My Saga, Part 1 - NYTimes.com
My Saga, Part 2 - NYTimes.com
Showing posts with label Reality as Representation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Reality as Representation. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 15, 2015
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
Monday, April 11, 2011
Hamlet and His Problems - T.S. Eliot (1922)
Source.
FEW critics have even admitted that Hamlet the play is the primary problem, and Hamlet the character only secondary. And Hamlet the character has had an especial temptation for that most dangerous type of critic: the critic with a mind which is naturally of the creative order, but which through some weakness in creative power exercises itself in criticism instead. These minds often find in Hamlet a vicarious existence for their own artistic realization. Such a mind had Goethe, who made of Hamlet a Werther; and such had Coleridge, who made of Hamlet a Coleridge; and probably neither of these men in writing about Hamlet remembered that his first business was to study a work of art. The kind of criticism that Goethe and Coleridge produced, in writing of Hamlet, is the most misleading kind possible. For they both possessed unquestionable critical insight, and both make their critical aberrations the more plausible by the substitution—of their own Hamlet for Shakespeare's—which their creative gift effects. We should be thankful that Walter Pater did not fix his attention on this play.
Two recent writers, Mr. J. M. Robertson and Professor Stoll of the University of Minnesota, have issued small books which can be praised for moving in the other direction. Mr. Stoll performs a service in recalling to our attention the labours of the critics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 1 observing that
We know that there was an older play by Thomas Kyd, that extraordinary dramatic (if not poetic) genius who was in all probability the author of two plays so dissimilar as the Spanish Tragedy and Arden of Feversham; and what this play was like we can guess from three clues: from the Spanish Tragedy itself, from the tale of Belleforest upon which Kyd's Hamlet must have been based, and from a version acted in Germany in Shakespeare's lifetime which bears strong evidence of having been adapted from the earlier, not from the later, play. From these three sources it is clear that in the earlier play the motive was a revenge-motive simply; that the action or delay is caused, as in the Spanish Tragedy, solely by the difficulty of assassinating a monarch surrounded by guards; and that the "madness" of Hamlet was feigned in order to escape suspicion, and successfully. In the final play of Shakespeare, on the other hand, there is a motive which is more important than that of revenge, and which explicitly "blunts" the latter; the delay in revenge is unexplained on grounds of necessity or expediency; and the effect of the "madness" is not to lull but to arouse the king's suspicion. The alteration is not complete enough, however, to be convincing. Furthermore, there are verbal parallels so close to the Spanish Tragedy as to leave no doubt that in places Shakespeare was merely revising the text of Kyd. And finally there are unexplained scenes—the Polonius-Laertes and the Polonius-Reynaldo scenes—for which there is little excuse; these scenes are not in the verse style of Kyd, and not beyond doubt in the style of Shakespeare. These Mr. Robertson believes to be scenes in the original play of Kyd reworked by a third hand, perhaps Chapman, before Shakespeare touched the play. And he concludes, with very strong show of reason, that the original play of Kyd was, like certain other revenge plays, in two parts of five acts each. The upshot of Mr. Robertson's examination is, we believe, irrefragable: that Shakespeare's Hamlet, so far as it is Shakespeare's, is a play dealing with the effect of a mother's guilt upon her son, and that Shakespeare was unable to impose this motive successfully upon the "intractable" material of the old play.4
Of the intractability there can be no doubt. So far from being Shakespeare's masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure. In several ways the play is puzzling, and disquieting as is none of the others. Of all the plays it is the longest and is possibly the one on which Shakespeare spent most pains; and yet he has left in it superfluous and inconsistent scenes which even hasty revision should have noticed. The versification is variable. Lines like
are of the Shakespeare of Romeo and Juliet. The lines in Act v. sc. ii.,
are of his quite mature. Both workmanship and thought are in an unstable condition. We are surely justified in attributing the play, with that other profoundly interesting play of "intractable" material and astonishing versification, Measure for Measure, to a period of crisis, after which follow the tragic successes which culminate in Coriolanus. Coriolanus may be not as "interesting" as Hamlet, but it is, with Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare's most assured artistic success. And probably more people have thought Hamlet a work of art because they found it interesting, than have found it interesting because it is a work of art. It is the "Mona Lisa" of literature.5
