Kyra Sedgwick has found new fame and fortune as Deputy Police Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson in The Closer. Her TNT series has proved successful beyond all expectation. Viewers are happy, sponsors are happy, and Sedgwick is now paid $250,000 to $300,000 an episode.
This puts Sedgwick in the spotlight. And the results are, well, disappointing. Take for instance her appearance on a recent Rachael Ray show where the object of the exercise seemed to be to make Sedgwick approachable and ordinary. It was a "what, little old me?" television, standard Hollywood issue for day time talk.
The interview for Town and Country was equally frustrating. Sedgwick appears in designer gowns and jewelry, and we are told how much she hates Los Angeles and loves her family. Not so ordinary in this case, but still thoroughly manufactured…as if T&C turned the article over to the PR flacks. Yawn.
I couldn’t help feeling something was missing. Then I saw what it was. The person I was looking for was not Kyra Sedgwick but Brenda Leigh Johnson.
Now here’s a woman to reckon with: southern and CIA, steely and melting, formidable and easily distracted, intellectually smart and emotionally cunning, a student of the human heart, a stranger to her own. This is quite a lot more complexity than TV is prepared to give us. (Cable took the risk. A mainstream audience responded. )
Sedgwick the person might be as interesting as Johnson the character. (And as a descendant of the founder of Groton and a relative of the woman who befriended Andy Warhol, it’s not like she doesn’t have biographic materials to work with.) But to judge from the Ray interview or the Town and Country piece, it doesn’t seem likely. Surely, one feels, Deputy Chief Johnson would be more opinionated, unpredictable, charming, contrary, and downright engaged in these exercises, that she would breath new, more interesting life into these PR procedurals.
Well, poor me. Apparently, I’m surprised to discover the actor is not the character. How desperately naive. Of course, there’s a difference. That’s why they are called actors. They’re pretending. Failing to see this is, well, just a little sad.
But I have a larger argument to propose. I think Kyra Sedgwick might be obeying an old model of celebrity. To make this argument, I bid you consider the case of Johnny Depp.
In the early days, Mr. Depp was a guy laboring in obscurity. He ‘s a high school drop out, a member of a modestly successful band, and eventually a struggling actor. Then he takes a role in 21 Jump Street and becomes a teenage heartthrob. Mr. Depp is now "can’t go anywhere in public" famous.
After this jolting exposure to stardom, Mr. Depp cultivates his distance from Hollywood. He does several pictures with the unrepentant outsider Tim Burton. He befriends and then plays the fiercely nonconforming Hunter S. Thompson. He plays plays clueless outsiders like Ed Wood and Edward Scissorhands. He moves to France and says intemperate things about America for German magazines.
After 21 Jump Street, Depp was in a position to begin climbing the conventional ladder to stardom…as Bruce Willis did after Moonlighting and Tom Hanks did after Bosom Buddies. But, no, a loose orbit was close enough, apparently, as close as he wanted to get. And we might argue that it was precisely this distance that helped him make the character (Captain Jack Sparrow) that helped make the movies (Pirates) that helped make Hollywood so much frickin money. (The Pirates trilogy has a shot at $2 billion.) Keeping one’s distance is sometimes a good thing.
Back to my argument (and I do have one.) Depp has been unrepentant. He’s an actor’s actor. He’s his own man. He doesn’t care if we don’t like him. He is not here to be our virtual friend or our celluloid hero. He’s not a role model or an exemplar of any kind. (This would make him the Sir Charles Barkley of acting.) He’s not ingratiating himself. We don’t like that he lives in France? Tant pis.
Unless Depp is an utter anomaly, his approach to stardom sets a precedent. It says stardom doesn’t have to cost what it used to. It says that an actor doesn’t have to drape themselves in the agreeable, that they don’t have glad hand their way into our hearts, that they don’t have to do Sammy Maudlin publicity to have a shot at further and farther stardom.
If Depp does set a precedent, Sedgwick’s present PR strategy is unnecessary and perhaps unwise. After all, she returned to stardom in a character who is uncompromising and unpredictable. If she takes her cue from her character, then "loose orbit," (aka "Sir Charles") stardom is hers for the asking. And it comes to her in a historical moment when America is finally prepared to give this liberty even to its stars.
References
McCracken, Grant. 2006. Johnny Depp and the dead man’s chest called Hollywood. This blog sits at the intersection of anthropology and economics. July 8, 2006. here.
Mithers, Carol. 2007. Kyra Up close: TV’s Hottest Star Shines. Town and Country. July. pp. 102-8. Sibbald, Vanessa. 2004. Johnny Depp Mulls His Post-‘Pirates’ Fame. Zap2it.com. March 01, 2004. here.
Jennifer Tilly is the worst offender, I think. She’s a strapping great gal (eyes right) who insists on talking in a tiny voice. Daum thinks the "baby-voice" trend is on the upswing. Oh, damn.
It is a blight upon the beauty of the American woman.
How many times have you found yourself standing in line behind a woman of unsurpassed grace only to discover that she speaks like a cartoon character?
That’s me in 2004. I had just moved from Canada, and baby voices was one of my most distressing discoveries state-side. Since then the evidence has been piling up. Paris Hilton is merely the latest case in point.
These voices are acts of self diminishment. They say, "It’s just little me: childlike, innocent, unthreatening."
Oh, please. Just stop it. Do these women wish to seem brainless? I guess they must. I mean, if someone’s prepared to sound like a cartoon character, what are the chances she’s going to risk an opinion on the new Werner Herzog movie.
This voices are acts of "don’t mind me" apology. And that makes them the perfect gender counterpart to Charlie Sheen/Harper and the unapologetic male. Charlie Harper of Two and a Half Men is happy to let you know that he is completely self interested and utterly incapable of apology.
So it’s a match made in heaven: women who apologize with every word they speak companion to men incapable of even a single word so spoken.
But hold on. Are women using baby voices to apologize for being insubstantial or to apologize for not being insubstantial enough? I think, it might be the latter. I think that the classic marker of subordinated womenhood may be the new marker of superordinated womanhood. Now that some women are entirely in charge of their lives, they have a new message to send out…some sort of "don’t hate me because I’m successful" strategy. That they use the old apology as a symbol of new status, well, that’s just proof that "the more things change…"
How should women sound? Plainly, they should sound however they sound. But if cultivation comes into it, if they are going to move off their natural voice, I nominate Christine Lahti, Ann Curry, Diane Sawyer, Angela Basset, and Kate Winslet as role models. There are lots of beautifully voiced women in the world.
This is a new industry waiting to happen, a new transformational opportunity for our culture to embrace. God knows, we’ve tried everything else. Surely, the time for beautiful voices has come.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Virginia Postrel for the head’s up.
References
Daum, Meghan. 2007. Little voices of distraction. Los Angeles Times. July 7, 2007. here.
