Cuttings: June 2021

Thelma & Louise at 30: a groundbreaking road movie that still strikes a nerve – article by Rebecca Nicholson in The Guardian. “There is plenty about [Thelma & Louise] that remains audacious, but still now, I think one of the boldest decisions taken by writer Callie Khouri and director Ridley Scott is to let it be funny, despite the weight of some of its storylines. It is quick, sarcastic, even silly. Thelma tells Louise to shoot the cop’s radio, she blows out the one playing music in his car. Darryl, Thelma’s grotesque, preening, deadbeat husband, is so incapable of talking to her nicely that when he answers the phone with a pleasant ‘Hello’, she immediately knows he’s being watched by the police. ‘My husband wasn’t sweet to me,’ she tells the sexist truck driver who crudely heckled her and Louise on the road, ‘and look how I turned out.’ There is an obscene number of air-punch moments like this …, though brilliantly, Khouri always leads the audience into a kind of moral murk. Thelma is famously robbed by Pitt’s JD, though he has given her fair warning that he is a robber. He leaves her with the gift of his criminal playbook, and she turns out to be really very good at a life of crime. It is satisfying to watch her stick up a store, charmingly, with the exact lines JD gave her. But is her choice to commit armed robbery worse than Louise’s spontaneous decision to shoot Harlan in the heart? Should they blow up the moron’s truck? Is it cathartic? Is it earned? Films, at their best, should challenge your perspective.”

Spain’s postal service accused of racism over flesh-toned stamps – article by Sam Jones in The Guardian. “Spain’s state-owned postal service has been accused of a damaging and counterproductive approach to equality after issuing a set of flesh-toned, anti-racism stamps in which the stamp with the lightest skin colour is worth more than twice as much as the darkest one. On Tuesday, Correos España unveiled the set of four ‘equality stamps’: a pale, €1.60 one, a slightly darker €1.50 one, a brown €0.80 one, and a black €0.70 one.”

The empty office: what we lose when we work from home – article by Gillian Tett in The Guardian. “Although [Xerox PARC] had initially been dominated by scientists, by the time JSB [John Seeley Brown] arrived, a collection of anthropologists, psychologists and sociologists were also there. One of these anthropologists was a man named Julian Orr, who was studying the ‘tribe’ of technical repair teams at Xerox…. These technicians were routinely ignored, partly because the managers assumed that they knew what they did. But Orr and JSB suspected this was a big mistake, and that the technicians did not always think or behave as their bosses thought they should. JSB first noticed it … when he met a repairman known as ‘Mr Troubleshooter’, who said to him: ‘Well, Mr PhD, suppose this photocopier sitting here had an intermittent image quality fault, how would you go about troubleshooting it?’ JSB knew there was an “official” answer in the office handbook: technicians were supposed to ‘print out 1,000 copies, sort through the output, find a few bad ones, and compare them to the diagnostic’…. ‘Here is what I do,’ Mr Troubleshooter told JSB… ‘I walk to the trash can, tip it upside down, and look at all the copies that have been thrown away. The trash can is a filter – people keep the good copies and throw the bad ones away. So just go to the trash can … and from scanning all the bad ones, interpret what connects them all.’ In short, the engineers were ignoring protocols and using a solution that worked – but one that was ‘invisible … and outside [the] cognitive modelling lens’ of the people running the company, JSB ruefully concluded…. Like many other anthropologists before him, [Orr started] looking at the group rituals, symbols and spatial patterns that the technicians used in their everyday life. [he] quickly realised that many of the most important interactions took place in diners.”

