Uh-oh

Big Ben chimes stoppage mystery. Does this mean we've been forced to pay Blofeld the one million pounds so that SPECTRE won't launch a nuclear terror across the globe?! Does 007 have only 48 hours to save the day and roger the bad girl?! Uh-oh!

Kink response theory

Not sure where this thought comes from today, but it's pleasingly inconsequential.

The work I did along the road to an aborted PhD in some ways boils down to advocating for the importance of a reader model in any system of automatic story generation. Forced to compress my ideas into a ten minute conference talk a few years ago, that's what was left: it's pointless talking about what might make a story work without considering who the reader might be, and having a formal model of how such a reader might process a story. That's the completely fatal flaw in all of the more or less elaborate models of story structure as a grammar. The analogy which forms the basis of any story grammar is that there's some sort of congruence between sentence structure and story structure. It's hooey, because, though they both have structure, of course, they work in such different ways. Sentences are about meaning; stories are about emotional affect, and the moment affect is introduced, you're talking about the necessity to have a reader model, whether you're aware of it or not. It was dispiriting to see story grammars alive and well at that conference, and also dispiriting to see how novel my stuff seemed to most - though an acolyte of Wolfgang Iser was there to exhort me to keep on fighting the good fight. Yeah, right.

Anyway, here's an analogy that does appeal to me. The complex of author and reader, both of which need to be taken into account when examining the worth of a story, strikes me as very much like the complex of top and bottom, dom and sub, pitcher and catcher, in a kink partnership. Not merely that one gives (for some definition of giving), while the other receives (for some definition of receiving); also, in just the same way that it's necessary to consider both author and reader - or perhaps more properly from my perspective story and reader - when assessing a story, it seems necessary to consider both top and bottom, dom and sub, pitcher and catcher, when assessing the orientation of either. Just as a story isn't in any objective sense effective when separated from its processor, a top isn't in any objective sense a top apart from a partner. I've always been fonder of seeing top and bottom and such as verbs, rather than nouns, and that's consistent here. If top is what you do, rather than what you are, then a partner is an integral part of the whole process. You're not a top without them.

Partly what I'm arguing for here is (as usual) a resistance towards using restrictive labels. It seems far more helpful, and also far more interesting, to speak, for example, of some kinky person K as a top with respect to person A, a sadist with respect to person B, maybe a 'parent' with respect to person C, and perhaps also a bottom with respect to person D, rather than merely as a switch. What matters - what's interesting - are the dynamics with individual others, rather than any attempt to somehow squish all of those variations into the smallest possible linguistic representation. It seems to encourage an openness towards stretching one's own kink boundaries, and perhaps also an openness towards other people's kink flavours.

So, yeah, I guess I'm a switch, but it's an empty umbrella term that I'm bored with. Kink is all about connection with others, and I think we're far better off using terms which capture the rich possibility and individuality of those connections.

Negotiating a price

A. has been bingeing on DVDs of 24 recently; bingeing might be the only way to capture its headlong rush. The programme has a very distinctive form. Such a long continuous narrative inevitably ends up being all middle, the same characters bouncing to and fro in a pinball plot, or perhaps circling in a holding pattern, until the call comes to tear down to the denoument. Since efficiency of plot and production procludes continually introducing new characters (and therefore actors), all roads end up leading back to Rome. Everyone has their moment as sub-plot bad guy and good guy; every conflict permutation is checked off; every evil nemesis rises again. Structurally, what this creates is essentially a soap opera about terrorists. Glossy, to be sure, but it's the soapiest of scaffolding keeping the gloss front and centre.

The 24-hour gimmick is realised with any plausibility in the same way that Jeopardy! realises its answer-the-answer-with-the-question with any plausibility: not at all. I caught a slightly farcical moment in which Kiefer Sutherland, driving along Figueroa in downtown LA, promised to be at some distant airstrip in ten minutes, then made it in ten minutes. Ah, I don't think so. The compression of plot is terribly important, though. 24 is principally an exercise in running the ticking bomb scenario over and over again - often with multiple (metaphorical) ticking bombs running at the same time. The terrorism edge is new, but the ethos is a very very old one, which might be called: Due Process Doesn't Work. It's a hoary old standby, because it pits the maverick against the system, and because we're hardwired to associate with the individual. Harry Callahan is only the best recent example.

