I’m writing this for all of the brilliant, witty and curious people in my life that I honestly believe Twitter would benefit. I’ve been on Twitter for almost two years, and I’ve learned a lot about how it works — and how I think it works best. And given that I would love to be tweeting even more with the people in my life that I care about, I thought I would share what I’ve learned. In this post, I am going to cover the absolute basics of Twitter — what a tweet is, how following and being followed works, user names and mentions, short URLs, and the wacky fun of hashtags and retweeting.

What is a tweet?

A tweet is a post or update from a user on Twitter. Twitter limits these posts to 140 characters (that is, letters, numbers and symbols) and spaces. What can you say in a 140 characters, you might ask? A lot. One of the great virtues of Twitter is its brevity. When I was growing up, my mother always asked me for the “Reader’s Digest” version of my rambling stories. She wanted me to whittle it down to the parts that mattered — and I became a better storyteller (and conversationalist) because of that. The 140-character limit on a tweet creates an economy of language. You don’t have space to waste space. It also generates another of Twitter’s great virtues — speed. With 140 characters, you can converse and contribute very, very quickly. So while I know that it may not seem like much, I encourage you to embrace the 140 characters of a tweet as the rules of the game. The constraints are part of what make it fun.

What’s with all the “@”s?

Mentions on Old Twitter

When you join Twitter, you create a user name. Mine is @circlesoffire. The @ in front of the phrase “circlesoffire” indicates that the words are a user name. Your user name matters on Twitter. It appears next to every tweet you make. When people want to get your attention on Twitter, they will “mention” your user name with an @ in their tweets to do it. And when people want to repeat something you’ve posted, they will include your user name before the copy of your tweet. You’ll notice on Twitter that there is a whole section devoted to your “mentions” — a listing of every instance that anyone has posted your username with an @. This is where the conversation on Twitter often begins for people. Another Twitter user asks you a question, or comments on something you’ve tweeted, and you can reply to their post by typing their username with an “@” first, and then your reply.

Mentions on New Twitter

Somebody I don’t know just followed me! What’s that about?

Don’t worry — it’s perfectly normal. On Twitter, there are three groups of people that you need to care about: 1) the people you follow, 2) the people who follow you, and 3) everyone else.

The people you follow are the other Twitter users you choose whose tweets will appear in your Twitter home feed. Once you follow them, every time those users post a new tweet, that tweet will appear in your feed (or you will see a notification that new tweets are available). You opt in to seeing other user’s tweets in your home feed — no one can require you to read their tweets.

The people who follow you are the ones who have opted in to read your tweets with the rest of the tweets of everyone else they follow. If you don’t want someone in particular to read your tweets, you can always “block” them from being able to follow you. However, if your tweets are public, then they will still be able to see your tweets directly by going to your twitter.com/yourusername page. If a Twitter user is harassing you or behaving in a malicious way, you can complain about them to Twitter, though. I mention these things because I know that it’s something people worry about. Most of the time, however, you don’t have to worry about who’s following you at all.

And everyone else… There is a wide, wide world of people using Twitter. Some of them are in your network of followers and who you follow, some more are in the networks of those who follow you and you follow, and a great many more are completely outside of those networks. You can connect with them, and they can connect with you, by searching through public tweets* and the magic of hashtags and trending topics — those hyperlinked phrases beginning with the symbol #.

Yeah, what are all those “#”s about?

When you see a “#” with words connected to it in someone’s tweet, this is called a hashtag. Hashtags are one of the great linguistic innovations of Twitter. In essence, they provide a way for sets of tweets from numerous users to be tagged together and then made searchable, in almost real time. Why does this matter?

1. Well, when a group of people converge for, say, a conference or a film festival, there is often a hashtag that is associated with the event. (And if there isn’t an official hashtag, then Twitter users will make one up.) When people tweet about their experiences of the event, they can add the hashtag to it and know that their tweet will be included when others search for the hashtag of the event. And why do others search for the hashtag? Because they want to join the conversation about what’s happening at the event! That includes people who are actually present to people around the world who are simply interested and want to be a part of the peanut gallery.

2. Hashtags also provide a way for people to spread news quickly about a particular topic or event. For instance, a few months ago when the humanitarian aid flotilla Rachel Corrie was en route to Gaza, I followed the hashtag #RachelCorrie and found out information, in nearly real time, about whether the ship had landed, whether it had been boarded by Israeli security forces, and the status of the passengers. #Flotilla was a second hashtag associated with that event. #FreedomFlotilla was a third. Big news events will often have several hashtags associated with them at the same time — it all depends on what people are tweeting. The brilliance of hashtags is that they provide an extremely effective means of searching for and filtering tweets, and this search will even update as new tweets come in.

