The Implications of the Image

I started reading Pauline Kael's I Lost It at the Movies last week, a collection of her reviews and essays from 1954 to 1965. It's giving me a lot of perspective. Most books I've read from that period, books that commentated on contemporary life, had a mostly progressive or liberal perspective while Kael seems to have been much more conservative. Although she praises Marlon Brando and The Wild One, Streetcar Named Desire, and On the Waterfront, she nonetheless decries a general trend of "delinquent" cinema.

The romance of human desperation is ravishing for those who wish to identify with the hero's amoral victory: everything he does is forgivable, his crimes are not crimes at all, because he is so terribly misunderstood. (And who in the audience, what creature that ever lived, felt he was loved enough?) This is the victory that we used to think of as a child's fantasy: now it is morality for nursery school and theater alike.

I wonder what she'd have thought of Joker.

More amusing, and slightly embarrassing, are her comments on how women were increasingly being portrayed, arguing a "Calendar Girl" aesthetic was infiltrating art-house cinema.

This female image is a parody of woman--lascivious face, wet open mouth, gigantic drooping breasts. She has no character, no individuality: she's blonde or brunette or redhead, as one might consume a martini, an old-fashioned, or a gin and tonic.

Now I am told that even the junior-high-school boys of America use photographs like these as pinups, and that this is their idea of the desirable female. I don't believe it. I would guess that they pretend to this ideal because they're afraid they won't be considered manly and sexy if they admit they find this image disgusting.

No, Pauline, they really thought these pinup girls were beautiful, I can guarantee it. And boys feeling disgust? I wonder if she thought bug collecting and the scatological humour of 14 year old boys were but poses. If she wanted boys to be disgusted by images of women, she should have shown them pictures of matrons serving broccoli and asparagus.

I recently reread Laura Mulvey's essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", the essay that introduced the term "male gaze" along with Gaze Theory. I was struck again by what an overrated essay it is, and certainly the concept of "male gaze" is no original thought. Even Pauline Kael, writing fifteen or twenty years earlier, wouldn't have been the first to comment on women in media being depicted so as to gratify male lust. I suppose one key difference between Kael and Mulvey is that Mulvey implies the impulse to degrade women is a genetic trait carried by all men while Kael felt it was societal conditioning. Which makes Mulvey sound like the right-winger and Kael the left-winger.

I would agree that women are portrayed degradingly in a lot of media. I would say men are, too, for the satisfaction of women, though less prevalently. The suffering delinquents in the movies Kael talks about would be an example as would, I'd say, the male figures in the Twilight series. Heterosexual men and women want to see the opposite sex degraded. It gives the viewer a sense of superiority, yes, but I think very often that sense is sought for an impression of safety. When the handsome, wounded boy looks up at his beautiful saviour, she doesn't have to worry about him deceiving her into going to bed with him. That mysterious creature on the other side of daily existence suddenly becomes a known quantity, that attractive shape suddenly becomes more easily obtainable.

A Friend in Times of Truffles

You might think you can guess why a pig would be so important to a man but you might be wrong. 2021's Pig has certainly surprised a lot of people who assumed it would be a different kind of film than it is. This is largely due to intentional misdirection in the marketing campaign and within the film itself--leading to a couple aspects of the story not making sense on reflection. But on the whole, it's a nice, melancholy rumination on how amoral business practices bleed into corrupting an artform and the well-being of the artists. And it's lovely to see Nicholas Cage disappear into a role.

As we watch him stalk the streets of Portland, in pursuit of his stolen pig, he's not conspicuously Nicolas Cage, he's a man named Robin Feld. A hermit we meet living alone in the gorgeous woods of Oregon with his truffle pig, now forced to make contact with the human world again.

Director Michael Sarnoski sure makes the woods look beautiful and dark. His shots of the city are less interesting, coming off as an imitation of Nicolas Winding Refn with their excessive use of neon. But it's nice just to watch a movie with such an easy, contemplative pace in which the filmmakers aren't constantly trying to find ways to feed you exposition.

Ultimately, the film is a rumination on the state of artistic expression in the modern media which is now dominated by twin forces of soullessness--corporate cowardice and deconstructionist academic theory. Don't watch the movie expecting a revenge fantasy because Robin finds a much more powerful, more eloquent way to respond to what was done to him.

Joss Whedon's Changing Mob

Reading the interview to-day with Joss Whedon in which he finally addressed at length the accusations against him, I couldn't help thinking of the trial of Oscar Wilde. Or the version of it dramatised with Peter Finch in the role as Wilde. Wilde cheated on his wife multiple times, too, after all. And there was a man, so used to his acerbic wit winning him praise, finding his every word sinking his ship further when he's on trial. Away from people with much to gain from understanding or pretending to understand his clever lines, in the courtroom he faced people who gleefully exacted revenge for never getting what the fuss was about this snooty playwright. So you could say of Whedon in the courtroom of public opinion.

