Imagine my joy that a thread containing a great many generalizations about romance and soap opera offers analysis of only two categories of texts: literary fiction by men (mostly Proust and Updike) and Marvel comics (albeit ones that are, loosely, “open to female perspectives.”)
Sigh.
I think this happened because people, in trying not to denigrate soaps and romances, were focusing on the elements they have in common with things that really aren’t romance or soaps. But in the process, it feels a little like the actual things that makes those genres feel the way they do, the things that make them emotionally appealing, are lost. Romantic situations do not a soap opera make — if I really want Robert Scorpio, Mr. Darcy will just not be good enough! Certainly romantic (i.e., dating, marriage, non-casual sex) and domestic situations are commonplace in the romance genre and the soap opera genre. But just having romantic or domestic situations at the center of a narrative, to me, is not enough to place it in those genres, and certainly not to actively gender the work female in the way those genres generally are.
That’s because what makes romance and soap opera “feminine” isn’t simply that they’re about romantic situations, or even that they’re about domestic situations in the broader sense. What makes them “feminine” is that they’re preoccupied with emotional motivations, more than just emotional experiences, and in that respect they mimic typical and stereotypical intrafemale conversation, including but not limited to gossip. (It’s circular, of course, because familiarity with these genres has shaped and colored and affected and even defined intra-female conversation, but nobody is claiming gender is not a social construct…)
In American soap operas, especially since the 1960s, a character’s motivations are generally multifaceted and involve a lot of duplicity, suspiciousness, victimization, competition, manipulation, machination, and whatever emotional anything can be thrown in to make human interaction complex, confusing, and melodramatic. (I don’t have the sense telenovelas are much different.) But the narratives are structured not to make the viewer care, but to give the viewer room to analyze and sort out those complex and dramatic motivations — what makes this character feel and act this way, why is she plotting, are there secrets in her past, is he telling the truth? The long duration of the narrative isn’t about building emotional relationships with characters — that’s an epiphenomenon of the intimate view of their lives. It’s about revealing those motivations slowly so that there’s more time to analyze and speculate about them, more time to gossip with yourself and other fans of the show about the characters. I think you could make a good case that the reason soap operas are vastly less popular now than they used to be is that women, even women who stay home with kids, are far less homosocial, so they have less opportunity for (or interest in) the types of conversations that used to circulate around soap opera plots. Soap opera is a deeply _social_ genre.
Romance is just a capsule from that, a solved problem. It’s not interactive — it’s fantasy with an idealized happy ending — but it’s still about motivation. Sometimes the framework focuses on sexual attraction and other times on social attraction (or social obstacles to attraction), but the emotional kernel of a typical formula romance novel is a shift in the man’s motivation from self-serving to heroine-serving, or in both main characters’ motivation from individual-serving to cohesive couple unit-serving. There it’s the repetitive pleasure of a single, longed-for, idealized motivation, rather than the sustained drawing out that you get in soap opera, but motivation is still the emotional heart of the genre.
The point of BOTH genres is peeling the onion of those motivations and establishing not social familiarity with or even affection for the character, but the kind of psychological intimacy that gives you a reliable gauge about why a person behaves a certain way. That is not a side effect; it is not a tool for effective characterization — that psychological intimacy is an end in itself.
I don’t really buy that Jaime Hernandez has been trying to write “female genre fiction” all these years, although it definitely seems to be genre of some kind. But when it’s described like this, from Dan’s review:
“In taking us through lives, deaths, and near-fatalities, ”TLB” and “Return For Me” encapsulates Maggie’s emotional history as it moves from resignation (Maggie fails to purchase a garage, i.e. fails to fulfill her dreams) to memories of loss, to sudden violence (a theme in this story) to love and contentment.”
I really don’t expect genre at all. Maybe a kind of pulp realism…or perhaps it is closer, in its deep structure, to this “romance” you all see in Marvel comics, which is maybe a different and less-well-codified subgenre of romance.
Jaime’s work, though, to me in my limited experience and from Dan’s description, seems much more concerned with capturing emotional experience — getting the emotional experience of the character down on the page in a powerful and compelling and convincing enough way that it invokes a connection to that emotional experience, and a sympathy and affection for the character, in a reader. It’s not that the characters don’t have motivations, of course they do — but their motivations are presented pretty straighforwardly, in the service of making the character make sense and seem real. The humanity of the character is the point. Believing in the characters is the reward.
I don’t knock that kind of emotional theater, but just to be clear — that ain’t romance or soap opera. It doesn’t satisfy anything comparable to the things that urge me to go consume some conventionally gendered-female genre material (or the similar “literary romances.”) I go to female genre material either for a safe and predictable space to indulge thinking about the social complexity of emotional motivation (without the real-world drama that ensues when you overscrutinize your real-life friends’ motivations) or for idealized fantasy of a minimal-drama, happy-ending world. One reason I am, generally speaking, not in the least bit interested in more realist work, including Jaime’s but also, say Theodore Dreiser’s, is that I do not need a book, comic or otherwise, to provide me emotional experiences or to present to me what is real in the world. All I need to do is call my girlfriends for a nice, long chat — the ones with babies in intensive care, brain-damaged adult children, elderly dependents, cancer-ridden siblings, failing or complicated marriages, miscarriages, unfulfilling jobs, no jobs, frustrated ambitions, low self-esteem, high cholesterol, and houses they can’t afford. They — and their low-drama compatriates with good jobs, great legs, smiling children, couture-filled closets, beautiful spouses, stellar wine cellars and glossy educations — are much more real than anything Jaime, or any other realist writer has to offer on the truth-in-narrative front.
So when Dan gushes that “They’re real,” the only response I really have is “why, then, wouldn’t my time (and yours) be better spent caring for the actual people in our actual lives who have similar or worse problems?”
Now, I can absolutely respect a realist-to-melodramatic book that offers rare, meaningful wisdom on WHY those experiences happened to people — and by “rare and meaningful” I mean some insight into the social and psychological conditions that shaped those experiences that a bright, socially adept, adult female wouldn’t have already gained from the routine business of conducting her social and familial life. I respect Dreiser for that reason (even though I have no interest in ever reading Sister Carrie again if I live to be 1000.) I need something extra-real to make a book worth the distraction from my actual real life.
Which isn’t to say that Jaime’s work does not do those things, doesn’t have anything extra-real. It’s just that the extra-real stuff is what I’d have liked the TCJ reviews, and discussions of this kind of art in general, to pinpoint and grapple with. Emotional verisimilitude and compelling characters and being real are just the bare minimum I expect of competent fiction. It’s not what gets you praised; it’s what gets you published. So given that, Mr Critic, what makes the experiences of these “real” characters so unique in the world or so idiosyncratic a representation of the social tapestry that it’s worth my time having fictional experiences with them when I could be having real ones with my family and friends (or having fictional ones that offer something really artistically challenging or intellectually ambitious, independent of all the emotional schtuff)?
That’s a question that, for my taste, isn’t answered — by critics or by fiction itself — nearly often enough.
__________
Update by Noah: This is part of an impromptu roundtable on Jaime and his critics.
I like that you’ve dinged me for seeing L&R as a soap opera, Jeet for thinking that soap opera isn’t gendered, and Jaime for not writing work that is sufficiently like a soap opera.
Still…to me at least, your description of soap opera isn’t as far afield from what Jaime’s doing as you are suggesting. I think, first of all, you’re conflating authenticity with realism — Jaime’s the first, Dreiser’s the second, which is why, say, Ghost of Hoppers really doesn’t feel like Dreiser to me (it’s got magical realist elements, among other things.) I think realism would be a hard thing to link to soap opera dynamics, but Jaime’s authenticity claims aren’t quite as opposed.
I think L&R is also fairly concerned with psychological intimacy and motivations; you definitely are encouraged in Ghost of Hoppers to try to figure out why Hopey is behaving the way she is, why the out-of-control maybe-but-not-actually bi semi-love interest for Maggie is behaving the way she is…it’s definitely a gossipy book in that respect. And I think that’s a big part of why criticism of it can take on a gossipy feel, which feels more like chatting about friends than about more formal kinds of analysis.
Not that you care necessarily…but I’d say that the Claremont/Byrne X-Men might really satisfy your definition of soap opera as well. Interpersonal interactions in an ensemble setting were pretty important…down to the stereotypical twin-double replacement for one of the characters (a doubling which emphasizes the question of motivation, right, because the characters look the same but behave in ways which are unpredictable, therefore exciting and ripe for analysis….)
Stan Lee Marvel comics romance though didn’t care about that stuff; it’s all focused on the main character and his (almost always) hardships, rather than on the dynamic of relationships.
So when Dan gushes that “They’re real,” the only response I really have is “why, then, wouldn’t my time (and yours) be better spent caring for the actual people in our actual lives who have similar or worse problems?”
Yes! Thank you.
Incidentally, I bow to no one in my admiration of Robert Scorpio. The story that climaxed with him, Luke, and Laura (with Tiffany’s help) breaking into the tropical-island underground lair of Mikos Cassadine to stop MC from turning Port Charles into a giant ice cube was one of the great narrative experiences of my life.
Seriously! General Hospital ruled.
Maybe we need a General Hospital roundtable.
Honestly, I’ve never watched daytime soaps, is part of the reason I’m not referencing them. I have seen all of Buffy though…does that count?
Excellent post — in film and media studies, the casual use of terms like “melodrama” and “soap opera” in dismissive ways was challenged by feminists long ago, and it’s time for comics criticism to also make those complex rather than simple and negative comparisons. (I’d suggest that rereading Tania Modleski on the narrative structure of soap opera could be of great use to comics criticism.) But the other term that needs some attention for its rich complexity is realism, which for its 19th century (and later) proponents was never offered as a mere copy or substitute for the (so-called) real world. As Barthes and others have demonstrated, it’s a formal concept too, not just an ontological claim by some forms of art.
I should have also cited a text too few comics scholars seem to know: Jennifer Hayward’s CONSUMING PLEASURES: ACTIVE AUDIENCES AND SERIAL FICTIONS FROM DICKENS TO SOAP OPERA. With Dickens on one end of her study and soap operas on the other, her middle chapter is wisely on … “Terry and the Pirates.” (She’s picking up on the daily consumption of episodes shared by soaps and strips, among other elements.) For Modleski, soaps are closely linked to women’s work in the home — cooking and cleaning — which is repeated daily, unlike tasks (or narratives) that clearly begin and end. In that regard, reading the X-MEN is a lot more like a soap opera than any novel, graphic or otherwise.
Corey clearly missed the thread where both Modleski and Hayward were mentioned. (and so was Margaret Drabble–so the “all male” accusation is only 98% right!
Soap opera is a deeply social genre.
Hm. I’m not sure I go along with this. It’s not my experience that people socialize by indulging in speculative gossip about characters in media entertainment. On the rare occasions I can remember someone trying to do so, he or she was usually greeted with indifference or told to get out more. Me and several of my classmates watched General Hospital pretty faithfully back in our middle-school days, but I think we were just using it in the manner most people use popular entertainment: it got us out of our heads for a time and sucked out the tension of the day.
If I had to guess, I would say daytime soaps are not as popular now in large part because of the increased stresses on middle-class households. People just don’t have the time to keep up with them. Nighttime serial TV is still going strong. It’s a lot easier to keep up with a once-a-week program than a five-day-a-week one. There’s also the option of watching the nighttime serials in large chunks via DVD and Netflix, which isn’t available for the daytime stuff.
“It’s not my experience that people socialize by indulging in speculative gossip about characters in media entertainment.”
Not a reader of fan fiction then, I take it?
Really, this happens all the time. It’s what almost all commentary on superhero comics amounts to. It’s really common (though not universal…and I think more prevalent among women than men…unless you count speculative gossip about sports, which you probably should.)
No, I’ve never paid any attention to fan fiction, I must say.
unless you count speculative gossip about sports, which you probably should
I’ve definitely been around a lot of that. And discussions about politicians and policy. And about whether this director or that actor is right for such-and-such project, and how a finished film might have been better (or at least different) with other personnel. And…and…and, oh just forget the first graf in my earlier comment.
Caro: One reason I am, generally speaking, not in the least bit interested in more realist work, including Jaime’s but also, say Theodore Dreiser’s, is that I do not need a book, comic or otherwise, to provide me emotional experiences or to present to me what is real in the world…. So when Dan gushes that “They’re real,” the only response I really have is “why, then, wouldn’t my time (and yours) be better spent caring for the actual people in our actual lives who have similar or worse problems?”
RSM: Yes! Thank you.
Not that I want to defend Dan, but he may have his reasons for that emotional response (one which I can’t empathize with in this particular instance but…). For example, he may not have access to the same range of emotional experiences in real life or at least those from the same milieu. Perhaps the people in his life are less prone to communicate their most intimate moments or thoughts. There are always other people and other lives the likes of which we will never encounter. It’s like asking why people yearn to travel and see other parts of the world when their own environments change constantly albeit at a slower pace. The reductio ad absurdum of this argument would be to ask why we read fiction at all when the world would be better served by us going out into the world to aid others. Of course, we all know the reasons why this doesn’t happen in most instances, whether it’s the sensitizing nature of fiction or more spiritual concerns. All this apart from the aesthetic appeal of Jaime’s work to some people and the “need” for a narrative with some closure.
The truth is that Dan was simply “gushing” in his TCJ piece and not evangelizing on the part of Jaime’s work. It does appear that a lot of critics have wanted to do this with respect to the current issue of L&R. At the very least, he managed to get Caro to write this piece. I suppose that’s not too bad a result…
Wow, thanks to everybody for some great comments!
I should say — I’m not really dinging Jaime for not writing work that’s sufficiently like soap operas. I mean, my impression is that he doesn’t, but I don’t know whether he does or not. It’s more that the way people tend to talk about him makes him sound less like a soap opera and more like realist fiction that I’m generally pretty bored by.
Which speaks to Suat’s point — it’s not that I believe we shouldn’t read fiction because there’s so much life to be lived. It’s that I select from the broad range of fiction available to me on the basis of what it offers me other than similarity to real life, so I try to avoid spending time on things where verisimilitude is a big part of the point. The logical end game of an aesthetic criteria that can be summarized as “they’re real” is reality tv — and yuk. So those questions (the one you cite, Suat, and the later one) aren’t really meant as snark — rather, “Please, Mr Critic, tell me the rest of the story. What else is there, besides ‘they’re real?'” The answer can be formalism, social wisdom, humor, or a whole range of other things, but Dan specifically says that Jaime avoids “formal play” (and then gives an example that really isn’t all that exciting, formally.) So the review really boils down to praise for Jaime’s convincing, compelling characters, and that’s just a requirement of competent storytelling, period. Jaime obviously sails over that bar — but it’s a low bar for such a lauded creator. There’s got to be more, surely. Let’s talk about the more, whatever it is.
(Not that nobody ever talks about the more — Charles Hatfield does. His comments on Los Bros generally make me feel like they are worth respecting but still in the realism camp, overall, and probably not something I’m going to really enjoy…the idea that they’re soap opera is tantalizing, but so far I’m unconvinced!)
I do strongly agree with Corey, though, and his statement is much clearer and more direct than mine: despite the fact that I do not LIKE realism (19th c., Dreiser, etc.), I definitely RESPECT literary realism for its formal accomplishments and socio-cultural insights. I do not really respect the non-literary variants of realism that much though — too much emphasis and value on verisimilitude is part of why soaps have been replaced with reality tv and I think that’s definitely a loss. Also, “based on a true story” generally doesn’t have a lot to recommend it. I’m not a big fan of shows like The Wire or Mad Men either. Pop culture realism tends to strike me as either depressing as fuck or smug.
I honestly haven’t thought in great depth about why I personally am so aesthetically unmoved by the entire spectrum of realism, even the demonstrably impressive literary kind. But it is definitely the case that if you want to talk me into reading something, telling me how convincingly realistic it is is absolutely NOT the way to go.
However, telling me Robert Scorpio is in it would probably work. Robert, you were definitely not hanging out with me at recess in the 9th grade… :D
I probably would have bored you with all the talk about how dreamy Kristina Malandro was.
Ha ha, you and the cheerleaders — the blonde girls in my class all tried so hard to look like her. I always preferred Anna! All that gorgeous hair…
But since you brought it up, that’s one of the most striking things — I’ve read some meaningfully large number of essays, praising and perjorative, about Los Bros’s sexy women, but I don’t think I have ever read anything talking about how sexy their MEN are. Are the men not sexy, or do critics just not talk about them? In soaps both genders are idealized — women want to be the women and date the men, and men want to be the men and date the women. Give me the essay about the sexy men and I’ll maybe buy it’s a soap!
Yes, I did miss the earlier thread — just came in with this as the start. Darn internet! I’ll learn how it works one of these days. Oh, and I should admit that I think Dreiser’s SISTER CARRIE is one of the great American novels, and it’s so melodramatic that I never really thought of it as a realist work …
Not sure I understand Caro’s comment “I do not really respect the non-literary variants of realism that much though”: that would mean a couple of centuries of painting, most of the history of photography, and (according to Bazin at least) the medium of film? Or just Italian Neo-Realism, Bresson, the Dardenne brothers, etc.? A pretty wide swath!
I should have said “pulpy” or “pop cultural” rather than “non-literary”. I don’t mean “non-written”; I mean “without literary ambitions.” I would include art versus genre film in that distinction — pulpy realist cinema is the worst sort of schlock; blech! — but not painting or photography, which aren’t narrative in the same way.
FWIW, one of the reasons why Modleski was never particularly convincing to me is that because I was a very busy teenager in the 1980s with a social circle of equally busy teenagers, I didn’t have the stereotypical quotidian experience of soaps, except for brief spurts during the summer — I taped them and watched all 5 hours of them (!) on the weekend. Yet losing that didn’t really affect the way I reacted to those narratives emotionally or psychologically. So I think she overplays that aspect of it a little bit. Not that I disagree, but I’m just very sensitive to the extent to which her observation is tied to the sociocultural experience of soap-opera viewers in the pre-VCR mid-century rather than to anything internal to the narrative itself. (I can’t remember but does she talk about the magazines that filled in the gaps from missed episodes during those years?) I’m just more interested in the genre’s internal mechanisms than to how it is experienced (a perspective which maps relatively closely onto the internal motivation/representation of experience dichotomy I draw on in the post, I suppose…)
Good lord…you’re a big fan of Dreiser. I guess I knew such people existed, but I never expected to meet one (other than Mencken I guess.)
You’ve mentioned your dislike of realist fiction before, I think, Caro. I don’t necessarily love realism…but good realist fiction can be good. Stephen Crane is a favorite of mine, certainly — definitely realism, but one which shimmers between sly social critique and symbolism in a way that I find sublime….
I think that thinking about reality television as realism is a little off, maybe? I haven’t seen a ton of reality television or anything, but it seems very manipulated, and intentionally so. People jumping through hoops isn’t realism; it’s a circus. I think there probably is an appeal to authenticity, but that’s not really the same as realism in the wire (which certainly has it’s own authenticity claims too, don’t get me wrong.)
I don’t think Gilbert’s men are especially sexy or fetishized? Certainly not the way the men are in Ai Yazawa’s books.
Ah, I see from the post you wrote while I was writing mine; Stephen Crane has literary ambitions, so he’d probably pass.
Have you seen the Wire and disliked it, or just suspect you’d dislike it based on the description?
Also, an example of “pulpy realist cinema” would be what? Fuller’s Shock Corridor/The Naked Kiss? Pulp Fiction?
I missed a chance to pick up on this point earlier, Noah — I think I need an umbrella term and I’m not sure what it would be. There’s this whole constellation of narrative that is concerned with verisimilitude of one form or another — from mere authenticity to full-on literary realism. Some of it is capital-R Realism. Some of it is realistic. Some of it is manipulated “reality.”
I don’t like ANY of it. It all comes off as insanely smug to me.
I haven’t seen all of The Wire. I’ve seen some of it. Breaking Bad is even worse. I think mostly it’s tone — I just don’t like the way those characters talk. This wouldn’t be true for literary realism, really, but I think in tv/film the dialogue is the biggest part of it — there’s kind of a fear of excessive verbal intricacy, I guess because that’s “artificial.” I like Oscar Wilde plays much much better.
Maybe it’s the “fear of artifice” overall that I dislike, because artifice is authentic too, damn it, especially for women. And the erasure of artifice just feels like an extremely, extremely male point of view.
FWIW, Sister Carrie and The Sound and the Fury are the two novels I threw out of my 8th story dorm window into the (not metaphorically) soapy fountain below. (The soap was a routine fraternity prank…)
Yeah, any of Tarantino would count, Suat, although with degrees. Reservoir Dogs more than PF? Tarantino’s got camp and melodrama, but Noah’s authenticity thing is there. Maybe Fuller too, yeah, although I dislike him less because of the historical interest.
Also, TV movies about whatever illness is scaring people most at the time — I remember one about AIDS starring Molly Ringwald that still makes me want to puke 25 years later. And those “based on true events” adaptations — those things are pure pulp.
It’s worth pointing out, to Corey’s comment above, that I think the pleasures of soap operas aren’t particularly visual. Costume design and art decoration, and the actors are always attractive, but the visuals aren’t meaningful in any important way. Soap opera is really a literary or theatrical genre where the writing and dialogue carry the bulk of the work.
Other kinds of TV realism, like The Wire, do tend to rely a lot on visuals, though, mixed in with that kind of really blunt-edged dialogue. I think I would like Breaking Bad (or Kill Bill, for that matter) a lot better if they were really aggressive angry narrative ballets.
You mean Malandro’s hair, right? That mane she had in the mid-’80s was like the eighth wonder of the world. I definitely remember it provoking some fairly heated envy.
I’m not that familiar with the L&R material since the mid-’90s, but my recollection is that the male characters are little more than ciphers. To be perfectly honest, I can’t think of any male comic-book character who would have cross-gender romantic appeal in the way that, for example, Robert Scorpio did.
Nope, Anna’s! http://www.facesgh.com/gallery/albums/facesgh/couples/duke_anna/duke_anna_03.jpg
(It was sleeker than Felicia’s, and longer. And brunette.)
The comic character with cross-gender romantic appeal is Dr. Strange. Talk about missed opportunities. But yeah, in general, there don’t seem to be a lot of Robert Scorpios in comics. Sad.
Suat, here’s a good example: http://io9.com/393576/first-glimpses-of-the-roads-moody-realism
That do is longer than I remember. For some reason I remembered Hughes’ cut as being shoulder-length. Malandro’s was at least as long, though. See here. Thinking back, I’d probably enjoy Anna more as an adult viewer, though. She was tough, take-charge, and no-nonsense. Felicia was the type who needed to be rescued all the time.
“Maybe a kind of pulp realism…or perhaps it is closer, in its deep structure, to this “romance” you all see in Marvel comics, which is maybe a different and less-well-codified subgenre of romance. ”
Considering how deeply imprinted JH is by 60s Marvels, he of course grew up with them, that may be the case.
” It’s more that the way people tend to talk about him makes him sound less like a soap opera and more like realist fiction”
That may be a case of fanboys projecting onto the series.
“I mean some insight into the social and psychological conditions that shaped those experiences”
One is definetly not going to get that from L&R.
I still think it’s at least partly a soap opera; just a consciously restrained one that mixes things up. Like Noah said, there’s the magic realism- sleepwalking superheros; the Izzy character gets as large as her house due to anxiety. Then there’s certain humor aspects from time to time- when JH draws kids they don’t look like the adults but more like a Ketcham/Schulz amalgam.
“. Are the men not sexy, or do critics just not talk about them?”
The answer to that may be more telling than expected. I think the men he’s drawn are generally NOT drawn sexy, especially as time has gone on. The most prominent guy character (and probable-JH stand-in) “Ray Dominguez” probably was sexy twenty years ago. These days he’s aged with a paunch and heavy lines on his face. His blonde redneck friend “Doyle Blackburn” definetly not at any time a sexy candidate. Maggie’s secret husband from the late nineties “T.C. Chase” looked like a reject from a Black Flag mosh pit. That leaves “Speedy” and “Rand Race,” but those characters are from twenty-five years ago. Oh, there was Hopey’s brother “Joey” who was drawn at one point exactly like John Romita’s sixties Peter Parker but with more muscles. So generally, the men are drawn realistically with only a few exceptions. Maggie has been allowed to age, but there are definetly plenty of other sexy women to make up for that. Pure soap operas like GH and telenovelas are defined by how both genders are equally sexy. JH’s approach, then, points to the degree which his stories are soap and to the degree that they are “authentic.”
If romance was part of certain Marvel comics, and adventure part of certain General Hospital episodes, there’s no reason why L&R can’t also be at least partly (or mostly) a soap opera.
