Media and Community

Over the past couple of weeks, I have tried to explain why my one year as a film major ended with a transfer to theatre education. This weekend, had anyone been by my side, they would have had an understanding beyond my stated excuse, "All we did in the film program was sit in silence in the dark, watch movies, and write papers."

My production at the high school, Cyrano de Bergerac, opened on Friday night. It has not been an easy production. It was a very large cast (30+), which has it own difficulties (managing schedules and needs of 30+ people), but it is also a difficult show for high school actors - the language, the swordplay, the elevated emotions. My schedule did not help my stress in pulling it all together, and I figured that if I could just get it behind me, I would be happy. I believed that the cast had done a good job, but I might have been too close to it. And, how many people in our community would be interested in a 19th Century French play? I didn't know what to expect.

But then we opened. We had a larger than expected house on Friday, especially considering we conflicted with state girl's basketball. The actors took hold of the show and ran. And the audience was right with them. I sat and watched what these teenage actors did to capture the grand emotions of Romanticism and a crowd of children, teens, and adults was rapt with what would happen next. It was a show that I had never seen in rehearsal. Everyone in that auditorium contributed to a successful production. It was even better on Saturday night. And I realized that it is the vitality of theatre that won me. In the end, maybe 700 will have seen the show. It will only exist for those two hours each night, and then in the memories of those involved. But the memory will be there because they all contributed.

I remember plays I saw as a child in Montana (my Gram took me to West Side Story, my mom to King Lear), and they stay with me more than films of my childhood. Bazin equated film with embalming. Theatre does not embalm, it resurrects a text. I have not had a media experience as visceral as any theatre experience, and I don't know if I can.

On YouTube, you can track views, you can post and read comments, you can parody or respond with your own work, but still it does not have the community that I have experienced in theatre. Media can be collaborative, but mediation places a distance between creator and audience. As I sat with a smile on my face, watching my students understand the text better than they ever had before because of the audience's reactions (Wait, that is funny! Whoa, this moment really is heartbreaking.), I could see whay these students devoted so many hours to it, why over a hundred students auditioned to be in it. Film started by replicating theatrical conventions, but soon found its own language. Theatrical conventions cannot survive on film. It does not work. In the reading for Sharon's class there are theorists who discuss how media are losing their individual identifiers and becoming more alike. But new media is not like this weekend with hundreds of people breathing the same air and sharing a story.

So, I am happy, and I hope my students are, too. We have one night to go, which hopefully will be as great as what they have already done. We can talk about community, and phenomonology, and interaction with media, but untimately it pales to theatre. Maybe not forever, and not for eveyone, but at least for me now. I can use this comparison in my theatre classes to talk about how new media is trying to capture the communal theatrical experience and see if students have had media experiences like unto theatre. It will be interesting to see if their perceptions are similar to mine, or having been raised on new media, if they view those experiences as more communal than theatre for them. If they feel that the experience is similar or greater to being in a live production or the audience of one, I will be sad, but it will link new media and theatre more in my mind, where a rift now exists.

Saving Ebert's Hide

I am a film teacher who rarely goes to the movies. This can be tricky because my students all assume that if I teach film, I need to have seen everything. But my schedule does not really allow me to see films in the theatre. I manage to get a little caught up on DVD in the summer, but end up seeing only a small fraction of new films each year. Instead, I read about film. I have a list of Web sites and magazines I read on a weekly basis to have knowledge about pretty much any film in current release. At least then I can talk intelligently about films when my students bring them up in class. For me, I read enough other people’s opinion’s to understand the film and filmmaker, but belatedly form any opinion of my own when and if I happen to see the film.

My students are the opposite. They see film all the time and rarely read anything, other than celebrity tabloid press, about films. Their opinion is all that matters. I do an informal survey in my classes about if they every read any critical responses to film. Most major newspapers and magazines have film reviewers on staff, I state, is this just wasted money? The answer appears to be yes. I have maybe one, seldom two students in a class who read any critical response to film. The film critic, they say, is dying.

This didn’t concern me much. My students are of another generation. It is all about them. They are not film geeks, like me, who lap up the words of Roger Ebert with delight (his nearly year-long hiatus due to health problems was a black time for me). So, my focus in the class has been to explore the opinions of the students. I tell them, their opinion is what matters. For the first paper of the semester, I require them to find a professional, critical review of the film they are writing on and comment on their opinion of the reviewer’s opinion. This has never been very successful. Often, they find rambling musings on a blog somewhere that usually support the student’s views, or that just have a plot synopsis and do not explore the film critically at all. I shrug when I read their papers. “It is about the student’s opinions,” I tell myself.

This semester was different. Frustrated by the quality of the reviews students include with their papers, and suspecting that they only skim the review anyway and say, in the most general terms, I agree/disagree with this reviewer, I showed the students what film criticism could be. I hooked the projector up to my computer and pulled up some professional reviews that we examined as a class. I looked at Ebert’s review of Cloverfield. He was direct in stating what worked and didn’t for him in the film, and since his critique was so pointed, the students could respond to what he was saying. His views fell pretty much in line with the majority of the class, which surprised them. Hearing parents and other adults talk about the film had led the students to think that adults “just didn’t get it.” Ebert didn’t mind the “queasy-cam” style of shooting the film, and thought it supported how the story was being told. Students talked about the plusses and minuses of the hand-held style. Ebert discounted complaints that too many questions about the monster were left unanswered. Students on both sides of the issue stated their feelings. All of a sudden, movie critics were not old, stuffy people who slammed everything good. They were people who loved movies and got to share their opinions with others for a paycheck. And sometimes, according to the students, the critics were right.

