Name speaks for itself: These are topics I hear people talk about all the time or have actually consumed people's lives or, sadly, are television channels and I do not understand why anyone talks about these topics at all. Please comment. :-)
Part IV - "Two...billion dollars...mwahahahahaha...oh, Mini Me stop running for presidential office..."
One billion dollars; that is what the Obama Campaign is expecting to amass in 2012 in the reelection campaign. Just to make sure "that guy" does not win again, Republicans are expected to suck up just as much if not more and spend like the world really is coming to an end. Oh yeah, because that is going to make American politics better. 'Hey everyone, how about we just add to the deficit we all keep claiming we are going to cut? That plan has totally paid off in the past.' For anyone wondering, yeah, I am rolling my eyes.
For anyone who actually bought the Tim DeLay argument that people spend more on potato chips then on politics, and so we should spend more money on politics because how can the American political system lose to crunchy potatoes, I have two things to say to you, and no neither will reference his moral character. First of all, considering the power of advertisements, the universal place of potato chips in the American diet and as a pretty universal snack, and the sheer quantity of anything Americans eat in our collective society diet that could be described as 'heart attack fast track', why is it surprising to you that we spend three billion dollars on potato chips? That is like someone asking me why we expect the sun to come up every day. I am amazed it was only three billion. I would have said five billion, considering McDonald's is at $8.64 billion per year. Second, on average every single night there are 60 million people in this country who have no home...and the money that could house all of them five times over you want to spend on TV ads and mobile advertisements for a group of people who do not understand the issues, do not care about these people and will do absolutely nothing to make the overall quality of life in this country...oh that is right, Americans do not care about human beings. Sorry, I forgot there for a second that anyone who thinks this is a good idea is a soul sucking demon. Silly me...
Now I could have put anything there for my second point. There is so much good we could do in this country with two billion dollars, perhaps starting with repaying all the people who lost money to the fraud they experienced thanks to the banks during the last recession. Or even better, why not use that money to actually do what you should have done, that being sue and finally hold these banks responsible? Maybe you could invest it in low-income housing options which have not had a rise in overall funding in nearly thirty years. Maybe you could fix the welfare system you hog tied, stabbed and left for dead on the side of the road back in 1996. Or here is a really intelligent idea: why not invest in the new sovereignty of Tunisia, Egypt and Southern Sudan and all the other countries that will soon be free in spite of American and European involvement. That would at least start to serve as an apology for our part in keeping their people oppressed for decades.
You all do realize that most of the "Founding Fathers" found the whole idea of campaigning to be beneath them and most of them openly deplored it right? George Washington even stated bluntly that the moment any American split the country along party lines was the moment the system would begin to fail...oops, guess we did not read that line carefully enough. Hey Glenn, are you going to talk about that with the green chalk or the red chalk...wait, he is not going to mention it because it is honest and sensible and completely reflecting of the uselessness in the American political system...oh, right, thanks for reminding me. Gee, I just cannot seem to remember that all these people are so dumb it is comical.
Not much more to say on this issue really. I could comment on how disgusting it is that America is gearing up to spend 2% of the net amount of money spent by the entire world on development and aid, 2.5% of all our education spending, ten times what our entire welfare system spends in a year, and so much, much more, all for the purpose of showing two guys (and yeah ladies it will be two guys...this is America after all) whoring themselves out for no real purpose. I think South Park perfectly said it that the elections will be between a giant douche and a turd sandwich. Maybe I would pay ten bucks for a Pay-Per-View fight session for that, but not two billion dollars. To call that blatantly insane and ridiculous is the understatement of all understatements. But do not worry violent murders...I mean Army Officials, your budget will still remain at around $200 billion. I mean we only have enough of a nuclear arsenal to kill the world twenty times over; why not spend more money on you all?
To say I just do not get it is an understatement. I have actually hurt my brain thinking about this. So thank you America. As usual, thank you so very, very much.
We are Socrates' Corner...and we just do not get it.
18 February 2011
13 February 2011
Things I Do Not Understand, Part III
Name speaks for itself: These are topics I hear people talk about all the time or have actually consumed people's lives or, sadly, are television channels and I do not understand why anyone talks about these topics at all. Please comment. :-)
Part III - Lights! Camera! Action? - The End of Character Development in Cinema
I am very glad I took the time to see The King's Speech. Why you ask? Well, because I was reminded that movies can still have a tone and character development, and I cannot remember the last movie I saw that I gave a ten out of ten in both those categories. Some movies like Inception and Black Swan certainly came close, but for these stories that have something meaningful to say and a message to speak to, there are at least twenty seven other movies that make me want to excrete from every orifice, and I think I am being generous saying it is nine out of every ten. Now I will not go into specifics about movies that use characters just to display the power of computer animation, cough, Star Wars II, or movies that exploit the wonders of dimensional representation to woo the audience into a sense of shock and awe for no reason other than to make a trillion dollars, cough, Avatar, or movies that I am not really even sure what the plot or the point was at all and still am confused as to what on earth I was supposed to take away from even ten seconds of said movies, cough, Transformers, but I will say this much on the subject of character development: $5,204,677,624 later, I highly doubt George Lucas or James Cameron care about character development.
Now what exactly is character development? Considering everything that has been made by cinema artists over the past six decades I think we need to seriously consider this question, and find an absolute definition. Now from what I know, my definition is Citizen Kane, and the sheer perfection that was the development of Charles Foster Kane. We see Kane grow, question, feel, create, inspire, form friendships, fall in love, and then as time progresses lose faith, hate, destroy, depress and eventually lose himself in the sheer madness he created, longing for a time when all he had was his heart and dreams. For anyone who just went, 'Wait, that sounds like something a real human being goes through. Is it possible that a movie can actually show me something about what it means to be human, or have characters that feel real?' the answer is yes, but highly unlikely.
Now I am not saying this is the solution to make every movie in the world better, so if you do not make four trillion dollars taking my advice do not think it was because I am saying character development is the greatest thing about a movie. It is definitely important if you intend to create something worth watching, but the type of development and the amount of development vary from story to story. To completely address the issue in this discussion, it is necessary to look at times character development actually did the opposite of help the story, before I can make my statement on what I think character development can do for a story. The two most prominent examples I can think of are Troy and Minority Report.
Now just to set the record straight that I can objectively analyze these movies, on a scale from one to ten, one being so awful the movie made Barber Shop II look like a masterpiece, ten being a movie that we should put in place at the nuclear fallout shelter because it is that important to preserve for posterity, I would give Troy a 5.5, and Minority Report a 6.5, and if I must round Troy gets a 5 and Minority Report gets a 6. Now that you know I genuinely do not think these were the worst movies ever made, I would like to talk about and analyze each one individually as to why character development was not particularly helpful in them, at least the development done in these particular movies, to make my point clear that I do not want every movie to follow a single straight line of development. To qualify my argument though, every movie should have some form of character basis because of what it can provide to a story, when done correctly.
Troy attempted to tell the story of the great epic poem The Iliad in a "modern" fashion. Now I am not in agreement with Roger Ebert that it was not the best movie ever because it "removed the place of the gods in the story" because frankly I did not want to go and see a spaghetti monster-based movie anyway. Honestly, it was the solely human element, as portrayed by Eric Bana, Brian Cox and John Shrapnel, that convinced me to stay and watch the whole thing. These three were magnificent, and their roles truly carry the movie and make me finally have a human connection to Hector, a character I have wanted to like ever since I first read The Iliad but never really could till now. I thought every ounce of their development and participation gave the movie its structure, and in that sense it was very good.
I will admit that while I know I am supposed to appreciate Hector and Agamemnon in The Iliad, I cannot help but feel they are not real people. Odysseus, Achilles and Diomedes all certainly feel real in the story, if only because they are all driven by very human emotions and positions, and I understand them very well. Hector and Agamemnon at times are great models of lordship, then cowardly, then hot-headed, then dead on the inside, then mischievous, then god-fearing, then god-hating; if I do have one critique of The Iliad it is that I am not sure I know Hector as a person. I can guess that everyone had the absolute required amount of respect for Agamemnon and little more which tells me a lot about who he is. The subject of Hector though is not so clear.
I know he wants to protect Troy, but in all honesty his motivation seems to come from ten billion sources all at once, and seemingly not at all in other scenarios. I know, and I think Homer knew too, that while Hector is a guy we all probably would love to have a drink or two with and could form a great liking towards, the story has to have Hector, in some sense at specific times, be the antagonist and I am not sure the whole 'anti-hero' genre had been invented yet. I think the character was always told tongue-in-cheek, with reverence but only feigned, and only because he was second to Achilles. I think it may have been similar to how sports fans despise their rival teams and do not like the opposing players, but still respect the captain or the lead player if only because of their extraordinary talent. While I have always seen this in Hector, I am not a man of the sword, so it was hard for me to be convinced to want to like Hector, since his only redeeming quality in the whole of the epic poem is his battle prowess. He does not get the honor monologue Achilles does, at least while alive, he does not appear to have Odysseus's tactical analysis, and he seems unable to fully commit to a course of action and possess stubborn strength of will like Diomedes can. He seems to have to try and play all these roles, and his failure may be associated with how he was unable to be everything, if only serving as a contrast role to the Achaean kings, which unfairly cast him as the known failure in this already played out battle.
One way or another, Eric Bana's Hector felt real. He felt like a real family man, a real prince who cared more about his city than just how awesome it will be one day when he is king. Eric Bana's Hector seemed a man who had a reason for everything he did, who actually would stand up for Paris and other Trojans just for the sake of brotherhood, and was the match of all the Achaean kings, truly, save for Achilles who beat him only in battle prowess. In fact, I would say that in Troy, Hector is the most enjoyable and likable character of all, and one of the few I genuinely related to.
I could not really relate to Odysseus, the man I usually relate to, because he did nothing in the film but scream about getting the men back into line, which is not really battle strategy so much as it is common sense. I did not want to relate to Achilles, part the Brad Pitt portrayal, part the fact that now Achilles apparently is a pissed off 0.87 ERA pitcher who shows up for the big games but sits out when his contract displeases him if he can. Gee, thank you ever so much for turning possibly the most memorable character of all literature into Daisuke Matsuzaka. None of the personal honor and self-dignity that Achilles represents in The Iliad was carried over, and frankly I was unsure who exactly this character was. He certainly was not the Achilles I have read about. Even the most ignominious portrayals of Achilles never had him being a spoiled brat. At one point I was worried he was going to cry because his sippy cup did not work anymore. Agamemnon finally is a believable prick, but that does not make me want to relate to him, nor to Menelaus who now is everything we wanted him to be in The Iliad but never got, that being a total simpleton. Nestor was incredible and I praise Sir Shrapnel for his performance, and even Paris got a little bit of a face lift, now at least being believable as a possible choice to run away and elope with. I like this Paris a lot better than The Iliad Paris who I just wanted to punch in the face the whole story. Even Helen is finally a believable character; honestly who could believe a woman like that would pick a guy like the Menelaus in the movie? I think I applauded her for leaving, not to mention this Helen actually appears to have a human soul, which was starkly missing from the original Helen.
If getting rid of the spaghetti monster family was the price to finally give some of these characters a human element, I think it was a price well paid, and considering the three hundred fifty million dollars made off of the telling I think the film makers agree. However, the very act of making some of these characters human and into what they were in the movie is exactly did the movie in, at least for me.
The problem with a story like The Iliad is that it is three thousand years old. The screenwriters and directors took a huge risk recasting characters older than Western Civilization, characters so well known and loved that quite a few of them form the very basis for the archetypes to some of our most common stories, to parts of our collective subconscious as a people. Honestly, if Beowulf is not Achilles from Denmark I do not know what he is. Tampering with characters that are so deeply embedded in our collective subconscious was a risky move, but at least monetarily it paid off. In terms of our collective reception of said characters, the payoff was not so notable.
If you take a look at Star Trek, Abrams and staff knew they could not mess around with characters beloved for only about thirty years. Three thousand years...you better have your story straight. Change every now and again is okay, but to radically alter the characters of a story well set in a society and a cultural subconscious is a big risk. You could try the route where there is some moral message in the story and where characters make for a moral/ethical archetype and developed more in that way, but Euripides already did that, even going so far as to make a play solely based on Helen, not to mention all his other works in the comprehensive eight volume set, almost all of which have something to do with these legendary characters. There really was not much left to do in terms of developing the actual characters from The Iliad itself, so the effort was a risk, and while I am undecided on whether or not the characters are better or worse, the effort itself was not a totally misbegotten one.
Again, I do feel Hector and Helen and Agamemnon more, but that still does not mean I am going to unwaveringly be in agreement with the change. All in all, I was okay with the part of Helen and Agamemnon in The Iliad, if only because I know how their stories end and because worse comes to worse the gods play such a central role in The Iliad that part of the story's point is that 'Ruin will always outrun you.'; their parts are just a piece to a bigger whole anyway, and even amid the Greek ranks they are severely outclassed and entirely eclipsed.
The problem I always had with Hector and Paris is that they are the story of Troy, the entire story, and literally all the feelings we have for the city and the people are transmitted through them. In terms of the Trojans, no subplot or other character can eclipse them, and they are the story of Troy itself as told by Homer. I want to like them because I want an association with Troy, but up till this point Troy is just that thing to conquer; Troy is the "stubborn" girl in Booty Call. It is okay if we do not feel like we can relate to the Trojans, because we are not supposed to anyway. I realize Homer's audience probably did not at any point care about not giving fair development to the Trojans and what it meant to be Trojan. The story of Troy matters to me and I want to see a people who are more than just "not Greeks" or "those people who live over there and are us but with different jerseys", but I have a feeling eighth century Greeks did not. If the story was as simple as the difference between Mets and Yankees, I doubt it would have the significance and cultural impact to survive for three thousand years, so I am aware there is something else here. The problem is there has been three millennia of collective memory and history between me and Homer's Trojans, and that is a lot to overcome. Having Paris and Hector as human characters aids me, if only slightly, in bridging that gap.
