What Future Does Professional Media Content Production Have?

In the Media Literacy class I’m teaching this semester, my students are engaging in a role-playing exercise in which they assume the roles of four groups that, traditionally, play a role in the development of a new medium: governments, advertisers, technology developers, and content producers. First, the students research the role that these groups played in the creation and popularization of print, radio, TV, film, internet, etc. Then, they form new groups comprised of representatives from each of these groups and discuss how to develop a heretofore un-developed medium. The first example I thought of for the un-developed medium is: virtual reality.

Most of us have an idea of what virtual reality could be. And this imagined reality of VR could have government regulation (determining how the content will be distributed, if the roll-out of VR will be subsidized like a utility, how to regulate violent/sexual content, etc.), advertising (product placement in virtual reality? Pretty much an advertiser’s dream!), and technology developers (Apple VR might have a cleaner look than Microsoft’s somewhat cluttered-looking VR), and content producers (custom-made luxury environments for you to relax in). Sounds like a good fit!

I’m going to do this exercise again later in the semester, and I’m having no trouble coming up with several other “media technologies of tomorrow”: augmented reality glasses, superior surveillance technology, a portable instant-fMRI machine, affordable 3D printing. Some of these technologies are already gaining a foothold in the market. It’s easy to see how governments, advertisers, and technology developers would be involved in the creation and development of these technologies. But where would the content producers fit in?

The more I thought about the exciting media technologies of the future, the more trouble I have thinking about how professional content producers (e.g., screenwriters or the equivalent) will fit into the picture. I’m quite confident that there will always be an appetite for well-told stories. People skilled at telling these stories, through words or pictures or sounds, will have a place in our media environment. But I suspect that people will devote less time to consuming those stories than in years past. During the golden age of radio and television, people spent hours every day consuming content created by professionals. Increasingly, we spend more and more time using Facebook, Twitter, and other activities that don’t involve much in the way of content production (yes I know, lots of conversations on FB & Twitter are about content produced by professionals, but still, most of the aggregate value of these sites, I would contend, is generated by the users and the creators of the venue, i.e., the technology developers). In thinking about the media technologies of the future, it’s hard to think of a place for the writers, the producers, the directors. I’m sure there will be a handful of greats who produce content we all talk about, but perhaps a shrinking middle ground, and a shrinking window of attention and time we all spend consuming professionally produced content. 

Aside from making my group role-playing project a bit more difficult to design, its hard to think of a downside to this future. Definitely something I'll come back to in class. 

Assessing the big, infrequently occuring effects of films and novels

Sometimes, I'll be asked by someone who knew what I was interested in years ago whether I'm still writing about film. I stopped and thought about why I'm not as interested in film anymore. I think its because I wanted to understand some principles of communication that have the most explanatory power, or that explain the highest percentage of the total human experience. Films, like novels and theater before them, used to occupy a great deal of our time and, probably, our consciousness, influencing what we thought about the world. Then came TV and the internet. My sense is that TV and the internet are like the air we breathe. They make up hours of many people's days.

Its not that films aren't still "important" in some sense of the word. They provide a lot of the content that people watch on TV. Large numbers of people still watch, discuss, and are influenced by films via Netflix. Films can still start a conversation about something in a way that TV and the internet seem unable to. But still, if I had to rank the most influential media, I would put the internet at the top, TV in the middle, and film after that.

However, I've always had this suspicion that film, like novels, though they are both experienced very infrequently, can dramatically change the worldview and trajectory of someone's life. This is pure speculation on my part, but I imagine the effects of these various media this way:

• TV and the internet erode our brains (but not in a bad way). The change happens very gradually through frequent exposure. Over the years, profound changes to our individual and collective mental landscapes can take place. These might be easier to observe and predict. People's encounters with religious texts seem to operate this way. Sure, maybe it was a revelation when they first discovered the power of the bible, but it really only has profound effects if you keep reading it over and over. Personally, I feel like the online version of The New York Times has gradually shaped the contours of how I think. I've been perusing it for the past decade.
  
• Film and novels act like earthquakes (again, not in a bad way). They can completely reconfigure the landscape in a short period of time. All you need is one story to hit you at the right time in your life and you might decide to change the entire trajectory of your life. These are probably less easy to observe and much harder to predict, but no less significant for the individual or society. Take the books of Ayn Rand. I'm guessing that not many people have read them. but if particularly influential people have read them and have been influenced by them, then they are capable of having profound effects on society. Personally, reading White Noise might've been part of why I decided to try becoming an academic. The main character of the book was a professor. That character (and by extension, the author) thought the way I thought. Its not that he had a glamorous, desirable life, but just that I identified with him and the way he thought. And so I thought "maybe I should look into becoming a professor." There were many other factors that contributed to that life-altering decision (an uncle, parents, former professors of mine), but this one brief encounter with this novel had something to do with it.
  

This isn't to say that some TV shows or some websites or online communities can't be revelations in the way that novels and films can be. In any case, I think its important to think about how you could test these significant effects of these media, these earthquakes. I guess you could start with interviews, or maybe surveying people and simply asking them: what was the most influential TV show, book, movie, etc, you ever experienced? How often do they reference them, talk about them with others, write about them, or think about them? One possible way to assess this would be by looking at people's online profiles. Are there any quotes from movies or books? Any tattoos of characters (I'm thinking of you, Twilight fans).

Also, I think it would be useful to assess the state in which the user found themselves at the time of their encounter. I'm guessing that in most cases, the user was young and in a period of transition (to extend the seismological analogy a bit further: this is like looking at buildings constructed on fault lines). One can imagine a well-made movie that is tailored to young men or women that has a certain pro-social or anti-social message having a profound effect, not on little everyday actions, but on choices like what job to pursue, or whether or not people are generally good or bad. It would be unsurprising to find that movies that glorify war or wall street boost enlistment and b-school applications. I also like to consider a particularly vulnerable population: the mentally ill. The trouble is that when you start this conversation about whether exposure to video games or vitriolic political rhetoric contributed to violent actions, people take sides based on their own behaviors or their political beliefs. But if we could set those aside, it seems clear that unstable folks are just another population that may react differently to certain media texts and that this is worth knowing. Maybe nutjobs like Jared Lee Loughner or John Hinkley, Jr. would've eventually latched on to some media text and used it as inspiration for an assassination. Or maybe not. Maybe there was something special about the interaction between one particular media text and an unstable mind that results in acts that are profoundly disruptive to society.

