Fenster writes:
If you haven’t seen Alex Gibney’s excellent 2016 documentary Zero Days you should. If you have you will recall it recounts good, bad and ugly aspects of cyberwarfare as practiced by America on others, and the risks of it being practiced back on America by those we have attacked in the virtual world. I think it has relevance to discussions today over weaponizing Facebook, Russian meddling, making life difficult for RT, and the like.
Fenster writes:
Citizenship increasingly resembles a night at the movies. Better yet, an obscure foreign art film without subtitles. Better yet, a foreign miniseries with multiple plot lines and seasons, each uncertain climax leading us not to clarity but to another season of confusion. We poor schlubs are alternately entertained, horrified and mystified in search of the plot line and in the hope of a satisfactory conclusion. “What the hell is going on?” is a better default attitude than reflexively rooting for a good guy.
What shall we make of the current tension between Russiagate and FISAgate?
My guess below, with implications for how the season may end.
Fabrizio del Wrongo writes:
Director Michael Almereyda often uses postmodern prickliness to bring us closer to his subjects. He courts obviousness, underlining his meanings so that we won’t miss them; yet his work has a quicksilver quality that belies its didacticism. It can sharpen your perceptions, bringing you to a state of pleasant cogitation that makes you feel as though you’ve retreated into your headspace. It helps that Almereyda is so attentive to mood and setting. In his 1994 “Nadja,” the atmosphere of ironic-posh alienation revealed the characters’ romanticism as a kind of protective garment — as ephemeral and as lovely as the shoegaze pop on the movie’s soundtrack. In 2015’s “Experimenter,” the shifting planes of the sets and narrative highlighted the way in which our sense of reality is inseparable from our manner of testing it. If we devote our lives to developing a theory of the world, at what point does the theory become the world, and the world change to conform to it?
In Almereyda’s latest, “Marjorie Prime,” adapted by the director from a play by Jordan Harrison, a family deals with the gradual loss of its members by replacing them with artificially intelligent holograms. In the opening scene, the aged Marjorie, played by Lois Smith, talks to a recreation of her dead husband, Walter. Portrayed by Jon Hamm, the hologram — it’s named Walter Prime — is half Marjorie’s age; it’s a representation of the handsome Walter of fifty years prior. So it’s no surprise that Marjorie looks at it with longing. But there’s a hint of the predatory there as well. For we gradually realize that this is Marjorie’s Walter; its consciousness exists for her benefit; she owns it. Even so, when she tells the faux Walter that she feels the need to perform for it, she’s being truthful: The hologram’s performance is drawn from her memories; without her input, it has nothing to work with, no material. In return the hologram engages in a performance of its own — a performance designed to seduce Marjorie. When it tells her a story, we understand that it’s reciting her cherished memories. In doing so it imbues them with a vividness that her failing mind won’t permit. Perhaps it even rewrites those memories. Like the two women in Bergman’s “Persona,” Marjorie and her electronic amanuensis constitute a feedback loop. Where does one personality end and the other begin?
Occasionally Almereyda opens up the play by inserting a flashback to the characters’ past lives. Since they’re unmediated — untainted by repetition and performance — they’re our only glimpses of the family’s actual history. In one such flashback, the youthful Marjorie canoodles in bed with Walter; the 1997 “My Best Friend’s Wedding” plays on a television. Walter proposes to Marjorie in a way that’s perhaps too casual. We immediately recognize that the flashback doesn’t jibe with Marjorie’s memory of the moment, as expressed by Walter Prime in the opening scene. In the memory the couple saw the movie in a grand theater. It was a big moment; there was nothing casual about it. Did the hologram invent this embellishment or did Marjorie? Either way, its extravagance has replaced the mundanity of the actual event — reordered it as a recording head reorders the particles on a magnetic tape. Now it’s the reality for Marjorie and hologram alike.
