Adam Driver walks off NPR interview

I don't know how I feel about Terry Gross on public radio's Fresh Air. I used to listen to it all the time, then I stopped and now when I try to listen to it, I can't stand it.

I began to suspect there was something wrong with Gross when she was interviewing someone about the one-sided slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza and she seemed to think that Israel only wanted peace but the Palestinians were too anti-Semitic. There were accusations of racism against Gross. She was interviewing someone about the large numbers of rapes committed in South Africa and was astonished to learn that white men were among the perpetrators. She interviewed a Black music mogul who had worked his way up from abject poverty and kept questioning him about his selling drugs when he was in high school.

So, anyway, here's something from an essay by Curtis White, a professor at Illinois State U., about what he calls "the middle mind". He expanded it into a book that's kind of interesting which includes at attack on Steven Spielberg. I copied an pasted the quote from an article about it on another website:

Let’s think about Terry Gross and Fresh Air for just a moment. Here is an interview program that claims quite earnestly to be for intelligence, for the fresh and new, for something other than regular stale network culture, for the arts and for artists. But anyone who much listens to the show knows (I certainly hope that I’m not the only one who has noticed) that: 1) Terry rarely interviews an artist or intellectual that real-deal artists and intellectuals would recognize. 2) She has no capacity for even the grossest distinctions between artists and utter poseurs. Many of the “writers” she has interviewed recently have been writers for TV series and movies. People who can with a straight face say, “Seinfeld is a great show because of the brilliant script writing” love Fresh Air. Now, Seinfeld may be a cut above the average sit-com, but it’s a sit-com! 3) The show is a pornographic farce.

Let me develop this last idea about the pornographic a bit. Terry Gross’s interest in books and writers is too often morbid, perverse and voyeuristic. Two quick examples: she recently interviewed the main writer of the new HBO series Six Feet Under. The critical moment in the interview came when she asked him (I’m paraphrasing from memory), “What was it like when you were in that car accident and your sister was driving and she died but you didn’t?” Was she leading up to a telling psychological reading of the work in question? No. She wanted to know and I suspect her audience wanted to know what it was like to be in an auto accident in which his sister died! That’s it. Do we learn something about writing, or the arts, or culture? Do we learn anything? No, we learn that he was traumatized by the event.

As to what the folks who go on this show are thinking, knowing they’ll face this kind of personal inquisition, I won’t speculate. They’re probably thinking either, “Fresh Air! The big time!” Or “Good grief, that woman is an idiot. But my publicist will shoot me if I don’t do it.”

A week or so later there was a program in which Terry interviewed an author who had written a novel in which a woman says, “Drop dead,” to her husband and the next day he does drop dead. Before the novel was published, the author’s own real-life husband dropped dead on a tennis court. This was the point at which the book became interesting for Terry. If her poor husband hadn’t dropped dead, Terry would never have been interested in her or her book for this Show of Shows. “What did it feel like to suspect you’d killed your own husband with your art?” Fresh Air? How about Lurid Speculations? It’s like Dr. Laura for people with bachelor degrees. Car Talk has more intellectual content.

From the perspective of a person really interested in art and culture, one can only say, “Well, I think she’s on my side, but, God, she’s so stupidly on my side that I hardly recognize my side as my side.” Thus the Middle Mind.

I bring this up because an actor of sorts called Adam Driver stomped out of a Fresh Air interview because Terry Gross played a clip from one of his movies. He can't be that good an actor since he's in a Star Wars movie.

I wouldn't want to hear myself, either, and it would really make you self-conscious about the sound of your voice in an interview.

It's like the old days when you'd be hanging around with friends and you were having a perfectly pleasant time, then someone gets out a Polaroid camera, takes a picture and you're reminded what you look like.

I saw video of Woody Allen being interviewed by Mark Cousins. Allen doesn't watch his own movies and averted his eyes when Cousins played a clip.

So I don't know whose side I'm on in the Fresh Air-Adam Driver case.

It's like the time long ago. Someone asked me whose side I was on in the Falklands War. I said Argentina. Then the guy attacked me for taking sides at all in a war between two horrible capitalist countries although even those of us who took sides recognized the problem.

The war did bring down the Argentine dictatorship and the cast of BBC's Top Gear later had to run for their lives when they filmed in Argentina. Maybe there will be some silver lining to this Fresh Air thing, too.