Anti-Intellectualism In Australia

We Hate Thinkers? That Would Take Some Thinking

I was going to ignore this one but Pleiades sort of prodded it back into view so I thought maybe I should chip in my two cents. It’s a rather oblique bit of commentary and maybe even a little whiny. 23000 people have already expressed their like for the article so it’s not like the wider public don’t feel sympathy for the intelligentzia in this country. But that number suggests also that it’s the intelligentzia feeling sorry for itself.

To be honest, it’s quite an irritating piece, so I’m going to pick out sections and point out why it’s a faulty piece of commentary.

Each week I watch Q&A praying for an expert, begging for someone who knows what they’re talking about. And each week I get Joe Hildebrand accompanied by a flurry of tweets by the emotionally unstable. In fact Nick Osbaldiston and Jean-Paul Gagnon recently found in their research on Q&A that only 5 per cent of panellists since 2008 had a research background. Even in an entire show devoted to education issues, Professor Gonski sat in the shadows while Pyne and Garrett proffered glib inanities and vapid insults. No one learned anything.

My problem is not that our public sphere harbours ill-educated members (like the imbecilic Andrew Bolt who never made it past first-year uni). I think we need commentators from all walks of life. The problem is that as a country we are hostile to those who are well-educated. We prefer home-spun wisdom to years of research. Our language is peppered with vitriol reserved for those who think for a living: “chattering classes”, “latte-sipping libertarians”, “intellectual elites” and now Nick Cater’s most unlovely term “bunyip elite”. If we want to emphasise the importance of something we say that the issue “is not just academic”. Any idea that takes longer than a nano-second to understand is howled down. Or perhaps, more precisely, any idea that threatens conservative orthodoxy is consigned to the divine irrelevancy of the academy.

There’s a lot of name-calling going on there.

Quite frankly I’m not even convinced that the people I meet are hostile to intellectual pursuits or that they resent people with a higher educational attainment. My own take on this is probably more hostile than the average Australian, and maybe even more resentful about people’s letters than the average Australian. So I guess this is going to be a kind of retort to somebody who is an adjunct lecturer at law at UNSW from somebody who flunked out of Med Shcool at Sydney University. You could say that we’re diametrical opposites: Lecturer versus drop-out, UNSW vs University of Sydney, Law versus Medicine and all that.

My own view is that some intellectual concerns genuine *are* academic and there’s nothing wrong with it being academic, but it takes a bit of honesty on the part of academia to admit that which is academic may not be easily transferred as wisdom for those who live in the practical end of the world. The reason why the dismissive phrase “just academic” comes about is not to stop ideas that threaten conservative orthodoxy but a frank and honest bid in not wasting time applying the inapplicable.

The point of the intellectual elite is not to “think for living about how the world can be a fairer place” for a start. A better place, maybe. But it’s simply not true that such a task is the burden of the intellectual elite. Some are going to write books and others are going to devise engineering solutions to problems that have nothing to do with fairness. And those who undertake practical pragmatic tasks in our society are not any less intellectual than those who toil in the halls of academia.

The complaint that only 5% of the panelists were researchers is also a bit misleading. This construction suggests that those who are not researchers do not have valid credentials to be asked questions about our society on television, when in fact most of politics is reducible to opinion and not knowledge at all. Politics is the enemy of epistemology, but you can’t really live without having politics so we all indulge in it, and we all form opinions. But here’s the thing: opinions are always *merely* opinions and it doesn’t matter who expresses theirs and how they do so in the context of a TV show like ‘Q&A’. the very demand that ‘Q&A’ ought to have more intellectual gravitas misses the point that it is a show about opinions masquerading as something more insightful than it really is. Personally I find it laughable that an adjunct lecturer of law is using it as a benchmark to show how anti-intellectual Australia is.

The flipside to what the writer is saying is that people who aren’t researchers and therefore not at the cutting edge of knowledge practice ought not to be heard on ‘Q&A’ and that seems like a terrible conceit on the part of academia.

