The Persistence of Gangster (and other “Depression Era”) Narratives October 22, 2009

“Times is hard, sehr. Times is haaaaaaarrrd…” Sorry, after this reading, I couldn’t resist slipping a little musical number in there.

I’m a little ashamed to admit I’ve never actually seen The Gold Diggers of 1933. We were more of a The Public Enemy and Baby Face household and that probably says it all. “People functioning in a dysfunctional society… living through the after effects of a catastrophe.” I love a good song and dance, but does anybody really wonder why the gangster films outlived the dance extravaganzas? The influence of the Busby Berkely musicals is more prevalent in modern dance and stage productions than in how today’s directors shoot musicals. Apart from Baz Luhrman, very few people do.

Dickstein was wrong to say that audiences during the Depression were not seeking escapism in the darkness of the movie theater (they were spending fifteen cents to watch Ginger Rogers dance at a time when the same amount of money could buy you lunch), just as I would be wrong to say that people today don’t seek escapist diversions in video games and multi-player online games, for that is at least part of their purpose. I do think he was right when he said that the Depression kick-started a fascination in film narratives that are parables of success and failure.

The two films I think of when I think of the 1930s are The Public Enemy and A Star Is Born: both stories of people from modest backgrounds who climb the ladder of success and end up either miserable or dead. Both films directed by William Wellman. Both films were huge hits, set box office records, and were remade not once but twice in the succeeding decades. But it was The Public Enemy that made a huge star out of its lead actor, James Cagney, while the leads of the big movie musical faded into obscurity. In the age of the Great Recession (let’s be honest, any age), it’s easier and more entertaining to identify with the narrative of a Tom Powers or a Scarface: the protagonist starts out with nothing, hustles, swindles and does what he has to to survive, reaches the pinnacle of success and then steps off a cliff of his own making.

It’s an odd mix of schadenfreude, moral ambiguity and the cyclical financial boons and fallout from catastrophe capitalism that makes these narratives enjoyable in film and other contexts (Grand Theft Auto, anyone?). I’m surprised Dickstein didn’t elaborate on that point more than he did.

Only Child Does Not Need a “Big Brother” October 22, 2009

If I can be serious for a minute…

Honestly, I’m right there with Joseph Turow.  I listened to the On the Media podcast that featured him, and read the transcript right along with the audio and thought to myself, “This guy is hitting it right on the head.”  But where he is OK with behavioral targeting to an extent, so long as there’s some sort of disclosure and checks-and-balances against the companies who use marketing advertisers in this way, I’m actually kind of annoyed with the whole ordeal, regardless of who knows what and how they know it and if they can or cannot stop it.

Case in point:

Currently, while I am sitting on my laptop typing this with a killer migrane that won’t go away and little sleep going on two nights now (work + migrane), my AVG Anti-Virus program is running its daily system scan in the background.  It does the same thing every day at the same time.  And every day, at some point after the scan’s completion, I’ll go in and delete the “warnings” that the system scan has picked up on my computer.

These warnings aren’t viruses that have infected my system.  There’s nothing there that’s going to indicate a Blue Screen of DOOM~! in my future (I just knocked on wood that this, in fact, won’t happen.)  They’re tracking cookies from the websites I visit throughout the course of a day.  Yesterday, AVG picked up twenty-five warnings…and I was barely even on the computer!  I can count on a hand and a half the number of websites I had time to check before needing to run out the door.  And to make matters worse, AVG doesn’t pick up *everything.*  Neither does Webroot’s SpySweeper (which also runs in the background and isn’t free like my version of AVG.)  So, if I run AdAware or SpyBot Search and Destroy on top of the daily AVG scan, and on top of SpySweeper, they’re going to pick up evey MORE tracking cookies and other junk from my Browser Travels.

I don’t pretend to know a whole hell of a lot about computers, because I honestly don’t (this is why I have computer geeks as friends), but doesn’t this seem entirely ridiculous?

I’m not going to deny a person from making an “honest” living.  Let’s face it, this behavior is legal.  Spamming my Facebook page with Art Institute of Illinois ads, and ads featuring a “scary” Jack O’Lantern asking if I’m haunted by my credit score (it’s quite excellent, thanks), and ads saying that there are single dads on Match.com looking for me (laughable, I’m totally NOT a kid person outside of my own family) is perfectly kosher.  I’m just tired of seeing it all shoved in my face, and I can’t do a damn thing about it.

