Living Off the Avails of Honey Boo Boo

Lauren "Boo Boo" Lexton

This isn't going be a rant about how awful a show Here Comes Honey Boo Boo is, or how icky Boo Boo and her clan are. My sermon today is about the real stars of the show: Lauren Lexton, Tom Rogan and David M. Zaslav. The first two are the co-founders of Authentic Entertainment, the production company that shoots the show. Zaslav is President and CEO of Discovery Communications, the parent company of TLC, the network that broadcasts Honey Boo Boo. One thing all three of these people have in common is that they're highly educated members of the American upper-classes. Lexton graduated cum laude from NYU; Rogan got his degree at Emerson College in Boston; and Zaslav graduated with honors from Boston University's law school. The most important thing the trio share is that they make their coin by exploiting and demonizing America's working classes. In this regard they are part of a larger broadcasting trend that sees networks and production companies owned or controlled by the upper-classes producing what amounts to propaganda designed to portray the American proletariat as venal, coarse, stupid and ugly.

David "The Situation" Zaslav

Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, Southie Rules, Jersey Shore, Buckwild,  any show with the word "Gypsy" in the title, and a dozen similar shows all share the same basic format: find a group of people who can be easily identified as "redneck" or "white trash" and encourage them to act badly, or at least in a manner that will make middle-class audiences cringe. But why the appetite for this kind of show? For the bourgeoisie it provides a chance to feel fortunate and superior. And for both the upper-classes making the shows, and the middle-classes watching them, this kind of show is a documentary argument against any type of social welfare program. If your view of the working classes has been formed by the antics of Snooki and Co., it's a fair bet that you'll squeal with rage at the idea of any portion of your tax money helping people at the bottom end of the socio-economic ladder. So as a tool of social control, a way of ensuring that the "lower classes" are seen as nothing but feckless and feral, these shows have a definite political utility: they work as a Greek chorus to the arguments of right-wing politicians and commentators that social welfare programs are wasteful, immoral and counter-productive.

It's not going too far to call these class-based reality shows a kind of hate literature in video form. The litmus test for this is that if one of these programs revolved around a group of African Americans it would justifiably be called racist. In fact, it's interesting that there are no blacks being featured in any programs of this type. By any and all economic and educational indicators African Americans are at the bottom of the heap in the US, so it would seem they would be the first choice for any producer looking to find the next group of loud, grotesque losers to follow around with a camera. But producers aren't dumb. If they were to present a black family as egregious as the Boo Boo clan, what's passed off now as silly fun or a guilty pleasure would be described, accurately, as an attack on a particular group. Look at it this way; if the Ku Klux Klan was in the TV business they'd be falling all over themselves to produce a black version of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.

Further proof of the class propaganda being fed to TV audiences is that the only show on which plutocrats make an appearance is Undercover Boss, a program in which the upper classes take the role of fairy godfathers/mothers, showering benefits on employees who've shown their worth by working like faithful and uncomplaining dogs. My piece on that odious show is here. So on one end of the spectrum we get shows about squalling, uneducated, witless white people, and at the other end we're presented with CEOs seen as beneficent guardian angels. And people still think there's no class system in America? Lexton, Rogan, Zaslav and the others who peddle this muck are certainly eager to profit from the class system, but it's equally certain that they wouldn't want the Boo Boo family as neighbors.

Owen Jones wrote a superb book on this topic from a British perspective called Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class. I've got a review of it here.

The Florida Keys

Key West rooster.

Just got back from a week's vacation in the Florida Keys; Islamorada, to be exact. The weather was fabulous, which is 9/10s of the reason for going south from Canada at this time of year. Here's some random observations on the other tenth of the trip.

Southwest Airlines. We flew Southwest from Buffalo, and the airline should really rebrand itself as the standup comedy airline, and I mean that in a good way. The cabin staff on both flights turned all of the standard in-flight announcements into a series of gags. It was usually pretty funny and took some of the sting out of the fact that everything else about the airline is strictly no-frills: it's essentially a bus service with complimentary peanuts.

