PARIS 2
OTC50#51
GENDER SUBJECT TO THE POLITICS OF INCLUSION
By PETER THOMAS BUSCH
S
ociety has incrementally moved forward on an intellectual level beyond gender inequality after a tenuous oscillation of competing interests.
Sure women can fall victim to human frailties as much as men, but time and time again women prove themselves equal.
Gender equality has occurred through individual efforts within a group, often as part of a group that does not define itself along gender lines, but also within a group that competes with other groups along gender lines within the same society. A female political leader might emerge not because of gender, but because of her representation of a particular set of ideas shared by a distinctly defined group.
That single female individual might get further along in a group of like minded politicians, than an entire group of individuals within a gender based association.
Society has changed as well. Rather than reinforcing expectations of the traditional family and stereotypical gender roles within the home, other forms of family have been accepted as the traditional structure has fragmented under the pressures of a modern egalitarian society.
Tolerance of divergence within the family is just one of several keys to greater equality as individuals need support from other individuals and also from society. Non-traditional family units would forever be disenfranchised on the margins of society without the support of the same government services and political and religious groups as traditional families that no longer seem to function properly.
The social fabric is an organic instrument of the individual and of the state that adjusts over time. If society remained static, people would experience an excessive amount of dysfunction as other elements of society become strained.
French society holds the female individual on an alter in public.
The historical Catholic society considers the Virgin Mary an icon of family and church. Mary was the virgin mother of Jesus and a Saint to everyone else.
Joan of Arc has been a symbol around the world of righteousness against tyranny for her role as heroine in supporting King Charles VII against the English. At the tender age of 19, Joan of Arc helped the French king chase the English king from the territory during the Hundred Years
War so long ago now, but her name still resurfaces.
Marianne, the face of revolution and the new republic, is a national symbol of democracy. Marianne personifies the national values of liberty and reason. The French held Marianne in such high regard that the Statue of Liberty was sculpted in the form of a woman and gifted to the City of New York.
Heroines have been used as personifications of national virtues for a very long time in France, but the national psyche harbors a dangerous contradiction, for when night falls and the window curtains are drawn, households experience a high rate of domestic violence committed by men against women.
So many women are killed by their husband’s in France that one instinctively wants to reach out to tell the men to stop. One woman dies every three days from domestic violence in France, perhaps as many as 150 women victims in one year alone, suggesting that although the image of equality is ever present in French society, the public will to allow true equality has not been sufficiently developed to the point of women becoming truly free. For freedom to truly reign, one must be equal in the private life and in the public life.
The tenuous oscillation of advancing equality in peaceful societies is instead a violent clash of wills in France.
The fusion of sexual violence and physical violence resulting in the death of the female spouse in domestic situations is one of the most horrible of crimes being committed because the trust developed through love has become betrayed with unsettling, violent results, not unexpectedly once or twice, but predictably every three days throughout the year, with too little effort being employed to stop the violence.
Notions of equality have changed. Families are still part of the national fabric, but the dynamics within the family and within society have changed because of changing social expectations.
New forms of family have not won a competition over old forms of family. New forms of family have become more prominent as the traditional family has deconstructed under the shifting burdens of an ever changing social order.
Too much attention has been placed on sexual relations when what society requires are functional units within the government systems that can cooperate and be provided services most efficiently with as little disruption to the state as possible.
Family also involves socialization, economic and emotional sharing, and procreation not necessarily through sexual relations amongst members of the same family unit. For example, children may be conceived through outside surrogates and brought into the family unit as blood relations.
Moreover, the family unit as a system of relations within society does not need to include children, but instead may also involve a caregiver protecting, nourishing and socializing adults.
In all respects the just society practices inclusion and embraces divergence, as opposed to a society that practices exclusion and keeps difference disenfranchised on the margins of society.
Ancient Greeks believed in equality as long as the poor kept to themselves and served the aristocracy. If you were limited in abilities, you were equal as long as you received what was due you based on those limited abilities.
