Stephen Crane is a master of the particular version of puerility; I think in particular of the Whilomville story "Lynx-Hunting," in which a group of Whilomville boys, led by Jimmie Trescott, stolidly defend the town against a grazing cow.
Crane, too, is continually said to work in miniatures; thus Michael Fried reads the final scene in The Monster as a scene of "reading painfully what has already been written, with the stove representing a domesticated (in effect miniaturized) version of the catastrophic fire" (142). Indeed, Fried argues, "two opposing tendencies, one toward miniaturization and the other toward a certain monstrosity, coinhabit Crane's prose" (141). The same could be, and has been, said of Wes Anderson's filmmaking.
This brings us back to Noye's Fludde, the systematized, aestheticized miniature of the real flood happening outside, which in the film takes on the cosmic significance of the Noah's Flood, the narrator going into some detail about its historic devastation. At a certain point the real flood takes precedence over everything else, disrupting Noye's Fludde and revealing every system as miniature, as diminutive.
Such moments appear in Crane as well. In The Material Unconscious, Bill Brown addresses Crane's poetry only once, in order to reveal the dimension of childish play latent in "The Open Boat":
The ocean speaks the lines of the poem, asking that the weeping woman on shore be told that her lover is dead: "Her lover I have laid/ In cool green hall." The second and final stanza supplements the message:
"Tell her this
"And more,—
"That the king of the seas
"Weeps too, old, helpless man.
"The bustling fates
"Heap his hands with corpses
"until he stands like a child
"With Surplus of toys." (W, 10:22)
The lines intimate an understanding of life and death that would make the entirety of "The Open Boat" intelligible as "play".... (Brown 123-4)
The great fear is that there is no end to this regress, that there are, indeed, no grown-ups in the room. Not only are all the adults invested in miniature systems; the Cosmic Adults are so many babies as well, pulling the heads off dolls.
Thus in Crane's story "Death and the Child," the unaware toddler playing on a mountaintop, accidentally abandoned by the evacuating villagers, is possessed of a godlike perspective on the battle below. To him the action looks like a doodle, "fantastic smoky shapes" and "white circles and whirligigs" and "[l]ines of flame" (Crane 962). When young Peza, foolishly overeager for battle, reaches the mountaintop and finds himself face to face with this baby, it is the baby who is in a position to inquire, "Are you a man?"
Of course, we don't quite have the same fear that gods are babies in Anderson's films. The weather exerts its whims, but there is always ultimately a grown-up chaperoning things—Anderson himself. The craftedness of his miniatures remind us that somebody has things under control.
That that register of control—the aesthetic—is the same register as that of the miniature, e.g. the church production of Noye's Fludde, however, may give us a moment's pause. In the end this film is deeply sympathetic to the ridiculous seriousness with which children and especially adults invest their play. For in the film, aesthetic satisfaction appears to be the only available site of even fictive shelter. One can but work on that production of Noye's Fludde, or pull a crisis back into the realm of Khaki Scouting by inspecting the camp and issuing a Commendable.
As Crane writes in Black Riders:
If there is a witness to my little life,
To my tiny throes and struggles,
He sees a fool;
And it is not fine for gods to menace fools. (Crane 1303)
Brown, Bill. The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane & the Economies of Play. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1996. Print.
Crane, Stephen. Prose and Poetry: Maggie: A Girl of the Street; The Red Badge of Courage; Stories, Sketches and Journalism; Poetry. Ed. J. C. Levenson. New York, N.Y: Library of America, 1984. Print. The Library of America 18.
Fried, Michael. Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane. Paperback ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Print.
I forgot to mention in my previous post one of my favorite things about Moonrise Kingdom, which was the liberal use of Benjamin Britten's works in the soundtrack. Movie nerds will recognize the theme from his Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra as the Rondeau from Henry Purcell's Abdelazar, which was adapted (quite effectively, for solo violin) for a key scene in The Lesser Adaptation of Austen's Pride and Prejudice.
"I'm a raven."
The amateur production of Britten's Noye's Fludde, staged in a local church and replete with children dressed as animals, is, like the Khaki Scouts, its own kind of child-adult collusion in overenthusiasm. Suzy is a failed raven just as Sam is a failed Khaki Scout, failed on social grounds rather than out of incompetence. It is a "play" that is taken utterly seriously, especially by the grown-ups (like the one who demotes Suzy from her raven role). Play taken too seriously, or serious enterprises (like child care) rendered all too game-like (as when the best scout of all, Scoutmaster Ward, manages to lose first Sam, then the rest of the troop), continually threaten happiness. The only possible resistance is yet another system, an alternative game, a union between Sam's wilderness skills and Suzy's fantasy world, the game of their private Moonrise Kingdom.
Thus when all the other social systems of discipline converge, they do so at the church, in the midst of Noye's Fludde, in order to escape the actual flooding outside.
Britten is a serious, even difficult composer who has, when you think about it, written a great deal for children—both child audiences and child performers. He's especially known as a composer of liturgical music in a tradition famous for its boy choristers. I couldn't help noticing a movement from his Simple Symphony when it appeared in the film—a movement tellingly titled "Playful Pizzicato"—I'd played it as a child, after all. Using childish sounds—"playful" pizzicato (plucked strings), glockenspiels, high-pitched child voices, and at times almost comical bombast (including in the didactic Young Person's Guide)—Britten proffers Middle English texts and challenging harmonies. Thus, within the world of the film, his music marks the oscillations between "too easy" and "too hard" that marks every educational pursuit, every system for cultivating the self.
Anderson's own oeuvre, so often described in the terms of miniatures and toys (and including an animated adaptation of a children's book, Roald Dahl's 1970 Fantastic Mister Fox) aspires to similar comminglings. In Moonrise Kingdom, Anderson focalizes childhood as a site of real difficulty, one whose difficulties are not discontinuous with those of adulthood, and indeed, one whose difficulties are most adult when they reside in the domain of play.
Suzy lugs a suitcase of stolen library books through the wilderness, imaginative resources for building a private universe. Her fictions are bulwarks against the flood.
There is hardly a clearer example of Foucauldian power than the Boy Scouts—a most codified set of techniques of the self, each self a set of badges pinned to the uniform.
I saw Moonrise Kingdom last night; the centrality of its "Khaki Scouts" highlights the way in which overinvestment in such systems conduces to tragicomedy, especially in Wes Anderson's films (The Life Aquatic, The Royal Tenenbaums, and Rushmore function similarly).
Particularly notable to me are the juxtapositions of adults and children; there is often intergenerational buy-in. There is something truly hilarious about a group of boys taking their scouting very seriously. Funnier still is the truest true believer, the adult Scoutmaster Ward, who avers that being a scout master is his real job: "I teach math on the side." But the boys' and men's beliefs exist in the same plane; Sam's adorable self-importance as he gives Suzy camping tips (of very widely varying utility) is later validated by his scout master's manner of offering sympathy: "I wish we'd had time for an inspection back there. I would have given you a Commendable."
