pop culture

With the release of 2012 today, we're now at the peak of the apocalyptic movie season.  Soon to come will be the big-screen adaptation of The Road, which looks like yet another barrel of laughs.  This comes on the heels of animated apocalypse movies like 9 and WALL*E. 

This raises an interesting cultural question -- is the obsession with disaster/apocalypse films correlated with the economic downturn? 

I'm not sure the answer is yes. Roland Emmerich, the director of 2012, is just a disaster porn fetishist who likes to destroy the world every time he commits anything to celluloid (except mosques, apparently).  His first disaster flick, Independence Day, was released in 1996 -- not exactly the peak of anxiety about the state of the world.  Deep Impact and Armageddon were also released during the boom times of the last decade.  Furthermore, during the Great Depression, Hollywood responded by instituting the Hays Code and releasing films about "high society" that allowed the downtrodden American to fantasize about The Good Life (a fact that Woody Allen ruthlessly exploited in his best and darkest film, The Purple Rose of Cairo). 

Still, the last time I can remember a spate of disaster flicks being released in such a fast and furious fashion was in the 1970's, another period of economic and political upheaval.  Films like the Airport series, Poseidon Adventure, Towering Inferno, Meteor, and Virus were not pieces of great cinema, but they all seemed to hit some taproot of anxiety that caused people to flock to the movies.

So... a question to the pop culture mavens here at foreignpolicy.com -- do down times lead to more disaster flicks, or is this just a trick of the light? 

Your humble blogger has occasionally prided himself as something of an authority on the intersection between celebrities and international relations.  Which brings me to Jessica Biel.   

Sure, the woman in the picture above these words seems pleasant enough, but according to McAfee security, she's not what she seems.  This Reuters story by Belinda Goldsmith explains: 

Actress Jessica Biel has overtaken Brad Pitt as the most dangerous celebrity to search in cyberspace, according to internet security company McAfee Inc.

For the third consecutive year, McAfee surveyed which A-list celebrity was the riskiest to track on the internet after Pitt topped the list last year and Paris Hilton in 2007.

Biel, 27, who shot to fame in the TV show 7th Heaven and most recently starred in Easy Virtue, was deemed the most dangerous, with fans having a one-in-five chance of landing at a website that has tested positive for online threats, such as spyware, adware, spam, phishing and viruses....

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama, who have featured on most celebrity list this year, were not at the top of risky public figures to search.

The Obamas ranked in the bottom third of this year’s results, at No. 34 and No. 39 respectively.

You can access the Top 15 list here.  Some interesting tidbits: 

• Megan Fox and Angelina Jolie are tied for 8th.  Read into that what you will. 
• Celebrities jump the shark before they lose their utility to cybercriminals.  My proof:  Jessica Simpson, Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and Kim Kardashian remain in the top 15. 
• Declining soft power of America, my fanny:  13 of the 15 celebs on the list were American -- Gisele Bundchen and Rihanna were the only non-American celebrities on the list. 
• In yet another justification for her unparalleled status as Your Humble Blogger's Favorite Online Crush, Salma Hayek is not on this list. So there -- go ahead and search her out on these interwebs. 
• Flavor Flav did not make this list... exactly. 

A question to readers:  if this were a truly just world, which celebrities should be at the top of this list?

Alex Massie alerts us to this BBC story about modeling who would win if the dead actually did rise from the grave: 

If zombies actually existed, an attack by them would lead to the collapse of civilisation unless dealt with quickly and aggressively.

That is the conclusion of a mathematical exercise carried out by researchers in Canada.

They say only frequent counter-attacks with increasing force would eradicate the fictional creatures....

To give the living a fighting chance, the researchers chose "classic" slow-moving zombies as our opponents rather than the nimble, intelligent creatures portrayed in some recent films....

[T]heir analysis revealed that a strategy of capturing or curing the zombies would only put off the inevitable.

In their scientific paper, the authors conclude that humanity's only hope is to "hit them [the undead] hard and hit them often".

