Marseille on Netflix: Enjoyable and Relevant

I just finished binge-watching Marseille, all eight episodes released this month in this made-for-Netflix French TV series with English subtitles, and I liked it a lot.  I mean, it's a little over the top with key points in the plot hinging of suddenly revealed family relationships, but the grit and dialogue and relevance to politics today, and probably yesterday as well, more than compensate.

The series was savaged by French critics, at least according to Wikipedia, check it out if you're interested, but c'est dommage,  I couldn't care less what French critics or for that matter critics of any nationality think about a television series or a movie.  Ok, I do think André Bazin's Qu'est-ce que le cinéma is a masterpiece, and I often quote it, but he wrote that a long time ago, and though he was a film critic, the book presents a theory of how film works, what it does and is, and is not a critique of any particular movie.  Regarding those, I find they more often then not miss the mark.

But back to Marseille, it doesn't, and in fact presents what I suspect is a pretty accurate portrayal of the democratic process at work in any city in today's free world, that is, the part of the world that is free, in other words, in which elections count.   But those elections are so subject to such noxious manipulation and deceit on all levels that you can see why Churchill quoted some unknown source to the effect that "democracy is the worst form of government, except for all others," and the venerable Socrates hated it outright.   Well, Marseille does a riveting, colorful job of exposing just why that is so.

Now, I'm about to start pointing out the special relevance of Marseille to what's going on in the United States today, and I know what you're thinking, and you would be right: Donald Trump represents the worst of the democratic process writ large.   E. M. Forster, another critic of democracy who thought there was no form of government that was better, expressed his views in Two Cheers for Democracy (published in 1951 but composed of material written earlier) - and had he known of Trump, he likely would have entitled his book One Cheer.

Fortunately, Trump has not yet won, and doesn't even formally have the nomination, so Marseille can be appreciated at least at this point as fiction with no quite analog in the real world, joining Boss, Borgen, and of course House of Cards as searing political drama, with lots of sex, crime, local flavor, and good acting - especially by Gérard Depardieu as the Mayor, Benoît Magimel as his deputy, and Stéphane Caillard as his daughter - as well as edge-of-your-seat vote counting.  So, see it and enjoy.

And if you're interested in the connection of Socrates to Trump, check out this little essay, Socrates, Time Travel, and Donald Trump, published just a few days ago.

 

#SFWApro

Photography Flips into Snapchat

One of the joys of understanding McLuhan is how his insights can leap forth at unexpected times to supply us with a connection or a new insight about a matter - or medium - at hand.  About six months ago, I came to realize that the photograph has flipped into the selfie in our own day and age.  Just yesterday, I did a little podcast on this subject - in which I also pointed out that radio has flipped into the podcast. And today, just a few hours ago, I realized that photograph has also flipped into Snapchat.

One of the best things about McLuhan's tetrad or four laws of media is that a given medium can enhance, obsolesce, retrieve, and flip into multiple media.  In case you'd like a quick refresher on the tetrad, it is an exploratory tool that McLuhan developed to help us make sense out of the emergence of media.   Take radio, for example:  It (1) enhances or amplifies sound (speech, music, etc) sent instantly across great distances simultaneously to lots of people; (2) obsolesces the written word as in newspapers as a mode of news delivery; (3) retrieves the spoken word that of course never really went away but was eclipsed to some extent by the products of the printing press; and radio, when it is pushed to its limits, (4) flips into television, which broadcasts like radio but re-inserts the visual into the mix.   And, radio, the professional mass medium, also flips into podcasting that anyone with a microphone and a connection to the Internet can do.    More on the tetrad in my book, Digital McLuhan, pictured below.

But back to photography: its flip into Snapchat is profound indeed, because permanency has always been one of photography's hallmarks.  As Andre Bazin so aptly noted, a photograph rescues an image from "its proper corruption in time".  In contrast, the Snapchat photo is deliberately intended to corrupt over time - and very quickly.  Because the essence of Snapchat is that you send someone a photograph that you want him or her to see only when they receive it, and not any time after.  If only former Congressman Anthony Weiner had known about Snapchat!

So we can now add Snapchat to the selfie as one of the media that photography has flipped into.   Like a reflection in a pool of water, which can also be a selfie and also can disappear as soon as the person staring into the pool walks away, Snapchat epitomizes the ever percolating evolution of media to forms that are at once both new and well established in our past.

See also Marshall McLuhan and the Kindle and Tetrad on Eyeglasses Flipping into Google Glass 

                               the spoken word
     McLuhan and the Kindle          |     McLuhan and the Selfie

Cameron Meets A. E. Housman and Andre Bazin in The Sarah Connor Chronicles

An appealingly old-fashioned, almost sweet episode 2.11 of The Sarah Connor Chronicles tonight, with talk of A. E. Housman (of "An Athlete Dying Young" fame) and the capacity of photography to, as Andre Bazin put it, rescue an image from "its proper corruption" in time - make the image, in contrast to the reality, live forever.

As I discuss in my book, The Soft Edge, years ago I was at a flea market in Stanfordville, NY. I picked up a photograph from a table - I could tell by the kind of photography (cartes de visite) that it was taken back in the 1870s. The photo was of a woman, likely in her late teens, early twenties. And, there she was, looking out at me - across more than 100 years. Could she have had any idea, when that photograph was taken, that someone a hundred years later would be looking back into her eyes?

Cameron and a guy she knows in a library contemplate and discuss such things, as they hunt through a nifty series of photographs, recordings, and early film from the 1920s and after. They discover Myron Stark, whom Cameron recognizes as a Terminator. He accidentally burns down a New Year's Eve celebration - the fire was caused by the electricity that accompanies all travel through time. But he's not a good Terminator at all. He's on a mission - to kill someone at an appointed place in ... 2010. Stark has just arrived at the wrong time.

But it's the right time for this part of The Sarah Connor Chronicles, because it gives us a chance to see even more closeness to humanity in Cameron. She and the guy in the library, who's in a wheelchair, could almost become a couple ... except, well, he's very ill, and although it's not 100% clear why he's gone at the end, he's gone, and Cameron, after all, is still a Terminator.

She figures out what Stark is up to, and finally takes him on in the flesh and circuits, as the photographs of the past merge with the reality in the present. It's poetic - Stark's progress from old photography to real life - and much as A. E. Housman said. The Terminator never had to worry about seeing his record surpassed as he grew older, but neither was he better off dying young, because he was never alive in the first place.

And the same is true of Cameron. Whatever she had slightly going with the guy in the library couldn't last, because he, disabilities of not, was frail and human, and Cameron is something else. Will she miss the guy in library? Maybe the most we can say is she learned something from him, but who knows what, and she shows up next time, with donuts again, to get into the new person in the library's good graces ... this time, a woman her own age.



See also 2.1 Cameron's Back ... 2.2 Firing on All Cylinders ... 2.3 Who, Truly, Is Agent Ellison? ... 2.4: Meet Allison ... 2.5: Unpacking the Future ... 2.6: Terminator Mom, Human Daughter ... 2.7: The Saving Robbery and Cromartie ... 2.8 Perspectives and Death ... 2.9: An Idiot's Guide to Time Travel in The Sarah Connor Chronicles ... 2.10: Riley Lashes Out at Facebook ... 2.12: Sarah Connor Chronicles in Triple Time

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The Plot to Save Socrates

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