Route 1. This highway is the backbone and main street of the Keys, but what you don't know if you've never been there is that it's pretty damn busy. The vast majority of hotels and condos in the Keys are within throwing distance of this road, which means traffic noise is a constant companion on your vacation.

Pelicans. I love pelicans, they're almost worth the trip to Florida just by themselves. They look completely ridiculous but picturesque at the same time. Stand near one on a dock and you'll notice they always appear to be looking down their nose at you.

Americans. How can people who are so friendly and open with strangers also be so wildly intolerant? Everyone we met is was friendliness personified, but then on Duval Street in Key West we saw the other side of the coin: a middle-aged couple had set up a card table stand decorated with posters calling for the impeachment of Obama. The stand featured a large picture of Obama dressed as a Roman emperor. It would be funny if it wasn't representative of a lot of other Americans.

Key West. This is the star attraction of the Keys, and its charm hasn't been completely obliterated by the tourist trade. Duval Street is the main drag and it's a wasteland of tourist trap shops and bars. Move off the main street and the town's quirkiness becomes more apparent: chickens and roosters roaming free; quaint, but not opulent, homes; pedestrian-friendly streets; and some decent and underused beaches. Key West is also famous for its gayness, but that aspect of the town seemed pretty subdued. The place was mostly full of middle-aged straight couples getting wild and crazy after two drinks.

National Parks. There are several in the Keys and they're all worth visiting. As usual, I'm always left annoyed by how well-maintained and designed state and national parks are in the U.S. compared to their equivalents in Ontario. Wasaga Beach Provincial Park in Ontario features one of the great beaches in the world, so why does it have such crappy facilities?

Ocean Drive. On our last day we drove up to Miami and walked along Ocean Drive on Miami Beach. Yuck. It's one of those places where rich people, and those who try to pass themselves off as rich, go to be seen; it's like a nature preserve for the noxiously affluent.

It's Still The Deep South. In restaurants and hotels all the front of house staff are white, all the cleaners, bus boys, and kitchen staff are black or Hispanic. I can't say for sure but it certainly looks like businesses in the Keys work hard to present a white face to their customers. Not surprisingly, black tourists are a rare sight.

The Zane Grey Lounge. This might be one of the best restaurants in the Keys. Not because of the food, which is OK, but thanks to the view, which is spectacular. The lounge is on the second floor of a deluxe fishing supply store called World Wide Sportsmen, which is part of the BassPro chain. From the second floor balcony you get an uninterrupted view of the ocean, fishing boats skimming back and forth, and a chain of tiny islands. The fact that the restaurant is attached to a store might be why it seems to be relatively unknown.

Book Review: 7 Ways to Kill a Cat (2009) by Matias Nespolo

Here's a crime fiction novel that redefines "noir." A lot of contemporary crime fiction is described as noir, and as dark as these stories often are, they almost always take place in milieus that their middle-class readership is familiar with: North American and European cities in which the characters, no matter how gritty or "street", have cars and homes, and generally have a consumer lifestyle most people would recognize. This is far from the case in Matias Nespolo's novel. It's set in the barrios of Buenos Aires and its protagonist and his peers live in tin shacks and own nothing but the clothes they wear.

Gringo, the main character, and his pal Chueco are in their late teens(?), have no real family, and make their living from petty crime. They spend most of their time either taking drugs or trying to find drugs. The two decide to rob a local bar owner at closing time, and, not surprisingly, things go pear-shaped and the pair come to the attention of El Jetita, the local crimelord. From that point on things spiral downhill for all the characters as a rival gangster from a neighboring barrio moves against El Jetita. Outside the barrrio the city is being gripped by protests and strikes by teachers, labourers and others.

One of the smartest parts of this novel is that it doesn't come to a conclusion: one crisis simply bleeds into another. Gringo slips away from the gang warfare in the barrio to run headlong into political violence in the larger city. The last we see of him he's preparing to throw rocks at riot police. The author does a great job of showing that life in the barrio is simply a constant scramble to find refuge and comfort between various crises and disasters. Gringo finds an unusual source of comfort in a copy of Moby Dick that he picks up on a whim. He reads Melville's novel at odd moments, and seems drawn to Ishmael's restlessness, the madness of Ahab, and the idea of the ship's men, like people in the barrio, being battered by forces beyond their control.

