Agency versus agenda

My first comment is that I totally understand the town’s frustration with 20/20. A similar incident happened with one of my students who killed her husband. She thought they were going to do a profile on her so people could understand better where she was coming from. More how she was not a threat to society, not how she was innocent. Then she was railroaded. They did a follow up interview a year later that was just going to be a five minute segment showing where she was. I advised her to use I much more. She would usually say, well, when someone yells at you, you get scared and don’t know what you are doing. In the second interview she said, I was scared, I thought he was going to kill me, I protected my soon. 20/20 did not air the follow-up. That was tangential.

But it does bring me to one of my main thoughts about the play and that was the obvious agenda that the writers were completely unwilling to stray from. Even the first little segment was completely unfair. Some cowboy comes out from the hospital and doesn’t want to be interviewed. That is obviously set up to show how much of a struggle it was for them to get people to talk, but the cowboy is given no context because they have no context. There’s a reason a lot of cowboys chose to be cowboys: cows don’t talk. To portray the man’s silence as anything other than a personal choice to not have his privacy invaded is taking the moment out of context and further their agenda which is the big problem they had with everyone who expressed any other opinion. The other moment where the agenda becomes very obvious is in the interview with McKinney. Greg keeps pushing him to say that they went after Matthew because Matthew was gay. Greg keeps acknowledging that it had something to do with the murder since it made him seem weak but that was obviously not enough for Greg. McKinney comes across as a completely unreliable person who has racist tendencies and is pretty overtly a psychopath. Why should his interviews ten years ago be held as completely trustworthy while the interviews he has been given in the past few years be totally false?

The problem is not with the play or the message. The problem is with the methodology. Instead of trying so hard to get McKinney to admit that he attacked Matthew because he was gay, the interviewer should have asked him why he didn’t remember anything from those months and weeks around the murder. That would have set up a great metaphor in comparison with the townspeople who are starting to believe that the murder was not a “hate crime” (which is a term I have a problem with but that is a different tangent). As time goes on, both the town’s and McKinney’s memory changes and fades and restructures. McKinney knows he’s not getting out of prison, he willingly admits that he has a problem with homosexuals, he gains nothing by changing his story when he tells it ten years later. I really liked the interviews with the folklorist who said that people want to control their story and their history. That’s a great statement and very true, but the writers apparently see no irony in the fact that they are writing another play about this incident and complaining about the way people of the town are structuring the story. The writers and interviewers are doing the exact same thing. They have a story that they have now become part of with the first play and the movie. They want to control that story and make sure their version is the one that survives. So they go about controlling the methodology and the tone to make sure their audience agrees. Part of that goes along with the controlling nature of the narrative. From a Foucauldian angle, narrative sets up the structure of its own use and makes sure that no one who takes part in the narrative can venture out of the structure. Even taking an opposing angle to the narrative, keeps the person within its control. Again, that becomes another tangent.

Week 1 Post

I think I got most of my discussion about The Fire and the Rain and concerns about the inconsistency of the play and, frankly, the writing. This is a smaller complaint but even some of the lines seem weak. The very first line threw me off. Craft 101 says you don’t have characters repeat themselves, especially at the beginning of the work. But I did want to mention Vishakha’s moment in the play after Paravasu kills his father. Paravasu is telling Arvasu to take responsibility for their father’s death. During this, Vishakha is blatantly telling Arvasu to defy his brother and her husband. I thought that was a really strong moment for Vishakha and an interesting commentary on gender relations. I think the scene is somewhat problematic since Vishakha has already expressed her wish to die. Since she has no problem with dying, she would have no problem with defying her husband because what is the worst thing he could do but kill her? I feel that she wouldn’t have as willing to stand up for herself and Arvasu if she did not already know that Paravasu was not going to kill her. At least, not immediately. I think that is now all have to say about the play.

Since we didn’t get around to discussing the first chapter of Liveness, I thought I would spend most of my blog post with the book. Right now, I’m kind of skeptical about this book. I have a hard time jumping into the arguments about new media or art or whatever it may be. Every time new technology comes along one side says it is going to be the best thing to ever happen and take over all other art forms while the other side says it’s inferior but inevitably will ruin all the other art forms. Usually either side is wrong. The Soviets were big into this when they first started making silent film. Eisenstien and other talked about how this was the new form of art and had very specific details and rules about how film should be used (somewhat like Lars Von Trier’s Dogma 95 which only took him a few years to abandon) and when sound started to be incorporated all the film directors mourned the end of cinema. Here Auslander seems to be doing something of both. At least in the first chapter, he seems to be dismissing some aspects of our dominate culture while holding onto what he perceives to be “the future”. And by this I’m referring to his dismissal of television as a simulacrum of culture while seeming to embrace how technology will enhance performance in the near future.

Not only did his somewhat bombastic approach make question this book but also his use of theorist. First, Susan Sontag was not stating some philosophical approach to theater and art but was simply stating a fact. While you can film a play to make a film, you cannot play a film to make a play. I feel like he takes this quote largely out of context to prove his point. But, in the end, this is simply a statement about our limits in technology. Maybe in the future we will be able to “play a film”. Second, his use of Baudrillard is basic at best and possibly intentionally misleading. He doesn’t do nearly a good enough job explaining Baudrillard’s theories of culture and simulation. He keeps alluding to the rock music chapter, but he needs to bring up Baudrillard’s discussion of LA and Disneyland to really make his point. I don’t have my Baudrillard on me, but the basic idea is that there are four stages of simulation. The first is the real culture. Rites, rituals, and habits that have true meaning for true believers. The second is level follows these rites, rituals, etc. but they are merely taking part of the action and do not believe or understand the actions. The third level is an abstraction of the second. The rites and rituals have changed in order for people separated from the first level to find meaning in the processes they are taking place in. The fourth level is full on simulacrum having nothing to do with the actuality of the first level. That really isn’t a great explanation either, but it’s a better effort than Ausalander's.