Michael Jackson and Media Time

Amidst the wall-to-wall coverage of Michael Jackson’s death have been frequent observations about his transformative and ongoing influence. A regular assertion has been that Jackson broke the color barrier at the fledgling – and initially all-white -- MTV in the early 1980s. Another observation, both self-evident and self-fulfilling when communicated by global media news outlets today, concerns the performer’s longstanding worldwide popularity during the crucial globalizing years of the 1980s and 1990s.

Less thoughtful attention has been devoted to why this historical significance matters. Breaking down racial barriers and crossing international borders are important, of course. Commentators from Eric Lott to George Lipsitz have written about the centrality of African-American performance and creativity to American culture that, in turn, have gone global with the proliferation of American cultural forms and products. Likewise, our efforts today to make sense of changing technologies and intensified worldwide cultural connections can only benefit from fuller understanding of what occurred a generation ago as new technologies, driven by satellites and cable television, and corporate consolidations enabled a heretofore unprecedented wave of media globalization.

One of the great anxieties of the time involved the homogenization of media content that would inevitably occur around the world. Homogenization here was a code word for Americanization and typically was feared as a parallel on the content side to the industrial consolidation that was taking place in the growth of media conglomerates. While such concerns have persisted, many critiques since have developed more nuanced readings of the media landscape that focus on the complex interplay between global and local forces. Scholars like David Morley, Kevin Robins and Annette Sreberny have adeptly sought to reconceptualize the geographies of media emergent since the 1980s.

Corresponding to this recasting of media space should be a rethinking of media time. The surplus of digital media content, from 24-hour news to nearly limitless audio and video internet downloads, has produced a landscape that is marked by at least three temporal elements: media impressions are constant (we have continuous input from multiple platforms), ephemeral (what crisis is CNN covering today) and less anchored in time (think TiVo). As importantly, understanding media over time – that is, media history – at least from the 1980s until today turns perhaps most dramatically on a fragmentation of attention and consumption across an increasing number of channels and platforms. Michael Jackson, we have been told, was among that last generation of figures to dominate cultural experience before media fragmented (consider John Rash’s piece about the passing of Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett and Michael at adage.com: http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=137601 ).

Yet the coverage of Jackson’s death across channels and platforms today suggests that that fragmentation may not be so complete. Nor do I believe that the recent all-MJ, all-the-time is simply an acknowledgment of a towering figure who pre-dated the diffusion of media. Rather, what the widespread, cross-channel coverage suggests is an interplay between the admittedly fragmented media worlds we variously occupy and participate in and what can still emerge as a more unified, event-driven media landscape. Most often those events are personal tragedies – think Jackson or Princess Diana – or political occurrences, like the Iranian election and its aftermath, but they can also be more benign, like the annual American secular holiday, the Super Bowl. As events, they are indeed fleeting. Much like the interaction between global and local in media space, though, these occasional unifying events balance the ongoing, everyday dispersion of attention and consumption in media time. Their interaction and balance give shape to media time and, in the process, to our sense of shared experience and community in the here and now.

A further take on Pirates and Privateers

Obviously my extended take on piracy, drawn in contrast to aspects of terrorism like anti-capitalism and mediated visibility, is only one of various possible approaches to the subject. In a fascinating piece of historical sociology, Bryan Mabee of the University of London, focuses on piracy in terms of historical changes in the contexts of war and violence.

"Historical accounts of private violence in international relations are often rather under-theorized and under-contextualized. Overall, private violence historically needs to be seen in the context of the relationship between state-building, political economy and violence, rather than through the narrative of states gradually monopolizing violence. Pirates and privateers in late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth century Europe were embedded in a broader political economy of violence which needed and actively promoted 'private' violence in a broader pursuit of power. As such, the de-legitimatization of piracy and privateering were the consequence of a number of interlinked political economic trends, such as the development of public protection of merchant shipping (through the growth of centralized navies), the move away from trade monopolies to inter-imperial trade, and the development of capitalism and industrialism. Present forms of private violence also need to be seen as part of a broader historical dynamic of war, violence and political economy."

Abstract for "Pirates, privateers and the political economy of private violence," _Global Change, Peace & Security_, Volume 21, Issue 2 (June 2009), pp. 139-152.

