Author Archive: Lyn Lesch

Greta Gerwig’s Somewhat Hidden Double Standard

Posted on by

As everyone now knows, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie is raking in millions of dollars and a great deal of positive approbation for her imaginative take on how the doll, if it were to come to life in the real world, would confront male patriarchy in various ways, including a visit to the all-male board room of Mattel, the toy company which designed the doll. So far, even those who find fault with the premises and politics of the movie, saying it dishonestly represents a time of cultural prejudice which has already passed, applaud it for being extremely entertaining.

Although I have not seen the movie, and therefore am in no position to comment on either the merits of the film or Greta Gerwig’s talents as a filmmaker, I’m able to recall a comment of Ms. Gerwig’s from the past, one she made while her brilliant, entertaining version of Louisa May Alcott‘s Little Women was in theaters, involving the life and art of the 19th century writer Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau, who as many people are aware, wrote his iconic account of living apart from society in the woods surrounding Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts while he was writing his enlightening account of what he might learn from nature in the book that became Walden.

Gerwig’s comment was that Thoreau of course was able to live in the woods in his hut and explore nature in the insightful way he did largely because as a solitary bachelor he didn’t have a wife and children for whom he had to care. Upon reading this, one has to wonder if Louisa May Alcott, one of Gerwig’s heroines and someone who like Thoreau never married and never had children, might be subjected to the same standard for personal success by the filmmaker. That is, would she likewise expound on the idea that Alcott was able to give herself over to writing Little Women because she was without a family?

A certain issue that tends to underlay this misunderstanding is the mistaken confluence of solitude with loneliness. That is people tend to confuse the positive qualities embodied in solitude (i.e. the spiritual space, freedom, and capacity for personal integration which it gives one) with loneliness itself. Whereas the two things are inherently and radically different in that genuine solitude is often eagerly sought for entirely positive reasons, whereas loneliness is obviously something that people run from in fear as they tend to become more closely wrapped inside the shell of a protective cocoon while they desperately search for some sort of meaningful personal connection with others.

Thoreau not only embraced but likewise reveled in the benefits of solitude, something which he wrote about so insightfully. This would seem to mean that whether or not he had a family to raise during his sojourns to Walden Pond is really very much beside the point simply because it tends to minimize the nature of his solitary experiences at the idyllic setting of the Pond. Rather, what does seem to be most important is his passionate embrace of solitude as a significant doorway to a larger consciousness; something which Greta Gerwig didn’t really seem to understand in her minimizing of his experience.

The Brilliant Labyrinths of Sidney Lumet

Posted on by

One might not think that the brilliant police dramas from the late director Sidney Lumet would have relevance in today’s era of cancel culture and social media, but really nothing could be further from the truth. For the fact is that everything today tends to be cloaked in a blanket of black and white. This person is a hero, and this one is a villain, with little space in between the two. If someone is judged to be a villain, that is what they are, with very little middle ground left for long-term reflective judgment, and once someone comes to inhabit this particular category, their actions, except those which continue to define them as being morally corrupt, are often rendered to be pretty much obsolete.

That is, once social media has pinned the proverbial scarlet letter on someone, that it seems is where they will tend to stay regardless of further circumstances. The recent movie Tar with Cate Blanchett appeared to be a significant example of this; with a talented conductor of classical music having her life veritably destroyed by her past indiscretions with various members of her orchestra. However, contrary to this sort of finality, the real truth tends to be that navigating such a world of ethical conundrums can be more of an adventure in navigating a precarious hall of mirrors in which there are no easy answers. In fact, two films from some forty years ago by Lumet, police dramas to be exact, depict this potential search for salvation brilliantly.

In Serpico, from 1973, New York City detective Frank Serpico, played brilliantly by Al Pacino, refuses to take pay-off money from criminals and other nefarious characters that the officers he works with take regularly. Consequently, they become deeply suspicious of him, and so his safety and even his life are put in peril. After reporting an attempted bribe to a high-ranking investigator as a young police officer, he is laughed at and simply told to keep the money. After reporting this sort of corruption to other superiors regularly, that which he soon finds is rampant within the department, the word gets out on him, and eventually he is shot in the face during a drug bust when the policemen with whom he is working fail to protect him.

