Blogcritics

Announcement: Short-content feeds

Phillip Winn — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

Sunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding.

Oh, Brave New World! Of Hollywood and Plastic Surgery

Jodi Daynard — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 20:42:49 EDT

I’ll admit it: I’ve been traumatized. Every time I turn around, another of my beloved actors has had “work.” Last time I watched the Academy Awards, more than two years ago now, Antonio Banderas was slapping Melanie Griffith on the butt and saying, “I like her sexy.” Sexy, fine. But at fifty, did she have to look twenty-five? The woman’s face was nearly unrecognizable; her lips looked like they’d been stung by a nest of bees. Everyone is having “work” nowadays. Even stars I never thought would stoop to it, like Michael Douglas, Meg Ryan, or Anthony Hopkins. While I'm not certain about Hopkins, the last time I saw him, he looked like a wax replica of himself. And we won’t even talk about Joan Rivers, who has morphed into a deranged twelve-year-old. One by one, our stars are being Jokerized, like the grinning citizens poisoned by Jack Nicholson in Batman. I would like to believe that we, the viewing public, are not entirely responsible for our actors’ need to remain young, that we are not shallow narcissists, incapable of watching our favorite stars age. Instead, I believe that some people might have a lot to gain by convincing us that we are. Dr. Arnold Klein, one of Beverly Hills’ most celebrated dermatologists — known for creating the kind of swollen-lipped mouth that looks like an altogether different female body part — has gone on record as saying, “If we had movie houses filled with actors and actresses who were ugly, no one would come to the movies.” Those surgeons who partake of a $9.5 billion industry have a great deal riding on that remark. But is it really true? Would we all walk away from the movies in disgust? Personally, I liked the wrinkles around Anthony Hopkins’ piercing eyes. I liked Meg Ryan’s laugh lines. These aging beauties looked real. Yes, Meg Ryan was adorable in the 1980s. She had an inimitable ingénue charm. But do we always and forever need her to possess that inimitable charm? Must our beloved actors, once successfully packaged, remain like so many frozen peas in the back of our psychic freezers? One might argue that actors have always been vain, and that audiences have always loved youth. Female actors in particular have had a rough time in Hollywood. Back in the old days, all but the top female stars would be forced into retirement once they lost their sex appeal. Indeed, the “has been” actress — that pathetic, abandoned creature chain-smoking in the dark and picking up young boys in seedy bars — became a cliché, institutionalized in such Hollywood classics as Sunset Boulevard and All About Eve.But there were exceptions, actresses who, whether through wisdom or sheer disregard, gave us the profound honor of seeing their life spans on celluloid. Bette Davis did not remain a society girl with a brain tumor (Dark Victory) her whole life. Ingrid Bergman moved from her role as the stunning spy in Notorious to the crafty old biddy in Murder on the Orient Express. Katharine Hepburn did not stay a coltish jock to Spencer Tracy’s burly coach in Pat and Mike. No, she evolved to become the compassionate, finely-wrinkled mother in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. How are our stars ever going to become compassionate, finely-wrinkled mothers (and fathers) if their faces look like mockeries of youth? The plastic surgeons’ knives are not only cutting out our stars’ valuable patina of the past, but altering their faces for future roles as well.Maybe moviegoers should start a movement -- to boycott films whose actors have had “work.” As consumers of this unsavory product, our strike could get the message back to Hollywood that we no more want Jokerized actors than we want irradiated fruit. Most of all, our protest will say that we can handle aging, both in ourselves and in our actors. Although, frankly, I’m not so sure anymore. A few months ago, I had a crisis of confidence on this very subject. I turned on the television to find a documentary on Bette Davis. The film contained some clips of her shortly before her death: she looked... well, mummified. Her face was drawn, leathery, and wrinkled, with mere blotches of color for eyes and mouth. I shrank back in horror, not so much from her as from my own reaction to her. Had real human beings begun to look alien to me?My horror at the old Bette Davis reminded me all too closely of a certain scene in Aldous Huxley’s dystopia, Brave New World. In one famous scene from the novel, two citizens visit an Indian reservation in New Mexico, one of the last surviving out-backs of “natural” humans. The woman is horrified by the sight of an old Native American:His face was profoundly wrinkled and black, like a mask of obsidian. The toothless mouth had fallen in. At the corners of the lips, and on each side of the chin, a few long bristles gleamed almost white against the dark skin. The long unbraided hair hung down in gray wisps round his face. His body was bent and emaciated to the bone, almost fleshless….She whispers to her companion, "What's the matter with him?" “He's old, that's all," [the man answers]. “Now they don’t allow people to look like that. We preserve them from diseases. We keep their internal secretions artificially balanced at a youthful equilibrium…Youth almost unimpaired till sixty, and then, crack! the end."More than seventy years ago, Huxley predicted a society of infantalized adults kept complacent by sexual promiscuity and conditioned consumerism. It’s 2007 as I write this, and let’s make no mistake -- we are there, inside that ageless world Huxley imagined. The only difference is that now it’s youth unimpaired until ninety — and then, crack! Americans have always had a passionately vicarious relationship with their stars, and to see ours grow older brings its share of pain. But there is something very beautiful, too, about an aging face. Clint Eastwood is far more attractive now than he was as that smooth-faced Ken Doll of the 1960s. His face says he’s lived. It has acquired both compassion and irony: that ability to see beneath the surface of things. It glows with the nobility of survivorship.I would like to think that Americans can accept themselves as noble survivors rather than perpetual children, incapable of reflection or memory. Truth is beauty, said the poet John Keats, not youth. But maybe that’s just a saggy relic of the 20th century speaking.

