Thru Fragments of Cinema: (New Years) Resolution

Life gains meaning through taking responsibility.

I’ve heard that a few times in my life in a few different contexts. The latest is from an unexpected source - my improv acting teacher. (A few months ago I capriciously decided to sign up for improv acting classes, inspired thru this article.) We witness great art, he claims, when characters own up and take responsibility for things. Part of it is the ability to admit you’re wrong and the willingness to be vulnerable in front of others. You can see it in the best actresses. The more that I think about it, the more I’m beginning to see that true beauty – at least in other people – lies in vulnerability. Good looks are important, but vulnerability underlies it. It’s what makes good looks look good, and it extends so much further. Consider



Back to taking responsibility. In order to judge a principle’s worth, Robert Pirsig (author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) believed, you use the principle like a scalpel to divide and classify phenomena, and then you ask yourself whether you’ve made a clean deep cut. By these standards, the idea of taking responsibility seems meaningful. It makes a clean cut in my life.



But it’s not as obvious as it may seem. Another student in my improv class pointed out that Steven Speilberg’s main characters are notorious for doing everything except taking responsibility. They never change, they never do anything but just run around and have things happen to them. This really set my mind turning. I’m a sucker, you see, for good movies. There’s nothing better than a well-made film, and it’s not just about the explicit elements of character and plot, it’s about the visual and audio portrayal of human experience. That’s why Shakespeare rarely makes for great cinema and why black and white is rarely as good as color. Directors make up their own grammar in the style in which they make films. And Speilberg is one of the best at doing this.

But the student was completely right, I just hadn’t thought about it that way. And it’s not just Spielberg. A lot of films are chock-full of producing a range of experience all of which just swirl around the main character. This post was partly inspired by a review of the movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (an intelligently shot and edited film which, I believe, fell way over top-side from a gimmicky story that went on for too long). Here are some snippets from the review. Consider how many other films the criticism could apply to.

Button is the star of the film, but also its least interesting, least developed character, a soothing blank of a protagonist who seems to want little, feel nothing, and never have anything to say.

Most of the scenes in the movie consist of Pitt giving pleasantly docile looks while others blather on. During one fairly long scene with a woman he's having an affair with, Button utters a total of three lines, two of which consist of only two words: "You make me feel young." "What mistakes?" And finally, "I'm freezing." Later, he's asked about his years of travels, and the only answer he provides is, "I saw some things." Which is accurate enough: he's an observer, a cipher, a blank screen, but nothing more.

Though the movie stretches past the two and a half mark, and Button is in every scene, it is impossible to say anything specific about him, except that he appears to desire Daisy. Button is not merely generic, he is utterly empty, like one of those carefully wrapped fake Christmas gifts displayed under a department store tree.

These points can apply to every other film produced these days. And I have to admit they apply to some of my favorites.

Consider Tom Hank's empty expressions throughout Forest Gump (written by the same screenwriter as Benjamin Button).

Or the classic American action hero.

How vulnerable is he?

But maybe there’s an appeal to the story of the man who is victim of his circumstances. The sort of person who merely has to watch life unfold around him, and he can come out saying, “The things I’ve seen. Oh, the life I’ve led.” Tom Cruise in Steven Speilberg’s War of the Worlds - all he had to do was run from the machines, and honestly what a great movie that made. Maybe that’s part of our modern world. Or maybe humans have always felt that way. Modern society can certainly be so alienating that it’s easy to feel like we’re just the victims of our surroundings or technology, and that that alone gives life a meaning worth fighting for – or running from.

Pirsig makes the point that while it’s easy to feel alienated from everything, technology was made to benefit us. There’s nothing inherently wrong with technology, or the system, or it all. It’s our mindset that’s wrong. Science has advanced so quickly that we lack the proper tools for incorporating it into our mindset. When your computer freezes your first thoughts are “it’s acting up again, what in god’s name is it up to?” You just want to take a bat to it! But the computer is just a tool, one that was meant to work with us. What the situation needs is someone to take responsibility for it. Because surely it’s not the computer’s fault. And I don’t think you have to know much about computers to realize this. But it’s not necessarily intuitive. And it doesn’t mean that you’ll solve the problem. But on the other hand the “condemnation of technology”, Pirsig wrote, “is ingratitude, that's what it is.”

I’d like to take more responsibility and perhaps allow myself to be more vulnerable. I’m not sure if that’s a tangible goal, or what it’d necessarily look like. But that’s my New Year’s resolution.