There’s also no room for cleverness in our models of masculinity or femininity. For women, intelligence equates with a dangerous independence that doesn’t sit well with your role as a docile adoring fan to the boys at the pub. It’s equated with sexual unattractiveness. And for men, carrying a book and using words longer than one syllable is a form of gender treason. It’s as good as wearing bumless chaps to a suburban barbecue. Real blokes have practical wisdom expressed through grunts and murmurs. Real Aussie chicks just giggle.

This bit is simply not true. It is not true of both men and women I deal with everyday. I categorically reject the notion that -even in the blue-collar context – that people do not try to express themselves in the most articulate manner. This reads more like projection on the part of the writer. I can easily imagine many contexts where this might be the case, but it is not any kind of a universal portrait of Australian life. If she thinks this is an accurate description, she needs to get out of the ivory tower more often.

It’s not just a hostile public sphere that keeps thinkers at bay. Academics may also not want to enter public debate. And I can understand why. Firstly, they receive no rewards in terms of career advancement for writing for the public. And secondly, many may not want to engage with a knife-drawn public prone to Goldstein-style Two-Minute Twitter Hate Rituals. Academics are often timorous folk who specialise in showing the complexity of issues, not offering tweet-sized solutions. Social media doesn’t democratise debate. It limits it to the resilient. Snark triumphs over insight, and commentary is reserved for those with voluminous folds of scar-tissue. Sensitive thinkers rarely fit this bill.

That’s just weak. If there’s something that needs to be said in the public sphere, and an Academic won’t venture forth to say it, then that’s dereliction of duty and we ought not be paying them to be our academics.

If the reason why they don’t come forward is because there aren’t enough rewards in coming forward, we should sack these academics and start again because they’re not fulfilling their social function. If there is a truth that needs to be spoken, it shouldn’t be about personal reward should it? In fact the writer goes on to mention the monetary motive twice more in the article so clearly it bug her that academic don’t get paid like bankers. Here’s a newsflash lady: only bankers get paid like bankers.

If they live in fear of public rebuke, then that’s also unacceptable and weak. It really doesn’t matter that the public might excericse its Goldstein-style two-minutes-hate; if you don’t have the conviction of beliefs as a scholar, what good as a scholar are you? Indeed, proper academics stand up all the time, like Tim Flannery. Why don’t they do it more often? Why make excuses as to why they don’t?

It might seem hard to take for the writer, but the biggest enemy of intellectualism in this country is exactly this kind of cloistered, self-interest-driven, condescending, patronising academia. They’re not helping the wider society in the least bit. They can hardly complain then when the outcome is for the wider society to snip their budgets.

As rants about anti-intellectualism in this country go, I actually found this one pretty lame, unhelpful and mostly disagreeable.

Tenacious D At The Sydney Opera House

It Seemed Even They Couldn’t Believe They Were There

I’ve seen Tenacious D live before. They were supporting the Foo Fighters. I’m trying to think of  international acts I’ve seen twice and the list is actually bizarre:

• Yes
• Foo Fighters
• Jon Anderson*
• Phil Collins*
• Tenacious D

And that’s it. I’ve seen Pink Floyd once, Genesis once. Led Zep – never. Almost saw Jason Bonham tour with his Led Zep cover band but he cancelled the Australian leg of the tour. Never seen King Crimson. Didn’t see the Who because it seemed really hard to call Pete & Roger & hired hands ‘The Who’. I wish I could see King Crimson – that would make my year.

The asterisks next to Jon Anderson and Phil Collins are there because I’ve seen both gents as part of their band and as solo acts. The most understandable is Yes, at the top with a bullet and it’s only twice because they’ve only toured twice in the last 45years.

The Foo Fighters is weird. The only reason I saw them the second time was because Tenacious D were playing support. So I must really like these guys.

What’s Good About It

It’s Tenacious D. Of course they’re Awesome. Everything about them is awesome. They even tell you this is so. It was all good.

