We need a better spokesperson for the urgency of the climate crisis than Bill Nye
▻https://massivesci.com/notes/climate-crisis-we-must-do-better-than-bill-nye
You may have seen Bill Nye’s tirade against our collective inaction to prevent the worst impacts of climate change on HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. It reminded me of...
dWeb : The #decentralized Web
▻https://hackernoon.com/dweb-the-decentralized-web-a0e9c6a5c0ec?source=rss----3a8144eabfe3---4
The decentralized web has become famous due to HBO’s Silicon Valley TV show; which highlights the hilarious comedy and grilling drama of nerds coding out the future of the internet.But for all of us who are not programmers, what does ‘decentralized web’ mean? What’s the difference between that and the other thing?The difference is living at home and being treated like a kid, and living on your own and being an adult.Using centralized websites, like Google, YouTube, Facebook, etc. is like living at home. You always have somebody watching over you, whether you like it or not.This comes with benefits though. If you forgot your keys or got locked out of the house, they can open the door for you. But as you might guess, if they are able to open the door, then they are also able to go into your (...)
Netflix: “We compete with (and lose to) Fortnite more than HBO”
▻https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-01-18-netflix-we-compete-with-and-lose-to-fortnite-more-than-hbo
TV and film streaming service points to Epic’s battle royale title as a major competitor
Why #Banksy Is (Probably) a Woman - CityLab
▻https://www.citylab.com/design/2014/11/why-banksy-is-probably-a-woman/382202
▻https://cdn.citylab.com/media/img/citylab/2014/10/RTR4B5LY/facebook.jpg?1494540323
Banksy Does New York, a new documentary airing on HBO on Nov. 17, opens on a bunch of scofflaws trying to jack an inflatable word balloon reading “Banksy!” from the side of a low-rise building in Queens. These hooligans weren’t Banksy. Neither were the police officers who took possession of the piece after the failed heist and denied that it was art. Nor in all likelihood was the silver-haired man who sold $420 worth of Banksy prints for $60 a pop in Central Park, or the drivers who slowly trawled New York streets in trucks tricked out with Banksy’s sculpture, or the accordionist accompanying one of Banksy’s installations. While the film shares a lot of insights about street art, media sensationalism, viral phenomena, and the people who make Banksy possible, it doesn’t cast a light on who Banksy is or what she looks like.
Nerial founder “couldn’t be happier” as Reigns gets Game Of Thrones spin-off
▻https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-08-23-nerial-founder-couldnt-be-happier-as-reigns-gets-game-of-t
London indie teams up with HBO and Devolver to deliver premium #Mobile adventure set in Westeros
#netflix and #vpn servers — How Do They Relate?
▻https://hackernoon.com/netflix-and-vpn-servers-how-do-they-relate-1e2942629aca?source=rss----3a
According to the global statistics, Asia scored highest among the continents with the maximum number of people accessing the internet. Almost 49% of people use various online channels to view their favorite TV shows, movies, videos and so on. To feed the huge demand, various new players have entered in the online space along with a lot of variety of VPS or VPNs or network access services.The Gaining Popularity of Live Streaming ChannelsThere are wide varieties of network accessing online service including Amazon prime video, Hulu, Sling TV, Pureflix, HBO Now, Show Time, Netflix and so on. Among all of these online services, Netflix has created a specific impact on the global audience. Netflix has proven itself to be the smartest and fastest online entertainment service provider in the (...)
Leftist Crushes John Oliver’s Venezuela Episode
▻https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/leftist-crushes-john-olivers-venezuela-episode
The week of Venezuela’s presidential election, John Oliver dedicated an ENTIRE episode of his HBO show “Last Week Tonight” to the country—full of distortions and highly misleading to...
More Shit Product Managers Say
▻https://hackernoon.com/more-shit-product-managers-say-f8f480448057?source=rss----3a8144eabfe3--
“Let’s double click that for more context. What’s a reasonable deadline within your bandwidth to complete the preso?”You already know about the “gentle pings” and “taking conversations offline.” After my Shit Product Managers Say, Translated article went viral, and my Shit Programmers Say article was republished by The Next Web, I decided to write this follow-up, with even more classic PM phrases.Jared Dunn from HBO’s Silicon Valley1. What’s a reasonable deadline for you?“Wow, these are all some great ideas. Let’s set a reasonable deadline for this launch. What date makes sense for you?”Translation: I’m worried we’re not going to launch in time. Maybe by making you set your own deadline, you’ll actually feel responsible for hitting our milestones.2. Let me know how I can help.“Nihar, I believe the (...)
#product-management #silicon-valley #technology #product-development #tech
EXCLUSIVE: New photos show China is nearly done with its militarization of South China Sea | INQUIRER.net
▻http://www.inquirer.net/specials/exclusive-china-militarization-south-china-sea
Aerial photographs obtained by Inquirer.net from a source show that China is almost finished transforming seven reefs claimed by the Philippines in the Spratly archipelago into island fortresses, in a bid to dominate the heavily disputed South China Sea.
