Solution to First Cause of Noir: the Afghan Counterfactual with WaPo update

here are the key slides from Tuesday's lecture.  The question is whether our favorite thing, detection, can deal with forces that seem clearly outside the bounds of reason.  The process of observation-inference-(re)framing depends on a certain amount of (and faith in) rationality.  Torture, mass murder, and invasion are three things that seem to break those boundaries and render reason, analysis, and negotiation fairly useless.  International and domestic law have exemptions for self-defense: you can't bargain with someone who's shooting at you, etc.  But what about short, medium, and long-term, once the immediate threat is past?

 

The police have to treat even the most extreme atrocities as a matter of criminal procedure--once the immediate threat is past.  (In the recent London Bridge attack, the suspect was shot dead on the scene, on the theory that he posed an ongoing immediate lethal threat.  The victims were in the area attending a conference on educational programs in UK prisons called Learning Together.  But again, outside of immediate self-defense:

 There have been very serious problems with the 2002 Afghanistan invasion defined narrowly as a search for the authors of the 9/11 attacks.

 So, what about  . .

 Actually, after invading Afghanistan (we're still there), and invading Iraq (we're still there but the government is controlled by Iran), we did the criminal investigation thing and found the perpetrator--in a nice town Pakistan!   Criminal investigation worked!

 so we get to this:

The claim here is that after initial hostilities, war can be replaced with investigative procedure and criminal justice.  (Societies often have other reasons for preferring war, e.g. Causes 1-5 . . .)

Don't forget our other theme, brought to you by all our detectives plus economic analysis (overview by one of my colleagues is here): do your first choice field.

UPDATE: The Washington Post published the Afghanistan Papers on December 9th, called, as noiristas might predict, "At War with the Truth."  Original research and archival material. 

Sixth Cause of Noir: Gangster Democracy

One meaning of this term is literal: when gangsters take over governments.  Remember the elements we saw in the opening clip of The Glass Key. 

Madvig, the amiably sociopathic mob boss, plans on becoming governor as a "reformer."

Noir is connected to a broader, second meaning: elected politicians running things as they see fit, with little accountability and plenty of deception.  The philosopher of this mode of rule was Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), author of The Prince and Secretary of the Florentine republic. 

 Lest you think this classic doesn't apply to large democracies, remember that some of the most successful political consultants in modern history have read it religiously, particularly Lee Atwater, who worked for the Bush family, and who mentored Karl Rove, senior advisor to George W. Bush and mastermind of many national Republican electoral victories.

Here's the summary slide you would have seen last Tuesday if the Cave Fire hadn't canceled lecture.  Read it slowly!

Normally we think that in a democracy people go into politics not to enrich themselves or amass power, but to promote well-being, social justice, progress, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  Well, at least some of us do.  Machiavelli thought that was sentimental nonsense--as do most of the rest of us. He narrowed the scope of the "prince" or ruler's activities from  pursuing self-interest (money, power, estates, etc) to pursuing the subjection of all others.  The prince's only job is to dominate, to have power superior to others, to compel obedience. All the other stuff, like building infrastructure or cutting income taxes, is an attempt to trick people into subjecting themselves.

Noir Cause 6 is the tendency of people in organizations, even when nominally democractic, to seek to subject others to their will--and to lie and deceive in order to do this. 

The literal realization of this is corrupt government.  As noir literature and film took off in the 1930s, many people were worried about mob control of government officials for the sake of getting contracts and other favors.  We talked about Chandler's cynicism about corruption in the police. Same for Mosley in a  different way.   Here's another slide about this.

 Do the munchkins rule? That is, small property owners, as Easy Rawlins wanted?  Gilens and Page conducted a big study that compared voter preferences to actual policies.  What they found is on the next slide.

The point is that the US isn't a democracy in the classical sense, in which the preferences of majorities of ordinary voters decide policy.  It also isn't run by gangsters, exactly.  Outcomes are most influenced by well-organized elites.  Democratic procedures don't yield democratic outcomes.

The term that the political scientist Jeffrey Winters uses for this is "civil oligarchy." He describes the U.S. this way. It's a system of laws, but the laws systematically favor elites over ordinary people.  Another term that is sometimes used is "post-democracy"--a political system that is democratic in form but elitist in outcome.

