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Roman Polanski is currently trying to make $4.5 million in bail to get out of Swiss jail. If he can rustle up that sum (and can he? How much coin does Roman really have?), he would be put under house arrest at his posh chalet in Gstaad with full access to phone, Internet, television and anyone who wants to visit him. A Swiss Justice Department spokesperson told the AFP, "He will have no prison regime ... He is completely free to determine his daily schedule. It's also up to him to get in food and other supplies." All things considered, that sounds like a pretty sweet deal for someone who has been a fugitive for the past 30 years.
But even so, 92 percent of those polled by the Los Angeles Times' Web site think Polanski would try to flee to France to avoid extradition to the United States. Why would he want to do that, considering how good he currently has it? He's already the object of renewed international scorn—even if he did flee to France, he would not be able to resume the quiet old life he had before his most recent arrest. And also, how would it even be possible to flee? He's going to be electronically monitored. Do people think he's going to tear off his lowjack and cross-country ski across the Alps? Doesn't seem especially likely. Finally, I don't believe that Polanski is so wealthy that he can afford to abandon $4.5 million. Full bail payment, without the help of bail bondsman, is customary in Switzerland. Unless his rich friends are willing to put together a Free Roman fund ...
Of course, many who are calling for Polanski's head probably think that even $4.5 million in bail is too little and that he deserves to rot in foreign jail until he can be brought to justice in Los Angeles. It looks like those haters will have to sit tight, since it doesn't lseem like he'll be forced to face an American court any time soon.
Photograph of Roman Polanski by Abdelhak Senna/AFP/Getty Images.
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Kerry, I take your point, that there’s something wrong-headed and overly sympathetic about considering the Salahis, the Heenes, and their grotesque, attention-seeking ilk exclusively as an outgrowth of our perverted, fame-seeking “culture.” When we say that these people are what we deserve, we’re letting them off the hook for behaving in a way that the vast majority of us still, thankfully, never would. But to say there’s not something new going on, that attention-seeking now is the same as attention-seeking always, just with the technology to amplify the seekers’ reach, feels wrong. You argue that the Salahis and Heenes are “painful to watch because they're desperate to be liked, and it's awkward to encounter that level of neediness in other people.” But they’re not desperate to be liked, they’re just desperate to be noticed.
What distinguishes reality TV from other fame-making mediums is that to get famous because of it, one doesn’t have to be liked one bit. (For more on reality TV’s unique terribleness, James Wolcott has a scathing, cheekily overdramatic column on it in the most recent Vanity Fair.) Movie stars succeed because we like them—our liking them, or their persona, is what makes them movie stars. That’s still more or less true. (Just this weekend, Sandra Bullock demonstrated what a bunch of goodwill and a half-decent, cheeseball movie can get you at the box office.) But for a regular person to become a reality TV star we don’t have to like him, we just have to be interested in him. As Puck, Omarosa, Jon and Kate, Kim Kardashian, and scores of others have ably demonstrated, disturbed, bitchy, unhinged, borderline crazy, fame-obsessed, self-aggrandizing, and even stupid can all be interesting, sometimes.
Maybe once, not so long ago, most people who wanted to be famous also wanted to be liked, because those two things were connected. They're not anymore. If the number of people who want to be noticed, who want attention and are willing to do anything to get it, hasn’t increased (and I think maybe it has), at the very least those people can now get what they want by behaving badly, with limited social stigma. How did we let that happen? And how do we stop giving them the recognition they want so desperately? Uh oh, there I went, blaming it all on us again.
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Star magazine's Web site was among many outlets to report on Chelsea Clinton's Thanksgiving engagement to longtime boyfriend Marc Mezvinsky. It's more evidence—on the tail of my piece this morning about the Salahis and their entitled ways—that the divisions among different sorts of fame are growing more and more murky. The three stories promoted alongside the Clinton engagement are about Tiger Woods, and Dancing with the Stars' Lacey Schwimmer and her new, totally unfamous beau.
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When we debate chocolate milk in schools, we're talking about far more than just the three teaspoons of sugar included in every half pint. We're talking about how we feed our kids, who feeds our kids, and whether we should strive for perfection, improvement, or just throw up our hands and hope that, like us, they'll learn to struggle with their own eating issues in the fullness of time.