We can't just take anecdotal evidence (e.g. most murderers read A Catcher in the Rye when they were teenagers or something like that). We need to subject this evidence to rigorous statistical analysis, comparing those who were exposed to the text and didn't change their lives to those that did. What makes them different? How many of them are there? How drastic and costly to the individual and society is the behavior change? What would be the cost to society of somehow limiting access to the text? There is not reason why we can't do this, but we have to start looking in the right places.

Discussing Inception

After seeing Inception for the 3rd time, I've become almost as interested in the way people discuss this film as I am in the film itself.

I first became interested in the discussion around psychological puzzle or "mindfuck" movies when I wrote a chapter of my thesis on the IMDB discussion of Mulholland Drive. I found that the arguments fell into two distinct categories:

Those who thought the film's creator was trying to create a coherent fictional universe in which cause-and-effect applied vs. those who thought the movie was like an abstract painting. The first group thought that the plot was like a puzzle and that if you understood which parts were "real" for the characters and which parts were dreams, fantasies, or hallucinations, and you understood how the "real" lives of the characters influenced those dreams/fantasies, then you could "understand" the film. The second group thought either that the artist is having a laugh at the audience by making them think that the art is somehow "important" b/c its so inscrutable or that it has real beauty which cannot be analyzed the way a cause-and-effect narrative is typically analyzed.

In a way, the same thing is happening with Inception (based on my observations of a very limited sample of audience reactions: my friends and people on reddit). But I think b/c Inception has all the markings of a traditional Hollywood film as opposed to the art-house pedigree of Mulholland Drive and b/c the film's characters spend so much time explaining how everything fits together, most people debate what the final reality (for the characters) of the film was and/or whether the creator of the film was successful in his attempt to create a coherent fictional reality. Those who loved the film seem to believe that it all fits together and those who didn't like it either felt that it didn't all fit together or that its construction - its attempt to weld together an action film, a psychological puzzle, and an emotional story of loss and acceptance - is clumsy and draws attention to itself as artifice. Here's what I'm interested in: why do people fall into those groups?

Here's my pet theory. People think that some characteristic of the plot's coherence is to blame/praise for why they liked/disliked the film. They argue as if that were the case. But really, its their abilities to emotionally connect with the characters and some pre-existing disposition towards the type of movie they see Inception as (a summer blockbuster, a Christopher Nolan film, a smart film, a trying-to-be-too-clever film) that determines how hard they look for those flaws. This categorization and emotional identification with the situations and characters in the film, in some sense, precede viewers' desire or attempts to piece together what exactly happened in the fictional reality of the film, even though we're not aware that they do. With Inception as with many sci-fi and/or mindfuck movies, there certainly are inconsistencies or blind-spots to find. Those who were pre-disposed to liking the film could acknowledge these, but they would probably say that they don't matter, that its all part of the willing suspension of disbelief, that all stories must leave out some information and that the rules of the genre demand that we overlook some un-reality of the film's world. Those who were pre-disposed to disliking the film would call these "plot holes" and treat them as a kind of empirical evidence that the film is poorly constructed.

So when people have debates over whether the film made sense or what happened in the reality of the film, they're really just reflecting whether or not they identified with the film and whether they typically like the type of film that, before they entered the theater, they had categorized the film as.

I have this hunch b/c I try to imagine if these relatively minor things in the movie that people talk about were altered (the spinning top falling over/not falling over, a bit more explanation here or there, things going a bit differently with the kicks, etc.) and what the people having these arguments might think of that altered movie. I am highly skeptical that their opinions would change. They talk as if these minor changes would alter their opinions of the movie, that their arguments for why this movie was good/bad rests on these features of the film, but this seems ludicrous to me.

Perhaps its easier and safer to talk about one's like or dislike of a movie in this way. To understand how or why one categorizes a film as a certain type is a really hard thing to be aware of. Also, when you talk about what characters or situations you identify with, you can be revealing something very personal about who you are. Any statement against the film could be construed as a statement against someone who identified with the characters, situations, or sentiments in the movie, which would cause a whole lotta friction.

It should be obvious which group I fall into by now. But the more I think about the multi-layered pleasure I get out of this film, the more I think, "why can't I experience this more often with more movies, TV shows, songs, etc.?" We talk about these things as if its the artists' responsibilities to bring us a pleasurable experience, but I think we as audience members have some control over this, more than we think. If I'm arguing this for Inception, I'm arguing this for all art. What if I had gone to see Eclipse instead? My knee-jerk reaction would have been to hate it and to argue why this was a bad film. But I wouldn't have to have done that. I could've acknowledged the fact that I categorized the film as "awful teen chick romance" and understood that, on the face of it, I probably wouldn't have identified with the characters, situations, or sentiments expressed in the movie. But that doesn't mean I couldn't have found something positive in the experience and that I shouldn't have to wait for an artist to cater to my desires or find a fan to convince me of the work's merit. Everyone could love everything, and if loving something is more fun than hating something (I know that hating films, TV shows, people can feel good, but as someone who really loves Inception, I can tell you that loving feels better than hating), why shouldn't we try? I think my arguments for the greatness of some works are arguments for enjoyment in general, arguments against not enjoying yourself at a movie.

The Pitfalls of Hypothesizing about Film Success

Say we take a film like Transformers 2. The film, like most other films, has a lot going on, in its content and the circumstances under which it was released: grand spectacle, a link to something that is established in a target audience's cultural memory, an extensive marketing campaign, the fact that its a sequel, Shia LeBeouf, its director, its screenwriter, its late-June release not opposite of other big action blockbusters, etc. Which of these elements is most responsible for the film's success? Let's throw in another element of the film: Skids and Mudflap, two robots who (quoting the NYTimes piece) "talk in jive and are portrayed as illiterate; one has a gold tooth." The depictions have been called racist by many. Are these depictions reasons why the film is more successful, or is the film successful in spite of those depictions?

