Quote of the Week

Perhaps the biggest reason why intellectuals excoriated entertainment was that they understood all too well their own precariousness in a world dominated by it. For whatever the overt content of any particular work, entertainment as a whole promulgated an unmistakable theme, one that took dead aim at the intellectuals’ most cherished values. That theme was the triumph of the senses over the mind, of emotion over reason, of chaos over order, or the id over the superego, of Dionysian abandon of Apollonian harmony. Entertainment was Plato’s worst nightmare. It deposed the rational and enthroned the sensational and in so doing deposed the intellectual minority and enthroned the unrefined majority.
--Neal Gabler, Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality

Book of the Week

I probably should resist the urge to comment on this book, given the fact that I've held enough blue-collar jobs in my lifetime to qualify as a blue collar intellectual in my own right, but I must admit that I liked it anyway. I kinda wished it went into more detail on certain subjects but it still delivered what it promised.

Quote of the Week

An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.
--Charles Bukowski, Notes of a Dirty Old Man

TV Quote of the Week

There’s one thing I learned, Lieutenant, is that we all have a cross to bear. Including those of us who seem most fortunate. My problem is just the opposite. Born smart, as they say. A blessing, you’d think. I had no real childhood, I was an imitation adult, because that’s what was expected of me. Most people don’t like smart people. Most children despise smart children. So early on I had to hide my so-called gift and conceal it from my own brothers and sisters, my classmates, in the service. Painful. Lonely years.
--Theodore Bikel, Columbo, The Bye-Bye Sky High I.Q. Murder Case"

Quote of the Week

Intellectual brilliance is no guarantee against being dead wrong.
--Carl Sagan

TV Quote of the Week

Here I’ve been talking with the most intelligent people in the world and I never even noticed.
--Peter Falk, Columbo, "The Bye-Bye Sky High I.Q. Murder Case"

Movie Quote of the Week

She’s taking the world away from the intellectuals and giving it back to the apes.
--Leslie Howard, The Petrified Forest (1936)

Dysgenics for Dummies: Idiocracy

The main problem with being a smart person like myself who has been trained since childhood by his Mensa member father to think for himself is that one doesn’t always like the same movies that other smart people like. Or at least one doesn’t look at such movies the same way that other smart people prefer to look at them.

Take, for instance, Idiocracy, the latest effort from film auteur Mike Judge. The standard take on this movie from most smart people is that this film is a daring effort at exposing the current American trend of “dumbing down” and where it is likely to lead us. Of course, a truly smart person, or at least one who is familiar with the concept of lateral thinking, can’t help but wonder if a movie arguing against dumbing down is all that daring. Has there ever been a film that argued in favor of dumbing down? A film that argued that we need more stupid people in this country or that our education system asks way too much of its students?

Okay, it could be argued that such films exist. But they are not necessarily the type of films people think of when they think of such films. Good Will Hunting, for example, is generally considered a smart person’s movie but it hardly presents smart people in a flattering light and indeed, the conclusion of that movie would seem to suggest that smart people would be a lot better off working on their people skills and making out with the opposite sex than they would be if they just concentrated on increasing their academic skills. Apparently, it is okay to be smart, that film argues, as long as you don’t actually do anything beneficial with your smarts apart from using them to argue with intellectual wise guys and impress women.

Of course, that is not the type of movies smart people like to think about when they’re looking for examples of anti-smart-people sentiment in America. And anyway, if such people were truly smart, they would have read enough to realize that most of the issues dealt with in Idiocracy are not exactly new. People have been fretting about the possible mental inferiority of future Americans since the turn of the century. Only back then it was argued that it would be recent immigrants that would lead to the intellectual downfall of America. The idea was that mentally inferior immigrants were outbreeding intellectually superior native-born Americans and that we were doomed to become a nation of morons because of this.

Of course, many of those “mentally inferior” immigrants eventually raised children who proved to be just as intellectually capable as any college-educated native-born. Indeed, it soon became obvious that the differences between such immigrants and the natives often had more to do with class, language, and education than with anything else. If you were born into the right class, spoke good English and had parents who could afford to provide you with a college education, you were automatically presumed to be smarter than people who were born into the “wrong” class, spoke little if any English, and had parents who could barely afford to send you to public school, much less college. Of course, this is not how America was supposed to work, but unfortunately, few smart people of the time bothered to argue that point. Perhaps because they were afraid that by doing so, they would run the risk of not being considered smart any more.

Of course, there are people who still think that way today, the most obvious example being former U.S. English member John Tanton. Like Judge, Tanton liked to argue that America ran the risk of being overrun by mental morons because all the dumb people were producing babies faster than the smart people. The only difference being the two being that Mike Judge does not pretend to single out a particular ethnic group to blame for such a result while Tanton preferred to single out Hispanic immigrants -- especially illegal Hispanic immigrants -- as being the “dumb people” in question.

