THE DARK KNIGHT RISES

What an odd day.

Yesterday, I bought a ticket to see The Dark Knight Rises and was enthusiastic about the fact that my movie-going companion is an expert in comic book heroes.  I knew I’d learn something from him, that conversation after the film would help me see things in a new way.

Early this morning another friend called to ask if I’d heard the news about the attack at a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado in which a shooter, apparently inspired by the villain of other Batman movies and comics, killed 12 people and injured 59.

Once again the national conversation turns to a tragedy as people try to make sense of the incomprehensible.

The Winston-Salem cinema where we went to see the noon show today was not swarming.  Our screening room had about a half dozen viewers including us.  My friend, who had not heard the news from Colorado until I told him, noted that all of the preview trailers before our film were stories about vengeance.

That comment, which added to the surreal experience of seeing the film while thinking about the implications of it and the tragedy so far away (yet in our living rooms and on our mobile devices), has stuck with me all day.

On some level, we do become what we consume, and too many stories about vengeance – like too much junk food – crowd out stories that privilege compassion, cooperation, and grace.

Before I heard the news today, I was thinking about Rush Limbaugh’s bombastic (nice word for it) commentary on the fact that the villain in The Dark Night Rises is named Bane, which sounds suspiciously (to Rush) like Bain Capital, the company Mitt Romney ran before he didn’t (whenever that was).

In truth, the Batman films have often felt a little rightwing to me.  After all, it doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to think that The Dark Night makes a case for rendition, and it is equally easy to make a case that Bane’s followers are the disenfranchised on steroids — some amalgamation of radical lefties and hardened prisoners, which on some level is just weird.

Not that the rich and powerful come off much better in the film because most of the elites are corrupt and even Batman himself is deeply flawed, but it is a matter of scale in this film.  Rightist values — the importance of nature over nurture, absolutism over relativism, individualism over communitarianism, and so on — dominate the narrative.

So, forgetting all of previously discussed context (which I could never do), how’s the film?

For a picture that runs two hours and 44 minutes, the pacing is surprisingly good.  Great production values are expected, and the film does have a good look to it with strong actors reprising their roles in the first two installments.  I don’t think fans will be disappointed.  It’s a good movie.

My favorite in Christopher Nolan’s trilogy is still the first one; Batman Begins the most thrilling of the three to me.

 

Unplugged

After I reflect a bit on The Dark Night, I’m going to take a week to unplug.  After that, I’ll probably have some thoughts about the experience of taking a hiatus from most of my daily media transactions.  Stay tuned…or…take a break yourself so we can compare notes.

POLITICAL ANIMALS

Why don’t people just call it a mini-series?  The USA network bills Political Animals a “limited series event,” and at first I had no idea what that meant.

Honestly, I’m glad there are four episodes. (It appears that it was originally six but some broadcasts extend beyond the hour slot.)  I can commit to that even if I like but don’t love the series.  Which is the case:  I like it – don’t love it.

Sigourney Weaver is a joy to watch as Elaine Barrish, a Hillary Clinton-ish character who dumps her husband after an unsuccessful campaign then the series picks up when she is Secretary of State and her husband Bud Hammond (Ciaran Hinds) starts dating a busty television star.   One of the minuses of the series for me is the writing and performance of Bud’s character.  He’s a former president and former governor of North Carolina.

The Elaine and Bud have two sons, one working with his mom and about to marry a woman with a secret and the younger one who is struggling with substance abuse problems.  Did I mention that the younger son is also gay?

It’s just a little too-too much for me.  Sigourney Weaver’s role is carefully crafted, and her performance is subtle.  Ellen Burstyn is fun as her outspoken mother, but how many over the top characters and fortuitous plot points can one limited series event juggle?

A little bit of nuance can go a long way, and Political Animals could use more of it.  But, I like it…as a four-week diversion…in the middle of the summer…when not much else is happening.

Time Warner – Hearst

A contract dispute between Time Warner and Hearst has left 16 Hearst-owned television stations off the air in markets across the country, including WXII, the NBC affiliate station in the Greensboro/High Point/Winston-Salem market.

Time Warner claims that Hearst wants a 300% increase in the amount the cable company pays to distribute the Hearst stations while Hearst says the increase is 3%.

What?  That’s a big discrepancy.

In the end, despite the griping of some folks in older demographic groups, it’s Hearst that stands to lose.  With so many ways to access local news and weather content these days, preferences and allegiances are fickle.  Viewers will find another source for the local content.

