Guest Post: 3 Reasons "The Newsroom" Is Remarkably Problematic And 1 Reason I Can't Stop Watching (For Now)

Jeff Daniels plays a news anchor dissatisfied with the state of network news on The Newsroom; via salon.com

By Kayla Safran


As a huge fan of The West Wing, The Social Network, and other work by Sorkin, I was extremely excited for the premiere of the new HBO drama The Newsroom last month. The promise of a clean, flashy new television show with Sorkin’s whip-fast writing and an excellent cast was alone enough to shake my summer television blues. But, like many other fans and critics, I have found each episode increasingly painful to sit through, and I’ve come to a point where I feel I am only continuing to watch in order to collect more evidence about its issues.

Here are three of the problems that I have been able to sort out:

1. Politics

I knew going in that I would struggle with Sorkin’s politics, as I had occasionally with The West Wing, but I had the hope that because the story was centered around a news program there would be extra effort to present both sides of the issues with equal respect. The West Wing, I thought, had done a good job of presenting conservative characters and their viewpoints as being just as earnest and decent as the liberal ones. However, to my grand disappointment, The Newsroom has managed to be more liberal and more self-righteous about its liberalism than The West Wing ever was.

The perfect example of this is the lead character, Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels). He is rude and moralizing, a self-dubbed “civilizer,” and the show constantly applauds him for it! Although it’s been noted in passing dialogue that Will is a Republican, he hasn’t yet in five episodes presented a single conservative viewpoint. In fact, his rants about the economy, the Tea Party, and the Koch Brothers sound to me like those of your average left-wing progressive.

My problem here is not necessarily Sorkin presenting these viewpoints (although I strongly disagree with most of them), but rather him presenting them as the moderate and reasonable viewpoints of all educated people—it leaves the impression that anyone who thinks differently must be crazy, stupid, corrupt, or all of the above, which as a young conservative I find incredibly frustrating and even a bit offensive. Even if you agree with Sorkin’s political opinions, you can’t deny that the tone of his writing is incredibly closed-minded and its politics skewed, while simultaneously parading about being the exact opposite. I see this tendency among many liberals in real life, but never with such a lack of subtlety as on The Newsroom.

2. Women

Others have critiqued Sorkin in the past about his female characters and the gender stereotypes he perpetuates in his writing, but I think my friends may understand why a feminist-y critique coming from me suggests a really serious problem. I like that Sorkin has written smart and powerful female characters for this show. But on The Newsroom he gives all the women a characteristic that makes them look ridiculous next to the men: they are all absurdly socially incompetent.

For example, newly-promoted assistant producer Maggie (the awesome Alison Pill), is talented and hard-working, but also a bit lacking in confidence, which makes her a very believable character. But her love life—specifically the love triangle between her, her boyfriend Don (Thomas Sadoski) and the very handsome and goofy Jim (John Gallagher, Jr.)—turns her into an unprofessional, irrational mess. More than once during a production meeting Maggie blurts out inappropriate comments about Jim sleeping with her roommate for the whole room to hear. (Don’t even get me started on the roommate—I’ve never seen so many female stereotypes rolled up into one character without any intended irony.) In real life, Maggie’s behavior, I would hope, would get her fired, but on The Newsroom it just makes her a ‘typical woman.’

The show’s economics analyst Sloan (Olivia Munn) is also presented as socially incompetent—hyper-educated and beautiful, she amounts to what I imagine Aaron Sorkin would consider the perfect woman…with the exception of her one ‘gigantic flaw’—she can’t give good relationship advice, engage in chitchat, or generally function in a social setting. If, in the character of Sloan, Sorkin is trying to write a quirky character—like a Zooey Deschnael on New Girl, or an Ellen Page in Juno—it’s simply not good writing. But if my instincts are right, I think that Sorkin is revealing that he can’t handle or doesn’t like the idea of woman who is not ‘stupid’ in one way or another. In Sorkin-World (or at least The Newsroom), only men can be charming, good-looking, and intelligent at the same time.