Most of the photos, taken between June and December 2017, were snapped from an altitude of 1,500 meters and they showed the reefs that had been transformed into artificial islands in the final stages of development as air and naval bases.
Shown the photographs, Eugenio Bito-onon Jr., the former mayor of Kalayaan town on Pag-asa Island, the largest Philippine-occupied island in the Spratlys and internationally known as Thitu Island, recognized new facilities on the man-made isles.
‘Photos are authentic’
Bito-onon saw the construction going on when he flew over the islands with foreign journalists nearly two years ago.
“These photos are authentic. I flew with HBO before the elections in 2016. We got repeated warnings from the Chinese because we were circling over the islands. I see there are now additional vertical features,” Bito-onon said.
With its construction unrestrained, China will soon have military bastions on Kagitingan Reef, known internationally as Fiery Cross Reef; Calderon (Cuarteron), Burgos (Gaven), Mabini (Johnson South), Panganiban (Mischief), Zamora (Subi) and McKennan (Hughes) reefs from which to project its power throughout the region.
Disney buys much of Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox in deal that will reshape Hollywood - LA Times
▻http://www.latimes.com/business/hollywood/la-fi-ct-disney-fox-sale-20171214-story.html
▻http://www.trbimg.com/img-5a3283f9/turbine/la-fi-ct-disney-fox-sale-20171214
We’re honored and grateful that Rupert Murdoch has entrusted us with the future of businesses he spent a lifetime building, and we’re excited about this extraordinary opportunity to significantly increase our portfolio of well-loved franchises and branded content to greatly enhance our growing direct-to-consumer offerings,” Iger said in a statement.
“The deal will also substantially expand our international reach, allowing us to offer world-class storytelling and innovative distribution platforms to more consumers in key markets around the world,” Iger said.
Disney’s determination to marshal resources is the clearest signal of heightening tensions between technology giants and legacy media. After decades of dominance, Disney, Time Warner, Fox, CBS and NBCUniversal have been scrambling to bulk up to withstand the gale forces coming from Google, Facebook, Netflix, Apple and Amazon.com, which have pushed into television production and distribution.
Disney’s deal to buy Fox studio could bring substantial layoffs, analysts say
Audiences for traditional television have been shrinking, in part, because viewers have so many options, including big-budget shows available through Netflix and Amazon. Movie attendance has stagnated. And Netflix is stepping up its output of films, roiling that business along with television.
“The lingering tensions between traditional media and digital platforms has devolved into an open war,” media analyst Michael Nathanson said in a research note. “It has become increasingly difficult for [film] studios to break through the clutter of high-quality TV options in the home.”
Buying Fox would continue the transformation of Disney, which began when Iger took the helm in 2005. He engineered a series of savvy acquisitions, starting with the 2006 purchase of Pixar Animation Studios — creator of “Toy Story,” and “Finding Nemo” — which reinvigorated Disney’s moribund animation division. The company then bought Marvel Entertainment in 2009 and Lucasfilm in 2012, betting big on marquee film brands such as “Star Wars.”
Then came a shift. This year, Disney spent $1.6 billion to gain a majority stake in BamTech, an online streaming platform that Disney plans to use to launch two streaming services in the next two years, including an ESPN service next year. Disney decided its future was in selling its shows and sports channels directly to consumers. That meant taking on Netflix.
“The core underlying driver for this deal … is the impending battle royale for content and streaming services vs. the Netflix machine,” Daniel Ives, head of technology research for GBH Insights, said in a recent report. The “appetite for content among media companies [is] reaching a feverish pitch.”
A Disney-branded streaming service, set to launch in 2019, will have more firepower with Fox’s assets. Disney would gain 22 regional Fox Sports networks, which could help entice more sports fans to sign up for the proposed ESPN streaming services if the service eventually includes access to Los Angeles Kings, San Diego Padres or New York Yankees games.
Wall Street isn’t sure whether the U.S. Justice Department would bless the combination. It would reduce Hollywood’s television and movie production capacity by eliminating one of the major studios.
The Justice Department’s antitrust division is suing to block AT&T’s proposed $85-billion takeover of Time Warner, which includes HBO, CNN, TBS, Cartoon Network and the Warner Bros. film and TV studio.
Telltale: “We have yet to tackle a romantic comedy”
▻http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2017-10-12-telltale-we-have-yet-to-tackle-a-romantic-comedy
The adventure game studio on its role as the HBO of interactive entertainment
The Best Of George Carlin
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hy-sVByUHqE
▻https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Carlin
Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits. Those are the heavy seven. Those are the ones that’ll infect your soul, curve your spine and keep the country from winning the war.
— George Carlin, Class Clown, “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television”
George Denis Patrick Carlin (May 12, 1937 – June 22, 2008) was an American stand-up comedian, actor, author, and social critic.
