Cannibalizing Culture

“These sacrifice zones of the corporate state are expanding. The recent shooting of an unarmed young black man in Ferguson revealed the insidious disease of white supremacy and how easily U.S. cities can turn into a military occupied police state. With unprecedented persecution of whistle-blowers, the Obama administration continues to threaten press freedom and engage in extrajudicial killing through drone attacks for anyone who is on the receiving end of U.S. imperial foreign policy.
The world is quickly becoming one big open-air prison.”
Nozomi Hayase

“Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.”
Paulo Freire

“-What takes place- in a narrative is from the referential {reality} point of view literally nothing…”
Roland Barthes

“This unfortunate race, whom we had been taking so much pains to save and to civilize, have by their unexpected desertion and ferocious barbarities justified extermination and now await our decision on their fate.”
Thomas Jefferson
1813, on problem of ‘Indians’.

If you took the major institutional equity theatres in major American cities, or mid majors, say population of one million, or a million and a half (Rochester is, after all, a million, as is Birmingham…and neither are considered large metro areas) and you examined the new plays, new work produced at these theatres for the last twenty five years, I am willing to bet you that you cannot find a single work by a playwright who wasnt either a graduate of an MFA theatre arts or writing program (and maybe some were only Enlgish majors or Law), or at least *developed* in house at the theatre in question. In other words, I would guess there are no plays written by Mortuary workers, or truck drivers, or nurses or warehouse workers, or factory workers or kindergarten teachers or ranch hands. Not unless they have gone through the ideological cleansing of an MFA program. Rarely, however, does the working class hear its own voice on stage. But my sense of U.S. culture today is one of utter and absolute homogenization. The plays feature a white core perspective, and they feature an acceptable topical theme, or just pure sentimentalized kitsch that reinforces an identical ideology. They are plays of not amnesia, but of manufactured memory.

There are gifted playwrights out there, its just that they don’t get mainstrage productions anywhere. On occasion a few will make a second stage appearance. And this is a related problem, because theatres dont develop the radical voices, the unsual talent. They may occasionally provide a single second or third stage short run production. They never provide the promise of five years of productions, even small ones. I was fortunate enough to work at Padua. To know I had a home each year. That is nonexistent today. My first play was awful, but I’d like to think I improved. Young writers need that support. Just the knowledge they have a home. What they don’t need is dramaturgs rounding off the edges, sanitizing and shaping their work to conform to the acceptable pattern. I had a dramaturg tell me once I lacked conflict in a play. Now, maybe I did, I can’t say, but the idea was that somehow ALL plays had to contain a certain kind of conflict. But worse, its not the details, its the backdrop, the extant *idea* of a social reality in which we all live. Or should. And one must write in a way that respects that backdrop.

I have noticed several trends in mass cultural entertainment of late. And I sense something else at work in how certain film and TV projects fail. One trend is the manufacturing of the ordinary. It is, it seems, a necessary construct for white America. Their sanity demands this prop be kept in view. And millionaire Hollywood actors and actresses flock to play, oh, the role of an ordinary junior high school math teacher…in Maine, least diverse state in the country. There is something suffocating in this finely detailed blandness. Oh I am a millionaire but I wish I were a high school math teacher. In a country that now ranks near the top among advanced nations in child poverty, and for whom nearly a third of its population lives right at the poverty line. There are no such places as are imagined in these stories. But August Osage County, and now Olive Kittridge upcoming on HBO are the homogenizing of not just representation, but of history and of community. Once upon a time Theodore Dreiser and Faulkner, and Inge wrote tormented autopsies of the nightmarish claustrophobia of inbred small town America. You drive across the US and stop at a dozen small towns in Idaho, Utah, Kansas, Iowa, Kentucky, Indiana, and West Virginia say, and what you find is unemployment, alcoholism, domestic abuse, bigotry and anger. Its curious how rarely unemployment finds its way into these *white ordinary* sagas so beloved by Hollywood. Or travel to the Reservations, to high plains tribes, what’s left of them, or to the southwestern deserts, and onto Navaho or Hopi land, and what you find is poverty, alcoholism and malnutrition, and government duplicitiy, even now. Or just stop in at the any of the prisons, federal or state. Allenwood, Walla Walla, Victorville, Lee, Big Sandy, Snake River up in Oregon, or Lompoc, Leavenworth or Terminal Island. The state’s super max joints like Pelican Bay and Florence ADX, or the crumbling Orleans Parish, or more crumbling San Quentin or Sing Sing, or the sinister Ely Nevada, which even years ago I remember having a rep as bad as those at Attica or Rikers or Soledad. Then a prisoner rotted to death at Ely, from untreated gangrene, and the public began to, sort of, demand a few small token reforms.