That being said, there were some unexpected stand out moments. They do a quick cover of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Rock’n'Roll’ The first verse was sung in a low register that exposed the blues roots of Zeppelin, but the second verse is sung with a falsetto that actually sounded like Robert Plant. It was amazing. They also did a cover of ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’ and ‘The End’ by the Beatles that was a show stopper.

Jack Black is an amazing vocalist. Kyle Glass is an amazing guitar player. Between the two of them, they obliterate the need for the rest of the band. It’s a great night of entertainment

Speaking of which, even the comedian who kicked off the support was great. Very funny man with some sharp insights, fully deserving to be aired in the Sydney Opera House.

What’s Bad About It

This is the tough bit. I don’t think they were quite as energetic and clownish as the last time. I could do with more clownish physical comedy. Also, the gag where they fight and Kyle leaves the stage, setting  the stage for ‘Dude I really miss you’ wasn’t done as well as the previous tour. The artifice felt forced. But that’s trivial. It was a thoroughly enjoyable show.

What’s Interesting About It

The Jack Black rock-buffoon persona is actually quite a work of performance art. I’m not sure  when the first time was that I saw Jack Black on screen and noticed. It must have been  ‘Mars Attacks’ or ‘The Jackal’. It’s really only since ‘High Fidelity’ that we’ve been graced with his “Musical Moron” rock persona that has segued into ‘School of Rock’ and the ‘Tenacious D’ movie. He is a superb singer, a delightful comic actor and author of some kick ass songs.

Somehow he sews together these diverse talents and presents to us the Jack Black rock buffoon persona as his pristine rhetorical device to critique contemporary culture, through rock music. It’s an interesting rhetorical structure because not since has Spinal Tap has there been such a forceful satire of rock music that has also been embraced so tightly by the rock audience.

The irony of two middle aged guys with steel string acoustics claiming to to be the world’s greatest rock band underscores a mordant wit that finds its target in sexual mores to self-help to enlightenment and religion. The catalogue of songs they bash through is like an Odyssey of post-modern neuroses (and faulty self-examination) that culminates in their encore song finale – and sublime masterpiece of idiocy – ‘Fuck Her Gently’.

The Closest Thing I Could Think Of

…was ironically Jon Anderson live at The Factory. Except Jon Anderson is the author of first order texts where Rock’s foundational beliefs are laid out in song. Then along come these two jokers and create a raft of second order texts that mercilessly parodies the metaphysical and social content but in actual fact the most similar show I could think of was Jon Anderson cracking jokes in between bashing out songs on his acoustic.

Rock’s come a long way in a short time. The two Tenacious D members are laden with Generation X cultural baggage, which is in a sense, the result of trying to make sense of the inherited wisdom from the first order texts from the Baby Boomers. It’s not surprising the deliberately garbled bad information results in fine comedy as presented by Jack and Kyle.

You can sort of see how I end up seeing Jon Anderson and Tenacious D live twice.

Here Comes The DLP

The Liberal’s Own Fracture

As a progressive of sorts, I’m sick of bagging out the ALP. I wish they’d do better but they won’t. They won’t because they’re who they are at this minute in history and more’s the shame. It’s been interesting watching the Libs this year doing their best to keep their noses clean and names out of the paper. Even Tony Abbott has been making himself scarce (as if that’s going to convince undecided progressives to vote for him), but occasionally something bursts to the surface.

This week it was leaked that Alex Hawke doesn’t think much of Abbott’s parental leave scheme. This is interesting for two reasons. Firstly, it’s a sign that the Liberals under Tony Abbott are not a monolithic right. It appears, there’s a sort of spectrum of Wet Malcolm, Soggy-Bottom Joe Hockey, Dry Tony Abbott, Fresh-Wheatbix Julie Bishop, and Bone-Dry Alex Hawke. And we have to remind ourselves that the drier they are the whiter and more private-school they get (unless of course they’re the scion of escaped European Fascists, it won’t matter what their school ties looked like).

