Find out how you can participate in the strike against SOPA . . .

One of the best cinematic experiences I’ve ever had was watching Wim Wenders’ new 3D film about dancer/choreographer Pina Bausch. I was moved by his interview on NPR, where he explained that he’d been intending to make a film about Bausch’s work for several years, but he just couldn’t figure out how to do it . . . until he watched a 3D film. He felt that the new technology would allow the audience to “be in the same water” with the dancers, and let me tell you, when he achieves that, the effect is blissfully visceral. Bausch’s work deals quite dramatically (often violently) with power relationships, gender divides, misunderstanding, affection: to be in the physical midst of all that motion and emotion is intoxicating.

So. It’s in theaters now. But not for long! See it while you can in 3D . . .

When Juliet Webster, a professor at the Open University of Catalunya, shared this cartoon with me, I couldn’t get over how well it captures the calculated, seductive power of the Internet. Like the most effective femme fatale, the Internet is increasingly optimized to give us what we want . . . even when we didn’t know we wanted it.

Oh what I’d give for an essay by Lacan on desire and recommendation engines . . .

During a recent trip to Seattle, I finally had a chance to visit the Experience Music Project, Paul Allen’s eccentric Frank Gehry-designed museum committed to Allen’s passions: rock and roll, digital technology, science fiction and the geekier side of American pop culture. A little tear welled up in my eye as I drifted through the somber Nirvana exhibition, but the highlights of my trip were to be found in the Sci-Fi wing of the museum.

The highly interactive Avatar exhibition was a delight to experience:  I was not the only one who had a hard time tearing myself away from the interactive table-top, which allowed you to shuffle through cards that triggered the retrieval of multimedia resources on the making of Pandora. I was also smitten by the fact that they let museum visitors try out Jim’s handheld virtual cameras, which he used to shoot scenes with actors after they already went home. It reminds you how magical motion capture really is, and I’m sure it puts the fear of Jesus in actors who thought they could never be replaced. I’m sure the gadgets installed at the museum are dumbed-down versions of Cameron’s cool invention (the zoom button felt like something circa 1972), but wow – it’s a brilliant way to give fans a taste of the creative process behind something they love.

I also could NOT wipe the smile off my face as I wended my way through the exhibit devoted to horror. Can’t Look Away: The Lure of Horror starts off with a descent in a soulless spiral stairwell, lined with pictures of people screaming. Once you land in the exhibit you realize that all those people are visitors who visited the “Scream Booth,” which gives everyone an opportunity to screech like Janet Leigh or Drew Barrymore. Such fun.

I also made an idiot out of myself in the “Shadow Monsters” interactive installation. As you move various parts of your body at various speeds, your projected shadow is transformed into a variety of monstrous forms. It’s pretty addictive but, man, I was little disappointed that I couldn’t get a decent shot of my monstrous shadow. I would have frightened you.

Exuberant colors and beach-ready style from Triya during Rio Fashion Week.

Just in case you haven’t noticed, Brazil is really hot right now. With its incandescent economy and its reputation for sensuality and Mardi Gras decadence, Rio de Janeiro, in particular, has attracted an unprecedented amount of global attention. As the sprawling city prepares for the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics, all eyes have turned to Rio to better understand how it ticks and how it might brace itself for the world stage.

When I was interviewed recently by Ronaldo Lemos for Brazilian MTV, he mentioned a new report that his research institute had issued about the growing Rio fashion industry. Territórios da Moda (Fashion Territories) is currently only available in Portuguese so, after trying my best to read it with Google translate, I asked Ronaldo and the project’s leader Pedro Augusto Pereira Francisco if they would answer some questions about their findings. They generously agreed and so this is Part One of a two-part interview about the inner workings of Rio’s booming fashion scene.

Johanna: I think most people are familiar with the bright colors and body-conscious style that’s typical of fashion in Rio, but you mention in your report a certain “hi-lo blasé” that defines the carioca lifestyle. Could you tell me a little more about that?

Ronaldo & Pedro: Sure, in our research we have identified three important segments in the Rio fashion industry. We have called them “fashion”, “off-fashion”, and the “atelier” circuits. The fashion circuit is the higher-end designers, the off-fashion is the incredible industry that developed in the outskirts of Rio, far from the posh neighborhoods. They are an important economic force, and have become also a creative force. And the ateliers are small-business, producing very exclusive pieces, and doing sometimes conceptual work, in a small scale. There is a lot of diversity in these segments, but they are all influenced to some extent by the image of Rio de Janeiro, that is, a casual-chic mixture, where flip-flops can be mixed with a very well-designed dress, and the combination ends up being a very sophisticated look.

