Tabarnouche

As McLuhan's rear-view-mirror analogy predicts, today's world-view of the present has been shifting from one framed by 19th-century referents to one derived from post-1945 premises. In a few years the Reagan/Thatcher/Gorbachev-Bush41/Yeltsin-Clinton/Blair era will supplant it.

The image in the mirror may indeed be closer than it appears in the convex passenger-side mirror, but our gaze is still firmly, axiomatically retrospective. Human beings have a distinct collective bias for — to paraphrase McLuhan — drawing conclusions about the present from the roiling wake behind the cruise ship rather than from the endless stretch of unknown waters between prow and horizon.

The acceptance of extreme wealth concentration, of corruption of the electoral process, of propaganda designed to ensure irremediable political polarization, of the utilitarian economic objectification of human activity, of perduring ideology-based terrorism, of impotence before human-caused climate change and unchecked population growth — this conditioned resignation is a feature of society we now take for granted. Yet it was still sinking its roots when McLuhan's Wake came out in 2002.

Does this make McLuhan's Wake irrelevant? On the contrary.

What does obscure McLuhan's brilliant synthesis, at least as portrayed in this film, is the screenplay's tortoise-like pacing. Contrary to the revelations about the nature of chaos and social upheaval that McLuhan finds in Edgar Allan Poe's maelstrom allegory, the film plods on for 93 minutes at a soporific crawl worthy of a long, mediocre Italian opera. Had McLuhan been alive when the film was made, and had he not been able to punch up the story line exponentially, he'd almost certainly have hurled himself overboard into the maelstrom — if only to feel his synapses fire again.

The cascading mass hypnosis with "virtual reality," the paranoia that attends the demise of privacy, and the impoverishment of human relations bequeathed by social media (McLuhan's "global village") — as social innovations become mutations, they illustrate McLuhan's Laws of Media: Enhancement becomes its opposite, Obsolescence, much as automobile-based mobility morphed into dysfunctional, perpetually congested urban immobility. This shift likely means that McLuhan's "the medium is the message" is due for a resurgence before finally receding into revered historical curiosity.

To dismiss this film because of stylistic shortcomings would be to blind oneself to the insights of a genius on a par with William Blake, Buckminister Fuller, Chomsky, Atwood, Jobs, Assange, Zuckerburg.

Charlie Rose's hour-long interview with Bernie Sanders on 26 Oct 2015 was, once again, hardly up to the standards one would expect from a televised interview series that has appeared on PBS for nearly a quarter-century.

Rose's aggressive, sometimes shabby, treatment of guests who challenge his neo-liberal bias and that of the show's funders is not new. See, for example, Scott F's comment (23 May 2015) on Rose's variable manner with other political guests:

"Two examples will hopefully illustrate {Rose's 'scrappy' biased interview style}. When Thomas L. Friedman is the guest (as he has been countless times) , I sit and wait for the moment when Charlie is going to bend forward to kiss Friedman's ring, as if everything Friedman says is as epochal as a papal homily. Contrast that with when someone from the political left is the guest (hardly ever, of course). When Noam Chomsky was the guest several years ago, Charlie attacked from every direction everything that Chomsky said, and that was after Charlie fessed up that Chomsky was one of the most requested guests ever by the viewers."

Rose made Sanders his new Chomsky. I did not count how many times Rose (a lawyer by training) put leading questions to Sanders, only to cut him off mid-sentence with additional questions. But it had to number in the dozens. Sanders took Rose's rapid-fire interruptions with good grace, perhaps sensing how many viewers would sympathize with him. And Sanders likely knew that sooner or later Rose was bound to slip up and let him (accidentally?) answer one of Rose's questions fully.

Despite Rose's persistent dismembering of Sanders' concisely articulated and well-supported explanations of his campaign's purpose, Sanders got a number of key ideas across. In the process, he nudged Rose into seeing that health care and education didn't really belong in the "social welfare program" drawer to which Rose had relegated them.

