Cinema
Girls on Film: Hollywood Keeps Stranding Women at the Edge of Tomorrow by Monika Bartyzel at The Week
[spoilers for Edge of Tomorrow] I’m usually right on the same page with Bartyzel’s Girls on Film column, but I think she’s reaching here. This actually kind of is an example of how screenwriters can’t win – Bartyzel complains that Vrataski’s role is merely to move Cage along the hero’s journey. Okay, but if the gender roles were reversed, that’d be considered much worse and would be much more cliched. Would it be okay if both the burgeoning hero and the veteran were women? Is the the ONLY way it’d be okay? Because while that would be a fine story, certainly every story shouldn’t be like that. She does have a point with the “angel/bitch” dichotomy, which is really the only time Vrataski’s gender is brought up AT ALL, but the film doesn’t endorse those views of Vrataski, I don’t think – both are understandable epithets from a group of soldiers who don’t really know her.
The Female Yoda has become the new normal because it allows Hollywood to appeal to feminist concerns while continuing to feed male wish fulfillment. She looks so killer in action — and seems so good on paper — that she seems to shut down arguments about female marginalization. She’s better than the hero: Stronger, smarter, more mature. [...] As a supporting player rather than star, the Female Yoda gets saddled with more than just the male hero’s inadequacies. She’s also forced to shoulder masculine viewpoints and needs. Edge of Tomorrow‘s Vrataski is simultaneously the hero who leads the war effort and the target of sexism. There’s a note of jealous condescension that follows her elevated stature in a male-dominated war. She’s not just a warrior or soldier; she’s the “Angel” of Verdun, or the Full Metal “Bitch.” Her fearless success elevates her, but her gender qualifies her power.
There Goes the Neighborhood: Godzilla and the Gentrification of Pulp by Lee Weston Sabo in Bright Lights Film Journal
I had an epiphany the other day when watching the Rise of the Planet of the Apes trailer at the theatre. It just didn’t look like any fun at all, and a movie with sentient apes riding horses should be FUN. I thought, “I wish these kinds of movies were still B-movies, because then they were weird and fun and awesome.” I hadn’t read this article yet, and I haven’t seen Godzilla, but this is exactly what I meant. I’d rather have a deliciously low-brow genre film than the aggressively middle-brow blockbusters we seem to be stuck with lately. See also: A Call for an End to Serious Blockbusters by Darren Franich at Entertainment Weekly.
Godzilla has no anarchy or eccentricity, much less any experimental spirit or Japanese weirdness. Edwards is too preoccupied with turning the movie into something new, serious, and, worst of all, respectable. It’s the gentrification of pulp filmmaking, the process by which properties originally intended to spin light-hearted ridiculous yarns are repurposed, repackaged, and resold as serious adult fare. [...] Now Godzilla, the King of the Monsters, has been stripped of personality and dressed up in a taciturn action blockbuster just like any other, perfectly acceptable for a middle-class audience to enjoy without feeling low-brow.
The Trials of ‘Entertainment Weekly’: One Magazine’s 24 Years of Corporate Torture by Anne Helen Petersen
Entertainment Weekly has been on the mind of many the past few months, with the controversial creation of The Community (of unpaid writers) and layoff of (paid writer) Owen Glieberman. This is a great (if long) read about the history of EW and the conflict between pop culture criticism and celebrity news that has always plagued the magazine. See also Sam Adam’s excursus on a particular point Petersen’s article touches on, that of the shifting focus of criticism (and on criticism) in the current media age.
Here, Time Warner’s purposes for the magazine became clear. Execs might not have expected it to serve as a purely promotional vehicle for Time Warner media products, but they did want it to be populist—celebrating rather than critiquing popular trends in culture—and, in the process, cultivate good will amongst stars, producer, directors, agents, and executives. Less than a month after the first redesign, Jarvis tendered his resignation. As he later explained, he and his team had developed a subscription-oriented magazine aimed at upper-middle class, educated Americans, and Time Warner wanted a middle-brow publication marketed for the newsstand.
Screenwriting Isn’t Writing by Richard Brody in the New Yorker
I first earmarked this article to read because of the provocative title – what do you MEAN, screenwriting isn’t writing?! Well, what Brody means is very simple and in some ways obvious – screenwriting is not the place for fully-formed literary writing in the way that novels are, because a screenplay is always the basis for a different work, that is, a film. He’s speaking particularly of the old Hollywood system here, contrasting F. Scott Fitzgerald’s failure in Hollywood with William Faulkner’s success; his distinction holds up a little less well in later eras where the screenwriter and director are more likely to be the same person, but there’s still some truth in it. Usually I say don’t read the comments on the internet; I always do for Brody’s pieces, because there’s always a couple of people who hilariously don’t get it, and this is no exception.