Despite the improvement to these two characters, the story suddenly stops making sense in spite of the better character portrayal. The whole point of The Iliad, or so I thought, was that Achilles, the greatest of all among his peers and Man in general, submerged the impenetrable city of Troy in sheer chaos and fear of all that he is, and in his wrath scarred humanity's collective subconscious to remember him forever. At least that is what the opening of the epic poem says anyway. That certainly was not the case in Troy. I think if I was alive in the Bronze Age after Troy, I would remember Achilles more as a pissed off recluse than I would a great and memorable comrade in arms, if not ask him what size panties he wears and why there is a knot in them. Now, due to this character flaw, I am not really sure what the point of the story is because we are not left with that image of greatness and glory, and the one we are left with is confusing.
Sure Agamemnon dies, which I think is a positive change to the story, and Paris and Helen escape, which I accept considering the rest of the plot development, so I guess maybe the point of the story could have been 'Karma is watching.' but that is not anything even remotely entertaining. Aside from uninteresting, the ending was exceptionally anticlimactic; the greatest war in the history of the ancient world, and the ending is Brad Pitt slumping over his own body after Orlando Bloom shots him with arrows only to run away with Rose Byrne after Pitt extols out some love line he stole from a reject Hallmark Card. Gee, thanks for wasting two and a half hours of my life. The character development was such a risk and so central that frankly I would give it an eight/nine out of ten if only because I finally got to feel for Troy and the Trojans, but the plot update apparently was as cliched as one could possibly get and I would not even give it a three.
If you are going to make us feel for a people, make the final scene a shot of sympathy for those people, not for the person the original story says the story should be about, especially after you notably changed his character and role. Having Troy literally burned to the ground and its populace slaughtered in up-close and personal shots could have made us sympathetic to the Trojans, and could have made for a very strong anti-military statement that would have made sense to the story that had been developed over the past two hours and fifteen minutes, and this ending would have preserved the development and convinced me I was watching an actual scene. With this ending, I am not sure who I am supposed to feel for and at no point did I feel like this was plausible.
I guess if you do know literature and you noticed one of the last scenes where Aeneas escapes to begin the tale of The Aeneid you perhaps got the sense that Troy will one day have its vengeance, so again the 'Karma is watching.' plot, but this plot is still so anticlimactic and boring, and in comparison to the greatest war in antiquity, intermingled with a colorful (in framing, picture quality and general overall script and characters) and a visually impressive story, that plot device is so dull, cliched and unimaginative it makes me wish that some sacrifice would have been made on the part of the character development if it would have meant that the plot could also have developed towards a point that made sense.
With the ending we are given, we feel some form of pity, I think, for Achilles but certainly not pride that we heard his tale. Achilles is not a sympathetic character, and the message of 'Ruin is outstripping men.' is best portrayed by Hector and Agamemnon, not by Achilles. Having Paris kill him and then escape ruins a part of the majesty of his life and death. Now I am not saying you had to do it exactly as The Iliad did, but if you are going to change the story, make sure your changes make sense. The changes made to the characters make sense because now they feel real; so why did you not base the plot on the new characters? If you are going to change the central focus of the story so much that even the gods are removed from the story, since in The Iliad the gods play easily a fourth of all the action, what is stopping you from changing the plot devices too?
This is where Troy did not measure up, and the first big example of where character development fails at times: recasting roles in well known stories. Sure sometimes it works with the "Make It Dark" theory, but that cannot work everywhere. The problem lies with the very simple reality that changing the characters would by no doubt change the outcome and circumstances. If you switch up Peter Parker and Bruce Wayne everything is going to start changing. If many plot elements change alongside the character changes to make a more unique, interesting story the alterations can be quite entertaining and a new universe for these characters is created. However, if you keep the title the same and bank pretty heavily on nostalgia and cultural osmosis for word to spread about your story, then you cannot change the major story elements, which means you have to try and make them fit your new story structure and characters, and that is very difficult to do, and can rather easily affect the reception of your story. I cannot think of any story off the top of my head that has pulled this scenario off.
The story would have made a lot more sense if one of two things had happened: keep The Iliad script almost untouched and develop the characters in some slight ways to make them feel more real and have them engage in more personal dialogue to keep us interested, but otherwise leave them alone; or change the characters to represent the 'vir communis' archetype, some being the average people, the leaders being exceptional in one or more categories, but concentrate on the development of the two main characters as they are basically superhuman, have them represent the full extent of what their culture emphasizes, and then let that story ultimately play towards one of the characters, and by the end one of their respective places is most highlighted. This latter part is what was done, or at least attempted, but the problem is that we do not think of Achilles and Hector in the same light. You either have to make Hector an exceptional character, which considering the whole dying thing is notably difficult, or you have to make Achilles tragic, which is what they did.
The problem is that the character Achilles, in this story and every story I have ever read, is not written, portrayed, incarnated or comparable to a tragic character. Making the whole tale into one great epic tragedy is what Shakespeare would have done; trouble is, Romeo and Juliet are both tragic characters. It is not called tragic poetry, it is called epic poetry. This story is about a creature that is not human, someone we will find very difficult to pity. The only notable tragedy for Achilles is that he could not kill more Trojans when he had the chance. Either the call to remember the greatness of Achilles, or an ode to the bravery and sacrifice of Hector should have been the ultimate theme of this story, not an attempt to have a 'tear jerker' ending and feel universal pity. Again, that just makes no sense at all and can be beyond confusing to downright contradictory.
All in all the movie was good in the sense that development happened for some characters to make them more human, but where the development failed horribly is that it occurred in a static and cliched universe that was not apt to accept the altering characteristics of these new characters. The tragedy of Troy was that so much was dedicated to making this into a perfect character representation story that everything else was left in the recycling bin...to very little avail of critics I might add.
The second big example of problems that can occur with character development occurs in what I like to call "Repetitious Role Reconsideration". This usually occurs in the "film noir" movies where there are so many twists and turns you may not even be aware of what is up and what is down by the end, with a cast of characters who seemingly are all against each other, and a world portrayed against a background that is either inherently evil or forthrightly totalitarian. Again, there is no such thing as an open and shut case and this is not a unique moment in history. In stories like The Wicker Man and Sin City, both the graphic novel and the movie, this story type and character development work together quite well, because the characters are so gritty and human that their flaws and inconsistencies are who they are, the scenarios are so fast-paced and fantastical it is hard to imagine how anyone would act, and the architects of these worlds are something we already know: everyone in the world has met a corrupt politician or that rich aristocrat who is unbearably self righteous and overbearing, and people who in general abuse their power. Also noteworthy are the characters in general, such as Dwight, Summerisle and Hartigan, if only because they are interesting and I can associate with their emotional state every once in a while and they have genuine human interests that intrigue me, not to mention Bruce Willis, Christopher Lee and Clive Owen make for exceptional actors to begin with. Even Gail came to life with the work of Rosario Dawson.
These characters and their development in the story work, even in fantastical circumstances, because I know from the start who is on whose side and who is doing what and I see as these alliances and scenarios play out in an interesting way that is not confusing or dull. The characters themselves might tend towards the one dimensional or pseudo two dimensional, but since the plots move so fast this is okay because it works with the tone of the movie. Sure the plot twists and turns, but no one is ever really out of character, and if there are any inconsistencies they tend to add to the intrigue of the story and not confuse the audience, if only because we expect these actions from the character because we see them as that "unstable element". The fourth time Marv is talking to himself and wondering if not taking his medicine is getting to him, we have long accepted this is the type of dialogue he engages in every now and again, and now it is expected and topical to the point where it teaches us about Marv and allows us, the audience, to connect with him, if only because we see that this really is Marv. This is not always the case, notably in the movie Minority Report.
Now the actual story of Minority Report is part of the collective works of Phillip K. Dick, one of the great science fiction authors of the mid-twentieth century. Yes, I do personally like the stories Dr. Dick wrote and I think he is a very talented writer, so no, I was not overly impressed with the attempt to almost completely rewrite his story. However, with a six out of ten rating I do admit I at least was intrigued by the movie if only because of the story development and the tone that kept me interested the entire movie. I also must praise the exceptional performances by Max von Sydow and Samantha Morton, and I guess what you have to call the cameo by Lois Smith who did a fine job as Hineman, and it was not her fault that her character basically made no sense at all. So yes I thought that, overall, the movie was more than entertaining, and I am able to go along with noting that a movie whose life blood is strange and unexpected twists might just have an ending that will not totally overlap with the overall tone, if only because the tone has been taken from so many strange occurrences anyway that complete overlap would be difficult on any level. No, the ending did not particularly bother me, and no I am not going to critique it here because unlike all the people who said "This is just another stupid 'good guy beats bad guy' ending that did not fit the movie tone." I would like to remind you that in no reality I can think of would I be happy that a whole generation of murderers were put back on the street in mass droves. Next time, do that little thing called thinking before you open your mouth.
So overall the story is that John Anderton, portrayed in the movie by Tom Cruise, gets accused of a crime that will happen in the future, and was predicted to happen by the precognitives, a group of individuals who have the unique talent to gaze into the future and foretell of upcoming crimes with a relatively high rate of predictability. As a society, the world came to recognize these talents as incredible sources for domestic tranquility and created a correctional department known as PreCrime, a police organization that arrests people based on crimes they are going to commit in some future time line as predicted by the precognitives, a policy accepted as plausible if only to stop the crimes from ever happening. Yes, the whole free will versus determinism debate was utilized, but I do not care so do not comment or ask.
The drama occurs as Anderton, the Chief of Police for PreCrime, tries to outrun the system without fatally crippling it. In both stories, this action is even more highly charged as Daniel Witwer arrives to take Anderton's job, in the novel due to retirement, in the movie due to the Secretary of State's interference. While both stories have extensive distinctions between them, the overall point is that in the end Anderton does alter the system for the better, at least from the story perspective, and leaves the current culture behind for a new one he intends to live in with a sense that while the story is not over, Anderton has moved on and is personally fulfilled.
Now again, the movie made many, many additions to the original story, to the point where aside from borrowing a few names I am not really sure anyone can say that the two represent one story. However, both stories exclusively tend to the story of Anderton and chart his rise, fall and redemption. In this sense the character of Anderton needed to be developed, and so far as the movie goes he was to an extent. The problem in the movie and with this idea of "Repetitious Role Reconsideration" is that in veering so perpendicular to the original story the characters began to start acting in ways that the novel characters might have acted, given their specific environment, but did not act in ways a normal human being in the movie environment would act, that being our own time line that is supposed to represent our own future 2054 CE. No human being who lived through this past year of 2010 CE would act the way most of these characters act. And only moderately resembling the book, your characters and their motivations and personal development should not be taken right from the novel's pages.
This is different from the "set character model" I described because the flaw specifically is that characters act in ways they are at no point expected to, and do this multiple times in the movie literally as if out of nowhere, constantly reconsidering their role and their motivation to the point where we as an audience become confused as to who the character is. Even at the nadir of Brad Pitt's portrayal of Achilles, Achilles was not off making dough and herding goats, or sneaking up behind someone and stabbing them by surprise and ambush, or interested in much more than his own honor, or talking about a metaphysical paradox and what that philosophically means to him. Achilles was still doing things Achilles would do. At times Anderton and Burgess and Witwer and Hineman do things so out of character or just plain weird that you have to wonder if Steven Spielberg thought he was being bold, stylistic and edgy, or just ran out of ideas and glossed over every little notable twist in cinematic history to specific scenes and pointlessly shoehorned these twists in to prolong the story. The entire movie could have lasted fifty minutes and been just as exciting and intriguing, rather than extending the film for another hour with pointless role reversal development, stupid and pointless action movie fillers, and generally confusing characters that could have been exciting had I believed I was in the setting of the novel, but certainly not in my belief that this is my own time line future 2054 CE.
Now I will only briefly mention that many elements in the story did not make a lot of sense, such as Agatha suddenly having visions about her mother's murder almost a decade later, and now suddenly the premonitions are actually useful in unveiling the murderer, the need to kill a woman who is trying to have an adult released back into her custody since I am not even sure you can legally do that, the entire car factory scene, Hineman and Burgess and their entire role in the film, and the fact that everyone with any form of doctorate in this universe is either a reclusive Walden or a violent murderer, as in one guy drowned a woman and the other lit them on fire. Not going after a movie that does not have any angst at all against people with graduate degrees, I understand why these elements were in the movie, but I still cannot help but feel they were all used as little more than shameless placement to prolong the running time.