The questions are essentially unanswerable, but its not because film is Art and one cannot theorize about why some people like art and others don't, or why some art is profitabe and other art is not. It is so hard to predict why films, as opposed to other art forms, are successful or not b/c there are so few comparable films made and the circumstances of release (marketing, timing) play such a significant role in their success/failure. In order to determine what aspects of a product are responsible for its success, we need to make comparisons, but there are so few comparisons to be able to make that its harder to predict what will succeed. If you wanted to find out what elements of motion picture content made a certain text successful (e.g. certain choices in pacing, plotting, certain bigoted depictions, certain actors, lighting, etc), then you would look away from film and towards online video. There are simply more comparable texts, and the circumstances under which each video is watched are so varied that the uniqueness of each viewing can be considered to be random error and cancels out. What you're left with is a more pure comparison and better insight as to how motion pictures work on audiences than one you would try to do looking at a successful box office film like Transformers 2 and making generalizations about what aspects of the film resonated with the public. And yet film and cultural theorists have been doing just this, and continue to do just this: identifying certain characteristics of a film that possesses many charateristics, noting that the film was successfull, and then making claims about a culture's preferences.

Its interesting to consider recent advances in two untraditional predictions markets, both linked to the work of Nate Silver: presidential politics and baseball. Frankly, I don't know much about Silver's prediction models, but I'd guess he just takes discrete characteristics of each event (a race for office, a baseball game), takes a data set comprised of past events, and sees which characteristics, when all other characteristics are controlled for, exert the most influence on the outcome. You take those influences, assess the observable characteristics of the upcoming game/election, and make predictions of the outcome. With presidential elections, you have very few comparable events to use, while in baseball, you have many. In the former, I would think that you would have to start incorporating patterns in opinion polls (which fluctuate systematically based on various characteristics of world events and their coverage).

The trouble with film is that there aren't the equivalent of polls. Yes, there's test screenings, but those samples are so small and they're just used for minor recuts, not learning about why certain people like certain characteristics of films under certain circumstances. There's too little comparable data to work with. Perhaps the prevalence of remakes, reboots, adaptations is an attempt by producers to use the "data" of those other properties being successful with their suite of characteristics, and making a bet based on that. Its not very systematic, but in a way, I trust it more than I trust anyone who guesses that a film resonated or failed to resonate with the public b/c it was/wasn't successful at the box office and possessed a certain characteristic. That's just guesswork on their parts.

Unoriginality at the multiplex: Franchises are the New "Genres"

Here are some broad trends. I've categorized the top 10 grossing films of several years.

1980: 6 of 10 original, 2 sequels, 2 based on books
1985: 6 original, 2 sequels, 2 based on books
1990: 7 originals, 1 sequel, 2 based on comic books
1995: 5 originals, 4 sequels, 1 based on comic book/cartoon
2000: 7 originals, 1 sequel, 2 based on comic book/cartoon

No interesting trends there. People liked to talk about how Hollywood was infected with "sequelitis," but the numbers don't indicate any significant movement in that direction during those 2 decades. Then something happens in the last decade:

2001: 3 originals, 3 sequels, 2 based on books, 2 remakes
2002: 3 originals, 5 sequels, 1 based on comic book, 1 based on popular musical
2003: 3 originals, 6 sequels, 1 remake
2004: 3 originals, 5 sequels, 2 based on books
2005: 2 originals, 2 sequels, 1 based on book, 4 remakes/reboots
2006: 3 originals, 3 sequels, 1 based on book, 3 remake/reboot
2007: 0 originals!, 6 sequels, 3 based on comic book/cartoon, 1 remake
2008: 3 original, 4 sequels, 2 based on comic book/cartoon, 1 based on book

In many cases, the sequels were sequels of movies that were based on existing properties.

Of course, this is a reflection of what people want to see and what they are presented with. Whether its one or the other is, for the point I'm making, beside the point. I'm claiming that this is not a temporary trend. This is cinema (creators and consumers) obeying a fundamental law of economy. There are other media in which producers can distribute motion pictures to consumers (namely cable TV and the internet). They can also share stories via books, as always. Now, if you were a bank and you were going to fund a major motion picture, which cost 10s of millions of create, distribute, and promote, you would want to be as sure as you could be that the movie would be a hit. An established star is one way to bolster your odds, as is a director or writer with a proven track record of hits. But what about the story or the premise. Ideally, you'd want to be able to test it out for a smaller sum of money. And that's what we're able to do now. When you make a film out of an existing property, be it a cartoon, a novel, or an older film, you attract an audience who believes the film will be similar to the existing property and you have evidence that the story or the premise will resonate w/ people.

Its a little odd that it didn't happen sooner. Why weren't all movies tried as novels first? Maybe b/c some stories would only work on the big screen as spectacle. But now, with the internet and lots more TV channels, you would have to be a bit daft to bankroll an unproven story as a film. Why not make it into a miniseries on TNT or a novel first, see how it does, and retain the motion picture rights?

I would suppose that many cinephiles lament the lack of originality in mainstream cinema (if they care anymore about anythign "mainstream" that is). But are these remakes, reboots and sequels really any less original? Do we judge originality by a title? Couldn't a non-sequel thriller be less original (that is, more similar to its predecessors) than a sequel? I think that this is possible and has been the case in some instances. Really, franchises are the new genres: boundaries within which various artists work.

What to do with CGI films? Are they a genre? There are two companies that dominate - Pixar and Dreamworks. They employ many of the same creative people, use a lot of the same dramatic tropes. More importantly, I feel like audiences treat them more like a series of films and less like a genre. In terms of number and "quality," they are more like movies in a series than films in a genre: there are few and they are of uniform quality.

This is just the top slice of cinema, too. There are plenty of "original" stories lower down the charts, though again, I would question the idea of original. There has evolved a horribly formulaic strain of indie film that, I would argue, are, as a group, no more original by any definition of that term than the bulk of franchise films.

We needn't lament the fact that more hit films aren't fantastically original, the way they were, say, the in 70's. There are still great, original stories being told using moving pictures, but they aren't being told on the big screen. This is what should happen, economically speaking. Cinema no longer holds the same place it did 30 or 40 years ago when it was, essentially, the only place to go for amazing, engaging stories. Once the internet ramps up as a distribution platform for video, cinema will be even less like the cinema of yore. Get over it.

Wordling Through Public Opinion

I've been examining audience interpretations of movies, TV shows, and web video for a few years now. Recently, a friend turned me on to this Wordle application which makes word clouds of any block of text you give it. Word clouds got a lot of press recently when CNN used it to analyze one of Obama's speeches (sadly, people didn't "get" what word clouds can tell them). Anyway, like any good data visualization tool, it allows you to see, at a glance, some of the trends in your data. There are, of course, limitations (as will become apparent in the examples i give below), but it could be an exciting new way to look at public opinion quickly. Take blog posts or comments from thousands of different people, feed it into Wordle, and you'll get a general idea of what that portion of the public is thinking about (or what they think about a certain issue).

