Tatooin' Indiana

With triple digit temperatures in the New York City Metropolitan Area, brains are frying in the pan just like eggs on the sidewalk, so all I can muster up is a little bit of an amusement.  We all know that George Lucas and Steve Spielberg are collaborators and otherwise sympatico filmmakers, so this mash up of Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark seems altogether appropriate, not to mention well-executed:

It is, of course, quite gratifying to know that Jawas are no friends of the Nazis, and in fact are quite willing to take them on.  As a nomadic people native to the desert planet of Tatooine, they clearly have more in common with the ancient Israelites of the Middle East than they do with the coldhearted denizens of Germania.  I also recall how these creatures were also the roadies for Neil Young's Rust Never Sleeps tour (really, I'm not kidding).  They sure do get around, and they sure do have a jones for killing the bad guys!  And these days, it sure does feel like we're out in the desert sun, maybe for a little bit too long...

The Professionalization of Social Networking

This is adapted from a post I just put up on the Interactive Rams blog. During our last Ineractive Media class meeting yesterday here at Fordham University, we were fortunate to have a guest speaker come in. His name is Paull Young, and I initially met him, and his colleague Rob Key, when they invited me for lunch after reading the New York Times article about social networking, where I was quoted several times (see my previous post, The Secondary Orality of Social Networking).

Paull is a Senior Account Executive for Converseon, Inc., a social networking consulting firm, and he give a talk to our class about professional opportunities associated with social networking. He was a dynamic and engaging speaker, especially for an Aussie (just kidding there), highly knowledgeable, and I know everyone learned a great deal from him.

If you click on the link, you'll find that Converseon lists among their services conversation mining (monitoring online conversation about a product or brand), affiliate and search marketing (including search engine optimization), brand reputation management (public relations extended to the online environment), and blogs and social media. Basically, the idea is that most companies don't have a clue as to what the new social media (aka Web 2.0) are about, how to deal with their negative consequences, or how to approach them for their own benefit, and that's where Paull and his colleagues come in. Paull has been blogging for many years now, and his own blog focuses on public relations, and appropriately enough bears the name, Young PR.

During his talk, Paull introduced an interesting concept, astroturfing, which is the oppposite, in a sense, of a grass roots campaign (not to mention a form of evil PR and marketing). With astroturfing, what appears to be a grass roots initiative, or messages produced by private individuals, is secretly the product of organized effort, work done for hire, on behalf of a political group or corporation. Paull provided us with an example that is both amusing, reminiscent of Terry Gilliam's animation for Monty Python's Flying Circus, and at the same time highly sinister because it masquerades as something done by some guy in his basement who just doesn't like Al Gore, but was actually produced and paid for by commercial interests. Here's the video:





Well, the good news is that Paull and some of his colleagues got together to set up an Anti-Astroturfing site and campaign. And just to be clear, he's a list of definitions from their site:

Definitions

From Wikipedia: In American politics and advertising, the term astroturfing describes formal public relations projects which deliberately seek to engineer the impression of spontaneous, grassroots behavior. The goal is the appearance of independent public reaction to a politician, political group, product, service, event, or similar entities by centrally orchestrating the behavior of many diverse and geographically distributed individuals.

From answers.com: Astroturfing describes the posting of supposedly independent messages on Internet boards by interested companies and individuals In American politics, the term is used to describe formal public relations projects which deliberately give the impression that they are spontaneous and populist reactions. The term comes from AstroTurf -- the fake grass used in many indoor American football stadiums. The contrast between truly spontaneous or "grassroots" efforts and an orchestrated public relations campaign, is much like the distinction between real grass and AstroTurf.

From the Jargon File: (The Jargon File is a compendium of hacker slang)
astroturfing: n.

1. The use of paid shills to create the impression of a popular movement, through means like letters to newspapers from soi-disant 'concerned citizens', paid opinion pieces, and the formation of grass-roots lobbying groups that are actually funded by a PR group (AstroTurf? is fake grass; hence the term). See also sock puppet, tentacle.
2. What an individual posting to a public forum under an assumed name is said to be doing.

Oh, and here's their logo:

It is certainly a pleasure, and very much in keeping with our outlook here at Fordham University, to be dealing with professionals who have a firm commitment to ethical practices and a reflective approach to their business.

Anyway, just as another example of the new and powerful phenomenon of social networking, Paull gave us the example of one of the most popular recent videos on YouTube, "Star Wars according to a 3 year old," which at the time of this writing, is up to 2,892,082 views!!!! It is an altogether charming little home movie, I must say:




Paull also showed us the highly successful YouTube campaign "Will It Blend?" which promotes BlendTec Total Blenders with the kind of stupid human tricks that David Letterman is known for. Here's the example he showed us, featuring Chuck Norris:





And Paull showed us one of Converseon's projects, Second Chance Trees for American Express, which was set up on the Second Life, the 3-dimensional virtual reality social network, where they created a place on Second Life for people to enjoy, and gave people an opportunity to buy trees that would be planted both in the virtual world where they can see them, and in the real world where they otherwise would not be able to see the results of their donation. Anyway, here's the YouTube video on the project, which interestingly includes "machinima" among its tags (see my previous post, Last Round of Screenings and Conversations):





And guess what? There's another YouTube video featuring a presentation by Paull Young on this project, so let's take a look at our friend here:



Not surprisingly, Converseon also has its own blog. And Paull also mentioned another website/blog worthy of our attention, FORWARD.

