Archive for category Pop Culture
Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Rating: F
Posted by Nav in Pop Culture on August 1, 2011
You, dear SiW readers, know this. My ambivalent affection for Michael Bay’s Transformers: Return of the Fallen has become, like, a thing. People I’ve never met know how much I like the film, despite the fact, by most accounts, I’m not ‘supposed’ to. But I do, oh how I do. I left the cinema giddy. Giddy, I tell ya’. And now I’ll talk to anyone who’ll listen about the absurd madness that is the film, even when I should really shut up.
After much wondering, I realized why I ‘liked’ it: its approach to narrative coherence was so brazen and unabashed, so obviously subservient to spectacle, that it seemed like a populist crystallization of modern problems in art. In the face of the incapacity to ever ‘accurately’ represent anything, T:RTOF responded by saying “well fuck it, then – we’ll just blow shit up and have some really incredible CG in the process”. The film made almost no sense - and none of that seemed to matter. It so clearly signaled its refusal to cohere as a story, that whether or not any one part of the film made sense when compared to another felt immaterial. It just was.
But I also had another creeping thought: if narrative coherence no longer holds, nor is meant to, then the gesture toward verisimilitude or referentiality also changes. The clearly racist, sexist elements of Transformers numero 2 didn’t particularly bother me because they were so divorced from the world to which they referred that they seemed irrelevant. Yeah the ‘black’ robots were illiterate and stupid, but none of the rest of the film made sense, so why should this? I dunno if that makes sense or holds up, but it’s what I thought.
Now that I’ve seen the third film, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, I can tell you two things: as a film, it is definitely better, marginally more coherent and logical; and that as a result, this was an infinitely more dangerous, insidious, offensive film. If I left T:ROTF feeling giddy, T:DOTM left me unsettled. I mean, it’s still fun and the effects really are spectacular, but yeah. It’s, um, weird.
Don’t mistake me, though. It’s still a film that places spectacle above plot, has non-existent characterization, sub-par acting etc. But now that it almost makes sense – now that its plot kinda’, sorta’ holds together – suddenly it felt a lot more sinister.
Here’s why:
- The autobots – ‘the good robots’ – are now part of the war on terror. No, seriously. The film opens with the autobots, their intergalactic battle seemingly over, doing the only obvious thing and helping Americans kill mean brown people. It’s just sthuper.
- These same autobots – bastions of morality, fairness and general human lovin’ goodness – are brutal. When they return after a false disappearance, they take glee in ripping their enemies limb by limb. “We will kill them all,” intones Optimus Prime. Uh, what? Memories of innocent Saturday mornings ruined!
- That disappearance I talked about? It’s because these same autobots are banished by the UN, er, ‘government’ or whatever. They come back, in secret, and their reasoning is that they should be there whether people like it or not. Hey, remember how I said that in this film they’re part of the war on terror? Nope, no disturbing resonance with current events there!
- Michael Bay has decided that an acceptable amount of time has passed that is now cool to show American skyscrapers being torn down for fun. And hey, good for him. I mean, Michael Bay has taken it on himself to heal America’s greatest psychological scar through his fucking art, man. And if he can’t, then tell me, who can? WHO CAN?
- Before the, uh, ‘plot’ kicks in, Megatron, leader of the eeeeevil Decepticons can be found in Africa (where else, right?). Know what he’s, um, ‘wearing’? A ‘Middle Eastern’ looking headscarf. At this point, it seems wise to remind you that in this film, Megatron is a 50ft robot. Made out of, like, metal and shit. He’s wearing his little hoodie thing though! I know, I know, it sounds like I’m making this up. Alas, I am not.
- John Malkovich in this film. Why? For no purpose whatsoever. Really. I can’t for the life of me explain to you why he was in the film other than to have his name appear on posters. It’s pretty fuckin’ weird.
- Alan Tudyk is in this film. Yeah, Wash from Firefly. Except here, he’s a German dude who is very helpful, prissy, is excellent at martial arts and gun use, and has enough knowledge to hack into basically anything, including the bridge system in Chicago. I don’t know even know why I’m typing this. I guess I hoped it would make more sense by the time I got to the end of this bullet point.
