Chimpanzee Ascendancy

Chimpanzee Ascendancy:

Pan Troglodytes’ New Status in Policy & in Films

by Jennifer Epps

Charles Darwin turned 204 this year, but his birthday didn’t make as big of a splash as Abe Lincoln’s (both were born February 12, 1809) because Darwin didn’t have a giant Hollywood epic movie playing in theatres. But those who champion what Darwin revealed, or who care about great apes and their intelligence, might want to look into the DVDs of several movies from recent years in honor of Earth Week.

All four great apes suffer when confined in captivity (over 3000 great apes are held in captivity in the U.S.); at the same time, they are disappearing from the wild due to poaching and habitat loss. Things are pretty serious for all of our great ape cousins, but it is our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, who have arguably had it the worst because in addition to other evils, they have been subjected to brutal experimentation in labs, abused by the entertainment industry, exploited by the pet trade, and even been sacrificed in space.

Fortunately, after many decades of struggle by their advocates, things are starting to look up for the chimpanzee, or Pan Troglodyte. At least it seems so judging by their gains in federal policy and public support, and the enlightened ways they have been depicted in several notable recent movies – an indicator of an improvement in how filmmakers think we see apes.

POLICY

Chimps as Experimental Subjects

The U.S., the only developed country still using this species in invasive medical experiments, has now taken significant strides toward cutting down their use by labs. First, a December 2011 Institute of Medicine report commissioned by the National Institute of Health (NIH) concluded that ‘most current use of chimpanzees for biomedical research is unnecessary’. A committee of experts then set about scrutinizing all NIH-funded projects making use of chimps. Within 9 months, the NIH authorized the retirement of 113 government-owned chimpanzees, and began transferring them to sanctuaries. Moreover, in January of this year a NIH task force of scientists, the Health Working Group, deemed laboratories unable to meet the needs of chimpanzees and called for a halt to the breeding of chimpanzees and a gradual end to existing biomedical research grants for projects with chimps. They recommended the government retire 300 other chimps from its labs, suggesting just 50 chimps be retained for possible future experiments.

This is long-overdue progress and will have a real practical effect on the quality of life of these chimps. This is clearly evident from footage this spring of freshly released NIH research chimps  seeing sunlight and the outdoors for the first time after decades of incarceration.   However, if invasive research and the keeping of chimpanzees in laboratory facilities is inhumane, then it’s just as inhumane for the unfortunate 50 chimps who have to stay behind. And Stephen Rene Tello, the executive director of Texas-based sanctuary Primarily Primates, has other concerns, since the government is maintaining ownership of all the chimps. “What happens if someone decides they suddenly need chimpanzees for research again?” Tello fears: “they’ll send them right back to the labs.”

Meanwhile, research on chimps continues in the private sector. While the efforts of animal protection agencies have raised awareness, and a string of pharmaceutical companies such as Idenix Pharmaceuticals, GlaxoSmithKline, Novo Nordisk and Gilead Sciences, Inc. have promised not to use chimps in their research, there are still 950 chimps in labs in the U.S. being used as industrial test subjects.

Thankfully, a strong movement exists to persuade Congress to pass the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act, a bill to ban the use of chimpanzees in invasive research (and save the Treasury $250 million dollars in a decade).

The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), a group that both opposes vivisection and advocates for human health (and whose legislative leader is Dennis Kucinich’s wife Elizabeth), is one of the organizations passionately campaigning for this bill, which has been introduced by allies in session after session. PCRM reports the encouraging news that the bill garnered record support in the 112^th congress, with close to 200 co-sponsors in the House and Senate. Its supporters will be back to try again.  The film world and Washington politics meet here, as James Franco, the headliner of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, also endorsed the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act in this PCRM video.

Chimps as Entertainers

The world of entertainment and policy intersect in another way where great apes are concerned. An international campaign is afoot to end the use of great apes as performers in entertainment (chimps and orangutans being the ones generally used) and it is spearheaded by tireless chimpanzee champion Jane Goodall, as well as by national animal advocacy groups such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). The opposition stems in part from the fact that there is no way to police how the animals are trained – though the American Humane Association (AHA) monitors the treatment of animal performers while they’re on set, no-one assesses the techniques the trainers use in private to condition the animals to obey their commands. (And moreover, there are numerous criticisms of the integrity of the AHA’s monitoring operations, which have very limited authority and which are financed by the studios themselves.)

Plenty of incidents have been recorded of routine brutality toward ape actors, who begin their careers at very young ages, while they can still be dominated by human beings. The allegations of chimp abuse on the set of 2008’s Speed Racer are just the tip of the iceberg.

Primatologist Sarah Baeckler, who witnessed a culture of beatings of young performing chimps as a volunteer at Amazing Animal Actors ranch in Malibu, points out: “Healthy, young chimpanzees are playful, curious, energetic, and mischievous, but these traits don’t serve them well when training begins, so one of the things that chimpanzees in the entertainment industry have to endure is an initial ‘breaking of the spirit.’ In other words, they have to learn how NOT to act like normal chimpanzees.” Baeckler goes on to state that “abuse and physical violence are seemingly commonplace in this industry, and it’s not even a secret. In fact, it’s taught in a training school [Moorpark College’s Exotic Animal Training and Management program] that is currently producing many future animal trainers and zoo workers.” One indicator of how prevalent the abuse may be is the ubiquitousness of chimp performers ‘grin’ — far from being gleeful, that grimace on chimpanzees is an expression of fear.

When apes get older they are no longer manageable even by brutes (typically, an 8 year-old chimp is already too dangerous to keep), and so they are sent to live somewhere else, often a sub-par roadside zoo where their housing and care are inadequate and they are isolated and bored. (Decent, accredited zoos won’t accept them because apes in such zoos now live in group installations, and chimps reared among humans are at sea in the complicated dynamics of chimp society; they can’t protect themselves from the aggression of dominant chimps.)

If they are lucky enough to end up at an enlightened ape sanctuary, this places the burden for their care on the philanthropic animal-charity community. The trainers who profited off of them (and traumatized them) just go on to acquire other young chimps.

And there are even more far-reaching reasons to ban the use of ape actors.

A 2008 survey found that the public is less likely to think that chimpanzees are endangered compared to other great apes. This may well be partly because chimps are so familiar to viewers from their use in commercials, circuses, and on greeting cards. (The truth is all four types of great apes are endangered.)

A 2011 study by Ross et al. has shown the power of even simple imagery: participants who were shown photos of a chimp standing next to a human were 35.5% less likely to deem chimpanzees as endangered or declining than those who saw photos of chimps alone.

These images can also boost the pet trade: participants who viewed these photos of chimps coexisting with humans were 30% more likely to believe that a chimp would make a good pet. (Charla Nash, the Connecticut woman who was attacked by former-performer Travis in 2009, would beg to differ, since her encounter with the 200-pound male chimp resulted in her face and hands being ripped off; she is now blind, has had a full face transplant, and now has to live in a nursing home at age 57). )

Some celebrities have taken a stand against the use of ape actors in entertainment, like Angelica Huston, Alec Baldwin, Cameron Diaz, and Bob Barker. And public pressure campaigns have convinced numerous companies – including Capital One, Dodge, Pizza Factory, and Pfizer — to can chimp ads for good.

However, Career Builder has been for several years one of the most prolific employers of chimpanzee performers through its series of humorous, office-based, TV ads.

Even though the trainer of the chimps used in the ads has been excoriated for cruelty by animal activists –- and his first round of chimps has already been shuffled off to sanctuaries — Career Builder has taken a defiant stand for several years when faced with complaints against its ads. For example, Stephen Ross of Lincoln Park Zoo’s Fisher Center for the Study and Conservation of Apes in Chicago has submitted his objections to Career Builder every year since 2005 without receiving a reply. (This is in spite of the fact that a Duke University study found that the ads were not even very effective.)

But there may be some good news: in 2013 Career Builder refrained from buying air time during the Super Bowl, as they had so often done. It is still too early to tell whether they will stop using chimp performers.

PORTRAYAL ON FILM

And there is yet more good news, especially for those who care about film and its social impact. Listed below are five recent movies, straddling a range of genres, which depict chimps in enlightened ways which communicate that our evolutionary siblings are highly social, intelligent, and sensitive animals. Two of these movies are strong indictments against conducting medical research on chimpanzees, and none of these films utilize trained chimpanzees as performers. Instead they used performance capture, puppet animatronics, documentary file footage, patient nature photography, and claymation.

The filmmakers here often employ a shorthand which suggests that they believe the audience already has a high level of respect for chimpanzees, and that it is ready to believe in quite sophisticated simian abilities. This is very encouraging because it is surely an inevitable step from that belief to a conviction that chimpanzees deserve far better treatment from us.

The Master Snubbed?

The Unacknowledged “Master”: director Paul Thomas Anderson
& a film that’s not about Scientology

Jennifer A Epps

Paul Thomas Anderson is my favorite film director who isn’t Scorsese. And even then, it’s getting very close. When I ambled out into the light after the L.A. native’s sixth feature, the psychological period epic The Master, I felt like I had just seen one of the greatest American films in a couple of decades. If you haven’t heard much about it, however, that’s because it isn’t nominated for any Oscars in the Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Production Design, or Best Score categories – in all of which cases it was robbed, in my humble opinion. It did still, nonetheless, receive 3 Oscar nominations for the work of each of its principal actors (Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Amy Adams). The acting was so rich and full it was impossible not to notice, but the Academy has treated the success of The Master’s cast as some kind of fluke, as if they could all just give spectacular performances without the words, story, and characters P.T. Anderson supplied them with in the first place, or the nuanced direction he gave them to guide them through some challenging and unusually-paced material.

One hears a lot about Kathryn Bigelow being snubbed by the Academy this year, and the question of whether this was in reaction to how she depicted torture in Zero Dark Thirty. One also hears about Ben Affleck, Quentin Tarantino, and Tom Hooper being left out of the Best Director category while their films were all nominated for Best Picture (though obviously when there are only 5 directors nominated yet 9 Best Picture nominees, there have to be some exclusions). What’s given little attention, however, is how severely Anderson and The Master were overlooked by the Academy (and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association) in the top categories. In fact, Anderson was not even part of the “directors’ roundtables” assembled by various news agencies early in the awards season. The reason for this perhaps is that Anderson’s work is so stubbornly idiosyncratic. The Master is even more uncompromising than There Will Be Blood; both of these surprising films exist in alternate universes of filmmaking with scant interest in building a story along familiar lines, cutting where audiences expect a cut, or scoring a scene in a way that sounds like other movies.

This weekend, there’s a chance for the British Academy to take a stand for originality at the BAFTAs, as The Master is nominated (once again) for awards for all three of its principal actors, as well as for Original Screenplay. And next weekend, the Writers’ Guild could recognize Anderson’s screenplay at the WGA Awards. However, I’m not sure anyone is holding their breath at this point, since there’s a little thing called “momentum”, and The Master seems to have lost that, while other, more commercial fare, has surged ahead.

But it is important to note that the title of this review is not strictly accurate. The Master, and Anderson’s impossibly fertile talent, is not completely ‘unacknowledged.’ For one thing, Anderson took home the second highest award at the Venice Film Festival, the Silver Lion, for Best Director. The Venice jury also awarded the Volpi Cup for Best Actor to both Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix. And apparently, the jury also wanted to award The Master the top prize at Venice, the Golden Lion, for Best Film, but new rules limited the jury to no more than two awards per film, no matter how exceptional the film. (The third award The Master picked up at the City of Canals was from the critics, the FIPRESCI award for the best film in competition.)

The Master has been a critical darling at home, too. Early in the awards season, it picked up a boat-load of trophies from critics’ associations across the U.S. Its wins are noted in the table below. That won’t help anyone in their Oscar pools, but it shows how far apart the critics and the Academy are. And it is worth keeping in mind when The Master is released on DVD on Feb. 26th, two days after the Oscars.

Assassination Bureau – CIA – Zero Dark Thirty

[See full coverage at: Zero Dark Thirty Scandal Files]

The Assassination Bureau: the CIA and Zero Dark Thirty

by Jennifer A Epps

The cover of the Feb. 4 issue of Time features Kathryn Bigelow, the director of Zero Dark Thirty, and dubs her new film ‘the year’s most controversial movie’ in its headline. The article inside makes an even bigger claim, calling Zero Dark Thirty “the most politically divisive motion picture in memory.” Though Bigelow has made a point in interviews to condemn torture as “reprehensible”, her depiction of torture in the Oscar-nominated dramatic thriller about the hunt for Osama bin Laden has created a firestorm, and could create some frissons at the 85th Academy Awards telecast later this month.

I’ve written a separate article on how Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal portray CIA torture of terror suspects in the movie, and this huge issue deserves the attention it’s getting. But it’s far from the only reason to be concerned about the content of Zero Dark Thirty.

In interviews about ZD30, Bigelow has taken to citing Oscar-winning political classics of past decades to suggest that this is the heavyweight context in which her film should be seen, films such as: All the President’s Men, In the Heat of the Night, and, though they are thematic opposites when it comes to the Vietnam War, both Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter. She has also included in the list the guerrilla warfare docudrama The Battle of Algiers (itself nominated for three Oscars), perhaps because of the scenes of torture, or perhaps because it is obvious that when Marxist director Gillo Pontecorvo shows the brutal repression of the Arab independence movement by French forces, “depiction is not endorsement,” as Bigelow says of her own movie.

But I think a more useful comparison with which to view Zero Dark Thirty is not the high-minded auteur-driven films of that rebellious age, but a commercial, inconsequential, big studio, romcom-adventure from 1969, called The Assassination Bureau.

Though the movie is just an excuse for Oliver Reed, with intrepid girl-reporter Diana Rigg at his side, to dash around foiling assassins with smirking British aplomb, The Assassination Bureau also happens to be about a secret mercenary firm of international hit men. The refined businessmen on its board of directors have happily influenced world events for decades by murdering dictators and other political figures. If it weren’t for the explicit commissions from clients, the private sector status, and the lack of government endorsement, they could remind one of the CIA.

The tone of the comedy is set minutes into the film when the bureau’s board, led by Reed himself, meets in an imposing star chamber. Ivan (Reed) directs their attention to large paintings of historic assassinations adorning their round boardroom: “Look around you at the great deeds recorded on the walls, gentlemen. Each one of them performed in the course of bettering the world, purging it of evil, striking down tyranny. In those days we were all ruled by my father’s basic principle that our bureau would never kill anyone without a sound moral reason.” A board member instantly responds: “He was a saintly man.” Ivan’s only qualm is that they might have begun to stray from “the high moral principles” of their founding — “the torch we once held so high.”

It’s tongue-in-cheek, this proud talk about ethical murder; the poised board members talking rationally in their elegantly appointed star chamber accept murder as completely civilized, and take their right to commit it as a given. (Intriguingly, the film was derived from an unfinished novel by socialist author Jack London, in turn developed from an early 20th-century story by anti-fascist novelist Sinclair Lewis.) But in Zero Dark Thirty, we get very similar scenes, and this time they’re not comedic. Though the CIA operatives in ZD30 don’t bring up ethics at all, they do sit around a conference table discussing, in a very professional and business-like way, whether they’re ready to green-light murder, or whether they should wait until they’re 100% certain they’ve got the correct target. Their authority to go around the world assassinating people is never up for debate.

