It's Sunday morning! It's that time when we lounge about in robes and jammies and mock (or feel pity for) the faithful, trudging off to be lied to at church. Here are a few fun links for us atheists:
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Campus Atheists, Skeptics, and Humanists of UMM has a preliminary web page, designed by Skatje, and also has a forum. Their first meeting is on Thursday at 7 (pizza party at the Pizza Hut in Morris!), but the big initial recruitment fair is tomorrow — so she is looking for suggestions. She needs stuff she can put together now, but she's also thinking longer term — ideas for tabling at the student union, for instance.
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Kirk Cameron is getting feisty again in his own ridiculous style — he's asking if we've "patronized blasphemy lately". The answer is yes: frequently and with vigor, especially since the religious insistence on trivia makes it absurdly easy to commit blasphemy. S.Z. takes poor Kirk down a few notches. My favorite part: Kirk pines for the good old days when the Hays Code forbade blasphemy in the movies. S.Z. points out that the Hays Code also forbade miscegeny. Wash and Zoe: abomination!
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Awful as it must be to be Kirk Cameron, I feel more pity for Matt Nisbet. Revere calmly pulverizes his liver, rips out his lungs, and gives him a classic Stooges eye poke. Nyuk nyuck nyuck. I don't get it — I'm not averse to the principles of framing, but why is it that its proponents suck so badly at implementing it?
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'Framing' is essentially a polite term for 'propaganda technique'. The word propaganda has developed some unpleasant connotations over the years - that's why people advocating it have adopted the term 'framing' instead. But since the concept itself is incompatible with honest, rational communication, that term is also beginning to develop the same unpleasant connotations.
The proponents aren't implementing it badly. That's what framing looks like.
I believe the word I would use is fervor, I am patronizing blasphemy with a fervor!!
Patronizing your friendly local blasphemy establishment:
"Yeah, can I get a six-inch Denial-of-Holy-Spirit on wheat?"
"Would you like to make that a combo?"
"Please. I'll have. . . um. . . a medium Unholy Water and a bag of Better-than-Eucharist chocolate chip cookies."
"Six dollars and sixty-six cents, please. Oh, wait, that's the Oxyrhynchus Special — I'm sorry, only six-sixteen, then!"
PZ, you used the wrong url in the link to UMMCASH.
Quoth Cameron:
Actually, what the Gospel really says has Jesus in full-on cult leader mode:
Christian apologists bring a whole bucket of whitewash to the New Testament. For example, regarding this particular verse, they'll say that "hate father and mother" really means "love God a whole lot more than father and mother" — which is total bollocks. The Greek word miseo means "hate", and is clearly used to mean "hate" elsewhere in the Bible (e.g., Amos 5:15, "Hate evil and love good"). If you say that Jesus couldn't really mean "hate" in Luke 14:26 because he clearly said all that other stuff about "love", then we could say with equal reason that Jesus couldn't really mean "love" in other places because it's obvious he meant "hate" in Luke.
I'm starting to sound like a fangirl, but I gotta say again that Hector Avalos' Fighting Words (2005) and The End of Biblical Studies (2007) are good and thought-provoking books on this general topic. (The former could have benefited from a more thorough copy-edit, at least in the printing I read, but it's still a great book.) Also worth reading: Creationists for Genocide, at Talk Reason.
I'm not averse to the principles of framing, but why is it that its proponents suck so badly at implementing it?
Perhaps it's because some of them hope that their names (and thus, their thought) will become indelibly associated with the 'framing' concept. This leads to a certain rigidity in what kinds of associations/attitudes are permitted, and hence hair-splitting, turf wars, schism, etc.
The next thing you know, we'll be talking about 'Framers' or 'Frameology' with a capital 'F' and the whole thing starts to feel like a belief system---which attitude I think a bunch of folk here have already sensed, hence the fireworks.
Firefly/Serenity is a veritable Hays Code abomination.
Let's see. We have sympathetic petty crooks, a sympathetic rostitute, lesbianism, an evil central government, and all sorts of misbehaving.
Going through the details, we have the aforementioned miscegeny, detailed descriptions of criminal methods, including train robbery and smuggling, ridicule of religion and blasphemy, drug trafficking, profanity (in Mandarin), nudity(ish),seduction as a subject of comedy, lecherousness and lustful kissing, revenge in modern times and gratuitous use of firearms. I could go on.
Robes and jammies? Oh hell no, I got up did yoga outside by the pool then jumped in when I was done.