In 1981’s Prince of the City, starring the late Treat Williams in another iconic role, narcotics detective Danny Ciello, played by Williams, is part of an elite New York City unit who are given wide latitude to make cases against defendants, but who at the same time are involved in various illegal practices, such as skimming money from criminals and supplying informants with drugs for their cooperation. Eventually, after being approached by a federal prosecutor who is investigating police corruption, Ciello finds that his conscience about the activities in which he and his partners are involved begins to really bother him, and so he begins to report many of the illegal activities in which he has seen while on the job, eventually crossing a line he had told federal investigators he would never cross, That is, naming his partners who are likewise his best friends.

What might be so deeply relevant in these two films relative to today’s Internet cancel culture climate is how easy answers these days seemed to have entirely disappeared from view. That is, rather than move through the labyrinth of moral complexities which Frank Serpico and Danny Ciello had to negotiate – one where friends can soon become enemies and enemies can soon become friends – we seem to be adopting a one size fits all definition of our moral quandries, rather than face the gruesome reality that we might not be able to face other people as the person we really are; and so we often, rather than allowing social media to come after us, hide from others in going along with the conformist line in various situation, one that we know will significantly protect us from the merciless nature of cancel culture.

More than anything, what makes these two movies so important is that they allow true heroism to exist within a web of moral complexities, one in which the hatred of others who used to be one’s friends might be coming down on them. Right up to the end of both movies, Frank Serpico and Danny Ciello remained highly uncertain of what they were doing. Yet at the same time, they recognized that they owed it to themselves and to those people they cared about to plunge ahead anyway.

Should Rock and Roll be Meaningful for Old People?

Posted on by

If one even occasionally pays attention to their Twitter feed, they have no doubt seen how aging baby boomers throughout European cities are flocking to stadiums to hear the music of 73 year-old Bruce Springsteen and his E Street Band. And of course, as he always does, Bruce is giving them their money’s worth, playing his usual three or four hours with a heartfelt passion that has very likely never been duplicated in the history of rock and roll. And of course, on the surface at least, that would appear to be entirely wonderful; that Bruce’s passion, and the passion of his fans can survive any number of complicated, difficult generations.

Except there may be one trouble, that which has really nothing to do with Springsteen, his fan base, or other high profile aging rockers who should be lauded for producing great music with the sort of heart and soul which they seemingly just can’t quit. It’s simply that rock and roll was never originally intended to be the province of old people. That is, it’s the one art form in our culture which is meant to celebrate the passion and energy of youth. Jazz, due to its improvisational nature, can be played by people of any age without it starting to seem silly, and the inherent beauty of great classical music transcends various time periods. But rock music, if it is to remain meaningful, may need to be necessarily anchored in the present moment.

Gracie Slick of Jefferson Airplane fame has been quoted in the past as saying that people who are fifty or sixty years old playing rock and roll on stage in front of other people tend to look ridiculous. And years ago, at a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony Ray Davies of the Kinks, upon receiving his statue, commented, “Rock and Roll has finally become respectable. What a drag.” What both of these great artists spoke to, obviously, was the spirit of a genre which began to die years ago with the death of AM radio, when everything new, fresh, and important could be heard, more than anywhere else, coming out of the radio on the dashboard of the family car. Since then, for many of us who came of age during that time, nothing has ever really seemed to be the same.

The sad truth is that time inevitably takes its toll on everything, even great art. When Springsteen’s landmark album Born to Run came out in 1975, two now famous tracks which appeared on it were of course Born to Run and Thunder Road; iconic songs which so brilliantly explored the angst and restlessness of young love and exploration. Now, unfortunately, nearly fifty years later, those two titles might seem to suggest to someone who is unfamiliar with the songs an escaped aging convict from a state prison who is on the run from his captors, or a group of aging moonshiners who are selling liquor from the trunk of their car somewhere in the deep South.

The period of time in which we baby boomers came of age was of course an incredibly exciting one. In point of fact, everything seemed to be happening so fast that it was hard to even keep up with it. Yet it seems we don’t want to make the mistake that Jay Gatsby made when he looked at the green light shining from a dock on the other side of the bay in hopes of rekindling his love for Daisy Buchanan, believing that it was possible to relive the past. For not only is the past gone forever, In point of fact, it may be something that doesn’t really exist in the first place, except in the illusory world of our flawed imaginations.

