"God's Love" and The Celebrity Apprentice

I stopped watching The Apprentice long ago, basically when it became clear that decisions were not about winning the weekly contests but about creating conflict that was good for "drama." I was, however, interested enough to read this interview with Joan Rivers who defended calling one of her rivals (apparently Annie Duke, the poker player) "worse than Hitler."

King: Joanny, where did you come up with that 'worse than Hitler' crack?

Rivers: Oh, I don't know. You know, you're always saying things. Hitler is the worst villain in the world. So when you really get furious at someone, you say, 'Oh, you're a female Hitler' or something, you know? It's just an expression. But I stand behind it.

So, it's all in the game, and it's all about making money for charity.

Joan's charity? I'm not making this up:

Trump: She got $250,000 plus she raised hundreds of thousands more during the course of the 14 weeks. But she gets $250,000. That goes to God's Love We Deliver, which is a great charity in New York.

I guess I should cap this post with a clever zinger about irony, but really, one senses that if people don't get it themselves, anything I could say about it would probably be lost. So, instead, I'll just say, thank you Joan Rivers for delivering God's love, and congratulations on acquiring $250,000 for your charity.

Dom DeLuise has died...

...and so has Bea Arthur. So has Jack Kemp.

But that's not really what this post is about.

The first celebrity passing which I recall actually being aware of was when a newscaster for the evening news gave a teaser that John Wayne had passed.

People died back then, but, pardon the crassness of my saying so, it seemed to happen less frequently. I'm sure there were obituaries and all, but with the Internet, it seems that someone dies every day.

And that's what this post is about.

There seems to me to be something pat, routine, and "Now...This"ish about the whole exercise of acknowledging (different from memorializing) celebrity passings that I actually find dispiriting and depressing. The phrase "Now...This" is from the book Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman (who I think is dead, but I'm not sure). It is the transition, he says, that indicates what you have just heard and been asked to think about has absolutely no connection to what you are about to hear or think about. Okay, that part is just typical media age disconnectedness. He also says, though, that it is the cue that you have thought long enough (an appropriate time) about whatever and now are okay to think about something else. If it is a really big celebrity, that might mean long enough to post a thought on your blog (or read someone's), but if it was someone you didn't really know was alive or dead until you read the obit, it's more usually a moment of silence or an acknowledgment.

What's wrong with that?

Well, nothing, I guess, other than my general dislike of expressions of anything that are ceremonial rather than actual. But it just seems like the canned way of responding is so routine that it just means that all we think about is death, that death is the only thing that gives the story meaning. It's also a bit of a trap in that not acknowledging makes us feel cold and hypocritical, so we have to acknowledge everyone...."Hey, that person that was in the commercial for x died...yeah, that was a funny commercial...hey and the first drummer on the One Hit Wonders...and the reserve point guard who played on the NBA finals..." But in acknowledging everyone, isn't there a kind of trap or hypocrisy as well? "So and so...wasn't he the one who did that television show I never watched before doing that other television show that I didn't watch?"

If nobody died, we can always do a catch up with the friends or family of somebody who died last month or last year. Earlier this month I was at the supermarket and there was a magazine that had a famous celebrity talking about dealing with the death of a family member. "Oh, yes," I thought, "I remember [vaguely] when it was reported that that happened."

The fact that I hadn't thought about it once since then is, perhaps an indication that this story didn't really have anything to do with me. That a stranger died in another part of the country under sad and tragic circumstances. Or perhaps it is an indication that whatever sympathies I had for that family and those people was parcelled into increasingly smaller packages to be shared with the friends and families of Dom DeLuise, and Bea Arthur, and (not dead yet!) Roger Ebert, and Patrick Swayze, and Farrah Fawcett...

Kon Ichikawa died this year. Seems like just yesterday we were talking about Bergman and Antonioni going in quick succession. Oh, wait that was 2007. I totally skipped over the tragic deaths of Heath Ledger and Natasha Richardson, didn't I? How could I have forgotten those stories? No, I mean that literally, how? They were all over the news, weren't they?

I don't mean to disparage any of these celebrities who brought beauty and entertainment to countless people and who, I hope, had friends and loved ones who will feel their losses very deeply, not because a newspaper told them to, but because they were integral parts of their lives. I don't even mind people who have a particular remembrance of a film or a performance writing a memory or an appreciation. (I did, when Nick Reynolds passed away last year...or was it 2 years ago...). I just wish that we could find some way of making such gestures something other than compulsory so that I could trust and believe them when I read them and not just feel like they served no other purposed than to make the person making them feel insulated from the charge of being a jerk less anyone notice that, "Hey, Marilyn Chambers died, and Ken was so busy writing about his life and his family that he didn't even mention it."

