Photos: Classiq Journal
“The diffusion of digital technology into children’s lives
has been like smoke pouring into our homes.
We all see that something strange is happening,
but we don’t understand it. We fear that smoke is having
bad effects on our children, but when we look around,
nobody is doing much about it.”
Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation
Viewing
Tootsie, 1982
Sydney Pollack
The first thing that I want to say about Tootsie, which I have recently rewatched after many years, is that it is such a good film which just happens to be a comedy. What I am trying to say is that – as much as I love good comedies and consider that comedy is hugely underrated – what truly lingers after you have watched Tootsie is the core of the story, the gist, not the fact that Dustin Hoffman puts on a dress (which is in fact the only thing I remembered from when I first saw the film, twenty years ago). And, yes, he is funny, but the reason behind it is so serious that it gives the film the spine that Sydney Pollack was looking for in order for him to accept directing the film. He didn’t want to make a drag comedy, the way the script was initially written, of which he thought was “silly and bawdy”, “just one gag”, with jokes that were “thin and repetitive”.
The serious idea behind Dustin Hoffmann’s impersonation of a woman is that, for reasons of survival, he is forced to put on a dress. And Pollack and his co-writers do create “the most dismal possible world for this guy before he puts on a dress”. He is a New York unemployed actor who can not get any work anymore, and one whom his own agent considers unemployable. Furthermore, he is in his mid-forties, unmarried and lives with a roommate (the uninimitable Bill Murray), and unable to treat women with any respect. He’s not exactly a great guy. He goes a long way to change into the man he is at the end of the film, and the dress, make-up and Southern accent do play a role in that. Because by being forced to put on a dress he becomes a better man. “Being a woman has made a man out of you” was the only idea that made sense for Sydney Pollack in order for the film to gauge his interest. Sydney Pollack was such a humanist director who liked to tackle weighty issues by way of entertainment. And here he touches on the complexities of masculinity and femininity in the most subtle yet effective manner. In the case of Dustin Hoffman’s Michael, the macho side gets tempered with sensitivity, understanding, kindness, and thus he becomes a better man. And that’s what the ending is also about, not the conventional Hollywood happy ending, which Sydney Pollack didn’t adhere to at all, but the beginning of another journey.
But I also want to bring up the character of Jeff Slater, the roommate, played by Bill Murray, who is such a key character in Michael’s life, and the definition of a supporting part. Jeff was invented by Elaine May, whom Sydney Pollack brought in to polish the script. “He’s really a structural device to give Dustin somebody to talk to about what he’s going through when he’s working on the soap opera,” the director said. It’s wonderful seeing Bill Murray on screen. I don’t know how many takes Pollack did, but I think Murray’s spontaneity would be different in each one of them.
Groundhog Day, 1993
Harold Ramis
For one reason or another, I hadn’t watched Groundhog Day until recently. It was only after I listened to an episode of Ben Mankiewicz’s Talking Pictures with Bill Murray when I knew I finally had to watch the film. Bill Murray plays Phil Connors, a grumpy weatherman who is dispatched with producer Rita (Andie MacDowell) and cameraman Larry (Chris Elliott) to the little town of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, to witness the annual Groundhog Day ceremony. Phil is demeaning, self-centered, and eager to get out of there as soon as possible. For reasons unexplained in the film (and it’s all the better for it), Phil wakes up the next morning to discover he is reliving Groundhog Day all over again. Imagine his mood. And he relives it again the next day, and the next, and the next. Phil first takes advantage of the situation, knowing in advance what would happen and what to tell to people to get the best reaction from them in his favour. After a few days, the situation starts to drive him to despair, before he begins to put in some effort to change and improve his behaviour. The film is hysterically funny without necessarily trying to be funny, and it uses being funny in a smart way to reveal something about human nature. You genuinely laugh and at the same time root for a better treatment of a person. Gradually and still reluctantly, which I find very realistic, Phil also starts to realise the truth of it all.
The Social Network, 2010
David Fincher
Before I get to see The Social Reckoning, the follow-up to The Social Network, I wanted to go back and revisit the 2010 film. The Social Reckoning is written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, who also wrote The Social Network, directed by David Fincher. Watching The Social Network now, with everything that we now know about Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg and tech companies, it dawns on you how different it all began, heralding a world we had no idea what would hold. And yet, the film, so precisely directed by Fincher, does see into that mind-set that changed the world for the worse and does capture the villain in Zuckerberg, played by Jesse Eisenberg. When it came out, I was reluctant to watch it. As someone who was born right on the cusp between Generation X and The Millenials, I was also reluctant in embracing the digital age. Only briefly did I have a Facebook account, and that was exactly at the time when the film came out. So I was not exactly eager to watch a film about social media, and I was surprised to find out how fascinating it was. It’s not just Aaron Sorkin’s great, overlapping dialogue that makes the film impacient. The one thing that I particularly liked about the film is that it is very cinematic – cinema belongs to cinema – especially the night scenes in the campus, evoking a feeling of unease, anxiety and darkness. It’s probably why I can hardly wait to watch The Social Reckoning. The times we live in are completely different than the times when The Social Network came out. They are bound to take on the form of a thriller to some extent, because how can they not? Who needs an imaginary villain when we have big tech billionaires in our world?
