Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 338

Psycho Meets Psycho

Steven Soderbergh, emerging from nominal retirement, has created a mashup of the shower scenes from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and Gus Van Sant’s 1998 shot-for-shot remake:

Jonathan Crow explains the experiment:

For much of the piece, Soderbergh alternates between a scene from the original and one from the remake – , who plays Marion Crane in Van Sant’s version leaves her apartment for work and in the next scene,  shows up at the office. At other moments, he cuts back and forth within the scene; at one point the Marion from the remake is at a traffic light and sees her boss from the original movie. And during a few key points in the film — like the famed shower scene… — Soderbergh does something different. That sequence opens with Heche disrobing and lathering up. But when the killer starts stabbing, Soderbergh jarringly overlays the original movie over top the remake, creating a disconcerting kaleidoscopic effect.

Rachel Arons also recommends the mashup:

The project cleverly doubles down on the great psychological theme of “Psycho,” making every character appear onscreen as a “split personality.” It’s also mesmerizing to watch, like listening to Girl Talk songs or watching Christian Marclay’s “The Clock”: the fun is in anticipating the breaks and in witnessing the fragments link up to form a larger—and, in this case, seamlessly coherent—whole. But Soderbergh’s double “Psycho” is most interesting for the perspective it brings to the much-maligned Van Sant remake. …

Van Sant’s “Psycho” experiment, by replicating Hitchcock’s style frame for frame, exposes how meaning arises in films in ways that transcend mere formal structure or technique. And Soderbergh’s mashup experiment—by placing the original movie and its meticulous but inferior re-creation side by side—allows Van Sant’s experiment to come across as the fascinating failure that it was. Both force us to appreciate the singularity of Hitchcock’s original.

Watch the full mashup here.  Previous Dish on Soderbergh here, here, and here.

Deadly At A Distance

Behavioral scientist Nicholas Epley notes “a surprising problem for military leaders in times of war: soldiers in battle find it relatively easy to shoot at someone a great distance away, but have a much more difficult time shooting an enemy standing right in front of them”:

George Orwell described his own reluctance to shoot during the Spanish Civil War. “At this moment,” he wrote, “a man, presumably carrying a message to an officer, jumped out of the trench and ran along the top of the parapet in full view. He was half-dressed and was holding up his trousers with both hands as he ran. I refrained from shooting at him. It is true that I am a poor shot and unlikely to hit a running man at a hundred yards. … Still, I did not shoot partly because of that detail about the trousers. I had come here to shoot at ‘Fascists,’ but a man who is holding up his trousers isn’t a ‘Fascist,’ he is visibly a fellow-creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him.”

Orwell is far from alone.

Interviews with US soldiers in World War II found that only 15 to 20 percent were able to discharge their weapons at the enemy in close firefights. Even when they did shoot, soldiers found it hard to hit their human targets. In the US Civil War, muskets were capable of hitting a pie plate at 70 yards and soldiers could typically reload anywhere from four to five times per minute. Theoretically, a regiment of 200 soldiers firing at a wall of enemy soldiers 100 feet wide should be able to kill 120 on the first volley. And yet the kill rate during the Civil War was closer to one to two men per minute, with the average distance of engagement being only 30 yards. Battles raged on for hours because the men just couldn’t bring themselves to kill one another once they could see the whites of their enemy’s eyes.

The Life Cycles Of Language

Joe Mac Donnacha offers a sober assessment of Irish as a “living” language:

In sociolinguistic terms, a language can be defined as living if it meets two criteria. First, it should be the dominant (but not necessarily the only) language in most or all of the social networks that make up a community. Second, the community of individuals who speak it as their dominant language must be capable of regenerating themselves as a “language community” – in other words, they must be a sustainable community in terms of both their demographic regeneration and the intergenerational transmission of their language.

On both of these criteria the Irish language is no longer a living language. It has not gained new dominance in the combined social networks of any community outside the Gaeltacht since the formation of the state, and since the late 1960s it has been losing its dominance in what were the Irish-language communities of the Gaeltacht. It is clear from the current research that though most of these communities have been able to regenerate themselves demographically since the early 1970s … they have been finding it increasingly difficult to regenerate themselves linguistically. What we are now seeing in the Gaeltacht, therefore, are the final throes of Irish as a living language.

But not all language is lost. Cal Flyn has good news for Gaelic speakers in Scotland:

The 1991 census showed a drop of more than 20 per cent [of Gaelic speakers] in a single decade. By 2001 the number had fallen another 11 per cent, to just 59,000. Gaelic speakers were ageing, then dying, and their language was dying with them. When the latest figures were released in September, naysayers were preparing to sound the knell. But the new total (58,000) had barely dipped and closer inspection revealed new growth: in every age group under the age of 20, there had been a rise.

