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Beyond the Multiplex: Can an actor still carry a movie?
America’s last hope: A strong labor movement
To achieve economic justice in the 21st century, we need to fight for democracy in the workplace
The 99 Percent Plan is a joint Roosevelt Institute-Salon series that explores how progressives can shape a new vision for the economy. This is the third essay in the series.
The fate of the labor movement is the fate of American democracy. Without a strong countervailing force like organized labor, corporations and wealthy elites advancing their own interests are able to exert undue influence over the political system, as we’ve seen in every major policy debate of recent years.
Yet the American labor movement is in crisis and is the weakest it’s been in 100 years. That truism has been a progressive mantra since the Clinton administration. However, union density has continued to decline from roughly 16 percent in 1995 to 11.8 percent of all workers and just 6.9 percent of workers in the private sector. Unionized workers in the public sector now make up the majority of the labor movement for the first time in history, which is precisely why — a la Wisconsin and 14 other states — they have been targeted by the right for all out destruction.
The urgency is striking. Instead of being fundamentally discredited, the oligarchs and plutocrats who crashed our economy are raking in record profits and acting even more aggressively to bury the American labor movement once and for all. Over the last year, several labor leaders have told me that they believe unions have only about five more years left if they don’t figure out some kind of breakthrough strategy.
The complete collapse of unions would have devastating consequences. The labor movement has played a crucial role in advancing economic justice in the workplace and in politics. Union membership raises median weekly earnings and reduces race- and gender-based income gaps, and union workers are much more likely to receive health care and pension benefits than workers who are not members of a labor union. The decline of organized labor is directly linked to the rise in economic inequality over the last 40 years and the onset of a “Second Gilded Age.” The decline in union density coupled with the decline in the real value of the minimum wage explains one-third of the dramatic growth in wage inequality since the early 1970s.
Over the past 30 years, American employers have become even more aggressive at violating their workers’ rights to organize under a toothless and outdated labor law regime. Contrary to the intent of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which made it national policy to encourage and promote collective bargaining, the NLRA now provides incentives for employers to break the law routinely and ignore any compulsion to negotiate collective agreements. When there is little outrage for the daily violations of workers’ liberty (1 in 3 workers is fired illegally for attempting to exercise freedom of association), our democracy is in peril.
As worker power has eroded in the workplace, the labor movement’s political clout has also declined. Measured by both members and money, unions are still the most influential and resourceful left-wing constituency in American politics. Organized labor also remains the most powerful core of the national Democratic Party by several measures, including campaign contributions, grassroots mobilization efforts, lobbying and setting the party’s legislative agenda. Indeed, the labor movement spent a record amount of money to help get a Democrat elected to the White House in 2008.
With a labor-friendly White House and a Democratic Congress, organized labor began strategizing about how and when to push for its No. 1 priority, the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). Labor law reform would not only help the flagging movement survive but also offer an indirect solution to our growing problems of economic inequality and the catastrophic Great Recession. By leveling the playing field between workers and employers, higher union density decreases wage inequality in the American labor market while increasing purchasing power of consumers.
But the move to pass EFCA failed, revealing just how weak organized labor has become. Now, with no hope for labor law reform in sight, is the time to rethink the role of the labor movement in the 21st century. Progressives need a strong and vibrant labor movement that focuses not just on workers’ rights, but can also act as a democratizing force advancing social justice and expanding worker, citizen and resident power in the workplace and in their communities.
The labor movement is the critical anchor and enabler of democracy grounded on a notion of freedom. Most people have an intuitive understanding of what democracy means: rule by the people (as opposed to rule by the few or an elite). Yet, as Corey Robin so eloquently points out in his book on fear, Americans give up their individual freedom and democratic voice every single day they walk into work. The workplace is an authoritarian dictatorship, and we accept this as legitimate.
Now is the time to challenge that feudal relationship. We need to call into question the assumption that Americans believe democracy stops at the workplace door. If we would not stand for a despot to rule over us with impunity, why do we let the boss do so every day of the workweek? Any progressive advance needs a strong labor movement to achieve a fully free and democratic workplace and society. This vision of freedom and democracy manifests in two domains: the workplace and the southern region of the country.
First, labor’s role must be made much more central at the workplace and in the economy more broadly. Labor can, and should, be a governing co-partner with business and government in the economy. What labor brings to the table is a vision of growth with equity. And there are already examples of this kind of union and worker organizational influence in the economy at the regional level. The Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE) and Working Partnerships USA, both in California, have shown how labor can become a governing partner in economic decision-making at the regional level.
