mollyporter | Entries tagged with meta

Embedding Disabled on Moses Supposes, but you should watch it anyway

A few weeks ago, I was watching movies at a friends house. We saved Singin' in the Rain for last-of-the-night and only got half-way through before we were too tired to finish. But we talked about it as we were watching, and during the Moses Supposes number linked above I mentioned that I really wish more modern movies had awesome dance breaks. She pointed out (to our mutual horror) that the closest thing contemporary Hollywood has to a Gene Kelly or a Donald O'Conner is the cast of High School Musical. And in the acting world, it's kind of true - the movie actors who CAN sing and dance (Neal Patrick Harris, Hugh Jackman, &c) are known for being Broadway crossover actors but tend to keep their singing and dancing to the stage and off the silver screen. The non-tween singing and dancing movies are more likely to cite Bollywood as their influence (see: Bride & Prejudice (2004)) than Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire. Interestingly, musical numbers do occasionally crop up on TV - in every episode of Glee, in that well-known episode of Buffy, twice this season on How I Met Your Mother. Delighted as I am by this, I feel it can be put down to added pressure on the writers to do something new for the show. And it tends to be more of a novelty item than anything else.

But then again - perhaps our storytelling through song and dance has just migrated to the short form, ie music videos. The boybands of the 90s were all known for their choreography as much as their music, as is Beyoncé, Chris Brown, Janet Jackson, Michael Jackson. The dance style en vogue may not be tap any longer (though I would love to see it make a comeback!) but if we're desperate for a song-and-dance fix we don't need to watch a 90 minute film when there's a 4 minute music video readily available. It sort of makes me yearn for the longer form, though. There are a lot of bands I like who release albums where every single song would make a gorgeous music video. There are a lot of really interesting concept albums that are thematically strung together to tell an overall story. I would love to see a band turn their entire album into a music video - craft each song into a chapter in the overall story of the album. Muse's latest album The Resistance is a perfect example of this. The album is basically a space opera that I would love to see brought to life visually - and why not stage it as a musical with dance routines helping to tell the story? Perhaps not every moment, but at least in part. I feel like there's room for longer form musical storytelling in the mainstream, and maybe doing it through music rather than through drama is the way for the form to gain authenticity right now.

I consider myself a good feminist. A living-in-the-real-world, we'll-never-be-a-perfect-society-but-we-can-at-least-be-better, I-think-it's-ok-to-sometimes-laugh-at-myself feminist, but a good feminist nevertheless. But I don't consider myself someone who toes the pitchfork wielding line of extremists who tell me that I'm a bad feminist if I don't take the most radical point of view. I don't consider myself someone who is so firmly rooted in what I believe that all I can do is shout it more and more emphatically, shutting down the lines of communication with people who think differently than I do.

There's this event that has been advertised on campus for the last few weeks. It's happening this Wednesday. It's an event that, in the interest of not shutting off lines of communication with people I disagree with, I will probably end up attending. The advertising for this event has been intentionally radicalizing, blatantly one-sided, and in the case of the table-topper pictured at the top of this post, actually offensive to me. Mostly because of the hypocrisy represented in the line "IF YOU ARE A WOMAN, YOUR BODY IS A BATTLEGROUND". Excuse you, if you don't think that the blasted patriarchy you're fighting so hard against should be permitted to create a discourse that constructs my body as something I don't wish it to be (a sexual object, a childbearing object, a care-taking object &c. &c. &c.) then WHAT GIVES YOU THE RIGHT TO DO EXACTLY THE SAME THING? My body is NOT a battleground on which you are permitted to stage your fight, my body is my own.

Yes, yes, yes, the body is a cultural object the meaning of which is not derived from a sovereign (ie singular and centralized) power but rather is entrenched in a cultural discourse and is constructed out of social, political, and cultural meaning. Ok, I understand that you want to shift that discourse. But how about instead of keeping notions of gender and sexuality so firmly rooted in the body you move it away from the physical body, from biological sex. How about you don't reaffirm the already existing notions of objectification of the female body by structuring it as a thing devoid of will or agency, something that is acted upon rather than something that acts. Because a battleground does not fight back, a battleground is appropriated for the use of the soldiers who fight on it. A battleground can be destroyed, ravaged, torn apart, with no final affect on the battle.