Reading
The Anxious Generation. I don’t believe there is any other book that requires more urgent reading than Jonathan Haidt’s seminal book about the effects of the Great Rewiring of Childhood (the trading, yes, trading, of the childhood based on play for a childhood spent on smartphones) on young generations, starting with Generation Z. This book is essential in understanding how something crucial was lost and how the big tech companies, facilitated, largely unbeknownst to them, by parents, teachers and schools (although I am personally more radical towards parents, because not all parents lacked the discerning quality of registering the harm they would do if they handed their toddlers and young children a smartphone or iPad), are robbing children of their childhood and of essential phases in their emotional, physical, social and, most grave of all, mental development and health. WHY isn’t this book already mandatory for every parent and teacher in the world? WHEN if not NOW will we take collective action and end this?
Terry O’Neill: Every Picture Tells a Story. Black and white has always been Terry O’Neill’s chosen medium. And it’s always his black and white photography that makes me linger over one image or another. He photographed everyone from Robert Redford to Sean Connery, from The Rolling Stones to Frank Sinatra (having compiled his pictures in the book Sinatra: Frank and Friendly). Terry O’Neill has many a tale to tell. And he has told the tales behind many of his legendary photographs (and, somehow, by doing so, he doesn’t take from their mystery, but adds to it). But with good-natured tact, charm, discretion. Always the professional, never intruding. It’s the approach he has also used in his photography. “I suppose I get on with these people because I never wanted to be up front.”
And then there is his colour photography. My favourite of them all is perhaps this one on the cover of this very book: Every Picture Tells a Story. “The Morning After” – Terry O’Neill’s famous photograph that shows a contemplative Faye Dunaway by a deserted Beverly Hills Hotel swimming pool, having just won an Oscar the previous night for her sublime performance in Network. About this shot, O’Neill said: “I set up the whole thing. I said to her, that if she won, I knew exactly the photograph I wanted to take. I’d seen people the day after, when it has suddenly dawned on them what winning an Oscar means. I wanted to capture that 6.30 a.m. moment of realisation.” The way Terry O’Neill captured the glamour, significance and gravity of the moment, with simplicity, honesty and elegance, makes it timeless and impossible to replicate. And quite frankly, makes you nostalgic for a time when movie stars were so much more than celebrities. They were great by the standards of their profession. They “were individuals. Now it’s like they all come out of the same factory.”
Every picture in the book is a story in itself, and Terry O’Neill tells it in his own words. The book is now available in the shop.
Listening
The podcast: Richard Osmon talks to writer John Grisham for The Rest is Entertainment about Grisham’s writing routine, favourite adaptations and the problem with Hollywood.
The soundtrack: The Social Network
The album: Toys in the Attic, Aerosmith
Making
I like talking about making when it comes to travelling. With intention, mindfulness, unhurried and open-minded. Exploring Transylvania with the Slow Cyclist is the definition of that concept.
Exploring
A Wim Wenders retrospective is running in Lausanne until December 13th. On the same note, I am hoping for a book as an accompanying catalogue for the recent exhibition Donata and Wim Wenders: Two Pairs of Eyes that held at the Ernst Leitz Museum, in Wetzlar. Because its concept is worth pondering on beyond the walls of an exhibition. It was curated as a dialogue between two different ways of seeing the world. Wim Wenders’ photographs – often emptied of people, intensely colorful, marked by space and silence. Donata’s work – black and white, close to people, condensed into light, shadow and movement. In their interplay, something unfolds that both artists continuously bring back to life: a quiet, multi-layered dialogue between clarity and dissolution, between the cinematic and the photographic view.
On an end note
To mark its 175th anniversary, The New York Times has selected five revealing, idiosyncratic and nostalgic films about chasing the truth, no matter where it leads. The retrospective is titled Stop the Presses and it is hosted by the Metrograph cinema, in New York City, starting with October 16th. The films include All the President’s Men, Almost Famous, The Insider, Broadcast News and The Parallax View. It is “a tribute to journalism’s role in history and culture – and to the colourful, complicated characters who fill our newsrooms and our screens”. And because I presume many of us won’t be able to attend the Metrograph screenings, there is nothing stopping us from watching the films at home, preferably on our own DVD or Blu-ray. I would add another one to the list: The Paper. Because good journalism is about something bigger than today’s news.
The regulars
The interviews, newsletters and podcasts I turn to every week and/or every month because they are that good. Soundtracking, with Edith Bowman. Ruthie’s Table 4 with Ruth Rogers. Fashion Neurosis, with Bella Freud. AccuRadio. Craig Mod’s newsletters: Roden and Ridgeline. Rennae Stubbs tennis podcast. Gone to Timbuktu with Sophy Roberts. Sirene Journal, Racquet, Waves & Woods, Legénde, and Monocle, all in print.
“Play is the work of childhood. […] But evolution didn’t just lengthen childhood to make learning possible. It also installed three strong motivations to do things that make learning easy and likely: motivations for free play, attunement, and social learning. In the days of play-based childhood, the norm was that when school let out, children were out playing with each other, unsupervised, in ways that let them satisfy these motives. But in the transition to phone-based childhood, the designers of smartphones, video game systems, social media, and other addictive technologies lured kids into the virtual world, where they no longer got the full benefit of acting on these three motivations.”
Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation
The Anxious Generation, by Jonathan Haidt / The Slow Cyclist / Every Picture Tells a Story, by Terry O’Neill
