The bridge is yours.
-Me. Maureen Ryan. Ryan McGee. Todd VanDerWerff. Homeland. Parks and Recreation. You know what to do.
-Some of the best television lines of the year.
-Brave‘s fired female director talks Belle, her daughter as inspiration, and her split with Pixar.
-Super-cute Game of Thrones house banners.
When I was writing yesterday’s post about dictators and culture, I was reminded of how fascinated I’ve always been by the women who the partners of authoritarian or repressive leaders. They’re a fascinating reminder that second-wavey ideas about women being more peaceful or nurturing than men can be entirely and terrifyingly untrue. And they’re a great way of examining the moral choices that allow such regimes to thrive.
1.The Director: Jiang Qing. I should have mentioned this former actress as a perfect example of the dictatorial effort to set up the government as a source of joy by dominating culture, and you could tell a fabulously scary story about her through a look at a single production. She interfered with the Beijing Opera, interfered what she called “revolutionary plays” ran the film section of Communist China’s propaganda ministry, and even discovered Joan Chen. Glee and Smash would have absolutely nothing on her in a story that could be about both the coercive power of government and the tyranny of people who are convinced they’re artistic visionaries.
2. The Escapee: Malyamu Amin. To a certain extent, The Last King of Scotland is an exploration of the life and death of Kay Amin, Idi Amin’s youngest wife, who is said to have had an abortion go wrong. But the movie isn’t from Kay’s perspective — her mutilated body is the means by which an arrogant young Scottish doctor comes to consciousness. And wouldn’t it be fascinating to see a tyrant through the eyes of his first wife, to try to understand what it must be like to see your husband become a monster — and to watch her make the decision to get out?
3. The Mother: Sajida Khairallah Talfah. Gillian Darmody and the other nightmare mothers of antihero television have precisely nothing on Saddam Hussein’s first wife in terms of producing deeply messed-up. One of her sons, Uday Hussein, was apparently a serial rapist and killed the man he believed introduced Saddam to his second wife at a party for another authoritarian leader’s wife, Suzanne Mubarak. He also ran a nasty little sideline torturing Iraqi athletes who underperformed in world competitions. Her other son, Qusay, managed to keep his crimes at the level of the state, wiping out the environment that was the home to the Marsh Arabs and rare bird species, and cracking down on dissidents. Her husband may have also murdered her brother. What can it be like to be the widow to such a man? The mother to such dead sons? She does play a role in House of Saddam.
4. The Pretender: Magda Goebbels: In a sense, she was the closest thing Germany had to a first lady, because Adolf Hitler hid his relationship with Eva Braun to avoid putting anything in the way of German women’s fantasies. A wealthy divorcee when she married Goebbels, she was humiliated by his affairs (though she had her own) and asked Hitler for permission to divorce his propaganda minister. Ultimately, they stayed together, and Magda supported the regime even though she privately doubted it, made no move to save her Jewish stepfather from death in a concentration camp, and helped kill her six children before killing herself with her husband. Again, it’s not as if there haven’t been portrayals of her on film before. But it would be fascinating and dreadful to see the story from her perspective, to see Magda go from bourgie flirt to participant in a genocidal regime.
5. Eva Peron, again. Sure, we’ve got Evita. And yes, her husband is nowhere near as bad as the spouses of the other women on this list. But in some ways, the more interesting story about Eva Peron is what happened to her after she died. Her enbalmed body was supposed to go on display in a monument that would rival the Statue of Liberty. Instead, it vanished for 16 years, and she ended up buried under another name in Milan. Tomás Eloy Martínez’s Santa Evita turns the mystery into a macabre and fascinating horror, complete with wax replicas and corpse desecration. But either way, it’s a fascinating illustration of how an even more restrictive regime tried to erase the memory of the one that followed it, and to dismantle a cult of personality.