Tell your daughter to do that graph you had with the dumb people being christians and the smart people not believing in magic. Big graphs, always an eye-catcher.
I've been neglecting to patronize blasphemy. Let's correct that: I suppose blasphemy is a quite useful way to irritate believers if that's what you want to spend your time doing.
It might be more fun to patronize Kirk Cameron. He'll feel so much more important if we do.
Good to see that another atheist/agnostic club is popping up! I've co-founded the Society of Non-Theists at Purdue University. We should be official in a week or so, and we already have a big group of members. Must keep infiltrating the conservative campuses!
I'm glad you're able to lounge around in your PJ's this morning, PZ, but I have boxes to move and errands to run! I'm moving in with my boyfriend, so I'm doing my part to be godless this Sunday morning.
In the comments to Revere's excellent post, Nisbet threatens us with many print articles on the vituperative Dawkins and Hitchens. Perhaps they will include actual counterarguments to the books. But then, that would require Matt to actually read the books. The worm turns.
There must be better pizza in the evirons of a large campus than Pizza Hut, n'est ce pas?
Now, I am by no means defending the actual CONTENT of the Hays Code, nor would I particularly like to see it or something of the same sort implemented today. HOWEVER, as a student of film studies, I can say that there's been a decent amount of writing by a number of scholars (whose names I can't remember just now...never said I was a GOOD student of film studies) which suggests that a lot of the innovation and subtlety of films from the Hays Office era is due to filmmakers having to be creative to get around the restrictions.
Richard Maltby's essay "'A Brief Romantic Interlude': Dick and Jane Go to 3 1/2 Seconds of the Classical Hollywood Cinema" discusses the general way in which classic Hollywood created films with multiple levels of meaning which, although not REQUIRED to understand the story, could give audiences a different or more well informed take on a film if they simply read a little more deeply. Many of these have to do with allowing the audience room to INFER taboo acts without ever actually showing them.
The Maltby piece deals with a scene in Casablanca where a fade-out during a conversation between Rick and Ilsa leads to a shot of an airport control tower. Then, when we come back to the two former lovers, they are in different positions. Ilsa is laying on the couch, Rick is smoking, and their conversation picks up where it had left off. Did they have sex? The Hays Code says NO, because Ilsa was married to Victor Laszlo, and filmmakers were not allowed to show casual, guilt-free, punishment-free infidelity. One doesn't HAVE to think they had sex to understand the story, as Maltby points out; it only adds to a 'sophisticated' reading of the film.
It's that shade of creative indeterminacy that Hays Code-era Hollywood had, and which IS lacking in today's typically-blunt Hollywood films. Again, I don't think we shoudl have a NEW code, per se, and the ratings system provides certain similar, though less stong, motivations. But it wasn't all bad.
At the same time, I'm fairly certain that this isn't what ol' Kirk had in mind.
Jared:
I recall that point being brought up in the film-studies class I took with Prof. David Thorburn. My take would be that the absence of an actual Code increases the freedom available to the individual filmmaker to make artistic choices: to show acts explicitly or leave them implicit. The mean shifts to a greater ratio of explicit sex, but what about the variance?
Besides which, there are still plenty of restrictions, not all of which come from the MPAA. Being forced to tell a story in no more than two and a half hours is a constraint which springs to mind.
It's sometimes fun to see how in the hell you wind up at a page. I started off here and within 10 minutes I'm in an article titled "Movie Legend Hedy Lamarr to be Given Special Award at EFF's Sixth Annual Pioneer Awards"
From here to the Kirk Cameron article, to Wiki for a review of the Hays Code, to the Wiki bio of Hedly Lamarr, then off to the EFF. And all the tabs are still open.
ADD, it's not just a mathematical function.
Blake,
I agree, completely. The things I left out of my post (the different modes of marketing films, pressure from studios and the media conglomerates that own them, choices of individual actors and directors) are probably more telling than the little bit of Devil's advocacy I took up.
There are always restrictions, and while some of them, such as the length of films, are more or less constant through the years (there are VERY few Greeds or Shoahs after all), others vary dramatically by country and era. You're under different restrictions for a PG-13 film that's aimed to children than you are for a PG-13 film aimed for adults, even if those restrictions aren't precisely in the letter of the MPAA's laws.
