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Now Playing at Reason.tv—producer Clay Epstein on the films the world wants to see (and is allowed to see).

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 17:04:00 EDT

reason.tv's Ted Balaker sits down with independent movie producer Clay Epstein of The Little Film Company to discuss the cultural, political, and aesthetic complexities of the international film market. The Little Film Company's credits include An American Haunting and the Academy Award winning film, Tsotsi.

Epstein reveals which kinds of films are most likely to get squashed by Chinese censors, which nation outdoes the U.S. in cracking down on big-screen smoking, and explains why horror films rarely get lost in translation.

Go here to embed this video on your website and for related websites and articles.

Best Western

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 15:52:00 EDT

Last week Kevin Knox of The Cinematheque sent around an email asking a bunch of movie buffs, including me, to pick our favorite westerns. You can read our ballots here; you can see how closely our tastes match establishment opinion by comparing our lists to the American Film Institute's selections here; and you can tell us what we should have picked here.

The Economics of "Elder Porn"

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 17:36:00 EDT

To follow up on my fascination with geriatric coitus, here's a little snippet from a Time article on senior citizen pornography in Japan:

A WHO report released in March found that one in four married couples in Japan had not made love in the previous year, while 38% of couples in their 50s no longer have sex at all....Yet, at the same time, the country has seen a surge in demand for pornography that has turned adult videos into a billion-dollar industry, with "elder porn" one of its fastest-growing genres.

I found it interesting (god and H&R readers forgive me for bringing it here) that the trend towards producing porn with more "mature ladies" is occurring in response to market signals:

A popular young actress can earn up to $100,000 per film, while a mature actress is paid only $2,000. The market for "elder porn" has doubled over the past decade, according to Kadowaki. "In the view of the aging society," he adds, "I think that in the future we will see a steady increase in demand."

I wrote about dementia patients conducting steamy love affairs here. Senior Editor Kerry Howley wrote about a seemingly global lack of libido here.

It's About Zombies, Dummy, Not Global Warming

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 18:11:00 EDT

Critics are calling M. Night Shyamalan's new movie, The Happening--in which plants release toxins that cause Northeasterners to kill themselves--a dystopian vision of the consequences of global warming (as well as a terrible movie), but Shyamalan says that's not what The Happening is about:

CNN: So a lot of people are going to see this and say, "Is this an environment movie?" Are you sending an Al Gore-like message out here, or is it just a thriller?
Shyamalan: No. 1, it's a B movie. This is the best B movie you will ever see, that's it. That's what this is. If there's other things that stick to your ribs as you walk out, that's great, but it's supposed to be, you know, zombies eating flesh.
CNN: So when you say B, you don't mean honeybee?
Shyamalan: No, I meant like, you know, zombies and killer things running around.

James at Gone Elsewhere reviewed the script of The Happening in August 2007, calling it, "The Day after Tomorrow…with plants." Perhaps anticipating that moviegoers would interpret the movie as an enviro-film, Gone Elsewhere slammed The Happening's not-so-subtle approach to the possible consequences of humankind's footprint:

The Happening features the most moronic environmentalism in the history of cinema. It makes On Deadly Ground look like An Inconvenient Truth....The Kindergarten-level message of the film is that if Mankind continues to be cruel to nature…nature will eventually fight back. In case you miss this (despite having it sledge-hammered into your brain for two hours) don’t despair: Shyamalan has characters spell-it-out for us throughout the proceedings.

The talking head scene at the end of the movie, in which an environmental expert explains the event as nature's way of defending itself and warns that the event was only a "prelude" to a more catastrophic attack, reinforces the critical sentiment that The Happening is a really, really, bad environmental movie.

But there are some aspects of the plot that suggest the environmental aspects are only a means for scaring us for the sake of scaring us, and not a strategy for raising environmental awareness.

I submit as evidence one of the movie's more explicit ironies: The few characters in the movie who are modeled after green freaks die horrible deaths. The greenhouse owner, who is the first character to suggest that it's not terrorists releasing the toxin, but plants, shoots himself, as does his equally earth-friendly wife. And the old lady who lives off the grid, grows her own crops, and doesn't own a car, ends up being bat-shit insane, killing herself by repeatedly headbutting the side of her earth-friendly house.

The two Philadelphia survivors--Mark Wahlberg's and Zooey Deschanel's characters--on the other hand, live to pollute another day, and the second to last scene of the movie shows Deschanel optimistically sharing the results of her positive pregnancy test with an equally joyful Wahlberg--which suggests that the two are bringing more rabid consumers into being. As if this wasn't enough, the final scene of the movie depicts the toxin infiltrating France, a country known for its environmentally-friendly regulations.

Here's a classic literature class question (posed to me by reason's very own green guru, Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey): Does the movie mean what the director says it means, or is it up to the critics to tell us what to take away from The Happening?

Check out Bailey's debate on Global Warming here and Tim Cavanaugh's comprehensive look at zombie cinema here.

Dirty Harry Libertarianism

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 09:33:00 EDT

The Guardian has a fun interview/profile of Clint Eastwood, in which Bronco Billy snarls at Spike Lee ("A guy like him should shut his face"), gleefully defends Dirty Harry ("Being a contrary sort of person, I figured there had been enough politically correct crap going around"), and says the following about his ever-confounding politics:

In 2005, he vowed he'd kill Michael Moore if the documentarian ever showed up at his house, the way he had doorstepped Charlton Heston in Bowling for Columbine. This March he was sacked from Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's California state parks commission for objecting to the building of a toll road through a national forest. But though he has been associated in the public mind with Republican viewpoints, he's something of an individualist. "I don't pay attention to either side," he claims. "I mean, I've always been a libertarian. Leave everybody alone. Let everybody else do what they want. Just stay out of everybody else's hair. So I believe in that value of smaller government. Give politicians power and all of a sudden they'll misuse it on ya."
Has he declared for anybody in this electoral cycle? "You know, I haven't really," he says. "My wife used to be an anchorwoman in Arizona, so she knew John McCain and she liked him and I kinda liked him. In fact, we sort of supported him when he was running the first time against Bush eight years ago. But we haven't been active as yet. It's kind of a zoo out there right now. So I think I'll kinda let things percolate."

Whole thing here.

The Birth of Hillary Nation

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 10:39:00 EDT

Sam Stein collects some comments from Clinton's die-hard supporters at last weekend's Rules & Bylaw Committee meeting:

"[Obama] is a cult. His campaign is an anti-woman cult."

"I will actively campaign against him."

"You know who is backing him is George Soros. It'll be George Soros, not Obama, who is running the country."

"South Dakota is totally rigged for Obama because of Tom Daschle. Obama's going to win South Dakota because he's buying it and rigging it."

"[Obama] is a socialist! You know what the Nazi Party was before it was the Nazi Party? It was the Socialist Party."

The intensity of this fear and venom shouldn't have blindsided me -- I'm the guy who says paranoia appears everywhere on the political spectrum, including the center -- but it did. It makes me take Hillary more seriously, not as a probable president but as a cultural phenomenon: Anyone who attracts that sort of passion is innately interesting. Even if it turns out that the passion was already floating around before it attached itself to a politician.

Bonus video: A rabid Clinton supporter is thrown out of the RBC meeting. On her way out, she calls Obama "an inadequate black male who would not have been running if had it not been a white woman that was running for president."

On a related note, here's a sneak peek at the Clinton campaign's next commercial:

Unexplained Mysteries: Why Didn't the Indians Build Their Pyramids Upside-Down?

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 30 May 2008 14:17:00 EDT

The new Indiana Jones flick prompts an anthropologist to debunk -- yet again! -- a resilient strain of crank theories:

Over the last 500 years Europeans and Americans have sought nearly any explanation for the complexity of native cultures in the Americas. Possible influences have been sought in a lost tribe from Israel, European wanderers, and even Atlantis. In the twentieth century extremely popular versions of this vein of thinking have included the idea that the Olmec civilization developed under the influence of priest-kings who came from ancient Egypt, and of course, Von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods, in which ancient cultures around the world are given inspiration and innovation by aliens.

One of the pieces of evidence that is most commonly cited in this less than rigorous scholarship is the presence of pyramids all over the world. If a pyramid is broadly defined as a building that is wider at the bottom and tapers to the top, it is hardly a mystery as to why this structure would be common. Any small child with a block set will tell you that it is very difficult to make the top wider than the bottom. Ditto for sandcastles. More compelling than my ad hoc engineering arguments, however, is the steady accretion of knowledge from around the world of local, indigenous culture histories. Thousands of archaeologists, working on thousands of sites, analyzing millions of artifacts have allowed us to see that pyramid building in Egypt, for example, is a process, developed out of long-standing traditions related to tombs. In Mesopotamia, pyramids are temples, with their own long trajectory of development that can be traced in the archaeological record.

