DVD Report: "Idiocracy" (The Movie Hollywood Doesn't Want You To See)

[post 193]

In case you haven't noticed, I think clowns and physical comedy are like totally RELEVANT and SIGNIFICANT in our modern world because we're all still pretty dumb at least part of the time, though we're less likely to admit it, and human error is still titanically inevitable. Which is what clowns have been telling us for several millennia, and the only good news is that we're still able to laugh about it. So if you need to justify your clown existence to an annoying "friend" or to that condescending uncle, read and steal these quasi-intellectual arguments I wrote about here and here. 

All of which brings me to the futuristic satire Idiocracy (2006), which is more about the overall dumbing down of America than it is about human error afflicting even the most intelligent minds... but close enough. And funny.

I was urged to watch the movie by New York City's own intellectual-in-residence, bon vivant, and man about town — of course I'm talking about Paul Persoff — who enticed me with the following opening scene, which is indeed quite brilliant:

BTW, damn good makeup and acting job on the aging, eh?

Directed by Mike Judge (Office Space; Beavis & Butthead, The Animation Show), Idiocracy sends two statistically average Americans five hundred years into the future, where they discover they're the smartest people on the planet. Now I'm not all that into science fiction, but I found this satirical premise deliciously pertinent to Life As We Live It. It can be hard to translate the resulting gags into a full-length movie, and the laughs are not as rapid-fire or as hardy as in Borat, another 2006 comedy with a similar theme, but the movie worked for me on about a four stars out of five level. Some might find it exaggerated. My reaction was that it won't take five hundred years to reach the dystopia portrayed in Idiocracy. More like fifty.

One of the many troubling aspects is its depiction of the entertainment of the future, which  consists of gross jokes and stupid people watching stupider people suffer. The top movie is Asses: ninety minutes of frequently flatulent butts. And here's the top tv show, Ow, My Balls!

Much more troubling was the shabby treatment the movie received from its distributors. What Variety labeled "a rare piece of rebellious political spoofery from a major studio" may in fact have been too hot for the studios to handle. As Ann Homaday wrote in the Washington Post:

"When Mike Judge's highly anticipated futuristic satire Idiocracy opened and promptly closed in a few cities last fall (it never played Washington), the blogosphere lit up. Did Twentieth Century Fox, the film's distributor, intentionally dump the movie?...  Put simply, did Fox do to Idiocracy what it had done to Judge's 1999 comedy Office Space, and was the new movie eligible for similar cult status? We may never know precisely who did what to whom and why (although a hilarious sendup of Fox News in the movie may not have helped)." 

Check it out yourself on DVD (available on NetFlix). Some links:

• The Movie Hollywood Doesn't Want You To See, a good review of the movie from the online magazine, Slate
• Idicocracy on Rotten Tomatoes, where it garners 73% from the critics but only 57% from the general audience
• Mike Judge on Wikipedia
• A YouTube video, one of many, about how dumb most Americans are.
• A Maureen Dowd column about stupidity in American politics.

What Advertisers Really Think of Us

[post 191]

Two compilations of "doing it all wrong" moments taken from tv commercials that promise to fix all that.

Part one — help!



Part two, not quite as funny.



Thanks to Jimmy Meier for the link!

Garrison Keillor on the Universality of Physical Comedy

[post 104]

And other oddly related stuff. A funny piece from 2007 by the novelist and Prairie Home Companion humorist. Just saw this reprinted in Funny Times, which I highly recommend you subscribe to.
___________________________________

A Good Knock on the Head Clarifies Everything

I live in a 1911 house built for a family that had a cook and a housemaid who were short, coming from undernourished countries like Ireland and Sweden, so the back stairway has low clearances, where Mary Margaret or Inga used to hustle down to fix breakfast, and where I now clomp down for coffee 8 or 10 times a day. There is a low overhang a few steps down from the second-floor landing where I have banged my head several hundred times and today when I banged it again, I heard chortling from a small person behind me and could not express my indignation as fully as I might.

I have lost some vocabulary bumping my head on that plaster but not the words that come to mind when you get a good crack on the head, but here is my child laughing and saying, "Do it again." One man's misfortune is a little girl's amusement.

