Moot Point

Because I am, as a blogger, somewhat inconsistent in bringing you the quality pop cultural analysis you expect, allow me to point you to some other analysis of same:

First, a discussion of Valentino as the first teen idol at Pop Feminst, which is part of an ongoing teen idols series that combines the greatness of nostalgia with tought-provoking and cogent arguments in favour of the power of the teen girl as consumer and cultural arbiter. At the end of her post, Rachel asks some interesting questions:

Valentino is a man who lived a celebrity without precedent. How much of the construction of the “teen idol” is socio-historical (based primarily in Valentino’s androgynous template), and how much of it is intuitive, or– though I despise the word– “natural”? Why was the first teen idol a movie star and not (as is much more common) a music star? Was it because Valentino predates rock ‘n’ roll/pop? Can Valentino be seen as a historical figure in rock ‘n’ roll, having set the standard for the ideal fandom?

Most important: with the 19th Amendment ratified in the United States 1920, was Valentino’s meteoric rise in 1921 somehow connected to the anxiety/energy surrounding women’s liberation?

I suspect the first teen idol being a movie star has a lot to do with the non-existence in 1921 of synchronized sound on film.

On a completely unrelated note, I was thinking about this post on This Recording while I was watching one of the myriad Family Guy reruns that are on my television in any given day. Molly quotes Cartman on his Family Guy hate:

Everywhere I go: “Hey Cartman you must like Family Guy, right?” “Hey, your sense of humor reminds me of Family Guy, Cartman!” I am nothing like Family Guy! When I make jokes they are inherent to a story! Deep situational and emotional jokes based on what is relevant and has a point, not just one random interchangeable joke after another!

On the one hand that is an entirely true criticism of Family Guy, because South Park is still making satire in the classical way — when they make a joke, it usually has a point, even if I don’t always agree with it. Family Guy has a problem, I think, in that their poor taste comedy sometimes blurs the line between, for example, making fun of racist culture and just being racist,¹ but I think the reason Family Guy is so popular is the same reason that torture porn movies make so much money: there’s no clear agenda they’re pushing, the spectacle is in the offensiveness. The whole point of Family Guy is like “Look what I made you watch! That dog just punched that baby! That guy is a total rapist! And you’re laughing at it!” It’s kind of a dialogue with the viewer about taste. Does this mean that it basically just makes people really comfortable with poor taste and offensiveness? Maybe. Especially when it’s just the same thing week after week. Also, when people quote it out of context without realizing that, coming from a cartoon, something might have ambiguous status on the satire-offensiveness line, but coming from just like, a dude you know, it moves onto the wrong side.

Okay, back to the thesis.

Emily Gould gets maybe too recursive on how she would have responded to her own NYT Mag story:

If I was still working at Gawker or another media blog, rushing to move on to the next post, I probably would have glanced through an article this long for maybe five minutes, skimmed the initial responses and gotten the sense that other people hadn’t liked it, and then started formulating a post along these lines:

a) Aw, poor doddering New York Times, trying to clue us into the niceties of this nutty “Web blogging” trend. What a pathetic attempt to boost online readership. And, like, soooo long!

b) Look at that picture. And she clearly can’t write — hello, that “my life was cozy and safe”? Is she in a freshman-year personal-essay class? — so obviously she is only in The Times because she’s marginally attractive. Or maybe she’s sleeping with someone influential there.

c) And if I’d actually read the article, I probably would have read the part describing Gawker and the self-reflexive world Gawker describes and I would have felt personally attacked, like someone was telling me my all-consuming job and, therefore, my life, were meaningless. So I would have responded defensively. Like, how dare this person position herself as somehow above the stuff she used to do! She’s no better than us, really. In fact, she’s worse.

d) And you know, on some level I would have felt jealous, so I probably would have called me an attention whore or a narcissist, because that’s what you call people who are getting the kind of attention you feel you deserve but are, unfairly, not getting.

NYT made me laugh re the 1001 Books thing:

I appreciate the sense of urgency because I feel it myself. But when Professor Boxall brings death into the picture, he sets the bar very high. Let’s have a look at some of these mandatory titles. Not only is it not necessary to read “Interview With the Vampire” by Anne Rice before you die, it is also probably not necessary to read it even if, like Lestat, you are never going to die. If I were mortally ill, and a well-meaning friend pressed Anaïs Nin’s “Delta of Venus” into my trembling hands, I would probably leave this world with a curse on my lips.

