Black Snake Moan is a film steeped in a viscous marinade of dirty-south blues, cum, butter beans, and buttermilk. And I have been waiting-- nay, trembling! with anticipation-- for its DVD release.
Because of the movie is a veritable soup (the food language seems apt here, mostly because my mental association between food and all things Southern runs deep) of all my favorite things, there's really not much about it that I shouldn't like. However, it's really not a perfect film, and as I write this, I'm still trying to think through the stuff that irked me. I've written before about how, when I sit down to watch a film, I'm minimally interested in being entertained. I seek challenging subject matter and/or style because, well, merely being entertained ISN'T entertaining at all for me. That said, there really isn't a frame of this movie that I didn't find "entertaining." It's dirty and sweaty and full to the brim of that Southern Gothic brand of hothouse sexuality that it makes me want to affirm my own Southern roots more than any Chicago-born half-Jew really could or should.
A few months ago, when this film was still in theatres, my friend Jon sent me this link to a Sundance summary article in The Nashville Scene. The reviewer is not my hero, Jim Ridley, but rather this bigwig, Scott Foundas, who writes for Variety or some such. The guy clearly has a snark-control problem, as his comments often seem negative just for the joy of being contrary, but he raised some interesting points. True enough, I read his comments about Craig Brewer's ( the director) other movie, the famed Hustle&Flow, a film I'd quite enjoyed, and grimace to note that he's ENTIRELY correct about the "white-boy fetishization of pimp culture" that is, indeed, pervasive in the movie. True, it's there... but somehow, because the characters therein remain fully human-- neither glorified nor demonized-- I have a hard time being as offended by said fetishization as I could be.
However, I can't agree with very many of Foundas' comments about Black Snake Moan at all. First off, he calls Christina Ricci "gaunt," "almost unrecognizable" and "twiggy," while she most certainly is not. She's outgrown her adolescent baby fat, sure, but that girl is one hard-muscled little fire plug! We get to spend an awful lot of time just staring at her near-naked body-- but she is pretty far from being emaciated. From the frames in which moonlight glints off her damn-near-perfect breasts to the frames in which the chains encircled her taut little stomach, ass, thighs... this movie knows how to cajole and set a-droolin' its audience, and it knows that part of its cache is that she is, as the Yids say, a gesunte moid (a healthy girl, for those of you who've misplaced your copy of The Joys of Yiddish). The movie unabashedly appeals to what I have no terminology for besides "the male gaze." While I have a somewhat tortured love-hate relationship with this "male gaze" myself, I can't help but admire how well Brewer puts his lusting camera to use in service of his story.
Much of Ricci's acting in this movie happens not in her voice but in her body. I couldn't help but notice that, though, the camera spends a great deal of time carefully articulating her impressive muscle tone, she seems fragile throughout. Her body looks remarkably similar to those of Olympic gymnasts (save the fact that her tits are not flat and childish at all, but so, so gorgeous)-- to the point that you know she'd be capable of putting up a considerable physical fuss if anyone really tried to hold her down-- but she is tiny in comparison to Samuel L. Jackson and even looks small next to Justin Timberlake, who isn't a very big guy (if you haven't seen this film yet, you're not gonna believe the intelligent performance that that kid put forth). Perhaps this is why Foundas thinks she's too skinny. She's not, if you're really looking, but she still appears stripped (metaphorically) and torn down. In some ways, I suppose, she reminds me of the Donatello sculpture of The Penitent Magdalene. She is ravaged and haunted, but her body is lovingly rendered and delivered to us with great care. I do not mean to draw any further analogies between Ricci's character of Rae and the Magdalene. (It would be easy to discuss presentations of whore-ishness through the ages, but, let us not forget that there is absolutely no Biblical indication whatsoever that the Magdalene was a whore-- it is merely a nasty bit of gossip perpetuated by medieval Catholic priests of the Petrarchan tradition-- and I want do not want to imply that Rae is a whore in any way. Her issues are of a different order.) I am merely putting forth the comparison as one between Ricci's body and the Donatello sculpture, because they both seem equally emotionally resonant. And so, yes, Brewer dresses Ricci in tiny cotton panties and a cut-up sweatshirt with a rebel flag on it (more on this later) and makes her arch and pose and play the coquette in such a way that you know damn well half her job depends on how many erections she can elicit. But then, even if Rae didn't dress like Daisy Duke on Ecstacy, you'd still know that girl. Or be her.
The other point that Foundas doesn't make exactly, but at which he hints, is that Brewer's having as difficult a time in dealing with women as he is dealing with races other than his own. All he says is "I can't deem Black Snake Moan an advance [from Hustle&Flow](at least where its attitudes toward women are concerned)..." And, really, I don't think this film is all that pejorative towards women at all. I mean, just because it's got a little white-trash sexpot all wrapped up in chains through the majority of the film doesn't mean that it's somehow anti-woman. I'm reticent to ever say that anyone is ever over-sensitive to gender- and race-bias issues, but I can't help but think that Foundas' comment here was a little glib and obvious (what else is a guy gonna say about a movie about a chained-up, sexed-up girl that isn't gonna get him slapped around in a public forum?) But there's a problem in its assertion in that it just plain doesn't give the film enough credit for self-awareness. The movie knows that it's a movie about an older black dude who's got a white girl chained to a radiator in his living room in deepest Mississippi. Trust me, the movie doesn't miss this eensy-weensy detail about itself. But Foundas seems to miss the fact that these issues are the very controversies it wishes to incite. And while I'm not sure that it ever pushes any of those envelopes far enough to actually incite anything, Brewer seems pretty hip to the landmines he's planted for himself.
That said, there are a couple of choices Brewer's made that chafed me just a little. I have a very difficult time with any creative vehicle that depicts the American South as a place that is so markedly different from the rest of the country. I mean, we all get the same cable channels, our malls all have Gaps and Starbucks and Pottery Barns, and bad chain restaurants are ever more pervasive. Every time I talk to someone who has never spent any real time in the South, I feel as though I'm having to put forth a song and dance about how the South is more than the Jerry Springer Show, Tim McGraw and the Dukes of Hazard... that not everyone is a racist asshole... and that, for every can of PBR, there are two pink martini-esque drinks to be drunk. And yet, to be fair, it wouldn't be the Dirty South if there weren't plenty that's still dirty about it. It's not that I'm not aware that all the cliches about the South are cliches for a reason-- but Dixie's got parts that've done gone and right citified themselves, too, though!
Still, when Ricci yells over her shoulder, "you can kiss my rebel cooch!" while wearing the aforementioned cut-up rebel-flag sweatshirt, well, c'mon! It's a little over-the-top, ain't it? I went to high school with a couple of girls who drew rebel flags on their saddle oxfords in red and blue ballpoint ink, but, in all my days, I've never met anyone who had a vagina with a stake in the outcome of the Civil War. And I know Brewer's from Memphis and feels like he can pick on the South like it's a family member, but this simultaneous poking-fun-at and Romanticizing is difficult for me to warm up to. Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi: Deep South, sure... but still not as far removed from all those other states to which they are united as the popular cultural discourse might want to imagine.
Beyond the chip on my shoulder that I always seem to have regarding the part of the country in which I grew up, I think I've got another pretty pointy bone to pick with Mr. Brewer. I've had a hard time wrapping my head around how to think about Rae's sexuality. The blurb on the cover calls her a "sex addict" and pretty much all of her heartache is quickly attributed to her having been molested by one of her mom's boyfriends when she was a kid. I find this a tiresome and easy answer to/explanation for this girl's effulgent libido. Yeah, she's broken and sincerely convinced that she has no currency available to her beyond her own tiny body-- I mean, she offers herself to anyone who comes within range-- but, though the film itself sports a dramatic bravado of a bitch in heat, I couldn't help but feel that the thought-process behind the story included the notion that no woman could ever be so sexual unless she'd somehow been victimized sexually in the first place. Really, the message of the film is a very simple one-- if you value yourself and have people who love you, you behave in a such a way that dictates you aren't allowed to "jump on every waggin' dick in town," as her mother says. And, while this character of Rae is raggedy and savage, there is something in her spirit that is, indeed, quashed as she learns to curtail her shenanigans. I don't suppose the story I'd like to see-- the one in which a woman is explosive in her sexuality without being a monster and without having had some trauma exacted upon her at some prior date-- doesn't really exist outside of the adult film industry. But I remain frustrated that Rae's ferocity and languor--and pain-- can be so easily explained away.
I should say, though, that one of the best moves Brewer makes is that he doesn't, in the end, strip Rae of her sexpot persona completely. Lazarus (the old black dude) buys her a couple dresses so that she has clothes other than her panties and rebel-flag shirt-- and her new dresses sit tightly on her torso and show all the skin they can, given that it's still summertime in deepest Mississippi. In her moment of real redemption, she loses herself in the sexual thrall of Lazarus' blues guitar, touching her own body and flinging hot sweat from the ends of her hair. She wears one of his skimpy little dresses and finally seems to own that body in a way that she hadn't, prior to this scene. And so, while the rules of this narrative dictate that she learn to tone it down a little, the film does not forget that what is powerful and provocative and important about Rae all resides in that sculptural body-- and her immodesty with regard to it.
Is this reductive? Does it lessen the character of a woman to say that her strength locates its machinery in her physical self? I'm not sure. I know I cannot ignore all the traditional Western thought with which I have educated myself--that which conceptualizes body and mind as two separate entities, associating that which is female with the body and that which is male with the mind/soul. As usual, I cannot help but resist this bifurcation between the genders which, in this case, is also the bifurcation that severs synaptic responses from the physical animal that generates them. In yogic philosophy, that languages gets flipped and makes "mindbody" into a single word and concept. However, it takes the practice, regular and stringent, for me to remember to think about the whole of a person in this way. But I very much want to think that one can live fully and fulfillingly within the body without becoming a vapid idiot. And that one can live fully within the mind without becoming insensate and vegetative. As a result, I cannot think that Rae's body-centrism makes this movie anti-woman in the way that Scott Foundas intimated it is. She's resplendent and hot! And yes, much of her sexual posturing is put forth for the benefit of men, but it doesn't entirely go away when she begins to sort through her psychic serrations and bruisings. And so, I ask, what is anti-feminist about an unapologetically sexy woman? Not much, as far as I can tell.
So, Ginger. I feel like we should bust out a six-pack of PBR, share a joint, and find some rocking chairs on somebody's rotted-out front porch during a summer gully-washer so as to discuss this film in its proper forum. How 'bout it?
Friday, June 29, 2007
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Can I at least pee without being patronized, please?