A good hard bump is a moment of truth which announces that (1) the world does not conform itself to our impressions of it, and (2) even if you duck and weave your way through the jungle of life, there is an overhang with your name on it, and (3) it is good, at a time of Gay & Lesbian Literature and Women's Literature and red states and blue, and persons of color and non-color, to get a simple universal experience that is available to everybody (BONK! Arghhh!), and (4) I forget what the fourth point is. Something about suffering.

This particular bump was a hard one and I sat down for a few minutes, not to feel sorry for myself but to get the full benefit of the experience. I could feel some revelation forming itself. I once slipped while running on a slippery dock and instead of landing on the edge of the wood slats and breaking my spine and starting a new life as a paraplegic, I landed fully in the water (which covers three-quarters of the world so statistically your chances are good even if they aren't really) and out of this came some revelation of God's grace and mercy. Not that it changed my life — it didn't — but it was memorable.

This particular bump made me think of my old journalism teacher at the University of Minnesota, Robert Lindsay, a gruff man with a big shiny head with a deep dent in it. The dent looked like a direct hit by a mortar shell. Professor Lindsay had fought in World War II and the Korean War as a U.S. Marine, retiring with the rank of captain, and now he was teaching a writing course to sophomores five days a week, a fresh assignment every day.

Though we were in journalism, none of us spoke up in class and asked Mr. Lindsay how he got that dent in his head. We were scared of him. He had a rule that any writing assignment that contained a misspelling would be an automatic F, which struck us as horribly unfair. What if you wrote something utterly brilliant but had misspelled one little teeny-tiny word? "If you're not sure, look it up," he said. "Learn what to be sure of and what not to be."

We think we want teachers for our children who will nurture and encourage them (You Are All Special, Each In Your Own Way, So Be Yourself And Follow Your Dream), but Mr. Lindsay was a teacher who gave good value. I was not a proofreader when I enrolled in his course and when I got out, I was. I still am. Simple as that. And he brought an ex-marine's eye to lit'ry pretensions that had served me well in high school and he triple-underlined them and wrote "What's this about?" in the margin. And sometimes "B.S." And once he wrote, "Oh for God's sake."

I saw Mr. Lindsay a few years before he died, and he was warm and friendly and proud of his old student, but I was still uneasy around him. He had become a permanent useful growling presence in the back of my mind, saying, "You can do better. Go back and check your work." And I would, sir, but this column is due now, but I will strive to do better in the future, sir. And thank you, sir. Whenever I hit my head hard, I will think of you.

 

On the Streets at the Copenhagen Climate Summit

[post 048]

Greetings from COP 15, the U.N. climate "Conference Of Parties" in Copenhagen, Denmark. In case you don't get out much, COP 15 is considered a big deal not only because it was designed to forge an environmental treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol, but because global warming trends have proven to be even worse than what the "alarmist" scientists were predicting just a few years ago. Thus not only do all the nations of the world have delegates at the conference, like it or not they have us "unofficial delegates" in town in the form of environmental activists staging their own Klimaforum, and taking to the streets with a variety of theatrics and actions intended to pressure the politicians and hopefully grab some international media attention.

Truth be told, it's a madhouse here, with so much going on at any given time that, like the parable of the six blind men and the elephant, it's impossible to ever get much of an overview. Saturday's big 6-kilometer march from Parliament Square to the Bella Conference Center attracted somewhere between 60,000 people (police estimate) and 100,000 (organizers' estimate). The march — I almost wrote "parade" — was quite theatrical, with the clear intention of engaging onlookers and attracting major media. Of course most of the headlines focused on the arrest of a very small number of violent protesters, even in newspapers you would think more attuned to the actual issues and to the not insignificant fact that this was the largest and most international climate change protest ever.

Of course the problem with political theatre is that you are mostly preaching to the choir, but I guess if that choir is empowered and goes on to preach to others, picking up a few tricks along the way, then all is not in vain.


So how do you visualize the politics of climate change? Here's what I saw:

• Depictions of the rich and powerful as puppets, robots or clowns.

• Images of imminent extinction, with the earth's most vulnerable inhabitants dying a grim death. Our 350.org contingent included a boat ("we're all in the same boat"), plus a dinosaur on poles created by a couple of Bread & Puppet Theatre vets.

• Masks, puppets, floats giving voice to the powerless, including endangered species — polar bears, penguins, and assorted wildlife.

• Personifying the positive: the wholesome qualities of the environmental movement (organic, natural, green, warm, fuzzy, etc.). Clowns, bright costumes, and green noses were part of this joyous branding of the movement. The motto for Mr. Green's Circus (see below) is "We are gonna save the planet — and we will have fun doing it."