To be fair, science fiction author C. M. Kornbluth made a similar argument to Judge’s in his famous short story, “The Marching Morons.” Like Judge -- and unlike Tanton -- Kornbluth refused to put the blame on any one group for the dumbing down of future America. Indeed, Kornbluth could not resist hinting that the few smart people who existed in such an America were likely to be racially mixed. Nor did Kornbluth pretend that any attempt to correct such a situation would be bloodless. Indeed, it could be argued that “The Marching Morons” was originally intended to satirize the eugenics arguments of the early twentieth century and that the true point of the story was not to warn against a tide of overly fertile dumb people but to warn that any attempt to come up with a “final solution” for that problem would be far worse than the actual problem.

In any event, Kornbluth wrote his short story back in the 1950s which puts Judge’s Idiocracy in the odd position of being a wildly imaginative restatement of a story that has already been told. To be fair, Judge’s version is a lot more light-hearted than Kornbluth’s story and has a happier ending. Moreover, he tosses in a lot of modern references for the benefit of those movie-goers who would just as soon not read anything from the 1950s -- or for that matter, not read anything, period. Indeed, it could be argued that Judge essentially “borrows” the concept of the original Kornbluth story and “dumbs it down” for the sake of twenty-first century moviegoers. Moviegoers who never once question how a society of people too dumb to figure out a jigsaw puzzle can maintain complicated machinery like computers and electric cars. Of course, some might argue that to consider such issues in a movie like this is to spend way too much time thinking. And, of course, the last thing Judge apparently wants viewers of this film to do is to think.

Or at least he does not want them to think too much. Otherwise, they might miss out on his movie’s message -- which is really funny when you think about it…

TV Quote of the Week

Evidently, quality of wits is more important than quantity.
--Derek Jacobi, I, Claudius, “Fool's Luck”

Rules of the Internet (Reglas del Internet)

1. The same person who complains about having been insulted during adolescence due to his or her appearance will inevitably feel obliged to insult the appearance of various celebrities on a regular basis.

2. The same blogger who gave a rave review to the latest Hollywood film denouncing materialism will devote more than a few blog posts to bragging about all the nice stuff he or she has.

3. The same person who regularly denounces people for using dirty political tactics will routinely write about certain political candidates in the nastiest way possible.

4. The same person who regularly raves about lowbrow films will be the same person who complains about the large number of dumb movies released by Hollywood.

5. The same person who regularly ridicules all the people who went shopping on Black Friday will inevitably spend a ton of money while shopping online on Cyber Monday.

6. The same person who regularly complains about the growing trend toward anti-intellectualism in American society is the same person who will rarely admit to reading a book that wasn’t written by J. K. Rowling.

7. The same person who talks about Hollywood not spending enough time dwelling on class issues will also complain about having to rub elbows with the masses at the local movie theatre.

8. The same person who regularly writes about how stupid religious people are will regularly champion lowbrow movies.

9. The same blogger who brags about how little he or she cares what people thinks about him or her will inevitably take offense at any readers who choose to qualify a compliment by noting that they don’t always agree with the blogger in question.

10. The same blogger who complains about Hollywood filmmakers interjecting politics into their work will inevitably interject politics into his or her work…

Not So Quiet Desperation

Cultural conservatives always tend to go on and on about the good old days when Hollywood movies respected flyover country (the land between LA and New York) yet some of the most negative portraits of such country pop up in many an old movie made in the very era they wax nostalgic over.

For example, it’s difficult to watch a film like 1936's The Petrified Forest and not get the feeling that the audience was meant to root for the female lead character (a bookish waitress played by Bette Davis) to leave Arizona and fulfill her dream of traveling to France. The film doesn’t exactly mock America but it doesn’t pretend that Davis’s character -- Gabrielle Maple -- is particularly happy where she’s at and it’s perhaps no coincidence that the character most mocked in this movie is a self-styled patriot while the most respected character describes himself as “an American once removed.”

The Petrified Forest is most famous today for being the movie in which actor Humphrey Bogart first achieved stardom. Bogart plays the heavy, a criminal fugitive named Duke Mantee whose gang hides out in the diner/gas station where Gabrielle Maple works. Also present at the diner are Maple’s grandfather, Maple’s would-be suitor, and a drifter (played by Leslie Howard) who captures Maple’s fancy. Eventually a rich couple and their chauffeur get roped into the mess and although words are exchanged between many a character, the main conflict proves to be a war of words between Howard's character -- Alan Squier -- and Duke Mantee, a conflict which eventually resolves itself in a way that I dare not give away.

Alan Squier -- a former expat who is currently hitchhiking his way across the country -- is most interesting because it’s the type of character one rarely sees in movies anymore: a self-styled intellectual who is self-aware enough to be humble and sensitive enough to be more attractive to a local girl than a local football hero. Yes, it’s tempting to see this character as little more than a lonely screenwriter’s wish-fulfillment fantasy but the dialogue between him and Maple actually proves quite interesting. The subjects Maple and he discuss in their conversation (fate, nature, genetics, etc.) rarely get mentioned in movies nowadays and I for one found it refreshing to hear such people talk on and on without once feeling the need to throw in a pop culture reference so that the average movie-goer won't feel left out.

