Combat medic Desmond Doss pulled 75 wounded men to safety in the Battle of Okinawa – without carrying a weapon. Let that sink in, because dear crap that’s amazing.

Doss’ bravery and commitment to non-violence* (*in service of violence) is a heck of a story, in a way of a sort that hasn’t been picked over endlessly in American cinema. American public life lacks a developed vocabulary to question the necessity, nuances of effects of its own state-sponsored violence. This is, of course, is partially why the one mainstream film concerning a conscientious objector is a freaking *war* film. It’s also how two years ago American Sniper launched a thousand think-pieces about whether it glorified its subject – an efficient killing machine who parlayed a lack of public introspection into a career on the conservative media circuit. Sniper was preceded by Lone Survivor (2013) and followed by 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (2016, directed by explosion-meister Michael Bay) – all December/Jan releases ‘based on true stories’ prominently used by Conservatives as political bludgeons. These films [at least the former two; I didn’t see Benghazi] may allow nuanced critical readings. But if we’re being honest, their prime audiences are flag-waving conservatives, and they are constructed so that audience can feel like a variety of nebulous political concerns are validated.

That is to say Americans are scarcely asked to go to the movie and contemplate themselves as anything less than the ‘good guys’; we’re very adept at finding stories that allow ‘real’ soldiers to be simultaneously celebrated as spree killers and victimized underdogs; and any subtle critique of war’s practice or premises (conceptual or specific) must be bathed in deferential gushing about the sanctity of the American soldier. Say what you want politically, but the dramatic possibilities are notably constraining.  An important caveat: the not-near-talked-about-enough Fury (2015), which portrayed soldiers late in World War II as calloused from years of fighting – or at least,  for its first 2/3. Then the genre demands (and likely, studio notes) took over and it became a pretty good action movie, largely unrelated to what preceded it. Also, maybe, the technically-experimental Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2016), which Google tells me is finally playing once daily at my local multiplex.

So I came to Hacksaw Ridge not expecting a great film, but with a curiosity about where the limits of American cinema intersected with Mel Gibson’s torture complex, aptly manifest in his other directorial efforts (Braveheart, The Passion of the Christ, and Apocalypto). In Gibson films, righteous men suffer. I assumed Hacksaw would partially re-inscribe non-violence in the service of violence (that is the premise), but I was more intrigued by how little ethical conflict is of concern in Hacksaw Ridge. For being a movie concerning a *conscientious objector* in *wartime*, it’s remarkable how every American’s value systems get along within the movie. True to American and Gibsonian obsessions, war just is in Hacksaw, immutable. Even conscientious objectors find it beyond critique. This doesn’t exactly un-write the language of dissent, but it does significantly configure it in support of conventional goals.

True to this recent genre, Hacksaw Ridge opens with a title card declaring it “a true story” (not based on, but simply “a true story”). To clarify:  Hacksaw Ridge is neither a documentary nor peer-reviewed. It’s an artistic interpretation and often a narratively pat one at that.  It’s generally accepted that these kinds of movies sand off the real-life rough edges of their subjects while leaving their authoritative air of ‘reality’ intact, but it’s remarkably blatant in Hacksaw, which continues another trend in some of the above-described movies of sticking archive footage of the real-life subjects in the closing credits. ‘You can’t argue with conviction’ one says of Doss’ drive which – I’ll be discussing – is really the frustrating crux of the film’s moral universe: nobody questions much except Doss’ bravery (about which, of course, they are mistaken).

The first act of the film is a grab-bag of genres as Hacksaw runs through bits of domestic drama, courtroom procedural, and a romance seemingly driven by the leads never having otherwise experienced sexual attraction. Functionally, of course, it exists to give the audience a reason to root for Doss before going off to battle, but it doesn’t develop either character much beyond being an unassailably upstanding golly-gee yokel and Rachel Griffiths as the ‘girlfriend’. Andrew Garfield’s Oscar nomination for Best Actor is confounding; there’s little to the character beyond being super-duper and not too bright. On another level, the overall package is an actor-y ode to American pieties of the sort well-represented at the Academy Awards.

The dynamics among the movie’s men are just as perfunctory, but they have some pleasantly complicated layering to them. The drill sergeant (Vince Vaughn) and other commanding officers shift effectively between being hard-asses, and explaining such apparent cruelty’s purpose in creating group cohesion. Vaughn, in particular, gives a damn good performance. The military itself seems realistic enough as an elemental combination of training camp, functional bureaucracy, and boy’s club. Doss’ drunken father (Hugo Weaving) is a theatrical condensation of war’s psychological cost: scarred by his experience in The Great War and coping by beating his wife and children, talking to tombstones, demanding to be killed, and telling literal gut-busting tales at dinner.

