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It is not enough for me to win. My enemies must lose.

............ David Merrick

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Would you say we are living in more of an Intellectual or Emotional Age?

............ mundusmundi (from his 'Question of the Week' section of last week's CMotW)

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I thought that this week I'd do something just a little different. Since last week's column(s) were guesthosted (and very ably so), I find that I'm now in the unusual position of being able to answer/ramble on about a Question of the Week instead of proposing one as I more typically do.

And good questions they were, too, all of them dealing with the 'big issues' kinda topics; intellect vs. emotions, turning points and life decisions, basic fears and horrors. I'm going to talk a bit about the one quoted above, because it suggested to me a particular film that became this week's choice for 'Classic' status, and also enables me to get down with one of my favorite soapbox topics.

As to the question at hand, I find it kind of tricky to gain a proper perspective to answer. To me, as I am living within and observing the actions of humanity in general, my initial shoot-from-the-cerebral-cortex reaction is that intellect and emotion are diverging just at a time when we need them to become more tightly integrated, although I'd have to say that right now 'Emotion' appears to be in the ascendancy compared to 'Intellect'. Of course, I can only speak of the particular section of the world I inhabit, but I think that I can generalize to some extent for the U.S. portion of North America.

One of my pet peeves in regard to the current waxing of Emotion is the increasingly dismissive way that many people behave towards the application of logic and reason, intellect if you will, towards the solution of problems. The usual disclaimer given is that 'you can prove anything with 'logic', and therefore by (logical?) extension, doing so tends to give meaningless results. The presumption in making this statement usually comes by noting (sometimes accurately) that logical conclusions are inherently limited by the breadth and accuracy of the raw data they are based upon. If the data are incomplete or flawed, then conclusions reached will necessarily be equally incomplete or flawed.

OK, so that much is pretty obvious, I hear you saying to your collective selves. Not all data is flawed, and sometimes you don't need an 'infinite' breadth of it to reach an accurate conclusion with many issues. What's your gripe?

The peeve stems not from recognizing the limits of logic/intellect/reason, but of presupposing the only alternative is to drop the 'reasonable' approach entirely and depend on emotive intuition-- 'feelings', or the 'use the Force, Luke' approach to resolving dilemmas. Whatever happened to having a balanced perspective, whereby the benefits of intuitive reasoning blend smoothly with the benefits of deductive logic?

Well, my own opinion is that politics, and its equally evil twin sibling, organized religion, are the big demons of the last few milleniums in that regard, and that they are coming strongly to the fore once again here in current U.S. society. Both of these mechanisms of potential oppression derive from a common evolutionary ancestor, namely the characteristic of a vertical hierarchy that seems universally present in the elemental DNA of most social animals. Put another way, we are pretty much dogs with bigger brains but not much better sense.

(Note in passing, to become more relevant at a later point in the column: Yes, it seems to be a sign of outward friendliness when your dog energetically jumps up and licks you on the face, but do you really know just where that tongue has been recently? Do you want to know? Ahh... didn't think so.)

A few million years ago, for most animals, this vertically-challenged arrangement rang true from a purely survival-related standpoint, which is really all that 'nature' cares about. To survive, there will be strength in numbers. But if there are numbers of individual brains, there will be conflicts if every animal in the 'pack' insists on doing their own thing. Some kind of order needs to be established, and if the brain involved is not evolved to a level that permits conscious recognition of the concept of 'mutual interdependence', then nature will have to kill off the groups where there is constant infighting, and reward with the forwarding of DNA to the subsequent generations those groups who set up a 'pecking order'. One 'leader', or alpha being at the top, with a series of 'followers' ranked below according to strength or cleverness or both.

From this 'natural' ordering process, it isn't much of an intellectual or intuitive leap to see how as human culture developed over millennia, we just did what 'feels right' (to our DNA) and organized our culture around the difficult-to-ignore imperative of our genetic heritage. We create gods and kings, (usually in each other's image), and align ourselves in submission to their wishes. We institutionalize societies run with vertical hierarchies. All is right with the natural universe.

Oops, sorry. Erroneous data there. We pretty much still try to kill each other a lot of the time, so that can't be entirely good. Yes, the 'weak' need to be thinned from the herd, but exactly who is truly fit to determine what constitutes 'the weak'? Now this last statement is rather important, because this is how I think 'reason' ended getting such a bad rap, and 'emotion' got to become its antithesis rather than its complement.