Another aspect of centralizing labor’s role in the economy and advancing workplace democracy is to expand workers’ voice and power at the bargaining table. A 21st century vision of the American labor movement is one that destroys the divide between labor and community that has long governed the politics and practices of unions. What the emergence of new forms of worker organizations have taught us is that workers are also residents in communities, while residents are also workers, and there are organizational models available that take all workers’ identities into account.
While labor law constricts the scope of issues that unions can negotiate at the workplace, it doesn’t prevent worker organizations from bargaining in the political arena for affordable housing, equitable development, local, regional and national economic policy, criminal justice, or the wide range of issues that affect poor and working class people. Stephen Lerner, among others, has outlined what a wider scope of collective bargaining might look like. Imagine, for instance, that the United Auto Workers could negotiate over the environmental standards of the cars they produce instead of just wages and benefits. Such a vision requires a far-reaching campaign to redefine the scope of collective bargaining and workers’ voices at work. This is a 10- or 20-year effort to be sure, but one that will be crucial to any future the labor movement has in the U.S.
Directly related to expanding labor’s role in the economy and expanding the scope of collective bargaining is advancing freedom in the workplace. In short: democracy, over autocracy, at work. This would go beyond the softer slogan of the AFL-CIO’s “voice at work.” This is an admittedly long-term project. But several concrete demands arise out of the broad notion of a workplace democracy. For instance, the Employee Free Choice Act would have allowed workers a modicum of political liberty at the workplace; it aimed to restore workers’ rights to freedom of association. But a deeper and even more controversial demand proposes an end to management prerogative over all workplace decisions. Workplace democracy means truly giving workers a “voice” at work. Whether through work committees or required seats for employee representatives on the company’s board of directors, a deeper vision of workplace democracy enables workers’ voices to have a real impact.
The second domain for a 21st century labor movement is geographic: finally democratizing the South through the building of a Southern labor movement. After the CIO’s Operation Dixie failed to organize Southern workers in the late 1940s, with a few exceptions mostly in the public sector, organized labor gave up on the South. We’ve been suffering the consequences ever since. The Southern, Walmart model of low-wage labor markets is being imported to the North. We only have to look at the attack on public sector workers in Wisconsin and Michigan and the recent passage of Right-to-Work legislation in Indiana to understand that Northern governors and the Republican Party are trying to turn their states into Yankee versions of Southern Right-to-Work (for less) states.
Instead of retreating to a defensive posture, organized labor should launch an ambitious and bold campaign to organize the South. A Southern labor movement would galvanize workers in the region who, contrary to popular belief, would like to become dues-paying union members. Given the dramatic demographic changes occurring in the South involving increased migrations of people of color who tend to be the most pro-union and pro-worker organization (see the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ recent victory over Trader Joe’s), the opportunity for organizing and building a Southern labor movement is greater today than even 60 years ago under Operation Dixie. This effort would not only transform the low-wage economic model of the South, it would prevent the race to the bottom from North to South, and most important, it would transform the politics of the region and fundamentally the country.
What grounds this vision of a 21st century labor movement is the core idea of extending what Americans claim to cherish in politics and civil society to the workplace: democracy, liberty and freedom. The consolidation of income, wealth and political power by the 1 percent over the last several decades is directly related to the decline of workers’ voice and power. Rebuilding a truly countervailing (and democratic) power, as the labor movement did in the 1930s and 1940s, will require a bold and convincing vision of workplace democracy and freedom. Workers and their organizations have historically played this anchoring role for progressive politics throughout American history. Now is the time to reclaim this historic charge for the 21st century.
What it’s like to be shipped home
The one-way flight back to Guatemala is a trip no unauthorized immigrant wants. But some take it over and over agai
Guatemalans deported from the United States are escorted by an immigration official upon their arrival at La Aurora International Airport in Guatemala City. (Credit: AP/Moises Castillo)
Topics:Immigration, Editor's Picks
GUATEMALA CITY — “No one will throw you out of here,” says the woman with the jaunty ponytail and the cheer of a motivational speaker. “Here we’ll give you affection.” Then she sends some love in the direction of Guatemala, the ostensible home of the bleary-eyed deportees who have just descended from U.S. government-funded flights a few feet away. “Our volcanoes! Our mountains! Everything we have!”
By the time she gets to the tortillitas and tamales and call-and-response, the deportees — the vast majority of them young men, a handful of them minors — are smiling. Some of them even wink and flirt. This may well be the least exhausting part of their journey.
“Together, we’ll work to do what we can to help the country rise,” continues the greeter, a Guatemalan government employee meeting her third plane of deportees today. She’s poised with a wireless mic before a banner reading, “You’re already in your country with your people” in Spanish and Kekchi, a Mayan language.
