, because while overseeing his next two features, Pinocchio and Bambi, he began to dream again--only this time of producing a genuine "highbrow" work of art.  Encouraging him were two cultural celebrities: Leopold Stokowski, the conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra; and Deems Taylor, the composer and critic.  The result was Fantasia, a series of animated shorts set to classical music that debuted in New York in 1940.

To judge by Neal Gabler's biography, Disney was so devoted to Fantasia that when it failed to impress the elite cultural establishment, he was crushed.  Some critics praised the film's ambition, but overall, the reaction was withering, especially toward the segment which illustrates Beethoven's Sixth Symphony with scenes from Greek mythology--centaurs, fauns, and nymphs--cavorting in a style that can only be described as Disneyesque.  Gabler reports that a careless remark by Disney--"This thing will make Beethoven!"--was used "to lacerate him for his alleged philistinism."     

The trouble is, not all of Disney's philistinism was alleged.  I hate to knock Fantasia, because I admire certain segments, especially the one based on Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker Suite."  But as Richard Schickel commented shortly after Disney's death in 1966, Disney's response to the criticism was not that of a "genuine artist [who] sees his failures...as instructive experiences," but rather a defensive withdrawal.  When Fantasia sputtered at the box office (due, some say,  to cuts by the distributor), Disney turned definitively away from elite culture: "We're getting back to straight line stuff, like 'Donald Duck' and the 'Pigs'."

Of course, some animators never left the "straight line stuff."  In striking contrast to Fantasia was the consistent production of cartoon shorts by such Disney rivals as the Fleischer Studios (creators of Betty Boop and Popeye) and Warner Brothers (home of Wile E. Coyote and Bugs Bunny).  To measure the difference, just try to imagine Popeye or Bugs joining Jiminy Cricket in a chorus of "When You Wish Upon a Star"!'

Similarly, United Productions of America (UPA), a studio founded in 1944 by disaffected Disney employees, spurned Disney's commitment to visual realism and depth.  These were men who had borne witness to such heroic Disney efforts as the multiplane camera, a tall contraption with a camera mounted at the top, used to photograph downward through several glass plates, the highest plates painted with the foreground of a scene, the middle ones with the moving characters, and the lowest ones with the background. Rejecting all that, and adopting the modernist preoccupation with "flatness," UPA developed the herky-jerky style of "limited animation" that gave the world Mr. Magoo and the many popular TV series of Hanna-Barbera (Tom and Jerry, The Flintstones, Yogi Bear, The Smurfs).  Today the same deliberately simplified style is found in such diverse programs as South Park, SpongeBob Squarepants, and (in a class by itself) The Simpsons.

None of these rivals has come anywhere near the commercial success of the Walt Disney Company, now the world's largest media corporation.  Some would argue this has less to do with Disney's lofty aspirations than with the company's brilliant, some would say ruthless, business practices.  When it comes to diversifying product, fostering synergy, and dominating global marketing and distribution, Disney still knows how to stay one jump ahead of the competition.

This is true even though Disney missed the first bite of the computer-generated apple, firing a young animator named John Lasseter when he tried to introduce CG in the early 1980s.  Since then, of course, Disney has corrected that mistake.  Since 1991 it has done business with Pixar, the company Lasseter founded after he was fired; and in 2006 Disney bought Pixar for $7.4 billion.  Also used by Dreamworks, Sony, and Warner Brothers, the Pixar style of CG animation has yielded a string of hits--Shrek, Ice Age, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, Wall-E, Up--that make all other forms of animation look obsolete.

Yet the Pixar style is not just a look, it's an attitude: irreverence carried as far the market will bear, and no farther.  As in The Simpsons, each satirical barb in a Pixar-style film is tipped with the honey of whatever sentiment is appropriate to the target.  For example, when the target is family, outrageous betrayal is allowed as long as it doesn't disrupt the basic bonds.  Far be it from me to criticize such a winning formula.  But it's basically a comedy formula, and as evidenced by the life of Walt Disney, the creative freedom promised by animation tempts the most gifted practitioners to reach higher.