Caro: I see what you mean now. I always assumed that it was the overt brutality and violence of McCarthy and Tarantino which you despised/avoided. I do have sympathy with your dislike for “disease of the day” art – “Angels in America” is one of those I like least. Also, finding “verbal intricacy” in modern primetime TV (or TV in general) seems like an impossibility. Would the old BBC adaptations of “I, Claudius” and “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” count as verbally intricate? If you threw “The Sound and The Fury” into the fountain, I can’t imagine what you did with “Germinal”.
Anyway, unwanted digression…back to your usual programming.
“I’m not that familiar with the L&R material since the mid-’90s, but my recollection is that the male characters are little more than ciphers. To be perfectly honest, I can’t think of any male comic-book character who would have cross-gender romantic appeal in the way that, for example, Robert Scorpio did.”
Nor should they considering that the two main characters of the series are at least part-time lesbians. So it makes sense that there’s no room for more prominent male characters. This obviously makes comparisons to GH problematic.
An aside about GH- besides Luke’s adventures the other thing I dug back then was Demi Moore’s smoky voice. I don’t know if hers still sounds like that, but back then that was very hot…..
“I do have sympathy with your dislike for “disease of the day” art – “Angels in America” is one of those I like least”
That dislike would include a good percentage of 1980s art then, right? “Angels” I thought was solid; just too damn long for its own good.
Re the argument that “Love and Rockets is more real, so what?”
Some context: back when that comic started coming out and found its footing, that was an exceedingly rare approach! (And still not exactly common, these days.)
Those folks praising Jaime to the skies are still fixating on what was so striking about his comics, ‘way back when…
I love the Sound and the Fury! Also Tarantino. It’s weird to think of either as realistic, or even all that obsessed with authenticity. Tarantino’s obsessed with film; Inglorious Basterds is really about *not* being real, and critiquing authenticity in a lot of ways. Kill Bill has problems, but realism isn’t one of them as far as I can tell. And Faulker…oh, wait. You must have disliked the Jason section, right? I love the Jason section…but more for the hyperbolic meanness of it than some effort at verisimmilitude. (Johnny Ryan really liked that section, which I think is indicative.)
The dialogue and writing in the Wire is quite good, I think. It’s not Oscar Wilde, but it has it’s own pleasing rhythms, and even it’s own flamboyance (the “fuck” scene is pretty over the top.)
Manga is much more prone to fetishizing male beauty than western comics are, I think.
I, for one, fell into the trap of conflating soap opera with ongoing serial drama… maybe the former is a subspecies of the latter? In any case, thanks for offering some clarity.
I agree with Corey and Sister Carrie–and would say the same for Crane—I don’t see how either of them is really “realistic”–They’re often categorized as “naturalism”–but they are so odd and melodramatic, that I can’t see them as realism. Crane’s The Monster is the greatest short story (or novella–it’s kind of an in-between length) going…and it’s light-years from “realism”–Much more about artifice in many ways. And The Sound and The Fury is really a melodramatic/gothic piece as well–Only the formal gymnastics keep it from being soap opera (I mean…there’s all the doubles, doubled names, incest, scheming for $, etc.)…
And one of the big moves of the later years of L & R is the establishment of Ray D. as a male character who is more than a cipher. Thus his central role in the new issue. Speedy was a sexy male character—but was killed off fairly quickly, largely due to macho posturing. H. R. Costigan is definitely not sexy.
I like Angels in America too…It too is far from realism. It is a bit on the long side…but the time passes quickly in the theater.
I’m willing to be talked out of Tarantino, although I really think it’s connected to Corey’s observation that “realism” often isn’t a very nuanced concept. And Tarantino at least gives the impression that he thinks his bitter, acid world is more “real” than a utopian or romantic one. I think it comes from that binary — realism versus romanticism. Tarantino is not romantic, so he’s realist. But obviously Corey’s right that the terminology is too reductive.
Naming them, though, the things that are “not romantic” about his work; I think that’s a worthwhile exercise.
I have extremely little patience with brute cruelty and meanness. Period. Ever. Not in person; not in art. If you’ve got so much violence in your soul that you need cruelty in your art, go become a policeman or a soldier and get the hell away from my civil society. Tarantino is a blight on Western culture as far as I’m concerned, for exactly that reason. Not Faulkner, though — it’s Jason who is the blight.
Loving that hyperbolic meanness is probably something that you’ll never be able to defend to me.
I don’t respect Tarantino; I do respect Faulkner. I know in Faulkner that the violence and cruelty is purposeful, a heightened, indeed hyperbolic depiction of a cruel racist society, for that society. I don’t think he intended for you to love those sequences — I think he intended for it to disturb you enough that you’d be sensitized to that racist cruelty, more aware of its cost to individuals and society, (and possibly even more likely to act to ameliorate it in the world.)
Can you make that kind of case for Johnny Ryan (or Tarantino)? Because that’s the “more” that makes it possible for me to get beyond the acrid tedium of cruel and violent work. And I don’t think Tarantino’s work is trying to right any kind of social wrong — it’s schlocky naval-gazing entertainment that plays to the basest instincts and papers it over with a very thin veneer of metatextuality. His fascination with film is no more inspiring or smart than the constant creative incest within comics. Compare him, say, to Truffaut, or Steven Soderbergh, or, say, Terence Malick in a film like Days of Heaven. Saying a film director is “obsessed with film” is almost as lame and baseline as saying a work is valuable because the characters are “real”. Just because Tarantino made it more central to his schtick doesn’t make it any less of a schtick.
Sometimes critics seem ashamed to defend anything big-tent romantic (in that above binary sense) — and capable artists often shy away from it. Our age is very cynical and authenticity a really indisputable value. But we seem to think that depicting the world as cruel and violent and ugly and brutish and mean is more “authentic” than imaginging the ways in which it, and we, can be otherwise. I think that’s deeply and profoundly destructive and a completely failure of art.
Honestly, THAT’s what I wish the Christian culture warriors would harp on, instead of “Happy Holidays” and gay marriage. Because that despairing hopeless angry cynicism is vastly more dangerous to the Christian worldview than someone refusing to wish a Jew Merry Christmas.
Eric — I was taught that naturalism is a subspecies of realism, which I think is extending the realism/romanticism distinction. I can be talked into using “naturalism” instead of “realism,” but I think if realism is defined to exclude anything melodramatic, then we need another word for realism in opposition to romanticism, because it’s confusing for it to be both a highly specific subgenre and an umbrella term.
I don’t really buy that melodrama kicks things out of the realism territory, though. Something being melodramatic doesn’t make it automatically less realist. There’s naturalist melodrama and there’s artificial melodrama and there’s a lot of bleedthrough; the concepts are on different axes.
Soap Opera’s again interesting: there’s a lot of melodrama and a lot of verisimilitude, but at its heart, it’s romantic, not realist. I’ve always thought there should be one called The Villainous and the Virtuous.
But I also think it’s worth pointing out that there’s literary and art critical realism and then there’s the more generalized “realistic.” An awful lot of those “based on real events” are very melodramatic, but they still make claims that have SOMETHING to do with authenticity and realism, even if not the literary critical kind.
I don’t love Crane, either, since I hadn’t said.
Literary realism doesn’t really bother me, though — it’s smart and important. I can respect something I don’t really get a lot of pleasure from.
I’m much more interested in pop cultural realism, which I think is out of hand and lazy and often an excuse for really abominably bad work. I’m open to suggestions for terminology to distinguish between authenticity and reality in pop culture and literary “realism,” but it’s worth noting that “realism” has sort of invaded the non-academic lexicon as the go-to way to praise slightly arty pop culture like The Wire. Literature may have a hard time holding onto the exacting definition of the term.
Robert — Exactly; as a teenager chomping at the bit to get out of my small town, Anna was inspiring. Felicia was spunky, though, not like, say, Autumn Clayton. (Remember her?)
Tarantino’s definitely got social and political points to make. Inglorious Basterds is pretty romantic, I think; it’s very much a utopian vision, essentially wishing that all the films about WWII were real, and that good (and the Jews) had triumphed over evil. Death Proof is a rape-revenge fantasy about female empowerment and friendship, again in a deliberately unrealistic mode, I think. Pulp Fiction is about karma and the the logic of genre and how those two things intersect. There’s certainly a fascination with violence in all of Tarantino’s work, but he’s overall a very moral artist, I think, and his fascination with film is a fascination with people and storytelling and how those things interact. Not that you have to like him or anything, but your critique here doesn’t resonate for me at all in terms of what I get out of the films.
I’d argue that Johnny Ryan’s work is a lot about abjection, body fluids, and gender — it’s not that far from the interests of feminist performance art, I think. There’s also a surreal, hyperbolic joy in creativity — and I think there’s an insight there into how creativity isn’t just joy and play, but is also violence. He’s a satirist too in a lot of his work. He’s just really smart and creative, as well as being funny. You don’t like body horror art either, right? I think that’s probably as much to the point as Ryan’s meanness, maybe?
This is my most recent essay about Ryan if you’re interested. I’ve written lots about Tarantino too…like at the very end of this essay.
Caro: Given your comments above about TV and dialogue, have you watched Deadwood? The dialogue is definitely not realistic, but it is wonderful.
Tarantino’s work is about as “real” as a kung-fu film or a giallo but with a little more self-awareness as Caro says. Maybe “The French Connection” would be a more appropriate example.
I avoided Inglorious Basterds and Death Proof because I was already so fed up and sick of Tarantino. Having been forced to teach Pulp Fiction for three years (I’ve probably seen it about a dozen times?) I can definitely say that I do NOT think it’s about karma, etc. etc. Because there’s just no room for all that other stuff to get purchase against the acrid violence.
One of the things that makes great art masterful is its ability to manage complex tonalities so that the atmosphere and texture (and sound, in film) of the work connect to the thematic material in equally complex ways. Pulp Fiction is always just a din. Even the quiet bits are rattly. And the atmosphere is always frightening, constantly nerve-wracked and threatening. It’s monotonal, so the nuanced readings all seem terribly terribly strained to me.
I didn’t mean to imply a criticism of Johnny Ryan. I’ve never read him because nothing I’ve ever read about him has made me think that they’re books I’ll enjoy. But I don’t like body horror either, right.
It’s mostly that I think body horror and violence, in pop culture, tend to overwhelm everything else. They don’t leave a lot of room for more subtle textures, because you’re either in the middle of something violent, preparing for something violent, or recovering from something violent. Or you’re inured to the violence and ignoring it or intellectualizing it, in which case what’s the point? They’re so rarely used judiciously that they lose their effect for me and just become irritating and manipulative. Constant exposure to violence and pain and horror will dull your senses in someway — or dull your humanity.
Contextualizing body horror and violence in a way that plays them against a broad range of emotions can be really powerful — sometimes Cronenberg gets this really right. But mostly it’s older films, before people got so desensitized — the fist fight in Lang’s “Cloak and Dagger,” the murder of the paraplegic in “Leave Her to Heaven.” (Or, for the “drawn from the headlines example,” the murder of Klinghoffer in John Adams’ opera.
But when a work is saturated with body horror or violence — whether for schlocky genre effect or in the name of an analysis of abjection or something — that’s just noise.
I haven’t seen “The French Connection” in a long time, but I can see it fitting. “Cool Hand Luke” comes to mind, too.
Noah said: “It’s very much a utopian vision, essentially wishing that all the films about WWII were real, and that good (and the Jews) had triumphed over evil.” There’s that “cynicism realism” behind that though: it’s essentially a critique that the “standard narrative” about WWII, where good did triumph over evil, is overromanticized and outright false.
Derik — I have not seen Deadwood, but I’ve been told by other people that it’s really good; I should probably check it out.
I want to get back to Steven’s comment about not-sexy men in L&R:
I think it really is telling — but I also think it’s kind of endemic, connected to RSM’s point that there aren’t a lot of Robert Scorpios in comics.
Honestly, when people get wrapped around the axle about why American comics aren’t appealing to women at a large scale, the comparison with soap operas opens some interesting questions — what is it about typical comics narratives that make it so difficult to infuse them with sophisticated, socially adept and sexually mature male characters, and a large number of female characters with diverse personality types and interests?
“They don’t leave a lot of room for more subtle textures, because you’re either in the middle of something violent, preparing for something violent, or recovering from something violent. Or you’re inured to the violence and ignoring it or intellectualizing it, in which case what’s the point? ”
Says you! I can see how someone could be so shocked and horrified by it that it would make them unable to see anything else…but for me many works in the genre are full of tonalities and subtleties. That’s absolutely the case for Tarantino (not quite in the genre, obviously.)
“Constant exposure to violence and pain and horror will dull your senses in someway — or dull your humanity. ”
This is an argument often made against violence in the media. There’s been lots and lots of studies (I’m actually editing a book on this at the moment for my real job) and those studies are extremely inconclusive, to put it mildly. I mean, do you really want to tell me my humanity has been dulled because I’ve watched a ton of horror films? How is that different than suggesting that your taste has been vitiated by watching soaps? Screen violence isn’t real violence (thank goodness!) But the world has a lot of real violence in it, and there are various ways of thinking about, condemning, and, yes, reveling in that. None of those reactions is in the least unhuman. And for me at least, horror often has really valuable insight into our society’s (and other society’s) ideologies, anxieties, and pleasures. Part of that is precisely because of the visceral reactions people have to violence, which are (like all aesthetic reactions) not “natural”, but filled with meaning. To me, those stories aren’t flat at all.
“what is it about typical comics narratives”
I really think it’s demographic rather than something about the narratives in and of themselves. Again, Japan shows that there’s no particular problem creating male cheescake and female friendly storylines in comics form.
And, to be fair, there are a non-negligible number of women who like Love and Rockets.
That’s why I left it open (“someway”) and used “or” instead of “and”!
It isn’t that it dulls your senses in some biological way. It’s that it trains you to expect intense extremes, rather than quiet nuances. Because even if there are nuances mixed in with the extremes, the extremes never go away. There isn’t a lot of room on tv or in cinema for subtle films anymore, because people crave the intensity of those more extreme experiences. I think that’s “dulling.”
Also, I don’t think reveling in violence is ever defensible. Period. Sorry. I think it’s a bad thing, in every possible way, and I think people are bullied into qualifying that sentiment. There’s no excuse for it, and any attempt to excuse it is just making excuses.
However, I’m not trying to make completely blunt arguments about large chunks of genre here — I think, for example, that although Pulp Fiction is crap, Eastern Promises is worthwhile. I don’t like this stuff, I think it’s boring and tedious but I’ve tried to say several times that I think there’s a range.
One of the things that bugs me the most about this kind of work, though, even when it’s worthwhile, is that I think it skews critical and artistic perspectives toward things that are more typically male. It’s like the first paragraph of the post, this thread too — the post is about soap operas and we’re fucking talking about Tarantino. There’s a meta-aggression to this type of art as well — it takes over the discourse. It dampens the range of conversational — as well as artistic — options. I think it’s telling that so often conversation about things that aren’t realist or violent end up being about realism and violence, because people are REALLY FUCKING BIASED against other kinds of conversations when those topics are available. They’re “authentic” and “interesting” and valuable and blah blah blah — but they’re also overpresent, overvalued, and aggressively prone to squeezing out and devaluing other forms of expression and representation, and other types of insight. That’s what the cult of realism in popular culture has done — it’s demeaned other forms of knowing and perceiving the world, to the point that a kind of cynical Hobbesianism is the only really acceptable outlook for a savvy cosmopolitan.
This is part of the denigration of romance and soap opera — women end up being pressured to appreciate ugliness and violence and all those stereotypically male things because they’re so “real” and they offer so much “insight” — while the insight offered by more stereotypically female things, like social maturity or the complexities and nuances of emotional motivation, are downplayed, run roughshod over by a shrill and hostile insistence by critics — and filmgoers — that films like Kill Bill are “filled with meaning” and generally awesome while films like “Notre Musique” (also about violence) are “tediously self-important” and boring.
That’s not only dull — in every sense — that’s tragic.
Caro,
Your dismissal of Tarantino reminds me of Rosenbaum’s. I still need to finish my defense of Inglourious Basterds, but since you asked for some Tarantino apologia, here you go. I think it’s a great film.
Noah: “And, to be fair, there are a non-negligible number of women who like Love and Rockets.”
Compared to the number of women who like General Hospital?
I just mean that if your question is why more women don’t read or like comics, which takes as a given that not enough women do, attempting some sincere and self-critical comparisons of comics with what gazillions of women DO like is probably gonna give you some insight. Especially if your question is what’s wrong with mainstream titles (recent insane over-the-top objectification aside.)
One series that I’m currently fixated on is George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire. It’s in a genre that’s prominently masculine, I guess, and there’s plenty of misogyny inherent in the social system he depicts, but emotions and romance are primary causative elements in the ongoing narrative. Each chapter is structured on something of a cliffhanger. I think it probably gives me the same thrills that a soap opera gives its viewers (albeit I think it’s much more richly developed and probably has a lot more to say about the world around us).
And I meant to add: women characters are as important in driving the story as the men, which probably explains why Martin seems to have a large female audience.
Charles, I googled and found this, and YES, you’re right; that’s exactly the way I feel about Tarantino. And I’m thrilled to have that reference, because now I don’t actually ever have to suffer through enough Tarantino to actually articulate why I hate it so much.
I love this phrase:” Part of the assumption of his defenders seems to be that no subject is so sacrosanct that it can’t be met with an adolescent snicker.” I don’t understand adolescent snickering. I hated it when I was an adolescent, back when I had that crush on Anna and Robert, and I hate it now.
And this quote is brilliant: “paraphrasing Roland Barthes: anything that makes Fascism unreal is wrong. (He was speaking about Pasolini’s Salo, but I think one can also say that anything that makes Nazism unreal is wrong.) For me, Inglourious Basterds makes the Holocaust harder, not easier to grasp as a historical reality. Insofar as it becomes a movie convention — by which I mean a reality derived only from other movies — it loses its historical reality.”
This is, again, why Corey’s observation that we need more nuanced ways of thinking about realism is so important.
Let me try to say it this way, perhaps, to generalize away from IB: I don’t think Tarantino is realist in the literary sense, but I think Tarantino’s choice of subject matter and the thin veneer of sociocultural meaning encourages people to take him seriously and to see the perspective he offers as more truthful than other, more subtle and adult, perspectives (by the logic in my comment to Noah, above, that it assumes a cynical Hobbesianism that we are encouraged to believe is more valid than any other vantage point on human nature and society.) In our culture, that’s a flavor of realism — one that, I agree with Rosembaum, spits in Barthes’ face. Our version of realism, so skewed toward cynicism and brutality, distorts the world in very horrific ways.
Heehee, sorry for more plugging, but here’s my Salo apologia against Barthes.
“Also, I don’t think reveling in violence is ever defensible.”
Reveling in screen violence isn’t reveling in real violence. I think it’s pretty important to see that there’s a distinction. And…the idea that there isn’t a very vocal and very powerful group of folks who condemn extreme media of various sorts is just incorrect. Lots of people really hate horror (and death metal, and porn, and…) You’re not alone…though it is a more marginal position on the left than the right, obviously.
I tend to think that extreme media can do various interesting things with gender…and that those insights are often quite closely correlated with the extremity (which is in part utopian/dystopian. So saying, “you should ramp down the violence in favor of nuance,” kind of misses the point. Some nuances you only get at the extremes.
And…you brought Tarantino up! I don’t think he’s actually anything like Jaime, as far as I can tell. If you’re going to flatten everything you don’t like into a single thing, you’re going to end up talking about stuff that’s only tangentially related to what you intended to talk about, though.
Re women liking love and rockets — obviously General Hospital’s demographics are way, way more female than Love and Rockets’ are. You did seem to be bordering on suggesting that L&R is really not interesting to women, though…and I’m not so sure that’s true. Especially compared to other American comics — which is a low bar, obviously, but it is kind of the bar in question. So if you’re asking how could American comics do better appealing to women, “more comics like L&R” wouldn’t be an insane answer. And in part that’s because L&R is somewhat more like General Hospital than are most American genre comics.
A better answer would be, “more comics like Nana” or “more comics like Sailor Moon,” or “more comics like Sandman” or, “more comics like Archie.” I mean, it’s not rocket science; there are examples, current and historical, of comics that women have liked. The main barrier isn’t conceptual; it’s demographic. Women haven’t paid attention to American genre comics in such a long time that there’s not the audience, or the community, or the editorial/creative personnel available to change things.
I guess my point was more that I wasn’t really buying Crane as naturalism either…at least not in the way naturalism is usually defined (as a competing realism). In truth, I think there’s relatively little out there that’s really “realistic.” I mean, Henry James and Flaubert somehow get to be considered “realism” AND the fathers of modernism, even though there’s a ton of contradiction in those two terms (not the least of which is the modernist response to realism as essentially unrealistc). The fact that Dickens is often considered a realistic novelist shows how empty the term really is.
Maybe Middlemarch is the only realistic novel.
“anything that makes Fascism unreal is wrong.”
I think that’s silly. Fascism was unreal — it’s a farrago of romantic nonsense. Moreover, fascism as the uniquely real quintessence that we cannot subject to fiction — please. Pointing out that fascism serves as a trope (which is what Tarantino does), and thinking about ways to rework that trope isn’t adolescent or stupid. As a Jew, I found the way Inglorious Basterds satirized and yes sneered at piles and piles of sententious horseshit about the Holocaust (from Schindler’s List on down) extremely satisfying.
“I think Tarantino’s choice of subject matter and the thin veneer of sociocultural meaning encourages people to take him seriously”
His subject matter is stuff like ninjas and genre crooks and nazi films (not nazis); he’s not Coppola or Scorcese, who really do make pretty strong authenticity claims. And his position as a “serious” filmmaker is way, way more contested than theirs for that reason.
He does have interesting things to say about society and culture…almost all of it very aware of the distinction between reality and narrative, and much of it pushing against the authenticity claims you suggest he unproblematically represents. It just seems like a bizarre criticism to me (much more so than the objection to the violence…)
I think it’s equally important to see why reveling in screen violence is like reveling in real violence, to see that these two things, although distinct, are not discrete in some unproblematic way. Reveling in screen violence is different from reveling in real violence, but at best it is self-indulgent. All forms of “reveling” are self-indulgent, and picking violence as the thing to indulge in?
I think indulging in artistic violence has to be tempered by a real emotional cautiousness and care. Intellectual care is not enough, because, again motivation counts. Not the intention of a specific artist, but the motivations of a culture. Why do people like it? Emotionally? What attracts them to watch violence or draws them to put it on the screen? What does the representation of it attempt to do to the viewer and what are the effects of that experience? Those things are just as much at stake in understanding it as the representational work it does — of our world or of experience.
Which is why apologies for it that do not directly engage questions of emotional motivation (of consumer and artist) tend to bother me. Feminist writing on abjection does, because the experience of the marked female body is an abject one, so the motivation is the externalization and representation of a specific, broadly shared experience. But even most feminist writers who draw on it don’t revel in it, or indulge in it to the extreme. And when they do, as in some feminist performance art, I think that the particular feminist spin on the concept often recedes to the background, putting a distance between the art and its meaning that is very much metaphorizing and “making unreal.” For such an intensely real subject matter, I question that. It bothers me. It seems to move us away from what needs to be said.
That’s what’s wrong with it — I think, following Barthes, that violence should never be made unreal, even though it should always be confronted. But violence is made unreal quite often in art. That’s precisely why you can make the distinction between real violence and screen violence. But that is not dissimilar to what Barthes objects to when he says that making it unreal changes how we interact with its historical reality, and that there are some things we should be cautious about treating that way.
That’s part of the value of Barthes’ observation, to remind us to think consciously, all the time, about the seams between art and reality, where they are abrupt and where they are osmotic and generative. I think the tendency to ignore his warning, to try and justify around it, is really problematic and disturbing.
I do think there’s a difference between what I don’t LIKE about realism and why I think it’s not useful for talking about soap operas. Realism just isn’t a good word; it has too many of the wrong connotations, but I think there is a real, genuine, tendency in American popular culture to believe that violent, aggressive, acrid, depressing, cynical Hobbesianism is more real, more truthful, than anything else. I think that vantage point influences a pretty broad swath of art, and I think sometimes the influence is subtle. That’s in Tarantino. It’s there in Jaime — it’s in the Calvin and Ray storyline and the way it prevents Ray and Maggie from having a really truly happy ending.
I do not like anything — fictional or otherwise, that starts from that premise, because it is too confining. Human history has happened in a dialectic between that Hobbesianism and various forms of idealism, and we fetishize one pole of the dialectic at our peril.
I didn’t mean to suggest that L&R was unappealing to women, or anybody in particular. Just in comparison to soap opera. But I think it’s a very valid question to ask what things about soap operas have made them so extraordinarily appealing to women over the decades, and to question why so few of those things have found their way into comics at critical mass even once people started actively caring about whether women read comics. I don’t think demographic issues are entirely at fault there — they’re the conditions of production, not the production itself — I think there are genre issues that also inform what’s happening. That’s why, to me, the “history of comics” fascination, the idea that they’re a self-contained medium primarily drawing on their own history and lacking much overlap with anything else, is so very, very limiting.
