Here are a couple of short essays; the first one is about the Internet as a vehicle for political reform, and the other is about the movie Double Indemnity.

The Internet as a Vehicle for Political Reform     dated October 18, 2010

Freedom of speech is a foreign concept to those living under authoritarian rule, but it is a concept that is finding its way into these regimes via the Internet  This essay will discuss the effect of Internet access on the people of China, in regards to free speech and political reform.  Living without freedom of speech is virtually inconceivable to those of us raised in the USA, because this has been guaranteed since the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791.  This freedom is included in the First Amendment to the Constitution: “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech” (US Const., Amend. 1). The 1.2 billion citizens of China have no such guarantee, and it has been the Chinese government’s policy to control thought and speech through control of the media.  “Under Mao Zedong’s command economy, the media’s function was to serve the state through imposing ideological hegemony” (Kalathil and Boas 18).  This ideological control is beginning to unravel, in a large part due to the influence of the Internet.

Controlling the Internet is a major issue for authoritarian governments such as China’s.  Content on the Internet, as posted in countries that guarantee freedom of speech, contains virtually anything that anyone wants to post, in the form of text, images, audio, and video.  Repressive regimes would like to prevent all Internet access; however the impact on commerce and education would be devastating to these nations.  The method that China’s rulers have used to impose control is “self policing.”  Internet providers and Internet café owners in China are charged, under penalty of law, with ensuring that people do not access sites and information that have government disapproval.  The might of the government and its policy of thought control are enough to coerce many into cooperation, but there are those who choose the consequences of persecution rather than forfeit their belief in the freedom of speech.  One such person is Liu Xiaobo, this year’s winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Liu Xiaobo is currently serving a ten year sentence in a prison in Jinzhou, China for “inciting subversion against the state and trying to overthrow the government” (Stack A4).  He is one of the authors of Charter 08, an open letter the the Chinese government, and it was his association with this document that landed him in prison.  Twenty years ago, Liu Xiaobo and Charter 08 would have vanished into obscurity, efficiently suppressed by the government’s policy of media control.  However, the full text of the Charter 08 document is available on the Internet, and it reads very much like the Bill of Rights.  Here is an excerpt: “We should make freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and academic freedom universal…We should end the practice of viewing words as crimes” (Charter 08).   Through the Internet, this document is now available to those in China with the courage to stand up to the government and read it.  It is also available without penalty to all Chinese citizens studying abroad and traveling abroad for business or leisure.

According to Liu Xiaobo, the Internet is an invaluable instrument in the struggle for freedom: “The Internet has brought about the awakening of ideas among the Chinese.  This worries the government, which has placed great importance on blocking the Internet to exert ideological control” (Liu Xiaobo 110).  The Internet has given Liu Xiaobo and the Chinese freedom movement a tool that they can use to stand up to a seemingly unbeatable authoritarian regime. Of course this regime will do what it can to suppress Charter 08 and silence Liu Xiaobo, but once something “goes viral” on the Internet, there really is no way to cover it up.  In his essay on social and political perspectives, Richard Sclove states: “Technologies do not merely affect society or states, they also constitute a substantial portion of societies and states” (Sclove 79).  The Internet has now become a part of Chinese society and state, and it is a medium that facilitates the open, free exchange of words and ideas.  It is only a matter of time before the concept of freedom of speech, carried surreptitiously on the Internet, is as familiar to the people of China as it is to the people of the USA.

References:

Charter 08, A Plea For Human Rights In China. Trans. Perry Link. AsiaNews.it 26 January 2009. Web. 09 October 2010.

Kalathil, Shanti and Boas, Taylor C. “Wired for Modernization in China.” Open Networks Closed Regimes: The Impact of the Internet on Authoritarian Rule. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution Press, 2003. Print.

Liu Xiaobo. “The Internet Is God’s Present To China.” The Internet. Ed. Gary Wiener. Farmington Hills, MI: Greenhaven Press, 2010. Print.

Sclove, Richard. “I’d Hammer Out Freedom: Technology as Politics and Culture.” Democracy and Technology. The Guilford Press, 1995. Print.

Stack, Megan K. “Chinese Dissident Is 2010’s Peace Laureate.” The Columbian. 9 October 2010: A4. Print.

United States Constitution, Amendment 1. Ratified 15 December 1791. Print.

Double Indemnity     dated March 22, 2010

When I told my wife that it would cost twenty-seven dollars to buy a copy of the film Double Indemnity on DVD, she tried to save us some money by renting it from Blockbuster.  Surprise, surprise, they did not have it.  So, I made the fifty mile drive to a Borders bookstore where there was one copy and paid the twenty-seven bucks.  Was it worth the effort?  No question about it, this is a truly great movie, one that can stand up to anything made before or since.