- Anyway, at this point, I realize this is turning into a bad copy of the Topless Robot FAQ, which is almost as funny as the last one and is better and explains the, uh, plot.
Transformers 3 was such a disappointment. In almost making sense, it became a total mess of a movie. Unlike the glorious, absurd, anti-referential pastiche of its predecessor, its pretensions of being, like, ‘a film that you would go and watch’ ruin it totally. And the one word that flashed throughout my mind as the film went started with ‘F’. No, not ‘fuck me, I can’t believe I’m watching it’. And no, not ‘fail’, either.
It was “fascist”. It really was. It was the very worst excesses of American patriotism, imperialism, violence and libertarianism writ large, and completely and utterly uncritically and presented with brazen, unthinking… loudness (the sound really was spectacular).
So, on Nav’s patented review scale, this film also gets a solid rating of ‘F’, for ‘Fuck everything about this movie’.
Still, those CG effects are really good. Like, really really good.
No I mean reeeeee-huh-eeeally good.
Seriously.
Um, yeah.
“Like Walking Through Cobwebs”
Posted by Nav in Immigration and Diaspora, Pop Culture on August 6, 2010
Today on Twitter, a couple of people I follow had a brief conversation about polyamory. It was intriguing, in part because it was tinged with the ambivalence that can often characterize some aspects of modern feminism. Like the relationship towards traditional ideals of femininity, it’s hard to both disavow the structures that produced something – whether sun dresses or monogamy – when those same structures were part of the cultural milieu in which one was raised. To wit, you can be a feminist woman and yet still ‘not feel like yourself’ wearing men’s clothing; you can believe in polyamory and still get wigged out by it.
Polyamory represents an alternative to the social and material practice of monogamy. But rather than only being a different lifestyle, it is also part of a historical moment. The effects and causes of feminism – which is to say the combination of activism and socio-economic change like, for example, women working during World War II – have opened up space for a change in the social organization of sexual relationships. It’s not so much that the notion of polyamory never existed before as much as the social and material conditions for its practice were never very, um, favourable. That we exist in an era of ‘sexual liberation’, feminism, secularism, female economic independence etc. has made the option of polyamory a reality.
At the same time, what was clear during this conversation was the conflictedness that polyamory can introduce. We still live in an age when sexual fidelity and morality are linked. Additionally, there is, I’ve heard, some small amount of discourse committed to celebrating the notion of the lifelong love, ‘the one’ and monogamous marriage as the ultimate goal. What’s more, there are still the psychological impacts of polyamory: of not only the possibility of external, social censure, but a kind of internal punishment too, one that stems from directly contravening one of the core principles around which goodness, the good life and morality is centered.
So, naturally, you can see why I thought of the hijab.
This is an argument I’ve had floating in my mind for some time. In much the same way that polyamory is a sorta’ ‘edgy’ rejection of established social norms that carries with it both external social consequences and also psychological ones that come from flaunting standards, so too is the choice of a Muslim woman to uncover her hair.
I say this because, so often, the hijab vs. no-hijab debate is constructed in terms of freedom and personal liberty vs. repression and misogyny, as if all someone wearing a hijab must do is simply see the light, peel off her headdress and step into the future. But it so often misses that, like choosing to be polyamorous, it is a decision that removes one from – and places one against – an entire network of socio-cultural beliefs. It is not a single act or a solitary moment, but an ongoing reconfiguration of your relationship to a set of structures and practices that have not simply ‘governed your behaviour’, but constituted your identity. It is not about throwing off shackles, but instead, choosing to let your skin be chafed by a new pair.
But making matters even more complicated is the inextricability of rejecting of what are often called ‘traditional beliefs, and the accusation of becoming westernized. In the contemporary moment, articulating something like ‘Eastern’ (or, more specifically, Iraqi or Pakistani) feminism is essentially impossible to do outside of some kind of discourse in which change is a movement from East to West. As Fanon notes, history has been constructed such that the East is the past of a timeline on which the West is forever the present and the future. Or, to put it in slightly more contemporary terms, Microsoft Word recognizes the word ‘westernized’ but not ‘easternized’. That is not a viable option. It does not ‘exist’.