Nespolo has a political message in his novel, one that might not be readily apparent to non-Argentinians like me, but there's nothing didactic or preachy going on here. Nespolo is sympathetic to the savage life of the barrio, but he certainly doesn't sugarcoat the motives or actions of his characters, most of whom are as vicious as feral cats. The message seems to be that the barrio creates these people, not the other way around. As grim as much of the novel is, this is an exhilarating, even fun, story. The dialogue and action is crisp, nasty and the story's twists and turns are never predictable.

Book Review: Spring Torrents (1871) by Ivan Turgenev

The first thing you notice about a Turgenev novel is that it's a lot leaner than those of his Russian contemporaries. Turgenev didn't write sprawling Tolstoyan epics; his specialty was short stories and perfectly formed novels that have a very modern feel, especially in their treatment of women. Most 19th century novels, even those by women, tend to describe female characters in the simplest terms: good women are pure and saintly, bad girls are wicked and slatternly right to the bone. Turgenev, who had problematical (to say the least) relationships with all the women in his life, created female characters that are strikingly real. Spring Torrents highlights Turgenev's skill in this area, as well as his ability to describe the pains and pleasures of love.

The plot is deceptively simple. It begins in  St. Petersburg where Dmitry Sanin, a wealthy, bachelor landowner is looking gloomily at his empty life. Cue the flashback. Sanin recalls a trip he made to Frankfurt thirty years ago when he was twenty-two and taking a tour of Europe. Sanin wanders into a pastry shop run by an Italian family and almost immediately falls in love with Gemma, the 19-year-old daughter of the shop's owner, a widow named Lenore. Gemma is, however, engaged to a pompous German shopkeeper. In short order Sanin fights a duel to defend Gemma's honour, and she breaks off her engagement in favour of Sanin. Everything's looking good until Sanin meets an acquaintance from school now married to Maria, a brauty who says she's willing to purchase Sanin's estate so that he'll immediately have the money to marry Gemma and begin his new life in Germany. It turns out that Maria is mostly interested in seducing Sanin, which she accomplishes in fairly short order. Sanin is left consumed with shame and writes a letter to Gemma to tell her that he's not worthy of her love. He returns to Russia to live with his regret, but in the final pages of the novel he tracks down Gemma, who is now living in New York with her husband and family. The last we see of Sanin he's heading to New York.

Gemma and Maria are the twin stars of the novel. Most 19th century novelists (Dickens being the most obvious example) would have made Gemma a vapid paragon of virtue. Turgenev makes her funny, a touch eccentric, and not given to attacks of the vapours or any other kinds of behavior common to literary heroines of the time. The love affair Gemma becomes involved is implausible, but she is very real. Maria is even more the star of the show. She's trouble and it's spelled f-e-m-m-e f-a-t-a-l-e. What's unique about her character is that Turgenev makes her so damn charming. She seduces Sanin just to win a bet with her husband (it's very clear he's gay), and it's something she's done before. As bad as this behavior is, it's almost impossible not  to still like Maria, she's that charming.

Turgenev is also at the top of his game in his analysis of the psychology of love, a subject that he was a master of. Here he is describing first love:

First love is exactly like a revolution: the regular and established order of life is in an instant smashed to fragments; youth stands at the barricade, its bright banner raised high in the air, and sends its ecstatic greetings to the future whatever it may hold -- death or a new life, no matter.

It's that kind of writing that knocks the edges off this novel's melodramatic plot and makes it feel, in parts, very modern. Turgenev's sense of humour also helps in that regard. He can't resist mocking all things German, including having Gemma's pompous fiance read from a German book called Merry Quips or You Must and Will Laugh. That book actually existed, and Turgenev was clearly in on the joke that Germans have a difficult relationship with humour. The more things change...

If your view of Russian literature has been formed by dour literary giants like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, give Turgenev a try. He's no less a genius than the other two, but his prose style is a lot more agreeable to 21st century readers.