What makes this movie great?  In a way, it is a “perfect storm”.  In weather, a perfect storm happens when all the elements combine in one place to create a cataclysm of the greatest magnitude.  For Double Indemnity, all the elements for a great film came together in one place simultaneously – the director, the actors, the script, the audience, and the state of filmmaking art.  The director, Billy Wilder, can be credited with bringing together the actors and the script, and crafting the masterpiece.  However, other elements were beyond his control – the availability of the actors, the film censorship situation, and the audience reaction.  A change in any of these factors would have diminished the film’s quality and impact; however, the studio provided the actors, the censorship board created the restrictions, and the audience provided the response, and so the combination was perfect for creating the “storm.”  Wilder made a strong statement through the film; however it is not my intent to deconstruct the film’s message, but rather to examine other factors contributing to the film’s success.  My plan is to discuss the actors’ roles, and how they create a compelling story.  Let’s start with the part of Phyllis Dietrichson.

Phyllis is played by Barbara Stanwyck, who is said to have been apprehensive about the role.  What actor would not be?  Phyllis is evil incarnate, a cold-blooded murderer.  Not only that, she represents an aberrant fantasy for both women and men.  “The fantasy of the woman’s dangerous sexuality is a feminine as well as masculine fantasy, and its pleasures lie precisely in its forbiddenness” (Cowie 136).  She is truly forbidden fruit.  Also, it was uncommon in the 1940s for a woman to be a dominant character in a thriller or suspense movie.  In genres such as westerns and war movies, women were there for men to protect or to be objects of romantic interest, but not as cohorts, equals, even leaders.  Fortunately, Mr. Wilder was able to convince Ms. Stanwyck to take the part, as she was not only able to be convincingly evil, she avoided playing the part as a mono-dimensional femme fatale.  “Many of its [film noir] films…involve women who aspire above their ‘place’ in both gender and class.  Neither submissive nor maternal, they exploit their sexuality to manipulate and often destroy men in their ruthless attempts to rise in class” (Lehman 327).  Rather than simply being a seductress, she invites the insurance salesman Walter Neff into her web of evil, under the guise of “making a killing” from her husband’s life insurance.  She is looking for her soul-mate, a man who can lie and commit murder as easily as she can, without remorse.  When she realizes that Walter’s conscience won’t let him join her in a career of villainy, she has to end her relationship with him.  She also realizes that, because of his remorse, she may not get away with the crimes she has committed and perhaps it is time for one or the other of them to die.  Although her character’s death probably satisfied the censors, it is not a death of punishment; it is one of resolution.  If she did not die, she would only commit more heinous crimes, such as convincing her step-daughter’s jealous boyfriend (whom she also seduced) to kill her step-daughter.  Although the story is narrated by Walter, the story revolves around Phyllis.

Why is her character central to the story?  She engineers Walter’s participation in adultery, the plot to swindle the insurance company, her husband’s murder, possibly even her death by the hands of the man who loves her.  The timing was right for a strong leading woman in a film.  At the time the movie was made (1944) women were doing the work that men traditionally did.  They were building cars, airplanes, and ships, flying military aircraft, and doing thousands of other jobs that were “men’s work”.  The rationale for this was that it was a war time, and they would go back to “women’s work” when the war ended.  Val Ogden, former Washington state representative, told a reporter for the Columbian newspaper that in 1941, when she graduated from high school, “There was a strong male-centered mindset in those times” (Branton C2).  The movie audience, both men and women, were beginning to appreciate strong female roles.  However, strong roles alone do not make a great movie.

Besides being a strong female, Stanwyck as Phyllis portrays plenty of ambiguity.  Her seductive pout disguises her emotions, as does her smirk as Walter (off camera) kills her husband.  This particular scene is so well done it is astounding.  Is she smirking because she is rid of her annoying husband?  Is it because she has enticed Walter into doing her bidding?  Is she just enjoying watching him die?  All of the above?  And all you see is her deepening smirk.  She seems to relish almost getting caught – calling Walter when he is talking with the insurance investigator Barton Keyes, and hiding behind the door when Keyes comes to visit Walter at his apartment.  Walter becomes more and more nervous, but she is enjoying the chase, the deception, the narrow escapes.  She never loses her nerve, even in her final manipulation of Walter, who is left to pick up the pieces of their almost perfect scheme.

