the millennium kids

Germaine Greer opens 'Town Bloody Hall'

Wed, 15 May 2013 12:54:00 -0400

The documentary Town Bloody Hall by Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker is a recording of a forum on Women’s Liberation held in 1971, ‘moderated’ by Norman Mailer and including Germaine Greer, Jacqueline Ceballos, Jill Johnston and Diana Trilling.

I couldn’t find Greer’s opening remarks anywhere online, so I transcribed them. Here they are:

” I’m afraid I’m going to talk in a very different way possibly then you expected. I do not represent any organization in this country and I daresay the most powerful representation I can make is of myself as a writer for better or worse.

I’m also a feminist, and to me the significance of this moment is that I am having to confront one of the most powerful figures in my own imagination, the being I think most privileged in male elitist society. Namely, the masculine artist—the pinnacle of the masculine elite.

Bred as I have been and educated as I have been, most of my life has been most powerfully influenced by the culture for which he stands, so that I am caught in a basic conflict between inculcated cultural values and my own deep conceptions of an injustice.

Many professional literati ask me in triumphant tones, as you may have noticed, ‘What happened to Mozart’s sister?’ However they ask me that question, it cannot have caused them as much anguish as it has caused me, because I do not know the answer and I must find the answer. But every attempt that I make to find that answer leads me to believe that perhaps what we accept as a creative artist in our society is more a killer than a creator. Aiming his ego ahead of lesser talents, drawing the focus of all eyes to his achievements, being read now by millions and paid in millions, one must ask oneself the question in our society: can any painting be worth the total yearly income of a thousand families?

And if we must answer that it is, and the auction reports tell us so, then I think we are forced to consider the possibility that the art on which we nourish ourselves is sapping our vitality and breaking our hearts. But the problem is very deeply seated. As you can see, I am agitated in this situation, because of the concept I have of the importance of the artist, because of my own instinctive respect for him. Is it possible that the way of the masculine artist in our society is strewn with the husks of people worn out and dried out by his ego? Is it possible that all those that have fallen away, all those competing egos, were insufficiently masculine to stay the course?

I turn for some information to Freud, treating Freud’s description of the artist as an ad hoc description of the artist’s psyche in our society and not as in any way a metaphysical or eternal pronouncement about what art might mean. And what Freud said, of course, has irritated many artists who have had the misfortune to see it: ‘He longs to attain honor, power, riches, fame and the love of women, but he lacks the means of achieving these gratifications.’

As an eccentric little girl who thought it might be worthwhile after all to be a poet, coming across these words for the first time was a severe check. The blandness of Freud’s assumption that the artist was a man sent me back into myself to consider whether or not the proposition was reversible. Could a female artist be driven by the desire for riches, fame and the love of men? And all of a sudden it was very clear the females artist’s own achievements would disqualify her for the love of men—that no woman yet has been loved for her poetry. And we love men for their achievements all the time. What can this be, can this be a natural order that wastes so much power? That breaks a little girl’s heart to pieces? I had no answer except that I knew the argument was irreversible.

And so I turned later to the function of women vis-a-vis art as we know it and I found that it fell into two parts. That we were either low sloppy creatures, or menials, or we were goddesses. Or worst of all we were meant to be both, which meant that we broke our hearts trying to keep our aprons clean. Sylvia Plath’s greatest poetry was sometimes conceived while she was breaking bread, she was such a perfectionist. And ultimately such a fool.

The trouble is, of course, that the role of the goddess, the role of the glory and the grandeur of the female in the universe, exists in the fantasy of the male artist, and no woman can ever draw it to her heart for comfort. But the role of menial unfortunately is real, and that she knows because she tastes it every day. So the barbaric yawp of utter adoration for the power and the glory and the grandeur of the female in the universe is uttered at the expense of the particular living woman every time. And because we can be neither one nor the other with any peace of mind, because we are unfortunately improper goddesses and unwilling menials, there is a battle waged between us. And after all, in the description of this battle, maybe I find the justification of my idea that the achievement of the male artistic ego is at my expense. For I find that the battle is dearer to him than the peace would ever be.

The eternal battle with women, he boasts, sharpens our resistance, develops our strengths, enlarges the scope of our cultural achievements. So is the scope after all worth it? Again the same question. Just as if we were talking of the income of a thousand families for a whole year.

You see, I strongly suspect that when this revolution takes place, art will no longer be distinguished by its rarity or its expense or its inaccessibility or the extraordinary way in which it is marketed. It will be the prerogative of all of us, and we will do it as those artists did whom Freud understood not at all, those artists who made the Cathedral of Chartres or the mosaics of Byzantium, the artists who had no ego and no name. “

Town Bloody Hall is available on Youtube.

Vote No on Question 2, a letter for lefties in Mass.

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 17:08:00 -0500

If you know me at all, it may surprise you to see me writing something encouraging you to vote. I hate calling myself “self-identified” anything, but as someone who believes in radical leftism, I am hardly drawn to the ballot box often, and certainly not for any candidates this year.

However, in the state of Massachusetts, I will be voting on the ballot questions, which include right-to-die legislation and medical marijuana. I am posting this, asking all of you who are able to to vote No on Question 2, because it is something I do believe is worth voting against, and it is an issue that leftists have failed to critique accurately. This is primarily for those who identify as ‘of the left’ and who are inclined to favor assisted suicide, two stances which I believe are mostly incompatible. Cheers.

Two years ago, close left-wing attention was being paid to a rash of suicides among gay youths. Highly publicized, many on the left were prompt to declare an ‘epidemic.’ To have suggested that these suicides were, in fact, rational end-of-life decisions made after careful consideration of pros and cons would surely have been met with howls of outrage and accusations of homophobia, and rightly so. To make such a claim would seem to members of the left to evade, if not encourage, the interlocking cultural and structural sites of oppression that work to limit the agency and freedom of non-heterosexuals. To suggest that, perhaps, in light of the systematic barriers and culturally-sanctioned assaults faced by gay teens, choosing to kill oneself was the ‘right’ or ‘smart’ decision would be instantly seen as sinister: a suggestion that failed to take into account that this decision, in a world set right and just, would never have been made. That an oppressed individual can be rationally driven to kill oneself by the sheer unbearableness of their situation is, after all, an indictment of a societal failure, and to read it as a wise example of autonomous decision-making would be almost dazzlingly offensive.

Yet, this is precisely how the left, by and large, chooses to frame arguments about ‘right-to-die’ legislation as it pertains to the disabled and ill.*

In order to have any productive conversation about this issue, one must first recognize that disability is not exclusively a medical designation, but a demographic one, and that the disabled are structurally oppressed not by the nature of their physical or mental condition but by society’s behavior towards them.

Secondly, we must understand that this issue cannot be discussed or understood as purely a philosophical exchange over personal autonomy and individual ‘choice.’ The theoretical justifications for physician-assisted suicide are inseparable from the health systems through which those decisions will be filtered and implemented. In other words, any proper understanding of physician-assisted suicide must also understand, in the words of disability historian Paul Longmore that it “would be practiced within a health care system rampant with disability prejudice and discrimination.”