I suppose the main thing that the Hays Code has that most of these other restrictions don't is centralization. During that era, films were not truly 'marketed' to one audience or another. Sure, there were genres and the breakdowns those provided, but most pictures were made with appropriateness for the FULL audience, children and adults, men and women, in mind. The Hays Office acted as that central arbiter with ONE code for ALL films, and did sometimes cut deals or give advice on how one could get a film produced despite offending material. Some of these bits of advice, as I recall, resulted in clever and creative moments in films, the credit for which was incorrectly given to the director...talk about shooting Auteur theory in the foot!
Anyway, I agree that the greater amount of freedom and variance we have today is better than the centralized restriction of the Hays era. I just wanted to make the argument that, as censorship-oriented as it was, the Hays Code DID have its benefits as well. It's a largely hypothetical question, then, to wonder what some classical Hollywood films would have looked like without the Hays Office restricting them. Would the end result, had the filmmakers been given 'total' freedom, be as well-remembered today?
I never patronize blasphemy, I have too much respect for it to treat it that way.
I like how S.Z took Cameron's garbage apart.
Surprised, though, that no 1 thought about this:
Oh yeah? So how many of those folks are TRUE xtians? Or are the figures only cherry-picked? Are they only counted as numbers when it suits their purpose?
Oh, wait, what am I saying? Of COURSE they are.
I liked this quote from Cameron's letter:
"Three of those times, *for some reason*, the 'F' word is used in the middle of His name." (emphasis added)
Like he really doesn't know the reason?
My favorite Italian curse is:
Va funcuolo Christi y tutti Santi
Which translates to:
Go fuck Christ and all the Saints.
I have to admit, Italian has the most colorful curses of the latin langauges.
I came across an utterly ridiculous WorldNetDaily argument today. I still can't get over the sheer headslapping amazement of them arguing that the U.S. government is worse to Christians than... well, you won't believe it either.
TonyP:
I agree about Italian curses. My grandmother is a little old Italian lady, and some of the things she says could, if translated, make a sailor doff his cap in respect. Actually, they DID, as my grandfather WAS a sailor in WWII and never swears. I think he must have given it up when he saw how totally outclassed he was.
I do have a slight quibble with your translation. I don't actually speak Italian, so I may be wrong, but I'd always been told that the "culo" in "vaffanculo" means "ass", even if the idiom is usually generalized to "fuck". If so, it adds an even, shall we say, 'deeper' bit of color to your favorite curse ;)
Jared,
I don't know Italian, but I bet culo is cognate with the French cul, which would confirm what you'd been taught.
Scott Hatfield:
Scott, thanks. You have lifted the veil here, at least for me personally.
Hmm. So how do we reframe this? You know, "Frameology" do seem like an obvious choice.
First Frameologist Matthew Nisbet, on his mission to fame..., erhm, frame.
That must be why it's so damn good.
About curses... I can't remember how to say it in Spanish, but one of the worst curses in the Spanish language translates as "I shit on the five wounds of Christ."
Woohoo, fun times!
Only 5? I saw that Christian Porn flick Gibson made -- there were a lot more than 5.
If the people advocating framing as a technique were any good, why would they have chosen a word that also means "to set someone up to take the blame for a crime" to describe their method?
Scott Hatfield:
Speaking of "schism", has anybody else thought that Chris Mooney seems to have left the "framing" business behind? I mean, over at The Intersection, he seems to have left that topic to Sheril Kirshenbaum; there may have been a podcast or something I haven't heard in which he talks about it, but as far as blog posts go, he seems to prefer writing about hurricanes.
Markmier:
"I can't remember how to say it in Spanish..."
Here you go; The complete list. Starts at "Me cago en ..."
Wonderful stuff; it clears the mind nicely after an evening of reading sickly-sweet Christian platitudes.
I'm going to use this as a chance to plug the UMN Twin Cities CASH group as well. We don't have an events calendar on the site yet, but sign up for our newsletter, and we'll keep you updated! (Believe me, some of the events this year CAN'T be missed!)
http://cashumn.org/
Is not Italian. It looks more like Spanish to me.
My Italian is not the best, but I believe that "Vai fottere il Cristo é glí tutti santi" would be closer.
I'm sure someone else can probably provide a better translation.
Katrina
Scott Hatfield:
Scott, thanks. You have lifted the veil here, at least for me personally.
Hmm. So how do we reframe this? You know, "Frameology" do seem like an obvious choice.
First Frameologist Matthew Nisbet, on his mission to fame..., erhm, frame.