Little Brother is Watching ( and he's worse than Big Brother)

Back in the pre-digital age, it was feared that having cameras everywhere would lead to a Big Brother state, where the government would use this footage against us. But now, thanks to the latest scandals involving NFL wife abusers and naked movie stars, it is becoming clear that the real problem is not Big Brother, but Little Brother.

Who is Little Brother? He ( or she) is not the government, but anyone who gets their hands on some of the millions of hours of raw footage that is taken every day of the rest of us. Unlike the National Security Agency, which at least knows what laws it is breaking, Little Brother could be an underpaid security guard in a hotel, or a stockroom boy in a grocery store, or some pimply kid living in his parent's basement with a gift for hacking. All they need to do is come across some embarassing act that has been captured by the ubiquitous security cameras. It may be a child wetting its pants in a grocery store, or a kiss in a stairwell that is discovered by the cuckholded husband, which leads to a fight. Or a star NFL player hitting his wife so hard in an elevator that she is knocked unconscious.

Some may object that we all had a right to see the video of Ray Rice hitting his then fiancee in the elevator, since it has exposed the tolerance of wife abuse in the NFL. That sounds like good journalism, right? The problem with that perspective is that Ray Rice's fiancee, Janay Palmer, was not consulted before the video was released to the Internet. The Ravens already knew about the beating, and had suspended him for two games ( a light sentence, obviously).  If Little Brother was trying to help her, the video completely backfired. By the time it was released, she had married the star Ravens player, who had a 35 million dollar contract. The public outcry over the video led to the cancellation of that contract. Before the video was released, Ms Palmer was married to a wife beater who was worth a lot of money. Had she chosen to divorce him later, she could have walked away with a lot of money, depending on their pre-nuptial agreement. But thanks to Little Brother, her wife-beating husband is now worth nothing ( and perhaps less, if he is in debt). She has publicly objected to the NFL's rulings and the cancellation of her husband's contract. We may disagree about her loyalty to her husband, but there is no question that the video has ruined his career, and  decimated her financial situation, not to mention grossly abused her right to privacy. Through no fault of her own, she is the public face of wife abuse, a role she did not ask for, and which should not have been thrust upon her against her will.

The problem here is that Little Brother doesn't care about the law, fairness or future consequences. Little Brother is just some unknown employee at the hotel, grocery store or parking lot who sees something that might get some traction online, and may earn him or her some cash. That's the full extent of their moral reckoning, which is to say, none at all. At least with Big Brother, the focus was more narrow. The National Security Agency only cares about the video footage that it can use to find terrorists or threats to the state. Moreover, the government doesn't have enough people or computers to watch all the footage that is being collected. But Little Brother does have the time. Some schmo *is* watching that footage all the time in some low paying job, and will notice when you or someone famous does something embarrassing. Unlike Big Brother, the bar is much lower for what is worth posting, since national security is not the main filter. This is a big problem, one that is  far more likely to catch up with you than anything the government may come up with.

This is why all those cameras in stores and parking lots are a problem. They claim in those little signs that they are for our security, but Little Brother doesn't see it that way. Janay Palmer's personal security was not protected by having an elevator camera film her beating. She lost her privacy, and her  financial security by the release of the video. A grocery store that has cameras in every direction stands to save how much money from shoplifting? The maximum price of any item is about twenty dollars in most smaller stores. But the money Little Brother can make ( and that you can lose) through posting a humiliating video is far, far more. We are all at the mercy of Little Brother now, and it will take a lot of work and new laws to reign him in. I, for one, would happily just have all those security cameras removed. I would much rather have a security guard watch the parking lot and come home with a funny story, rather than have a security camera take footage which ends up online the next day, featuring some couple's mishap as they try to make out in a car.

All those cameras are *not* for our security - that is just Orwellian doublespeak ( also known as B.S.). It is the company that owns the cameras - the store, the parking lot, the casino- which enhances its security with the cameras. No one came to Janay Palmer's rescue as she was being beaten. The crime will be committed, and it may be on film, but any bad guy knows that the best defence is a cheap hoody to keep their identity hidden. So, at best, we get footage of unknown criminals. Meanwhile, what shows up very clearly on the footage are the people who are not committing crimes, ( us), but whose actions are deemed worth uploading. Those security cameras are a sham, and just make our lives less secure. Little Brothers won't ask the Janay Palmers of the world if they want their footage uploaded, and they won't ask you, either.

It isn't 1984 we need to worry about, it is 2014.

Stephen Milton is a freelance documentary film maker in Toronto, Canada. www.milton2.tv

The 9/11 Effect: Time Travel and Redecorating Shows

There's a lot of time travelling going on in this summer's movies, and it provides a window into what's really bothering us right now. In Tom Cruise’s latest move, Live, Die Repeat: The Edge of Tomorrow, the entire plot relies on his ability to go back and forth in time to try to solve a key problem in the present. In X-Men: Days of Future Past,  we see the same thing: Wolverine is sent to the 1970s to stop an event which will have devastating consequences for the future. Both are attempts to re-write history, to prevent the present from ever happening. Science fiction fans may recall that this used to be the greatest sin of all in time travel. Anyone who went back in time had to be very careful not to change anything, since that could result in a domino effect, preventing people from being born, governments from being elected, wars from being won. It was considered a form of temporal genocide. But this summer, killing the future is explicitly the goal. So why such a huge change?

I suspect that 9/11 is the culprit. In the years since the attack, Americans have come to see the rest of the world as a scary and hostile place. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been traumatizing, and appear to be unwinnable. It appears that American citizens who leave the country are at risk, and can be killed in terrible ways, which will be broadcast. During this period, Americans reacted as individuals do when confronted with terrifying situations: they regressed and withdrew.

The best proof of this comes from what happened on cable television. In the 2000s, The Learning Channel (TLC) stopped showing programs about the rest of the world and got rich broadcasting home renovation programs. Food, redecoration and makeovers became the big winners for ratings, which led to copycat programs on other lifestyle channels. These shows were signs that Americans were withdrawing into themselves, the television equivalent of nesting and cocooning. The outside world was terrifying, so it was time to go home and stay there. Television provided the opportunity to remake the home, the meals, our faces and wardrobe, over and over again. Live, redecorate, repeat.

