Category Archives: Media

That Hysterical ‘Chinese Professor’ Ad from the 2010 Election Campaign

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China’s own Heinrich von Treitschke!

 

This is a great ad. Anyone with an interest in Asian security should see it. Not only is it a great inside joke if you are in this area, it also does a great job capturing the American public’s angst about China’s rise. And quite honestly, it’s basically correct. We are spending our way into oblivion, and the Chinese are (deservedly) laughing as we fall into the abyss of our own making. We are doing this to ourselves – and Chinese elites are studying past hegemonies – so the scenario presented in the ad is, in fact, credible. Plus, it’s nice to see a professor presented in the US media who actually looks serious and authoritative instead of the usual Fox Network tropes that we’re pointy-headed, irrelevant Marxists who have affairs with our students. Now if only that professor image could include Americans…

There is some grumbling that the ad is racist. A friend in the field suggested it replaces the bogus Japanese threat 20 years ago with a Chinese one today. But I don’t really see that myself. The concern of the ad is not the ‘yellow-peril,’ but American foolishness, and the Chinese are presented rather well actually. The students look serious, civil, and healthy, while the prof behaves and talks like he actually knows wth he is talking about. Contrast that with typically condescending or idiotic portraits of academics in the US media – think about the ridiculous professor sequence from last year’s Transformers 2, e.g. At least this guy actually moves and speaks the way we really do in class. Ok, well, maybe he is a little more like Heinrich von Treitschke than most of us are, but still, he looks like a pretty good lecturer. Think of him as the Chinese Leo Strauss or something. LOL. I imagine that his class would be pretty fun to take. Fallows’ treatment of the ad is worth a look too.

More seriously, the ad is right on target actually in its basic claim. American errors and profligacy are the makers’ real targets; it is not ‘Asia-baiting,’ although it may feel that way initially. If it gets Americans to think more seriously about the looming debt crisis and the seriousness of the Chinese challenge, so much the better. Certainly the Tea Party, for all its sturm and drang, has neither the guts nor focus to say anything meaningful about the US response to Asia – another one of its many failures of seriousness. Nor does anyone in official Washington really know how to rein the $1.3 T budget deficit – funded, incidentally, by massive borrowing from China – without huge tax increases and spending cuts. (Quick note: It’s mathematically impossible!, which is why no one has any idea.) So if we must scare Americans into budgetary seriousness by noting that China is breathing down our neck (which they are starting to), then so much the better.

Finally, it is worth noting that China is a much more serious long-term threat than Japan ever was. China is 10 times larger in population (and 4 times larger than the US), and it is not democratic. So while I wouldn’t want yellow-baiting, ads like this that prick America’s unipolar daydream are useful actually.

Nobel: Occasionally Reminding China about Human Rights is still Good

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By now everyone one knows that Liu Xaibao won the Nobel Peace Prize. He is a human rights and democracy activist rotting in a Chinese prison, along with so many others, for laughable, ‘only-in-a-dictatorship’ crimes like ‘insulting the state and national dignity.’ He is most famous in the West for starting the ‘Charter 08,’ probably the most important liberal outburst from Chinese civil society in this decade (and a nice counterpoint to the ‘national humiliation’ nationalism otherwise showcased by the Chinese Internet). Predictably China was acerbic; it threatened Norway (!), because, of course, we all fear Norway rising and its rogue unilateralism. It is worth noting that the Norwegian government does not assign the prize; the independent Nobel Foundation does.

The flap tells us a few things:

1. I am not sure if we should laugh about the Norwegian threat (threatening the Green Nordics who give lots of development aid, have a globally envied living standard, and no military – lol) or lament (Chinese bullying now extends to NATO – yikes). But the Chinese overresponse fits its recent behavior in the South China Sea and toward Japan (as well as NK, I bet; it’s just behind the scenes, so we don’t see it), as well as its now system-threatening monetary interventions and downright bizarre head-in-the-sand denials about the Cheonan sinking. Now it is ok for rising powers to be tvetchy. We expect that. But if the Chinese keep up the bullying, then lots of westerners (think the Kagans) who can’t wait to label China a threat (in part because so many have predicted it) will claim that Chinese foreign policy has taken a major, and nasty, turn. For a long time, China’s claim to a ‘peaceful rise’ rested on its ‘Good Neighbors Policy.’ As Dave Kang has pointed out for years to the ‘China threat’ school, China has generally sought good relations with its neighbors. It has (previously at least) tried to settle border disputes peacefully (most importantly with Vietnam) and has generally sought to be a good institutional player in all those various East Asian semi-organizations like the EAS, ARF or the Six-Party Talks. US business lobby has generally used this to defend engagement with China, in an important pushback against the US military, especially the navy, which is both nervous (a possible peer competitor to break the Pacific-as-American-lake) and secretly hopeful (at last a symmetrical contestant we can understand! unlike all these noxious terrorists against whom our super-cool aircraft carriers are useless). In short, if the Chinese aren’t careful and step back here a bit in the next few months, they could find themselves seriously ringed in. Quick Prediction: the Chinese aren’t stupid. Unlike OBL, they don’t want to take on the whole world. They will pull back, and in six months we will be talking once again about the ‘unpredictable swings in Chinese foreign policy.’