The grounds of Hamlet's failure are not immediately obvious. Mr. Robertson is undoubtedly correct in concluding that the essential emotion of the play is the feeling of a son towards a guilty mother:
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative"; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of thatparticular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. If you examine any of Shakespeare's more successful tragedies, you will find this exact equivalence; you will find that the state of mind of Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep has been communicated to you by a skilful accumulation of imagined sensory impressions; the words of Macbeth on hearing of his wife's death strike us as if, given the sequence of events, these words were automatically released by the last event in the series. The artistic "inevitability" lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion; and this is precisely what is deficient in Hamlet. Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear. And the supposed identity of Hamlet with his author is genuine to this point: that Hamlet's bafflement at the absence of objective equivalent to his feelings is a prolongation of the bafflement of his creator in the face of his artistic problem. Hamlet is up against the difficulty that his disgust is occasioned by his mother, but that his mother is not an adequate equivalent for it; his disgust envelops and exceeds her. It is thus a feeling which he cannot understand; he cannot objectify it, and it therefore remains to poison life and obstruct action. None of the possible actions can satisfy it; and nothing that Shakespeare can do with the plot can express Hamlet for him. And it must be noticed that the very nature of the données of the problem precludes objective equivalence. To have heightened the criminality of Gertrude would have been to provide the formula for a totally different emotion in Hamlet; it is just because her character is so negative and insignificant that she arouses in Hamlet the feeling which she is incapable of representing.7
The "madness" of Hamlet lay to Shakespeare's hand; in the earlier play a simple ruse, and to the end, we may presume, understood as a ruse by the audience. For Shakespeare it is less than madness and more than feigned. The levity of Hamlet, his repetition of phrase, his puns, are not part of a deliberate plan of dissimulation, but a form of emotional relief. In the character Hamlet it is the buffoonery of an emotion which can find no outlet in action; in the dramatist it is the buffoonery of an emotion which he cannot express in art. The intense feeling, ecstatic or terrible, without an object or exceeding its object, is something which every person of sensibility has known; it is doubtless a study to pathologists. It often occurs in adolescence: the ordinary person puts these feelings to sleep, or trims down his feeling to fit the business world; the artist keeps it alive by his ability to intensify the world to his emotions. The Hamlet of Laforgue is an adolescent; the Hamlet of Shakespeare is not, he has not that explanation and excuse. We must simply admit that here Shakespeare tackled a problem which proved too much for him. Why he attempted it at all is an insoluble puzzle; under compulsion of what experience he attempted to express the inexpressibly horrible, we cannot ever know. We need a great many facts in his biography; and we should like to know whether, and when, and after or at the same time as what personal experience, he read Montaigne, II. xii., Apologie de Raimond Sebond. We should have, finally, to know something which is by hypothesis unknowable, for we assume it to be an experience which, in the manner indicated, exceeded the facts. We should have to understand things which Shakespeare did not understand himself.
FEW critics have even admitted that Hamlet the play is the primary problem, and Hamlet the character only secondary. And Hamlet the character has had an especial temptation for that most dangerous type of critic: the critic with a mind which is naturally of the creative order, but which through some weakness in creative power exercises itself in criticism instead. These minds often find in Hamlet a vicarious existence for their own artistic realization. Such a mind had Goethe, who made of Hamlet a Werther; and such had Coleridge, who made of Hamlet a Coleridge; and probably neither of these men in writing about Hamlet remembered that his first business was to study a work of art. The kind of criticism that Goethe and Coleridge produced, in writing of Hamlet, is the most misleading kind possible. For they both possessed unquestionable critical insight, and both make their critical aberrations the more plausible by the substitution—of their own Hamlet for Shakespeare's—which their creative gift effects. We should be thankful that Walter Pater did not fix his attention on this play.