As for the reasons why one might not want to serve: Doss’ father doesn’t want his sons to enlist based off his own experiences. Vaughn’s drill sergeant seems un-ironic enough when he tells the other trainees that they’re fighting for others’ rights – including, to refuse to fight. Doss mentions two boys from his hometown were declared unfit to serve and killed themselves because they couldn’t live with it – not exactly a ringing description or endorsement of principled non-involvement from the movie there. Yet these potential dramatic hooks are mentioned in passing compared to the time expended on the question of whether or not Doss will physically touch a weapon.

How not carrying a gun is qualitatively different from supporting others who do is beyond the film’s nuance. Provided he doesn’t physically have to touch a gun, Desmond Doss is as morally serene as the Buddha himself. As such, his conscientious objection is constructed so as to not actually be in conflict with war. He doesn’t reflect on his conviction; the movie never challenges it. And so, his ill-articulated objections to organized violence are mostly configured as another venue for wartime machismo. He’s pretty much a guy with a few idiosyncratic ideas about combat ethics who found his moment to shine.

Also unexamined: what value the military’s vaunted group cohesion is in combat exercises where they’ll likely die horribly for ambiguous gains. If the commanding officer says to climb a cliff face and muck about in fog and gunfire for… [reasons unarticulated], well, ours is not to wonder why, as the poem goes. Or how Doss’ blessed conviction is different from that of the Japanese soldiers or Nazis (the latter of whom go un-mentioned). It goes without saying that the Japanese combatants are largely unexamined, portrayed as duplicitous, threatening, and – at their most human – afraid.

This is in contrast to that other 2016 movie where Andrew Garfield plays a devout Christian attempting a Japanese intervention. The ethical crises of Silence haunt me; its characters enter the mission field with good intentions and wind up being involved with extensive, unintended suffering. Silence is a movie where there are no easy ways to do ‘right’, and one’s capacity to act effectively narrows; Hacksaw is one where the ‘right’ paths are never in doubt or beyond achievement.

I don’t know if it’s better or worse that there are, genuinely, about 20 minutes at the start of the big battle scene that’s as horrifying as anything I’ve ever seen on film. Bullets flying, heads exploding, men dying, corpses rotting – it’s a vision of hell.  Gibson’s progressed since Braveheart, in which the action scenes are mostly close-ups of impalements. And it does come off as a really arbitrary, stupid way to settle a conflict, as my friend Dave said, selling me on watching the movie (time well-spent for its moments of excellence). But for the movie as a whole, that horror becomes suspenseful, and the tension shifts to the audience wondering how clever Dossy going to survive the moment. By the end, Hacksaw Ridge is an outright action movie as the (morally unimpeachable) Doss hauls his friends to safety while they machine gun the ‘nips’ to hell. The more the film revels in spectacle, the more Doss’ commitment to non-violence seems akin to the ethical codes of TV’s Dexter ‘only kills serial killers’ Morgan or the ‘I won’t kill you but I don’t have to save you’ Batman of Batman Begins. Ethical conviction is pretty adaptable if you really, really need a bunch of people to die for the sake of country and genre conventions.

And so, Hacksaw Ridge becomes another ode to soldierly bravery. Doss’ bravery and commitment to the war effort remain aptly presented; his (or others’) non-violent convictions and their relationship to conflict, not so much.

At the start of Silence – the second film adaptation of Shūsaku Endō’s novel – the Tokugawa Shogunate has closed Japan to Christianity (and the ‘West’ more generally). Word reaches Macao that Catholic missionaries are facing torture and death, and two young priests are shocked to hear their mentor Ferreira has recanted the faith and adopted Japanese ways. The priests would have been raised on stories of the heroic sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross; the suffering of the early saints at the hands of the Roman Empire; and Elijah cheekily defeating the priests of Baal. We know how the story ends: after temporary suffering comes eternal victory. So they go on a quest to find Ferreira and save his soul.

I read what happens thereafter as a variation on the Garden of Eden story. In Genesis, eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge brings suffering. In Silence, the introduction of Christianity to Japan forces missionaries and locals to define themselves in relation to it. Embracing or refuting the religion – publicly or privately – brings suffering.