Here are the results of my wordle of people's evaluation of several movies on IMDB. I drew the comments from the headings of the first 300 posts for each movie. Check 'em out.
Shawshank Redemption (the highest rated film on IMDB). No big surprises. People think its the best. Its interesting to note that they think its the best ever. If you look closer, you can see adjectives like "brilliant" and "moving." These may not seem surprising, but when you start comparing the different word clouds to each other, even the films that everyone loved, you start to see that fans put emphases on certain elements of certain films.
Amelie (44 on the list of top 250 IMDB). Interesting to see the word "overrated" in there. People define this movie by the fact that its French, and they find it charming.
Love Guru (I had to pick a bad one for contrast). This represents the limits of assuming that word choice (taken out of context) will tell you what people think. The word "funny" might have been part of the phrase "not funny," but Wordle can't tell you that. Its interesting to see that "bad" is used far more than "worst," and that people think of this as a Mike Myers film more than anything (again, obvious, but worth noting). Also, the word "critics" indicates that the critics lambasting of this film carried some weight with people (you don't see "critics" in many other worldes for other films).Casablanca (11 on Top 250 list). Again, "best" and "greatest" are there. "Classic" is there. It would be interesting to see at what year the word "classic" becomes commonly used by people. You would expect it to grow in highly-rated movie word clouds the older the movie is, but maybe there are certain characteristics that make people call a movie "classic" (the centrality of a romance? PG content?). In any case, its far more interesting to me to look at the ways in which hundreds or thousands of viewers use words like "classic" than the ways in which a handful of critics use them. Definately something worth exploring further.

What gets written about in Media Studies?

I just went to a talk about the portrayal of women in shows and movies about the spiritual/supernatural in the late 1990's. Of course, the key text that the scholar was examining was Buffy the Vampire Slayer. the speaker described people's reactions when she told them she was writing about Buffy. Generally, people reacted negatively because so many media scholars (particularly those working in the feminist or cultural studies traditions) write about this one show. This was followed by a justification by the scholar as to why she was writing about this one very-written-about show. It was part of a larger trend that she was examining, it ran for a relatively long time (6 years), and it was fairly popular.

The idea of one show or movie being "better" than another is one that most media scholars, I would expect, would reject. And yet it seems impossible to get away from, because we must write about certain texts and not others. What do we base our selections on?

What we love: My problem with this is it will lead to a few shows/movies being written about a lot while most other shows/movies don't get written about at all. This seems to be happening in film studies. There are a million papers about The Searchers, which isn't a bad thing per se, but shouldn't the number of films that scholars examine and write about be larger? Shouldn't we aspire to examine a diverse set of texts, however one might define diversity? Also, there are plenty of hyper-articulate, passionate, super-smart people who write about texts they love on the internet. They're called fans. Part of the discipline of media scholarship, part of what sets us apart, is our willingness to consider texts that we don't like. Examples: Buffy, The Searchers.

What is popular: I like this strategy, but only if it pertains to films/shows that are popular over a long period of time in multiple cultures, and ideally, independent of the degree to which they were promoted (extra promotion gives some shows/movies an unfair advantage over other shows/movies that would've been just as popular had they had the marketing muscle behind them). If it is desirable to have the deepest knowledge about the greatest number of media experiences, starting with the most popular experiences seems like a good idea. Example: The CSIs and Law & Orders.

What isn't popular: Scholars often take it upon themselves to act as a corrective influence on readers' tastes, trying to counteract the effects of extensive mainstream marketing by "rescuing" lesser known works that are usually aimed at marginalized audiences. This isn't so much about enlarging our collective understanding about how media and culture work as it is about acting is opposition to the private corporate influence on culture. Examples: Stan Brakhage, Queer as Folk, soap operas (yes, I know soaps are "popular" in that they endure much longer than any other text, but it depends on how you look at it. Individual episodes are disposable in the way that news reports are disposable. They don't have a long shelf life).

What did/could/should have an impact on culture: Even if a show wasn't particularly popular, it may have exerted a significant influence on culture or cultural form thereafter. A show like My So-Called Life wasn't very popular when it aired. I doubt that its very popular now (DVD sales and all). And yet its hard to argue with the fact that every teen drama that came after it resembles it in many ways, and that no show that came before it was quite like it. Ditto to Arrested Development, which has spawned a ton of voice-over single camera comedies that might usher out the era of sitcoms (fingers crossed). Its exceptionally difficult to anticipate what shows/movies will have the greatest influence in the future, but if we look back, we can see some unpopular-yet-influential texts. Unfortunately, a lot of scholars try to promote texts they happen to like as highly influential (or possibly influential in the future), but this is just textual boosterism, plain and simple.

Selecting Purely at Random: No one I know of does this, but it strikes me as a good way to go about studying media. If you did it enough, you'd get a pretty good (that is to say, unbiased) sample of all media. Thus, the conclusions you drew about the texts you happened to look at would be generalizable to a much larger portion of all media than any other selection technique. I was going through old TV Guides for some research and kept seeing shows that I knew no scholar or fan was ever going to write about, and this seemed like a shame to me. Again, if we want to form larger theories about how media works, we should broaden our horizons to include texts that don't fit into any of the above categories: the truly mundane texts.

Some texts can fit into more than one of these categories. My next project: taking a survey of texts written about in scholarly journals and those written about on blogs, to see what categories and texts we've got covered and which ones need covering.

Superhero Movies - More Diverse Than You Think

At the risk of using a classic snowclone, Superhero (or comic book) movies are the new Westerns. What I mean is that the genre is both popular and diverse enough to be regarded as a venue for working through our collective philosophical and psychological issues.

Other genres (horror, melodrama, comedy) also hold up a mirror to our collective psyches, but not in the way that the Big movies do. The lesser genres show us what we want - morally, aesthetically, emotionally - but only part of what some of us want. The dominant genre of the time, be it Westerns, gangster movies, or superhero flicks, reflects most of what most of us want. I would consider comparing gangster movies and TV shows to Westerns, if you were to say that Westerns were more of a way of defining masculinity. But I think Westerns, in their time, were bigger than gangster films/shows like The Sopranos, Godfather, Goodfellas, and Scarface are today.

No one would doubt that superhero tales are quite popular, more popular in the last 5 years than ever before and more popular than any other type of film with the possible exception of talking-animal-CGI films. If you were keen on making an older comparison, you could liken them to myths or fairy tails, other dominant genres of their times. But what about my claim that the genre is diverse?