Secondly, it is interesting that the reason they don’t like it is because the architecture of the plan so to speak hinges on taking the 3200 top companies to pay for it, and try as they might some people on the right just can’t stand the thought of another tax. Now, it appears to me that this kind of tax the big companies and pay the people dosh mentation is largely of the old DLP mold, so it surprises me none that Tony Abbott thinks this is the way to go, and for Joe Hockey to concur. (“Do you concur?” “Sorry?” “Do you concur!?”)

The other news from the Liberal side is that not only are they likely to repeal the Carbon Tax, some would want to abandon their ‘Direct Action’ policy – which interestingly enough involved taxing the biggest polluters – which is a bit like the gun lobby wanting to repeal gun laws in Australia:

Two Liberal MPs want Tony Abbott to review or consider abandoning parts of his $3.2 billion plan to combat climate change in light of ”dire economic circumstances”.

Mal Washer and Dennis Jensen made the comments about the Coalition’s Direct Action plan in the same week MPs broke ranks to publicly criticise Mr Abbott’s paid parental leave scheme as economically irresponsible.

Western Australian MP Mal Washer said: ”If we are not going to get a big environmental bang for our buck then we ought not to do it. The policy needs to be reviewed and only the valuable parts need to be retained … in light of dire economic circumstances.” Dr Washer added that he agreed with the tree planting initiatives in the scheme.

I guess the point there is that there  are some pretty crazy people on the right end of the conservative side of politics and it’s a miracle they don’t all jump ship and join Bob Katter or Clive Palmer. (This has already happened on the Left – and let’s be honest, that’s what the Greens are: the political hidey-hole for old time communists and assorted marxists, Lesbian Separatists, piratical whale-huggers, disorderly tree-huggers, illustrated people with socially unacceptable piercings and consciousness-altered hippies and dope fiends… You know, the people who used to make up the ALP Left faction).

The great irony in all of this is that the current carbon pricing policy is something the coalition came up with way back when and Kevin Rudd co-opted it in order to win the election. Now, that was a famous drubbing, but that shouldn’t mean the Carbon Tax should be against the Liberal Party’s ideological framework of free markets unless of course it is even more important for the Liberal Party to be the party of climate change scepticism. Of course, Tony Abbott himself is famously a climate change sceptic which not only robs him of intellectual credibility, it robs him of having a mandate when he wins this September.

But here’s the thing. This model of taxing the biggest companies and handing out the spoils is classic old school Leftist thinking – like, the splittist Democratic Labour Party of old. After all, Tony Abbott cites B.A Santamaria as his political inspiration. It’s exctly the kind of policy style that B.A would have approved. It’s a bit of a miracle the WASP types in the Liberals have tolerated Tony Abbott and his DLP ways until now. And maybe now that they’re so confident they are about to win, they want to re-stack the policy deck.

I guess all this goes to show it is pretty deplorable that the ALP had to be forced to the table by a hung Parliament to put through the Carbon tax by the aforementioned Greens, and then utterly failed to sell it. Now that they are about to lose badly, it’s all going to get undone and the climate sceptics are going to have their day, which is tragic.

Maybe they can take comfort in the fact that their old time brethren/apostates of the DLP have infiltrated the Liberals and are putting in policy on their behalf. You sort of wonder how the old Masons look at all this. I guess it’s no surprise hyper-WASP Malcolm Fraser walked out on the Liberal Party. What kind of Liberal Party is it with a Jesuit at the helm?

News That’s Fit To Punt 10/May/2013

Not Wilton, Surely Not Wilton

The Federal Government and transport minister Anthony Albanese in particular has been leading a strange crusade of his own to put an airport at Wilton. To that extent his department has somehow deleted references to an old study done into Wilton which categorically rejected Wilton as a site for Sydney’s second airport; then commissioned a new study based on the fact that Wilton was about the 9th best candidate in a field of 9, and then finally released those findings to find that there is yet another reason to do another study.

