The new film, Another Earth, is about the sudden appearance of a new planet, floating in the heavens, not very far away (as pictured).
It is, apparently, a second earth that duplicates our own. They call it Earth 2.
“Who is your other you?” the film asks.
Once more popular culture, drawing from string theory, among other things, contemplates transformational options and multiple selves.
But it is not just popular culture that cares about the theme. It turns out the writer, star, and producer, Brit Marling, began her professional life as an analyst at Goldman Sachs.
So she knows a thing or two about multiple selves and alternate realities.
Of course, Marling’s earth 1 (investment banking) and her earth 2 (Hollywood) are not duplicates. Being a citizen in good standing in both of them takes an unusual person, real transformational range, and a daunting act of reinvention.
It’s kind of wonderful that after Marling made the transition she wrote this filmic Valentine to alternate realities and the process of moving between them.
References
For more on the theme have a look at my book Transformations
Ooph. To be standing in the intersection, when the new comes roaring through. My hat, pipe and papers all went flying.
I finally, belatedly, got my invitation to Google + and I have been fiddling with it.
On first glance, it feels like an elegant restatement of the social media proposition.
Indeed, it so simplifies and clarifies that it may actually claim a “late adopter” advantage, forcing on Facebook and Twitter what Veblen once called “the penalty of taking the lead.”
The fun of being on Google+ as the moment is that it is filled with people doing “edge finding,” trying to figure it what it is, how it works, what you can make it do.
Please come find me there. And if you need an invitation, send me an email at grant27@gmail.com. (But I think by this name the gates may be open, no invitation required.)
USA Network is an answer to the question: what would TV look like if it were made by women? It is more emotionally interesting, more socially complex, more embedded in the world. It’s about character, and, yes, characters, and, here and there, it’s now in danger of jumping the shark.
If there were any doubt about the USA Network contribution to TV, it was removed by the recent launch of Necessary Roughness (Wednesday 10:00). This follows in the tradition of Fairly Legal. Both feature women as professional mediators who step into conflict and make talk do the work of confrontation. Good writing flourishes. Good acting flourishes. TV gets better.
But there is trouble. Just as USA Network goes from strength to strength, some of the workhorses are failing. I looked in on Burn Notice and Royal Pains this week and both are in danger of turning mechanical. The formula is showing. Disbelief is getting harder to suspend. In Royal Pains we can now see plot points coming a long way off, and the moments of urgency (a medical crisis of some kind) are now entirely paint by number and they leave this viewer wondering if I’ve got time to go make a sandwich. Burn Notice is still worse. The music comes up and people spring! into! action!, yelling, shouting, and blowing things up. And I think, “oh, definitely. I have time to make a sandwich and a blended beverage.”
This is perhaps a programming problem. Perhaps there is a constituency that will not tune in unless they get high drama and big explosions. They will sit through the dialogue and character(s) development, but that’s not why they’re there. You need to blow stuff up.
So now the creative challenge for CEO Bonnie Hammer is this: how to combined old-fashioned TV with new-fashioned TV in a manner that pleases the traditional constituency without making a more sophisticated constituency roll their eyes and think about sandwiches. One solution perhaps is to somehow make the drama and dialogue more seamless, to make them interpenetrating. Otherwise the action feels like a commercial break (and in a sense it is).
But not to worry. Suits (tonight on USA Networks at 10:00) is flat out wonderful. It is crafted, embedded, and (so far) unformed. And the performance by Patrick J. Adams as Mike Ross has on several occasions left me speechless. Actually, it moved me to say to Pam with muttered astonishment, “is this kid good or what?” To which she replied, if memory serves, “Amazingly.”
Ok, so we need some dialogue coaching at our house. Or we can just keep watching USA Network.
References
McCracken, Grant. 2009. The Hammer Grammer: how to make culture. This Blog. Aug. 31. Click here.
I just stumbled on a talk given by Wallace Stegner in 1980. It proved pretty good reading for this 4th of July.
Stegner opens by observing how Thoreau gave voice to “America’s stoutest self-confidence and most optimist expectations.”
He then reflects on more recent books like Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd and the Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism, remarking on their pessimism.
Stegner’s question: How did we get from Thoreau to Lasch?
