Gendered stories on film: the wax and wane of tradition

Gender and sexuality are in a great state of flux. As our understanding of these concepts expand, we also develop new language (which in turn, will affect other people's experience of themselves and the world around them): how many learned the word cisgender only around the recent transformation of Bruce to Caitlyn Jenner and were, for a moment, brought to feel grateful for the fortune of feeling comfortable in their own skin? Still, social change is slow and traditional representations remain very prevalent in the media. We can decode the underlying stories as another means to understand how society may be changing - and often how people in power feel about those changes. 

Take, for instance, Judd Apatow's films. I loved the 40-Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up. Yet these and even Trainwreck, written by Amy Schumer tend to reinforce notions of traditional courtship and marriage as our ultimate life goal. In Apatow's hands, Schumer's normally raucous, sex positive brand becomes a comedic morality tale which finds her character getting on the wagon and committing to monogamy. In the film poster pictured, her index finger in the foreground means to say "Wait, wait while I take a swig to deal with this monogamy thing!!" but it is as much a finger wag taking women to task: Don't find yourself in the position of being a successful 30-something woman without a ring on your finger - complete with shocked, judgmental guy overlooking the hot mess. (Third meaning: "Watch as I put my true destiny on hold, drinking and shagging myself silly"). Clearly this was not Schumer's ending but Apatow's. Schumer's brand is as shameless and unapologetic as is Lena Dunham's. But Apatow's stories support the goodness of traditionality, precisely because they make us laugh.

But when we think about children's movies, it is not a stretch to say that representations of social life become a more important topic. Movies and media more generally socialize children - they create the cognitive models that kids use to interpret the world throughout their lives. They have a more hungry and intense connection to stories and images. One interesting children's film, How to Train Your Dragon 2, brings up the changing scope of masculinity and legitimates new kinds of masculine challenge and talent for a new generation of kids. 

The protagonist Hiccup is a smallish, uncertain and soul-searching young hero who doesn’t understand his trajectory in the world. He has talent but needs to establish himself independently from his father, Stoick the Vast (boisterous, courageous freewheeling, strong, certain, larger than life). In short, a “lad”. Rather than braun, it is Hiccup's tenderness and technical prowess with dragons, an unusual but highly important skill, that lie at his core. Yet, his talented, sporting and much more confident girlfriend Astrid is unimpressed by his boyish inability to see the obvious path to chiefdom clearly ahead of him. Unsatisfied with the ease of success by birthright, he required a cathartic experience, like all heroes going back to Odysseus, to feel worthy of the honor. He had to look for trouble and earn his way out of it to feel he could lay claim to being chief. He identifies more with his mother when he finds her. She is strong, agile and intelligent, driven by a similar passion for dragons, but she is also tender and rather than particularly “caring” - she did abandon him as a child after all- she could be called “protective”in her relationship to the dragons.

Fergus caricatures tradition masculinity

Many of these traits expand the profile of a “new” or alternative masculinity - an archetype that gives more voice to what was once thought of as a weak man. Rather than brute strength (think Brave's King Fergus - a caricature himself), new men can be talkative, sensitive, quietly intelligent, tender and choose love over war or be indecisive at times. Of course, it isn't that such guys didn't exist before - it is that they are portrayed as legitimate, valid ways of being masculine compared to the past where a "real man" meant not too much more than physical strength - pure corporeality.

Another recent film, Son of a Gun (2015) narrates this shift perfectly as it pits these two pure archetypes against one another: JR, the young protagonist of the film and Brendan (played by Ewan McGregor) who likened the difference between these two models to that between Chimps (forceful, independent) and Bonobos (who just "want to stand in a huddle and fuck"). Guess who triumphs?

He-man and the alternative in Son of a Gun

Well, unsurprisingly, the less aggressive guys do - bonobos can win. The narrative structure is a classic "overcoming the monster", but the cultural content is different. The overall message we're seeing is that Brendan's analogy of two types of guys doesn't hold. Two of the traditionally masculine archetypes , Snotlout and Eret, in the How to Train Your Dragon 2 film, ultimately follow Hiccup's lead, won over by the intelligence of his plan. Most importantly, the underdog who triumphs isn't a grotesque sort of caricature like he once was - as are the nerds in "The Revenge of…” series from the 1980s. This newer model is more complex reflecting different, important competencies in a less war-ridden and less manufacturing based reality. It connects more with young men who will also experience their own questions of identity in a world where economic uncertainty is high, with the soul crushing challenge of no chance for an adventure to prove themselves. These boys might have other forms of intelligence -emotional or technical intelligence- that give them alternative pathways to success. A world where many paths, at least in the West, have been cut off as a result of de-industrialization. Part of what legitimates these new forms of masculinity is not only making the characters more likable, but also handsome, or at least "cute" or physically attractive in any way at all.