#2010disappointments Search on New Twitter

3. Hashtags are also used as tweet themes or jokes on Twitter. For instance, today’s #2010disappointments is for people to tweet about, you guessed it, their disappointments in 2010. If you see a hashtag and you don’t know what it means or what it’s about, check out @wtt (or What The Trend?) to see what the prevailing definition (created by a user-generated encyclopedia) of the hashtag is. I think this is one of the more dynamic and interesting emerging qualities of Twitter.

4. Finally, hashtags are simply an interesting linguistic convention on Twitter. They both point out what people think are the keywords and topics in their tweets, and they often indicate commentary or asides on the tweet itself. For instance, from my recent tweets:

circlesoffire What is #streetlit? Find out from one of the best radical librarians I know: “30 Days of Street Lit” at http://www.meganhonig.com #YA #libraries

I made “streetlit” into a hashtag, and also added the hashtags “YA” and “libraries” to it, outside of the conversational flow of the tweet itself. I did this because I wanted anyone searching along those terms to read this tweet. You can make hashtags wherever there are words, both within and outside the phrasing of the tweet itself.

circlesoffire The problem with banking by mail is that sometimes the checks really do get lost. #annoyed

So in this case, I use the hashtag #annoyed as a kind of meta comment about my emotional state about the content of the tweet. This one is pretty obvious and on-the-nose, but you can be as off-the-wall as you want in hashtags. Just remember that when you want to hashtag a phrase, you can’t insert spaces or punctuation. So, for instance:

circlesoffire Yeah, Joss watching Warner make another Buffy must be like how Aerosmith feels every time they hear Dream On. #intellectualpropertylawsucks

When I read hashtags in tweets, especially this kind of comment/addendum-style hashtag, I often think of them as being what folks say under their breath or out of the corner of their mouth. It’s one of the ways that Twitter is communicating on different linguistic levels, some more direct than others. And personally, I enjoy wordplay like this so I’m into it.

What are those weird small URLs I keep seeing?

They are called short URLs. They are used as gateways to longer URLs. One such free service is bit.ly. You copy the full URL you want to shorten, go to http://bit.ly, paste it into the field and hit “Shorten.” It generates a unique short URL that will forward to the original page. Not only is this great for making links fit in your 140 character limit, but if you take your new bit.ly link and add a “+” to the end of it, you can go see all the bit.ly statistics for that link — how many people are clicking it, where they are coming from, etc. It’s a nice, free tracker. There are many other options for URL shortening, such as Hootsuite’s ow.ly, Twitter’s t.co, Facebook’s fb.me and others — I just happen to like bit.ly the best.

Why do people repeat tweets all the time?

This phenomenon of repeating someone else’s tweet is called “retweeting.” There are two flavors — the manual retweet and the retweet button on Twitter. To manually retweet, the convention is to type “RT @username [the tweet to be retweeted],” where the username is the person who originally posted and the words in brackets are the tweet itself. I like to do this and add some kind of comment of my own alongside their tweet. For instance:

circlesoffire Holy cow!! @rosspruden BitTorrent Based DNS To Counter US Domain Seizures. http://r2.ly/5zbv #infdist /via @davewiner ECCE HYDRA.

Now, at first, this may look like a lot of gobbledygook, but some of it should be familiar by now. My contribution is the “Holy cow!!” Then, I am retweeting (RT) my friend @rosspruden. The http://r2.ly/5zbv is a short URL. #infdist is Ross’ hashtag about “Infinite Distribution” or hybrid distribution strategies for independent artists. Then there’s the “/via @davewiner” which means that @davewiner is how Ross first saw this tweet. Now, I had to look up what “ECCE HYDRA” means, but I think its some Latin phrase meaning “and so birthed the hydra [multi-headed snake].” But honestly, I didn’t even bother to look that up until writing this — which is another by-product of Twitter filtering. It’s okay if you don’t understand everything — use what you need and move on.

However you change the content of a tweet (and that often happens as you tweak it to fit 140 characters when you pass it on), careful and correct attribution is one of Twitter’s unspoken rules of etiquette. This is especially true since repetition counts so much on Twitter. Above all else, Twitter is a network — when your tweet is retweeted by a handful of people, you have the possibility of exponentially increasing the number of people who read your tweet. When you retweet someone else’s tweet, you are expanding their network momentarily to include yours. Depending on how compelling the tweet is, people may become new followers of the original user, who may also follow them back. This is one reason why it’s so important to correctly attribute tweets. It’s also part of why people tend to thank folks for retweeting their posts — not only is it kind, but it strengthens the ties between you and the retweeter.