To take off the hijab, then, is always read as the inevitable movement toward the telos of western, individual liberty. But if one is concerned with a kind of ‘fidelity’ to an identity that is not simply about enabling or submitting to a neat East/West dichotomy – that one either participates in ‘traditional beliefs’* or assimilates to a set of western values – this presents a problem. Suddenly, your lack of faithfulness hurts not only those around you, but you yourself hurt too. You have betrayed something by becoming someone who cannot stick to one thing and one system. You have become a floating mark in a system that cannot locate you adequately because you are no longer recognizable by its most treasured precepts, ideas that form the very structural basis of social relations. You have sidestepped the control of female sexuality. You no longer makes sense within the ways of speaking about the individual or the woman or faithfulness because your actions contravene accepted truths.
What you do know though, is that with each step forward, the ‘fine meshes of power’ tug at you ever so slightly. They drag. They weigh. So that, as if walking through a stream of cobwebs, you are constantly reminded of your choice: to exist just on the edges of the world that made you as it keeps trying to pull you in.
Box Office Madness Redux
Posted by Nav in Pop Culture on April 14, 2010
Why redux? Because ‘Box Office Madness’ was the title of the first ever non-travelogue Scrawled in Wax post. It went up in August 2006. Which, I’ll be honest, makes me feel a little old. Well, that and my prodigious amount of grey chest hair.
Anyway.
At the time, I railed against what I saw to be the strange madness that saw people become obsessed over box office numbers. Tim and others have disagreed with me about this, but I still stick to the argument that it’s weird. And now, strangely, Techdirt – that bastion of free-market futurism run by Mike Masnick*, who loves to claim that the world has fundamentally changed and the solution is to intensify capitalism – backs me up.
Not in a deep way, mind you. They simply argue that box-office receipts are only a tiny fraction of how films make money, which means that the weekly breathless reporting is just misleading and misinformed.
But I guess I just liked the circularity of it all. Well, that and I like the word redux.
*I saw Masnick give a presentation at Mesh ’08, and it was really good. He’s smart and nice. I just disagree with his faith in free-market capitalism.
Sarah Silverman in NY Mag
Posted by Nav in Pop Culture on April 13, 2010
I’ve always been a bit fascinated by comedy. I can listen to comics (like Chris Rock) whose views I mostly disagree with because comedy seems this strange space of catharsis – an id to a superego cultivated by years of leftist grad-school inculcation.
So the provocative/offensive comedy of Sarah Silverman has always been a draw, because it’s always hovers near the edge of the transgressive.
All of which is a way of linking to this write-up/interview with Silverman about her book The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee.
(Yes, clearly I’m still in semi-linkblogging mode. SiW will likely stay that way until I get used to writing so many words a week.)
Avatar was not the most important film of 2009. Transformers 2 was.
Posted by Nav in Cultural Theory, Pop Culture on March 7, 2010
Tonight, there’s a good chance that Avatar will win a host of Oscars. When trying to figure out why, it seems there are two main explanations. Firstly, in a strange, circular logic, the Academy will confer honours on the film so that the Academy itself is seen as both relevant and populist. Dismiss ‘the most successful film of all-time’ (itself a dubious claim) and the Hollywood elite will seem out of touch and snobby.
Secondly, it’s because the film is seen as ushering in a new age in the medium, introducing the world to the wonders of 3D and its capacity to immerse audiences within a story with a never-before sense of immediacy.
But, when it comes to marking out the possibilities of storytelling available to us in the future, Avatar wasn’t the most important film of last year. Oh no, dear readers. When considering which film marked out a direction for North American film and culture, the moist important movie of last year was Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.
First, if you haven’t seen the film – and I’m willing to be that a good slice of you refused purely on principle – you first really need to read this summary on Topless Robot, partly because it’s both the best description of the film I’ve found, but also because one of the funniest things I’ve ever read.