Interestingly, the fact that Paull spells his name with a double "l" came up, along with the point that it turned out to be fortuitous because otherwise he would not be easy to pick out from all the other Paul Youngs when his name is googled. And that gave me the idea that in the future parents will want to give their kids unique names, in order to optimize their kids for search engines--in this way, technology may alter the time honored traditions by which we name our children. And you can probably say goodby to John Smith!

But, you can also say G'day Mate to Paull!!!

Python Wars or Monty is a Star

Nothing profound, just a mashup of two favorites offered as a bit of an amusement.


Monty Star Wars

And, now this...

Fantasies of Seinfeld

So, my son has discovered Seinfeld, and turned into a huge fan of the series. Not that there's anything wrong with it, mind you. The series is, after all, the best sitcom ever in the history of broadcasting.

As has so often been repeated, it was the show about nothing, which actually means that it was the show about communication (ever read what Plato had to say about rhetoric in the Phaedrus and the Gorgias?). It was Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life turned into twenty-two minutes of comedy a week. And more often than not, it was a show about media--someone needs to compile a key of all of the references to motion pictures, other television shows, comics, and other forms of popular culture that were used in the series. As a show about nothing, it was easy to fill it up with innumerable references, allusions, and quotations.

And so, not surprisingly, Seinfeld has lent itself to further play with its iconography, re-imagining the sitcom along the lines of grand fantasy. In this spirit, I want to share with you an image my son found on the net, entitled Seinfeld Wars:







I thought that was pretty comical, especially George as R2D2, and Newman in the background as Darth Vader. Jerry fits in nicely as Luke Skywalker, Elaine makes sense as Princess Leia (and Elaine is essentially a Jewish-American Princess, even though the character is identified as a shiksa (non-Jewish woman) on the show--George and Kramer are both Jewish character types as well, even though they are presented as gentiles).

Probably the toughest decision was whether to make Kramer into Chewbacca the Wookie (Kramer does have some animalistic traits), or to depict him as C3P0, as was done here. I think this was the right choice, as they share the same quality of awkwardness, although the decision to have him hold a gun strikes me as a mistake--that's not C3P0 at all! Instead, a better correspondence would have been to give Kramer one of his typically confused expressions.

So anyway, I took a further look, and found a Seinfeld Wizard of Oz as well:







This one isn't as good, simply because the correspondence between the characters is less than perfect. Sure, Elaine could be Dorothy, who else? Jerry? Actually, in terms of group dynamics, that would make more sense. So, Jerry as the Tin Man? No heart? Jerry? I don't think so. Kramer as the Scarecrow works in regard to body type and that same awkwardness, although (as my son just pointed out to me), personality-wise the Cowardly Lion might be a better fit. Again, George as the Cowardly Lion seems to be more about body type than personality. So, nice try, but it just doesn't work.

Now, I have not done an exhaustive search, so maybe a Star Trek Seinfeld is out there? Jerry as Captain Kirk, Elaine as Lieutenant Uhura, George as Dr. McCoy, and Kramer as, what else? The alien, Mr. Spock. Well, if it hasn't been done, maybe there's an artist out there willing to take this on?

How about applying McLuhan's laws of media to form a Seinfeld tetrad? Here goes:

Enhance=Jerry
Obsolesce=George
Retrieve=Kramer
Reverse=Elaine

All right, all right, enough already, I admit it. This has been the blog about nothing, and that's no fantasy.

Pirates of the Revolution

So, my son and I went to see the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie the other day, which is Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. If you're not familiar with this or the other two movies, you can check out the official Disney site.

And here I am transformed into a pirate, courtesy of the official Disney site. Arrrhhh, mateys, shiver me timbers, yo ho ho and a bottle of RUM!!!!



Anyway, these are movies based on the popular ride first established at Disneyland, later supplemented by a variation at Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom, and you can also play and battle in a virtual reality version at DisneyQuest in Walt Disney World's Downtown Disney, I've done all three multiple times and they're all worth your while. But I have not, so far, gone on the other versions of the ride in Disneyland Paris, Tokyo Disneyland, and Hong Kong Disneyland (which has an entire Pirateland!).

Anyway, the ride is a classic, as is the theme song, which goes like this:

YO HO (A PIRATE'S LIFE FOR ME)
Lyrics by Xavier Atencio and music by George Bruns

Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me.
We pillage, we plunder, we rifle, and loot,
Drink up, me 'earties, yo ho.
We kidnap and ravage and don't give a hoot,
Drink up me 'earties, yo ho.

Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me.
We extort, we pilfer, we filch, and sack,
Drink up, me 'earties, yo ho.
Maraud and embezzle, and even high-jack,
Drink up, me 'earties, yo ho.

Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me.
We kindle and char, inflame and ignite,
Drink up, me 'earties, yo ho.
We burn up the city, we're really a fright,
Drink up, me 'earties, yo ho.

We're rascals, scoundrels, villans, and knaves,
Drink up, me 'earties, yo ho.
We're devils and black sheep, really bad eggs,
Drink up, me 'earties, yo ho.

Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me.
We're beggars and blighters, ne'er-do-well cads,
Drink up, me 'earties, yo ho.
Aye, but we're loved by our mommies and dads,
Drink up, me 'earties, yo ho.

It's a fun song, a song that makes pirates seem childlike, or rather that's about children pretending to be pirates. Which is what kids did, sometimes, when I was growing up, and still do some extent. Back then, pirate costumes were a popular alternative on Halloween, but then again so was dressing up like hobos--ho boy, you couldn't get away with that today, now that hobos are known as the homeless.