3. Cable News

A main plot point, and frequent topic of lecture on the show, is the idea of “doing the news right.” McAvoy is first introduced as the “Jay Leno of news anchors,” who receives consistently good ratings because of his neutrality. He is quickly encouraged by a number of other characters, especially MacKenzie McHale, his ex-girlfriend/exec-producer and Charlie Skinner, his boss, to forget the ratings and speak his mind.  The only problem with this premise is that they’ve got the whole thing backwards—today’s network news industry is characterized by extreme bias receiving high ratings (hello FOX News, MSNBC) and the quiet, more neutral reporting falling behind (hi CNN). While I noticed this mix-up on my own, Joe Muto, writer for Slate and ex-FOX producer, writes on the subject more eloquently and has the insider knowledge to back it up. Check it out for yourself.

Additionally, I think that being bias and vitriolic (like The Newsroom’s McAvoy) only makes the news worse, not better. But maybe Aaron Sorkin and I simply disagree on the premise that news should simply tell the news, and not try to lecture the public on what and how to think…. I guess I’ll let that one go.

~

As the season has progressed, the show has only gotten worse. Not just because of the three reasons above, but also because the narrative arcs are pretty boring and the characters insist on preaching at one another (and the viewer) rather than talking. Additionally, in terms of the plot, because all of the news stories are pulled out of last year’s headlines (rather than realistic but fictional stories like Sorkin used on The West Wing), nothing can really surprise us when all the major development are literally old news.

The one and only reason I won’t stop watching, at least for now, (besides wanting more reason to hate on it) is that I am a huge sucker for TV romances, and I won’t be satisfied until Maggie and Jim get together. They are young and good-looking and their relationship/flirtation is rather adorable. So, I’ll give you that one, Sorkin.

Aurora And What It Means For The Movies

Arguably, there are more important conversations to be had regarding the horrifying movie theater shootings that occurred in Aurora, CO early Friday morning—expression of condolences for family members of the deceased, gun safety, and how to deal with mentally ill criminals—but this entire situation can’t help but lead me to wonder: what does this mean for the movies?

Of course, for Christopher Nolan’s new film The Dark Knight Rises in particular, it means bad things. Very bad things. There’s no need to explain that blaming Nolan’s film for the violence is a stupid and incredibly narrow-minded way of dealing with this trauma; that much should be obvious to anyone reading this. But the blunt reality is that many people remain distraught with the film for quite some time and will likely not see it this weekend. In fact, one friend commented immediately after finding out, that he was going to wait “until that one comes out on DVD”…as if the shootings had forever altered the context of the film for him.

In terms of the movie world as whole, though, several commentators have already offered up the distressing insight that the movie-going experience will never be the same after this. While this strikes me as a bit of a blasé claim (what about the global movie-going experience?), I think that there’s some truth to this idea, at least in the context of the United States. Historically, if Aurora comes to represent the death of the traditional movie-going experience, then it will be seen as no more than the straw that broke the camel’s back.

After all, movie theater culture has been on the way out for a long time now. Stretching back to the introductions of the VHS in the late 1970s and the DVD in the mid 1990s and, finally, the digital age—with its swath of legal and illegal movie-watching services and options in the 21^st century—the traditional movie theater model has never faced so much competition. It’s a death that no coroner wants to call, but the film industry has been aware of it for quite some time. Ticket sales since 2002 have been on a decline despite an increase in U.S. population, while Netflix, for example, grew to almost 25 million subscribers by the end of 2011 after having only a paltry 670,000 subscribers in September 2002.

~

What do we stand to lose from this transition? What do we stand to gain?

If we’re being positive about this shift in movie culture, then I’ll have to point out that a serious film buff gets more bang for his or her buck with a subscription based service like Netflix. Movie theaters—especially those showing 3-D films—more or less fleece their customers: when most showings are somewhere between $13 and $14 for a showing, a matinee showing for under $10 (or any price negotiated with the flick of a student ID card) feels like a godsend. In the long run, we save money by watching at home, not in the theater.

After the events of early Friday morning, it turns out that there’s an additional positive aspect: we’re safe. Movie theaters—unlike, say, train stations, tall buildings, airports, sports stadiums, concert halls, and any other large public-gathering place you can think of—have always been thought of in our culture as safe places. Which is, as lots of people have learned today, kind of an odd assumption. Why should a movie theater be any safer than a concert venue?

However, part of the allure of the movie theater since the inception of the industry has been that appeal to sanctuary. It would be a useless exercise trying to draw together examples from literature, music, and, obviously, film that has drawn on this idea of the movie theater as safe haven. How many protagonists have we witnessed seek shelter in those plush velvet seats? How many couples have we seen hunker down in the flickering darkness? There are simply too many iconic moments to bother cataloguing. You probably have a series of those scenes chasing through your mind right now.

