Friday, September 21, 2012
Sunday, September 16, 2012
I Lied: Roswell Actor B-Movie Face-off, Infections Galore
I'm fairly certain I'm never going back to Roswell. It's Tru Calling all over again. So I decided instead that it's high time for a Roswell star/unlikely consonant combination direct-to-video double-header. Not since Jessica Alba versus Jessica Biel has there been such an unnecessarily fabricated face-off: Jason Behr versus Brendan Fehr: it's the battle of the ehr's... OF THE CENTURY!
Meet the consonant contestants: Up first, let's welcome Jason Behr in The Tattooist (2007). Alternate movie title: Everything your Mother Warned you About Tattoos (and Samoans). Behr faces off against faux competitor and fellow Rowsell "bad boy" alien, Brendan Fehr, who doesn't-quite-star in the forgettably named The Forsaken (2001). Yes, it's a Behr-Fehr duel to the depths of oblivion and disrepute.
*
The Tattooist is off to a formidable start: it's incomprehensible, culturally insensitive, and the only thing the central romance has going for it over The Forsaken is that at least the lady love interest is conscious. We are introduced to Behr's character, who, as a child, demonstrates exceptional freehand tattoo skills. We see the character's first attempt at a tattoo here:
So ok, it's a little bit of a dated style what with the thorns, but the kid clearly has some artistic prowess. Which his father celebrates by saying The Lord's Prayer while slicing the design off of his son's arm. Cut to: present day. Behr's character is asleep in bed, and we see his scarred arm in the foreground. He proceeds to wake from his nightmare/flashback, get out of bed to get some air, and to let the camera linger lovingly on the massive tapestry of ink that spans most of his upper-body (and also his pale white ass). What follows is a variation on the Cultural Appropriation Curse story.
The Tattooist was produced by a prolific, if not award-winning Singapore production and distribution house. Behr's character, Jake, is a white American who likes to collect indigenous designs from across the world and sell them as medicine and hope to injured and sick people. He seems a little dead inside, as well he should, but much to my own disappointment, it's nothing that the whitest Pacific Islander lady-actor that the studio could find, can't fix. They meet in Singapore at a tattoo convention, where Jake exchanges one meaningful look with Sina (Mia Blake), and decides to follow her into a private area where some of her family are taking part in a traditional Samoan tattoo ritual.
The conversation that follows goes something like this:
Samoan Man: "Hey, man, why the fuck are you so entitled as to invite yourself in on our private, tented-off tribal ritual and sit down and watch us like we're television?"
Jake: "Oh, just always looking for new cultures to steal from!"
Samoan Man: "Yeah, fuck you."
Sina: "I don't have any dialog, except to vouch for you for no damn good reason, but I can tell that you are going to have sex with me later."
IMDB describes the movie as a story about "A young artist (who) unknowingly plays a role in releasing a deadly spirit as he attempts to learn the tatau, the Samoan tradition of tattooing." But no, IMDB, not true: Jake doesn't give a shit about learning Samoan tattooing. Jake is a spectator who leaves the tent when he learns there is nothing he can use for his healing ink scam. In fact, to show his level of cultural regard for the Samoans at the convention, Jake steals a traditional tattooing instrument from a case outside the tent.
So it's a classic story of boy meets girl, boy steals culturally significant object from girl, boy follows girl across international lines in the hopes of sleeping with and/or having a second line of dialog with girl, which is lucky for boy, because he's going to need girl to help him lift the curse he earned his pale white ass.
Not since the Brady boys found that Hawiian relic have the Pacific Islands seemed so darn creepy.
I could could further dissect this movie, pull out its inky bladder of latent terror of body modification culture AND indigenous ritual, but I will simply leave it at this: if you are a lover of supernaturally quick-acting infections, and scenes of people cutting off/otherwise removing patches of skin, this movie is a goldmine!
I would be remiss if I did not point out one thing about the sentient ghost-thing that drives the horror aspect of the film: when we finally see more than a flash of him, it is clear that despite the fact that the writing ostensibly calls for a member of the Samoan community to play the ghost, the thing shares no facial or bodily characteristics such with his numerous Samoan co-stars. I can't prove this, but he looks like a skinny white dude who has been painted ink black. So... definitely a fruitful addition to conversations about cultural sensitivity with that one.
Behr's main skill as an actor is his look of lovestruck concern. He gives the acting and dialog parts the old college try, but pretty much his only skill is reacting to things.
Let's see how Fehr lines up.
The Forsaken: Desert Vampires is not so much a vampire movie as it is a car commercial that argues the best way to kill a vampire is by driving a Mercedes.
Why? Because vampires like to drive around a lot in cars. They also like to shoot people with guns. Really, the bad guys in The Forsaken are less vampires than they are psychopaths who don't mind a lick of human blood every now and then. Speed? Strength? Mental powers? Biting? Who needs 'em? Not Desert Vampires. Desert Vampires live in car trunks, driven by a knife-wielding human who draws more blood than the vampires combined (this includes vampire gun usage). To be fair, the vampire king has exactly one moment of clever badassery in which he picks up a snake by the head and injects the thing's poison into his arm.
But let's get to the real point here: boobs. The movie opens with a dazed Megan (played by Izabella Miko), who stands under the spray of a shower, slowly rinsing a curtain of blood off of her naked torso. Everybody with me? Good, because once one of those titties gets clean, this movie is not wasting any time. The main character, cash-strapped Sean (Kerr Smith), is headed to his sister's wedding, and he has figured out that instead of paying for transportation, he can deliver a sexy convertible across a few states for cash. Of course, he mustn't pick up hitchhikers, the car mustn't be soiled in any way, and MOST of all, he mustn't play chicken with vampires. (Beuller? Anyone?)
He gets right onto the road, where he has a conversation with two girls in a convertible who invite him to something (I can't tell what; I was pretending those were real people in real convertibles, who wouldn't have been able to have a minute-long conversation consisting of anything other than screaming "WHAT!?" at one another really loudly). And then there are some more boobs. The movie pulls a spooky fake-out here; the girls in the other convertible disappear preternaturally, and in that instant, Sean's tire blows.
His stipend runs out immediately when he is forced to replace the tire. Forced to spend the night in a hotel, Sean lies around in his boxers listening to the strange, half-erotic, half-dangerous sounds coming from the next room. The next morning, the other occupants (and their dusty car) are long gone, and just as Sean is ready to pull out of town, enter "Nick" (Brendan Fehr), in the form of an acerbic hitchhiker with a secret (a VAMPIRE HUNTER sort of secret). Reluctantly, Sean takes on the self-described slacker, who offers to pay for gas. Hijinks ensue as hijinks are known to do, setting the tone for a very slightly bloodier-than-usual road trip bromance.
Along the way they pick up the tits from the first scene, who is in full-on Naked Lunch mode. They stuff her in the back seat of the car, where she remains for most of the movie, junkying out from a vampire infection (Seriously. Her first line of dialog is not until roughly the third act). Fehr's character instinctively knows what is happening to her, and quickly gets her into a hotel room where he strip searches her for bite marks (bite marks: always in the last place you look on a naked girl!). Poor Sean is still clueless, but he's just a nice guy driving a really sweet car, caught in the gravity of Fehr's charisma. Finally Nick takes Seanon a date out for a meal, where he explains that a vampire infection is something that can be delayed with something like mid-1990's HIV retrovirals (and also to rant about baby boomers and Monica Lewinsky?), which is good, because it turns out Nick has it too. Nick got "infected" by a "girl" at a "party," and it turns out he's just running out the clock chasing the king vampire, who he must kill in order to cure himself and the breasts damsel-in-distress.
Sean develops some sort of affection for Megan, despite never learning her name or having any sort of conversation with her whatsoever. Attempting to keep her quiet at one point, he gets bitten on the hand, receiving the infection as well. The infection acts as a homing device to the King vampire, who, for reasons that are never explained, can't stop chasing the bromance on wheels, despite the fact that they kill off his entire hunting party, with the exception of his one hyper-violent, hypersexualized consort, whose feral nature is credited to her being a new vampire and not, you know, because the writing and direction was racist as fuck.
There are some subplots. One is about Sean trying to sacrifice his health to keep Megan sane. Ok, I guess there was only one subplot. Oh, also, vampires disguise their kills as "gang war." In the middle of no-name towns in northern-central Texas. In case you were wondering.
Also: Fehr's character spends most of the movie trying to get to hallowed grounds (because vampires can only be killed on hallowed grounds, despite the fact that he already killed one or two of them on the road). Chased and out of gas, they are finally forced to seek refuge in a former taxidermist's house, inhabited by the only woman in the entire movie who does not get called, "bitch," "skank," "slut," etc. by someone. Luckily for all involved, the old woman's house is on a cemetery: hallowed ground, BINGO! A last stand is made, stuff happens, the old woman, who was so ready to use her rifle on trespassers, is incapable of using it on vampires (because, too scary), and hands it off to Fehr instead. There's a shootout (a VAMPIRE shootout), Fehr takes a bullet, and Sean finally manages to kill the King Vampire by driving a Mercedes through his heart.
Sean finally has an intelligible conversation with Megan at the hospital, and then finds that Fehr/Nick is gone; Nick explains, in a touching note, that killing that last guy didn't cure him, so he's doomed to blah blah blah until he kills another vampire.
Cut to three months later: Fehr is hitchhiking and a familiar-looking car stops up ahead: It's Sean! He's put a new engine in the vampire's old car, he's been reading about "gang shootings" and tracking vampire movements, he quit his desk job, and now he wants to help Fehr/Nick kill the next King Vampire and cure his infection!
I promised you a bromance, didn't I?
*
So how do the Jason Behr and the Brendan Fehr stack up? Tattooist has a slightly better love story, unless you take into account the gay subtext in Forsaken, which, when it comes to scoring points, I do not (too much T&A to have any real subversive value). It's really up for grabs as to which is more racist; Tattooist is internationally racist, whereas Forsaken is a little more USA homegrown. The vampire movie is funnier, but vampires usually have a little more levity, a little more panache than ghosts. Neither actor delivers more than his signature Roswell emotion (for Behr, that's concerned and lovestruck, for Fehr, it's bad boy on the run), but at least the movie didn't ask as much from the latter. And I think that's ultimately the tie-breaker here: At least I didn't have to watch Brendan Fehr act out of his range. Forsaken for the win.