They added: "It's imperative that zombies are dealt with quickly or else... we are all in a great deal of trouble."  

Now, one could argue that this finding represents a Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious. On the other hand, the report has clear freaked out Alex Massie:

[The researchers] are cheating. It's like something out of Dad's Army: You can't fight like that, it's not in the rules... Then again, if we can be destroyed by Zombie 1.0, just think how powerless we'd be when confronted by Next Generation Zombies...

To try to make Massie feel better let's have some fun with this and ask a different question -- what would different systemic international relations theories* predict regarding the effects of a zombie outbreak? Would the result be inconsequential -- or World War Z? 

A structural realist would argue that, because of the uneven distribution of capabilities, some governments will be better placed to repulse the zombies than others. Furthermore, anyone who has seen Land of the Dead knows that zombies are not deterred by the stopping power of water. So that's the bad news. 

The good news is that these same realists would argue that there is no inherent difference between human states and zombie states.  Regardless of individual traits or domestic instiutions, human and zombie actors alike are subject to the same powerful constraint of anarchy. Therefore, the fundamental character of world politics would not be changed. Indeed, it might even be tactically wise to fashion temporary alliances with certain zonbie states as a way to balance against human states that try to exploit the situation with some kind of idealistic power grab made under the guise of "anti-zombieism." So, according to realism, the introduction of zombies would not fundamentally alter the character of world politics. 

A liberal institutionalist would argue that zombies represent a classic externality problem of... dying and then existing in an undead state and trying to cause others to do the same. Clearly, the zombie issue would cross borders and affect all states -- so the benefits from policy coordination would be pretty massive.

This would give states a great opportunity to cooperate on the issue by quickly fashioning a World Zombie Organization (WZO) that would codify and promnulgate rules on how to deal with zombies. Alas, the effectiveness of the WZO would be uncertain. If the zombies had standing and appealed any WZO decision to wipe them out, we could be talking about an 18-month window when zombies could run amok without any effective regulation whatsoever. 

Fortunately, the United States would likely respond by creating the North American F*** Zombies Agreement -- or NAFZA -- to handle the problem regionally. Similarly, one would expect the European Union to issue one mother of a EU Directive to cope with the issue, and handle questions of zombie comitology. Indeed, given that zombies would likely be covered under genetically modified organisms, the EU would trumpet the Catragena Protocol on Biosafety in an "I told you so" kind of way. Inevitably, Andrew Moravcsik would author an essay about the inherent superiority of the EU approach to zombie regulation, and why so many countries in Africa prefer the EU approach over the American approach of "die, motherf***ers, die!!"  Oh, and British beef would once again be banned as a matter of principle. 

Now, avid followers of social constructivism might think that Wendt and Duvall (2008) have developed a model that would be useful for this kind of event... but you would be wrong. Back when this paper was in draft stage, I specifically queried them about wther their argument about UFOs could be generalized to zombies, vampires, ghosts, the Loch Ness monster, Elvis, etc.  Their answer was an emphatic "no":  aliens would be possessors of superior technology, while our classic sci-fi canon tells us that the zombies, while resistant to dying, are not technologically superior to humans. So that's a dead end.

Instead, constructivists would posit that the zombie problem is what we make of it.  That is to say, there are a number of possible emergent norms in response to zombies. Sure, there's the Hobbesian "kill or be killed" end game that does seem to be quite popular in the movies.  But there could be a Kantian "pluralistic anti-Zombie" community that bands together and breaks down nationalist divides in an effort to establish a world state. Another way of thinking about this is that the introduction of zombies creates a stronger feeling of ontological security among remaining humans -- i.e., they are not flesh-eaters (alas, those bitten by zombies are now both physically and ontologically screwed). 