-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance):

Photo: (1) Natalie Portman II, 10/23/2007, Mira(on the wall); (2) Portrait of Julia Roberts; (3) zooey deschanel of she & him, 04/23/2008, by Dese'Rae L. Stage; (4) vlcsnap-959983, 02/22/2007, dooby brain;(5) Portrait of Jennifer Gehrt from the 2007 documentary Confessions of a Superhero; (6) zooey deschanel of she and him, 04/23/2008, by Dese'Rae L. Stage; (7) Photo of Kathryn Aselton, from the 2005 film The Puffy Chair; (8) Promo from the 2008 film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; (9) Photo from 1994 film Forrest Gump; (10) Photo from the 2008 film of Rambo; (11) Photo from the 2005 film World of the Wars; (12)Happy Christmas Shopping, 12/16/2006, by Sherlock77; (13) Jason Campbell of the Washington Redskins.

Video: Music video of the song "Lovers in Japan (acoustic version)" by Coldplay from the 2008 album Viva La Vida.

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Upcoming ideas:

• Seeing things in perspective in the stock market
• (another) example of why the economy's not a zero-sum game
• One solution for some times when you may get stuck in thought
  

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What are you fighting for?

So many people these days have a chip on their shoulder. It’s not always a bad thing – there’s nothing inherently wrong with believing in something and wanting to improve the world. But I can’t help but think they’re missing the bigger picture. The other day, for instance, my neighbor got pissed that I was parking on her public dead-end road. There weren't any houses around, although a bit further down the road branches off into 3 or 4 individual cul-de-sacs. And this was a safety issue because the shoulder across my house, where I usually park, was too prone to side-swiping. Nonetheless, she called me an asshole and drove off before I could process.



It’s not that I was offended, but it piqued by imagination: Does this lady worry about other people’s parking spots all the time? What are you fighting for?, I wanted to ask her, in the double-sense of what’s the object of your fighting and why are you even doing in it. Surely if I’d moved my car, her largest problems in life would remain unresolved. She’d just have some other chip on her shoulder.

But lots of people have chips on their shoulders, and sometimes I almost feel like other people expect the same of me. There are, I suppose, lots of things to be mad about, lots of causes worth fighting for. But there are infinitely more causes not worth fighting for. All too often, the fervor in which people fight for a cause is disproportional to its actual importance. Even people parking by others’ houses is quite a contention area in America, as you can see in this google search.

I savor these times when people can afford to worry about such inconsequential issues. But there is something incredibly ugly about these minor squabbles. And I see it in various people, in the obstacles they unnecessarily make for themselves and others. Up-close they're ugly, but from a distance they’re pretty funny. I’ve begun a small collection:

• Topping the list is the Topfree Equal Rights Association, their stated mission is to “help women who encounter difficulty going without tops in public places in Canada and the USA.” Laws which require women to wear tops, they claim, are confining. It’s an equal rights issue, they say. Men can go around without shirts, so why can’t women? For them it’s also about comfort, convenience, well-being, and “ownership and control of [women’s] breasts”. (Now, as a guy I kind of support this, but not for stated reasons.) Their argument is completely logical (although there are some holes, such as the fact that, evolutionarily, breasts are a sexual organ), but in light of the billion other issues that people are fighting for, who cares?
• Lack of bias in language. For the past decade, the American Psychological Association has taken this to new heights by divorcing pathological language from any negative traits. For example, when discussing schizophrenia, you have to write, people with schizophrenia rather than schizophrenics, so as to avoid defining people by a pathological condition. This might be reasonable - ignoring the fact that, left untreated, people’s lives are often defined by such conditions – but then there are other guidelines that further separate pathology from negative consequences. For instance, you’re not supposed to write people suffering from multiple sclerosis, but rather people who have multiple sclerosis, even though everyone who has multiple sclerosis is also suffering from it. More examples can be found here. Taken to the extreme these guidelines devoid words of their meaning because pathological conditions are by definition negative. Currently however they merely make for ugly sentences in the name of political correctness.
• Handicap parking. A website community, Handicapped Fraud, has been established to report incidents of illegally parking in handicapped spaces. They’ll also get on your case if you have handicap that isn't visually verifiable. Regardless of the website, handicap parking laws are already pretty absurd; depending on the size of any lot, they require anywhere from 2% to - in the hypothetical of a lot with 2-spots - 1/2 of the spots to be handicapped. It's a business expense issue, not an equal opportunity one. It hurts smaller businesses more; while people with handicaps have already, arguably, benefited disproportionally more from the automobile. In addition to high associated fines, wrote the website creator, “offenders seem to slip in and out of their illegal handicapped parking spaces, with no questions asked. Breaking the law every day with no repercussions.” There are a lot of really angry people at that website.
• All federally funded research has to ask 2 questions about race/ethnicity: Are you Hispanic/latino? And then, identify your race. This is because many Hispanic/latinos have multiple ethnicities. At the same time, so do many people of non-hispanic descent. While this measure was intended to streamline data collection, it falls short for the same reason most silly government guidelines fall short – because the government is no expert in the area. The guideline was first promoted through the Office of Management and Budget (?) in 1997, tested by the census bureau in 2000, and then required in any study funded through the NIH. Surely should the scientific consensus on ethnicity change – and after all, America is a changing landscape – the government won’t be quick to adjust.
• School Bus traffic stop laws. You might have heard about these because the punishments are so severe. In many areas you can get up to $1000 and a month of jail time for passing by a stopped school bus that’s either loading or unloaded kids. In essence the school bus functions as a moving stop sign, which pops out whenever the bus is stopped, however these rules still apply if the flashing stop sign doesn’t work. And it doesn’t matter if it’s a bus for kindergarteners or high schoolers. Childhood safety is surely important, but I’ve yet to see any studies on the safety of a moving stop-sign that applies to passing cars in both directions.
  