Postrel, Virginia. 2007. Squeaky Voices. Dynamist. July 8, 2007. here.
McCracken, Grant. 2007. The Charlie and Barney Show: Birth of a new American male? This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. January 3, 2007. here.
McCracken, Grant. 2004. Blaming Buffy. This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. July 14, 2004. here.
Flight of the Conchords would persuade us of its artlessness but there are several comedic subroutines spinning furiously within. I counted no fewer than 9 of them. (Aren’t anthropologists tedious? Always decoding culture, always overthinking things.)
1) the "second look" subtlety I talked about yesterday. As Flynn points out, the song lyrics demand careful attention and repetition.
2) broad humor, as when Bret glues Jemaine’s Kodak and cell phone together to make him a "camera phone." Or the robot video in which the boys dress up in aluminium foil and mechanical movements.
3) self mockery, as when Jemaine announces to the girl who is just about to dump him, "I’m usually more charismatic than this."
4) a passionate investigation of the bureaucratic sensibility, as evidenced by Murray (Rhys Darby) and his band meetings, roll calls and agendas. Anyone touched by the British Commonwealth likes this sort of thing, perhaps because the founding culture, England, managed to produce both a formidable love of bureaucracy and its anarchic opposite. In this view, Flight is to New Zealand what Monty Python was to Britain and Kids in the Hall were to Canada.
5) an affectionate investigation of the fan sensibility. The band’s fan Mel (Kristen Schaal) stalks the Conchords with insinuating questions that disclose a condition of imminent sexual ecstasy. In Schall’s best moment, she puts her nose to Clement’s shirt and inhales deeply.
6) Clement and McKenzie have a fine anthropological eye, and in the manner of Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld, they examine "nothing" carefully for its comedic opportunity.
7) an idiotic innocence, which Alessandra Stanley captures nicely. The boys can’t quite decide what put off the woman Jemaine went out with. The viewer knows perfect well that it’s because Bret interrupted them as they were about to kiss, but the boys can’t help wondering whether perhaps Jermaine failed to walk "on the outside of her." The boys appreciate that this mysterious ritual is an absolute deal breaker with it comes to soliciting kisses.
8) dissonance, as when Clement takes on child labor in one of his "message songs," only to spin off into a reflection on why sneakers aren’t cheaper, the suspicion that we pay too much for sneakers, before being thrown free of the song with a plaintive cry: "what’s your overhead?" This is anthropological trickery of another kind. Normally, the folk song and business analysis are things kept secret. Clement binds them up.
9) splicing. This isn’t something I’ve noticed before, and it’s not something I’ve seen talked about. Let me have a go and leave it to my readers to sort things out. By splicing I mean exactly what Wikipedia means by the term: joining two pieces of rope or cable by weaving the strands of each into the other" except in this case what gets joined are not bits of rope but culture. There is lots of splicing in Flight.
First order splicing
There’s the cheap kind, the kind I associate most with Larry David, as when some stray detail of the plot turns out to be critical to its outcome. In episode 3 of Flight, a monkey serves this purpose.
Second order splicing
There’s something more complicated as when Brett determines that to square things with Jemaine, he must recover the camera phone they lost in a mugging. The mugger returns not just the camera phone, but also the pictures he took with it. These include pictures of him because, well, he had to "finish out the roll." There’s actually a picture of the mugger ripping off a convenience store.
It’s good comedy and it works because it represents the intersection of people who should never see one another again, and objects that are themselves the outcome of a preposterous kind of splicing, which devices, it turns out, capture photos that should never have been taken. Both the camera and the photos end up exchanged by people who should be enemies in the creation of a social moment that should never have happened. Sure enough and the boys all become friends. This is splicing to make the head spin.
Third order splicing
And there are moments of highest order splicing. The boys go to a party and Jemaine spots the girl of his dreams and breaks into song, exclaiming that she is so beautiful she could be a "part time model" or "high class prostitute." While Jemaine sings, we understand that we are now in "song time." More specifically, we understand that we have entered another dramatic dimension that is rooted in "drama time" but a departure from it. (This conviction is well established in our culture and musical theatre depends upon it.) But no sooner have we got our bearings than Jermaine walks up to the party host in "drama time" and still singing asks him a question. Yikes. Drama time and song time are suddenly one. They are now spliced.
Now, it’s not impossible to imagine why we might be charmed by splicing. We live in a culture that is busting out in all directions. We attempt to manage selves that are themselves disparate and various. There is something deeply reassuring about a comedy that puts the world back together again.
References
Flynn, Gillian. 2007. Taking ‘Flight.’ Entertainment Weekly. Issue 941/942. June 29-July 6, 2007, p. 125.
Richmond, Ray. 2007. Flight of the Conchords: Can a couple of sullen, sardonic New Zealand boys find success singing, strumming and spoofing at 10:30 p.m. on HBO? I’m guessing no. here.
Stanley, Alessandra. 2007. The New Zealand Invasion: Digi-Folk Now! New York Times. June 15, 2007. here.
More details
FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS HBO Dakota Pictures, Comedy Arts Studios and HBO Credits: Teleplay-creators: James Bobin, Jemaine Clement, Bret McKenzie Executive producers: Stu Smiley, James Bobin, Troy Miller Co-executive producers: Tracey Baird, Jemaine Clement, Bret McKenzie Producers: Anna Dokoza, Christo Morse Director: James Bobin Director of photography: Patrick Stewart Production designer: Christine Stocking Costume designer: Rahel Afiley Editor: Casey Brown Casting: Cindy Tolan Cast: Jemaine: Jemaine Clement Bret: Bret McKenzie Coco: Sutton Foster Mel: Kristen Schaal Murray: Rhys Darby
Will HBO’s new show survive infancy? The fate of The Flight of the Conchords is now unclear.
The Hollywood Reporter predicts disaster, calling the show,
so cloyingly doofy that [protagonists McKenzie and Clement] are not only tough to root for but difficult to watch for extended periods.
Other critics responded more positively. Flynn of Entertainment Weekly, called the show a "simple bit of joy," and gave it an A-. Stanley of the New York Times offered a review that was thoughtful and affectionate.
Here’s the problem. This is "second look" television. It’s pretty difficult to appreciate the show unless you watch episodes a second time. Much of the show is resident in its subtleties. Miss these and you end up sounding like a Hollywood Reporter reporter. How embarrassing. (Imagine having your least observant moment committed to paper and national scrutiny?)
Traditionally, TV has honored a "one look" contract. In the early days, there were no reruns and no rewinds. The medium was obliged to keep it, um, medium. Things were served up with stunning clarity. Writers hated it, directors hated it, actors hated it. But in the democratic world of TV, no viewer was left behind.
The "one look" contract said keep the proposition loud and clear. If need be, repeat the proposition. When that didn’t work, have characters "explain" things to one another. And if that didn’t work, summon Dr. Exposition (as Mike Myers calls him), the character who’s sole function was to make things unmistakable clear…and have him make things unmistakable clear.