It is still possible for older rockers to discover other outlets in which to display their creativity and their passion. This past year, Susanna Hoffs, former lead singer of the 1980s group The Bangles, released her highly successful novel This Bird Has Flown, an engaging, hilarious novel about an aging superstar who is given a second chance to explore the possibility of stardom, a book which has been drawing rave reviews; which is most likely a good thing. For one fears that if the Bangles were still on stage singing their famous 1988 hit In Your Room, about a scintillating hook-up between a boy and girl, they might have, with the passage of time, been tagged as aging Mrs. Robinsons from Mike Nichols film The Graduate.

The New Film Oppenheimer and Technology Run Amuck

Posted on by

Sometimes different cultural events occur simultaneously in a way that seems almost preordained to deliver a message to us about specific dynamics involving life in the world; one in which we are being warned about a similar danger through the lens of different events that occur at the same time. Next week the new film Oppenheimer opens in theaters, that which concerns the creation of the atomic bomb under the supervision of physicist Robert Oppenheimer.  At the same time, writers, directors, actors and actresses are on strike against movie studios in Hollywood, one their strongest concerns being the use of A.I. technology to produce digital likenesses of those who appear in films.

The manner in which these two events are related has very much to do with runaway technology that should have been prevented from doing so years ago. As far as the creation of the atomic bomb, it was known years before the bomb was created by scientists working to develop it in the New Mexico desert during World War Two, and just prior to the bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, what its catastrophic effects would be. In point of fact, ever since Enrico Fermi and his group of scientists discovered that bombarding certain elements, such as Uranium, with neutrons from other atoms could produce artificial radioactivity, the die was cast as far as the potential development of atomic weapons. That is, if scientists were willing to take the equivalence of matter and energy to its ultimate conclusion without interruption.

In similar fashion, when the developers of social media found that they could use various algorithms to create an artificial reality which many people accepted as being real, ultimately working its way through the labyrinth of virtual communication and virtual images that took the place of real ones, the die was likewise cast there. Now of course we have reached the point where we have A.I technology that can produce real world virtual images that seem all too real, such as those found in Meta, and pieces of writing which are entirely created by A.I. machines; and so even real world actors trying to make a living can become disposable as just a single image of theirs can be copied and used over and over by A.I technology.

The point is that the place to stop this sort of runaway technology, such as that which produced the atomic bomb, and now that in which A.I is threatening to replace human interactions, is at the beginning of its development when scientists and social theorists, through their foresight, are able to see exactly where it is leading. In doing so, those who are involved with this sort of prescient analysis of new technologies might heed the words of the late great social critic Neil Postman, who advised people to ask two questions whenever any new technological development comes to call. They are: what problems does this new technology solve, and what new problems does it create?

It is probably’ no coincidental mystery why a number of the actors and actresses out on strike, protesting the potentially dangerous infusion of A.I. into how they earn their living are the very same ones that appear in Oppenheimer. Perhaps a number of them have drawn the inference between how both atomic energy and A.I. technology may have been haphazardly introduced to the world before their potential consequences could be fully examined. Whether we realize it or not, the future that we will live in is already being created right now. Yet for us to realize this, it means taking to heart Neil Postman’s prescient warning to us all, and instead of being habitually excited about what the possibilities are when some new technology comes to call, taking a hard look way down the road toward where it may be eventually headed.

Why A Clockwork Orange is Still So Relevant

Posted on by

Anthony Burgess controversial but brilliant dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange was published in 1962, over sixty years ago, with Stanley Kubrick’s thoroughly engaging adaptation of it appearing in theaters nine years later. Yet, in a way both the book and the film continue to be highly relevant, but not necessarily for many of the same reasons which some people believe they are. Of course, people in contemporary society may believe that the film is highly relevant today due to the rise of gang culture in our inner cities or a culture which is now becoming increasingly sexualized and increasingly violent, yet these particular dynamics may not be what makes A Clockwork Orange still highly relevant so many years after both the book and film appeared on the scene.

The story involves the activities of a teenage boy (young man in the film) who pursues all manner of physically and sexually violent activities against others in the streets of London with his three accomplices (“droogs” as they are referred to) simply because he has a taste for what he calls “the old ultra-violence.” Yet, at the same time it is revealed that there is a higher purpose to his soul in his love of classical music, particularly Beethoven. Incidentally, this fusion of violent activities with exalted classical music in Kubrick’s film is nothing short of sheer genius.