Much later, liberty became of great concern to the middle classes as protection against state authority, but within liberty old notions of equality prevailed so that even with liberty having been achieved, people did not have equality in the sense contemplated today. Liberty only protected people from the long reach of the state, but not interference from one another.
Even liberty eventually changed to become just one part of freedom.
Freedom is the ultimate goal now, not only equality and liberty, but freedom made in part from those corner stone concepts of liberty and equality that allow each person to experience freedom regardless of gender.
Equality has become something more than female icons and placing equal value on stereotypical gender roles. Women rightfully want more – more freedom from life, and more peace and tranquility in the household. People want the freedom to choose free from state intervention, particularly when different moral codes are at play within the same social setting. Imposing one set of morality onto a distinct set of moral codes is the fastest way forward toward conflict and violence.
Equal pay is an example of the difference between perceived equality and the real inequality women face in society. When women in the same employment as men receive less remuneration, equality becomes limited and freedom wanes. She is perceived to have an equal role in the economic order, but that perception of gender equality is a false one.
The sexual exploitation of movie actors is another example of gender inequality. The public perceives women as having important roles in film, but only the actor knows the backstage story on what she had to do to get there.
This real implementation of equality influences social identity. As a result, social power is attained by people believing, however erroneously, in possessing a greater share of equality within a system compelled by competition than they actually experience.
People must first take apart perceived equality, and then reassemble a free society based on real freedoms. Only through critically evaluating each element of society can real gender equality be achieved within a pluralistic society. If you want mono-cultures, there will be violence as individuals and groups struggle with structural tensions.
Society has several inequitable tenants, but if the world could repair certain inequities, society would be a better place for everyone. No one person remains free when other people are restricted in their thoughts or actions. One person’s freedom cannot come at the expense of another person’s equality because good karma goes a long way toward finding happiness along the life, journey continuum.
Freedom equally for everyone creates a much more dynamic cultural fabric that benefits everyone eventually. Integrating smaller societies with distinct moral and family identities goes further toward creating internal harmony than exclusion and having individuals and groups causing tensions on the periphery.
Every individual attains freedom by being able to make personal choices. Joan of Arc no doubt felt freedom by choosing to act like no other woman before her.
Marianne may only be a symbolic character of the revolution, but defining liberty and equality on the basis of gender equality, and then incorporating those definitions in a more modern society, would help everyone obtain a better sense of freedom. Everyone benefits when the state stabilizes competing aspects of society.
In domestic circumstances, personal choices may cause tensions within the family dynamic when one individual’s personal choice limits another individual’s personal choice, with little patience left to compromise. This struggle for equality is the classic question of liberty played out in the darkened living rooms behind curtained windows.
The right to liberty allows people to act as they choose to act so long as those acts do not interfere with another person’s liberty. So, the state often operates minimally – interfering just enough to ensure peaceful integration.
The need to compromise is but one condition of family as well. Individuals must be willing to compromise to maintain the family structure just as families must compromise to belong within a community of other families and individuals. One family cannot find freedom by enslaving a neighboring family.
People wishing to maintain the family unit must be continuously aware of the need to maintain an equilibrium of needs, wants and desires among all the members of the household just as that balance is essential to a peaceful and just society.
It’s odd that the French do not understand new notions of equality. Perhaps it is not that they do not understand, but that they faulter when implementing notions that still seem too awkward.
Partners were once sought as soul mates, which is just fine if you can find one, but for many people that level of union is as elusive as finding realty in a space fantasy. Families take a lot of work, not just to financially support a family but to stay together as a family. Freedom requires perseverance.
When the lights go down, and a loved one loses her life before morning, women are living in a state of constant fear. Even if she survives the night, when the man leaves the home for the day, there is that constant dread of his eventual return.
Fear of violence is one of the greatest obstacles to freedom and liberty.
This state of domestic affairs brings shame to much of the free world in which gender equality has become more and more the mantra.
If 52 per cent of the population are female and many of the 48 per cent of males support female equality, then what is the problem?
The problem is not really one of gender equality.
Families who struggle with maintaining an equilibrium may suffer from a lapse of functionality.
