Posted in November 2009 …

Nov 22 2009
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Fashion, Film

[Film review] The September Issue

You go to watch The September Issue because you want to look at the gorgon. Sure, you might be fascinated by fashion, you might be the sort of magazine obsessive who geeks out on sneaking a look at other people’s flatplans (I am both) – but ultimately, what you want to know is whether American Vogue editor Anna Wintour is as monstrously frosty as her reputation claims.

Wintour won’t haunt your nightmares after you watch this movie, which charts the assembly of Vogue’s critical September Issue (the one which sets all the trends for the following year). That’s not because she comes over as especially pleasant, though. In fact, she has a way of crushing an inferior with a twitch of her lip so devastating, you can watch her victim’s heart break on screen in front of you. (Inferiors, by the way, include office interns who get in her way, junior editors who can’t fight for their photo shoot, and top-of-the-pile designers seeking US Vogue approval for their collections. “She’s the Pope”, explains one Wintour employee.)

Yet with the mixture of intimacy and remove afforded by film, though, there’s something arresting about Wintour’s combination of brutal decisiveness and evident frailty. Wintour is near-60 and very thin: the camera is not cruel or intrusive, but however glossy her bob and toned her arms, Wintour’s voice and skin are whispering her age. Gawker speculated that Wintour collaborated with The September Issue’s makers as part of a campaign to reinvent herself as likeable. I doubt it: she doesn’t approach the camera as someone looking to be loved, but as someone who knows that power is her trade and imperiousness her greatest asset.

If it was a charm contest, then Wintour certainly lost it to creative director Grace Coddington. Where Wintour is sleek business, Coddington is expansive art – her spectacular, dreamy combinations of garments and settings make up captivating spreads which define both the magazine’s aesthetic and the idea of fashion. Witty, appealing and determined, she even offers advice to her colleagues on standing up to Anna.

But it’s a mistake to see their relationship as purely competitive. At one point, Coddington reflects on the magazines move toward celebrity culture. She doesn’t like it, but she applauds Wintour for identifying the trend early and building it into the magazine. After all, Coddington explains, if the magazine doesn’t sell, she won’t have a job – and if she doesn’t have a job, there will be no venue for her work.

You get the impression that, while Coddington adores clothes and fashion and the magazine she works for, she sees the industry as more of a platform than an end in itself – whereas as Wintour is involved in every part of the chain, even acting as an ambassador for negotiations between stores and designers. For Coddington, fashion is only a part of the world. “We can’t all be perfect”, she expounds, forcefully: “It’s enough that the models are perfect.” In the aggressively perfect world of Wintour’s Vogue, where too-big cover fonts are dismissed as “large and pretentious, like it’s for blind people”, Coddington’s exuberance feels like the true soul of the magazine.

Text © Sarah Ditum, 2009

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Nov 21 2009
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Books

[Book review] The Believers by Zoë Heller

Zoë Heller, The Believers (Penguin, £7.99)

Heller’s saga of a left-wing New York family reconciling itself first to the slow death of its patriarch, and then to the mortifying revelation of his secrets, has lots to enjoy – wit and insight, sympathy and intelligence. But it’s a family novel, and not in the end the saga of faith and doubt that the title hints at.

That isn’t to say that Heller lacks intelligence when it comes to believing, and she invests her characters with various forms of devotion: marital, maternal, filial, political, and religious. Yet despite the range of commitment she presents through the Litvinoff family, it seems as though every faith is cultivated to a point beyond the abilities of Heller’s sympathy. Once The Believers attain their belief, Heller’s narrative closeness falls away.

An example? In the early stages of the novel, it’s older sister Rosa who dominates – a dedicated socialist whose political convictions were undone by a long stay in Cuba and some untold romantic disappointment. But as her trajectory draws her into Orthodox Judaism, Heller loses the ability to draw her inner world: faith cuts her off from the world. By the end of the story, the free indirect discourse emanates mainly from younger sister Karla, whose direction is a more worldly, more fleshly one.