Two recent writers, Mr. J. M. Robertson and Professor Stoll of the University of Minnesota, have issued small books which can be praised for moving in the other direction. Mr. Stoll performs a service in recalling to our attention the labours of the critics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 1 observing that
they knew less about psychology than more recent Hamlet critics, but they were nearer in spirit to Shakespeare's art; and as they insisted on the importance of the effect of the whole rather than on the importance of the leading character, they were nearer, in their old-fashioned way, to the secret of dramatic art in general.2Qua work of art, the work of art cannot be interpreted; there is nothing to interpret; we can only criticize it according to standards, in comparison to other works of art; and for "interpretation" the chief task is the presentation of relevant historical facts which the reader is not assumed to know. Mr. Robertson points out, very pertinently, how critics have failed in their "interpretation" of Hamlet by ignoring what ought to be very obvious: that Hamlet is a stratification, that it represents the efforts of a series of men, each making what he could out of the work of his predecessors. The Hamlet of Shakespeare will appear to us very differently if, instead of treating the whole action of the play as due to Shakespeare's design, we perceive hisHamlet to be superposed upon much cruder material which persists even in the final form.3
We know that there was an older play by Thomas Kyd, that extraordinary dramatic (if not poetic) genius who was in all probability the author of two plays so dissimilar as the Spanish Tragedy and Arden of Feversham; and what this play was like we can guess from three clues: from the Spanish Tragedy itself, from the tale of Belleforest upon which Kyd's Hamlet must have been based, and from a version acted in Germany in Shakespeare's lifetime which bears strong evidence of having been adapted from the earlier, not from the later, play. From these three sources it is clear that in the earlier play the motive was a revenge-motive simply; that the action or delay is caused, as in the Spanish Tragedy, solely by the difficulty of assassinating a monarch surrounded by guards; and that the "madness" of Hamlet was feigned in order to escape suspicion, and successfully. In the final play of Shakespeare, on the other hand, there is a motive which is more important than that of revenge, and which explicitly "blunts" the latter; the delay in revenge is unexplained on grounds of necessity or expediency; and the effect of the "madness" is not to lull but to arouse the king's suspicion. The alteration is not complete enough, however, to be convincing. Furthermore, there are verbal parallels so close to the Spanish Tragedy as to leave no doubt that in places Shakespeare was merely revising the text of Kyd. And finally there are unexplained scenes—the Polonius-Laertes and the Polonius-Reynaldo scenes—for which there is little excuse; these scenes are not in the verse style of Kyd, and not beyond doubt in the style of Shakespeare. These Mr. Robertson believes to be scenes in the original play of Kyd reworked by a third hand, perhaps Chapman, before Shakespeare touched the play. And he concludes, with very strong show of reason, that the original play of Kyd was, like certain other revenge plays, in two parts of five acts each. The upshot of Mr. Robertson's examination is, we believe, irrefragable: that Shakespeare's Hamlet, so far as it is Shakespeare's, is a play dealing with the effect of a mother's guilt upon her son, and that Shakespeare was unable to impose this motive successfully upon the "intractable" material of the old play.4Of the intractability there can be no doubt. So far from being Shakespeare's masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure. In several ways the play is puzzling, and disquieting as is none of the others. Of all the plays it is the longest and is possibly the one on which Shakespeare spent most pains; and yet he has left in it superfluous and inconsistent scenes which even hasty revision should have noticed. The versification is variable. Lines like
Look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,
Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastern hill,
are of the Shakespeare of Romeo and Juliet. The lines in Act v. sc. ii.,
Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting
That would not let me sleep...