I didn’t write anything on the occasion of Christopher Hitchens’ death, because I didn’t feel like I had much to add. I never met him, though we were neighbors, and I occasionally saw him getting out of cabs. There are candles, flowers, and bottles of whisky in a makeshift shrine outside his building. And I wasn’t overly influenced by his writing, though this line from a review of Philip Roth remains an all-time great: “When Raymond Chandler felt things going limp in a story, he would have the door open and then it would be: Enter a man carrying a gun. When Roth is in the same fix, we know that some luckless goy chick is about to get it in the face. Exit reader.” But I’ve rather enjoyed watching the people who did know first Hitchens glorify him — and by extension themselves — and then dissect him. And I love this parody, by Neal Pollack, of the whole arc:
Christopher Hitchens and I were friends for 40 years, plus another five when we were enemies. He took ideas so seriously that if he disagreed with you on a matter that he deemed important, he’d literally throw you in a ditch. It was 1972, the height of our mutual virility. He and I went to a pub to celebrate his most recent intellectual victory over the establishment press. I intimated that sometimes women could be funny on purpose. Even back then, the thought enraged him. Hitchens threw a drink in my face, pressed a lit cigarette into my neck, and hit me over the head with a barstool. The next thing I knew, it was two days later and I was lying hogtied and naked beside the M5. Hitch had already severely damaged my reputation in a vicious essay in the Guardian. But that’s how he operated, and that’s why we loved him.
It’s rather wonderfully reminiscent of Woody Allen’s “A Twenties Memory” (and by extension Midnight in Paris):
I remember one afternoon we were sitting at a gay bar in the south of France with our feet comfortably up on stools in the north of France, when Gertrude Stein said, “I’m nauseous.” Picasso thought this to be very funny and Matisse and I took it as a cue to leave for Africa. Seven weeks later, in Kenya, we came upon Hemingway. Bronzed and bearded now, he was already beginning to develop that familiar flat prose style about the eyes and mouth. Here, in the unexplored dark continent, Hemingway had braved chapped lips a thousand times. “What’s doing, Ernest?” I asked him. He waxed eloquent on death and adventure as only he could, and when I awoke he had pitched camp and sat around a great fire fixing us all fine derma appetizers. I kidded him about his new beard and we laughed and sipped cognac and then we put on some boxing gloves and he broke my nose.
Hitchens seems to have been singularly successful at setting up his approval and friendship as highly valuable commodities, less Orwell than the version of Gertrude Stein in Allen’s story. I can understand why, I suppose. In an age of specialists, generalists hold a special fascination. A capacity for alcohol can seem like an important marker of physical tolerance in an intellectual community (though I think Katha Pollitt does a particularly nice job dismantling why that should be true). And if you know someone with the capacity to pronounce loudly and emphatically on your fitness as a person and a thinker, all the better to have them pronounce in your favor. It’s fun being a sage or judge. But I’m always curious about the impulse to make yourself an acolyte.
I’m obviously thrilled to see good ratings for Homeland‘s first-season finale: I like seeing pop culture behave like a meritocracy once in a while. But it got me thinking about whether or not Showtime’s new hit is trading off with All-American Muslim, which is seeing a downturn in viewership. 10 p.m. on a Sunday is obviously a tough time for a family-oriented show in any case, and I’d be curious to see how the show did in another slot, like 8 p.m. on Fridays. But it also meant that a show specifically designed to dismantle misconceptions about American Muslims by showing them living and debating their faith was running against a show that poked holes in stereotypes about Islam and terrorism and gave one of its main characters space to explain his conversion and show him at prayer. It would be great to open up new audiences to that conversation. But that takes time. And it’s too bad to have two shows with those themes competing with each other.
It looks gorgeous:
I think the main question for me will be how they handle the encounter between Gollum and Bilbo. Gollum’s origin story in the Lord of the Rings trilogy is perhaps the finest cinematic depiction of the Fall. Bilbo is less corrupted by the Ring, of course—it’s a gentler story. But it’s not an unimportant one for the fact that he has less far to tumble.
We’ve talked a lot about mental illness and Homeland here, and as a corollary (and possible pick-me-up), I wanted to recommend Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover‘s Gingerbread Girl.
