Let the record state: I love subcultures. Big ones, small ones, ones as big as your head. I love the simultaneous exclusivity and community-building of flashily displayed signifiers, be they dyed hair, Ed Hardy T-shirts, Timberland boots, or LOLspeak. My favorite thing about spending time in large, open areas through which herds of people migrate -- airports, train stations, mall food courts -- is watching the unspoken interaction of all these signifiers, the chaotic jostling of colors and brands. I especially love the zeal showcased by the younger members of the species, whose entire bodies, in spite of an insistent outward display of boredom, act like quivering antennae, submitting a dozen urgent signals to everyone in range: Hello, world. I may look young, but I'm actually really into The Clash, and also I like old-school gaming systems, but not ironically, unlike this SpongeBob T-shirt, which is sort of ironic, but if you look closely, you'll see there's actually a delicate vein of innocent, childlike love, too, which you'll find I also exhibit in relationships, and you may find charming if you're the Prince Charming type. But as evidenced by this studded belt, I'm obviously too smart to fall for the Disney princess cliche, because I'm actually very mature for my age. Even though it has very little to do with what I'm working on for my PhD, my favorite work done in an academic setting has been stuff on subcultures, and despite feeling somewhat dated, the Bibles of my inner bibliography include such sine qua nons as Dick Hebdige and Greil Marcus (unabashed shill for Lipstick Traces, the wackiest, most engrossing pseudo-academic, quasi-Marxist, mostly-memoiristic cultural study ever published by Harvard University Press).
...which is probably why I have a love/hate relationship when it comes to diaspora communities; aka, the reified remains of old foreign subcultures.
I've never seen it cohesively stated, but I'm almost certain that someone has already made the comparison between marginal ethnic communities and contemporary subcultures. The similarities are too seductive: both arise as a product of a too-broad and thus somewhat alienating dominant culture. For ethnic communities, it's the big multiethnic empires of the past two centuries (which is why Bavarians, with their Weißwurst and lederhosen, seem so much more authentically German than the cosmopolitan Berliners, giving us two German archetypes in the American popular consciousness -- quaint, robust lederhosen-clad peasants and soulless Bauhaus urbanites in black turtle-necks), and for subcultures, it's the global juggernaut of bourgeois conformity and capitalist mass culture. Also, both are created by a system of signifiers that turn the dominant hierarchies on their heads -- for example, ethnic communities subvert the official state religion by injecting it with old pagan practices, and subcultures revel in taking ordinary objects (sneakers, safety pins) and turning them into signs of rebellion. And, finally, both are selectively celebrated and repressed, according to the political climate of the day. Sometimes, it's in the dominant culture's favor to trot out the subculture as a symbol of diversity and freedom, and other times the subculture represents too much of a challenge to the universalizing rhetoric of the dominant culture and needs to be stamped out. Sometimes, the time-table for these cultural mood swings is incredibly narrow: one day, Stalin is singing the praises of the diverse Soviet nationalities, and the next, it's terror and the Gulag for Jews, Gypsies, and Ukrainians. Similarly, one day the Putin administration is heaping scorn on the cultural degeneracy of the Western-influenced Russian rap phenomenon, and the next day, this:
So, okay, the affinities are legion, but what complicates the matter is when ethnic communities emigrate and form diaspora communities, which are a strange hybrid of the ethnic and cultural categories. Take, for instance, this New York Times article on Veselka, the East Village Ukrainian diner. There are repeated mentions of hippies and beatniks who used to frequent the place in the 60s -- ostensibly, for the Counterculture Grand Central location and good, cheap food. But, obviously, I think there's more to it than that. I think subcultures naturally gravitate to ethnic joints because their signifying systems are extremely compatible. Moreover, these days, both the New York subcultures and Veselka have gone mainstream; the place was featured in the abysmal Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, for god's sake. Age-old story: something a few people love becomes something marketed to the masses, and all of a sudden you get Michael Cera selling you a Hollywood hipster fairy-tale.
Which brings me to my last point about the similarities between ethnic and contemporary subcultures: an uncomfortable dynamic of authenticity and artifice. Contemporary subcultures, as constantly evolving, living-breathing things, tend to cycle through signifiers at a dizzying rate. While it's fun to trace their trajectories (the reggae of the British slums moving to high-class London art students moving to American rock bands moving to Bob Marley posters on 1 out of 3 college students' walls), it's hard to ignore the artifice behind the whole subcultural enterprise. For instance, there may be some small percentage of early adopters or true aficionados who could argue that reggae was their music, or that punk was their style, but for the majority of the members of these subcultures, it was theft, pure and simple. Of course, that's part of the fun -- would dyeing your hair electric red and pretending to be an alien be so captivating if it weren't for the underlying acknowledgment of ridiculousness, sham, performance? But artifice and ethnic community don't mesh quite so well. Part of the marginalized ethnic project is, again, to continually insist on the authenticity of its cultural experience, in contrast to the artifice of the dominant culture. In diaspora communities, this insistence on authenticity continues to play out -- except the dominant culture is now American mass culture, with the ethnic acting as the marker of authenticity against the conformity of corporate capitalism. See: Gogol Bordello.
