Tag Archives: Noah

Utilitarian Review 10/9/15

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Wonder Woman News

Nice piece at the History of BDSM site summarizing my arguments about WW and bondage.

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Sarah Shoker on high fantasy as subversive literature.

Robert Stanley Martin with on sale dates of comics from mid 1948.

Petar Duric on the Sly Cooper games and class hierarchy.

Chris Gavaler on comics inking and Henry James.

On Xasthur and the circle of metal.

A short piece on loving to hate/hating to love Mandy Moore.

Me on Stendahl Syndrome and never getting out of the patriarchy.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At Slate I wrote about Jojo Moyes and romance with a sad ending (and a happy one.

At Playboy

—I interviewed Mistresse Matisse, about her work in sex work activism.

—I wrote about Meryl Streep’s T-shirt and suffragette’s history with racism.

—I wrote about the Kunduz hospital bombing and how atrocities are always going to be part of war (which is why you shouldn’t go to war.)

At Pacific Standard I wrote about Alison Bass’ book Getting Screwed and how laws against sex workers were less harsh in the past than they are now.

At the Rumpus I talked about Percival Everett’s new book and the good and bad of African-American literature’s marginalization.

At Splice Today I wrote about

—how Lawrence Lessig is an idiot.

—A.O. Scott and conventional snobbery.
 

Other Links

Justin Lehmiller on the relative health of people in monogamous and open relationships.

Tim Sommer on why Kraftwerk should be in the Rock and Roll hall of fame.

Rebecca Thorpe on how rural representatives vote against prison reform to keep jobs in their districts.

Patriarchy in You

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According to Andrew Cooper, you can read the Stendahl Syndrome as a winking parody of critical fears of horror movies. In the film, Detective Anna Manni (Asia Argento) is violently raped by a serial predator. The rapist manages to capture her because she suffers from Stendahl Syndrome—a psychological condition which causes her to be overcome, and even experience hallucinations, when viewing art. Anna, then, is the incredibly overly receptive viewer of critics’ nightmares; her whole view of reality is transformed by aesthetic experience. Little wonder, then, that the rape/revenge plot of the film she is in leads her to perdition. Morally censorious critics imagine that watching films causes violence; Anna, the overly sensitive viewer, observes her rapist and becomes him. She does manage to take her revenge, but after doing so, she becomes psychotic herself. Through the power of art, the detective changes to the murderer. End of joke.

There’s another, less ironic way to take the film, though. Most rape/revenge films are narratively linear, and set. You start out with a healthy, unmarked woman; she is abused, suffers, strikes back, and destroys her tormenter.

The Stendahl Syndrome scrambles this—not with the rather obvious chronological trickery of Irreversible, but through more subtly letting the emotional and narrative components of the story shift out of true. Anna begins to experience trauma when she goes to an art gallery, before she is raped. And rather than a singular event, the rape is reenacted; first by Anna, who begins to dress as a man, and then molests her boyfriend, and then by the rapist, who attacks other women, and then re-kidnaps Anna. Finally, Anna murders the rapist in revenge—but that doesn’t end the story. Instead, the narrative grinds on, with the rapist apparently back from the dead—until it turns out it’s not the rapist, but Anna herself who is murdering her own lovers and friends. The rapist is inside her, she says; being violated, and then enacting violence herself, has turned her into him. She becomes the abusive patriarch who assaulted her.

Psycho, and Hitchcock in general, seem like an obvious touchstone here; as in Hitchcock’s films, the movie world seems to gleefully conspire against the beautiful protagonist, creating switchback complications to destroy and humiliate her. But unlike in Hitchcock, the film affect is always, firmly with Anna, which means the complications don’t seem like trickery, but like grotesque unfairness. The movie even says, just about outright, that it is rigged against Anna; it is art itself which disorients her and traumatizes her before the rapist can.

Again, Anna’s susceptibility to art could be a meta-comment that art doesn’t actually work like this; a painting doesn’t make you hallucinate, a film doesn’t make you a murderer. But the antipathy of art within the film could also be an acknowledgement of the antipathy of the film itself—and, metaphorically, of the antipathy of the world outside the film.

