Thursday, November 21, 2013

Bothering billionaires

Having worked on a project for Canadian Business magazine a couple of months ago that involved chasing down retired CEOs, I can tell you that contacting billionaires for the Richest People in Canada feature was much much harder. I didn't talk to a single one, though I did chat with the son of one of them.

My billionaires mostly made their money on real estate development, food retail and franchises. Aside from that, it's hard to generate advice based on their successes. Some started poor, some were born into money. Some have been impressive philanthropists, others not so much. Some are highly social, others more reclusive and/or belligerent.

All of them, by the time they're worth billions, are pretty hard to get access to. Although there is no record that Louis Reichmann, for example, the most reclusive of the Reichmann brothers, has passed away, I had difficulty finding evidence he is still alive. So writing the simple sentence, "Paul Reichmann is survived by three brothers" was not so simple at all.

Friday, November 08, 2013

My response to Sky Gilbert's critique of my IN Toronto piece on celebrities coming out

It's always flattering when someone you admire takes issue with something you said, since, at the very least, you were worth responding to. 

So I'm glad Sky Gilbert took umbrage with my piece in this month's IN Toronto magazine, which asks the bratty question "Does coming out even matter anymore?"

Sky's critique is here.

I responded to Sky directly and wanted to share my response here, for the record.
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Hi Sky,

I appreciate your thoughtful essay and feel delighted and honoured that you took the time to respond to what I wrote.

My piece was meant to be a playful riff on a series of ideas around coming out. (It all started when a friend of mine complained that there were too many out actors and not enough out scientists, which was a weird notion I wanted to unpack.)

It might have been hard to figure out what I was saying in the piece because I was deliberately trying to be non-prescriptive--evasive even. I didn't want to tell anybody what to think or do with their lives, nor give a thumbs up or thumbs down to different celebrities. Rather, I was throwing some ideas and stereotypes into the air to see them crash into each other, hopefully provoking readers into examine their own feelings about famous people coming out. I purposely eschewed answering the headline's question so readers could answer it themselves. And you've done so yourself quite forcefully and I'm glad of that.

But I hope I was clear, especially when I write about the "enduring value of coming out"--that's the bit near the end where I laid my cards on the table--that, despite my cavalier approach and the provocative headline, I still think coming out is very important. Perhaps I buried the lead.

I just think coming out publicly has a very different social meaning than it did a decade or 20 years ago. That's progress, though not the end of our labours.


Thursday, November 07, 2013

Rob Ford's substance abuse problem

People love to quibble over "addiction." It's a term that suggests a medical condition with specific symptoms (for example, you start to shake if the substance is withdrawn) and specific treatments (methadone, AA meetings).

That's why I much prefer talking about drug and alcohol problems. A problem is something an outsider can determine without knowing the biochemistry, thoughts and feelings of the person in question. A problem doesn't presume to know what's going on inside a person, only how the person is doing in the world.

Toronto mayor Rob Ford has said again and again that he's not an addict--it's something he's entitled to say. It could be true. But his addiction or non-addiction is irrelevant. That's why councillors need to focus on his drug and alcohol problem--Ford undeniably has one.

Ford might not crave a drink or a fix. Ford might use only occasionally. But if drugs or alcohol (or drugs and alcohol, as seems to be the case) harms his work and personal relationships, it's a problem. It may not be a problem for Ford himself--I've known some users who have had a great time drunk or high--but it is is for the people around him who have to respond to his doped up behaviour. Those who are affected decide if there's a problem, not the user.

It's a problem if someone's missing time at work. It's a problem if it hurts performance. It's a problem if someone become belligerent and abusive. It's a problem if the lies needed to continue using drugs and alcohol create headaches and heartaches for the people around the user. Falling asleep on the job, spending chunks of the workday meeting up with  an alleged drug dealer friend, showing up at public events drunk--all problems, regardless of whether Rob Ford is an addict or alcoholic or not.

The salacious drama of the crack video--the video! the video! the video!--has distracted people from the central issue. Yes, it's shocking that the mayor of Toronto has smoked crack, that he was in such a drunken stupor that his memories of the experience are vague. I'm sure the video, if we ever get to see it, will be both hilarious and troubling.

But I'm more interested in the problems created by what Rob Ford did in that seedy room. Where should he have been? Conducting city business? Spending time with his kids? How did he get home afterwards? What actions did he take, if any, to obtain and/or destroy the video or punish its owners? How much trouble has six months of his lying about the video caused for his friends, family, co-workers and the citizens of Toronto? How much trust has been destroyed?

It doesn't really matter if it was crack or meth or pot or tobacco in Rob Ford's pipe if troublesome things came of his smoking it.