As someone with a toe in both worlds, I find the overlap equal parts fun and disturbing. Fun because, hey, my personality was forged in ethnic kitsch, and there will always be some part of me that gets off on foreignness as elite, exclusive subculture. But also disturbing, because this just hammers home how tendentious culture really is, and how insignificant ethnicity really is, except in self-deluding fantasy. And these days, I'm more comfortable with that level of self-delusion in the form of an American teenager wearing a Ramones T-shirt, rather than a folk costume, if for no other reason than the disposability and mutability of the former as compared to the latter. But maybe that's just the impending citizenship test talking.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Monday, January 4, 2010
Fuck the police: three ways
In Postwar (a breathtakingly thorough overview of European history since WWII), Tony Judt makes an interesting claim about the progression of popular culture in the 60s and 70s. According to Judt, immediately following the violent, radicalized, leftist youth movements of 1969 -- the French student movements, American civil rights, second-wave feminism, various Marxist and pseudo-Marxist organizations -- came the much more solipsistic, hedonistic wave of the Sexual Revolution. Judt is fairly skeptical of the purity of the former trend, but the latter is clearly even more of a problem in his eyes, representing as it does the full-on self-indulgence and navel-gazing of the adolescent Baby Boomer.
While I was reading Postwar over the summer, "Mrs. Officer," that Lil Wayne song, was on heavy rotation on the radio. Arguably the best lyric in that song is, of course: "And all she want me to do is fuck the police." (Ha ha because it's about wanting to have sex with a female police officer, get it?) So, with Judt in mind, I wonder if it's not so outlandish to say that radicalism is generally replaced by a decadent period of sex and solipsism. When NWA first sang "fuck the police," it was all about violent machismo mixed with political subtext, heavily in line with the aesthetic principle of a Weather Underground* or Black Panthers-style organization, but already declawed enough to venture into the mainstream. Today, when Lil Wayne sings his version of "fuck the police," it's self-conscious, childishly naughty, and totally harmless -- on par with the saccharine sex of early disco or the stage antics of Sir Elton John.
When I first thought of this brilliant cultural analogy, I saw the Lil Wayne "fuck the police" moment in Judt's terms: a degenerate version of the slightly (only slightly) more "pure" NWA moment. But when I was reminded of it by Ryan over brunch today, his argument for the Lil Wayne version really stuck. Ryan was much more willing to give self-indulgence the benefit of the doubt, and I can see his point about it being more honest with respect to the whole enterprise of pop music in general. By the time NWA came out with that song, rap was already appearing on MTV, marketed toward a suburban, white audience, and thriving on the manufactured controversy. Lil Wayne's whole "Young Money" project, in contrast, is unapologetic in its anti-topicality. From start to finish, it's pure, childish fantasy -- youth culture at its most honest and, arguable, at its best.
Which brings me to "Fuck the Police" mark 3: the 2001 song by J Dilla. So, a new iteration of the cycle through a return to radical, politically-conscious machismo? The circle of life, it moves us all?
*Ironically, but further bolstering my rap dichotomy, the "Weathermen" moniker is being used today by a contemporary rap group recycling the NWA-like sound and ideology.
While I was reading Postwar over the summer, "Mrs. Officer," that Lil Wayne song, was on heavy rotation on the radio. Arguably the best lyric in that song is, of course: "And all she want me to do is fuck the police." (Ha ha because it's about wanting to have sex with a female police officer, get it?) So, with Judt in mind, I wonder if it's not so outlandish to say that radicalism is generally replaced by a decadent period of sex and solipsism. When NWA first sang "fuck the police," it was all about violent machismo mixed with political subtext, heavily in line with the aesthetic principle of a Weather Underground* or Black Panthers-style organization, but already declawed enough to venture into the mainstream. Today, when Lil Wayne sings his version of "fuck the police," it's self-conscious, childishly naughty, and totally harmless -- on par with the saccharine sex of early disco or the stage antics of Sir Elton John.
When I first thought of this brilliant cultural analogy, I saw the Lil Wayne "fuck the police" moment in Judt's terms: a degenerate version of the slightly (only slightly) more "pure" NWA moment. But when I was reminded of it by Ryan over brunch today, his argument for the Lil Wayne version really stuck. Ryan was much more willing to give self-indulgence the benefit of the doubt, and I can see his point about it being more honest with respect to the whole enterprise of pop music in general. By the time NWA came out with that song, rap was already appearing on MTV, marketed toward a suburban, white audience, and thriving on the manufactured controversy. Lil Wayne's whole "Young Money" project, in contrast, is unapologetic in its anti-topicality. From start to finish, it's pure, childish fantasy -- youth culture at its most honest and, arguable, at its best.
Which brings me to "Fuck the Police" mark 3: the 2001 song by J Dilla. So, a new iteration of the cycle through a return to radical, politically-conscious machismo? The circle of life, it moves us all?
*Ironically, but further bolstering my rap dichotomy, the "Weathermen" moniker is being used today by a contemporary rap group recycling the NWA-like sound and ideology.
Saturday, January 2, 2010
Edumacation
Kids want "practical" college majors; smart people collectively roll eyes.
Disclaimer: I'm coming at this from an elite Ivy League angle. In theory, I can see how more trade-school-type majors might actually be great for kids who aren't shooting for upper corporate management or presidential candidacy. In theory. In practice, I'm pretty sure "practical" majors at state universities will become the next decade's "Computer Science" (too broad, totally useless) or "Animal Husbandry" (too specialized, totally useless), and will just end up swindling and short-changing an underqualified, overeager, superfluous workforce.