Christian Bale's Rant

Woke up this morning and was perusing the Internet and it seems the most important thing that happened in the world this week is that actor Christian Bale dressed down a director of photography on the set of Terminator 4.

My overriding reaction? People who like to eat sausage shouldn't look too closely at how they are made.

Okay, that's a bit tongue in cheek, but really...If one thing is, or should be, patently obvious from the extent and intensity of the responses is that this isn't really about Christian Bale. Much like the Alec Baldwin phone message to his daughter, this is a microcosm that touches on everything from civility to powerlessness to privacy to celebrity.

I think the intensity with which people respond has to do with the fact that the incident, like many that have higher shelf lives on the Internet, has the illusion of being self-contained (i.e. without context) and thus allows people to graft it onto their own experiences and think it analogous. (Who hasn't had a boss, parent, or other authority figure scream at them? Who hasn't had a subordinate, child, or team member f--- things up through lack of concentration, attention, or adequate training?)

What follows are a couple of random thoughts, in no particular order:

--I don't know any of the people involved nor do I know anyone who knows anyone. Christian Bale may very be a jerk whom people like Darren Aronofsky are defending for reasons that serve various self interests that have nothing to do with what they know to be true. He could also be a very nice person to know and work with that others are deliberately trying to embarrass or discredit for motivations that have nothing to do with this particular incident. That's the nature of media. I haven't ever been involved with making a movie, but I've had a small taste of being in the public eye to the extent that things I did (or people close to me did) were reported. When are people going to learn to get over this notion that this dichotomy between scripted and unscripted, caught by microphone and not caught by microphone, etc. isn't identical with the dichotomy between the "real" person and what they are projecting? They are both expressions of the real person. What's so hard to understand about that?

--To the extent people want to make this about "acceptable" vs. "non-acceptable" behavior, I would respond with "according to who?" Context matters. (Which is what microphones or clips don't always give.) Like it or not, there are different standards of behavior that are considered acceptable in different contexts. Some may say that there is no context in which such an outburst is acceptable. To them, I would say, have fun in your bubble, because that's the only place where you get to be the unilateral arbiter of acceptable behavior. There are behaviors that I think would be unacceptable to a stranger that would be acceptable for a parent. There are means of addressing a person that I would find reprehensible in a Little League coach, questionable in a High School coach, perfectly acceptable in a college coach, and pretty much expected in a professional coach.

--I honestly wonder how much of this is generational? I would not be the first person in the world to suggest that the self-esteem movement in child-rearing and education has resulted in a group of young adults who tend to phase out or not listen to correction and who, because they have been systematically shielded from the consequences of their mistakes, never learn from them nor develop the capacity to distinguish between major and minor errors or consequences. These people are incredibly frustrating to have to work with or be teamed with, not just for divas, but for anyone who has something invested in the success of the enterprise one is corporately working on.

--I have seen or been involved with many enterprises (plays, sports teams, military, business) where such people are much more effectively dealt with via peer policing than top-down instruction. This is especially true as we move to an age of a relatively "flat" world and one in which team chemistry (athletic or corporate) is more important to success than effective management. Chuck Daly used to talk about this in sports--guaranteed contracts flattened the authority/power hierarchy, making the difference between coach and player small. There is an emerging (heck probably already present) attitude in our culture to praise team members' policing themselves, motivating each other, and holding each other accountable rather than simply doing their segmented job and expecting management to deal with any other problems. Like it or not, Bale's conduct or initiative is increasing viewed as a legitimate kind of leadership** in a team environment, particularly one such as sports or film where success or failure is very strongly performance based.

--Here's one thing I know from teaching, from being on some athletic teams, from having been on a variety of jobs, and from being involved in theater. Such dressings down are no fun to give and less to receive, but they are extremely effective at altering behavior, particularly behavior that has already been addressed but has not been altered. People don't like being embarrassed, but...and here's a point that I think is largely lost in this discussion....sometimes they should be. And if they should be and they are not, than forcing them to acknowledge that they should be can be a last, drastic intervention before escalating the consequences of their failure to alter their behavior.

