The documentary, The End of Suburbia, paints an interestingly grim view of a coming world without oil in much the same way that Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye predict the theological eschaton: The end times are here, and only a fool or a cretin would seek to disbelieve what is plainly written. And much like LaHaye and Lindsey, the prophesied end of the world has been happening fairly continually since the late 1960’s until now, with the actual start date being pushed back incrementally.
There are a number of extremely valid points to be dealt with in the context of the film, amidst what is otherwise an oddly smug pronouncement of doom. Specifically, the sustainability of the American lifestyle is in question for a number of other reasons, beyond the loss of cheap and easily available energy sources. How this is dealt with in coming generations is a question of resource management, global awareness, and the realization of what is truly necessary for a First World existence. Entwined with this is an examination of how the American Dream got us to this point in the first place and how it will have to be modified in the accordant future.
The concept of the American Dream is a heavily laden cultural symbol that is recognizable on a global scale. In one form or another, it represents the potential opportunity of any individual willing to work and sacrifice themselves to be able to achieve some otherwise impossible measure of success. The specifics of what the American Dream promises are fluid and mutable, depending on the time period and the individual in question, but it remains a vibrant and strangely universal constant. Other cultures still see a version of the “city on a hill” ideal that the country was founded upon, and it allows them a different path from what their culture might otherwise have afforded them.
In some ways, it’s the perception of the casteless nature of the American society that draws people to this ideal. In Japan, for example, a person with no experience must work at entry level positions, no matter the level of their skill or education, until such point as they have put in the requisite time needed to move on to the prestigious levels. The same person, coming to the States, would be able to prove their worth in ways other than simply paying their dues in the lower positions. While not a guaranteed result, there remains the potential to be able to vault over the scut work, and to many this represents a form of the American Dream. To a Korean, it would be the ability to live free of a rigidly enforced scholastic hierarchy that exists from the lower levels of elementary school and extends throughout their lives. While not the archetype of the American Dream, it still exemplifies valid perspectives on the idea.
The United States exists on a world stage dominated by other nations whose cultural identities stretch back hundreds or thousands of years. It moves in circles where the landmass of its allies could be easily incorporated into mere fractions of its own, divided into discrete states of greater size than entire other countries. These are necessary factors to consider with any contemplation of the mindset of the nation as a whole. Raised as we were with the ability to seek the land beyond the horizon and know that it is part of our own, we have found ourselves with a wholly alien outlook with respect to how the rest of the world functions. There is always more land to be found or used. Any of us are able to achieve greater potential, largely by trying to do so. Our only limits are the ones that we set upon ourselves.
And to paraphrase Fight Club, we’re starting to realize that this isn’t true. The endless possibilities that were promised us through our years of public school enculturation are only as easily availed as the circumstances of our births allow us. In comparison to much of the world, we are afforded greater than average potential and possibilities simply by drawing breath in the reality of the United States. Certain specifics of survival and continued existence are mostly taken for granted by an abundant majority of the population. But there still exist subtle and rigidly enforced barriers of class and wealth that are strictly unlikely to be overcome, no matter what our reach may indicate.
In an oddly inverse way, some of this understanding may be directly tied to such things as the previously mentioned theological and sustainability eschatons that have been shouted from the rooftops for the last four or five decades. Two generations of Americans being subjected to the doomsaying prophets of the Cold War and its aftermath have likely wrought a serious amount of havoc upon the collective psyche of the American Dream, bringing about a culture that actively seeks its own end, if only for the relief that it would provide. If nothing else, the end of the world would shut up all of the smug men who make such a living making such prognostications.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Monday, July 12, 2010
Freud in general
My first reaction to the psychoanalytic section was a shrug of indifference, being as this was old ground that had been trod enough in the past. Describing the various stages, according to Freud, is a simple sort of exercise, given that it forms a discrete section of critical theory and has been dealt with here and there through academia. The four stages are as follows: Oral, Anal, Phallic, and Genital. They are based on the working theories of child development of the time, and the natural progression through these stages could affect certain behaviors as the individual matured. Freud’s theories based on the sexuality of a child and an adult, with the gratification or physical response forming the motivation of individuals throughout their development.
