Straight to Landfill Release

Ok, in my effort to recover content from Amazon.com--and resist creating new content for this blog, I've pulled another zinger from the handful of reviews I've left there. I was forced to watch this movie on a return-trip from Europe in 2000. The middle-aged American woman sitting next to me on the plane, seeing I was preparing to watch it, sang its praises. I was polite to her, but I can't say I withheld judgment before watching. I expected a sappy, product-placement-laden lukewarm bowl of poorly-prepared and nearly undigestable tripe. I was not disappointed. I can't remember when I originally wrote the review but I did "update" the review in 2004 in order to try to get it higher up the rankings. That didn't work. I'm on page 5. Sadly, only 12 of 21 people found the review helpful. I guess this is not surprising since most people wanting to view a romance film don't really want to read harsh criticism about it.

Straight to Landfill Release, March 18, 2004

Reviewer:

Christopher R. DeFay (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews

It is difficult to redeem a movie as deeply disturbing as You've Got Mail. And I don't mean to knock the reviewers here who said they liked it. If you bracket the disturbing political messages of the movie and just talk about the "romantic" part then, yeah, sure it's ok. But...

I'd have to say that a 119 minute commercial for AOL, Starbuck's coffee and Giant MegaBookstore Corp. was just too much to bear. What was Nora Ephron thinking?

The political message of You've Got Mail seems to be that corporate monoculture (as embodied by AOL/Starbucks/Barnes&Noble/etc.) is really just grand. That if you're a small bookstore (or coffeestore owner, or whatever) owner trying to survive against mega-conglamorates that as long as you fall in love with the enemy that it's all ok.

Kathleen Kelly's (Meg Ryan's character) consciousness of the real political struggle facing small business owners is staggeringly shallow. There is no small irony that she and Joe Fox (Hanks' character) can go to the same Starbucks and she is oblivious to the parallels between her choice of coffee and the choice she expects her customers to make when they buy books.

That irrepressible scene toward the end of the film when she loses her business and goes in to Joe Fox's Mega-Book Corp's store is enough to make one physically ill. She sees, lo and behold, that Mega-Book Corp really can be a wonderful, caring place. It's enough to make her forget that she's just lost her business she'd developed for years. And the thing that moves her to this new state of unconsciousness? Love for Mr. Joe Fox. Wow!

I'm not saying that Nora Ephron needed to make a politically engaged story. It is a romantic movie, after all. But why a long commercial for conglamorates like AOL and Starbucks?

Revisiting the "Contract With America"

So, many commentators have pointed out that the Democrats have great opportunity this year to pick up a number of congressional seats. Others have said that, minus a legible and relatively unified agenda, the Democrats will not mount a serious attack against the Republicans, even an increasingly fragmented one. I think the Dems will certainly gain a few seats as the Republicans falter with corruption, division, a lame-duck president, and an ailing foreign and domestic policy. This will not be the year they sweep back into power. More energy is needed in creating a unified agenda. The Democrats should take a look at the 1994 Republican Contract With America (http://www.house.gov/house/Contract/contract.html).

I'm certainly not advocating becoming more Republican than the Republicans: this is the unfortunate strategy of the DLC and the pseud0-Democratic Blue Dogs. I do look at the "Contract" and a few things stand out. First of all, the ten bills proposed are broad, open-ended, and undergirded by carefully considered and unified neo-conservative ideology. For instance, stating that the government as an institution should model its spending on families and businesses. There's the standard focus on punitive measures for individuals and social groups that could be pegged as "bad" and "socially irresponsible." So, criminals and social welfare recipients are targeted.

Ever read George Lakoff's book, Don't Think of an Elephant? It's an important book that I think rightly reminds Progressives the importance of controlling the debate by framing it in terms that resonate with core constituencies. If you look at the Contract, it definitely does that. What Progressives need is a similar contract to unify them. Those on the left are generally more tolerant of diversity, and thus more likely to be sympathetic to divergent points of view. This would seem to make unity difficult. It will be. but if you look at the Republican agenda it needs to be challenged at a very fundamental level. Assumptions need to be challenged, and this needs to be accomplished at the level of language. The common terms repeated throughout the Contract ("responsibility" "restoration" "reinforcement") have their 21st century equivalents for the left and center-left. But what are they?