Also, just for the record, for the producers of The Tattooist: you should really make sure the hip-hop song that starts the credits on your awful film doesn't mention five better films in under sixty seconds. Just a thought.
Meet the consonant contestants: Up first, let's welcome Jason Behr in The Tattooist (2007). Alternate movie title: Everything your Mother Warned you About Tattoos (and Samoans). Behr faces off against faux competitor and fellow Rowsell "bad boy" alien, Brendan Fehr, who doesn't-quite-star in the forgettably named The Forsaken (2001). Yes, it's a Behr-Fehr duel to the depths of oblivion and disrepute.
*
The Tattooist is off to a formidable start: it's incomprehensible, culturally insensitive, and the only thing the central romance has going for it over The Forsaken is that at least the lady love interest is conscious. We are introduced to Behr's character, who, as a child, demonstrates exceptional freehand tattoo skills. We see the character's first attempt at a tattoo here:
So ok, it's a little bit of a dated style what with the thorns, but the kid clearly has some artistic prowess. Which his father celebrates by saying The Lord's Prayer while slicing the design off of his son's arm. Cut to: present day. Behr's character is asleep in bed, and we see his scarred arm in the foreground. He proceeds to wake from his nightmare/flashback, get out of bed to get some air, and to let the camera linger lovingly on the massive tapestry of ink that spans most of his upper-body (and also his pale white ass). What follows is a variation on the Cultural Appropriation Curse story.
The Tattooist was produced by a prolific, if not award-winning Singapore production and distribution house. Behr's character, Jake, is a white American who likes to collect indigenous designs from across the world and sell them as medicine and hope to injured and sick people. He seems a little dead inside, as well he should, but much to my own disappointment, it's nothing that the whitest Pacific Islander lady-actor that the studio could find, can't fix. They meet in Singapore at a tattoo convention, where Jake exchanges one meaningful look with Sina (Mia Blake), and decides to follow her into a private area where some of her family are taking part in a traditional Samoan tattoo ritual.
The conversation that follows goes something like this:
Samoan Man: "Hey, man, why the fuck are you so entitled as to invite yourself in on our private, tented-off tribal ritual and sit down and watch us like we're television?"
Jake: "Oh, just always looking for new cultures to steal from!"
Samoan Man: "Yeah, fuck you."
Sina: "I don't have any dialog, except to vouch for you for no damn good reason, but I can tell that you are going to have sex with me later."
IMDB describes the movie as a story about "A young artist (who) unknowingly plays a role in releasing a deadly spirit as he attempts to learn the tatau, the Samoan tradition of tattooing." But no, IMDB, not true: Jake doesn't give a shit about learning Samoan tattooing. Jake is a spectator who leaves the tent when he learns there is nothing he can use for his healing ink scam. In fact, to show his level of cultural regard for the Samoans at the convention, Jake steals a traditional tattooing instrument from a case outside the tent.
So it's a classic story of boy meets girl, boy steals culturally significant object from girl, boy follows girl across international lines in the hopes of sleeping with and/or having a second line of dialog with girl, which is lucky for boy, because he's going to need girl to help him lift the curse he earned his pale white ass.
Not since the Brady boys found that Hawiian relic have the Pacific Islands seemed so darn creepy.
I could could further dissect this movie, pull out its inky bladder of latent terror of body modification culture AND indigenous ritual, but I will simply leave it at this: if you are a lover of supernaturally quick-acting infections, and scenes of people cutting off/otherwise removing patches of skin, this movie is a goldmine!
I would be remiss if I did not point out one thing about the sentient ghost-thing that drives the horror aspect of the film: when we finally see more than a flash of him, it is clear that despite the fact that the writing ostensibly calls for a member of the Samoan community to play the ghost, the thing shares no facial or bodily characteristics such with his numerous Samoan co-stars. I can't prove this, but he looks like a skinny white dude who has been painted ink black. So... definitely a fruitful addition to conversations about cultural sensitivity with that one.
Behr's main skill as an actor is his look of lovestruck concern. He gives the acting and dialog parts the old college try, but pretty much his only skill is reacting to things.
Let's see how Fehr lines up.
The Forsaken: Desert Vampires is not so much a vampire movie as it is a car commercial that argues the best way to kill a vampire is by driving a Mercedes.
Why? Because vampires like to drive around a lot in cars. They also like to shoot people with guns. Really, the bad guys in The Forsaken are less vampires than they are psychopaths who don't mind a lick of human blood every now and then. Speed? Strength? Mental powers? Biting? Who needs 'em? Not Desert Vampires. Desert Vampires live in car trunks, driven by a knife-wielding human who draws more blood than the vampires combined (this includes vampire gun usage). To be fair, the vampire king has exactly one moment of clever badassery in which he picks up a snake by the head and injects the thing's poison into his arm.
But let's get to the real point here: boobs. The movie opens with a dazed Megan (played by Izabella Miko), who stands under the spray of a shower, slowly rinsing a curtain of blood off of her naked torso. Everybody with me? Good, because once one of those titties gets clean, this movie is not wasting any time. The main character, cash-strapped Sean (Kerr Smith), is headed to his sister's wedding, and he has figured out that instead of paying for transportation, he can deliver a sexy convertible across a few states for cash. Of course, he mustn't pick up hitchhikers, the car mustn't be soiled in any way, and MOST of all, he mustn't play chicken with vampires. (Beuller? Anyone?)
He gets right onto the road, where he has a conversation with two girls in a convertible who invite him to something (I can't tell what; I was pretending those were real people in real convertibles, who wouldn't have been able to have a minute-long conversation consisting of anything other than screaming "WHAT!?" at one another really loudly). And then there are some more boobs. The movie pulls a spooky fake-out here; the girls in the other convertible disappear preternaturally, and in that instant, Sean's tire blows.
His stipend runs out immediately when he is forced to replace the tire. Forced to spend the night in a hotel, Sean lies around in his boxers listening to the strange, half-erotic, half-dangerous sounds coming from the next room. The next morning, the other occupants (and their dusty car) are long gone, and just as Sean is ready to pull out of town, enter "Nick" (Brendan Fehr), in the form of an acerbic hitchhiker with a secret (a VAMPIRE HUNTER sort of secret). Reluctantly, Sean takes on the self-described slacker, who offers to pay for gas. Hijinks ensue as hijinks are known to do, setting the tone for a very slightly bloodier-than-usual road trip bromance.
Along the way they pick up the tits from the first scene, who is in full-on Naked Lunch mode. They stuff her in the back seat of the car, where she remains for most of the movie, junkying out from a vampire infection (Seriously. Her first line of dialog is not until roughly the third act). Fehr's character instinctively knows what is happening to her, and quickly gets her into a hotel room where he strip searches her for bite marks (bite marks: always in the last place you look on a naked girl!). Poor Sean is still clueless, but he's just a nice guy driving a really sweet car, caught in the gravity of Fehr's charisma. Finally Nick takes Sean
Sean develops some sort of affection for Megan, despite never learning her name or having any sort of conversation with her whatsoever. Attempting to keep her quiet at one point, he gets bitten on the hand, receiving the infection as well. The infection acts as a homing device to the King vampire, who, for reasons that are never explained, can't stop chasing the bromance on wheels, despite the fact that they kill off his entire hunting party, with the exception of his one hyper-violent, hypersexualized consort, whose feral nature is credited to her being a new vampire and not, you know, because the writing and direction was racist as fuck.
There are some subplots. One is about Sean trying to sacrifice his health to keep Megan sane. Ok, I guess there was only one subplot. Oh, also, vampires disguise their kills as "gang war." In the middle of no-name towns in northern-central Texas. In case you were wondering.
Also: Fehr's character spends most of the movie trying to get to hallowed grounds (because vampires can only be killed on hallowed grounds, despite the fact that he already killed one or two of them on the road). Chased and out of gas, they are finally forced to seek refuge in a former taxidermist's house, inhabited by the only woman in the entire movie who does not get called, "bitch," "skank," "slut," etc. by someone. Luckily for all involved, the old woman's house is on a cemetery: hallowed ground, BINGO! A last stand is made, stuff happens, the old woman, who was so ready to use her rifle on trespassers, is incapable of using it on vampires (because, too scary), and hands it off to Fehr instead. There's a shootout (a VAMPIRE shootout), Fehr takes a bullet, and Sean finally manages to kill the King Vampire by driving a Mercedes through his heart.
Sean finally has an intelligible conversation with Megan at the hospital, and then finds that Fehr/Nick is gone; Nick explains, in a touching note, that killing that last guy didn't cure him, so he's doomed to blah blah blah until he kills another vampire.
Cut to three months later: Fehr is hitchhiking and a familiar-looking car stops up ahead: It's Sean! He's put a new engine in the vampire's old car, he's been reading about "gang shootings" and tracking vampire movements, he quit his desk job, and now he wants to help Fehr/Nick kill the next King Vampire and cure his infection!
I promised you a bromance, didn't I?
*
So how do the Jason Behr and the Brendan Fehr stack up? Tattooist has a slightly better love story, unless you take into account the gay subtext in Forsaken, which, when it comes to scoring points, I do not (too much T&A to have any real subversive value). It's really up for grabs as to which is more racist; Tattooist is internationally racist, whereas Forsaken is a little more USA homegrown. The vampire movie is funnier, but vampires usually have a little more levity, a little more panache than ghosts. Neither actor delivers more than his signature Roswell emotion (for Behr, that's concerned and lovestruck, for Fehr, it's bad boy on the run), but at least the movie didn't ask as much from the latter. And I think that's ultimately the tie-breaker here: At least I didn't have to watch Brendan Fehr act out of his range. Forsaken for the win.
Also, just for the record, for the producers of The Tattooist: you should really make sure the hip-hop song that starts the credits on your awful film doesn't mention five better films in under sixty seconds. Just a thought.