The nerds are complete misfits; While you were rooting for them, you could never identify with them. 

One needs to look back only as far as 1999 to observe how these types were contrasted more forcefully (and more brilliantly), as in The Fight Club, for instance where Ed Norton’s character is a drab, exhausted, overly feminized, half-a-man, who is considered a sort of distortion of historical circumstances. Instead, 15 years later, we celebrate Hiccup, who wouldn’t be so rude as to manspread on the subway, yet can recruit an army of dragons.

There are other fascinating undercurrents in the film, for instance the way the differences between self-assured, talented and sporty Astrid is contrasted to Hiccup, reflecting how boys and girls are differently performing in school today; or how the confrontation between Hiccup and Drago seems to presage the revival of Cold War divisions as manifested between Obama and Putin...but enough of that. 

The wax and wane, moving forward while pulling back on the reins of cultural change isn't so surprising. As some people push for change, others resist, sometimes forcefully. Social change tends to be more evolution than revolution.  The results we see little by little. 

Riley - the little ice hockey badass from Inside Out. 

Girls rawk math, drums and skateboards, Thanks ED...

Multi-functionality and technology: Case in point...The playground slide

Here, you'll find nothing too complex beyond a bunch of cute kids playing. Right? We know kids can be more innovative than the rest of us. I caught it on tape.

There are certain fundamental principles of the process of technological innovation to be gleaned in this video I made at the behest of some pride-filled children They were elated to have discovered something new. Neither a fossil nor a piece of shrapnel from WWI, items that until recently are more easily found in this slice of the planet, what these children discovered was that instead of going down the slide, which had likely become boring beyond compare after five years of THAT, they found a new use for it, doing some crazy Parkour, super-hero jumps right off the top. It was nearly six feet off the ground. They weren't analytic about it - these daily revelations are part of playtime. They watched each other and goaded one another on. Some of them took the jump fearlessly; one took the initial risk and the others followed along, eager to experience the mix of fear and triumph, not to be left out. They landed differently. Others didn't even conceive of taking the leap. Maybe they followed along on another day. They wanted others to take notice - they wanted to share their discovery.

Once we understand what the slide is for, what any technology is for (yes, the slide is a technology...), it just seems inevitable that we use it the way its design seems to suggest. Especially if is designed well. There is even an onomatopoeia to the word slide (say it slowly to yourself to hear it) which let's you know how to use one. The slide is nearly perfect in its precision and yet a seemingly ancillary aspect of its design as a part of this live "play-station" led to the joyful frenzy in the video. There is a sweet spot in envisioning the possibilities for a developer and children seem to be particularly keen in finding new uses for mundane things. Thinking parents love toys - or learning technologies- that are general usage because they inspire creativity. Blocks, Legos, or Lego Mixels which have the best of both worlds, a kit with lots of prompts to mix up the guys and create crazy, new monsters.

I love the Lego Mixel Chilbo - I'm sure the creator had Groucho Marx in mind... 

We don't truly know the uses/purposes/abuses of technologies until they're released into the wild. Technologies often don't conform to the designer's intent. Slides are for children, correct? Who knew that child-safety obsessed, aka helicopter parents, would start going down slides with their kids to *increase* their safety, leading to a rash of toddler tibial fractures on slides in the US. Playgrounds - designed for children. On that note, did the creators of the television know it would become the world's cheapest and most convenient babysitter?

This one uses pots and pans for drums and also to check himself out!

Though it would serve equally well as a coaster, I don't use my iPhone as one (well, not since the screen cracked as I'm afraid water will seep in). Our smart phones are generative as technologies, like those basic toys we love for our children. Now that they're understood as life management devices, developers can conceive of infinite uses for them through apps. Not the case with more specific technologies, designed to be single-use devices, but whose ultimate utiliti/es are for the world-at-large to decide.

Our nature is really to color outside of the lines. Go up the slide. Jump off the top of it. Then we're socialized out of that kind of behavior. Where are the playgrounds for adults? Think about the excitement of creativity in this video next time you tell your kid to follow the boring rules, and then follow their lead.

Columbusing and Kendall Jenner as white people translator

There was some talk recently which I noticed on bustle.com, featuring Kendall Jenner wearing a traditional style of dress from South Asia called a salwar kameez, consisting of a pair of tapered pants with a long shirt worn over it. Except the original trendspotters (not sure who...) were excited about her look without having acknowledged the cultural origin of the outfit. It allows some thinking out loud on transmission of culture.

Kendall Jenner was being her celebrity self in the spotlight, but the initial (or otherwise) lack of acknowledgement of the origins of her attire is being discussed as cultural appropriation, with an interesting (and relatively new) word attached to it - Columbusing- that I just learned from @Soc_Imagination (Compliments to The Sociological Imagination for bringing me up to speed). 

