My dad loved mysteries, and he wowed us all with his ability to guess whodunnit every single time.
And then when I was around, oh, I dunno, somewhere between 10 and 12, he told me just how easy his little trick was.
Here’s the thing about television mysteries. Unlike real life, somebody picks and chooses what scenes to put in a movie. Unlike real life, it costs extra money to have to film unnecessary scenes that do not advance the narrative. Therefore, there will never be an utterly irrelevant scene, again, unlike real life.
So when, for instance, you are watching an hour long mystery and it shows the characters eating at a restaurant and then leaving and one of them goes back in because he forgot to leave a tip? That’s a clue, that is. While that might happen and mean nothing in real life, it’s only put in the television show for one of two reasons- it is significant to the narrative, or it’s a red herring.
As an illustration of the approach to media we are proposing, consider the case of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s election in 2003 to the governorship of California. Schwarzenegger’s victory has often been attributed to his status as a Hollywood star, as if that somehow guaranteed success.
But this explanation, in our view, falls far short. If it were adequate, we would have to explain the fact that the vast majority of governors and other political officeholders in this country are not actors or other media celebrities, but practitioners of that arcane and tedious profession known as the law. If Hollywood stardom were a sufficient condition to attain political office, Congress would be populated by Susan Sarandons and Sylvester Stallones, not Michele Bachmanns and Ed Markeys.
Something other than media stardom was clearly required. And that something was the nature of the legal and political systems that give California such a volatile and populist political culture, namely the rules that allow for popular referendums and, more specifically, make it relatively easy to recall an unpopular governor. California has, in other words, a distinctive set of political mediations in place that promote immediacy in the form of direct democracy and rapid interventions by the electorate. It is difficult to imagine the Schwarzenegger episode occurring in any other state.
Armand: Don’t you believe in love, Marguerite?
Marguerite: I don’t think I know what it is.
Armand: Oh, thank you.
Marguerite: For what?
Armand: For never having been in love.
Eric Rohmer, the French critic and filmmaker who was one of the founding figures of the French New Wave and the director of more than 50 films, including the Oscar-nominated “My Night at Maud’s,” died on Monday in Paris. He was 89.
“The Moral Tales” and the cycles that followed — the six “Comedies and Proverbs” in the 1980s and the “Tales of the Four Seasons” in the 1990s — are the essential Rohmer. Other filmmakers manufacture sequels or burrow repeatedly into genres. His cycles are unusual in the way that they arrange self-contained narratives around themes, ideas and suggestive anecdotes. They don’t make arguments so much as offer slightly different views of similar problems. What happens when we fall in or out of love? How do accidental occurrences impinge on our plans and ambitions? What happens next?
These are not necessarily timeless questions, at least not in the way that fundamental problems of philosophy are. But they are always part of life, and framing them — in language and in pictures, the constituent elements of Mr. Rohmer’s movies (he rarely used music) — is what art does. Classicism is an approach that takes up these problems as they occur, without worrying too much about their contemporary relevance or their permanence.
Although our bodies appear largely symmetrical on the outside, the way our brains are organised and wired is rather more lop-sided. This is obvious to us in relation to handedness, whereby the brain is better at controlling one hand than the other. The idea that, for many of us, the left-hemisphere is dominant for language is also widely known.
However, functional asymmetry between the brain hemispheres also affects our behaviour in more subtle ways that are still being explored. The latest example of this comes from Japan where Matia Okubo has shown that right-handers have a preference for sitting to the right of the cinema screen, but only when they are motivated to watch the film.
The finding is consistent with the idea that in right-handers, the right-hemisphere is dominant for processing visual and emotional input. By sitting to the right of the screen, the film is predominantly processed by the right-hemisphere and the suggestion is that, without necessarily realising it, right-handers are choosing to sit in an optimal position for their brain to digest the movie.