Basically I want to mention three scenes that I just cannot even wrap my brain around as to what was supposed to be going on and why the characters were so ridiculously reversed in such an amalgamation of so many cliches or archetypes that they stop making sense. The first is the entire dialogue scene with Hineman. First of all, why is Hineman a Walden reference? I realize so many things were thrown into this movie for no reason other than to extend the running time, but come on, a Walden reference? Be more cliched and dull, go ahead. It is always good to show contempt for your audience. So then after we assume she is a crazy recluse we apparently learn she genetically mutated a doll's eye vine to have not just a poisonous sting, but a fatal reaction along with it. Oh goodie, so now she is Walden, Doctor Mephesto and that guy from The Human Centipede. Yes, I really believe this character...you know Dr. Evil is a parody, right? After she cures Anderton with what seems like green tea, because that is a known antibiotic to anything apparently, she starts talking like Victor Frankenstein, literally stealing the line "science gone awry" about how she is not proud of her work as a scientist, extolling out some ridiculous ethics discussion even though she does not seem too disappointed at genetically altered monstrosities she created more or less just to torture people. Yeah, great moral character.
Then the revelation about the minority report is so casual and controlled that it makes it seem for a moment like she is the one who set Anderton up because she is pulling strings so far beyond the understanding of everyone else and because it makes it seem as though she expected him to come seek her out. You know, normally when I have a problem I do not go searching for the first scientist to be listed on the paper, not to mention the exceptional convenience he knows where she lives when apparently she does not associate with humanity anymore. Now we have Dr. No from the James Bond series. Man, this character just keeps getting better and better. At this point I can no longer believe anything Hineman says and anything she does I am going to assume that the only reasoning to it is her madness. Honestly if crazy scientist was what you were going for with this character, why does she similarly play the role of the "Call to Adventure"? Crazy scientist could have been covered with Solomon, since someone who lit people on fire could easily qualify for the Crazy AMF of the Month Award. Why did every scientist have to be sneaky, underhanded, confusing, disturbed, destructive and an overall villainous character? You know in normal reality that description usually is reserved for the villain in a Dudley Do-Right cartoon, not for real people.
While on the subject of scientists, I just would like to say that Hineman showed her mindset to be rather distinct from the scientific view before the movie even started with the design of the interface for the precognitives. The interface in the movie has all three reports seem more like one giant report, similar to three people writing for the same sample to hand in for a grade. The image comes across as one screen view and without any notable review from the computers. This interface was designed with the purposes of efficiency, basic function and marketability. Not to mention, a scientist would not use characteristics they expected to fail. Since we had to have a 'feminist moment' when Hineman says "The female." almost laughing to the inquiry as to which precognitive is the most effective, then we all must ask, why were any subjects that were male commissioned to be precognitives? Hineman says that there were hundreds of kids in the experiments at the Merriam Clinic and she says the phrase "boys and girls" when referencing the survivors. Am I really supposed to believe you could only generate one female from that pool? A scientist would not even test the system, if females really were singularly better at the foresight gift, unless three females were involved. No scientist would create a device just to get it to start working and figure out how to fix it later.
That is how engineers think, not scientists. Scientists try singularization in every experiment and function so as to first set a basis and then compare to universal samples, not throw everything together and hope to find a pattern by throwing paint at a wall and hoping some sticks. In the book the individual precognitives all gave their own report, the computer translated it and then the overwhelming story parameters were used. This fact also did not seem like uncommon knowledge. Anderton knew about it rather plainly, and even Kaplan seems to know of the existence of the process, which means he knows of the possible existence of minority reports, even if he does not make the association. Hineman gives too much assumption that reasonable doubt torpedoes an entire justice system, and thinks way too much like an engineer when designing the interface. That, or Burgess forced her to design the system to cover the minority report flaw. Again though, I must simply ask why reasonable doubt is such a nuclear missile to a justice system, because if it is we are apparently setting off one hundred nuclear missiles a day. We know she has some scientific sense of exploration as there is nothing marketable in a poisonous doll's eye. Also, I was confused when she said that both sexes had the dreams of future visions but apparently the system cannot work with the two boys because Agatha is "the key". Female anatomy reference aside, I do not think Agatha held their hands back when they were kids. They had their own visions. So really, they cannot work at all unless all three are together. If the males are that useless I again have to ask, why use them at all?
So yet again, Hineman switches back and forth between attitudes, ethics and actions and apparently general theory on scientific advance as it seems she thought more along the lines of get it to work in her early career and only now cares for a more lasting discovery and mechanistic control. Not like this change is any more nonsensical than all the other ones with it. So then she starts talking more and at the end of her dialogue she pulls a scene right from the original House of Wax and basically vomits on Vincent Price's grave and starts drawing Anderton in with the quiet voice ploy as she prepares to drink her tea, then kisses him in a scene that eerily resembles the scene in the Scarlett Letter. Okay, Spielberg, please throw more into this movie that is cliched or ripped from someone's cold deal fingers. "Who do you think I am?"...wow, good thing I did not have that copy of Dead Alive near me or anything to check to make sure you did not steal this monologue too. This whole scene was ripped from so many places and so many characters, forget not making sense, this was lazy and unimaginative. At least there was not Scooby Doo reference, so I guess I have something to be thankful for.If you honestly did not know you were utilizing cliches and played images, then that is even worse because then you admit to not understanding what the whole point of original story construction is and obviously could not see that trying to combine all these attitudes and sympathies was going to create an incredibly complex but ultimately boring character because I do not believe she exists. Hineman was way too complex, conflicted and contradictory to act as an ancillary character that has the answer to the riddle. Referencing The Count of Monte Cristo, please note the character of the Abbe Faria for what Hineman should be like, if she is in the movie at all. Specifically, to save you the trouble, she should be on the screen for more than three minutes and have a real impact and not be confusing.
Next, the car factory scene...oh good. I could literally go on for ten days about how stupid, pointless and utterly ridiculous this entire four minute sequence was. I have literally hurt my brain thinking about why this was even in the movie. Now the moment when Anderton wonders if Hineman might be able to help him and when his brand new car (product placement, woo!), which he technically stole as he certainly did not buy it, finally pulls up in front of a comical "Keep Out" sign posted on a ten foot wall (again, the little thing about overkill) that looks so old it witnessed the death of Queen Victoria, and he stumbles into her green house, ran for approximately twenty minutes. Did this filler really need to be twenty minutes? All that happens is that Anderton flies around on a jet pack for two minutes while punching Fletcher in the face and then the ever so "epic" man-to-man, "sine missione" combat scene with Colin Farrell intermingled with the conveyor belt scene, because the two "macho" characters have to apparently bare hand fight in this movie. Did that really need to be a tenth of the movie?
What irks me most about this scene is not the product placement and the exceptionally simplistic styling, but the fact that Witwer and Anderton are so very out of character it defies all sense to put this in the movie. In both the movie and the book, Witwer is described as an administrator, a writ, almost a clerk. So why apparently was he recently decommissioned from the CIA? In fact every police officer with an actual title, even Burgess, was just recently decommissioned from international sting operations, because that is how they enact their authority and how in shape they appear to be. Again, in the fantastic, para-military world of the novel this would have made sense and I guess if everyone was twenty five it would have made sense. Try and do anything the way they do in what we call reality, in our time line, forget the ACLU, you will have the Judicial and Commerce Guild bringing you to court. This entire justice process of PreCrime would last all of ten minutes in our current world, but the irritation does not end there.
We get a sense from the time line we know of Anderton and Witwer in the movie that they are approximately in their mid thirties, both have some family commitments, both have suffered a high degree of loss in their lives and personal failure in relationships, and both are experienced in their high administrative position. Just in case anyone is wondering, being an administrator in a bureaucratic, static environment does not encourage getting into fight scenes, and neither does strong family associations nor any of these two characters' main attributes and emotional context. I could understand if people loyal to Anderton fought people loyal to Witwer or I guess you could say loyal to the Federal Government in general. This would have added intrigue and interest to the movie and added filler that was not totally pointless and mind-numbing, not to mention would have been believable considering the general characters of Anderton and Witwer, both men who apparently have a highly critical and methodical approach to life and people around them who at least seem to be very loyal to them.
A fight between the two ideological factors we explore in this movie would have been exciting, but the two main characters slugging it out on a comical overhang in the car factory as the overhang is activated for some reason to move directly over the conveyor belt, and then both of them falling and then getting caught on the assembly line...yawn. What, was I supposed to find that interesting? If you get caught on a mechanical conveyor belt of that speed I have a feeling you would get torn to pieces long before you would ever think to react, not magically end up unharmed inside of the car and drive off to thankfully end the scene. You know the reason we find scenes like this interesting, aside from the fact that some of them actually are based in realistic scenarios, in titles like Die Another Day, Spartacus: Blood and Sand, or The Count of Monte Cristo is because the entire plot led up to these moments, the epic final showdown, and the action and general character development of the story revolved about these moments. You cannot have that scene less than fifty minutes into the movie. If Spartacus and Crixius did not have their epic final showdown I would have been confused and dismayed, but here is the point: it was the last episode and neither one of them suddenly used the water tank as a weapon and tried to drown the other one. I was expecting the fight sequence, the choreography that was used, the scenery that was used, and the outcome to happen as it did because the development and characters measured up to this fight scene, and more importantly the five minutes they spend fighting is actually intriguing and attention grabbing. The fight brings an end to what was the rising action to give us the climax and then the ending in a proper way. The Anderton-Witwer fight was just a ploy to attract the fan boys.
Anderton and Witwer are more likely to call up a lawyer to resolve their conflict than beat each other senseless. Just because you can fall back on the "tough guy" image, why try and make me want to roll my eyes so hard I snap my visual nerve? The whole idea of trying to turn the two main characters into sock 'em, bop 'em robots for five minutes was a terrible and time wasting effort that made no sense at all and is going to be contradicted by the entire rest of the movie, considering after this the most violent aspect of either two is how they treat Wally with verbal abuse. Anderton even forgives a man when he believes wholeheartedly he raped and murdered his son. I do not think Serpico would have done that. The only notable thing that happened in the scene that did not make me want to excrete from every orifice was the fact that at no point did anyone say 'Time's up.' or 'Assemble this.' or any other lame action movie hero dialogue. Maybe that should have been the main characteristic of the actors during the hour of useless role reversal: they do not talk.
The final scene I want to discuss is the entire ending, which was so ridiculous in terms of role reversal that I think I assumed Steven Spielberg forgot which character was which. So the point in the end is that Anderton turns on the PreCrime system because he feels a moral obligation to and Burgess, even though he must be edging 75, just cannot let go of his investment and tries to murder everyone. First off having Burgess be the one who would do anything for the system makes no sense at all. Burgess was trying to save face with the whole minority report scandal. If I was an executive making millions of dollars I probably would try and play the publicity game too. Now we do not know exactly what Burgess does, but he started PreCrime, which I assume means he had substantial private interests in it. Losing PreCrime would be financially devastating for him. However, unless you are Victor von Doom, what you do in that situation, again assuming we really are just in our future 2054 CE, is file for bankruptcy or make an appeal in the business review boards, not go on a killing spree.
Anderton should have been the one defending PreCrime up until the bitter end. It is acknowledged that Anderton is the one with the emotional association, and Burgess's association is only political. No one goes to this level to save face. Hoover might have gone a little overboard with the FBI at times but he never took someone into the backyard and drowned them. Nothing of Burgess's character suggests him to even have any advantage in being a murder, other than that no one would ever expect that he is the most villainous of all. Once in a while the shot from left field is interesting, note the Sixth Sense, but other times it just ends up being boring and disappointing, cue The Village.
My point here is that Burgess should have been the Kaplan figure in the movie, the one who died to save PreCrime, not assassinate it. No one is that vain, megalomaniacal and egotistical that they cannot bear to see their life's work go on without them, especially after you killed three people to make it come to fruition and seemingly intended to kill another two after you put your best friend in prison for a life sentence, at least we assume. The only reason Burgess had to die is because he was created to allow Anderton becoming the sympathetic victim at the end of the movie when in the novel he played no such role at all. You had to create a demonic antagonist to make Anderton into this new Atticus Finch role. Why did the story have to be sympathetic to Anderton? What part of his character is particularly tragic? If anything he turned tragedy into moral qualification. Someone that dedicated to a single, absolutist approach of justice and order would do anything to preserve it. A seventy five year old man with arthritis is trying to get off his addiction to Advil. Really, this whole plot sequence is ridiculous and so filled with role reversal that the final moments are comical, not adventurous and intriguing. Anderton carted off at the end after killing Burgess, the last one who knew about the minority report, to preserve PreCrime and the hope no other person goes through what he went through would have been very intriguing and exciting. A seventy five year old man shooting himself in the stomach to give way to the "new" generation that will be "better"...oh, I get it, this is supposed to be topical. Are they going to find butterscotch candies in his pockets after they search the body?
My point is that Anderton, Burgess, Witwer and Hineman could have been very interesting characters, had I believed two of them existed, and believed the other two were conscious moral/ethical agents throughout the whole movie. I have to assume all of them did anything just to move the plot along, a plot which made no sense. There was no methodology or moral implication to any of their actions, even though they all represent different moral aspects of the free will versus determinism debate. They changed so constantly and without reason that it just became inane and intolerable by the one hundred twentieth minute to try and place them on any side or tally who was most adequately representing reality or the side of the debate I sympathize with, because none of them did they changed so much. All they were in the story could be described as puzzle pieces that are allowed to completely change their shape and connectivity after a certain time. Sure after half of the puzzle pieces erupt in flames the rest of the puzzle was pretty easy to put together, but the sheer madness in the alterations made the entire sequence just boring and so convoluted I was not sure if the characters had been developed at all because I was unsure I understood or knew them at all and left me confused, unimpressed and very critical.
