Poor, poor beleaguered experts. How can one possibly survive the onslaught of the unwashed (and uncredentialed) blogospheric masses?
Thanks to Aunt B. for the reference, and for the citation, as well. It’s no accident that the first chapter of The Anxiety of Obsolescence cites Schickel’s article on the death of film, but I hadn’t realized that we were also facing the imminent death of film reviewing…
I’m quite behind the times on this (appropriate for mon état, quand je souffre du décalage horaire), but the talk of the lefty blogosphere a couple of weeks ago was the much that was being made of W’s having been spotted drinking what his advisors insisted was a non-alcoholic beer (and, of course, the Beeb’s somewhat tickled connection of that beverage to the “stomach bug” that apparently knocked him out of commission the next day. One might also note the gleeful reminder of H.W.’s stomachal gift to the prime minister of Japan back in 1992).
Here, however, what’s being circulated with equal schadenfreude is the video of an apparently drunken Nicolas Sarkozy in a G8 press conference. His advisors insist that Sarko never drinks, and that he simply wasn’t used to the long hours and late nights of negotiating, and that lack of sleep produced his wooziness. It’s hard, however, to imagine a late night with Vladimir Putin that could conceivably end in sobriety.
On the other hand, if I’d been asked to give a morning press conference yesterday, I might have looked much the same. Today, after a full night of sleep (though one admittedly produced with a bit of prescribed assistance), I’d be a little more on my game.
I suddenly find myself with about a dozen things I’d like to write about, which is a remarkable change from the blankness that I’ve experienced when pondering the blog. At least a couple of these things I’m quite behind the curve on, given our recent preparations for travel, and our travel, and our adjustments to travel, but I’m operating in the spirit of better late than never today, which seems only appropriate to my pitifully jet-lagged state.
So, the first of those things: the finale of The Sopranos. Folks have weighed in on this everywhere (so everywhere, in fact, that I’m not going to bother linking), but I found the episode’s ending compelling enough that I want, however belatedly and repetitively, to record my reaction to it. For propriety’s sake, I’ll note that one should stop reading now if one is among the three people left in the country who don’t know how the episode ended.
I understand that some folks were really perturbed by what seems like the series’s non-ending — the sudden cut to black in the midst of not very much happening. Not least of these, my mother; my phone rang four-point-three seconds after the credits started rolling, and when I answered, all she said was “I don’t get it.” The good news is that we’d watched the east coast feed, rather than waiting for the west coast, so I could give her my sense of what had just happened, at least as it was then developing.
That sense is this: the scene is filled with a very intentionally constructed and uncertainly located though not in the least vague sense of menace, a menace which emanates from some expected places, like the hinky guy at the counter who keeps looking at Tony over his shoulder and the fairly tough-looking guys apparently scouting the jukebox in one of the last shots, but also from some unexpected places: the man sitting with a table full of Cub Scouts; Meadow’s repeated inability to parallel park. The scene pays just a bit too much attention to the small details of what’s going on around Tony, encouraging us to begin guessing what’s going to happen: the hinky guy at the counter is going into the men’s room to get a gun hidden there, à la Godfather, or he’s just given a signal to the toughs at the jukebox, who are going to open fire; the Cub Scouts are going to get caught in the bullets’ path; Meadow is going to be a horrified late witness to the scene that’s just unfolded. Or, perhaps, Meadow is going to get caught in the crossfire, and the Cub Scouts are going to be horrified onlookers.
Or perhaps none of that. As Tony and Bobby Baccala discussed earlier in the season, probably you don’t even hear it when it happens, and so it’s very likely that the cut to black is that end: the shots that Tony never sees coming. But on the other hand, perhaps what’s after the black isn’t carnage, but just more of the same, and this last scene is just allowing the viewers to enter into the world that Tony will, as long as he lives, continue to inhabit: a world filled with unlocalizable menace, in which every moment could well be the last.
For both of those reasons — that you don’t hear the bullet that gets you, but that if you think it’s coming, you hear it everywhere — the only way that the series could conceivably end was simply to end, precisely because, as Steve Perry reminded us, “the movie never ends; it goes on and on and on and on.” And that, I’ll confess to thinking, was a brilliant choice, and evidence of the show’s impact: “Don’t Stop Believin’” finds itself, 26 years later, at number 22 on iTunes.
The world’s going to be a bit different without The Sopranos, but on the other hand, the world’s radically different for their having existed. There could have been no Six Feet Under, no Deadwood, no The Wire, no The Tudors — or, for that matter, no turn toward complexity in network television, either — without The Sopranos leading the way. It’s an appropriate end, I think, for the series not to end, but rather to go on in imagination and discussion and argument. Not a big fuck-you to the fans, as some have accused David Chase of delivering, but one last thing worth thinking about.