Silence dramatizes reformers coming dramatically up against the limits, encountering a hostile environment that transforms from agentive forces to reactive ones. They start out trying to effect a change for the better; they end up trying to minimize harm. This ought to resonate with (and provide deep challenges for) anyone with plans to change the world, for whatever defensibly righteous reasons: the political protestor; the secular global ‘development’ worker; the PhD student – and not least of all myself, stuck between all these categories, seeking to provide design and policy recommendations based on research on refugees’ online privacy needs.

However we may regard the characters’ goals, the ethical dilemmas they experience seem analogous to what various international aid-type workers experience, as well as those my (mostly Lutheran) pastor friends have discussed with me: with what do you do when your congregation’s heartfelt beliefs are heretical? What do you do when your presence appears to be hurting more than helping? What do you do when your conscience conflicts with the institutional line? To what extent can you trust that God (or the system) is playing the long game effectively – in spite of immediate, visceral feedback to the contrary? How do you handle being co-opted by a variety of systems, playing your naiveté to their advantage? Is admitting powerlessness abdicating responsibility? Is pursuing your conscience mere narcissism?

In the movie, this plays out in debates between the priest Rodrigues and the local inquisitor, representative of the shogunate, concerning the cultural compatibility between their respective visions of Japan and Christianity. The specific options available to Rodrigues narrow until they become a series of singular choices among bad options. Visually, as the characters move from the expansive cityscapes of Macao to Japan, the cinematography eschews sweeping crane shots of dramatic landscape in favor of the compact, foggy and claustrophobic. The more I think about it, the more I see how the film embeds challenges to the narrowness of the characters’ worldviews. Both the inquisitor and Rodrigues are, of course, fighting losing battle on behalf of purity – syncretic mixes of local and external influences develop, as they always do.  Yet within the film, the precision of their wills is convincing in its immediacy.

Nonetheless, the film remains largely from the missionaries’ perspective, with ‘Japan’ (and the suffering Christians therein) considered in its relationship to them; the country is an operatic hell-scape that reflects their own failings back at them. This is reinforced by their limited ability to communicate with the local Japanese Catholics. While I think the film ultimately critiques this – the condescending ‘white savior complex’ mission/outreach model is an oft-critiqued, oft-resurgent bad idea – from our own contemporary moment, this certainly opens Silence to the criticism that it uses Japan as a prop for three white men’s spiritual crises. To this, I’m really interested to read how the movie has been received in Japan.

In a sense, missionaries have it easier than aid workers; the “not of this world” nature of Jesus’ kingdom allows wiggle room between apparent material circumstances and the spiritual kingdom that awaits at some later date. Artists’ ability to gauge their successes is somewhere in between. At a meta-level, Nick Ripatrozone at LitHub notes, “the apparent cross of Scorsese” is “trying to perfect an idea than wrangling with personal belief”. While the obvious comparison point for the (Catholic) director is the Last Temptation of Christ, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky  writes that Rodrigues is also a “typical Scorsese narrator in that he can’t stop voicing his admiration or disgust for other characters”. This attention to mediation – to the layers of perception at work – I see as an insightful engagement between Catholicism and artistry.

To go back to the above challenges to global do-goodery, however, Silence poses harsher critiques to those who would separate their piety from others’ material circumstances. Here, the refrain is “they’re suffering for you.”  This is especially pertinent to the American cultural landscape and its homegrown varieties of evangelical Christianity, recent ill-regarded cinema from which have tended to offer easy answers to many of the difficult questions posed (and left unanswered) in Silence. In this genre, characters often have their faith confirmed with little risk to their middle-class material security and social status. True to Max Weber’s protestant work ethic, the correct spiritual choice is often closely related to secular middle class success. A protagonist must, say, choose between worldly prestige or mere personal fulfillment and eternal life, a choice remarkably similar to the archetype of the mid-level management executive who must choose between the career-making presentation or his child’s soccer game.

That’s the American pulpit and cinema. We know how the story ends. The good guy wins. You are the good guy. You always win. Iron Man saves the day.

Silence received only one Oscar nomination, for Rodrigo Prieto’s aforementioned cinematography. At least three Best Picture nominees, by contrast, fit into the ‘triumph over adversity / following your dreams’ genre.

In the face of all those self-serving tales of comfort and affirmation, Silence offers a human story worthy of the spiritual one, a direct accusation to both the active and uninvolved, and a final act in which God and Man accuse each other, asking to what (human and divine) silence in the face of all these failures testify.