Those shows appealed mostly to women, but men also found a way to withdraw. Before 9/11, National Geographic specials and The Discovery Channel broadcast programs that took place all over the world. National Geographic specials took viewers to the ends of the Earth, to meet Pygmies and other tribal peoples,  to explore mysterious ruins, and of course to see nature in all of its glory. During the 1990s, I worked as a writer and producer of documentary series for The Discovery Channel. Back then, Discovery was a science and nature channel, but liked to feature stories of adventure, too. So, I worked on series that featured explorers searching for Cleopatra’s Palace in Egypt, as well as historical documentaries that featured stories from all over the world, such as the Titanic’s sinking, the discovery of King Tut’s tomb, and warships being dragged through the African Jungle.  The world was our oyster, and it didn’t matter much if the main characters were Americans.

But after 9/11, the appetite for stories from around the world dried up. Both National Geographic and Discovery shifted their focus to stories that occur in America. What’s amazing is that the appetite for strange people and places remains, but now it is being satisfied by focusing solely on Americans. The naked tribal people are now white Americans roughing it in the bush ( Naked Afraid). The adventurers are crab fishermen in Alaska (Deadliest Catch), or guys who live off the land (Yukon Men). When viewers want to see strange cultures and people, they no longer expect ( or want) to go to the Amazon. Instead, they sit back and marvel at American hillbillies (Moonshiners), the Amish (Breaking Amish) little people (Little People, Big World) , or the morbidly obese (My 600-lb Life). Americans have the same interests as before, but they want to satisfy them all on their home soil, since the rest of the world is too scary to visit, even virtually.

American popular culture has been imploding since 9/11, and the effects are being seen in the movies, too. The reboots of Planet of the Apes and Star Trek have both placed new emphasis on Earth, rather than the more exotic settings of their originals ( such as the Earth in the far future, or outer space). In Star Trek, the plots of both movies have hinged on events at StarFleet on Earth, and, like 9/11, there is a city-destroying attack in the second movie. In Live, Die, Repeat, we meet aliens who can invade Earth from space, but lack the ability to fly once on Earth, making them an earthbound threat ( which makes no sense, of course). The emphasis on Earth in these movies ( and many others), is part of this 9/11 effect. With the exception of Star Wars, which seems like a fairy tale, we don’t want stories that take us far from home. However, on movie screens, we can admit what we don’t want to admit in reality: we feel like we are being invaded, and we don’t know how to fight back. As the ISIS debacle in the Middle East proves, the last decade’s efforts to ‘solve’ the terrorism problem by invading Afghanistan and Iraq have not worked. The present seems terrible, and we don’t know what to do.

But unlike reality, the movies can give us the answer we so desperately desire. Oddly, the solution is not the invention of a new weapon that will kill off the invaders. Perhaps our experiences in the last decade have shown us that there is no magic bullet, no drone or technology that will fix this mess. So the movies propose a different answer: stay home, and change time itself. Make it so that this whole nightmare never happened. Time has replaced space as the battleground. If only 9/11 had never ocurred. If only we hadn’t invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. In the movies, those wishes are coming true, as our heroes stay home, but travel in time to stop the invasions.

If only it were so simple in real life….

Stephen Milton is a freelance documentary film maker and writer in Toronto. www.milton2.tv.

stephen.milton@yahoo.ca

There's Something Missing on our Spaceships

This weekend, I went to friend’s Star Wars birthday party. As a kid, he had seen the first Star Wars movie at the age of ten, and was hooked right away. He decided then and there that he wanted to be in the movie industry when he grew up, and now he does payroll for feature films. To celebrate his birthday, we watched the first Luke Skywalker film again, which now seems incredibly cheesy, with bad acting, bad directing, and terrible writing. But despite all of that, it is still magical, especially with its vision of a world filled with strange aliens.

But as I watched, I noticed that on board the spaceships, there was something missing. As I came to think about all the other space movies I have ever seen, I realized this missing element applied to just about every one. Space ships always have lots of technology, various types of engines, weapons and living quarters. But there’s one thing that is missing which says a lot about who we are as a civilization, and the trouble we’re in now.

To appreciate what’s missing on spaceships, it helps to see the world through the eyes of our ancestors. A few years ago, I went to an art gallery exhibition of early Renaissance paintings from Florence. For the most part, it was religious art, featuring crucifixion scenes, but they weren’t what caught my eye. Instead, it was a document written in the 14^th century that had been placed on the wall. It was gorgeous. In the center, there was hand-written text ( the printing press had not been invented yet), but all around the borders there were intricately drawn vines and birds. Each page had these lovely embellishments. But the document had nothing to do with nature. It was actually a legal document, something about commercial law. In other words, it was totally boring and utilitarian, like a computer manual now, yet it was covered in drawings of nature. Why?

This sort of natural adornment was not restricted to legal documents. It shows up in all sorts of manuscripts, most famously in religious texts like prayer books and bibles. Virtually every page has some kind of imagery from nature, usually forests, vines, birds or animals. The strange thing is that most of the time, the stories being told in the text have nothing to do with nature. These nature drawings are ornamental. They show that at this time in history, the people who made these books could not imagine the human world without the natural world. It was simply part of their world view and consciousness. Humans existed in nature, even when discussing laws that only affected humans. The implication was that humans could not be extracted from nature, we are a package deal.

Now, spin forward to the era of spaceship movies. Human beings hurtle through space in ships that look like all sorts of Earth-based models, from cities to hotels, battleships to submarines. They are populated by humans and their alien friends, all of which are intelligent. But in the vast majority of films, there are no other life forms from Earth on board. No plants, no animals, no fish, no meadows or forests. Not even a houseplant here and there. Nada.

You may wonder, well so what, why would they want any plants or animals on board? Simple: because in real life, we need them. Scientists have discovered that patients who have been ill recover faster in hospital rooms which have a window looking out onto green trees and plants. In fact, even a painting of nature helps more than a blank wall. This is one of the reasons why real offices have plants in the corners. People like to have nature nearby, even inside, because at a subconscious level it makes us feel more at home, more at peace. Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson has named this feeling “biophilia”  , and he believes it is innate in all of us.

