History and the Movies: Eugenics and the "Dumbing Down" Factor

William Shockley died 20 years ago, August 12, 1989. He brought computers into the modern age by co-inventing transistors, an achievement that earned him a Nobel Prize in physics and spent decades bringing about further innovations that make the world we live in the electronic interconnected world it is. He also believed that intellectually deficient undesirables were reproducing at a far faster clip than those deemed to be intellectually sophisticated and should be sterilized. This despite that fact that going back to the earliest moments of eugenics there were biologists arguing that intelligence could breed stupidity and vice versa. He ignored facts in favor of belief and dressed it up in a cloak of pseudo-science to convince himself he was right. And many people, from Francis Crick to Roger Pearson, were likewise convinced. Convinced despite the Flynn Effect which states that intelligence as measured by intelligence tests continually improves over time as does semantic and episodic memory. Convinced despite the fact that all around them are examples of parents smarter than their children and others of children smarter than their parents. Convinced despite the fact that perfectly healthy individuals have children with Down Syndrome (gaining higher possibility as the woman ages. Intelligence of the mother is not a factor). Convinced despite the abundant knowledge that breeding only certain traits leads to a loss in genetic diversity which leaves a population vulnerable to biological and environmental factors that can lead to their extinction. In the end, all of this simply goes to prove once again that an individual can possess a high order of intelligence in one area and still be fundamentally lacking in overall reason, logic and common sense.

Recently on these pages I reviewed Homo Sapiens 1900, a documentary on the history of Eugenics. The very next day Roger Ebert published his post on the gathering Dark Age of Cinema, a post fundamentally lacking in overall reason, logic and common sense. It falls into the same traps that Shockley and company fell into: We're all getting dumber and if we don't stop it now it will be too late. The post has already been covered and analyzed and dissected by far better writers than yours truly but what hasn't been called to the fore is the disturbing nature of these types of beliefs, and I find his post both disturbing and insulting. I am not implying that Roger Ebert or any of the well over 700 people who agreed with him in his comment thread are ready to start sterilizing people. I am simply suggesting that a worldview based on ones intellectual superiority to the great huddled ignorant masses is not only egotistical but intellectually counterproductive (how could it not be counterproductive since you're never engaging those you look down upon - they're simply not worthy). Ebert uses no hard evidence or scientific study to support his point, merely the box office numbers for the film The Hurt Locker. It is a searing drama about a bomb squad unit in Iraq. Like multitudes, hell, legions of other searing dramas made in the last 100 years, teenagers are not flocking to see it. No big surprise there. And yet, somehow, this spells doom for the future of cinema. Why this film? It's an unanswerable question. When one decides that the world is filled with dolts common sense usually goes out the window. Inadvertently funny is the post-script in which Ebert writes, "There has been an overnight outpouring of response to this entry, and most of the posts are from young readers who sadly agree with me about their generation." He has written a post on the lack of intelligence in the next generation and then receives an overwhelming response from the very members of that generation, responses he calls "eloquent and reasoned." The very response itself disproves his entire piece and yet... well, I think that speaks for itself.

I would like to ask a question now, one in which I believe there is no answer but I will leave that up to you: From 2000 to 2008, America apparently went through a "dumbing down" period due to our President George W. Bush. I was certainly no fan of President Bush and viewed him, quite frankly, with contempt, but I would like to know what exactly got "dumber." I did not. I continued to read daily and educate myself in multiple areas of interest. My youngest son went from six years old and a basic understanding of the world to 14 and an active interest in politics, science and art. If one would like to discuss current government policies with him, one could. It would not be in-depth but it would suffice for casual conversation. Television, literature and film look to my eyes to be about the same. In fact, one of the movies that Ebert and others have been railing against, Transformers, was released under the current administration, after the supposed dumbing down ended. The point being that casual assumptions based on beliefs and not fact can lead us all down a very divisive and hostile road in which have and have-nots (in this case, intelligence is the desired item of possession) are sectioned off.