What tends to make the story of Alex and his three droogs still so relevant is the idea, one which has now become a permanent part of contemporary cancel culture, that art and life are so intextricably intertwined that deficiencies found in one’s life must necessarily diminish either his/her art or even their appreciation of artistic genius. That is, should Woody Allen’s, Michael Jackson’s or Kevin Spacey’s brilliance relative to their directorial, musical, or acting skills be looked at in a diminished light due to possible complications with their personal lives, as difficult to swallow a those potential transgressions might be?

In Burgess’s novel and likewise in Kubrick’s film, young Alex is saved from having to serve increased prison time by being allowed to enter a program which physically conditions him to find violent acts repulsive by administering a drug that makes him violently nauseous as he simultaneously observes certain violent acts on a movie screen directly in front of him. Unfortunately, the soundtrack of one of the violent films which he is watching while becoming nauseous contains Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony as part of the background score. Therefore, at the same time he is being conditioned to feel sick at the sight of violence, he is likewise being conditioned to feel sick whenever he hears Beethoven.

Metaphorically speaking, this would appear to be the same sort of conditioning which might be in the process of being applied to all of us amidst a culture, largely as a result of the Internet and social media, which now tends to so thoroughly conflate lifestyle choices with artistic brilliance. For example, numerous people no longer want to watch the film Midnight in Paris because of certain accusations which Woody Allen’s adopted daughter has made. Likewise, certain people no longer want to listen Michael Jackson’s music or watch his videos due to similar accusations which have been made against him.

It is admittedly a difficult question; whether the enjoyment of someone’s artistic genius should necessarily be abrogated due to accusations which have been made against them in their personal life. Similar to the scene in A Clockwork Orange, in which Alex is being simultaneously conditioned to loathe both violent acts and the music of Beethoven which he once loved, we have to decide whether we can potentially separate certain accusations which have been made against a certain artistic genius from the brilliance of the art they have produced.  If not, there would appear to be the potential danger that the quality of certain art forms may at last become entirely subjective.

 

 

Why A.I. Will Never Match the New Journalism

Posted on by

Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, Joan Didion. These were the writers from the mid-twentieth century who changed the nature of journalism by brilliantly inserting themselves into the stories on which they were reporting. Norman Mailer, in reporting on the march on the Pentagon which took place in 1967, became both reporter and fully engaged participant. Tom Wolfe, in spending time with Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters during the mid-1960s, gave America a birds-eye view of the emerging counterculture. Hunter Thompson in spending time on the 1972 campaign trail in order to view both Republican and Democratic campaigns with a jaundiced yet jocular eye reduced national politics to its entirely personal dimensions. And Joan Didion, in inserting herself at the entirely personal level into the Hippie culture of the 1960s on which she was reporting was able to elucidate so clearly why at the time in American culture ” the center was not holding.”

What made their brand of journalism so important was that it entirely removed what had heretofore been a lack of personal engagement in the stories on which contemporary journalists were reporting; and while doing so, made their particular approach to the narratives which they were elucidating both clearer and exponentially more interesting, as opposed to newsworthy stories which were regularly reported at the time through the myopic lens of “responsible journalism,” which had dictated that a good reporter never became part of the story.

As many people already know, many newsrooms throughout the country now use A.I generated technology to produce their stories, using bots to write automated articles based on data which they have gathered about what might become a story in their publications, However, as Cait O’Riordan, who is a former BBC journalist, adamantly said, there is no danger that article generating systems will replace human journalists in the foreseeable future simply because, as she puts it, “human audiences want to read opinion and analysis, not just structured data produced by an algorithm.”

However, relative to the sort of new age journalists mentioned here, there is another, seemingly even more pernicious danger. This is that the journalist as active participant in the evolution of a particular story will be effectively removed in favor of A.I. generated technology which editors may tend to feel can produce a particular story quicker and with greater accuracy. Yes, of course, there are dangers in allowing writers to become a significant part of the story on which they are reporting; mainly having to do with a loss of objectivity and unbiased analysis. However, when a journalist has no opportunity to become an actual participant in the development of a story, the opportunity to bring it into sharper focus, and in doing so making it more interesting to the reader, is often lost.

Also, there is a profound difference between opinion-oriented journalism, the likes of which we see on cable television every day from both the left and the right, and a writer becoming an actual participant in the story which he or she is covering. That is, if Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, and Joan Didion had covered the aforementioned stories only through the insertion of their opinions about what they were covering, we the reader would never have been allowed to become an actual vicarious participant in them, and in doing so, understood them more completely simply because they had become exponentially more interesting.

