Zimmerman, Television and Social Media

Note: The following was a presentation to the Cleveland Media Association, Cleveland, TN, on August 2, 2013. I'm grateful to the CMA for the opportunity to speak. Special thanks to Dr. Joel Kailing and Allen Mincey.

Our topic today is, generally speaking, Televised Criminal Trials, but more specifically the State of Florida vs George Zimmerman. With respect to the topic, I’d like to cover three points, though with the disclaimer that these points may not be the droids you were looking for. I want to address first of all the state of television news, especially cable television; then I want to talk about the lingering controversy over TV’s handling of the Zimmerman trial (with passing reference to a few other trials); and I’d like to conclude with comments on the role of social media, which may very well be the emerging Fifth Estate in this country and abroad. And it’s just possible that the Zimmerman trial may be a watershed event for social media influence in the USA.

So. Point #1 is a categorical statement that will set the tone for the rest of what I have to say. Here’s the statement—it’s kinda big: Television news (especially cable TV news--but possibly excluding local TV news) is not really news. What I mean to say is that TV news is Infotainment with a dominant corporate agenda to bring the largest possible audience to paying advertisers. This last distinction will become important here in a minute.

The Medal of Fear

I think Stephen Colbert recently and very aptly demonstrated what TV news has become. In 2010’s Washington, DC "Rally to Restore Sanity And/Or Fear," Colbert awarded several awards and medals. And he awarded a Medal of Fear, not to Anderson Cooper the reporter, but to Anderson Cooper’s tight fitting black t-shirt that he wore while reporting live on various natural disasters. And I think Colbert's tongue-in-cheek recognition pointed out one of the more disturbing trends in 24-hr news coverage, that of reporters who are trying to position themselves as characters in an unfolding human drama, a drama in which they aren’t so much uncovering news as they are trying to tap into gut-wrenching human emotion on the scene.

So for FOX News, MSNBC, CNBC, CNN, HLN: When you put “news” in the title of your broadcast, one generally assumes there will be news. But ounce for ounce there’s about as much real news on those networks as there is Coca in Coca Cola. Anyone try to catch actual news on television during primetime? HLN used to have it, but now they have Nancy Grace. But when you watch any of the others during daytime hours, you'll see they have resorted to a news "digest" at the top of the hour followed by news-related “discussion” that features far more partisan policy makers than experts. Why? Because uninformed people yelling at each other makes for better TV. If you want qualified, boring experts, go to PBS, NPR or better yet, to Stewart and Colbert on the Comedy Channel. But be careful. There may just be a strong correlation between expertise and liberal bias. 

I don’t want to belabor the point. I could parse for you the comparative news content on TV news, and even at the best of times and under the best of circumstances, TV news coverage is very weak in comparison to print and even some radio. (Check this article for more specifics.). But let’s jump to the Zimmerman case.

So, with regard to the Zimmerman trial, was the TV news coverage terrible? Yes, emphatically so. Was it agenda driven? Yes, You betcha! Was that agenda political?  No, it was not.

We need to pop some big myths about TV news and bias. First of all, there no longer is an animal called “the mainstream media,” if it ever existed. It’s time to exorcize that demon from our minds. It may have existed when three networks, plus PBS, and two news services—UPI and AP—dominated the news industry in company with a handful of urban newspapers. In those days, the respectful conservative opposition was also represented by highly educated, gentlemanly wordsmiths, masters of taste and tact like William F. Buckley, William Safire and James J Kilpatrick, men who could string together a pithy sentence without the help of a ghost-writer. There were standards in those days and the bar was high if you wanted to be part of the national dialog. “The glory has departed,” one might say. Advertising had its place, because someone had to pay for the airtime, but news directors and anchors, who made middle-class incomes, worked their tails off to gather news and present it to the masses. That was the era in which there might have been something we could call "mainstream media."

Now, however, news media is highly fragmented in message on one hand but amazingly unified by entirely corporate agendas on the other. So what is the first great goal of any corporation? Profitability. What makes for profitability in the world of televised news? Ratings. And how do you get ratings? You tell a gripping story. How do you tell a gripping story? Why do we like “CSI”? Why do we watch “House”? Why do we TIVO “Downton Abbey” so we can be sure we have a box of tissues handy? What’s so great about “Duck Dynasty” and “Storage Wars”? 

They have tragedy and triumph, colorful personalities and suspense and, above all, they have CONFLICT. The average American feeds on drama, and nothing makes drama more poignant than conflict.

So let's take a look at the Zimmerman trial coverage. A host of conservative bloggers and mavens (who have evolved into desperately unoriginal carbon copies of one another) have eviscerated CNN, HLN and other TV news carriers for depicting the principle characters in starkly contrasting terms. It’s obvious the Obama agenda has got to be at the bottom of all of this! Race should never have been an issue here, it was invented by the media! Mainstream liberal media bias, clear as day, people!

