Moot Point

“We should go to the good bookstore. They’re having a sale. 30% off film books!”

Alex is trying to cheer me up, because I lost $20 and I am sad. It’s really not the end of the world, but I hate feeling irresponsible.

As I walk to the (typically) tiny film section, the first thing I see is this:

My day is saved! Then I open it up to see how much it costs, and I see this:

!!!* Continue Reading »

So you know that girl on Myspace who is apparently on a hunger strike to get Sanjaya voted off American Idol?

Everyone’s like “haha that is so dumb,” with which I surely agree, but I really think the more profound craziness of using an extreme method of political protest (employed by Gandhi, early suffragettes, and recently, prisoners at Guantanamo Bay) to try to change what is truly going wrong with a television show is too depressing to contemplate.

Someone is so committed to the purity of Fox-produced, Coke- and Ford-sponsored American Idol that they are willing to starve themselves. In a country that is at war. This is what Adorno and Horkheimer were talking about.

So, I’m reading my feminist feeds, and I notice this post on the WIMN’s Voices blog about how America’s Next Top Model had a crazily misogynist photo shoot in which the girls all posed as murder victims in their underwear:

The “beautiful corpses” episode of Top Model (a series that traffics in bottom-feeder humiliation, objectification and degradation of women in the name of fashion, fun and beauty for the deep profit of integrated marketers such as Cover Girl and Seventeen magazine) serves as sharp reminder that what millions of reality TV viewers believe is harmless fluff… is anything but. ANTM is less a “guilty pleasure,” as TV Guide and infotainment shows have called it, than it is a cynical CW cashcow guilty of making product placers, and Tyra Banks, rich at the expense of not only the self-esteem of the few hungry (in every sense) young strivers appearing in the modeling competition, but of the millions of girls and women, boys and men, who watch the show uncritically, learning that unhealthily underweight, Brazilian-waxed waifs can only achieve the ultimate in beauty when they appear to be erotically, provocatively maimed and murdered (as they were this week), self-abusive (as when models were made to pose as bulimics mid-purge last season*), corpses (as they were during a prior season when the challenge involved posing in caskets lowered into open graves in a cemetery).

I kind of disagree, and when I say kind of, I mean not necessarily with her characterization of the show, which is pretty true, but that that’s all that’s going on with ANTM. (Actually, I think the first photoshoot this year, in which the girls were all tarted up to portray political viewpoints like “Pro-gay marriage,” and “pro-straight marriage,” or “vegan” and “pro-meat,” or “pro-death penalty” and “pro-life in prison” did a way bigger disservice to women, but I guess you could also just call that camp.)

I’m not going to pretend that the show (or the fashion industry) is in any way not misogynist, but how many people do you think watch the show “uncritically”? I mean, maybe I’m giving people too much credit, obviously they get tons of girls who try out every year. But I think the majority of viewers watch it with some level of irony-meter turned on.

This isn’t to say that it’s in any way helping the world with its standards of beauty, but I generally lean toward seeing ANTM in particular as sending mixed messages. Just because something is a corporate product cynically produced to make a bunch of money for Tyra Banks and her production company doesn’t mean it can’t also Trojan-horse in some contradictory messages.

Its many flaws are (for me) at least somewhat mitigated by the way it shows how constructed and fake the images of women put out there by the fashion industry are. Instead of pretending that models are somehow naturally that thin or that nonchalant or that they wake up all made up like that, the show emphasizes the work of modeling, and how the poses that “look good” in the fashion world are, for the actual models, totally uncomfortable and unnatural. So far this hasn’t really sparked a fashion revolution, but I think emphasizing the constructedness of conventional beauty — through make-up, weaves, unnatural body positions, etc — is actually pretty interesting and could be positive, in a “gradual shifting of perspective” kind of way.

I don’t think that actually is in any way a defense for the weirdly straight-faced way they treated the whole “violent death” photo shoot (and it was beyond awful to make the girl who was mourning the very recent death of a friend to play a corpse). Usually I am the first person to be like “hear, hear, feminist criticism of pop culture!” Maybe I’m just feeling defensive because I watched the show and it didn’t gross me out, especially not to “letter writing” proportions. It’s not that it wasn’t bad, it just didn’t occur to me that it was appreciably worse than anything else they do on the show; I’m inclined to think that literalizing that fashion=lifeless women could have been fascinating/hilarious, if it had been handled less creepily by the judges, or taken to a campier extreme.

*It was actually only one girl. And given that she was eating cake, it was more “mid-binge.” The rest of them posed as other goofy “modeling industry stereotypes,” like “girl with a tiny annoying dog.” I’m not defending it, I’m just saying.

So I was uh, getting ready to go to the library (and mourning a certain TV death¹) when I came upon Pajiba’s “Guide to Third Date Flicks”, the premise being that on the third date, you bare your cinematic soul to your prospective mate or whatever. I usually don’t enjoy this kind of humour because of the high “men are like this, but women are like that” quotient, but then I also enjoy judging people based on what stuff they like², so I’m not sure whether to endorse the article. Maybe because it hit so awfully close to home:

If either partner sticks in Truffaut, David Lynch, Von Trier, Bertolucci, Malick or anyone else of their ilk, someone is already trying too hard to impress — if he/she is actually an intellectual heavyweight, there is no need to bother with Le Crime de Monsieur Lange unless he/she is out to prove something or he/she is an asshole movie critic (or film student) and, trust me, you don’t want to go there. Roman Polanski, Jean-Luc Godard, foreign films, and documentaries might suggest a high level of intelligence, but they’re not good third-date choices unless you’re trying to scare away your Ashton Kutcher types or sleep with one of your grad students, who feign interest to procure an A in your class. Don’t get me wrong: There is something to be said for a cerebral mate, but anyone who discusses auteur theories on a third date probably doesn’t wash his or her hair very often and will likely end up trying to talk you into an “open relationship” at some point.