There is a Gaelic revival under way. Increasing numbers of parents – even those who don’t speak the language – are opting to send their children to Gaelic-medium schools, where all subjects are taught in the language. In 1985 there were only 24 primary school children being taught in Gaelic; last year the figure was 2,953. Sixty-one schools across Scotland now offer Gaelic-medium education. The expectation is that, as time passes, these young Gaels will revitalise a language that is intricately tied up with their country’s identity.

Is Obama Naive?

Leon Wieseltier – surprise! – blames Obama’s rationality and his belief that others share it for blinding him to the ambitions of Putin’s Russia:

The lack of preparedness at the White House was not merely a weakness of policy but also a weakness of worldview. The president is too often caught off guard by enmity, and by the nastiness of things. There really is no excuse for being surprised by evil. There is also no excuse for projecting one’s good intentions, one’s commitment to reason, one’s optimism about history, upon other individuals and other societies and other countries: narcissism is the enemy of empiricism, and we must perceive differences and threats empirically, lucidly, not with disbelief but with resolve. “Our opinions do not coincide,” Putin said after meeting with Obama last year. The sentence reverberates. That lack of coincidence is now a fact of enormous geopolitical significance.

But opinions don’t coincide with almost all geo-political adversaries and even allies. That doesn’t mean that some common ground on the question of shared interests cannot also be reached, even as one retains no illusions about the underlying conflict. Rich Lowry shakes his head at the administration, which he says should have learned from the Bush era that Putin was not to be trusted:

Of all President George W. Bush’s failings, not giving the Russians a chance wasn’t one of them. He notoriously looked into the eyes of Russian resident Vladimir Putin at the beginning of his presidency and saw sweetness and light. His illusions were shattered by the end, with the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008.

Larison counters Lowry’s whitewashing of Bush’s Russia policy:

It is not possible to understand Russian behavior over the last ten years without acknowledging the extent to which U.S.-Russian relations were wrecked by several Western policies, chief among them being Bush’s push for missile defense in eastern Europe and NATO expansion into the former USSR. If the Bush administration suffered from any illusions, it was that the U.S. could consistently goad and provoke Russia in its own region without consequences. By the end of Bush’s second term, that illusion was dispelled, and it was in order to repair the substantial damage that had been done in the previous five or six years that the U.S. successfully sought to find common interests with Russia.

Chait takes a broader look at Obama’s foreign policy. He argues, contra Fred Kaplan, that Obama isn’t a realist:

The Libya example alone cracks apart the case – no Realist would ever have committed American military power to save civilians in the service of a social revolution obviously unsettling to American interests.

The reason Obama has had liberal humanitarians like Power and Susan Rice on his foreign policy staff since his campaign, and throughout his presidency, is that he shares their ideological goals within the limits of what is practically attainable. Obviously, Obama is no George W. Bush. On the other hand, nobody else is George W. Bush, either. Most American presidents fall somewhere on the continuum between Bushian crusading moralism and Nixonian ruthlessness. Obama does, too.

Chait is right, it seems to me, on the broad level. And yet Libya remains more of an exception than a rule. And Obama seems to have learned from its unintended consequences just how dangerous liberal internationalist impulses can be.

(Photo: Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sits with U.S. President Barack Obama during a meeting in the Oval Office of the White House March 3, 2014 in Washington, D.C. Obama urged Netanyahu to ‘seize the moment’ to make peace, saying time is running out of time to negotiate an Israeli-Palestinian agreement. By Andrew Harrer-Pool/Getty Images.)

Character On Canvas

In a review of Daniel E. Sutherland’s A Life for Art’s Sake, a biography of James McNeill Whistler, Barry Schwabsky considers how the painter’s personality informed his work:

Was Whistler just as belligerent toward his art as he was with the wider world into which he sent it? You might think so, judging from reports of how he went about making it: “His movements were those of a duellist fencing actively and cautiously with the small sword,” according to one witness. But no, the results show very little evidence of Whistler’s aggressiveness. Henry Adams can’t have been the only observer to have noticed the contrast between Whistler’s “witty, declamatory, extravagant, bitter, amusing, and noisy” public manner and his art of “nuance and tone,” though perhaps he was one of the few to speculate that it showed how the painter might have been “brutalized … by the brutalities of his world.” That might be putting it a bit too strongly, but still, something must account for Whistler’s conviction that “the Master stands in no relation to the moment at which he occurs—a monument of isolation—hinting at sadness—having no part in the progress of his fellow men.” Whatever the cause of this inner core of loneliness and sorrow, none of Whistler’s biographers, including Sutherland, has ever come close to touching on it. Perhaps that’s just as well, because the beauty of the art transcends its motivating ache—by communicating it in a homeopathic dosage.

