What I've Been Watching: Twin Peaks

It’s been a while since I’ve posted any commentary about film or television here. Toward the end of changing that, it seems worthwhile to point out that I recently finished watching the entire run of Twin Peaks. It was wonderfully compelling, in large part because of the skillful blend of soap-operatic, don’t-miss-an-episode plotlines, potentially revelatory themes, and wonderfully artistic imagery. Despite an almost perfect pilot movie, a thoroughly satisfying season and a half, and a finale that was the most eye-poppingly surreal bit of television I’ve seen since the last episode of The Prisoner, Twin Peaks has also allowed me to experience, twenty years after the fact, one of the most rapidly disappointing declines in television history.

I am assuredly not going to be saying anything that hasn’t been said a million times since 1991, but it is stunning how clearly season two of Twin Peaks demonstrates the destructive potential of television networks. If any controlling interest in work of fiction has ever made a more glaring error in judgment than ABC did in insisting upon a solution to the Laura Palmer murder, let me know about it. I cannot fathom how anyone could have thought that that would be a good idea, when even the most casual observer should have recognized that that was what held the show together, that without unresolved questions about the slain prom queen the show didn’t really exist.

If they’d wanted to resolve the storyline out of some sense of duty to their audience, I suppose I can understand that, especially if they were confident enough in the rest of the series to expect it to maintain its appeal on its various other merits. From what I understand, though, the network never had much faith in the show, even when the public was obsessed with it. Of course, the ratings at the end of the first season and the beginning of the second should have made it clear that the accountants and executives didn’t know what they were talking about, and they should have thus been motivated to stay the hell out of the way.

I can begin to understand insisting on the resolution to the initial A storyline, but how in God’s name could anyone see value in ending it mid-season? I started viewing the show in almost complete ignorance as to what to expect, and I certainly didn’t realize that the murder would be solved when it was. Even so, the revelation was extremely powerful for me, and I was quite disappointed in myself for not determining who the killer was ahead of time. But upon viewing that extremely early climax and knowing how many episodes were still left, I assumed that what I had watched was just the beginning of the end, and that the rest of the season would entail the characters pursuing a killer whose identity the audience now knew. I also assumed that they would continue to piece together layers of the mystery, tying the minor storylines into narrative of Laura Palmer’s death.

It’s not that the latter half of season two is bad, but when neither of those things happened, and when the primary driver of the plot was wrapped up very quickly and neatly, I was utterly disoriented. I imagine that the majority of fans of the show, like me, had to force themselves past that point just to see what happened next. Once I came to terms with the fact that the bottom fell out of the show, I rediscovered its appeal from a completely different standpoint. But even though it remained good television, what could hurt a series more than several episodes of the audience collectively wondering why they were suddenly watching an altogether different show.

Because of the catastrophic effect of ABC’s insistence on something that was about as obviously bad as bad ideas come, it’s a terrible disappointment that Twin Peaks didn’t constitute a breaking point in the tradition of interference by moneyed interests in art and media. But unfortunately that was just a particular high water mark in a still-ongoing history of networks and studies derailing promising projects and preventing good stories from becoming great.

Twin Peaks was still great, but it could have been great for so much longer. Oh, there were other problems with the post-resolution portion of the show, too. The recovery period might have been quicker and smoother if it weren’t for the fact that even minor storylines were dropped and new ones with new characters had to be unexpectedly introduced in large part, based on what I’ve read, because Kyle McLaughlin was unabashedly shitting where he ate. Nevertheless, all of this built through the development of a beautifully complex mythology to a final episode that kept my mind constantly racing to keep up with a parade of nightmarish riddles.

And that final episode was intellectually gratifying but emotionally devastating. David Lynch and Mark Frost had apparently arranged to put multiple characters in peril in hopes of generating demand for continuation to a third season. This also was something I didn’t know going into it, so I, and presumably many of those who watched it when it was on television, was expecting a closed ending. But when I read the final scenes that way I came away from the show grappling with the implication that there are dire personal consequences for trying to do good in a world that possesses precious little hope.