“In Defense of Saccharin(e)” by Leslie Jamison, so an essay after my own heart:

Our capitalist ethos loves a certain kind of legibility—insisting we can read sloth and discipline tallied in bank accounts and inscribed across the body itself—and artificial sweeteners threaten this. They offer a way to cheat the arithmetic of indulgence and bodily consequence, just like sentimentality offers feeling without the price of complication. Oscar Wilde summed up this indignance: “A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.” This speaks to a privileging of the Horatio Alger ethos within our aesthetic economies: you need to earn your reactions to literature, not simply have easy sentiment handed out like food stamps across the boundaries of the text.

How do we earn? By parsing figurative opacity, close reading metaphor, tracking nuances of character, disseminating real world repercussions.

We are disgusted when anything comes too easily. But also greedy. We want to have our cake without eating it too. Many women describe heaven as a place where food doesn’t have calories. And now we’ve done it here on Earth: liberated our bodies from the sins of our mouths.

(This last via Jezebel, who take the whole sweetener metaphor a kind of literally.)

1. Sixteen Candles (John Hughes, 1984): I have to confess, I kind of hated this. I wanted to like it, I love The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink, so I kind of figured I’d like this. But…uh, there is some rape in it? That is not portrayed as horrible and ugly but as though it’s like somehow nice that the rich popular dude “gives” his passed out drunk girlfriend to a nerdy virgin to drive home. And then she wakes up in the morning and is nice to him, and tells him that she “enjoyed” it. Uh, ew.
   Also that whole Long Duck Dong thing is also kind of racist? It could have not been, but it so, so was. The Molly Ringwald can’t catch a break bits are actually pretty funny, as are the John Cusack and that other guy geek chorus, and I get the whole Bakhtinian carnival thing¹ but the whole thing, it’s kind of gross. I realize it’s supposed to be a classic for our times, but it has not aged well at all.
   
   I still love you, Molly Ringwald!
2. What Have I Done To Deserve This?! (Pedro Almodóvar, 1984): This holds up really really well; it’s Almodóvar’s fourth film and the cinematography and storytelling are leaps and bounds above the first three. It’s not as polished or bright as the stuff that came after and that really made him famous, but I found it surprisingly enjoyable to watch again.
3. The Law of Desire (Pedro Almodóvar, 1987): I’ve probably said contradictory things before, but this is my favourite Almodóvar. Things I like: it is beautiful, visually daring in cinematography and fantastically overwrought in mise-en-scene, with ’80s fashion and kitsch altars; you get gay love treated as just part of life, without any kind of weird stress or hysteria, that may not seem like a big deal now, but it sure as hell was in 1987; young, crazy Antonio Banderas, in repressed gay love with Eusebio Poncela, seduced by his movies; Carmen Maura’s performance as the transsexual Tina is still one of the best things I have ever seen, she seems so aware of her body and she seems to feel everything so unabashedly. This was the movie that made me fall in love with Almodóvar.

Oh hey so after putting it off and being stuck in my horrible long hair rut for years, I finally sprung for a haircut. Continue Reading »

There is actually only one weekly movie this past week, because of a brief trip to exotic Ottawa (and actually exotic Gatineau as well) for family stuff.

1. Matador (Pedro Almodóvar, 1986): This one’s really grown on me since the first time I watched it. I think my problem was that I was looking too hard for stuff below the surface when obviously the surface was the whole point. So instead of doing a capsule review and image (which I could do, I promise, I’ve been writing my ass off about this movie), here are my top 5 Matador frame grabs in the giantest files ever: Continue Reading »

Because I am easing myself back in to doing work. The ones I’ve read are bolded; by my count I’ve read 91 of the 1,001 (which are by the way from this book), which isn’t bad but is less impressive when you remember that I was an English major so a bunch of them were assigned. Ones I’ve started but not finished (not necessarily because I didn’t want to in most cases) and/or read part of are in Italics. I took the list from here, via kottke; the whole thing is reproduced behind the fold so that if I ever have time to read novels again I’ll have some ideas. I bet I’d do better on the movies list.