I hear this kind of stuff coming from my students all the time -- they're all experts on the national rankings of every major and the star professors of every field, rattling off the pros and cons ("Econ will eat your soul, but you'll be rich," "nobody in their right mind majors in Art," "the only good thing about VES is free pizza") like talking heads on cable news networks. I figured this was just an Ivy thing, but I guess there's also a generational difference at work. When I went to college, I had absolutely no clue what rankings were. I was more interested in the New Orleans music scene, Mardi Gras, and, as a distant third, less-commonly taught languages. It also never entered into my head to plan a major that fed into a career. I took classes because I thought they were interesting, challenging, or both. Not to say this attitude toward higher learning was the norm or that it's actually ideal; it presupposes a certain personality type -- absent-minded professor, let's say -- that works for naturally grad-school-minded individuals, not ambitious go-getters who keep the world functioning. But it still dampens my spirits every time I hear a student with mind-blowing writing skills and an impeccable aesthetic eye express doubt in a Humanities major, because it's not highly ranked and won't set him/her on a career conveyor belt like neuro-bio-econo-whatever. In my darker moments, I wonder what's the point of teasing these kids with poetry or Russian novels, if it's all just a distraction from problem sets and lab reports?
The biggest problem with the "practical" undergrad major at a top-ten school, though, is that it doesn't actually teach anything. A class with 300 students, four TFs, and one dazzling star professor has all the heuristic sophistication of a feeding tube. Information goes in, and the same information, hastily chewed and poorly digested, churns right back out. But what use is information these days? Anyone can be a temporary expert in anything, and anyone can write (or assemble, or buy) a paper on any popular subject. On the surface, everyone wins: the star professor promotes his/her new book, and the students all get As (or, at the very least, B-, the "gentleman's F" of the Ivy Leagues). In reality, though, these kids increasingly think they're experts in their field and expect to be treated and paid accordingly, when they've just barely scraped the scummy surface of reality with one baby-pink toenail.
In a class with ten students on a subject that isn't "practical" and popular, the game totally changes. Instead of assembling a jigsaw puzzle of jargon, they're suddenly expected to think, rethink, and, in the process, generate the themes of the course on their own -- something that many students coming from conveyor-belt fields are totally incapable of doing. Not to rehash the somewhat tired arguments of this article by William Deresiewicz, but there's definitely a tendency toward groupthink, playing it safe, not rocking the boat at major universities, and given the radical, idealistic history of the American institution of higher learning, it's dispiriting to see the Polo-wearing contingent confidently taking over. I mean, they've been there all along, but at least they knew about Machiavelli, Marx, and Matisse along with marketing.
Disclaimer: I'm coming at this from an elite Ivy League angle. In theory, I can see how more trade-school-type majors might actually be great for kids who aren't shooting for upper corporate management or presidential candidacy. In theory. In practice, I'm pretty sure "practical" majors at state universities will become the next decade's "Computer Science" (too broad, totally useless) or "Animal Husbandry" (too specialized, totally useless), and will just end up swindling and short-changing an underqualified, overeager, superfluous workforce.
I hear this kind of stuff coming from my students all the time -- they're all experts on the national rankings of every major and the star professors of every field, rattling off the pros and cons ("Econ will eat your soul, but you'll be rich," "nobody in their right mind majors in Art," "the only good thing about VES is free pizza") like talking heads on cable news networks. I figured this was just an Ivy thing, but I guess there's also a generational difference at work. When I went to college, I had absolutely no clue what rankings were. I was more interested in the New Orleans music scene, Mardi Gras, and, as a distant third, less-commonly taught languages. It also never entered into my head to plan a major that fed into a career. I took classes because I thought they were interesting, challenging, or both. Not to say this attitude toward higher learning was the norm or that it's actually ideal; it presupposes a certain personality type -- absent-minded professor, let's say -- that works for naturally grad-school-minded individuals, not ambitious go-getters who keep the world functioning. But it still dampens my spirits every time I hear a student with mind-blowing writing skills and an impeccable aesthetic eye express doubt in a Humanities major, because it's not highly ranked and won't set him/her on a career conveyor belt like neuro-bio-econo-whatever. In my darker moments, I wonder what's the point of teasing these kids with poetry or Russian novels, if it's all just a distraction from problem sets and lab reports?
The biggest problem with the "practical" undergrad major at a top-ten school, though, is that it doesn't actually teach anything. A class with 300 students, four TFs, and one dazzling star professor has all the heuristic sophistication of a feeding tube. Information goes in, and the same information, hastily chewed and poorly digested, churns right back out. But what use is information these days? Anyone can be a temporary expert in anything, and anyone can write (or assemble, or buy) a paper on any popular subject. On the surface, everyone wins: the star professor promotes his/her new book, and the students all get As (or, at the very least, B-, the "gentleman's F" of the Ivy Leagues). In reality, though, these kids increasingly think they're experts in their field and expect to be treated and paid accordingly, when they've just barely scraped the scummy surface of reality with one baby-pink toenail.
In a class with ten students on a subject that isn't "practical" and popular, the game totally changes. Instead of assembling a jigsaw puzzle of jargon, they're suddenly expected to think, rethink, and, in the process, generate the themes of the course on their own -- something that many students coming from conveyor-belt fields are totally incapable of doing. Not to rehash the somewhat tired arguments of this article by William Deresiewicz, but there's definitely a tendency toward groupthink, playing it safe, not rocking the boat at major universities, and given the radical, idealistic history of the American institution of higher learning, it's dispiriting to see the Polo-wearing contingent confidently taking over. I mean, they've been there all along, but at least they knew about Machiavelli, Marx, and Matisse along with marketing.