As ridiculous as the Khaki Scouts are, they are soon revealed to be no more ridiculous than the other disciplinary institutions that they mimic—the law, as figured by Suzy's lawyer parents; the state, as figured by Social Services (Tilda Swinton, in some of the film's most visually striking moments—of course); and perhaps the most absurd of them all, the police, as figured by Commander Sharp. In a climactic scene, all four avatars of systematized discipline bark into walkie-talkies attempting to sort out the proper placement of the two children, four criss-crossing domains of authority emblematized by five bewildered—but still entirely invested—adults. At the end, when Sharp agrees to foster the orphaned Sam, Sam switches out the Khaki Scouts uniform in which we have always seen him for a miniature police uniform. He has merely switched systems.
In Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf mocks men's love of fancy dress by pointing to the pomp and circumstance of the military. Busby Berkeley's Footlight Parade (1933) contains a military dance sequence ("Shanghai Lil") that indeed quite undermines any distinction between the military and the Tiller Girls when it comes to examples of the mass ornament. What I am getting at is that there is a pettiness in these systems—and it is precisely the pettiness that interests Anderson—that we may identify as a form of puerility. It is "boyish" behavior, both highly elaborated and ridiculous, even if adults are frequently the originators of that puerility. (What is The Life Aquatic if not a story about a man playing with the people and things around him as if they were so many toys?) These are systems of play entered into for their own sake, and prioritized regardless of the consequences. (A pet dog is killed in one encounter; when confronted with this fact, Sam's nemesis shrugs and says something to the effect that it can't be helped; the dog is a casualty of war.)
Puerility and its powerful appeal—its necessity, even—is one of Anderson's continual themes. Why do people invest themselves in ridiculous systems? When is such investment reprehensible? From what standpoint is one capable of distinguishing between puerility and grandeur of vision—or does any such distinction exist?
Kracauer, Siegfried. "The Mass Ornament." The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1995. Print.
Woolf, Virginia. Three Guineas. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966. Print.
Puerility is also one of Stephen Crane's great themes.
Friday, September 23, 2011
Beddini (reading a telegram): 'Come ahead stop stop being a sap stop you can even bring Alberto stop my husband is stopping at your hotel stop when do you start stop.' I cannot understand who wrote this.
I was just made aware that there is a movie coming out called How Do You Know (trailer). I would dearly love for this to be an adaptation of "Melanctha," but the odds aren't looking good.
I did notice that there's no question mark in the movie title, though, which is very Stein.
In Nest, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge invokes the horrors of cuteness in a poem titled "Dressing Up Our Pets," a poem that, as I posted in August, reminded me of the inappropriate weirdness of a Regretsy post.
Now my sister Maria has alerted me to what I can only describe as a similarly horrifying crime against taste, and probably against animals in some states, in the name of cuteness: a photo gallery of pets dressed up in Halloween costumes, courtesy of the Boston Globe.
The screen shot below of "Madison Yee in a bee Costume" [sic] would seem to show an animal costumed as a different animal. But since it's a "Halloween costume," and dressing up for Halloween is specifically a children's tradition, it's actually a dog costumed as a child costumed as a bee.
I can only feel sorry for this animal. It had no choice in the matter.
What motivates the decision to dress a pet up like a child, or to dress a child up like a pet?
In A Christmas Story Ralphie is forced to wear an atrocious bunny suit sent by his aunt; his mother forces him to put it on and then, when he does, can't suppress a laugh as she exclaims, "Isn't that cute!" (His brother just laughs openly.)*
Sianne Ngai argues that the cute creature is defined partly by its unthreatening aggression. Cuteness has a "capacity to convert a subject's veiled or latent aggression toward a vulnerable object"--like a child or a pet--"into an explicit aggression that seems to be directed toward the subject" (828). Like Ralphie miserable in his animal suit, like the animals miserable in their child suits, the cute creature is on the receiving end of aggression and is visibly dissatisified, but can't do anything about it.
In the abstract that makes plenty of sense. But it seems like there's more going on here, because of the special symbolic connection between children and animals. Haraway points out that we are particularly prone to speaking of pets as if they were "furry children." To dress a child as an animal is an act of aggression that renders the child particularly cute.
Why is it that dressing a child up as an animal, and apparently vice-versa, according to the Boston Globe, constitutes a privileged special case of cuteness?
Perhaps it is precisely the symbolic closeness between animals and children that makes it so very aggressive and uncomfortable (therefore cute) to persuade (or force) one to masquerade as the other. This is the sort of thing that makes me think we need to think much more carefully about the relationship between animals and children.
Image by Yoshitomo Nara
*The humiliation of being dressed up in something awful is, oddly, not associated with being identified with an animal in the film, but rather with the ultimate humiliation: being "perpetually four years old [and] also a girl." It's not that the costume is appropriate for a girl or that a girl could look dignified in it (who could?) but that the indignity would somehow make sense for a girl. It is the father who protects Ralphie's masculinity by urging him to take the costume off. (Uh, and gives him a gun that can really shoot. But I digress.)
Haraway, Donna Jeanne. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. Print.
Ngai, Sianne. "The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde." Critical Inquiry 31.4 (Summer 2005): 811-47. Print.
Oh boy. (So to speak.) Fall semester is in full swing, and and I'm having to put Gertrude Stein and Susy Clemens on hold for a while in order to move some other writing projects to the head of the queue. It's busy, busy, busy, and I would grouse about it, but the truth is it's my favorite way to be.
Anyway, that's why I've been meaning, but failing, for weeks to post on Jerome Christensen's wonderful talk at the English Institute, "Pinocchio Logic, Pixar Theory, and the Assertion of 'Cultural' Authorship." I thought it was amazing, but I also had a huge beef with it, which of course means blogging, since I distinctly don't have time to write up some kind of formal response.
Corporate authorship
At this late date I can't summarize the whole talk, which included some really brilliant readings, but I'll try to represent it as best I can.
Christensen wanted to know what it would mean, exactly, to construe a corporation's "culture" serve as its conscience.
Juridically, guilt depends on mens rea, or a guilty mind, for which corporations lack the subjective capacity. It can break the law, but a corporation itself can't know right from wrong, and the difference matters legally. An undesirable consequence of this distinction is that corporations escape accountability for their actions.
On the other hand, in the recent Citizens United decision, the court ruled that corporations do have the right to protected speech, where speech is construed as indistinguishable from money, since speech need not originate in a physical body, even for you or for I. A key example in the Citizens United decision is that of the Frank Capra film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, which the opinion construes as an instance of corporate authorship on the part of Columbia Pictures--over and against, Christensen pointed out, the auteur theory suggested by what is technically the film's full title, Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Indeed, the decision conspicuously omits any mention of Capra or his negotiated billing. The film, the court opined, was an example of protected free speech on the part of Columbia Pictures; the ability to make money is reinterpreted as the ability to speak politically and construed as a right that all corporations hold.
The idea of corporate film authorship, something Christensen has written on before, thus underwrites the Citizens United decision. (One wonders whether the same principle is really extensible to corporations that don't make films but rather, say, chocolate pudding, since corporate pudding authorship seems less analogous to speech, or to corporate-funded political ad campaigns. But I digress.)
Christensen then turned to two corporations and their corporate-authored, animated allegories of animation itself, Disney's Pinocchio and Pixar's Toy Story trilogy. It's important to this story that both Disney and Pixar have distinctive corporate cultures, and that when Pixar was acquired by Disney, a clause in the contract stipulated that Pixar's "culture" -- quotation marks in the original -- remain intact.