If we’re looking to the negatives of this situation, I offer that it’s exactly that notion of the theater that we have to lose. There is no other ‘public’ experience that measures up to that of a movie theater. In my lifetime, not live theater nor musical concerts nor religious ceremonies—only movie theaters have had the ability to layer that fabric of non-awareness over my overactive consciousness. When we watch a film, we travel somewhere else. We exist outside of time. As Italo Calvino says (whom I could quote over and over again with regard to the cinema experience, thanks to his essay “A Cinema-Goer’s Autobiography”), the movie theater “swallowed [him] up…in a suspension of time, or in the duration of an imaginary life, or in a leap backwards to centuries before” (Calvino 43). If there were anything in our society that could even loosely compete for the title of ‘time machine’ or ‘teleportation device,’ it would be the movie theater. Neither the television nor the computer, in my mind, come even close to offering the same opportunity as the movie theater.

For one, neither operates on the basis of a shared experience. It is the shared-ness that is crucial to film. Film toes a curious paradox in that way—it is both a wonderfully solitary and yet socially engaging experience. I am reminded of this whenever I go to see a film by myself: that moment when you laugh at a funny bit in a film and hear other people, perfect strangers, laughing at the same joke, that moment has a kind of magical resonance, an inexplicable kind of wonder.

~

I offer this question to those who often watch television or films alone among the comforts of home: when was the last time you laughed out loud at a joke? when was the last time you gasped in amazement? or muttered wayward advice at a character? In my own experience, I find that my reactions are muted when I am alone with a film—the same level of engagement is simply absent. I would offer that, ironically, solitude in the film experience imposes a kind of self-consciousness. We know that we’re alone and we can’t help but wondering whom we would be reacting for if we laughed out loud. Simply put, it seems to me that there is less enjoyment in a solitary film experience than in a communal one. (The horror genre, I find myself admitting, is an exception to the rule. Horror films are as deliciously terrifying in the theater as they are alone in a one’s darkened [or lightened…] living room.)

So will we keep going to the movies? Or does Aurora represent the end of an era? Will the concept of the American movie theater recover from the wave of indirect bad press it’s on the verge of receiving? I can’t offer any answers. All I can say is that despite the recent tragedy and the security measures that will likely be implemented as a result, I will continue to go to the movies. Quite simply, there’s nothing else like it. 

Passion Pit And The Reverse Atomic Fireball: A Review Of Passion Pit's "Gossamer"

First off, I’m sorry. There are two contributors to my recent absence: Boston and my internship. That said, my visit to Boston will likely contribute an arts-related post at some point in the near future and my internship…well, let’s say that there’s some hope for a contributed topic in the future. (Unless I count Danny’s Fight Club reference as inspiration?) The point of this prelude is, of course, that I never write as much as I promise to. But, rest assured, Pueblo Waltz will live to fight another day!

— Taylor

~

If candy-related metaphors are still fair game when it comes to talking about music (e.g. bubblegum pop), then I would have to claim Passion Pit’s sophomore album as a kind of reverse Atomic Fireball—starting off sweet, almost sickly sweet, before diving suddenly into deep melancholy rage. Think about that one for a second.

It makes sense once you look back to their 2009 debut album Manners, which dug into some pretty dark places despite the giddy, electronic sunshine that sprung from the speakers of every almost-hipster a few summers ago. Although you all probably remember, it’s worth the effort to recollect that, despite their precious surfaces, songs such as “Little Secrets” included lyrics like “you’ve caused all this pain / and you proudly shame / your whole family’s name” and “Moth’s Wings” explored the bitter familial accusations: “you’re just like your father / buried deep under the water." My point being, of course, that the album wasn't exactly all sunshine. More like an Atomic Fireball...er...the surface of an Atomic Fireball...or...forget it. Bad metaphor. Let's move on.

Anyways, that 'dark' quality is easy to forget when listening to Passion Pit, whose recent critical and commercial success in both the indie and mainstream worlds arguably parallels only that of MGMT and Vampire Weekend. But the glossy prominence Passion Pit has been achieved on innumerable college party playlists (my own included) and in TV/film programming (Gossip Girl, Life As We Know It, Big Love) makes it easy to forget that their particular brand of pop music follows the path trod by records like Wilco’s Summerteeth and The Lemonheads’ It’s a Shame About Ray. Those records, evidenced by Wilco’s delightfully clever title, toe the line between spirited pop music and distressed confession; they're not quite the sugary confections they make themselves out to be. (Like a reverse Atomic Fireball.)