Friday, January 1, 2010
On anti-intellectualism
I have this problem. I think of it as my Savonarola side, named for the fifteenth-century monk who called for the bonfire of the Renaissance vanities and made famous the phrase "Vanitas vanitatum," which I kind of want tattooed somewhere on my body (Irony Win). The Savonarola side of me often kicks in late at night, after I've had a few drinks and have managed to extract myself, whether physically or mentally, from whatever social entanglement has come my way -- dinner with friends, rollicking house party, or even quiet evening alone with the husband. Suddenly, an internal switch flips, and all I can think is how incredibly repetitive and futile are all the conversations that human beings tend to take up: politics, religion, art, life. Everything becomes a tasteless gray mush of words, chewed and rechewed till stripped of all vital juices. And this ruminant cud gets passed from one mouth to the next with such revoltingly gleeful self-importance that I just want to drop out of the human project entirely, go live in a cave or a newspaper lined trash-bag cocoon somewhere far from the madness. I know how trite and childish it sounds, but, unfortunately, I also know some very un-trite and decidedly un-childish folks who had the same idea. Diogenes, among others.
The funny thing is, my religion-obsessed father has expressed an eerily similar sentiment. During a drunken rant at last summer's family gathering, he said he was glad to know there were acetic monks living in caves somewhere, because their piety was probably keeping the world from going straight to apocalyptic hell. When pressed on the matter ("If you like them so much, why don't you become one?"), he said he wished he could, but was just too weak -- read: too enmeshed in the meager pleasures of the bourgeois lifestyle, the regular paycheck and modest house and nuclear family. Well, minus the fundamentalist religious streak, I tend to feel the same way. If I had an ounce more testicular courage, I'd give the finger to my secure career path and go herd sheep in Argentina, because, at heart, I don't have much more faith in the purity of the organized intellectual pursuit than I do in corporate law or investment banking. Unfortunately, the play-it-safe bourgeois in me always seems to win, and it's only in dark moments of self-flagellation that I let Savonarola come out and put a match to my personal stacks of crepe and tissue tchotchkes, the pretty intellectual idols I've accumulated and used to decorate my inner chambers.
It's not that I hate intellectual endeavors, or the people who pursue them. I have massive respect for those few brave souls who manage to combine intellectual proclivities with an equally strong capacity for enthusiasm and love toward their arbitrary field of choice. Those are, hands down, my favorite kind of people. The problem is, in spite of everything, I've never felt like one of them. I can't quite get myself to see the forest for the trees, and the one big tree of knowledge is that we're all going to fucking turn to worm food one fine day, so why even bother. Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas.
In other news, Happy New Year!
The funny thing is, my religion-obsessed father has expressed an eerily similar sentiment. During a drunken rant at last summer's family gathering, he said he was glad to know there were acetic monks living in caves somewhere, because their piety was probably keeping the world from going straight to apocalyptic hell. When pressed on the matter ("If you like them so much, why don't you become one?"), he said he wished he could, but was just too weak -- read: too enmeshed in the meager pleasures of the bourgeois lifestyle, the regular paycheck and modest house and nuclear family. Well, minus the fundamentalist religious streak, I tend to feel the same way. If I had an ounce more testicular courage, I'd give the finger to my secure career path and go herd sheep in Argentina, because, at heart, I don't have much more faith in the purity of the organized intellectual pursuit than I do in corporate law or investment banking. Unfortunately, the play-it-safe bourgeois in me always seems to win, and it's only in dark moments of self-flagellation that I let Savonarola come out and put a match to my personal stacks of crepe and tissue tchotchkes, the pretty intellectual idols I've accumulated and used to decorate my inner chambers.
It's not that I hate intellectual endeavors, or the people who pursue them. I have massive respect for those few brave souls who manage to combine intellectual proclivities with an equally strong capacity for enthusiasm and love toward their arbitrary field of choice. Those are, hands down, my favorite kind of people. The problem is, in spite of everything, I've never felt like one of them. I can't quite get myself to see the forest for the trees, and the one big tree of knowledge is that we're all going to fucking turn to worm food one fine day, so why even bother. Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas.
In other news, Happy New Year!
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Triumph of the shill
My first, visceral reaction to watching Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds was: this is awful. My second, more intellectualized but still fairly visceral reaction was: This is The Marriage of Maria Braun without any of the psychological subtlety. Tarantino, never one to hide his influences, steals with gusto from the visual and cinematographic aspects of Fassbinder -- he, too, features a pretty, predatory blond protagonist (Shoshanna) fond of indulging in spectacular acts of cruelty, wearing red, and taking a black lover for scandalous social effect (sadly, it still feels "scandalous" to include an interracial relationship in a major motion picture, simply by virtue of the fact that, outside of Tarantino films, it never happens). Exhibit A:
Maria Braun
Shoshanna Dreyfus
This much of Tarantino's borrowing is fairly obvious. What's less obvious to me is why he chooses to take this particular character from German postwar cinema and refashion her in his favorite geeky comic-book-nerd revenge fantasy role. I mean, it's clear why he needed the strong female lead. As a story, the whole "Basterds" shtick is the epitome of one-dimensional, something even the one-dimensional story king himself could never pull off. It's one thing to pitch "band of Nazi-killing Jews who win the war!!" to a well-lubricated Hollywood party crowd, and another thing entirely to translate this into a film that doesn't come off as grossly distasteful and/or totally ridiculous. True story: I once read a children's book about a little American girl who hears about all the terrible things happening in Germany during World War Two, flies to Berlin, and shares a sandwich with Hitler on a park bench, thereby convincing him that he should stop being mean to the Jews. I'm pretty sure Q.T. read this book, too.
