Musings on a Sunday: What's So Funny About Peace, Love, and Understanding?

The nice thing about working on a Sunday is that you have a little time to meander. I mean, it's Sunday, after all.

And I wanted to post something else, because really, I can't bring myself to have bald Britney top of my page for more than a few hours.

In my meandering I was reading this article in the great British Music Magazine UNCUT this afternoon. It's a recounting of a tumultuous press conference Elvis Costello gave in the U.S. in the midst of his tour to support Armed Forces.
What happened was this:

Elvis and his mates were in some bar with some American musicians from another band. And things got loud and scrappy. It's hard to remember now, with the Krall and the Twins and all, but onceuponatime Elvis Costello was quite an angry young man. Anyway, things get heated, and Elvis winds up saying something horrible about Ray Charles and James Brown. Come on. You know what he said. Let's just say he called him two things, and one of them was "blind."

Well, this gets reported in The Village Voice and, understandably, there's a bit of a flap. What the UNCUT article does (it's in the issue with Radiohead on the cover -- I know that doesn't really narrow it down too much, but I bought it off the stand yesterday so it's either the new issue or the last issue) is recount the entire press conference where Costello attempted to set the record straight and say that he's not a racist.

This thing had the potential to sink Costello in America, remember. He was getting into fights and scraps on the tour all the time.

The press conference is remarkable. Costello tries to explain himself, and say that he's not a racist, it was just a matter of trying to hurl the most outrageous thing you could say into the atmosphere of the fight. But he's also still clearly annoyed with the press, and he will not back down from that. In fact, he makes no secret of how much he dislikes them. He winds up apologizing but tries to evade that at first, as he tries to make the point that the only reason he's here is because the reporting of the incident takes things out of their context.

Reading this flap, more than a quarter century on, strikes me as peculiar and interesting. Because the questions from the press are the same plodding, usual questions trying to trap him into this and that. They're peevish and high handed, and though he's being a bit of a prat, your sympathy reading the thing is clearly with Costello. The context was, and is, important. It must have been mortifying for Costello, who had written lots of songs decrying racism and had great respect for black music, to find himself in the position of having the press he loathed (and who loathed him right back) trying to sink him with a quote that he had actually said.

But of course...it went away. We don't think of Elvis Costello as a racist today. In fact, today we see him doing records with Allen Toussaint.

Bowie flirted with Neo-Nazi statements in the midst of his Berlin drug haze. Today he's a rock elder statesman and a new father with Iman.

I don't know what, if anything, this says about Michael Richards -- but Richards was caught in a remarkably similar situation to Costello. I mean, remarkably similar. But this time there's video, and video that's instantly playable on YouTube. And then there's also the 24 hour news cycle. And those things have changed everything -- and I'm not sure the changes have good implications for what we as writers do.

Maybe it's the fact that if I see one more mention or picture of a certain poor deceased Playboy model, I'm gonna hurl, but I think that the mediascape we live in now goes beyond venerating the shallow and being celebrity obsessed. I think it's rewired us in a way to not reach conclusions -- or at least to jettison context for ubiquity, and form conclusions based not on consideration, but repetition.

It's in the best interests of the cable news 24 hour cycle to keep you watching every moment; to not have you reach conclusion or closure with anything. Even (especially?) when there's nothing new. So we get endless updates with no context at all. And the repetition of images, over and over, replace thinking with pure emotion, which we're expected to internalize and feel, and react to: and inevitably, we conclude certain things because we are "familiar" enough with the story to think we've thought it through. When really, we're no further than those reporters were at that Elvis Costello press conference. We don't have answers. But when someone asks you what you think, you have to say something, and what comes out of your mouth is the spin.

When the news only came once a day, the politicians weren't focused on never losing a moment of the news cycle. The absolute primacy of spin hadn't yet taken root. It seems to me that now, with the internet and the 24 hour news cycle, it's not just in the best interests of the news people to keep the story alive, it's in the best interests of the news people to keep the story from progressing too much. Details need to be revealed for maximum impact, teased endlessly before you get anywhere. And we all watch. So the simple narratives of celebutards are perfect because, really, how much change and growth are you going to have?

Before all this was available, more of us read newspapers or newsmagazines which weren't so hot in their reaction, but offered the context that allowed us to slow up a bit and weigh different elements and points of view before coming to a conclusion.

If there was a 24 news cycle back on the Armed Forces tour, I'm not sure Elvis Costello would have survived. And maybe we'd be calling David Bowie that flaming Nazi poofter.

What does this say about what we do as screenwriters? Well, one of the other things I used to love was the movie that I had to think about for three days. You'd come out of the theatre and think one thing but then you'd consider it a little bit and a little bit more and eventually there'd be a synthesis and that process was engaging and delightful.

But now movies are made for the 24 hour news cycle, too. Which means that ponder time, that time that allows for the sober second thought, is cut off. Same is true with TV. Though shows like LOST are analysed and discussed endlessly -- I'm not sure it's people coming up with their own constructs. It's not a synthesis. To be perfectly honest, when I watch shows that I think are layered and interesting like Battlestar Galactica, I'm baffled and appalled when I go online and see the utter banality and surface nature of most people's analysis of what they've just watched. It's not that they're not getting it (well it is, but that's not my point) it's that they're not even giving themselves the time to get it. Any moment of character development, any moment of ambiguity, needs to be answered or stamped out immediately. After every cliffhanger of every show, I check the Google search queries that bring people to my blog, and inevitably they're trying to get an answer about this or that possible plot point that just unspooled.

People used to try to work this out on their own...and that working out..that helped to provide context. It helped improve the quality of our understanding. Now people Google because they need to know what to think right away. They need to know the answer, they need to know how to feel, who to hate, who to blame -- and I think it's our mediascape that has taught them to be that way.

I just don't know how we tell stories for that. Because it seems like those aren't the kinds of stories I really want to tell.

I bought the 2 disc DVD of The Departed this weekend. And I was watching the documentaries, and all of a sudden, I saw Scorsese talking about one scene that is pivotal in the narrative. (Not to spoil too much but it's the scene where a certain character says, "I sent you to the wrong address.") What Scorsese says is that scene is ambiguous, because there's a couple of ways to read it. And that blew me away. Because I read it one of those ways and thought that was the only way you could possibly have read it when I saw The Departed. But he's right. It is ambiguous. And that's way way cooler. Why didn't I see that ambiguity the first time? Am I skipping the consideration stage, too? Is that why I went straight to that conclusion?

I'm not sure. But since the point, these days, is to jump to a conclusion and not allow for any context, I'm going to go ahead and blame Wolf Blitzer.


Way to go, Wolf. Asshole.