Sexual violence and patriarchy aren’t neatly contained in a narrative of (provisional) redemption. Instead, they leak out everywhere. Anna is traumatized before she is traumatized; her rapist continues to haunt her not only after the rape, but after his death. The violence to her is not only real, but symbolic—and is so overwhelming that she can’t even separate the violence from her self. Her relationship to her own sexuality, and her own violence, is inseparable from what has been done to her—and what has been done to her isn’t just the rape, but the vision in which the rape occurs, which precedes it and enables it.

One of many false climaxes in The Stendahl Syndrome occurs during Anna’s second rape. She has been tied down to a bed, and the rapist, having finished his work, leaves to amuse himself in some other way before coming back to finish her. There’s graffitti on the walls of the chamber, and her syndrome kicks in, causing her to hallucinate. Her powerful thrashing allows her to free herself. She kills her attacker when he returns in an extremely satisfying scene. Art serves as inspiration for empowerment — the message of many revenge films which seek to uplift, whether Fury Road or Ex Machina.

But Anna can’t get out of the film. Once she has tied herself to the tropes of suspense and violence and patriarchy, she can’t undo the knots. If Stendahl Syndrome is a parody of the idea that aesthetics can corrupt, it’s also a parody of the idea that aesthetics can save and liberate. Instead, in the Stendahl Syndrome, art and life collaborate together to create a hierarchy from which there is no escape, a dream of violence that doesn’t end.

Xasthur and the Circle of Metal

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This ran on Metropulse, way, way back.
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For centuries, scholars believed that metalness was a straight continuum, with bands like Slayer at the top end and performers like, oh, say…Debussy at the bottom. In recent years, though, researchers have discovered that the truth is somewhat different. Beyond St. Vitus, beyond Celtic Frost, out where the black dooms drone, we now know metal curves, and Stephen O’Mally, like a wily ourobourous, takes his tail in his teeth only to discover he’s chomping on the smiling visage of Danny Elfman.

Xasthur’s new album doesn’t sound like Danny Elfman at all, really. But on it, one-man-band Malefic maybe takes a step or two around the circle in that direction that I wish he hadn’t. At his spiky, buzzing best — as on 2002’s Nocturnal Poisoning — Malefic was right in the soul of black, with static and keyboards and shrieking vocals and drums all fusing in a single hissing howl of knives and hate. Xasthur was fierce, brutal, and unrelenting.

And then, on All Reflections Drained, Malefic relents. Oh sure, he breathes out something approaching his trademark evil at the beginning of “Inner Sanctum Surveillance,” or in the middle of “Masquerade of Incisions.” But for the most part, the album just backs off everything a bit — the buzz, the static the shrieks — and all of a sudden we’re listening to a soundtrack for the apocalypse rather than experiencing the apocalypse itself.

What’s even worse is that slowly, horribly, as you listen it becomes clear that Xasthur was always just an inch away from …restful. And…pleasant. Like Jesu, or…Sigur Ros. And, don’t get me wrong, I like Jesu and Sigur Ros. But I liked the old Xasthur more.

Utilitarian Review 10/3/15

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Wonder Woman News

Nell Minow interviewed me at HuffPost about Wonder Woman and bondage.

On HU

Featured Archive Post: James Romberger on Sammy Harkham.

Robert Stanley Martin with on sale dates for comics in early 1948.

Me on Foxy Brown, The Descent, rape, revenge, and race.

Chris Gavaler on the problems with superhero marriages.

Kim O’Connor on why Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Black Panther won’t save comics.

Me on Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible, moral structure, and immoral style.

Me enthusing about Nirvana’s Freak Puke.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the New Republic I argued that liberals shouldn’t frame contraception as an anti-poverty measure.

At Playboy I wrote about how xkcd is awesome.

At Vice I wrote about the new Muppets and Meet the Feebles, and how viscerally disturbing muppet sex is.

At Quartz I asked, what would “Foucault” say about “first-person” essays.

At Splice Today

—I wrote about how everyone is wrong about Trump. Yes. Even you.

—I argued that the internet doesn’t care about harassment.
 
