Matt Yglesias

How Much Does The Food Network Tell Us About America?

Lifestyle journalism often suffers from ambiguities in the ordinary language use of universal quantifiers. “Everyone reads The New York Times,” is the kind of thing you might say in casual conversation. But of course it’s not actually the case that all people read The New York Times. In fact, rather few people read it. It’s just that in certain social classes, NYT readership is so nearly universal that it feels as if everyone does it. Which is about how I feel about Top Chef on Bravo and the Food Network in general.

Meanwhile, Michael Pollan’s work is always interesting but at times lacking in a certain hard, quantitative rigor. And his latest, a big NYT Magazine article that “everyone” is talking about on how food became a spectator sport is a good example. He goes on and on at quite some length with a detailed exegesis of Food Network programming as if it were the greatest cultural force on the planet. I think this seems plausible to NYT Magazine readers because it fits in with their/our social universe. An essay that tried to explain changes in law enforcement doctrine almost exclusively through references to The Mentalist would, by contrast, strike people as bizarre. But according to Nielsen in the week of July 27 The Mentalist had 160% the viewers of any Food Network program.

And that’s during the summer, when the Food Network’s not competing with a-list first-run programming.

Michael Bay Gets Political

More than meets the eye?

Reviewing Transformers: The Rise of the Fallen for io9, Charlie Jane Anders memorably proclaimed that Michael Bay had finally produced a high-concept film and “used a squillion dollars and a hundred supercomputers’ worth of CG for a brilliant art movie about the illusory nature of plot.”

I think there’s a lot to that, but one shouldn’t miss the extent to which TROFT is also an incredibly engagé political text, a searing indictment of Obama’s liberal fascist United States of America. After all, though the film doesn’t dwell on the point, one critical turn in the storyline comes when a heroic Major in the United States Army (or possibly Air Force) decides to disobey orders and mutiny against a civilian operative specifically sent by POTUS to take command of the operation. But what’s more, this is no rogue special forces officer, he’s clearly supported in his action by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who elects to turn a blind eye, and leave President Obama (who’s named specifically) in the dark as he cowers in fear in an underground bunker. Obama, you see, has ordered American forces to attempt to appease the Deceptecon threat by halting all collaboration with the Autobots, and agreeing to turn Sam Witwicky over to the forces of evil. By defying Obama and staging what amounts to a coup, the military saves the day.

What’s more, the film appears to indicate that Jordan and Egypt share a border right near the tip of the Gulf of Aqaba. For this to be the case, of course, Israel would have to be wiped off the map. The film doesn’t specify how this horrific turn of events took place, but I think we can take for granted that Obama’s cowardly of a settlement freeze is ultimately responsible.

Ten Best Pictures

This business of having ten Best Picture nominees at the Oscars seems like a terrible idea. It means that the winning film from among the nominees could sneak through with extremely little support, and that tactical voting is going to become a paramount consideration. Clearly the goal here is to increase the quantity of films able to juice attendance by saying they were nominated, but if they want to make this switch they also need to reform the voting procedure to something with ordered preferences or something.

SoCal High School Noir?

Ezra Klein justly praises the excellent 2005 film Brick. But he also describes it as “the best hard-boiled noir ever set in a Southern California high school.”

I remember thinking when I saw Brick how strange it was that this film came out at the very same time when Veronica Mars was on television. Suddenly the world was full of Southern California high school noir. And then just like that, the genre vanished. At any rate, I think I liked VM slightly better than Brick, although arguably the TV show doesn’t qualify as “hard-boiled” so we could draw the distinction there.

The McG Ouevre

Chris Orr was not a big fan of Terminator: Salvation:

What’s missing is much of anything that could be plausibly described as fun. Director McG–best known for his work on music videos, commercials, and the Charlie’s Angels movies–paints his post-apocalyptic landscape in a palette of sand and steel, as if color itself had been bleached from the world. But in contrast to The Dark Knight (one of the obvious models for this reboot), he fails to imbue his grim vision with any depth, texture, or complexity. A slender, silly movie that is upfront about its silliness (say, Star Trek) can be a giddy pleasure; a slender, silly movie that presents itself as an unflinching portrait of human endurance is setting itself up for failure.

I keep hearing McG’s music video work referenced in negative reviews—see, e.g., Smash Mouth’s annoying years-old hit “All Star”—but in my view the quintessential McG work was the short-lived Fox cop show “Fast Lane”. It was about a small crew of sexy undercover narcotics cops (two dudes who I forget, with Tiffany Amber Thiessen as the boss) in Miami, who worked out of some kind of giant barn full of awesome stuff they’d confiscated from bad guys. The show was terrible, but damn stylish. This scene has Mischa Barton and “Pictures of Success” by Rilo Kiley:

I can’t really stomach the way the Terminator franchise has inconsistent treatments of time travel paradoxes.

