All posts by Gary C. Woodward

Disaster a la Carte

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video play image wikipediaHave we become numb to the irony of using the good news of advertising to sell peeks into the Seventh Circle of Hell?

Understanding events by giving attention to context is our intellectual birthright.  It isn’t just poets who widen the frame to see life and all of its interconnected possibilities. Even a new automobile driver must learn to read the totality of the landscape in order to stay ahead of potential problems. Those whose business it is to document trends in the culture provide the clearest examples of pulling back to see beyond the small pieces to the larger whole. This skill was especially evident in the work of ground-breaking critics of film and painting like Pauline Kael and Robert Hughes.  And it remains on continual display in the works of any number of contemporary novelists and essayists.

Even so, I’m struck with how digital news from many different sources slices and dices single occurrences into tighter frames of reference that have the effect of training us to ignore a wider view.  Because so much internet journalism is short-form rather than long-form, we are encouraged to look at events that hook us by their recency rather than their significance. Many news sites update every few minutes to catch the latest atrocities and verbal assaults that have surfaced. Our media atomizes these moments, even though moving from one event to the next in a flash sabotages the mind’s capacity to glean significant and larger patterns.  Our growing thirst for the recent is the equivalent of looking at a pointillist painting just inches from the canvas.

Here’s one specific form of the problem: the mindless juxtaposition of upbeat advertising immediately in front of videos of human beings abusing each other. This is a good test of what we can call the consciousness of incongruous juxtaposition. Imagine an elevator ride that includes successive visits to floors where the doors open onto scenes of people who are in dire need of help.  Presumably we would feel compelled to respond because we are momentarily “in” each place as well as the elevator.  But such a ride should be psychologically uncomfortable, forcing us to witness successive traumas partly beyond the bubble of our own world.

ISIS searchThe point is that our media tends to destabilize the relationship we have to the  outside world.  And more than a few media critics have noted that the constancy of this fact seems to dull our abilities to react appropriately to the incongruous.

Like or not, we now live in an age where we must decide how much we want to open ourselves to various forms of human depravity.

Consider a few samples that our consciousness of incongruous juxtiposition, all presented in the last few years in the popular Huffington Post:

-A house explosion that critically injures two in New Jersey is caught by a dash cam a half a block away, preceded by a 15-second ad for Boeing Aerospace.

-A closed circuit camera catches a fiery blast at a Russian railway station that kills 16 people, brought to us courtesy of Starburst Candy.

-A video of gruesome ISIS killings of a number of men in Libya, also preceded by an ad for Starburst Candy.

-A video of a man attacking a British police officer with a foot long kitchen knife, preceded by an ad for Airnb, with a child in a posh living-room taking her first steps.

You get the idea.  In each case the ads book-ended the stories.  Images of mayhem are utterly at odds with the upbeat messages for a range of products and services, all following in quick succession.

Why don’t we notice?  Irony is more than a nice literary trope.  It’s one product of a mind that is fully alive to the tensions that exist in any culture.  Even so, desensitization is perhaps the price we pay for franchising our time to others using “clickbait” to draw us in.

In truth, news in print and on tape has almost always been supported by advertising that is immediately adjacent to content. But most outlets used to edit stories in ways to buffer ad messages from horrific content. Even minimal sensibility for what advertisers used to call “complementary editorial” has disappeared on some sites, suggesting declining sensibilities that would normally recoil at awkward juxtapositions.  It’s testimony to our growing numbness that we usually miss the ironies of using the good news of advertising to sell peeks into the Seventh Circle of Hell. Imperial Rome may have had plenty of bread and apparently a lot of grisly “circuses.” But they’ve got nothing on us.

Comment at Woodward@tcnj.edu

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What Counts as Funny?

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Charlie Chaplin's Tramp Wikipedia.org
Chaplin’s Tramp               Wikipedia.org

It can be funny to see someone gleefully ransack the minor social conventions the rest of us are so careful to observe.

There are many theories of comedy, and no shortage of academic approaches to it. As the cliché goes, it’s a serious subject. My favorite theory of humor in  dramatic settings proposes that our impulse to laugh flows from observing settings where individual actions violate normative expectations. We watch a play or film.  The character that an actor is playing seems to be a recognizable type, perhaps a businessman, a young suitor or a priest.  Comedy is often born in these surroundings when earnest characters fail to enact social scripts they have supposedly mastered.  The actions usually can’t be dire or cruel. But when a puffed up socialite gliding through a hotel lobby slips on a banana peel, that’s funny.  If the same thing happens to a child, not so much. The humor lies in the punctured dignity of the socialite’s pratfall.  It reminds us of the distance between who someone aspires to be and the mortal that they are.

This is the set-up facing an earnest and tuxedoed Henry Fonda in Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve (1949).  He has dressed to be the perfect suitor for a shrewd young woman he wants to impress. The setting of a party is the right place to make the impression. But he just can’t quite pull it off.

Sometimes its words rather than behaviors that can be the source of violated expectations.  When Rowan Atkinson’s Father Gerald tries to perform his first nuptials in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) it becomes clear that the nervous priest has come up short in finding for the exact language needed to help the equally jittery groom:

Father Gerald: I call upon those persons here present to witness... that I, Bernard... Delainey...

Bernard: I call upon those persons here present to witness... that I, Bernard Delainey...

Father Gerald: take thee Lydia Jane Herbert... to be my awful wedded wife.

Bernard: take thee Lydia Jane Herbert... to be my *lawful* wedded wife.

Father Gerald: That's right... That's right. May Almighty God bless you all in the name of the Father, the Son, & the Holy Spigot... *Spirit*.

Another variation on the mismatch between a scene action  is to introduce into familiar surroundings a character who is physically or temperamentally out of place. Charlie Chaplin continually put his scruffy Tramp in reasonably affluent settings that emphasized the pathos of a kind little man facing a much tougher world. The contrast was greatest when he costars where beautiful women such as Virginia Cherrill in City Lights (1931) and Paulette Goddard in Modern Times (1936). The effect of his efforts to romance them is funny and always sentimental.

Groucho Marx and Robin Williams created types defined more by their manic times. The often brilliant stream-of-consciousness riffs of Williams were at least echos to the wisecracks and double entendres that poured out of Groucho. In both cases there is comic power in characters who could leave the occupants in a well-ordered room looking like they just survived a tornado.

And, of course, that’s the point.  Dramatic comedy may seem at first to be only a source of passing amusement. But it is also a form of discourse that reminds us of how much social life relies on prescribed rules of conduct.

Comments: Woodward@tcnj.edu