Joel Coen on movies vs TV

In my 2022 movie year-in-review I mentioned my exhaustion with TV and my preference for movies. Joel Coen, from a 2020 podcast with longtime cinematographer Roger Deakins on why he and brother Ethan have stuck to movies and not ventured into TV, explains a little of what goes into my preference:

[L]ong-form was never something we could get our heads around. It’s a different paradigm. Not to be shitty about it, but you can look at stories that they have a beginning, middle, and end. But so much of television has a beginning, a middle, a middle, a middle, a middle, until the whole thing dies of exhaustion. It’s beaten to death and then you find a way of ending it.

We’ve all watched TV shows like this. Even some of our favorites fit the arc Coen describes here.

One of the reasons I hope movies and movie theatres survive is that the discipline of the form makes moviegoing better than binge-watching even a good TV show. The discipline of the filmmakers to turn out a compact, well-crafted, self-contained jewel—rather than giving themselves permission, as so many TV showrunners do, to sprawl all over the place—and the discipline of the audience starting a story and not being able to stop it, having to receive it continuously in the form intended by the filmmakers; these are virtues that dissipate in the size and potential aimlessness of a TV series.

There are exceptions, of course, but who has time to find them? And I’ll carve out space for mini-series, which demand some of the same beginning-middle-end discipline as a two-hour drama. Not for nothing is the five-episode Chernobyl and the six-episode The Night Manager the best TV I’ve seen in the last few years.

I’m currently listening to the full Deakins-Coen interview on my commute between campuses. I discovered it and the passage above thanks to this short post from World of Reel.

Frictionless news

Apropos of nothing: pre-prepared headlines in Citizen Kane

Two more thoughts, which are really one thought, in my ongoing meditations about the baleful influence of news media on our culture and our minds.

First, I have returned several times to this post from Alan Jacobs, written in the aftermath of the riots on Capitol Hill. Jacobs begins by noting two facts:

1. During a crisis one turns instinctively and desperately to the internet for news;

2. During a crisis the worst thing one can do is turn to the internet for news.

Jacobs notes that with something as (seemingly) monumental as those riots going on, it is natural and understandable that so many people tried to keep track of it in real time. However:

But you know what? It did me no good. I got mixed messages, unreliable reports, rapidly changing stories; and I heard repeatedly from fools and knaves. If I had waited a day, or two days, or three, I wouldn’t have had all the emotional upheaval and I wouldn’t have missed anything significant. What possible difference could it make to me to learn about the Capitol Disgrace on Wednesday or on the following Monday (which is my usual news-reading day)? The only answer: None. None at all.

Instantly available information is often bad information. Which brings me to a possible partial solution—friction.

Last year on his blog, novelist Robin Sloane wrote that “Browsing Twitter the other day, I once again found myself sucked into a far-off event that truly does not matter, and it occurred to me that social media is an orthographic camera.” This refers to a system of 3D projection that renders objects the same size regardless of their distance from the viewer. Social media functionally “standardiz[es] all events, no matter how big or small, delightful or traumatic, to fit the same mashed-together timeline.” By contrast:

Before electronic media, news was attenuated by the friction and delay of transmission and reproduction. When it arrived on your doorstep, a report of a far-off event had an “amplitude” that helped you judge whether or not it mattered to you and/or the world.

That’s not the case with social media, where even tiny, distant events are reproduced “at full size” on your screen. This has been true of electronic media for a long time—I’m thinking of all the local TV news broadcasts that have opened with the day’s grisliest murder—but/and there was, before social media, at least an argument that it was important to have good “news judgment” if you were responsible for putting events on screens, particularly at the highest levels.

Indeed, working out the relative importance of events was, and is, a big part of what newsrooms do. The front page of a print newspaper was, and is, the tangible result: its allocation of paper and ink to different stories a direct and costly indication of their relative weight.

Note the roles of distance, elapsed time, and judgment required here. All forms of friction that can scour away the useless, the trivial, and the merely controversial.

Compare my thoughts on a very different social media flap from two years ago here, or the line from Neil Postman that I’ve been invoking since I first started these reflections shortly thereafter. After the invention of the telegraph and its capacity for the near-instantaneous relay of news, “the whole world became the context for news. Everything became everyone’s business. For the first time, we were sent information which answered no question we had asked, and which, in any case, did not permit the right of reply.” The result? “[W]e have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.”

Sloan offers two helpful thoughts in conclusion, the most helpful being a set of questions we could constantly and deliberately ask ourselves as we take in items presented to us as news:

I think a practical and healthy thing that any user of social media can do when confronted with a free-floating cube of news is ask: how big is this, really? Does it matter to me and my community? Does it, in fact, matter anywhere except the particular place it happened? Sometimes, the answer is absolutely yes, but not always—and these platform[s] don’t make it easy to judge.