Assuming that Thoreau spoke for his time, as he surely did, and that Christopher Lasch speaks for at least elements and aspects of his, how did we get from there to here in little more than a century? Have the sturdiness of the American character and the faith in America’s destiny that Thoreau took for granted been eroded entirely away? What happened to confidence, what happened to initiative and strenuousness and sobriety and responsibility, what happened to high purpose, what happened to hope?
Stegner scrutinizing the historical run-up to the American present. And there are some wonderful moments in this speech.
Because Europe has always dreamed westward, America, once realized, touches men’s minds like fulfilled prophecy. It has lain out there in the gray wastes of the Atlantic, not only a continent waiting to be discovery but a fable waiting to be agreed upon.
Stegner gets to one of the strengths and weaknesses of the experiment.
Admittedly there were all kinds of people in early America, as there are all kinds in our time – saints and criminals, dreamers and drudges, pushers and con men. But the new world did something similar to all of them. Of the most energetic ones it made ground-floor capitalists; out of nearly everyone it leached the last traces of servility. Cut off from control, ungoverned and virtually untaxed, people learned to resent the imposition of authority, even that which they had created for themselves. Dependent on their own strength and ingenuity in a strange land, they learned to dismiss tradition and old habit, or rather, simply forgot them.
Things end badly. Eventually Stegner embraces Lasch’s dystopic view, and the lecture descends into scolding contemporary culture as a place where “celebrity obscures distinction.”
Intellectuals often end up here. They believe that selfishness and greed rule the day. And this causes them to believe that the American experiment is corrupted and that confidence must be forsaken.
At its worst, this is a self indulgence from someone blessed with privilege (and, usually, tenure) and so protected from the hurly burly of the world. Well, worse still, it’s an act of vanity that says in effect “oh, why can’t the world be more like me?” By which the intellectual usually means, thoughtful, deep feeling, (and thoroughly protected from the hurly burly of the world). (Ironically, the Walking essay by Thoreau from which Stegner draws is shot through with this disdain for people who can not rise to the author’s fineness of thought and feeling.)
But at its best, the intellectual is declaring what all of us hope for: that we should hold ourselves accountable to something larger than ourselves, that we should make sacrifices for a larger good.
But there is a problem with allowing this thought to pitch us out of American confidence into the dystopic nonsense Lasch inflicted upon us. The fact of the matter is clear: America is a roaring experiment driven sometimes by self sacrifice (and God bless those who make this sacrifice) and the rest of the time by self interest. (The fable would never be agreed upon. It was to filled with people wishing variously, exerting themselves in all directions.)
This scares the pants off an intellectual. This America is so very messy, unthoughtful, and unformed by ideas. So coarse. So reckless. So unpredictable.
Precisely. If we are going to come to terms with America, we have to come to terms with this. With “messy,” “coarse,” and “unformed,” not as failings but as virtues. Indeed, I wonder if we shouldn’t treat these adjectives as our higher calling.
And the sacrifice asked of the intellectual? Hold your nose. The American experiment is not going to be pretty. It’s not going to be elegant. You don’t have to like it. But you are unwise to mistake it. Because without grappling with this truth, your confidence abandons you. And when your confidence goes, you write intemperate books like the Culture of Narcissism and encourage a moral panic that affects the rest of us.
And that’s when the republic is really in peril. When the people appointed to think for us cease thinking for themselves…and lose their nerve.
Raymond Kurzweil is famous for declaring that he wants to stay alive long enough to be a beneficiary of what he calls The Singularity. If he can just hang on until the great synthesis of humans and machines, he can live forever. He will have made the cut.
But there is another cut. I thought about the other day when someone told me I should read Leslie Fiedler. (Forgive me I can’t remember who. I am still using organic memory and frankly it’s crap. At least mine is.)
Fiedler was an American academic who dared take popular culture seriously when this was a great violation of intellectual orthodoxy. There is lots to like about Fiedler’s work (one of his essays is called “Fiedler on the roof”) and I am astonished (and, yes, ashamed) that I am only now hearing about him.
I went to Amazon to buy one of his several books and only one been digitized. Fiedler didn’t make the cut. It’s not an irreparable difficulty. One of these days we will have everything online. (Of course we do now, but Google Books is only showing snippets and previews.) But Fiedler is plenty obscure as it is. Not being available in digital format is a problem.
