Posts Tagged ‘movies’
“Never trust people who promise to make you rich in a day. They are generally crazy swindlers”*…
Scheduling note: as a consequence of visitors and attendant obligations, (R)D will be off tomorrow and Sunday. Regular service will resume on Monday.
Last month we lost Om Malick. The journalist, investor, and blogger who chronicled Silicon Valley was a collector of fine pens. In one of his final posts, he mused on one of his last acquisitions and on its inspiration…
I have always wanted to own a Montblanc Writers Edition dedicated to Carlo Collodi, the Italian author whose real name was Carlo Lorenzini. He took his pen name from the Tuscan village where his mother was born, and then spent his career writing under a false name about a character who could not sustain one. I grew up reading the tales of Pinocchio, but only read the non-Disneyfied version as a grown-up. The book left an indelible impression on me. It is a great parable for modern times.
In case you were wondering, I did get the pen. It is one of the most beautiful and underrated pens in the Montblanc Writers Series. I have been mildly obsessed with it for a long time.It is not overwhelming, gaudy, or over the top. It tells the full story, not just of the pen but the story behind it. And it starts with the clip, that subtly hints at Pinocchio’s nose.
The cap is where Montblanc’s craftsmen did their most serious work. It is cylindrical, dark resin, topped by the Montblanc snowflake, wrapped in a silver and platinum skeletal overlay, a filigree of characters and scenes from the story, the dark resin visible beneath through the cutouts. The effect is like looking at a shadow puppet theater contained in your hand. The barrel is restrained by comparison, dark resin with horizontal platinum ring banding, letting the cap hold the eye. The nib carries its own engraving tied to the story.
Holding it in my hands recently, I found myself thinking about the story of Pinocchio, and how it throws the names that dominate our headlines into sharp relief — the ones who shape our zeitgeist of half-truths…
… The Adventures of Pinocchio was published in serial form in 1881, aimed at Italian children in the way the 19th century aimed things at children, full of suffering, consequence, and moral instruction delivered through catastrophe. The puppet is hanged. He is swallowed by a giant fish. He watches companions degrade into beasts of burden. The world he moves through is predatory at every level, and the institutions that should protect him are either absent, corrupted, or actively hostile to his interests.
I can only imagine the outrage and horror over this story should it have been published today. I am old enough to have been smacked for my stupid mistakes as a kid. So this was actually not a bad story to read. Still, I can understand how much anxiety it might cause today’s parents.
Most people remember Pinocchio as a story about lying. The nose grows. You get caught. Lesson learned. But that reading misses almost everything Collodi was actually doing. The book is a close study of a society where deception has gone ambient, woven into every institution, every transaction. Courts punish victims. Authority figures perform competence without exercising it. Experts are decorative. Society holds together through spectacle and habit rather than accountability. Into this environment, a naive creature is released, constitutionally unable to resist a good story about easy reward.
The nose is the least interesting lie in the book. The interesting lies are the ones that work.
The Fox and the Cat are the novel’s most modern characters. They persuade Pinocchio to bury his coins in the Field of Miracles on the promise that they will multiply overnight. Exploit impatience, exploit greed, frame skepticism as a failure of imagination, and dismiss skeptics as lacking vision. Remind you of someone? Space Cowboy for example?
That structure is so familiar I barely need to name it. But let me name it anyway.
Everyone from Jensen Huang to Sam Altman to Elon Musk spent a decade accumulating what I have called symbolic capital, the reputation, the prestige, the weight of being seen as someone who understands the future better than the rest of us. Now each of them seems to be running some version of the Field of Miracles, with promises that keep not arriving, timelines that dissolve, products that exist primarily as announcements, and platforms run as machines for generating more reputation regardless of what they actually do. They don’t need to be right. They need to be believed. Velocity is the new authority, and no one has weaponized that more effectively.
We are living, as I wrote years ago, in the golden age of half-truths.
Your average influencer flogging a supplement, a course, a skin cream, or a crypto token on TikTok and Instagram is running the same operation, just cheaper. The confidence is the product. The audience wants to believe. The Field of Miracles is open for business everywhere you look.
Collodi in 1881 was writing about all this at a point of major societal inflection. So perhaps now you understand why I am drawn to this story. Pinocchio is a story about a society organized around deception.
The Land of Toys is the sequence that haunts me most, especially now. Children abandon school and responsibility for a place of permanent amusement. They play. And then, gradually, they begin to change. They grow ears. They grow tails. They become donkeys, beasts of labor and exploitation, stripped of language, used until they break.
This is a parable of who we have become, a BNPL-fueled spectacle in itself.