None of this is to say that Manners was wholly unaccomplished as a record of 'melancholy pop,' but simply that people noticed it a little less than they should have. There’s a host of reasons that it didn’t quite work the first time out—one of them that comes to mind is the slightly silly criticism that songs like “Moth’s Wings” and “Sleepyhead” were too infectious, too danceable. The complaints, of course, are small, but Manners still remains the work of a band trying to find its proper sound.

Gossamer, on the other hand, is the work of a band who has started to know itself. Passion Pit brazenly strides along that weird divide between gleeful dance music and weary sadness—not curt like Dando, nor weirdly wonderful like Tweedy—but with a unique sensibility all their own. Simply put, this is a sharp batch of songs: catchy and consummately constructed. The songs on here are way sharper than anything on Manners. If Manners had one weakness that was easy to point to, it was the shapeless, half-assed set of lyrics that accompanied the strident dance-pop. You could argue on behalf of some of the images Michael Angelakos throws out there, but most of it is just bad poetry (from “To Kingdom Come”—“so now I hide in piles of princely orange peels”).

By contrast, Gossamer goes for the gut with the lyrics, from the opening verse of “Take A Walk,” which openly addresses one (or several?) stories of financial difficulty. The fourth line “I love this country dearly” might sound like an opening salvo on paper, but Angelakos’s voice stretches it out so that you can practically hear the impending ‘but…’ The uber-unhappy “Love Is Greed” scores points with the cynical question at its center: “If we really love ourselves, / how do you love somebody else?” He takes time with these lyrics, crafting some serious questions and insights along the way.

As such, the album is rife with signs that not only Angelakos is coming into his own as a songwriter, but that the band as a whole is figuring out how to orchestrate his compositions. Several tunes retain the big, bombastic choruses of Manners, but venture out into newer and more interesting textures during the verses, bridge, and intro/outro sections. There are hints of M83, rumors of the Postal Service, vestiges of ‘80s music à la Bon Iver’s “Beth/Rest,” and even a touch of Sufjan Stevens in the 33-second a cappella “Two Veils To Hide My Face” and the electronic squirts and squiggles in the background of “Love Is Greed.” There are textures and expansions and details that would have been lost under the veil of fuzzy electro-pop wall that is Manners. Kudos, Passion Pit—let’s see how many college party playlists I can sneak this one on to.


Listen to the full album on NPR's First Listen here.

Satyajit Ray's "The Music Room" And The Problems Of Bimusicality

Sitting down to watch Satyajit Ray’s 1958 film The Music Room, I already knew that many critics claimed it as a classic not only of Bengali cinema, but also of world cinema. On my part, it was a purposeful first step into Ray’s filmography, a director who stands with only a handful of others in the auteur club. But, at the same time, I steeled myself for disappointment. Knowing that a work of art is a masterpiece often does not ease the experience; that knowledge frustrates it. Such was my experience with Ray’s film: I found myself unmoved by the plight of the fallen aristocrat, Biswambhar Roy, played so convincingly by Chhabi Biswa. Driven by his obsession (indeed, one could make a convincing case for addiction) to music, Roy loses his family, his fortune, the respect of the community, and, by the end, some part of his sanity.

You should understand that this isn’t the Beatles or Beethoven that’s driving him down this dark road; it’s Indian music. Why is this so hard for me to understand? It’s because there’s a big cultural gap between my Western appreciation for music and Indian music; it’s not that I don’t like the music that appears in the film (there are three memorable concert sequences), it’s that I don’t understand it.

~

In ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl’s essay “The Nonmusical Language: Varieties of Music,” he lights on the concept of bimusicality, a fairly familiar one if you’re accustomed to scooting around the ethnomusicology world…but not so much if you caper around, as I do, in the mainstream Western one. Bimusicality, at its essense, is the concept of being ‘fluent’ in two or more musical traditions. In some sense, it depends on how one defines ‘tradition’; there is some wiggle room, for instance, to call classical music and hip-hop separate musical traditions, but I think that it’s a bit of an overstatement. To claim, on the other hand, fluency in both “Western” music and “south Asian” music seems like a clear case of “bimusicality.”

