Midway (1976) and Midway (2019) [Media Notes 150]

When I was a kid I was glued to the TV set every Saturday at 12:30 watching Victory at Sea, with its grand opening theme composed by Richard Rodgers (of Rogers and Hammerstein), performed by the NBC Symphony Orchestra. No doubt I saw the episode about the Battle of Midway. Here’s the opening narration:

And now Midway is East. Yesterday it was Pearl Harbor. Today it is the whole Southeast Pacific. Hardened by the campaigns in China, fired by the sacred mission of extending Hirohito's dominion over 12 million square miles of the Pacific, the hordes of Imperial Japan surge south and east in a deluge of destruction. Glory is their goal; glory and oil and rubber and rice, mysterious haunting names of the Far East are the notes of an Allied dirge. Manila, Mindoro, Mindanao, Hong Kong, Hanoi, Mandalay, Malaya, Batan, Bangkok, Borneo, Cambodia, Kaviti, Corgador, Batavia, Bali, Singapore, Shanghai, Sumatra... Banzai!

At about 11 minutes into the show, which is only a half-hour, we get to the Battle of Midway, the subject of two feature films, Midway (1976), and Midway (2019). I made it through each of them in a single sitting, which is a bit unusual for me these days, especially for movies that clocked in at over two hours each. I’m not sure why, but I just can’t pay attention to a movie for that long. Perhaps it’s because I’m pre-occupied with my own thoughts.

Whatever.

But I made it through these. Perhaps it was the sheer adventure of it all, dog fights in the air, dive bombers, guns blazing, ships exploding, the wait, the plotting, the relief, but also the death and mangled bodies, and of course, the final victory. If you’re in a mood for it, both of these movies deliver it. The 1976 is a bit slicker, with a roster of stars from here to the moon, while the 2019 – no remake, but its own production – is grittier. And I preferred it. But not for the grit.

For some reason the 1976 had a romance plot woven into it. A young naval aviator is in love with the daughter of Japanese immigrants. When the war breaks out, the Japanese are herded into internment camps. The aviator asks his father, a Navy captain played by Charlton Heston (they don’t make them like that these days), to intervene. Here’s how Erik Lundegaard puts it:

Unfortunately, the movie also includes is a fictional subplot that is the stuff of soap opera. Charlton Heston plays Capt. Matt Garth, the estranged father of fighter pilot Tom Garth (Edward Albert), who is looking to reconnect with his son. The fact that Matt is divorced feels out of time—that was a ’70s conversation, less a ’30s one. And then there’s Tom’s dilemma. He has to tell his old man: 1) his girlfriend, Hakuro (Christina Kokubo), is Japanese; 2) she and her parents are being held as subversives; and 3) can he help free them? When Matt objects, Tom accuses him of racism. Matt, in that Heston way, says he’s not racist, it’s just that his son’s timing is lousy; then he spends most of the rest of the movie trying to free them. I can’t even remember if he does, to be honest, and none of this is helped by the acting from Heston and Kokubo. Oh, and it turns out that her parents object to the union anyway since they don’t want Hakuro marrying outside her race. So who’s the racist now, huh? That’s the vibe.

Like Lundegaard said, it’s unfortunate.

Here’s what Wikipedia says about the 2019 film:

While the film takes some artistic license, Emmerich and Tooke were both adamant about being historically accurate, and Midway received praise from some combat veterans and historians for being a more accurate portrayal of events than Midway (1976) and Pearl Harbor (2001). Naval History and Heritage Command director and retired Navy Rear Admiral Sam Cox said: "Despite some of the 'Hollywood' aspects, this is still the most realistic movie about naval combat ever made."

If you want to see a WWII naval battle movie, see that one, not the 1976 one.

And you might dig out that Victory at Sea episode. Perhaps some of the news-reel footage in that shows up in these movies.

My Streaming Diet [Media Notes 145]

I’ve written previously about my posting habits over the long-term, posting charts showing wide variation over time, with periods lasting two to four months where I post very little, between longer periods with many posts per month, over a 100 in recent years. I’ve attributed this to mood swings; I’m depressed during periods when I’m not posting much. 

 

What do I do with my time when I’m not making many blog posts? I’m streaming a lot of movies and TV programs on Netflix and Amazon Prime and watching more YouTube videos that I otherwise do. I’ve been keeping a list of movies and TV programs since sometime in 2018. I’ve decided to post that list online as deep background for an article I’m preparing on my mood swings.  

 

The list is simple. I list the titles by year, and then by whether or not they’ve movies (films) or TV programs. I define movies as titles that are somewhat over an hour long and that reach a definite conclusion at the end of the title. This, I realize, is a crude criterion. There may, of course, be sequels. Everything else is a TV program. TV programs typically have multiple episodes and may or may not continue the same plotlines in the same story from one episode to the next. TV programs tend to have (somewhat shorter than) half-hour episodes or (somewhat shorter than) one-hour episodes. 

 

The distinction is rough, but reasonable. The list says almost nothing about how many episodes to a TV program I watch. In many cases I’ve watched all of the available episodes, which may stretch into the hundreds in some cases. I’ve watched some titles more than once and I’ve generally listed the title more than once.

* * * * *

2018 more or less

TV

Bourdain: A Cooks’ Tour, Parts Unknown
Death in Paradise
Shetland
Iron Fist
Luke Cage
Jessica Jones
Lilyhammer
The Get Down
Samurai Gourmet
The Ranch
The Chinese Mayor
The Crown
Sunny in Philadelphia
Bordertown
Sherlock
Master of None (Aziz Ansari)
Hip-Hop Evolution
Sense8
Fyre
Grace and Frankie
Jack Ryan
Lost in Space, S1
The Man in the High Castle
Transparent
Sneaky Pete

Movies

Jurassic Park, 1, 2, 3
Gimme the Loot (2 graffiti artists)
Sand Castle (war in the Middle East)
Road House (Patrick Swayze)
Indiana Jones, all of them
Ex Machina
One Mississippi
Running Man
American Playboy
Spectre
Wild Card
Julie & Julia

Toward an ideology of intellect: Adrian Monk and Jerry Espenson [Media Notes 96]

Adrian Monk is the central character in the eponymous TV series, Monk, a comedy-drama mysteries series that ran from 2002 to 2009. Jerry Espenson is a character in Boston Legal, a comedy-drama series that ran from 2004 to 2008. Monk is a brilliant detective who is beset by a bewildering plethora of compulsions and phobias (312 by his count). Espenson is a brilliant attorney with specific expertise in financial law. He has Asperger’s Syndrome, and possibly Tourette’s, making it difficult to interact with others socially.

That is to say, both men are professionally brilliant but pathologically weird in a way that makes it difficult for them to practice their profession. Monk has to have a companion with him at all times to drive him around, hand him wipes so he can wipe his hands whenever he touches anything, including being subjected to hand-shaking from others, and, in general, coach and cajole him through the day. Espenson gets around by himself, but often walks in rectilinear patterns, such as before the judge while arguing in court, emitting spontaneous popping sounds, and taking little hops into the air. Both men have been bullied at various times in their lives, and are so in the present.

As his series opens, Monk is an ex-detective for the San Francisco police who now works as a consultant for the police force and occasionally takes other clients. While he was on the police force his wife, Trudy, was murdered by a car bomb. As a result Monk lost his job and refused to leave the house for several years. But his nurse, Sharona, is finally able to coax him out and he begins work as a consultant. He dreams of being reinstated on the police force and is haunted by his wife’s death, working on and off to solve her murder.