Those are just humorous outliers - examples of people fighting, and fighting really hard, for things that don't really matter. But they make me wonder how many other beliefs – held by me or by others – are as vain. Battles against things like drugs, gay marriage, or corporate America all strike a similar cord with me: What are they fighting against?

Sayre’s Law summarizes related phenomena as follows: “In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the stakes at issue.” I like that law. It throws the fighters directly on their heads, and I don’t think it undermines my perspective but maybe it does. A corollary to the law states, “That is why academic politics are so bitter.”

Coldplay - New Music - More Music Videos

Usually in our modern society, very little is at stake. This is in part due to our affluence. A successful economy functions to keep our individual stakes small, it hedges risk. Banks minimize the risks involved in loaning money just as insurance companies minimize the risks involved in getting sick. Our largest corporations are partially owned by millions of stakeholders; if they make an irrational move and the shareholders disapprove, they stand to lose a lot of money. Speculators from Wall Street protect farmers from the risk of volatile price swings. Clearly we’ll never be immune from risk – business cycles still exist – but you can’t deny progress. We’ve been able to relocate risks further upstream, before they occur. Things like liquid assets and health insurance provide buffers against risk. Only in their relative absence we’re left, to varying degrees, to face real risks like famines and epidemics.

But all the more reason, I think, to make sure that our battles are worth fighting. It’s all the easier in our society to find new battle fronts – be it in the mind or in the body politic - but it’s become even harder to ensure that they’re worthy battle fronts. Robert Pirsig proposed that the answer to this dilemma is to use those extra resources to bolster the quality, rather than the quantity, of how one spends one's time. Else we’ll go about chasing phantom concerns such as the location of your neighbor's parked car or women’s right to go topless.

-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance)

Photos: (1) Dead End, 04/22/2008, by Loric Wilson; (2) Photos of topfree people, 07/25/2007; (3) Handicap Parking Spaces, 11/23/2007, Road Side Pictures; (4) Stopping for Students to Board a School Bus at 7:02 AM, 09/22/2005, Old Shoe Woman; (5) Half Quality, 02/02/2008, by Beige Alert.

Video: (1) Music video, by Radiohead of the song "No Surprises" from the 1997 album OK Computer; (2) Music video, by Coldplay of the song "Lovers in Japan" from the 2008 album Viva la Vida. Sphere: Related Content

Bad Policy Kills

It’s estimated that Soviet Russia’s government killed at least 20 million of its own citizens. Higher estimates are triple that around 60 million, lower estimates are around 7 million. 6 million Jews are thought to have died in the holocaust, and yet holocaust victims are given infinitely more memorials and museums than Soviet Russia’s. Part of this is in response to the sheer idea of the planned genocide of a whole race – no doubt one of the ugliest marks on Western civilization. Post World War II saw dramatic improvements but only in some areas: US and England experienced one of their largest growth eras. And yet in the decade after the war, Russia saw around a quarter to a third of those mass Russian deaths.




