The Distance in Immediate Violence

This piece of information comes at the beginning of a 1952 film about that most notorious of sex offender, The Sniper. Well, okay, shooting women from rooftops with a high-powered rifle doesn't quite qualify as a sex crime to most people. It's a bit strange when the police refer to him automatically as a sex offender after he's shot only two women--they apparently make no effort to see if there's anything besides a common sex linking the two victims. And yet, taken as a metaphor for sex crime that couldn't be discussed too directly by a Hollywood film in 1952, The Sniper is actually kind of effective. It makes an effort to be a serious insight into the mind of the sex criminal and to be an essay on how society ought to address mental health issues, but it's more effective in terms of mood and a sort of nightmarishly arbitrary portrait of brutality.

It's an ensemble cast of mostly new and B movie actors nominally headed up by Adolphe Menjou, a star from the 1920s and early 1930s, maybe best known to-day for Sternberg's Morocco. He plays the police lieutenant in charge of investigating the sniper crimes, but he doesn't show up for the first third of the movie and the bulk of the film follows the sniper himself, Eddie Miller, played by Arthur Franz with a peculiarly earnest desire to be caught by police alternating with a methodical fury for all womankind.

The two sides of his personality never quite coalesce properly and despite the fact that we spend more time with him than anyone else, we never quite feel like we know him. Nevertheless, there's something frighteningly effective about his hatred for women.

In one of the most effective scenes in the movie, he throws baseballs with perfect aim to drop a woman in a dunk tank at a carnival sideshow. She starts by taunting him and playing along, but gets quiet as she repeatedly has to climb out of the tank and back onto the seat. Everyone grows visibly uncomfortable at the strange spectacle of the angry man with perfect aim grimly hitting the target again and again until he's throwing baseballs directly at the woman in the cage before he stalks off.

Each time he shoots a woman, it's very effective, too, and despite the movie's attempts to humanise him, our sympathy is totally with the victims each time. The movie somehow makes them more than just random victims with a very short space of time to characterise them--particularly effective was the death of the first woman, played by Marie Windsor, who's shot as she pauses a moment to wipe the dust off a poster of herself outside the nightclub where she works.

She was introduced to us as a customer of Miller's cleaning service and she gives him the stained dress she's wearing at the time in a mildly flirtatious manner. She gives him a beer, but her manner changes when her boyfriend shows up and she has Eddie go drink his beer outside. She's established as a woman who's maybe a little vain, a little coquettish, but basically a good person, just right for the sort Eddie's twisted mind would cultivate an irrational hatred for.

We're introduced to a number of women who break Miller's balls in various ways, but mostly they feel like the two dimensional random weird jerks in Rambo or Fist of Fury. Windsor's is the only really effectively established female character, and mostly it seems strange the movie feels compelled to line up female antagonists for Eddie.

Richard Kiley's on hand as a criminal psychologist to deliver a speech about how violent misogyny needs to be caught and treated early and while that's certainly an appreciable message, the movie's a little too strange to go with it. The rifle seen as a phallic symbol used to harm women from a distance is kind of an effective shorthand for a man's body forced on a woman without connexion, the inherently combative nature of rape. It is a strange and disturbing film.

Forms of Captivity

How did I only just now find out Thomas Kinkade is dead? Which isn't to say his death brings me any pleasure. I'm going to say that with the next sentence. His death brings me some pleasure.

Well, no, I'm not happy for anyone to die. But I'd wish certain kinds of lives on people even less than death and what I get some pleasure from is that Kinkade apparently drank himself to death and that he was a miserable bastard. It's bad enough when someone cynically exploits the shallow, overriding consumerist instincts that have been cultivated in this culture. It's worse when they're disgustingly happy. If there are afterlives suited to individuals, I hope Kinkade has to spend eternity in one of his two bit, faux Disney cottages.

On the other hand, if you'd like to express support for my art and honest depravity, my friend Amee yesterday put online a Facebook fansite for my work. Feel free to facelike it or whatever it is one does via Facebook.

I was reluctant to watch the second season Star Trek episode "Metamorphosis" for some reason. Maybe it was because it was written by Gene L. Coon, most of whose work from season one I didn't like, maybe it was because I think it's the Star Trek episode I've seen the most. Back in the 90s, in my imprudent Trekkie youth, for whatever reason this episode tended to get replayed a lot.