As I stated in my review of Homo Sapiens 1900, the idea of a society constantly diluting the intellectual gene pool until stupidity runs rampant may make amusing fodder for a film like Idiocracy but in reality it just doesn't work. The idea makes the assumption that when a societally deemed "stupid" couple has a child that child will never have the intellectual ambition to move beyond his parents level of intellectual curiosity. Abraham Lincoln's father not only refused to learn to read but tried to stop Abe from reading. And yet, few people would consider Abraham Lincoln a stupid man. But how could that be? His father was unintelligent, uneducated. Shouldn't Abe have been as well? No, because biology isn't that simple but there is a danger in thinking it is. A century ago eugenics was looked upon, briefly, as a possibly valid method of insuring a brighter future for the human race. Today there is no danger of falling into a eugenics program again but the same intellectual smugness remains. And I find it sad. I find it sad that a critic I once admired has fallen so far and is spewing such mindless, ageist garbage. When someone decides to exalt belief over fact, to hold on to cherished assumptions over verified data, it becomes difficult to see the reality of the situation: We're not "dumbing down" we're "smarting up" if you'll excuse the awkward phrasing. And we have been, for millennia.

History and the Movies IV: There Are Places I Remember

File this history post under useless nostalgia. Since I obsessively search archives of revered institutions, foundations and universities on an hourly basis for anything and everything it is to be expected that I will come across photos of movie theatres from time to time. Even though I was born in the sixties and therefore wasn't around when the cinema below was showing Howard Hawks' Land of the Pharoahs in 1955 it still looks familiar. That's because the architectural look of cinemas in the fifties carried through well into the seventies and the seventies is when I started going to the movies on a regular basis.

Below is another photo of a cinema in Albany, CA in 1971. The cars have changed but the architecture has a similar feel. It's not that they're the same architecturally, because clearly they're not. It's that they have a business-like look about them, a functionality mixed with a bit of mid-century modernism. I can't pretend that these theatres look better than the palaces of the twenties and thirties, because they don't. But they're the theatres I love and the ones that bring back moviegoing memories like no other. And they just don't exist anymore.

And it's not just that they don't exist anymore. There aren't even theatres that replaced them in the same location. They got replaced and relocated. Look at the Albany cinema. Click on the photo to enlarge it. Down the street there is a silhouette of a stripper indicating that this cinema coexisted with the hardened denizens of the city, the real city, not those bullshit fantasy cities everyone has now where the downtown area is filled with chains and franchises and Ben and Jerry's and piped in music. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy for my kids that Silver Spring has such a gentle, clean downtown area where they can hang out and feel safe but Lord, it's soulless.

It's nothing like the locale of the Ultravision. That's the theatre I used to go to in the seventies in the West Ashley section of Charleston, SC. I saw The Poseidon Adventure, Juggernaut and Jaws in their initial runs there and wish there were theatres like it to see movies in now. It was next to car lots and pawnshops and liquor stores. I couldn't find a picture of it online but ABC, the company that operated it, had a twin Ultravision in Deerfield, FL and that I could find a picture of, here, so you can at least see the design I'm talking about.

Later, after moving to Washington, DC in the eighties, I saw many movies at the Outer Circle on Wisconsin Avenue and was sad to see it demolished in 2007. It lasted for so long I thought for sure it would remain but alas, it couldn't survive the onslaught of the multiplexes even if I did think it was immune for a short while there. The picture below is courtesy of Rockcreek's Flickr account where I was happy to find several pics of this once great suburban cinema.

The Outer Circle was in the nowhere zone between DC and Chevy Chase, MD where you're not quite sure what city or state you're in. There were diners, banks and gas stations nearby. That doesn't mean much now I suppose but NOT being in a multiplex by a mall or a Disney-fied Downtown gave it a very different feeling that is hard to describe now. There was a feeling you could be walking down the street and suddenly happen upon a cinema next to the Phillips 66 and say to yourself or your walking companion, "Hey, want to see a movie?"

I miss the sleek lines and non-busy look of the mid-century to mid-sixties cinemas that filled my youth. They weren't as formal as the original movie palaces, not as corporate as the multiplexes that followed. They were slightly trashy and often times out of the way. They were next to fast food joints, bars and truckstops in the places that zoning forgot. I'd like someone to revive them but it's a bit like trying to make a campy film. If your intention is camp then it's not camp. For these cinemas to succeed they need a specific time, place and feel that's gone and will remain gone. But never let it be forgotten.