Friday, September 14, 2012
Oh, Roswell! / Insomniac Interludes
First of all, it's not my fault that I slept in this morning and couldn't make any of my appointments until after noon. I had to take a break. I needed to watch something light, something that wasn't about rape, and also, just to be picky, had to contain no central murder.
I was a nanny when Roswell reruns were all over the SciFi channel, and it played in that one pristine hour where the toddler and the infant had naptime crossover. You always remember your first time (watching Roswell), the leather-scented upholstery of the wealthy house where you, starving and broke, graze organic food and feel feelings entirely too sexy for someone getting paid to take care of children. That pilot is absurdly erotic. Oh Roswell, oh, organic string cheese, oh, the squalor.
What can I say? Roswell hit me right in that saccharine soft spot last night. I careened through almost the first ten episodes, preparing for bed roughly at the time that I could hear my housemate upstairs, leaving for her Real Job.
The show is just steeped in teen sexuality, both real and symbolic. It's all bowls of strawberries, throbbing teenage lust, the erotic energy of resisting attraction, and there is Shiri Appleby's fresh, gorgeous face, clean and round as Eve's own right breast, there is even the urgency of that horrid Sara McLaughlin song: Kind of like its soundtrack, Roswell makes me want to cringe, but it is a cringe that has a shrill golden vein of exuberance.
I seriously almost ruined my entire next day because I had to watch teenagers try really hard not to fuck each other all night.
I've only seen the first season, enough to know that the Sheriff Isn't So Bad, and I did mistakenly catch the series finale last year: I vaguely remember Katherine Heigel's character was marrying like a 40-year-old teenager and there was something about a motorcycle coming onstage during high school graduation? And why was Max giving the speech? Liz would have TOTALLY been the valedictorian. Side note: While this show isn't super progressive, it does have a nice stereotype reversal in which the main character, Appleby's Liz is a GIRL who likes SCIENCE. I'm not saying they get a cookie, but maybe they get a plastic-wrapped, organic string cheese.
As you can see, there is lots to clear up here. The show began in 1999, circling the drain by 2003 (definitely one for the deeply tragic list of pop-culture that was overshadowed or otherwise killed by 9/11). Also, peeling back for the moment the sexy teenage lust, we find just a turd nugget of highly inappropriate, painfully embarrassing cultural appropriation. Watching Roswell depict Native Americans is excruciating for me, and I'm white, which means, if I really wanted to, I could pretend not to notice how we stereotype people so that we can genocide them. So. They either don't specify or maybe even just make up the "Tribal Nation That Has Answers" (because, of course they do). It is about as humiliating as thinking about my first attempts to (resist) learning about white priviledge in college. Really, both things are. just. horrifying.
Despite sed turd, I will probably watch the show through the end, a three-season commitment (pre-writer's strike, which means the whole 22ish episode seasons). I think for me, the best part, the sexy pages with the creases in them, when it comes to Roswell, are really the first three minutes of the pilot (or the first 24 seconds of this promo). Shiri Appelby gets shot in a diner, and hunky Max (Jason Behr) races to her aid, tearing open the top of her dress to reveal a deeply Freudian bleed: it's like she took one look at Max and got shot with a puberty gun. But it's also like she's having her first period/sexual awakening out of her abdomen, in her guts, right below her sexy little bra. Max is able to heal Liz by cradling her head, hovering over her and making absurd little effort faces; they are practically in the missionary position, and let's face it, this metaphor isn't thinly veiled, it's translucent: this IS sex. Max runs out of the diner so that no one finds out that he's amagical unicorn alien, and Shiri Appleby holds her dress together at the neck, watching him retreat, with a stunned, hungry look that pretty much stays on her face for the rest of the season.
So now I will ignore social media, and I will watch more Tobasco-loving aliens, and the awkwardly excessive eye makeup of a freshly-launched Katherine Heigel, and the less successful launch of Tom Hanks' kid, who may or may not have hit puberty by now, but retains a gangly earnestness that will likely haunt him until he goes all Denzel in Training Day, or bulks up for a role until his neck is as thick as his head.
Go on Roswell, shoot me with your puberty gun.
I was a nanny when Roswell reruns were all over the SciFi channel, and it played in that one pristine hour where the toddler and the infant had naptime crossover. You always remember your first time (watching Roswell), the leather-scented upholstery of the wealthy house where you, starving and broke, graze organic food and feel feelings entirely too sexy for someone getting paid to take care of children. That pilot is absurdly erotic. Oh Roswell, oh, organic string cheese, oh, the squalor.
What can I say? Roswell hit me right in that saccharine soft spot last night. I careened through almost the first ten episodes, preparing for bed roughly at the time that I could hear my housemate upstairs, leaving for her Real Job.
The show is just steeped in teen sexuality, both real and symbolic. It's all bowls of strawberries, throbbing teenage lust, the erotic energy of resisting attraction, and there is Shiri Appleby's fresh, gorgeous face, clean and round as Eve's own right breast, there is even the urgency of that horrid Sara McLaughlin song: Kind of like its soundtrack, Roswell makes me want to cringe, but it is a cringe that has a shrill golden vein of exuberance.
I seriously almost ruined my entire next day because I had to watch teenagers try really hard not to fuck each other all night.
I've only seen the first season, enough to know that the Sheriff Isn't So Bad, and I did mistakenly catch the series finale last year: I vaguely remember Katherine Heigel's character was marrying like a 40-year-old teenager and there was something about a motorcycle coming onstage during high school graduation? And why was Max giving the speech? Liz would have TOTALLY been the valedictorian. Side note: While this show isn't super progressive, it does have a nice stereotype reversal in which the main character, Appleby's Liz is a GIRL who likes SCIENCE. I'm not saying they get a cookie, but maybe they get a plastic-wrapped, organic string cheese.
As you can see, there is lots to clear up here. The show began in 1999, circling the drain by 2003 (definitely one for the deeply tragic list of pop-culture that was overshadowed or otherwise killed by 9/11). Also, peeling back for the moment the sexy teenage lust, we find just a turd nugget of highly inappropriate, painfully embarrassing cultural appropriation. Watching Roswell depict Native Americans is excruciating for me, and I'm white, which means, if I really wanted to, I could pretend not to notice how we stereotype people so that we can genocide them. So. They either don't specify or maybe even just make up the "Tribal Nation That Has Answers" (because, of course they do). It is about as humiliating as thinking about my first attempts to (resist) learning about white priviledge in college. Really, both things are. just. horrifying.
Despite sed turd, I will probably watch the show through the end, a three-season commitment (pre-writer's strike, which means the whole 22ish episode seasons). I think for me, the best part, the sexy pages with the creases in them, when it comes to Roswell, are really the first three minutes of the pilot (or the first 24 seconds of this promo). Shiri Appelby gets shot in a diner, and hunky Max (Jason Behr) races to her aid, tearing open the top of her dress to reveal a deeply Freudian bleed: it's like she took one look at Max and got shot with a puberty gun. But it's also like she's having her first period/sexual awakening out of her abdomen, in her guts, right below her sexy little bra. Max is able to heal Liz by cradling her head, hovering over her and making absurd little effort faces; they are practically in the missionary position, and let's face it, this metaphor isn't thinly veiled, it's translucent: this IS sex. Max runs out of the diner so that no one finds out that he's a
So now I will ignore social media, and I will watch more Tobasco-loving aliens, and the awkwardly excessive eye makeup of a freshly-launched Katherine Heigel, and the less successful launch of Tom Hanks' kid, who may or may not have hit puberty by now, but retains a gangly earnestness that will likely haunt him until he goes all Denzel in Training Day, or bulks up for a role until his neck is as thick as his head.
Go on Roswell, shoot me with your puberty gun.
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Yes, sexism, but: Giraffe!
 |
| Seriously, some of this Femmebot shit is triggering as fuck and you should take care of yourself. Don't go to the bad place. You are wuved. |
Rape, Rape Revenge, and Rape Myths, Part 1: I Spit on Your Grave (2010)
**Just: trigger alert. Like, for this whole series. It's pretty awesome, but sometimes you don't need to put this stuff in your mind, so please go look at a baby giraffe instead.**
Alternate movie title: Hang 'Em High for the Ladies (Now with 95% more rape!)
The last person I fucked was an intriguing but irredeemable straight cisgendered boy. We had a lot of conversations about sexuality, mostly because we approached the subject so differently (something that became an increasing concern to me during the times we spent not fucking). He talked of achieving a moment in every encounter, in which a woman lets him in, describing a yielding, almost akin to submission. We have some common ground there; the pleasure I take bodies comes together with someone else involves all sorts of sexy yielding. However, as an omnisexual kinky queer feminist survivor person, who seizes both "masculine" and "feminine" roles in sex, I felt an inarticulate sense that the poor man was missing out on something critical: that what makes sex so tasty is a mutual yielding. Not this dichotomy of "Doer" and "Done," of inside and out. My experience, my tastes, if you will, involve something more fluid. Sometimes my experience is to go inward, and to find I go further in in in in in in. Sometimes I achieve the ecstatic selflessness of taking someone else to that place: to paraphrase Rilke, that the highest form of love is being the guardian of another person's pleasure (Rilke said "silence," not pleasure, but he's dead). I seek not only to be fucked senseless but to fuck my fuckpals and lovers beyond their senses.
His model of sexuality is certainly the one that sells, but needless to say, I was too queer for this poor fellow: he had learned to fuck, but never to be fucked. If you're asking me, that's missing quite a big piece of the human experience. His way of thinking about gender and sex seemed to me to follow an antiquated, almost Freudian notion of men as active and women as passive. The heady scholars I so love, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigrarary, you know, that party, posit that how we live as a culture, the social order, depends on this antiquated model of gender. Which means that in order to define masculinity as strength, femininity must be designated reciprocally passive, powerless. It's not true, but it's the functional social construct for an alarming number of people in strategic positions of power, and an alarming number of people are ok with that.
This is how the gender trap works: women are heavily policed by a virgin/whore dichotomy, men are taught that no emotional expression other than anger is permitted, lest he be a pansy, feminine, and therefore less than male.