I guess it was a combination of low expectations and the fact that I've changed so much as a person in the last decade that I enjoyed it as much as I did. There's a sweetness to Cochrane's relationship with the Companion in the way both seem to be so innocent about the nature of their relationship. Though Kirk and McCoy smugly assuming the two are lovers from the fact that the Companion is seemingly female was a little silly.

There is some encouragingly progressive subtext to the story, as when Cochrane expresses disgust for the idea of a relationship between himself and the Companion and old fashioned McCoy of all people says, "There's nothing disgusting about it. It's just another life form, that's all. You get used to those things."

This takes some of the edge off of an earlier moment when Kirk tells Cochrane that the "idea of male and female are universal constants." Yeah, tell that to a bacteria. Though maybe that's just Kirk not being psychologically equipped to contemplate a civilisation where he can't get pussy.

Twitter Sonnet #374

Aries strippers produce many sweaters.
Soon Roo cooks the wool in a loomless room.
Squished Squirt cans recall their cola betters.
The limes lingered in time for lemon doom.
Zigzag rice misleads the lovelorn maggot.
Iridescent blueberries bulge the scone.
Malted walls flatten the round red target.
Skinny doctors medicate to the bone.
Oval apricots describe slow judges.
The grey tarantulas worry a mouse.
Confused cannibals craft gourmet fudges.
You can't TP the toilet paper house.
Rusty coffee cups shiver on the shirt.
Olive skies conceal the encroaching dirt.

Streets and Guitars

A little short on time to-day--it's my birthday, so I'm meeting my mother and sister for a quick lunch before I need to get to class. I wish I could skip class to-night, but I have to perform a skit in Japanese and I wouldn't want to leave my partner hanging, even though that's exactly what he did to me when he didn't meet me as planned before class on Monday so we could write the skit. Fortunately, I assumed he'd flake on me so I wrote the skit entirely myself.

I've decided to call it "Anyone Can Play Guitar" after the Radiohead song. Here it is, my masterpiece, translated into English by the author himself (again, me);

ME: Good morning. You didn't bring your guitar?

PARTNER: No.

ME: Why not?

PARTNER: I can't play it very well.

ME: No. I think you can play it very well.

PARTNER: Really?

ME: Yes. Besides, we need music at the barbeque.

PARTNER: True. For this reason, I will bring my guitar. What time is the barbeque?

ME: Four o'clock.

PARTNER: Who's cooking?

ME: My father and my younger sister.

PARTNER: Your father always cooks, doesn't he?

ME: Yes. He likes to cook.

PARTNER: Of course.

ME: I'm going to the convenience store. See you.

PARTNER: See you.

And scene.

I hope the class isn't left breathless by the brutal honesty of this human drama.

Well, I posted The Smashing Pumpkins' "Thirty Three" last year because I'm a moron who forgets how old he is, so I better post it this year when I'm certifiably thirty three;

Seems like there was a better quality video last year. This year I had to choose between shit video or shit sound so I chose shit video. Please, decision, don't define my year.

Better Judgement

I'm by no means a religious person, but I can appreciate what Father Logan does in Alfred Hitchcock's 1953 film I Confess. Hitchcock himself later thought non-Catholics would have trouble with the film, as Wikipedia quotes him as having said, "We Catholics know that a priest cannot disclose the secret of the confessional, but the Protestants, the atheists, and the agnostics all say, 'Ridiculous! No man would remain silent and sacrifice his life for such a thing.'" Speaking as an agnostic, I think the grace and wisdom displayed by Logan in allowing a murderer opportunities to redeem himself, despite having to pay a great personal price, is a beautiful story and one that is quite insightful about human behaviour.

Montgomery Clift plays Logan simply but effectively, giving an earnest and unmannered method performance that does a lot to humanise the very simple and larger than life character. A housekeeper named Keller confesses to Logan at the beginning of the film that he murdered a lawyer named Villette. It turns out later that Logan happened to have substantial motive, in the eyes of law enforcement and public opinion, for murdering Villette and as Logan keeps his silence about Keller, suspicion turns more and more strongly towards him. And his former lover, played by Anne Baxter looking extraordinarily good, is humiliated by public revelations about her past with him. Being caught in one of Hitchcock's plots somehow makes her far more interesting than she was in All About Eve, but Hitchcock's movies seemed to have that effect with a lot of actresses.

Partly it's the subtly strange, fascinating wardrobe. I loved this evening dress--it's like a dress from an alternate timeline where modern wardrobe evolved almost entirely from traditional Indian clothing.