Terrorists versus Pirates

Introducing a book published four years ago, I acknowledged the quandary of defining terrorists and terrorism. Not only is one man’s terrorist another’s freedom fighter; taking a longer view of which actions or groups should be understood under the label of terrorism and which not tends to cast as much light on those doing the labeling as those committing the acts. As an analyst, I was thus left to choose between two poor choices: plunging into a definition that would seem tendentious and emphasize certain aspects of action or ideology, or sidestepping such emphasis and thereby fail to provide a useful critical frame for the subsequent discussion.

There are patterns, though, that have emerged over time and multiple studies of different violent actions labeled as terrorism. For the sake of orienting my readers, I condensed these to five:
1. The deliberate deployment, or threat of deployment, of violent action against persons or property;
2. The production of anxiety and fear, and the disruption of social routine, by this action;
3. The pursuit of this action by individuals, sub-state groups, or states motivated by criminal, political, or religious reasons including the desire to demonstrate their power;
4. The intimidation of, or impact on, individuals who are neither directly involved in the violent action nor the primary targets of the actors’ motivation; and,
5. The often clandestine or semi-clandestine nature of the action and responsible actors.

While a useful starting point, what’s largely left out of this list is the importance of anti-Capitalist violence to understandings of terrorism, at least in Europe and the U.S. since the late 19th century. From the Haymarket bombings and Italian anarchism to Bolshevism to the Red Army Fraction and ultimately Al Qaeda’s bombing of the World Trade Center, the violent actions mounted against property, especially private property, and the capitalist system it represents offer a continuing if quite varied thread linking so-called terrorists. Like any broad categorization of terrorist groups, of course there are exceptions; the point is that violence or its threat against property and the capitalist-system organized around and protected by nation-states has been a mainstay of the actions labeled as terrorism over the last century and a half.

The other aspect of terrorism worth highlighting is more familiar: the media. My contention has been that the production of anxiety or fear and intimidation of individuals distant from direct involvement in violent action requires mediated communication of information about that action to be effective. In other words, for a violent event to be terrorism, that is, qualitatively different from just another violent event (as traumatic as that may be), requires a certain framing, communication and interpretation of the event to those who did not experience it firsthand. Depending on one’s political leanings, then, parallels might be seen between a capitalist-media-system organized around and protected by nation-states and the resulting labeling of actions or events as terrorism. Put differently, as I did in Terrorism, Media, Liberation, media communication heightens the visibility of violent actions even as the violent groups themselves seek, at least most of the time, to remain invisible.

These two highlighted issues, anti-capitalism and mediated visibility, seem relevant not only for groups designated as terrorists. Both capitalism and media also raise questions about that other spectre of non-state group violence, pirates. Piracy, of course, is millennia old. Indeed, arguably a golden age, was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when capitalism was emerging – along with nation-states and global trading systems.

Today, piracy has evolved along several tracks. The Somali pirates in recent headlines have primarily seized ships in the Indian Ocean and held them, and their kidnapped crews or passengers or cargo, for ransom. Elsewhere, in the waters around Southeast Asia, for example, the physical theft of cargo is more common. In both instances, the legal language around piracy entails violence and, tellingly, the use of “war-like acts” of violence or criminality – in other words, acts reserved in the inter-national system for nation-states. The status of “non-state actors” and their violation of the right to employ violence ordinarily the monopoly of states is as critical for the legal characterization of pirates as for terrorists.

(As a sidenote, the fuzzy status of airplane hijacking is intriguing here: there would seem to be a parallel with the seizure of ships at sea for which the term piracy is typically invoked, yet that same term is rarely if ever used for actions against airplanes. This might have to do with the apparent distinction between financial and political motivation for such action. The French use the term, pirate de l’air for the hijacker of a plane, and pirate de la route for the hijacker of a truck or bus.)

Many contemporary pirates are adept at the use of modern technology. But the more compelling connection between technology and piracy involves the illegal infringement of copyright or theft of copyrighted material. Digitalization has enabled the ready manipulation and circulation of such materials, with the internet, in particular, allowing unauthorized sharing. Probably the most famous example of this process was the appearance in the late 1990s of Napster and the illegal downloading and proliferation of audio files in mp3 format. Despite the successful shutdown of Napster by the Recording Industry Association of America in 2001, the episode altered the basic business model – and dominance by a handful of longtime corporate players – in the music industry. In the roughly decade since, the film industry has feared similar downloads of its productions, causing, as some see it, a delay in the implementation of widespread internet- or broadband-delivered digital film.