But any enthusiasm transmitted to the deported, who then shuffle out the door carrying their earthly belongings in thin, transparent plastic bags, is often temporary.
“Some of them get on a bus here and go right back to the border with Mexico to cross again,” says Jorge, one of the employees here with the International Organization for Migration, which has a table set up just outside the holding room with telephones and transportation assistance. He is standing by the first of a series of one-way doors, handing out energy drinks. “Some of them have never been to the capital, or they don’t know how to speak Spanish because they’ve spent their lives in the U.S.” There are usually familiar faces among the pack; he saw one man who claimed to have been deported seven times.
Their initial needs are practical: changing Mexican pesos or U.S. dollars, figuring out if their families are on the other side of the iron door being guarded by a baby-faced, heavily armed soldier, getting a ride. After that, reintegrating from one of the wealthiest countries in the world to a country where 51 percent of the population lives on less than $2 a day, one beset with violent crime, is more complicated.
But more than ever, this return trip is the reality for migrants. Last year, the United States deported more undocumented migrants than ever in history, nearly 400,000 of them, a number that has skyrocketed from a mere 7,029 in 2004. After Mexicans, Guatemalans made up the largest group of deportees, with about 29,000 “forced returnees” by air. Another 28,000 were deported overland from Mexico. An estimated 1.3 million Guatemalans live in the United States, equal to about 10 percent of the Central American country’s population, and remittances – money sent home by migrants – regularly make up about 10 percent of GDP.
The surge in immigration enforcement, and in tools designed to ramp it up, began under President George W. Bush but has expanded under Barack Obama’s administration, a fact not lost on pro-immigration advocates, some of whom are refer to it in Spanish as the “deportation administration.” The strategy has been to target “criminal aliens,” rather than, as Obama himself put it, “folks who are just looking to scrape together an income.” In fiscal year 2011, 55 percent of deportees had been convicted of a crime, compared to 31 percent when Obama assumed office. That said, the Association of Immigration Lawyers of America (AILA) has pointed out that the Department of Homeland Security “made no distinction between people convicted of petty misdemeanors and violent felons, putting a person convicted of loitering on par with a drug kingpin.”
In a June memo, Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director John Morton said that pending deportation cases would be subject to “prosecutorial discretion,” meaning that special consideration would be given depending on family situation, length of time in the U.S., and so on. And President Obama also supports the DREAM Act, which would give a path to citizenship to young immigrants who were brought to the country as minors and are enrolled in the military or college but has repeatedly failed in the Senate. Meanwhile, intra-Republican discussions on the topic have in the past year ranged from Herman Cain suggesting Great Walls with alligator-filled moats, to Rick Perry coming under fire for supporting a Texas version of the DREAM Act, to Mitt Romney advocating “self-deportation.”
The Obama position seems to be trying to have it both ways: seeming tough on enforcement while suggesting humane, if narrow, accommodations. But according to a November survey AILA conducted of its members, “the overwhelming conclusion is that most ICE offices have not changed their practices since the issuance of these new directives.” Indeed, a recent report by the Applied Research Center estimated that 5,100 children are in foster care because their primary caregivers were deported; another report by the University of California at Berkeley Law School found that about one-third of the 226,000 immigrants deported under “Secure Communities,” a program that links local law enforcement to immigration status, had spouses or children who are U.S. citizens.
That includes men like the one who gave his name as Armas, deported from the last plane this February afternoon. It’s his first time back in Guatemala in 17 years. He’s left a wife and five children, including a newborn, back in New Jersey, all U.S. citizens. He thinks he was either 15 or 17 when he left, he isn’t sure. He says he was deported because in 1995, he was “drunk and stupid” and got a criminal record, though he declines to elaborate. What waits for him outside the gates, he isn’t sure – and anyway, he plans to be back in the U.S. soon.
Anastasio, 21, says he managed to stay in the U.S. for four years, working as a cook in a Mexican restaurant in Virginia until getting deported last summer. In December, he decided to make the crossing again. “I didn’t need a coyote, because I remembered the way,” he says. It was much harder the second time, he said. And that time, he was deported on the same day he entered the United States, after getting caught in a convenience store in Tucson, Ariz. He spent Christmas in detention. “I love Guatemala, but I had to get out for a better future,” he shrugs. His girlfriend is waiting for him back in Virginia, he says.
Anastasio can’t find the phone numbers for his family, who live in the northern lowlands of El Peten – he had them pinned to his pants, he says, but they didn’t make it through detention — and he has no idea where to reach them. So today he’s going to hop in the van for Casa del Migrante, a Catholic shelter in Guatemala City’s Zone 1 that hosts the most desperate cases.
