The Act of Killing: a snuff film?

So let me be as upfront as I can. I dislike the aesthetic or moral premise of The Act of Killing. I find myself deeply opposed to the film. Getting killers to script and restage their murders for the benefit of a cinema or television audience seems a bad idea for a number of reasons. I find the scenes where the killers are encouraged to retell their exploits, often with lip-smacking expressions of satisfaction, upsetting not because they reveal so much, as many allege, but because they tell us so little of importance. Of course murderers, flattered in their impunity, will behave vilely. Of course they will reliably supply enlightened folk with a degraded vision of humanity. But, sorry, I don't feel we want to be doing this. It feels wrong and it certainly looks wrong to me. Something has gone missing here. How badly do we want to hear from these people, after all? Wouldn't it be better if we were told something about the individuals whose lives they took?

I'd feel the same if film-makers had gone to rural Argentina in the 1950s, rounding up a bunch of ageing Nazis and getting them to make a film entitled "We Love Killing Jews". Think of other half-covered-up atrocities – in Bosnia, Rwanda, South Africa, Israel, any place you like with secrets – and imagine similar films had been made. Consider your response – and now consider whether such goings-on in Indonesia are not acceptable merely because the place is so far away, and so little known or talked about that the cruelty of such an act can pass uncriticised.

The film does not in any recognisable sense enhance our knowledge of the 1960s Indonesian killings, and its real merits – the curiosity when it comes to uncovering the Indonesian cult of anticommunism capable of masking atrocity, and the good and shocking scenes with characters from the Indonesian elite, still whitewashing the past – are obscured by tasteless devices. At the risk of being labelled a contemporary prude or dismissed as a stuffy upholder of middle-class taste, I feel that no one should be asked to sit through repeated demonstrations of the art of garrotting. Instead of an investigation, or indeed a genuine recreation, we've ended somewhere else – in a high-minded snuff movie.
 

So writes Nick Fraser in The Guardian.

I saw The Act of Killing at the Toronto Film Festival two years ago, and it was one of the most unique documentaries I've ever seen, especially given an environment in which the genre largely adheres to the same formula: some archival footage intercut with clips of talking heads serving as narration.

A key point in Fraser's essay is this:

In his bizarrely eulogistic piece defending The Act of Killing (of which he is an executive producer), Errol Morris, the documentary maker, compares the film to Hamlet's inspired use of theatre to reveal dirty deeds at the court of Denmark. But Hamlet doesn't really believe that theatrical gestures can stand in for reality. Nor, we must assume, did his creator.
 

This is the crux of this debate. What to make of this methodology of having these killers re-enact their deeds? It's worthwhile to me if it allows us to understand the mental mechanisms (defects, if you are an optimist and believe them to be missing in most people) that allow a person to so easily murder millions of people. I believe director Joshua Oppenheimer does succeed in revealing the danger at the intersection of power and narrative.

A key weakness in the human condition is our need for narrative, our ability to justify almost anything if we can frame it with the proper narrative. The choice of the killers in this documentary to frame their re-enactments in the popular genres like gangster movies reveals much of the narrative structure they themselves erected in their minds when they were carrying out the genocide.

Fraser argues he'd rather hear from the victims, but I suspect it's very difficult to find victims to interview when the killers are, as the movie makes clear, still walking about with impunity in Indonesia. As I recall, Oppenheimer, in his Q&A at TIFF, noted that he began with the aim of building the documentary around victims, but most were terrified to speak on the record. The result was a shift to focus on the killers, and what came out of that is one of the unique and terrifying documents of an example of the worst case scenarios in the social sciences.

As one of the killers profiled in the documentary says, “We were allowed to do it. And the proof is, we murdered people and were never punished. The people we killed—there’s nothing to be done about it. They have to accept it. Maybe I’m just trying to make myself feel better, but it works. I’ve never felt guilty, never been depressed, never had nightmares.”

The death of the Michael Mann LA look

After Michael Mann set out to direct Collateral, the story’s setting moved from New York to Los Angeles. This decision was in part motivated by the unique visual presence of the city — especially the way it looked at night. Mann shot a majority of the film in HD (this was 2004), feeling the format better captured the city’s night lighting. Even the film’s protagonist taxi needed a custom coat to pick up different sheens depending on the type of artificial lighting the cab passed beneath. That city, at least as it appears in Collateral and countless other films, will never be the same again. L.A. has made a vast change-over to LED street lights, with New York City not far behind.
 