I heard whispers that the film, Fire Walk With Me might provide some resolution to the oppressively bleak ending of the show, but it didn’t. It tauntingly hinted at the possibility of a resolution, but it didn’t follow through with it, so I get the impression that David Lynch just enjoys screwing with his audience for kicks. That said, I’d be happy to be screwed with again. Hopefully I am part of an ongoing growth of retrospective interest in Twin Peaks. If so, I honestly think Lynch should revisit the town, since Twin Peaks has the unique distinction of having specifically placed one early scene twenty-five years in the series’ future. That’s right around the corner, underneath the sycamores, behind the red curtain.

Andy Rooney

Now that he’s retired, how do I become Andy Rooney? Can this be sort of like the possible Tibetan solution to the absence of the Panchen Lama, wherein a person who is still alive personally identifies his own living reincarnation? With his lifetime in broadcasting and thirty-three years of low-key ranting on 60 Minutes, I think Rooney’s presence is too ingrained in American media for it to be lost to something as trivial as a man’s retirement. I think Andy Rooney should be like the news media’s version of James Bond or Batman, in that a new individual should just periodically take on the personality. And I think I’m just the man to start the trend.

I imagine that a lot of people don't believe that the role being vacated by Andy Rooney could be filled by anyone who’s less than eighty years old. I would like to prove those people wrong by going on the air and showing myself to be the most curmudgeonly twenty-six year-old they ever will see. I find it inspiring to know that a man was able to make a high-profile career or picking apart the minutiae of daily life and modern society. I want there to be another Andy Rooney because I want to know that there is still a place for that kind of analysis and criticism.

That kind of overthinking about things that most people pay no attention to is exactly the kind of thing I do day after day, and I almost never make any money off of it. On Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me, Tom Bodett joked that the producers of 60 Minutes might have just always had a camera filming Rooney’s office and searched the footage each week for the content that they wanted to use. I’ll wear a wire, and when someone picks up the sound of me taking umbrage with modern technology, lost social mores, current trends, or what have you, they can alert me with a remote buzzer that they want the content to fill the last minute of a television program, and I’ll turn it into an essay.

It’s a silly thing to be famous for, and Andy Rooney was the butt of many jokes, but I genuinely appreciate the impulse to look with a critical eye on the sort of things that most people take for granted. I think that within a society that tends to charge forward into rapid changes without thought of loss or consequence, we needed voices like his to hold up a mirror to ordinary things so that people can have a closer look at them even if it is just as they are running by at full speed. I am very much trying to apply that model to my own life. I am always trying to make people around me understand that all these little things are not just what they are, that there is something to be learned from everything. It is a personal characteristic that makes it sort of difficult to relate to people in a straightforward way, and I’m sure it makes me the butt of jokes.

I’d be as different from him as the latest James Bond is from the first, but the core concept would be the same. I’d be more focused in my presentation, maybe a bit more ideological, and more prone to calling others to action. But still, I’m confident that I could enter into the public spotlight with work that, by its bizarre de-trivializing of trivial subjects, would call to mind some of Rooney’s early television essays, which included topics like doors, bridges, hotels, women, and chairs. So if anyone wants to put me in touch with CBS, maybe I could find my calling in life.

I Don't Gotta Cut Loose...

I saw the trailer for the remake of Footloose yesterday. It looks truly awful, and not just in comparison with the 1984 Kevin Bacon classic, which, I must confess, I loved as a pre-teen boy. Judging by the trailer, this new version just has all the earmarks of an objectively bad movie. It’s hard to justify an overall impression of that sort. The first minute or so of the trailer is full of melodrama, a lot of uncomfortably close camera work, and disorienting fluctuations in lighting. It looks simultaneously like a completely formulaic teen comedy, and a completely formulaic teen dance movie, which apparently is a genre unto itself now. However, if you didn’t notice any of these things on your first viewing of the trailer, you probably won’t sense them much more clearly after I’ve pointed them out.