Other Links

Elizabeth Bruenig on why many unwed American teen girls want to have children.

Heidi MacDonald on harassment in the comics industry.

Ijeoma Oluo on women of color and the struggle for reproductive rights.

Less Real Than Nirvana, Thank Goodness

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This originally ran on Splice Today.
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I’m one of those people who didn’t hear about the Melvins until after Nirvana had explained that they were the shit. As a result, the two bands are linked in my head. Kurt Cobain shot himself a good long time ago, and I overplayed his albums so thoroughly that I can’t even listen to them now. Still, when I think about the Melvin’s, I can’t help but get a little nostalgic for that other band I loved back there in the 90s when I was loving the same thing as everybody else.

None of which is really fair to the Melvins, who were always a much more creative outfit than Nirvana — as Cobain would be the first to acknowledge, I think. It’s also misleading since the Melvins were around well before Nirvana, and have persisted long after. The band was formed in 1983, which means that they’re almost three decades old now.

The Melvins’ latest, Freak Puke, doesn’t exactly break new ground for them — but it also doesn’t sound anything like a nostalgia act. Partially that’s because the Melvins were never big enough that theirmoves became a cliché. Their early albums are amazing, but they don’t show up on best of lists, which means that the band doesn’t have to fight their back catalogue the way indie giants like Sonic Youth or REM have had to. Partially, too, the Melvins have managed to avoid musical calcification because they always had more than one schtick. On Freak Puke, for example, they’re less full-on-doom-sludge, less avant-experimental-weirdness, and more dirty grungy rawk. Indeed, Freak Puke hearkens back to their one major label effort, 1993’s fantastic Houdini.

The main reason that the album doesn’t sound dated, though, is simply because it kicks ass. Longtime members guitarist Buzz Osborne and drummer Dale Crover and sometime bassist Trevor Dunn have put together an amazingly thick sludge of testicle-cleansing hooks. But while the Melvins are definitely riding in on the same brontosaurus as Sabbath or Aersosmith, they still manage to get that Saurian to stumble about to some bizarre bop heads. “Worm Farm Waltz” is Charlie Parker getting buried in cement — until the abstract, spacy bridge, which sounds like the Sun Ra orchestra if the Sun Ra orchestra had employed Dale Crover on drums. And yeah, I tried to think of another metaphor there, but the fact is, that nobody sounds like Dale Crover. Even John Bonham doesn’t pulverize the skins like he does.

Anyway, that’s basically the album; track after track mining the unexpectedly fertile ground between dirty 70s classic rock and avant jazz. “Mr. Rip Off,” the opening track, starts with quiet bowed bass and spooky chalk board squeaks before staggering seamlessly into a distorted trudge, as if Webern was always meant to play arenas. “Let Me Roll It,” on the other hand, is totally, gloriously sold out kitsch — the kind of trashy, self-parodic testosterone swagger that Gene Simmons lived for, complete with stoopid half-failed double entendres. “You gave me something that I understand/you gave me lovin’ in the palm of my hand!” Buzz Osborne bellows while Crover smashes a beat that’s just about two times too slow. When they declaim “Let me roll it to you,” it’s like watching the Hulk dressed as Vegas Elvis thrusting his crotch while he pushes a square boulder towards the massed groupies.

All of which suggests that the Melvins are the band Nirvana might have been if Nirvana was the sort of band that could name itself “The Melvins”. Kurt Cobain certainly had an irreverent sense of humor…but it was irreverent, not absurdist. When Nirvana moved away from its core pop-punk-metal remit, it did so by covering Leadbelly or singing about how Jesus didn’t want them for his sunbeam — a different take on angst and realness, in other words, but still angst, and still realness.

The Melvins, in contrast, were always already sold out —punks who spent all their time pretending to be doom metal or glam rock or some sort of jazz weirdos. They’re a gimmicky band — the cover of Houdini, with its adorable cartoon two-headed puppy, is a nice summation. But being true to your gimmicks can be its own kind of integrity. Thirty years on and you can still hear the Melvins giggling like fifteen year olds when they put “puke” in their title or end their album with a thoroughly annoying beeping sound-effect loop. Grunge came and grunge went, but the Melvins remain, still quietly making the best loud music on the planet.