2. I am pleased to see this issue back in discussion, after a decade of quiet. Everyone recalls what a big issue this was in the 1990s. I remember Jay Leno even once had a Chinese-American who had been arrested there on his show. And human rights (and labor) was the big stumbling block behind permanent most favored nation status for China under Clinton. Of course no one wants a war or another cold war, but it is also clear that western engagement can’t just be all flattering and desperate (please keep buying US bonds). Sometimes we need to push them hard on political change too. This is an obvious danger of mixed or contradictory signals – we want to work with you, but we will antagonize you too. But in fact, we do want both. When western governments push for change, it sends the Chinese off the deep end; hence neither Hillary nor Timothy Geithner challenge China on liberalization much anymore. In the end, Google too gave-in (rather disappointing that actually). But western NGOs like Nobel or Amnesty International can also send the other message – that our values are important, that we are genuinely uncomfortable dealing with dictatorships even if we don’t want a cold war, etc. So I think flaps like this, of the earlier Google one, are useful. They tell China that they are limits and expectations – mild, to be sure – that it will lighten up a little on the nationalism and repression. In short, after one experience with a superpower that stepped all over its people and bullied the neighborhood, no one wants to go through that all over again. And the Nobel reminds the CCP leadership of this.

3. Finally, after last year’s ridiculous Nobel choice, this year’s was smart and helps restore the Peace Prize’ good name. In fact, I bet the Foundation figured that after such a light, gauzy choice for Obama, credibility demanded a really tough choice this year. And few human rights cases are harder than China. Like most observers, I applaud the choice, but I am also glad, because I think the prize is a useful weapon in the struggle for human rights and liberalism. It shows up the glaring failures of places like Burma, apartheid South Africa, and China, and tells their elites that the West isn’t always looking the other way for business contracts. So here, here to the Foundation for such a strong choice. My quick choice for next year: Morgan Tsvangirai.

Pop Culture and International Relations Theory

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Just about everyone plays video games now, and a sizable chunk model international relations in one way or another. Over the years, I have noticed that students have picked up ‘information’ from games – just as they do from film – which filters into the classroom. For example, I had a student once who insisted on basing his cyberterrorism paper on the scenario of Die Hard 4. Film, and increasingly now video games, are a shared language and pool of narratives among our undergraduates. They provide common stories and references, just as the transmission of Homer did among the Greeks. But the big films of the last 40 years are the stories they know now: my students are far more likely to know the Star Wars mythology than classical myth. Yoda has replaced Zeus, and Halo replaced the Iliad as a depiction of combat.

This raises all sorts of interesting pedagogical questions, and it places a burden on us as teachers to at least be mildly informed of what they watch and play. (If you don’t,  students think you are a hopelessly out of touch dork they can’t relate to, and hence, you are less likely to reach them.) The study of IR film is mature, but I have yet to see any serious treatment of video games as either depiction of international relations or as teaching tools. Duck of Minerva has touched on this a little bit. But this topic needs to be really worked on by someone in IR with an interest in communications. It doesn’t strike me as a well-organized enough topic for a dissertation, but definitely an MA. If Lord of the Rings can be discussed as an IR teaching tool, then so should gaming. Most of our students now game. Military games are hugely popular – including a bestseller released by the US Army itself originally designed as an in-house simulation and now used as a recruiting tool. Such games regularly include depictions of war, the normative concern behind IR’s very existence. At the very least we should think about how this impacts what they bring to class.

Sound ridiculous? Actually, in my experience in the classroom, it’s not at all. Whenever a big war or history movie shows up in theaters, we inevitably discuss it in class, because students ask questions about it or it otherwise creates such a stir in the larger society. So frequently did I notice this when I first started teaching, that I actually bought a few movies that I was asked about most, because I thought it was a good idea to know them well – including Black Hawk Down, Saving Private Ryan, Apocalypse Now, JFK, and the Hurt Locker. This has been a constant experience in teaching undergrads. It may depress more mature readers and IR observers, but it is nonetheless a reliable element of teaching undergrads. In fact, so prevalent are references to Black Hawk Down especially, that I even read the book, because I fielded so many questions on it.

I don’t have the training in media studies for this, but two video games which I have played leap out to me as relevant in IR – the Civilization series and the Modern Warfare series. Civilization is essentially a state-building simulation, complete with interaction with other states, including warfare. But Modern Warfare is far more important given how much the games have sold and how directly they model the current GWoT. The sequel is basically  ‘Iraq War- the video game,’ which is pretty shocking the first time you see it. Sequences are ripped straight out of the documentary Generation Kill. The battle-realism of the violence is far beyond anything you have seen in a game before. The gunfire, killing, and destruction are extreme and amazingly graphic. There are no aliens that are morally easy to dispatch by the battalion (Halo, Quake, etc). Instead your character knifes people, shoots dogs (yes, that’s right), and fairly easily racks up ‘collateral damage.’ At one point, your character even participates in a terrorist massacre at an airport (video above), which generated a big controversy apparently. Quite honestly, it is a shocking sequence in the game – you are expected to participate in machine gunning hundreds of civilians! The sequence creeped my wife out so much she made me turn the game off. This is calling out for a serious treatment.