One of the reasons for calling my blog "catachresis" has to do with the gulf that separates my understanding of the world with the one framed by the neo-conservatives. Theirs is a misuse of language, and one that recalls Orwellian double-speak. Legislating discrimination against lesbian and gay families becomes the "Defense of Marriage Act." Privatizing public space, eliminating the safety net and social services is billed as the new "ownership society" filled with "personal [savings] accounts" and a "small" government. The list is long and painful.

What is the answer to ending the neo-conservative madness? Should the left become better propagandists than the right? One of Lakoff's most sobering statements is that framing isn't really about truth and the real truth is that people believe what they want to believe. Apparently, the truth doesn't set you free. Catachresis is about finding that misuse of language that works to further a progressive agenda.

I believe that irony and cynicism, bless them, are probably not part of a successful progressive agenda. A catachrestic progressive agenda must involve the positive misuse of language. By positive I mean both non-negative (i.e. little room for irony and cynicism) and "scientific" in the Comtean sense. To develop a progressive "science" of language misuse is really the flipside to what the neo-conservatives have already done. I'm not saying I know exactly how to carry out this agenda, but I do think its important.

Intolerance explained...

Ok, since I don't seem to have time to actually write a new blog entry, I'm trolling for content. I wrote this review on Amazon.com and it's actually pretty good. When I last checked, "24 of 29 people found the following review helpful"! I don't know what that means, however.

Ever think about that content you publish on sites like Amazon.com? I'm sure their terms of service state that I've given them all rights to my screed, and thus republishing here is technically illegal. Well, 29 people reading a review on Amazon over a four year period is more volume than I'll be getting here!


Intolerance explained..., May 30, 2002

Reviewer:

Christopher R. DeFay (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews

Many of the reviewers here rightly praise Griffith's well-deserved credit for his technical achievements. Others criticize him for a poorly constructed film. The fact of the matter is that, for 1916, this film is an incredible feat. The first American big-budget extravaganza, it followed closely in the steps of other big multi-reel films in vogue at the time(Griffith's own Birth of a Nation, and others coming out of Italy). The spectacle alone makes this film worth a look, but viewers should try to contextualize it. There was a great expectation across the nation to what would come from Griffith after the amazing--and incendiary racist-film, Birth of a Nation.

What is Intolerance really a metaphor for anyway? Griffith was fighting off attempts by legislators to regulate or censor the motion picture industry. An anti-censorship booklet released by Griffith in 1916 suggests he continued to respond to "moral reformers" even as he assembled Intolerance. In fact, his film is an attempt to address these reformers while simultaneously opining on nothing less than the historic importance of the film media itself.

Intolerance is really about a nation's cultural memory and Griffith's attempt to offer a totalizing, yet entertaining version of it. His belief that if we were educated on the subject of past "sins of hate, hypocrisy and intolerance" through the magic of film that we could inoculate ourselves against war, capital punishment and other evils. He argued that film was a better education than traditional education. To quote the master: "Six moving pictures would give students more knowledge of the world than they have obtained from their entire study." Such an understanding is, of course, naïve and dangerous.

Griffith was caught in a double-bind. In order to fight the censors he needed to simultaneously argue that his epics (like Birth and Intolerance) were a kind of filmed truth, yet the construction of this "truth" should only be the purview of the director. Griffith's logic is dangerously flawed. Birth of a Nation is hardly true history. In fact its racist vision of blacks fanned the flames of racial hatred in whites and surely accounted for many more lynchings than if the film had not been made. What's missing from his vision is how truth is arrived at: certainly not from a lone man's dictates. We have another word for that...

Intolerance is worth viewing because it is a wonderful illustration of the limitations of film. It's a simple morality tale blown up to epic-and phantasmagoric-proportions. It's greatest weakness is the cross-cutting between the four time-periods, and the attempt to narrate all history, yet this is precisely what makes the film interesting. The failure to arrive at an overarching metaphor that somehow spans history and unites us with our past points to Griffith's own flawed vision. It reminds us-contrary to Griffith's own advice-that understanding history in all its irresolvable complexity is absolutely essential.