Realizing I made an exhaustive analysis of the times character development fails, I do not need to be so long winded with the success. Again, the success and the failure in both of these films were mere steps away from each other. If Troy had kept the character development and just altered a plot device here and there I think it would have been astounding. Character development is only so powerful. Your characters still need to fit into their setting, structure and plot. If they do not, or change ten times in the movie, the aspects become confusing, convoluted and uninteresting in a universe that is too static or too dynamic. Granted, you do not hear me complain about movies like Disaster Movie or Scary Movie III, but that is because I get the point that all I am supposed to get from these movies is a loss of brain cell function. If you are just making something for the sake of making something to sell, that is fine. I am not saying it is good or bad, right or wrong, it just might be overly cliched and boring at times with moments of amusement here and there. However, these movies sell that point. I never saw a full blown summer blockbuster add for Scary Movie III. Even the trailer was a joke and very tongue-in-cheek. So when you spend more money on the trailer than I did on my teeth of the past two decades, with two dentist visits per year and braces and all the fun that went along with that, I am going to expect the movie is going to be good. Also of note, when you have real critics say your movie is good, and not just nameless people you paid to say something good, I expect the movie to be good, and rightly so.
Generally speaking the three things movies, and stories overall, need to be good all revolve around development. First story development, then character development, then plot/structural congruency. If you can combine these three elements together in some fashion, whether it be action, or romance, or comedy, or horror, with a story that starts and ends with the same tone, characters that seem to fit their universe, and overall plot and structural formation that seems like something other than what I could find a robot sentinel doing in The Matrix, you might just create a movie that is somewhat interesting and engaging. Otherwise you usually end up with a gaudy, unrealistic mess that looks like something a fifth grader would write, a script that is rushed and not thought out and characters I do not want to relate to or understand, and whom I genuinely despise.
For any director who really thinks that it does not matter whether or not your audience makes a connection to the characters, ask every kid who was twelve in 2001 if they had nightmares about Hannibal Lector because they watched Hannibal ten times more or less just to see Hopkin's character. Sometimes a character can haunt you, engage you, intrigue you, and become a real part of your collective subconscious. There are just too many to name. I could go on for two weeks about how so many movies fail to live up to character development, and I needed only one example of how it can be so essential, endearing and enduring that a character will stay in our collective subconscious forever. For anyone keeping count, Character Development 1: Stupid Computer Animation Crap -14.
If all you intend to do is make garbage to sell DVDs in six months that is fine, just do not act like it was made for anything other than the receptacle. If you want to make a real "blockbuster" style film, get your story straight, make you characters real and have a plot that is intriguing and interesting. Otherwise, stop with the false advertisements already. Aside from this, I am completely baffled as to why you would want your commercial diarrhea held up to the light of real art. At this point I have to assume James Cameron is an idiot, because he knew almost immediately someone was going to say his movie was Dances With Wolves with blue coloring and realize pretty quickly that Dances With Wolves was fifty billion times better. Yet again, I am left to say...
...I just do not get it.
Part III - Lights! Camera! Action? - The End of Character Development in Cinema
I am very glad I took the time to see The King's Speech. Why you ask? Well, because I was reminded that movies can still have a tone and character development, and I cannot remember the last movie I saw that I gave a ten out of ten in both those categories. Some movies like Inception and Black Swan certainly came close, but for these stories that have something meaningful to say and a message to speak to, there are at least twenty seven other movies that make me want to excrete from every orifice, and I think I am being generous saying it is nine out of every ten. Now I will not go into specifics about movies that use characters just to display the power of computer animation, cough, Star Wars II, or movies that exploit the wonders of dimensional representation to woo the audience into a sense of shock and awe for no reason other than to make a trillion dollars, cough, Avatar, or movies that I am not really even sure what the plot or the point was at all and still am confused as to what on earth I was supposed to take away from even ten seconds of said movies, cough, Transformers, but I will say this much on the subject of character development: $5,204,677,624 later, I highly doubt George Lucas or James Cameron care about character development.
Now what exactly is character development? Considering everything that has been made by cinema artists over the past six decades I think we need to seriously consider this question, and find an absolute definition. Now from what I know, my definition is Citizen Kane, and the sheer perfection that was the development of Charles Foster Kane. We see Kane grow, question, feel, create, inspire, form friendships, fall in love, and then as time progresses lose faith, hate, destroy, depress and eventually lose himself in the sheer madness he created, longing for a time when all he had was his heart and dreams. For anyone who just went, 'Wait, that sounds like something a real human being goes through. Is it possible that a movie can actually show me something about what it means to be human, or have characters that feel real?' the answer is yes, but highly unlikely.
Now I am not saying this is the solution to make every movie in the world better, so if you do not make four trillion dollars taking my advice do not think it was because I am saying character development is the greatest thing about a movie. It is definitely important if you intend to create something worth watching, but the type of development and the amount of development vary from story to story. To completely address the issue in this discussion, it is necessary to look at times character development actually did the opposite of help the story, before I can make my statement on what I think character development can do for a story. The two most prominent examples I can think of are Troy and Minority Report.
Now just to set the record straight that I can objectively analyze these movies, on a scale from one to ten, one being so awful the movie made Barber Shop II look like a masterpiece, ten being a movie that we should put in place at the nuclear fallout shelter because it is that important to preserve for posterity, I would give Troy a 5.5, and Minority Report a 6.5, and if I must round Troy gets a 5 and Minority Report gets a 6. Now that you know I genuinely do not think these were the worst movies ever made, I would like to talk about and analyze each one individually as to why character development was not particularly helpful in them, at least the development done in these particular movies, to make my point clear that I do not want every movie to follow a single straight line of development. To qualify my argument though, every movie should have some form of character basis because of what it can provide to a story, when done correctly.
Troy attempted to tell the story of the great epic poem The Iliad in a "modern" fashion. Now I am not in agreement with Roger Ebert that it was not the best movie ever because it "removed the place of the gods in the story" because frankly I did not want to go and see a spaghetti monster-based movie anyway. Honestly, it was the solely human element, as portrayed by Eric Bana, Brian Cox and John Shrapnel, that convinced me to stay and watch the whole thing. These three were magnificent, and their roles truly carry the movie and make me finally have a human connection to Hector, a character I have wanted to like ever since I first read The Iliad but never really could till now. I thought every ounce of their development and participation gave the movie its structure, and in that sense it was very good.
I will admit that while I know I am supposed to appreciate Hector and Agamemnon in The Iliad, I cannot help but feel they are not real people. Odysseus, Achilles and Diomedes all certainly feel real in the story, if only because they are all driven by very human emotions and positions, and I understand them very well. Hector and Agamemnon at times are great models of lordship, then cowardly, then hot-headed, then dead on the inside, then mischievous, then god-fearing, then god-hating; if I do have one critique of The Iliad it is that I am not sure I know Hector as a person. I can guess that everyone had the absolute required amount of respect for Agamemnon and little more which tells me a lot about who he is. The subject of Hector though is not so clear.
I know he wants to protect Troy, but in all honesty his motivation seems to come from ten billion sources all at once, and seemingly not at all in other scenarios. I know, and I think Homer knew too, that while Hector is a guy we all probably would love to have a drink or two with and could form a great liking towards, the story has to have Hector, in some sense at specific times, be the antagonist and I am not sure the whole 'anti-hero' genre had been invented yet. I think the character was always told tongue-in-cheek, with reverence but only feigned, and only because he was second to Achilles. I think it may have been similar to how sports fans despise their rival teams and do not like the opposing players, but still respect the captain or the lead player if only because of their extraordinary talent. While I have always seen this in Hector, I am not a man of the sword, so it was hard for me to be convinced to want to like Hector, since his only redeeming quality in the whole of the epic poem is his battle prowess. He does not get the honor monologue Achilles does, at least while alive, he does not appear to have Odysseus's tactical analysis, and he seems unable to fully commit to a course of action and possess stubborn strength of will like Diomedes can. He seems to have to try and play all these roles, and his failure may be associated with how he was unable to be everything, if only serving as a contrast role to the Achaean kings, which unfairly cast him as the known failure in this already played out battle.
One way or another, Eric Bana's Hector felt real. He felt like a real family man, a real prince who cared more about his city than just how awesome it will be one day when he is king. Eric Bana's Hector seemed a man who had a reason for everything he did, who actually would stand up for Paris and other Trojans just for the sake of brotherhood, and was the match of all the Achaean kings, truly, save for Achilles who beat him only in battle prowess. In fact, I would say that in Troy, Hector is the most enjoyable and likable character of all, and one of the few I genuinely related to.
I could not really relate to Odysseus, the man I usually relate to, because he did nothing in the film but scream about getting the men back into line, which is not really battle strategy so much as it is common sense. I did not want to relate to Achilles, part the Brad Pitt portrayal, part the fact that now Achilles apparently is a pissed off 0.87 ERA pitcher who shows up for the big games but sits out when his contract displeases him if he can. Gee, thank you ever so much for turning possibly the most memorable character of all literature into Daisuke Matsuzaka. None of the personal honor and self-dignity that Achilles represents in The Iliad was carried over, and frankly I was unsure who exactly this character was. He certainly was not the Achilles I have read about. Even the most ignominious portrayals of Achilles never had him being a spoiled brat. At one point I was worried he was going to cry because his sippy cup did not work anymore. Agamemnon finally is a believable prick, but that does not make me want to relate to him, nor to Menelaus who now is everything we wanted him to be in The Iliad but never got, that being a total simpleton. Nestor was incredible and I praise Sir Shrapnel for his performance, and even Paris got a little bit of a face lift, now at least being believable as a possible choice to run away and elope with. I like this Paris a lot better than The Iliad Paris who I just wanted to punch in the face the whole story. Even Helen is finally a believable character; honestly who could believe a woman like that would pick a guy like the Menelaus in the movie? I think I applauded her for leaving, not to mention this Helen actually appears to have a human soul, which was starkly missing from the original Helen.
If getting rid of the spaghetti monster family was the price to finally give some of these characters a human element, I think it was a price well paid, and considering the three hundred fifty million dollars made off of the telling I think the film makers agree. However, the very act of making some of these characters human and into what they were in the movie is exactly did the movie in, at least for me.
The problem with a story like The Iliad is that it is three thousand years old. The screenwriters and directors took a huge risk recasting characters older than Western Civilization, characters so well known and loved that quite a few of them form the very basis for the archetypes to some of our most common stories, to parts of our collective subconscious as a people. Honestly, if Beowulf is not Achilles from Denmark I do not know what he is. Tampering with characters that are so deeply embedded in our collective subconscious was a risky move, but at least monetarily it paid off. In terms of our collective reception of said characters, the payoff was not so notable.
If you take a look at Star Trek, Abrams and staff knew they could not mess around with characters beloved for only about thirty years. Three thousand years...you better have your story straight. Change every now and again is okay, but to radically alter the characters of a story well set in a society and a cultural subconscious is a big risk. You could try the route where there is some moral message in the story and where characters make for a moral/ethical archetype and developed more in that way, but Euripides already did that, even going so far as to make a play solely based on Helen, not to mention all his other works in the comprehensive eight volume set, almost all of which have something to do with these legendary characters. There really was not much left to do in terms of developing the actual characters from The Iliad itself, so the effort was a risk, and while I am undecided on whether or not the characters are better or worse, the effort itself was not a totally misbegotten one.
Again, I do feel Hector and Helen and Agamemnon more, but that still does not mean I am going to unwaveringly be in agreement with the change. All in all, I was okay with the part of Helen and Agamemnon in The Iliad, if only because I know how their stories end and because worse comes to worse the gods play such a central role in The Iliad that part of the story's point is that 'Ruin will always outrun you.'; their parts are just a piece to a bigger whole anyway, and even amid the Greek ranks they are severely outclassed and entirely eclipsed.
The problem I always had with Hector and Paris is that they are the story of Troy, the entire story, and literally all the feelings we have for the city and the people are transmitted through them. In terms of the Trojans, no subplot or other character can eclipse them, and they are the story of Troy itself as told by Homer. I want to like them because I want an association with Troy, but up till this point Troy is just that thing to conquer; Troy is the "stubborn" girl in Booty Call. It is okay if we do not feel like we can relate to the Trojans, because we are not supposed to anyway. I realize Homer's audience probably did not at any point care about not giving fair development to the Trojans and what it meant to be Trojan. The story of Troy matters to me and I want to see a people who are more than just "not Greeks" or "those people who live over there and are us but with different jerseys", but I have a feeling eighth century Greeks did not. If the story was as simple as the difference between Mets and Yankees, I doubt it would have the significance and cultural impact to survive for three thousand years, so I am aware there is something else here. The problem is there has been three millennia of collective memory and history between me and Homer's Trojans, and that is a lot to overcome. Having Paris and Hector as human characters aids me, if only slightly, in bridging that gap.
Despite the improvement to these two characters, the story suddenly stops making sense in spite of the better character portrayal. The whole point of The Iliad, or so I thought, was that Achilles, the greatest of all among his peers and Man in general, submerged the impenetrable city of Troy in sheer chaos and fear of all that he is, and in his wrath scarred humanity's collective subconscious to remember him forever. At least that is what the opening of the epic poem says anyway. That certainly was not the case in Troy. I think if I was alive in the Bronze Age after Troy, I would remember Achilles more as a pissed off recluse than I would a great and memorable comrade in arms, if not ask him what size panties he wears and why there is a knot in them. Now, due to this character flaw, I am not really sure what the point of the story is because we are not left with that image of greatness and glory, and the one we are left with is confusing.
