The Secret Life (of Walter Mitty)?

Read this (but only after watching the movie); this isn't a review but a reflection:

Daydream-like thoughts of B. Stiller's recent adaptation of the Secret Life of Walter still visit me at unexpected moments of the day. While thinking about my previous trip to New York, I recall my excitement at seeing a familiar train station in one of the first scenes on film.

But I also appreciate the candor of the film, its unpretentious mundaneness and the way it displays for all to see the reality of the dreams and hopes and disappointments of our lives. Notably, the film also reflects the shame involved in being unseen or that which compels us to maintain our invisibility, and how we try to engage with and challenge it in minute and grand ways in our daily lives.

The film also makes palatable forms of human relations that have emerged relatively recently and still carry the sting of opprobrium that follow what was previously 'unseen' and felt to be irremediably deviant. Which is not to say that deviance is merely a function of common practice but is to say that the growing popularity of an object or practice can challenge the taboos it has long felt.

Walter Mitty, by trade, is a 'negative asset manager,' and so it is his lot in life to live in the shadows of others who curry recognition and take responsibility for the work of so many unseen, unfelt, unheard. Typically leaving his office only to interact with superiors and deliver anticipated media, he otherwise resides and labors in a dungeon-like archive of photographic negatives with his squeamish but resolute and dependable partner Fernando. In some ways, he is a modern Quixote, imaging himself caught up in grand stories made from the stuff of normal life.

But we only find him as his occupation - along with those of many others - finds jeopardy at the whims of bearded strangers who appear on the corporate Life scene to rearrange, downsize and 'transition.' Specializing in corporate transformations that involve moving companies from dated formats to new ones (in this context and ours, we're speaking of an analog or print being updated to a digital or online one), these antagonists poke and prod the longtime employees and treat them with far less than what they deserve for their sustained and enduring commitment to the project of making Life happen.

But the experience of these employees under the overseership of the Bearded Ones is far from uncommon, and their immediate presence on film only covers up the reality that they are intervening because the governing boards charged them to, which remains peculiar throughout the film, for it clearly takes little radical stance against the onerous and capricious decision-making involved in organizations that remain governed by a few.

This organizational and occupational transition operates as an appropriate background for his own personal realizations (and revisitations of memories) that he had for so long repressed or expended great effort to ignore. Life has hired others to implement global alterations to its format, while he too feels compelled to alter the format of his life, perhaps even with the stresses involved in the Life transition, but as he implies later, he actually harbors little spite for the Bearded Ones and their charge; he just bitingly challenges them to avoid being such "dicks," suggesting he doesn't take issue with their work but how they carry it out.

In this way, again, Mitty remains reserved and hesitant, even subservient but always mindful of what is most important to him and unwilling to expend too much of himself needlessly pillorying the inevitably bleak or discouraging circumstances in which he seems to regularly find himself.

Walter Mitty's own hesitation, disembodied as it is, stands as yet another antagonistic element in the film, germinated so early in his own development. His own hesitation, as the film suggests, derives from real conditions, however; in his late adolescence following high school, he toiled and planned to realize his ambition to travel Europe, displaying his early interest in adventure and the world, having been so close to doing so (having purchased all of the necessary objects).

But often we lack the favorable conditions for realizing our aspirations, whatever they may be, and Mitty offers us consolation for this decision, comfort that the world does not end even if we must delay and suppress our desires for some time. As his father passed, he concluded the irresponsibility of leaving a family that had no means to support itself, nor savings nor luck. Instead, he worked these ambitions into oblivion, supporting his sister and mother, maintaining his familial commitments and obligations while stomaching the fatefully certain consequences that he would not be leaving their side for a very long time (something he may not have appreciated at the time).

Eventually, he is inspired to act but not until he finds another who gives him reason to do so, but I dispute that this series of events has little to do with impressing a girl, which is the tried explanation that might describe it. Instead, their relationship helps him realize something about himself, that he must do for himself, as with so many human realizations: we are social animals who best know ourselves around others. And so, in doing so, this narrative turn actually frames the female as very much a part of this human community that endorses and proliferates personal realization, not just passive, supportive bystanders, but real individuals who act and mutually-produce our shared world.

Cheryl's presence and words motivate him, and although this movie does remain admittedly male-centered for who so many of the main characters are (and noticeably white, save extremely minor characters, for that matter), distinguishing between 'acting-to-impress' and 'acting-as-inspired-and-motivated-by' wholly changes the relationship of the male to the female (assuming loosely bounded identities here). The feminine is no longer an object to eventually be obtained by the impressor but another agent and actor in the world, like Mitty, like the Bearded Ones, like Sean.