Despite charges by Winfried Fluck, Jack Zipes, and others, Disney's corporate culture reveals itself as entirely contemptuous of mass production, Christensen argues. Pinocchio is never represented as a commodity in the film; not only does Geppetto never sell Pinocchio, the idea of selling Pinocchio is pointedly raised precisely as a repugnant notion to be rejected. Geppetto is never really a toy-seller but an animator, a bringer-to-life; likewise, Pinocchio is always a boy manqué, who will always need to have a cricket substitute for his conscience but who is deserving of animation nonetheless.
To Pixar, however, a toy is not a near-child longing for subjectivity (or a conscience); it's always a toy. It therefore never wants to be a child; it is manufactured to be played with by a child, and therefore that is what it wants. Mass production is the condition of their existence, as we see when the toys in the films confront identical copies of themselves who both are and are not them.
The Roberts court, like the Blue Fairy, rescues an artificial person, the corporation, that has proven constitutively incapable of maintaining a conscience. But a corporate culture can substitute for subjectivity, serving as the source of a conscience that need never be internalized. Pixar doesn't maintain any fantasies of becoming a real boy, but it preserves in its place the Pixar "culture," which will do just as well. As Christensen put it, "If it makes no difference who is speaking, it may as well be a cricket who can tell right from wrong." Under the terms of the Disney-Pixar merger, Pixar preserves its autonomous culture; thus its authorship and speech remain accountable to the Pixar culture. Thus the Citizens United decision, by making corporate authorship into legal precedent, backhandedly confers an external but still functional conscience on corporations, providing, perhaps, the grounds for mens rea and responsibility.
Real boys will be real boys
Now here's where I wanted to hear more from Christensen: What about gender--specifically, gendered childhood? At the risk of being The Feminist (look, someone has to be The Feminist), I posed this question after the talk and was very disappointed not to receive much of an answer. Here's why it matters: American corporate culture is famously masculinist, as is Pixar's oeuvre. If Pinocchio and Toy Story can be read as allegories of corporate culture, and I'm persuaded that they can, then their constructions of boyhood have implications for how we construe corporate authorship, hence corporate liability. In fact, it's worth noting that Toy Story's plot comes almost wholesale from a really terrible 1986 made-for-TV muppet production called The Christmas Toy (yeah, you read that date right, so don't judge; I was FIVE). The Christmas Toy is less a missing link between the Disney masterpiece and the Pixar masterpiece than an inconvenient cousin, and not only because live-action muppets are an odd form to triangulate with animated puppets (Pinocchio) and hyper-round animated dolls (Toy Story). It's inconvenient because it contains -- wait for it -- girls.
In The Christmas Toy, the loved child is not a boy (Andy) but a girl (Jamie). More importantly, the central conflict between the old favorite toy and the new, flashy superhero toy is not a battle of competing masculinities but an allegory of the glass ceiling: instead of comically super-butch Buzz Lightyear, The Christmas Toy's threatening but ultimately lovable interloper is a classic 1980s castrating bitch, the metal-be-boobed Meteora ("queen of the asteroids"). (Oh, the eighties!)
It could be argued that the dynamics brought into play by Buzz Lightyear's gently mocked hypermasculinity are as complicated as those engendered by Meteora's masculine performance. Pushed far enough, gender always reveals itself as drag. But Pixar's version has consequences for corporate authorship because it not only embraces the existential quandary of mass production (for the toys, that is) but also reimagines toy consciousness as an allegory of rightly performed masculinity--the masculinity of good workers (toys) and of good managers (real boys). In Pixar's toy universe, you can have old-fashioned masculinity (the cowboy--as Christensen pointed out, at one point Woody's skill at being played with is remarked upon: "Are you classically trained?") and a futuristic masculinity (the space invader); there are good boys (Andy, who takes care of his toys) and bad boys (Sid, who likes to blow them up). Nearly as unacceptable as being owned by the bad boy is the possibility of being owned by a girl, which Christensen did not mention because there is, of course, no possible analogue in the corporate history of Pixar. The result of being owned by a girl would be a situation antithetical to the playful aims of any self-respecting toy: boring, unimaginative girl play, most likely someplace pink. The girl is benign, but out of bounds.As Christensen remarked, success in Toy Story doesn't lie in achieving subjectivity but in getting oneself managed by a good, rather than a bad, boy (or, say, getting acquired by the right parent company, which will let you keep your "culture"). That's why gender is so crucial in this understanding of corporate authorship and its consequences. With Pixar, there's no longing to be a "real boy," but there's an insistence on maintaining a corporate culture in which boyhood--and emphatically not girlhood--is the name of the game. And boyhood--the kind of playing that boys are imagined to do, the kind of creativity and propensity for technical production that boys are supposed to have--is central to the way the corporate author is imagined.
But it's not just Pixar but Pinocchio that's instructive here, since Pinocchio supplies the metaphor that makes Pixar's culture into a potential source of conscience. Perhaps we're comfortable with a boy whose conscience is a cricket. Perhaps that's cute, perhaps that's even the condition of puerile creativity. Perhaps boyish ruthlessness is what lets Pixar be as technically skillful and imaginative as it is. But how would we feel if girlhood were the model for corporate authorship? Could we countenance a girl with a cricket for a conscience?*
Christensen proposes a legal model that he represents as ungendered. I'm persuaded that he is right to see corporations, now granted protected free "speech," as substitutes for real boys. He is wrong to suppose that "boy" means the same thing as "person" or "subject." The insight that Christensen makes and then misses is that corporations are precisely "boys' clubs." As of the year of our Flying Spaghetti Monster 2009, three percent of Fortune 500 companies were headed by women (source). The model of personhood that Christensen extrapolates from the court's decision is in fact a model of boyhood. It depends entirely on a specific, historical construction of boyhood that underwrites what we see as possible and permissible in corporations, especially insofar as they are understood as "creative," and therefore capable of authorship in the narrower sense. And it is this narrower creative corporate authorship that, as Christensen shows, enables the broader understanding of corporate speech on which Citizens United relies. Since this model of boyhood is specifically one of ruthless creative play and total amorality (his conscience is a bug), can we expect corporate culture to serve any differently from the ultimately ineffectual Jiminy Cricket?
Boys--male children--have been constructed as creatures that are morally culpable for very few things. Nor are they legally liable for much. Boys will be boys.
What, then, is the real upshot of puerile corporate authorship?
-----
The obvious point of comparison is Lyra in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. Her daemon, Pantalaimon, is an externalized manifestation of her soul. Note (1) Pantalaimon is explicitly male, part of Pullman's complicated and generally misguided attempt to rectify C.S. Lewis's objectionable gender politics; and (2) the film, in which Pantalaimon was of course animated, was a flop.
Apropos of a conversation begun here, continued here, and continued further here.
