Highly recommended: Keep Quiet

On Netflix now. (Incidentally, the local tabby was entranced by the Philip Sheppard soundtrack.)

Interlude – Sonata for a good man

Recommended: Wild Tales (2014)

I loved this film despite hating its underlying premise.



As the title suggests, and the opening credits make explicit, Wild Tales is based on the notion that we’re a heartbeat away from “regressing” to our animal nature. As expected, this nature is characterized by: violence, vengeance, irrationality, lust, the reflexive defense of kin and tribe, greed, and gluttony.

This sort of speciesism – which itself underlies a great deal of racism, sexism, and political repression - we can and should avoid, particularly in works that aspire to political satire or social criticism. Director Damián Szifrón has discussed the film’s theme:

Despite the clear common theme of violence and vengeance, what connects the accounts, according to the director, is ‘the fuzzy boundary that separates civilization from barbarism, the vertigo of losing your temper, and the undeniable pleasure of losing control’. This is explored through the concept that human beings have animalistic features. Szifron considers the main difference between human and animals is the capacity one has to restrain oneself as opposed to animals who are guided by their instincts. Humans ‘have a fight or flee mechanism, but it comes with a very high cost. Most of us live with the frustration of having to repress oneself, but some people explode. This is a movie about those who explode’. It deals with ‘daily life’ aspects and ‘is a movie about the desire for freedom, and how this lack of freedom, and the rage and anguish it produces, can cause us to run off the rails’. The main issue, according to Szifron, ‘is the pleasure of reacting, the pleasure of reacting toward injustice’. (my emphasis)

The Freudian distinction between a repressed “civilization” and a “barbarous” freedom, in addition to isolating the human characters with their alleged instincts and drives, presents an obstacle to working out a real approach to political freedom and social justice. As I said, I loved the film, but it could have been a much stronger work of art, a stinging and biting social satire, had it questioned and challenged received wisdom about “civilization” and “barbarism,” “human” and “animal,” rather than reproducing it.

Recommended: Testament of Youth

Recommended: Sherpa

Tremendous documentary, now on the Discovery Channel. (One aspect I emphatically do not recommend are the subtitles. Why anyone would place small white subtitles with no box behind them over a snowy, icy landscape is beyond me.)

The Invitation

Truly tense and suspenseful. Fascinating premise. Psychologically and culturally rich.



(I had a choice between two bad trailers – one that gives too much away and one that leaves you with almost no sense of what the movie’s about. I went with the latter.)

Recommended: Blame It on Fidel (2006)

HIGHLY recommended: Hearts and Minds

I’ve seen documentaries so obscure I can’t even find them on the internet, and yet somehow until recently I hadn’t seen one of the best of all time, Peter Davis’ 1974 Hearts and Minds.



The moment that best captures the spirit of US imperialism during the past century or so is a scene at a Revolutionary War reenactment in Croton, New York. A reenactor is asked to think about commonalities, to consider the Vietnamese in terms of revolutionary anti-colonial struggle. The young man responds derisively: “Are you kidding? Oriental politics? Don’t put me on!”

So much of US imperialism rests on this assumption: that people in most of the world have no politics. They can be clients, stooges, pawns, threats, enemies, rebels, savages, primitives, labor, markets, religious zealots, henchmen, fanatics, or victims, but they don’t – and can’t – have genuine politics, understood in the same terms as our own.

The creepiest ad

The advertisements featured in the 2004 mockumentary C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America, an alternate history in which the Confederacy has won the US Civil War, are among the movie’s most striking elements:







They hit home through the familiarity of their form and their resemblance to real commercials today (as the first video above notes, some are based on real twentieth-century brands; the reference of the last should be obvious).

For those who know the reality of dairy and meat production, the new Freschetta Pizza ad evokes a somewhat similar dystopian sensation. Meet Tilly Mae:



Commercials like this seem to be reviving tropes - like the plantation “family” and the “happy darky” - developed in the eras of slavery and Jim Crow. This seems particularly to be the case, for some reason, when they feature cows and chickens.