ZD30 is a far more serious and ambitious film than The Assassination Bureau, but the broad characters in the ‘69 fantasy are (briefly, at least) more honest. When their ethics are questioned, they retort: “Everyone from some point of view deserves death,” and “It’s always possible to find a moral principle for killing someone.” By contrast, the CIA’s philosophy of killing is not on the table in ZD30: the agents certainly engage in analysis, but it’s not any moral or legal justification for their actions that they consider. They only analyze intelligence: photos, videos, interrogations, clues. Meanwhile, the movie’s momentum is very powerful, with everything building toward Act 3 and the climactic raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound. It is easy to get sucked into this suspenseful forward drive. This risks obscuring the realities behind the system and policies depicted.

Remote-controlled Execution

ZD30 hits theaters at a time when the drone industry is booming, when more and more of the U.S. strategy in the (still underway) ‘War on Terror’ is about using unmanned drones to take out pre-targeted individuals from control rooms on the other side of the globe.

The U.S. multiplied the number of drones in their arsenal 100-fold in the decade after 9/11. In occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, these strikes have been conducted by the Pentagon; in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia, where we are not technically at war, they are handled by the CIA. And the next gambit in the ever-expanding drone playbook is Mali; the U.S. has apparently already arranged to base drones in Niger to be flown over its North African neighbor.

Now, ZD30 doesn’t make drone warfare an overt part of its subject, but the ‘targeted killing’ program – the belief in ethical murder — is very much a part of the CIA culture which ZD30’s filmmakers embraced, or at least got into bed with, and the central event of the movie is a pre-planned assassination.

The film does show protests in Islamabad leading to the ouster of the CIA’s Pakistan station-chief, but Bigelow lingers over the station-chief’s defeat, and lead actress Jessica Chastain’s words of comfort to him – accusing the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence service, of letting him down. The direct relationship between the drone strikes and animosity toward the U.S. is not made clear.

ZD30 also runs news footage on the 2010 Times Square bombing incident that was staged by a naturalized U.S. citizen of Pakistani origin. Though in real life the bomber referred to the missile strikes on Pakistan as part of his incitement, the movie bypasses that explanation. Instead, NYC Mayor Bloomberg reads the man’s mind, sloganeering on a TV in the background of a shot that it was ‘our freedoms’ which motivated the terrorist plot.

Much later in the film, after CIA agent Maya (Chastain) has discovered bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan and struggled mightily to get an attack on it launched, she declares to a Navy SEAL that she’d really prefer to just drop a bomb on the compound. She has a proud, defiant air at the time that she says it: she scoffs at her supervisors’ concern that ‘UBL’ might not really be there. Since she turns out to have been right about UBL’s location, viewers are given little reason to distrust other people like her, people who prefer to drop bombs and skip all the pesky red tape.

Maya’s attitude is not really much different from that of maverick-warrior types from many mass-appeal movies  – like Rambo, The Dark Knight and 300 – in which the man or woman of action is held back by small-minded bureaucrats or worse. (A kind of detective, Maya is also akin to on-screen sleuthers who obsessively follow their hunches, like the heroes of Chinatown, Dirty Harry and Zodiac.) The usual result is that the audience roots for the maverick. Indeed if they didn’t, they’d be rooting against the very resolution of the story itself.

Bigelow and her screenwriter Boal have repeatedly sworn that they were scrupulous about not judging the methods of the professionals they were documenting. But the trouble with Bigelow and Boal’s pretence of detachment is that Maya’s obsession is the only game in town; again, if the audience were to detach from it, they’d have to go home. There’s more backstory in an Antonioni film. Bigelow and Boal’s previous drama, the Oscar-winner The Hurt Locker, felt like a character study despite an intense, action-heavy main storyline. But ZD30 does not delve deeply into Maya’s psyche, and her reactions to events are fleeting and inscrutable. Thus, by default if not by design, the movie lends itself to the well-worn grooves of commercial movie-making, and encourages the audience to side with Maya and her agenda. This is further strengthened by the fact that there are only two other alternatives in this film: a) timid supervisors who just want to delay action, and b) terrorists. Whistleblowers, diplomats, lawyers, human rights observers, and non-terrorist Muslims or Arabs are basically invisible. (When Muslims or Arabs are shown, they are often alien and mysterious – one may admire the beauty of a shot in which chador-clad figures suddenly surround a man in a formal garden, producing rifles from their dark drapery, but Bigelow really ought to know better than to perpetrate the same kind of tired images of exoticism that Edward Said condemned 45 years ago.)

The Dark Side of Zero Dark Thirty

 
[Editor's Note: See our extensive coverage of the Zero Dark Thirty torture scandal here.]
 

 

Torture and the Dark Side of ZERO DARK THIRTY

by Jennifer A Epps

 
The new movie about the hunting-down of Osama bin Laden, Zero Dark Thirty, is currently a box office leader, thanks to the judicious timing of its wide release to coincide with Jessica Chastain’s Golden Globe win as Best Actress and the announcement of the movie’s five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. It also happens to be the subject of attention in Washington, which creates some negative publicity but also stirs up buzz and curiosity at the same time.

It is safe to say that a lot more people will see this movie than saw director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal’s previous film, the character study and war drama The Hurt Locker, the little-movie-that-could: a film with, to this day, the smallest total box office take of any Best Picture-Oscar-winner. Both these Bigelow films derive from Boal’s journalism, as all of his movie credits – including the article that inspired the splendid Paul Haggis film In the Valley of Elah – stem from his reporting on the U.S. military or security apparatus. The Hurt Locker emerged from what Boal witnessed as an embedded reporter in Iraq; similarly, his latest script most likely reflects with accurate faithfulness the information shared with him by CIA sources. Some people have made a big stink over those CIA briefings and demanded to know exactly what the CIA shared with Boal. This has led to the release of an interview transcript through a Freedom of Information Act request by the Richard Mellon Scaife-funded conservative group Judicial Watch (whose outrage seems to stem from the filmmakers’ Democratic affiliation), as well as to a letter from Senators Dianne Feinstein, John McCain, and Carl Levin to the acting director of the CIA, requesting all pertinent documents on how the film team was briefed.

But what the ruckus obscures is the one-sided nature this action thriller was set up to have from the start. Since Boal himself was embedded with the military in 2004, he has already been influenced by the ridiculous practice of embedding – the only one on offer by the Pentagon at the time and the only one they’ll offer in the future, since the mainstream media bought it hook, line, and sinker. The Alice-in-Wonderland logic of embedding, which pretends truth can be even remotely glimpsed when a reporter is immersed in only one group’s point-of-view in a bitter and hugely complex conflict, had a virulent effect on Iraq War reporting — and there’s research to back up just how pathetic that reporting became.

Nonetheless, thanks to the power of artistic imagination and sensibility, Boal’s script for The Hurt Locker still led to a very nuanced film which many of us felt was a humanistic cautionary tale that respected individual warriors while criticizing what war does to them. Lightning has not struck twice, however, and Zero Dark Thirty does not inherit its predecessor’s wisdom just by mimicking its attention to details. In the filmmakers’ desire to unearth every step of the bin Laden manhunt, they have overlooked the concept of balance (or convinced themselves that refraining from commenting on their subject matter is the same thing). Boal probably knows more about the inscrutability of truth than some of his moviemaking peers – his educational background is in Philosophy – but he does not seem worried that becoming the confidante for CIA officials could possibly skew his view. He did not, after all, counter the high-level access he got to CIA officials by ‘embedding’ himself with, say, Human Rights Watch, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Amnesty International, or the Red Cross, World Court, or UN Commission on Human Rights. Nor did Boal hang out with the staff at the European Court of Human Rights – the court which, a week before Zero Dark Thirty opened, set a precedent by ruling in favor of German citizen Khaled El-Masri’s lawsuit that the CIA broke the law in subjecting him to torture.

So it is no wonder that Boal serves up Dan, the CIA torture specialist portrayed in the film by Australian actor Jason Clarke, as rational, decent, and perfectly capable of going back to paper-pushing when he’s done stripping Muslims’ clothes off. At no point is Dan conveyed as sadistic or out-of-control: his actions are deliberate. Moreover, he and Maya, the dedicated CIA protagonist played by Chastain, get along fine; Maya’s female colleague (Jennifer Ehle) even chit-chats with her about how Maya and Dan should “hook up”. Granted, Maya is initially very disturbed to see Dan inflicting a smorgasbord of pain and suffering on a detainee – waterboarding, sexual humiliation, stress positions, sleep deprivation, starvation, enclosure in a sealed wooden box the size of a suitcase (a tactic almost identical to one used on slaves in Django Unchained.) But she makes no complaint over the actions or the scars and welts on the prisoner’s body. In fact, she eventually becomes a torturer herself, fully accepting waterboarding and employing henchmen to punch prisoners on her command to ‘enhance’ her interrogation. It seems the operatives’ only real concern about torture comes later on, in reaction to President Obama’s public disavowal of it; they look uncomfortable when it sounds like the rules are going to change. “Don’t be the last person holding a dog-collar,” Dan warns Maya when he gets out of the racket.

At the same time, the film rewards CIA certainty that detainees are withholding information in the face of denials. Though one detainee who is tortured becomes so distraught he starts jabbering nonsense – thus underscoring experts’ assertions we’ve heard in real life that torture leads to unreliable information — this moment is unlikely to stick with viewers. It is not a plot point, and certainly the agents are not worried about getting false leads (though even Shakespeare understood four centuries ago the uselessness of torture)1. What will impact the audience much more is that the same detainee who is tortured so much finally does reveal important information. Yes, he’s sitting at a meal with his torturers and they’re being nice to him at the time – but the implication is obviously that he ‘broke’ after the grueling succession of tortures he’d endured. Feeding him is just the follow-through phase of the torture.

And how differently the main torture victim in Zero Dark Thirty is depicted from the innocent, Egyptian-born, Chicago resident married to Reese Witherspoon in the unjustly-overlooked 2007 film Rendition. In that film, engineer Anwar (Omar Metwally), mistaken for someone else, is kidnapped from an airport terminal by the CIA and vanished to North Africa to be tortured – the script is said to be inspired by the El-Masiri case mentioned above, as well as by the similar case of Syrian-Canadian citizen Maher Arar.

In Rendition, the torture sequences are clearly empathetic to the victim, and they are seen from his point-of-view. Moreover, the CIA agent who witnesses the torture (Jake Gyllenhaal) isn’t merely uncomfortable, he’s beside himself, and he ultimately rebels against the system. By contrast, in Zero Dark Thirty, the interrogation scenes are from the interrogators’ perspective, and are part of the forward-movement of the movie: the viewer is, by dint of the dynamics of a detective story, co-opted into rooting for the interrogators. At no point do those interrogators we side with seem to have the slightest twinge of conscience (Maya’s initial discomfort is when she is green; like a kid learning how to skin a fish, she gets over it)2. And the false leads that cause delays are not shown as being the result of torture, but as understandable mistakes.

Furthermore, none of the detainees are portrayed as innocent or out-of-the-loop. While it may well be that a crime drama feels it’s necessary for dramatic economy to focus on criminals and accomplices only, the psychic effect of this emphasis is to make us side with the authorities – as our protectors – and to perceive that the world is full of dangerous hoodlums. In this case, which is no quaint PBS Mystery but a living-newspaper moment with influence over our current policy choices, this emphasis obscures the fact that the U.S. government was ‘disappearing’ people and hiding their very existence from human rights observers, that at least 100 prisoners are known to have died in U.S. custody as a result of interrogation and detention procedures during the Bush regime, that even some American citizens in custody have been subjected to torture, and that the Bush Administration kept scores of inmates imprisoned at Guantánamo for years despite knowing they were innocent (including an 89-year old villager, a 14-year boy, and a journalist).

As Andy Worthington, a British reporter who researches Guantánamo, told Democracy Now in 2011 after thousands of documents from the prison were released by Wikileaks:

“all along, it’s been apparent that there’s only been a very small number of genuine terrorist suspects at Guantánamo and that the rest of the people included large numbers of innocent people who were swept up… [T]here were a lot of low-level Taliban foot soldiers in there, as well, which is really at the heart of the failure of the war on terror to make a distinction between, on the one hand, terrorists and, on the other hand, soldiers in a military conflict…Major General Dunlavey, who was the commander of Guantánamo in 2002, complained about the “Mickey Mouse” prisoners, the number of “Mickey Mouse” prisoners, as he described them, that he was being sent from Afghanistan. Here they are. Here are the farmers and the cooks and the taxi drivers and all these people who should never have been rounded up in the first place and who ended up in Guantánamo because there was no screening process.”

The large number of innocent people at Guantánamo is in fact relevant to Zero Dark Thirty despite what the filmmakers might think because it’s all part of the same system, and because what’s being presented to us is also similar. First of all, Guantánamo was supposed to glean intelligence to thwart terrorism, and secondly, because it was a massive torture operation. Or in Andy Worthington’s words again: “what these files reveal in detail is that when people didn’t have anything to tell, because in so many cases they were nobodies, the Bush administration actually introduced torture techniques in an attempt to extract information from them.”

The makers of Zero Dark Thirty seem to be ignorant of this big picture, and their understanding of the actual practices of torture in the Bush Administration seems as misguided as the familiar lines dished out by the mainstream news. As Glen Greenwald wrote for Salon in 2009: “The reality — that our ‘interrogation tactics’ killed numerous detainees, who, by definition, are people confined helplessly in our custody, virtually none of whom has been convicted of anything, and at least some of whom are completely innocent — is virtually never heard as part of these debates.”

When we meet the detainee who Zero Dark Thirty will submit to an extended buffet of coercive brutality, he is already openly hostile to his torturer. He is clearly not a neutral party, but someone who actively dislikes his captors and their cause. Thus his defiance makes the audience instantly see him as their ideological enemy, perhaps even one who needs to be brought down a few pegs. I realize that other entertainments have been much more overtly pro-torture and gotten away with it (24, The Dark Knight, Inglourious Basterds), but Bigelow’s film is supposed to be a serious drama ‘based on a true story’ and this makes it potentially even more influential.

I take Bigelow at her word that she is “a lifelong pacifist” who “support[s] all protest against the use of torture, and, quite simply, inhumane treatment of any kind”,  even if she says she’d prefer they didn’t protest her movie (as groups like the orange-jumpsuit street demonstrators World Cant Wait have been doing). She has argued in a piece in the L.A. Times that “depiction is not endorsement” and that “confusing depiction with endorsement is the first step toward chilling any American artist’s ability and right to shine a light on dark deeds.” This would be a valid point, except for the fact that, whether purposefully done or not, sometimes depiction is endorsement. Sometimes depiction is encouragement — and that is why critics and scholars have spent as much time as they have decrying the depiction of violence against women in much mainstream entertainment, or the depiction of the LGBT community in ways that promulgate gay-bashing (there being a big difference between Cruising and Brokeback Mountain), or the depiction of sadistic murders in ways that make them seem cool, or the glamorization of battle, or various other media trends that harm society. It’s all a matter of tone.

Bigelow goes on to state that “War, obviously, isn’t pretty, and we were not interested in portraying this military action as free of moral consequences.” That is a noble sentiment, but where does Bigelow think she showed those consequences in her film? Zero Dark Thirty is no Casualties of War. Sure, she rightly avoids an overtly rah-rah-rah tone, and she doesn’t end on a triumphant peal but on a somber, quiet note. And Maya is consistently grim and joyless. But all these CIA operatives merely seem to be doing their jobs; their conduct is normalized by their banality, and moral considerations don’t seem to come into it. Unlike Sergeant William James in The Hurt Locker, who demonstrably goes a little crazy under the pressures of an impossible war, these characters always maintain an aura of professionalism and rationality.