Then, consider the following points, in which I make the case that while Avatar simply repeats the values and ideas of the past, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a paragon of both postmodern film and culture:
- Avatar signaled the distinction between its ‘good’ and ‘evil’ sides with extremely clear-cut visual clues: the hard, grey steel of humanity versus the soft, blue flesh of the Na’vi. There could be no confusion over who you were supposed to root for because the aesthetics of the film were part of the frame of establishing good and evil (as happens in many films).
- Transformers 2, by contrast, was shot in such a manner that fights between the robots made them indistinguishable. The only way you could tell the difference was when the action slowed so that you could see a robot delivering a final blow to another robot. Put another way, you were witness to the method through which your sympathies were aesthetically constructed through camerawork, perspective, editing etc. In Transformers 2, there is no essential distinction between good and evil; it is constructed for you as you watch the film.
- Avatar’s characters may generally be thin and one-dimensional, but they serve a particular function in the film that coheres within the film’s world. The ‘hot college student’ Decepticon, on the other hand, does not; her presence is largely inexplicable. More generally, the protagonists of Transformers: ROTF are there to fulfill a structural role so that the loose narrative of the film may move toward its final goal: the production of spectacle. But just as importantly, the protagonists exist as secondary to the structure that produces the spectacle, namely, the film itself. To translate that into theory-speak: it isn’t the human individual who is the basis of truth or reality; it is the systems of truth and discourse that produce the individual. Transformers 2 is a mainstream filmic manifestation of the post-structuralist inversion of the primacy of the subject. (You’re fucking right I just typed that with a straight face!)
- As the Topless Robot piece suggests so well, Transformers 2 does away with a need for narrative coherence. It is, however, far too easy to lament this fact as somehow indicative of Michael Bay’s idiocy (which is a fact) or the stupidity of modern audiences (which is totally not the case). Instead, by: 1) abandoning the need for narrative logic in the name of spectacle, and; 2) having this incoherence be embraced by millions around the world; we see the widespread acceptance of postmodernism. Rather than just being ensconced in ivory towers and the art world, Transformers: ROTF shows a global audience mature enough to deal with the absurdity and constructedness of all narratives. We know that the story is a construct meant to elicit a response and then become a cathartic release when the good guys win. We know that it is only gesturally referential to ‘the real world’ or ‘a logical world’ and that, instead, it is simply put together in order for us to experience spectacle, regardless of whether or not it hold together ‘as narrative’. T:ROTF shows that it doesn’t matter a whit whether narrative coheres, because we are now comfortable with the idea that no narrative actually coheres. We just try and make them do so.
- Even if that last point is a stretch, here’s my final one: Transformers 2 was the ballsiest movie I’ve ever seen. I’ve been moved after walking out of movies before. I’ve been sad, I’ve been happy, I’ve been reflective. I have, however, never left a movie giddy. Like, fully, completely giddy with the sheer, brazen, unabashed, mad absurdity that was Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Avatar used fancy new technology to trot a visually spectacular tired colonial trope. T:ROTF used a whack of new technology to revel in the complete non-meaning of spectacle. Ask yourself: which film was more honest? Which film was more endemic of its time? Flashy modern blue spectacle that repeats the evils of the past or grey, shiny, cool spectacle that simply says nothing and is proud of it?
I’m deliberately being a bit over the top with this. It’s partly because, as much as I enjoyed Avatar, I don’t quite understand how it could be nominated for best picture tonight. And I really believe that Transformers 2 was something important, even if it was inadvertent. And besides, arguing this has been a hobby of mine ever since I’ve seen it. Still – feel free to hit the comments and call me an idiot.
The Trouble Translating Sound
Posted by Nav in Immigration and Diaspora, Pop Culture on February 16, 2010
“Translation is treason.” – Old Italian proverb.
Like so many other 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants, over the past few years I have made various half-hearted attempts at learning my parents’ native tongue – which, in my case, is Punjabi.
No, wait: maybe I should type ‘Panjabi’.