Sure Agamemnon dies, which I think is a positive change to the story, and Paris and Helen escape, which I accept considering the rest of the plot development, so I guess maybe the point of the story could have been 'Karma is watching.' but that is not anything even remotely entertaining. Aside from uninteresting, the ending was exceptionally anticlimactic; the greatest war in the history of the ancient world, and the ending is Brad Pitt slumping over his own body after Orlando Bloom shots him with arrows only to run away with Rose Byrne after Pitt extols out some love line he stole from a reject Hallmark Card. Gee, thanks for wasting two and a half hours of my life. The character development was such a risk and so central that frankly I would give it an eight/nine out of ten if only because I finally got to feel for Troy and the Trojans, but the plot update apparently was as cliched as one could possibly get and I would not even give it a three.
If you are going to make us feel for a people, make the final scene a shot of sympathy for those people, not for the person the original story says the story should be about, especially after you notably changed his character and role. Having Troy literally burned to the ground and its populace slaughtered in up-close and personal shots could have made us sympathetic to the Trojans, and could have made for a very strong anti-military statement that would have made sense to the story that had been developed over the past two hours and fifteen minutes, and this ending would have preserved the development and convinced me I was watching an actual scene. With this ending, I am not sure who I am supposed to feel for and at no point did I feel like this was plausible.
I guess if you do know literature and you noticed one of the last scenes where Aeneas escapes to begin the tale of The Aeneid you perhaps got the sense that Troy will one day have its vengeance, so again the 'Karma is watching.' plot, but this plot is still so anticlimactic and boring, and in comparison to the greatest war in antiquity, intermingled with a colorful (in framing, picture quality and general overall script and characters) and a visually impressive story, that plot device is so dull, cliched and unimaginative it makes me wish that some sacrifice would have been made on the part of the character development if it would have meant that the plot could also have developed towards a point that made sense.
With the ending we are given, we feel some form of pity, I think, for Achilles but certainly not pride that we heard his tale. Achilles is not a sympathetic character, and the message of 'Ruin is outstripping men.' is best portrayed by Hector and Agamemnon, not by Achilles. Having Paris kill him and then escape ruins a part of the majesty of his life and death. Now I am not saying you had to do it exactly as The Iliad did, but if you are going to change the story, make sure your changes make sense. The changes made to the characters make sense because now they feel real; so why did you not base the plot on the new characters? If you are going to change the central focus of the story so much that even the gods are removed from the story, since in The Iliad the gods play easily a fourth of all the action, what is stopping you from changing the plot devices too?
This is where Troy did not measure up, and the first big example of where character development fails at times: recasting roles in well known stories. Sure sometimes it works with the "Make It Dark" theory, but that cannot work everywhere. The problem lies with the very simple reality that changing the characters would by no doubt change the outcome and circumstances. If you switch up Peter Parker and Bruce Wayne everything is going to start changing. If many plot elements change alongside the character changes to make a more unique, interesting story the alterations can be quite entertaining and a new universe for these characters is created. However, if you keep the title the same and bank pretty heavily on nostalgia and cultural osmosis for word to spread about your story, then you cannot change the major story elements, which means you have to try and make them fit your new story structure and characters, and that is very difficult to do, and can rather easily affect the reception of your story. I cannot think of any story off the top of my head that has pulled this scenario off.
The story would have made a lot more sense if one of two things had happened: keep The Iliad script almost untouched and develop the characters in some slight ways to make them feel more real and have them engage in more personal dialogue to keep us interested, but otherwise leave them alone; or change the characters to represent the 'vir communis' archetype, some being the average people, the leaders being exceptional in one or more categories, but concentrate on the development of the two main characters as they are basically superhuman, have them represent the full extent of what their culture emphasizes, and then let that story ultimately play towards one of the characters, and by the end one of their respective places is most highlighted. This latter part is what was done, or at least attempted, but the problem is that we do not think of Achilles and Hector in the same light. You either have to make Hector an exceptional character, which considering the whole dying thing is notably difficult, or you have to make Achilles tragic, which is what they did.
The problem is that the character Achilles, in this story and every story I have ever read, is not written, portrayed, incarnated or comparable to a tragic character. Making the whole tale into one great epic tragedy is what Shakespeare would have done; trouble is, Romeo and Juliet are both tragic characters. It is not called tragic poetry, it is called epic poetry. This story is about a creature that is not human, someone we will find very difficult to pity. The only notable tragedy for Achilles is that he could not kill more Trojans when he had the chance. Either the call to remember the greatness of Achilles, or an ode to the bravery and sacrifice of Hector should have been the ultimate theme of this story, not an attempt to have a 'tear jerker' ending and feel universal pity. Again, that just makes no sense at all and can be beyond confusing to downright contradictory.
All in all the movie was good in the sense that development happened for some characters to make them more human, but where the development failed horribly is that it occurred in a static and cliched universe that was not apt to accept the altering characteristics of these new characters. The tragedy of Troy was that so much was dedicated to making this into a perfect character representation story that everything else was left in the recycling bin...to very little avail of critics I might add.
The second big example of problems that can occur with character development occurs in what I like to call "Repetitious Role Reconsideration". This usually occurs in the "film noir" movies where there are so many twists and turns you may not even be aware of what is up and what is down by the end, with a cast of characters who seemingly are all against each other, and a world portrayed against a background that is either inherently evil or forthrightly totalitarian. Again, there is no such thing as an open and shut case and this is not a unique moment in history. In stories like The Wicker Man and Sin City, both the graphic novel and the movie, this story type and character development work together quite well, because the characters are so gritty and human that their flaws and inconsistencies are who they are, the scenarios are so fast-paced and fantastical it is hard to imagine how anyone would act, and the architects of these worlds are something we already know: everyone in the world has met a corrupt politician or that rich aristocrat who is unbearably self righteous and overbearing, and people who in general abuse their power. Also noteworthy are the characters in general, such as Dwight, Summerisle and Hartigan, if only because they are interesting and I can associate with their emotional state every once in a while and they have genuine human interests that intrigue me, not to mention Bruce Willis, Christopher Lee and Clive Owen make for exceptional actors to begin with. Even Gail came to life with the work of Rosario Dawson.
These characters and their development in the story work, even in fantastical circumstances, because I know from the start who is on whose side and who is doing what and I see as these alliances and scenarios play out in an interesting way that is not confusing or dull. The characters themselves might tend towards the one dimensional or pseudo two dimensional, but since the plots move so fast this is okay because it works with the tone of the movie. Sure the plot twists and turns, but no one is ever really out of character, and if there are any inconsistencies they tend to add to the intrigue of the story and not confuse the audience, if only because we expect these actions from the character because we see them as that "unstable element". The fourth time Marv is talking to himself and wondering if not taking his medicine is getting to him, we have long accepted this is the type of dialogue he engages in every now and again, and now it is expected and topical to the point where it teaches us about Marv and allows us, the audience, to connect with him, if only because we see that this really is Marv. This is not always the case, notably in the movie Minority Report.
Now the actual story of Minority Report is part of the collective works of Phillip K. Dick, one of the great science fiction authors of the mid-twentieth century. Yes, I do personally like the stories Dr. Dick wrote and I think he is a very talented writer, so no, I was not overly impressed with the attempt to almost completely rewrite his story. However, with a six out of ten rating I do admit I at least was intrigued by the movie if only because of the story development and the tone that kept me interested the entire movie. I also must praise the exceptional performances by Max von Sydow and Samantha Morton, and I guess what you have to call the cameo by Lois Smith who did a fine job as Hineman, and it was not her fault that her character basically made no sense at all. So yes I thought that, overall, the movie was more than entertaining, and I am able to go along with noting that a movie whose life blood is strange and unexpected twists might just have an ending that will not totally overlap with the overall tone, if only because the tone has been taken from so many strange occurrences anyway that complete overlap would be difficult on any level. No, the ending did not particularly bother me, and no I am not going to critique it here because unlike all the people who said "This is just another stupid 'good guy beats bad guy' ending that did not fit the movie tone." I would like to remind you that in no reality I can think of would I be happy that a whole generation of murderers were put back on the street in mass droves. Next time, do that little thing called thinking before you open your mouth.
So overall the story is that John Anderton, portrayed in the movie by Tom Cruise, gets accused of a crime that will happen in the future, and was predicted to happen by the precognitives, a group of individuals who have the unique talent to gaze into the future and foretell of upcoming crimes with a relatively high rate of predictability. As a society, the world came to recognize these talents as incredible sources for domestic tranquility and created a correctional department known as PreCrime, a police organization that arrests people based on crimes they are going to commit in some future time line as predicted by the precognitives, a policy accepted as plausible if only to stop the crimes from ever happening. Yes, the whole free will versus determinism debate was utilized, but I do not care so do not comment or ask.
The drama occurs as Anderton, the Chief of Police for PreCrime, tries to outrun the system without fatally crippling it. In both stories, this action is even more highly charged as Daniel Witwer arrives to take Anderton's job, in the novel due to retirement, in the movie due to the Secretary of State's interference. While both stories have extensive distinctions between them, the overall point is that in the end Anderton does alter the system for the better, at least from the story perspective, and leaves the current culture behind for a new one he intends to live in with a sense that while the story is not over, Anderton has moved on and is personally fulfilled.
Now again, the movie made many, many additions to the original story, to the point where aside from borrowing a few names I am not really sure anyone can say that the two represent one story. However, both stories exclusively tend to the story of Anderton and chart his rise, fall and redemption. In this sense the character of Anderton needed to be developed, and so far as the movie goes he was to an extent. The problem in the movie and with this idea of "Repetitious Role Reconsideration" is that in veering so perpendicular to the original story the characters began to start acting in ways that the novel characters might have acted, given their specific environment, but did not act in ways a normal human being in the movie environment would act, that being our own time line that is supposed to represent our own future 2054 CE. No human being who lived through this past year of 2010 CE would act the way most of these characters act. And only moderately resembling the book, your characters and their motivations and personal development should not be taken right from the novel's pages.
This is different from the "set character model" I described because the flaw specifically is that characters act in ways they are at no point expected to, and do this multiple times in the movie literally as if out of nowhere, constantly reconsidering their role and their motivation to the point where we as an audience become confused as to who the character is. Even at the nadir of Brad Pitt's portrayal of Achilles, Achilles was not off making dough and herding goats, or sneaking up behind someone and stabbing them by surprise and ambush, or interested in much more than his own honor, or talking about a metaphysical paradox and what that philosophically means to him. Achilles was still doing things Achilles would do. At times Anderton and Burgess and Witwer and Hineman do things so out of character or just plain weird that you have to wonder if Steven Spielberg thought he was being bold, stylistic and edgy, or just ran out of ideas and glossed over every little notable twist in cinematic history to specific scenes and pointlessly shoehorned these twists in to prolong the story. The entire movie could have lasted fifty minutes and been just as exciting and intriguing, rather than extending the film for another hour with pointless role reversal development, stupid and pointless action movie fillers, and generally confusing characters that could have been exciting had I believed I was in the setting of the novel, but certainly not in my belief that this is my own time line future 2054 CE.
Now I will only briefly mention that many elements in the story did not make a lot of sense, such as Agatha suddenly having visions about her mother's murder almost a decade later, and now suddenly the premonitions are actually useful in unveiling the murderer, the need to kill a woman who is trying to have an adult released back into her custody since I am not even sure you can legally do that, the entire car factory scene, Hineman and Burgess and their entire role in the film, and the fact that everyone with any form of doctorate in this universe is either a reclusive Walden or a violent murderer, as in one guy drowned a woman and the other lit them on fire. Not going after a movie that does not have any angst at all against people with graduate degrees, I understand why these elements were in the movie, but I still cannot help but feel they were all used as little more than shameless placement to prolong the running time.
Basically I want to mention three scenes that I just cannot even wrap my brain around as to what was supposed to be going on and why the characters were so ridiculously reversed in such an amalgamation of so many cliches or archetypes that they stop making sense. The first is the entire dialogue scene with Hineman. First of all, why is Hineman a Walden reference? I realize so many things were thrown into this movie for no reason other than to extend the running time, but come on, a Walden reference? Be more cliched and dull, go ahead. It is always good to show contempt for your audience. So then after we assume she is a crazy recluse we apparently learn she genetically mutated a doll's eye vine to have not just a poisonous sting, but a fatal reaction along with it. Oh goodie, so now she is Walden, Doctor Mephesto and that guy from The Human Centipede. Yes, I really believe this character...you know Dr. Evil is a parody, right? After she cures Anderton with what seems like green tea, because that is a known antibiotic to anything apparently, she starts talking like Victor Frankenstein, literally stealing the line "science gone awry" about how she is not proud of her work as a scientist, extolling out some ridiculous ethics discussion even though she does not seem too disappointed at genetically altered monstrosities she created more or less just to torture people. Yeah, great moral character.
Then the revelation about the minority report is so casual and controlled that it makes it seem for a moment like she is the one who set Anderton up because she is pulling strings so far beyond the understanding of everyone else and because it makes it seem as though she expected him to come seek her out. You know, normally when I have a problem I do not go searching for the first scientist to be listed on the paper, not to mention the exceptional convenience he knows where she lives when apparently she does not associate with humanity anymore. Now we have Dr. No from the James Bond series. Man, this character just keeps getting better and better. At this point I can no longer believe anything Hineman says and anything she does I am going to assume that the only reasoning to it is her madness. Honestly if crazy scientist was what you were going for with this character, why does she similarly play the role of the "Call to Adventure"? Crazy scientist could have been covered with Solomon, since someone who lit people on fire could easily qualify for the Crazy AMF of the Month Award. Why did every scientist have to be sneaky, underhanded, confusing, disturbed, destructive and an overall villainous character? You know in normal reality that description usually is reserved for the villain in a Dudley Do-Right cartoon, not for real people.