Boal has alleged that the “torture scenes are graphic and unsparing and unsentimental”, which is in the eye of the beholder, since each type of torture shown is quite brief and the extent of the prisoner’s suffering is not fore-grounded. But he also adds that “what the film does over the course of two hours is show the complexity of the debate.” Now, this extraordinary statement bears no relationship whatsoever to the actual movie playing in theaters. As journalist Jane Mayer (the author of the torture exposé The Dark Side) remarks in The New Yorker, the movie “doesn’t include a single scene in which torture is questioned.” If Boal thinks he’s showing a debate, it must be a debate between those who believe in torture – the ones he shows – and some invisible opponents he assumes must be answered. None of the characters mention that proscriptions against torture have been codified in fundamental international and U.S. documents for decades; it’s hard to tell if they even know. Mayer underscores the irresponsibility and inaccuracy of the movie’s lack of criticism of torture:

“the Bush years were racked by internal strife over just that issue—again, not just among human-rights and civil-liberties lawyers, but inside the F.B.I., the military, the Justice Department, and the C.I.A. itself, which eventually abandoned waterboarding because it feared, correctly, that the act constituted a war crime. None of this ethical drama seems to interest Bigelow.”

By positing that torture helped the CIA track down bin Laden while at the same time taking an uncritical stance toward the practice, the filmmakers have drawn a great deal of ire. (Recently, noted activist-actors David Clennon, Ed Asner, and Martin Sheen have brought the fight to the Academy by publicly opposing the film as an Oscar contender.) Bigelow and Boal may very well find torture abhorrent themselves, but if they do, they’ve really bent over backwards to hide it. What seems more likely is that their outrage has diminished because of their closeness to the culture which did those deeds. This comes out in small ways. Concerned about investigations, Boal has now enlisted the help of Jeffrey Smith, the attorney who represented Henry Kissinger and Robert McNamara – hardly scions in the cause of human rights. Smith also happens to be former CIA general counsel, so Boal is picking an apple not far from the tree. Meanwhile, Bigelow’s L.A. Times piece defending her film salutes the “ordinary Americans who fought bravely” to defeat bin Laden “even as they sometimes crossed moral lines, who labored greatly and intently, who gave all of themselves in both victory and defeat, in life and in death, for the defense of this nation.” She may call herself a pacifist, but no pacifist I know has so much equanimity about crossing ‘moral lines’ like these.

Ironically, Bigelow’s chief public defense of the portrayal of torture in the film is that we need artists to show us unsightly parts of our history, that sweeping our shameful deeds under the rug serves no-one. This is a remarkably specious argument, since it must be clear to her that the complaints against the movie by opponents of torture are not over the fact that it shows torture, but the way it shows torture. And it is a pretty spry contortionist’s act to a) claim moral high ground as a courageous truth-teller revealing dark secrets, while b) overtly championing the people and system you claim to be critiquing, and c) simultaneously adopting a non-judgmental, neutral-observer pose.

L.A. Weekly film critic Scott Foundas writes in his thumbs-up review of Zero Dark Thirty that “Bigelow and Boal come not to judge but to show”, but why would anyone assume those are the only two choices? There are actually ways to tackle problematic, raw-nerve historical subjects without being preachy or black-and-white. In fact, The Hurt Locker had seemed like an exemplar of that type. Beyond that, the British TV movies Bloody Sunday (2002) and Battle for Haditha (2007) are even more complete paradigms of that achievement. Both are documentary-style, ensemble-oriented features which follow characters with viscerally-divergent viewpoints. Both are scrupulous recreations of actual incidents, and portraits of how certain cultures (i.e. counter-terrorism forces and the military) breed certain mind-sets. But these two Brit pics don’t take objectivity so literally that they seem blasé about atrocities. It’s true that Bloody Sunday and Battle for Haditha are both about senseless, avoidable massacres (Derry, Northern Ireland in 1972 and Haditha, Iraq in 2005) and that they were both tragedies whose victims were innocent civilians, whereas Zero Dark Thirty is something altogether different. But the point is an aesthetic one: there are precedents already in the can to prove that reprehensible actions need not be filmed with a moralistic, condemnatory tone in order to make a moral argument. Those two fine U.K. films try to understand all their characters, even the worst of the bunch, but they do not accept all of their actions.

It is not to suggest that movies should talk down to the audience to say that filmmakers really need to think about media psychology more. It is merely to acknowledge that the images they create have extremely powerful effects on our psyches. Perhaps none of the CIA sources Boal interviewed had any lasting problem with torture and Bigelow was intent on verisimilitude, so the torture isn’t protested in the film. But when those characters are also the good guys in the movie, when the active protagonist who pursues her goal and finally achieves it is presented as a positive force (not as an anti-hero like, say, Michael Corleone in The Godfather films), then our human psyches taking in the film will not generally compute “wait a minute, remember the torture? Didn’t those people break a truck-load of laws? I feel ambivalent about this woman who is so morally compromised.” Instead, the human mind will compute: “The end justifies the means.”

It’s true that Bigelow is, as she declares, “part of a Hollywood community that has made searing war films part of its cinematic tradition”, but that same Hollywood community has also made plenty of movies that the Pentagon loves – which is why the Pentagon and Hollywood have been such happy collaborators for so many decades. Likewise, Hollywood and the CIA have also been very willing partners on many entertainment projects–not just the current crop of prominent ones. This enduring marriage makes a mockery of MPAA President Christopher Dodd’s warning to Washington that the fuss about CIA cooperation with Zero Dark Thirty might frighten the military or other government agencies from working with Hollywood in the future. That is highly unlikely; those agencies know a good thing when they see it. Last year the U.S. military literally commissioned its own action movie, Act of Valor; it has been developing its own video games since 2002 and now has about two dozen games in use; and there is even an entertainment liaison office in Los Angeles for the DOD and Armed Forces.

And when CIA officials cooperated with Zero Dark Thirty, they were certainly not acting as whistleblowers. It wasn’t “X” in a trenchcoat on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial whispering secrets his boss might have him killed for. No, CIA big guns met with Bigelow and Boal, on record and above board, “to ensure an appropriate portrayal of the Agency’s mission as well as the dedication of the men and women of the CIA who played a key part in the success of the mission,” as they told their Senate overseers. The CIA maintains that the relationship with the Zero Dark Thirty team was nice and cozy, and included the filmmakers agreeing to let the agency read drafts of the screenplay. This runs counter to Boal’s assertions, since he denies that he ever let the CIA officially vet the script, but even if did maintain the independence he has avowed, it’s not like there’s anything in the movie that might offend the agency.

The letter sent to the CIA’s acting director by Senate Select Committee chair Feinstein and ex-officio members Levin and McCain asks an interesting question: whether the CIA agents who met with the filmmakers lied to them about the role of torture in the hunt for bin Laden. This is one trail worth following, because if it is discovered that these Hollywood liberals were in fact guided into making the kind of exculpatory movie they made in order to influence public opinion – and perhaps to protect torturers from future prosecution – then this is a scandal that could last for some time.

One can only hope that the movie might lead to very different results than those which its depiction of torture would otherwise engender. This week, John Kiriakou, former CIA analyst and counter-terrorism consultant to national media outlets, will be sentenced for disclosing classified information to the press after pleading guilty to one of five counts against him in October. Kiriakou was the first government official to expose the use of waterboarding during the Bush regime, revealing the actions of another CIA officer to a New York Times reporter in order to bring to light how al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times. In other words, Kiriakou has been prosecuted because he was a whistleblower about U.S. torture – whereas none of his colleagues who actually committed the war crime of torture have been so much as indicted. Nor are they likely to be, since Attorney General Eric Holder concluded a three-year investigation last August by declaring that no interrogators would be prosecuted for the abuse of prisoners (even though the abuse resulted in corpses).

It is obviously a grave injustice that these people not only get to walk away free but also get their own movie. (Where’s the movie in which Kiriakou is the hero?) But still, if it turns out that Zero Dark Thirty was derived from lies told by CIA officers to shape a narrative they wanted to see, maybe that could make at least the more conscientious members of Hollywood less eager to cooperate with them in the future. And one can always hope that such revelations could bring on renewed calls to prosecute the torturers — and repercussions for those who may have pulled a psy-op on the American people by manipulating some gullible filmmakers.

————————————————————————————————

1 In The Merchant of Venice Portia uses the knowledge for casual metaphor in a love dialogue:
“I fear you speak upon the rack,
Where men enforced do speak anything.”

2 This analogy is not meant to advocate fishing as a harmless activity. Scientific research has proven that fish feel pain.

 

 

Lincoln (2012)

by Jennifer Epps

The period epic Lincoln may be the least Spielbergian movie that director Steven Spielberg has ever made.  Not only is it shot in a remarkably straight-forward way for such a visual stylist, but it is also an unhurried, contemplative, and actually quite subtle film for a director whose recent ventures were War Horse and The Adventures of TinTin. Therefore: never say never. Lincoln  is proof that Spielberg can be a great storyteller when he has a great script.

He has that here, thanks to perhaps America’s most intellectual and politically passionate playwright, Tony Kushner (Angels in America). The dialogue is a thing of beauty — both literate and folksy, touching on grand ideas as well as the frailty of ordinary humans — and it often feels like the thoughtful, opinionated discussions by the Founders in HBO’s John Adams. Like that award-sweeping miniseries, which was based on a 650-page biography, Lincoln  accomplishes an impressive feat — it adapts a door-stopper, in this case Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 750-page history Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, and winnows out the important and meaningful information. It feels rich and alive but not rambling (the graveyard of lo, so many bio-pics), because it focuses with determined precision on a 4-month period around the end of the Civil War when Lincoln was most actively and most urgently pursuing an amendment to outlaw slavery. At the same time, however, Kushner and Spielberg leaven all the epic stuff about changing America forever with just the right number of small details: Abe’s animosity toward wearing leather gloves; how much he spoils his youngest son; the unhappiness of his marriage; and the look in his eye when his aides want decisions and instead he digs in his heels and tells a drawling anecdote.

Though the characterization of the eponymous character, as written by Kushner and performed by Daniel Day-Lewis, is mesmerizing, Lincoln is not just a biography of a president but also a biography of radical change — a process story about the passage of the 13^th Amendment, with some similarities to earlier types of process stories, like Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing,  though more monumental. It turns out that the steps on the road to the abolition of slavery were anything but noble: there are nowhere near enough votes to pass the amendment, and the imminent end of the Civil War hangs over Lincoln’s head, making him fear that those he has freed will be ordered back into servitude if his Emancipation Proclamation has no peacetime equivalent. A point is reached when the only way to secure the needed support for a firm end to slavery is to bribe, threaten, cheat, and deceive. Or in the words of a Lincoln ally near the close of the film: the 13^th Amendment was “passed by corruption aided and abetted by the purest man in America.” (Lincoln was never quite a saint, though, as this article shows.)

The sausage-making of politics is not supposed to be palatable to watch, but in this case, the hijinks are quite delightful. Like  the Godfather, or Nixon, honest Abe has to take a back seat so his name cannot  be linked to anything unsavory. This leaves lots of the most dynamic work up to supporting players — who are bursting with vim and vigor, and deliciously well-cast: James Spader, John Hawkes, and Tim Blake Nelson play three low-lifes  hired to extort co-operation from members of Congress; Peter McRobbie and Lee Pace are vociferous Democratic congressmen staunchly opposed to abolition; Tommy Lee Jones is the radical, hotheaded abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens; Michael Stuhlbarg is a timid politician pressured into doing the right thing; and David Strathairn is the reserved, pragmatic Secretary of State, William  Seward, who finds Lincoln’s plans ill-advised and yet helps make them happen. (His characterization has met with the approval of the director of the historic Seward House, though two significant moments from Seward’s relationship with Lincoln were left out of the film.)

President Lincoln is in almost every scene, and with Day-Lewis in the role he quietly dominates each one. But there is also an enveloping tapestry of Republicans, Democrats, abolitionists, soldiers and advisors, all of them struggling through a uniquely turbulent time. Neurotic Mrs. Lincoln (Sally Field) is there, adoring yet resenting her husband — she seems to wish she had married a more ordinary man. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Lincoln’s defiant son, ill-suited for following in his dad’s intellectual footsteps. Jared Harris is the Union’s dignified General, Ulysses Grant; Hal Holbrook (who has himself played Lincoln on TV) is Francis Blair, a southern Republican with contacts on the Confederate side (he will later turn Democrat);  and Jackie Earle Haley is a beady-eyed emissary from the South, registering all the humiliation and anger of his people when he realizes slavery — the region’s economic staple — is history.

Though there are ignoble actions going on, there’s never any  doubt in the movie that Lincoln possesses a fundamental morality, that he cares  deeply about ending slavery. He is down-to-earth and modest, but we can see the remarkable person underneath: wise, shrewd, humane, and committed. Day-Lewis plays him as an idiosyncratic but consummate leader who listens intently to  even the humblest interlocutors, his eyes peering into their souls. He is introduced, in fact, at an army base, meeting with soldiers one-on-one. He is the epitome of gentle courtesy and rapt attention, whether listening to his boisterous pre-pubescent son or to a challenging black soldier who wants to make sure Lincoln understands the issues. Yes, it’s a hagiographic depiction, with the  crowd-pleasing humor and warmth that fits so comfortably with a holiday season release, but it’s also a layered portrait, permitted by the director to flower slowly. Day-Lewis’ Lincoln draws people to him simply by thinking, and he manages to radiate energy just sitting and staring at the floor.

And there’s a lot of thinking required. The burdens of leadership weigh heavily upon his shoulders. Like Shakespeare’s Henry V, he likes to perambulate among the common people because he is faced with an awesome responsibility — and difficult choices. The long and winding path to abolition hits a pivotal crossroads when ending the Civil War and ending slavery come to be at odds with each other. Lincoln could engage with the South’s proffered peace delegation right away, or he could delay so as to have  the leverage to pass the amendment. (His public argument having been that the South is fighting to preserve slavery, and that they won’t sue for peace unless they see that slavery is no longer an option, he stands to lose the support of those on the fence, those who don’t care much whether slavery continues or  not.) Lincoln’s dilemma becomes even more terrible and personal when his own son enlists — and Mrs. Lincoln has a meltdown over the prospect of losing a second son in the war.

I had expected Lincoln  to glorify militarism more, especially considering Spielberg’s recent foray into  the First World War. I think he’s consciously trying not to do that: the movie’s very first imagery is the silent ugliness of the Civil War, as soldiers from both the North and the South, the Northern regiment being black, wrestle bitterly in a muddy drizzle. But it’s not actually a war movie: most of the film seems to  take place in wood-paneled drawing rooms and offices, in a dim gloom broken up by cold natural light. The war is referred to frequently but barely glimpsed; it is a merely abstract, background concept. I’m sure Kushner could have  conveyed the horrors of the Civil War if that had been the assignment — besides writing a heart-rending play on Afghanistan, he co-authored the last serious film Spielberg directed, the espionage drama Munich  (an action thriller about a Mossad agent’s soul-searching), and he adapted Bertolt Brecht’s classic anti-war play Mother Courage  in 2006. But that was in fact not the assignment, and at the end of the picture, Lincoln’s speech to the troops, about fighting until every last whiplash is avenged, rings in the air.

Target Iran: Argo’s CIA Heroes vs. A Separation

 

Iran, Politics, and Film: “Argo” or “A Separation”?

by Jennifer Epps

On the spectrum of recent U.S. films about intense life-and-death conflicts between Persians and “our guys’, the most propagandistic, militaristic, and reactionary position is occupied by the reprehensible live-action cartoon 300. You could call this the “Kill Them All” position. On the opposite end of that spectrum, the most humanistic, egalitarian, and psychologically insightful position is occupied by the exquisite drama The House of Sand and Fog — a chamber piece that shows how misunderstandings can spiral tragically out of control. You might call this the “Human Decency” position.

