The Books of My Life: Science Fiction in the Cinema

 

John Baxter's Science Fiction in the Cinema (London: Tantivy and New York: Barnes, International Film Guide series, 1970) is a solid early introduction to the role science fiction has played in film from the last decade of the nineteenth-century to the late 1960s. It reflects that hybrid of history, sensitivity to the workings of cinema including its mise-en-scene, and aesthetic criticism that dominated so much 1950s and 1960s European and North American film criticism.

Baxter traces the roots of science fiction in general, with its apocalypticism and allegories, to the mediaeval era. He traces the roots of film science fiction more specifically to the literary science fiction of ideas and to juvenile comic books. Baxter argues that between the late nineteenth century and the late 1960s two issues have been central to science fiction cinema: the fear of technological change and the fear of a loss of individuality. He explores these themes and the character types that emerged in science fiction cinema (monsters and mad scientists, for instance) in certain highlighted films (for example, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Metropolis, Forbidden Planet, The Day the Earth Caught Fire, and the films of Jack Arnold) and, if briefly, in sci fi serials and television in Germany, the US, France, and Japan.

Some might quibble with Baxter's typology of science fiction themes and characters. Some film critics in the postmodernist West might see Baxter's delineation and characteristics of science fiction cinema as to anemic and too back dated. Others might wonder, since the history of horror and science fiction in cinema has a lot of overlap, if it is possible to clearly delineate these two tones or genres. Still others might bemoan the fact that Baxter's book is somewhat out of date in the twenty-first century. His book and its largely chronological expedition through science fiction cinema and the countries that made it ends several years before Star Wars (1977) when the economic predicament of post-World War II Hollywood and the new marketing demographics of Hollywood films transformed science fiction into one of the pillars of Hollywood blockbusters, Hollywood blockbusters aimed at the teen and tween demographic. While all these may be valid criticisms of Baxter's book, Baxter's book still provides a useful guide for those thinking about science fiction in film and for those wanting to see some of the big names in cinematic science fiction before Star Wars.

The Books of My Life: Television in the Antenna Age

 

Television in the Antenna Age: A Concise History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005) by television historians and critics David Marc and Robert Thompson explores, in brief compass. the history of American radiotelegraphy or radio and American television, radio with pictures. Beginning with the development of the telegraph, the antecedent of radio and television in the early twentieth century, Marc and Thompson explore how something that was developed for commercial and military uses at sea became the dominant form of entertainment and information for Americans after the 1920s. Along the way, Marc and Thompson tell the tale of radio and television from the network era, that era in which the cartel of NBC, CBS, and later ABC, dominated the over the air airwaves, and its demise with the coming of satellite fed cable television in the 1980s. Marc and Thompson's lively and well-written history is enlightened and enlivened by oral histories, some of them done by Marc, and collected by the Center of the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University.

Television in the Antenna Age is aimed at American high schoolers engaged in college preparatory work and college undergraduates. However, it is also an excellent very short introduction to the subject of American broadcasting hitting all the high and low points of that history from the innovations in broadcast technology, to the quiz show scandals, to government regulation of lack thereof, and to jiggle television. Highly recommended for those who want a brief refresher course on the history of broadcasting and for high school college prep courses and college courses. By the way, the fact that Marc and Thompson often use footnotes as a refresher course in American history says something about the current state of schooling and education in America.
 

Musings on the Segmentation of the Media

Since the age of cable TV and satellites ended the era of the dominance of the three big television networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC, networks each who tried to reach the largest demographic possible, radio and television stations and networks, including the cable news networks, have morphed from trying to reach the broadest demographic possible to trying to reach the segmented parts of the audience to which their programming is targeted. The cable "news" networks want to, after all, sell advertising, including ideologically correct and politically correct advertising, to its targeted demographic. Fox News, for instance, targets its propaganda, its ideologically and politically correct sensationalist goop at the angry White little schooled males in their market demographic. This means that, to use an analogy, Richard Milhous Nixon was the political equivalent of ABC, CBS, and NBC during the antenna age. He wanted to get the largest demographic possible and he wanted to do something for each of those demographics in such a way that he didn't offend anyone. It also means that Donald Trump is the political equivalent of Fox News. He targets his demographic and he paints in sensationalistic and emotional hues in order to rev his demographic up. That so many don't recogise this reality--something very obvious--tells you a lot about the audience and the ability of that audience to do the Sgt Schultz Shuffle. It also tells us something about the power of PT Barnumish demogoguery in the brave new digital age.

