As the last couple of generations to come of age have rediscovered, urban living has its benefits. One of those benefits is the ability to keep an eye on your neighbors — quite literally, given a situation of buildings in close proximity, sufficiently large windows, and minimal usage of drapes. Fortysomething Brooklyn couple Alli and Jacob find themselves turned into voyeurs by just such a situation in Marshall Curry’s The Neighbor’s Window, the Best Live Action Short Film at this year’s Academy Awards. “Do they have jobs, or clothes?” asks Alli, overcome by the frustration of looking after her and Jacob’s three young children. “All they do is host dance parties and sleep ’till noon and screw.”
You may recognize Maria Dizzia and Greg Keller, who play Alli and Jacob, from their appearances in Noah Baumbach’s While We’re Young. That film, too, dealt with the envy New York Gen-Xers feel for seemingly more freewheeling New York Millennials, but The Neighbor’s Window takes it in a different direction.
Curry based it on “The Living Room,” an episode of the storytelling interview podcast Love and Radio in which writer and filmmaker Diana Weipert tells of all she saw when she enjoyed a similarly clear view into the life of her own younger neighbors. “Am I supposed to have maybe respected their privacy and just looked away?” Weipert asks, rhetorically. “But it’s impossible because that’s the way the chairs face. They face the window! I couldn’t have not seen them if I wanted to.”
Then again, she adds, “I guess I could’ve not gotten the binoculars.” That irresistible detail makes it into The Neighbor’s Window as a symbol of Alli and Jacob’s surrender to their fascination with the couple across the street. “They’re like a car crash that you can’t look away from,” as Alli puts it. “Okay, a beautiful, sexy, young car crash.” Yet both she and her husband, like any human beings with a partial view of other human beings, can’t help but compare their circumstances unfavorably with those seen from afar. Eventually, as in “The Living Room,” the twentysomethings experience a reversal of fortune, changing Alli and Jacob’s view of them. They also regain the view of themselves they’d lost amid all their voyeurism — enough of it to make them forget that the observers can also be observed.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
For decades following World War II, the world was left wondering how the atrocities of the Holocaust could have been perpetrated in the midst of—and, most horrifically, by—a modern and civilized society. How did people come to engage in a willing and systematic extermination of their neighbors? Psychologists, whose field had grown into a grudgingly respected science by the midpoint of the 20th century, were eager to tackle the question.
In 1961, Yale University’s Stanley Milgram began a series of infamous obedience experiments. While Adolf Eichmann’s trial was underway in Jerusalem (resulting in Hannah Arendt’s five-piece reportage, which became one of The New Yorker magazine’s most dramatic and controversial article series), Milgram began to suspect that human nature was more straightforward than earlier theorists had imagined; he wondered, as he later wrote, “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?”
In the most famous his experiments, Milgram ostensibly recruited participants to take part in a study assessing the effects of pain on learning. In reality, he wanted to see how far he could push the average American to administer painful electric shocks to a fellow human being.
When participants arrived at his lab, Milgram’s assistant would ask them, as well as a second man, to draw slips of paper to receive their roles for the experiment. In fact, the second man was a confederate; the participant would always draw the role of “teacher,” and the second man would invariably be made the “learner.”
The participants received instructions to teach pairs of words to the confederate. After they had read the list of words once, the teachers were to test the learner’s recall by reading one word, and asking the learner to name one of the four words associated with it. The experimenter told the participants to punish any learner mistakes by pushing a button and administering an electric shock; while they could not see the learner, participants could hear his screams. The confederate, of course, remained unharmed, and merely acted out in pain, with each mistake costing him an additional 15 volts of punishment. In case participants faltered in their scientific resolve, the experimenter was nearby to urge them, using four authoritative statements:
Please continue.
The experiment requires that you continue.
It is absolutely essential that you continue.
You have no other choice, you must go on.
In a jarring set of findings, Milgram found that 26 of the 40 participants obeyed instructions, administering shocks all the way from “Slight Shock,” to “Danger: Severe Shock.” The final two ominous switches were simply marked “XXX.” Even when the learners would pound on the walls in agony after seemingly receiving 300 volts, participants persisted. Eventually, the learner simply stopped responding.