The best movies I saw in 2015

Leviathan



Spotlight



Amy



Phoenix



Honorable mentions:

Foxcatcher



Elevator to the Gallows

Venezuela in the mesh

Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1948 In the Mesh – a scenario for a film which was never produced as such – isn’t his best work. His emerging themes of political responsibility and the use of violence in liberation movements are largely sidelined in favor of a melodramatic portrayal of a love quadrangle (which itself is marred by sexism), the characters and their relationships are simplistically drawn, and many of the events are improbable.

But it’s of interest for two reasons. First, for its suggestions of experimental film techniques, marking a different artistic path for Sartre, who preferred “transparent” writing that didn’t draw attention to itself. Film, it seems, freed him to try new creative approaches. More important, for the premise of the film, even if it wasn’t realized as well as it could have been. It was prescient for 1948 and is of continuing relevance today.

The movie is set in a small, oil-rich country. It begins with a revolutionary storming of the presidential palace, and the action follows a hastily convened trial of the overthrown president for his seven years of repressive rule. We understand through trial testimony and flashbacks that he himself had been a revolutionary leader who rose to power in similar circumstances, and is seen to have betrayed the very movement he once led. While he came to power with a promise to nationalize the oil fields, he hasn’t done so. He’s restricted the press and refused to call free elections. He’s undertaken a mechanization of agriculture in the face of mass opposition from the country’s farmers and violently repressed their rebellion. The insurgents demand explanations.

We learn over time that he was operating under powerful constraints from the start. Moments after entering office, he was informed by the representatives of the government controlling oil concessions – presumably the US, but never named – that any nationalization would be regarded as an act of war and would result in an invasion and/or occupation. All of his actions, in his view, have responded to this dreadful possibility. He couldn’t nationalize, and democracy would have led immediately to legislative decisions to do just that. He was caught in the mesh. The only option he saw was to stall long enough for the superpower to become involved in a dispute with the other superpower and lose interest, which could take years but appeared to him the best of the very limited options.

Sartre set the film for some reason in Europe, but it would have more plausibly taken place in Iran or another less powerful nation of the global south. The constraints on movements and governments attempting to claim popular sovereignty, nationalize national resources, and institute social welfare policies in the face of US imperialism became all too clear in the years that followed. Outright invasion and occupation have been joined by covert actions: staged and assisted coups, the installation of puppet regimes, destabilization, underground support for the rightwing opposition, economic and resource warfare, financial warfare, diplomatic warfare, propaganda and (social) media warfare,…

Venezuela is facing these offensives, and has been since 1999 when it openly defied US dictates. Reading Sartre’s scenario, you wonder why the leader didn’t tell his comrades about the threat or include them in the decision, why he didn’t reach out to those in other countries in a similar situation. But that was to come in reality. In response to Venezuela’s defiance, as Sartre foresaw, the attacks never end, or even abate. A news search for the country reveals a constant barrage from the US government and its subservient media. Determined to have their way – or what they foolishly believe is their way - they won’t stop.

Whatever happens in today’s legislative – not presidential, as the English-language corporate media would have us believe – elections, the one certainty in the immediate future is that Venezuela will continue to be caught in, and its people to struggle against, the mesh.

Another round

More of this nonsense. I would ask whether people really believe xenophobia or “mocking the death of Aylan Kurdi” is the point of the cartoons, but I’m all too aware that self-satisfied, self-righteous ignorance (and its cynical exploitation) is the norm.

Also disappointing is how many people think journalism consists of pitting a series of tweets attacking the magazine against a series of tweets defending it (or worse, simply reporting the allegedly justified outrage). It hasn’t occurred to these people to try to understand the satirical purpose of the images, by, say, reading the magazine or seeking comment from those who are more informed? Of course not. What was I thinking? Reporting on and goading a social-media mob while briefly alluding to a few people suggesting the images are being misread is all that’s required.

Well, at least there’s this.

Quote of the day

“Over the past couple of years, SeaWorld’s visitor numbers have fallen, its stock has plummeted, lawsuits have confronted their business practices, legislation has challenged what goes on at Shamu Stadium, and reported profits were down 84% on the previous year.

People ask me whether this is a win. I can only say that it was inevitable, and that I hope it’s only the beginning. Today’s kids are increasingly becoming part of the ‘I can’t believe we used to do that’ generation. They know that killer whales are not suitable for captivity.”

