I published a few essays last week about entertainment that I’d like to recommend to our PoMoCon readers. First, over at Law & Liberty, I reviewed a new volume of pop culture criticism from a libertarian point of view, dedicated to the memory of & including one of the last essays by Paul Cantor, friend & board member of the American Cinema Foundation in his spare time from being the eminent Shakespearean of his generation & a wonderful teacher.
Paul was a big fan of TV, always had the TV on, & enjoyed wrestling & reality TV, not just prestige drama; he liked the democratic confidence & ingenuity of much lowbrow entertainment. Hence his writing on Shark Tank:
Cantor presents the show as the ideal of middlebrow art, a combination of entertainment & education. The education is primarily offered by experienced investors to aspiring entrepreneurs, whose businesses they might or might not buy into, &, by extension, to the audience as well, since anyone might get it into his head to start a business, if he can think of a product people might really want. This requires taking chances rather than being cautious, which makes the entrepreneur an interesting & impressive figure, since he innovates: “This is a principle that Shark Tank repeatedly illustrates. The entrepreneur is the visionary who paradoxically know what people want before they even know what it is.”
Next, over at Acton, I wrote about The Firemen’s Ball, a movie by Miloš Forman, showing the corruption of community by Communist tyranny, in his native Czechoslovkia:
The plot of The Firemen’s Ball is simple & quite farcical. In a small provincial town, a brigade of volunteer firemen wants to honor its retired chief at its annual ball, which also includes a raffle & a beauty pageant. These old men are our protagonists, hard at work imitating, & competing with, the Western capitalist world’s fun & games, but with meager resources & scant knowledge of the matter. They’re also attempting to dignify the whole social arrangement & uphold some form of public spirit. Since it’s a comedy, you can already guess that these fine intentions turn out to mean playing with fire. The comedy is about how each aspect of the proceedings fails & how the demands of the authorities, sometimes seeming more reasonable, other times hysterical, fail, since they’ve little or no legitimacy & not much more competence.
Finally, for the Washington Free Beacon I wrote about two documentary miniseries about basketball legends Wilt Chamberlain & Bill Russell, whose rivalry led the NBA in the 1960s to amazing athletic shows:
Russell & Wilt show us two sides of America. Wilt is all about the meritocracy, as we call it, but if we were to speak without a moralizing jargon, we’d say that this love of victory is about transforming freedom into excellence. In America, we often want the best man to win. We wish to be lifted up to a higher level ourselves. The achievement of excellence is in a way even patriotic—fulfilling the American dream, acting on the hopes we all share.
Russell is all about leadership, about bringing people together for common success, thinking about winning games & winning championships rather than standing up for himself. Russell was also an important voice for civil rights for black people, both as an athlete & helping activists in Mississippi & elsewhere at a time when this, unlike sports, required real courage. Bill Russell was also a successful writer, because he liked to reflect on his experience & criticize people, more or less as a teacher would—it’s why he was also a good coach.
The common concern here is what do these societies admire? The Czechoslovaks under Communist tyranny admire nothing, Forman’s movie suggests; they don’t really come together, therefore. The Communists wish to beautify force, the military, but are inept.
Now, the two spectacles about America show something different. The NBA is part of American love of victory—sports allow men to reveal their power in a society that is largely against manliness. This, in turn, is part of American democracy, since sports allow the men who make up the audience to claim a certain importance for themselves as supporters of the team. Of course, race & civil rights come into the picture, too, but the important thing is to notice that unlike ‘60s America, it is no longer possible for men to publicly show themselves as passionate & possessive—neither the athletes nor their admirers.
Shark Tank shows Americans as businessmen, aspiring entrepreneurs, chasing after money & success, earning applause in the process. American freedom is somehow involved in all this—Americans aren’t simply workers for the boss, but to some extent their own bosses; but at the same time, the boss of all American entrepreneurs turns out to be the American people, the great continental democracy whose desires & opinions cannot easily be predicted & which are not even easily persuaded…
"The Firemen’s Ball" sounds interesting; reminds me of Krtek, the Czech ripoff of Mickey Mouse
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mole_(Krtek)