History and the Movies III: The San Francisco Earthquake

Tomorrow is April 18th, the day 103 years ago that San Francisco was rocked with a 7.8 magnitude* earthquake and subsequently burned to the ground. Initial figures of deaths in the hundreds were doctored and the real death toll, which was in the thousands, was hidden from the public because the city government was afraid people might be apprehensive to move back in and businesses might be scared away. It took two to three years for the city to clean-up and start rebuilding the downtown area and a few more for it's economy to get back on track. The earthquake is still one of the strongest to ever hit the continental United States, though the strongest is still the almost unbelievable in size 9.2 earthquake of March 28, 1964 in Anchorage, Alaska. Thirty years after the fact, the movies got involved.

San Francisco was released in 1936 and starred Clark Gable, Jeanette McDonald and Spencer Tracy. The story of gambling hall owners, singers and priests called... Tim, really didn't matter much. The main thing was to show the earthquake and that's what ended up raking in the dough for all concerned. And Hollywood took notice. Using disaster as a backdrop for soap opera (touched on recently here in a post on the Titanic) quickly caught on and within a year John Ford had directed and released The Hurricane with its spectacular ending using extraordinary miniatures and even more extraordinary wind and water machines that must have made Thomas Mitchell and Dorothy Lamour wish they were in a real hurricane. From that movie to the seventies disaster flicks such as Earthquake and The Towering Inferno to the nineties offerings of Twister and Deep Impact to the 2000's The Day After Tomorrow the sub-genre is alive and well.

It does so well because audiences love seeing destruction and the wrath of nature from a safe distance. It's too terrifying and heartbreaking in real life but fictionalized up on the screen it can be awesome to behold. I grew up in Charleston, SC which suffered a massive intraplate earthquake in 1886. It was felt as far as Chicago, IL, Cuba and Bermuda. Charleston has only had that one big one but it has small earthquakes almost daily and every few weeks they're big enough to feel. Growing up there I got used to occasionally hearing all of nature go silent for a few seconds and then feeling the tremor as the doors rattled and the dishes shook. I also saw my fair share of hurricanes and tropical storms. I was already living in DC when Hurricane Hugo slammed into Charleston in 1989, just days before another huge earthquake rocked San Francisco, but going home to see my parents afterward it was amazing to me that anything had survived, so devastated did the whole area look. Like I said, close-up it's not much fun, but seen in a movie it can exhilarating, even cathartic.

The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 was also one of the first big natural disasters well documented photographically, with both still and motion picture photography. Thirty years before the fiction movie was released, newsreel footage was abundent and can be seen below in the first clip. The second clip is from the climax of the 1936 movie, showing the first part of the earthquake unfold. On April 18th, 1906 San Francisco was destroyed by an earthquake. In 1936 Hollywood exploited that event and discovered gold still lay in the hills of San Francisco after all. Over a hundred years later we still don't know enough about earthquakes to predict when they will occur but predicting big-budget onscreen destruction is as easy as checking the calendar. Every summer the aftershocks of that Gable-McDonald romance are still felt, and will be until the world ends in 2012.

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*current estimate.

Further Links:
The Virtual San Francisco Museum
Wikipedia entry on 1906 earthquake
Eyewitness to History
USGS Page on 1906 Earthquake

History and the Movies II: Titanic

On this night, April 14th, 1912, the Titanic struck an iceberg in the chilled waters of the North Atlantic and slipped under the waves in the early morning hours of the 15th shortly after. If you are unfamiliar with this event then I heartily welcome you into the world from your long, damp and dark years of living in that cave of yours. Hope it's not too bright out here for you. The Titanic disaster has been written about and turned into dramatic movie fare so often it's fact has blended with fiction and new writers and filmmakers are consistently looking for a new angle, a new approach. After the last big movie, Titanic (1997, d. James Cameron) no one wants to make another attempt given the overwhelming success of that production: billions in box office worldwide - yes, billions - eleven Oscars, good critical reception (even if some critics deny it now) and even a few top ten lists. Money, Critical Reception and Awards: It's the sacred triumvirate of movie success that Hollywood producers dream of but rarely achieve. Once achieved it's hard to bounce back from. It's taken Cameron 12 years to finally direct another non-documentary movie (Avatar, December 2009).

The Titanic has also been used as a backdrop in otherwise engaged dramas such as Cavalcade (1933, d. Frank Lloyd), as a punchline in Time Bandits (1981, d. Terry Gilliam) and even as the basis for a computer adventure time-travel game, Titanic: Adventure out of Time (1995).