Is It Moral to Find Humor in North Korea’s Bizarreness?

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kimjong2

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I never really know how to answer this question. Among IR and foreign policy types, the DPRK is just as easily a punch-line over drinks after a long conference as it is a topic of that same conference. Andrew Sullivan equivocates on the question here.

I found these pictures, with the appended humorous dialogue, here. Remember that Kim declared long hair bad for socialism. The NK media also claims Kim Jong Il can manipulate time. So when it gets this wacky, it’s fairly hysterical. It’s hard not to laugh, right?

On the other hand, you can in fact imagine that the captions above to the third picture are accurate. The regime is that arbitrary and brutal.

My sense is that it is within the bounds of ethics to laugh at communist kitsch after the regimes have collapsed or at loopy Chavez-types who aren’t too destructive  – yet. But North Korea is probably too far. Comments would be appreciated.

If you want even more North Korean surreality to tempt your ethics with humor, try here for the genuinely bizarre subculture fetishizing the pretty but robotic North Korea traffic cops. Yes, it’s that weird. See if you can avoid laughing…

For my other writing on how opaque and bizarre NK is, try here, here and here.

Jason Bourne Goes to Iraq: Iraq War Film Debate, part 3 – “Green Zone”

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I have written on Iraq war film before. Here are parts 1 and 2 on the The Hurt Locker.

The Green Zone (GZ) got 54% on rottentomatoes. I would give it an 80%.

This is an awkward film to review because its political content is serious, yet it wraps that in action-movie panache. It’s a war film (serious) that awkwardly treats violence like an action film (fun, exciting), so you’re morally not quite sure what to think. The message, that there was a fair amount of Bush administration shadiness in the 2003 run-up, is accurate. Anyone who has followed the war will absolutely relish the sequence at the swimming pool of the private military contractor in a bikini carrying a machine gun. Hah! I laughed out loud at that one, while the Koreans looked bewildered at me. Unfortunately, there’s too much ‘Jason Bourne goes to Iraq’ excitement to take the message all that seriously.

1. Usually war film reaches for a ‘message’ by portraying violence as tragic and dehumanizing to all involved. I can’t think of a serious war film that portrays war as fun; only idiot portraits of war, like 300, do that. No viewer wants to think he is ‘enjoying’ morally meaningful violence (as opposed to video game/300 violence). It is morally necessary for the viewer to not enjoy the on-screen violence, because that would trivialize the political message and generate huge internal conflict in the viewer. If the viewer gets a rush from the on-screen action, the moral effect is more like a cool video-game sequence from your favorite shooter. So in Apocalypse Now or Platoon, the action sequences are never a video game-style rush to watch. Instead they are framed, with somber music frequently, to make the viewer reflect seriously, and presumably agree with the directors that the Vietnam war was an error.

2. By contrast, action movies that want you to enjoy the frenzy and violence must make the bad guys ridiculous. It is too challenging to show morally realistic (i.e., mixed, not all bad) bad guys suffering from extreme violence. The only way the viewer is morally permitted to enjoy extreme on-screen violence is with cartoonishly evil guys. Good guys dishing out brutal just desserts need really bad Bad Guys. Think about Lord of the Rings or Starship Troopers. Aragorn is astonishingly brutal (beheadings and such), but he is still the hero, because those orc-things are clownishly over-the-top bad guys. (This, btw, is why the LotR films are so empty of real meaning and hence wildly overrated.)

3. This tension is one of the reasons why Black Hawk Down (BHD) is so controversial and so morally flawed. It reaches for seriousness, but then provides an exhilarating action thrill ride for two relentless hours. The film’s replay value is not as a portrait of the BHD event, but as a gripping, visceral action film. So it’s a real war film that people like because for its action movie content. Ugh. Because of course all those Somalis are real people whom our military killed in large numbers. We shouldn’t enjoy watching them get mowed down, but we do. (Student after student has asked me about that films for more than a decade now.) This is a growing problem in the video game industry too.

4. GZ suffers from the same problem. It tries to have it both ways. The movie reaches for depth with a serious political message, but then gives you action sequences that are so exciting and exhilarating to watch, that you aren’t quite sure what to make of it. How can you oppose the Iraq War if Jason Bourne Matt Damon is so gripping to watch?

5. GZ is morally superior to BHD though, because BHD director Ridley Scott clearly took a perverse joy in showing the extreme violence of the story. He was obviously making an action movie, which morally reduces the awfulness of the actual BHD event. My sense of Greengrass (GZ director) is that he included the ‘Jason Bourne goes to Iraq’ sequences to ensure that viewers would come to his film. I.e., the action sequences are the hook to get the viewers to hear the Damon-Greengrass message that the Bush administration rooked us into Iraq.

6. Conservatives have predictably panned the film as Hollywood ideology, and Damon has now made two left-critical takes on the GWoT (the other being Syriana). To which I would only say that such a take on the war is way overdue. The war is still on, so Hollywood probably terrified of being seen as ‘not supporting the troops’ if it were to make films questioning our presence. Hence, most Iraq films have been unwilling to address the central political issues. The overrated Hurt Locker ducked politics altogether, and other Iraq films like Stop-Loss or Lions for Lambs don’t actually get into the central political question: how did we get there on such false premises? The only film yet to dig somewhat is Oliver Stone’s W – where Bush is shown telling Blair that the war is on regardless what the UN does. But Stone’s reputation today is too far gone, especially with conservatives, for his work to establish real credibility. So I welcome GZ, even if it isn’t really close to the best US war film.