Movie Trailers - Movies Blog

But it’s that dance movie formula, which becomes particularly evident at the 1:20 mark, which gives me something distinct and analyzable to criticize. It shows a scene that presumably takes place somewhere in the middle of the movie, wherein a rather absurd number of teenagers are dancing in a large parking lot, and not merely shuffling and swaying, but showcasing rigorous choreography and acrobatics. So apparently, in this modern update of the town of Bomont, dancing by young people is outlawed, but all young people residing in the town are trained dancers, and they all still dance in spite of the law. Got that?

But then that looks even more ridiculous when you rewind to the first seconds of the trailer, and see a bunch of kids dancing at the party that led to the deaths that set the stage for the dancing ban. In that case, they all appear to be dancing by simply jumping in place – that is, dancing the way normal teenagers do. So in light of the apparent weird discrepancy, Bomont is actually a place where a few kids died in a car crash, the town outlawed dancing, but teenagers continued to dance for the three years of the ban, and got really, really good at it. Sensible plotline.

And that’s just it really. The final moments of the trailer also feature the female lead being pushed out of the way of a speeding train and a school bus exploding with two characters leaping into the air in the foreground. I get the impression that they’ve done about all they can to strip the film of any pretense of believability. The original was not a science fiction film; it required a fairly modest suspension of disbelief, and all of the events plausibly could have happened in the real world. The new version apparently sees no value in making a realistic drama inside of which the viewing audience can easily see itself.

This plays into the post that I made recently about analysis versus escapism, and may well say something about changing approaches to filmmaking and film viewing. When I watched the 1984 film and was not yet an adolescent myself, I cast myself into imagining what it would be like to be in the setting of the film. Bomont was not like any place that I was likely to live, but reactionary social pressures are real in every time and place, and with that as the antagonist, Kevin Bacon’s character was something to admire. I could watch him leaping across the screen and fighting his rival for the girl’s affections and think that if I kept up my martial arts training, then I too would be able to perform his feats of strength and agility. (I haven’t quite lived up to those ideals, admittedly.) I could watch him speaking before the town council and think that his conviction in the face of overwhelming opposition was something I should emulate as I grew up. But it was possible to identify with that character, because when the music kicked it, it wasn’t a stage play with three dozen hand-picked extras all with four years of modern dance and seven of jazz-tap, it was just a physically fit, outgoing guy dancing in the company of his friends. Not so with today’s version, or with any of a number of movies just like it.

I imagine that any child or adolescent who watches this sort of movie nowadays must be either so seriously deluded that he thinks that with a little work he can be talented enough, cool enough, and good-looking enough to join in with the crowd depicted on the screen, or so personally detached from the entertainment that he’s only interested in the spectacle, consciously recognizing no themes of personal significance underlying it.

When I heard about the remake of Footloose in the first place, I wondered, why on Earth does this need to be remade at all? What relevance has it really lost in the two-and-a-half decades since the original was made? Now that I’ve seen the trailer, I wonder, why on Earth was it remade like this? But on the other hand, it has at least answered part of my original questions. Apparently, the relevance that has been lost is the very presence of any relevance at all in the original.

Not Always Black, but Always White

The front page of the Sunday edition of the Buffalo News prominently read “Minorities – the New Majority.” Now make no mistake, I don’t make a habit of reading that terrible little newspaper; I just happened across it on this occasion. I don’t read it precisely because it doesn’t take much more than one of their headlines to launch me into a diatribe about their thoughtless reporting, bias, or simple bad journalism. Speaking of which…

It’s not at all unusual for the Buffalo News to run a headline like the above, apparently without anyone on staff raising an objection about the obvious contradiction they’d placed top-center on the first page. But what’s altogether more frustrating than that is that exactly that same oxymoronic reference to “minorities” seems commonplace in the media in general, and in much of public discourse.

