Seth MacFarlane: An Oscar Host who is Harmful to Comedy and the Public’s Health

This week’s post for Pop Health was co-written by Beth Grampetro, MPH, CHES. Beth has been working in college health promotion for 7 years and her interests include feminism online and in popular culture. You can follow her on twitter @bethg24. 

The role of society is important in public health.  Health is not just influenced by individual decisions and behaviors.  It is also influenced by our interactions with the world around us- our communities, our families, our workplaces, our schools, entertainment, celebrities, and the media.  These interactions can have a very strong influence (good or bad) on the public’s health.

With that in mind, we were horrified to witness host Seth MacFarlane’s monologue and ongoing commentary during Sunday night’s Oscars.  According to Nielsen ratings, approximately 40.3 million viewers tuned in to the Oscar telecast.  This broad audience watched MacFarlane, a widely known celebrity, make jokes about domestic violence, female actresses’ bodies, and various forms of discrimination.

In the opening number, MacFarlane sang a song entitled “We Saw Your Boobs”, about the scenes in various movies where actresses in the audience had appeared topless. While it has been reported that the actresses were in on the joke, it is nonetheless disturbing that this number passed muster- especially given that several of the scenes he referenced were from movies where the actresses he named portrayed rape victims.

Other jokes included a reference to Jennifer Aniston’s past as a stripper, a congratulatory statement about how great all the actresses who “gave themselves the flu” to lose weight looked in their dresses, and a comment about how Latino actors (in this case Javier Bardem, Salma Hayek, and Penelope Cruz) have difficult-to-understand accents “but we don’t care because they’re so attractive.”

MacFarlane also tried some jokes that had men as their targets but still managed to get mud on a few women in the process. He joked that Rex Reed was going to review Adele’s performance (a reference to Reed’s recent movie review in which he called Melissa McCarthy a “hippo”) and made a joke about 9-year-old nominee Quvenzhané Wallis dating George Clooney. Some defenders of MacFarlane’s performance argued that these jokes were meant to be about the men in question, but ignored the fact that they were made at the expense of women and girls.

The Oscars are billed as “Hollywood’s Biggest Night”, and it’s incredibly disappointing to see what is the biggest event for the entertainment industry turned into the worst office party in history, complete with a leering coworker who’s creating a hostile environment.  If MacFarlane succeeded at anything, it was reminding women that they’re expected to always be thin, be pretty, and be willing to shut up and take it, lest they spoil the whole evening.

There is evidence to show that (unfortunately) these types of jokes and messages that devalue women are believed and internalized within our communities.  For example, a 2009 study by the Boston Public Health Commission found that over half of teens surveyed blamed the singer Rihanna after she was beaten by her boyfriend Chris Brown.  In addition, research shows that a mere 3-5 minutes of listening to, or engaging in, fat talk can lead some women to feel bad about their appearance and experience heightened levels of body dissatisfaction.

Research also tells us that these internalized messages and social norms are correlated with serious public health outcomes.  For example, the CDC outlines the risk factors for sexual violence perpetration.  Under society level factors we find (among others):

• Societal norms that support sexual violence
• Societal norms that support male superiority and sexual entitlement
• Societal norms that maintain women's inferiority and sexual submissiveness
• Weak laws and policies related to gender equity

So the issue is much bigger than if Seth MacFarlane was funny or made a good Oscar host.  The issue is about the quality of the role models we choose to represent our communities and the messages they send.  These messages can have a broad and long lasting influence on public health.  We hope the Academy will choose wisely next year.

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The thrill of transcendence: Kathryn Bigelow Studies

Updated with video and new links on April 12, 2010

Jamie Lee Curtis as Megan Turner in Blue Steel (Kathryn Bigelow, 1990)

[Kathryn] Bigelow’s earliest works are often radical experiments with genres—combinatory, subtractive, subversive, offering a tool for crafting a mode of vital self-reflexive cinema in which the spectator becomes a thrill junkie, like the restless characters in Bigelow’s films. Ultimately, however, the raw exhilaration experienced by Bigelow’s characters must end so they can come to terms with reality and the laws—be they legal or gravitational—that anchor them to society. The later films show an interest in group dynamics as a form of politics or, perhaps, as an ideal of social living contained but not determined by politics. The turning point between these two parts of Bigelow’s career is Strange Days, whose protagonist attempts to wean himself off his addiction to spectacle in order to face the violence of his urban surroundings.
     This is the double bind Bigelow investigates: while thrill is ultimately an alienating form of individualism, the “real world” tends to be a trap, whether confining or merely banal. While Bigelow’s films reveal genre cinema’s promise of glossy escapism to be a dead end, they also pointedly argue that re-engagement with community is tantamount to conformity. One possible escape is offered to Bigelow’s protagonists by seeking out those extreme situations on the bohemian, criminal and physically fraught margins of society, where the rules can be broken and the self fleetingly transcended. Kathryn Bigelow, 'Filmmaking at the Dark Edge of Exhilaration', Harvard Film Archive, 2009

A little while back, Film Studies For Free promised a list of links to openly accessible scholarly essays on the work of filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow, recent recipient of the Academy Award for Best Director for Iraq War drama The Hurt Locker (2009; see that film's Press Kit/Production Notes). And now FSFF's Bigelow Study Day has finally arrived - maybe not its longest links list ever, but one full of highest quality material nonetheless. The links follow the wonderful embedded video 'Outlaw Vision: Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker' created for The L Magazine by Michael Joshua Rowin and Matt Zoller Seitz.