It may seem strange to argue that we love nature in an era where corporations and governments are burning down rainforests and turning up the global thermostat. Collectively we don’t seem to express much biophilia, but at the individual level, it is a different story. Rich people provide a particularly striking example. Studies of wealthy neighbourhoods have found that they usually include more trees and plants than where poorer people live .  Gated communities have trees, ghettoes don’t.  Rich people are also the folks who own expensive country homes, and penthouse apartments with views of the nearest park, like the wealthy denizens on Park Avenue in Manhattan. Although at work, CEOs may be wrecking the environment, when they come home, they drive through tree-lined streets, and spend the weekend at expensive cottages.  Given a choice, we want nature with us. It is part of our nature.

Why aren't there plants on the Enterprise?

When we imagine going out to space, that love of nature goes out the airlock. If the Enterprise really was like a city in space, it would have dogs in the hallways, perhaps the small ones like condo owners walk to the park. Why doesn’t Uhura have a houseplant strapped to her work station? Why can’t there be a real meadow or forest inside the ship, instead of a holodeck? If spaceships were like real human environments, there would be plants and animals.

One might assume that the reason is ultimately technological, not psychological: plants and animals would take up too much space or be a drag on scarce resources. But in fact, the opposite is true. When NASA imagines taking human to Mars, plants will be on board to provide food, and to clean the air and water. The weight of bringing all the food and oxygen for the long trip is simply too great, so a sustainable organic system is actually more practical. Future real spaceships would include plants simply because this type of life support system works better than current artificial models for long-haul trips.

Granted, movie spaceships have never claimed to be very accurate scientifically, but instead tend to draw their inspiration from past types of ships like submarines and air craft carriers. But here, again, reality includes nature. World War Two submarines were home to small dogs whom the crew kept as mascots, and were valued for their calming effect. Sea dogs were a regular part of the crew of sailing ships, and during the  World Wars, mascots of all kinds of species could be found among sailors, pilots and soldiers.  If our spaceships really were inspired by actual ships, then nature would be on board, too.

So what’s going on with these barren movie spaceships? Why is it that despite our persistent desire to bring nature with us, there are no pets or plants on board most of these spacecraft? I think the key is that the movies are a form of collective dream, which frequently portrays our deepest desires and wishes, long before we consciously recognize them. In the 20^th century, the movies depicted spaceships where human society was depicted as living in a vacuum, completely divorced from nature. This was not a nightmare, but a dream, the next stage in our evolution.

This disturbing dream was on screen long before the environmental crisis hit, further proof that art can be a powerful guide to the human psyche. Now that the world is getting warmer, and thousands of species are going extinct due to habitat loss, it is slowly becoming clear that we cannot afford to imagine ourselves as separate from nature. Our love of nature needs reinforcement, on the streets and on screen. As individuals we are drawn to nature, but increasingly, only on our own terms. Shrinking dogs to fit into our increasingly cramped world is not the answer. Our ancestors knew that humans were embedded in nature, there was no way to separate us. We need to regain that consciousness, and it may require artists dreaming of it in new ways before it ever becomes policy. This is not a problem that will be fixed if houseplants are added to the next Star Trek movie, but it wouldn’t hurt. More important is to realize how strange our world has become – that, surely, is something worth making movies about.

Stephen Milton is a freelance documentary film maker in Toronto. www.milton2.tv.

He also runs a website devoted to nature, www.torontonature.com.

Homicide Shows: What They Don’t Tell You About Murder

Some years ago, I worked as a writer on documentary series that featured real homicides. Each show would focus on one murder case that had gone through the courts, resulting in a conviction ( enabling us to use court evidence to reconstruct the story without fear of getting sued.) My particular episode was about a gruesome murder at a fast food joint, where an employee was beaten to death. The series usually featured a few suspects whom the police investigated for a bit, then dropped, to focus on the actual murderer. The trick was, in show after show, the murderers were rarely the kind of people who show up on fictional crime shows like Law and Order,  or CSI. In our series, the perpetrators were almost always poor people, whereas on TV, murder is committed by middle and upper middle class people, who occasionally hire thugs to pull the trigger.

The discrepancy got me thinking about the strange divide between television crime and real crime. On television, crime is big business. Prime time would be hard to imagine with crime shows. How would the networks get by without all the CSI and Law and Order spinoffs? For the past few decades, crime shows have composed on average about 25% of the primetime fare, not including news programs . Those statistics were compiled at a time when people didn’t have as much choice about what to watch online or on demand. I suspect once you throw in Game of Thrones, The Sopranos, all the vampire shows and the rest of cable, the rates would climb higher still. When we tune in to watch  crime, we want to see murders.

But what's on television,  and what’s really happening on the streets are very different. Over the past few decades, murder rates on television have been steadily rising. Studies have found that in the 1970s, homicide made up about 25% of all crime shown on television, whereas by the 1990s, it had shot up to 79% . But out in the real world, the exact opposite was true. Property crimes like theft make up most crime, whereas the homicide rate has been steadily dropping since the 1990s. New York City is a fascinating case in point: the home of Law and Order and CSI:New York was actually getting progressively safer as those franchises took off in popularity. In 1980, 2,228 people were murdered in New York; by 2012, it was down to 684, a reduction of almost seventy-five percent. Similar decreases were seen in other major cities, but you would never know it from watching CSI:Miami, CSI:New York or CSI.

Television is also wrong about who does the killing. On CSI and other crime shows, the murderers are usually people who are middle class or wealthier. In reality, it is generally poor people who kill, and get killed. Specifically, murder rates are highest in areas where there is significant income inequality. That means that living in a poor country doesn’t create high homicide rates, but living in a country where there is a wide gulf between you and richer people does result in more murders.  It is the income disparity of unemployment, and dead-end low wage jobs that create the frustrations and the short tempers that result in homicides against family members, friends, and less often, strangers . These patterns persist across nations, not just in the United States. America has a high income inequality rate, whereas countries like Canada redistribute income from the rich to the poor through taxes and social welfare programs. Canada’s homicide rate is much lower than America’s, despite sharing a common culture, and watching the same television programs. (Gun laws also play a role here, but the point I want to make  is that it isn’t rich people who are shooting each other, but poorer people).