To some extent I've liked all of the Titanic movies I've seen because the event itself looms so large in my mind that any dramatic recreation of it will hold my attention. In the end however, looking back as objectively as I can, it is the movie making world's distrust of history and disrespect for the intelligence of its audience that eventually takes me out of all Titanic movies save one.

Allow me to explain by taking a short digression to an American Experience episode on Annie Oakley that I recently watched. I happened upon it which is good because otherwise I probably would have never sought it out. Once watching, it didn't take long to realize that Annie Oakley had a pretty damned interesting, and at times, fascinating life. And every single movie made about her had utterly destroyed the facts in favor of Hollywood make-believe. It was maddening to watch it and think how pathetic in comparison were the stories of Annie Oakley (1935, d. George Stevens) or Annie Get Your Gun (1950, d. George Sidney). Why Hollywood believes their unimaginative, mediocre story inventions trump that of reality I'll never know. They claim it is for audience appeal but of course without making the same movie twice, once with an invented story and once following history, and releasing them at the same time, there is no way to prove that one way or the other. I'm sure to some extent they are right and certainly the story of Jack and Rose aboard the Titanic seemed to help that film's fortunes greatly.

For myself though, that's precisely the problem. When it comes to the story of the Titanic, history trumps fiction every time. I know many people are fans of Cameron's Titanic, from critics I respect to bloggers I know and love, and I am not here to bash the film unfairly. In fact, I think Cameron did a superb job of directing the chaos of the that night of April 14th and handled the epic length of the film quite admirably. It maintains a steady but quick pace throughout. But I don't care about Jack and Rose or Julia and Richard Sturges (Titanic, 1953, d. Jean Negulesco) or anyone in any of the made for television versions I've seen. And it goes beyond that: I get a little annoyed by their very existence. I find the real story so compelling that fictional creations in lieu of the real people seem insulting to me. Why hasn't anyone ever focused on the Strauss' in a movie? A couple so deeply in love they died together rather than have one die while the other lived alone. They get a shot or two in most of the movies but that's it. I guess they're not young enough to hold anyone's interest.

Of course there is one movie that does deal with history, the one so many hold up as the best of the Titanic films and for good reason: Because it is. I refer to A Night To Remember (1958, d. Roy Ward Baker), a film that eschews fictional characters in favor of the officers aboard the Titanic facing and dealing with the disaster thrust upon them on that fateful night. The main character is Second Officer Charles Herbert Lightoller played by Kenneth More. For this viewer the movie is gripping in part because the historical figures aboard the real Titanic become the characters we follow in the movie. Lightoller has not one doomed romance while aboard the ship on its maiden voyage and yet somehow is still interesting. He does not have a single custody battle with his ex-wife and yet doesn't bore the viewer to sleep. Amazing. Who would've thought soap opera storylines would be unnecessary when dealing with a story about a massive steamliner dragging over 1500 people to their deaths? I'll still watch those other Titanic movies if I happen across them, so fascinated am I by the story of that ship, but A Night To Remember is the only one I can honestly recommend and feel good about it. The rest are inventions with an interesting backdrop, an historical event used to prop up make-believe drama. An event that occurred 97 years ago tonight and will reach the century mark in just three more. Will there be a new movie in 2012 to mark the occasion? Perhaps. Will it be the best yet made? It's possible. For now though, the best yet made is the one whose title also perfectly evokes the reflection upon that quiet moonless night when over 1500 people met their deaths and 706 escaped from a night that no one would soon forget, A Night to Remember.

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Links and resources:
Open Directory on Titanic - Amazing and extremely thorough online compilation of multiple resources of Titanic information, for just about any topic on the Titanic one is interested in.
Library of Congress Online, where the photos for this post were retrieved. Not all photos at the site are available for reuse so check the copyright information. The ones posted here are in the public domain.

History and the Movies I: Jeannette Rankin

I often connect history and the movies in my head. When I think about or read about an historical event, often a movie dealing with the same themes will come to mind. Today is no exception. On this day in 1917 Jeanette Rankin officially took her seat in the House of Representatives to become the first woman elected to the United States Congress, and whenever I think of Rankin, Friendly Persuasion comes to mind. Allow me to explain.