He could think of only one way to explain Fisher's motives. “We're talking about a malevolent force,” he said. “We're talking about a bad actor in both senses.”

That's a good line and probably true. But it's also easy for the gallery to seize upon. Stephen Colbert made a joke about Whedon criticising a black man on Martin Luther King Day, as though Whedon had any say about when the article was published. But regardless of how you feel about Whedon or what he did, it's undeniable there are forces arrayed against him even from the text of this article itself. The writer, Lila Shapiro, uses a number of rhetorical strategies to shore up opinion against Whedon. In the first couple paragraphs in which she establishes the breadth of Whedon's fanbase before the scandal, she makes a point of only quoting white men who praised his feminism. A lengthy portion of the article with comments from Rebecca X--formerly known as Rebecca Rand Kirshner, a writer for Buffy the Vampire Slayer--Shapiro carefully massages X's conflicted but mostly positive statements to make it seem like X is a woman still just barely emerging from the tyranny of Whedon's gaslighting. Shapiro ends the section with this:

A few days later, she sent me a text. “Joss is a beautiful person,” she wrote. “But you know what,” she added dryly, “I’m actually particularly vulnerable to abusive people.”

Then the paragraph break, insuring what impression we'll be left with.

Now that people routinely cheat their way through humanities courses or rely on the greed of college administrations to hand them easy grades, it's no wonder a writer like Shapiro needn't worry about even transparent methods like this being picked up on.

Shapiro poses an argument about the folly of worshiping great artists as gods. She establishes the following Whedon had among academics by talking about a conference in 2002 in which professors from various fields cosplayed and carried cardboard cutouts of Buffy characters. She talks about three professors there who "would go on to establish the Whedon Studies Association, an organization devoted to expanding the field of Buffy scholarship." I like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and a lot of Whedon's work but I'd say his body of work is a ridiculous subject for such a loftily named association. If you're busy studying Joss Whedon instead of Ingmar Bergman or Terry Gilliam, you're way off track.

I say this as I'm hitting a point in my Buffy/Angel rewatch in which the shows are starting to pick up again after a lackluster stretch in season five of Buffy and two of Angel. After Buffy's "The Body", the show finally gets off the soap opera-ish relationship plots while Angel finally ends the silly arc about Angel and his supporting cast shunning each other. I used to say I didn't like "The Body" but in my recent viewing I had to admit it is pretty good. Especially coming as it did at a time when I've been contemplating the deaths of people in my life, watching Buffy deal with her mother's sudden death struck a chord. Whedon's techniques with cutting and sound didn't feel quite so obtrusive. My problem with the episode is that he used that good technique in a way that deliberately separated it from the show's usual supernatural fare. My opinion is that he should took take it all as seriously and maybe he came around to that opinion, too. The weakest part of the episode is when Anya, the thousands of years old vengeance demon turned human, breaks down in grief over Joyce's death. Really, the death of one person, even one she knew, shouldn't have hit her so hard. But that would have forced the story down a different path than Whedon wanted. I do think being a control freak can be a problem when you try to control your own muse.

This article, for as much time as it takes, still doesn't establish Whedon as being truly guilty of anything worse than cheating on his wife. Is he caustic, even rude sometimes? Yeah. Maybe I wouldn't even like being in the room with him. But this revelation doesn't justify his ostracisation from the industry. Nor does it present evidence that he shouldn't be considered a god. The fact that he's not as good a writer as J.R.R. Tolkien or as good a director as Alfred Hitchcock--those things prove he's not a god. People would know that if they actually knew what they were talking about. I mean, name one god who doesn't have worse personality problems than Whedon. Poseidon? Tiw? Jehovah? Maybe Santa Claus. Is that what we're talking about?

Gods aren't made by kindness. Gods are made by their extraordinary abilities and achievements.

I'm less bothered by this on Whedon's behalf than I am on the further implications of just how dumb and petty the general brain is getting.

The Doctor and the Changing News Media

You may or may not have noticed that, after several years of writing about Doctor Who every week, I abruptly stopped a few months ago. Part of it was simply fatigue, I felt like I'd said enough and had repeated myself a few times. But I think a bigger part is that the mediocrity of the 13th Doctor era has fully settled in, the result being a general feeling of death about the franchise. Something about the Davies and Moffat eras made the franchise feel alive, that, incredibly, this over fifty year old series was still in play, was capable of gripping an audience with exciting choices and lively characters. Putting together all of the problems of the 13th Doctor era--the bad writing, the shallow political influences, the BBC production mandates--have been like a plastic bag sucked down the throat. The show gasped and couldn't get air.