In short, Fitzgerald was undone by his screenwriting-is-writing mistake. It’s a notion that has its basis in artistic form. Look at Fitzgerald’s books: they are stylistically pellucid, following on the great realistic tradition, brushed only lightly by the wings of self-consciously interventionist, modernist formalism (as in the list of party guests in “The Great Gatsby”). By contrast, William Faulkner, who went to Hollywood in the early nineteen-thirties, had no such illusions about screenwriting – in part because his sinuous and syntactically profuse writing bore so little relation to the lens-like transparency of a screenplay’s overt storytelling. [...] Hawks and Faulkner worked together intermittently for the next two decades, through Hawks’s 1955 film “Land of the Pharaohs,” and one of the reasons they meshed well is that Faulkner got the idea: namely, that he wasn’t exactly writing; he was providing material that Hawks could make use of in his own way. Hawks spoke very highly of Faulkner’s screenwriting, but emphasized that it was collaborative: Faulkner worked with Hawks himself, with Joel Sayre, with Jules Furthman, and sometimes he simply pitched in when a single scene was needed.
Ruby Dee and the Scream That Killed Generations of Progress by Alex Withrow at And So It Begins…
Ruby Dee, one of the pioneering African-American entertainers and civil rights supporter (along with her lifelong husband Ossie Davis), died this week. There have been a number of memorial pieces written about her, and I admit that I haven’t had time to read them all, but Alex Withrow’s short piece of incisive analysis of a single scene of Dee’s in Do the Right Thing hit home. The title is a bit off, though – it’s not her scream that killed generations of progress, right? Her scream is in response to that progress being killed all in an instant.
As the riot [in Do the Right Thing] progresses, the (mostly white) police and fire department officials issue verbal warnings for the (mostly black) crowd to disperse. When they don’t, the firefighters turn their hoses on the crowd, which sets Mother Sister off into a bout of hysteria. She screams and screams, desperately howling “No! No! No!” at the top of her lungs. But these screams aren’t an effort to get the firefighters to stop. They’re far deeper than that. These screams are a cry of defeat. Defeat acknowledging that, just 26 years prior, firefighters killed black people in Birmingham, Alabama by spraying water at them with fire hoses. Defeat that, here, on this hot and riotous block in Brooklyn, progress for Civil Rights has vanished in an instant.
Defeat that we, as a society, have learned nothing.
Not Cinema
“What Did They Do to You?: Our Women Heroes Problem by Leigh Alexander in GamaSutra
Coming out of E3, it’s inevitable that there’s going to be a hot-button issue that spills much ink, and it’s often the portrayal of women or minorities in games. This year is no exception. I found this one of the most compelling on the topic. I’ve played about half of last year’s Tomb Raider reboot, and while it’s an extremely well-done game (the mechanics are great, and it’s really fun to play), I’m not a fan of how little agency Lara has in the story. Sure, she gets beat up and survives and makes it through to become Lara Croft, Tomb Raider, but every step of the way she has no idea what she’s doing or where she should go next, until she gets a cue from one of the other people on her team (usually a man). I thought the new Tomb Raider trailer looked pretty awesome, and I think it’ll be a good game – as Alexander says, none of this precludes any specific game from being good, or even the “woman in trauma” being a good story. The problem is that this trope pervades so many games, with barely any exceptions.
It seems that when you want to make a woman into a hero, you hurt her first. When you want to make a man into a hero, you hurt… also a woman first. [...] Well-intentioned men sometimes chastise one another about sexism: “She could be your wife. She could be your daughter. Think about if someone did this to your girlfriend or your mom.” How about just “she’s a human being”? It’s all part of a bigger problem, in that media, especially geek media, still too often only understands women in terms of their relationship to men. The question is never who is she, but what did they do to her. There is still little exploration of how heroic qualities — not necessarily “strength”, but relatability, motivation, complexity — in women can exist independently. There are still few roles for them other than catalyst for male revelation or victim defined by male abuse. All people exist in an ecosystem and are defined by their experiences and affected by the people in their lives. But when we want to know why our favorite male leads are the way they are, we don’t just think about the women who happened to them or the trauma they endured: We think about their beliefs, their thoughts and feelings, their goals and desires. Their personalities, their habits, their quirks, their flaws.