Maybe partly because it is such an old trope, but I find myself slightly bothered by how politically unpleasant 24 seems to me. I'm not about to claim that it's made by Fox to promote a political viewpoint - though (Murdoch knows) that would hardly be implausible - but nevertheless it does fit right in on Fox. 24 takes Due Process Doesn't Work and augments it for a modern era, in a way that's entirely consistent with the Gonzales memo. That's what the ticking bomb scenario is for: it's an argument for rendering 'obsolete' and 'quaint' the due process with which a civilised nation deals with the threat of terrorism, and for sanctioning torture.

Perhaps what bothers me about 24 isn't that it accepts that there is an argument to be made against the restrictions of due process when time is short and the potential consequences are dire. No, it's that, rather than treating the argument as a serious one, with potentially nation-changing consequences on either side, and constructing thoughtful, imaginative drama from that, it's already decided what the answer is, and hammers away at that answer until there's barely any trace of there ever having been an alternative. In retrospect, due process would never have been a successful approach. Each rendering of due process as obsolete and quaint turns out to be key to the saving of the day. Each small torture is worth it.

Moreover, 24 stacks the deck so heavily in its favour that the argument that it feels has been won, could hardly have been otherwise. The harmed are guilty of something, anyhow, so abuses are little more than - as the programme would appear to see it - a shortcut to justice. That's mostly the case, at least. The third series includes a prolonged episode in which a terrorist demands that the head of the counter-terrorism unit be executed, or else dire consequences will result. Shockingly - albeit after all alternatives have been exhausted - the execution takes place. I couldn't help but think of the line Nicholas Meyer wrote for Spock as he selflessly gave his life to save the Enterprise: "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." Maybe they do, but there's a crucial inversion between the two examples: Spock willingly, and unbidden, gives his life; the terrorist chief is executed. In the world of Star Trek, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few because an individual is able to act with bravery and dignity to lay down his life. In the world of 24, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few because, well, there are, like, more of them, right? How far we've come in a few years.

It feels like my knee is jerking away crazily at all this, in a way that I'm not used to feeling. I don't find myself railing against portrayals of violence in drama because I claim they make people more violent, though I'm always happy to see the consequences of violence represented with some verisimilitude - mostly because it makes better drama, dammit. And, sure, I know that torture happens, and that it's happening right now, both at the hands of, and at the behest of, many countries around the world which fly a tarnished flag of civilisation. So what's wrong with portraying torture as a tool of the United States, if in fact it is used as such?

Well, perhaps, to borrow from 24's own accounting, what's wrong isn't that it's portrayed - very much not - but that so much is currently at stake from exactly how it's portrayed. Whether this was its intention or not, 24 serves as propaganda for the effective use of torture by Our Side. Only bad guys get tortured anyhow, so what's the problem? Torture helps our side win, so what's the problem? Here's something:

Al-Libbi had been beaten and injected with the so-called "truth drug", sodium pentothal, said the official. "They have tried all possible methods, from the 'third degree' to injecting him with a truth serum but it is hard to break him," he said.

In time, the officials hope that al-Libbi, 28, will tell them about forthcoming attacks, al-Qaeda's funding and its sophisticated coded communications network.

And then, Captured Al-Qaeda kingpin is case of 'mistaken identity':

According to European intelligence experts, however, Abu Faraj al-Libbi was not the terrorists' third in command, as claimed, but a middle-ranker derided by one source as "among the flotsam and jetsam" of the organisation.

Whoops. But not a single eyelash was batted, either about the matter-of-fact torture while it was thought that he was the right bad guy, or after he turned out not to be.

Post Bagram, post Camp Delta, post Abu Ghraib, it's becoming accepted that torture is okay - it's a good translation into real English of the White House mantra that 9/11 changed everything. I can't honestly claim that 24 is creating that acceptance - at least once my knee stops jerking I'll be happy saying that. The mirror it's holding up to America probably, sadly, isn't a distorted one; it's in all likelihood presenting an accurate picture of a country that's distorting itself by the week to assimilate the evils done in its name. I don't believe art has a responsibility to reflect all voices at once, though the more it's able to encompass, the better it'll probably be as art. There's fine drama to be constructed from imaginatively discussing the nature of torture in a civilised world. 24 has already decided what it thinks, and has reduced torture to a soap-opera plot device.

Maybe I just regret a missed opportunity, in popular culture, at a time when America is faced with choosing what sort of country it wants to become once the dust settles. To accept the necessity of torture would seem to be to be, if not selling one's soul, then at least negotiating a price.