We have seen everyone’s media literacy get better. And many shows are now sufficiently sophisticated and understated to reward a second look, including the work of Aaron Sorkin, shows like Arrested Development, The Wire, and Homicide, and networks like HBO. A "second look" contract with the viewer now appears to be in the works. We talk about a "digital divide" to distinguish between younger media consumers who "get" digital, and older ones who don’t. I wonder whether there is another generational distinction to be made here, one between "one look" viewers and "second look" viewers.
So it we were doing this as a Harvard Business School case, the debate come down to this: how many viewers have migrated from "one look" to "second look" capability, and how many of those will find pleasure in the rest of Flight. ("Second look capability" is the necessary condition. "Pleasure in the show" is the sufficient condition.) Is this number smaller or larger than the one that HBO needs to sustain the show, or at least a "wait and see" commitment to the show? Hey, presto, we have cracked the case.
The secondary marketing question is how successfully HBO has identified a "second look" audience and how well have they reached out to this audience? Mostly this is a "word of mouth" undertaking, but we must hope HBO is being maximally strategic here.
As to the pleasure of The Flight of the Conchords, well, there’s lots of that, but more tomorrow.
References
Flynn, Gillian. 2007. Taking ‘Flight.’ Entertainment Weekly. Issue 941/942. June 29-July 6, 2007, p. 125.
Richmond, Ray. 2007. Flight of the Conchords: Can a couple of sullen, sardonic New Zealand boys find success singing, strumming and spoofing at 10:30 p.m. on HBO? I’m guessing no. here.
Stanley, Alessandra. 2007. The New Zealand Invasion: Digi-Folk Now! New York Times. June 15, 2007. here.
More details
FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS HBO Dakota Pictures, Comedy Arts Studios and HBO Credits: Teleplay-creators: James Bobin, Jemaine Clement, Bret McKenzie Executive producers: Stu Smiley, James Bobin, Troy Miller Co-executive producers: Tracey Baird, Jemaine Clement, Bret McKenzie Producers: Anna Dokoza, Christo Morse Director: James Bobin Director of photography: Patrick Stewart Production designer: Christine Stocking Costume designer: Rahel Afiley Editor: Casey Brown Casting: Cindy Tolan Cast: Jemaine: Jemaine Clement Bret: Bret McKenzie Coco: Sutton Foster Mel: Kristen Schaal Murray: Rhys Darby
This is Russell and Arthur Davies, father and son, outside Conway hall, site of Interesting2007. The quietly charismatic servant of ceremonies and his son, the latter in this picture graciously standing in for the rest of us, our hand in a bag of crisps, playing shyly to the camera, pleased to be included, living this brief moment in the protected space of a congenial world. (Russell will so hate this metaphor, more on that later.)
I participated with trepidation. Russell was clear. No talking, he said, about anthropology, economics, branding, marketing, blogging, creativity, culture, or commerce, and so removed all my usual crutches, obsessions, and the very parachute I like to wear while public speaking. Kindly, he suggested I talk instead about my Oprah episode and it turned out pretty well. Clever Russell.
My first guess on why Interesting2007 was going to work (if it worked) was that everyone in the room was drawn from one of the creative industries (design, planning, art, advertising, film making, and so on). This means that everyone in the room at Conway Hall was good at metaphor capture and pattern recognition.
So you could talk, as Adrian Gunn Wilson did, about how to cut wood, and the audience was bound to help themselves to that and much more. The details themselves turned out to be flat out interesting and the room fell into a state of silent absorption. And the metaphors were everywhere, including the very big piece of wood on which Adrian cuts wood. I forget what he called it, but it’s huge and well scored and serves as the platform for the undertaking. It stabilizes the piece of wood that’s being chopped. It absorbs the blow of the ax. It catches the ax as it completes its arc and especially when it misses its mark. This is what we used to call an "agency," I think. It is strange and horrible to look at. Yes, quite like an agency.
My second guess was we were looking at the reinvention of the conference. Many cultural artifacts that have been dislodged by our new world. Our world has been decentered, flattened, destabilized, distributed, and made participative, anarchical, elite indifferent, cloudily networked, self organizing, and concatenating. So it’s natural that we’re having to rethink entertainment, information, elites, experts and especially speakers. Who now wants to sit in a room and hear someone hold forth? Certainly, there are a couple of people who we would like to hear speak in this way. But how often do they turn up to the conferences we go too? Mostly what we get is two things: 1) badly concealed self advertisement, and 2) a view of the world that means to be comprehensive but proves to be alarmingly (and unwittingly) partial.
Conferences used to create value by giving us the benefits of a sorting exercise. The organizers would choose experts and the experts would choose topics and treatments. We the audience would undergo edification mixed with a couple of moments of epiphany (with the opportunity to build networks over drinks). The trouble is we are now fantastically good at sorting for ourselves. What we want from a conference is not a surrogate intelligence of a big name speaker. What we want is a tide that delivers new and interesting things that present themselves in fresh and unexpectedly formed ways. (Interestingly, some presentations were overformed by their very effort to be underformed. This happened when you could see that the presenter was deliberately casting a topic or treatment against mainstream type, as it were, the better to claim a quirkier credibility.)
Put us on the Kauffman continuum, the one that arrays the world between fixity at one end and chaos at the other, and it turns out that we most of us have paddled our way away from fixity towards chaos, and now tread water here in rougher, whiter waters with no discernible effort or difficulty. Experts be damned. We can read the world quite nicely on our own, thank you very much. It doesn’t have to be very fully formed for us to "get it." (It was fun listening to Johnnie Moore on this theme, and a pleasure to meet this fella in real space and time.)
Clever Russell. To forbid the recitation of what we think we know for things that are interesting, this is a good way to oxygenate an occasion with things that are less formed in just about the right measure. Less formed, and more charming. There is something "nice" about things that offer the world up all in the jumble and leave us to think what we will.
Now, someone is bound to say that this is merely the planning world, in the person of Russell Davies and conference attendees, discovered the well established truth of post modernism, that the world is now a thing of perfect incoherence, that the architectures of knowledge, the consistencies of culture, the thematicness of contemporary life, these have all collapsed, and that Interesting2007 was in fact merely an exploration and a demonstration of same.
Wrongo! What collapsed was mostly the intellectuals’ favorite interpretative frames. Naturally, this made it look like the sky was falling. Naturally, because they are intellectuals, they worked very hard to make their problem our problem. But the rest of us, those of us who actually make and manage meanings in the world know the truth of our present condition, and this is that if you have the right powers of metaphor capture and pattern recognition the world is still a relatively intelligible place. The things to remember is that the coherences are multiple, the interpretive frames many and conflicting, and the world changeable and fluid. And when all of this is true, then not only is the sky not falling, but Red Lions Square and Conway Hall when filled with speakers by Russell, is a very interesting place to be.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Bowbrick for the photo. (More photos by Bowbrick here.) Thanks too for his support of Interesting2007
To Johnnie Moore for interesting thoughts. See Johnnie’s website here.
