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Tuesday, August 03, 2010
Agora: Impurity, thy name is knowledge
This is a movie review, and it has spoilers. Cross posted at New Savanna.
As fate would have it, and along with Nina Paley and two other members of her free culture posse, Barry Solow and Clyde Adams, I went to see Alejandro Amenábar’s Agora last evening. Yes, there were moments during the film where I was thinking, ‘come on guys, can we just move it along.’ But at the end I was in a pensive mood, the kind that comes over me a film has, in whatever way, gotten to me. And so I really wasn’t into the after-movie debriefing session that Nina, Barry, and Clyde held in the downstairs lobby of the semi-ratty little movie house in the West Village. I did manage, however, to get in a word for menstrual symbolism, about which more later.
The film is set in ancient Alexandria during the rise of the Christians and centers around the philosopher Hypatia. It ends with Hypatia’s murder by a Christian mob. According to this post at Armarium Magnum it makes a hash of the history, a time-honored tradition in historical flix. In sum, this is what got botched:
Over and over again, elements are added to the story that are not in the source material: the destruction of the library, the stoning of the Jews in the theatre, Cyril condemning Hypatia’s teaching because she is a woman, the heliocentric “breakthrough” and Hypatia’s supposed irreligiousity. And each of these invented elements serves to emphasize the idea that she was a freethinking innovator who was murdered because her learning threatened fundamentalist bigots. The fact that Amenábar needs to rest this emphasis on things he has made up and mixed into the real story demonstrates how baseless this interpretation is.
OK, Amenábar blew it. I wouldn’t have known that if I hadn’t read that post, which I did before I went to see the film. Now that I’ve seen the film, you know what? I don’t give a termite’s ass. That is, assuming termites have asses, or what will pass for one.
I figure that when film-makers, or novelists for that matter, botch the history they pretend to be telling us, they do so because they want to tell us something other than history. They’re just using historical material to give us a myth dressed up to look like it really happened out there in the world. But that’s not where myths happen, ever. They happen in the mind and in the heart.
So what’s Amenábar’s myth about? Yes, it’s about knowledge and religious fundamentalism and intolerance and you can certainly read those Christian thugs as Taliban thugs if you wish I’m not going to try to stop you from doing that because you know your mind and so on. But that’s not the part of the myth that interests me, that’s not what drove me to silence by movie’s end.
The myth that held me is one about knowledge. Hypatia was a philosopher and a teacher. We see her in the classroom several times and listen to long disquisitions and demonstrations on matters mathematical and scientific – way more than would be necessary to a movie content and eager to score points against fundamentalist Christians. One of Hypatia’s students, Orestes, falls in love with her and declares his love publicly. She answers him the next day in class by presenting him with a handkerchief stained with her menstrual blood.
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Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Fans: A New Public for Literary & Cultural Studies
In continuing to think about fan culture I sent a query to Francesca Coppa, a long-time student of fan culture and one of the founders of the Organization for Transformative Works, a non-profit that is all about fan culture, serving it, studying it, and advancing it. In her reply she mentioned several kinds of ongoing fan scholarship and observed:
I think of all of these as “real” research; the question, perhaps, is what sort of umbrella it would have to be gathered under to “count.” But everyone knows that “fans” are a kind of grassroots academy who know more about the things they are fans of than any “TV and media” scholar!
So, I’m thinking that if the literary academy really wants to reach the general public, these folks should be high on the list. But just what would that entail? These people are actively creating their own artistic expressions in words, images, and sound, and are actively pursuing their own research agendas. What does the academy have to offer these people? Can the academy conceive of a relationship that’s more of a partnership than a relationship conceived around more evaluative essays in intelligible prose?
Because I’m thinking that that’s where the deep action is going to be. Not in trying to reconstruct the glory days of Leavis and Trilling and the rest, but in doing something that’s of this 21st century, something that’s new.
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Friday, July 23, 2010
Toward a Fan-Based Research Collaboratory
Cross-posted at New Savanna.