Retweet Button - Old Twitter

The second flavor of retweeting is a relative newcomer to Twitter — Twitter’s retweet button. By clicking this button (and confirming Yes when Twitter asks you if you’re sure), you instantly copy the entire original tweet into your timeline. If the tweet is already a retweet from someone in your network, Twitter will bypass that user and just show the original post. The major flaw with the retweet button is that it doesn’t allow for commentary or editing of the tweet, and it doesn’t create a new “mention” of the original user so that the user can see exactly who retweeted them in their mentions feed. You have to go into the Retweets section of the Twitter.com interface to see who’s retweeted your posts. I personally find this clunky and awkward, but it does have its uses. Basically, the retweet button makes retweeting that much simpler (and copy and paste was simple enough), so I think it probably encourages people to do it. It’s also true that it has an added benefit of slightly getting around the 140 character limit rule since retweet-button retweets don’t count the original user’s username in the tweet or the three extra characters that “RT” and a space take. For those of us who really tweet to the wire, this is a nice perk. [Please note: you will need to move your mouse over the area under the tweet to make the Retweet Button appear. The pictures here show the button already activated.]

Retween Button - New Twitter

All right, I’ll give it a shot. How do I get started?

Well, first go to Twitter.com and sign up for a new user name. Then tweet something! Then check to see if you know anyone on Twitter already — Twitter makes it easy to check against your email address book, if you like, or you can search for people by name. Then follow them and see what they are tweeting about. Reply to one of their tweets, and see if they reply to you. Then do a search on Twitter about a topic that you find interesting — and check out what people are saying. Listen. Think of it like a very large, very public cocktail party — and when you have something interesting to share, don’t hesitate to jump in!

I’d love to hear about how it goes for you — feel free to leave a comment for me here on this blog or write a tweet to me @circlesoffire. And be sure to check back for my next blog on Twitter: “But What Do You Tweet About?”

* You may notice that I’m not talking much about private or “locked” Twitter accounts. For the first year that I was on Twitter, I had a private, locked account. The only people who could read my tweets were people that I allowed to follow me, and they were generally the dozen or so people that I actually knew in real life who were on Twitter, too. My tweets were not searchable or public. I did this because I wasn’t sure what Twitter was and I, believe it or not, am actually a little cautious when it comes to public broadcasting technology. But now, especially for artists and professionals who want to take Twitter seriously, I encourage everyone to have public Twitter feeds. It’s very difficult to unlock the full potential of Twitter when your tweets are hidden behind closed doors, accessible only to your personal network of contacts. It simply doesn’t have the same power or effect. That said, my first year on Twitter with locked tweets was very instructive, and I needed that time to dip my toe into the water and get comfortable. However, my hope is that this post will help you jump into the deep end more quickly, and with more confidence.

Similarly, you might notice that I don’t talk much about direct messaging. Direct messaging is sending a tweet (140 characters) directly and only to a particular user (who must be following you — you cannot send a direct message or DM to someone who is not following you). You might notice from my graphics above that I simply don’t use this very often. There is very, very little that I would need to say in private to someone that would be served by talking to them in 140-character snippets. I’d ask them to message me their email address first. But that’s me, and I do think that’s just one of my idiosyncracies. If you want to send a direct message, it’s as simple as typing the letter “d” and the username of the person you want to reach — without an @ — and then your message. But again, I truly believe that Twitter is at its most useful, most interesting, and most powerful when the conversation is public.

We don’t know each other very well, but we walk in some shared circles. Today, I saw you in a classroom at the Lesbians in the 70s conference up at CLAGS. My best friend and I had walked in late to the class, one we’d actually been denied entry to earlier. Instead, we’d gone to watch the documentary on Audre Lorde (“Litany of Survival”), and had walked away with tears in our eyes from the wonder and the ferocity that is (and was) Audre Lorde. I wasn’t sure if you had tears in your eyes when I saw you in that heated, tense classroom. I just saw your pained smile, and noted your silence over the course of those last ten minutes. My friend said he thought you were crying. I read your Twitter timeline later and read your mention of tears at the transphobia of an outspoken few from earlier in the discussion. I said to my friend that if I’d been in the room when you were moved to tears, I think I would have lost my shit. “It would have come to blows,” I said, feeling my hackles still up, my heart still beating hard in my throat, even just from the ten minutes I did see. As it was, I still spoke up when desire was disdained, when I (and my generation) was accused of taking “everything” for granted. It was complicated to speak as a person new to the room, and still respect the conversation that had already occurred that I hadn’t been a part of. But I’ve also been in those fights before, heard those arguments, that disdain, and still yet again, found I could not be silent…

But when I think about your tears, I do not want to rehash all these arguments. I want to tell you that I am a lesbian, raised by lesbians in the South, and I am sending you love. I feel a deep connection to lesbian herstory, to lesbian culture — and that I have always understood lesbian identity to be big enough and wondrous enough and strong enough to include my love for trans and genderqueer women, trans and genderqueer men, and everyone else in all quarters who ever felt an affinity — complicated as it ever may be — with Lesbianism. I came to lesbian community through my two mothers: one who came out at 14 in the early 70s South, one who “came out” by falling in love with her. I came to lesbian community by immersing myself in the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn, whose policy has never been to tell anyone what is or is not Lesbian — but rather to accept ALL of the materials from those who would send them to the Archives to be safeguarded. And so my definition of Lesbian has always included mothers, cross-generational alliances, butch/femme, kink and s/m, and genders and experiences not my own. I never asked for or expected a monolithic Lesbian identity. Anyone who’s ever done a volunteer shift at the Archives and filed ephemera in their voluminous subject files could not help but come away from that experience with a taste of the vast diversity of Lesbian life and its many, many, many permutations (or so I’d hope). When people talk about the inevitability of border wars, with cultural “police” who decide who fits the bill and purge the ones who do not, I think of the Archives — and know there is another way.