All one has to do is listen to the scoring for Olive Kittridge, in the trailer out now, to feel the condescension and smugness of the project. This is white world of minor problems that are not really such big problems, after all. There are certain adjectives, when read in a review of a film, that mean one should flee and not look back (irascible is one, whimsical is another, and of course heart warming). This sickening sentimentality is, I am finding, now sutured to the fine cross hatch stitching of all things white, of a nostalgia for an imagined world that never never never existed. The entire thrust of this sort of narrative is to erase the tragic, to erase the actual suffering and despair of the poor today on the streets of America. To erase the history of genocide and slavery. But it is also, more, to fabricate an imaginary world as if it were real, and then allow it to provide a sort of backdrop for discussions about the real world. Again, there is nowhere in the United States like these towns. But its worth repeating that Maine is the least diverse state in the entire country. Fiftieth out of fifty.

Inge’s best play is probably Picnic. It is interesting to examine the interior worlds of Inge’s characters to those today found in Olive Kittridge or August Osage county. Or read An American Tragedy, or McTeague by Frank Norris.

For even in the classic noir films of the 1940s, there was a fundamental probing of the corruption of institutional America. The kind and decent were preyed upon by the ruthless and sociopathic. A film such as High Sierra, where the protagonist is a criminal, “Mad Dog Roy Earle”, but a man, one haunted by his own actions, vulnerable and damaged, and almost tragic. The film investigates forgiveness, and sacrifice. The potency of such films comes from their basic distrust of society. Society is almost a malevolent force just out of frame. This was the world of Hammett and Chandler too, and of James Cain. But on another level, one can sense certain structural changes occurring in mainstream TV and film. In TV, the serialized narrative must manufacture reasons to stay on the air. Everything becomes a circling, a delaying of the story. Characters wait, and yet they don’t wait in an effort of unearthing new insight, they delay to see what Neilsen share they captured that week. The more prestige products — created as finite series (mini series) somehow often fall into this pattern, only because its so familiar. The Affair, the product of Sarah Treem, is so incalculably bad, so trite, so cringe inducing that its hard to find words for it. Never has the privileged world of WHITE ruling class ideology been so nakedly presented. The working class characters are treated as almost mentally damanged, and in possession of DNA scripted to exhibit lack of ‘couth, and in this case, even an ignorance of anal sex. Its all so strange and surreal, a show in which Dominic West’s eyes betray that caught in the headlight panic. How can I null this deal? Maybe I need a new agent.

I realized this week that the problem of much criticism of TV, from the new pseudo celebrity journalists of the pseudo left, is exactly consistent with this world. The last two postings I’ve touched on the absence of class analysis. It is simply a hole in the prevailing discourse. Look at the films this year that are being predicted as contenders for Best Picture. Never mind the utterly regressive and moronic insistence on this as a marker for anything, but in purely sociological terms, the list (as I read it in The Atlantic) was the following: Boyhood, The Imitation Game, Birdman, Whiplash, Unbroken, Insteller, and An American Sniper.

Now I don’t want to take up too much time on this, for its all rather obvious. Linklater’s Boyhood is an unwatchable exercise in misogyny and, again, this pretend world of white ordinariness. The Imitation Game is a historical bio pic of Alan Turing with the execrable Benedict Cumberbatch, and not having seen it, its hard to know what really to expect. But its possible that it might be interesting. And its directed by Mortyn Tyldun, a Norwegian responsible for two vaguely interesting films in Norway. So I give it a pass, for now. Birdman is more solipsistic cannibalizing of the movie industry, and is really just more white neurosis. Whiplash is a feel good cliche set against elite white privileged education, and Unbroken is by Angelie Jolie, but nobody’s seen it yet. But I mean, what does one expect from the woman who shut down an entire African nation so she could have her baby in peace?Intersteller is the latest Chris Nolen exercise in meta-emptiness (also very white and set in outer space…strip mining Kubrick’s 2001), and finally Clint Eastwood’s An American Sniper. I’m not sure I need to really say anything more about that.