The short graphic novel follows Annah Billups, a 26 year old who insists that she has a missing sister. And not just any sister: her Penfield homunculus, which she says her father removed from her brain during her parents divorce, grew into a full-sized sister for her, and who subsequently appeared, only to seem to be avoiding Annah in the city where she lives and loves. As a result of that surgery and loss, Annah claims to feel things less, both physically and emotionally, an excuse for her to behave less than admirably. She schedules two dates for a single night and goes out with the woman who shows up first, is sexually manipulative, and often generally inconsiderate. But she’s still charming and compelling: damage is not incompatible with charisma, and in fact, the two can go together quite handily.
So is Annah insane? It’s never clarified: a Penfield homunculus is, of course, a way of illustrating brain functions rather than a real thing. But the story of her missing sister Annah has a certain magical quality to it that’s a lovely representation of the divorce from self. Annah wants to feel normal and whole again, but Ginger doesn’t want to see her, she dashes around corners and runs out of stores. And while Homeland gives us a Cassandra rendered explicable and admirable to us even as she’s stigmatized by the people around her on-screen, Gingerbread Girl is told significantly from the perspective of the people Annah hurts and loves, from the people (and in several cases animals) she encounters along the way, who are more inclined to be charitable with her than we might be.
It’s also a good way of illustrating the challenges of treatment. It’s one thing to massively reset your brain with ECT therapy. It’s another to have a problem that’s magical rather than scientific. We’re making advances in brain science, but we’re still not far enough along for true cures to depression and dementia, as in Rise of the Planet of the Apes to seem like the provenance of fantasy or science fiction.
I really hope all of the people who complained vociferously about Emily Browning’s cover of “Sweet Dreams” in Sucker-Punch are happy now, because this one is so much worse:
There is no way the ancient Greeks were this freakin’ tacky.
And I know I’m a total apologist for this movie, but really, Browning’s cover:
Is to Sucker-Punch what Carey Mulligan’s “New York, New York” cover is to Shame: self-indulgent, manipulative, and affecting anyway:
None of them, of course, add up to anything like Karen O and Trent Reznor’s “Immigrant Song,” cover, though I kind of wish they’d found a way to set it up so that’s what Lisbeth Salander does at karaoke or something:
Business Insider has pretty much the best headline announcing this news: “Some People Who Don’t Know Louis CK’s Material Very Well Just Booked Him for the Congressional Correspondents Dinner.” I like C.K. in part because his jokes are psychological, and often oriented towards making people recognize their common experiences and values. But it’s true that they aren’t the kind of zippy political one-liners that someone like Stephen Colbert can toss off all day. So here are five things that C.K. should do when he comes to Washington:
1. Get at the audience’s failure to ask the important questions of the day, like whether Donald Rumsfeld is a lizard from outer space who eats human flesh:
2. Washington is ridiculously full of powerful white people. Remind them how awesome their lives are — and that they aren’t necessarily responsible for that awesomeness:
3. Point out a fundamental an uncomfortable truth: no matter how tough reporters are, and no matter what their political leanings are, people get star-struck by proximity to the president (starts at 3:15):
4. If you take one policy position, go hard on evolution and its deniers. Please:
5. Remember: your Sarah Palin jokes are not your funniest (or best) work of the past couple of years:
Whoever is choosing the psych-up movies for the House Republican caucus is…not having a good year. First, the caucus used a speech by Ben Affleck’s bank robber character in The Town to rally enthusiasm for House Speaker John Boehner’s debt-ceiling plan, a spectacle that ended with Rep. Allen West (who has his own questionable taste in movies) to volunteer to drive the getaway car. Now they’re taking inspiration from Braveheart, which of course ends with its hero getting tortured and beheaded, perhaps a sign of psychological anxiety about their approval ratings?
What’s baffling about this is why the caucus doesn’t turn to the most anodyne, psychologically unmuddled psych-up genre, the sports movie? The speeches are martial without glorying in actual violence, a parallel way to set up climactic conflicts, and leave an out to feel good about yourself even if you lose:
It’s one thing to scapegoat cultural elites. It’s another to stumble into super-awkward cultural allusion after super-awkward cultural allusion. If you care about message discipline, sports movies are totally safe and reliable, and perhaps most importantly, Heartland-appropriate.
