Down With Psychiatry

I have to admit that I don’t always use my subscription to The New Yorker to full effect, but sometimes an article appears in the pages of a new issue that lets me know with its subtitle that it is something I have to read and give my fullest attention.  Yesterday’s issue contains such an article.  The piece by Rachel Aviv is called God Knows Where I Am, and beneath that title on the table of contents, it reads “A patient rejects her diagnosis.”  That is a meaningful subject to me, because everywhere I look, I see people not only accepting psychological diagnoses, but accepting them unquestioningly, and courting them as if by sworn duty.

Ladies' Night

A friend of mine made the very poor decision to go see The Hangover II yesterday. She later pointed out to me that apart from her brother and two other young men, the entire audience was female, the vast majority of them adolescents. That got me wondering over what the reason for that demographic appeal would be, and as I considered the point I recalled watching the DVD special features accompanying a season of the FX series Rescue Me. In an interview, one of the show creators relayed that a number of female fans of the show said that they watched it primarily for the sake of the all-male firehouse discussions that take place regularly, because they thought this would give them some earnest insight into what men talked about when women weren't around, and consequently how they thought.

I wonder if a similar impulse could be at play in the minds of young women who decide to attend a showing of a film that follows three men after a night of wild debauchery and forfeited inhibitions. In particular, this case would be an audience of teenaged girls on the cusp of adulthood watching a movie about adult males, ostensibly stripped to their most basic characterization.

I'm not saying that I believe this is why my friend observed the audience demographics that she did. I haven't considered the matter very closely, and I don't know whether her experience was anomalous or not. What I am prepared to say, though, is that if these were the factors at play, it is a terribly foolish idea in the minds of women to think of media like this as representing male experience or male thought, or as presenting characters that should be thought of as true men of the first order. It's entertainment, and generally low-brow entertainment, and its insight does not extend farther than that. Thinking that base humor speaks to an understanding of the male psyche depends upon already being committed to the notion that the male psyche is first and foremost a subject of base humor.

If there are women who really do watch gross-out comedy and other things of that class as a way of better understanding men, I hope that a failure to gain in that understanding brings these women to a breaking point whereby they realize that what that tendency of theirs should really teach them is a better understanding of themselves.

But as I said, I don't know if this impulse driving feminine media consumption is actually commonplace. Does anyone else have a better explanation for why young women would be attracted in large groups to films like The Hangover?

Sign of the Times

Apparently, there is a hot new trend among large law firms, to create a separate career track for newly hired attorneys whereby they do the same work as others, but are paid less than half the salary, usually bringing in somewhere between fifty and sixty-five thousand dollars annually. Could there be any clearer warning about the rapidly advancing death of the American middle class? If you graduated from law school ten years ago and secured employment at a high-level firm, you stood to easily make six figures. If you’re just graduating now, you absorb a greater debt burden, but your earning potential is drastically reduced as a matter of policy.

Just Ignore the Roof Over Her Head

Despite clocking in at over two thousand words, this post is going to be shorter than it should be. It is, however, also longer than it should be in the sense that it shouldn’t exist at all. Not where I am posting it. You see, I’ve been trying to build a personal brand for myself and run a successful copywriting business, and I have honestly taken up the advice of the douche-bag real estate agent in American Beauty: “In order to be successful, you must project an image of success at all times.” I use this blog to advertise myself to prospective clients, and so I try to keep it free of mentions of my economic hardship, or any personally negative feelings that aren’t expressly directed at current events or social trends. (I should probably also aspire to keep it free of usage of phrases like “douche-bag.")

Chip, Anyone?

There’s been a good deal of attention given to a positive, uplifting news story about a Chihuahua that was reunited with its original owners after five years of separation. I came across it a couple days ago with a link to the below video. I like to think it’s not just me, so I’ll assert that many people my age think of Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey when they hear a story like this. There are actually real life cases that parallel that film, but in this instance, the truth is significantly less interesting.

Getting Off

In one of the lighter pieces posted over the weekend at Salon, Matt Zoller Seitz writes about bad films, and describes Sex and the City 2 as "wealth porn." I think that could prove to be a very valuable phrase, if used widely, and I am frankly upset that I hadn't thought of it on my own yet.

I have long described many modern so-called horror films as being better identified as part of the "torture porn" genre, and I am hopeful that a tasteful viewing audience will start to catch onto the distinction and recognize that horror doesn't need to driven solely by gore and shock value. As a horror fan myself, I think it does a disservice to the genre to let the likes of the Saw sequels and Hostel, which are much more prominent, but have a very particular appeal, define horror. I like the term "torture porn" because it makes clear what the focus of the film is, whereas horror, on my conception, might not aim for disgust in its presentation, but rather atmosphere, and may possess a story that strive to shock, to startle, to amplify an audience's fears by logically presenting the threat of a subject, or to instill the subtle, creeping atmosphere of dread or nightmare.

I also like the term "torture porn" because it's disdainful to the specific sub-category of horror that I think of as pandering to the lowest common denominator. Despite changing attitudes, "porn" is still a pejorative word, and attaching it to anything serves to suggest an exploitative impulse, and an utter lack of nuance. Individual instances of torture porn may have other merits to them, but in general, I think people watch such films as ways of indulging their most base impulses without reflection, whether that means putting themselves in the role of the victim, or imagining themselves experiencing a pain they could never really experience, or just participating in anything that's seen as pushing the envelope and abutting with polite society. Giving it a more specific name than "horror" helps to bring all of this out into the open, and hopefully prompts a bit of the reflection that is otherwise conspicuously lacking.