Despite some reservations about fan scholarship—e.g. I’ve seen pointless edit wars at Wikipedia & pros are adept at pointless quarrels as well—I’m seriously thinking about an initiative to see if fans are interested in doing at least some of the descriptive work I call for in the piece on cultural evolution I recently did for the National Humanities Center (cf. this “quasi-festo" for naturalist criticism, and this piece on “Kubla Khan"). I see little prospect that academy-based scholars will under take such work in the near term. The sort of descriptive work I have in mind is not obviously subordinate to an inquiry into the “meaning” of a text. That pretty much means that the work is not unpublisheable on its own; there’s no obvious way to earn professional credit for doing it.
But fans may well be interested in doing such work, but on the texts that interest them. And those texts are only rarely going to be canonical high culture texts. And that’s just fine with me. I’ve done such work on manga and cartoons and would have no problem with doing it on episodes of, e.g. Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Star Trek (any generation).
I’ve recently been doing quite a bit of work on Sita Sings the Blues, an animated film by Nina Paley, which I discuss in the Humanities Center post. As some of you may know, the film is done in four different visual styles. So I’ve made a table with a column for each style and then gone through the film from beginning to end and briefly annotated each segment in the proper column. You can find that table online in a Google docs file here. One of those segments, the Agni Pariksha, is done in a fifth style. I’ve gone through that segment an annotated each “shot” or sequence within it. You can find that here. In prinple each of the some 60+ segments in the film could be described at the level of detail I’ve used in the Agni Pariksha segment.
In fact, one could easily describe a film frame-by-frame. Would that be worthwhile? In some cases, yes, and in some cases no. It depends. There’s really no way of knowing until the work’s been done in at least some cases and we can take a look at it.
It’s clear to me that such descriptive work is a necessary precondition to a deeper knowledge of texts, whether written, filmed, or videotaped. All the cognitive psych and evolutionary psych and neuro-psych in the world is not going to accomplish what can only be accomplished through description. If the pros aren’t going to do the work, then it’s up to the fans. If the fans get into it, then in a decade or two the pros will have no choice but to follow or simply to drop off the edge of the earth.
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Monday, July 05, 2010
The Human Sciences
I’m discussing Cultural Evolution: A Vehicle for Cooperative Interaction Between the Sciences and the Humanities, a blog of the National Humanities Center. Here’s the blurb:
IN THE FORUM
William Benzon, an independent scholar who has written about cognitive science, art, music, and the web, is in the Forum. The author of Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture (2001), he outlines here a comprehensive approach to the human sciences, championing methods and insights from researchers trained in the humanities and the sciences. His essay,”Cultural Evolution: A Vehicle for Cooperative Interaction Between the Sciences and the Humanities,” claims that a humanistic range of knowledge of cultural phenomena is necessary for effective description of the objects of analysis. Lacking such background, students of the human are likely to produce unscientific models and theories about population-wide maintenance, propagation, and incremental change of cultural codes.
To build accurate models at what Benzon calls the micro-scale, one needs to understand perceptual and cognitive processes and how meaning is negotiated through interaction. On the larger canvas, one needs to see at the macro level how changes in cultural codes support the emergence of new forms of mental activity. Properly pursued, the study of humanity can reveal the design of cultural codes as emerging from the collective efforts of populations where each individual negotiates his or her life transaction by transaction.
Bill Benzon is on the scientific advisory board for the Institute of Music and Neurologic Function in New York City. Previously he was a Senior Scientist with MetaLogics, Inc., where he worked on knowledge representation and information design for web-based health services. Benzon taught in the Department of Language, Literature, and Communication at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and has published scholarly articles, reviews, and technical reports on African-American music, literary analysis and theory, cultural evolution, cognition and brain theory, visual thinking, and technical communication. In conjunction with Richard Friedhoff, he wrote a book on computer graphics and image-processing entitled Visualization: The Second Computer Revolution.
Come on down!
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Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Race in the Symbolic Universe 6: Cultural Evolution?