Chief executive of Urban Development Institute of Australia Stephen Albin, who is backing another airport at Badgerys Creek, said the further studies into Wilton were a waste of time and the public had ”report fatigue”.’

‘They don’t believe what they are hearing from the politicians,” Mr Albin said. ”Decisions need to be made to ensure that community confidence in government plans is not eroded.”

Mr Albin, as well as the NSW Business Chamber and the Tourism and Transport Forum, said Badgerys Creek was clearly the best option.

”The biggest surprise out of this report was that they’ve said they’re going to do another report,” Mr Albin said.

That’s exactly it.

It’s all pretty strange with its fixation on Wilton if it didn’t keep costing millions in tax money to keep conducting these studies that basically keep saying Wilton is a bad idea. Even if it were an average idea, the Federal Government already owns land to what everybody knows is the right idea, which is Badgerys Creek. But no. They’ll do another report into Wilton. So here’s another one of those facepalm moments you can chalk up with this ALP government.

Anyway. Crikey has this piece here, thanks to Pleiades.

Labor is under suspicion of protecting someone’s pecuniary interests in not building Badgerys Creek, which a brand new suburban railway line, the SW Rail project, could be extended into at trivial cost  on its completion to Leppington in less than two years time.

It can’t possibly be acting to protect the public interest in depriving western Sydney from having its own airport, and the jobs and additional public transport infrastructure that come with it.

Labor even sponsored a supposedly independent federal/state study into a site for a 2nd Sydney Airport which overwhelmingly endorsed Badgerys Creek, which the Commonwealth owns, and the minister, Anthony Albanese, trashed its independence in about 20 minutes after its official release by rejecting the finding as incompatible with party policy. That development, a year ago, then lead to today’s ridiculous and useless quest to ‘independently’ come up with a Wilton answer that would justify turning over the Badgerys Creek site to whatever private interests will benefit from such a decision.

Minister, the answer is not another or further studies. The answer is change the policy.

That about sums it up. But of course this government is pathologically incapable of doing the obviously correct thing. As with the other white elephant study – the one into a high speed rail link they have no intention of building – this one has sucked a lot of government money and public confidence. I’m amazed that Julia Gillard gets given so much credit for her policies when in fact her ministers are off creating this miasma of nonsensical studies and non-decisions.

For those of you short of a laugh, here’s something you might like: Some black-humoured wags are saying that the reason Anthony Albanese is insisting on Wilton is so that Badgerys never gets built. The reason why they don’t want to build on Badgerys Creek is because that’s where all the corpses are buried by hitman Lucky Gatellari and hitman-hirer-about-town Ron Medich, so it would be a terrible thing to dig anything up out there. That sort of thing just might fit the bill of pecuniary interests, no?

Jokes aside, you do wonder what on earth the ALP is up to with this charade. If they want to build the second airport in Badgerys, they should just come out and say so. Everybody knows it’s the only real choice.

Education As A Trap

Selling A Dud Product With Gowns

It’s got to be those black gowns, right?

Here’s an article that might dissuade people of the value of tertiary education as education.

A group of journalism students took my undergraduate university course on entrepreneurship and innovation. They were bright, creative, fun to teach and strong communicators. What a pity most will never work in a newsroom, such is the pressure on media companies to cut costs.

How many other university disciplines educate far more students than needed? How many marketing students are needed as technology drastically cuts marketing costs? How many graduate accountants, lawyers or technology students will be needed as firms outsource work offshore?

How many PhD students will find work as full-time academics as the Federal government cuts university funding and if massive open online courses reshape higher education?

Will there be a point where the supply of university graduates exceeds demand by so much that students no longer see sufficient value in spending three of four years at university, racking up tens of thousands of dollars in student debt, and finding their degrees count for less upon graduation?

And what will happen to a potential glut of university graduates in certain industries?