7. I can’t imagine that anyone today, knowing what they know now, would still counsel the war. (This is not to say that that the 2003 decision was wrong given 2003 information; only that with 2010 information, it is hard to endorse the 2003 decision.) So it is important that our film – which is a far more widely shared social media than books or journalism – begin to investigate the war’s origins. In the same way that our best war film has looked back at Vietnam and told us difficult things we don’t like to think about US power, the GZ will hopefully start the process on Iraq. To all those conservatives who love to hate Hollywood on the Iraq war, remember that self-criticism is a central American political value too.

‘Hurt Locker’ Backlash, Part 2: A Response to Rodger Payne

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The Duck of Minerva is one of the better international relations theory (IR) blog out there. You should read it if you don’t already. Its name is a riff on Hegel’s famous comment that the “owl of Minerva” only flies at night; i.e., wisdom only comes in hindsight, or more specifically that philosophy can only understand an age or civilization as it passes away. I don’t quite get the joke behind the title ‘duck of minerva,’ but whatever – it’s quality IR blogging.

Rodger Payne had a post two days ago on the continuing IR back-and-forth over The Hurt Locker (HL). Payne links to the relevant other IR posts on the film, including my own. Payne notes that I and others have found many problems with the film’s much-celebrated ‘realism.’ My own sense is that the lead character, Staff Sergeant William James, probably would have gotten himself or his associates killed a lot earlier through his overt recklesness. That, and the bizarrely out-of-place and unbelievable desert-sniper sequence, do a lot to reduce the film’s credibility as a portrait of the Iraq War. Michael Kamber summarizes.

Payne counters that, while Kamber and I are correct, that’s beside the point.  HL’s strength as an IR film is as a metaphor for US foreign policy more generally since the end of the Cold War, and especially in the Middle East. Money quotes:

The U.S. too has a long and mostly successful military record — and it too has been incredibly lucky. Like James, the U.S. returned to Iraq after a successful first effort in 1990-91… To its critics, the U.S. too is a reckless showboat, willing to take incredible risks with other peoples’ lives, even as it claims to be “saving” them.

In political debates, Americans focus on U.S. forces, casualties, and experiences. Few consider the implications for Iraqis and the wider Middle East… The FUBAR narrative works pretty well to explain the actual U.S. experience in Iraq. The lead character’s addiction to war, recklessness, luck, inexplicable behavior, and need to “save the day” reflect an unsavory, but nonetheless viable, portrayal of American identity.

1. Ok. I don’t really disagree with any of that, but I think it is a reach, a generous overreading that sorta lets the film off the hook. Is Bigelow really giving us the arc of the erratic, poorly-planned Operation Iraqi Freedom in the story of one soldier? Do we really think Bigelow had something this profound in mind? Francis Ford Coppola did when he made Apocalypse Now. He went to Cannes and famously said “We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane.” That’s going for the big view. But Bigelow’s schtick has been that this is the first realistic film portrait of the Iraq, and that is how it has been received. The problem, as I argue, and Payne admits, is that it’s not that. I certainly agree that the US use of force has drifted toward recklessness since the end of the Cold War, and Payne is dead-on that US audiences love cowboy-style swaggering heroes, but the film is so pointedly apolitical, that it is hard to see James’ swagger as America’s. Maybe, but I just don’t see that in the film itself…

2. Given the film’s ‘reality problem,’ in round 1 I suggested that one alternative is to read the film as a memoir of battlefield stress for the US warfighter in the GWoT. The film goes out of its way to suggest that James is motivated by the narcotic effect of combat, so I think this better fits the small-scale of the film than Payne’s ‘big think’ approach. The problem with my interpretation is that Bigelow unfortunately does not develop this much beyond the initial thought. So we see James at home, bored with his alienated ex-wife. This is supposed to suggest that James misses the thrill-ride (!) of Iraq. But lots of us have had relationships and family lives that go bad, so this was rather weak. Much more convincing would have been imagery of James as an addictive personality. Scenes showing him struggling with drugs or alcohol would have really shoved the ‘psychology’ interpretation of HL forward, because you could see James substituting one thrill (Iraq) for another (booze, perhaps). Instead, Bigelow lets herself wander into a series of unconnected vignettes, like the sniper story, while the audience waits and waits for a theme to hold it all together.

3. HL’s rise is function of ‘intelligence guilt’ over the success of Avatar, plus the American desire to finally have a good GWoT film, not its inherent quality. It is fascinating how this film has grown from an indie joint into a Best Pic taker, and now faces a growing pushback from foreign policy types.

Initially almost nobody saw HL. It grossed a measly $12.7M. Avatar made more than that just here in Korea; its global total is now a staggering $2.2+B. HL was neither in theaters nor DVD here; I had to import it. So if it can’t make it to the world’s 13th biggest economy, did anyone see it beyond the US, Canada and Western Europe? Do we have any idea what Arabs/Iraqis particularly thought of it? Audience attendance is no great mark of quality, but still, without the critical buzz of the last two months generating an anti-Avatar Best Pic vibe, we wouldn’t even be talking about this film. Remember that it was originally released in Italy in October 2008, and for the next 14 months, almost no one saw it. Christopher Orr summarizes.

