Categotry Archives: (un)popular entertainment

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A Farewell to…Stealth

Categories: (un)popular entertainment, adventures in transition, all about me, i get around, omphalos gazing, tv (not trans), tv (trans)

Okay, so this has gone out to a couple of places. First, the big news:

Jeopardy!, the famous international quiz show, is having a 30th anniversary tournament. They are bringing back former champions to play, broken up (initially) by decade. All very good.

As a gimmick, they are asking the fans to vote for the last player in each decade from five former champions.

One of the champs from the 1990s…is trans.

Great! Visibility! Barriers broken! I hope she gets on!

Especially since she managed to also out herself…as me.

Aw, raspberries.

That was somewhat of a mistake. Stuff happens, I dropped a reference to my work for the Guardian and so that the producers could check, left in my nom-de-plume. And they ran it unchanged.

Oh well. There are lots of blogging aliases out there. Have I introduced you to my new blogging partner, D M Mignon?

Anyway.

Most likely, the only thing that will come from this is that I will have permanently wrecked my life. For sure, stealth is gone, done, dead; I’ve left a paper trail that you could make an origami mansion out of.

Eh bien? Non. But hey, I walked into this propeller of me own free will.

So, vote, if you like, and you want to see a trans person get a lot of visibility. More than she’s comfortable with! Much, much more!

And if you wanna pass it along, please do. If I gotta go up in a blaze of glory, let’s make it a doozy.

Meantime, I might as well write a few things. Tomorrow is no good, I’m gaming, but I’ll try to write up something on Jacques Demy (the Film Forum is currently doing a festival of all his movies) and feminism.

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Walking Through Fire

Categories: (un)popular entertainment

I’ve already written in a more general way about The Girl Who Played With Fire on my own blog, but I had a lot of thoughts rattling in my head about it–more than I put into that review. There’s also been a lot of discussion of these movies in on the feminist blogs I read, so I thought I’d make some comments here, too. This movie is built around the rape scene and general abuse of women in its predecessor, so sensitive readers are hereby admonished that this may contain triggers. I also need to note that I haven’t read the books on which these movies are based. I’m ONLY writing about the movies. I understand that there are some major differences.

For the most part, I don’t approach movies with any particular ax to grind, so I don’t default to a feminist or a queer reading of most movies. Usually, individual movies will suggest the critical tools that are most useful to understanding their value (or lack thereof). For example: my main cinematic drug of choice is horror movies. By their very nature, horror movies suggest psychoanalytic readings. Freud works. So does Lacan. I tend to use Jung when I approach horror movies, because I think he best explains the enduring appeal of horror movies even after they’ve lost their power to actually scare the viewer. You could use a feminist scalpel to dissect horror movies, or a sociological scalpel (especially given the interesting tendency of horror movies to mirror the social climate of their milieu), but these are secondarily useful, given that horror movies are specifically attempting to manipulate psychological effects in more radical ways than other kinds of movies. I also think that the greatest movies reward multiple approaches.

I don’t know that the Millennium trilogy is composed of “great” movies. Almost certainly not. But I do know that they are specifically tailored to a feminist viewpoint. And when they are subjected to a feminist critique, they are a serious muddle. On the one hand, they cast Lisabeth Salander, their title character, “the girl”, as a defiantly queer heroine who spits in the face of the patriarchy. On the other, they cater to the fantasies of middle-aged white men by providing them with a secondary protagonist to act as a surrogate. This is most obnoxiously played out in the first film when, seemingly out of character, Lisabeth, decides to become sexually involved with Blomqvist, the male protagonist. Given the systematic abuse of the character both in the text of the first film and in the revealed back-story in the second, this stands as a stroke fantasy for Blomqvist’s middle-aged het male identifiers. Blomqvist is a necessary character from one other point of view, too, given that most of the men in these movies are such monstrous avatars of misogyny that he functions as a kind of apologia. At least these films are smart enough to let Lisabeth Salander stand as the heroine of the story, though she tends to vanish from this role from time to time in the second movie. I note on my own blog that Lisabeth strikes me as Holmes to Blomqvist’s Watson, and Holmes sometimes vanished from his stories, too, all the while remaining as the driving presence. Continue reading →