The plot of “Majorie Prime” is riddled with false memories, unfounded stories, and elisions. Late in the film, a story concerning one of Marjorie’s former suitors is revealed to be the partial invention of her daughter and son-in-law, Tess (Geena Davis) and Jon (Tim Robbins). In order to pad her ego they’ve given her the impression that she rejected a tennis pro; in reality, he was in the drywall business. Does a part of Marjorie recognize the tale as bunk? Smith’s performance, a diaphanous evocation of the cunning naivety of old age, suggests that possibility. On the other hand, Marjorie has heard the story so many times that it might as well be real; its telling has become a ritual with a value independent of veracity. Why contradict it? Though Jon calls the story a “harmless lie,” other fibs cut deeper. Over the course of the film we learn that as a young woman Marjorie lost her son, Damien. Though it was a defining moment, she’s suppressed her memory of it, a lie of omission in which the whole family is complicit. Is this lie also harmless? By forgetting Damien the family has attempted to erase him, but his specter persists; his absence is felt in the awkward shapes their conversations take as they talk around his existence. And the consciousness of this evasion has left a poisonous residue. “I hated him,” says Tess, without apparent guilt. In an act of transference as troubling as it is understandable, Marjorie has moved her memories of Damien onto the late family dog. She catches herself when she refers to its fur as “hair”; the shadow of a barely understood revulsion flits across her face.
It’s too simplistic to say that “Marjorie Prime” is about the fudginess of memory. Harrison and Almereyda are after something more elusive. They’re trying to pin down the subjectiveness of personality, of relationships, of communal narrative. Like the Primes (in addition to Walter, we meet electronic recreations of Marjorie and Tess), the movie’s viewers engage in an act of intuitive reconstruction. Presented with the chunks of a family’s history, we fill in the gaps between them, inevitably adding our own biases to the emerging model. Is this not how shared notions of history take form? That these notions contain inaccuracies is admitted by the movie’s writers through their inclusion of at least one historical red herring: The composer of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” is not Mozart, as the characters of “Marjorie Prime” believe, but an unknown songwriter, a person whose name has failed to find a place in our collective memory. (Does that absence mean the composer never existed?) Being a movie buff, Almereyda can’t help but wink at the issue of unreliable memory via a film reference: A flashback scene depicting the first meeting of Tess and Jon takes place in a museum whose walls are painted to resemble the gardens in “Last Year at Marienbad.”
It’s to Almereyda’s credit that “Marjorie Prime” never feels like a puzzle movie. Its revelations are gradual rather than abrupt; even the deaths of major characters seem to register subconsciously, as though we’re remembering rather than experiencing them. Wisely, the chamber-drama structure has been taken as the basis for the film’s aesthetic; the nondescript domestic settings are as anodyne as the pacing, and Sean Price Williams’ diffuse lighting makes everything look a little transient, like a sunset. Almereyda and his team prove that philosophical sci-fi doesn’t require scale and showy ponderousness to put its points across. Despite its modesty, “Marjorie Prime” is sprightly, engaging, and profound; it expresses in 100 minutes what the handsomely catatonic “Blade Runner 2049” merely suggests in 160.
In the movie’s final scene the electronic shades of Walter, Marjorie, and Tess engage in a conversation. They trade tales, all derived from their now-deceased human subjects. Left without their fleshy reference points, sources of new material, will they eventually converge on a single consciousness, all of them repeating the same details of the same stories for eternity, or are they capable of improvising? Their discussion may provide a clue: In their retelling of Walter’s proposal to Marjorie, the movie they attend is not “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” but “Casablanca.”
Fenster writes:
Let’s stipulate the meddling. The amount spent was minuscule and the effort undertaken paltry. The only way it could have sown discord is if we did it to ourselves.
Maybe those evil Russkies are clever enough to know we would tie ourselves up in knots over some Facebook ads. Maybe it was their strategy all along to count on a huge overreaction based on domestic political considerations. But what they actually did–as described in the actual documents, not as described on the evening news–is pretty thin gruel. You don’t have to defend the Russians or deny they were engaged in the common practice of meddling in the affairs of other countries to conclude that this has been overblown from the start.