Which is correct? No-one knows. Or, at the very least, nobody agrees. See, in the specific instance of P… – well, that language from Northwestern India and Eastern Pakistan – there is no explicit vowel between the the ‘p’ and ‘n’ sounds in the name of the language. It’s implied. In fact, probably the best way to type the word in English letters would be “P’njabi”. I think.
Which, when you’re slightly OCD about rules in language, is awesome. More to the point, it means that when we are called upon to translate how words sound, most of us are totally at a loss.
Why the confusion? Well, unless you count obscure and difficult to learn phonetic alphabets, there is no easy yet systematized set of rules that state clearly which letters in the latin alphabet signify which sounds in non-latinate languages. And as we see increasingly more examples of linguistic and cultural overlap, where learning languages and translation across cultural lines is a necessity, this feels like a problem that needs solving – ’cause what we have right now is a mess of inconsistency.
Bollywood is great for examples of this. In the word ‘kuch’ in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, the ‘u’ stands for a short ‘oo’ sound, as in ‘look’. Yet, in the song “Ishq Samunder” the ‘u’ signifies the same vowel sound as in ‘hut’. Similarly, the ‘a’ in Samunder is pronounced like the a in ‘ago’, while in ‘gham’ in Kabhi Kushi Kabhi Gham, the ‘a’ stands for a long ‘ah’ sound like in ‘car. Oh, settle in – we’re just getting started.
Sometimes this long ‘ah’ sound goes by a single ‘a’, but at other times it is indicated by ‘aa’, which is why you get both ‘dal’ and ‘daal’ on restaurant menus, and why most non-Indians pronounce – erm, dhaal? – as if it were the first syllable of the word ‘Dalhousie’. Fun!
More complicated, however, is that in… - crap: P’njaabi? – and hundreds of other languages, sounds exist which latinate letters can’t explicitly designate. Going back to ‘dal’, the first sound of the word is a soft d, formed by pushing the tongue against the fleshy bit just above one’s teeth and flattening the tip, making a sound halfway between ‘d’ and ‘th’. Because of this, many words with this soft d sound have it written as ‘dh’.
Trouble is, one has to distinguish between the aspirated and non-aspirated versions of the sound (i.e. the ones with and without ‘a strong exhale of breath’). The… fine! P’njahbee! – word for cilantro starts with the aspirated form of the ‘soft d’ syllable, which you make by placing the flattened tip of your tongue against the spot where the roof of your mouth and teeth meet and then exhaling air with the production of the sound (while, naturally, you spin anti-clockwise three times, glancing up at the sky at those times the moon is in the third quadrant).
So, when using latin script, some write the word for coriander as dhhania, others as dhania and others, most confusingly, as dhdhania, where the repetition indicates the aspiration. Keep in mind that that ‘a’ here is now the same sound as the ‘u’ in ‘cut’ – but that when you put ‘dhhania’ into ‘dal’, the a in ‘dal’ which should be better written ‘dhaal’, sounds like the ‘a’ in ‘czar’.
What? That’s totally clear. Or not.
Of course, one could object to a call for formalisation and systematization, claiming that it unnecessarily restrains creativity and play. But trip-ups in language are only fun when you’re in on the joke. To wit, linguistic slippage is entertainment to word-nerds, but just frustrating for everyone else.
People need to learn languages – and just as importantly, they should learn languages. The era of monolingualism should end; to speak only one language seems out of touch with the global future offered by the internet, particularly if we want to avoid online monoculture and foster something like real cultural exchange.
And in order to begin learning a language, I think some translation from one script to another is necessary. It’s all well and good to insist one simply learn a new script, but it’s not an easy thing, and represents a hurdle that slows fluency considerably. If one can use a phonetic spelling of another language, you can get going a heck of a lot more quickly. And if translating sound is a necessary intermediate step, then we really need to figure out how we’re going to do that.
So, who’s up for the challenge? ‘Cause, I’ll be honest – I could really use some help with this P’njaabee.