Ford's opponents like to throw everything they don't like about Ford into a big bag, shake it and offer it up as evidence toward removing him from office. That includes his policies (the man ripped up bike lanes!), his sleazy populist tactics, his slovenly appearance, his crassness, his violation of council rules, his negative attitudes toward LGBT people and other minorities, as well as his substance abuse problem. For these opponents, the crack video is just another embarrassing, frustrating thing, like the "subways, subways, subways" mantra.

This "He's awful and needs to go" generalization confuses the issue. It distracts as much as Rob Ford's own "I am not an addict" shtick.

No matter what you think about the direction Rob Ford has taken the city in, his competence in doing so or his personal style, these are things for voters to decide. We are allowed to vote for incompetent people, even addicts, for that matter. But it is clear from all kinds of evidence, not just the video and the expansive police files, that the man has a substance abuse problem that needs to be addressed. And it needs to be addressed by the people around him who are most affected. His family, his staff and, on behalf of the citizens of Toronto, his fellow councillors.

Toronto councillors can't force Rob Ford into treatment, but they can refuse to stop cleaning up his mess.

Sunday, November 03, 2013

How a children’s film out-bleaked the season’s three anxiety-causing hits

A note: This piece contains spoilers.

This season’s three runaway critically acclaimed hits—Gravity, Captain Phillips and 12 Years a Slave—have all leveraged that classic piece of advice about good dramatic writing. Tie the audience to a relatable protagonist, competent yet not inherently heroic. Put that protagonist in jeopardy. Keep him or her there. Put them in more jeopardy. Repeat until the audience can't take it anymore, then go further.

Mortal danger is usually most effective in getting audiences to tense their muscles, clench their jaw and  prepare themselves to look away from the screen if need be, though a filmmaker might go further than that and inflict pain, humiliation, self-doubt and dark pasts upon our worthy avatars. Only when they have totally brutalized us will we accept we’ve seen a great film.

The lightest of this season’s three masochistic masterpieces (which is saying something), Gravity focuses on danger that taps into space-age existential angst. Its harrowing threat is getting lost in infinity, a surprisingly claustrophobic place, more like suffocating in an endless wash of molasses. If Sandra Bullock’s Astronaut Ryan Stone is not attached to something—anything—she will drift into space die. EM Forster probably never imagined so literal a depiction of his maxim “Only connect.”

Captain Phillips and 12 Years a Slave are more layered and topical, not surprising since both are based on true stories. That’s some reassurance going in—you know they lived to tale the tale. 12 Years even gives you a time limit. Both films lack the technologically produced astral beauty that makes Gravity so watchable. They provide no distraction from their assault.

Tom Hanks’s Phillips, captain of a cargo ship that must pass through Somali pirate territory, faces down humanized blowback from the inequities of abstract global capitalist systems. We in the Western world thought we could hoard the world’s wealth, but, no, the losers in our divided world will find a way to grab something for themselves, putting people who don’t even consider themselves to be on the front lines of this class war in harm’s way. Not of this is spoken. You just pick it up from the setting and the expressions on the characters’ faces.

12 Years a Slave, about a free black man in the US North who is kidnapped and sold into slavery in the South pre-1865, is even more deeply engaged in social criticism, giving an innocent and naïve free man a dehumanizing guided tour of the savagery that was necessary at all levels to maintain the savage system of slavery. At first Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) suffers under a somewhat sympathetic plantation owner played by Benedict Cumberbatch. I have no recollection of his character’s name is nor do I think I was meant to have one—Cumberbatch is a mere amalgam of everyone who presents themselves as good and kind yet blames “the system” for their failure to act on these supposed virtues. Michael Fassbender, who plays Northup’s second owner is a much more singular character. Who can say whether slavery turned him into a sociopath or whether it merely lured his already warped personality into its horror-filled kingdom?

In all three films, Stone, Phillips and Northup find inner courage and tenacity, if not always to get themselves out of their predicaments, then at least to make the best of it, practically and soulfully. These films’ power comes from their relentlessly sharp focus—the filmmaker’s decision to cut away most of the padding that usually goes into building a world, building characters, explaining context, creating a framework of relationships the audience can grab onto. For directors Alfonso Cuarón, Paul Greengrass and Steve McQueen, it’s all peril from the word go.

Unlike last year’s Life of Pi, for example, which also dropped its protagonist into mortal danger and kept him there, there’s little time spent on the characters’ lives before or after the story’s crisis. Gravity’s biggest flaw was the tacked-on feel of Stone’s backstory (thank God there were no flashbacks to her daughter before her death) while Captain Phillips’s misstep was the perfunctory and clichéd introductory scenes of Phillips’ home life (and Catherine Keener’s bad hair). 12 Years a Slave’s quick introductory sketch of Northup’s family life was certainly the most treacly part of an otherwise unsentimental film, though director Steve McQueen’s worst decision was to cast Brad Pitt as the Jesus-y looking Canadian who “saves” Northup; that role should never have been deified by star power. The films work best when they keep the audience in the moment. Gravity and Captain Phillips, especially, operate almost in real time; 12 Years a Slave just felt like it was that long.