Of course, that’s not to say that there has not been any intermingling between the forms over the past century. Memorably, the Beatles (among other British Invasion groups) seized Indian music and culture as an inspiration. George Harrison’s tutelage under sitar master Ravi Shankur has become the stuff of cross-cultural legend. Equally, Indian and south Asian music has borrowed pop forms and styles from the Western world. However, there remains a difficult gap between south Asian (from here on out, I’ll speak to Indian music in particular) musical forms and Western music forms.

Part of the trouble for me in watching The Music Room—with its three showcase scenes of  musicians who were famous in India—I was not struck by the beauty or sadness or complexity of the music. I promise you, I tried. Instead, I was left with the irremediable sense of ‘foreignness.’ The music—not only its language, but also its instruments and its rhythm and sense of melody—were alien to my ears. Certain musical moments were even painful to me; some of the singing sounded less great and more grating.

My experience with the film’s music brought me back to one of my early encounters with world music, in the figure of Hamza el Din, perhaps the best-known Nubian musician in history. I suspect it was a chance encounter of el Din’s dizzying oud-playing, relaxed vocal lines, and the fact that I was doing yoga at the time, but his music struck a spiritual chord with me that I could not escape. Of course, I understood nothing of the Nubian music tradition—neither the importance of el Din (who owns the dubious distinction of playing with the Grateful Dead), nor the style of Nubian traditional music, nor even the language el Din was singing, nor what an oud even was. (An oud is a fretless, stringed instrument similar to a lute played mostly in Arab countries.) Looking back on my connection to el Din’s music, I can’t help but feel that the exchange was fraught with pride on my part: I was proud that I liked the music. Pride in one’s taste—musical or otherwise—isn’t an attractive thing; loves and hates in the art world shouldn’t be constructed off the ego of the viewer/listener.

The issue with my love of el Din was that, very literally, I had nothing to compare him to. It would have been inaccurate to create peers for him in the Western music world (the Grateful Dead?!). It’s hard to imagine a counter case to my experience with el Din. These two worlds—that of Western music (or even, let’s say, American folk music) and traditional folk music are not interchangeable entities. It wouldn’t make sense to offer up the example of a Sudan native sitting down to a Bob Dylan record. It would be meaningless to offer up that comparison without actually doing it and interviewing the person afterwards. (Would we make him do yoga? Would we send him on a jog? The more I think about it, the more I can’t help but feel that yoga has intrinsically been tied to my experience of el Din’s music—if there was ego involved in connecting to his music, there was certainly ego connected—at least initially—in being able to take yoga ‘seriously’…which I clearly wasn’t yet doing, anyway.)

~

What does all this have to do with The Music Room? I started talking about a film and then I segued into music and bimusicality. The connection is this: if we can have different musical traditions that require separate fluencies, then what stops us from having different film traditions that similarly require their own fluencies?

The answer, obviously, is not this easy to answer, but I don’t think music and film are reducible to possessing any of the same elements. They are fundamentally different media, especially in their temporal sense; music has existed for millennia—programmed, many argue, into our very genes. Cinema, on the other hand, is a modern invention. Cinema was arguably born at the beginning of the global era. Far more than any other art form (speaking broadly, of course), cinema is global.

That said, there are cultural differences. The first and most obvious one is language. When I watch The Music Room, I cannot ‘understand’ the dialogue; I must read it. But, as we all are aware, subtitles are often clunky and awkward, never able to fully expound upon the complex and vibrant nature of the language. Despite this shortcoming, I cannot help but feel that cinema is—partly thanks to its roots as a silent form and partly thanks to the human fascination with visual forms—centered in image. Italo Calvino, in his ‘memory exercise’ “A Cinema-Goer’s Autobiography,” puts it far better than I:

“…only half of each actor and actress was truly present, in the sense that we got only their bodies and not their voices, which were substituted by the abstraction of the dubbing, by a conventional, alien, insipid diction, no less anonymous than the printed subtitles which in other countries (or at least in those where filmgoers are thought to be more mentally agile) tell you what the mouths nevertheless continue to communicate with all the considerable charge of individual pronunciation, of a phonetic signature made up of lips, teeth, saliva, made up above all of the varying, geographically conditioned accents of the American melting pot, in a language that for those who understand it offers nuances of expression and for those who don’t brings with it an extra musical potency… […] …[The American voices] become part and parcel of the film’s enchantment, something inseparable from the images, a sign that the power of the cinema was born silent…” (Calvino, The Road to San Giovanni, pp. 53-4)