Johanna: You indicate in the report that higher-end designers are less concerned with being copied than with being accused of copying, or getting caught on the back-end of a passing trend. In fact, I think one designer you interviewed said that they need to “escape trends” in order to remain relevant in the marketplace. Could you talk a little more about that?

Ronaldo & Pedro: Absolutely. The “fashion” segment is a fairly recent phenomenon in Brazil. The Rio de Janeiro fashion week (as well as Sao Paulo’s) only really took off in the last 12 years. So it is natural that designers find it important to establish their own identities and make a point that they are not simply copying the trends they saw in the previous shows in New York, London, Paris or Milan. In this sense, it is important to mention that seasons in Brazil are the opposite of what they are in the US and Europe. With that comes the temptation to simply copy the trends presented in the last seasons in the US and Europe. But the movement now is to establish a local identity, to strengthen the local brands and their ideas. There has been quite a lot of consolidation in the market in Brazil, and many local brands have been acquired by investment groups.

Johanna: It sounds like fashion designers in Rio have the option of registering their designs for industrial patents. However, they say it’s impractical to do so because of the cost and the speedy turn-over of product each season. Are designers upset that they don’t have more options to assert ownership control over their work?

Ronaldo & Pedro: Very few designers were upset that they were being copied and wished there existed more effective ways to protect their designs. That opinion is not the majority’s. Many designers realize that protection for the designs is impractical. Therefore, they believe it is very important to protect their trademarks, rather than worry if they are being copied or not. Especially in the atelier circuit, the copy is actually seen as a compliment, and many designers say they feel flattered that their pieces are being copied.

Johanna: You mentioned a sort of dialectical relationship between copying and creation in the fashion industry. What did you mean by that?

Ronaldo & Pedro: This is particularly important for the “off-fashion” circuit. These are fashion companies located in the outskirts of Rio, away from the posh districts like Ipanema or Leblon. They sell clothes to many other states in Brazil, they export their pieces, and they sell their apparel in their own neighborhoods in Rio. However they do not sell them to the posh neighborhoods, since they are perceived as obscure brands in comparison with the brands that are typical of the “fashion” circuit. But there is a lot of vitality in these circuits. Some companies employ more than 900 employees and have huge operations. In the beginning they copied many of their designs, but now they are becoming a creative force on their own. Some of these companies are now going to the Première Vision in Paris every year to research new colors for instance. Their typical consumers in Rio de Janeiro are getting increasingly demanding, even if they belong to the lower-income classes, and these companies are responding to that by getting more and more creative.

Johanna: Would you say a little bit about how the “slow fashion” movement is taking hold in Rio?

Ronaldo & Pedro: That is true, especially for the atelier scene. There are a lot of small studios and companies, working with very small-scale production, but being highly creative. They don´t want to increase their production: they prefer to produce exclusive pieces and sell them to a network of exclusive clients. They also sell through fairs that are organized in Rio, which have become very popular. It is a very interesting scene, with a strong “do it yourself” component, but also one that can be very sophisticated.

Johanna: I was very interested to see you propose a “Made in Rio” brand or trademark that would take advantage of, and attempt to codify or solidify, the reputation of Rio de Janeiro as a unique, creative, cutting edge kind of place. This is a strategy that another “low-IP” industry — food — is trying to promote as well. Do you believe that the lack of copyright protection in fashion  has put an increased emphasis on trademark and branding in the Rio fashion scene?

Ronaldo & Pedro: Rio has been an important trendsetter in Brazil. Many Brazilian TV shows take place in Rio, and the Rio de Janeiro lifestyle is something that is commonly shared. This has had an economic impact: the added value for the clothes that are produced in Rio is often higher than the clothes that are produced in other places in Brazil. Because of that, it makes sense to create a Made in Rio brand, since it already exists in practical terms. Another thing we realized is that the work conditions in Rio are good. We have not found sweatshops or anything like that. Many of the the sewing professionals work at home, close to their families. We are also exploring the idea of creating a brand that conveys the idea that that the fashion productions in Rio are produced respecting “fair trade”.