Unboxing a Bad Column
Posted by Nav in Culture of Technology, eBooks, Electronic Reading, newspapers, Pop Culture on October 30, 2009
I know I’m not the only one who’s been waiting for the unboxing column or post. Unboxing, if you’re unfamiliar, is the phenomenon of documenting taking a new, usually technological product out of its box, paying close attention to the packaging and conveying the feeling of ‘getting new gear’.
It’s the sort of thing dying for a good, insightful piece about the contemporary fetishisation of tech, and the blurring of identity, branding and desire. Alas, so far, we’ve all come up a bit short. I even know the perfect person to write it: a close friend, whose dissertation includes the ideal mix of the psychoanalysis of Lacan, the material bent of Marxism and the ‘hope’ of Ernst Bloch – but, alas, I can’t seem to convince him.
Of course, all that said, you know who really shouldn’t write a column on unboxing? Russell Smith. At least, that’s the impression I get reading his infuriating and exasperatingly stupid column this week.
I could tell you what the column is about. But then, I’m sure that without even reading the piece, you’ve already guessed its approach: it’s about boys and their toys and how sad it all is. It’s trite, supercilious fluff and takes the classic newspaper columnist approach and decries how ‘everything has gone wrong’ and how we should all shake our heads because, and I quote “oh, come on, every single thing about this is horribly sad.”
Rather than trying to understand the unboxing phenomenon (sorry, throwing out the word ‘fetish’ doesn’t count), Smith simply seeks to pass judgement. Instead of dealing with some of the reasons that cause people to so grossly idolise objects, so lubriciously love their stuff, Smith simply jumps to the part where he essentially tells you that he is not like this.
But not only is it bad writing. By jumping to evaluation, Smith is simply seeking to assert his position of intellectual authority. And while all analytic writing tries to do that on some level, there’s a distinction between clarifying and condescending, between smart, empathetic critique and simplistic condemnation. If you don’t explain why someone should hate something, instead relying on an assumed set of values that prioritises ‘that which came before’, you’re not a writer – you’re just an ass. You focus on judgment and miss any sort of actual analysis.
You might even delineate the distinction by trying to describe his column:
- Descriptive: Russell Smith is a contemporary culture columnist who has written on ‘unboxing’.
- Analytic: Russell Smith’s approach to unboxing reveals that he is invested in maintaining the privilege of ‘the writer’ and ‘the intellectual’ against the increasingly vocal, technophillic masses.
- Evaluative: Russell Smith is a fuckwad.
See how that works? The really useful part is the one in the middle – and it’s the part that Smith missed.
Why am I so worked up about this? Well for one, it highlights the all-too-common approach of non-techie media to ‘geek culture’. Too often, they attempt to understand cultural phenomena outside of the context of late capitalism, postmodernism etc., appealing to their readers’ most basic sense of ‘what is good and right and true’ – here meaning anything from ‘don’t play with toys’ to ‘go and read a book already!’ – to condemn a practice that requires a far more nuanced critique.
But it’s also another attempt to construct a relationship between print and authority, cementing a link between whose opinion counts and the medium it appears on. If the web has disrupted the concept of expertise, then columns decrying the brevity of Twitter, the narcissism of Foursquare, the emptiness of video games etc. are attempts to reassert the link between authoritative publications and authoritative voices. Smith’s column is an example of the very worst, precisely because it fails at doing analysis better than it appears elsewhere, displaying how simplistic analysis and kneejerk commentary have become the domain of print rather than the web.
To be clear, I think unboxing is a strange thing, something that should be criticised, if not occasionally vilified. But what Smith misses is that the loving affection given to the physical object is as much a historical reaction to digitization as it is an insidious effect of capitalist fetishism. Publicly salivating over your new iPhone may be a slightly sick, perverse attempt to recoup wonder; at the same time, it might also be the modern equivalent to ‘the smell of books’ or ‘the feel of paper”: a physical, sensual reminder of the wonder the medium can hold.
And the unboxing of the New Liberal Arts book shows how fetishising the object, when not co-opted by the dehumanising effects of capitalism, can actually bring one into a community, connecting one to others. It’s Penumbra’s fellowship, made manifest.