People who inhabit what they think of as a 'modern' society tend to consider that one of the definitions of 'modern' is that we don't automatically try to 'thin the herd' every time someone does something that we don't like. But is this true, or is the action still the same, just with a different methodology? Thousands of years ago, if another person got you sufficiently angry, you just killed or seriously injured him or her. Today, one might recall the old line that 'some men rob you with a six-gun, others with a fountain pen'. Either way, you still end up on the losing end, and politics and organized religion are often good exemplars of robbery by proxy. How so? By progressively cloaking base emotions with a thicker and thicker veneer of 'intellect' it becomes possible to imagine almost any destructive action as not only being emotionally satisfying, but even logically 'reasonable'. Unless, naturally, you happen to be on the side that's getting the destruction aimed in your direction.

It doesn't need to be literal, in-the-moment, immediate death-inducing destruction either, which is only one option. In fact, a large part of politics/religion is to remove the 'personal' nature of hated and institutionalize it instead. This allows you a far greater venue of choices to not only ultimately seek your enemy's undoing, but if you are really lucky, you can get your enemy to undo themselves. Best of all, if you are very clever, you will get your enemy to blame himself for his undoing. All this while making friends and opening greater opportunities for advancing your career!

So, think about it-- we've come a long way since resolving a difference meant grabbing a big stick lying nearby and smashing the other guy's skull with it. Now, you:

1. Offer your foe the opportunity to purchase a big, heavy stick at a 'really low' price.
2. Tell your foe that hanging the stick above his bed will bring about a closer relationship with some god.
3. Point out that if your foe really believes in his faith, that he will make the string holding the stick as thin as possible to illustrate that the god is looking out for him and won't allow it to fall.
4. When the string eventually breaks, remind your foe in his last fading moments of consciousness that he failed his god by not making the string correctly. Your foe dies lamenting his carelessness, especially since it also caused the death of his mate, who was lying beside him in the bed.
5. Accept a promotion from your superiors for selling so many sticks.

All this because of 'logic' and 'intellect'. Obviously, one could think, that even if the old way was bloody and violent, at least it was honest and upfront. If the blood was on someone's hands, it was on yours, not on a set of words printed in a book, words codified by realms of deep thought that conveniently ignore inconvenient contrary facts. So why shouldn't the dispossessed and the downtrodden distrust the 'Intellect'? What has it ever done for them, except provide further excuses for their suffering?

A sharp object isn't automatically dangerous, it is how it is used. A simple scalpel can save a life or just as easily end one. Intellect and Emotion each need to approach the difficulties that life presents with an awareness of the inherent limitations of each, and an even greater awareness of how they can be misused. Until we humans work actively to break free of the ancient practice of blindly excusing/rationalizing our genetic heritage as being 'just the way it is', we are no better than any other animal on the planet, and a case could even easily be made that the cows and chickens should be eating us instead. We alone, of all the creatures of the earth, can actively choose to change our destiny, and look how we've wasted that gift.

Of course, that's easy to say. Heck, I typed a few keys, and there it was! Doing it is quite another matter, because modern life has become seriously complicated, especially in the latter half of the last century. Realizing that it's easy to get all preachy about the evils that humanity visits upon itself, I would like to remark that it's hard to change for the better when so much resistance to change is present all around you. The sheer mass of human population and the complex societies we have assembled present so much inertia by their very existence that even making small steps to behave in a more enlightened 'humanist' fashion will likely exact some significant penalty from you, no matter how careful you might be.

Like most people in the United States, I bitch and moan and gripe constantly about how hard it is to 'get by', make a living, whathaveyou. In reality, compared to millions of other people in other parts of the world, I have it easy, as do most of my fellow U-Staters. Frankly, we're pretty damn spoiled. Even our political system, corrupt and stupid as it is, is still less corrupt and stupid in general than many other governments elsewhere. Much of the frustration comes not from failure to appreciate how good we have it, but in realizing how hard it is to make it better still, because despite our advances we still keep blindly accepting the concept of vertical hierarchies as being the only possible way of organizing ourselves. We rely on 'elected representation' than cannot possibly meet all of our individual needs, because those needs are many and varied, and often in opposition to one another. These representatives know this. The better ones try to act as mediators, and generate the most overall beneficial results for the greatest numbers of those who they represent. The average ones rationalize that they are helping others while they mostly aim to help themselves. The worst, as we well know, smile beneficently for the cameras as they quietly rob us with a fountain pen, and think what a great service they have performed in making their enemies lose.