Machiavelli would have predicted this.  It's a norm in noir culture-- in the US, and elsewhere.

Here's our full list of Noir Philosophers, in chronological order:

Example of Anti-Noir: Accepting Negative Feelings (vs. Cause 2)

In this post I'm going to connect Philip Marlowe to Mr. Rogers.  Bear with me.

It's that time of the course when we look for antidotes.  There's Noir Cause 2, "unprocessed romantic loss." What does that mean? The example I gave was the passage in The Long Goodbye where Marlowe thinks Eileen Wade is coming on to him, gets interested, changes his mind, flips out, runs away, and then drinks until he passes out.  It's one of those anomalies that needs explaining. A slide from October 15th:

My claim was that if Marlowe doesn't see himself as the dominant figure in the situation--the head guy in charge-- he flips instantly to feeling humiliation. That's what he'll feel if he loses control, or isn't the person in control.   He then experiences himself as the inferior person in the very unequal structure typical of being "in love."  He is terrified of the possibility of being rejected.

Of course this is a common condition: we're all susceptible to having our feelings massively hurt when somewhere we're attracted to isn't attracted to us.  It's not so bad, however, if we have attachments to other people to whom we don't feel inferior and who won't humiliate us.  In lecture, I argued that Marlowe doesn't have these attachments, and he tends to sabotage all prospects of them (with Terry Lennox or Linda Loring).

I inferred from his behavior that Marlowe is attached to some lost person.  In this sense, he is a classic melancholic, enduring that condition in which the lost object is brought into the self and preserved there. It becomes confused with the self, and it's hard for someone like Marlowe to find his identity as separate from that lost object and not missing it. (This struggle happens to many of us when we pine for someone for months or years, long after we are supposed to have "moved on with our lives"--moved on to an attachment to someone else.)

The key outcome is weakness of self-identity, or a sense of inferiority.  This increases the tendency to latch on to (apparently superior) people, in this case the "unclassifiable" blonde. This doesn't strengthen the self, but keeps it in the same state of dependency, inferiority, and resentment.  This in turn can lead to behaviors like Marlowe lunging at Eileen Wade and then running away.

It's possible to overcome this condition--it happens all the time. But it requires facing negative feelings, particularly the sense of inferiority.  This sense surfaces in that passage in The Long Goodbye. This won't change for Marlowe as long has he doesn't face his negative feelings (like fear of humiliation) but keeps them repressed.  Facing them would involve identifying the lost object(s) whose permanent, unacknowledged loss produces his sense of sadness or weakness, and gradually letting go of it (them). Instead, what Marlowe does is find temporary substitutes, and acts out being in charge and dominant.  This masks inferiority, temporarily.  Then the whole thing happens again.

You probably know that A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is in theatrical release, with Tom Hanks playing Mr. Rogers.  My favorite commentary so far is, It's a Terrible Day in the Neighborhood, and that's OK.  It's worth reading in full. Here's a good moment:

Despite his sweet pastor’s demeanor, Rogers was tuned into our souls’ darkest feelings. He had an uncommon appreciation for anger, fear, stress, sadness, disappointment and loneliness. He respected the range of emotions and encouraged children to accept all their feelings as natural. . . . Rogers believed that variations of the “sticks-and-stones” adages intended to get kids to “shake it off” are stifling; they abandon children to their pain instead of teaching them how to process it. In contrast, Rogers encouraged children to face their dark feelings.

After a couple of paragraphs on Aristotle (also interesting), the author, Mariana Alessandri, continues:

Aristotle would discourage us from shaming ourselves over feeling sad when we “should” feel happy. He rejected “shoulds” altogether when it came to feelings, since he believed them to be natural and, without accompanying wrong action, harmless. All feelings, for Aristotle, are potentially useful in that they provide an opportunity to practice behaving well. Feelings alone can’t jeopardize virtue, he believed, but actions can and often do. Mister Rogers agreed: “Everyone has lots of ways of feeling. And all of those feelings are fine. It’s what we do with our feelings that matter in this life.”

Rogers believed that all children (and adults) get sad, mad, lonely, anxious and frustrated — and he used television to model what to do with these difficult and often strong emotions. He wanted to counter the harmful message kids typically receive, some version of the ever-unhelpful you shouldn’t feel that way.

