Forget Freud, Forget Marx. Rioting, above all, is fun.

By Andrew Potter - Friday, June 17, 2011 at 12:45 PM - 99 Comments

Photograph by Simon Hayter

White riot – I wanna riot
White riot – a riot of my own
White riot – I wanna riot
White riot – a riot of my own

– The Clash, “White Riot”

There is nothing better than a good old-fashioned downtown hockey riot to get everyone’s ideology pumps working overtime. Probably the most predictable analysis came from Adrian Mack and Miranda Nelson over at the Georgia Straight, who took a bus in from 1969 and blamed the alienating character of capitalism. In trashing the downtown of their own city, the rioters were simply rehearsing the violence that is inherent in the system: “The market practices institutional violence on every single one of us, every day, just by virtue of existing,” they write. Meanwhile, demonstrating the law of conservation of rhetoric that holds that for every idiocy there is an equal and opposite idiot, Don Cherry apparently claimed that the Vancouver rioters were left-wing pinkos (which, come to think of it, is not necessarily at odds with the Mack/Nelson view of things.)

Getting into the shallower ends of the thought pool, the Vancouver police officially blamed “anarchists” for starting the riot, and drunken youth for making it worse. And in a column that has been widely circulated and praised as the best thing written on the riots, National Post sportswriter Bruce Arthur took the most direct route, daring to suggest that of course the rioters were hockey fans, largely those possessed of an overload of “machismo and rage and nihilism.”

Arthur is closest to getting it right, but even he feels the urge to take it further, wondering what it is about the Lower Mainland, why  “this strain of poison leaches from a city that, while it has a bright line between rich and poor that grows brighter every day, is generally a good place.”

Everyone, Arthur included, is over-thinking this way too much: Any proper discussion of the riot and why it occurred has to start with the recognition that rioting, especially for young men, is a huge amount of fun. The only reason there isn’t more of it is that if you do it by yourself or in a small group, you’ll almost certainly get caught. It’s like the old joke about owing the bank money: If you do five million dollars damage to downtown, you’re in big trouble. If a hundred thousand people do five million dollars to downtown, the city is in big trouble.

The point is that if you can get enough people to riot, then you all get away with it. The trick, then, is getting enough people willing to do it, in the same place and at the same time, to create a tipping point effect. And so when it comes to starting a riot, what the participants are faced with is essentially a coordination problem.

A coordination problem is a situation where all the relevant actors have a common goal, but there is imperfect information. We are collectively trying to achieve the same general outcome, but don’t know how each person is going to act to get to it. In the 1950s,  the economist Thomas Schelling described a situation in which two people wish to meet in New York City on a given day, but cannot communicate the time or place at which they should meet. How should they act? He suggested that beneath the clock at Grand Central Station at noon would be an ideal time and place– this is what he called a “focal point” for coordination. (He no longer believes this to be the case, though; it is interesting to think of where the focal point would be in New York City today, or in a given city of your choice.)

Back to the riot: Particular events, like Stanley Cup Game Sevens, become natural social focal points for  “reliable riots” — or reliable opportunities to riot. This is especially so once a city has an established reputation for hosting (and to some extent tolerating) riots: this is what is going on in both Montreal and Vancouver, in contrast with Edmonton and Calgary, for example.

Once a city becomes a known focal point for rioting, then a bunch of people show up to just to riot (indeed, they will even  travel great distances to do so), precisely because they know that a bunch of other people are also going to be showing up to riot. This is exactly what happened with the G20 in Toronto (and the antiglobalization stuff in general) and what happens now with the Stanley Cup final.

In principle, social media have the capacity to increase the amount of rioting, since “flash mob” technology can be used to solve the coordination problem – there is probably some of this at work in the Arab spring protests.  On the other hand, technology also tends to work against the rioters, by reducing the impunity that comes with the anonymity of crowds. The most important thing the Toronto police did, with the G20 riots, was not all the head-cracking and detentions, but going after people who were photographed committing crimes. The Vancouver police are currently gathering videos and images of the rioters and crowdsourcing their identities. They won’t catch everyone, but they will probably identify enough people that it will serve as a huge deterrent to future riots.

In the meantime, the chief lesson is to keep in mind that there is no reason to delve into the depths of class warfare, or to psychoanalyze the culture or the city, when there is a far simpler explanation for what is going on. As a rule of thumb, never invoke Freud or Marx when Hobbes is at hand.