The romanticized image of the pirate is odd, when you think about it, as pirates were basically criminals, the Sopranos of the sea, I guess you could say. But maybe it's not so odd to be celebrating an ocean-going mafia when we also celebrate the western outlaw (such as Billy the Kid), the Prohibition-era gangster (such as Al Capone), and of course the modern mobster.

But, how about if we called them aquatic terrorists? No more yo ho then, eh hobo? If you've ever gone on the ride, then you'll know what I mean when I say that the attraction makes light of a scenario where pirates are, in fact, terrorizing a town. In fact, they had to make some changes to take the edge off of scenes where the pirates are chasing women, which if you really think about it reflects the reality of sexual assault, although a scene where women are being auctioned off remains in tact, made humorous by the fact that it's a chubby lady who's being offered, one who presumably is pleased at the prospect of finding a man. (I'm just reporting what I've observed, mind you.)

But look, I'm not here to argue for political correctness. The generalized image of the pirate, which is occasionally parodied in the popular cartoon, SpongeBob SquarePants, for example, has been reduced to a children's character. And the Pirates of the Caribbean ride is a part of our popular culture, charming and amusing, yo ho! Moreover, in the film adaptations, the imagery has been brought up to date so that there are strong assertive women, some of whom are pirates themselves, even pirate captains in this third movie, even the pirate king, er, queen.

I should add that it is hardly news, but worth mentioning nonetheless, that it came as an unexpected but altogether pleasant surprise that Disney was able to make an adaptation of a ride (a film adaptation of a ride!) into an entertaining and successful feature film, Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl. They then were able to surpass the original with a very funny sequel, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men's Chest.

A third film was obviously pushing their luck, and as I've mentioned in other posts (Spider-Man 3 and the Limitations of Adaptations, Shrek It Up, Baby), it's pretty much a rule that the third film in a series is the weakest of the bunch in quality, and popularity. And what I had read of the initial reviews of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End seemed to be consistent with that rule. I recall the criticism that the film is too long, too much action that accomplishes little in the first hour or so, etc. Of course, I also knew that, with lowered expectations, I'd probably enjoy the film just fine, albeit with the understanding that it would not match the quality of the first two.

Well, rules are made to be broken, and my son's verdict is that this is the best of the 3 Pirates movies. I'm not that certain myself, but I will say that it is at least as good as the other two. The second, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men's Chest, was funnier, and the first was the biggest surprise, because who knew what to expect? But this one was equally entertaining in its own way, and had the best action and adventure (in a fun sort of way, not in the sense of a movie like Die Hard) of the three, yo ho! It was long, it's true, but it wasn't a problem as the pacing of the movie was just fine, so it was long in a Lord of the Rings sense of long but I didn't mind.

What makes all three Pirates movies so entertaining is the absolutely brilliant performance of Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow. I am confident that this character will be recognized as one of the all-time greats of film comedy. He is the movie, and that's no yo hokum. Geoffrey Rush as Captain Barbossa is fine as his rival, an older and more straightforward kind of pirate. Orlando Bloom as Will Turner moves the plot along, but adds little to the film. And Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Swann is interchangeable with any number of attractive young actresses. Jack Davenport is fine as the elitist British bad guy.

And I could go on, but the point is that it's Depp's movie, and there even are a few scenes where there are multiple copies of Jack Sparrow, albeit all in his head as he converses with himself (call it Depp psychology). Hey, the more Depp the better, yo ho! And seeing as Depp used Keith Richards as his model for creating the character of Captain Jack, it was great to see the Rolling Stones guitarist (whom I met a few times when I was a graduate student working for a store called Video Shack in Manhattan circa 1980-1982) as Sparrow's father, however briefly (and it was way cool when he played guitar, and broke a string!).

I should add that the cinematography and effects make the film easy on the eyes, and there's lots of light-hearted action, capped off by having Captain Barbossa conduct an impromptu wedding ceremony for Will and Elizabeth in the midst of a massive sword fight on board which they all take part in--cute choreography there, as they fight off attackers and take their vows at the same time. And there are interesting scenes of the world's end, which leads to a otherworldly limbo known as Davy Jones' locker. For those familiar with the rides, there are a couple of magic moments, one when the Black Pearl goes over the massive waterfall at world's end, and we go to black and hear sounds from the ride, and one where the little dog with the key that you see towards the end of the ride appears in the film.

There was a plot element about Will's desire to save his father, and their ultimate reconciliation, which should have been moving but came across as fairly bland, as well as an interesting storyline concerning the love, and betrayal, between Davy Jones and the goddess Calypso, that also did not excite. But the film became a bit poignant at the end with the parallel love between Will and Elizabeth. The connection between Elizabeth and Calypso, referred to in the middle of the film, and implied in its ending, was never fully spelled out, however, and it seems to me that something significant was left out, or more likely, cut out of the film, some bit of verbal explanation, if not a more substantive scene. It's as if they got to the end, and the movie was already so long that they had to edit out something, so they decided to leave the final bit of exposition on the cutting room floor. I wouldn't be surprised, though, to see something reinserted in a director's cut or expanded edition on DVD.

Ultimately, though, what make this pirate story palatable for a popular audience is that it becomes a reenactment of the American Revolution, a theme that we long for, as can be seen in movies like Star Wars, Red Dawn, Independence Day, even Die Hard, and on TV shows like Jericho (as I discussed in a previous post). In this case, the bad guys have British accents because they really are the British, and the Redcoats represent an overwhelming force that is threatening to wipe out all of the pirates and anyone who is at all sympathetic to them (the movie begins with multitudes of civilians being hanged, including women and children, for being in some way associated with the pirates). The Brits are once more the evil empire.