Someone has a dysfunction that needs to be dealt with in a positive way so that the entire family can move forward together as one. The perpetual cycle of abuse and violence must be broken despite what may often be intergenerational trauma.
Quite often a continuity of violence exists from generation to generation and from patriarch to patriarch that has no reason. Often, no one is to blame for the hardships when life becomes difficult in tinderbox circumstances.
This perpetual creation of victims and survivors over time may result in systemic barriers. People acquiesce, perhaps involuntarily in some deep metaphysical way, from the government officials allowing the perpetrator to obtain a weapon, to the police refusing to make the initial arrest that would have prevented a crime, to the judge refusing to convict the perpetrator as exemplary punishment, with many other people often searching for other reasons not connected to the victimization of the person lying in front of them in the morgue.
People have also become bound to their labors to such an extent that the importance of stopping domestic violence is beyond their contemplation.
The individual operates in conjunction with individual labors, whether a factory worker putting parts together on an assembly line or a farmer tilling the soil in advance of seeding for the next harvest.
While labour is held in high regard, what often distinguishes a person in society are those contributions to intellectual thought and art and other dynamic influences at play in the collective consciousness.
People however have sparingly little left at the end of the day, along with a bit of hunger and thirst, for more intellectual pursuits.
Labour is so important to individual consciousness that too much subservience to labour creates alienation from the rest of what the world has to offer. And yet, too little contributions to production results in alienation, because everyone else is caught up in the social identity impressed upon them by their part in the economic order.
People derive purpose from labor because they have been taught to. But real purpose comes from the intellect and relations with family and other intellects in society, while labor is more often than not just what we have to do to survive.
Often nobody is watching you at home, and nobody really cares about you at work except that you get to work on time and finish the day according to someone else’s production plan.
For those precious few hours left in the day, the darker side of humanity finds room to take hold. Individuals become consumed by nothing but brief passions after the factory has required the majority of everything else.
People have nothing left to give each other in the evening but the whip, after experiencing the chain all day long on the factory floor.
Life collapses around the means of production for the benefit of the factory owner, and too few other people. And to a certain extent the meaning of family has become lost amidst this rubble of deconstruction.
People have fixed concepts of who was who and who did what even though those concepts have now become more fluid with the day cut apart all in bits and pieces lying on the floor: the morning coffee pressed from an instant cup to save time at home for that long commute, perhaps taking the coffee into the car to save a bit more time for bossman, and then the so many repetitive tasks demanded per hour, so many tasks just short of requiring artificial intelligence to complete, all deconstruct the day into bits and pieces of time based on an unwritten agreement that people work to live and live to work.
The capitalist no longer owns employees as slaves, but the oligarchs still own your time.
Those quiet agreements do not necessarily work anymore, because deep in the background is the understanding that the day did not get the worker anywhere. To and froe and then back home again only to leave once more during the first moments of the next day.
All that chaos within a strict routine, put together by and for someone else, ends up as a personal disaster.
Marx’s Concept of Man, Erich Fromm, London: Continuum, 2004.
TITAN #2
MEGA SOCIAL MEDIA CORPORATIONS MINE METADATA FOR PLUNDER
OTC50 #78, February 4, 2022
T
he perception of the benefit outweighing the risk permeates the human condition ever more so within the digital universe than during the time before the world wide web.
The world is a much different place with this digital generation building virtual communities and making on-line friends that may or may not be who they say they are.
In this same way the Internet is not so much free speech building a path to a better democracy than an e-commerce marketplace, a logical progression in human development from hanging out all day in the shopping mall to following click bait leads through the cyberverse.
The Internet is a huge honeypot of consumers lured there for the financial exploitation of entrepreneurs. The ecommerce market is, however, becoming increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer megacorporations that make the viability of new start-ups more and more near unlikely.
Facebook is a hive not just for start-up businesses, but for established criminal organizations, large domineering corporations and power ambitious politicians.
The teenager in Seattle may not experience the depth of the risk that life on-line poses, but that good will generated in the affluent free world communities lures unsuspecting victims in poorer neighborhoods and the less transparent virtual streets of the developing world.
