Zombies vs. Strippers

I was searching through the new movie releases when I came across the following title: Zombies vs. Strippers. Intrigued, I read the full description:

The local strip club has seen better days. But tonight it's gonna see a whole lot worse. Spider has been losing money on his business for years. Now it's finally getting the traffic he's always wanted, unfortunately most of his patrons are undead. With a sudden outbreak of the zombie virus, Vanilla, Bambi, and Sugar Hills deal with the disaster the way only a stripper can, as blood and braziers [sic] go flying.

Rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America for bloody horror violence, sexuality/nudity, language, and some drug use.

Excusing the several grammatical problems, I can’t say that this description holds any allure. I suppose there must be a market out there for zombie-stripper movies that promise “bloody horror violence, sexuality/nudity, language, and some drug use,” not to mention protagonists name “Vanilla, Bambi, and Sugar Hills,” but that market doesn’t include 63-year-old retirees living (as yet not undead) in Iowa. There seem to be more and more movies released each week, but at the same time fewer and fewer worth viewing. The problem with a market-driven media (film, TV, books, whatever) is that the market doing the driving is 16 to 28 years old and can’t get enough sex and gore, separately or preferably mashed together, “blood and braziers [sic] . . . flying.” Hence, someone was able to conceive of, finance, produce, and distribute something called Zombies vs. Strippers. It would be nice to think that it is a neo-theater-of-the-absurd comedy in the manner of Ionesco, Genet, or Beckett, or even Mel Brooks. But I’m not going to bet the $1.20 rental fee to find out.

Whitney Houston

More and more regularly I’m reminded just how out of touch I am with popular culture. So it’s been this past week following the death of Whitney Houston. While I was never a fan of the singer and sometime actress, I was aware of her talents and popularity. I was surprised, however, with the media reaction to her death. Beginning last Saturday night, cable news went almost 24/7 with various tributes, memorials, and interviews with friends, family, and fans. And in the past week I must have heard that first drawn-out line of the chorus – “And IIIIIIIIII will ALLLways love Youououououou-EWW-EWW-ouououou” – at least a couple dozen times a day until it went from its original haunting appeal to its current cloying peal. The funeral is today and it’s being covered for three hours live (despite it being the same shared feed, as well as streamed online) by CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, E!, and BET (with the strange title, “The Homegoing of Whitney Houston”). I’ve been tempted to voice criticism of what seems an overreaction, another hyped mourning of a celebrity for the sake of ratings. But I suspect it might be nothing more than another indication of my disconnect from popular culture. So I’ll just keep quiet.

Storm Warnings

We’re approaching the height of the end-of-summer storm season (we’re into the middle letters of the alphabet) and the news media – especially the TV news media – is in full-bore batten-down-the-hatches, run-for-your-lives, we’re-all-gonna-die fear mode. Last week it was Hurricane Irene, a category 1 hurricane that did significant damage along the Atlantic coast from North Carolina all the way up to Maine, though it wasn’t half as bad as warned and predicted (but much worse in Vermont after the not-predicted or not-hyped flooding after the downgrade from hurricane to tropical storm). This week it’s tropical storm Lee, bearing down on Louisiana with a forecasted 10”-20” of rain over the next 3-4 days (but no real threat beyond local flooding). And then “lurking” out in the Atlantic is hurricane Katia, which looks like it’s going to stay out over the ocean, but you just don’t know, do you?

The purpose of TV news is to entice eyeballs and ears to sell to advertisers, and a sure-fire way to do that is to scare the bejesus out of viewers into thinking their lives are just about to end in some massive tempest of apocalyptic proportion – it keeps us glued.

But the media are toeing a very thin line. If they don’t hype the danger of some impending storm (can anyone say Katrina?), they’re condemned for ignoring the threat that caused the suffering and death of people. But if they overdo their warnings, and the storm doesn’t materialize or veers off beyond harm’s way, they’re condemned for over-hyping the threat. It’s not a decision I’d care to make. But it does seem to be one that if you’re going to err, it’s best to err on the side of over-hyping: You don’t die if you escape a storm that doesn’t live up to the threat. You might well die if you hang around not thinking it’s going to be all that bad.

And that’s the media’s conundrum – if they downplay a storm’s threat, they run the risk of being accused (properly) of not warning the public, but if they overplay a storm’s threat, they’re accused of hyping the danger and (unduly) panicking the public. And then there’s the “cry wolf” syndrome: If you keep warning of danger that never comes, no one’s going to heed the warning when the threat’s real. Of course, given the option, the media are going to hype the danger – it just keeps the eyeballs glued. But if it’s erring, it’s erring on the side of safety. I can go with that.

That said, once the storm has passed, the media could return to a more reportage mode: This is what happened, and this is the way things are now. But following these storms, the media drumbeat of disaster keeps its rhythm steady. They search as search they can for the worst effects of the storm, even if the worst is a few inches of flooding in an unoccupied intersection or an empty boardwalk. One correspondent last week said she was reporting from onsite in a diminished area of the storm and was told by her producer in the studio to find a better shot because another channel had “more wind on camera” – that is, find something more visually dramatic. Another reporter I saw was standing in her waders (they all now seem to wear waders while standing in the rising flood waters, warning us not to venture into the rising flood waters), just up to her knees, saying in all earnestness that the water must be “three to three-and-a-half feet” – “Yes,” I thought, “if you happen to be about ten feet tall.” It seems that because they’ve predicted and warned that this could be a really big if not catastrophic storm that they have to find what they can that is (at least somewhat) big and catastrophic to validate their predictions and warnings.