Restore a bit of friction to your news consumption—most of all, give it time—and see what burns away.

I wrote about the news and our consumption of it earlier this year here and here. I discovered Sloane’s excellent post (read the whole thing when you can) via this article from The Hedgehog Review, which offers an interesting application of friction to our own writing. And I’m fixing to read a specifically theological examination of these issues in Jeffrey Bilbro’s Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry into the News, a book I’ve been looking forward to for some time. Should be worth your while if you’re interested in this topic, too.

Tuchman's Law

Yesterday evening my wife and I watched A Night to Remember. About midway through the film, as the decks started to slope and the Titanic’s passengers grew truly frantic for the first time, my wife turned to me and said, “I don’t think I’m ever getting on a boat again.”

I had to agree. The ocean bothers me anyway, and I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about sinkings lately—from teaching the Lusitania earlier this semester to passing the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic earlier this month to reading up on the deadliest sinking in history, that of the Wilhelm Gustloff, last week, which led me to revisit the Goya and the the Cap Arcona and the General von Steuben and…

But is this really reasonable? Don’t most ships make it safely to port? Aren’t these noteworthy precisely because of how much went wrong on their voyages, placing them well outside the norm?

All this brought to mind something else I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, especially in relation to the way we keep up with the news: Tuchman’s Law.

The Tuchman there is Barbara Tuchman, author of The Guns of August among many other bestselling works of history. In the introduction to her book A Distant Mirror, about “the calamitous fourteenth century”—a century I revisited twice in my Years Worse than 2020 series in December—Tuchman examines the formidable obstacles faced by modern people seeking to understand the Middle Ages. In addition to the vast cultural differences—differences in belief and worldview, imagination and priorities, among others—there is the inherent bias of all written records:

A greater hazard, built into the very nature of recorded history, is overload of the negative: the disporportionate survival of the bad side—of evil, misery, contention, and harm. In history this is exactly the same as in the daily newspaper. The normal does not make news. History is made by the documents that survive, and these lean heavily on crisis and calamity, crime and misbehavior, because such things are the subject matter of the documentary process—of lawsuits, treaties, moralists’ denunciations, literary satire, papal Bulls. No Pope ever issued a Bull to approve of something. Negative overload can be seen at work in the religious reformer Nicolas de Clamanges, who, in denouncing unfit and worldly prelates in 1401, said that in his anxiety for reform he would not discuss the good clerics because “they do not count beside the perverse men.”

Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening—on a lucky day—without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena. This has led me to formulate Tuchman’s Law, as follows: “The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold” (or any figure the reader would care to supply).

Or the way I often explain this concept to students: the mere fact that something is given media attention makes it seem X times more common than it actually is.

I appreciate the way Tuchman herself applies her law to the news media. Clearly we are wired to build probably scenarios out of the stories we hear, especially when they bring to light shocking dangers—however remote. There’s a natural pattern-seeking at work there which will inevitably skew your perceptions of what is normal, especially when overwhelmed with information.

What Tuchman clearly does not anticipate is the manipulation of this tendency, the artificial construction of narratives out of the news media’s vast sea of white noise—so aptly described by Postman, who I’ve mentioned in this connection before. These narratives may or may not actually reflect real world trends, but the mere fact that stories supporting the narratives are reported makes it that much harder to determine. And this is not even to factor in deliberate dishonesty, of which there is plenty.

I’ve found Tuchman’s Law a helpfully specific way to apply skepticism when looking at a news story, especially one, as the news is wont to do, meant to shock, disturb, or scare you—or, increasingly, call you to some kind of righteous indignation. In addition to basic questions like those proposed by Alan Jacobs here, ask something like: Barring intentional dishonesty about this story, how common is what it describes? It has a salutary effect on the intellect not unlike getting away from the computer and taking a walk in the sunshine and fresh air. You know—the real world.

I’ve critiqued the news and especially our consumption of it before here and most recently here.

CS Lewis and too much news

This week I started reading an excellent volume called CS Lewis on Politics and the Natural Law, by political scientists Justin Buckley Dyer and Micah J Watson. In their opening chapter the authors contest the widespread perception of Lewis as apolitical, as either uninterested in or uninformed about politics. I won’t get into that argument—suffice it to say that any perception of Lewis as apolitical should not survive a reading of his essays—but in passing they quote from the following February 18, 1940 letter to his brother, Warnie, written after a visit from their friend Owen Barfield, who was greatly agitated about world affairs.