Somewhere in the middle of those two extremes lies the new movie Argo,  directed by Ben Affleck for Smokehouse Pictures, the production company owned by George Clooney and Grant Heslov. Argo  is about the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979, and how the CIA came up with an unlikely rescue plan for six of the Americans hiding outside of the embassy: they would pretend to make a sci-fi movie. The premise has enormous potential, and it’s easy to see why it would be attractive to Hollywood. Unfortunately, the finished product is nowhere near the “Human Decency” end of the spectrum. I think its liberal makers would be surprised and actually ashamed if they realized how much more it leans towards 300.

There is no doubt that Argo is a very ambitious film. It wants to be life-and-death serious, funny, and exciting all at once, and to join historical accuracy with breathless pacing, jokey put-downs of Hollywood, and an absurdist scheme at the story’s core. As Affleck confided in an interview, it is also ambitious in its delicate tonal balance. It aims to be a taut suspense thriller that also provides some history of the strained relations between the U.S. and Iran, and it tries to re-create the 1970′s vibe without being too cheesy or campy. All the while, of course, it is designed to be commercial, with a budget of $44 million — the L.A.Times  alleges that this makes it “one of the season’s more daring gambles, the kind of movie most studios stopped making in the last decade.”

At the same time, it seems to want to leave us with the takeaway that even in a nightmarish scenario, bitter differences can be resolved without bombing anyone. (At the premiere, the audience applauded President Carter’s voiceover explaining that in the end we got all the hostages out, and we did it peacefully). The movie does show that deciding against a bloodbath can take courage and foresight. And perhaps this is what Affleck, Clooney, and Heslov believe made the movie the right thing to do right now — even at the risk of stoking the fires of warmongers here at home in 2012, by raising the spectre of Americans imperiled by Iran.

Well, it achieves all those goals in spades, and I applaud its ambitions and its aplomb. But I wish it was considerably more ambitious.

Argo catapults between, as Affleck put it to the L.A. Times, “three different themes and three different worlds: the CIA, Hollywood, and the Iran tensions.” Affleck’s quote is informative: the third theme or world that he organized the film around was “Iran tensions’, not Iran itself. Not even the Iranian revolution. The subject is the threat to Americans. Argo is about the plight of 6 Americans hiding out in Tehran after the embassy is seized, and it cuts away only to strategic debates at CIA headquarters as agent Tony Mendez (Affleck) struggles against bureaucratic inertia, or to comic relief scenes in Hollywood between John Goodman and Alan Arkin. No matter where our wheels touch down, it’s Americans who matter. This is a movie that views Iran in the 1970s from the living-room where the 6 are hiding — and the blinds are closed.

The cover story being used to try to smuggle the 6 hideaways out of Tehran is that they are location-scouting for a movie, so the day before they are to escape, they go out in public to make their aliases more believable. Do we, on the pretend location scout, finally see some of Tehran’s cultural landmarks? Do we get a sense of an ancient civilization and a sophisticated culture? Do we have any panoramas of people going about their business in the complexity of a metropolitan city? No, because the Americans’ expedition is just as claustrophobic as the scenes in their lair — Affleck crowds them into a van, squeezes the van in a vice as they are swarmed by furious protesters, and then jostles them around in a packed bazaar that turns hostile. Of course, he’s doing this deliberately for the tension it creates in them and in us. But throughout the film, the Iran we see in the news clips and the Iran we see dramatized are all on the same superficial level: incomprehensible, out-of-control hordes with nary an individual or rational thought expressed.

After a brief (albeit important) animated storyboard introduction that contextualizes the events of 1979 with some history, it is the storming of the American embassy which begins both the film proper and our exposure to the Iranian revolution. You wouldn’t know from this film that, despite years of persecution during Iran’s westernized government, the communist Tudeh Party was also out organizing workers’ strikes during the turmoil of the Shah Pahlavi’s overthrow. The movie does stress that the U.S. helped overthrow the democratically-elected prime minister Mohammad Mossaddeq in 1953 because he dared to nationalize Iran’s oil, and then backed the Shah and his use of the notorious SAVAK secret police to kidnap and torture the Shah’s opponents. These are obviously excellent points to make. But Argo glosses over the diversity of opinion in Iran and the intellectual ferment before the theocratic lockdown, making the culture look exactly the way an insular American public has come to believe all Islamic countries look. The film offers only scant insight into how  the Islamists came to win over a country that had previously been quite secular and sophisticated.

Very, very few Iranian characters are individualized in Argo, and most of the time when we see Iranians on-screen, their words are not translated for us. Take Farshad Farahat’s character. He is an officer in the Revolutionary Guards, one of the final terrifying obstacles the escaping protagonists must face at the airport. Farahat tries not to play stupid or cartoonish like so many ethnic villains in Hollywood movies, but most of the little he has been given to say is un-translated, so Farahat has to do almost all of the work with his eyes. The movie apparently never intended much more for him: his character’s name is merely “Azzizi Checkpoint #3″.

Another Persian, Reza (Omid Abtahi), makes an appearance in the marketplace in Tehran. His defining characteristic is whether the Americans can trust him. When he is friendly, his words are translated. When an altercation breaks out, there are no subtitles.

And even the point of the jokey snippet of dialogue that is translated seems to be to mock his idea of a Hollywood movie even more than Argo sends up the fake sci-fi B-movie. This dialogue emphasizes his cultural Other-ness, making him sound as sexist and out-of-touch as a Sacha Baron Cohen creation.

Nowhere, in a caper that exists in part to celebrate movie magic, is it mentioned that Iran has its own cinematic tradition – though if the Argo  creative team had ever seen the award-winning 1992 tribute film Once Upon a Time, Cinema  they would have seen clips from old Iranian movies dating all the way back to the silent era. By the time Argo is set, a number of Iranian film festivals had been in existence several years, including the Tehran International Film Festival ‘to promote the art of Cinema that expresses humanitarian values and promotes understanding and exchange of ideas between nations’. And there were already several film and television schools in Iran, including a decade-old  government-financed School of Television and Cinema which students attended for free. 480 feature films were made in Iran between 1966 and 1973; filmmakers, like other Iranian artists and intellectuals, had plenty to call attention to under the Shah’s oppressive regime. In fact, the Iranian New Wave, which launched in 1969, should have been known to Argo ‘s Foreign Service professionals who had spent their leisure time in Tehran; with filmmakers as respected as Dariush Mehrjui and Abbas Kiarostami already active. By the late seventies, movies were already the key form of mass entertainment in the country. Yet Affleck has the Revolutionary Guards gawking and giggling over the storyboards and poster for the fake Hollywood movie like awe-struck children.

SORKIN AND THESE WOMEN: “The Newsroom” Special Report #2

Maggie and Lisa

by Jennifer Epps

HBO’s workplace dramedy The Newsroom has an ensemble cast, but its first season, which concluded last month, nonetheless revolved around cable-TV anchorman Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels). While sometimes gruff and insensitive, Will is the center of gravity in the show – much as the President was in Aaron Sorkin’s hit show The West Wing – and though Sorkin is conscious of Will’s character flaws, the anchorman’s leadership – both of his staff and the national dialogue — is generally portrayed as bold, wise, and perceptive. Many have noticed that the elevation of Sorkin’s middle-aged, white male hero has come at the expense of the rest of The Newsroom’s ensemble. In fact, several commentators have put it quite bluntly: “In Sorkinworld,” writes a Time.com reviewer, “the men are men and the women are sorry.” A critic for Daily Beast claims: “In Sorkinland, men act (nobly!) and women support (comically!)”  Slate accuses Sorkin of having a “woman problem.”  And Huffington Post media critic Maureen Ryan labelsthe new HBO show “dismissive of anyone who isn’t a white heterosexual male.”Indeed, there are a fair number of examples on The Newsroom to back up these assertions. The young associate producer of the series’ fictitious primetime show, News Night, is smart, conscientious, and an independent thinker. Maggie Jordan (Alison Pill) is often the one who rushes in with a key piece of information on a story; the one who puts forth an innovative idea for the newscast. Yet Maggie also happens to be a young woman who cannot leave her personal problems at the door. As laudable as her input is, she spends a lot of time distracted by romantic entanglements (two of which work in the office with her), and her primary color is neurotic. She also lacks credentials – she began as an administrative assistant, and got promoted as a reward for her loyalty, not her work. There have to be more experienced news hounds among the support staff that mills around the large open-plan office; it’s simply a statistical probability, since there are so many of them. But we don’t hear much from them because it’s the older white men – host Will, and news division head Charlie Skinner (Sam Waterston) — who get to sound like journalistic pros, while the other News Night staffers generally sound like research assistants.

Mackenzie

Though Sorkin consciously views the flirtatious, fast-paced dialogue he likes to write as a descendant of classic screwball comedy, he seems to have forgotten that those Hollywood films of the 1930s and 1940s featured tough, confident, professional women. In fact, that’s what made them work; ‘neurotic’ doesn’t really go with ‘banter.’ Nor were the men put on pedestals and treated as saviors; the scales were often balanced by giving the women more power and the men less. (Hence those films in which the man was impoverished, the woman an heiress; the man a rustic rube, the woman a worldly urban careerist.) It’s not like these films are locked up in a vault — screwballs are readily available for study. Sorkin might even have gotten a refresher course in 2008, when George Clooney resurrected the cool, successful, feminine-but-at-home-in-a-man’s-world leading lady in his overlooked roaring-twenties film Leatherheads (which he directed and claims to have co-written, though the Writers Guild did not give him credit).  Though Sorkin may be better at capturing screwball comedies’ effervescence and rapid-fire wordplay than anyone else, he’s gone off-track with the core character dynamics behind the verbal jousting.

Jordan

The most knowledgeable and most serious female on the News Night staff is economist Sloan Sabbith (Olivia Munn). She is fluent in Japanese, hosts her own afternoon show, is given a regular 5-minute segment on News Night, has two Ph.D.’s, and teaches at Columbia University. She also tends to speak in an amusingly affectless tone like Star Trek’s brainiac Mr. Spock. Still, her expertise is as a scholar; as a journalist she fumbles, and is insecure about her abilities as a broadcaster. But all her diplomas are truly for naught when Sloan has a bizarre attack of paranoia in a horrible moment when co-worker Neal Sampat (Dev Patel) asks if he can post sexist comments about her online to catch internet trolls. She doesn’t mind that the comments are crudely sexual or even slanderous: he wants to post that she slept her way to the top, and she doesn’t even seem to have heard him. What she freaks out over is a sudden fear when he suggests he post that she has a large backside; she demands to know if it’s true. She doesn’t call him a sexist, she doesn’t sound offended. She turns it on herself. Even worse, Neal tries to reassure her by telling her that some men like that in a woman — as if she really does have a big rear. Not only is that rude, crude, sexist, and out of place in the office, but for God’s sake, it’s Olivia Munn. She probably hasn’t seen a piece of chocolate since 1990. Note to Sorkin: if you want to instill confidence in your pre-teen daughter, this eating-disorder-in-the-making kind of dialogue is no way to go about it.

Dana

Then there’s the fact that Will seems to get last word on each decision concerning News Night. His executive producer, Mackenzie MacHale (Emily Mortimer), makes her recommendations, but she either retreats to wait on tenterhooks and see if her former flame follows her guidance, or she tries to control him and fails — she issues instructions into his earpiece rather weakly, even when he’s really screwing up. Mostly, she just hangs out in the control room, listening silently to Will say whatever he wants to on the air. She is ultimately so admiring of McAvoy, she even considers his altered state of consciousness stabler than her own — she lets him go on-air to announce a huge bombshell, Osama bin Laden’s death — though she can hear that pot brownies have affected his speech patterns.

Mackenzie is unprofessional in a variety of ways; she cries in the workplace, has trouble understanding email technology, obsesses over past mistakes with Will, discloses very personal secrets to a woman she’s just hired, and assigns her minions background research on McAvoy in a romance revenge plot. She is supposed to be a successful former war correspondent, but apart from vague tales of getting shot at, there is nothing about her that seems even remotely informed by that past – given her hystrionics, her confession to having cheated on Will, and her inappropriate, borderline sexual-harassment comments. This well-coiffed, leggy fashion plate seems more like the editor of a lifestyle magazine than a war-zone survivor. And her staff seem unimpressed by her: in a moment of professional crisis, financial reporter Sloan pleads “I need wisdom”; Mackenzie responds “I have wisdom.” Without even pausing to listen, Sloan tells Mackenzie that her ‘wisdom’ sometimes ends in – and then she mimes a nuclear explosion. Mackenzie (her boss) doesn’t take offense, but quietly agrees with her. Sloan then immediately turns to the Father Knows Best standing next to Mackenzie – News Night’s host Will – and his face is already serious and focused.

Gossip writer Nina Howard

Obviously Sorkin is not the only writer to weave love stories into dramatic fiction, nor is there anything wrong with creating romantic tension. But he’s not writing Sex and the City, in which the women’s careers were almost completely irrelevant to their real focus: dating. In fact, in the season finale, he overtly contrasts Maggie’s life with Carrie Bradshaw’s in that other HBO show — an odd reference for him, but he did after all recently date Sex and the City’s Kristin Davis. Throughout his oeuvre, he has elevated educational accomplishment and high professional standards as the ultimate signs of worth — and has really given no props at all to housewives who dedicate themselves to a family, grandmothers who volunteer in their community, etc. So, particularly in light of his own framework and his narrow definition of value, when the women on The Newsroom are so easily flummoxed by romantic feelings, and so concerned with how the men in the office see them, he is ipso facto presenting his female characters as second-class.

There were precedents for these kinds of portraits on his previous TV series, NBC’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Sorkin created an intelligent, discriminating, and risk-taking maverick for Studio 60, Jordan McDeere (Amanda Peet), and placed her in charge of network programming. Yet this key female character spent the whole season alienating the press with needless hostility, being scolded by big-wigs for foolish mistakes, worrying about the security of her job, and begging her staff to befriend her. After repeated bizarre outbursts, Jordan derides herself as “hormonal” (something I don’t recall any of Sorkin’s male characters ever calling themselves) and she laments her behavior as the “stereotype” of a woman in charge. It was not a stereotype I realized anyone believed in, actually, but I guess it’s one that pops up readily for Sorkin.

C.J.

The show sexualizes Jordan, defining her by biology much more than by her opinions or her work performance. When network chair Jack Rudolph (Steven Weber) wants to warn her to do a good job, he has to bring in her gender: “You saw how fast I fired Wes Mendell? Screw this up and I’ll fire you faster. I’m not like every other heterosexual man in show business, Jordan. I don’t find you charming.” Several episodes are taken up by a scandal that erupts when her ex writes a sordid memoir of sex clubs they frequented together, and other episodes revolve around her being pregnant and single. When Jordan exhibits an intellectual disdain for reality-TV to Hallie Gallaway (Stephanie Childers), a woman who heads up that division, the ambitious young V.P. sneers at Jordan: “That’s right. There’s another pretty girl at the dance, and this one’s not pregnant.” WTF? Is Sorkin, by any chance, going meta and poking fun at sexist reality-TV cat-fighting, like Tina Fey did (hilariously) in special episodes of 30 Rock? Could he be about to critique the deplorable way women are presented on ‘alternative programming’?  Not on your life. After Hallie’s completely unrealistic and insubordinate outburst, Jordan does not reprimand her in any way; instead Jordan feels bad about her own conduct, seeks out the V.P., and apologizes to her! Even when commiserating with a female friend, Jordan doesn’t sound offended by the objectification. But then how could she be, when a few episodes prior, she had advised a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist (Christine Lahti) to get access for a Vanity Fair piece by dressing sexily and flirting with Matt and Danny?