So, obviously, to avoid the Scylla and Charybdis of indecency and infantilism, there needed to be a truly human face in this film, a likable, sympathetic face -- and not zany character-actor/incomprehensible accented Brad Pitt or "The Bear Jew." But why Maria Braun, an archetype of ruthless femininity and an allegory for the ambivalent nature of German industriousness? To me, there are two possible reasons. First, ruthless femininity is clearly what gets Tarantino off -- and not just the traditional plucky resolve of the Hollywood "tough girl," but the downright sexualized sadism of a Shoshanna or a Beatrix Kiddo. In the strongly polarized-by-gender world of the film, not all revenge fantasies are created equal. The men indulge in more traditional skirmishes and espionage, while the women (both Shoshanna and Bridget von Hammersmark) use their bodies to penetrate into the heart of the enemy lines and destroy them from within. What Tarantino seems to have missed from Fassbinder, though, is that the body is not like a gun or a sword; it tends to carry the imprint of violence on itself much more corrosively. Maria Braun is brought down by the very same venomous hatred that propels her throughout the film. Over the course of Fassbinder's film, she transforms from an admirably courageous survivor to a soulless monster, willing to devour or destroy everything in her path. Of course, for Shoshanna, this is moot -- she goes down in a convenient blaze of glory, probably because Tarantino was uninterested in exploring the more complex dimensions of his own project. And therein lies the trouble with revenge fantasies, and especially historically motivated ones. What, in the end, distinguishes the gleeful killing spree of The Basterds' death-squad from that of the Nazis? Where does one draw the line between romanticized freedom fighter and guerrilla insurgent? Between fantasized/sexual and real, historical violence? In the opening scene of the film, we are shown the devious methods by which a Nazi commander finds and machine-guns a group of Jews hiding in a French farm house -- after watching this gut-wrenchingly real slaughter, it's impossible not to see the stylized slaughter of the Nazis at the hands of the fictional Basterds as a chilling reminder of how actually capable we are to commit unspeakable acts against fellow human beings, and how that's not necessarily something that needs to be cheered for.
And, speaking of history, I think this explains the second connection between Maria Braun and Shoshanna -- the national allegory. In one climactic scene, Shoshanna is shown painting streaks of red on her cheeks, which highlights both The Basterds' self-proclaimed "Apache" fighting tactics and the brief mention of Karl May, the German writer of tremendously popular schlocky novels set in the Wild West. Contrasting this with the Socialist Realism representation of nationality in the film-within-a-film, Nation's Pride, Tarantino makes an interesting analogy between the two kinds of national imagining -- the official political dimension, which emphasizes heroicism, and the unofficial, popular dimension, which revels in rooting for the scrappy underdog. In The Marriage of Maria Braun, the former version of the nation is obviously suspect from the start, with all the heroic men in society reduced to cripples or ghosts. But the latter version, the one Tarantino suggests is so quintessentially American (or, more precisely, Hollywood, which for Q.T. is pretty much the same thing), is shown to be just as potentially damaging and false. Maria is the scrappy underdog, but there's no way a viewer can call her ruthless social climbing a good or heroic thing, not even in the anti-hero sense. In fact, what Maria shows is the dark underbelly of the German national myth -- the fabled ability of the German people to work with efficiency and zeal to achieve a goal, be it the rebuilding of a nation after catastrophic war losses, or the eradication of an entire ethnic minority in the name of "progress."
Unfortunately, instead of deconstructing his own national myth with the same level of sophistication, Tarantino blunders right into the most egregiously distasteful stereotype of national self-imagining, the very stuff that Fox News is made of: the great American savior complex. Instead of going beyond the hackneyed cowboy aesthetic of a Karl May, Tarantino celebrates it with the same blaring fanfare that led George Bush to hang that unfortunate "Mission Accomplished" poster -- another act of imagined national triumph, equally flawed and, in the end, downright laughable.
Maria Braun
Shoshanna Dreyfus
This much of Tarantino's borrowing is fairly obvious. What's less obvious to me is why he chooses to take this particular character from German postwar cinema and refashion her in his favorite geeky comic-book-nerd revenge fantasy role. I mean, it's clear why he needed the strong female lead. As a story, the whole "Basterds" shtick is the epitome of one-dimensional, something even the one-dimensional story king himself could never pull off. It's one thing to pitch "band of Nazi-killing Jews who win the war!!" to a well-lubricated Hollywood party crowd, and another thing entirely to translate this into a film that doesn't come off as grossly distasteful and/or totally ridiculous. True story: I once read a children's book about a little American girl who hears about all the terrible things happening in Germany during World War Two, flies to Berlin, and shares a sandwich with Hitler on a park bench, thereby convincing him that he should stop being mean to the Jews. I'm pretty sure Q.T. read this book, too.