In case you haven't heard the term, Urban Dictionary one of my favorite websites, defines it as as "When white people claim they have invented/discovered something that has been around for years, decades, even centuries". The founding example is its namesake - the idea that Columbus "discovered" America, never mind that it had been landed upon previously by other European ships or the ongoing power dynamics and the bloody colonial history attached to territorial "discovery". Laughably, the iconic example at this point is how Miley Cyrus columbused twerking.  If you would call that dance she did at the VMA awards properly twerking. Perhaps her twerk did introduce the term to the 50 or so people who hadn't heard it previously.

Columbusing works as a description because it so deftly captures the "appropriation" aspect - the borrowing, taking, or employing of something that once more "naturally" belonged to another group. The way Ricetec, a Texas based ag firm tried to columbus Basmati rice, filing a patent for it in 1997 which would have robbed India and its farmers the economic wealth derived from its national culinary staple and agricultural heritage - to say the very least. 

Good for India that Dr. Vandana Shiva lead the charge against Ricetec.

But what I think the term also highlights is how particular individuals -cultural intermediaries, sentinels, nodes in network speak, trendsetters for the fashion bloggers, disruptors for innovation and brand thinkers- become translators of other groups' culture for white people, then commodified for rabid consumption. In many places in the West, that is simply the "dominant" culture. Kendall Jenner became part of the "white people" translation process by wearing what high-end fashion brand The Row, called a "tunic" (going for a whopping $3690) over the traditional term for the dress. The designers took what tends to be a very colorful and decisively modest dress style and wiped it of the ornamentation and colors that normally define it to meet their monochrome chic style. It was lightly transformed and sold in a venue where few people making under 150K a year could afford to shop (see black leggings for 430 euros...). Then the trendspotters reached near rapture over the originality of the "anti-crop top" and the story is told. At what point did the cultural appropriation happen? As I've described it, it is a process and often no single actor can be extracted from the equation. 

Kendall Jenner's tunic is a good, simple example of cultural translation, of which the appropriation aspect of 'columbusing' is sometimes, but not always a part. On becoming an American citizen (after about 30 years in the US) my father changed his heroic Greek name Konstantinos, after Constantine the Great, to "Costas", which seemed to him easier for the Americans. Assimilation or Americanization is a result of many cultural translation/s over time, of a similar sort. He changed the name because it was too annoying to spell Konstantinos for Americans over the phone. Many immigrants changed their names for similar reasons, making the cultural differences between them and the locals less stark, more easily digestible for the xenophobic. Each of these decisions accumulate, one by one, to create a larger effect, like Americanization - which can sometimes appear like a watered down, saltless version of something more harmonic and intense. Something is certainly concealed or lost in this process for the base culture. Do you think this example of translation is columbusing? Discuss, and let me know what you think.

Yet in many cases, the translation process creates something altogether innovative for the dominant culture - who don't receive it as a degraded copy of some platonic cultural meme, but as something new and fascinating. For a sort of trivial example, the director Ridley Scott translated Swiss surrealist HR Giger's perverse and disturbing alien imagery into a blockbuster film in the Alien series. While the movie was terrifying and disgusting (for me), it was re-packaged well enough to highlight how the translation process also enables cultural diffusion. This photo shows HR Giger's work - complete with head as giant phallus - to be consumable to a relatively limited audience.   Monet's waterlilies this is not. Throw1979 Sigourney Weaver in the mix and you have one of the biggest sci-fi hits of all times.

Cultural translation often doesn't require the translators to come from the target group or dominant culture - in music there are clear examples from the 1950s and 1960s of columbusing of innovative music by black artists by white translators for white audiences (Elvis and The Rolling Stones are the common examples). In contrast, take NWA, whose origins were recently featured in the film Straight 'Outta Compton. Through their raw stories and talent, they brought the violence of inner city ghettos and the black male experience to a young white audience eager to understand and empathize and sometimes emulate the urban styling. Cultural translation is science journalists who interpret the encoded language of published academic articles for a non-science audience of readers in the New York and LA Times. There are many other examples of cultural translation which may have this more neutral or positive character - can you think of one?  

Columbusing is then the negative side of cultural translation which, on the other hand, is one mode of creativity and more broadly of social change. It is the space where cultural innovation and diffusion often takes place.

Happy Columbus Day?

On that note, I'll leave you with this video on the absurdity of Columbus Day from the brilliant John Oliver.

The Spiffero: Making sense of why Italians mostly despise air conditioning...