Of Course It Takes Work to Build Female Video Game Characters; Companies Should Do It Anyway by Alyssa Rosenberg at the Washington Post
A lot of the discussion of female characters at E3 this year stormed around Ubisoft’s decision to not include female characters in the multiplayer of Assassin’s Creed: Unity, claiming it was too much work to put them in. Alyssa Rosenberg hits it on the nail. Sure, it’s more work. But if you’d built it into your production schedule in the first place as a must-have, you’d have gotten it done. A side rumor was that they had said it wouldn’t be historically accurate, which is bull, but I actually haven’t seen that substantiated. Their response to the furor was to point out how diverse the AC games are in general, which is not totally untrue, but it’s not a carte blanche for the future. Meanwhile, Ubisoft also won’t have women in Far Cry 4, though they say they were CLOSE. To cap it off somewhat positively, The Mary Sue came up with a decent list of games at E3 that will have playable female characters, though some of them are kind of a stretch.
The reality is more complicated. It does take time and effort to design new body types for video games, whether you want to add a female character or a man who is heavier than either a playable male main character or the henchmen players are supposed to eliminate. Those characters move differently and they require different coding for their costumes. But that does not mean that companies should not invest the time and energy in broadening their character bases — and their audiences.
Destroy All Monsters: The Fault in Our Reading by Matt Brown at Twitchfilm
Lots of sort-of related book posts this week that I could’ve merged together, probably, but I didn’t. Deal. This one from Matt Brown is a direct response to the “you should be ashamed of reading YA novels” post I included in last week’s Roundup. He’s bemused by the defensiveness of The Internet in response to the article, and takes a pretty similar approach as I do – it’s not that we’re defensive of YA in and of itself, but that the article in question makes tremendous errors in logic. Matt takes the discussion in a far more interesting direction – what is it about YA novels (in general) that accounts for their surge in popularity?
Beyond this, however, when I see a surge in the popularity of a certain type of story, I inherently assume that the popularity is thanks to that story satisfying an otherwise-unsatisfied need in the popular consciousness. If YA “presents the teenaged perspective in a fundamentally uncritical way” (as Graham suggests), its new, explosive popularity might speak to a need for such uncritical messaging in the normal social and recreational lives of its adult readership. Among the many things that stories and storytelling have always done for us is to help us analyze and demarcate our passage through life. Our signposts through that life used to be much more clearly defined. We have more access, now, to leisure and expression, and less reassurance that anything we’re doing has meaning. A society that has replaced ritual with freedom might be called upon to consider why pop culture has, effectively, replaced culture.
Reading: The Struggle by Tim Parks at New York Review of Books
This article is not explicitly in response to the YA shaming piece, but it’s definitely got some similar things in mind, looking at how our culture of constant communication and connectedness actively work against the kind of reading required for complex (“adult”) literature. I can tell you that I was reading this article on my phone while I was grilling steaks, one of the times in the week I steal for reading time because for three to six minutes at a time, I’m not being interrupted by babies or work or tempted by TV or video games. Of course, I could still be interrupted by Facebook notifications and email pop-ups. Reading the paragraph-long passages he quotes from Dickens and Faulkner was challenging at best. I can remember times like he conjures up from his life in Italy, when I had nothing else to do than sit and read for hours at a time. Can we reclaim that kind of attention again? I don’t know. I’d like to try. But I say that often. Giving up connectedness is more difficult than I’d like.
The conditions in which we read today are not those of fifty or even thirty years ago, and the big question is how contemporary fiction will adapt to these changes, because in the end adapt it will. No art form exists independently of the conditions in which it is enjoyed. What I’m talking about is the state of constant distraction we live in and how that affects the very special energies required for tackling a substantial work of fiction—for immersing oneself in it and then coming back and back to it on numerous occasions over what could be days, weeks, or months, each time picking up the threads of the story or stories, the patterning of internal reference, the positioning of the work within the context of other novels and indeed the larger world.
It’s Tartt, But Is It Art? by Evgenia Peretz at Vanity Fair
More on books and complexity. I haven’t actually read Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, so I can’t actually say much about this article, but I found it interesting just from the perspective of critical kerfluffles. I’m used to them in the film criticism world, but there’s a bit of a different feel coming from this literary one. It’s kind of fascinating, and seems to suggest that the high-brow/low-brow debate is even more heated in literary circles than it is in film circles. And I kind of want to read the book now.