Walter, played by Fred MacMurray, serves as the narrator, and so is slightly distanced from the center of the story.  It is his character that goes through various transformations throughout the film.  He starts out as a man who has achieved his goals and become bored with life; he has no more challenges in his work, and has no apparent interest in women.  He has an imaginary girlfriend, primarily to satisfy Keyes’ curiosity.  When he first sees Phyllis at the top of the stairs, draped in a towel, he is pretty much done for.  The camera angle works perfectly in conveying her awareness of how she appears to him.  Their banter shows that she is more than his match with wit and flirtation – he thinks he’s clever, but she’s just wrapping him around her finger.  Soon, it is the atmosphere of danger surrounding her that he finds irresistible.  Although Phyllis has embraced evil fully, Walter tries to but can’t.  He must resolve to go one way or the other, and so he does.  After he resolves to confess, we have the great scene between Walter and Keyes, where despite all that has happened, Keyes says that he is “Closer than that, Walter.”

The part of Barton Keyes is played by Edward G. Robinson, and this was a break from the gangsters and tough guys he had been playing.  Keyes is tough, but he also cares greatly for Walter.  He even covers for Walter, as a message on his Dictaphone states that Walter couldn’t have killed Phyllis’ husband, because his whereabouts at the time of the murder were accounted for.  Still, Keyes is a brilliant investigator and has to know that the young punk who is his main suspect does not have the intelligence to engineer the crime.  In all likelihood, Keyes didn’t want to think that Walter might have done it, although this may just be one of the loose ends common to film noir.  Robinson had the skill to make the supporting role of Keyes complex and funny, delivering some amazing monologues.  The speech where he berates the owner of the insurance company for his lack of knowledge concerning suicide is a masterpiece of patter.

Robinson, as well as Stanwyck and MacMurray, each made the decision to show what they could do as actors, even though the roles were outside the parts for which they were best known.  They made it work, Wilder coached them well, and the result was a film that has stood the test of time.  Double Indemnity is considered a foundational film noir.

Film noir appears to be more of a style of film making.  Genres are easy to recognize: cowboy films have cowboys, screwball comedies have screwball characters, and so on and so forth.  There are no typical genre-dictated roles in film noir, although there are are some frequently used character types.  An evil woman is often contrasted with a good woman, as in the film Dark Passage.  However, in that film, the good woman, Irene, is the female lead and the evil woman, Madge, is a much smaller part, and she appears to be delusional, suffering from paranoia.  Contrast Madge with Phyllis in Double Indemnity, who is amazingly cool and methodical in her plotting.  In Dark Passage, there is a somewhat phony happily-ever-after ending with Irene and Vincent together and safe in Mexico.  Double Indemnity ends with Phyllis dead and Walter destined for certain execution.  There is really no formula into which both of these films fit, but they are both considered film noir.

This lack of a genre-based formula appears to be a principle factor in the success of Double Indemnity, both with critics and with audiences.  David Bordwell lists four common patterns in film noir: “An assault on psychological causality…A challenge to the prominence of heterosexual romance…An attack on the motivated happy ending…A criticism of classical technique” (Bordwell 76).  In Double Indemnity, Walter experiences internal conflict, resulting in confusion and unpredictability.  The sex between Phyllis and Walter (suggested but not shown) is not romantic, but immoral and forbidden.  There can be no happy ending.  “It is with film noir that American cinema finds for the first time a form in which to represent desire as something that renders the desiring subject helpless, but also propels him or her to destruction” (Cowie 148).  As in Greek and Shakespearian tragedy, the only satisfactory resolution is when the characters meet their doom.  And lastly, the dark scenes, innovative camera work, and complex characters, are all in direct conflict with traditional Hollywood filmmaking.  Both critics and audience responded favorably to this film making style where directors broke out of the confinement of formula-based films to create works that were original, entertaining, and thought-provoking.

All of the principles took risks to make Double Indemnity: the director Billy Wilder, actors Stanwyck, MacMurray, and Robinson, and even the studio.  There were no guarantees that the film would make it past the censors, that it would be well-received, that it would not end their careers.  In the case of this film, the art, the craft, and the timing were all just right.  Justifiably considered one of the most important films made in the 1940s, it is currently rated 57th on the IMDb Top 250 Movies (IMDb).  I look forward to many more viewings now that I have the DVD.  It is the kind of film you can watch over and over, finding something new in the acting, directing, cinematography, and story with each viewing.

References:

Branton, John. “Women Describe Their 70 Years of Liberation.” The Columbian 14 Mar. 2010: C2. Print.

Bordwell, David. “The Bounds of Difference.” The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. 70-84. Print.

Cowie, Elizabeth. “Film Noir and Women.” Shades of Noir. Ed. Joan Copjec. London: Verso, 1993. 121-165. Print.

IMDb. Top 250 Movies. IMDb The Movie Database. n.d. Web. 20 Mar. 2010.

Lehman, Peter and Luhr, William. Thinking About Movies. 3rd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008. Print.