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Reading Habits

Categories: (un)popular entertainment

It occurred to me this week, and not for the first time, that my therapist might raise an eyebrow toward my reading habits. Shortly after I began transition in earnest, she started suggesting women’s lit to me, as a way of starting the process of socialization. The first book she recommended was The Red Tent by Anita Diamant, which I had already read and enjoyed, though maybe not as much as she would have liked. She smiled approvingly and further recommended a book by Kris Radish, who I had not read. So a couple of days later, I picked up The Elegant Gathering of White Snows at the public library and started reading it right there. My public library has some mighty comfy reading chairs, so this was no hardship, really. I chose not to check it out. After about twenty pages, I decided that it just wasn’t for me. This happened again with the next writer she recommended, and eventually I realized that she and I were not going to see eye to eye on literary matters. I started heading her off at the pass by having a book with me every time I showed up at her office, usually something daunting and intellectual like Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem or Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. It’s not that I don’t like women’s literature, or books by and about women, however you want to define it. Heavens, no. I mean, I named one of my dogs after Flannery O’Connor and my favorite writer of horror fiction is not H. P. Lovecraft or Stephen King, but Shirley Jackson. What seems to butt against my therapist’s suggestions is the fact that I do have fairly well-developed literary appetites, and some of those appetites are decidedly un-feminine.
Continue reading →

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Marriages and Infidelities

Categories: (un)popular entertainment

I’m a bit late to the party when it comes to The Kids Are All Right (2010), Lisa Cholodenko’s comedy of manners about a lesbian couple whose children seek out their sperm donor. It’s a droll movie that shades into painful drama with deceptive ease. It’s good. Very good. You should see it if you haven’t already. It’s a film that begs the question of why doesn’t Annette Bening have an Academy Award yet? All well and good. But it does raise some questions.

From my perspective, there are two elephants in the room in regards to this movie. First: For a decidedly queer movie from a queer filmmaker, there are surprisingly few queer people in front of the camera. As in none. Second: The plot twist that drives the second half of the movie, in which Julianne Moore’s character, Jules, has an affair with Paul, Mark Ruffalo’s character, is a cliché, and an obnoxious one at that. The movie actually does deal with both of these issues, but it’s debatable whether it deals with them successfully.

Taking them one at a time:

While I don’t demand that gay characters be played by gay actors, its galling to see an entirely straight cast playing gay characters in an era when Newsweek magazine is decrying the “fact” that gay actors can’t play straight characters (and why doesn’t this impediment flow the other way? Hmm?). The timing of the movie is unfortunate in this, and it’s compounded by the fact that Cholodenko is herself a lesbian and would presumably have no blinders on when it came to straightwashing the movie. It’s obvious that she’s aware of the problem because she comments on it directly in the text of the movie: When quizzed by their son about why they prefer gay male porn, Jules explains that in lesbian porn, the actresses are all played by straight women. “It’s so inauthentic,” she adds. This is probably the funniest line in the movie, given the casting, but it’s also kind of a bitter pill. On the other hand, the actors Cholodenko does have are so good that it suggests that there were no better choices available.

The second issue is more vexing, given the underlying patriarchal meme that all a lesbian needs to turn straight is a good fucking from the right man. Fortunately, this is demolished by the movie–Jules repudiates the idea that she is somehow straight and she repudiates Paul in the end, too–but should it have been raised in the first place? I don’t know. In the context of the movie, it does rise organically from this particular story and these particular characters. Jules is demonstrably having a mid-life crisis even before Paul shows up, and such people often do stupid things. This is compounded by the fact that some lesbian women actually DO occasionally have sex with men, even once they’re in touch with being lesbian, and this is NOT indicative of some latent heterosexuality (or even bisexuality), so the movie could claim some level of verisimilitude if it wanted. I just wonder if it couldn’t have explored Jules’s crisis in some other way. It might not have, given the film’s plot for Paul: he wants a family and he wants Jules and Nic’s family. This comes to a head when Nic rages at him that it’s HER family and he can bloody well go out and get his own. It’s a terrific moment, and it wouldn’t be possible without Jules’s dalliance with him.