And the executive suite is hardly the only chamber at the fictitious Studio 60 soundstage where women are treated in an icky way. One of the performers in the SNL-like sketch-comedy show is openly portrayed as the resident slut, and she allows head writer Matt (Matthew Perry) to use her as sexual bait; Jeannie (Ayda Field) obligingly flirts with other staff members, or even reporters, when her boss asks her to pitch in as part of some con scheme he has going. Not to harp on the ways in which Tina Fey’s own SNL-inspired series beat Sorkin on the same network, but 30 Rock had a story where Liz Lemon tried to use sex to manipulate someone for work-related goals – and Liz ended up suspended and forced to attend sexual harassment sensitization sessions. Clearly, Fey and Sorkin have different mind-sets.

Sorkin actually seems resentful of the very concept of sexual harassment law: towards the end of Studio 60’s first and only season, a former employee files a sexual harassment lawsuit. The character never shows up on-screen to give the suit any credence, and instead we get to hear why the defendants – and people who weren’t even around at the time — dismiss and deride it. She was too touchy, she just didn’t get the way a writer’s room works. She made too big of a deal out of the sexual jokes, which are just part of the creative process. (Creativity being, perhaps, a male domain?) When a female lawyer (Kari Matchett) is sent in by the network to investigate the details, her actual investigation goes nowhere; she and Sorkin seem to have little interest in the case itself, and focus instead on – I kid you not – the attorney’s attempts to ask Matt out. In fact, she’s so persistent she comes across as a sexual harasser herself, though Matt doesn’t seem to mind. All of which kind of makes sense if you read the report of a correspondent for The Globe and Mail, a woman who Sorkin demeaningly called “Internet girl” (though the newspaper she writes for is Canada’s second-largest daily), then insisted on high-fiving with the line “I’m sick of girls who don’t know how to high-five…let me manhandle you”, and bid farewell with a “Write something nice” parting shot in “the ‘Smile, honey’ tone of much less successful jerks.”

Let’s not forget the Christian comedienne Harriet Hayes (Sarah Paulson), one of the star performers on the “Studio 60″ sketch show; a talented mimic, singer, and actress. When she gets a breakthrough role in a major feature, it’s offered to her by a director who wants a relationship with her; not, perhaps, simply on her merits. In another episode, she has to be dissuaded by three male colleagues from posing for a lingerie spread; she has no idea anyone is trying to take advantage of her as a Christian icon. (Meanwhile Sorkin’s series itself takes advantage by interrupting her changing in the dressing room.) In another episode, the show’s producer Danny (Bradley Whitford) feels it is perfectly acceptable for him, as Harriet’s boss, to give her orders on her dating life — she doesn’t seem to disagree. And though Sorkin tries to use Harriet as a foil to Matt’s sanctimonious, hedonistic, Hollywood-liberal views, her arguments rarely hold much weight. Instead, Matt repeatedly insults her religious beliefs and she puts up with it, pining for him.

Some have claimed that Sorkin has been writing this way for a long time; as The Guardian.com reports, “Critics say Sorkin has a habit of creating one-dimensional female characters in male-dominated settings.”  One side note that may be related is that, from A Few Good Men all the way through to The Newsroom, he has frequently given unisex names to women in the most demanding professions: Jo (short for Joanne), Sydney, Dana, C.J., Mandy, Joey, Ainsley, Jordan, Hallie, Mackenzie, Sloan. In Sorkin’s subconscious, he may believe that women who aspire to positions of responsibility need to have something male about them – perhaps he feels that power is a more natural fit for men?

But still, he should get some credit for creating gifted and accomplished women over the years. Especially considering the fact that he does, after all, work in the same industry that gave us Charlie’s Angels and Baywatch. He invented Sydney Ellen Wade, the headstrong environmental lobbyist played by Annette Bening in Sorkin’s 1995 feature The American President. Sydney earns more than the fictitious president (played by Michael Douglas) and is highly respected in her field. She is leery of a romance with the widowed dad while he’s president because she doesn’t want to be on the short end of the power differential, provoking this exchange with her sister:

Sydney Ellen Wade: Why did I have to kiss him?…I gotta nip this in the bud. This has catastrophe written all over it.

Beth Wade: In what language? Sydney, the man is the leader of the free world. He’s brilliant, funny, handsome. He’s an above-average dancer. Isn’t it possible our standards are just a tad high?

Just a few years later, in the 1998-2000 sit-com Sports Night, Sorkin created Dana Whitaker (Felicity Huffman), the witty, hard-driving, and perfectionistic producer of a late-night sports round-up show. This is a woman to whom authority comes easily and almost unconsciously, as her senior associate producer Natalie implies:

Dana: People in Graphics are my friends.

Natalie: That’s not quite right.

Dana: I am so nice to them!

Natalie: That’s one way of looking at it.

Dana: What’s another way?

Natalie: That often times you express your displeasure with their work in ways that make them want to take their own lives.

Dana readily gives orders to low-ranking staff members…

Dana: Dave, Chris, Will, what are you guys doing tomorrow morning at ten?

Dave: Gotta basketball game at the “Y”.

Will: Yeah, it’s a 3-on-3 with the guys from…

Dana: Dave, Chris, Will, what are you guys doing tomorrow morning at ten?

Chris: Fixing the sound system?

Dana: There ya go.

As well as to her star anchors…

Dana Whitaker: You mind telling me what the hell’s going on?

Dan Rydell: We’re just –

Dana Whitaker: I don’t wanna hear about it. This show’s supposed to be fun. You guys sound like you’re giving stock quotes. Is there a reason I’m not aware of?

Casey McCall: We think we should be able –

Dana Whitaker: Don’t give me your excuses. We’ve got 18 minutes of show left. What I’d like is you guys to start earning your money. Do you have anything you’d like to say?

Casey McCall: Yeah –

Dana Whitaker: Good!

[She leaves the room]

While the two seasons of Sports Night had plenty of romantic banter, and even some moving twists in its love stories, Dana seems comfortable with her own sexuality, and uninterested in boosting the male ego.

Casey: Was there a stripper?

Dana: At the party?

Casey: Yeah.

Dana: Yes, there was.

Casey: Did he have a better body than me?

Dana: Of course he had a better body than you Casey. He was a professional male stripper.

Casey: Let me tell you something. When we’re asked, men know how to answer that question.

Her speech to a suitor about self-realization sure sounds feminist:

“The truth is, I have a job that involves me, and stimulates me, and rewards me, and takes up a lot of my time, and I’m not willing to do my job just a little bit. I want to do ALL of it. It’s part of me, and I’m different without it. And that is who I am, and that is who you need to love.”

And she is capable of delivering a lecture as forcefully and incisively as The Newsroom’s Will McAvoy, even one that is about her love life:

“You’re mad at me? You spend six months making me feel guilty for liking my job. Then propose to me, then two days later, you tell me you slept with the woman who wants my job? I say fine. I say fine! Then six days after that, you tell me you wanna break off the engagement. Here’s the thing. I think only one of us should be angry at a time, and I have a hunch it’s gonna be me.”

Moreover, with Sports Night Sorkin tackled the most extreme form of sexism in an episode when diligent associate producer Natalie (Sabrina Lloyd) is sexually assaulted by an athlete in a locker room interview. Though one insightful blogger found some flaws in the follow-up episodes, surely Sorkin should get some points for broaching the subject and displaying the sensitivity he did – as well as for writing a female character who is so well-versed in sports history and so devoted to sports reporting.

As Sports Night went into its second season, Sorkin began writing The West Wing. Although some have complained about sexism in the Sorkin White House (such as this blog at Feminist Law Professors) the criticisms I have seen so far have seemed rather minor and perfunctory, and rather unfair to a television writer who turned in almost 88 hours-worth of scripts for a pioneering show. (Sorkin created the series and stayed for four seasons.) Sometimes characters on the series were themselves quite sexist: series regular Leo McGarry (John Spencer), for instance, held very old-school views; and the British ambassador Lord John Marbury (Roger Rees), who appeared in four episodes during Sorkin’s tenure, was a lecherous 1960’s-throwback (evidently a big Benny Hill fan). But as one site about the show points out, sexist characters are not the same thing as sexist authorship.

Instead, what I always remember from the show are numerous vivid and capable women walking and talking their way through the halls of The West Wing. C.J. Cregg (Allison Janney) endures pressures and crises that any White House press secretary would find daunting (pressures which George Stephanopoulos implied could be unbearable in his memoir All Too Human: A Political Education), and she stays grounded, principled, and sharp as a tack through it all. Moreover, Sorkin didn’t pretend that her gender would never be an issue for her – sometimes she is shut out or overlooked, and has to fight back. But C.J. is certainly able to stand up for herself and others:

C.J.: One other thing—

SAM: Are we done?

C.J.: No, Sam, when I say ‘one other thing’ that means we’re not done, that means there’s one other thing…Before, now, in the future, anytime you’re into something and you don’t know what – and you can’t tell me that you thought there was nothing to it, ‘cause you sat down with Josh and you sat down with Toby – anytime you’re into something and you don’t know what, you don’t keep it from me. I’m your first phone call.…

SAM: C.J.–

C.J.: We’re done talking now. You can go.

SAM:…I’ll see you later.

C.J.: Count on it.

——————

C.J.: You’re pissed at me?

Toby: I’m saying, I could’ve used your support in there.

C.J.: You get my support the same way I get yours: when I agree with what you’re saying or when I don’t care about what you’re saying. This time I disagreed.

——————

C.J.: They beat women, Nancy. They hate women. The only reason they keep Qumari women alive is to make more Qumari men.

Nancy McNally: So what do you want me to do about it?

C.J.: How about instead of suggesting that we sell the guns to them, suggesting that we shoot the guns at them? And by the way, not to change the subject, but how are we supposed to have any moral credibility when we talk about gun control and making sure that guns don’t get in the hands of the wrong people? God, Nancy! What the hell are we defining as the ‘right’ people?

——————

C.J.: You know if I was living in Qumar I wouldn’t be allowed to say ‘shove it up your ass Toby.’ But since I’m not, shove it up your ass Toby.

The President’s wife of 30 years, Abbey Bartlet (Stockard Channing), was a specialist at two hospitals, a Harvard professor of thoracic surgery, the mother of three young women, and a very rational and self-possessed woman who took seriously the potential to make a difference as First Lady. She was also an opinionated feminist. Her husband had enormous respect for her, and considered her a formidable opponent in any argument:

President Josiah Bartlet: You know what I did, just then, that was stupid? I minimized the importance of the statue that was dedicated to Nellie Bly, an extraordinary woman to whom we all owe a great deal.

Abbey Bartlet: You don’t know who she is, do you?

President Josiah Bartlet: This isn’t happening to me.

Abbey Bartlet: She pioneered investigative journalism.

President Josiah Bartlet: Then she’s the one I want to beat the crap out of.

Abbey Bartlet: She risked her life by having herself committed to a mental institution for ten days so she could write about it. She changed entirely the way we treat the mentally ill in this country.

President Josiah Bartlet: Yes. Abigail–

Abbey Bartlet: In 1890, she traveled around the world in 72 days, 6 hours, 11 minutes and 14 seconds, besting by more than one week, Jules Verne’s 80 days.

President Josiah Bartlet: She sounds like an incredible woman, Abbey…

Abbey Bartlet: When it comes to historical figures being memorialized in this country, women have been largely overlooked. Nellie Bly is just the tip of the iceberg.

Abbey’s Chief-of-Staff Amy Gardner (Mary-Louise Parker) is likewise a fiercely independent feminist. Before working for the First Lady, she held top positions in various feminist political organizations and lobbied within the Democratic Party on behalf of powerful women’s caucuses. During the series, she is sometimes in a relationship with the President’s Deputy Chief-of-Staff Josh (Bradley Whitford); this often leads to a certain amount of personal and professional conflict. Unlike the women on The Newsroom, she handles these conflicts with steely determination.

Josh: So I just came from seeing Amy Gardner.

C.J.: Yeah? How’d it go?

Josh: Well, I showed her who’s boss.

C.J.: Who’d it turn out to be?

Josh: It’s still unclear.

Then there’s pollster Joey Lucas (Marlee Matlin), a confident and forthright political strategist who can also flirt with Josh without losing her cool  – even with a male ASL interpreter accompanying her everywhere. Josh has a romantic/adversarial relationship with her too:

Josh: When I get back, you’re gonna argue with me and we’re gonna argue about the things I wanna argue about and you’re gonna do your best not to annoy me too much.

Joey: It’s almost hard to believe you’re not married.

There was also Nancy McNally (Anna Deaveare Smith), the hard-as-nails National Security Advisor. There was Ainsley Hayes (Emily Procter), Associate White House Counsel, a lifetime Republican who clashed frequently on issues with the rest of the staff – but with equanimity and confidence. For the first two seasons, the aging Mrs. Landingham (Kathryn Joosten) was the President’s smart-mouthed, no-nonsense, personal secretary, and as it turned out a guiding influence on him since his youth. In the first season, there was also the hyper-educated, super-confident White House consultant Mandy (Moira Kelly). And throughout the series, Josh’s alert, aware, and wry assistant Donna (Janel Moloney) treated Josh more like a college classmate than a boss.

Josh: I don’t need a doctor.

Donna: Are you a doctor?

Josh: No.

Donna: Then be quiet.

———–

Donna: Josh, this was delivered by messenger.

Josh: What is it?

Donna: It’s… wait, wait. No, damn, my x-ray vision is failing me today.

———–

Josh: I’m thinking about firing you.

Donna: You’ve fired me twice already tonight. I’m impervious.

So what are we to think? Is Sorkin a sexist or is he a feminist? Perhaps the answer is he’s neither, or a little bit of both. And perhaps a writer’s work can’t be examined as if it contained clues to some secret permanent state. It’s possible, after all, that his attitudes can be in flux.

For one thing, in the middle of his rise to prominence he went through a divorce. He later had a significant relationship with actress/singer Kristin Chenoweth, much of which is said to be reflected in the Matt and Harriet push-me-pull-you romance in Studio 60. And he also happens to be very, very successful. In a patriarchal industry like entertainment, if you’re acclaimed as a sparkling intellect and placed in charge of vast high-profile endeavors (as a show-runner of a TV series, for instance), it’s quite likely that you will find yourself surrounded by sycophants. And if it goes on long enough, you may start to think that that’s the way the world looks.

Woody Allen is another prolific and comedic writer whose female characters do not seem nearly as independent and self-sufficient as they once did. In Allen’s early films the nebbishes he played were shy and clumsy around women, while many of the women were poised, articulate, cultured, and seemingly out of reach. Annie Hall, however, ushered in a series of neurotics, harlots, and harridans. This is not meant to cast aspersions on Diane Keaton, Mia Farrow, or Soon-Yi Previn; but when artists have had some degree of painful personal experiences in their own relationships, it’s going to be very tempting to use their public platform to express that – and if at the same time they’ve also been showered with accolades for their artistic work, it’s going to be especially tempting to use that platform to blame the Other, rather than question themselves.