• Kate Adams, 'Review of The Cinema of Kathryn Bigelow: Hollywood Transgressor. By Deborah Jermyn and Sean Redmond (eds.) London & New York: Wallflower Press, 2003', Scope, Issue 2, June 2005

• Katherine Barscay, 'Kathryn Bigelow's Gen(d)re', Cinephile (Post Genre Issue), Vol. 4, Summer 2008

• Robert Burgoyne, 'The Hurt Locker: Abstraction and Embodiment in the War Film', University of Minnesota Press Blog, March17, 2010
  

• Kevin L. Ferguson, 'Yuppie devil: villainy in Kathryn Bigelow’s Blue Steel', from Jump Cut, No. 50, spring 2008 

• Tom Jennings, 'Rose Coloured Spectacles', Variant,27, Winter 2006

• Jeff Karnicky, 'Georges Bataille and the Visceral Cinema of Kathryn Bigelow', Enculturation, Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall 1998

• Victoria Large, 'Young Vampires in Love: Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 53, August 2006

• Jenna Ng, 'The Handheld Digital Camera Aesthetics of The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield (via Strange Days)' 16:9, No. 32, June 2006

• Karl Palmås, 'Bodies without Bodhis', First published in Glänta 2-3/2009
  

• Parallax View Special Section on Kathryn Bigelow  February-March, 2010
  
  
  

  • The Loveless Worlds of Kathryn Bigelow by Robert C. Cumbow

  • Black Arts by Kathleen Murphy

  • True Fiction: Kathryn Bigelow on The Hurt Locker – Interview by Sean Axmaker

  • The Way You Don’t Die: The Hurt Locker by Sean Axmaker

• Patricia Pisters, 'Logistics of Perception 2.0: Multiple Screen Aesthetics in Iraq War Films', Film-Philosophy, 14.1, 2010

• Laura Rascaroli, 'Strange Visions: Kathryn Bigelow's Metafiction', Enculturation, Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall 1998

• Laura Rascaroli, 'Scopic Drive, Time Travel and Film Spectatorship in Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys and Bigelow's Strange Days', Kinema, 15 (Spring 2001)

• Michael Joshua Rowin and Matt Zoller Seitz, 'Outlaw Vision: Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker ', The L Magazine, June 26, 2009

• Steven Shaviro, 'Kathryn Bigelow', The Pinocchio Theory, March 10, 2010

• Brenda Wilson, 'Blurring the Boundaries: Auteurism and Kathryn Bigelow', Cinephile (Gender and Violence Issue), Vol. 1, April 2005

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Reports from the E-Repositories #1: eScholarship Initiative/California Digital Library

Image from November (Hito Steyerl, 2004, DVD, 27 min)

Film Studies For Free has donned its fetching explorer's hat to check out some excellent university e-repositories for research and scholarship.

In the first of a series of posts reporting on its findings, here are five of the best, freely-accessible, film-related items that FSFF found on its e-travels, today courtesy of the eScholarship initiative of the California Digital Library, served by the individual units of the University of California:

• Laure Astourian (2008) “Bridging Fiction and Documentary in Godard’s Notre Musique”, The Berkeley Undergraduate Journal : Vol. 21: No. 2, Article 4 (thesis adviser: Ulysse Dutoit) (abstract: This paper is a close analysis of Jean-Luc Godard’s 2004 film, Notre Musique. Its primary focus is the implications of Godard’s blending of documentary footage with staged footage. Among the examples of documentary and narrative blurring, Godard stages an interview with an internationally known poet, Mahmoud Darwish, and though the pretext is completely false, the exchange that takes place is honest and potent. Aside from the famous personages who play themselves, the film’s other main characters are actors. They insert themselves seamlessly through events that actually took place in Sarajevo (i.e. that were not planned for the shooting of the film). I believe this technique echoes Godard’s belief that people have faith in the imaginary, and doubt reality. Even though the narrative curve is atypical--there is no climax, and the two main characters never meet--it offers that which the spectator needs in order to submit himself or herself to a film: the imaginary. Thanks to the lens of narrativity, the varied documentary subjects (the Israeli/Palestine conflict, the symbolic rebuilding of the Mostar Bridge, the Native American plight, the future of digital filmmaking) whose philosophical links would otherwise not be considered are conjoined into a field where realities point to imaginaries and vice versa. Throughout the film, the characters acknowledge the inability of images and words to represent certain atrocities, and strange way by which imaginary representations are at times more believable than the truth.)
  