Carlin was noted for his black comedy and thoughts on politics, the English language, psychology, religion, and various taboo subjects. He and his “seven dirty words” comedy routine were central to the 1978 U.S. Supreme Court case F.C.C. v. Pacifica Foundation, in which a 5–4 decision affirmed the government’s power to regulate indecent material on the public airwaves. He is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential stand-up comics; one newspaper called Carlin “the dean of counterculture comedians.” In April 2004, he placed second on the Comedy Central list of “Top 10 Comedians of US Audiences”.
The first of Carlin’s 14 stand-up comedy specials for HBO was filmed in 1977. From the late 1980s, Carlin’s routines focused on sociocultural criticism of American society. He often commented on contemporary political issues in the United States and satirized the excesses of American culture. He was a frequent performer and guest host on The Tonight Show during the three-decade Johnny Carson era, and hosted the first episode of Saturday Night Live in 1975. His final HBO special, It’s Bad for Ya, was filmed fewer than four months before his death. In 2008, he was posthumously awarded the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. In 2017, Rolling Stone magazine ranked him second (behind Richard Pryor) on its list of the 50 best stand-up comics of all time.
How the New York Times Is Using Strategies Inspired by Netflix, Spotify, and HBO to Make Itself Indispensible
▻https://www.wired.com/2017/02/new-york-times-digital-journalism
Sulzberger, like more than three dozen other executives and journalists I interviewed and shadowed at the Times, is working on the biggest strategic shift in the paper’s 165-year history, and he believes it will strengthen its bottom line, enhance the quality of its journalism, and secure a long and lasting future.
The main goal isn’t simply to maximize revenue from advertising—the strategy that keeps the lights on and the content free at upstarts like the Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, and Vox. It’s to transform the Times’ digital subscriptions into the main engine of a billion-dollar business, one that could pay to put reporters on the ground in 174 countries even if (OK, when) the printing presses stop forever. To hit that mark, the Times is embarking on an ambitious plan inspired by the strategies of Netflix, Spotify, and HBO: invest heavily in a core offering (which, for the Times, is journalism) while continuously adding new online services and features (from personalized fitness advice and interactive newsbots to virtual reality films) so that a subscription becomes indispensable to the lives of its existing subscribers and more attractive to future ones. “We think that there are many, many, many, many people—millions of people all around the world—who want what The New York Times offers,” says Dean Baquet, the Times’ executive editor. “And we believe that if we get those people, they will pay, and they will pay greatly.”
Taking binge watching to the next level : speed watching
Don’t have the time to watch 50 minutes episodes? Watch them accelerated!
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/12/technology/favorite-shows-high-speed.html
Netflix, Hulu and HBO, however, don’t offer higher speeds on their players, but there are workarounds available. It’s possible to speed up online video through a Google Chrome extension, and an open-source media player called VLC will play many formats of digital media. Some set-top boxes like TiVo allow high-speed playback of recorded programs.
A thorough article about this phenomenon (with some tl;dr danger, but it’s worth reading it all) that delves deeper into the matter :
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/06/22/i-have-found-a-new-way-to-watch-tv-and-it-changes-everything
x1
x1.2
x2
▻http://tempsreel.nouvelobs.com/rue89/rue89-nos-vies-connectees/20161219.RUE6033/pour-gagner-du-temps-ils-matent-des-films-ou-des-series-en-acce
Il est aussi possible de télécharger une extension de Google Chrome, Video Speed Controller, qui peut être utilisée sur Netflix, Vimeo et Amazon Prime, ou de télécharger Overcast, qui réduit les silences pour gagner du temps. L’appli de podcasts d’Apple ou Audible, une appli de livres audio, le propose aussi directement.
▻http://www.liberation.fr/futurs/2016/12/26/speed-watching-des-series-a-grande-vitesse_1537518
Après l’indigestion d’épisodes d’une même série regardés à la queue leu-leu, la tendance est maintenant à la consommation en accéléré. Quelques applications permettent désormais de visionner en augmentant de 20% à 50% le défilement des images.
▻http://www.20minutes.fr/television/1989799-20170105-speed-watching-trop-series-tele-matez-accelere
Westworld
Excellente série.
Rien que le générique, déjà, que je regarde en entier à chaque fois.
L’histoire se dévoile petit à petit, à chaque fois sous un autre angle pour ainsi résoudre le puzzle, en commençant par les coins.
▻http://venturebeat.com/2016/12/20/hbos-westworld-artificial-intelligence-then-and-now
Today, Ray Kurzweil, Jen-Hsun Huang, Andrew Ng, Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, and others are making bold predictions about AI’s potential, and corporations are moving fast to prepare for opportunities in image recognition, voice detection, and conversational intelligence. The current AI revolution stretches far beyond university and defense research into our everyday lives. It is driven by 6 different components that were nonexistent or under-resourced in the 1970s: research, compute power, storage costs, open source resources, talent, and investment capital.