Life with Jane and Jacques

A. and I are in Portland, looking after her grandparents while her parents are away in Hawaii. The quiet, the huge, well-stocked house, and the presence of both a Chevy Tahoe and a BMW outside the front door ought to make this time something of a relaxing break from LA - and it is something of a relaxing break. But then there's the grandparents.

Imagine a world in which Jane Marple married Jacques Clouseau, and they both lived to 99 years old (yes, the GPs are both actually 99), and you might have some idea of the difficulties involved. Jane, who is actually Vivian, still has a mind like a steel trap, but the springs are perhaps not as taut as they once were. She scolds me for not eating breakfast. Where once she pursued the criminally genteel, she now doggedly lays the table for dinner, circumnavigating with her tennis ball walker the vast kitchen island between the table and the drawer where the place mats are kept, one mat at a time. To be young, and to be old, is to need patience in the absence of an alternative.

To watch Jacques - who is actually Frank - totter from the table to the coffee-maker for a refill, and then totter back again, the steaming mug canted at a precarious angle, is to feel one's hair greying by the very second. His short-term memory is blisslessly decayed. Old stories of genuine charm are bled dry by repetition. A conversation between the two of them this afternoon, during which he tried to construct in his mind the sequence of actions and events which would be triggered should he need medical help - and then keep it constructed in his mind - had the miscommunication and panicky despair of Abbott and Costello.

They're both quite remarkably self-sufficient, though this is achieved at the cost of their lives having become very small. Purpose is a matter of small ritual. Dinner at 5. Jeopardy at 7, the volume ear-meltingly loud. It's not an easy balance, but the trick seems to be to give them space to exercise whatever volition they feel, no matter how teetering or glacial the execution, but to watch from the wings should some help be needed. And to enjoy the moments of connection and lucidity. Easier to do that knowing that we're only going to be here another week, perhaps.

The God F.A.Q.

Funny, but this is what not begging the question looks like.

The top deck of the bus

Here's a simple way to tell if software is any good or not: is it fun to use? If you struggle and wrestle and curse, it's probably a heap of crap. Probably an expensive heap of crap.

I'm finding more fun playing with Google Maps right now than anything for a while. It's quite spellbindingly simple and effective, and wowingly fun. There's some serious thought and innovation gone into the stuff you don't see, so that what you do see is right. Zoom in and out to cache all of the relevant bits of image, and you can make your own little Powers of 10.

Here's how much fun it is. Google Sightseeing is dedicated to just finding cool stuff on Google Maps. Go read the comments too, because they're also a trove of goodies.

Nice as Google Maps was before they hooked up the satellite imagery, it makes for an entirely different experience to be able to see stuff. I find the effect oddly like sitting on the top deck of the (double-decker) bus when I was a kid, right at the front by the window. For some it might have been about pretending to drive the thing, but I was always more interested in seeing over the walls and the fences and the big box hedges that separate a small boy from most of the world. In this case what's over the fence is Area 51 (note that, when you switch the display, it literally isn't on the map), but it's the same difference.

The Existential Angst of a Psychopathic Pepperpot

Let's get this straight. I kill The Doctor, destroy the TARDIS, and that makes me a standard Dalek?! I hardly think so. Exterminate! Exterminate!!

Unexpectedly Fucked in the Ass

[Via BoingBoing] Because perhaps nothing says "Hey, happy birthday!" better than being unexpectedly fucked in the ass, I give you the Institute of Oriental Studies, at the University of Santa Catarina, in Brazil.

Happy 1st birthday, little blog. And a big "w00t!" to my loyal readers. Don't you people have homes to go to?

[Update: Okay, they took it down, so here's a cached copy.]

Deference and the Election

Dinner with friends some time ago, and, things having been a bit lubricated with wine, a friend of theirs aimed a question in my Limey direction, a reasonable paraphrase of which would be something like: "So. The Royal Family. What's that all about then? Hmm? Hmm??" The edge of belligerence in his tone seemed to be driven by bafflement with a power structure which seemed incredibly alien to his American soul: one of tradition and heredity, rather than meritocracy. It appeared that, as a Brit, I was both responsible for the Royals, and also assumed to be a mindless feudal serf who didn't see it his place to question that arrangement. He seemed to want me to justify this abomination, or simply to cut to the chase and admit apologetically that I couldn't. I'm not really much of a monarchist. I couldn't care about the pomp and the commemorative tea-towels. I tend to see the Windsors as the head of Britain's tourist industry and, as such, they're worth every penny of the (moderate and decreasing, by the way) tax groats that get shovelled their way. The bottom line is that they make more for Britain than they cost, way more, so arguing that they're a bad thing on those terms does seem to be weak. The other bottom line is that enough people want their continued existence for enough reasons that, well, why not? At worst they're a harmless dalliance, a bit of symbolic detritus from a different age. I said as much, and that was that.

