Added my notes on The Passion of the Christ (2004) over at Alex on Film. A huge success and the center of a storm of controversy ten years ago, how does it play today?
A sleep and a forgetting
From Hydriotaphia (1658) by Sir Thomas Browne:
Darknesse and light divide the course of time, and oblivion shares with memory, a great part even of our living beings; we slightly remember our felicities, and the smartest stroaks of affliction leave but short smart upon us. Sense endureth no extremities, and sorrows destroy us or themselves. To weep into stones are fables. Afflictions induce callosities, miseries are slippery, or fall like snow upon us, which notwithstanding is no unhappy stupidity. To be ignorant of evils to come, and forgetfull of evils past, is a mercifull provision in nature, whereby we digest the mixture of our few and evil dayes, and our delivered senses not relapsing into cutting remembrances, our sorrows are not kept raw by the edge of repetitions.
From Vultures’ Picnic (2011) by Greg Palast:
The Chenega Natives, decked out in yellow hazmat suits, look like firemen from outer space, wielding high-pressure hoses and pulling up the crude from the Exxon Valdez. It’s six years after the spill, and you can see this black crap all over them, like they’d thrown grenades into an outhouse.
And here I am on Knight Island in 2010, two decades after the tanker spill. I just have to stick my hand in the gravel, and the place will suddenly smell like a Bronx gas station.
In June 2010, the U. S. Department of the Interior said the Deepwater Horizon spill will be cleaned up by the fall. In the fall they revised that to “two years.” What they mean was, it will take two years for you to forget all about it.
Remember the Tsunami of 2007 that killed a quarter million people? I don’t: That is, I had to Google the date. The massacre of over three-quarters of a million people in Rwanda in . . . what was it, 1996? 1998?
The poet Wordsworth said, “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.” Exactly. In a couple of years, you’ll forget all about the Gulf Coast, and BP will run ads that Nature has taken care of it all. And in two years or five, you’ll chuck this book in your recycle bin or clean it out of your iPad’s hard drive.
And we repeat the story again. The levees of New Orleans collapsed in 1925, and the nation was repulsed and angry. Then we slept and forgot. The United State of Amnesia.
Must we burn Jian Ghomeshi?
Hic est locus Marini Faletro decapitati pro criminibus. (CP — Chris Young)
I don’t know Jian Ghomeshi, have never met or corresponded with him, and the only time I ever listened to his Q Radio Show was when I was writing commentary on the Canada Reads program. I knew of him, but he wasn’t really on my radar. Since his firing from the CBC, however, his celebrity star has gone supernova, attracting daily headlines in the national news media for over a week.
From poster boy of the new CBC to whipping boy of “rape culture,” it’s been quite a fall, of the kind that celebrity-watchers delight in. His humiliation has been exquisite. We’ve learned about his Big Ears Teddy, and the foulness of his body odour (that he apparently tried to conceal beneath baths in cologne that stank up the Ceeb’s elevators). We’ve put him on the couch, analysed his “pathological narcissism” (Michael Smyth, writing in The Province), and been told of how he represents an entire culture’s “narcissistic male rage” (Gabor Maté in the Toronto Star). On Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir even came up with “Ghomeshi syndrome,” a label for “delusional creeps” with an inflated sense of alpha-male entitlement. Finally, by the end of his week from hell, another media station of the cross was reached when a male friend made the claim that Ghomeshi had fondled his junk in an elevator. The man has become a cliché as well as a pariah.
All of which is fair enough. The charges are serious, and celebrity is cruel. (That Ghomeshi even counted as a celebrity tells you something about Canadian culture today.) This is a point I brought up in my review of Paula Todd’s book on Internet bullying, Extreme Mean:
Rebecca Black is Todd’s poster child for [the use of YouTube as a public pillory for prospective celebrities], but despite becoming “the most hated person on the Internet” at the tender age of thirteen when her music video “Friday” was cybermobbed, she is not a sympathetic case. Black was a celebrity wannabe following a script that, after all, had made a global star out of Justin Beiber. But fame is a harsh game — as many a talent-show contestant taken from the stage in tears can testify – and this is as it should be. Our attention comes at a price.
When you play the fame game in the digital age you’d better have a skin of steel or a very well-developed case of narcissism, the kind that makes you totally oblivious to what anyone else thinks. The state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation (Ghomeshi’s initial defence, on Facebook), but celebrity isn’t politics, it’s pop culture. Ghomeshi was a personality, of the kind that has taken over much of the radio dial. That personality was, in turn, a brand. When you become a brand, everything is in play. You’re selling yourself, and the public feels entitled to inspect the goods.
All of the coverage has led to some unseemly piling on (it appears no one really liked Jian very much), as well as unfortunate collateral damage. One can’t be surprised any more by the haters who post on YouTube threads (just ask Rebecca Black), but Moxy Fruvous weren’t a bad band. Come on, people: they wrote silly, satirical pop songs, a couple of which have managed to stay in my head. Of course they look and sound stupid now, but making fun of them is anti-Jian overkill.
More serious collateral damage will be felt by the CBC. The scandal hits them at a bad time (not that any time would be very good). But the impact may be even broader, what with the “rape culture” debate getting re-energized as media gasoline is tossed on the flames. After Ghomeshi’s original Facebook post there was a flood of support for his pro-kinky sex stand. Now the kinksters are running scared. Under Canadian law, we are told, there is no such thing as consent to harm. An investigation has begun into who knew what at the CBC, and when they knew it. Early reports don’t look good. Heads may roll. Carl Wilson, writing for Slate, suggests that because a lot of people in the Toronto scene knew Ghomeshi was a creepy perv, they were “complicit in his abuse.” That is, “you didn’t know, of course. But you knew. There was doublethink, a split consciousness” (Wilson’s piece is written in the second person). Is that a defence that will hold up in court?
Ours is a society terrified of personal responsibility, and for good reason. Responsibility means liability, and you really, really don’t want to go there. Ghomeshi’s case has made a lot of people anxious, and for that alone he’ll probably have to burn.
Now you see him . . .
Go on, take the money and run.
Added my notes on The Amazing Transparent Man (1960) over at Alex on Film. Atomic-age nonsense with a rather unlikeable cast from low-budget auteur Edgar G. Ulmer. At times it stumbles into humour, but it’s not quite bad enough to be good.
Alex Good 