The Wallstreet Journal series on Facebook details the worst that can be expected of on-line ‘piracy’, but also that executives at the massive digital global corporation know about the problems and consistently do not do enough or nothing at all to fix them.
If CEO Mark Zuckerberg does not like your Facebook page, he simply engineers a fly in your newsfeed algorithm that slows, if not stops, the popularity of your posted content from rising.
The digital world looks easy, but success is just as riddled in obstacles and just as unlikely as starring in that winning Broadway play in the famed New York City theatre district.
Zuckerberg can change your future just as easily as he changed the corporate entity name from Facebook to Meta Platforms Inc or something like that (it’s still Zuckerberg’s Facebook) when he started to feel the political maelstrom coming. But one of the most influential CEOs on the planet, is so brazen that he chose a name that implies wrongdoing with people’s trusted personal information.
Metadata is a digital profile of a user’s on-line content, including personal profile information, that allows companies like Facebook and government surveillance organizations like the NSA (US National Security Agency) to find you, and profile you, even when you are in the bathroom.
The digital age, American anti-hero Edward Snowden discloses that the American government controls much of the digital universe, except for those parts controlled by China and perhaps Russia, kind of like competing at the online World Series with only three countries invited, and the Americans almost always hosting the competitions at home plate.
Snowden does not use the sports analogy, probably because he has been in exile in Moscow too long, especially too long since snacking on those roasted peanuts while taking in a baseball game.
But Snowden was not much of a sports fan, according to his own words in the autobiography, Permanent Record. No doubt Snowden wrote the memoir to make his case for anti-hero status by telling the world who he is and why he did what he did, and most of all, that he is as American as baseball and apple pie.
Snowden draws a picture of himself being more American than over 90 percent of Americans with ancestry back to the pilgrims escaping religious persecution on the Mayflower, and then a long line of service in the American military, including his parents stationed at Fort Mead while he was growing up.
Whereas Zuckerberg began his digital hacking career by copying an existing campus website and modifying the algorithm so college friends could rate each other worthy enough or not for the college dating circuit.
Sure you can twist your own personal truth, especially growing up a military brat with few witnesses to suggests the contrary, but you kind of got to crack a smile and believe Snowden when he says that at the age of 7, he tried to fix his dad’s 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System, but he lost a screw in the process and couldn’t quite get all the parts back into the gamebox before his dad came home from research work at the naval avionics electronics laboratory.
‘Little Ed’ found out at an early age that the truth out there in the real world is so complicated that playing computer games and searching the Internet for the facts of life is an over-simplification of the daily struggle to survive that many Americans face.
Snowden’s secret of tampering with the ‘boy toys’ was safe within the family though, as his parents both had top secret security clearance.
Like most hackers, Snowden likes to talk about his hacks, especially the really big ones, like the hack of the US National Nuclear Laboratory computer at Los Alamos. Snowden explains that at the age of 12, he just thought he would try the hack, and he just so happened to find the digital front door unlocked at Los Alamos.
I believe Ed’s telling of the progression from hacking bedtime rules to ratting on US President Barrack Obama’s surveillance program, and becoming the biggest anti-hero since US Military analyst Daniel Ellsberg.
That projection to stardom is more or less the same that Zuckerberg is on, according to former Facebook CEO and cofounder Chris Hughes, who published an editorial in the New York Times calling for the breakup of the ‘mega data mining corp’, Facebook.
Hughes confirms that Zuckerberg can personally change the algorithms on Facebook. Zuckerberg can switch you off like a light or turn you into a star on a whim. And the most influential person in the digital world takes a personal interest in doing so.
And like Bill Gates of Microsoft, as Gates was described in the first part of this series, Zuckerberg has an insatiable appetite to dominate the digital world. And Zukerberg does so by picking and choosing competitors to “acquire, block or copy”, according to Hughes.
“News Feed algorithms could change our culture, influence elections and empower nationalist leaders,” writes Hughes.
That ability to manipulate the culture and social engineer is a lot of power for an unelected capitalist whose favorite topic at Harvard was the expansion of the Roman Empire under Caesar Augustus.