But those border wars are still raging, and I am grieved by the ways those who would call me sister, who would accept my lesbian cred (at least at first) still spout viciousness that moves you to tears. And all while taking these words, so hard won — dyke, lesbian, sister — and using them as shields while blaming trans women for everything wrong in the world. I want to tell you, as a lesbian raised by lesbians, that they are wrong. That the only thing they are representing is their own hate and bigotry and fear — and that hating on trans women is the absolute antithesis of a woman-loving-woman politic. If all that hard-won consciousness-raising just led to more borders to patrol, and not a vaster more wide open space to live in, then I don’t know what the hell we’ve all been fighting for so hard. I do not need a new list of rules to follow, and I certainly do not need to be recruited into a new police force that looks for more ways to divide us from each other.

I’m a lesbian, and a lover and a warrior and an artist, and I am sending my love to you, Kate Bornstein. I want to tell you that every time I hear you speak about survival, I am moved to tears — because your words make it just a little more possible. I want to tell you that every time I see your smile, every time I see your tattoos because you’ve dressed up all gorgeous femme, every time I hear you name your marginalization, every time … your words, your actions, and your bearing open up that room for me and those that I love to live our lives more fully, more richly, and with deeper joy. It should not be your job to make this cis dyke’s life (or anyone else’s) a little more liveable, and, I know, it is not. And still, you do. So when I see you in a room full of lesbians with tears in your eyes, I cannot abide that there has been one more moment where a woman like you has been made to feel unwelcome. There are those who say you are not welcome, but they are wrong. It would have come to blows. It has come to blows. And there is another way, I am certain of it. I’m a lesbian and I am seeking it, yearning for it, making it happen now. And it is a bitterly slow and cyclical process.

But I am sending my love to you, Kate Bornstein. I hold a deeper connection to lesbian culture because of the paths that you and folks like you blazed before me. The ferocity of my desire and my yearning and my commitment to a liberation big enough for all of us owes its foundation to the tears and pained smiles of folks like you — and I can never repay that debt. But what I can do is live my life, love the ones I love with integrity and passion, and refuse to be silent. And today what I will not be silent about is my love for you, Auntie Kate. Thank you for being in that room today, thank you for all the rooms you’ve stayed in after the ignorance and hatred reared its ugly face, thank you for all the many ways you’ve helped a generation survive and love, thank you for surviving. Love is what I thought this whole revolution thing was about, and it’s what I continue to believe and fight for.

With mad love and respect,

Emily Millay Haddad

I went to see Scott Pilgrim vs. The World tonight with measured expectations. I thought it looked cute and quirky and like it might do some formally interesting things. And it did do that — walking me through the video game conventions of my childhood with ironic hipster relish. But as the tale of Scott Pilgrim defeating his love interest’s seven evil exes progressed, I found myself oddly detached. It may be that I am reading too many screenwriting books lately, but my problem with Scott Pilgrim can be squarely summed up as this: he never “saved the cat” for me. In fact, he’s kind of a narcissistic douche bag. I never understood, throughout the entire movie, why I was supposed to care about him.

By the fourth ex, I had almost given up caring about the problem of whether Scott is likable. By then, I was just rolling with the convention of the movie that Scott is, of course, likable and will, of course, vanquish all of the evil exes of his love interest Ramona. But my second problem with the movie is that I didn’t really understand why I should care about that, either. They are, after all, Ramona’s exes. Shouldn’t, uh, she be handling them? But then, understanding Ramona’s motivations isn’t something that the universe of the movie cares about all that much — she’s opaque and tough and blasé and beautiful, the classic unattainable pretty girl. (For a movie I’d recommend that substantially explores this question of desiring the unattainable pretty girl, see John Hughes’ Some Kind of Wonderful.) Whether Ramona actually desires or loves Scott, or what she wants at all really, is honestly (if horrifyingly) beside the point. She’s the princess, and Scott has to defeat the seven dragons to “rescue” her. Yeah, I’ve played that video game before.

