AKA Earned Suspension of Disbelief

Several months ago, I put aside a post about the Daredevil series that had recently aired on Netflix.  I couldn't file it down to the narrow point I wanted to make at the time (and I was also conscious that I have one about the Marvel live-action universe still on the page), but last night, I stayed up binge-watching (as the kids do these days) the followup series, Jessica Jones, and I think I want to work a few things out here. 

Daredevil was the only reason I gave in and got a new Netflix subscription early this year.  On the whole (and like most people), I thought it was fantastic.  There are any number of ways to take on the space-aliens-and-superheroes fare and keep it entertaining--god knows that like 90% of these books I read fall neatly in the sci-fi/fantasy basket--but I've always liked the stories best when they keep a strong connection to known reality.  I think this was as important for the oldest hero stories as it is for the new ones: you can't make anyone larger than life if no one around them is life-sized.  Almost always, the believable angle comes as a plausible approximation of human nature in the response to all the craziness (I always love the sane, marginalized characters who point out just how nuts everything around them is, or who can't help lampshading the plot flaws), but what I'm finding so interesting about Marvel's live-action efforts is how they've been very creative about the places the stories touch ground. 

I don't think Iron Man would have worked nearly as well, for example, without a 20-minute cut of Tony Stark's touch-and-go experimentation.  Something in there got the process of innovation some exaggerated flavor of right.  Shit never works too well at the beginning, even when you're a tech genius.  Agent Carter wasn't in the same league as the Netflix dramas, but it was occasionally very strong, and that one was held to earth by the unexpected tethers of institutional bias.  When I write it like that, it sounds like it's been done before, but it's a very different animal here, and the distinction is important.  Peggy isn't smashing her way through the sexist 1940s and punching oppression-themed villains in the eye (not yet anyway), she is more like a well-realized character who is struggling within a confining peacetime reality. 

Daredevil went on to do a whole bunch of things right in this regard too.  The grounding theme of this show was the human consequences of movie-theater violence.  In a stroke of genius, the aftermath of all the skyscraper toppling in The Avengers reverted New York to an old film-school version its corrupt, shabby self.  (Because for anyone who's been there recently, today's Hell's Kitchen is a world of safe boring storefronts, and modern Times Square looks like some unholy lovechild of Disneyland and Tokyo.)  And of course when the hero can get his ass kicked, get ground down, get laid up as painfully as Matt Murdock did, it makes any of his successes feel earned.  Seriously: Daredevil was a great urban Kung Fu story before anyone got in spitting distance of the red suit.  It would have worked every bit as well if he were just an athletic blind guy--the story didn't really need the "abilities."  I bought wholly in to the first ten episodes, even as syndicates of mystical old ninjas were running through the city, and this viewer didn't bat an eye.  Those places where it gave in to its comic self, that's when it stumbled a little. 

(The other way that Daredevil established its emotional stakes--and this is a strength of Jessica Jones as well--was by giving the characters room to act like believable friends.   To get close to someone as likeable but remote as Matt, you'd have to keep ignoring all of his subtle keep-away vibes, and they found a couple sorts of people who could.  It required some decent acting and direction to communicate it.)

So on to Jessica Jones, a character I was only vaguely aware of through the nerdblogs, who came out 15 years after I gave up on comics.  On TV, she is more obviously powered with enhanced strength and (at least some) resilience, and it's terrifying how all of that power means precisely fuck-all when it comes to the emotional challenges of acting like a hero. 

If Daredevil was about the consequences of violence, Jessica Jones is about the consequences of abuse.  Looking back on the binge, I see it mapped on every character thread, but as before, this is the tether to human realism.  David ("Tenth Doctor") Tennant plays the villain Kilgrave, who can make people obey him, who can make people want to obey him (and what good is super strength against that?).  This is an abuser who is additionally enabled by mindfuck powers (and it's not at all clear which came first), and it's damn interesting how often he resorts to conventional abuse too, because that's the kind of person he is.  It's damn interesting how willing the show is to get right in the head of people like this and develop it as a theme (not just Kilgrave, but a number other male and female characters act abusively as well), treating them with empathy, encouraging the viewer to understand their motives and to weigh their charming apologies, without forgiving a damn thing about what they do, and without ever ceding the agency of the victims.  It's a bit of a spoiler, but Kilgrave starts out as casually menacing, and the show gradually recasts his behavior as obsession, and then as petty obsession.  And the truth is, the Purple Man would be nowhere near as scary if he were bent on world domination, or revenge, or any of the standard supervillain schtick.  Nor is Luke Cage (Jones's lover, and total badass) allowed to ride in as a savior, even though if anything he is more powered than she is.  He understands that this is her demon to overcome, and the wannabe good-guy types who feel it is their job?  The ladies don't even let them drive.  It only sounds like a textbook in hindsight, because it's a character drama before anything else, and they do an good job of keeping it real.

Finally, a Serious Subject: Blogging The Biggest Loser

With a mountain of work on my desk (most of it recently prioritized by my twice-weekly chewing out, and no, morale has not improved, thanks so much for asking), then the obvious course of action is Road Trip! to waste an hour or two blogging about some utterly pointless piece of cultural trash. I'm not quite in stupid and futile gesture territory yet, but we'll see how next week's meetings go.

So yeah, as I mentioned, I'd never seen the show before this season. That makes me seven years and eleven seasons behind it's peak popularity, with an interest that is, I have to admit, less than completely sincere. But that's just how I like to approach fandom. And, like with most Americans, I find some personal relevance here. Although I don't know how I could ever hit a quarter ton, I've nonetheless slid far enough up and down the BMI scale to appreciate just how hard it is to lose weight and keep it off. I have an intimate understanding of what it takes to do that through exertion and discipline, how damn much more that takes for some people than others, and how even small changes of habit, not all of which you have a good handle on (for example, your sedentary job may be unhealthy, but so is not paying the mortgage), can tip you right back to an unattractive equilibrium porkulence. Watching this show makes me appreciate the minor blessing that my own Weebley resting poundage is only in the lower 200s. This, of course, is one of the major unstated selling points of the show. The others include Americans' undying love for cheap sanctimony, and the fact that there's no easier straight line to set up than one for a fat joke. I'll do my best to be sensitive.

1. Let's first dissect the show's basic premise. Yes, we have some people who have really let themselves go, and they've been selected thanks to some (I imagine) intense psychological and physical screening to help predict that the success rate will be high enough among this carefully chosen sample so they will at least not to depress the entire viewership in their where-are-they-now spot. These folks are then subjected to a grueling supervised workout schedule, every filmable moment of which (again I assume) is recorded in order to mine for positive storylines, in an effort to drop the pounds.

