I watched Luis Bunuels’ Discreet Charm for
the first time recently on the back of comparisons between it and Lars Von
Trier’s Melancholia.
Discreet Charm is a better film
–notwithstanding the aesthetic beauty of Von Trier - and is in some ways similar
to Bunuel’s earlier Exterminating Angel. In both films Bunuel uses the dinner
party as a means to satirize and poke a particular kind of surreal fun at the
bourgeoisie.
Both revolve around the genteel rituals of
the dinner party, in particular the polite discretion each middle class attendee
affords the other. Etiquette demands
that certain conversations be off the menu.
In ‘Discreet Charm’ Bunuel is having none
of this polite dinner stuff. Instead he interrupts each of his middle class
protagonists’ attempts at breaking bread with an excursus into social relations
that underpin the surface of this polite society: adultery, drug running,
assassinations, militarism, addictions, all are rudely played out to the
annoyance of the dinner set, continuously interrupting their attempts to eat.
The film is surreal and funny whilst ripping away the mask of polite society,
thrusting the reality of domination into the audience and the actors faces.
I wonder what Bunuel would make of ‘Come DineWith Me’? A show that revels in encouraging its working class participants to
heights of indiscretion, bitchiness and freakery. A kind of ‘Discreet Charm’ turned on its head?
Walking around on a recent trip to Turkey I happened to be passing a mosque when the Adhan or call to prayer began.
I'd been wanting to capture this sound as a field recording and I managed to get a decent clip. It was outside a mosque in the tourist town of Marmaris.
My ideal would be to get a field recording in a larger urban environment when the sound of hundreds of mosques calling out at the same time gives rise to an almost unreal layering of sound that is unique to Muslim countries.
I'm a JC fan, but this film is not one of his best. Not sure if the disengaged acting, ropy characterization and lazy plot line are intentional, I suppose they could be, given the film's vision of an anomic consumer society enslaved 'behind its own back' by aliens. And that's the problem with this film: the aliens. Why blame extraterrestrials for inequality, injustice, over consumption, police repression and the like? We do a pretty good job of that by ourselves thank you very much. The film's premise reminds me of this research paper which, among other things, argues that an advanced alien civilization might have the solution for many earthly problems.... you know, world poverty, inequality, sustainability, global warming... stuff like that. Far be it for humans to be able to solve these problems ourselves. Of course, the film could just be an ironic joke, in which case... you certainly got me there.
I was going to write a blog about how companies like News
International adopt the PR tactic of ‘stealing thunder’ to limit bad news and sell more things.
But before I could finish, as if to ram home the point,
former news international CEO Rebekah Brooks gave a quite brilliant show of how [not] to do
it.
In a statement, Brooks and her husband castigated the CPS:
"We deplore this weak and unjust decision
after the further unprecedented posturing of the CPS..."
Later in the day (just in time for the prime time evening news slots) she and her husband followed-up with a statement to for TV News cameras:
For a journalist, like Brooks, it probably seems common
sense to go for the ‘stealing thunder’ approach, to get the bad news out there on
your own terms, before your enemies.
The immediate response on Twitter was interesting. The Mail’s Political Editor, James
Chapman, with a hint of irony, hailed it as ‘classy’.
Rebekah Brooks steals thunder of CPS by announcing her own arrest before they do. One more scoop. Got to say, classy — James Chapman (Mail) (@jameschappers) May 15, 2012
BBC correspondent Daniel Sandford called it ‘cheap’ (which I think means basically the same thing).
I don’t know what Brooks’ lawyer thought. Nor have I seen
any PR heads giving their view.
For what it’s worth, I think Brooks’ act could only be
considered ‘tactically’ sound, if staying on top of the 24-7 media agenda was important to some other aim within the context of the impending criminal trial. By pre-empting the
CPS and announcing that she had been charged she won a couple of decent
headlines and signalled an important message to her supporters in the media and
elsewhere.The problem is, this isn’t the end of it and it’s difficult
to see how she will be able to keep ahead of the discourse for long. Surely her
lawyers will be trying to get her to keep schtum. Or will they?
An organisation has several options when releasing
information about a crisis. Perhaps the most common, intuitive position is to say nothing, or deny everything. In the early
days of the phone hacking scandal that’s what News International seemed to do. They
stuck to the ‘one rogue reporter’ line until a mounting set of allegations, culminating in the details surrounding the court case concerning Milly Dowler, left them with no credibility left. At some point during the summer of 2011 News International
must have realised that it needed to start fessing up about a few things. That’s
when rumours started about ‘draining the swamp’ in and around Wapping. It was
met with a backlash by senior News International journalists.
I understand that the tactic of ‘stealing thunder’
originates in the arena of courtroom rhetoric (happy to be told I'm wrong on this). Lawyers in jury trials have,
apparently for a long time, adopted the tactic, particularly when defending
dubious clients. So much the better to tell the jury early doors that there’s a stain
on your client’s character, rather than leave it to the prosecution, juries don’t like
that.