Moreover, both Sorkin and Allen seem to have begun to view beautiful young women as creative muses. In Studio 60, Matt writes better if Harriet hangs out at his office to inspire him; Harriet even feels guilty when she hears he has been having writer’s block without her around. In The Newsroom pilot, the catalyst for Will’s inflammatory, Paddy Chayevsky-like public speech is the sight of Mackenzie at the back of the lecture hall holding up cue cards. He thinks it’s a vision. That’s all dandy, but where are the shows with male muses inspiring female geniuses? Artists may think they’re complimenting a woman by calling her a muse, but won’t she feel more gratified creating her own work?

Incidentally, the opening speech that Will makes in that pilot has had a second life on You Tube, as many have been eager to see facts about America – its abysmal world rankings in literacy and infant mortality, its chart-topping percentage of incarcerated citizens and its astronomical defense budget  – exposed on the national stage. One statistic Will missed, however, was that the U.S. has one of the lowest percentages in the world of federal seats held by women; the Inter-Parliamentary Union puts it in 91st place worldwide. This ought to be of enormous concern to the person who worked so hard to rehabilitate civil service in his White House dramedy. It ought to be a thunderous alarm bell for him.

But as liberal as Sorkin is both in topics discussed and in his donations to the Democratic Party, he seems a little out-of-step with the status of women these days. There are grounds to conclude it hasn’t always been that way, and reasons to believe it’s not incurable. However, now he’s on the defensive, and has denied there’s anything askew about the way he has written for women on The Newsroom.

May I just say, actually he shouldn’t listen to everyone out there who attacks the show’s depiction of women. Not everyone has gotten there from a feminist place. (Much as the Bush Administration’s sudden concern for the women of Afghanistan in Oct. 2001 did not mean they’d joined N.O.W.) Some of the criticism has, bizarrely, claimed that Sorkin’s vendetta against unscrupulous and trivial tabloid journalism is just further evidence of his misogyny. The logic behind this, apparently, is based on a pretty flimsy list: the scheme to smear Will through a tabloid magazine is conceived by a woman, company owner Leona Lansing (Jane Fonda); the shameless gossip reporter who writes hatchet jobs about famous people just for the hell of it is a woman (Hope Davis); and the primary consumers of such fare are women. Okay, first off, the definition of misogyny is not “women do it, therefore it must be terrible” (objections to the wearing of fur, for instance, are not mainly driven by hatred of women); and the feminist flipside is not “women do it, therefore it must be positive” (the ancient practice of Chinese foot-binding comes to mind). Secondly, I can’t believe that anyone writing about broadcast media can defend our trash culture with a straight face, or pretend to be ignorant of the direct relationship between an American public gorging on infotainment and an American public starved for real information – an electorate bursting with the details of Britney and Lindsay’s rehab stints and custody trials but unclear on whether we actually located weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

If Gloria Steinem guested on News Night, she’d almost certainly agree with Will that gossipy ‘takedown’ trivia is “pollution” and “human cock-fighting,” and that it’s “destroying civilization.” She and the rest of the activist-editors who founded the groundbreaking feminist magazine Ms. in 1971 viewed the existing women’s magazines of the time as “contentless.” Ms. writers, much like the 2011 documentary film Miss Representation, the blog affiliated with the film, and the 1991 Naomi Wolf book The Beauty Myth, have profoundly criticized the beauty-fashion-celebrity matrix for its effect on women’s psyches. Lisa Bloom’s 2011 book Think: Straight Talk for Women to Stay Smart in a Dumbed-Down World also cautions women to break their obsessions with what she calls “our shallow, self-absorbed celebutainment culture”; she urges this for women’s own survival, among other reasons. Sorkin’s detractors would, in short, be hard-pressed to find a feminist to stand up for reality TV or checkout-counter rags. In fact, the Miss Representation blog specifically praised the episode of The Newsroom in which Will lambasted the TMZ (Sorkin dubs it “TMI”) industry, agreeing with him that the gossipy ‘takedown’ culture is toxic.

Sadly, Sorkin was not strategic enough to lambaste TMZ et al from a feminist angle, and indeed there are no feminists in sight on The Newsroom yet – unless Leona Lansing can be counted, by virtue of her power. Sorkin has instead laid himself open to charges of chauvinism with things like Will’s opening-episode speech, in which he waxes nostalgic for a time when Americans “acted like men,” when we were able to be and do great things “because we were informed. By great men, men who were revered.” Sorkin may think he’s using the word “men” in a gender-neutral way, but his scripts for The West Wing are dotted with similarly worshipful uses of “man” and “men” and definitions of manhood. And The Newsroom’s opening credit sequence – a black and white montage that pays tribute to selfless and sober males of a bygone era in TV news – just reinforces that gender exclusivity.

What we need is for the former First Lady Abbey Bartlet to show up and harangue Will McAvoy for forgetting accomplished women reporters like Nellie Bly. (Or Ida B. Wells. Or Margaret Fuller. Or Lorena Hickok. Or even Christiane Amanpour or Leslie Stahl.) Let him eat some humble pie. Oh, if only Dana Whitaker would come over on loan from Sports Night and fill in at the control panel, showing Mackenzie that she doesn’t have to pussyfoot around Will. And what is Amy Gardner doing these days? Can’t she stop by and give News Night staffers some insights on how right-wingers are spinning the war on women? The Newsroom is not so far gone that these kinds of injections aren’t possible.

But if Sorkin is going to reverse his recent trend in TV writing, he’s going to need to become conscious of what he’s been doing lately. He can’t assume that because he gave female characters strength at times in the past that he’s in no danger of slipping into sexism. That was part of the lesson of the feminist revolution — Consciousness Raising 101: that good intentions are not enough when sexism is so ingrained in the culture. No-one can sit back and assume that they are immune.

As Will himself says in The Newsroom’s kick-off speech: “the first step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one.”

************

In subsequent articles, I will examine other aspects of the first season of The Newsroom and Sorkin’s mind-set as a writer, including several serious flaws which hold him back from having the impact his themes deserve.

SORKIN V. THE MEDIA – “The Newsroom” Special Report #1

 

by Jennifer Epps

Shortly before Aaron Sorkin’s HBO series The Newsroom began in June, I speculated as to what effect an idealistic Sorkinian vision of journalism’s potential could have on the American public. I was worried because Sorkin’s breakthrough hit show The West Wing revived (at least temporarily) public respect for civil servants — and the show’s longterm legacy continues in numerous pilots and series about politics and political office. Before The Newsroom premiered, I had concerns that Sorkin would shower us with appealingly witty and movingly dedicated figures, and it might result in an up-tick in the American public’s trust in the fifth estate. A trust which would be misplaced, hence my concern.

Well, it turns out there wasn’t much reason to worry, at least not yet. The Newsroom garnered a critical aggregate score of 57% on Metacritic and as The Nation reported: “Critics have had a field day with The Newsroom. Ever since Aaron Sorkin’s new TV show launched, it’s been the object of near-universal, often-withering condemnation.” The New York Times noted that Sorkin has been inundated with “charges (more vehement than had been leveled at him in the past) of elitism, self-righteousness, windbaggery and bias” in “unusually harsh reviews”. There were raves as well, but not enough for HBO to rely on for a double-page ad; according to Forbes,  some critics’ words were taken out of context. The show’s reception itself became the story, and Sorkin has apparently been confronted by detractors head-on – at this summer’s Television Critics’ Association press tour, for instance.  It is not what would have been expected for this winner of six Emmys, three Humanitas Prizes, a Golden Globe, and an Oscar.

But really, if you’re going onto the national stage to openly attack the fundamental ways the mainstream media operates in this society, a hostile response from that same media is probably a sign that you’ve done something right. Recappers and reviewers are not even among the journalists Sorkin evaluates in The Newsroom, but it is nonetheless conceivable that they might take his barbs personally. It also makes perfect sense that they would know which side their bread is buttered on. The media often seem as loyal to each other and as unwilling to call each other out for serious wrongdoing as police officers are. The mainstream media’s version of the “Blue Code of Silence” tends to mean they either rush like lemmings to parrot stories that are trivial or even false (i.e. Judith Miller and her stories about Iraq for The New York Times), or they ignore and vilify stories that upset the powers that be (i.e. Gary Webb and his CIA/Crack/Contras stories for the San Jose Mercury News – though much of the series was eventually confirmed.) This has led to a surreal world where the Obama Administration’s David Axelrod can’t even say what everyone already knows, that Fox is not a news organization, without CNN circling the wagons.

 

Washington insiders ate The West Wing up with a spoon because it made their jobs seem taxing and complex, but the first season of The Newsroom has presented an overwhelmingly broken fifth estate; only the show’s lead characters seem to have any professional pride or integrity. This has led to a backlash among media writers as if Sorkin is merely being sanctimonious and hyperbolic. But I don’t see one thing inaccurate in the monologue news anchor Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) gives on-air in the 3rd episode. He apologizes to viewers for an industry that:

“miscalled election results, hyped up terror scares, ginned up controversy, and failed to report on tectonic shifts in our country from the collapse of the financial system to the truth about how strong we are, to the dangers we actually face.”

Throughout Season 1, in fact, both McAvoy and his executive producer Mackenzie McHale (Emily Mortimer) have lambasted their profession for all kinds of trends that are indeed absolutely prevalent in the media. TV critics who spring to the defense of the off-screen media under attack in the series bring to mind the adage: “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.”Because Sorkin has used actual events from the recent past as the fodder for the news his characters cover, one of the chief gripes against The Newsroom alleges that he unfairly shows up real-world media outlets by using 20/20 hindsight to make his fictional news team do a better job. Or as Alex Pareene put it at Salon: “the answer is always that the equivalent of a week’s worth of research and reporting should have been accomplished in the two hours before that night’s show.”

Really, you’d have to think Sorkin is a complete idiot to believe this is his whole modus operandi. When the primetime cable news show that the series revolves around, News Night, follows through on a hunch that the BP oil spill will be a huge deal, the point is not that they broke the story fast and the real media should have been quicker. Speed and urgency are dramaturgical tools – none other than Shakespeare condensed events into ahistorically brief time spans in order to ramp up the excitement (i.e. in Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and so on).

Sorkin is much more interested in the media’s relationship to power, whether they ask the tough questions that they should. In Sorkin’s idealized world, anchor McAvoy does: he presses representatives from BP and Halliburton, as well as a government inspector, to reveal underlying truths about the safety of offshore oil drilling.

In the 6th episode, Will affirms his belief system on this aspect of journalism to correspondent Sloan Sabbith (Olivia Munn). She’s about to go on-air to fill in for the anchor of the 10pm show, and he warns her:

“…you’re brilliant, but you let your guests say things that I know you know aren’t true, and then you just move on. Ask the damn follow-up, and then demonstrate with facts how the guest is lying. You can’t just sit there and be a facilitator for whatever bullshit the guest wants to feed your viewers…You knowingly, passively, allow someone to lie on your air, and maybe you’re not a drug dealer, but you’re sure as hell the guy who drives the dealer around in your car.”

This may not make Will the friendliest guy on the block, but I don’t care. He’s right. If there are TV critics who honestly don’t know what a fundamental problem this is in broadcast media, then they ought to stop watching so many fiction shows, and see what the news is up to these days.Perplexingly, some of the feedback about The Newsroom has been that Will McAvoy is unlikeable. Will can be obnoxious, full of himself, and offensive, like when he calls out “Hey, sorority girl” from the stage in the pilot episode. Yet Sorkin never claims he isn’t those things. Sloan says as much when she describes the general view of him among the cable station staffers. But it’s part of Will’s flaws; Sorkin sees it that way. Two women throw drinks in Will’s face after he insults them; it’s not unlike how or why Mark Zuckerberg’s girlfriend breaks up with him in the first scene of The Social Network. Sorkin is perfectly capable of writing arrogant characters and knowing that they come across that way.

But the series’ detractors seem to focus on the most simplistic interpretations of what Sorkin is actually saying about the media. Take episode #4. When news breaks of the shooting in Arizona, News Night producers scurry around trying to decide whether their show should declare Congresswoman Gabby Giffords dead, as other outlets have done. Several critics disliked Sorkin scolding the networks’ haste. But the false report of Giffords’ death was no anomaly. It originates, exactly as Sorkin suggested it does, in the ratings-obsessed suits from ‘upstairs’ screaming: “Every second you’re not current, a thousand people are changing the channel to the guy who is!” The mind-set of a 24-hour, instant-update, for-profit news media is bound to result in such mistakes; and worse, in falsehoods and hoaxes — like Balloon Boy.

Too often, the media never corrects the record at all, or does so in such a mouse-squeak no-one notices. For example, in 1991, the networks blindly accepted the U.S. congressional hearing ‘testimony’ by a 15-year old Kuwaiti hospital volunteer of babies cruelly dashed from incubators by Iraqi soldiers – this fabrication and the witness ‘Nayira’ (actually the Kuwaiti ambassador’s daughter, and never under oath) had been coached by American PR firm Hill & Knowlton. But the lie lives on still, even in the 2002 HBO dramatic feature Live from Baghdad. It’s a short trip from there to the second invasion of Iraq, in 2003, when pundits cheered the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue. The fact that the incident was actually stage-managed by U.S. Army psy-ops has not stopped the phony image from becoming an iconic historical photo. This is the kind of thing that results from the mind-set that Sorkin describes: the go-along-with-the-pack mentality which, among other things, led to an entire press corps of ‘embeds’ contentedly letting the Pentagon take charge of their coverage of the Iraq War.

At one point, Will mentions that the networks’ nightly newscasts were set up as a public service in exchange for their receiving licenses for the public airwaves. And he adds that they should now also be required to run the news without ads! This is a fairly mind-blowing argument to hear on HBO on a Sunday night. So mind-blowing, in fact, that some of the minds blown have lashed back against the series on this idea: in Salon and Esquire blogs, to name just two. No doubt everyone who has written about The Newsroom feels entirely independent and feels they have an open mike. But they are also, by dint of the venue to which they report, integrated into a media culture which influences them, however subconsciously. Esquire is owned by Hearst Corporation, which also owns 300 other magazines, 53 newspapers, 29 TV stations, and controlling interests in major cable networks; Salon is much more alternative and is considered progressive — and has had terrific writers like Glenn Greenwald — but Salon Media Group also happens to have made $3.8 million in sales in the last year. Writers within those universes might not even be able to contemplate how news could function without underwriting by advertisers.

 

They are perhaps unwilling to wake up and smell the rancid coffee, to consider that media companies began downsizing newsrooms and closing up foreign bureaus when they were in the full bloom of profit, not when they were losing money. (As media reform group FreePress.net notes, “in the 1990s, big media companies used 14–27 percent profit margins to buy up other properties rather than invest in the quality of their existing products or innovate for the future.”) Far from profits bankrolling quality news-gathering, the pursuit of profit has merely resulted in an emphasis on profitable news.

Robert McChesney, a media scholar who co-authored, with political reporter John Nichols, the book The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again told the program Democracy Now:

“we think we’re in a moment of crisis right now for journalism…really a freefall collapse in which, in the next few years, the decisions we make will determine whether we even have journalism as it’s been known traditionally. The business model that has supported journalism for the last 125 years in this country is disintegrating…If we’re going to have journalism in this country, it’s going to require that there be public subsidies to create an independent, uncensored, nonprofit, non-commercial news media sector.”