Many of the great female monsters play with and challenge the idea of the passive feminine, from Medusa to Reagan (I speak of Reagan from The Excorcist, not the much more alarming, "ketchup is a vegetable" Reagan). We see this explicitly in rape revenge movies: the "Doer" gets "done," the roles of victim and perpetrator reverse. When the woman is a monster, the horror often comes from the twisting of gender roles.
The rape revenge movie has any number of variations, but let us take I Spit on Your Grave (2010) as a template. Sorry, superbuffs, but I reserve the right to treat myself to not watching the 1978 version on which this film is based; at least for now. Between Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring and its two US homages, The Last House on the Left (1972, 2009), we will have plenty of material to consider as the narrative of rape and revenge moves through time: it is a story we tell ourselves, as a culture, over and over.
*
I Spit on You Grave opens with a luscious country road, revealing a stereotypically beautiful (read: feminine, young, thin, white, etc.) woman driving, suggesting all the promise and possibility that lie before her. The protagonist, Jennifer, stops at a gas station where she encounters three hillbilly stereotypes, all men roughly her peers. She interacts with the most confident of them, a sort of cocky/"I get all the girls at the Dairy Queen/big stud in a small pond. In the background, as if to nail in the hillbilly stereotype, one of the men on the porch ominously plays a harmonica. The "studly" dude has a sort of B-movie Liev Schrieber/Sam Worthington matched build-and-buzzcut. He immediately hits on Jennifer with a tired automobile insinuation, and the more cosmopolitan Jennifer quickly rejects him with a laugh, humiliating him in front of Thing Two and Thing Three.
Jennifer settles in at her rented cabin and beings the work of writing her second book, but not before asking the hicksville studmuffin for the directions that will lead him and his cohorts right to her door. Almost immediately, the insinuations that she is being watched begin: birds are disrupted across the pond as she takes in the view. Jennifer has about three minutes of film time to show off her midriff and enjoy the peace and quiet of writing undisturbed, while the tension, amplified by minimal minor key tones, begins to mount in earnest. She meets Thing Four, (think Ryan Gosling with no makeup and a developmental delay), who repairs her cabin's plumbing issues. She inevitably fucks up her cellphone (perhaps she wanted to instagram her repaired toilet?), leaving her further isolated, alone in the woods.
The three men from the gas station who attack Jennifer are seen as carnage-loving sociopaths, and the fourth, the mentally handicapped young man, is in some ways portrayed as the more human, or the least abhorrent (Not that he doesn't rape her. He's just the only character who seems to, you know, experience either hesitation or remorse about it.)
So next we clock in at a tidy 35 minutes of abject sexual torture and terrorism. Jennifer is videotaped as she is orally raped with a gun, and that's just the jolly beginning of her experience being sexually menaced and raped by the four men. For a brief moment, she earns a reprieve, escaping her cabin, running face-first into the chest of the town sherriff, who is, (surprise!) also a rapist.
This actually strikes me as one of the more realistic, if symbolic, moments in the film: often real victims turn to people in power, only to find that they are in collusion with the perpetrators, if not perpetrators themselves. Jennifer is terrorized, raped, and tortured some more. The movie spends between a third and a half of its screen time enumerating oral, vaginal, and anal assault at the hands of the (now five) men.
The camera seems to identify with the victim: we see her dazed and horrified eyes, and then we see from her perspective: the sky and earth drain of color, a sort of subtle reversal of the technicolor debut in The Wizard of Oz. The absence of soundtrack (minor chords, some ominous noise, and a touch of hillbilly harmonica) seems to encourage the audience to identify with Jennifer as she is repeatedly victimized. Finally, stripped, covered in dirt, she stumbles to an old bridge and submerges into the murky water of the swamp as the sheriff fires off a bullet (take note; we're going to see this exact scenario a few more times). Jennifer is seemingly dead, or perhaps she has just dissipated.
When she reappears, she is transformed from victim to monster, a far cry from the young woman with her future twinkling in the sun on the road before her. Her murky immersion was not a disappearance but a reverse-baptism. Pale and gaunt, she is imbued with a witch-y vibe that allows her to appear silently and disappear at will, much as her attackers did in the first half of the film. The camera flashes to her face: her eyes are an unnatural pale blue: the hunt is on. It becomes clear that if the movie will restore any real color, it will start with a blood red.
Jennifer begins with the easiest target, the most ambivalent rapist. (When I talk about this character, I tend to characterize him as more human, more feeling than the other characters, but it is also highly likely that the film sought to capitalize on the horror of being raped by a developmentally delayed man, the difference of his mannerisms and handicap made to amplify the monstrosity of Jennifer's experience.) As he expresses remorse, she pacifies him into a cold sort of forgiveness, trapping him with a noose. From what I understand, in the 1970's version, she utilizes her sexuality as a ploy to subdue him, killing him at orgasmic peak. The castrating seductress is an interesting figure, secure in film and literature; don't worry, we can always come back to her later. Suffice it to say, this begins the forty-five minutes of woman turned victim turned monster, hunting down each man, saving the particularly sadistic sheriff for last.
Her affect switches between dead calm and unbridled rage. She doles out revenge perfectly calculated for each perpetrator: the bird-smashing, amateur cinematogapher is forced to watch himself on his own camera as she lures crows to peck out his eyes (a little self-defeating, but we'll give her points for taking that symbol and making it her own). She suspends Thing Three (he of the ominous harmonica) face first over a tub of lye, so that he is forced to resist gravity until his face, and, symbolically, what little personality he had, is fully erased.
She takes lesser Liev Schreiber and re-enacts the tortures he perpetuated against her, and then pulls out a few of his teeth, which produced, for me, the most cringe-worthy act of violence in the whole film. It is interesting to me that frequently the the violence against the perpetrator is in some ways more grotesque to me than the initial acts of violence against the protagonist (also I'm squeamish about teeth). At this point, the film makes it possible to identify with both Jennifer and her attackers, or to move between identification.
Not satisfied with the symbolic castration, she proceeds to castrate the man in earnest, waiting emotionlessly outside the cabin where he bleeds out from his wounds. Continuity junkie that I am, I cannot but wonder how she got new clothes and such shiny, hair commercial hair after the men both demolished her physically and burned all of her personal items; we can only assume she found a Target in the wilderness and stole away some beauty supplies and a quick freshen-up at the bathroom sink before taking her final revenge.
The sheriff is established as two-sided: he is a sadist in earnest, but also a seemingly loving family man. Jennifer comes for him by way of his clueless wife and daughter (the ironically named "Chastity"). Not satisfied even with the Freudian tortures of castration, she comes as close as possible to re-creating the physical abuse she experienced at the hands of the sheriff. Using a rifle, she anally penetrates the self-described "ass-man," whom she has also rigged in an elaborate R-rated version of Mousetrap. He is killed, crying for mercy, as the gun penetrates him a second time, now with a bullet. Jennifer listens to this last death, her face dark yet blank and her head cocked to one side: roll them credits.
In short, five men rape a woman, and the woman kills the five men. Approximately equal time is devoted to both. None of the characters are developed, and almost all of them are unsympathetic.
It's a bizarre equation, not without it's niche.
An optimist (or, you know, a dude) might look at this film and say it is a way to create a culture of terror for rapists. One problem I have with that is that for me, the initial violence against the victim stayed with me much longer than the revenge portion, which in this case was a little contrived with its contraption-heavy appeal to die-hard gore lovers. Watching this movie doesn't make me in any way feel more safe as a woman, and contributes to a sense that I can only describe as "am I on sneaking-up-from-behind cam?" The rape revenge flick simultaneously justifies and undermines its own "violence merits violence" formula by overexposing the audience (in this case, me) to some of the longest, most explicit assaults on film in popular culture. Sure, it is a cautionary tale, but for whom? At the end of the film, Jennifer remains completely transformed by her experience, and, while she certainly demonstrated resourcefulness in enacting revenge, it is doubtful that she will now skip on home to play with her new puppy. Rape has transformed Jennifer into an avenging fury, and it seems obvious to me that she will never revert to the woman at the beginning of the film, with that lush road ahead of her. What, then, has she accomplished, other than survival? Has she survived?
Supposedly by escalating the violence, the woman is able to create a situation in which her attackers are equally victimized: I object to this formula for a number of reasons. I'm willing to suspend disbelief to go along with the trope that an incredibly traumatized person can immediately calculate several elaborate stalkings, killings, as well as tie some exceptional boy scout knots with steady hands, but I am not left with the belief that she has reversed roles with her perpetrators. The idea that the movie portrays tit-for-tat violence mimics the same twisted logic of that term favored by bigots everywhere: "reverse racism." The victim may be able to physically injure, to torture, to terrorize her perpetrators, but she doesn't have the cultural clout of the centuries of misogyny that really perfects the formula. She can even rape the man or men back, but he/they still will not have lived in a culture saturated with threats based on their gender, a culture which seeks to control their every behavior through sexual terrorism for every day of their lives. And that is a key element of why and how rape functions all over the world: to police women to act "good," "passive," and all that crap. She can harm her attacker, but she cannot duplicate for him the conditions for women-at-large, which, in case you haven't noticed, are not terribly awesome.
This is also true of the sexual humiliation that Jennifer faces. This is not mutual either. If the argument is "now we're all even," I remain skeptical. It is tricky for me: I'm not a pacifist, nor do I believe in the healing powers of revenge.
When I step back and think about rape, one of the biggest things that stands out, that we are missing in our conversations, whether at the personal level, media, film, legislature, law enforcement, or the so-called justice system, is that the average perpetrator uses the absolute minimum of force needed in order to convince the victim that the victim is going to die. It can be as simple as an arm across the throat, a threat to one's family, one's status as a citizen, or speech that is simply paralyzing by nature of its foulness. There are terrible, worse-than-movies rapes that happen (there are, Sweet Mother of Destruction, there are, and the vicarious trauma I have simply from knowing some of what I know about other people's histories' is enough to make me never want to leave my house). But your garden variety "normal" rapist uses minimal force. Normally he (and, seeing as men commit 90% of violent crimes, it is normally a he) is a serial predator who is either known to or a family member of the victim. Most rapists do not think of themselves as rapists, and many, if not the vast majority of rape victims don't fit the stranger-danger stereotype: torn clothes, contusions, and other such hard evidence: yet this kind of rape is no less a rape. Every survivor is a special individual snowflake of grief and rage, and it doesn't take an exceptional five-man team to reverse-baptize, or permanently alter the reality of the survivor. Many survivors wear our wounds on the inside, where they are complex, and hard to get at, and often inconveniently invisible.