His apartment is extremely neat and orderly, although he keeps the coffee table in his living room at an oblique angle like it was when he found out about his wife’s death. He wears the same outfit every day, insists on drinking only his favorite brand of bottled water (the name of which escapes me at the moment), touches lamp posts, telephone poles, parking meters, whatever, as he is walking along, and on and on. He’s afraid of heights, which is common enough, no? But what about “milk, ladybugs, harmonicas, heights, asymmetry, enclosed spaces, foods touching on his plate, messes, and risk” (from the Wikipedia article)?

At the same time he has superior powers of observation, a mind for detail, a sense of pattern, and superior deductive and reasoning skills. This man who is himself so disordered, while insisting on maintaining an idiosyncratic sense of order, is able so, analyze, and describe patterns in events that elude others. When he’s on the crime scene he wanders slowly and apparently randomly around, his torse often at an angle, his arms moving around, almost as he is conducting an orchestra, with his hands open and his fingers spread wide. It’s as though he becomes and antenna absorbing the vibes lingering at the scene after the crime’s been committed. He’s a brilliant detective whom the San Francisco police force consults on particularly baffling murder cases and on high-profile cases. Only Monk can do the job.

Brilliant and weird. His weirdness makes it difficult to work with others and yet, paradoxically, is a necessary condition for his doing so. Why? Because people are frightened and put off by his brilliance. His plethora of oddities is the beard he must wear to be a functioning member of society.

Adrian Monk is not the only such character in fiction. There are many. Sherlock was a brilliant detective, but also a bachelor (with an unhappy love affair in his past), a loner, who scraped away on the violin while thinking and who was probably addicted to cocaine as well. Moving out of the detective genre and returning to the present, we have Commander Spock of Star Trek, a brilliant alien who can communicate telepathically with others, of various species – the famous Vulcan mind-meld, but who has to keep his emotions rigorously suppressed. He was succeeded by Commander Data, a brilliant android, who was constantly wondering what emotion is. And then we have Abe Maisel, Midge Maisel’s father. He’s a brilliant mathematician – though not so brilliant as he imagines himself to be – who is rigid in his routines, demanding, and obtuse. While not pathologically weird like Adrian Monk, he nonetheless is a representative of the type. And, wouldn’t you know, Tony Shalhoub played both characters.

The world of fiction is littered with such characters. ChatGPT, itself the oddest of odd ducks, has kindly listed various types of such characters – I dread to think what it would have done if I’d asked it to name and characterize examples of each time. How many examples could it have given me?

Jerry Espenson is another example of the type, an individual so brilliant that others are reluctant to work with him, but will do so because he is also beset by oddities for which they ridicule him behind his back, though sometimes to his face. He’s not a primary character in Boston Legal. He didn’t appear until episode ten of the second season, when the litigation department was working on a case requiring his expertise. So Denny Crane, one of the firm’s founders (played by William Shatner) says that should call in “Hands.” That’s Espenson’s nick name, referring to his habit of walking rigidly erect and taking small rapid stripes while his hands are pressed firmly to his thighs.

I have the impression that there was no intention to use him as a regular character in the show. But he had become one by the third season and remained so through the end, in season five. He becomes good friends with Alan Shore, who had been a central character from the show’s beginning. Shore had his own kind of brilliance, particularly in delivering long, sometimes convoluted, but always effective summary arguments in court. And, while he was a compulsive womanizer, he had no off-putting oddities.

In one set of episodes Jerry dated a woman with Asperger’s. She dumped him for, I believe, a clock radio. Objectophilia it’s called – look it up (I wonder what the Chatster would say). In another set of episodes Alan introduces him to a sex therapist who tries to get him used to physical closeness – not sex, just touching and holding. Alas, they were raided by cops. After a bit of therapy of some kind or another Jerry adopts a wooden cigarette as a prop. Once he stuck it in his mouth, he undergoes an instant transformation into an obnoxious fast-talking wise guy. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. If, for example, his friend Alan takes the cigarette out of his mouth, the wise guys disappears and shy involuted Jerry reappears.

And, yet, by the end of the series Jerry has begun dating an attractive young associate at the firm. [See my earlier post on Boston Legal.] Who knows what the future brings?

For them we’ll never know. The series is over. More generally, though, we’re going to see more such characters in our fictions. They are one aspect of what I have begun calling an ideology of intellect. To repeat myself from an earlier post, the term "ideology" is generally used in the context of political or social believes, e.g. Marxist ideology, that's not (quite) how I'm using it here. Here I mean a fixed set of beliefs and ideas that are more or less impervious to contrary evidence. In the case of the ideology of intellect this means, among other things, the reification of intelligence and, in particular, the reification of IQ as intelligence itself, rather than being simply a measure of cognitive capacities. In the case of characters such as Adrian Monk and Jerry Espenson, superior intelligence is treated as a disability originating in the mind and expressing itself, both in brilliant arguments and assertions, but also corporeally in acongeries of compulsions, ticks, syndromes, and phobias.

It is as though the body is unable to contain the force of that inner brilliance and, in consequence, expresses it in movements that warn others of the brilliance within while at the same time protecting them from it. They are assured that, as long as they keep their distance, they will not themselves be afflicted by that awful power. 

* * * * *

ADDENDUM: This just came to me and I haven’t had time to think it through. Is it also, perhaps (and above all else?), a protest against the Cartesian dualism that separates mind from body?  The brilliant mind and warped body are one and the same.

Boston Legal – Denny Crane! [Media Notes 94]

I’ve just finished watching the series, which had five seasons that ran from 2004-2008. It’s a one-hour legal show with dramatic and comedic aspects and a touch of surrealism. It’s basically an ensemble series with a shifting cast, and with three members of the ensemble predominating: James Spader as Alan Shore, William Shatner as Denny Crane, and Candice Bergen as Shirley Schmidt. Crane and Schmidt are name partners in the distinguished firm of Crane, Poole, and Schmidt. Poole shows up on screen perhaps a half-dozen or times in the whole series, but is otherwise off-screen in a mental institution.

My favorite little bit about the show is Shatner’s suits. This is, after all, a high-class law film, so all the male lawyers wear suits. But Denny Crane’s are a cut above the rest, richer and more interesting fabric. Lots of the guys wear pin stripes and so did Denny, but he may have been the only one with chalk stripes. Luscious! And the ties. Most of the guys wore ties with narrow diagonal strips or small figures and patterns. Denny had some of those, but he also had wider stripes, mid-size polka & even largish dots, and richer textures. More interesting shirts, the only one wearing those shirts with white collars and cuffs – called a Winchester – against a colored or patterned fabric. If I were a rich man, I’d dress like Denny Crane. I wonder if Shatner got to keep any of those suits for his personal wardrobe?

The series ends – spoiler alert! – with a double wedding: Denny Crane and Alan Shore, Shirley Schmidt and Carl Sack. Crane and Shore have been with us for the whole run, from the first episode and in every consequent episode. Shirley Schmidt arrives halfway through the first season and is in most, if not all (I don’t recall), subsequent episodes, though not quite as prominently as the first two. Sack doesn’t arrive until the beginning of the fourth season and is a featured player from there to the end. For the sake of a not very rigorous argument let’s casually assume that these two weddings more or less define the show.

First, Shirley and Carl. Carl is Jewish and Shirley is Catholic, which didn’t signify much of anything until the very last episode when it occasioned arguments between them that almost scuttled the wedding – don’t ask why, it’s silly and complicated. That’s not all. Shirley and Denny were founders of the firm and had had a hot romance back in the day, but never got married to one another. Both went on to have multiple marriages. But Denny spent the whole series mooning over and hitting on Shirley now and then. He even had a life-size Shirley doll which he kept in a closet in his office, decked out in a wedding dress in the last episode when, in his confusion, he sometimes thought he was the one marrying Shirley. But he wasn’t, he was marrying Alan.