As tough as these films were to watch, their makers realize the pleasure of viewer masochism comes not in the torture itself, but in the release from it. And release they did. All three films deliver short, sharp and astonishingly uncomplicated happy endings—Disney could hardly do better.

Once adrift, Stone returns to Earth’s loving pull; the mud virtually hugs her. Phillips, once he calms down, will go back to his messy haired wife, his cleverness acknowledged and respected, his uptightedness vindicated. When Northrup leaves his slave labour and hops in the carriage that has come to rescue him, we know in that moment that he is free because his white friend has a bigger hat and a more steely-eyed gaze than crazy, crazy Fassbender. We gasp in relief. The momentary worry that Northrup’s wife may have remarried—that his family may not want him back—is quickly pushed aside. Like Hanks in Captain Phillips’ final scene, the audience finally exhales and shudders like a panic attack has just ended.

Tense films, but their happy endings betray their intentions. They want the audience to leave satisfied. Case closed. Our surrogate is home safe. None of them as bleak as Ender’s Game, which messes with the recipe to deliver a darker message that should follow filmgoers home. Yes, darker than slavery because its ideas inform slavery and world history before and after slavery.

Based on a 1980s novel, Ender’s Game is not a well-made film. It had the rushed, clunky feeling of a work that compensates for overcompression of the source material with clunky overexplanation and uneven pacing. Its effort to attract both younger and older audiences leaves it satisfying neither. Many of the performances are laughable—the talented Viola Davis looks like she had no idea what movie she’s in.

But the film’s ending—the revelation that concludes young Ender Wiggin’s (Asa Butterfield) tests and torments as a trainee to lead the Earth’s forces against possible alien invaders—is as far from Hollywood happy as you can get. Most films are about love, courage, strength and trueness to oneself. This one’s about power, tactics and deceit. It nod to empathy as a virtue, but it doesn’t have a heart. Perhaps it hopes the audience has one, but even that’s not certain.

Despite his savvy in combat both personal and intergalactic—perhaps because of this savvy—Ender is bullied by his brother, his peers and his handlers in the future Earth’s military-industrial complex. He’s been recruited as their saviour but, like Harry Potter, is left to figure out the “how” on his own. Excessive violence usually works.

Unlike Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers, though, which reveals itself to be a satire of fascism, and which attempts (unsuccessfully, one might argue) to make its audience feel bad for cheering on the humans in their aggression toward the enemy, Ender’s Game’s POV on its fascistic future society is not so clear—are we to despise or admire it?

As a good messiah should, Ender cleverly navigates through all the obstacles put before him and even wins allies. But then, in startling reveal, discovers he’s been had—the obstacles were not what they seemed. What should be a triumphant Hollywood movie ending—he and his team of misfits succeed in a computer simulation of a war against their insect enemies—turns into something radically different. The simulations were actually real. He was not playing an elaborate videogame, he was waging real war. In demonstrating that he could, theoretically, destroy an enemy planet, Ender does destroy an enemy planet. And is filled with not with joy, but remorse. There were other ways of winning, he suspects, that would not have caused so much harm.

The Ender books have been criticized for depicting a protagonist who commits violence but who remains innocent because harm was not his intention. But just because the saviour is untainted, culpability doesn’t vanish. It moves elsewhere. It moves onto the system which lied and manipulated him. The systems humans create are perfectly capable of destroying us, even if those pulling the strings have created technicalities that depersonalize that culpability. Tactics wow us but they are not our humanity.

In Captain Phillips and 12 Years a Slave (Gravity doesn’t think so much about these themes—how we wreak evil on ourselves), our protagonists are reborn merely by escaping the trials the system has thrown in their way. Once Phillips and Northup are happy, we’re happy.

Ender’s Game doesn’t let us off the hook so easily. If we’re uneasy with a child being manipulated into genocide, the manipulation itself must be unpacked, even if the peril faced by the child has ended.

By delivering their heroes to such clear safety, Captain Phillips and 12 Years a Slave relieve of us of our worry for the individual we have bonded to. They allow us to put their peril behind us, even though the world that created their troubles continues. Domestic contentment is restored in the foreground.

For all their seriousness, this kind of thrill isn’t so different from what you might get from a roller coaster. Once it’s done, it’s done. In Ender’s Game, we still have much to work through.