I hadn't been thinking about it until a few days ago YouTube's algorithm offered me a five hour video called The Fall of Doctor Who. This video premiered two months ago and it already has 1.1 million views. It's top of the list when you search for "Doctor Who" on YouTube.

I'm on summer vacation from teaching now (though I still work with students for various reasons) so I was looking for things to listen to while working on my comic. Five hours of someone talking about Doctor Who sounded like it had potential and I did end up listening to the whole thing. Though I found myself thinking more about the YouTuber who made it than about the arguments they present. In five hours, I feel they could have covered more ground--they don't address how bad the direction is, for example. The things they do go after ought to be low hanging fruit--the poor writing that fails to build any character, the shallow moral rhetoric, the unsatisfying contributions to the franchise world building. And yet, it is worth boosting the signal on these criticisms because the BBC and the professional critics on its payroll are so vigorous at pushing a hollow impression of general praise for the series and hatred for those who dissent. This YouTuber who made the five hour video is a 21 year old kid named Jay Exci who's already been smeared as far right, fascist, and misogynist. This is in spite of the video not offering a single criticism of the Doctor being female--only briefly mentioning the fact once--in the whole five hour runtime.

They (according to TV Tropes, Exci identifies as non-binary and prefers she/they/he pronouns) have been a YouTuber for some time despite being so young. I wondered how someone so young could be so conversant in critic speak but then it occurred to me this is the language so many people are likely being raised on as their primary media intake has become YouTube videos. While Exci's criticism may not be profound, their video is well produced and relatively entertaining. As the voices of "official" media become increasingly false, I find the honesty inherent in the expressed opinions of internet personalities like this increasingly valuable and necessary.

I guess what we're seeing in progress is a profound shift in media discourse. As old publications become increasingly incompetent and belligerent, and quite ugly in their attempts to discredit criticism, it seems almost inevitable that voices outside of mainstream publications will become more and more important. Not as well paid or as well funded (like many of the most successful YouTubers, Exci appears to come from a wealthy family), but more reflective of reality.

Getting the Impression

The purpose of writing is to communicate. Either ideas, impressions, or facts, the point is to create something that ends up in someone else's mind where they can form their own opinion about it. But when readers are increasingly unable or unwilling to acknowledge nuance or complexity beyond the frame of a certain prescribed set of interpretations, the act of writing begins to feel sort of pointless. But writing may be the only way out, to let the light in, even if only a little, and limited by the extent of my own skill, so I guess I'll try again.

It's a well known quote but it seems worth repeating to-day; "Cinema is truth 24 times a second, and every cut is a lie." - Jean-Luc Godard. On some level, we're always aware of this instinctively. This is why Fred Astaire wanted his dancing filmed with as few cuts as possible, because then audiences would see his real skill as a dancer without any finesse manufactured by creative cuts. Of course, such "lies" are a part of the creative process of filmmaking. The lie of a cut is part of the fabric of the story, so when a video just over a minute long was posted on Twitter of a group of obnoxious white teenage boys surrounding a Native American man, it quickly fit into a story, the cut at the beginning and the end creating a sense of what happened, that, it turns out, is vastly different from the reality of what occurred.

No doubt it's embarrassment and shame that prevents many of the people in various media outlets from admitting they made a mistake. There are no apologies from The Washington Post, Slate, or, of course, HuffPost for telling the world that an apparently innocent teenage boy is evil incarnate. Now Donald Trump is the one using the word 'Evil': "Nick Sandmann and the students of Covington have become symbols of Fake News and how evil it can be." The media did exactly what Trump always says it does, it modified a story to fit a left-wing narrative, and there's just no hiding it now. It's a great big gift to the right wing. If the Democrats lose in 2020, I don't think it would be unreasonable to point to this moment as when their fate was sealed. But this has been a problem for a long time.

In 1789, Benjamin Franklin wrote a satirical definition of the press as a court; "An Account of the Supremest Court of Judicature in Pennsylvania, viz. The Court of the Press":

POWER OF THIS COURT

It may receive and promulgate accusations of all kinds against all persons and characters among the citizens of the state, and even against all inferior courts, and may judge, sentence, and condemn to infamy, not only private individuals, but public bodies, &c. with or without inquiry or hearing, at the court’s discretion.

But the internet seems to have exacerbated the problem to unprecedented proportions. So why don't people watch the full two hour video of the altercation between the Catholic school boys, the Native American Protesters, and the Black Hebrew Israelites? Most people don't have two hours to watch raw footage of ordinary people wandering around a monument and arguing. On some level, people know, or they used to know, you can't get the full truth in a minute of footage. That's the responsibility of people who work in the news media, to, yes, create a narrative, but one that reflects the essential truth in lieu of the literal truth. Something packaged for people who work eight or twelve hours a day and don't want to spend all their precious free time on depressing news stories but still want to stay informed. This incident is an example of how people in the media have failed to be worthy of that responsibility. The effect of this may not ultimately be to convert people to one ideology but force them to submit to a vacuum. Garry Kasparov spoke recently about the chaos Putin and now Trump sought to exploit in order to assert and maintain power.