Faiths, Old and New

What does reaching higher mean in 2010?  For the answer, look again at Fantasia, which along with artistic ambition displayed religious aspiration.  In 1940 it was not uncommon to see Christian, especially Catholic themes in Hollywood films.  So the ending of Fantasia--a vision of satanic revelry set to Mussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain," followed by a procession of candle-bearing worshipers into a cathedral of trees set to Schubert's "Ave Maria"--attracted little comment.  Yet as noted by journalist Mark Pinsky, this was "the most explicitly religious sequence in any Disney feature until The Hunchback of Notre Dame," released in 1996.

This means that for the last half century the Disney corporation  has been airbrushing religion out of the Magic Kingdom.  From the black magic in Snow White to the voodoo in The Princess and the Frog (2009), the supernatural in Disney consists of folklore and magic, not miracles and faith.  As Pinsky points out, some Christian evangelicals regard this as sacrilege.  But as he also argues, the "Disney Gospel" of "dreaming, wishing, hard work, love and self-sacrifice" is made up of equal parts American Dream and Biblical ethics.

Pinsky makes the further point that while Disney "always called himself a Christian," he also "insisted that any narrow portrayal of Protestant Christianity (or any religion, for that matter)...was box-office poison, especially in lucrative, overseas markets."  The prescience of that comment is borne out today, as Hollywood earns two-thirds of its revenue overseas and gazes hungrily at huge potential markets in India and China.  Given the global nature of today's audience, the need to avoid "narrow portrayals" is greater than ever.  And this goes double for animators with lofty aspirations.

Does this mean the future is reflected in the wide golden eyes of the Na'vi?  The top brass at Sony, Dreamworks, even Fox (which begrudgingly bankrolled Avatar) are not announcing any more $500 million productions.  This may change, as Avatar breaks box-office records in country after country.  But if the major studios do launch a new project on this scale, they had better heed the real lesson of Avatar, which is less about money and technology than about a new belief system replacing the Disney Gospel.

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat calls this new belief system "pantheism" and belittles it as "Hollywood's religion of choice."  But because he focuses exclusively on America, he misses the most important source of this creed: the master of Japanese animation, Hayao Miyazaki.

Miyazaki came of age in U.S.-occupied Japan but does not claim Disney as an influence.  Instead, he points to European animation, which has always resided more comfortably (if less lucratively) in the realm of fine art.  And despite his friendship with Lasseter (who arranged a cushy distribution deal with Disney), the 69-year-old Miyazaki is hardly about to go Hollywood.  On the contrary, his lyrical, hand-drawn work draws most of its inspiration from Shinto, the traditional Japanese animism, with its belief in kami, spirits that dwell in nature, symbolize the virtues, and represent the ancestors.

This animism blends seamlessly with environmentalism in many Miyazaki films.  For example, Princess Mononoke (1997) is about spirit-animals defending a primeval forest against a rapacious mining company (basically the same plot as Avatar).  In Spirited Away, winner of the 2003 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, the "stink spirit" of a polluted river cries out to be cleansed.

The great advantage of this new belief system is its universality: every government on earth gives lip service, at least, to preserving the natural environment; and every culture possesses a repository of folklore used to entertain children and teach them valuable lessons.  To call this "pantheism" is to join the ranks of those who would condemn the fairies, gnomes, and talking animals in Disney.

Most likely, there's a political motive behind Douthat's anti-animation animus.  In Avatar, Pandora is despoiled by a 22nd-century version of a greedy American corporation backed up by brutal American mercenaries.  The human hero is a former Marine, but his heroism consists of going native and leading the Na'vi in a successful insurgency.  These references are so heavy-handed, one wonders if Cameron and his fans are aware that the Taliban and al-Qaeda are not peaceful tree-worshipers; or that American soldiers fighting and dying in Afghanistan and Iraq do not deserve to be caricatured as goons.

State-of-the-Art Propaganda?