#série #series
#Westworld
#AI #IA #machine_learning #deep_learning
#HBO
Westworld Is Strikingly Real: AI Could Be Conscious and Unpredictable - Facts So Romantic
▻http://nautil.us/blog/westworld-is-strikingly-real-ai-could-be-conscious-and-unpredictable
Westworld recently wrapped its first season with a few stunning twists and a stunning statistic: With a 12-million-viewer average, it was the most-watched first season of an original HBO show in the network’s history. Westworld concerns a perverse and macabre theme park, styled in the fashion of the American Old West. The park’s “hosts,” artificially intelligent beings physically indistinguishable from humans, begin to remember the horrifying experiences inflicted on them by the park’s “guests,” the humans who pay to visit and do as they please, including raping and killing hosts. Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), the fictional cofounder of Westworld, built the park’s hosts with the ability to improvise and make decisions based on their environment—a vision of AI strikingly similar to the one (...)
7 Things You Should Do After Watching ’How to Let Go of the World’
▻http://www.filmsforaction.org/takeaction/7-things-you-should-do-after-watching-how-to-let-go-of-the-world
My new film How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can’t Change debuted on HBO June 27th.
How to Let Go of the World is unlike any other documentary you’ve ever seen...
The #Brexit Could Be Bad News for #Game_of_Thrones | Foreign Policy
▻http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/06/21/the-brexit-could-be-bad-news-for-game-of-thrones
The European Union helps fund production of HBO’s epic in Northern Ireland. If the U.K. leaves, that money could too.
[…]
That’s because if the U.K. votes to leave the EU, it would take Northern Ireland with it, potentially robbing HBO of one of the show’s primary filming locations. It takes a lot of cash to depict Jon Snow and thousands of Stark loyalists defeating Ramsay Bolton’s forces to take back Winterfell, a scene shot there and aired this past Sunday.
That leaves HBO looking for partners to help pay for the show, and some of that money for it comes from the EU’s European Regional Development Fund, created to spur economic growth across the European Union. If the U.K. leaves, filmmakers might not be eligible to draw from that fund. This means that some of the cash used to bring big-budget productions to Northern Ireland could disappear.
The truth about TV’s rape obsession: How we struggle with the broken myths of masculinity, on screen and off - Salon.com
▻http://www.salon.com/2015/06/25/the_truth_about_tvs_rape_obsession_how_we_struggle_with_the_broken_myths_of_m
attention l’article spoile de nombreuses séries, GOT, MadMen, Downton Abbey...
“The Sopranos” did it in 2001, when Lorraine Bracco’s Jennifer Melfi was suddenly and violently raped in a parking garage. “Veronica Mars” made it part of the titular protagonist’s backstory, in the 2004 pilot. In 2006, “The Wire” introduced and then never confirmed it, when it showed us the story of Randy (Maestro Harrell) keeping watch as a girl named Tiff “fooled around” with two boys in the bathroom. “Mad Men” did it in 2008, when Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks) was raped by her fiancé, Greg (Sam Page) on the floor of Don’s office.
A few shows were practically founded on it—“Law And Order: SVU,” which premiered in 1999, has dealt with rape in nearly every episode of its 16-season and counting run. “Oz,” the 1997 HBO show set in a prison, regularly featured male-on-male rape.
But starting around the turn of the decade, rape on television morphed from a delicate topic to practically de rigueur. In the last two years alone, shows as vastly different as “Downton Abbey” and “Game Of Thrones” have graphically portrayed violent rape—typically, but not always, perpetrated by men onto women—to the point that depictions of sexual assault on television have become a regular part of the national discourse. “SVU,” “Outlander,” “Broad City,” “Inside Amy Schumer,” “Orange Is The New Black,” “Tyrant,” “Stalker,” “Shameless,” “Scandal,” and “House Of Cards” have all handled sexual assault, in their own way—either by depicting rape, exploring whether or not a sexual encounter is rape, or making jokes about how often rape happens. For a crime that has a dismal 2 percent conviction rate, it certainly is getting talked about an awful lot.
I can identify that this is a phenomenon that is happening. It’s a little harder to explain why. Some of it is purely a numbers game: There’s more television than ever—and more and more of that television is not on broadcast networks, with their stricter censorship rules and mandates for reaching a mainstream audience. It’s certainly easier to depict and discuss sexual assault on television now than it ever was before.
