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Culture Is Living in Middle America Odd? For inhabitants of the Dream Factory, Ohio seems like an alien land. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images) Among the more curious features of my job as a critic who writes regularly about the motion picture industry is explaining to various interview subjects, PR flacks, and sometimes even professional colleagues that I live in Ohio. In my experience, most people who work in Hollywood assume that nearly everyone who might enter their orbit also works in Hollywood or some other acceptably cosmopolitan locale, which means, in practice, New York. Remarkably, this habit of mind persisted even during and after the age of the Covid-19 pandemic, when, conceivably, it should not have mattered one iota whether I was conducting a phone interview with a Hollywood bigwig from an office in downtown Los Angeles or a coffee shop in Dubuque.  Over the years, I have adopted certain strategies, or coping mechanisms, to account for my apparently unusual decision to live in Ohio. If, when speaking to someone in Tinseltown for a magazine piece, the question of my area code or time zone comes up, I have taken to saying the following: “I am one of the magazine’s farthest-flung far-flung correspondents.” This generally prompts a laugh, and we can move on with the business at hand. Sometimes, I have been known to refer to the proximity of Indiana University when explaining my decision to live in adjacent Ohio: IU’s Lilly Library, merely one state over, contains a trove of show-business materials that I intend to make use of when I write my biography of Last Picture Show director Peter Bogdanovich. So there—if I didn’t live in the Buckeye State, I would be at a serious disadvantage in writing my book! I admit there is a certain defensiveness in these answers. Instead of coming up with sheepish excuses for making my home in Ohio, I should proudly tout my state’s normality, affordability, and likely imminent political prominence as the home state of the man I assume to be the next GOP presidential nominee, Ohio-born Vice President J.D. Vance. Well, I would probably leave out that last part when interviewing Hollywood types, even though Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy was made into a perfectly credible Netflix movie starring Glenn Close and directed by Ron Howard (the latter of whom I once interviewed—a genuinely nice guy).  My status as an Ohioan was a nagging source of conversation during my decades-long, long-distance interaction with the great director Bob Rafelson, who should have been the most tolerant of my location given his own wandering ways: By the time I knew him, Bob had long ago said so long to Hollywood and lived, when he was not engaged in various globe-trotting travels at the behest of this or that film festival, in Aspen, Colorado. Furthermore, Bob looked down on directors who made movies in Hollywood, even if their address happened to be there. He preferred to sojourn to the hinterlands to make movies in what he called “odd American places”: Bakersfield, California, in Five Easy Pieces, Atlantic City in The King of Marvin Gardens, Birmingham, Alabama, in Stay Hungry, even Miami in Blood and Wine. “It’s kind of a personal pleasure of discovering these places,” Bob told me about why he made films in such curious spots.  In fact, when I first interviewed Bob in 2004, I was not even living in Ohio myself: I was briefly in Maryland, though I would soon be returning to Columbus—a homecoming to which I looked forward and about which I must have bragged to Bob, who said, darkly, that he had once made a movie in Columbus, sort of. This had not been a happy experience for him: He was fired from the Robert Redford prison movie Brubaker, which was shot, during and after Bob’s reign as director, in Columbus and other Ohio locations. Thereafter, my home base in Ohio was a source of amusement and prickly condescension for Bob, who, though he routinely expressed appreciation and admiration for my writing on his movies, returned to the subject every so often. After the 2004 presidential election, when I was still in Maryland but bound for Ohio, I remember feeling some unease when talking to Bob since I knew he had supported John Kerry and that Ohio helped give the race to George W. Bush. Years later, Bob seemed annoyed when I referred to professional commitments in Columbus that might keep me from writing a magazine profile of him that would require travel to Aspen. Perhaps I was projecting my own insecurity about living in Middle America onto Bob, a formidable and sometimes fearsome personality. Yet, in the final chapter of our relationship, I was not proved wrong. In the spring of 2022, I impulsively asked Bob to sign my poster for Stay Hungry, his fabulously friendly and fun Birmingham-set comedy-drama starring Jeff Bridges, Sally Field, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. To my shock, Bob agreed, and to my even greater shock, the signed poster arrived on my front porch one day. “To Peter T.,” Bob scrawled in red ink, “who lives in an odd American place.” For Bob, who died later that year, I was always associated with a strange, strange land. But which is stranger: Ohio, America’s seventh-most populous state, or the fact that it is regarded as an oddity by people who live and work in Hollywood, also known as the Dream Factory and La-la Land? The post Is Living in Middle America Odd? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Takimag Weakness of Will Is Not a Biological Condition The medicalization of human nature has unwelcome consequences. TakiMag (Photo by Joe Martinez for The Washington Post via Getty Images) There is nothing more important than the trivial, as Sherlock Holmes well knew. The smallest indications often (though not always) have the widest implications. One should always be on the lookout for deeper significance while, of course, guarding against paranoia and the siren song of conspiracy theory.  