I might have added, with a sardonic smile: "What, you think Dubya got where he is today on merit?" And if I'd said it right I might have got a chuckle or two, but, sitting here tonight, I'd have wanted to give the gag a great deal more heft. The unspoken comparison the neo-Roundhead appeared to be making, between the unelected, undemocratic, unaccountable British Royals, and the elected, democratic, and (presumably) accountable American heads of state and government, seems less clear to me the more I think about it. If we set aside the issue of heredity (noting in passing that it sometimes seems to work that way over here too, ballot box or not), and we also take note of the absence of any genuine power in the hands of Liz and the boys beyond the symbolic and the whisperingly influential, what's left for a meritocrat to despise about monarchy - the British monarchy at least - is mostly the deference paid to them, and I caught some of that in the dinner-guest's annoyance. It's a fair point - with the caveat that I get the impression Americans think Brits are way more deferential about the Royals than they actually are.

But deference isn't remotely exclusive to royalty. Driving home tonight, there was a piece on NPR about the British general election, the theme of which was the amazing lack of deference that's given to politicians from the PM on down. Clips were played of Blair being effectively handbagged by members of the public at extremely close quarters. Blair, for all his occasional disastrous lapses into faith-based ideology, doesn't seek protection from such moments. It's the rough and tumble of British election politics, which - as the NPR correspondent correctly suggested - spills over partly as a consequence of the rough and tumble of British parliamentary politics. Oliver Willis notes the same lack of deference from the British media, and he's right. Here is the sequence of opening questions from Jeremy Paxman to Tony Blair during the televised interview last week:

"Prime Minister, is there anything you'd like to apologise for?"

"But do you accept that there is a trust issue, and that the reason opposition parties can talk about wiping the smirk off your face is because you can't any longer say, look at me, I'm a pretty straight kind of guy?"

"Alright, let's look at Iraq. When you told Parliament that the intelligence was 'extensive, detailed and authoritative', that wasn't true, was it?"

"Okay, but you know, don't you, that just two weeks before you made that statement, the Joint Intelligence Committee said that 'intelligence remains limited'."

"Therefore it's not 'extensive, detailed and authoritative', is it?"

"They said it was 'limited', you said it was 'extensive, detailed and authoritative."

"So was the JIC - the Joint Intelligence Committee - report wrong?"

"So when you wrote in the foreword to the dossier that the threat from Saddam was serious and current, it wasn't, and indeed your own Chief of Staff, Jonathan Powell, had said that the dossier did nothing to demonstrate a threat."

"Did you see the Foreign Office legal advice which said that military action against Iraq would be illegal without a further UN Resolution?"

"You didn't see that Foreign Office advice, saying that an invasion would be illegal without a second UN Resolution?"

"You didn't see it?"

"The Attorney General is a political appointment, Prime Minister. Shouldn't you have seen the Foreign Office legal advice?"

"Do you accept any responsibility at all for the death of Dr David Kelly?"

"Do you accept any responsibility at all?"

"So the answer to the question is, you don't accept any responsibility?"

Those aren't edited highlights; it's a single unbroken sequence of questions. And, whatever the non-pejorative opposite of deference is called, that's what it looks like.

There are all sorts of places one might look for the causes of such undeference: the post-Empire cynicism and worldliness in the British psyche; the freedom to be just plain difficult that's championed by well-funded and politically-independent public service broadcasting, with the BBC at its head.

I think one might also look pretty closely at the separation of state and government in Britain. To the extent that monarchy takes for itself all of the flag-waving, all of the pomp and the commemorative tea-towels - and, yes, sometimes the deference too - that can be stripped away from government, so that those things can't be used by government as a shield: attack me and you attack the country; be disrespectful to me and you disrespect the idea of democracy; burn the flag and you Hate America.