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If migrants come legless, says Father Francisco Pellizari, the Argentine-born priest who runs the shelter, they can stay a few months at Casa del Migrante. Train accidents in crossing Mexico are common enough that the center has a prosthesis expert on call. More often, the migrants get psychological counseling and legal counseling. Migrants can arrive traumatized, he says, either from harrowing experiences, like rape, assault, or being trafficked, during the crossing, or from the shock of their detention and deportation. (The consensus, unsurprisingly, is that it’s better to be detained in the U.S. than in a Mexican prison.) Migrants will often mortgage whatever possessions they have – usually land in the countryside, or their home – on the informal market at usurious rates, and if they get deported before they can earn much money, they return facing not just a sense of failure but also an enormous debt.
Casa del Migrante opened its receiving program in the Guatemala City airport last April in response to the jump in deportations; it works with the IOM, which in turn gets USAID funding for some of its reintegration programs. There are three Casas del Migrante in Mexico, and one more in Tecun Uman, a Guatemalan border town. (The organization publishes a magazine, the most recent issue of which contains a stinging critique of Obama administration policies and, in the back, a word puzzle — you have to find words like “crisis” and “security” — and a maze in which you “help a lost migrant” – a silhouette with a backpack – “find the way home.”)
Pellizari spent 14 years in the Mexican shelter, but says, “Here in Guatemala it’s worse, because there are even fewer opportunities. There are no jobs.” They can help with the first few weeks or months, but the long-term is beyond the resources of either the first-aid nonprofits or the existing Guatemalan governmental efforts. An IOM official told me they have helped 3,000 migrants with “social reintegration,” but said job placement services had so far managed to help only about 20 people find jobs, though more may have found employment on their own.
From what Pellizari is seeing, the migrants are undeterred by increased deportations or a tougher economic situation in the United States. Sometimes, he says, migrants’ families in Guatemala will even send what money they can to an unemployed relative in the U.S., a remittance in reverse to help them hang on until things improve.
Meanwhile, this month the IOM is collaborating on an ad campaign, mostly on local radio stations, in Guatemala and Mexico, trying to discourage people from migrating by discussing the significant risks and dangers in crossing the border. It can understandably be a touchy subject, not just with the government but with the average Guatemalan.
Miguel, a Guatemalan working in the tourism industry, told me he welcomed the spike in deportations. “They belong here with their families,” he said. “Only the greedy migrate.” In some towns, he claimed, men were marrying two women to meet the shortage of available husbands.
When tourists praise the more lavish houses that dot the side of the road – usually, the ones with more than one story – he says he tells them cheerfully, “That’s your money.” Besides, he says, all of the women who make the crossing get raped. He even knows a Mexican truck driver who smuggles women across the border. He bragged to his Guatemalan friend that he has the best job because he gets to “have sex” with a different woman every night. “He rapes them,” Miguel said, in case it wasn’t clear. (Among deportees, women commonly make up only about 5 percent.)
One 18-year-old Kekchi Mayan girl, Loita, has heard the stories – her parents told her about how women are raped by coyotes and narcotraffickers to try to get her to stay home. She even has a cousin who made it across the border that way. “I asked her how she could sleep with some man she didn’t want to sleep with,” she told me. “She said she just closed her eyes and thought about her family.” But she insisted she would migrate someday anyway. “I want to make my dreams come true,” she said. One American tourist she told this to, she recalled recently, asked her why on earth she’d want to leave. After all, the lake she lived near was so beautiful. Wasn’t that enough?
Back at the airport, another deportee, Oscar Gonzalez Mejia, knows his way around well. He spent eight years working in the United States, mostly in Maryland. But after getting deported last year, he was lucky enough to find a job — working for the IOM, greeting and helping fellow deportees. These days, it’s a growth industry.
A new breed of porn CEO — female
Lux Alptraum, the new head of Fleshbot, embodies how the Internet is changing the face of the adult industry
(Credit: Adam Courtney)
Topics:Sex, Internet Culture
Lux Alptraum is not your stereotypical adult-industry executive: She’s young, female, queer, Ivy-educated and based in New York. As the newly minted CEO of the porn blog Fleshbot, which until recently was part of the Gawker Media empire, Alptraum is proof of how the Internet is changing the face of the adult business.
She took “a long and winding road” to this point. In college at Columbia, she discovered the online amateur porn scene, which was exploding at the time. “There were a lot of different people doing things that were really fascinating and intriguing and not standard porn,” she says. Alptraum started modeling and doing cam shows for a site that specialized in “nerdy girls,” but after a year she quit and started her own site, That Strange Girl.