(Image of Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Old Battersea Bridge, circa 1872-1875, via Wikimedia Commons)

A Grave Concern

Charles Simic recalls a business scheme for a new kind of gravestone dreamed up by the poet Mark Strand when he was down and out:

It would include, in addition to the usual name, date, and epitaph, a slot where a coin could be inserted, that would activate a tape machine built into it, and play the deceased’s favorite songs, jokes, passages from scriptures, quotes by great men and speeches addressed to their fellow citizens, and whatever else they find worthy of preserving for posterity. … One of the benefits of this invention, as [Strand] saw it, is that it would transform these notoriously gloomy and desolate places by attracting big crowds—not just of the relatives and acquaintances of the deceased, but also complete strangers seeking entertainment and the pearls of wisdom and musical selections of hundreds and hundreds of unknown men and women.

Simic continues:

While this invention may strike one as frivolous and irreverent, in my view it deals with a serious problem.

What happens to everything we kept in our heads and hoped others would find amusing after we pass away? No trace of them will be left, unless, of course, we write them down. Even that is not a guarantee. Libraries, both private and public, are full of books no one reads any more. Anyone who frequents town dumps has seen yellowed manuscripts and letters thrown out with the trash—papers that sadly, but unmistakably, not even the family of their author wants. Just imagine that Strand’s dream had come true and your dead grandmother is a big hit in some large urban cemetery, passing on her soup and pie recipes to an admiring crowd of young housewives; while your grandpa is telling dirty jokes to boys playing hooky from school. Given their immense local fame, you, too, are regarded with interest by your friends and neighbors, who can’t help but wonder how your everlasting selection is coming along and what inspiring words and vile blasphemies they’ll be hearing from your gravestone.

A PSA For Tax Season

If you’re a drug dealer, you might want to get some tax stamps:

[Kansas] has set its tax rate on marijuana at $3.50 per gram and its taxes on other controlled substances at $200 per gram or $2,000 per pill. Drug dealers operating in the state should visit the Taxpayer Assistance Center in Topeka between 8:00 am and 4:00 pm to buy drug tax stamps. Or they can order them through the mail. By attaching the stamps to the drugs, dealers can show that they paid their taxes. They may be busted and arrested, but at least tax evasion won’t be one of the charges.

Kansas is not alone in demanding that drug dealers pay their fair share of taxes. Some 10 to 20 states have (or once had) legislation setting tax rates on illegal drugs.

One problem: the stamps aren’t exactly flying off the shelves:

According to attorney Robert Henak, “Everywhere but four states, I believe, there is no indication that drug dealers are buying stamps.” The majority of states have sold no stamps, or only a few thousand dollars worth in tiny increments. So who is buying?

Stamp collectors. Many of the stamps feature marijuana leaf designs or comical health warnings as Henak, a stamp collector who once shared his collection of drug tax stamps with Playboy magazine, can attest.

(Image: A marijuana tax stamp image via NORML)

Down With The Upskirt

On Wednesday, the Massachusetts court ruled that the state had no laws barring someone from taking a photo up a woman’s skirt. Meghan DeMaria notes the court’s judgment that those women were not “completely or partially undressed”:

If you’re wearing Spanx, a thong, or other undergarments that could constitute being “partially nude” beneath your skirt, you’re entitled to legal protection, but women who favor granny panties are out of luck. Good to know.

Doug Mataconis defends the court’s reasoning:

I agree generally with the principle that something like this should be against the law, but it seems to me that the Court was correct on the law here. As a general principle, people can only be convicted of a crime when they’ve actually committed an illegal act that is specifically defined in the law and, in this case, what Robinson was accused and convicted of did not comport with the statute under which he was charged. If the legislators in Massachusetts want to prevent this from happening again, they simply need to rewrite the law to cover the activities that Robinson was accused of committing.

In response to the case, the legislature quickly passed a bill to ban such behavior. The governor signed it this morning. Nichi Hodgson wonders if it will have any effect:

[S]omething tells me we won’t be seeing a wave of prosecutions any time soon – at least not if the backlog of domestic violence, rape and restraining order cases are anything to go by. California, the only US state to institute a revenge porn law, did make two major prosecutions since it passed a law in October, but only time will tell as to whether that was merely a PR flurry.