The deepening concentration of American corporations should be of concern to the rest of the world, although not the presence of capitalism alone, but the size and breadth of economic and social influence of a legal entity operating within a loosely regulated free market.
These corporations have a long reach from America to the rest of the developed world, and easily influence everywhere else with billion dollar investments into digital infrastructure and the promise of thousands of new jobs.
By leaking the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and the Washington Post, Ellsberg revealed that the military generals knew that the Vietnam War was one hundred percent unwinnable and much, much riskier to the American public than of a benefit.
Ellsberg smuggled out top secret reports he had access to on behalf of the US contractor, the RAND Corporation. Snowden states the CIA uses contractors to shield their agent’s true purpose as government spies.
Snowden too was working on a report searching CIA computer databases when he stumbled onto operation honeycomb. Of course, once a hacker’s interest is peaked, a hacker continues to search for interesting top secret reads until the door is closed again.
“America remains the hegemon, the keeper of the master switches that can turn almost anyone on and off at will,” writes Snowden (p. 163)
Facebook users post content without charge and develop networks on-line and then give it all up when the NSA comes knocking with a silent warrant issued by a judge for that personal data stored on megacorp computer hard drives.
The perception created by social media companies is that the on-line world is freer and more open and fairer, almost more democratic than democracy itself, but in digital reality, the systemic flaws in the social order are condensed on-line like an archeological midden. Everything is compressed and exaggerated with this veil of authenticity and trustworthiness that has no grounding in reality.
The problem of privacy is exacerbated because the people who created the digital midden are still alive and vulnerable to manipulation if the social media company decides to sell the information contained in the metadata to advertisers or give the profiles up to the intelligence community knocking on the door with a silent warrant
And at the same time, the digital on-line world is much more dangerous than street life, because of the possibility of manipulation and the unassuming users caught in the honeycomb.
First, the algorithms are set to massage content, and then second, the data from the use of the content generated from the algorithms is sold to ecommerce corporations, potential advertisers or government surveillance agencies who convinced a judge to issue a silent warrant.
The added danger of that silent warrant is that no-one knows about the search and seizure of private personal information other than the government surveillance agency, the mega social media corporation mining metadata and the judge.
The moral use of metadata cannot be trusted. Social media engineers are called capitalists for a reason. And intelligence agents are called spies for a reason.
The factual matrix for silent warrants can be manipulated with dubious intent. Judges are not always right after being misled by the information advanced to obtain the warrants in a closed courtroom, or everyone involved in the process just having too much right wing bias to rationally consider the long term damage to individual civil rights protected by the constitution through which the next e-generation will have to muster.
The ownership of the facts and the manipulation of those facts control the real and virtual world order simultaneously as electioneers are discovering almost only too late.
Algorithms can change more than the popularity of your social media pages. The free world order and the politics of democracy are just as susceptible to algorithm fraud as consumer spending habits. Content does not just flow into the newsfeed. Algorithms direct content there more aggressively than some managing editors of national broadcasting corporations control prime time news.
The power of influence through content manipulation is one of the reasons Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos diversified his portfolio by purchasing the Washington Post. The national newspaper had been owned and operated by the Graham family, but the ‘ma and pa press’ was at risk of insolvency.
Billionaire Bezos purchased the Washington Post for $250 million USD and gradually restored some of the journalistic integrity to the historically influential newspaper. For politicians like former US Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Donald Trump, the sinking of the Post would have been the best possible outcome for a right wing democracy.
So, Bezos reinventing the Washington Post was probably a nightmare for the political right.
The newspaper barons of lore meet with business leaders and politicians from time to time, even inviting them into the newsroom to talk directly to journalists shaping the news. When Bezos turns the newsroom around from losing 400 of 1600 journalists to hiring 200, and meets regularly in DC with the editorial team, his presence is felt in the building and his influence must certainly at least indirectly affect the front page leads and opinion columns.