David Cronenberg on Freud, Keira and pressing the flesh

By Brian D. Johnson - Wednesday, August 25, 2010 at 4:14 PM - 0 Comments

Canadian director David Cronenberg is fresh back from Germany, where he just wrapped his latest feature, A Dangerous Method. Scripted by Christopher Hampton (Dangerous Liaisons), it’s a period piece about the fathers of psychoanalysis,  Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender). Cronenberg steps into the limelight this weekend as a star attraction at FanExpo Canada (Aug. 27-29).  The event, which takes place in his hometown, at Toronto’s Metro Convention Centre, draws fans of comic books, horror, sci-fi, and gaming—all domains that Cronenberg has explored in his movies. I interviewed him by phone last week:

Q. So you’re going to be pressing the flesh at FanExpo. Have you done this kind of thing before?

A. I  did go to ComicCon in San Diego when we released A History of Violence, because it had been a graphic novel. And it was really a lot of fun.

Q. What’s the profile of a typical David Cronenberg fan?

A. Well, it varies. Somebody who’s a fan of Eastern Promises is not going to be the same person, necessarily, as someone who’s a fan of Scanners. Even Guillermo del Toro—he’s a fan of mine in general and we’re friends, but he likes the early stuff, the horror stuff. So Guillermo could be a typical fan, if you like: he’s a large Mexican filmmaker who’s very funny and very smart.

Q. Do you actually enjoy getting out there and signing autographs?

I’m ready. I’ve been in isolation for too long. I’ve spent four months doing a movie in Germany, most of it in a studio, a hermetically sealed environment. I thought it would be fun to connect with my past—not that it’s over for me with gore and sci-fi films, but I haven’t made one since eXistenZ. And this is different from doing heavy-duty interviews when you’re selling a film. It should be looser and more fun.

Q. Tell me about A Dangerous Method. You’ve called it a biopic, which surprises me. I can’t imagine a David Cronenberg film cleaving to such a conventional genre.

A. In a way, I think of Naked Lunch as a biopic, or even M. Butterfly, or Dead Ringers—they were all based on real people.

Q. So much of your work is based on making the unconscious palpable, and here you’ve made a film about Freud and Jung, the two towering thinkers who put the unconscious on the map. Are you a fan of Freud or Jung?

A. I’d hate to choose now. My actors would be upset. [laughs] I certainly tend more to the Freud side than to the Jung side. But I did a lot of research into Jung and his relationship with Freud, and he’s really fascinating—a great, charismatic character. It filled out my understanding of the whole psychoanalytic movement. That’s the great thing about making a movie, it encourages you to do deep, deep research. When I say deep, I’m talking about the physicality, the furniture—I have a chair in my house now that’s a replica of Freud’s chair. Freud actually designed a chair for himself to sit in while he was writing. The producers bought me a replica. It looks like a human being. The back of the chair has a head and the arms are like arms. It’s quite comfortable too; it actually has lumbar support, which I was surprised to find. They presented it too me at the wrap party because they knew I admired to chair. It was made by a furniture maker who made the replica of the chair for the museum in Vienna, because the original is in the museum in London. They got him to make me one.

Q. Your films tend to produce artifacts—the flesh gun from eXistenZ, the gynecological instruments from Dead Ringers.

A. The art form is physical. The acting is physical. You’re putting light on objects and humans. And of course, when you’re doing a period piece, the artifacts are critical because it’s the only way you can take your audience back in time with you. Of course there’s some CG sleight of hand that isn’t physical. But for the actors, to put on those clothes and put on those spectacles and pick up that pen at that desk, it’s important for them.

Q. Do we see dreams being analyzed and taking on sci-fi or surreal form?

A. I would say not. But what is amazing is the way these people spoke and thought in such intellectual, learned, abstract ways, and the dialogue reflects that. It’s based on letters and recollections from the time.

Q. What trademarks of yours does the film have? Is there violence?

A. There’s a little S & M. There definitely is a little S & M [laughs]. But I wouldn’t say that’s my trademark. I would say that intellect is my trademark, and there’s a lot of that. What I loved about Christopher Hampton’s script is that there’s no compromise in terms of delivering the intellect of these characters and the way they fought, and how it flowed, and how everything became referenced to sexuality and psychoanalysis, which they thought of as a medical procedure. They were so enthusiastic about it and so protective of it, and there were such struggles. Then of course there was the great split between Freud and Jung.  I wanted to bring these people back to life. I never got to talk to Freud but I got to talk to Viggo playing Freud.

Q. Speaking of Viggo, you’ve now made three movies with him, and there may be a sequel to Eastern Promises. He’s become what the French call your acteur de fetiche. Why Viggo?