This letter grabbed my attention for two reasons. First, Lewis specifically mentions the Winter War or Russo-Finnish War, an interest of mine for some years. In November of 1939, the Soviet Union had invaded Finland in an attempted takeover. The outnumbered Finns fought the Russians to a standstill. Especially important was the tenacious Finnish defense of the Mannerheim Line, a network of trenches dug in across the Karelian Isthmus and the scene of unbelievably brutal fighting. (And Lewis knew something about trench warfare.) The war would end just under a month after Lewis posted this letter.

Second, and more to my point, Lewis’s frustrated reflections on the amount of grave news we’re expected to keep up with still seem fresh, even though he didn’t have to contend with the 24-hour news cycle or, God help us, social media.

Lewis:

[Barfield] is very much depressed having a greater faculty than you or I for feeling the miseries of the world in general—which led to a good deal of argument, how far, as a man and a Christian, one ought to be vividly and continuously aware of, say, what it’s like on the Mannerheim line at this moment. I took the line that the present rapidity of communication etc. imposed a burden on sympathy for which sympathy was never made: that the natural thing was to be distressed about what was happening to the poor Jones’s in your own village and that the modern situation, in which journalism brings us the Chinese, Russians, Finns, Poles and Turks to your notice each morning really could not be met in the same way. Of course I know the more obvious reply, that you can’t do them any good by being miserable, but that is hardly the point, for in the case of the Jones’s next door we should think ill of the man who felt nothing whether his feeling did them good or not.

I am afraid the truth is in this, as in nearly everything else I think about at present, that the world, as it is now becoming and has partly become, is simply too much for people of the old square-rigged type like you and me. I don’t understand its economics, or its politics, or any dam’ thing about it.

A year and a half ago I wrote a post called “Against the News,” in which I examined some of Neil Postman’s account of the way the modern media “elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.” Glutted with the news, impotent to do anything, all that’s left is opinion—or, worse, fervid, sanctimonious admonitions—“about which you can do nothing.”

This is as specific as I’ll be: for days now my newsfeeds across all social media have been full of inescapable nothing.

Please revisit that post in full—I develop these ideas with more detail and less irritation than here—and consider seriously cutting down on your diet of current events. Maybe limit yourself to those for which it would be possible for you to be physically present.

That’s the negative. A positive suggestion: direct your sympathy and action toward the Joneses of Lewis’s letter. Not for nothing is the language of the Bible to love one’s neighbor—literally a near-dweller. Or, as Tolkien put it in a passage I’ve challenged myself with again and again, “uproot evil in the fields you know.” More on that here.

Against the news

FAKE NEWS AND FEARMONGERING IN CITIZEN KANE (1941)

After the busiest, most hectic, and stressful semester of my career, I’m coming up for air. I have quite a backlog of stuff I’d like to share—movie and book reviews, especially—but one of the most thought-provoking things to cross my path in the last months is this excellent post by my old acquaintance Will Gray: “What I learned from giving up news for Lent this year.”

Will decided to give up the news—all news media, even casually observed TV news in public places. The saturation of our day-to-day lives with news is such that it proved nearly impossible but, to his credit, he stuck with it. In the process, he learned a couple other important things: any truly important information will make its way to you eventually, and via more organic, meaningful routes—like, you know, family and friends—and avoiding the constant fever pitch of news consumption is “delightfully refreshing.”

It’s a good post—do check it out.

I’ve never given up the news cold turkey the way Will did this year but I’ve certainly been tempted to. And on the occasions when I have purposefully avoided the news for a day or two, or even a few hours, I have felt that refreshment. A French word for it—fresh on my mind since I’ve just lectured on Nixon and Kissinger—is détente: literally de-tensifying or unstretching. Without the news I find I can relax—I can be lax again.

But it was not ever thus. Détente might have come to my mind on this topic just this morning, but as I first read Will’s post last week I thought of something even more directly relevant: I recalled some observations in Neil Postman’s seminal critique of modern media, Amusing Ourselves to Death. I’ve just completed design on a new Humanities course on technology and culture—one of the things making this semester so busy—and Postman’s book will be one of the texts for the course.

Amusing Ourselves to Death examines the way different kinds of media make possible—as well as make impossible—certain kinds of discourse, ways of conversing about the world. His primary concern is with the deleterious effect of TV on American discourse (the book was published in 1985), but in the first part Postman examines “typographic” or print culture.

Postman argues that a typographic culture of discourse pertained in the United States through roughly the mid- or late-19th century, and what distinguishes a population raised on print is a long, patient attention span, the ability to focus intently, a store of shared cultural background that can be drawn upon for mutual understanding, and an immense capacity for following and digesting complicated information. His most potent example is the audience for the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858—ordinary citizens of all ages and sexes from seven respectably sized towns in Illinois who not only sat still for, but apparently followed, participated in, and enjoyed minutely detailed political and philosophical debates for upwards of seven hours at a stretch.