This may some day be an important categorical distinction: those who didn’t make the digital cut or the singularity one, those who made the first but not the second, and those who made both.
I was congratulating myself on completing the manuscript when there was a great clutter at the end of the platform. A late arrival! Forsaking her accustomed grace, in a small state of panic, and this close to tears, she made her wishes known.
“Stop this train. I want to get on. I have to get on.”
No trainman is also a gentleman refuses a belle in distress and the belle is now on board, ribbons stowed, heart beat slowing, perfume pooling (where once it trailed), dignity on the mend.
I have around a week to make her really comfortable, but she is most welcome because now we have a better last chapter and Culturematic will be, er, “heavier” by 10,000 words. Anyhow, this means I will be AWOL another week. Sorry.
The dark horse favorite, IMHO, is Michael Raymond-James (Terriers), the most effortlessly gifted actor I have seen in a long time. This role may be too small for him but they would be mad not to take him if he’s willing. On another note, this array of talent tells us how “deep is the bench” for American TV, a cultural undertaking that used to be hard pressed to find a single one of these guys.
Apologies for having been away. I was laboring to finish the manuscript for Culturematic. And it’s done! God, Tim Sullivan, and the Harvard Business Review Press willing, it will be published March of next year. Thank you to blog readers for their encourage and comments.
I am in Banff at the moment, at the Banff World Media Festival. I present in a couple of hours. Will be talking about how to use the Kauffman continuum to make great popular culture. I dreamed it up for the Rio Content conference in Brazil last year and it played quite well.
Last night I got back to the hotel around 9, still lots of light in the sky this far north. I walked out on to the grand patio at the back of the Banff Springs hotel. There was an older couple already there. Together, we stared at the sheer glory of the mountains, the water, the forests. It really is astounding.
And then we realized we were not alone. The air was filled with swallows fetching their evening meals. They were doing that fly-boy thing, whistling at top speed, changing direction in the blink of an eye, flying apparently in all directions at once.
The three now stood watching the sheer art and athleticism of this performance, when we were buzzed by a swallow who traveling at 100 miles an hour managed to come within 18 inches of our heads. We grinned with alarm at one another with that look that claimed to say, “that was close!” but really said, “I’m not afraid.”
A voice in the back of my head, “is it safe out here? I mean, what if one of these guys runs into us.” And then I thought again. A swallow has as much trouble avoiding a human on a patio as I do avoiding a winged back chair in the lobby. A tiny course correction. Collision avoided. Ain’t nothing to it.
Of course the comparison is preposterous. Compared to these feathered fly boys I am quite a lot like a wing back chair in the lobby. Utterly immobile, virtually insensate, and incapable of dynamism of any kind. And that is the point of these proceedings. How to be more like swallows and less like winged back chairs. How to produce culture that is responsive to the new speed and diversity of contemporary culture. How to course-correct in real time and the blink of an eye. Most of all, I guess, it’s how to find the joy in the proceedings and forgo the self congratulatory stolidity of a winged back chair.
I’ve met some wonderfully agile people over drinks, including a rollicking conversation about popular culture with Mickey Rogers and Ty Funk yesterday and Judy Gladstone and Philip Alberstat last night. Canadians have a genius for working the interface between culture and commerce. Of course, I say that without knowing whether the audience is going to like my presentation this morning. And if they don’t like it, well, the nation totally has a problem with the culture and commerce thing! (I can do winged back, I really can.)
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Robert Montgomery and Achilles Media for including me in this event.
Douglas Adams was the author of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. We have just passed the 10th anniversary of his death.
In 1999, when the internet was still being greeted with some suspicion in some quarters. (Hey, just a couple of years ago, a group of planners at a big agency were prepared to tell me that social media was just a passing fancy.) Adams wrote an essay that includes this wonderful passage that segments technology adopters by age:
Then there’s the peculiar way in which certain BBC presenters and journalists … pronounce internet addresses. It goes ‘www DOT … bbc DOT… co DOT… uk SLASH… today SLASH…’ etc., and carries the implication that they have no idea what any of this new-fangled stuff is about, but that you lot out there will probably know what it means.
