(no subject)
Aug. 6th, 2015 10:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretA couple nights ago I watched the Moneyball movie as a followup to the book. It was um... in some ways it was worse than the book. In some ways it was more interestingly bad.
The filmmakers reproduce a scene from early in the book where Beane sits in a room full of his scouts and listens impatiently as they talk about 'tools' and physical attributes rather than about statistics. Lewis's version is subtly more interesting in a million ways: Lewis captures the mix of older and younger scouts, adaptable scouts and inflexible scouts, thoughtful scouts and intuitive scouts. The movie shows a room full of old men, emphasizing this by having one of the most outspoken ones wearing a hearing aide. It is lazy and ageist and it is not as interesting a story as the reality, or even Lewis's botched reality.
But basically the plot of the film is Regression to the Mean: The Movie. The Oakland A's jump out of the gate slowly, underperforming as compared to what their statistical output as far as run creation would predict. Fans are unhappy, players are unhappy, media is unhappy, ownership is unhappy. Billy Beane and [Pseudo-Paul DePodesta with some Sandy Alderson thrown in] tell them not to worry, the team will regress to the mean. Gradually, it happens. Everyone is happy. The end.
This is phenomenally boring. The movie tries to deal with this problem by obfuscating its own thesis. Beane's trade of Jeremy Giambi for John Mabry is, pretty clearly, an emotional overreaction by Beane that worked against his own theory of run creation, but in the movie it's positioned to suggest it somehow played a role in changing the team's fortunes. Beane tries to maintain separation from his players to maintain objectivity early in the film, but after the Giambi-Mabry trade, the film starts to show Beane and fake-Depodesta lecturing the players on sabermetric tactical principles, suggesting that it was selling the system to the team's players, leadership on Beane's part, that caused the turnaround... even though the movie's whole thesis is that the turnaround was just regression to the mean. This tension between sports movie tropes and moneyball's mathematical truths is inharmonious at best.
But it is interesting how much the movie is committed to not looking like a sports movie. We barely see any baseball being played in the movie, and when we do, it's shot in explicitly trope-subversive ways. The trope of the players fading off the field to leave an empty stadium at the end of the season is used particularly effectively in this regard.
Unfortunately, instead of baseball imagery we get weird, fetishy number imagery. Tables of data shot out of focus, shot with the column headings cut off, scrolled through too fast to make sense of. Math as magic, whee! Never in the movie does Sorkin trust the numbers to actually tell a story. People have to tell the stories for the numbers, and they usually do a pretty poor job of it.
The filmmakers reproduce a scene from early in the book where Beane sits in a room full of his scouts and listens impatiently as they talk about 'tools' and physical attributes rather than about statistics. Lewis's version is subtly more interesting in a million ways: Lewis captures the mix of older and younger scouts, adaptable scouts and inflexible scouts, thoughtful scouts and intuitive scouts. The movie shows a room full of old men, emphasizing this by having one of the most outspoken ones wearing a hearing aide. It is lazy and ageist and it is not as interesting a story as the reality, or even Lewis's botched reality.
But basically the plot of the film is Regression to the Mean: The Movie. The Oakland A's jump out of the gate slowly, underperforming as compared to what their statistical output as far as run creation would predict. Fans are unhappy, players are unhappy, media is unhappy, ownership is unhappy. Billy Beane and [Pseudo-Paul DePodesta with some Sandy Alderson thrown in] tell them not to worry, the team will regress to the mean. Gradually, it happens. Everyone is happy. The end.
This is phenomenally boring. The movie tries to deal with this problem by obfuscating its own thesis. Beane's trade of Jeremy Giambi for John Mabry is, pretty clearly, an emotional overreaction by Beane that worked against his own theory of run creation, but in the movie it's positioned to suggest it somehow played a role in changing the team's fortunes. Beane tries to maintain separation from his players to maintain objectivity early in the film, but after the Giambi-Mabry trade, the film starts to show Beane and fake-Depodesta lecturing the players on sabermetric tactical principles, suggesting that it was selling the system to the team's players, leadership on Beane's part, that caused the turnaround... even though the movie's whole thesis is that the turnaround was just regression to the mean. This tension between sports movie tropes and moneyball's mathematical truths is inharmonious at best.
But it is interesting how much the movie is committed to not looking like a sports movie. We barely see any baseball being played in the movie, and when we do, it's shot in explicitly trope-subversive ways. The trope of the players fading off the field to leave an empty stadium at the end of the season is used particularly effectively in this regard.
Unfortunately, instead of baseball imagery we get weird, fetishy number imagery. Tables of data shot out of focus, shot with the column headings cut off, scrolled through too fast to make sense of. Math as magic, whee! Never in the movie does Sorkin trust the numbers to actually tell a story. People have to tell the stories for the numbers, and they usually do a pretty poor job of it.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-08-09 10:14 am (UTC)-The underdog triumphs (in their sport)
-The underdog triumphs (not by winning, but through self-actualisation)
-The fallen champion makes a comeback
-Excessive pursuit of sporting success leads to general destruction
-Sports teach the protagonist a more widely applicable moral about life/ life values (the above is a subset)
-Story about larger culture surrounding sports (perhaps what Moneyball was aiming for?)
What others do you know? It strikes me as a somewhat restrictive genre. Someone else, unconnected to my question/ your post, raised the point that regression to the mean is a boring story. Some of us argued that "highly competent, disciplined, and well-funded team wins, as everyone expected they would" is a boring story; others argued that you can do a lot within that, and yay competence porn.
Again for curiosity: can you think of an example of a numbers story told well?
(no subject)
Date: 2015-08-09 01:26 pm (UTC)-Dog plays sport
But otherwise, your list pretty much covers it. I guess there's also Young, talented upstart challenges the dominance of aging champion (Bull Durham, Rollerball, etc..), but that's arguably a subset of one of the other narratives you mentioned.
Many of the underdog triumphs movies are absolutely competence porn- Hoosiers is a movie about the satisfaction of watching a good coach teach his team how to play well, for example.
The only film I can think of about talented, disciplined, well-coached, well-funded team wins is The Mighty Ducks 2, but that's a pretty unsatisfying movie. (That I love anyway because... knuckle puck)
Hmm... Numbers story told well. Well, the best math movie I've seen is Travelling Salesman which is literally a movie about 4 mathematicians in a room arguing the ethics of solving P vs. NP. I'm hard pressed to name another movie I really respect on these grounds... perhaps Barbarians at the Gate, because it's so much more of a people story that the numbers give a strong underpinning to. I also didn't hate A Beautiful Mind, and it certainly had a few really good math telling stories scenes.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-08-12 10:00 am (UTC)OK, need to see Hoosiers. You had me at "competence porn". [And now I'm curious about Mighty Ducks 2, because even if unsatisfying, I feel there'd be something to think about, there.]
Thanks for the number/math narrative recommendations.
[[This conversation came up, for me, because I was recalling a summer job I'd had fact-checking children's books, and one of the children's books was about Jim Abbott, left-handed, physically-handicapped baseball star. After a certain point my job research turned into the interviews he'd given as his career faded, and I was struck by deep strangenesses in the conversations that go "why aren't you winning." And the acceptable answers.]]