*Which frankly seems overly weighted toward current fiction (there are 70 books from the last nine years, but only a couple hundred from the entire 19th century, which makes sense because the field has kind of been winnowed down there, based on what survived — I really think that historically the 19th and 20th century will be seen as the peak of the novel) and seems to have like every book by the big contemporary authors. I read Money and I’m glad I did, but I don’t want to read everything Martin Amis ever wrote, you know? Eh, it is flawed, but so are the general requirements of being well-read. Continue Reading »

Weekly Movies is probably going to be short on detail this week. I hurt my back and it still hurts to type a little. I did watch movies and not spend the whole week being obsessed with Gossip Girl, I promise. (Oh, but while we’re on GG: an entire (awesomely detailed) tumblr devoted to the greatest episode of TV ever.)

1. Labyrinth of Passions (Pedro Almodóvar, 1982): This is Almodóvar’s second film, when he still was a wacky, trashy punk. How many Academy Award-winning directors have appeared in their own films, in drag, performing a New Wave song that if I’m not mistaken is partly about having sex with rats in the sewer? I’m guessing not very many.
2. Waiting For Guffman (Christopher Guest, 1996): I had never seen this, but I had seen Best In Show. This is better. It actually really reminded me of the best episodes of The Office, because you have the mockumentary factor, the fact that these are people whose lives you don’t necessarily envy and whose denials you can see through, but there’s still something really beautiful about them. I really loved the one guy on town council or whatever who was just completely enraptured with Corky.
3. Southland Tales (Richard Kelly, 2007): Okay, I’m not going to lie. This isn’t (as I’d hoped), a secret masterpiece. It’s not a good movie. Some parts of the story still don’t make sense, and not in a “man, this movie’s so complex” way, in a “there is no explanation for this chain of events” way. I was kind of okay with that, because all the porn stars and Marxists and WWIII and the oil running out and the scary government internet surveillance and the Rock being wrapped up in this big, sprawling messy narrative where everyone in the movie ends up riding a zeppelin kind of captures something real about the culture, even if I do think it was at least half accidental. But, more importantly, it’s a hell of a lot of fun. Every scene with Sarah Michelle Gellar is comedy gold (I’d really forgotten ho funny she is); and obviously all the Amy Poehler and Cheri Oteri stuff was also actually funny, because Richard Kelly was all up with the political satire, but he still seemed to get that a lot of “Marxists” are really lame. For me though, the highlight was definitely Justin Timberlake, scarred and on drugs, lipsynching to “All These Things That I’ve Done” and pouring beer all over himself. Don’t ask me why.
   
4. Romance & Cigarettes (John Turturro, 2006): This is another neo-musical (which Southland Tales almost is), with actors singing along with old songs that express their feelings, and the ways that the musical sections, which start out clearly coded as fantasy, kind of seep into the world of the movie a bit. This one is strange, but it’s actually worth seeing. There’s an amazing cast (James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon, Kate Winslet, Steve Buscemi, Mandy Moore, Mary-Louise Parker, Amy Sedaris, etc), it’s set in a working-class neighbourhood, it’s really depressing, and I have been thinking a lot about pop cultural nostalgia, of which this movie is a really interesting example. It’s like Woody Allen movies, in that it’s apparently set in the present day, but all the references are about a generation too old for everyone.

From The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 by Michel Foucault, trans. Robert Hurley, pub. Vintage Books, pp. 71-72

Dating a gay guy is one thing, but lying to your friends about sex is unforgivable.

Perhaps this production of the truth, intimidated though it was by the scientific model, multiplied, intensified, and even created its own intrinsic pleasures. It is often said that we have been incapable of imagining any new pleasures.

We have at least invented a new kind of pleasure: pleasure in the truth of pleasure, the pleasure of knowing the truth, of discovering and exposing it, the fascination of seeing it and telling it, of captivating and capturing others by it, of confiding it in secret, of luring it out in the open–the specific pleasure of the true discourse on pleasure.

The most important elements of an erotic art linked to our knowledge about sexuality are no to be sought in the ideal, promised to us by medicine, of a healthy sexuality, nor in the humanist dream of a complete and flourishing, and certainly not in the lyricism of orgasm and the good feelings of bio-energy (these are but aspects of its normalizing utilization), but in this multiplication and intensification of pleasures connected to the production of the truth about sex.