However, some have grown so attached to the model of media for fun and profit that they have objected to The Newsroom trying to resurrect the concept of informing the public as a sacred duty. “The purpose and history of ‘the news,’” wrote Alex Pareene on Salon, “is not actually wise men sternly lecturing you about what you need to know even if you don’t care about it.” Apparently, it’s much better to have jovial anchors who let you make up your mind about which is more important: Brangelina’s latest adoption, or a glacier twice the size of Manhattan breaking off of Greenland? You decide: we’ll present them both as equal!McAvoy does lecture, but Sorkin doesn’t intend him to be lecturing the audience: it’s the people lying to and distracting the audience he’s hectoring. It’s the people, whether in media, PR, or politics, who pretend that 98% of scientists and 2% of scientists are equivalent, and who certainly aren’t going to mention that those 2% are actually funded by the very industries which have an interest in obscuring the truth. Nowadays the media would take the 4 out of 5 dentists who recommend sugarless gum and the 1 dentist who thinks his clients should be chewing sugared gum, and give both sides as if equal.

Sorkin gave New York magazine a great quote about the media:

“Nobody uses the word lie anymore. Suddenly, everything is ‘a difference of opinion.’ If the entire House Republican caucus were to walk onto the floor one day and say ‘The Earth is flat,’ the headline on The New York Times the next day would read ‘Democrats and Republicans Can’t Agree on Shape of Earth.’

He realizes that broadcast media now pursue a holy grail of objectivity that has resulted in “false equivalency”, as he lamented to USA Today:

“Most of us have been raised to believe that there are two sides to every story, and the truth lies somewhere in the middle….Sometimes the truth doesn’t lie in the middle, it lies squarely on one side or the other….[But] you’ll never hear the word ‘lie’ on network news when something is plainly a lie.”

In “The 112th Congress”, the 3rd episode of The Newsroom, news division head Charlie Skinner (Sam Waterston) confronts Leona Lansing (Jane Fonda), the owner of AWM, the parent company of the network that airs News Night. Leona is furious that Will is going after Tea Party politicians and calling them out for doubting evolution and so forth.

“Facts are the center.  Facts.  We don’t pretend that certain facts are in dispute to give the appearance of fairness to people who don’t believe them.  Balance is irrelevant to me.  It doesn’t have anything to do with truth, logic or reality.”

Sorkin’s superb boardroom quarrel between Leona and Charlie also makes perhaps the best point of The Newsroom’s first season. Charlie tries to make Leona see the importance of properly informing the nation, especially now that “America just elected the most dangerous and addle-minded congress in my lifetime.” Leona thunders back: “I have businessin front of this congress, Charlie!” Thus in one key line, Sorkin sears into viewers’ minds the crucial but certainly under-reported fact that the corporate media has its own legislative and regulatory agenda, and that this colors its news reporting.It is quite possible that we will see more of this in season 2. Sorkin is obviously hip to the significance of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, and he certainly spent a significant chunk of season 1 excoriating the Koch Brothers’ wholesale attempt to corrupt the democratic process. He even brought up the notion of ‘Corporate Personhood’. What most people may remember about the scene where Mackenzie invites economist Sloan Sabbith into her office and hires her will be the bizarrely sexist comment that other economists won’t “have your legs”,  but before the scene went south Mackenzie was most intrigued by the fact that Sloan switched a clause about two corporations from the teleprompter’s “both of whom” to “both of which” – because, Sloan explained nonchalantly, “‘whom’ is for people.” Sweet! Sorkin may be fumbling the pass a little, but he has laid the groundwork for his second season to more fully explore the nature of corporate media and the dangers to our democracy of corporate hegemony.

This summer he assured a roomful of media writers at the Television Critics Association: “I don’t want to have an adversarial relationship with the press.”
Well, he’s got one. The question going into Season 2 is how he will make use of it.

************************

In subsequent articles, I will examine other aspects of the first season of The Newsroom and Sorkin’s mind-set as a writer, including several serious flaws which hold him back from having the impact his themes deserve.

“Hope Springs” (2012): Not Just Your Grandmother’s Rom-Com

“Hope Springs” (2012): Not Just Your Grandmother’s Rom-Com

by Jennifer Epps

In a genre continuously spewing out specimens, most of which are as indistinguishable from each other as they are distinguishable from reality, the romantic comedy feature Hope Springs is an anomaly worth paying attention to. It is unfortunate that Hope Springs bears the same title as a 2003 rom-com that received a paltry 25% on Rotten Tomatoes (from a pool of a mere 12 reviewers), and that search engines work rather bizarrely and keep dredging up the older movie. Because the new and unrelated film, released last Wednesday, currently holds a 78% on RT (from a pool of 100 critics). It is a chamber piece scripted by Vanessa Taylor and directed by David Frankel, and revolves around three characters: a couple married 31 years, played by Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones, and their counselor Dr. Feld (Steve Carrell). The film also seems to have the famous sexologist Dr. Ruth Westheimer’s endorsement.

But despite its aging romantic leads and the support of an 84-year old psychiatrist, Hope Springs is far from old-fashioned or ‘retiring’. On the contrary, it is refreshingly bold and ahead of the pack in several ways. For one, it presents a female character who actually states what she needs, not just once but as often as it takes, and despite intimidating obstacles (her husband’s attitudes, primarily). And she doesn’t have to be a writhing nympho or a ball-breaking action heroine to do it. She’s quite ordinary, a conventionally-dressing wife and mom of ‘a certain age’, and she’s led a pretty timid life. But the problems in her marriage have reached their zenith, and she’s fed up.

Moreover, Kay and Arnold and Dr. Feld don’t just speak in vague, inoffensive generalities about ‘Love’ the way characters do in most ‘chick flicks’ that are not Sex and the City. They get quite technical – but in a way that is always related to how the characters feel about their sexuality. Unlike the raunch-comedy genre, that’s meant to make you laugh at dick jokes and gross-out humor by making you think “how outrageous!” and “how badly those bros behave!”, Hope Springs scores its points by being honest about the characters’ moments of dismay, embarrassment, and insecurity.

Most unusual of all, it’s a movie with romantic leads who are well beyond middle age. They even have several (PG-13) sex scenes. One of which is actually female masturbation! Kudos to Meryl Streep, I say. Both Streep and Jones know that these scenes are probably not going to go viral as erotic videoclips. Their attraction to the material — and Streep attached herself to it early on, before it had backing – was probably because, as the superb character actors that they are, they could recognize a revealing investigation of human behavior when they saw one. The fact that it’s a facet of human behavior overlooked in an age group that Hollywood all but puts out on an ice floe and sends out to sea was probably impossible to resist.

Now, Hope Springs is unmistakably a mainstream film and a comedy. There’s no chance of confusing it with a raw, harrowing, dysfunctional-relationship drama like Blue Valentine, Closer, or We Don’t Live Here Anymore. Arnold and Kay are not themselves sick, even if their marriage is ailing — their normalcy, and the lack of shame in seeking counseling, is part of the message of the movie. Yes, you can see where it’s headed from the outset: just as the late Nora Ephron’s script for When Harry Met Sally signaled from the initial meet-cute scene that the dramatic question to be solved would be “Can men and women be friends?”, Hope Springs lets the viewer know almost immediately that it will be organized around the question “Can marriages change?” And we’re not exactly astonished when we can predict the answer.

But the assurance this movie takes from knowing what it’s about is palpable. This is screenwriter Taylor’s first produced feature and according to her it took some revising by her — and advising from others — to pare the script down so cleanly to just the nuts and bolts of the principals’ relationship. Though rom-coms are frequently buoyed by quirky supportive characters, this one features only a handful of day-players with just a couple of lines each; the film has a laser focus on its triumvirate of star leads and on its therapy and make-out sessions. This streamlining and Frankel’s succinct, unfussy direction pay off.

The high-powered cast invests emotionally despite the discomfort. Jones is not afraid to wallow in his character’s locked-in curmudgeonly-ness; weaker actors shy away from alienating an audience, but Jones is on Arnold’s side, like a good actor should be. Streep, who worked under Frankel’s direction before on The Devil Wears Prada, has plumbed the kind of woman that Kay is and internalized what makes her tick. (Hint: it’s very different from what made her last film role, Margaret Thatcher, tick.) Carrell – who long ago proved that a background in parody or satire doesn’t necessarily limit a comedian to oversized performances – is excellent at listening and cogitating, saying much with the flicker of an eyelid or the corner of a smile.

In a Q & A, Taylor explained the genesis of the script. Though she is only in her 30’s, she was writing about something with strong personal meaning for her, not specifically to pay tribute to an older generation but because she wanted to write about difficulties with intimacy and she saw how the challenges that any couple can face would be especially magnified with age.

Kay and Arnold’s issue, an enormous distance that has opened in their marriage, is one that a couple could experience at any age. Though Viagra, flab, and wrinkles are mentioned, the real issue is they’ve stopped communicating. In fact, as they limp painfully over the threshold of a real relationship, they discover there were some pretty fundamental things they had never communicated about in the first place.

For years, writing instructors have told their students to “write what you know.” Taylor has demonstrated that the adage can be phrased another way: “write what you feel.”

The packed screening I attended in Los Angeles was very eclectic in terms of age, gender, and race – only about 10% looked to be seniors – and yet the auditorium repeatedly erupted in gales of uproarious laughter over the tiniest line readings, gestures, or facial expressions. I think this shows that Hope Springs is going to be able to transcend the senior-discount demographic and find a general audience, even though there are quite a few people who have a knee-jerk prejudice against entertainment they perceive as geared to the blue-rinse set, to cite a pejorative term. Unfortunately, even some of the staunchest of liberals, concerned about homophobia, racism, sexism, anti-semitism, classism, and even speciesism, haven’t yet added ageism to their list. Part of that bias may derive from observable trends like older voters skewing Republican and socially conservative. But it is also likely to stem from the overall influence of a consumerist, high-tech, disposable culture which constantly equates newer with better.

Hope Springs opens a crack in that mentality. The film is a clear and healthy reminder that everyone is interested in sex. Without being preachy, this rom-com can make you realize how Hollywood’s emphasis on youth, high cheekbones, and well-defined abs keeps everybody down – even those who manage to fill the bill.

A War Horse of a Different Color

A War Horse of a Different Color: Stage Vanquishes Screen

By Jennifer Epps

If anyone else has refused to watch Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation of War Horse until they could attend the puppet version from Britain’s National Theatre, the fact that the Tony Award-winning theatrical hit has embarked on a 20-city tour of the U.S. may be welcome news. The equestrian extravaganza is currently strutting the stage in San Francisco, (while simultaneously continuing its long runs in London, New York, and Toronto) and has visits scheduled for Portland, Spokane, Dallas, Chicago, Des Moines, St. Louis, Atlanta, Fort Lauderdale, Boston, and more over the next 11 months – as well as tours of Britain and Australia in 2013. Fortunately, the tour kicked off with a run in Los Angeles, and I’ve kept my own vow by seeing War Horse live on stage first, then followed it with Spielberg’s movie on DVD. The contrast is striking and deep-seated.

Knowing that Spielberg has a tendency to, if not glamorize, at least fetishize, warriors and military heroism (i.e. his executive-produced series Band of Brothers, his opus Saving Private Ryan, most likely his upcoming Civil War ode Lincoln, and even a 40-min war film he made at age 14) it is hardly surprising that historian Jacques R. Pauwels wrote on Political Film Blog that Spielberg’s War Horse is “militarist” and fails to question the First World War. And it turns out I agree with Pauwels. But those who haven’t seen the National Theatre show that motivated the making of this movie epic of a horse and his boy ought to take note that the stage version is A Very Different Animal.

There’s the obvious difference that Spielberg and his producer Kathleen Kennedy relied on the usual animal wranglers and flesh-and-blood horses whereas the National Theatre hired South African-based Handspring Puppet Co. to bring jointed cane-sculptures to life, which they do remarkably realistically despite the puppets’ skeletal, see-through designs revealing the puppeteers inside. The film chose not to use animatronic puppets, CG animation, or other representational art to try to re-create the mystery and magic of the puppeteers; as it so happens, those qualities are scarce in it. At the same time, the horse on the silver screen is, ironically, less believable, even though he’s played by 14 real equine actors; it’s partly because the film is less sure it can manipulate the animal’s slightest response on cue and so leaves out much of the war horse’s characterization, and it’s partly because the screenplay calls on the horse to do more anthropomorphic things than his theatrical predecessor.

Differences in aesthetics, style, and content between the War Horse rivals quickly add up to major differences in theme as well. Nick Stafford’s stage adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s 30-year-old novel of the same name is a strong example of animal advocacy, not unlike the Anna Sewell classic Black Beauty, which helped to build the RSPCA when the novel was published in the 19th century (and has itself been repeatedly adapted for animation, film, and TV series). And this animal advocacy goes together with and aids the other important theme: War Horse on-stage is also a plangent anti-war fable, low on gore but high in often-symbolic shorthand for battlefield horror — a risky stance for a story that parents want to bring their kids to see. (For a long time, the show piles on the misery, probably pushing the audience as far as we can go in a general-audience entertainment before redemption rewards our patience.) Though I have not read Morpurgo’s novel, Stafford’s dramatization seems true to the author’s original purpose, as espoused in the play’s program notes. Morpurgo is quoted for wanting to “write a story of the first World War that wasn’t told from one side or the other.” He hit on the construct of a hoofed protagonist not as a staple of the genre (though he does generally write children’s fiction), but as the articulation of his theme. Morpurgo had speculated: “Wouldn’t it be an interesting notion to tell the story about the universal suffering in that war due to the 10 million who died on all sides – German, American, English, Scottish, French, Russians – telling it how it was, but through the eyes of a horse.”

(Battle scene as depicted on-stage with the Handspring Puppet Co. creations)

Though Spielberg saw the show, somehow he didn’t get the same program notes.

First of all, his film is not really a horse’s eye view. British screenwriters Lee Hall and Richard Curtis introduce the title character, Joey, literally through the eyes of the farm boy Albert (played by Jeremy Irvine), who watches his birth. By contrast, Joey’s puppet predecessor in the play trots nervously out alone towards the footlights at the play’s opening — we only meet 16-year-old Albert (Andrew Veenstra in the U.S. tour) a bit later; in other words, in the theater, we essentially see Albert through Joey’s eyes. On-stage, Joey is surrounded as a colt by jeering, hostile humans, hemming him in with long poles that double as fence rails, and he’s terrified – our sympathy is with him. Yet in the film, Joey has grown from helpless colt to strong stallion before he ever has to leave the verdant pastures of his foalhood. He is therefore much less vulnerable during his auction, and this allows the focus to slip off of him from an early point.

Though the play had some Jack London-style moments revealing the harshness of life for a domesticated animal, the film cuts out the whippings, mines for comedy in the plough-pulling test, omits the fight with a rival horse, and emphasizes throughout Joey’s courage and special nature. (Like many other fiction films about horses do.) In the play, we were urgently aware of Joey’s suffering and the extreme peril he faces when he goes to war; in the film, however, Hall (Billy Elliot scribe) and Curtis (known for comedic writing) keep most of that low-key until the harrowing climax. (At least they didn’t mess with the visceral effect of that.)

The screenwriters seem to use more dialogue than Stafford’s adaptation did, crafting numerous scenes beyond Joey’s earshot or understanding. In contrast, the stage production was more devoted to the visual than the verbal – an aspect that L.A. Weekly theater critic Steven Leigh Morris scorned in two different responses to the production.

But there’s nothing hierarchical about literary art over visual art; that’s why we have both libraries and galleries. The National Theater production had good reason to exploit the inherent fascination of the Handspring puppets and their deft manipulators. It also did very well to include black-and-white animated backgrounds in a jagged swath across the upstage scrim (we justify them, unconsciously, as drawings ripped from an officer’s sketchbook). The show’s excellent animation, designed by the late Peter Stenhouse of 59 Productions, morphs during the course of the play from representational rural landscapes (with clouds wafting gently by) to swirling, nightmarish, wartime abstractions – as befits an epoch that inspired new paradigms in art like Dada and Surrealism. This emphasis on the visual is also extremely appropriate for a horse’s tale because, if the autistic and renowned animal expert Temple Grandin is to be believed, animals think in images.