American Resilience

One of the clichéd news stories that inevitably follows natural disasters of whatever kind – fires, tornadoes, floods, hurricanes – is the “resiliency” of the people of whatever community might have been afflicted – national, regional, state, or local – and how they pull together to help one another overcome the hardships and calamities and blah blah blah. It’s going on right now in the aftermath of Hurricane Irene, which ended up not being the end of civilization as we know it as predicted by the media last weekend. But their search for disaster did eventually find flooding in New England, and so they abandoned their disaster stations along the Carolina coast and New York City (which turned out to be busts) and scrambled up with their waders and rain slickers into the floodwaters of Vermont and New Hampshire in time to cover the resilience of the residents in pulling together to bring their communities back to where they were and even more blah blah blah. And all this is couched in banalities about the “character” of the people, of the community, be that community the United States, New England, Vermont, Joplin MO, Greensburg KS, or wherever . . . at least in the U.S. We’re a resilient people. We pull together as neighbors. We help one another. Blah blah blah. The whole familiar meme is one of self-aggrandizement. Look at us, we’re so special. But I’ve looked around the world and I don’t think we’re all that special. We’re at best human. Communities across the globe and across time have come together in time of crisis and worked together to rebuild. It’s part of the warp and weave of civilization, of being human (and, truth be told, many nonhumans). Not the special trait of the American character. If there’s a special trait of the American character, at least as championed in the media, it’s the ability to hoist it up on its own petard.

Weiner's Wiener

I didn’t want to write about the Anthony Weiner sexting and texting scandal. Over the past couple of years I’ve respected Weiner’s positions on issues and especially his impassioned harangues against the ideological idiocy of the Republican right (is that redundant?). But his sending semi-nude photos of himself via the Internet to women he’d never met face-to-face was unseemly at best, tasteless, improper, inappropriate, all of that. And it certainly demonstrated a base ignorance of web technology; as I learned long ago, and instruct my students regularly: assume that any and everything you throw out into cyberspace stays there forever and is available to anyone anytime, no matter how “private” you may think your platform might be. But what he did wasn’t illegal. (At least as far as we know at this time.) He never even explicitly propositioned any of the women for sex, at least beyond the virtual kind (which I’ve read about for three decades and still can’t wrap my mind or any other part of me around). And none of the women came forward charging abuse, threat, or offense, and certainly no crime. Just slime. And just how many politicians do we still have in office who are slithering through their own slime?

I don’t want to defend Weiner (there is no defense for what he’s done), and I don’t want to argue with those who demanded his resignation, most agreeing with President Obama that his actions were “inappropriate” and “a distraction.” What I do what to point out is something I haven’t seen in all the coverage of the scandal: How much did Weiner’s name play in the inappropriateness and distraction? From the beginning, even Weiner himself acknowledged the humor-laden possibilities in his name (hell, he’s probably lived with it since he was in junior high). It could only be worse if his first name was Richard (though he goes informally by Rich). I don’t recall hearing any of the late-night comedy show jokes that didn’t play in some way on his name (though I only heard a few hundred from what I understand were several thousand).

I remember the first media political sex scandal, Gary Hart’s 1987 dalliance with Donna Rice on the boat Monkey Business. But what brought Hart down wasn’t the dalliance per se, but his challenge to the media in the wake of rumors about his extra-marital affair to “Follow me around. I don’t care.” So they did. And they found him with her on (of all places) the Monkey Business. It’s hard to sift through the mess to see how much the extra-marital affair had to do with Hart’s downfall and how much had to do with his challenge to the media (not to mention the sweet frosting of the boat’s name). And in much the same way, I can’t sift through the Weiner mess (at least the “distraction”) without wondering how much had to do with the confluence of his surname and his unfortunately homonymic organ (or “member,” if we want to move on to another pun that was front and center, so to speak, in this whole package, so to speak, etc.).

War Room Photo

In the infinity of analysis following Sunday’s killing of Osama bin Laden, one thing I find interesting is the interpretation of this now-famous photo of President Obama and his security staff watching in real time the attack on bin Laden’s compound:

Most commented on about this photo is the expression of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, her hand over her mouth – is she about to gasp? cry? barf? The usually more level-headed Joan Walsh describes her in Salon as “beyond anguished; her hand is over her mouth, her eyes red-rimmed.” She describes Obama as “grim” and Biden as “stricken,” the military leaders (I only see one, and he’s looking at his laptop screen) as “granite-faced,” and the civilian leaders “grimacing.” This kind of psychological analysis of photographs is silly at best (and Walsh is not at all the only one), particularly the attempt to ascribe different thought or demeanor to each of the individuals. To me, the most that can be said is that everyone in that room is (thankfully for us all) serious, grim, focused. I certainly don’t see Clinton as “beyond anguished.” Her posture, her hand over her mouth, is much like mine in any number of department meetings over the years where little more than the distribution of travel money or the recycling of paper is at issue, not the killing of the world’s #1 terrorist. And maybe my computer doesn’t have the resolution of Walsh’s, but I can’t at all make out her “red-rimmed” eyes (any more than Robert Gates’ on her left (arms crossed in anguish?)). This projection of one’s own desires and biases as interpretation is much too common in today’s media. The cliché that “a picture is worth a thousand words” is just that, a cliché. Sometimes – maybe most often – a picture is just a picture. And any words can only distort it.