It is a bit of a stretch, of course, to turn pirates into rebel freedom fighters, but that's what this movie accomplishes, as a multicultural, international fellowship of pirates reluctantly unites to defend, you guessed it, FREEDOM!!!! That they are thieves, and cutthroats, is all cast aside, or overboard, as they are shown to have a higher code that they answer to--they respond to the rule of pirate law, while the British military have suspended all of their citizen's legal rights. The problem for the pirates is to find a way to overcome their excessive individualism (which manifests itself as selfishness, greed, and cowardice), and come together as a community. Into this mix comes the character of Jack Sparrow, who is a classic self-centered rogue in the mode of Humphrey Bogart's Rick from Casablanca, and Harrison Ford's Han Solo from Star Wars, claiming to only look out for number one, but in the end putting ego aside for the greater good.

And, yo ho!, the British are defeated, the pirates preserve their freedom, and freedom for all, and a new world's end order is established. Just in time for the 4th of July, mateys.

Yo ho!

Sopranos Second Coming

The title of last night's Sopranos episode, "The Second Coming," is a reference to the famous poem by Yeats, which I included in a post not too long ago (Reversals of Fortune), and on The Sopranos there was a scene where Tony Soprano's son AJ (Anthony, Jr.) is sitting in a college class, listening to his English professor reading the poem out loud. And this is a minor point, I know, but the reading, while not done poorly in any overt way, struck me as much too bland for a work of this magnitude. It requires a dramatic reading, but then again many English professors are molded by the silent reading of the printed page, better versed in deconstruction and poststructuralist theories than in, well, verse and oral interpretation. And this is evidenced by the kind of writing they themselves produce, writing for the eye, not the ear, a complaint that has been registered, in turn, by Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, Neil Postman, and Camille Paglia, and by any media ecologist who has had anything to do with the study of literature. One point that I made at the end of my book chapter on The Sopranos which I posted on my blog (The Sopranos) is that the characters on the program live in a world of sound rather the abstract visual world of the written word, but a world of electronically-mediated secondary orality.

In the beginning was the spoken word, the world of sound, and electricity brings on the second coming of voice, song, and acoustic space. The second coming is a reference to Christian eschatology, of course, and this episode further fleshes out some of the themes I discussed in my last post about The Sopranos, entitled The Passion of Christopher. Tony Soprano remains the "chosen one" that the opening song by A3 makes reference to, the chosen boss of the North Jersey mob (messiah means "anointed one," and being anointed means you are chosen to be king). But is it Christ or Antichrist that Yeats refers to as the "rough beast" that "slouches toward Bethlehem to be born"? Or is Phil Leotardo, recently anointed as the chosen one for the New York City mob, and whose hostility towards Tony is increasing geometrically, Tony's opposite number 666? Or is it just a reference to the end of the series itself, with only two more episodes to go, "its hour come round at last"?

Is it armageddon or anarchy, a bang or a whimper, or a bit of both? It is perfectly in keeping with the cultural geography of North Jersey that Tony has to deal with the upstart Phil from a position of insecurity. After all, Brooklyn is taking away our basketball team, the NJ Nets (not that we didn't get them from Long Island, but let's not go there).

But the interactions between family and family are part of the shows attraction. AJ's depression and suicide attempt, while finally bringing out Tony's soft side--the scene where Tony is cradling AJ like a baby after rescuing him from almost drowning in the pool, and after his initial angry reaction is comforting him by calling him baby and telling him everything is all right, was another brilliant moment. We know that Tony has a sentimental side, and is capable of nurturing, from the very beginning of the series when he became so enamored of the ducks raising their young in his swimming pool, and the parallel in this scene is quite powerful. And we are also reminded of his brutality when, reacting to the vague insults and threats received by his daughter, Meadow, from New York mobster Coco, he loses his temper and beats Coco within an inch of his life, which pushes the already strained relationship between the two mobs over the edge.

Depression and aggression, suicide and homicide, are twin manifestations of the mental instability that plagues the family members. It is fitting that the pool looms so large as a symbol throughout the series. A body of water is an archetypal symbol of the unconscious mind, hence depth psychology, and it is also symbolic of the mother and the womb. AJ's botched suicide attempt, ridiculously ineffective (being the home of a mob boss, he surely had access to firearms if he really wanted to end his life), was an attempt to return to the womb, as he ties a cinder block to his leg and jumps into the pool, the rope being just a bit too long to actually keep him completely underwater. At the same time, he ties a plastic bag over his head to suffocate himself (why is this necessary if he is going to drown anyway?), almost like a deep sea diver wears a helmet, to penetrate the mysteries hiding below the surface of the water and learn its secrets. He's on a voyage of self-discovery, paralleling in an odd way the epiphany that Tony had in the previous episode, which he was unable to communicate adequately in this episode--Tony takes peyote, sees the sunrise in the desert--the antienvironment to the pool--and shouts, "I got it!"