A couple of examples, perhaps not as extreme, but I think analogous:
--I was in a stage play once where one of the principals was having trouble learning his lines. The director was at a loss; she was used to simply just giving a deadline (i.e. I will expect all lines to be learned by such and such a date) and having actors with enough pride in their craft and professionalism and courtesy towards others that would motivate them. She tried several times to explain in polite terms to this actor that this was holding back the development of the play. Each time he would nod politely, listen attentively, say he would try to do better, and then go out that night and show up at the next rehearsal still not ready. It wasn't until other members of the cast got in his face and said "You are not going to mess up our play. If you don't learn your lines and we can't rehearse, it is not just your performance that will suffer, our play will suffer. We will all look stupid and dumb. The scenes that you are not in will be worse because we will have had to rob time working on them to redo stuff we should have down flat by now with you. Or we'll have to have you dumped and spend even more time with an understudy. In either case, you are screwing this up for all of us and we are not going to let that happen--and if it does, you can be damn sure that we will do everything in our power to make sure everyone who will listen knows it is your fault." Needless to say the prospect of escalating embarrassment was a much greater motivation than any other. *

--I had an otherwise good student once who in the course of a busy semester fell behind in reading and came to class unprepared several times in a row. Assuming she was one of those who was responsible enough to be humiliated by being found out to be unprepared, I just said something generic like, "you need to get caught up" and moved on. But rather than this motivating the student to work harder, it actually relieved her of the fear of being caught--hey, that wasn't so bad--and the behavior escalated rather than diminished. Worse she started cracking jokes about not being ready for class until I finally read her the riot act before class. Chagrined, she admitted the non-chalance was a defense mechanism to cover her embarrassment at not being ready. Avoiding embarrassment was her motivation, and to the extent that it was, the refusal to ever embarrass her was actually a disservice, because she wasn't capable of motivating herself by herself and needed me to motivate her before things got to the point where the consequences of her failure to motivate herself were beyond repair.

--I wonder, then, if all the people who think Christian Bale is now the scum of the earth would feel if he had ignored the director of photography altogether or said something polite, like "Hey, as a gentle reminder, please don't adjust the lights or walk in my eye-line while the cameras are rolling" and then gone privately to the director and said, "Look, McG, we've talked to this guy several times, but it's just not working. He doesn't get it. He's a nice guy and it's nothing personal, but this is a $100 million dollar plus movie and we have a responsibility to the studio and other members of the cast and crew whose careers are on the line to get rid of him and get someone else in with a bit more experience who knows how to conduct himself around a set."
What would have been the consequences of that? I imagine a) Christian Bale's reputation might not have taken a hit. b) The DP could very well have been fired (and if people in Hollywood don't think of Bale as being particularly hard to work with, might have been branded as incompetent and had a hard time finding another job). c) The director could have said "no, I won't fire him but I'll talk to him" after which the DP stayed on the job but didn't alter his behavior and the film suffered as a consequence; Bale or others could have trashed him later either on the record or privately, and the DP would have a hard time getting additional work. d) The director could have said "no, I won't fire him but I'll talk to him" after which the DP stayed on the job but did alter his behavior.

Perhaps d) might have happened. Given that Bale asked McG in the tirade if he had anything to say and the director said he didn't see it unfolding, I suspect (but don't know) that this issue had been addressed by the director previously and therefor I'm skeptical that d) would have been the case.

Here's my point about such hypotheticals. For all those who are aghast at how Bale handled the situation and think he could have (or even should have) handled it better. How should he have handled it? What would have been an appropriate response? And are you positive that the response you think was appropriate would have been better for anyone, including the object of his wrath? Locker rooms, green rooms, sets, some board rooms, boot camps, are all high conflict areas and cultures, and anyone who wants to succeed in these industries knows that going in and accepts it, or if they can't accept it, probably won't succeed in such cultures. Now we may not like that. We may say I would like to be in such an industry but I wouldn't want people to treat me that way. But that's the way it is. And Christian Bale responding to the way things are doesn't make him the root of all that we find evil in such situations. Heck, it may not even make him wrong. It may. We may find out after the fact that he's just a jerk. But I don't think this one tape clip is evidence of that fact. Sometimes you have to be a little cruel to be kind. Sometimes, to be successful, you have to require that people take their work seriously or make way for someone who does.

*It's also worth noting, as any parent will tell you, that different people have different temperaments. Some kids will be so embarrassed by a withering look that that is all it takes. Others are more expressive and honestly don't think anything rises above the level of a minor irritation until the volume level is raised. Some people respond well to clear, flat instructions, but some really do need a good kick in the pants.

**If I were going to invest a 100 million dollars in making a movie, even laying aside talent, I'd rather have my cast led by someone like Bale than someone who is the nicest guy in the world to everyone from the director of photography down to the smallest intern, but phones it in or cares more about hurting people's feelings than about holding them to a standard of professional behavior. We aren't talking about having the wrong color M&Ms in your trailer here or just being generally d--kish to someone because you can be even though they did nothing wrong.