Rethinking the ‘American’ references into a different context—in the case of The Music Room, to Bengali India—you can see the complications we face as American viewers of this kind of foreign cinema. But, Calvino insists (as do I), film is still essentially visual. There are shadings of syntax (‘language’) differences between different film traditions, but the global context the film form has grown up in prevents it from having the same closed-off ‘language’ in the way of Western and south Asian musical traditions.

Song Of The Week - "Submarines" - The Lumineers

One of the reviews that I read of The Lumineers’ self-titled debut pointed out that “Submarines,” the third track on the album, starts out as a silly story, but, towards the end, suddenly dissolves into sadness. Opening with the premise of a military satire, the narrator claims that he has seen a Japanese submarine off the coast and that no one believes him, instead treating his story as a joke. The sighting of the submarine (and the presumable negative aftermath) consumes the narrator, who muses that “it all boils down to credibility. / I had none, so I will die with the secrets of the sea.”

It’s a brutally sad lyrical turn and songwriter Wesley Schultz leaves ample room for the listener to explore that transition. The sudden maneuver pushed me to consider the submarine account less as a literal situation and more as a metaphor. I always hate to drag biographical information into analysis, but the story of the Lumineers begs me to consider this song in light of their tragic career arc.

Before Wesley Schultz (vocals/guitar) played with Jeremiah Fraites (percussion/vocals), he used to play with Jeremiah’s older brother Josh, who was Wesley’s best friend. Ten years ago, at age 19, Josh died from a drug overdose and left his younger brother and Wesley to pick up the pieces. Dealing with the tragedy through their music, the duo pressed on for several years through the competitive New York City music scene, before throwing in the towel on NYC dreams, packing up a trailer with their musical equipment, and, in the most cliché of American gestures, heading out west to Denver. Placing an online ad for a cellist, the duo was contacted by Neyla Pekarek, a classically-trained Colorado native, who has played with them ever since. Their narrative, thankfully, is happier thereafter.

~

Once familiar with the drama of Josh’s death, drawing parallels between the band’s tragic biography and their music becomes almost a game. Despite the trio’s buoyant sound—critics have drawn obvious Mumford and Sons/Avett Brothers comparisons—their songs are leavened by a noticeable sadness. There is an intriguing darkness to several of the compositions on their debut album, “Submarines” among them. With a little effort, it’s not hard to see the connection between “Submarines” and Josh’s death.

Whether or not it’s accurate to the experience of Wesley (and Jeremiah) with regard to Josh’s death, the story of the narrator functions as a metaphor for the experience of someone who recognizes the approach of a dangerous situation, but decides to ignore it. In order to properly understand the metaphor, we need to collapse all the figures in the song—the narrator, the people in the town bar, and the laughing policemen—into a group of warring figures within a single mind. One lone part of this individual’s brain picked out key moments that pointed to danger—the 'flags' and the 'periscope'—but these symbols were seen as silly and absurd. How could Japanese subs be lounging right off of Atlantic Beach? But even though they seemed trivial, the danger that they posed was real, evidenced by the narrators chilling vision of how "ships will rust in Baldwin Bay," a small bay in southern Long Island.

Again, I hesitate to so crudely apply that loose metaphorical concept to biography, but I think that its premise holds when considered against Wesley’s friendship with a young man who must have had somewhat of a noticeable drug problem. (I feel safe in assuming to a degree that as a best friend, Wesley was at least partially aware of Josh's difficulties.) The warning signs were there in retrospect (could a periscope have been any more obvious?), but it must have seemed like such a silly thought at the time…

Why "Fight Club" Is Better Than I Thought (And The Value Of Second Viewings)

The first time I watched David Fincher’s Fight Club, I think I was in my sophomore year of high school. Among my friends, it had been carelessly shuffled into the same category of violent, masculinity-loving films as the über-idiotic The Boondock Saints (the poster of which peppered the walls of my friends’ rooms) and a parade of war films, which probably began with Full Metal Jacket (which I’ve still only seen the boot camp section of, which was the ‘good part’ as I remember a high school friend insisting) and ended with Saving Private Ryan (which we adored more as a method of hero-worship than proper film-going admiration). There were good and bad films among them, but I remember all of them through a shade of, quite literally, sophomoric understanding. Since high school, I’ve found myself returning to some films (Boondock is not, happily, on the list) and experiencing a shift in perspective.