In the New World, there is clear evidence in Mesoamerica and South America (which is where Peru is by the way, Indy) of the indigenous development of pyramid building traditions. Similarly, in North America, the largest, pyramid-shaped earthen structures of the Mississippian period do not appear suddenly, with no precedent, rather they are part of a long tradition of earth mound building that stretches over thousands of years into the Archaic period in eastern North America. There is absolutely no reason to revert to theories of alien intervention unless you are predisposed to think of Native Americans as dull, lazy, conservative people who lack the initiative, creativity, cleverness, and cultural complexity to be responsible for the archaeological remains we can empirically document in their homelands.

[Via Infocult.]

Miscellaneous Friday Links

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 23 May 2008 11:33:00 EDT

* John Ford's lost Vietnam propaganda film.

* You want witch hunts? Here's a witch hunt.

* Is Alice Cooper a terrorist?

* Jimmy Carter's hands-on presidency.

Iron Man Confidential

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 02 May 2008 07:11:00 EDT

Early word on the latest Marvel Comic turned big-screen spectaculah, Iron Man? It's been updated from Vietnam to the War on Terror and is techno-riffic. From the Daily News:

Downey is Tony Stark, a millionaire arms inventor who, while giving a weapons demonstration to troops in Afghanistan, is attacked and kidnapped. Shoved in a cave by terrorists who give him a week to build a rocket from spare parts, Stark - who now has a magnetized sphere in his chest that keeps shrapnel in his body from entering his aorta - instead constructs a tank-suit that looks like the Michelin Man and boasts more goodies than a Swiss Army knife.
Back home at his L.A. mountaintop bachelor pad (which of course has a workshop General Motors would kill for), Stark experiences a true change of heart, deciding to stop making war machines. So he builds a suit of armor that flies like a jet, shoots energy blasts and helps keep his ticker going as he fights injustice.
The fact that Iron Man is a B-lister in the Marvel Comics stable doesn't stop director Jon Favreau and his writers from aiming high and generally hitting the target. Meanwhile, Stark's inner circle - including Gwyneth Paltrow (sexy and bookish) as his trusty assistant, Terrence Howard (tough and loyal) as his military connection, and Jeff Bridges (bald and menacing) as a mentor-turned-villain - lend a touch of class.
But cruising above it all is Downey. Since Iron Man's helmet has no nose and a little rectangular mouth, the smartest thing Favreau did was cast a lead who's constantly alive. The few times the red-and-yellow battle gear is front and center in "Transformers"-ish action moments, Favreau often shows his star's face inside the shell-head. As Downey pumps life into every scene, it's clear the actor, long regarded as one of the best of his generation, has not let the rust set in after his battle with drugs a decade ago.

Sexy and bookish? Bald and menacing? Tough and loyal? It sounds like they're really blazing new trails!

More here.

I salute Iron Man because he, along with the board game Monopoly, Dallas, Bruce Jenner, Jimmy Carter's cardigans, and Bobby Fischer helped us beat the Russkies when it mattered (until his death earlier this year, the insaniac former chess champ Fischer was helping us defeat Islamism by identifying as anti-Western[*]). And because Iron Man points the way to the coming age of the cyborg (or cyborg-like humans), which we're already in. Everytime you see someone with a cochlear implant (look carefully) or a pacemaker or wearing a wrist-guard for carpal tunnel syndrome, there beats the adamantium heart of Iron Man. If you can't be a full-blown mutant (thanks for nothing Mom and Dad) and are a couple standard deviations down the Bell Curve from homo superior, you might as well have microprocessors and exoskeleton-like devices up the ying-yang.

But enough with the drug-story backstory on RDJ (and Iron Man, who battled the sauce longer than he did The Mandarin, one of the last great gasps of full-blown Orientalist fantasy is post-war pop cult)! Spencer Tracy had problems—including a penchant for locking himself in hotel room bathtubs for an entire weekend while drinking and pissing himself into stupor—but you don't have to know that to enjoy Bad Day at Black Rock, do you?

All you need to know about Tony Stark--a cool exec with a heart of steel and two fistfuls of "repulsor rays"--in 22 seconds:

Bonus video: Black Sabbath asks the musical question "Can he walk and talk?,' etc. in this great home-brewed video.

[*]: Corrected spelling and life status of Fischer thanks to reader UCrawford.

We Get Letters....

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 14:14:00 EDT

From an R.G. Bethany, subject line of "Peace":

The Movie "HAIR" is Psychological Anti-Warfare at its finest. Here's how it works. Two hours of very exciting music and dance. Nothing bad is said or implied. Everything is happy. You will notice alot of movement in every scene. Several things are always moving. You are being conditioned. Knowing this does not matter. Then the series of scenes at the end and...BAM. It hits you hard. Remember this is Psychological Anti-Warfare.

Me, I'm even more shocked that the movie came out in 1979. After, for example, the first season of Dallas....

Little Brother Is Watching

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 20:00:00 EDT

Flunk This Movie!

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 12:00:00 EDT

"This is not a religious argument," asserts Discovery Institute president Bruce Chapman in conservative Hollywood gadfly Ben Stein's new anti-science propaganda film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. The movie opens this Friday in 1,100 theaters, the largest theatrical release ever for a documentary, according to Expelled's producers.

The movie's basic point? To quote a transcript from a Rush Limbaugh show posted to the movie's offical website: "Darwinism has taken root, taken hold at every major intellectual institution around the world in Western Society, from Great Britain to the United States, you name it. Darwinism, of course, does not permit for the existence of a supreme being, a higher power, or a God."

Yet despite its topic, the film is entirely free of scientific content—no scientific evidence against biological evolution and none for "intelligent design" (ID) theory is given. Which makes sense because biological evolution is amply supported by evidence from the fossil record, molecular biology, and morphology. For example, the younger the rocks in which fossils are found, the more closely they resemble species alive today, and the older the rocks, the less resemblance there is. In addition, molecular biology confirms that the more distantly related the fossil record suggests species lineages are, the more their genes differ.

Instead of evaluating this evidence, Stein spends most of the movie asking various proponents of evolutionary theory, including Richard Dawkins, P.Z. Myers, Michael Ruse, and Daniel Dennett, for their religious views. Neither the producers nor Stein understand that offering critiques of a theory with which they disagree is not the same as proving their own theory.

Stein and the film's producers maintain that belief in evolutionary biology makes societies more likely to succumb to totalitarianism. The flick is replete with grim black-and-white shots of Soviet armies, Nazi thugs, Stalin, Hitler, and concentration camps. The filmmakers portray opposition to teaching ID in universities and public schools as a threat to freedom on a par with Communist and Nazi repression. But ID proponents in the academy are not being dragged off to concentration camps by goose-stepping Darwinist thugs—the worst thing they suffer is the loss of their jobs. That's not fun, but it's not the gas chamber either.

This silly, duplicitous film features one associate after another of the Discovery Institute, the Seattle-based "think tank" that has been at the forefront of campaign to smuggle intelligent design into science classrooms and public discourse. This campaign was outlined in the Discovery Institute's infamous "Wedge Strategy" document in 1998. That document begins with the sentence, "The proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built." The Wedge document goes on to complain: "Yet a little over a century ago, this cardinal idea came under wholesale attack by intellectuals drawing on the discoveries of modern science."

The Wedge document makes it crystal clear what comes first for intelligent designers, and it isn't evidence. Under activities to popularize intelligent design, the Wedge document mentions "documentaries and other media productions." Expelled is just part of that propaganda strategy.

The film is being bankrolled by Walt Ruloff, a Christian evangelical software millionaire. A resident of Vancouver, British Columbia, Ruloff hooked up with another Expelled producer, Logan Craft, when Craft was studying with evangelical theologian J.I. Packer at Regent College in Vancouver. Ruloff claims that he was shocked when one of the leading genomic researchers in the U.S. told him that as much 30 percent of research in his field is never published because it points toward intelligent design theory. Just how this much research is hidden from view goes unexplained.

The film begins with moody shots of Ben Stein backstage before he addresses an unidentified audience on the alleged suppression of scientific research in the name of Darwinian orthodoxy. Stein stalks onstage and declares that freedom is the essence of America. So far, so good. Then he muses, What if our freedom was taken away? In fact, Stein asserts that this is already happening. We are losing our freedom in one of the most important sectors of our society—science.