Hanna Rosin follows through on the revenge porn comparison:

Upskirting is like an anonymous version of “revenge porn,” the practice of posting your girlfriend’s naked pictures online if you’re pissed at her. Upskirting, by contrast, is more passive and generally not directed at any one woman in particular. Air marshals do it. Commuters do it. Players do it, like this one who posted on an upskirting site:

I’ve been upskirting chicks, mostly at clubs, for almost two years. The club I go to is a great spot, real crowded, strobe lights going, loud music, so no one notices me sitting near the edge of the dance floor and if a woman in a skirt ends up by me I stick the cam under and snap.

Now even if this douche moved to a state where upskirting was illegal, it would still be perfectly legal in most states for him to post online all the pictures he already has on his cellphone, according to Danielle Citron, a law professor who supports the effort to make revenge porn illegal. In her forthcoming book, Hate Crimes in Cyberspace, Citron documents the way women’s lives can be ruined when someone posts a nude picture of them online that co-workers or employers or anyone else can easily look up. (One of the women she profiles had to change her name.)

How To Spot A Winner

It’s all in the body language. Christian Jarrett surveys a study that explored whether people pick up on losing athletes’ submissive body language without knowing the score (the above clip is a sample from the study):

The researchers showed adult and child participants dozens of silent, three-second clips of winning and losing athletes in table tennis, basketball and handball, and tested whether the observers could tell, based purely on “thin slices” of non-verbal body language, whether each athlete was winning or losing, and by how much (from “far behind” to “high lead”). The clips were taken from the breaks between play. Scores were concealed. And any clips containing explicit emotion, such as shame or pride, were omitted. … The researchers found high levels of accuracy, among young children (aged 4 to 8), older children (age 9 to 12), and adults. That is, the participants’ estimates of whether an athlete was losing or winning, and by how much, tended to correlate with the actual situation, as measured by the (hidden) score at that stage in the contest.

Jarrett considers the implications:

Assuming the main finding is accurate – that athlete’s express clear submissive signals when they’re losing – this will surely be of interest to sports psychologists and athletes looking for a competitive edge. Exhibiting submissive non-verbal behaviours could be “highly dysfunctional”, the researchers said, encouraging an opponent to increase pressure. “What makes sense for a primate losing a fight may lead to exacerbating the downward spiral for athletes on the losing side.” This suggests learning to mask submissive body language could be highly advantageous, something Roger Federer and other cool champions appear to have mastered already.

What’s Wrong With Ukraine’s Economy?

A lot:

Ukraine was badly hit by the financial crisis and plummeting steel prices. GDP fell by 15% in 2009. That made it a prime candidate for economic streamlining. In 2010 the IMF agreed to loan Ukraine $15 billion—with conditions attached. A major target for reform were Ukraine’s cushy energy subsidies. The state gas company, Naftogaz, only charges consumers a quarter of the cost of importing the gas. Cheap gas discourages investment: Ukraine is one of the most energy-intensive economies in the world and domestic production has slumped by two-thirds since the 1970s. The IMF ended up freezing the deal in 2011 after Kiev failed to touch the costly subsidies.

Daniel Berman’s explains the EU’s new $15 billion aid offer:

This is not quite as generous as it seems – the aid is tied to the implementation of an IMF restructuring campaign that is sure to be almost as destabilizing in the short-run as the aid is intended to be stabilizing. If the goal was simply to strengthen the Ukrainian state in the near future, the aid should have been offered with fewer if any strings.

Nonetheless a major aid package is an excellent idea, and is precisely what should have been [done] 20 years ago. The 15 Billion Dollar package would have done infinitely more to strengthen Ukraine and to guarantee the nation’s territorial integrity than the near-worthless promises entailed within the Budapest Memorandum, or a decision to risk both American and Russian ostracism by retaining control of Nuclear weapons Kiev could not fire. Kiev’s greatest weakness through the last two decades and even today has been less its lack of military force, and more its lack of political unity. History teaches us that money does not solve those divisions on its own, but it sure damn helps. In times of crisis economic weakness is, as was demonstrated in 1930s France and Germany, a political, not an economic problem.

But he also wonders if it’s just a payoff:

The package can be just as easily seen as a bribe to console Ukraine for the loss of the Crimea as it can be as an effort to retake it. With Crimea seemingly preparing to increase the tension by petitioning to join Russia, that is suddenly a more important issue than anything else. Right now the package represents the overlap between the German and American positions because it can either console Ukraine for accepting Russia’s terms, or strengthen the Ukrainian state in its resistance, the respective goals of those two countries.