Johanna: If I was reading my bad translation correctly (!), I think you said that even the lower-end designers, who are often accused of copying the more innovative designers, actually make a lot of changes to their designs – not just to make them cheaper, but to make them more appealing to their particular customers. Is that the gist? I’d say that’s definitely the case for fast-fashion giants like Zara and H&M.

Ronaldo & Pedro: Absolutely, especially regarding the “off-circuit,” which produces a lot of pieces, there is a lot of creativity. Even if a piece is inspired by some piece the designer might have seen in the fashion show in New York, it gets completely revamped in Rio. It quickly becomes a carioca piece. It is important to remember that the winter in Rio is very mild, and summer is really hot. So that is also an influence for the designers, who play a lot with the borders between chic and casual. No wonder, for instance, that the swimwear industry in Rio is so strong, and is heavily exported. But even formal dresses can get a twist, and the result is often very interesting.

Johanna:  As the fashion industry becomes increasingly professionalized and business-like in Rio, do you believe that some of the je ne sais quoi that makes people excited about Rio fashion will fade away?

Ronaldo & Pedro: I don’t believe it will fade away anytime soon. One of the reasons, as I mentioned, is that we have the TV shows being produced in Rio, and Globo TV, the largest broadcaster, has its main operations in the city. Actually, I believe that for the next few years, there will be a lot of new discoveries and territories to be explored. One untapped potential is that of the “off-fashion” circuit, which tends to grow at the same pace or faster than the country’s economy. These designers might be ignored right now by the posh areas of the city (served by the high-end “fashion” designers) but increasingly more people find out about them and start buying from them.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this interview, where Ronaldo and Pedro talk about how the favelas influence fashion and the parallels between Rio and Los Angeles . . .

Mashup Compilation from Eduard Minobis on Vimeo.

When I think about mash-ups, I can’t help but think about Julia Kristeva and her notion of intertextuality.

The term has been used in many, many different ways since she first coined it, but, quite generally, she was using it to talk about literature and the way that it exists within not only a network of language but a network of texts. Every text, even something you wrote on a sticky note, is in dialogue with the entire linguistic system – you’ve just selected a few words from that system. Those words, of course, are weighted with meaning: they have a long history of being used by lots of other people, for lots of different purposes – both constructive and nefarious.

Now a literary text – something that’s trying to assert or achieve the status of a cultural object that deserves a reader’s consideration (something more refined than your sticky note) – is part of a network of language and also a network of previous texts. Kristeva was very interested in how it is that the meaning of a piece of literature is produced in the mind of a reader, who cannot help but situate their understanding of that text in a larger context, one that includes what they’ve read before and what the writer is both self-consciously and unconsciously referencing.

If you think about it, the process of writing anything could be described as the process of sampling.

Some authors are far more self-conscious about this process than others. I wrote my doctoral dissertation about literary modernism and so I became very familiar with T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, a poem infamous for its intertextuality. Eliot’s literary and historical references were so numerous and so intricately interwoven that he was prevailed upon to provide footnotes for later editions. Nowadays I don’t believe you can find an edition without the footnotes, which themselves have become the subject of detailed literary analysis. Even though I was a big fan of Public Enemy at the time, it didn’t occur to me that what Eliot was doing in his “high modernist” masterpiece was not all that different from what hip-hop artists were doing with recorded samples – creating multilayered, multivalent texts that engage with the past as they try to grapple with the present. (You can find out a bit more about my continuing research on The Waste Land here)

You find a similar creative dynamic in fashion. Vivienne Westwood is well-known for her overt mash-up aesthetic, where she often imposes a punk sensibility on a decidedly Victorian construction. In this design from her Spring 2010 collection, she seems to be mocking the notion of “English romanticism” by combining, or mashing-up, a florid floral textile with clownish fluorescent stockings typical of a punk rock aesthetic.

If we treat this outfit as a literary text, as Kristeva might do, we’d need to consider what the viewer brings to the image. For me, the material of this dress looks like the type used for curtains, which further besmirches the idealism of the English romanticism that the print connotes. But it also makes me think instantly of another audacious woman who confidently wore curtains:  Scarlett O’Hara, of course! Suddenly, this one combination of clothing, of modular memes, becomes a much richer cultural object for me because I can start thinking about Gone With The Wind – both the book and the movie – and all the ways in which Scarlett might be considered a punk princess herself.

Is this intentional on Westwood’s part? Who knows? Part of the nature of mash-ups, or self-consciously intertextual texts, is that the reader/viewer is given even more latitude for the construction of meaning because the elements of the mash-up are already laden with connotation.