Cross-posted at New Savanna
As I’d originally planned it, this series of posts ended with the one on The Cosby Show (where you can find links to the earlier posts). However, I’ve decided to add one last post in which I briefly think about what it would mean to consider this succession of texts – The Winter’s Tale, Huckleberry Finn, A Passage to India, Light in August, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and The Cosby Show – as being the product of cultural evolution. That, of course, links this post with my ongoing series on cultural evolution (here, here, and here).
Let me begin by noting that, in a private email, Jeb suggested that we consider Caliban as an instance of the Medieval trope of the Wild Man. That makes sense to me. Now consider my last comment in that discussion, which loosely follows from a conception of cultural evolution:
Continue reading "Race in the Symbolic Universe 6: Cultural Evolution?"Let’s think of literary texts as indicators of the cultural psycho-social dynamics existing in the population in which the texts circulate. Other dynamics may also be circulating in those populations. And, of course, it’s quite possible that there are similar dynamics in populations which pay no attention to these particular texts of interest.
So, on the one hand there’s a certain dynamic of projection in the relationship between Prospero and Caliban in The Tempest, a text that is known to a certain population which we’ll call X. Just what this population X might be, that’s a tricky question, as that particular text has been read far and wide (and acted on the stage) for four centuries or so. Are we interested in that whole population, smeared as it is all over geographical space and historical time? Well, I don’t want to try to come up with a precise answer to that, not here and now. Not so much because this is merely a comment to a blog post, but because I simply don’t know how to do it. Let’s say that we’re particularly interested in the subpopulation of X that existed in early modern England in the early 17th century.
Imagine, then, that we find a similar dynamic in some other text or texts, texts that circulate in some different population Y. Under what circumstances does it make sense to argue for a historical and causal connection between the underlying psycho-social dynamics of population X and population Y? I think, for example, that there is a projective psycho-social dynamic in A Light in August that is similar (but not the same) to the one in The Tempest. Is there some kind of causal connection between the cultural psychodynamics operating in that early modern English population X (in the case of the Shakespeare) and the cultural psychodynamics operating in that mid-20th century American population Y (in the case of the Faulkner)?
Consider a similar, but different question. That early modern population X spoke some version of English. That language is similar, but not the same, as the version of English spoken by the mid-century American population Y. Those versions of English are similar enough that people in the two populations could converse with one another and have some degree of mutual understanding, though there certainly would be difficulties. Is there some causal connection between the English spoken by X and that spoken by Y? If so, how does that causal connection work? There certainly isn’t any direct influence (there’s that word) between early modern England and mid-20th century America. But there is something. What is it and how does it work?
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Thursday, May 13, 2010
The Hollywood Version: Who Framed Roger Rabbit
This is the fourth in a series of five posts dealing with the symbolic deployment of racial difference. The first was about Shakespeare’s Caliban; the second was about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; and the third dealt with A Passage to India and Light in August.
Cross-posted at New Savanna.
Robert Zemeckis’s 1989 film Who Framed Roger Rabbit uses cartoon characters in roles which Hollywood had assigned to blacks back in the thirties and forties--suggesting that Disneyland is basically the Cotton Club in which black performers have been replaced by mice, ducks, dogs and other cartoon characters. The basic technical gambit, and triumph, of the film is to mix animated characters with live actors. This technical wizardry is thematically important.
In the film’s Los Angeles there are two worlds, that of people, and that of Toons, classic cartoon characters from Betty Boop through Dumbo to Elmer Fudd. The Toons and their world are consciously modeled on white stereotypes of blacks. That is to say, they enact the symbolic role which whites have developed for blacks. The Toons are born entertainers: they sing, they dance, they tell jokes—the few positive roles which American popular culture has, until recently, allowed to blacks. One of the settings for the action is a night club where the entertainers and staff are Toons, but the clientele is strictly human, a setting modeled after those clubs, such as Harlem’s Cotton Club, where the performers and staff were black while the patrons (and owners) where white.
