// Don’t Fail, Whale!

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What did that whale say?
Fredrick Douglass once likened people who claimed to support freedom — but who discouraged agitation — to people who want to grow crops without plowing up the ground. 140 characters or not, it seems like an appropriate response to the news that Twitter has developed the ability to censor tweets on a country-by-country basis.

I know this isn’t a simple issue. Many countries, wary of the potentially destabilizing force of social media, simply will not allow companies like Twitter to operate unless they agree to some form of censorship. Even Google, who two years ago pulled access to their main search engine in a dispute with Chinese authorities, recently began softening its rhetoric in an attempt to regain lost time and market share.

One could make the case that a policy of engaging with oppressive regimes helps them become more liberal — even if only in small, slow increments. Change takes time and maybe half a loaf of Twitter is better than none at all.

But whether you think that idea makes sense or not, this much is clear: Many companies who market their products as tools to empower individuals are, in fact, actually building them in ways which aid in subjugating those same people. // more //

// A Wordless Joy

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“The Artist” is a modern French interpretation of an old black-and-white silent movie, which is to say that you’d be hard-pressed to come up with a film idea which would have to travel a more difficult road in order to find a wide American audience.1

However unlikely the concept, though, “The Artist” is poised to do just that. Michel Hazanavicius, previously best known for his O.S.S. series of Spy Parodies, leads Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo into new territory with a movie which manages to be both a tribute to a film-making era gone by and also one of the most emotionally potent movies that I have seen in some time.

Many critics have been happy to pull out the “Silence is Golden” trope in their reviews, anticipating the almost certain Oscar nominations for the film and its cast (not to mention for the wonderful score by Ludovic Bource). They’re right to do so. “The Artist” has some incredibly nuanced performances and, believe it or not, one of the most compelling ones is by a dog. Uggie is a Jack Russell Terrier who steals every scene he appears in, prompting an ad-hoc Twitter campaign to get him an Oscar nomination as well.2

Watching Dujardin and Bejo tap dance together was also a revelation to me: The wordless joy that these scenes express is the real thing, not an ironic, tongue-in-cheek gesture or some sort of “Hey — Look at me dance in the 1920′s!” exercise that some of Hollywood’s recent forays into the era have produced. The film’s American production design team also really nailed the look and feel of the time, adding so many fun little grace notes for the audience to pick out.3

And yet with all the tap dancing, period artifacts, and performing dogs, “The Artist” manages to remain a serious film about love and pride. It is, without a doubt, my favorite film of 2011.

  1. Please — Don’t consider this an invitation to submit your own “Springtime For Hitler”-esque suggestions. [↩]
  2. This would be well-deserved and a return to Oscar’s origins, if you believe the story about Rin-Tin-Tin receiving the most votes for Best Actor in the Award’s first year. [↩]
  3. A favorite: Watching Dujardin’s character, slinking away from an auction where all of his personal movie star memorabilia was sold, almost get hit by a car in front of a marquee which reads “Lonely Star” [↩]

// Deep Impact

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The sad, but not unexpected news of the death of Christopher Hitchens reached me late last night.

Though it felt a clichéd gesture, I couldn’t help but pour a little single malt scotch into a rocks glass in his honor before turning in.1 Today, the obituaries and personal eulogies begin to try to explain just who Hitchens really was — just as the remembrances of Steve Jobs attempted to do only a few short months ago. Hitchens sometimes took positions that felt strange or even hypocritical to me, but almost everyone I know would at least offer a toast to the style and aplomb with which he expressed himself.

As one of my friends put it — You didn’t always like him, but you always read him.

Shortly before he died, Hitchens wrote an essay which challenged the notion of “That which does not kill us makes us stronger”. At any point in his career, he could make short work of platitudes like these but, when accompanied by a photograph taken of him in the final stages of the esophageal cancer which ultimately claimed his life, his words took on an added weight which all but obliterated any possible counter-argument.

Now if you’ve ever had a front row seat to “The Cancer Show”, you knew that this was exactly the kind of falsely-sentimental thing about the disease that Hitch would enjoy laying waste to — and lay waste he did. But after I had finished reading it, I found myself considering a reformulation of the very idea that Hitch had just destroyed:

Who are we once we’ve been stripped of everything we call “us”?

// more //

  1. It may have been more than a little [↩]