True, the weather and traffic reports are useless, but that’s a minor part of the overall broadcast day, and Time Warner is filling the NBC slots for the time being with other affiliate stations so that network offerings are still available locally.

I don’t have the resources to ferret out the truth in corporate negotiations (300% vs. 3%), but I can see who has the most to lose in this contest.  It will be interesting to see what WXII’s next Nielsen book looks like if this standoff is not resolved.

 

LUTHER

The first time I ever jumped into a series and watched all the episodes (on DVD) was years ago, and the series was The Sopranos.

There’s something delicious about sitting down and watching a series or a season of episodes that feels like taking a vacation to a different world.  After all, don’t all the best series (yes, The Wire) evoke something real, distinct, and new for us?

The most recent mini-break (term learned from reading Bridget Jones’s Diary and appropriate for the show at hand) I’ve enjoyed via television is the BBC series Luther.

Weighing in at a manageable ten episodes and streaming on Netflix, Luther is a police procedural with less of a paint-by-numbers feel than the US counterparts (airing endlessly on cable) and possessing more psychological subtlety.

Idris Elba (yes, from The Wire) stars as detective John Luther, and he commands the screen.  Of course, he gets a lot of help from the cinematography.  The use of a narrow depth of field in all but the widest shots throws all of the actors into sharp relief against soft backgrounds, which leads the viewer to focus on the strong performances and the good writing.

(I won’t bore you by talking about some of the rare but stunning deep focus wide shots that I’m carrying around in my brain right now like photographs, but they are all the more memorable because they are used sparingly in the series.)

John Luther is bright and brave and has an uncanny ability to get inside the heads of some very sick characters, though often not in time to save human life.  There is an elliptical quality to the storytelling that I find engaging because all of the blanks are not filled in and that style keeps me from thinking of the series as being overly formulaic.

In the end, John Luther’s intriguing character and some of the others introduced along the way are a major selling point of the series.

Another is the look of the show.  It’s set in London but not the city captured in the mind’s eye of a tourist, which is another reason the show feels fresh instead of clichéd.  As noted, the cinematography is an important element of the show with lighting and UK weather contributing mightily to the overall mood – hint:  it’s not rainbows and sunshine.

As the close friend who directed me to the series advised, watch all ten episodes (six from season one and four from season two) to get come closure.  There’s talk of a third season, perhaps two two-hour movies, but there is enough here for a mini-break.

One thing about the show bugs me, though.  I wonder why John Luther traded his sleek loft apartment (with purple sheets on the bed) from the first season for the grimy, roach hotel with peeling wallpaper where he lives in the second season.

Elliptical storytelling…

Culture and the Sitcom — Goodbye to Andy Griffith

Sitcoms have loomed large in my thoughts this week.  Tuesday, the same day Andy Griffith died, I gave the final exam in my summer course, Culture and the Sitcom.

Griffith is best known as Southern sheriff Andy Taylor from Mayberry, NC in the series The Andy Griffith Show (but if you haven’t seen his chilling performance in A Face in the Crowd, give it a look!).  We saw two episodes from the series in class, “Opie the Birdman” and “Man in a Hurry,” to go along with the assigned class reading, “Against the Organizational Man:  The Andy Griffith Show and the Small-Town Family Ideal” by John O’Leary and Rick Worland.

I doubt any of my students loved the show like I do.  After all, I have years of watching and some experience with the small town life of an earlier era through visits to my grandparents’ farm as a child.  It occurred to me as I was preparing for an interview on FOX 8 Wednesday that O’Leary and Worland are on to something.

The Andy Griffith Show was a bit of nostalgia even when it aired.  It celebrated a time-gone-by that really never existed because Mayberry and the people in it represent an ideal of kindness and community that is comforting and a bit elusive in real life.  Certainly, the series never addresses the social upheaval that characterized Southern towns in the actual 60s.  Ironically, it is that dislocation from an actual time and place that makes the show timeless for some of us.

During the FOX 8 interview, Brad Jones asked me if the show resonated with my students, and I said that I don’t think it speaks to them as powerfully as, say, Friends, which is a show of their childhood that they have seen widely, a series that also speaks in its own way to family and community.

Even if different shows resonate with us, I hope the students learned something during our joint explorations of television, history, and culture in recent weeks.  Our talks in class were wide-ranging, and I learned something from each of them in the process of discussion.

That’s what makes teaching exciting for me:  we get to think and talk together and try to figure out layers of meaning where much has been taken for granted.  In a future post, I’ll share some of our ruminations on Real Time With Bill Maher, which is not a sitcom but still fair game in our class (at the time we were talking about “pushing the envelope” on shows like South Park, which qualifies as an animated sitcom!).