So, you might be thinking – well, hell, every type of cultural object could be understood as an example of intertextuality. And I’d have to agree with you! The instinct to combine and sample and remix is simply part of our creative DNA as humans. We can’t help but mimic others and incorporate materials from others into the work we produce ourselves. Creativity is an inherently social process and mash-ups reflect this profound urge to grapple with our enmeshment with each other and our environment.

And it’s not just designers who are mash-up artists. We all do it. Every day. Just getting dressed each morning is an exercise in mash-up aesthetics.

Now the funny thing about fashion is that it’s legal to mash-up different elements of different looks. In the music business, this is not the case. Although fashion designers and musicians have very similar creative drives and methods, designers have much more freedom to reference the work of their peers than musicians do. (You can find out a lot more about my research on this topic at the Ready to Share site and in this TED talk.)

Hip hop artists the Beastie Boys made their name by cleverly sampling from the archives of recorded music, adding their pronounced personal perspective over collages of sometimes barely recognizable songs (Just think about The Waste Land in this context).

Their iconic album Paul’s Boutique – whose cover captured the mash-up spirit of a thrift store – was initially unsuccessful but it eventually became  an influential and well-respected album due to its technical virtuosity in weaving together samples from other songs. Over one hundred songs were sampled on the album, including 24 individual samples on the last track alone. They spent $250,000 licensing most of the samples (as is often the case, they had trouble finding the rights owners for some of the material) and they thought that was a great deal. But in an interview with Paul Tingen, one of their producers from the Dust Brothers, that low number would be “unthinkable” in today’s litigious music industry.” Unfortunately, in the music industry, intertextuality is a luxury.

But of course there are some digital pioneers and provocateurs out there who are pushing the limits in mash-up songs and music videos. Girl Talk has managed to make a living from his popular mash-up sets, despite not clearing the rights for the excerpts he uses, and Danger Mouse launched his career with his   technically brilliant mash-up of the Beatles White Album and Jay Z’s Black Album.

Some of the most memorable mash-ups use deeply ironic juxtapositions to make us think twice about the meaning of two different messages that seem utterly incommensurable: an excellent (and appalling) example of this is “Smells Like Rockin’ Robin.”

Ironically enough, some of the best mash-ups feel like they should never have been made.

With the increased bandwidth of the Internet, music mash-ups often have a visual component as well and I am fascinated by this mash up between The Doors’ “Riders on the Storm” and Blondie’s “Rapture,” not just because the melodies and the emotional vibe so easily merge together but because I don’t think it ever would have occurred to me the degree to which Jim Morrison and Deborah Harry could be long lost twins. Much of the strength of this mash-up is about the overlapping visual memes of two iconic faces that we don’t often think of as connected.

As with “intertextuality,” there is a whole burgeoning literature about mash-ups, which can be categorized in all kinds of complex taxonomies. Some classic mash-ups will take two songs that seem completely unrelated and find a formal similarity between them. In this great example, a French artist named Overdub exploited the odd 5/4 time signature of Dave Brubeck’s iconic “Take 5” and Radiohead’s “15 Steps” to make this seamless and very listenable mash-up:

This post is based on a short talk I gave at Categorically Not! – a great speaker series at Santa Monica Art Studios. DJ and pop culture scholar Eduard Minobis curated all the mash-up videos for the event. You can find out more – and check out the other speakers in the series – here.

I’m certainly not the first to point out the similarities between haute couture – rarefied apparel that no normal person would have an occasion to wear – and haute cuisine – exquisitely prepared food that costs a fortune and simply disappears by evening’s end. This last July, the French Ministry of Culture sponsored a posh event at the Palais Royale that celebrated two of France’s most respected exports: in justifying the dual focus, organizers argued that

Though the raw materials may be different, artisans in both trades must master techniques, a “savoir-faire“
and possess a vision to reach the height of their craft . . .

But most foodies and fashionistas don’t realize that there’s an even more elemental connection between cuisine and fashion: neither have a great deal of copyright protection.

In my research on the role that copyright plays in the fashion industry, I came across a few articles mentioning the similarity between recipes – which cannot be copyrighted – and fashion designs, which don’t qualify either. I thought it was fascinating that such creative industries managed to innovate and stay fresh even though fashion designers and chefs have no control over the appropriation of their work by others. The same cannot be said of painters, sculptors, photographers, graphic designers, musicians or writers.