Although they followed instructions, participants repeatedly expressed their desire to stop the experiment, and showed clear signs of extreme discomfort:
“I observed a mature and initially poised businessman enter the laboratory smiling and confident. Within 20 minutes he was reduced to a twitching, stuttering wreck, who was rapidly approaching a point of nervous collapse… At one point he pushed his fist into his forehead and muttered: “Oh God, let’s stop it.” And yet he continued to respond to every word of the experimenter, and obeyed to the end.”
Milgram’s study set off a powder keg whose impact remains felt to this day. Ethically, many objected to the deception and the lack of adequate participant debriefing. Others claimed that Milgram overemphasized human nature’s propensity for blind obedience, with the experimenter often urging participants to continue many more times than the four stock phrases allowed.
In the clip above, you can watch original footage from Milgram’s experiment, frightening in its insidious simplicity. (See a full documentary on the study below.) The man administering the shock grows increasingly uncomfortable with his part in the proceedings, and almost walks out, asking “Who’s going to take the responsibility for anything that happens to that gentleman?” When the experimenter replies, “I’m responsible,” the man, absolving himself, continues. As the person receiving the shocks grows increasingly panicked, complaining about his heart and asking to be let out, the participant makes his objections known but appears paralyzed, sheepishly turning to the experimenter, unable to leave.
Although Milgram’s work has drawn critics, his results endure. While changing the experiment’s procedure may alter compliance (e.g., having the experimenter speak to participants over the phone rather than remain in the same room throughout the experiment decreased obedience rates), replications have tended to confirm Milgram’s initial findings. Whether one is urged once or a dozen times, people tend to take on the yoke of authority as absolute, relinquishing their personal agency in the pain they impart. Human nature, it seems, has no Manichean leanings—merely a pliant bent.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in November 2013.
James Pogue in the Baffler recently lamented the rise of “shareable writing,” manifest in a now-common breed of article both “easy for publishers to reproduce” and for readers to absorb. Shareability requires, above all, that pieces “be simple to describe and package online.” This in contrast to the writing published by, say, TheNew Yorker in decades past. “Every time I have a reason to pull up a piece from the archives, I am shocked at how strange and outré the older pieces read — less like work from a different magazine than documents from an alien society.” That alien society provides the backdrop for Wes Anderson’s next feature film The French Dispatch, whose trailer has just come out.
Anyone who watches one of Anderson’s films will suspect him of loving all things mid-century — that is to say, the artifacts of life as it was lived in the decades following the Second World War, especially in western Europe. This love comes through in the look and feel of even Anderson’s earlier pictures, like Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, whose stories ostensibly take place in contemporary America. But in recent years Anderson has gone in for increasingly intricate period pieces, setting Moonrise Kingdom in mid-1960s New England and The Grand Budapest Hotel in the years 1932, 1968, and 1985, all in the imagined European country of Zubrowka. The French Dispatch takes place in the 1960s in the very real European country of France, but a fictional town called “Ennui-sur-Blasé” that allows Anderson to conjure up a mid-20th-century France of the mind.
The mid-century objects of Anderson’s love include TheNew Yorker, a magazine he’s read and collected since his teen years. The influence of that love on The French Dispatch has not gone unnoticed at the current New Yorker. A piece published there offering stills of Anderson’s new film describes it as “about the doings of a fictional weekly magazine that looks an awful lot like — and was, in fact, inspired by — The New Yorker. The editor and writers of this fictional magazine, and the stories it publishes—three of which are dramatized in the film — are also loosely inspired by The New Yorker.” Heading the titular dispatch is Arthur Howitzer, Jr., played (naturally) by Bill Murray and inspired by New Yorker founding editor Harold Ross. Owen Wilson’s Herbsaint Sazerac is “a writer whose low-life beat mirrors Joseph Mitchell’s.” Jeffrey Wright as Roebuck Wright, “a mashup of James Baldwin and A. J. Liebling, is a journalist from the American South who writes about food.”