Collodi was writing during rapid industrialization and the early emergence of mass entertainment. He understood, earlier than most, that distraction offered as pleasure can be a leash. The children who choose the Land of Toys over school are not liberated. They are owned more completely than any schoolroom could manage.
The algorithmic feed is the Land of Toys. It is built to keep you there past the point of nourishment, past the point where you are even enjoying it. Outrage travels faster than understanding. Spectacle beats judgment. The algorithm doesn’t care whether something is true. It cares whether it moves. And it keeps you scrolling, reacting, and returning in ways that benefit the platform, not you.
The political system has learned the same lesson. Governance is slow and grinding and unsatisfying. Performance is fast and shareable. We have built media and political economies that reward entertainers over administrators, and the clean story over the complicated truth.
Collodi refuses to assign blame only upward. That is what keeps the novel from collapsing into moralism. Pinocchio is deceived because he wants to be deceived. He chooses shortcuts over work, belonging over truth, spectacle over judgment, every time, until the costs become too steep to ignore. The Fox and the Cat succeed because he hands them what they need. His credulity is not innocent. It is participation.
The grifters and the hucksters and the influencers selling impossible things succeed because audiences reward certainty and punish doubt. They honor confidence and resist complication. A clean story about a genius who will fix everything travels faster than a difficult story about tradeoffs. The Field of Miracles stays open because people keep wanting to bury their coins there.
The Fox and the Cat is how the whole thing works.
Pinocchio becomes real, becomes human, only after he accepts obligation. Collodi is saying that it is important to have self-governance. It is necessary to choose the difficult truth over the easy satisfying one. That doesn’t jibe with everything the attention economy is selling, dopamine hits delivered so frequently that it becomes hard to distinguish stimulation from autonomy.
There is an obvious irony in a luxury pen commemorating a story about the seductions of wanting things you have not earned. The Montblanc Collodi is made to be admired, displayed, collected. And it honors a puppet who had to lose everything, friends, coins, his own body, before he understood what was actually worth having.
I am not sure Collodi would find that irony disqualifying. A beautiful object that makes you think seriously about the spectacle we are living in. It makes you think about what is the cost of being real. It is a more interesting pen to own than one that simply confirms your taste.
The clip is shaped like Pinocchio’s nose because the nose is the one honest thing in a world built on performance. It grows because the body keeps the score even when the mouth doesn’t.
When I hold this pen, I try to remember what that means…
A story for our times: “We Are Living in Pinocchio’s World.”
* Carlo Collodi, The Adventures of Pinocchio
###
As we know that the nose knows, we might remark that today Rhys Frake-Waterfield‘s horror film reimagining of Collodi’s tale, Pinocchio: Unstrung— featuring Robert “Freddy Krueger” Englund as the voice of “Cricket” (Jiminy!)– opens in theaters around the U.S.
The trailer is here.
“It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives”*…
As the U.S. curdles and Ukraine twists in the wind, a look back.
In the summer of 1941, World War II has been raging for almost two years; still, of course, the U.S.– while it had emerged as the “armory” of the Allies– was a non-combatant. A majority of Americans favored continuing to “to help Britain, even at the risk of getting into the war.” But stoked by isolationists and Nazi sympathizers (like Henry Ford and Father Coughlin), a third of Americans were opposed.
Into this gamy situation, Dorothy Thompson, the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany, back in 1934, released a powerful– and ultimately very influential– essay in Harpers…
It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.
It is preposterous to think that they are divided by any racial characteristics. Germans may be more susceptible to Nazism than most people, but I doubt it. Jews are barred out, but it is an arbitrary ruling. I know lots of Jews who are born Nazis and many others who would heil Hitler tomorrow morning if given a chance. There are Jews who have repudiated their own ancestors in order to become “Honorary Aryans and Nazis”; there are full-blooded Jews who have enthusiastically entered Hitler’s secret service. Nazism has nothing to do with race and nationality. It appeals to a certain type of mind.
It is also, to an immense extent, the disease of a generation—the generation which was either young or unborn at the end of the last war. This is as true of Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Americans as of Germans. It is the disease of the so-called “lost generation.”
Sometimes I think there are direct biological factors at work—a type of education, feeding, and physical training which has produced a new kind of human being with an imbalance in his nature. He has been fed vitamins and filled with energies that are beyond the capacity of his intellect to discipline. He has been treated to forms of education which have released him from inhibitions. His body is vigorous. His mind is childish. His soul has been almost completely neglected.
At any rate, let us look round the room…
[And so, in a way both enlightening and entertaining, she does, concluding…]
It’s fun—a macabre sort of fun—this parlor game of “Who Goes Nazi?” And it simplifies things—asking the question in regard to specific personalities.
Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi. They may be the gentle philosopher whose name is in the Blue Book, or Bill from City College to whom democracy gave a chance to design airplanes—you’ll never make Nazis out of them. But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis.
Believe me, nice people don’t go Nazi. Their race, color, creed, or social condition is not the criterion. It is something in them.
Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t—whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi. It’s an amusing game. Try it at the next big party you go to.
Eminently worth reading in full: “Who Goes Nazi?” from @harpers.bsky.social.
(And in a very effective testament to Thompson’s technique, Rusty Foster– who anchored a recent (R)D— asks “Who Goes AI?“)
See also: “The MAGA Theory of Art,” from Art in America, which reviews the roles that arts and design played in Nazi Germany, then compares them to what’s transpiring today. Also eminently worth reading in full; a sample:
There is a fable that persists in even themost respectable quarters, perhaps because it has retained its power to shock for more than half a century. Get any card-carrying liberal into a sufficiently confessional mood and she will tell you, sotto voce, that there was one domain in which the Nazis were perversely and chillingly formidable: the domain of the aesthetic…
… It is tempting, then, to take one look at the shambolic flailing of the Trump administration—the ham-handed takeover of the Kennedy Center, the tawdry gilding of the Oval Office, the AI slop, the women with too much filler, the men on too many steroids who boast about eating too much meat, the tweets with their erratic capitalization, the general air of carnival grotesquerie—and conclude, as Karl Marx did, that history repeats itself “first as tragedy, then as farce.”
Of course, there are obvious continuities between MAGA and its antecedent on the Rhine. “Fascism is theater,” Jean Genet wrote of the Nazis, and it is hard to think of a politician with more theatrical flair than Trump, who adores Andrew Lloyd Webber and once harbored ambitions of becoming a Broadway producer. If Hitler fostered “the modern era’s first full-blown media culture,” as the film scholar Eric Rentschler claims, then Trump is surely responsible for the postmodern era’s first full-blown social media bonanza. He has the Führer’s instinct for pageantry, the Führer’s gift for glister and grandiosity.
Trump’s resentments, too, recall those of his forbears. In his study of Nazi art policy, the historian Jonathan Petropoulos writes that art collecting was important to top brass in the party because it served “as a means of assimilation into the traditional elite.” Much to their chagrin, their political ascendency had failed to confer the cultural capital they craved; now they had to seize prestige by other means. The MAGA gentry is more resigned; Trump and his lackeys more or less accept their status as philistines and content themselves with exacting revenge on the gatekeepers, yet their air of wounded arrivism is all too familiar.
Here it may seem that the similarities come to an end… While Trump has hosted motley rallies, and even made one deflating attempt at a military parade, he has yet to produce any of the disciplined displays that so effectively reduced the bodies of their participants to raw geometries.
Above all, MAGA lacks the aesthetes who are dutifully trotted out as evidence of fascism’s scandalous refinement. Who is the MAGA Hugo Boss, the MAGA Leni Riefenstahl, the MAGA Knut Hamsun, the MAGA Gabriele D’Annunzio, the MAGA Ezra Pound? Mar-a-Lago has more in common with any suburban Cheesecake Factory than it does with the monumental austerities of Albert Speer…
(Image above: source)
* Dorothy Thompson
###
As we cast our eyes around, we might recall that it was on this date in 1917 that the U.S. entered World War I, formally declaring war against Germany and entering the conflict in Europe, which had been raging since the summer of 1914. It ended in November of 1918– one of the deadliest conflicts in history, resulting in an estimated 15 to 22 million military and civilian casualties and genocide (and via the movement of large numbers of people, a major factor in the catastrophic Spanish flu pandemic that followed).
The Paris Peace Conference of 1919–1920 imposed settlements on the defeated powers. Under the Treaty of Versailles, Germany lost significant territories, was disarmed, and was required to pay large war reparations to the Allies. The dissolution of the Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires led to new national boundaries and the creation of new independent states including Poland, Finland, the Baltic states, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia.
The League of Nations was established to maintain world peace, but failed to manage instability during the interwar period, contributing to the outbreak of World War II in 1939. Indeed, those unresolved tensions in the aftermath of World War I created the conditions for the rise of fascism in Europe (and militarism in Japan).
“In comics at their best, words and pictures are like partners in a dance, and each one takes turns leading”*…
In his new book, Lost Literacies: Experiments in the 19th Century US Comic Strip, literary historian Alex Beringer demonstrates how the birth of the genre of printed comic long preceded the Sunday Funny Pages. He elaborates in conversation with Tim Brinkhof, who introduces the colloquy…
Most people consider the introduction of the Funny Pages in the late nineteenth century as the birthday of the “modern” American comic strip. Alex Beringer is not most people.