Like piracy on the seas, the piracy of copyrighted material has a longer history. The latter phenomenon dates at least to the early 17th century – again, the time when capitalism and the private property underlying it were assuming what are for us recognizably modern forms. The linkages between these notions of private property and intellectual property remain underdeveloped, however. Moreover, as my friend Martin Roberts has put it to me, both kinds of property speak to the emergence of commodities created and regulated not only by capitalism but the legal orders of nation-states.

Piracy of both kinds also relies on minimizing the visibility of its perpetrators. Terrorism, recall, depends for its success on the ever-increasing visibility of events to influence those not having immediate proximity to events. Pirates, on the other hand, not only employ stealth and invisibility in order to carry out their actions but generally seek advantage by denying visibility or awareness to those beyond immediate events. Anthropologist Carolyn Nordstrom and others have referred to the enormity of the “hidden economy” existing outside or on the margins of the official capitalist economy, and many groups identified as pirates are directly involved in its operation. The role of media in increasing or denying visibility thus becomes crucial for the continuing success of pirates.

The juxtaposition of terrorism and piracy turns on this different relation to visibility. Even more important, though, is their shared if still different relationship to capitalism and the nation-state system underlying it. Terrorism, at least of the Al Qaeda strain, is in its attack on and critique of capitalism, in ways a double for that ideology. Piracy is different. As an extreme, violent version of the ever-growing pursuit of self-interest and private control of capital, piracy is finally guided by the same logics of political economy, however exaggerated. It is a shadow of capitalism. In this age of increasing circulation of global capital – not to mention of global media – the renewed prominence of that shadow should be unsurprising.

Are We not Men? _Terminator Salvation_

*****SPOILER ALERT: The following comments take off from revelations made toward the end of the film that answer questions about character and narrative posed throughout. Readers not wishing to know these before viewing the film should not read further.*****

Near the end of Terminator Salvation, Marcus Wright (Sam Worthingon), the major new character introduced in the film to the franchise has his role explained to him (and us) by a computer. He is not only a cyborg, a revelation already made dramatically in the course of the narrative, but one whose purpose was to lure Connor to SkyNet where the resistance leader could be killed. This purpose is explained by a computer simulation of Dr. Serena Kogan, played by Helena Bonham Carter, who had fifteen years earlier persuaded Wright to donate his very human body for medical research. Wright’s enraged reaction includes tearing out the SkyNet control chip implanted in his neck and smashing the computer video display. He then comes to the aid of Connor, who is being assailed by the next generation, Schwarzenegger-faced Model 101 Terminator. After dispatching the machine and fleeing the headquarters, Wright offers his human heart to the mortally wounded Connor so that the resistance leader can fight on.

Wright is arguably the central character in Terminator Salvation. (Bale’s stilted acting as John Connor makes this an easier claim to defend, though that’s not my point.) The film begins with Wright on death row in 2003, signing over his soon-to-be-executed body for research to Dr. Kogan. His appearance in 2018, the post-apocalyptic moment of principal action in the film, is not immediately explained and his movement through the narrative parallels, while sometimes crossing, that of John Connor up to the scenes at SkyNet headquarters where the revelations about him and the final conflicts with Connor and the new Model 101 occur. The film’s poster shows only him and Christian Bale’s John Conner, the grown-up resistance fighter whom viewers have come to know over the three earlier films and the current TV series. Reportedly, Bale had even initially been approached by the director, McG, to play the Wright character before convincing the filmmaker that he should be Connor.

That Wright is a cyborg comes as only a minor surprise midway through watching the film. What interests me more, and is finally more telling, is the later revelation that his very purpose was programmed by SkyNet. This explanation is neat and plausible. It makes sense within the narrative and allows for the subsequent closure achieved through Wright’s rescue of Connor from the Terminator and his donating his heart for transplant. It also alludes to the other films – one that comes to mind is the 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate, where Bennett Marco, Denzel Washington’s character, who serves throughout the film as the viewer’s surrogate and seeming pursuer of villains, is himself revealed in the end to be the brainwashed assassin.