The same is true of their mother, Audrey. The phases of her anxiety (in her case, anxiety about her devotion to her husband) are drawn with a riveting rawness. Once she’s reached a resolution though, she falls away, becoming far less interesting. Is this just because the state of reaching is so much more active than the state of knowing? Or is it that Heller is simply better at delineating doubts than certainties? It’s hard to say, but it certainly feels like a loss when Heller has brought you so far with a character – yet won’t take you into what is, for the outsider, the most fascinatingly incomprehensible phase of all.

Uncertainty isn’t a problem that plagues the story itself. There isn’t a gun on the mantelpiece that doesn’t explode in someone’s face: the classes become a conversion, the flirtation becomes an affair, the steely and controlling lady remains steely and controlling. Almost everything makes sense within the novel’s own terms – if only, though, that consistency could have been achieved with a few surprises thrown in. As it is, there are only maybe two and a half things which register any degree of suspense, and in every case they slide towards the most-expected conclusion.

It’s not a happy novel. In fact, it has a groggy undertow of cynicism in many parts – something that frequently distracts from the compassion demanded by this sort of big novel with its many interacting characters. If one of the principals can find it so hard to see merit in other people, and go without narrative censure for her withdrawal, what sort of concern is the reader supposed to work up for that character?

Heller is exquisitely sensitive to the emotional negotiations which generate the compromises on which family is built, but seems able only to half-heartedly applaud them – whereas as faith seems to erect a boundary through which criticism is pointless, or impossible. A novel, then, for which faith is admirable but also uninteresting. A well-made novel, but one that in the end fails to be totally engaging or satisfying.

Text © Sarah Ditum, 2009

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Nov 19 2009
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Books, Media

Death en pointe

Yesterday‘s Metro praised Zadie Smith for having the “deadly precision of a ballerina”. (Original article not online.)

That’ll be one of those specialist ninja ballerinas with blades in her pointe shoes, then.

Text © Sarah Ditum, 2009. Photo by Gabriela Camerotti, used under Creative Commons.

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Nov 18 2009
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Media, Politics

Misuse of the law is not an argument for self-regulation

There’s something curious about Baroness Buscombe’s speech to the Society Of Editors. She talks a great deal about our “dysfunctional democracy” and the role of the press in supplying oppositional scrutiny. She is – and this is very welcome – severely critical of superinjunctions, and the harm they do in restricting information. But none of these things are within her remit as chair of the PCC, and she seems adamant that while there’s plenty to be fixed around the PCC, everything inside is working just fine.

The PCC is a “discreet”, “sensible”, “democratic” service she proclaims, and she has a chilly warning for anyone who thinks the PCC should be doing more:

So to those people who have recently signed a petition on the Number 10 website urging the government to put the PCC on a statutory footing I say: be careful what you wish for.

Yes, there were many people angered by Jan Moir’s controversial article about the death of Stephen Gately; and indeed 25,000 people were sufficiently moved to complain about it to the PCC. But when there is – in the PCC – already a channel to express dismay that a paper has overstepped the line, do people really want a government body telling us what we can read and think? [...]

But a statutory press council is, in any case, pie in the sky. We need look no further than the other great development of the last few weeks to see why. The most benign thing that can be said about the recent Trafigura injunction fiasco was that it showed a touching naïveté on the part of the highly paid lawyers advising the company.

Baroness Buscombe, “Speech to the Society of Editors”

From a restricted perspective, the revulsion at Moir and the exposure of Trafigura might look like contradictory impulses: the conflicted twittermob wants The Mail to hush up, and The Guardian to speak freely. But Trafigura was about verifiable, public interest information. Moir offered nothing but crass speculation – and it’s important to note that she didn’t just outrage the delicate and arbitrary mores of online liberals. Her column broke the PCC’s own code – a code which her employer, The Mail, is ostensibly committed to maintaining.