But, of course, we cannot claim that there is some good in all this newness; we cannot strive to find the hope in the slightly sad, intensely materialistic videos of geeks. We have to find a way to condemn.We have to find a way to instill fear. We have to find a way to reassure our readers that the things they believe still hold true.
After all, we have dead trees to sell.
Is Joan Holloway’s Body a Feminist Act?
Posted by Nav in Cultural Theory, Pop Culture on September 29, 2009
Wait, what?
I’ve bounced back and forth over this one. And this is going to annoy some of you because, well, I just don’t do feminism very well. It’s not for lack of trying, mind you. It’s just that, even when I try not to, I end up being an asshole anyway.
Still, you gotta’ try, right?
So.
On one side you have people who argue that by showing the voluptuous, zaftig Hendricks/Holloway as so unabashedly sexy – so remarkably in control of her sexuality – Mad Men challenges contemporary notions of attractiveness that idealise thinness. In fetishising both the fashion of the 60s and Joan Holloway’s decidedly ‘not-skinny’ body, Mad Men projects a differing model of the female desirability. Similar attempts to portray a more inclusive visions of (it must be said, white, typically attractive) women can feel so counter to the norm, that it makes some women want ‘to shout from the rooftops’.
On the other, you have people who argue that in presenting a specific ‘feminine ideal’ through the lens of the male gaze – the idea that representations of women always conform to the whims of an implied straight male viewer – isn’t a helpful move at all, but instead is simply a repetition of the objectification of women. In fact, even worse is that by explicitly making Joan an object of male desire, the show fetishises the act of fetishisation itself: it makes a hot woman being gawked at seem like an act of empowerment. And like Marilyn Monroe before her, Hendricks is ‘blessed’ with almost cartoonish hourglass proportions. It’s an expansion of an ideal only if you too can look like a skinny woman hiding two well-placed tires under her dress. (Look, I told you this was going to be bad.)
I haven’t really linked to any other opinions above, so what’s clear is that there are a lot of people with opinions floating around in my head - one of whom is probably a bit of a misogynist twit who likes to say stupid things like “man, Joan Holloway is really fucking hot”, particularly after a couple of G&T’s.
But as I roamed the streets late at night a couple of days ago, thinking – this is just something I do – what bothered me about the latter option is that it relies on the possibility of an alternative. It suggests there’s a better way to do things. And in an abstract sense there is. But when you consider audiences and economics and the entrenchment of gender norms – is there?
See, trouble is, we get mired in the same never-ending questions that have plagued feminism for decades: can you broadly change the idea of attractiveness without presenting a new vision of attractiveness in the public space?; is there any way to re-frame notions of attractiveness without asking individuals to aspire to some kind of ideal?; and is the entire notion of visually recognisable attractiveness that is about body types – rather than the things that bodies do – tenable from a feminist perspective?
These questions are too hard. For me, anyway. So let’s go to a better one.
Does seeing Hendricks/Holloway on screen make people feel better – especially women? My anecdotal evidence – based on a large, representative sampling of 2 or 3 women who, for reasons unknown, are still willing to speak to me – says yes.
But like I said, I do feminism badly.
So whaddya’ think?
How Do We Tell Stories About Our Age?
Posted by Nav in Cultural Theory, Culture of Technology, Electronic Reading, Pop Culture on September 25, 2009
For some time now, this question has been simmering at the back of my mind. It started well over a year ago when, suddenly frustrated by how hard it was to articulate the changes wrought by the web, I realised what I wanted was a story, not analysis. Enough brittle, steel words had been laid down. It was time for something else.
If what we ‘new liberal arts’ bloggers and writers were actually talking about was the way the present was spilling into an unknown future, suddenly it seemed even the most lucid analysis was, at best, like a clean, closed room with the blinds drawn. The outdoors, with its rolling hills, its horizons beckoning – that was where we needed to dwell. What we needed was a gesture towards half-formed thoughts, dream-like impressions, images seen from the window of a speeding train. A couple of things – a short-lived tumblr by Rex; a post here and there by Diana – cemented this new-found belief.