Which is funny because Alex and I actually watched Alphaville on our third date. (Furthermore, dear Pajiba: film students are capable of love too. Also, hygiene.)

Funnier still:

She’s Either a Complete Wack Job or The Woman of Your Dreams: Annie Hall.

Or both! I am pretty sure I made Alex watch Annie Hall on our next date.

Pajiba ends by recommending Almost Famous as the ultimate Third Date movie, and are also favourable to the better Jon Cusacks. Now, the thing is, and maybe boys don’t know this, but there are two kinds of girls: the kind that love the Cusack and think that tape deck thing is the Most. Romantic. Ever. and the kind who thinks that any guy who’s that into kickboxing is an automatic write-off and find the whole thing kind of creepy.

I don’t really have a point for all this, except to say that on St. Patrick’s day, instead of spending the day getting drunk, like a good Irishman (which I partially am), I went to check out the new Urban Outfitters (Vancouver finally can buy overpriced t-shirts!), which was the usual mix of really cute, too expensive, and “so ridiculous I feel vaguely embarrassed to be shopping here.” Then I bought some pants on sale at Banana Republic and we ambled over to the Cinematheque to see my new favourite movie, Rivette’s classic Celine and Julie Go Boating. (Dudes, it is like someone took all the angst out of Being John Malkovich, by which I mean Charlie Kaufman must have seen this movie 100 times, and added some pyscho-drama angst, to get treated as the most original screenwriter evar.)

So to review, Alex and I spent St. Paddy’s seeing a three-hour French movie.

Tonight we are catching the one Rivette made with lady pirates. I don’t think there is any movie I could want to see more. (Edit: We are not doing that! Because it is on Thursday! When we will in fact go. I am dumb.)

¹ You know which one. I was totally spoiled by the time I saw it like two weeks ago, but I am still not over it. I am so invested in this show, I can’t even talk about it.
² Not you! It never works for people I already like. It only works for strangers on whom I can make snap judgements. (They are probably actually nice people, but I am High Fidelity in gender reverse, with movies, so there.)

Okay, so someday historians are going to look at 300 and be like “Damn, yo! People in 2007 sure hated people of Middle Eastern and African descent and also those who are sexually indeterminate!” It is basically like someone thought, hey, let’s take all the fears of the “average” “North American man” and then make a movie of it. This is not something that has escaped notice.

Delicacies of dismemberment aside, 300 is notable for its outrageous sexual confusion. Here stands the Spartan king Leonidas (Gerard Butler) and his 299 buddies in nothing but leather man-panties and oiled torsos, clutching a variety of phalluses they seek to thrust in the bodies of their foes by trapping them in a small, rectum-like mountain passage called the “gates of hell(o!)” Yonder rises the Persian menace, led by the slinky, mascara’d Xerxes. When he’s not flaring his nostrils at Leonidas and demanding he kneel down before his, uh, majesty, this flamboyantly pierced crypto-transsexual lounges on chinchilla throw pillows amidst a rump-shaking orgy of disfigured lesbians. (From the Village Voice review.)

Basically, yeah. But like, it’s not even subtext. They are not even trying to disguise it with elves and wizards and passionate homosocial friendships. It’s just exactly what it is. Almost everyone who’s immoral is grossly physically deformed or otherwise marked. The pure beautiful Spartans refuse to kneel to the sexually-ambiguous Persians, they say because they value their freedom, but freedom really seems like lip service to war, apparently the only ideal and occupation that anyone in Sparta has. The violence itself is glorious: the action slows down to catch floating droplets of blood, or show the pure graphic beauty of a whole army falling off a cliff. It’s war via Busby Berkeley. It is the gladiator movie pared down to its most basic elements. But I don’t think you can make the mistake of thinking it’s being cleverly overdetermined: it’s not winking at you anymore than it’s trying to make a secret of what it’s doing. It’s just showing America exactly what it thinks America wants to see.

Thing 1: I am sick. I am not really sick enough to get out of doing stuff, and this is kind of a slack week because my profs are SCMS-ing, but I had a bunch of stuff I wanted to catch up on this week, as opposed to catching up on forming opinions about American Idol contestants.

Thing 2: I missed marking International Women’s Day yesterday, except by reading about the prevalence of rape in the US military, including the story of one woman, who was jailed for desertion after her complaints that she was raped by her superior officer fell on deaf ears. Also, Rach pointed me to this Feministe post, about a creepy law school message board that sexually harassed Jill and a bunch of other women. Ooh, and let’s not forget about Feminist Icon McG’s stance that the Pussycat Dolls represent “third-wave feminism.” Meanwhile, Canada has fewer elected women representatives than Rwanda and Afghanistan. (PS Remember how when Belinda Stronach switched parties, at least one prominent conservative man called her a whore?) I hate the world.

To the guy who loudly said “ew” or made similar disgusted noises when the naked parts of the Rubenesque prostitute appeared on screen for about thirty seconds in The Lives of Others last night:

Stop going to the movies until you can learn to act like a grown-up.