While on the subject of scientists, I just would like to say that Hineman showed her mindset to be rather distinct from the scientific view before the movie even started with the design of the interface for the precognitives. The interface in the movie has all three reports seem more like one giant report, similar to three people writing for the same sample to hand in for a grade. The image comes across as one screen view and without any notable review from the computers. This interface was designed with the purposes of efficiency, basic function and marketability. Not to mention, a scientist would not use characteristics they expected to fail. Since we had to have a 'feminist moment' when Hineman says "The female." almost laughing to the inquiry as to which precognitive is the most effective, then we all must ask, why were any subjects that were male commissioned to be precognitives? Hineman says that there were hundreds of kids in the experiments at the Merriam Clinic and she says the phrase "boys and girls" when referencing the survivors. Am I really supposed to believe you could only generate one female from that pool? A scientist would not even test the system, if females really were singularly better at the foresight gift, unless three females were involved. No scientist would create a device just to get it to start working and figure out how to fix it later.
That is how engineers think, not scientists. Scientists try singularization in every experiment and function so as to first set a basis and then compare to universal samples, not throw everything together and hope to find a pattern by throwing paint at a wall and hoping some sticks. In the book the individual precognitives all gave their own report, the computer translated it and then the overwhelming story parameters were used. This fact also did not seem like uncommon knowledge. Anderton knew about it rather plainly, and even Kaplan seems to know of the existence of the process, which means he knows of the possible existence of minority reports, even if he does not make the association. Hineman gives too much assumption that reasonable doubt torpedoes an entire justice system, and thinks way too much like an engineer when designing the interface. That, or Burgess forced her to design the system to cover the minority report flaw. Again though, I must simply ask why reasonable doubt is such a nuclear missile to a justice system, because if it is we are apparently setting off one hundred nuclear missiles a day. We know she has some scientific sense of exploration as there is nothing marketable in a poisonous doll's eye. Also, I was confused when she said that both sexes had the dreams of future visions but apparently the system cannot work with the two boys because Agatha is "the key". Female anatomy reference aside, I do not think Agatha held their hands back when they were kids. They had their own visions. So really, they cannot work at all unless all three are together. If the males are that useless I again have to ask, why use them at all?
So yet again, Hineman switches back and forth between attitudes, ethics and actions and apparently general theory on scientific advance as it seems she thought more along the lines of get it to work in her early career and only now cares for a more lasting discovery and mechanistic control. Not like this change is any more nonsensical than all the other ones with it. So then she starts talking more and at the end of her dialogue she pulls a scene right from the original House of Wax and basically vomits on Vincent Price's grave and starts drawing Anderton in with the quiet voice ploy as she prepares to drink her tea, then kisses him in a scene that eerily resembles the scene in the Scarlett Letter. Okay, Spielberg, please throw more into this movie that is cliched or ripped from someone's cold deal fingers. "Who do you think I am?"...wow, good thing I did not have that copy of Dead Alive near me or anything to check to make sure you did not steal this monologue too. This whole scene was ripped from so many places and so many characters, forget not making sense, this was lazy and unimaginative. At least there was not Scooby Doo reference, so I guess I have something to be thankful for.If you honestly did not know you were utilizing cliches and played images, then that is even worse because then you admit to not understanding what the whole point of original story construction is and obviously could not see that trying to combine all these attitudes and sympathies was going to create an incredibly complex but ultimately boring character because I do not believe she exists. Hineman was way too complex, conflicted and contradictory to act as an ancillary character that has the answer to the riddle. Referencing The Count of Monte Cristo, please note the character of the Abbe Faria for what Hineman should be like, if she is in the movie at all. Specifically, to save you the trouble, she should be on the screen for more than three minutes and have a real impact and not be confusing.
Next, the car factory scene...oh good. I could literally go on for ten days about how stupid, pointless and utterly ridiculous this entire four minute sequence was. I have literally hurt my brain thinking about why this was even in the movie. Now the moment when Anderton wonders if Hineman might be able to help him and when his brand new car (product placement, woo!), which he technically stole as he certainly did not buy it, finally pulls up in front of a comical "Keep Out" sign posted on a ten foot wall (again, the little thing about overkill) that looks so old it witnessed the death of Queen Victoria, and he stumbles into her green house, ran for approximately twenty minutes. Did this filler really need to be twenty minutes? All that happens is that Anderton flies around on a jet pack for two minutes while punching Fletcher in the face and then the ever so "epic" man-to-man, "sine missione" combat scene with Colin Farrell intermingled with the conveyor belt scene, because the two "macho" characters have to apparently bare hand fight in this movie. Did that really need to be a tenth of the movie?
What irks me most about this scene is not the product placement and the exceptionally simplistic styling, but the fact that Witwer and Anderton are so very out of character it defies all sense to put this in the movie. In both the movie and the book, Witwer is described as an administrator, a writ, almost a clerk. So why apparently was he recently decommissioned from the CIA? In fact every police officer with an actual title, even Burgess, was just recently decommissioned from international sting operations, because that is how they enact their authority and how in shape they appear to be. Again, in the fantastic, para-military world of the novel this would have made sense and I guess if everyone was twenty five it would have made sense. Try and do anything the way they do in what we call reality, in our time line, forget the ACLU, you will have the Judicial and Commerce Guild bringing you to court. This entire justice process of PreCrime would last all of ten minutes in our current world, but the irritation does not end there.
We get a sense from the time line we know of Anderton and Witwer in the movie that they are approximately in their mid thirties, both have some family commitments, both have suffered a high degree of loss in their lives and personal failure in relationships, and both are experienced in their high administrative position. Just in case anyone is wondering, being an administrator in a bureaucratic, static environment does not encourage getting into fight scenes, and neither does strong family associations nor any of these two characters' main attributes and emotional context. I could understand if people loyal to Anderton fought people loyal to Witwer or I guess you could say loyal to the Federal Government in general. This would have added intrigue and interest to the movie and added filler that was not totally pointless and mind-numbing, not to mention would have been believable considering the general characters of Anderton and Witwer, both men who apparently have a highly critical and methodical approach to life and people around them who at least seem to be very loyal to them.
A fight between the two ideological factors we explore in this movie would have been exciting, but the two main characters slugging it out on a comical overhang in the car factory as the overhang is activated for some reason to move directly over the conveyor belt, and then both of them falling and then getting caught on the assembly line...yawn. What, was I supposed to find that interesting? If you get caught on a mechanical conveyor belt of that speed I have a feeling you would get torn to pieces long before you would ever think to react, not magically end up unharmed inside of the car and drive off to thankfully end the scene. You know the reason we find scenes like this interesting, aside from the fact that some of them actually are based in realistic scenarios, in titles like Die Another Day, Spartacus: Blood and Sand, or The Count of Monte Cristo is because the entire plot led up to these moments, the epic final showdown, and the action and general character development of the story revolved about these moments. You cannot have that scene less than fifty minutes into the movie. If Spartacus and Crixius did not have their epic final showdown I would have been confused and dismayed, but here is the point: it was the last episode and neither one of them suddenly used the water tank as a weapon and tried to drown the other one. I was expecting the fight sequence, the choreography that was used, the scenery that was used, and the outcome to happen as it did because the development and characters measured up to this fight scene, and more importantly the five minutes they spend fighting is actually intriguing and attention grabbing. The fight brings an end to what was the rising action to give us the climax and then the ending in a proper way. The Anderton-Witwer fight was just a ploy to attract the fan boys.
Anderton and Witwer are more likely to call up a lawyer to resolve their conflict than beat each other senseless. Just because you can fall back on the "tough guy" image, why try and make me want to roll my eyes so hard I snap my visual nerve? The whole idea of trying to turn the two main characters into sock 'em, bop 'em robots for five minutes was a terrible and time wasting effort that made no sense at all and is going to be contradicted by the entire rest of the movie, considering after this the most violent aspect of either two is how they treat Wally with verbal abuse. Anderton even forgives a man when he believes wholeheartedly he raped and murdered his son. I do not think Serpico would have done that. The only notable thing that happened in the scene that did not make me want to excrete from every orifice was the fact that at no point did anyone say 'Time's up.' or 'Assemble this.' or any other lame action movie hero dialogue. Maybe that should have been the main characteristic of the actors during the hour of useless role reversal: they do not talk.
The final scene I want to discuss is the entire ending, which was so ridiculous in terms of role reversal that I think I assumed Steven Spielberg forgot which character was which. So the point in the end is that Anderton turns on the PreCrime system because he feels a moral obligation to and Burgess, even though he must be edging 75, just cannot let go of his investment and tries to murder everyone. First off having Burgess be the one who would do anything for the system makes no sense at all. Burgess was trying to save face with the whole minority report scandal. If I was an executive making millions of dollars I probably would try and play the publicity game too. Now we do not know exactly what Burgess does, but he started PreCrime, which I assume means he had substantial private interests in it. Losing PreCrime would be financially devastating for him. However, unless you are Victor von Doom, what you do in that situation, again assuming we really are just in our future 2054 CE, is file for bankruptcy or make an appeal in the business review boards, not go on a killing spree.
Anderton should have been the one defending PreCrime up until the bitter end. It is acknowledged that Anderton is the one with the emotional association, and Burgess's association is only political. No one goes to this level to save face. Hoover might have gone a little overboard with the FBI at times but he never took someone into the backyard and drowned them. Nothing of Burgess's character suggests him to even have any advantage in being a murder, other than that no one would ever expect that he is the most villainous of all. Once in a while the shot from left field is interesting, note the Sixth Sense, but other times it just ends up being boring and disappointing, cue The Village.
My point here is that Burgess should have been the Kaplan figure in the movie, the one who died to save PreCrime, not assassinate it. No one is that vain, megalomaniacal and egotistical that they cannot bear to see their life's work go on without them, especially after you killed three people to make it come to fruition and seemingly intended to kill another two after you put your best friend in prison for a life sentence, at least we assume. The only reason Burgess had to die is because he was created to allow Anderton becoming the sympathetic victim at the end of the movie when in the novel he played no such role at all. You had to create a demonic antagonist to make Anderton into this new Atticus Finch role. Why did the story have to be sympathetic to Anderton? What part of his character is particularly tragic? If anything he turned tragedy into moral qualification. Someone that dedicated to a single, absolutist approach of justice and order would do anything to preserve it. A seventy five year old man with arthritis is trying to get off his addiction to Advil. Really, this whole plot sequence is ridiculous and so filled with role reversal that the final moments are comical, not adventurous and intriguing. Anderton carted off at the end after killing Burgess, the last one who knew about the minority report, to preserve PreCrime and the hope no other person goes through what he went through would have been very intriguing and exciting. A seventy five year old man shooting himself in the stomach to give way to the "new" generation that will be "better"...oh, I get it, this is supposed to be topical. Are they going to find butterscotch candies in his pockets after they search the body?
My point is that Anderton, Burgess, Witwer and Hineman could have been very interesting characters, had I believed two of them existed, and believed the other two were conscious moral/ethical agents throughout the whole movie. I have to assume all of them did anything just to move the plot along, a plot which made no sense. There was no methodology or moral implication to any of their actions, even though they all represent different moral aspects of the free will versus determinism debate. They changed so constantly and without reason that it just became inane and intolerable by the one hundred twentieth minute to try and place them on any side or tally who was most adequately representing reality or the side of the debate I sympathize with, because none of them did they changed so much. All they were in the story could be described as puzzle pieces that are allowed to completely change their shape and connectivity after a certain time. Sure after half of the puzzle pieces erupt in flames the rest of the puzzle was pretty easy to put together, but the sheer madness in the alterations made the entire sequence just boring and so convoluted I was not sure if the characters had been developed at all because I was unsure I understood or knew them at all and left me confused, unimpressed and very critical.
Realizing I made an exhaustive analysis of the times character development fails, I do not need to be so long winded with the success. Again, the success and the failure in both of these films were mere steps away from each other. If Troy had kept the character development and just altered a plot device here and there I think it would have been astounding. Character development is only so powerful. Your characters still need to fit into their setting, structure and plot. If they do not, or change ten times in the movie, the aspects become confusing, convoluted and uninteresting in a universe that is too static or too dynamic. Granted, you do not hear me complain about movies like Disaster Movie or Scary Movie III, but that is because I get the point that all I am supposed to get from these movies is a loss of brain cell function. If you are just making something for the sake of making something to sell, that is fine. I am not saying it is good or bad, right or wrong, it just might be overly cliched and boring at times with moments of amusement here and there. However, these movies sell that point. I never saw a full blown summer blockbuster add for Scary Movie III. Even the trailer was a joke and very tongue-in-cheek. So when you spend more money on the trailer than I did on my teeth of the past two decades, with two dentist visits per year and braces and all the fun that went along with that, I am going to expect the movie is going to be good. Also of note, when you have real critics say your movie is good, and not just nameless people you paid to say something good, I expect the movie to be good, and rightly so.
Generally speaking the three things movies, and stories overall, need to be good all revolve around development. First story development, then character development, then plot/structural congruency. If you can combine these three elements together in some fashion, whether it be action, or romance, or comedy, or horror, with a story that starts and ends with the same tone, characters that seem to fit their universe, and overall plot and structural formation that seems like something other than what I could find a robot sentinel doing in The Matrix, you might just create a movie that is somewhat interesting and engaging. Otherwise you usually end up with a gaudy, unrealistic mess that looks like something a fifth grader would write, a script that is rushed and not thought out and characters I do not want to relate to or understand, and whom I genuinely despise.