Other regular Anderson players include Adrien Brody’s Julian Cadazio, an art dealer “modelled on Lord Duveen, who was the subject of a six-part New Yorker Profile by S. N. Behrman, in 1951.” Consider, for a moment, that there was a time when a major magazine would publish a six-part profile of a British art dealer who had died more than a decade before — and when such a piece of writing would draw both considerable attention and acclaim. There are those who criticize as misplaced Anderson’s apparent nostalgia for times, places, and cultures like the one The French Dispatch will bring to the screen this summer. But here in the 21st century, inundated as we are by what Pogue calls the “largely voiceless and precisely formulaic” writing of even respectable publications, can we begrudge the filmmaker his yearning for those bygone days? The only thing missing back then, it might seem to us fans, was Wes Anderson movies.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
When Emily Roebling walked across the Brooklyn Bridge on May 24th, 1883, the first person to cross its entire span, she capped a family saga equal parts triumph and tragedy, a story that began sixteen years earlier when her father-in-law, German-American engineer John Augustus Roebling, began design work on the bridge. Roebling had already built suspension bridges over the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh, the Niagara River between New York and Canada, and over the Ohio River between Cincinnati and Covington, Kentucky. But the bridge over the East River was to be something else entirely. As Roebling himself said, it “will not only be the greatest bridge in existence, but it will be the greatest engineering work of the continent, and of the age.”
New York City officials may have had little reason to think so in the mid-1860s. “Suspension bridges were collapsing all across Europe,” notes the TED-Ed video above by Alex Gendler. “Their industrial cables frayed during turbulent weather and snapped under the weight of their decks.” But the overcrowding city needed relief. An “East River Bridge Project” had been in the works since 1829 and was seen as more necessary with each passing decade. Despite their misgivings, the authorities were willing to trust Roebling with a hybrid design that combined methods used by both suspension and cable-stayed bridges. Two years later, he was dead, the result of a tetanus infection contracted after he lost several toes in a dock accident.
Roebling’s son Washington, a civil engineer who had fought for the Union Army at the Battle of Gettysburg, took over the project, only to suffer from paralysis after he got the bends while trapped inside a caisson in 1870. For the remainder of the bridge’s construction, he would advise from his bedroom, relaying instructions through his wife Emily—who became after a time the bridge’s de facto chief engineer. She “studied mathematics, the calculations of catenary curves, strengths of materials and the intricacies of cable construction,” writes Emily Nonko at 6sqft. She knew the bridge so well that “many were under the impression she was the real designer.”
“1.5 times longer than any previously built suspension bridge,” the video lesson notes, Roebling’s design worked because it used steel cables instead of hemp, with towers rising over 90 meters (295 feet) above sea level. This is almost three times higher than editors at the New York Mirror projected in 1829, when they called the brand new “East River Bridge Project” an “absurd and ruinous” proposition. “Who would mount over such a structure, when a passage could be effected in a much shorter time, and that, too, without exertion or trouble, in a safe and well-sheltered steamboat?”
Just six days after Emily Roebling crossed the newly opened Brooklyn Bridge, a stampede killed twelve people, and months later, P.T. Barnum led 21 elephants over the bridge to prove its safety. Who would cross such a structure? It turned out, for better or worse, anyone and everyone would drive, walk, run, subway, bike, scoot, climb up, leap from, and otherwise “mount over” the East River by way of the neo-gothic wonder (and later its much uglier sibling, the Manhattan Bridge). Learn much more in the short lesson above how John A. Roebling’s bombastic claims about his design were not far off the mark, and why the Brooklyn Bridge is one of the greatest engineering feats in modern history.
New York Times culture reporter Dave Itzkoff joins your hosts Mark Linsenmayer, Erica Spyres, and Brian Hirt to consider issues raised by Dave’s 2018 biography Robin: How do we make sense of our strange relation to celebrities, and what are strategies that celebrities use to deal with their asymmetric relationship to the world? While Robin Williams tried, in gratitude, to share himself with his fans, and was very anxious about letting us all down when some of his later work didn’t garner the widespread praise he was used to, someone like Joaquin Phoenix takes a much more seemingly detached attitude, keenly aware of the absurdity of the celebrity-audience relation.
We also talk to Dave about interview technique and the different attitudes that his subjects take toward him. Can an interview be something that has intrinsic value and not just parasitic on popular media?
