Month: October 2013

Judith Shulevitz shudders at how easy it’s become to be a one-mother NSA:

For the iPhone I will soon be buying [my son], I can get an iPhone Spy Stick, to be plugged into a USB port while he sleeps; it downloads Web histories, e-mails, and text messages, even the deleted ones. Or I can get Mobile Spy, software that would let me follow, in real time, his online activity and geographical location. Also available are an innocent-looking iPhone Dock Camera that would recharge his battery while surreptitiously recording video in his room, and a voice-activated audio monitor, presumably for the wild parties he’s going to throw when his father and I go out of town.

Had such science-fiction-worthy products somehow become acceptable while I wasn’t watching? Apparently they had.

When ZDNet conducted an online debate about parental espionage a few weeks ago, 82 percent of respondents agreed with the statement that parents “should be able to observe the full data feeds of what their children post and receive via Facebook, text, email, and any other application or service used on their devices. It is a parent’s right to ‘violate’ their child’s notion of ‘privacy.’” When a media researcher interviewed 21 parents in three Canadian cities in 2011, only three said that they had faith in their children and that they found such hypervigilance “harmful.”

Nora Caplan-Brickler wonders if teenagers might be better at monitoring each other than adults ever could be:

There’s already good evidence that letting teenagers police themselves can work. An organization called Students for Sensible Drug Policy has long advocated “Good Samaritan Policies” (or “amnesty” policies), which can encourage kids to report their own and their friends’ binge drinking and drug abuse by pledging that they won’t get in trouble for calling 911. Good sex-ed policies can create a similar environment around reporting harassment and assault (though offering anonymity or amnesty in those cases is more ethically jumbled). A study at Cornell in 2006 showed that amnesty policies had increased the number of 911 calls—some life-saving—while the level of drinking and debauchery stayed constant. When it counts, asking kids to play NSA on one another can work.

Jo Marchant traces the legend of King Tut’s curse, which took root as soon as the pharaoh’s mummy was discovered in 1922 by archaeologist Howard Carter and his financial backer, George Herbert, the fifth Earl of Carnarvon. The latter died in Cairo two weeks after the excavation:

The idea of the mummy’s curse was already a popular story, but Carnarvon’s demise (and [superstitious novelist Marie] Corelli’s apparent prediction of it) turned it into one of the great legends of the age. Rumours quickly spread that Carter had found warnings in the tomb itself. There were reports of a clay tablet, allegedly found over the tomb’s entrance, that read: ‘Death shall come on swift wings to whoever toucheth the tomb of Pharaoh.’

According to the stories, Carter buried it in the sand in case it scared his labourers into stopping their work. The whole situation was a gift for journalists who, four months after the tomb’s discovery, were desperate for more Tutankhamun-related news. Once the curse story took off, they began running daily updates, roping in scholars to debate whether evil spirits were to blame for Carnarvon’s demise. Ernest Budge, a curator at the British Museum, dismissed the theory as ‘bunkum’. The adventure writer Rider Haggard complained that it served only ‘to swell the rising tide of superstition which at present seems to be overflowing the world’. Carter himself apparently said that his answer to the curse was ‘spherical and in the plural’.

But plenty of respected names supported a paranormal explanation. The Oriental scholar J C Mardrus (known for his translation of the Thousand and One Nights) suggested that ‘dynamic powers’ killed the Earl. Impatient with the argument that, were spirits really guarding the tomb, they would have taken out Carter, too, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle insisted: ‘One might as well say that because bulldogs do not bite everybody, therefore bulldogs do not exist!’