But whether explorations of the unconscious have any efficacy in Sopranoland is at best unclear. Is AJ sinking lower and lower into the pool, or is he fighting his way back to the surface? Was he baptized and reborn, or is he still drowning? In a family therapy session with his psychiatrist, Dr. Vogel, AJ whines about all the things that his parents have done wrong to him, including making him wear a raincoat in 2nd grade (note the connection, a raincoat, to keep from getting wet) that got him beat up by some kids. It's the standard kind of blame the parents stuff that comes out with psychoanalysis, and there's no indication that this is at all helpful. Not surprisingly, Tony loses his temper and calls AJ a momma's boy. The end of the episode, where Tony visits his son at the institution where he's been staying since the suicide attempt, while not showing what actually occurs, seems somehow hopeful in regard to their relationship, and AJ's future. Unlike Tony, who struggled with a monstrous-feminine mother, AJ's relationship with his mother seems fine. Instead, AJ is in a position similar to Luke Skywalker--having discovered that his father is Darth Vader, will AJ, too, try to redeem him?

But whether AJ goes down with the ship or swims for shore, it is not at all clear whether therapy has done him any good, or just fed his depression. A similar question was raised regarding Tony's relationship with his therapist, Dr. Jennifer Melfi. This has been one of the most intriguing aspects of the series, and one of the main elements of the scenario as it was set out in the pilot and over the first season: the mafioso undergoing psychoanalysis. As I noted in my last post on The Sopranos, the series never quite recovered from the death of Nancy Marchand, who played Tony's mother Livia, and what's therapy without a mother to inveigh against? Sure, she's still there symbolically and psychologically, but she stopped being a source of new issues long ago. Without Livia, Melfi lost some of her relevance.

But the relationship between Tony and Melfi played itself out. At the end of the first season, Tony demonstrates the danger he poses and his protective side by telling Melfi that she has to leave town and hide because Uncle Junior and his mother found out he was seeing a shrink, and may want her whacked for knowing too much. At the start of Season 2, Melfi is able to return home, but refuses to treat Tony any longer. But there's this sense of flirtation coming from her when she sees him in a restaurant and says, "toodle-loo," much to her chagrin and embarrassment. Still, she decides to resume his therapy, but starts drinking before their sessions to get over her distaste for Tony's criminal behavior. In the Season 2 finale, while suffering from food poisoning, Tony has dreams heavily laden with symbolism, including one about having sex with Melfi.

Season 3 is a major turning point in the role of Dr. Melfi, and for the role of psychoanalysis in the series. It begins with the 4th episode of that season, "Employee of the Month," where Tony, having returned to therapy sessions, is feeling liberated by the death of his mother. But then Melfi has a therapy session with her own therapist, Dr. Kupferberg, a recurring role filled admirably by Peter Bogdonavich, where she realizes, "I've let myself be charmed by a sociopath." She also mistakenly reveals Tony's identity to Kupferberg, who urges her to stop treating the mobster. She seems to agree. But then, she becomes the victim of crime herself. The Wikipedia entry on this episode describes the sequence of events very well:

Meanwhile, as Dr. Melfi leaves her office late in the evening, she is approached in the deserted parking garage by a young man named Jesus Rossi. He grabs Dr. Melfi from behind and pushes her into the stairwell where he brutally rapes her and leaves her crying for help. She is taken to the emergency room where she learns her leg is badly bruised. She also has bruises on her face. Her son, Jason, wants revenge on the rapist, but Richard (Melfi's ex-husband) tells Jason to let the police handle it. The following day, Richard phones the detectives, who inform him that Rossi was released on a technicality, due to a breakdown in the chain of custody. Upon learning of Rossi's release, Melfi becomes very emotional and afraid. While buying a sandwich at a sub shop, she notices a plaque indicating that Rossi is the establishment's "Employee of the Month." In fear, she drops her soda and runs out of the building.

Dr. Melfi later dreams about buying a soda at a vending machine and getting her hand trapped in the machine (effectively symbolizing the helplessness Melfi experienced when she was raped). While trapped, she dreams of a large Rottweiler that scares her, but then she sees her rapist coming to assault her again. The dog attacks Rossi, mauling and killing him. When Melfi awakens, she feels a sense of relief. Later, she describes the dream to her therapist, Dr. Elliott Kupferberg, and realises its meaning: the large dog protecting her was actually Tony Soprano — someone who could take revenge on her behalf. However, Melfi assures Kupferberg that even though the justice system has failed her, she will not turn to him for help. However, she mentions that the dream of watching that man suffering brought her great pleasure and it could be argued that if it weren't for Melfi's staunch record of stringently following professional ethics, she may consider or even follow through with bringing Tony into the matter.

Wikipedia does not do justice to the conflict inherent in the situation. Given her previous flirtation with Tony Soprano, and the tacit approval of both Jason and Richard for seeking revenge, it is no easy decision to follow through with her "staunch record of stringently following professional ethics," which have been called into question already due to her decision to continue to treat Tony--in her defense, as a psychiatrist, she is a physician who has taken the Hippocratic Oath, and is as obligated to help him, just like the doctors who saved his life after he was shot (in following their oath, they didn't stop to consider whether saving him would allow him to murder others). But keeping quiet about this would have been the most difficult task of her life. How could she not want to run to daddy, or any available father-figure, including Tony, following such a devastating trauma. This truly was The Last Temptation of Melfi. Hence, when she next has a session with Tony, as Wikipedia describes it:

When Dr. Melfi becomes tearful during Tony's next therapy session, he tries to comfort her. Tony asks her what is wrong, but she persuades him to sit back down and continue the session. Then Tony asks Melfi if she wants to tell him something. After a tense pause, Melfi declines and the scene changes abruptly to a black screen and the end credits. The issue of Melfi's feelings of helplessness and dread are never again brought up in a way in which any actions of retribution or justice are taken.