Bezos took a page out of Daimler, when the automaker bought Chrysler, and raided the Washington Post pension fund. The ecommerce tycoon then made moves like Citizen Kane and gave the newspaper a new life on-line in the digital age.
Tonya from North Dakota might have an opinion on the ongoing functionality of missile siloes, but whether that thought is grounded in the truth is as much of a guess as hers was. Journalist and editorial boards source out the facts for the opinion, whereas social media publishers at the most just look for red flag triggers of hate and homophobia and bigotry imbedded as tropes in the language.
Facebook is not protected by free speech. Social media posts are protected by an omnibus legislation drafted by the Senate and Congress and the Oval Office for the developing stages of the digital universe. The legislation was to foster limitless growth of ecommerce and the on-line world by protecting companies providing storage servers for virtual reality content.
But as Producer Jessica Chastain points out in the documentary about the sex trade, I Am Jane Doe (2017), the same legislation, protected by Congress and enforced by the Canadian and American judiciary to protect social media posts, also protects organized crime sites that prey on global innocence.
Free speech has nothing to do with young American girls being nurtured into sex slaves for fat belly yokels.
Zuckerberg, as do many Americans, haul out the freedom mantra every time digital publishing gets put under the hot spotlights of the mainstream press. Before the legislation, right wing crack pots and left wing wig heads would have to take out an ad or write a letter to their friends for their extremist opinions to be read. And the ads might not have gotten published either, while the letter might have got lost in the mail on a cold rainy night along the publishing trail.
Even national media, first of all, have limited space and resources to publish material, and second of all, have sophisticated editorial boards for vetting content, whereas social media companies have artificial intelligence programmed to identify language tropes, doing the work of seasoned journalist with advanced degrees from prestigious universities.
Facebook has artificial intelligence protecting, through non-feasance, fake news and libelous posts, in the name of free speech, originally published by algorithms and software patches.
Literally millions of Facebook users might not experience any adverse effects from an algorithm, but an entire nation an ocean away, such as India, might experience racial riots and have to live with a president they did not want as a result of the same lack of control, or in a darker telling of the world wide web, because of the intent to manipulate the information highway for profit.
No doubt, Zuckerberg drives a ‘big masheen’.
Meta Platforms Inc. (Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp) whitelists celebrities, influencers and other users that have either paid for their popularity or attract advertising revenue to their posts.
Celebrities with perfect lives, beautiful faces and perfect bodies lure in social media users and a heck of a lot of cash, just like talent does in Hollywood and TV time on national broadcasting networks.
In one year, in one virtual reality that merged with surviving the daily struggles on the city streets, Facebook made $152,000 in advertising for massage parlors.
According to the Wallstreet Journal Facebook Files, Zuckerberg can turbocharge the growth of political movements through the manipulation of the algorithm that determines what content ends up in what newsfeed in what political election.
Zuckerberg chose to help stop genocide in places like Ethiopia, while social media users in Indonesia have witnessed murders posted to their pages by video. And European political parties have shifted their real world political platforms to conform with the algorithm designed for their country.
Facebook has been developed pursuant to the other American free market capitalist value of make money now, whichever way but loose, and ask for forgiveness later.
With neglect, the digital universe can potentially become a test kitchen for socializing and building communities that eventually provide the blueprint for social engineering unplugged on street level.
When US President Barack Obama caught the digital wave of support on social media to win the national election in 2008, many people were still scratching their heads out of curiosity. But each successive presidential election has been more and more influenced by social media companies to the extent that concerns are now being raised about election rigging and vote tampering.
Zuckerberg only had to turn off 5% of the college vote to allow the Republicans to win in 2020, and less than 1% in pivotal swing states such as Arizona, Wisconsin and Georgia.
The power and influence that comes with controlling information is what has authorities so pissed off at Snowden and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. The information highway carries more than one message, but the ability to get the right message to the right people, at the right time carries significant political power, with the potential of immense wealth, future fortune and fame.
The ‘spies in our midst’ headlines were nothing short of embarrassing for America’s first black president, whose patriotism had been challenged during the campaigning. Opposition candidates even questioned whether Obama qualified to run for president by suggesting he was not born in the United States, which is just one of many nationalistic rules for presidential candidates meant to protect American values.