So, as a foodie and a fashion lover, I was delighted to be invited to a unique conference in Barcelona, co-sponsored by Telefónica, Spain’s most prominent telecommunications company, and the El Bulli Foundation, Ferran Adrià’s effort to perform cutting edge research about food and innovation. Gastronomy & Technology Days (check out the Twitter hashtag #gastrotechdays) brought together an incredibly diverse international group of writers, researchers, software engineers and hard-core food bloggers to discuss the intersection of food and technology.

The talks were occasionally mind-bending (e.g., “Hacking the Food Genome”) and participant Rachael McCormack tweeted that the conference was “like TED but with better coffee.” Video will be available soon I’m told, but until then, I thought I’d lay out some of the key points from my keynote speech about the similarities between fashion and food.

It turns out that both fashion and food qualify as utilitarian creations in the eyes of the legal system. Copyright is reserved exclusively for “artistic” creations and so, despite the incredible ingenuity and craftsmanship of an evening gown or a perfectly poached lobster, neither receive protection, falling instantly into the public domain.

(You can check out a summary of my argument about the positive side-effects of this seemingly irrational and unfair exclusion in the fashion industry in this TED talk: I’ll focus a bit more on cuisine here.)

Both fashion designers and chefs get to enjoy an open creative process: Chefs can sample from the entire history of cuisine when they make a new dish or revive an old one. Imagine if a chef had to perform copyright clearance for the use of a certain combination of ingredients or a particular procedure?

Of course the fact that chefs may sample from their peers without legal ramifications contributes to the development of trends, which we think of as a defining feature of the fashion industry. In the U.S. we’ve seen all kinds of seemingly random trends in food, from tart yogurt to cupcakes to gastropubs to pork belly, which is now a staple on high-end menus.

And even more so than fashion, cuisine is a very ephemeral creation: once it’s eaten, it’s gone. The photograph lives on, as does the copyright on the photo, but the dish itself is literally consumed (which is one reason why authors rights protection has been denied chefs who’ve requested it in France).

And of course, just like in fashion, there are tremendously influential tastemakers who have a great deal of power defining what is tasty and modern and what is not: Ferran Adrià, Gaston Acurio, Heston Blumenthal, René Redzepi are among the handful of chefs single-handedly influencing cuisine around the world. And, as they well know, the critics play a huge role in that determination. Zagats and Michelin, for instance, wield the same kind of power that Vogue magazine does in fashion.

But critics and celebrity chefs and the fashion elite do not singularly determine what we eat or what we wear. Everyone wears clothes and eats and prepares food – everyone, whether they like it or not, participates in the culture of fashion and food, and so, inevitably, you see a lot of creativity and innovation on the street level, where people mix and match tastes and create appetites for new combinations of flavors and designs. (The food truck scene in Los Angeles is a perfect example of this.)

Of course the fact that people can copy one another has a huge impact on the creative process. One lovely side-effect is that high-end designers and chefs find themselves challenged to create truly innovative and surprising things that they believe will be hard to knock-off. Chefs who wish to remain at the top of their game acknowledge that they must be relentlessly creative, coming up with new ideas and new flavor profiles to keep their customers (and the critics) coming back for more.

A very strong reputation-based system has developed in creative industries like fashion and cuisine, which demands that professionals who want to be taken seriously cannot simply copy their peers. They must develop a signature style recognizable to others, something that copyists will be chastised for taking without attribution. (In a recent trip to Jose Andres’ splashy restaurant Bazaar in Los Angeles, my friend said that when they brought the liquid olives to the table the server proudly announced them as the creation of Ferran Adrià.)

With the rise of social media it has become even more important that fashion designers and chefs beware of copying from other sources without acknowledgment because they will be found out and their reputations could be destroyed.

Another way in which high-end fashion designers have dealt with an industry that allows legal copying is by knocking-off their own work: Far from cannibalizing their own product sales, these designers realized that they could expand their clientele and their brand by marketing a variety of products at vastly different price-points through mass-market retailers such as Target and Topshop. Missoni’s most recent partnership with Target was so successful that all the servers crashed and Missoni items selling at bargain-basement prices on Target are being sold for a premium on eBay.

We find a very similar dynamic in cuisine, where innovative chefs have created powerful personal brands (think Wolfgang Puck or Mario Batali) that they’ve leveraged in order to create products at lower price-points. As in fashion, chefs have discovered that developing a strong trademark can offer lucrative benefits when copyright protection is unavailable to them.