So I think I'm seeing merit (if not meritocracy) in monarchy that I'm not sure I'd seen before. If it serves even somewhat as a box into which we can put whatever deference we have, whatever love of the procession and the ritual and the fairytale, whatever need to sing Jerusalem at the Last Night of the Proms, whatever simple unconditional love of country, then perhaps that can licence a hard-nosed, objective, fiercely critical approach to the process of government, and to those who govern. Perhaps, in other words, it's just plain good for democracy. Lump together state and government, on the other hand, and a cowardly retreat behind the flag is always an option. The metonymy of President as State is cheaply available. I find it quite pleasing that both deference to British royalty and lack of deference to British heads of government are both jarring from an American perspective. From this distance, it seems an effective way to run a quirky little country.

None of this will stop Labour being re-elected tomorrow, of course (the Lib Dems would get my vote, and with greater enthusiasm than ever before), but that's by the by. If Iraq doesn't kill Blair politically, it won't be because the democratic process in Britain has been hidden behind a cowardly Wizard of Oz curtain of deference.

Oh, and the dinner-guest then went on to ask another question, in the same tone of bewildered belligerence, a reasonable paraphrase of which would be something like: "So. Benny Hill. What's that all about then? Hmm? Hmm??" Those were the two Brit references which came first to his mind. The Royal Family. And Benny fucking Hill. I didn't have the heart to point out that the President of his country is treated with a far more dangerous deference than Liz and Phil, and that Benny's T&A burlesque was funded for the last ten or so years of his life mostly by American TV money.

If heredity is anything like the issue, then perhaps America might get itself a head of state who - like Lenin - is frozen into permanence, into whom all flag-draped patriotic feeling might be poured, so that the transitory head of government could be taken genuinely to task. To avoid the problem of over-deference it needn't be someone too grand. A tastefully-enbalmed Fred Rogers, perhaps.

Oh no, not again

Not the least of the problems facing any film adaptation of the Hitch-Hiker's Guide (I prefer it with the hyphen, so there) is this, and it's a big one: Adams's structural skill was something very Pythonesque, or maybe Carrollian; it was for elaborate, precise, whimsical play with words and ideas, and not, very very much not, for plot. Since film necessarily prefers plot, the room it occupies squishing everything else up, or out, the significant task with Adams's work is to introduce enough larger-scale plot that everything holds together and seems of a piece, whilst not squishing the smaller-scale precision into a nothingness. Though the film doesn't always succeed, it does enough - and, importantly, it does enough at the beginning and the end, where it's felt most keenly. It's easy to get into a balance-sheet stocktaking of an adaptation such as this one, the good stuff on one side, the bad on the other, then to apply a cold actuarial eye. Bah to that. Frankly, I had a great time, and I want to see it again.

Let me get this out of the way, then. The last line of the foreword of the HHGTTG book is:

It begins with a house.

The last line of the analogous foreword of the film is, instead:

It begins with a man.

That's a slightly baffling bit of quibbling, but it's also a basic structural mistake. Beginning with a house emphasises the elegant congruence, somewhat underplayed in the film, between the demolition of Arthur's house and the demolition of the Earth, for similarly pointless and bureaucratic reasons. It's also a neat linguistic harmonic to the visual pulling of focus from the universal to the personal which has become a filmic grammar standby. It's also - and this is most important - a signpost of the best bit of structural design that's new to the film. Not only does the film begin with Arthur's house; it also ends with it. This is exactly right for many reasons. Arthur having ventured down the rabbit-hole for most of the film, suddenly all of the other protagonists are dragged down his: Zaphod is baffled by his tiny caravan; the vogons are thwarted by a garden gate. The mundanity of Earth is given a new, rather wonderful life, all of which is kicked up to eleven by the fact that we know this Earth (like the last) was constructed. Paradoxically it seems to make it all the more precious. And Arthur, having returned to the potential of home, if not home itself, can see that he's outgrown it, that there's more out there. The film begins with the house, and ends with it.

The film does indeed have an extremely saggy middle, during which the ramshackle plot obliterates any particular rhythm. The restructuring and complication of the steps from Arthur and Ford's rescue by the Heart of Gold, through to their arrival at Magrathea, are breathlessly messy. Too much plot, too many ideas not quite given enough time to work. The Deep Thought back-story, the Answer, the Question, and the Earth's role in all of that, are terribly unfocused. The rescue of Trillian from Vogon bureaucracy is a characteristically Adams theme, but it's not given time to breathe. This is not a particularly short film, yet often it does seem too rushed. The introduced Humma Kavula character is a pointless diversion. (It's pretty dumb to be too hard on a film for having too many ideas. I haven't missed that that was the point of the shovel minefield on Vogsphere.)