Kate Plays Christine is a film without a subject. This is partially both the point and the hook: the film revolves around Sarasota, Florida news anchor Christine Chubbuck, who left almost no public record except urban lore of her on-air suicide on July 15, 1974, inspiring Network (1976). To cinematize this mix of limited material and interesting subject matter, Christine documents actress Kate Lyn Sheil as she prepares to portray Chubbuck for a fragmented film within a film. It’s a framework that could illuminate any number of things – about acting, identity, voyeurism, gender dynamics, cinema and who knows what else. Unfortunately, the documentary fails at most all of them. Kate Plays Christine is a movie in which the filmmakers set themselves up with a difficult task, can’t think of an interesting approach beyond their high-concept hook, half-ass the execution and blame the medium and its audience for their own failings. The result is a self-satisfied ode to its own solipsism.

It’s shitty as history. If one takes ‘Chubbock’ as the subject, it is notably constrained by its limited sources, mostly Chubbuck’s childhood journals and a few era news reports. It is apparent, however, that nobody involved did much background reading (Sheil’s prominent copy of Durkheim’s 1897 classic Suicide aside). The result is the first hour is mostly unfounded, unfocused speculation from Sheil and others about Chubbuck, the 70s newsroom, and suicide – despite how much has been written on the latter topics. Factual claims – that Chubbock was descendent from screen icons Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks – are voiced, but neither confirmed or refuted. Grasps at theoretical framings are half-hearted. Murmurs about sexism and Chubbuck’s probable difficulties with it underscore the masculinity of the media professionals she meets, but also underscore the extent that everyone is mostly creating projections about Christine. The latter seems to be the film’s primary point, which (again) might have broader applicability if the filmmakers weren’t conspuously trying to avoid empirical evidence.

It’s shitty as a portrait of craft. As an exploration of acting, it devotes a notable amount of time to superficial actions; ‘getting into character’ is mostly represented by purchasing a wig and buying contact lenses so Sheil might better resemble Chubbuck. She goes to the office building that was once an old TV studio, but doesn’t go inside. Beyond that, Sheil doesn’t say particularly insightful things – which, fair enough, not everyone can explain their own particular genuis. But if what Sheil says isn’t enlightening, neither is the process of watching Sheil say un-insightful things illuminating. The direction and editing doesn’t compensate.

If one takes the movie as examining the process of creation, it doesn’t show much in the way of how historians, directors or film editors continually reflect and revise throughout their work. This is underscored by the film’s best moment of drama: when Sheil meets with people who actually knew Chubbuck, one-time co-workers who challenge Sheil’s assumptions and the filmmakers’ motivations. By that point, however, one is left to wonder why the filmmakers didn’t seek such pertinent input earlier in the process. Whether academia or cinema, you edit your drafts until they’re good, and if you only have enough good footage for a 20-minute documentary than that’s what you make. The movie neither serves as a record of reflective choices made throughout its production, nor gives an indication it was paired down to reflect the best thinking resulting from those choices.

It’s shitty as cinema. Moments of heartfelt reflection on the challenges of acting are displayed – particularly one actress relating an unstable emotional moment to how she imagines Christine may have felt, and an actor’s speaking of the constant rejection that comes with the job. These, however, are in service of a project conspicuously ill-advised. Speculation on Chubbuck is mostly a parade of quasi-professionals venturing obvious, surface level interpretations of her actions. May have extraordinarily hesitant connections to Chubbuck (an employee at the gun store where Chubbuck bought the weapon) who seem reluctant to be interviewed. The ‘scenes’ of Sheil acting as Chubbuck, the ‘film within a film’, are furthermore extraordinarily stilted, shot almost entirely in over-exposed close-up and assembled from clichés and the most literal record. Watch, as Christine’s family tells her they’re worried about her! Watch, as she heroically confronts her editor about bumping her ‘important’ stories! Then, there are the scenes that deliberately blur the line between when we’re seeing ‘Kate’ and ‘Christine’, such as one in which she goes for a swim in her all-important wig, which naturally falls off. The camera lingers. The physical explanation runs: it’s difficult to swim in a wig. The symbolically-minded one goes: it’s because cinema is fake. The wig is the movie in a nutshell – an argument about the artificiality of cinema, as represented by an actress wearing a wig, as evidenced by the fact that the wig is not waterproof.

And then, after all that, the film ends with [spoiler-ish] an admittedly tense final monologue in which Sheil the actor-character looks straight at the camera to decry the ‘fucking sadists’ that are the film’s raison d’etre. To the extent that Sheil and Greene accuse the audience more than themselves, it’s a bold claim to make given how sloppy the whole production has been. And indeed – given scenes that are eminently readable as Sheil’s reluctance to ‘act’ for the camera – there’s certainly a case to be made that she, at least, mostly meant director Robert Greene & co.