This makes a great deal of sense to me: in taste-based industries, what customers long for in fashion and in food is someone to help them navigate the tremendous number of options. They want someone with a proven track record to tell them, “this is beautiful” or “this is tasty.” And, as chefs and designers are well aware, if the customer disagrees, they’ll just follow someone else.

I knew I had to write something in response to A. O. Scott’s Sunday New York Times piece about all the movies out right now which give an insider’s perspective on industries that we find fascinating. Moneyball and Margin Call were two of the films that inspired him to write about our perennial interest in lifting the veil and seeing what’s really going on inside baseball and Wall Street.

I don’t think the irony was lost on Scott that we like to turn to pieces of fiction in order to get the real story. And some poststructuralist scholars might tell you it’s as good a place as any to look for the truth. But I don’t think that Scott went as far as he could in establishing the tremendous power that commercial storytelling has in influencing individual attitudes and, if it’s enough of a cultural juggernaut, public opinion. We may not care to admit the degree to which our knowledge of the Holocaust, for instance, is dependent on Hollywood’s depiction of it, but often these well-produced, tightly scripted fictional narratives can do more than entertain us for a couple hours, they can fill in the blanks in our knowledge. Just think about how much you learned about global pandemics in Contagion, cancer in 50/50, the founding of Facebook in Social Network and Jim Crow in The Help…

Although the connection between fictional media and public opinion is not always causal or directly linked, many scholars acknowledge that popular culture influences public opinion and in turn, the social and political landscape. Communication scholars have determined that media influence increases as the public’s direct experience with an issue decreases. Cultivation theorists, in particular, have found that information communicated to viewers via media like television can influence the audience’s perception of social reality in a subtle and cumulative fashion. (You’ll find more on this topic in a recent report I co-authored about primetime TV’s depiction of the War on Terror and the War on Drugs.)

So how might this have a civilizing influence on us? If you’re looking for a bit of good news today, I’d suggest you immediately check out Steven Pinker’s latest book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Pinker goes to great trouble to provide evidence demonstrating just how good we have it these days, and his opinion is that things will only get better. Humans will continue to exhibit a growing preference for life over death and happiness over suffering, and we will develop a better understanding of the way in which our fate is tied to others, whose quality of life will have a direct impact on our own.

He lists a few factors that have proven key to this positive transformation: the state monopoly on force, the spread of commerce, the empowerment of women and the role reason plays in moderating our more destructive impulses. But he also adds to this list the invention of the printing press – the technology of mass media, if you will, which allows storytellers to communicate compelling tales about people and issues you never would have thought about otherwise. He mentions novels like Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Oliver Twist but he might as well have mentioned Roots, The Grapes of Wrath or Philadelphia or a host of other books, TV shows, movies and songs even (remember “We Are the World?”) that invited humans to contemplate the plight of other people. It’s great to know that our longing for escape to fictional landscapes actually makes us better humans upon return.

After the tenth anniversary of 9/11, I wondered whether people would remain interested in the War on Terror, or whether we’d see some flagging interest register in the polls that, just last year, placed terrorism in the number three slot of national priorities, right after the economy and jobs.

A shift in public sentiment remains to be seen, but Hollywood seems to have decided to keep mining storylines from the War on Terror. I recently co-authored a report (with Sheena Nahm) on how primetime TV dramas depict the War on Terror. We were surprised to discover that primetime generally avoided the racial and religious stereotypes that we associate with terrorism — and when we took a look at the War on Drugs, we also discovered depictions that adhered more closely to reality than to preconceptions (for example, most drug abusers in this country are white).

Among the top-rated shows in 2010 we found nine that dealt frequently and substantially with the War on Terror, including the NCIS, Law & Order and CSI franchises. After 24 went off the air in spring of 2010, no other major network show replaced it, and so the sheer volume of hours devoted to the War on Terror in primetime sunk considerably. However, Fox has a new show starting this Fall called Exit Strategy, with Ethan Hawke, about CIA operations gone bad, and Homeland, which is from the producers of 24, just started on Showtime last night.

As New York Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley argued in her glowing review of Homeland, which focuses on an American Marine turned terrorist,”the enemy within is always more sinister than the one lurking across the ocean.” She suggests that this helps to explain one of the key findings in our report: the majority of terror suspects in primetime dramas are white; only 14% were identified as Middle Eastern or Muslim. Several insiders that I talked to in Hollywood initially chalked this up to political correctness, but, as Stanley suggests, that’s only part of the picture.