I don't know of a single rape-revenge movie in which the monstrous victim avenges herself against date rape, incest, or other acquaintance rape (with the exception of scenarios of sexual exploitation/forced prostitution). For these films to function, the victim-monster cannot have any prior relationship with her perpetrators, and the rape(s) must be as violent and exceptional as the MPAA will allow. The rape must be morally clean, "legitimate," if you will. While the devastation and trauma of stranger rape can impact victims in similar ways to acquaintance rape and incest, the perpetrators are not held to the same standards of guilt to which strangers are held.
I just love the logic of that; it's so crisp, so mythological, so... Republican: If we've never met and I rape you, I'm the heathen devil, but if I am your mailman or your father or your ex, good luck even getting me arrested!
It is much easier and much less interesting to write rapists who are obvious monsters, rather than to write them as manipulative and opportunistic. After all, most rape is not, "Oh, damn, I shouldn't have secluded myself in this cabin to write my novel in a town I've never seen before today because now there are hillbillies trying to get up in my shit." Putting aside for a moment the love of thrills and theatrics, rape revenge movies do not make the leap to challenging rape culture; it is simply not a conversation at that level. To make a movie that is truly challenging to people who rape, and to people who are complicit with rape culture, one would have to examine a more morally and emotionally complex perpetrator and his environment.
Cherrypicking a stranger-in-the-bushes scenario is not a progressive depiction of sexual assault. It functions in a gritty polemic horror to argue that people deserve to suffer, and die, and die suffering. The supersaturated rape is used here, not to foster awareness, or scare off would-be perpetrators, but to wrench, to torque both victim and perpetrator of their respective humanity, peeling them down to a single dark streak of emotion, be it sadism or wrath.
When it comes to rape victims, I know personally a harrowing number of women who, sexually assaulted in childhood, were so physically damaged that they now experience infertility. If we can make The Virgin Spring, and both I Spit on Your Graves, and Both Last Houses on the Left, what is to stop us from telling a story in which a different kind of victim avenges the losses she has suffered? Survivors who are assaulted early in life have to make interesting decisions about virginity: some feel as though they simply never had it, some cannot describe a precise time when they first gave unequivocal consent, and some, perhaps most, suppress the hell out of that shit. If the rape revenge movie explores the loss of innocence, the malevolent damage of rape, why must that innocence always be symbolized by a conventionally attractive, middle-class white girl who gets gangbanged by strangers?
The answer is that in this society, we have multiple ways to write off every single form of rape.
Remember that these movies are man-made, with emphasis on the "man." It's not as much a revenge tale as it is a sort of nightmare inevitable to the social order that privileges male over female. It's a way of playing with the dynamics of man = aggressive, therefore woman = passive. It's a trope that actually capitalizes on men's fear of women, fear that women will not remain passive. Remember, within the first five minutes of the film, Jennifer sexually rejects the "studly" guy, causing him to experience a cultural shaming via his peers. In a civilization constructed on elevating the masculine and eschewing the feminine, the "bad" woman, the aggressive woman, the woman who can sexually negate a man, will always be there to haunt, to agitate, to resist the story of gender. The monstrous woman demonstrates a structural flaw in Western culture that goes back to Genesis.
There is one last thing that nags at me about I Spit on Your Grave, and the genre in general, and it applies to almost all of the material I'm going to cover in this series: it is straight up offensive to spit out endless victims that are five out of six, if not all, of the following: young, hetero, white, cisgendered, middle-to-owning class, and able-bodied. By doing so, the filmmakers gloss over the intersections of power that make a victim more likely to be targeted. Rapists capitalize on the pre-existing system of priviledge, of cultural currency, of power over. Just as, say, a victim's drug habit, or a history of abuse, makes her less credible in the eyes of the law, a perpetrator knows to target such a person, precisely because she is less likely to be believed. So we do not tell the story, then, of a queer woman, a woman of color, a drug user, or a sex worker who is raped. For the purpose of these movies, the rape must be atrocious enough to merit a death sentence, and this means no complications in a society with strong sexist/homophobic/transphobic/white supremacist/ageist/ableist leanings. If she is Black or in a wheelchair or trans (or, god forbid, all three), this is somehow a lesser story; this victim has less entitlement to address the crimes committed against her. When in reality, she is a more likely target for sexual violence.
When it is only pretty little white girls who get assaulted, the insidious message is that the rest of us are fair game.
Which is too fucking bad, because if there were a rape revenge movie about a trans woman of color in a wheelchair who exacts unequivocal revenge upon her attacker/s, I would watch the shit out of that: if only because it would be a more difficult, and therefore more interesting story to tell.
I'm sure they would fuck it up terribly, but still.
Alternate movie title: Hang 'Em High for the Ladies (Now with 95% more rape!)
The last person I fucked was an intriguing but irredeemable straight cisgendered boy. We had a lot of conversations about sexuality, mostly because we approached the subject so differently (something that became an increasing concern to me during the times we spent not fucking). He talked of achieving a moment in every encounter, in which a woman lets him in, describing a yielding, almost akin to submission. We have some common ground there; the pleasure I take bodies comes together with someone else involves all sorts of sexy yielding. However, as an omnisexual kinky queer feminist survivor person, who seizes both "masculine" and "feminine" roles in sex, I felt an inarticulate sense that the poor man was missing out on something critical: that what makes sex so tasty is a mutual yielding. Not this dichotomy of "Doer" and "Done," of inside and out. My experience, my tastes, if you will, involve something more fluid. Sometimes my experience is to go inward, and to find I go further in in in in in in. Sometimes I achieve the ecstatic selflessness of taking someone else to that place: to paraphrase Rilke, that the highest form of love is being the guardian of another person's pleasure (Rilke said "silence," not pleasure, but he's dead). I seek not only to be fucked senseless but to fuck my fuckpals and lovers beyond their senses.
His model of sexuality is certainly the one that sells, but needless to say, I was too queer for this poor fellow: he had learned to fuck, but never to be fucked. If you're asking me, that's missing quite a big piece of the human experience. His way of thinking about gender and sex seemed to me to follow an antiquated, almost Freudian notion of men as active and women as passive. The heady scholars I so love, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigrarary, you know, that party, posit that how we live as a culture, the social order, depends on this antiquated model of gender. Which means that in order to define masculinity as strength, femininity must be designated reciprocally passive, powerless. It's not true, but it's the functional social construct for an alarming number of people in strategic positions of power, and an alarming number of people are ok with that.
This is how the gender trap works: women are heavily policed by a virgin/whore dichotomy, men are taught that no emotional expression other than anger is permitted, lest he be a pansy, feminine, and therefore less than male.
Many of the great female monsters play with and challenge the idea of the passive feminine, from Medusa to Reagan (I speak of Reagan from The Excorcist, not the much more alarming, "ketchup is a vegetable" Reagan). We see this explicitly in rape revenge movies: the "Doer" gets "done," the roles of victim and perpetrator reverse. When the woman is a monster, the horror often comes from the twisting of gender roles.
The rape revenge movie has any number of variations, but let us take I Spit on Your Grave (2010) as a template. Sorry, superbuffs, but I reserve the right to treat myself to not watching the 1978 version on which this film is based; at least for now. Between Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring and its two US homages, The Last House on the Left (1972, 2009), we will have plenty of material to consider as the narrative of rape and revenge moves through time: it is a story we tell ourselves, as a culture, over and over.
*
I Spit on You Grave opens with a luscious country road, revealing a stereotypically beautiful (read: feminine, young, thin, white, etc.) woman driving, suggesting all the promise and possibility that lie before her. The protagonist, Jennifer, stops at a gas station where she encounters three hillbilly stereotypes, all men roughly her peers. She interacts with the most confident of them, a sort of cocky/"I get all the girls at the Dairy Queen/big stud in a small pond. In the background, as if to nail in the hillbilly stereotype, one of the men on the porch ominously plays a harmonica. The "studly" dude has a sort of B-movie Liev Schrieber/Sam Worthington matched build-and-buzzcut. He immediately hits on Jennifer with a tired automobile insinuation, and the more cosmopolitan Jennifer quickly rejects him with a laugh, humiliating him in front of Thing Two and Thing Three.
Jennifer settles in at her rented cabin and beings the work of writing her second book, but not before asking the hicksville studmuffin for the directions that will lead him and his cohorts right to her door. Almost immediately, the insinuations that she is being watched begin: birds are disrupted across the pond as she takes in the view. Jennifer has about three minutes of film time to show off her midriff and enjoy the peace and quiet of writing undisturbed, while the tension, amplified by minimal minor key tones, begins to mount in earnest. She meets Thing Four, (think Ryan Gosling with no makeup and a developmental delay), who repairs her cabin's plumbing issues. She inevitably fucks up her cellphone (perhaps she wanted to instagram her repaired toilet?), leaving her further isolated, alone in the woods.
The three men from the gas station who attack Jennifer are seen as carnage-loving sociopaths, and the fourth, the mentally handicapped young man, is in some ways portrayed as the more human, or the least abhorrent (Not that he doesn't rape her. He's just the only character who seems to, you know, experience either hesitation or remorse about it.)
So next we clock in at a tidy 35 minutes of abject sexual torture and terrorism. Jennifer is videotaped as she is orally raped with a gun, and that's just the jolly beginning of her experience being sexually menaced and raped by the four men. For a brief moment, she earns a reprieve, escaping her cabin, running face-first into the chest of the town sherriff, who is, (surprise!) also a rapist.