Hard Times? October 22, 2009

As I sit here watching the climactic final scene of “The Third Man” (o! wonderful coincidence, but just left of the Depression), I’m puzzling over the finality with which Gladstone and Dickstein determined that current pop culture couldn’t recreate the movie and radio culture of the 1930s. I have to agree with them that the fractioning of our communication has made such a thing impossible. The choices are simply too many, and the forms of entertainment too fleeting. Any given weekend releases at least a handful of new movies, and appealing to the common man is lost. Entertainment appeals to a target market.

We may have lost the art of subtly and well-written movie scripts, but I disagree that the economy is being ignored by popular entertainment. Let’s take last week’s episode of 30 Rock, arguably one of the most popular TV shows on air now. It speaks directly about the economy, conceiving a conflict in which the rich, powerful Jack Donaghy is confronted about his greed by the page Kenneth. The story is obviously more complex, but also the opposite of 30s subtle. “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” has a similar episode, in which the characters’ greed serves as an allegory of the bail outs and the sick repercussions. A marked difference in these examples from films of the Depression era is their directness and their fairly gloomy outlook on the situation. Those who should be punished are not, and the common man has to get by. it’s still a matter of “grin and bear it” but less hopeful.

However, it’s been pointed out in this class that people spend an incredible amount of time on the internet, so TV is not enough. I do agree with Dickstein that volume of information on the web, the unbelievable volume, really does destroy the notion of a community. I don’t believe that it destroys the necessity for art and music and movies and other forms of creative mass communication to address social issues. However, browsing the list of movies at the cineplex, I can already see that this is no priority in the (struggling) business of Hollywood, cranking out easy crowd pleasers in time for Halloween.  I also know that I won’t be able to see any of these movies at $10 a pop.

Off Target Is Me October 21, 2009

I am such a contrarian that I laughed when I thought about how the advertisements on the web might be geared to me. No way thought I! I avoid ads. On television, I immediately change the channel when an ad comes on or I read a book or magazine through the commercial or I turn to the computer to read my e-mail or do some research. If a pop-up shows up, I x it out of existence. The ads on home pages, face book, etc are all ignored and I go on my merry way. I am on a budget and am not allowed to purchase much of anything these days – so no sale.

If I do notice an ad, I do not remember it the next day. something good about a poor memory – the only thing good about it I must admit.

I hardly ever watch news shows or current events shows like 60 minutes. I never know what subjects they are going to address and do not care. Therefore, I am one of the people they could not target to. Well they could target me – but i will never know it. How will they know what people want to watch on television? By tracking searches on Google? Sports has been doing this for awhile by assuming that you want to watch whatever team is in the region you live in. This also pushes my buttons as I like certain teams across the nation and want to watch them, not what the broadcast companies want me to watch.

Grocery stores are now issuing coupons at the cash register based on what you purchase. The thinking being if you bought something you must like it and want more of it. This make sense to me. While checking something out on the internet does not necessarily make it something of real interest to me. In order to determine my interest level, I think it would need several visits to the same site to indicate real interest. Otherwise they are wasting there advertising dollars. I am just so contrary, that if I were to see ads based on my searches (unless it is books) I would run in the other direction and never buy the product. This is not the way to real me in.

Now I realize that this post is not academic at all but rather my rant about advertisers trying to target my hard earned pennies. But I find that others trying to catalog people just pushes by buttons and I can not look at this topic all that seriously.

Glamour and Glitz vs. Gutz and Grit October 21, 2009

In promotion of Dancing in the Dark Brooke Gladstone  and Morris Dickstein discuss the importance of cinema as a cultural reference to the Depression era (“Hard Times,” On the Media).  To the causal viewer,  films of the era may be dismissed as “cultural artifacts,” but are really speaking to the reasons why there may have been a demand for escapist films.  One does not have to read very hard into Bugsby Berley’s Golddiggers of 1933 to see the allure of Hollywood that New York showgirls might have felt or to see political parallels between FDR and the Wizard of Oz (Okay, i never saw that one before but now it seems so obvious!)  Their discussion also mentions the juxtaposition of highly budgeted show-stoppers by grittier films, especially those that fall in the gangster genre.  While these connection are far from revolutionary, it is an important to know that example cinema is a reflection modern societies and cultures of the times in which a film is made.

As I was walking home today, I was listening to the Filmspotting podcast from April 3, 2009 (you can play the podcast from their blog.  Adam and Matty’s discussion of neo-neorealism is the first 20min of the podcast).  The hosts were discussing Ramin Bahrani’s movie called Goodbye Solo.  The hosts were commenting on the movie because it was mentioned in an article in The New York Times magazine about “Neo-Neorealism.”  The Filmspotting podcast and the articles that sparked their discussion all mentioned the “escapist” films of the 1930′s.