And really, good for them, they have every reason to be proud of themselves. But the corrollary to all that production is that unless you have 16 hours a day available for exercise under the direction of a crack personal trainer and a team of possibly competent doctors, then don't expect to lose 3% of your body mass every week. Obviously not everyone has this option. It's encouraging how they follow up and all, but I wonder how the average contestant does 2 or 5 years out, because unless your job is "personal trainer" (and more about that in a second), then your regimen is unlikely to be sustainable, or to be compatible with full-time employment. Even here, beyond the careful screening, the TBL constentants have a better shot at staying thin than your average schlub does, because they always have a chance at making a career of their minor celebrity. If they keep the weight off, there's always an endorsement to be had, maybe not full Jared, but there's the opening the new GNC in the Niceville mall and that sort of thing.

2. The show does not neglect to include a smidgen of contempt for its participants by inviting fat jokes. (You'll notice that this formulation cleverly removes the moral responsibility from me, the sarcastic viewer, who is responding to those invitations.) I'll give them a pass on the title, whose backhandedness is overt, and instead present the location as exhibit A. Do the biggest losers compete on a compound? On a set? In a complex? A retreat? A campus? Even a farm or a camp? Nope, it's the Bigger Loser Ranch. Moooo-ve over, losers.

3. I don't know if the whole season is like this, but the first two episodes of the damn show have been drawn out to two interminable hours. Now look, as hinted above, the sedentary but stressful lifestyle of Americans, often forced on them, is an important factor contributing to our general rotundity. (Independent of exercise level! An ariticle in a high-impact journal, but man, if there's any medical research that needs airtight scrutiny, it's obesity research.) This show which exhorts us to get off our expanding asses is all about dulling up the programming in an effort to extend the fraction of precious free time that we spend sitting on them.

(On the other hand, maybe it prepares us for the tedium of riding an exercise bike for 16 hours a day if we do get the bug.)

4. The show is decent enough to limit its advertisers to (among the usual purveyors of cars, investment assistance, and penis stiffeners) to diets and healthy things. I don't believe for a second that this is done out of decency, however. I suspect that the producers have spent some quality time with their actuarial models and concluded that the recriminatory backlash of Very Concerned Viewers would cost more than the substantially increased profits they could get from pitching Doritos and Twinkies to hungry and self-loathing viewers.

5. One of the female contestants is an opera singer. For some reason, I have her to make the finale.

6. I understand the need to milk every emotional angle, but I can't be the only one who finds this policeman's family situation horrifyingly unlikely to lead to fulfilling reconciliation. Dude, if your son said that he doesn't love you because you're a fatass, the problem is not that you are obese, it is that your son is a dick.

7. And okay, I know this is wrong, and I feel like a terrible person mentioning it, but can we please get a shot of Dan and Don on tiny motorcycles. Just one quick clip?

8. Contempt for the contestants exhibit B: they really played up that doughnut thing last night, lingering on the torture the poor guy was feeling about tossing that pancaked cruller into the dumpster. I mean, I thought for sure he was going back for it as soon as the cameras were off. I expected to learn this at the big weigh-in ceremony. (Good for him though.)

9. In my own life, it took some time for me to realize that aches and pains from exercise weren't an effect of my general conditioning. When I get a regular enough cycle going, I can look forward to constant discomfort of one kind or another. Now I realize that if you get fat enough, you will be pretty uncomfortable already, but I'm impressed that they are not complaining constantly about screaming knees, shin splints, stiff-as-hell muscles. These poor folks must be so sore they need to be pried out of bed with a canoe paddle in the morning, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I didn't see anybody stretching once.

10. What was interesting about Rulon Gardner wasn't precisely that he was an olympic wrestler, but that he was a kind of unlikely one even ten years ago, a doughy kid with a strained but honest grin who somehow bested a Russian genetic cyborg by the space of a quarter-inch of a lost hold. Presumably there are legal reasons for not including Alexander Karelin's picture in there, but the images of the two of them together were what really told the tale of the match.

Judging your lifetime fitness level against your prime bulemic high-effort wrestling best is a forbidding standard, and while he seems like a nice guy, even in 2000, you could see that he was on the thin side of his normal weight. You could see that those heavy-guy features were ready to threaten the integrity of his unitard about five minutes after he stopped training. More than most of the contestants, he's well-suited to a mad dash of weight loss, and while they need the pounds off, feast or flail is not the strategy they need for the rest of their life.

11. I don't much like Bob and Jillian. I mean, it's somewhat refreshing that Bob is fit and attractive into his forties (and even Jillian would have been retired from MTV ten years ago), but the cult of Bob and Jillian is creepy. Look what those contestants gave up last week just to bask in their twin glow.

I do think that the two of them are sincere in their drive for the Losers to succeed (who wouldn't be?), but I'm not buying the shows of empathy for a second. Not only are they high-metabolism people feigning to understand folks cursed with a low one, but exercise is their job! That Jillian confesses to having been tubby when she was twelve years old or so is telling. Adolescence is a tough time, and there are lots of kids who grow out of it late, but it's not really the same thing as weight maintenance as an adult. I think trainers have a valuable role as teachers, for people who don't know how to exercise, or who need some new suggestions. But inspiring? How is a normal person supposed to relate?

12. I'm ambivalent about the trainers, but I attained an instant and active loathing for that smarmy blonde doctor they trotted out. First, you figure that your average doctor on the show has about as much professional integrity as the medicos who signed off on the treatment of prisoners in Iraq. (Given the size of these people, and how hard they're pushed, it's a bit alarming. The wiki article on TBL doesn't suggest that everything is perfectly kosher, even though a heart attack would take a worse toll on the viewership than an advertisement for Little Debbie.) That age calculator he drags is about as scientific as that computer simulation that told Lisa Simpson she needed braces, and his accusing "evidence" hurled at Dan (or was it Don?) was about the lamest tv-drama bombast that ever failed an audition.

But what really gets me is that here's the guy on the show who's not holding back to belittle these people in the bad way. I mean, they're here because they want to make a change and are willing to do it. Does it help to rub it in their face how badly they've been fucking their lives up?

And now a word for our sponsors...

Dear Gatorade company,

I wish to share with you some observations I've made regarding your new 3-stage "hydration system" of sports beverages. It might be fair to call me a loyal Gatorade customer. I've certainly popped an occasional bottle of lemon/lime consistently over the years. It took some time to acquire a taste for that flat, almost salty mouthfeel, but when I'm really thirsty, I admit that it does seem to do the trick better than water. Adding electrolytes to make my body absorb the stuff faster actually violates everything I know about osmosis, but frankly, I am not so knowledgeable about the anatomy of food absorption that I can rule out some cellular mechanism that clams up when presented with improper ionic strength. Or something. At any rate I can pull down your product a lot faster than I can as much water, which works for me, and even my flop sweat has got to be costing my body precious sodium that I'm unlikely to get from any other conceivable source.