We all knew that Avatar was shallow, but we swooned for its astonishing GCI, arguably the biggest visual leap since Star Wars. But when the hangover hit in the month before the Oscars, the Academy needed something to suggest we weren’t so fluffy. Nobody wanted Cameron to take two Best Pics for childish stories wrapped in pretty colors. So, given 2009’s poor Best Picture choices, HL became the default anti-Avatar. Call it penance for giving the 1997 Best Pic to Cameron’s Titanic instead of the far more deserving LA Confidential; snubbing the King of the World this time buffs the Academy’s credibility. So HL rolled through the awards season, culminating in the Oscar that will insure it shows up on lots of IR syllabi in the future.

But now that the film is on our radar, the serious critical work is coming in, and the verdict, as this thread, indicates, is a lot more mixed. The irony is that a good Iraq pic does already exist – Generation Kill. Where is that much better, more accurate portrait in this whole debate?

The ‘Hurt Locker’ Should Not Be Best Picture

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I have seen The Hurt Locker twice on blu-ray. For part 2 of the Hurt Locker debate, try here.

The Hurt Locker got 97% on RottenTomatoes.com, and it has a acquired an indie, anti-Avatar panache for this weekend’s Oscars. But honestly, I don’t really think it is that good. Instead, I think its elevation tells you more about our general desire to find a good GWoT movie after so many bad ones, and the need to balance out the Avatar behemoth. We all know that Avatar is fairly shallow, but we were so wowed by the FX that we secretly saw it more than once. So Hurt Locker is our ‘smart film’ penance. But I just don’t buy it that is some amazing war film, as the hype says:

1. In the history of war films, it is hardly as good as titans like Apocalypse Now or Platoon. Hurt Locker is more in that mid-range quality area of films like Casualties of War or We Were Soldiers. Vietnam, tragically, brought out the best in US war film, probably because we lost. Defeat ‘permitted’ or opened the moral door to investigate all kinds of issues about battlefield conduct that just don’t show up in the usual celebratory, ‘America-is-awesome’ war film. Your standard issue western or WWII film portrays the US as the hero without a hint of irony; ever noticed that there is still no movie about the 1945 Dresden bombing raid? You learn nothing you didn’t learn in the self-congratulatory US history book you read in grammar school. By contrast, most Vietnam films struggle with moral questions of how and why the US is fighting. Hurt Locker explicitly ducks this avenue, and therefore is not as intellectually rich as the best US war film, certainly not to the level of best picture. If Apocalypse Now, Saving Private Ryan, or Full Metal Jacket can’t take best picture, then the only reason Hurt Locker might get the nod is because the competition this year is so weak.

2. The Hurt Locker doesn’t really tell you much about the Iraq War. In fact, a lot of knowledge is assumed – IEDs, the Green Zone, the term ‘haji,’ the playing cards with Saddam’s lieutenants on them. So again, it strikes me as strange that this is supposed to be the best Iraq movie out there. You don’t actually learn that much about Iraq. As Vikash Yadav points out, the Iraqis are just the ‘other’ floating around in the background. And frequently, you don’t even know where the protagonists are. The long sequence in the desert with the enemy sniper was gripping but was fairly inexplicable – what were they doing by themselves in some random patch of desert? Brian Mockenhaupt makes this point well too. As a portrayal of the Iraq war, it has some fairly obvious flaws – why doesn’t the showboating lead character get reprimanded?, why don’t they just call in an air strike during the sniper stand-off if they are really trapped there for 6 hours?, what is with the lead character running around off-base in the middle of the night, etc? I would rank Generation Kill as the best portrayal of the Iraq War yet. (The obvious response is the Generation Kill is 8 hours; the Hurt Locker is 2. So Generation Kill can do a lot more and show you a lot more. Agreed; but still, I found 2 hours of Generation Kill much more convincing than the 2 hours of Hurt Locker.)

3. Another take is to suggest that the film is really about the psychology of the warfighter. Some get scared; some just muddle through; others love it. This is more convincing; the literature on battlefield stress suggests people react in all sorts of unpredictable, frequently lunatic ways when they are subject to military violence. So it is entirely possible that characters with a semi-death wish like the film’s protagonist would pop-up. But its also hard to believe the highly professionalized, highly bureaucratic US Army would not weed out such types fairly quickly. Certainly in the film, the lead character fairly quickly becomes a danger to himself and those around him. So is the film really about the possibility of  combat as a narcotic? That seems more likely and is psychologically richer. War films rarely risk showing warriors enjoying war, so Bigelow deserves props for that gutsy angle. But this psychological aspect is never properly developed; the main character is simply reckless and remains so, as well  as lucky, throughout.

