Vindication? Or, That the Umbrella is Anti-Social
February 9, 2010
I’m continually harangued for my belief that umbrellas are both anti-social and dangerous…but this seems to prove my point perfectly.
Yes, you might argue that this is not representative of most Umbrellas. But I would say that in its exaggeration it reveals the true essential nature of an Umbrella as a retreat from humanity and its environs.
New York Magazine’s Bizarre Assault on Shoes
February 3, 2010
That New York Magazine continues to attack shoes is a fact both troubling and puzzling. After all, shoes may be evil, but, considering the urban shrapnel covering our sidewalks, they’re a necessary one. Can’t we just let bygones be bygones, and recognize that shoes carry with them their own discontents?
Yet the most disconcerting part of their continued attack are their tactics. Gone are the reasoned essays discussing the evolution of feet; in their place: cute children. As a sidebar to their piece on child achievement tests is this answer, in mock child handwriting, to the question: “Why do we wear shoes?”
Yes, it’s true that shoes are a part of the style system, but so is New York Magazine, and there is a reciprocal relationship between the two. Would they really want to live in a world without shoes, ergo a world without shoe advertising? It’s clear that no progress will be made until we adopt a positivist assessment of shoes, reforming the system rather than tearing it down completely.
William Hurt: On the Edge of Postmodernism
January 26, 2010
By a reasonably objective metric (academy award nominations), William Hurt 
ranks as one of the greatest film actors of all-time (he has four) and yet he makes no appearance on the AFI’s 100 Years…100 Stars. On its own, this would be a triviality; many great actors fail to achieve mass consciousness. Perhaps I’m betraying my age, but has anyone ever gone to a movie just to experience the raw animal magnetism of Albert Finney? But, as we’ve mentioned many times, William Hurt owned the 1980s, starring in several of the decade’s biggest commercial and creative successes.
I thought about this the other day while watching Damages season 2 on DVD. There’s a scene where William Hurt’s character takes a polygraph. Hurt’s character is exactly the type of role for which he’s remembered: handsome without being charming, and cold without appearing calculating; uncertainty surrounds him. And Hurt is an expert at maximizing uncertainty. Watching him take the polygraph, you’re sure that he’s managed to pass the test while lying. When it comes back inconclusive, you’re almost surprised. Is he not as devious as I thought, or could he be telling the truth? There may only be a 5% chance that he’s telling the truth, but Hurt makes you consider it. In this way, he’s a great foil to Glenn Close whose skill is smiling as she stabs a knife in your back. She’s good at convincing other characters that she’s being honest, but not so good at staying a step ahead of viewers. Only the show’s jumbling of chronology allows those possibilities to slip in.
But again, the mystery that is William Hurt and his ownership (or: pwnage) of the 1980s. Read the rest of this entry »
Thaw me out when robot wives are cheap and effective
January 25, 2010
The second season of 30 Rock (a perennial favorite of the Yesterday’s Salad staff) ends with Tracy Morgan’s character creating the ultimate distraction: a seamless meld of video games and pornography. The creation of the game is depicted in a pitch-perfect homage to the film Amadeus, with Tracy working frenetically into the night, as his co-worker, Frank, looks on in despair a la the jealous Salieri. When Frank attempts to dissuade Tracy, he explains that it is impossible to create a porn video game because of a phenomenon known as the uncanny valley.
The uncanny valley is a metaphor for how people’s affinity toward computer-generated characters follows a parabolic curve (much like a valley). A computer-generated character that looks nothing like a person, such as an animated car, will not make a viewer feel much of anything. Much as we might be fond of our cars, an animated car is just an object. However, if the computer generated car had great big eyes and a smile, we would have much less trouble relating to it. The more the character looks like a real person, the more alive it seems. Yet, there is a point at which the limitations of the animation start to appear, representing the bottom of the uncanny valley. After this point, as the animators try to make the character look more human, the character becomes progressively more unreal, and we feel much less sympathy (and perhaps, more than a little creeped out).
What this means for a hypothetical sex video game is that any attempt to make the game’s characters realistic enough to be arousing will instead make them incongruous enough to be repulsive. Unless your audience has a fetish for cartoon characters (a small audience in the U.S.), or has a fetish for being repulsed (which may violate the principle of entailment in this situation), this is not great a recipe for commercial viability. Within the context of 30 Rock, this explanation is meant humorously, but it is essentially the prevailing theory for why there aren’t more video games about (or even featuring) sex, while there are plenty of games featuring violence, whether cartoonish or quasi-realistic.
A good example of this theory in practice is found in the game Dragon Age: Origins. Dragon Age is an epic fantasy in the vein of the Lord of the Rings, and tasks the player with defending their kingdom against a horde of demon-like creatures. As anyone familiar with the general setting might expect, there is a fair amount of fighting (against both demon and human alike), and it is decently violent. With fast pacing and fairly realistic graphics, the combat is both dramatic and fun. To the game’s credit, there is a very rich backstory and well-developed characters, and the larger part of the game is spent talking and politicking amongst them. Thanks to quite a bit of cleverly-written dialogue (leavened with some innuendo), this part of the game is even more fun than the combat, and is often moving.
