Quirk in the Time of Cholera

From Gloss, one of my favorite new blog finds, on Judd Apatow:

Don't let the eye-dropper's worth of character development he gave the women in Knocked Up fool you, Judd Apatow treats objects like women, man. His female characters are at best goalposts, there to measure your male narrative arc against—motherly when you are ready to lose your virginity; pregnant and employed when you finally outgrow the stoner act; drunk and waiting to give you a blow job when you finally show up at the high school party, even though you've only talked to her once. The joyous parade of penises at the end of Superbad is exactly the point—this is the world we live in. Apatow's male character (really, there's just one) shows that it's painful growing into his role as penis bearer in the planet's last surviving empire. But guess what, tough guy, you still get to wear the penis in the world.

The rest of J's comments about quirk and gender are worth your time, but I gave this chunk the blockquote treatment because, while I wholeheartedly agree with his take on Knocked Up—irritating conservative commentary dressed up in an even more irritating stand-up performance by Seth Rogen—I hold Superbad in slightly better esteem. So long as we're going to explore male gender (and this I approve—my friend Sarah describes this trend as men, having internalized some feminist concepts, suddenly realizing that they also have a gender), it's worth doing so in a way that doesn't gloss over certain realities of penis-having at the sunset of American empire. Sure, Wes Anderson's films don't treat women so poorly, but they're also not illuminating, either. If you can look past the anti-feminist women characterizations in Superbad (which are gross and not worth actually skipping over, but bear with me)—you have a film in which the men basically treat each other terribly throughout. That's novel. In the high-school morality tale, brohem is such a firm rule governing male-male relationships that you don't ever have to establish the tenets of brohem—you only need to introduce the conflict, that single violation of brohem, whatever it may be, in order to confirm the obvious, absolute, unquestionably given and universal rule that is brohem. Superbad follows that track to a certain extent, and has the convenient happy ending, but it also features enough instances of cruelty to undermine brohem as this contour-free base state between men. Rather the movie reveals brohem as a strategy, a way to negotiate the intra-gender dynamic. I'm not just talking about the part where they hit each other in the balls.

MORE: One more thing. It's more than ridiculous that they cast this film with one fat guy and one skinny guy, with the skinny guy playing the character you're supposed to identify with (I guess) and the fat kid who's essentially his foil. Granted, they do much better than some in actually developing a narrative for the bigger kid, but we really ought to be beyond this point where the large guy only plays the fool to an attractive woman/skinnier fellow.

Killer of Sheep

Playing this week at E Street—it's just not to be missed, friends. The superlative reviews from the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post (among many other outlets, I'm sure) are all deserved. I'm busy but I'll write more about it soon. Go see it!

Misses, Doubt, Fire

Josie writes,

here is something I also disapprove of—Felicity Huffman playing a transgendered man in Transamerica. That's weak, people. There are plenty of transgendered actors to play that part.

Wikipedia—which may not be the go-to source on tranny cinema—lists 23 actors and actresses. That's very few. (But say there are actually 230. If half of those are any good, and if half that number actually fit the assignment (ba-dum), and assuming that some of those aren't available or interested, then you're still looking at a modest number for an audition.)

But a number there are, and the movie deserved a tranny lead. Here's one suggestion for the role: Alexis Arquette, who put in a respectable performance as Georgia in Last Exit to Brooklyn. The studio boasts that its film depicts important, progressive work—why not, you know, actually do that work? Kind of along the lines of Yglesias's complaint that Brokeback Mountaint showed aesthetic cowardice for its lack of hot man-on-man action. Only kind of along those lines, though, since Annie Proulx didn't set out to do work with her story, and Ang Lee captured what she did: a heartwrenching love story that just so happens, etc, etc. Transamerica, on the other hand—I mean, c'mon. "Transamerica." This is coy illusion—in a word, weak.

I think a lot of people mistakenly classify indie film as an aesthetic category—an umbrella brand to be trusted—rather than a production category or, better yet, distribution category.

Still Sore Over My Near Academy Victory

But—but—there is a huge advantage to watching film on the big screen! The brains just never splatter quite so convincingly on the home entertainment system.