A. He wasn’t our first choice for Freud. It’s not the lead role in the movie, for example. We had gone to Christoph Waltz. In fact, Christoph pursued us—because his grandfather was a student of Freud apparently, and he really wanted to play that role. Since the movie was a co-production with Germany, his name meant a lot in terms of raising money—these are really perilous days for independent film—and he copped out basically to do a Hollywood movie [Water For Elephants]. So I phoned Viggo. I said, “I know that you weren’t interested in playing Freud but it’s come up for grabs again and I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you if you wanted to do it.” He said, “Let me look at the script,” and in two days he was doing it.

Q. So who is the lead?

Michael Fassbender [Hunger] plays Jung. He’s about to do X-Men, so he will soon have genre cred. He’s a terrific actor and he and Viggo got along absolutely great. Very light, terrific tone on the set. Keira [Knightley] is a brilliant actress. She blew everyone away. I’m telling you, she’s as good as anyone I’ve worked with, including Miranda Richardson and Lynn Redgrave and Judy Davis. You don’t realize it until you start to work with somebody. It was the same with Viggo when I first worked with him.

Q. She’s got a pretty lightweight reputation.

A. She’s a heavy dude.

Q. So will there be a sequel to Eastern Promises?

A. It’s hard to say. There is a script, a really good script that Steve Knight wrote. It’s the best first draft I’ve ever read of anything. But there are financing issues, issues of Focus [Pictures] survival and Comcast buying Universal and God knows what else. So I’m not sure yet how real it can be. It’s alive as a possibility.

Q. As for FanExpo, which celebrates horror, sci fi, comic books and so on—now that comic books are Hollywood’s blockbuster staple, what does that do to an art form that draws its cachet from being outside the mainstream?

A. It depends what art form you’re talking about. It’s obvious that comics have gotten more sophisticated, more politically aware, more technically sophisticated, and the fact they they’re more attractive to movie makers has helped them become that. I can see that the comic books have gotten better. Whether the comics have made the movies better is a whole other thing. It depends whether you think Iron Man I is fabulous filmmaking, or not.

Q. You must have your own opinion.

A. I have many opinions that I don’t express. Is it top-level filmmaking, is it top-level art? My answer to that is no, it’s not. On the other hand it’s really good mainstream entertainment and it’s pretty clever and intelligent, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s not the art films of the 60s, but I don’t know if we’re going to see that any more.

Q. For someone who enjoys intellect, I imagine Robert Downey Jr. would be on your wish list of actors to work with, no?

A. He has been. But I think he’s probably out of reach now. He’s got three or four franchises going for himself. And I’m not sure that’s been good for him as an actor. I don’t know why I say that because I don’t know him. But you can become glib and you can fall back on some tics, and I’m starting to see a few of those in what he’s doing. Is that because he’s encouraged to do that by his directors, or not? I don’t know.

Q. Do you covet a franchise?

A. I wouldn’t mind doing the first of a franchise that happened to turn into one by accident. The second or third wouldn’t be that interesting.

Q. Are you a Girl With The Dragon Tattoo fan?

A. I was asked about doing that. Then I went to see the movie, the Swedish movie, and I thought, “No, it really should be called Men Who Hate Women,” which was the title of the book in Swedish. Because that’s what it’s about. It wasn’t an approach that appealed to me. Every man in that movie except the lead guy is a rapist and a misogynist, if not a murderer of women. And there’s something that’s not really being dealt with. I don’t know if the novels opened that out but there was something that really didn’t appeal to me. Once David Fincher got interested, they would have gone with him anyway. But there was a time when it was an open assignment and I turned it down.

In the Shakespeare wars, James Shapiro fights for the Bard

By Brian D. Johnson - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 at 2:00 PM - 10 Comments

James Shapiro is a Shakespearean scholar at Columbia University in New York, an orthodox Stratfordian—meaning he believes that the plays and sonnets commonly ascribed to William Shakespeare were indeed written by him and not by the 17th Earl of Oxford or Christopher Marlowe or any of a good dozen pretenders to the throne. Shapiro’s Contested Will is an eye-opening account of an authorship dispute now 150 years old. He spoke with Senior Writer Brian Bethune:

Q: Looking at the issue historically, does it seem plain to you that the authorship controversy is a theological quarrel?