But that’s not the whole story. I joke, morbidly, that my job title has changed from television critic to “senior rape correspondent” because I cover televisual sexual assault with alarming frequency. The cases, on TV, run the gamut from 14-year-old girls drugging 18-year-old boys into having sex with them and plots attempting to reconstruct hazy memories of late-night drinking to men raping other men as an act of war and husbands raping wives in the bedroom. It’s a topic that engages, uncompromisingly, with our notions of gender, sexuality, power, and equality. And despite the barrage of sexual assaults on television, it’s a crime that occurs far, far more often in real life.
voire aussi : Femmes violées : une affaire d’hommes
▻https://culturesgenre.wordpress.com/2012/11/09/femmes-violees-une-affaire-dhommes-12
▻https://culturesgenre.wordpress.com/2012/11/14/femmes-violees-une-affaire-dhommes-22
ainsi que « à toi l’honneur » sur Radiorageuses #radio
▻http://www.radiorageuses.net/spip.php?article384
Partie sur l’histoire du viol :
What we call rape is an entirely new phenomenon—barely 50 years old. For most of human existence, rape was not a crime committed against women but instead against the men who supervised them—husbands, fathers, brothers, lords, kings. The word “rape” likely comes from the Latin “rapere,” meaning to seize or abduct—to kidnap, to rob, to deprive another of property. Rape sullied a bloodline and damaged goods and/or services; it was a crime against private property. The implication of that language is also that rape happens to women, not men. Men might be violated, abused, tortured, yes, but not seized; they were typically not someone else’s property.
And though the Romans had their own word for sexual violation, “stuprare,” it was not necessarily immoral, criminal, or otherwise repugnant. Women were by and large not empowered enough to grant consent over their bodies, so the question of nonconsensual sex was rendered moot. Greek and Roman mythology is rife with gods raping maidens; in those stories, treated almost casually—an irritating fact of life, kind of like chicken pox.
The language of this era is extremely familiar, even today: Women invite sexual assault through their behavior; men have carnal urges they can’t control; people have to continue the species somehow. It’s reasoning that all hinges on the same logic—female desire is necessarily subordinate to male desire.
In 1975 Susan Brownmiller published her landmark work “Against Our Will,” which provided the foundation for the language of consent as a bulwark against the prevalence of rape. We rely on terms like “consent,” but consent can be silently or unconsciously given, and hard to prove after the fact. Intent is hard to prove in any context; the upside of a crime like murder is that at least there’s a dead body to point to. With sexual assault, it’s much harder to point to the aftereffects of trauma—either because the rape kit was mishandled or lost, as happens an awful lot, or because the aftereffects are more psychological than physical.
But primarily, what Brownmiller’s work did was center rape as a crime committed against women, not against property. “Against Our Will” fit into the feminist movement’s aims to recognize sexual violence and redefine it—both socially and legally. Before rape reform legislation of the 1970s, marital rape was an oxymoron, rape against men wasn’t illegal (or even acknowledged), and a woman’s reputation could be used as evidence against her accusation of rape in court.
It was a victory, but one with an upsetting aftertaste. A change in legislation cannot change social attitudes to sex and gender overnight. A prudent study of history asks us to not impose our own perspective of what people are like onto peoples throughout history, which could lead to the argument that because it so radically redefined the concept, before Brownmiller’s seminal work, rape as we know it didn’t exist. But that part of us that does identify with people from the past—that part of humanity that both spins tales and listens to them, rapt—is forced to acknowledge something much more upsetting: Perhaps, instead of there being no rape, there was only rape. Perhaps human existence is built entirely on intimate violence.
Dans les programmes à destination des hommes voici comment se présente le viol :
Rapists are depicted as identifiably outside the mainstream through their language, clothing, habits, or attitudes. Each of these plot elements works to rein force sensitivity and desire for justice on the part of the male protagonist. In most episodes it is the male detective/ main character who provides the primary comfort and support for the victim. The stories end when the detective protagonist has completed his work, that is, when the rapist is caught or killed. The detective’s sense of morality, and often his need for revenge on the criminal, thus culminate in a successful triumph of the “good guy,” which is often accomplished through violence against the rapist. However, the further plight of the victim through the course of counseling or a trial are not included… In short, these plots are about the male avengers of rape rather than about the problem or crime of rape or the experiences and feelings of the victim.
Dans les programmes à déstination des femmes voila comment se présente le viol :
Daytime TV and made-for-TV movies such as those on Lifetime, in their low-budget, melodramatic glory, was far more likely to offer a woman-centric narrative of rape. Where mainstream TV ran away from topics like domestic violence, prostitution, abortion, and of course rape, soap operas and Lifetime films almost reveled in it; presumably there was some cathartic release in watching crimes suffered mostly by women in the real world play out in exaggerated glory on television. Lifetime’s films, then and now, were characterized by lurid titles and grim scenarios: “The Burning Bed” (1984), “She Fought Alone” (1995), “She Cried No” (1996), “She Woke Up Pregnant” (1996). On the abuse and rape survivor advocacy site The Road To Anaphe, the site’s creator includes an exhaustive list of Lifetime films, adding: “Lifetime Television may be a ‘women’s network,’ but it is one that shows a lot of good, informative movies on the subjects of child abuse, domestic violence, and missing children.” You could count on violence and exploitation in these films. The crucial difference is that you could also typically count on the point of view of the victim being central to the story.