What the world needs now is a good lesbian anarchist or a mild-mannered football player to 'fight the power'. Either that or at least give us a good laugh to forget our troubles for a while. And on that somewhat strangely-pitched note...

If there were ever even the slightest question in anyone's mind just to what degree the experience of high school is directly related to the way that the real world is run, and therefore why high school is such an effectively frightening horror-film metaphor, you have only to rent or purchase this week's Classic Movie, Election, by director Alexander Payne. This film is a bitingly accurate satire not merely of the high-school 'student government' and the campaign for student 'leaders' that it engenders, but of the real adult world of political machinations that drag down attempts at achieving real democratic ideals and subvert them into endless and heedless individual power-grabs.

The main protagonists of Election are one Tracy Enid Flick (Reese Witherspoon) and one of the school's history/civics teachers, Jim McAllister, played wonderfully and in perfect counterpoint to Witherspoon by Matthew Broderick Tracy Flick is a paradigm of one of those students that everyone can recall from their own hellmouth years-- intelligent, energetic, dynamic and underneath it all, vicious and vindictive in a cheerfully disassociative way. Tracy is the darling of the school administration, since she embodies the relentless 'go for it' style of behavior that exemplifies the 'winner mentality' that the school likes to pat itself on the back upon for creating.

In reality, the school's head honchos have absolutely nothing to do with Tracy Flick from a creative standpoint-- she is the user, they are the used, they're just too wrapped up in their own snarky politics to notice that she is manipulating them shamelessly with hers. One person who does see through the facade into what really makes Tracy run is Jim McAllister. Originally a somewhat bemused Tracy supporter, Jim gained a glimpse behind the curtain when a fellow teacher and close friend lost both his job and his good reputation in the previous year because Tracy was the 'victim' of a sex scandal involving the friend. Flick, naturally, had arranged the seduction all along, and a chill goes up the spine of McAllister when Tracy announces to him that she hopes they can work together 'harmoniously' in the coming school year.

McAllister is a good teacher, and he's passionate and sincere about his work. In one of several voiceover narratives from all the major characters that continue periodically throughout the film, McAllister remarks, Teaching wasn't just a job to me. I got involved. I cared. It is that level of concern, and a sense that a decent, righteous candidate should prevail in the election, not a disingenuous one, that eventually gets him into serious trouble as he becomes progressively involved in Tracy's bid for school president.

The main problem he faces is that Tracy is such a big, friendly ol' steamroller that no one wants to oppose her, she's either universally loved or feared, thus making the election outcome pretty much a given. In an attempt to change the balance, Jim encourages another student to run against her, his choice being one Paul Metzler (Chris Klein), who is one of the best-loved and most sincere students at the school. He's a football star who isn't terribly bright, but he is honest, forthright and somewhat self-effacing, good candidate qualities which Jim sees as being easily promoted with a little properly designer PR work. Paul normally wouldn't have time to run for student council president, except that a leg injury has sidelined him from the football team. Initially somewhat reluctant, but with McAllister's cajoling, Paul eventually takes on the challenge of running a counter-campaign to Tracy's.

Tracy, not surprisingly, is outraged, although to the 'general public' inhabiting the school she always appears cheerful at having a 'worthy competitor'. She also sees McAllister's involvement in promoting Paul to be a candidate as a warning sign that he can no longer be trusted as one of her 'allies', even though Jim is scrupulously even-handed and stays within his boundaries as a teacher, at least initially. Paul is a popular individual, but he runs a somewhat lackluster and often unintentionally humorous campaign. For example, when he gets the opportunity to address the students with a prepared speech, he reads it as if it were a single, long sentence, free of inflection, much like a third-grader struggling with a difficult reading assignment. (When time comes to vote, he casts a vote for Tracy, because 'it just doesn't seem right to vote for yourself'. Despite all the events which transpire throughout the film, Paul never once manages to get the idea that morality and ethics are adversaries to success, which naturally make him both admirable and doomed.)