For more about Robin, Dave participated in a recent podcast called Knowing: Robin Williams, which was created in part to support Dave’s book (which some of us read for this episode; it’s really good). HBO also recently released the documentary Come Inside My Mind that relates much of the same story.
For all the not-quite-believable material in the annals of 1970s rock history, is any more difficult to accept than the fact that Ziggy Stardust first materialized in the suburbs? Specifically, he materialized in Tolworth, greater London, at the Toby Jug pub, whose storied history as a live-music venue also includes performances by Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac, Genesis, and King Crimson. There, on the night of February 10, 1972, David Bowie — until that point known, to the extent he was known, as the intriguing but not wholly unconventional young rocker of “Space Oddity” — took the stage as his androgynous Martian alter ego, bedecked in otherworldly colors and acting as no rocker ever had before.
History.com quotes Bowie in an interview published in Melody Maker less than three weeks before the Toby Jug show: “I’m going to be huge, and it’s quite frightening in a way, because I know that when I reach my peak and it’s time for me to be brought down it will be with a bump.”
He was certainly right about the first part: while Bowie’s performance as Ziggy Stardust brought him serious attention, the release that summer of his concept album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Marswould launch him permanently into the popular-culture canon. Later described as “a boot in the collective sagging denim behind of hippie singer-songwhiners,” the album expanded the listening public’s sense of what rock and rock stars could be.
In a sense, Bowie was also correct about the time coming for him to be brought down — if “him” means Ziggy Stardust, that deliberately doomed creation, his fall foretold in the title of the very album on which he stars. As we’ve previously posted about here on Open Culture, Bowie-as-Ziggy famously bid the Earth farewell onstage in 1973, not much over a year after his arrival. Of course, what to some looked like the end of Bowie’s career proved to be only the end of one chapter: the saga would continue in such incarnations as Aladdin Sane, the Thin White Duke, and a variety of others known only as “David Bowie.” But this much-mythologized and hugely influential shapeshifting all goes back to that February night in Tolworth, real footage of which you can see above. The sound comes spliced in from a different show, played that same year in Santa Monica — but then, Bowie was about nothing if not artifice.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
“The search for authentic Mexican food—or rather, the struggle to define what that meant—has been going on for two hundred years,” writes Jeffrey Pilcher at Guernica. Arguments over national cuisine first divided into factions along historical lines of conquest. Indigenous, corn-based cuisines were pitted against wheat-based European foods, while Tex-Mex cooking has been “industrialized and carried around the world,” its processed commodification posing an offense to both indigenous peoples and Spanish elites, who themselves later “sought to ground their national cuisine in the pre-Hispanic past” in order to fend off associations with globalized Mexican food of the chain restaurant variety.
Stephanie Noell, Special Collections Librarian at the University of Texas San Antonio (UTSA), explains how these lines were drawn centuries earlier during the “culinary cultural exchange” of the colonial period: “[C]onquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo referred to corn dishes as the ‘misery of maize cakes.’ On the other side, the Nahuas were not impressed by the Spaniards’ wheat bread, describing it as ‘famine food.’” Whatever we point to—corn, wheat, etc.—and call “Mexican food,” we are sure to be corrected by someone in the know.
Cooking, as everyone knows, is not only regional and political, but also deeply personal– tied to family gatherings and passed through generations in handwritten recipes, sometimes jealously guarded lest they be stolen and turned into fast food. But thanks to UTSA Libraries, we have access to hundreds of such recipes. An initial donation of 550 cookbooks has grown to include “over 2,000 titles in English and Spanish,” notes UTSA, “documenting the history of Mexican cuisine from 1789 to the present, with most books dating from 1940–2000.” Many of the books, like that below from 1960, consist of handwritten content next to cut-and-paste recipes and ideas from magazines.
Thecollection spans “regional cooking, healthy and vegetarian recipes, corporate advertising cookbooks, and manuscript recipe books.” The oldest cookbook, belonging to someone named “Doña Ignacita,” whom Noell believes to have been the kitchen manager of a wealthy family, “is a handwritten recipe collection in a notebook,” writes Nils Bernstein at Atlas Obscura, “complete with liquid stains, doodles, and pages that naturally fall open to the most-loved recipes.” Like the other manuscript cookbooks in the collection, “never intended for public scrutiny,” this one “provides essential insight on how real households cooked on a regular basis.”