Musings on Variations in the Political "Right" and the Political "Left"

If the radical right has its cultural origins in Christianity, populist violence, and theocratic laissez-faire liberalism, libertarianism has its origins, like liberalism, in the Enlightenment. This makes libertarianism very different from conservatism since conservatism was a reaction against the Enlightenment.

Libertarians are also different from the radical right. They have different historical origins and libertarianism has never really been fully theocratic in its conception of the limited state or in its its morality and it has had a long intellectual, including a secular intellectual, culture. As a result, there have long been tensions between libertarians and the religious right. After all the radical right favours a regulatory state that regulates, for example, morality.

As I noted, the radical right, historically speaking, has engaged in and continues to engage in all sorts of regulatory legislation from, for example, not allowing Austin, Texas to pass laws that it wants and which its legislators were elected to pass by having the Texas legislature cancel it, to moral regulation such as, for example, religious based discrimination and laws against trans people. Historically speaking the radical right pushed for and often passed legislation against "sodomy", mandating the "missionary position" in sex, making alcohol illegal, making pot illegal, and cancelling certain types of political discourse such as communism and anarchism. Libertarians, it seems to me, should be very concerned about such a regulatory or paternalistic nanny state.

This regulatory aspect of the radical right is one of the axes that separates libertarianism from the radical right. These regulations are all examples of the paternalistic nanny state. By the way, I think one can argue that historically all nanny states, regardless of political persuasion, are equivalent in form though sometimes different in content. If forced to choose I would take a secular nanny state over a religious theocratic one including that of the Bolsheviks, who instituted a new religion and religious like culture in the USSR. Religious nanny states have a tendency to go all inquisitorial a la The Handmaid's Tale, a la the Spanish Inquisition (which everyone should expect from right wing theocrats), and a la the Stalinist purge trials.

Liberals and the left, like the radical right and libertarianism, have very different origins. Liberals are the product of the early Enlightenment whether they are the laissez faire liberals of Smith or the more regulatory liberals of JS Mill (greatest good for the greatest number). Regardless, of their type of liberalism they are capitalists as Democrat Nancy Pelosi noted in a famous remark. Democrat social liberal FDR saved capitalism from, some would argue, its boom-bust self.

The left whether Christian communalists (the first socialists I know of along with the Essenes though they did not call themselves socialist) or the modern Christian socialists, communal socialists, collectivist socialists (the most successful being the kibbutzim), democratic socialists a la the Nordic countries, or communists, all the product of the later Enlightenment, want to move beyond capitalism whether through reform or historical "progress". This makes them very different from liberals. It also makes them different from conservatives who are generally much more skeptical of notions of "progress" compared to the left and to liberals. Liberals, of course, argue that capitalism in either its "free" or more regulated form will bring about heaven on earth, utopia

There are, by the way, places where libertarianism and communist varieties of "scientific" socialism meet. Marx claimed that the state would wither away when communism triumphed. This makes him a kind of anarchist, a left libertarian, and perhaps more libertarian than many contemporary libertarians.

Life as Crisis Management: The TracFone Kiada...

As all of you out there in reality land know, dealing with bureaucracies of any type, economic, governmental, educational, or cultural, can be a Kafkaesque experience and a Voinovichian challenge. I seem to get these Kafkaesque or Voinovichian challenges several times a year. Some backstory first: I get cell phone service from TracFone. Unfortunately, I have had problems with this company almost since I got their one-year plan several years ago. Recently, I had occasion to contact the TracFone corporation about several problems I was having with TracFone and to get to responses to several problems I was having with the company.