Knives from Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

Curiously, the movie does do the work of making one character likable as well as her motivations and stake in the action credible: Knives, the girl who actually does love Scott. (Again, see Some Kind of Wonderful for a similar triangle with a different focus.) Knives transitions through the film from a necessity (Scott’s rebound after a devastating break-up), to a cheerleader (she fawns over Scott’s band, and while the audience may disagree with the degree of her fandom, she is what points to a reality that Scott’s band is actually good), to an annoyance (she’s in the way of Scott’s desire for Ramona), to a moral fulcrum (she reminds Scott of his flaws and infidelities at a crucial moment, providing critical insight for him to have a second chance at winning), to a villain (she repeatedly attacks Ramona, first pathetically then with more serious ability), to finally a sidekick (she helps Scott defeat the final ex, and then gracefully steps aside so that he can pursue Ramona unencumbered). Knives has the most dynamic character arc of the film, and it’s through her relationship with Scott that we get some of the most emotionally satisfying moments of the film: Scott’s successful come-on about Pac-Man, the ease of their joint play in “Ninja Ninja Revolution,” the reference to that comraderie as they defeat the final ex together, and even Knives’s final speech releasing Scott to pursue Ramona. In many ways, Ramona has it right when she sees how good they are together and walks away. But Knives is “too cool” for Scott, as the movie reminds us. But seriously, the fact that’s true is ludicrous when his name remains on the movie poster.

Maybe I’m missing the point by asking Scott Pilgrim to be emotionally satisfying. Perhaps it’s enough to sit back and enjoy the nostalgic hipster irony of life as an 8-bit video game, and let the visuals that were burned into my brain from years of watching Voltron and playing MegaMan and Street Fighter (with updated and impressively sophisticated CGI martial arts fight sequences) replace the need for such an uncool thing as actual emotional investment. And don’t get me wrong — the fight sequences are the best part of this movie, and make watching it worthwhile if only for their internal problem-solving, meta-referentiality, and sheer visual chutzpah. However, the overarching motivations of the film are foggy, at best. It takes more than being baby-faced and a bass player to earn my regard as a spectator. Likewise, it takes more than cleverness or kitsch or irony to make me care. In the end, I want to have something real to root for — I want to care about what the folks on screen care about, and understand why they’d go to the mat for it (or her, or him). It’s what makes “winning” worthwhile. Here’s hoping Hollywood remembers that one of these days.

SPOILER ALERT: The spoilers in this review are extensive. If that’s not your cup of tea, then my apologies and I’ll hope to catch you next time. Should you choose to continue reading, consider yourself warned.

There is a problem haunting the hearts of good men — especially the hearts of good, white, Western though especially U.S.-based, able-bodied, thin, middle-to-upper class, heterosexual, cisgender men¹. The problem is the normalization of their privilege, and their growing awareness that all that they’ve been told about what they are entitled to, what is their birthright, and what constructs the qualities of who they are (and often specifically their masculinity) is a brutal, violent lie. The assumption of the good man’s normalcy, and by extension his quiet (or perhaps not-so-quiet) supremacy, can no longer stand unchallenged — even to him.

As an artist situated on the “margins” of that “normalcy,” I have watched with increasing curiosity and interest as good men have struggled with this lie. My particular focus for observation has been on the multi-million-dollar “tent pole” blockbusters that Hollywood generates every year.² I’ve found myself increasingly disappointed with these movies, as I watch the good men struggle mightily, realizing that something is very very wrong, and then fail to find a satisfying resolution — often with spectacularly bizarre and contorted plots along the way. There is a lot to say and many films I could name and analyze, but I found myself struck anew by all these issues when I watched the independent narrative feature Person of Interest, starring J. Reuben Appelman (who also wrote the screenplay) and directed by filmmaker Gregory Bayne.

I first became aware of Bayne’s work in the final days of his successful $25,000 Kickstarter campaign for his latest documentary feature Jens Pulver | Driven. Person of Interest follows Iraqi War veteran and explosives expert Terrence Dyer and his melancholic, paranoid ordeal with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Driven traces the true story of mixed martial arts superstar Jens Pulver as he attempts to revive his career as a ultimate fighter. I think it is safe to say Bayne is a man who makes films about the struggles of good men. Outside of my occasional interest in the spectacle of Hollywood and its bloated and bizarre ramblings on these issues, I have to admit that I am generally not interested in films which centralize the concerns of men. However, Bayne’s preview for Driven on Kickstarter genuinely touched me, and through our ongoing conversation on Twitter, I realized that I was up for exploring the concerns of the good man with Bayne. There aren’t many people I would trust to handle these questions — and by that I mean trust that his work would not involve a kneejerk brutalizing of the “marginalized” people that mean the most to me — but Bayne is one of them.

And I believe Person of Interest is an exploration of the plight of the good man. First and foremost, Person of Interest is a story about betrayal. Iraq War veteran Terrence Dyer bookends the film with a video message spoken directly to the camera about how his country, the one thing he has truly loved, has betrayed him. The lightly non-linear construction of the film follows Dyer as we see how his life fits together now that he is home from war. Person of Interest is a montage of Dyer’s rough-grained video memories and ruminations, mixed with hand-held jittery, though smooth-grained, HD video of scenes in real-time between Dyer and the various characters populating his life: his older brother, an embittered veteran and paraplegic; his younger trans sister, a battered prostitute; a woman he could love, a blogger and a journalist; a shock jock radio DJ who antagonizes him; his father, a child molester and a pimp; and a mysterious government agent who may or may not be recruiting Dyer to commit an act of domestic terrorism.