Community! *Wherein we avoid a Marxist analysis
January 17, 2010
Community is the best new show on TV. Normally that would be an uncontroversial statement, as we’ve been in something of a sitcom dark age, but people really love Modern Family. Reuters actually selected it as one of the ten best shows of the decade. I like Modern Family. Actually, every time I watch it I’m surprised at how much I enjoy it; I forget how funny it is between episodes. But one of the best of the decade? Frankly, that The Wire wasn’t on this list shows that the critic in charge has no standing. Maybe season 6 will change his mind.
No, Community is the funniest situational comedy of the year. And I mean that in the truest sense. As Freud writes:
The comic turns out first of all to be something unintended we find in human social relations. It is found in persons, in their movements, forms, actions and traits of character—originally perhaps only in physical characteristics, and later in mental ones as well–and in their respective ways of expressing them…However, the comic is capable of being detached from persons if the circumstance that makes a person appear comical is recognized. This is how ‘the comic of situation’ arises, and this knowledge brings the possibility of making a person comic at will, by placing him in situations where these conditions for the comic attach to its actions.
The comedy of the situation depends on merging social roles with circumstance, with creating character traits that are exploited by putting the character in a dissimilar or disadvantageous circumstance (or, as we say in the biz: “hilarity ensues’). For Freud, situational comedy is different from a joke, a self-contained unit that depends on verbal economy for its humor; the sitcom depends on character traits.
This is why Community is the funniest new show on TV. The writers consistently invert classic sitcom plots, adapting them to the strengths of their characters. They may sometimes seem one-dimensional, but there are enough one dimensions to go around.
In one episode, it’s Abed whose situation makes him the funniest; in others, he might disappear. The show has more jokes-per-episode than just about any other show on TV, but, ultimately, it’s the way the jokes are tied to the comedy of situation that make them so successful.
Combine that with rotating situations and you have something that few other shows have: a truly funny ensemble series.
Why Does Adam Banks’ Father Hate His Son?
January 16, 2010
Something has always bothered me about the end of The Mighty Ducks. (There’s a great article about what the movie meant to my generation here.) It’s not the fact that the Ducks play terrible, unsound hockey; as coached by Gordon Bombay, the Ducks can only score via trick plays (statue of liberty, flying V) defensive breakdowns (the fact that everyone just gets out of the way whenever Fulton shoots the pucks), or the individual heroism of their star player, Adam Banks (I concur with this post; it’s no contest in any film but the third). D3 acknowledged this element, allowing me to move past it. That the Hawks twice blow a 3 goal lead in the final doesn’t even upset me; the Ducks ability to comeback (their bouncebackability) wouldn’t rate very highly on the cinematic revenge scale (see Kill Bill, wherein the Bride overcomes a bullet to the head). We can all agree: Gordon Bombay is a good motivator, but not a strong tactician.
And it’s not the film’s bizarre class commentary. The social divisions of income inequality are at the heart of the film. Gordon Bombay’s elitist lawyer needs to get in touch with his inner proletariat in order to be a successful coach, correlated on film by dressing down in athletic clothing instead of suits.;Mr. Duckworth can buy the Ducks gear, but he can’t buy membership in the Ducks; Adam Banks’ father has access to the lines of power and can get the league to change its rules in order to accommodate his son; Jesse Hall refuses to acknowledge Banks as a member of the Ducks–despite prolific goal scoring–until he is viciously checked and run into the goal by a member of the Hawks. This symbolically marks him as the enemy-of-my-enemy in the eyes of Hall, transforming him into friend. “Cake-eater,” Hall’s emphatic pejorative of those in upper-income brackets, (how this did not become a widespread insult, I’ll never know!) even becomes a term of endearment. At the end of the day, the class-conflict is left in place. All of this suits a world stung from the Bush 1 recession.
No, rewatching the movie on Encore this morning, I realized why the end of the Might Ducks leaves me frustrated: it’s that Adam Banks’ father has difficulties accepting his son for who he is. We don’t know much about Mr. Banks. We know that he’ll fight to keep Adam on the Hawks. Understandable given that “his older brother was a Hawk; all his little friends are Hawks.” He seems as if he’s on his son’s side.
And yet…during the last game, Mr. Banks is wearing a Hawks jacket. This is the last game of the season, after the Ducks have miraculously made it to the championship game, overcoming ridiculous odds. Banks has clearly emerged as the team’s star player, and the Ducks have gained a sizable fan base, 90% of whom are wearing Ducks’ merchandise. So why is Mr. Banks wearing a Hawks jacket? The only explanation is that Mr. Banks loves his older son more than his younger son. Indeed, he prefers this unseen character so much that he will wear a Hawks jacket to a game where he visibly cheers on his younger son. You don’t have to be a structuralist to recognize that Mr. Banks is projecting mixed signals. Yes, he shows real concern when his son is rammed into the post, but that doesn’t change the fact that he was unwilling to affiliate with him during the game. Do the bonds of Hawkship last so long that Mr. Banks cannot support his son? Is he the film’s anti-Gordon?
Either way, this is a dark cloud hanging over what should have been a magisterial climax.