How powerfully consumed with our culture biases do we have to be that we never pause and think, “Wait, if they constitute a majority of the population, why are we calling them by a term that means exactly the opposite?”? It seems to me that that’s a natural question, but I’d emphasize that even if more people had the common sense to ask it, they still wouldn’t be asking the right question. A better question would be something along the lines of, “Wait a minute: why are we only calling non-white people minorities, if white people are now in the minority?”

If you think about it for a second, you realize that identifying minorities as a collective majority requires separating all of society into exactly two distinct groups: white people, and everybody else. The fact that the hasty editors of news outlets like the Buffalo News don’t bat an eye at such a move goes to show that much of media, and much of the public dialogue throughout white America identifies the default human being as white, and sets everything else in contrast to that.

There is no statistically valid reason for deciding that blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans constitute one group, termed “minorities,” while Caucasians make up a second group, which is not labeled as being in the minority even if its share of the population is substantially under fifty percent. The only reason there is for such a move is an ingrained cultural bias. It’s the sort of well-intentioned, socially liberal racism and shortsightedness that leads people who are reflective, but not self-reflective, to champion causes of social justice and equality, without ever addressing the most crucial racial and cultural problem of all – the social tendency to actually look at one kind of people differently than one looks at absolutely everybody else.

Film Commentary: Rango

Given my child-like innocence, my admiration of Johnny Depp's acting career, and my tendency to be taken in by good marketing, I decided almost immediately after seeing the previews for it that I wanted to go to see Rango. I went to a showing with my friend last night, and about ten minutes into the film, when the title character found himself stranded in the desert looking down upon the plastic fish that he had considered his closest friend, and coming to terms with the loss of everything that had defined him up to that moment, my companion turned to me and inquired, "How is this a kid's movie?"

"Who says it is?" I answered.

Andrew O'Hehir at Salon wrote an article titled "Rango and the Rise of Kidult-Oriented Animation" in which he outlines the growing trend towards gearing animated films not only towards entertaining parents who are accompanying their children, but towards adults who might attend the film by themselves and for themselves. Certainly, that has always been in spite of the implicit understanding that these films are first and foremost for children. With Rango, however, I think the balance has tipped. Whereas the "children and family" genre has long been producing material that is fun for the whole family in the sense that it has roughly equal entertainment value for both children and adults, Rango, while still fitting that formula generally, seems to me to be geared primarily towards adults, with the intention of being equally entertaining to children as a secondary consideration.

I thoroughly enjoyed the film. As a matter of fact, if Rango is intended as a children's film, I expect that I shouldn't have related to it as closely as I did. But I think the major themes were artfully designed in just that way. They can be interpreted for children, or they can be read against the backdrop of adult experiences and understood in another way. The hero is presented in the opening scene as having no genuine sense of self, and he spends some moments daydreaming about the heroic roles he could play out for himself on stage. This provides a familiar point of connection for children, who simply have not determined what course their lives will take yet. But read differently, and in a way that I think becomes more appropriate as we come to know the character and his situations better, this film is not about the lizard as a child who is just finding his way in the world, but rather the lizard as a man who has come to face a crisis of identity and alienation.

Beyond that, the film is rife with biting social commentary, some of which actually stunned me as I watched the plot unfold. The story relies at times on dense metaphors, which can certainly be expected to fly right over the heads of children, and are likely to be difficult for even some adults to grasp. These do not hide deep within the story, either, but present themselves early and directly, as with the armadillo that Rango meets at the very beginning, who councils him on the quest to reach the other side of the road, which the armadillo has undertaken many times, Beckett-like, before being run over by a vehicle and starting back on the near side.

But after we are introduced to that conceptual dialogue, we are immediately thrown into a minute of Rango riding the currents of passing cars, bouncing among windshields, and entertaining children with perfectly cartoonish excitement. That is the way it is throughout the film. There is adult humor, reference to numerous films, depiction of people struggling through economic hardship, and spiritual visions, but all the while there is slapstick comedy, gunfights among a cast of animal characters, and flashy visuals. Amongst all of this, there is entertainment enough for children and adults, and for those who seek a cerebral experience at the movies as well as those looking to indulge in pure escapism.