Matters get even more complicated when Paul's sister, Tammy (Jessica Campbell), a lesbian whose view of student elections is that they're 'pathetic', decides to run also, on a platform that openly declares just that. I'll excerpt here her keynote address to the students at a campaign 'pep rally', because if nothing sums up the entire traditional farce of the current American two-party system better, I don't know what else could:

Tammy Metzler:

Who cares about this stupid election? We all know it doesn't matter who gets elected president of Millard. You think it's going to change anything around here, make one single person happier or smarter or nicer? The only person it matters to is the one who gets elected. The same pathetic charade happens every year, and everyone makes the same pathetic promises just so they can put it on their transcripts to get into college. So vote for me, because I don't even want to go to college, and I don't care, and as president I won't do anything. The only promise I make is that if elected I will immediately dismantle the student government, so that none of us will ever have to sit through one of these stupid assemblies again!

After she concludes, nearly the entire student body jumps to their feet and erupts in raucous cheers. The school administrators look appalled, and the teachers are either amused or equally dismayed, depending on their acceptance of the fact that someone has just done the unthinkable-- namely speak the truth. The administrators immediately try to disqualify Tammy from the contest, but find much to their dismay that Tammy's words are effectively protected speech, and that they can't do anything without tainting the 'fairness' aspect of the campaign. (Naturally, 'fairness' wasn't much of an issue to them when 'their girl', Tracy, was running unopposed).

The race, once a 'given' for the unstoppable Tracy Flick, now turns into a close contest with Paul remaining completely honest, Tammy pretending not to care, and Tracy resorting to unethical stunts. Meanwhile, in one of the film's many deliciously perverse (and realistic) aspects, Jim McAllister begins to harbor sexual fantasies about Tracy even as he works surreptitiously to orchestrate her downfall.

Election's ending is simply too perfect and too full of irony to even suggest, let alone openly reveal here. Director Payne employs the same even-handed satirical skills in this film that he brought to his previous work Citizen Ruth, a story about a wastoid aerosol-huffing loser (played by Laura Dern) who becomes a foil for pro- and anti-abortion groups when she becomes accidentally pregnant. Payne is careful not to concentrate on the foibles or stupidities of any one person or group at the expense of the other side-- he even manages to make his least sympathetic characters-- such as Tracy Flick-- human and somewhat sad, earning then a modicum of sympathy even as we detest the things that they do.

Perhaps this is why the integration of the intellectual and the emotional perspectives remains such a baffling challenge for us all-- the intellect encourages us to continually integrate and understand cool, analytical reality, until we are absolutely certain of something that then turns out to be irreconcilably wrong, and meanwhile the emotions encourage us to feel implicitly trusting of instinct despite the counterclaims of evidentiary reason, until we are surprised to find that we were... absolutely wrong, again.

Oh, well. One thing for sure (?) that I'm not wrong about, is that Election is one of the best films of this century. (No, I'm not exaggerating. Would I do that? Me? Your beloved Movie Man?) It is on my personal Top-10-Best-of-All-Time list, and is certainly a buried treasure to end most all buried treasures.

So do go dig it up, and meanwhile, I'm voting for Tammy. Vive le anarchy!

E. Pluribus Cinema, Unum,

OnM

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Technically it's all fixed anyway:

Election is available on DVD. The film was released in 1999 and the run time is 1 hour and 43 minutes. The original theatrical aspect ratio is 2.35:1, which is preserved on the DVD. The screenplay was written by Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor, and was based on the novel by Tom Perrotta. The film was produced by Albert Berger, David Gale, Keith Samples, and Ron Yerxa. Cinematography was by James Glennon with film editing by Kevin Tent. Production Design was by Jane Ann Stewart, with art direction by Tim Kirkpatrick, set decoration by Renee Davenport and costume design by Wendy Chuck. Original music was by Rolfe Kent and Ennio Morricone. The original theatrical sound mix was Dolby Surround.

Cast overview:

Matthew Broderick .... Jim McAllister
Reese Witherspoon .... Tracey Enid Flick
Loren Nelson .... Custodian
Chris Klein .... Paul Metzler
Phil Reeves .... Dr. Walt F. Hendricks (the Principal)
Emily Martin .... Girl in Crisis
Jonathan Marion .... Classroom Student
Amy Falcone .... Classroom Student
Mark Harelik .... Dave Novotny
Delaney Driscoll .... Linda Novotny
Molly Hagan .... Diane McAllister
Colleen Camp .... Judith R. Flick
Matt Justesen .... 'Eat Me' Boy
Nick Kenny .... 'Eat Me' Boy's Buddy
Brian Tobin .... Adult Video Actor

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Miscellaneous:

Item(s) the First -- Just thought I'd share two favorite Tracy Flick-isms, courtesy of the IMDb quote collection:

None of this would have happened if Mr. McAllister hadn't meddled the way he did. He should have just accepted things as they are instead of trying to interfere with destiny. You see, you can't interfere with destiny. That's why it's destiny. And if you try to interfere, the same thing's going to happen anyway, and you'll just suffer.