As evidence of this loss of freedom, Stein trots out a small parade of intelligent design martyrs. Let's look at a few cases. In 2004, Richard Sternberg, who was editor of the scientific journal Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, published an article by Stephen Meyer arguing that the "Cambrian explosion" 570 to 530 million years ago in which most of the body types of animals developed was evidence for intelligent design. Meyer was then a professor at Palm Beach Atlantic University where all "trustees, officers, members of the faculty or of the staff, must believe in the divine inspiration of the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments; that man was directly created by God."

Sternberg was serving on the editorial board of the Baraminology Study Group, a group of young-earth creationists. Baraminology is the study of biblical animal "kinds." Sternberg argued that he was a friendly outsider advising them against their young-earth views. Meyer is now the head of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture and Sternberg is a signatory of the Discovery Institute's A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism.

Many of Sternberg's colleagues reacted with dismay and the journal retracted Meyer's article. In the film, Sternberg says he lost his office at the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History, was pressured to resign, and had his religious and political beliefs questioned. Yet, he still has office space in the Museum and has been reappointed for three more years. To be sure, probably some of his colleagues are unhappy with him and don't want to hang out with him anymore. This is far cry from the concentration camps, or what Stalin did to proponents of evolutionary biology in the name of Lysenkoism.

In another case of alleged persecution, George Mason University (GMU) did not renew a teaching contract with Caroline Crocker, an adjunct biology lecturer who believes in ID. She says that she only wanted to teach students to question scientific orthodoxies. "I was only trying to teach what the university stands for—academic freedom," she says in the Stein's film. Since GMU let her go, she says that she can no longer find work. In the film, Crocker insists, "I did not teach creationism." Interestingly, Crocker apparently delivered the same offending lecture at a local community college later. It didn't turn out to be a "balanced" presentation of evidence for and against biological evolution. Why not? "There really is not a lot of evidence for evolution," Crocker said.

Assistant professor of astronomy and ID proponent Guillermo Gonzalez was denied tenure at Iowa State University in 2007. In 2004, Gonzalez was coauthor, with theologian and Discovery Institute fellow Jay Richards, of The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery. The publisher's press release claims that the authors "demonstrate that our planet is exquisitely fit not only to support life, but also gives us the best view of the universe, as if Earth—and the universe itself—were designed both for life and for scientific discovery." Gonzalez is arguing that the Earth is precisely positioned to enable researchers like him to make scientific measurements. But is this so? An Iowa State colleague, associate professor of religious studies Hector Avalos, disagrees and neatly skewers this conceit. To wit:

This rationale is analogous to a plumber arguing that if our planet had not been positioned precisely where it is, then he might not be able to do his work as a plumber. Lead pipes might melt if the Sun were much closer. And, if our planet were any farther from the Sun, it might be so frozen that plumbers might not exist at all. Therefore, plumbing must have been the reason that our planet was located where it is.

Did Gonzalez fail to get tenure because of his ID views? Although the university denies it, my guess is probably yes. Why? On the evidence of The Privileged Planet, Guillermo's colleagues could reasonably worry that his ID views weren't likely to lead to fruitful research results. Gonzalez was not thrown into a concentration camp for his views. He just didn't get tenure.

The most egregious part of the film is the attempt to link evolutionary biology with Communism and Nazism. The claim that Communism was motivated by Darwin is just plain silly. Official Soviet biological doctrine was Lysenkoism, which was opposed to the findings of the modern synthesis of genetics and evolutionary biology. In fact, evolutionary biologists and geneticists were denounced as "Trotskyite agents of international fascism" and actually thrown into the Gulag for their scientific sins.

As for Nazism, the film interviews mathematician and Discovery Institute fellow David Berlinski who says, "Darwinism is not a sufficient condition for a phenomenon like Nazism, but I think it was a necessary one." To visually illustrate the alleged totalitarian temptations of evolutionary biology, Stein wanders through the Nazi death camp at Dachau. Berlinski and other Discovery Institute denizens are basically claiming that scientific materialism undermines the notion that human beings occupy a special place in the universe. If humans aren't special, goes this line of thinking, then morals don't apply. This is a variation of the adage, "If god is dead, then everything is permitted."

Of course, this overlooks the fact that people down through the millennia have found all sorts of justifications for why they are permitted to murder each other, including plunder, tribal competition, and, yes, religion. Meanwhile, insights from evolutionary psychology are helping us to better understand how our in-group/out-group dynamics contribute to our disturbing capacity for racism, xenophobia, genocide, and warfare. Evolutionary psychology is also offering new ideas about how human morality developed, including our capacities for cooperation, love, and tolerance.

Near the end of the film, Stein asks Dawkins, author of The God Delusion and arguably the best-known living evolutionary biologist on the planet, if he could think of any circumstances under which intelligent design might have occurred. Incautiously, Dawkins brings up the idea that aliens might have seeded life on earth; so-called directed panspermia. This idea was suggested by biologists Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel back in the 1970s. In the film, Stein acts like this a great "gotcha" and is the silliest thing he's ever heard. Of course, the irony is that this is precisely what proponents of intelligent design are claiming—that a higher intelligence created life on earth. Only, they don't want that higher intelligence to be a race of purple space squids. (By the way, Dawkins says that he is not a proponent of directed panspermia.)

The film's close returns to Stein's speech in which he declares, "There are people out there who want to keep science in a little box where it can't possibly touch a higher power." Earlier in the film, Warwick University "science studies" sociologist Steve Fuller archly poses the question: Which comes first, worldview or evidence? Fuller aims his question at the proponents of evolutionary biology. However, as this dreary film itself makes it painfully clear, the question is far more relevant to the supporters of intelligent design theory.

If ID is all worldview and no evidence, here's something else to ponder. At an April 15 press conference for bloggers held at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., the movie's producers said that they plan to use the movie as part of a campaign to roll out legislation in states—so-called "freedom bills"—that would forbid anyone from "punishing" teachers and professors who question "Darwinism." Walt Ruloff noted that the science standards of about 26 states are currently in play and that Florida was likely to pass such a "freedom bill."

Asked if the movie's makers expected any friendly interest from scientific journals, Ruloff noted that Scientific American had savaged Expelled, adding, "I would expect that any other 'science rag' would do exactly the same thing."

"What's happening here is politics," lamented the film's star, Ben Stein, at Heritage. "Politics in the halls of science and that needs to be stopped."

I couldn't agree more.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His most recent book, Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution, is available from Prometheus Books.

New ONDCP Message: Don't Smoke Pot Too Much

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 11:55:00 EDT

The Office of National Drug Control Policy has a new, mildly amusing anti-pot website featuring a faux documentary called Stoners in the Mist (parts of which, I assume, will also be featured in anti-drug PSAs). Although the jokes are mostly ripped off from Cheech & Chong and such pothead-depicting movies as Fast Times at Ridgemont High, I suppose I prefer this soft-sell approach to the ads accusing pot smokers of funding terrorism or initimating that it's only a matter of time before they accidentally run over a little girl or blow a friend's head off. Then again, people might be more receptive to subtler lies in an entertaining package, in which case the better propaganda is actually worse.

The mockumentary and the material accompanying it include many misrepresentations (see if you can spot them all!), but the most fundamental one is the conflation of pot smokers with stoners, which is rather like treating all drinkers as drunks. No doubt people who spend most of their lives stoned do have difficulty accomplishing things, relating to others, carrying on conversations, and catching basketballs. This is the grain of truth at the center of the pothead humor from which Stoners in the Mist borrows so shamelessly. But the traditional portrayals are usually gentle, even affectionate, and are especially popular among people who like to smoke pot, who recognize both the realistic aspects and the comic exaggeration. I doubt there are many people who decide to stop smoking weed (or never to try it) after watching Dude, Where's My Car? or Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. By contrast, although Stoners in the Mist resembles a sketch from a weak episode of Chapelle's Show, the ONDCP's intended message is that all pot smokers are losers. In a country where about half the population admits to trying marijuana before graduating high school, and a substantial majority surely knows at least a few pot smokers pretty well by then, who is going to believe this message? Probably only the teenagers who were not inclined to smoke pot in the first place.

