Hollywood's cultural responsibility

Still cleaning out browser tabs from way back. This one is from August last year, a Jonathan Chait essay on how liberal views dominate Hollywood. As much as conservatives dominate Fox News, liberal viewpoints tend to dominate most other channels and most Hollywood movies.

Few will find that surprising. What's more important is Chait's survey of the available evidence of the power of movies and TV on society, and the evidence says it's powerful.

Several years ago, a trio of researchers working for the Inter-American Development Bank set out to help solve a sociological mystery. Brazil had, over the course of four decades, experienced one of the largest drops in average family size in the world, from 6.3 children per woman in 1960 to 2.3 children in 2000. What made the drop so curious is that, unlike the Draconian one-child policy in China, the Brazilian government had in place no policy to limit family size. (It was actually illegal at some point to advertise contraceptives in the overwhelmingly Catholic country.) What could explain such a steep drop? The researchers zeroed in on one factor: television.

Television spread through Brazil in the mid-sixties. But it didn’t arrive everywhere at once in the sprawling country. Brazil’s main station, Globo, expanded slowly and unevenly. The researchers found that areas that gained access to Globo saw larger drops in fertility than those that didn’t (controlling, of course, for other factors that could affect fertility). It was not any kind of news or educational programming that caused this fertility drop but exposure to the massively popular soap operas, or novelas, that most Brazilians watch every night. The paper also found that areas with exposure to television were dramatically more likely to give their children names shared by novela characters.

Novelas almost always center around four or five families, each of which is usually small, so as to limit the number of characters the audience must track. Nearly three quarters of the main female characters of childbearing age in the prime-time novelas had no children, and a fifth had one child. Exposure to this glamorized and unusual (especially by Brazilian standards) family arrangement “led to significantly lower fertility”—an effect equal in impact to adding two years of schooling.

More:

A trio of communications professors found that watching Will & Grace made audiences more receptive to gay rights, and especially viewers who had little contact in real life with gays and lesbians. And that one show was merely a component of a concerted effort by Hollywood—dating back to Soap in the late seventies, which featured Billy Crystal’s groundbreaking portrayal of a sympathetic gay character, through Modern Family—to prod audiences to accept homosexuality. Likewise, the political persona of Barack Obama attained such rapid acceptance and popularity in part because he represented the real-world version of an archetype that, after a long early period of servile black stereotypes, has appeared in film and television for years: a sober, intelligent African-American as president, or in some other position of power.

Hollywood industry insiders deny a liberal bent to their work, claiming they're only following market demand, leading to an ironic configuration of the conservative-liberal debate on the topic: 

The denials generally take the form of a simple economic aphorism. The entertainment business is a business, so if its product leans left, it must reflect what the audience wants. One oddity of the Hollywood-liberalism debate is that it makes liberals posit the existence of a perfect, frictionless market, while conservatives find themselves explaining why a free market is failing to function as it ought to.

The power of popular culture is often underestimated, as is the value of art in general. Some of the examples noted above are why I've become less tolerant of lazy stereotypes or tropes in even the lightest of Hollywood movies. Argo was a skillfully crafted movie, but it played so loose with the facts that I can't in my heart embrace it as fully as I would had it been brave enough to stand by the truth. (Spoiler alert here) When the crowd I saw the movie with burst into applause as the plane lifted off the tarmac at the end, just eluding dozens of angry Iranian guards with guns giving chase in jeeps, I couldn't help feeling saddened that once again Hollywood felt the need to conform the truth to a more cartoonish narrative arc for commercial reasons. There's an entire section of the Argo Wikipedia entry titled Historical Accuracy which addresses the discrepancies. I felt the same unease with A Beautiful Mind, which scrubbed many less savory elements from John Nash's life to make him a more palatable hero: anti-semitism, homosexuality, a child he fathered with a nurse who he abandoned, and his divorce, among others.

[The phrase "based on a true story" is one of the great cheats in filmmaking. It excuses you to bend the facts but still capture the amazement of a credulous audience which won't ever bother to investigate what liberties the filmmakers took.]

Even movies which aren't based on historical facts bother me when they grab and reuse defective modules from the Hollywood library. Pitch Perfect was a cinematic stick of sugar, but it resorted to several popular stereotypes of Asians that made me cringe (I refer not to the quiet Asian singer with the bangs, but the no-fun bookworm of a roommate and her stone-faced friends).