These theories have been around for over a century, so a lot of the jargon has entered the common lexicon; if a person is schedule oriented and picky about details, they might be termed as anal-retentive, where an obese smoker might easily described as orally fixated. These are relatively common terms in society today, evidence of the weight that Freud’s theories still hold over the development of modern psychological theory.
What gives this section immediate interest to me is the author’s fascinating sort of defensiveness that drives the chapter, combined with his obliviousness to the effect that his defensive statements create when put against the more seemingly outrageous statements he makes later on. He opens the section on sexuality with a statement that people are unnecessarily hostile to the theories of psychoanalysis and Freud in general because of their tendency to misconstrue or misunderstand the deeper meanings that Freud is attempting to uncover in his work.
Okay, I’ll give him room to work on this one. Freud is contentious these days, simply because his work was based on 19th Century medicine and thought, and it was a pioneering voice in a new field. In light of feminist theory and different trends in psychology, there’s a lot of Freud that can be argued against as being outdated, outmoded, or simply misguided based on revised theories and more than a century of research. To an extent, the defensive nature of his opening statement holds some water with my own perception simply because there’s been so much criticism of the way the theories have been put to use in the intervening decades.
The problem is that, in a striking display of applied irony, the author of a critical theory book is unable to critically look at his own writing to see where the criticism of Freud would have arisen. The very same section that opens with Berger decrying Freud’s detractors ends in a weirdly unapologetic and flatly stated theory that gold and feces are intrinsically linked. There’s a fascinating cognitive dissonance with editorial whining about how people are unfair to Freud’s theories, only to turn around and baldly state such a generally ridiculous assertion without any examination or reflection. Midway through, he goes to the trouble of asserting that people might have problems with understanding what Freud is trying to get at because they’re unfamiliar with the work and generally don’t understand what sort of understanding that Freud is trying to get to. It may seem ‘fantastic and farfetched’ to such people.
Instead of actually addressing such concerns, Berger launches into an examination of things that he finds fascinating about the writings. Rather than delving into a logical deconstruction of the theories and how they might apply after a hundred years of advancing theories, we’re treated to a strange quotation from Freud’s own writing talking about applying mythology and Victorian belief to make sense of the anal eroticism that was the subject of one paper. He later goes onto cover his assertions with the statement that all of this understanding occurs below the threshold of consciousness, therefore making immune to most forms of criticism. If we state that such repression doesn’t apply to our own psyches, it obviously indicates that we’re very good at this same repression, to the point that we’ve been made unaware of it.
That aside, it occurs to me that a proper modern discussion of Freudian theory (as written, rather than as it tends to be applied in critical theory) is remiss without noting the difference between the Victorian standards of familial structure and modern family organization. Freud’s theories are based solidly upon what was normative for the time, with the particular social strata and geographic locale that he did his research in. What was entirely normal for the children of married upper middle class Victorian-era Austrians may well hold significance for lower class single parents in modern America, but there’s a respectable likelihood that certain portions of these theories might have to be discarded entirely.
On the other hand, I’m going to spend a great deal of time returning to the Gold/Feces connection for some time, just in the way that it was flatly asserted.
These theories have been around for over a century, so a lot of the jargon has entered the common lexicon; if a person is schedule oriented and picky about details, they might be termed as anal-retentive, where an obese smoker might easily described as orally fixated. These are relatively common terms in society today, evidence of the weight that Freud’s theories still hold over the development of modern psychological theory.
What gives this section immediate interest to me is the author’s fascinating sort of defensiveness that drives the chapter, combined with his obliviousness to the effect that his defensive statements create when put against the more seemingly outrageous statements he makes later on. He opens the section on sexuality with a statement that people are unnecessarily hostile to the theories of psychoanalysis and Freud in general because of their tendency to misconstrue or misunderstand the deeper meanings that Freud is attempting to uncover in his work.
Okay, I’ll give him room to work on this one. Freud is contentious these days, simply because his work was based on 19th Century medicine and thought, and it was a pioneering voice in a new field. In light of feminist theory and different trends in psychology, there’s a lot of Freud that can be argued against as being outdated, outmoded, or simply misguided based on revised theories and more than a century of research. To an extent, the defensive nature of his opening statement holds some water with my own perception simply because there’s been so much criticism of the way the theories have been put to use in the intervening decades.
