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Hollywood Blast: Bursting Our Eardrums in a Background-noise Culture

By Selwyn Duke

“What did he say? Huh? Okay, well, pass the popcorn and put on the sub-titles.” This is not only a common experience people have with today’s entertainment; it also reflects something deeper about our culture.

It’s not often that reading a Washington Post article makes me exclaim “Thank you. Thank you!” But that’s precisely the reaction I had when imbibing a Friday piece by movie critic Ann Hornaday. Titled, in part, “How auteurs diss their audiences,” it criticizes a modern film phenomenon long a pet peeve of mine: background — or, should I say, foreground and all-around — music so ear-splittingly loud one cannot hear the dialogue.

I know you’ve noticed this. Most everyone has. My late father, a WWII veteran with hearing somewhat damaged by reports in training and battle, complained years ago already that actors in movies would “whisper.” I’ve been with other people who’d have to crank the volume of a movie up high so they could decipher the dialogue, and the commenters’ verdict under Hornaday’s article is unanimous. “I used to think I was going deaf,” related one reader. Numerous others said they’d wait till they could watch a film at home so they could turn on subtitles. For my part, I’m no fan of modern movies; there’s a good chance the work isn’t my cup of tea if the actors weren’t dead when I became alive. But I have watched enough of them to know that, despite my fairly acute hearing, I can only decipher parts of the dialogue and must fill in the blanks.

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Robin Williams: Death of a Funny Sad Man

By Selwyn Duke

“There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt,” said columnist Erma Bombeck. On Monday, comedian and Golden Globe, Emmy, Grammy, and Oscar winner Robin Williams, finding himself lost on the wrong side of that line, hanged himself after a long bout with depression. It was an end that shocked and saddened many fans but that was also sadly stereotypical, giving weight to the claim that comedians ply their playful trade to cover up or deal with pain.

Whether this phenomenon is exaggerated or not, I knew an aspiring comedian who certainly fit that mold. He often was side-splittingly funny but never seemed happy; he could make you laugh but never laughed himself — I don’t remember a genuine smile ever crossing his face even once. And my erstwhile acquaintance and Williams have a lot of company. As Lenny Ann Low wrote in The Sydney Morning Herald:

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The War on Men’s Wages

By Selwyn Duke

A market economy is absolutely the worst system in the world — except for all the rest. This isn’t just a play on Winston Churchill’s quip about democracy, it’s also true. Pity that we have to rely on those vice-ridden, flighty creatures called human beings to make decisions about what products and services we’ll enjoy. The only thing worse is having those decisions made by the subset of human beings called bureaucrats or politicians.

“Study: Hollywood execs have own 'war on women,' choking off major roles, salary from women,” reads the headline at Washington Examiner. At issue is a new report by the Women’s Media Center (WMC) — arch-feminista Gloria Steinem’s group — showing that in terms of warm-body count and amount of cold cash, women lag behind men in all corners of media and entertainment. We’re to find these data troubling and, as Time magazine wrote in a headline, “depressing.” In perhaps some comic relief, Time followed that note with the subtitle, “Jennifer Lawrence makes $11 million less than Adam Sandler.” Yeah, hey, pass the Prozac.

I don’t know, is it depressing that men do more dangerous jobs and suffer vastly more work-related injuries and deaths? Is it depressing that the whole workaday world, so unjustly dominated by men, was created by them in the first place? Is every difference among demographics that doesn’t happen to benefit “victim” groups to be thought depressing?

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Influential Beats: The Cultural Impact of Music

By Selwyn Duke

The Devil really is a fellow of wine and song,
Playing a tune that trades right for wrong.
The tone-deaf man will hear his notes and say,
What could be wrong with being festive and gay?
And when a sad tomorrow that tune does bring,
Few will know that from their own lips it did spring.

There perhaps is something primal about music, something that can touch or twist one’s soul. This is no doubt why Ludwig van Beethoven said, “Music can change the world,” and William Congreve famously wrote that music “has charms to soothe a savage breast.” And music’s power is tacitly acknowledged all the time. For example, last year Michelle Obama lent her name and image to a rap album that complements her “Let’s Move!” anti-obesity campaign. And while a track featuring a trio called “Salad Bar” and a song entitled “Veggie Luv” is easy to mock (given their mother’s priorities, I can just hear Sasha and Malia singing, “And we’ll have fun, fun, fun till daddy takes the tea cake away”), there is method to the first lady’s madness. As Boston College professor emeritus William K. Kilpatrick wrote in his book Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right From Wrong:

[We] tend to learn something more easily and indelibly if it’s set to a rhyme or song. Advertisers know this and use it so effectively that we sometimes have difficulty getting their jingles out of our heads. But there are more positive educational uses. Most of us learned the alphabet this way and some of our history as well (“Paul Revere’s Ride,” “Concord Hymn”). Recently some foreign language courses have been developed which employ rhyme and song as the central teaching method. Similarly, one of the most successful new phonics programs teaches reading through singing.

Quite true. To this day I can recite a McDonald’s Big Mac-recipe jingle I heard as a little child — verbatim. And I only had to hear the weather advice “Red sky in morning, sailor take warning; red sky at night, sailor’s delight” once to remember it forever. But since all power can be misused, can music possibly usher in a storm of civilizational upheaval? If it can soothe the savage breast, does it not follow that it can also inflame it?

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The Genocide of Dead White Males

By Selwyn Duke

With the way dead white males get vilified nowadays, it almost makes me afraid to die. And with the way true education is being killed off, you may be afraid to send your kids to school.