- Gabriela Cowperthwaite, director of Blackfish

Pinkwashing Exposed: Seattle Fights Back!

I just learned of the film from listening to this interesting interview with its director Dean Spade. Here’s the trailer, but you can watch the whole thing – it’s a little under an hour – on Vimeo for free, or at the film site, or right here:

Pinkwashing Exposed: Seattle Fights Back! from Pinkwashing Exposed on Vimeo.

I think Spade did a great job with it. As he describes:

This film is useful, I hope, because it tells a story of what some local activists did to speak truth back to propaganda, and how we made our city confront uncomfortable truths. It doesn’t spare the details of the backlash - and it was ugly - because being prepared for backlash is part of doing work against well-organized opposition. But I think it demonstrates that despite the backlash, our work built a great deal of awareness and relationships and strengthened our resistance network.

For more about pinkwashing (origins), see here.

And because I still love it:



And a live version I just learned of:



“Because there is nothing hot about cruising in an apartheid state.”

Quotes of the day

“If you identify yourself with something for so long, and suddenly you think of yourself as not that thing, it leaves a bit of space.” - Paul Haggis, quoted in Going Clear, p. 362

Truthout features an interview with Robert Whitaker and Lisa Cosgrove, authors of the new book Psychiatry under the Influence: Institutional Corruption, Social Injury, and Prescriptions for Reform (which has recently been added to my list of recommended readings in psychiatry, skepticism, and social justice). Bruce Levine asks the two about the possibilities of reform coming from within psychiatry, in light of the depth of the institutional corruption, the cognitive dissonance it entails, and the tendency among psychiatrists in response to “construct a narrative that protects their self-image.” They both answer that the chances seem slim.

I share their pessimism (which isn’t a general pessimism, I should emphasize, but specifically skepticism about moves for reform coming from within the institution itself – they do believe change can come from outside). The quotes by past presidents of the American Psychiatric Association at annual meetings that Whitaker and Cosgrove provide late in the book struck me as well, especially because I read it around the same time as I read Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (2013). The quotes all evince an effort to construct a particular narrative and collective self-image, to cast off doubts and criticisms. Two that stood out:

Herbert Pardes in 1990:

Psychiatry in 1990 is at the height of its powers. We have had a spectacular decade… Psychiatry works, psychiatry is respected for it, and we can hold our heads high.

Jeffrey Lieberman in 2014:

We have been waiting, many of us our whole lives, for the chance to change the way the world thinks of psychiatry and the way we think of ourselves as psychiatrists. Let’s use the momentum we have to plunge ahead into the next year with our confidence brimming, our energy renewed, and our sights set high…this is our opportunity to change the practice and perception of psychiatry for the better and as never before. Last year, standing on the stage in San Francisco, I told you that ‘our time has come’. Today, I say to you that our future is now!

These speeches remind me of little as much as the meetings and rallies shown in Alex Gibney’s documentary version of Going Clear. I don’t believe the similarity is entirely superficial, and there’s a tragic element in both cases. How difficult it must be to have dedicated years of your life to an institution; to realize it’s corrupt, built on a harmful mythology, and has led you to act unethically; and to face up to that knowledge. What a struggle not to let yourself continue to be seduced by the self-serving narrative that would put your mind and conscience at ease. And how rare are the people like Haggis who can bring themselves to do it.

A narrative that is regularly filled with distortions and misinformation

Robert Whitaker writes about how John Nash’s story has been dishonestly and disrespectfully hijacked in “Reflections on a Beautiful Mind”:

…[A]s our country mourns Nash’s death, I think the story of the movie serves as a reminder of how our societal thinking about psychiatric drugs arises from a narrative that is regularly filled with distortions and misinformation. Think of “drugs that fix chemical imbalances like insulin for diabetes,” and of studies that appeared in the scientific literature during the 1990s that told of how the atypicals were so much better than the first generation of psychiatric drugs, and of Russell Crowe in the movie A Beautiful Mind, and you can see a script that tells of a medical breakthrough and, if truth be told, it is that script that has governed our society’s “treatment” of those diagnosed with schizophrenia for the past 20 years.