So it's interesting to me that you've sought new additives for other chemicals I might crave before, during, or after physical exertion. Good idea, but I'm struggling with the marketing. See, it might be my physical resemblance to Peyton Manning, but I tend to associate my image as an athlete with your product. I may come off as a chubby dork in the office, but when I'm wiping my drenched brow, arching my back, and slugging down a Gatorade, that's when I feel awesome, like a real man. Now, it was bad enough when you started to put those little retractable nipples on the bottles a few years ago. No one feels manly when they slobber over one of those things to open it, and then suck plaintively at its tip. You had to hold it inches away from your mouth and squirt juice everywhere to avoid embarrassing yourself as you flop all over the stair-skier at the gym. So now there's a little sippy pouch full of Gatorade #1, and I've got to tell you that making this smaller doesn't help the coolness problem at all. (Although to be fair, I can see why you might avoid selling a bottle of yellowish liquid marked "#1.")

I mean, take a look at the guy you found to model it. This dude is a finer human specimen than I've ever even been able to imagine myself (and I used to whack my brother with a stick and yell, "I'm Conan!" which is even funnier if you ever saw the loincloth). He'd've zipped around the field three or four times while I was procrastinating my fat ass out of the car. And yet if we happened to meet up at the track for whatever reason, I'd be the one chortling at him. Do you see where I'm going with this? Your pouch of prime combines all of the serious, competitive athletic connotations of a baby bottle crossed with a juice box. Perhaps you might be better off marketing this stuff to my kids as a fun drink, just like all the other toxic crap they always ask me for.

Speaking of which, I happened to grow up in an artificially sweetened era that convinced me that primary-color red was the color of cherries, grapes glowed neon purple, and, most mysterious of all, that raspberries were bright blue. I'm used to associating these unnatural colors with liquified sugar-delivery mechanisms....but protein? You can suspend your disbelief and admit that fruit is in fact brightly colored, and that adding chemical colors only perfected what advertising nature had already begun. But good god, man: day-glo meat, garish dairy, fuzzy green nuts? Those are associations I have with with fumigating the refrigerator.

And while I'm offering this marketing advice, I can't leave out the fundamental flaw of this whole approach. Even with all this product development, you only get so thirsty as you work out. Offering different products for different stages of your workout is clever (and okay, it might get you back some market share, and the packaging industry might be happy with it), but it's not going to cause Gatorade drinkers to now purchase three times as much of your beverage. If they buy into the system, they'll still only be drinking the same volume of three different products. If you move just as many units but have more kinds of units, you've only made your life more complicated.

So here's my suggestion, and I think you'll like it. What you need to do is to convince non-athletic people to drink Gatorade for other purposes. Athletes only can drink so much, but what about Gatorade mixers for depressed housewives and husbands (just add grain alcohol)? Have you thought about high-tech throat hydration products for smokers and public speakers? Gatorine, that lemon/lime flavored oral antiseptic (with electrolytes!)? My best suggestion is based on why I ever thought it was a good idea to drink the stuff in the first place:

I'll be looking forward to the first royalty check. Thanks.

Media Monday

0. Luv.
I don't watch the televisions at the gym, and can't listen to them (why they haven't figured out closed captioning, I have no idea), but in context, there is no amount of stationary biking I could do, no number of squats--and playing tennis never got me close--that could ever fill out my woefully flat, quintessentially white-guy hindquarters. And that's why I was looking--I'm just sensitive to these things.

I was too far away this morning (and honestly, I was trying to not look) to realize that Venus Williams was, in fact, wearing flesh-colored bottoms on her bottom, and that the presentation spread coverage the attention that was given to her outfit across five simultaneous screens was relatively unfounded. I suspect the usual combination of titillation and disapproval was being employed by the networks, bringing in the entire middle American Good Morning America demographic, both the prudes and the unhappy people they're married to. ABC was definitely showing her off as they scowled, and the local news didn't hesitate either. Oddly, Fox and Friends made their angry faces without highlighting any revealing serves. (CNBC and the NFL network did not mention the incident at all.)

And if she looks that good, well, who can blame her for showing off? Venus is a badass cool.

1. Lost.
I still haven't seen a single episode, not even the pilot, which I avoided only due to the usual confluence of business trips and mild aviophobia. I don't necessarily shun commitments requiring lengthy analysis of lesser art, and even though I consider my time too valuable these days to comb the waste for improbable diamonds, I can't deny that I've wasted many happy hours discovering how the discussion and speculation can blow up into something far more entertaining than the story itself (and sometimes the story can pleasingly confound your expectations too).

Anyway, I got into a conversation with the microscopy guy on Friday about this very thing, and he attempted to convince me (as others have tried) that Lost really did so have it all plotted out from the get-go, and that it's totally worth the five years of your life. I've got far too much invested in being a non-watcher at this point, so I'm not likely to engage until well after the post-mortem, if at all. Nonetheless, it's fun to have opinions, and here's my top five predicitons, based on knowing not a goddamn thing about this show:

It was all a dream. (c.f., The Wizard of Oz.)

It was all a simulation in which the characters have participated, willingly or no. Something universal about human nature is asserted, in this case probably at the last minute, through the experience. An experiment on humans by higher beings is a likely possibility. (c.f., The Matrix. Also a number of sf books, my possible favorite of which is The Deep by John Crowley.)

It was a mysterious simulation, and these characters dissolve in a horrifying fade-out with the realization that none of them are "real". (I'm sure I've read or seen more than one story of this type, but I've got no canonical example. My favorite short along these lines is Forlesen, by Gene Wolfe. Maybe The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathon Hoag by Robert Heinlein qualifies.)

They all died in the crash, and the time on the island has been a sort of Purgatory, as they unknowingly defend their lives for the appropriate torment, or else it's the last mad flailings of their minds before they all let go and pass on to oblivion. (The prime example is A Strange Occurrence at Owl's Creek Bridge, by Ambrose Bierce. For a more afterlife-themed version, see the movie, Jacob's Ladder. Aging is such a weird, slow disappointment that sometimes I wonder if I'm really in the back of an ambulance back in 1994 or something, hallucinating the whole thing.)

They're participating in some alternate reality, that is possibly just as true, due to death or delirium. The increasing madness of life on the island is a symptom, or maybe an unconscious metaphor, of trying to break free into "real" reality. (My favorite example of this is The Iron Dragon's Daughter, by Michael Swanwick.)

What do I win?