I think with Tarantino it’s the two things together: that Hobbesian view of the world, and the extremity of the violence. There’s not much he could say about anything in that framework that I would be interested in; I’m with Rosenbaum that it’s just adolescent. I do think his subject matter is violence and representation, though, not ninja film etc. I just don’t think he has profound things to say about them. I think he’s pretty broadly given more credit than he deserves.
And Suat brought him up, actually. :) He may be regretting it. (I’m not, even though I may have sounded like it earlier!)
I tend to agree with Eric that realism is a pretty empty term, which is why the way I used it here has resulted in so much confusion. But I think because it’s so empty, for me it ends up being defined as an absence of or rejection of Romantic Idealism — our cynical Hobbesianism, gross materialism, just plain lack of imagination. I’m happy for another word for that. But I’m never going to like it.
Looks like you can read a translation of the Barthes here, since we seem to be crystallizing a little bit around it.
This is I think the most salient bit:
That really resonates with what I think about Tarantino. I think we have gotten to the point that we perceive the distortion itself as the most real thing and the real thing as unreal. That is what “realism” is now, which is why it seems like such an empty signifier and why it is so overpopulated with shallow self-important pulp. It’s been entirely evacuated. And we claim Barthes and Lacan as our excuses for believing such nonsense. No wonder Derrida sneered so much at Americans!
Caro, I agree, and It’s hard to imagine anyone except a teenage boy with poor taste liking anything by Tarantino.
Ah, it’s Suat’s fault. My apologies!
Seeing Tarantino as Hobbesian seems nuts to me. He’s extremely moral; he’s not at all about nature red in tooth and claw, or about a war of all against all. His violence is very emotionally distanced and weird; he’s totally interested in and comments on the motivations of violence. I think people find him so upsetting for that reason, actually — his violence is meant to make you feel uncomfortable, and that discomfort is often quite morally inflected.
He feels very idealistic to me, often — especially in Pulp Fiction and Inglorious Basterds and Death Proof, but really in all his work. It’s tied into his use of film and genre, but there’s a real faith in both those things. Inglorious Basterds is in part about trying to change reality through the stories you tell. If that’s not idealism, I don’t know what it is.
Any form of aesthetic investment is going to be self-indulgent. You don’t watch General Hospital as some sort of exercise in stoicism. I’d certainly agree that why violence is appealing and what people get out of it are entirely reasonable questions to ask. I think that you actually need to look at the work in question though to determine the answer, which I would submit is not always easily expressed by, “these viewers are amoral self-indulgent sadists who should be ashamed of themselves.” I’d argue that in a lot of cases, horror violence is masochistic rather than sadistic, for example, and that it’s about identifying with others rather than about fantasizing about hurting them. Tarantino’s more sadistic…though Death Proof is complicated.
And saying violence should never be made unreal — again, you end up privileging violence as somehow uniquely real. People have violent dreams just as they have funny dreams or sexual dreams or dreams about chairs. Saying, “well, you shouldn’t have those dreams; that should only be allowed in reality” — I think that makes violence more of a fetish, not less.
And again…saying violence is a distraction from a nuanced gendered point assumes that the violence isn’t part of the point, or that you can make the point without the violence. I don’t think that’s always the case.
Thanks, Holly! Backup is always appreciated. ;)
Noah, I’m curious — had you read the Barthes before you wrote the last two paragraphs? I mean, in psychoanalytic poststructuralism, violence is in fact pretty much uniquely real, in the sense that the Real is trauma. And dreams would be a bridge between that traumatic Real and the symbolic. And Barthes is coming out of that here, I think…
Which ties into the last point: violence, being Real, is not gendered. Not that you’re a Lacanian or anything, but I don’t think I’m being inconsistent, really…
And I guess that’s the rub – I don’t find Tarantino’s violence emotionally distant and weird at all. I find it to be just violent, and the emotional distance is between the violence and its representation, which just irritates me and makes me really really REALLY question his motivations and just plain not like him.
I will say this — the social experience of violence is gendered, especially in terms of how we relate to it and how we’re taught to handle it. But that’s why there’s a threshhold for me at the extremes — at some point it recedes away from gender and just becomes pure Death Drive. Death does not discriminate by sex.
“I think we have gotten to the point that we perceive the distortion itself as the most real thing and the real thing as unreal. ”
That is so completely not my experience of Tarantino. He’s not presenting tropes as more real than the real. He’s presenting tropes as tropes, and using them to think about both film and reality and how they intersect. Again, trying to take him down as some sort of simplistic purveyor of authenticity claims seems like a serious misfire. Inglorious Basterds is really not Schindler’s List.
Holly, I know people of varying ages and genders who like Tarantino. Whether their taste is poor or not is another question, of course!
Well, I won’t disagree that Schindler’s List is also schlocky pulp realism.
But I don’t see how saying that Tarantino buys into a particular view of the world that makes it easy to rationalize a fetish for violence, and saying that this view of the world has, in our culture, been broadly mistaken for “realism” (leaving it largely an empty signifier), is the same as saying he makes “simplistic authenticity claims.” I think Tarantino’s insights are pretty simplistic, especially compared to Barthes; I don’t think he’s representing truth in the same way as Schindler’s List. Schindler’s List falls into that “based on true events” category, and Tarantino’s obviously not that.
But I thought it was a given that all realism wasn’t based on true events, that there were other ways to engage claims of truth and realism. And I think Tarantino often claims that the violence he shows is more natural, more real and more likely to give us insight than anything a film like Schindler’s List could hope to convey. That’s the claim I’m making for him, and then I’m also making the claim that such an approach is today’s version of “realism”, rather than something like MiddleMarch, or even Sister Carrie. (And yes, I’ll pick Dreiser over Tarantino any day.) Tarantino is schlock.
There may be some dissonance in terms of which Tarantino we’re talking about. I mean, I could see seeing Reservoir Dogs as “violence for violence’s sake”—but Kill Bill’s violence is pretty obviously aesthetically distanced. Thousands of ninjas in choreographed danced moves…or the plucking out of someone else’s eyeball. These things are so over-the-top and ridiculous that there can be no mistaking them for reality.
Of course, I liked Reservoir Dogs, and thought Kill Bill was interminably dull (and Uma Thurman was terrible in it)…so I guess that tells you something. about me
And I mean “Natural” in the sense that our attempts to pretend we’re anything other than violent and brutish are “romantic fictions.” That’s the message I get from Tarantino — that he sees no point in making films that don’t indulge people’s taste for violence.
“And I think Tarantino often claims that the violence he shows is more natural, more real and more likely to give us insight”
The last is possibly true. The other two (“more natural, more real”) is simply not something I see in his films just about ever. Even Reservoir Dogs aestheticizes the violence as something like ballet. It’s never about violence as real or natural. He’s just way more Oscar Wilde than he is the Wire.
“And I mean “Natural” in the sense that our attempts to pretend we’re anything other than violent and brutish are “romantic fictions.”
And I just have no idea where you’re getting this. It really is like you think he’s Coppola or Scorcese. The end of pulp fiction, the whole point is that Samuel Jackson’s character is trying to something other than violent and brutish…and the film is totally behind that effort (even if it is in many ways just a change of genres.) Tarantino’s always mocking the tough guys who would be making the point you want him to be making — whether it’s DeNiro’s character in Jackie Brown or Kurt Russell’s in Death Proof. And he adores romantic fictions…that’s what Inglorious Basterds is, pretty much from beginning to end.
Violence is always a trope in Tarantino. It’s never a representation of how the world really is, or an effort to show us truth the way it is in, say, Taxi Driver or Straw Dogs — or even in Paul Verhoeven (who Rosenberg loves.) Or (for that matter) in Drifting Classroom. Violence in Tarantino is something to analyze, and aestheticize, and enjoy, and think about, but it’s never in and of itself truth, and he consistently casts people who think it is (like Russell in Death Proof, or the fascists in Basterds) as the villains.
Death Proof was pretty interminable too…
OK, so answer this then: why doesn’t he make movies where violence is not The Thing that gives us the most insight? If that is a structural placeholder, if it’s just a trope, why doesn’t he ever make movies where the trope is something else?
I don’t buy that a film with as much violence as a Tarantino film, assuming Inglorious Basterds is comparable to the other films, is romantic. That’s the problem. That much violence is saturated with The Real, even if it’s stylized, even if it’s a literary fiction, even if it’s a useful literary fiction. Tarantino doesn’t get to magically show up with his pop guns and his cowboy hat and transform things like death and suffering into the stuff of Romance – claiming that doesn’t do anything except start to evacuate Romance of any meaning in the same way that Realism has been. Just wrapping them up with formal tricks and funny dialogue so they’re entertaining doesn’t magically make them, or even his representation of them, magically serve only moral or worthwhile ends. That’s not a romantic fiction, that’s a childish fantasy that isn’t sophisticated about the complexity of violence as a trope, realist or otherwise, let alone about the complexity of violence and people’s emotional responses to violence.
This just seems like it’s largely the same set of reasons why people are saying they don’t really think Sister Carrie is realist — it’s too formally sophisticated, it’s too melodramatic. Those are basically the claims you’re making for Tarantino. Even if I agreed with them, I wouldn’t think that they made him non-realist. Realism isn’t limited to Scorsese and Coppola.
I’ll just repeat what I said earlier: You said, “It’s very much a utopian vision, essentially wishing that all the films about WWII were real, and that good (and the Jews) had triumphed over evil.” And I said, there’s that “cynicism realism” behind that though: it’s essentially a critique that the “standard narrative” about WWII, where good did triumph over evil, is overromanticized and outright false. That rejection, that unveiling of myth, is a kind of realism.
Now, I’m willing to accept that “realism” is the wrong word for all that — but I’m not willing to accept that “romantic” is the right one. I’m guessing if we could come up with something other than “realist” without all the baggage and connotations that term has, this would be clearer.
I’m assuming you mean the final scene in the restaurant in Pulp Fiction, not the final scene chronologically. I don’t find that scene to anything “other than violent or brutish.” It’s less violent, but still pretty brutish — the guns are in the picture most of the time, and the scene’s atmosphere and tone is still saturated with the threat of violence. That’s the source of tension in the scene. You know by that scene that more violence occurs after that point in time. But you don’t know what happened to Jules after he walked away — the film sticks with Vincent and his violent end. I get the message from those choices that no matter how hard Jules tries, violence and terror are inescapable.
Oh, man. I come back here all primed to talk about the character dynamics of Robert Scorpio and Anna Devane and Duke Lavary and Felicia and that Tanya drip that Frisco let his brother Tony have sloppy seconds with, and what do I find?
Caro sez: we’re fucking talking about Tarantino.
[FACEPALM]
Robert, YES!
I’d completely forgotten Tanya. There needs to be a DVD of ’80s GH. (There isn’t, is there?)
I think, Noah, that the real problem is that saying something is a trope, making it unreal, isn’t particularly smart or innovative or insightful. When you try to dig out deeper insights from Tarantino beyond some really trivial formal ones, it’s hard to get anywhere beyond “violence is inescapable.” Maybe IB is better, but the rest of the stuff is really pretty thin.
I mean, even if I bought your reading of PF based on Jules’s walking away from the job being the emotional kernel of the film, which I don’t, that’s still a pretty shallow emotional kernel.
Caro: I’m assuming you mean the final scene in the restaurant in Pulp Fiction, not the final scene chronologically. I don’t find that scene to anything “other than violent or brutish.”
I agree. You’re not watching it thinking about the possibilities of redemption. You’re sitting there in a state of dread that the Tim Roth character is going to get shot to death. I think I’ve said this before, but Tarantino’s effects in that film don’t reinforce his themes at all. The dialogue is witty, but ultimately all it functions as is absurdist decoration. The same is true of the violence.
Caro, if you had to teach classes on that film on three separate occasions–much less watch it a dozen times–my heart bleeds for you.
It was completely miserable, Robert.
To make a feeble attempt to rope GH back into this conversation, one of the things that differentiated that show from other soaps of its era (I don’t know about now) was that there was a legitimate criminal element and much of the show’s drama came from either the actual drama of crime or the emotional fallout of having someone you knew and cared about involved in a crime — as a victim or a perpetrator. That was a big part of the shifting tonalities that made the show so emotionally compelling at that time.
There needs to be a DVD of ’80s GH. (There isn’t, is there?)
I wish there were, even though it’s probably a couple of thousand hours of material. It’s a great piece of popular culture, and probably the most compelling run of a daytime soap ever. We should have it around for posterity.
With GH, I’d say a lot of what was integrated was adventure fiction. The “Ice Princess” storyline that kicked off the whole Luke & Laura phenomenon and landed the show on the cover of Time was something you’d expect to see in a James Bond movie. Scorpio was certainly inspired by James Bond, although he wasn’t a tomcatting jerk. The Anna Devane character had a good deal in common with Shane, in that she just wanted to hang the gun up and not deal with that crap anymore. The adventure material really helped give it its crossover appeal. Guys openly acknowledged watching it.
It wasn’t something you saw in other soaps at the time. I remember watching All My Children one summer during that period. The adventure elements were not there in the way they were with GH.
Yeah, that’s exactly my experience as well — I didn’t really love soaps, although I had a soft spot for the NBC ones (Days and Another World) from watching them with my grandmother when I was really little. My mother was openly contemptuous of them. But I was a huge huge huge fan of spy fiction, and GH was this perfect mix.
Come to think of it, it’s a pretty good example of the kind of drawing from other genres that I frequently wish art comics would do with literature.
I’m finding a lot of brief clips on youtube, but nothing sustained yet that I could really dig in to talk about. Might be interesting to compare the Laura rape storyline with Death Proof though. (Are there any rapes in L&R?)
“that the “standard narrative” about WWII, where good did triumph over evil, is overromanticized and outright false. ”
No, I don’t think so. I think he’s talking about other films…and films in which the good guys win is the message re: wwII are overromanticized, I think. The Holocaust isn’t a happy ending, no matter how much Schindler’s List wants to make it one. You really think Tarantino is glorifying the triumph of violence by suggesting that it might have been nice if the Holocaust hadn’t happened? That seems kind of nutty to me.
“OK, so answer this then: why doesn’t he make movies where violence is not The Thing that gives us the most insight?”
Well, like I said, I don’t think he ever actually makes films where violence is the thing that gives us the most insight. He has films with violence in them, because he’s fascinated by it, like lots of people are (General Hospital has no violence in it? I find that difficult to believe….) But in Death Proof, for example, I’d say the thing that provides the most insight is actually female friendships and female conversations. Which is why lots of people who like other Tarantino films find it interminable, I think.
I think Jules does get out in Pulp Fiction, actually. Vincent’s violent and embarrassing end seems pretty clearly to be a sign that Jules did the right thing. If you live by violence, you die by violence, but you don’t have to live by pulp fiction or by violence. That seems a fairly positive, and even romantic, message to me.
I think it’s also a mistake to believe that peace has to be peace without the threat of violence. Peace is often most valuable and most necessary when there is the threat of violence.
And you all can keep trying, but I will not be shamed because I like talking about Tarantino. I fully support your right to chat about General Hospital too though.
I don’t know how you get away from violence IF it’s just trauma, because otherwise– how is there drama with no trauma? Slapstick, adultery, insults, afterschool specials, Barney, you name it… That seems like the most totalizing assertion about violence being made, either by Caro or Lacan, not Tarantino. Implied or repressed violence isn’t really more psychoanalytically benign, is it? The skulls on which the Pax Romana is built hardly reflects well morally or psychologically on the conquerors.
The pleasure of torment in thrall to power is profound, but certainly no excuse to like Coppola movies.
Ah, the Ice Princess might just be online: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHBex7Ud3jc There are at least 54 parts…
Oh, missed the second bit…jeez.
Caro, I find the Jules escape quite moving — especially since it goes (deliberately, specifically) against the tropes Tarantino is establishing. I find a belief in salvation moving. If that makes me a romantic fool, well, I can live with that.
Caro, I love you!
The picture quality bites, but I can feel a weekend viewing marathon coming on…
And. if we’re defending this term against realist violence (which is detestable)… people do claim that very bloody forms of nostalgia, like racist nationalism, are “romantic.” I don’t think that’s too far off in any number of shades of meaning.
I poked around; it looks like GH is not available, and there are no plans to make it available….which is unfortunate because I’m kind of interested in it now. The abc website doesn’t appear to have any classic website either (just the last few days of shows.)
For what it’s worth, I don’t much like Coppola movies either.
I was really responding, though, to Noah’s comment “And saying violence should never be made unreal — again, you end up privileging violence as somehow uniquely real.”
I do think physical violence is unique, and I think that’s why the terror associated with it is psychologically different from the psychological response to adultery or insults. I’m not sure it’s useful to equate them — but I also think the problem is with the idea that insults and slapstick and adultery are actually “violent.” Violence is functioning as a metaphor there, and not always an apt one. The word really isn’t quite appropriate for “calculated destruction,” like, say, using explosives to bring down a building in a controlled way. Or someone deliberately seducing someone specifically to harm that person’s current partner (a common soap trope.) It’s destructive, but calculated. Those types of “violence” would not fall into the psychoanalytic category of Real, and there are tomes upon tomes describing how the actual psychoanalytic category of Real connects with psychological trauma. They’re not reductively equivalent, just metaphorically so. The trauma of the Real has to do with death, not social or aesthetic distress.
Being from a part of the country where there’s a lot of a particularly insidious flavor of racist ‘national’ism (regionalism?), I don’t think anybody considers, say, lynchings to be romantic. They’re very real. That’s rather their point.
The romanticism is elsewhere, in the ideology that rationalizes and papers over the violence that results from the commitment, in the case of Southern lynchings, to white supremacy. But the violence is very much at odds with the romanticized ideology. Southern Racist romanticism is really invested in Ivanhoe, which doesn’t feature lynchings at all. It’s a very perverse and twisted romanticism, distorted to conceal something that isn’t romantic at all. There’s definitely a break between the romantic version of the ideology and the actual ideology that results in the violence.
I’m going to be hard pressed not to watch all of those clips too, Robert! I don’t remember it well at all…
But if physical violence is unique, and bringing down a building in a controlled way doesn’t count as violence, then nothing in a film counts as violence. Right? Film violence isn’t real violence; if physical violence is the unique thing, then violence in movies doesn’t count as the unique thing. If adultery isn’t violence, a picture of a fake alien eating somebody’s head surely isn’t violence. Unless you want to claim that fake aliens are more like real violence than real adultery is like real violence, which seems like a bizarre claim to make.
But I don’t actually think physical violence is uniquely real, and I don’t agree that death is uniquely real either. That’s what Scorcese and Jack London want us to believe, and they’re full of crap (though not entirely without merit.) Death isn’t more real than life; love isn’t less real than violence; war isn’t more true than peace, no matter what fascists would like us to believe. And making violence uniquely sacred — which is what you do when you make it uniquely taboo — is not a stance against violence.
No, because then you’re saying that there’s no relationship between a thing and its representation, which would make film impossible. It’s not a simple relationship, it’s a simulacrum, maybe, but they’re related. The representation of physical violence is different from the representation of psychological violence, in the same way that physical violence is different from psychological violence. The fact that the relationships among the things are related doesn’t make the things themselves equivalent — nor does it make them absolutely other. Simulacrum — the map the same size as the country. The representation of each thing is a map of the thing.
A fake alien eating a head is a simulacrum of a real alien eating a head, not a simulacrum of adultery. And taboo isn’t the same thing as Real.
Wait, I tihnk I misunderstood something there with that last sentence. I didn’t say that violence is taboo and should never be in films. I mentioned Leave Her to Heaven and Cloak and Dagger. There’s a lot of violence in the spy genre, which I love.
But I think that there’s a threshhold at which violence ceases to be about the experience of violence in the symbolic and becomes about the trauma of death and the Real. I put it earlier like this: “there’s a threshhold for me at the extremes — at some point it recedes away from gender and just becomes pure Death Drive.” And at that point it isn’t a symbol or a simulacrum or anything; it’s just violence qua itself.
Romanticism is like guns; neither ever kills anyone?
I disagree about the lynchings. They occur as part of narratives. The victims obviously don’t see them as romantic, but the perpetrators do.
I think part of the problem is that you’re seeing romanticism and realism as necessarily opposed. But fascism believed in a real infused with romantic spirit. The real violence they worshiped was romantic.
Caro: “what is it about typical comics narratives that make it so difficult to infuse them with sophisticated, socially adept and sexually mature male characters, and a large number of female characters with diverse personality types and interests?”
The immature readers?
Domingos, HA. But General Hospital was very popular with teens, despite not pandering to their adolescent-ness…
Noah: I’m not seeing them as opposed; I’m seeing them as distinct but not discrete, as I see all components of binaries. There’s violence in romantic fiction — there’s violence and death in Wuthering Heights, and there’s violence in gothic novels. But there are important differences between the violence in Bronte and the violence in Tarantino. The Gothic novel is a good example, because a characteristic is the terror of physical violence that runs throughout, but the heroine isn’t usually bludgeoned for our voyeuristic reveling, let alone in series, one herione after the other. Death is always averted, pushed aside, by heroism or whatever. A parade of violence would move the genre into straight horror, lose the gothic, and get away from the romanticism. Discrete? No. But distinct.
You on the other hand, are seeing them as indistinct, as two things that blur together so totally that they cannot be identified as strands of perception or approach or whatever. It’s your standard move with binaries — to interpret what “collapses” as the ontology of the referent of the sign rather than just the oppositional relationship of the elements of the binary. C’mon, challenge yourself a little!
Binaries do mark distinction and difference, and those differences are critically useful. Rejecting this one has brought you to the point that you’re again eliding important facets of romanticism — following your logic here, that having a moral belief or social Ideal at the kernel of your book or film makes something Romantic, The Road or Gangs of New York (to go for something you implied you’d consider realist) are just as “romantic” as Pride and Prejudice or General Hospital?
Just because realism, having been evacuated, is defined as the absence of Idealism doesn’t mean automatically that romanticism can be defined as the presence of any Idealism at all. That’s what you’re suggesting, and that’s far more binary than anything I suggested about the relationship between the categories. Saying that realism rejects Romantic Idealism doesn’t mean that Romanticism rejects realism in turn. That’s not a binary between romanticism and realism; that’s the binary between presence and absence, between being and non-being, superimposed onto romanticism and realism.
Pulp Fiction IS closer in tonality and emotional texture to Gangs of New York than it is to Pride and Prejudice or General Hospital. Maybe I’d describe The Road, along with io9, as “gritty realism”, while using something like “campy realism” for Pulp Fiction. But claiming it’s ultimately “romantic,” primarily romantic, rather than just a little bit romantic, is just patently ridiculous apologetics that sacrifices engagement with the experienced tonality of the work in favor of a reading that does not account in any way for the amplitude of that experienced tonality.
It surely has something to do, though, with why you can watch Pulp Fiction and see tropes instead of violence — because you’re letting your own aptitude at creating critical distance remove you, intellectually and critically, from the normative experience of the film. Clearly you’ve never had to deal with a bunch of hormonal 19-year-olds after a screening.
Hope that doesn’t sound too vitriolic. Tarantino pisses me off.
In response to Caro from Domingos’ comment above, it’s more the creators than anything. They don’t identify with or even romanticize men like that, so when they try to depict them it just comes across as posturing. I’m sorry to focus on superhero characters, but the depictions in comics and movies allow one to see some pretty telling contrasts. I know any number of women who think Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine and Robert Downey, Jr.’s Tony Stark are as hot as all get out. The characters are basically the same as those in the comics, but Jackman and Downey are able to give them a body language that both makes sense in terms of the characters and is appealing to women besides. The actors are tapped into something the comics creators aren’t. I can’t imagine many women finding the comic-book Wolverine or Tony Stark terribly appealing. Wolverine generally comes across as a hotheaded, gruesome-looking thug. When Tony Stark is showing his billionaire playboy ladies-man side, it’s like something that was rejected as too ridiculous for a SNL “The Continental” skit. The problem isn’t inherently comics, because there’s several examples of romanticized women who I can see having cross-gender appeal, such as Abby Cable in Moore’s Swamp Thing, or the L&R characters, or Neil Gaiman’s Death from Sandman.
Tarantino has a lot of variety in his female characters, none of whom are bludgeoned for pure entertainment (not that there’s anything wrong with finding enjoyment in fictional bludgeoning). I haven’t encountered a more richly developed female in films or TV of late than Jackie Brown.
Tarantino is super into critical distance, though.