Soap operas, unlike TV movies or even primetime TV shows, are not just serialized but heavily serialized. The short production time for soap episodes means that the shows can respond on the fly to audience interests, making the medium a fascinating one for measuring audience sentiment. And, uncomfortably, when rape shows up on soap operas, often those stories end up redeeming the rapist—indeed, in response to popular affection for those characters.
The best example of that might be the iconic Luke (Anthony Geary) and Laura (Genie Francis) on “General Hospital,” who have been one of that show’s foundational relationships. But their first sexual encounter, in 1979, was rape, when Luke drunkenly forced himself on Laura. She eventually fell in love with him and they were together for 37 years. Their wedding episode in 1981 remains to this day the highest rated soap opera episode in history. It was only in 1998, when their son learned of the rape, that the show really confronted the myth of “forced seduction” they had established nearly 20 years earlier, and reframed it as the assault it really was.
“One Live To Live,” in 1993-1994, focused much of its storytelling on the gang rape and subsequent aftermath of a college student named Marty Saybrooke (Susan Haskell). The football jock who instigated the rape—a tall, handsome guy named Todd Manning (Roger Howarth)—was originally intended to be a serial rapist. The brutal honesty of the scene inspired both audience and critical praise; the series won Daytime Emmys for the plot arc, which unapologetically framed Todd as a sadistic villain.
But then the story took a turn: Audiences loved Todd. Their enthusiasm spurred the writers to instead build a redemption arc for the character, even as Marty struggled to rebuild her life. Todd lingered as a flawed character on the margins as the writers of the show tried to reconcile their desire to maintain that the rape was reprehensible with audience enthusiasm for the character. The situation was settled (sort of) in 1998, when actor Howarth decided to walk away from the show. Unfortunately, I can only find this quote from Soap Opera Digest in Wikipedia, but it’s so compelling, I’m reproducing it:
If the rape had been an unrealistic, soapy thing, then it wouldn’t matter. But because it was so in-depth and so brutal, to show Todd and Marty having drinks together in Rodi’s — to show Marty feeling safe and comfortable with Todd — is bizarre… People have come up to me and said, ‘My 7-year-old loves you.’ What do I say to that? I’m not going to tell them, ‘Don’t let your 7-year-old watch TV.’ But I have to say, it’s disturbing.
Howarth’s departure from the show effectively scuttled any possibility of redeeming the character (though he did return for guest-stints on the show). Of course, this being soap operas, Todd was recast with Trevor St. John, who believed himself to be Todd but then turned out to be Todd’s twin brother, and in the meantime, Marty returned to the show with amnesia, and they had sex, which ended up getting dubbed “re-rape.” But it’s a plotline notable for never losing sight of the fact that what Todd did to Marty was unforgivable, in a landscape where, to quote the writer and unofficial soap expert Joe Reid, “The laundry list of incredibly popular soap characters who started off as rapists — or even just terrorizers of women — is uncomfortably long.”
Interestingly, by 2003, when the rape of Bianca Montgomery on “All My Children” dominated national conversation, the audience’s desire to see the rapists forgiven seems to have fallen off. Bianca herself, as the first openly lesbian lead on a daytime drama, became the subject of redemption; where some audiences had hated her for coming out of the closet, her rape—a “punishment” or “corrective” for her sexuality—and her subsequent struggle to keep her baby became objects of such audience fervor that the New York Times covered it in 2004.
Pourquoi la TV aime le viol :
The book “Prime Time: How TV Portrays American Culture” makes a stark observation that Cuklanz, includes in her own book I quote above. The authors state that rape is “a crime ideally suited to television. It is violent and therefore action packed. The sexual nature of the crime can easily be presented as the act of a violent, mentally unbalanced madman.” And after noting both a study on sexual assault finds rape to be “the only violent crime to be a matter of universal concern among women of all class and ethnic backgrounds” and the role that detective procedurals in primetime played in shaping socially acceptable performances of masculinity, Cuklanz comes to a conclusion that is, in its way, astounding: Rape on television is used to, more often than not, to redeem masculinity,
by offering a subtle redefinition that frames masculinity as the means through which women are protected and avenged rather than brutalized and demeaned. At the same time, protagonist males can engage in violence within certain parameters, such as when they become so morally outraged at criminals that they can no longer contain their anger. Masculine volatility is harnessed for acceptable purposes and never used against women. … Rape provides a subject matter for which these stereotypes are easy to maintain. Not only are victims clearly deserving of protection and care, but the extreme evil and brutality of rape also serve as a clear contrast to the detective’s behavior and legitimize his use of force.
Rape on television is the theater through which both men and women grapple with masculinity—with the fact that in its most corrosive form, masculinity is a quality that wreaks violence on those closest to it. Destruction and power are built into our concept of maleness; rape plots on TV work desperately to allow men that access to power while also codifying when it’s acceptable to use.