I get what Eszter's saying. I asked the same thing way back when about commercials for DVD technology . . . being played on VHS casettes. All those amazing visuals! and sounds! that you couldn't possibly live without! were intended to make you run-not-walk to the store to buy a DVD player, despite their being amazing on the video-casette player you already own. One thing I did notice in the hour or so I caught of last night's blowjob to the movie theater: the clips from Star Wars were certainly, obviously pulled from the original version and not the THX Remastered or Special Edition collections. I caught one quick scene from Return of the Jedi, but I can say that with absolute confidence. So there may be something to Eszter's sotto voce suggestion that these beloved but grainy clips were subtle signals, intended to make you recall that, yeah, those did look good in the theater. . . .

Sin, Yes; Porn, No

I'm surprised to see Josh Chafetz and Lindsay Beyerstein both taking a pedestrian position vis-à-vis violence in Sin City. I disagree that the movie's violence or gore is objectionable in any sense, and that's fine—people can disagree about these things. But I don't think Josh and Lindsay are couching their objections in fair terms. Josh says that he worries about the state of my soul (not my individual soul per se, but insofar as it exists, I assure you it's pure gold); Lindsay thinks the movie was "a depressing reminder of how sexy torture is to some people" (which is needlessly hyperbolic and inflammatory).

So my strong concern for my good ethical name compels me to say that I not only disagree with them, I think their positions are unsustainable. There are excellent reasons for Quentin Tarantino to have made Kill Bill as greedily violent as it was, and the same applies to Sin City. Both works have certain aesthetic obligations, anthropological goals, and camp objectives that signal the OK for ratcheting up the violence—to a steroid-fueled cartoonism that isn't actually like violence in any sense. I think these ends have been pretty well covered by the film critics. But let's say that Tarantino and Miller/Rodriguez/Tarantino had shot the violence without the mitigating cartoonism. I can't imagine that these movies would work with realistic violence, but putting that aside for a moment—would they be offensive?

Cut to Wendy Steiner's The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in the Age of Fundamentalism, which I try to push whenever the conversation turns to decency standards. Steiner highlights a legalistic paradox concerning varying standards for different media: Nobody, for example, bothers any more to try Lady Chatterly's Lover for obscenity; even court precedent has decided that text no longer has a pornographic capacity. (Otherwise I'd include American Psycho in this discussion, which is an excellent example of intentional obscenity as literary tool.) This happens whenever newer technology replaces a medium as the prime format for smut, e.g., as photography entirely replaced literature. In hindsight, these provocative cases always seem quaint, and though that consideration shouldn't necessarily color our judgment, I'm willing to bet that a summer blockbuster made 5 years from now will make Sin City look the way that Sin City makes Braveheart look: tame.

In obscenity trials of any medium, the strategy is the same: to show that the objectionable material is at the apex of realism, critically indistinguishable from reality. The defense is always the same as well: to prove that even lascivious imagery works in a virtual way if it does so to serve art (e.g., Robert Mapplethorpe; the NEA 4). Lindsay gets at this in her point that Sin City provides an insufficient dramatic arc for the violence to serve. I think that's wrong because the violence is partly Miller's point in ways that lots of people are discussing. But moreover, most summer action movies provide the same plot (think: any non-funny movie starring Nicholas Cage) but tweak the violence—sounds like traditional porn to me.

I think it's more helpful to describe these things in terms of virtual and real than narrative . The violence of Sin City is virtual. Were the violence realistic, per my earlier question, I think there'd be a much stronger case against the movie, because that would amount to neutering a crucial tool used to accomplish the aesthetic.

I'm trying to think of a movie that features violence I find offensive. The most recent I can come up with is City of God, a movie laden with offensive violence, being more documentarian in nature and conveying the awful violence of a really horrible situation. But it's far from the case that the movie is offensive in any sense for it. The Passion of Christ was far bloodier than the Bible requires it to be because Mel Gibson's theology is pornographic in itself, so in some sense I guess that he successfully found the virtual violence level to match his inner gore. Ladder 49 sounds as if it features some offensive fire violence, but only because it serves as a backdrop for a bunch of hero-assholes. Tom & Jerry don't really do anything except hit each other with frying pans but it's all virtual, so what can you do?

Soft on Hollywood violence? I'm afraid a snuff film might find a sympathetic audience in me. My opinion might change were science to make ground on the claims that portrayed fiction affects the way that people interact with the world, but I'm not holding my breath on those charges. Breakthroughs in behavioral science notwithstanding, the virtuality of fiction serves as a built-in use/mention clause. The ideas in fiction are open to hostile criticism, but I think that fiction devices probably should be given a limitless purview.