Film Review: Zero Dark Thirty (2012)

If nothing else, Zero Dark Thirty confirms that director Kathyrn Bigelow is the Leni Riefenstahl of the American right. Let's start with the torture question. The first half-hour or so of the film is filled with scenes of al-Qaeda suspects being abused by CIA agents: beatings, waterboarding, sleep deprivation, we see it all. As has been widely reported, and contrary to what's shown in the film, the hunt for Osama bin Laden wasn't helped in any way by the torture of suspects, and even Bigelow, in a letter to the Los Angeles Times answering the criticism aimed at her film, waffles in her own defense, falling back on her 1st Amendment rights "to create works of art." In other words, she's saying that it's OK to take the hard truth that torture didn't work and fictionalize it into a success story because, after all, it's just a movie. Some people would call that propaganda. I do.

So why did she distort the truth? One plausible explanation is that in cinematic terms showing scenes of torture is more dramatic, engaging and visually powerful than scene after scene of people reading transcripts and conducting briefings. The other possibility has a more political explanation and becomes apparent later in the film when two CIA agents are watching a TV interview with President Obama. In the interview, done shortly after his election, Obama announces that the U.S. will no longer use or condone torture. The agents don't react to this statement and barely pay attention to what Obama is saying. What this little scene suggests is that the CIA people in the field have no respect for Obama, and given that the early part of the film has argued that torture pays big intelligence dividends, the point of the scene becomes clearer: the film is arguing that Obama was, at best, out of touch with realities on the ground, and at worst was a hindrance in the hunt for bin Laden. But there's more. In the end phase of the hunt the decision to attack bin Laden's compound is portrayed as a decision made wholly the CIA. There's barely a hint of any presidential involvement. A quick check of the historical record shows that the pursuit of bin Laden was drastically scaled down by President Bush in 2005, who said "I don't know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority." In 2008, President Obama prioritized finding and killing bin Laden, and in April 2011 it was he who gave the go-ahead for the raid on bin Laden's compound.

So it would seem that some degree of credit for the death of bin Laden should go to President Obama. Bigelow denies him this credit, and very clearly goes out of her way to make him seem like part of the problem, not part of the solution. In all the talk about the film's fallacious portrayal of torture as an effective means of intelligence gathering, little has been said about its anti-Obama political agenda. Now, I'm not American and I don't particularly like the president, so I don't, as they say, have a dog in this fight, but it seems obvious that Zero Dark Thirty attempts to downplay and disparage the Obama administration's part in the killing of bin Laden. But why should she do this? One intriguing explanation is that the high degree of official and unofficial help Bigelow got from the Pentagon and CIA came with a price: give us the glory and not that black guy none of us can stand. It's either that or Bigelow's a hardcore Republican.

Putting aside the film's function as a vehicle for disinformation, it's not as good as Bigelow's previous effort, The Hurt Locker. The chief problem is the main character, Maya, a young CIA case officer who makes it her single-minded goal in life to find bin Laden. The trouble with Maya is that she's nothing but a tightly wound ball of anger and determination. She's more of an investigation-bot than a human. Bigelow and her screenwriter are peddling the cliche that a successful woman can't express the normal range of human emotions. Maya's main co-worker, a man, is just as driven and ruthless but is given a more rounded personality. Jessica Chastain gives a good performance as Maya, but most of the time all that's required of her is that she look stern. And her abusiveness towards her superiors makes for some cheap dramatics, but in the real world it's the sort of behavior that gets people fired or reassigned.

Bigelow gets full marks for her recreation of the attack on bin Laden's compound. It generates a lot of tension, which is quite a feat since we know exactly how it's all going to play out. Bigelow shoots the action in a combination of night vision p.o.v. and near total darkness, and it's hard to imagine this sequence being done any better. As she showed in The Hurt Locker, Bigelow has filmmaking talent to burn, it's just unfortunate that it's been corrupted by a less than subtle propaganda message.

Propaganda-Style Kung Fu

Donnie senses the presence of a tourist from Torquay & prepares to strike.