So, on television, the cops are focusing on all the wrong people. They shouldn't be finding so many rich victims, nor should they be searching for rich suspects. What's more, they should slowly be going out of business, with fewer murders each year. Instead, they should be solving the murders of poorer people. In theory, television could make more shows like The Wire, which portrayed  poverty-led crime among drug dealers. But our society doesn’t want to admit that the land of opportunity is dependent on a vast underclass of people who are kept poor, and are at risk of murder. So, instead, it presents a different society, where most people are well off,  but they are at risk of being murdered. The enemy is not the system, but each other – your co-worker or your spouse. We are all potential murderers, so watch your back. This is a total fiction, but we happily go along with it, and broadcasters get rich on the perpetuation of this myth. We should be careful, though: when entertainment is mistaken for reality, the results can get ugly. Americans consistently vote for candidates who are tough on crime, and keep their gun laws intact, despite little proof that the middle class and the upper class are in any real danger from violence. If the livelihoods of the well-off are at risk, it is from job loss and smaller pay checks. But short of becoming a serial killer, you won't get into a cop show for being downsized.

All of this helps make sense of the one crime show I wrote for television. In our documentary, after the middle class suspects had been ruled out, the real murderers were found. They were two unemployed kids who were looking for drug money. That's what real homicide looks like, but you won't find it on prime time.

Stephen Milton is a freelance documentary film producer and writer living in Toronto.

www.milton2.tv.

The Evolutionary Roots of Violent Video Games

Call of Duty

My house has a fair number of male teenagers, which means that there is a lot of shooting going on. The boys range in age from 13 to 19, so at any time video game battles are underway against aliens ( Starcraft), wizards ( World of Warcraft), mutated monsters ( Bioshock), or soldiers ( Call of Duty). For a few years, I found this appalling, as I felt that my nice young men were in training camp to become serial killers. Mass murder seemed to be the order of the day in these games. No one ever came out of the basement saying that they had to stop because there were just too many things to shoot. But recently, I have relaxed about these games, as I think I have realized what makes them so popular, and why they aren’t going to go away.

The rise of first person shooter games didn’t seem inevitable back in the 1980s when video games started appearing in arcades and on primitive computers. There was nothing violent about Pong, and the arcade games featured only cartoon style violence, seen from God’s point of view. Pac Man’s voracious appetite didn’t seem dangerous in any way, unless you were a dot. Asteroids was certainly a shooting game where spaceships and asteroids were the enemy, but we all know there are never any real people in spaceships, so that was okay. The low quality graphics made it all seem about as dangerous as chess.

When CD-ROMs first appeared as the next gaming platform, there was  great buzz about how now we could make games educational, and the kids would eat them up. That worked a bit for the little kid crowd, but it became clear pretty quickly that  teenagers thought games were for fun, not for learning. Fair enough, most adults don’t go to the movies or even television to learn anything. But why should so many of the current video games involve shooting the crap out of anything that moves?

Having watched my boys play, it has slowly dawned on me that the thrill of these games doesn’t come from the shooting per se. If it did, most games would feature a really big gun where you just stood and slaughtered anything that came your way. I admit that some of the battles in Starcraft and World of Warcraft look like that, but in reality, they are part of a larger story where you need to collect resources and plan ambushes and traps before you get to the firefight. Indeed, most of these games are a blend of shooting battles with a lot of hunting for resources- wands, potions, health credits, ammunition, whatever you need to stay alive and get stronger. Many games involve extensive searches for resources, with lots of puzzles to solve along the way. This structure has become so common, I don’t think the kids realize that games don’t have to feature journeys through landscapes to collect things before you get to battle. It just seems like the natural way to play a game.

It is that inevitability that is the clue to what is really going on here. About a year ago, while I was trying to get one of the kids to get off his game and come to dinner ( “In a minute, Dad!”), the penny finally dropped. The kids didn’t spend their spare time on these games because they liked killing people/wizards/aliens. They did it because they love hunting and gathering. They weren’t just shooting these targets, they were searching them out, hiding from them, setting traps, then shooting them, hoping they would not get killed in return. Unwittingly, these 21st century kids using quantum physics powered computers had tapped into the most ancient lifestyle of all: they had become hunter gatherers.

The parallels are striking. According to anthropologists, before the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago, everyone survived by hunting and gathering. Most food was gathered, not hunted. Nuts, berries, fruit, whatever was in season, was gathered during the day. Based on cave paintings and other evidence, men did most of the hunting. But they needed resources and cunning to succeed. Rocks that could be sharpened needed to be made into points for spears and later arrows. Our ancestors were stronger than we are, but still no match for a one-on-one battle with most of their big prey like mastodons or wildebeest. So, they needed to find ways to ambush them, hurt them without getting hurt, then follow them, sometimes for days, as the victim escaped, bleeding. Our edge as a species was not that we were fast or strong, but that we were smart, and we could trot for long periods of time, allowing us to eventually catch up to the deer that we had wounded. Our species, Homo Sapiens, appeared two hundred thousand years ago, but our predecessors like Homo Erectus had praticed this lifestyle for almost two million years. So it is a fair statement to say that hunting and gathering is literally in our blood, buried in our psyches. Our bodies and minds are built for this kind of living - farming is a recent add on. If an asteroid ever slams into Earth and sends us all back into the Stone Age, we’ll be ready, this is what we evolved to do.

Seen against our ancient past, the wild success of hunting and gathering video games is not all that surprising. It is actually a fascinating case study of what happens when technology provides the human psyche a blank slate to play with. Will we elect to use computer technology to educate ourselves, or to save the world from its problems? Apparently not. Given complete freedom, our teenagers, most of whom have never hunted a real animal in their lives, will choose to spend all of their free time living like a cave man. Using the most sophisticated computer processors ever invented. These games are unwittingly tapping into our core psyche, and are laughing all the way to bank. The choice of targets has changed, since the kids are shooting aliens, wizards and monsters, not animals. But, as Barbara Ehrenreich pointed out in her fascinating book Blood Rites, our drive to describe all our enemies as monsters ( think Saddam Hussein, Hitler), probably tracks back to our Stone Age past, when there really were monsters in the dark, ready to eat us. Today we don’t fear wolves or tigers since we have conquered them, so we focus our fears on fantasy monsters.