But to indulge my pessimistic side for a minute, it could be that control of narrative is an essential feature of any large political entity, as important as establishment of systems of law, justice and policy. Our constitution explicitly deals with these last three systems by embodying them in the three branches of government and setting them apart from, and in tension with, one another. But our system leaves the media free, on paper.
Yet what if all effective public action is in the long run deeply tied to information, interpretation of information and, in turn, consensus and legitimacy? The press was free enough over our history but nonetheless had ties to the established order sufficient to allow us to cohere and for government action to be considered legitimate. Now comes the internet and social media. And the Establishment asks, perhaps quite reasonably from the point of view of regime management, “can we afford the unregulated spread of these destabilizing platforms?” Beyond the overstated worry over throwing an election there are more legitimate concerns over the spread of counter-narratives that are false as well as counter-narratives (as with Wikileaks) that are true but are held to be detrimental to American interests, however those interests are defined by those in power.
So it may be all about Russia, Russia, Russia today but in the background is fear and dread over losing the historic ability to shape the narrative under our freedom of the press rules. In China and even in Europe they are coming at this question head-on by formally regulating social media and controlling speech. We are daintier about it here given our Constitution, history and traditions.
But we are at it in our own ways. In the US “private” internet companies practice shadowbanning and demonetization to suppress while the government screams “RUSSIA!!” It seems to me to be all part of the same thing. And who knows, if large political entities need to control narrative irrespective of whether they technically are supposed to have freedom of the press and freedom of speech then our technological future will be collective and not individualistic.
It is a little ironic that an Establishment that is so cavalier about the virtues of borderlessness should be so Pecksniffian about its own interests in the national project. But as they say everyone is conservative about what they know best.
Blowhard, Esq. writes:
Having seen most of the major movies of 2017, my current top 10 is:
1. FRANTZ
2. MARJORIE PRIME
3. INGRID GOES WEST
4. GOOD TIME
5. I LOVE YOU, DADDY
6. “Finding Frances” episode of NATHAN FOR YOU
7. WONDER WHEEL
8. THE TRIP TO SPAIN
9. BRIGHT
10. SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING
Still haven’t seen THE FLORIDA PROJECT, THE POST, DOWNSIZING, or TRANSFORMERS: THE LAST KNIGHT. I’ve seen all the other Oscar contenders.
Sir Barken Hyena writes:
I watched this series from French director Louis Malle back-to-back the other day, it’s that good. In the late 60’s, Malle spent 5 months motoring around the vast backwaters of India in search of what spontaneous cinema verite gold he could find. India obliged, with it’s usual extravagance. The film overflows with unforgettable, yet wholly mundane images. Compiled into seven themed episodes, Phantom India is a worthy addition to the literature on fraught relations between East and West, from Kipling through Conrad, to Bowles, Chris Marker and Rushdie.
Malle was the usual muddle-headed Marxist of his era, and the narration provides far too many forehead slapping moments. Yet, because he’s also a true artist of vision, this only adds to the film’s value. Malle himself is quite aware that he can’t grasp what he is seeing, and has no choice but to take it all in as a Westerner, and an intellectual. He makes this struggle a recurring theme.
Time and again, the visuals subtly belie his analysis. Speaking of economic misery, the images are of villagers riotously celebrating a festival, or singing and smiling while toiling in their fields. While miserable statistics on malnutrition stream by, young men with physiques a metrosexual would die for wrestle in a dirt field. They look better than he does! Sure they are old at 40 but they leave good looking corpses. Too bad they burn them up.
Thankfully this sort of thing is not the whole show. Many fine moments are wisely left to speak for themselves. It’s the faces that amaze the most, and the camera lingers and stares while they stare back. We see the gulf that separates, but the humanity that connects. And, the crew being French, they are adept at finding what’s most beautiful to film.