A few years later, after a stint teaching sex ed at an after-school program, she started Boinkology, a site about sex and pop culture. That got her noticed by the folks at Fleshbot, which has always specialized in a mix of sexy content from both porn and mainstream entertainment (for example, a red-carpet shot of a celebrity with a see-through dress or a sex scene on “Weeds”). She quickly rose from a contributor to associate editor to editor in chief.
The recent split with Gawker was a result of the fact that “Fleshbot required all this special attention,” she says, because everyone from advertisers to banks are scared of being associated with an adult site. “They couldn’t devote the energy to optimizing it, and it wasn’t bringing in enough to justify the problems it was creating.” In an interview last year, Gawker Media founder Nick Denton, who recently reported a record of 35.6 million unique visitors across all his Web properties, said Fleshbot accounted for only 5 percent of the company’s traffic.
So Denton put it up for sale. Alptraum can’t go into details because of “some nondisclosure stuff I signed,” but says, “Basically, they had a really short timeline on a sale, and there were interested people who just couldn’t make an offer in time. So it ended up going to me, basically.”
Now she’s the 29-year-old CEO of an adult site, and one of a growing number of women taking the helm of everything from porn production houses to sex toy companies. That said, the industry is still dominated by old white guys. But that’s slowly changing. Quentin Boyer, who has been in the industry since 1997, says “the shift in the ‘porn executive demographic’” began “in the late ’90s, when Internet-based companies began to assert themselves in the adult entertainment market.” Says Boyer, the public relations director for Pink Visual, a porn production company that advertises on Fleshbot and also happens to have a female CEO: “In my view, Lux is part of the wave of new talent that has arrived in the adult entertainment industry as a direct result of the industry’s ‘webification,’ if you will.”
Alptraum agrees. “I’m someone who’s kind of a Web native and who comes from a sex positive background of not necessarily embracing the dominant narrative of what’s sexy,” she says. “I’m kind of like the embodiment of what the Internet has done to porn.” By freeing up the means of production and giving direct access to niche audiences, the Web has empowered all sorts of people who don’t fit the typical porn mold to enter the business, and from all angles.
Women have slowly made progress outside the alt and Internet-based sectors of the industry too. “There are several video companies that have females in high-ranking positions,” says Mark Kernes, a senior editor at Adult Video News. For example, heavyweights Wicked Pictures, Vivid Entertainment and Digital Playground. Miller says, “Certainly the assumption from outside the business is that it’s male dominated, and that’s the majority still, but women have made a big impact in recent years.”
Much like Alptraum, Fleshbot is unusual within the industry. “They have tapped into a unique niche within the adult media and publishing world,” says Dan Miller, executive managing editor of XBIZ, an industry news source. “They’ve been able to dip their toes a little bit into both worlds.”
The site’s also unusual in terms of its “feminist and respectful ethos,” argues Alptraum. “It’s not vulgar, it’s not treating these performers in a degrading way,” she says. “We never shame anybody’s body because we believe that anybody who’s willing to put themselves forth as a sexual object is worth celebrating.”
But the biggest thing setting Fleshbot apart from other porn blogs is that it publishes straight and gay content side by side. “From a marketing perspective, that’s a real departure from the industrywide tendency to categorize and segregate content starting with sexual orientation as the first point of separation,” says Boyer. Instead, Alptraum sees the site as a collection of “anything that we feel could be hot.”
It’s a decidedly Internet-era mindset of plurality and pansexuality. “The reason why I’m able to run Fleshbot, and the reason why Fleshbot is in ascendance, is the same reason why alt porn became popular: the Internet is dramatically transforming the adult industry,” she says. “It’s not so much of a top-down dictation thing anymore.”
Tracy Clark-Flory is a staff writer at Salon. Follow @tracyclarkflory on Twitter. More Tracy Clark-Flory
The Oscar favorite no one really likes
"The Descendants" is Oscar-bait, from George Clooney to its tropical locale. And it'll lose to a French silent film
Stills from "The Descendants" and "The Artist"
I can’t be the only person who had a mixed, double reaction to George Clooney’s big emotional scene near the end of Alexander Payne’s “The Descendants,” which seems destined to end up as the also-ran or bridegroom in this year’s Oscar race. Wearing his bad haircut, his Hawaiian shirt and his 15 extra pounds as Honolulu lawyer Matt King, Clooney bends over his recumbent wife in her hospital bed, murmuring things to her that I won’t specify, in case you haven’t seen the movie yet. He calls her “my joy and my pain,” lets a quite convincing tear run down his face, and leaves the audience digging for tissues.
Sure, the moment affected me — but there was both something Pavlovian and something willed about the way I was affected. Part of me was right there with Matt and the severely ill wife he’s learned a lot of unsettling things about, the daughters he’s just getting to know and the big decision about selling unspoiled land on Kauai to developers that still lies ahead of him. (As if anybody in the viewing audience believes for a second that George Clooney is going to do that!) And part of me was thinking, “Boy, George is really acting his ass off right here, isn’t he? I’m supposed to cry, right?”