So, now when I see the boys playing these shooting video games, I don’t worry that they will grow up to become Hannibal Lecter or Jeffrey Dahmer. I also don’t worry that they will ever go out to battle aliens - not unless the invasion starts in our basement.

Stephen Milton is a freelance documentary film maker in Toronto.

www.milton2.tv.

Mad Men - Why did Don Draper become such a creep?

This may not get me any points with parents, but I have been watching Mad Men with my teenaged daughter for the last few years. This past week, we finally caught up, and now we have to wait until next year to see how the series ends. For my daughter, it has been an excellent way to painlessly learn about the sixties. I have enjoyed the chance to pause the show and help  her with the back story on political events like the Kennedy assassination, and the first Moon walk. It’s not often a teenager actually wants to talk to a parent about history, so this has been a great experience for both of us.

However, when it comes to explaining the social mores of the 1960s, that has been tougher. Throughout Mad Men, there has been a conscientious effort to portray the habits of the age accurately. Most characters smoke, women are treated by the men as playthings or second-class citizens, blacks are invisible or servants, drinking and driving is normal. They get all these details right, although my father tells me few people kept that many bottles of booze at the office. But in season six, the series decided to shift its focus to the love lives of its characters, which quickly became the tale of their endless affairs. At this point, the series seemed to become an unrealistic soap opera. It was an odd turn for a show that had tried so hard to seem plausible, and of course, I needed to explain it to my daughter.

Mad Men and the Inferno

Dante's Inferno, art by Gustave Dore

So here’s what I told her. At the start of season six, the lead character, dashing Don Draper, is seen reading Dante’s Inferno. For those of you who skipped classic lit, The Inferno is the epic poem of Dante’s guided tour of hell.  Don is reading the book on his honeymoon. He has just married Megan, his beautiful secretary, who seems to be everything he ever wanted. Megan is a twenty-something dark beauty, a bit exotic (a French Canadian, would-be actress), and fully subservient to Don, at least at first. It is a marriage of the beautiful people. Don has always yearned to be connected to the Bohemian lifestyle of the sixties, and Megan is already there. Divorce wasn’t common in the sixties, but it did happen, so this much I can explain to my daughter. But the reading of Dante on his honeymoon? Don is obviously not going to stay in heaven for long.

Without giving much away, it is fair to say that for the rest of the season, Don descends into a personal hell defined by drink and adulteries of various kinds. Don has a perfect wife at home, but he spends his time seeking out new sexual adventures everywhere he goes. Other characters do this as well. For this season, it seems like men can have sex with anyone they want, whenever they want. Don’s prince charming becomes a thoroughly unlikeable character, as he cheats and lies to everyone, at home and at work. The adulteries are wanton, and happen so often that the show becomes strangely unrealistic, and even annoying. Don takes ridiculous risks, as though he could never get caught. The core of the series, the actual writing of advertising campaigns, took a backseat in this season, much to the umbrage of many critics and viewers. So why did the writers of Mad Men turn it into a soap opera in season six?

Don Draper, the Perfect Consumer

The key, I explained to my daughter,  is that Don’s character in season six is no longer a real person, but a symbol: he has become the perfect consumer. Throughout the series, Don has written ads about desire – for the perfect family life, for adventure, for escape. But in this season, he leads his personal life just like the perfect consumer is meant to shop. Don’s love life becomes based on whatever he cannot or should not have. If a woman is attractive, and belongs to someone else, he wants her. But once he gets her, he consumes her, then moves on to the next new thing. He has affairs with no thought for the consequences, or for getting caught. In real life he would have been discovered ages ago. But in this season he is not playing a real person, he is playing the consumer of goods which are built to be used and replaced.

It is a brilliant parable of consumerism, because at the root, Don is playing us. We are all consumers, buying products made somewhere far away in conditions we ignore, and we don’t really want to know what happens to our stuff when we throw it away. The rise in global temperatures is also the story of the rise of worldwide consumerism, as we demand more and more stuff to keep us happy. Wisely, Mad Men  reminds us that this consumerism is not just about the world we ignore, but can also be very personal. In season six, Don’s ex-wife Bets, the Barbie-like one, gets overweight for no apparent reason. In season seven, Don’s company vies for a fast food contract. This is where we really become the victims of the consumerist ethic. In the 1960s, only 15 percent of Americans were obese; by the 2000s, it had more than doubled. This explosion is obesity started in the 1980s, and tracks very well with the rise in consumption of fast food, an industry made possible and popular by wall to wall advertising. With junk food, we are the perfect consumer, both the cause and the effect.

In season seven, Don Draper comes out of hell to some extent, but Mad Men  is subtly suggesting that the rest of us are still there. Will he fully escape the inferno? Dante did – in the last instalment of his Divine Comedy,  he ends up in heaven with his perfect lover, Beatrice. It remains to be seen if Don will be fully redeemed and find lasting love and inner security. In case you are wondering, I did share all of this with my daughter. To my relief, she is still watching, now aware that even television can have multiple layers of meaning, the mark of any great art.

Stephen Milton is a freelance documentary film maker in Toronto. www.milton2.tv

The story behind the song, the chair and Marilyn Monroe

Ian Foster

Last night, I went to a CD release party at a local bar. The musician was a gentleman from Newfoundland, Ian Foster, and he spent the night telling stories. The stories came in many forms: his songs were often stories, about things as varied as lost loves to shipwrecks. His music and lyrics were lovely. But he told stories about these stories, too, which is what I found interesting. Each song was introduced with a  story about how he had written it, or a funny thing that happened one night when he was performing the song. None of the songs stood alone. They came wrapped in a story – stories within stories.