It is unusual for the left to miss any opportunity to decry the inequities of the American health care system. The left knows that marginalized groups are structurally barred from receiving health care on par with those with wealth and power and routinely says as much. It knows that the profit-seeking of managed care is at odds with truly equitable and adequate health coverage. They know, in other words, what disability-rights advocate Diane Coleman knows, “that the system is willing to kill for money.”

Yet they do not acknowledge, perhaps do genuinely not appreciate, that the combination of a health care system dedicated to reducing costs and maintaining profitability, a longstanding medical tradition of discrimination and hostility towards the disabled, and the heralded ‘right to die’ act in tandem to put the disabled community at great risk.

III

If these factors are appreciated, we begin to understand how once assisted suicide is seen as a legitimate health care decision, how different groups of people will be encouraged or discouraged to ‘choose’ it.

It seems immanently likely that a for-profit health care system dedicated to minimizing costs will look at assisted suicide as the savings boon that it is. It is the clearest truth that it will act as a disincentive to long-term medical care for the disabled.

It is the darkest hilarity that the most heralded right the mainstream left is choosing to cede to the disability community is the ‘right to die,’ in the name of an autonomy that cannot exist prior to liberation, as all good leftists know. Marta Russell claims, accurately, that in this issue above all others, the left-wing loses its sights: “Their rhetoric of ‘independence’ [is] void of analysis of capitalism, the market, labor relations, perpetual unemployment.”

And to quote Paul Longmore once again: “What I want is for the state to guarantee me adequate health care in all its forms. What kind of a society would give me the right to die as the first right it guarantees, when it hasn’t been willing to guarantee these other rights? Could I really trust a society like that to fairly and justly administer a right to physician-assisted suicide? I don’t think so.”

To legitimize assisted suicide is to continue the legacy of devaluation of persons with disabilities; it is to believe, contrary to all appearances, that it will not work as one more of society’s not-so-subtle cues to the disabled that death is their best, most rational, option; it is to refuse to locate the nature of their disadvantage in society’s disregard for them, not in their physical or mental condition; and it is to place them in even greater danger than that in which they are already placed; to throw them to the mercy of a health care system that has so far been merciless and to have them rely on the care of a society that has so far been blithely uncaring.

As Marta Russell claims, “there is a direct link between physician-assisted suicide and efforts to reduce health-care spending on poor, sick, and disabled people.”

Here’s to breaking it.

Vote No on Question 2.

Some Resources:

http://www.raggededgemagazine.com/departments/closerlook/000749.html

http://www.second-thoughts.org/home/files/better-dead-than-disabled.pdf

http://www.zcommunications.org/dollars-and-death-by-marta-russell

* (analogy drawn from Eleanor Smith here) http://www.raggededgemagazine.com/focus/liberals0104.html

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/10/physician-assisted-suicide-is-not-progressive/264091/

http://scholarship.law.stjohns.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1344&context=jcred

http://dredf.org/assisted_suicide/assistedsuicide.html

http://www.newmobility.com/articleView.cfm?id=35&srch=Health

Vote for my brother, Tuli Fisher, for American Made Awards

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 14:24:00 -0400

Hey, Tumblr. I know I keep neglecting you, but I promise, it’s only because I work so much. Since I’m not paid to write, that hurts my output, naturally. So if you were waiting for my write-up on Cosmopolis, which I adored, you’ll have to wait—though not for long hopefully.

For now though, I have to hawk my brother’s wares. My brother, Tuli Fisher (named after Tuli Kupferberg: beatnik anarchist poet and founding member of The Fugs, in case you were thinking about not voting for him), left Indiana years ago for Montana to become a blacksmith. He makes garden tools; as in, he makes each one, by hand. This is a lot of work. His garden tools are really good and he makes a lot of them out of recycled materials.

He potentially could have a major breakthrough if he is selected to win this Martha Stewart American Made contest. It’s something like $10,000 and a Martha Stewart feature. And if he wins, he will be giving 20% of the money to Gallatin Valley Food Bank.

So, here’s my social media plea: help him out and vote for him.

You can do so here: http://bit.ly/TsKNpr

You can do so once every day between now and September 24th.

I know posts like this are annoying, mostly because they abuse the fact that this is what the internet is for, and who likes being reminded of that.

Okay, done now. But if you find it in your heart, vote for him and repost this if you think the tools look neat.

Until next time, when I can announce my always timely thoughts on Magic Mike.

Vote here.

Thanks.

PS: If you one of those people who follows me on every social media platform, sorry for the over-saturation. Don’t hate me. Consider it an IOU whenever I need to vote for you for whatever.

3/50 pictures of BTVS cast first tumblr post in months because...

Sat, 23 Jun 2012 12:54:00 -0400

3/50 pictures of BTVS cast

first tumblr post in months because this is the best photograph ever taken

ON BEING WHITE: Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited; or, How to lose a lose-lose situation.

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 16:17:55 -0400

The radical feminist Marilyn Frye in The Politics of Reality has an excellent piece called ‘On Being White.’ A thinking through of what it means to be white and how that knowledge affects your interactions with any non-white person, it is superb in simultaneously acknowledging that in certain ways whiteness marks one inescapably as an oppressor while absolutely refusing to play the card of white victimization.

I will quote from the final section of this essay: “In a certain way it is true that being white-skinned means that everything I do will be wrong—at least an exercise of unwarranted privilege—and I will encounter the reasonable anger of women of color at every turn… There is a correct line on the matter of white racism which is, in fact, quite correct, to the effect that as a white person one must never claim not to be racist, but only to be anti-racist. The reasoning is that racism is so systematic and white privilege so impossible to escape, that one is, simply, trapped… But white supremacy is not a law of nature, nor is any individual’s complicity in it.’ (Read the whole thing here).

I find Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited and the commentary around it interesting in large part because it seems to be, to borrow Frye’s phrase, ‘trapped.’ I do not mean that none of the criticisms made of the film are true, but simply that if the criticisms are taken seriously then they seem to dictate, in the end, that the film The Darjeeling Limited is irredeemable. In which I mean the critique becomes less ‘the film did this wrong,’ than ‘the film should not exist at all.’

For clarity: I’m restricting this to The Darjeeling Limited in particular and not Anderson’s other films of which I am not so fond. Anderson is an Anglophile, to that there is no doubt, and his films are about rich, white people almost exclusively. As Mark Browning, in his book ‘Wes Anderson: Why His Movies Matter’ no less, puts it: “It is not perhaps that Anderson’s films condone overt racism but that in a series of films, nonwhite roles are often subordinate and for sexual/comic relief only.”

We already have an interesting distinction here between Browning’s very partial defense of Anderson and Frye’s very partial defense of whiteness. Browning claims Anderson doesn’t ‘condone overt racism’ but as Frye points out, it is wrong-headed to make such a claim to be ‘not racist’ and one can only meaningfully make a claim to be ‘anti-racist.’

Wes Anderson, in making The Darjeeling Limited, attempts to create a film around an experience that is extremely common: that of white people experiencing Otherness. As anti-racists, we know, of course, that the perception of Otherness leads to an Orientalism and is a mainstay of racist cultural oppression. We have hopefully set ourselves the goal of trying our utmost to dismantle or upset anything that reinforces the perception of Otherness.