"Wealth porn" is a phrase that can aspire to the same effect on a different class of media, and one that is vastly more commonplace these days. Between Sex and the City, celebrity gossip, and the plethora of reality shows that focus their lenses on the obscenely rich, there is a almost ubiquitous impulse among consumers of American media to watch other people enjoying, taking for granted, and wasting the benefits of a privileged existence. It is absolutely right to call it wealth porn, because it shares so much of its appeal with actual pornography, in that it is an escapist fantasy in which other real people are surrogates for your own would-be participation. You can't have wild anonymous sex with the buxom, blonde co-ed who stops by to help you study for your exam, and you can't spend four hundred dollars on dinner for two and then spend the next day hanging out in all the most posh martini bars. So you watch someone else doing it, and you satisfy yourself by forgetting for a little while that you're overweight and lonely, and your gas bill is past due.

Branding is enormously effective in generating breaking points. By terming something - correctly - as porn, we can potentially prompt a handful of people who would tend to have a bit of shame about participating in actual voyeurism to look with a more critical eye on what gives them satisfaction and realize, as they should have realized long ago, that it is an empty sort of satisfaction, completely reliant upon the glorified presentation of something that simply shouldn't be. So let's call everyone who films a "real housewife" or their ilk a wealth pornographer, and understand that by being asked to swallow it as if it's just any other form of entertainment, we're being screwed in a way we ought not accept.

Stick to the Character Limit

In advance of the current issue, The Atlantic Monthly has changed its Letters to the Editor section. Comments are now printed in a more broadly conceived section called "The Conversation," which, as James Bennet explains in the Editor's Note for May, "is an attempt to more fully express the widening range of reaction to our work." That is to say that there is a much greater diversity of media through which one might comment on a piece of journalism, and The Atlantic now prints traditional letters to the editor alongside blog comments, poll results from TheAtlantic.com, and so on.

By and large, I find this to be an admirable way of extending the dialogue that might grow out of the writing in the magazine without giving short shrift to anyone who tries to express their insight in what is arbitrarily identified as the wrong place. That said, I think there are wrong places - media that ought not be included, and I was appalled to see that among the meaningful and articulate commentary, one tweet had been transcribed and printed in the pages of an esteemed, historic magazine. It read: "I love the 'Letters to the Editor' part of The Atlantic where they let the writers respond. SO MUCH GLORIOUS CATTINESS."

Perhaps this is appreciably amusing, and perhaps it comments on the nature of the discourse that tended to fill the newly renamed section. But anything that's one hundred forty characters at an established maximum is severely limited in how amusing it can be, and debilitatingly limited in how insightful or poignant it can be. The main impression that I get from the above tweet is that it seems like it's just somebody's off-the-cuff, knee jerk commentary. It seems like something that somebody might have simply said aloud to a friend while reading the magazine, not a series of thoughts that somebody took the time to formulate and carefully express. The latter is the only thing that deserves to be put into print.

But of course, my reaction to the tweet printed in "The Conversation" is my reaction to every tweet I'm likely to run across. They all strike me as just being part of somebody's unfiltered and unrefined stream of consciousness, because of course that is what they all are. That is specifically what Twitter is an outlet for, and it has no more place in "The Conversation" than a word from somebody who is simply passing through the room has in an actual ongoing conversation.

The tweet printed in The Atlantic is a perfect example of that. The word "love" is used in it in such a way as to actually denote almost complete detachment. Neither is it used sarcastically nor does it indicate genuine affection, of the sort that would make one want to give something back to the object of it. It is "love" in a sense that is almost unique to the internet, and no doubt endemic on Twitter, in that it is expressed in pleasure at simply letting something happen while you stand as an anonymous observe to it, neither contributing to nor mitigating its persistence.

More than that, anything that uses the word "glorious" in such a casual, colloquial, and borderline meaningless way should not be taken seriously. Is "glorious" really the best word that could have been used here? Does the cattiness the tweeter refers to actually confer something triumphal, something magnificent? Or would it be better to simply call it something like "pleasant"? I won't pretend to never use words like "glorious" in such exaggerative, overly-emphatic contexts when speaking to friends, but I would never write like that. And that is just the problem. The Atlantic is a magazine. It is a piece of literature. It is not idle talk, and there should be a distinction between the two.

It depresses me every time I see things like twitter further validated in traditional media. Does no one else perceive the absurdity of hearing a news presenter say "You can tweet at us," or of seeing a 134 year-old magazine print a comment IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS? Does no one else think that this sort of thing robs us of self-respect as a society? It seems to me that it is all an effort at inclusiveness in building a dialogue, but that fact, as I see it, is that including the largest number of voices possible tends to reduce the number of actual ideas being shared. We shouldn't strive to make room for the words of people who haven't really thought things through.

But everywhere I look, we seem to go on reducing the level of discourse, and I am left to wonder: Will there ever be such a volume of pablum in the media that we reach a breaking point that changes and compartmentalizes the ways in which we communicate, or will this go on indefinitely, until the entire conversation is presented in one-sentence increments, with every third comment being LOL or WTF?