Lately, I've been noticing a weird thing happening to semi-public women's bathrooms all over. When I first began my current job, the women's bathroom on my floor required that female prospective urinators enter a code into a little keypad on the door to the bathroom. This was not required for male prospective urinators. Fortunately, within a couple months of my employment, they removed the keypad from the door and now anyone can charge on thru as they please. I, for one, was kinda annoyed that the whole elimination process, at work anyway, required yet another step for girls that was not required of boys (ok, I'll admit, punching 4 buttons isn't a big deal).
But beyond that, I couldn't help but to feel completely patronized by the fact that it was deemed necessary for women to have this extra level of security surrounding the lifting of skirts/dropping trou that the men who work on my floor apparently do not need (when they, uh, also lift their skirts or drop their trousers!). I mean, heaven forbid one of the nerdy old guys who works for my company got a wild hair to furtively dart into the women's bathroom and then...what?...stand on a toilet so as to peer at our dimpled little knees over the partition? I suppose this is a POSSIBLE scenario, but it's HIGHLY IMPROBABLE, don't you think? Really, I do not fear for my safety at work, nor do I worry about peeping toms. At my last job? Where I acquired a few stalkers over the years? Well, that was a different story... but, even there, it was more likely that the nerdy old men (different nerdy old men, by the way) were gossiping about who'd seen my body parts rather than trying to capture their very own glimpse of them.
I bring this up because, while I'm in OH for work and working in rented office space, I couldn't help but notice a little green plaque underneath the picture of a skirt-wearing figure by the women's bathroom (in said rented office space) that read "Shelter Zone." Directly across from the women's bathroom is the men's bathroom, but there is no analogous sign underneath the pants-wearing figure's picture. There are no locks on either door and they're roughly 20 feet apart... so, I wonder exactly how sheltered a woman running into this bathroom might actually be, but that's kinda beside the point.
Why is it that there is this perception that women need all this sheltering to begin with? I mean, this is kinda the same concept as the "Take Back the Night" business, isn't it? Like somehow, we aren't able to function normally within a totally civilized office space without needing special hideouts and underground networks? Or maybe, there's an assumption that we need someplace to which we can run after a dramatic tearful exit? (Because girls LOVE to make dramatic, tearful exits at work, right?) Or maybe these shelter zones are like those menstruation tents of yore (yeah, let's send all the chicks to a smelly little room so we can get them off our hands while they're bleeding... and let's call it a "shelter zone!" Brilliant! They'll never catch on!)
In truth, I have a hunch that it's really a bunch of misguided womenfolk who are behind these little insipid security measures. I imagine they're probably very well-intentioned in that they think they're providing a safe exit to sad little girls who find themselves in sticky situations. But what they're missing is that, by assuming that women should not EXPECT to be safe in their own workplaces, they've instituted this entirely dis-empowering little practice of putting signs and keypads up in front of doors behind which women might be naked from the waist down for about 90 seconds at a time.
And I suppose these small measures are resulting from various and assorted workplace problems that have arisen and have since been categorized under the heading of Sexual Harassment. And sure, women (and men) should not be physically assaulted in their offices. Nor should women's (and men's) employment or promotional status or payscale be affected by their gender or sexual habits. Nor should women (or men) have to put up with anyone continually infusing the professional atmosphere with sexual entendres (OK, fine, I'll admit, I'm a little guilty of this one). But the fact that women (and men, but particularly women) should have an EXPECTATION of freedom from all these things should render the aforementioned keypads and signs unnecessary. And because they SHOULD be unnecessary, I can't help but feel that their presence is entirely condescending and infantalizing (oh, please, big, tough keypad! Take care of me, save me, for I am weak and cannot handle the mere threat of someone watching me pee! *simper*).
Can we all just agree that the first step to not feeling victimized is NOT assuming that women are, by definition or by nature, victims in the first place? Please?
But beyond that, I couldn't help but to feel completely patronized by the fact that it was deemed necessary for women to have this extra level of security surrounding the lifting of skirts/dropping trou that the men who work on my floor apparently do not need (when they, uh, also lift their skirts or drop their trousers!). I mean, heaven forbid one of the nerdy old guys who works for my company got a wild hair to furtively dart into the women's bathroom and then...what?...stand on a toilet so as to peer at our dimpled little knees over the partition? I suppose this is a POSSIBLE scenario, but it's HIGHLY IMPROBABLE, don't you think? Really, I do not fear for my safety at work, nor do I worry about peeping toms. At my last job? Where I acquired a few stalkers over the years? Well, that was a different story... but, even there, it was more likely that the nerdy old men (different nerdy old men, by the way) were gossiping about who'd seen my body parts rather than trying to capture their very own glimpse of them.
I bring this up because, while I'm in OH for work and working in rented office space, I couldn't help but notice a little green plaque underneath the picture of a skirt-wearing figure by the women's bathroom (in said rented office space) that read "Shelter Zone." Directly across from the women's bathroom is the men's bathroom, but there is no analogous sign underneath the pants-wearing figure's picture. There are no locks on either door and they're roughly 20 feet apart... so, I wonder exactly how sheltered a woman running into this bathroom might actually be, but that's kinda beside the point.
Why is it that there is this perception that women need all this sheltering to begin with? I mean, this is kinda the same concept as the "Take Back the Night" business, isn't it? Like somehow, we aren't able to function normally within a totally civilized office space without needing special hideouts and underground networks? Or maybe, there's an assumption that we need someplace to which we can run after a dramatic tearful exit? (Because girls LOVE to make dramatic, tearful exits at work, right?) Or maybe these shelter zones are like those menstruation tents of yore (yeah, let's send all the chicks to a smelly little room so we can get them off our hands while they're bleeding... and let's call it a "shelter zone!" Brilliant! They'll never catch on!)
In truth, I have a hunch that it's really a bunch of misguided womenfolk who are behind these little insipid security measures. I imagine they're probably very well-intentioned in that they think they're providing a safe exit to sad little girls who find themselves in sticky situations. But what they're missing is that, by assuming that women should not EXPECT to be safe in their own workplaces, they've instituted this entirely dis-empowering little practice of putting signs and keypads up in front of doors behind which women might be naked from the waist down for about 90 seconds at a time.
And I suppose these small measures are resulting from various and assorted workplace problems that have arisen and have since been categorized under the heading of Sexual Harassment. And sure, women (and men) should not be physically assaulted in their offices. Nor should women's (and men's) employment or promotional status or payscale be affected by their gender or sexual habits. Nor should women (or men) have to put up with anyone continually infusing the professional atmosphere with sexual entendres (OK, fine, I'll admit, I'm a little guilty of this one). But the fact that women (and men, but particularly women) should have an EXPECTATION of freedom from all these things should render the aforementioned keypads and signs unnecessary. And because they SHOULD be unnecessary, I can't help but feel that their presence is entirely condescending and infantalizing (oh, please, big, tough keypad! Take care of me, save me, for I am weak and cannot handle the mere threat of someone watching me pee! *simper*).
Can we all just agree that the first step to not feeling victimized is NOT assuming that women are, by definition or by nature, victims in the first place? Please?
Sunday, June 24, 2007
indisputable proof of jinx
My job (or rather, the folks who determine whether or not I HAVE a job) has deemed it necessary for me to travel to Columbus, OH a couple of times this summer. I was supposed to leave tonite for a lovely week trying to look like a human after sleeping on hotel pillows-- which tend to have a consistency remarkably similar to day-old polenta, in my experience. Instead, my flight got delayed past the point at which catching my connector would have been possible, so they sent me home and rebooked me for one of those delicious buttcrack flights. Yay.
For those readers unfamiliar with the history of my travel woes, I must direct you to these old posts: August 1, 2006, December 23, 2006,and April 20, 2007. Herein, you shall find the history of my travails.
So, here's my new theory: The real problems started on the return leg of my trip to DC to interview for the aforementioned job. That was a Friday. I got the call on Monday morning that I'd actually gotten the job, so I assume that they'd decided I was hired right away. And ever since then, the EASIEST flights I've had have entailed no less than a 4-hour delay. Hell, delays are for babies. Try being stranded overnight without a tampon in the most dilapidated flophouse in the greater Dallas area. THAT'LL make a real woman outta ya! But regardless, I'm beginning to think that there's some correlation between my working where I work and the great and dark pall that drops over any given airport upon my arrival.
Dear air travel gods: If I quit my job, would you let me fly happy again? Pretty please? With a $19 sandwich and a $6 bottle of water on top? Please?
For those readers unfamiliar with the history of my travel woes, I must direct you to these old posts: August 1, 2006, December 23, 2006,and April 20, 2007. Herein, you shall find the history of my travails.
So, here's my new theory: The real problems started on the return leg of my trip to DC to interview for the aforementioned job. That was a Friday. I got the call on Monday morning that I'd actually gotten the job, so I assume that they'd decided I was hired right away. And ever since then, the EASIEST flights I've had have entailed no less than a 4-hour delay. Hell, delays are for babies. Try being stranded overnight without a tampon in the most dilapidated flophouse in the greater Dallas area. THAT'LL make a real woman outta ya! But regardless, I'm beginning to think that there's some correlation between my working where I work and the great and dark pall that drops over any given airport upon my arrival.
Dear air travel gods: If I quit my job, would you let me fly happy again? Pretty please? With a $19 sandwich and a $6 bottle of water on top? Please?
Thursday, June 21, 2007
My own private gender dysphoria
No one has EVER accused me of being manly. Even in my days of exclusive girl-kissing, my outward aspect has always been consumately gender-identified and overtly girly. Why then, every time I run across a study that even vaguely broaches the topic of human sexuality, do I find myself checking everything down the list of typical male patterns, thought processes and behaviors and leaving nary a mark down the analogous female list?
Case in point: this article about a study on sex dreams across genders. First off, I noted a bunch of problems with this study-- not the least among them that they only surveyed 173 people, with nearly twice as many women as men. Second, the study only went on for less than a month! How many people can conjure up enough sex dreams in a month for them to have any substantive tales to tell?
But then, the (slightly suspect) statistics they derive from this study are pretty divergent from my own idiosyncratic experience. Women, supposedly, dream about celebrities or past and present lovers--familiar faces, in other words-- while men dream about strangers, in multiplicity and in public. I can't remember the last time I dreamt about someone familiar... in fact, sometimes the folks in my dreams are barely even human. These dreamscape denizens of mine are often possessing somewhat amorphous genders of their own or are strange hybrids of varying sorts. And FREQUENTLY, the venue is both public and including more than one other somebody hanging around.