When I started this blog two and a half years ago, it was an experiment, a chance for me to see if I wanted to write about culture full-time, and an attempt to see if political, mostly cheerful, sometimes deeply cranky culture blog could find a home in the awesome, experimental wilderness that is online criticism. It turns out that I did, and that it could. And I’m deeply grateful that ThinkProgress and the Center for American Progress decided to take me on, and to make a serious investment in the idea that culture plays a critical role in shaping our politics and our collective character.
Being here has meant a lot of things to me. It’s a chance to write about the things I love full-time, and thanks to the wisdom of my editors here and to the standards you all hold me to, I’ve learned a tremendous amount. It means I get to take a seat on stages and argue that superheroes are the key to the American idea, ask Chris Dodd if he thinks piracy is a customer service problem, and talk about what the 99 Percent movement can learn from 2 Broke Girls. It’s given me a chance to call out the shame of Joe Paterno and the cowardice of Lowe’s and Kayak. And it’s let me talk, at great length, about banking, governance, and A Song of Ice and Fire.
A lot of what makes it possible for me to do the kind of criticism I do is the fact that I’m at a non-profit. But it’s not easy, or cheap, to create something like ThinkProgress. If you’ve enjoyed my writing, or if you’ve benefited from anything ThinkProgress does throughout the year, please consider supporting our work by making a donation. We’re headed into an election year where many of my colleagues will be hitting the road to cover a critically important presidential campaign, and during which I’ll also be expanding my reporting outside of Washington, D.C. to bring you more news, interviews, and early looks at what’s next in movies, television, video games, books, museums and theater. $5 gets us almost two gallons of gas in Iowa, and goes far towards Hollywood economics textbooks.
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The bridge is yours.
-The Force is growing stronger. Particularly in the Czech Republic.
-Anti-heroine recommendations from the great Heather Havrilesky.
-Piracy turns out to be irresistible even to the people who fight it, sometimes.
-Are these the most underrated actors on television?
There’s been a lot of discussion prompted by Good Men Project founder Tom Matlack’s recent essay, in which he suggests that women want men to be more like them, and that manliness is a good thing. I’ll leave Amanda Marcotte to take on some of the larger assumptions in this piece (and to mount a defense as Matlack appears to denounce feminists and insist attacks on him are unfair because he’s a simple oral historian, or something), because I want to address this one: “So are dudes as a gender really assholes? If you look around in the press, on TV, and in popular culture you certainly might conclude that.” I’ve written in the past about some of the best shows about masculinity on television. Sure, it’s true — there are men who behave badly on television, but a lot of women who do same. But I also think that there are a lot of great manly male characters in pop culture right now. Among them:
1. With a bullet. Or with U.S. Army issued mustache trimmers. Parks and Recreation‘s Ron Swanson: Ron Swanson eats steak, drinks whiskey, smokes cigars, venerates John Wayne, reads Patrick O’Brian, hunts, camps, lays wreathes, lights torches, and teaches fourth-graders the importance of libertarianism. He also mentors women, loves mini-horses, shows up with hangover cures, self-sacrifices for the greater good, and dances with a fascinator on when he’s drunk. And he makes the point that none of these things are remotely inconsistent.
2. Because sometimes mentoring means you call the CIA on your mentee. And sometimes it means you show up with chicken soup. Homeland‘s Saul Berenson: Dude has one of the most serious beards on television. He blackmails the vice president of the United States in the name of justice. He talks around homegrown terrorists into giving up critically useful information. He responds to improper advances from his desperate mentee in an entirely proper fashion. He tries to woo back his estranged wife when she announces she’s leaving him to his workaholic tendencies, but ultimately respects her decision to go. Saul’s personal and professional courage are admirable. I’m going to be really sad if he turns out to be a mole.