The most common retort to all of this is that it's just a movie, and nobody cares or should care. But it's not just a movie, as Chait notes. These works of art carry cultural tropes that burrow into our brains and leave germs that sprout at an almost subconscious level.

And that's how I sense Hollywood's cultural influence operates, not as overtly as, say, those who claim that the use of guns in movies leads to shootings in direct emulation, but at a more subtle level. In a recent post I discussed two versions of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, strong and weak. If there was a theory of Hollywood's influence on our cultural norms, I'd subscribe to a weak version of it.

George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You’ll Read This Year

This loving profile of George Saunders is just gorgeous.

At the risk of hyperbole at the end of a story that began in a state of fairly high exaltation, I would say that this is precisely the effect that Saunders’s fiction has on you. It “softens the borders,” as he put it in one of our conversations. “Between you and me, between me and me, between the reader and the writer.” It makes you wiser, better, more disciplined in your openness to the experience of other people. The guy talking on the bus about how his girlfriend doesn’t appreciate his music and why couldn’t she just cut him that much slack, seeing how he just did all that time? The couple in the basement of the Port Authority, the wife helping her husband get into his Grover costume before he stepped out onto 42nd Street. The woman, one recent morning, who screamed at panhandlers on the subway that it was the day after Christmas and why couldn’t they just give us all some peace? “Peace on Earth,” she hollered. “Is that so much to ask for? Get off the train.” She went on for a while, and some other passengers started to turn on her. “I’m right!” she yelled. “I’m right.” And then her face took on the saddest expression.

It’s hard to maintain, the softness. It’s an effort. That Dubai story ends with these lines, wisdom imparted from Saunders to himself: “Don’t be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.”

It's safe to say the modern fiction writers who've most captivated me ever since I developed a passion for short stories in college are Tobias Wolff, George Saunders, Alice Munro, and Raymond Carver.

Misc

A supercut of Joe Biden's greatest hits at the Senate swearing-in ceremonies yesterday. There's a fine line between charm and harassment, and damn if Biden doesn't dance it like a pro (hat tip to @kenwuesq)

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I finally read the Adam Green article about pickpocket master Apollo Robbins in this week's New Yorker. It is fantastic. This video of one of Robbins' pickpocket routines, one mentioned in the article, is low-res but gives you an idea of his technique of manipulating the audience's attention. Related, if you have time and Hulu Plus, watch Bresson's Pickpocket. Also great.

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Did MIchael Jackson's Thriller sell 100 million copies? After Thriller, what is the number two selling album of all time? Can any album hope to match any of these giants again? Surprising answers here.

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This is an old article, but until recently I hadn't renewed my NYTimes subscription in months. Humans have long quested after eternal life, but one creature has already solved it: the immortal jellyfish. It ages, then like Benjamin Button, it grows young again, until it is back where it started. And then it reverses course yet again, in an endless cycle.

Turritopsis has now been observed not only in the Mediterranean but also off the coasts of Panama, Spain, Florida and Japan. The jellyfish seems able to survive, and proliferate, in every ocean in the world. It is possible to imagine a distant future in which most other species of life are extinct but the ocean will consist overwhelmingly of immortal jellyfish, a great gelatin consciousness everlasting.

"A great gelatin consciousness everlasting" is a beautiful image, like something from a Miyazaki film.

Less an article about how close we are to harnessing the immortal jellyfish's secrets for human needs than a study of the peculiar Japanese scientist who has made that organism his life's work.

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Also from that issue of the NYTimes Magazine was an article about a man who was inspired by his autistic son to start a company employing autistic adults. Of particular interest:

The autistic worker, Cowen wrote, has an unusually wide variation in his or her skills, with higher highs and lower lows. Yet today, he argued, it is increasingly a worker’s greatest skill, not his average skill level, that matters. As capitalism has grown more adept at disaggregating tasks, workers can focus on what they do best, and managers are challenged to make room for brilliant, if difficult, outliers. This march toward greater specialization, combined with the pressing need for expertise in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, so-called STEM workers, suggests that the prospects for autistic workers will be on the rise in the coming decades. If the market can forgive people’s weaknesses, then they will rise to the level of their natural gifts.