Here were my questions. Question: When will the log in to the TracFone website work consistently? I have tried to log in four times in the last two months and each time I been met with a website that malfunctions when I can actually get in it, which is only occasionally? Answer: We are working on it. Question: When I can actually get into my TracFone account online there are no minutes listed in my account. The only thing I find in my account is my phone number under “Devices Active” and my data minutes. As I don't have any data minutes, I don't need to know how many data minutes I don't have because I already know that I don't have any. Now that is absurdist, Kafkaesque, and Voinovichian ain't it? Answer: Silence. Question: Why do I not have my total minutes listed on my flip phone? I had to switch to a flip phone because of my arthritis and had to have the minutes moved over to the new phone from the old. On my old phone the minutes I had appeared on the time/date/signal etc. page. Answer: In a 25 March telephone conversation I was finally told that now I have a smart phone and smart phones don't list the minutes you have. TracFone could have simply told me this answer to this query via an email or via Facebook. Question: Do I pay for these calls for help to TracFone? Answer: A rousing vampire capitalist yes. Skank and slag capitalists like TracFone appear to want to have their cake and eat it to leaving the customer with not even any crumbs in the process.

I was given the gift of a telephone conversation with an actual TracFone representative once on 25 March. Here is what happened: The customer service operative told me to log in to my account on the TracFone website. After I logged in the rep asked me for my userID. I gave it to him. Then the information that was there, including my phone number and my data minutes, the data minutes that are none, suddenly vanished like a Soviet commissar living in the age of Stalin. Initially there was no change in the status of my website after this encounter. That changed, however, at 6 pm, 25 March when I was suddenly and almost magically able to log into my account. Once I got there, however, there was still no information about how many minutes of telephone talking time I have on my phone. By 9 pm on the same day, I couldn’t get in my account once again. I can hear you moan as I type dear Franz and Vladimir!

The TracFone representative did offer alternatives both of which I was already familiar with and both of which were not really viable options for me. First, he informed me that I could text for information about my minutes something physically impossible for me to do because of muscular skeletal arthritis. That is why I use the computer and try to use the online if awful TracFone website to get into my account. My computer keyboard, after all, is bigger than that of a smart flip phone. Second, he informed me that I could do the app thing. Again, as I told him earlier, I can’t do that given the small keyboard size of the flip phone. I use the flip phone exclusively to call people and it suits that purpose well, much better than the micro phone TracFone sent me after they upgraded everyone to 4G.

I can't end this post without briefly commenting on the TracFone telephone help line. One of the things you get when you call for help is the formulaic clear your browser history canned message. I have my browser, Firefox, set on automatic clearing or cleansing of all my online history when it is closes so this cliched response was irrelevant in my case. Better yet, once when I requested a call back from TracFone I got an automated “person” who told me I had to wait for the next available operator. During one of these callbacks I had to wait for several minutes and then I got a dial tone that rang fifteen times before it was picked up. Finally, a real human TracFone rep actually answered my callback but almost immediately hung up on me. TracFone's callback, needless to say, was not what I expected. I expected an actual human to call me back.

To end this long and tragicomic tale let me note that because of all the problems I have had with TracFone, that company, it seems to me, has broken its contract with me. As a result, I wrote the Attorney General of my state requesting refund for the 6???? or so minutes I still have in my minutes account. I simply have no interest in continuing with a corporation as incompetent as TracFone and prefer to seek a better alternative, which should not, given all the above, be all that difficult to find. Hell, If I wanted to experience Kafkaesque and Voinovichian incompetence and absurdity, I would rather experience it vicariously while reading Kafka’s masterful short stories and books and Voinovich's masterful satires rather than from a company that has taken incompetent Kafkaism and Voinovicheanism without the humour to new dumbed down "heights".

Musings on the Origins of the American Radical Right...

Though America's radical right likes to think that it has its origins in conservatism that supposed genealogy is simply false. The contemporary American right is not conservative. Conservatism had its origins in the Enlightenment and to modernity. It was a reaction against the liberalism of the Enlightenment. Conservatives set themselves in opposition to bourgeois middle brow culture and society and proletariat low brow culture and society including bourgeois mass capitalism. Real, historically speaking, conservatives were thus opposed to mass capitalism, opposed to middle class or bourgeois political culture, and opposed to middle class mass middle brow or working class low brow culture and the mass individualism or mass narcissism (I, me, mine) of both. They favoured instead a kind of liturgical Christian or manor house like community run by the best and brightest, not surprisingly themselves, that was hierarchicalised on the basis of different degrees of culturedness and civilisedness.

