November 26, 2006: Tristan "+" Isolde

As may have been observed in the past, I do not mind talking about how seriously I take my Wagner (particularly this season at the San Francisco Opera, where they mounted the Los Angeles production with Hockney sets and, as usual, the Chronicle got it all wrong and the performance was riveting from beginning to end). So I was more than a little skeptical when I saw the posters and newspaper adds for a film calling itself Tristan + Isolde, which seemed to make it clear that any contribution from Wagner would be, at best, irrelevant. Nevertheless, when Cinemax decided to run the film, my wife and I figured we would give it a try. (It's a lot easier to bail on a cable broadcast than a visit to a movie theater.) As a matter of fact, we jumped the gun when we saw that it was available through the Comcast On Demand feature prior to its first airing. Like acts2120, whose review appeared on the IMDB page, we were more than pleasantly surprised.

Nevertheless, I can see why this movie left San Francisco almost as soon as it arrived (and probably did not even arrive in many other cities). Even if this is one of the most highly-charged stories of sex and violence (not to mention one of the earliest), it is hard to imagine any telling of the tale "making it" as a "teen flick;" and teens constitute the market the dominates the logic of film distribution, if not conception and production. Most important is that this particular telling is not that all transparent. As a matter of fact, its greatest appeal may be to Wagner-lovers for the way in which it fills out the back-story. We see how Tristan came to be part of Marke's household, and we learn about Isolde's betrothal to Morholt. We also see the blood-and-guts (and lots of dirt) battle where Tristan slays Morholt and is wounded so badly that he is taken for dead. Like that of any dead hero, his body is placed on a boat and floated out to sea. It then washes up on the Irish coast and the story goes pretty much the way Isolde tells it in the first act of the Wagner opera (with one interesting exception, which is that it is Isolde who gives a false name, calling herself Bragnae, rather than Tristan).

Another problem involves sorting out the characters. Since most of the performers are pretty unfamiliar, it is too easy to confuse Morhold with Kurseval, which is a pretty drastic confusion! Also, Marke ages by cutting his hair almost to the skull, making him hard to recognize when we move from the scene in which he adopts the child Tristan to the time in which most of the story takes place. On the other hand Rufus Sewell portrays a Marke who is far from over the hill and could have been an excellent match for Isolde.

By the way there are no magic potions here. Isolde is an herbalist (and, interestingly enough, so is Morholt). Her passion for Tristan is a natural one, and in this telling she keeps it pent up far longer than Wagner's Isolde did. (Well, "pent up" was probably not in Wagner's working vocabulary!) The result is that her first serious tryst with Tristan makes for the sort of earth-moving encounter that the legend wants it to be.

Finally (and this may be the real reason why this movie had no chance of grabbing the teen market), there is a certain "meta-level" to the way in which the legend is told. It is as much a reflection on a familiar tale as it is a telling of that tale. Since the teen market does not go to the movies to reflect, my guess is that the studio bean-counters knew from the start that this was a losing prospect.

This last problem has been sticking in my mind now that I have read Daniel Mendelsohn's New York Review piece on Marie Antoinette. It almost seemed as if Mendelsohn was taking Coppola to task for not being reflective enough about her familiar subject. However, since Coppola is no stranger to that "Hollywood logic," you have to wonder how much she deserves to be Mendelsohn's target, even if it is her name on the credits. I have no trouble imagining that most of the things Mendelsohn disliked most about the film were actually committee decisions, where the bean-counters had the strongest voices, in which case it may be better to wait to see if a "director's cut" version ever gets released on DVD.

November 06, 2006: What's in the Script?

JP Rangaswami seems to be having a good time exploring the analogy between film-making and software development; and I am glad to see that one result of this exploration is the assertion that "the script is central." However, I see this as a point of departure, rather than a conclusion; and the direction in which we must depart is that of a more rigorous epistemological and ontological consideration than those emerging from JP’s efforts to develop his analogy. Most important is that, to invoke my favorite language, we need to honor the fact that a script is fundamentally a dramatistic (rather than scientistic) artifact (which entails the corollary that software development is also more dramatistic than scientistic, that being what JP really means in his related proposition that software is about stories). (Needless to say, neither filmmakers nor most parties involved in software projects, including the customers, are particularly interested in either epistemology or ontology; but we need them to keep our own thoughts in order!) As regular readers should know by now I have decided that Kenneth Burke’s pentad provides a useful grounding for both epistemology and ontology.