That’s the phrase that lept to mind last night, as I sat in a South bank cafe. I was sitting with a small group people gathered in the National Film Theatre cafe, one of those end-of-week drinking places that London does so well, people spilling out of doors (the liquor license, what liquor license?) into the street, in this case, a concrete plaza, drinking, talking, flirting, exclaiming, declaiming, carrying on, leaping from one story to the next, in breathtaking acts of barely managed continuity. The balance! The dexterity! The English, they sure can talk.
The world is sorting because this particular group of drinkers (Russell Davies, Mark McGuinness, Jennifer Lyon Bell, Tim Plester, Marcus Brown and Lauren Brown would not exist were it not for Interesting2007, and this would not exist were it not for the bloggable world.
I sat there at one moment thinking what it would cost me in time and effort to meet any of these people. Tons. Tons of time and effort. But these people have found one another, thanks to the internet, blogging and of course, the present master of ceremony, Russell Davies.
If we are not "on the same page" we found that page with a conversational short hand. And when compressed speech and nimble orientation failed us, we fashioned "same pages" in no time at all. It was wonderful to see how few questions any one of us had to ask to "place" the other.
We come from disparate parts of the world (planner, film maker, anthropologist, poet) and there are great pieces of each world were inscrutable or opaque. But a little scrambling about on a shared but unsuspected catwalk and people began to work out what the other meant, may have meant, or under the circumstances and given what the listener knew about proximate or equivalent parts of the world, almost certainly did mean (give or take).
The world is going in two directions. These differences are expanding. What counts in the world of poetry and film-making may not be so very different, but keeping in touch with the trends, inclinations and cultures that produce the people that produce the poetry or the films, that’s a different matter, and if once London nurtured a shared creative culture, now it encourages many hundreds of them. (Was there a big bang at some point in recent memory, our life times, that produced this expanding universe? No, this is one of those cultural things we (we, the West, we the species) have been working up to over thousands of years. It’s just the we can now see changes happening in real time.)
Good thing that cat walk is expanding. Good thing we all are pretty good at mobilizing our way out of our present world and transplanting, if only for a moment, into the world of someone else. Our cultural literacy has so expanded, it turns out that most of these differences are negotiable.
But what about traversing this expanding world not intellectually, but actually? What about actually finding somehow in these expanding galaxies. And this is where blogging comes in, as my table at the NFT cafe last night demonstrated so convincingly. What one needs to get a seat at this table is not any of the other gate negotiated affiliations: the right family, the right college, the right club. What one needs is a blog, a readable blog. By this means, we identify ourselves, and one another, as interesting and engaged, and eventually we find one another.
The world is sorting and the implications are, er, interesting. We can imagine a perfect world in which an invisible hand sorts the world so that each of us is put in contant all but only the people we find most interesting. What would happen to what we do, think, accomplish, create? Tons. But what about the collective effects? What happens to the social and cultural worlds are integrated, cross referenced, interpenetrating in this way. This is the $64,000 question, isn’t it, and the great challenge for the social sciences and especially anthropology. After all, anthropology was about two things: culture and kinship. Both of these are changed beyond recognition, but not beyond the possibility of anthropological investigation.
Which brings me to Lance Ulanoff and the column he posted in PC magazine on Wednesday. Lance thinks that the social networks are goners. MySpace, Second Life and Twitter are, he says, "doomed," symptoms of the hype that now surrounds Web 2.0. Lance, Lance, Lance. The social networking has only just began. None of these sites (or the others, Facebook, Dopplr, Jaidu, LinkedIn) has got it exactly right, but that can’t be for of. Most of us are still making connections by hand, using the bloggable world has our source and our quide. Once someone finds a way to industrialize this process, and harness the power of a machine to replace handcrafting, things will really get going. It may turn out that the ability to watch change happen in real time will be a brief episode that will end as it begins to happen so quickly it evades overwhelms our optic abilities.
References
Ulanoff, Lance. 2007. MySpace, Second Life, and Twitter Are Doomed: these overyped social networks will soon crumble under the weight of overhyped expectations. PC Magazine. June 13, 2007. here.
Postscript:
Oh, and the photo was taking last night about 9:00 and it captures a cloud showing off shamelessly, but quietly, in the sky above London, looking north from Pall Mall. North?
A think-tank has issued a report on Canada and the results are grim.
"Our culture is unwilling to accept the failures that are built into an environment that genuinely supports risk taking. Nor are we wholly comfortable with differentiation, success and excellence. This culture holds Canada back in entrepreneurial and technological innovation."
The Conference Board, the think-tank in question, says that it has discovered a "story of governments, businesses and people punching below their weight.
"[T]oo often we trail the pack. The failure to innovate is a large part of the explanation for our mediocrity — a mediocrity that is hampering what we can do and what we can be."
References
Viera, Paul. ‘Mediocrity’ threatens way of life: report card. National Post. June 13, 2007. here.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Mark Medley and National Post for the report card image.
Just seconds ago, I was checking in at the desk of my hotel, and I found myself standing beside Marzena (eyes right).
And, what ho, there’s something on her upper arm. Why, it’s a tattoo.
By golly, if it’s not…
"Hey," I say in my most charming voice, "what is that?"
"It’s a double helix," Marzena says, matter of factly.
"Double helix!" I exclaim. I’m a smooth talker. "What, did you study that in school?"
"I studied history," Marzena says.
It turns out that Marzena is in the lobby of my hotel because her car has broken down in the hotel garage, and she is, at the moment, asking the hotel clerk to call her a tow truck.
"It’s not finished," she says.
"What?"
"The tattoo. It’s not finished."
A work in progress, then. I’ve sat in the Cambridge pub, the Eagle, where Watson (or was it Crick?) pulled out the X-rays and wondered whether this might represent the discovery of the secret of life.
And now it’s a double helix on the arm of a girl who can’t get her car out of a Lodz garage. The passage took 55 years: X-ray (1952) to tattoo (2007).
And I ask you. When tattoos went mainstream in the 1990s, everyone thought real hard about how to get something "totally interesting." Dolphins, dragons, death heads, yawn. Marzena had a better idea.
This is sort of an experiment. I am at the end of my first day in Warsaw and my head is tumbling with impressions and I thought I would share them in a manner less rehearsed and less premeditated than is customary here at This Blog Sits At. (This is another way of saying, "here’s the data, you sort it out.") I am drinking and, thanks to another guy at the bar, smoking, so this is discourse that is both alcohol and nicotine assisted (aka diminished). (Blame Russell and Twitter.)