On the final exam for the course, I included a question asking students to share the most significant thing they learned in class.  Several of them cited the way the trajectory of the second wave of the women’s movement paralleled the role of women represented on television.  In class, we saw episodes of 50s family sitcoms, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and the two-part “Maude’s Dilemma” in which Maude Findley decides whether or not to get an abortion, Roseanne, and more.

Similar comments were voiced about gay characters.  In class we charted the silliness of the pilot episode of Three’s Company, in which a straight man pretends to be gay to share an apartment with two women, and looked at the coming out episode of Ellen as well as heteronormative strategies employed in Will & Grace to make mainstream audiences more comfortable with gay characters.

Another student reported that learning to “read against the grain” to seek deeper or hidden meanings in texts is what was most significant for him. He used The Andy Griffith Show as one of his examples and discussed the lack of racial diversity in the town (certainly not the norm in small town, Southern life) and the fact that people from cities, especially from the North, are always proven to be inferior in some way to the rural sensibilities that inform the lives of those living in Mayberry.

Two other students thought about the form more broadly.  “From this class I have learned to be more critical of the shows I choose to watch,” one wrote.  “I have a better understanding of how television is a consumer product and does not provide an unbiased view of the world.”  If only more people grasped the role television has played in selling us certain ideologies – for better and for worse – in addition to the overt role of advertising in television from sponsored programs to commercials to produce placement.

Another student wrote about how the class had challenged her and her own viewing habits.  “The past five weeks we have sat in this classroom and in a weird way, I thought we were all playing a pseudo-sitcom.  Each with a role to play that had been set up for us by society, each with concrete examples seen in television sitcoms,” she wrote.  This student noted that television used to be one of her favorite mindless activities but that now she is aware of the larger points made in the series about race, gender, social class, and sexual orientation.  She noted a new flexibility in her thinking about certain concepts.

I like that.

Andy Griffith is gone, but Andy Taylor is still with us along with seasons worth of messages and meaning, both explicit (and usually intentional) and implicit (and often unintentional).  Just thinking about how much I love the show (while realizing what may be certain shortcomings) and how it intersects with different periods of my life makes me smile.

Bring out the kerosene cucumbers and enjoy them on the front porch while Andy picks out a tune.

WGHP Fox 8

I’ll be on the morning news show on WGHP Fox 8 tomorrow around 8:45 or so to talk about The Andy Griffith Show.

Recent Books III

A pattern is emerging (I have a thing for patterns).  Every time I’ve finished three more books from the big stack I assembled for summer reading, I post about recent books.

The latest batch:  The London Train by Tessa Hadley, Swamplandia! by Karen Russell, and One Hundred Names for Love by Diane Ackerman.

Diane Ackerman’s book probably meant the most to me of the three.  I’ve read two of her other books, A Natural History of Love (which taught me so much I’ve read it twice and should probably read it again), The Zookeeper’s Wife (which was interesting but too long so that it began to lose me in the second half).

One Hundred Names for Love is subtitled A Stroke, A Marriage, and the Language of Healing.  Since Ackerman and her husband, Paul West, are both writers and understandably obsessed with words, I was fascinated by details of their lives together and their work.  Many aspects of the book resonate with me.

Like this (page 271), which talks about the role of writing in Paul’s therapy after the stroke:  Our mission was to keep the momentum of his recovery going, and for Paul that meant continuing to write, regardless of obstacles.  In part because writing daily influenced his self-confidence and mood.  But also because it was his lifelong form of deep play.  Not ha-ha play, but an altered state humans seem to crave, one of clarity, wild enthusiasm, and saturation in the moment.

I get that.  I am reminded once again that I need to write more myself so that I know what I think and what I feel or, at least, know those things more concretely.

The craft of Swamplandia! impresses me, but I was fairly detached from sections of the novel instead of swept away.  Maybe that’s a good thing.  Who wants to be swept away in a foundering alligator theme park?  The characters are offbeat, which leads to some quirky plot twists, but there are moments of deep pain and perfect grace.  I can’t quite figure out my disconnect with this novel, but that shouldn’t keep you from giving the story a try.

On the other hand, I can’t advise you to take a chance on The London Train.  Because it’s set in Wales, and I’ve been there a couple of times, I slogged through and discovered that I liked the second half of the book (which features a different character from the first half) a lot better than the beginning.  Other than character, I did have stylistic concerns about this one, too.

Ah, time to select the next batch.