(Video montage of the animation used in War Horse stage show)

But when it’s Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski’s turn, they fill the frame with resplendent panoramas — carefully composed, luxuriantly lit. For the most part, Dreamworks’ War Horse is a series of inexplicably beautiful postcards. When the story slows down in the film (as it does teeth-grittingly often) for banal palaver between friends or family, the sun usually comes through a window and reflects off the dust motes. Even the muddied black spikes of No Man’s Land are bathed in a blue glow. It’s pretty hard to absorb the horrors of war when it’s so self-consciously pretty.

The Sorkinization of the Media: Will It Be Good for the News?

 by Jennifer A. Epps

In April of this year, Vanity Fair ran an article by Juli Weiner titled “West Wing Babies.”
The article focused on young policy wonks and politicians’ aides who became motivated to pursue careers in Washington in large part because of the multiple- Golden Globe (2) and Emmy (26) winning TV series that NBC premiered in 1999, The West Wing. Weiner writes: “Just as All the President’s Men made newspapers seem cool—imagine!—and propelled legions of baby-boomers into journalism, so Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing has inspired a new generation with its vision of a Washington brimming with lofty ideals.” She caught up with many of the young Washington insiders which the Bush-era series influenced so profoundly, and she found that the series still holds sway over how they view their calling, in short, “a totem” responsible for “infusing a historically uncool career with cultural cachet.” Sorkin’s pioneering show didn’t just lead to a new generation of reform-minded civil servants; it also “made policy discussions seem thrilling and governing heroic” to its many ardent fans. Weiner called this whole phenomenon “the Sorkinization of politics.”

Tonight, HBO premieres a new series created by Aaron Sorkin, the drama The Newsroom, a workplace series that follows the staff of a cable-network’s nightly newscast. Originally titled More As This Story Develops, the hour-long drama features, among others in a large cast, Jeff Daniels as an opinionated cable-news anchor, Emily Mortimer as his boss (the show’s producer), and Sam Waterston as her boss (the network head). And before we get distracted by the energy of what we know will be witty characters who banter while briskly ‘pedeconferencing’ (Sorkin’s signature ‘walk and talk’ technique), we should take a moment to think about what it will mean if The Newsroom becomes as successful or influential as The West Wing.

I approach this question as a longtime connoisseur. I’ve seen every produced script that Sorkin has written, including his play The Farnsworth Invention on Broadway. (Uh, well, no, wait – I’ve never seen Malice. I’m in no rush to fill that gap.) Though the idea of Star Trek and Star Wars conventions mystifies me, if there were a West Wing convention, I’d happily dress up as Ainsley Hayes. Or Lord John Marbury. Maybe even Bruno Gianelli. When asked to name our favorite authors in a college writing class, I said Aaron Sorkin. (The teacher didn’t know who he was, but that’s another story.) During the 2011 Oscar® season, I was solidly on Team-Social Network, and I just thank God that they have separate categories for adapted and original screenplays.

But what I’m worried about is, what if The Newsroom ends up Sorkinizing the media? What if it instills in us a new respect for the mainstream media, and reverses the trend of recent years? Studies have shown that the younger generation’s interest in the networks’ nightly newscasts has virtually vanished, and a 2009 Time poll discovered that Jon Stewart was the most trusted newscaster. (He beat his closest competitor in the poll by 15 points.) Commentators like to blame the apathy of the young, and some sort of selfish irresponsibility that leads viewers to seek their news in a comedy show rather than a straight newscast, but the difference between Jon Stewart and the alphabet net anchors he was up against is that…he tells the truth.

However, if The Newsroom has the kind of effect The West Wing did, the viewers most susceptible to its message will be the affluent, the well-educated, the technologically-savvy. (In 2000, The West Wing’s viewers had more advanced degrees and more web access than any other primetime audience. During its run, more 18 – 49 year-olds, earning over $100,000, watched the show than any other series.) In other words, if The Newsroom is as powerful and convincing as The West Wing, its audiences, a very likely crossover with consumers of straight news broadcasts, could have their faith in the real TV news renewed. For the mainstream media, this could be a get-home-free card.

Granted, this is Sorkin’s third series about the staff of a TV show, and the other two, the half-hour ABC comedy Sports Night and the hour-long NBC drama Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, were cancelled – the first after two seasons, the second after just one. But the odds are stacked much higher in The Newsroom’s favor. First of all, it’s on HBO, a fairly obvious home for quality writing and edgy material and even, quite often, for liberal-themed work. Secondly, there is a huge difference between the scope of Sports Night and Studio 60 and the potential of this show. His first two TV-show-centred TV shows were respectively, focused on the (at least to my mind) repetitive field of sports reporting, and the (to a great many people’s minds) overly-insular domain of Hollywood creatives. (Which is not to say I haven’t lapped up every single episode of both series — many of them in binge fashion on DVD.) By contrast, The Newsroom can, simply by virtue of its setting at a national cable-news show, have the world as its canvas, as The West Wing did. Sorkin’s new show can, if it wants to, touch on virtually limitless stories and all manner of controversial, emotional, transformative events, from the local level to the international. Hell, even outer space is up for grabs.

Whereas the self-importance espoused by Matt and Danny in Studio 60 seemed out of proportion to what it was they were actually doing – producing a tame SNL-like sketch comedy show of parodies, impressions, and riffs – journalists actually do have a serious responsibility to the public, and what they say on-air actually does impact the national dialogue. If The Newsroom characters believe that kind of principle ardently, rhapsodically, as it is a safe bet they will, won’t the contrast between them and the real media – where almost no journalist seems to think the First Amendment requires anything of them — make the fantasy all the more compelling? And will this glamorization make us trust the real news more?

It is almost a default position for Sorkin to canonize the characters he writes about. “It isn’t enough for me to write something that people will like. I think the young men in my script have to be in some shape or form the husbands and boyfriends that women want. I think the fathers have to be the fathers that sons and daughters want. I think the bosses have to be the bosses that employees want.” Commentators remark over and over on the feat that Sorkin pulled off in erasing the widespread distrust the public had of Washington before The West Wing. “The corrective to public cynicism is healthy” writes a contributor to the scholarly compendium The West Wing: American Presidency as TV Drama. But what if you’re believing in something that is a lie? Sorkin’s show was on during the very period when we most needed to distrust Washington. For six out of the West Wing’s seven years, the Bush cabal sat in the White House they had usurped. A period of so many history-changing incidents, invasions of multiple countries, wars on the environment, erasure of civil liberties, and public deceptions that I can’t begin to count them here, but Rep. Dennis Kucinich counted 35 of them in his Articles of Impeachment against President George W. Bush, author Michael Haas counted 269 war crimes that Bush committed, and a study by the non-profits Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism counted 935 occasions when the Bush Administration lied about Iraq. It seems that, at such a time, cynicism would have been a very healthy corrective. I don’t mean the giving-up kind of cynicism, but the seeing-through kind. Yes, it was comforting during those years to share in an illusion of an idealistic liberal Democrat in office. But there were some pretty damaging illusions within that illusion.

Sorkin has probably dramatized more debates on issues of social reform than any other writer since George Bernard Shaw. (The right-wing Media Research Center cites a few such “notorious” scenes here.) He obviously loved to bring down an ideological opponent and many of us loved to watch him do it. (Conservative John Podhoretz called the show “political pornography for liberals” – as if that was a bad thing.) A consistent contributor to the Democratic Party and Democratic candidates, Sorkin is certainly a Democratic loyalist. But on issues where the two parties rarely skirmish in real life – defense, foreign policy, U.S. exceptionalism, how everything works just fine on the democracy front, etc. – his sentimentalism and his admiration for macho militaristic solutions limited more serious debate.

One very troubling continuing plotline during his creative leadership was a targeted assassination of a foreign leader. The advisors to President Jeb Bartlet (Martin Sheen) inform him that the leader is a proven terrorist, although charges cannot be brought against him in an international court because the evidence was obtained by torture. (Not of course, torture by Americans. Torture by Russians, of a Chechnian prisoner.) The torture thus is implied to be a legal inconvenience – the fact that, among other things wrong with it, torture renders the accuracy of the information obtained questionable seems not to have occurred to Jeb Bartlet, a brilliant Nobel-prize winning Keynesian economist who once wanted to be a priest. Instead, he allows Leo to talk him into arranging the leader’s secret assassination, griping only “Doesn’t this mean we join the league of ordinary nations?” This kind of a statement is baffling for anyone who knows about Washington’s central role in and strong support of a whole host of assassinations and coups, including large-scale massacres in Indonesia in the 1960’s and 638 CIA attempts to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro. But it is rather typical of the attitudes conveyed by Bartlet.

Because The West Wing was always about an alternate White House – where no president more recent than Eisenhower could be named – there was no 9/11, but terrorism became a frequent storyline on the show. In Sorkin’s final season (the series’ fourth), a terrorist attack within the U.S. kills student members of a swim team in the episode 20 Hours in America. The President responds with a speech to the nation:

“More than any time in recent history, America’s destiny is not of our own choosing. We did not seek nor did we provoke an assault on our freedom, and our way of life. We did not expect nor did we invite a confrontation with evil.”

It is undeniable that in that moment Bartlet stopped sounding like Bartlet and started sounding like Bush. The speech even sounded like a call to arms: “This is a time for American heroes. We will do what is hard. We will achieve what is great.” At the time that it aired (Sept. 22, 2002), not only had the U.S. been occupying Afghanistan for 11 months, but the Bush Administration had already begun its propaganda campaign to convince the public to invade Iraq. The speech may even have helped the effort.

Weiner’s Vanity Fair article does not discriminate between Republican and Democratic political operatives, and indeed, The West Wing had plenty of Republican fans too. One such fan quoted in the article was Kurt Bardella, former press secretary to the richest member of Congress, Republican Darrell Issa (net worth $450 million). Issa is the businessman who contributed $1.3 million to the 2003 campaign to recall California Governor Gray Davis, and whose main focus in the House seems to be to plague Obama with investigations. Issa has also been fighting tooth and nail against anyone doing anything to stop climate change – invested, as he is through his business, in the automotive industry. It is somewhat perplexing that a person who worked for Issa could, in April 2012, still “recite dialogue from almost every West Wing episode by heart.” One would think that there might be too many ideological obstacles. And indeed I don’t suggest that Sorkin has any affinity with Darrell Issa. In fact, Issa’s actions probably make Sorkin want to puke.

However, even in his non-West Wing projects, Sorkin wrote very little during the Bush cabal’s Global Reign of Terror – sorry, Global War on Terror – that would have alienated any rah-rah hawks. By the 2006-2007 TV season, the time of Sorkin’s series Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Sorkin had had time to reflect on that GWOT. Several of Studio 60’s characters – Hollywood liberals – even express views against the Iraq War. However, as the first and only season of the show neared its finale, a somewhat ambivalent 5-episode story arc appeared. A U.S. airman is captured and held hostage (off-camera) in Afghanistan, and though we never meet the airman, he is the brother of “Studio 60” comedian Tom Jeter (Nate Corddry). Tom and his brother are said to have disagreed about his enlistment and on Bush’s wars. Over the course of the highly suspenseful ticking-clock episodes, several of the principals flash back to their reactions to 9/11 – emotional as well as artistic — while Tom is ensconced in a greenroom with a close-lipped military minder. One of Tom’s worries is that the kidnappers won’t respect the Geneva Conventions the way Americans do. That’s almost a direct quote. (Sorkin doesn’t explain if it’s Tom who’s unclear about just what the Bush Administration had been doing the last few years, or himself.) Anyway, the tension builds to a breaking point as Tom is tormented over whether to accept a private security firm’s pitch to rescue his brother or not, but just in the nick of time it turns out the U.S. military has heroically saved the day – a familiar kind of resolution from The West Wing.

How does this relate to what will happen on The Newsroom? I predict that Sorkin will bring up many social and political issues, and also eviscerate the most vacuous, most sensationalistic, and most irresponsible habits of the corporate media (ideas for which he will find in abundance on Fox News or the watchdog that monitors them: www.mediamatters.org) His idealistic principal characters will almost certainly be kept busy with a plethora of struggles against the commercial pressures of today’s media marketplace, and in keeping abreast of politicians both foolish and noble. I predict that he will make the dialogue scintillating, the humor absurdist, and the gravitas moving.

However, I have my doubts that the full extent of the perfidy of the news media will be part of the discussion. And if his characters hold the same overarching, American-chauvinist, “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds” views we’ve heard President Bartlet and others in the Sorkin oeuvre espouse, then they will ultimately be in perfect agreement with the limiting corporate media that we already have. If they then combine what is actually a myopia with the conscientious, driven, reformist qualities Sorkin returns to again and again with his creations, won’t the end result be a strengthening of business as usual for the mainstream media? And a lulling illusion for the rest of us?

We’ll have to tune in to find out. But let’s try to keep a level head on our shoulders, even if the dialogue becomes dizzying.

 

The Island President (2011)

“The Island President” and the Maldives Coup: Ground Zero for Climate Change & Human Rights

by Jennifer Epps 

Watching The Island President, an environmentalist documentary that is also an inspiring biography of a unique national leader — the Maldives’ first democratically-elected president, Mohamed Nasheed — it is painful to be reminded that the Copenhagen climate change conference at the film’s climax was not only inconclusive, but happened more than 2 years ago. Since then, the UN Climate Conferences in Cancun and Durban have inched us closer to international co-operation on global warming, yet still have not produced a binding agreement to make cuts to carbon emissions. But The Island President, winner of the 2011 People’s Choice Award for Best Documentary at the Toronto Film Festival, makes a vital contribution to the struggle for hearts and minds on the most serious dilemma of our time.

Director Jon Shenk (co-director of the award-winning doc The Lost Boys of Sudan) shot 200 hours of film of President Nasheed’s first year in office as Nasheed campaigned to secure a future for the Maldives, a virtually sea-level nation of atolls in the Indian Ocean which will be completely wiped out by global warming. It obviously took some time to construct a narrative out of the intimate and engaging  footage. But Shenk and his editor have succeeded in assembling a fascinating portrait of a pioneering administration and a historic mission to rescue the lowest country on earth — and although The Island President  depicts events from 2009, the film couldn’t be more
topical.

The documentary is urgently needed because, first of all, the story of how the remarkable figure at the center of this film came to power in the Maldives is an inspiring tale of a courageous people’s non-violent resistance against oppression. As an activist, Nasheed and a massive pro-democracy movement used Mahatma Gandhi’s tactics to topple the brutal dictatorship of Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, resulting in 2008 in the country’s first multi-party elections, a peaceful revolution that the American environmental leader Bill McKibben calls a “precursor of the Arab Spring”. Secondly, the next U.N. climate change conference starts in  about two weeks in Bonn, Germany, and the deadline to achieve concrete progress is now.  Though climate change is not expected to hit with full-force for decades, we are almost upon the “Tipping Point’ — a point of carbon saturation that will, if nothing is done before then, create its own self-generating momentum and override cuts in CO2 emissions going forward. The climate “tipping point’ is now estimated to be the year 2017.

Thirdly, we’re in an election year in the U.S., and the well-funded climate change deniers have gained ground — thank you very much, corporate media. (Part of this is due to how the Republican primary season has dominated coverage. For example, an 8-month Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting study of the four TV network Sunday morning talk shows, released April 12^th, found that Republicans accounted for 62% of partisan roundtable guests and 70% of partisan one-on-one interviews.)