Comic Book Prisons

Last week’s genius Gitmo quip belonged to Glenn Greenwald who observed “Actually, the only person to even make an escape attempt from a SuperMax is Green Arrow, who hasn’t succeeded despite the help of Joker and Lex Luthor.” That said, Adam Serwer correctly observed that this isn’t quite right:

Greenwald clearly doesn’t remember the Magneto incident of 2003, in which the mutant supervillain escaped from his glass prison facility after Mystique increased the iron content in his guard’s blood, which Magneto extracted using his ferrokinetic powers and then used to destroy his cell. Obviously, we need to discover if Gitmo inmates do have mutant abilities, which will undoubtedly require more waterboarding, and this has to be done before the administration gets a dime to close Guantanamo. In fact, I’m pretty sure Nancy Pelosi was briefed on the subject in 2002.

Indeed, the 1996 non-canon DC Universe miniseries “Kingdom Come” by Mark Waid and Alex Ross is largely consumed with the difficult question of super-villain incarceration. As a fictional problem, this shouldn’t be overstated. Note also that the Powers series, which I like a lot, has to rely on the pretty odd deus ex machina of the “powers drainer” to make its “realistic” superhero noir work.

Catholics and Conspiracy

Ross Douthat on Dan Brown:

Brown’s message has been called anti-Catholic, but that’s only part of the story. True, his depiction of the Roman Church’s past constitutes a greatest hits of anti-Catholicism, with slurs invented by 19th-century Protestants jostling for space alongside libels fabricated by 20th-century Wiccans. (If he targeted Judaism or Islam this way, one suspects that no publisher would touch him.)

I think this is a bit apples-to-oranges. You could target Judaism or Islam for criticism in a book, but you simply couldn’t target Judaism or Islam “this way.” The Catholic Church has a centralized bureaucracy and an institutional continuity lasting over a thousand years. That’s good fodder for conspiracy theories. Other religions aren’t organized this way. Protocols of the Elders of Zion had to postulate not only a conspiracy, but the elders themselves, since you can’t have a conspiracy without conspirators.

That said, my favorite work of historical conspiracy fiction, The Eight, does the proper thing and takes aim at the Freemasons, a group that seems to have been invented precisely to provide fodder for good conspiracy theories. Plus, it also involves accounting improprieties!

Anvil! The Story of Anvil

Over the weekend, I went to see Avil! The Story of Anvil, a surprisingly affecting documentary about a Canadian heavy metal band. Anvil, it seems, had a modicum of success in the early 1980s and were influential on a number of bands that went on to become much more successful metal acts. But instead of riding the hair band wave of success, Anvil sort of slipped into obscurity. And yet they kept playing and, indeed, have kept on playing right up to today. Here’s one of their early music videos:

Definitely worth checking out the movie if it’s playing somewhere near you.

Star Trek

The early gossip around Star Trek had me very nervous. It was clear that the studio wasn’t interested in doing something that, like the TNG-based films, was basically designed to appeal to fans. Instead, they wanted to turn Trek, which has always been a kind of weird thing, into a mainstream broadly accessible movie.

Given those constraints, I thought they wound up doing an extraordinary job of not doing anything that’s outrageous from a real fanboy perspective. Handling the desire to ditch elements of the established history through the mechanism of a goofy time travel plot is very much in the spirit of a franchise that’s full of goofy time travel plots. And under the circumstances, the use of select snatches of homage (the bug like the bug from Wrath of Khan, Captain Pike in a wheelchair, etc.) served to drive home the idea that we’re watching the same multiverse unfold.

That said, I still think the Trek concept has always been something that best unfolds on television. A quintessential Trek scene, from any of the series, consists of a bunch of people standing around on the bridge of a starship (or DS9 equivalent) talking to one another, followed by a cutaway to a shot of a ship in space, followed by a return to the standing around talking. It’s just not something that particularly requires the big screen. And it’d be nice to see the energy and money and talent that was dedicated to re-imagining the Enterprise just put toward doing something original and new.

Heroics for Liberals

Dana Stevens writes:

Star Trek’s vision of the future, as guided by creator Gene Roddenberry, was also a relic of its time, the age of NASA and the Cold War and Kruschev pounding his shoe on a podium at the United States. The show’s faith in diplomacy and technology as tools for not just global but universal peace might seem touchingly dated in our post-9/11 age of stateless jihad, loose nukes, and omnipresent danger. Yet in a weird way, Star Trek’s cheerfully square naiveté makes it the perfect film for our first summer of (slimly) renewed hope. It’s a blockbuster for the Obama age, when smarts and idealism are cool again. In fact, can’t you picture our president—levelheaded, biracial, implacably smart—on the bridge in a blue shirt and pointy ears?