Italians despise air conditioning. Or at the least most of them don't even consider it an option. I'm bitter because I'm suffering sweltering days and nights in an apartment in Italy with no AC. Maybe silly, but I long for the days in the US when I'd run my central air conditioning unit for three months straight during the summer months. No doubt this was a particular brand of American gluttony and lack of ecological sensitivity. Not to mention the cost. But have you ever lived in an apartment with full sun exposure, directly under the tarred roof of a building in an East Coast city? Even in springtime at 70° Fahrenheit outside ( 21° Celsius), the temp in our place would reach as high as 95° F/35° C. When the external temp reached 95°F, then we were officially in an oven. So judge 'ye not...

Contrast that to how I live here in Italy where you simply have to block out heat mechanically. The shutters are strategically closed to keep the sun out, with the windows open to let the air in and if I remain still most of the day with the fan on high blowing directly at me, I won't sweat. My renovated apartment, originally built likely sometime in the 16th century doesn't have a hole in the wall for the AC. Imagine that.

I'm trapped inside this place with shutters closed during the day...

For an American, this situation is unthinkable - close to comical if I weren't living through it. On the one side of the pond, find Italians during the sweltering summer by locating those who remain stubbornly committed to wearing their foulard.

Italian with giant scarf on in summer...

No, it isn't carefree insouciance - it is surely a bit of Italian style but most of all fear of the spiffero, that deadly draft that may ill-affect different parts of one's body, but in particular the throat or neck. The spiffero could cause problems digesting, various cramps and muscle aches, sinus, ear and lung infections with exposure on those respective body parts, but the fear and prevention of sore throat is really where Italian talents lie. Ferrari or Pucci may beg to differ...

While New Yorkers and Americans in general revel in the frigid contrast of arctic air on skin, damp with sweat, as they walk off the NYC street to enter seemingly single digit temperatures, listen for those lamenting the icy airstream, looking for a way to protect themselves as though their clothes had been forcibly ripped from them. Those would be the I-talians.

Think about the BTUs* in terms of American military force.  Operation ICY Storm. Of course, Americans are extreme in many areas of life: the amount of space we require to store our stuff, the size of our refrigerators, the number of lanes we have on highways, our food portions, yes, American military force, the temperature of our coffee, the number of flags we fly...and the size of them. Our AC just fits into the larger culture so sweetly. One barely needs to explain it.

America's biggest flag, flying in Hoboken, New Jersey

But how to explain the extreme response of Italians to AC. The most recent data available show that only around 10% of Italian households have AC compared to 87% of Americans. This is an incredible contrast. My guess would be that even fewer than 10% use AC regularly at home while offices are most likely using them more frequently but never with the defiant love of it that Americans have.

Certainly, Italians don't like extreme weather of any sort. Rain is often an excuse to stay home, and they are invariably well-equipped with any kind of technical clothing for whimsical turns of the barometer. This weather preparedness, based in fear of the spiffero, becomes a fantastic vehicle for their inimitable sense of style in part fueling a high-earning fashion industry. It is not dissimilar to how fear of gluten is inspiring the growth of a whole new product division of gluten-free foods.

At the same time, Italians also don't like too much processing of any sort - they are more likely than Americans to want to take a natural approach to certain things - of course to their cuisine, being full of pure, primary flavors from fabulous ingredients and whose Mediterranean diet enjoys World Heritage status at the UN. As an aside, this is related to Italian rejection of GMO foods, an unthinkable interference in their food traditions. But they also seem more likely to want a softer, less extreme approach to many things: to medications and medical treatments, to exercise, to their general pace of life. Not to exaggerate the Eat, Pray, Love stereotype, but there is a shred of truth to it.

So maybe the voltage capacity here might play a role? I know few people even in quite elegant and well-equipped homes that could run more than two major appliances without blowing a fuse (I've done the permutation: [dishwasher + washing machine + espresso machine] ~ dryer; [washer + dryer + espresso machine] ~ dishwasher). But I don't think that's what's going on.

Instead, what might be at the base of it all can be summarized as the unwillingness of Italians to alter their immediate surroundings (through AC) when they can change their geography quite easily - that is, they'll eventually go on vacation. The work/leisure balance in Italy plays an important role in the annual life rhythm: Italian families have the feeling that beyond their work and home life, they are entitled to leisure time and that consists of mare e montagna - seaside and mountains- and they often take time during summer to enjoy the health benefits of both. In about mid-March you can begin to hear the din of what will happen come June, until this reaches a deafening pitch and people talk about nothing else at a certain point. With ten national paid holidays, plus four EU mandated weeks of vacation, they have the sixth highest amount of vacation time globally, so Italians just move to seaside or mountains in search of the relief they need.

