I was watching The Bank Job yesterday.  You know the one with Jason Statham and Saffron Burrows.  It’s a classic heist picture.  How many of these have we seen?  Rififi, Heist, Heat, Sexy Beast, Reservoir Dogs, The Score, The Italian Job, tons.  This is a genre that just never gets tired. 

Or so I thought.  In fact, there are a couple of moments when I thought to myself "can’t we just take this as read, please?"  For instance, the lads gather their "bank heist equipment" and start working on the "bank heist tunnel," and you think to yourself, "Got it.  Got it.  Let’s move on." 

Normally, we soak the details up.  And the CSI franchise has us fascinated with scientific apparati and technical processes.  Normally, this is (mysteriously) absorbing.  But in this case, it was a little tedious.  I wasn’t sure I really needed to see the van racing through the streets of London. 

Clearly, TV and movies are predicated on taking things as read.  I mean, if The Bank Job were obliged to offer a record of all of the events and people that let up to that bank job (a true story, apparently), it would take many hundreds, perhaps thousands of hours of film.  (Not to mention the agony it would bring to philosophically minded film makers, with the scrupulous ones building out the back story until we had exhaustive accounts of British politics and banking.  And no one wants that, I think we can agree of that.) 

So taking things as read is an essential part of the film maker’s craft.  TV and movies are dedicated to giving us only the "good parts," the parts that draw us into the film, that jack up our emotions, that give us purchase enough for acts of identification, and excising all the rest, taking it as read.

But here’s the thing, the more your audience knows the genre, the more you can take things as read.  And at the limit, you should be able to show the star, the car, the girl, the stunt and the "climax," and Bob is, as the English say, your uncle.  You’re done.  You take the rest of the film as read, and we can all go home.  Whew.  Think of the time we’d save. 

And, yes, Professor Postrel, as our powers of assimilation get better even this should be possible.  And this is a nice test actually of the Woody Allen proposition (that speed reading would tell us only that War and Peace "was about Russia".  I am devoutly fond of this joke, thanks for the memory.)  Give me a dedicated film goer who hasn’t see The Bank Job and I guarantee you that if we gave her the the star, the car, the girl, the stunt, the "climax," and of course the title, and she could give us an amazingly accurate account of how the film must go.  This despite the fact that this film is pulled out of genre by the fact that it must honor the "real facts" of a "true story.")  But I digress.  (This paragraph refers to a comment that Steven Postrel was kind enough to leave on my post Wednesday.)

Here’s what I mean to say: If we are as Henry Jenkins argues we are getting better at reading contemporary culture, and especially generic film, the ratio of things left out to things kept in should be changing.  We should be getting more telegraphic.  Less should be more, a lot more.

Which brings me to voice over.  Pam, my wife, says she thinks she is hearing more voice over on TV these days and I think she’s right.  It’s there in any thing with Noir origins and there is quite a lot of this.  And it’s even there in the police procedural (In Plain Sight) and the spy procedural (Burn Notice). 

I think Voice Over (VO, hereafter) is about putting things in.  It lets us add complexity, motive, background, depth and subtlety or simple exposition.  The VO is always an intelligent, authorial voice.  It doesn’t stumble.  It never says stupid things.  It is always astute, observant, and helpful.  (I, for one, would love a movie that used a completely straight VO even as the stuff on the screen began ever so subtlety and then increasingly to depart from the what the VO thinks is going on.)

Perhaps this is a cultural moment where we are taking things out (by treating them as read) and putting things in (by way of the VO).  Are these related?  It’s as if we are getting so good at contemporary culture that lots can be removed.  And this leaves Hollywood with a problem and an opportunity.  There is now a big hole in the narrative machinery, one that every self respecting writer and director is eager to fill with good writing and directing. 

On the whole, this shift is a good thing for popular culture.  After all, the stuff that typically come from VO is the human stuff.  And what is got rid of when we take things as read are all of the laborious details supplied by genre.  In effect, this may be the end of a certain Hollywood era.  After all, this is a cultural industry famous for taking the human out of films and replacing it with special effects, spectacle and starlets.  VO may mark a departure from all of this.

I mean, isn’t this is what we mean by "procedural."  It’s the literary machinery into which we can drop human beings without much more attention to their complexity as human beings.  They are really there just as machine operators.  Their job is to make the procedural go.  If we are now prepared to take this as read, if we are getting rid of the procedure, we are free and forced to pay more attention to what is human about the human.  And voice over feels perfect for this, at least as a short term intervention. 

In sum, it feels like things are changing in Hollywood, and we may take the rise of Voice Over is a leading indicator of this new trend.  Unless of course you saw this coming years ago, in which case please just take this post as read. 

Reality programming came up in conversation today, and everyone took turns putting the boot in.  Me too.  We scorned it in suspiciously well informed detail. 

