#NoirSummer : Daily Dose of Darkness 1

Who's watching the kids? 

Dread is the word.  Lang juxtaposes domestic tranquility against danger in such a way that the viewer can sense that something is definitely off-kilter.   The children in the ring play happily, but sing a dreadful song.  Little Elsie's mother smiles because it's time for her to come home from school, but Elsie nearly gets squashed by a car. The opening elevated shot demonstrates that Mother can see the children, but so can anyone else.  The cintog highlights how vulnerable they are out in the open.   The most concise image is that of the ball bouncing up against the warning sign on the post--in our minds a child's toy should never occupy the same space as murder, but here it does. The shadow falling across the sign plays with our notions of what we have seen on the screen, because we see M, but not his face.  Our minds don't rest well with that ambiguity.

The sound design keeps us off-kilter, too, with the long silences and proto-jump scares of the car horn and the cuckoo clock. The writing underlines the seriousness of the problem.  Mother is clearly quite rattled, otherwise why make such a big deal of a ring-a-round-the-rosy type game?  She's frightened, and she takes it out on the kids.

These notions of the off-kilter feeling and domestic tranquility merely as a sheer overlay diffusing the evil underneath are threads that run through noir as a style.  Noir is LA Confidential digging below the glitz of Hollywood for find that "Everything is suspect...everyone is for sale...and nothing is what it seems." (official tagline) It's that final phrase that captures so much of the essence of noir.  

The Feast

I'll confess-I've gone back and forth a number of times on a "way in" to this production that honors its complexity without implying discordance. Ultimately I found best way to approach the script by young playwright Celine Song is the both/and.  It's both narrative and experimental, a dining room drama and play about big ideas, both squirmingly morbid and goofily funny.

Times Change

So this NY Times article says that college education is so expensive because of increases in administrative costs, not because of decreasing state support.

Slate rebuts, saying it IS because of declining state support, but still talks about "administrative bloat."

However, neither take into account the realities of higher education today. Think pieces like these love to tout the anecdotes that our grandparents or even parents could go to college on their savings from their summer jobs, yada yada.

What is never really outlined is that anything other than instructional functions are labeled administrative.  Anything. So when you're referring to administration, it's not just the Assistant to the Associate Vice Provost or whatever is the conventional wisdom, it's the oh, let's say, ENTIRE information technology unit that didn't exist when our grandparents went to college.   It's the army of academic advisors that help students figure out what's a VPLA versus a W versus a linked versus a global studies requirement.  It's the financial aid offices that help students figure out Pell grants and federal work study and state work study and everything else.  Health Centers are non-instructional.  Libraries have non-instructional budgets, and you know what, online databases and subscriptions cost money.

Higher education is orders of magnitude more complex than it was in 1960 (why is that the banner year for comparison?) and complaining about non-instructional budgets just demonstrates a lack of understanding of how college actually works.  We could go back to using typewriters and course catalogs of 57 courses total, sure. That would get costs back down. But who would want to?

Happy Opening Day!

Go Mariners!

Poetry

What does a poet do but
Grasp the dust motes or leviathan
In trembling fingers
And
Pulls out her own heart fibers
To use as wrapping ribbon
While dripping tears of pride
And
Offers it to say
This was mine
But now it's yours.

Photo from ihatefog Flickr.