Mr. Rogers is talking about "processing" emotions, or what Freudians call "working through."  We don't have easy, direct access to these feelings or their causes--hence the value of other people, particularly professional therapists, who help.   But it's a start on what we're looking for-- a reversal of Noir Cause 2.

Small and Monopoly Property

We saw Easy Rawlins get screwed out of locally-owned Freedom Plaza in Black Betty. We saw in Chinatown a syndicate of wealthy private interests buy farmlands that they could make a fortune turning into suburbs because of publicly-funded water projects (the bond issue).   Marx is one of our Noir Philosophers for saying why this concentrated power is a problem--for workers and for society.  Below I've posted the 5-point slide plus a second slide.  Below the slides, I've pasted in a story about a Manhattan hardware store that is closing.

In lecture, I suggested a solution that the course materials offer is small property plus democratic control over key aspects of the economy.  This latter issue is very much at issue in the 2020 election.  The "noir" take is that it's completely unrealistic--the strong always rule the weak, who conform to them.  So the critique of monopoly capitalism would need also to deal with those social and psychological issues.

And Happy Thanksgiving!

"The Life and Death of the Local Hardware Store"

Note that the author, a professor at Columbia Law School who writes about tech and internet law, is frustrated with the psychology of people who would rather shop on Amazon than in a hardware store even though Amazon means they often buy the wrong stuff.  Have we learned things in this course that might help explain this mystery?

You Must Read / Watch the Assigned Material BEFORE I Lecture on it, NOT AFTER!!

Here's why.  Once upon a time, there was a long period after World War II when the U.S. economy needed armies of employees to do routine white-collar jobs.  These were mostly "middle-skill" jobs.  They paid mid-level salaries that paid for for middle class lives.

Public universities expanded quickly to crank out large numbers of white-collar workers.  UCSB went from being a teacher's college to a research university in about 10 years.  Enrollments multipled by 5.  Passive learning was fine for most of the situations these graduates would face in their office jobs: take in information, process it accurately, reproduce it correctly.  The job would often be following instructions that other people write for you, like your bosses.  To simplify, higher-skill people would write the scripts for the mid-skill jobs.  High-skill people decided things, and mid-skill employees operationalized them.  Large lectures were pretty good formats for people learning to follow semi-complicated instruction sets in those large middle levels of big companies.   Other things being equal (they weren't but bear with me), learning to do this meant a decent salary, a pension, health benefits, two cars in the garage, a chicken in every pot, etc.

That world is gone.  Parts of it should and could come back--I don't at all condone precarious working conditions and uncertain job pathways. Nor do I think precarity helps make people smarter, more creative, and more competitive. (We're talking about the background economic issues in Chinatown.)   But whatever I think, it's my job to help prepare you for what comes after college.  The main thing I need to do is help you all be high cognitive skill people who have a chance to avoid the shrinking pool of (often boring) routine jobs and get into high-skill jobs that are more interesting and challenging.

Passive learning won't help you with this.  Active learning will.  (It's a necessary but not a sufficient condition for acquiring high-level cognitive skills.) 

Here's the slide I showed in lecture on November 7th.

Active learning requires bringing pre-existing knowledge to bear on the material being presented in lecture (or while you are reading or watching something) .  Active learning means making connections between things you already know (and are re-learning by recalling them) and things you are seeing for the first time.

In the case of a novel or film for this course, you can bring things you've learned in other courses (attachment theory from a psych course for example) to bear on what's happening in lecture.   Most importantly, you need to bring what you personally know about the work I'm discussing into contact with what you are hearing me saying.  If you're not making connections, you're not learning. You're just transcribing stuff on the theory that you'll learn it later by remembering it when you actually do watch the film or read the book.  Here's the problem: This destroys active learning in lecture.  It lowers your learning overall (you will learn less later on your own).  It reduces what you get out of the class, including ideas that you can use in other courses and later in life.

So that is why Requirement 1 for this course is "Read Texts On Time." Now more than ever.  