But Christine’s biggest problem is that it’s just shitty at being shit. As critic Michael Atkinson suggested, I wouldn’t rule out that all this half-assery is a deliberate create choice, a statement about the laziness of documentaries and biopics. If so, I’m sympathetic to the impulse, but it’s dour, unoriginal, and self-satisfied execution reads like a film-school provocation that should be beneath seasoned professionals. ‘Art’ is short for ‘artifice’. Every documentary –-every film ever – is compromised. These ideas are not novel. They’re premises, not conclusions, and the interesting part comes in what the filmmakers do with them.

There are numerous interesting, innovative documentaries about frustrating subjects and failures. Director Joshua Oppenheimer said of The Look of Silence that he expected his direct subject (a man confronting his brother’s killers) would ‘fail’, but that he expected the way it failed to be interesting. Silence and its predecessor, The Act of Killing, brilliantly used its interviewees’ mix of reluctance and bravado at the murders they committed to illuminate how performances (everyday and cinematic) might and might not be ‘authentic’. Errol Morris’ films routinely interrogate the layers of storytelling at work between his agenda as a filmmaker and his interviewees’ – applied in The Unknown Known (2013) to a frustratingly unreflective Donald Rumsfeld. With regard to the specific subject of acting, Maximillian Schell turned Marlene Dietrich’s willful obscurity and idiosyncratic demands into abstract art in Marlene (1984). Documentaries about questionable movies are genre unto themselves: American Movie (1999), Lost in La Mancha (2002), Overnight (2003), Lost Soul (2014), Audience of One (2007)…

A core message of Kate Plays Christine is that looking at images tells us much less than we might hope. Yet as a statement about the limits of documentary, empathy, and cinema, it is notably constrained by its own ignorance. It takes its own questionable creative choices as evidence that cinema itself is questionable, coming off like the kid in class that calls everyone else is stupid because s/he didn’t do the assigned reading. As an audience, we do trust films to mediate some sort of experience, and they often fall short. Noting that a film is aware of its own artifice, however, isn’t the same as saying it engages with that artifice effectively. Christine, of all films, should know that. Unfortunately, you can’t accuse cinema of deficiency through a film that seems committed not to function.

~

*FYI: Over the years, I’ve used this blog as an irregular dumping ground for various written pieces that otherwise might not have a home.  I still do film reviews over at The MacGuffin, but as the 2017 awards season is gearing up and I’m otherwise working on my PhD, I thought I might distract myself distract myself by writing some reviews of films that have already been critically picked-over. They won’t all be negative – and I’ll admit that the above could be the most negative thing I’ve ever written about a movie, I cringe reading it, and should anyone involved with the production happen across my humble blog I sincerely apologize. Somewhere, I believe, there could be an alternate edit of Kate Plays Christine that is much much better.

Hollywood celebrates itself, bullshit and all. Especially the bullshit. That’s a known fact, and I would have been naïve to go into La La Land not expecting a healthy dose of it. It’s also a cliché that any near-universally acclaimed awards frontrunner can expect a backlash. With this in mind, I’m reluctant to blog here and rain on everyone’s love-fest for a nice little movie my mom will probably see and like. Still, criticism is staking a position, so here goes: La La Land embodies ideas about art I find objectionable in both content and its burgeoning position as an awards contender. There are fine lines between celebrating the dreamers, validating their self-absorption, and exploiting the lot of it for commercial purposes, and La La Land conflates all those impulses – admirable and awful – together in a big ball of masturbatory stardust.

Simply put, in La La Land, creating cinema is closely equated with moving to L.A. and being employed in ‘the industry’, and it gives much less attention to the creative aspect than to the professional one. The result is you’re not rooting for the characters to make meaningful art so much as gain employment in a willfully exploitive industry.

While that may pay the bills and amount to reasonable professional aspirations, as a vision of the pinnacle of artistry I personally find it highly unsympathetic. It never occurs to Stone’s character that she could maybe act in a low-budget, independent production. It never occurs to Gosling’s character that he could reach out to fellow jazz traditionalists. In fact, no one in this movie seem to have ‘friends,’ just romances, flat-mates, relatives, professional connections, dreams and an industry that’s shutting them out. It never occurs to them that they could make art outside the industrial systems against which they’re chafing, and which they are not shown expressing justifiable resentment towards. As the movie being fawned over this year as 2016’s pinnacle of the cinematic art form, it’s frustrating.