“Traumatic Brain Injury. That is the signature wound of this war.” Terrence Dyer in Person of Interest

Throughout the film, I found myself switching between experiencing Dyer from the outside as a civilian, and a member of the audience, and flipping to his perspective on how the world appears to him now. Dyer’s broken melancholy, his paranoid outrage, his bitter humor is, at once, both sympathetic and opaque. At times, I felt that I understood Dyer’s state of mind directly; at other times I felt that I understood that Dyer was having an experience I couldn’t understand as a civilian and a sane person; and still at other times I felt alienated from him entirely, and fearful that, in fact, he was not a trustworthy narrator at all and my whole understanding was suspect. My perspective shifted as rapidly as Bayne’s montage. The lines of reality in Person of Interest are blurred and grained. It’s a testament to Bayne’s direction and cinematography that the film is able to maintain such a level of narrative force and coherence while the main character spirals within his trauma and insanity.

Person of Interest can be taken as narrative realism — as a film telling a story about a “real” person, who had “real” experiences in Iraq, and the experimental qualities of the film can be attributed to a cinematic attempt at portraying this “real” person’s disturbed experience of the world stateside now. The film does, more or less, succeed at not disturbing such a suspension of disbelief. However, since I believe the film is also a rumination on the plight of the good man — despite his madness and his sneering capacity for violence, there was something persistently sympathetic and “good” about Terrence Dyer — I’m interested in taking a step back from the question of whether the film passes the bar as narrative realism, and examine what other questions writer Appelman and director Bayne seems to be grappling with in Person of Interest.

If the problem in the hearts of good men is the fallacy of their privilege, as I posited earlier, then the question for good men becomes: how can they still be good men? How can they do the right thing? How can they reconcile their masculinity, their race, their class, their sexuality, all of the core elements of who they are, when they have begun to see how such things have been predicated on violence and oppression wrought upon other human beings?

It is a pitiable task. Dyer’s betrayal and disillusionment is never convincingly specified. It is revealed that he was injured; began to experience his insanity; and, when the military refused to treat him, he deserted and sought treatment in a local hospital. Upon being found at the hospital, he was arrested and dishonorably discharged — making the source of his betrayal possibly the callous ineptitude of the military. But Dyer continues to maintain that he was honorably discharged, and the moment of his injury is never described, which leads me to think that Dyer’s betrayal and catastrophic disillusionment stems from something much more insidious and devastating: that is, realizing the fallacy of his privileged status as a good man.

So what can Dyer do? Person of Interest walks through a few alternatives in the persons of Dyer’s brother, father and sister. He could give up, be immobilized, “lazy” and embittered like his brother. However, Dyer’s restless walking throughout the film, his meticulous care for his body, and his direct activism (he gives free talks and hands out literature he’s written on “The American Betrayal”) derides that path as a viable alternative. The traditional option of “following in your father’s footsteps” is similarly foreclosed, as it is revealed that Dyer’s father is a liar, a pimp and — the most damning — a child molester who molested both Dyer and his sister. Dyer blames his father for his sister’s transgender identity and prostitution (and probable death), and then continues to confess that he remembers that his father also molested him. “You fucked me, man,” he screams at him in despair, and I was left wondering if Dyer was referring only to the specifics of his abuse or also to the current bleak circumstances of his life. A few frames later, Dyer shoots his father and presumably kills him, though the sequence has a shuttering slow-motion quality to it which begs the question of whether any of this is actually happening. Regardless, becoming a man like his father is not an option for Dyer.

Maggie/Mark in Gregory Bayne's "Person of Interest"

Dyer’s transgender sister has a more complicated role to play. On the one hand, like her brother and father before her, she could simply stand-in as another alternative masculinity since she refutes her identity as a “man” and lives her life as a woman. The problem of how to be a good man is thereby sidestepped by refusing a male identity entirely. However, this could never be a viable path for Dyer, who does not respect her name or her gender, and is virulently opposed to her prostitution, which he considers solely and completely exploitative on the part of “him” (presumably her pimp, her father, or possibly her johns). The appearance of this trans woman in the midst of Dyer’s despair cracks the world, raising numerous complex questions about the role of women in this landscape, and it’s not surprising that she is later disappeared (presumably murdered while prostituting herself) from the story as Dyer continues his downward spiral. Her steady gaze over a cigarette as she regards Dyer is a bit too pointed. “You look like shit,” she tells him, and smiles quietly. He shrugs it off, returning to her inconceivable choice to be a woman and a prostitute. Perhaps for Dyer the transition from male to female would necessitate being available for exploitation by men, and hence be intolerable. That any man would choose to become a woman, the exploited other, is incomprehensible. And yet, to stay a man who would exploit women, and others, is equally irreconcilable with the necessary belief that one is “good.”