The Course's Claims in the Wider World

Detective Fiction has used an observation-inference process to make some claims.  The operating assumption of the course is that people's shouldn't trim their claims to fit their (incomplete or sloppy or limited or lazy or doctrinaire) evidence, but make strong, interesting claims and then search for the evidence to back them up.  (And if they can't find the evidence, then they are supposed to fix, drop, or replace the claim.)

For example, here's a slide prompted by the November 2018 elections, one year ago.

Note that we often have to fuss around to get the most accurate wording.  "Fuss around" means that recursive process of making an observation, describing it, and then checking to see if your description fits the observation, trying again, drawing an inference, checking it, etc.   We do this a lot, often in the space of 60 seconds without noticing it.

We also have to pick one issue rather than taking about a lot of things at once.  I pick B.

Then, we can find two kinds of evidence.  There are exit poll data.

 

And there's the classic finding of passages that your judgement (within a given frame) tells you are relevant and revealing of an important feature.

Then, a conclusion (II) derived from a claim from the course (I)

My summary statement is then that our third cause of noir culture is still operating in U.S. national life, with 2018 election patterns as one symptom.

Some Slides about the Walter Mosley Novel Last Week

Black Betty is helping us analyze noir culture's third source, "legacies of slavery."  Here's some material from lecture.  Mosley details element of a noir society.   A segregationist police force, the LAPD, is fairly straightforward.

Mosley also focuses on the active agency of folks within the Black community.  There's Easy Rawlins's old friend Mouse, the enforcer / destroyer who is also occasionally a savoir in moments of danger.

And there's the real estate dream of Black-owned retail for the Black community, doubled-crossed.

Mosley grew up in central LA and was there before, during, and after the Watts "riots" / rebellion in 1965.  Black Betty appeared in 1994, and he was either writing it or its immediate predecessor during the Rodney King uprising in 1992.  He is well-aware of the history of police-community relations, and as far as I can tell, in agreement with the argument of the next slides, taken from Mike Davis's City of Quartz (1991), that the 1990s escalation of gang violence resulted in part from law enforcement's suppression of gangs that were political.

Another context for Mosley is Blaxsploitation film, whose golden age was 1970-75.  Most of the films featured whites preying on a Black community that was weakened by traitors within--sometimes Black politicians spouting Black nationalist rhetoric.   A hero or heroine comes forward to confront the predators and drive them back, at least temporarily.  Here are two.

 

We'll see next time, when we watch the end of Coffy, that it these films generally assume force can only be beaten with force.  Easy Rawlins doesn't agree.  Force from below almost always loses to force from above.  It is weaker and badly funded.  Hence Easy's stress on alliances and of course detection-- along with his floundering community development scheme.

 On Thursday we ended with a discussion of Betty Eady.  I argued that she's a complex, multisided character who is both beaten down and free--and free, mostly threateningly, through her sexuality.  Here are the passages:

We'll look at chapter 33 carefully.  I'll go on to argue that Black Betty offers a strong ending if not a happy ending, and in strength there's hope.

Murder in Santa Barbara

This week's SB Independent has nice short accounts of historical murders in alleged paradise.  Minor compensation for the murder of I.V. Halloween.  "The Armenian Assassin" is particularly good.

Chinatown System Today

The irony of the film title, Chinatown, is that the corporate-government syndicate is something like the opposite of Chinatown. Here's a story in today's NYT that shows the development model is alive and well: buy and control a natural resource whose value you increase through government connections.  (Don't think about Trump here, think about Milken, a real California story.)

(Photo is of Milken's Opportunity Zone in Nevada under a federal program "designed to spur economic development and job creation in distressed communities.")

The Love and Loss Example for Paper 1: Thursday's lecture

My basic claim was that Chandler's novel adds the effects of bad love to those of the aftermath of world wars.  But how would I turn this into a paper topic and thesis based in a particular passage?  Here's the assignment.

I used one of my main interests in this novel as an example of how one can generate a paper topic and thesis.  I started with my question about why Marlowe seems to have such a hard time having stable relationships.  I put it more generally on the slide but I'm really thinking about Marlowe.  I found my passage -- the almost-sex between Marlowe and his client Eileen Wade.