“For the first time in human history, people were faced with the problem of information glut.”

All that began to change, according to Postman, with the invention of telegraphy. Because the telegraph could transmit previously hard to get information almost instantaneously over vast distances, “for the first time in human history, people were faced with the problem of information glut.” Furthermore, the information conveyed by telegraph was unformed, unsorted, “essentially incoherent.” Its speed encouraged brevity, and therefore urgency. It “introduced a kind of public conversation whose . . . language was the language of headlines—sensational, fragmented, impersonal. News took the form of slogans, to be noted with excitement, to be forgotten with dispatch.” In the end, one of the most important unintended consequences of telegraphy was “to dignify irrelevance and,” more importantly for my purposes here, “amplify impotence.”

In his post, Will writes: “Many other reports, articles, exposés, and scoops are bound to have rankled you during the past 40 days. Gotten under your skin. Raised your blood pressure. Gotten your dander up.” Something we’re bound to be familiar with. Here is where Postman’s observation about the impotence created by telegraphic news reporting—and only enhanced since—comes in. One of the reasons people get so worked up about the news is that most of what they read about or see on TV they are powerless to do anything about. All one can do is fret or enjoy the show. We are, at best, a whole world of helpless observers; at worst, a world of prurient rubberneckers.

Why is this? According to Postman, “in both oral and typographic cultures, information derives its importance from the possibilities of action.

Prior to the age of telegraphy, the information-action ratio was sufficiently close so that most people had a sense of being able to control some of the contingencies in their lives. What people knew about had action-value. In the information world created by telegraphy, this sense of potency was lost, precisely because the whole world became the context for news. Everything became everyone’s business. For the first time, we were sent information which answered no question we had asked, and which, in any case, did not permit the right of reply.

“The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing.”

We’ve come a long way since telegraphy, of course, and from Postman’s era, in which “Sesame Street” and CNN—two of his notable but now seemingly quaint concerns—were relatively new threats to public discourse. The 24-hour news cycle ushered in by CNN is now the norm, and the hour is hardly a sufficient unit of time with which to measure how quickly the news comes in and changes. In the course I designed, I invite my students to conjecture what they think Postman would have made of Snapchat or, especially, Twitter.

But all of this just deepens that feeling of powerlessness. Here’s Postman again, quoted at length so you can see how his examination of this problem accidentally foreshadows even more troubling issues:

You may get a sense of this [sense of impotence] by asking yourself another series of questions: What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous mistreatment of the Baha'is in Iran? I shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them. You may, of course, cast a ballot for someone who claims to have some plans, as well as the power to act. But this you can do only once every two or four years by giving one hour of your time, hardly a satisfying means of expressing the broad range of opinions you hold. Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convent them into—what else?—another piece of news. Thus, we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.

Notably, even the momentous national issues debated by Lincoln and Douglas in front of those raucous crowds across Illinois were debated from the perspective of Illinoisans. Their interest was locally inflected. It mattered to them. And so whatever worry, fretfulness, or even anger the news caused them was finite and open to their doing something about it. They had a good time at the debates, but that wasn’t because they couldn’t do anything about the issues. (I wrote more on this theme, inspired by a great line from Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings, here last summer.)

Compare the news we consume nowadays. We probably all have opinions on the Mueller Report or the so-called Green New Deal, opinions we were invited to adopt and defend tenaciously by our news medium of choice. And beyond the irrelevance of our news and the powerlessness it creates in us, there’s the anxiety—which clickbaity headlines are designed to produce. Postman’s description of the kind of conversation favored by telegraphy reflects our culture of catastrophizing, apocalyptic internet headlines better than anything I’ve read from our time.

The news—simply receiving the news in the form and via the media we do now—does more harm than good. I think it’s worth opting out. I mean to, as much as I am able. It will be a discipline, but nothing worthwhile is ever arrived at purposelessly.

For myself, I plan to scale back. Like Will, I’m going to root out and delete that Apple News app just for starters. I may not quit wholly, but I’ll set aside specific blocks of time to be news-free. But as I hinted, there must be a purpose behind giving up the news. For Will, it was a Lenten discipline, “an act of solidarity with Jesus.” That’s a good starting point. Giving up the news will certainly be better for my soul than not, especially given my choleric temper. But giving up the news will also be a means to spend more time, my mind free of distant and ultimately irrelevant current events, with my wife and kids, with friends and family where we can talk about each other and not what’s going on five-hundred miles away in Washington DC or, even worse, 2300 miles away in Hollywood. I can be fully present. And I can work, bit by bit, on improving my wife, my kids, my friends and family, and myself.

Whether that makes headlines or not, I won’t care, and I certainly won’t know—until you tell me.