And then this part, well...:
And finally, when it came to erotic dreams that dealt with sexual disappointments, the genders had very different tales to tell.
The women recounted scenarios where they were turned off by something that happened or the pace of proceedings. For the men, it was more often a case of their virtual partners refusing to engage in certain activities, or their sexcapade plans falling through for some reason.
I would venture to say that being rejected and/or left hanging in one of my dreams is more the rule than the exception... and I can't remember even one instance of my being the one to lose interest. (I know, I know, this probably bespeaks something or other about a great and long series of my own petty insecurities. Shut up. I don't wanna talk about it.)
And so, I find studies like this to be intensely frustrating-- and only partly because they reinforce so many tired and outmoded ideas about the ways women define their own sexuality. The lion's share of my frustration about these stems from the fact that they make me feel so blasted abnormal. You know all those studies that say that men think about sex between 30 and 70 times a day while women only think about it between 2 and 10 times a day? Anyone who reads this blog, or has met me, or has seen me walk down a street could probably guess that sex is, like, the default setting in my brain. And while, yes, male and female friends alike like to accuse me of being the dirtiest-minded girl they know, I honestly don't think I'm alone amongst my gender in my fixation.
The end of that article atributes the readiness to discuss sexual matters among female participants (in comparison to participants of older studies of this topic) to our living in a post-sexual-revolution era. And I'll allow that our timeframe for this study could contribute to their openness-- but I don't think women actually THINK about sex more or less now that we're so "liberated." And I find the notion that the 1960s would be responsible for having any notable effect on the female libido at all to be entirely patronizing.
And what about the factors that the study doesn't address? Which of the women surveyed were on The Pill at the time of questioning? I know that, during the tiny epoch in which I experimented with hormone therapy, my own sex drive bottomed out. I know, people! It was horrible!!! But what other outside factors could effect brain chemistry in such a way as to quell or exacerbate certain dream motifs? Surely there are plenty. Ugh! This study was just so shoddily conducted, I can't stand it!
So, well, fine. I'm a freak. Or my testosterone levels are too high. Or I really am nothing but a consistent exception to the rules of gendered studies.
But don't worry, fair readers. I won't go a-changin'!
Case in point: this article about a study on sex dreams across genders. First off, I noted a bunch of problems with this study-- not the least among them that they only surveyed 173 people, with nearly twice as many women as men. Second, the study only went on for less than a month! How many people can conjure up enough sex dreams in a month for them to have any substantive tales to tell?
But then, the (slightly suspect) statistics they derive from this study are pretty divergent from my own idiosyncratic experience. Women, supposedly, dream about celebrities or past and present lovers--familiar faces, in other words-- while men dream about strangers, in multiplicity and in public. I can't remember the last time I dreamt about someone familiar... in fact, sometimes the folks in my dreams are barely even human. These dreamscape denizens of mine are often possessing somewhat amorphous genders of their own or are strange hybrids of varying sorts. And FREQUENTLY, the venue is both public and including more than one other somebody hanging around.
And then this part, well...:
And finally, when it came to erotic dreams that dealt with sexual disappointments, the genders had very different tales to tell.
The women recounted scenarios where they were turned off by something that happened or the pace of proceedings. For the men, it was more often a case of their virtual partners refusing to engage in certain activities, or their sexcapade plans falling through for some reason.
I would venture to say that being rejected and/or left hanging in one of my dreams is more the rule than the exception... and I can't remember even one instance of my being the one to lose interest. (I know, I know, this probably bespeaks something or other about a great and long series of my own petty insecurities. Shut up. I don't wanna talk about it.)
And so, I find studies like this to be intensely frustrating-- and only partly because they reinforce so many tired and outmoded ideas about the ways women define their own sexuality. The lion's share of my frustration about these stems from the fact that they make me feel so blasted abnormal. You know all those studies that say that men think about sex between 30 and 70 times a day while women only think about it between 2 and 10 times a day? Anyone who reads this blog, or has met me, or has seen me walk down a street could probably guess that sex is, like, the default setting in my brain. And while, yes, male and female friends alike like to accuse me of being the dirtiest-minded girl they know, I honestly don't think I'm alone amongst my gender in my fixation.
The end of that article atributes the readiness to discuss sexual matters among female participants (in comparison to participants of older studies of this topic) to our living in a post-sexual-revolution era. And I'll allow that our timeframe for this study could contribute to their openness-- but I don't think women actually THINK about sex more or less now that we're so "liberated." And I find the notion that the 1960s would be responsible for having any notable effect on the female libido at all to be entirely patronizing.
And what about the factors that the study doesn't address? Which of the women surveyed were on The Pill at the time of questioning? I know that, during the tiny epoch in which I experimented with hormone therapy, my own sex drive bottomed out. I know, people! It was horrible!!! But what other outside factors could effect brain chemistry in such a way as to quell or exacerbate certain dream motifs? Surely there are plenty. Ugh! This study was just so shoddily conducted, I can't stand it!
So, well, fine. I'm a freak. Or my testosterone levels are too high. Or I really am nothing but a consistent exception to the rules of gendered studies.
But don't worry, fair readers. I won't go a-changin'!
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
I know from whence you come.
Several months ago, I installed a little counter on this blog. I've been reticent to draw anyone's attention to it... because, well, the fact that not everyone knows what kinda information that little number on the bottom of the righthand column over there gives me has come in handy, in a number of ways. But good lord, sometimes the search queries are so good that it's been difficult to resist sharing them with you all.
Quite often, I get people looking for all varieties of porn, information about masturbation, circumcision, pictures of celebrity breasts... oh, and when I put up that BeautifulAgony.com link, well, people from ALL OVER are interested in that! I post a lot of stuff about socio-sexual issues...and I'm not exactly shy about the nature of my assorted fixations within the forum that this blog provides. And frankly, I get a little thrill that I attract a racier variety of traffic. My receipt of said thrill should come as a shock to absolutely no one.
But this morning, I swear, I got the weirdest query ever. I'm not sure anyone in the history of the internet has ever entered a weirder query.
Someone googled the question, "What is wrong with a rabbit when brown gooey stuff comes out of him?"
Really. Someone really did ask our modern-day oracle (aka, Google) that very question. I swear it to be true.
However, this prompts a series of queries in my own mind. From which part of the rabbit is the brown gooey stuff coming? Is the rabbit previously deceased? Is this a wild rabbit or a family pet? Why has the querent not already consulted a veterinarian? What's the rabbit's name? What has the querent been feeding said rabbit? What the hell kinda website would actually answer this query???
Truly, this is the mystery for the ages.
Quite often, I get people looking for all varieties of porn, information about masturbation, circumcision, pictures of celebrity breasts... oh, and when I put up that BeautifulAgony.com link, well, people from ALL OVER are interested in that! I post a lot of stuff about socio-sexual issues...and I'm not exactly shy about the nature of my assorted fixations within the forum that this blog provides. And frankly, I get a little thrill that I attract a racier variety of traffic. My receipt of said thrill should come as a shock to absolutely no one.
But this morning, I swear, I got the weirdest query ever. I'm not sure anyone in the history of the internet has ever entered a weirder query.
Someone googled the question, "What is wrong with a rabbit when brown gooey stuff comes out of him?"
Really. Someone really did ask our modern-day oracle (aka, Google) that very question. I swear it to be true.
However, this prompts a series of queries in my own mind. From which part of the rabbit is the brown gooey stuff coming? Is the rabbit previously deceased? Is this a wild rabbit or a family pet? Why has the querent not already consulted a veterinarian? What's the rabbit's name? What has the querent been feeding said rabbit? What the hell kinda website would actually answer this query???
Truly, this is the mystery for the ages.
Monday, June 18, 2007
war, genocide, and epidemiology, oh my
I don't have a particularly great thematic link between the three movies I want to talk about in this post-- other than they're all about social ills and other bad stuff. But I'm gonna try anyway...
The Painted Veil
In general, I don't have a hell of a lot of patience for standard pretty period-piece sorts of movies. Some of them are nice to watch, sure, but more often than not, they are adapted from novels by long-dead writers, and as such, provide a distinct disconnect for one such as myself, who regularly ferrets out the new, new, new, just to keep her interest aroused. I'd heard this movie was different from every other staid, conservative period piece. But it wasn't. Sure, there's some extremely modestly filmed extramarital bed-hopping... and there's a stab at depicting the early awakenings of a social conscience among colonialists, but in the end, it's still a stuffy Somerset Maugham morality tale that just happens to be shot in a dense China jungle. This movie even snagged Ed Norton and Naomi Watts, who have both been known to put forth a risky performance now and again. But here, they're both underutilized in terms of talent.
The most recent cover article for one of my favorite magazines, Bookforum, is Phillip Lopate's in-depth discussion on the benefits and pratfalls of trying to adapt the novelistic form to the cinematic form. Most of the films he talks about are really old, and, as I've said, I'm certainly no film historian (if it was made before I was born, you'll probably have to sit on me to make me watch it(except for Marguerite Duras' Hiroshima, Mon Amour, one of my favorites)), so I didn't know what he was talking about. Still, he brings up the age-old argument of fidelity to the text vs. directorial ownership over subject matter in a pretty interesting way. But here's what he says about The Painted Veil:
Recently, I saw The Painted Veil (2006), a movie directed by John Curran from a W. Somerset Maugham novel. It is a competent and affecting picture, with a terrific performance by Naomi Watts as the beautiful, shallow, adulterous wife of an idealistic doctor, who is transformed by her husband’s death. Many film critics tempered their praise by calling it “old-fashioned,” and indeed it is, not only because the adultery-in-the-colonial-tropics story and the theme of sacrifice seem fussy for today’s audiences but also because the craftsmanship of the adaptation is so unobtrusively intelligent. The Painted Veil is criticized as old-fashioned for making human sense of a now-dusty Maugham novel that was just the rage in the ’20s and ’30s.
For my money, "unobtrusive intelligence" is not what makes a movie "old-fashioned," nor is it something that is absent from good films that have been produced more recently. However, the fact that there is very little adventure to be had in the viewing of this film IS what makes it "old-fashioned," in my mind anway. It is, well, enjoyable, I guess, to sit through, but I would say that I was less "affected" by it than Lopate claims to have been.
The Last King of Scotland
The morning after squirming through this volatile and riveting film, I emailed a friend at work to rave about it and, coincidentally, he'd also seen it... and had fallen asleep in it! Unbelievable. Though he claims it was because the movie was boring, I stand by my assertion that he was tired because he aspires to arise at the buttcrack every morning. Really, Forest Whitaker's fumbling, brutish performance is all that it was cracked up to be... and more. It SHOULD be enough to keep the drowsiest among us shifting in our seats and peeking through our fingers.