So where does that leave Dyer? Well, it leaves him with the bomb. Dyer is an explosives expert, trained in both the construction (and, it must be said, defusing) of these lethal, merciless and indiscriminate machines. After exhausting the avenues of bitterness and apathy (his brother), sexual misconduct and deception (his father), and the sheer incomprehensible (his sister), what’s left for Dyer is annihilation. Dyer fantasizes briefly about a normal life — a life of gentle heterosexual happiness with the journalist — but it too feels out of reach. He returns to the bleak reality of his current life and circumstances, as he holds a cell phone (detonator?) and rides a public bus to a large building. Is he going to blow it up? Is he going to blow himself up? Is the only option left to the good man to destroy himself and anyone else who happens to be within his blast radius?

These are the questions Person of Interest leaves us with. The final scene of the film shows Dyer watching the women and children in the atrium of the building where he finds himself. There are no other men in sight. He gazes up into the white light of the windowed ceiling of the atrium, and his eyes flutter closed. Then they open again. Dyer’s voice intones, “This is my stop.” The camera suddenly pulls back from Dyer, as if he is falling away, and holds. His eyes close again. “They pull the wire just to get out.” Then blackness. The nimble bowing of a violin begins as the credits roll.

I admit it: I groaned. I laughed. I felt cheated. And I immediately started thinking about writing this review. Person of Interest leaves you in the uncomfortable position of reckoning what you think happens next, and what that ending means for you. I concede that refusing to offer a resolution and refusing to clean up the mess of questions left in the wake of his characters can be a subversive act. Person of Interest is certainly not the same glib tale of watching a man blow things up that circulates so widely, and with so few explorations of the consequences of those explosions. But I want more from the good man than despair over his inevitable path towards annihilation. Is the pain of disillusionment over coming to realize the falseness of his privilege so great that the only way out is death and destruction? Surely not. What must be destroyed and overcome is the structures that falsely attribute superiority to the good man, and inferiority to everyone else. What must be destroyed and overcome is that hegemonic construction of the “good man” — though not the flesh and blood human being that label has been applied to. You can still be good, and you can still be a man. But you cannot be both if it means the degradation and destruction of others. If we are going to survive — all of us — past those blank black frames, then we must dream of and enact masculinities, femininities and all genders which are truly good and not based on the subjugation of all by one.

Do I know how Person of Interest ends? I do not. But I believe that Bayne and Appelman, and other good men like them, are wrestling with the problem. And a film that refrains from easy answers, recycled tropes, and pat resolutions is taking one mighty step towards pinning that problem down. I look forward to going the next round with LovelyMachine in the future.

Edited to Correct: J. Reuben Appelman was the writer of Person of Interest, and also played the main character Terrance Dyer. Gregory Bayne was the director and cinematographer, though not the writer as I originally posted. My apologies for the error.

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Notes:

1. I’m aware of the clumsy mouthful of identity labels this sentence attempts to encompass. (I’m especially aware of all the ways that these words fall short.) For the purpose of this article, it is these men that I will be referring to in short-hand as the “good men.” The privilege of many (if not most) men is complicated by racism, poverty and class warfare, dis/ability prejudice, fatphobia, homophobia, transphobia and the violence of U.S. imperialism, and nuanced discussions on how these men in their varying experiences of privilege and power can be agents in their own liberation and the liberation of others are extremely important. That said, this essay is specifically interested in cinematic and iconic representations of those I am calling the “good men,” who are largely presented in these privileged terms without complication, because I believe they are stories which are supposed to speak to “good men” in the audience — and I am fascinated by the messages that I perceive.

2. I am indebted to the critical rigor of Michelle Esther O’Brien’s writing on the subject of heterosexual desire as a mediating influence on the conflicts between white supremacy and imperial capitalism, specifically her Contradictions of Capital, Perversions of Spectatorship: Watching Robocop. While her focus is on the foregrounding and manipulation of the body in science fiction, I believe much of her analysis can be applied to mainstream action/thrillers, and even realist dramas like I am doing here with Person of Interest as contemporary real-world conditions worsen. Her theoretical formulation of heterosexual desire as the glue which makes it possible for white supremacy and imperial capitalism to co-exist, however uneasily, opened my eyes to this specific lens for “subversive” spectatorship — and helped me make sense of some of the more bizarre forays into solving this problem I was witnessing in the mainstream.