Lest anyone think this is just a philosophical exercise in abstraction, I have now performed an initial exercise at putting it into practice. The exercise is based on what is probably now a “classic” case study in the first chapter of the Decision Support Systems text by Keen and Scott Morton. The study concerns a manufacturer of laundry equipment dealing with forecasting sales and then projecting requirements for manufacturing. This case study concerns the “real world” (albeit a bit dated) of decision-making, rather than the world of support software; so, in spite of the fact that it reflects an earlier business era, I find it a good way to focus on those stakeholders who are not fixated on things like software artifacts.

The problem can be cast in the ontological categories of Burke’s framework as follows:

* Acts (what takes place)

o Manufacturing “sells” consumer products to Marketing
o Marketing prepares sales projection
o Manufacturing prepares requirements for manufacturing and inventory
o Marketing-planning manager resolves conflicts between salesforecast and production forecast

* Scenes (situation in which it occurs)

o Negotiating parameters for sales forecast model: Marketing manager ↔ Marketing-planning manager
o Negotiating parameters for production model: Marketing-planning manager ↔ Production manager

* Agents (who)

o Profit centers

. Marketing
. Manufacturing

o Planners

. Marketing-planning manager
. Marketing (sales) manager
. Production manager

* Agencies (means or instruments)

o Sales forecast based on computer model
o Forecast of manufacturing and inventory requirements based on computer model

* Purpose (why)

o Project sales for next twelve months

o Manage production consistent with sales projection

. Work force levels
. Production schedules
. Inventory management

o Define pricing and merchandising strategies

In this framework the key problem comes down to whether or not the agencies are doing a good enough job to facilitate the resolution of conflicts between the sales forecast and the production forecast. To invoke language that JP holds so dear, this involves facilitating conversations that work, where much of the “work” has to do with aligning the agencies to the motives of the agents (in this case both individual and institutional), in order that the negotiation “scenes” are furnished with the necessary information. The punch line is that the dramatistic stance allows us to examine the nature of negotiation through the subjective lens of motivated action, rather than trying to see the world in terms of the objective numbers (whether or not they are visualized in “dashboards”) compiled by the bean counters who drive the enterprise software.

Final disclaimer: This exercise is far from cast in concrete. I just decided it was time to start trumpeting the virtues of Kenneth Burke by anchoring his stuff down to a concrete example. All sincere efforts to refine the details of the exercise will be most welcome!

October 27, 2006 (1): "Death" of a "President"

Speaking of fiction, The Raw Story ran the German Press Agency item about the limited-release opening of Death of a President in the United States. The byline was Los Angeles, but the film has also opened here in San Francisco. The Chronicle ran their review under an interesting headline: "Bush is murdered in tasteless, creepy 'Death.'" Well, as a long-standing John Waters fan, who was one of the first kids on my block to see a midnight screening of Pink Flamingos, I figure that I have earned myself the right to make my own call on tastelessness! On the other hand the Germans seem to agree with the creepy part, describing the assassination itself as "a chilling approximation." Meanwhile, as of this writing, The Raw Story has harvested 31 comments; and, without wading through all of them, there seems to be a strong faction that want to see this film in order to indulge in their favorite fantasy. I would probably find that even more creepy, were it not for the fact that I was living in Marina del Rey when Platoon came out; and there were movie theaters you wanted to avoid, because the veterans had chosen them to be the places where they would gather to relive their personal horrors while engaging in "dialog" with the images of the actors on the screen. So I guess the only lesson from all this is that, whenever we think we have a working definition of "creepy," something creepier comes along to raise the bar.

So, do I want to see this film? Notwithstanding any definitions of taste, I am always interested in anything that is called provocative, just to see to what extent I am provoked. Will I go to a theater to see the film? Well, this is opera season, not to mention the Symphony, and new new play just opened at Berkeley Rep. Usually I wait for these things to show up on cable. Perhaps I should worry that Comcast will block it, but I would be inclined to believe that they will just wait for a reasonable period of time to lapse after the election.