Nice overview of the impact of L.A.'s switch to LED lighting on how the city will look on film and TV. Good move for the environment, but I will miss the distinctive cinematographic fingerprint of Michael Mann's Los Angeles: equal parts gaudy and sickly neon hues from the sodium and mercury vapor streetlamps.

Los Angeles on film before (left) and after the switch to LED streetlamps

America risks becoming a Downton Abbey economy

Via Tyler Cowen, this Lawrence Summers' article on income inequality in the United States (behind a required Financial Times account registration, but it's free).

It is certainly true that there has been a dramatic increase in the number of highly paid people in finance over the last generation. Recent studies reveal that most of the increase has resulted from an increase in the value of assets under management. (The percentage of assets that financiers take in fees has remained roughly constant.) Perhaps some policy could be found that would reduce these fees but the beneficiaries would be the owners of financial assets – a group that consists mainly of very wealthy people.
 

Good point, it can be infuriating to look at the money being made on Wall Street and wonder how anyone can justify making so much money, no matter how many sleepless nights they spend in Microsoft Excel, but as Summer notes most reform proposed their just moves money from one group of wealthy people to another.

Is the answer in tax policy?

It is not enough to identify policies that reduce inequality. To be effective they must also raise the incomes of the middle class and the poor. Tax reform has a major role to play. The current tax code is so badly designed that it is very likely to be having the effect of reducing economic growth. It also allows the rich to shield a far greater proportion of their income from taxation than the poor. For example, last year’s increase in the stock market represented an increase in wealth of about $6tn, of which the lion’s share went to the very wealthy.

It is unlikely that the government will collect as much as 10 per cent of this figure. That is because of a host of policies that favour the rich, such as the capital gains exemption, the ability to defer tax on unrealised capital gains, and the fact that gains on assets passed on at death are not taxed at all. Similarly, the corporate tax system allows value to flow through it like a sieve. The ratio of corporate tax collections to the market value of US corporations is near a record low. The estate tax can be more or less avoided with sophisticated planning.

Closing loopholes that only the wealthy can enjoy would enable taxes to be cut elsewhere. Measures such as the earned income tax credit can raise the incomes of the poor and middle class by more than they cost the Treasury, because they give people incentives to work and save.
 

What's more interesting is to ask why we worry about the uneven distribution of income instead of just focusing on improving the financial lot of the poor. Isn't getting them out of poverty a worthwhile goal regardless of what's happening to incomes of the 1%? It turns out there's a name for this school of thought: prioritarianism. It's an alternative to egalitarianism.

Whether income inequality is inherently wrong is a question many people smarter than myself have already contemplated. Some of the arguments against income inequality that are most persuasive to me:

Extreme inequality ruins democracy

It's no secret money rules politics in America. Team Obama spent $1.1 billion to win the 2012 presidential race. When inequality becomes extreme, it undermines democracy, as the late philosopher John Rawls and others have argued, because it creates unequal access to the political system and to positions of power.

One person, one vote -- yeah. But one person with millions to spend has much more influence. "What is problematic in the United States is the political system ... is one that is quite substantially dominated by those people that have money," said Pogge, the Yale professor. "They can, in the American system, yield a substantial amount of influence on the legislation through lobbying and therefore expand their advantaged position."
 

That is, income inequality can become self-perpetuating because the wealthy wield such political and media power in the U.S. democracy that they make it impossible, for example, to pass tax reform like the type outlined by Summers above. That, in turn, can damage economic mobility. The rich continually redefine the rules of the game.

Inequality isn't a moral problem; opportunity is

In this school of thought, it doesn't matter if the mayor of New York City is worth $27 billion (he is) as long as everyone in the city has an equal chance to succeed. That's the view of Brooks, from the American Enterprise Institute. I asked him about that city, which is more unequal than any other metro in the U.S.

"The truth is there are a lot of really, really wealthy people there. Great! That's a morally neutral concept," he said. But not all of them have an equal opportunity at success, he said, in part because schools don't perform well in all neighborhoods. That's morally bankrupt. (Check out this wild map that shows the chances a kid at the bottom of the income ladder would have of climbing to the top. In Atlanta, where I live, a kid in the bottom fifth of income earners has only a 4% chance -- 4%! -- of making it into the top fifth of income earners.) Fix economic mobility, Brooks said, not inequality. And let the rich do their thing.
 

Is there an optimal level of wealth inequality?