The problem is that, in a striking display of applied irony, the author of a critical theory book is unable to critically look at his own writing to see where the criticism of Freud would have arisen. The very same section that opens with Berger decrying Freud’s detractors ends in a weirdly unapologetic and flatly stated theory that gold and feces are intrinsically linked. There’s a fascinating cognitive dissonance with editorial whining about how people are unfair to Freud’s theories, only to turn around and baldly state such a generally ridiculous assertion without any examination or reflection. Midway through, he goes to the trouble of asserting that people might have problems with understanding what Freud is trying to get at because they’re unfamiliar with the work and generally don’t understand what sort of understanding that Freud is trying to get to. It may seem ‘fantastic and farfetched’ to such people.
Instead of actually addressing such concerns, Berger launches into an examination of things that he finds fascinating about the writings. Rather than delving into a logical deconstruction of the theories and how they might apply after a hundred years of advancing theories, we’re treated to a strange quotation from Freud’s own writing talking about applying mythology and Victorian belief to make sense of the anal eroticism that was the subject of one paper. He later goes onto cover his assertions with the statement that all of this understanding occurs below the threshold of consciousness, therefore making immune to most forms of criticism. If we state that such repression doesn’t apply to our own psyches, it obviously indicates that we’re very good at this same repression, to the point that we’ve been made unaware of it.
That aside, it occurs to me that a proper modern discussion of Freudian theory (as written, rather than as it tends to be applied in critical theory) is remiss without noting the difference between the Victorian standards of familial structure and modern family organization. Freud’s theories are based solidly upon what was normative for the time, with the particular social strata and geographic locale that he did his research in. What was entirely normal for the children of married upper middle class Victorian-era Austrians may well hold significance for lower class single parents in modern America, but there’s a respectable likelihood that certain portions of these theories might have to be discarded entirely.
On the other hand, I’m going to spend a great deal of time returning to the Gold/Feces connection for some time, just in the way that it was flatly asserted.
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Camera as Sign
Berger puts forth the idea that, within the medium of television, the usage of a camera can function as a signifier for what the cameraman and producer wish to covey, in terms of point of view. The angle of view can imply specific intention, as can the focal distance of the camera. By focusing closely upon a person in an interview, the camera can imply a certain sense of intimacy, where a longer shot can offer relationships between people by showing how they are positioned with reference to each other. Holding a camera at a low point of view can imply the viewpoint of a child, giving the subject of the shot a power over the viewer. At the same time, positioning the camera above a subject puts the viewer in a position of power over the situation. These viewpoints and intentions are innate, in that the personal distances and points of view reflect our assumptions and experience in how they are conveyed.
Most of the camera work in Control Room was done with medium to close shots, trying to keep the context of the situation to a minimum as it spent its time focusing on the personalities in the interviews and their viewpoints on the situation. The principal subjects of the documentary were showing in close shots, as they were the people hemmed in by their circumstances, as the camera attempted to get a better perspective of their thoughts and their lives as the situation unfolded around them. It also offered a certain sense of being locked into the situation at hand, rather than being able to escape the circumstances and gain a different perspective. The Central Command building was shown to be claustrophobic, heavily populated, and divided into small, cramped offices that the reporters were forced to work from. The scale offered a sort of solidarity between the Al-Jazeera reporters and the foreign correspondents. Only occasionally was a longer shot put forth, and that was to emphasize the personal distance between the organizers of the press conferences and the reporters in the audience. The rest of the time, all of the camera shots were close at hand, creating little personal distance between the audience of the documentary and its subjects.