See what I mean, surrealistic?

Denny was in his early 70s when the series began and was having mental slips. His doctor said he had precursors to Alzheimer’s. As a protective gesture Denny referred to it as “mad cow,” which became a running motif in the show. There was even a late show involving mad cow and the beef industry. So, Denny’s got the mad cow and is always lamenting that he’s no longer the macher (not a word he’d use) he’d been in days gone by. He's also erratic, which brings a bit of disarray to the litigation department. So Alan Sacks was brought in from the firm’s New York office to tighten things up. He gets off to a rocky start. Not the least because that turns out to have been a cover to get him to Boston so he and Shirley and spark and spoon, which doesn’t please Denny at all.

As for Denny, Alan Shore is his best buddy and a generation younger (early 40s). They are opposites in important ways. Denny is a staunch conservative Republic. Alan is a passionate liberal Democrat. Alan doesn’t believe in abortion, Denny does. Alan gives long, ornate, convoluted, and successful closing arguments. Denny sometimes has trouble stringing a half-dozen words together, often uttering “Denny Crane” as though it were a magic incantation.

Nor does Alan approve of guns. Denny loves them. Has one or more on his person at all times, but no carry permit. At one point he produced a half-dozen while being booked. Sometimes the gun is only a paint gun, which he shoots off, several times. But sometimes the gun is real. He also shoots people with that, but manages to stay out of jail. Again, the surrealistic intrudes. Both end up joining the Coast Guard Reserve; I forget just why.

Both are compulsive womanizers. I don’t believe Alan has ever been married, or perhaps he was, once, but he’s had series affairs. Has one during the show. But also hits on woman and woman. The mad sex scrum in an elevator or on his desk is a running gag. As is the sight of Denny grabbing a woman’s buttock as he hugs her. Lots of that. At one point he marries a woman. The marriage falls apart almost instantly. Why? Because Denny has sex with a bride’s maid in the coat-check room, which is how he’d met the woman he just married.

See, the surreal touch. Or is it mere farce? Whatever.

Both love scotch and cigars. How often do you see men smoke cigars on TV? Well over half the episodes of Boston Legal end with Alan and Denny seated side-by-side on the balcony outside Denny’s office high above Boston. They’re smoking and drinking and talking about things, musing on the meaning of it all. They are obviously deeply attached to one another.

And so it is only fitting that they get married, as same-sex marriage is legal in Massachusetts. By this time Denny’s mad cow had progressed to early-stage Alzheimer’s and he was worried, deeply worried. Who would take care of him when the disease got really bad? Who would see that he died a decent death? What would happen with his money? And so he proposed to Alan that they get married. Alan turned him down initially, but Denny persisted and Alan agreed.

And so they got into Denny’s Gulfstream along with Shirley, Carl and judge and flew to Denny’s favorite resort, Nimmo Bay, Alaska, to get married. And, wouldn’t you know, there was Justice Antonin Scalia, who’d just arrived on vacation. Alan and Denny had just been arguing before the Supreme Court earlier that day! They got Scalia to perform the double ceremony. The couples danced and then ... back to Boston, back to Alan and Denny with cigars and scotch on the balcony.

Now, as I said, it’s an ensemble show. There are lots of other interesting characters in the show, not to mention the wide variety of legal issues taken up. But this is enough for a simple little blog post.

The End

Postlude, an hour later.

What? This is a legal show! What about the legal issues, the cases argued? Shouldn’t I say something about them.

Well, I suppose I should, but the idea hadn’t even occurred to me until after I’d posted the above material. That’s what interested me.

How could I possibly cover the legal issues, and their entanglement in moral and political issues, in a relatively short blog post? What do I do, there are so many. Each show had at least two, if not three, cases, and some of them were absurd on the face of it. There were 101 episodes, implying 250+ cases. How would I pick three of them. I suppose I could do that, but this is just a blog post, and a bright and breezy one at that.

If I were to write about one more thing it would be about Jerry “Hands” Espenson, a lawyer who showed up a third of the way into season two and was so liked that he became a regular member of the cast. Why him? Because he was on the Asberger’s spectrum and his behavior sometimes seemed dominated by ticks and compulsions. The way the show treated him was interesting and worthy of comment. But I digress.

What I wrote above is what came to mind when I decided to do a blog post. Think of it as the matrix in which all these legal, moral, and political issues are presented to us. THAT’s worth thinking about. 

Really The End

Hot Ones [Media Notes 90] {We are one in wings.}

A recent article by Maya Salam in The New York Times alerted me to the show:

“Hot Ones” — a breakthrough pop-culture phenomenon in which stars eat 10 progressively fiery wings (or, increasingly, a vegan substitute) while being asked 10 deeply researched questions — has built itself into an online pillar, holding steady amid the shifting tides of digital media.

Since 2015, First We Feast, the food culture site that produces “Hot Ones,” has aired nearly 300 episodes, almost all of which have amassed millions of views. Guests this season, its 20th, include Pedro Pascal, Bryan Cranston, Jenna Ortega and Florence Pugh. In the early days of the show, guests were mostly rappers, comedians and athletes. Now Oscar winners like Viola Davis and Cate Blanchett often occupy the hot seat, as do headliners like Dave Grohl and Lizzo. The two most watched episodes, with Gordon Ramsay and Billie Eilish, both in 2019, have a combined 165 million views. The astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson popped in to discuss our place in the universe, and its place in us.

Evans uses his affable, unassuming approach to his advantage, with his deep-cut questions disarming guests, as the wings set them ablaze. Often visibly suffering, the guests are swiftly won over by Evans’s knowledge of their careers and his uncanny ability to keep conversations on track, even when they come dangerously close to going sideways.

So I decided to watch an episode or three. It seemed familiar. I’d probably watched an episode or two at some time in the past and forgot about them. FWIW, here’s two of the episodes I’ve just watched:

What’s the appeal? The people, host and guest, of course, it’s always the people. But it’s also the situation.

The host and the guest share a meal, a feast. But a peculiar feast, an array of chicken wings eaten in order according to the intensity of the hot sauce on each. They start by eating mild wings and work their way to hotter and hotter wings. Thus the shared meal becomes something of an ordeal, a trial by fire.

But the focus is always on the guest. We hear their comments on the wings and sauce, see them chug water or mild, see them wipe tears from their eyes, and so forth. All this time the host, Sean Evans, seems calm as he asks questions.

It's an engagingly egalitarian ritual. The host and the guest are on the same level. Both eat the wings. It is quite easy for those watching to identify with them through the ritual of eating those wings. Who among us has not eaten Buffalo wings? Heck, I remember eating them at Frank and Teressa’s Anchor Bar in Buffalo, where Buffalo wings originated. So, you watch and wonder: Could I handle those wings? And those? Yeah, sure, there’s that Klingon ritual with the pain sticks. The Klingons can have that one. But Buffalo wings? Bring ‘em on!

Cunk on Earth [Media Notes 89]

Think about the title for a moment, Cunk on Earth. “Cunk” – is that a person’s name, an interrogative, a noun, or what?

I suppose we’re dealing with a mockumentary aimed at those sweeping BBC series that give us the wondrous scoop on everything. It’s deeply ironic without, without being – and this is the peculiar part – without, it seems to be, being parodic. I goes beyond parody to something else. Whatever else it is, Philomena Cunk, played by Diane Morgan, is giving it to us deadpan straight.

