When Anti-Intellectualism Rears Its Ugly Head

The other day I got the movie Lincoln out of the library.  I had grave misgivings about this movie, that stem from the fact that too damn many historians were exclaiming about how wonderful it was.  Accurate.  It really portrayed Lincoln.

I have had misgivings about movies and been wrong before.  And it would have been a shame to miss out on something that was that good, and after all, free.

It was indeed impressively... accurate.  The man looked like Abe and was just as understated as I would have expected.  After about one-half hour, whenever Lincoln opened his mouth to tell another anecdote, I thought, "Oh, jeez, there he goes again."  Maybe his friends thought he was a wit, but I imagine if you had to work with him, or were for god's sake married to him, you would have been resorting to a lot of eye-rolling.

After 50 minutes I found myself walking around the house doing things I'd forgotten to do earlier, without pausing the movie.  This is something I never do.  So at 60 minutes I figured my life would be able to go on without a serious lack of quality if I never finished the movie.

This need for movies to be just like real life has got to run its course at some point.  But even movies that are not about historically important things have just too many scenes that are just like real life.

It took me a while to figure out why I was so bored with so many movies lately.  At first I thought it was because they were about "young people" and they were all full of angst and obsessing about stupid things.  But that wasn't it.  I am definitely not above enjoying a movie about stupid things.

The new trend in movies is to have scenes replicate real life word for word.  Last night I sat through Shame which I had had on hold at the library for quite some time.  I'm really noncommittal about the sex scenes.  I think I don't care enough one way or the other to have an opinion.  They are usually long enough.

But the longest scene in that movie was the dinner scene.  It was practically the whole dinner conversation.  And it was really boring.  And this is the kind of thing that is going on just too much in contemporary movies.

I imagine that there is just too much studying of the writing of screenplays.  I can imagine the screenplay professor instructing his students to, "This week, listen to conversations.  Then write them down."  It has become important that people in movies talk just the way real people talk.  And for the same length of time.  Which makes a lot of potentially interesting characters really boring.

I couldn't believe it when the woman at the restaurant agreed to go out with the guy again.  "Oh, come on," I said, "What are you going to talk about next time?"  Turns out they ran out of things to do in bed before they ever had to go out to eat together again.

I have been accused of being anti-intellectual.  So be it.  I don't mind a movie that has some thought to it, but not if every thought a character has has to be verbalized.  And I kind of think that Abe was a lot more clever than he appeared on screen, because nobody was being obsessive about "portraying" him.

I hope when things swing back in the movie business from this ultra-realism, it doesn't go the other way of having movies where nobody is even sure what is happening.  I think reality is just fine, as long as there is some imagination that goes with it.

And some movement, for gods' sake.  Let's please not have people sitting around at dinner in real time, because it just isn't as much fun when you don't get to choose who you're sitting there with.

Don't Ask

Last night I took a telephone survey.  This is a big deal for me because I have learned to (politely) cut people off mid-sentence with a "No, thank you" and hang up without even knowing what the survey is about.

I have a pretty jaded view of survey research, going back to my training in psychology.  Most of the time they aren't accurate, they are crazy-prone to self-report bias, and are poorly constructed, to be fair, because it's pretty much impossible to construct an accurate self-report inventory.

And most of the time when someone calls with a telephone survey, it's a business or politician and the survey part is a ruse or misrepresented.

Also, I hate telephone surveys for the same reason I hate people knocking on my door.  It's my home, so leave me alone.  You want my attention, write me a letter, and if I'm interested I'll know where to find you.

Which they did.  I received the letter a week or so ago, and threw it away.  And when the nice woman on the phone told me who I could contact if I had any questions I neglected to write down the phone number.  I think it's a DHEC survey but I might be wrong.  Obviously, I really didn't care all that much.

But it was legitimate, so I figured I would turn over a new leaf and cooperate when and if they called.

And I was honest.  Mostly.  I had no problem giving my age or my weight.  I know I'm obese, and I know I'm hovering over the cliff of old age, so it doesn't matter to me who knows.

I told two lies.  The first was about how much I drink, and the second was how often I wear a seat belt.  And I would like to tell you about both of those lies.

These days, whenever I see my doctor her assistant takes a ridiculous survey about the usual, how much I smoke (I don't) and how much I drink.  The answer to both of those questions is a resounding "none of your business" but I don't say that, because I'm assuming this data is being recorded for posterity and research and most important, for insurance company records, and they WILL use it against anyone who refuses to answer or answers honestly.  So I lie.  And so should you.  If you drink with any regularity, the alcohol nazis will use it against you someday.  Just as with smoking you will have to pay higher premiums, if you are allowed to get insurance at all.

The seat belt question was a surprise, but I recouped and, of the options given, I answered "most of the time."  Now this is ridiculous and I think pretty much an admission that I am lying.  One either wears a seat belt or doesn't, so if the folks who designed this questionnaire were really clever they would assume anything other than a yes or no is a lie.

I resent the fact that people can still carry on intense conversations on cell phones while driving -- which affects my own safety -- but there are laws that come into my own vehicle and require that I wear a seat belt.  And given my admitted obesity, the times I have tried to wear seat belts I have found them to be, shall we say, not made for my short and fat body.

So those were my two lies.

But there was one question in this really, really detailed survey that was missing and should not have been.  In a survey that asked about number of phones in the house and whether I knew my emergency evacuation route, this is the question that was left out:

HOW MANY GUNS ARE IN YOUR HOME?

You can ask about my weight, my alcohol, how often I eat leafy greens, and whether I have a cell phone as well as a land line, but don't dare ask whether I own a gun.

I guess it's safe to say that this survey leaves my cynicism about surveys intact.