At one point near the end, James McAvoy's character, Dr. Nicholas Garrigan, says to Whitaker's Idi Amin something along the lines of "you're just a big child! And that's why you're so fucking scary!" Shortly thereafter, the good doctor is quite literally strung up by his aureolas. The point is, Idi Amin was a horrendous tyrant and executor of grand genocidal atrocities because his psychological development was so seemingly stunted that he was unable to determine that he was accountable for such horrors. Watching Whitaker tunnel through this disconnect is well worth the price of the rental.
Interestingly, this movie is also adapted from a book, but it presents a far different set of challenges for adaptation than did Maugham's older narrative. It's a fictional account of a fictional character--our Dr. Garrigan--and his life with a real historical figure-- and one of mythological proportions, at that. This incorporation of real people into fiction has been a fun little game for some so-called "postmodern" writers (Paul Auster and Jonathan Safran Foer, for two easy instances, like to name fictional characters after themselves). But when you have to depict a real monster like Idi Amin as a human, a legend, a historical figure and a veritable devil, well, it's a tall order for filmmakers and actors alike. By and large, I think Whitaker carries the film remarkably well... and pretty conscientiously, for the most part. And McAvoy is also compelling as we follow him through his Dante-esque descent into politico-hell. But the film remains a work of fiction, and somehow, for me, anyway, this lessens its punch.
Pan's Labyrinth
This film is what you would get if Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's Mirrormask and Spielberg's Schindler's List produced a gimpy little baby. It's a funky, dark-but-cute fantasy film with a brutal torture-and-war drama buried within. The general atmosphere that the director, Guillermo Del Toro, creates is one that would be very familiar in a kid's movie. It's got the obscuring and glimmering lighting effects of the Harry Potters and the like, but then, a guy gets shot through the ear for hunting wabbits. And a guy sews his own lip back on after getting skewered by his maid (she's the good guy, he, the villian, of course). I quite like how confusing this mixing of genres is. I mean, the patina of the fairytale that settles over the film from the earliest scenes onward lulls the audience to the point that you feel, when the more brutal moments happen upon you, at once removed at some distance from them, but also startled from your movie-watching trance. It's a movie told from a child's point of view but it is not a movie for children-- and in its most stylistically careful way, it succeeds far above and beyond Terry Gilliam's Tideland, which purported to do the same thing.
In some ways, I think what a film like this does-- telling the narrative of Franco's Spain in the guise of a fairytale-- is really kinda genius because it's so subversive. I mean, if you want to push a particular political perspective or story upon people who might not seek out the information themselves, what better way to do it than to present it from the innocuous perspective of the child's-eye-view? Here, I'd like to make a little comparison with V for Vendetta, a film about which I still have mixed feelings, a couple years after I saw it. On one hand, it's a grand-scale, flashy, big-budget comic book come to life sort of movie... and therefore generated the sort of audience that frequents flashy, comic-y movies (i.e., not me). But on the other, it was notable for its relentless onslaught of criticism of totalitarian goverments-- and those that look like they might be heading in that direction (i.e., Bush's America). It's no coincidence that a very Cheney-esque actor plays a prominent villainous role therein.
And so, in the end, you've got a pretty thinky political allegory masquerading as a pyrotechnic geekfest for teenage boys. And what more insidious way to get a subversive message across than to sneak it into just such a vehicle? To be fair, I did not feel like I was the best audience for this movie. It's all together too flashy for my taste-- and also FAR to reductive and monosyllabic in its message and impetus as it paints its point of view with very broad strokes... but if it tricked some suburban adolescent out there into thinking a little bit about his own relationship with his government, well, that's kinda great! And though Pan's Labyrinth is subtitled, start to finish, and very indie in terms of cinematograhic texture... and will probably never find a viewership larger than those of us who seek out that sort of fare... there is still something a little dangerous about splicing kids' movies and war dramas into the same film. And for that, I'll continue to hold a candle for that very elusive viewership.
The Painted Veil
In general, I don't have a hell of a lot of patience for standard pretty period-piece sorts of movies. Some of them are nice to watch, sure, but more often than not, they are adapted from novels by long-dead writers, and as such, provide a distinct disconnect for one such as myself, who regularly ferrets out the new, new, new, just to keep her interest aroused. I'd heard this movie was different from every other staid, conservative period piece. But it wasn't. Sure, there's some extremely modestly filmed extramarital bed-hopping... and there's a stab at depicting the early awakenings of a social conscience among colonialists, but in the end, it's still a stuffy Somerset Maugham morality tale that just happens to be shot in a dense China jungle. This movie even snagged Ed Norton and Naomi Watts, who have both been known to put forth a risky performance now and again. But here, they're both underutilized in terms of talent.
The most recent cover article for one of my favorite magazines, Bookforum, is Phillip Lopate's in-depth discussion on the benefits and pratfalls of trying to adapt the novelistic form to the cinematic form. Most of the films he talks about are really old, and, as I've said, I'm certainly no film historian (if it was made before I was born, you'll probably have to sit on me to make me watch it(except for Marguerite Duras' Hiroshima, Mon Amour, one of my favorites)), so I didn't know what he was talking about. Still, he brings up the age-old argument of fidelity to the text vs. directorial ownership over subject matter in a pretty interesting way. But here's what he says about The Painted Veil:
Recently, I saw The Painted Veil (2006), a movie directed by John Curran from a W. Somerset Maugham novel. It is a competent and affecting picture, with a terrific performance by Naomi Watts as the beautiful, shallow, adulterous wife of an idealistic doctor, who is transformed by her husband’s death. Many film critics tempered their praise by calling it “old-fashioned,” and indeed it is, not only because the adultery-in-the-colonial-tropics story and the theme of sacrifice seem fussy for today’s audiences but also because the craftsmanship of the adaptation is so unobtrusively intelligent. The Painted Veil is criticized as old-fashioned for making human sense of a now-dusty Maugham novel that was just the rage in the ’20s and ’30s.
For my money, "unobtrusive intelligence" is not what makes a movie "old-fashioned," nor is it something that is absent from good films that have been produced more recently. However, the fact that there is very little adventure to be had in the viewing of this film IS what makes it "old-fashioned," in my mind anway. It is, well, enjoyable, I guess, to sit through, but I would say that I was less "affected" by it than Lopate claims to have been.
The Last King of Scotland
The morning after squirming through this volatile and riveting film, I emailed a friend at work to rave about it and, coincidentally, he'd also seen it... and had fallen asleep in it! Unbelievable. Though he claims it was because the movie was boring, I stand by my assertion that he was tired because he aspires to arise at the buttcrack every morning. Really, Forest Whitaker's fumbling, brutish performance is all that it was cracked up to be... and more. It SHOULD be enough to keep the drowsiest among us shifting in our seats and peeking through our fingers.
At one point near the end, James McAvoy's character, Dr. Nicholas Garrigan, says to Whitaker's Idi Amin something along the lines of "you're just a big child! And that's why you're so fucking scary!" Shortly thereafter, the good doctor is quite literally strung up by his aureolas. The point is, Idi Amin was a horrendous tyrant and executor of grand genocidal atrocities because his psychological development was so seemingly stunted that he was unable to determine that he was accountable for such horrors. Watching Whitaker tunnel through this disconnect is well worth the price of the rental.
Interestingly, this movie is also adapted from a book, but it presents a far different set of challenges for adaptation than did Maugham's older narrative. It's a fictional account of a fictional character--our Dr. Garrigan--and his life with a real historical figure-- and one of mythological proportions, at that. This incorporation of real people into fiction has been a fun little game for some so-called "postmodern" writers (Paul Auster and Jonathan Safran Foer, for two easy instances, like to name fictional characters after themselves). But when you have to depict a real monster like Idi Amin as a human, a legend, a historical figure and a veritable devil, well, it's a tall order for filmmakers and actors alike. By and large, I think Whitaker carries the film remarkably well... and pretty conscientiously, for the most part. And McAvoy is also compelling as we follow him through his Dante-esque descent into politico-hell. But the film remains a work of fiction, and somehow, for me, anyway, this lessens its punch.
Pan's Labyrinth
This film is what you would get if Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's Mirrormask and Spielberg's Schindler's List produced a gimpy little baby. It's a funky, dark-but-cute fantasy film with a brutal torture-and-war drama buried within. The general atmosphere that the director, Guillermo Del Toro, creates is one that would be very familiar in a kid's movie. It's got the obscuring and glimmering lighting effects of the Harry Potters and the like, but then, a guy gets shot through the ear for hunting wabbits. And a guy sews his own lip back on after getting skewered by his maid (she's the good guy, he, the villian, of course). I quite like how confusing this mixing of genres is. I mean, the patina of the fairytale that settles over the film from the earliest scenes onward lulls the audience to the point that you feel, when the more brutal moments happen upon you, at once removed at some distance from them, but also startled from your movie-watching trance. It's a movie told from a child's point of view but it is not a movie for children-- and in its most stylistically careful way, it succeeds far above and beyond Terry Gilliam's Tideland, which purported to do the same thing.
In some ways, I think what a film like this does-- telling the narrative of Franco's Spain in the guise of a fairytale-- is really kinda genius because it's so subversive. I mean, if you want to push a particular political perspective or story upon people who might not seek out the information themselves, what better way to do it than to present it from the innocuous perspective of the child's-eye-view? Here, I'd like to make a little comparison with V for Vendetta, a film about which I still have mixed feelings, a couple years after I saw it. On one hand, it's a grand-scale, flashy, big-budget comic book come to life sort of movie... and therefore generated the sort of audience that frequents flashy, comic-y movies (i.e., not me). But on the other, it was notable for its relentless onslaught of criticism of totalitarian goverments-- and those that look like they might be heading in that direction (i.e., Bush's America). It's no coincidence that a very Cheney-esque actor plays a prominent villainous role therein.
And so, in the end, you've got a pretty thinky political allegory masquerading as a pyrotechnic geekfest for teenage boys. And what more insidious way to get a subversive message across than to sneak it into just such a vehicle? To be fair, I did not feel like I was the best audience for this movie. It's all together too flashy for my taste-- and also FAR to reductive and monosyllabic in its message and impetus as it paints its point of view with very broad strokes... but if it tricked some suburban adolescent out there into thinking a little bit about his own relationship with his government, well, that's kinda great! And though Pan's Labyrinth is subtitled, start to finish, and very indie in terms of cinematograhic texture... and will probably never find a viewership larger than those of us who seek out that sort of fare... there is still something a little dangerous about splicing kids' movies and war dramas into the same film. And for that, I'll continue to hold a candle for that very elusive viewership.