You can just see this. A university somewhere teaching journalism or media or mass communication or something of that ilk. And all these students are in there paying huge amounts of money hoping for a career in their chosen field and of course the field is collapsing in the real world. The University is offering a course that bears very little resemblance or relationship to the real world situation of the industry. So most of these kids will graduate and become unemployed – or be forced to do something else.

The universities are now market driven, so they offer up courses depending on what’s in demand. But this might not reflect the real marketplace for jobs. I keep thinking about the stupidity of the film industry that had a premiere film school churning out directors and cinematographers and failed to grow in line with the people coming out. Walk-off HBP told me years ago about his experience as a graphic design student and how the vast majority of the graduates who graduated with him did not work a single day as a designer.

And once a upon a time this was okay. It was okay because the graduates weren’t burdened with dirty big debts to HECS and whatever other schemes are going at the moment. You sort of wonder how this is going to play out. Consider for a moment the Baby Boomers  in Australia got ‘free education’, some tuned in dropped out but inmost part, they benefited greatly from this. Generation Y is being saddled with dirty big amounts of debt and being told they can do whatever they like when in fact there is a major restructuring of all industries coming our way. Not only will they be Generation Jobless, they may well end up being Generation Bankrupt.

Of course they could inherit grandpa Baby Boomer’s money and pay off debts that way. They do say what goes around, comes around.

Hollowing Out Your Future

The scary prognostication made in the mid to late 1990s was that we were staring down at a 90-10 future where 90% of the work will be done by 10% of the people and everybody else was kind of redundant. Since then we’ve seen massive waves of what Schumpeter called creative destruction of value where new technologies and business models abruptly consign old business models to the dustbin of history.

Here’s an article that caught my eye today.

Jaron Lanier’s latest book, Who Owns the Future?, begins by noting an instructive coincidence: the bankruptcy of the photography giant Kodak occurred within months of Facebook’s billion-dollar acquisition of the photo-sharing site Instagram. This would be just one example of the destructive dynamism of American capitalism, a process through which old companies are overtaken by new technology and new firms more in tune with the needs of customers — and that perhaps benefits us all.

Except for one thing, that is: whereas Kodak employed 140,000 workers during its heyday, Instagram employed just 13 people when it was purchased in April 2012.

“Where did all those jobs disappear to?” Lanier asks. “And what happened to the wealth that those middle-class jobs created?” Lanier’s answer is that the new “information economy,” which is now superseding the manufacturing economy, is developing in such a way that the rewards are filtering to an elite few at the expense of everybody else.

That would be because any rationalisation would streamline the flow of capital back to the investor. That is what productivity and economic rationalism really mean. Lanier’s been saying this for a while, and in many ways this lines up with the 90-10 future.
Anyway, seeing that we’re talking about education, and journalism and educating journalists just before, I think you should read this bit too:

The first victims of this business model have been journalists, musicians and photographers. Lanier points out that the technological punditry has often cheered the demise of these careers as sources of secure middle-class jobs in their enthusiasm for a cheap, bountiful online experience. But as the “real” economy becomes more and more automated, what information-based work is safe from a similar fate? Education seems to be the next industry primed for the sort of disruption that the music industry faced 10 years ago, as the cost of education continues to rise at the same time the tools necessary for self-directed learning are increasingly at our fingertips.

Now, that’s depressing.

The problem is that we’re not really talking education. We’re talking vocational training. the real aim of education, the enlightenment project as such came to a shuddering halt in 1970. It came to an end because essentially universities were being asked to be relevant to a post-modern technological society when in fact they had their roots in medieval politics. And so education slowly got supplanted by vocational training – and most people who couldn’t distinguish between the two chose to take vocational training as something that has a superior outcome.

If you really want to know why our cultural life is so poor in Australia, the quick answer is that our universities turned hard towards the course of vocational training at the first sign the changes were in the air. I mean, really! Who needs education? Who needs to know about literature or philosophy or art or music? What good is this stuff when you can earn good money perfectly well, driving trucks out in the mines in Kalgoorlie or wherever!?