So, obviously, to avoid the Scylla and Charybdis of indecency and infantilism, there needed to be a truly human face in this film, a likable, sympathetic face -- and not zany character-actor/incomprehensible accented Brad Pitt or "The Bear Jew." But why Maria Braun, an archetype of ruthless femininity and an allegory for the ambivalent nature of German industriousness? To me, there are two possible reasons. First, ruthless femininity is clearly what gets Tarantino off -- and not just the traditional plucky resolve of the Hollywood "tough girl," but the downright sexualized sadism of a Shoshanna or a Beatrix Kiddo. In the strongly polarized-by-gender world of the film, not all revenge fantasies are created equal. The men indulge in more traditional skirmishes and espionage, while the women (both Shoshanna and Bridget von Hammersmark) use their bodies to penetrate into the heart of the enemy lines and destroy them from within. What Tarantino seems to have missed from Fassbinder, though, is that the body is not like a gun or a sword; it tends to carry the imprint of violence on itself much more corrosively. Maria Braun is brought down by the very same venomous hatred that propels her throughout the film. Over the course of Fassbinder's film, she transforms from an admirably courageous survivor to a soulless monster, willing to devour or destroy everything in her path. Of course, for Shoshanna, this is moot -- she goes down in a convenient blaze of glory, probably because Tarantino was uninterested in exploring the more complex dimensions of his own project. And therein lies the trouble with revenge fantasies, and especially historically motivated ones. What, in the end, distinguishes the gleeful killing spree of The Basterds' death-squad from that of the Nazis? Where does one draw the line between romanticized freedom fighter and guerrilla insurgent? Between fantasized/sexual and real, historical violence? In the opening scene of the film, we are shown the devious methods by which a Nazi commander finds and machine-guns a group of Jews hiding in a French farm house -- after watching this gut-wrenchingly real slaughter, it's impossible not to see the stylized slaughter of the Nazis at the hands of the fictional Basterds as a chilling reminder of how actually capable we are to commit unspeakable acts against fellow human beings, and how that's not necessarily something that needs to be cheered for.
And, speaking of history, I think this explains the second connection between Maria Braun and Shoshanna -- the national allegory. In one climactic scene, Shoshanna is shown painting streaks of red on her cheeks, which highlights both The Basterds' self-proclaimed "Apache" fighting tactics and the brief mention of Karl May, the German writer of tremendously popular schlocky novels set in the Wild West. Contrasting this with the Socialist Realism representation of nationality in the film-within-a-film, Nation's Pride, Tarantino makes an interesting analogy between the two kinds of national imagining -- the official political dimension, which emphasizes heroicism, and the unofficial, popular dimension, which revels in rooting for the scrappy underdog. In The Marriage of Maria Braun, the former version of the nation is obviously suspect from the start, with all the heroic men in society reduced to cripples or ghosts. But the latter version, the one Tarantino suggests is so quintessentially American (or, more precisely, Hollywood, which for Q.T. is pretty much the same thing), is shown to be just as potentially damaging and false. Maria is the scrappy underdog, but there's no way a viewer can call her ruthless social climbing a good or heroic thing, not even in the anti-hero sense. In fact, what Maria shows is the dark underbelly of the German national myth -- the fabled ability of the German people to work with efficiency and zeal to achieve a goal, be it the rebuilding of a nation after catastrophic war losses, or the eradication of an entire ethnic minority in the name of "progress."
Unfortunately, instead of deconstructing his own national myth with the same level of sophistication, Tarantino blunders right into the most egregiously distasteful stereotype of national self-imagining, the very stuff that Fox News is made of: the great American savior complex. Instead of going beyond the hackneyed cowboy aesthetic of a Karl May, Tarantino celebrates it with the same blaring fanfare that led George Bush to hang that unfortunate "Mission Accomplished" poster -- another act of imagined national triumph, equally flawed and, in the end, downright laughable.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Sinema
Now that it's officially winter break, I've dusted off my painfully neglected Netflix account and restarted my love affair with foreign cinema. It's on!
The other night, I ate gruyere on ciabatta baguette as I watched this:
First of all, can I just say that almost everything I see written about this movie is dead wrong? Suzanne, a fifteen-year-old Parisian who embarks on a sexual rampage... Um, did we watch the same movie? Sexual rampage? Suzanne, the main character, has two or three on-camera relationships (no sex shown) with boys, meant to imply that she's a goddamn teenager with a head full of hormones and a troubled relationship with monogamy. She's hardly banging hobos for kicks, y'all. The Netflix blurb is even worse, and makes it sound like a movie about child abuse. Again, what? Of all the themes to focus on -- growing up, being sexually precocious, dealing with your parents' divorce, dealing with puberty -- who decides that the reason the sweet little girl suddenly becomes a turboslut is because she gets smacked by her dad?
At any rate, French cinema is kind of ridiculous. All the reviewers also laud this film as being super edgy and original ("Pialat is the French Cassavetes!"), except it's sort of a self-conscious retelling of 200 Blows and every Francois Sagan novel ever (especially Bonjour Tristesse). Also, the Freudianism is overwhelming and painfully heavy-handed ("Ha ha ha, when he says 'moment,' it sounds just like 'mommy!'"). Everyone is in love with Suzanne -- her dad, her brother, her brother's friends -- but Suzanne only really loves her dad, who's selectively protective and ultimately a bombastic, self-important turd (played by the director, of course, ho hum). Her mom is the menopausal, hysterical wicked witch of the west. I'd be more upset by this schematic treatment of familial relationships (again, all the reviews I've read are really into the "painfully real" family dynamics) -- except this is essentially exactly how my aunt's family functioned. She married young, had two adorable blond daughters, had a terrible relationship with her husband, went totally hysterical nutzoid, husband left for another woman, daughters who were already painfully damaged by years of bad family mojo proceeded to go off the deep end. I've seen that exact look of hollow trauma in their faces, and I can't help link their desperate and predatory relationships with men to the missing father figure in their lives. So, I spent the entire movie-watching experience wavering between "this is stupid, no family really works like this" and "well, shit, maybe Pialat really is onto something." I'm still trying to work that out.