Poor editing is way scarier than homos.
Tonight, TMC is running what they're calling the "Screened Out" film festival. It's not exactly new news that Hollywood produced a buttload of horror movies on up through the '60s in which assorted demons, villains and ghosts engaged in plenty of overtly homosexual behavior. Plenty of social and film criticism has been written to the effect that these movies represented a sometimes sub-surface, sometimes more oblique societal anxiety about queerness. After all, what's scarier to a highly closeted culture than some hot young innocent being ravaged by a same-gender paranormal being?
So, it's not really all that interesting that TMC has grouped these five movies (The Uninvited (1944), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), Voodoo Island (1957), The Haunting (1963), and The Seventh Victim (1943)) together. But what is interesting is the following excerpt from QueerSighted, the gay and lesbian community blog on AOL:
The following year, MGM's adaptation of 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' raised the hackles of the Roman Catholic censorious Legion of Decency after critics commented on how well writer-director Albert Lewin had been able to convey the homosexual undercurrents in the classic Oscar® Wilde tale.
The rest of this article, like the paragraph above, offers minimal critical insight and is more-or-less just an advertisement for TMC. But please note the inclusion of the Registered Trademark symbol in the middle of Oscar Wilde's name. Does this mean everyone's favorite little gold man is a homo? You'd think he'd be a little less anatomically Ken-doll-like, wouldn't you? But, good lord, people! Writing for a queer online publication does not mean that you can abdicate your proofreading responsibilities!!
So, it's not really all that interesting that TMC has grouped these five movies (The Uninvited (1944), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), Voodoo Island (1957), The Haunting (1963), and The Seventh Victim (1943)) together. But what is interesting is the following excerpt from QueerSighted, the gay and lesbian community blog on AOL:
The following year, MGM's adaptation of 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' raised the hackles of the Roman Catholic censorious Legion of Decency after critics commented on how well writer-director Albert Lewin had been able to convey the homosexual undercurrents in the classic Oscar® Wilde tale.
The rest of this article, like the paragraph above, offers minimal critical insight and is more-or-less just an advertisement for TMC. But please note the inclusion of the Registered Trademark symbol in the middle of Oscar Wilde's name. Does this mean everyone's favorite little gold man is a homo? You'd think he'd be a little less anatomically Ken-doll-like, wouldn't you? But, good lord, people! Writing for a queer online publication does not mean that you can abdicate your proofreading responsibilities!!
Friday, June 15, 2007
This post is so steamy it may vaporize at any moment
I owe indirect thanks to my friend Bob for this hot-as-blazes video. A couple months ago, he gave me a mix CD-- a veritable Zach Braff movie soundtrack of the trendiest stuff around-- and this one song sent me googling. And I have a distinct suspicion that, knowing me in the way that he does, Bob did not inform me of the existence of this video very much on purpose. This is why I love the internet more than I love Bob. OK, that's not entirely true...
But the internet DID lead me straight into the web of source material for the video. Beautiful agony, indeed. Why is the internet always so good to me?
But the internet DID lead me straight into the web of source material for the video. Beautiful agony, indeed. Why is the internet always so good to me?
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
I mention Uma Thurman's breasts way way way at the end of this post.
I've gotten totally lax in my discipline regarding keeping up with my film-viewing-and-then-blogging project. I know I really only write about movies because they're a readily accessible art form that tends to reflect other issues going on out there in the world. In effect, I only ever wanted to write about the world-- but movies are a good spot from which I can begin my descent. However, when life-related activities of a non-aesthetic nature begin to occlude my engagement with films, I tend to write round-up posts. But I've been seeing such juicy pictures lately that I think I'm gonna opt for a quick succession of short-ish posts instead... because a couple of lazy-ass readers (you know who you are) have mentioned to me that they don't want to read to the end when I write really long stuff (hence my alluring title above). Sound Bite Nation, I'll tell you what!
But anyway, here we go:
The Namesake
I actually saw this movie with Jon when I was home in Nashville for the Film Festival. It seems that neither of us could get quite enough movies, even though that's just about the only thing either of us did for the entire 9 days I was there! But a couple weeks before I saw the movie, I got into a blog-debate with my illustrious friend Jai over on his blog, in which I was primarily talking out of my ass... because I have neither read Jhumpa Lahiri's novel, nor had I seen the film at that point. I had, however, read Lahiri's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of short stories, The Interpreter of Maladies, and deemed it highly overrated--I was both bored and felt a little too keenly that I, liberal white reader of multi-culti writers that I am, was more the target audience of the book than I should have been. I mean, I had a creepy sensation, as I plugged through those stores, that I was being fed a prettily-packaged idea of the "Indian-American Experience" so that I might find a "deeper understanding" of a minority group of which I was not a member. In the end, I don't particularly enjoy being pandered to when I'm in audience of something of which I am, by default, not a part. I WANT to feel alienated by a depiction of a life I could never fully understand, but Lahiri's work makes me feel coddled and congratulated for my supposedly enlightened, bleeding-heart seeking-out of culturally diverse writings. Spare me. She'd have done better by me to flagellate me for my ethnic blind spots-- of which I still have many. At least that way, I'd have been made more keenly aware of those blind spots so that I could DO something about them, right?
Also, one of the girls with whom I work is in the process of writing her dissertation on writers of Southeast Asian descent and I'll admit, she'd colored my feelings about the novel, The Namesake and, by extension, the film. This particular colleague HATES this book... but feels slightly warmer towards the movie. So, I went to the theatre a little skeptical. My colleague's reasoning for liking the movie better than the book is that the book spends too much time on the life of Gogol, our faithful protagonist, while the real heart of the story resides in the romance of his parents.
And to the movie's credit, the movie is much more a sweet and sumptuous love story than it is the story of an Indian-American misfit trying to negotiate his "other-ness." Which isn't to say that it doesn't dive into its fair share of bemoaning the ways in which poor Gogol perceives himself as "among the downtrodden" because his primary concern in life is deciding when to be Indian and when to be American. I did not feel as though I was watching a film about an interesting person. I was watching a film about an ethnic person... about whom there was very little interesting BESIDES his ethnicity. In other words, it's difficult to engage with a narrative about a person who lacks character traits beyond what makes him part of some marginalized group.
For another example, I once met a girl who introduced herself to me and then immediately informed me that she was bisexual, Japanese-American and her father had abused her when she was a kid. Clearly, these three things were the things that she thought made her interesting. The only thing that really made me engage with her, at that point, was that I started wondering about what motivates a person announce the ways in which she labels herself so early in an acquaintance in lieu of presenting a more free-formed, albeit messier, public persona-- one in which someone might discover deeper layers than that she was 1. a Bisexual, 2. a Japanese-American and 3. an Abuse Victim. I never really got to know this girl well enough to uncover her nuances... partly because I think she'd already told me all I wanted to know (or at least all she wanted me to know about her)... but also because I found her labelling system rather impenetrable. And that's kinda how I feel about Lahiri's Gogol. He behaves in ways that I understand only because all his motivations stem from his cultural heritage--either to sync up with it or to rebel against it-- and he really doesn't exceed those expectations so as to become a real person. And there's another character-- his white girlfriend-- who sort of mirrors his behavior in this way. She is hopelessly oblivious to his need to participate in his family's traditions in a way that belies her white privilege... and thusly, she becomes the very paragon of white privilege and therefore, must be dumped! She has no personality beyond her whiteness in the same way he has none beyond his brownness. Tell me again why I'm supposed to care about these folks?
I should mention that the actor who plays Gogol is Kal Penn, of Harold and Kumar go to White Castle fame. The same aforementioned colleague and I have had a discussion about why we both like this silly stoner flick (for me, this is somewhat momentous because I so rarely find comedies to be actually funny)-- and my colleague claims it's because it's a dumb mainstream-movie type of plot, in which the two main characters are a Korean-American and an Indian-American, but their racial identities bear virtually no relevance to the plot whatsoever. They're simply a couple of polluted kids who get their car stolen by Doogie Howser and make love to giant bags of weed. This isn't to say that they don't make a few jokes about racial stereotypes along the way, but overall, racial identity isn't the SUBJECT of this movie about a some non-white people. Yes, Jon, I'm finally owning up to the fact that I am quite the Harold-and-Kumar fan. The spoils of war resulting from your subtle-yet-perpetual attack on my film-snobbery go to you, my friend-- this round, anyway.
Now, the overall presentation of the film was a little disappointing, considering what I've come to expect from Mira Nair, the director. Mississippi Masala is a totally gorgeous film--Sarita Choudhury has never been sexier... and Nair really knows how to make a girl look hot in a mundane setting. And speaking of hot, Kama Sutra, anyone? OK, so, this film is a little short on plot... but you really can't do better in terms of arty soft-porn unless you go watch Dangerous Liaisons for the billionth time (Need I remind anyone of Uma Thurman's 18-year-old breasts (there!)?). But The Namesake is just the most straightforward of narratives that I've seen in a while. It's still pretty and we do have several distinctly sensory scenes full of sari silks but that, for me, wasn't enough to keep maintain engagement throughout. I suppose there are certain trademark styles I come to expect from certain directors and I feel kinda let-down when they underplay those trademarks. I mean, Julie Taymor's Frida totally sucked because it was all Salma Hayek and very little Taymor and even less Frida Kahlo. I like Kahlo and LOVE Taymor for their respective freakishnesses-- and that movie had very little of either. And I discussed a similar situation in my post about Fur, Steven Shainberg's movie about Diane Arbus. This guy freakin' directed Secretary and then you give him a total weirdo like Arbus for subject matter and all you get is a Nicole Kidman vehicle? Come. On! So, basically, I wanted something luscious and confectionary from Nair in The Namesake and I got something more understated and sincere. That's not bad, I guess, but I left the theatre with a still-achy sweet-tooth.
They should really put cupcake kiosks in movie theatres. I'd rather eat those than that disgusting butter-esque oil they put on the super-salty popcorn any day. GodDAMNit, why am I so obsessed with cupcakes???