The Skittles

But take another look at it. Did the TV news coverage play the race card? Undeniably, they did. Did they paint a simplistic contrasting picture of an innocent teen who just wanted some Skittles and a brooding vigilante rent-a-cop? Yes, many of them did. Did they leak each little bit of hearsay evidence without much in the way of fact checking? Absolutely. They did all this and intensified the hype with hour upon hour of analysis by people going at each other like sports analysts on ESPN. Was all this sloppy sensationalism about ideology? Not really. People don’t really like ideology. People have pretty advanced crap-meters these days and it's pretty hard to sell ideology to us. But guess what? We are every one of us suckers for drama. Will Casey Anthony cry? Will Jodi Arias show her true colors? Will the jury convict? "If the glove don’t fit, you must acquit!" These networks are all looking for a Holy Grail, but there’s nothing Holy about it: they are all in search of that one viral moment that may propel them into ratings heaven.

Speaking of ratings, they go a long way to explaining what was really going on with this case. We start with Headline News. Headline News has recently become a surrogate Court TV. Second to last in the cable news race, a whisker ahead of CNBC and behind even the Weather Channel, their market analysts have discovered a valuable niche. HLN alone has run all the last big trials (Casey Anthony, Conrad Murray and Jodi Arias) gavel to gavel and in the closing days of those trials, their ratings shot up as much as 100%. So guess what? The closer we got to a verdict in the Zimmerman case, other cable networks ditched their regular programming for the trial as well, lining up color commentators to give us the play by play followed by hours of instant replay analysis. Did their ratings go up? Indeed they did. Mission accomplished.

But wait a minute! Who didn’t run the trial? FOX News. Why didn’t FOX run the trial? For ideological reasons? Nah. FOX didn’t run the trial because FOX didn’t need to run the trial. Get this: Even though CNN claims to be “the most watched cable news network,” every one of FOX’s mainstay programs, from "FOX & Friends" to "Bill O’Reilly," absolutely demolishes all the other cable news offerings combined. That’s right. Anderson Cooper’s black t-shirt runs a distant third behind FOX's and MSNBC’s programming for the same time slot.

So if I’m an executive at one of the non-FOX networks and I have a decent shot at grabbing a bigger chunk of the overall cable audience, you bet I’m going to use what’s available to do just that. Do I privilege aspects of this story that heighten the conflict, that get people emotionally involved enough to stay with my network as the drama unfolds? Do I conveniently neglect to run details that might make the story more mirky and less formulaic? Of course I do. 

This is where I repeat one of my common mantras—in the end all we have to do is follow the money.

But wait, there’s more! In this case, and certainly going forward, the story is a bit more complicated. Something else is going on here that has added a whole new dimension to TV news coverage. And that something is the exploding role of social media.

In the last couple of years, social media have played a part in altering the landscape of human events. Twitter, Facebook and other social media apps have become conduits not merely for social change but also for actual revolution—both peaceful and violent—helping to topple governments and shape the course of national policy decisions.

In the Zimmerman case, social media changed the shape of this story and played unwittingly into the corporate values of TV news. Shortly after the shooting in Sanford took place, the apparently glaring absence of an arrest prompted a social media uprising that led to actual protest marches. These protest marches had a direct impact on the eventual arrest and charging of George Zimmerman.

As media critic Phil Cooke noted, by July 4^th 2013, 200 homicides had occurred in Chicago; 78% of the victims were African American. What did those cases lack? Public outrage. In Florida, social media activism forced the issue and made the Zimmerman trial necessary. And during the trial, social media commentary, much of which had very little basis in fact, fueled the hype surrounding the trial itself. For a 24-hr news network that needs chum to keep the news tank churning from dawn to dawn, the social media craze was like blood in the water. Out of hundreds of possible cases nationwide, one solitary tragedy gets this kind of attention. Why? Because we, the people, decided it should. It’s the ultimate democratization of the news.

Social media have also become a quick way to find out what the audience cares about. Hardly a major story is touted on any TV network today without pausing to consult the social media oracle. Tweets and FB posts now form the basis of entire stories—Remember Manti Te’o (see my earlier blog post)? In the Zimmerman case, both sides of this trial resorted to social media in unprecedented fashion, from creating websites to proliferating tweets and posts, that took their cases directly to the public. One juror was dismissed because of a Facebook post. The Seminole County spokesperson was asked by media to abandon less reliable email updates in favor of Twitter, which she did—and there was much rejoicing. Finally, thousands of tweets about the trial were aggregated, dissected, weighed, measured and assessed by media outlets as a tool for ascertaining the public’s sentiments and thereby coloring the content for the next news broadcast.

