One of the things that it seems most of my friends are united on is the expansion of what is generally considered "fair use" of copyrighted material. Though I agree with them more often than not, I often find myself taking a contrarian view because I find the self-righteousness of their view to be a little-bit offsetting. Their view of "fair use" is broad enough that if it were widely implemented I believe it could do more harm than even the current tragic copyright regime.

So I've been a bit surprised to see many of these same people suddenly find one area in which they support curtailing fair use: censorship. Not censoring what anyone else watches, mind you, but censoring what their families watch. I find this a bit perplexing in a couple of ways. First, these leave-me-alone folks are suddenly concerned with how other people watch movies. Second, they are lining up against the consumer to do what they want to the movies that they purchase!

The case and point is a recent court ruling that put an injunction against a Utah-based company that scrubs dirty movies, taking out the objectionable material. There's no piracy going on as the customers send in one copy of the video and get back one copy of the video, albeit with some parts missing. This doesn't affect anyone except the consumer and the company providing them a service -- the movie tha tthe rest of us see is the same.

Though I don't know Pete's views on "fair use" at large, I find his views on the matter indicative of a lot of liberal-minded media consumers:

You don't get it both ways, guys: if the movies presented as are aren't to your liking, make your own. You don't get to alter a director's work without his approval. I realize our "human laws" don't hold up against the teachings of Jesus (or Joseph Smith, whoever), so maybe you ask him to pay your legal fees.

I consider this view to be quite peculiar. By this reasoning, when you purchase a movie you are only entitled to see the movie as the original producers intended it. Theoretically, that means that the last time I fastwarded through some less interesting scenes in Spiderman, I was infringing on their artistic vision and copyright because I was watching a movie in a way other than how it was intended. The answer, according to Pete's logic, is that I should make my own. More often, the answer I see is to not get movies that you dislike any particular part of.

This from the side that normally promotes cultural freedom.

Obviously, I disagree. If someone wants to edit Jar-Jar Binks out of Star Wars Episode 1, they have no right to do so. Either they accept Jar-Jar or they reject the entire movie. The same applies to someone that wants to put Memento in chronological order.

I will grant that there is an extra fold to all of this: These people are not cleaning up their own movies (as someone inside Pete's comment section advocates the right to do), they are cleaning up someone else's as a service. I can sort of understand a distinction here. And if someone wants to make that argument, I may disagree but I will understand it. Instead, however, the argument is that they shouldn't want to and therefore should not be allowed to. It usually involves the sort of personal ridicule sprinkled throughout Pete's post. Their opposition to this fair use seems at least partially rooted in animosity towards those that would take advantage of it.

And... to be honest... I agree with the first part of that rationale: they shouldn't want to. Replacing curse words with bleeps and "Motherfalcon!"s detracts from the movie even in cases where the curseword was needless to begin with. A family that has reasonable priorities should almost immediately see bigger and more important battles to fight than this and any that doesn't has bigger problems, in my view.

But this invites all sorts of producer-rights that I am extremely uncomfortale with. It gives movie studios further justification to apply more copy protection since they have one more "evil" to fight off. And besides slippery-slope arguments, I think that someone that wants their movie scrubbed should have the right to do that, even if I question the wisdom of doing so. At the retail level it could prevent or make more difficult for people to get the particular artistic work as the artist intended. In this case, the cheaper and easier version is precisely what the producers intended.

It's nigh impossible to argue that the customer was in any way denied the opportunity to consume the artists' original intent if they have to go to the trouble of sending it away to get it altered.

Nick Gillespie makes a better case than I do on the subject:

As a writer, I can sympathize with Apted's sense of creative ownership and his fear of losing control of his work. (Let's leave aside for the moment the legendary compromises all movie directors make on virtually every picture; and let's even leave aside whether that sort of often overbearing editorial oversight is a bad thing, though the short answer is that it sometimes is the only thing keeping a self-indulgent artist from producing total crap and losing his audience).

"These films carry our name and reflect our reputations," continued Apted. "So we have great passion about protecting our work...against unauthorized editing."

But here's the rub. There is only unauthorized editing whenever a piece of culture is put in front of an audience. The individuals watching in the darkened theater, the family room, or on a computer screen are constantly making choices, skipping over stuff, misinterpreting things, and more. The audience, alas, has a mind of its own, and that mind doesn't care about the creator's intentions.

Several months ago, I read this article John Kessell essay on Orson Scott Card's classic Ender's Game. I'm not sure what compelled me to read the article when I had not yet read the book, but like Tom Townsend I sometimes appreciate critiques of works more than the works themselves because they give you two competing (or concurring) ideas whereas the original work usually takes considerably longer to give you one. I similarly enjoy reading Cliff Notes of works that I do not have any obligation to read or understand.