The movie is nevertheless obsessed with what it literally and figuratively means to be unseen and unheard and who is considered worthy of depiction and reproduction and visibility and audibility. It does suggest some tentative conclusions: that relative few, talented, established and renown people might use their connections and social positions to continue to orchestrate the coordinates of what Ranciere called the "Distribution of the Sensible," which really, to me, seems like a modified Ideology, meaning that they still influence and control, in large part, what is seen, thought, heard and comprehended, consciously or no.

This bare fact is best illustrated through two crucial characters and by contrast in one. Sean O'Connell, for example, monopolizes the attention and photo-space in the print edition of the Life magazine. His artistic decisions virtually determine what is or is not included, based, it is implied, on a long-standing relationship between the publication and his contributions. Seniority, then, can be decisive for what is considered worthy of illumination, publication, foregrounding and distribution.  But not always.

The main Bearded one, the manager handling the transition (known ignobly as 'Ted'), displays an irrefutable influence over the structure of the organization in which so many people labor but does so with little demonstrable 'seniority;' instead, he derives his authority from decisions by the board to undergo the transition, induced and motivated by a changing market climate, with new institutional and technical requirements for competitiveness. He is a foil to Sean, in this way, but his position feel relatively unearned and undeserved, and he spares little time in establishing himself as an object of contempt, hatred and fear by many.

While the reviews frame him differently, emphasizing his own authoritative qualities and existence as a 'publishing executive,' this isn't what he is called in their film, and so reviews like this one unjustifiably downplay the narrative potential and impact of his performance as a 'transition manager.' While he is certainly qualified, based on his appointment, and tasked with an important charge, he nevertheless carries out these duties with capricious condescension, treating employees like discardable cogs. But this, too, the review failed to note, because it's not about whether the character is believeable but about whether people can sympathize with Mitty in his trials to appease him, and many can, I think.

While we're on the topic, this review is additionally frustrating for how the reviewer seeks to drawn on his experience traveling in Iceland to debunk filmic narrative elements and take pot shots at the film. In doing so, this review discloses his privileged position (removed from the audience again) and his inability to fixate on necessary elements rather than those that are inessential to focusing on the crucial or key aspects of the film as it relates its audience and some sense of how its musing on the prevailing social and aesthetic relations in our world.

Really, we cannot finally decide the matter without a fuller and more personal engagement, as evaluations and judgments are tied up with interpretation as much observations and other invocations, but many of the reviews I've read have obsessed over details or aspects peripheral to the central interest in the lives of those who are unseen, unheard, unthought and unarticulated. Although there always remain some group that has yet to experience this kind of iteration, movies such as this inspire others that contemplate the significance of desiring that sense of being heard, though, and seen, while consoling those along the way with stories, images and words that shine light towards new avenues for negotiating everyday situations and finding ways to better cope with existent conditions and relations.

But, as Sean O'Connell's subtly remarks on the ephemeral nature of beautiful objects left uncaptured, this film is about all of the "Ghost Cats," those who will not be seen because not thought deserving of center stage. In reality, however, we are all Ghost Cats, and we deserve that kind of treatment and consideration.

That's Not a Real Thanksgiving Dinner...

WRITING PROMPT WEBSITE 

Thanksgiving is always the same for me. While my relatives and immediate family feverishly toil to prepare a purportedly-luscious and juicy constellation of thank(and sleep)-inducing entrees, I typically attempt to carve out a space for myself somewhere in the corner of the kitchen to briskly prepare my own light protest-on-a-plate. But this isn't necessarily how I intend it - even though, as it often turns out - Vegan dining is just (ostensibly) a visible and demonstrative contest against all things holy and traditional. 

And my relatives certainly acknowledge this quiet and clandestine culinary 'defiance'. Without a doubt come every thanksgiving, I get a few unmistakeably interrogating glares, subtle uttering comments and querying questions I always anticipate. "Should I make a separate dish of potatoes for you, you know, because you don't eat our butter?" my aunt asks with a strong, patronizing tone. "Yes," I retort: "how about you segregate those potatoes just for me."

But I know this verbalized, if implied, disapproval has no malevolent intentions. It is just born of acting and living in the world in a given way for years: an established practice honored by established practice that becomes comfortable and familiar like an old friend, with little ole me trying to make my STATEMENTS in both subtle and prominent ways.

I have to admit. I don't always like being the focus of at least part of the Thanksgiving conversation, or really any other dinner really. When your diet differs so much from those around you, you have to be prepared for constant questioning: you can't just talk about the mundaneities of your morning attempt to transport yourself to school on time or that guy who was doing something funky on the street on the corner. Nope: "Hey, Joe, why are you Vegan again?"

I'd be lying, though, if I said this weren't the point. Part of doing something different is to strike up conversation about difference, about why about wherefore, and about why we do things as we do in the first place. Difference confronts us and forces us to think on our beliefs and why we have them. It reminds us that nothing is natural or inherent, and that there are billions of people out there in the world that do things a lot differently than we do and often they have reasons that are just as good as ours. 