I haven’t seen Gangs of New York. Tarantino is actually a lot more like Jane Austen than either is like Scorcese though, I think. Both Tarantino and Austen have a clinical distance on their tropes; they’re both cold in that way, so that the art becomes almost analysis. And they both also are willing to sometimes collapse into romanticism, I think, which becomes more sublime because of the usual distance. I find them both incredibly life affirming in that way; the contrast between critical edge and emotional force just really sends me.
I would say that the idea that I’m putting critical distance in the film that Tarantino doesn’t have there…he’s all about distance. I think you’re dislike of violence in film is so overwhelming that you can’t tell what he’s doing. It all ends up being just noise to you, and then you insist that it’s a moral failing if someone else can distinguish subtleties. I could suggest that you push yourself a little and try to get beyond your visceral dislike enough to actually engage with the object…but visceral dislike is visceral dislike. I don’t actually think you should see the film again or anything (I mean, it seems cruel to everybody to have forced you to teach it multiple times.)
Part of the problem with the binary you’ve set up is it isn’t a binary. Tarantino just isn’t about realism or authenticity. He’s not really about romanticism either, but he’s more about that than he is about realism. I actually really like your analysis of what’s wrong with the deployment of realism as a sign of the real, and think it works nicely as a takedown of Straw Dogs or Taxi Driver or Schindler’s List. Tarantino just doesn’t fit in there though. He’s doing something else.
And yeah, what Charles said about Tarantino and women. He doesn’t bludgeon women. When women are hurt (like in Death Proof) they (at least as a group) pretty much always come back and triumph. And brutality in Tarantino just isn’t romanticized the way it is in Bronte. The people in his films who are violent thugs aren’t larger than life; they’re ridiculous and banal. Puncturing the romanticism of violence is one way Tarantino is realistic…but it’s not in the interest of saying that violence is real and the most important thing so much as it is in the interest of saying that violent people aren’t romantic Heathcliff’s, but are idiotic poltroons. It’s just really unclear to me why that particular binary is supposed to redound to Emily Bronte’s favor just because she uses fewer fake blood packets.
Oh, and no worries about the vitriol. It’s been a fun conversation. The Austen/Tarantino comparison really makes me happy, for example.
Double echo on the Jackie Brown appreciation from Charles.
Tarantino’s violence is not distanced in the sense of being pure spectacle. Superhero/action-phallus movies are distanced in that way– as are, in fact, Gangs of New York, or gritty realist noir fiction like The Road (and the spy and mystery thriller genres too, I’d say). Tarantino’s violence is klunky and embarrassing and stupid, which is how violence looks– and then there are consequences and people have to go on living in a lesser, diminished way.
On the other hand, saying that Wuthering Heights, with its mad captive Negress, isn’t doing something pretty horrific (and amazaing, and offensive, and insightful) with the traumatic kernel of the Real is a big stretch for me.
I utterly reject the idea that lynching is any less part of the orgasm for believers in the white racist vengeance narrative than– what- the amusing folk songs that ethnomusicologists feel okay about appropriating?
I think Bert’s mixing Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre…but he is correct otherwise.
The distancing of violence in Tarantino…maybe spatial metaphors aren’t the way to go. It feels more clinical and removed because it isn’t framed in the way that genre usually frames violence. It’s in quotes, but the quotations make you notice it in a way you wouldn’t otherwise. He’s talking about genre tropes, not just reproducing them. It doesn’t make the violence more real necessarily, but it makes you think about its artificiality — as something produced and manipulated for which people are responsible. It’s the way he makes violence *unnatural* (like that great scene in kill bill where someone reads the effects of snake venom to the woman who’s just been bitten) that is both sublime and moral, to me. It’s not realism, it’s not romanticism — camp is more like it, but there’s something of Brecht there too. Like DeNiro shooting his girlfriend in Jackie Brown because he’s losing a stupid argument with her, and then continuing to argue afterwards, and then getting dressed down for it by Samuel Jackson; it’s stupid and petty. Shooting her isn’t an apotheosis of manliness; violence here really is the last resort of the incompetent, and that incompetence (quite deliberately, I think) encompasses not just this film, but all of DeNiro’s brutal, realist, method-acting tough guy roles. Violence isn’t cool or real; it’s stupid and sordid, and so is DeNiro’s dumb-ass career.
I’m distracted at the moment but let me ask a specific question about Tarantino’s women. With the exception of Jackie Brown, whom I accept and agree is different, what is it about those female characters — about the characters, not about the experiences they have or narrate (I’m thinking about the discussion of pregnancy in Kill Bill as a “narrated experience” — that makes them clearly and demonstrably female characters? Is there anything particularly, strikingly, meaningfully feminine about the way they react to their experiences or, more importantly, talk about them? Is there anything about the way they interact with each other, or with the men? What are those things?
It’s really insanely easy to answer that question for the women in Austen or Bronte or General Hospital, and the fact that it’s so easy is part of why they are appealing, so I’m curious about the answer for Tarantino…
Sorry, yes, oops. Wuthering Heights has the raging swarthy gypsy man, of course, duh.
Feminine Tarantino characters? Like outside of language but with access to jouissance? The avenging Jewess in Inglorious Basterds perhaps not, but the German actress from the bar shootout, I’d say yes. I don’t know– but I didn’t see Death Proof.
To quote the late supergreat June Carter Cash: “Quentin Tarantina makes his women wild and mean.”
That wasn’t quite what I meant — not psychoanalytically or structurally, just at the level of characterization. What marks the character as female, other than saying so (or saying some statement that implies female biology, like “when I was pregnant”).
Death Proof is pretty much all women talking to each other. It’s very gendered (there’s a pretty great discussion about women’s fashion magazines for instance) and one of the women (a stunt actress) essentially plays herself, which seems like it should count as her playing a female character. The whole first half is structured around one woman trying to set her friend up with a date, while also trying to take care of her and keep her safe — it’s completely a female dynamic. The second half is much more about women being butch, but it really is *women* being butch, and I pretty strongly reject the idea that women being butch means that they’re not women.
Like I said, the fact that it is so much about women’s relationships is I think it’s why critics have tended to find it so unappealing.
Clearly, Tarantino is not in general as female focused as Austen or Bronte (though C. Bronte is not actually all that fond of other women….) But I think he’s become more and more interested in women characters as he’s gone along. He’s a huge fan of Jack Hill, whose work really was distinguished by his interest in female characters and female friendships.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09sE7svMXSs
So that’s one movie. And although I’m not entirely sure I buy that subject matter is sufficient for gendering, the claims were in general — Tarantino’s female characters. So what about all the others?
Can I just point out how the stakes have changed? At first it was appalling to perform “apologetics” for Tarantino’s self-indulgent violence– whereas now having two movies with strong female characters still doesn’t make him an exceptional action-movie director. That could be your Tarantino collab film, Caro– Tough To Please.
I didn’t mean it had anything to do with anything previous, really — Charles just said “Tarantino has a lot of variety in his female characters,” and I was just asking for some meat on the bones of that claim. They don’t seem tremendously varied to me — they all seem just wild and mean (like everybody else in Tarantino films.)
There are 8 women in death proof (if I remember correctly.) What other action movie director are you thinking of that has a film with eight major female characters who spend most of the time talking to each other?
They definitely aren’t all wild and mean either.
Judging by the way Jaime’s women react to them, I’d say Jaime’s men are sexy.
Doyle “not at any time a sexy candidate”? You haven’t read “Spring 1982”. Lots of people are attracted to “blonde rednecks” by the way.
That’s why I asked what their characteristics were. Not what they talk about, but what their characteristics were. I know they are women, but are they gendered female, and if so, in what way? Other than “they are women who talk to each other about other things than men” — which I can get from soaps (without violence), or novels (without this kind of violence), or from, ahem, real life.
I’ve never cared about the physical biology of the character. I’ve always been more interested in the ways in which their gender was constructed — and I am more interested in nuances of normative gender or true androgyny with a mix of both norms than I am in seeing women in typically masculine roles and contexts. So convince me that these are varied women characters, worth my time to pay attention to. If all the women are butch, that is NOT variety. It’s not BAD, not in any way, but the claim was for variety.
And again, that’s one movie.
Remember that the original point of this was limitations in the way critics talk about female things. These comments reflect some of the same limitations — serial drama is not soap; 8 female actresses playing butch characters who have different jobs and histories but who talk to each other about fashion magazines is not a “variety” of female types — it’s 8 of the same female type.
Not that the characters aren’t diverse, but you haven’t described diverse characters. You’ve described a cast of actresses and what they do.
There’s more about character in the one sentence Robert wrote about Felicia and Anna (the “needs to be rescued” versus “no-nonsense” thing) and we didn’t come close to actually describing their characters. But you probably have a better sense of them from Robert’s description than I do of the women in Death Proof from yours.
So describe those 8 women (and preferably some from the other films too). You haven’t even told me their names! Let alone given me enough information to differentiate them from one another as different, varied people! (Except that one of them plays a stunt actress, which tells me exactly nothing about her personality or what kind of person she is…)
Or don’t — I mean, you aren’t obligated to answer the question. It’s not going to make me want to suffer through Tarantino.
For what it’s worth, tv offered three shows with ensemble female casts this fall — Charlie’s Angels, which only had three, Pan Am, which has 4 with some recurring female side characters, and The Playboy Club, which had about 12 (who did spend most of their time talking to each other.) 2 of the three have been canceled, and both of those were very, very bad. In all cases, the gendering was very overt, but also very pat, trafficking in stereotypes of nurturing and self-conscious and ambitious and manipulative women obsessed with men and fashion and blah blah. They were all basically soaps on the surface, in terms of subject matter and general overall plot arc, but without the investment in psychological intimacy or motivation that the daytimes like 80s GH got so right. None of the writers seemed to have a clue how gender normative women like that talk to each other. So just the fact that women talk to each other really, truly, honestly isn’t enough to make something worthwhile. The Bechdel test is telling, but not all there is. I like the old BBC miniseries of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy a great deal, and it has virtually no women — Alec Guiness’s old girlfriend, who is a really wonderful character but appears onscreen for something like 4 minutes is the only one I can think of. (She’s striken with arthritis, forced into retirement due to politics despite a brilliant career, fiercely proud of her skill at her job and so disappointed at how it ended, desperately, graspingly remembering their long-ago flirtation as a bright spot of encouragement amidst that heartbreak, substituting a nostalgic romantic recognition for the professional recognition she was denied — so much about her character and personality gets packed into that 4 minutes of her talking even though she is talking to a man.) It’s stellar genre work, really.
So just because the characters are biologically female and talking to each other doesn’t mean the characters are actually varied and especially doesn’t mean their talk is gendered female. (Talk among real biological women isn’t always gendered female either!)
I’m not demanding that the talk be gendered female, but is it not gendered? Is it gendered male? What kind of talk is it? What kind of “female” characters are they? That’s what I want to know.
(I should say that I don’t mean it isn’t possible to have a diversity of butch characters, but then you’d need to describe them as something other than just “butch.”)
Matt, do those women ever articulate what it is they find sexy about the men, or can it be gleaned from context?
I mean, Noah maybe will say that the women’s reaction can’t be trusted since a man created the women, so they’ll behave according to the creator’s fantasy, not according to reality. It’s also theoretically possible that the women are deluded, or making choices to date thoroughly un-sexy men because there aren’t any sexy alternatives and they think it’s important to be dating somebody. Or maybe the man isn’t sexy by any broad cultural metric but the woman has some real affinity for him that makes him sexy just to her. That kind of stuff happens.
But if there is actually a disjunct between conventional norms of male sexiness and male sexiness in L&R, I’d be very curious to know why people think that is and whether it means anything.
I’m trying to get through all the comments I shortchanged.
Robert, your comment about the differences between male comics characters and their film counterparts really resonates with me. I think it does involve the representation of physicality — the distinctions you draw are really convincing. I was reminded of the James Bond comic Noah wrote about a couple of weeks ago — Ian Fleming’s vision of the character wasn’t thuggish at all, but the comic books went with a version that looked like Bond had been bleeding from the face without a bandage a few too many times. I don’t know if this has to do with comics’ affection for caricature, if it’s actually anxiety about masculinity that forces the representations into the extremes, or maybe it’s that craggy faces have more texture and seem more nuanced. It’s a really perceptive observation, though, worth more examination.
Noah, did I actually say somewhere that you were making up that Tarantino has critical distance on his subject matter? I don’t agree with myself if I did — I think there’s plenty of distance, too much distance! I don’t think he does anything particularly interesting with the distance, though — maybe I just failed to say that successfully? I think the analytical/critical places he gets are very predictable and pat, very much recycled film studies in a violent jumpsuit. I do agree that he is _trying_ to say something about violence and about filmic representation. I just think there are a gazillion other filmmakers who do the things he does much much better — Cronenberg, if you must have body horror. I think Cronenberg is brilliant even when I find him repugnant. Or David Lynch. Or pretty much any French experimental film. So what’s left, that’s original to Tarantino, is the hyper-intensity of the violence and meanness. And I not only don’t think he says anything particularly profound about violence, I think he’s actively wrong about it, for basically the same reasons that I think you are actively wrong about it — it subsumes violence entirely into the Symbolic, or tries to. But violence is always at most a bridge between the Symbolic and the Real and more often the signifier of the impossibility of a bridge between the Symbolic and the Real. That’s why there is blood on the Cross; that’s why sacrifice is a good theme for propaganda; that’s why there is fear in the Gothic; that’s why murder in a cozy always happens offscreen.
I don’t think it’s a moral failing to be able to distinguish subtleties within that context. I do think it’s a critical failing to not be able to also appreciate what aspects are not subtle, especially when that failure makes you overlook or devalue the impact of tone and atmosphere. Like in that last scene of Pulp Fiction — I don’t think it is a moral failing to read it as about non-brutishness. I think it is a critical failing for a reading not to take into account the emotional affect of the amped-up tension in parsing that. My students saw it (and most reacted in very gendered ways). Robert sees it; I see it. The fact that your reading dismisses the tension (or really, just ignores it) rather than accounting for it is a problem with your reading.
For the most part, the boys in my classes tended to react similarly to you about the violence, although they rarely caught the nuances. But they generally reacted the same way – it’s so over the top it’s not real; he doesn’t really want you to believe it (which is sophomore-speak for critical distance), he uses extremes because he can talk about things that he couldn’t in a slower more boring movie. Your aesthetic response isn’t entirely idiosyncratic. But, critically, formally, the film doesn’t set up or demand that response – it allows it. I think I had one girl share that response, and there were always a few boys who shared the experience of the girls and found the whole thing tedious and noisy. Tarantino’s treatment of violence either only works for a particular niche who will respond the way your reading requires without having their hands held (which is the way many comics work), in which case critics should identify and acknowledge the biases of the niche and analyze those along with the work, or it recognizes and responds to the resistance to the violence, and hopefully does, or fails to do, something meaningful with that resistance. I think it’s absurd to suggest that Tarantino doesn’t realize people will resist it, and maybe you’re not suggesting that. But you haven’t really indicated that you are sensitive to or even attentive to that resistance, or that you think he is, let alone made that a part of your interpretation. Instead, you give the impression that the resistance comes entirely from individual viewers being too ideologically biased or whatever to work with Tarantino’s game.
Which may be true — but if Tarantino’s game is to just ignore that understandable and extremely common response, I’d say that means he’s not quite as savvy or as “analytical” as you think he is about how film works — he’s just like a comic book creator, pandering to his niche.
I think I shortshifted this too: I said, “I mean some insight into the social and psychological conditions that shaped those experiences”
And Steven Saumels responded “One is definetly not going to get that from L&R.”
Is that really true? I don’t know that it surprises me — but I honestly just can’t imagine anybody leaving it out. Filling those gaps is really central to good narrative for me, especially character-driven narrative, where psychological motivation is so vital. And characters are what everybody always lauds L&R for. If you never really understand the social and psychological forces that motivate and define them, how can they be so compelling?
I don’t know that there’ll be anyway of satisfying whatever type you have in mind, Caro. Tarantino has a diverse set of female characters, not something that can be ideologically stamped for approval. That’s a good thing to me. Plus, I’m not sure I know any gals who act in ways that would fulfill your criteria.
In Death Proof, one woman talks about how she refuses to give it up to a man she’s interested in, but complains to her friends how he’s been seeing someone else. The other two are somewhat sympathetic to the man seeing someone else. In the other group, one woman uses her sexuality to pretty much overpower everyone else in the room, while an acquaintance from high school discusses how she’s been living in the woman’s shadow all her life. And, as Noah has alluded, this is in the middle of a slasher/car chase film.
In Jackie Brown, compare the fate of Jackie, who is an active agent with quite a range of human emotions to the girlfriend who’s been content living off of Samuel Jackson’s gun dealer. Surely something positive is being said by that (granted, with the language of a crime/heist film). And, for that matter, compare that girlfriend to how Uma Thurman’s gangster moll in Pulp Fiction comes across as much more self-deluded — that she should know what she’s involved in, but pretends otherwise. That is, his dominated women don’t react to their constraints in the same way. And then there’s the sweetness of Bruce Willis’ gal, which plays very much like women I’ve known.
The two parallel plots to kill Hitler in Inglourious Basterds are both hatched by women: one an avenging Jewish woman who chooses to sacrifice herself and the man she loves for a higher moral calling; the other a German actress willing to potentially sacrifice her career to rid her country of evil. I’d say what’s exceptional about these portrayals is their lack of stereotypicality, of being easily pigeon-holed into what most commonly motivates women in similar fiction. (The film itself pretty much satirically takes down the notion of male heroism.)
And there are interesting contrasts in the feminine fantasy constructions of Kill Bill, too. The rivalries between the Bride and her three female antagonists are all rooted in revenge, yes, but the relations are differently nuanced, the villains aren’t motivated in the same way, nor is the way the Bride treats them (e.g., destroying Vivica Fox’s domestic illusion at the beginning doesn’t result in the same sort of elation that killing Lucy Liu’s crime boss does). Are these relations essentially feminine? I don’t know about that, but the emotional range is a lot wider than I’ve seen in most martial arts films.
Caro: I said, “I mean some insight into the social and psychological conditions that shaped those experiences” And Steven Saumels responded “One is definetly not going to get that from L&R.” Is that really true?
Nope, not true. It’s an exaggeration. There are lots of social and psychological conditions which make up the woman Maggie has finally become. Now if you hate Love and Rockets, you might say that these conditions and motivations aren’t convincing but they’re there – some in broad daylight and others only hinted at. It might be a low bar but I would say that Maggie is at least as interesting as any female character on American TV at present. Also, the men in Love and Rockets aren’t uniformly ugly – I’d say that a number of them are “dashing” Latino street types (you’ll have to ask a female reader for confirmation). They’re certainly considerably more attractive than those drawn by his brother. But the series is really focused on the women and their generational relationships, so the men almost never become central characters (except in the case of Ray I suppose).
Noah: “What other action movie director are you thinking of that has a film with eight major female characters who spend most of the time talking to each other?”
The Descent? All female spelunking movie. Not as thematically interesting as “Death Proof” but it exists. And Caro, please don’t watch “Death Proof”. It has even more senseless violence than “Pulp Fiction”. It will only make you more angry. There’s little doubt that Tarantino revels in it – it’s his fetish. Ties in with his love for movies like “Old Boy” and “Lady Snowblood” etc. Which are both fine (not all time favorites by a long shot) in my book but you’ll really really hate the former.
Also, shocked that you actually took a chance on “Charlies’ Angels” and “The Playboy Club”. The only pilot worth watching this new season is probably “Boss” (with Kelsey Grammer). Not a recommendation since it has its share of violence and has similarities with things like “The Wire”.
“The adventure material really helped give it its crossover appeal. Guys openly acknowledged watching it.”
Yes. I remember when I was a kid even a janitor in our school was talking about watching it. The adventure and the fact that Anthony Geary was “cool.”
“The Road or Gangs of New York (to go for something you implied you’d consider realist)”
“Gangs of New York” is not realist. Bert had it right. “Mean Streets” would be the best possible Scorcese example. Maybe not “Raging Bull” because of all of the stylization. Perhaps certain sequences.
“I haven’t seen Gangs of New York.”
It’s an overstuffed mess.
“Doyle “not at any time a sexy candidate”? You haven’t read “Spring 1982?. Lots of people are attracted to “blonde rednecks” by the way.”
“Spring 1982” is no doubt one of JH’s best stories. We were using popular soap operas and the type of lead characters they cast as the metric. Over the top beautiful. Doyle does not qualify, especially these days. I’m sure some people found him attractive, back then, but that still would be eye-of-the-beholder.
“Caro- Matt, do those women ever articulate what it is they find sexy about the men, or can it be gleaned from context?”
Generally, I think in most cases the latter. “Those Wild and Mixed Up Locas” from the Maggie the Mechanic book would probably be one example.
“But if there is actually a disjunct between conventional norms of male sexiness and male sexiness in L&R, I’d be very curious to know why people think that is and whether it means anything.”
Pretty much what Suat said. Considering that the “Locas” cast has always been about 75-80% female, and the lead characters at least part-time lesbians, in the end I don’t think it matters terribly much. The “Ray Dominguez” character aside, the women have had the starring role. And they’ve always been sexy, even if tempered a bit with shades of “realism.” Maybe it just comes down to the artist being a male and hey, he just likes drawing women, dammit. That said, I’m very interested in hearing what lesbian soap opera fans think of the series.
“Caro- But the narratives are structured not to make the viewer care, but to give the viewer room to analyze and sort out those complex and dramatic motivations — what makes this character feel and act this way, why is she plotting, are there secrets in her past, is he telling the truth? The long duration of the narrative isn’t about building emotional relationships with characters”
This makes me think that you won’t care for much of “Locas.” But then again, maybe its not a fair comparison. GH can spend hundreds of hours unwinding those characters. “Locas” would come out with about fifty to sixty pages per year. These comparisons can’t line up exactly. Surely there are other examples besides GH that can be pointed to?
Just out of curiosity- who did the writing for GH? And was it mostly women?
“Cronenberg, if you must have body horror. I think Cronenberg is brilliant even when I find him repugnant.”
Yes, “Scanners” is terrific. Its a prime example of “termite cinema.”
“Caro: I said, “I mean some insight into the social and psychological conditions that shaped those experiences” And Steven Saumels responded “One is definetly not going to get that from L&R.” Is that really true?”
Ng Suat Tong says: “Nope, not true. It’s an exaggeration. There are lots of social and psychological conditions which make up the woman Maggie has finally become.”
Yes. She’s lower middle class, has a probable mediocre education and a meager apartment managing job. Plus she’s Latina, bi-sexual and has no one to support her. But these conditions are never delved in to. Its mostly implicit. Let me bring up again the quote I was responding to:
“Caro- Now, I can absolutely respect a realist-to-melodramatic book that offers rare, meaningful wisdom on WHY those experiences happened to people — and by “rare and meaningful” I mean some insight into the social and psychological conditions that shaped those experiences that a bright, socially adept, adult female wouldn’t have already gained from the routine business of conducting her social and familial life. I respect Dreiser for that reason”
“Locas” doesn’t get into “WHY” very much. There is plenty of emotional shading but the “WHY” just isn’t there. And I’m not saying thats a bad thing, necessarily.
By the way, anyone who hasn’t read much “Locas” should probably start with the “Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S.” book. I think that was Jaime’s peak period. That would be it.
Caro: I mean some insight into the social and psychological conditions that shaped those experiences that a bright, socially adept, adult female wouldn’t have already gained from the routine business of conducting her social and familial life. I respect Dreiser for that reason”
Steven: “Locas” doesn’t get into “WHY” very much. There is plenty of emotional shading but the “WHY” just isn’t there…
Hmm, now you’ve made me wonder what is being asked for here. If Caro is asking whether there’s an in-depth sociological portrait of Maggie and Hopey’s barrio and her family dynamics, then some of it is there. But no documentary-like approach to the politics of the era and the sociolcultural events that shaped the U.S middle-class. No out of story moments like what you get in Moby Dick or War and Peace. Locas is almost religious in its avoidance of “big” real-life contemporaneous events in U.S. history. This choice (and it is a very deliberate choice) adds a certain timelessness to the proceedings.
I do think episodes in Wigwam Bam, Chester Square, Home School, Ghost of Hoppers, and the recent Love Bungers do explain why Maggie acts the way she does. It’s not a straight 2 + 2 = 4 though. Life isn’t mathematics.
Caro: “I haven’t seen Gangs of New York.”
Steven: “It’s an overstuffed mess.”
Watch the first half hour, Caro (after that Scorsese had to pay the expensive set). I watch period films these days for the historical reenactment alone.
Quentin Tarantino is for campy violence what Robert Crumb is for campy racism.
Charles, I can come up with the kind of gendered psychological personality and motivational profiles I’m asking for for pretty much any female character – honestly, I could probably do it for Tarantino’s if I had the patience to sit and watch them, although they likely wouldn’t be very detailed if I remember the amount of information I get, or very flattering, or very gendered female. But you’re making these characters sound almost like caricatures of women.