Enter The Dark Knight, in some sense a synthesis of the superhero movie and the gangster flick. And yes, I know Batman isn't technically a superhero because he doesn't have superpowers. But genres and classification aren't defined that way. They're defined by the language we use to refer to the texts, by marketers, vendors, critics, and fans. And I'm willing to assume that most of them would classify this as a superhero blockbuster film. While watching it, I couldn't help but compare it to another superhero blockbuster - Iron Man. These films came out in the same year, they're of the same genre, I'm willing to wager they make roughly the same money (they're as popular as one another), and, significantly, they have almost the same amount of critical acclaim (79 for Iron Man on metacritic, to Dark Knight's 82).

If we were going to plop down $15 to see the Dark Knight on the Imax, maybe we'd like to have a good idea of what we're in for. Ads are of no service here, as they remain startlingly homogeneous. They have to. Ads have to appeal to the largest group possible, even if they have to misrepresent their product, which they frequently do. Ads for Iron Man, Hancock, and Dark Knight look pretty similar to one another - lots of action, some ironic wit, good-looking wounded-yet-rough men, sexy women. To take Dark Knight as an example, its interesting to note that almost all of the clips in the many previews come from the first 2/3 of the movie (which, in my opinion, are the least interesting part of the movie, certainly not as morally complex as the last third). So ads are not a good indicator of content.

What about critics? Shouldn't critics be the corrective to misleading advertising? Well, it depends on how much you bother to read. If you're just looking for general thumbs-up-thumbs-down assessment, as most people are, then the critics are of no use. Yes, all of the critics like both movies, but I have a tough time believing that the public will like both movies equally. One is pretty frothy and fun, the other is pitch black and quite complex. If you dig a little deeper and read the reviews, you can see that most critics recognize these differences. Its important to say that I do not think critics should've praised Iron Man, damned Dark Knight, or vice-versa. But to fail to acknowledge the stark differences between these movies, as thumbs-up-thumbs-down reviewing does, seems to indicate that there's something wrong with that kind of popular film criticism.

Let's go over some of the differences:

Humor: the humor in Iron Man relies primarily on understatement - the hero reacts to a huge explosion with raised eyebrows. There are plenty of catchphrases and instances of Tony Stark reacting in more laid-back fashion than the situation dictates. In the Dark Knight, the humor is more dry and British, quicker and, depending on your taste for these things, either clever or too clever. There's more gallows humor as one would expect with the Joker (here's hoping that Heath Ledger's death doesn't totally overwhelm critical appraisal of this film).

Romance subplot: While both protagonists are playboys, Tony Stark gets the girl in the end while Bruce Wayne is left to brood over a dead lover. Not exactly a minor difference in terms of tone.

Morality: Iron Man dabbles with moral complexity, casting a reformed arms dealer as hero (who ultimately ends up using weapons he designed to kill bad guys, much like the military does). The Dark Knight, on the other hand, had scene after scene in which characters were made to ask themselves (and the audience) tough moral questions: is it ever moral to kill large numbers of people? Is it okay to lie to the public in order to maintain order? Is it okay to survey the public without their knowing? Does using force against the enemy breed more insidious, amoral enemies? Can we delegate the killing that our situation demands to superheroes (read: soldiers) because we can't do what needs to be done? The film was practically an ethics class.

There's one scene that really brings home the dissimilarity. At the end of Iron Man, Tony Stark holds a press conference and announces that he is Iron Man. The scene is subversive, in that it goes against what we know about superheroes: they like to keep their true identity a secret. In The Dark Knight, Harvey Dent calls a press conference and announces that he is Batman (when we know that he's not). Iron Man is content with a few double crosses here and there but doesn't want to confuse the audience with too many. The Dark Knight assumes the audience can maintain an understanding of character motivation even when there are many, many more double crosses.

If there's anything to learn from this, it is that looking at who wrote and directed the movie might be a better indicator than any as to what the film will be like, lending credence to the beleaguered auteur theory. I think that auteur theory is imperfect in that it fails to recognize the fact that creators could create something especially similar to other creators' works and dissimilar to their own previous work. This happens plenty, and the good critic can recognize it.

So, what are the recurring authorial themes? Right away, there's identity. In the first two scenes, the Nolans play with our expectations of who's who, just as they did with the twins in The Prestige, the hero/villain of Memento, and superhero-as-symbol-transcending -individual concept in Batman Begins. They take the idea of superhero's symbolic power being more important than their individual identity to a new level by making a mockery of the personal-history-as-destiny concept. The Joker tells a couple of different versions of how he got to be as fucked up as he is, and none of them is the truth. Each version suits his situation. This film deals far more with moral, political, social, and philosophical issues than psychological or personal ones. Another point of difference from some comic book heroes (Hulk) but not terribly different than others (Spiderman).

And for those of you who think web criticism doesn't matter, check out this article from Slate. Be advised that the article never claims that critics cause a movie to be popular. Only that they are able to anticipate the popularity of a movie better than non-experts and better than chance. Surely, some critics exert some effect on the popularity of a movie (probably the ones who have been especially good at predicting how much the public will like it). Anyway, if critics learn to write from the point of view of the experienced expert and not from the point of view of the cultural elitist, then they will be valued widely. As long as they assume that their job is to say what is good and what is bad, what is art and what is trash, instead of being able to distill the differences of films and be able to present those differences in a way that consumers can make decisions based on them, they'll be writing for just another niche.

New Media Mood Rings

I've become more interested in people's use of media related to their moods. You could understand any moment of human experience by looking at moods, how they change, what changes them, why they change, why we're able to control them sometimes and can't control them at other times (if we could, wouldn't we always choose to be happy?).

All media consumption is related to moods, but with some, there seems to be more variety and fluctuation in moods. TV is interesting in that, at least for me, it seems to generate very few moods: the ritualistic up-down-up of a good drama; the introspective, aggro-but-still interested-in-learning-about-human-behavior vibe I get from HBO dramas; the self-esteem that comes from watching "healthy" TV like Charlie Rose; the amusement brought on by comedy; the pleasant, trance-like numbing of the mind that sports and pretty much everything else induces; some combination of these. With film, its mostly the same. But with music, things are totally different.