It occurred to me that this is quite different from what we usually get in the modern age, and I wondered why. If you go to a rock concert, Mick Jagger doesn’t tell you about how he was sitting in his car ( or wherever) when he wrote “Brown Sugar”. Of course, part of this is that most people who hear a new song won’t encounter it in concert, but on the radio or internet. But even if you attend a rock concert, in my experience few musicians take time to explain the origins of each song on their new album. They might say here’s a track from the new CD, but that’s it. The song is expected to get by on its own merits, cut off from its artistic roots.

Homes without stories

That attitude is a very modern one, and does not just apply to music. If you look around the room where you are sitting, chances are you are surrounded by objects that you bought in a store, that come with no story whatsoever. You have no idea where your computer was made, and even if you guess correctly that it was Taiwan or Korea, you haven’t a clue about any of the people who made it. The same is true for that chair you are sitting on, or the light bulbs in the lamps. They are commodities, made by people somewhere, but we haven’t a clue about the story behind each of these goods. Was Li-Huang having a good day on a Tuesday when she put the circuit board into your Mac? Was this the last computer she would ever work on, or the day after her son graduated from high school? No one knows.

There was a time not so long ago, where pretty much everything came with a story. In pioneer days, families had to create a lot of the furniture and food in the house. That table was made by Pa that first winter we arrived, you can still see where the axe slipped. Food grown in your own garden has stories built in which you literally eat and become part of you. This is the lettuce we rescued from the raccoons, and the pickles Ma made last winter when we had a bumper crop of cucumbers. Even before the pioneer days, when most of our ancestors lived in villages, in Europe, Africa or Asia, people often knew the people who made the things in their homes. Even if it was the smith from the next village who had pounded out the shoes on your horse, you knew his name, and his reputation.

When mass production came along, the price of efficiency was the loss of story. When every product was meant to look exactly the same, insuring consistent quality, then it didn’t matter anymore who made it. In fact, the idiosyncratic element of the worker’s personality needed to be removed, so that Bob’s widgets weren’t preferred over Ellen’s. Every toaster of a particular brand needed to be exactly the same. That sameness was a fiction, of course: some toasters were defective, others lasted longer than most. But in the modern age, all you needed to know was the name of the manufacturer. The worker’s stories were removed, and replaced with advertising campaigns, which provided a story which would apply to every product, as if they were all the same.

Andy Warhol: The Original is the Copy 

This new kind of meta-story was captured brilliantly in Andy Warhol’s art. His genius was to realize that in the 18^th century, artists painted portraits of heroes, and rich people. But in the modern age, the true heroes weren’t people at all, they were products, like a Campbell Soup can. Moreover, what made that soup can heroic was that it was the same as all the other soup cans. Its elevated status came from the fact that it was not unique, but one of a million copies, all purportedly identical.

And what of the heroic people in our culture, the rock stars and movie stars? Warhol realized that what made them famous was not that they created unique performances, but that they too were replicated, via the movies they starred in. Marilyn Monroe would not have become a star if there was only one print of each film she made, which was passed around from theatre to theatre. Her fame came from the fact that through film, her identical image was multiplied, so her movies could be seen on screens all over the country at the same time. Monroe, like an Ikea chair or a soup can, was a product of multiple copies. So when Warhol painted Elvis or Marilyn, he painted them three or four times on the same canvas, like frames from a film. Their power in modern culture came from the fact that they were copies.

It could be argued that one of the paradoxes of the modern age is that while it removed stories from the physical objects in our lives, it also provided a way to vastly increase the number of stories we can consume. In previous blogs, I have mentioned that the average American spends five hours a day watching television, and I suspect few hard working medieval peasants could have spared that much time for story telling around the kitchen hearth. We may have lost the stories of our furniture and food, but we have  (over?) compensated by engorging ourselves on mass-produced stories.

Did we lose something important by forgetting who and how our goods are made? There is something about knowing the story behind an object which gives it some charm. We all know that a jar of jam made by a friend seems to be more valuable than a similar jar bought in the store. It matters that we know the person who made it, it makes it seem more special, more soulful. Similarly, when we go on vacation, we like to buy souvenirs from the local market where (we think) we are meeting the local folk artist who produced it. Those souvenirs are more valuable and soulful than the Chinese-produced “I love Barbados” t-shirt that we can buy in the airport as we leave. A souvenir is not just a thing, it is part of a story that involves you, and may sit on the shelf at home for years to come as a warm reminder of a great holiday.

The story behind the movie

But does the story behind a story work this way? When DVDs started replacing VHS tapes, it was assumed that one of big draws would be the extras on how a movie was made. The director’s commentary through the entire film,  and the behind-the-scenes mini-documentaries became a standard feature of DVDs. But when movies became downloadable, these features dropped away. Part of the reason may be cost, but I suspect the other reason is that most people weren’t watching the making-of features, especially for films they had not seen before. Making-of stories can detract from the power of a movie, since they show how films are ultimately made of boring actors, equally boring directors, and a lot of special effects that look like nothing  special on set. Unlike a jar of jam, knowing how a movie was made can hamper the enjoyment of a film. Our suspension of disbelief can be eroded, particularly when we haven’t seen the film before, or it is new. For a movie to work, we need to forget that the film crew is there.

Paradoxically, once a film has become famous, like Star Wars or Casablanca, then it is easier to watch making-of features. I think this shift occurs because an older movie becomes a myth, a story with its own power, regardless of who made it. Star Wars was created by George Lucas, but it is independent of him now ( which is one of the reasons Disney can safely take over the franchise and make new versions). The story has entered that kind of movie heaven where stories live forever, divorced from their origins. This allows us to return somewhat nostalgically to how it was made. We can marvel at the misconceptions the original cast and crew held about the film they were working on. The stars have aged, the director is bald, the effects are passé, but the film is still forever young, preserved against time, living in its own parallel universe. Like a myth, it has a life of its own, and can be remade by new people, but the story itself will persist independent of them.

That takes us back to where we started – to our modern-day troubadour at the CD release party. Mr Foster charmed us with tales of how he first wrote his songs, and told us funny anecdotes about the places he had performed them. The people in the audience will carry away his CD with a story about the night they saw him, and heard the making-of tale behind a particular favourite song. His story-telling style beckons back to a lost age when everything had a story attached to it, from chairs to love songs. But my guess is that if his songs live on among his fans, it will be because, like movies, they will attain a life of their own. If people are still performing them fifty years from now, they won’t know much, if anything, about the circumstances of how they were written. What will become important is that the songs have their own inherent power. Songs, like stories, float through time. But hearing the song’s origin is certainly a nice send off.