As the cerebral sort, I enjoyed this movie enough to rate it four and a half stars, both on account of its thought-provoking content and its skillful balance of that content and the simple, immersive spectacle of children's entertainment.

Super Bowl Ads

I’m the sort of person who likes to watch the Super Bowl for the commercials. However, my enjoyment of advertising is not limited to that occasion, on which it has acquired a reputation for tremendous entertainment value. I find advertising terribly interesting, and I derive a lot of enjoyment from analyzing it – what I think works and what I think doesn’t, and moreover what I think the persons responsible for the advertisement are saying about their target audience and society at large.

I didn’t watch the Super Bowl last night, as I don’t have television, and haven’t for quite some time. I did, however, take a look at a handful of the commercials online today. Of those that I viewed, I found the spots for Groupon and Living Social to be the best, both on point of humor and evident effectiveness. That was remarkable to me, because these are the newest companies represented, and indeed the newest kinds of companies in the current market. Concordantly, it seemed to me that they both produced commercials very specifically geared to a new generation of consumer.

Whereas the other spots that I sampled seemed fairly ordinary and non-adventurous with their content, the Groupon and Living Social ads seemed to be taking chances that might have alienated certain viewers, but likely not those that could be expected to utilize their services. The Groupon ads both made use of the same premise, masquerading as public service announcements for several seconds before effectively disregarding the plight of the whales and the Tibetan people in order to laud a deal related to each of them that the spokesperson had acquired through Groupon. The campaign runs the risk of being accused of insensitivity, but I think it adeptly walks that line without crossing it. The gamble at play here is, I think, an understanding about the social character of highly modern consumers, and I think the Groupon ads do a good job of identifying their target audience as the sort that would be likely to take an interest in social and environmental issues, but not in a humorless way. I take the makers of these spots to be assuming that the persons they are seeking to reach do not take themselves too seriously, and can laugh over their own causes, that they will both give those causes their attention and set them aside when it’s not an immediate concern, in order to take a nice whale-watching trip, or have a Tibetan meal. It may in fact be a jaded perspective, or it may be a livable and realistic one, but in any event, I agree with the implicit claim that it’s characteristic of the current generation.

Living Social goes another route, and puts itself at risk of being accused not of a deficiency of sensitivity, but of an excess of it. They present a burly, reclusive man at the start of the thirty second spot, and show him discovering Living Social and being exposed to a wealth of new activities and products, which change his appearance until, in the final reveal, he approaches a classy bar dressed as a woman. I imagine that there must be some amount of tenuousness when the idea has been presented to portray transvestitism positively during the nation’s most-watched sporting event. But anything with such a large audience is likely to have a diverse set of viewers, and Living Social did a fine job of zeroing in on those of them that would be likely to use their service, namely young, urban, open-minded consumers. The ad strikes me as a skillful act of selective alienation, with the makers of it recognizing at the outset that they were not going to reach everybody, and so making an ad that would be appealing only to the emergent market that their similarly nascent business is trying to tap. It is probably the case that only people who are okay with alternative lifestyles are likely to utilize Living Social.

I think it is interesting that the youngest companies have done some of the best jobs at trying to appeal to the youngest consumers. They do not have entrenched models for their advertising, and they may well have hired young firms to craft the commercials for them. It makes good sense that what is new in the marketplace of goods and services would mesh best with what is new in the marketplace of social ideas.