One last word about social media in all this: There is a very dark side. A lot of very hateful material has been and is being circulated about this case, and I don’t like to say it, but many otherwise respectable and decent people have tapped into some of the most hateful stuff without stopping to check the reliability of the information. And that’s unfortunate.

Is there a lesson to be learned from all of this? I hope so. Even in an era awash with undisciplined, uninformed and unscrupulous manipulation of information, there are still ways to find the truth, and we owe it to ourselves and to our friends not to allow ourselves to be carried away by all the hype and drama. Ultimately we may be looking at a contemporary form of mob rule, though in this case it would be the electronic mob. I just don’t see how that has a happy ending, do you?

Pacific Rim: Ginormously Fun

[Adapted from my Flixster Review] This film fires beautifully on every one of its diesel and thermo-nuclear powered cylinders. Many of the critics who panned this movie demonstrate unfortunate (albiet understandable) ignorance of the genres that gave rise to this piece. Not all of us grew up on mech anime and the kaiju films of the 60s and 70s. I'm just one of those geeks who loved these movies every bit as much as Guillermo Del Toro did. I remember as a kid going to one of those drive-ins with two screens separated by a berm. You could see the top half of the other screen from the back window of your car. I no longer recall what movie we were actually there to watch that night, but my breath fogged the window at the back of our car as "Destroy All Monsters" played on the other screen. It was years before I got a chance to watch it on TV. Fans like me have been waiting decades for the movie-making technology to catch up with this larger-than-life subject matter. The 1988 remake of "Godzilla" featuring Matthew Broderick and Jean Reno didn't cut it. Nor have the ridiculously cheesy "live action" versions of "Transformers."  But "Pacific Rim" fills the ticket on just about every level. Each aspect of the film: the dialog, the characters, the casting, the story structure, the epic battles and even the acting, tap into the best aspects of genre tradition in sometimes surprisingly innovative ways. "Pacific Rim" could have been as laughable as its predecessors on one hand or a ludicrous send-off of kaiju/mech on the other, but instead the film picks and chooses elements from the "canon" and gives them a very fine new digital polish. Del Toro said he didn't want to do an homage or an updating of the old films--he wanted something that could stand on its own feet. He succeeds in a gigantic way. Word is there's an hour or more of footage on the cutting room floor--expanded Blu-Ray anyone? And a sequel is already in the planning stages. We may be witnessing the birth of a franchise.

A History of the World in Six Glasses: Review

A History of the World in Six Glasses by Tom Standage
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This wonderful book by Tom Standage (who also wrote "An Edible History of Humanity") traces human history via the importance of six types of beverage--beer, wine, distilled spirits, coffee, tea and Coca Cola (there is an addendum about water, never fear).  While one would expect these drinks to figure prominently in the grist of human life, this book reveals that a good part of history was actually driven by drink. Trade practice, farming techniques, wages, commercial value, foreign policy--all these were heavily affected by the demand for these beverages. Standage even claims a strong relationship between rum and the American Revolution! The [true] history of Coca Cola holds some surprises, not all of a fizzy, pleasant nature. As a bonus in the appendix, if you want to take a historical taste tour, Standage tells you how. In the meantime, stay away from bottled water. It's no better for you than tap water if you live in a developed country and it costs a lot more. Definitely a fascinating read.


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The Great Gatsby: Lost in Adaptation

A discussion of Baz Lurhmann as a film-maker would take far more space than a brief review, but in a nutshell he strikes me as the Thomas Kinkade of the Film Arts community. He uses kitsch, glamour, sound and broad, colorful strokes as misdirection to cover story-telling sins and tap into a kind of populist pathos. He is to Hollywood what Benny Hinn is to religion. The Vox Populi, like the applauding audience at the end of Lurhmann's Moulin Rouge, is pleased by the emotional, hard-pumping razzle, even if it is largely incoherent. Perhaps it's that very incoherence, tapping into non-rational parts of the psyche, that people like in a Luhrmann offering, the cinematic version of glossolalia. In the end, Baz' work is always more about Baz' work than it is about the subject of the film. 

The Great Gatsby has a perhaps inflated reputation as THE American story. Like The Godfather, and now "Mad Men," its claim to iconic space is built on an obsession with the genteel decay and corruption in the urban northeastern corner of the country. For many people, especially the people who live there, New York is America. For those of us who grew up on Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy, it ain't. We've got our own class of genteel decay to obsess over, thank you very much. And it doesn't look like yours. Stories like Gatsby masquerade as morality tales, but the focus is not really on the morality, is it? 