3. Because sometimes being a good father means letting your daughter get mentored by Oprah. Up All Night‘s Kevin: Jason Lee’s had a bit of a wacky streak these past couple of years, but it’s turns out he’s exactly what this freshman comedy needed. As a contractor, he’s a nice counterbalance to the glitzy world new girlfriend Ava spends most of her time in without being an exploitable working-class fling. He spends Christmas with his ex-wife to create a smooth transition for his daughter. And he trusts and respects that Ava will find her way to a relationship with his daughter—and in expecting her to behave like a normal human, or as close as she’s capable of getting, helps her level up.
4. Cable executive. Tuxedo-wearer. Single father. 30 Rock‘s Jack Donaghy: Now, let’s be clear. Jack Donaghy has his flaws: a pathological hatred for his (admittedly dotty) mother, a disturbing level of comfort with turning children permanently orange, and a willingness to fake Dominican birth certificates to bolster Tracy Jordan’s struggling baseball team. But he loves smart women, whether he’s marrying first wife Bianca or talented cable-talker Avery Jessup or mentoring Liz Lemon; he’ll do anything for his father, include arranging a one-beneficiary all-star charity concert; and even if baby Libby is Canadian, you know that man will take all the care of her in the world.
5. The mismatched socks. The mad marksmanship skills. The naked omelet-making. Bones‘ Seeley Booth: I know Bones drives a lot of you crazy. But in the post-Bush years, and in this particular moment after Christopher Hitchens’ death, there’s something really valuable about throwing down a marker and declaring that while it may be manly to be able to use force, it’s morally correct to abhor killing even if you’re good at it. And even though David Boreanaz makes it look effortless, the character of Booth is all about the fact that manhood — whether in the form of resisting addiction, caring for a wayward brother, respecting and loving a strong but difficult woman, and holding on to your faith — is hard work. But it’s worth doing.
Portrait of the tyrant as a young director.
There’s Hitler’s collaboration with Leni Reifenstahl on Triumph of the Will, of course — he collaborated and starred in the movie, and was an executive producer. Who needs the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and mawkish watercolors when you can participate in the creation of a groundbreaking work of cinema? Stalin, too, dabbled in movies, keeping an eye on the production of Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible movies. He also made socialist realism the official artistic movement of the Soviet State with a declaration entitled “On the Reconstruction of Literary and Art Organizations” in 1932. Saddam Hussein wrote cheesy historical romance novels that were meant to be metaphors for his own reign. Ferdinand Marcos hired actress Dovie Beams to play his love interest in a movie about his war exploits, had an affair with her that produced a sex tape scandal (which became an excuse to crack down on his political opposition). Before he ruled Egypt, Hosni Mubarak apparently cameoed in an Egyptian movie, Farewell at Dawn. A critical point in Juan Peron’s rise to power in Argentina was the fundraising efforts he lead in relief of the San Juan earthquake, which happened in collaboration with the country’s creative industry.
Cracking down on artists, and treating their speech as if it functions in the same way as other political speech is a first-level realization for tyrants. If you truly acknowledge and appreciate the particular power art has, of course you want to exploit it to your own ends. And if you’re creating a cult of personality or a cult of the state, it makes sense that you want your people to believe that joy and uplift emanates from the Leader and from the state. This is a reason that dictatorial art is bad, or sentimental: because it’s premised on an idea that isn’t true, that isn’t even really plausible.
Making movies about your own greatness, your historical roots, your role in upholding distinctly Filipino values, doesn’t actually make it so. Providing temporary distractions from the miseries you cause your people doesn’t ameliorate those miseries, or cause them not to matter. Vaclav Havel’s art worked in the opposite direction, becoming a crucible for refining the ideas and principles that informed his dissent, and later his governance. Unsurprisingly, truth makes for more humane politics, and for better art.
Voting closes at noon EST on Friday. So get clicking!
This year’s winner is a doozy, and David Guterson could have won for this line alone:
It didn’t take long for the beautiful and perfect Ed King to ejaculate for the fifth time in twelve hours, while looking like Roman public-bath statuary.
I guess Brandon Sullivan kind of looks like Roman statuary while finally, painfully reaching orgasm in Shame, maybe in a Laocoon-y kind of way, but that’s not a good thing.