Film Analysis: Hot Fuzz

This will be the first in what I hopefully will make a long series of – let’s call them analytical film reviews. I’m beginning in a strange place. It would probably be a stronger opening if the first review I offered was either something that could be called classic or something current, whether now playing or just released on disc. But I intend to do these for just whatever I happen to be watching, and I am, for better or worse, starting the project now, rather than, say, after watching for the first time Fritz Lang’s “M” a couple of months ago. I can’t afford a ticket to a movie theater, either, so we’re stuck with the last film I returned to Netflix, which was the Edgar Wright/Simon Pegg action-comedy “Hot Fuzz.” Of course, as evidenced by the earlier “Shaun of the Dead,” the people responsible for this film take their comedy seriously, so it is by no means without content upon which to comment. Nor is it without personal significance to me as a starting point for this aspect of my blog.

A definite part of the reason why I’m starting this now, in spite of having meant to for numerous weeks prior, is that my cohabiting relationship has just ended, and my now ex-girlfriend has left me with much time and space to use to think, and write, and entertain myself, and perhaps do all of these together. I am determined to be personally productive now that my environment has been abruptly rattled. But this relationship is an upsetting loss, having been unusual, transformative, and of quite a long duration. The sort of odd significance of “Hot Fuzz” being the subject of my first analysis is twofold: Firstly, the major reason I’d chosen to watch it was that I knew my girlfriend was under serious stress, and the mood of the household in the last week or two before she left was dour, so I thought we were in need of a dose of comedy. Secondly, the film was released in the spring of 2007, just before she and I met and fell in love, hence it being in the Netflix queue that she and I had been sharing. There’s this weird sense of serendipity, then, in the fact that it is the first movie I’ve watched on my own since the very time it was released. Perhaps I’m making too much of it, but then I make too much of most things; that’s why I find it would be a worthwhile project to analyze films like this.

Even if I had watched “Hot Fuzz” while alone, heartsick, and overly reflective, it may not have exactly been the thing to lighten the local mood. I found it to be quite different from what I had expected, in that it by and large worked better where it presented itself as a thriller than where it was a comedy. It is a rather darker movie than I anticipated, a fact which I noticed straightaway. The atmosphere is too heavy for boisterous laughter. That is not to say that it isn’t funny, but most of the humor is subtle, and had me nodding inwardly rather than laughing out loud. The rest seems like comic relief, meant to stand in contrast to a plot that is driven by death and mystery.

While so much of the humor is subtle, much of the thematic content is not. As with “Shaun of the Dead,” which utilized common, almost cliché elements of the zombie horror sub-genre, and actually made them more explicit, “Hot Fuzz” draws on another cliché in horror: the idyllic small town with dark, deeply hidden secrets. However, by the end, after the plot makes a series of sharp turns towards increasing absurdity, there is nothing that is not in the open. While that probably sounds like criticism, the absurdity is clearly both intentional and useful, allowing the action-packed climax of the film to be perhaps the only segment that really is uproariously funny. In that sense, the film is quite well structured, though on the other hand, the variety of false-leads and subplots that lead the audience to the satisfaction of witnessing a shootout between two cops and a dozen sexagenarians can make the whole thing feel a little cluttered.

Along the way, it is probably easy to lose sight of some of the less direct thematic statements that the story makes. As I said, though, much of it is perfectly obvious. By the time the Neighborhood Watch Alliance is revealed as a cabal of secretive, black-cloaked manipulators of local events, there is no mistaking the criticism of suburban and rural lifestyles in all their potential to commit a person to the acceptance or active pursuit of an illusion. But the film overall is just a bit more cynical, or else more even-handed, than all that. If one keeps the entirety of the story in mind, he can see the way the criticism extends to urban life, as well. Two things are of clear significance in leading one to that conclusion. First, the story begins with Pegg’s character, officer Angel, being forced out of London by the entirety of the police force because they don’t want his excellence as an officer making the rest of them look bad. Then, in the end, the same officers request that he return, having discovered that his departure did not preserve the status quo, but rather interrupted it, in that the crime rate increased without him, but Angel determines to stay, saying that he likes it in Sandford. This is not what one would expect, given his evident boredom during his time there. To my thinking, after his victorious battle with the town elders, Angel decides that the small town is well worth staying in, after all, likely because its cultural landscape is more changeable than that of the big city. There is no greater reason to return to London, because the powerful residents of both places are given to the same human impulses toward manipulation in favor of a perverted concept of the common good. What differs is only the method. In a small town, the locals remain entrenched in fear of what harm a thing might do, whereas in the city, the good of a thing might be recognized, but it may still be rejected, whether because of shame or for the sake of political efficacy. That is, the problem with the city is built into its fabric, but the problem of the small town is a problem of perspective, which is more easily rectified.