But the fact remains that this type of experience exists; it is my contention that our feelings about this experience, and our feelings thus about The Darjeeling Limited, must be given space to allow for equivocacy and must work to avoid the ‘trap’ that allows no exit or ambivalence.

I believe we allow this space in other contexts; for example, I believe it is possible for a person to have meaningful experiences as a member of the Peace Corps, experiences that may not otherwise have been possible for that person, and experiences that in the future will lead that person on a purposeful course of anti-racism, and also for that person to understand, and presumably agree, that the Peace Corps can be critiqued as a public relations or political arm of United States imperialism.

Likewise, tokenism is presumed by anti-racists to contribute to perceptions of cultural Otherness. This is almost certainly true in many instances, but tokenism’s cultural contributions become somewhat more knotted when actually experienced by real-life people. It is taken for granted that simply including ‘the black character’ or ‘the gay character’ does not account for racism or heterosexism. However, in real life, these small, individual encounters that usually constitute tokenism in film or television, can have seriously meaningful effects on people. For example, it is known that the number-one factor determining support of gay marriage is whether someone knows someone who is openly gay (it is certainly the only way to explain Dick Cheney). Similarly, ‘I have a black friend’ is no defense for racist behavior, but we should all agree that, yes, it is good to have black friends.

When these meaningful encounters (‘I know a lesbian’) are translated in film or television (‘the lesbian character’) they are often perceived as tokenistic, and they often are. But they can also lead one in the direction of anti-racism or anti-sexism; Will and Grace may be tame and heteronormative, but The Will and Grace Effect exists. In other words, can tokenism actually have demonstrable positive effects?

To bring this back to The Darjeeling Limited: is it possible to approach the subject of Otherness from the perspective that the experience could be positive? One must be careful: we may need to clarify ‘positive.’ We do not want experiences that are ‘positive’ in the Eat, Pray, Love sense, in the sense that they are ‘spiritually fulfilling’ or a ‘learning experience,’ and that lend themselves to disposable lessons that are not backed by any political action or change of behavior. What we want to believe in, unless we are to be ‘trapped,’ is the possibility that the experience of encountering Otherness or tokenism can actually lead to a reorientation of the self, away from Whiteness.

So does The Darjeeling Limited do this? I’m not sure it completely does, but I think it could. This is why I think the conversation is important. When Anderson is called out for Sara Tanaka’s Margaret Yang, the Asian love interest of Jason Schwartzman’s Max Fischer, one realizes as Glenn Kenny does that this role could have been played by a white actress, that there is nothing about the character itself that emphasizes Asian stereotypes, and that Anderson’s real crime is this context is casting an Asian actress in a supporting role. He calls this ‘damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t’ territory, and this is definitely what I mean when I say the conversation has been ‘trapped.’ One can also bring up the difficult racial questions brought up by Captain America, where the erasure of military segregation by the film is certainly problematic, but also appears to most easily lend itself to the solution of being all-white.

Personally, I would like to see filmmakers cast more non-white actors in all possible roles. I can think of very few filmmakers who routinely have a racially diverse cast where the characters roles are not necessarily particular to their race. This is a serious problem.

But supporting roles can be important; bell hooks writes about a moment in Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train: ‘I am equally moved by that moment when the young Japanese couple arrive in the train station in Memphis only to encounter what appears to be a homeless black man, a drifter, but who turns to them and speaks in Japanese. The interaction takes only a moment, but it deconstructs and expresses so much. It reminds us that appearances are deceiving. It made me think about black men as travelers, about black men who fight in armies around the world. This filmic moment challenges our perceptions of blackness by engaging in a process of defamiliarization (the taking of a familar image and depicting it in such a way that we look at it and see it differently).’

So does The Darjeeling Limited challenge perceptions? Does it deconstruct? Not as much as it could, for certain, but I think it’s trying. The white characters openly are seen as attempting to exploit the country for a ‘spiritual journey’ but Anderson does work to upend these expectations. Although a supporting character who acts as a sexual interest to one of the brothers, Amara Karan’s Rita is seen as an individual with autonomy who doesn’t simply fall into his arms. Richard Brody makes an insightful observation comparing the brothers’ extravagant luggage and luxurious dress to the ornate funeral proceedings they observe, and how both are placed together to emphasize ‘the pain, the anguish, and the horror that dazzling ornament and formalized ritual serve to mask and—to the sensitive observer—signify.’ I find much the same impulses behind the tracking shot of the train cars when Anderson reveals it to be a fantastic construction, each car keeping to the styles of its inhabitant, such as Natalie Portman’s, whose car is straight out of the Hotel Chevalier. In this shot, Anderson bats away the style-over-substance naysayers, applying his distinctive skills to an expressive deconstruction of emotional and cultural compartmentalization.

Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited is a film about three white rich men in India attempting to learn about themselves. This is a narrow space in which to navigate, but I do not believe it is a trap; I believe it is difficult but possible to find within it room to experience equivocacy; to work against the mystification of the Other; to galvanize one into rejecting Whiteness. The Darjeeling Limited doesn’t quite get there, even if the last shot is the brothers abandoning their luggage, but it’s hardly racist on its face, or even not anti-racist. It is problematic, but it is to Anderson’s credit that he seems to be offering an attempt to work through that problematic as opposed to ignore it; nor does he seem at the end to have conquered it, which would be impossible, but only to have seen it through and arrived at a better place than which he started. He’s no Satyajit Ray, but then he never could have been. But he appears to ‘have some Indian friends’ and maybe, in the end, that could be the start of something, and let’s hope it is.

Even if he doesn’t really count, my real celebrity crush...

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 12:47:30 -0400

Even if he doesn’t really count, my real celebrity crush is Will Sheehey.

What this entire team has gone through and done is incredible. Hell of a way to end the season, but next year: people get ready.

It’s that time again. After this, I’ll post real...

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 10:14:00 -0400

It’s that time again.

After this, I’ll post real things probably. You never know.

humansacrifice: “No Seconds” - a series by Henry Hargreaves...

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 13:52:00 -0500

humansacrifice:

“No Seconds” - a series by Henry Hargreaves that recreates the last meals that were served to inmates on death row (Source: Dripbook)

I find these photos boring as all fuck, but I’m reblogging it so I can issue a clarification and share one of my favorite historical anecdotes apropos of ‘Ricky Ray Rector.’

Here you will see only his name, his charges (2 counts of murder), and his statement regarding the pecan pie that he was ‘saving it for later.’ On first glance, this sounds like the hardened sarcasm of a double murderer accepting death with traditional insouciance. It is not.

Ricky Ray Rector, as a result of an attempted suicide, suffered brain damage to the point that he was completely unable to understand his sentencing or punishment. Whether or not to allow the state to execute those with a mental impairment so profound that they are not conscious of their own impending death was something of a hot button issue in 1992, the year Rector was executed. His line about the ‘pecan pie’ is not a joke—he did not understand that this was his last meal on Earth.

Bill Clinton, man about town on the campaign trail at this time, took a very ‘tough on crime’ stance in this case. Clinton, governor or Arkansas at the time, had a choice on the this matter, and chose not only to go forth with the execution of the Arkansan Ricky Ray Rector, but to witness it.