I’m not an expert on Italian neorealist filmmakers so I will default to wikipedia:

Italian neorealism is a style of film characterized by stories set amongst the poor and working class, filmed on location, frequently using nonprofessional actors. Italian neorealist films mostly contend with the difficult economical and moral conditions of post-World War II Italy, reflecting the changes in the Italian psyche and the conditions of everyday life: poverty and desperation.

Scott says neo-neo realism is a school of American filmmakers that are using similar aesthetics and are continuing the trend of a gritty story that often does not end on the brightside.  Often, the characters in the neo-neorealism films are down on their luck and are scrapping together their pennies to be able to seek out better life.  Scott’s article generated a retort from the movies editor at the New Yorker “About ‘Neo-Neorealism.’”  Richard Brody said that Scott was a little too ga-ga over these “abstemious” film that are purposely gritty but in doing so are often cutting “off a wide range of aesthetic possibilities and experiences on ostensible grounds of virtue.”

Scott mentions that it is obvious that cinema reflects cultural attitudes but sometimes the more “socialminded” films get undermined by escapist films.  He mentions huge blockbusters of early 2009 and says that people are diverted but essentially misled from their troubles by happy endings and the glamour of Hollywood just as they were in the Depression Era.  His solution is to “counter the tyranny of fantasy” by taking more stock in the social commentary embedded in neo-neorealism films.  Brody counters this point by saying Scott is remiss not to mention the gangster films in comparison to the highly budgeted “escapist” films of the ’30s.  Even though films like Golddiggers were more likely to appeal to the population looking for escape,  it is no less a cultural reference of the gritty realism portrayed in gangster films like The Public Enemy.

Dickstien and Gladston finish their discussion by talking about media artifacts that extend beyond the cinema.  They mention T.V. shows and novels (I think it is safe to say that new media artifacts as well) are always going to be cultural artifacts -  and probably more so in retrospect – no matter how epic or populist they may appear to be in the moment.

For Every Action, Consequences May Vary October 21, 2009

The Game Theory article, which was a fun read, may not be exactly be as sound as the gamers imagined because of the lack consequences to real people. In the example given with the epidemic, the players “gleefully” infected one another because there was no true suffering caused by this contagion. There is no pain, no sadness, and if a character dies, he can be reanimated like “Kenny” in “South Park” like nothing happened. Because of the lack of emotional connectionwith the characters in the games, who have no fear of loss, the game cannot truly estimate what humans would do, which is why the idea of trying social experiments in the game, such as testing the bail out on the characters.

Perhaps a bailout isn’t a real test of the social experimentation possibilities. What if there was some way the could do the Milgram experiment using Everquest characters. Only when there is a tactile experience to a social experiment, such as with the Milgram experiment and subsequently, the Lucifer Effect, by Philip Zimbardo, demonstrating how good people turn evil. Only then can an EverQuest social experiment be worth its salt to social scientists studying human behavior.

Somewhat Tailored Ads October 21, 2009

It can be scary to think that almost everything you do online can be tracked without your knowledge. I suspect most people realize that their activity is being tracked to a certain degree or that some sort of interconnectedness exists on the Internet. However, I’m not sure many people realize that advertisers are drawing vivid pictures of what we are like, based on what we do online.

Marketers who specialize in behavioral advertising track where you go and what you do on the Web, and this is how they gain the information they use to paint a picture of you. They then use this information to tailor the ads you see online to ones they think you’ll be interested in. Joseph Turow points out in his discussion on NPR that people are concerned about whether or not the pictures that the advertisers are drawing of them are ones they would agree with. But does it really matter if they agree with the pictures or not? If marketers can get a fraction of the image correct, I think all Internet users will be happier.

If the only advertisements you saw online were ones you were interested in, you’re time online would be marginally more enjoyable. You wouldn’t have to spend your time closing ads for things you aren’t interested. In a perfect world, every ad would offer something of some degree of interest to you. But let’s be realistic. If the ads were solely based on your online activity, there’s no doubt that many of them would not apply to your personal interests. Think about all of the sites you visit and the items you click on that you’re really not interested in. Just because you visited a site or clicked on a product doesn’t mean it truly interests you. Therefore, it seems unlikely that Internet users will ever fully agree with the pictures that the marketers paint of them.

But agreeing on the picture isn’t what’s important here. Marketers can’t be right all of the time. They don’t have to be—they just need to be right some of the time. Marketers will certainly be able to determine some of the stuff we like based on our activity, and they can use that information to market new, similar things to us. If they can eliminate a percentage of the annoying ads, our time online might be less annoying.

Turrow points out that people are more worried about what’s being collected about them online than offline, even though more data is collected offline. This is an interesting point. It seems that most people who fear the Internet fear it because of the “unknowns” that surround it. I think this fear of the unknown or the misunderstood is something the plagues the world of Web 2.0. People are afraid of everything Web 2.0 has to offer until they try it for themselves.