• Imagery centered on the desirable number 350 (target for safe number of carbon particles per million in the atmosphere).

Here are some images and video of the spectacle. I don't have time for everything while I'm here, but will add some more to this post later, so check back!

Here's my friend Adnan Saabi, from IndyAct in Lebanon, in action inside the Bella Center, in clown nose and glasses unsympathetically portraying a member of the oil lobby. The 850 refers to the amount of carbon in the atmosphere this character is apparently willing to tolerate, and the "recruiting e-mail hackers" refers to the recent brouhaha in England. So in this case the clown persona is basically saying the guy's a bozo.



The Greenpeace puppet of a rich cigar-chomping industrialist manipulating the world's political leaders (including Obama) on marionette strings; all of the "puppets" were in fact human performers.



Mr. Penguin and Mr. Dinosaur.



Clowns on a mission.


Frosty the Snowman says: "I fell down and I can't get up!"



Three puppets (about 35' tall) swaying in the wind, from Seven Meters, whose poster you see toward the top of this post. Seven meters is the height water will rise if all the ice in Greenland melts.


Partial view of our "We're all in the same boat" contingent.


Mr. Green's Circus.


And here's one of their videos.




And here they are at the mall. Not sure what they're doing there, but at least you get to see the whole group in action.





Okay, I admit it, this last one isn't from Copenhagen, but I figured I could sneak it in while we're on the subject of climate change. Besides, it is visual and I did learn about it in Copenhagen. If you like 3D street art, I think you'll love this ice-age video of the summer 2008 work of German street painting artist Edgar Müller .




Physical Comedy in the 21st-Century
One way for physical comedy to break new ground is to move it outside of your standard performance structures and into a remix with everyday life. The work of Improv Everywhere (motto: "we make scenes') offers some good examples of this, as does the history of street theatre. But with street theatre, we're usually talking about a band of outsiders trying to shake up the complacent and the powerful. Think Abbie Hoffman throwing dollar bills onto the floor of the NY Stock Exchange.


You may be pleasantly surprised, therefore, to see similar shock tactics being employed by an actual government, though one that itself is very much on the outside of world power. I am talking about the Maldives, whose president, Mohamed Nasheed, I will in fact be hearing speak later today. The Maldives are an island nation in the Indian Ocean and because of global warming they are literally sinking. Here are the text and the image from an excellent Daily Beast slide show, Our Sinking Earth:

What does it take for a small country like the Maldives to get noticed on the world stage? The nation’s cabinet recently held a meeting underwater, in scuba gear, to call attention to the state — the lowest-lying country on earth. Using hand signals and white boards 20 feet underwater, the cabinet produced a document calling for all countries to cut their carbon dioxide emissions before the Copenhagen meeting.



More to come....

Book Report: Why We Make Mistakes

[post 33]

Why We Make Mistakes
by Joseph T. Hallinan
(NY: Broadway Books, 2009); hardcover, 283 pp.


Mistakes of judgment and mistakes of execution are the stuff of comedy, especially physical comedy. YouTube offers a rapidly expanding video archive of human stupidity in action, from the world's most incompetent criminals to every conceivable mishap awaiting those so foolhardy as to get out of bed in the morning. Likewise Chuck Shepherd's News of the Weird.

When Joel Schechter, editor of Yale's Theater magazine, asked me to do an article on physical comedy way back in 1986, I used it as an excuse to probe the connection between human error and physical comedy. [Read the whole article here.] Admittedly this was my subversive attempt to forge some new connections that would counter the notion that physical comedy was an inferior form of comedy, mindless entertainment that was good for a belly laugh but little else. Instead, I wanted the reader to see physical comedy as embodying a deeper truth about the human condition, and I had no better ally in this than Henry Miller in his clown novella, The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder:

"The beloved clown! It was his special privilege to reenact the errors, the follies, the stupidities, all the misunderstandings which plague human kind. To be ineptitude itself, that was something even the dullest oaf could grasp. Not to understand, when all is clear as daylight; not to catch on, though the trick be repeated a thousand times for you; to grope about like a blind man, when all signs point the right direction; to insist on opening the wrong door, though it is marked Danger!; to walk head on into the mirror, instead of going around it; to look through the wrong end of a rifle, a loaded rifle! -- people never tired of these absurdities because for millennia humans have traversed all the wrong roads, because for millennia all their seeking and questioning have landed them in a cul-de-sac. The master of ineptitude has all time as his domain. He surrenders only in the face of eternity."