And here is one of my favorite historical anecdotes of all time, as reported by The Washington Post, but which I learned about in Christian Parenti’s Lockdown America:

“[Rector] carefully put aside the slice of pecan pie that came with his last meal. Rector always liked to eat his dessert right before bedtime, and he apparently expected to return to his cell for his pie after he had received the lethal injection ordered by Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton… Just hours before he died, Rector told [his attorney] Rosenzweig: ‘I’m going to vote for Clinton in the fall.’”

I’ve always wondered how Clinton responded to hearing about that. Perhaps for once in his life he realized that his political calculations are attached to actual human lives, but given his eight years in office, it hardly seems to have been a lesson he absorbed.

Just another reason I despise the man.

THE SKIN I LIVE IN, TOMBOY

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 17:31:00 -0500

“There is the outline of a body, distinct, separate, its integrity an illusion, a tragic deception, because unseen there is a slit between the legs, and he has to push into it. There is never a real privacy of the body that can coexist with intercourse: with being entered. The vagina itself is muscled and the muscles have to be pushed apart. The thrusting is a persistent invasion. She is opened up, split down the center. She is occupied—physically, internally, in her privacy.”

— Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse

Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse is largely a book of literary criticism, elaborating and pinpointing how literature inscribes heterosexual intercourse as an act of male violence against women.

While watching Pedro Almodovar’s newest film, The Skin I Live In, I wished dearly that she was still alive to witness it. It would have been perhaps the perfect target: rarely is the use of intercourse as punishment wielded so overtly as it is here.

It is hard to know where to begin when talking about Almodovar, who has somehow ginned up a reputation as a champion of LGBT cinema. But while doing so he has had to fend off a strong faction of antagonists who feel his subject matter and presentation betrays a serious fascination with misogyny. (For a synopsis of this so-called debate, see here).

Almodovar’s gravest breach was early in his career when his film Kika contained a rape scene openly played for laughs; the director himself opined that “that sequence ended up being curiously engaging and entertaining, though still a rape.” Given that Almodovar wrote and directed the film, one would be excused for being bewildered at what he could possibly mean by the use of the word ‘curious.’

As the above-mentioned Popmatters article shows, Almodovar’s ‘curiosity’ with rape certainly didn’t end there and it continues to infuse a major part of his filmography.

Most recently this ‘curiosity’ is front and center with The Skin I Live In, the plot of which is so elaborately perverse that one may reel while hearing it; here goes: a surgeon, Antonio Banderas, maintains an underground laboratory where he is holding a female captive. He has been performing some kind of operation on her and keeps her in constant isolation and surveillance. It eventually becomes known that this captive was formerly a male, in fact it is the man who raped Banderas’ daughter, which eventually led to her suicide. Banderas, you see, has been plagued by his wife’s death in a car accident years ago. So, what he does is kidnap this man, Vincente, his daughter’s rapist, and perform a forced sex-change operation on him, followed by a full skin transplant wherein Vincente is turned into a replica of Banderas’ dead wife.

Now that’s a doozy!

But even this central conceit which so clearly pivots on woman-hating is accentuated by even more abuse. For example, Banderas’ brother comes into the home one evening by chance and rapes Vincente (now known as Vera). After he leaves, Banderas comforts Vera and they sleep together—because nothing eases the trauma of rape like falling into bed with your kidnapper and torturer.

But, still, the least of this film’s problems is the suspension of disbelief. Instead it is this: at every moment in this film, being female is seen as a source of punishment and this punishment is most centrally enforced by penetration.

After awakening from the sex-change operation, Vincente is confronted by Antonio Banderas displaying a set of increasingly wide ‘dilators’ which the patient will have to use on the vagina in order to prevent it from sealing. Most if not all of the sex scenes draw attention to the pain felt by penetration. It’s a bit unbelievable really how every example of intercourse/penetration in the film is a source of pain or subjection of the female characters.

Dworkin would have a field day. Another of her quotes springs to mind: “Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men’s contempt for women; but that contempt can turn gothic and express itself in many sexual and sadistic practices that eschew intercoures per se.”

Beyond how closely the film hews to Dworkin’s elaboration of intercourse, the film also provides an opportunity to remind ourselves why men really shouldn’t be directing rape scenes at all, or even nude scenes. Richard Brody in the New Yorker wrote very clearly that in the case of asking actors and actresses to film nude scenes “directors shouldn’t ask them to do it.” His reasoning is not framed as necessarily feminist, but is persuasive.

But beyond the aesthetic argument that Brody makes, there’s the political one. While apologists for ‘artistic license’ may think anything short of a snuff film is grounds for unequivocal defense, there remains the fact that in a society where men possess privileges and power that women do not (aka, the patriarchy), these aesthetic decisions are not without political consequences. In a world where rape exists, in the immortal words of Susan Brownmiller, as ‘a conscious process by which all men keep all women in a state of fear,’ asking an aspiring actress to be mock raped in front of a camera cannot be seriously entertained as purely an aesthetic choice.

It seems there will never be a shortage of male directors who believe that ‘rape revenge’ narratives qualify as feminist. It seems beyond their imagination that not having rape shown at all might be a more favorable option. Of course, the censorship police descend fast at that notion, declaring that what that means is ‘limiting the dialogue’ or some such nonsense. If you are confronted by any of these people, it is perhaps best to laugh them out of the room at the notion that Pedro Almodovar is a vital part of the worldwide discourse of rape and that his work on the subject is indispensable.

The icing on the cake is Almodovar’s insistence that he ‘toned down’ the story, finding it too ‘gratuitous.’ Given the final product, one is reminded of Pauline Kael’s riposte to Antonioni’s Blow-Up. When Antonioni claimed Blow-Up was a film with ‘no social or moral judgments,’ Kael responded ‘I’d hate to be around when he’s making moral judgments.’

I’d surely hate to be around when Almodovar is being gratuitous.

In sharp contrast, Celine Sciamma’s Tomboy is downright revolutionary in how nonchalantly it lays waste to the concept of gender. Focusing on 10-year old Laure, who tells a neighborhood group of kids that she is a boy named Mikael, Tomboy isn’t so much an act of war against gender as a blissful ignoring of it. The film’s forthright positioning of the nude female and the nude male bodies against each other as indistinguishable must count as a refreshing attempt to confound any gender conservatives in the audience.

When Mikael is outed as Laure by her own mother, the kids track her down and, to confirm the rumors, pull on her waistband and take a look. Sciamma’s film wonderfully exposes the arbitrariness of this gesture. Almodovar seems to think that what’s between your legs countenances your fate; Sciamma sees this for what it is: a last-ditch vestige of oppression maintained when all else fails to secure male power over women.

Tomboy was recently just edged out of my Top 10 of 2011, but deserves support: try to see it. The Skin I Live In should be avoided at all costs.

Laure/Mikael and Lisa in Tomboy.

Vera about to be raped by a man in a fucking tiger costume in The Skin I Live In. Fuck you, Almodovar.

Kirsten Dunst as Marion Davies and Eddie Izzard as Charlie...

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 02:32:00 -0500

Kirsten Dunst as Marion Davies and Eddie Izzard as Charlie Chaplin in Peter Bogdanovich’s The Cat’s Meow.