4. One critical angle I reject is Yadav’s assertion that the film is orientalist, because the Arabs are portrayed as vague and shady. You could reverse this and say that the film is trying to capture the war from the American soldier’s point of view, especially if you accept that the film is not really about Iraq, but about the contemporary US warfighter. The average GI there clearly doesn’t speak Arabic or know the culture, so I actually  found the ‘othering’ of the Iraqis a powerful narrative device. It shows you the cultural isolation, fear, and easy possibility of misperception by the Americans there. It is an reflexive response to read this as just racism; I think Bigelow is a better director than that. Similarly, Yadav argues that  ‘portrayals’ of women and others could have been better, but this is easily dismissed. You can only do so much in 2 hours, and it is a constant intellectual failure of identity politics that any minority or out-groups must always be ‘portrayed’ well in the western media. For example, you might just as well make the same critique of US officers in the film – they only have a few minutes and don’t come off too well, but no one would seriously suggest the film is a group slur on the US officer corps.

5. As has been widely noted, GWoT movies have generally been poor (Stop-Loss, Body of Lies), jingoistic (Stealth), or ridiculous (Avatar, as Cameron’s self-described analogy). Hurt Locker feels far more believable than any other film to date, although top-notch still goes to Generation Kill. The notion of war as a drug is an creative one in the war film genre (although Ernst Juenger first showed us this problem in his classic Storm of Steel). And if you take the film as a battlefield stress-response memoir, than many criticisms, such as orientalism, fade easily. As a film, it is certainly worthy of your time, but I think the only reason it is a Best Pic nom is, because 2009 was a fairly weak year. If District 9 can be a Best Picture candidate, then the bar is pretty low. (D9 was good, very fun, and smart for an action movie, but really, best picture?)

Hurt Locker may get the tap, because the Academy blew it the last time James Cameron released a super-epic. The vastly superior LA Confidential got trounced by Titanic in the 1998 awards. This is one of the worst Academy decisions in my lifetime, and clearly not one that stands the test of time. The irony is that this time, unlike last time, Cameron probably deserves it. The competition this year is far weaker than LA Confidential, and Avatar is much more seminal because of its revolutionary effects. For all its glitz, Titanic’s FX were still conventional, and the story was even more mind-numbingly childish than Avatar. This time, the story is better, but the 3D FX are a massive step forward, arguably justifying the Best Picture award, especially given the weak competition. If an LA Confidential or There Will be Blood were around this year, I think the calculus might be different. But Hurt Locker is just not strong enough to overcome the major visual breakthrough Avatar’s 3D represents. (For my Avatar review, go here.)

Kim Yu-Nationalism, Or How Middle Powers Assert Themselves in Global Politics

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Nothing verifies the claims of my last two posts about the jingoism and politicization of world sport as much as the national euphoria here that greeted Yuna Kim’s Olympics victory last week. Koreans reacted to her medal the same way Americans did to the US hockey’s team 1980 victory – it became a banner symbol of national greatness in world society. Kim has become not an image of skating beauty, but rather the latest capture of an unrelated event to serve Korea’s near obsessive effort to be noted in the world politics. This is how states reinforce themselves in the era of globalization, and this is how middle powers tell the world to pay attention to them.

Here are just a few headlines, to remind you that her victory is not just a gold medal, but a “world historic event,” as one Korean put it to me:

“Yuna Becomes ‘Golden Queen’: Kim Yu-na’s Olympic triumph cements her status as the megastar of figure skating and the sport’s most transcendent personality since Germany’s Katarina Witt.”

“Beyond Perfection: Fascinating the world with dazzling performance”

“Kim Yu-na: Figure skating queen aids Korea’s Olympic dreams”

“Olympic favorite Kim Yu-na delighted fans around the world”

“Korea Energized by Figure Skater’s Olympic Debut: Korea is ablaze with excitement”

This sort of purple rhetoric should convince anyone of the way the state instrumenatlizes sports for nationalist assertion. Kim is a fine athlete obviously. But the far more interesting story for a political scientist is the way her victory was ‘captured’ for the interest of state and nation. Indeed so fanatical have Koreans become about Kim, that she now practices mostly in Canada  in order to avoid the cult of personality that has grown up around her.

Maybe I’m Huntington’s flimsy de-nationalized globalist, but I can’t help but find this sort of adulation extremely discomforting, and not just as  foreigner living here. Aren’t modern, liberal states supposed to outgrow this sort of clannishness? Aren’t cults of personality, uncritical coverage of national ‘heroes,’ and jingoistic assertions of the ‘world’s joy’ over an athlete (?!) a sign of political immaturity and hard-edged nationalism, the sort of thing we associate with dictatorships banking on nationalism as a legitimizing ideology?

My sense is that if Korea really wants to be taken by the rest of the world as a serious, perhaps even leading, member of the G20, this sort of nationalism will need to fade. Like much of East Asia, Korea is torn between a deeply held nationalist narrative of its uniqueness (frequently drifting into racial blood-and-soil narratives of the minjok), and the desire to be cosmopolitan and open to world of globalization (‘Global Korea‘). (China too has the struggle, between the CCP’s growing racialization of Han ethnicity, and the need for Walmart and more FDI.) Yuna Kim embodies both of these trends, as she is both instrumentalized for Korean national purposes (carrying the flag everywhere, eg), yet also reasonbly fluent in English. It is not clear to me which way Koreans want to go.