The PCC’s impotent position means that newspapers feel able to disregard the rules they’ve signed up to. Buscombe, in her interview on Today the next morning, congratulates the PCC on the work it does in averting breaches pre-publication, but when something as clearly egregious as Moir on Gately can make it online and in print, her confidence looks misplaced.

Superinjunctions and libel law need reform, badly. But if legal remedies are going to be made increasingly inaccessible, the PCC will have to do more to assist individuals who end up on the wrong side of reporting: ugly intrusions into personal grief are not the fair price of a free press. The PCC could impose all sorts of penalties on a columnist like Moir without standing in the way of a single Trafigura. But the conflation of personal intrusion with public interest has long been the PCC’s argument for doing nothing: Buscombe is simply aligning recent events to fit a very old way of doing things.

Text © Sarah Ditum, 2009

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Nov 13 2009
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Media, Politics

Shameful, disrepectful… No, wait, actually it’s just a mistake

sun typo apologyAnd so to bed for The Sun’s Brown-baiting, as it turns out that it’s quite easy to make a spelling mistake – even when you’re using a keyboard and have a newsroom full of eyes. Any suggestion that, by mis-spelling Ms Janes’ name, The Sun has displayed shocking insensitivity to a grieving mother and a brutal disregard for her dead son would, of course, be mistaken.

Text © Sarah Ditum, 2009. Grab via @tom_watson.

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Nov 12 2009
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Media, Politics

Newsbeat and the BNP: complaint partially upheld

Darryl Chamberlain of the 853 blog reports that his editorial complaint over BBC Newsbeat’s presentation of the BNP has been partially upheld. BBC head of editorial Fraser Steel agrees that the report on the website was at fault, both for repeating unchallenged the assertion that Stepney-born Ashley Cole was “not British”, and for only linking to the BNP’s website.

However, Steel maintains that – despite these defects – Debbie Randle’s interview was appropriately challenging. This is where Chamberlain feels the BBC’s editorial policy shows serious strain, and I agree:

On a journalistic level, the BNP is a news story on stilts, because it represents danger to most people – a political refuge for the ignored and misled which also threatens the safety of our fellow British citizens. In crude news terms, the frisson of violence associated with the party makes it interesting in a way, say, the Liberal Democrats aren’t. Even this summer, its leader on Epping Forest council said the party could not have been behind an alleged firebomb attack on a man’s home because: “Firebombing is not a British method. A brick through the window is a British method, but firebombing is not a way of showing displeasure.” As a journalist, why wouldn’t you quiz a BNP member about why they’ve joined a party which has officials spouting that stuff?

This is not a normal political party. To treat it as such is not only cowardice, but a basic journalistic failing. The BBC acknowledged this when it invited Nick Griffin onto Question Time – and the vast majority of the programme was dedicated to his being there, with host David Dimbleby turning master interrogator as well as benign chairman.

853, “Newsbeat meets the BNP: Complaint partially upheld”

Will the BBC decide that “political balance” is no longer an acceptable substitute for rigorous journalism as a result of all this? I hope so, because while I agree that the BBC must avoid adhering to any political party, there is no justification for the neutral presentation of those who endorse hate, harassment and violence.

Related:

The Media Show on reporting the BNP

BBC fails on BNP: AVERT PANDICIDAL CRARROW CRISIS NOW!

Text © Sarah Ditum, 2009

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Nov 12 2009
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Media, Politics

Intrusion, part two

Gordon BrownThe Janes family weren’t the only ones to be exposed by The Sun’s attacks on the PM. Gordon Brown was the unwilling subject of an especially unpleasant kind of scrutiny – including having his phone call recorded and republished by The Sun. At the Currybet blog, Martin Belam thinks this is a likely contravention of clause 10 of the PCC code, which forbids the interception of private communications:

I’ve no doubt that the contents of the call were of interest to the public, but it seems to me that one side of the phone call is someone attempting to make an apology for their visual disability causing them to have poor handwriting, in a phone call they had every expectation at the time of being private. It would have been possible for The Sun to report on the conversation without publishing a transcript, and it would certainly have been possible to report on the story without publishing a recording of the call in full on the paper’s website.