Hardly ever in recent memory has the Academy Awards best-picture race been so bereft of drama or gossip or horse-race speculation with a week to go. I think everyone understands that in our sped-up media society the Oscar campaign just goes on too damn long, and the innate ridiculousness of all this focus on an election in which 6,000 people get to vote starts to show through. (I’d expect the ceremony to be moved to early or mid-February next year.) Even so, in most years there’s some late-breaking scuttlebutt among the industry reporters who follow this stuff and quiz Academy members off the record. We often get word that some dark-horse candidate is starting to pick up steam (à la “Crash” in 2006), or breathless reports of a tightening two-way contest (between “The King’s Speech” and “The Social Network,” or “Slumdog Millionaire” and “Milk,” or “The Departed” and “The Queen”).
This year, though, zilch. Nobody even gets to complain about Harvey Weinstein’s strong-arm tactics, because he doesn’t need them. Mitt Romney can only dream of having the aura of inevitability that has clung to Michel Hazanavicius’ “The Artist” throughout awards season. Oh, “Midnight in Paris” and “The Help” have had their Rick Santorum moments, I guess, but those faded out even more rapidly than Sen. Frothy Mixture has. So here we are, a week out from the big night in the No-Longer-Kodak Theatre, with Oscar’s big prize all but awarded to a silent black-and-white film made by French people. If we can pull that fact free of the massive ennui we’re all feeling about Oscar season this year, it remains objectively amazing. I mean, don’t get me wrong: “The Artist” is agreeable lightweight entertainment, and I can see exactly why it appeals to the wounded, nostalgic and crisis-ridden industry insiders of the Academy. Jean Dujardin is an irresistible performer, and I bet he’s been hitting the “apprenez l’anglais” CDs hard in preparation for his likely Hollywood career.
Still, the likely Oscar triumph of “The Artist,” like the movie itself, is a novelty hit, a one-off parlor trick that demonstrates the weakened cultural position of the Academy Awards and the lack of confidence endemic to mainstream American filmmaking. As a spoof and tribute to the glories of Hollywood’s silent age, “The Artist” is not especially subtle, but a lot of love and talent and pure high spirits went into making the movie, and that shows up on-screen. It’s not a great film and may not even be an especially good one, but it’s going to win the prize because it resounds with good cheer and confidence and willingness to entertain. Those are precisely the qualities usually associated with American cinema, good or bad, and precisely the qualities lacking in this year’s other nominees.
When I made a mock-proposal for an alternate-universe Oscars in which mass-market hits like the “Harry Potter” or “Twilight” movies might compete against art-house films like “Melancholia” and “Take Shelter,” I was trying to approach this same question from a different angle. Some readers assumed I was adopting some kind of bass-ackward, pseudo-contrarian Philistinism, and at least that’s a change from the usual charge that I only like lesbian war films told backward and made in Hungarian. Please note that I didn’t nominate “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” or “Thor,” for my imaginary Oscars — but I definitely prefer it when the Academy honors movies that don’t apologize for their own existence, and that don’t embrace a middle ground of mediocrity calculated to offend no one.
It’s patently unfair to cook this crisis of confidence down to a single donkey tail and pin it on one movie. And I liked “The Descendants.” Kind of, in parts, and up to a point. It’s got quite a few modest, nice moments of emotional honesty, one of Clooney’s best and subtlest performances (mainly when he’s not saying anything) and a pleasant, half-dissolute Hawaiian vibe. But it’s always going to be the American movie made by a name director that has George Clooney playing a bereaved husband and father, a spunky, sexy teenage daughter, slack-key guitar stylings and gorgeous tropical locations — and that lost the best-picture award to that silent movie made by French people.
Believe me, I can hear your complaints, thanks to the one-way Panopticon that allows me to observe all of you out there in Internet-land. Criticizing “The Descendants” for not being some completely different kind of movie than it actually is is even more unfair than everything else I’ve said. Sure, sure. But the fact remains that on paper “The Descendants” sounds like an absolute, surefire Oscar winner — a blend of laughter and tears; Hollywood’s most beloved male star served in a pineapple, with a little umbrella — and in practice it’s a bit of a melancholy slog, a movie with a lot of dragged-out emotional scenes and not that many laughs, a movie people like well enough without feeling passionate about.