I’ve just watched the second episode, which opens with Philomena strolling around Rome and telling us:

The time is half past Rome o’clock B.C.
The Romanite Empire is at its most biggest.
But despite the fancy columns and mosaics,
there was an emptiness at the heart of Roman culture.
Holding endless wine-fueled orgies
in cramped vomitoriums is all very well.
But eventually you need something more.
And also a mop.
Humans craved enlightenment.
To find it, they’d need
a spiritual role model, and icon,
an almost Christ-like figure.

At this point we know what’s coming, but don’t anticipate the little twist with which it comes:

And as luck would have it,
someone fitting that bill was about to arrive.
None other than Mr. Jesus Christ.

I suppose they could have had an “H” in there, but that would have been overkill. The “Mr.” is far more effective.

The whole thing is like that, though at times far zanier. Moreover it would seem that the “experts” Philomena Cunk interviews are, in fact that, experts. Each has their own way of getting along with it, whatever it is. For example (quoting from the NYTimes):

On her BBC show investigating the history of humanity, Philomena Cunk interviews Martin Kemp, a professor at the University of Oxford, about the Renaissance period.

“Which was more culturally significant, the Renaissance or ‘Single Ladies’ by Beyoncé?” she asks the academic with all seriousness.

Kemp pauses before patiently answering. The Renaissance was trying to reform culture as a whole, he says, and “whatever Beyoncé does, I don’t think she’s quite got that ambition.”

Cunk responds with bewilderment: “So what, the work of a few straight white men just blows Beyoncé out of the water?”

I’d say I can’t wait for the third episode. Nor do I have to since all of them are available on Netflix. But why binge my way through this in a single sitting? Better to savor it over successive evenings.

Remington Steele [Media Notes 83]

I remember when I say GoldenEye in 1995. “Hey! That’s Remington Steele,” said I to myself. For Pierce Brosnan had first become known for playing the front man in 1982-1987 TV steries of that name, Remington Steele. So, when it recently became available on Amazon, I decided to watch it. It's pleasant enough.

The first thing I asked myself was whether or not it was on TV at the same time The Rockford Files was. No, it wasn’t. The Rockford Files ran from 1976 to 1980. But why would I even associate the two programs, they’re very different, no? Yes. And in a way that’s why I associated them. In any event, they’re in pretty much the same decade, one at the beginning and the other at the end.

Part of the charm – if that’s the word – of the The Rockford Files is that Jim Rockford was a down-to-earth unpretentious guy who took his licks, was something of a con man, and was buddies with Angel Martin. Nothing upscale about it. While Remington Steele is very upscale, swanky offices, tailored suits, and upscale clients. They were opposites, and you know what they say about opposites. They attract.

And there’s this, Remington Steele isn’t Remington Steele. The agency is Laura Holt’s. She’s played by Stephanie Zimbalist, who delivers these words in voice-over at the beginning of each show:

Try this for a deep, dark secret – The great detective Remington Steele? He doesn’t exist. I invented him. Follow – I always like excitement. So I studied and apprenticed and put my name on an office. But absolutely nobody knocked down my door. A female private investigator seemed do... feminine.

So I invented a superior. A decidedly masculine superior. Suddenly, there were cases around the block. It was working like a charm. Until the day he walked in... with his blue eyes and mysterious past. And before I knew it he assumed Remington Steele’s identity.

Now I do the work, and he takes the bows. It’s a dangerous way to live, but as long as people buy it, I can get the job done. We never mix business with pleasure. Well, almost never.

I don’t even know his real name.

I don’t know whether or not Steele’s, I mean Brosnan’s, real identity is revealed by the end of the show. I’m only about ten episodes into the first season.

I keep thinking about those words. There’s something a little “off” in that penultimate paragraph, and some of that is in the way Zimbalist delivers the lines. Yes, they’re flirtatious, and so is the show. Do they ever, you know, “do it”? I don’t recall, but they haven’t so far.

What those lines do is to precisely mix business with pleasure, however it is that you’re going to define those terms. Although this is a bit of an exaggeration, it’s as though the detective story was cooked up as a pretext for Brosnan and Zimbalist to flirt. If they didn’t have to solve a crime each week they’d be in bed having a grand time. Work becomes a defense against sexual pleasure.

How very American.

Maybe that’s the connection with Rockford. Rockford pals around with his dad and with Angel, even with Dennis Becker. That’s the grease that keeps the show moving along. Oh, every now and then there is a woman – a pretty serious affair with a blind psychiatrist in one of the later seasons – and every now and then he flirted a bit with Beth Davenport, his lawyer in the first two or three seasons. But whatever the show is about, it’s not flirting with sexuality. Remington Steele is. When The Rockford Files is about sex, it’s pretty straight forward about it.

Cid Caesar on Jazz [A blast from the past]

The music on Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood was good jazz [Media Notes 79]

Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood was a children’s TV program that ran from 1968 to 2001. Thus my own childhood was well behind me by the time it got started. But I certainly knew about it. Other shows would occasionally reference it and I’d see part of an episode now and then on PBS. But, for whatever reason, I didn’t pick up on the fact that the music was more sophisticated than what you’d expect for children’s programming. It was uncompromising jazz played live by pianist Johnny Costa and a small ensemble. From the Wikipedia article about Costa:

Costa served as musical director, arranger, and keyboardist for the children's television series Mister Rogers' Neighborhood from the show's debut in 1968 until his death in 1996. The show's creator and host, Fred Rogers, regarded Costa as one of the most gifted musicians he had ever met. Rogers' choice was surprising because Costa's style was regarded as too complicated and sophisticated for a children's show. Costa accepted the job without hesitation because it wouldn't require him to travel away from Pittsburgh, and because Rogers offered him the same amount he needed to pay his son's college tuition ($5,000). Although Mister Rogers' Neighborhood was a children's show, Costa made it a point not to play "baby" music. He believed children understood good music[3] and that he could experiment with his own musical styles and techniques, even for a kids' show. Each day, Costa and his trio (Carl McVicker Jr. on bass, Bobby Rawsthorne on percussion) played live in the studio for the filming.

I learned about Costa from two YouTube videos that came across my feed on Tuesday, August 30. Here they are:

Star Trek: Picard, Discovery, Strange New Worlds [Media Notes 73]

I’ve watched the first season of Star Trek: Picard, and bunch of episodes from the first season of Star Trek: Discovery, and two episodes from Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. I like SNW the best of the three, but don’t know how many more episodes I’ll get to at the moment. I’m in an UP phrase in me yearly creative cycle and so have much less time to spend on binge watching.

Picard, well, you know, Patrick Stewart seems just too old to go galivanting around the universe like that. I know, the man’s less than a decade older than I am and, except for the body, I feel young enough. But still... And maybe it’s the baggage it pulls from TNG and whatever else. Things feel too intricate for whatever it is that’s actually going on.

Discovery: I don’t like the design of the Klingons and their spaceships. Too glittery and intricate. It’s like all of a sudden they really are from a different (imaginative) universe. And I wish they’d speak English like the Klingons of old, except for the occasional burst of opera.

Strange New Worlds: Like Discovery, it’s set before the Original Series. And yet somehow it feels more like a fresh start, like they decided to do a new Star Trek with new special effects but without the burden of all the Treks that have gone before. But, if “hit it!” is going to be Pike’s catch phrase, that’s pretty lame, but it doesn’t seem to be contextualized and delivered with the sort of irony that says: “We know it’s lame. That’s the point. Aren’t they all?”