How is an open Internet and essential part of my life? The open and free exchange of information online is a critical element of my livelihood. I work in major motion pictures, and as an independent media maker, in New York City. Every day, I utilize the internet to exchange files (sometimes quite large files of media content), research news and events and skills-building information, and connect with other people around the globe about my industry and countless other topics. The open, unthrottled and unmitigated exchange of data is foundational for my work. When I’m on set shooting in motion pictures, and inevitably need to rapidly solve a problem, half the time the answer for my trouble-shooting can be found instantaneously on the internet — often on message boards and other individually-generated pages where people are sharing solutions and critically engaging each other around ideas. The solutions are rarely found on corporate websites — but if media conglomerates are allowed to throttle the internet and determine which sites should be accessed more quickly and easily than others, I can guarantee that the most innovative and productive (that is, the least controllable) parts of the internet will be the ones the most affected. Corporations that can buy their way into the media conglomerates’ good graces will be the ones who can afford the “premium” speeds of access, and the profound creativity of the internet will be greatly diminished. There is already a class divide that spoils the greatness of the digital promise — between those who can afford the expensive machinery and the grossly overpriced monthly internet service access that makes it possible to participate online and those who can’t. Allowing media conglomerates to regulate the internet around their profiteering whims would deepen this digital divide, and cut off the internet’s power and potential at the knees.

The FCC has grappled with new technologies in the past, and come out with the understanding that telecom companies and media conglomerates should not be allowed to determine access to services. The broadcast spectrum is a public good, and it is the public’s money (largely collected via our taxes) that built the infrastructure that is making high-speed internet access possible. It is the public which made these technologies economically viable. It is the public which innovates these technologies and takes them places no corporate honcho could ever imagine. And it is the public that needs to be protected from the short-sightedness and greed of these corporations. These profit-oriented corporations should not be allowed to determine what content is suitable/prioritized for public interaction. It is vital that the FCC reassert its authority to regulate media conglomerates and insure that Net Neutrality isn’t sacrificed to satisfy a tiny, but powerful, minority’s bottom line. I implore you, FCC Chairman Genachowski, to act quickly to reassert the FCC’s authority and protect and strengthen Net Neutrality.

But after hitting my wall against PHP and the WordPress Codex, I remembered that the reason why I was excited about WordPress in the first place was that it had the potential to help me remember what I enjoyed about websites in the first place — the ability to make instantaneous communication possible between people across vast distances. If I could get over my perfectionism and exceptionalism (Really, it has to be custom? There isn’t a single pre-made theme that will do?), then WordPress would be plug and play enough to let me do what I really do best: which is write. Tell stories. Theorize. Talk about motion pictures. Talk about politics. Connect with other people. Produce good work offline and take time to share it with the world here. If I let myself get bogged down in all this code, then I could let myself procrastinate on ever doing the work that really mattered to me. There will always be some programming language that I don’t know, some mark-up language that needs to be updated or is now deprecated, or some nifty tech thing that I — in all honesty — have no idea how it works. I’ll probably always be interested in knowing how it works, and learning those languages. But today I realized that I need to remember what it is that I do best, and then let myself do that.

I had the privilege recently of hearing Lance Weiler speak at IFP’s Think Outside the Box Office weekend workshop with Jon Reiss. Lance is doing mind-blowing work as a part of Seize The Media, and DIY Days, and the Workbook Project. He walked us through the possibilities of transmedia for the future of media-making, and I was completely blown away. Outside of the transmedia framework — and there is certainly a lot to say there, and that I’m sure I will be talking about more later — it was Lance’s emphasis on collaboration that spoke most to me. An audience member asked him what his technical background was, and Lance answered that he had none. But that didn’t stop him. “Go out to tech meet-ups,” he said. “Find the people who know how to do this, and work with them.”

I loved this. I used to say that I decided to get into the filmmaking business because it seemed a lot more collaborative, at its core, than theater (and the stage acting I’d been focused on up until that point). Then I started moving in indie circles, and starving artist circles, where too often the ethos focused around a singular auteur who wears all the hats — and is often exploited and perpetually exhausted. My tendency in the past has been to lean towards full autonomy and control and self-sufficiency, even if it meant that I wore all the hats and burned myself out in the process. Lately, I am more deliberately and explicitly embracing a collaborative “open source” model. It’s a paradigm shift, but one that I think will make it more possible for me to sustain myself, and for those I collaborate with to sustain themselves, in our work together over the long haul.

It feels all of a piece — to focus on the things that I do well, and collaborate with others who do great work that fills in the gaps, and stop trying to know everything and do everything myself. I’d rather bet on not knowing, and leave room to be surprised — and to actually learn and be inspired — then lock myself into a rat race of needing to know everything and be everything before I feel okay to proceed. So in the spirit of that, I’ve made this WordPress site-in-progress open and public. I haven’t even picked out a theme yet, or decided on categories, or finished writing my About page.

I’m just going to build from here, with an eye towards my strengths and the best that I can offer. The rest will, one way or another, take care of itself.

Again, I’m glad to be here, glad to be setting the foundation. Here is post number 1.