There should be no doubt that this was the greatest struggle of her life, and her greatest victory. Fans who took pleasure in the empowerment they experienced vicariously via Tony's violence were frustrated by this turn of events, and even the best of us called out for revenge on behalf of this sympathetic character. And it is to David Chase's credit that he resisted the pull towards narrative closure and popular formula and left the story as unresolved as so many real-life crimes are. Artistically, a courageous move that set a moral standard against which all other actions in the series could be measured against. But this also in effect ended the story of Dr. Melfi as a character. While therapy sessions continued in some of the episodes, no further growth or development seems possible with her character, and the narrative function of therapy also receded into the background after this point.

With one exception, I should add, which made for one of the most poignant scenes in the entire series, paralleling the temptation of Melfi in setting up a moral bellwether. In the 7th episode of the season, "Second Opinion," Melfi has a session with Tony's wife Carmella, and gives her a referral to a colleague, an elderly Holocaust survivor who tells Carmella to leave her husband and give up the blood money that she has been taking from him--he himself refuses to accept her payment for the session. This one psychiatrist stand out as a moral exemplar who forces Carmella to confront the fact that she is an accomplice to unspeakable crimes, even though the result is that she simply continues on, now with no delusions about her own culpability. But it is not simply his psychiatric training that has given him moral clarity, it seems, its his familiarity with the genuine evil of the Holocaust.

Towards the end of the 3rd season, Tony starts an affair with a sexy Mercedes saleswoman he meets at Melfi's office, another indirect association between therapy and sex for him. Therapy sessions continue here and there through the end of Season 3 and the very beginning of Season 4, and then fade away until the 6th episode, when it turns out that this sales rep that he had an affair with, and later dumped when she proved to be as crazy as his mother, had killed herself. Drunk and angry, he yells at Melfi for not being able to save this woman, but this leads to the realization that he himself felt guilt over the situation. By the 11th episode, Tony wants to quit therapy, admitting that he was no longer interested in trying to change his life. But in the first episode of Season 5, he is back to see her, but proposing that they start an affair rather than continue the therapeutic relationship. Melfi says no, no doubt feeling little of the temptation she felt in refusing to ask for his help following her rape, and in fact having her resolve strengthened by the experience. In her own therapy session, she admits that she found Tony a bit sexy in the past, but is ultimately repulsed by him. Eventually, Tony resumes therapy, but the sessions are few and far between last season or in this one.

Now, in this more recent episode, Melfi is back in session with Dr. Kupferberg, and she refers to Tony as Kupferberg's favorite patient. Is this projection on her part? Perhaps, but it also reflects an unprofessional fascination on Kupferberg's part with Tony's notoriety, and he in turn tells her about a recent study that shows that therapy actually validates sociopaths and makes them more likely to commit crimes. This is the fundamental question that remains unresolved throughout the series. Is therapy bullshit, as Tony sometimes would maintain? Is it an exercise in self-absorption and narcissism for the patient? Mental masturbation, Tony would say in an angrier mood. Worse yet, might it help make a mobster be a better mobster, a more effective criminal--there was some hint of that in the first season, when Melfi inadvertently gives Tony the idea to let Junior be the titular head of the family, let him feel like he's in charge, while Tony to operated behind the scenes.

Chase gives ample indication that therapy is not always effective, that therapists can be enablers, that they have hang-ups of their own that interfere with their professionalism, and that they form their own in-group, a psychoanalytic mafia (just as academics do, and filmmakers, and priests, and just about any profession or group). But they also have provided the only moral standards to be found in the series. For better or worse, they are the prophets predicting the second coming, which can only be the children re-enacting the conflicts of their parents, in a cycle of violence through the generations, a cycle that will continue coming and coming, unless their warnings are heeded.

Jericho Fit

I've been wanting to comment on the CBS series Jericho which premiered last fall, and finished its first season this past Wednesday. And for starters, the fact that I've watched all 22 episodes is a testament to the success of the new strategy of making them available over the internet. I saw the promos for the series and remember being intrigued, but there were a lot of interesting series premiering last fall, and Jericho didn't stand out from the crowd, and September is always a busy time, so I missed the first episode and figured, oh well, I'll just skip this show. And that would have been that in the old days of a year or two ago, with the possible alternative of catching it on reruns. But I started to watch the episodes online in November while I was away at a conference, and got hooked, got caught up, and here I am.

Jericho tells the story of the aftermath of a nuclear attack, a genre that has been around since the fifties. I confess to having a perverse love/hate relationship with such atomic scenarios ever since they ran the movie Fail-Safe (1964) on TV when I was a kid (circa 1967), and I made the mistake of watching it. That movie ended with the bomb being dropped on New York City, and they just showed that everything stopped, still images, then nothing! It scared the hell out of me, and I had nuclear nightmares for many years afterwards, and used to get shivers whenever I heard a plane go overhead (in the film, the bombs were still being dropped from planes, not rocketed on missiles)--I guess that might be consider a bit prescient, post-9/11. By the way, Stanley Kubrick's brilliant black comedy, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), was something of a parody of Fail-Safe, and ended with a cowboy-type airman riding a bomb down like a wild bull, after being dropped from a plane.