For the evaluation papers turned in by this new group, the students explored the opinions of others to a degree that they hadn’t in papers before. They sometimes quoted multiple reviewers. In comparing their views with others, the students become more solidified on the impact that a film had (or did not have) on them. One student quoted the Entertainment Weekly cover story that dealt with Juno and discussed how the character was more than the center of the film, but a real model to female teens. They started looking at a film through someone else’s eyes. I usually get my students there by the end of the semester, and it is mostly as a result of listening to their classmates discuss film. With the reviews, they crossed geographic, gender, economic, and generational lines. They came closer to seeing films the way I do on a weekly basis. If only I could come closer to seeing films, so I could add my response to the mix, like my newbie film students are doing right now. I will be adding Ebert, et al, to more of my lessons and watch the students open their eyes. Maybe I can still save the professional film reviewer.

Daddy's Little Girl

It was Valentine’s Day this week. My two sons love the holiday. My two-year-old daughter is not quite sure what it is all about. The boys brought home bags of valentine’s from school and sat on the floor reading their cards, laughing at the puns, sharing and comparing. Isabel watched and grabbed a valentine from their pile and carried it around until it was crumpled and mangled.

Now, my kids are not as pop culture savvy as many of their peers. They looked blankly at several of the valentines not knowing who was on the card. They know who SpongeBob is but don’t realize that he lives in a pineapple under the sea. They can name Spiderman though they have never seen him in action. They have a strong connection with Scooby Doo and are well-versed in the original 1970s episodes, and I am okay with that. Isabel is even less knowledgable, but she knew what she wanted. The valentine she carried around all day? Bratz.

Now, I have no idea what Bratz are or what they do. I just know that they have big, make-up coated eyes and dress in a way that puts them just past Betty Boop on the skank scale. Isabel had no context for the character. I imagine she was just responding to the color, the design, and layout of the card. But that is where consumerism starts, isn’t it? I smiled when she kept asking for her Disney Princess pajamas when she had no idea who those girls were on her tummy. But it wasn’t until the Bratz card that I really considered how those characters were ingratiating themselves with my children. It seems like a tough time to be growing up as a media seeped girl. I read an article in Entertainment Weekly (see my next post) about the popularity of Juno, and one person suggested that Juno’s success was partially driven by the fact that teen girls now have a cultural icon on the same plane as Holden Caufield. She acts on her own terms. But isn’t that how they are marketing Bratz and the Disney Princesses? I will be honest with you, I would be just fine if my daughter decided that she wanted to get some turtle necks and some square glasses and be like Velma when she grows up. Velma is smart. She is independent. She has her own slang (“Jinkies!”). And, she is all but ignored by Fred. What more could a father want?

My daughter is not media literate. She cannot see past the packaging to discern the contents. I need to work on that. I cannot just examine these issues in my classroom. But this event made me really consider the mindset of my students. They were two-year-olds influenced by forces they could not understand. Where do they stand now?

A Night in the Car

On Wednesday night, I was driving home from Provo. I had attended class that evening and while I was taking a midterm, a blizzard was burying nothern Utah County. My wife suggested that I spend the night in Orem, but I had started north and the roads were clear and traffic light. That is until I got to Lehi. The final ten miles of my commute took just over three hours. Hundreds of cars sitting in idle. I had turned on the radio to get a traffic report as I headed home, but KSL had chosen to not disrupt the BYU basketball game broadcast to tell listeners that, well, that hundreds of acres of highways and freeways had been jammed with immobile vehicles. I longed for news and was frustrated by not having instantaneous access to it. I called my wife, but was wary of using the phone and "driving" even though I was not moving. Finally, about 9:45 PM, after having spent an hour not moving and being a couple of hours away from home, KSL started a live broadcast fielding calls and text messages from those in the same boat as I, some who had been stuck since 5 PM. Listening did not move me any faster (my shaky knowledge of Lehi surface streets and frontage roads helped a bit there), but it did pass time, and it bonded me to all of those in my same predicament. I marveled that there were no calls or texts of anger, rage, or frustration. There was acceptance. There was humor. There was a desire to pass information and encouragement to others. By having a media outlet, I presume, tension was dispelled. I felt the same way. I wasn't something that was happening to me anymore. It was happening to us. I am glad I could vent occassionally to my wife, but at 10:30, when I encouraged her to go to bed, I was left with the miles and miles of strangers. And with the texts and voices of those strangers.

While teaching on Thursday, I talked to a couple of students who were stuck in that massive jam coming back from state wrestling and club volleyball. They were not a part of KSL's demographic and did not join that same community I did. They did have phones and called and texted friends. For about 30 minutes, I was beside a UTA bus. Those on the bus did not commune face to face. They sat solemn and frustrated. If they had a mediated means to deal with it, perhaps they would have been in a better mind set.

This is a great example of the power of media for those students who were stuck as I was. I don't think that those who did not experience it would understand the power of sharing the experience through the radio that night. It is a great example I can use, and try to find moments when my students had similar experiences.

My favorite moment on the radio was when the announcer kept repeatedly admonishing listeners who were in their homes to not leave their homes and contribute to the traffic mess. I could not help but wonder, "Who leaves their homes at 11:00 PM on a snowy Wednesday night just for the hell of it?"