Warsaw. As a naive North American, I am inclined to put Poles and Ruassians in the same category, but day 1 tells me how naive this is. Many of the Russians I interviewed for this project seemed to suffer a condition of astonishment at the trick history had played on them. They were, it seemed to me, as if waiting for the next foot to fall, with the possibility that footfalls were over and that it was all cat’s feet after this, small directions, hard to appreciate really, with an adaptive strategy (read critical path) that nows look like hundreds, perhaps thousands, of tiny course corrections over the course of a life time. Ok, the less critical path. We Americans take this for granted. This is what it is to have seen the latest Old Christine or Spiderman…and thousands of little clues we take from this, that and the other thing. Ah, ok, we say, so it’s this…until the next this, that, or the other thing. Poles get this. They flourish in a world that forsakes directions from on high and marching orders below.
The Polish, at least the three of them I talked today (and since when has an anthropologist refused the opportunity to make this slender part to speak for every single person in the whole) are all about tiny adjustments as driven by, and this was the surprising part, an active curosity, and optimism, a pleasure in the change. As North Americans we are well fed on Saturday Night Live "wild and crazy guy" stereotypes that would make the Polish the latest guests to a party that has moved uptown. We couldn’t be more wrong. There is more here than imagined by our philosophy. Sorry.
To understand this world, we want to think more in terms of Conrad and Malinowksi, those Poles (novelist and anthropologist, respectively) who effortlessly mastered English prose and other cultures (not respectively). I’m tryng to think of the Conrad that opens with a magnificent evocation of time and place. It’s not Heart of Darkness. He talks about a port. And you’re there. It’s a little like Hardy talking about the heath, opening pages so powerful you read remaining pages out of gratitude, and the certain knowledge that the fun is over. It was the opening. Poland is about the opening pages. Not investing, necessary, but getting the opening engagement so perfectly that any number of things are possible.
I wonder if that’s Poland now. I did an interview with a woman who had adorned the interview in everyway imaginable. She had added a guite stirring white blondness to her hair, she had contacts that gave her eyes a striking blueness, her coat had a black fur ruff, her shirt was a fetching pink, her pants were covered with slogans and speech (I didn’t try to read every word but, you know, hey), her shoes too were pink. And she was, it turned out, gilding the lily. Quite beautiful, actually more beautiful without. But as I talked to her I came to think of all of these aesthetic gestures as a SETI search for life out there. Try everything, because it’s hard to know what might work. Broadcast on every frequency, because you are not afraid that some, perhaps all, signal(s) might return. We will work this out as Sahlins used to say, on the cushion. We have some play. We’ll play with the play.
This is a statement of one’s absolute confidence in one’s powers of adaptation and assimilation. What’s out there? Send it here. Don’t protect me. Don’t, for God’s sake, manage me. This is why this managed economy and culture must have seemed like such an outrageous imposition. Russians, like they have a clue! Managing the world for us, please!
And this may be why they were first out of the Soviet box. The conventional notion, I know, is that Stalin, to get Poland in place, was obliged to give farmers and small enterpreneurs the right to keep some, more, of the value they created than was allowed in other parts of his gulag. So a talent for capital accumulation and management was there, and not snuffed out. But I wonder if there isn’t a talent for dynamism was there first. Why is the world so very comforting with our stereotypes in place and so much more interesting when we give them up? No, it’s not rhetorical. I’m asking. Or as we say in New York City, "I’m asking here!"
And the low point of the day. I stood at the station where 300,000 Jews, all of them, as nearly as I could tell, from this very neighborhood, borded a train and were transported to camps. This is not a place you want to be, a human forced to bear witness to the horror of which his species is capable. And it’s not the place you want to be if you are even a little empathic and you can imagine what you clothes smelled like as you were brought aboard. You are overdressed! But of course you are, because your body is now a means of transport. Pack what you can, wear what you must. The capitivity starts here, in the heat coming up. What else? What more? Apparently, the Nazis kept up the fiction of "relocation" until the very last. You are talking, terrified but talking, you are managing your emotions and those of your mother, your father, your children, everyone is pitching in, everyone is freaking out. It’s not so bad. It’ll be okay.
Creativity likes chaos. So it loves Mexico City. The graffiti here is markedly better than what I see in New York City, and it’s better than what I saw this spring in Berlin, Frankfurt, Brussels or Paris. (I admit happily that I am using old fashioned aesthetic notions to make these judgment. Would a graffiti artist agree with me? I think she would. Please click on the image to the right. It’s worth a closer look.)
And it’s everywhere. Very few vertical surfaces in Mexico City escape sprayed paint. In Monterrey, my present location, there is much less work and what there is often anemic, as if someone can’t quite work the nerve to get on with it.
But chaos doesn’t just come from graffiti. It’s there in the mixed (read, "no") zoning that shapes Mexico City. A single block can contain an array of possibilities: several types of architecture, a couple types of habitation, many sizes and shapes of building, and a mix of commerce and habitation. Buildings that are carefully segregated in the US here jumble up.
What Monterrey lacks in graffiti, it makes up in other intrusions. Just when we think we have a fix on what we’re doing, something intrudes, a glimpse of mountains, a field of brush, a stand of cactus, clouds draped on a hillside. Just for a second, we’re a world away. And then we’re back. What were we thinking again? Oh, right.
Thomas Hardy was pretty good on the chaos of the heath, where perceptions swim and distinctions tremble.
the heath wore the appearance of an installment of night which had taken up its place before its astronomical hour was come: darkness had to a great extent arrived hereon, while day stood distinct in the sky.
Monterrey’s got this sort of thing going on in a big way. Who needs graffiti artists when the natural world remakes itself?
The creative classes are drawn to places like this. I think that because, in these places, chaos does most of the hard work of creativity. Graffiti in Mexico City and heaths in Monterrey break apart received wisdom and the taken-for-granted assumptions that would otherwise prevent us from (cliche alert) thinking outside the box. The creative classes need "mixed zoning," because otherwise the decomposition and recombination of things would be up to them.
Mea culpa. Me, too. Chaos at work is totally interesting.
References
Florida, Richard. The Rise of the Creative Classes. [sorry, I don’t have the full ref.]
Hardy, Thomas. Return of the Native. read and download here.
Post script
Alex, I see your NY Graffiti (see comment below) and I raise it! (please click on this photo to get fuller detail)
Thanks for your kind words and the opportunity to pit noble graffiti tradition against one another. (Not that graffiti is competitive or anything.)
A life long dream came true yesterday on the flight from NYC to Mexico City. I was able to watch a film in flight, not an airline film and not on airline technology which feels increasingly like a stowaway from the 20th century. I used my Lenovo ThinkPad X60s, the one with the long battery life, and thanks to Amazon UnBox, I was able to see Chinatown, the 1974 film by Roman Polanski.