There is a certain current awards-season narratives positions Land as a film of privilidge, contrasting Land’s heterosexual white leads against Moonlight’s queer African-American ones. I see the privileges La La Land celebrating as running deeper: the privilege to move to L.A. and spend years *aspiring* to work unreflectively making American commercial culture. Which is to say, I think we’re supposed to watching the opening musical number – set in a routine traffic jam – and think wow, Los Angeles is awesome but difficult, whereas all I could think was – dear crap, how much gas must all these cars be burning? Why exactly should the audience care which of these interchangeable aspirants get to ‘make it’? Couldn’t they maybe take the damn bus and work in regional theater? Why are we celebrating this horror?

To be fair, as an examination of creation, what the film has – and I suspect, a big part of why it has garnered a lot of its support – is sympathy to challenges faced by the laborers on the edge of the Hollywood system. In the words of the movie, it “worships everything and values nothing”. I appreciated how the final half hour (the film’s best section), raises questions about where personal and professional concepts of success might diverge. These challenges often go unacknowledged within films, including films that take place even more narrowly within the Hollywood matrix (2011’s Best Picture winner The Artist, 2016’s Hail, Caesar!), whatever other critiques they raise. Yet when watching those, I get the sense that they more clearly demarcate their subject matter as concerning the Hollywood system unto itself. While La La Land acknowledges the difficulty of Hollywood, it ultimately takes the position of a successful insider who eventually succeeded. Even its nuanced counter-point to Gosling’s jazz traditionalism (“How are you gonna be a revolutionary if you’re such a traditionalist? You hold onto the past, but jazz is about the future.”) is gently voiced by a character whose ‘revolutionary’ thinking is in the service of making a slick commercial product with broad four-quadrant appeal.

It’s here that La La Land’s intense devotion to frustrating ideas about professionalism stand in contrast to the film’s under-developed treatment of art. Gosling and Stone’s characters are clearly passionately committed to their respective ‘ideas’ about jazz and acting, but they never articulate much about what those ideas are. This is similar to criticisms leveled at Damian Chazelle’s previous film, Whiplash (2014), that it didn’t ‘understand’ jazz. I didn’t buy those criticisms because I never thought the audience was supposed to take Whiplash’s leads’ boneheaded ideas about art-as-personal-sacrifice as valid, so much as read them as justifications for a mutually self-destructive relationship. It produces artistic results at a great cost. I can’t argue, however, that La La Land shares that same sense of perspective. As such, I’m inclined to suggest that putting an Ingrid Bergman poster on your wall or watching Rebel without a Cause are actions so iconic that they’re largely bereft of meaning, and merely clocking in the requisite name-check doesn’t entitle you to shit.

Similarly, there’s little attention to the process of artistry (in which, I find Richard Brody more convincing than I did in regard to Whiplash). Here, let’s examine how the film depicts the art of writing, gallingly underdeveloped in light of Gosling’s assertion that you “need to see” jazz to understand it. Late in the story, Stone’s character writes a play. It’s a one woman show, based on her childhood, called Goodbye, Boulder City – the individuated narcissism of such creative choices going unremarked upon in La La Land itself. We get only fleeting glimpses of the play’s creation and production, mostly related to her character announcing ‘I’m writing a play’, though one could surmise it’s drawn from various anecdotes she mentions throughout the movie. We see nothing of her artistic choices, how she has shaped a particular telling of her story for the stage, the edits she made and the revisions she did. The film cuts between her preparing to perform and its reception afterwards, further reinforcing the play’s primary value in terms of its relation to industry. The play is treated as valuable not as an act of Stone’s self-expression, nor as art unto itself worth of audience attention. Rather, its value is that it’s an audition piece for the movie industry. Her childhood, the subject of the play, is by extension most valuable as preparation for Los Angeles; leaving the city to return to her hometown is equated with abandoning her art altogether.

Here, I partially realize how different my own preferred cinematic myths are. Growing up, I romanticized the origin stories of directors like Peter Jackson, Robert Rodriguez, and Sam Raimi who spent weekends covered in fake blood, with limited budget and no distribution guarantees, working on masterpieces far outside the Hollywood system. Other B-movie directors who never ‘made it’ within the system still made films – terrible ones, sometimes, but they made something and showed a lot of heart in the process. In that mode, I thought 2016’s Sing Street a delightful film in which Irish teenagers start a band, fight the power, make some listenable-but-imperfect songs, and follow their dreams against long odds.

So anyway – what I’m saying is, follow your dreams, find a job, and make your art – and by all means buy tickets to the work of the other creative laborers who do. Nonetheless, Hollywood is but one exceptionally-privileged venue of many, and don’t equate its commercial constraints with what cinematic art is or should be. See an independent film; make one of your own. America’s media industry doesn’t need more validation from within or without.