I don’t think there’s anything particularly “weird” about it. In some ways, the original Star Trek is very much a product of the Cold War era. But in a more precise way, it’s very much a product of the high tide of American liberalism that was occurring in the 1960s. That era gave way to a more conservative era, but now, arguably, the pendulum is swinging back to liberalism.

Culture in the Balance: Commercial or Non-Commercial

Via Julian Sanchez, a neat video mashup of different dance scenes from different Walt Disney animated films, that shows the reuse and recycling of certain motion patterns and tropes. Check it out:

I watched that video and got a few minutes of amusement from it. And so far thousands of other people seem to have done so as well. And with the video bouncing around on some blogs, that number ought to keep rising. So the world has, in a small way, been made a better place by the fact that modern digital technology makes it feasible for a hobbyist to create this even though there’s no real prospect of monetary reward.

And yet in the name of halting “piracy” there are those who would so tighten intellectual property rules as to make it impossible for these kinds of creative works to be made. That would boost the financial incentives for for-profit corporations to produce high levels of cultural content, but it would also raise substantial barriers to the creation of amateur, hobbyist, or not-for-profit content creation. That’s worth keeping in mind whenever you hear debates about intellectual property issues. Strong IP is usually branded as “good” for “creators” but the main impact of the digital revolution has been to advantage non-commercial producers relative to commercial producers, and the main impact of strong IP law is to shift the balance of power back to the commercial world. We’re accustomed to thinking of capitalism in opposition to socialism, state-direction production, but in the information realm the main opposition is between capitalism and activity that is simply non-commercial in nature.

Watchmen

In general, I agree with most everything Spencer Ackerman says here. I’ll add that I wasn’t thrilled by the decision to use so many famous and iconic songs in the soundtrack. I don’t see any real basis for that in the original material, and it’s somewhat distracting. It also poses some weird questions about the nature of the alternate reality we’re witnessing. One of the pleasures of Watchmen is seeing all the little things that are different about the world—airships, the popularity of Indian fast food, etc.—but it’s strange to think that the different historical trajectory would still have left us with a completely identical “99 Luftballons.”

Beyond that, the main thing to say is that I think it’s pretty clear that the Watchmen people have been seeing this weekend isn’t the real Watchmen. The film was clearly crafted with a great deal of respect for the original work and its fans. And that’s great. But still, certain concessions to basic reality had to be made in terms of tolerable length. But there will be a Tales From the Black Freighter animated DVD. And there will be a longer “director’s cut” version of the film. Eventually, perhaps you’ll see the longer version of the film with the Freighter animation intermingled between chapters. Obviously, normal people wouldn’t want to go see that in a theater. But I’d definitely buy it on Blu-Ray. And the ultimate test for the work will really be how good that is.

All-in-all, I’m torn between immense admiration for the film and regret that it was done as a movie at all. In retrospect, I kind of wish we’d instead gotten a 12 part HBO maxi-series that was really uncompromising and didn’t leave anything out.

The Ontology of Transformers

There’s no denying that this is a pretty amusing poster. Still, it reminds me that I think the film engaged in a bit of revisionism when it portrayed the Autobots as humanoid-shaped robots capable of change into cars and trucks and so forth. My understanding from my childhood is that we should think of them as car-shaped robots capable of changing into humanoid-shaped ones. After all, they’re called autobots, like automobiles. Their essential property is their car-ishness.

On the other hand, they’re also called transformers which indicates that it’s the transforming itself that the essential fact. They’re neither humanoid nor car-shaped, but transformative. Or something.

Conservatives’ Bizarre Readings of Gran Torino

Andrew Breitbart offers up an Oscar wine:

This year Gus Van Sant and his gay marriage public service announcement “Milk,” garnered eight nominations while Clint Eastwood and his objectively conservative box office titan “Gran Torino” got completely shut out.