A film like this typifies why I hate when people refer to something as a ‘minor work.’ Compact and charming, The Cat’s Meow is about the Hollywood rumors surrounding producer Thomas Ince’s death aboard William Randolph Hearst’s yacht. A film like this shows how beneficial a great director can be to solid material—Bogdanovich gets effortful performances out of his cast of character actors, all of whom seem familiar but unplaceable, and deftly choreographs his action around his single set. The script is up to the task of seduction, but it is Bogdanovich’s rather humane emphasis on the emotional toll that the rash effronteries and crisscrossing trysts may have on Hollywood’s nouveau riche that occasions its specialness. Izzard plays Chaplin as the world’s foremost scalawag; Cary Elwes (as Ince) handles his poor luck poorly, but his fate seems rather cruelly punitive; Dunst, as per usual, stuns, preserving Davies’ integrity to the end; and Edward Herrmann (as W.R.) sinks into Hearst—his protectiveness of Davies, once turned tragic, unveils the crippling insecurities underpinning his strong-arm lifestyle. The film’s narrator announces that history is written in whispers, and there are plenty here, only not just the lurid gossip—Hermann’s best work here comes from stopping the bellows short, from allowing Hearst to pause and truly appreciate the inappropriate and calamitous nature of his limitless power, from taking the lion’s roar and turning it, in the arms of his lover, into something like a meow.

(It’s on Netflix instant—check it out if you can).

“At the Dinky Donut, outside town, Bob Pardee sat quietly as the family ate and talked. The...

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 02:51:00 -0500

“At the Dinky Donut, outside town, Bob Pardee sat quietly as the family ate and talked. The soft pink golfer’s face had begun to droop from his skull. His flesh seemed generally to sag, giving him the hangdog look of someone under strict orders to lose weight. His hair was expensively cut and layered, a certain amount of color combed in, a certain amount of technology brought to bear, but it seemed to need a more dynamic head. I realized Babette was looking at him carefully, trying to grasp the meaning of the four careening years they’d spent as man and wife. The panoramic carnage. He drank, gambled, drove his car down embankments, got fired, quit, retired, traveled in disguise to Coaltown where he paid a woman to speak Swedish to him as they screwed. It was the Swedish that enraged Babette, either that or his need to confess it, and she hit out at him—hit out with the backs of her hands, with her elbows and wrists. Old loves, old fears. Now she watched him with a tender sympathy, a reflectiveness that seemed deep and fond and generous enough to contain all the magical counterspells to his current run of woe, although I knew, of course, as I went back to my book, that it was only a passing affection, one of those kindnesses no one understands.”

Don DeLillo, White Noise

favorite films of the 21st century

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 22:15:00 -0500

Inspired by this list by Liketx, I’ve compiled this list of my favorite films of the 21st century in alphabetical order. It’s mostly so I can keep track of this stuff myself, but go see these if you haven’t already. Also, obviously, I have not seen nearly as many movies as I would need to to make this list anything nearing authoritative. But as it is now:

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, 2001)

Bully (Larry Clark, 2001)

Cache (Michael Haneke, 2005)

Dancer in the Dark (Lars von Trier, 2000)

Gerry (Gus Van Sant, 2002)

Palindromes (Todd Solondz, 2004)

Somewhere (Sofia Coppola, 2010)

Time of the Wolf (Michael Haneke, 2003)

Werckmeister Harmonies (Bela Tarr, 2000)

Y Tu Mama Tambien (Alfonso Cuaron, 2001)

Should sex offenders be allowed to participate in the Occupy movement?

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 18:36:53 -0500

This post is not a direct response to, but was informed and inspired by this post on Daily Kos. If you are concerned with knowing exactly what I am referring to, it is recommended, but not absolutely necessary, to read it first.

Essentially, though, you need to know this: during the time when the Occupy Boston camp was active (it is now gone), there was a level 3 sex offender staying there. This information was known to organizers within the movement but was not shared during the period when the camp was active, despite the presence of children. At a recent GA meeting, the issue was taken up in a proposal that stated:

identify and verify a Level 3 sex offender
have someone approach the person and let him know that we’re aware and we think it would be best if he didn’t participate in Occupy Boston
denying the person Occupy Boston resources such as food, clothing, shelter, etc.

This did not pass. This decision is controversial. The points of complaint are obvious: this is harboring a sex offender, it is a callous indifference to misogyny within the movement, it creates a threatening atmosphere which is contradictory to the stated purpose of the Occupy movement, etc. The rebuttals are also obvious: we don’t ‘shun’ people, criminals are also marginalized groups that need support, etc.

I do not think that this is an easy argument beyond a certain point. This much is without a doubt: this information should have been openly conveyed to everyone within the movement. That it was not is a huge breach of responsibility for the coordinators of the movement.

I think we should begin with the arguments that I think are persuasive, but maybe not persuasive enough. First—convicted criminals are a marginalized group and Occupy claims to speak for the marginalized. Also, the decision to dismiss convicted criminals from the movement seems to contradict a certain essential tenet of our belief in the justice system (if we have one): that once a person has completed their prison sentence, they have effectively ‘done their time,’ and are no longer to be held to account for their crimes upon their release. In effect: if you against felony disenfranchisement (as most leftists are), then why can’t a convicted rapist vote in your GA?

Here, we also run into something of the radical politics version of Blackstone’s formulation: whether it is better to let 10 guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer. In other words, if we leave the Occupy Boston setting for a moment, we are forced to interrogate how we feel about known rapists escaping prosecution or imprisonment due to legal technicalities. The standard rebuttal to Blackstone is that letting a guilty person go free is letting innocent people suffer, on the expectation that they are now categorically less safe. But most leftists don’t think that moral argument holds water: we have certain safeguards that are in place, not because they have a one-hundred percent success rate, but because without them our legal system would operate only whimsically. The argument against Blackstone, and the argument presented against allowing sex offenders inclusion in the movement, both, to an extent, rely on a visceral feeling of wrongness, in a moralism that seems to preclude any tactical or strategic thinking; insofar as this is the case, I believe both arguments are fundamentally conservative.

So then, let me frame the conflict differently: is it tactically necessary to include certain people in political movements that may be aesthetically undesirable or openly threatening or hostile to other members in the movement?

And now we must parse ‘the left.’

The Occupy movement is built around a certain ideology that is anathema to many traditional leftists; namely, its love of ‘autonomy,’ ‘consensus,’ etc. What we mean, when we get down to it, is that the so-called ‘old left’ really dislikes the ‘anarchists’ and vise versa. Yes, we all have our hearts in the right place, but after that initial caveat, there are a lot of seriously fundamental disagreements that stall our cooperation. The left, to start, thinks consensus is all but completely incompatible with mass politics. Without getting too far off track, let’s just point out the key flaws inherent in consensus. It leads to lowest-common-denominator proposals that have to be vague enough to discourage serious dissent. Most of all, it too easily allows a small group of people to hijack and veto proposals that are desirable to a much larger portion of the population and in fact could do wonders in creating public support for the movement (examples of this: OWS rejecting the OWS demands working group’s ‘jobs for all’ proposal; and the blocking of a provision in the Occupy Boston charter that specifically endorsed ‘non-violence.’ It should be duly noted that the main antagonists to the passage of these proposals were the strong anarchist contingent). In fact, the author of this Daily Kos piece has another piece on the same website called “Consensus doesn’t fail. People do.” If that title isn’t the goddamn exemplar of ultraleftism eating its own tail, I don’t know what is.