...she is to conceive daughters as well as sons and sons as well as daughters
--noted well-meaning poet Walt Whitman, "I Sing the Body Electric"
Aaron,
Happy Fourth, and thanks for your thoughtful reply. I can see how my earlier gloss (“Patriarchy hurts women. But that’s not the point. The point is, it hurts men.”) could be interpreted as scolding you for not writing about something entirely different. I agree that that would be an illegitimate critique, like unto a reviewer saying "okay, but why didn't you write an article on Tender Buttons instead?"* To clarify, I don't suggest that you need to write about the women in the films. What I am critiquing in your writing on these films is not the objects of inquiry but the critical position, which is one that takes for granted (and, I have been arguing, universalizes) a certain nostalgia for an all-cereal diet.
You have just very usefully elaborated on the position from which you write these posts, a position of thinking through masculinity. I find this illuminating, and, as I remarked earlier, I see that you never meant to claim transparent-eyeball status.
Yet as I wrote at the beginning of my post and in earlier comments, my objection is less to your reading than to a gesture that you have now made several times -- one that implicitly moves your argument into an impersonal theoretical register. You remarked that you symptomatically repeat the disclaimer that these films are misogynistic. I am identifying the compulsive refrain as a two-parter: "Yesyes, it's misogynistic, but that's not what's important here."
To be clear — as I seem to symptomatically keep saying over and over again — these films are, in a few very important ways, very basically misogynist and I don’t mean to downplay that fact. But I think I have a good rationale for bracketing that off, at least temporarily: as with the fact that Jefferson owned slaves, the importance of the fact can sometimes mislead us into thinking that simply pointing it out accomplishes more than it does. I call this Sociological Images syndrome, the tendency to confuse pointing out a text as symptomatic of a naturalized systemic projection of power with neutralizing its power as such. Doing so can have real value, I agree — though I believe we’ve discussed this point before — but while I love Sociological Images (and I think I discovered that blog via you), they have a real tendency to identify and emphasize the misogyny of the images they dig up at the expense of reductively simplifying the constitutive complexity of those artifacts. Of course, they often have good reason for doing so; as a clearinghouse for found images and as a pedagogical resource, their commentary, it seems to me, is largely intended to provoke and to serve as a suggestion for how a discussion could begin. Saying “this image is misogynistic” is, in that context, a prelude to a much richer and deeper discussion that they, there, have the space or intention of having.
I, however, am after something slightly different. First of all, the problem with pointing out the misogyny of the Apatow movies is that it’s so obvious as to make pointing it out not particularly an interesting thing to do...
This is a methodological claim, one that sets up your approach as interesting and productive and any other approach as uninteresting and unproductive. Unexplored, because unasked, are the questions, Interesting to whom? Productive of what? Interesting and productive are evidently universals; you're not saying "I am interested in the forms of masculinity in this film because of my personal investment in XYZ." You're saying -- and I'm paraphrasing pretty closely here -- "We should not discuss this film's misogyny because that is not interesting." Period!
You've convinced me that any claim to objectivity is unintentional (indeed, you had already), but I am suggesting that this gesture, so formulated, always makes that claim, whether or not you use the (by now conventional) pronoun "I," or write it on a blog rather than in your dissertation.
To repeat my earlier post, "In a sense I'm criticizing you for doing a thing you never meant to do. But you keep seeming to mean to do it, and I think you should consider trying to put an end to that." Imagine my astonishment when you responded in part with "the problem with pointing out the misogyny of the Apatow movies is that it’s so obvious as to make pointing it out not particularly an interesting thing to do." You're still seeming to mean to do it.
The kicker is that very soon after this move, you acknowledge that I wasn't suggesting that you ought to reduce your argument to pointing out misogyny, nor indeed to reduce anything.
So why set up an argument that you know is straw and call it uninteresting, prior to proceeding to your truly deep analysis of Apatovian masculinities? Might one not go ahead and make an argument without first slaying the mother? (Second-wave feminism is, after all, the source of masculinity studies.)
Your androcentric approach, with its nostalgia for the man-cave, is, as you say, productive, insofar as it "constitute the texts as rich and interesting." It sounds like you have a situated rationale for exploring these versions of patriarchal masculinity, and that's great. To me, in contrast, these films are impoverished, not because it's the job of popular films to overthrow the patriarchy (hah) but because whatever permutations of masculinity it explores, it's always (as you've already observed) masculinity fully contained within and reinforcing of a heterosexist patriarchal framework, which makes it, to me as a feminist critic, The Same Old BS. All those multi-dudes, each oppressing women in their own way. I've seen it, and I've seen it, and I've seen it.
I don't suggest that you need to agree with me on that score, and I don't think I have ever suggested that you ought to be writing about something else. As evidenced by the complexity of your readings, to you these films are rich, interesting, and useful for thinking about masculinity, to which I say hurrah. Your reading is your reading; it's insightful; it's valid. But I wish you would not preface your readings with explicit refusals of the possibility that, for certain non-dude critics, the films' loving homages to various forms of patriarchal oppression might not be what's interesting.
*That's PURELY HYPOTHETICAL. Obviously.
Monday, May 11, 2009
I saw Sita Sings the Blues last night in San Francisco. It was very much worth watching on the big screen, but you can also watch it for free online.
Trailer:
There is a way to read this film as appropriation, which would be fair. To me the self-consciously collaged (collé?) stylistics of the film read more as mashup. What counts as fair game for mashup (or alternatively, what's the difference between mashup and appropriation -- what formal features define the moral shift) is a good question, but the film is in any case brilliantly crafted.
There's an article in the NYT just now on the proposed Berkeley Art Museum. I quite like the new design, although I don't see what the author, Nicolai Ouroussoff, has against the current building (apart from the fact that it's falling down). He writes,
Standing on a rough commercial strip at the campus’s southern edge, the old building is still marred by the big steel columns that were installed after the quake to support its cantilevered floors. Its rough, angular concrete forms and oddly shaped galleries are awkward settings for art.
I beg to differ: its oddly shaped galleries are awesome. I'm also not sure what Ourossoff means by "a rough commercial strip." Surely he doesn't think Bancroft and Bowditch is a rough neighborhood. But then, he does come out with things like
On a local level, the museum could help break down the divide between the ivory tower at the top of the hill and the gritty neighborhood at the bottom.
Gritty, gritty Shattuck Ave.
One thing I do think Ouroussoff did get right is this, the very first line of the article:
I have no idea whether, in this dismal economic climate, the University of California will find the money to build its new art museum here.
Good question. Since, you know, we've fired the lecturers.
Economic data rarely inspire poetic thoughts. But as I was contemplating the latest set of numbers, I realized that I had William Butler Yeats running through my head: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”
The widening gyre, in this case, would be the feedback loops (so much for poetry) causing the financial crisis to spin ever further out of control. The hapless falconer would, I guess, be Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary.
I cracked up when I read this -- perhaps because I'd just been grading. It's a good thing he's interpreting the economy and not Yeats.
* * *
More disturbingly, a New Republicarticle about David Axelrod, Barack Obama's consultant, pitches him as an expert in convincing white voters to accept black candidates. His recipe?
The self-described "keeper of the message" for Obama's presidential bid has taken the lessons he learned from his mayoral and gubernatorial campaigns and made them cohere into something that approaches a unified theory of how to elect a black candidate--emphasizing biography, using third-party authentication, attacking with an unconventional sideways approach, letting voters connect to the candidate by speaking to them directly in ads, and telling voters that supporting the black candidate puts them on the right side of history.