One could imagine the same story being made using blacks instead of Toons. However, that film would surely, and properly, have been attacked for its blatent racism. While racism is alive, and altogether too well, in contemporary American society, sensitivities have changed. Hollywood no longer allows itself to indulge in stereotyping as blatent as it once enjoyed. The film Zemeckis made replaces racism with the technical virtuosity needed to mix animated characters with live actors. Instead of reviling the film for its racism, we can revel in its virtuosity. This basic structural device allows Zemeckis to create a film which shows that there are things the human characters need to do to live their lives, or, at least, to live them well, which those humans cannot do for themselves. They depend on Toons to complete their emotional lives.
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Monday, April 26, 2010
Race in the Symbolic Universe 1: Caliban
cross-posted at New Savanna
The concept of freedom did not emerge in a vacuum. Nothing highlighted freedom—if it did not in fact create it—like slavery. . . . For in that construction of blackness and enslavement could be found not only the not-free but also, with the dramatic polarity created by skin color, the projection of the not-me. The result was a playground for the imagination. What rose out of collective needs to allay internal fears and to rationalize external exploitation was an American Africanism—a fabricated brew of darkness, otherness, alarm, and desire that is uniquely American.
—Toni Morrison, Playing in the DarkThere’s a young black boy on my job and those white cats have made him tell them so many lies about what they call his love life that he can’t tell whether he’s coming or going. They want to believe that we screw like dogs or cats—you know, just go out there and get you a piece, just like they might scratch their backs or get a glass of water. . . Another thing, if we were just like dogs, then all the rotten things they have done and are doing to us would be okay!
—Clifford Yancy, in John Langston Gwaltney, Drylongso
This is a series of short pieces dealing with the representation of race in American culture:
- Shakespeare’s Caliban
- Sam Clemens at the Cotton Club: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- Inter-Racial Sex: A Passage to India and Light in August
- The Hollywood Version: Who Framed Roger Rabbit
- The Funkified Standard Version of the American Dream: The Cosby Show
The first follows immediately in this post. I’ll post the rest over the next week or three.
Shakespeare’s Caliban
The symbolic universe of white America originated in Europe. And Europeans had, by the late Renaissance, developed an image of blacks. In The White Man’s Burden, Winthrop D. Jordan showed that Europeans were disposed to see blacks as strongly emotional and sensual, qualities they were coming to reject in themselves. In the late Renaissance blacks were likened to beasts. In Bacon’s New Atlantis (1624) the “Spirit of Fornication” was depicted as “a little foul ugly Æthiop” (Jordan, p. 19). Jordan notes that Englishmen “were especially inclined to discover attributes in savages which they found first, but could not speak of, in themselves”. Thus before the European settlers of North America had any substantial contact with Africans, they had a lascivious place prepared in their symbol system through which to understand and interact with them.
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Sunday, April 04, 2010
Disney Does Darwin
Another post examining Disney’s Fantasia. Here’s one about the entire film; one about Dance of the Hours; one about The Nutcracker Suite and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice; and one about Ave Maria (dialog with Mike Barrier).]
Disney’s Program
Just how and why Darwin came to be on the program for Disney’s Fantasia, that I do not know, though perhaps the question could be answered though a trip to the Disney archives. There can be no doubt, however, that Darwin was on the program, even if he, and his theory of evolution, wasn’t mentioned by name. Here’s what Deems Taylor says in his on-screen introduction to Disney’s presentation of The Rite of Spring:
When Igor Stravinsky wrote his ballet The Rite of Spring, his purpose was, in his own words, “to express primitive life” So Walt Disney and his fellow artists have taken him at his word. Instead of presenting the ballet in its original form, as a simple series of tribal dances, they have visualized it as a pageant, as the story of the growth of life on Earth. It’s a coldly accurate reproduction of what science thinks went on during the first few billion years of this planet’s existence. So now, imagine yourselves out in space, billions and billions of years ago, looking down on this lonely, tormented little planet, spinning through an empty sea of nothingness.
