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Entertainment’s Place In Post-Attack Rebuttal

Entertainment’s Place In Post-Attack Rebuttal

By Steven Zeitchik, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

Global tragedy strikes these days with a kind of wearying familiarity. The pain is fresh, but our thoughts — as they did after Madrid, London, Mumbai and elsewhere — return to a well-known place.

As the Paris attacks and their aftermath have played out this weekend, once again we stare dazed at the cable news screen, facing questions we never imagined — questions we suspect have no answers, even as the scouring of CNN for motives and details and revelations provides a comforting illusion otherwise.

And once again, those of us immersed in entertainment — as producers, as distributors, as chroniclers, or even just as devotees — are left to ask where it fits in. Cultures have been grappling for centuries with how much space to allow levity in the place of a tragedy. But the relevance and even the defensibility of entertainment has lately been thrust forward as never before. These are new and confusing times, an age when mass civilian murders are common and our individual responses to them, thanks to social media, widely known. The proper reaction remains unclear; the rules of collective grief are still unwritten.

Was going to the movies, for instance, acceptable this past weekend? Was it OK to tweet about a television series or college football game? Was there a palatable way to return to, or justification for embracing, the shows, sports, movies, music and other pursuits that fill our typical weekends?

Was doing some of these things perhaps even an act of noble defiance — the attacks, after all, had taken place in part at a musical performance and seemed intended to strike at the freedom to enjoy life in such a manner — or an act of unsavory and even heartless self-distraction?

Would it be OK to wait 24 hours and then resume such activities? What about 48? Was the very idea of a statute of limitations untoward?

Entertainment companies faced their own dilemmas. Lionsgate weighed how to proceed with a Los Angeles premiere for its new Hunger Games movie on Monday, ultimately deciding to hold the event without a traditional red carpet. Saturday Night Live also scaled down but didn’t step out: It scrapped its usual comedic opening this past weekend in favor of a touching salutation, in English and French, from cast member Cecily Strong, then carried on with the show.

A friend at a Hollywood publication said he was in a quandary over whether to overhaul an upcoming issue to focus on the attack. On the one hand, Paris was all we were thinking about, and it would be insensitive, even inaccurate, to carry on with the coverage of ratings and box office and first-look deals as if we weren’t. On the other hand, the Paris attacks were not fundamentally an entertainment story, and wouldn’t it be tone-deaf to pretend that they were?

And yet through it all, entertainment may have already been playing a role in our processing mechanism. In movie theaters these past few months, films have, in their own oblique way that seem clearer after Friday, already been speaking to the issues underlying the attack, to the perpetrators and the victims, to the dangers posed and the values threatened.

The season has brought the high-wire-walking story The Walk and its spirit of unbridled humanity, whose main character uses ingenuity and showmanship to enhance lives instead of diminishing them, a fitting antidote to what happened in Paris. That said character was French and was walking between New York’s twin towers that themselves would become a target and symbol only underlines the comparison.

There is the new release Spotlight, an abuse drama in which truth-seeking journalists push forward and try to do what we all hope to do in the face of cataclysm: find justice, and maybe a little comfort for the afflicted, even as they are tempered by the knowledge their actions will always be insufficient. They press on while Sept. 11 strikes right in the middle of their efforts.

There has been The Martian, which in its own Hollywood escapist way has showed the power of countries and people around the world to band together when life is at stake, differences of nationality and ideology suddenly irrelevant.

There are, of course, literal attempts in Hollywood at understanding militant attacks, as with the upcoming 13 Hours and Patriots’ Day, each about those trying to prevent the murder of innocents. But comprehension also comes more subtly, as with the current Spectre, in which disparate acts of mass murder are chillingly realized to be emanating from a common source.

The movie seeks to fathom what could drive such bloodthirsty nihilism (while also depicting the struggles of democratic governments to contend with it). Like many other examples, Spectre is part of a feedback loop that circles between our brains and our screen, fears of an attack making their way from the first to the second, then coming back to us in a different form once such violence takes place in real life.

The question after attacks like Friday’s is whether to allow entertainment back in. But perhaps that elides the real issue. Perhaps entertainment has been here all along.

When it comes to a post-tragedy pop culture, there are the easy calls to make — the French distributor that decided to pull an upcoming movie in which Paris was under attack, for example. Most choices are harder. There are no answers — certainly no one-size-fits-all answers — on how entertainment can fit in during these shocking after-hours. Personal choices remain that way.

But whatever the response, there may be some comfort is not seeing these activities as separate. Asking the too-soon question may be, in a sense, asking the wrong question. Maybe entertainment shouldn’t be treated as a distinct refuge to which we tentatively crawl back when it is safe to do so and after we sheepishly check to make sure no one is looking. Maybe it’s something that can and should be part of the understanding of the attacks in the first place.

In its purest form, entertainment is built into the process — part of a post-attack rebuttal that allows us to stand up for a life of choice and freedom, sure, but also a way we’ve been understanding the tragedy all along, comprehending those who plot to kill, and the humanity they would seek to destroy.

©2015 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: Shinya Suzuki via Flickr

Putin Resists Western Offensive As Testy G20 Closes

Putin Resists Western Offensive As Testy G20 Closes

Brisbane (Australia) — A weary Russian President Vladimir Putin on Sunday shrugged off a new barrage of Western fire over Ukraine at a G20 summit where the world’s most powerful leaders vowed to heat up the cooling global economy.

Host Tony Abbott insisted that everyone including Putin — who left the Brisbane summit early — was on board the G20 campaign to enact reforms that could infuse more than two trillion dollars into the world economy.

“I’m happy to be on a unity ticket with Vladimir Putin on that subject,” the Australian prime minister told a news conference after the two-day talks, during which the two leaders put aside days of sniping to share a photograph with cuddly koalas.

