NCA 09: Putting the "Munitions" in Communication Studies

I just pulled into my place after about three days in Chicago for the 2009 convention of the National Communication Association (NCA). For those not familiar with how academic conferences work, the main attraction is panel presentations by scholars in the field, a great opportunity to present your ideas, catch ideas from others, and dialogue about them. There are also other elements including a trade show of new books and a job fair where schools looking for new faculty are available to talk with those seeking work. NCA is a huge organization, representing an incredibly diverse group of scholars, some of whom have essentially no theoretical or methodological common ground. As such the convention seems unable to satisfy all of the people all of the time (in general, the organization is pretty riven with controversy). But this year’s convention was a really good experience for me, even though (because?) I wasn’t presenting any work of my own, and despite an extremely controversial decision about early registration that cut hundreds of panelists and isn’t worth going into detail about here.

Two high-profile panels turned out to be winners, one featuring Robert McChesney, a well-known critic of media consolidation, and the other Lauren Berlant, essentially a feminist philosopher of identity. What I admired about both scholars . . .

Solange Knowles, "Stillness is the Move"

You read that right. This shit is pretty amazing.

Links are going up and down pretty fast, but here's one for now.

Let's warm this thing up again.

It's time to get rolling again. I haven't posted here in far too long, but I'm committing to getting back on track. This is late, but in a gesture at content, the centipede in a bottle over there is in reference to my participation in the Naked Lunch @ 50 celebration in Iowa City last week. It was a mess of fun, though we were all sad that our honored local noise-collage weirdos LWA weren't able to play due to illness.

Movie Review: Suicide Club

This is a really promising movie from the start, and though I think it has more than its share of problems, it ultimately left me with the sense of confounded, frustrated intrigue that makes me want to write about something. The basic story is of a sudden rash of suicides in Tokyo. It’s a serious topic, and the parallels to real life are obvious – Japan has the second-highest suicide rates in the world, and events very similar to that depicted here are common. These are on a huge, ludicrous scale in line with Japanese horror films, though – fifty girls at a time throw themselves in front of a train in the film’s opening sequence.

That sequence shows off one of the great choices made, the cinema verite camerawork that blurs the line between documentary and absurd horror. This isn’t the gimmicky handheld style spreading in movies like Cloverfield, but a much more neutral camera eye that, with its slight graininess and locked-off view conveys a different kind of “realness.” It makes the opening gut-wrenching, as it sets up the girls as strikingly everyday. Then it goes into splatter mode, drenching the train in corn-syrup blood. It’s a dichotomy – between the real and the absurd, the filmic and the lived – the movie goes on to play with quite compellingly.

The following hour does a great job of offering a view of what is, in the film’s own parlance, a jigsaw world, where the suicides are suggested as, at least possibly, having causes both concrete and more metaphorical. No punches are pulled in making this a story about Japan’s ongoing social malaise, as everyone in the movie guzzles crap pop-culture in the form of the preteen girl-group Dessert, people sadly hunt for companionship on the internet, kids follow fads without knowing the line between a joke and a commitment, and everyone on the trains looks like they’re about to kill themselves just on principle. There’s a parallel ambiguity to the detective story that pins it all down. Are these true suicides? Is something supernatural going on? A crazed teen fad?

All of this richness is what makes the film’s one hour mark at first galling, then rewarding, as it trots out a barely-developed, malevolent “villain” to take the fall for the ongoing rash of deaths. At first it seems unbelievably ham-handed, a narrative dues ex machina that explains far too much of what has come before. But soon, we realize that the film itself is making this exact point, as it spins back out into chaos and despair. We are quite bluntly being told that there are no easy answers, that, just maybe, the problems being described are far deeper than any mass murderer.

One thing that bugs the shit out of me with this movie, and with a lot of Japanese movies, is that even though one of the film’s themes is the manipulative pull of pop music, it uses some of the most saccharine film music, at some of the most obvious and pappy moments, of any film I have ever seen. It’s so ham-handed it’s almost like Godard’s satire of film music (I forget the name of that one). Further, the film’s closing trades in a few too many of the tropes of Japanese horror, as in its use of children and a descent into surrealism.

It does highlight particular social problems, and ends with a truly unfortunate ‘message’ moment about being ‘connected to yourself,’ as if, despite his earlier trick, the writer didn’t have the will to leave things truly unresolved. But it does retain a (to me) certain irresolvable status, a refusal to settle clearly on any ‘villain’ that reminded me a great deal of the recent “Dark Knight.” Perhaps ironically, while the film from supposedly individualistic America has a great deal to say about the role of law in society, the film from supposedly ‘collectivist’ Japan seems to locate all of the problems it depicts in problems of individual choice, behavior, and psychological orientation. This emphasis may ultimately suggest an exacerbation of the very problems of atomization and detachment that the film seems to bemoan.

