The Best Words - Trump, Hanson and language.

The rise of Donald Trump like some grotesque balloon in the Thanksgiving Parade and the rise of Pauline Hanson from the grave like some political zombie have a lot to do with words. In particular they have a lot to do with the power of spoken words as opposed to written words.

Written words have shaped the modern world. Prior to Gutenberg, books existed but they were expensive and accessible only to a small section of society. The printing press made books available to almost everyone. This not only changed the way information flowed, it even changed the way people thought.

Prior to printing, ideas were communicated primarily by speech – the priest preached from the pulpit, the master instructed the apprentice, the mayor made public announcements in the village square. Speech had one overriding virtue: it was public. One person can communicate to many people at once: a congregation, a brigade, a classroom, even a large crowd if a PA system is available. In other ways it is, however, limited. Firstly by time. People usually cannot listen to someone talking for more than a couple of hours as anyone who has endured a Speech Night knows. And informal verbal communication, such as the conversations people have in a bar or at a barbecue, is even more limited. These discussions generally consist of short blocks of speech delivered alternately by the participants, often hastily when the topic is controversial.  Also, no one has editorial control over a conversation and the discussion can quickly veer off into other topics as new ideas are introduced.

Books, on the other hand, are not time limited. While a lecture or a speech may last an hour, reading a book can take twenty hours or fifty hours. Also, books are carefully prepared and constructed. The author has control and the flow of ideas is not interrupted. Thus a book can communicate more complex and extensive ideas than a speaker and those ideas can be enhanced by references, quotations, footnotes and illustrations. Most significantly, reading is a silent activity making it a private communication between the author and the reader.

Books thus brought about two major changes to the world.

Firstly, reading created the notion of the personal intellect. One of the strengths of communicating through speech is that everyone gets the same message which is important if there is something everyone needs to know. But it can also however be seen as a limitation, even a form of oppression. With the advent of books, rather than being educated, instructed and informed en masse, individuals could assemble their own library of books and develop their own views of the world. And because books contain more complex ideas and more information than spoken language, an intellect formed by reading is more sophisticated and better informed than one shaped solely by weekly sermons at the church and local gossip. The advent of books not only gave individuals the ability to develop their own personal intellects, it was perhaps the first time that the whole idea of a person having their own view of the world was realised.

(It has also been surmised that reading books was the first private and independent activity that women ever experienced.)

Of course books can include ideas that contradict the prevailing beliefs in the community which is why the Nazis were quick to burn books, knowing they could might cause people to doubt or question the propaganda blaring from the loudspeakers of the Third Reich. But despite bannings and burnings, books continued to be read and gradually eroded the old Medieval culture which was based mainly on verbal communication.

Reading however did not just change the channels and sources of information: it changed the way people thought. Speech is delivered in relatively short sentences that are most devoid of qualifications, exceptions and caveats. A mind formed by solely by speech tends to have simplistic concepts that are regarded as immutable “facts”. Written language, however, with its toolkit of adjectival, adverbial and conditional clauses, complex sentence structure, capacity to cross-reference and pursue the implications of arguments and hypotheses, and ability to lay out discussions two-dimensionally rather than in a simple linear narrative, awakens the reader to the complexity of ideas, the interdependence of concepts and ultimately the tentative and ongoing nature of all intellectual inquiry. Books, unless they are specifically designed not to, smash certainty and with it, prejudice.

The second thing that books did was to create the middle class. From the 16^th century onwards, the main feature that distinguished the lower class from the middle class was the ownership of books. The middle class was, essentially, the class that could read, a definition which still holds theoretically today. “White collar” citizens (a classification that did not exist before the invention of books) may earn less than tradespeople, mine workers or construction labourers but being able to read and write extended slabs of text (i.e. get a college degree) defines them as being members of a higher class.

So, more than any other thing, books and the literate, educated middle class that read them created the modern world. The concept of the personal intellect led inevitably to the notion of having a personal and private relationship with God, i.e. Protestantism and writing and publishing over time led to science, economics, political theory and eventually democracy.

Which brings us to Trump and Hanson.

While reading and writing created our world, politicians (or should we say, wise politicians) know that not everyone reads and especially, not everyone reads history, economics or political texts. In fact, very few people read “serious” literature at all. The way to the electorate’s heart is still via spoken language and that must be language that is understood by the majority of people. We still remember people, even educated people, recoiling at Kevin Rudd’s tendency to descend into bureaucratic gobbledygook with such terms as “programmatic specificity.” No one likes a smart-arse.

In contrast, the political power of politicians such as Churchill, Roosevelt, Menzies and Obama lay in their ability to communicate important ideas in language that was understandable yet powerful. But those speakers might be regarded as assuming some basic level of literacy and readership among the population. Churchill, Roosevelt and Menzies were certainly speaking to a population that read. When those politicians spoke, they spoke a language that was informed by written language. They formed sentences such as you might construct on a page – simpler and shorter indeed – but containing elements of imagery, carefully chosen words and rhythms such as you might find in written text.

But what of a world where communication and entertainment is dominated by movies, television, radio and the Internet? What of a world where people get their news, as has been claimed, from Facebook and politicians are interviewed on morning television shows? The Internet is not, in general, a haven for carefully constructed prose. Indeed, the most widely used forum for political discussion on the Internet, Twitter, specifically disallows any serious comment by limiting all communications to 140 characters!!  I can’t put enough exclamation points after that sentence. That is not just a limitation on comment size, it is a limitation on THOUGHT. And this is a channel that is used by Donald Trump and which all politicians are being urged by their minders to master.

And that brings us to Hanson. People will say they agree with Hanson’s policies but they not really policies at all. They are really just the sort of things people say in pubs collected and presented as a political manifesto. Hanson doesn’t even (and this is her strength) even bother to re-word these comments into formal political language: she expresses them in pretty much the same words as they are when uttered around the barbecue.

