Mungo's Custard Fudge

A place where boredom, television and general culture collide.

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Last month, a group of British scientists found that comedians are more likely than regular people to exhibit psychotic traits, or the characteristics associated with people who have schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. Writing in the British Journal of Psychiatry, the authors describe how they administered a questionnaire to 523 comedians, 364 actors, and 831 people with non-performance jobs. The survey asked about experiences with magical thinking, antisocial behavior, distractibility, and “introverted anhedonia,” or not deriving pleasure from others. Comedians and actors alike scored higher than the non-performers across almost all of the traits. The only difference was that comedians were more likely to experience a reduced ability to feel social and physical pleasure, but the same wasn’t true of actors. Comedians, more so than the regular folk or even actors, were more likely to have a mild distaste for humanity.

"The Dark Psychology of Being a Good Comedian" - Olga Khazan in The Atlantic

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There’s always been an anecdotal link between comedy and inner turmoil, but the empirical evidence has started to back it up. In the 1920s, the psychologist Lewis Terman found that children rated as having a good sense of humor by their parents and teachers died younger as adults. A longitudinal study of Finnish police officers found that the funniest among them were more likely to be obese and to smoke. And an analysis of New York Times obituaries found that performers died nearly eight years younger than members of the military did.

- Olga Khazan

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It’s not easy to critique a show that is at once deliberately alienating in its themes and shamelessly ingratiating in its packaging. “Mad Men” wants you to find it twisted and layered and dark, but it also wants you to buy it.

MATTHEW BRANDON WOLFSON IN SALON

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For the viewer, it’s a pretty easy pill to swallow: We get our escapism, minus the guilt. We can admire Don’s certainty and his sexual appetite while judging him for his prejudices, just as we soak in Betty’s poise while pitying her for her limited possibilities. But as a critic, it can be hard to reconcile the show’s competing aims: the fact that an embedded critique of commercialism basically serves as a commercial itself.

MATTHEW BRANDON WOLFSON IN SALON

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In “You’ll Love the Way It Makes You Feel,” Greif accused the series of overdramatizing history solely for the purpose of making its audience feel at once superior and titillated: “Beneath the Now We Know Better is a whiff of Doesn’t That Look Good. The drinking, the cigarettes, the opportunity to slap your children!”

MATTHEW BRANDON WOLFSON IN SALON

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“Mad Men” claims insight into a historical period, and then sentimentalizes it to sell product. Assessing the series’ quality becomes an exercise in distinguishing where “Mad Men” is pandering to its audience versus where, if at all, it has anything of substance to say about the period and the people who populated it.

MATTHEW BRANDON WOLFSON IN SALON

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it’s an over-costumed soap opera whose success says more about the needs of modern American viewers than any intrinsic artistic merit

MATTHEW BRANDON WOLFSON DISCUSSES "MAD MEN" IN SALON 

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A 'Stiff Grope' for Authenticity: Why Critics Hate Mad Men

Some insulting things critics say about Mad Men:  (from this article by Matthew Brandon Wolfson)

Mark Greif in the London Review of Books calls the show an “unpleasant little entry in the genre of Now We Know Better.” (read here)

In the New York Review of Books, Daniel Mendelsohn accuses the show of "historical glibness". (read here)

Jenny Diski in Harpers called the show “puppetry, rather stiff in its groping for authenticity.” (read here)

Marc Tracy in The New Republic says the show has a “trying-too-hard brand of seriousness.” (read here)

 Article: How “Mad Men” became the most controversial show on TV by Matthew Brandon Wolfson in Salon. 

[akraticwolf]

He is the Dude. His rumpled look and relaxed manner suggest a man in whom casualness runs deep. 

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For the Cookie Jar Collection Tin: The Lingering Shadow on Aronofsky's Black Swan

Aronofsky has a new film out, which got me thinking back to Black Swan; a film that that always made me wonder about the danger of male auteruship; and how things that look really good can be bad for you (a running theme in my life hence DONUTS)

I will reserve my own feelings for a day when I can robustly consider them without ending up clawing my back and shredding feathers over it. For now, here are some crumbs I've gathered from the web. For the critical collection tin. 

One of the reasons I feel this film is chauvinistic is that the girl-on-girl sex and masturbation scenes are there to sexually thrill (be it for a male or female audience). Apparently after Aronofsky asked Portman how they could get men to go watch a ballerina movie, Portman suggested they throw in a lesbian scene.  

- Source: Full of Sound and Fury

Aronofsky, on being asked about the charge of misogyny, goes on to explain the 'complexity' of Vincent Cassel's ballet-teacher character, Thomas Leroy: 

He calls the women girls, he dominates them, and you've set him up as this figure of dominating masculinity in a movie that's otherwise all about women. Is that a comment on the role of gender dynamics in the ballet world?