I liked Gran Torino a lot. But consider. Milk is about a small businessman who goes into politics and takes a stand against firing people for actions irrelevant to their job; the implicit subtheme is that couples who love each other should get married. Naturally, conservatives hate it. But that’s their problem. The idea that Gran Torino is a conservative movie is, meanwhile, bizarre. In its main plot arc it’s very clearly a subversion of Dirty Harry-style right-wing vigilante fantasies. You should see the movie, so I’m putting the rest below the fold:

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Encounters at the End of the World

Ross Douthat expresses the inevitable post-Oscar grouchiness about the Academy’s predictably deplorable taste. He does say, though, “I was glad to see the mad Frenchman from Man on Wire pick up a statue, at least.” Man on Wire was good, but not nearly as good as it’s fellow nominee in the Best Documentary category Encounters at the end of the Earth. Conveniently, the film’s best scene, about insanity among penguins, is available on YouTube. Inconveniently, the real genius of this passage doesn’t come through out of context:

The seal sounds is cool, too.

National Review’s Best Conservative Movies

When you learn that National Review is going to list the 25 best conservative movies of the past 25 years, you know you’re in for a good time:

For example, as Isaac Chotiner observes, Andrew Breitbart doesn’t seem to have actually seen the end of Gran Torino. Isaac, meanwhile, likes any list that encourages people to go see The Lives of Others. And I agree, but we’re really defining conservatism down if we take “the pervasive intelligence state of Communist East Germany” to be a distinctly conservative notion. Perhaps more truly typical of the conservative worldview is that after Lives of Others comes in at the number one slot, The Dark Knight takes position number twelve specifically because of its alleged advocacy of pervasive surveillance. Many movies on the list, (Pursuit of Happyness e.g.), aren’t even remotely good.

The Wrestler

This should come as no surprise to anyone who’s read anything written about movies recently, but The Wrestler is a very good film and you should go see it.

My Generation

Rick Hertzberg writes about the irony of listening to “My Generation” now that Pete Townsend’s in his sixties rather than hoping he dies before he gets old. For my part, I first heard the song in the form of a Green Day cover on their seminal album Kerplunk:

It struck me, in eighth grade, as an incredibly awesome anthem of generational angst and change. It was only later that I learned the irony—it was appropriated from an earlier generation. To this day, I’m still not sure exactly what to make of that, but ultimately I think it speaks to the enduring power of the song—it captures sentiments that remained vital long after they had ceased to really make sense in the mouth of the original singer.

Great Moments in Wingnuttery

The beginning of the Obama administration is good for the world, but probably bad for the progressive blogosphere. Fewer conservatives in positions of power equals fewer wingutty policies to complain about it. Fortunately, here comes Big Hollywood to the rescue with a fine wine from Dirk Benedict who played Starbuck on the old Battlestar Galactica. Benedict’s hilariously insupportable thesis is that the old BSG was better than the old BSG and that the specific reason the old BSG was better than the old BSG was the old BSG’s tendency toward simplistic storylines and retrograde gender politics:

“Re-imagining”, they call it. “Un-imagining” is more accurate. To take what once was and twist it into what never was intended. So that a television show based on hope, spiritual faith and family is un-imagined and regurgitated as a show of despair, sexual violence and family dysfunction. To better reflect the times of ambiguous morality in which we live, one would assume. A show in which the aliens (Cylons) are justified in their desire to destroy human civilization, one would assume. Indeed, let us not say who the good guys are and who the bad are. That is being “judgmental,” taking sides, and that kind of (simplistic) thinking went out with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and Kathryn Hepburn and John Wayne and, well, the original “Battlestar Galactica.”

[...]

Women are from Venus. Men are from Mars. Hamlet does not scan as Hamletta. Nor does Hans Solo as Hans Sally. Faceman is not the same as Facewoman. Nor does a Stardoe a Starbuck make. Men hand out cigars. Women “hand out” babies. And thus the world for thousands of years has gone’ round.

Suffice it to say that the original BSG was no Hamlet, the new Starbuck character is great, and to read the new show as claiming that the Cylons are justified in their desire to destroy humanity seems like a perverse reading of the action. What they’ve done is portray the Cylon sneak attack as emanating from a classic “security dilemma” rather than from intrinsic Cylon evil or some such. Because they’re trying to make an interesting show rather than, you know, cheesy crap.

Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.

If I may take the time to agree with my friend Spencer Ackerman, it’s absolutely imperative that Samuel L. Jackson be paid whatever it takes to persuade him to appear as Nick Fury in upcoming Avengers / Iron Man / Captain America films. Marvel literally drew the character to look like Jackson when they launched their Ultimate Marvel series. They put jokes about Jackson playing Fury into one of the Ultimates stories. And then as an easter egg at the end of Iron Man they cast Jackson as Fury. They’ve come too far to back down now.

Deadweight Loss

You hear a lot of bogus statistics thrown around about economic losses due to piracy, but you hear very little about the economic cost associated with pricing digital media so far above the marginal cost of production.