Malle isn’t insensitive to the consolations religion brings them, though he can’t help seeing it as exploitation. In fact, he sees just about everything in those terms, with the usual Commie blindness and platitudes. In one scene, a caste of fishermen bargain with a city slicker on a bike who buys their catch to sell in town. An epic battle ensues, with one feisty crone clearly loving getting in his face. But in the end, the cash changes hands and he peddles off with his baskets of fish, and no doubt the same scene will play out the next day, and forever. This is the “exploitation of man by his fellow man”, yet it never crosses his mind that the fishers could pool their money, get their own damn bike and send Mr Middleman packing. Doubtless it never occurred to them either.
I am simplifying as much as Malle. Perhaps the fishers couldn’t sell in the market due to caste restrictions; I don’t know. A touching interview with a pair of fresh faced hippies gives one possible answer: the Indians don’t care about having more, just enough. When they get it, they stop working. That’s a kind of exploitation some Westerners I know might like.
And here is the heart of the paradox: they themselves accept quite easily their position in life. It’s we who can’t allow it. They themselves have resisted change at every turn. They know what they like, it’s what they already are. It’s an automatic assumption of Westerners that all humanity is our business, when all through our colonial imperialist adventures nothing has been wanted from the world except for us to butt out. The “false consciousness”, is our own. Maybe one day world peace will come, when we let it.
Fabrizio del Wrongo writes:
Fenster writes:
Most of my friends are liberal, which in the current era is to say progressive, which in the current moment is to say increasingly illiberal about a lot of things. A closed mind seems to many to be the epitome of virtue.
We butt heads regularly on Trump, which is to say in the current moment Russiagate versus its doppelganger the FBI probe. There’s no proof yet of either argument but I find much more actual evidence is present with respect to the latter. In turn, the arguments created when people connect the dots of actual evidence seem much stronger, and of more import, with respect to the FBI probe (and related matters) than it does with Russiagate.
My so-called liberal friends don’t much bother to look at the evidence on the emerging case about FBI misdeeds. I have my biases but since I consume mainstream news I can’t miss the pro-Russiagate arguments. And I will sometimes go out of my way to read what are purportedly serious attempts to make the anti-Trump case, just in order to see if I am missing anything substantive.
When I do that most of the time I still don’t find any real beef. Case in point: Jeffrey Toobin’s recent article in The New Yorker. His argument: the attempt to fire Mueller reveals that “the case for obstruction is clear”.
Lawyers often get a free pass to traffic in the counterintuitive because the law is not always logical. But even after I try to adjust for the fact that I am not an attorney and that I may not be able to follow the law’s counterintuitive nuances I honestly don’t find his argument persuasive in the least.
He starts by saying that most white collar crime turns on motivation and uses that to suggest that the search for motivation is the main issue in framing a case for obstruction.
Trump is held to have suggested to his lawyer several rationales for firing Mueller that don’t hold up. And from that Toobin gleans bad motivation.
But:
Almost all of the arguments against Trump if you vanish and go to the other side of the mirror. Which is why much depends on “the memo” and the energies it may set loose.
If the case against the FBI, Clinton and the Obama administration has the weight it is alleged to have then Trump would have had all the justification in the world for seeing events in motion as threatening, and in taking action to protect himself. It is possible that this explains the furious thrashing around on the Russiagate side at the moment. There is nothing new to report there, really, and so the level of angst about the FBI probe and the breathlessness of the reporting about obstruction seems to me to be revealing about—well, about motivation.