I Confess is obviously a good example of one of Hitchcock's "wrong man" movies. That his predilection for making such movies arose from a childhood trauma probably made a man voluntarily allowing blame to be wrongly be cast on him seem incredibly admirable to Hitchcock.

Of course, realistically the story might be more complicated--if Keller had killed again after his confession to Logan, Logan would obviously have seemed irresponsible for not turning him in. Though I suppose a priest would say any subsequent deaths are part of God's plan and not the priest's responsibility at all. But in the particular atmosphere of the movie, we can appreciate the value given to all human life, even the life of a murderer.

Twitter Sonnet #373

Long sandwich bread takes a fire voyage.
Anachronistic tanginess comes home.
Terrible things are for instance savage.
Blurry music pervades the slow Space Rome.
Smooth glaze shields snap the king's final doughnut.
Widening apples distort William Tell.
Clinging fake grass ruins the rabbit's put.
More boxers swallow fish than we can sell.
Guitars scorned by passive chefs start to rust.
Hollow wood grids block thin naked coppers.
The fuzz collects outside the filter's bust.
Love cannot dislodge Drebin's cheap stoppers.
Starchy cloth teeth gently chew the priest's neck.
Powder rooms have hidden alien tech.

Where Fruit was Not Meant to Grow

It's really more appropriate for May Day, but I felt like The Wicker Man was a fitting enough movie to watch on Easter. It has chocolate bunnies, anyway.

Or as Mrs. Morrison corrected Howie, "Those are hares, not silly old rabbits. Lovely March hares."

I guess one could say the movie's about the dysfunction inherent in religious belief, whether it's Christian or pagan. It doesn't really feel like that to me, though. The movie portrays extreme examples for both cases, so it's not really a good argument. It seems more like a portrait of just how fascinatingly bizarre and sinister the human mind can be. In this sense, one could say it is a horror film, but it's also a movie that makes me question the existence of the horror genre. Almost every decent so-called horror movie I can think of can be described as really being a drama or comedy that happens to have scary moments or just a horror aesthetic. I think the heart of the horror genre is the relationship between guilt and mystery.

I watched the original Japanese version of The Ring (リング) for the first time last week. It's not a particularly great film, but it has that complex, that confrontation of guilt and its oppressive perplexity manifested by an almost arbitrarily vindictive and unforgiving supernatural force. The Wicker Man, too--the movie's not content to simply laugh at straight laced, deeply religious Howie. When he's told his own actions have led him to a fate far worse than rationally he deserves, we recoil a bit. It's this moment of disorientation, this moment where we find ourselves trapped and threatened by our own presumptions, that's where horror exists.

Of course, I can't watch The Wicker Man without thinking of Sonya, and I should mention her recent review of The Invisible Man isn't just the best review by her I've seen, it's one of the best things she's written.

The Swooning Fraggle

Happy Easter, everyone. I don't have much to say about Easter, so here's another Halloween post.

Written by H.P. Lovecraft disciple Robert Bloch, "Catspaw" was the first episode shot for Star Trek's second season, though it was obviously meant to air during Halloween.

As in his previous episode for the series, Bloch name drops "the Old Ones", and the main antagonists bear a resemblance to shoggoths, though perhaps Lovecraft never imagined one of his shoggoths taking the form of a human woman and falling prey to magnetic male sexuality as Kirk easily masters the latest omnipotent intergalactic being with the casual might of his mojo.

Later, the woman entity is powerless when Kirk steals the rod of power with the glowing tip from her man.

The pair of entities, one taking the form of a woman and the other of a guy who looks a bit like Anton Lavey, put together a haunted castle complete with witches and a manacled skeleton because in attempts to gain knowledge by reading the human mind they were only able to access the subconscious. They read Scotty and Sulu first and perhaps we should be thankful the crew wasn't beset by demon samurai in kilts. Kirk and Spock were, however, forced to confront a giant kitten.

Possibly the least effective Star Trek monster ever. The fella is given panther and lion sound effects, but creative lighting and editing can't hide that she just wants a little love and maybe a ball of string. Really, words can't serve here. It's a giant kitten. What more can be said? I mean, okay, getting a panther or something would've been difficult and more expensive. But couldn't they have gotten an adult cat? A mangier one? One that wasn't so fluffy? Maybe this was an Easter post after all.