I tried in vain to label all of my music according to mood: drunk, funny, energetic, emo, emotional, happy, in love, rock out w/ cock out, blissed out, sad, druggy, melancholy, etc. (it would be interesting to explore color coding as a means of categorizing music according to mood. Maybe this would work better than words). I was thinking that when I was in a certain mood, I'd dial up those songs on my Ipod, but it wasn't that simple. Sometimes, I knew what I wanted, what song, what artist, what genre. But most of the time, I'm not sure how I feel or what I want, but I'm not willing to give myself over to the randomness of the shuffle feature. That's the key difference between interactive and passive media, and I'm defining music, as we listen to it now in the post-album era (and perhaps TV in the era of remote controls and frequent commercial interruptions), as "interactive" in the sense that we expect to exert control, that we're not willing to give ourselves over to the mood-shifting narrative created by the artist.

Music media can be a mood enhancer, mood manager, mood changer, or, most interestingly of all, a mood indicator (like a mood ring). It seems odd not to know whether you're happy or sad, but most of the time, according to my use of music, that's how I am. Its not until I don't hit the "skip" button when that Beatles song comes up on shuffle that I realize I'm really happy.

I'm still sketching out these ideas on mood and the level of interaction or control in media. I think w/ online video, we're treating video in the same way we treat music, but it might be overly-simplistic to say that we use both to enhance moods rather than experience a new mood. I doubt that self-reporting will get us the answer to these questions. Most of the time, we don't know exactly what we want, but maybe we're too afraid to admit that b/c it means that we're being controlled, which goes against every freedom-loving, individuality-promoting instinct in our minds.

When you look at the big picture of our media use, our use reflects our demographic, our psychographic, our values and beliefs and preferences. But when you start looking closely, you can see the ups and downs of our moods, which are far less predictable than other patterns. You could predict I'd like a new band b/c I like that genre of music, but you can't predict what I'm going to listen to tonight b/c you can't know whether the hundreds of interactions I have w/ people today are going to put me in a good or bad mood...unless you carefully monitored my brain activity and physiological states? Or just spied on me all the time? Maybe the next generation of IPods will measure that sort of thing, and finally I'll get the media I want but didn't even knew I wanted.

Mapping Narratives

I thought I'd post an abridged version of the paper I presented at this year's Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference here.

Here's what i had in mind: at any given moment in a film, information is being imparted to the viewer. At the same time, the viewer is aware (to varying degrees) of whether or not various characters are privy to this information. If you see a monster sneaking up behind the heroine, you are aware of the mortal threat to the heroine and you are aware of the fact that she is not aware of the monster. Thus, you feel that the heroine is quite vulnerable, more vulnerable than she would have been had she known that the monster was right behind her.

I'm positing that many (if not all) emotions a viewer experiences are dependent on fluctuations in these relative ranges of knowledge of events over the course of a narrative. For this project, I made some rather crude charts to illustrate my proposed mode of analysis. These charts show the course of movie narratives, and points during that narrative at which a key bit of information (an obvious threat to the protagonist or an obvious aid in helping he or she achieve his or her goal). 1=high level of knowledge ; 0=low level of knowledge. Click on slides for detail.



Flaws: as someone was kind enough to point out at my presentation, I have left out so many subtle aspects of narration (information revelation) in this crude model. The slightest bit of music or glance from a character could be considered a bit of information that would affect our emotions and our perception of goals and threats. To this I would say: I'm working on it. As I said, this model is very basic and crude. While watching movies for this paper, I became aware of the almost infinite amount of information that narratives dole out. And yet, it is not truly infinite. Also, it can be categorized, into threats and goals, by character awareness, perhaps by level of ambiguity. With a more sophisticated data visualization tool, I think I could create a chart that incorporates every bit of information in a narrative that could possibly affect viewer emotion. You could zoom in on various sections of the narratives, or highlight certain types of information.

Then there's the question of motivation. This model works well enough when the goals and threats are well defined, and when viewer identification with the protagonist is relatively straight forward. But what about when its not? When you look at them closely, many movies are bound to have moments of ambiguity concerning motivation, or the status of some bit of information vis a vis a given character. To that, I would say: this is one of the reasons why viewers do not have identical experiences of the same movie. Their experience and values will shape their identification and also their interpretation of some information as possibly helping or hindering a character. And yet, I do not think it is infinitely varied.

In any case, there is a way to set about proving the worth of this mode of analysis. I propose hooking a few viewers up to machines that measure their physiological states and comparing the read out yielded from those sessions with some narrative maps. We may not be able to say that a moment on our viewer physiological reaction chart represents "guilt" or "suspense," but I think we would be able to see fluctuations in the viewer's mental and physiological states. If those fluctuations corresponded to fluctuations on the more sophisticated narrative charts I hope to make in the future, in terms of the fluctuation's spacing, their duration, their degree (which I believe they would) then I think we could start to see how the machinery of narrative actually works on our emotions.

I think we already know the basics of this, intuitively. We're all familiar with the tropes of suspense, with dramatic irony, with farce. This is extending (and exacting) that intuition.

3 Ways to Define Good Cinema: Box Office, AFI, and IMDB

As the subjective coronation that is the Academy Award for Best Picture approaches, its interesting to compare a few gauges of public and critical enjoyment: AFI's top 100 (critics), Box Office revenue adjusted for inflation (public), and IMDB's top 250 (a certain segment of the public). If nothing else, a comparison might give us some clue as to what kind of sample of the public IMDB users are. Also, it might give us some indication of differences between public and critical perception of films.

What the lists have in common
Amazingly, Star Wars is on all three lists (#2 B.O., 15 AFI, and 11 IMDB). My personal opinion on this film is that the acting and dialog are awful and the special effects haven't aged well. Still, the themes resonate across time and cultures, the story is well constructed, and its a good mix of humor, romance, action, and philosophy. The Godfather just misses being in the top 20 on all lists (21 B.O., 2 AFI, 1 IMDB). Just as I'm surprised that so many critics like Star Wars, I'm shocked that The Godfather, with its European art cinema tendencies, is as popular as it is. I wonder if this film is a lot more popular with men than with women. Might that also be true of Star Wars? If that's so, then the male bias in movies isn't just coming from the critics or IMDB users. Its coming from paying customers. And yet, there are plenty of women who consume media. Historically, were they (and are they still) not making the decision as to what films to go see? Might this change in the future? Are TV and books more women's media than film and video games?