He goes on to add that “Science, not art, wrote the scenario of this picture. . . . Finally, after about a billion years, certain fish, more ambitious than the rest, crawled up on land and became the first amphibians.” From there we see the age of dinosaurs, and their demise in a great heat wave. Disney had originally intended to present evolution from the beginning to the dawn of humankind, but pressure from Christian fundamentalists led him to abandon that idea.
Still, the basic idea is there on the screen. The damage, if that’s what it is, has been done.
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Wednesday, March 31, 2010
“NATURALIST” criticism, NOT “cognitive,” NOT “Darwinian” – A Quasi-Manifesto
You mean a quasifesto?
Shoo, get out . . .
Fact is, if I’d known then what I know now, I’d never have thought of myself as being in the business of bringing cognitive science to literary criticism much less represented myself to the world in that way. But I didn’t (know) and I did (represent), so now I seem stuck with the moniker. I’d like to shake if off.
When I finally decided to publish a programmatic and methodological statement, “Literary Morphology: Nine Propositions in a Naturalist Theory of Form,” I adopted naturalism as a label. Fact is, I’d just as soon not think of it as anything but the study of literature. But we live in an age of intellectual brands, so I chose “naturalism” as mine.
Yes, I know that “the natural” is somewhat problematic, but you’ll just have to get past that. No label is perfect and I’m not about to coin a new term. Assuming you can struggle past the word, what does naturalism suggest to you? To me the term conjures up a slightly eccentric investigator wandering about the world examining flora and fauna, writing up notes, taking photos, making drawing, and perhaps even collecting specimens. That feels right to me, except that I’m nosing about poems, plays, novels, films, and other miscellaneous things. Beyond that I’d like the term to suggest some sense of literature as thoroughly in and a part of the world. There’s only one world and literature exists in it.
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Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Two Rings in Fantasia: Nutcracker and Apprentice
A light in sound, a sound-like power in light,
Rhythm in all thought, and joyance every where
— S. T. Coleridge, “The Æolian Harp"
Caveat: There’s a bunch of screen shots below the fold, so the post may load slowly.
Long-time readers of The Valve know of my affection for Fantasia (1940). I’ve already argued that it’s one of the greatest art works of the last century, an argument I don’t intend to reprise here. Rather, I want to augment my analysis of two of the the eight episodes, Dance of the Hours and Ave Maria (which is at Michael Barrier’s site, not here) with a look at two more, the Nutcracker Suite, and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. I’ve chosen those two episodes because both have a ring structure, thus: A, B, C, . . . C’, B’, A’. My object is thus a formal one and its primary result descriptive: These two episodes each have a ring structure. I do, however, comment on matters other than form.
Nutcracker Suite: An Animist Fantasy
Disney chose Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite for Fantasia’s second segment. This music, unlike the piece he chose for the first segment, Bach’s Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor, does have a program; it tells a story that has to do with Christmas Eve, large dancing dolls, a nutcracker in the form of a soldier, and so forth. But, as Deems Taylor informs us in his on-screen introduction to the episode, Disney discards that story. Disney presents us with a six-part animist fantasy of the natural world around a small pond.
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Sunday, March 14, 2010
A Defense of Literary Studies Anyone?
During the first minute or two of the clip below, Alec Baldwin gives an impassioned brief for the fundamental importance of acting, his craft. Has any humanist recently defended the humanities this unequivocally? Has any literary scholar defended the academic study of literature with like passion and conviction? And I mean the academic study of literature, not literature itself, that’s different.
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Thursday, February 18, 2010
Avatar Rooted in Cameron’s Childhood Experiences in the Canadian Woods
Cameron talks to Charlie Rose:
Cameron had to fight the studios to play the environmental and spiritual so prominently in Avatar.
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Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Avatar and Disability
Writing at Open Salon, Bill the Lizard (guesting for Chauncey DeVega) puts disability front-and-center in a reading of Avatar:
What many people seem to forget is that Jake Sully, the main character, is established early on in the story as being both an ostracized and emasculated character. Thus, he does not fall into the classic white privilege archetype that you see in white guilt fantasy.