The Greatest and Most Expensive Bang

I've been nursing for a little while the idea of James Cameron, with Titanic and Avatar, being the twenty first century Cecil B. DeMille, creating popular movies of amazing spectacle with very little substance. When I say spectacle here, I'm not talking just in terms of expense, size, and quantity. A huge selling point for both Titanic and Avatar was that in both cases Cameron was doing something unprecedented--in Titanic it was the detail and scope of a production under the control of one man who forwent a pay check to see it through, and in Avatar it was the idea that the 3D was somehow better than 3D had ever been, and the cgi was somehow better than it had ever been. That neither of things really proved to be true may be beside the point. He got people to believe it. Selling himself and painting his films as extreme undertakings was also a big part of DeMille's career.

DeMille and Alfred Hitchcock were the best known directors of the studio era, virtually the only directors who became personalities that lasted for decades, but DeMille traded on this far more than Hitchcock through radio shows and political manoeuvrings. Cameron hasn't exactly gone so far as the latter (as far as we know), but with his recent publicised journey to the deepest part of the ocean, one can see a similarity in how the two directors made their personal lives a big part of their publicity machine. To test my idea in terms of film quality, yesterday, after seeing Titanic 3D with my mother and sister, I watched DeMille's 1952 film The Greatest Show on Earth.

Both movies won Best Picture, both possess qualities one associates with Best Picture winners--employing a number of known actors and crew, a melodramatic and shallow storyline that's also easily digestible and which generally handles large setpieces with good timing and proportion. Cameron benefits from filmmaking concepts like POV and cinematic expressionism that in DeMille's time were being pioneered by the likes of Hitchcock and Welles only to be made dogma by the 1960s' New Wave. And yet, of the two, The Greatest Show on Earth emerges as the more interesting film by far.

Both films have the virtue of including copious details from real life. One of my favourite things about Titanic are the intricately recreated set designs, props, and costumes. The Greatest Show on Earth benefited from having the actual 1950s era Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey's Circus and many of the best parts of the movie are essentially documentary footage, but DeMille does successfully integrate his actors into the reality of the circus on film. Titanic does this, too, but the circus performances, in addition the authenticity of their appearance, are more intrinsically interesting. In addition to the (presumably horrifically mistreated) animals and incredible acrobatics acts that were daring in ways one suspects are prohibited by modern safety regulations, the film includes rare colour footage of the famous clown Emmett Kelly.

In his brief moments onscreen, one gets some impression of his inimitable mixture of melancholy and absurdity, something portrayed a bit more literally by the clown played by James Stewart. Stewart's billed behind Charlton Heston, Betty Hutton, and Cornel Wilde despite being by far the most intriguing and frustrating character in the movie. In one of his early scenes, he quotes from Oscar Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol;

Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

It's surprising to hear Wilde quoted in a film by the deeply conservative DeMille and even moreso when this quote defines the story of Buttons, the clown Stewart portrays, as we learn that he's in fact a brilliant surgeon who's in hiding now because he murdered his wife. The film unreservedly portrays him has a sympathetic and even heroic character, which makes it frustrating that the issue of his wife's murder is never really addressed. When Hutton's character begs him to help Heston, who's injured, at the end, she says to him, "Maybe you killed someone . . . because you loved her very much . . . Now you can save someone I love." Here's an unaddressed issue bigger than the iceberg in Titanic.

The circus train wreck equals the Titanic disaster in its effective portrayal of sudden, dangerous chaos, particularly in the case of Titanic 3D, which renders the already dated cgi about as artificial as the models used in The Greatest Show on Earth.

Twitter Sonnet #372

Category lawns cross checked heel mould shape.
Folded tables of contents pin the grass.
The grilled salmon lines the healthier cape.
Burning cities trade trout for golden bass.
Shells strapped to uneven streetcars clatter.
Pea soup slants toward the eastern jointed wind.
Mummy screams were written on dry batter.
In jacuzzis cherry lamé will bend.
Freshly nerfed pipes rain your bathwater dream.
Rising Arctic blue gets the white cheese chin.
Greased foreheads cave for the midori beam.
Akai evil repels the angel's win.
Lactating eggs tangle nature's whole scheme.
Rabbit eyes vibrate to The Shadow's theme.

Seeking the Pollen of Truth

I dreamt last night that Commander Riker (I know, any story becomes funny somehow once you say "Commander Riker") and an unfamiliar Starfleet engineer were exploring a derelict ship that looked somewhat like the Defiant from Deep Space Nine. There were several mannequins on the bridge made out of newspapers and at one point an alien burst from the chest of one. The alien was also made entirely of paper.

