So, I think I some kinda film afficionado, do I?

This post was originally published on film/foreplay. Because I think it's relevant to this project, I'm republishing it here. Bon appetite!


Sometimes, when someone around my own age gets wind of the fact that sometimes I write about film-- and that I watch an awful lot of movies-- he or she will begin listing arty, often foreign, films of the '60s and earlier. And upon hearing such a list, I'll nod along politely while I also listen to conflicted protestations from within my own head.

On one hand, I want to shake these people. I want to demand that they explain to me why they aren't watching and supporting and getting excited by and moved by and challenged by and inspired by the real artistic innovators of their own generation. I want to know why I so often hear the there's-nothing-new-under-the-sun argument when there are always a million new things baking under MY sun. I want to know what it is that people my own age find that's so much more relevant in art that was made by people our parents' and grandparents' ages.

And on the other hand? I think, Oh, craptastic! That's another one I've never seen. There goes my critical credibility. Again.

So, over where the brown rabbits roam, I've alluded to the fact that, within about a year and a half, I hope to be pursuing an interdisciplinary PhD in critical film studies and gender theory. And both here on film/foreplay and on my other blog, I've mentioned my impatience with older films. It seems I've come to a point at which I need to defend that impatience -- and to explain it, as much to myself as to anyone who cares to read this.

First of all, I need to concede that I do see value in learning film history-- particularly if I'm going to attempt any serious critical writing about this medium. That's part of why I want to go back to school, rather than continue on the digression-filled path of self-education. I do feel like plenty can be gained in learning the genealogies of any given art form so as one might witness the progression through the ages. And there is valuable discipline in learning to appreciate work outside of one's narrow angle of taste. I'm bored to death by Milton-- but I'm glad I read Paradise Lost-- if for no other reason than that I drew a connection between his half-woman, half-snake Sin character and the old Melusine legends of similar creatures who are terrifying because they have no need for men (top half woman... bottom half snake... the masturbatory implications of the image need no further explication). I'm not quite sure why that soap-opera-in-print, Middlemarch, is such a classic but at least I'm informed enough to have an opinion about it. Out of Africa was painful for me to read because Dinesen's story is so situated in colonialist attitudes that make me bristle but it's an important text because it's such a document of its time. I find these books to be worthy readerly ventures, even though I don't much like reading them.

Truthfully, I found reading these books to be work. While I've often said that I'd rather be challenged than entertained, I still find being challenged enjoyable. When a text-- or a film-- feels like drudgery to me, I'm not as likely to seek it out without specific professorial direction. Perhaps this is a weakness of character-- I'm not sure. But my point here is that I put a lot of older films in that category. I find so many of them to be so slow. And sometimes I find the acting to be so stylized and emotive that I might call it hamebone-y if I'm feeling particularly snarky. And, as I mentioned when I was discussing Casablanca, I find it difficult to see how old movies were once experimental when they seem so tame in comparison to the newer films that rebel against the standards set by the older ones. (This is not universal, mind you. I still find, for example, Antionini's work to be disorienting and strange in an interesting way. And Truffaut.) Yes, I should watch them because I need to understand film as situated within a film-historical context. But if every artistic era is both a rebellion against the one prior and a snapshot of the culture at its moment of creation, I'm most interested in today's rebellions and cultural reflections.

And this brings me to the point at which I get to describe what I hope will be my basic project through Grad School, Round II. I've been formulating this theory about how film is feeding back to us our collective anxieties about this piquant, yet immanent, threat to social infrastructure-- the slutty girl. Or the sexpot. Or, put in a language less vernacular, "the sexually liberated woman." In film after film, I see iterations of this girl. And she is rarely rendered whole. Sometimes her raging cocklust (or, pussylust, as the case may be) is explained away by means of mental illness-- as in, no woman could ever want sex so badly if there weren't something kinda tweaked in her head (see Black Snake Moan). Sometimes her keyed-up libido is attributed to the fact that she's some sort of abuse victim. For example, her father is a withholding asshat, so she seeks male attention in compensate (see Come Early Morning)-- or, variantly, she was sexualized as a child and ekes out the pattern of sexual "acting out" ever after. Regardless, she doesn't have a healthy appetite; she's nothing but a disempowered victim. And sometimes, she's the Devil herself. We call her the Femme Fatale (often, this is a confusing image as these red-dressed girls shimmy back and forth between being victims and being sirens) or we call her the Praying Mantis or we simply call her a whore (and we don't mean it as a compliment).