Similarly, Trump has stolen a considerable number of Republican voters away from the main party by expressing ideas in terms that are essentially non-literate. He speaks in short simple sentences devoid of any complicating dependent clauses: “I will build a wall. And I will get Mexico to pay for it.” No qualifications, amplifications or explanations. Now in office, Trump continues to make these utterances such as “We are going to tax imports from Mexico.” without any further information of how such a taxation scheme might work.  And this seems to have resonated with a considerable number of American voters who see Trump as a good straight, plain speaking antidote to the “political elites” (readers) which Hillary Clinton unfortunately came to represent.

And so we have perhaps returned to a pre-Gutenberg world. The middle class is no longer defined by the number of books they own but by the type of coffee they drink (quarter-strength soy latte with Fair Trade beans), the Prius they drive (I’m saving the environment – no you're not), the width of their flat screen TV (all the better to watch Married At First Sight) and the fact they voted for a black president in 2008 (but not so much in 2012). In a world where even educated Americans speak in clichés, wear slogans on their t-shirts, post sampler-type homilies on Facebook, go on endlessly and narcissistically about loving yourself and living your dream, where emojis replace long complicated blocks of text such as “Love you”, perhaps Trump is actually right when he says he has “the best words”.  

The problem with CGI resurrections or why Grand Moff Tarkin is still uncanny

Many people were surprised to find that Rogue One featured an actor who died in 1994.  I must admit that when Peter Cushing appeared on screen as Grand Moff Tarkin, Governor of the Outland Regions, I was rather taken aback. I was pretty sure he was dead and this was a computer recreation or should I say resurrection. However, regardless of whether my historical knowledge was correct, within a few seconds I was pretty sure this was a computer image. It was almost completely convincing but there was still something wrong.

What that thing was, was movement.

Since 3D animation was first pioneered, people have talked about the “uncanny valley.” This is the problem that while we can accept the stylised faces of humans such as those in Toy Story, when we attempt to create faces that attempt to replicate faces that look “real”, there is something odd about them, even creepy. The paradox lies in the fact that, strangely, the closer we get to replicating the shape, colour, texture and luminance of real faces, the more odd they seem.

I think that much of the problem of uncanniness arises because CGI people tend to look “mechanical” – not in their structure or texture but in their movements.  For faces - apart from ones like models' which have been botoxed into paralysis – are never still. Perhaps this is why some photographic models look like CGI.

People not only have individual faces and individual voices but individual ways of moving. They stand differently, walk differently and move their hands, eyes and heads differently. Some of these are subtle and some more obvious. Patterns of bodily movement are so distinct that we are able to recognise people from far away, long before we can see their faces or body details, just from the way they walk.

Alec Guinness once said that in order to find a character, he had to know how the character walked. What he was suggesting was that gait can be an indicator of personality.  Generations of actors have given us a range of distinctive walking and even standing styles, from James Cagney’s square shouldered, confrontational stance often with fists held clenched in front, ready for action, to John Wayne’s lumbering, rolling walk with head tilted up and arms hanging loosely at his sides or a thumb hooked into his belt. Dustin Hoffman displays an odd jerky way of walking as does, strangely, the very physically different James Caan. Some actors are constantly moving, while others remain almost perfectly still. Some remain in one pose for a while and then move suddenly into another one.  It’s not just a matter of height and weight but the way we move our bodies idiosyncratically.

In Rogue One, Darth Vader is “bodied” (is that the physical equivalent of “voiced”?) by Daniel Naprous and Spencer Wilding. They were presumably chosen because they could match the height and power of 6’6” body-builder David Prowse who was the original Vader. Indeed, when Darth Vader appears in Rogue One, the body has the same impact and yet…. there’s something different about the walk. It’s not quite how Prowse used to move.

The notion that we are identified and interpreted by our body language makes sense. After all, animals judge each other’s mood by physical cues – raised hackles, bared teeth, defensive postures. We too are constantly reading, even if not fully aware of it, the emotions and intentions of others through tiny clues. Store security staff learn to spot shoplifters from their physical behaviour, even when, or perhaps particularly when, they are acting “casual.” We know when our friends or partners are lying because of almost imperceptible changes in their expressions or bodily movements meaning that we are more accustomed than we realise to their characteristic physical behaviour.

I have a friend who always turns his head about 30 degrees to the side, alternating from left to right, when he is listening to you. I have another who always leans forward across a table for emphasis when telling you something. When we watch television we might notice how Nigella Lawson looks sideways at the camera as she cooks, smiling an almost sly smile, while other cooks maintain almost no eye contact at all or just flash an occasional glance. David Attenborough is always sitting or squatting comfortably with simple hand gestures for emphasis while Tony Robinson seems always to be charging around antiquities sites hands waving as he makes some historical point. What is interesting is that once their normal way of moving is established, people rarely move like someone else. Attenborough is unlikely ever to be seen walking along a breakwater, shoulders hunched and hands plunged into his pockets like Neil Oliver or tramping stoically across an old battlefield like David Starkey.

The way people hold themselves, walk, move their hands, angle their heads, shift their weight, look around, look at you, or not look at you, are all part of their individual physical personality.  In the case of the Grand Moff, it seems the animators managed to construct a reasonable facsimile of Peter Cushing’s face and body, and voice artist Guy Henry managed a believable reproduction of his voice but capturing the minutiae of Cushing’s body language, as with Darth Vader, was more difficult. The great challenge for 3D (re-)animators is not just to create pore-accurate models of living or deceased actors but to be able to capture the unique signature that habitual behaviour has stamped on their physical actions. Then they will have truly reproduced the sense of a real human being.
  
Ian McFadyen Jan 2017