Many, including Cowen, have theorized that Sherlock Holmes was a high-functioning autistic, modeled on another man who may have had functional autism, his creator Arthur Conan Doyle. What was TV's House but an updated version of Holmes and arguably also a doctor who, thanks to a group of people who tolerated his eccentricities, was able to leverage his peak skill to great effect?

When tech companies talk about whether to hire brilliant assholes, they're trying to evaluate whether they can leverage that person's peak skill while shielding the rest of the organization from the collateral damage. Often that person must be put in a silo, quarantined from coworkers, like Hannibal Lecter in a glass cage, working in isolation.

The perfect language

Joshua Foer wrote Moonwalking with Einstein, one of my favorite books of 2012 and one I've promoted on my blog so many times I've lost count. Catching up on issues of the New Yorker piled up from the holidays, I was thoroughly drawn in by an article by Foer titled Utopian for Beginners about one amateur linguist's quest to invent the perfect language.

What is wrong with the natural languages we have now, like English or Mandarin Chinese or French? Many things, as anyone who has tried to explain the vagaries of their language's grammar to a non-speaker could attest. As Foer summarizes:

Languages are something of a mess. They evolve over centuries through an unplanned, democratic process that leaves them teeming with irregularities, quirks, and words like “knight.” No one who set out to design a form of communication would ever end up with anything like English, Mandarin, or any of the more than six thousand languages spoken today.

John Quijada, a former California DMV worker, agreed, and so he set out to construct a language free of these flaws.

Why would this be worth doing? One reason cited by many who have attempted this gargantuan endeavor is that language is the predominant vessel for transmitting information among humans, so the more precise and efficient the language, the more efficiently and precisely we communicate with each other. A second reason is that many people believe language controls thought, and so imperfections in language lead not just to embarrassing grammar mistakes but imperfect thinking, a far more dangerous consequence. Popularly referred to as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the principle of linguistic relativity says that "the structure of a language affects the ways in which its speakers conceptualize their world, i.e. their world view, or otherwise influences their cognitive processes."

It's important to note that most linguists today believe only in the weak form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis which says that the language we speak influences the way we perceive the world rather than outright confining and our thought processes. Still, considering how much we use language, how pervasive it is, any flaws or leaks are in language can compound over time in ways that can be disturbing. The world over, we generally all use the same symbols to do mathematics or read music because those methods have proven superior in so many ways that individual variations make no sense. Couldn't the same be the case with written and spoken language?

Some people aren't even satisfied with how we do math. A while ago I linked to designer Bret Victor's fascinating essay Kill Math in which he argues that math is difficult to learn because the symbolic system we use to teach math abstracts things to a degree that renders it confusing for most people. In a related way, I hear my programming friends discussing the merits of various programming languages all the time. At its most powerful level, those who try to develop new written and spoken languages believe that they can unlock new ways of thinking and comprehension that we don't even know we're missing yet, much in the way that certain things can only be done efficiently in certain programming languages.

John Quijada, consumed by this goal, developed an artificial language (in his spare time, no less) called Ithkuil. Though it's written in English and thus full of the imprecisions of that language, the explanation of Quijada's goals for Ithkuil are difficult to render any more clear:

While I enjoy the idea of inventing fictional languages which mimic natural languages, it is not enough for me to add simply another language to the thousands that already exist or have existed. For me, the greater goal is to attempt the creation of what human beings, left to their own devices, would never create naturally, but rather only by conscious effort — an idealized language whose aim is the highest possible degree of logic, efficiency, detail, and accuracy in cognitive expression via spoken human language, while minimizing the ambiguity, vagueness, illogic, redundancy, polysemy (multiple meanings) and overall arbitrariness that is seemingly ubiquitous in natural human language. This new version of Ithkuil represents the culmination of over thirty years of personal effort toward creating such a language.

Quijada notes up front that Ithkuil is not a natural language that humans would use in regular spoken or written form. Rather, he intended it as a cross between "an a priori philosophical language and a logical language". The ideal he is striving towards is still inspiring.

I asked him if he could come up with an entirely new concept on the spot, one for which there was no word in any existing language. He thought about it for a moment.

“Well, no language, as far as I know, has a single word for that chin-stroking moment you get, often accompanied by a frown on your face, when someone expresses an idea that you’ve never thought of and you have a moment of suddenly seeing possibilities you never saw before.” He paused, as if leafing through a mental dictionary. “In Ithkuil, it’s ašţal.”