Philistinism is everywhere you look; and in saying that I don’t mean ‘punks’. I mean philistines that don’t even know the context of punk. But they’re raking it in.

I know people wax lyrical about Whitlam and Hawke Keating governments but really, they were as culpable as John Howard in ruining education and supplanting it with vocational training. We really shouldn’t be surprised when the end result is an intellectually dishonest Julia Gillard and intellectually blighted Tony Abbott currying for our votes. The damage has been done. The rest of it is watching the Titanic go down – feel free to shuffle the deck chairs.

‘Robot & Frank’

The Odd Couple of Crime

This is a light little movie with an interesting theme – the relationship between identity and memory. It’s also philosophical about things to do with persona and being and time. It’s the kind of film you expect if Martin Heidegger were a screenwriter.

What’s Good About It

The premise is pretty simple. A tag team character drama between a man who is losing his memory to age-related disease with a Robot who collects and hoards memory. The simplicity of the setup makes for some fun viewing and moments of chuckles.

It’s a clever ‘little’ science fiction movie that spends most of its suspension of disbelief on the evolving identity of the Robot character. No spaceships, no rampant futurism, just the Robot technology being extended upon as a character study.

What’s Bad About It

The central drama ought to be more upfront, but instead it gets taken over by the action of the police coming around to arrest the main character Frank. Also, the choice of the impassive Robot voice that is strongly reminiscent of HAL in ’2001: A  Space Odyssey’ sort of leave you cold. I know it sounds calm, and therefore creates irony, but that was Stanley Kubrick’s trick. Doing that again after all the parodies of “you can’t do that Dave” is a bit tedious.

What’s Interesting About It

I’m going to cut to the chase – The most poignant moment in the film is when Frank erases the Robot’s memory in order to rid him of the memories of the crime they committed together. In that moment, we understand that the Robot’s persona does not change but his identity changes. Our memories allow us to constantly change as who we are. This is why Frank losing his memories is a terrible thing because he lives in fear that he will lose his identity however trivial it might be to the world, once he loses his memory. He is no good to his family if he is simply the persona of Frank without the identity.

The issue of identity over time is the ever-confounding problem in philosophy. One of the artists I interpreted for a couple years ago was doing something interesting. He would make molds of mass produced items. They were mostly items with wear and tear and dings on them. He would then make multiple perspex ‘prints’ of the items. He would paint them in identical patterns and send them out in the world, knowing full well that each one would experience different abrasive experiences. The point of the exercise was to highlight the interplay between the mass production of something which is somehow anttitheitical to individuality, yet each of the manufactured things experiences something that makes them different to the others in the same batch. He collects one, mass produces that, but of course the process would begin again.

This interplay is exactly where the Robot sits in this film. The Robot, coming from some presumed mass production unit is individuated through its interaction with Frank. So much so that frank comes to recognise a persona of the Robot that is unique to that unit, only to have to erase it to save his own skin.

All of this comes at a very interesting topic because as biological machines, how different are we from mass produced machines? The evidence mounting each year is that thanks to the genetic bottlenecks Homo Sapiens has experienced in pre-history, our genetic variance is quite low. If we send a batch of people to school, we all think we’re individual, when in fact we’re being programmed by the same people to enter society with the same program. This point was brought home tome recently when I established contact with people I went through school with through Facebook, only to find they had remarkably similar, nuanced views on politics that I possess. And this led me to believe that maybe the socialising power of a school is much more far-reaching than for which my belief in individualism could account.

In other words, the experience of humanity might just be a lot like the Robot, but with a desperate in-built belief in each and every individual’s individuality. The picture the film paints, is the distinct possibility that our sense of our individuality is over-stated. We are metaphorically, the mass produced Robot going through life collecting moments for individuation, but largely the same.

From The Horse’s Mouth

Straight, No Trailers

Walk-Off HBP sent in this link which might be of great interest to many people who are film watchers. It’s Steven Soderbergh’s version of the state of the cinema. It makes for sobering reading because he’s actually a working director with a great career and probably many more films to come, and he’s clearly in a conundrum. It’s a bit long but I want to draw your attention to this section right here because it describes one of the many major problems, in fairly concrete number terms.