2. Iron Man 2
(Okay, let's note a certain method to the numbering here. Ain't I something.)

Speaking of surpassing expectations, there was a lot to like about the first Iron Man movie. To be sure, there was quality acting (including the Dude taking a turn as a meticulous, technologically savvy villain) that could sell it, but there was almost a--I don't want to go so far as to label it verisimilitude--there was also a low threshold for suspension of disbelief that let me accept Tony Stark flying around at unsurvivable accelerations and looking totally kickass. It's fairly obvious that they hired a technology consultant for the films, and even if putting a little fusion reactor into his chest made little medical sense (what, it was an electromagnet meant to prevent the migration of shrapnel? That's silly.), what makes Iron Man believable over Marvel's panoply of mutants is that you could convince yourself that these are merely engineering challenges overcome, not outright magic. The reactor in particular was a smart touch, with throwaways that it was a long-running failure by the company. It resembles a tiny tokamak (and the one in their lobby was a a more plausible big one, if you could imagine they'd build 'em with glass walls, or would keep one running down the grid as a demo piece), a real device and actual long-running failure, which is screaming for some revalatory inspiration from a gifted scientific mind. The suit too, in a compelling discovery sequence (a directorial achievement given its length) had its struggles and successes, to the extent that it was believable enough to warrant viewer apology (we assume that Stark Enterprises must have already developed some wicked shock absorbers, etc.).

Good stuff, but on to the sequel, and we're running into problems. First of all, palladium is a noble metal, and considering it doesn't react with things very much, I am not convinced that it's especially toxic. (Hey Tony, I realize that in the comics universe radiation often gives you powers instead of kills you, but maybe the neutron damage is, you know, the problem.) You encounter this in science, where a limited set of material properties (usually with complicated interdependence) gets in your way and I suppose with enough computational effort, you could identify hypothetical materials that are more amenable (and then hind them in your futurama floorplan for some reason). But a new element? What the fuck is up with that? Did they find a new number between 1 and 107 that no one has thought of before? And that shit isn't toxic and radioactive? Let's ask the science consultant how one might go about doing this. It was great that Tony built a particle accelerator in his garage, on top of old milk crates and piles of laundry, though I'm even more impressed that he could shoulder it and wing around a glowing beam like a laser. (See all that stuff inside, Homer? That's why your cyclotron didn't work.) And all he had to do was hit that little slab with his harmless high energy proton beam (or whatever), and blammo, a little coathanger made out of unobtainium. Man, if nuclear chemistry is that easy, then I'm back to the basement to work on my gold machine. Meanwhile, some nerd chucks off his glasses in disgust.

It's the sort of thing that makes me look for other flaws. The antogonsist Ivan Vanko, now given the run of a defense contractor's full secret facilities, can run giant production items without using any of the people on the floor, no people at all, except an occasional complaining visitor. Ivan had great potential for a character, and Mickey Rourke damn near sold him as both an impressively scary motherfucker and a brilliant physicist, but given his origin story, whatever's contributing to this guy's amorality really needed to be filled out. Revenge is usually a passionate enterprise, you know? (Also, did Iron Man just cold-cock him in a suit powerful enough to throw a tank? And he lived?) And Sam Rockwell was unpleasant and non-technical enough, but I'd no indication of how he could possibly run a big company. So at least that part was plausible.

Of course I wish that I could age as well as Robert Downey Jr.. Getting older has only made him better looking, and I was surprised to learn that Gwynneth Paltrow shares this quality. Scarlett Johanssen plays an alluringly blank-faced enigma, which, beautiful as she may be, might best be described as her "entire range." The silliest casting was Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury, a pointless excercise that lengthened an already-long movie with sequel tie-ins: have they learned nothing from casting this guy as Mace Windu?

And they dared to crack open the military/technology/arms race can of worms, but then left it there stinking up the joint. Maybe it was better that way, at least approaching some basic philosophical challenges about the very existence of this stuff and leaving the questions open to the fanboys. I found myself thinking that the world would be bad enough off with one Iron Man, accountable to anyone only by his acquiescence, but an army full of them was even more terrifying. I'm not expecting deep political analysis from a superhero movie (and it's implied that Iron Man, as well as a number of other too-dangerous-for-just-anyone technologies will be relegated to oversight by special entities which would never, ever be tempted to fight covert or unjust wars), but no good is coming out of this. Didn't anyone regret the collateral damage when 20 giant robots started blowing up Madison Square Garden?

At least in comic book land, we can count on moral resolve from the good guys when we need it.

3. Treme
I like this show enough to only stay a week or two behind. There's the well-developed character dramas, of course, but you can watch it for the music alone, for what it means (and doesn't mean) in the culture. Sneaking in that many of the local artists was an act of sheer brilliance, but I want to tell Mr. Simon that there's a threshold for this sort of thing. Anyone who's routinely featured on television, or who's crossed the bar in record sales is going to be conspicuous, and their introduction needs a deft hand. When the dialogue reads, "Oh my god, that's Elvis Costello, famous musician and record producer," then something's a little off in the way you're bringing in your special guest cameos, even if some characters might actually talk like that in the situation. "That's Tom Colicchio, and he brought along Eric Ripert and Wylie DuFresne. They're notable New York chefs!" Or maybe there's just no good way. Why wouldn't people like that show up? Of course they would.

Nature Trail to Hell

I still haven't seen the film, although I intend to sooner or later, hopefully while it's still on the big screen. I can (and expect to) enjoy a souped-up B-movie of a blockbuster as much as anyone, and I do appreciate the big visual and sound experience, even though I remain deeply suspicious of the merits of 3-D technology itself. And I believe the many reviewers when they say that Cameron over-invested heavily in his own writing genius, which will no doubt shame him all the way to the bank. For groundbreaking legacy, it would have been nice to hire some screenwriters and all, but for something like this we don't expect much more than reaching for the fastest cliché-ridden quasi-heroic epic that the nearest body can put to paper. And to his partial credit, it took James Cameron a longer resume than George Lucas to get to this point.

(Actually the problem with Star Wars is that Lucas did outsource for one of his flicks, and it turned out to be the good one.)

No, what it's going to take for Avatar to finally irritate me, is when they start believing their own bullshit, and we may already be in the event horizon of that. Star Wars was bad enough, and in that mold, we're about ready for four too many Making Of Avatar features, and worse, endless documentaries about the deep philosophical implications of the bargain-bin script, probably invoking three pounds of Carl Jung and ten pounds of Joseph Campbell, maybe a dash of whoever likes to say that science fiction is really about today, dude, to describe how the story is not some cheap-ass derivative piece of crap, but something timeless.

Avatar has also set the media abuzz with how 3-D television, introduced this year, is going to Change Everything. I am sure that they can do better than the awful, headache-inducing cardboard glasses that they (used to?) distribute in the theaters. Wikipedia says that more advanced versions use glasses with polarizers, or which have shutters synched to a rapidly flickering screen. The latter has got to be better way to go about it, and could justify dedicated hardware to manage that control link. And the refresh rate on the screen would have to be twice as fast as usual, which may even be why they were pushing 120 Hz last year, come to think of it.