I got thinking about Chinatown because the post on Raines (Thursday) got me thinking about Noir. Now, I was singing the praises of Raines but then it occurred to me that it is not nearly so good as Polanski’s film. It is, at least, good enough to claim kinship with Chinatown, and to have make itself the beneficiary of the things Chinatown did for the genre. (And that’s saying something.)
This is a “second look” film if ever there were one. The plot demands it, in the way that Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects does. Once you know the outcome, you are obliged to review every detail. But it is second look in another way: it is so very carefully crafted.
I have a funny habit of mentally “clicking” when things in the world fall into a “composition.” It’s as if whenever things line up in the manner of a photograph, I feel compelled to “take the picture.” Sometimes I actually click my teeth, to mark exactly when the composition was “just right.” Normally, I would not share this with you, dear reader. But it’s worth mentioning here because Chinatown had me clicking like crazy. In the scene that has Jack Nicholson (as Jake “J.J.” Gittes) drive his car up the driveway of the Mulwray mansion (24:37-55 on the Amazon UnBox counter), I clicked 17 times. (I had to go back and count, obviously. There is actually a double count opportunity, but never mind.) It is as if the eye (Polanski too?) is trying to return the moving images to a series of stills.
Having satisfied his aesthetic craving for order, Polanski puts the film back together again with a device that I came to think of as “eddies.” There are little moments in the film that refer us back into the film, as if one moment were a ripple returned from an earlier one.
Notice the look Mulwray’s secretary gives Gittes as he is escorted out of Mulwray’s office. It has ferocious, well banked disdain. (She is punishing him for having invaded her boss’s office.) Gittes looks at her as he passes, and, as he groks her disdain, he looks again. Their eyes lock. (It’s a .3 second stand off.) This scene evokes the earlier one, and the movie feels more and more a record of a world, and less and less it’s simulation.
Notice the smile that Nicholson gives when he is sitting in his office, reading a newspaper and listening to one of this “operatives” describe Mulwray with a resounding, “He’s got water on the brain!” This tells us volumes about office interactions, a long standing relationship, the pleasure of a friend (or a knucklehead) playing true to form. Eddies everywhere.
Polanski is especially good with odd noises, introducing them as anomalies and only later giving us the lowdown. The first scene of the film begins with a grunting, keening sound we’ve (I’ve) never heard before. Eventually, it proves to come from a cuckold as he confronts evidence of his wife’s infidelity.
At Nicholson gets out of his car at the Mulwray’s mansion, he hears squeaking issuing inexplicably from a magnificent sedan. Eventually we see that this is caused by a servant hard at work waxing and who, eventually, waxes his way right into frame. When he discovers Nicholson staring at him, he returns a gaze of dull significance. This is Polanski telling us, possibly, that if there are some signals the significance of which is withheld from us, there may be others. Faire attention! Viewer, be warned.
Clearly, Polanski is a champion noticer. And he is in this case of Chinatown, a noticer doing a film about a noticer. The detective is one of those noticers who may, by noticing, actually change the outcome of municipal politics and LA history. Every artist wants this kind of influence, and the trouble is that, usually, they are forced to settle for something more general and indeterminate. To be sure, this influence is actually more powerful than the redirection of LA politics, but it takes long and credit is rarely forthcoming. The vanity of the artist demands both power and proof, cultural influence and political effect. (And if you’ve got gifts like Polanski’s, who’s to say you don’t deserve it.)
Now, clearly no one this talented doesn’t steal aesthetic resources anywhere and everywhere. There is a trace of Kubrick, with every frame furnished and inhabited before we get there (as opposed to Altman who pushed the camera into the hurly-burly of an improv in the hope of capturing something more interesting than anything he could furnish or inhabit. In a sense, Kubrick and Polanski are France. Altman, England.) There are moments entirely Hitchcockian, wonderfully shrill and sculpted, as when the body of of poor, drowned Mulwray, his eyes pried open by terror, is pulled into frame. The is film making ripped from the pages of the pulp and scandal rag, Noir at its most unapologetically overwrought.
Why does Noir matter to us, especially when so much of it is over the top? I think its because of all the inventions of popular culture, this is the one most devoted to complexity. Chinatown has lots and lots of complexity, the plot for one. The viewer (this viewer anyhow) must from time to time break frame and ask “ok, what’s going on here?” and even then we’re left with the uneasy feeling that there are complexities here that are still probably going to escape us.
Complexity aside, Noir has always been prepared to be openly sociological. In this case, we can see social classes cleanly delineated. As when Nicholson has the black, veneered door of the Mulwray mansion closed in his face. This is not very subtle, but it gets the job done. Notice the gazes, then, that pass between the Mulwray’s staff, so like wrought iron in their attention to good form. This isn’t very subtle either, but clearly Polanski wants certain social truths made clear that he might investigate real subtleties with more subtlety.
Notice the look Mrs. Mulwray gives a detective at 34:14. The Lieutenant is asking Mrs. M. if she knows who “the girl” is. She says no. The detective slides in from the hallway to inspect Mrs. Mulwray more closely. She returns his gaze and then, seeing his impertinence, she looks at him a second time, this time with affront and that look that leads with a downturned chin, and rakes upward as if to say, “who are you to look at me that way? I return your challenge with my own, and, listen here, you jumped-up little man, my challenge trumps your challenge, by rank and performance and gender.” Of course, Dunaway issues this challenge with the steely fragility she exhibits in this film, so the “trumping” is, like so much in Chinatown, balanced on a blade’s edge, only just holding and millimeters from failure. Another kind of tipping point, this one with tolerances set by sociological stipulation.
Complexity and that sociological eye come together as Nicholson begins to understand that he has been drawn into the “wheels within wheels” interaction of forces much larger than himself. This is urgent sociology. Nicholson has to crack this case if he is not to end up in a drainage ditch pointed at the Pacific ocean. See also the moment that Dunaway realizes that she has a problem on her hands. (Spoiler alert: stop reading here if you have not seen Chinatown, and take this script to your local video store: “for one copy of Chinatown, to be viewed immediately, repeat as necessary (and at least 4x). [Signed] Dr. McCracken”).
Dunaway’s problem is Nicholson, a guy whose motives are not quite clear. He is an accident scouring her life for a place, unpredictably, to happen. We can see her character wondering, who is this guy and what do I have to do to manage him?
This is of course the problem of the modern and post modern society. With roles unspecified (or at least undeclared) a good deal of social interaction turns on the question:
“who are you to me”
and
“what am I to you?”
(This question is usually haunted by another set of questions. These are:
“Who do you think you are?”
and
“Don’t you know who I am?”
This is effectively our opportunity to protest the indeterminacy of our social world in situ.)
Finally, we work our way to clarity. Identities are determined. Interactions are dispatched. This is worked out in the economy of impressions, and the exchange of social and cultural capitals, but before this economics is engaged, anthropology must be satisfied. The actors have to detect role, motive, character.