It's just especially tough when this difference confronts us so close to home, on a day so honored for so long that it has arrived at some peculiarly sacred proportions for practices that are otherwise perhaps somewhat questionable (That whole pilgrim-native american thing? I mean, c'mon: just watch the Addams family parody about Wednesday's Thanksgiving's day play protest to get what I'm saying).  A lotta people aren't gonna like me for saying this, but appreciating difference is not about liking: it's about learning and getting to know. The liking can come later, along with the gravy. But, I should say now: only if it's Vegan.

250. What is on your typical Thanksgiving plate? Do you pack it to the brim with as much food as possible? Do you only fill it with your three favorite foods? Use all of your senses to describe the plate in great detail.

On The Decline of a Discourse

That our dignitaries are so compelled to visit other countries and openly oppose the indictment of security and surveillance policies speaks to the increasing inefficacy of the all-tactics-are-acceptable-for-the-sake-of-security discourse.

Even here, Afghanistan is referenced as reason for overweening and nearly unchecked and clandestine inspection of millions of people. Unfortunately, it took years of battle and thousands of lives for this to become the case.

Perhaps rhetoric and logic could've transported us to here far sooner: before the contradictions themselves had to be turned into what would endanger the lives of people who live inside and outside of the United States.

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/12/18/headlines#12185

On Black Friday, 2013

I notice a kind of self-contentment forming around having the privilege to avoid Black Friday shopping. Before you find comfort in your status for being able to avoid it, think on what compels the rest of us to participate: (1) low cost, (2) a desire to participate in the good life promoted through various circulated media means.

Are the shoppers, then, those who we should really be lampooning, criticizing or distancing ourselves from then? But what of those who encourage, stoke and stir people to want such objects and those who disproportionately create economic conditions which force us to compete with one another and treat each other with such little regard? How are they implicated? I will let you decide.

Gaga on the Artist and the Critic; Whose Want and Whose Body?

Invoking terms like 'racy,' 'sexy,' and otherwise, many commentators are showing their comfort with some of the simplistic, cliched judgments of Gaga and her performances in general and of hers at the AMAs in particular.

But if you actually watch the performance to the end, you're exposed to a completely different sense of what she means by 'body.' On stage, immense monoliths of newspaper articles with various critical headlines appear, surrounding and towering over her. This is the body to which her duet with R Kelly really refers, and while she is willing to show her artistic acknowledgment of our need to conceive of words metaphorically, she also shows her recognition for our tendency to sexualize but also of seeing sexualization as a negative or inherently problematic or polarizing act.

Saying something is sexualized has become akin to saying it is something forbidden, sinful and problematic. So while she is decries this entrenched tendency to use moral prescriptions to stigmatize and polarize, she is also commenting on the kind of body that is a body of work, a public image, what it is that people know about us and feel it is their right to make judgments about. In her performance, she anticipates the base criticisms of her public critics (her interlocutors), deftly pillorying them for the unthought negative and moralizing judgments about her work

And so, while album reviewers drone on and on about how simplistic and sexual her songs are, playing into a longstanding prejudices against certain objects of low culture and into sex-negative conceptions, they're entirely missing the subtext of what may be inferred when gaga entreats us to "Do What You Want With My Body." She knows they will criticize and judge her, drawing on discourses of sexualization. But I wonder: whose body is being used by whom?

Another interpretation abides: she actively parodies and indicts the careless and hurtful manner in which public debate about certain figures has been conducted, decrying the problematic relationship that has developed between the artist and the critic.

So while her commentators continue to read sexualization into her self-presentations and work, they fail to check their own sexist tendencies and acknowledge the steep barriers to recognition female performers experience.

And so I ask: Why are all the judgments being made about Gaga those that have to do with how racy or lewd or profane she or her performances were? What about the elaborate displays, the impressive costume design, the apparently-simplistic lyrics and music that in their own way disclose profound commentaries on the nature of the pop star and their relationship to their public and to the notion of the image?

Nope, various critics would rather indict than celebrate her, and this is their act that they must take responsibility for in perpetuating the stereotypes and interpretations that she labors to challenge in her own work.

Economic Justice in Belief and Action, Some Reflections on Moral Obligations Pt. 2

(Pt. 2)

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Are we then required to subject ourselves to the harsh, challenging living conditions in order to cancel the debt we feel to people who have themselves been structurally, routinely and regularly exploited and disenfranchised by the very system which has benefited some of us, in different ways?