There is an interesting discussion to be had that revolves around the fact that there is a good deal of criticism of violence in film and TV. And indeed, the level and saturation of violence is astonishing. But the sentimental drivel that is August Osage County is rarely criticized in terms nearly as harsh. Why? Which does more harm to a culture; The Expendablesor August Osage County, for example? Im going with August Osage County. But perhaps they are inseparable — the coma inducing insulin short fall of August Osage County, and the thrum of gun shots, broken glass, screaming women (or men, less often) and bombs and aging men with too much cosmetic surgery. Is Hannibal worse than The Affair? No, no, I mean finally its not actually. Shakespeare was violent, so was Sophocles. But there was narrative, and video games, or violence porn like Saw, abolishes narrative. Its very important to make and identify these distinctions. For failing to do that starts to erase all art, to turn in the philistines that censor literature and want profanity labels on rap albums. There lurks the latent Puritan.

The reasons that even a show like Hannibal, which traffics in displays of forensic gore, is less destructive than August Osage County, is because at least in Hannibal, there is the innate dignity of narrative, of actors like Mads Mikkelsen or Lawrence Fishburne, who evince a sense of the passage of character from A to B. That human experience is given value through such performative mechanisms. In the saccharine dishonesty of August Osage County, the cliche driven familiarity, the dishonesty of the white ordinary again, or a propagandistic rural America, and of sickeningly syrupy acting — the end result is one of diminishment and insufficiency; that also serves to stigmatize those rural poor who can’t measure up to such representations.

It is hugely destructive to turn to an Osage County, or Olive Kittridge as a cure or tonic for Boardwalk Empire. There is violence and there is violence. One really should not over simplify the question of violence in film, TV, and theatre, or in literature. There is no such thing as some *violence* essence. It happens in narrative contexts, and it happens in the context of anticipation and marketing. I feel nothing but a kind of ulcerous pain internally, when I see Samantha Power interviewed…as a personal example. I feel literally nauseated at the sight of Netanyahu, or Eric Holder, or Antonin Scalia, and I feel a smouldering rage when I read the mannequin left self annointed celebrity scribes such as Molly Crabapple or Laurie Penny. These are the release valves, those who diffuse the anger of the under classes. If art matters, if it does shape the consciousness that is a pre-condition for social change and revolution, then blaming depictions of violence only has cogency if Osage County and the like are at the top of all lists.

Go to google and type in August Osage County trailer. I cant link it here, I just cant. Do the same for Olive Kittridge.

Remember that throughout U.S. history, the story of Native American genocide was ignored, buried, justified, and that even today a football team in the NFL refuses to change the name *Redskin* speaks to the absolute invisibility of this story. I mention this because that process of assimilation that the Native American was forced to endure. The boarding schools (Indian schools) like Carlisle in Pennsylvania, were in essence only exaggerated versions of what education for the poor has always been. As a sidebar on mascots, the Cleveland Indians baseball team is finally retiring the logo nicknamed *Chief Wahoo*, which is, in fact, a far more offensive image than even the Redskins logo. This is 2014, and sports franchises for multi million dollar teams (maybe billion) are still using blatantly racist imagery. Take a moment and ponder that.

I dont have the same confidence in reforming education that many people I know have, and these are people I respect. But the fact that accreditation remains in place as a guiding principle is reason enough to be suspicious, but beyond that, the very idea of compulsory education has lost the thread of what was once its obvious raison d’etre.

What are schools supposed to be, in theory, doing? Turning out the well rounded humane compassionate tolerant and articulate individuals? The socially conscious erudite skilled and imaginative human? Nobody believes that, few even want that, if they’re being honest. Schools are there to squash creativity, condition students in the acceptance and naturalness of social hierarchies, and in obedience to wealth. Not to the powerful, really, but more to the wealthy. Wealth is its own virtue and with it comes power. There is a sense that all institutions are fully corrupt now. That resistance almost cannot really effectively begin within institutions. It may certainly migrate there, but one of the truths of an aesthetic resistance is that there needs to be a certain radical poetics, an interpretive radicalism, a return of focus to hermeneutical concerns. And the idea of a new attention to culture, to narrative, to image, to art seems important to me.