The learned volumes, written and read; the consultations and examinations; the anguish of answering questions and the delights of having one’s words interpreted; all the stories told to oneself and others, so much curiosity, so much scandal, so many confidences offered in the face of scandal, sustained–but not without trembling a little–by the obligation of truth; the profusion of secret fantasies and the dearly paid right to whisper them to whoever is able to hear them; in short, the formidable “pleasure of analysis” (in the widest sense of the latter term) which the West has been cleverly fostering for several centuries: all this constitutes something like the errant fragments of an erotic art that is secretly transmitted by confession and the science of sex.

Must we conclude that our scientia sexualis is but an extraordinarily subtle form of ars erotica, and that it is Western, sublimated version of that seemingly lost tradition? Or must we suppose that all these pleasures are only the by-products of a sexual science, a bonus that compensates for its many stresses and strains?

In any case, the hypothesis of a power of repression exerted on our society on sex for economic reasons appears to me quite inadequate if we are to explain this whole series of reinforcements and intensifications that our preliminary inquiry has discovered: a proliferation of discourses, carefully tailored to the requirements of power; the solidification of the sexual mosaic and the construction of devices capable not only of isolating it but of stimulating and provoking it, of forming it into focuses of attention, discourse, and pleasure; the mandatory production of confessions and the subsequent establishment of a system of legitimate knowledge and of an economy of manifold pleasures.

We are dealing not nearly so much with a negative mechanism of an exclusion as with the operation of a subtle network of discourses, special knowledges, pleasures, and powers.

At issue is not a movement bent on pushing rude sex back into some obscure and inaccessible region, but on the contrary, a process that spreads it over the surface of things and bodies, arouses it, draws it out and bids it to speak, implants it in reality and enjoins it to tell the truth: an entire glittering sexual array, reflected in a myriad of discourses, the obstination of powers, and the interplay of knowledge and pleasure.

XOXO

Okay, I’m not even a little embarrassed about liking Gossip Girl anymore after the hour of wonder that was last night’s show. There’s still all the amazing catty campiness (”And to think, I almost asked you to wear a matching dress tonight”) but it was actually really fantastic asterisk-free gripping drama all the way tonight. (I am behind-the-folding this because I talk about the big! revelation! and it’s really not the kind of thing I want to spoil for anyone who hasn’t seen it yet!)

Continue Reading »

If anyone’s been breathlessly following my academic career, what’s up is that I’m finished all my coursework, but I still have like 80 pages of thesis left to write this summer. So I of course went to the movies twice this week. I still haven’t seen Baby Mama or Harold and Kumar, both of which I want to.