Up from my cabin,
My sea-gown scarf'd about me, in the dark
Grop'd I to find out them: had my desire;
Finger'd their packet;
are of his quite mature. Both workmanship and thought are in an unstable condition. We are surely justified in attributing the play, with that other profoundly interesting play of "intractable" material and astonishing versification, Measure for Measure, to a period of crisis, after which follow the tragic successes which culminate in Coriolanus. Coriolanus may be not as "interesting" as Hamlet, but it is, with Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare's most assured artistic success. And probably more people have thought Hamlet a work of art because they found it interesting, than have found it interesting because it is a work of art. It is the "Mona Lisa" of literature.5
The grounds of Hamlet's failure are not immediately obvious. Mr. Robertson is undoubtedly correct in concluding that the essential emotion of the play is the feeling of a son towards a guilty mother:
[Hamlet's] tone is that of one who has suffered tortures on the score of his mother's degradation.... The guilt of a mother is an almost intolerable motive for drama, but it had to be maintained and emphasized to supply a psychological solution, or rather a hint of one.This, however, is by no means the whole story. It is not merely the "guilt of a mother" that cannot be handled as Shakespeare handled the suspicion of Othello, the infatuation of Antony, or the pride of Coriolanus. The subject might conceivably have expanded into a tragedy like these, intelligible, self-complete, in the sunlight. Hamlet, like the sonnets, is full of some stuff that the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art. And when we search for this feeling, we find it, as in the sonnets, very difficult to localize. You cannot point to it in the speeches; indeed, if you examine the two famous soliloquies you see the versification of Shakespeare, but a content which might be claimed by another, perhaps by the author of theRevenge of Bussy d' Ambois, Act v. sc. i. We find Shakespeare's Hamlet not in the action, not in any quotations that we might select, so much as in an unmistakable tone which is unmistakably not in the earlier play.6
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative"; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of thatparticular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. If you examine any of Shakespeare's more successful tragedies, you will find this exact equivalence; you will find that the state of mind of Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep has been communicated to you by a skilful accumulation of imagined sensory impressions; the words of Macbeth on hearing of his wife's death strike us as if, given the sequence of events, these words were automatically released by the last event in the series. The artistic "inevitability" lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion; and this is precisely what is deficient in Hamlet. Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear. And the supposed identity of Hamlet with his author is genuine to this point: that Hamlet's bafflement at the absence of objective equivalent to his feelings is a prolongation of the bafflement of his creator in the face of his artistic problem. Hamlet is up against the difficulty that his disgust is occasioned by his mother, but that his mother is not an adequate equivalent for it; his disgust envelops and exceeds her. It is thus a feeling which he cannot understand; he cannot objectify it, and it therefore remains to poison life and obstruct action. None of the possible actions can satisfy it; and nothing that Shakespeare can do with the plot can express Hamlet for him. And it must be noticed that the very nature of the données of the problem precludes objective equivalence. To have heightened the criminality of Gertrude would have been to provide the formula for a totally different emotion in Hamlet; it is just because her character is so negative and insignificant that she arouses in Hamlet the feeling which she is incapable of representing.7
The "madness" of Hamlet lay to Shakespeare's hand; in the earlier play a simple ruse, and to the end, we may presume, understood as a ruse by the audience. For Shakespeare it is less than madness and more than feigned. The levity of Hamlet, his repetition of phrase, his puns, are not part of a deliberate plan of dissimulation, but a form of emotional relief. In the character Hamlet it is the buffoonery of an emotion which can find no outlet in action; in the dramatist it is the buffoonery of an emotion which he cannot express in art. The intense feeling, ecstatic or terrible, without an object or exceeding its object, is something which every person of sensibility has known; it is doubtless a study to pathologists. It often occurs in adolescence: the ordinary person puts these feelings to sleep, or trims down his feeling to fit the business world; the artist keeps it alive by his ability to intensify the world to his emotions. The Hamlet of Laforgue is an adolescent; the Hamlet of Shakespeare is not, he has not that explanation and excuse. We must simply admit that here Shakespeare tackled a problem which proved too much for him. Why he attempted it at all is an insoluble puzzle; under compulsion of what experience he attempted to express the inexpressibly horrible, we cannot ever know. We need a great many facts in his biography; and we should like to know whether, and when, and after or at the same time as what personal experience, he read Montaigne, II. xii., Apologie de Raimond Sebond. We should have, finally, to know something which is by hypothesis unknowable, for we assume it to be an experience which, in the manner indicated, exceeded the facts. We should have to understand things which Shakespeare did not understand himself.