Outisde the courtroom, if you’ve got bad news, the tactic
implies it’s better to adopt a journalistic mindset, and look to scoop the
hacks. In PR parlance this is known politely as ‘initiating a crisis
communication scenario.’ And there’s actually some evidence the tactic works by
enhancing the credibility of the person/organisation who fesses up. A study byArpan and Roskos-Ewoldsen concluded that organisations that ‘steal thunder’ are
perceived as more credible than those that do not.
According to PR theory the more credible an organisation is
perceived to be, the more palatable its messages become, the more palatable its
messages the higher the likelihood that customers will continue to buy its
product.
By way of illustration (not I stress correlation or
causation) latest circulation figures show that 2.4 million people per week buy
the Sun on Sunday, just 200,000 less than bought the News of the World before
it was closed last year.
There’s a basic misunderstanding at the root of this PR Week editorial about ethics in the communications industry.
Editor-in-Chief, Danny Rogers, cites the 2012 Sunday TimesRich List as evidence of the failure of what he terms free market trickle down
economics. It followed the surprise expressed by some commentators that the already
wealthy became even wealthier in 2012.
This is worrying, opined Danny, because:
‘if wealth is not ‘trickling
down’… then the whole value of business to our society comes under scrutiny.’
But why under 'trickle down' would one expect the wealth of
the richest to leak to the poorest?
‘Trickle down’ as soundbite is a spin doctor’s dream. A two
word phrase that neatly packages up what we think we know about the prevailing social
relations of the last 40 years or so.
A small technical feature of soundbites (second to its overall
ideological role), is its tendency to strip away theoretical meaning. I’m no
expert, but I think it fairly certain that trickle down is no exception from this rule.
But in principle it is possible for anyone to invest even a modicum of attention to what ‘wealth’ might mean
(or what it certainly does not mean) before worrying
that the ‘value’ of business to society is eroded if it appears the reality of
mega wealth is in contradiction to economic propaganda.
I doubt there’s any contradiction in theory or practice between increasing wealth and trickle
down economics. Danny is confusing trickle down with progressive redistribution,
which has a completely different dynamic. True, it's the redistributive dynamic that proponents of 'trickle down' like to allude to, hence its use as a soundbite, but it's an illusion. The following piece by Ed Shultz provides a great performative reposte to such thinking.
'Trickle down' might refer, not to wealth, but to the wider dissemination of goods and services to greater numbers of people (mobile phones among the Masai for example) over time. It does not necessarily imply that the depositories of wealth accumulated by the rich will inevitably leak down to those who are less well off. As a soundbite, it's nice to imagine that such a trickle down does occur though.
Now for the depressing bit:
‘What has this got to do with PR?’ asks Danny, ‘Well,
corporate comms strategy is often predicated on shareholder value. But if this
value – quite apart from social justice – is failing to be delivered, then
comms professionals must look at where else their organisation is creating
value.
‘This creates an impetus for ‘values-based’ businesses;
organisations that can genuinely contribute to the broader society.’
As an example of
alienation, this passage is outstanding. There’s an obvious conflation of value
with wealth and a vacuous allusion to ethical value (a capitalist content to substitute ethical value for shareholder wealth would not be a capitalist for long). I
suppose some capitalists have succeeded in mobilizing shared ethical
conceptions to help prop up their profits and I suppose this is the point
Danny is making.
But what depresses me about this statement is the assumption that value is only created by business. The passage demonstrates what happens when one is alienated
from the product of labour. Under such conditions ‘value’ becomes solely about
profit or shareholder value. We, the alienated, have no idea what lies beneath
this ‘value’, and we end up picking through the entrails of lost
profitability like zombies looking for a substitute value to feast
upon, never contemplating what exists prior to the extraction of surplus value: the value of human labour itself.
Ali G’s caricature of a type of late 20th Century urban ignorance (I know there is a four letter word for this but I will not use it) would be funnier, but for the fact that it appears to exist as actual social policy in the form of the Real Business Cycle model.
A fascinating blog at Mainly Macro examining the ideological bias immanent within the foundations of micro economic theory is here. In it Professor Wren-Lewis explains how, in RBC modelling, changes in levels of unemployment are voluntary, with higher rates of unemployment explained by more workers choosing leisure than work (or hanging out with one’s partner, to paraphrase Ali G). As a result, high unemployment in a recession is not a problem.
I’d never heard of RBC modelling until today. But if it is even slightly as pervasive as Professor Wren-Lewis implies, then it’s sickening. It’s also fascinating to come across an example of applied social policy (with real implications) erected on such anti-socially abstract foundations.
Economic theory often has a pathological air about it.
When the social relation that is Jeremy Clarkson last year said that striking nurses, teachers and other public sector workers should be 'shot in front of their families', the whole of the UK breathed a sigh of relief. It was after all 'just a joke.'
But when justified calls for bourgeois pay restraint start to gain traction in the public's imagination, it is not funny at all is it? Oh no, in fact, as George Gideon Oliver Osborne (Chancellor of the Exchequer and heir to the baronetcy of Ballentaylor, Eire) tells us, it is in fact 'vewy, vewy, vewy, vewy.... sewious.'