I suspect this was all due to reading before bed a story about Prometheus and then a bit of Through the Looking Glass, the scene on the train with the man dressed in paper;

I also read the part where the Gnat tells Alice about various insects in the looking glass world, including the "snapdragonfly".

The Annotated Alice has this to say about it;

Snapdragon (or flapdragon) is the name of a pastime that delighted Victorian children during the Christmas season. A shallow bowl was filled with brandy, raisins were tossed in, and the brandy set on fire. Players tried to snatch raisins from the flickering blue flames and pop them, still blazing, into their mouths. The burning raisins were also called snapdragons.

How is it we don't now have children's games involving fire and liquor, where the winner is likely the one who gets third degree burns?

I'm on spring break right now, so on Wednesday I threw caution to the wind and went to the library. Not the sad little repository of right wing propaganda we have here in Santee, but the downtown San Diego library, the three storey hardcore shit. I'd never been in there. Which is sad for a few reasons, one of which is that it fulfilled my childhood expectations about libraries from watching Ghostbusters over and over and had a labyrinth of books.

The place was actually pretty crowded, too. I was there for research for my upcoming comic, which I'm saying is basically set in 1952, though I may make stylistic deviances. It's also going to be set in a fictional city, but I thought I might use some real detail about San Diego in the 50s as a starting point, so I found the "California room" on the second floor of the library, a rather small room attended by a guy who looked and sounded like Spaulding Gray. I felt really awkward asking him questions and getting him to bring old maps from the back room but he was actually very patient with me.

This is the San Diego city directory from 1952, by the way;

Leather bound. Dopey little advertisements in leather. Some things in this country used to be better.

Anyway. Bees!

The Bitter Earth

For some reason in the movies I'd seen him in, Robert Ryan had never made much of an impression on me. But from now on, when I think of Robert Ryan, I'm going to think of 1952's On Dangerous Ground;

I'm really starting to love the boldness I'm noticing in the way 1950s movies portrayed bad cops. I'd watched White Heat a couple nights before On Dangerous Ground, and despite a terrific, haunting performance by James Cagney, the movie's diminished incredibly by its gaggle of smug, self-righteous cops. In On Dangerous Ground, the good guy/bad guy line is obliterated.

At one superficial level, the movie seems to be a comment on the importance of policemen not stepping over the line. But the movie's better than the heavier handed social commentary of Ray's later film, Rebel Without a Cause, because Ryan's internal conflict completely takes over. Perhaps if Rebel Without a Cause had had a similarly short running time (only 81 minutes compared to Rebel's 111 minutes), James Dean's performance would've given the later film a like focus.

Routinely roughing up suspects and leads while remaining detached and quietly worked up in the company of his colleagues, Ryan so perfectly comes across as a man whose humanity is cauterised by continual exposure to the worst of human nature until he's pared down to the single minded focus of getting every last one of them bastards and breaking their necks.

In an effort to get him to cool off, his chief sends him north, out of the city, to assist in solving a murder. Little does the chief know he's sending him to partner up with the even looser cannon, Ward Bond, who plays the father of the murdered girl.

The movie's pace rarely slows as the two men chase the killer across treacherous, snowy roads and woods. Ryan's up for killing the man as much as Bond is until they run into the culprit's blind sister, played by the great Ida Lupino.

As she and Ryan talk by fireside, he tells her how he can't trust anyone, and she tells him being blind makes you have to trust everyone. It's maybe the horror Ryan feels at such a vulnerable existence that leans him towards trying to take her brother alive, but the tension about whether or not he'll change his mind stays constant. When she remarks he's one of the few people who doesn't talk to her with pity, she doesn't seem to suspect it's not because he respects her but because he's nearly lost all capacity for pity. One senses it's her inability to see him that allows Ryan to start to feel somewhat safe in allowing his humanity to peek through.

On Dangerous Ground is also made fifty times better than it otherwise might have been by its score by Bernard Herrmann. Herrmann finds just the right tactics to draw us into the landscape, turning the footage of rocks and snow into something simultaneously familiar and bizarre, and totally threatening. The French horns in the climactic chase up a rock face are like a paean of apocalypse.

Glimpses of the Bird Network

The space raven flees the supernova.

This giant raven demolishes SUVs when he's not busy crushing your head!

This pair of egrets crashed the duck social a few days ago. Perhaps they were the envy of this duck;

Who stood lost and alone on the path to Wal-Mart. Turn away, duck, this is not your path. You're not alone, no, duck, you're not alone, you're watching yourself but you're too unfair, you got your head all tangled up but if I could only make you care . . .*

I watched the second season Simpsons episode "Principal Charming" last night, which was good, but I only mention it because of its completely non-sequitur Vertigo reference;

I suspect this is the last time we see Springfield Elementary's bell tower.