Personally, I don’t think the question is as easy as it is sometimes assumed to be. To this Daily Kos writer, to refuse to kick out the sex offender is tantamount to endorsing and joining with the forces of misogyny. To her opponents in the GA, the denial of support for this person because he’s a sex offender is tantamount to selling out the communist promise of all-inclusion to the culture war. In not so many words, we have arrived at something of a restating of the question that tore at the early Women’s Liberation movement: who is the “real” enemy, man or capitalism? Is it misogyny in the form of a sex offender, or is it capitalism in the form of refusing support?

I don’t like answering this question because I don’t think it is satisfactory. After all, we can have several enemies, all of them real. The chicken-and-egg nature of how this question is posed only allows for a simplistic answer: it’s me or him.

So here’s the trick: how do we allow for an answer that asserts that both capitalism and misogyny are the enemy of our movement and yet still allows for the possibility that the dual nature of this struggle occasionally leads to friction between them, including the problem of raising contradictions?

I think the inability to grasp that dilemma is what has led the left to a constant process of self-immolation. In the absence of a mass left movement (besides the Democratic Party, which we all know is not left in any compelling sense), certain segments of the left-wing population become enamored of ideas of prefigurative politics. They begin to isolate themselves from the mass public and begin to talk only amongst themselves. The longer they are only talking to themselves, the more precise the lines among them can be drawn: this is how we end up first with anarchism and then with the innumerable ‘strains’ of anarchism. The doctrine of ‘acceptable’ leftism narrows. To quote Adolph Reed, with reference to the ‘self-conscious left:’ ‘Ultraleftism is a maximalist politics. It’s much more about taking positions that express the intensity of one’s commitments than about organizing or building anything. Rather than crafting language to build broad support for a substantively radical program, for instance, ultraleftists prefer potted rhetoric that asserts their bona fides, without concern for communicating outside the ranks of belivers.’

This is what I find striking about this case. The left these days often does communicate only within the ranks of believers. The limits of this style of politics should be self-evident. The left perspective I would argue for, not completely comfortably but with confidence, is that disallowing a member of the working class to participate in a movement dedicated above all to the assistance of the working class is ineffective and strategically detrimental. Critics may say that Occupy isn’t dedicated ‘above all’ to issues of class, but is in fact dedicated to all sorts of intersecting issues; or, again, man and capitalism. I’m okay with that—but as a basis for political organization, I believe we should fight capitalism first, and not because it’s more “real” an enemy that misogyny or racism or heterosexism, but because tactically it is what can build an effective mass political movement where the others cannot. To quote Adolph Reed again, from a provocative essay called ‘the limits of anti-racism:’ ‘My position is—and I can’t count the number of times I’ve said this bluntly, yet to no avail, in response to those in blissful thrall of the comforting Manicheanism—that of course racism persists, in all the disparate, often unrelated kinds of social relations and “attitudes” that are characteristically lumped together under that rubric, but from the standpoint of trying to figure out how to combat even what most of us would agree is racial inequality and injustice, that acknowledgement and $2.25 will get me a ride on the subway. It doesn’t lend itself to any particular action except more taxonomic argument about what counts as racism.’

I believe it is not unreasonable to argue that the question posed in the title of this post ‘does not lend itself to any particular action except more taxonomic argument about what counts as misogyny.’

I believe a central fallacy of the left these days is that they can narrow down their ranks to the strictly virtuous; that it is possible, if not in fact absolutely necessary, to create a movement without any bad apples, without any contradictions within its ranks. I am afraid that I believe the political world is not amenable to such views, as valuable as they may be as benchmarks.

I agree it is uncomfortable and unenviable to be put in the position of allowing a sex offender amongst the ranks of a political movement; and I agree that the kneejerk reaction to the question would be ‘no.’ But, it seems that contradictions have to be allowed if movements are to move forward. Otherwise, we turn inward, constantly purging our ranks, and we eat our own tail: only collapsing inward, never moving forward.

—

NOTE: There is an argument here that I am not engaging with that clearly makes this a special case. There is an obvious safety issue present because of the unique nature of the Occupy protests. Because this involves a non-policed tent city, the bar to entry should be higher. In this post, I am grappling with the larger debate: should these people be allowed to be counted as part of the movement at all, not simply should they be allowed to camp out, a question I think is more easily answered in the negative.

NOTE TO POTENTIAL SCREENWRITERS: This building is made of glass....

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 11:17:00 -0500

NOTE TO POTENTIAL SCREENWRITERS: This building is made of glass. This is not exactly what I would call expert spycraft.

Missing line of dialogue: “Yes, front desk? I am in room 317. There is a man CLIMBING OUTSIDE MY WINDOW.”

That is all.

YOUNG ADULT

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 13:50:00 -0500

I have a Midwest problem. I was born and raised in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and many of my friends and almost all of my family still live there. After high school, almost everyone I knew went to college in-state or didn’t go at all. I understand that towns like this can be a hard place to leave, for a variety of factors, and I understand that the longer you tend to stay, the less energy you have for replanting yourself.

I also sort of hate Fort Wayne, and I’m fairly certain that you could get that statement out of most of the city’s residents, although the ‘sort of’ is what matters. You see, we all know that our city is not sophisticated or terribly culturally interesting. There are a lot of chain stores. There are not a lot of museums, and the ones there are are pretty esoteric and dull. We know you laugh at us for saying ‘pop.’ In other words, every negative comment you make about the lifestyle of mid-size Midwestern towns, we duly respond: we fucking know. We live here, after all.

To make my association with Jason Reitman’s new film Young Adult even more acute, I happen to have left the Midwest, as soon as possible, and I’m very thankful for it. I now live in Boston, a culturally elite city if ever there was such a thing. So I know why Charlize Theron wanted to get out—as she does—and live in Minneapolis instead of Mercury (not a real place, though it looks like Fort Wayne to me). I also know why she may feel a little bit better than those she left behind, or at least those that voluntarily are choosing to raise families there; I mean, c’mon! These cities blow.

But, here’s the difference between me and Jason Reitman (besides the fact that Jason Reitman inherited incredible wealth and would never in any circumstances find himself living in a mid-size Midwest city). I don’t believe for a second that the people who live in Fort Wayne, Indiana are any different whatsoever from the people who live in Boston, Massachusetts. Call me fucking crazy, but there’s nothing inherently within ‘these people’ in these ‘hick towns’ that keeps them there. So I’m especially irked when directors like Jason Reitman and writers like Diablo Cody seem to think that the only proper way to view Midwest residents is to look down upon them.

That’s where this movie becomes more than poorly constructed and poorly directed and shows itself as dripping with contempt. Charlize Theron escaped Mercury, but she’ll always be trash to this creative duo. Every possible benefit that could be had by showcasing atypical female attractiveness is deep-sixed as Theron is stigmatized by doing such horrendous things as drinking a two-liter of Diet Coke straight from the bottle, going off in the middle of the night to snag some Ben & Jerry’s, and wearing bra inserts. Jesus, how shameless is this woman, you must ask yourself! Someday I will see a movie where a woman eating ice cream isn’t portrayed as a significant sign of sloppiness, or at least I keep telling myself that when I’m considering offing myself.