Charlton Heston, RIP

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 19:31:00 EDT

Yes, we're late to the wake, but it's important to note that the giant chest of American post-war cinema is no more. Cue former reasoner and current abs-ophile Tim Cavanaugh:

I'd like to stand up for the trilogy of dystopian science fiction of which Planet of the Apes is merely the first part. The New York Times doesn't even mention Soylent Green or The Omega Man in its obit, and our own coverage is pretty dismissive of both. (Planet of the Apes is now canonical enough that highbrows belittle it at their own risk.) I'd argue that both those movies are touched by greatness and live on for, if nothing else, the insights they provide into the culture of their time.
The Omega Man -- which opens with Heston tooling around an empty, post-apocalyptic Los Angeles (the city where the world was meant to end, god damn it!) and, in a brilliant touch, watching, over and over again, the only movie still playing, Woodstock -- is as full an examination of the relationship between the establishment and the counterculture as any film of its time. It's an olive branch from Heston to the hippies, with the hero repulsed, fascinated and ultimately in love with the groovy kids he recognizes as the only future for mankind. Who else but Heston could have been at the same time hip enough and square enough to share a hot makeout scene with the late Rosalind Cash, and have that actually mean something? That Anthony Zerbe's black-robed zombie inquisitioner puts a face of intolerance and anti-reason onto the rhetoric of progress ("Put away the old ways, brother, all the old hatreds") just shows that even when Heston put a hand out to the flower children, he did so recognizing that they shared a common enemy in unreason.
Then there's Soylent Green, which has suffered mightily from partial recognition. Everybody knows the film's hokey last-act revelation, but hardly anybody appreciates the sense of exhaustion, world-weariness and dismay at modernity that endures long after the movie's warning about overpopulation has failed to meet expectations. Heston, who could always play a great ennui-filled cynic, is crucial to making that work. In addition to a chilling opening-credit sequence, the film offers Heston and Edward G. Robinson in an emotional death scene that manages to be bizarre, disturbing, sarcastic and moving all at once.

Whole thing here.

Aye, but what of his politics? (Which, during my half-asleep consumption of NPR this morning I heard described along the lines of "Charlton Heston was a great actor, but later in life grew more and more conservative.")

Well, luckily for you we have a reason interview with Moses himself from April 1987. A taste:

reason: [Jefferson's] philosophy that "that government is best which governs least" -- are you sympathetic with that?
Heston: Oh, I'll sign that any day. There's no question that one of the most pernicious effects of modern society is the seeming impossibility of reversing the tendency of government to get bigger. It has under every administration, I guess, in the history of the Republic -- certainly in this century. And despite all the protestations and brave assertions that if I'm elected we will cut big government, which has been included in the platforms of most men who ran for the presidency in the last 30 or 40 years, it doesn't stop.
reason: Even Ronald Reagan doesn't seem to have made much headway.
Heston: No. No one has had an appreciable effect, even to slow it a little bit. It just goes on growing. And it is terribly wasteful. It's not just the money it costs. It's the wasted manpower, and it renders governnment clumsy and unresponsive. [...]
reason: [Martin Luther] King has been deified by progressives as well as the federal government, with the holiday, while on the right, people like Jesse Helms seem to think that he was a Communist dupe or something.
Heston: I question that. He was not a saint. He was a man, even like Moses was a man. He was a charismatic and effective leader who recognized the importance and the capacity for nonviolence to succeed. Even men who knew him then, like Jesse Jackson, have not recognized them.
reason: Are you a disciple of nonviolence?
Heston: No. [...]
reason: The public perception of you politically is that you are...
Heston: A registered Fascist.
reason: Are you comfortable with the label "conservative"?
Heston: Yes. Particularly in both its general political meaning and the literal meaning, "to save."
reason: Although there are some things that aren't worth preserving -- segregation laws, things like that.
Heston: Yes, indeed.

The Upside of Seeing Financial Institutions Face a Crisis

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 08:00:00 EDT

It's as good an excuse as any to link to the long-lost ending of It's a Wonderful Life.

You've Got an Old-Fashioned Idea Copyright Is Something That Lasts Forever

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 11:58:00 EDT

Today His Girl Friday is rightly revered as a screwball classic. But the movie didn't make a major splash when it came out in 1940, and even when critics began to take a serious look at director Howard Hawks' career in the '50s and '60s it didn't attract much notice.

Then something important happened. Film scholar David Bordwell explains:

Columbia Pictures failed to renew its copyright, and His Girl Friday fell into the public domain.

Entrepreneurs made dupe copies, in quality ranging from okay to terrible. You could rent one for peanuts and buy one for only a little more. Some of these bleary prints have been telecined and turned into the DVD versions of the film that fill bargain bins today....

Most important of all, TV stations were screening their bootleg prints. HGF didn't become a perennial like that other public domain classic It's a Wonderful Life, but its reputation rose....

Once HGF became famous, the proliferation of shoddy prints became an embarrassment. In 1993 it was inducted into the National Film Registry, which gave it priority for Library of Congress preservation. Columbia managed to copyright a new version of the film. A handsomely restored version was released on DVD, and a few years back I saw a 35mm copy whose sparkling beauty takes your breath away.

The lesson that sticks with me is this. If Columbia had renewed its copyright on schedule, would this film be so widely admired today? Scholars and the public discovered a masterpiece because they had virtually untrammeled access to it, and perhaps its gray-market status supplied an extra thrill.

Something to remember the next time the issue of extended copyright terms comes up. Copyright owners aren't the only people who respond to incentives and opportunities.

[Via Jason Mittell.]

Keep Your Mouth Shut and Your Eyes Open

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 09:06:00 EDT

With the caveat that I am not the world's biggest fan of political Road to Damascus confessionals (on the theory that anyone younger than 95 years old who was ever a Trotskyist, let alone a Maoist, just should not be preaching to me about political judgment), this David Mamet mea culpa is pretty entertaining, and not only because he's going libertarian on us. A selection:

I wrote a play about politics (November, Barrymore Theater, Broadway, some seats still available). And as part of the "writing process," as I believe it's called, I started thinking about politics. [...]
[My play is] about the polemic between persons of two opposing views. The argument in my play is between a president who is self-interested, corrupt, suborned, and realistic, and his leftish, lesbian, utopian-socialist speechwriter.
The play, while being a laugh a minute, is, when it's at home, a disputation between reason and faith, or perhaps between the conservative (or tragic) view and the liberal (or perfectionist) view. The conservative president in the piece holds that people are each out to make a living, and the best way for government to facilitate that is to stay out of the way, as the inevitable abuses and failures of this system (free-market economics) are less than those of government intervention.
I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.

Whole thing here. Maybe it was all that time in Santa Monica.

Stuff I've Been Meaning to Blog

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 14:26:00 EST

From Nicholson Baker, one of the best essays I've read about Wikipedia.

Wired on the autistic pride movement.

A sequel to Stop Snitching.

Plagiarism in the world of online dating.

"Kremlin hawks feed conspiracy theories with 3,200 white mice."

Evidence Suggests That Violating Disney Copyrights Leads to Genocide

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 10:35:00 EST

The Telegraph reports:

The director of a Norwegian museum claimed yesterday to have discovered cartoons drawn by Adolf Hitler during the Second World War.

William Hakvaag, the director of a war museum in northern Norway, said he found the drawings hidden in a painting signed "A. Hitler" that he bought at an auction in Germany.

He found coloured cartoons of the characters Bashful and Doc from the 1937 Disney film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which were signed A.H., and an unsigned sketch of Pinocchio as he appeared in the 1940 Disney film.

Hitler tried to make a living as an artist before his rise to power. While there was no independent confirmation yesterday that the drawings were the work of the Nazi leader, Hitler is known to have owned a copy of Snow White, the classic animated adaptation of a German fairy tale, and to have viewed it in his private cinema.

I'm extremely skeptical, but what the hell: Here are the drawings attributed to the Fuehrer:

Note that there are no sketches of Mickey Mouse. In 1931, a Nazi organ declared, "Youth, where is your self-esteem? Mickey Mouse is the most shabby, miserable ideal ever conceived....Healthy feeling by itself should actually tell every decent girl and every honest boy that the dirty and filth-covered vermin, the greatest bacteria carrier in the animal kingdom, cannot be the ideal type of animal. Don't we have anything better to do, than to decorate our dress with the filthy animal, because American business Jews want to profit?...Throw out the vermin! Down with Mickey Mouse, wear the Swastika cross!"

Oscar Roundup '08: Was There Blood?

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 00:03:00 EST

From Sunday's Baltimore Sun:

[U]ntil the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers settled their differences, it didn't matter how many times the Oscar folks assured everyone they had plans to meet any contingency. It didn't matter how many billboards went up along the freeways promoting Oscar as "The One. The Only." It didn't matter that streets around the Kodak Theatre were still scheduled to be closed the week leading up to today's ceremony.

What mattered was that the writers were on strike, which meant they wouldn't be around to craft all the show's witty banter.

In other words: The biggest winners this year were the writers, who were nearly shown up as superfluous. Without that tedious "witty" "banter," we would have had the most watchable Oscar night in years. Except, of course, for the songs and montages.

As for the awards themselves...I have a toddler, which means I don't usually see movies until they come out on DVD. So I haven't actually watched any of this year's Best Picture nominees. But I'll give a tentative cheer for the fact that the Academy chose to honor the film that seems most likely to be good.