Twitter Sonnet #371

New chapter pink smokes the recent bruised hand.
Broken substitute days switch the cotton.
Careless love's alone in provolone land.
Square exit forks widen the stacked mountain.
Nude giraffes hold brittle olive branches.
Moon legs glitter on the metal marble.
Vintage uranium pollutes ranches.
The froze smile villain just said, "robble."
High pitch mushroom oboes pet Sylvester.
Awe paints policeman constructions purple.
Foetal toast crisps in the third trimester.
Pockets in sunflower shade can triple.
Giant Jurassic Red Vines grew sweet thorns.
For squids, the pen continually mourns.

*I feel I must point out for some people that I'm quoting David Bowie's "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide".

Sin's Breadcrumbs and Petals

Prostitutes come runnin' for the good taste of sausage. This subtle visual metaphor is brought to us by G.W. Pabst's 1929 film Diary of a Lost Girl (Tagebuch einer Verlorenen), the story of an innocent girl's bizarre descent into a life of sin and abuse. The ostensibly social interest story feels quite tongue in cheek and it's one of the cutest and funniest silent movies I've ever seen.

Louise Brooks' smirk at the camera here as one of the prostitutes starts to undress her reminded me of John Belushi in Animal House. This is despite the fact that Brooks is supposed to be playing Thymian, the sweet and innocent subject of the film. Thymian is basically the exact opposite of the character she played in her previous collaboration with Pabst. Where she was an unapologetic and fantastic hedonist in that film, here she plays a girl everyone takes advantage of and who spends a lot of time fainting. Lulu, her character in Pandora's Box was such a remarkably natural performance. Here, it's as though Brooks is laughing at her own character.

Here she is with her first client at the brothel. She faints for sex, alcohol, and the sight of her father fraternising with a maid. The maid takes over the household, and after Thymian is raped by the impressively vile man who works as an assistant to her pharmacist father, the maid succeeds in getting Thymian sent to a militaristic reformatory headed by a lusty old lesbian. A lot of this movie made me grin in the way School of the Holy Beast did.

Escaping from the reformatory with the help of one of her fellow inmates, Thymian ends up at the brothel. After accidentally have sex with a client her first night there, Thymian protests that she can make money in other ways. She asks the brothel's madam to post an advertisement in the newspaper for dancing instruction. The madam adds "lovely" to Thymian's name in the advertisement and the film cuts to this guy;

The message is clear--if you choose the life of a prostitute, ladies, you might end up having sex with a guy who has a crazy big goatee. So just you keep that in mind.

Thymian starts the dance lesson and it's adorably obvious she has no idea how to dance. She starts flipping her torso up and down and doing stretches while the goatee guy looks on utterly perplexed.

Most of the movie just made me smile but there were one or two effective dramatic moments, as when Thymian's father finds her in a club standing as the prize in a drunken raffle. As Thymian's frivolous mood is broken by the sight of her saddened father, her friend observes that she is a lost girl now.

The film is inferior to Pandora's Box largely because of its comparative lack of focus, but it is nowhere near bad. Louise Brooks is just too great.

Gazing Maley

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. - Oscar Wilde

I thought of this quote to-day when I was reading "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", an essay by Laura Mulvey originally published in 1975. This essay is the origin of the "Male Gaze" concept as applied to film criticism. The quote from the essay that reminded me of the Wilde quote;

It is said that analysing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article.

Mulvey argues that destroying the system by which men attain pleasure through viewing women is essential to making any strides towards ending sexism in society. There's quite a lot of hyperbole and ill-considered statements in the essay, but Mulvey herself, according to Wikipedia, "later wrote that her article was meant to be a provocation or a manifesto, rather than a reasoned academic article that took all objections into account." But the concept of the Male Gaze still finds currency in some corners of media criticism. I thought of it again a week or so ago when I read this analysis of American Psycho which approached the film, directed by a woman with a screenplay by a woman, as an example of a "Female Gaze". It was in the application of the Gaze in this instance that reminded me what an illegitimate idea I thought it was.

So, what is this "Gaze" I'm talking about? Last time I blogged about it, Wikipedia didn't have an article for the Male Gaze, but it does now, albeit one with several typographical and grammatical errors despite having been edited several times in its short existence ("Even when a woman is the hero or protagonist of a film, her body is still sexualized put on display . . .") and provides examples of films without explaining why these films function as examples.