Charlize Theron is back in Mercury to attempt to steal her ex-boyfriend, Patrick Wilson, from his new wife and their newborn baby daughter. Obviously, she is, as these characters often are, simply another variation of ‘a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty.’ * In fact, the film is largely an attempt to see how far one woman will go in humiliating herself.

She’s not alone though—no one in the film escapes unscathed. Patrick Wilson shows the film’s hand when he says some stupid thing about Mercury being great because it has this tacky sports bar and how he and his dad eat lunch together at General Mills, ‘sometimes pizza…sometimes sub sandwiches.’ It doesn’t take long after this to tell that for Reitman and Cody there isn’t a single person in the Midwest who has achieved any kind of happiness that isn’t predicated on a substandard IQ (Patrick Wilson), blissful naivete (Wilson’s wife, Theron’s mother), or the fatalism of lowered standards (Oswalt and his sister). This is where Reitman and Cody go horribly wrong—they refuse to accept or even imagine the notion that there are perfectly normal, perfectly intelligent, perfectly hip, people living in the Midwest who have found happiness.

Not so! claim the storytellers. The joke is on the saps! After all, it takes a truly miserable, pathetic human being to trick themselves into thinking their lives are truly happy when they are so clearly rotting away in Mercury. We are supposed to pity every single person in this movie on the basis that they are too stupid and oblivious to realize how unhappy they are. At the end of the day, after Theron proves herself to be, more or less, as unlikable as a movie character is generally allowed to be, a supporting character sets it all straight by saying: you’re right! Take me with you! Back to the big city! You were right to come here and thoroughly fuck up everyone’s lives! You are the enlightened one!

It should be mentioned, at this point, that calling the film a ‘black comedy’ does not suffice. Nor do any of the film’s alleged instances of ‘edginess’ bear out. Oswalt’s character is disabled, which would, we would hope, give the film some fucking transgressiveness. Not so—it turns out, as it so often does, that we are unable to think about disability in film as anything other than a story device to play both sides of the PC dollar. In other words, we have people with disabilities laughing at other people with disabilities, or making ‘cripple’ jokes about themselves, which gives the audience the chance to think both a.) wow, this movie sure is interesting for including these talking points, and b.) haha, see, they’re okay with ‘cripple’ jokes! The real joke, obviously, is on every disabled actor who didn’t get a part in this movie because they gave it to a famous comedian. Color me un-fucking-surprised. PS, we can blame this all on Ryan Murphy if we want.

And yes, at the end, Theron and Oswalt finally sleep together. It’s this scene where Reitman and Cody are so off-base, no matter how well-intentioned. Oswalt sits there, his leg mangled and scarred, while Theron stands there with plastic bra inserts attached to her breasts. It’s supposed to be a here-we-are-at-last moment of realization that our own bodies, no matter how ugly we may find them, are fully sufficient. Of course, in Reitman’s hands, it’s just another pity party. It’s ‘love conquers all’ but the ‘all’ is all the condescending obstacles he’s forced you to crawl through to get to this point. At the end, Theron goes back to Minneapolis and Oswalt probably resumes being unhappy. Hey, at least these two sad sacks got in one good fuck.

So! In other words: I’m sick of movies where the filmmakers are more concerned with showcasing what low-end brand-name products Midwestern characters keep in their homes than in those characters’ actual lived emotional experiences. Young Adult has nothing but a opportunistic straddling of disability that lacks political backbone, a horrible narrative structure that allows shocking reveals to be dropped in like anvils, and more than anything else an absolute unwillingness to even try to see lower-middle-class life in a way that appreciates its economic, material, and emotional realness. No matter what other attributes you have, if you live in Mercury, Minnesota, or any other analogous city, you are, to Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody, a primarily faulted person. In cutting off the emotional opportunities of these characters at the start, for no reason other than their geographical and, to some extent, their class status, this movie is fucking inhumane.

To this I respond to Jason Reitman, a wealthy hack whose entire career can be owed to his famous father, and Diablo Cody, the odds-on favorite for worst screenwriter on planet Earth, with a full ‘go fuck yourselves.’

—

NOTE: This is primarily a rant, although I hope it is apparent that I’m engaging on the film on a critical basis as well. Just don’t take this to be a completely ‘evenhanded’ view of the film’s strengths and weaknesses. It’s an aggressive attack on the heartless, bullshit assumptions that prop up the entire film’s narrative. I am thinking critically about the film—but I’m also so pissed off about the film that I’ll admit to not even wanting to mention the one or two things I liked in it.

* Apologies to David Brock. He, former right-wing hack, and current left-wing journalist and founder of Media Matters for America is the original author of the ‘little bit nutty and little bit slutty’ line that has become so notorious. It was originally a reference to Anita Hill. However, although Brock can never un-write it, I feel it somehow necessary to point out that, in my mind, he’s been as good a repenter as we could ask for.

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 12:05:11 -0500

In Lynne Ramsay’s first film in nine years, We Need to Talk About Kevin, ‘the problem with no name’ becomes named. Giving up her dream career as an ‘adventurer,’ Tilda Swinton becomes a mother and caretaker for her newborn son; Ramsay’s conceit is to play this off not as merely an investigation of the ‘feminine mystique,’ but as a complete living fucking nightmare. Kevin is pure evil, up and down, his mother swears to it. And although he acts well-adjusted around everyone else, he is fully committed to psychologically terrorizing his mother. The final act of slaughter is devastating not only for its violence, but for Swinton, for its coherence.

We Need to Talk About Kevin flits about every which way and its narrative construction is what gives the film its gravitational pull. Jumping between timelines with little signposting or pattern, the film becomes an associative montage, held partially together by Swinton’s panicked psyche. Scene-to-scene transitions happen through visual rhymes, giving outstanding form to the discordance of a traumatized mind. Add to this the audio cues: this film has the best sound design of the year. Small, constant sounds are honed in on; amplified. Kevin crushing cereal or breaking crayons; a neighbor bouncing a basketball or mowing his grass. Sound bridges in this case don’t come across as annoying, but serve the same purpose as the visual rhyming: shifting emphasis to the flexibility of the narrative and the looseness of concentration. It lets the film embody Swinton’s struggle to hear herself think, to unclutter her mind.

Ramsay’s use of horror is also occasionally inspired. The struggle in a film like this is to prevent Kevin from seeming to have walked out of a B-movie and in that department the results are mixed. There’s no doubt about it that this kid is a psychopath, but as psychopathy in movies goes, I found this one convincing if frustrating. But, of course, it is in the nature of psychopaths to be frustrating. Fanatically convinced that their adolescent rantings about the dehumanizing effects of television and society’s infatuation with mass murder make them somehow prophets, as opposed to third-rate op-ed writers, is nothing, one feels, that a good ten years couldn’t cure. What fifteen-year old hasn’t mistaken their incomplexity for genius? Psychopaths, of course, don’t have time to learn, as dedicated as they are to sadism and as convinced as they are of their superiority. As a depiction of how teens murder teens, the film isn’t terribly convincing and is a bit too spruced up in its cleverness, but as a depiction of the dead-end psychopathic mindset, it’s rightly compelling. (It should be noted that I’m drawing a fair amount of my perspective on this from Dave Cullen’s admired book Columbine, which, in terms of their mentality, seems to indicate similarities between our fictional Kevin and the real-life Eric Harris).