What they don't have in common
Gone with the Wind is #1 in Box Office, #6 with the critics, but its nowhere to be found on the IMDB site. IMDB definately has a bias towards newer films while AFI skews much older. The average age of a film in the IMDB top 20 is 30 years, while the average age of AFI's top 20 is 50(!). The average age of the top 20 box office hits is 38.

Casablanca is 3 on the AFI, 9 on IMDB, and nowhere to be seen on box office. Could it be that the general public didn't or wouldn't really like this movie as much as the critics or the semi-elite users of IMDB? Possibly, or maybe Casablanca was never promoted properly in the theater or re-released widely. Perhaps its stature grew over time. Perhaps all of these things account for the discrepancy.

E.T. is the 4th highest grossing film of all time, and rates a reasonable 24 on the AFI list, but is nowhere to be found on IMDB's 250. The critic/public hybrid represented by IMDB seems to be more testosterone heavy than either the general public or the critics. IMDB's top 20 is packed with men and violence. E.T. is a bit schmaltzy and certainly isn't very high in testosterone. This male (presumably young male) skew is a big reason why IMDB should not be confused with public or critical praise, but more likely represents, on average, the desires of young male Americans.

The Empire Strikes Back is 12 on all-time BO, 8 on IMDB, and its left off of the AFI list. I've always felt that Empire is vastly superior to Star Wars in every way: acting, cinematography, character development, pacing. The Joseph Campbell mythic themes that made the first one great are still there, too. The only reason I can think that AFI found Star Wars so superior to Empire is the former's cultural and economic significance, which is weird b/c they have no problem putting films that didn't exactly change cinema or the public consciousness (The Searchers, for example).

Critical godhead Citizen Kane (the Stairway to Heaven of movies, as it were) sits atop the AFI list. Only 3 films stayed in the same spot from the 1998 top 100 AFI list to the 2007 list, and this was one of them. IMDB rates it a respectable 24, and of course, its not on the box office list. I wonder if this were re-released and promoted heavily, would the public show up? Would they like it? Would they get what the big deal was about this movie? I kinda doubt it. Again, maybe critics are rating this movie highly for being innovative, in terms of style (depth of field), story, and themes. Sure, its still a good story, and the look of the film, the acting, and the dialog still hold up reasonably well, but I think the critics are mostly rating it so highly for its influence on subsequent movies (and the IMDB folks are probably acting like critics on this one). Ditto to Wizard of Oz (10 on AFI, 110 on IMDB, nothing on BO).

The Searchers, considered by many to be the apotheosis of a critics movie, is number 12 on the AFI list, 241 on IMDB, and nowhere on box office. What's most interesting is that on the 1998 edition of AFI's top 100 list, this film was 96(!!!). What the hell happened in those 10 years? Other big jumpers include Vertigo (52 spots) and City Lights (65 spots to 11).

Many films (Psycho, Schindler's List, Vertigo, Dr. Strangelove, Lawrence of Arabia to name a few) are higher on AFI's list than IMDB by 20-50 spots, but that's not really that much of a discrepancy. They both think the film is great. But none of these films grosses all that much $. Unsurprisingly, epics do better on the box office list, probably b/c they play well on big screens and are heavily promoted to recoup high costs of production (both of which critics and IMDB users don't seem to care about). Sequels and films based on existing properties do better on the box office list, too, for obvious reasons.

So, what lesson can we draw from this brief comparison? I think we should pay more attention to IMDB and AFI for a few reasons: big screens won't really account for that much huge revenue in the future. Only 3 out of the top 20 films of all time were released during the home video (VHS/DVD) era. Back when theatrical release was the only revenue stream for film, they made them so that they would play well on the big screen. AFI and IMDB lists are made by people watching films that were made during that era and the era of home video, so I don't think they'd have this big screen historical bias that the box office list has. Presumably, home video, with its smaller screens, isn't going away. It would help to have a list of top 100 grossing films in all formats (theatrical, VHS, DVD, online, TV, etc). The same is true for repeated viewings: critics and IMDB users have time to pour over films again and again, so that might be a better indication of what people would really like, instead of what they've been told to like by marketers.

On a similar note, I think that in the future, promotion won't influence film revenue the way it has in the past. The long tail economy of the internet will allow good films to rise to the top over time. For these reasons, the top box office list might look more and more antiquated as the years go by. I think that the critics list are just as prone to cultural elitism bias as ever, but there also needs to be a way to track audience desire that can factor out the effects of marketing. Maybe that's what truly "good" criticism can do.

Box Office adjusted for inflation:

1	Gone with the Wind
2	Star Wars
3	The Sound of Music
4	E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial
5	The Ten Commandments
6	Titanic
7	Jaws
8	Doctor Zhivago
9	The Exorcist
10	Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
11	101 Dalmatians
12	The Empire Strikes Back
13	Ben-Hur
14	Return of the Jedi
15	The Sting
16	Raiders of the Lost Ark
17	Jurassic Park
18	The Graduate
19	Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace
20	Fantasia

AFI:

1	Citizen Kane	1941
2	Casablanca	1942
3	The Godfather	1972
4	Gone with the Wind	1939
5	Lawrence of Arabia	1962
6	The Wizard of Oz	1939
7	The Graduate	1967
8	On the Waterfront	1954
9	Schindler's List	1993
10	Singin' in the Rain	1952
11	It's a Wonderful Life	1946
12	Sunset Boulevard	1950
13	The Bridge on the River Kwai	1957
14	Some Like It Hot	1959
15	Star Wars	1977
16	All About Eve	1950
17	The African Queen	1951
18	Psycho	1960
19	Chinatown	1974
20	One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest	1975

IMDB

1.	9.1	The Godfather (1972)	263,716
2.	9.1	The Shawshank Redemption (1994)	311,972
3.	9.0	The Godfather: Part II (1974)	151,051
4.	8.9	Buono, il brutto, il cattivo, Il (1966)	85,867
5.	8.8	Pulp Fiction (1994)	267,773
6.	8.8	Schindler's List (1993)	179,754
7.	8.8	One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)	134,305
8.	8.8	Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980)	189,692
9.	8.8	Casablanca (1942)	117,857
10.	8.8	Shichinin no samurai (1954)	65,877
11.	8.8	Star Wars (1977)	229,423
12.	8.8	The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)	239,837
13.	8.7	12 Angry Men (1957)	63,122
14.	8.7	Rear Window (1954)	77,927
15.	8.7	Goodfellas (1990)	145,925
16.	8.7	Cidade de Deus (2002)	90,867
17.	8.7	Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)	162,612
18.	8.7	The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)	273,337
19.	8.7	C'era una volta il West (1968)	43,490
20.	8.7	The Usual Suspects (1995)	184,812

Are 'No Country for Old Men' and 'There Will Be Blood' good movies?