Interestingly, H.L. Mencken's review of Gatsby, coming from Chicago, was less than flattering. (Take a moment to read the review. You won't be sorry.) Nevertheless, the forced reading of Gatsby in the nation's high schools, dating from somewhere around the '50s from what I hear, has given the work a privileged place in the minds of the general public that actually grants it a status few other cultural artifacts can claim in a world as digitally fragmented as ours. The consensus, after previous failed film attempts, has been that the literary flavor of Fitzgerald's work, featuring his elegant economical style and his nuanced flare for expression, cannot be translated to film. The challenge for a film-maker is to produce an adaptation that either captures in image what words express or to create a vision so definitive that it competes with and/or replaces the original (Ben Hur, Wizard of Oz, Peter Pan). Baz Luhrmann does not succeed in either category with this version. 

Tobey Maquire looks and feels the part of Nick Carraway, but misfires terribly in the narration, which is fatally over-used by Luhrmann in this film (a basic no-no against which film-makers are frequently warned but to which they are all-too susceptible). Lurhmann's visuals luxuriate in the revels at Gatsby's estate, an almost lovingly celebratory depiction that takes on the style of a rave with the anachronistic music (another Lurhmann trademark) and deliberately off-pace scene cuts. In doing so, he defies the tone of the original Fitzgerald muse, but again, this is nothing new for Lurhmann. Like Tim Burton, he seems convinced that his prevailing artistic sense is best. 

In this version, Elizabeth Debicki's portrayal of Jordan Baker--an already shallow character in the book--becomes almost transparently insubstantial. She stands out literally only because she is so much taller than Nick. The same can be said for Isla Fisher's Myrtle, who gets the most visual attention when suspended over the car in slow-motion. Lurhmann seems more informed than he should be by Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 film script--he wants to make the Gatsby story about star-crossed lovers. So he shoe-horns scenes and dialog and images to give us the flowering romance that Fitzgerald himself failed to give. While DiCaprio and Mulligan are well-cast, their performances, maybe aided by the fantasy-land ambience of the film's art direction, seem as though they are pretending to be pretending. Even so, they hit far many more true notes than Redford and Farrow managed in the 1974 vehicle. Joel Edgerton as Buchanan is a force to be reckoned with in the film, delivering a solid performance that only fails in that it's a poor adaptation from the book. The standout performance is that of Jason Clarke as George Wilson. No actor managed to pour more soul into such a tiny share of a role. 

A factor looming in this spectacle is the art design. Lurhmann's films seem to have moved toward tighter control of this aspect of his work, relying heavily on green screen cgi backgrounds. Used judiciously, these might have worked, but as the movie developed they began to assume the appearance of theatrical backdrops. These and the relentless parade of meticulously manicured set pieces--even the ash was carefully arranged--give the whole a stylized glare.

Nevertheless, the film may do for Gatsby what Lurhmann did for Romeo and Juliet--it will become the school-age movie version that everyone will now watch. It will doubtless make its way into the collective subconscious of the American public for the next decade or more, regardless of its merits and/or flaws. What better way to ensure immortality in the minds and hearts of the masses? But from a critical standpoint, like the afore-mentioned Romeo and Juliet, this film is more about Lurhmann's take than it is about the original. And that, for what it's worth, won't matter.

Iron Man 3: Plot a Course for Tennessee

Expanded from my Flixster post:

"Jarvis, plot a course for Tennessee." Thus says Tony Snark, I mean Stark, at a critical moment of the sleuthing portion of the third Iron Man installment. It points up the principal difficulty with this otherwise entertaining film--its "identity" issue. Action film? Mystery movie? Superhero vehicle? Bromance/Romance flick? MacGyver episode? Christmas Special? Certainly these categories do not have to be mutually exclusive. But cramming them all into one feature is bound to cause some hiccups.

When Aristotle argued in favor of creative unity a mere couple of millennia ago, he was actually on to something. But what did he know? He was stuck with blockbusters from Euripides and Sophocles and never got to see Gone with the Wind.

While I'm on the subject of plot holes (see what I did there?) Wouldn't the vaunted Stark tech have provided better warning of impending attack than the sad variation on "uh, guys, are these red dots moving toward these green dots important?" Wouldn't Jarvis have a counter-measure or two installed given all the hardware Stark Enterprises had thrown at it in The Avengers? Nah. Who needs counter-measures when you have The Suit?

Anyway, in spite of the unevenness of the storyline and the cliché of massive exploding metallic structures serving as a flying trapeze for heros and villains, the movie has enough moments to push it over the "B" and into the B+ to A- range. The villain arc manages to be creative and droll at the same time. It's played fairly well by the curious duo of Guy Pearce and Ben Kingsley with mildly surprising and sometimes comic twists and the expedient of a superfluous female character played by Brit actress Rebecca Hall, who doesn't get to use her British accent (bummer). But there is something unsatisfying about the villains, as if their relegation in the film to less-than-critical status early on sort of lets the air out a bit. The stakes seem to have been deliberately reduced. Too bad Hans Gruber, Roy Batty and Mr. Smith were busy being dead. And too bad much of the supporting cast like Favreau's Happy and Cheadle's Rhodes seem more like props and convenient plot devices than actual characters.