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Why I Make Melodramas (1936) by Alfred Hitchcock
What Is Melodrama?
One man's drama is another man's melodrama.
In the Victorian theatre there were only two divisions of entertainment - the melodrama and the comedy. Then snobbery asserted itself. What you saw at Drury Lane was drama. At the Lyceum it was melodrama. The only difference was the price of the seat.
"Melodrama" came to be applied by sophisticates to the more naive type of play or story, in which every situation was overdrawn and every emotion underlined.
But still the definition is not universal. The "melodrama" of the West-end may be taken as drama in the Provinces. To some extent "melodrama" seems to be in the eye - and mind - of the beholder.
In real life, to be called "melodramatic" is to be criticised. The term suggests behaviour which is hysterical and exaggerated.
A woman may receive the news of her husband's death by throwing up her arms and screaming, or she may sit quite still and say nothing. The first is melodramatic. But it may well happen in real life. In the cinema a melodramatic film is one based on a series of sensational incidents. So melodrama, you must admit, has been and is the backbone and lifeblood of the cinema.
I use melodrama because I have a tremendous desire for understatement in film-making. Understatement in a dramatic situation powerful enough to be called melodramatic is, I think, the way to achieve naturalism and realism, while keeping in mind the entertainment demands of the screen, the first of these being for colourful action.
Examine what was popular in the provincial theatre before films and you will see that the first essential was that the play had plenty of "meat." It is to that audience, multiplied many times, we must cater in films.
But - and it is a difficult "but" - the same audience has been taught to expect the modern, naturalistic treatment of their "meaty" dramas. The screen has created the expectation of a degree of realism which was never asked of the theatre.
Now realism on the screen would be impossible. Actual life would be dull, in all but its more exceptional aspects, such as crime. Realism, faithfully represented, would be unreal, because there is in the minds of the cinema or theatre audience what I would call the "habit of drama." This habit causes the audience to prefer on the screen things that are outside their own, real-life experience.
So there is the problem - how to combine colour, action, naturalism, the semblance of reality, and situations which will be intriguingly unfamiliar to most of the audience. All these must be blended.
My own greatest desire is for realism. Therefore I employ what is called melodrama - but which might as well be called ultra-realism - for all my thinking has led me to the conclusion that there is the only road to screen realism that will still be entertainment.
Perhaps the strangest criticism I encounter is that I sometimes put wildly improbable things, grotesque unrealities, on the screen when actually the incident criticised is lifted bodily from real life. The reason is that the strange anomalies of real life, the inconsequences of human nature, appear unreal.
On the other hand, if they are real they may be too near the onlooker's experience and he does not go to the cinema to see his own troubles at closer range.
The man who understands the psychology of the public better than anybody else to-day is the editor of the successful, popular modern newspaper. He deals to a great extent in melodrama. The modern treatment of news, with its simple statement, which makes the reader "live" the story, is brilliant in its analysis of the public mind.
If the film-makers understood the public as newspapers do they might hit the mark more often.
If I admit I prefer to make films that may be so classified I must first define it. Try to define it for yourself and see how difficult it is.
One man's drama is another man's melodrama.
In the Victorian theatre there were only two divisions of entertainment - the melodrama and the comedy. Then snobbery asserted itself. What you saw at Drury Lane was drama. At the Lyceum it was melodrama. The only difference was the price of the seat.
"Melodrama" came to be applied by sophisticates to the more naive type of play or story, in which every situation was overdrawn and every emotion underlined.
But still the definition is not universal. The "melodrama" of the West-end may be taken as drama in the Provinces. To some extent "melodrama" seems to be in the eye - and mind - of the beholder.
In real life, to be called "melodramatic" is to be criticised. The term suggests behaviour which is hysterical and exaggerated.