It wasn't until much later that it occurred to me that in Fail-Safe and a multitude of other apocalyptic narratives in a variety of media, it was always New York that was getting nuked or otherwise destroyed--that's New York, as in my home town. Pretty chilling to realize that you live at ground zero, again a speculative phrase that became a reality post-9/11. And looking out at the Manhattan skyline after 9/11, I couldn't help but be reminded of all of those scenarios, and wonder about the future. The popular series Heroes, which I'll write about in a future post, is the latest to depict the destruction of New York City in very vivid terms. As I mentioned in a previous post, Wild Palms 2007, I find it a bit of a relief when some other place gets the honor, like in the miniseries Wild Palms where it was Boca Raton of all places, or the movie The Sum of all Fears where it was Baltimore, or on the series 24 where there have been a few nuclear explosions and meltdowns, but all out west.

In Jericho, rumor has it that New York was not destroyed because the NYPD discovered the terrorists and bomb at the last minute, although central to the scenario of the show is the fact that nobody knows anything for certain because there are no reliable channels of communication, almost no broadcasting whatsoever. I assume that, post-9/11, it was thought to be insensitive to subject New York to another disaster, plus it also draws on the heroic image of our first responders that emerged in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.

Anyway, according to the Jericho wiki, the cities that are certain to have been nuked are Denver (whose mushroom cloud is seen in the distance in the first episode) and Atlanta (a phone message of the last moments of a character's parents serves as the evidence), and the cities that appear to have been nuked include Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and Seattle on the west coast: Houston, Dallas, Phoenix, and St. George/Cedar City in Utah; Chicago, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Boston, Hartford, CT, Baltimore, Washington, DC, Norfolk, VA, Charlotte, NC, and Miami (not Boca?); and Lawrence, Kansas!

It's interesting to see that the folks who are watching the series closely enough to gather this evidence have noticed some inconsistencies from episode to episode, and between the episodes and information found on the CBS website. Perhaps its unintentional, but the problems that the fans are experiencing in obtaining definitive information on what happened parallel the problems that the characters in the series have in finding out exactly what happened. The breakdown of reliable communications and the consequent isolation of the town of Jericho, Kansas, is a central element of the series. It's also interesting that Jericho is at the center of a controversy about payments and royalties for writers working on webisodes, and CBS canceled and removed a preliminary web series called Beyond Jericho, and replaced it by another set of webisodes called Countdown. The strategy of adding narrative elements online is becoming more commonplace, having been pioneered in relation to films such as The Matrix trilogy, and the Blair Witch Project and its sequel, and I would certainly support appropriate compensation for the online writers and producers.

Anyway, Jericho is part of the nuclear apocalypse genre, one of the most memorable being the 1959 film On the Beach, which starred Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire (in a non-dancing role!), and Anthony Perkins. Like others that would follow, On the Beach (which was the subject of an inferior TV-movie remake in 2000), depicted the slow death of humanity due to radioactive fall out. Of course, there was a whole slew of post-atomic adventure stories, where the survivors fought off mutants with a combination of futuristic, contemporary, and medieval technologies, not to mention the whole Mad Mel, oops, sorry, I mean Mad Max trilogy. But attempts at realistic depictions hit their stride with the No-Nukes movement of the early eighties, and include movies such as Testament (1983) and Threads (1984). One of the most original is Miracle Mile (1988), beginning as it does with a young man answering a pay phone, receiving a call to the wrong number warning that a nuclear war has started and that the missiles will hit in 70 minutes, and showing what a he and other people do up until the bombs hit.

On television, the big event was the TV miniseries The Day After in 1983, in which it was assumed that the east and west coasts were destroyed, along with the other major cities, and even Kansas was hit due to the missile silos located there. The story took place in the area of Lawrence, Kansas, and I can only imagine that the inclusion of Lawrence in Jericho is an homage to The Day After. Like most viewers, I found the miniseries very believable when it first aired, but having recently had the opportunity to see it again on the SciFi Channel, I was amazed at how hokey it looked. Either way, it was pretty depressing, the idea that the living would envy the dead and all that. Ah, well.

Because The Day After reflected a liberal political perspective, conservatives asked for equal time and were given Amerika, a 1987 miniseries in which the Soviets take over the US, depicting the horror of totalitarianism, but also providing an opportunity for some Americans to become rebels once more and fight for their freedom. While there was no nuclear armageddon in Amerika, it was very similar to Red Dawn, a conservative fantasy in which a sneak attack by the Communists leads to World War III, and a large part of the U.S. is occupied by the Soviets and the Cubans, forcing a group of high school football players to wage guerrilla war against the occupiers. More than anything, this film demonstrates the powerful desire that exists in our culture to re-enact our origins, to be the revolutionaries fighting the evil empire. Some sense of celebrating the creation and reenacting the defining moment exists in all religious and cultural traditions, the sense of what Mircea Eliade calls sacred time, but in the U.S. we've grown so distant from our revolutionary origins that it takes a more drastic scenario to set up the symbolic reenactment. Or we have to resort to a more distanced fantasy, such as the highly popular Star Wars trilogy where we identify with the rebels fighting the empire, and even Han Solo and some of the others dress in a way that's vaguely colonial. This helps to explain the let down accompanying the second trilogy, which is not about rebellion, but about the decline and fall of the republic, the antithesis of our creation story.