Currybet, “PM’s private call published by The Sun, but PCC has no interest in a ‘public interest’ debate”

Belam has taken his concerns to the PCC, and predictably been told that, as he isn’t the prime minister, there’s nothing the PCC can do. I suspect that in any case, as the phone call to Mrs Janes was made in the course of Brown’s public duties as head of government, The Sun could argue that the expectation of privacy doesn’t apply – in the same way it was argued that Alan Duncan’s “on rations” comments were fair game for Heydon Prowse to record and distribute.

But intercepting a phone call to entrap one (sincerely apologetic) party in the conversation is in pretty bad taste – and besides, isn’t it a practice that News International has put behind it? After Nick Davies’ reports for The Guardian earlier this year on the pervasive use of the black arts on the NOTW and Sun, the PCC produced a report this week which assured the public that:

Despite the manner in which the Guardian’s allegations were treated in some quarters – as if they related to current or recent activity – there is no evidence that the practice of phone message tapping is ongoing. The Commission is satisfied that – so far as it is possible to tell – its work aimed at improving the integrity of undercover journalism has played its part in raising standards in this area.

PCC, “PCC report on phone message tapping allegations”

Improving its integrity. Raising its standards. By running a personal apology from one bereaved parent to another on the front page. Well done, The Sun.

Text © Sarah Ditum, 2009

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Nov 10 2009
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Media, Politics

Getting the ok to intrude

Brown condolence letterThe PCC code warns that “In cases involving personal grief or shock, enquiries and approaches must be made with sympathy and discretion and publication handled sensitively.” But in some cases, the distressed and bereaved will have reasons for actively welcoming publicity – and Jacqui Janes appears to be one such case. The mother of a guardsman killed on duty in Afghanistan, she is grieving and angry over her son’s death, and those feelings have been compounded by what she feels to be the offensively illiterate way in which Gordon Brown wrote to express his condolences.

Up until this, I didn’t know that Brown was handwriting letters to the families of fallen soldiers. And personally –despite many misgivings I have about the way the government has managed the war in Afghanistan – this makes me think better of Brown. He appears to experience his responsibility to bereaved families deeply. But I understand why Ms Janes would feel differently on receiving what she considers a deeply inadequate letter.

What I don’t understand is how Dominic Mohan can justify making a spectacle of one family’s grief. Loss of a child is a dreadful, crushing thing – and however cathartic it might be to attack the government responsible for that death, grieving in public can be a cruel process. In the worst cases, people can become fixed as professional mourners, and the process of recovery is made horribly protracted. That’s why the PCC’s guidelines on intrusion into shock and grief are there, and every publicity approach from a bereaved family ought to be handled with huge tact and discretion. It doesn’t work like that, but it should.

It seems unpleasantly likely that The Sun has consciously recruited the Janes to the paper’s anti-Brown cause at a time when the family is deeply distressed. Publicising the reaction to the letter is one thing; encouraging Ms Janes to act the reporter and challenge Brown when he rang to apologise is something else. I hope that the Janes family do not feel exploited. But watching The Sun rack up the politicised covers, making a shattered family the front for its partisan campaign, it looks like something awfully close to exploitation.

Text © Sarah Ditum, 2009

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Nov 06 2009
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Media, Politics

PCC rules on Mail homophobia: snippy is fine

At the beginning of October, Iain Dale suddenly noticed that The Mail was not very nice about gay people and put in a complaint to the PCC. Or at least, he noticed that The Mail was not very nice about him, and the focus of their abuse was his sexuality. Anyway, the PCC have issued their judgement on the case – and the original column is ok with them:

In coming to a conclusion on the matter, the Commission had to have regard to the context in which the remarks were made. They appeared in a diary column which is well known for its mischievous – and sometimes self-consciously fusty – remarks that poke fun at the antics of public figures. The piece followed the complainant’s own comments to Pink News – a news website aimed at gay people – about his attempt to secure the nomination in Bracknell. It may have been an uncharitable account of the complainant’s position – and any intended humour may have been lost on some readers – but the item appeared to be relevant to the news, and to fit into the column’s style, rather than constitute an arbitrary attack on him on the basis of his sexuality.