At the beginning of Hamlet, when the keepers of the watch are changing shift, Barnardo, the incoming guard, issues a challenge,
“Who’s there?”
Francisco, the incumbent, isn’t having any of this. He says,
“Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself.”
Barnardo obliges, “Long live the king!”
If I read this correctly, it is a classic role play. Barnardo has usurped Francisco’s authority and Francisco responds with something like, “Listen, this is my job. I challenge you, not the other way round.” Who is Francisco to Barnardo? It’s clear. Even in the face of Barnardo’s indiscretion, it is clear that Francisco is right to challenge the challenge and restore things to order.
This kind of clarity is missing in our world. (It was of course being dismantled even in the 16th century to the extraordinary profit of the Elizabethan age and our own.) In our world, it’s not clear who is who, and how whos should how (if you will forgive Dr. Seuss phrasing.) Eventually, it will be negotiated, thanks not least to the facilitations of the marketplace, but for the moment things are unclear and perilous, especially if we harbor a secret like Dunaway’s own.
Noir matters finally because it is the only popular form, I think, that can approach tragedy. My rough and ready definition of tragedy are those moments when two things can’t but must be true. Clearly, popular culture has always had an inclination to make itself agreeable, like the good natured uncle who works so hard to please everyone. (My family, rich in scoundrels and the merely disagreeable, would have liked to have had even one person like this. I speak not from experience, but the big pop-out book of cultural truisms.) Popular culture has usually defaulted to sunny simplicity and Noir offers something richer, more complicated, more ambivalent.
Ok, I am as you read this sitting in a living room or a kitchen in Mexico City plying the respondent with questions. I’ve done work here a couple of times before. Almost universally, respondents have been helpful and illuminating. Mexico City, does this place do Noir?
References
Rich, Nathaniel. 2007. The Shadows Know. Vanity Fair. February 7, 2007. here.
Straw, Will. 2006. Cyanide and Sin: Visualizing Crime in 50s America. PPE Editions.
One of the secrets of understanding contemporary culture is the telling comparison.
Yesterday, it seemed to me a good way to extract the significance of Jeff Goldblum’s character on Raines was to compare him to Kieffer Sutherland’s character on 24. This comparison is not so much telling as damning. Sutherland looks like a robot by comparison. (I say this with some regret because I actually like 24.)
I guess I was vaguely aware of the limitations of Kieffer Sutherland’s character, but it took a telling comparison to make them leap into view. Raines is a character who thinks and feels, and this helps us see Jack Bauer as wind up toy programmed only for "stoic impassivity," "heroic grimacing," and "fleeting regret."
Telling comparisons demand the right terms for comparison. Comparing Jack Bauer to Homer Simpson, Conan O’Brian, Les Moonves, Johnny Depp, or Jack Welch is not going to help us see him in a new light. What we need is what Fred Egan used to call a "controlled comparison," one with enough similarities to make the contrast stand up and holler. Raines gives us this. No, of course, there is scientific or very precise about these comparison. They are not, in fact, very controlled at all. They require a good deal of editorial discretion, but in the right hands they show (or tell) us things we couldn’t/wouldn’t otherwise see.
Telling comparisons are useful, I think, because our culture has expanded so much I, for one, think of things discretely. When I think of 24, I don’t do much comparing. I am captive on the little universe created by the show. In fact, I find that when I construct what I hope will be a telling comparison I get a little shock, as if I have crossed wired, as if I have conjoined things that are made to be kept separate. The anthropology, the blogging, of contemporary culture depends on comparisons. All of us would love to live free of the judgment that comparison brings, but sorry no can do.
Today, I was thinking about how much interesting stuff about marketing appears in the pages of Fast Company. And I wondered whether Fast Company had maybe not done us the very great favor of smuggling marketing discourse back into serious treatment. I mean this is a field that gets it from all sides. The liberal left think it’s the work of the devil. The intellectual world believes it an exercise is stupidity. The b-school world regards marketing as a dark art, one that must struggle without the aid of metrics. Fast Company has done us the very great honor of taking the field seriously, showing that it is not a moral dubious exercise engaged in manipulation, not a field of simple problems pursued by simple people, and not a dark art that makes up with guess work what it lacks in metrics. Thank you, Fast Company.
But have I taken their measure fully? No, what I need now is a telling comparison, and after due deliberation and running the mainframe very nearly to the point of combustion, I think we might compare Fast Company to the Harvard Business Review. Oh, cruel comparison! Now Fast Company begins to look positively mercurial, mobile and curious and connected to contemporary culture and commerce, and poor HBR looks tired and a little clueless, as if everything it cares to comment on in the world of marketing and culture is whatever it can see from the window of it’s men’s club in Boston. That Google Trends map above shows HBR on high but losing altitude.
Alright! Enough on telling comparison. I have 4 minutes in which to work if I want to post this on Friday, April 20th, and I do. (Next week I will be in Mexico where I hope to do my best Jan Chipchase imitation. Stay tuned.)
References
For more on Fred Eggan, see his Wikipedia entry here.
Raines is a new show on NBC. Chatter on line suggests that it has not taken off like a rocket. This is a pity, because it is, I think, the best thing to come to television in a long time.
I’ve never liked Jeff Goldblum. He always struck me as self-enamored. But this is a new Goldblum. Somehow the guy got gravitas. And this changes everything. With a new seriousness and depth of feeling, all that preciousness and posing transforms itself, hey presto, into great acting. That virtuous control of face, body and especially voice, now that they are no longer servants of his vanity, give Goldblum extraordinary depths and control as an actor. It’s really an amazing transformation…as if Olivier has spent the opening years as a talk show host. A star is born.
Did we need a new detective show? Certainly not. But somehow had the very good idea of giving this show roots in the Noir tradition. At a stroke, this gives Goldblum’s character that air of a tarnished knight and Goldblum works moral weariness and self-doubt to perfection. Hollywood shamelessly ransacks Noir structure and vocabulary, always taking, never giving. It borrows, in the famous phrase by x because it cannot steal. Raines steals. This is Noir actually lives and breathes. This is Noir getting better.
Listen especially for the voice-over dialog that Goldblum offers at the beginning of each show. This is a Noir staple, the voice of bad tempered authenticity. The Noir novelists (Chandler, Hammett) always made this voice a little too tough-guy for my tastes, as if getting this close to literary obliged them to hype the speaker’s gender credentials. In a more secure time, Goldblum can work this territory with nuance, and I think it’s fair to say that these opening orations may be the best voice-over work ever.
The show turns on a stunt. Goldblum’s character can see dead people. Yawn. This is a device that is precious close to jumping the shark, if it didn’t do some years ago. (Consider Sixth Sense, Ghost Whisper, etc.). But even here the show draws up to the brink of cliche and then finds a way to make it work. In this case, Goldblum is not so much seeing dead people, as inventing them. They are figments of his imagination. They know it. He knows it. Your scalp will not tingle. Your spine will not shiver. Nothing supernatural is revealed. This turns out to be a lovely device for listening to a thinking, feeling man thinking and feeling. An interior dialog made outward for our delectation.