Furthermore, it’s pointless to say that since Alexander Payne is a pretty-much-independent director who made the film he wanted to make, he’s not to blame for the fact that it’s almost but not quite an Oscar-winning movie. Let’s face it, the movie Payne wanted to make is kind of a mess, starting with that mind-bendingly awful opening narration, in which Clooney-as-Matt pretty much tells us the whole story, including exactly how he feels about it and how we should too. In fact, whenever we draw near a dangerous scene where we’re not quite sure what Matt’s thinking or how he will react, Payne halts the forward progress of the narrative (which is already leisurely in the extreme) in order to have him talk to us in that literary voice that’s not quite conversational and not quite internal. I have a hard time listening, though, over the Pounding Hammer of Obviousness.
Yes, this must be intentional. Payne is an experienced filmmaker who thinks, I guess, that he’s being mildly unconventional here, dosing his tropical Mai Tai with a little Brechtian potato vodka or something. But mostly it comes off as forced and indulgent and a little bit off — an attempt to create an Oscar moment — which is exactly what I was talking about in the big scene where George Clooney made me cry.
I cried, in a pro-forma way, maybe because I’d sat through a long movie that was supposed to deliver an emotional catharsis. But the final shot, when Matt and his daughters snuggle wordlessly on the sofa, watching TV with a tub of ice cream, moved me on a much more profound and mysterious level. That scene represented “The Descendants” at its best, when Payne isn’t trying so hard to deliver big emotions for which he’s ill-suited, and is instead finding small, silent truths. If he had made that movie all the way through, instead of laboring so conspicuously to build an Oscar vehicle — well, he might not be in the Academy Awards race at all. But at least he wouldn’t be remembered forever for failing to beat out a French film where nobody talks.
My Facebook angst
The social network site kicks up so much anxiety and embarrassment for me. But that doesn't mean I want to quit it
(Credit: Salon/iStockphoto)
A few days ago, my friend Elizabeth posted an item to Facebook. I wanted to comment but held back, though not exactly because I had plenty of work to do. Instead I sent her a text: “Sometimes do you want to say something or post something or like something on FB, but then you think of all those unanswered emails and texts and silence yourself, so people won’t see you ‘wasting’ time when you could be responding to them?”
“Sometimes?” she replied.
“It’s called Twilt, that feeling,” I answered, laughing, having coined the term on the spot.
Twilt (n): the particular brand of guilt or self-reproach that results from posting, liking or commenting on items on Facebook or Twitter while simultaneously not responding to emails, text messages, phone calls or other types of personal communication with the knowledge or anxiety that the specific message senders will notice your public offerings and question your lack of private ones. Twilt, while related, is not the same as the guilt that results from general Internet-specific procrastination such as browsing blogs or online shopping, which, though it may result in its own brand of self-disgust, generally has no public shame component.
Adam Zagajewski, in his essay “The Shabby and Sublime,” says that the poetry of recent years is “marked by a disproportion … between powerful expressions of the inner life and the ceaseless chatter of self-satisfied craftsmen.” The same could be said for Facebook updates, our contemporary confessional. I have eaten the plums in the refrigerator, and they were yummy. Facebook is bad for me because I not only embarrass myself but I keenly feel the embarrassment of others whose lack of discretion, as I perceive it, I quietly judge and am embarrassed by all the same.
When someone starts a conversation with me on Facebook, in public, I’m mortified. There’s a message function for that! I have email and a cellphone. Let me respond when I can, away from the watch of hundreds. Sometimes I disable my Wall so people can’t write things there, until someone points it out and I feel guilty that I’ve done this so I change it back. I don’t like to talk on the phone in public and when a friend speaks too loudly in a cafe I am nervous that someone will overhear our conversation. At home I don’t like the sensation of my husband overhearing me order pizza, let alone having more sensitive conversations with friends. I have never been one to kiss and tell, and I like to keep my private life private. Why I have a Facebook account at all still perplexes me. I like the idea of seeing what’s going on, but I don’t want to always be a part of it. I don’t want to not be a part of it either. I want to swoop in and swoop out. But Facebook doesn’t allow for inconsistency without amplifying it, a constant record of our obsessions and our contradictions to the point of caricature.
The conversations between couples embarrass me the most, whether they’re sentimental or self-referential. It’s not that you live with that person and somehow don’t need electronic communication — I often text my husband across the table at a bar to make a snarky comment, or sometimes I send ridiculous things to the online printer in his office just to be impish. But it’s done in private, between us. That’s the point. It’s something about the relationship having a public facade so contrived and self-aware that makes my eyes water with shame. We all have facades and personas, of course, that are not Internet confined. Game faces. Once, at a reading, a poet thanked his wife so gushingly that I whispered to my friend, “That guy is totally having an affair.” I didn’t know a thing about him. But it turns out, I was right. Maybe the wife requested the shout-out, but if I were his wife I would have smiled at the crowd and taken flight. Up, up and away.