For any director who really thinks that it does not matter whether or not your audience makes a connection to the characters, ask every kid who was twelve in 2001 if they had nightmares about Hannibal Lector because they watched Hannibal ten times more or less just to see Hopkin's character. Sometimes a character can haunt you, engage you, intrigue you, and become a real part of your collective subconscious. There are just too many to name. I could go on for two weeks about how so many movies fail to live up to character development, and I needed only one example of how it can be so essential, endearing and enduring that a character will stay in our collective subconscious forever. For anyone keeping count, Character Development 1: Stupid Computer Animation Crap -14.
If all you intend to do is make garbage to sell DVDs in six months that is fine, just do not act like it was made for anything other than the receptacle. If you want to make a real "blockbuster" style film, get your story straight, make you characters real and have a plot that is intriguing and interesting. Otherwise, stop with the false advertisements already. Aside from this, I am completely baffled as to why you would want your commercial diarrhea held up to the light of real art. At this point I have to assume James Cameron is an idiot, because he knew almost immediately someone was going to say his movie was Dances With Wolves with blue coloring and realize pretty quickly that Dances With Wolves was fifty billion times better. Yet again, I am left to say...
...I just do not get it.
11 February 2011
22 January 2011
Things I Do Not Understand, Part II
Name speaks for itself: These are topics I hear people talk about all the time or have actually consumed people's lives or, sadly, are television channels and I do not understand why anyone talks about these topics at all. Please comment. :-)
Part II - Advertising: The Power it Exerts and the Concern I Cannot Understand
No matter who you are you have to admit: advertisements are really, really good. It should be disturbing how good we are becoming at convincing ourselves to buy things we do not need. We are getting so good we do not even need the words anymore; previous statement a realistic assessment in admitting that no one can actually explain the benefits of anything in twenty seven point four seconds. The images, people and aura about the commercial can tell us everything we need to know, even if we do not see the name of the product or see the product only at the very end. What bothers, irks and just banishes intelligibility on my behalf is the fact that we, as a society, spend $250 billion on advertising, a third of all education spending, when, quite frankly, if you have the money to advertise in the current American economy...oops, sorry I meant "culture", you probably do not need to advertise anymore, especially in a society that actively supports everything that you are attempting to accomplish in advertising anyway.
Now I do not want to get into a semantics discussion about the changing and progressing state of needs and proportions of goods in American or Western Society (because believe it or not you do not need alcohol, high-definition television or prophylactics by any definition of 'need') so I will just assume all things aside from the most basic provisions of carbohydrates and protein and potable clear liquid known as water to be beyond absolute necessity. Considering all things aside from what I just classified as necessary have had at least ten minutes on SuperBowl commercials, I believe I have constructed a fairly acceptable distinction.
The battle for semantics sidelined, I would like to address the issue I actually want to discuss, that being my wonder as to why we invest so much into advertising. Now believe it or not this thought process did not occur because of the SuperBowl, in spite of the temporal proximity. I had started this thought a few weeks ago and I just happened to get back to it now. The thoughts really started when I got my hair cut recently. Nick was cutting my hair and we were chatting and having a good time, me especially as he was removing that ChiaPet that had been growing on my scalp. Then, I had to look at the television...
Near the end of the haircut a commercial came on that I caught maybe four to five seconds into the commercial. Now this was in the morning, about the time that Wayne Brady hosts Let's Make a Deal, so the commercial might have been a little longer then the average twenty seven point four seconds and the audience is notably less varied on random Friday morning for Let's Make a Deal than say SuperBowl Sunday. However, that can still only tell anyone so much and I do not think I am that overly analytical that I could narrow down the most likely commercials based on time and audience, not to mention that pompous that I think you can make a list of hobbies and interest based solely on demographics. My point is that someone who openly rejects the notion that Western Civilization and American economy, I mean "culture", has much to offer, should not be prone to making correct quick assessment of what any pictorial series in said society represents, even after twenty one years of what I can pridefully say was limited exposure, but exposure nonetheless. This is not the most tragic thing in the universe, but it makes one point blindingly clear: American commercialism has found its strength in advertisements to be so essential not because the commercials and advertisements are good, but because the society itself has become one giant commercial where scripts and brand recognition are played out over our daily lives, Friday night at a bar between the people waiting for a Coors, standing in line at the game waiting for a Coke Zero, even apparently within a close group of friends, but not over the television.
Honestly, if the power of advertisement really was limited to the twenty seven point four seconds on the television and the glances of a magazine cover I can honestly say that I do not think it could ever be even comparable to the strength we know it has. I am not critiquing it one way or another, I am simply stating that we, in our society, have "been taught" or perhaps innately "know" that a Time Magazine cover of a soldier in Iraq and his memories as the head story can and apparently "should" evoke a far more "essential" and "personal" response than the reading of the Iliad. This thought process is not so simple in logic as our relativistic plagued culture has assumed it to be, and more than any misconception is the feeling that these two sources are the same kind of media. The two are, rather, completely different levels of media, even though both claim to be the same. Print media, if it really is print media, does not seem to dazzle, entrance and engage.
I am not one of the people who thinks that print media ever did these things, mind you. The greatest accomplishment of the print world was the dissemination of the Western Biblical Tradition that began the Wars of Religion and the European Expansion. Whether we are sound enough with our skin tone and/or theological perspectives to admit it or not these moments alter, define and speak to what we are as humanity almost every minute. That was four hundred years ago, and since then the mystical properties have become worn and garnished. Perhaps it has something to do with the horrors we remember from those moments, a general lack of interest to begin with, or a societal guilt complex that has come along with the "failure of modernity", but frankly put, we as a society are no longer a print media and we have traded in every accomplishment of that society for flashing lights and interesting backgrounds.
Conversely, the greatest accomplishment of the pictorial world was seeing Marylin Monroe's boobs. Again, I can only guess as to why this is held as important, but I am not above saying it is as superficial as easing masturbation efforts, and not so debased I cannot also see a possible plot on behalf of our collective subconscious mind. In the end, sensationalism won out for a very simple and very plain reason that is not morally culpable nor psychologically poignant - simply put, people are gullible and apathetic.
Print life is more difficult and skeptical. The difficulty and lifestyle demanded provides logical reasoning to assess why pictures won, far more reasonable and obvious than it is to determine why words lost. Simply put, it is not easy nor particularly profitable to have a print media, so people shied away. I enjoy being skeptical and assuming that if I do not check every source someone will try and sell me something. Most people do not. Most people in Western Civilization live a life between temptation and assuaged luxury where, honestly, saying 'No.' really is as easy as saying 'No.' and saying 'Yes.' is as simple as having a credit card. There is no substance or meaning, no greater effort or drive, no development or enrichment. It is simple and easy and quick, fitting nicely into a controlled and simplistic environment and comprehensible construction of life. I am not saying it is good or bad, right or wrong, six, half-dozen or the other; I am just saying that it is.
Yet even that only could ever have so much power. Christianity and educational philosophy are also core to that which is Western Civilization and pandemic in proportions with thousands of pictorial redoubts, and frankly, saying you are Christian or philosophical is pretty easy because of how prevalent both ideas are; anyone can mire their way through an explication that sounds impressive but does not mean anything at all. So long as keywords are used that could be heard on any TV station about ten times an hour, you are a "Christian". Yet neither of these societal distinctions possess even associative amounts of influence that a Pepsi commercial has. The difference is that while we have been told over and over what a good Christian "should" be, we do not like the image. When we are told what a good Pepsi drinker is, we love that image. Why is that? Frankly, it most likely can be granted to the guarantee that whatever it means to enjoy what you are doing already, that is what it means to drink Pepsi.
I am trying to make the effects of advertising and societal influence clear in an effort to stress my real issues. In actuality, the deference to symbol and the sheer dissemination of advertisements that is the American "culture" is not what I am concerned about. I do not like either, but I have found ways to avoid them.
I am most concerned and confused by the issue that I had no idea what product was being advertised when I saw this commercial in Nick's barbershop. I saw the entire commercial after that four to five second delay, heard not one word that was said, and I still only needed about ten seconds to know the commercial was about birth control, only about seven seconds to have an emotional response. When I finally did see the name, I had never heard of it, no one of notable import or celebrity that I could recognize was in the commercial that I could associate the brand with, and because the buzz cut was going on there was just a "small" amount of background interference that made it impossible for me to hear. All I could see of this commercial was the people and things they were doing; I never heard a word or saw the product or even the product name. Even with all these disruptions to the message, the medium gave me the metaphor simple and clear: this is a commercial about a birth control pill, and it is a great product because, as you can see, everyone in this commercial is happy. I am not even really sure how I knew it was about birth control - I just did.
Again, just to clarify this point too, I am not making any comments about birth control or the usage thereof. As far as I am concerned, if you want to have kids, have kids, and if you do not want to have kids, do not have kids. If I can put some opinion in this, here it is: if you are one of those people who think American consumerism is a good thing, do me a huge favor and start using birth control more often. Aside from that, I could not care less who does and does not use what. This is not a rant on birth control. This is a discussion of a generally disturbing and confusing issue. This is me asking 'How did advertising get so good that I, a twenty one year old male graduate level chemist, someone obsessed with his work, someone who is more concerned with the welfare failure than getting laid, who has zero interest in relationship issues, someone clearly not in the "range of consumers" for these advertisements, how did I know exactly what they wanted me to know and probably recognized everything they wanted me to recognize?'.
I have to conclude the power of advertising is in society as a whole. If it really was just a presentation of twenty seven point four seconds, there is no way I would have known what the commercial was about or had any emotional connect at all, especially without seeing any product or hearing a word. In our society, I truly believe that the power of commercialization has convinced me, innately, to assume that a group of interracial "friends" of the female sex enjoying the company of each other and seemingly "happy" are using birth control. And of course, in American "culture" if there are attractive people smiling they must either be in love or making money, because that just makes sense. Frankly, that was all you could tell from the commercial, which is exactly what the problem is.
The screenplay and action in the commercial was so bland, flat and generally unimaginative that it was almost comical. Characteristic attractive white girl with impeccable facial structure, sensational smile and curly locks is walking around town with her "friends" who apparently have no interest in walking next to her but rather want to be "close enough", and so I assume that they must be friends. They walk into a stationary/furniture style store because they are female and five girls would never go out to get pizza or beer in Commercialica. The commercial goes on to show the ladies doing very little other than smiling and buying inessentials, but all the while seem as if they have just been proposed to rather then spent two hundred dollars on something truly useless, not to mention they are oblivious to the rest of the world and the general tone of the scene as all I see are smiling faces, uncut laughter that seems so out of place and forced it is comical. I have a feeling after George Lucas wrote the picnic scene between Anakin and Padmae, he went and wrote the screenplay for this commercial. Too bad there was not a sand metaphor because I guess making little to no sense is sensible; with that sand comment I have to suppose this commercial would sell like hot cakes (if you do not get the reference please find a copy of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones and go about forty minutes in and wait for the dumbest thing you have ever heard - disclaimer: this author does not accept responsibility for the natural attempt to stab out one's ears after watching Star Wars Episode II).
More than any reason to worry, I always thought that when you trusted a group of people it was because you liked them, and had a real feeling that you can relate to them and they understand you enough to be honest. In my screening of other commercials on the same topic I saw the same thing over and over again, one commercial even being as forthcoming, ridiculous and offensive, at least to me, as possible, having the women walking around what I suppose is a shopping mall floor and literally picking up "the things you might one day really want", such as a home, a 'significant other' and a graduate school degree. Aside from utterly urinating over the difficulty level of a graduate education, turning relationships into a shopping excursion and giving credence to every inane comment made by the Family Foundation about how to live a "good life" and conceivably reinforce every stereotype possible, especially with the 'Trip to Paris' option, all I can conclude about any of these women is that they are materialistic, rude, unrepentant, superficial and plain as a piece of toast. I do not like any of these people, but I could not remove from myself the belief that they are happy and the world is their oyster.
These thoughts and associations had nothing to do with the commercial. It had everything to do with some innate belief that the advertisers knew something I did not, that women on birth control or who have 'choice' in their sexual life are happier than women who do not have 'choice', and that this "scene" actually occurs in real life, at least symbolically. All three of those associations cannot be made over twenty seven point four seconds, over forty eight seconds, over one minute fourteen seconds, or the timing I noticed for any of the commercials I saw in my Google Search. Those associations occur over two decades of exposure to images and associations that are depressing, degrading, dehumanizing, divisive and droll. So why is this not an issue, especially considering that I am more than certain I am not the first person to notice it?
I guess my real issue is that advertising still spends more money than almost any other industry in the United States, but frankly their investments over the past forty years have been more successful than they could ever have imagined. In a world where the "culture" and society do all your advertising for you, what more do you need? I realize this came about because of all the efforts of advertising over the past forty years, but if that is how tight your grip over a collective conscious is, what more do you need? This is the equivalent of the military continuing to ask for money when it invested nearly four hundred trillion in our nuclear missile program, and now have the strength to kill all the world with, literally, the push of one button. What more do you need after the technology to press one button and kill every known living cognizant thing in the Solar System? There is this thing called overkill, and you are quickly approaching it.
In a world where most people cannot manage to garner three dollars for twelve hours of labor, American "culture" spends 342,465,753.42% more per year on advertising, than the average company pays the average laborer per year. Spending money on something that no longer needs to be developed...once again I have to say quite plainly...
