13 Conversations About One Thing (2001)

RATING:	40%
FORMAT:	DVD

(Image: http://www.allmovie.com/)

Ostensibly about Happiness, but really detailing its widespread absence from Western culture.

The characters are volitionally self-pitying & unlovable; choosing to scapegoat others: They are addicted to their problems in the vain hope of escaping affectless existences.

The movie cannot demonstrate if happiness exists nor does it make a clear distinction between the luck you make yourself and that with which you are born.

A self-obsessive other-fixation explains unhappiness here and few possess the courage to see this or to want to have good working-relationships with themselves.

There is no appreciation in this movie that Whites tend to worry-themselves-miserable about happiness, as no other culture does.

A dishonestly-solipsistic movie (such narcissism being a major source of unhappiness, to begin with), such that the authors of this tract write about a subject they know as little about as do their fictitious characters.

Copyright © 2013 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

Chagrin et la Pitié [Sorrow and the Pity] (1969)

RATING:	60%
FORMAT:	DVD

(Image: http://fouducinema.com)

Inevitably, this film is too long to support its content, but it does exert a morbid fascination. It asks: What did you do in the Occupation, Daddy? a question that re-lives the sorrow and the pity of that occupation.

People consider more what they have to lose than to gain, which is why so few joined the Maquis while so many claimed to be members. The greatest pleasure in this film is watching a bunch of aging Frenchmen animatedly reminisce about their days in the Resistance. Essentially a band of misfits who would likely never have come together for any other reason, they found war to be their route to selfhood. War clearly brings out the best in people as well as the worst.

The guilt and shame of postwar France comes from the widespread political collaboration, with the Germans, of Vichy: Essentially rendering themselves a pro-German Axis power. The endemic anti-Semitism of French culture led French police to help the Nazis find Jews and become vigorously complicit in the Holocaust. French laws were even more racist than German ones as genetic murder is an effective means of eliminating the economic and political competition.

As it can be difficult to separate a German from a Nazi, it can be hard to distinguish a patriot from a collaborator. It is all too easy to condemn collaborators, from the outside, but this is morally-complex territory. The fact that France was the only country involved in the Second World War occupied by Nazi Germany to agree an armistice - rather than simply surrender - damns the whole country as collaborationist. Of all the occupied lands, the French were the most conscientious rounders-up of jews for transportation to the gas chambers; leading one to the conclusion that France is as endemically anti-semitic as Germany. This is as good an example as any of the recurrent bouts of European phenotypism that regularly comes to the surface.

The political defeat of France in 1940 was inevitable but the military failure was not since France possessed a more powerful military than Nazi Germany. The Germans exploited this by partitioning France and thus dividing it against itself.

The lack of moral complexity of this documentary is evinced in contemporary issues such as the ethical difficulty of being White in a country unhealthily obsessed with skin pigmentation. Or a Westerner in a world apparently running out of the resources Westerners are squandering.

The ultimate moral issue is food since without it one cannot be a moral entity - the dead are amoral, after all. If the Third World starves, the First will not take the food from its children's mouths to feed it. If a qualified Black is not hired because he is black, the less qualified White then employed would not renounce his post if he learned of this.

Collaboration is more complex than this film admits since the movie never draws any useful parallels with other areas of collaborationist thought and activity.

The occupation of ones homeland is a classic example of discovering what people are really like. They are usually very willing to exploit the unethical advantages of collaboration to obtain financial advantages. A give-me-your-watch-and-I’ll-tell-you-the-time point made more simply and more profoundly in a thriller like Inside Man. The narrow moral focus here is as unethical as the collaboration being condemned.

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Copyright © 2013 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

Up Till Now (2008)

RATING:	80%
FORMAT:	Book

(Image: http://www.amazon.co.uk/)

Never more than a mediocre actor with a strong streak of narcissism and solipsism, William SHATNER is, nevertheless, very funny indeed. The sheer chutzpah of the man has to be seen to be believed and, despite his now great age, he still retains his impulsive desire to try out new experiences - despite the danger.

The humour does wear a little thin at over three-hundred pages; combined with a decided lack of self-insight, but this is a quick, enjoyable read. Although this subjective memoir is not very profound in its insights into life, again, it is very funny.

Copyright © 2013 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

PYGMALION IN THE CLASSROOM: Teacher Expectation and Pupils’ Intellectual Development (1992)

RATING:	80%
FORMAT:	Book

(Image: http://www.amazon.com/)

Apart from its academic nature, that makes wading through statistical tables onerous, this is a fascinating look at self-fulfilling prophecy - as such - and, particularly, at negative self-fulfilling prophecies.

The fully-evidenced idea is that children defined as disadvantaged are expected by teachers to be unable to learn; that the label Underprivilege is largely responsible for the so-called underprivilege.

Thus, poverty alleviation programs can only work if it is accepted that all students can perform well, educationally, despite their socio-economic circumstances. A tall order, indeed, given the entrenched vested-interests such a call-to-arms involves confronting - especially the intransigence and laziness of the teaching profession, itself.

Clearly, such prophecies have implications in politics - especially with regard to White supremacy, sexism and social class. Someone who is told from an early age that Black people or women are intellectually-inferior; that the poor are congenitally-unable to be anything but poor and/or that they possess poor personal hygiene, is likely to come to actually believe such claims - regardless of the evidence - and spend their adult lives treating such people as inferior. It is also likely, in such circumstances, for the three example groups to start behaving in relation to their treatment rather than in terms of their actual abilities and character.

The refusal to treat people (including oneself) as an individual - rather than as an exemplar of a social group - leads to the inevitable conclusion that many people define themselves by their treatment as children, even after they have become adult, and not by their actual innate abilities and interests. Children told they are stupid are far more likely to become stupid adults.

Politically, self-fulfilling prophecy can become a simple method of social control and engineering, with the downside that when a technologically-advanced culture upgrades its technology, entire groups of people are unfit for the new employment possibilities so created because they have been told that change, for them, is impossible.

That the solution to this well-known social phenomenon is as obvious and as easy-to-implement as it is uncommon, means people cling to such beliefs out of malice. For example, in education, there are really no good students only good teachers; the quality of ones education having less to do with ones own intellectual abilities, than those of the teacher.

Thus, studies suggesting the genetic inferiority of either the poor or Blacks are nothing more than self-fulfilling - especially as such studies are never conducted by either the poor or the Black, themselves.

Terms like “Disadvantaged” and “Underprivileged” are the real problems people so labeled experience, not the social circumstances such designations allege they point out. Scholastic improvement is much more closely-related to teacher attitudes and aptitudes than it is to the socio-economic origins of scholars; meaning it is better to learn alone than in bad company.

Copyright © 2013 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.