‘Andrew Sullivan is an Anti-Semite,’ or the Israel Lobby is in a Panic

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In the last few weeks, the literary editor of the New Republic, Leon Wieseltier, accused Andrew Sullivan of being an anti-Semite for his changing, increasingly tough views on Israel. For original post, go here; for Sullivan’s response, here; Greenwald, as usual, gave the most insightful read of the whole thing. Also, Cole, Chait, and Mead.

1. My sense of Sullivan’s work – from reading his blog irregularly, his essays at the Atlantic, and his book Conservative Soul – is that the charge is ridiculous. Sullivan is as thoughtful a writer as they come. I can’t think of anyone who has so openly showed, through his blog, the humanist thinking process day-by-day. Unlike academics who strive to present iron-clad work as if they’d thought of every angle, Sullivan has basically thrown open his brain so the whole world can watch him think. He routinely retracts, modifies, and apologizes when he makes mistakes or reconsiders. In this way, he is wonderfully honest – head and shoulders above the partisan hackery of most of American punditry. The blog is essentially the organic thinking process of classical liberal, with a touch of conservative sadness, muddling through tough questions, as we all do, only for the whole world to watch in print. It is a fascinating process, occasionally mundane or humorous, frequently engaging, but prejudiced? Hardly. That violates the very spirit of thinking-out-loud behind his blog that has made it so popular.

2. Wieseltier’s piece is pretty shoddy. It is a collection of extrapolations, slippery allegations, and ad hominem shots. Name-dropping Niebuhr and Auden was pretentious and served no point. I would not have accepted this from a graduate student. You can’t write this way unless you have an assured platform. Wieseltier is a like PhD who just got tenure – ‘now I’ll say anything  I want.’ If he weren’t an editor of one the best intellectual-policy magazines in the US, no one would have read this essay. It is telling that most of the debate has either sided openly with Sullivan or suggested that Wieseltier overreached or overreacted.

3. The real story, as Greenwald and Walt have also suggested, is the growing panic of Israel’s deep supporters in the US. The ground is shifting against Israel, particularly because of its continuing hard-right insistence on retaining the West Bank. The current prime minister, B Netanyahu, has clearly deepened the rift with the US by his open recalcitrance on the settlements. Much of the credit for this shift on Israel is due to Walt and Mearsheimer’s book and the subsequent flood of discussion it unleashed and legitimized. (They too enjoyed the institutional power of saying whatever they want; tenure in top 10 schools gives you that kind of space.) Walt’s blogging, relentless, measured and intelligent, has kept up the pressure. Increasingly it has become clear that the biggest obstacle for peace is now the Israeli religious right, not Hamas or Hezbollah. The fundamentalist-zionist Orthodox have now pulled Israel’s otherwise modern, liberal population into a semi-imperialist venture that increasingly smacks of permanent apartheid for the Palestinians. There is simply no way the US can support this; Israel’s friends in the US know this, and they are panicking. The consensus of elite opinion on Israel is swinging against them, and anti-semitism charges against the likes of Jimmy Carter, Walt, Mearsheimer, and now Sullivan, tells you more about the changing American debate on Israel, than it does about these writers.

3. I find the charge of anti-semitism thrown at intelligent writers like these inappropriate, because it is a prejudice we associate with crass, vulgar, unrefined thinking. That is, we assume the racism and other bigotry reflects a lack of thoughtful thoroughness. So ‘X is an islamophobe after 9/11, because he has no idea about Islam, but still makes snap judgments based on minimal information.’ Yet clearly, Sullivan, Walt and the rest do in fact know a great deal about Israel, Judaism, and the associated issues. They have a long, substantial body of work over many years demonstrating, rich nuanced thinking on all sorts of topics. Their work, not just on Israel, but on lots of topics, is not a collection of from-the-hip prejudice, but usually pretty well-thought out. That’s why people read them to begin with. (Remember that Mein Kampf was a publishing failure originally; before reading it was coerced, the normal German saw right through it for the bigotry and poor thinking it was.)

Certainly ‘smart’ people can be racist or anti-semitic, but I bet the proportion is lower. Why? Presumably, all the reading, traveling, and reflection we associate with intelligence leaves some sort of intellectual mark. This is why we send our children to school to begin with. Presumably it humanizes the thinker to the circumstances of other people, encourages one to try to see the world through others’ eyes, and expands one’s sense of self. Consider Walt. He is the chairman of the finest political science program on the planet. Do you really believe the people who vetted him throughout the long institutional path to this height somehow missed his latent anti-semitism? Hundreds, maybe thousands, of professors, students, and administrators somehow missed this roaring prejudice? Is it possible? Sure. Probable? That question answers itself. So leave the racism charges for uneducated boors like Timothy McVeigh; it’s just a gimmick to stifle debate of things you don’t like.

“Avatar”: Blue Ewoks Save the Amazon from Blackwater Inc.

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I have seen it twice now, both times in 3D. The following contains spoilers.

1. Its technical prowess is undeniable. For all the hype, I do think that Cameron has revolutionized the action movie. Note that I do not say films in general. 3D will help action, and to a lesser extent, horror and children’s, films, but I doubt it will add much to dramas or comedies. Consider if you think the Godfather, Airplane!, Schindler’s List, or Casablanca  would be much better in 3D. I don’t really think so. On the other hand, think of the chariot race in Ben-Hur in 3D. Now that would be something! So I think we should give credit to Cameron for his revolution. But we should also realize that its best impact will be limited in scope. This revolution is not on par with the transfer from silent to spoken films in the 30s, but rather more on the level with the move from frontal stereo to surround sound that began in the 80s.