I mean, can’t you see the difference between saying someone is “the type who needs to be rescued a lot” (like Robert said about Felicia) and saying someone is “an active agent with a range of human emotions?” The latter could describe anybody from Robert Scorpio to Leon Panetta, and doesn’t really have much at all to do with the character’s character. But the former is a recognizable character type. It tells me that the character is likely to go into situations and then panic once she gets into them, unable to think of a way to get herself out. It tells me that even though she’s got spunk, she’s probably supposed to invoke a little of the stereotype of “helpless women” (which is why I always preferred her friend Anna.) And I’ve gotten that from 8 words of reportage, so it does NOT reflect the character in any depth; there’s a lot more information, some of it general, some of it about how she feels and reacts to specific situations, that I could get by actually going and watching a clip — because, as I said in the piece, that’s what the dialogue is for.
You’re sort of suggesting it when you talk about a woman using her sexuality to overpower the room — but that’s a report of the activity. Is she the type to do that routinely? Is it due to insecurity or is it manipulation for a specific reason? Is she aware of doing it or is it unconscious? Does she do it to make herself feel better about her desirability — or deliberately to intimidate other women? Etc etc. And likewise for the friend in the “shadow”? Why does it bother her to be in the shadow — because she wants the approval of men too? Because she gets passed over in some way because of it? Because she really feels like she can’t physically compete?
I think this gets to what Robert said about the characters in superhero movies, and illustrates one of the the things I don’t like about Tarantino’s direction — or perhaps it’s just that when the characters are so busy acting out violent scenes they don’t have time — but generally actors are really really good, in a way that comics on the page aren’t, at infusing the kind of inflection into language that allows you to gather that kind of information I’m looking for. Although it doesn’t require an actor — think about how easily you could construct a profile like that for Hardy’s Tess, since the entire book is essentially there to open her up like that.
I mean, this is the point of my saying strong characterization isn’t what gets you praised, it’s what gets you published. It isn’t an either/or between complex literary or theoretical ambition and good characterization. Metatext doesn’t mandate flat, blunt, or even broad-stroke characterization. But to have a “variety of characters” — that doesn’t just mean women with different professions and histories. All people have professions and histories – that’s something that makes us the same, even if the specifics of those jobs and histories are different.
I think GH writers changed pretty frequently, and I think there was always a good bit of improvised dialogue and ad libbing and changing up dialogue on soaps, but the list of writers here, from 1984, has 5 women and 4 men.
Suat, “social and psychological” is more internal, I think, than you’re talking about. I mean, not that I object to or devalue the “in-depth sociological portrait” but if the goal is to tease out how much the show is like soap operas and to defend this notion of good characterization, then it’s mostly psychological and the small-scale social that’s at stake. Motivation, but in fine and immediate detail, not broad strokes.
In soaps you get a lot of it quickly; Steven’s right that soaps have thousands of hours to build characters, but they’re also pretty good at getting at psychological characterization pretty quickly. That’s the point of soap dialogue. I honestly don’t see how you get that level of psychological characterization without a lot of dialogue, and I think that’s a really big problem with comparing Locas to GH – psychoanalysis is a talking cure. Gossip is talk. Soap operas involve a lot of instances where what’s on your screen is 2-t people having a sustained conversation about something, because generally the point of the narrative is their psychology, not action, so those conversations get the information viewers are seeking across just fine. As Robert said, the adventure subplots in GH were unusual and made the show appealing to men — but the writers didn’t stop having characters talk to each other at length just because they were also doing action sequences. Just — without a lot of talk, I don’t see how you get there.
But I think that is one of the main reasons why action movies — and comics — are so often gendered male and even experienced as gendered male, and why it’s so easy to perceive even very male-focused fiction as less so. Long conversations (even if they’re internal monologues or narration) are a really important tool for conveying psychological motivations and satisfying the urges that female genre is going after.
And FWIW, I’m pretty unapologetic about feeling that there’s something fucked up and wrong about anybody who has violence as a fetish. No amount of metatext, Noah, will get me over that, and nothing you’ve said makes me think Suat and Domingos aren’t right. It’s caricature fetish — it’s just fetishizing things that you like (although not necessarily that you fetishize; you can enjoy someone’s violence fetish without sharing it, I guess?)
I’m just not clear, though, and would like to be, why the characters in Human Diastrophism strike you as so negative but Bellatrix in Kill Bill doesn’t also rub you the wrong way. They both come off, strongly, as male fantasies of idealized women to me — just the fantasies of different men, who value different personality traits and aspects of women’s character. Tarantino has a fetish for violence, so he likes making his women commit acts of violence. At that level, it’s no more or less perverse than Gilbert’s fetish for ginormous breasts on women who are slightly emotionally and socially broken. And I’m not convinced that either gets those characters much beyond that.
I don’t really have a problem with that aspect of either, honestly, although I object to anybody trying to hold those women up as stellar examples of female characterization. But objecting to it in one, and not in the other — I don’t get that.
I’m going to throw something out there and see what people think about it. I think everyone (though it may vary, and of course has lots of connections with rational and irrational fear) finds pleasure in violence. I don’t have a good handle on the death drive, but if you subscribe to it, it is a drive. And I think it’s a sense of being in the presence of power– channeling it, receiving it, seeing it.
None of which invalidates soap operas or the feminine libidinal charge of language-jouissance. I don’t even remember why it’s relevant. But it might be a gender thing, since women are sort of in the Real and desire the Symbolic, and men are sort of in the Symbolic and desire the Real. At any rate, the trauma=drama equasion needs to be dealt with in some way.
Violence is wrong, revenge is wrong– and starting to work out the ways in which our pleasure in those things inform evil intentions and deeds should really not be a taboo subject.
Caro, I didn’t say they were all butch. I said some of them were. The difference between the femme characters in the first half and the butch characters in the second half is fairly important. They’re absolutely not 8 of the same female type. They have different interests and different motivations, and the way they fit into a very gendered narrative is different.
I haven’t seen it for a couple of years, so I doubt I can answer your question with the specificity you want.
In terms of Kill Bill — it’s not really my favorite Tarantino film, and Thurman in it isn’t my favorite female character of his. I think fetishizing strong women has arguably some positive political results, though.
My objections to Gilbert aren’t well summarized by saying that I object to big breasts on women either…but I don’t think I really want to get into that again right now.
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Caro says:
…If you’ve got so much violence in your soul that you need cruelty in your art, go become a policeman or a soldier and get the hell away from my civil society.
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Heavens. I’d hate to see what would become of our relatively peaceful “civil society” if the cops and soldiers just…went away. (Not that I’m overly idealizing either group, but…)
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I don’t think Tarantino’s work is trying to right any kind of social wrong — it’s schlocky naval-gazing entertainment that plays to the basest instincts and papers it over with a very thin veneer of metatextuality. His fascination with film is no more inspiring or smart than the constant creative incest within comics.
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Indeed so!
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But we seem to think that depicting the world as cruel and violent and ugly and brutish and mean is more “authentic” than imaginging the ways in which it, and we, can be otherwise. I think that’s deeply and profoundly destructive and a completely failure of art.
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And, moreover, it propagates that worldview. (Not that I’m not profoundly pessimistic m’self…)
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Honestly, THAT’s what I wish the Christian culture warriors would harp on, instead of “Happy Holidays” and gay marriage. Because that despairing hopeless angry cynicism is vastly more dangerous to the Christian worldview than someone refusing to wish a Jew Merry Christmas.
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But, the Christian culture warriors, being fundamentalists, do see “the world as cruel and violent and ugly and brutish and mean”; with themselves as perfect Good on one side, and everybody else as a vile servant of Satan.
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…what is it about typical comics narratives that make it so difficult to infuse them with sophisticated, socially adept and sexually mature male characters, and a large number of female characters with diverse personality types and interests?
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I can’t imagine… http://edge.papercutpm.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/hulk-smash.png
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This is part of the denigration of romance and soap opera — women end up being pressured to appreciate ugliness and violence and all those stereotypically male things because they’re so “real” and they offer so much “insight” — while the insight offered by more stereotypically female things, like social maturity or the complexities and nuances of emotional motivation, are downplayed, run roughshod over…
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Which likewise propagates the worldview that violence is more real and effective than wussy feminine stuff like conversation, emotional understanding and interaction.
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Charles, I googled and found this [ http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/?p=16606 ], and YES, you’re right; that’s exactly the way I feel about Tarantino.
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I found it amusingly telling that when asked “Has 9/11 or the war on terror had any impact on you personally or creatively?”, Tarantino kept relating it to movies:
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A: “9/11 didn’t affect me, because there’s, like, a Hong Kong movie that came out called Purple Storm and it’s fantastic, a great action movie. And they work in a whole big thing in the plot that they blow up a giant skyscraper. It was done before 9/11, but the shot almost is a semiduplicate shot of 9/11. I actually enjoyed inviting people over to watch the movie and not telling them about it. I shocked the shit out of them…I was almost thrilled by that naughty aspect of it. It made it all the more exciting.”
Q: But on some level you must have been caught up in the reality of 9/11.
A: “I was scared, like everybody else. ‘OK, what is this new world we’re going to be living in? Is it going to be fucking Belfast here?’ And I didn’t want to fucking fly nowhere. I remember thinking at the time – this was when they were shooting the Matrix sequels in Australia – ‘What if everything, all this shit, breaks out, man?’ And all that’s left in Hollywood are the Matrix people? That would be a fuckin’ drag’ (Laughs).”
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Caro says:
Looks like you can read a translation of the Barthes here…
…That really resonates with what I think about Tarantino. I think we have gotten to the point that we perceive the distortion itself as the most real thing and the real thing as unreal.
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As Ronnie Reagan said, “I know it’s real, because I saw it in the movies!”
George W. Bush’s “mission accomplished” landing on an aircraft carrier — all a carefully staged photo-op — makes him more of a “hero” in the public mind than John Kerry’s actual Vietnam War bravery.
And then there were the Republican politicos who, when John Wayne died, wanted to award him (whose wartime “heroism” was confined to acting in movies) the Congressional Medal of Honor…
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…brutality in Tarantino just isn’t romanticized the way it is in Bronte…Puncturing the romanticism of violence is one way Tarantino is realistic…
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Isn’t it awfully aesthesized, though, made to look cool? Which creates a “romanticizing” effect?
About those Brontes: http://harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=202
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Caro says:
…I was reminded of the James Bond comic Noah wrote about a couple of weeks ago — Ian Fleming’s vision of the character wasn’t thuggish at all, but the comic books went with a version that looked like Bond had been bleeding from the face without a bandage a few too many times. I don’t know if this has to do with comics’ affection for caricature, if it’s actually anxiety about masculinity that forces the representations into the extremes, or maybe it’s that craggy faces have more texture and seem more nuanced…
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In the case of the Bond comic strip, the artist’s alteration from the approach of the Fleming-commissioned rendering had the effect of making Bond look more ruggedly working-class; Fleming’s Bond — whom the strip artist criticized as appearing “pre-war” — looked like a borderline-aristocratic “toff”…
I don’t really disagree with any of that, Bert, although I could quibble here and there. Not with the gist of it though. I think Cronenberg very much is doing that last project you describe (even when I can’t stand to watch!) and coming up with things, especially regarding visual imagery, that are pretty original. I think Godard’s Notre Musique has that project. Of theoretical work, Rene Girard’s book Violence and the Sacred is very strong, as is Allen Feldman’s Formations of Violence, dealing with the narrative of violence in Northern Ireland. And Hannah Arendt’s On Violence, of course, is the classic.
But I don’t think the need to ask those questions or the interest in answering them puts us in the place of having to apologize for fetishized violence or eroticized violence and I think both are present in Tarantino. I think Tarantino’s got nothing to say about violence and/or representation that goes beyond what film studies and Girard and Feldman and others haven’t already postulated, and I think the din of that fetishized, eroticized violence interferes with considering him some sort of popularizer of their theories or a theorist in his own right. No more (or less) so than Crumb is a theorist of racism.
So the problem I have with him isn’t with the fact that it’s violent. The problem is with the fact that the violence is at a level where it begins to take the place of other things, to function, as Suat says, as a fetish. It’s eroticized — Tarantino turns/reduces women into avenging angels not for their liberation, but for his pleasure — and then he pushes it even further until it’s fetishized, repeated, over and over, replacing any other way of grappling with the themes, and unreplacable by any other way of grappling with the themes. That’s what a fetish is — something which replaces, stands in for, the fetishist’s desire for anything else and, in so doing, becomes something so valued that it can’t be replaced by anything else. (In the classic example, the foot fetishist replaces his desire for the woman with passion for her foot, and in the process of her foot becoming the only part of her that matters, the woman herself is erased.)
I also don’t think fetishizing violence ultimately makes it any less Real, except for the fetishist. It is a way of bracketing violence into the symbolic, as I’ve said, of keeping it away from the Real, of resisting the pressures of the death drive. (That’s part of what fetishes do, especially in Lacan where the death drive replaces the oedipus complex as the heuristic center of psychoanalysis.) But in the absence of the fetish, as is the case for most viewers, that function doesn’t engage — you don’t get to the point that it evades the death drive, you just get the death drive shoved in your face. And since the death drive is opposed to the pleasure principle, that’s unpleasant for most viewers.
To be pedantically theoretical for a moment, I think it’s important that in post-Freudianism, the “drives” aren’t exactly drives — they’re just vectors in the topology. They’re very independent of will and conscious desire. In Freud the death drive is pretty marginal, but it’s both central to Lacan and very abstract. Which is a quibble — you don’t really subscribe to the death drive; it’s a sort of extra-human thing that pushes against you, more just an “awareness of mortality”, except it’s not really aware.
I agree with Bert, to no one’s surprise.
Caro, just to pick up on something you said before — to me it sounds like you’re saying it’s a critical failure not to be so put off by the violence that that’s all I talk about. Which doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for discussion, it doesn’t seem like.
But in terms of what the point of the violence is…first of all, it’s not all hyperbolic or ramped up, necessarily. The scene where DeNiro shoots his girlfriend, is anticlimactic; same with the scene where Travolta shoots the guy in the car accidentally (which is even offscreen, I think.)
The scene with Jules in the cafe…I think it’s interesting that Robert says he was worried about the guy getting shot, because the character you’re worrying about is pretty much entirely unsympathetic; he’s a crook and a loser, and that’s all we know about him, really. It’s the amped up threat of violence that makes you care about him, I think…and that also serves as the emotional lever or foil for Jackson’s change of heart. It’s attractive and frightening and exciting (like the cold-assed shit Jackson says before he shoots people)…and that’s what Jackson is walking away from.
I agree with Suat that violence is a fetish for Tarantino — and with Bert that it’s a fetish that is fairly widely held, to some degree, by most people (as I said before, there’s violence in GH too, I’m sure.) In that scene, Tarantino is indulging the fetish — and also rejecting it. Nobody gets shot. Jackson walks away. The amped up tension, and the anticlimax, are both part of the thematic and moral message. I find that a lot more honest, and a lot more meaningful, than an Agatha Christie cosy (for example) in which the violence is all offscreen so everyone can safely lick their lips over it through the entire narrative without tasting blood.
Mike said:
Granted. I meant “civilian” I guess — I think it’s appropriate that a soldier or policeman has a different relationship to violence than a civilian…that’s part of the point of having policemen and soldiers. Not that civilian society and military society are radically discrete, but they are distinct in this respect. It’s one of the things that’s so very hard about being a policeman or a soldier (or really, an EMT) — they bear this burden for us.
I think you’re right, too, about the changes making Bond more working class. There are an awful lot of aristocratic men in romances and soaps…but the working class ones are appealing too. They do tend, I think (and this is a hypothesis based on limited evidence) that working-class men in soaps tend to be very boyish, if they still have the possibility of becoming less working-class…
Mike: “Isn’t it awfully aesthesized, though, made to look cool? Which creates a “romanticizing” effect?”
Sometimes it is. As Bert said before, it often is fairly anticlimactic and clumsy and stupid. Tarantino’s villains really aren’t cool, at least a lot of the time. They’re stupid and bumbling and ridiculous.
Noah — I have a meeting, damn it, so some of this will have to wait. But I’m not sure fetishing women is ever all that politically positive; it’s just pleasurable. There are degrees of good and bad, but it’s still ultimately fetish.
I don’t think it’s a critical failure in ALL violent movies. I think it’s an error to not recognize how extreme and fetishistic it is in Tarantino, and I don’t think
I’ve said I think there’s a huge difference between Tarantino and Cronenberg, even though I do not really “like” Cronenberg for the same reasons or go to it for pleasure. But the violence and the tension in Cronenberg is vastly less fetishized and eroticized and extreme, so I think talking about it less is justifiable. I don’t think it is with Tarantino — I think it’s apologetics, just like when people make apologies for the racism in Angelfood McSpade.
And we just disagree, clearly. I think that scene where Jules accidentally shoots the guy in the car is possibly the most violent scene I’ve ever witnessed. It’s the only scene I consistently left the screening room for. To me, it’s far and away the worst moment in the film. Anticlimactic isn’t the same thing as understated (i.e. having anticlimatic violence isn’t evidence that the violence isn’t still hyperbolic and ramped up.)
And for what it’s worth, I absolutely 100% do not give a damn about Tim Roth’s character and whether he gets shot or not either. I don’t give a damn about any of Tarantino’s characters — I’m perfectly happy for him to kill them all off because IMO they are all completely and totally useless fucks with no redeeming characteristics whatsoever that the world would be vastly better off without. However, I fucking resent being asked to watch him wank over their carnage.
Actually, skimming again while listening to conference-line hold music: Noah, why is it that you think it matters whether the villians are cool or not? To me, that just means that they’re not romanticized. It doesn’t mean that they, and the violence they perpetuate, isn’t hyperbolic or ramped up or fetishized. Fetishes are often very quiet, and the hyperbole can be a net effect rather than a property of a specific instance…
Also, I think the thing with the scene in the cafe is sort of like being in a bank during a robbery while people are getting massacred around you. You’re not really sitting there thinking “Oh dear, I am really worried about marjorie.” You’re thinking, “please don’t shoot me; please don’t shoot anybody; make the gun go away; please get me the fuck out of here.” I don’t think that’s an abnormal response.
It’s not exactly that they’re realistic though. Travolta and Jackson are made ridiculous by inserting them into a tv sitcom where they’re the stooges, for example.
And it matters often because characters are stupid and foolish in his films often *because* they are associated with violence. It’s the violence that specifically diminishes them, as Bert says. That’s the case for Kurt Russell, and DeNiro and Travolta, and Jackson too, I think. It’s especially the case for male characters, actually. So while there is fetishized violence in the films, there’s also a strong sense of violence as unworthy, or as failure.
Incidentally…Mike, I find Tarantino’s reaction to 9/11 pretty great. Or at least, I wish that our leaders had taken 9/11 as an opportunity to go look at movies, rather than turning it into the most uniquely real thing to ever happen in human history. If they had done the first, there’d be a lot less dead bodies in Afghanistan and Iraq.
I still don’t really agree with this. Recognizing that a fetish is pathetic doesn’t make it any less of a fetish. Lots of fetishists are obsessed with how pathetic they are; that’s part of the pathology.
With this talk about the “Tarantinoizing” of the Holocaust, the aesthetisizing of violence, and what constitutes “realism,” couldn’t resist some more Photoshopping:
http://i1123.photobucket.com/albums/l542/Mike_59_Hunter/Conan_Conc3.jpg
(Apologies to Frazetta and the digitally conscripted concentration camp victims…)
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Caro says:
.. I think it’s appropriate that a soldier or policeman has a different relationship to violence than a civilian…that’s part of the point of having policemen and soldiers. Not that civilian society and military society are radically discrete, but they are distinct in this respect. It’s one of the things that’s so very hard about being a policeman or a soldier (or really, an EMT) — they bear this burden for us.
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For all the good about there not being a draft, I do worry about soldiers — and police, for that matter — being segregated away from the rest of society, not seen as “one of us.” Which leads to their feeling alienated; the public alternately maligning or exaggeratedly idealizing them, as Kipling told of in “Tommy”:
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Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an’ they’re starvation cheap;
An’ hustlin’ drunken soldiers when they’re goin’ large a bit
Is five times better business than paradin’ in full kit.
Then it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Tommy how’s yer soul?”
But it’s “Thin red line of ‘eroes” when the drums begin to roll…
We aren’t no thin red ‘eroes, nor we aren’t no blackguards too,
But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;
An’ if sometimes our conduck isn’t all your fancy paints:
Why, single men in barricks don’t grow into plaster saints…
For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Chuck him out, the brute!”
But it’s “Saviour of ‘is country,” when the guns begin to shoot…
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http://www.web-books.com/Classics/Poetry/Anthology/Kipling/Tommy.htm
Mike, I don’t disagree. I don’t know how you change it without a draft or mandatory military service, though, and that’s not happening.
I think the feelings of alienation are probably more destructive than the exaggerated images, especially where police are concerned, because they make it harder for the police to respect the people they’re there to protect, and that feeds into the worst kinds of anti-authoritarianism. Nobody likes to be lorded over by someone who is in a different group, but people can get behind being protected by their own strong ones. I feel like the uniformed personnel I encounter now are much angrier and harsher than they were in my youth.
I’d forgotten about this mixed review of Kill Bill I wrote a while back.
I do think Tarantino’s work is a lot more like Airplane or Naked Gun than people generally acknowledge (I love Airplane and Naked Gun.)
Oh, on the lynching thing – I think it’s really important to be able to distinguish between eroticized violence and ritualized violence. In lynching the violence is extremely ritualized (at least narratively; obviously it can be eroticized, too, in the moment).
The Klan justified their lynchings as “refiner’s fire” (as in “but who may abide the day of his coming? and who shall stand when he appeareth? for he is like a refiner’s fire,” from Malachi.) That’s why they burned crosses. The psychological logic was not grounded in erotic pleasure; it was grounded in self-righteousness. And the righteousness was what was pleasurable.
I’m entirely comfortable saying that is worse than the eroticized violence in Tarantino, but it’s just not a fetish, narratively. Violence is not the fetish of the ideology; self-righteousness is. And being “narratively better than lynching” really isn’t saying much.
Nobody’s going to make Caro like Tarantino, but the idea that people don’t love to watch heads splatter is, I think, pretty false. We are perverse beings. We don’t want to (just) erase trauma, we want to inflict it.
John Wu, Michael Bey, Paul Verhoeven, whatever hack directed 300– those are all grand fetishizers of violence. Tarantino is queering that. He’s a far more moral creator than Crumb, or even Spiegelman. The Two Towers comic calls to mind Elie Wiesel on Oprah beating the drums for the Iraq wat– “Never Forget” is the kind of truly sinister statement that erases the humanity of victims. Zizek’s illustration, based on Levi-Strauss, of the leftist view of the universe as irrevocably split by conflict, but the conservative map of the world as a peaceful circle only interrupted by invaders deserviong death is a worthwhile conversation-starter.
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Caro says:
…I feel like the uniformed personnel I encounter now are much angrier and harsher than they were in my youth.
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I’ve heard that where the general police attitude used to be “us against them” (meaning us law-abiding folks against the criminals”), now the “us” is just the police, the “them” is everybody else…
I don’t think Wu, Bey and Verhoeven are fetishizers of violence; I think they’re romanticizers of it.
Which has it’s own problems, that I also don’t like. But the fact that Tarantino fetishizes, with all the psychological complexity and engagement of a fetish, rather than romanticizes doesn’t get him a free pass, which is what you guys are saying. Those things are all basically in the same category of people who use intense representations of violence to affect the emotions of their viewers. It’s really punishment.
And I think you’re overgeneralizing — some people like watching heads getting based in. It’s a NICHE; it’s not a property of all people. And in the same way that comics fans aren’t self-critical about the impacts and limitations of their subcultural characteristics when they engage with problematic representations in their art form, neither are Tarantino fans.
Mike, that really is what it seems like! It’s so sad…
Caro – I suppose you’re right that the fanbase for exploding heads is a niche – but it’s a very, very big niche. Tarantino is really popular. The “Saw” movies are really popular. Violent movies in general tend to do very well at the box office. It’s worthwhile to criticize that, but you’re criticizing a broader phenomenon than some weird fetish in an artistic subculture.
“some people like watching heads getting based in.”
That’s a niche. But violence isn’t restricted to watching people’s heads getting bashed in. Cozies have violence too. Soap operas have violence too; you were just praising GH for its adventure tropes. Violence is about as endemic as sex in popular culture of all sorts, directed at all genders, from Twilight to the Hunger Games to Harry Potter to Bronte to BL fan fiction. How it’s inflected and presented differs, and discussing that is certainly worthwhile. But arguing that one presentation is violence and others aren’t violence because you happen to find one disturbing and not the others doesn’t seem especially convincing to me.