But the truly surprising golden heart of the movie involves the scenes between Stark and a random tech-savvy Tennessee kid (played by not-so-Tennesseean veteran Ty Simpkins). The improbable interplay actually works because the actors make it work. Forget that southeast Tennesseeans are unhappy about the depiction of their wifi access. And forget that snow doesn't generally stay on the ground in SE Tennessee. And forget that the Miss Chattanooga pageant is in May. This is a movie, people. Who cares about details? What they do get right is the chemistry between Stark and the kid.

After that, settle in for lots of playful screen-time with Stark out of his suit, some nice throw-away humor where the audience gets to spew some popcorn, and a finale worthy of a New York City Christmas fireworks display. That leads to my last gripe--the Christmas plot positioning was just kind of...lame. The film-maker meant well, but the effort was wasted. Be that as it may, Iron Man 3 is still a lot of fun. And the after-the-credits bonus is nice, too.

Les Miserables - The Book

Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Having seen two film versions, the stage musical and the film based on the musical, I didn't exactly know what to expect from the book. But in this instance, perhaps more than many others, comparisons are pointless. The stage production took on a life of its own long ago and is an incomparable work of art that stands alone. It can be said to be based on another work of art--the book--but comparing the two is an exercise in futility.

The 1400+page book is unlike any other nineteenth century opus one is likely to encounter. It combines several normally disparate elements--the stemwinding plot of Dickens, the narrative scope of Tolstoy, the moral/ethical tone of Dostoevsky, the melodrama of Dumas and the politics of Carlyle, with bonus material in theology, rhetorical and cultural criticism. In other words, it's Victor Hugo, who completed the novel while in exile on Guernsey Island (yes, of the cows).

If you are looking for a rip-snorting adventure that teeters precariously along the protagonist-antagonist axis of Valjean and Javert, much like film and stage have done, then save yourself the time and don't crack this massive volume. Or find a cheap cheat of an abridged version with which to be entertained. If you are willing to brace yourself for a long, heavy trudge through--and under--the streets of Paris and 19th century France, rich with the aroma of layer upon layer of historical, political and social context, if you are willing to take on a social burden presented like the cross of Christ, if you can stomach sermons, lectures and illuminations about everything from the sublime to the mundane during lengthy pauses from the "story," then you are ready to absorb "Les Miserables." I say "absorb" because this is not a book you can read. It's a book that happens to you.

The one forgivable vice of the work is its penchant for romantic melodrama--that sickly sweet staple of so much 19th century prose--forgivable because it's a vice to which so many of Hugo's peers were also inclined. Work your way around it gingerly and you'll be fine.

I had heard of the famous account of the Battle of Waterloo by Hugo, but didn't realize it was in this book (right now you're thinking "what does the Battle of Waterloo have to do with anything?" Turns out, not much, but that's just one of the cereal box prizes contained in this novel). For Napoleonic era aficionados like me, it was a rare treat to encounter it finally. This remarkable addition, along with so many other fascinating asides in this novel, serves to break all the rules of good story telling. Tolstoy would give us Borodino in "War and Peace" but he had a couple of central characters present during the action. Not so, Hugo. The battle does connect to the story, but almost at the level of the so-called Butterfly Effect. One gets a lot of this sort of contingency development in this book, which makes it either a bad narrative or ahead of its time, pre-figuring post-modern tales influenced by the era of Quantum science.

Be that as it may, for the disciplined mind, the book will do two things: it will enrich one's life and it will shine a light on a segment of life and humanity that even today we would rather ignore.




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Oblivion: It's just that memorable

Expanded from my post on Flixster:

Oblivion is a visually gorgeous film with a terrific soundtrack by Anthony Gonzalez and Joseph Trapanese. Another great feature of the film is the CGI blending with "real" cinematography. This is seamless, rendering the futuristic desert-Earth über-realistic. Too bad the story itself is DOA, somewhat of a developing habit for Joseph Kosinski, who also has the visually stunning but weak story from Tron: Legacy to his credit. The narrative has the feel of too little butter spread over too much bread. The initial elements of the story develop at an almost Space: 2001 pace--deliberate, unhurried but also relatively non-explanatory. Apparently the director wanted to treat the viewer to an immersive experience prior to developing what is then a very rapid-paced story--so rapid that it leaves us scratching our heads. The subsequent action sequences have a forced, video-game quality with some almost laughable improbabilities. At one point one is forced to recall Matrix: Revolution. In the acting category, Tom Cruise doesn't actually disappoint. He renders no surprises and pretty much delivers the character we have come to expect over dozens of outings. The female characters, played by Andrea Riseborough (for British accent flavoring) and Bond-girl Olga Kurylenko are both also-rans unadorned with any troublesome complexities. The flashback scenes that explain all the relationships come too late for any genuine emotional engagement. The central plot device [spoiler alert!] involving the recall of a vessel that's been drifting in space for decades is left ludicrously unexplained. Many of these errors would have taken little to fix, but alas, the audience is left to its own devices for much of the movie. By far the film's greatest disappointment is the general neglect of heavyweight Morgan Freeman, who gets little more than a courtesy cameo in cool goggles and largely superflous black cape. Two and a half stars with all the star power going to the sound and visuals.