Jake Sully is emasculated in a literal sense because of a combination of physical injury, financial inadequacy and family tragedy. Not only is Jake Sully a Marine who cannot walk or fight, but more tragically he knows that there is a cure for his injury, but cannot afford it. Further, Jake’s closest relative, his twin brother, has been killed in a meaningless act of violence that Jake could not prevent, and now Jake is now forced to step forward into a position that he does not feel he is smart enough to handle.
Thus, he compares Sully to Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises. Bill the Lizard goes on to point that, because of his disability, he did not enter the Avatar program from a position of privilege and entitlement. He was determined to “to apply his knowledge and skills towards his own self-care and development” had is “forced to operate outside of the two dominant spheres of influence at the Hell’s Gate facility on Pandora: the soldiers and the scientists.” That is to say, he entered the program as an Other. Thus “while the scientists are slowly accepting him, it’s very apparent that Sully would rather immerse himself within the Na’vi culture through his interactions with Neytiri.”
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Wednesday, January 06, 2010
Opsis
The current round of discussion of Avatar brings up an issue I think about from time to time: opsis, aka spectacle. In the Poetics Aristotle laid out six categories under which to examine drama: mythos (plot), ethos (character), lexis (diction), dianoia (theme/idea), melos (song), and opsis. He thought of opsis as a secondary matter, not so important as mythos or ethos. Fair enough. However, that was then, and now is now and movies aren’t plays.
Just how important is the look of a film in its overall impact? The story is the story regardless of whether the film is live action color, live action B & W, animated full (e.g. traditional Disney style), animated limited (most anime), CGI, etc. Character is not so independent of visual medium and at least some of the discussion about animation as a medium, hand-drawn vs. CGI (I’m thinking of Mike Barrier in particular), has to do with the presentation of character.
Avatar is scoring points – at least in some quarters – for its technical sophistication: CGI, motion-capture, 3D. And there are some in Hollywood who say that 3D in particular is the future (Jeffrey Katzenberg for one). Yes, much of Avatar certainly looks good. But I can’t say that the forest mysticism scenes look any better than similar scenes in Miyazaki (e.g. Princess Mononoki or Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind) and that’s mostly traditional hand-drawn cel animation. For that matter, Sita Sings the Blues looks as good as any film I’ve seen recently, and it’s all Flash animation. There are many ways of looking good.
But would Avatar be doing this well at the box office if it had been done as a superbly crafted work of hand-drawn cel animation (with the same cast doing the voice work)? I doubt it. But why not? Is the film’s look so tightly integrated with the story and character that the latter demand the former?
Of course, Avatar is but an example. I’ve just been re-watching Apocalypse Now, a live action film in shot in color. It’s a good-looking film, and a better one than Avatar. How much of that film is tied-up in the look?
Etc.
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Saturday, January 02, 2010
Cathy & Heathcliff xoxoxox, NOT!
During last year’s bruhaha over Cornel West’s sublime and funky as-told-to autobiography Michael Bérubé offered a side comment (115) that caught my attention: “Which reminds me. Could people please stop speaking about Wuthering Heights as if it were a romance novel, and about Heathcliff as if he were some dark Byronic hero? The book and its central character are profoundly creepy and unsettling and all-around chthonic.” He’s right, of course, both in his presupposition (that the book is often romanticized) and in his assessment of the book itself. Which leads me to this question:
How did Wuthering Heights ever come to be thought of as a paradigm of intense romantic love that, alas, could not be fulfilled?
My first inclination would be to blame it on the movies. I vaguely remember seeing one in which Olivier played Heathcliff; but all I remember of the film is that it stopped halfway through the book, with the death of Catherine. I’d assume that Hollywood removed the violence and the perversity as well.
But I’m not sure that Hollwoodification is the answer. After all, the book itself still exists and is taught in both secondary schools and college. How was the book received in the 19th century? Did 19th century reviewers look squarely at the book’s violence, which includes spousal abuse and near-murder, not to mention animal cruelty?
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