The government holds a lot of information that the public is not conscious of, creating a hacker’s paradise in search of damaging content when the ‘digital door is left open’ by agencies conducting matters in secret.
Snowden points out that the smart phone alone is a treasure trove of information. If the NSA wants to find you and find out everything about you, they just have to hack your smartphone for your present past history. And this hack may just occur without your knowledge.
Military intelligence agencies can access your metadata from social media and on-line usage with silent warrants, and then track you down in real time with your smart phone.
Once they cage you in a digital prison, the holders of the keys to your heart can track your heat signatures to tell whether you are standing up or sitting down when pissing in the pot they let you keep.
If you think you just have to turn off the WIFI, agents can follow your work on screen, before you even publish the content, with electromagnet pulses that reproduce your screen images on their computer screens.
Imagine not knowing what the agent next to the black site you have found yourself in can do to you, then imagine the virtual universe you are stuck in without Edward Snowden.
America asks for forgiveness later, almost always.
So, the digital age has Mark Zuckerberg acting like Caesar Augustus, and Jeff Bezos like Citizen Kane, Edward Snowden like Daniel Ellsberg, Elon Musk like Nicola Tesla, Bill Gates as Bill Gates, Bob Iger as famous as Mickey Mouse and Tim Cook… well that’s for the third part of our series in OTC50 Edition #79.
An Ugly Truth, by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang, New York, Harper Collins Publishers, 2021
The Permanent Record, by Edward Snowden, New York, Metropolitan Books, 2019.
Opinion/It’s Time to Break Up Facebook, by Chris Hughes, New York Times, May 9, 2019.
The Facebook Files, Jeff Horwitz, et al, Wall Street Journal, September 21, 2021 to November 9, 2021.
Amazon Unbound, by Brad Stone, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2021.
Fulfillment, by Alec MacGillis, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.
Power Play, by Tim Higgins, New York, Doubleday, 2021
ICONIC MOVIES
TAUTOU CHARACTERS PERSONIFY COSMO PARIS
A
n infant girl becomes a young woman amid a whimsical Parisian life shown apart from the iconic monuments that become limited by the camera to subtle backdrops.
In this way, the film’s protagonist remains the focus despite a complicated ensemble cast in a picturesque world capital.
The camera follows the girl muddling a bit through life, even in her early adult years, getting into trouble and finding adventure out of whatever she can in what is otherwise an ordinary day for Amelie Poulain in Amelie (2001).
Amelie’s friends are her widower father, a disabled grocery clerk bullied by the owner, a lonely senior citizen repainting a classic Renoir, and coworkers in a Parisian café all of whom contribute their own personal fantasies to the narrative.
Director Jean-Pierre Jeanet has a vision for his films that uses fantasy, realism and science fiction to tell uniquely French stories that resonate with international audiences.
In a Very Long Engagement (2004) the story of young lovers separated by World War I is told through a similar camera lens. When the fighting ends he does not come home from the front. Mathide doubts his death though, and begins researching what happened to him, forever holding out the faint hope that he will return one day.
Jeanet directs again a similar narrative of misadventure compelled forward along the narrative by various subconscious impulses at the center of the character’s profile. The importance of the story being told is underscored by much of France and the people of France having been adversely impacted by Word War I.
But all the creative camera work in the world cannot take the focus away from the enchanting acting of Audrey Tautou.
In The Davinci Code (2006) Sophie Neveu assists Robert Langdon in a discovery of Christian archeology and the lay meaning behind signs, symbols and scripture. Tautou plays in a supporting role but the camera subtly pays more and more attention to her character as she gradually becomes the real focus of the narrative.
Tautou’s acting is almost too enchanting to be considered real until she takes on biopic roles of French icons. Fantasy has now become real, a bit.
In Coco Before Chanel (2009) Tautou depicts Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel as a personification of the woman’s struggle to become independent in a world of patriarchy, old money and class. Tautou shows Coco struggling with life until an orphan child becomes a fashion icon.