Every year, it seems, brings a new touchstone in school lunches. With soda machines and fast-food advertising now either out, or at least out of sight of the parents who object to them, chocolate milk has become the target of choice, and it's easy to see why. To pull chocolate milk (or any flavored milk) and replace it with regular requires nothing more than a few strokes of the pen for a pat on the back. Bigger changes—eliminating the giant cinnamon bun offered as lunch once a month at our local public elementary school, for example, or replacing frozen-food-service vegetables with fresh local ones, or finding a way to get kids to actually eat the daily apple instead of tossing it—those take time and effort and may or may not succeed.
Chocolate milk's been banned in Boulder (where chef Ann Cooper is doing a lot more than banning flavored milk for the schools) and many other districts. Barrington, Ill., is considering bringing it back after students petitioned for chocolate milk's return. Students in part of Pennsylvania needn't worry—their district agrees with the industry's new ad campaign and say they'd rather have students drinking chocolate milk—which still contains calcium and other nutrients—than water, juice, or soda (the latter presumably brought from home).
One issue is that the chocolate milk offered with school lunches is subsidized by taxpayers. In a nation consumed with fears about rising childhood obesity levels, subsidizing the consumption of any food that's nutritionally less than perfect raises all kinds of red flags (although our national commitment to corn subsidies suggests that we would very much like to have this one both ways). The larger issue is that controlling what our kids eat has proven difficult for even the most dedicated parent. On a personal level, one trip to the grocery store reveals aisle upon aisle of foods far less nutritious than chocolate milk. To achieve some kind of balanced diet in a world where the balance of food offered is so off is difficult at best. To achieve it for a whole coming generation seems impossible. Limiting chocolate milk, on the other hand—that we can do.
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The story of the gate-crashing Salahis was with us for the duration of the holiday, given top billing at every major paper and half-heartedly justified by the pretense of their presence as a “security issue.” The commentary was predictable because we’d seen the same when balloon boy descended from the attic. We created the Salahis. This is our culture of attention-seeking. The Salahis aren’t outliers, they are what we have become. Etc, etc, and so forth.
This line of argument has always seemed to me unpersuasive. Of course we’re going to notice the tiny minority of fame addicts more than we notice the vast majority of people who lack interest in publicly humiliating themselves; getting noticed is the point. Yes, fame-seekers now have more stages on which to perform their dysfunction. But that doesn't mean that there are more exhibitionists among us than there once were, or that every life is now a public life. Kids who grow up on Facebook are going to be relatively practiced at drawing boundaries; if anyone knows where the line is, it’s the people who have always had to make the choice between privacy and public revelation. I don’t care if Penelope Trunk wants to tweet her miscarriage, but that kind of openness does not seem to be the norm.
The Heenes and the Salahis aren’t uncomfortable to watch because they epitomize some ugly new aspect of American culture. They’re painful to watch because they're desperate to be liked, and it's awkward to encounter that level of neediness in other people.
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Jennifer Senior has a nuanced article about the current state of the abortion debate in this week's New York magazine, in which she says that the current generation of twnetysomethings is the most anti-choice since the generation born during the great depression. I found this very upsetting, not just because I am pro-choice, but because the reason my peers are anti-choice is they have no sympathy or empathy for people who become pregnant accidentally. It's not because of their more stringent religious or ethical beliefs—they're anti-choice out of spite. "They feel much more strongly about personal responsibility than the generations preceding them: Didn’t use birth control? The burden’s on you," Senior writes.
There was also an article about the Stupak amendment and the abortion debate in the New York Times' Week in Review section. Even the pro-choice twentysomethings are not fighting hard against the anti-choice tide because they take abortion for granted. The Times quotes Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg, who says, "For many [twentysomethings], the daily experience is: It’s legal and if you really need one you can probably figure out how to get one. So when we send out e-mail alerts saying, 'Oh my God, write to your senator,' it’s hard for young people to have that same sense of urgency." If the amount of political support for Stupak is any indication, we may have that push to defend our rights sooner rather than later.
Photograph here and on the homepage by Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty Images.
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Desperate to get out of the house yet? Looking for an activity that the whole family can enjoy, without--and this is key--actually talking to each other? Ah, yes, the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend. If you're not on an airplane, you're probably at the movies. It's a big time for kids' movies--The Fantastic Mr. Fox, A Christmas Carol, Where the Wild Things Are, Astroboy--but there's another gap movie makers like to fill this time of year. Call it the all-ages adult comedy. 2007 brought us Fred Claus and Enchanted; last year: Four Christmases. In other words, it's tough to do well. The hope, of course, is to create something that a fifteen-year-old can watch with his grandmother, with just enough raunch for both to feel cool, but not enough that either feels the need to crawl under his or her sticky seat.