Rodney King's Children

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 15:00:00 EST

Over the last few years, a brave group of Arab activists has circulated footage of Egyptian cops striking, lashing, and even raping detainees. The torture videos, which had been filmed by the policemen themselves, prompted protests both inside and outside the country. They also prompted censorship: YouTube temporarily shut down the dissident blogger Wael Abbas' digital video channel after the company received complaints about the violent clips.

The channel can now be viewed on YouTube again. Much of its footage can also be seen on a website called The Hub, which is what YouTube would look like if it had been designed by Mohandas Gandhi. The site first appeared in pilot form in 2006, and a beta version launched in December 2007; over 500 pieces of media—videos, audio clips, photo slideshows—have been uploaded to it since its debut. The offerings range from raw footage of a massacre in Guinea to a detailed documentary about forced labor in rural Brazil. Most are accompanied by further information on the issues examined and on ways to take action against the abuses.

The site was created by Witness, a Brooklyn-based group founded by the pop star Peter Gabriel in 1992. Conceived in the wake of the Rodney King beating, the group first focused on getting cameras into the hands of human rights groups around the world and then on training them in the most effective ways to use those tools—creating, in Gabriel's phrase, a network of "Little Brothers and Little Sisters" to keep an eye on Big Brother's agents. Now Witness wants to move that community of camera-wielding activists online.

Gabriel serves as the group's celebrity face and as chairman of the board, but he stays out of the organization's day-to-day operations. Those decisions are made by people like program manager Sam Gregory. A human rights activist since he first joined Amnesty International in his teens, the U.K.-born Gregory became a student filmmaker at college, where he "was always trying to find a way to combine" his two interests. In addition to his managerial work, Gregory, 33, has co-produced videos about human rights issues in Burma, the Philippines, Argentina, Indonesia, and the United States.

Managing Editor Jesse Walker met Gregory at the DIY Video Summit at the University of Southern California, where Gregory gave a presentation about The Hub; Walker interviewed him via phone in mid-February.

reason: How did Witness get started?

Sam Gregory: Peter Gabriel had been traveling the world with the Amnesty human rights tour in the late '80s. He repeatedly encountered activists who were saying, "We've experienced this abuse, we've heard these stories of abuses, and we have no ways of responding." He had been carrying a Hi-8 camera with him, and it struck him that if those activists had access to cameras they would be able to document what was happening around them and share it in a way that would be totally different from the typical text-based approach.

The Rodney King incident brought that idea home. You had this example of an amateur, George Holliday, on the balcony of his apartment filming a graphic instance of abuse and receiving massive news coverage. That gave the impetus to start the organization. What we learned over the first four or five years was that the promise that Rodney King represented couldn't be realized just by providing cameras to human rights groups. In the absence of technical training, they couldn't produce video that would be used by news organizations and they couldn't craft the stories that would engage audiences.

We also found it was challenging to reach the right audiences. For example, it's very hard for most human rights activists to get mass media coverage. Their issues are either censored by their governments or not considered newsworthy or are hard to represent in just a single snapshot—they're more structural or deeper than just a single image of, say, police brutality. Similarly, trying to use the video as evidence did not work. It's challenging to get it into court, and the Rodney King experience taught us that video evidence can be turned either way—in the Rodney King case, used in the defense as well as the prosecution of LAPD officers.

reason: Were there any notable successes in that first period?

Gregory: There was footage that got into the news media, but it wasn't a successful period in terms of creating real change. I'm trying to think of what was especially effective in those first few years. I'm actually hard pressed to put my finger on an example.

So we learned to think more strategically about what kind of training you provided to groups, how you helped them tell stories, and, most importantly, where you tried to place that material. We train them to develop something called a video action plan, which is essentially a strategic communications plan around video. They'll say, for example, "We're trying to persuade this UN committee to recognize that the government is not reporting the whole story on this issue." And we'll say, "This is how you might think about crafting videos so you'll be able to persuade that committee of the truth of your side of the story." Or they might be doing community organizing—to give a concrete example—around child soldiers in eastern Congo. They faced a problem in terms of persuading parents not to let their children be voluntarily recruited. They needed to find a way to show the impact on the children and present a range of voices explaining the damage without pointing the finger at the parents so they just feel guilty, but instead giving them an option to find alternatives for their children.

reason: How do you get the video in front of those parents? I assume this stuff isn't aired on Congolese TV.

Gregory: The idea at the root of our work is that the voices that need to be heard are the ones closest to the violations. It's not a centralized vision, and all our work derives from the agency of those locally based human rights groups. At any given time we're working with around 13 groups around the world—our core partners—on a range of issues. They'll come to us with a campaign and a strategy that they already have in place.

The group in the Congo, a group called Ajedi-ka, was already doing village meetings all around this area affected by voluntary recruitment. What they were doing with the video is bringing it into that setting: They're bringing a TV, they're bringing a generator, literally just carrying it there.

In other settings you take a different approach. In a high-tech setting, you might carry a video around on an iPod. On Capitol Hill we'll get a screen up and do a much more traditional showing. But the root of it is always the human rights groups themselves thinking about how to use it as a tool to complement what they've done before, and not assuming that video is a magic bullet that will get people to react. It has to be within this context of options for people to take action.

reason: How do you train the people?

Gregory: We train them initially around how to film. We're not trying to make human rights workers into filmmakers, but we give them the tools to be mediamakers within their work. It's media literacy: Just as they can write a written report, they should be able to pull out a camera and film. Alongside that we develop this video action plan.

Usually there's a process after that where we receive footage from them and we provide feedback. We'll say everything from "Maybe you should put that person a little bit to the right in the frame" to "Have you thought about whether you're getting the right testimonies in order to persuade the audience you want to reach?" Typically, at least in the first instance, groups will come to Witness to edit. We do that partly so they can tap into a range of experiences here. In a lot of the relationships, as time moves on, we train them how to edit on their own. So, for example, a group we've work ed with on the Thai-Burma border that secretly travels into Burma to document atrocities there—they produce all their videos in the villages on the border. At this point we're really just a strategic consultant to them.

reason: Did you have any notable successes during that period after you rethought your approach and before you launched The Hub?

Gregory: I would highlight Ajedi-ka. We worked with them first on that campaign around child soldiers, and they've seen a decline in voluntary recruitment in communities where they've been doing work. They then identified a need to reach a completely different audience, to communicate with people at the International Criminal Court, which was making a decision about what to investigate in the Congo. We worked with them to develop a video that spoke to the impact on children of being involved in conflict. The organization did private screenings with senior members of the International Criminal Court, and that helped push the court to prioritize that issue. The first arrest warrant they issued in their investigation was for a warlord, and it was specifically on the child soldier issue.

Another example is in Mexico, where a group called Comisión Mexicana has been looking at murders of young women in Ciudad Juarez. You've had this pattern of murders of young women, failures by the local police to investigate, and choices to arrest and torture scapegoats. We worked on a video that found a very powerful individual story that spoke to the broader pattern. It was the story of a young woman who disappeared shortly before she was due to go to university. She's never been found, but the police two weeks later arrested her uncle, accused him of the murder, and tortured him into confessing. So this one story wrapped together both the murders and the abuse of power.

They used this video to lobby Congress here in the U.S. but also showed it to the attorney general's office in Mexico and to local politicians there, and as a result of that the young man who had been arrested was released.

reason: What were they lobbying for in Congress?

Gregory: They were lobbying for a House statement that Mexico should do more to investigate these murders. I wouldn't place much emphasis on that, but you can use it in human rights advocacy. For example, recently we've done a lot of screenings around Burma with the Congressional Human Rights Caucus in D.C.—again, trying to bring those voices of people driven from their villages directly into a committee room in Washington. You can sometimes see the boomerang effect of that.

reason: What did you think of the way the Burmese atrocity footage was used at the beginning of the new Rambo movie?

Gregory: The people we work with inside Burma are tremendously excited that the Rambo movie came out, because it's another way of focusing attention on the crisis. I think it was effective. I have some concerns about how you then go into, essentially, a Hollywood revenge fantasy. But I think it was important that people knew that this was a real situation, and I think it is important to think about how this accesses other audiences that might not know about Burma.

reason: Most of the examples that you've given so far have involved one form or another of narrowcasting. Do you still make an effort to get something out to a mass audience like that?

Gregory: We absolutely do think about how you reach out to a broader audience. In fact, some of our footage appeared in the opening credits of Rambo.