Fabrizio del Wrongo writes:
Based on the comic by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières, “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets” more than makes good on the extravagant promise of its title. The principal setting is Alpha, an improbable space station forged, rather haphazardly, from the technology and derring-do of innumerable interstellar cultures. Though made by the hands of intelligent beings, Alpha is so complex it’s unknowable. Its depths hold discoveries and dangers. It’s as mysterious as was the pre-Columbian world, whose maps depicted sea monsters and fantastic races — not as warnings against the unknown but as promises of it. With his customary cheek Besson uses the environment to riff on multiculturalism. But the Model UN officiousness of “Deep Space Nine” isn’t his bag; his multicultural space is dripping with sensuality and redolent of classic Boy’s Adventure. It’s also somewhat anti-universalist. An independent movie mogul, Besson isn’t afraid to tweak PC values. “Valerian” harks back to the unwoke era of space opera; it reacquaints us with the allure of the exotic.
The movie is a lot like its setting: it’s a fabulous conglomeration of absurdities. As Besson and his team (Thierry Arbogast is the cinematographer, Hugues Tissandier the production designer) hurtle the characters through spaces, dimensions, and ecosystems, the spatio-temporal frame skews, and the resulting disorientation plays into Besson’s directorial performance, his razzle-dazzle showmanship. During the picture’s most successful moments boffo set-pieces whiz by like the painted cars of a circus train, each more colorful than the last. In one, the heroine is captured by a tribe of aliens who suggest pinhead Ubangis out of some racially insensitive comic of yesteryear. When they present her to their leader, she’s wearing a hat that looks like a giant nacho bowl. It seems a visual non sequitur — until you realize that King Ubangi intends to dine on her brains. Another sequence has the hero, Valerian, pursuing a whale-like creature that inhabits Alpha’s aquatic sector; he’s attempting to acquire a species of jellyfish that lives on its back. The purpose of the jellyfish I can’t recall, but the sequence is so fun a purpose seems unnecessary; its immersive strangeness evokes Miyazaki.
Besson errs, I think, in relying on a conventional villain. The movie doesn’t need Clive Owen’s hangdog machismo, nor does it need the burden of the exposition required to explain the coverup for which he is responsible. All of this weighs “Valerian” down and unnecessarily adds to its running time (at 137 minutes, it’s at least a quarter too long). The plot’s central idea is good, though: A peaceful alien race, surreptitiously dwelling near Alpha’s core, wants to be restored to independence, and to remain free of the forces that hold the space station in tenuous semi-unity. The conflict, which posits Alpha as an obstacle both literal and figurative, is enough to keep “Valerian” moving. It doesn’t need a conventional heavy.
As Valerian, the interdimensional government agent, Dane DeHaan has the inviolate quality of an Ingres portrait. In a movie fraught with entropy, the intenseness of his placidity gives him presence and even a touch of eroticism. But he and Besson haven’t given Valerian’s personality much of a foundation, and his playboy-in-space persona seems like a costume that DeHaan hasn’t quite figured out how to wear. His collaborator, Laureline, played by Cara Delevingne, is more successful. Delevingne has a droll I’m-not-putting-up-with-your-shit quality that seems to grow out of her eyebrows. DeHaan teases her, propositions her; she gives him the Ginger Rogers cold shoulder, and makes him live up to her standards. As a team the pair have little in the way of authentic sizzle, and yet I found them appealing. Either I’m reflexively responding to the classic rom-com tropes, rarely employed in this era of sexual puritanism, or the appeal of the couple lies in the nimble way that Besson employs their lithe physicalities. That nimbleness is also evident in the handling of Rihanna, who makes a brief appearance as a shapeshifting dancer named Bubble. Based on the evidence of “Valerian,” Rihanna isn’t yet much of an actress, but like a lot of singers-turned-actors she’s a natural movie performer, and her vulnerability is about as appealing as her gameness, her willingness to please. Her dance routine is “Valerian” at its best: sensuous, baroque, and exotic.