A woman may receive the news of her husband's death by throwing up her arms and screaming, or she may sit quite still and say nothing. The first is melodramatic. But it may well happen in real life. In the cinema a melodramatic film is one based on a series of sensational incidents. So melodrama, you must admit, has been and is the backbone and lifeblood of the cinema.
I use melodrama because I have a tremendous desire for understatement in film-making. Understatement in a dramatic situation powerful enough to be called melodramatic is, I think, the way to achieve naturalism and realism, while keeping in mind the entertainment demands of the screen, the first of these being for colourful action.
Examine what was popular in the provincial theatre before films and you will see that the first essential was that the play had plenty of "meat." It is to that audience, multiplied many times, we must cater in films.
But - and it is a difficult "but" - the same audience has been taught to expect the modern, naturalistic treatment of their "meaty" dramas. The screen has created the expectation of a degree of realism which was never asked of the theatre.
Now realism on the screen would be impossible. Actual life would be dull, in all but its more exceptional aspects, such as crime. Realism, faithfully represented, would be unreal, because there is in the minds of the cinema or theatre audience what I would call the "habit of drama." This habit causes the audience to prefer on the screen things that are outside their own, real-life experience.
So there is the problem - how to combine colour, action, naturalism, the semblance of reality, and situations which will be intriguingly unfamiliar to most of the audience. All these must be blended.
My own greatest desire is for realism. Therefore I employ what is called melodrama - but which might as well be called ultra-realism - for all my thinking has led me to the conclusion that there is the only road to screen realism that will still be entertainment.
Perhaps the strangest criticism I encounter is that I sometimes put wildly improbable things, grotesque unrealities, on the screen when actually the incident criticised is lifted bodily from real life. The reason is that the strange anomalies of real life, the inconsequences of human nature, appear unreal.
On the other hand, if they are real they may be too near the onlooker's experience and he does not go to the cinema to see his own troubles at closer range.
The man who understands the psychology of the public better than anybody else to-day is the editor of the successful, popular modern newspaper. He deals to a great extent in melodrama. The modern treatment of news, with its simple statement, which makes the reader "live" the story, is brilliant in its analysis of the public mind.
If the film-makers understood the public as newspapers do they might hit the mark more often.
Monday, August 30, 2010
Hacks, Hustlers, Charlatans, Liars, Fiction Writers and Thieves
These writers, similar to Laura Albert, blur the line between hoax and reportage. They become actors, game players in their own fictions and grandiloquent memoirs, to a lesser or greater degree.
Laura Albert is more of an enigma, Warhol showman, that shoplifter of persona. The contours of opportunism, financial, careerist, are much more clear in these cases. In most cases because there's less art to the con.
This is reportage through the lens of resentment, coupled with a despairing fascination with the fleetingness of Truth, despite all the mass industries set up to present their spin on it.
Others seem to have worked out a sophisticated theory of how the sentimental potboiler intersects with a culture's trauma, with a view towards commercial success. In the cloyingly sentimental yet disquieted climate of an affluent post industrial landscape, impoverished, hopeless and/or abused youth began to suit the sentimental criteria for privileged subject.
This doomed urchin, upbraiding wealth and material accomplishment by her or his very existence, honour a latent but recurring Rousseau-like theme in America: the corruption of society by virtue of shattered innocence.
This newer genre, obeying the dictates of good showmanship, posits: always better if that abject youth is real than a story.
The prose can be titillating, sensational, excruciating, sadistic, erotic, repugnant, heart-tugging, with borrowed flourishes from the movies.
Certain motifs and conventions abound: Addiction then twelve step programs, unwholesome parents, sexual and physical abuse portrayed graphically, one might say luridly, punishment and enduring, a call for mass-cultural healing.
The redemption sought becomes not coincidentally an economic and professional boon for the writer.