Nevertheless, Abbott insisted that he had had “very robust” discussions with Putin in recent days and described the July downing of a Malaysia Airlines plane over Ukraine as “one of the most terrible atrocities of recent times”.

Putin flew out of Brisbane shortly before the summit formally ended but denied any snub to Abbott, saying it would take 18 hours to fly home via Vladivostok in Russia’s far east.

“Then we need to get home and return to work on Monday. There’s a need to sleep at least four to five hours,” said Putin, a judo black belt who prides himself on his stamina.

And the Russian strongman played down the testy exchanges seen in Brisbane, when at one point Canada’s leader expressed reluctance to shake his hand.

In general at the G20, Putin said, “some of our views do not coincide, but the discussions were complete, constructive and very helpful”.

– Going after tax cheats –

The G20 leaders backed efforts to close loopholes between different tax regimes that allow some multinationals to get away with paying only a pittance on their profits.

Luxembourg is accused of having connived with such companies to the detriment of their home countries’ treasuries for years when Jean-Claude Juncker, now the European Commission president, was its prime minister.

The G20 endorsed a “common reporting standard” so that companies cannot arbitrage differences between tax regimes, stressing: “Profits should be taxed where economic activities deriving the profits are performed and where value is created.”

The Financial Transparency Coalition, a campaign group, welcomed the G20’s emphasis on “the ravaging effects tax evasion, avoidance, and money laundering have on our economies”.

But it urged tougher rules to make public who owns companies and where they are based — a stipulation that has stirred discomfort in China, where the issue of communist leaders’ personal wealth is a political livewire.

The G20 countries, which represent 85 percent of global economic output, committed to structural reforms that would lift their combined economic growth by at least 2.1 percent by 2018.

That amounts to more than two trillion dollars, although economists are skeptical that many of the G20 members have the stomach for such reforms when growth is already slipping in some key countries, including China and Germany.

– ‘Trench warfare’ –

International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde welcomed Sunday’s pledge while stressing: “Implementation is now critical, with a strong accountability framework to monitor progress, supported by the IMF.”

Oxfam said the focus on growth should be allied with a focus on reducing yawning levels of inequality around the world, “to ensure the bottom 40 percent benefit more than the top 10 percent”.

The G20 declaration also endorsed “strong and effective action” on climate change despite attempts to prevent its mention by Abbott, who wanted the focus to remain on the economy.

One European diplomat likened the G20 negotiations with Abbott to “trench warfare”, but the pro-climate lobby was confident of victory after Obama breathed new life into global discussions on greenhouse emissions with a surprise pact with China last week.

Real warfare remains the fear in Ukraine, where the West alleges that Russia is aiding and abetting rebels in the former Soviet satellite’s east.

In Brisbane, Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron hammered home the West’s determination to curb Russian meddling in Ukraine, which the U.S. president said violated international principles.

“One of those principles is that you don’t invade other countries or finance proxies and support them in ways that break up a country that has mechanisms for democratic elections,” he said.

Cameron said the West would maintain its campaign of sanctions for years if need be, because the alternative was allowing the Ukraine crisis to develop into “some permanent frozen conflict on the continent of Europe”.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who held lengthy talks with Putin far into the night in Brisbane, said after the G20 that it was “important to take advantage of every opportunity to talk”.

But she stressed: “There is a close agreement among Europeans about Ukraine and Russia.”

AFP Photo/Steve Holland

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Fast-Food Workers’ Minimum-Wage Protests Go Global

Fast-Food Workers’ Minimum-Wage Protests Go Global

By Tiffany Hsu, Los Angeles Times

Fast-food workers around the world rallied for a higher minimum wage Thursday in what organizers called the largest such protest of its kind.

The movement, which began as a single walkout in New York in 2012 before sprawling across the U.S. last year, will spark gatherings Thursday in 150 U.S. cities as well as 33 countries on six continents, according to planners.

Protesters are calling for a $15-an-hour minimum wage and the right to form unions without retaliation from bosses.

In the U.S., where union ranks are thinning, the fast-food strikes have been called an attempt by labor leaders to boost membership.

On Thursday, the libertarian Cato Institute said that paying fast-food workers $15 an hour could raise labor costs so much that companies will decide to slash headcount and boost menu prices. The right-leaning Employment Policies Institute said that nearly half a million workers nationwide could lose their jobs.

But protest participants say they want to emphasize that the demographic working the drive-throughs isn’t just teenagers looking for spending money. Instead, supporters say, employees are often heads of households, many of whom must resort to public assistance to supplement their salaries.

Some cities, counties and states are proposing or pushing through minimum-wage increases. In September, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill into law raising the minimum wage in California to $10 an hour by 2016. Earlier this month, Seattle Mayor Ed Murray unveiled his plan for a $15 minimum wage in the city.

On Thursday, social media filled with photos of crowds of protesters outside McDonald’s restaurants, Burger Kings and KFC outlets in New York, Ireland, India, Japan and elsewhere.

In Los Angeles, the Rev. Al Sharpton is expected to join demonstrators outside a Crenshaw Boulevard restaurant in the afternoon.

In a regulatory filing earlier this year, McDonald’s noted that “the impact of events such as boycotts or protests, labor strikes and supply chain interruptions” could “adversely affect” the company and its supply network.

In the same document, McDonald’s listed key factors that could affect its operations, plans and results.

On the list, the company placed “the impact on our margins of labor costs that we cannot offset through price increases, and the long-term trend toward higher wages and social expenses in both mature and developing markets, which may intensify with increasing public focus on matters of income inequality.”

In March, McDonald’s workers filed a spate of lawsuits against the company, accusing the burger giant of systematically stealing their wages and committing other labor violations.

steve rhodes via flickr