Leroy Jethro Gibbs – Beyond the edge (#NCIS) [Media Notes 64]

Leroy Jethro Gibbs is the central character of NCIS, one of the longest running and most popular shows on network TV. It premiered in 2003, has just completed its 19th season. Gibbs is a Supervisory Special Agent and a former Marine sniper. He’s highly respected by his superiors and subordinates and seems to be almost legendary, at least in certain circles. I’m interested in three aspects of his characterization, that “point beyond the edge.”

What do I mean by that? That will emerge as we examine them: the mysterious woman, the boats in the basement, and Gibbs’ rules.

The Mysterious Woman

At the end of the first episode, as Gibbs is standing around, a woman pulls up in a silver Mercedes convertible. Gibbs gets into the car and they drive off. No one remarks about it, then or later. This happens throughout the first and second seasons and into the third. We never learn who she is.

What’s up?

We assume, more or less by default, that they have a sexual relationship. But we don’t actually know that. That she’s a redhead is one thing; we learn in the course of things that Gibbs likes redheads. That’s it.

That she’s in a Mercedes indicates that she’s got money. The Mercedes convertible is also a bit exotic. It’s a bit of a James Bond touch, though admittedly Bond favored sportier vehicles. But Gibbs is not a Bond kind of guy. Yes, they’re in the similar businesses, but Bond is a cosmopolitan urban sophisticate who favors bespoke suits while Gibbs is more mundane. We’ll eventually learn that he from a small coal-mining town in Pennsylvania. Bond jets all over the world while Gibbs stays mostly in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan region, though he does travel to Mexico, Arizona, the Middle East, North Africa, and Afghanistan as required. He does not don a Tuxedo to gamble in clubs peopled by wealthy folks and Eurotrash. It's almost as though that woman-in-the-Mercedes serves to tells that the Bond world exists, but this is not that. It is something else.

A blogger writing as hessd as an interesting take on this motif. That Gibbs is pursued by a wealthy woman establishes his sexual attractiveness without encumbering him with a relationship that might interfere with his job. As the show moves on he has affairs with other woman, an army colonel, a psychiatrist, a lawyer, and others, but nothing that becomes permanent.

Gibbs is offered as some kind of prototype of ideal masculinity, as is the somewhat different James Bond. As such, he has to be sexually attractive and active. This motif is a way of achieving that. But it only lasted into the third season. On the one hand it’s not the sort of they could have gone on forever. One the other hand, things did change in the third season. NCIS got a new director, an attractive redhead names Jenny Shepard. We learn that in the past Gibbs and Shepard we agents together and had had a torrid affair. Every so often we’d get flashbacks to that affair, but, in the present, their relationship we professional and free of sexual complication. After two or three seasons – I forget exactly – Shepard is killed and the show comes up with other women to keep us aware of Gibbs’ sexual heat.

The boat in the basement

I don’t know when we first went down into Gibbs’ basement, but I assume it was relatively early in the first season. There we see an upturned hull of a sailing vessel supported on sawhorses. At first it’s just the keel and ribs, but in time planking is added. How is he ever going to get it out of the basement? It’s much too large to go up the steps.

Every so often someone will ask Gibbs about that. He just smiles and shrugs it off. It’s a mystery.

Gibbs goes down there to think while he works on the boat, generally sanding or planning. He pours some bourbon into a mug, offering his visitor the same. And they talk, about the case, or perhaps about life. Whatever.

Though Gibbs is working for the navy, albeit in a civilian capacity, he shows no particular interest in the sea or sailing. Sometime a case will take him aboard a ship, but we never see in sailing about in the kind of boat he’s building.

At some point the first hull disappears, without comment, to be replaced by another somewhat different hull, one for a small motor launch. Then the boats disappear entirely and Gibbs builds other stuff.

What’s up?

Whatever else is going on, this is a device for displaying Gibbs’ love of craftsmanship and carpentry. He does it for the activity itself, not to achieve some practical end, though occasionally he will build something for a specific purpose, such as the ornamented coffin he built for his friend, colleague, and mentor Mike Franks. Some people meditate; Gibbs crafts boats, coffins, and other things.

I suppose woodworking also contrasts with the high-tech world of crime fighting, from the cell phones (which Gibbs hates), to the computers, to the lab equipment. Agent McGee is an MIT graduate with excellent computer skills and Abby Sciuto handles all the laboratory instrumentation. But Gibbs is an old-fashioned guy who likes woodworking with hand tools.

Gibbs’ rules

And then we have Gibbs’ rules, a running motif in the show. If you do a search on “Gibb’s rules” you’ll get multiple hits, like this one. Some of them seem specific to the job – Never Let Suspects Stay Together, Never Get Personally Involved on a Case – others are more general – You Don't Waste Good, Never accept an apology from someone who has just sucker punched you. There doesn’t seem to be any particularly logical order to them. It’s a more or less arbitrary list.

Apparently #91 is the highest number mentioned so far: When you decide to walk away, don't look back. But there are many numbers without rules attached to them, e.g., 17, 19, 21, 24, 25, etc. Only 35 rules have been mentioned so far. (I’ve only watched the 15 seasons available on Netflix, so I’ve not encountered all that have been revealed.)

Gibbs’s agents are supposed to learn the rules. Every once in a while you’ll see one of them write one down. Occasionally someone, not necessarily Gibbs, will mention a rule by number only.

I suppose the central point is that these are Gibbs’s rules. No one else gets to have them. They establish the world as his world. The fact that they don’t exist in any logical order or structure, yet they are numbered, suggest they radically open-ended nature of this world. It is not logical and orderly – it is, after all, a world structured by crime, terrorism, and war.

* * * * *

Addendum, 1.8.22: In S16, E13, “She,” near the end, Gibbs opens a small file box where he apparently keeps slips of paper with his rules on. He takes out the slip for rule 10, Never Get Personally Involved on a Case, and tosses it in the fire (in his fireplace). This is in response reading Ziva David’s old personal notes about a case that then team had just solved. It seems that Ziva had kept a private office which she rented in a small building and kept personal notes on every case she’d worked on.

What have we got?

Any fictional world is going to imply things that we do not see actually happening. But these three motifs – the mysterious woman, the boat in the basement, Gibbs’ rules – serve explicitly to point beyond what we see on screen. Though I’ve not thought this through, nothing else in NCIS works like this, nor have I seen anything quite like it in any other show I’ve watched. Of course, there any many shows I haven’t watched. Any or several of them do this sort of thing, I wouldn’t be surprised. But I’d be curious.

I wonder what role, if any, these motifs play in the show’s popularity. More likely, they tell us something about the show that is central to its appeal. What?

The Chair (How many women were on the faculty of the English Department at Johns Hopkins at the time of the structuralism conference?) [Media Notes 62]

Having watched The Chair in a single sitting, I suppose I should say something. But I don’t have much to say. For one thing, I haven’t been in a classroom in 35 years, so I have little way to gauge student activism beyond what I see reported here and there. I did read an interesting series of discussions of the program in The Chronicle of Higher Education; the discussants are all current academics. Someone remarked that, whatever its deficiencies as a representation of campus life and politics, it does seem to be a reasonable depicture of public anxieties about higher education – a reasonable remark.

Some quick remarks

Beyond those preliminaries:

1. It was better than I’d expected. A low bar, I suppose, but worth something.

2. Having been at three schools that started in the 19th century (Johns Hopkins, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, State University of New York at Buffalo; see a link in Further readings) I recognize the architecture, especially the paneled rooms.

3. It was unfortunate to see old male faculty depicted as doddering incompetents, but then, as a 73 year old, I’m biased. I was no more pleased to see that self-involved jack-ass of a middle-aged “star”, as I have little love for academic stardom. Are they really that ridiculous? Perhaps so, see my working papers on Avital Ronell and Houston A. Baker, Jr. But the guy was good with the Ju Ju (daughter of Ji-Yoon Kim, the titular chair) and that’s something.