Meanwhile, just to remind us that irony never died, the front page of the Chronicle Datebook section allocates most of its space to a review of The Bridge. This documentary is real, not "faux," to use the word from the German Press Agency. For those of you unaware of this film, it is a documentary that shows (real) people taking a suicidal plunge off the Golden Gate Bridge and even interviews a survivor of one of these attempts. The Chronicle reviewer was full of praise for this one, but I am going to think a lot harder about whether I really want to see it than I shall over Death of a President. That kind of reality may just be too much with me.

October 22, 2006: Ian Buruma on Reality and Fiction

Continuing the theme of the necessity of fiction, I found the following paragraph in an article Ian Buruma wrote about the nature of the portraits being painted in Weimar Germany:

Civilized life cannot be sustained without hypocrisy. A certain moral code, a degree of courtesy and decorum, are necessary to keep out instincts under a modicum of control The unforgettable downfall of Professor Dr. Immanuel Rath, played by Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel, is a warning of what happens when all social niceties are stripped away, when a man loses all self-respect. When men and women are reduced to nothing but their lowest appetites, we live in a state of barbarism. This is what Weimar period artists painted, for this, in their view, was what society had become. Their honesty would be costly to them. When the Nazis made barbarism official, these artists were among the first ones to go—into exile, concentration camps, of "inner emigration."

Having already suggested that barbarism may have been made official over a decade ago, this observation seems particularly appropriate.

October 12, 2006: Citizen Page; Citizen Brin

Charles Foster Kane's Declaration of Principles (from a 6/19/40 revision of the script)

1. "I'll provide the people of this city with a daily paper that will tall all the news honestly."
2. "People are going to know who's responsible."
3. "And they're going to get the news -- the true news -- quickly and simply and entertainingly."
4. "And no special interests will be allowed to interfere with the truth of that news."
5. "I will also provide them with a fighting and tireless champion of their rights as citizens and human beings."

It seems as if every time I make another visit to the "Ten things Google has found to be true," I keep flashing back to the scene in Citizen Kane where Kane forges his declaration in front of Leland and Bernstein. Why do I keep visiting this site? I suppose the main reason is to remind myself how such "declarations of principles" can be corrupted, as much in word as in deed. Anyone who knows the "ten things" knows that "don't be evil" isn't there; what the "thing" actually says is, "You can make money without doing evil." I am too much of a literary analyst to view this as picking nits. As a point of grammar, an injunction is not a "thing found to be true;" but it is still nice to know that, at least as far as their philosophy is concerned, Google is not trafficking in injunctions.

Citizen Kane, of course, is a study in the corruption of principles. Leland keeps a copy. When he finally walks out on Kane, we learn that he made a check on his copy each time one was violated. Will this happen to the "ten things found to be true." At the very least, we might want to reclassify them as "ten things worthy of serious debate;" but I suspect that such an attitude would not resonate with the Google lifestyle. Still, someone ought to be reflecting on that list. Maybe that someone will also be the someone who eventually does unto Google what Google is trying to do unto Microsoft!

September 25, 2006 (1): Postmodernism is Still with Us

In a contribution to Confused of Calcutta, Dominic Sayers delivered a sort of "obituary" for postmodernism. Much as I sympathize with his position and enjoy his way of framing it ("we have had our playtime and it’s time to put the functional elements to the best and simplest use we can"), I would say that any announcement of the death of postmodernism is premature. Sayers wrote, "It seems to me that today you can represent yourself with humility, sincerity and openness without suffering for it." These are the words of someone with little (if any) exposure to Fox News and Bill Clinton's recent attempt to retaliate against their version of journalism.