Utilitarian Review 9/26/15

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On HU

Robert Stanley Martin with on-sale dates of comics in late 1947.

On how Hitchcock is the Birds.

Chris Gavaler on the superheroes of Patricia Highsmith.

Little reviews of Legion of Two and Sonic Youth.

Phillip Smith on the morality, or lack therof, of the Lego concentration camp set.

On why exploitation rape/revenge is better than Bergman’s Virgin Spring.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At Playboy I wrote about PBR&B and condescending to R&B.

At the Guardian I wrote about She Shred magazine, and fighting the erasure of women guitarists.

At the New Republic I wrote about The Intern, and Hollywood’s gross celebration of working without pay.

At Splice Today I wrote about

—the GOP’s inability to pander to women.

—Sonic Youth and Chuck D’s Kool Thing, and whether white people can make non-racist music videos.

—the first black Marvel superhero (not the Black Panther)
 
Other Links

Celebrate! Happy Birthday is in the public domain!

David Brothers on the importance of being careful in writing about race. It’s painful for me, since I’m one of his big negative examples, but he’s right. I should have been more careful.

Hitchcock is the Birds

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The usual symbolic interpretation of the deadly massed birds in Hitchcock’s 1963 film is that they’re a sign of the terrifying feminine, and/or grasping maternal. Melanie drives out to Bodega Bay to get her grasping playgirl claws into Mitch; Mitch’s mom freaks out much like the birds. The clash of terrifying female desire around this one good looking guy results in a nature freak out and violent squawking.

It seems like there might be a more direct way to read the birds though. In particular, Tippi Hedron has said that Hitchcock during the filming essentially stalked her; he made sexual advances, insisted on separating her from the rest of the actors, and was generally a crazed controlling jerk. He also famously in the attic scene actually tied birds to her to get the right shot; some of the blood on her you see was apparently real. She suffered multiple cuts and broke down in tears at one point. This is in the interest of the film, rather than in the interest of his being a creepy stalker, supposedly, but it seems like at some point the two stop being especially distinguishable. Hitchcock as stalker blurs into Hitchcock as perfectionist director; he gets to hurt and control Hedron wearing either (bird) hat.

The birds then are Hitchcock’s catspaw; he ties them to Hedron in an excess of jealous vindictiveness, to show her who’s boss. And if the birds function that way in that scene, why not throughout? Apparently Hitchcock warned Rod Taylor (who played Mitch) to stop cuddling Hedron as soon as Hitchcock yelled “cut”; there seems to have been some jealousy there. And similarly, the birds seem set up to punish Melanie for her sexual desire. The first attack occurs as she’s coming across the bay and about to meet up with Mitch for a potentially romantic chat. The escalating violence seems designed to prevent the further development of their relationship. Rather than excess maternal force, you could see the birds as an enactment of the paternal law; proscribing sexual activity in the jealous name of the father/director. As in all those slashers, the girl who has sex must die.

The Birds work well as a meta-patriarchal avatar precisely because their in-film motivation is so poorly defined. Why do the birds attack? The characters say repeatedly they don’t know, and no reason is offered. But of course there is a reason why the birds attack. It’s because Hitchcock tells them to. The fakeness of the birds (many of them were puppets, and you can tell) only adds in this reading to their symbolic resonance. Hitchcock has created these birds out of wholecloth for his sadistic purpose. That purpose is control, violence, order—the striking birds’-eye view shot of Bodega Bay with a street afire nicely melds the rage for order and destruction, or for destructive order, each person dying in agony in his or her place.

The birds then aren’t a symbol of inhuman mystery so much as they are a sign of a particularly human glee in fucking with other humans. Melanie and Mitch tease and play practical jokes on each other, but the biggest, meanest, most remorseless practical joke is the film itself, which flagrantly reaches into the romantic comedy that seems to be underway and fills it with bloody beaks and death just because it can. The birds are Hitchcock’s remorseless, bitter, bitterly excessive way of making sure yet another of his icy blondes gets what she deserves. Those long, sharp beaks aren’t maternal; they’re misogynist.