It's part of the reason writing feels kind of pointless. But now may be the most important time to fight that feeling.

Well knows he who uses to consider, that our faith and knowledge thrives by exercise, as well as our limbs and complexion. Truth is compar'd in Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetuall progression, they sick'n into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition. A man may be a heretick in the truth; and if he beleeve things only because his Pastor sayes so, or the Assembly so determins, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds, becomes his heresie. - John Milton

The Dream of an Itch

Following an episode that parodied itself as a television series, Cowboy Bebop brings us a more sinister story about television as a medium and the dangers of media in general. Owing a considerable debt to David Cronenberg's Videodrome, this story nonetheless is a crucial point in the overall narrative of the series and its particular statement on art and culture.

Session Twenty-Three: Brain Scratch

The episode begins with television. We're introduced to Londes (Chikao Ohtsuka), the leader of a cult, "Scratch", via a television being watched aboard the Bebop by Spike (Koichi Yamadera). Londes, with his hypnotic, unblinking stare, promises freedom and purity to the viewer in contrast to the ugliness of the physical body. "What is the body?" he asks. "The body is a mere physical object. It is an existence all too impure to store the gods within us called souls."

He condemns the entirety of human history and asserts there is no future. He advocates a reality divorced from the physical plane and also exhorts the viewer to abandon all other religions which he recognises as illusion. He's another very potent manifestation of the postmodern--he advocates an existence entirely within media. As we find out by the end of the episode, the concept has a lot in common with Videodrome, David Cronenberg's 1983 Science Fiction film about a professor named Brian O'Blivion, his idea that television has become the essential concourse of human consciousness, and the shadowy political entities that exploit this pathway in the human mind to provoke manipulative hallucinations, eventually using a VR helmet to create assassins. Cronenberg was influenced in part by the writings of Marshall McLuhan.

The hero of "Brain Scratch" turns out to be Ein, the dog, who's able to hack into the cult's VR software much faster than Ed (Aoi Tada). This is because Ein, as established back in episode two, is the product of an experiment and is secretly a genius but the fact that it's Ein who cracks Scratch seems more significant because, as an animal, the dog is the perfect opposite of Londes' philosophy. Even more than Jet (Unsho Ishizuka) Ein's nature is defined by physical reality and his pack. Londes, who turns out to be a kid in a coma, selfishly hopes to draw other people into his static world.

He defeats Faye (Megumi Hayashibara) who'd infiltrated his group and he's about to render Spike helpless, too, before Edward and Jet stop him at the source. Jet and Edward don't have a chance to reveal to Spike what they learned about Londes but Spike has his number anyway--he intuits the cult leader is a kid, and says so, which pisses Londes off. Of course it would--it's not just a reminder of Londes' physical reality, it's a sign that his physical nature can be recognised by an observer without his intent. Internet trolls glory in their anonymity, nothing irritates them more than being pegged.

Spike goes further, once again invoking the concept of a dream that recurs with him throughout the series. "If you want to dream," Spike says to Londes, "dream alone." After Londes has given a speech about how people are controlled by television, no longer able to tell fantasy from reality, Spike rightly observes this is more true of Londes than for anyone else and whatever Londes says its not freedom from the physical body that he glories in but the feeling of dominating other people.

This explains the subtle contrast presented between Londes and Edward. They're both kids, they're both representatives of the postmodern, but Edward is more perfectly detached. When she poses as Jet's daughter, she calls him "Papa" as naturally as she greets her real father in the next episode--in fact, more naturally, as I'll go into further when I talk about Session Twenty-Four. She gives one last look to Londes' hospital room as she and Jet walk away, wishing him better dreams, perhaps hoping he finds the serenity she was born with.

There's an amusing scene in this episode where Spike and Edward are eating while Jet is busy with the computer. Edward pours milk on her bowl of beans, unhesitatingly reconfiguring ingredients outside tradition and seems unperturbed by the result. Spike, following her example, pours beer his meal but when he tastes it he finds it disgusting. But he has to finish it anyway because, after all, he's hungry and it's still food. He needs it.

...

This entry is part of a series of entries I’m writing on Cowboy Bebop for its 20th anniversary. I’m reviewing each episode individually. My previous episode reviews can be found here:

Session One
Session Two
Session Three
Session Four
Session Five
Session Six
Session Seven
Session Eight
Session Nine
Session Ten
Session Eleven
Sessions Twelve and Thirteen
Session Fourteen
Session Fifteen
Session Sixteen
Session Seventeen
Session Eighteen
Session Nineteen
Session Twenty
Session Twenty One
Session Twenty Two
Knockin' on Heaven's Door