4. The student protest seemed way too superficial to me, even allowing for my skepticism about so-called cancel culture. The discussants at The Chronicle seem to agree on that.

5. Research had very little presence in the series. But then how do you dramatize an activity that takes place mostly in the mind and on paper? Criminal forensics, from Sherlock Holmes to the various CSI-type shows, seems to be the primary fictional vehicle for depicting abstract thought. Oh, and there’s the mad scientist.

Dan Everett on University Life

The linguist Daniel Everett has been department chair, dean, and acting provost. He’s made some remarks at Facebook about academic life.

Composition of the faculty

The gender composition of the faculty was one of the show’s central issues. Though I didn’t count, the English Department appeared to have about a dozen members, only three of which were women. Two of those were people of color, one East Asian (Korean) and one African-American.

As I will explain shortly, that proportion is higher than what I experienced at Johns Hopkins, but I believe that things have improved since then. Still, one in four seems low. As I said, though, I haven’t been on campus in years and I don’t follow statistics on these things.

But, to answer the question in my title, the English Department at Johns Hopkins had about 15 members in the mid-1960s; none of them were women. As far as I know, the entire faculty at Johns Hopkins had only five women, and I took courses with three of them. In particular, I took an introduction to developmental psychology and did an independent study with Mary Ainsworth. She is one of the founders of attachment theory and that was the topic of my independant study. The undergraduate student body was still all male, though there were women as graduate students. Women were admitted to the undergraduate school in 1970. Male faculty would openly date female graduate students. I know of two marriages resulting from such dating.

As for POC on the faculty, I'm sure the math department had at least one man of East Asian descent, Jun-ichi Igusa; a roommate of mine studied algebra with him. The philosophy department had a young guy named Edward Lee; I took two courses with him. I don't believe there were any African-Americans on the faculty. One joined the undergraduate student body in, I believe, 1969. The Humanities Center brought in Frank Moorer as a graduate student in the early 1970s; he remains there on the faculty.

And then there's the English Department at SUNY Buffalo, where I got my PhD (73-78). It was a large department, 70+. I can think of women who were on the faculty when I arrived, Diane Christian (who'd been a graduate student at Hopkins), and Mili Clark (a medievalist). One woman was hired while I was there, Claire Kahane. There were no African-Americans on the faculty (nor do I remember any graduate students, but there were many of us and I certainly didn’t know them all), but both Ishmael Reed and Chip Delany held visiting appointments during that era, though not when I was there. Male faculty openly dated female graduate students.

I had my first and only faculty post at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, an engineering school. I was in the Department of Language, Literature, and Communication (LL&C), which encompassed English literature, composition and technical writing, French and German languages, and communication (as a social science discipline). The faculty had, perhaps, 20 or so members. There was one woman when I arrived in the fall of 1978. Three were hired while I was there; I believe one of them replaced another, and then she left as well. There were no people of color. There were women in both the undergraduate and graduate student bodies. I was unaware of any male faculty dating female graduate students in the department.

Further commentary on the academy

Old School: Torpor and Stupor at Johns Hopkins, 3 Quarks Daily, Nov, 13, 2017, https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2017/11/old-school-torpor-and-stupor-at-johns-hopkins.html. This is about the literary society at Johns Hopkins.

“It got adults off your back” • Richard Macksey remembered (2019), 7 pp., https://www.academia.edu/40040691/_It_got_adults_off_your_back_Richard_Macksey_remembered. This is about a highly regarded humanist at Johns Hopkins who was very important to me.

The Hunt for Genius, Part 5: Three Elite Schools [RIP #RichardAMacksey], July 23, 2019, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-hunt-for-genius-part-5-three-elite.html?fbclid=IwAR0BnJkdB69TmaQ0Kt6kI0qswPkyEnW0dq_1K-KZYhocpwqTAJk2LYXy92Y. Quick sketches of the three schools I went to, Johns Hopkins, SUNY Buffalo, and RPI.

Billions (the TV show) and game theory

Trump's cybernetic circle: Twitter and television

Maggie Haberman, Stripped of Twitter, Trump Faces a New Challenge: How to Command Attention, NYTimes, Jan. 10, 2021:

In some way, television became the medium through which he could watch the effects of his tweets.

The television in his alcove dining room off the Oval Office was usually on in the background, catnip for his short attention span. He consumed much of his information through it and watched the coverage of his tweets.

Mr. Trump’s White House aides said he loved tweeting and then watching the chyrons on cable news channels quickly change in response. For a septuagenarian whose closest allies and aides say often exhibits the emotional development of a preteen, and for whom attention has been a narcotic, the instant gratification of his tweets was hard to match.

I analyzed the relationship between Trump's tweeting and his television viewing in a blog post from 2018: Trumposaurus Rex @ 3QD – Toward a cybernetic interpretation, which is part of a working paper on Trump, Trump Works the Presidency: Imperial Boss and Cyborg Operator.

Seinfeld likes the Marx Brothers [so do I]

The NYTimes just ran a piece where Jerry Seinfeld talks about his current reading: “So the book that’s on my stand right now that I’m really, really enjoying is called Four of the Three Musketeers, by Robert Bader, and it’s a very, very long, detailed history of the Marx Brothers.” He goes on to remark:

This Bader — it’s a ridiculous book. I don’t know what this guy was thinking, that he would spend this much time and do this much work on the Marx Brothers. This is not an old book, it’s from like 2016. But he did the most incredible job of research. And he’s also a very good writer. And you know, to me, the history of the Marx Brothers is kind of the invention of comedy, not just as a substance but as a business. And also, if I can put this the right way: They emerged as Jews in New York City, just kind of coming out and going, “By the way, we’re better at this than anybody.” And ever since then you can trace — I mean, you can trace comedy obviously back to the Greeks — but in terms of what you see now, in the world, the Tigris and Euphrates to me is the Marx Brothers and vaudeville in the teens and early ’20s of the last century.

I share Seinfeld’s admiration and affection for the Marx Brothers. Years ago in my late teens I read an autobiography by Groucho, Groucho and Me I believe it was called, and one by Harpo, Harpo Speaks. Both of course talked about their early days in vaudeville, which I found fascinating. I remember that Harpo also talked about playing golf. Groucho may have talked about golf as well, but it’s Harpo I remember, in particular how, for whatever reason, he played a round in the nude.

I’d grown up watching Groucho on TV. He had a quiz show called “You Bet Your Life.” The quizzing wasn’t very serious – the money was peanuts. It was a vehicle for Groucho’s wit. My father loved the show. He loved language and Groucho was a master of word play, puns in particular. I associate the term “ad lib” with my father’s remarks about Groucho. It was only later that I’d associate the term with jazz performance.

Father also loved their movies, but I didn’t get to see any of them until I went to college. Seinfeld mentions their first film:

The first Marx Brothers movie was “The Cocoanuts,” which was originally a play that they did. And talkies had just happened, and a couple of years later Hollywood was looking around for anybody that could talk on film, and obviously grabbed the Marx Brothers. And so they made this movie. Nobody really knew how to make a movie; they just kind of shot the play, onstage. And the brothers hated it. They hated it so much, they wanted to buy it back so it wouldn’t be released. Then it was a gi-monster hit and it made a fortune. That’s so much fun to read, stuff like that. People do things and they hate them and the public

loves them, and then they have to change their thinking on it.