It’s even more refreshing to see Ms. Davis prove her versatility by playing a character so vastly different than the role she last played with Mr. Howard -- that of the scornful waitress in Of Human Bondage -- though, of course, that movie would not be the last film in which Ms. Davis proved such talent.

Of course, this movie was based on a play, and it might be argued that the movie could afford to be more literate than the average modern movie because it was based on a property that had already proved itself commercially on stage. But it’s still refreshing to see such a movie in existence and it’s a pity one doesn’t see movies like this more often.

The Difference Between Smart People and Really Smart People

Smart people like to hang out with other smart people in the hope that the intelligence of the other smart people will rub off on them.

Really smart people tend to be able to learn from anyone -- and tend to hang out with anybody who treats them with respect.

Smart people tend to make a big deal about whatever book, record or movie that is currently fashionable.

Really smart people tend to realize that fashions come and go and choose to develop their own tastes in books, records and movies.

Smart people tend to look down upon people who can’t afford the same things that they can -- and pride themselves on being early adaptors.

Really smart people realize that some people can’t always afford the same things that they can -- and take little pride in being early adaptors.

Smart people look scornfully at people who live in certain neighborhoods.

Really smart people know that a person’s character matters a lot more than where he or she lives.

Smart people tend to believe that other smart people ideally look and talk the same way they do.

Really smart people tend to know that smart people can look or sound like anybody. And that only a dumb person makes assumptions about the intelligence of a person they don’t know that well.

Smart people pride themselves on knowing things other people don’t know and tend to tease others about their ignorance.

Really smart people tend to know that everyone is ignorant about something at one time or another and that it does little good to tease other people about their ignorance because such teasing only reveals how insecure one is about one’s own knowledge -- and worse yet, such teasing discourages others from learning.

Jennifer Jason Leigh and the Friends of Dorothy

Oscar time arrived quite recently and once again people chose to gripe about Oscar-winning Forrest Gump, a film much hated by would-be intellectuals due to its “anti-intellectual” subtext. To be fair, this film is hardly the most complex movie out there and the fact that so many of its smartest and possibly most self-aware individuals end up quite miserable would seem to indicate that the movie itself has an anti-intellectual message.

Yet one could find miserable smart people in many movies, including movies that are allegedly aimed at smart people. Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, for example, makes no bones about being aimed at smart people. (It's certainly not aimed at the type of people who prefer films like Forrest Gump.) And yet one would hardly argue that it makes an argument against the misery of smart people. Indeed, the movie would appear to argue that especially smart and witty people tend to have a special talent for making themselves especially miserable.

The main character of the movie is writer Dorothy Parker (played by Jennifer Jason Leigh), a woman who herself had little time for sentiments like “life is like a box of chocolates.” Indeed, Dorothy Parker was very much an anti-sentimentalist. And yet she spends most of the first half of the movie “falling in love” with inappropriate sex partners--one of which is ironically her ex-husband, the man who gave her the title of “Mrs. Parker” -- whose chief attributes seem to lay in the fact that they're good-looking. To be fair, she does fall in love with newspaperman/writer Charles MacArthur (played by Matthew Broderick) who is also witty as well as handsome. And yet ironically the chief love of her life -- at least as far as the movie is concerned -- is the not-so-handsome-but-not-quite-that-unattractive Robert Benchley (played by Campbell Scott), a writer who pretty much remains Parker's kindred spirit for most of the movie. Not only is Benchley one of the few men in the movie with whom Parker does not have sex -- primarily because he is married -- but he remains one of the few men who supports Parker when almost every other man in the movie breaks her heart.

And yet alas, he dies off-screen from cirrhosis of the liver halfway through the movie, a fate quite ironic given that Parker drinks about as much -- if not more -- than Benchley. Indeed, Parker outlives almost all of her contemporaries, including those acquaintances who were part of the literary group known as the Algonquin Round Table (the “vicious circle” of the title). And yet survival alone does not make her happy. Indeed, despite all her wit and humor, she seems quite miserable during the last half of the movie -- very much the example of a smart, self-aware woman whose own intelligence and self-awareness are not enough to save her from unhappiness.

I doubt that we were meant to watch this movie and come to the conclusion that intelligence and self-awareness are bad things. And yet few would argue that such qualities prevent people like Dorothy Parker from making the same mistakes over and over again. If anything, intelligence often makes people more adept at finding excuses for their own misbehavior. One would think, for example, that a smart person like Robert Benchley would realize that excessive drinking could very well send him to an early grave. And yet a smart person would also rationalize the risk of excessive drinking, preferring to settle for short-term happiness in a bottle than a long-term life of sobriety.

This doesn't mean that dumb people avoid misery more than smart people. Just that smart people aren't as immune to the sorrows of the human condition as they would like to think they are. As the old song goes, what a fool believes, a wise man has the power to reason away. Even if such reasoning costs that wise man his life.