Will this glib anti-Americanism become part of animation's new belief system?  It's hard to predict.  But for the sake of argument, let's say it doesn't, and the next generation of spectacular films is based on the Gospel of Miyazaki without the Michael Moore overlay.  Would that be such a bad thing?

It depends on the alternative.    The worldwide religious resurgence of the last 50 years has been a good thing in many ways.  But it has also led to the transmogrification of faith into extremist ideology.  What would happen if one of these extremist movements got their hands on the money, technology, and expertise to produce Avatar-quality propaganda?

Here's one possible scenario.  Avatar is Sanskrit for "descent" or "appearance"--the earthly manifestation of a Hindu deity.  One of the first films to reach India was Vie et Passion du Christ (1903), a French silent film with state-of-the-art special effects such as color (hand applied) and splicing to make divine beings such as the Angel of the Annunciation miraculously appear and disappear.  So impressed was a Bombay printer named Dadasaheb Phalke, he vowed to do the same for the Hindu gods.

Today Phalke is revered as the father of Indian cinema, and the making of his first major film, Raja Harishchandra (1913), is the subject of Harishchandrachi Factory, India's entry for Best Foreign Film at the 2009 Academy Awards.  This new film is a light-hearted comedy that avoids the freighted topic of religion.  But that doesn't change the fact that Phalke adapted his story from the Hindu epic the Mahabharata.  The Hindu roots of Indian cinema run deep, and right now there are quite a few Hindu extremists who would like to turn that  country's prolific film industry into a propaganda machine.

To its credit, Bollywood has avoided taking sides in the current culture war between extremist Hindus and Muslims.  Some leading figures, such as director Yash Chopra and actor Shah Rukh Khan, have made films urging religious tolerance and reconciliation between India and Pakistan.  But others have stooped to anti-Muslim stereotyping.  And as the industry acquires more technical expertise from its partners in Hollywood, the likelihood grows that this kind of propaganda could become more powerful and sophisticated.

Needless to say, there are also plenty of Islamist extremists who would happily return the compliment, using cutting-edge special effects to foment hatred against all infidels, including Christians and Jews.  One barrier might be the Islamic stricture against graven images.  But barriers can be gotten around, if the atmosphere is sufficiently heated.  In volatile conflicts  such as Indian-Pakistani dispute over Kashmir, what better way to rally the masses than with the entertainment equivalent of the nuclear bomb?  Compared with such a prospect, the Gospel of Miyazaki looks downright benign.

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Martha Bayles http://www.artsjournal.com/popcorn/ If you have never heard Charlie Gillett, you have missed something.  His 1972 book, The Sound of the City, is still one of the best books ever written about rock'n'roll during its formative years.  And his website will tell you what an indefatigable and generous radio host he was to musicians from every continent (and the occasional author, as I can attest).

Gillett died yesterday, and while his obituary is worth a look, his real legacy is all the terrific music he shared with the world.
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Martha Bayles http://www.artsjournal.com/popcorn/ I am not a Scorsese fan, and if you want to know why, here's my review of The Departed, in which I compare it with Infernal Affairs, the Hong Kong thriller on which it was based.  My conclusion, in the words of Dr. Johnson, is that The Departed is both original and good, but unfortunately the part that is original is not good, and the part that is good is not original.

I confess to not having seen Shutter Island, Scorsese's latest, which like The Departed bottom-feeds on my home town of Boston.  But after reading A. O. Scott's scathing review, I suspect this murky mess does not even deserve Dr. Johnson's faint praise.

Of course, I reserve final judgment on Shutter Island until somebody pays me to see it.
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Martha Bayles http://www.artsjournal.com/popcorn/ I confess to having started another blog, "Hearts and Minds" at worldaffairsjournal.org.  And because they are actually paying me (just a pittance, fellow bloggers, just a pittance), I agreed not to post those entries here.

But that doesn't mean I can't direct interested readers to the site, which has four entries so far: two on Avatar in China and two on the Indian superstar Shah Rukh Khan (pictured above), whose new film, My Name is Khan, premiered in the U.S. this weekend.