Ramsay does score a couple of terrifying grace notes though—early on in the film we approach Celia, Swinton’s daughter, from behind as she sits at a counter. When she turns around, she is wearing a massive grey eye patch. There’s something shocking about this reveal, so matter of fact in its ordinariness but also in its unmistakable dread. Later, in a doctor’s office, the walls are covered with images of clowns. Maybe kids are charmed by these, but again, it’s hard to shake the feeling of unease. Ramsay’s skill in moments like these is reminiscent of the offbeat, undermining horror of something like Twin Peaks. It’s not overt, but there’s no mistaking it.

Ramsay has said the film isn’t an ‘issue film,’ and we’re all the better for that, because any political significance is neutered: as mentioned, as a film about teens killing teens, this doesn’t tell us very much. But as a film about a woman beset on all sides, this one goes straight to the nerves. Expect it to round out my top ten.

It is nice and strange...

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 20:30:39 -0500

…to see something I posted be ‘reblogged’ and commented on a whole bunch of times, especially when that thing is a brief analysis of racism in The Muppets. I take this to indicate that a lot of people pick up on things like this, even if only a select few take time to write about it on the Internet. Wise up, Hollywood.

Anyway, I will take this as a good excuse to post here more. In the meantime, if you somehow come across this blog and you’re also on twitter, that’s where I spend most of my internet-time (see here).

JLG AT 81

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 17:48:24 -0500

To my embarrassment, I somehow missed that Saturday was Jean-Luc Godard’s birthday. He turned 81.

As anyone who knows me well at all knows, I am a Godard acolyte of the highest order. This man is a singular artistic influence and presence; and despite what you may have heard, he’s still going strong—last year’s Film Socialisme, though hardly seen, proved that Godard can still make every other working filmmaker seem instantly prosaic.

I am glad to report he is working on another film, titled ‘Farewell to Language.’

Here’s to 81, and the greatest filmmaker alive or dead (but thankfully alive).

Also—Godard’s Week End will be playing at the Brattle from December 9-15. You’d be silly to miss it.

Racial Coding in 'The Muppets'

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 14:32:33 -0500

Since I can safely assume that very few people other than myself are interested in decoding the racialism in The Muppets, I’ll keep this very to the point.

As I posted before, the above is a picture of the villains in the new Muppets film.

These characters are only the most blatantly racist exponents of the racially-coded rural-urban dichotomy that props up the film’s structure.

Jason Segel and Amy Adams, the whitest people alive, are from Smalltown, USA.

Smalltown is a loving embrace of quaint, fifties-style Americana. It is described as the best possible place to live.

After beginning their quest to reunite the Muppets, Segal, Adams and Walter (his puppet brother) must journey into the city of Reno. Reno is a far cry from the kitsch of Smalltown, USA, and they find Fozzie in the unenviable position of fronting a cover band called ‘The Moopets,’ which is composed of those pictured above. There’s a pivotal scene here in terms of racial symbolism, when our heroes are outside in an alleyway talking with ‘Miss Poogy,’ the Miss Piggy substitute. During a conversation expressing disbelief that Fozzie could ever end up in such a terrible place, the sound of gunshots is heard. Later, Miss Poogy is seen sharpening knives, presumably for sheer pleasure or criminal intent.

Underpinning this entire drama is the juxtaposition of the clean, safe, neighborly Smalltown with the dirty, violent and hostile urban city. To say that this dichotomy has historically been predicated on the nostalgia for all-white rural homogeneity is not exactly a quantum leap. The sentimentality that surrounds fifties-style community is often expressed through a fear of the urban, which transposes quite naturally into (and is often meant as nothing but a coded expression of) a fear of non-white minorities.

Before the accusation comes that we are reading too much into this, the depiction of ‘The Moopets,’ and the positioning of them as greedy, violent villains says otherwise. The Moopets are entirely composed of Muppets that were darker-toned to begin with or are conspicuously darkened versions of light-toned ones. In the case of dress, clearly the Moopet versions of Fozzie, Miss Piggy and Janice are so overtly racialized as ‘thugs’ as to make the point clear.

Last, but certainly not least, comes the fact that these characters align themselves with Chris Cooper, the primary antagonistic in the film, who, in his one musical number, delivers a parody rap called ‘Let’s Talk About Me.’

In this, the racial coding finally becomes crystal clear: the villains rap, the heroes sing. But, even beyond that, we have the extra racism that is inherent in what these days passes as hip-hop parody. As something of an enthusiast for calling out every white person who thinks parody raps are funny, I am the first to assert that this is no different whatsoever. Instead, The Muppets is just another iteration of a beloved cultural trend, as seen in The Lonely Island, Taylor Swift and T-Pain’s “Thug Life,” endless commercials and Youtube videos, and God knows everywhere else. That trend is the absolutely giddy enthusiasm of white people to seize every opportunity to do that which they are not supposed to do: namely, rap, or, better put, act black. As I’ve said before, all of these jokes have the same punchline: this is not how white people are supposed to behave; and therefore, all of these jokes establish a hierarchy by telling a racial joke that cannot be told in reverse. The underlying premise is that the performers of these ‘parody raps’ are temporarily inhabiting these archetypes; that when the joke is done, they can leave and return to acting regularly—a privilege not afforded to the blacks they mimic.

That last point is what extends this argument even to white rappers who are attempting to be taken seriously, not ironically. As a white rapper, you are afforded the privilege, as Greg Tate sez about Eminem, to be ‘not burdened with representing the ‘hood and black sex to hiphop’s prime real estate, the vanilla suburbs.’ This is why I think people like the Emerson-canonized George Watsky are pricks; hip-hop isn’t all about verbal linguistics, or, in Watsky’s case, ‘rapping fast.’ The fact that you not only think it is, but can actually achieve some sort of fame from it, is nothing but an indication of privilege. After all, a Youtube video called ‘black kid raps fast,’ would never go viral. It would not be seen as exemplary, merely expected; it would not be seen as talent, merely inclination. Only when a white person excels at something that is normally associated with blackness do we care to take note, do we care to designate that skill as bonafide ability, and do we exert all necessary effort in showing not only can these white kids do it, they can do it better. What is missing from this is the baggage that white culture forces black hip-hop artists to carry: the crucible of ‘authenticity’ on which black artists must prove themselves but which white slam poets can simply bypass.

Paul Mooney puts it bluntly when he calls white hip-hop ‘blackface without the make-up.’ Harry Allen puts it even more bluntly when he sez ‘from a certain angle, there’s just a shade of difference between white people rapping and white people telling nigger jokes.’

In other words, if you’re white and you think rapping is funny, here’s some advice: it’s fucking not.

Or, is there any compelling difference between Chris Cooper’s performance in the Muppets and in vogue ‘ghetto parties’ like this?

I contend that there is not.

These are the villains in the new Muppets film. Three guesses...

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 18:16:18 -0500

These are the villains in the new Muppets film. Three guesses which race these characters are coded as!

(More on this to come).