It's like my mom always says, 'The weak are always trying to sabotage the strong".

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Item the Second-- For real: The synthetic actors are here.

http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/entertainment/3935188.htm

Here's an exerpt from this short but interesting article:

Cyber-actors. Synthespians. Whatever you call them, they are among us. From George Lucas' cloying Nabooian creature Jar Jar Binks to the buff intergalactic crew of last summer's Final Fantasy to the titular Great Dane in this summer's Scooby-Doo, computer-rendered screen images that realistically simulate human beings (and giant ghost-hunting dogs) have arrived.

"The technology has advanced to the point where we don't really know what's real and what's fake anymore," explains Niccol, the writer and director of Simone, which stars Al Pacino and opened in theaters Friday. "Pacino has this line in the film - 'Our ability to manufacture fraud now exceeds our ability to detect it,' and that's really become the case."

(c) 2002 Steven Rea & The Philadelphia Inquirer

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Item the Third-- A mini-review of Blue Crush, which I managed to get out to see this last week:

What would summertime be without a good surfer movie? OK, so there haven't been all that many good surfer movies to see since... well, since a real long time ago. If you haven't already seen Blue Crush, which opened just over a week or two ago, I would like to heartily recommend that you do, since this film not only features some absolutely stunning photographic work, it takes you into the lives of the young women who are the subjects of the film. Blue Crush isn't deep (yikes! water metaphor alert!) or overly analyzable, but it is well crafted, involving and a lot of fun.

Some critics have complained that the film slows down in the middle section when it temporarily abandons the incredible shots of massive waves crashing down upon or curling out from beneath the surfboards of the talented 'surfer girls', who are gearing up for a big time competition that could bring serious money and fame to the winners. I whole-heartedly disagree with this-- even the most spectacular photographic work will get repetitive and boring if it just goes on and on without letup. The 'real world' that makes up the lives and loves of the women is a perfect counterpoint to the sheer immensity of the ocean and the waves, the grandeur of nature balanced by the ordinary existence of an average human. While on the surface (yes, water metaphor again, sorry!) the film is about the inevitable admiration we have for the skills of talented athletes, the deeper currents running underneath are really about just how hard it is to succeed when failure is so much more comfortable and safe, and that this isn't necessarily anyone's 'fault'. It's easy to urge someone to accept challenges and 'succeed', but success can walk a razor edge of disaster (and quite literally does here, or at least swims by it), and by what right do you insist someone should risk everything? One has to willingly choose, and then accept the potential consequences, good or bad.

I give Blue Crush 3 out of 4 stars on the usual star-rating scale, or 7 out of 10 on my preferred 0/10 system. Either way-- strongly recommended. Please see this film in a good theater with a good digital sound system. Unless you have a really state-of-the-art home theater system with great speakers and a big front projection screen, it will be very hard to generate the intended visceral impact of the surfing scenes on video.

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The Question of the Week:

Earlier, I said that 'everybody' knew someone like Tracy Flick when they were in High School. Now this could be hyperbole, but if it is, so what. I'm a critic, and so emotionally I have to feed my ego by acting like I'm important to the total scheme of things. If you don't like it, write your own damn column.

(Ooooo.... behold the synthesis of Intellect and Emotion! ;-)

Anyway, did you? Know a Flick-type personality, or were you one? (Interestingly, Roger Ebert says he was). If so, do you know what happened to them (or you) later on in life-- did they succeed, fail, become a Pulitzer-prize-winning movie critic, whatever? Tell us your stories. You know you want to!

OK, Most Honorable Members of the ATPo Flickoverse, that's all for this week. Hope the summer has been generally good to you as it's been winding slowly down. Labor Day weekend is fast approaching here in the States, and already some of the kids are back in school, so there's just one more remaining 'Guilty Pleasure' for me to bring you this month. In keeping with the pattern established with last year's crop of somewhat offbeat August 'treasures', I'll be ending the month with a favorite of mine from the horror genre, which if I were to actually ever get any summer vacation is certainly the mood that I'd be in upon returning from it.

Take care, and as always post 'em if you've got 'em. Bye!

******* Classic Movie of the Week - August 24th 2002 - Election