Ouch. I guess I have to give Axelrod credit -- it's tried and true. Really tried and true. For instance, in abolitionist slave narratives. (And as we keep hearing, Obama's memoirs are, as it were, "written by himself.") But it is painful to read that such a formula still seems necessary.
* * *
Stanley Fish, meanwhile, compares Barack Obama to Jesus in a way that only Fish can (or would), via Milton's Paradise Regained. I must admit to being amused.
* * *
And finally, according to a NYTarticle, some researchers in Massachusetts are using Thoreau's notes to study climate change.
Henry David Thoreau endorsed civil disobedience, opposed slavery and lived for two years in a hut in the woods here, an experience he described in “Walden.” Now he turns out to have another line in his résumé: climate researcher.
The profound weirdness of Walden, curiously, goes unmentioned in the article. The researchers also seem surprised that archives could, I don't know, matter.
Rock Hudson's Thoreau-quoting character in Douglas Sirk's 1955 All That Heaven Allows, sitting next to Jane Wyman
Recently Hillary showed me this video of Feist singing “1, 2, 3, 4” for Sesame Street.
I found the video very funny, and particularly enjoyed the way Feist’s dancing mimics the movement of the muppets – head upturned, mouth wide open, body being flung from side to side. The clusters of muppets seem to drag her around the set, as if she’s a muppet herself. As Hillary pointed out, this version is more appealing than the original.
The lyrics aren’t especially clever; it’s obvious that it was a pre-existing song being adapted to fit an educational theme. It’s charming nonetheless, especially the earnestness with which the merits of the number four are announced: it’s “one less than five, and one more than three.” I mean, who can argue with that?
The song blithely suggests that there’s something natural about counting up to your favorite number (in homage?). In fact, what’s amusing about the song is the absurd specificity of the activity being lauded, not just counting (as high as you can), but counting to four.
I suppose it could be argued that all the counting represents a set-theoretic construction of the number four (i.e. as a set of four elements). The singer then points to a three-dimensional Arabic numeral 4, singing “I see four here,” and correlates it to the four penguins she’s just counted (one, two, three, four) by pointing to them and singing “I see four there.”
Of course, any pedagogical achievement in that line is undermined by the next two: “My favorite number/ Nothing can compare.” Contra the lyrics, usually natural numbers don’t inspire affect (“my favorite,” and the gesture of laying the hand over the heart). Instead they are the abstractions by which certain kinds of comparisons become possible (to wit: four monsters, four penguins, four chickens, "one less than five and one more than three").
But in general, counting over and over again is usually read as a symptom of obsessive compulsive disorder. Émile Zola suffered from this particular obsession, and experienced deep shame that, while publicly committed to a scientific program, he privately performed over and over these rituals of order that were essentially superstitious.
Part of what’s appealing about the Feist video is the unironic joy in counting to four. But I wonder if that appeal doesn't have more to do with its absurdity -- an absurdity specifically associated with children's (perceived) cognitive limitations -- than with any actual desire to get toddlers pumped about counting to four. And perhaps a bit of the pleasure comes from the juxtaposition of those perceived childish limitations (counting, not as high as one can, but to four, and not because it's useful but because four is your favorite) with our own adult sophistication -- our recognition of the tune from a different context, etc.
Of course, I still like the video. And is anyone else detecting a subtle shout-out to Lyn Hejinian here? Like plump birds along the shore? Yes?
* * * * *
In other news, I sincerely hope that Poe studies have not really come to this.
(Of course they haven't; it's just that the NYT would rather report on this than on anything actually literary.)
As I've mentioned before, teaching A Room of One's Own forced me to face up to the overwhelming prevalence of the girl-in-drag-has-adventures meme. It is everywhere, from Shakespearean comedies to Mulan.
Several YA books that I've mentioned on this blog wholeheartedly embrace the idea that a girl should embrace her Inner Dude by making it her Outer Duds. In Boston Jane you're practically clubbed over the head with it. In Philadelphia, Jane wears corsets and is exaggeratedly feminine; out west, she loses the corset and Finds Herself (TM). In The Shakespeare Stealer, a girl is shown, without a trace of irony, making it in the Globe Theater by cross-dressing (in order to cross-dress yet again on the stage). And don't even get me into Alanna.
I find this device deeply irritating when it's used in order to mock women for being oppressed. This is the case in Boston Jane, and to some extent in Mulan as well (although Mulan actually does some interesting things with the performance of gender). Such narratives are merely another spin of the patriarchy wheel: "girls are stupid and useless, and if you want to avoid being stupid and useless you have to become an exception to your gender."
So I was interested to read Mary Hoffman's City of Stars, about a fifteen-year-old girl named Georgia O'Grady, who travels in her sleep to Talia, the Renaissance Italy of a parallel dimension. She's a loner at school and is bullied in particular by her older stepbrother Russell. Russell's taunts are truly vile, and insistently sexual. This fifteen-year-old girl loves horses, practically the quintessential little-girl obsession, but Russell spins it as a cheap Freudian substitute for frustrated sexuality, constantly accusing Georgia of both out-of-control desire and sexual failure (he actually calls a fifteen-year-old a "spinster"), simultaneously female and insufficiently feminine. Especially given that he's her older step-brother, the fixation on Georgia's body and on her sexuality is extraordinarily creepy.
So: she puts on drag.
Not drag in the sense of "drag queen," but drag in the sense of a sexual masquerade: she effaces the social markers of her femininity. With her short hair and baggy clothes that hide the shape of her body, Georgia announces that she withdraws from the femininity game. She knows she cannot win it and she doesn't intend to play.
But unlike in the spunky-girl narrative, merely wearing trousers does not solve Georgia's problems. She doesn't suddenly come into dudely awesomeness, complete with spitballs and weaponry. Instead, she travels to to another world, where she becomes embroiled in a complicated political situation marked by magic. There she dresses as a boy, since the demands of femininity are even stronger in this world, and there is no hope of avowing femininity with such short hair. Nonetheless, all of the friends that Georgia makes there know her to be a girl in boys' clothing (and haircut), not a boy or even an honorary boy.
Georgia eventually saves the day in a public event under the name "Giorgio Gredi," and the ability to pose as a boy certainly helps her in the "city of stars." But the real difference in this alternate world is not that she acts boyish -- she acts the same as she does at home -- but that she has a chance to interact with people who are not vile sexists. Putting on drag at home is a defense; putting on drag in Talia is mostly fallout from the situation at home. Georgia has her adventures in boys' clothing, but those adventures allow her to re-embrace femininity from a place of safety rather than anoint her an honorary XY.
I'm partly struck by the way the masquerade in City of Stars echoes the masquerade in Diana Wynne Jones's Howl's Moving Castle. Like Georgia, the protagonist of Howl's Moving Castle, Sophie, starts out under a sexual threat, though it's much more euphemized here than in City of Stars. Sophie, the eldest of three daughters in a fairy-tale universe is constrained by what's expected of women and of eldest daughters.
"What made me think I wanted life to be interesting?" she asked as she ran. I'd be far too scared. It comes of being the eldest of three."