For example, I was in Target last week and saw this box set of The OC DVDs on sale for $116.99:

Now for my part, I was never a huge OC devoté but I watched most of the first season and some of the second season before losing interest. And I have some money, I like pop culture, and I like impulse buys, etc. If this box set were orders of magnitude cheaper—say $10.00 instead of $116.99—I might have bought it. Now presumably the people running these businesses know what they’re doing, and overall profits really would be lower. But still, owning all those episodes would have given me $10.00 of utility and it would be possible, though not legal, for me to acquire them at no cost whatsoever to their owner. And it seems that The OC lost over five million viewers between its popular first season and its unpopular forth season. Maybe all five million of us would be moderately interested in the box set worth of DVDs were it cheap. That’s maybe $50 million—maybe more—in deadweight losses related to just one show.

Now obviously that’s a lousy estimate. Don’t take it seriously. Maybe some clever economist somewhere will come up with a reasonable way of calculating it. I’m just illustrating the point that the costs are real. And that for this reason, the optimal amount of copying is not zero. It’s just common sense that there are lots of people for whom owning the complete run of a TV show would be worth more than $0 but more than the $100+ prices these things carry in stores. It’s a good thing, from a social point of view, that some of those people are able to acquire “pirated” copies of the things they want to watch.

And So We Blogged On, Boats Against the Current, Borne Back Ceaselessly into the Past

This gives me some doubts:

“Have I read The Great Gatsby?” Combs said to a London newspaper in 2001. “I am the Great Gatsby.”

Would someone who’d read The Great Gatsby say something like that? Perhaps more interesting, would acknowledging one’s Gatsby-esque status even be consistent with being Gatsby? I think it’s sort of integral to Gatsby’s character that he lacks this particular insight about his role in the scheme of things.

The Final Frontier

Before posting any additional inflammatory remarks about Gaza, I thought I would address the other controversy likely to provoke lengthy internet feuds — which of the “Star Trek” series is the worst? Yesterday afternoon while awaiting the beginning of the Texas-OSU game, I opined on my public Twitter feed that “truly ‘Voyager’ is the worst of the Star Treks.”

This provoked some dispute from my Twitter followers. The most popular contrary view was that “Enterprise” is worse. But a substantial number of people took the line that “Deep Space Nine” was the worst. That’s just crazy. It’s true that DS9 starts weak, but it actually becomes quite awesome once the Dominion plotline gets rolling. And beyond that, it’s actually a pretty innovative show — it was one of the pioneers in moving the hour-long television drama away from the pure serial mode and toward longer-running narrative arcs.

As for “Enterprise,” I dunno. The Temporal Cold War is stupid. But I think the explorations of the origins of the Federation and the Prime Directive are interesting. Not interesting to normal people, of course, but interesting to fans of the franchise. Whereas “Voyager” just gives me nothing. I appreciate the desire to set a show far, far away from the rest of the action in order to avoid being weighed down by too much existing canon, but an inability to rely on basic familiar pillars (Klingons, Romulans, the occasional emergency sub-space transmission from admiral so-and-so) winds up doing a lot of reinventing the wheel. Except it’s a kind of second-rate wheel.

“Windowsill”

I’ve seen a few people putting together lists of definitive Bush-era songs (with the implication being that we’re looking for songs that capture the spirit of the age rather than just good tunes), many of which include Arcade Fire’s “Intervention.” That wouldn’t even be my choice off Neon Bible. I’ll go with “Windowsill”

I think this does a good job of capturing the sense of shame that a lot of people felt over the way the country’s good name was being dragged through the mud by an atrocious president.

Obama in Context

Chris Bowers has an interesting post looking at the composition of the Obama cabinet and concluding that the personnel is on average to the right of the average Democratic member of congress. It’s worth understanding, however, that the same methodology would lead to the conclusion that Obama’s cabinet is to the right [CORRECTION: by "to the right" I mean "to the left"] of the veto points in congress. Those points are the median member of the House (a Blue Dog) and in the Senate either a centrist Democrat for things requiring a majority or else someone like Susan Collins to break a filibuster. It’s those characters who determine the scope of what’s possible legislatively. And though I think progressives will have many disappointments in the coming years, many more of those disappointments will come because something good Obama proposes gets watered-down in congress than because congress wants to do something good and somehow gets thwarted by the White House.

I was watching West Wing re-runs over the weekend and it’s an interesting thought experiment in the “what if Bill Clinton had been more left-wing?” hypothetical. It makes a big difference in some areas, including judicial nominees and Israel-Palestine diplomacy, but on core domestic policy issues there was no plausible script to write in which Bartlett being a big lib led the congressional GOP to suddenly surrender on expansive new social spending.