The American modern and postmodern populist right, on the other hand, has its roots in three cultural streams, one before the European revolutionary eras and two others unleashed by the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and mass capitalism. The first stream that fed into the American right wing was the ethnocentric (nativism), conspiracy theory, paranoiac, and inquisitorial culture of theocratic and popular Christianity. One can also, of course, find this stream in the American South's Jim Crow Dixiecrats and the John Birch Society, two of the fathers and mothers of the contemporary American right. The second stream was the populist revolutionary movement that gave virtual free reign to revolutionaries chopping off the heads of aristocrats, putting them on pikes, and making them them eat hay. The third stream that fed into the American right was laissez-faire liberalism, one of the strands of liberalism that arose in the Enlightenment and afterwards. Paradoxically, this laissez-faire capitalist stream merged with right wing mass populism to produce a populist movement that advocated for oligarchic rights. All of these streams were inherently manichean, inherently intolerant (our way or, at best, the highway), inherently rageoholic, and inherently intellectually anti-intellectual. All of these cultural phenomena seem to have an elective affinity for each other and seem to be the glue that holds the intolerant, raging, and manichean American radical right together.

The terms "conservative" and "conservatism" have, of course, a history just like everything else. With the triumph of liberalism and modernity "conservative" was eventually coopted by laissez-faire liberals as a term for themselves, a term which also served to binarily mark them off from social or reformist liberals often in patented foucauldian fashion. The term and the social movement has now, in turn, been coopted by the looney radical right which consists of paranoids, the deluded, intolerant politically and ideologically correct theocrats, secular and religious, and adolescent rageoholics.

It is, of course, these characteristics--paranoia, delusion, political and ideological correctness, and the rageoholism of White men--which distinguish classic Conservatives from modern and postmodern right wingers. However, there are other characteristics that distinguish classic Conservatives from modern and postmodern right wingers as well. Right wingers typically can't engage in empirical discussion. Right wingers typically behave like male seventh graders during recess in conversation. Right wingers typically delude themselves that they are omniscient and that their cult totem is the messiah or a messiah. Right wingers typically have no sense of real history. Right wingers typically live in a simplistic manichean world with Dudley Doright and Boris and Natasha Badonov heroes and villians. Gee, they sound a lot like Dixiecrats and revved up WWE fans don't they? Anyway, right wingers typically tick all of these boxes, Classic conservatives do not tick any save perhaps one.

Further Reading:
Daniel Bell (ed.) The Radical Right
Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics
Joseph Lowndes, From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism

Musings on the "Working" of the Right Wing "Mind"

I really find the exploration of how the contemporary American right wing mind "functions" fascinating. Of course, the place one has to start if one wants to understand how the right wing "mind" "works" is with its binarism.

American right wingers conceptualise the world, thanks to their Christian cultural heritage, in terms of boxes. They imagine that there is one box for them and another box for the other. As a consequence, right wingers seem incapable of understanding reality and the reality of human complexity. The seem incapable, in other words, of grasping that life is more a spectrum or continuum than two little binary boxes.

American right wingers are also manichean. They see themselves as saints and everyone else as profane sinners if not demons. They see themselves as sacred victims and everyone else as those evil nasty blue meanies who persecute them and victimise them.

As a consequence America's right wingers can only put those who disagree with them, even those who are citizens of the same nation-state they are, in the other box, in the bad guy box, in the demon box. They perceive the world as a theatre that is hosting a cosmic action-adventure or wild west drama in which they are the good guys in the white hats and every one else is one of those dastardly Boris and Natasha Badonov baddies in the black hats. Life, for them has become, as it was for the equally paranoid, conspiracy theory laden, and apocalyptic and eschatological early Christians, a battle between good and evil. For right wingers, life is an action adventure horror movie or TV show which bears, like film and TV, only a limited relation to reality.

To quote Kurt Vonnegut, "and so it goes".