Then I describe my search for cultural materials and ideas that would form my framework and help me come up with a thesis.  That took most of lecture.  I read the "blonde of blondes" passage that describes Marlowe's first reaction to Eileen Wade (page 90).  I emphasized the specific words he used to describe her, as is normal with a close reading. 

 That last line: it's about moving from text to context, as we often do in this course (which combines literary and cultural study). Then I described research that tried to identify different kinds of blondes and how they mean different things in US culture.  There were a lot of pictures that wound up with this summary slide:

I'm interested in point 3, but I don't have great concrete evidence for it. I could develop more, and link Marlowe's racist cracks about Candy to his fascination with Eileen Wade through more textual close reading.  I could also bring in cultural materials -- the history of efforts to keep the US segregated in the aftermath of World War II, the segregated history of Los Angeles, the whiteness of Hollywood glamour, Chandler's backstory, etc. 

But with Marlowe I'm more focused on point 4.  The whole book is shaped by his "lone wolf" isolation, and his repeated insistence on it.  The book also narrates a series of events in which Marlowe takes up with people but doesn't stick with them.  He has a thing for two people in the book (Terry Lennox and Eileen Wade) and sleeps with a third (Linda Loring, Terry's sister-in-law).  He can't stay attached to them.  There's love-hate here: he is ambivalent. He is also somewhat mournful about relationships, or, more correctly, he is melancholic.  Both his ambivalence--his love-hate for Eileen Wade in that scene) and his melancholia, point to psychological models developed by Sigmund Freud.  Freud's theories about our divided psyches, our powerful yet opaque unconscious mind, our formation in repressed sexual attachments, for starters, pervaded the postwar US culture in which Chandler wrote. 

No time for detailed psychoanalytic theory! But there's always time for

Once I start talking about Vertigo I really can't stop.  Watch it- it's one of the great 20th century movies by a director who was (1) channeling Freud and (2) brutally realistic about white postwar masculinity.  This business of the Jimmy Stewart character losing his partner (blaming himself), finding Madeline then losing her, finding Judy and needing to make her into the lost Madeline (and then . . . ok no spoiler here), got us to this slide where my version of Paper 1 has setttled on its frame.

There's a lot on this slide. It's the very short version of Freud's intense and fascinating attempt to understand the sources of depression in which people lose interest in the world and withdraw the energy for attachment (or "cathexis") into themselves. He used clinical evidence to get to a version of the somewhat crazy-sounding final line of the slide, in which the melancholic no longer has an ego that is independent of their loss (and the lost person).   (I mentioned the "introjection" (or bringing-into) of the lost person into the self).  Freud insists it's not crazy and is all too common.  The concepts -- ambivalence (love-hate), loss, melancholia--get me to this translation of the framing slide above.

And so now I'm ready to go back to the passage from The Long Goodbye.  Note the recursive process: topic, then on to finding a passage, or maybe having a passage that really stuck in my mind and then figuring out the topic, then contextual and textual material that solidfies a frame, then the passage again.

 

Now I start to build the argument, and because it will improve my structure I write it out formally using our beloved observation-inference pairing.  

We didn't have time to go through this, so check it out now and we can discuss it on Tuesday.  The last two lines say, basically, that Marlowe associates attachment (starting with sex with Eileen Wade) with humiliation, so he would rather drink himself into oblivion than risk the attachment.  (Remember, Freud is the guy who says this is less weird and unusual than we would like to think.)  This gets me to a thesis, seen on a version of the first slide that I've filled in (under 4 and 5). 

I'm not yet satisfied with the formulation, but there's progress--and a plot line through a lot of material.  You held up very well under a lot of material. 

We'll Fix this Question Together in Lecture on Tuesday

remember that there's more than one right answer.

Power of Evidence

We're talking about the role of colonialism and then World War I in turning US and UK culture "noir." We're also stressing the importance of evidence in making assertions and coming to conclusions about whodunit, not to mention everything else.  A major New York Times investigation brings these two issues together.  The story points out that, "Recklessly or intentionally bombing hospitals is a war crime, but proving culpability amid a complex civil war is extremely difficult, and until now, Syrian medical workers and human rights groups lacked proof."  The NYT investigation has proof that the Russian Air Force, in support of the Assad government in Syria, intentionally targeted the four hospitals in question.  The proof consists of several kinds of evidence, which they detail at the bottom of the article. I'll cite the whole thing because I'm such an evidence nerd:

Our reporting began by collecting social media posts, interviewing witnesses and speaking with organizations that support hospitals in opposition-held Syria. They gave us the approximate time each hospital was struck on May 5 and 6.