Take as an example the recent *Hollaback* video, which garnered something like 5 million viewings and elicited in the tens of thousands of comments where posted, was also critiqued for the underlying ideology of white supremacy that was its backdrop. This was an obvious case, but in one way it was encouraging that so many recognized the message. The message wasn’t ‘dont harass women’; the message was, white women are at risk from ghetto dwelling black and latino men. There is a sense I’ve been having lately that suggests the white pov, the foregrounded white storyline, the narratives of white problems in a white world are becoming more strident. More panicky. The Hollaback video is not about this white woman walking the streets of NYC. It is about this *white woman* walking the streets of NYC. She is not an everywoman. If she were, she would be many. There would be that shift of perspective from her specialness, to the fungible *woman*, harassed by men, and by men who would be edited to shift the focus from individual to social, from subjective to objective. The video would be about a system of patriarchal privilege that allows for the reinforcing of this privilege in acts of verbal stigmatizing and objectifying and humiliation. That men exert a tacit abusive power over all women. When the image is a particular white woman, with an implied class, and disproportionate numbers of abusive men are black or latino — the narrative elides into one of colonial space and dynamics. Its also serving as a pro-gentrification narrative.

There has been a change in what ideas of ‘topicality’ mean. Topicality is a word used in advertising and promotion, and mainstream criticism or reviewing and is code for self congratulatory. Topical means the theme will flatter the target audience. In theatre today, just as an example, look at Theresa Rebeck’s Zealot, given its world premiere at South Coast Rep in Southern California. Some critics *liked* it, many did not. I have not seen it. But how does such pablum reach the main stage of a major institutional theatre? This is an almost laughably bad sort of CNN version of middle eastern politics. And of course, at the center of the story are a pair of US and UK diplomats. It is seemingly impossible for playwrights today to recognize their own world vision is one borrowed from TV news and earlier films and western journalism. Why write this story? Rebeck is a TV hack and New York playwright with a pretty substantial reputation — but born of what? Quick name me a Theresa Rebeck play.
I cant.

But worse is that this is the theatre of faux realism. The representational world as seen by affluent Americans. It is Orientalist and depicts a cartoon image of Islam. I don’t think that this is at all unfair to say. Compare to Genet’s The Screens of sixty years ago, or some of Peter Brook’s work, or even Paul Bowles. Or Margarite Duras. Bowles ‘was’ the white man expat who wrote explicitly about the tensions of white colonial thinking, the harm and the wounds of European erasure of the culture of the colonized. The alienated white tourist. Bowles also said that the Sahara was community. It was mythic too, he called it ‘being close to the absolute’. But he also noted in several interviews, that the desert changes you, but that it changed through an immersion in a kind of community long disappeared elsewhere. Today, in reading the LA Times review, for Rebeck, that community is replaced by western diplomats. The Muslim characters are seen through western eyes. The issues are one’s imagined by a paternalistic West. Making it ‘topical’ is to insert a faux feminist issue about veils. And the form resembles that of a TV mini series (of course Rebeck wrote for NYPD Blue, Law & Order, and Smash). Now, again, I haven’t seen this production, and perhaps it is wildly and singularly different from the other five or six plays I’ve read of Rebeck’s. But that disclaimer should be inserted here. And its certainly possible that every reviewer was missing some deeper point. But does anyone honestly think that a quick scan of the plot points doesn’t convey the truth of what I’m saying? And I’m not picking on Rebeck particularly. It is just that working class and underclass voices do not make appearances on big theatre stages in the United States anymore.

That today, a William Inge feels radical by comparison is rather remarkable. Clifford Odets dropped out of high school, and founded the Group Theatre. There were many University educated artists attached to the Group Theatre, but the sensibility of their work was left wing politically, and never concerned with ideas of the status quo. A different era, yes, and that’s rather the point. Many of those writers and directors and actors; Harold Clurman, John Garfield, John Randolph, Oscar Saul, Morris Carnovsky, Sandy Meisner, and Joe Bromberg, were later working, even if briefly, in Hollywood — most were children of immigrants, working class, many rose up through Yiddish Theatre, and the influence can be felt in those noir of the forties and fifties.