Set against the backdrop of an unfolding war, the expectation would have been to show long shots to give an impression of the scale of the conflict unfolding, but the few long vistas that were shown were mainly used to illustrate that things were going on around the characters rather than show that the characters themselves were interacting with the situation at all. The war itself was only important in the context that it provided the events for the characters to react to and consider in their own personal narratives. It had an effect on the characters only really in the ways that it offered for them to consider their own world and the relationships or dynamics that it suggested. The few times that long shots were used as a structural part of the narrative was to show that the reports put forth by the foreign media and the American propaganda were contextually false and unreliable. The most easily available example of this was the march on the central square in Baghdad that was played up in the American media. By showing the relatively few people that were involved, noting their unlikely props (specifically the old Iraqi flag that symbolized the removal of Saddam Hussein), and their lack of diversity, the documentary reinforced the viewpoints of the people within the documentary. In the context, the camera argued, this was unlikely at best, wholly false at worst.
Notably, the representation of the American media and authority was always shown through the filter of a viewscreen that the camera recorded. By doing so, it was emphasized that this viewpoint (most often showing the American President or Defense Secretary) was disconnected from the real life and the relationships that the rest of the documentary focused itself upon. Since these personalities had no perspective on the situation that was being offered to the viewer of the documentary, they could have wildly incoherent and confused viewpoints that the viewer of the film would be unable to connect with. By showing the implied distance that they were removed from the situation, they could put forth demonstrably false perspectives as a result of their personal distance.
Overall, I find Berger’s theories on the camera to be fairly interesting, albeit relatively straightforward. There’s nothing that is inherently surprising about the discussion of how the perspective of the camera implies the perspective of the viewer, but examining the intentions and the signifiers of the production of a documentary such as Control Room gives the audience a better idea of the methods that the production used to convey their message.
Most of the camera work in Control Room was done with medium to close shots, trying to keep the context of the situation to a minimum as it spent its time focusing on the personalities in the interviews and their viewpoints on the situation. The principal subjects of the documentary were showing in close shots, as they were the people hemmed in by their circumstances, as the camera attempted to get a better perspective of their thoughts and their lives as the situation unfolded around them. It also offered a certain sense of being locked into the situation at hand, rather than being able to escape the circumstances and gain a different perspective. The Central Command building was shown to be claustrophobic, heavily populated, and divided into small, cramped offices that the reporters were forced to work from. The scale offered a sort of solidarity between the Al-Jazeera reporters and the foreign correspondents. Only occasionally was a longer shot put forth, and that was to emphasize the personal distance between the organizers of the press conferences and the reporters in the audience. The rest of the time, all of the camera shots were close at hand, creating little personal distance between the audience of the documentary and its subjects.
Set against the backdrop of an unfolding war, the expectation would have been to show long shots to give an impression of the scale of the conflict unfolding, but the few long vistas that were shown were mainly used to illustrate that things were going on around the characters rather than show that the characters themselves were interacting with the situation at all. The war itself was only important in the context that it provided the events for the characters to react to and consider in their own personal narratives. It had an effect on the characters only really in the ways that it offered for them to consider their own world and the relationships or dynamics that it suggested. The few times that long shots were used as a structural part of the narrative was to show that the reports put forth by the foreign media and the American propaganda were contextually false and unreliable. The most easily available example of this was the march on the central square in Baghdad that was played up in the American media. By showing the relatively few people that were involved, noting their unlikely props (specifically the old Iraqi flag that symbolized the removal of Saddam Hussein), and their lack of diversity, the documentary reinforced the viewpoints of the people within the documentary. In the context, the camera argued, this was unlikely at best, wholly false at worst.
Notably, the representation of the American media and authority was always shown through the filter of a viewscreen that the camera recorded. By doing so, it was emphasized that this viewpoint (most often showing the American President or Defense Secretary) was disconnected from the real life and the relationships that the rest of the documentary focused itself upon. Since these personalities had no perspective on the situation that was being offered to the viewer of the documentary, they could have wildly incoherent and confused viewpoints that the viewer of the film would be unable to connect with. By showing the implied distance that they were removed from the situation, they could put forth demonstrably false perspectives as a result of their personal distance.
Overall, I find Berger’s theories on the camera to be fairly interesting, albeit relatively straightforward. There’s nothing that is inherently surprising about the discussion of how the perspective of the camera implies the perspective of the viewer, but examining the intentions and the signifiers of the production of a documentary such as Control Room gives the audience a better idea of the methods that the production used to convey their message.
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