“I’ve had students in tears going through these,” says Noell, “because it’s so powerful to see that connection with how their family makes certain dishes and where they originated.” On the other hand, we also have generic “Corporate Cookbooks” like Recetario Bimbo, a book of sandwich recipes from the well-known bread company Bimbo. Recent publications like the ultra-hip, 2017 Fiesta: Vegan Mexican Cookbook, which promises “over 75 authentic vegan-Mexican food recipes included,” strain the word “authentic” to its breaking point. (“Want to feel all the great benefits from the ketogenic diet?” the book’s blurb asks, a question that probably never occurred to either Aztecs or Conquistadors.)
The UTSA Mexican Cookbooks collection is open to the public and anyone can visit it in person, but Noell wants “anybody with an internet connection to be able to see these works.” UTSA has been busy digitizing the 100 manuscript cookbooks in the collection, and has scanned about half so far, with Doña Ignacita’s 1789 notebook coming soon. While these aren’t likely to resolve debates about what constitutes authentic Mexican cooking—as if such a thing existed in a monolithic, timeless form—they are sure to be of very keen interest to chefs, home cooks, historians, and enthusiasts of the history of Mexican food. Enter the digital collection of manuscript cookbookshere.
There’s been a lot of talk about the blurring of national and linguistic boundaries at the Academy Awards this year. Have we entered a new era of moviemaking internationalism? “History, that never-failing fount of irony,” writes Anthony Lane at The New Yorker, “may be of assistance at this point.” When Louis B. Mayer first proposed the Academy in 1927 at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, it was to be called the International Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. “The word ‘International’ didn’t last long. It smacked of places other than America, so it had to go.”
As every student of the medium knows, however, not only have various international styles dominated film since its inception, but so too have various international cinematic languages—among them the production of abstract “visual music” films like those pioneered by German-American artist and filmmaker Oskar Fischinger, who worked on the special effects for Fritz Lang’s 1929 Woman in the Moon, created several dozen short films, and inspired Walt Disney’s Fantasia.
Fischinger’s work also inspired another, far less famous American filmmaker, Mary Ellen Bute, a Houston-born, Yale-educated animator and experimental director who “produced over a dozen short abstract animations between the 1930s to the 1950s,” notes Ubuweb, “set to classical music by the likes of Bach, Saint-Saens or Shostakovich, and filled with colorful forms, elegant design and sprightly, dance-like rhythms.” See several of her short films above and below.
Bute collaborated with many prominent creators, including composer Joseph Schillinger, musician and inventor Thomas Wilfred, Leon Theremin, animator and director Norman McLaren, and cinematographer Ted Nemeth, whom she married in 1940.
The films in Bute’s Seeing Sound series are “like a marriage of high modernism and Merrie Melodies”—and the shorts proved so compelling they were screened regularly at Radio City Music Hall in the 1930s.
Like Fischinger’s, her animations spoke a purely abstract language, though they sometimes gestured at story (as in “Spook Sport,” further down). “We need a new kinetic, visual art form—one that unites sound, color and form,” she told the New York World-Telegram in 1936. She conceived of sounds and images as working in harmony or counterpoint, along the same mathematical principles. “I wanted to manipulate light to produce visual compositions in time continuity,” Bute wrote in 1954, “much as a musician manipulates sound to produce music.”
The language of film has narrowed considerably in the decades since Bute made her films, it seems, excluding experiments like visual music. In so doing, contemporary cinema—with its reliance on narrative plotting and dialogue as its central engines—has excluded a significant part of the human experience. In her last film, her only feature, Bute adapted passages from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, a book that turned literature into music as Bute had sought to do with film.
She opens her Finnegans Wake with title cards bearing quotations from Joyce, including a quote she also used to explain her transition from abstract, animated film to a movie with actors and sets: “One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wide-awake language, cut-and-dry grammar and go-ahead plot.” Such modernist abstraction in cinema, Bute wrote, adds up to more than “novelty,” a word sometimes used to describe her work to the public. Like Joyce, her use of abstraction, she wrote, “is about the essence of our Being.”
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