Jericho provides the same opportunity for us to relive our origin story, but there is no evil empire to fight. The enemy appears to be terrorists, but reflecting current events, there also is a threat from government officials with suspicious motives--three's a kind of Dick Cheney type that's way, way in the background of the story--and also from mercenaries called Ravenwood that I can't help but connect to Halliburton. This time around, we have met the enemy and he is us, to quote Walt Kelly's famous line from the comic strip Pogo, as threats also come from within Jericho itself, mostly due to selfishness, from outlaws outside of Jericho, and even from the neighboring town of New Bern, led by Sheriff Constantino (in name at least, somewhat foreign sounding, not to mention imperial, although the character is as middle America as the rest). There are a few precedents for this type of story, not many but a few, one being the vastly underrated 1997 Kevin Costner film, The Postman (an adaptation of the David Brin SF novel by the same name), which I think has some very interesting things to say about the imagined community of the American nation and believe it or not, the importance of the postal system, a point made by the great media theorist, the late James W. Carey.

Jericho is more like a story about the American pioneers, about homesteading and settlement. and defense against outlaws and savages. It's a post-nuclear western, Bonanza, Little House on the Prairie, but without the stability, with the addition of the mystery genre, the whodunnit relating to the greatest crime ever committed. And the threat level is much wider in scope, ranging from the reduced circumstances of the locals, to the contemporary level of various military elements, to the threat of further nuclear detonations.

But at its heart, it is a story about community. Jericho is the good community, a small town that's hard hit but better off than the surrounding area. That's where the biblical allusion comes in, Jericho as the walled city under assault by invaders. But it's an odd reversal, since in the book of Joshua, Jericho was conquered by the underdog Israelites come to claim the land promised by God. The fall of Jericho is a good thing, and a miracle that results from the blowing of the sacred ram's horns, the shofars. Joshua fit de battle of Jericho, and the walls came a tumblin' down, says the old Negro Spiritual. The obvious connection is not to the town of Jericho, but to the United States as a whole, which has always enjoyed the advantage of being far from the maddeningly crowded Europe, at a distance from the theaters of war, protected by two oceans, Fortress America. But the walls have come a tumblin' down, and what's more, it's looks like Humpty Dumpty was sitting on those walls, because the rumor is that there are several different presidents and regions claiming sole legitimacy in the aftermath.

But Jericho too is under assault from without and within, as I mentioned, and this presents us with the classic conflict of values that can be found time and time again in American popular culture, that of community vs. individualism. This conflict is paralleled by the conflict between equality vs. freedom, and democracy vs. capitalism. Of course, all of these values are, well, valued in American culture. The problem is that they are inherently contradictory, and while the contradictions can be ignored some of the time, they do come into conflict from time to time. Popular culture helps us to deal with the conflict by mediating between the oppositions (a function of myth, according to Claude Lévi-Strauss). Often in American culture, individualism, freedom, and capitalism is favored slightly over community, equality, and democracy, but ultimately balance must be maintained because excessive individualism, freedom, and capitalism tends to cross the line of morality and threaten to destroy the community.

As is often the case in the western genre, the community, in this case the town of Jericho, is the ideal that must be defended, that is in need of defense and clearly worth defending. Jericho is an egalitarian society, and although there are some status differences, things are pretty much leveled after the attacks, so for example the rich girl Skylar forms an alliance with the poor boy Dale (nice touch that the salt mine that her parents own turns out to be an extremely valuable commodity in the new economy that emerges, reminiscent of how salt was used as money to pay workers, a practice that is recorded in the book of Ezra, making for another biblical connection, albeit a later one, but is more famously associated with the payment made to Roman soldiers, which is why the word salary comes from the Latin root for salt, and even the word soldier may come from the same root). Equality is also demonstrated in the salt of the earth demeanor of the first family of Jericho, the Greens (it's not easy, but it is environmentally sound). Democracy is also upheld, to the extent that an election for mayor is held at the appointed time despite the circumstances (reminiscent of the presidential election held during the Civil War), and Johnston Green who is clearly the better man is defeated in his reelection bid by Gray Anderson. The will of the people, even when wrong, must be honored (shades of 2000 and 2004). In contrast, in the neighboring town of New Bern, Sheriff Constantino appears to have usurped mayoral powers.

So, Jericho essentially upholds the values of community, equality, and democracy, but in classic Western fashion, these values are shown to be insufficient in and of themselves, and the settlers incapable of adequately seeing to their own defense. While the forces that threaten the town represent excessive individualism, freedom, and capitalism, the heroes who come to the defense of the town use those very same qualities in defense of community, equality, and democracy (thereby mediating the opposition between the two). The main hero is Jake Green, the prodigal son returned just in time for the crisis, with enough military training and related experience to do what must be done where others are lost. The second hero, a rogue hero who at first is ambiguous as to whether he is a hero or a villain, is Robert Hawkins, an FBI agent with knowledge about the attacks, access to information and resources that go beyond the town, and training like Jake's that allow him to be an effective defender. In a smaller way, Dale use entrepreneurial energy and sometimes coercion in ways that ultimately serve the best interests of the town. And the criminal Jonah, while exceeding the boundary and threatening the community at times, rises to the defense of the town on more than one occasion, temporarily using his "bad methods" in the service of a good cause and saving them from destruction.

In its first season, the program has shown a good balance between elements of the classic western applied to the post-nuclear scenario in a way that reenacts the American Pioneer Myth. None of this is original, but the combination of elements is novel and entertaining. And the mystery is unfolding at a pace that is neither too fast nor too slow. There's a great deal to work with assuming the series continues, much left to be revealed, but the pieces of the puzzle are provided often enough to keep us coming back for more.

The season ends with a shocker that I would compare to the ending of the original Planet of the Apes film, where the hero discovers the half-buried Statue of Liberty. Without giving it away, I would describe it as being the equivalent to the American civil religion in which we worship our democracy and creed, as the Satanist use of the inverted cross or crucifix is to Christianity.