Photo from CRISP’s blog post about the summer school

In June I attend the third annual doctoral summer school from the Centre for Research into Information, Surveillance & Privacy (CRISP) in Edinburgh, Scotland. My PhD program assigned me to share my experiences for others who may wish to join summer school four next year – or five, or 55. As we all know, every byte is forever and will return to haunt us – in its worst possible, out-of-context light – just before we finalize employment contracts, wedding licenses, bids to become head-of-state, etc…

Or not – the longevity of digital information is complicated in practice (as is what we can do to protect it). I attended the CRISP school because (on a related note) I’ve read a fair amount of academic literature about privacy, broadly defined as individuals’ control over their personal space and information. I went to the summer school hoping to gain a perspective on privacy related to surveillance – the acts of observation (via garden-variety voyeurism, CCTV, digital meta-data collection, etc) often thought to endanger privacy.

In regards to that surveillance perspective I hoped to gain, thinking in terms of security helped place me in a more ‘active’ head-space. Privacy is often envisioned as a defensive concern, related to preventing others from gaining access to oneself. Reflecting on the action of surveillance reminded me that many privacy measures are no less proactive. Furthermore, it reminded me that the action of surveillance is situated within its own concerns, which are not directly conceptually opposed to privacy. As CRISP academic and school organizer Charles Raab argued in a paper and summer school seminar, privacy and security (the freedom from danger often invoked for surveillance) are not opposite poles on the same sliding scale. One doesn’t necessarily gain security by giving up privacy, or lose security by enhancing privacy. This fits in with critiques I’ve been developing to present at another summer school in August  on Privacy and Identity Management.

Of course, volumes have been written on these topics – the above is merely my own immediate take-away. Just what ‘surveillance studies’  is was a perfunctory controversy on day one, as we were all jokingly asked if we considered ourselves ‘surveillance scholars’ to an (expected) lukewarm reception. This wasn’t for lack of interest (we all chose to spend the week there, after all) but rather a statement of the complexity of positioning oneself in a multi-disciplinary field. Just what are we as professionals, and how do we study whatever we study?

While this identity anxiety was expected, the week’s conception of multi-disciplinarily was a welcome refresher – as was the flexibility in what surveillance studies can be. I earned my bachelors’ degree at an American liberal arts school, where taking courses on a variety of subjects is the modus operandi, all rooted in humanities-style critical thinking. By contrast, I’ve found that some of the UK’s disciplinary heritages to be more singular – in the case of my own department, reflecting the underlying epistemologies of Computer Science, Human Factors, and Human-Computer Interaction. I felt at home in a place that incorporated technical discussions; a panel of journalists and activists; a film screening (2006’s Galsgow-set Red Road); and two talks that related theology to surveillance. At the CRISP school and July’s Digital Economy Network Summer School, I further noted that the American imports (either academic staff at UK institutions or invited speakers) tended to talk about their teaching as a particularly integral element to their careers (often discussing it in relationship to their own research), which further made me feel a bit ‘at home’ in regard to academic values.

This attention to breadth also speaks to the CRISP week’s overall quality. It was apparent that everyone involved cared about fostering an informative experience for us students, who chose to make the trek from across Europe, North America and Oceania (Asia, Africa, and South America were not represented in students and under-represented in content, in contrast to my current home at the Horizon CDT – where the student body is nearly 50% Chinese if one considers it as part of the same whole as the IDIC program). It was well-scheduled, alternating between seminars and coffee, with a field trip mid-week to Glasgow Community Safety’s CCTV command centre. Even general seminars on topics like ‘publishing in top journals’ and ‘research ethics’ managed to keep a personal and practical voice and focus. Some bits of useful advice I’ll pass on: 1) stop reading when you’re only making marginal gains. 2) Become a part of the review process if you really want to learn the intricacies of how a journal’s conventions. And two talks by journalist Duncan Campbell about mass surveillance (who was prosecuted in 1978 for journalism related to the publicizing the existence of GCHQ – who today, together with various international intelligence organizations, are likely collecting your data as we speak) reminded me of the importance of well-founded paranoia all over again.

Furthermore, I have to hand it to CRISP for its creative branding: part of its promotional propaganda includes ‘CRISP privacy devices’ (‘do not disturb’ hotel-style door-hanger) and packages of CRISP-branded crisps.

Anyway – it was a great summer school, and do consider it if you’re a PhD student considering learning more about surveillance, information and privacy!