I had initially intended for this post to focus on one Mr. Penumbra. And I’ll get to that soon, because when it comes to stories about our time, I think it does smart, interesting stuff – and I just kinda’ loved it. So, sometime in the next couple of weeks, I will write about Robin’s writing and we’ll call that part 2.
But a couple of nights ago, I saw Goodness, a play written by Michael Redhill that, tangentially at least, gestures to the Rwandan genocide. Now that’s a world away from stories about the post-textual, microfame or 3D data visualisation. But I wanted to touch on it because: 1) it’s worth keeping in mind that, as we chatter on both excitedly and sincerely about the age of the screen, people continue to suffer and die in ways they shouldn’t have to; 2) those things don’t seem as disconnected as they originally appear.
But that sentence is a tough one, isn’t it? I mean, how can you ‘tangentially gesture toward the Rwandan genocide’? How do you use it as a marker for something else without cheapening it, without somehow making miniature an event that defies words, resists representation?
The answer – as much as there can ever be answers – lies, I think, in those last ideas: it defies words and resists representation. What might you ever say or film or paint to capture it? What exactly might you do where you’d sit back and say, “yes, now I have said enough”.
So, we’re left with Goodness. Now, as much as I joke about how little I read, in my short life I’ve stumbled across a lot of literature and film. Less than most of my peers, sure – but a lot. And, though I know I’m rather prone to hyperbole, Goodness may have been one of the most stunning, devastating and masterful pieces of art I’ve ever witnessed. I was shaken by it; pushed to the edge of something I didn’t know existed. But beyond its power as theatre – its capacity to elicit the feeling that somehow, almost against your will, you were slipping outside of yourself – it made me think: why did it work so well as a story about our time?
Well, I don’t know. When something borders on a kind of personal experience of the sublime, it’s hard to parse how it worked its effect on me. But there were these simple things:
- There was no truth at the end; only ambivalence.
- The personal and global overlapped; so much so, at times they were indistinguishable to the characters on stage.
- It wasn’t simply a tale of who gets to tell stories; it was also a story about the pressure exerted by narrative upon itself to coalesce and to ‘make sense’.
- Who tells a story is important. This has nothing to do with ‘authenticity’.
- That stories are told is important; we have no idea how the database and the network are going to constitute individuals in relation to both history and the future – or if they in fact can.
- Laughter is the only thing that allows for humanity in the fact of the abject.
- Everything of consequence happens between people – often in the silent spaces between looks and caresses and touches. This is because life actually has no words; those little audible markers are just the signposts by which we recognise our movement from one moment to the next.
How do we tell stories about out time? I don’t know. But it seems that the age of wholeness is over. We no longer know things.
A storyteller is a person who points to the dark and asks you not simply to imagine, but to let yourself be enveloped by it.
You won’t see yourself in it. And you may not see your hand in front of yourself.
But you will be changed as, stumbling into the next minute, the next hour, coughing, struggling to catch your breath, you see a glimmer of just how big the dark is.
Fuck the (CanLit) Farm Novel?
Posted by Nav in Literature, Pop Culture on September 22, 2009
I know there are some Canadian Literature nerds who occasionally read this blog, so… Is CanLit too rural? My initial response to this was “Yes! God, yes!” – until I remembered that I may have read around 10 Canadian novels in my entire life. So I’m not exactly qualified to judge.
Still, since I’ve been thinking so much recently about cities and their capacity to make people and culture – to make no mention of planning a Toronto short story collection in my head that I’ll probably never write – it seems a fair question to ask here. Is Canada’s vision of itself still too focused on the ole’ “hewers of wood, drawers of water” cliche – especially when around 80% of the population lives in cities? Or is the sometimes rural focus of Canuck writing a way of re/constructing a past and a cultural legacy that one might morph and play with?
Note: This was also just an excuse for me to bust out a picture of Autumn, which is my favourite time of year.
Note 2: The only downside to that link is that calls As for Me and My House a “lobotomy between two covers”. I dunno’ – I sorta’ loved it. But then, it is a very morose, introspective novel.