I’ve seen it, at least once in college, and probably once or twice on TV. I’ve also seen Horse Feathers, Duck Soup and A Night at the Opera (I own that on DVD). I’ve probably seen the others, but I don’t have specific memories. Aside from general antics, each film would have a set piece where Chico played the piano and Harpo played the Harp.

My favorite scene from the films is a one from Duck Soup where Groucho and Harpo mirror one another. Harpo is disguised as Groucho. The mirroring starts at 2:04, but you should watch from the beginning to get some idea of the context.

Groucho is in the foreground and Harpo is the mirror image. He gives the game away at c. 3:41 when he has the wrong hat behind him – it’s his standard “Harpo” hat. Chico joins them in a three-way question.

In response to a question, Seinfeld remarks that while he’d like to see the Marx Brothers adapted for TV or movies

But I don’t know if people would be interested. And you could never do it. You could never recreate these guys. Remember they did that Three Stooges movie? My manager, George Shapiro, says trying to get someone to act like a comedian is like trying to get them to act like a baseball player. It’s almost impossible. There’s so many tiny polished movements they have that the best actors struggle to replicate.

What about the effort it took for Groucho and Harpo to imitate one another?

Star Trek Deep Space Nine, Politics and Matter [Media Notes 52]

I’ve watched all of the Star Trek franchise except for the animated series and for the most recent ones: Discovery, Short Treks, Picard, and Lower Decks. I’m currently well into season six of a re-watch of Deep Space Nine, which is, for me, those most interesting of the Trek series I’ve watched.

This is a speculative post about the myth-logic (think of Lévi-Strauss) operating in the series and, in particular, is a query about the relationship between Odo and the political nature of DS9.

Unlike the others in the series, DS9 centers on a single world: the station, Deep Space Nine, Bajor, the planet it orbits, and the wormhole that is near them. The others all move from place to place in the galaxy. To be sure DS9 moves about as well and there are many episodes that aren’t on either the station or Bajor, but the station is the central locus. More or less, I believe, as a consequence DS9 was able to develop longer story arcs, with the final two seasons being an extended story about an inter-world battle between the various people and empires in the series. Thus the series had a more political focus, though the politics tended to be relatively simple power politics ultimately realized through armed combat.

The first two Trek series, the original series and Next Generation, featured a character dominated by intellect, Spock and Data respectively. Voyager had a similar character, the holographic doctor. DS9 lacks such a character. To be sure, Doctor Bashir was very intelligent as a consequence of genetic enhancement in childhood (something we didn’t learn about until, what? the fifth season), but he carried his intelligence differently than Spock or Data. For example, he didn’t long after humanity in the way Data did.

But DS9 does have Constable Odo, who is trying to figure who and what he is. What he is is a Changling, a creature who has no intrinsic for and is able to take on a variety of different forms, not only of other humanoids, but or animals and even inanimate objects. He is in some sense the opposite of Spock and Data. They are Mind, while he is Matter.

As the series moves along we learn that there are other Changlings; indeed, there is a planet of them. And those Changlings are, in some mysterious fashion, the heart of the Dominion, an empire located in the Gamma Quadrant on the far side of the wormhole. First we learn of the Jem’Hadar, drug-addicted warriors. Then we learn of the Vorta, who command the Jem’Hadar. And finally we learn of the Founders, who run the Dominion. These Founders are Changlings, like Odo. His relationship with them will turn out to be important in the dynamics of that war that dominates the final seasons of the series.

Here’s my query, as best I can formulate it: Within the scope of the myth logic operating in the franchise, what is the nature of the relationship between 1) the opposition between Odo (as Matter), on the one hand, and Spock, Data, and The Doctor (as Mind), on the other and 2) the episodic and relatively light politics in those three series, on the one hand, and the extended stories and political interactions of DS9, on the other hand? Is it one of mere contingency, or is there an element of necessity, or myth-logic in that relationship? I suspect that latter, but I don’t really know, nor am I prepared to argue it at this point.

Addendum: Think of Odo in relation to the emergence of Object-Oriented Ontology.

The Ranch [all in the family | Media Notes 51]

I started watching The Ranch when it first started streaming in 2018 and stuck with it for, say, a season and a half and dropped it for whatever reason. I got back to it a few weeks ago and am now well into the fourth and final season. As the title implies, it’s set on a small family-run ranch in Colorado. Willa Paskin noted in Slate:

The Ranch is a red-state sitcom, though it takes place in the swing state of Colorado, and is good enough to be watched by people of any political affiliation. The goodness sneaks up on you. It is a sitcom that is meatier than it is funny, unusually in touch with the painful, disappointing aspects of life. […] But The Ranch is sophisticated in pursuit of its audience, preferring to dignify the Bennetts’ hardscrabble circumstances than to raise anxiety by fixating on their precariousness.

That’s a fair assessment.

The ranch is run by patriarch, Beau Bennett (Sam Elliot) and his two sons, Colt (Ashton Kutcher) and Rooster (Danny Masterson), while Maggie Bennett (Debra Winger) runs a local bar. She’s estranged from, then divorces, her husband, Beau, but they maintain more or less cordial relations. Relations between Beau his two sons, Beau and Rooster, are at best problematic. While the individuals try hard, Bennetts are a dysfunctional family. In a way, the harder they try, the more dysfunctional they are.

There’s some good work to be done analyzing just how this family functions, but that’s more than I want to take on in this brief note. I note that Beau, Colt, and Rooster drink a lot and, as I already mentioned, Maggie runs a bar. Though she doesn’t have a drinking problem, she does like marijuana, as do others in the community. And at least one character, who becomes central in the later seasons, has a serious addiction problem. The show harbors no pretense that this rural community is a drug-free zone.

The show runs a continuous narrative, rather than a succession of half-hour episodes, and the Bennetts seems to live at the edge of financial disaster. So the plot has the feel of free-form improvisation; these people are just making things up as they go along. That’s one thing.

The other is that, because the Iron River Ranch is a family farm, family life and work life and intertwined. Much of the conflict within they family, especially between the three men, but not only them, is around and about roles in running the farm: Who is competent in what tasks and who has what rights and obligations? This dynamic is set off against the Neumann’s Hill ranching corporation, which plays a more prominent role in as the series moves on. Neumann’s Hill wants to dominate and buy up everything thing it can while the Bennetts want to remain free and independent. As the four season moves along – I’m only about half way through it – Neumann’s Hill seems to be winning.

These two issues, the lack of security and constancy in life, and the relationship between family and business life, seem to define the overall scope of this series. How do those issues speak to the American public? I don’t know. I’d really like to know the demographics of the audience. How will that audience be voting in this coming presidential election? There’s an obvious appeal to Trump’s America, but I’m not in Trump’s America and I like the show. Yet, it’s one thing for me to say that the show appeals to Trump’s America, but does it? I was right about NCIS, am I right about this?

I note that the show makes no reference to current presidential politics, so one can only guess at how, say, Beau Bennett voted in 2016 or how he’d vote in 2020. I’d like to think that, though he’s a gun-toting conservative and proud of it, he couldn’t stomach Trump. But he certainly couldn’t stomach Biden either. Perhaps he’d write in Reagan, which he’s done before.

The Boys: Superheroes for the Trump Era? [Media Notes 50]

Just watched the Netflix series, The Boys, which came out in 2019 and is based on a comic book from 2006-2008, about which I know nothing. Here’s the basic premise (Wikipedia):

The Boys is set in a universe where superpowered individuals are recognized as heroes by the general public and work for the powerful corporation Vought International, which markets and monetizes them. Outside of their heroic personas, most are arrogant and corrupt. The series primarily focuses on two groups: the Seven, Vought's premier superhero team, and the eponymous Boys, vigilantes looking to bring down Vought and its corrupt superheroes.