2. Cameron also deserves credit for integrating 3D in a non-gimmicky way. Back in the 80s, 3D was tried, but it was always cheesy. Third films in bad series showed up with titles like Jaws 3-D or Friday the 13th 3-D, but usually the only thing 3D was a gimmick like a spear flying straight out at the screen. To Cameron’s credit, his 3D is integrated throughout to generate a richer, more immersive  environment for the viewer. In that way, he has matured the technology, which is now over 30 years old. That too is major feat, especially given the decadence of CGI in the last decade or so. CGI is now so ubiquitous, that it enables laziness. Cameron has helped return CGI to an exciting enhancement to a movie, rather than a replacement for it (300, Star Wars prequels, Matrix sequels). Cameron’s visual advance in technique rivals the the size of the steps forward made by Star Wars (1977), Terminator 2, and Jurassic Park. Visually, this film is the most important advance since Return of the King.

3. But the story… It is so politically correct postcolonial/environmental, that you just writhe in its painful predictability (kinda like Kingdom of Heaven with its blessedly pleasant Muslims and wretchedly imperialist Christians – yawn.) Indeed, in my second viewer, I found myself rooting for the “Sky People” just to upset the all-too-comfortable and easy PC moralism of it all. And there is no doubt that the bad-guy mercenary is the most enjoyable character in the movie. In the same way Lawrence Olivier or Darth Vader were the most fun to watch in Spartacus  and Star Wars, here you can’t help but love the watching the bad guy marine drink coffee in his ship (hah! ripped straight out of Apocalypse Now), while his machines wipes out the beautiful, harmonious, nature-loving, athletic Californians, I mean, Ewoks, I mean Navi! I wish they had made him a smoker too.

If you make a farce of tragedy, it becomes comedy. The Navi are so wonderful, that you kinda want to see them get smacked around. You’re not as muscular and virile and beautiful as they are; you’re sitting in that theater right now with a half-gallon of popcorn in one hand and a 64-ounce gulper of Jolt cola in the other. And how come they don’t commit human sacrifice like the Aztecs? The point is that if your story simply recites platitudes with no moral complexity, then its easy to ignore. Hollywood usually does this from the right actually. Usually Hollywood movies are unthinking vehicles for US patriotism (Michael Bay, Rambo, e.g.), but movies like Avatar and Kingdom of Heaven show you just how easy it is for the left too. By contrast, consider a difficult movie like Apocalypto, whose moral categories are all mixed up for the viewer and is consequently a richer, more challenging intellectual experience.

4. The best political reviews I read of the film are here, here, and here. Cameron deserves all the criticism IMO, from both right and left. Ironically, both the left and the right are correct about the film. Most of the political commentary I have read on the film is excellent – rapidly deconstructing its facile morality and easy ‘white messiah’ storyline, which is just ripped-off from Dances with Wolves and the Last Samurai.

5. Conservatives found it a simplistic story of PC platitudes: nature=good, technology=bad; white people=destructive rationalists, native peoples=harmonious pantheists; fossil fuels=bad, crying after the hunt=good. The blue people are a hodge-podge of the Vietnamese, Native Americans, and the Ewoks; the bad guys are a cross between Blackwater and Caterpillar; and Cameron even gives you throwaway references to the GWoT with dialogue about shock-and-awe or martyrdom. Too easy!

6. The left finds it a white man’s guilt trip, only without much of pain of actually being like the oppressed indigenous people. So the main character can find how good and wholesome and nature-loving  the natives are, and he can play at being one of them. But if it gets too weird, he can always go back and get his legs fixed. So he can pretend he is a native, in order to assuage his guilt for destroying the Amazon, I mean Endor, I mean Pandora!, but he doesn’t actually really want to be oppressed like real Native Americans, so he can always head back to his white body. This is the fantasy of a rich white man living an highly technologized culture about what it might be like to give all that up. The reality of course would be if Cameron moved onto a contemporary US Indian reservation and confronted the problems of cultural dislocation, alcoholism, and poverty. But who wants that? Better to fantasize about riding dragons and hooking up with the hot native babe. Ridiculous.

7. Avatar is strange film to review given the wildly unbalanced mix of revolutionary style and banal substance. On the upside, I think it is the most important film of 2009, although obviously not the best. Everyone should see it. It’s the most important step-forward in visual presentation since Lord of the Rings, if not Jurassic Park, and 3D is coming to home theater this year. I do agree with Cameron that this is the future of visual entertainment (look for it in video games too soon), albeit for only for certain genres of film. On the downside, Avatar proves once again the long-standing rule that no amount of razzle-dazzle can cover an abysmal story. For all the money Transformers 2 or Phantom Menace made, I don’t know anyone who really likes them. By contrast think how great were Hitchcock’s one-room drama Rope or Linklater’s let’s-just-walk-around-Paris couplet Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. I think the latter cost maybe a million dollars, but I’d rather re-watch that than Avatar.