I could use this new blog as an excuse for neglecting Serious Popcorn, but as loyal readers know, SP already suffers from chronic neglect.  Who knows?  Maybe my two-timer's guilt will goad me to better behavior.
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Martha Bayles http://www.artsjournal.com/popcorn/ latest report, the sage is not attracting enough business to justify keeping him on all the 2-D screens in China.
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According to this brief item in today's New York Times, the Chinese government has yanked Avatar from the vast majority of that country's movie theaters in advance of the time it was scheduled to close - and replaced it with...

Martha Bayles http://www.artsjournal.com/popcorn/ According to this brief item in today's New York Times, the Chinese government has yanked Avatar from the vast majority of that country's movie theaters in advance of the time it was scheduled to close - and replaced it with a new state-sponsored biopic of Confucius.

Whatever the merits of this new biopic, Avatar is so hugely popular in China, it's hard to imagine why the government would choose to market its own film in such a counter-productive way.

For reason, some have suggested that the climactic scenes in Avatar of giant bulldozers moving in on people's land is striking a chord with the many dispossessed people in China. Needless to say, this is not an interpretation that would not have occurred to most of Avatar's American critics (including me).
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Martha Bayles http://www.artsjournal.com/popcorn/ In case you missed it, this parody promo reveals the many parallels between Avatar and a semi-forgotten animation feature, Fern Gully, released from Fox in 1992.  Same company, same theme, as you will see.  I still like Avatar better, because it is much more impressive to look at -- not because of its updated politics, which I'd describe as anti-globalization ca. 1995 (with a soupçon of crowd-pleasing anti-Bush venom thrown in). ]]> tag:www.artsjournal.com,2010:/popcorn//26.24083 2010-01-02T18:24:45Z 2010-01-02T18:35:13Z

Martha Bayles http://www.artsjournal.com/popcorn/ The biggest box office success of the year is unfolding with Avatar, not just in the US but around the world.  Indeed, this new special-effects extravaganza from James Cameron may be the film to break the all-time record of his previous smash hit, Titanic.

I enjoyed Avatar immensely, but in this op-ed from the Boston Globe, I wonder whether it signals a new genre: the anti-American blockbuster ...
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Martha Bayles http://www.artsjournal.com/popcorn/ This cartoon says it all.  Hope your holidays are warm & mellow in spite of the cold & tense mood of the country and world.  More movie postings soon. ]]> tag:www.artsjournal.com,2009:/popcorn//26.23501 2009-12-06T00:54:32Z 2009-12-07T00:10:47Z

Martha Bayles http://www.artsjournal.com/popcorn/ Is the grief caused by terrorism more intense than the regular kind?  Yes, to judge by Reign Over Me (2007), starring Don Cheadle as Alan, a successful Manhattan dentist who helps his former college roommate, Charlie (Adam Sandler), recover from the trauma of losing his wife and three daughters in the inferno of 9/11.

The critics panned this film for lacking a clear direction, but that's because it turns a predictable formula into something unpredictable.

First of all, Reign Over Me contains no overwrought flashbacks to 9/11.  Indeed, the only direct reference to that day is Charlie's painful recollection when finally induced to talk about his loss.  Second, the film has a wide streak of the juvenile humor we've come to expect from Sandler and writer-director, Mike Binder (whose credits include the raunchy HBO series The Mind of the Married Man).

The humor comes from Charlie's way of expressing his grief -- which is to regress to acting like a young teenager.  Instead of dealing with his pain, he tools around the city on a motorized scooter, listens to rock music on his headphones, and plays kill-the-monster video games on a giant TV screen.  Not only that, but he has been like this for several years when Alan runs into him, and it is clear that one reason why Alan decides to help is because spending time with Charlie allows him to regress, too.

But the result is something more than another comedy about the prolonged adolescence of the American male, because the immaturity of these characters is thrown into relief by the dark backdrop -- and when they finally do grow up, it comes as a relief not a letdown.
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