But that's neither here nor there. In this case, I finally did get around to consuming the book itself and it was a strange thing to be entering something as comprehensive looking through the prysm of someone's ideas. It's not surprising, though, that the elements discussed in the essay were the ones I honed in most closely on when consuming the original work.

Kessell's main point is thus:

In relating Ender Wiggin’s childhood and training in Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card presents a harrowing tale of abuse. Ender’s parents and older brother, the officers running the battle school and the other children being trained there, either ignore the abuse of Ender or participate in it.

Through this abusive training Ender becomes expert at wielding violence against his enemies, and this ability ultimately makes him the savior of the human race. The novel repeatedly tells us that Ender is morally spotless; though he ultimately takes on guilt for the extermination of the alien buggers, his assuming this guilt is a gratuitous act. He is presented as a scapegoat for the acts of others. We are given to believe that the destruction Ender causes is not a result of his intentions; only the sacrifice he makes for others is.

While combing the material for examples in agreement or opposition to Kessell's thesis, I ran across a couple interesting parallels. First to Harry Potter, which I had consumed just before. The similarities between Potter and Ender are common to youth-oriented works: outcast child thrust into extraordinary circumstances. The other connection, which came considerably later, was to Neon Genesis Evangelion, the monumental (and monumentally warped) anime work of Haddeaki Anno.

One of the main elements of Kessell's essay about the Ender whose Game the book is about, and the most notable (and notorious) aspect of Neon Genesis Evangelion's lead Shinji Ikari is his reluctance to do... well... much of anything, really. There is a photoshopped picture out there for the Neon Genesis Evangelion video game where the buttons, instead of having typical markers like "punch" or "kick", all have the same command: whine.

I thought of the whine buttons pretty frequently throughout Ender's Game. Ender's resentment was much more justified than Shinji's, and I understood why Ender was often reluctant to do those things that he was reluctant to do, but throughout the entire novel one never got a sense of what Ender really wanted to do. In that vein, the characterization of his psychotic brother was considerably more deep.

Of course, that too is a sort of lesson for adolescence -- or at least adolescence as I experienced it a decade ago and many seem to be experiencing it today. There are surely many ambitious exceptions, but learning is not generally high on the agenda of young people. Neither, for that matter, is earning. Spending is usually a goal, but most of the spending seems to be geared towards temporary amusement (movies, video games, or books) or otherwise temporary things (seasonal fashion).

There is a frequent stereotype in film, among other entertainment media, of a parent trying to get through to his kid that won't take the earphones out of his ears. It is generally a quite lazy metaphor for the child living in his own world, but it is used so frequently in entertainment because it represents something so frequent in reality: the desire for isolation.

As if to make this post's descent in to geekdom complete, the last example is a comic book involving an older character: Kevin Matchstick of the Mage serials. The only real connection is the reluctance of the hero to do what is asked of him and his inability to articulate a preferred course of action, but I bring it up to cite a quote from Mirth, his wizardous sensei: "What makes you think you are so worthy of this isolation that you so crave?"

Ender Wiggins was quite a talented kid and did amazingly well with the tasks put before him, but with the exception of the relationship that he had with his sister Valentine his talents were remarkably wasted otherwise. Were he not being pushed so hard by Corporal Graff, what would he have done with all of these extraordinary skills? Without the direction that Graff laid out for him, where would Ender have gone? What would he have done to deserve the right to be left to do his own thing?

The best answer provided by the book was that absent rising to the call of duty, he would have been able to live a normal childhood. This is presented by some, inside the book and out, as some notable achievement. Normality. The childhood that our society goes to such lengths to preserve and protect and freeze in amber. Innocence as not a condition one is in but a goal to be achieved. Instead of encouraging and rewarding excellence, we lament the costs it incurs.

This is not so much a criticism of Orson Scott Card and his premier novel as I believe Card himself would agree with a lot of what I have to say. It does seem, however, that in the same way that Archie Bunker was often found to be funny for all the wrong reasons, I wonder if Ender Wiggins is found to be right for all the wrong reasons by many of the book's admirers. I wonder if people relate to him not because of the universality of certain aspects of his condition, but because they too see their talents as a metaphorical burden in their lives in the same ways that they deliberately (on the part of Graff and others) become a burden on his life in the novel.

In case you couldn't tell, the blog is on the backburner at the moment. My work ended on Friday and we're leaving Idaho on Tuesday. Kinda busy.