Last time I blogged about it, I referred to the much better Wikipedia article on the Gaze which includes the Male Gaze in a sub-section as well as criticism of the concept. I somehow find it really amusing that the two articles are ignoring each other--the fact that "Male Gaze" used to redirect to "Gaze" leads me to believe at least one of them must at least know of the other and is deliberately not linking to it. Comparing the definitions is also kind of amusing. From "Male Gaze";

The male gaze occurs when the audience, or viewer, is put into the perspective of a heterosexual man. Mulvey stressed that the dominant male gaze in mainstream Hollywood films reflects and satisfies the male unconscious: most filmmakers are male, thus the voyeuristic gaze of the camera is male; male characters in the film’s narratives make women the objects of their gaze; and inevitably, the spectator’s gaze reflects the voyeuristic male gazes of the camera and the male actors.

From the Male Gaze sub-section of "Gaze";

The male gaze occurs when the camera puts the audience into the perspective of a heterosexual man. It may linger over the curves of a woman's body, for instance. The woman is usually displayed on two different levels: as an erotic object for both the characters within the film, as well as the spectator who is watching the film. The man emerges as the dominant power within the created film fantasy. The woman is passive to the active gaze from the man. This adds an element of 'patriarchal' order and it is often seen in "illusionistic narrative film". Mulvey argues that, in mainstream cinema, the male gaze typically takes precedence over the female gaze, reflecting an underlying power asymmetry.

The second seems more dispassionate, but one can find the flaws in the concept in both cases.

I consider myself a feminist. In arguing against the idea of the validity of the Male Gaze, I don't mean to suggest that sexism is not real or that a patriarchy has not existed, or continues to exist, that disempowers women. To me, the Male Gaze is like a feminist cavalry rashly riding well past the sexist line, or rather, a feminist cavalry riding well past a line of sexists defending an oil spill. Because the underlying problem is not the war between the sexes--war is another problem, a counterproductive tool employed to fix the first problem. Sexist men are combative to protect what they regard as their privilege, and the kind of feminist who supports the Male Gaze concept, at least on a subconscious level, is motivated by a desire to return fire, to inflict some of the hurt caused by sexism. It's a product of lazy thinking, as belligerence often is, and, as belligerence often does, tends to lead to more belligerence and thoughtlessness.

This can be illustrated by the perspective on the Female Gaze offered by Maria Haws' analysis of American Psycho. To support her idea that the movie is an example of the Female Gaze, she mentions that the movie is directed by a woman, that its screenplay is written by a woman, and that the movie is critical of men and male vanity. She talks about the scene where Patrick Batemen flexes for a mirror while having sex with a prostitute as a strong example.

I agree that the movie is from a female perspective, and I agree that it criticises a male personality and society. However, supporters of the Male Gaze concept often point out that women are capable of perpetuating the Male Gaze. That a female performer's artwork, by emphasising female physical beauty, for example, is an example still of the Male Gaze because it supports that paradigm. So we're left then with the fact that American Psycho is critical of men. From this logic, we could argue that The Three Stooges is an example of the Female Gaze.

Again, we get back to just what this Gaze business is. Why do we need the term, what makes it different from saying a portrayal is sexist, or that it objectifies women? Well, "objectify" is a much stronger verb than the passive "Gaze". The argument behind the Gaze is that a man can oppress women just by looking at them, that objectifying women or demeaning them is an aspect of this particular Gaze. And how do we indicate which specific Gaze we're talking about when we're talking about a Gaze that objectifies women? The Male Gaze. Because "Male" implies that woman gazed at is objectified.

So the problem with the term goes beyond the fact that it's heterocentric. Mulvey in her essay equates images of women catering to heterosexual male taste to the Gaze. The idea is that through the ostensibly passive act of finding a woman beautiful a man is committing an injustice to her.