Review of Phantastes by George MacDonald

Phantastes by George MacDonald
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I had attempted to read this book once or twice as a teenager, but for some reason it didn't capture my imagination at the time. I laid it aside and thought to pick it up from time to time, but never got around to it. Now, having read it, I'm disappointed that I let it go for so long. It's a late Romantic Era masterpiece. The narrative, like that of Lilith, is a story in dream state. If you're looking for a traditional three-act structure, go elsewhere. This work is more lyric than story, more song than tale. The imagery evoked by MacDonald is some of the richest in literature and the episodic scenes are achingly powerful. One can easily see the thread of influence on CS Lewis, who claimed that this book "baptized" his imagination. But the work stands alone, separate from the scores of people who lay claim to the power of its resonance in their thinking. It strikes a truly original chord.


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Networked Personas, Catfish and Other Illusions

Manti Teo - (Photo by Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images)

"Your Catfish Friend" by Richard Brautigan

If I were to live my life

in catfish forms in scaffolds of skin and whiskers
at the bottom of a pond
and you were to come by
one evening when the moon was shining
down into my dark home
and stand there at the edge
of my affection and think, "It's beautiful
here by this pond. I wish
somebody loved me," I'd love you and be your catfish
friend and drive such lonely
thoughts from your mind
and suddenly you would be at peace, and ask yourself, "I wonder
if there are any catfish
in this pond? It seems like
a perfect place for them."

As Congreve said, “Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.” No rage is more pure than the rage of one who has been taken in and knows it. And when the woman scorned is a major media outlet, woe be unto the object of the fury.

The saga of Manti Teo, erstwhile Heisman contender from the University of Notre Dame, is not merely instructive. It fairly screams for sermonic adaptation. Here be dreams within dreams within dreams. We only thought Inception was fiction. Turns out it’s as true as true can be—or as true as anyone can weave a web of comfortably lovely untruths.

And to celebrate the achievement, we get to bandy a newly adapted word—from that most respectable of all bottom feeders, the catfish. The catfish is the new Eve of the Fallen Eden, the new Pandora of the celebrated Box, the new Jezebel to be thrown down from the window and torn apart by the dogs of public discourse.

The “new” term, which has evolved into the rarified advanced word-form of noun/verb, owes its origin to Nev and Ariel Shulman and their friend Henry Joost who created what is probably a faux-documentary, Catfish (2010), based on Nev’s “personal” experience. He “met” a person online and discovered over time that the person was faking parts of her networked identity. He decided to follow up anyway and plunge through the maze of conflicting messages to get to the bottom of who this person really was, though--given the nature of the film--all that is in doubt. Critics allege the film is too neatly packaged to be showing actual events. As a work, it may fall into the same genre as Exit Through the Gift Shop, another piece that mingles truth with dark irony to pack a message alongside an artistic prank (not quite as onerous as a hoax). Schulman has parlayed his work into an ongoing MTV series with the same name as his film that explores other incidents of “catfishing,” or being duped by a false online persona.

Another layer of irony is that the story about catfish and cod as told in the “documentary” is specious at best. As a boy living in the wetlands of southeast Virginia, I pulled my share of non-predatory catfish from muddy freshwater creeks. In a funny twist, the story may actually derive from a book of sermon illustrations. Regardless of the source, anyone who knows fish or fishing can tell you the story smells, well, you know. And this detail lends yet another touch of farcical comedy to the development of what is about to be a very common verb.

All recriminations aside, call this catfish Lenny Kekua in a fish story that grows more bizarre with the telling. If you don’t know the Manti Teo story, feel free to read it here.” Turns out the Lenny Kekua who died never actually lived, at least not in the flesh. Several major media outlets, including ESPN, were duped by the story that the star athlete was spending all his spare time on the phone with his dying love Lenny, all conveniently during the lead up to Heisman voting. It was a made-for-television drama that got made for television several times over by those who followed MT with great interest. MT apparently learned at some point that Lenny didn’t actually exist, that she was the creation of someone’s twisted imagination, that she was a special online plant who blossomed, lived a very short life and died a beautifully tragic death, all of which just happened to enhance and embellish the true-life story of the star athlete. Only it was all a lie. What we don’t know, and what is still unraveling, is how much and exactly when MT knew what we all know now.

Lars and the Real Girl

The story is a strange confluence of S1m0ne (’02) and Lars and the Real Girl (’07)—the one movie about a digitally manufactured actress pushed on the general public, the other about a desperately lonely man who is unaware that his girlfriend is a life-size doll.