Slasher films are arguably a niche. Tarantino is really, really popular; not significantly less popular than general hospital, I don’t think. So I’m not sure why exactly he’s supposed to be a niche…except that you don’t like it, of course. (Superhero comics are a niche because no one reads them, not because you in particular don’t.)
Wu and Verhoeven absolutely fetishize violence. I don’t know how you get around superslowmotion gunbattles holding babies. Much more than they romanticize it, I think (I guess wu arguably does both). Coppola and Scorcese romanticize it, I’d argue.
“Those things are all basically in the same category of people who use intense representations of violence to affect the emotions of their viewers. It’s really punishment. ”
So violence is better when it’s presented in a comfortable fashion, like in cozies where it’s off stage or in soap operas where it’s used to drive the plot but not commented on or thought about? On what grounds is that better, exactly? If violence is uncomfortable, shouldn’t it be presented as uncomfortable? Or shouldn’t that at least be an option? And shouldn’t violence affect your emotions…rather than, as in cozies, merely being a cute set up for an intellectual game? (Not that I hate cozies…but I think the way violence is used in them is fairly problematic.)
Tarantino doesn’t get an out because he fetishizes violence. I find his treatment of violence interesting and often inspiring because it’s thoughtful and (again as Bert says) often takes the really not especially common pop-culture position that violence makes you ridiculous and less of a person, rather than that it makes you cool and powerful. You haven’t really commented or reacted to any of the specific instances of that I’ve put forward, as far as I can tell.
I think your claim that its punishment is actually insightful. Tarantino does punish both his audience and his characters for their investment in violence…both by hurting characters they care about, and often by refusing to follow through on the logic of violence that genre seems to demand. It’s not clear to me why those are bad things exactly.
Oh, and lynching wise…I don’t know exactly what narratives of lynching you think you’re talking about, but the typical excuse for lynching involves accusing the victim of rape. That’s why the cross burning was usually preceded by castration. That seems fairly erotically invested to me.
I think the only reference on your approved ;ist that I knew, Caro, was Arendt. The banality of evil. I mean, evil is pretty banal in some Tarantino, and then it’s also absurd at other times. But, correct me if I’m wrong, for it to be romantic, it needs to be tied into a worldview, which is what you were earlier accusing “realist” movies of doing, right? So if it’s arbitrary and banal, it’s not a critique because the characters’ conversations don’t interest you as much as Arendt’s prose? The fetish involves erasing the object– but Tarantino doesn’t erase his victims. The Jew Hunter is pretty clearly the most interesting character in Inglorious Basterds, and he gets his.
If any depiction of violence involves fetishizing it, I need to have it explained to me again why you aren’t ujust categorically opposed to any depiction of violence ever.
Sorry; I fear I’m getting overly cranky. Just to say again: I’ve found this conversation very valuable. Among other things…I think it probably is really worthwhile to look more closely at the way lynching is connected to rape-revenge narratives, including those used by Tarantino. I’m not sure there are any rape-revenge films that really confront the racial dynamics of that, but there should be.
I’ve a limit on time right now, Caro and others are confusing the map and the mapped when it comes to violence. Tarantino loves films with violence in them. He loves the aesthetics of violence. I, too, love the aesthetics of violence and make no apologies for that. I also know the difference between seeing rape or murder in a film and the times that a former girlfriend of mine was raped by four men or one of my best friends was shot in the head at point blank range. They’re not the same — good grief. I should hope that it doesn’t take actually encountering the real thing to help some distinguish the psycho-emotional reactions in these cases. It’s horseshit psychoanalyzing to suggest Tarantino is a festishist of violence, at least, in any literal way. I don’t object to the term being used, but when you derive Wertham-styled realworld lessons from its use, then it becomes an actual problem. You need actual evidence for that. I can’t speak for Tarantino, but I don’t get off hanging out with murderers, even cute gals with swords, in real life. Does this really have to be stated? Evidently it does.
Speaking of cozies, but when I first saw the old movie version of Ten Little Indians I was a kid and loved it, because eccentrics in a manor house do it for me every time. The second time I saw it I was a grown-up with frantic mortality issues and I hated it, because all the characters were being awfully debonair and offhand about people getting murdered. Later I remembered something I’d learned as a volunteer at a small neighborhood library: the audience for Agatha Christie stories skews elderly (and yes, and yes, there are plenty of exceptions). I suspect some people who are very close to death find it comforting to engage entertainment in which death is reduced to a plot device that can be discussed with offhand wisecracks.
Spiegelman repeatedly critiques Elie Wiesel, Oprah, and “never forget” both inside and outside of his work—that’s not what his work is about (though I do think 2 Towers is not particularly good)
“Domingos- Watch the first half hour, Caro (after that Scorsese had to pay the expensive set). I watch period films these days for the historical reenactment alone. ”
The opening sequence in the ghetto was a complete historical fabrication. Everything about it was. Scorcese was giving his best guess based on meager historical records about those places. And what was with that women and the claws? It felt like something straight out of “X-Men.”
“NB- The scene where DeNiro shoots his girlfriend, is anticlimactic; same with the scene where Travolta shoots the guy in the car accidentally (which is even offscreen, I think.)”
Too bad the blood in it isn’t also off screen.
And way belatedly…It’s not true that social and psychological forces are not used to describe/define choices characters make in Jaime’s work. They definitely are…but it’s often very subtle (though less so lately), and often filled in after the fact (that is, we learn the motivations after we see the actions).
I think Agatha Christie appeals to the tween set as well. Perhaps because death is so distant from them, the lack of immediacy doesn’t seem problematic.
In general, though, the murder is never the point of those books. They’re just logic problems (like word problems in math). The violence is beside the point (yes, I know that’s what some folks above are criticizing—but it’s kind of like criticizing your high school math class for not being gory enough)
Eric B, I think you’re right, but the second time I saw the film I was hypersensitized about death and couldn’t accept the film’s artificial coolness. To which one might compare and contrast Tarantino’s artificial hotness.
steven samuels sez: An aside about GH- besides Luke’s adventures the other thing I dug back then was Demi Moore’s smoky voice. I don’t know if hers still sounds like that, but back then that was very hot…..
I’m with you. Moore was a lot more enjoyable on GH than she ever was in the movies I’ve seen her in. I don’t think she sounds all that different now, but the effect isn’t the same. A lot of the charge came from hearing that mature, womanly voice coming out of someone who was so young. Per Wikipedia, she was 19 when she started on GH. You’d have to go back to Bacall in To Have and Have Not for something similar.
Noah sez: it’s interesting that Robert says he was worried about the guy getting shot, because the character you’re worrying about is pretty much entirely unsympathetic; he’s a crook and a loser, and that’s all we know about him, really. It’s the amped up threat of violence that makes you care about him, I think
I’ve basically vowed not to so much as mention the name Tarantino again. Jackie Brown notwithstanding, I think David Denby summed Tarantino up pretty well years ago when he wrote, “Kill Bill is what’s formally known as decadence and commonly known as crap.” I think he’s just about the most over-discussed filmmaker relative to merit that I know of. It’s not just this thread. However, let me address this. The issue for me isn’t that I find the Roth character sympathetic, it’s that I find it really unpleasant–excruciating, really–to be put in the position of waiting to see if a character is going to be shot in the face at close range. I certainly don’t want to see it from a filmmaker who is as callous about the horror of violence as Tarantino is. (Another character gets shot in the face earlier in the film, and it’s just a pretext for a tasteless stream of absurdist humor that goes on for half an hour.) I’m not listening to what the Jackson character is saying–although the bullying manner of it heightens the feeling of violent portent–I’m waiting for him to put the gun away so I can breathe easier about the scene’s outcome.
Caro–more to come about our discussion issues, I promise!
“but it’s kind of like criticizing your high school math class for not being gory enough”
High school math classes don’t usually rely on story problems involving people getting killed. Though if they did, they might well be more popular.
Not to derail us, but it might be possible to talk about some of these issues of violence in a different context if you wanted to go over to the drifting classroom roundtable now underway. It’s even violence against children, so arguably even more unpleasant than Tarantino, if that’s any incentive.
It’s fine to put the gun away— it’s just not an action movie any more.
“Moore was a lot more enjoyable on GH than she ever was in the movies I’ve seen her in.”
This is, regrettably, an exceedingly low bar. Moore was always one of those actresses I wanted to like because she was so darned attractive…but alas, everything she was in was horrible. So it goes.
David Denby is kind of an idiot. Jonathan Rosenbaum too, alas….
“High school math classes don’t usually rely on story problems involving people getting killed. Though if they did, they might well be more popular.”
I knew somebody (probably you) would say that. Yes…they should try to increase the popularity in precisely this fashion.
History classes use violence in the story problems. That’s how ideology happens.
Steven: “The opening sequence [of _Gangs of New York_] in the ghetto was a complete historical fabrication.”
Yeah, I know, I didn’t mean that… I should have said so though, sorry!…
What I meant was Scorsese’s inspiration in Jacob Riis’ photos or everything surrounding Boss Tweed, nothing else… And I mean visually more than anything else. As I said in my previous comment: I’m a sucker for highly detailed historical reenactments.
Do I need to add that set decoration alone doesn’t a good film make? On the other hand: imagine a film with no actors… hmmm… I may be on to something…
On the lynching — I thought we’d talked about this before? The Klan burned those crosses in the field across from the house I grew up in. I went to school with the nieces and nephews and grandchildren of their victims. I watched them march in parades; I heard them recruit in churches. Their justification was that they were, had always been, the refiner’s fire, the instrument of God’s justice on a corrupt people. That’s how they recruited — in the 1870s; in the 1930s; in the 1970s. I’m not going to link to it but read the historical justification on their website: their interpellative mechanism is that they are protecting God’s society from decay, purifying it.
There is so much more to Klan violence than the subset of lynchings as revenge for rape. Those were just the narratives they thought would be compelling outside of rural evangelical pulpits. But their ideology was large, and expansive, and based on this notion that God had anointed them to purify his society. In the town my father grew up in, during the depression when the town had no money, the Klan served as the police force. They killed and maimed for reasons far less serious than rape, and they also bullied and traumatized anybody they felt did not conform to their ideas about what a proper society should be like, certainly including sexual crimes (and sexual deviance) but also men who didn’t support their children properly, women who didn’t bring their children to church, children who cursed, teenagers who drank and went truant, etc. etc. etc.
I’ve witnessed Klansmen in churches in near-orgasmic trances over this idea that they are God’s refining fire — it’s erotic all right, but the erotism is not tied to the violence in the way you’re suggesting; it is tied to the ideology, and it is vastly more complicated, vastly more insidious, and vastly more pervasive despite the Klan’s significantly lower profile today. It’s a kind of self-glorifying religious megalomania and it is incredibly and excrutiatingly frightening despite not looking violent at all.
So sure, there’s aspects of it that are about rape-revenge. But if you think killing black men for raping white women is all the violence the Klan ever perpetuated, you’re just nuts.
Yeah, the Klan fit the conservative (fascist) model. The violence is an unfortunate necessity to restore harmony and order. They’re using violence as a tragic consequence of the greater glory– which is romantic and ideological.
The writing of Joseph de Maistre (an extremely eloquent romantic conservative aristocrat from French Revolution times) on the figure of the executioner is instructive– the executioner is abject but “all greatness, all power, all social order depends upon the executioner.”
I think the niche strand of this is a red herring. Soap operas ARE niche. So’s reality TV and even the news at this point. We live in a nichified society. I think that’s just a semantic kerfuffle. I said it in a challenge specifically to the universality — and only the universality — implied in Bert’s statement “The idea that people don’t love to watch heads splatter is, I think, pretty false. We are perverse beings. We don’t want to (just) erase trauma, we want to inflict it.” I think that’s true for some people. I don’t think that’s universally true of all people.
Noah said: “You haven’t really commented or reacted to any of the specific instances of that I’ve put forward, as far as I can tell.” I did, actually. I said “Recognizing that a fetish is pathetic doesn’t make it any less of a fetish. Lots of fetishists are obsessed with how pathetic they are; that’s part of the pathology.” I don’t think Tarantino’s characters being ridiculous actually constitutes a critique — not because it is banal, as Bert suggests, but because it actually works to intensify the violence qua violence, make it even less contextualized and more fetishistic. The violence is very removed from the people who perpetuate it. That’s why the psychoanalytic concept of a fetish is appropriate.
To Charles’ comment, I have no idea whether Tarantino is a fetishist or not (although he might be) but so could anybody. Fetish as a term in literary theory refers to structure, not intent. See comment-24237.
Bert said:
I’m not sure that’s romantic or realist at that level. Everything is always tied to a worldview, isn’t it? Everything human at least.
No, it’s just a banal critique. But who has time for those?
The object has to have been already erased before the fetish comes into being, so the victims aren’t the object. Although this is maybe getting a little into that territory of actual psychoanalysis (rather than lit critical psychoanalysis). the object probably is “real violence” and the fetish is for “hyperreal violence” (although I’m not sure that’s a good word.) The hyperreal violence — the critical distance combined with the over-the-top intensity — erases the real violence. That’s not even me; I think Noah said that earlier. There is the erasure of other tonalities (as Robert gets at); there’s the erasure in the oeuvre overall of other questions besides violence. All that you really need for a fetish is that it be The Thing, which it clearly is in Tarantino. Whether or not there are nuances, which I don’t deny there are, the work is more saturated with violence than it is with anything else.
Because I don’t think any and all depictions of violence fetishize it. I don’t think Cronenberg fetishizes violence. I don’t think the old movies I mentioned earlier do; I don’t think Tinker Tailor does. In order to be a fetish, the violence has to be the dominant component of the film’s erotic economy, which it is in Tarantino. It may get there in Scorsese; it gets there in some video games. But the bottom line is, if a viewer can’t find any pleasure in violence, Tarantino becomes completely intolerable, because the erotic economy is organized entirely around the viewer being able to find that pleasure. If you can’t, there’s no pleasure AT ALL in the films (as Robert and I keep pointing out.) This doesn’t mean there are no rewards in the film for people who can participate in that erotic economy, although it really gets in their way for people who can’t. But really it just means that’s the erotic economy.
Usually films have more varied erotic economies than that. The singularness of the economy is an attribute of it being fetishistic.
I know there were more comments but I have to go to my grandmother’s 97th birthday party!
That’s a great quote, Bert. Creepy, but really right on the point.
“The violence is very removed from the people who perpetuate it. ”
That’s just not the case. The violence is absolutely linked morally and emotionally and narratively to the people who perpetuate it. That’s why you and Robert and everybody else find it uncomfortable. It’s much, much more the case in Tarantino than it is in, say, James Bond films (where the moral consequences of violence basically don’t exist); or cozies (where the violence is off screen and the whole point is it can be linked to anybody); or in many of Tarantino’s sources (like gangster films where violence is everywhere and naturalized, or kung fu films, where the violence is totally abstracted ballet.)
I don’t think it’s right either to say that the fetish is for real violence. Tarantino fetishizes screen violence, I think. He’s very much about other movies, and the way violence is represented in other movies. And real violence isn’t erased. His films think about it in a very directed way; much more so than all those other examples.
Suggesting that Cronenberg doesn’t treat violence as a fetish, though, is kind of insane. Shivers is an ode to sexualized violence; Cronenberg flirts with the idea of rape as liberation (and more than flirts) in a way Tarantino would absolutely never do. I love Cronenberg, but the morality in his films is completely fucked up. He puts his misogynist rape fantasies out there in an unfiltered and really pretty unthinking way. Tarantino would just never do that. Violence in his films is never abjectly romantic in that way.
Really, your whole critique works a ton better with Cronenberg than it does with Tarantino. (Though like I said, I love Cronenberg too.)
In terms of a fetish being nerdy or self-loathing — that’s interesting (more in terms of Russell’s character than DeNiro’s), and might be telling…if, again, non-violent characters and victims weren’t treated with such sympathy. Death Proof isn’t like Crumb, where you’re in the head of the masochistic victim lame-ass and that’s the fun. Rather, you sympathize, and are almost entirely focused on, the victims of the violent loser. It’s much more like slashers…except the sympathy with Russell’s character is even less than that allotted to the villains in Friday the 13th. The losers aren’t losers because Tarantino gets off on being a loser; they’re losers because they use violence and they’re cruel, and violent, cruel people in his moral world are (not absolutely always, but often enough to be a trend) losers to be despised and defeated.
Have fun at your grandma’s!
Oh…and I think purifying rage as orgasmic apocalypse fits very nicely onto rape/revenge narratives. I don’t think the rape/revenge was chosen as emblematic just by accident.
I don’t buy this completely, but Alfred Hitchcock avoided following the bad guys around the whole film because, if he did, we, the viewers, would see things from the bad guys’ perspective. That’s what Tarantino does, right?…
(If any site ever needed threaded comments, it’s this one.)
I grew up watching ALL MY CHILDREN, ONE LIFE TO LIVE and GENERAL HOSPITAL with my mother. Three hours a day, five days a week, every week.
So I speak from experience when I say that TV soap operas are violent. Spousal abuse, child abuse, murder, rape… I’m pretty sure I learned what rape *was* from a soap opera. They depict those acts of violence less graphically than Tarantino does, but they’re limited by network content restrictions. The part violence plays in soap opera narratives, however, is just as base and exploitative as any Tarantino film could be argued to be: it’s there to titillate you. It’s there to sell ad time. It’s there to make you tune in tomorrow.
In RESERVOIR DOGS, a man is shot in the gut and spends most of the next ninety minutes writhing and screaming in pain. I am a pacifist, and I have been a victim of violence, and I find the extended agony of Mr. Orange more palatable and more morally acceptable than any of the multiple rapes and countless murders I saw in a decade of soap opera viewership. If violence is going to be entertainment, as it presently is in both male- and female-coded genres, I’d rather have the act and its consequences onscreen in all their ugliness than have them sanitized for “general audiences.” (In a different genre but along the same lines, I was far more offended by the clean, kid-friendly warfare in PRINCE CASPIAN than I was by anything in INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS.) In real life there is no editor to cut mercifully away from the extremity of your pain.
Soap operas, it’s also worth remembering, have a history of turning rapists into romantic heroes. (Two examples come immediately to mind: Luke on GH and Todd on OLTL. There may be more.) These shows do not stand firmly on the moral, humanistic, life-affirming side of any binary question about violence.
Part of the reason I’m posting here is that I wanted to be a female voice in Tarantino’s defense, since, as far as I can tell, there haven’t yet been any. I’ve always been drawn to genres that commonly employ graphic violence (cop shows, war movies, adventure stories and so on). These genres are culturally coded male, and they are privileged over genres that are coded female, but their appeal is certainly not exclusively male; I don’t think it’s even *primarily* male.
The talk about Tarantino as an exponent of some fraudulent “realism” is a bit baffling to me; in my perception, each successive film since RESERVOIR DOGS has been *less* realistic, more mannered, more self-conscious, more stylized. INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS never once allowed me to forget that what I was watching was a construct. I have mixed feelings about that. The fundamental draw of RESERVOIR DOGS, for me–the draw his films have lost since PULP FICTION (although I haven’t seen JACKIE BROWN or DEATH PROOF)–was an *emotional* realism. That movie is a love story. I engaged with it on that level, and it rewarded me.
I refuse to have threaded comments. I think Tarantino fans should be forced to deal with soap operas, and vice versa. And everybody should be forced to read comments like yours, because said comments rock.
Also comments like Caro’s and Charles’ and Bert’s and Robert’s, for that matter. Threads like this make me happy, damn it.
Thanks for commenting, Katherine! You said:
That’s sort of my original thought when I agreed with Suat about Tarantino’s films, so I agree, although I think we’d probably disagree about the mechanisms of that realism and it very much isn’t a draw for me. Emotional realism isn’t much of a draw for me even when it isn’t violence, as I say in the post, but that’s personal aesthetics. And I think we’ve gotten so absorbed in the violence questions we’ve lost sight of the realism one. I don’t entirely agree that realism is never mannered or stylized or self-conscious; I think films like Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs are probably my go to examples of mannered, stylized work that offers that “emotional realism;” one of the things I encouraged my students to engage with was specifically that — how a film so stylized, so graphic, so fractured, could still have that effect. It didn’t for everybody (and it did break out largely on gender lines, but gender is a social construct so it wasn’t a clean distinction.)
I know that it’s because the Tarantino thread is happening on the soap opera post, but you (and others) have sort of implied that I’m saying that soap operas aren’t violent, and I’m not. I know they’re violent — but they aren’t graphic, for a lot of reasons, not only the network restrictions. I think the crux of the issue is graphic violence, not violence per se.
The “rapist love interest” is a feature of both soaps and romance, but there isn’t a lot of it after the ’70s and ’80s. If I remember correctly, and it’s been a long time and I wasn’t watching at the time, but I think the Luke and Laura storyline actually did a lot to trigger enough conversation about it that the genres moved away from it. It’s not that it never happens — it still shows up surprisingly frequently in fanfiction — but it’s much rarer and more marginalized.
Rape though is common enough — but I’m not really going to apologize for thinking the talkiness of soaps mitigates it and makes it more about motivations and structures and less about experience, whereas graphic violence is about experience. That’s the same distinction I draw in the original post, and I think it applies here as well. The representation of experience — whether it’s narrated or shows — isn’t as interesting to me as that analysis of why things happen. It’s not my experience that the violence in soaps (or fanfiction) was particularly entertainment, certainly not in any voyeuristic or indulgent sense. The genres use narrative to dissect experience, and violent experience is one kind of experience that they dissect. If you didn’t have that experience of dissecting the experiences — if you were just taking them in as entertainment, then it’s not surprising that they irritated you. But I think, at least in the relatively few violent storylines I’ve watched in soaps, they’re absolutely not about avoiding the ugliness and consequences. But they examine it obliquely through conversation and narration, they don’t present it directly through graphic representation.
Noah: the fetish isn’t “for” real violence. Real violence is what’s pushed aside in the creation of the fetish, which is for screen violence, as you say. I think that’s what I said, isn’t it? Yes, although I said “hyperreal” instead of “screen”: “the object probably is “real violence” and the fetish is for “hyperreal violence” (although I’m not sure that’s a good word.) The hyperreal violence — the critical distance combined with the over-the-top intensity — erases the real violence.”
I don’t think there is anything structural in the film that specifies whether viewers sympathize with the victims or fail to sympathize with anyone — like I said above, I think whether or not that happens entirely has to do with whether a specific viewer is able to buy into the erotic economy of violence or not. I don’t think Tarantino is unaware of that resistance – I think he just consciously rejects such people as part of his targeted audience.
Also, thanks! I did have fun at my grandmas!
I think, duly chastised by Charles, I need to walk back my agreement that Tarantino fetishizes violence. Thinking about Cronenberg and Friday the 13th films and just lots and lots of horror…that stuff really does fetishize violence. Violence in those films is compulsive, repetitive, and absolutely erases/stands in for sexuality, sadism, masochism. Slashers, Cronenberg, Carpenter sometimes — those films feel like dreams; you’re in somebody’s head, and that somebody is fixated on these primal scenes that happen again and again. Motivations are totally beside the point as individual psychological motivators; they’re detached and cling to the wrong people, or to objects, in the way they do in dreams.
I really love that about Cronenberg and about the Friday the 13th films — and I love the ritualistic and arguably fetishized violence in kung-fu movies too. But that’s not Tarantino — which is part of the reason that, while he lifts from those genres in some ways, his movies often actually are *not* as violent. He cuts away from scenes that horror directors wouldn’t cut away from; he has stand offs that end in everybody walking away safe. He often makes you experience violence, and he is obviously very interested in violence, but it’s just not true to say that he has to fetishistically show you violence in the way that a Friday the 13th movie does, or in the way that a kung fu movie does. His violence isn’t the point of the genre; it’s always motivated.
Jackie Brown for example…it’s just not, not, not that violent by the standards of action movies. I just watched a totally disposable action movie for a review this evening, and it was tons more violent — lots more deaths, lots more shootings, guns everywhere, car chases, deaths. Tarantino makes the violence in his movies count, but not by making them more gruesome or more hyperbolic. He does it by showing the consequences of violence, like Katherine said, and by caring about those consequences.
I’m someone who does buy into the erotic economy of violence in something lreveling in ike Cronenberg or Friday the 13th. And it’s just not what’s going on in Tarantino. The thing to love about Tarantino is not the repetitive satisfaction of violence. The thing to love, for me, is how exuberant and full of love the films are. There’s just so much joy in creating characters, in language, in other films, in his actors — I compared him to Shakespeare in that Kill Bill review, and I still think there’s something to that. (And Shakespeare was not above a severed body part or two I might add.