A literary historian and professor of English at the University of Montevallo, Beringer dates the history of comics earlier, to roughly the mid-1800s, a period of prolific and uninhibited experimentation. He came to this understanding by piecing together the medium’s fractured archaeological record, diving through myriad online resources and archives. In the middle of the nineteenth century, New York-based artists followed the lead of their French and Swiss colleagues, particularly Rodolphe Töpffer, the “Father of the Comic Strip,” exchanging single-image political cartoons and caricatures for multi-panel sequences that, many believe, for the first time enabled them to play around with characterization, worldbuilding, and—well—storytelling.
Coming decades before the standardization of speech bubbles and panel borders, these early American comics seem to have little in common with their modern, more streamlined counterparts; they featured sudden and purposefully jarring jump cuts reminiscent of the yet-to-be-invented film montage or musical notes instead of text. One comic artist tells a story through shadows behind the curtains of a window; another, with hieroglyphs the reader must decipher with the help of a legend.
“The audience for this first wave of US comic strips was strikingly sophisticated in its reception of this material,” Beringer writes in Lost Literacies: Experiments in the Nineteenth-Century US Comic Strip, which chronicles this oft-forgotten renaissance. Out from the Ohio State University Press, the book is one of hundreds of titles included in JSTOR’s Path to Open program, making scholarly books accessible online to wide audiences (read chapter four here, free of charge).
“The sense of flux—the idea that the visual language could turn on a dime—was often precisely the appeal,” Beringer observes in his chronicle of this oft-forgotten renaissance.
Foretelling the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s assertion that drawing is in itself a “form of knowing,” early comic strip artists and their consumers treated the medium as a philosophical exercise; Beringer quotes the observation by media scholars Hilary Chute and Patrick Jagoda that comics “enable an intense focus on how complexly woven stories unfold across time and space and, particularly, how these involve the reader…to generate meaning through interacting with, or themselves shaping, spatiotemporal form.”
While some early American artists blatantly plagiarized illustrations and formats that originated in France and Switzerland, others used them as a springboard, giving European drawings a decidedly American twist. For example, where Töpffer’s character Monsieur Vieux Bois (“Mr. Oldbuck”) satirized the European bourgeoisie, comics featuring his Yankee doppelganger, Jeremiah Oldpot (artist unknown), a New York tin merchant who leaves his family to prospect gold in California, often hinge on what Beringer defines as the contradiction between his “romantic view of himself as a rugged frontiersman and his attachment to consumer goods.”
Beringer discusses this and other critical facets of this period in comics history…
Read on for their fascinating exchange: “Lost Literacies Strips Down the Dawn of Comics,” from @jstordaily.bsky.social.
* Scott McCloud, in his wonderful Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
###
As we tell and show, we might ponder where all of this has led, recalling that it was on this date in 2007 that the then-latest entry in a comic-born franchise dropped: TMNT, the first animated entry in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film series, was released. The film (which was entirely computer animated), is set after the final defeat of their arch-enemy, the Shredder; the four Turtles — Leonardo, Raphael, Donatello, and Michelangelo (voiced respectively by James Arnold Taylor, Nolan North, Mitchell Whitfield, and Mikey Kelley) — having grown apart, reunite and overcome their faults to save the world from evil ancient creatures. It also features the voices of Chris Evans, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Mako, Kevin Smith, Patrick Stewart, and Ziyi Zhang, with narration by Laurence Fishburne.
TMNT ranked number one at the box office on its opening weekend, beating 300 (the top film of the previous two weeks), The Last Mimzy, Shooter, Pride, The Hills Have Eyes 2, and Reign Over Me, grossing $25.45 million over the weekend of March 23–25, 2007. That said, the film grossed (only) $95.8 million million worldwide, including $54 million domestically during its 91-day run in the 3,120 North American theaters… as the Rotten Tomatoes consensus read: “TMNT’s art direction is splendid, but the plot is non-existent and the dialogue lacks the irony and goofy wit of the earlier Ninja Turtles movies.”
“Mr. Hackett turned the corner and saw, in the failing light, at some distance, his seat”*…
Michael Wolf is an award-winning and widely-exhibited photographer famous for his documentation of big city architecture and life around the world, but especially in Hong Kong… Consider this series…
Much more at “Informal Seating Arrangements in Hong Kong” and more of Wolf’s other wonderful work on his site.