Jodi Daynard's essays and short stories have appeared in numerous periodicals, including The New York Times Book Review, The Paris Review, Harvard Review, Other Voices, and in several anthologies. To read more about her, go to www.daynard.com.

A Jaundiced Eye: Why Humans Don't Deserve Automobiles

Jodi Daynard — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 21:06:05 EDT

I often wish that those visionary inventors to whom we are indebted for our greatest progress as a species would have stopped a moment to also imagine the ill use to which we humans would put their inventions. Thomas Edison invented nearly everything upon which the modern lifestyle is based: movies, stereos, and lights that you could switch on and off. But could he possibly have imagined all-night ski slopes or surround-sound home movie centers? Could Alexander Graham Bell have envisioned the blight of the cell phone? There are many such inventions about which I could — and probably will — rail. But one of the worst of the modern inventions, the one that brings out the most vicious traits of our species, is the automobile. I got to thinking about automobiles in a general way a few months ago, when, one bright winter morning, I pulled out of a parking space too slowly and a woman in an SUV careened around me. She misunderstood my hesitant lurchings as a desire to push ahead of her and, as she passed me by, a young daughter looking on, she gave me an upward-shoved fist. We have all witnessed road rage firsthand. In urban areas, drivers constantly get into fights about who reached that parking space first. Get out of the car to argue the point, you take your life in your hands. Then, there’s highway rage. Who can forget the story of Donald Graham, the church deacon who, irked by some young punks on the highway, pulled into the breakdown lane, removed a hunting crossbow from his trunk, and shot one of the punks. Dead. Luckily, I have not yet been shot, but I have been flipped countless times. Usually, it’s for going too slowly in the fast lane, and for refusing to move over when tailgated. At these moments, my husband tells me that my intransigence is dangerous behavior (he doesn’t say it quite that way, however). But I am ready to die rather than to yield to road-bullies, which I suppose is a sort of road-bullyish attitude all by itself. What’s more, as a former New Yorker, it annoys me that these highway desperadoes in my suburban Massachusetts area don’t actually have anywhere important to go. I want to shout at them, you’re heading to nowhere, you deluded moron. What’s the rush? Road rage is not limited to the road. One dark, winter night, I was backing out of a parking space at the local pharmacy when a man and his daughter emerged out of the fog. I stopped in time not to run them over, but the father behaved as if I had tried to kill them on purpose: he smashed his fist down on my engine cover. Another form of road rage is driveway rage. I once parked with the back of my car about six inches into someone’s driveway. It was one of those multi-million dollar mansions for which my town is famous, right next to the town lake. I left the owner plenty of room to get in or out of his driveway, but when I came back from the lake, I found a hasty note pinned to my car: Your big butt is blocking my driveway. And yet, as much as I’ve suffered for my automobile, I have also experienced moments of nearly divine mercy. Occasionally, a driver will let me pull ahead of them with a friendly smile. Sometimes, a truck driver will give me the raised palm (British for “thanks very much”). And one time, someone even waited patiently as I thrashed my way into a terrible parallel parking job. At such moments, I am so overcome with gratitude that tears spring to my eyes. In general, though, mercy is not part of our 21st century American ethos. Indeed, the issue of road rage has grown so big that it has become a bona fide area of sociological and psychological study. Psychiatrists have even come up with a name for it: intermittent explosive disorder, or IED. Contemporary clinicians ascribe numerous complex causes of IED. But to me, the whole problem boils down to something fairly simple: ownership. Ownership, and the sense of entitlement it brings. Think of a mean dog. The dog has bared his teeth once too often. Before the owner puts it down, there are several things he can do to try to save it. The first thing he must do is deflate its ego. Take away its food bowl, forbid it from jumping on the furniture or having a set place to sleep. Ignore it when you eat dinner, until it remembers its place. So it is with humans. Like the vicious dog, we form entitled attachments to things. And humans do not take “ownership” any more literally