There is indeed a real danger that our essential humanness, even with all its difficulties and foibles, will be swallowed up in the potential ease and accuracy with which A.I. can produce intelligent and accurate content. As a consequence of this, what we may lose in the bargain is the highly personal response to developments in our society that allows us to look at interesting news stories at the sort of close range which can serve to reveal their essence more completely when this essence is seen through the lens which only a thoroughly engaged human observer might offer the rest of us. That is, A.I. technology would most likely never have reported on the nature of the intersubjective experience which Kesey’s pranksters shared with each other, as did Tom Wolfe, or on the general malaise which underlay the personal freedom which those who were part of the counterculture prevalent in San Francisco in the mid-1960s believed they had achieved, as did Joan Didion.

How Norman Mailer Wrote the Great American Novel

Posted on by

On January 17, 1977, convicted murderer Gary Gilmore was executed by firing squad by the state of Utah for the execution type murder of two men, a gas station attendant and the desk clerk at a local motel in Provo Utah, both murders the result of the emotional pain that Gilmore was in as a result of his break-up with his girlfriend, Nicole Barret, a young mother with two young children; Miss Barret having ultimately rejected him due to his chaotic, haphazard behavior obviously brought on by having spent the vast majority of his youth and adult years in reform school and prison, where he had been locked up for various lesser crimes. Soon after the execution, following his trip to Utah, the great writer Norman Mailer wrote his masterpiece, The Executioner’s Song, that in which he provides a vivid account of Gilmore’s stunningly rapid fall from grace.

The story line of the book, which is some 1100 pages long and which takes place from the time Gilmore was paroled in the spring of 1976 until his final reckoning with the firing squad which took his life nine months later, is nothing short of a masterpiece of understated writing; depicting what the late Joan Didion in her review of the book described as the nihilism of this part of the American West, where people often have to live lives without much purpose, trapped halfway between the mountains and the desert, and where potential dread often reaches such proportions that, as Didion puts it, “People get sick for love, think they want to die for love, shoot up the town for love.”

In writing his account of these events, Norman Mailer did something that was completely unexpected by much of the literary community: He stopped being Norman Mailer. That is, in writing a number of his previous books, he often relied heavily on inserting his unique voice, and even his own persona and actual experience into the storyline. The Siege of Chicago, which depicted the climate surrounding the ill-fated Democratic convention of 1968, was written as a first-person account in which Mailer in many ways becomes an actual character in the narrative. As was the case with his previous book, The Armies of the Night, which depicted the storming of the Pentagon in 1967 as part of the anti-war movement protesting American involvement in Vietnam.

The Executioner’s Song, however, was written with an entirely flat affect, and with no traces of Mailer to be found anywhere amidst its pages. Written as a series of paragraphs spatially separated from one another in the context of different chapters, without any sort of commentary by Mailer on the events he is describing, it is the minimalist depiction of the events which are occurring in the lives of all the participants (e.g. friends of Gilmore and Nicole, fellow convicts, members of the legal and judicial community, journalists covering the story at a national level, etc.) which entirely matches the stark environment in which the events surrounding Gilmore’s trial  and execution take place.

Certainly, there have been other books in which the actual style of the writing so thoroughly matches the events which are taking place. One thinks of Ernest Hemingway’s depiction of the bored, inconsequential lives of American ex-patriates living in post- World War One Europe in The Sun Also Rises or Joan Didion’s account of the young Hollywood wife for whom life has lost all meaning in her harrowing novel from the early 1970s Play It as It Lays. Yet it might be argued that The Executioner’s Song may have even outdone these and other similar great works in fusing writing style with the realities with which the storyline is concerned.

Susan Sontag’s brilliant essay from 1966, Against Interpretation, argued that rather than indulge in endless interpretation of what important events in our lives and art mean, we need to hear more, see more, and feel more. Unfortunately, in our current Internet age in which social media has become that which rules us all, we have become subject to seemingly endless interpretations of what our experience online might tell us. Yet if we could somehow, like Norman Mailer did in his great real-life novel, return to allowing just the facts inherent in important situations or works of art to guide us, we might all be significantly better off.