But now you've introduced ergonomic variables (Not everyone's eyes are the same distance apart; not everyone is sitting in the same position relative to the screen; people may wish, at times, to briefly divert their attention to something else) that are sure to make many users highly uncomfortable. And let's be honest, stereoscopic vision just isn't all that. Don't believe me? Try closing one eye, and tell me how much less real everything fails to seem. I mean, the big mover for 3-D television is ESPN, and if you actually watch live sports, you'll notice that they tend to be, you know, far away, and coming right at you doesn't change the perspective much at all. I mean, except for horror or sci-fi flicks with big cluttered screens and objects you want to believe are near the lens... Christ, the worst thing about 3-D TVs, if they're adopted, will be what they direct the content to.

American Idol Season 8

First of all, let's get the yearly apology back on the table, and then out of the way. I hate the show: it's transparently manipulative, it highlights an awfully narrow (and frequently awful) spectrum of musical taste, and the only judge that's not a simpering retard is the production genius that brought us Il Divo. Since, however, 3/4 of my household is comprised of young girls and moms--the precision demographic of the show--there's no escaping the chugging dawgs and the paint-peeling glory notes, not at that volume, and really, talking about it is my minor act of subversion. I've tried to follow Vote for the Worst, but it doesn't strike quite the right groove for me… I think I'm still a little itchy from last year's marathon Idol conversation with the excellent company on quiblit.

I watched this year's buildup of young talents, and the most remarkable thing about the pre-singing episodes is that they're really letting the talented clowns shine this year, going all the way to the feature stage, while downplaying the truly pitiable. As a captive audience, I support this both for it's entertainment value, and it's reduced malice (people really delude themselves, and AI scores ratings on humiliating them--someday I'll post a heartfelt lament for all of us untalented dreamers). From the show's perspective, I suspect that they want to send the message that yes, they need freaks and drama queens of ambiguous sexuality to show up and be exploited, but no, they're not what "America" wants. (Unless, of course, it is. After meddling in "country," "rock," and "soul," maybe they're now fishing for the next Fallout Boy or something).

Anyway, even with a few quality nutbars in the wings, Tatiana Del Toro with her starry-eyed neediness and her infectious SpongeBob-like giggle is already missed. But the thing is, Tatiana actually has singing talent, and she was a lot less painful to watch on the stage than that stumbling tuneless troll Michael Sarver, whose only talent appears to be the fact that he's really white. And a roughneck. On a real Texas oil rig. They have some kind of wildcard round this year, so maybe the judges will allow Tati to re-emerge in her scary, hungry glory. Anoop ("Noopsy") Desai also lost to Mikey Roughneck because he doesn't fall into a ready American ethnic stereotype. Also because the song he sang was boring as shit. He has a good voice though, and he seems nice, and he's been pimped madly by the judges, and I take this to mean he is sure to get wildcarded, even if they have to cheat.

A couple of teenagers were disposed of last night too, deservedly. One of them sang "Every Little Thing She Does is Magic" because it's so fun and uplifting, not that childish disconnection from the material is always a deal-breaker on this show. The thing about Sting (who now joins Whitney Houston on the AI verboten vocal list) is that he can't really sing, but in spite of this, he's able to communicate the emotion of the music, which is at least sometimes interesting. Our young tart got it wrong from both angles.

I've already forgotten the name of the girl who sang "Natural Woman," but I think she got a bad deal from the judges. I don't pretend to have a good ear, but her singing really felt like it clicked into the music, which I identify as a sign of good pitch and good time, and while it may not have been a star performance by any means, given the flailing of the other eleven, I felt that singing pleasantly in key should have counted for something in the judges' comments. In the car I was thinking how "Natural Woman" is to soul what "Whipping Post" is to rock or country. Would you ever want to hear anyone to a simple, straight take (smiling smugly, fingers snapping jauntily) on that one?

Finally, at what point did Danny Gokay turn into one of a pair of undertalented not-gay nerds (he looks like the creepy progeny of Robert Downey Jr. and Bud Bundy) to the next sure thing? (And why does my wife love the guy?) I know he's got a sob story, but his style is mediocre, and even though he sang better on Tuesday than I'd heard him before, I still don't want to hear him again. And . I thought the producers where playing him up so that he could face his best friend in a sing-off, but it looks like he's an anointed contender. Judging from the people who passed through, it's going to be a long dull season of this terrible show.

Five More Thoughts, LCD Ed.

1. I join the digital age, whining all the way
I know I talk a big game about the evils of consumerism, but the truth of the matter is that I really enjoy my technological comforts, and as such, I'm willing to devote some small fraction of my undeserved paycheck for the purposes of entertainment. My desire to get a flat television was actually less to bow before the alter of the great glass-eyed Polyphemus (I kid, please put that stick down), and more to float that gigantic old blown-speakered CRT box off the floor of my tiny living room. Like a good American, I got a big TV with all the latest available interfaces, which, unsurprisingly, is pushing my aging video equipment into obselescence, but if I ever get a signal that's good enough for this television, I tell you, it's going to be awesome.

So far, my biggest gripe is the aspect ratio. Naively anticipating cinematic film viewing and football games with enough resolution to pick out chipped teeth, I quickly discovered that all of my cable and DVD content is broadcast in 4:3 aspect ratio. Even the "widescreen" content coming from my cable and my two DVDs is still spaced 4:3 and keeps those letterbox stripes, which ends up giving me a box all around the picture, which in the end is about the same image as on my old TV. For the lo-res widescreen stuff, I can get fiddle the settings around to make it to fill the screen with approximately the right proportion, but it's imperfect (top and bottom edges cut off), and it's kind of a pain in the ass. When blown up, it acquires texture too, like a film projected onto burlap. Although the unit has some preset settings for different viewing environments (not to mention plenty of extra buttons on the remote), there's evidently no way to customize them, nor to toggle quickly between them.

To get signals that are meant fit in the viewing box, it looks like I need to spring for blu-ray or for HD cable, which I'm sure is part of the marketing plan. I half suspect they're intentionally blurring any picture riding an old style feed. And yet I'm sure I don't care to spend any more money to boast an additional six inches of picture. Damn you, Samsung.

2. The Wire, Season 1
Now that I have something to watch stuff on, I opted into a Netflix free trial to find out what all the stuff was about. I've seen The Wire advertised as the best show ever, the sort of thing that (to paraphrase some commenter somewhere) art historians will review centuries from now, and deem, disregarding everything else that has wandered pixellated space, to have made the invention of the medium worth it. Or at least good enough to justify owning a TV. Some praise. I decided to check it out.