I wrote in 2013 about the film’s false claim, its likely consequences, and the responsibility of writers and artists to speak the truth and expose lies.

Black Ties Matter

Jessica Williams gets it just right:*

The Daily Show
Daily Show Full Episodes, More Daily Show Videos, Comedy Central Full Episodes

*(except the capital, in the global context, encompasses much more of the country)

Cowspiracy directors Kip Anderson and Keegan Kuhn on Democracy Now!

“[N]o matter what issue you care about, whether it’s ocean dead zones, species extinction, habitat destruction, rain forest [destruction], literally the list goes on and on, animal agriculture is at the forefront of the issue. Why aren’t these organizations talking about it?” - Keegan Kuhn

Read or watch the interview here, or watch below:



You can watch Cowspiracy online for a small donation at the film site. I haven’t yet, but plan to soon.

Going Clear and Psychiatry Under the Influence

I can’t remember when I’ve been so excited about the upcoming release of two works harshly critical of two bitter enemies. Possibly never.

This Sunday, March 29, HBO will premiere Alex Gibney’s documentary about Scientology, Going Clear.

Just a few weeks later, on April 23, Robert Whitaker and Lisa Cosgrove are set to release a new book, Psychiatry Under the Influence: Institutional Corruption, Social Injury, and Prescriptions for Reform.

In this post, Whitaker discusses his reaction to former APA president Jeffrey Lieberman’s new book Shrinks, which he characterizes as a narrative “quite unmoored from science and history.” He describes it as “an institutional self-portrait. What you hear in this book is the story that the APA and its leaders have been telling to themselves for some time.”

In this sense, I feel sorry for people like Lieberman. Even if he continues to believe, and continues to convince others, that he and his colleagues are heroes of health and science, that isn’t how they’ll be remembered.

On the other hand… It’s admirable to have a good-faith belief, test it, learn that it was wrong, and share that information - that’s a contribution to science, and negative results aren’t generally treated with enough respect. It’s not admirable to test your belief, learn that it was wrong, and publicly pretend that this didn’t happen. It’s not admirable to continue to cling publicly to a scientifically discredited claim. It’s not admirable to cling to this discredited claim to secure riches, prestige, and authority. It’s not admirable to use this discredited claim to gain power over others and violate their rights. It’s not admirable to ignore the evidence of harms while presenting yourself as a hero for advancing and institutionalizing this claim long after it’s been discredited.

May both of these pseudoscientific cults rot.

Citizenfour and Online Covert Action

Of course, everyone should see Citizenfour:



Looking at the summary of disclosures since 2013, I was reminded (?) about the revelations at the Intercept a year ago about the GCHQ unit JTRIG (Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group) and its program of “Online Covert Action.”

Glenn Greenwald wrote at the time:

Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. To see how extremist these programs are, just consider the tactics they boast of using to achieve those ends: “false flag operations” (posting material to the internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and posting “negative information” on various forums.

…The broader point is that, far beyond hacktivists, these surveillance agencies have vested themselves with the power to deliberately ruin people’s reputations and disrupt their online political activity even though they’ve been charged with no crimes, and even though their actions have no conceivable connection to terrorism or even national security threats.

…Whatever else is true, no government should be able to engage in these tactics: what justification is there for having government agencies target people – who have been charged with no crime – for reputation-destruction, infiltrate online political communities, and develop techniques for manipulating online discourse? But to allow those actions with no public knowledge or accountability is particularly unjustifiable.

It seems that for some reason this information didn’t fully register with me at the time. Naturally, it’s of great interest to me. Two observations:

First, corporations do this, too.

Second, seeing the documents (like the set of slides Greenwald links to – “The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations”) evokes a mixture of rage and…sadness. Someone put this presentation together, and this is actual work people do. Like the employees of the repressive secret services of East Germany or Iran, they have, for whatever reason, chosen to devote years if not their lives to this. In some cases, people have dedicated their professional knowledge and understanding of psychology and sociology not to serving real needs, but to manipulating, deceiving, and destroying people in the service of the state. This is their legacy. It’s pathetic.