But anyway, here we go:
The Namesake
I actually saw this movie with Jon when I was home in Nashville for the Film Festival. It seems that neither of us could get quite enough movies, even though that's just about the only thing either of us did for the entire 9 days I was there! But a couple weeks before I saw the movie, I got into a blog-debate with my illustrious friend Jai over on his blog, in which I was primarily talking out of my ass... because I have neither read Jhumpa Lahiri's novel, nor had I seen the film at that point. I had, however, read Lahiri's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of short stories, The Interpreter of Maladies, and deemed it highly overrated--I was both bored and felt a little too keenly that I, liberal white reader of multi-culti writers that I am, was more the target audience of the book than I should have been. I mean, I had a creepy sensation, as I plugged through those stores, that I was being fed a prettily-packaged idea of the "Indian-American Experience" so that I might find a "deeper understanding" of a minority group of which I was not a member. In the end, I don't particularly enjoy being pandered to when I'm in audience of something of which I am, by default, not a part. I WANT to feel alienated by a depiction of a life I could never fully understand, but Lahiri's work makes me feel coddled and congratulated for my supposedly enlightened, bleeding-heart seeking-out of culturally diverse writings. Spare me. She'd have done better by me to flagellate me for my ethnic blind spots-- of which I still have many. At least that way, I'd have been made more keenly aware of those blind spots so that I could DO something about them, right?
Also, one of the girls with whom I work is in the process of writing her dissertation on writers of Southeast Asian descent and I'll admit, she'd colored my feelings about the novel, The Namesake and, by extension, the film. This particular colleague HATES this book... but feels slightly warmer towards the movie. So, I went to the theatre a little skeptical. My colleague's reasoning for liking the movie better than the book is that the book spends too much time on the life of Gogol, our faithful protagonist, while the real heart of the story resides in the romance of his parents.
And to the movie's credit, the movie is much more a sweet and sumptuous love story than it is the story of an Indian-American misfit trying to negotiate his "other-ness." Which isn't to say that it doesn't dive into its fair share of bemoaning the ways in which poor Gogol perceives himself as "among the downtrodden" because his primary concern in life is deciding when to be Indian and when to be American. I did not feel as though I was watching a film about an interesting person. I was watching a film about an ethnic person... about whom there was very little interesting BESIDES his ethnicity. In other words, it's difficult to engage with a narrative about a person who lacks character traits beyond what makes him part of some marginalized group.
For another example, I once met a girl who introduced herself to me and then immediately informed me that she was bisexual, Japanese-American and her father had abused her when she was a kid. Clearly, these three things were the things that she thought made her interesting. The only thing that really made me engage with her, at that point, was that I started wondering about what motivates a person announce the ways in which she labels herself so early in an acquaintance in lieu of presenting a more free-formed, albeit messier, public persona-- one in which someone might discover deeper layers than that she was 1. a Bisexual, 2. a Japanese-American and 3. an Abuse Victim. I never really got to know this girl well enough to uncover her nuances... partly because I think she'd already told me all I wanted to know (or at least all she wanted me to know about her)... but also because I found her labelling system rather impenetrable. And that's kinda how I feel about Lahiri's Gogol. He behaves in ways that I understand only because all his motivations stem from his cultural heritage--either to sync up with it or to rebel against it-- and he really doesn't exceed those expectations so as to become a real person. And there's another character-- his white girlfriend-- who sort of mirrors his behavior in this way. She is hopelessly oblivious to his need to participate in his family's traditions in a way that belies her white privilege... and thusly, she becomes the very paragon of white privilege and therefore, must be dumped! She has no personality beyond her whiteness in the same way he has none beyond his brownness. Tell me again why I'm supposed to care about these folks?
I should mention that the actor who plays Gogol is Kal Penn, of Harold and Kumar go to White Castle fame. The same aforementioned colleague and I have had a discussion about why we both like this silly stoner flick (for me, this is somewhat momentous because I so rarely find comedies to be actually funny)-- and my colleague claims it's because it's a dumb mainstream-movie type of plot, in which the two main characters are a Korean-American and an Indian-American, but their racial identities bear virtually no relevance to the plot whatsoever. They're simply a couple of polluted kids who get their car stolen by Doogie Howser and make love to giant bags of weed. This isn't to say that they don't make a few jokes about racial stereotypes along the way, but overall, racial identity isn't the SUBJECT of this movie about a some non-white people. Yes, Jon, I'm finally owning up to the fact that I am quite the Harold-and-Kumar fan. The spoils of war resulting from your subtle-yet-perpetual attack on my film-snobbery go to you, my friend-- this round, anyway.
Now, the overall presentation of the film was a little disappointing, considering what I've come to expect from Mira Nair, the director. Mississippi Masala is a totally gorgeous film--Sarita Choudhury has never been sexier... and Nair really knows how to make a girl look hot in a mundane setting. And speaking of hot, Kama Sutra, anyone? OK, so, this film is a little short on plot... but you really can't do better in terms of arty soft-porn unless you go watch Dangerous Liaisons for the billionth time (Need I remind anyone of Uma Thurman's 18-year-old breasts (there!)?). But The Namesake is just the most straightforward of narratives that I've seen in a while. It's still pretty and we do have several distinctly sensory scenes full of sari silks but that, for me, wasn't enough to keep maintain engagement throughout. I suppose there are certain trademark styles I come to expect from certain directors and I feel kinda let-down when they underplay those trademarks. I mean, Julie Taymor's Frida totally sucked because it was all Salma Hayek and very little Taymor and even less Frida Kahlo. I like Kahlo and LOVE Taymor for their respective freakishnesses-- and that movie had very little of either. And I discussed a similar situation in my post about Fur, Steven Shainberg's movie about Diane Arbus. This guy freakin' directed Secretary and then you give him a total weirdo like Arbus for subject matter and all you get is a Nicole Kidman vehicle? Come. On! So, basically, I wanted something luscious and confectionary from Nair in The Namesake and I got something more understated and sincere. That's not bad, I guess, but I left the theatre with a still-achy sweet-tooth.
They should really put cupcake kiosks in movie theatres. I'd rather eat those than that disgusting butter-esque oil they put on the super-salty popcorn any day. GodDAMNit, why am I so obsessed with cupcakes???
Monday, June 11, 2007
More links of joy
I don't know who the genius at www.Stevemadden.com is, but dear god, has anyone seen my paycheck lately? Oh, right. It went here. Honestly, I could play with this thing the rest of my life and never need food or sex again. I'm veritably trembling with shoe-bliss.
Also, the folks at Aardman Animations, who are responsible for the likes of all the Wallace & Gromits and Chicken Run and all that great, quirky brit-anime stuff, have descended upon American network television in the form of Creature Comforts. It seems the thought process behind the show includes some interviews with totally random people who talk over each other and embarrass each other and bicker and say pretentious stuff or totally inane stuff or whatever else people unaccustomed to television interviews say. And then they run the interviews over claymation penguins or squished flies or horses or vultures and many other animals. Honestly, it's so unlike anything else on television that I'm not quite sure how it made it where it is. But it's bloody brilliant. I don't know how long the novelty will last before it gets played out, but, for the time being, it's not to be missed.
Also, the folks at Aardman Animations, who are responsible for the likes of all the Wallace & Gromits and Chicken Run and all that great, quirky brit-anime stuff, have descended upon American network television in the form of Creature Comforts. It seems the thought process behind the show includes some interviews with totally random people who talk over each other and embarrass each other and bicker and say pretentious stuff or totally inane stuff or whatever else people unaccustomed to television interviews say. And then they run the interviews over claymation penguins or squished flies or horses or vultures and many other animals. Honestly, it's so unlike anything else on television that I'm not quite sure how it made it where it is. But it's bloody brilliant. I don't know how long the novelty will last before it gets played out, but, for the time being, it's not to be missed.
Thursday, June 7, 2007
Link-happy Afternoon
In case you like movies, food, or the American South, or some combination of the three, or maybe even all three simultaneously: The Potlikker Film Festival
In case you're still relieved that George "Macaca" Allen didn't win the most-tightly-contested-Senatorial-seat-in-the-2006-midterm-elections: download of Jeff Sharlet's forthcoming Rolling Stone article entitled "James Webb's Never-Ending War" (this is a fascinating piece!)
In case you like statistics that reveal deeply intimate stuff about people: (it's healthy, not dirty)
In case you're still relieved that George "Macaca" Allen didn't win the most-tightly-contested-Senatorial-seat-in-the-2006-midterm-elections: download of Jeff Sharlet's forthcoming Rolling Stone article entitled "James Webb's Never-Ending War" (this is a fascinating piece!)
In case you like statistics that reveal deeply intimate stuff about people: (it's healthy, not dirty)
Wednesday, June 6, 2007
How to forward my career
How could I become an extra in indie-neo-porn movies? Or an origami-vagina-maker? Clearly, I have missed my calling.
It's no WONDER I'm so unhappy in my current job if there are opportunities such as this abounding.
It's no WONDER I'm so unhappy in my current job if there are opportunities such as this abounding.
Monday, June 4, 2007
Despite to shortages at the Big Red "A" Store, there is still pain to be administered, or Marjorie meditates on the subject of adultery
This weekend, I caught the end of one of my favorite movies of all time: Grand Canyon, the Lawrence Kasdan film about interconnectedness, community, responsibility and the psychic pain we all inflict upon one another while grappling towards the interconnectedness, the community and the responsibility. I hadn't watched this movie in a while and I'd forgotten Mary-Louise Parker's oration to Kevin Kline (her boss, who'd fucked her and then refused to do so again, on grounds of, uh, being married) about how, despite the fact that he was kind and caring and well-meaning in virtually every aspect of his life, he was still an asshole because he'd created a situation in which he was oblivious to the inevitability of her very particular hurt. I suppose what I love about this scene and the movie in general is that the characters are continually putting themselves in positions where they transgress social boundaries--and sometimes they face consequences for those transgressions, and sometimes they don't--but the film doesn't ever demonize them for doing so. Neither the homewrecker, nor the cheating husband, nor the otherwise-occupied wife could ever be wholly exculpated or wholly blamed because these events are, in the context of this film, just part of negotiating the world as an adult. Interestingly, though, Parker's character is the one to bear the deepest wound from the aforementioned transaction, because she is the one not chosen--and the wife never knows. This, I find to be the saddest thing about this movie--and one of the most interesting things because the pain of the interloper has been so minimally explored. But wouldn't we always consider it a "best-case scenario" when The Other Woman is the only one who gets hurt, no matter what? Certainly, she is awfully low on the morality totem pole (on which we also find innocent children, innocent wife, and fallible-but-well-meaning husband in descending order), poor girl.