Women did not have the right to vote across the nation yet in 1918 when Rankin was first elected but they did in Montana, the state from which she hailed. Her election was historic but unfortunately for Rankin, a mere four days after taking her seat there was a vote to enter into the war in Europe, later to be known as World War I. It was unfortunate because she was a pacifist and took the unpopular route of voting against it. A total of fifty members voted against it but as a woman, she was singled out, as if all women would immediately be pacifist. The implication being that a woman didn't have the guts to go to war, nevermind the 49 men who also voted against it. She wasn't re-elected and stayed on in Washington for twenty years as a lobbyist until being voted back to Congress in 1940. Yes, 1940, meaning that December 7th, 1941 occurred during her term of office. Surely her timing at getting elected, not once but twice, decades apart, both times just when a World War was underway, has to be one of the most extraordinary instances of bad luck in political history.

She voted against war with Japan and this time she was not one of fifty, she was one of one. She was alone. Her statement before casting her lone "Nay" vote was, ""As a woman, I can't go to war and I refuse to send anyone else. It is not necessary. I vote NO." It is probably not necessary to relate that this did not go over particularly well. The position was so unpopular she didn't even bother to attempt a re-election campaign.

Rankin was called a pacifist, even by herself, but I don't think that's entirely accurate, or better put, it doesn't tell the whole story. It's all a matter of degrees. Years ago in a discussion with a Professor of History (yes, I was the kind of student that stayed after class and got into discussions with my professors) he told me that he couldn't abide pacifists. They do nothing in the face of injustice, he said, and were to his mind immoral. An activist stands against injustice and he held up Gandhi and Martin Luther King as two shining examples. Non-violent activism was not the same as Pacifism and it bothered him when people confused the two. But that's only one view of Pacifism and a fairly limited one at that (sorry Prof). If you go to this entry on Wikipedia you can see there are as many definitions of Pacifism as there are outlooks on world affairs. Jeanette Rankin was no immoral Pacifist refusing to fight for justice. Quite the opposite.

In life, after voting against both wars, she worked with the war effort on the homefront and later led a march of some 5,000 women to the Capitol Building protesting the Vietnam War. Rankin was an activist with non-violent principles. An extreme pacifist, one that refuses to become involved in any way is quite different than Rankin. One could argue that merely getting elected and taking part in the political process proved she was no Pacifist of the non-involvement variety.

In Friendly Persuasion it's that idea of non-involvement that is palpable. I don't much like the film because I feel it swings back and forth between serious examination of principles and lightheartedness too often and too uneasily for me. I'm no big fan of Samantha the Goose and feel the story would have been better served without all the silliness in between the moral arguments. But those arguments of principle are what make the movie worthwhile. And it has always made me wonder about the ideals of non-involvement.

In the film the Birdwell family will avoid involvement even to the point of not protecting themselves. The son Josh, played by Anthony Perkins, decides to fight against the approaching Confederate hordes and protect himself and his family. His father Jess, Gary Cooper, does not and disagrees with the action. The problem for me is that the film tries to have it both ways. Josh fights but isn't killed and so the characters are spared having to deal with the moral guilt of someone dying to protect them, the very act of with which they disagree.

Or the scene where Jess fights a soldier, overpowers him and then lets him go. Had the soldier threatened Jess enough that Jess kills him in the heat of the moment there would be more places to go but as it is we get to see Jess fight for himself and also be a pacifist, having his cake and eating it too.

How about when the home is invaded while Jess and Josh are gone? The mother, Dorothy McGuire, invites the soldiers in, let's them have whatever they want and everyone's happy. Would that really happen, or would she have been raped and killed? And then would Jess have stood by his religious beliefs or engaged in an act of revenge?

All questions never answered by the film because it never asks them. Still, it is a well made film and William Wyler's direction is admirable. The way the films juggles the moral questions and finally skirts around them though, isn't. In the end, the movie is too afraid to support any one view of pacifism or non-violence to its conclusion. The ideals of fighting for what one believes in but stopping short of violence to get it is an admirable principle, one that I am not sure I could adhere to every day of my life. It would be interesting to see it explored fully by a film like Friendly Persuasion but only in real life, with the likes of Jeanette Rankin, Martin Luther King and Mohandas K. Gandhi, can we see those ideas realized and fully examined.