(Image: Howard Carter opens the innermost shrine of King Tutankhamen’s tomb near Luxor, Egypt, 1923, via Wikimedia Commons)

Angela Watercutter praises Kimberly Peirce’s new film adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie for giving its female lead agency and self-awareness, unlike most horror films:

[T]he men in the audience … identify with her as she wreaks her revenge. Why? King has a theory: “One reason for the success of the story in both print and film, I think, lies in this: Carrie’s revenge is something that any student who has ever had his gym shorts pulled down in Phys Ed or his glasses thumb-rubbed in study hall could approve of.” In other words, [film professor Carol J.] Clover writes, a young man who’s been humiliated in a locker room can identify with a young woman pelted with tampons in a gym shower; King also suggests the “possibility that male viewers are quite prepared to identify not just with screen females, but with screen females in the horror-film world, screen females in fear and pain.” The new version of Carrie states this almost flat-out, using Carrie’s eventual prom date, Tommy Ross, who relates her locker-room torture to his own experiences being bullied in grade school.

Devon Maloney identifies bullying as the film’s true monster:

This is the reason one remakes Carrie in 2013: to reframe unadulterated, schmaltzy horror into a more nuanced, realistic terror, the one that leaves you, on the one hand, oddly charged if you’ve ever felt been a victim, or scouring your mental Rolodex for the Carries of your own teenaged past if you were one of the kids dishing it out. This Carrie does what it ought to do: It proves that every generation needs its own cautionary tale about preying on the vulnerable until its circumstances are no longer relevant.

On the other hand, Eli Yudin and Carey O’Donnell see Carrie’s abusive, fanatical mother (played by Julianne Moore) as “the real horror of the movie”:

Our first glimpse of the twisted matriarch is in the very opening of the movie, as Moore gives birth to her daughter alone on her bed. She cries out to God, believing her labor is punishment for a sin she committed (premarital sex), and is convinced she is dying. When she first looks down at the infant between her legs, she views her as an immediate threat and raises a pair of scissors above the baby. However, Margaret spares her daughter after she looks into the baby’s eyes, and immediately cradles her, giving us a perfect summary of their relationship. Moore captures this love/hate seesaw wonderfully: she hates Carrie for being the physical reminder of what she views was her most dire disobedience to God, but realizes that Carrie provides her with the only remaining trace of humanity left in her, a mother’s unconditional love for her child.

Rather than [actor Piper] Laurie’s operatic Margaret [from Brian De Palma’s 1976 adaptation], Moore’s religious rants are hushed, coo-like, making for a more menacing contrast when she hits her daughter in the face with books, drags her into her “prayer closet”, and digs her fingernails and sewing tools into her own flesh. She’s a ghoul in every sense of the word, one that Peirce makes clear Carrie is so desperately trying not to become.

But Richard Corliss pans the move, saying “virtually ever scene in Peirce’s film is a pallid duplicate of De Palma’s”:

After Carrie’s transformation on prom night, when the event is called off due to high body count, she goes walking through the town’s streets like a Godzella unchained. De Palma showed [actor Sissy] Spacek dispatching [actors Nancy] Allen and [John] Travolta with a killer gaze that sent the bad kids’ car into an eight-turn rollover and a quick burst into flames. Peirce draws out the comeuppance, delaying Carrie’s climactic confrontation with her mother. It’s just unnecessary, like the rest of the movie.

Matt Goulding reports on a push to add traditional Japanese cooking to the UNESCO’s list of “intangible world heritages”:

Most people know UNESCO as the cultural arm of the United Nations dedicated to protecting important landmarks and features in the physical world: Angkor Wat, the Grand Canyon, the Taj Mahal. But in 2008, they expanded their heritage protection program to include intangible cultural artifacts – as they describe them, “traditions or living expressions inherited from our ancestors and passed on to our descendants.” To date, they’ve added 257 items to their list of safeguarded customs, from well-known cultural staples like Brazilian Carnival to more obscure traditions like the gong culture of the Vietnamese highlands. Along with the petition to safeguard Japanese cuisine, there are 31 other proposals being examined this fall by the world body, including Korean kimchi-making, Turkish coffee culture, and the Belgian tradition of shrimp fishing on horseback.

Goulding notes that while “preserving a building or a monument is relatively straightforward, the objective of the intangible heritage program is considerably more opaque”:

UNESCO officials are careful not to use the words protect or preserve, as it implies freezing or impeding growth. What’s at hand is even more delicate: educating communities on the importance of their greatest cultural traditions, without stunting their development or dictating their future.