Manti Teo, if he was truly duped (which many doubt) might be granted some slack here. Apparently the phenomenon of being “catfished” by a manufactured online persona isn’t that unusual. And it’s not as if the lines of personal identity haven’t already become blurred by technology anyway.

Who among us doesn’t want to be viewed in a positive light? We are all of us festooned with managed imagery every day, costuming ourselves for each role we play. Even the “genuine” among us who say they are declining to present a facade are, by their self-selection, presenting a carefully crafted image using loudly muted tones.

But the online Presence in which we are all granted an Avatar to stand in for our already altered selves takes the notion of image management to a whole new level. The gamey face I see in the mirror upon waking may be beautiful in the sight of God but is clearly unfit for Facebook. In fact, I can carefully control those bits and angles of me that people see. I can make of myself a sort of digital commodity and the people who constitute the audience for all of my socially networked connections (including  Twitter and Tumblr and Instagram and Pinterest and all the burgeoning legion of networking choices) create for me the illusion of a platform upon which I am perpetually posited. The imaginary crowd that “follows” me shares its love with comments, likes and favorites. If I am the rhetorical sort, I can scatter the seedlings of my thoughts upon the masses. If I am the emotionally needy sort, I can phish in any number of assorted ways for a cyberhug from my hundreds of besties. If I want to convert my audience of "friends" into a starter market for my wares, I need only self-advertise and create “pages” to be “liked” or "pinned" or whatever vapid new cyber-verb we introduce. It’s all about empowerment, right? And it has nothing at all to do with the marketing schemes of the people who were so obliging as to provide us with such platforms out of the sheer kindness of their hearts.

Are we all just a little catfishy? Are we all Lenny Kekua?

I don’t think so. At the risk of throwing the first stone, the ethical landscape has not really altered with the rise of all these new windows through which we can see and be seen. What has altered is the scope of opportunity, the target rich environment and the ridiculous ease with which one can deceive and be deceived. A lie by any other name is still a lie. And, as the high drama of the last couple of weeks has indicated, the fallout for a lie can be as radioactive as ever.

The moral, of course, is to have a care. Online environments are becoming increasingly accepting and even encouraging to catfish, many of whom believe they are just having a bit of fun. Anonymous pranskerism can be a heady rush for pimply geeks in their pajamas. But if we aren’t careful, this emerging brand of psychological vandalism may be the next common counseling concern as the victims line up for help.

Just a Spoonful of Torture: Zero Dark Thirty

One astonished recent reviewer for Les Miserables took care to warn people that the movie’s lines are all sung. “If you don’t know that going in, you might be surprised.”

I had a similar feeling for the movie Zero Dark Thirty. If you thought, as I did from the trailers, that this is the true-life Delta Force we’ve all been waiting for, only this time without Chuck Norris, then prepare to be very surprised.

Naturally I didn’t really think the film would be all about Seal Team Six. The actual raid on the Bin Laden compound is shot in real time for added authenticity, so there you go. What one might not expect is that the film delivers the decade-long “Hunt for Bin Laden” economically packed into the first two hours (and change). I don’t offer this as a problem, only as an observation.

Even as it receives accolades and major award nominations, Zero Dark Thirty is embroiled in controversy. Questions regarding depictions of torture, the film’s intent (is it propaganda?) and the unusual level of access to CIA and government figures by the scriptwriter have produced a veritable seething publicity pot for the release. Not surprisingly, Al Jazeera’s reviewers give the film credit for its own level of “collateral damage.”

Boal & Bigelow

The filmmakers are arguing fiercely for the fact-based objectivity of the film, trying to spin it as a neutral depiction of a true story with no political or otherwise hidden agenda. The problem, of course, is that artistic neutrality is a specious argument at best and a bald-faced lie at worst. Even documentaries are rhetorical; the very choice of subject matter is meant to draw our attention and enhance our awareness. The effect is always a subtle—or not so subtle—influence on consciousness that inevitably shades opinion and may possibly shape actual choices. While there is no hypodermic needle—stick the movie into your bloodstream and behave like an automaton—there is always some sort of positive or negative effect and a structure of new information upon which other information acts and reacts. There also may not be overt intentionality on the part of the filmmaker, but the framing of the story with its coded sympathies tends to privilege the reception and provides, if nothing else, a latticework of values under the surface.

Be that as it may, no great detective work is required to grasp the loyalties of this film. It begins with a powerful moment that I won’t spoil for anyone here. But the elements are clearly intended to re-kindle the cold furnace in the hearts and minds of citizens for whom 9/11 may have receded into distant memory. This is an undisguised and intentional setup to which the succeeding story elements cling with narrative fidelity.