Then we all took turns on the high horse: The rabble have broken into the castle of broadcasting!  This is the end of civilization as we know it!   This is a ferocious attack on taste, discernment and elites!  Run for your lives!

I get the argument, and I especially like the phrase that calls RP the "theater of humiliation."  There is a lot of gratuitous cruelty.  I take Hell’s Kitchen to be exhibit A.  The Joe Schmo Show is exhibit B. 

But there are other things to say about this cultural form:

1)  Reality programming is instructive.  Pam and I watch Project Runway.  I see a new design come down the runway, I take my money and I place my bet.  Out loud, so that Pam can hear, I say what I think.  And eventually I discover whether my judgment bore any resemblance to the experts who eventually hold forth. 

It’s clear that some education is taking place.  My judgments diverge less and less. This means that this kind of reality programming is actually making me a more discerning observer of the world of fashion.  It is helping me internalize my own modest mastery of the code. 

2) Reality programming also serves as a way for a divergent culture to stay in touch.  Now that things have become more various and more diverse, divergence is a real problem.  It is hard for any one part of other culture to remain within shouting distance with any other part. Common ground is scarce. 

Reality programming gives the culture of plentitude a chance to phone home.  The Real Housewives of Orange County is ethnographic gold. Horrifying, yes.  Gold, yes. Cougars are glimpsed in Age of Love, kids in Kid Nation, 16 year olds in My Super Sweet 16, gays in Boy Meets Boy. child rearing in The Baby Borrowers.  (It is very hard to know what the Flavor of Love helps us see, but the boys in the lab are working on it.)  Of course we would not want to make these programs authoritative sources of information, but for a culture that is an exploding star,  it does help us stay apprised of one another’s movements.

3) Reality programming is not just cheap TV, it is responsive TV. Surely, one of the most sensible way for the programming executive to get back in touch with contemporary culture is to turn the show offer to untrained actors who have no choice but to live on screen, in the process importing aspects of contemporary culture that would otherwise have to be bagged and tagged and brought kicking and screaming into the studio and prime time.  Reality programming is contemporary culture on tap.  It is by no means a "raw feed."  That is YouTube’s job.  But it is fresher than anything many executives could hope to manage by their own efforts.  In effect, reality programming is "stealing signals" from an ambient culture, helping TV remain in orbit.  (Mixed metaphor alert.  Darn it, too late.) 

This is an era in which we are inclined to issue lots of brave talk about cocreation, open source, and dynamic institutions.  We speak of breaking down the citadel that separate the corporation from the real world. Well, this is actually what it looks like (for certain purposes).  And funny old TV may in fact be one of the first meaning makers to figure out how we solve this particularly thorny problem.  This, in turn, would make reality programming not the end of civilization as we know it, but a test case in what comes next. 

Yes, of course, in every case, the reality program insists on a preposterous pretext, and this in turn misshapes the behavior that gets on the screen.  I wonder if there are options here.

References

The 08/08 issue of Entertainment Weekly has several goods pieces on Reality programming.  It was the inspiration for this piece. 

In the era of Web 2.0, miracles are so commonplace that I’ve grown a little jaded.  And then along comes something like Wordle.

Yes, we have seen things like this before, but something about this idea now, or perhaps it’s this execution here, made my job drop. 

This is a clever bit of code that creates a beautiful object that creates new powers of pattern recognition that creates an assimilable world.

What Jonathan Feinberg’s program does for us is roughly what academics do when they pick up a book and start with the index. 

I know a Harvard professor who can look at the index of a book, and give you a pretty good idea of the shape and content of the argument within.  It’s an impressive party trick. 

The first image is from the post I did last week on "how to be a self funding anthropologist." 

The second image is from yesterday’s post on transformational identities. 

And the third image is today’s post.  I wouldn’t want to have to read the post from the Wordle, but can that day be far off?

There is a general feeling in some circle, see especially Henry Jenkins and Steven Johnson, that we are getting better at reading popular culture, that our powers of assimilation and pattern recognition are growing apace. 

All of us do something like this when we look at the index, table of contents, and browse a couple of pages, and make a determination about whether to buy or not.  We have not quite read the book, but we have made it’s acquaintance.  Something lodged.  Our cloud of ideas has reshaped a little.

There is something about the beauty of these images and their implicit conviction that the form of the idea is a guide to the content of the idea.  How does Wordle know?  But it does, and it’s knowing aids my knowing.  This feels like the beginning of a new order of information architecture and design. 

As we get better and smarter, I wonder if Wordle won’t be the future.  Can it be long before we send new blog posts, articles and books to Wordle and read the output? 

Hats off to Jonathan Feinberg, a senior software engineer at IBM research in Medford, MA and total genius.

References

Find the Wordle website here.

To an anonymous blogger: hat’s off for the head’s up