And let's be clear, I could've cared less if I ever saw another police procedural. Opening up, here's yet another charismatic-but-rough-around-the-edges white guy in what looks to be the lead, putting in long hours, bending the rules for the sake of the case. I mean really, is police detecting such an all-encompassing job? Really the sort of thing that pulls in the top analytical (and intuitive) talent, staffing an assortment of geniuses that's willing to scrape every stain, yank every file, bend every rule for the sake of an infallible personal sense of public Justice? How much does a detective even get paid, anyway? I'm watching the first episode of The Wire, and I'm thinking, wow, it's the same old crap with bonus office politics. Cop drama written by Aaron Sorkin with a humorectomy. A first impression mind you: it took the introduction of the unlovable crowd of incompetents to warm me up to the environment of the cop shop, and the thin, human line the writers drew between the police competence and the actual underworld made it suddenly more interesting. I'm leaning toward buying in, at least for the sake of enjoying the drama. (But still, if the competent multiracial policewoman isn't (a) killed (b) a victim of violent crime or (c) addicted to drugs by the end of the first season, then I don't know television writing.)

The setting in the projects is more engaging from the get-go, even if they'll leave no metaphor untortured. (Will I ever see that chess set again?) We quickly find young murderer D'Angelo plying his trade with what, once he can get past the wretched necessities of the job, could almost be called decency toward his customers and employees. It shapes up rapidly to highlight the accident of birth and the arbitrariness of the law, and the way lives are accordingly shaped. I think the moment The Wire won me over was when D'Angelo noted that the inventor of Chicken McNuggets probably is not, in fact, rich, but is probably still shuttered in his bolthole in the nether reaches of the McDonaldland empire, concocting taste sensations for a pittance as the executives get rich and neighborhood kids juice up on corn oil and chicken by-products. I'm sure that bit would have hit home even more if I'd ever invented anything of value.

3. Burn after Watching
[Spoiled!] Okay, just after watching the last 15 minutes. The first 3/4 of Burn After Reading brought us through a series of comically unlikable people behaving like assholes to one another, and I like that just fine. Highlights include (an ever-more emaciated) John Malkovich taking his turn at indignant white collar anger mismanagement (would that Ted Knight were still alive), Tilda "White Witch" Swinton's bedside manner as a pediatrician, Brad Pitt in his most natural role since he played Floyd, horrifying geek intercourse, and a secret project that works up to a great sight gag. Some Netflix troll mentioned that the film would have benefitted from better dialogue, and I can't disagree. Even if the acting was top notch, a little repartee would have sold the comedy more. Quite possibly, it's one of those that works better on repeat viewings (like the Coens' other comic masterpiece).

Well and good as it went, right up to the point where it got splattered against the back of the closet wall.

I'll take my dark comedy with a mordant dose of cynicism, usually. But I can't get myself to laugh about the gray matter spewed across the back of the car--one fucking Tarantino is already too much. I mean, I make a plenty of exceptions to graphic violence, but the context is, you know, everything. We wouldn't have been too worked up had even the Malkovich character been murdered on screen, it's a common enough literary conclusion to fate-tempting, but taking the opportunity to dash the brains out of the two people in the film who could be called anything like "innocent" broke my amused suspension of disbelief entirely. Charitably, I could say it made me think about my assumptions about film violence, but so much for my entertainment.

4. Polarize me, sensitize me
Empirical evidence of the relationship between electrical currents and magnetic fields had been plugged away for a while by then, and the equations themselves look suspiciously similar to the famous Euler or Navier-Stokes formulations for fluid mechanics, and yet James Clerk Maxwell's contributions to physics sure feel like one of those lightning-bolt strikes of brilliance that changed everything. It's as if he took all that bizarre phenomenology, derived something like Newton's laws from it, and then instantly mapped the subsequent 150 years of post-Newtonian theoretical development onto electromagetics to bring it perfectly up to speed. Good stuff, and the mad genius part is that he also brought an explanation of light into the fold. Maxwell told us that light was an electromagnetic phenomenon, a coupled wave, and while it didn't quite resolve the physical argument (even Maxwell didn't believe it propagated without a medium, and there were still a few odd tricks it did with materials), it did offer a rigorous mathematical framework for electromagnetic theory, which, at least according to the hagiography in my old undergrad physics book, hasn't needed revision since.


So we all know that light can be thought of as an oscillating electric field, which jiggles up and down perpendicular to the line of the wave's propagation, and a coupled magnetic field also jiggles along at 90^o to the electric one, also along the line. The orientation of that single wave in the picture is up-and-down, but light from most sources is understandably going to have the orientation going every-which-way, made up of lots of little waves. The orientation of the electric field (for a given wave) is the polarization direction (when you're talking about visible light, pretty much all materials don't have any disagreement with the magnetic component and everyone just ignores it, but pretty much all the materials we see interact with the electric field).

When light is incident on a flat surface, some part will reflect, some transmit (and some absorb, but we don't have to go there just now). Where it all meets, the component of the electric field of light that's actually aligned with the surface needs to be the same. For light polarized parallel to the surface, that would be all of the electric field, and for light polarized differently, only a component of the electric field needs to satisfy those conditions. For all angles, a beam of light reflected off of a flat surface will be polarized a little more in a direction parallel to that surface (and for one special angle, it'll be completely polarized) than for other orientations. [Fresnel worked this all out before Maxwell was born, by the way, but I guess he didn't have to acknowledge any electromagnetic character of the light wave.] It's like a handful of skipping stones get thrown at the surface, and the ones that hit it flat manage to bounce off more often.

That horrible road glare is polarized a little more in the horizontal plane, which is why polarized sunglasses (that is, which will only pass light polarized in the vertical direction) are supposed to be better than just dark ones without any directional sensitivity. I got myself a pair of those this Christmas too, and I love them. I can't tell the difference compared to regular sunglasses, but it's a lot of fun walking around with a couple of polarizers on my head.

LCD displays use polarizers too. Depending on whether voltage is applied or not, the liquid crystal molecules will orient so as to pass light of one polarization or another. There's a polarizer on the front of the display which will either block the output, or pass it, and that's one pixel blinking on or off, depending on which way the LCs inside it are orienting the light. I've had a lot of fun this past week looking at LCD displays, including my spiffy new TV, through my sunglasses. Twist my head parallel to the output polarizer and it's nice and bright; turn at a right angle and it all goes black. Turns out that pretty much all LCDs are oriented 45^o from the vertical. Who knew?

5. Spoon!
My internal conversation is full of ridiculous little in-jokes, some of which were once shared with people, and some that no one gets but me. Now and then, they sneak out, and after subjecting my kids to apposite quotes from the olden days when cartoon binges were limited to Saturday morning and an hour after school, I finally thought to just buy the DVD and share the source of more than a little bit of my nonsense.