In any event, it’s a lot to think about. Fortunately, the movie grounds all of this in a very closely observed depiction of Nic and Jules’s marriage, the details of which suggest that the movie as it actually plays probably could NOT have been made by a straight filmmaker. The way Jules and Nic behave with each other betrays too much knowledge of lesbian culture, from the therapy-speak they sometimes use to the details of their sex life together. The second funniest moment in the film comes when Nic pulls a big comforter over herself while Jules is goinq down on her: “I’m cold,” she says. “I’m suffocating!” Jules replies. Oh, and there’s the vague disappointment visible when they realize that their children are totally hetero. Mostly, though, it’s a celebration of marriage, and a timely one at that. It suggests that Jules and Nic’s marriage is exactly like anyone else’s marriage, which is to say that it’s like no one else’s marriage at all. Because no two marriages are alike.

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Secular Myths

Categories: (un)popular entertainment

“Cyril, the Archbishop of Alexandria, despised her because of her close friendship with the Roman governor, and because she was a symbol of learning and science, which were largely identified by the early Church with paganism. In great personal danger she continued to teach and publish, until, in the year 415, on her way to work she was set upon by a fanatical mob of Cyril’s parishioners. They dragged her from her chariot, tore off her clothes, and, armed with abalone shells, flayed her flesh from her bones. Her remains were burned, her works obliterated, her name forgotten. Cyril was made a saint.” –Carl Sagan, Cosmos

One of the things I’ve come to love about Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is the sheer effrontery of the way it re-writes the end of World War II. All movies about history are fiction, Tarantino seems to be (truthfully) saying, so let’s wallow in that freedom. Anyone who watches movies for history lessons deserves what they get. Or to quote another film by another filmmaker, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

The Myth of Hypatia–and Carl Sagan relates a myth, not historical fact–is a kind of Rorschach test. Are you a bibliophile? Then this is a horror story. Are you a feminist? Then this is a portrait of the patriarchy at one of its lowest moments. Are you a scientist? Then this is a parable about academic freedom. Are you an atheist? Then this is your worst fears about religion made flesh. What you take from this is in large part what you bring to it. The atheist in me has a few problems with this, because one of the core questions an atheist needs to ask herself is this one: do you care that what you believe is true? As it turns out, this particular atheist does care, so The Myth of Hypatia is a bit of a disappointment to me. No matter how much I may want this story to arm me against the religious and the superstitious, it’s bullshit and I can’t in good conscience use bullshit as ammunition against bullshit.

This disappointment does not extend to Alejandro Amenabar’s recounting of the myth in Agora (2009), however. Because, you know, it’s a movie, and just like Tarantino, Amenabar is rewriting history for his own ends (though he rewrites considerably less than Sagan even as he adds romantic subplots). I don’t have to care if a movie is true. I only care if it’s good theater. Continue reading →

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A Fractured Fairy Tale

Categories: (un)popular entertainment, cis-o-rama, teh tranz

While it doesn’t indulge in the same kind of thematic miserablism of other movies about transgender sex workers, Olaf de Fleur Johannesson’s The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela (2008) still can’t avoid the fact that at least part of its narrative–arguably the dominant part–is constructed from a cisgender man’s preconceptions of who transgender people are. The conceit of the movie is that it’s half documentary and half fiction, mixed together in such a way as to obscure the lines between the real and the fake. The director himself calls this shambolic portmanteau structure a “visiomentary.” You can probably see the flaws in this approach without even seeing the movie, but I’ll elaborate anyway.