The casting choices are stunningly good. Hats off to Meg Liberman and Irene Cagen. Everyone in the station house is good. Dov Davidoff is flat out brilliant. Madeleine Stow as the psychiatrist is not so good. It’s as if she is trying to put too many funny, gracious roles behind her, and prove that she is an actress with chops playing a professional woman with substance. It’s a one note performance from a cast that is very good at working the scale. One of my favorite things is that this ensemble never has those terrible moments that beset the cast of CSI: New York where everyone keeps repeating "vic" over and over like a support group for people with David Mamet disorder. (We get it! We get it! You are street toughed officers of the law!)
Some of the credit for this show must go to the executive producer, Graham Yost. Graham’s Dad was Elwy Yost, a famous Canadian film buff who once sent Graham to school with a note that read: "I am sorry that Graham is late for school today. We were watching Citizen Kane till very late last night." What Graham draws Elwy. Raines draws from popular culture. Some TV is getting better because we have taking it seriously, and doing it better, for several generations now.
I think one way to see the significance of Raines is to compare it to 24. 24 has become a drama machine. There is no surprise left. Only tension. Jack Bauer (Keiffer Sutherland’s character) has become an action figure, running, jumping, hitting, shooting, and only very rarely actually acting. Raines is Shakespearean by comparison. Raines may well owe its existence to The Closer, but I think it is much better. In fact, it’s not clear to me that there are few things on TV better than Raines. (Though I have to agree with Peter and Joshua that nothing is better than The Wire.) That there is talk of cancellation is pure madness. I don’t doubt that there was an editor and a publishing house that refused the early work of Chandler and Hammett. I mean, come on, take a risk. History may be watching.
McCracken, Grant 2004. Complexity on TV. This blog sits at the intersection of anthropology and economics. September 15, 2004. here. [in praise of the Wire]
Full Credits
Premiere date: March 15, 2007
Starring: Jeff Goldblum, Matt Craven, Dov Davidoff, Linda Park, Madeleine Stowe, Nicole Sullivan, Malik Yoba
Executive producer: Graham Yost
Creator: Graham Yost
Co-executive producers: Felix Alcala and Fred Golan
Producer: Preston Fischer
Consulting producers: Bruce Rasmussen and Jennifer Cecil
Co-producer: Josh Singer
Story editor: Taylor Elmore
Staff writer: David Andron, Moira Walley-Beckett and Wendy Calhoun
Director: Frank Darabont (pilot)
Casting directors: Meg Liberman and Irene Cagen
Production designer: Greg Melton
Art director: Anthony D. Parrillo
Director of photography: Lex du Pont
Costume designer: Giovanna Melton
Editors: Ron Rosen, Derek Berlatsky and Peter Frank
With doctors, [he] assumes the role of a doctor; with psychologists he says he is a psychologist; at the solicitors he claims to be a solicitor. [He] doesn’t just make these claims, he actually plays the roles.
Clearly AD suffers this condition for good medical reasons. Cardiac arrest caused damage to the fronto-temporal region of his brain.
But perhaps you recognize something in AD as you did in Zelig, Woody Allen’s character in a film of the same name.
If we de-pathologize this condition for a moment, it looks adaptive. The world grows more various and more demanding. We are defined by looser boundaries, fewer "off hours," and a diversity of stimulus, opportunity, obligation and response.
Zelig’s condition might be useful. What if we could be exactly what people want us to be with no opportunity cost. We could be X with the Xs, and still be Y with the Ys. Perfectly fluid, undetectably various, effortlessly responsive.
I mean this is what we hope for in all circumstances. We all know people who are too sweet to be tough and others too tough to be sweet…to name just one of the failures of "coverage" that can challenge the biographical fortunes of the individual. The costs of even this ordinary failure in versatility are high: wrong jobs, failed educations, bad marriages.
But the world has grown in its complexity, breadth and depth. There is more "identity space" out there, and therefore more possibility of contradiction and personal shortfall. Who can be all things to all people, now that all people are so very various?
AD seems to have lost the capacity to keep his own identity constant…
Very wise. Yes, it looks like a symptom or a condition to the British Association of Psychology. (Yum, more to cure.) And in AD’s case it plainly is. But for the rest of us…who wants to keep his identity constant in a world like our own?
It’s all very Stuart Kauffman, the complexity theorist from the Sante Fe institute who asks us to consider the structural advantages of the "complex adaptive system." Real adaptation, Kauffman will tell us, comes from being messy and multiple.
Naturally, this is a power that will have to be used for good. We don’t like the sound of the character in Catch Me If you Can, Spielberg’s 2002 movie, staring Leonard DiCaprio. Zelig is a sweet, bumbling idiot, motiving by a wish to please and an effort to do his best. It is precisely this sincerity we hope for, and not the cunning of the con man.
Certainly, this is what we do in an ethnographic interview, trying to turn ourselves into the other. So three times today, in people’s kitchens in Brussels, I tried as much as possible to become them. It was pretty. It wasn’t successful. But boy was it interesting. But forget interesting. Someday, very soon, it’s going to be adaptive.
References
Anonymous. 2007. Brain damage turns man into human chameleon. The British Psychological Society. March 20, 2007. here.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Johan Strandell for spotting this article and giving me a head’s up.
My ethnographic interviews in Hamburg are going really well. There is "gold on the ground," data everywhere, there for the asking, easy to get, easy to think. Can this be one of the reasons that the social sciences were largely invented here? Probably not.
In one happy moment, a perplexed respondent complained that she had learned a new English word, but couldn’t find it anywhere in the dictionary. What, she wanted to know, does "bleep" mean? We eventually encouraged her to understand is that is stands for a great many other words, as long as they are rude. But when you think of it, it’s a fair question: is this a word? And if it isn’t a word, what in the dickens is it? This is the kind of thing the God-like Michael Silverman could dispatch in a couple of sentences. Me, frankly, well, I leave it to the likes of Silverman.
It is interesting to hear Europeans talk about the US. They have a hard time of it. America, is that dream factory of Hollywood or a great university like Princeton, is it Las Vegas or hip hop, is it street people or Disneyland, is it Alice Waters or McDonald’s? What they don’t say (not yet anyhow) is that America is all these things. You can see them shuttling back and forth between partial accounts. Apparently, to call America various is to fail the work of description. Countries can’t be everything.
Clearly, Hamburg respondents are not the only ones to find America’s plenitude a taxing problem. It’s a little like the "bleep" problem. How can one term stand for many terms? The solution for the post-modernists is delightedly to declare the death of the category and the ability of the generalization. But this is as intellectually pointless as insisting on a single-term approach. We need new ideas here.