AI Mind-Reading and the End of Privacy

Posted on by

A recent article concerning artificial intelligence written by Adam Jezard and published on the World Economic Forum website delineates how scientists working in the field of AI are developing technology linked to functional magnetic resonance machines which measure brain activity that can be linked to deep neural networks in the brain – those which can actually replicate human brain functions. Although, in relation to this recent rather astounding development, newspaper headlines around the world began to scream out that AI can now read minds, this is not entirely the case. In fact, a better description of what is taking place, according to Jezards’ reporting, would be a “reconstruction of a visual field algorithm,”

This means that although computers cannot yet able to anticipate what we are going to think, feel, and desire, by using the program referred to in the article, they can actually decipher images of what objects people may be looking at or in certain limited circumstances reveal what they are thinking. However, in one recent report from Japan’s ATR Computational Science Laboratory and Kyoto University, there was a program developed that not only recognizes images, such as artificial shapes, but likewise reconstructs new images from brain activity. That is, not simply images that have been previously fed into a computer program, but images that it had not yet been trained to recognize.

At the same time, according to Jezard’s article, scientists as Carnegie Mellon University in the US. claim to have gotten a step closer to actual “mind reading” by using algorithms to decode brain signals that can identify deeper thoughts and even whole phrases of words that they have not been previously trained to recognize. In addition researchers who are familiar with this technology say that it is able to understand complex events expressed as sentences and based on a certain understanding of people, places, and actions, can predict what types of thoughts may be contemplated by certain people in relation to them.

For those of us who value not only our privacy, but also the integrity of our individual selves, this particular technology might appear to be especially troubling. Already, with the intrusion of the Internet and social media into all our lives, we have lost an extraordinary amount of privacy related to the integrity of our individual selves. That is, the particulars of our lives, even those which are the result of complicated social dynamics that might not be so easily understood by those who don’t know us, are now on full display for nearly everyone to see. Yet, at the same time, the one place which is still our private domain, that which is a significant part of our personal integrity, is that which exists in the privacy of our thoughts.

Yet if that begins to disappear amidst the possible mind-reading technologies of AI, it seems possible that that sacred space within us, that in which our private thoughts and feelings exist, will likewise begin to disappear. The late, great social critic Neil Postman said many times that when some new technology comes into the world, we need to ask ourselves two prescient questions: What current problems does it solve, and what new problems does it create? It would appear, more than ever now in an age in which reality itself is becoming increasingly virtual, that in relation to A.I. we seriously consider these two important questions.

The Dangerous False Self Inherent in Reality TV

Posted on by

The current show Vanderpump Rules, appearing now on the Bravo network, has been getting a significant amount of attention lately in the mainstream press due to one of its significant stars cheating on his long-time girlfriend with a certain younger member of the cast who ala Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, has been seemingly running after one male cast member after another. The fact that a show such as this, particularly the ones that appear on the Bravo and the E networks, is receiving such a degree of attention is a disturbing trend in our society for a number of reasons; not the least of which is how these shows greatly facilitate the sort of superficial, dumbed down culture which is now so prevalent in our society, as well as encouraging the sort of bullying behavior which, if the truth be known, is a major reason why many people become so enamored of these shows – to watch their least favorite character be subjected to other people’s animosity.

However, there is another deleterious dynamic inherent in the web of reality television, possibly one that is even more dangerous simply because it is not so obvious. This is how they regularly encourage the facilitation of a false self in those who are regular cast members. Of course, as everyone knows, the people who inhabit these shows are not playing a character similar to how one might do so if they were appearing in an edgy drama written by the likes of Arthur Miller or Eugene O’Neill. Yet, at the same time, as the great Italian filmmaker Frederico Fellini said years ago, whenever you turn the camera on somebody to film them, it inevitably changes their behavior.

Therefore, in a very real sense, although the people who show up on reality television shows like Vanderpump Rules are still being filmed as themselves, still it seems rather obvious that many of them will tend to change their behavior, even if only slightly, when the camera is on them. Consequently, they are in effect creating a caricature, if you will, of their true selves; something that becomes rather obvious when they appear on Bravo to discuss their role in the show when they are not actually appearing in one of its episodes. For example, situations that appear on the show to be extremely dramatic, and at times even heart wrenching, are simply laughed off when those who have been filmed as being part of them appear on Andy Cohen’s gossip-driven show Watch What Happens Live, and it becomes rather obvious to anyone watching that what they are often seeing on Vanderpump Rules are disingenuous performances of sorts.