This actually strikes me as one of the more realistic, if symbolic, moments in the film: often real victims turn to people in power, only to find that they are in collusion with the perpetrators, if not perpetrators themselves. Jennifer is terrorized, raped, and tortured some more. The movie spends between a third and a half of its screen time enumerating oral, vaginal, and anal assault at the hands of the (now five) men.
The camera seems to identify with the victim: we see her dazed and horrified eyes, and then we see from her perspective: the sky and earth drain of color, a sort of subtle reversal of the technicolor debut in The Wizard of Oz. The absence of soundtrack (minor chords, some ominous noise, and a touch of hillbilly harmonica) seems to encourage the audience to identify with Jennifer as she is repeatedly victimized. Finally, stripped, covered in dirt, she stumbles to an old bridge and submerges into the murky water of the swamp as the sheriff fires off a bullet (take note; we're going to see this exact scenario a few more times). Jennifer is seemingly dead, or perhaps she has just dissipated.
When she reappears, she is transformed from victim to monster, a far cry from the young woman with her future twinkling in the sun on the road before her. Her murky immersion was not a disappearance but a reverse-baptism. Pale and gaunt, she is imbued with a witch-y vibe that allows her to appear silently and disappear at will, much as her attackers did in the first half of the film. The camera flashes to her face: her eyes are an unnatural pale blue: the hunt is on. It becomes clear that if the movie will restore any real color, it will start with a blood red.
Jennifer begins with the easiest target, the most ambivalent rapist. (When I talk about this character, I tend to characterize him as more human, more feeling than the other characters, but it is also highly likely that the film sought to capitalize on the horror of being raped by a developmentally delayed man, the difference of his mannerisms and handicap made to amplify the monstrosity of Jennifer's experience.) As he expresses remorse, she pacifies him into a cold sort of forgiveness, trapping him with a noose. From what I understand, in the 1970's version, she utilizes her sexuality as a ploy to subdue him, killing him at orgasmic peak. The castrating seductress is an interesting figure, secure in film and literature; don't worry, we can always come back to her later. Suffice it to say, this begins the forty-five minutes of woman turned victim turned monster, hunting down each man, saving the particularly sadistic sheriff for last.
Her affect switches between dead calm and unbridled rage. She doles out revenge perfectly calculated for each perpetrator: the bird-smashing, amateur cinematogapher is forced to watch himself on his own camera as she lures crows to peck out his eyes (a little self-defeating, but we'll give her points for taking that symbol and making it her own). She suspends Thing Three (he of the ominous harmonica) face first over a tub of lye, so that he is forced to resist gravity until his face, and, symbolically, what little personality he had, is fully erased.
She takes lesser Liev Schreiber and re-enacts the tortures he perpetuated against her, and then pulls out a few of his teeth, which produced, for me, the most cringe-worthy act of violence in the whole film. It is interesting to me that frequently the the violence against the perpetrator is in some ways more grotesque to me than the initial acts of violence against the protagonist (also I'm squeamish about teeth). At this point, the film makes it possible to identify with both Jennifer and her attackers, or to move between identification.
Not satisfied with the symbolic castration, she proceeds to castrate the man in earnest, waiting emotionlessly outside the cabin where he bleeds out from his wounds. Continuity junkie that I am, I cannot but wonder how she got new clothes and such shiny, hair commercial hair after the men both demolished her physically and burned all of her personal items; we can only assume she found a Target in the wilderness and stole away some beauty supplies and a quick freshen-up at the bathroom sink before taking her final revenge.
The sheriff is established as two-sided: he is a sadist in earnest, but also a seemingly loving family man. Jennifer comes for him by way of his clueless wife and daughter (the ironically named "Chastity"). Not satisfied even with the Freudian tortures of castration, she comes as close as possible to re-creating the physical abuse she experienced at the hands of the sheriff. Using a rifle, she anally penetrates the self-described "ass-man," whom she has also rigged in an elaborate R-rated version of Mousetrap. He is killed, crying for mercy, as the gun penetrates him a second time, now with a bullet. Jennifer listens to this last death, her face dark yet blank and her head cocked to one side: roll them credits.
In short, five men rape a woman, and the woman kills the five men. Approximately equal time is devoted to both. None of the characters are developed, and almost all of them are unsympathetic.
It's a bizarre equation, not without it's niche.
An optimist (or, you know, a dude) might look at this film and say it is a way to create a culture of terror for rapists. One problem I have with that is that for me, the initial violence against the victim stayed with me much longer than the revenge portion, which in this case was a little contrived with its contraption-heavy appeal to die-hard gore lovers. Watching this movie doesn't make me in any way feel more safe as a woman, and contributes to a sense that I can only describe as "am I on sneaking-up-from-behind cam?" The rape revenge flick simultaneously justifies and undermines its own "violence merits violence" formula by overexposing the audience (in this case, me) to some of the longest, most explicit assaults on film in popular culture. Sure, it is a cautionary tale, but for whom? At the end of the film, Jennifer remains completely transformed by her experience, and, while she certainly demonstrated resourcefulness in enacting revenge, it is doubtful that she will now skip on home to play with her new puppy. Rape has transformed Jennifer into an avenging fury, and it seems obvious to me that she will never revert to the woman at the beginning of the film, with that lush road ahead of her. What, then, has she accomplished, other than survival? Has she survived?
Supposedly by escalating the violence, the woman is able to create a situation in which her attackers are equally victimized: I object to this formula for a number of reasons. I'm willing to suspend disbelief to go along with the trope that an incredibly traumatized person can immediately calculate several elaborate stalkings, killings, as well as tie some exceptional boy scout knots with steady hands, but I am not left with the belief that she has reversed roles with her perpetrators. The idea that the movie portrays tit-for-tat violence mimics the same twisted logic of that term favored by bigots everywhere: "reverse racism." The victim may be able to physically injure, to torture, to terrorize her perpetrators, but she doesn't have the cultural clout of the centuries of misogyny that really perfects the formula. She can even rape the man or men back, but he/they still will not have lived in a culture saturated with threats based on their gender, a culture which seeks to control their every behavior through sexual terrorism for every day of their lives. And that is a key element of why and how rape functions all over the world: to police women to act "good," "passive," and all that crap. She can harm her attacker, but she cannot duplicate for him the conditions for women-at-large, which, in case you haven't noticed, are not terribly awesome.
This is also true of the sexual humiliation that Jennifer faces. This is not mutual either. If the argument is "now we're all even," I remain skeptical. It is tricky for me: I'm not a pacifist, nor do I believe in the healing powers of revenge.
When I step back and think about rape, one of the biggest things that stands out, that we are missing in our conversations, whether at the personal level, media, film, legislature, law enforcement, or the so-called justice system, is that the average perpetrator uses the absolute minimum of force needed in order to convince the victim that the victim is going to die. It can be as simple as an arm across the throat, a threat to one's family, one's status as a citizen, or speech that is simply paralyzing by nature of its foulness. There are terrible, worse-than-movies rapes that happen (there are, Sweet Mother of Destruction, there are, and the vicarious trauma I have simply from knowing some of what I know about other people's histories' is enough to make me never want to leave my house). But your garden variety "normal" rapist uses minimal force. Normally he (and, seeing as men commit 90% of violent crimes, it is normally a he) is a serial predator who is either known to or a family member of the victim. Most rapists do not think of themselves as rapists, and many, if not the vast majority of rape victims don't fit the stranger-danger stereotype: torn clothes, contusions, and other such hard evidence: yet this kind of rape is no less a rape. Every survivor is a special individual snowflake of grief and rage, and it doesn't take an exceptional five-man team to reverse-baptize, or permanently alter the reality of the survivor. Many survivors wear our wounds on the inside, where they are complex, and hard to get at, and often inconveniently invisible.
I don't know of a single rape-revenge movie in which the monstrous victim avenges herself against date rape, incest, or other acquaintance rape (with the exception of scenarios of sexual exploitation/forced prostitution). For these films to function, the victim-monster cannot have any prior relationship with her perpetrators, and the rape(s) must be as violent and exceptional as the MPAA will allow. The rape must be morally clean, "legitimate," if you will. While the devastation and trauma of stranger rape can impact victims in similar ways to acquaintance rape and incest, the perpetrators are not held to the same standards of guilt to which strangers are held.
I just love the logic of that; it's so crisp, so mythological, so... Republican: If we've never met and I rape you, I'm the heathen devil, but if I am your mailman or your father or your ex, good luck even getting me arrested!
It is much easier and much less interesting to write rapists who are obvious monsters, rather than to write them as manipulative and opportunistic. After all, most rape is not, "Oh, damn, I shouldn't have secluded myself in this cabin to write my novel in a town I've never seen before today because now there are hillbillies trying to get up in my shit." Putting aside for a moment the love of thrills and theatrics, rape revenge movies do not make the leap to challenging rape culture; it is simply not a conversation at that level. To make a movie that is truly challenging to people who rape, and to people who are complicit with rape culture, one would have to examine a more morally and emotionally complex perpetrator and his environment.
Cherrypicking a stranger-in-the-bushes scenario is not a progressive depiction of sexual assault. It functions in a gritty polemic horror to argue that people deserve to suffer, and die, and die suffering. The supersaturated rape is used here, not to foster awareness, or scare off would-be perpetrators, but to wrench, to torque both victim and perpetrator of their respective humanity, peeling them down to a single dark streak of emotion, be it sadism or wrath.
When it comes to rape victims, I know personally a harrowing number of women who, sexually assaulted in childhood, were so physically damaged that they now experience infertility. If we can make The Virgin Spring, and both I Spit on Your Graves, and Both Last Houses on the Left, what is to stop us from telling a story in which a different kind of victim avenges the losses she has suffered? Survivors who are assaulted early in life have to make interesting decisions about virginity: some feel as though they simply never had it, some cannot describe a precise time when they first gave unequivocal consent, and some, perhaps most, suppress the hell out of that shit. If the rape revenge movie explores the loss of innocence, the malevolent damage of rape, why must that innocence always be symbolized by a conventionally attractive, middle-class white girl who gets gangbanged by strangers?
The answer is that in this society, we have multiple ways to write off every single form of rape.