This might strike some as a fine distinction to make, but where it is debatable – as in this case – about whether remarks can be regarded solely as pejorative and gratuitous, the Commission should be slow to restrict the right to express an opinion, however snippy it might be. While people may occasionally be insulted or upset by what is said about them in newspapers, the right to freedom of expression that journalists enjoy also includes the right – within the law – to give offence. The Commission regretted that the item had upset the complainant, but the complaint was not upheld.

PCC, “Adjudicated – Iain Dale v Daily Mail”

Within the broader politics of the Daily Mail, which consistently figures homosexuality as some sort of threat to the nation (see this report, where the US electorate’s rejection of same-sex marriage is called “a victory for traditional marriage”), the Ephraim Hardcastle column was mild stuff. And given that the PCC has previously asserted that Mail columnists are entitled to claim plain untruths about homosexuality as “facts”, it would be hard for them to penalise the Mail now for using a snide tone to report something that actually happened.

In fact, snarking that “gays all stick together, don’t they?” is barely worth more than a quiver of outrage when there are those who object to extending basic human rights to gay people – the right to marry someone they love and fancy, the right to have a family. The Conservative Party’s group in the European Parliament, for example, includes Valdemar Tomasevski MEP, who describes homosexuality as an “evil” from which children must be “protected”. It’s easier for the Tory party to ally with outright homophobes than it is for them to confront their own Eurosceptics. If Dale really is distressed by hate and prejudice, he might want to modify his support for Cameron’s European policy.

Text © Sarah Ditum, 2009

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Nov 02 2009
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Books, Politics

Ayn Rand: how fiction doesn’t work

Fountainhead1968Big books don’t scare me. I’ve read Infinite Jest. I’ve read Middlemarch. I might even hit House Of Leaves one day, which is extra tough because the words don’t all go in the right direction. So it’s not the massy text that puts me off Ayn Rand, and even seeing my friends struggle with Atlas Shrugged wasn’t the ultimate deterrent – I spent long enough studying Middle English to let go of the idea that books should give me pleasure.

But the dreary working-out of Rand’s Objectivist philosophy (pathologised here by Johann Hari) in novel form – that’s what makes her books seem not worth picking up. Once you’ve grasped the essentials of the belief system, there’s nowhere for the narrative to go. Altruism is a corruption, capitalism is freedom, weakness is an imposition on the strong, etc etc. Fix the characters in within the cracked schema, and you’ve anticipated the moral conclusion towards which the plot is creaking.

Which is depressing on its own. But worse is the knowledge that Rand offers her make-believes as triumphant evidence of her own world-view. This isn’t the sympathetic curiosity that animated Eliot’s realist “experiments in life”, just a bludgeoning insistence on telling the reader How It Is:

In The Fountainhead I showed that Roark moves the world—that the Keatings feed upon him and hate him for it, while the Tooheys are consciously out to destroy him.

Ayn Rand, Journals of Ayn Rand, ed. David Harriman (Penguin Dutton, 1997), p. 392

Roark is the genius of capitalism, Keating is the ambitious mediocrity, and Toohey is the collectivist anti-Roark. So Rand started out with a belief in the heroic entrepreneur. Then she wrote a novel in which the entrepreneur is the hero. Then she claimed she’d “shown” the truth of the position she started out with. It’s the basic Littlejohn manoeuvre: making something up, then screaming “you couldn’t make it up!” for the remaining word count.It’s a sort of genius I suppose – just not one that you’d want to try governing by unless you were a splinter-brained ideologue.

Text © Sarah Ditum, 2009

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