We try to build media attention when we think it's complementary to the advocacy goals. We don't assume that media attention will work. The experience of many of the groups that we've worked with is that the way they're represented in the media doesn't represent either them or their communities well and can be counterproductive. So we try to find opportunities where we can help navigate how it's covered and retain the advocates' point of view. Certainly with The Hub we're thinking about how the media gets access to a broader range of grassroots footage.

reason: How do you police the clips on The Hub for accuracy?

Gregory: We don't police heavily. We made a decision early on that we cannot guarantee the accuracy of every clip. But when we look at clips, we look for red flags, such as someone being exposed to a risk by being seen, or graphic sexual violence that's not in a human rights context. If it's something we're not sure about, we'll try to contact the user who uploaded it and ask more questions. If there's a big question mark in our minds we won't upload it.

We're trying to move to a more community-based model of assessing human rights footage. We've seen success in a number of instances. There was a case from the Ivory Coast where collective intelligence helped identify falsification of footage around a shooting of civilians there.

reason: But nothing goes up until you've approved it. It's not like YouTube.

Gregory: At the moment, nothing goes up until we've approved it. In the long run, I think we'd like to move to a situation where more material can go directly up. We'd like to trust more to the community to assess that material, but right now we've got to build that community.

reason: What are some of the other differences between what you do and YouTube?

Gregory: One key area is the issue of security. We are very aware that people may be uploading from situations where the government is watching the Internet and there may be potential repression. So when someone tries to upload to the site they're given an indication of the security risks. We provide ways to upload safely and securely. Once they upload, we don't hold onto their IP address, so if someone tries to obtain that information either legally or illegally we are unable to identify where users are based.

Another element is editorial control. We're trying to tap into a participatory community of human rights activists rather than leave it in the hands of a corporation. That's an important difference.

Another element is that the pages are designed to provide space to contextualize and act around the footage. We're building a number of advocacy options into the site, so people can find ways to generate online or offline action. If you look at the Shoot on Sight clip from Burma, for example, the video itself is quite self-contained, but the underlining material gives more information, gives the statistics, gives more background about what's been happening, and gives ways to act.

One of the functionalities that will launch shortly is an ability to download the clips, so people can use them in the kind of offline settings that are particularly common outside the global North. Perhaps there's only one connection to the Internet, so what you want to do is download it and take it into a communal setting.

We're definitely encouraging people to port the media out. We want them to share it, to embed it in their blogs, and to take it offline, in a community setting or on a mobile phone.

reason: Are there projects outside of Witness that have influenced what you're doing?

Gregory: I think the Amnesty International Unsubscribe Me campaign, which shows six minutes of someone going through a stress position, is an interesting one to look at, in terms of how you use the vaudevillian characteristics of something like YouTube and turn it around for human rights purposes.

reason: The definition of human rights activism gets kind of hazy around the edges sometimes, and you'll often see groups with very broad political agendas. There are also times when people in different parts of the community have had very different ideas about, say, whether to call for military intervention. Do you accept clips from groups with different analyses? How do you deal with those tensions?

Gregory: We don't have any particular focus in terms of human rights issues. We define human rights very inclusively, so we include economic, social, cultural, political, and civil rights. We wouldn't typically take two core partners that have dueling perspectives, but we're open to groups that are on the edge and leading. We worked, for example, with the Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan under the Taliban when they were definitely not the mainstream of human rights activism there. We don't necessarily go for the middle-of-the-road groups.

In the context of The Hub, there's a clear set of community guidelines in terms of how people should act on the site. So advocating violence or posting hate speech or slurs will violate the terms. But we don't legislate a particular point of view, and in fact we encourage different points of view on how to address human rights violations.

We also, in some cases, will contextualize clips that have a public service value, even though they may be a piece of hate speech. If we were to receive footage similar to, say, the incitement to violence by the Rwandan government during the Rwandan genocide, I think there would be a strong reason to feature that on The Hub, but then to put a comment around it. So there is a place where we might editorialize, to explain why something is there.

reason: How does the site deal with informed consent?

Gregory: The overall framework we've set is to think about informed consent in a victim- and survivor-focused model. That means making sure that someone who is filmed is doing it voluntarily, that they understand the risks, that they understand how it's going to be used, and that they're competent to agree, so it's not someone who for reasons of mental disability or age or trauma is incapable of making an appropriate decision. Often oppressive governments will hunt down people who are featured in human rights material. People should be aware of the risks, and they should be aware that any piece of media, once it's out there, can be seen by their worst enemy.

We recognize that we can't impose that standard on people uploading to The Hub. So we emphasize that people shouldn't just think about consent as something legalistic. It's not a legal question whether someone in Burma is filmed and faces risk. They're never going to sue you. You should think about it in a much deeper way that centers on the safety and security of the person filmed as much as the person filming.

reason: The site includes clips of beatings in Egypt that were filmed by Egyptian police officers themselves. How often does that kind of footage appear on the site?

Gregory: There's quite a lot of it. One piece of footage that surfaced in the pilot project was something that became known as squatgate. Police officers in Malaysia used a cell phone to film the humiliation of a young woman who had been arrested. They forced her to strip and to squat in a jail cell. Similar to the Egyptian footage, that escaped from the closed circle of police officers sharing it among themselves and sparked a national outcry in Malaysia around police misconduct.

reason: Do you worry about consent issues in that context?

Gregory: We do. In fact, with the Egypt videos, we made a decision not to show the most grotesque of them, which included the sodomization of one of the detainees. And in the squatgate example we decided not to post that video because it had been seen so widely, and the woman involved specifically requested to me, "Please don't circulate this anymore."

In the case of the Egyptian footage, the people involved said they really wanted people to know about what was happening. When we can get that kind of cue from the people in the material, that helps.

reason: What other approaches have the clips taken?

Gregory: One of the primary modes is witness journalism. Clips filmed by the right people in the wrong place. We have a clip, for example, from a group in Cambodia that is recording forced evictions in Phnom Penh.

Another genre is advocacy videos—videos that speak to a particular audience and push for a particular change in policy, behavior, or practice. Most of the videos from Witness are in that mode, including the videos I talked about from the Congo.

And I think there's a third kind of video: more traditional documentaries that follow a story in a human rights context but don't necessarily have an explicit call for action. It sort of splits into two. For example, we have footage from Al Jazeera on The Hub. So that's a news story. And there's a video that explains the history of West Papua under Indonesian control. That's more of a documentary.

The important elements for us are to go beyond a space where footage is viewed to think about how you create a human rights community around it and how you turn that visual media into action. It's not OK just to see scenes of misery. In fact it can be deeply draining and frustrating both for the people creating it and the people watching it. You have to think about ways to contextualize and ways to act.

Discuss this story at reason's Hit & Run blog.

Was Lee J. Cobb Right?

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 09:59:00 EST

Writing in The Spectator, Leo McKinstry argues that the defendant in 12 Angry Men was clearly guilty and that "The self-righteous [Henry] Fonda character twists every piece of evidence, and stretches the term 'reasonable doubt' beyond any logical breaking-point." Blogger ~~Matt Sinclair~~ Tiberius Gracchi replies with a passionate defense of Fonda, the film, and trial by jury. The Volokh Conspirators weigh in as well, with Orin Kerr pointing out that the author of the original play was "deliberately...unclear" about the guilt or innocence of the accused. (No one brings up the feminist angle: Why were there no women on the jury?)

If you haven't seen the movie or play, here's a condensed version:

The Ghost of Rambo

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 12:42:00 EST

(Editor's Note: The following article about the Rambo series contains spoilers.)

Twenty years after he last sprayed bullets across America's movie screens, John Rambo has returned in Rambo, a 93-minute feature in which Sylvester Stallone's bulky soldier wields a bow, a machine gun, and his muscle-bound, 215-pound body against another army of foreign villains. If you're rolling your eyes, you're not alone: According to Rotten Tomatoes, just 38 percent of the new film's reviews have been favorable, with its critics deploying such phrases as "torture porn," "jingoistic imperialism," and "the Schindler's List of B-list butchery."

For the most part I'll have to join in the jeers. This is basically a paint-by-numbers action picture that has almost as little to say as its laconic protagonist. But I can't dismiss the Rambo franchise entirely, and even this entry shows a brief glimmer of something thoughtful beneath the monosyllabic grunts and the CGI gore.

There are three things people forget about the Rambo series. One is the original book. Before there were any Rambo movies, there was a novel called First Blood, written by a young John Barth scholar named David Morrell and published in 1972. It's about a Green Beret called Rambo—the name was inspired partly by Rambo apples and partly by the French poet Arthur Rimbaud—who has come home from Vietnam and is tramping across America. It's also about a sheriff named Will Teasle, who doesn't want the long-haired, unshaven kid bringing trouble to his corner of Kentucky. Their conflict builds until it engulfs the entire town, with countless meaningless deaths. The book is told alternately from both characters' point of view, switching back and forth until their identities essentially merge. In the end they both die.