Of course I'm not the only one to notice the disastrous results of human error, be it the sinking of the Titanic or our nation's certitude as to the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. In many fields, especially those that involve human life, the study of risk assessment and human error is serious business — and often the findings are quite frightening.

Now there comes along a new book on the subject, and one I highly recommend for its research and readability, Joseph T. Hallinan's Why We Make Mistakes. (The image you see above is a joke wraparound cover and flaps, not a result of my crooked scanning.)

Subtitled How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average, the book offers both clear analysis and great entertainment. And in most cases, the connections to comedy pretty much jump out at you. A few choice tidbits:

• In an experiment designed to test our ability to recognize change, two researches from Cornell University concocted a scene that could have been right out of a Marx Brothers movie. One of their actors would stop a stranger on the street to ask directions, but in the middle of the conversation two other actors would abruptly walk right between them carrying a door. But the catch was that while passing through, the actor asking directions would use the cover of the door to quickly change places with another actor, who seamlessly continued the conversation with the stranger. In the majority of cases, the stranger did not even notice the change! However, when the experiment was described to a college class and the students were asked to predict whether or not they would have noticed such a switcheroo, 100% were quite sure they would have.

• Overconfidence is indeed one of Hallinan's main themes and, as they teach you in clown school, pride goeth before the fall. Overconfidence makes us buy gym memberships or time shares we'll never fully use, and think we can accomplish complex tasks without following instructions (what he dubs the "bushwhack" approach). It seems to be part of human nature to want to feel on top of things, what Hallinan calls the "illusion of control." In one experiment, subjects guessed the outcome of a series of coin tosses. Students who were told that their first guesses were all correct (they didn't actually see the coin close-up) became convinced that they would be able to continue to predict the outcome well above half the time, and that they would even get better with practice. And who were these overconfident and, dare I say, foolish subjects? Students from a certain ivy league college in New Haven. The same researcher did an experiment in which the subjects bet on the outcome of a simple card game in which whoever drew the high card won. Though the chances on any draw were obviously 50-50, what happened was that when playing against "a guy dressed as a schlub," the subjects bet more than they did when betting against a nattily dressed opponent. Yes, these were Yale University students.

You probably won't be surprised to read that all kinds of tests have shown that men on average are far more overconfident than women and that they (conveniently) forget their mistakes a lot quicker. In the chapter "Men Shoot First," Hallinan gives example after example of this tendency, from men being more likely to kill their fellow soldier ("friendly fire") while in combat, to men overestimating their own IQ scores. Tragically, when it comes to driving a car, men wear seat belts with less frequency than women but are three times more likely to be involved in a fatal accident.

It's not much of a leap to connect this arrogant overconfidence to today's talking heads who assure us that climate change is nothing to get so worried about, that they've got everything under control. Obviously a lot of this drivel comes from those getting rich from oil production, but there are millions of others with nothing to gain — and, like all of us, everything to lose — who are blinded by overconfidence into assuming that somehow it will all work out, but with no evidence to back that up. Somewhere Henry Miller is chuckling.

I haven't seen it yet, but you might want to check out the new movie, The Age of Stupid, in which a man living alone in 2055 in a world devastated by climate change examines old footage from 2008 and tries to figure out how we could have been so stupid. Here's the trailer:




I guess the good news is that clowns know what they're talking about. The bad news is that what we're talking about is pretty scary.

Zen & the Heart of Physical Comedy (Yale Theater, 1987)

[post 001]

This article with the overly-cute title, which I wrote for Yale's Theater magazine some 22 years ago at the behest of editor Joel Schechter, is still the best intro to where I'm coming from on the subject of physical comedy. This was about 11 years after I wrote Clowns, but this time around I had more fun with the writing and tried to make a wider range of connections between performance and the so-called real world. I still like the article, and I welcome your feedback on it.

[A Note on Using Scribd: think of Scribd as just another (free) file sharing service, the YouTube of text documents. I upload my .pdf to Scribd.com and then embed the code in my blog. You the reader can view it in the blog or download it and print it out. To download, click on More and then on Save Document. To view it at full-page rez within the blog, click on the icon on the far right; click there again to return to the blog. And if you open it in Scribd, there are even more options.]