Each of these authors understand journalistic realism with an eagle eye for convincing detail and colourful character. Embarked on a professional thrill ride where real money or status is at stake (one reality consistent to all these stories), charged with the gung-ho, high spirits of gamblers, they remain relatively unapologetic of their actions to the last, self-cast anti-heroes in a morally erratic capitalism gone off the rails.
Psychologically, they are often deferring, evasive, charming. In the last, they are an empty byline.
Often, the permission the author feels he or she needs to invoke begins with that convention, now invisible if practically everywhere in our culture: I am a survivor. A noteworthy subject should also physically manifest symptoms of worrisome decline in puritanical or Utopian America: poverty, crushed egalitarianism, broken homes, suburban disillusionment, addiction, violence, moral squalor, sexual permissiveness, AIDS.
The villain in this story is unrepentant abuser (abuser both of people but also of substances, physical pleasures, sex, drugs). Heroes are the abused who have admitted their helplessness before destiny, renouncing decadent worldly pleasures, expressed in a way that touches the heart. The view is protestant, religious through and through.
In response to a hunger for such material, material that, in the words of Oprah has a "dramatic impact" on other morally sick, trembling lives, these writers inaugurate the new genre: poverty, abuse porn; tiny exploitation films cast as credible journalism, warbled or barked from the pulpit.
If one wishes to consider the contemporary lie as a naive art, here are some of its masters.
The Dubious Borderline Affair of Mr. Daisey Going to China
Transcript of the original This American Life episode: "Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory."
‘This American Life’ Retracts Episode on Apple’s Suppliers in China
Dave Pelzer
Excerpts from a Child Called It.
James Fray
Also: In the New York Times.
Excerpts from A Million Little Pieces.
Stephen Glass
Also, in Vanity Fair.
Also, in Slate.
Also, the original article which caused the trouble.
Other amusing hatchetjobs:
"A Day on the Streets", for The Daily Pennsylvanian, June 6, 1991
“Mrs. Colehill Thanks God For Private Social Security”, June 1997, for Policy Review magazine. PDF format.
“Probable Claus”, published January 6 & 13, 1997
"Holy Trinity", published January 27, 1997
“Don't You D.A.R.E.”, published March 3, 1997
“Writing on the Wall”, published March 24, 1997
"Slavery Chic", published July 14 & 21, 1997
“The Young and the Feckless”, published Sept. 15, 1997
Jayson Blair
(April 19, 2003). "A NATION AT WAR: VETERANS; In Military Wards, Questions and Fears From the Wounded".
(April 7, 2003). "A NATION AT WAR: THE FAMILIES; For One Pastor, the War Hits Home".
(April 3, 2003). "A NATION AT WAR: THE HOMETOWN; Rescue in Iraq and a 'Big Stir' in West Virginia".
(March 27, 2003). "A NATION AT WAR: MILITARY FAMILIES; Relatives of Missing Soldiers Dread Hearing Worse News"
(March 3, 2003). "Making Sniper Suspect Talk Puts Detective in Spotlight".
(February 10, 2003). "Peace and Answers Eluding Victims of the Sniper Attacks".
(October 30, 2002). "Retracing A Trail: The Investigation; U.S. Sniper Case Seen As A Barrier To A Confession".
Viki Johnson
Excerpts from a Rock and a Hard Place
Jonah Lehrer Charmed Me, Then Blatantly Lied to Me About Science
Laura Albert is more of an enigma, Warhol showman, that shoplifter of persona. The contours of opportunism, financial, careerist, are much more clear in these cases. In most cases because there's less art to the con.
This is reportage through the lens of resentment, coupled with a despairing fascination with the fleetingness of Truth, despite all the mass industries set up to present their spin on it.
Others seem to have worked out a sophisticated theory of how the sentimental potboiler intersects with a culture's trauma, with a view towards commercial success. In the cloyingly sentimental yet disquieted climate of an affluent post industrial landscape, impoverished, hopeless and/or abused youth began to suit the sentimental criteria for privileged subject.
This doomed urchin, upbraiding wealth and material accomplishment by her or his very existence, honour a latent but recurring Rousseau-like theme in America: the corruption of society by virtue of shattered innocence.