1. Forgetting Sarah Marshall (Nicholas Stoller, 2008): I know a lot of feminist critics are way more down on Judd Apatow than I am (as are some of my feminist friends), and I totally get why but I respectfully think that focusing on dudes isn’t necessarily a flaw, it’s only a flaw because there are so few movies that do focus on women. (I definitely don’t agree with everything in that Manohla Dargis piece, especially not her characterization of Legally Blonde as another Pretty Woman or “one of those aspirational comedies in which women empower themselves by having their hair and nails done.” Legally Blonde is such a rare win for lady-films because it’s actually about a young woman empowering herself by being awesome at law school. But, it’s interesting.) Anyway, I feel bad that I’ve placed this whole disclaimer because I shouldn’t have to apologize for liking this movie. It’s delightful. Jason Segel is probably the most likeable of the whole Apatow crew and so makes the most sense as a (kind of) romantic hero. Also, while I question the fact that this movie relies on average-looking dude Jason Segel having to choose between such phenomenal hotties as Kristen Bell and Mila Kunis, it is only because it’s unfair that Segel gets to be average-guy goodlooking, but the women in the movie have to be Hollywood goodlooking. (Obviously it makes plot sense in terms of Kristen Bell’s character, who is a TV star, but you know.) Anyway, the point is, it’s a delightful movie. Everyone’s funny, including K-Bell, whose character doesn’t actually turn out to be evil and you do get a sense of why she liked Segel’s character Peter in the first place (and also why he liked her); they kind of leave her character on a weird note, but it’s not really a complete villainization and the movie is kind of better if you pretend that scene didn’t happen (you will know the one I mean if you have seen the movie). Also, and mainly, the funny. Kristen Bell’s character Sarah Marshall is on a crime show that gets cancelled during the course of her vacation — which was, I believe, shot around the same time last year that Veronica Mars got cancelled; and they have this whole joke about this horror movie “she” made about how people die through their cellphones — which sounds an awful lot like Pulse: you know I love the meta. While I’m at it I should probably address the comical presence of penis in the film, given my late preoccupation with cinematic penis. I think it’s nice that they’re trying to make the male frontal nudity less taboo in general, but it was interesting to me that the joke wasn’t even that he was naked, the joke — the thing that got the laugh — was that they showed the penis at all.
   Plus — no one told me this before going in — a major plot point involves a Dracula puppet musical that Segel’s character is writing. This means that Jason Segel actually wrote some of said Dracula puppet musical, which basically means that I love him. (According to some interview on youtube, he actually was working on it in real life, to “launch his career.” Also, he’s writing the new Muppet movie, which means I love him even more.) Anyway here is an unnervingly literal slideshow video someone made of “Dracula’s Lament”:
2. Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963): So Godard was kind of a misogynist, but man, he makes beautiful movies. Every frame of Contempt is a work of art, even if I thought the film was flawed. The story is about this couple whose marriage is falling apart because the wife (Brigitte Bardot, constantly being beautiful and wearing wigs and changing her clothes) tells her husband she hates him. There is also a whole meta-movie thing, because the husband is a screenwriter for Fritz Lang’s adaptation of The Oddyssey, a story which everyone reads differently to suit their own view of the world. Jack Palance is definitely a highlight for me, as the movie’s over the top American producer who can barely contain his glee when he sees naked chicks in the dailies. I don’t really like movies that are like “women, how mysterious and changeable they are,” but at least this one seemed to acknowledge in its ambiguous characterization of Bardot’s character, that the mystery is essentially still the man’s problem. I did love the trailer though:
3. Pepi, Luci, Bom, and Other Girls of the Heap (Pedro Almodóvar, 1980): This is Almodóvar’s first film, and it’s certainly not his best work, but it is interesting. One thing that is surprsingly on display, even here, is the sense of the law as not really meaning very much, and trying to decide what that means: Pepi gets raped by a policeman and reacts by getting her friends to beat him up; Luci’s husband (the policeman) tries to use the law to get his wife back from her sadomasochistic relationship, but that doesn’t work, so he eventually gets her back by beating her up (which is forgivable because she wants to get beaten up, and yes I realize how problematic it is to have a movie whose main storyline is kind of a tortured excuse for spousal abuse but you have to understand, it’s about a suspended morality). Sorry, I’m getting all thesis-y on you there.
4. Iron Man (Jon Favreau, 2008): Okay so first off, Robert Downey Jr. is absolutely the perfect guy to play Tony Stark — he brings a lot of charm and danger that are absolutely necessary — and this movie is a pretty huge amount of fun. I could have done without the self-sacrificing minority character or the strangely doting female assistant, but they were sort of the least gross versions of either of those action movie tropes possible. I think it was really interesting in its politics. Alex and I were talking on the way home, and I made the observation that if they had wanted to, the movie could have taken a way harder line against the military than it did, but that it probably didn’t because a) this movie is a commercial property in America in 2008 and b) they likely had the cooperation of the US military in filming (which the internet confirms). Alex says (and I agree) that they weren’t explicitly pro-military, they just weren’t anti-military. But to my mind, that’s kind of conspicuously neutral, especially given the real-world situations the movie was about: the story is that Tony goes (awesomely) vigilante to destroy the weapons he designed that had been sold to the “bad guys” in Afghanistan and save the Afghani villagers that they are killing. But of course, in real life if Afghani war lords have US weapons, they likely didn’t get there because one corporate guy acting alone; everyone knows the US military (and their allies in Afghanistan) are fighting guys they helped train. Also, it’s kind of logically inconsistent to decide that making weapons is wrong and you shouldn’t do that because they might wind up killing innocent civilians. But…the US army’s bombs aren’t exactly not killing civilians, you know? It was smart and actually makes it a more interesting movie that someone with different politics could actually watch it and wind up coming to a completely different political conclusion.
   Also worth pointing out, from this io9 review: “It’s best to view Iron Man as a cyborg narrative rather than a superhero one, especially since it follows very few of the superhero conventions. [...] Because the super-suit is powered by the same glowy disk that keeps Tony alive, we’re never able to forget that it’s an extension of his body rather than a costume.”

Contempt still via lj film stills community