It isn't immortal literature, but it's an intelligent thriller. It was even occasionally assigned as classroom reading, though "by the mid-eighties," Morrell later wrote, "the controversy generated by the films had caused teachers to shy away from the book." Morrell's Rambo is more loquacious than Stallone's. He is also more of a cold-blooded killer, picking off policemen who pose no real threat and enjoying the thrill of battle. He's one of the first manifestations of what would become a pop-culture archetype: the deeply damaged Vietnam veteran who can't adjust to the home front and snaps. In real life, Americans who survived that war have been more likely to be married, college-educated, and gainfully employed than other members of their generation. But in the media, they were often portrayed as time bombs waiting to explode.

You can't blame Morrell for that. His Rambo is a well-rounded character with his own motives for what he does, not a cookie-cutter copy of a movie cliché. Morrell meant his story as a metaphor for the culture war breaking out at home while another war raged in Southeast Asia. "The final confrontation between Rambo and Teasle," he wrote, "would show that in this microcosmic version of the Vietnam War and American attitudes about it, escalating force results in disaster. Nobody wins."

When First Blood became a movie in 1982, both the story and the metaphor changed. Rambo became more sympathetic: He kills only once in the film, a slaying that is both accidental and in self-defense. Teasle, in turn, grew less appealing: Brian Dennehy's textured performance keeps him from being entirely one-dimensional, but he's still a redneck sheriff pointlessly persecuting a war hero. His officers mistreat the man in jail, and the film compares their abuses directly to the torture the soldier received as a prisoner of war. It's clear that Rambo is a little crazy—by the end of the movie, he's more than a little crazy—but it's also clear that the viewers are supposed to root for him. "My intent was to transpose the Vietnam war to America," Morrell complained. "In contrast, the film's intent was to make the audience cheer for the underdog."

But there was more to the movie than that. That's the second thing people forget about the Rambo series: The first installment is explicitly anti-war and surprisingly radical.

The film opens with Rambo learning that one of his war buddies has died of exposure to Agent Orange. Right after that, when the sheriff starts to harass the soldier, Teasle tells him that "wearing that flag on that jacket, and looking the way you do, you're asking for trouble around here." The reference to the flag seems to signify an intolerance toward veterans, but the second clause implies that Teasle doesn't like Rambo because of his appearance—i.e., because he looks like a hippie drifter. When the sheriff's men finally find out that Rambo is a Green Beret who served in Vietnam, one of them exclaims, "Jesus! That freak?"

This identification of Rambo with the counterculture is a residue of Morrell's novel, which was partly inspired by a news report. "In a southwestern American town," Morrell writes, "a group of hitchhiking hippies had been picked up by the local police, stripped, hosed, and shaved—not just their beards but their hair. The hippies had then been given back their clothes and driven to a desert road, where they were abandoned to walk to the next town, thirty miles away....I wondered what Rambo's reaction would be if, after risking his life in the service of his country, he were subjected to the insults that those hippies had received."

The most jarring thing about the movie's politics comes later. Everyone remembers Rambo's much-quoted soliloquy at the end of the film, the one where he complains about "maggots at the airport, protesting me, spitting on me, calling me a baby-killer." What isn't quoted as often is a conversation between Teasle and Col. Trautman, the Special Forces officer who trained Rambo. Trautman, played by Richard Crenna, describes his student's immense skills as a fighter, and he suggests the police should defuse the situation by letting Rambo escape, waiting a few days, then putting out a nationwide APB and picking him up later. Teasle refuses.

Trautman: You want a war you can't win?
Teasle: Are you telling me that 200 men against your boy is a no-win situation for us?
Trautman: You send that many, don't forget one thing.
Teasle: What?
Trautman: Plenty of body bags.

A small but committed guerilla force humiliating a larger power that doesn't comprehend the fight it's in—the comparison to Vietnam is obvious. It's also a little discomfiting, because it puts Rambo in the role of the Viet Cong. Morrell was wrong: The movie did transpose the Vietnam war to America. It just did it in a radically different way than the book did, and with radically different implications. It asks the audience to cheer for a guerilla hero.

This was surprisingly common in the allegedly right-wing cult movies of the '80s. Consider John Milius' Red Dawn (1984), in which a small group of Colorado high school jocks battle a Soviet occupation. The film outraged liberal critics, but further to the left it had some supporters. In a witty and perceptive piece for The Nation, Andrew Kopkind called it "the most convincing story about popular resistance to imperial oppression since the inimitable Battle of Algiers," adding that he'd "take the Wolverines from Colorado over a small circle of friends from Harvard Square in any revolutionary situation I can imagine." The one sympathetic character among the occupying forces is a Cuban colonel with a background in guerilla warfare. At one point he tells a Russian officer, voice dripping with disgust, that he used to be an insurgent but now is "just like you—a policeman." Increasingly sympathetic to the Coloradoan rebels, at a key moment the Cuban allows two of them to escape.

First Blood drew from the same water, and from several other genres as well: the redneck movie, the revenge movie, the war film, the western. One sequence, when the sheriff's men track the fugitive soldier through the woods only to discover that he's hunting them rather than the other way around, feels like a slasher flick, with Rambo in the Jason/Freddy/Michael Myers role. The difference—and it's a substantial one—is that unlike the villains of Friday the 13th and Halloween, Rambo has the audience's sympathy. In that, he's more like the monster in Universal's old Frankenstein series. Frankenstein was, in fact, one of the inspirations for the script: According to the feminist writer Susan Faludi, who interviewed several people involved in the Rambo sequence for her 1999 book Stiffed, Stallone "envisioned the drama 'like the Frankenstein monster and the creator,' a creator who 'understood what he made' and 'felt guilty' for it." (Stallone's role in creating the Hollywood Rambo cannot be underestimated. He co-wrote all four films and directed at least one, perhaps two of them—George P. Cosmatos, credited as director of First Blood Part 2, was reportedly a figurehead.)

First Blood ends with a confrontation between Rambo, the sympathetic monster, and Col. Trautman, his creator. As originally shot, it concluded with Stallone's character committing suicide, but test audiences hated to see their hero die. So the filmmakers changed the ending. The veteran was sent to prison instead, and a series of sequels became possible.

Like the monster emerging from the pit beneath the burning mill at the beginning of Bride of Frankenstein, 1985's Rambo: First Blood Part 2 starts with the title character being freed from a prison "hell-hole." Dangling the possibility of a pardon, Trautman asks if Rambo is willing to go on a covert reconnaissance mission to find MIAs in communist Vietnam. Rambo accepts with just one question: "Do we get to win this time?"

So begins the movie everyone remembers; or, rather, the movie everyone thinks they remember. If Stallone's speech about the mistreated vet serves as a screen memory that conceals the more radical implications of the first Rambo picture, then the hype and hysteria around the follow-up film has done something similar for First Blood Part 2. Yes, it's an ultraviolent story about a supersoldier refighting the Vietnam war. Yes, it implies that we could have won Vietnam the first time around if our hands hadn't been tied by liberals back home. Yes, Ronald Reagan co-opted it, joking at the end of one hostage crisis that "After seeing Rambo last night, I know what to do the next time this happens." The word "Rambo" entered the language, in phrases like "Rambo foreign policy." Some veterans picketed the picture. One vet—Gustav Hasford, author of the book that became Full Metal Jacket—called it "Triumph of the Will for American Nazis."

All of which makes it easy to forget that this movie is as cynical about the government as any 1970s conspiracy thriller. Indeed, the POW/MIA rescue genre evolved directly from those post-Watergate pictures. The transition film was Ted Post's Good Guys Wear Black (1978), which begins by sending Chuck Norris on an ill-fated effort to free some prisoners of war; the rest of the picture is a poor man's Parallax View, with Norris and Anne Archer tracking down the conspiracy that sabotaged the mission. In First Blood Part 2, likewise, we learn that Rambo was never supposed to find any prisoners; he rescues them only by ditching the authorities' plan and setting off on his own. (I haven't read Morrell's novelization of the film, but it apparently includes a scene in which Rambo chuckles darkly as he informs the disbelieving POWs that Ronald Reagan has become president. He "couldn't bring himself to tell them that Vietnam was about to change its name to Nicaragua.") In the movie's climax, Rambo returns to the computerized command center and pumps pounds of ammo into its alienating array of machinery. It's a violent, cathartic revision of an old '60s slogan. I am a soldier. Do not fold, bend, spindle, or mutilate me.