When she reached Market Square, it was worse, if possible. Most of the inns were in the Square. Crowds of young men swaggered beerily to and fro, trailing cloaks and long sleeves and stamping buckled boots they would never have dreamed of waring on a working day, calling loud remarks and accosting girls. The girls strolled in fine pairs, ready to be accosted. It was perfectly normal for May Day, but Sophie was scared of that too.
Ho-hum, it's just another day in patriarchy-land, with the usual catcalls from drunken men.
Sophie is suddenly freed from the sexual threats of her world by being magically disguised not as a man but as an elderly woman. In her pseudo-old age, she is no longer expected to be a sexual victim; instead she is free to be catankerous, eccentric, and bossy, something her apparent old age lets her get away with. As an elderly woman, Sophie's even mistaken for a witch, a category seen as repulsive yet powerful.
It's an interesting twist on girl-in-drag-has-adventures; although elderly women are not free from the threat of sexual violence, that threat is more socially acknowledged as inappropriate, unlike the harassment of young women, which is "perfectly normal." Sophie escapes into a marginalized category, and its similarity to Georgia's escape into androgyny is revealing.
In books like Boston Jane, a particular model of masculinity itself is powerful, desirable, and laudable, and is therefore the thing to be emulated. The way to kick ass is to approximate masculinity.
The sexual masquerades of City of Stars and Howl's Moving Castle, in contrast, are not attempts to emulate masculinity but to seek the kind of exemption from the threat of sexual violence that masculinity (anxiously) entails. These sexual masquerades are recognized as unsustainable but crucial stopgaps that allow the young female protagonists the respite from sexual threat that is necessary to develop selfhood. Undercover as a boy or as an elderly woman, these protagonists get a chance to build up reserves of experience and strength.
Of course I have mixed feelings about how femininity manifests at the end of the novels as heterosexuality and empowerfully normative beauty; surely there is more to achieving a secure home environment than a boyfriend and a halter top. After all, in City of Stars, the crucial resolution at home is similar to that in Talia: thanks in part (but not entirely) to Georgia's opportunity to spend some time around people who aren't vile sexists, Georgia's parents wake up and stop her being surrounded by vile sexists. In Howl's Moving Castle, something surprisingly similar occurs: Howl regains his heart and stops his predatory womanizing. So it's a bit disappointing that, in the end, both protagonists get makeovers.
But partly I think these endings recognize the difficulty of these radical positions. The woman who is rejected as beyond the pale of unfemininity is not resisting femininity by choice. She may embrace her position as a position of resistance, but because others have constructed her very body as unassimilable to society, she is abjected (the "radically excluded," as Kristeva famously puts it).
Georgia's drag is a sign of her abjection, of absenting herself from the game of gender by trying to become androgynous (which here means boyish, on which more could be said). Sophie's drag is also imposed, by the Witch of the Waste, and similarly represents Sophie's desire to exempt herself from the sexual economy. It is a radical position, yes, but also a painful one and a dangerous one. This drag is not the stuff of Butlerian parody but rather of self defense, and existing as a marginal figure (of ambiguous gender, of old age) carries with it its own problems.
The two protagonists therefore undertake the dangerous performance of femininity by drawing on a period of differently but equally dangerous resistance through sexual masquerade. Masquerade supplies not only a period of subject-formation in which the protagonists are allowed a sense of personal integrity (to wit: the notion that they own their bodies) but also the means of removing vile sexists from the vicinity.
Though I'm ambivalent about these endings -- I find them too easy -- I can see a certain logic to them. These protagonists have made femininity safe for themselves. That it takes magic and/or trips to an alternate universe in order to accomplish it registers the precariousness of that safety.
I can't help noticing how muchbuzz is about regarding the recent Batman film. But I'm puzzled that no one yet seems to have pointed out the obvious. Allow me to quote the Rolling Stonereview:
The trouble is that Batman, a.k.a. playboy Bruce Wayne, has had it up to here with being the white knight.
So he becomes, I suppose, the dark knight. In short, Batman: The Dark Knight is an almost comically timely instance of what Bruce Holsinger described in the recent CI as "the 9/11 pre-modern."
I recently re-read a chapter from Mary Anne Doane’s Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, and Psychoanalysis, in which Doane tries to tease out some of the complex relationships between articulations of race and gender in cultural history.
In particular, she explores the way that the sexuality of white women has been figured in terms of race; the "pure" (racially pure, sexually pure) white woman is the figure against which the black man is constructed as a violent, hypersexual taint, as seen in the rhetoric of racist organizations in the nineteenth century (and continuing to today) and thoroughly played up in D.W. Griffith's famous Birth of a Nation, a landmark in film technique and in deeply horrifying racist propaganda all at once.
At the same time, white female sexuality is also seen as profoundly unstable, the "weak link" in civilization, so that the white woman is prone to "falling" (like Eve) and becoming a "fallen woman" whose sexual "impurity" translates into a kind of racial "impurity." The white woman, in other words, exists (culturally speaking) in the madonna/whore binary, and the "whore" half of that binary is mapped onto blackness. Meanwhile, the black woman is the invisible term, erased from the cultural map by the black man/white woman complex of social anxieties. As Doane observes,
Just as Africa was considered to be the continent without a history, European femininity represented a pure presence and timelessness (whose psychical history was held, by Freud, to be largely inaccessible). The trope, however, reduces and over-simplifies the extremely complex relations between racial and sexual difference articulated by the colonialist enterprise. For that enterprise required as a crucially significant element the presence of the black woman (who is relegated to non-existence by the trope)." (212)
All this recently in my mind, I was completely shocked to run across this Vogue cover on the internet:
A quick google revealed that I was by no means the first to notice the cultural contexts evoked by the cover (here, here, here, here...)
As usual, any time a historically oppressed group is publicly subjected to further oppression, a bunch of astonishing people have to crawl out of the woodwork to inform the world that there is no problem, because they "just don't see" the racism in the photo, because after all they are "colorblind" and the world would be perfect if everyone would be as blind as they are and stop complaining about racist images.
It is true that you pretty much have to invoke the imagery of blindness to get away with claiming that the photo above is not racist, although as I'll elaborate, it's not as straightforward as the press is making it out to be.
In the photo, the basketball player LeBron James is enormous, but not standing up quite straight. Instead, he is hunched forward, his right arm dangling, notionally to dribble a basketball but effectively striking an ape-like pose, his right hand reaching nearly to his knee. (And let us face it; they probably photoshopped that ball in.)
His mouth is wide open in a growl (other bloggers are taking it as a matter of course that basketball players growl as part of their job; I will have to take their word for it).
His clothes are short, revealing bare limbs and evoking nakedness; apart from that they are entirely black -- athletic wear, as many have observed, but in no way his actual athletic uniform (research in the form of googling "Cleveland Cavaliers" reveals that the players wear uniforms that carry, you know, the team logo).
In James's left arm, model Gisele Bündchen leans sideways at a crazy angle, her body barely supported by her feet, her head leaning away, her fair hair blown up behind her. Her odd angle evokes helplessness; our casual experience of physics tell us that she would be sprawled on the floor were it not for James's arm around her. Her clingy, sleeveless dress reveals the contours of her limbs.