There is seemingly no escape from PR firms, and their reach extends deeply into the tissue of almost any topic. Everything is mediated by marketing. Malala is *handled* by a PR firm. Military action is fed to the public via a PR firm, or several PR firms. War crime tribunals are dealing with marketed materials half the time, and all policy decisions are shaped by Madison Avenue to some degree. The United States is now, in its daily operations a cartoon. But the deep state carries on regardless of the lurid and increasingly idiotic nature of the professed rulers and people of influence.

Here is an excerpt from a recent interview with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, from The New Yorker…

“-Oh. So you don’t know where I’m going. Thank God.–
I don’t know where you’re going. I don’t even know whether Judas Iscariot is in hell. I mean, that’s what the pope meant when he said, “Who am I to judge?” He may have recanted and had severe penance just before he died. Who knows?

Can we talk about your drafting process—
[Leans in, stage-whispers.] I even believe in the Devil.

You do?
Of course! Yeah, he’s a real person. Hey, c’mon, that’s standard Catholic doctrine! Every Catholic believes that.
Every Catholic believes this? There’s a wide variety of Catholics out there …
If you are faithful to Catholic dogma, that is certainly a large part of it.

Have you seen evidence of the Devil lately?
You know, it is curious. In the Gospels, the Devil is doing all sorts of things. He’s making pigs run off cliffs, he’s possessing people and whatnot. And that doesn’t happen very much anymore.

No?
It’s because he’s smart.

So what’s he doing now?
What he’s doing now is getting people not to believe in him or in God. He’s much more successful that way.

That a Supreme Court Justice believes in a literal Devil who is out doing mischief, should not be surprising. This is a long ways now from Thurgood Marshall, William O. Douglas, and William Bennett. From a certain perspective, the Warren court is to the government today as Melville is to Jonathan Safer Foer. I’m being glib, and a bit snarky myself, but the nepotism and insularity today in media, and fine arts, let alone Hollywood is actually pretty staggering. Being a slow learner it was only this week that I realized Laurie Simmons was the mother of Lena Dunham. Well, of course, and the father is the stupefyingly talentless Carroll Dunham. (go ahead, google his paintings). This is only worth noting because it is so common. A good many people will suggest that this is really not of much importance, or meaning, or that it is resentful on my part, or that, god knows… but the truth is that culture cannot finally survive this level of suffocating intellectual partisanship. That social networking and family connections, as well as just class, is now so nakedly rewarded ahead of actual talent is the result of forty years of direct attacks on art and artists. It is impossible to imagine The Group Theatre today. Culture is entertainment, occasionally with a *message*, but never threatening, never politically radical, never too serious and never too difficult. It is clever, and snide, and novel and usually loud and bright and narcissistic. It is usually always misogynistic. It conforms to a white world view, an Imperialist world view, and it is endlessly familiar, and solipsistic. It is the imaginary manufactured *ordinary* presented with a wink as *extraordinary*. This coy nod to the common folk is a feel good ploy by the ownership class. The truth is that today the cultural gatekeepers are an increasingly narrow and privileged class, most of whom regard culture as something of a hobby, but always with an eye to profit. Whether they even admit it to themselves, it is a province cleansed of the unruly or uncontollable, or subversive. Today film and theatre operate cannibalizing earlier versions, or earlier iconic works.

Take Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey. It is sometimes to easy to forget just how influential this film was. How it has shaped several decades of how the public imagines outer space {sic} and created the stylistic template for all future science fiction. It was almost a new genre onto itself. I am not a gigantic Kubrick fan, but there is no question that his artistic integrity seems even larger now than during his lifetime. I suspect Tarkovsky’s difficulty with 2001, and his decision to make Solaris as a sort of critique of it, was a deeply felt instinct, and a correct one. For in ways unintended I think 2001 has become something that fused certain latent dreams in much of the collective US psyche, and whose style code has been appropriated by the military itself. The slightly kitsch elements in it, from the ape costumes to the acid flash back corridor, are now the stuff of countless cheesy sci fi films, but the more elegant elements, the neutered emotionless HAL voice and the equally emotionally withdrawn Keir Dullea, seemed to have infected the dream life of the two generations, or three. The genius of the film is really in the sense of meticulous care that went into it, and in the rhythm of the editing, the duration of each scene. It is a hugely formal film, but it is also ambitious and grand in design. Not as an expression of neurotic problems masquarading as myth (ala Terrence Malick), but a truly sort of relgio-mythic monolith in its own right. Its how I have always experienced the film, as Kubrick’s own totem making enterprise; the movie becomes as enigmatic and seamless as those monoliths themselves.