So my body is not your battleground, Sunsara Taylor. Not yours or anyone else's. And if the fliers I have seen plastered all over campus are truly reflective of your views then I fear your so-called revolution will do me as a woman more harm than good. I guess I'll see you at your event tomorrow, because now that I've critically engaged in your advertising I'd better at least see if it matches the views you present at your talk.

Edit: Attended the talk. A lot of outrage, not a lot of solutions. This is my unsurprised face.

Current Mood: annoyed

Back in September I posted about my initial reaction to Inglorious Basterds

Since then, I've seen the movie twice more, read a bunch of interviews with the actors and others involved in the process, and pretty much come to the conclusion that the movie is just as if not more fabulous than I initially believed it to be. The thing about it that did take some distance and thought to really comprehend, to be able to articulate rather than just to feel in your gut, is the movie's almost cleansing quality. The bizarre sense of cultural relief that comes from expressing decades of pent up anger and horror that have haunted us and still do haunt us. One of the things that really made that clear in my mind was Eli Roth's father writing an article for the Jewish Journal entitled My Son Killed Adolf Hitler

He speaks about his reactions on watching the film, and discusses the difference between factual and emotional history in a very interesting way. The film captures what Sheldon Roth terms "an emotional dream" that is not mere fantasy because it is based in life and true experience. He really touches on something significant in the final paragraph where he recalls overhearing a conversation between a 14 year old and his father:

For me, one of the most interesting debates over the merits of this film occurred while eavesdropping in a cinema men’s room. A 14-year-old boy heatedly insisted to his dad that the burning of the Nazis was immoral, against everything he had been brought up to believe. The father just as heatedly told his son that his son did not understand the context; revenge was justifiable in special circumstances. The feelings of each were valid, each based on their own lives, and only different experiences would ever alter those feelings. I, on the other hand, have nurtured a set of feelings for seven decades. I wanted to lean over to the father and son and say, “My son killed Adolf Hitler!” But that’s just the Jewish parent in me.

I did not live through the events of World War II, or the Holocaust. I'm 22 years old, born over 4 decades after that war's end. I've lost track of how many generations my family has been in America, and my parents are protestants. But my grandfather fought in that war, and served proudly. My history recognizes that enemy. My entire life, Hitler and his Nazis have been held up by my culture as the pinnacle of evil in this world. The feelings of horror at learning about the Holocaust, the raw impotence of the allied forces inability to do anything about it, it is a horror that has been relived in my cultural and emotional history many times - I nearly collapsed in grief at the Holocaust Museum in DC when I turned the corner and was faced with the shoes recovered from the death camps, and I cried on my friend's couch as I watched Easy Company discover the camp in the miniseries Band of Brothers. These are my experiences, but they are shared by many.

We live in a culture that carries these events heavily on our shoulders, and Tarantino brilliantly, artfully captured that emotional history in his film, and he allowed us to release those emotions. He allowed us to leave the theater empowered, victorious, and acutely loosed from the clutched of that cultural grief. I couldn't agree more with Sheldon Roth's assertion that while the facts of the movie may be false, the emotions are entirely true.

I could talk all day about the merits of this movie. The art direction, the casting, the genius script. Name an Oscar category and I'll tell you a reason the Basterds deserve to win it. But it's the reason I've articulated above that most strongly makes me believe that it truly is the best picture of the year.

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The Thing About Your Past, It Must Always Last.

You'd Better Do Your Best To Like It!

Entries tagged with meta

Lately I've been on a Singin' in the Rain kick.

On Feminism.

Inglorious Basterds got nominated for the Best Picture Oscar!

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March 2011

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