And so, flipping down the list of mulitplex offerings this year, it's quite possible that your fingers will linger over "Old Dogs." Robin Williams--well, he used to be funny, and every time he bats another one we all hope he'll somehow hit this one out of the park. And John Travolta--Pulp Fiction! Get Shorty! And it's Disney--surely this is family friendly fun. But we took a small office poll here, and couldn't find a single person who, having once seen Seth Green snuggled in the arms of a gorilla during the trailer, was willing to sit though the entire movie (and remember, I made it through Imagine That and Mr. Troop Mom). So although we cannot actually offer you a review of Old Dogs, we can state with confidence that we've seen the moments this film's creators thought put its very best foot forward (in fact, we've seen them more than once) and we decided to stay home. Our best advice would be that you do the same.
Still from Old Dogs. © 2009 Walt Disney Pictures. All rights reserved.
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DoubleX is starting a new partnership with The Washington Post Magazine. Each week our contributors will argue over a certain question, and we invite you to join in. This week: Is gossip at work a malicious distraction or a useful social tool?
Hanna Rosin: It depends on the size of the workplace. At a small office where I once worked, the gossip was like family gossip. It was all viciously intimate but assumed a great amount of unspoken connection and affection. At a bigger office where I once worked, gossip seemed more like a management tool to organize individuals. Everyone had a reputation, a two-sentence summary of their personality and work habits. That characterization stuck no matter what. It was often not true and never very interesting, but it could always be used against you.
Alison Buckholtz: Tomato, tomahto. Office gossip to one person is another person's strategizing. When it comes to office politics, all intel is fair game, as long as the participants play fair. The real issue is knowing boundaries, because when coworkers cross the line, using personal information in underhanded ways, no one benefits.
KJ Dell'Antonia: Gossip about bosses? All's fair. Gossip about colleagues? Mouth shut. Gossip about underlings—very uncool, although sometimes irresistible if you have a particularly colorful group. In the law firms where I worked, gossip about the partners was downright necessary—plenty were guys you didn't want to let shut the office door behind you. And there's always the senior associate who doesn't give credit where it's due. Those are things you need to know. But when it comes to colleagues, dishing dirt invites others to do the same, and it's just never struck me as politic. In my experience, anyone willing to gossip with you will also gossip about you. Of course, that's not to say I won't listen ...
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Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Roald Dahl’s anti-fable is just as delightful as the critics say. Save for one part in which Wes Anderson’s oft-criticized “mishandling” of race peaks through. Mr. Fox, voiced by George Clooney, is an upper middle class fox, pretty much anthropomorphized as a white baby boomer liberal (at one point, the villain insinuates Mrs. Fox was a slut in her day and Mr. Fox launches into a very Abbie Hoffman-esque defense of the free love decade.) Throughout the movie, Mr. Fox’s opossum sidekick won’t let up on Mr. Fox’s admitted phobia of wolves. The phobia of course makes perfect sense strictly in the animal world. Wolves are predators, foxes their prey. But it takes on a blatantly racial tone when Mr. Fox actually confronts a wholly black-furred wolf on his victorious drive home.
He pulls the motorcar over and yells to the wolf: “Do you speak English?” The wolf doesn’t. Mr. Fox tries French. That doesn’t work either. The wolf looks on blankly, big and majestic at the top of a wooded hill. Then Mr. Fox raises his hand into the black power sign—arm straight, fist closed-- and the wolf is finally responsive, raising his black arm into the black power sign in return. Then he runs off into the forest a wild creature, while a clothed Mr. Fox resumes his drive back to his furnished home euphoric after confronting his phobia. Hooray! The wolves Mr. Fox has been so afraid of his entire life aren’t so scary after all—they’re just language-less beasts that can easily be outfoxed with a little black power arm raise.
Still from Fantastic Mr. Fox © 2009 Fox Searchlight Pictures. All rights reserved.
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I'm suspicious of this new poll showing that Americans are tired of hearing about Palin, and that they follow the health care debate more closely than they follow the news about her. This is a classic in the category of virtuous self reporting, along with studies about diet and exercise. In the study, only 3 percent of Democrats say they paid attention to coverage of Palin's book tour. But there are two big problems with that statistic. One, paying attention to news about Palin's book tour is not the same as paying attention to news about her. People may not even know she has written a book but, as any web site editor can tell you, they will read any story with Palin or Angelina Jolie in the headline. Second, if I asked you to rank your preference about stories on celebrities, child horror or health care, what would you say?
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