The Tick vs. Season 2 suffers from a missing episode, and also because the second season only ever gave a certain bomb-throwing anarchist a cameo and denied us scenes of the superhero night life, but still I'm watching it a dozen years later, with my kids, and I'm having giggling fits at the extended Doctor Strangelove outtakes, at blaxploitation star ShTaft (complete with funky theme music) working as an orderly where he dresses up to assist in a series of confrontation therapies, and I'm wondering to myself what the hell was this ever doing on Saturday morning? (And why did the Disney empire ever gets it's verminous claws on it?) To get it's place in the kiddie slot, a lot of adult humor had to be filtered through the G-rated personality of the infantile man of action, and the sensibility really had to target the silly to make the balance work. The bizarre part is that it did work, that it was such a winning combination. Unfortunately for the producers, immature college kids were the only demographic that would ever think to watch the show more than once. I guess it could have had a worse run than three seasons.

(It was also a comic book, one of several mock-superhero titles that I never read. The cartoon evolved into a live-action show, which was awful by any measure.)

American animation often suffers from the whims of marketing, shifting from adult to childish orbits, with more or less artistic effort, depending on the times and the people in charge. Some manages to break through to universality (good writing is good writing), and if I seem overly impressed by this, then you have to keep in mind that I grew up in the absoulte nadir of cartoon artistry. It's also a pretty common trick to pepper some adult jokes into kiddie fare, throw a bone to the parents forced to sitt through another jejeune pile of crap (or maybe the writers do it to keep themselves sane). It's rare that the adult and the childish humor manage to feed off of each, rounding out the simplicity of kids' tastes, and highlighting the basic absurity of adults'. I don't think I'd recommend it unreservedly, but The Tick did manage that silly synergy brilliantly, probably because it was forced to. Good times.


[Will append a screen capture if I can ever get it to work.]

A Brief Clowning Interlude

[lotta filler lately]

I'm up for a little frivolity. I'm watching (by which I mean hearing and glimpsing between beers and picking, and, reluctantly, sniffing up the usual online pissing posts) The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai on the on-demand dealie my cable service offers. People looked young and sort of funny in 1984, a bit scarecrow-like with thin bodies and too-big clothes and hair. Peter Weller looked like a stiff in his upturned collars, and he'd go on to do RoboCop later in the decade, where his immoble jaw was a feature not a bug, and then fade from leading roles anywhere. John Lithgow and Christopher Lloyd remain, so far as I know, first-rate clowns, which I mean in the most complimentary way. They recognize the comedy that comes out of exaggerating your emotions on camera, and they can't keep it out of their role. I not only respect that, I can hardly trust anyone that didn't see the humor in the effort.

I love watching the careers of bit actors. I'm half-watching the flick, and I think, Holy crap, is that the Kurgan? Oh my god, it is!

Clancy Brown is an imposing giant of a man, and Buckaroo Banzai has him cast as a sort of affable, gently-spoken southern fella, and it's convincing. I mean, he's not glowering or threatening at all, he doesn't take up too much space, and I take it all to mean the dude can actually act. Either way, whether he's a naturally menacing or a naturally comforting presence, I'm liking the guy. I think his last live role was as a guard in the Shawshank Redemption. He must have already been typecast by then, as a great big badass, and it's funny that he did, because it's not like Hollywood has an issue with tall people, and in his still shots, he looks about as threatening as Al Gore. It's a kind of magic. Or something.

Clancy Brown went on to do voice acting, and looking at his IMDB bio, he has, like most voice actors, shown up in almost every animated production you can think of. Notably, Clancy Brown has been the voice of Mr. Krabs on SpongeBob Squarepants for the last ten years or so.

Dig it: the Kurgan is also the skinflint proprietor of the Krusty Krab.

This knowledge warms my heart. It's like there's some cosmic connection of the arts or something. As a character, the big, sword-wielding, skull-wearing maniac was evil, but he wasn't a complicated evil, nor quite a humorless one, and the writers and casting directors realized he needed some good lines. Somehow, there's a connection between that goofy movie and the only cartoon I can giggle at with my children. Clancy Brown is a clown too. You'd have to be to put on skeleton-shaped underwear and wave a broadsword around, and how can you voice Mr. Krabs with no joy in your soul? I am happy to report that the universe is once again in tune.

Nurture, Nature, and Eddie Murphy

"All right, gather up kids, it looks like one of the best movies of all time is on."

"Isn't Eddie Murphy in this, Daddy?"

"Yup, back when he was funny, thank Bowdler."

"Thank what?"

"Huh? Oh, nothing. It used to have some swear-words is all. I don't think it loses much."

"Where's Eddie Murphy? Who are those people?"

"He'll be here pretty soon. Now see he used to be poor, but those two old guys..."

"Who's that guy?"

"That's Dan Aykroyd. I think this was the only time he was funny. Now look, he used to be have Eddie Murphy's job, but those guys switched. They're trying to say..."

"He looks pretty gross."

"Yeah, well, he's had some hard times. That's kind of the point."

"Why is she dressed like that?"

"Um, well, she's not a real classy girl."

"What's a pimp? Daddy? What's a pimp?"

"Yes, well, see, they're those guys that dress all crazy like I was telling you before. They, um, are mean to girls though. They take all their money."

"He looks pretty sad."

"That's kind of what they're getting at. You take someone's money away, and look where it gets them. But he was pretty lucky in the first place, you know? And now he has to find out how everyone else lives."

"He's not a very nice Santa."

"Shush now, this is a funny part."

"Hey, there's Eddie Murphy!"

Thank god she didn't make it far enough to ask me explain their stock trading scheme.

That conversation Thing One's way of picking on me a little, giving back what she usually gets. My kids always follow the rules, but that's more because they prefer to be creative and could often give a rat's ass about the letter of the law (this according to their teachers, which makes me secretly, and excessively, proud). That's my little angel. Be a playful little pain in the ass.

Maybe it's wrong to call Trading Places one of the best ever--there are extraneous gags, and the closing sequences are oddly put together--but I've got to call it out as one the best-directed comedies. Even though it channels a piece of young Murphy's comic energy, it's much more a director's project than a star vehicle. The best jokes are elaborately constructed, set up with the care of a Rube Goldberg machine. There are half a dozen scenes where John Landis crescendos and concentrates the energy up to a single point, balances it on a pin, and uses the smallest possible change to send the momentum in a completely different direction. Maybe it's meant to capture the dynamics of floor trading. The false calm shattered by the opening bell and the huge shift when the crowd shifted from buy to sell, are very much examples of what makes this movie tick.

It's not just a matter of timing. Landis worked to make that big pivot in the smallest possible space too. There's one scene where Eddie Murphy is surrounded by (white) cops with guns, which were arranged to fill the whole of the shot except for the star's face, very small in the frame. The entire mood of the scene hinges on Murphy breaking a smile. Time to laugh, everyone.