Ultimately, it isn't as simple as just changing the temperature - whose variation alone would leave them vulnerable to all manner of spiffero-centric maladies. Italians forego AC as sort of an agreement that they can be relieved of the heat by being part of different landscapes on which they can lay claim as their natural heritage - there are coasts and mountains in every direction. In fact, the mare e montagna idea takes the Italian concept of wellbeing (or benessere) even further - mothers are often heard talking about how their child requires the seaside for their very health, making it part of your parental duty to offer your child the necessary curative properties of an Italian seaside or mountain holiday.

In contrast, Americans, with little vacation time, vast distances to travel to see something new and a lot of industrialization over the past 150 years have been cut off from nature in a way that Italians have not. Italians live life in and accept more readily the rhythm of the seasons while Americans make their home into a leisure landscape, take a staycation and deal with that difficult reality of life by removing some of the summer pain with a snazzy HVAC.

Certainly, the food movement is bringing more awareness of seasonality back into the American mindset. And the Chinese also have very advanced theories about the role of drafts or wind in illness which in turn confounds Americans. In the end, the issue of AC often doesn't even enter the Italians' mind or, when it does, it just seems excessive and slightly dangerous.

In the meantime, I'd like to go on vacation for my own seaside escape, or to the Dolomiti, more or less in my backyard. But when I'm home, I'll admit I'd rather be blasted by the cold air...in front of a spiffero-machine!

*BTU or British Thermal Unit is the amount of energy is takes to heat or cool one pound of water. We measure the strength of our air conditioners in terms of BTUs, where a good sized room of about 450 square feet requires an AC of about 10,000 BTUs.

Hunger for stories? Anthologies satisfy the craving...

Have you seen Orange is the New Black (OITNB)? It is the original series from Netflix about women in a minimum security prison in Danbury, Connecticut (just a few miles outside of NYC). I'm following this show which has been adapted from the memoir of Piper Kerman, an upper-middle class white woman who landed in prison for drug trafficking for her girlfriend, got out and now works to improve prison conditions for women. It struck me recently that it is similar in its narrative structure to another show that is fueling my story addiction, High Maintenance, about a friendly pot dealer in Brooklyn who services varied Brooklyn clientele in need of their smoke. They are both anthology style series which tell a different story each episode.

"The Guy" From High Maintenance

Though the cultural content is different -one show is about pot smokers and the other prison women- the common anthology structure allows you to deepen your broader cultural understanding of each of these subjects (taking account of the fact that this IS television and not reality, after all). This anthology structure is generative: rather than simply deepening or extending the plot lines of the same four or so characters, the structure displaces the primary characters in favor of narrating the stories of myriad others, who sometimes have only cameo roles.

The payoff is a deepening of an entire profile, archetype or persona, rather than a single individual character. For example, instead of learning about one woman gone bad in Piper Kerman in OITNB over the course of three seasons, we learn about "female prisoners" or "prison dynamics" or, from High Maintenance, which takes the formula even further, "pot smokers". In High Maintenance, we don't even know the pot dealer's name; he's called simply "The Guy" (call "your guy"). He is the vehicle to these varied stories, ranging from comic to melancholic, bringing you all over New York on his bike. The people to whom he delivers, it is their stories that assemble the complex profile of those who smoke pot - these are not stoners á la Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The characters are like a stack of the veritable Carte-de-visite from the 1800s (later known as "cabinet cards"), only in a narrative version. For the ADD types, it will be very satisfying: it offers a lot of stimulating and changing material so you don't have to invest too much in any single story.

A collection of the Carte de visite from the 19th century

In the case of OITNB, the show certainly grounds itself in and ultimately banks on an ongoing fascination with female same-sexuality (alongside the SCOTUS decision to declare same-sex marriage constitutional).  While there is no doubt many flaws in the representation of prison life on this show, on the sex front, the show is said to be keepin' it real; there is a much discussed strap-on sex scene with Lea Delaria (butch and proud). As much, the show is about the lives of women in prison under a patriarchal supervisory regime in an era of extreme corporatization where, by the third season, the new owners of the prison are creating deeper efficiencies by serving inedible slop in the cafeteria and bringing in bunk beds to double up on the number of inmates. Of course the one key difference between us and them - we are not imprisoned so we can watch the shenanigans from the safety of our couch. While there is a certain camaraderie we could all envy, much of it looks miserable.

With this setup, it is certainly easier to give each of these topics their due: as an audience, we are aware that people are individuals but at the same time, we're so inclined to let single iconic characters represent an entire group. A more nuanced understanding can be built, forcing us to find the thread that runs through all of the character's experience. And because there are so many stories - OITNB fluctuates between the quotidian meanderings of inmates and staff and each of their backstories - what they were like and how they arrived in Danbury while High Main explores the smoker- the personae constructed is multi-dimensional. OITNB has its flaws but in this way, we are allowed to see how we, as the non-prisoners, may not be so different.