It is also assures that the film remains summer schlock rather than edgier sci-fi (or, to borrow the evocative name of a club is the first film, tech noir) fare.

Why? In the Terminator franchise universe, machines are bad and humans good (some stupid, some mean, most victims, but all, as a species, good in the face of SkyNet’s genocidal evil). After being revealed as a cyborg, the question remaining about Wright, whom we’ve been assured in the prologue was a human, is how did he become a cyborg and for what purpose. The first possibility, that SkyNet made him for the subterfuge, is laid out in the film. The second possibility, the one not taken, has Wright as a cyborg made by men for the purpose of aiding the resistance. This would be akin to the human reprogramming of the Model 101 Terminator sent back to help Sarah and John Conner against the T-1000 in the second film.

Such remaking of a human as part-machine by other humans would also be importantly different from the simple reprogramming of a machine. It would complicate the clear boundaries maintained in the franchise between men and machines. Summer Glau’s female Terminator in the TV series, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, treads on similar ground, occasionally expressing curiosity for human emotion and feeling, particularly for the teenage John Connor. The Model 101 Terminator in the initial sequel, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, also evinces some arguably human traits despite at the end of that film explaining that he can never cry. If the boundary was pushed in the 1991 production, it may be the larger-than-life Schwarzeneggerian exception that proves the franchise rule. On today's film screen, especially, no such blurring occurs.

Even more importantly, the mechanizing of humans by humans avoids any suggestion that men are striving to become more machine-like in ways that parallel how machines, in the continuing evolution of Terminator models, seek to become more like men (at least in appearance). Terminator Salvation therefore avoids any hint of convergence of man and machine, at least from the human side. As a result, the film sidesteps the knottier and ultimately more provocative questions posed by ore thoughtful science fiction, preferring to fill the current production with pyrotechnics of future war.

Blade Runner, particularly in the variations offered through its multiple versions, is the consummate example of a film that plumbs the depths of what convergence of man and machine might mean. It is also probably an unfair basis for comparison. Yet other productions demonstrate how multi-dimensional characters can complicate otherwise clearcut oppositions between man and machine. Consider the first Matrix film (1999), setting aside the sophistication of the guiding conceit of the matrix itself, Cypher, the character played by Joe Pantoliano, who betrays his fellow rebels in hopes of returning to the painless ignorance of simulated reality. Again, this is perhaps another unfair comparison.

My point nevertheless is that reworking even relatively minor elements could interject layers to character and narrative. For a summer action film from an extraordinarily profitable franchise, that may well be a non-issue. But with two more Terminator films in a projected new trilogy set after Judgment Day, that kind of richness could only be for the good.

_Wall-E's_ Debt to D.W. Griffith

To describe the gentle movements of Wall-E’s eponymous, robot hero, critics have regularly invoked the poetic physicality of Charlie Chaplin and, occasionally, Buster Keaton. This seems particularly apt in the film’s opening thirty minutes, when the robot’s trash compacting movements around a desolate Earth is synchronized with music and proves expressive to the point that dialogue is unnecessary. The parallel continues to be relevant as Wall-E leaves Earth in romantic pursuit of Eve, a vegetation-seeking robot, calling to mind Chaplin’s City Lights, in which the Little Tramp falls for a blind matchgirl. That masterwork, despite appearing in 1931 after the movie sound era begin, was a silent production dependent on character’s visual expression of emotion.

If the comparisons to silent film virtuosi resonate in celebrating the gestural subtleties of Pixar’s animation, they lack historical depth. No critics I have read have pursued the parallels they draw with Chaplin or Keaton in contemporary reviews. To a certain degree, that’s fine: the point of mentioning these past giants is to celebrate a technological updating of the timeless capacity of cinema to convey characters’ feeling and emotion through their visual movement alone.

History is important to Wall-E, though. This is true not only when considering the film’s comments, offered from seven hundred years in the future, about our present destruction of the environment. The past also operates more complexly in the ways the film itself tells its story. But neither Chaplin nor Keaton is the key to understanding this history. The key figure here is David Wark Griffith.