Remember that these movies are man-made, with emphasis on the "man." It's not as much a revenge tale as it is a sort of nightmare inevitable to the social order that privileges male over female. It's a way of playing with the dynamics of man = aggressive, therefore woman = passive. It's a trope that actually capitalizes on men's fear of women, fear that women will not remain passive. Remember, within the first five minutes of the film, Jennifer sexually rejects the "studly" guy, causing him to experience a cultural shaming via his peers. In a civilization constructed on elevating the masculine and eschewing the feminine, the "bad" woman, the aggressive woman, the woman who can sexually negate a man, will always be there to haunt, to agitate, to resist the story of gender. The monstrous woman demonstrates a structural flaw in Western culture that goes back to Genesis.
There is one last thing that nags at me about I Spit on Your Grave, and the genre in general, and it applies to almost all of the material I'm going to cover in this series: it is straight up offensive to spit out endless victims that are five out of six, if not all, of the following: young, hetero, white, cisgendered, middle-to-owning class, and able-bodied. By doing so, the filmmakers gloss over the intersections of power that make a victim more likely to be targeted. Rapists capitalize on the pre-existing system of priviledge, of cultural currency, of power over. Just as, say, a victim's drug habit, or a history of abuse, makes her less credible in the eyes of the law, a perpetrator knows to target such a person, precisely because she is less likely to be believed. So we do not tell the story, then, of a queer woman, a woman of color, a drug user, or a sex worker who is raped. For the purpose of these movies, the rape must be atrocious enough to merit a death sentence, and this means no complications in a society with strong sexist/homophobic/transphobic/white supremacist/ageist/ableist leanings. If she is Black or in a wheelchair or trans (or, god forbid, all three), this is somehow a lesser story; this victim has less entitlement to address the crimes committed against her. When in reality, she is a more likely target for sexual violence.
When it is only pretty little white girls who get assaulted, the insidious message is that the rest of us are fair game.
Which is too fucking bad, because if there were a rape revenge movie about a trans woman of color in a wheelchair who exacts unequivocal revenge upon her attacker/s, I would watch the shit out of that: if only because it would be a more difficult, and therefore more interesting story to tell.
I'm sure they would fuck it up terribly, but still.
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
"I'm fairly certain we can't say 'Dick Wolf' on television": Interlude for Law and Order: SVU
*Trigger alert: describes procedural evidence-gathering for sexual assault victims and talks in broad strokes about how society is not very nice to survivors.*
I just saw Cloe Sevigny on a 2012 episode of Law and Order: SVU. On the good hand: I actually watched something that happened this year, this year (Don't worry, I promise to get back to my list of great movies eclipsed by 9-11 and other such dusty topics later). The bad hand: I was so bummed to see her play the archetype of the manipulative shrew who falsely reports a rape.
Now I know Law and Order: SVU (the weird rubbernecking drug of survivors everywhere) is its own carnival of conceits: the franchise is, without exception, both provocative and blandly formulaic. That is a healthy mindset to go into watching these kinds of shows, your crap baseline, if you will.
But come on. The proportion of falsely reported rapes in real life is exponentially inflated in entertainment. Last I heard, 6% of rapes were considered false (and the data for making such assessments can and should be rigorously interrogated, just for the record). Fewer "fake" survivors come forward than the percentage of people who falsely report a car as stolen. Just because rape only seems like a pressing issue when fame is involved doesn't mean that survivors deserve the incredible amount of scorn, suspicion, and scrutiny that survivors inevitably receive for coming forward. The fame-seeking ho who's out to destroy a nice celebrity family man is a crude stereotype. It is used to suppress the fact that 90% of rapes go unreported (that's a generous statistic compared to the numbers put out by the FBI).
Every murder procedural, and every crime drama on TV today has featured this stereotype at one point or another, and often repeatedly: the bitch who's just in it to ruin peoples' lives.
Yes. What about her. What about the woman, who, on a lark, puts on a Sunday dress and tears the strap, who must then induce enough harm to her own body so that she will not be laughed out of the hospital or police station where she seeks care. Who submits to invasive mouth, vaginal, and anal swabbing, who must have her pubic and head hair pulled out by the roots, her body charted and stripped and scraped and and photographed and mapped. Who, even if she is not subjected to a "rape kit," as we are so fond of calling the evidence-gathering protocol for sexual assault victims, is still guaranteed to endure scrutiny of most parties involved, including the police, the justice system, the survivor's social circles/employers, family, and often the media as well. (I'm told we have rape shield laws in this country, but we do not have victim harassment laws, nor do we have Idiotic Remark Prevention protocol.) Who may be shunned either because someone doesn't know how to talk to her, or simply because we live in a rape-friendly culture that encourages lashing out at the victim. The lying shrew who can just shrug off all this contempt and violation and say, "Good golly, it is just such a lovely day to become the scene of a crime."
Right. Because victims have WAY too much power in this day and age. And so many incentives for lying.
Every time you portray a survivor as a calculating liar, you perpetuate the basest rape-enabling myth of all: that survivors should not be believed. The stereotype argues that taking a survivor at her word inevitably produces results akin to a Greek tragedy.
If I was ANYWHERE on the assembly line for Law and Order: SVU and I learned that I was going to get to write or produce something for Chole Sevigny, an actor who demonstrates such tremendous and thoughtful range, I would be thrilled. I cannot fathom why they would utilize all that depth and talent just to shit out another carbon-cutter sexually manipulative Girl Who Cried Dick Wolf.
I just saw Cloe Sevigny on a 2012 episode of Law and Order: SVU. On the good hand: I actually watched something that happened this year, this year (Don't worry, I promise to get back to my list of great movies eclipsed by 9-11 and other such dusty topics later). The bad hand: I was so bummed to see her play the archetype of the manipulative shrew who falsely reports a rape.
Now I know Law and Order: SVU (the weird rubbernecking drug of survivors everywhere) is its own carnival of conceits: the franchise is, without exception, both provocative and blandly formulaic. That is a healthy mindset to go into watching these kinds of shows, your crap baseline, if you will.
But come on. The proportion of falsely reported rapes in real life is exponentially inflated in entertainment. Last I heard, 6% of rapes were considered false (and the data for making such assessments can and should be rigorously interrogated, just for the record). Fewer "fake" survivors come forward than the percentage of people who falsely report a car as stolen. Just because rape only seems like a pressing issue when fame is involved doesn't mean that survivors deserve the incredible amount of scorn, suspicion, and scrutiny that survivors inevitably receive for coming forward. The fame-seeking ho who's out to destroy a nice celebrity family man is a crude stereotype. It is used to suppress the fact that 90% of rapes go unreported (that's a generous statistic compared to the numbers put out by the FBI).
Every murder procedural, and every crime drama on TV today has featured this stereotype at one point or another, and often repeatedly: the bitch who's just in it to ruin peoples' lives.
Yes. What about her. What about the woman, who, on a lark, puts on a Sunday dress and tears the strap, who must then induce enough harm to her own body so that she will not be laughed out of the hospital or police station where she seeks care. Who submits to invasive mouth, vaginal, and anal swabbing, who must have her pubic and head hair pulled out by the roots, her body charted and stripped and scraped and and photographed and mapped. Who, even if she is not subjected to a "rape kit," as we are so fond of calling the evidence-gathering protocol for sexual assault victims, is still guaranteed to endure scrutiny of most parties involved, including the police, the justice system, the survivor's social circles/employers, family, and often the media as well. (I'm told we have rape shield laws in this country, but we do not have victim harassment laws, nor do we have Idiotic Remark Prevention protocol.) Who may be shunned either because someone doesn't know how to talk to her, or simply because we live in a rape-friendly culture that encourages lashing out at the victim. The lying shrew who can just shrug off all this contempt and violation and say, "Good golly, it is just such a lovely day to become the scene of a crime."
Right. Because victims have WAY too much power in this day and age. And so many incentives for lying.
Every time you portray a survivor as a calculating liar, you perpetuate the basest rape-enabling myth of all: that survivors should not be believed. The stereotype argues that taking a survivor at her word inevitably produces results akin to a Greek tragedy.
If I was ANYWHERE on the assembly line for Law and Order: SVU and I learned that I was going to get to write or produce something for Chole Sevigny, an actor who demonstrates such tremendous and thoughtful range, I would be thrilled. I cannot fathom why they would utilize all that depth and talent just to shit out another carbon-cutter sexually manipulative Girl Who Cried Dick Wolf.
Sunday, August 19, 2012
Mutant X Pilot Synopsis (TV, 2001)
Mutant X: Because 2001 was such a great year...
Pilot Synopsis:
Shalimar (the smug one with the all the crane stunts) and Mondo Jesse rescue Jean Grey Emma from a kidnapping attempt by some G-men. They take her back to the Xavier Mansion Mutant X headquarters, in a laughably rendered stealth jet (I think they blew their digital budget on erasing the ropes from Shalimar's Crouching Tiger antics, at which they failed), where they explain in very special ligation-proof language that Mutant X is a group of people with special abilities. Professor X Lex Luthor (less known as actor John Shea) talks Emma out of her shirt, into binding her breasts in ace bandages, and sitting in some sort of diagnostics dental chair despite her insistence that she doesn't have any mutant new mutant powers. Emma ditches Mutant X the first chance she gets in order to pick up a man at a bar, who, convieniently, is also a mutant who is also being hunted by the same sinister G-men, who are run by evil Andy Warhol. Emma's new friend, abhorrently named "Brennan", is a bad-boy hero archetype, so from now on we'll call him Broverine. Emma winces her powers at him to let him know he's in danger, capping off both ends of the episode with a three-minute fight scene, and then I think Evil Andy Warhol is going to kill Lex Luthor asap so poor John Shea, who is really trying here, can legetimize himself as an actor by starring in a few plays.
 |
| The Campiest Live Action Marvel Ripoff Since the 1970's |
Pilot Synopsis:
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| "No, really, I'm the SERIOUS actor here!" |
Pressing questions: Will I be able to endure an entire "Shalimar backstory" episode? Will Emma grow a spine and become less cloying? Is it me or does the fact that Evil Andy Warhol blames Lex Luthor for his immune issues bear tremendous HIV/AIDS subtext?