A: Exactly, and at every level. Academics have veered away from religion in Shakespeare’s time—except for the not very helpful issue of whether he was Protestant or Catholic—because they would have to face the very religious language that runs through Shakespeare studies, and the authorship dispute.  Look at Delia Bacon’s religious crisis just as she first launched Francis Bacon’s claims, or the way the contemporary interest in historical Jesus scholarship and the doubts that it raised about Christ, figured in hers and others’ thinking about Shakespeare. “Heresy” is not a word I used myself in the book, but it was the language used by critics then when choosing sides on the true author— “heresy” or “my confession of faith”—or Garrick calling his three-day festival a “Jubilee.” And the early forgeries were clearly relics—when William-Henry Ireland produced the documents, believers would kiss them.

Q: Once Shakespeare was deified people began to feel the man from Stratford wasn’t large enough—not sufficiently high-born, well-travelled or educated—for the scale of his achievement. Devotees started mining his works, which is all they had, for hints. And not just the heretics?

A: The orthodox are sinners too, if I can keep up the language. What I really wanted to do was point out how dangerous, if seductive, it is to deduce facts from Shakespeare’s imagination. The assumptions of Stratfordians are so close to what the doubters say—that we can find the life in the works—that Shakespeare professors should ask themselves some hard questions. We all draw inferences from Shakespeare’s imagination, and turn them into articles of faith, when it’s just the power of his imagination. We now know a lot about him, but still not what we want to know: what was in his heart. That’s the problem.

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What’s behind the Shakespeare wars — An eye-opening new history explains why the authorship dispute has lasted for 150 years

Q: You neatly show how the dispute is a dialogue of the deaf with the response to one of the newest pieces of evidence.

A: You mean the margin note in Camden’s Britannica? Yes, here’s a brief description of Stratford, printed in 1590, that mentions two distinguished citizens [a bishop and a judge] and an early 17th-century local vicar made a margin note, adding Shakespeare as a third eminent son. To me this is proof of Shakespeare’s early fame; to the man who discovered it, a committed Oxfordian, it just shows how early the plot to disguise Oxford’s authorship had taken root!! It’s pointless to try to discuss this, given the radically different assumptions about it.

Q: The anti-Stratfordian cause has attracted a lot of prominent authors and thinkers. What did you make of their arguments?

A: Mark Twain is the only one I came out of this with diminished respect for. Here’s a guy who re-invented himself down to his own name, who hired a—I made up this term, which I hope works—a stunt-writer to go to the South African gold fields for him and gather “experience.” Though as it turned out, Twain couldn’t use it, because the stunt guy died on the way home of blood poisoning after stabbing himself in the mouth with a fork—you can’t make this stuff up. But after doing all that himself, Twain simply dismissed Shakespeare’s imagination, saying no glove-maker’s son could write these plays about royalty and aristocracy. Of course, Twain also came to think Queen Elizabeth was a man.

Q: What about Freud?

A: I adored Freud. Still do, but on his Oxford belief …. Freud hinged his whole Oedipus Complex theory on Hamlet, and the accepted notion that John Shakespeare [William’s father] had died just before it was written, so that the entire unconscious Oedipal longing came pouring out of William. When doubt was cast on whether John died before or after Hamlet, Freud’s response essentially was “Well, show me somebody whose father died before.”

Q: As the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death—with all its attendant hoopla—approaches in 2016, how is the marathon faring? Who is the leading contender for Hamlet’s creator?

A: Putting Shakespeare himself aside for a moment, Oxford still leads the field, though Christopher Marlowe—a former contender who faded—is catching up. Go to Westminster Abbey and look at Marlowe’s grave. In 2002, his death date of 1593—and he needs to be alive long after that to be Shakespeare—suddenly spouted a question mark. If the administrators of Poets’ Corner could be convinced of that, which is utterly denied by the surviving original document of the Elizabethan inquest that examined his death, who knows what could follow. Next year comes Anonymous, directed by Roland Emmerich, of all people, which will plug the Oxford cause. In the rock-paper-scissors world of pop culture, movie beats book, and this film may well be a Emmerich disaster movie for Shakespeare teachers.

Q: In Contested Will, you make an overwhelming case that William Shakespeare was exactly who his contemporaries thought he was, the imaginative genius who wrote the plays bearing his name. What else can you and other Stratfordians do?

A: My next book will be on Shakespeare in 1606. We too often accommodate what the doubters stress—and which has become the popular concept—of  Shakespeare as an Elizabethan only. He was a Jacobean too, who wrote many of his greatest plays in King James’s reign, long after Marlowe and Oxford died. I will show the Jacobean influence in taste, style and performance place. We as a profession don’t teach Shakespeare enough in a historically conscious way. That’s what we need to do.

The truth is out there. Somewhere.