D.W. Griffith is best known for having directed The Birth of a Nation, the seminal 1915 film that was at once a momentous step forward for narrative filmmaking and a vile racist account of the Civil War and Reconstruction whose heroes were the Ku Klux Klan. Yet despite this unpardonable offense in visualizing invidious racial politics, Griffith was also a father, indeed a founder, of narrative filmmaking as we have inherited it. A master at consolidating the advances wrought by others and creating his own innovations in visualizing more an more complex stories on screen. The use of parallel editing to build suspense while simultaneously tracking separate dramatic developments and the visual development of complex psychological characters are but two of the legacies of the hundreds of films, mostly shorts, made by Griffith.

While shaping film narrative in the early, formative years of the twentieth century, Griffith was nevertheless an unalterably nineteenth-century man. He had been born in Kentucky in 1875, the son of a former Confederate army officer who had been a hero in the Civil War. Another way to conceive of this connection is to recall that fewer years separated the appearance of The Birth of a Nation and the events it recounted than we in 2009 are separated from the end of World War II. While much else has changed in renderings of the past and shaping of collective memory, of course, the point is that such a defining event still held great sway in the popular imagination. Perhaps more generally important was the sentimental cast on which he relied for constructing coherent stories about the world and especially the historical past.

Returning to Wall-E, the film appears to contain a direct if fleeting nod to Griffith. Midway through, after discovering soil left by our intrepid robotic hero on the Axiom spaceship, the previously inactive human captain requests a computer lecture about the soil and planting. Various images flash before his eyes, and ours, but the very first is recognizable from its place in film history. It shows a single man, bag slung over one shoulder, walking slowly and spreading seeds through a field. The image is drawn from A Corner in Wheat, a 1909 short film made by Griffith.

The short was adapted from Frank Norris’s 1902 novel, The Pit. The titular “corner” is the control that one mogul seeks over the world’s wheat market and the film dwells on the contrast, developed through skillful editing, between the profligate lives of financial speculators and the sufferings of the poor who cannot afford bread when wheat prices are artificially increased. A cautionary tale for the turn-of-the-century progressive era, modern urban excess is critiqued in favor of a more equitable agrarian past. Pictorially, the closing pastoral image of the film that appears in Wall-E is itself a reproduction of Millet’s 1850 painting, The Sower, which idealized a peasant farmer.

Griffith was nostalgic here in the truest sense of that word: he yearned for an imagined past, particularly a past home, that never was. Nostalgia is a timeless impulse, of course, and it is fair to observe that stories tinged with nostalgia are, if not universal, largely unbound by historical era or place. Cinema has always been about nostalgia – some film philosophers claim that the medium’s defining condition is the celebration of the continuity of the world through viewing actors and experiences captured on celluloid (or, now, disk) that we know existed in the past. As a late nineteenth and early twentieth-century invention, however, cinema has most consistently trafficked in nostalgia for a pre-modern, pre-urban, pre-mechanical past that can be juxtaposed with the viewer’s present.

Besides the happy ending to Wall-E and Eve’s romance, the story in the Pixar production concludes with the hopeful return to Earth – to “home,” as the captain repeatedly says – of the previously inactive human occupants of the Axiom. The planet has become habitable again, they believe, based on the successful growth of a single green plant. They excitedly elect to pursue their future by returning hopefully to their past, seeking to re-create home in a world that they can now only imagine, or have imaged for them by technology.

If Wall-E is primarily a sentimental romance in the tradition of City Lights, its background story of societal change extends the tradition of A Corner in Wheat to address the collective need of humans to get back in touch – here, literally – with the physicality of their surroundings, notably the Earth itself. That latter story, also told a century ago by Griffith, remains a quintessentially modern one: our ongoing quest for newer and better technologies must be balanced by an uncertain fascination with the consequences of their use that drives us to embrace the imagined visions and values of the past. With its combination of breathtaking animation and adroit storytelling, Pixar offers, to many, the best of a new generation of technological filmmaking. Yet even as the medium continues to evolve into the twentieth-first century, and even to tell stories about the twenty-eighth, their latest production suggests that cinema remains squarely rooted in its own imagined past of nostalgic returns and hopeful new beginnings.