The composition of the shot -- the coloring of the models (especially James's clothes and Bündchen's hair), their poses, their positions in the frame, James's growl -- thoroughly evokes the iconic image of King Kong clutching a screaming Fay Wray, from Merion C. Cooper's 1933 film King Kong.
Except for one thing.
Bündchen is smiling. She looks happy.
Her pose is unstable, and she certainly looks helpless, as if she might fall, but hers is not the stricken backwards arc to which Wray's unfortunate spine was subjected. (Of course, Bündchen's unfortunate spine is subjected to her shoes. Perhaps Annie Leibovitz felt that this was enough.)
It looks more like Bündchen is playing with weight and balance (in a "roses, roses, we all fall down" kind of way) than that she's been grabbed by a giant ape. And although her head is tilted back, her eyes are directed back down at the viewer.
Her fair hair, though evocative of Wray's, is not falling abjectly, a visual indication of what would happen to Wray if King Kong were to drop her; rather, Bundchen's hair defies gravity, billowing up behind her as if to insist on the contrived quality of the photo.
After all, the shot is clearly taken indoors; her hair could not be windblown without a fan and/or enormous amounts of environmentally unsound chemicals. (Ironically, perhaps Wray's hair in the film should be more windblown, given that she is supposedly outside at a pretty high altitude.) This hair signifies glamor, and specifically all the technologies of contrived glamor that a high-status fashion magazine can marshal for its photo subjects.
Seen in that light, Bündchen's mischievous, playful smile is jarring next to James's dramatic scowl.
What is she so happy about? What is he so angry about? It's as if James is diligently playing King Kong, while Bundchen gleefully breaks character to wave at the camera.
* * * * *
Vogue, of course, is the blind that proudly leads the blind, insisting that the photo has no iconographic context. A Daily Telegrapharticle quotes their position thus:
Patrick O'Connell, a spokesman for Vogue, said the magazine had chosen to "celebrate two superstars at the top of their game" for the cover of the annual "Shape" issue, which also features a series of unusual athlete-and-model combinations inside. "We think LeBron James and Gisele Bundchen look beautiful together and we are honoured to have them on the cover," he said.
The insistence is that the photo is not racist because it's not a still of King Kong and Fay Wray, both abject in their own ways; it's a photo of successful basketball star LeBron James and successful fashion star Gisele Bündchen.
But no one ever said that the photograph was the still from King Kong. The fact that the photo subjects are LeBron James and Gisele Bündchen is precisely the point: the photograph both evokes the 1933 still and departs from it.
Here's the photo again:
There is absolutely zero possibility that Annie Leibovitz didn't know what she was doing when she composed this photograph; she is a visual artist, and visual composition is what she does. Of course, Leibovitz's awareness is not the question; even if she were magically unaware of what she was invoking, the objective resemblance remains. The Vogue cover mimics an iconic American image in very clear ways.
At the same time, the photography plays with the icon that it mimics -- and the icon's racist context. As I noted above, Bündchen does not completely keep faith with Wray's character, looking playful, secure, and happy where Wray is terrified and totally without control of her body's relation to its physical environment.
James continues to evoke the "black man = voracious ape-like predator" image, with his near-perfect King Kong imitation, but his stance is alienated and objectified by the image. However fearsome his scowl, he is not scary to Bündchen, who is smiling happily and not even looking at him; if he is a predator, she is not his prey.
But neither is she engaged with him as an equal; as noted above, she does not look at him at all. In fact, both their gazes are directed outward -- James's toward the camera but vaguely off center, Bündchen's deliberately focused on the viewer, despite her tilted-back head. James functions more like a stage prop than a photo subject, since his gaze is met by no one, and his clutching arm is being used by Bündchen more or less like a piece of playground equipment. And though James has the "basketball," his figure is curiously static; it is Bündchen who, thanks to her turbo-fan, appears to be in motion. Though James's enormous figure dominates the field of the photo, it is Bündchen's photo -- Bündchen's Vogue cover.
Of course, it may also be argued that the 1933 still is Wray's scene. Sure, there's a giant ape tromping across the city, but the image does not receive its cultural meaning until we spot the tiny abject white woman in King Kong's hand. Buildings can be destroyed and rebuilt, but racial taint, figured in the violation of the sexualized white woman's bodily sovereignty, is, according to the logic of the film, forever. So even the way that Bündchen seems to be the real subject of the photograph in a way reproduces the dynamics of the 1933 film.
But that's clearly not the only thing going on. Playing on a reconstructed Hollywood stage set, Bündchen is all carefree glamor. The racist specter of the predatory black monster is still there all right; it's just that no one really cares about it any more, least of all the supposedly threatened white woman, who in this case happens to be famous for being one of the most highly paid women in the world -- paid, of course, for renting herself out as a highly sexualized clothes-hanger, still one of the most lucrative professions available to women.
Mary Ann Doane argues that by the 1930s, the figure of the New Woman of the 1920s had made it impossible to maintain the madonna/whore binary stringently enough to invest racial purity in white female sexual purity; white female sexual purity was by now too much in question. I don't really buy it; it's kind of a cheap historical link, and even if maternal melodramas like von Sternberg's 1932 Blonde Venus(1) registered sympathy with the "fallen woman," the madonna/whore binary was still going strong. (It still is, although now our society rewards whore status, up to a point, in order to then indulge in the gleeful and lucrative shaming of said "whore"; see also: Britney.)
Moreover, as Doane herself points, out, the white woman's sexuality is always seen as unstable and capable of reverting to sexual licence/blackness.(2)
What is worth noticing is that there are multiple ways that white female sexuality is used to repudiate blackness on behalf of the white community, not just via the omnipresent Birth of a Nation "black-man-as-raping-ape" stereotype, and these modalities clearly coexist. (King Kong is 1933; Blonde Venus is 1932.) Doane's reading of Blonde Venus is therefore instructive; in the film's "Hot Voodoo" number, Marlene Dietrich appears onstage as a cabaret singer, wearing a gorilla suit to the sound of drums, attended by a chorus of women in blackface decked out as "natives."
In the number, Dietrich removes the gorilla suit to reveal herself as a blonde Venus, white sexualized femininity itself, and a white sexualized femininity that is completely commodified, as her glitzy show outfit indicates. (She even puts on her blonde Venus wig, with two arrows through it, right onstage, covering over her already blonde hair.)
Instead of revealing a fear of the blackness within the white woman -- her proclivity toward sexual licentiousness -- blackness becomes yet another prop for fully commodified white female sexuality. As Doane puts it,
It is as though white femininity were forcefully disengaged from blackness once and for all in the process of commodification of the image of white female sexuality. Such a commodification is already announced by the neon sign flashing "Blonde Venus" which introduces the sequence and slowly dissolves into an image of Dietrich preparing for her act in front of the mirror. Blackness functions here not so much as a term of comparison (as with the Hottentot and the prostitute), but as an erotic accessory to whiteness. The black women (represented by the chorus primarily composed of white women in black face with huge black wigs and shields and spears) becomes the white woman's mise-en-scène. Black masculinity is so fully exhausted representationally by the gorilla costume that the black bartender can only be presented in relation to a stuttering fear produced for comic effect[.] (215)
If the Vogue cover directly invokes the image of King Kong, its logic is closer to that of Blonde Venus; blackness is invoked as spectacle.