Right after seeing No Country for Old Men and There Will be Blood (both of which I liked, kind of), I got the feeling that critics would love them and the public would wonder what the critics were smoking. The lackadaisical pacing, the meandering plots, the lack of distinct musical cues, emotionally remote protagonists, and the oddball endings all seemed like something that people wouldn't like nearly as much as critics. I was right about the critics, but I'm not so sure about the second part.

One hint that this is the case can be found on metacritic which aggregates critical reception of a film and compares it to the opinions of users. The 18 point difference between critical praise and user praise of Blood and 17 points for No Country are larger than those of any other film out now, maybe bigger than any film on the site ever (need to do more research there). Granted, the sample of users is so small (329 & 401) and is interested enough in critical reaction to come to a site dedicated to aggregating it, and therefore it probably isn't very representative of general public opinion. IMDB users (larger samples at 30,000 and 60,000) rated both films very highly, so highly that they're both in the top 40 films of all time according to users.



For a moment, let's assume that the public didn't (or wouldn't) like either of these films as much as the critics. As I've always been interested in the relationship between critical praise and popular success, having rejected the reductionist platitude that critics like one type of film and the public another, I thought I'd take another look at why the discrepancy might exist.

One explanation would have it that there are certain static characteristics, both thematic and stylistic, that critics are drawn to more than the general public. Grandiose themes like the criticism of American capitalist arrogance, might be a thematic thread that is common to so many critically acclaimed films, while long-duration shots and any of the attributes listed above seem to fare better with critics than audiences.

In some cases, I think critical praise, of a film or the themes and stylistic traits of a film, precede the popular embrace of those things. Does the praise cause the public to like those things; that is, does the public or has the public ever looked to critics to tell them what's good and what isn't? Are the critics merely good at predicting what the public will eventually like? Are they just as likely to guess which movies will be popular if they were to pull a film's name out of a hat (the times they anticipate popularity are roughly equal to the odds that they would do so by chance)?

It would be fascinating to do an analysis of films that were loved by critics and hated by the public. Within that category there would be to sub-categories: the films (or attributes of films) that the public came to love (or at least accept) and films/attributes that the public still dislikes. The former would show us instances critical anticipating of popularity (critics doing their job well) while the other would show us what the critics like that the public will never like (critics acting like cultural elites, trying in vain to force the public to like what they like).

Limited access might skew there numbers. Even if all critically praised films become available to everyone via online or in-person rental, some will be better promoted than others, and so their popularity would reflect their promotion budget more than any intrinsic characteristic of the film. But still, the internet allows people to see some prima facie indication of what films critics liked that the public wouldn't like if they were made to watch the film instead of selecting it b/c they sought it out or b/c it was heavily marketed. Critics are made to watch every film, so for it to be a sensible comparison, the public would have to be made to watch every film too.

The Self Conscious Documentary

This weekend, I saw the thought-provoking documentary My Kid Could Paint That. The movie could've been a straight-forward presentation of the story of Marla Olmstead, a 4 yr old whose paintings sell for several thousand dollars. That subject alone is enough to get people talking for hours. Instead, the documentary turned into a story about the manipulative nature of non-fiction narratives. In fact, there were odd parallels between this movie and The Insider: both films centered on one story but gradually became about the coverage of the story, in particular the coverage provided by 60 Minutes. In The Insider, the producers of 60 Minutes are portrayed as objective heroes fighting big network honchos who are in the pockets of corporations while MKCPT portrays them as spin-meisters who are so intent on making a compelling story that they don't mind ruining the career of a young artist.

Things get really interesting towards the end of MKCPT when the documentarian includes himself as one more person profiting from presenting a certain, inevitably distorted version of the events surrounding Marla's rapid rise to prominence. In this respect, it reminded me of Some Kind of Monster, the oddly entertaining documentary about Metallica and their relationship with psychologist Phil Towle. In both cases, the audience gets to sit back, analyze, pass judgment, and laugh at the subjects of the documentary. Then, suddenly, shockingly, the subjects talk back, accusing the filmmakers of profiting from their real emotional turmoil. The audience feels implicated, too. I'm sure there are other instances of this mini-genre in which documentary makers acknowledge their own construction of reality.

In MKCPT, New York times art critic Michael Kimmelman articulates a point that I'd been trying to make for awhile: there's something manipulative and deceptive about all documentaries (in fact, Kimmelman quotes someone who says that even all photos are an assault on the subjects). Kimmelman says that there might be a real physical event that takes place, but in the retelling of that event, things must be left out, thereby skewing the depiction in a certain way. I suppose you could give a viewer a lot of raw footage and allow them to construct their version of an event, but no matter what, the viewer's version of reality is limited by an intermediary (the documentarian).

We may laugh at aboriginal people who refuse to have their picture taken b/c they believe that the photographer is stealing their soul, but I'm beginning to think that they might have it right. Once you begin to tell another person's story, you're using their existence and their actions for your own ends. As soon as the camera starts rolling, the subject lends some authenticity to the person behind the camera who may then make claims about who the subject is. Its a power balance that is all around us, given the number of camera phones and online photos and videos.

At the center of this particular documentary is the controversy over whether or not Marla's parents helped her paint. The evidence that is used to refute that claim is a DVD recording of Marla creating a painting, unassisted. The message of the film is clear: film is the ultimate evidence. The documentary is also looked upon by many as evidence. It casts itself as getting "the real scoop" behind the smear campaign that 60 Minutes launched against Marla, but ultimately, the documentary maker realizes that the mere fact that he is editing, that he is telling a story about someone else and is profiting from how compelling the drama is (and all good drama needs conflict, heroes, and villains), puts him on the same level as 60 Minutes.

In a wonderfully revealing moment near the end of the film, the mother, after beginning to cry about the fact that she had let so many people use her daughter for their stories, says exactly what I was thinking: "documentary gold." Tears are documentary gold, and its good that the documentary maker is able to recognize that and leave it in the movie. Does that let him off the hook? I was surprised to read that A.O. Scott thinks it does not let him off the hook.

Really, there are degrees of manipulation. The fact that a good chunk of the film emphasized the the turmoil in Marla's family, instead of the heady questions raised about the nature of art, is what made it something worth apologizing for.