But things recover quite triumphantly once we do finally hit Magrathea. Playing with the Earth's purpose and history (the cause of most comparisons between Adams and Kurt Vonnegut, I guess) was always Adams at his best. The sequence in which Bill Nighy as Slartibartfast gives Arthur a swooping tour of the reconstructed Earth is funny, happy, and oddly moving. It reminded me of the bravura beacon-lighting sequence in Return of the King. No matter that the Earth is a construction, and no matter that it was constructed for greedy, shallow (albeit pan-dimensional) mice, it's still home.

Casting turned out phenomenally well, on the whole. Zooey Deschanel was never going to have much to play with, but those big round eyes make the thinnest of romantic sub-plots just about believable. I didn't particularly mind the boy-finds-girl-again conceit. It's entirely consistent with Arthur's romance with Fenchurch in So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, so I poke in the eye anyone who says it doesn't fit. Simon Jones was always more Douglas, but Martin Freeman does the job admirably. I was always a big fan of David Dixon as Ford, but give Mos Def another film and he'd be right too - the idea of a black American rapper being mistaken for someone from Guildford is actually a pretty good gag. My only gripe is with Alan Rickman as Marvin, who just didn't work for me. Maybe the slight Black Country twang. Marvin should be comically over-depressed, rather than just darkly cynical. Marvin is Eeyore, wanting affection but driving people away. If Stephen Moore would have taken the job and they didn't offer it to him, then that's the only big-name casting fuck-up.

I'd anticipated this film as an interesting exercise in demonstrating its unfilmability. People would watch it, remember Adams, be driven back to the books and the radio series, and that'd be that. Minus several million for good thinking, yeah? There's plenty of room for sequels here, particularly since this one seems to be making some money. I'd love to see the darkness at the end of Restaurant at the End of the Universe played really dark. I'd love to see the scene in So Long and Thanks for All the Fish where Fenchurch shows Arthur she can fly, which is one of my very favourite bits of writing. Oh, and more catchy show tunes sung by dolphins, please.

Finally, I promised myself I wouldn't gripe because My Favourite Bit Was Left Out, but, what the hell:

"You know," said Arthur, "it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space, that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young."

"Why, what did she tell you?"

"I don't know, I didn't listen."

That's every bit as good as Carroll's tortoise gag. So: Gripe.

Cruising backwards

Via Pharyngula, today's exercise in compare and contrast.

There's nothing terribly new in this Dawkins interview at Salon, but the clarity and the lack of any whiny intellectual compromise in his language is always profoundly thrilling to me:

You've said that raising children in a religious tradition may even be a form of abuse.

What I think may be abuse is labeling children with religious labels like Catholic child and Muslim child. I find it very odd that in our civilization we're quite happy to speak of a Catholic child that is 4 years old or a Muslim of child that is 4, when these children are much too young to know what they think about the cosmos, life and morality. We wouldn't dream of speaking of a Keynesian child or a Marxist child. And yet, for some reason we make a privileged exception of religion. And, by the way, I think it would also be abuse to talk about an atheist child.

And then there's poor little Tom, white of teeth and empty of brain, fantastically outmatched by a delightfully cranky Spiegel interviewer, with Spielberg as his all-beliefs-have-equal-value dummy sidekick:

SPIEGEL: Do you see it as your job to recruit new followers for Scientology?

Cruise: I'm a helper. For instance, I myself have helped hundreds of people get off drugs. In Scientology, we have the only successful drug rehabilitation program in the world. It's called Narconon.

SPIEGEL: That's not correct. Yours is never mentioned among the recognized detox programs. Independent experts warn against it because it is rooted in pseudo science.

Cruise: You don't understand what I am saying. It's a statistically proven fact that there is only one successful drug rehabilitation program in the world. Period.

SPIEGEL: With all due respect, we doubt that. Mr. Cruise, you made studio executives, for example from Paramount, tour Scientology's "Celebrity Center" in Hollywood. Are you trying to extend Scientology's influence in Hollywood?

Cruise: I just want to help people. I want everyone to do well.

Spielberg: I often get asked similar questions about my Shoa Foundation. I get asked why I am trying to disseminate my deep belief in creating more tolerance through my foundation's teaching the history of the Holocaust in public schools. I believe that you shouldn't be allowed to attend college without having taken a course in tolerance education. That should be an important part of the social studies curriculum.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Spielberg, are you comparing the educational work of the Shoa Foundation with what Scientology does?

Didn't it seem as if Katie Holmes had a level head on her shoulders?