I just do not get it...
Part II - Advertising: The Power it Exerts and the Concern I Cannot Understand
No matter who you are you have to admit: advertisements are really, really good. It should be disturbing how good we are becoming at convincing ourselves to buy things we do not need. We are getting so good we do not even need the words anymore; previous statement a realistic assessment in admitting that no one can actually explain the benefits of anything in twenty seven point four seconds. The images, people and aura about the commercial can tell us everything we need to know, even if we do not see the name of the product or see the product only at the very end. What bothers, irks and just banishes intelligibility on my behalf is the fact that we, as a society, spend $250 billion on advertising, a third of all education spending, when, quite frankly, if you have the money to advertise in the current American economy...oops, sorry I meant "culture", you probably do not need to advertise anymore, especially in a society that actively supports everything that you are attempting to accomplish in advertising anyway.
Now I do not want to get into a semantics discussion about the changing and progressing state of needs and proportions of goods in American or Western Society (because believe it or not you do not need alcohol, high-definition television or prophylactics by any definition of 'need') so I will just assume all things aside from the most basic provisions of carbohydrates and protein and potable clear liquid known as water to be beyond absolute necessity. Considering all things aside from what I just classified as necessary have had at least ten minutes on SuperBowl commercials, I believe I have constructed a fairly acceptable distinction.
The battle for semantics sidelined, I would like to address the issue I actually want to discuss, that being my wonder as to why we invest so much into advertising. Now believe it or not this thought process did not occur because of the SuperBowl, in spite of the temporal proximity. I had started this thought a few weeks ago and I just happened to get back to it now. The thoughts really started when I got my hair cut recently. Nick was cutting my hair and we were chatting and having a good time, me especially as he was removing that ChiaPet that had been growing on my scalp. Then, I had to look at the television...
Near the end of the haircut a commercial came on that I caught maybe four to five seconds into the commercial. Now this was in the morning, about the time that Wayne Brady hosts Let's Make a Deal, so the commercial might have been a little longer then the average twenty seven point four seconds and the audience is notably less varied on random Friday morning for Let's Make a Deal than say SuperBowl Sunday. However, that can still only tell anyone so much and I do not think I am that overly analytical that I could narrow down the most likely commercials based on time and audience, not to mention that pompous that I think you can make a list of hobbies and interest based solely on demographics. My point is that someone who openly rejects the notion that Western Civilization and American economy, I mean "culture", has much to offer, should not be prone to making correct quick assessment of what any pictorial series in said society represents, even after twenty one years of what I can pridefully say was limited exposure, but exposure nonetheless. This is not the most tragic thing in the universe, but it makes one point blindingly clear: American commercialism has found its strength in advertisements to be so essential not because the commercials and advertisements are good, but because the society itself has become one giant commercial where scripts and brand recognition are played out over our daily lives, Friday night at a bar between the people waiting for a Coors, standing in line at the game waiting for a Coke Zero, even apparently within a close group of friends, but not over the television.
Honestly, if the power of advertisement really was limited to the twenty seven point four seconds on the television and the glances of a magazine cover I can honestly say that I do not think it could ever be even comparable to the strength we know it has. I am not critiquing it one way or another, I am simply stating that we, in our society, have "been taught" or perhaps innately "know" that a Time Magazine cover of a soldier in Iraq and his memories as the head story can and apparently "should" evoke a far more "essential" and "personal" response than the reading of the Iliad. This thought process is not so simple in logic as our relativistic plagued culture has assumed it to be, and more than any misconception is the feeling that these two sources are the same kind of media. The two are, rather, completely different levels of media, even though both claim to be the same. Print media, if it really is print media, does not seem to dazzle, entrance and engage.
I am not one of the people who thinks that print media ever did these things, mind you. The greatest accomplishment of the print world was the dissemination of the Western Biblical Tradition that began the Wars of Religion and the European Expansion. Whether we are sound enough with our skin tone and/or theological perspectives to admit it or not these moments alter, define and speak to what we are as humanity almost every minute. That was four hundred years ago, and since then the mystical properties have become worn and garnished. Perhaps it has something to do with the horrors we remember from those moments, a general lack of interest to begin with, or a societal guilt complex that has come along with the "failure of modernity", but frankly put, we as a society are no longer a print media and we have traded in every accomplishment of that society for flashing lights and interesting backgrounds.
Conversely, the greatest accomplishment of the pictorial world was seeing Marylin Monroe's boobs. Again, I can only guess as to why this is held as important, but I am not above saying it is as superficial as easing masturbation efforts, and not so debased I cannot also see a possible plot on behalf of our collective subconscious mind. In the end, sensationalism won out for a very simple and very plain reason that is not morally culpable nor psychologically poignant - simply put, people are gullible and apathetic.
Print life is more difficult and skeptical. The difficulty and lifestyle demanded provides logical reasoning to assess why pictures won, far more reasonable and obvious than it is to determine why words lost. Simply put, it is not easy nor particularly profitable to have a print media, so people shied away. I enjoy being skeptical and assuming that if I do not check every source someone will try and sell me something. Most people do not. Most people in Western Civilization live a life between temptation and assuaged luxury where, honestly, saying 'No.' really is as easy as saying 'No.' and saying 'Yes.' is as simple as having a credit card. There is no substance or meaning, no greater effort or drive, no development or enrichment. It is simple and easy and quick, fitting nicely into a controlled and simplistic environment and comprehensible construction of life. I am not saying it is good or bad, right or wrong, six, half-dozen or the other; I am just saying that it is.
Yet even that only could ever have so much power. Christianity and educational philosophy are also core to that which is Western Civilization and pandemic in proportions with thousands of pictorial redoubts, and frankly, saying you are Christian or philosophical is pretty easy because of how prevalent both ideas are; anyone can mire their way through an explication that sounds impressive but does not mean anything at all. So long as keywords are used that could be heard on any TV station about ten times an hour, you are a "Christian". Yet neither of these societal distinctions possess even associative amounts of influence that a Pepsi commercial has. The difference is that while we have been told over and over what a good Christian "should" be, we do not like the image. When we are told what a good Pepsi drinker is, we love that image. Why is that? Frankly, it most likely can be granted to the guarantee that whatever it means to enjoy what you are doing already, that is what it means to drink Pepsi.
I am trying to make the effects of advertising and societal influence clear in an effort to stress my real issues. In actuality, the deference to symbol and the sheer dissemination of advertisements that is the American "culture" is not what I am concerned about. I do not like either, but I have found ways to avoid them.
I am most concerned and confused by the issue that I had no idea what product was being advertised when I saw this commercial in Nick's barbershop. I saw the entire commercial after that four to five second delay, heard not one word that was said, and I still only needed about ten seconds to know the commercial was about birth control, only about seven seconds to have an emotional response. When I finally did see the name, I had never heard of it, no one of notable import or celebrity that I could recognize was in the commercial that I could associate the brand with, and because the buzz cut was going on there was just a "small" amount of background interference that made it impossible for me to hear. All I could see of this commercial was the people and things they were doing; I never heard a word or saw the product or even the product name. Even with all these disruptions to the message, the medium gave me the metaphor simple and clear: this is a commercial about a birth control pill, and it is a great product because, as you can see, everyone in this commercial is happy. I am not even really sure how I knew it was about birth control - I just did.
Again, just to clarify this point too, I am not making any comments about birth control or the usage thereof. As far as I am concerned, if you want to have kids, have kids, and if you do not want to have kids, do not have kids. If I can put some opinion in this, here it is: if you are one of those people who think American consumerism is a good thing, do me a huge favor and start using birth control more often. Aside from that, I could not care less who does and does not use what. This is not a rant on birth control. This is a discussion of a generally disturbing and confusing issue. This is me asking 'How did advertising get so good that I, a twenty one year old male graduate level chemist, someone obsessed with his work, someone who is more concerned with the welfare failure than getting laid, who has zero interest in relationship issues, someone clearly not in the "range of consumers" for these advertisements, how did I know exactly what they wanted me to know and probably recognized everything they wanted me to recognize?'.
I have to conclude the power of advertising is in society as a whole. If it really was just a presentation of twenty seven point four seconds, there is no way I would have known what the commercial was about or had any emotional connect at all, especially without seeing any product or hearing a word. In our society, I truly believe that the power of commercialization has convinced me, innately, to assume that a group of interracial "friends" of the female sex enjoying the company of each other and seemingly "happy" are using birth control. And of course, in American "culture" if there are attractive people smiling they must either be in love or making money, because that just makes sense. Frankly, that was all you could tell from the commercial, which is exactly what the problem is.
The screenplay and action in the commercial was so bland, flat and generally unimaginative that it was almost comical. Characteristic attractive white girl with impeccable facial structure, sensational smile and curly locks is walking around town with her "friends" who apparently have no interest in walking next to her but rather want to be "close enough", and so I assume that they must be friends. They walk into a stationary/furniture style store because they are female and five girls would never go out to get pizza or beer in Commercialica. The commercial goes on to show the ladies doing very little other than smiling and buying inessentials, but all the while seem as if they have just been proposed to rather then spent two hundred dollars on something truly useless, not to mention they are oblivious to the rest of the world and the general tone of the scene as all I see are smiling faces, uncut laughter that seems so out of place and forced it is comical. I have a feeling after George Lucas wrote the picnic scene between Anakin and Padmae, he went and wrote the screenplay for this commercial. Too bad there was not a sand metaphor because I guess making little to no sense is sensible; with that sand comment I have to suppose this commercial would sell like hot cakes (if you do not get the reference please find a copy of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones and go about forty minutes in and wait for the dumbest thing you have ever heard - disclaimer: this author does not accept responsibility for the natural attempt to stab out one's ears after watching Star Wars Episode II).
More than any reason to worry, I always thought that when you trusted a group of people it was because you liked them, and had a real feeling that you can relate to them and they understand you enough to be honest. In my screening of other commercials on the same topic I saw the same thing over and over again, one commercial even being as forthcoming, ridiculous and offensive, at least to me, as possible, having the women walking around what I suppose is a shopping mall floor and literally picking up "the things you might one day really want", such as a home, a 'significant other' and a graduate school degree. Aside from utterly urinating over the difficulty level of a graduate education, turning relationships into a shopping excursion and giving credence to every inane comment made by the Family Foundation about how to live a "good life" and conceivably reinforce every stereotype possible, especially with the 'Trip to Paris' option, all I can conclude about any of these women is that they are materialistic, rude, unrepentant, superficial and plain as a piece of toast. I do not like any of these people, but I could not remove from myself the belief that they are happy and the world is their oyster.
These thoughts and associations had nothing to do with the commercial. It had everything to do with some innate belief that the advertisers knew something I did not, that women on birth control or who have 'choice' in their sexual life are happier than women who do not have 'choice', and that this "scene" actually occurs in real life, at least symbolically. All three of those associations cannot be made over twenty seven point four seconds, over forty eight seconds, over one minute fourteen seconds, or the timing I noticed for any of the commercials I saw in my Google Search. Those associations occur over two decades of exposure to images and associations that are depressing, degrading, dehumanizing, divisive and droll. So why is this not an issue, especially considering that I am more than certain I am not the first person to notice it?
I guess my real issue is that advertising still spends more money than almost any other industry in the United States, but frankly their investments over the past forty years have been more successful than they could ever have imagined. In a world where the "culture" and society do all your advertising for you, what more do you need? I realize this came about because of all the efforts of advertising over the past forty years, but if that is how tight your grip over a collective conscious is, what more do you need? This is the equivalent of the military continuing to ask for money when it invested nearly four hundred trillion in our nuclear missile program, and now have the strength to kill all the world with, literally, the push of one button. What more do you need after the technology to press one button and kill every known living cognizant thing in the Solar System? There is this thing called overkill, and you are quickly approaching it.
In a world where most people cannot manage to garner three dollars for twelve hours of labor, American "culture" spends 342,465,753.42% more per year on advertising, than the average company pays the average laborer per year. Spending money on something that no longer needs to be developed...once again I have to say quite plainly...
I just do not get it...
26 December 2010
The Miniature Earth's Statistics (2010)
I. If you could reduced the world population down to 100 people:
a. Ethnicities
i. 61 – Asian
ii. 12 – European
iii. 13 – African
iv. 8 – North American
v. 5 – South American and Caribbean
vi. 1 – Oceania
b. Sex
i. 50 males
ii. 50 females
c. Demographics
i. 47 live in an urban area
ii. 43 live without basic sanitation
iii. 18 live without an improved water source
d. Religion
i. 33 – Christian
ii. 18 – Muslim
iii. 14 – Hindus
iv. 16 – Non-religious
v. 6 – Buddhists
vi. 13 – Practice other religions
e. Economy
i. 6 people own 59% of the wealth of the entire community
ii. The village spends $1.12 trillion on military expenditures, $100 billion on development aid
iii. If you keep food in your refrigerator, clothes in your closet, have a bed to sleep in and a roof over your head you are richer than 75% of the world
iv. If you have a bank account you are one of the 30 wealthiest people in the world
v. 18 live on $1.00 a day or less
vi. 53 live on $2.00 a day or less
f. Health Issues
i. 9 are disabled
ii. 13 are hungry or malnourished
iii. 1 adult (15-49) has HIV/AIDS
g. Education
i. 14 cannot read
ii. 7 are educated at a secondary level
iii. 12 have a computer
iv. 3 have an internet connection
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