Anyone who has seen Fight Club probably remembers the titular aspect of the film better than any other and, as high school boys with our heads up in masculine clouds, that’s the aspect that we tended to focus on when watching the film. The entire focus group section at the start of the film and the dull corporation-directed anger infused by the narrator into the narrative were simply an interesting prelude to the entrance of Tyler Durden and the initiation of the fighting. I remember being far less interested in ‘Project Mayhem’ and the anti-corporate, anti-government scheming going on by the end of the film; I was more invested in the violent encounters between the men in shadowy basements and back rooms. It was the fight that interested us boys—safe in our boarding school rooms in western Massachusetts, most of us raised in safe, upper-middle class families—that kind of brutal, physical encounter that none of us had ever known, with the hedgy exception of contact sports, whose envelopment by rules prevented the non-regulatory Fight Club spirit: First rule of fight club: You do not talk about fight club. Second rule of fight club…

~

Over the past six years since my first viewing, I came to realize that an audience far broader than that of hormonal high-school boys recognized the film as an achievement. It was a film, I understood, to be admired. But in what way? All I could remember when I thought back to the film was the extraordinary violence and the anti-…well…anti-everything spirit that it seemed to espouse. [Spoilers to follow.] I remember being vaguely disappointed by the Jekyll-and-Hyde twist and the explosions that capped off the ending. In taking another look at the film, I was excited to explore the parts I once admired about it, but I was more excited to have another look at those parts that I disliked.

Before I dig deep into the film, I should acknowledge the genesis of my newfound interest. About a week ago, my fellow intern Danny mentioned in passing that he had looked at Fight Club in a film class, particularly in terms of its use of product placement. “Product placement?” I interrupted him. “There was product placement in Fight Club?” He shrugged off my incredulousness. I declared, as if it were suddenly a necessity, that I would rewatch the film that night. (I actually saved it for the weekend…) But once I got around to the film and settled into the experience, I found that I completely understood the role of product placement in the film. Even if Tyler Durden is vehemently opposed to advertising and the supposed ill effects it has on society, the film industry certainly is not. There is a point in the film in which the narrator and Durden climb aboard a public bus and mock a Gucci ad set into the crease between ceiling and side of the bus. “Is that what a man is supposed to look like?” sneers the narrator, as he and the Durden consciously brandish their war wounds from the previous night’s violence.

Product placement, I had foolishly forgotten, depends less on positive or negative treatment within the film itself and more on the lasting impression it can have on the audience. Any publicity is good publicity, according to product placement. So the product placement that occurs in Fight Club treats the film essentially as a smokescreen. When the screen fades to black at the end, we’ll exit the theater thinking how great we would look in Calvin Klein underwear. It struck me in watching the film, though, that the film functions as a smokescreen in an entirely different way, largely unrelated to product placement. I had missed it the first time around: the glorying in what is essentially a totalitarian regime run by Tyler Durden. Even as we—as the audience—cheer on the anti-corporate mayhem and idealistic charm that the film’s latter half indulges in, I don’t think people walk away from the film thinking: Hey, I’d like to join a fight club and start a revolution.

~

The film, if looked at critically, provides an argument against totalitarianism and for capitalism, but to first arrive at the basis of that argument, you have to take a few steps away from the film and consider the circumstances. It goes—almost without saying—that most, if not all, Hollywood films are the product of capitalism. Fight Club is an edgy, artsy film, but that doesn’t exclude it from having been produced, filmed, and publicized with a financial motive. I don’t mean to undervalue it as a work of art or diminish its impact by referring to it as a ‘consumer product,’ but, in many ways, that’s what it is. One has a more difficult time judging the ‘capitalistic content’ of a piece of visual art or a musical concert or a book of poems. With a Hollywood film, it seems hard to put up much contention.