A movie that rather effectively presents a better take on the reality of the situation is Vertigo--which is a movie Mulvey actually talks about at some length in her article. I've read a lot of reviews and analyses of Vertigo, and in some respects Mulvey is more insightful on the movie than most. She picks up on the fact that it's Scottie's choice to become a policeman, that he's independently wealthy, which is a crucial point a lot of reviews miss. But Mulvey goes on to say that this shows Scottie's active desire to be one who investigates, who is a voyeur. I don't think Hitchcock felt any need to logically justify a voyeuristic compulsion in a protagonist. No, Scottie's career choice is significant in that it was meant to support his self-image as a hero. Mulvey talks elsewhere in her essay about Jacques Lacan's idea of a mirror fixation, she'd have done well to have looked harder for how the concept could apply to Vertigo. She misses or forgets the significance of the film's title--Scottie's anxiety isn't provoked because Judy isn't who he thought she was, it's provoked by the fact that he isn't who he thought he was. His vertigo manifests when he's confronted by his distorted mirror image, and his vertigo is dispelled when he finds out he wasn't at fault, in at least one case.

Mulvey says that the establishment of Judy's guilt reaffirms the female identity as castrator, but she neglects to mention that a man, Elster, is a lot more guilty than Judy. Judy tried to stop him, in fact.

In observing that Mulvey misses this, we can see how she misdiagnoses the entire problem in sexual relations. The problem isn't just that men have power and women don't. The problem is that we subscribe to a system where one group has more power than the other. Scottie is clearly unhealthy, psychologically, and it goes from limiting his perspective to outright tormenting him. And this sort of thing is exactly what happens to a lot of men who subscribe to the myth of the patriarchal ideal. Human beings aren't cut out for being masters or slaves, and people are diminished by both positions.

This is Arthur Rackham's illustration of Brunnhilde waking to greet the sun after being caught in an enchanted slumber for years before being woken up by Siegfried. She doesn't know or doesn't care yet that Siegfried, in his innocent exploration of her body, had taken her armour. Do we get pleasure from seeing Brunnhilde beautiful in a compromising position? We do. But Siegfried is also naked in his fear of his own feelings and his lack of understanding, having never seen a woman before. Art portrays human vulnerability, and sometimes vulnerability is beautiful. There's a great danger in wanting never to be vulnerable.

Universal Bird Food

This was one of the biggest ravens I've ever seen. It was about the size of a duck. In fact, I saw a pair of ducks in exactly the same fountain a few days earlier;

They're a little more in the foreground, obviously, so it doesn't quite work as a good way to show the size of the raven. This fountain is part of a "Santee Town Centre" sign in front of a shopping centre, at the usually empty edge of the CostCo parking lot. The sign somewhat conceals the four large wooden boxes I guess CostCo decided to put there since no-one uses that part of the parking lot. The boxes had only been there about a week when I saw that raven a couple days ago. There were a couple more ravens on top of and around the boxes.

I've often fantasised about buying beef jerky and trying to feed it to the ravens the way I feed bread to the ducks. I see them eating road kill now and then and on this particular day, there was a bad smell from around the boxes that I guessed had drawn the ravens. I hoped it wasn't one of the ducks--I went down to look and noticed a bunch of straw fanning out on the asphalt by the boxes. The boxes were made of wide spaced slats of ragged plywood, like each box was really six pallets nailed together. Each box was about as high as my shoulder.

Now I was thinking the smell was coming from inside the boxes. There were several more large ravens about and they seemed reluctant to fly away. I wondered if someone at CostCo had really fouled up and left a big meat inventory out there, but from the way the sunlight was getting through the slats there couldn't have been a lot in the boxes. I looked inside one of them and didn't see a lot in there but straw at first and what looked like a bundle of wet blue and purple laundry. The smell was horrible up close, it almost knocked me down. I wondered if spoiled meat could actually give off toxic fumes. Then the pile moved.

For an instant I thought someone was buried under it, but then it rippled. A ridge of material on the pile waved like part of a sea anemone, expelling a blast of air from between the folds so putrid, like being coughed on by a giant who'd just eaten a diseased dinosaur he pulled from a tar pit.

Blood and other dark, hot fluids shot out from it, some of it getting through the slats, driving the birds crazy. I went into the CostCo to buy a crowbar, hoping I could help the birds to the meal. So, happy April first, everyone.

Twitter Sonnet #370

Tables ground to criminal salt attack.
Shakers stand still in the old kitchen war.
Coiling trains are never on the right track.
The white matchbox waits for the wax to pour.
Maple tunnels warmly impress the night.
The day's strings straighten against the wall.
Root beer tells the small sleeper not to fight.
The grey and silent space cools a suede fall.
Melted Hershey legs collapse for magic.
Broken koopa spines drip with mercury.
Cross hatched shrouds drift down from Sydney Paget.
Pale dust shows a bent brown accessory.
Tar toupees trended on old Tatooine.
Skies hold sand solidified gasoline.