Fenster writes:
Nils Gilman writes:
Perhaps the most insidious threat facing Western democracies has been the progressive decline of elite accountability and responsibility. “Today’s elite is more talented and open but lacks a self-conscious leadership code. The language of meritocracy (how to succeed) has eclipsed the language of morality (how to be virtuous),” David Brooks observed in 2012. “They have no sense that they are guardians for an institution the world depends upon; they have no consciousness of their larger social role.” This “hollow elite,” as Charles Murray called it in Coming Apart, is doubtless one element of the rise of populisms across the Western world—nor are such observations restricted to right-of-center critics.1 Poll after poll shows a collapse of ruling-class credibility, particularly among the young, and an increasing inclination to embrace strongmen who promise accountability and results.
I think all of that is true. But why is it the case?
Gilman provides a clue in the quote he uses the open the article:
“Good government is the outcome of private virtue.”
—John Jay Chapman, Practical Agitation
Also true, I believe.
This is hardly news. Sound government depends on virtue–something that, however nebulous, is inarguably cultural, and not political much less institutional.
We see the sentiment behind this passage in Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France:
The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please; we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations which may be soon turned into complaints.
And we see it in the exchange on the street between Benjamin Franklin and someone asking about the outcome of the Constitutional Convention:
“Well, Doctor, what have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?”
“A Republic, if you can keep it.”
And it was a republic, not a democracy, that we got. And that means elites, and elite rule, are all but guaranteed. So, yes, the question of the private virtues of our elites is an important one. And if, as Gilman suggests, our current elites are not accountable then we will have problems–indeed we will have exactly the problems we have at present.
What is the answer? Gilman would like a “self-draining swamp”. That is, it would be wonderful in his view if elites magically adopted and held onto the proper collection of virtues. But will they?
Our entire structure of government is based on human fallibility, the threat of faction, and the need for checks and balances. And so we have a structure in which, among other things, the power to act (the Executive) is kept in check by the power to consider (the Legislature) and that is kept in check by the power to judge (the Judiciary). Rock, paper, scissors.
And since a republican form of government will give rise to elites, and to a split between the elites and the people, one should ask: by what measure should the elites be held accountable? There are elections, of course, but are elections a sufficient method for guaranteeing elite accountability? You have only to look at the present moment to doubt that proposition. If elites run things they can corrupt things. Indeed, that is exactly why Gilman would argue that virtues such as restraint, honor, duty and public service are essential.
But here we get to a conundrum. As Madison wrote, if all men were angels we would have no need for government. That goes for everyone. Gilman would like a “self-draining swamp”–that is, an elite with strong and permanent virtues, good for all time. But how is that possible if the members of the elite are not angels?
Gilman acknowledges the problem at the end of his article, suggesting that certain institutional mechanisms may have to be considered that would have the effect of giving the elites a good thwack on the head. He writes that we may wish to revive
various largely forgotten practices that republics have traditionally used to enable popular control of both economic and political elites. University of Chicago political scientist John P. McCormick, for example, has pointed to three elite-accountability institutions common in pre-18th-century popular governments: magistrate appointment procedures combining lottery and election; offices or assemblies excluding the wealthy and political incumbents from eligibility; and political trials enlisting the entire citizenry in prosecutions and appeals. If elites cannot be relied on to police themselves, and the evidence that they can is not good, then bringing new/old methods to the fore to impose such accountability may be the only option remaining.
That seems like a promising avenue. But once again we come round to where we started:
“Good government is the outcome of private virtue.”
Yes, and that virtue is not just required of elites. It is required of the people, too. The keeping of the republic is not just a matter of elites reminding one another of noblesse oblige. The most effective check on elite misbehavior will not be institutional. The true check on elite lack of accountability are the private virtues of the people.
Thus we the people are in large measure complicit in the lack of accountability of our current elites. If the culture is all about getting for me and the hell with you should it surprise us that the elites might behave in similar fashion?
Blowhard, Esq.
Callowman
Sherbrooke
Eddie Pensier
Enzo Nakamura
Epaminondas
Fabrizio del Wrongo
Fenster
Brundle Guy
Glynn Marshes
Paleo Retiree
Atypical Neurotic
Question Lady
Sax von Stroheim
Sir Barken Hyena
The Mistaken
Uncouth Reflections 