I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on, but you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this:
1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.
It would certainly explain those planners.
Thanks for Steve Crandall for telling me about this essay.
Yesterday, in our discussion, Chuck Norris surfaced a couple of times.
Specifically, the question was, “did everyone see the irony intended in the Old Spice ad.” Or was this, for some people, a return to the old stereotypes of masculinity?
There are 4 possibilities here (see the chart below).
The first, far left, is the fan who sees no irony in Chuck Norris. Norris is masterful, heroic and exemplary.
The last, far right, is the fan who is hip to the joke. He/she scorns Norris, and loves these ads because they scorn Norris too.
In between are people who are more or less admiring of Norris but who are also more or less hip to the joke.
It’s astounding that these ads should have this kind of range. It’s as if our culture accumulates meanings and does not shed them. So irony comes in but admiration remains available.
Still more remarkably, people in the middle categories are holding opposing ideas at the same time. (Very Roger Martin.) And that is never supposed to happen in popular culture.
He wouldn’t be afraid to show his feminine side, if he had one.
His mother has a tattoo that reads “son”
At museums, he’s allowed to touch the art
He is the most interesting man in the world!
We have 3 campaigns that feature a certain kind of man. I refer to the most interesting man in the world. Sorry, I mean of course, the most interesting man in the world!
And most recently, the DQ ad in which a guy says “I’m not just playing a guitar, I’m playing a guitar that sounds like dolphins.”
The men in these ads appear to have somethings in common. They suffer from overweening self regard and total self possession. These are the people for whom the term “supercilious” was invented.
We have noticed hyperbolic males here before. Charlie and Barnie, characters in Two and a Half Men and How I Met Your Mother, respectively, as played by Charlie Sheen and Neil Patrick Harris, respectively, are self-regarding males. But what marks them as males is not just the fact that they are self self aggrandizing, but a still deeper cynicism.
The DosEquis,OldSpice,DQ man is much too vain to entertain cynicism. Cynicism requires a knowledge of the world outside yourself. DEOSDQ man does not know about the world outside himself.
So where is this guy from, why are we using him, and why is he, in the Old Spice case, so spectacularly successful as a cultural artifact?
The good news is that our culture used to produce these males, on screen and in the world, without a hint of ridicule. James Bond and other spies were all about “touching the art,” that is to say, claiming special privileges that came to them because of their special status. (License to kill!)
And this is what make these guys funny. We are not laughing with them, we are laughing at them. But there are lots of ridiculous artifacts that can be retrieved from the backwash of our culture.
If ever I update my book Transformations, I may well open with the story of Naomi Uman.
Uman is an American artist. In her first career she worked as a private chef for Gloria Vanderbilt, Malcolm Forbes, and Calvin Klein. She then turned to filmmaking and her work’s been screened at The Guggenheim, The Whitney, and the Museo de Art Moderno in Mexico City.
Uman’s great-grandparents emigrated from the Ukraine in 1906 and a century later she returned there, settling for four years in a remote village called Legedzine.
Out of this experience came Ukrainian Time Machine, a cycle of 16mm films that give us everyday activities, a local wedding, a small brick factory and glimpses of the world that her ancestors occupied long ago.
The Nazis inflicted a murderous devastation on the Jewish community of the Ukraine and there are some places Uman’s time machine can never take us. But parts of the Ukraine are relatively untouched by urbanization and industrialization, and here and there she finds traces of the 19th century and the world we have lost.
Uman “re-entry” was not easy. Virtually everything that defined her made her unwelcome. She was an unattached, Jewish, woman with a full body tattoo who at first didn’t speak Ukrainian, and who made art for a living. In some quarters, only her dog (pictured) broke the ice.
Uman stuck it out for 4 years. (She may still live there. I found the record unclear.) We sometimes talk about the “old country.” We are eager to catch a glimpse of the Europe, Asia, Africa from which we come. We might dedicate an vacation to a search for “ancestral origins” in, say, the highlands of Scotland or the basin of the Amazon. But, really, who goes back? Who learns the language? Who bears witness to horror? Who inflicts on themselves the discomforts and alienations of being an outsider? Who gives up home?
Really, as a transformational exercise, this is heroic and pretty close to unprecedented.