Many critics have made much of the "misleading" faux-journalistic patina on the film, but anyone actually offended by such “truth” claims in a movie can only be marked down as naive. Don’t we all know by now that directors mesmerize themselves with the “truth” of their own art and care very little about everyone else’s misguided fetish for accuracy and fact? “Based on actual events” means just as much as “based on an idea by Fulano DeTal.” In other words, “Something did happen somewhere, but by the time I, the filmmaker, am finished with it, it’s going be a lot more compelling and interesting. You should be thanking me instead of condemning me.”

Along those lines, director Kathryn Bigelow and scriptwriter Mark Boal tap into some of the same strong narrative stuff that made The Hurt Locker so effective. They serve up a menu of sharply flavored fare, giving us tension, conflict and visceral action in carefully measured increments. I’m fully convinced that Bigelow and Boal are genuinely shocked by assertions that they are elevating torture as a viable means of information gathering. I really doubt they thought beyond the necessity of telling what a gritty and gut wrenching story. Torture for them was a means to a narrative end.

Jason Clarke as "Dan"

And that irony points up one of the central enigmas of this film. Jason Clarke as “Dan” delivers the same lines we are used to hearing from maniacal, leather-strapped villains as he goes about “breaking” detainees. Only he’s one of the good guys and he makes his threats without grinning through metal teeth. Later we see him clean-cut with white shirt and tie, the paragon of civilization itself, and somehow the paradox is washed away by the objective of killing Bin Laden. As an audience, we’ve been pushed toward justice mode, we believe the detainee is implicated somehow (he wouldn’t be a detainee if he wasn’t implicated, right?) that he and all the other conspirators deserve this treatment or worse. We want to think that the torture is justified. The payoff, that Bin Laden is bagged in the end, is the justification we require. It’s simple narrative arithmetic and therefore effective.

What most of the critics may not realize, or simply refuse to realize, is that a great many Americans who watch this film are going to have absolutely no problem with that arithmetic. None whatsoever. And it’s just as possible that Bigelow and Boal were counting on that. But who knows? Ultimately what this movie says, whether the makers intended it or not, is that you better not mess with the USofA because we have the wherewithal to get our revenge and we will persevere to the last full measure of our vengeance no matter how long it takes or how much frag damage we receive and/or inflict to get it done. So don’t start it.

The question is whether or not that clear message reduces the film to the level of propaganda. Bigelow and Boal are horrified by the thought, according to their interviews and the growing statements in their own defense. In fact, they feel very put upon by the accusation. They point their fingers (futilely) at a spirit of censorship and bluster that their artistic integrity is being called into question. I’m actually hoping they don’t win any Oscars because I cringe at the thought of the martyrdom they may feel obligated to pedal after all this.

So while this review is more about the controversy than the film, I should mention that it’s a good movie. Mark Boal is a good storyteller and Kathryn Bigelow is an innovative director. The impressive lineup of Brits and Aussies playing Americans lends gravitas even to the bit parts. (I’m always amazed and inspired by the work ethic of Commonwealth B-stars who labor so hard at little roles). Jennifer Ehle, Mark Strong, Jason Clarke and Joel Edgerton sketch their roles with strong outlines that lend credible definition to their characters.

Jessica Chastain as "Maya"

Jessica Chastain as the centerpiece of the film, Agent Maya, definitely delivers as the kid who came out of high school to hunt down the biggest bad guy in recent history. Thankfully the film does not resort to some sort of maudlin flashback to clue us in to the inspiration for the character's intense motivation. This leaves her to be Everyman and Everywoman Who Cares. And that may be a genuine description of the actual person upon whom her character is based. As a person with whom the audience is meant to identify, the choice clearly works.

Both the storyline and the “on-the-ground” filming afford us an efficient linearity that takes us from the Twin Towers to the compound in Pakistan where the 18 minutes of real-time raid provide a satisfying climax. At times the un-filmic verisimilitude felt a little like 1977’s Raid on Entebbe, a TV movie depicting the true-life story of Israeli commandos rescuing an airplane load of hostages in Angola. Only this time there was a singularly lethal purpose to the action. The tight dimensions of the story limit our view to a series of terrorist actions and undercover counter-terrorist operations, almost as though we are witnessing a deadly chess match where crucially important pieces are traded for advantage. The wider wars in the region are almost completely blocked from view, conveniently helping us to avoid any additional annoying ethical dilemmas.

One critic referred to ZDT as “the best movie you won’t have any fun watching.” It’s true that one does not leave the theatre with any sense of “Huzzah, America!” At the same time, the “enemy” is sufficiently dehumanized in this film and even the Pakistanis are so completely marginalized (referred to almost dismissively as “Paks”) that any sense of internal debate is quickly quelled. In the end, we get UBL, and that’s what matters. In the end, it’s all about catharsis for an America that is no longer the victim but the great Righter of Wrongs.