I’m reminded of one of the most shocking and iconic rape episodes on primetime television—“Sylvia,” a two-parter on the family-oriented “Little House On The Prairie,” in 1980. The episode is horrifying, drawing on slasher-film imagery to tell a story of a girl whose “bosoms” came in “too soon,” resulting in horrific violence at the hand of a man in town. Sylvia herself is a one-off character who is introduced at the beginning of the two episodes and dies by the end. The episode is not about her; it’s about the men around her—her father, her rapist, her boyfriend, and most importantly, Pa Ingalls (Michael Landon), the show’s continued figure of masculine righteousness. What would have happened if Pa hadn’t been around is a chilling possibility left unrealized.
Underneath the archetype of the righteous man, the myth of the redeemed rapist, and the specter of the girl who was “asking for it,” in “Little House On The Prairie” or elsewhere, is a far greater fear, a far bigger problem. If good men don’t exist, if rapists can’t reform, if it’s not ultimately the woman’s fault, then something much scarier bubbles to the surface: This world, and masculinity in it, is very, very broken.
cc @supergeante
cc @mona
Cette partie spoile la saison 2 de « True Detective »
In this long examination of rape on television, it is hard not to think of HBO’s “True Detective,” which both consciously borrows the bones of the detective procedural and its unsubtle discourse on righteous masculinity. In the first episode of the second season, we learn Ray Velcoro (Colin Farrell) is a man tortured by the fact that his wife was raped; it is almost farcical, given the work we have done to center women in their own victimization. (I remain convinced, perhaps naively, that it is farcical, but that’s another story.) “True Detective” is a show with many faults, but it does attempt rather dramatically to tell a big story about masculinity in this world. And what it seems to tell is that the myth of masculinity we currently are all invested in is purely unsustainable. The men of “True Detective,” the ones consumed by the warring ideas of both destruction and violence but also righteous, proper violence, are erratic, addicted, and tortured; they fixate on violence done to the innocent because they know that on some level, they are responsible for that violence. The men of the first season of “True Detective” both have to confront their own monstrosity in order to come out the other side of a case that they could not solve; the confrontation leaves them both desolate and broken. If the mythos of masculinity is a beautiful, irresistible supernova, “True Detective” offers a vision of the collapsed, soul-sucking black hole it really is.
And if men struggle with it, women struggle with it, too; the story of soap operas and Lifetime movies is overall the story of women attempting to come to terms with the fact that that which they love is always capable of violating them. Women’s television offers either redemption for the abuser or an open-and-shut justice, via Olivia Benson (Mariska Hartigay) in “SVU”; neither happens with any notable frequency in real life. Rapists keep raping, with premeditation and without recourse, and we can barely admit it to ourselves.
There’s a point in Cuklanz’s work, which focuses on TV between 1976 and 1990, where she argues that as television is a more formulaic medium, it’s unsurprising how this standard detective-rape plot is produced and reproduced. It’s 2015 now, though, and we don’t live in a world of formulaic television. The past few years have yielded an incredible number of rape plots that often push the envelope in ways we’ve never seen before—exploring their violence, their frequency, the insidiousness of acquaintance rape, and the less-discussed phenomenon of male-on-male rape.
My complaint with these plots, over and over, is that the stories—usually written and directed by men, despite progress in gender equity—is that so often they focus on the feelings of the men in the story, at the expense of the victims’. But I can see why they focus on the men; the men, as the overwhelmingly more likely perpetrators, present a greater puzzle for us. It would be simpler to dismiss all rapists as monsters, but when so many are fathers, brothers, friends, boyfriends, it becomes harder and harder to do. Sexual assault has only existed the way we think about it for a few decades, and we are still trying to figure out how to address it—how to change the way this world functioned for millennia, and still functions in pockets of untouched refuge all over the world. I don’t particularly have a solution for how to “fix” rape on television; it’s graphic, brutal, violent, and horrible, to the point that it is very difficult to watch, hard to explain, confusing to discuss.
But one thing is clear: I’d rather we dealt with this than we didn’t. I’d rather discuss rape on every TV show than not discuss it all. I’d rather see the world convulsing with outrage over Sansa or Anna or Mellie or Claire or Pennsatucky— who are all, by the way, white women, suggesting an erasure of experience for women of color that has yet to be addressed —than pretend that this isn’t a crippling social problem, an epidemic that we appear to lack the political will or interest to fight. This is what we do with stories; we imagine not just what happened then, and what happened now—but what happens next.
et pour la saison 2 de true detective, je suis d’accord avec le fait qu’elle soit ridicule aussi bien le perso de Colin Farrell que l’autre gangster est aussi incroyablement cliché. Il n’y a que le générique qui vaille la peine pour cette saison à mon avis.