Unfortunately, I fear that constructivists would predict a norm cascade from the rise of zombies. As more and more people embrace the zombie way of undead life, as it were, the remaining humans would feel social pressure to conform and eventually internalize the norms and practices of zombies -- kind of like the early-to-middle section of Shaun of the Dead. In the end, even humans would adopt zombie-constructed perceptions of right and wrong, and when it's apprpriate to grunt in a menacing manner. 

Now, some would dispute whether neoconservatism is a systemic argument, but let's posit that it's a coherent IR theory.  To its credit, the neoconservatives would recognize the zombie threat as an existential threat to the human way of life.  Humans are from Earth, whereas zombies are from Hades -- clearly, neoconservatives would argue, zombies hate us for our freedom not to eat other humans' brains.   

While the threat might be existential, accomodation or recognition are not options.  Instead, neocons would quickly gear up an aggressive response to ensure human hegemony.  However, the response would likely be to invade and occupy the central state in the zombie-affected area.  After creating a human outpost in that place, humans in neighboring zombie-affected countries would be inspired to rise up and overthrow their own zombie overlords.  Alas, while this could happen, a more likely outcone would be that, after the initial "Mission Accomplished" banner had been raised, a fresh wave of zombies would rise up, enmeshing the initial landing force -- which went in too light and was drawn down too quickly -- in a protracted, bloody stalemate. 

Readers are hereby encouraged in the comments to posit other IR theoretical prediction of the response to a zombie uprising. For example, would the zombie uprising confirm Marxist predictions about the revolt of the proletariat? 

*Alas, your humble blogger does not have the time to puzzle out the zombie effect on two-level games. 

Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

My latest TNI online essay is now available for viewing on the interwebs.  It looks at recent U.S. foreign policy actions through the ever-useful lens of the good cop/bad cop routine.  Can a gambit that always worked on NYPD Blue work on the global stage?  I have my doubts:

On the whole, the good cop-bad cop routine is of limited utility in world politics. Iran appears to be unbowed in the face of a hawkish Israeli government (though, to be fair, they have been preoccupied with other matters recently). A protectionist Congress has not made it any easier to complete the Doha round. Bill Clinton’s good cop was able to secure the release of the hostages, but at the price of a photo op that looked bad no matter how necessary it might have been. And while no one doubts that Biden occasionally goes rogue, it remains unclear just what policy benefits that strategy yields.

In theory, the best kind of bad cop is the one that seems genuinely unconstrained and ready to strike. An independent but allied government plays this part much better than a subordinate member of the executive branch. In other words, if you want to successfully execute the good cop-bad cop routine in world politics, the odds are long to begin with. To pull it off, however, under no circumstances should you let Joe Biden be Joe Biden.

Go read the whole thing. 

[Would a threat to display more of Dennis Franz's posterior work as a compellent threat?--ed.  Hmmm... let me check the Biological Weapons Convention to see if it's a legit move and I'll get back to you.] 

I know so little about rap music* that I can't directly comment on Marc Lynch's marathon post on Jay-Z and American hegemony.  [You could comment on Beyoncé, though, right?--ed.  Let's just say that I am in complete agreement with Marc that this is one of the most awesome display of soft power on the Internet] 

In reading the blog reaction to the posting, however, I was struck by Ezra Klein's shrewd point about how truly powerful actors rely on proxies to fight their more vicious battles for them. 

Which made me think about what's going on in Iran again.  Najmeh Bozorgmehr's Financial Times story today suggests that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei can't seem to find the necessary proxy to push back against his opposition: 

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, warned the country’s opposition leaders on Monday that they faced “collapse” if they continued to incite protests over the disputed presidential election.

The warning came amid an unprecedented war of words between the regime’s senior leaders and looked like a retort to Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, the influential former president who has backed the opposition. Mr Rafsanjani said on Friday the country was in “crisis” and the regime had to regain people’s trust....

“The [political] elite should be careful,” warned Ayatollah Khamenei. “They [the opposition leaders] are in an exam session; a big exam. Failing in this exam does not mean getting one [academic] year behind. It will lead to [their] collapse.