We tuck away in history the bits and pieces that we want to ignore while other bits and pieces continue to have meaning today. Modern-day Nazi’s are despised as murderous racists while communists are simply considered harmless liberal extremes. But “it works in theory” I hear from some of my friends. Yet so does Nazism, which is as steeped in its own ideas as any other ideology. Any theory works in theory; if it didn't it would cease to be a theory and then it would be something else. To advocate communism without addressing areas in which its lead to widespread starvation and death - Russia being just one example - is like advocating Nazism without addressing the holocaust.

The extremes of where an idea have gone wrong are often most telling, but you have to look within extremes as well: Extremist ideas, many have argued, aren't always categorically different from their watered down counterparts. Consider

• Communism in the extreme has led to mass starvation, but in the less extreme it's bad health care.
• Nazism in the extreme was the holocaust, but in the less extreme it was Kristallnacht.
• Discrimination in the extreme led to lynchings, while in the less extreme it led to segregation.
  
• Religious fanaticism in the extreme is seen as terrorism, while in the less extreme it's evangelical Christianity.

Moderate ideas from one culture sound radical to another. While the outcomes of such extremist movements are alarming, we are doing ourselves a disservice by separating ourselves from them, rather than trying to discern historically where they came from. The holocaust was terrible, but Nazi's are people too. What part of human nature - the very same human nature that yes we all share - had gone wrong? Looking at the roots of many extremist movements in the world, we can see many of our own commonly held moderate ideas, and their drawn out implications.

Not to sound polarizing, it’s just surprising how we cling so readily to some atrocities while completely disregarding others. Europe circa WWII is a very concrete example, as both Nazi and Soviet atrocities occurred in the same era and in the same part of the world. And this is by no means a mere abstract question, we’re dealing with two independent events responsible each for over 6 million deaths. Yet how often do you hear, "Remember the Soviet Union and its millions of victims"? My suspicion is that we’re less likely to recall the deaths in Soviet Russia because communism, moreso than Nazism, is somewhat accepted in America, particularly among liberals.

People cling to their opinions as their personal identity. As Tocqueville pointed out, this is a natural byproduct of democracy and freedom of speech. Ideas suddenly separate people, and they have concrete manifestations. Opinionated as I may seem, I really try to hold them at an arm’s length from my mind.

Sometimes I’ll go to social events with “intellectual conversations” where people will say things like “I believe that all people should earn equal incomes” or “I think education is important”, note with the emphasis more on the first person than on the opinion itself. It’s indeed correct that the first person, I, deserves emphasis, it is more important than the opinion itself. But unfortunately the manifest content of the discussion is inevitably on the issue being discussed not the person talking. And in this context, something like “I think education is important” is one of the the weakest arguments. What people fail to realize – I think sometimes to a fault – is that opinions are easy. They’re cheap. And granted this is just my opinion as well, but they’re often fairly meaningless.

Opinions again can be very personal while the real world is anything but. To get the one confused for the other is a very confusing state indeed. Should I ever come across such concrete evidence as to truly undermine my own opinions about the world, then I hope that I have the strength and peace of mind to change how I view the world.

Some people say that the best politics is always personal. But I just don’t buy it. Because the personal is referring to you - how you feel - and the politics is reflected in reality. It's like saying that physics should always be personal - a colossal confusion between the subjective and objective. And no it's not that politics deals with things that are more personal than physics, as I'm sure some physicists would tell you that physics is more personal. It's that reality abides by laws - such as economics laws - much sooner than it abides by our personal preferences. Contrary to the notion of personal politics, passion and fury when it's coming from a politician is ultimately no more persuasive than when it's coming from a crazy scientist. Distinguishment for the most passionate and fiery politician might very well go to Hitler with his unmatched ability to rile crowds and to gather a whole nation behind him. Personal politics isn’t necessarily opposite of good politics, but they are often placed at odds. The disconnect between personal politics and good politics is like that between the short-term solution and the long-term solution; between the irrational and the rational; between a rash emotional decision and a carefully thought out one. Which isn’t to say that good politics can’t be personal – ultimately all these distinctions are artificial – but it is to say that that which is personal isn’t categorically better. Often it’s worse.

When reality doesn’t match people’s opinions, they often think that it’s the world that has to change. Anything but.

-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1) CCCP, 04/07/2008, by MrOmega; (2) At the Temple, 02/05/2007, by Pete4Ducks; (3) She's made up her mind, 10/12/2008, by bobster1985; (4) Del Martin, 1966, 10/20/2008, also by bobster1985; (5) Hong Kong in Motion, 09/16/2006, by Steve Webel.

Video: (1) Tv Theme World At War, 10/05/2008, tvtestcard's channel from the 1973/1974 documentary series World at War. Sphere: Related Content