Do you remember “This American Life’s” 2001 episode about Superpowers, which poses the question: If you could have a superpower, would you choose Flight or Invisibility? My first reaction was and remains, flight. To fly! I’m petite and have spent a lifetime trying to fight invisibility, being intellectually overlooked, or feeling insignificant (this is not simply a result of my size but an entire slew of issues that would benefit from Lacanian psychoanalysis, which if I had I’d have to talk about in my status updates). I still have dreams where I’m flying, frequent dreams, and when I wake up I feel inexplicably happy. When I fly in my dreams, I don’t sputter or start or anxiously hover. I soar, I glide, and it’s fluid, like a manta ray moving through water. When I fly in my dreams I am all grace. My desire for flight would get me places faster, and in style.
But maybe my desire for flight is a sort of conditional invisibility; the idea of flight not only as the act of flying but the act of fleeing. I want to be part of the scene but to float somehow above it, to engage in the action but then be able to gracefully exit. I want to swoop on in and then glide away. But I want to be seen, for sure, and present. I just don’t want to have to stay, and I certainly don’t want anyone to comment on it.
It is also, of course, part of being a writer, to be part of a scene but also removed. Writing is about observation, but if I observe and immediately state then I’ve lost it, released it. The essay allows an expression of doubt but the Facebook update or conversation has a sort of self-satisfied glibness to it. It doesn’t invite dialogue but somehow challenges it. There is also the lack of control. It could go anywhere. Someone could say something too revealing or racist or just plain idiotic, and there it is, linked to your name. It is not a place for the anxious, Facebook.
And there is the difference of stance. An essay is an attempt at dialogue but a status update is a solicitation; the first is a meaningful hesitation or an assertive pronouncement, a languorous dip in a warm sea or a fast-paced race in a pool. But the essay swims all the same. A Facebook update is a haphazard nose dive into a near-empty watering hole. What if I break my neck? Will someone find me if my head is bleeding? If I post and no one comments, do I exist?
The comparison between the two forms needn’t be made; we know the difference, yet it might explain my relative comfort, even ease, with the personal essay and my fear of any public sort of dialogue. Do I want to be invisible or do I want to fly? Although the personal is intimate there is also the artifice of distance. When I fly in my dreams I can see myself flying while being aware of my place on the ground. Philip Lopate argues that a good essayist must see oneself from the ceiling, must turn oneself into a character. He is not advocating a “self-absorbed navel-gazing” but instead “a release from narcissism,” an ability to be able to “see yourself in the round.”
I admit I am often self-amused by my status updates (what else are they for?), but I am rarely satisfied with them. In the rare case I am amused with myself when writing anything, that to me is a sure sign that it’s going to need a very careful edit, or that it’s garbage.
What I love best about that episode of “This American Life” is the moving analysis at the end, immediately after several of the show’s guests comment on what it means to want invisibility or flight. John Hodgman reflects:
Flight and invisibility touch a nerve. Actually, they touch two different nerves, speak to very different primal desires and unconscious fears … In the end, it’s not a question of what kind of person flies and what kind of person fades. We all do both. … At the heart of this decision, the question I really don’t want to face, is this. Who do you want to be, the person you hope to be, or the person you fear you actually are?
Am I becoming someone on Facebook or am I trying to escape her? I’m happy my partner is not on Facebook because I am spared that public embarrassment, of people wishing us happy anniversary or the pressure to comment, or not comment, on his witticisms or offerings: J. just made fabulous butternut squash ravioli! From scratch! Natalie likes this. And then he would like my liking, and another friend would find it cute, and like it too, and no one would know that we spent the last hour fighting because I overloaded the dryer and almost burned down the house.
I wouldn’t mind if he joined Facebook, though, because he is the face man of our relationship and it would take some of the completely imagined but hugely felt pressure off me. (“Could you please like so-and-so’s photos of her daughter’s dance recital?”) If we had a band, he’d be the lead singer and I’d be the bassist, hiding behind my hair. (No, not the drummer! No one sees the drummer!) The bassist can look up and make eye contact with the crowd for a moment and the crowd will go wild. They don’t expect it but they hope for it all the same. The face man: He has to be on all the time. It’s his job to be on.
Do you remember the scene in “Sex in the City” where Carrie, upon receiving an email, ducks underneath her desk and shrieks, Oh my god, can he see me? A decade later it seems charming, like a text message from our grandmother. Yet the anxiety remains. Now, I suffer from what is surely a new psychological disorder: a DSM-IV classifiable paranoia that all my personal conversations are somehow being broadcast on Twitter. Is there a word for that?
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