Like the previous picture in the series, First Blood Part 2 owed a lot to the western. But where the first film resembles those existential stories where a stranger enters a corrupt frontier town, Part 2 is about a cowboy who rides deep into the wilderness to save white captives from savage Indians. Complicating the racial dynamics, Rambo is now a identified as a halfbreed, part civilized and part wild: We learn that he's half Native American himself (his other half—paging Gustav Hasford!—is German), and he has a brief affair with a Vietnamese woman. But you can still trace the core plot to the Indian captivity narratives that first flourished in 17th-century New England, and which have manifested themselves in the American imagination countless times since then.

The movie may have had a more recent antecedent as well. In the late 1970s, a self-promoting soldier named Bo Gritz staged several unsuccessful efforts to rescue American POWs from Vietnam. It is often claimed that Gritz's exploits helped inspire First Blood Part 2. Whether or not that's true, the movie certainly had an impact on Gritz, who started to bill himself as the "real-life Rambo" after the film became a hit. If you take that literally, you can chart two illuminating courses from the movie.

First we have Hollywood Rambo. He appears in another picture, 1988's Rambo III, in which he fights alongside the mujahadeen in Afghanistan. It's another bringing-Vietnam-home film, but this time Stallone is bringing it home to the Soviets. (In this one Col. Trautman—the same man who warned Sheriff Teasle about those body bags—informs the Russians, "This war is your Vietnam, man. You can't win!") Hollywood Rambo also gets his own TV cartoon (Rambo and the Forces of Freedom) in which he works for a military peacekeeping unit and battles a global brotherhood called S.A.V.A.G.E. There are Rambo video games, Rambo action figures. This is the Rambo of the "Rambo foreign policy," the Rambo of popular memory; it is invoked by both the fans and the foes of Reagan's bombing raid over Libya and Oliver North's illicit efforts to aid the Nicaraguan contras.

And then there is Real-Life Rambo. In the late '80s Gritz continued to build on that suspicious post-Watergate mood, accusing the intelligence community of connections to the drug trade and speaking to audiences of both the radical left and the radical right. In 1992 he ran for president, drawing support from what would soon be known as the militia movement. His core constituency was a bunch of angry patriots, many of them veterans, who said they loved their country but feared their government. Their rallying cry was the confrontation between the Branch Davidians and federal police at Waco, a conflict that was retold in two very different ways. For the authorities and most of the media, it was another version of the captivity narrative, with the ATF and FBI unsuccessfully attempting to rescue children from a sexually depraved death cult. In the alternative story, the police were the villains and the confrontation was a massacre, part My Lai and part Wounded Knee.

Which of those two Rambos prevailed? When the Cold War ended, Sylvester Stallone's movies lost their hold on the culture and decayed into '80s kitsch. But that distrust of the government didn't disappear; if anything, it intensified and crossed what used to be sharp ideological lines. (In the early '90s, it wasn't that unusual to hear left-wing radicals pondering the possibility of a POW coverup—or right-wing radicals touting the powers of hemp.) Since 2001, the balance has tipped back and forth. When the wounds of 9/11 were fresh, the outrage of the heartland populists turned outwards again; since then, the failures of the Iraqi occupation have driven many of them back to an anti-government stance.

And now we have a new Rambo movie, giving Stallone another chance to reflect some segment of that constantly shifting Zeitgeist. An early version of the script pitted his alter ego against a right-wing American paramilitary group—sort of a Rambo vs. Rambo scenario. But the finished product takes us back to Southeast Asia instead.

The fourth film in the Frankenstein series was called The Ghost of Frankenstein. The fourth film in the Rambo franchise is ghostly as well: After an absence of two decades, both the series and its protagonist feel a little undead. When we return to Stallone's character, he is a numb man hunting snakes for a living in Thailand. Vietnam is deep in his past, and the country's fresher wounds don't seem to have touched him—the word "Iraq" appears nowhere in the movie, and neither do "Al Qaeda," "Islam," "9/11," or "bin Laden." The writer/director/actor told Ain't It Cool News that he did this because "the idea of Rambo dealing with Al-Qaeda, etc. would be an insult to our American forces that are actually dying trying to rid the world of this cancer. To have at the end of a 90 minute movie the character of Rambo seizing Osama bin Laden in a choke hold then dragging him into the Oval Office then tossing him in the President's lap declaring 'The world is now safe, Chief' would be a bit insulting." I don't doubt Stallone's sincerity, though World War II-era GIs didn't seem to mind the fact that Superman, Captain America, and the rest were fighting alongside them in the comic books. Personally, I wouldn't have minded seeing some of the Afghan heroes of Rambo III return as villains in Rambo IV, but that might push the franchise into areas that Stallone would rather leave alone.

Instead the action takes place in Burma, where brutal government soldiers have seized a group of missionaries tending to Christian villagers. Rambo sets out to rescue them, arriving just in time to save a young woman—the closest we have to a female lead—from a rape.

In other words, Stallone has returned to the classic Indian captivity narrative. Here's how the historian Richard Slotkin described the archetypal captivity story in his 1973 book Regeneration Through Violence:

a single individual, usually a woman, stands passively under the strokes of evil, awaiting rescue by the grace of God....In the Indian's devilish clutches, the captive had to meet and reject the temptation of Indian marriage and/or the Indian's "cannibal" Eucharist. To partake of the Indian's love or his equivalent of bread and wine was to debase, to un-English the very soul.

That story has appeared in hundreds of guises in the last three centuries. There are movies that intelligently explore the racial and sexual anxieties that underlie the tale. The most famous is John Ford's 1956 film The Searchers, in which the captive woman does not want to leave the Indian community; her would-be rescuer, a complex antihero played by John Wayne, would rather kill her than watch her become an Indian. The new Rambo, by contrast, merely adopts those old anxieties as its own. The lady prisoner is almost comically pure, kind, white, and blonde, while every Asian character except one—a thoroughly westernized mercenary who was obviously raised in the United States—is either a victim or a savage. In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, Slotkin writes, when the original captivity narratives enjoyed their peak of popularity, "It almost seems as if the only experience of intimacy with the Indians that New England readers would accept was the experience of the captive (and possibly that of the missionary)." Rambo gives us both, and little more. It doesn't seem to have anything to say about the country's scars, in Vietnam or in the Middle East. Or rather, it doesn't until the final scene, when Stallone does something unexpected.

The Searchers concludes with John Wayne's character, Ethan Edwards, turning his back on home and hearth and walking into the western landscape, unable to join the civilized world. Stallone's movie inverts that: Rambo returns to civilization, hiking down an Arizona road toward the house where he grew up. In real life, the actor has endorsed the only POW in the presidential race, pro-war Arizona Sen. John McCain. His movie, though, ends on a much less belligerent note. As Rambo strides down a driveway to his family homestead, the film finally says something that resonates in the era of occupation and empire.

Come back from that violent foreign wilderness, it says. Come home.

Jesse Walker is managing editor of reason.

McCain Touts Endorsement of HGH Smuggler

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 18:03:00 EST

That would be Sylvester Stallone. Rolling Stone explains:

...does anyone else find it incongruous that McCain, who has held Senate hearings on steroids in baseball, and just last month shamed the Rocket for his alleged Human Growth Hormone use — “I’m very disappointed with Roger Clemens” — is now locking arms with Sly Stallone?
This is the same Stallone, after all, who was convicted in Australia last May for illegally importing human growth hormone and testosterone into that country — including 48 vials of an HGH drug banned in the U.S.

Rocky's unapologetic about it, too:

"HGH (human growth hormone) is nothing," the 61-year-old actor tells Time magazine in its Feb. 4 issue. "Anyone who calls it a steroid is grossly misinformed."
Because it is nearly undetectable, HGH has become a substance of great concern in major league baseball and other sports battling allegations of rampant doping.
"Testosterone to me is so important for a sense of well-being when you get older," he says. "Everyone over 40 years old would be wise to investigate it because it increases the quality of your life. Mark my words. In 10 years it will be over the counter."

He's right. HGH is a kind of miracle drug, and the fuss over it is silly. Maybe he can talk some sense into McCain.

reason on McCain. reason on steroids. reason on McCain on steroids.

For the Love of Allah

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 09:49:00 EST

Here's one way to disguise your contraband sex flicks:

Algerian police have uncovered a criminal group that made pornographic DVDs and put well-known Islamic preachers on the covers to disguise the films, the Al Shuruk al Yawmi daily reported on Monday.

Police said tens of thousands of copies of the erotic films were sold in the capital, Algiers, and that many customers bought the discs in good faith, innocently unaware of their contents.

"Many" customers, eh?

Elsewhere in Reason: Porn as psychological warfare.