A generation ago we heard the chant, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western culture’s gotta go!” And it’s going, alright. One of the more recent casualties was the University of California at Los Angeles’ humanities program, which until 2011 was one of the last bastions of traditional Western scholarship in the humanities. Rick Moran at American Thinker recently covered this, and quoting a Wall Street Journal piece he writes:

Where previously, undergrads would have to take one course studying Chaucer, 2 for Shakespeare, and one on Milton, a "revolt" by junior faculty forced "a mandate that all English majors take a total of three courses in the following four areas: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability and Sexuality Studies; Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies; genre studies, interdisciplinary studies, and critical theory; or creative writing."

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Trashing Our Culture With Trash

By Selwyn Duke

A long-growing garbage field much larger than Texas is creeping toward the United States’ west coast, and parts of it will increasingly make landfall for quite a long time.

And one can’t help but think that it has come to the right place.

A new book by writer Charlotte Hays entitled When Did White Trash Become the New Normal? will be released this week, and, paraphrasing historian Arnold Toynbee, it issues a serious warning: “Society crumbles when it takes cues from the underclass.”

The author goes on to write in a New York Post article on the subject:

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Marvel Rolls out Muslim Girl Superheroine

By Selwyn Duke

It must be really exciting being a kid today. Denied the strength that “lies in our diversity,” youngsters languishing in the unenlightened 1960s had to content themselves with banal white male superheroes such as Superman, Spiderman and Ironman. But not only has affirmative action created a Hispanic Spiderman (perhaps a white Hispanic?); a homosexual Pink…I mean, Green Lantern; and a Batwoman reintroduced in 2006 as a lesbian (the irony is that she was originally introduced in 1956 as a romantic interest designed to dispel rumors about Batman’s homosexuality); now Marvel Comics is giving us a female Muslim superheroine. Writes The Telegraph:

Marvel Comics is bringing Ms. Marvel back as a 16-year-old daughter of Pakistani immigrants living in Jersey City named Kamala Khan.

10 Really Stupid Things Liberals Have Said

By Selwyn Duke

Liberals truly are fonts of sophistication and erudition. We know this because liberals tell us, and liberals are smart. They would never mangle words as does Dubya Bush or misspell “potato” like hapless Dan Quayle. But there are some things they would do, and what follows is a sampling.

1. The Four Chinese Pilots

San Francisco’s KTVU made news when reporting on the Asiana plane crash recently — but not in the way they intended. Mistaking an obvious Internet joke for legitimate information, the station reported, “KTVU has just learned the names of the four pilots who were aboard the flight. They are Captain Sum Ting Wong, Wi Tu Low, Ho Lee Fuk and Bang Ding OW. The NTSB has confirmed that these are the names of the pilots onboard Flight 214 when it crashed. We are working to determine what roles each of them played during the landing.”

There’s Sum Ting Wong in the mainstream media, alright.

2. Dog Food Afternoon

But perhaps KTVU had graduated from the Patsy Schroeder School of Comedy. During a 1990s budget battle, the Democrats said that if the GOP got its way, the elderly would have to eat dog food to afford medicine. Radio host Rush Limbaugh then spoofed this demagoguery in a GOPAC speech, joking that he’d bought his mother a new can opener “so that she can get the dog food easier when she has to eat it.”

Enter liberal Congresswoman Schroeder. Taking Limbaugh’s comment seriously, she appeared on the House floor the next day to complain, emotionally and incredulously, that “this is what it’s come to! …Rush Limbaugh actually said he's going to buy his mother a can opener so she can have dog food. Wow!”

Yeah, wow. And they say conservatives have no sense of humor?

3. NBC: Nominal Brain Capacity

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Why the NRA is Right about Hollywood

By Selwyn Duke

Upstate New York’s Catskill Mountain Range is a bucolic place near and dear to my heart. It’s where storybook character Rip Van Winkle enjoyed his legendary slumber, and its scenery hasn’t changed much since he was born of Washington Irving’s fertile imagination. Yet, like Van Winkle, if I’d fallen asleep for 20 years when first arriving in that verdant heaven, I, too, would have noticed some profound changes upon awakening.

About two decades ago, many rural Catskill teens — sons of farmers and hunters and fishermen — suddenly started donning baggy pants and reflecting “gangsta’” counter-culture despite living nowhere near any large urban center. The following generation of teens experienced today’s recent cultural evolution and often sport multiple tattoos and body piercings despite living nowhere near NYC’s grungy East Village. Yet I’m wrong in a sense: those places were actually very close — a television set away.

Aurora and Romanticizing Evil

By Selwyn Duke

We may never know what was going though Aurora shooter James Holmes’s mind when he committed his heinous mass murder. We don’t know what kind of psychosis, or precisely what evil influences, he might have been subject to. What we do know is that, in wanting to be the Joker and not Batman, the villainous and not the virtuous, he reflects something prevalent today: The romanticizing of evil. And to whatever extent he was imitating art, this trend certainly is not art imitating life.

I remember when Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega was taken into custody by U.S. forces. Here was this fellow, who we’d seen giving fiery speeches from podiums and talking about killing political adversaries, now doing a perp walk in shackles. No longer the strongman, he looked neither strong nor like much of a man; it was as if he’d shrunk. He looked pathetic — like any dime-store thug in a mug shot. It was then that one understood what writer Hannah Arendt meant when, after observing Nazi war criminals, she coined the phrase “the banality of evil.”

Evil people aren’t very interesting, but you wouldn’t know it from our popular culture. It serves up fantastical fiction such as the all-seeing serial killer Hannibal Lector, the superhuman Cape Fear criminal Max Cady, and the philosophizing hit men in Pulp Fiction. It certainly titillates and triumphs at the box office, but what, ultimately, is triumphing in the hearts and minds of generations weaned on such fare? What is their conception of good and evil? Which is more attractive to them?

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