I’m always sort of amused by the idea that the people who are having good sex look all suave and aesthetically appealing while it happens. This is a misconception that both writers and folks who make film and television seem to have. It’s an idea that’s debunked very effectively in Zack and Miri Make a Porno. When Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks’ characters finally have sex in the scene that they’re filming for their adult movie, we see the scene first from their perspective, where the sex is transformative and miraculous. Then, we see it from the perspective of the camera crew, who after weeks of ridiculous posing, are disconcerted by the image of two people huddled together somewhat lumpily on a coffee shop floor. In a more sophisticated way, the sex scenes in the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair (other than the ludicrous sex-up-a-stairway sequence, which would hurt SO MUCH) do the same thing. When people try to have sex on tables, they fall off. They get the giggles. They act kind of stupid and do things, like pour water on each other, that seem like a good idea in the moment but mostly seem sort of weird afterward.
Scenes like this are a lot more intimate than depictions that are about showing off how great a female lead’s hair look, or letting her keep her bra on to stay compliant with the clauses in her contract, or are about letting the male lead look like an awesome physical specimen, or a sensitive dude, or both at once. Good sex gets you beyond those concerns, which is why it’s hard to capture in art.
I’m no badass Milton scholar like John Rogers (whose lectures on his poetry are free, and awesome). But the things he taught me while I was in college have left me with a permanent interest in what it means when artists put compelling words in their villains’ mouths. And goodness is Christopher Nolan doing a lot of that in the first full-length trailer for The Dark Knight Rises:
I’m most interested in Selina Kyle’s dancefloor warning to Bruce Wayne that “You think you can last. There’s a storm coming, Mr. Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches. Because when it hits, you’re all going to wonder how you could ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us.” This is what’s at the heart of the most convincing critique of Batman, isn’t it? The idea that he needs Gotham’s corruption for self-gratification more than he needs to eliminate it in the name of justice, that he’s used his wealth to purchase the capacity to engage successfully in endless conflict. But are we supposed to believe her?
If there’s a hallmark of Nolan’s exploration of the Batman legend it’s this: Bruce Wayne squares off with an intelligent foe who articulates an opposing worldview so Batman can vanquish them both philosophically and physically. In Batman Begins, Ra’s al Ghul is repeatedly shown to be wrong that crisis will deliver a cathartic shock to Gotham, leading people to support a revolutionary upheaval of society. And he dies in a train crash, an act that both obscures his own death among a larger tragedy, and that fails to achieve the kind of effect he’d hoped for. In The Dark Knight, Gotham City’s convicts prove the Joker wrong more than Batman does, actually. But even though it’s at great cost, Wayne and Commissioner Gordon manage to create a set of perceptions that keep the city’s residents faith with the government. Here, I’ll be curious to see if Bruce Wayne proves his genuine fidelity to Gotham City’s 99 percent.
And I’m intrigued by Bane launching his campaign on the city with an attack of the closest thing America has to a national church, professional football. (And please tell me the Wayne family owns the team and the movie riffs on bad owners. Please, Santa, I have been SO GOOD.) Of all years, coming after the Penn State scandals, the Times’ move from reporting on football and concussions to the role of enforcers in hockey, to the allegations that the NBA fired a male employee who spoke up for his female colleagues who were being sexually harassed, this would be an interesting time to rigorously interrogate sport’s role in our national life. Of course we won’t, and the attack on the stadium will just be proof that Bane is another combination of brain and brawn with a strong sense of symbolism. But it would be interesting to see Bruce Wayne acknowledge that one of his opponents is a little bit right. God may have blown off Satan’s critique once his former antagonist was in the pit. And look where that got him.
At Netroots New York this weekend, I went to an interesting workshop by John Hlinko, the man behind Left Action (and, interestingly, the write-in campaign to get former DC Mayor Adrian Fenty reelected after he lost the Democratic primary) and Julianna Forlano, the Brooklyn College media professor and voice behind the Ironic News Report. They were discussing how to use comedy to recruit people for activist projects, which is, of course, different from comedy for comedy’s sake. But the presentation raised some interesting questions for me about how best to make arguments through comedy — and whether, as progressives, it makes more sense for us to be rallying the troops internally, or to be working on converting the unconvinced.