But if there was one show that exemplified the highest aspirations of TV-as-art, it was The Wire. Airing from 2002 to 2008, it was the single best show in the history of television, a (yes) Dickensian portrait of an entire city’s corruption. Show-runner David Simon was a classic aughts auteur: arrogant, grudge-bearing, with a bullheaded sense of artistic entitlement. The show he created never became a pop sensation like The Sopranos; it attracted a cult following. Yet despite the show’s tiny fan base, it symbolized what truly brilliant TV could be. A portrait of Baltimore in decay, the series built, over 60 episodes, a prismatic, mordantly funny, bleak, and enraging universe of drug dealers, cops, pier workers, teachers, politicians, journalists, and do-gooders. Animated by a slow-burn moral outrage, it was grounded in Simon’s experience as a crime reporter. And it featured an astonishingly diverse set of African-American male and female characters, often playing roles other crime series would have reduced to fungible thugs. (Standouts included Idris Elba’s stunning turn as business-student/kingpin Stringer Bell.) But the series’ sneakiest achievement may have been the way it elevated, shattered, and remade the format of the police procedural, spider-webbing that old scaffolding with numberless subplots, bits of crackling dialogue, sickening and subtle imagery. Over the seasons, The Wire generated a sheer narrative density that demanded and assumed an intelligent audience was out there, willing to interpret. No wonder critics kept reassuring readers that the show wasn’t homework: It was worth the devotion it required.
Superman’s extraordinary strength is somewhat of a mystery, since it seems at times to not satisfy Newton’s laws. Imagine Kal El lifting an office building over His head, one handed, while walking down the street. The feat of strength itself is not just unbelievable, but also unphysical. Consider figure 1. If we were to position a multi-storied office building upon on a post on a street, to be held from the same position as we imagine Superman holding it: the building above the post would crack from the enormous pressure; as would the pavement beneath the post. Since the post would not lie beneath the building’s center of mass, we would expect to see the building either tumble forward, or we would see the building crack from the shear stresses which come from being held by the corner.
In contrast, we see none of these effects when Kal El lifts an ob ject. We can only conjecture that Superman has the ability to move the center of mass (by controlling the moment of inertia) of the office building. In addition, the lack of deformation of the pavement (though the pressure beneath His feet as He walks must be intense), and the lack of damage at the point of contact of the building tell us that He must have also somehow reduced the effective mass of the building.
{ Having become a father, Spielberg was more sensitive about the scene where gun-wielding federal agents threaten Elliott and his escaping friends; he digitally replaced the guns with walkie-talkies. | E.T. 20th anniversary version }
Laboratory experiments in psychology find that media violence increases aggression in the short run. We analyze whether media violence affects violent crime in the field.
We exploit variation in the violence of blockbuster movies from 1995 to 2004, and study the effect on same-day assaults.
We find that violent crime decreases on days with larger theater audiences for violent movies. The effect is partly due to voluntary incapacitation: between 6PM and 12AM, a one million increase in the audience for violent movies reduces violent crime by 1.1 to 1.3 percent. After exposure to the movie, between 12AM and 6AM, violent crime is reduced by an even larger percent. This finding is explained by the self-selection of violent individuals into violent movie attendance, leading to a substitution away from more volatile activities. In particular, movie attendance appears to reduce alcohol consumption. (…)
Exposure to violent movies has three main effects on violent crime: (i) it reduces significantly violent crime in the evening on the day of exposure; (ii) by an even larger percent, it reduces violent crime during the night hours following exposure; (iii) it has no significant impact in the days and weeks following the exposure.
{ Does movie violence increase violent crime?, Gordon Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna, 2008 |PDF | Continue reading }
Plot: When his gorgeous fiancée “goes to pieces” in a freak lawnmower accident, aspiring mad scientist Jeffrey Franken is determined to put her back together again. With the aid of an explosive superdrug, he sets about reassembling his girlfriend, selecting the choicest bits from a bevy of raunchy New York prostitutes. But his bizarre plan soon goes awry. His reanimated girlfriend no longer craves his body… she craves everybody! And, for money, she’ll love anyone… to death!
{ Finding the locations used in Taxi Driver turned out to be incredibly difficult, largely because the film documents a side of the city that has since been demolished, rebuilt, renovated… | Scouting NY | Part 1 | Part 2 }