To hear some of Ian Foster’s music, click here.

Stephen Milton is a freelance documentary film maker in Toronto.

www.milton2.tv

Why do we love movies so much?

The summer blockbuster season is starting at the movie theatres, and Hollywood hopes that droves of us will go to watch the latest crop of big-budget flicks. Even if you don’t go to the theatres very much, you probably watch a lot of movies at home, whether on television or YouTube. The average American watches television five hours a day, and even when the kids are on their video games instead, they are still watching moving pictures. Most of us spend our non-working hours watching motion pictures of one kind or another, far more hours than we spend reading, and frankly, more time than even our grandparents spent reading or listening to the radio each day. We are story junkies, and moving pictures are the way we get our fix.

But why are moving pictures so popular? 

Why not reading, or listening to the radio? One of the most interesting theories comes from  Walter Murch, the editor of Apocalypse Now and American Graffitti. He has argued that when movies first appeared in the late 19^th century, they caught on because they reminded us of the movies that were already in our heads : our dreams. For as long as we have been human, we have woken each morning to memories of visual stories, complete with soundtracks, editing ( often jump cuts) and strange landscapes and situations.  Murch argues that “if we assume people's dreams were cinematic before the invention of the motion picture, then what cinema has done is to take the language of dreams and bring it under our control.” Those dreams amazed early movie goers, and perhaps it is no coincidence that some of the first silent films were science fiction. Those early films of adventures on the Moon with monsters and alien babes were just as strange as the dreams people were used to inside their heads. (Martin Scorsese’s wonderful film Hugo captures this period of early film making really well). In time, movies branched out to encompass all forms of the human experience.

I like Murch’s theory, but I think that there were other forms of movies in our heads before the movie industry arrived. I am thinking of the movies we call memories. There are many types of memory of course, and not all play out as mental movies. Memories of the deep past can flash simply as images – think of that first date with your significant other, or when you first learned to ride a bike. Those are glimpses, less like the full movies of dreams. But more important, I think, are the memories we use to stitch  together what we are doing right now. You walk into the kitchen to get a cup of coffee. That action makes sense to you because you are living in the movie of having just been in the other room where you were talking to someone.

You may object that this sense of being alive right now doesn’t feel anything like a movie, it is simply reality, the present. That is what it feels like, I agree. However, it feels real because your mind is stitching together this moment with everything that has happened in the last half hour or more. Think of what happens when that process breaks down, as it does for people with Alzheimers. They find themselves in the kitchen, but they can’t remember why. The present is cut off from two minutes ago. They have now, but it doesn’t make any sense, it is the end of a story that appears to have no beginning, so it isn’t a story at all. It is just confusion. Their internal movie isn’t working, so they can become confused about who they are, or where they are. It is a terrible condition, but it proves in extremis that we rely on an internal movie simply to make sense of the here and now, every second of the day. We are all living in a mentally created movie, where we are the star, and if we forget the plot, we also lose our identity, and our sanity.

The difference between us and those with Alzheimers is that our memory is working properly. Alzheimer’s attacks a part of the brain known as the hippocampus, where memories are not stored, but sorted.  This is where short-term memory is turned into long term memory. Tragically, this is the first part of the brain that is targeted by the disease, so that short-term memory itself is compromised. They cannot remember what happened in the last two minutes, so there are no events to be placed in long term storage. They get stuck in the present, with a huge gulf between now, and the deep past, which they retain from before the disease took over.

In healthy people, the hippocampus acts like a film editor. It reviews the footage of the day, and decides what will get into your personal movie, and what boring details will get lost forever. This may be why most of our memories of childhood are about exceptional events, but we can’t remember a typical day in any detail. At the time, the normal was in good supply, but that day you broke your arm seemed more important, so it got stored in deep memory, becoming part of the movie of your life.

In the Middle Ages, they had a way of gaming this system to force people to remember important events. If a town was hosting an important event, like the investiture of a new mayor, a boy would be brought around to witness all the official events that day, the signings, the oaths, etc…Then, at the end of the day, they would suddenly throw him into the river. After they fished him out alive, the astonished child would go to bed. That night, his brain decided to store all the events of the day leading up to being thrown in the river, on the assumption that knowing what preceded the near-drowning would help to avoid having it happen again. Decades later, that boy, now an old man, would still remember the events of that important day in the city’s history, serving as a kind of living record. ( Thanks to James L. McGaugh's book, Memory and Emotion, for this strange fact).

This internal form of movie making helps make sense of why motion pictures have become so common in modern life. 

We like movies because we have always had movies in our heads, as memories, as dreams, and as our sense of the present moment. So, in this early part of the 21^st century, we have become motion picture junkies. We fill every moment we can with moving pictures, whether they come in the form of tv, movies, YouTube videos, or video games. We do it at home, and when we are commuting. Even on the street, it seems most of us are talking on the phone or checking emails, keeping us jacked into the bigger story of our lives. We have shown that our internal instinct for stories is leading us to spend as much time as possible in external stories, often in the form of moving pictures.

Ironically, this fascination with external stories may be interfering with our ability to create our own internal movies. Remember the hippocampus, our internal film editor? It works best when you stop taking in new experiences. Our memories are sorted during down time, when the mind isn’t doing much of anything. Daydreaming, lying around, staring out the window on the streetcar, and most of all, sleeping. The hippocampus doesn’t work well when our minds are constantly taking in new information, like checking our emails every few minutes, in between YouTube videos and Facebook postings. All that constant digital activity that is so normal in our lives now is actually really bad for our ability to form memories.

People who multi-task do far worse on cognitive tests than people who don’t. People who get less than seven-nine hours sleep ( which statistically is pretty much everyone) on a regular basis harm their brain’s ability to form memories.  50-100 years ago, everyone got up to two hours more sleep per night than we do now. Our reduction in sleep means the next day you can’t remember that new employee’s name, or what time the meeting will occur. Our addiction to stories and moving pictures is keeping us up too late at night, undermining our ability to make lasting memories.