Coincidentally, when I arrived home on Friday night, I had a long-ago-ordered box from Amazon (man, that free super-saver shipping option didn't always take this long, did it?) which contained, among other books, Daphne Gottlieb's (queer, post-punk, guttermouth, San Francisco poet) anthology entitled Homewrecker: An Adultery Reader (see my new subheading quotation above). Though I haven't yet had much time to read a whole hell of a lot of the stories and poems therein, there seem to be quite a few accounts of already unstable marriages, rendered more so by the inevitability of extramarital desire. Really, though, I particularly interested in Gottlieb's own introduction to the book. She rather succinctly sums up pretty much all my reasons for being interested in and buying this book to begin with:
After Homewrecker's call for submissions went out, I received a number of fevered, upset emails. Over and over, they said: You're not in FAVOR of it, are you? I want to believe (but rather doubt) that this same question would be asked of me as the editor of an anthology on motherhood, cancer, or swing dance. But mothers, the ill and dancers do not have to lie to nurture, heal or perform. (On a side note, if cheating is as rampant as even the moderate statistics suggest (Earlier in the intro, she mentions that "statistics vary widely, from a marginal 15 percent to a whopping 80 percent of married couples cheating."), it strikes me as odd that we're still blaming the "homewrecker" rather than questioning the system. What would it look like if we prized honesty and love instead of pair fidelity?)
OK, so, what WOULD it look like if we prized honesty and love instead of pair fidelity? Well, firstly, it's not at all as simplistic as that. And I think part of the faulty system is that we do, in some problematically idealistic way, prize love above all.
For myself, I tend to see marriage as a rather futile endeavor. Much research has shown that the average lifespan of a pair-bond between two human animals is roughly four to seven years--i.e., the amount of time it takes to raise a child out of infancy. In other words, we're biologically predisposed to feel the proverbial 4-to-7-year-itch because any given sexual attraction is designed to peter out somewhere within that range. That's how it WORKS! This idea that we're supposed to be in love for life is one devised purely by the heavily restrictive social mindset. In this way, how can marriage be anything but such an extreme uphill battle? It is not what our bodies' instinctual drives to propagate the species want for us.
And if my belief system about the unnatural-ness of life-long companionhood-contracts is too antiseptic, skeptical or extreme for you, how about the fact that we've invented a legislated civil institution, that once was originally devised as nothing more than a way to manage personal assets and to sanction certain bloodlines, but is now based solely on what we must admit is often a whimsical predilection for one person over another. Sure, marriage is still quite often about nothing more than money, convenience, and/or stability for the children's sake (and there's certainly nothing wrong with these things--or, really, even basing a relationship on these things), but if we want to marry for love? Love is tenuous, fragile and flighty. Love is irrational. It would be a problem for one such as myself, who is made uneasy by such irrationality, to make a lifelong commitment based on a state that I have only known in its temporary aspect. As Gottlieb says, "Love does not conquer all."
My skepticism about marriage did not, however, prevent me from attempting one such commitment. Nor does it prevent me from believing in falling in love. My longest relationship to date was with a woman, and because our government has deemed such relationships to be unworthy of tax breaks, property rights and power of attorney (thus, incidentally, reinforcing the notion that the civil institution of marriage remains little more than a financial arrangement--and one not afforded to all citizens--which, in my opinion, renders our lofty aspirations of "sanctity" and "love" within marriage wholly secondary, thus devaluing the system entirely. Thank you, U.S. government, for commodifying love, along with everything else!), I was not able to make my commitment official. Do I see some silver lining there, because I would obviously now be divorced? Well, no. The creation of a second class of citizens through denial of civil rights is nothing to celebrate... but, yeah, I guess I am glad I never married her.
However, I must admit, I entered into that relationship with every intention that it would last me a lifetime. Never had I met someone with whom I could laugh and cry in equal share. Never had I met someone who opened herself to me with such abandon and ferocity. Never had I doubted my own lovable-ness less. Never had had I encountered someone of whom I did not get bored or annoyed. I do not doubt that I was in love with her. But love doesn't conquer all. I can confirm that this is true because I was still in love with her the night I left.
I will spare my readers the sordid details of why I had eventually had to leave her, this woman who was supposed to be the love of my life. My real point in relaying any of this is just to say that there is no greater feeling of failure than that which one experiences at the moment at which one realizes that one can no longer abide by a commitment that was intended to be lifelong. It does not compare to failing a class in school and it does not compare to getting fired. When you, once and for all, abandon a pair-bonded relationship in favor of sex with another or singlehood or whatever it is that has led you astray, you feel utterly irredeemable. And strangely enough, this horrible feeling is not great enough motivation to stay.
And some might ask me, in this post that is supposed to be about adultery, was I unfaithful, there at the end? Sure, in some ways, I absolutely was. Sometimes, when you need to get out, you engage in activities so as to force your own hand. So, there's that.
And now I can come 'round to my recent viewing of Little Children. Man, I could never make it as a real movie critic. I just want to talk about myself too much, now, don't I? Well, anyway, I should just say that I think this movie is one of the best I've seen in a couple years. Really, I watched it a couple weeks ago and it's gotten so under my skin that haven't been able to wrap my head around how to write about it.
One review that I read discusses how, early on, when the two main characters, Brad (the knock-out, despite receding hairline, Patrick Wilson) and Sarah (Kate Winslet), kiss in a park in front of several other soccer-mom-types, despite being strangers. The review says that the horror of the soccer moms establishes that we are not in the landscape of the swingin' suburbs, such as is portrayed in movies like Ang Lee's The Ice Storm, wherein there is still a sort of detached discomfort that accompanies one of those parties at which all the husbands throw their keys in a fishbowl in spite of the social bravado implied by writing such a scene into a script. In a movie like that, sex is not intimate and no one is expected to fall in love as a result of it. In Little Children, though, it's a different story. Sarah, the former English lit PhD candidate, is bored and disenfranchised with her little domestic life. And Brad, the football star and would-be lawyer who can't pass the bar, is emasculated and a chickenshit, while his gorgeous, creative wife (still uber-hot Jennifer Connolly) is the successful documentary filmmaker that their son insists upon favoring. In other words, these two are ripe for the distraction and drama of falling in love with each other. Brad is still probably in love with his hot wife, even though he despairs at his life with her, but once Sarah finds her husband jerking off in front of the computer with polka-dot panties stretched over his face, well, I just don't think she was really feeling it anymore. Regardless, these two seek refuge from the lush-suburban-cum-bleak-and-vapid narrative landscape of this film in each other. And, maybe because we do not want to associate ourselves with the prudish suburbanites, we are glad for them.
But, though it would be great for the purposes of this post if this movie was really about nothing beyond adultery, it isn't. Adultery is, by far, NOT the most sinister of the topics broached in Little Children. Jackie Earle Haley plays Ronnie McGorvey in probably the most disturbing portrayal of a child molester in the annals of cinema. He is both sorrowful and repugnant. And the thing is, you want to love him and forgive him, until you just can't love or forgive him, not even remotely. Most indicative of the heinousness of this character is the sequence of scenes in which he goes on a date with a young woman. As it turns out, she's depressed to the point that she's made a couple attempts on her own life and, during their dinner together, he listens to her confessions of craziness and despair in such a way that he leads her to believe she's finally found a sympathetic ear. After their date, however, he asks her to drive him to a quiet street where he has a view of the neighborhood playground. While staring at her lap, she tearfully begins to tell him how he seems to be such a nice person and how she's so glad he listened to her, but when she looks up at at, he's gazing out the window of the car at the top of a swingset, vigorously masturbating. And he tells her that if she tells on him, he'll punish her. It's horrendous. It's horrendous, not only because he's given into his destructively deviant drives but because he's used this broken sad-sack of a woman to do so. After all, he's not allowed within 100 yards of a playground, unless he's hidden in some stranger's car!
Really, throughout the movie, it is McGorvey's story that serves as context for all the psycho-sexual unrest amongst all the characters. I'm particularly curious to note, though, that here, American suburbia is portrayed as a place simultaneously so full of castration-anxiety and so full of castration-lust. Male and female characters alike profess a desire to lop off McGorvey's dick. And yet all the men are stymied by their own in ability to live up to the expectations of their gender. Their sadness and frustration about all this is palpable. As are the resulting sadness and frustration the women. And in the face of all this batting around of this castration-as-a-metaphor-for-the-futility-of-domestic-life, it is finally McGorvey who takes the initiative and LITERALLY performs the gruesome deed upon himself. And so, in the end, none of the characters have dicks. And none of them are particularly good at performing... anything.
And so, if these ineffectual folks are representatives of those who've achieved the general American goal of upper-middle-class privilege, I gotta say, I'm both trepidatious and disappointed. I mean, I'm interested in the idea of male virtues being valued in and of themselves, so long as they don't denigrate or infringe upon female virtues, right? (And I guess so long as any virtue can be considered applicable to either gender...) But what of the men who wrote and directed this film? Tom Perotta wrote the novel on which it's based, and co-wrote the screenplay with director Todd Field. I wonder, are these men feeling these sorts of anxieties? What cultural rivulet of thought have they tapped into? I mean, is the fear that men are no longer entitled to their gender identities really so prevalent? I'm thinking back, now, to when I saw Byron Hurt's documentary, Beyond Beats and Rhymes, which talks a lot about the overcompensation inherent in the hyper-masculinity of hip-hop culture. So, surely this concern regarding metaphoric and literal castration is not one specific to rich white guys... and surely it is not new, but nonetheless, does it not point to some great societal illness? And because women are often both direct and indirect receptacles, if not victims, of this sort of psychological unrest in our male counterparts, well, shouldn't we have equal vestment and cause for concern?
I suppose, Little Children is not really a movie about adultery at all. It's a movie about how helpless people are when faced with their own unadulterated fucked-up-edness. And what does the movie present as the cause for said fucked-up-edness? Why, the frustration and demoralization that accompanies our inevitable inability to live up to whatever it was we were supposed to live up to, whether that be society or self-inflicted expectations-- of goodness, of tangible success, of beauty, and of course, of fidelity.
So, why, exactly is it that we just want so damn MUCH from ourselves? What would it look like if we valued questioning the system and coming to terms with our nature as human animals over aspiring to some obsolete American Dream?
UPDATE:
(Disclaimer) I don't suppose I can really stand 100% behind all the anti-marriage assertions I made in this post. It just seems that I'm getting bombarded with an awful lot of information about this topic lately and, apparently, I've got some processing to do. I don't know. Maybe I do mean it. But maybe not. Too soon (young, unattached, out-of-love) to tell yet?