I've watched a whole bunch of kung fu films over the years, lots of them featuring mantis-style kung fu, others showing crane or drunken monkey style, and a couple highlighting the dreaded Buddha Palm technique. The bad guys in these films were the usual selection of corrupt officials, warlords, or boastful and evil kung fu masters. Some recent kung fu films have been featuring what I'm going to call propaganda-style kung fu. What's that, you ask? In films like Ip Man (2008), Ip Man 2 (2010), and Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zen (2010) the new enemies are the Japanese and Westerners, usually  represented by the British.

Now, there's nothing new about Japanese villains in kung fu films. Historically speaking the Chinese have good reason to cast them in this role, and in a lot of cases they use the Japanese as default villains in the same way Hollywood uses Nazis or Germans, as in the Raiders of the Lost Ark and Die Hard franchises. What's new is that Westerners have joined the stable of villains in a big way. In the 1970s and '80s Westerners were, in my viewing experience, rarely cast as villains. The trend seems to have started with Jackie Chan's The Legend of Drunken Master (1994), in which nefarious Brits are smuggling Chinese artifacts out of the country. The difference between the kung fu films from the '70s and today's films is that there's a hysterical and fearful vibe to the anti-Japanese/Western theme. In sum, it feels like the Hong Kong film industry has become the unofficial propaganda wing of the Chinese government.

The IP Man films and Legend of the Fist (all starring Donnie Yen, as it happens) are good examples of this hysteria. The Japanese and Brits (and some other Westerners) are vilified and demonized with relentless enthusiasm, far exceeding what's necessary to establish them as conventional villains. After a certain point you begin to realize that what's going on here is an attempt to make Chinese audiences wary, if not actually intolerant, of the non-Chinese world.

What's curious is why the Chinese government feels it's necessary to mount this propaganda campaign. China's economy and political clout is growing every day, but the kind of propaganda on view in these kung fu films feels like it's being created to bolster a fragile sense of self-esteem. Another example of this comes from Skyfall, the latest Bond film. In one throwaway scene a European hitman kills a Chinese security guard. Chinese censors snipped this scene out, apparently because the idea of a Chinese citizen falling victim to a European is too harrowing for Chinese audiences.

I'm guessing that the real reason for this propaganda effort is that some people at the higher levels of the Chinese government are scared at the pace of change in China. Few nations in history have undergone such sweeping changes in the course of one generation, and it would appear that some Chinese politicians and bureaucrats feel that the increasing Westernization of China's culture must be combated. It's also possible that this propaganda effort is also designed to create domestic support for some of China's more belligerent diplomatic efforts; the quarrel with Japan over the Senkaku Islands immediately comes to mind. Whatever the reason, this shift in the tone of some modern kung fu films drains them of their charm and leaves a rather bitter taste.

Film Review: Django Unchained (2012)

Based on Django Unchained, it seems fair to say that Quentin Tarantino isn't interested in making films anymore, or at least not the kind that people have traditionally recognized as films. Django isn't so much a film as it is a loosely stitched together series of moments and bits that are meant to be appreciated by themselves, totally apart from any kind of coherent narrative. The audience for this kind of film? The  demographic that delights in discovering and chattering about tropes, meta moments, homages, genre references, and tributes to other films. If that's the kind of film you like Django is an absolute buffet of genre cliches and, dare I say it, tropes. For the rest of us this is a jaw-droppingly bad piece of filmmaking that goes on and on and on. There are so many things wrong with Django it's going to be easier just to narrow it down to a sampling of the things that annoyed me the most:

Talk is way too cheap

Early in his career Tarantino was justifiably praised for his dialogue. If you can be damned with faint praise, it appears that in Quentin's case you can also be damned with too much. He's turned into a scriptwriting windbag. Scene after scene has characters talking at such length it would be more accurate to call this script a Hansard. Not only are most scenes grotesquely overlong, some are completely gratuitous.

It's a western?