Personally, I find Fox News the latest phase in United States' history of sustaining itself on “fictions of convenience” that reaches back way before “postmodern” entered our vocabulary. I am not sure I can easily track down its origins; but the first example that had an impact on me was Malcolm Cowley’s description of the primary narrative of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! as “a long and violent story that he regards as the essence of the Deep South, which is not so much a mere region as it is … an incomplete and frustrated nation trying to relive its legendary past.” The operative word there is “legendary,” as in the most memorable line from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (hardly a postmodern classic): “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” (J. Hillis Miller actually continued Cowley’s argument by demonstrating the key role of “fictions of convenience” in the secondary narrative of Absalom, Absalom!) So, while playtime may be over in Mr. Sayers' corner of the United Kingdom (which I would be the first to applaud), the games continue over here and the stakes keep getting higher, whether you are talking about policy-making in the public sector or the conduct of business in the private!

July 12, 2006: Why Irrationality?

Reading Jim Hansen's report on global warming in the July 13 New York Review left me wondering why it should be so hard to communicate such a painfully clear message. My reflex was to resort to a comment by Herbert Agar (which I used to associated with James Reston): "The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear." This is what makes the title of Gore's lecture/book/film so appropriate: the inconvenience of it all. On the other hand, Antonio Gramsci may have come closer to the mark with his theory of ideological domination. Here is how Randall Collins explained it in his Theoretical Sociology text:

The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, writing a few years later in his Prison Notebooks (1928/1971), however, argued that the working class is most afflicted by the power of the dominant class’s ideology. If not deceived by outright illusions, their minds are subject to ‘contradictory consciousness,’ with confused and fragmented judgments on the nature of the world they inhabit. This is because the ruling class is hegemonic: controlling not only property but—even more importantly—the means of producing beliefs about reality. These include religion, education, and more recently, the mass media. Thus the working class is severely crippled in its ability to revolt against the dominant order, or even think critically about it. (For modern examples, see Gitlin [1979] on the power of television, or the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s [1984] theory of the stratification produced by differences in personal taste and styles of entertainment, which he calls ‘cultural capital.’)

In other words, in less elevated langauge, what we prefer to hear is what the media tell us we prefer to hear.

June 28, 2006: Narratology 101 or Both Sides Now

Movies can be a great source of irony, particularly when they are juxtaposed in the just the right way. Last night I was watching Patton and was struck by the amount of ceremony associated with our first view of the man in Africa, being honored before the Moroccan army. His reaction is to praise the Moroccans for having developed the most disciplined troops he had ever encountered. That was all very well and good, except that the previous evening I had watched Moroccan soldiers rape the "two women" from the title of Vittorio De Sica's outstanding film. This led me to think back on observations about how we use narrative to make sense of the world around us, which then led me to wonder whether or not too many of us now deal with the world only in terms of the stories we are told about it, neglecting not only other sources but also the whole question of what the story is trying to tell.

One of the products of the structuralist movement, particularly on the European continent, was the emergence of the discipline of narratology. If hermeneutics is concerned with the full generality of texts, then narratology narrows the field down to narrative texts and then invokes similar methodological baggage. On the one hand there are questions concerned with how a narrative account is structured (which then bring up questions of priority of the structural elements); and then there are the questions of what the story is actually trying to tell. Needless to say, this can then run into arguments over whether or not a story can be interpreted in different ways, which brings us back to the conflict over diversity of interpretation. Where faith is involved, this is a particularly sensitive issue, since much of the absolutism of fundamentalism involves the conviction that there is only one way to interpret Biblical narrative.

My personal feeling is that, if narrative can help us to make sense of the complexity of our world, it is not by providing us with punch-line answers (or the morals of Aesop). Rather, it is by virtue of the fact that narrative, itself, is often highly complex; but it can still be rendered in such a way as to make that complexity more palatable. This is why (artificial intelligence notwithstanding) it is so absurd to trying to reduce a play like Macbeth to a representation in some logical calculus. If you only pay attention to the "facts," you miss out on all the things that Shakespeare does to draw you into this story; and, as Aristotle observed in his "Poetics," that "being drawn in" is actually a highly-charged learning experience. Furthermore, different narratives will then cross over each other in our own minds (like the scenarios for Patton and Two Women), leading to further access to that complexity of the world.

Think about that the next time you lay out $10 for two hours of special effects that do not hang on much of a narrative line. As a former colleague of mine once put it, "That's like picking all of the raisins out of the box of raisin bran." A narrative experience is yet another invitation to commitment. Every rejection of that invitation is made at our own peril.