I’m an American living in the UK, conducting research on how refugees use social media. I grew up in small town Iowa. It’s a distinct, stable and generally friendly place, surrounded by fields that stretch in all directions for lengths comparable in size to the entirety of England.

I’ve viewed connecting my present life and work to where I grew up as something of an opportunity and necessity.  About 3,000 people live in my hometown. Contrary to stereotype, supposedly ‘isolated’ areas often have complex relationships with the world at large. I’ve met Clarion friends (and friends of friends) traveling and living abroad. For locals, the international residents they encounter are primarily Mexicans who have arrived to work in the local industrial farms and foreign exchange students who spend a year at a time at the local high school.

Meanwhile, America is highly mediated society, the vast majority of which is produced in coastal centers like New York and L.A. These films, television shows, news programs and publications filter through to the massive interior, a highly unequal communication relationship that, I feel, discourages locals from feeling meaningful agency in the world at large. You hear many things in a small town; others scarcely have much interest to listen. At the national level, however, the current refugee crisis is partially caused by American foreign policy that was enacted by official elected by wide swathes of the country. When I return, I’m dismayed at the casual national security fears, underscored by the ambiance of Fox News on public television sets – the sense of threat that is normalized amid the geo-political safety of America’s interior.  It is particularly obscene to see refugees, travelling on immediate threat to their lives, being publicly dismissed en masse on the unprecedented contingency that some might be terrorists.

That’s its own form of privilege – the fear of the abstract and distant – and freedom of travel is among mine. I was on a leisure trip to Budapest, Hungary, last August when a friend’s friend (Mark Szabo) showed me some paintings some refugee children had made with his help. The kids and other refugees had been staying outdoors in II. János Pál pápa tér (Pope John Paul II Park). On August 7, Mark and a group of his friends had decided to spend the day painting. When one of the children asked him for a slice of melon, the day’s activities grew to incorporate them.

The artist, with the picture. Photo by David Bodnar.

For Mark, the painting was one in a stack. For me, it was not particularly unique either; any child could have drawn it. I got it framed for my hometown in the hopes that in displaying it, I could build a bit of international empathy. I don’t want to overstate my involvement in the picture’s creation or a contentious local situation I briefly visited. The frame of this blog post is, in part, a fulfillment of academic credit. Seeing the painting in a locally-crafted wooden frame looks obscene, the contrast between the sturdy woodwork of the frame and the moment of instability it captures. But such is art; it is valuable because we have decided its value; and the figurative or literal frame, as Erving Goffman famously described, is a what gives us that point of reference. It took a photo of the dead body of three-year old Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi (far from the first child to die) to give international media an empathetic rallying point late last year; here, with this picture, and the story of its transit, I thought I could build a more direct, albeit modest, bridge between my hometown and a crisis that will last until some form of long-term settlement prospects are realized.

Budapest, summer 2015, marked a unique moment in the ongoing migration. In late August, Germany announced it would welcome refugees.  Many who had been staying in Hungary immediately boarded westbound trains. The painting represents a moment that has now passed into memory. The artist who painted this was among the over one million displaced persons who crossed into Europe that year. These charts from the BBC explain the scope of the ongoing ‘crisis’, which – despite its recent increasing prominence in the news – is not new. The refugees in Europe represent a small percentage of people around the world displaced by conflict and natural disasters, which totaled 65.3 million by the end of 2015, up from the mid-2015 totals of 59.5 million. Nonetheless, just 272 refugees had gone through the initial settlement process as of the end of 2015. As we approach the middle of 2016, few have been offered opportunities for long-term settlement. Many are still living in temporary camps.

The painting I had framed was displayed at my local high school for the last several weeks of school in May. It then went on display at their annual summer “Festival in the Park” – celebrating the 151^th anniversary of the town’s founding; it was incorporated one year before my historically-recent ancestors’ moved from Germany to America. From there, it will be circulate the local churches throughout the summer, the town ministerial committee having offered to guide its movements. An article was written about in the local newspaper, where I served as editor and primary reporter in 2014 before starting my PhD at Horizon.

I’ve also perhaps realized something of the practicalities of artwork, and why one would want to put a piece on ‘loan’ rather than donate. Permanent gifts may both create an awkward storage challenge for the recipients, one that may end with a permanent installation in the Town Hall janitor’s closet. So a loan is a way still have a bit of agency back there, even as (in another sense) it’s also a reminder of the limits of my tether to life back home. But life itself is made up of connections like those, and I hope the painting helps a bit to make more visible.