I have no idea whether Tarantino is a fetishist or not (although he might be) but so could anybody. Fetish as a term in literary theory refers to structure, not intent. See comment-24237.
I’m not sure I get your meaning, Caro, or which post you’re referring me to. You said that making violence unreal (not sure how fictionalized violence does that, it’s unreal to begin with and real violence continues to be real), “it changes how we interact with its historical reality.” Some structure might be changing, but you’re certainly claiming it changes our psychological makeup. For that you need empirical evidence, and anyone who’s read such evidence knows its shaky at best. Furthermore, you don’t say anything about structure and are quite particular when you said, “I’m pretty unapologetic about feeling that there’s something fucked up and wrong about anybody who has violence as a fetish.” These are not purely structural assessments you’ve made, nor do they concern the literary. This is what I was getting at by saying that using metaphorical psychological terms begins to confuse matters as those metaphors become concrete (the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, Whitehead called it).
Also, as for Tarantino’s moral view in his films, I think he often expresses retributivism, which I’m in some ways sympathetic to, but I’m sure that many here aren’t at all.
I haven’t caught up with the whole discussion, but I find myself mostly nodding at Noah’s assessment. Cronenberg made an entire film about fetishizing violence, his adaptation of Crash. I might need to rewatch it, but I didn’t get some moralizing message from it. It was more like a portrait of a fetishistic group. While it came off much goofier than Ballard’s book, it still clearly attempted to eroticize the conflation of automation, violence and sex. The film wants its audience to feel the fetish.
And, if no one’s mentioned it, Tarantino’s classic example of how he implies a violent act through editing and sound is the ear cutting scene in Reservoir Dogs. Most people still saw it, but he’s not near as graphic as Cronenberg (but I love him, too).
Noah: I think, duly chastised by Charles, I need to walk back my agreement that Tarantino fetishizes violence.
Well, what do you think of the first (?) crash scene in Death Proof. It’s been sometime since I watched it but I vaguely remember a slow motion CGI moment with body and car parts swirling across the screen. A deliberate focus on and appreciation of graphic dismemberment. Isn’t there an echo of J G Ballard and Crash in there? As a connoisseur of violent cinema, I’m pretty sure Tarantino understands the power of delayed gratification. Hence the extended talk scenes in that movie. That’s the foreplay.
Strangely enough, wrote this while Charles was posting his last comment.
Thank you for the compliment, Noah. But–re: threaded comments–what about those unfortunate readers like me whose attention spans have been so reduced by the internet that following a half-dozen different arguments across a single thread of 100+ posts makes our heads spin? I can hardly believe I’m even in this discussion.
Caro:
“And I think we’ve gotten so absorbed in the violence questions we’ve lost sight of the realism one.”
Well, for my part, I’ve lost sight of what you mean, specifically, when you say “realism,” or argue against it. (See above re: my attention span.) For me, when realism is as mannered as INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS or KILL BILL it entirely ceases to be realism. I’d describe Tarantino’s recent work as, well, cinematic mannerism, as distant from my perception of “the real” as the Madonna with the Long Neck.
“I know that it’s because the Tarantino thread is happening on the soap opera post, but you (and others) have sort of implied that I’m saying that soap operas aren’t violent, and I’m not.”
I apologize for misconstruing your argument. But–as I perceive it, and my perception may be incorrect–you’ve been taking a moral stand against the representation of violence as entertainment (your distinction about *graphic* violence was lost on me until your most recent comment), identifying it as a feature of male-coded genres, and praising female-coded genres such as soaps in the same thread. Therefore, I made the assumption that you would argue that female-gendered genres do not rely on violence to provide entertainment.
“The “rapist love interest” is a feature of both soaps and romance, but there isn’t a lot of it after the ’70s and ’80s.”
Todd raped Marty on OLTL in the early ’90s, and was redeemed later in the decade. I wasn’t around for Luke and Laura, but I was around for Todd. To be fair, there was controversy–the actor who played Todd actually quit in protest–but, still, the fact that they did it at all…
They had their pleasures, but I don’t really miss those shows. Neither does my mother, who cut down on her soap-watching after she started working part-time, and finally dropped AMC about five years ago. Our TV-mediated mother-daughter bonding experiences are focused on PROJECT RUNWAY and SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE now. Looking back, I’m grateful that she’s a feminist, and could provide a feminist critique of what we were watching when it was needed (which it frequently was).
“It’s not my experience that the violence in soaps (or fanfiction) was particularly entertainment, certainly not in any voyeuristic or indulgent sense.”
Oh, my. How much fanfiction have you read? I’ve seen violence (more graphic and much more sexualized than Tarantino’s, and portrayed in greater detail) used as entertainment in fanfiction over and over and *over.* It’s one of the most common tropes. Yes, most of the time there’s some kind of narrative purpose for the violence–it’s usually a device to break down one character so that another can rebuild him–but the violence quite often happens onscreen, and quite often happens in graphic, sensuous, loving detail. When the brakes come off, as they do on the internet, there’s an awful lot of blood and torture in my gender’s collective imagination.
“they examine it obliquely through conversation and narration, they don’t present it directly through graphic representation.”
This *is* mostly true of soaps, but, like I said, one of the things fanfiction does, regularly, is present violence directly through graphic representation.
Back to soaps: is the portrayal of a rape or a murder on a soap entertainment, in a “voyeuristic or indulgent sense”? You’re right that, because soaps don’t present graphic violence (for whatever reason), their approach to violence is more about “motivations and structures,” more about the telling and retelling of an event. And yet: that event is still present. It’s there. Its specter looms over the narrative; the specter of a corpse, the specter of an abused body. And those specters provide a frisson for the audience. Violent plotlines on soaps–especially the frequent serial-killer stories–were heavily advertised, which leads me to suspect that they were a reliable ratings boost. I don’t really find that any more acceptable, despite the lack of onscreen blood, than the directly presented violence that drives the plot of RESERVOIR DOGS. Of course, I respect that your response is different.
For contrast: the last Cronenberg I saw was VIDEODROME (I had to watch it for a class; I wasn’t previously familiar with Cronenberg’s work), and I had a very difficult time with the early scene where the woman is tortured–so much so that, later in the film, I found myself thinking, “Yeah, people who would watch *that* for pleasure do kind of deserve to die,” and then being a little shocked that I’d had that thought. As always, the answers to all these questions are powerfully subjective.
Oh, by the way, Caro, going all the way back to your original post:
“One reason I am, generally speaking, not in the least bit interested in more realist work, including Jaime’s but also, say Theodore Dreiser’s, is that I do not need a book, comic or otherwise, to provide me emotional experiences or to present to me what is real in the world… I need something extra-real to make a book worth the distraction from my actual real life.”
This is spot on and I agree completely.
Oh dear, I want to respond to all of these and it’s just too late at night. I will get to everything eventually…
I want to throw out one quick thing to Noah about fetishes: I think you’re using “fetish” to denote something different from what I use it to denote. Especially when you talk about dreams. Fetishes belong to phantasm, and (for a coincidental example), Barthes in that essay Rosenbaum paraphrased puts it like this:
Laura Mulvey (who tends to align more closely to you in that she’s generally positive about fetishes) says “the Freudian fetish flourishes as phantasmatic inscription. It inscribes excessive value to things considered to be valueless by the social consensus.”
So, I mean, if it feels like a dream, it’s not a fetish. Fetishes are conscious. Tarantino inverts the fetish in Mulvey’s formulation (he assigns less value to things he thinks the culture is oversensitive to), but I think the way he organizes it still aligns with Mulvey’s logic and Freud’s basic concept, though.
I don’t disagree with your take on those Cronenberg films; I think they do have that dream-like quality (although I think it works differently in a very psychological film like Dead Ringers) but that’s not fetishization.
It’s a semantic point, but it’s probably causing a lot of confusion.
OK, one more quick point to Charles — the fetish belongs to the narrative gaze of the film, not to Tarantino the person or anybody. So it’s structural and textual (a better word than literary); not about psychology.
And thanks, Katherine!
More tomorrow.
Sorry, I misunderstood what was meant by “sexy.” Please disregard my previous comment. Thank you.
I appreciate Caro’s clarification– it makes sense that a fetish isn’t unconscious. So the Crucifixion (which I have good feelings about as a symbol, many don’t)– is a clear fetishization of violence. I think in the process it subverts the implications of the fetish, and I think Tarantino does too, but that has maybe more often than not been lost on viewers/believers.
The intentions of Jesus versus Tarantino on the question of revenge, though, as Charles points out, are somewhat more distinct.
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Caro says:
I don’t think Wu, Bey and Verhoeven are fetishizers of violence; I think they’re romanticizers of it.
———————–
Is there such a distance between romanticizing and fetishizing? Both depend upon maintaining a distorted image of the object or action in question; where its actual reality is overruled in favor of the idealized fantasy.
Whether it’s a Victorian male with fantasies of the demure, submissive ideal woman, a fetishist seeing womens’ high-heeled shoes as filled with a sexual charge, a serial killer viewing his latest sleazy murder as a powerful ritual giving him godlike powers, the same basic distortion is at work…
———————–
Noah Berlatsky says:
…the typical excuse for lynching involves accusing the victim of rape. That’s why the cross burning was usually preceded by castration. That seems fairly erotically invested to me.
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Most lynchings culminated in the destruction of the body of the victim; which ties in how…
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Bert Stabler says:
…The fetish involves erasing the object…
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Caro says:
“Usually films have more varied erotic economies than that. The singularness of the economy is an attribute of it being fetishistic.”
This is where people can get understandably confused about what you’re trying to say about obsession and fetish. You can certainly say that Cronenberg and Tarantino are dissimilarly preoccupied with violence, but it’s just such a fine line for many (me included).
If Netflix has done us one favor above all others, it’s probably just, as you imply earlier in the niche discussion, that all of our interests can be flattened into micro-constituencies in a pretty continuous field. And I still maintain that brutality is an erotic category (whether that’s a techinically correct use of the term “erotic” I don’t know) that not everyone indulges, but that it is not in and of itself unethical to engage, in depiction and not merely discussion.
The Netflix favor, is, of course, pointing out that field. Scuse me.
Too much to get to right, right now…but Suat, that’s a good point about the crash scene in Death Proof. The thing is, I didn’t experience it at all the way I experience John Woo’s slow motion (as a lingering on, and almost licking his lips over, the violence.) I experienced it (and I think this was the intention) as very sad; much more as the distanced, slow motion horror you experience when you wish something wouldn’t happen than the giddy excitement you get from horror movie violence (or John woo.)
I think the build up — meeting the women, chatting with them — is seen as foreplay…by the Kurt Russell character. I think that viewpoint is pretty thoroughly rejected by the film itself. Russell sees the build up and the violence as sexual gratification, but I don’t think Tarantino endorses that perspective.
As with Tarantino’s films in general, the violence really matters; the girls’ deaths are a loss because you are invested in them as people. That’s different even than something like I Spit on Your Grave, which is very much opposed to violence against women, but (In part because it can’t imagine female relationships) has real trouble giving the victim any personality beyond her victimization.
“Fetishes are conscious.”
As Carol Clover points out, many slasher films are quite conscious of their sado-masochist dynamics. The folks who make them can read theory too. And I suspect Cronenberg knows what he’s doing to some extent at least. “Feeling like a dream” isn’t the same as being a dream, anymore than screen violence is real violence. But I think the dream-like sense in Cronenberg and slashers, along with the compulsive repetition, is a good indication that you’ve wandered into Freudian territory, where the unconscious is being (probably consciously) mined and represented.
Tarantino’s certainly a very conscious director.
Dead Ringers is fantastic…but all of Cronenberg’s films feel so Freudian, I don’t know that Dead Ringers especially stands out in that regard….
Tarantino’s definitely into revenge, which I am not…though I think he’s sometimes at least willing to complicate it or think about it a little. The most obvious example is Jules, who walks away from violence. I think it’s telling that when he does so, he walks out of the narrative, which is intertwined with violence. There’s some sense that these are the stories he’s telling, but that he can see his way out of them (unlike Cronenberg, for example).
That’s also why I think it makes sense to think that Jules *has* gotten out of the cycle of violence. If he hadn’t, we’d see that. But peace is transcendent — which is something Tarantino and Christ could agree on, maybe.
I think there’s at least some question in Kill Bill about whether revenge is really ideal. Death Proof and Inglorious Basterds are less ambivalent.
It’s interesting to think about Tarantino scripts that are not directed by him. From Dusk Till Dawn, for example, is very violent…but much more conventionally so. Just lots of vampires getting slaughtered and blood and gore everywhere. Much more like a Verhoeven film, or any Hollywood action film, really, where the body count is the thing and violence is more a candy than a topic of analysis or discussion.
Do you just hate all those kinds of movies, Caro? You kind of like Bond films, right? What about Bugs Bunny cartoons?
Katherine: “But–re: threaded comments–what about those unfortunate readers like me whose attention spans have been so reduced by the internet that following a half-dozen different arguments across a single thread of 100+ posts makes our heads spin?
Well, I think Caro has established that I’m something of a sadist….
A creator projects a personality through their work. Tarantino is simply a guy who if I had one conversation with him, that would be all it took to know I’d be keeping a polite distance if I worked with him, and if it was outside work I’d avoid him completely. He’s like a stridently obnoxious teenage boy trapped in the body of a fifty year old man.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Dead Ringers is fantastic…
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Yes, indeed; d’you know it’s unsettlingly based on a true story? See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_and_Cyril_Marcus ; and…
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Drs. Cyril and Stewart Marcus shared a thriving Manhattan gynecology practice, office quarters and a luxury apartment on Manhattan’s East Side. Both taught at Cornell University Medical School and were affiliated with New York Hospital.
But the identical twins also shared a fatal addiction to barbiturates. It led to their joint suicide in the summer of 1975 – deaths that astonished the medical community and highlighted the problem of drug abuse among physicians.
During their last months, the 45-year-old twins examined and even operated on patients while under the influence of drugs. Witnesses later told a New York State Assembly committee that the doctors performed surgery when their hands were shaking and they could barely stand up.
Colleagues, who described the twins as ”inseparable,” said they initially attached little significance to the twins’ aberrant behavior, because the Marcuses had a reputation at the hospital for being geniuses, although a bit peculiar.
Both graduated in 1951 from Syracuse University, where they were elected to Phi Beta Kappa. In 1954, they received medical degrees, with honors, from New York State University’s Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse. Together, they edited a textbook on obstetrics and gynecology and co-wrote several articles about infertility. Cyril was divorced and had two daughters. Stewart [was a homosexual and] never married. On July 17, a handyman discovered the doctors sprawled on the floor in their bedroom. Autopsy reports showed that they had been dead for approximately a week.
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http://www.jeremy-irons.com/press/archive/27.html
I’ve always thought the main title sequence of “Dead Ringers,” featuring a series of terrifying-looking antique gynecological instruments and illustrations set to the sinister music of Howard Shore, more deeply frightening than most horror movies…
Hey, it’s on YouTube! Creepy as I’d remembered: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbZzpXMfwvE&feature=related .
And I can’t find info to the actual case, but one severely disturbed gynecologist (male, needless to say) performed operations on some of his patients to “improve” their genitals, often leaving them in constant pain…
holly: “He’s like a stridently obnoxious teenage boy trapped in the body of a fifty year old man.”
That’s a great description of a Peter Pan syndrome-afflicted babyman (or fanboy).
Bill, by the way, is quite the comics scholar!
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Clark Kent is how Superman views us. And what are the characteristics of Clark Kent? He’s weak, he’s unsure of himself, he’s a coward. Clark Kent is Superman’s critique on the whole human race…
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A pretty astute perception…!
I’m happy too that most humans aren’t self-righteous militaristic fascists.
Domingos, I am shocked, shocked to my very core that you don’t like Tarantino.
Next you’ll be telling me you don’t like Friday the 13th….
“History classes use violence in the story problems. That’s how ideology happens.”
I hesitate to throw my hat back in the ring, but what the heck, we can push this comments thread to 200…clearly a goal for all involved.
So: a) I was joking about adding violence to the math curriculum. I assume that was self-evident…and perhaps this response was as well…but now I feel like someone’s preaching to me about my own immorality and my own lack of knowledge about ideology on the basis of said joke.
b) I still think Christie’s mysteries don’t work like “History” in this fashion. Essentially, they are a guessing game, where you try to guess what happened…that’s where the “fun” lies. In terms of the HS History class Bert describes, (supposedly) the events are all in the past and you are just being told “what happened”—The “fun” is not in guessing what “will” happen. There’s no fun involved in most cases.
Obviously, the Christie books are already written…and there is some propagation of ideology there…but the point is not to “explain” (as history does), why such violence was visited, but to guess/create your own explanation. To be ideological, the eventual explanation provided would have to “make sense” of all that has come before in some kind of “logical” fashion that actually promotes one ideological viewpoint over another (while obscuring that fact). While this may happen from time to time, more often the point of the “explanation” is to be as illogically logical as possible…to present the most outlandish possibility in order to fool the reader—not to teach us how the world (supposedly) works. The only lesson in the end is that the author is “smarter” than you…though often even this lesson doesn’t get conveyed, because it is obvious that it was impossible to be “right” in the first place.
Rereading “Murder on the Orient Express” to my daughter recently, I realized how, essentially, this stuff is for children or adolescents. The case doesn’t really make sense. Poirot is just a Mary Sue whose intellect and personality quirks are supposed to impress and amaze you. There is some “ideology” in the book (particularly in the form of painful racial/national stereotypes), but none of it is really linked to the solving of the murder.
While I’m here, I guess I’ll say that I think Noah gives Tarantino too much credit. To me, much of this argument comes down to author intent. Does Tarantino “intend” all of the thoughtful and moral things Noah sees in his movies–or is it more a byproduct of Noah’s creative critical skills. I think Noah’s the smarter one here…and Tarantino’s stuff is more the fetishizing of old movies than anything else.
Also…I do see the notion of a fetish as “unconscious” rather than “conscious”—at least via Freud. It’s the object of desire that “covers” the desire for the mother (or whatever other illicit desire)… obscuring it/replacing it while allowing the “real” desire to remain repressed. If it doesn’t mean that, what does it mean? Simply “preoccupation” or “something the person is obsessed by”? If so, the immediate questions follows…Why are they obsessed by it…?
Re: Clark Kent…
It would be an astute observation if Superman was a real person—but since he isn’t, it’s more accurate to say the standard thing…which is that Clark Kent is how Siegel/Shuster saw themselves (not necessarily humanity), and Superman is how they wished to be. Obviously, their view was reflected by enough people to make Superman a hugely popular idea.
The idea of a Superman who has such disdain for humanity might be an interesting storyline to pursue…but it isn’t really the Superman we’ve ever seen. The closest is Supes’ disdain for Lois in the early Siegel/Shuster episodes… but that’s more about gender than about a general condemnation of humanity.
I didn’t want to forget to mention Simone Weil’s discussion of the Iliad– a story quite consciously preoccupied with violence. She describes force as a force at a scale outside of human ownership or direction.
“The true hero, the true subject, the centre of the Iliad, is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks away. In this work at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relation to force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to.”
No offense intended, Eric…
Noah:
If you inferred from my last comment that I don’t like Tarantino, you’re wrong, said comment just indicates my dislike of the superhero genre… On the other hand you’re also right, of course, I dislike his films because…
eric: “Tarantino’s stuff is more the fetishizing of old movies than anything else.”
It’s the camp thing, right to the sophistication of mimicking old film (scratches and whatnot) in _Death Proof_.
I’m unfortunately a little swamped with work today but I wanted to say one thing on the conscious/unconscious thing, especially to Eric’s point: it’s sort of like the “distinct but not discrete” thing earlier.
Freud calls phantasm the “waking-dream” and says it is the realisation of a desire. Phantasms “are substitutes for and derivatives of repressed memories which a resistance will not allow to enter consciousness unaltered, but which can purchase the possibility of becoming conscious by taking account, by means of changes and distortions, of the resistance’s censorship.” (from Writings on Art and Literature“)
So what I should have said (and my excuse is that it was 1:30AM ;) is that fetishes (and other phantasms) function in consciousness; not that they “are” conscious. They “are” phantasms. They’re not unconscious, like the repressed memories they stand in for. But they are the thing which “purchases the possibility” of those unconscious things in consciousness. So distinct without being discrete, linked in a Borromean knot or the as sides of a moebius strip.
(It’s not that relevant, really, but poststructuralist psychoanalysis tends to make the distinction between “dream” and “waking dream” a little more acute than Freud himself does, in keeping with how the Symbolic/Real distinction is more acute than conscious/unconscious.)
Does all that sound more sensible than just “fetishes are conscious”? They are, but not in the really straightforward sense.
Domingos…thank God. For a moment I thought you were going to say you liked Tarantino and my head would have had to explode. But now all is right with the world.
Caro, that makes much more sense re: fetish and consciousness. I was somewhat confused.
Tsk tsk, heads exploding: what cheap genre effect!…
Eric, there are some creators where I’m willing to say that their relation to intentionality is unclear (the Friday the 13th movies, for example.) Tarantino’s a very conscious filmmaker who cares a lot about the narratives he tells. Old movies tell moral stories too; Tarantino is quite aware of that. He’s not a dumb guy.
I’ve turned Katherine’s comments into a post here, by the by.
“NB- (And Shakespeare was not above a severed body part or two I might add)”
Or cannibalism.
“Katherine Wirick says: what about those unfortunate readers like me whose attention spans have been so reduced by the internet that following a half-dozen different arguments across a single thread of 100+ posts makes our heads spin? ”
Have you tried google reader? It’s much easier following comments with that. Maybe there’s some plugin that would allow you to thread the comments in a separate window.
“eric b- While I’m here, I guess I’ll say that I think Noah gives Tarantino too much credit. To me, much of this argument comes down to author intent. Does Tarantino “intend” all of the thoughtful and moral things Noah sees in his movies–or is it more a byproduct of Noah’s creative critical skills.”
The same could be said of what some people think of Jaime Hernandez’s work. That said, I did read “Education of Hopey Glass” the other night and like it much more than the previous time.
We had the same argument in reverse about Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing
About intentionality? Really? I was arguing that Moore’s effects weren’t intentional? That’s weird; I think of him as a very conscious writer in most respects…?
I think Noah is smarter than Tarantino, too.
Me and Caro agree!
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eric b says:
…I still think Christie’s mysteries don’t work like “History” in this fashion. Essentially, they are a guessing game, where you try to guess what happened…that’s where the “fun” lies….
…Obviously, the Christie books are already written…and there is some propagation of ideology there…but the point is not to “explain” (as history does), why such violence was visited, but to guess/create your own explanation. To be ideological, the eventual explanation provided would have to “make sense” of all that has come before in some kind of “logical” fashion that actually promotes one ideological viewpoint over another (while obscuring that fact). While this may happen from time to time, more often the point of the “explanation” is to be as illogically logical as possible…to present the most outlandish possibility in order to fool the reader—not to teach us how the world (supposedly) works. The only lesson in the end is that the author is “smarter” than you…though often even this lesson doesn’t get conveyed, because it is obvious that it was impossible to be “right” in the first place.
Rereading “Murder on the Orient Express”…There is some “ideology” in the book (particularly in the form of painful racial/national stereotypes), but none of it is really linked to the solving of the murder.
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Oh, I dunno. Poirot himself makes much about how the solving of a crime to him is not so much about analyzing clues, but understanding the personalities of the victim and their killer; thereby ” ‘explain[ing]’ (as history does), why such violence was visited…”
Re “Murder on the Orient Express,” (SPOILER ALERT) it’s only its violations of the conventions of the detective story genre that made the dénouement a shocker. In historic reality, a group of people who hate someone have been known to come together to kill that person a lot. (Weren’t we talking lynch mobs earlier?)
And the murderers in Christie aren’t simply “the most outlandish possibility” among the suspects; probably their most frequent motive is, with the utter banality of real life, to get money. Which sure as hell teaches us how the world — unfortunately — works.
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…I think Noah gives Tarantino too much credit. To me, much of this argument comes down to author intent. Does Tarantino “intend” all of the thoughtful and moral things Noah sees in his movies–or is it more a byproduct of Noah’s creative critical skills. I think Noah’s the smarter one here…and Tarantino’s stuff is more the fetishizing of old movies than anything else.
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Not that I’m much of a fan of Tarantino, but…
A creator might not consciously “intend” for their work to have deeper resonances, or certain symbolic meanings; yet, through their art (and with perhaps some aid from our silent partner, the subconscious) those can appear in the final work anyway.
Frederic Remington’s writings about the American Indian are astonishingly racist and denigrative; yet in his art they are noble, dignified. Hardly the rabble he describes them as. Shakespeare might well have been anti-Semitic; yet his Shylock, though villainous, is far from a simplistic caricature.