The Boys are led by Billy Butcher, who despises all superpowered people (whom he calls “Supes”) and the Seven are led by the narcissistic and violent Homelander. At the start of the series, the Boys are joined by Hughie Campbell after a member of the Seven accidentally kills his girlfriend, while the Seven are joined by Annie January, a young and hopeful heroine forced to face the truth about those she admires. Other members of the Seven include the disillusioned Queen Maeve, drug-addicted A-Train, insecure the Deep, the mysterious Black Noir, and narcissistic Homelander. The Boys are rounded out by tactical planner Mother's Milk, weapons specialist Frenchie, and superpowered test subject Kimiko. Overseeing the Seven is Vought executive Madelyn Stillwell, who is later succeeded by publicist Ashley Barrett.

That’s the general idea. We get quite a bit about the personal lives of, say, ten of the major characters, including, in a number of cases, tangled relationships with parents or parent surrogates.

But I wish I had a more extensive and fine-grained knowledge of superheroes against which to read this series. How original is the corporate premise? I know, from a movie or three, that the Avengers has some kind of corporate identity beyond merely teaming-up time and again. And, while they have their personal idiosyncrasies, they aren’t vain, self-serving, two-faced and corrupt in the way The Seven are. There’s nothing new about evil mega-corporations, of course, but the linkage between Vought and The Seven does seem new.

During the first episode or two I saw the possibility of turning such a series into a critique of the business to superhero films and comics, but nothing like that has appeared, nor did I expect it. Still, if you just cranked the right knob up to eleven, that’s where it would take the series.

The overall plot seems driven by three arcs: 1) Butcher’s desire for revenge, 2) some kind of interaction between Hughie and Annie, and 3) a drive toward, well, world domination by (some of) the Supes. It’s this last drive coupled with the need the Supes have for the adulation of the crowd that makes this seem particularly Trump-like. Since the series has been made during Trump’s presidency that seems possible, either through deliberate intent by the creators or simply by osmotic awareness of the current scene. How much of that is there in the comic books? All of it or only some of it?

Of course Trump did come not out of nowhere, even if his 2016 victory was unexpected and unforeseen. The cultural forces were there and those forces have certainly been alive in popular culture.

Above all I’m thinking about role superheroes in people’s imaginative lives. There is a need to make sense of the world to the extent – in time, space, and causal nexus – that we are aware of it. Superheroes, even or perhaps especially corrupt ones, are mediating figures in this process. In the first place they are concrete individuals, not abstract actors like corporations and governments. But these individuals are powerful enough that they can, as individuals, motivate the actions of corporations and governments. Moreover, as individuals, they have their merely personal stories, which we can identify with. In this series the story of Homelander in particular is filled with personal details, some of the sort that suggest or even require a psychoanalytic reading.

Finally, I note that the series has scenes of extravagant violence.

BTW, what is it with Fresca?

How TV gives an education about class in America [Media Notes 49]

Rob Henderson, Everything I Know About Elite America I Learned From ‘Fresh Prince’ and ‘West Wing’, NYTimes, Oct. 10, 2020.

A working class background:

I started off in what most people think of as America’s lower class. I was given up for adoption when I was 3; I spent the next four years in seven foster homes. When I was 7, I was adopted and subsequently settled in Red Bluff, Calif., a working-class town, population 13,147, median household income $27,029. Two years later, my adoptive parents got divorced; after that, my adoptive father severed ties.

When I was 15, I got my first job, as a dishwasher at a pizza restaurant, and on breaks, all my conversations with co-workers eventually turned to the topic of money. We would fantasize about what we would do if we suddenly had it: vacations, cars. In high school, we’d hear rumors that so-and-so was rich, because their parents had a second house or a boat. We all thought that money was the important thing: If you had it, you were “rich” — which for us was indistinguishable from “elite.” If you didn’t, you weren’t.

This was true, to an extent. But it wasn’t the whole story. How did I learn it wasn’t? From television.

Henderson goes on to tell us more about his life and then tells us about watching The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, where he learned that education was valued among the elite. What got my attention, though, were some remarks about The West Wing ("not very good"):

And though the show was not my favorite, I was fascinated by its characters. They were constantly engaged in debates about contentious social and political issues. One plotline I found particularly interesting was when President Bartlet’s deputy communications director, Sam Seaborn, loses a debate against a Republican woman named Ainsley Hayes. To her surprise, Hayes is subsequently offered a job in the Democratic administration; the president cites her “sense of civic duty.”

The more I watched, the more the characters reminded me of the Warrior-Scholar Project tutors. Characters like Josh Lyman and C.J. Cregg were educated at elite universities and, despite their flaws, tried to live up to their moral principles. They engaged in fierce debate with political foes, but respected them too. The characters who staffed the Bartlet administration were highly educated, extremely witty, clever and idealistic. It made me wonder: Was this show so popular among elite college graduates because they saw aspirational versions of themselves in it? And if this was how they aspired to be, was this also how I should aspire to be?

Why did he find it "particularly interesting"? I would imagine it's because in the world he grew up in you don't help your opponent, in this case a political opponent, especially when they've bested you in a contest. That reminds me of some remarks I made about Saturday Night Fever some years ago:

In 1977 John Travolta became a star by playing the lead role of Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever. Manero worked a nowhere job in Brooklyn and lived for the dance floor. That’s where he felt most alive, and most fully human. And that’s where he staked his identity. He was Tony Manero, king of the dance floor.

In the movie he sets out to win the dance contest at the local disco. A Hispanic couple danced better than he and his partner did, but he gets the prize anyhow. Why? He is well-known at this particular disco, he is Italian, and so are the folks who run the disco.

It was in inside job. It was corrupt.

Though winning seems to have meant everything to him, he rejects the prize because he feels he didn't deserve it. It turns out that his dedication to the craft of dancing means more to him than the prize. Until he lost this contest he didn’t know that.

Thus to accept the tainted prize would be to assert that dancing, in itself, is of no consequence. If dancing is of no consequence, then what’s the value of being Tony Manero, dancer?

Seems to me to be pretty much the same story in both cases. But in Saturday Night Fever Manero didn't have a middle-class example to guide him, at least not that we saw. He figured out that virtue, however you want to characterize it, for himself.

Away [Media Notes 46]

This is just a quick note: Away is a new Netflix series about a manned mission to Mars. The first season has ten episodes and takes us from launch to touch-down. I enjoyed it for its mixture of high-tech adventure, interpersonal drama, and political maneuvering. The high-tech adventure is standard stuff, things don’t work and so the crew must cope; the mission almost falls apart two or three times, maybe four – I wasn’t counting.

There are five in the crew: an American, Emma Green (Hilary Swank); a Chinese, Lu Wang (Vivian Wu); a Russian, Misha Popov (Mark Ivanir); Ram Arya (Ray Panthaki), from India; and Kwesi Weisberg-Abban (Ato Essandoh), British-Ghanaian and Jewish. As you might imagine, tensions between nations show up in relations among the crew. That’s what makes this interesting. We are implicitly asked to read interactions between crew members as a metonymy for relationships between nations. Spoiler: when they touch down on Mars, the crew presents a united front.

At the same time crew members have their own problems with family and friends on the ground. While we get personal background on all the crew, current day interactions center on Emma Green, Misha Popov, and Lu Wang. Of those three, Emma Green, who is also the mission commander, has the most complex situation. And those are the ones representing the most powerful nations.

It will be interesting to see how this develops in subsequent seasons, assuming the series gets renewed.