My point, of course, is that these film characters rarely experience their sexuality with any sort of simplicity or, you know, joy. Or unconflicted ownership. And I'm interested in what this says about the culture out of which these films rise.

No. That's not really the thing that fascinates me at all.

I'm veritably galvanized by the prospect of BEING a woman who can experience a variant, empowered and oft-satisfied sexual persona. I don't want to be accused of being crazy or demonic or abused just because I walk around with sex on the brain for most of my waking hours (and some of my slumbered ones as well). And I want to know how to live in a culture that has a hard time processing a woman like me-- one that has a hard time accepting my mental and spiritual health at face value.

And I'm living in this culture right NOW. My generation has come of age in the middle of our own fin de siècle. In so many ways, this millenial generation is bound to be breaking ground of a sort we will not know until we have the perspective of plenty years on. While I fully recognize that I have much to learn about the shifting morès of eras past, my project and I are primarily concerned with what I see going on around me. Now. It's an exciting and scary and mysterious moment. I just don't want to miss it while puttering about in the issues of bygone decades, you know?

I must also acknowledge that I both struggle with and need to know films of past generations that deal with my chosen subjects of feminism and that which is erotic. For instance, a few months ago, I watched several Catherine Breillat films and they pissed me right off! I couldn't even write about them because I found them so dated-- even Anatomy of Hell, which was released in 2004. Her feminist aesthetic reeks of '70s-ish Second Wavery, wherein we still assumed that all men were afraid of vaginae and therefore wanted to hurt (or, more specifically, put pitchfork handles in) those of us who have them. Though Breillat achieved her acclaim through her scrambling of boundaries between the genres of art film and pornography, I couldn't help but feel she aimed to exacerbate the problem of squeamishness between the genders. I mean, I wouldn't suppose having my lovers drink a tincture of my menstrual blood would be the way to encourage their affection for my pinker parts (not even with the lovers who don't seem to have a problem with, as one clever one called it, "crime scene sex"). Yes, that drinking-of-blood thing really does happen in Anatomy. Yes, it's pretty tough to watch. To me, her insistence on heightening revulsion with regard to female sexuality (that only serves to distance the two genders) bespeaks an antiquated school of feminist thought. A school-- and her films, by extension-- that I happen to find alienating. Still, I know I couldn't make the argument I want to make without knowing these films.

So, I have this agenda. I have this topic. I've chosen film as a vehicle for a discussion that I mean to have with the world around me (though, of late, I have been straying far and wide on my own blog). I chose film for a couple of different reasons-- the primary one being that it's a cheap, accessible art form. For $15 a month, NetFlix sends you as many films as you can watch. And for $10, you can see the newest and the shiniest. And everybody watches movies. Moreover, everybody has opinions about movies and can, therefore, contribute to this discussion. And there's something I find very appealing about the theoretical egalitarianism of that sort of conversation-- and also why the blog format is so useful.

Ultimately, yeah, I know I need to watch more pokey, heavily stylized, stage-y older films. But for me, so many of them continue to feel like eating bran cereal-- good for colon, but relatively flavorless, especially in comparison with all the pyrotechnics available on the global film scene right now.

I've said it before-- I'm a child of my own age. And I kinda like it that way-- even though I could never deny that I'm still trying to glean what there is to glean from older work. Inevitably, though, that which glistens with newness continues to draw me. I am the magpie to contemporary film's tin foil.