By Andrew Coyne - Thursday, January 7, 2010 at 11:05 AM - 495 Comments

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t . . .
We will keep them out somehow—even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is! . . .
If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the U.K., I think I’ll delete the file rather than send it to anyone . . .

And so on. Since their release last November, the famous hacked emails from scientists in the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia have provided a rich source of such incriminating phrases. Participants, including some of the leading figures in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), discuss how to prevent skeptics from publishing in peer-reviewed journals, plot to destroy or suppress the raw data underlying their studies, suggest ways to massage the figures for better effect, and generally carry on in a tone more evocative of the “war room” than the common room.

To many, the emails offer disturbing evidence that a number of prominent climatologists have crossed the line, from science into activism. It is clear they view dissenters, not as critics to be engaged, but enemies to be beaten. But in fact there is a more fundamental problem at work: a breakdown of trust between scientists and large sections of the lay public.

Continue…

Political scientists (IV)

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, December 30, 2009 at 12:11 PM - 15 Comments

Isaiah Berlin’s consideration of political judgment.

The quality I am attempting to describe is that special understanding of public life (or for that matter private life) which successful statesmen have, whether they are wicked or virtuous—that which Bismarck had (surely a conspicuous example, in the last century, of a politician endowed with considerable political judgment), or Talleyrand or Franklin Roosevelt, or, for that matter, men such as Cavour or Disraeli, Gladstone or Ataturk, in common with the great psychological novelists, something which is conspicuously lacking in men of more purely theoretical genius such as Newton or Einstein or Russell, or even Freud. This is true even of Lenin, despite the huge weight of theory by which he burdened himself…

What is it that the Emperor Augustus or Bismarck knew and the Emperor Claudius or Joseph II did not? Very probably the Emperor Joseph was intellectually more distinguished and far better read than Bismarck, and Claudius may have known many more facts than Augustus. But Bismarck (or Augustus) had the power of integrating or synthesizing the fleeting, broken, infinitely various wisps and fragments that make up life at any level, just as every human being, to some extent, must integrate them (if he is to survive at all), without stopping to analyze how he does what he does, and whether there is a theoretical justification for his activity. Everyone must do it, but Bismarck did it over a much larger field, against a wider horizon of possible counts of action, with far greater power—to a degree, in fact, which is quite correctly described as that of genius. Moreover, the bits and pieces which require to be integrated—that is, seen as fitting with other bits and pieces, and not compatible with yet others, in the way in which, in fact, they do fit and fail to fit in reality—these basic ingredients of life are to a sense too familiar, we are too much with them, they are too close to us, they form the texture of the semiconscious and unconscious levels of our life, and for that reason they tend to resist tidy classification.

Evolution evolving

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, February 12, 2009 at 11:17 AM - 4 Comments

It was 200 years ago today that Charles Darwin (and Abraham Lincoln, for that matter) saw the light of day, the first-born of the secular trinity of 19th-century thinkers who created the modern world. Darwin was widely hailed in his own day—he ended up buried with other English greats in Westminster Abbey—and his fellow titans admired him as much as anyone. A new edition of Darwin’s revolutionary 1859 tome The Origin of Species (packaged like a bestselling novel, with the author’s name in type larger than that of the title) has the presumably unique distinction for a 2009 publication of bearing a front-cover blurb from Freud: “An extraordinary advance in our understanding of the world.” And in 1873, Marx mailed Darwin a copy of his earthshaking 1859 book, Das Kapital, inscribed from “his sincere admirer, Karl Marx.”

The admiration was a one-way street, though. Darwin the well-mannered English gentleman did write Marx a polite thank-you note—“I believe that we both earnestly desire the extension of knowledge and that this in the long run is sure to add to the happiness of mankind”—but the copy itself is more revealing of his real reaction. Now on display in his home-cum-museum, the volume’s uncut pages prove the scientist got less than a third of the way through it. (It’s impossible to guess what the socially conventional Darwin, who died in 1882, long before Freud’s major works, might have made of The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1900.) And as it began, so it continues. With Freud and Marx dating badly in the modern era (notwithstanding Marx’s recent economic stimulus bounce), Darwin is the only one still dominant in his field today. That’s not because evolution by natural selection is, as Darwin’s more fervent admirers like to declare, the single greatest idea anyone has ever had. Even though it may well be that, at least as long as you keep your list of potential contenders to how-the-universe-works concepts, as opposed to ideas on how we should treat one another; in the former case evolution’s only real competitors are Newton’s gravity and Einstein’s relativity. No, it’s because evolution is the finest example ever seen—and possibly ever to be seen—of an idea whose time has come, the ultimate intellectual supply and demand phenomenon. Continue…