David Mitchell: ‘The world still thinks autistic people don’t do emotions’ – interview by Michael Hogan in The Guardian. “Mitchell translated the autism memoir The Reason I Jump from Japanese to English with his wife, Keiko Yoshida. Written by Naoki Higashida when he was 13, the book became an international bestseller and has now been turned into an award-winning documentary also featuring Mitchell. ‘The book challenges stereotypes about autism. Was that important for you?’ ‘By its very existence, it explodes some of the more pernicious, hurtful, despair-inducing myths. If autistic people have no emotional intelligence, how could that book have been written? … And, practically, it helped us understand things like our son’s meltdowns, his sudden inconsolable sobbing or his bursts of joyous, giggly happiness.’ ‘What was the most valuable thing the book taught you?’ To assume intelligence. Don’t assume the lack of it. Assume complete comprehension and act accordingly. No baby talk, don’t adjust your vocabulary, don’t treat an autistic person any differently to a neurotypical person. Let them out of infantilisation prison and allow them full human credentials, which they’re too often denied. You’re doing no harm at all and good things can happen.’ “

The Father: Anthony Hopkins superb in unbearably heartbreaking film – review by Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. “Hopkins is Anthony, a roguishly handsome and cantankerous old widower… Anthony has dementia. He is subject to mood-swings and fits of temper connected with his sudden terror at not being able to work out what is going on.… What is deeply scary about The Father is that, without obvious first-person camera tricks, it puts us inside Anthony’s head. We see and don’t see what he sees and doesn’t see. We are cleverly invited to assume that certain passages of dialogue are happening in reality – and then shown that they aren’t. We experience with Anthony, step by step, what appears to be the incremental deterioration in his condition, the disorientating time slips and time loops. People morph into other people; situations get elided; the apartment’s furniture seems suddenly and bewilderingly to change; a scene which had appeared to follow the previous one sequentially turns out to have preceded it, or to be Anthony’s delusion or his memory of something else. And new people, people he doesn’t recognise[,] keep appearing in his apartment and responding to him with that same sweet smile of patience when he asks what they are doing there. The universe is gaslighting Anthony with these people.”

Less storytelling, please: why documentaries will benefit from getting real – article by Simran Hans in The Guardian. “‘Main character. Three acts. Heroic journey. Climax. Resolution. Nothing else seems to suffice in today’s documentary marketplace. A good story reigns supreme,’ writes the Toronto-based film-maker Brett Story in an essay for World Records Journal about ‘story’ as documentary’s hottest commodity…. With the intellectual property market booming, there is pressure on those who work in nonfiction – film-makers, long-form journalists, audio producers – to shoehorn the lives of real people into the tried and tested template of classic storytelling. … In her essay, Story argues that ‘story’ is only as natural as capitalism. It’s easier to sell a neat, narrativised nugget of information – but to become reliant on story as an organising principle is to lose something unique to the documentary form…. Documentary films have the power to make viewers understand their subjects rather than to simply identify with them. … Through their juxtapositions, [documentary] film-makers are able to ask questions, convey scale and create emotional resonances that reflect the mundanities, digressions and complexities of real life.”

Microsoft’s Kate Crawford: ‘AI is neither artificial nor intelligent’ – interview by Zoë Corbyn in The Guardian. “Kate Crawford studies the social and political implications of artificial intelligence. She is a research professor of communication and science and technology studies at the University of Southern California and a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research. Her new book, Atlas of AI, looks at what it takes to make AI and what’s at stake as it reshapes our world. ‘What’s the aim of the book?’ ‘We are commonly presented with this vision of AI that is abstract and immaterial. I wanted to show how AI is made in a wider sense – its natural resource costs, its labour processes, and its classificatory logics. To observe that in action I went to locations including mines to see the extraction necessary from the Earth’s crust and an Amazon fulfilment centre to see the physical and psychological toll on workers of being under an algorithmic management system. My hope is that, by showing how AI systems work – by laying bare the structures of production and the material realities – we will have a more accurate account of the impacts, and it will invite more people into the conversation. … We aren’t used to thinking about these systems in terms of the environmental costs. But saying, "Hey, Alexa, order me some toilet rolls," invokes into being this chain of extraction, which goes all around the planet… We’ve got a long way to go before this is green technology. Also, systems might seem automated but when we pull away the curtain we see large amounts of low paid labour, everything from crowd work categorising data to the never-ending toil of shuffling Amazon boxes. AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. It is made from natural resources and it is people who are performing the tasks to make the systems appear autonomous.”