“Anyone under any title and position who pushes the society toward insecurity would be a hated figure in the eyes of the majority of Iranian nation,” he said, in a clear reference to the top opposition figures including Mr Rafsanjani.

Meanwhile Mr Ahmadi-Nejad, who has been largely silent on the unprecedented dispute over his re-election, is preparing to swear in his new cabinet (emphasis added).

Pretty ominous words from Khamenei, to be sure -- but it's interesting that he's the guy who has to make these threats.  In doing so, Khamenei has brought himself down to the level of Rafsanjani and Khatami.  Like Jay-Z, I'm not sure he can maintain his hegemonic leadership status without throwing away almost all of the structural power that comes with being acknowledged as the Supreme Leader.  Now he just looks like the rapper with the biggest posse.   

Of course, the supreme irony is that Khamenei might have triggered his invitable downfall by pulling out all the stops to bolster a proxy.   

Question to readers familiar with Iran, rap, and IR theory -- did the above make any sense whatsoever?  Because at this very late hour, the parallels seem surprisingly strong. 

*Seriously, I'm not acting faux out-of-touch here.  This is the last rap song I remember enjoying from beginning to end. 

Over at Entertainment Weekly, Mark Harris bemoans the timidity of Hollywood's recession offerings

 Many of us are gritting our teeth and counting our dimes through this rough recession, but the studios and networks have discovered a silver lining — they don't have to try anymore. In entertainment, we have met the first casualty of the economic collapse: ambition....

There will always be an audience for mindless crap, but not only for mindless crap. Executives who insist that all we want is comfort food because that's all they know how to cook are missing our appetite for variety, for surprise, for something we've never seen. And in underestimating our intelligence, they overestimate their own.  

Here's a suggestion for Hollywood.  It's not even that radical a suggestion, because the source material has already been filmed.

Why not remake The Bonfire of the Vanities? 

This is a no-lose proposition.  The Tom Wolfe novel was a heady cocktail of personal hubris set in the financial, political and media world of 1980's New York.  It's the perfect lens through which one can dissect our current financial travails.  Plus, the original movie version was such a God-awful bomb that the most memorable thing about it was a book chronicling the disaster.  The remake, much like Ocean's Eleven, is bound to improve on the original. 

Hell, if even Tom Friedman is dropping references to Wolfe's novel in his columns, one would hope a movie mogul or two has figured out the zeitgeist enough to greenlight a remake.

Here, I'll give my Left Coast friends one last nudge -- some helpful casting suggestions:

• Sherman McCoy -- Aaron Eckhart
• Peter Fallow -- Hugh Laurie
• Maria Ruskin -- Scarlett Johansson
• Judy McCoy -- Calista Flockhart
• Reginald Bacon -- Jeffrey Wright
• Larry Kramer -- Jake Gyllenhaal

That's a talented, inexpensive cast right there!  C'mon, Hollywood, if you're making a movie version of Moneyball, then surely you could do the same for either Liar's Poker or Tom Wolfe's fictional equivalent.  Get on it!

This is an age when it's fashionable to complain about everything in America going downhill. So it's worth pointing out that, compared to my youth, the Super Bowl is an event that has improved with age. This past decade the games have been far more competitive than the first 25 Super Bowls. The NFL has been smart enough to dispense with the military metaphors. Even the halftime shows have gotten better -- props to Bruce Springsteen.

Yesterday's game was thrilling, if a bit sloppy and very chippy. There was some excellent scrambling from Ben Roethlisberger and some outstanding wide receiver play (also a more recent and pleasant change: wide receivers with exceptional talent who don't shoot off their mouths, or their hips).

While the game was good, I'm not so sure about the ads. I liked the one with Jason Statham, and I loved the one with Conan O'Brien. Otherwise, it seemed like a down year. Enough with the f$%^ing Clydesdales, Budweiser. And that Alec Baldwin Hulu ad was funny peculiar more than funny ha-ha.

Readers, what did you think?