In The Odyssey (2016) Tautou must apply aging cream to play Simone Melchoir, a family matriarch roughened up a bit by the sea, by smoking and by the hard work chasing all the other beautiful women off the ship. The Jacques Cousteau family is depicted as happy and content with life exploring the ocean blue – almost a life so good to be almost another French fantasy.
Tautou is good with humour and good with serious subject matters – this plodding scheming thinker almost meanders her way through films, sneaking in front of and away from the director’s camera with her petite physical presence, but clocking away screen time until she is once again the star of the film.
Tautou has well crafted acting art for her many acting accolades. She works her entire face and body to develop tone and character in synch with the script. The eyes shift about signaling the inner struggles of the character. The thin neck shows anxiety and despair. She hangs on to the ships railing to signify a tired argument for life on the sea.
In Amelie the ensemble cast are equally eccentric as the camera rolls from one scene to the next developing the narrative about how fragile relationships are in an otherwise mundane life.
Amelie is just a young women who still gets flustered by the riskier side of Paris, like an accidental audition for a position in a soft porn shop. Tautou’s face drops to show shock and despair in the same obscene phone call.
But Coco is just the opposite. Amelie still connects with her father, while Gabrielle was an orphan born with nothing only to become an international icon. Simone’s presence finds the middle ground on the deep sea exploring vessel, Calypso. And Audrey is all of them in front of the camera from time to time, depending on the film script.
Tautou gradually shifts this idea of her being likable like a daughter or a sister or best friend who everyone would like to have, or that barista you have grown attached to and want to ask out for a drink at your favorite Parisian café.
Often in the same film Tautou will show different sides to the same character, but then in another film the shift is more substantial requiring not a total reinvention, but a substantial creation in rephrasing the performance.
Tautou occasionally does one scene in a film from time to time in which she gives multiple cues in quick succession – like saying to the audience, if you have not guessed who I am yet, here I am in a montage of characteristics.
Were you correct?
Tautou is a French cinema actor telling bits and pieces of French culture in each film in a way that an international audience can deeply appreciate.
The talented actor does not need to be in every scene to maintain her presence as the film protagonist. Tautou has such screen presence that the audience is still thinking about the character between scenes until she comes around again for another turn in front of the camera.
The director adds a layer of art overtop. Jeanet, for example, is creative and inventive with the camera. All eyes remain on the screen as the camera takes the audience through the set from character to character.
Jeanet cheats a bit with movie magic and coupling images in the same scene to keep a certain level of active ownership. This panning into the set and then between coupled images creates a lot of action in a small space.
The lead actor in the main narrative also intermingles with other actors in the subplots, and she ends up omniscient as a result. Tautou does not share information about the main narrative with the other actors, though. So only the audience knows more than Tautou, having seen everything including the scenes not shared with her character.
Director Anne Fontaine has a difficult job of matching France’s iconic actor with the fashion icon, Coco Chanel.
The casting is difficult to believe at first but Fontaine introduces Coco as a penniless seamstress, moon lighting as a singer/dancer with her orphan sister in a type of vaudeville dance club. Gabrielle and her sister, Adrienne, dream of moving to Paris. Amelie is still unforgettable to audiences nine years later, so Fontaine starts off with an Amelie type story about how Chanel got the nickname Coco.
Coco gradually matures during the film and Tautou seems to belong to the part more and more, while Fountaine creates a beautiful biopic film around the idea of struggle and success without creating a costume drama or a period piece.
Tautou shows that life is about relationships and making the most out of the semblance of love and affection that people do find along the way.
Coco finds happiness, love and success incrementally, but also intrinsically simultaneously connected to class wealth and female fashion.
Ultimately, French cinema becomes as intimate and detailed as Parisian life to the Parisians, and Tautou becomes a French cinema icon.
Tautou’s characters are often on an adventure of discovery of some sort, but in the end, the talented actor is so endearing that the audience goes on an adventure of its own, doing mental work following her about, having to catch up to her at times, and quite often worried about where she is and where she will end up – which are all the signs of a true cinematic star.