That bit said, the argument against totalitarianism ought to be painfully clear to anyone once the notion has been raised. The militaristic, anti-individualist, jingoistic attitudes of the tertiary figures in the ‘fight club’ are terrifying. What is so chilling is that we never witness Durden bearing down on his little army (Norton’s narrator, we assume, is schizo’d out of the picture while this is taking place). Instead, we only witness the efficient, charismatic side of Durden. There is, however, one scene in which Durden’s rhetoric ought to tip us off to his nefarious project: the infamous Raymond K. Hessel scene.

~

Fight Club from Joon on Vimeo.

Once upon a time, I thought that this scene was a weirdly efficient vehicle for an idealist/existentialist lesson: follow your dreams. Which it still was when I saw it for a second time…but in a totalitarian way, because that lesson comes with a caveat: Tyler Durden decides what your dreams are. It might help to reproduce the dialogue from this scene—TD is Durden, N is the narrator, and RH is Raymond K. Hessel:

~

TD: Give me your wallet. Raymond K. Hessel. 1320 SE Benning, apartment A.  A small, cramped basement apartment. […several lines…] An expired community college student ID card.  What did you study, Raymond?

RH: S-s-stuff.

TD: “Stuff.” Were the mid-terms hard? [hits him] I asked you what you studied.

RH: Biology, mostly.

TD: Why?

RH: I don’t know.

TD: What did you want to be, Raymond K. Hessel? [cocks the gun] The question—Raymond—was what did you want to be?

N: Answer him! Jesus…

RH: Veterinarian! Veterinarian!

TD: Animals.

RH: Animals and s—

TD: Stuff. Yeah I got that. That means you have to get more schooling.

RH: Too much school!

TD: Would you rather be dead? Would you rather die—here, on your knees, in the back of a convenience store? [puts the gun away] I’m keeping your license. I’m going to check in on you. I know where you live. If you’re not on your way to becoming a veterinarian in six weeks, you’ll be dead. Now run home. [gives him a shove and Raymond runs] Run, Forrest, run!

[…a few lines…]

N: What the fuck was the point of that?

TD: Tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of Raymond K. Hessel’s life. His breakfast will taste better than any meal you and I have ever tasted.

N: [narration] He had a plan and it started to make sense in a Tyler sort of way. No fear, no distractions. The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide.

~

There’s a lot packed into this brief scene, which occurs about two thirds of the way through the film. In watching this clip and then reading through portions of the dialogue, you’ve probably developed a bit more of a feel for what is going on here. When I first saw this part of the film, I took it as a very weird, nearly violent act of goodwill on Durden’s part: he was helping Raymond K. Hessel ‘find himself’ again. In shorthand, he was helping Raymond be free. There’s obviously a great irony in that first impression, because Durden is doing anything but help Raymond achieve freedom.

It begins with the fact that Durden assumes that he knows what is best for Raymond. He doesn’t bother to note the grammar of his question: “What did you want to be?” The question is phrased with regard to the past, not the present. For all Durden knows, Hessel is perfectly happy working at the convenience store: a convenience store worker is what he wants [pr. tense] to be. He wanted to be a veterinarian. Durden is forcing Raymond on a career path that he may no longer have any interest in pursuing. Of course, it might sound silly to say that someone would rather make change all day over working with animals, but that is his choice to make. Raymond’s career choice (and the path he takes to get there) ought belong with him. In threatening him the way he does, Durden usurps Raymond’s freedom and asserts that he is making Raymond ‘more free’ than he would be otherwise. Durden knows ‘what is best’ for everyone.  

The final horrifying moment in this scene is Durden’s claim that “tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of Raymond K. Hessel’s life.” The narrator does not bother to contradict the statement. Upon consideration, however, I doubt that Raymond’s meal will taste all that good. It will be the first day of many days under the yoke of Durden’s idealistic life plan. I doubt that it will be a good breakfast. Raymond might even go so far as to imagine that breakfast of the day beforehand was the best one he ever tasted.

~

I could dig deeper—into more examples of the totalitarian spirit of Fight Club—but you’ve probably gotten the point. The larger question I’ve been trying to answer, however, remains unanswered: how many viewings is enough? How much do we change with age in terms of how we interact with and understand art? I suspect there are lots of films out there that I will see again and see differently. There are films I’ve seen in the past months that will seem different when I see them years from now. It’s a worrisome thing…what lessons am I missing? what intended ironies have I taken seriously? I can at least say that I no longer march to the beat of Tyler Durden’s drum, but I’m sure there are other beats that I follow with a sure and steady step, not suspecting their disagreeable natures.