Even a pulpy, schlock creator can nonetheless have absorbed in school assignments of the classics or philosophy “deeper” thoughts or materials that can then subconsciously filter through into their hackwork. Making the creator’s work, in essence, better than it was intended to be…
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eric b says:
Re: Clark Kent…
It would be an astute observation if Superman was a real person—but since he isn’t, it’s more accurate to say the standard thing…which is that Clark Kent is how Siegel/Shuster saw themselves (not necessarily humanity), and Superman is how they wished to be. Obviously, their view was reflected by enough people to make Superman a hugely popular idea.
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Surely so! Yet, if one admires and wishes for their real self to be someone exceedingly strong, courageous, invulnerable, doesn’t that fantasy-self reveal that you see yourself as weak, cowardly, vulnerable, and very much don’t want to be that way?
Bill’s (of “Kill Bill”) quote was, “Clark Kent is how Superman views us. And what are the characteristics of Clark Kent? He’s weak, he’s unsure of himself, he’s a coward. Clark Kent is Superman’s critique on the whole human race…”
Don’t you think that the vast majority of superhero fans (or James Bond, Dirty Harry, Rambo, John Wayne, etc. fans) deep down, if not necessarily consciously, DO share that “critique on the whole human race,” themselves very much included?
On the subject of creators whose work turns out to be smarter than they are themselves, a couple of quotes:
“Never trust the teller. Trust the tale.”
– D. H. Lawrence
“An artist is usually a damned liar but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day. And that is all that matters…”
– D. H. Lawrence
The idea that mysteries have an intimate connection to the rise of a sophisticated, integrated police surveillance state shouldn’t be too counterintuitive. And neither should the connection between modern romances and the institution of a domestic private sphere with all kinds of relations to markets, colonialism, and larger divides in society. There’s implied violence, albeit not depicted porn violence, all over genre fiction.
Self-aware manipulation of genre tropes is absolutely not a pass on ethics, but in many ways it can (and does in Tarantino and Shakespeare’s cases) lead to critique from within.
Yeah what Bert said about cozies. The cozies are totally about the apotheosis of the cop, whether the detective really is a cop or somebody who out-cops the cops. It’s a world of transgression and punishment. It really is sadistic; you take pleasure in tracking down and foiling the villain, whose entrapment and suffering is narratively validated because they’re evil. I really do find cozies and cop dramas a lot more morally problematic than Tarantino’s films, especially given our ongoing orgy of imprisonment.
I wonder if some amount of opposition to directors like Tarantino is a sort of suspicion of the purely visual. There are some extremely visual directors where you can dispense with the visual elements and still have a plot or script worth talking about, but Tarantino is a director that one could definitely appreciate (or despise) with the sound turned off.
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Bert Stabler says:
The idea that mysteries have an intimate connection to the rise of a sophisticated, integrated police surveillance state shouldn’t be too counterintuitive. And neither should the connection between modern romances and the institution of a domestic private sphere with all kinds of relations to markets, colonialism, and larger divides in society.
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(?????) What’s the point of doing satire, when people — apparently seriously — say stuff like this?
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Yeah what Bert said about cozies. The cozies are totally about the apotheosis of the cop, whether the detective really is a cop or somebody who out-cops the cops. It’s a world of transgression and punishment. It really is sadistic; you take pleasure in tracking down and foiling the villain, whose entrapment and suffering is narratively validated because they’re evil…
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Harrumph! First, whether someone is an amateur (Jane Marple, Father Brown) or free-lance (Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot) detective makes a big difference as far as their being a tool or part of the law-enforcement system.
The de rigueur hostility of cops (often depicted as brutal, incompetent, or corrupt) to “private dicks” makes blatant the crucial division that where the police enforce the law, most non-cop fictional crime investigators function as agents of justice.
A particularly blind justice; because, routinely (especially in Christie) the victim is a shit who is richly deserving of their fate; the murderer seldom particularly evil, aside from their one murderous action.
As far as the uncovering of the criminal’s identity being “sadistic,” the only fictional example that comes to mind is Columbo (inspired by the detective in “Crime and Punishment”). In those stories we knew who the murderer was from the start, were encouraged to identify with them, and got to suffer through Peter Falk’s cat-and-mouse games with them…
Might add that there are also many fictional police detectives who frequently are forced to deal with job politics, pressure from incompetent higher-ups, police officers that are sometimes racist, sexist, brutal.
The “rise of a sophisticated, integrated police surveillance state” hardly gets a rah-rah boost from these works…
I’ll buy that argument for cop dramas a lot faster than I’ll buy it for cozies, which I think really do work like Eric said. Although Bert didn’t say cozies, he said mysteries in general, and that’s a pretty wide swath.
Has anybody seen the BBC series “The Last Enemy”?
“there are also many fictional police detectives who frequently are forced to deal with job politics, pressure from incompetent higher-ups, police officers that are sometimes racist, sexist, brutal. ”
What’s the point of pointing out the obvious when people (apparently seriously) believe stuff like this actually qualifies as critique?
Yeah, conservatives denigrating bureaucracy– my mind is blown.
So, http://static-cdn.guyanapublications.com/images/2010/12/poirot.jpg and http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2007/09_04/MarpleDM2809_468x635.jpg (Jane Marple)
…lead to http://approvedgasmasks.com/images/riot-ExoTechCop.jpg and http://www.jfsc.ndu.edu/images/hlspc/police_adv_NriotGear.jpg ?
As another great fictional detective would put it, “Pfui!”
I have no particular horse in this conversation as mystery is not my genre, but any reference to Inspector Clouseau makes me giggle.
Has anybody seen the US version of Life on Mars? It’s got Harvey Keitel as one of those sexist cops.
More time, so I’m catching up.
Domingos:
Alfred Hitchcock avoided following the bad guys around the whole film because, if he did, we, the viewers, would see things from the bad guys’ perspective. That’s what Tarantino does, right?…
In some of his films, yeah, but so did Hitchcock in Pscyho (a thief and then a serial killer), most directors in film noir, Yakuza films, Godard, Melville, The Sopranos, and I could go on and on … Anyway, Kurt Russell’s auto-serial killer in Death Proof is probably the most pathetic serial killer in film since Anthony Perkin’s, probably more so since the former’s facade of machismo is completely liquidated into a gibbering puddle.
Caro,
So the problem I have with him isn’t with the fact that it’s violent. The problem is with the fact that the violence is at a level where it begins to take the place of other things, to function, as Suat says, as a fetish. It’s eroticized — Tarantino turns/reduces women into avenging angels not for their liberation, but for his pleasure — and then he pushes it even further until it’s fetishized, repeated, over and over, replacing any other way of grappling with the themes, and unreplacable by any other way of grappling with the themes. That’s what a fetish is — something which replaces, stands in for, the fetishist’s desire for anything else and, in so doing, becomes something so valued that it can’t be replaced by anything else.
I missed this comment, which I’m guessing is the one you referred me to. Isn’t any heist film, for example, placing some object as central to the thief’s desire? The object can be called, by the nature of stealing, a fetish. Similarly, any action film, say Kill Bill, is going to be about action, or violence. Reminds me of a Doug Stanhope bit: when watching porn, he doesn’t want the fucking interrupted by a bank heist, and when watching a bank heist, he doesn’t want to distracted by fucking. Calling the content of a genre a fetish when that’s essentially what the genre’s about seems mostly useless, as nothing but a jargonistic redescription of the obvious. As Bert said, “[i]t’s fine to put the gun away— it’s just not an action movie any more.”
The one use of such a redescription is, of course, for moralizing purposes: you can say that you’re discussing structure, but why would that bother you unless it has some impact on a subject? Otherwise, saying the structure is sick or immoral doesn’t mean more than saying this or that rock is sick for being granite. Adorno and company didn’t go on about object fetishism because they were simply worried about the fate of objects. What you’re really talking about is that it has adverse effects on people viewing a particular example of the structure (e.g., me and Noah) or it reveals a sickness in the people contributing to the structure (e.g., Tarantino).
All that you really need for a fetish is that it [violence] be The Thing, which it clearly is in Tarantino.
Except it isn’t. If you look at the screen time, what takes up most of Tarantino’s is a character talking about life with another character. That is, in fact, what he’s known for, his dialogue. He’s one of the writers closest to the golden age in this regard, that every bit character could potentially have a whole movie devoted to him or her. On the other hand, as you say, a viewer isn’t going to enjoy his films unless he or she finds violence entertaining (but see previous paragraph). Anyway, I think your statement about rape in soap opera easily applies to violence in Tarantino’s oeuvre: “the talkiness […] mitigates it and makes it more about motivations and structures and less about experience.”
I am wondering why you find Tarantino such an abomination, but have only expressed admiration for Samuel R. Delany, who’s transgressive works make the former look about as violent as a Disney ride. And talk about sexualizing violence … Jesus.
Some miscellaneous comments:
I find realists more problematic than whether something is or isn’t realistic. Nevertheless, I’ve completely lost track of what anyone thinks of as realism in this thread.
Why does no one ever worry that too much fictional love will likely desensitize us to the real thing? Sure, critics will say that fictional love can gear us toward improper expectations, displace it towards the wrong objects, but never desensitize us to it. I think the difference lies with violence being assumed to be wrong regardless of content. I’d suggest that violence is sometimes moral.
Regarding revenge, I like this quote from the film Arch of Triumph regarding a Nazi getting his just deserts: “revenge is a personal thing, this is something bigger.” Kill Bill is a revenge flick, Inglourious Basterds isn’t. The latter is about retributivist morality.
Regarding Tarantino’s reaction to 9-11: cinema is truth 24 frames per second or maybe the event was the greatest work of art in the entire cosmos. Yeah, artists can get a bit myopic about their vocation.
And regarding his Nietzschean interpretation of Superman: Another possible interpretation, more consistent with Superman’s own thought balloons, is that Clark represents the smalltown values with which he was raised and can never completely escape, regardless of how much power he might possess. Superman is no übermensch, but a being who uses his power to reinforce his (and others’) place in the flock. It’s Luthor with the Zarathustran dreams.
And now there’s another thread about all of this …
I agree that Tarantino’s work is typically fetishized for its “snappy dialogue”–though I feel like said dialogue hasn’t really been that good since Pulp Fiction…
Part of the point, though, is the disjunction (often) between trivial, pop-culture obsessed dialogue and grisly violence. At least that’s my memory of Reservoir Dogs. I haven’t really liked any of T’s films since Pulp Fiction. Jackie Brown was ok…and Inglourious Basterds was better than those that immediately preceded it. Part of my reasoning is that the dialogue felt flat in the later movies.
I haven’t read much Christie recently, so maybe Mike is right… Orient Express and Roger Ayckroyd, though…the two that I could always remember the “solution” for, always struck me as intentionally illogically logical. There’s no way to solve Ayckroyd… and Orient Express doesn’t give you enough evidence to solve it until Poirot already has told you the “solution.”
I just remembered that I actually published a piece about Auster’s New York Trilogy that discusses its relationship to the traditional hard-boiled mystery genre. I probably even discussed the ideology of those mysteries… Do I contradict myself? Very well…
Eric,
I think the dialogue is at Tarantino’s best in Jackie Brown, but it’s also a lot less focused on pop cultural references. That scene in the car between Forster and Jackson is really tense, owing as much to actors as the words, I guess. And the most “realistic” conversations are probably in Death Proof, which is why they probably fell flat for many fans. The references in Kill Bill did indeed often fail, but the violence was beautiful. And I think that’s been the most common consensus, that these last 2 fail in terms of what Tarantino’s best known for, but move him up a level in terms of being an action director. Inglourious Basterds was considered a return to form (meaning quality dialogue qua references, in addition to violence).
Bert Stabler- I wonder if some amount of opposition to directors like Tarantino is a sort of suspicion of the purely visual. There are some extremely visual directors where you can dispense with the visual elements and still have a plot or script worth talking about, but Tarantino is a director that one could definitely appreciate (or despise) with the sound turned off.
Do other “purely visual” directors receive the same amount of vitriol? I think most of the derision QT receives is due to the B-movie sensibility he champions. Touting something as fluffy as “Switchblade Sisters” didn’t do him any credit. Though granted, he also touts Godard on a frequent basis.
MH- As far as the uncovering of the criminal’s identity being “sadistic,” the only fictional example that comes to mind is Columbo (inspired by the detective in “Crime and Punishment”). In those stories we knew who the murderer was from the start
Any number of Claude Chabrol films also have the murderer revealed early on. Of course Chabrol frequently adapted mystery writer stories.
“Eric B-Part of the point, though, is the disjunction (often) between trivial, pop-culture obsessed dialogue and grisly violence”
As far as “Pulp Fiction” goes, the only QT I’ve seen, the dialogue wasn’t just trivial. It was smug. And self-satisfied. I don’t agree with RSM that it was witty. A film overly pleased with itself and its “innovative” plot structure.
Switchblade sisters is awesome.
“Do other “purely visual” directors receive the same amount of vitriol? I think most of the derision QT receives is due to the B-movie sensibility he champions. Touting something as fluffy as “Switchblade Sisters” didn’t do him any credit. Though granted, he also touts Godard on a frequent basis.”
Brian De Palma (of whom Tarantino is not-surprisingly a big fan) probably used to get even more flack, back in the early 80s, though he also shared the the obsession with b-movies and self-reference.
I have to say when I think of fetishistic sadists I think of Jan Svankmajer well before Tarantino or De Palma (both of whom I like), because of that persistent repetitions of minutia, he’s talented but in some ways he just seems like such a compulsive automoton. I guess “fetishism” could just be easier to recognize it in a film-maker with whom you don’t share any sensibilities though.
Noah- It was about my Abby Cable piece (you can check it in the thread…) (this is the intentionality discussion, btw)
“Do other “purely visual” directors receive the same amount of vitriol? I think most of the derision QT receives is due to the B-movie sensibility he champions.”
I think they probably do, when they get any critical recognition whatosiever. The visual, as a category, is gendered male, in a way that noncompetitive dialogue is gendered female. But it’s also a funny modernist quirk that visual movies were silent movies, but pretty hyperactive overall, while radio dramas skewed (for the time) pretty feminie– lots of drama relative to comedy and action.
The grand-guigonol B-movie revolution of the drive-in era did privilege masculine tropes, but some directors did do amazing things with the conventions.
Besides being awesome, Switchblade Sisters is also the perfect blend of Quentin Tarantino and soap operas.
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Caro says:
I’ll buy that argument for cop dramas a lot faster than I’ll buy it for cozies, which I think really do work like Eric said. Although Bert didn’t say cozies, he said mysteries in general, and that’s a pretty wide swath.
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I’ve actually not watched any cop shows since “N.Y.P.D.” (which I see online was back in 1967-1969), so maybe later versions do give “sadistic…pleasure in tracking down and foiling the villain, whose entrapment and suffering is narratively validated because they’re evil”; though I have my doubts.
And I’ve not seen seen “The Last Enemy,” though we’re suckers here for whatever BBC fare we can borrow at the library…
We have seen the original Brit version of “Life on Mars” (which, come to think of it, qualifies as a cop show, despite the horror/sf/supernatural elements), and it’s pretty great…
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Bert Stabler says:
“there are also many fictional police detectives who frequently are forced to deal with job politics, pressure from incompetent higher-ups, police officers that are sometimes racist, sexist, brutal. ”
What’s the point of pointing out the obvious when people (apparently seriously) believe stuff like this actually qualifies as critique?
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When you argue that “mysteries have an intimate connection to the rise of a sophisticated, integrated police surveillance state,” doesn’t the fact that they routinely show the legal system, and those working within it, as seriously flawed, actually make them piss-poor propaganda for the glories of the police state?
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Yeah, conservatives denigrating bureaucracy– my mind is blown.
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I am such a total right-winger! And to Russ M., a “far-leftist”! Funny how an ideological perspective affects the viewing of reality, flattens down complexities…
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Charles Reece says:
Why does no one ever worry that too much fictional love will likely desensitize us to the real thing? Sure, critics will say that fictional love can gear us toward improper expectations, displace it towards the wrong objects, but never desensitize us to it.
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But if romance books can create the following effects…
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…The genre may still account for almost half the novels bought, but its idealised love and sex give readers false expectations, insists relationships expert Susan Quilliam.
And although the stories can be enjoyable and fun, they encourage unreal expectations of a life of unbridled passion and trouble-free pregnancies, she added.
Miss Quilliam hit out at portrayals of non-consensual sex and female characters who are ‘awakened’ by a man rather than being in charge of their own desires.
…The books have come a long way in terms of depicting a more realistic view of the world, but ‘still a deep strand of escapism, perfectionism and idealisation runs through the genre’…
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2012071/The-Mills–Boon-effect-Why-romantic-read-harm-love-lives.html
…doesn’t that (sounding pretty soap-opera-ish, too) amount in some ways to “desensitizing”?
Not to mention the messages they give…
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The romance novel follows, the researchers argue, a typical pattern. The hero is almost never, they say, a blue collar worker, a bureaucrat, or someone in the traditionally feminine occupations (hairdresser, kindergarten teacher, etc.). He is competent, confident, and usually wealthy. He is, in short, an alpha male.
But, they argue, this alpha male is typically a rough character who learns to be tamed into kindness, kindness to her. Thus, you wind up with not only the strong silent cowboys with the soft interior life, but also these days vampires and werewolves and Vikings.
And all of this is moving toward the climax of the romance story: the “happily-ever-after.”
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http://www.russellmoore.com/2011/05/18/can-romance-novels-hurt-your-heart/
…that a “bad boy” cam be tamed by their love into being a devoted, sensitive hubby! How many women end up with cheating, drunken, beating spouses ’cause they thought they’d be able to “fix” them?
Mike, showing corrupt or flawed individuals isn’t a systemic critique.
Sure; but isn’t showing how corrupt/racist/incompetent individuals can be part of, and abuse, a system hardly propaganda for that system? Hardly encouraging the masses to cheer on the law-enforcement system’s expansion into “a sophisticated, integrated police surveillance state”?
Did you see Fox News fretting about how G.W.’s pushing America in that direction could lead to abuses, highlighting unsavory individuals and practices? No, a uniformly positive attitude about the protection of our national security was put forth.
As perhaps the most blatant example of this criticism by a well-known author, Rex Stout, creator of Nero (“Pfui!”) Wolfe, featured J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI as his detective’s antagonists in one novel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doorbell_Rang (Splendidly adapted for TV.)
Stephen Knight’s “Form and Ideology in Detective Fiction” (as well as related works) discussed here: http://tinyurl.com/3lns23f .
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…Knight sees Chandler’s idealist form and his presentation of the informed and self-defending alienated individual [Philip Marlowe] as a real advance over his predecessors. It is the elevation of the moral value of the individual and the denigration of the external collective and mechanistic world. Its only defect is that it deliberately evades “the realities of urban crime.”
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(Emphasis added)
Does that sound like “hooray for the police state”? Not that detective fiction is cheering on anarchy or the criminal, either:
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The second part of Porter’s study focuses on ideology…the ideological content which thus comes to sight is primarily and for the most part conservative: “it is in conformity with the most cherished behavioral norms of a given society.” The most perfect language of detection, it seems, is the language of Chandler, a mythic stylization of quintessential American values which is a reaction to the tawdriness of American life…
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The thing about cop shows, though, is that they aren’t generally *just* about the incompetent and abusive people in the system. Usually there are also noble, hardworking, good guy cops, with whom you identify.
And an emphasis on individualism can actually fit nicely into support for strong police measures. You just have to decide that some individuals are evil and should be punished. When your heroes (or superheroes) are basically cops, and when the evils of society are basically summarized as the evils of criminals, that’s an ideological position.
“I think they probably do, when they get any critical recognition whatosiever. The visual, as a category, is gendered male, in a way that noncompetitive dialogue is gendered female. But it’s also a funny modernist quirk that visual movies were silent movies, but pretty hyperactive overall, while radio dramas skewed (for the time) pretty feminie– lots of drama relative to comedy and action.
The grand-guigonol B-movie revolution of the drive-in era did privilege masculine tropes, but some directors did do amazing things with the conventions”
The key word here in your last sentence is “some.” Once again, I don’t know it points to anti-visual bias so much as to a natural distaste of lo-brow conventions. Yes, silent films were kinetic. But they were also frequently sentimental, overwrought and downright kitschy. Not to mention throwaway. Let’s face it, self-consciously serious artists usually do get more respect than wallowers. Tarantino is nothing if not a wallower.
Besides being awesome, Switchblade Sisters is also the perfect blend of Quentin Tarantino and soap operas.
Maybe I’m biased because of QT’s gushing of it, but I thought it was innocuous. A good B-picture to me would be something like “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.”
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Noah Berlatsky says:
The thing about cop shows, though, is that they aren’t generally *just* about the incompetent and abusive people in the system. Usually there are also noble, hardworking, good guy cops, with whom you identify.
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Sure! But doesn’t that then emphasize that it’s those individuals who are to be trusted and admired, rather than the entire system?
In all fairness, if a show idealizes its cops as utterly honorable, infallible and skilled, or (whether it’s Dirty Harry or Jack Bauer*) excuses or glorifies their use of torture, then it is indeed to some degree aiding in the right-wing agenda to turn us into a police state…
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…When your heroes (or superheroes) are basically cops, and when the evils of society are basically summarized as the evils of criminals, that’s an ideological position.
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Yes; it surely is silly-ass that Superman picks on mere bank robbers and such, rather than dictators and polluting industrialists. And focusing on those relatively petty crimes serves (intentionally or not) the ideological end of calling attention away from far more large-scale criminality.
But for a “cosy” or police procedural to focus on a simple, relatively small-scale crime, where guilt s not spread among thousands of stockholders, millions of right-wing voters, or dozens of corporate executives, makes for a more cohesive narrative, a simpler resolution with an easily-targeted wrongdoer.
If a reader delights in one murder mystery after another, it hardly indicates they’re unaware of Darfur, Global Warming,the Armenian genocide and other large-scale horrors.
*By a not-so-amazing coincidence, John Milius (screenwriter of “Dirty Harry”) and the producer of “24” are right-wingers…
See, I hated Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Homophobic tripe.
I’m a huge Jack Hill fan in general. He’s one of America’s most underrated directors, IMO.
“See, I hated Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Homophobic tripe.”
But surely Tarantino liked it! I’m going to have to watch it again, since I’ve never heard that critique before.
I’ve never heard Tarantino praise Russ Meyer, I don’t think? But he certainly could be a fan.
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Quentin Tarantino is reportedly “hot” to remake Russ Meyer’s 1965 classic piece of silliness Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, in which “three wild women in three fast cars take time off from stripping in clubs to go on a murder rampage”, as the IMDb summary explains.
Paris Hilton in Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!According to Variety, the director’s casting choices are Kim Kardashian, Eva Mendes and, rather splendidly, Britney Spears…
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http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/17/tarantino_pussycat/
QT on (Suzuki &) Meyer: It’s funny…I’m not inspired by [Seijin Suzuki’s] movies as a whole, but by certain shots and just his willingness to just completely experiment to try and get images that are really cool or psychedelic. I’m very inspired by that. To me, his films…well, he’s a little bit like Russ Meyer for me. It’s easier to like sections of his films than the whole movie. I’m not putting him down, its just that I think he works better in sequences and scenes. And some movies work better than other movies. As for Russ Meyer, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is a complete masterpiece. That was one where everything worked. Suzuki did that with Branded to Kill (1967, Japan) even though I do like the first half better than the second.
QT on what he wants to convey with the death of O-Ren from Kill Bill 1: It’s supposed to be kind of amusing and poetic at the same time. And also just a teeny-tiny bit solemn. When you see her head, it’s funny. And then her line, “that really was a Hattori Hanzo sword.,” that’s funny. But then, the next shot is not funny, when she tips over and Meiko Kaji is singing about revenge on the soundtrack. So, it’s all together. Funny. Solemn. Beautiful. Gross. All at the same time.
from here</a.
Does Tarantino have anything to say about Nicholas Roeg?
From an LA Weekly interview back in 1992 (in QT Interviews book):
I’m not coming from the attitude that I want to run as far away from the studios as I can, or the attitude that I want to run up to the studios as much as I can, because there’s danger in both. You don’t watch out and next minute you’re Richard Donner. At the same time, if all you can do is these little art films for 10 years for a million or two dollars, you’re going to climb up your own ass. When was the last time Nicolas Roeg did a good movie? I’m not ragging on other people, but after I saw Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me at Cannes, David Lynch has disappeared so far up his own ass that I have no desire to see another David Lynch movie until I hear something different. […] I think Gus Van Sant, after My Own Private Idaho, has become a parody of himself.
I’ve heard that Twin Peaks quote! He’s wrong though; Fire Walk With Me is awesome. But…more violent, and more fetishistically violent, than anything Tarantino has done, I think.
Yeah, it’s one of my favorite Lynch films.
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