Anyway! Do you know Sandrine Bonnaire?
Because you should. She's sort of the Lindsay Lohan of the 80s French cinema scene, except instead of starring in some terrible stripper movie and then dipping back down into the cocaine spiral as her "comeback," Bonnaire did one of the best, most gut-wrenching, teeth-gnashing movies of all time:
She's fantastic in both, of course, but I love her in this film. Her honest, sensual, but slightly haunted face works so well as a canvas for all those familiar teenage-girl emotions to which we of the fairer sex can, I'm sure, all relate -- wanting sex, feeling dirty for wanting sex, wanting sex even more for feeling dirty for wanting sex... At one point, the line "I'm not 15 anymore" is uttered, and it just hits home. So. Hard. God, that incredible dilation of time between the ages of 13 and 21, when a year can seem like an eternity of hard-fought experience. Which, I guess, is ultimately the biggest problem with this film, because in true French fashion, it tries to allegorize this localized temporal experience in a really dumb way. Pialat makes "I'm bored, I'm fed up, I want to kill myself" sound like an existential statement, rather than the typically tempestuous psyche of a prematurely jaded teenager. But for those of us who have been there, it's both a delicious vindication (I wasn't the only teenage turboslut!) and a confrontation with the little monster we once were (only once...?). If only for that (and Sandrine Bonnaire!), definitely worth a watch.
The other night, I ate gruyere on ciabatta baguette as I watched this:
First of all, can I just say that almost everything I see written about this movie is dead wrong? Suzanne, a fifteen-year-old Parisian who embarks on a sexual rampage... Um, did we watch the same movie? Sexual rampage? Suzanne, the main character, has two or three on-camera relationships (no sex shown) with boys, meant to imply that she's a goddamn teenager with a head full of hormones and a troubled relationship with monogamy. She's hardly banging hobos for kicks, y'all. The Netflix blurb is even worse, and makes it sound like a movie about child abuse. Again, what? Of all the themes to focus on -- growing up, being sexually precocious, dealing with your parents' divorce, dealing with puberty -- who decides that the reason the sweet little girl suddenly becomes a turboslut is because she gets smacked by her dad?
At any rate, French cinema is kind of ridiculous. All the reviewers also laud this film as being super edgy and original ("Pialat is the French Cassavetes!"), except it's sort of a self-conscious retelling of 200 Blows and every Francois Sagan novel ever (especially Bonjour Tristesse). Also, the Freudianism is overwhelming and painfully heavy-handed ("Ha ha ha, when he says 'moment,' it sounds just like 'mommy!'"). Everyone is in love with Suzanne -- her dad, her brother, her brother's friends -- but Suzanne only really loves her dad, who's selectively protective and ultimately a bombastic, self-important turd (played by the director, of course, ho hum). Her mom is the menopausal, hysterical wicked witch of the west. I'd be more upset by this schematic treatment of familial relationships (again, all the reviews I've read are really into the "painfully real" family dynamics) -- except this is essentially exactly how my aunt's family functioned. She married young, had two adorable blond daughters, had a terrible relationship with her husband, went totally hysterical nutzoid, husband left for another woman, daughters who were already painfully damaged by years of bad family mojo proceeded to go off the deep end. I've seen that exact look of hollow trauma in their faces, and I can't help link their desperate and predatory relationships with men to the missing father figure in their lives. So, I spent the entire movie-watching experience wavering between "this is stupid, no family really works like this" and "well, shit, maybe Pialat really is onto something." I'm still trying to work that out.
Anyway! Do you know Sandrine Bonnaire?
Because you should. She's sort of the Lindsay Lohan of the 80s French cinema scene, except instead of starring in some terrible stripper movie and then dipping back down into the cocaine spiral as her "comeback," Bonnaire did one of the best, most gut-wrenching, teeth-gnashing movies of all time:
She's fantastic in both, of course, but I love her in this film. Her honest, sensual, but slightly haunted face works so well as a canvas for all those familiar teenage-girl emotions to which we of the fairer sex can, I'm sure, all relate -- wanting sex, feeling dirty for wanting sex, wanting sex even more for feeling dirty for wanting sex... At one point, the line "I'm not 15 anymore" is uttered, and it just hits home. So. Hard. God, that incredible dilation of time between the ages of 13 and 21, when a year can seem like an eternity of hard-fought experience. Which, I guess, is ultimately the biggest problem with this film, because in true French fashion, it tries to allegorize this localized temporal experience in a really dumb way. Pialat makes "I'm bored, I'm fed up, I want to kill myself" sound like an existential statement, rather than the typically tempestuous psyche of a prematurely jaded teenager. But for those of us who have been there, it's both a delicious vindication (I wasn't the only teenage turboslut!) and a confrontation with the little monster we once were (only once...?). If only for that (and Sandrine Bonnaire!), definitely worth a watch.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Girls, games, grenades
Naturally, just minutes after I bare my geeky girl-gamer* soul to the resonant echo chamber of the Internet, I read this. Synopsis for the tl;dr crowd: old TED talk video from the ringleader of the Purple Moon game series, marketer of "horizontal" rather than "hierarchical" games for girls, inspires Jezebel contributor and avid girl-gamer to rehash all the problematic talking points of the Purple Moon "games for girls" project.