The movie begins with its central character, a trans sex worker in Cebu City, The Philippines, speaking directly to the camera and swearing to tell the truth and the whole truth. This is Raquela Rios, essentially playing herself. The filmmakers spend a good deal of time following Rios through her life, which includes interactions with her family, attempts to find employment outside of the sex trade, clubbing with her friends, and generally walking around the city. This is where the film is heavy on the documentary and while it’s letting Raquela speak for herself, the movie is on pretty firm ground. Raquela is bright, funny, optimistic, and gregarious. Were she in different circumstances, she would undoubtedly be a success at whatever she did. The same might be said for her friends, Aubrey and Olivia, who also make their livings as “ladyboy” sex workers. Unfortunately, the filmmakers can’t leave well enough alone. They also start the film with a title card that says, “Raquela is transsexual. A chick with a dick,” and once the movie acquires a narrative, the attitude behind that pronouncement seeps into the whole enterprise. Continue reading →

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Fear and Loathing in my Netflix Queue

Categories: (un)popular entertainment, kyriarchy, let's hear it for the ladies, teh tranz

As a filmmaker (or, perhaps more truthily, an art student who did not receive an F for her sole video project) I feel it is my duty to view as many films depicting trans folk as the doctors will allow me. ‘Tis a quest not without peril. When a visit to the SF LGBT Center brought me face to face with Clair Farley, a subject of Red Without Blue and number three on my list of “people who have inspired me to do make great changes in my life who I hope never to meet in person because I know I’d lose my shit”, spoiler alert: a lot of shit was lost. I stared at the floor, dodged her questions (did I mention I met she was doing my intake for an employment services program? OF COURSE I DIDN’T, UGH SO FUCKING LIKE ME) and when I realized that the chances of me winning that golden ticket that would let me rearrange reality so that instead of giggling uncomfortably to myself I could instead escape to a universe where I was gainfully employed and she and I were bff who played Chu Chu Rocket on the weekends were fairly slim I just made shit up. Dante never specified what the punishment in hell is for people who try to convince their heroes that blogging counts as a form of community volunteering, but I’m willing to guess it involves having something put in your anus that you’d rather not. Oh, and once I was asked to leave a screening of Normal, but it was agreed that if I never stated who I threw my notebook at and why they would keep it off my record and let me squeak by with a written apology.

Dangers be damned, I saw Beautiful Boxer, the biopic about Muay Thai boxer Parinya Charoemphol, or Nong Toom. As a safety precaution, I had Ms. Pacman plugged in just in case I needed emergency escort to my “happy place”. Much to my surprise, I thought it was an amazing film, and my gripes with it were limited and tied entirely with the storytelling and not the portrayal of Parinya (I thought the dream sequences were contextually inappropriate when done outside of her first person narrative, though I must admit they were poetically executed and relevant to the film’s message). So rare do I find films that engage me emotionally while sating my hunger for organically choreographed violence. I feel it served as an illustration of the fallacy behind the notion of transitioning to avoid the struggles and challenges traditionally assigned to men, or as my father put it “acting delicate and weak and girly to avoid having to live up to my responsibilities”. And I thought Kyoko Inoue playing herself was pretty fucking neat. Yeah, that’s all I have to say about it. This isn’t a film review. This is a reaction piece. So yeah, you’re still gonna have to rent it or read the reviews on IMDB if you want to bluff your way through a conversation about it in your little Livejournal group. Sorry.

The film is very clear with presenting and expressing a common criticism levied against Parinya and those behind her career: she was a gimmick and novelty act that mocked the sport of kickboxing and her trans identity was exploited and paraded about for profit. To this I say “eh, that’s one way of looking at it, where I come from we call that the wrong way”.

To suggest that the Thai boxing establishment’s acceptance, support, and promotion of Parinya’s gender expression was somehow more profit-minded than the minds behind Manon Rheaume (the first and only woman to play in the NHL)’s stint with the Tampa Bay Lightning or fuck, let’s just go for broke here, Jackie Robinson playing in the MLB, is to contribute to a the ignorance of the machinations of the kyriarchy. The underdog from a troubled, prejudiced life who’s talent just has to be shared with the masses regardless of their latent bigotry is a noblie lie disguised as a marketing ploy disguised as a human message. The real tragedy is not, I believe, in the tokenization of one’s identity to be part of the majority’s broadway production, but in the refusal by those who have benefitted from your sacrifice to acknowledge the good you may have done for your community. Without the scream queen, there’d be no ass-kicking Whedonverse heroine. Without the Hays Code-era sissy, there’d be no Brokeback Mountain. That’s just how hiearchy works. When we break free from our cage in the kyriarchal circus, they’ll just find someone else to fill our place, and then we, sitting in the audience, will have to decide between shutting the fuck up and eating our kettle corn or bum rushing the stage and burning the tent down.