Natalie connects it to any kind of male-dominated system. Sure, you can read into that, and think about it that way. She feels the film is a real feminist movie. 

[...]

There are certain cliches, but as Hubert Selby Jr. used to say to me, "It's called a cliche because it's often true." But it's not just that. The Vincent character was a really hard obstruction for Mark [Heyman], the writer, because it's very easy to make him one thing. But what he did, and what Vincent ran with, is he kind of is an artist. Even though he's this manipulative pig, it's all about the art. There's a nice balance and complexity. That whole scene with Natalie when he tells her to go touch herself, it's really not that out of line. It's very aggressive, but he's just trying to get on with it.

 - Aronofsky interview at Cinema Blend 

A description of the exchange that takes place between Cassel and Portman's characters: 

He gets Nina back to his palatial apartment, asks about her sexual history, and tells her to go home and masturbate so that she can learn to lose control. What in other workplaces would be grounds for sexual harassment charges is presented as legitimate—if self-serving—artistic coaching. Nina tries to maintain her dignity but later goes back to her bedroom—the one wallpapered with pink butterflies and decorated with stuffed animals and a music box that plays, yes, the theme from Swan Lake—and practices what he preached. 

[...]

And guess what? In a film where the sexual predator is an older man, the most graphic, soft porn sex is between two young women. Who’s watching now?

- Debra Cash at Alternet 

To end off, sample this lovely little rant at Pop Culture Haterade which says of the film's direcotr: 

he relishes in documenting abject human misery (particularly the sexual misery of women) obscured by a patina of faux-realism and with all the empathy and compassion of Ted Bundy

 - Pop Culture Haterade

[saltriverjordan]

James Baldwin on Sentimentality in 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'

"Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty."

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Fudge Bite Writing Technique: A little guide to Plot Dumping, or 'Exposition'

From TV Tropes:  "Intensive infodumping about the world itself (called Expospeak) is most commonly used in Speculative Fiction, where the reader cannot necessarily make assumptions about the way the fictional universe works. Some Speculative Fiction writers, such as Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams, make a virtue of their infodumping (which can sometimes go on for pages) by making it funny and therefore pleasurable to read. Writers of less comedic works must work hard to avoid heavy infodumping unless they are sure that they can make it entertaining. Many choose to avoid intensive infodumping altogether through the use of supplemental material. If the character does it repeatedly, then he or she is Mr. Exposition."

Continue reading 

Wikipedia entry on Exposition: 

"Incluing is a technique of world building, in which the reader is gradually exposed to background information about the world in which a story is set. The idea is to clue the readers into the world the author is building, without them being aware of it. This is in opposition to infodumping, where a concentrated amount of background material is given all at once in the story, often in the form of a conversation between two characters, both of whom should already know the material under discussion. (The so-called As you know, Bobconversation.)"

Continue reading

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Does TV have a misogyny problem?

An interesting discussion television, HBO, and the unnecessary use of misogynistic themes and representations. The author wonders whether the disclaimer, 'it's authentic', can discharge the worries some may have over television's gratuitous content. 

http://faustusnotes.wordpress.com/2011/08/12/a-game-of-thrones-and-the-misogyny-of-imagined-worlds/

Shows you what a misogynist I am - when I saw the title of this post I immediately assumed the article had to be written by a woman (because duh what guy doesn't love a good rape scene). Turns out it's by a dude, so.  

[theatlantic]

My Parents, the Real Mad Men

My father saw one episode of Mad Men and refused to watch any more. “You don’t make great ads by drinking and screwing all day!” was his angry objection to a show that he felt insulted the work he’d given his best years to.

As creative director at the Detroit ad agency Campbell-Ewald during precisely the same years that Mad Men portrays, my father, Thomas Murray, had poured his heart into making better advertising for what was the biggest client in the world, General Motors. 

And now some TV creeps were going to use all that as a stylish backdrop for a drama about decadence?

Over his dead body.

Since Dad died in 2009, I’ve been researching the contribution he and the other 1960s ad men made in the hopes of helping Mad Men fans learn what they missed by seeing that world through the filter of Don Draper’s preposterous drinking and casual sex. In a memoir I’m working on, I hope to commemorate the earnest, occasionally fierce, and almost moral devotion of 1960s advertising people to making more communicative, more candid, more human advertising for conservative corporate clients. 

Yes, but what about all the interoffice grab-ass? Was it really like that?

I’d say no, except I’m the product of it—but of a version that also contrasts significantly with the portrayal in Mad Men, and connects more coherently with how we live and work today.

Read more. [Image courtesy of David Murray]