Coincidentally, when I arrived home on Friday night, I had a long-ago-ordered box from Amazon (man, that free super-saver shipping option didn't always take this long, did it?) which contained, among other books, Daphne Gottlieb's (queer, post-punk, guttermouth, San Francisco poet) anthology entitled Homewrecker: An Adultery Reader (see my new subheading quotation above). Though I haven't yet had much time to read a whole hell of a lot of the stories and poems therein, there seem to be quite a few accounts of already unstable marriages, rendered more so by the inevitability of extramarital desire. Really, though, I particularly interested in Gottlieb's own introduction to the book. She rather succinctly sums up pretty much all my reasons for being interested in and buying this book to begin with:
After Homewrecker's call for submissions went out, I received a number of fevered, upset emails. Over and over, they said: You're not in FAVOR of it, are you? I want to believe (but rather doubt) that this same question would be asked of me as the editor of an anthology on motherhood, cancer, or swing dance. But mothers, the ill and dancers do not have to lie to nurture, heal or perform. (On a side note, if cheating is as rampant as even the moderate statistics suggest (Earlier in the intro, she mentions that "statistics vary widely, from a marginal 15 percent to a whopping 80 percent of married couples cheating."), it strikes me as odd that we're still blaming the "homewrecker" rather than questioning the system. What would it look like if we prized honesty and love instead of pair fidelity?)
OK, so, what WOULD it look like if we prized honesty and love instead of pair fidelity? Well, firstly, it's not at all as simplistic as that. And I think part of the faulty system is that we do, in some problematically idealistic way, prize love above all.
For myself, I tend to see marriage as a rather futile endeavor. Much research has shown that the average lifespan of a pair-bond between two human animals is roughly four to seven years--i.e., the amount of time it takes to raise a child out of infancy. In other words, we're biologically predisposed to feel the proverbial 4-to-7-year-itch because any given sexual attraction is designed to peter out somewhere within that range. That's how it WORKS! This idea that we're supposed to be in love for life is one devised purely by the heavily restrictive social mindset. In this way, how can marriage be anything but such an extreme uphill battle? It is not what our bodies' instinctual drives to propagate the species want for us.
And if my belief system about the unnatural-ness of life-long companionhood-contracts is too antiseptic, skeptical or extreme for you, how about the fact that we've invented a legislated civil institution, that once was originally devised as nothing more than a way to manage personal assets and to sanction certain bloodlines, but is now based solely on what we must admit is often a whimsical predilection for one person over another. Sure, marriage is still quite often about nothing more than money, convenience, and/or stability for the children's sake (and there's certainly nothing wrong with these things--or, really, even basing a relationship on these things), but if we want to marry for love? Love is tenuous, fragile and flighty. Love is irrational. It would be a problem for one such as myself, who is made uneasy by such irrationality, to make a lifelong commitment based on a state that I have only known in its temporary aspect. As Gottlieb says, "Love does not conquer all."
My skepticism about marriage did not, however, prevent me from attempting one such commitment. Nor does it prevent me from believing in falling in love. My longest relationship to date was with a woman, and because our government has deemed such relationships to be unworthy of tax breaks, property rights and power of attorney (thus, incidentally, reinforcing the notion that the civil institution of marriage remains little more than a financial arrangement--and one not afforded to all citizens--which, in my opinion, renders our lofty aspirations of "sanctity" and "love" within marriage wholly secondary, thus devaluing the system entirely. Thank you, U.S. government, for commodifying love, along with everything else!), I was not able to make my commitment official. Do I see some silver lining there, because I would obviously now be divorced? Well, no. The creation of a second class of citizens through denial of civil rights is nothing to celebrate... but, yeah, I guess I am glad I never married her.
However, I must admit, I entered into that relationship with every intention that it would last me a lifetime. Never had I met someone with whom I could laugh and cry in equal share. Never had I met someone who opened herself to me with such abandon and ferocity. Never had I doubted my own lovable-ness less. Never had had I encountered someone of whom I did not get bored or annoyed. I do not doubt that I was in love with her. But love doesn't conquer all. I can confirm that this is true because I was still in love with her the night I left.
I will spare my readers the sordid details of why I had eventually had to leave her, this woman who was supposed to be the love of my life. My real point in relaying any of this is just to say that there is no greater feeling of failure than that which one experiences at the moment at which one realizes that one can no longer abide by a commitment that was intended to be lifelong. It does not compare to failing a class in school and it does not compare to getting fired. When you, once and for all, abandon a pair-bonded relationship in favor of sex with another or singlehood or whatever it is that has led you astray, you feel utterly irredeemable. And strangely enough, this horrible feeling is not great enough motivation to stay.
And some might ask me, in this post that is supposed to be about adultery, was I unfaithful, there at the end? Sure, in some ways, I absolutely was. Sometimes, when you need to get out, you engage in activities so as to force your own hand. So, there's that.
And now I can come 'round to my recent viewing of Little Children. Man, I could never make it as a real movie critic. I just want to talk about myself too much, now, don't I? Well, anyway, I should just say that I think this movie is one of the best I've seen in a couple years. Really, I watched it a couple weeks ago and it's gotten so under my skin that haven't been able to wrap my head around how to write about it.
One review that I read discusses how, early on, when the two main characters, Brad (the knock-out, despite receding hairline, Patrick Wilson) and Sarah (Kate Winslet), kiss in a park in front of several other soccer-mom-types, despite being strangers. The review says that the horror of the soccer moms establishes that we are not in the landscape of the swingin' suburbs, such as is portrayed in movies like Ang Lee's The Ice Storm, wherein there is still a sort of detached discomfort that accompanies one of those parties at which all the husbands throw their keys in a fishbowl in spite of the social bravado implied by writing such a scene into a script. In a movie like that, sex is not intimate and no one is expected to fall in love as a result of it. In Little Children, though, it's a different story. Sarah, the former English lit PhD candidate, is bored and disenfranchised with her little domestic life. And Brad, the football star and would-be lawyer who can't pass the bar, is emasculated and a chickenshit, while his gorgeous, creative wife (still uber-hot Jennifer Connolly) is the successful documentary filmmaker that their son insists upon favoring. In other words, these two are ripe for the distraction and drama of falling in love with each other. Brad is still probably in love with his hot wife, even though he despairs at his life with her, but once Sarah finds her husband jerking off in front of the computer with polka-dot panties stretched over his face, well, I just don't think she was really feeling it anymore. Regardless, these two seek refuge from the lush-suburban-cum-bleak-and-vapid narrative landscape of this film in each other. And, maybe because we do not want to associate ourselves with the prudish suburbanites, we are glad for them.
But, though it would be great for the purposes of this post if this movie was really about nothing beyond adultery, it isn't. Adultery is, by far, NOT the most sinister of the topics broached in Little Children. Jackie Earle Haley plays Ronnie McGorvey in probably the most disturbing portrayal of a child molester in the annals of cinema. He is both sorrowful and repugnant. And the thing is, you want to love him and forgive him, until you just can't love or forgive him, not even remotely. Most indicative of the heinousness of this character is the sequence of scenes in which he goes on a date with a young woman. As it turns out, she's depressed to the point that she's made a couple attempts on her own life and, during their dinner together, he listens to her confessions of craziness and despair in such a way that he leads her to believe she's finally found a sympathetic ear. After their date, however, he asks her to drive him to a quiet street where he has a view of the neighborhood playground. While staring at her lap, she tearfully begins to tell him how he seems to be such a nice person and how she's so glad he listened to her, but when she looks up at at, he's gazing out the window of the car at the top of a swingset, vigorously masturbating. And he tells her that if she tells on him, he'll punish her. It's horrendous. It's horrendous, not only because he's given into his destructively deviant drives but because he's used this broken sad-sack of a woman to do so. After all, he's not allowed within 100 yards of a playground, unless he's hidden in some stranger's car!
Really, throughout the movie, it is McGorvey's story that serves as context for all the psycho-sexual unrest amongst all the characters. I'm particularly curious to note, though, that here, American suburbia is portrayed as a place simultaneously so full of castration-anxiety and so full of castration-lust. Male and female characters alike profess a desire to lop off McGorvey's dick. And yet all the men are stymied by their own in ability to live up to the expectations of their gender. Their sadness and frustration about all this is palpable. As are the resulting sadness and frustration the women. And in the face of all this batting around of this castration-as-a-metaphor-for-the-futility-of-domestic-life, it is finally McGorvey who takes the initiative and LITERALLY performs the gruesome deed upon himself. And so, in the end, none of the characters have dicks. And none of them are particularly good at performing... anything.
And so, if these ineffectual folks are representatives of those who've achieved the general American goal of upper-middle-class privilege, I gotta say, I'm both trepidatious and disappointed. I mean, I'm interested in the idea of male virtues being valued in and of themselves, so long as they don't denigrate or infringe upon female virtues, right? (And I guess so long as any virtue can be considered applicable to either gender...) But what of the men who wrote and directed this film? Tom Perotta wrote the novel on which it's based, and co-wrote the screenplay with director Todd Field. I wonder, are these men feeling these sorts of anxieties? What cultural rivulet of thought have they tapped into? I mean, is the fear that men are no longer entitled to their gender identities really so prevalent? I'm thinking back, now, to when I saw Byron Hurt's documentary, Beyond Beats and Rhymes, which talks a lot about the overcompensation inherent in the hyper-masculinity of hip-hop culture. So, surely this concern regarding metaphoric and literal castration is not one specific to rich white guys... and surely it is not new, but nonetheless, does it not point to some great societal illness? And because women are often both direct and indirect receptacles, if not victims, of this sort of psychological unrest in our male counterparts, well, shouldn't we have equal vestment and cause for concern?
I suppose, Little Children is not really a movie about adultery at all. It's a movie about how helpless people are when faced with their own unadulterated fucked-up-edness. And what does the movie present as the cause for said fucked-up-edness? Why, the frustration and demoralization that accompanies our inevitable inability to live up to whatever it was we were supposed to live up to, whether that be society or self-inflicted expectations-- of goodness, of tangible success, of beauty, and of course, of fidelity.
So, why, exactly is it that we just want so damn MUCH from ourselves? What would it look like if we valued questioning the system and coming to terms with our nature as human animals over aspiring to some obsolete American Dream?
UPDATE:
(Disclaimer) I don't suppose I can really stand 100% behind all the anti-marriage assertions I made in this post. It just seems that I'm getting bombarded with an awful lot of information about this topic lately and, apparently, I've got some processing to do. I don't know. Maybe I do mean it. But maybe not. Too soon (young, unattached, out-of-love) to tell yet?
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