* Samuel Beckett, Watt
###
As we grab a chair, we might keep our focus on Hong Kong: it was on this date in 1978 that Snake in Eagle’s Shadow was released. A Hong Kong martial arts action comedy film, it was the debut of director Yuen Woo-ping, and the breakthrough outing for its stars, Jackie Chan, Hwang Jang-lee, and (Yuen Woo-ping’s real life father) Yuen Siu-tien.
The film is the story of Chien Fu (Jackie Chan), an orphan who is bullied at a kung fu school, but meets an old beggar, Pai Cheng-tien (Yuen Siu-tien), who becomes his sifu (teacher) and trains him in Snake Kung Fu. The film established Chan’s slapstick kung fu comedy style– which he further developed with Drunken Master, also directed by Yuen Woo-ping, released in the same year, and also starring Jackie Chan, Hwang Jang-lee and Yuen Siu-tien. Snake in Eagle’s Shadow (and Drunken Master) established the basic plot structure used in many, many martial arts films internationally since then.
“Individuals may form communities, but only institutions can create a nation”*…
Good institutions are social technologies that scale trust from personal relations to entire nations. Game theorist and social scientist Julien Lie-Panis unpacks the extraordinary phenomenon of human cooperation to explain how– and why– institutions work…
Every human society, from the smallest village to the largest nation, faces the same fundamental challenge: how to get people to act in the interests of the collective rather than their own. Fishermen must limit their catch so fish stocks don’t collapse. People must respect others’ property and safety. Citizens must pay taxes to fund roads, schools and hospitals. Left to pure self-interest, no community could endure; the bonds of collective life would quickly unravel.
The solutions we’ve devised are remarkably similar across cultures and centuries. We create rules. Then we appoint guardians to enforce them. Those who break the rules are punished. But there’s a problem with this approach, one that the Roman poet Juvenal identified nearly 2,000 years ago: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who will guard the guards themselves?
Fisheries appoint monitors to prevent overfishing – but what if the monitors accept bribes to look the other way? Police officers exist to protect everyone’s property and safety – but who ensures that they don’t abuse their power? Governments collect taxes for public services – but how do we stop officials from diverting the funds to their own accounts?
Every institution faces the same fundamental paradox. Institutions foster cooperation by rewarding good behaviour and punishing rule-breakers. Yet they themselves depend on cooperative members to function. We haven’t solved the cooperation problem – we’ve simply moved it back one step. So why do institutions work at all? To understand this puzzle, we need to first ask what makes human cooperation so extraordinary in the natural world…
[Lie-Panis explores human cooperation, and examines the ways in which, while it follows the same evolutionary rules as cooperation among other species, humans have expanded the ambit of their coordination. He explains the ways in which institutions depend on “a present-future trade-off,” on its constituents’ patience as it works through problems. And he illustrates the ways in which constituents’ concerns with material security and social capital can generate that patience. He concludes…]
… Institutions can thus be understood as social technologies. We engineer them constantly, often without realising it. When neighbours organise to maintain a shared garden or playground, they appoint a small committee to manage funds and decisions. The arrangement works because it transforms the hard problem of coordinating dozens of contributors into the easier problem of trusting a few visible people who can be praised for diligence or blamed for misuse.
Like any tool, institutions cannot create what isn’t already there; they can only amplify existing cooperative capacity. Institutions rest on the conditions that make cooperation rational: material security and social capital. Where those conditions hold, reputation can work at scale. One layer of accountability supports the next, until cooperation extends far beyond the limits of familiarity. From the same force that binds vampire bats and coral reef fish, we have built cities, markets, and nations. Institutions are how trust is scaled to millions of strangers.
Eminently worth reading in full: “Guarding the Guardians,” from @jliep.bsky.social in @aeon.co.
Apposite (albeit a bit orthogonal): “Culture Is the Mass-Synchronization of Framings,” from @marco-giancotti.bsky.social.
* Benjamin Disraeli
###
As we get along, we might recall that it was on this date in 1938 that a film poking fun at a plethora of institutions, Howard Hawks’ comedy Bringing Up Baby, premiered at the Golden Gate Theater in San Francisco. Featuring Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, and a leopard, the film earned good reviews but suffered at the box office. Indeed, Hepburn’s career fell into a slump– she was one of a group of actors labeled as “box office poison” by the Independent Theatre Owners of America– that she broke with The Philadelphia Story (again with Grant) in 1940.
As for Bringing Up Baby, the film did well when re-released in the 1940s, and grew further in popularity when it began to be shown on television in the 1950s. Today it is recognized as the authentic screwball classic that it is; it sits at 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, and ranks among “Top 100” on lists from the American Film Institute and the National Society of Film Critics.
You must be logged in to post a comment.