The size of the rich-poor gap matters

Some inequality is acceptable to pretty much everyone these days. No one is arguing for a fully equal society. But the degree of inequality really does matter when you're trying to determine whether inequality is moral or amoral, said Pogge, the Yale professor. When extreme inequality sets in, that's when social and political problems follow.

His best estimate for a fair distribution is the Palma Ratio, which measures how much income the top 10% earns compared to the bottom 40%. Ideally, those amounts would be equal, meaning the country would have a Palma Ratio of one. According to a calculation cited by the Danish Institute for International Studies, the United States has a 2010 Palma Ratio of 1.852, which is about the same as Burkina Faso but not as bad as China or South Africa. (In an earlier version of this column, I incorrectly estimated the U.S. Palma Ratio based on wealth instead of income. I should have let the experts handle that, and I regret the mistake). By Pogge's assessment, that means inequality here is too high. Negative consequences for our society will result.
 

At some level of inequality, why would the poor or even middle class choose to play by the rules as defined by the wealthy? Is there a Palma Ratio beyond which we see a sharp increase in social unrest, crime, and other indicators of people opting out from the system?

On a recent Philosophy Bites podcast Nigel Warburton interviewed Harvard philosopher TIm Scanlon on this topic. It's well worth a listen. One passage from Scanlon that stuck with me.

Adam Smith famously said in The Wealth of Nations that it's an objection to a society if it forces some people to live in such a way that they can't go out in public without shame. Now that happens when the standard of acceptable dress, acceptable appearance, acceptable house, or whatever, is set at a certain level by the way most people live so it's humiliating for people to have to live in a different style.
 

The Wealth of Nations contains multitudes, so many of which I've forgotten.

It's difficult not to contemplate the moral dimension of income inequality everyday living in San Francisco. I've never lived any place where the difference between the lot of any two people confronts me more on a daily basis. I can't remember the last time I walked around San Francisco without walking past many homeless people. It's difficult not to feel that something is not just wrong but deeply broken.

This brings me back around to the moral dimension of income inequality. When it comes to this issue, as the Atlantic notes, the giant is economist John Rawls.

Rawls argues that when we think of how to create a just society, we need to imagine that we are all placed under a "veil of ignorance," where we don't know anything about the various advantages - social or natural - that we are born into. What principles of society would we then agree to? Rawls builds a strong case for two:

Principle 1: "Each person has the same indefeasible claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme of liberties for all."

Principle 2: "Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: first, they are to be attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and second, they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society."

Frequency

Another classic by xkcd.

Marriage is now all-or-nothing

As the expectations of marriage have ascended Maslow’s hierarchy, the potential psychological payoffs have increased — but achieving those results has become more demanding.

HERE lie both the great successes and great disappointments of modern marriage. Those individuals who can invest enough time and energy in their partnership are seeing unprecedented benefits. The sociologists Jeffrey Dew and W. Bradford Wilcox have demonstrated that spouses who spent “time alone with each other, talking, or sharing an activity” at least once per week were 3.5 times more likely to be very happy in their marriage than spouses who did so less frequently. The sociologist Paul R. Amato and colleagues have shown that spouses with a larger percentage of shared friends spent more time together and had better marriages.

But on average Americans are investing less in their marriages — to the detriment of those relationships. Professor Dew has shown that relative to Americans in 1975, Americans in 2003 spent much less time alone with their spouses. Among spouses without children, weekly spousal time declined to 26 hours per week from 35 hours, and much of this decline resulted from an increase in hours spent at work. Among spouses with children at home, spousal time declined to 9 hours per week from 13, and much of this decline resulted from an increase in time-intensive parenting.
 

Eli Finkel in the NYTimes on the third age of marriage we're living now, one he calls the self-expressive marriage, the first two being institutional and companionate.

What caught my eye was the distribution of marriage quality as measured by divorce rates.

One of the most disturbing facts about American marriage today is that while divorce increased at similar rates for the wealthy and the poor in the 1960s and ’70s, those rates diverged sharply starting around 1980. According to the sociologist Steven P. Martin, among Americans who married between 1975 and 1979, the 10-year divorce rate was 28 percent among people without a high school education and 18 percent among people with at least a college degree: a 10 percentage point difference. But among Americans who married between 1990 and 1994, the parallel divorce rates were 46 percent and 16 percent: an astonishing 30 percentage point difference.
 

It's not just household income or venture capital returns that show this signature barbell distribution anymore, it has extended to marriage.

Fascinating read, and not surprisingly, the most emailed article on the NYTimes right now.