On Apollo, Dionysius, and Batman

In response to Paul's post on The Dark Knight:

The gap between the illusion/"hope" of justice, represented by Dent, and the ugly reality of enforcement and extralegality, represented both by the Joker and Batman, connects to some of the most fascinating issues I've been grappling with lately. It seems related to the Birth of Tragedy, as the division between the Apollonian and Dionysian is in one sense that between a comforting illusion of order and sanity on the one hand, and the brutal confrontation with the fundamentally chaotic nature of existence on the other. It ties in even more closely with a discussion I was recently having with my brother, who is a nascent libertarian. My argument to him (though I didn't put it in these terms) was that, ironically, libertarianism is founded on an assumed Apollonian worldview. That is, you can only argue for libertarianism if you believe that the world is subject to an emergent meta-order that develops from the unrestrained actions of many individuals. My contrary position, as a socialist, is essentially dionysian - that we live in a world and society that are ultimately chaotic, and that the important thing is to construct institutions that combat that chaos.
The Dent/Batman duality puts that division on slightly different ground, since Dent's status as the Lawgiver is both personal and institutional - he represents both humanity as Apollonian, and the forces of the state maintaining order in the face of the Dionysian, which is embodied in the Joker, but which implicitly exists in all of us (even Dent).
These two forces have historically traded off - a book like "A Canticle for Leibowitz" shows the episodic nature of human history, achievement followed by collapse ad infinitum. The solution proposed by "The Dark Knight," one that seems to accord with contemporary socialist thought, particularly Laclau, is that one possible way to eliminate this cycle is to make sure that the Dionysian and the Apollonian remain in balance. This requires that the Dionysian remain fundamentally 'outside' but still imaginatively accessible. This is the point of the end of the film - the best way Batman can help maintain order is to remain ultimately outside of order. All of the bat-imitators, even the bat-signal, are symbols of the integration of chaos into order, and that integration ultimately leaves the ordered universe itself less stable. I’m reminded of the chapter from “Freakonomics” about promiscuity – the point that large amounts of celibacy actually makes sex more dangerous by reducing the number of participants and increasing the risk for each one. Stricter and stricter order leads inevitably to its own cataclysmic collapse.

On Guitar Hero

Three or four days ago, I got to play Guitar Hero for the first time, at a friend's party. Then tonight I got to see and play Rock Band, which is fundamentally similar - a game that tests your sense of rhythm by sequencing certain actions to famous rock songs. First, let's get the pro forma out of the way:

As a musician, Guitar Hero offends my sensibilities.

As much as it bears a huge whiff of self-importance, I feel like it's the kind of thing I want to put in scare quote so I can hide its fundamental honesty. The game has a weird, not entirely obvious relation to actual musicianship, and it's supremely frustrating not to be good at something modeled on a real-life activity you're pretty good at. Someone tonight mentioned a video of the band Journey playing along to their own songs and failing miserably, apparently making a more direct form of that point - i.e. don't confuse this for the real thing, fatty.

But why is this important for musicians to protect? Well, because of the rewards of musicianship. Obviously, no groupies are going to glom onto the best of the best Guitar Hero players the way they (used to) do real guitar heroes, but there is a much more indefinable and slightly more fleeting set of emotional rewards that actual play reveals, a kind of climatic experience of accomplishment. And it's not incidental that a crowd is built in both to reward and punish.

But I'm not in Journey, and I don't play that much real guitar - it would probably take me a month to learn, to any level of competency, most of the songs featured on Guitar Hero, and to be frank, I don't really want to. The music that I play is generally way less virtuosic and more focused on a) getting some ideas out and b) having fun making noise. That's thanks to the final reason I'm offended by guitar hero - it's not just musicianship at stake, it's creativity. Despite my understanding of the principles of the cultural commons, it still simply feels a little less creative, to me, to play someone else's song, making Guitar Hero doubly fake.

Allright, so, got that judgment out of the way. Now on to actual thought. What's most confounding about the experience of playing Guitar Hero is the nonintuitive relationship between the source music and the requirements placed on the player. First, it's not as if there's anything like a "G" on the Guitar Hero controller - there are only five buttons and a little fin-like thing you strike to play. So, from the start, there's no such thing as a "note" - all you have is a color. Second, especially at the easy difficulty settings, you don't actually play all (or even most) of the notes, instead doing something drastically simpler and getting a whole slew of sound as a reward. What really sucks about this for anyone who is either a musician or just generally has good audio rhythm is that, obviously, there's no way to tell which of these many notes you're supposed to pretend to "play," so depending on the audio becomes a lost cause. Ultimately, while the song is crucial in a lot of ways, Guitar Hero is a visual rhythm game - you watch the little dots come down the screen and then hit the little buttons at the right time. It's a whole different language than music, one that happens to fit within one aspect of music's regime.

All that said, though, I must admit it's hella fun - weirdly, in some ways it's way more fun than playing an actual show, which is most often a stressful situation in which you kind of lose track of everything going on around you. By simplifying the whole process, Guitar Hero actually lets you enjoy it more, even with a fake audience. And maybe that's what's most upsetting of all - not that Guitar Hero is a matter of lowly mortals stealing fire from the musical Gods, but that it might keep some people who would otherwise be jumping over those initial hurdles from doing so. Lord knows, if it weren't for Fallout 3, I would be doing a lot more exploration of the rotting hulk of Washington, D. . . oh, wait.

Hoodwinked! Bamboozled!

I was just watching a broadcast of an Obama Rally . . . I think live. In reference to McCain's economic policy, he says:

"We will not be hoodwinked. We will not be bamboozled."

I'm doing a little looking around, and it seems Obama has been using these phrases for a while. And it's not really Malcolm, just a speech from Spike Lee's movie, never actually delivered:

http://www.mydd.com/story/2008/1/26/15930/0207

Is this a Democratic version of right-wing people quoting obscure passages of the bible? If so, HALLELUJAH. The mere connection has me fired up.

The question is - why haven't the Right made more hay with it? It seemed linking Obama with X would be one hell of a lot more frightening to the people the McCain campaign is targetting (which is apparently ignorant, distrustful rednecks who truly believe themselves to be 'more patriotic' than other Americans and who really think Obama is a terrorist). But it seems this is a really subtle play on Obama's part, since the Republicans would probably just end up looking ridiculous if they accused him of referencing Malcom X . . . "But it's not really him, it's from a movie."

-David