Now, there are a lot of obvious things that irk me about this video -- most glaringly, the idea of "giving girls what they want!" that totally ignores the by-now practically sacrosanct Judith Butler et al. literature on gender as a social construct. Or, in layman's terms: exactly what is it about pink, unicorns, and tiaras -- or, for that matter, "horizontal social bonds" -- that's "naturally" feminine, and how do we know it's not just the "natural" product of a century of Disneyian social conditioning, from cradle to grave? O hai, obvious feminist social theory is obvious!
No, but what really gets to me about "games for girls" is something else. It's an argument that's seeped into the well of our collective conscious even more insidiously, so much so that nobody seems to notice when they're drinking the Kool-aid. It's the idea that girls need didactic games, because girls are special, delicate creatures that need to be nurtured and protected. They need to be taught how to navigate those tricky social bonds (despite the fact that they're naturally good at it...?), to be guided to make the right choices and be happy, friendly, and popular. I can see how this is a more delicate matter to discuss; in spite of the many leaps and bounds our civilization has taken in the past century-long race to gender equality, girls are still limping behind boys, getting tangled up and drowning in the swamps of body dismorphia, beauty magazines, and the Industrial Wedding Complex. Nobody wants another generation of starvers, purgers, cutters, hysterics, and bridezillas. But to suggest that video games are the proper media for conveying a healthy social message is to overlook the decades of actual reality: most people play video games to transgress boundaries (to kill, steal, speed, fly), not to reinforce them. And to suggest that girls need this kind of nurturing more than boys, who obviously seem to do alright in our society despite hours of mind-numbing, gore-splattering shooting and fighting games -- well, ma'am, tha's just plain sexist!
It is my humble and, I think, empirically-justified opinion as a girl gamer that this is all the result of a fundamental misunderstanding about what video games actually are. To me, video games are the epitome of a medium that actively challenges any kind of essentialist assumptions about reality, showing that our morality is (ba-ba-BAH!) a construct that we're happy to set aside in order to frag the hell of our best friend and get that sweet 10-person kill streak. They're an escape, a fantasy, a gleeful descent into the depths of the Jungian abyss. Everything else is just well-marketed educational software. And as great as Oregon Trail or Carmen Sandiego were, I certainly hope no child of mine, girl or boy, will ever be satisfied with that kind of light didactic fare.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'll be off "horizontally" bonding with some zombies. Via chainsaw.
*With all the propers going to this lady and her aggressive deconstruction of the term... but I'll still use it, because goddamn do I love me some alliteration.
Now, there are a lot of obvious things that irk me about this video -- most glaringly, the idea of "giving girls what they want!" that totally ignores the by-now practically sacrosanct Judith Butler et al. literature on gender as a social construct. Or, in layman's terms: exactly what is it about pink, unicorns, and tiaras -- or, for that matter, "horizontal social bonds" -- that's "naturally" feminine, and how do we know it's not just the "natural" product of a century of Disneyian social conditioning, from cradle to grave? O hai, obvious feminist social theory is obvious!
No, but what really gets to me about "games for girls" is something else. It's an argument that's seeped into the well of our collective conscious even more insidiously, so much so that nobody seems to notice when they're drinking the Kool-aid. It's the idea that girls need didactic games, because girls are special, delicate creatures that need to be nurtured and protected. They need to be taught how to navigate those tricky social bonds (despite the fact that they're naturally good at it...?), to be guided to make the right choices and be happy, friendly, and popular. I can see how this is a more delicate matter to discuss; in spite of the many leaps and bounds our civilization has taken in the past century-long race to gender equality, girls are still limping behind boys, getting tangled up and drowning in the swamps of body dismorphia, beauty magazines, and the Industrial Wedding Complex. Nobody wants another generation of starvers, purgers, cutters, hysterics, and bridezillas. But to suggest that video games are the proper media for conveying a healthy social message is to overlook the decades of actual reality: most people play video games to transgress boundaries (to kill, steal, speed, fly), not to reinforce them. And to suggest that girls need this kind of nurturing more than boys, who obviously seem to do alright in our society despite hours of mind-numbing, gore-splattering shooting and fighting games -- well, ma'am, tha's just plain sexist!
It is my humble and, I think, empirically-justified opinion as a girl gamer that this is all the result of a fundamental misunderstanding about what video games actually are. To me, video games are the epitome of a medium that actively challenges any kind of essentialist assumptions about reality, showing that our morality is (ba-ba-BAH!) a construct that we're happy to set aside in order to frag the hell of our best friend and get that sweet 10-person kill streak. They're an escape, a fantasy, a gleeful descent into the depths of the Jungian abyss. Everything else is just well-marketed educational software. And as great as Oregon Trail or Carmen Sandiego were, I certainly hope no child of mine, girl or boy, will ever be satisfied with that kind of light didactic fare.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'll be off "horizontally" bonding with some zombies. Via chainsaw.
*With all the propers going to this lady and her aggressive deconstruction of the term... but I'll still use it, because goddamn do I love me some alliteration.
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