Posed like the eminently fake giant ape King Kong, James is not so much exhausted by the gorilla suit as he is standing in for it. He is Bündchen's mise-en-scène, and Bündchen's commodification, already clear from her status as a "supermodel" (remember Vogue's insistence that she's not screaming Fay Wray but a successful model "at the top of [her] game") and emphasized by the contrivedness of her improbable hair, is the point. Blackness does not need to be repudiated by her purity or her performance of helpless white femininity à la Wray, not because real racial harmony has intervened but because the logic of the market, which controls Bündchen, James, and Vogue, obviates any such need: your racial history is meaningless to the parent company, which just wants to sell ad space. If the image recalls King Kong, what of it? "We think LeBron James and Gisele Bundchen look beautiful together and we are honoured to have them on the cover."
I suppose it's no surprise that a publication that's devoted to selling luxury goods to wealthy white women by enforcing those women's status as luxury goods chose a cover that focalizes the sexualized-white-woman-as-commodity. I'm rather surprised that they decided to use black masculinity as a prop for it at this late date (although if there is one class of men that is commodified it is surely athletes).
Oh, don't worry, Vogue; this is still completely racist. It's just that you're only getting called out on one of the racist tropes you're exploiting, and on none of the misogynistic ones.
* * * * *
Doane, Mary Ann. Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, and Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge-Chapman Hall, 1991.
(1) This film is crazy.
(2) This is why the girl in The Searchers goes from being the object of rescue to the target of murder; she's "gone native." Being raped is equated to sexual impurity, which is equated to racial impurity; hence she is now one of "them." Since, as a white virgin, she was once the bearer of the whole family's racial purity, the ex-Confederate maniac character feels that she and her impurity have to be wiped out.
It's the second day of MLA, and I'm sort of horrified that there's just as much more to come.
I've heard many good talks and some miserable ones, and some in between. Here are some highlights so far:
Session 21: The Challenge of a Million Books
The crappy panel title notwithstanding, I thought this session, run by the Association for Computers and the Humanities (program here), was very good. Each of the presenters discussed computational methods in literary research. Brad Pasanek and D. Sculley (the latter not present at the panel) used a classification algorithm to test how well patterns in metaphor predicted political affiliations; they have a database of metaphors at http://metaphorized.net, which could come in handy sometime. Glenn Roe and Robert Voyer used text mining to try to understand the classification of knowledge in Diderot's Encyclopédie, and Sara Steger used similar techniques to try to make more precise the formulaic quality of sentimental writing. Good times. I would be especially interested in learning more about pedagogical applications for these techniques.
Session 85: Micro: Studies in the Very Small
Wai Chee Dimock gave the first paper, "Fractals: The Micro in a Global World," and much as I respect Dimock as a scholar, I must say that I found her use of "fractals" entirely specious. She began by suggesting a loosening of the idea of fractals in order to think of self-similarity in terms of scalablility and the structural self-similarity of epic as a genre. Perhaps I was missing part of what was going on, but Dimock's paper struck me as an old-school organic unity paper with the word "fractal" stuck on it. By loosening the definition of "fractal," the usefulness of which I was already dubious, I felt that she robbed it of its power as a concept. She also used the term "recursion" to mean, more or less, repetition, again diluting the meaningfulness of the concept of recursion. It is possible that the short format of the talk prevented Dimock from supplying some crucial justifications for these moves, but I simply came away from the talk with the sense that she has little understanding of complex dynamics, and that they bear no relation whatever to the epic as a genre.
I found Robert Rushing's paper, "Fractal Microscopy: Blowup, Greene, Calvino" more convincing and quite entertaining. Rushing discussed how three texts try to assimilate the traumatic sublime of quantum mechanics (its impossibly small scale, its discreteness, its counterintuitiveness) to everyday life through ideologically charged metaphors. This was my favorite talk in the panel, and came away with an urgent feeling that I need to see Antonioni's Blowup.
Anna Botta gave a paper on dust. I more or less liked it, but can't say much about it, since it was mainly an art history paper and discussed a lot of works that I wasn't familiar with.
James Ramey gave an interesting paper called "Micropoetics: Nabokov's Small-Scale Parasites," which refreshingly used science in a legitimate way. Ramey explored how Nabokov uses the metaphor of the parasite to characterize creativity, especially literary creativity--a sinister generativity. I wound up asking him a question at the end about the difference between being the gestating egg and the egg-laying parent bug, since Nabokov seemed to be enormously interested in the "sting" of the egg-laying. (Some dim person in the audience turned around and suggested that it would help to think of the parasite as species rather than as individual bugs, as if I were confused about it. Sigh.)
Session 93: The Press
This session was arranged by the Division on Nineteenth Century French Literature.
I really enjoyed Cary Hollinshead-Strick's paper, "Personifying the Press: Newspapers on Stage after 1830," which looked at how vaudeville and the press spoke to and about one another.
I also enjoyed Marie-Eve Thérenty's paper, "Vies drôles et scalps de puces: Des formes brèves dans les quotidiens à la Belle Epoque," which looked at a hitherto little-noted genre of short, humorous newspaper pieces. It was a very interesting talk, but as it was in French, I'm sure I only caught about a third of it.
Evelyn Gould's paper, "Among Dreyfus Affairs: The Emergence of Testimonial Chronicle," similarly engaged in a kind of genre study, this time of very long works somewhere in between journalism and autobiography. I'm not really sure I understood how she was theorizing "testimonial chronicle," but she discussed the texts in interesting ways.
I went to a mostly miserable panel late on Thursday evening. It will remain nameless.
I also went to a panel today solely because a friend was presenting a paper on it. In my completely unbiased view, hers was the best paper on the panel, which was on nineteenth century American women's religious poetry. Apart from my friend, one panelist seemed to be trying to recuperate this corpus, which has been widely charged with crappiness, but she seemed to want to do so by pointing out a few exceptional writers (i.e. yes, this genre is crappy, but here are a few diamonds in the rough), and by valorizing these writers in spite of form. I'm baffled. I do want to check out her book, however. The other panelist seemed to have, um, missed the last 30 years of feminist studies?
Session 324: Brave New Worlds: Digital Scholarship and the Future of Early American Studies
I mostly liked this panel; I didn't come away with anything portable, but I learned some stuff about Samson Occom, and am interested in the Charles Brockden Brown Electronic Archive, which draws on fourteen different physical archives, which must be a giant pain in the butt for the people on the project. Interestingly, one presenter was Michelle Harper, the director of project management for Readex. Apparently they're coming out with an interesting feature in which you can annotate digital editions from their archive. It looks cooler that I'm making it sound here, but my notes are sadly devoid of detail, and I'm too spaced out now to remember it.
I gave my paper this evening, but perhaps I'll post on that panel separately, or not post on it at all.
Today I ran into some friends, a former professor, and a woman from Stanford with whom I once took summer German, which was nice. Margery Kempe was right, though: MLA is a desperaat tryal and a terribil oon amonges devils and hir ministeres and necromanceres.