Some Marxists intrigue me for the position they take on this issue. Often, they claim a practical fidelity to their principles, while their principles virtually complicate any attempt to practically realize them in nonviolent or tempered forms. An ideologically infused, systemic and totalizing critique, for such a person, may even become a bulwark against any action, as taking 'smaller' steps to ameliorate economic depredations seems to pale in comparison to something so grand and important as uprooting and overturning an entire system's inequalities or exclusions. In response, one might ask: What is the relevant system and scale? How can we confidently define it and attribute determinative agency to it? These are important questions. And, in response, I might be accused of conflating or simplifying positions or generalizing across different Marxist ideologists.

In whatever case, the issue remains: how can one maintain a systemic, totalizing critique and not act in other ways to arrive at its outcomes, the eventual amelioration of inequalities produced by capitalism? Are these habits in contradiction or opposition? Is the contradiction material or insignificant? I contend that it is significant, that it sheds light both on the challenge for the Marxist in pursuing the end goal of their theoretical view of how society should operate and how we should arrive there in light of the prevailing conditions of production and such a theoretical path closes off, obfuscates or renders seemingly inconsequential any other, more immediate, focused or targeted efforts to the point of rendering their own theoretical positions practically insignificant.

I don't make these statements lightly, as they have frustrated, depressed and challenged me and continue to do so, informing and shaping my own decisions and activity. They are, nevertheless, real and we must all face and cope with them, every day, forever, as much a part of the absurd conditions of existence (and our political economy) as anything else.

But, then, I ask myself: "who am I to make such judgments for any anyway?" and "What if they," (whoever they are) just for example, "do make good on some of these promised revolutionary ventures?" And to generalize even further, "what is the relationship of any opinion 'we' have to those around us?" In a few short moments, the moral swamp deepens and becomes murkier, as it is no longer clear who bears a 'more' moral mission (or, alternately, how we might navigate these dilemmas at all), while the traditional ethical interpretive framework of intention-action-possible consequence, remains only so helpful in addressing and heading off such questions. Such a framework doesn't even really consider who should be invested with the power and right of being the judge, in addition to other issues of calculation, of discrete separation of activities into these categories as well as so many other things.

One of my immediate intuitions is that there isn't a tangible or apparent final judgment to be found here, and consequently, no judgments absolutely better than any others, just a variety of arguments, some with better justification and others with worse justification (or a justification that isn't apparent, isn't made public or isn't clear or completely articulated). We live in a world that contains an environment of evidence and possible opportunity, and the fact that it is up to us to both act and judge complicates both activities, when we lack some kind of recourse to a higher power, in the case, which increasingly it is, in many circles that we refuse to ascribe to a laid out religious doctrine (but still maintain a respectful position to it). MLK evaded this problem of moral foundation by citing god and the divine law as the ultimate litmus test for any terrestrial practice or policy; but we simply no longer have that formerly-widely-consented to privilege any longer.

Living in an unprecedented age where meaning is uprooted and floating, inscribed in our human practices and reinforced by our own actions and beliefs, we must find alternative sources for justifying our own actions, and, as I see it, the only possible solid alternative is a kind of fidelity to a human community that involves both immediate and longer term investments of power, effort, service, finance and care to what we do have. This conclusion doesn't answer the question entirely, but it does shed light on some of its complexities, which is perhaps all we can really do now.

And yet, another position remains. I cannot help but think that any position that places one more immediately in the fray of appreciating and addressing inequality and injustice deserves greater attention and appraisal, no matter what it is. This course of action doesn't accept any categorical inhibitions that cast any and all such work in a nonconstructive pall. It prioritizes confronting present conditions and expediently working to create more fair, less unequal arrangements from them. Again, the issue of standard persists, but in this position, one may more comfortably admit that much of what today happens may have positive outcomes that are yet undiscerned but that any action whatsoever that refuses the Economists promise of a better world later on is worth considering.

As well, there are likely to be contradictions and conflicts between the various attempts to address these issues (not to mention the various definitions, interpretations and narrativizations of them, which I will get to in a later post). True, the particular actions need to be scrutinized, but I contend that we nevertheless need action and reflection; and if we lose the balance or lose a sense of the immediacy, then we lose any hope of ever addressing the issues themselves. The Economist's prediction lives nowhere but in our imaginations, but we do not want our own fidelity to our fellow humankind, to social justice and making fairer the world to be made of the same stuff.

If nothing else, it is worth noting how our own morality is a problem for us, and has been, for so long. It even provides a kind of comfort, really, to see that what we're working on has been worked on and will likely continue to be. Nevertheless, we must maintain fidelity both to the present and what is not present, and to this we hopefully can work towards.

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Bipartisanship?

What does it say that we cannot even agree to what it means to be bipartisan or that we're fighting over its very definition? http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/10/15/gohmert-pushes-impeachment-obama-getting-close-to-a-high-crime-and-misdemeanor/