In 1959 radical British psychotherapist R.D. Laing published his visionary book The Divided Self, in which he so brilliantly explained how people might create a false self around themselves in in order to protect themselves from a reality which was too frightening to deal if one confronted it fully exposed as the person which one actually was. However, as this process of self-protection further evolves, a person becomes eventually trapped inside the false self which he or she has created around him or herself. And as a result, one’s relations with the world and with other people grow increasingly less authentic until at last one is trapped inside a false persona in which authentic connections with others become increasingly if not entirely impossible to achieve.

The real danger of this trend in our culture relative to reality television is of course that many of the young people watching these shows on reality television might begin to believe that it is alright for them to begin adopting the same sort of false persona which they see their favorite reality show participants adopt until eventually it begins to swallows their more authentic selves. Yes, reality television shows have introduced some dangerous trends into our society (e.g. encouraging the sort of bullying behavior in a society in which the next person who has been continually bullied might pick up a gun as retribution). Yet the encouragement of the adoption of an inauthentic self is likewise one of the unhealthy trends that are part of the popular explosion of reality television into our culture.

A Movie from the Past and Our Current Border Crisis

Posted on by

Watching the crisis at our southern border these days, with tens of thousands of people almost certainly headed for what will be nearly impossible conditions in which they might exist, flooding into a country whose government and whose people are both logistically and emotionally incapable of dealing with the entire influx of migrants, one searches for answers to a situation with which it is seemingly impossible to deal, with no clear vision seeming to be anywhere in sight. In addition, so far at least the only potential answers that have been proposed have tended to emanate from potential responses which originate exclusively at the level of policy decisions, rather than stemming from what might be occurring within people at the personal level.

It might certainly be possible that the answer to this seemingly impossible situation might indeed be found deep inside the psyches of those who are trapped within it, not within the sort of policy issues which seek to curtail it. Just about twenty years ago the movie Maria Full of Grace was released to a public which didn’t see anything this raw and elemental coming at their local movie theaters. Starring a young Catalina Sandino Moreno, it told the story of young women, among them seventeen-year old Maria, who, in order to escape the stifling poverty of their native Columbia were willing to swallow up to fifty or more balloon pellets full of cocaine in order to transport them vis-a-vis riding on an airplane from Columbia to the United States, where the cocaine would be eventually sold, and the girls paid well for their part in the enterprise.

In several terrifying, riveting scenes, the extent of the girls’ desperation, and what they are willing to do in order to leave behind their impoverished lives in Columbia is on full display. Particularly harrowing is one scene where the girls are in effect trapped inside the cabin of the plane, with no possible escape route, with the drugs inside them while one of them is starting to feel extremely ill. In another extremely tense scene, Maria is stopped at the baggage carousel by immigration agents who are convinced that she is carrying drugs in her stomach. Then, just as they are getting ready to x-ray her to prove the existence of the pellets inside her, a urine test proves she’s pregnant, the agents know that they can’ t x-ray pregnant women, and to her great relief she is suddenly released.

This is obviously a movie about young women who amidst their desperation are willing to risk everything in order to improve the circumstances of their lives under the most harrowing of conditions. Therefore, amidst the talk and discussions of policy as well as the political conversation concerning immigration which tends to dominate the nightly news on cable television, it seems particularly relevant that we keep in mind the extreme desperation of people who are willing to endure the near impossible circumstance depicted in Maria Full of Grace, a movie which almost certainly evolved from true life stories of young people acting as drug mules, in addition to those who are now walking hundreds of miles through rough terrain and extremely dangerous circumstances in order to come to this country. That is, their desperation and their will power will continue to become impossible forces to impede.

If this country seriously wants to stem the influx of migrants at our southern border, we must begin by recognizing the degree of desperation which has caused so many to come here seeking asylum and the possibility of a better life; and that begins with working with those countries from which the current crop of migrants are fleeing to improve living conditions there. Unless we begin doing that, nothing is ever going to change, with the huge influx of migrants, that which we can’t possibly fully control, continuing to exist. That is, it is now very much our business and our responsibility to work with the governments of those countries from which so many are fleeing to work to improve the lot of their citizens, even if certain economic or political pressures need to be applied in order to make this occur. A movie about young women swallowing balloons full of cocaine in order to flee intolerable conditions is really only a glimpse into the reality of what we are now facing.