He used space to paint wealth and poverty too, letting the two worlds emerge as characters of their own, shrinking the actors when the abstracts need to have their screen time. Even though the film's 25 years old, it's probably singularly responsible for my (positive) mental image of urban Philadelphia. I don't imagine using setting as character is terribly original, but Landis was clever enough to let it crack a joke or two as well. One of the better scenes, where the Dan Aykroyd character is fired, an executive pool of hundreds of harrumphing old men is dwarfed by an enormous wood-paneled boardroom, the embodiment of old money. It ends with the portraits of the founders looking down in silent disapproval from their bygone eras. Brilliantly timed.

I couldn't explain any of this to my children, who are still brainwashed to think that low-budget Nickelodeon's live action crap is the essence of comedy. Hell, I think they giggled at drunken Santa (the rain opening up when he steps off the bus, the gun going off after he fails to shoot himself, both brilliantly timed) only because they are so conditioned to laugh track cues that they did what I did. They didn't appreciate a damn bit of it in fact, but it was fun trying to get them to.

The Disapproval Network

"You're such a whore, Phil."

"Keifus! How can you say that? Dr. Phil is not a 'whore'."

"Are you kidding me? Listen to him shill. What the hell is it this time? Some weight loss crap*? In the name of intervention? The dude's totally shameless...and not exactly the slimmest guy in the world, I might add."

"I don't care. He's not a whore. Look at that little girl crying. You can't fake that sort of compassion."

"Compassion? The knob's exploiting the poor kid's emotions on TV like that. If he really cared about these people, he wouldn't be embarrassing them on national telelvision. But you know, Sweetie, anything for ratings. The whore."

For some reason, my wife doesn't like watching TV with me very much.

I've got kind of a love/hate relationship with the medium. While I enjoy some television programming outright, I choose to apply a relatively high standard if it's purporting to keep my attention between the crass ad breaks. I'm for a free market (with some big caveats), but that doesn't mean that I'm not bloody tired of all the consumerism jammed into every goddamn crevice of my life. I hate the way TV shamelessly angles for the susceptible: those primetime ads at least attempt to entertain me between the allegedly superior programming, but children's telelvision, and the crap on the emotion-pandering-on-the-cheap world of daytime TV just offer up a barrage of inferiority complexes. So when I'm stuck in that hell, I take every perceived opportunity to unleash my inner prick. You know, make my own entertainment. And anyway, Phil McGraw is a fucking whore, and deserves to be called on it.

My libertarianism is more of a pursuit-of-happiness than a laissez-faire stripe. I'm all for that free speech, and for as little government power over individuals that can leave an overpopulated society still functioning. The government will make no law abridging the freedom of speech, but communities can still pressure people to behave, and national television makes the network homogeneous. The TV lessons range from acceptable (friends matter!) to sketchy (love the cops!) to awful (the solution to violence is more violence!). Since we have shit that needs to be peddled and TV, even with cable, is a broad brush, we get the lessons most easily absorbed by the most, and it reinforces the values of the dumbest of us. Sex is bad, says the tube (but we can't get enough--what are our neighbors doing?!). Ditto killin' people. Ditto our opinions on who's not to be trusted, and who can't be punished enough. Don Imus didn't survive this long because he had a good radio voice. He got adopted as some brand of jowly bullshittin' culture reinforcer, a dinosaur remembering the semi-mythical good old days when the uppity mice were kept away from the eggs.

Dr. Phil's message could be worse, I suppose. Self-actualization is one thing, but I could do without the busybodies chasing around the poorly actualized. One of the more odious Dr. Phil guests is a retired detective, who spies on and professionally confronts people. The segment I remember showcased a teenage bride in a sketchy (possibly illegal) relationship with an older man. The camera followed the citizen police into the home, caught his shouting match, filmed him dragging the young woman out to the car. Meanwhile, the mother tearfully milked the Nielsens back in the studio. It worked out well for the young person. On camera it always does, but how many wannabe citizen soldiers have been heartened to bust the doors down on nonconformists?

If the free market means that I have to put up with marketing, then the free exchange of ideas means that insecure people will constantly try to shame you with their loud voices. Good arguments wouldn't rule the day even in libertarian la-la land. Even then we'd have to listen to the chorus of the disapproval network. And don't get me wrong, it's not conservative ideas about community that I'm attacking here (although I'll happily single out a couple of 'em if pressed), but rather the means of reinforcement: by peer pressure, by accentuating insecurity, by barrage.

The prices of freedom, I tells ya.

K

*It was probably something else last time I was watching, actually, but the diet aid dominated the Google search. Phil-endorsed Shape Up! supplements were something he was actually called on by consumers. The handful of shows I watched had him hawking either his books or somebody's self-help or emotionally-sanctifying product of some kind. In Phil's defense, the books are a lot less bad than the television.

Pregnancy TV?

I read a Slate article today. Evidently, there's a pregnancy-themed sitcom on ABC in the works.

It sounds absurd on the face of it, right? A woman's pregnancy will only get you through a season of programming, unless you take a truly weird take in which she's eternally preparing her nest, or has a new one just in time for every sweeps week. It's not a cartoon: sitcom kids aging is part of the deal.

But it's not like focusing on a year in the life is an unusual marketing ploy. To move all those beauty supplies, consumers are pursuaded to twist themselves to a mythic ideal of an eternally 18-year-old body. Gotta convince the tweens they need to look older, convince the twenty-somethings they're too fat and wrinkled and the forty-something men they should still be rutting like rabbits (note to self: re-evaluate on 40th birthday). (Of course developing all those products takes chemical engineering as much as advertising, so I guess it's nice that something's driving the economy these days.)

We pass through those famous couple of years hardly realizing it, even those of us who are pretty enough to achieve the body ideal. Even shorter than the traipse though the adult/teen threshold are those ten or twelve new baby months. Yeah, the passage takes about as long, but the magic rubs off a hell of a lot quicker. Without marketing, the saccharine thrill of being new parents evaporates completely by the time Junior finally starts sleeping through the night. Sure, people may have more, out of biology or carelessness or love, but I don't think most second-time moms get pushed into spending a fortune on this stuff. (I could be wrong.)

But there's a whole pregnancy industry, a bizarre time-like loop that exists betweeen the moment you find out the blessed news and the time you decide you're sick of midnight feedings. There are pregnancy magazines, pregnancy books, pregnancy party supplies, and baby registries full of endless pregnancy products. It's a pregnancy lifestyle that they push. The magazines are surreal. Covers of celebrities shooting across the sky in their moment of pregnancy fame, doing their gravid photo spread. It's a lifestyle that no one lives in very long except for the editorial board. Maybe if they push it hard enough, women would want to get pregnant again just to relive the magic.

Can Underbelly last as a sitcom? They'll have to either get an audience of well-conditioned pregnancy groupies, or else replenish the demographic every couple of months. I'd call it an insane strategy, but outside of television, there's a pretty good record of it working.

Keifus (meh. I tried to make it interesting)