This newer genre, obeying the dictates of good showmanship, posits: always better if that abject youth is real than a story.
The prose can be titillating, sensational, excruciating, sadistic, erotic, repugnant, heart-tugging, with borrowed flourishes from the movies.
Certain motifs and conventions abound: Addiction then twelve step programs, unwholesome parents, sexual and physical abuse portrayed graphically, one might say luridly, punishment and enduring, a call for mass-cultural healing.
The redemption sought becomes not coincidentally an economic and professional boon for the writer.
Each of these authors understand journalistic realism with an eagle eye for convincing detail and colourful character. Embarked on a professional thrill ride where real money or status is at stake (one reality consistent to all these stories), charged with the gung-ho, high spirits of gamblers, they remain relatively unapologetic of their actions to the last, self-cast anti-heroes in a morally erratic capitalism gone off the rails.
Psychologically, they are often deferring, evasive, charming. In the last, they are an empty byline.
Often, the permission the author feels he or she needs to invoke begins with that convention, now invisible if practically everywhere in our culture: I am a survivor. A noteworthy subject should also physically manifest symptoms of worrisome decline in puritanical or Utopian America: poverty, crushed egalitarianism, broken homes, suburban disillusionment, addiction, violence, moral squalor, sexual permissiveness, AIDS.
The villain in this story is unrepentant abuser (abuser both of people but also of substances, physical pleasures, sex, drugs). Heroes are the abused who have admitted their helplessness before destiny, renouncing decadent worldly pleasures, expressed in a way that touches the heart. The view is protestant, religious through and through.
In response to a hunger for such material, material that, in the words of Oprah has a "dramatic impact" on other morally sick, trembling lives, these writers inaugurate the new genre: poverty, abuse porn; tiny exploitation films cast as credible journalism, warbled or barked from the pulpit.
If one wishes to consider the contemporary lie as a naive art, here are some of its masters.
The Dubious Borderline Affair of Mr. Daisey Going to China
Transcript of the original This American Life episode: "Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory."
‘This American Life’ Retracts Episode on Apple’s Suppliers in China
Dave Pelzer
Excerpts from a Child Called It.
James Fray
Also: In the New York Times.
Excerpts from A Million Little Pieces.
Stephen Glass
Also, in Vanity Fair.
Also, in Slate.
Also, the original article which caused the trouble.
Other amusing hatchetjobs:
"A Day on the Streets", for The Daily Pennsylvanian, June 6, 1991
“Mrs. Colehill Thanks God For Private Social Security”, June 1997, for Policy Review magazine. PDF format.
“Probable Claus”, published January 6 & 13, 1997
"Holy Trinity", published January 27, 1997
“Don't You D.A.R.E.”, published March 3, 1997
“Writing on the Wall”, published March 24, 1997
"Slavery Chic", published July 14 & 21, 1997
“The Young and the Feckless”, published Sept. 15, 1997
Jayson Blair
(April 19, 2003). "A NATION AT WAR: VETERANS; In Military Wards, Questions and Fears From the Wounded".
(April 7, 2003). "A NATION AT WAR: THE FAMILIES; For One Pastor, the War Hits Home".
(April 3, 2003). "A NATION AT WAR: THE HOMETOWN; Rescue in Iraq and a 'Big Stir' in West Virginia".
(March 27, 2003). "A NATION AT WAR: MILITARY FAMILIES; Relatives of Missing Soldiers Dread Hearing Worse News"
(March 3, 2003). "Making Sniper Suspect Talk Puts Detective in Spotlight".
(February 10, 2003). "Peace and Answers Eluding Victims of the Sniper Attacks".
(October 30, 2002). "Retracing A Trail: The Investigation; U.S. Sniper Case Seen As A Barrier To A Confession".
Viki Johnson
Excerpts from a Rock and a Hard Place
Jonah Lehrer Charmed Me, Then Blatantly Lied to Me About Science
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