There are perhaps few things more trivial than letters to the British Medical Journal, but they sometimes suggest something important. My attention was captured by a recent letter headed “Weight ‘regain’ is not neutral language.” The authors, from Buenos Aires and Düsseldorf, objected to the use of the word “regain” in an article in a previous edition of the journal in which it was pointed out that when people stop taking the new weight-loss wonder drugs, they often put on weight again. The authors write: Weight regain after stopping medication is often interpreted as failure rather the expected course of a chronic condition. The term “regain” encapsulates this stigma, shifting responsibility from biology to personal inadequacy. At least the authors agree with me that the usage of a word or a few words can reveal philosophical presuppositions.  Now in a sense, everything that humans do is biological, since we are biological organisms. But it seems to me that there is an important and philosophically significant difference between a wholly biological organism, say an amoeba, and a human. Once you have described the biology of an amoeba, there is not much left to say about it. I do not think that once you have described all the neurochemical discharges in the brain of a human, there is nothing left to say about that human’s behavior.  With regard to this letter, let me take the example of a near neighbor of mine, in his mid-80s. He was overweight, had Type 2 diabetes, and was taking metformin to counteract it. Unfortunately, he did not feel well.  He took the decision to change both what he ate, and how much he ate. He lost weight, his diabetes disappeared, and he felt (and looked) much better. Would it be to stigmatize him adversely to say that he had taken responsibility for himself, and that his efforts were laudable?  Weakness of will is part of the human condition. I doubt whether there is anyone living who has never suffered from or displayed it on occasion. Moreover, an iron-willed person is not necessarily very attractive as a human type. Furthermore, there is no doubt that the abundance of food and the marketing of convenient, highly processed products that offer swift gratification of appetite make weakness of will both all the more disastrous and all the more necessary to overcome.  This has gone further in Anglo-Saxon countries than elsewhere, perhaps because there is little in the way of culinary tradition that in other places offers more resistance to the attractions of junk food. But the tendency is by no means limited to Anglo-Saxon countries: The conditions of modern life conduce surrender to the line of least resistance.   Sociological and physiological correlates of human conduct not doubt sometimes explain such conduct adequately (if a man’s behavior changes drastically from usual, and he is subsequently found to have a tumor in his frontal lobe, we do not look further for explanation); they may often provide mitigating circumstances for behavior that is undesirable in some way. But note that there is an asymmetry between our explanation of bad and good behavior. No one says of a very good or kind person that his goodness or kindness is merely biological, and that it is wrong to shift the praise from biology to personal adequacy.  At the heart of the letter writers’ philosophy is the view that human beings are intrinsically flawless and their failings are caused only by adverse circumstances exterior to themselves. This seems generous and tolerant, because it absolves them of all blame: and there is nothing as nasty as blame.  It is true that this attitude avoids censoriousness, the easy, categorical, immediate, and unthinking (but emotionally gratifying) resort to adverse criticism, which is a most unattractive quality. But if the cost of avoiding censoriousness is to turn human beings into the physiological automata that this letter seems to think desirable, the cost is too high. Blame and censoriousness are not identical. The authors implicitly believe that to blame someone for his situation is automatically to withdraw all sympathy from him, as if it were possible to sympathize only with perfect persons. Obviously, such paragons don’t exist, at least to all appearances. But the imperative to be sympathetic is very great: Nobody wants to be thought unsympathetic. The solution is therefore to attribute all their imperfections to something other than themselves. They are not behaving weakly, they are ill. And no one can be blamed for his own illness.  But no one who adopts the views of the writers of this letter conceives of himself  in the way the authors conceive of people who put on weight after they stop taking weight-reducing drugs. Thus, that person divides humanity into two, those who are agents and act of their own volition, and those who are feathers on the wind of circumstance, whose conduct it is always wrong to attribute to anything other than raw biology. I need hardly point out that there is a considerable element of both grandiosity and narcissism in this.  If this attitude were adopted fully, it would require clinicians to tell patients that there was literally nothing that they could do to ameliorate their condition. They should not even try to limit the amount that they ate, or alter their diet, because that would be to suggest first that they had some responsibility in the matter, and second that if they failed to do so, they would be potentially subject to reproach, and might even reproach themselves—which, of course, would be psychologically damaging.  For myself, I have always sympathised with the weak of will, because they so much resemble me, though in some things they may take weakness of will a little further than I take mine. And surely we all wish that we had sometimes behaved differently from how we did behave, having surrendered to weakness of will. If there is anyone who has never felt this—well, I wouldn’t like to meet him.     The post Weakness of Will Is Not a Biological Condition appeared first on The American Conservative.