If the thematic conflict of the story is not the conflict of city versus suburb, then the climactic battle is all that much more significant in crystallizing the overall theme, which is focused instead on generational conflict. It then makes surprisingly much sense that the relatively young main characters do battle with an army of villains who are significantly older. The conflict of the story represents the potential for a more educated, tolerant generation to supplant the entrenched, often wrong-headed ideologies of the one that preceded them. The final resolution of the gunfight, after the chase scene, taking place in a scale model of the town, squarely places the characters of Pegg and Timothy Dalton – the latter practically being an emissary of older action films – as two giants, representing opposite ideologies, the progressive and the regressive, fighting over the very soul of the town. And as if to make it more clear that the future is determined by the outcome, the film places a solitary child in the middle of that struggle, with the potential to be made a victim or a thing to be protected. But because the conflict is generational, the child is not merely a prop. He participates briefly in the fight, and it may even be a plaything of his that ultimately fells the regressive force.

"Sharp Criticism"

Here’s an interesting bit of copy from today’s New York Times:

The International Committee of the Red Cross reported finding what it called shocking scenes on Wednesday, including four emaciated children next to the bodies of their dead mothers. In a rare and sharply critical statement, it said that “the Israeli military failed to meet its obligation under international humanitarian law to care and evacuate the wounded.”

You know, I think that remaining markedly silent in ordinary or barely exceptional circumstances is marvelously productive of breaking points. The less you speak, the more weight your voice tends to carry when it is raised. And what’s more, the less frequently you are inclined to speak, the more confidence you can have in the significance of a subject that forces language from your lips. I think it is largely because of the strength of my belief in those sentiments that I often find I grow frustrated with myself whenever I go on speaking too long, or get mired in idle talk. I flirt with the idea of vows of silence, which would promise me time enough to reflect on would-be words, and avoid the mistake of speaking too soon and too carelessly. But then I worry. I worry because it is easy to imagine the dire tragedy of reflecting so long, then opening your mouth again to say only “I haven’t learned anything.”

Worse than never seeking one’s breaking point is building toward it, only to lose grip of the object of it, to miss the sight of its power. That, I fear, is the circumstance the Red Cross has come to, with this empty statement, and the New York Times should be ashamed of its use of such strong and beautiful adjectives in grossly mischaracterizing it. A “rare” statement perhaps it was – if the organization keeps to the habit of not speaking out for the people on behalf of whom it ostensibly works, then yes, any statement whatsoever that it makes is technically a rare one. But by no reasonably objective measure can the above words be termed “sharply critical.” To say that the Israeli military “failed to meet its obligation under international humanitarian law” is the geopolitical equivalent of reprimanding a subordinate in one’s workplace for not filling out the forms deemed necessary by office policy. It carries little more emotional and moral weight than does accusing someone of a traffic violation, which, while illegal and potentially dangerous, is by no means barbarous and roundly detestable.

No, a “rare and sharply critical statement” would be to say that the Israeli military is personally responsible for the deaths of hundreds of innocents; that it is guilty of murder – wholesale murder that with each stage of escalation more closely verged on the genocidal. It would a rare, sharply critical statement to say the Israeli military has come to the endpoint of transforming itself into the monster it thought it was fighting. Statements like these are sharp criticisms. Statements like these are proper to the events that, pray God, have left the region now, and they are the sorts of statements that normally silent parties such as – I suppose – international relief organizations should make when next they feel compelled toward the point of breaking their silence.