The irony in this is that our devices are making personal memory less important. Our digital calendars can tell us when the next meeting is, and our massive personal photo collection in our phone or computer can show us exactly what we were doing on that first date.  You could argue that with a universe of data and memories in the cloud, we can afford to lose some personal memory. It is a fair trade. But that misses the fact that what makes us special as individuals is our ability to stitch together events and information in novel ways. That’s the essence of creativity, the mixing of different things together to make a new idea, a new technology, or a new business strategy. That creative process only works if you have the information in your head, so your mind can come up with new connections and combinations. It can’t all be in the cloud.

This is new territory for everyone, so I don’t have a simple answer. But this much is clear: our brains like to dream, to have down time. Out of those fertile fields come our best ideas. Staying jacked in undermines that creative process, the way in which we bring something new and wonderful to the boardroom, to the kitchen table, to our friends at the bar. We shouldn’t let our fascination with stories and movies get in the way of us making our own stories and movies in our heads. Who knows, if you unplug a bit more you may become the person with ideas others tweet about:)

Stephen Milton is a freelance documentary filmmaker in Toronto. www.milton2.tv

Why we believe in science too much to watch Cosmos.

The reboot of the Cosmos television series just ended, and despite a ton of publicity, lots of money, and being broadcast on ten Fox television channels, the series still didn’t do well. Some scientists may be tempted to conclude that this is more proof that the public cares less about science than ever before, since in 1980 the first Cosmos with Carl Sagan was a big hit. But are they right? I don’t think so, in fact, I think that the public does believe in science – and that is why Cosmos couldn’t be a big hit today, but it was 35 years ago.

I should admit that I have a slight connection to the Cosmos series – the first one, not the second. In the early ‘90s, I was a budding documentary film maker, working as a writer on a science series about Nobel Prize Winners ( The Nobel Legacy). My boss was Adrian Malone, the executive producer of the first Cosmos series. I heard a lot about Adrian’s dealings with Carl Sagan ( often fractious), and how the show was produced. It was a time when big-budget, 13-part series about serious subjects were more common, and attracted lots of attention. When Cosmos aired on PBS in September of 1980, it received 8.7million viewers in America’s four biggest cities ( that’s how ratings were calculated back then). Cosmos became proof that PBS could produce a ratings hit, and Adrian hoped that he could do it again with our series ( no such luck).

Television was changing in the early 1990s, in ways that would ultimately affect how the next Cosmos series would fare in 2014. I was living in Boston in 1992, and when I went home after work, I watched some of the new cable channels. One of them was TLC, known as The Learning Channel back then. It had just been bought by The Discovery Channel network. I rather liked TLC, since it was basically a PBS and BBC reruns channel, full of fascinating serious documentaries.

But during the 1990s, TLC discovered that science and history shows were not going to get big ratings. However, one kind of show did really interest people: home renovation programs. So, the channel slowly drifted away from science, towards lifestyle shows. Home and personal makeover shows became big hits, followed by shows about atypical people like dwarves, people too fat to get out of bed, and tons of shows about aliens and paranormal events. Science was out, the bizarre was in. This format worked so well, other channels, including the big broadcasters, started producing their own big budget versions of these shows.

When Cosmos came back in 2014, it was facing this new television universe. There were three other shows that were its main competition for most of its run: The Good Wife, Resurrection and Believe. Resurrection is a new fictional series about people who come back from the dead, while Believe is a new J.J.Abrams vehicle which follows a little girl who has paranormal powers. So, in 2014, two of Cosmos’ top competitors were shows about superstition. It lost to both of them, as well as to The Good Wife. In 1980, by contrast, Cosmos was up against Archie Bunker’s Place ( a sitcom), Charlie’s Angels and CHiPs . Not an alien or zombie in sight. In 2014, Fox aired Cosmos on all ten of its channels (for example, FX, and its news channels), and the show still only got a maximum of 8.5 million viewers. Back in 1980, it got slightly more than that in just four major cities ( the way ratings were calculated back then), so in the U.S. as a whole, far more people watched it in 1980 than in 2014.

So does this mean that we are slipping back into an age of superstition, where science is no longer considered true? No. I think we all understand that our televisions, mobile phones and ipads are made possible by science. But - and this is a big but-  we don’t feel like we have any say about what happens in science. It is something produced by experts, who know way more than us, and we will never catch up. And that is a problem for making a hit television show.

Far from being dismissive of science, we’re more like medieval peasants who walk into those huge, beautiful cathedrals. They were in awe, and knew that what the Church said was The Absolute Truth, and not to be messed with. You couldn’t start telling stories about Jesus where he had a wife and kids, you know, for fun. Not an option, since what the bible and the priests were saying was simply fact, no room for debate or alternate versions. The same is true for science today. There’s no point in making up stories about the laws of physics, as if there is some wiggle room there. The universe has laws that can’t be broken or distorted. So we approach science as something that is true and it works, even if we don’t know why. So a show like Cosmos deserves our respect. It may fill us with wonder and awe, but we know that our opinions don’t matter in any way.

The paranormal shows Cosmos was up against don’t have this problem. Their plot lines are flexible, they can make up the rules as they go along, keeping the audience guessing. Few of us would stand around the water cooler talking about the laws of physics, but we happily talk about some show we saw about aliens, or the latest superpowers a character on True Blood or Heroes has acquired. It is like sports: we feel fully qualified to diss a player who makes millions of dollars a year. We feel we have the right to heckle. That’s why watching shows like Honey Boo Boo or Duck Dynasty is fun: their characters are different from us, and we can gossip about them.

That kind of talk doesn’t work for astronomy. Our human instinct for telling stories, for exaggeration and gossip just doesn’t come into play if you believe something is the absolute truth. It does work for superstition, though, which is why serious science shows like Cosmos will rarely do well in the ratings anymore. We have become used to seeing television as an arena where we can heckle, so a serious science program is not going to attract a big audience, unless there is a human element we can engage with. Or, to put it another way, it is not that we don’t believe in science anymore, it is because we believe it so much that we will keep being attracted to superstition, and subjects which are thoroughly unscientific.