People talk about how Hollywood latches onto trends and tries to replicate successful formulas, but I believe that the creative people who come up with the stories that fill the primetime hours are hungry for new angles, fresh perspectives and stories that feel real. They realize that they need to tell the story in a different way than we expect in order to engage our continuing interest. Our report discovered that Hollywood depictions were often in better alignment with reality than with public opinion: for instance, while a slight majority of Americans are worried about radical Muslims in America, only about .003% of American Muslims have joined a jihadist group. That’s about 100 people. But from 2009 to 2010 we see a 22% increase in radical right-wing groups, from 1,753 to 2,145 of them. Homeland is yet another show to take advantage of the disconnect between American perceptions of terrorism and the actual facts.

The TV industry seems convinced that we’ll remain intrigued. Our analysis of War on Terror storylines included CSI, CSI: Miami, Law and Order: SVU, The Good Wife, NCIS, and NCIS: Los Angeles — all of which have all been renewed for the 2011-12 season. And then there’s Chuck, which has, oddly enough, evolved into a show about thwarting international terrorists. Even Direct TV’s critically acclaimed Damages is devoting its current season to an investigation of a Blackwater-style private military company in Afghanistan. And National Geographic’s new show Border Wars recently debuted to the network’s highest ratings ever. It tackles issues surrounding the War on Drugs as well as smuggling, terrorism and immigration.

I guess we’ve got plenty of material to work with for a follow-up report.

Soon after presidential candidate Michele Bachman pronounced the new cervical cancer vaccine “dangerous,” public health officials began shaking their collective heads.

One expert from the American Academy of Pediatrics, which supports the use of the vaccine, told the New York Times, “These things always set you back about three years.”

Pronouncements on screens large and small by recognizable people — whether they are actors, musicians, politicians or the growing ranks of reality TV celebrities — can have an impact on public opinion completely out of proportion with their expertise.

Whether its history or science, that’s one reason people get very nervous about feature films — fictional films — that try to grapple with real-life issues and events. There has been a flurry of news coverage about the accuracy of the hit film Contagion, which provides a gripping illustration of what could happen if a global pandemic occurred.

As usual, Steven Soderbergh managed to attract a bevy of A-list talent — not only Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow but also Kate Winslet, Marion Cotillard, Jude Law, Laurence Fishburne . . . you couldn’t throw a stick in that movie without hitting a critical darling and a fan favorite. Which makes it even more important that the film tried to get the science right.

Whether we like it or not, audiences are moved by fictional representations and, if the depictions feel realistic and compelling, people often apply what they learn in fictional settings to their real lives.

So, it was heartening to see interviews with experts singing the praises of the scientific research that went into the script. One of the consulting experts on the film published an op-ed in the Sunday edition of the New York Times, where he described how he overcame his wariness about using Hollywood glamour to communicate messages about the dangers of a global pandemic:

Is this fiction? Yes. Is it real? Absolutely. During the SARS outbreak of 2003, the first pandemic of the 21st century, I flew to Beijing at the invitation of the Chinese government to help address the situation there. My memories of deserted streets, food and supply shortages, and political instability are reflected in scenes in “Contagion.” I hope the public and our lawmakers will see the movie as a cautionary tale. Pandemics have happened before. And they will happen again.

And beyond the raw science, popular films like this one can play an outsize role in romanticizing or trashing entire professions. It was a little sad to hear this from a public health official interviewed by the Los Angeles Times: “It’s very nice to see a movie where scientists aren’t the evil ones.”

It’s hard to say where a conservative like Michele Bachman might come down on a movie like Contagion. Although the “big government” health officials are generally depicted heroically, they are by no means perfect, and LA Times columnist Patrick Goldstein goes so far as to say that, “Although it would be a stretch to call Contagion a ‘tea party’ movie, it does reflect much of today’s anti-government and anti-corporate sentiment.”

Just when you thought that Soderbergh could be depended upon to make a movie custom made for a liberal audience who cut their indy movie teeth on Sex, Lies & Videotape, there he goes making a film that — surprise! — can be interpreted in lots of different ways. That’s how representations work: there’s never a one-to-one correspondence between the encoding and decoding of meaning. The process of meaning-making unfolds over time, and it’s always context dependent.