So what do we learn about prison women, aside from how they're often low income and that they organize into groups by race, and ethnicity? If you had to choose a defining quality that comes through for all of these stories it is that female prisoners are vulnerable. Vulnerable to rape and pregnancy and violence, to heartbreak both from the loss of time spent with children and family members, the heartbreak of finding love in prison and losing it, to friends leaving, to physical and mental illness, to poverty from the loss of earnings. The list goes on.

High Maintenance, pulls us in with the fantastic absurdity of the characters that one finds in New York. An It Girl who's actually homeless, a recluse caring for his mother in a tiny apartment, a young couple trying to make money by turning their own tiny place into an Air B&B business, a successful writer with writer's block, passing time as a stay-at-home dad cross-dressing and smokin' dope while his wife goes out to work every day. Please open a new browser immediately to go watch the majority of these episodes for free on Vimeo (the final episodes cost a few bucks but well worth the symbolic amount). In the closing credits, The Guy is often found observing a friendly neighborhood nutter.

If you have any ambitions in the world, you might ask yourself how The Guy, this sweet, cool, articulate and sensitive person, perhaps in his late 30s, could not find any other job beyond riding his bike to deliver people drugs. I so crave to know a bit more about The Guy, as much as I enjoy all of his clients' stories. On the flip side, while he suffers certain annoyances in working with demanding people looking for drugs, I find myself asking instead why can't *I* have a job like this? He doesn't have to sit at a desk all day, he is getting a kick ass workout without thinking about it, he gets paid right away in cash and he can afford to occasionally indulge by taking time out to partake in a toke with his favorite clients. These are some of the best moments of the show (case in point is the first episode, only five minutes long where he sits in a bathroom chatting away with a cute hypochondriac from LA). I digress.

More than anything we learn over the course of about 10-15 episodes that The Guy's clients seem stressed and need to relax. Suffering the intensity of urban and middle-class life, they aren't going to Headspace on their IPhones to solve their problems through a meditation app - that would be a very Silicon Valley thing to do. Instead, they are self-medicating in a sort of live-hard-play-hard mantra as they experience the extremes in NYC. It isn't that they are enduring life in a favela - the characters are overall livin' pretty. But the kind of stimulation and human stew you find yourself in in NY lends itself to needing concrete ways of decompressing and this group goes to The Guy for that.

Both of these series are breaking boundaries as part of the first-wave of shows to emerge from the web and mess with the format of television in a number of ways including releasing twelve episodes at once or varying the program length - High Maintenance can tell a story in five minutes or in eighteen. And like the internet itself, the anthology format of these two shows allows us more to think about, play with, explore, identify with. Its format gives us the best hope for not reducing characters to simple stereotypes and it gives us abundant material - it satisfies the craving for stories- for meaning, for understanding and contextualizing our own lives, as well as for recreating them and finding our comfort in the world. They give us some new scripts. They connect us more deeply to different realities. It is fitting that both of these shows originated on the internet, which connects us to those people with whom we can identify. We can see our inner antics out there in front of us and, in the words of Cindy from OITNB, "Suddenly shit be perfectly normal." 

Anchorness: A cultural take on the Anchor persona of Brian Williams

People are talking about Brian Williams again. In case you hadn't heard, he was the most respected news anchor in America who, until sometime earlier this year.  He was forced to leave with tail between legs after he lied about being in a helicopter that went down while investigating a story in Iraq during the war in 2003. It turns out he was with a group of helicopters and another heli in the group went down. But over the course of several years, this story morphed into how his own helicopter was shot from the sky, depicting him as a heroic journalist who paid a personal price in the war. And the story caught up with him. He was outed by soldiers no less.  Now he's back - this time at MSNBC. But he's still a media image, which is different than a real person. That's the case I made below, when the scandal first broke.

After hearing and reading many news stories and comments on Brian Williams, all to some degree with the tone of how he should either  a) be given a pass (based on the science of memory) or b) fed to the wolves (lying is an offense to our shared morality), here is one take I haven’t read. As much as people would like to believe that we live in the world of Walter Cronkite, we don’t live in the world of Walter Cronkite anymore. We live in a setting where the political party who can put the most advantageous frame on some potentially central reality is considered the one telling the truth. Often, “the truth” indeed coincides with that frame, other times not so much. Think of it like a Venn Diagram with the central circle as some event and then more or less overlapping circles with different versions of the event, some of those circles representing lies, and others merely different perspectives based on many factors. Yes, on many grounds — in many areas of our lives, we still believe there are central truths — whether or not a statement is clearly a fact — the preeminence of the central circle.