than a dog does. For example, we will “own” a rented car, a blanket at a crowded concert, a familiar vector on the roadway from point A to B. We will “own” the air in front of our driveway. And, give us a car able to travel at one hundred miles per hour, we will “own” the right to travel at one hundred miles per hour. What’s to be done? Many things could and someday no doubt will be done. But for now, here are just a few suggestions: First, cars should be forced to go certain speeds on certain roads. When entering a stretch of road, cars should pass through some electronic force field that switches you to a preprogrammed speed. People who cut in front of you going ninety without having signaled could be photographically “tagged” and fined. As for those who ride your tail and give you the finger when they finally pass you — the computer built into your car will snap a photo of him in the act, then send it off to their designated insurance agencies. One step for each offense.This is where my husband would step in and object that I would make an excellent fascist, and maybe he’s right. But I’ve never been entirely comfortable with the American Dream, in achievement at any price, in ownership that impinges on solitude or reverie, in personal success unmitigated by at least a passing nod to morality and community. Were Thomas Jefferson or John Adams to step into an American city today, I’m certain that they would believe they created not a free democracy but a Sodom and Gomorrah. They would pray to God for another flood. Which brings me to the penultimate worst problem with automobiles: how successfully they create an illusion of anonymity. One never knows anything about the person inside the automobile. Not his sex, his age, his history, his capacity for kindness, or goodness -- unless, of course, one is stupid enough to get out of the car. But by then, one has morphed into The Incredible Hulk, anyway. Once, in a blinding snowstorm, I backed up right into a new BMW sports car. The man stepped out, ready to confront me when, to our mutual horror, we discovered that he was the father of my son’s best friend. I watched as he tried to shove the green monster back into the body of the mild-mannered suburbanite. And I’ll always wonder what he would have said to me, had I not been me. That’s my point: in the face of anonymity, we spit our venom onto that shiny dashboard, give it the finger, shout obscenities at it. But who is “it”? A ninety-year-old man who has just lost his spouse of fifty years? A woman struggling to survive her cancer treatments? A single mom who lost her husband in the Twin Towers? Humans have never done very well with the unknown. In it, we project little good and a great deal of evil. Science fiction writers have known this about us for a very long time. We see the Devil in every shadow. Just as easily, it seems, do we turn our fellow humans into malevolent creatures. In fear of this Devil we have, historically, ratted out loved ones, abandoned sick parents, made dirty deals or, when none of that has worked, just started shooting. It seems we humans are filled with a nearly inexhaustible supply of free-floating, blind hatred. And I can only hope that when the aliens arrive, they come well-armed. Because I have little doubt as to who will deploy their weapons first. Which bring me to the worst worst thing about the automobile: the way its heavy metal and shaded glass encourage not only the failure of imagination but the failure of empathy as well. Granted, it’s hard to empathize with a huge, bullying SUV. The human being in there is all but lost. One must summon all one’s creative powers to invent them. But when it comes to automobiles, even gifted human beings often fail at empathy. To lose both imagination and empathy is, in a word, to lose one’s humanity. But that’s precisely what the automobile does so effectively. And not just in the abstract, either. My fellow human beings’ near-total loss of humanity is something I experience once, often twice, a day. Personally, I’m leery of calling this hatred something specific and psychiatric like IEP. For I don’t believe this hatred is a different hatred from that which has murdered countless human beings over the years. It’s the same hatred. Only now it’s inside you and me. The normal ones. Humans have always liked speed, have always wanted to fly. If we could, we’d fly just like birds. Or like Icarus, whose father, Daedalus, built him wooden wings and stuck them on with wax. The boy was supposed to fly straight to Sicily. His father warned him about the sun, but Icarus flew straight toward it. I’m very glad that nobody has yet invented automated wings, because then the sky would forever be raining wax instead of water.