Last night, I have to say, was a heck of a night of television — the second-to-last episode of The Sopranos (EVER, as the trailer for next’s week’s episode informed us, in case we hadn’t been paying attention), followed by the second-to-last episode of the first season of The Tudors. The two episodes make for an interesting pairing; one could imagine Melfi’s dawning awareness of the manipulative uses of talk therapy made by the sociopath just as easily coming from Thomas More, with the substitution of piety for psychoanalysis.
R. and I just started watching The Tudors this last week, however, and went on a fairly minor binge, watching the re-airings of season one’s first eight episodes over the course of the week, leading up to last night’s episode nine. There are some fairly significant tinkerings with the history involved in the series, not least some key deaths that are shifted around for narrative effect. Henry Fitzroy, for instance, Henry VIII’s illegitimate son, died when he was 17, but the series kills him off as a toddler. I get the dramatic impact there: just at the point at which Henry is rolling out his “God is punishing me for having married my brother’s wife” argument, his one acknowledged son dies, a harbinger of the plague that follows. But others of the changes are less easily understood. The series’s Margaret Tudor, for instance, dies of consumption in 1533ish (after having killed her first husband, the king of Portugal, and remarried Charles Brandon, the first duke of Somerset) — when, in fact, it was Mary Tudor who married Somerset and died in 1533; Margaret Tudor married James IV of Scotland and bore a line of Stuarts, living until 1541. (So far as I know, none of the Tudors killed the king of Portugal, though I could well be wrong, and wouldn’t be a bit surprised.) Why substitute Margaret for Mary here? Did the producers just like the name better?
Such changes to the historical narrative, however, are relatively superficial; the series strikes me as a compelling reimagining of the period, if through a somewhat presentist lens. That, The Tudors shares less with The Sopranos than with Deadwood, with which series I’d also be willing to swear The Tudors also shares the producers of its opening titles, as well as the composers of its title music, though I haven’t been able to find any confirmation of that hunch.
I don’t think I know anyone at Virginia Tech. But if any of you are there, I hope you and your colleagues and loved ones are okay.
We actually had a psycho-on-campus drill earlier this semester, and though we all went along, no one I know here took it terribly seriously. That we live in a world that’s always happy to provide us evidence of why we should take such things seriously just breaks my heart.
Timothy Burke has posted one of the most sensible assessments I’ve seen of the problems with “effects” research, spurred on by the vastly over-reported study recently released suggesting a correlation between time spent in day care and “disruptiveness” in school. Burke extrapolates outward to think about the persistent problem of “media effects” research, which has for decades attempted to create causal links between a series of social problems and the consumption of media texts (i.e., Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cause schoolchildren to kick one another, Marilyn Manson causes teenage suicide, violent videogames cause school shootings, and so forth). For whatever reason, I keep expecting us all to have moved beyond such simple causalities, and am always taken by surprise when any study suggesting that mode of cultural consumption x causes social problem y seems to achieve such wide purchase in the public imagination.
But then, by and large, we all want something to blame for such social problems other than ourselves, something external to our family structures and our under-supported schools, something that we can demonize without having to ask more difficult questions about our culture and its values and inequities. Burke concludes with a pledge that we could all bear to take:
Do not endorse research about social behavior or social psychology without first looking very carefully at the methodology and the effect size. If you would disregard the study on those grounds when it contradicts your own social views, disregard it when it endorses your views.
I’d add to this, though, that we might all bear growing a bit more skeptical about causality in general, resisting the suggestion that a correlation between phenomena can tell us anything more than that there’s a correlation between phenomena, particularly when the putative “effects” of the phenomena under study are, as Burke points out, “teeny-tiny.”
I cannot stop looking at this. There’s something about the flatness of the subjects’ affect (apparently a learned pose, which sinks in sometime around age 4) and something about the monumental changes in the kids and the ever-so-gradual changes in the parents that I find absolutely haunting.
A quick post to say thanks to Chuck for letting me know that the New York Times has finally made its Times Select features free to students and educators with a valid university email address.
Repeat subject line here.
Henry Jenkins has a new article in this morning’s Chronicle of Higher Education, suggesting the ways that the field of media studies needs to shift in the face of the increasing penetration of the read/write web (the link above should be good for the next few days, after which time I’ll hope that the article has been moved to the free side of the Chronicle website.)
I’ve opened the floor to reactions and discussion over at MediaCommons. What do you make of Jenkins’s arguments? And how might MediaCommons figure into the future that Jenkins projects?