We obtained access to tens of thousands of flight observations kept by spotters who watch the skies and warn civilians of incoming airstrikes. Each observation logged a time, location and type of plane.

Most crucially, we also obtained thousands of Russian Air Force radio transmissions never before made public. We spent weeks deciphering their code words. By the end, we knew when Russian pilots were receiving coordinates, locking onto targets and dropping their bombs.

Finally, we reviewed the videos of three of the four bombings and consulted with military experts. We concluded that the videos showed the hospitals being bombed at the reported times, and in two cases that they were hit with precision bombs that the Russians possess but the Syrians don't.

Combining all this information revealed that Russian pilots were flying at the time and place each hospital was bombed, that they released their weapons at the same time we'd been told the strike occurred, and that at least two of the strikes were too precise for the Syrians to have even accomplished.

This is an enormous amount of dedicated work.  It's also expensive, which is why most newspapers, including my hometown newspaper the Los Angeles Times, do a lot more cutting and pasting of internet stuff than they do investigating.

In addition to money, there's the problem of savvy replacing truth as the ethos of high-end reporting, at least according to this interesting analysis.

Sherlock Lecture Slides From Friday

We were talking about 2 theories of human intelligence, which we simplistically polarized as Theory 1, Only Sherlock is Sherlock, and Theory 2, Anyone Can Be Sherlock, But Almost Nobody Does the Work.  Here's a slide I raced through about how his personality helps.  Theory 1 or Theory 2? I know you know.

Also there was the kind of closure the "whodunit" or "mystery" offers, particularly before all hell breaks loose for the UK and Europe in World War I.  It gets much harder to make convincing in crime fiction later on.

Evil Appearing Where You Don't Expect It

In this case, it's the front page of the Sunday New York Times, which yesterday ran a huge, horrifying investigative piece on Internet-based child abuse material (access it through the link in the first paragraph of this story).  I mentioned evil in lecture on Thursday as the bad thing that seems to have (1) no explanation and (2) no cure.  We'll be investigating these features in the course: can we explain the worst things? Can we really not cure them?  (Photo: National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.)

One of the lead authors, Gabriel Dance, has a Twitter thread with interesting background, including his own distress while researching and writing the piece.  In one tweet he writes, "every single image or video is documentation of a crime, and all are beyond the pale. i've read descriptions of abuse that were previously unfathomable to me. they've rocked me to my core. they raise fundamental questions about humanity."  Can't emphasize that last sentence enough.  He ends by warning, "this is just the start. we have more coming - lots more. and while it's not easy to read (or write), the @nytimes is committed to this line of reporting. i'm grateful for the opportunity to help children who need it, and to you all for reading."

This is an important piece, but take care reading it, and take good care of yourself.

Slavery and Voting

One of our course's 6 causes of "noir culture" is the legacies of slavery.  Here's one example--Black voting rights--from deep in the heart of Texas. My first teaching job was in Texas (at Rice University in Houston), and I try to keep tabs on the place.  In my experience, Texans were the most hospitable and partying bunch of Americans I've ever lived with.  The politics? another story.

Summer of Blood

This fall, Detective Fiction is yet again going to be wresting with the psychological, political, and cultural factors behind the U.S.'s off-the-charts levels of gun death--far higher than any other country in the world that is not actually at war or in a civil war.  The New York Times has a good overview of the summer's shootings that involved three or more deaths at a time.  26 mass shootings between Memorial Day and Labor DAy left 126 people dead.

I turned the page and there was a new mass shooting in a South Carolina bar that didn't quite make the Times' 3 person cutoff.

I taught this course last fall in the midst of multiople wildfires and the Thousand Oaks bar shooting that affected a number of students in the course. 

Better luck this year. R.I.P to the victims, whom we never forget. Vivos voco, mortuos plango.

Noir Candidate?

The  tweet on this post implies that Warren has decided to run as what we were calling a noir candidate.  It worked for Trump.