One marvels that Rose seems unaware that, to the politically savvy, the normative overtones Rose takes with guests whose opinions — left, right, economic, medical, artistic — veer from the beaten path betray him as a loyal defender of an elite-consecrated status quo.

Whatever talents Charlie Rose's decades on the air may confer, his most glaring professional deficit is his inability to get out of the way of guests who don't fit his Procrustean mold. Let them make their cases without the badgering, Charlie!

When it comes to effectively interviewing people who hold opinions at odds with his own, Rose has quite a few things to learn from NPR's Terry Gross and former late-night king Jon Stewart. Only, as a 73-year- old establishment-beholden millionaire, Rose may now be too comfortable with his Janus-faced role as darling/bulldog to sniff them out.

Putin's Kiss (shot and edited so as to situate it midway between documentary and Reality TV show) follows Masha Drokova, a rather naïve 19-year-old who eventually rose to prominence in Nashi, a pro-Russia, anti-fascist, thug-infested political youth organization. ("Nashi" is presumably derived from the Russian word for "nationalist" similar to the way "Nazi" was derived from the German term for National Socialist.) Nashi offers members "summer camps" reminiscent of both the Young Pioneers in the Soviet Union and the Hitler Youth. It proves to have a nasty, violent side that Masha ideologically blinds herself to. For Masha, though, Nashi held more immediate benefits (new car, spacious digs, a meeting with the head of the Russian state, the hem of whose garment she touched).

That gradually changes as she gets to know Oleg Kashin, an opposition journalist who figures prominently in the film. Masha reflexively dislikes him, as her Nashi affiliation requires. True-believer Masha thus serves as foil to Stalwart Oleg, who endures much for his commitment to journalistic professionalism. He has chosen a lonely life of hardship and injury, and we are all glad of it.

Oleg appears as one of two credited cast members on the IMDb "full cast" listing. (Masha's name is curiously not present.) The other cast member being ... Vladimir Putin, formerly a lieutenant colonel in the KGB and now (again) President of the Russian Federation and de facto strongman leader since 1999. (If you watch closely, a secondary theme may emerge: Here's yet another short man who entered public life to make a right pest of himself so as not to be overlooked.)

Actually, the film, set in Moscow, shows hundreds of other political militants as well (thousands, if you count the political rally scenes). A few of them are captioned during public appearances and motivational speeches.

For those who still believed Russia to be a fledgling but functional post-Soviet-era democracy, the film will hold upsetting revelations. One of them is that political leaders see no downside to saying one thing and doing another — a tendency yielded to with even more relish and gusto in Russia than in chaotic corners of the EU or in the corporation-beholden US Congress.

Another is how PR-savvy Putin has become in his dealings with the public and the media, the better to put a palatable, modern face on Russia while consolidating absolute control and entrenching the Russian police state. Putin has, for example, cannily overseen the creation of a range of political organizations that act as clubs for Russians young and old, affording them relatively harmless, socially sanctioned, toothless outlets for their nationalism.

But there's little in Putin's strategies that can't be found in countries the world over. Putin just has fewer qualms about making dissidents offers they can't refuse.

For those who even cursorily follow international news, Putin's Kiss will flesh in some details about how the Russian political machine operates. Otherwise, it could prove a yawner after the first half-hour or so. Had this film been made in the West, the full cast would have included a few dozen informants and interviewees. But that's not in the cards in Putin's Russia.

And so, while admiring Oleg's bravery and Masha's political maturation, viewers over, say, age 30 will be left wondering why the film was built around the well-intentioned but bland Masha (including childhood photos of her and other biopic trappings). Is it primarily a self-aggrandizing compensation for political disillusionment? She was likely well placed to arrange for its production via contacts she'd developed as a Nashi figurehead.

Russophiles will find material of interest in Putin's Kiss, as may those who have just begun delving into political studies.

Others ... probably not so much.