Yet when we are dealing with the media and politics, the reporting of particular situations is a construction. We might expect that the truth exists somewhere in that construction, but that may or may not be the case. When we see a US president, don’t we already know that there are advisors like David Axelrod or Karl Rove that will advise for or against real action in the world based on how it will appear to the public? Representations are often more important than actual realities, but of course are strongest when there is a close fit. And those representations, like the Brian Williams anchor brand, interact with reality in ways that can be ruinous —for  example the presentation of a “good” American politician (male, married, children, dog, God-fearing) is ruined when the reality of his sexual exchanges with strangers in a truckstop bathroom are revealed- a reality versus the brand.  

Actually, the central reality that I’m proposing is that Brian Williams is a media brand, so much more than a nameless journalist. The actual Brian Williams overlaps with the brand Brian Williams but they are separate things, in the same way the character Stephen Colbert from The Colbert Report on Comedy Central, a parody of Fox News' Bill O'Reilly, was a character qualitatively different from the real Stephen Colbert. The camps of those who are, to put it simplistically- on BW’s side, or against him, both condemn or excuse him based on his actual trustworthiness. Result? a) He is not trustworthy because he intentionally lied or b) His ability to recall was compromised by natural function of the human brain. These positions both confuse the anchor brand BW – a media image- with the living, breathing human BW. The distinction between two brands like Brian Williams and Stephen Colbert (of Comedy Central) is rather flimsy even when the intent is different: the former results from the conscious media presentation of a crafted version of reality while the latter is a construction for satirical effect. Brian Williams the anchor was already going way off brand in recent years with forays into comedic late-night appearances. It was deleterious to insert himself too deeply into the coverage, merging subject and object, and the brand imploded.

The brand BW is now tarnished in whatever way you believe that happened. But he is also a real person — and real people lie, forget, reconstruct events intentionally or otherwise, and remember things differently, sometimes radically so. The old guard, like Tom Brokaw or Walter Cronkite, and the new guard of media journalism both have to deal with upholding the boundaries of trustworthiness and respectability and an unwavering sense of moral certitude, anchorness if you will. But they are actually talking about two separate things, a media brand versus a human being. Of course that brand -the anchor Brian Williams- collides with reality in the real BW’s pocket.

A previous version of this story was  originally posted at Medium: https://medium.com/@MoniqueCentrone

Rachel Dolezal Identity crisis

The issue of racial identity is tightly bound to painful political and economic realities and to the history of slavery and colonialism. It lies within the context of the debates around “culture” in the United States and its role in explaining privilege between different racial and ethnic groups in the US. But this issue of Rachel Dolezal is somewhat more narrow than that - concerning the contemporary meaning of her "blackness".

My intention here is not to deal with whether Rachel was mentally ill or the ethics of her having adopted a “Black” identity. There are likely so many details of which we have no current knowledge to make those kinds of decisions. But it is a good test case for understanding the boundaries of contemporary identity even while there are overwhelmingly sad circumstances that make Rachel now well known to many, while the efforts of many black women remain invisible or unvalued.

So let’s say, for the sake of argument, that Rachel’s identity is not a matter of mental illness. In any case, it seems unlikely. This was either an explicit choice she made, or a series of them over time (even if she perhaps did not articulate these decisions to herself as decisions). Perhaps during her time in college at Howard University, a traditionally Black college, and with an African American husband, siblings and children as well as colleagues, she began to adopt certain symbolic identifiers that she felt reduced the contrast between her self and her reference group. She appropriated cultural codes that imply legitimate ownership of blackness, even as her skin was white (albeit schmeared with some self-tanner it would seem). And her status likely remained unquestioned to some degree due to the uneasiness of discussing the issue of race outside of a formalized setting such as a classroom.  

A key question some people are asking is “Why would a person co-opt a position of marginalization and victimization…?” In other words, why would she ever trade in the social privilege of whiteness, for blackness in a world where white is so privileged?  There is overwhelming evidence that the relative condition of Whites in the US is better than for Blacks. This is an understatement.

That is to say, in the immortal words of Louis CK “I’m white, thank god for that shit…That is a huge leg up for me. I love being white”.  

So allow me to quickly bring you to the money shot and then I’ll elaborate:

While the outcome of Rachel being white and appearing to be black was relatively original as an outcome, what Rachel did was more a difference of degree rather than kind in terms of how we each construct our own identity.

You might argue over when such gradations on a clear continuum of behavior become qualitatively different as they reach a certain high end of the scale… adding a level of clear intention or officialdom, when her behavior became officially fraudulent. Was Rachel’s lie complete when she got a tightly wound perm, or was it when she posted a selfie on Instagram saying she was going for the “natural” look, or when she checked the box next to “Black” or even explicitly wrote it in as her racial/ethnic status on some application or another? Or was it the whole shebang à la the king of identity transformation, Don Draper?