So then there’s the expense of putting a movie out, which is a big problem. Point of entry for a mainstream, wide-release movie: $30 million. That’s where you start. Now you add another 30 for overseas. Now you’ve got to remember, the exhibitors pay half of the gross, so to make that 60 back you need to gross 120. So you don’t even know what your movie is yet, and you’re already looking at 120. That ended up being part of the reason why the Liberace movie didn’t happen at a studio. We only needed $5 million from a domestic partner, but when you add the cost of putting a movie out, now you’ve got to gross $75 million to get that 35 back, and the feeling amongst the studios was that this material was too “special” to gross $70 million. So the obstacle here isn’t just that special subject matter, but that nobody has figured out how to reduce the cost of putting a movie out. There have been some attempts to analyze it, but one of the mysteries is that this analysis doesn’t really reveal any kind of linear predictive behavior, it’s still mysterious the process whereby people decide if they’re either going to go to a movie or not go to a movie. Sometimes you don’t even know how you reach them. Like on Magic Mike for instance, the movie opened to $38 million, and the tracking said we were going to open to 19. So the tracking was 100% wrong. It’s really nice when the surprise goes in that direction, but it’s hard not to sit there and go how did we miss that? If this is our tracking, how do you miss by that much?

I know one person who works in marketing at a studio suggested, on a modestly budgeted film that had some sort of brand identity and some A-list talent attached, she suggested, “Look, why don’t we not do any tracking at all, and just spend 15 and we’ll just put it out.” They wouldn’t do it. They were afraid it would fail, when they fail doing the other thing all the time. Maybe they were afraid it was going to work. The other thing that mystifies me is that you would think, in terms of spending, if you have one of these big franchise sequels that you would say, oh, we don’t have to spend as much money because is there anyone in the galaxy that doesn’t know Iron Man’s opening on Friday? So you would think, oh, we can stop carpet-bombing with TV commercials. It’s exactly the opposite. They spend more. They spend more. Their attitude is: you know, it’s a sequel, and it’s the third one, and we really want to make sure people really want to go. We want to make sure that opening night number is big so there’s the perception of the movie is that it’s a huge success. There’s that, and if you’ve ever wondered why every poster and every trailer and every TV spot looks exactly the same, it’s because of testing. It’s because anything interesting scores poorly and gets kicked out.

Think about that for a moment. Good or bad, for better or worse, when you want to get a movie out into the marketplace in North America, they’re looking at a $30million dollar operation. If it’s not that figure, they don’t want to begin marketing the film.

I don’t know about you, but for a long time, Australian films have had a maximum budget that sits at about AUD$10million. For a long time in the last 30years there wasn’t anything close to parity, so the real figure would be that we were trying to make our biggest productions for the equivalent of 6-7million in US money. Then it had to be a domestic hit, which is something that happens about once in a decade. But now, that film has to find a distributor who is willing to back it with US$30million before it even gets a shot at the market.

The ramifications of the numbers should be obvious – we have no business making films in Australia. And this doesn’t even take into account that 95% of the domestic box office in Australia is dominated by foreign films. I keep citing this, but what this means is that the back of the envelope calculation done by David Dale suggests the net viewing public for Australian films is 20,000 people; and let’s face it that can’t even justify the 10million dollar budget (and that’s without marketing).

So that’s what we have. In the decade that the FFC fell apart and got replaced by Screen Australia, the world marketplace for films simply amped up, powered on and left Australia behind. None of the assumptions in Australian film making – which you see in the application forms to get funding, or annual reports tendered to Parliament – make any sense in the international market place.

If Steve Soderbergh’s got ‘Present Shock’ about the market and access to the market, how on earth can we even begin to re-construct a film industry in Australia? I hate to be spoil-sport but, we’re so done-over it’s not funny.