In a society where hierarchies exist (i.e. all of them) the minority takes on an air of mystique and curiosity. Thus we are forced to ask ourselves, as minorities, whether it is better to be an attraction or risk being unseen by society. The answer will be different for each and every one of us. Parinya played the game, made enough money to afford SRS, is a successful model/actress, and could probably break every bone in the body of any asshole who thinks they’ll “teach this shemale a lesson”. If you could play the system like that and win by that much of a margin, you’d have already picked out your stage name. But you can’t. The minority underdog is the bizarro affirmative action: they meet their quota once and then it’s closed to everyone else. Personally, I prefer my chances against the system as opposed to with it. But fuck, ask me in a year or two if and when Comedy Central is looking for a caustic plus-sized trans woman with no indoor voice. For now, I find it more efficient in the long run to just be happy for her success and hopeful that it will start a trend of acceptance of trans people in professional sports and instead direct my rage to those instances where people are being played by the system. The bearded lady, the conjoined twins, they know they are part of a sideshow. The microcephalic (or “pinhead” for those of you who fear Wikipedia) does not. Try, if you can, to fight and prevent the greater injustice of the two. The famous and successful can take care of themselves.

And they’re giving me the sign to wrap up, but I do want to point out that Parinya Charoemphol is often credited with pulling Thai kickboxing out of its slump and re-establishing its popularity in Thailand.

Me-1 You -0.

Get used to this.

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Rolling the Bones

Categories: (un)popular entertainment

“Ain’t you got no men to do this?”
“No, ma’am, I don’t,”

Movies don’t usually have an overt thesis statement, but this exchange from Debra Granik’s stark indie hit, Winter’s Bone, serves pretty well.  It’s a familiar kind of movie–it’s a hard-boiled detective film–with unfamiliar trappings. We don’t get the mean streets of the city at night. The movie is set in the Ozarks. And we don’t get the cynical, hard-drinking private eye, either. Rather, we get a seventeen-year-old girl who is just trying to keep her family together. We do, however, get most of the plot points of film-noir detective film, but given the other elements of the film, it all seems fresh and new. Certainly, the power dynamics are different when you have a poor teenage girl rather than a hardened detective, but she perseveres with the same stubbornness and moral rectitude of a Philip Marlowe or a Lew Archer.

This film is also a portrait of the wreckage left by late capitalism, envisioned by the film as a stark winter of discontent, possibly as a new dark age where established institutions like law and education have completely failed and where the feral world of drug trafficking has taken their place. Granik and her cinematographer, Michael McDonough, capture all of this in a cold, desaturated style that casts its setting as vaguely post-apocalyptic. This is the world that men have wrought, the film suggests, and the men are absentee landlords, either literally as in the case of our heroine’s missing father, or figuratively as weak, venal characters. Women are left to clean it all up, and frankly, it’s a shit job.

Ree Dolly, played by the a-MAY-zing Jennifer Lawrence, is this film’s version of the private eye, and a more unlikely candidate for the job is hard to imagine. At least Marlow and Archer had contacts and the resources of their clients. Ree has only her own determination. This doesn’t stop the film from throwing her into those brutal situations in which hard-boiled detectives sometimes find themselves. It doesn’t stop the goons in the employ of the film’s bad guys from kicking the shit out of her. In the traditional hard-boiled story, these kinds of scenes are designed to show how tough the detective is, and to knock the detective so far down that it seems that there’s no way back up. It serves the same function here, but the inequality between the opponents throws it into even starker contrast. Ree’s major antagonist is Merab, played with stony resolve by Dale Dickey. In a lot of ways, she’s Ree’s doppelganger, in so far as she’s stubborn and not above getting her hands dirty. She, too, is cleaning up the messes left by her men folk.  It seems oxymoronic to claim Merab as a feminist villain (meaning that she’s not a villain because she’s a feminist, by the way), but here she is. Both characters function as everywomen, as two sides of the same coin.