“What makes people laugh,” Julianna said, is “surprise and a feeling of superiority…this is one that can be used for good or evil. You can use it to create a feeling of solidarity with your people, or you can do that thing I mentioned, where Mexicans love gardening. What we want to do is turn our focus on those people who are in power.” Which I think is true, to a certain extent. But there’s always the danger that in cutting people down to size, you end up confirming your (and your audience’s) own biases in a way that disarms your ability to fight hypocrisy and damaging ideas. Take the idea that Republicans are stupid. John used, as an example, a campaign he used to attract followers to LeftAction, getting people to register Facebook likes for the concept: “Can this horse’s ass get more fans than Mitch McConnell?” “It was clearly tapping into the kind of community,” he told us. “It pre-sold them on the concept. And then I said if you like an edgy, creative approach to left activism, like LeftAction.”
I get the impulse, especially if you’re feeling beaten up, to take refuge in the idea that your opponents are stupid. But that’s not actually an argument that’s going to dislodge people who agree with the arguments you’re not actually addressing, a project towards which I am more temperamentally inclined. By contrast, there’s something like Hustler’s Jerry Falwell parody, which was both funny because it was obviously not true, and because it provoked him into a response that made Larry Flynt’s point for him: that Falwell was thin-skinned, brittle, and humorless. The parody ad worked precisely because Hustler was coming into it from a position of confidence, rather than insecurity. He didn’t scare them enough for Flynt and company to have to reassure themselves that they were better than Falwell was—in fact, the ad copy is written completely straight, and sets Falwell up as a figure of authority within the context of the joke. “The greater the prestige of the target, the greater desire of people to see them equalized,” Julianna said. “My theory is we all know this is an illusion…Some of us on the left have to get over saying we love everyone and go on the attack.” The question is, what’s the best way to expose that artificiality? Dismantling illusions takes more work than just stating that they’re mirages, but it’s probably more effective in the long term.
I brought this up in the session, and John and Julianna and I talked about it afterward, but I also think it’s important to remember that comedy can be an incredibly valuable tool for reframing debates. The funniest bit of Louis C.K.’s environmentalist riff on his current tour and in his special isn’t necessarily the bit about people who think the natural world is there for them to exploit. It’s him as an aggrieved, and slightly naive, God, asking, “What the fuck did you do to my duck? It had a green head and it was so awesome and you fucking killed it!” When our debates become about who is smarter, or cooler, we’re losing focus. Sometimes the most important thing about environmentalism is the wonder of the duck.
We’ve spent some time here talking about homophobia in professional sports, but my friend Benjy Sarlin has a new lens on the gay community’s relationship to sports in the form of a great piece about the rise of gay sports bars. The piece focuses on gay men (I’d be curious to know if there are lesbian sports bars out there), and takes on everything from the role of gay athletic leagues, to the charges that gay sports bars aren’t “gay” enough, to understandings of what counts as acceptable gender and political expression in various gay communities:
Not surprisingly, gay fans complain they’re often unfairly labeled as wannabe heteros.
“As gay men, it’s expected that we know nothing about sports,” Frank Anthony Polito, a Detroit Tigers fan who watches ballgames at nearby Gym Sportsbar, says. “And if we act like we do, we must be putting it on.”
Cyd Zeigler, an obsessive sports nut and intense competitor, says being teased as “butch” by other gays is one of his biggest frustrations.
“It’s kind of sad, but many gay people are as close-minded about sports as some high-profile athletes are close-minded about homosexuality,” he says. “Many gay people feel the need to compartmentalize people who aren’t like them. So if you’re politically conservative or you like sports, many gay people try to push you to the far corners of the community. They felt tormented by sports as children, so it’s payback time now that they’re adults.”