Hope in Hard Times October 21, 2009

Looking at the cultural themes of the depression era does draw parallel to today’s cultural themes.  The NPR clip commented that films during the depression, while they were a form of escape for people, they were far from lonely, desperate, or sorrowful in nature.  They were about hope, togetherness, and boosting morale.

The same forward-looking themes play out in our culture as we experience similar hard times.  Themes of refocusing on what is important, moving away from materialism, living a green and healthy lifestyle, among others, are more prevalent these days.  We experience these messages in different forms then in the time of the depression, but they are nonetheless present.

In the NPR clip, they discussed how ‘going to the movie’ was what people did, together, because that is all there was to do.  Morris Dicktsein does not think that culture can unify us as it did during the time of the depression because, “it is fragmenting in too many different directions.”  I do agree that culture has shifted as we are infiltrated with much more information then in earlier times.  But we cannot choose the way in which information comes to us; we can choose how we define our attitudes and values amidst the new structures for information sharing that form around us

It is no longer up to the traditional media companies to push out the ideas, messages, and thoughts that make up our conversations.  New tools allow anybody to communicate to masses of people.  This is evident in the new communities created on sites like YouTube, in the new ideas being expressed on blogs, and new relationships forming from networking technologies. We need to make sure that these themes of hope and togetherness continue to be at the center as we move through these hard times.  As they said in the clip, “separately we fail, but together we may actually be able face the music.”

Escaping Your Problems October 21, 2009

While I find Morris Dickstein’s argument to be interesting, I cannot help but waiver in my agreement.  He goes against the predominant thought that movies flourished during the Great Depression because everyday Americans were seeking an escape from their monetary problems.  He says that instead these movies were based on problems and not an escape at all.

And here is my main…perhaps only…disagreement: of course the movies had problems.  If a film, story, blog (like how I slipped that in there?) didn’t have some sort of conflict, it’d be a precursor to Jackass and, really, how many versions of that do we need?  (Although I can’t lie that this will always crack me up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWk57tFyNx8&feature=related – I think I’m secretly a 12-year-old boy.)  Even if someone chooses to go to something on the plausible end of the reality spectrum or something more likely to make you to cry from sadness than laughter, a movie goer is escaping.

Going to a film or a theater performance or, hell, karaoke night is escaping from the real world outside.  Taking two hours to absorb yourself in darkness, pretend that calories don’t count, and watch the world move without your influence is relaxing and powerful.  Take my Sunday afternoon, for example.  It’s been a tough few months and my cousin and I decided to hit up a movie.  While going through the listings, we could have picked Couples Retreat or Toy Story, movies that require little brain power and literal escapism.  Instead, perhaps because we’re masochistic or maybe a little shallow, we saw The September Issue.  Anna Wintour and Andre Leon Talley in all their Vogue glory.  It was excessive and unaffordable and wholly unrealistic (darn my genetic luck in not being born to parents who know people) and fabulous.  Before the movie even started, my cousin turned to me and said, “We should do this more often.  It’s nice to just come to the movies and chill out.”

Because that’s what the movies are for.  No matter the subject or genre.  They take you away from everything and just let you move along.

But then Dickstein says that in our current depression (is that a politically correct or accurate term?) we won’t be coming together as a nation like our grandparents did many moons ago.  And he’s right.  Technology is too great and the world has become too small for us all to be awestruck at once anymore.  If King Kong came out today (kind of like it did just a few years ago) no one would be as excited as they were the first time.  Something amaaaaaahzing would have to happen for the world to come together.  Something amazing, or, something tragic.  I’d rather be split apart – it’s not as sad.

OM-MMOG October 20, 2009

Williams makes a point of saying that, while not all activity on MMOGs can be applied to real life phenomena, certain trends do translate between the real and virtual worlds, I am still skeptical. One might as well record ants for a year and extrapolate formulas based on their natural actions.

The point of MMOGs is to create a fantasy world for players to inhabit: therefore, they won’t act as they would in real life. Not only do players treat money differently (and diseases), but they become, through their avatars, a different persona. If experimental data suggests that there is a valid correlation, I would, just through intuition, believe the similarities to be superficial.

Furthermore, there is also an issue of privacy. Although players’ personal information may not be stored or shared, their activities are nonetheless being recorded. Perhaps it ought to be disclosed to players that their activity will be used for data, and by whom and for what purpose.

On a somewhat related note, I saw a show on PBS in their Art in the 21st Century series. The last 15 minutes of the Fantasy episode is the story of an artist who creates an in depth world for MMOG use.