The auteurist in me looks at this movie and compares it to Granik’s first film, the similarly titled Down to the Bone, in which Vera Farmiga plays a rural housewife and mother struggling with drug addiction. Like that film, Winter’s Bone is bracingly unglamourous. Like that film, it links poverty with drug addiction as inextricably linked. Like that film, it’s about a woman trying to keep her family from getting sucked into the downdraft. Both films find the kind of stark beauty in poverty that one finds in depression era photography. Auteurs in the purest sense tend to make the same movie over and over again. It appears that Granik is doing exactly that, but she’s discovered, like many directors before her, that she can smuggle her thematic concerns to a wider audience by framing things in terms of genre. That’s the main difference between her two films. She links Winter’s Bone to the plot and visual style of a film noir thriller, while she was content to just turn her camera on the characters in Down to the Bone and let them play things out without genre archetypes. Good as Down to the Bone might be (and it IS very good), I think Winter’s Bone is probably stronger for it.  It lets the story set the hook, then it reels the audience in for the rest.

Winter’s Bone should still be in theaters. Down to the Bone is on DVD and is currently available for instant streaming from Netflix.

–Dr. Morbius

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The Multiplexes Giveth…

Categories: (un)popular entertainment, let's hear it for the ladies

“So do we get to watch Steel Magnolias?” That was my long-suffering girlfriend’s response when I told her about this particular writing gig. This is an ongoing joke between us. Every so often, she’ll ask if I suddenly like Steel Magnolias and I’ll tell her that I still don’t like it and she’ll mutter something like “the estrogen isn’t working.” My take on that film is similar to Manhola Dargis’s take on Nora Ephron in an interview she gave to Jezebel earlier this year:

“Sometimes I think women should do what various black and gay audiences have done, which is support women making movies for women. So does that mean I have to go support Nora Ephron? Fuck no. That’s just like, blech.

One of the things that most annoyed me about Steel Magnolias was the Julia Roberts character, who contracts one of those diseases whose main symptom seems to be a tendency for the character to get more beautiful. In film circles, it’s known as Ali McGraw’s Syndrome and dying beautifully is a hallmark of weepies.  Women are never asked to go all Robert De Niro when it comes to looking bad on screen, and it’s particularly egregious here. The only time I can remember actually seeing a major actress get anywhere near what dying from an incurable disease might really be like was in Mike Nichols’s Wit, in which Emma Thompson’s prickly English professor is confronted by the unpleasant facts of the end of her life. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a legitimately great movie and you SHOULD see it, but I’ll never, ever watch it again myself. It looks too much like my mom’s slow death from breast cancer, and I imagine it looks like what my own death might be like at some nebulous time in the future.

Which brings me in a roundabout circle to what’s on my mind today. Continue reading →

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Kate Bornstein ♥’s TOTWK; Or, It’s Hip to be Au Contraire

Categories: (un)popular entertainment, beating them at their own game, bitterness, don't get your panties in a bunch, Humorless Tranny™, i heart oppression, kyriarchy, the transsexual empire strikes back, transphobia: now in blog format

Hey, ducks! I’ve been talking quite a bit of late about Ticked Off No-I-Won’t-Say-Its With Knives. You know, because of the outrage, and because I went to the protest. What ho!

Now, the general consensus here in Transland (Population: More than you think) is that this thing is outrageous, especially the trailer (which Luna has now modified to take out the references to recently brutally murdered transfolk. Um, thanks–I’m glad to know it took a massive outcry for you to display basic humanity! No, kudos to you, sir!) But that doesn’t mean that there’s massive agreement on the film. Some people actually are defending it! Trans people! Trans people who were not employed in it as actors!

Take, for example, Tom Leger’s post over at Trans Group Blog:

Continue reading →

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