Kubrick’s intelligence is what separated him from his imitators. And that he recognized that unseen forces shaped the world, forces outside his own subjective concerns. And, honestly, I don’t think he ever made a film he should feel ashamed of or made for pure profit. But to lead this back to the homogenizing of culture today, I am willing to bet that one cannot find a space narrative made since 1970 that does not predicate its vision of space on the Kubrick. Kubrick may well have shaped how NASA imagines space.

The biggest problem though, for homogenized culture, and not entertainment — lets pretend we can separate them — is that it adheres to and draws from this fake reality. There is a curious contradiction at the heart of this *small town* realtiy ala Olive Kittridge, and that is that small town rural America is also the butt of endless jokes, and the location for slasher and psycho killer films. Countless numbers of them. *August; Texas Chain Saw County*. So there is this coy wink, this slight nudge, when the idealized small town depiction comes on. For deep down the manufacturers of these films hold such locations, the real versions, in contempt.

Often I think it is just that seriousness scares today’s producer and public. I’ve posted three pieces by the now 92 year old Syed Raza Haider, originally from Madyha Pradesh, but longtime Paris resident. The devotional mathematics of Haider, the geometry that encases the void. When I look at Haider’s work I often think of Kubrick, perhaps oddly. I think of Kenneth Noland too. But I think bindu, the point of focus in a sacred geometry of Hindu philosophy, as well as the Kaballah, is expressed in a care for the single detail out of many. The geometrician at work, as Blake drew God, the builder of the Universe. For the artist, there must be a silence behind each sound, veils behind which secrets are to be found, or not. And in narrative there must be an ability to transcribe something of the tragic and suffering of the vulnerable.

I wanted to bring this discussion back to the topic of violence again.

“Violence in movies today is as peculiarly affecting these days as stupidity.” writes Timothy Bewes. And his discussion of it touches a bit on what I was writing above. He continues…“Fear of violence in postmodernity renders all action violent and all violence erotic.”

In a society of acute, and often immaterial control, of endless obfuscation and neutralizing of dissent; the expression and/or representation of violence feels a bit like that frozen moment, the Naked Lunch, the distillation of recognition of the super or meta enclosing of daily life. There is a line from Shakespeare and Marlowe through Dostoyevksy and Kafka and Melville, in which narrative cannot escape its own personal psychic trauma, and its relationship to legal state violence and domination. In narrative Ive called this ‘primal crime’. The lack of it, the substitution of neurotic bourgeois concerns of marriage or property or career feel oddly more damanging psychically and certainly eerie in that post modern way of suggesting ur-passivity. Walter Benjamin touched on this idea of legal violence, in his essay Critique of Violence. The appeal of violence, its erotic appeal, is not just the process of numb inducing repetition of the same, but also because its an expression of defiance to the regulatory state.

Violence that takes place, representationally, outside a state framework tends to be treated, narratively, as criminal. State violence is righteous and protective. Fear of the outside. Now, this is only one register, for in another way, there is a de-sensitizing assault of non stop images of violence and death and pain that are only expressions of pure titillation. But how does that work? How do images of violence get marketed? They are marketed in an overall strategy to instill fear and suspicion and distrust in people about other people. That is the actual dark side of the *individualizing* theme. It distracts from the real enemy which is the system of domination in place. Of capitalism.

Bewes cites Hegel, the ignoble or disrupted spirit, realizes the dialectical movement of true Spirit. Now, this was the Dostoyevskian Underground Man in a sense. There is much to dissect in all of this, but here my point is only that art is not real life. We tell each other stories not to reinforce equilibrium, but to tear it apart. Not all violence is the same, and without transgression, there is no radicalism at all.