Indeed, we might ask the snobs, What’s the big deal? Can’t we all just agree that it’s great she spent all this time writing a big enjoyable book and move on? No, we cannot, say the stalwarts. Francine Prose, who took on the high-school canon—Maya Angelou, Harper Lee, Ray Bradbury—in a controversial Harper’s essay, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read,” argued that holding up weak books as examples of excellence promotes mediocrity and turns young readers off forever. With The Goldfinch she felt duty-bound in the same way. “Everyone was saying this is such a great book and the language was so amazing. I felt I had to make quite a case against it,” she says. It gave her some satisfaction, she reports, that after her Goldfinch review came out she received one e-mail telling her that the book was a masterpiece and she had missed the point, and about 200 from readers thanking her for telling them that they were not alone. Similarly, Stein, who struggles to keep strong literary voices alive and robust, sees a book like The Goldfinch standing in the way. “What worries me is that people who read only one or two books a year will plunk down their money for The Goldfinch, and read it, and tell themselves they like it, but deep down will be profoundly bored, because they aren’t children, and will quietly give up on the whole enterprise when, in fact, fiction—realistic fiction, old or new—is as alive and gripping as it’s ever been.”
Masters of Love by Emily Esfahani Smith at The Atlantic
And now for something completely different. This is about a study that looked at two sets of married couples – the “disasters” and the “masters”, so distinguished by whether their relationship was headed for divorce or not. The main takeaway – listen to what your spouse wants to talk to you about, because paying attention to them and their interests makes a huge difference. This seems obvious. Yet I can also tell you plenty of times that I’ve dismissed what my husband wanted to talk to be about because it seemed less interesting to me at the time than whatever I was reading or watching. I’m aware of that tendency in myself and I’m trying to correct it, but this article was a good reminder to keep at it. It matters.
Contempt, they have found, is the number one factor that tears couples apart. People who are focused on criticizing their partners miss a whopping 50 percent of positive things their partners are doing and they see negativity when it’s not there. People who give their partner the cold shoulder—deliberately ignoring the partner or responding minimally—damage the relationship by making their partner feel worthless and invisible, as if they’re not there, not valued. [...] Kindness, on the other hand, glues couples together. Research independent from theirs has shown that kindness (along with emotional stability) is the most important predictor of satisfaction and stability in a marriage. Kindness makes each partner feel cared for, understood, and validated—feel loved. [...] There are two ways to think about kindness. You can think about it as a fixed trait: either you have it or you don’t. Or you could think of kindness as a muscle. In some people, that muscle is naturally stronger than in others, but it can grow stronger in everyone with exercise. Masters tend to think about kindness as a muscle. They know that they have to exercise it to keep it in shape. They know, in other words, that a good relationship requires sustained hard work.
A Few More…
The Crew is a Great Racing Game First, MMO Second – It’s been a while since I played a great racing game, and the open world aspect really intrigues me, so I hope this article is borne out when the game releases later this year
Why Software (Not Hardware) Is Quickly Becoming the Most Exciting Thing About Oculus Rift – It may be superficial, but a virtual storefront where I could browse virtual shelves would be a huge turn-on for me.
This is the Absolute Worst Way to Teach Your Kids to Read – Reading isn’t a chore; don’t treat it like one. Something to remember as I already struggle to balance reading to Karina with other activities.
For Your Listening Pleasure
I realize I shared The Dewover podcast just a couple of weeks ago, but they just did a special episode on 1945 (when the project started, it was limited to 1973 and newer year). I finished listening to it yesterday, and I really enjoyed it. A couple of members on the panel were pretty conversant in classic films, but a few people weren’t, including host Jamie Dew (I think Anchors Aweigh was his first Gene Kelly film, and Spellbound his first Hitchcock). They all came at it with pretty open minds, though, which is a sure way to win me over – even though they didn’t like all the films, which is fair enough. They all uniformly liked Mildred Pierce, which is wonderful. Since I grew up on classic film, sometimes it’s hard for me to understand coming at classic films for the first time as an adult, and this was a great window into that process, and while a few things were frustrating (the idea that Anchors Aweigh was an anomaly for stringing musical numbers along a paper-thin plot, for example), it was more gratifying and encouraging than anything else.
Images of the Week
True Detective poster, by Daniel Keane. A diagram of the one tracking shot. You know the one I mean. Awesome.
Classic Children’s Stories with a Minimalist Twist, by Christian Jackson. I like the Red Riding Hood one the best; the others are okay, but maybe a bit TOO minimal/abstract.
Video of the Week
Star Wars Kitbashed. This is incredible. It’s Star Wars, but with references to other films spliced right in. It’s heavy on Kurosawa, as you’d expect, but there’s also Flash Gordon, Forbidden Planet, similar scores from The Bride of Frankenstein and Kings Row, and a lot more. Truth be told, I’ve only watched the first third of it or so, but it’s impressive already. Here’s the full Kitbashed site, giving more information on the project (which is on-going).