Also: Why do mutant powers always come with martial arts training?
Rape in Horror and Suspense Overview: The Human Condition Wild Ride
I'm not terribly descriptive here, but let's just say *trigger alert* for the record.
We all have our vicarious thresholds when it comes to violence in entertainment. Rape functions differently for me in genres like suspense, horror, and sci fi than it does in drama. I am too squeamish for a huge proportion of dramas that involve sexual violence, with the exception of those laughably rare scenarios, like Demi Moore sexually harassing Kurt Douglas--shit, pass the popcorn and let's watch the white dude get terrorized for an hour. We can make a Straw Feminist drinking game!
Sexualized fright sells, and it always has. It is not only a foundation of horror, it is a foundation of cinema itself. Think of the idiotic silent films in which "savage" blackface dudes capture the pretty white lady in a long dress. Think Hitchcock, who made breathless thrillers in which he attentively tortured his starlets, both on and off screen. Think of the massacre franchises and their relation to sexuality; think of the Final Girl complex.
When the movie asks me to suspend my disbelief by presenting itself as otherworldly, when it does not claim to tell a literal human story, my personal tolerance for violence is much higher. It is that, and a healthy ability to dissociate, that makes it possible for me to not only view but also speak about ostensibly triggering material such as the prolonged gang rapes that are a critical part of the rape-revenge movie formula, often referenced as rapesploitation. It's a largely 1970's phenomenon, with some perennial remakes such as The Last House on the Left (1972, 2009) and I Spit on Your Grave (1978, 2010) and some millennial takers such as Sweet Karma (2005), and Tomboys (2009).
It is this distinction between genre and drama that makes it so I will eventually get around to watching The Hills Have Eyes (also a remake) before I will ever consider finishing The Piano. This is also why I'm not going to talk about the popular Men Who Hate Women series (besides, there is a lot of great critical material out there about that trilogy already). When I watch horror, I'm not empathizing with the human condition, I'm on the Human Condition Wild Ride. That ride has a familiar, circular track, even if it is a little jerky, and I'm more able to consider what went into the construction of that experience.
There is a lot that I want to discuss about the utilization of rape in horror and thrillers, from 'sploitation to subversion. I'm going to start at the bottom, work my way through some more respectable (read: less gory, equally problematic) films that include rape, and see if there is anything that passes the test of a skeptical survivor intersectional feminist. Sensitive folks, please feel free to skip past this stuff, and be good to yourself if you decide to actually watch anything I discuss. Because I'm not necessarily recommending any of the movies I'm talking about.
So next I'm going to Spit on Your Grave, and take it from there. Please keep your hands and feet inside the Human Condition Wild Ride at all times.
Friday, August 17, 2012
Convalesce and Confessions
So, I torqued my vertebrae, very low on the lumbar register, creating the curious sensation that my pelvis is actively trying to divorce my spine. I am technically in good health, but if you told me that after the nine days I've spent in bed, alternating heat and ice and IcyHot, and making the most out of entirely too few drugs, I would consider shucking your heart out of your chest and swallowing it down like a raw oyster.
What I've been watching: I've seen three seasons in three days of Queer as Folk (US version; I can't understand what British people are saying), but I had to cut myself off when the season three finale made me cry thrice in the span of half an hour. I'm going to be a WRECK when Brian gets ball cancer.
So instead, a moment with a few B-actors I love.
There is an engrossing show that has not yet been cancelled: the objectionably spelled ScyFy channel's Haven. It's got a good Stephen King/Coastal New England foundation, and while it may be unremarkable in large doses due to some formulaic issues, it also has a lot to offer. There is the will-they-or-won't-they love story between the man who can't feel physical sensation and the only woman who can penetrate his numbness. There is the distinct relationship between the supernatural and the dysfunctional, as the impossible disasters inevitably link back to a single "troubled" soul. There is a clever "add a cast member from 90210" Hail Mary that actually WORKS. There is also the charming B actor presence of Eric Balfour.
What can I say? Eric went to high school with Buffy (ok, he tried to eat her in the pilot), he was sympathetic in the only season of 24 I could stand to watch, and he was heartbreaking in Six Feet Under. Was there ever much character variation? Well, no. He's pretty much the Troubled Manslut with the Heart of Gold (and some facial hair) in everything he plays. But that's not really a problem for me, because it seems like he's genuinely trying to hit bottom in every role; it's so depressing, it's almost admirable.
Another actor I've been following is Laruen Lee Smith. She had a nice little affair with Dana the tennis player in the L-Word, and was oddly memorable in the 2001-'03 equally oddly memorable X-men ripoff tv series Mutant X. I'm three minutes into the pilot of Mutant X, and the usage of the crane alone scores it high on the Squalid chart. Smith plays Jean Grey the psychic one, and I'm looking forward to a thousand close-ups of her furrowed brow which indicate she is using her powers. I can't remember if she uses the hand-on-the-forehead gesture to emphasize her skills; only time will tell.
Excitingly enough, these two actors bone like crazy in a movie that amounts, for me, at least, to a bisexual sundae: 2005's Lie With Me. I've only watched half of it (I sense a bad case of disaster syndrome coming on), but I like a) how the film is narrated in the voice of a sexually voracious woman, for once, and b) there is fairly convincing chemistry and extremely convincing sex. I'll report back to you on Lie With Me when I feel I can stomach whatever after-school-special/dangers-of-sex trope they throw in the last 45 minutes. Best guess based on pattern: Eric gets shot.
Let's see.. in my misguided enthusiasm for the future Ms. Bonanza (that's what I call illustriously out bisexual Anna Paquin), I watched Margaret (2011), and was too busy being annoyed that Paquin has been playing teenagers for longer than anyone spends in their actual teens (and also being annoyed by her character) to have any fun. It did spark the idea for a future blog post about two actors, one male, one female, who are so pigeonholed for teenage coming-of-age roles that they have each lost their virginity in at least a dozen movies. I'm looking forward to holding them up to the Gender Analysis Lens, and seeing which one bursts into flame and which one just melts. It's going to be "tits," as the kids like to say.
Squalor of the month goes hands down to In the Cut (2003), a tawdry whodunit complete with dismemberment, voyeurism, slang vocabulary lessons, and really talky, dirty sex (dirty for the MPAA, that is) between Meg Ryan and Mark Ruffalo. The poor film was despised by critics and audiences alike, despite its irregular romance and almost-grindhouse appeal. I think maybe I've been single and/or without sex for too long, because I rewatched this squalid classic out of the bizarre sensation that if I met Ruffalo in person, I would hold some part of him over my mouth and nose and inhale as though he were an oxygen mask. In the Cut: a fair substitute for a kind of sex I should probably not be having. And some nice work by Jennifer Jason Leigh.
Ok, I promise to get back to rape in film as soon as I can sit upright. In the meantime, friends, stay squalid.
What I've been watching: I've seen three seasons in three days of Queer as Folk (US version; I can't understand what British people are saying), but I had to cut myself off when the season three finale made me cry thrice in the span of half an hour. I'm going to be a WRECK when Brian gets ball cancer.
So instead, a moment with a few B-actors I love.
There is an engrossing show that has not yet been cancelled: the objectionably spelled ScyFy channel's Haven. It's got a good Stephen King/Coastal New England foundation, and while it may be unremarkable in large doses due to some formulaic issues, it also has a lot to offer. There is the will-they-or-won't-they love story between the man who can't feel physical sensation and the only woman who can penetrate his numbness. There is the distinct relationship between the supernatural and the dysfunctional, as the impossible disasters inevitably link back to a single "troubled" soul. There is a clever "add a cast member from 90210" Hail Mary that actually WORKS. There is also the charming B actor presence of Eric Balfour.
What can I say? Eric went to high school with Buffy (ok, he tried to eat her in the pilot), he was sympathetic in the only season of 24 I could stand to watch, and he was heartbreaking in Six Feet Under. Was there ever much character variation? Well, no. He's pretty much the Troubled Manslut with the Heart of Gold (and some facial hair) in everything he plays. But that's not really a problem for me, because it seems like he's genuinely trying to hit bottom in every role; it's so depressing, it's almost admirable.
Excitingly enough, these two actors bone like crazy in a movie that amounts, for me, at least, to a bisexual sundae: 2005's Lie With Me. I've only watched half of it (I sense a bad case of disaster syndrome coming on), but I like a) how the film is narrated in the voice of a sexually voracious woman, for once, and b) there is fairly convincing chemistry and extremely convincing sex. I'll report back to you on Lie With Me when I feel I can stomach whatever after-school-special/dangers-of-sex trope they throw in the last 45 minutes. Best guess based on pattern: Eric gets shot.
Let's see.. in my misguided enthusiasm for the future Ms. Bonanza (that's what I call illustriously out bisexual Anna Paquin), I watched Margaret (2011), and was too busy being annoyed that Paquin has been playing teenagers for longer than anyone spends in their actual teens (and also being annoyed by her character) to have any fun. It did spark the idea for a future blog post about two actors, one male, one female, who are so pigeonholed for teenage coming-of-age roles that they have each lost their virginity in at least a dozen movies. I'm looking forward to holding them up to the Gender Analysis Lens, and seeing which one bursts into flame and which one just melts. It's going to be "tits," as the kids like to say.
Squalor of the month goes hands down to In the Cut (2003), a tawdry whodunit complete with dismemberment, voyeurism, slang vocabulary lessons, and really talky, dirty sex (dirty for the MPAA, that is) between Meg Ryan and Mark Ruffalo. The poor film was despised by critics and audiences alike, despite its irregular romance and almost-grindhouse appeal. I think maybe I've been single and/or without sex for too long, because I rewatched this squalid classic out of the bizarre sensation that if I met Ruffalo in person, I would hold some part of him over my mouth and nose and inhale as though he were an oxygen mask. In the Cut: a fair substitute for a kind of sex I should probably not be having. And some nice work by Jennifer Jason Leigh.
Ok, I promise to get back to rape in film as soon as I can sit upright. In the meantime, friends, stay squalid.
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