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJJfe1k9CeE
’Show Me a Hero’: David Simon Is Still Mad as Hell
▻http://www.rollingstone.com/tv/features/show-me-a-hero-david-simon-is-still-mad-as-hell-20150811
’The Wire’ showrunner David Simon discusses his new HBO miniseries, fixing the system and that “difficult men” tag. Source: Rolling Stone
HBO buys rights to film about Holocaust documentary maker Claude Lanzmann - Jewish World News - Israel News | Haaretz
▻http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/1.654381
HBO Documentary Films has bought the American television rights to “Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah,” according to the Hollywood Reporter. The film is a portrait of the French director who is best known for his monumental nine and a half hour 1985 Holocaust documentary “Shoah.”
The new movie portrait of Lanzmann, which was produced, directed and written by Toronto-based director Adam Benzine, is to air on HBO next year, possibly on Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Reporter said. It traces what the Reporter described as Lanzmann’s “harrowing artistic journey” between 1973 and 1985 in making “Shoah.”
▶ A Conversation with President Obama and The Wire Creator David Simon - YouTube
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWY79JCfhjw
President Barack Obama and David Simon, the creator of HBO’s The Wire, sat down to talk honestly about the challenges law enforcement face and the consequences communities bear from the war on drugs
▶ Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Daylight Saving Time - How Is This Still A Thing? (HBO) - YouTube
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=br0NW9ufUUw
Hitchcock and the Holocaust: “Memory of the Camps”
▻http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/inside-frontline/hitchcock-and-the-holocaust-memory-of-the-camps
▻http://seenthis.net/messages/216238
Night Will Fall, a documentary that recently aired on HBO, tells the story behind what has been called “Alfred Hitchcock’s lost Holocaust film” — a 1945 documentary filmed by camera crews who accompanied Allied armies as they entered the Nazi death camps at the end of World War II.
“At the time we found the film in a vault of London’s Imperial War Museum, it was not entirely clear what role Hitchcock played in its development,” says David Fanning, executive producer of FRONTLINE. “Moreover, one reel of the original six, shot by the Russians, was missing. There was a typed script intact — undated and unsigned — but it had never been recorded.”
The footage was as horrifying as it gets: Gas chambers. Pits full of the bodies of thousands of systematically starved men, women, and children. Crematoria designed to burn large numbers of corpses. And haunted, emaciated survivors.
Work on the documentary featuring the footage had begun in the summer of 1945, with some of the editing done under the direction of Hitchcock (who, according to the film’s director, Sidney Bernstein, would not take a fee for his work). But as Night Will Fall explores in detail, the film was ultimately shelved.
#documentaire #Hitchcock #camps_de_la_mort #histoire #real_politique #sauvetage
Le coup de gueule de Ben Affleck contre les clichés sur l’islam affole le Web
▻http://www.france24.com/fr/20141006-ben-affleck-islam-discours-cliche-tv-americaine
À l’origine, l’acteur et réalisateur américain Ben Affleck était venu dans l’émission américain Real Time, sur la chaîne câblée HBO, vendredi 3 octobre, pour parler cinéma et promouvoir le dernier thriller de David Fincher, « Gone Girl », en tête du box-office américain. Mais le public a surtout retenu son intervention dans le débat sur l’islam.
En plateau, le présentateur de l’émission Bill Maher échange sur l’islam avec son invité Sam Harris, un spécialiste des neurosciences connu pour son avis critique sur les religions, et affirme que la religion musulmane recèle de mauvaises idées. « C’est la seule religion qui agit comme une mafia. Ils vont vous tuer si vous dites la mauvaise chose, si vous dessinez la mauvaise chose ou si vous écrivez le mauvais livre », déclare Bill Maher.
Si le public applaudit, les propos déplaisent fortement à Ben Affleck, qui perd son calme et ne peut s’empêcher d’intervenir. « Pourquoi êtes-vous si hostiles ? C’est répugnant et raciste ! », fulmine-t-il. « Que diriez-vous des plus d’un milliard de personnes qui ne sont pas fanatiques, qui ne punissent pas les femmes, qui veulent juste aller à l’école, avoir des sandwiches, et ne pas faire l’une des choses que vous dites que tous les musulmans font ? », poursuit Ben Affleck.
Son discours a rapidement fait le tour des réseaux sociaux. Si certains saluent son intervention dans le débat, d’autres dénoncent « un discours gauchiste endoctriné qui ne comprend rien ».
Endoctriné ? Par qui ? Comment ? Sérieusement ? Et les journalistes qui se sentent obligés de faire l’#équilibre en indiquant les réponses qui « dénoncent ». Tiens, quand on « dénonce », on n’agit pas comme une sorte de « police de la pensée » ? Amusant de constater comme ces artefacts linguistiques peuvent se retourner instantanément. Sorte de preuve de leur inefficacité à rendre le moindre service intellectuel raisonnable.