I’m always sort of fascinated by debates about communal purity, like this sort of conversation, and more substantively, a lawsuit Benjy alludes to about whether bisexual players count as gay or straight for the purposes of determining membership on a gay softball team. Obviously whether or not you’re super-into football isn’t actually determinative of who you like to have sex with. But it’s too bad that we’re still at a point where hollering at the television over insane managerial decisions during the playoffs could still be seen by anyone as culture treason. One of the benefits of an environment that makes it easier for folks to come out should be a sense that your community is bigger than you knew, big enough for everyone not to have to be invested in the same projects, and big enough to accommodate multiple gay cultures, and to accept solidarity when it’s offered. If gay men want a bar where they can hang out and watch football, it doesn’t mean the club that has Madonna dance nights is going to shut down. And bisexual people aren’t inherently infiltrators.
The bridge is yours.
-Louis C.K.: web innovator and skeptic.
-Ninja engagement photos. Zombies are so earlier this year.
-Apparently we get five more Daniel Craig-as-Bond movies.
-Restoring the credits of blacklisted screenwriters.
-More Azelia Banks:
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was never quite my jam: it’s over my personal comfort threshhold for depictions of sexual assault, and the early financial stuff is some seriously heavy furniture, so I never read the subsequent books. That said, I’ve always been half-amused, half-depressed by the idea that this novel, originally titled Men Who Hate Women, and directly connecting capitalism and the abuse of women, is a huge American hit. Who knows what it is about this particular package that got these ideas, which would be radioactive in another context or presentation, into circulation?
All of which is a long way of saying that, no matter what you think about the novels and how they depict violence against women and the way those women recover, I don’t think creating a clothing line inspired by Lisbeth Salander glamorizes either the terrible things that are done to her or the things she does in response to them. That’s what Natalie Karneef is arguing in a post that’s produced a moderate buzz, rising up to ABC News. She writes:
And now, H&M, you have created a line of clothing based on her character: a woman who has suffered a lifetime of abuse, who is violently raped, and who is hunting down a man who violently rapes and kills other women. Lisbeth has been through hell, and her clothing is her armor. That’s her choice, and it’s an understandable choice. But you glamorize it, putting a glossy, trendy finish on the face of sexual violence and the rage and fear it leaves behind.
I wonder if you’ve considered how a survivor of sexual violence chooses her or his fashion choices…When I dress in the spirit Lisbeth Salander, it’s because I want to send a message to men: to stay the fuck away.
Anna Norling, the Division Designer at H&M, says that she is “so proud” of this collection, because Lisbeth is the “very essence of an independent woman.” Lisbeth Salander is independent woman whose mother was abused by her father, who was violently raped by a man in charge of her well being, who is harassed and bullied by men in public, and who is severely emotionally scarred.
Stieg Larsson was inspired to write The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo because he witnessed a girl getting gang raped when he was 15 years old. I’ve heard it said that being raped is like getting a tattoo – it never goes away. I hope your shoppers bear this in mind before they emulate Lisbeth Salander.
There’s a lot going on here, so I’m going to unpack it step by step. It’s pretty hard to tell from either Karneef’s post or her statements to ABC, in which she says she objects to the collection because it “glamorizing surviving rape” whether she thinks Lisbeth Salander is a role model or not. Again, having read only the first book, it’s not particularly clear to me that Lisbeth is an aspirational figure. She’s painfully thin, has difficulty emotionally connecting to people, works in a field that allows her to isolate herself from human contact, and the violence she herself commits is both offputting and logistically out of reach for most women. Neither her experience nor means by and extent to which she’s recovered seem particularly glamorous.
And are we really supposed to find “glamorizing surviving rape” so offensive? Sure, a narrative where someone is brutally attacked and rises from their hospital bed dewy and saintly would be offensive, but it also would be so emotionally implausible that it wouldn’t resonate with people. Stories on the other hand that emphasize that rape and sexual abuse are horrific and difficult to recover from but that still celebrate the strength of survivors seem appropriate. But whom am I or anyone else to tell survivors where to find their role models or how to interpret the stories they find meaningful?
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Alyssa Rosenberg is a culture blogger for ThinkProgress.org. She is a correspondent for TheAtlantic.com and The Washington Monthly. Read more.
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