Django is supposed to be some kind of tribute/homage to spaghetti westerns, but in truth the story turns out be more of a drawing room comedy of mayhem. The key visual element in any western is the great outdoors. The idea of vast, unpopulated spaces was one of the reasons for the popularity of westerns in small, overpopulated Europe, hence the rise of the spaghetti western. Tarantino has no eye or enthusiasm for shooting outdoors. Just to let us know we're watching a western he has Django and Schultz ride past a herd of buffalo. OK, fine, there's that box ticked. And then several scenes later we see them go past a herd of elk. Oh, right, I almost forgot I was watching a western. That's the extent of the director's enthusiasm for western landscapes. Most of the film takes place in smallish rooms and the tone in the latter half is more blacksploitation than western.

Foghorn Leghorn was a technical advisor on the film

Yes, most of the actors seem to have taken voice lessons from Foghorn Leghorn, especially Leonardo DiCaprio. And Don Johnson gets to play a plantation owner in full Colonel Sanders regalia. This is as subtle as things get in the film.

Guns don't kill people, massive, spectacular blood loss does

If I sit down to watch one of the Saw films or something by Dario Argento I expect and demand buckets of blood. But a western? For no clear reason Tarantino films his shootouts as though they were scenes in a horror movie. When bullets hit flesh in this universe they release a geyser of blood that travels yards. I know, I know, it's a homage to Peckinpah, but he didn't make blood a star in its own right.

Why are there so many empty beds in the Old Actors' Home?

I can answer that: it's because Tarantino dragooned Tom Wopat, Franco Nero, Russ Tamblyn, Lee Horsley, and Bruce Dern into making cameo appearances. Why? So film geeks can play Spot The Former Star. It's a lot like the Where's Waldo books but without the popcorn. These actors don't add anything to the film except a distraction.

A Peculiar Institution

Believe it or not, some critics and Tarantino apologists/fans have been furrowing their brows and saying that Django delivers a strong lesson about the evils of slavery. Well, if you've been living in a cave for the last 100 years or so it might be news that slavery was a bad thing, but for the rest of us it's a yawn-inducing revelation. And Tarantino isn't really interested in any kind of serious look at slavery; his interest in slavery only extends to referencing tawdry exploitation flicks on the subject like Mandingo and Drum.

Miscegenation, please

For someone who worships at the temple of genre films, the nastier and cruder the better, Tarantino proves to be something of a prude. He's happy to show wholesale quantities of graphic violence, but sex and nudity is something he seems uncomfortable with. All of his films are G-rated when it comes to sex. T & A is a big part of all the genres referenced in Django, especially the slave-themed ones, but Tarantino skates right around some obvious opportunities for naked fun. How boring.

Hot Shots: Part Trois

Remember those parody film franchises like Scary Movie and Hot Shots? Tarantino must have decided to honour that genre as well because that's the only explanation for a farcical sequence with Don Johnson and Jonah Hill (yes, Jonah Hill) as members of a Klan-like posse that gets into an argument about headgear. The scene is supposed to be farcical and off-kilter, just like some of the conversations in Pulp Fiction, but it's written and filmed so badly you have to wonder if the Wayans brothers weren't in charge of this part of the film. 

White/Star Power

For a film that's supposed to have a strong black power vibe, at the end of the day it's mostly about the white characters. Jamie Foxx as Django gets to shoot a lot of white folks, but it's Christoph Waltz and DiCaprio who get almost all the dialogue, and Waltz's character is very clearly the brains of the outfit. 

Draw!

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't western action sequences have their own particular grammar and tradition? Not in this one. The shootouts owe more to Scarface and John Woo than Sergio Leone. And they're dull. No style, no imagination; Django just draws his gun and mows down scores of blood bags southerners.

Does Tarantino have a Screen Actors Guild card?

If he does, someone please take it away from him. Quentin makes one of his unfortunate acting appearances towards the end (he gets blowed up real good) and this time he treats us to an Australian accent. Why an Australian accent? Don't ask, because you might also begin to ask what a German bounty hunter is doing in the Old West.

There's one good thing in Django and it's Samuel L. Jackson. He plays an elderly, evil house servant and what little wit and energy the film has is provided by him. But that's always the case with Jackson, isn't it?