• Deniz Göktürk (2005) “Yüksel Yavuz’s Kleine Freiheit / A Little Bit of Freedom”, TRANSIT, Vol. 1: No. 1, Article 50915 (abstract: Yüksel Yavuz’s internationally celebrated film Kleine Freiheit / A Little Bit of Freedom (2003), tells the story of a friendship between two young men, both of them illegal immigrants living in Altona, one of them a Kurd from Turkey. Baran’s application for asylum has been declined, and he has therefore fallen into an illegal status in Germany. That means that he does not have basic rights, such as health care or job protection. He works as a delivery boy in a relative’s kebab restaurant. When he has a toothache, they try to cure him in the kitchen by sticking a hot skewer into his mouth. His scream leads over into the first montage sequence of a bicycle trip. This triple exposure sequence conveys a gripping cross-section of the neighborhood by superimposing shots of city traffic with shots of the various locations to which kebab is delivered, ranging from a Turkish bakery to a construction site and a brothel. The sequence conveys a sense of multilayered locality, which is underscored by the music of Mercan Dede. Despite the excess of mobility displayed in these images, the characters remain confined within the St. Pauli neighborhood throughout the film. Taking advantage of a “Germany in transit,” Yavuz’s cinematically impressive engagement with locations in Hamburg raises a whole range of interesting questions such as: Where is home? How are transnational mobility and traumatic memory represented in cinema? Do immigrants live in a “parallel world”? Do they care about integration into German society? Do they form new inter-ethnic alliances in this new place? How do questions of race and gender come into play? And where are German (and global) spectators positioned in relation to immigrant spaces and networks?)
  
• Kathleen Sclafani (2006) “Finding Home in a Liminal Space: Exile and Return in Andreas Dresen’s Halbe Treppe ”, TRANSIT: Vol. 2: No. 1, Article 61212 (abstract: In his film Halbe Treppe, Andreas Dresen uses stylistic elements and modes of production similar to exilic filmmakers, as described by Naficy in his book An Accented Cinema, in an attempt to portray both a sense of exile and a desire for freedom in his characters. Since exile is inextricably bound-up in questions of both homeland and identity, the film invites comparison not only to exilic cinema but also to certain aspects of New German Cinema, particularly issues of German identity that many critics argue have been too often ignored by other young German filmmakers. By emphasizing the importance of Frankfurt/Oder as the setting for his characters’ experience of exile, Dresen creates a connection between identity and “place” that encourages the spectator to reflect upon the traditional notion of “Heimat” and how it might be re-imagined in a new multicultural, unified Germany.)
  
• Dean K. Simonton, 'Film awards as indicators of cinematic creativity and achievement: A quantitative comparison of the Oscars and six alternatives', Creativity Research Journal. 16 (2-3), pp. 163-172 (abstract: Although film awards are often taken as indicating the creative achievements that underlie outstanding motion pictures, critics have questioned whether such honors represent a consensus regarding cinematic contributions. Nevertheless, a strong agreement was demonstrated by investigating 1,132films released between 1975 and 2002 that had received at least 1 award or award nomination from 7 distinct sources (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Hollywood Foreign Press Association, British Academy of Film and Television Arts, New York Film Critics Circle, National Board of Review, National Society of Film Critics, and Los Angeles Film Critics Association). The results indicated that (a) almost all award categories exhibited a conspicuous consensus, the Oscars providing the best single indicator of that agreement; (b) Oscar awards provided meaningful information about cinematic creativity and achievement beyond that provided by Oscar nominations alone; (c) awards bestowed by the 7 organizations corresponded with more specialized awards granted by guilds and societies, with the Oscars usually providing the best correspondence; and (d) awards correlated positively with later movie guide ratings, the correlations being especially large in the categories of picture, direction, screenplay, and acting. The findings were discussed in terms of whether the awards can be considered to be indicative of cinematic creativity.)
  
• Hito Steyerl (2005) “November: A Film Treatment”, TRANSIT: Vol. 1: No. 1, Article 50914 (abstract: In the eighties Hito Steyerl shot a feminist martial arts film on Super-8 stock. Her best friend Andrea Wolf played the lead role, that of a woman warrior dressed in leather and mounted on a motorcycle. The engagement expressed in the formal grammar of exploitation films later became Wolf’s political praxis: She went to fight alongside the PKK in the Kurdish regions between Turkey and northern Iraq, where she was killed in 1998. Now honored by Kurds as an “immortal revolutionary,” her portrait is carried at demonstrations.
  In November Hito Steyerl examines the spectrum of interrelationships between territorial power politics (as practiced by Turkey in Kurdistan with the support of Germany) and individual forms of resistance. Her memories and accounts of Wolf’s life provoke the filmmaker to engage in a fundamental reflexion: She comes to understand how fact and fiction are intertwined in the global discourse. Her friend’s picture as a revolutionary pin-up would equally connect with either Asian genre cinema or a private video document. If October is the hour of revolution, November is the time of common sense afterward, though it is also the time of madness – Hito Steyerl considers from this perspective a relationship which began with a pose, and Andrea Wolf took its implications so seriously that she was no longer satisfied with symbolic action. Wolf chose the Other of filmmaking, which was what made her into a true “icon”.

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