Was it qualitatively different than what many of us do to construct our own identities, starting with the widespread and basic infractions on your match.com or your get-it-on.com profile or, further down the line, exaggerating or hiding a part of your past or present circumstances (your salary, how much you adore his/her best friend) to that new person in your life? In the simplest instantiation, we have minor cases of misrepresentation and misunderstanding that can’t be sustained over some longer term. These sorts of best-face-forward performances that we put on for partners can ultimately fall away in the routine of a daily life lived together and that over-playing of certain desirable qualities probably plays a large role in the 50% divorce rate in the US. The guy wasn’t who you thought he was. What goes into our identity performances and how very different are they from Rachel’s?

Then we have the experimentation phase of our teenage years…sk8tr, emo, gangsta, it girl – maybe you try these all on for size because you like the image, something it offers, the people who wear it well, but you run through a variety of identities to see which one makes sense, feels right, feels authentic, which one you could pull-off.

Ultimately, we settle into an identity that feels right over-time, until it no longer feels exactly as though it is an identity. It just feels like you’re you because you stopped working at it – it becomes natural and mainly invisible until you are forced to articulate its contours.

Actually, in the United States, many white people of European descent have ample material for such flexible identity changes during our early years. Americans, especially in big cities that have had a long history of immigration from various parts of the world can choose to identify with different aspects of their ancestry because they are often a rich mix of heritage, especially in places where enclaves that maintain language and culture allow original traditions to perpetuate. The Greek-American community in Astoria, Queens or Colombian community in Jackson Heights (to name two places in NY). And in cities, the broth is already thick enough that few are worried about how gay you are or what aspects of your past you might be trying to hide. When your skin is dark brown, you have a more limited range available. Dark skin becomes a symbolic boundary in the range of options open to people who have it.

And so as adults, are our identities mostly already established? There is certainly still room for growth and play in the various identities we choose along our life’s path – the kinds of parents we’ll be – free-range parent, attachment parent. And crucial junctures in people’s lives can bring up one’s identity – create it, break it or reinforce it- perhaps in the way that Rachel’s divorce might have.

We experiment with certain identities as young people, as we select different personas and even sometimes create something original, but there is the tendency to feel that certain aspects of our primary identity are “deeper” or that there is less room to play, where certain pieces are non-negotiable aspects for most people. Skin-color would seem to be a limiting factor in adopting certain identities. 

Does that mean that race is mainly biological? Is racial identity deeper or less flexible than other kinds of identities? For me, that is the key question, and if so, why? Historical circumstance? Biology? Difference in social perceptions and expectations?

Let’s put the biological piece to rest quickly. Research on the human genome shows that the genetic difference between individuals far outweighs difference between what are considered standard racial groups. The biology of racial origin is such that it is technically not bound or coupled to our identity in the same way genitalia is no longer the limiting factor in gender identity when you can have your nether bits reconstructed. Women have fought now for a long enough time not to be bound by their biology. Yet with both racial and gender identity, we maintain the utility of such distinctions even as they are unraveling… Caitlyn Jenner appeared all 1940s Hollywood glamour on the cover of Vanity Fair making some women question what are the underlying notions of womanhood that transgendered people are highlighting.

This decoupling is happening in many areas of our social life – motherhood can be split old-school through adoption (= biological mother + adoptive mother) as IVF procedures re-classify the integrated parents of yore into various divisions of labor – who donated an egg, who gestated a fetus and who rears a child. Rachel's identifying as "black" took advantage of the decoupling of "black" and "African-American". Rachel passed as black because she employed an entire toolbox of signifiers that together outweighed her actual skin color - it became a softer factor in signifying her identity. The rub here is that such test cases give us the opportunity to rethink and perhaps to redefine certain concepts or understandings of what once seemed so intuitive, but they in no way erase the social, economic and even health realities for those people living with an identity with no other way to redefine themselves, because skin color is almost always a baseline factor in how people define us. Most people do not have the option to adopt any identity: to pay for sexual reassignment or to change a skin color.

In any event, there is almost always a significant investment in any convincing identity performance - an explicit or an implicit amount of time, money and creativity in identity construction. 

So what is it that we’re left with?

We can have it both ways. We can recognize that the social, political and economic effects of race are “real” even if not biological and that they are also inherited within family and community settings where culture is transmitted and adopted without a series of set choices having been made.

I’m not trying to excuse or say that Rachel Dolezal has any right to claim any benefits based on a conjured origin of a black identity. On the contrary, she may have even accused and sued institutions of hate crimes and/or discrimination. However, it seems that her behavior fits on an extreme end of the scale of something we all do today in the context creating our own public personas.