Utilitarian Review 9/18/15

Rush Limbaugh made an ass of himself last week, as he often does. In consequence, the death of Andrew Breitbart had a half-life short even by the standards of the Internet news cycle. There’s apparently only room on the web for one right-wing pundit spat at a time. You can opine on Breitbart’s legacy or sneer at Rush’s misogyny, but doing both at once is too soul-killing for even the most soulless pundit.

The speed with which Breitbart’s communal eulogy has effervesced into its respective Internet archives is a strikingly neat self-refutation of its own main thesis. That main thesis is that Breitbart’s death was an event that should be of actual importance to some range of people who were not his friends or family. David Frum insists, “It is impossible to speak nothing of a man who traced such a spectacular course through the contemporary media,” and goes on to lament that “It’s difficult for me to assess Breitbart’s impact upon American media and American politics as anything other than poisonous.” Conor Friedersdorf characterizes him as “a singular figure unlike any other in American politics or Web publishing.”

Andrew Sullivan goes even further in his quest for meaning, arguing that Breitbart’s early death is a sign of the intense pressure faced by the new media blogocracy. Constantly checking Twitter and site stats, barking 24-7 after the latest culture war blip, Breitbart was, apparently, crucified upon the cruel cross of his Blackberry.

“Human beings were not created for that kind of constant unending stress, and the one thing you can say about Andrew is that he had fewer boundaries than others. He took it all so seriously, almost manically, in the end. The fight was everything. He felt. His anger was not feigned. He wanted to bleed and show the world the wounds. He wanted to scream. And he often did. And when you are on that much, and angry to that extent, and absorbed with that kind of constant mania, and obviously needing more and more validation, and on the online and real stage all the time, day and night, weekends and weekdays… well, it’s a frightening and dangerous way to live in the end. He is in that sense our first new-media culture-war fatality. I fear he won’t be the last.”

The title of Sullivan’s post is “Breitbart—And Us.” It’s a telling phrase. Because… who is that “us” exactly? When you first read it, it seems like it’s supposed to mean, you know, “us”—everybody and their siblings.

But by the end of the piece, it’s clear that we’re not talking about a universal “us.” Surely I can’t be the only one on the planet who doesn’t own a Blackberry. In fact, when Sullivan says “us,” then, what he actually means is “us, the really successful new media pundits.” Breitbart’s death is significant to Sullivan not because it offers some sort of universal warning about the human condition, but because Breitbart and Sullivan are (despite differences in politics) basically a lot alike. They’re extremely successful people in the same industry. It’s not exactly a revelation that driven people obsessed with their jobs are in danger of heart attacks. But it hits Sullivan close to home because Breitbart was a driven person not just in any job, but in the same job Sullivan has.

It’s natural enough to be interested in, and to want to talk about, your colleagues. It’s water-cooler gossip; everybody does it. But since pundits do so much talking in public, I think it can be easy for them to forget that their water-cooler gossip isn’t necessarily transcendentally important. I can’t say I followed Breitbart’s career closely. But you read his eulogies, and what do you get? A personally charming and generous muck-raking journalist with shoddy standards and a big mouth, who managed to land a big story or two, slander some innocent people, and mostly generate a lot of hot air. It’s a character that was hoary in 1951 when Kirk Douglas played it in Ace in the Hole. The fact that Breitbart was one of the people to bring the archetype into the digital era is of interest primarily to those in the industry. To everybody else, it’s just the latest iteration of a familiar truth; e.g., whatever venue you find them in, journalists are scum.

Andrew Sullivan likes to tout the digital media’s escape from the hidebound orthodoxies and navel-gazing of traditional media. But if the rapidly evaporating Breitbart furor shows anything, it’s not that the man was a visionary pioneer, or that he epitomized the decline of our culture, or that our age is more stressful than any other. Rather, it’s that online journalists are every bit as self-obsessed as their print forbearers.

Men, Women, and Guns

Posted on September 17, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

This first appeared on Splice Today.
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Dorado Films recently bundled together two late sixties spaghetti westerns — Django Shoots First! and Gatling Gun — as a budget twofer. Outside the classic Sergio Leone films, I’m not that familiar with the spaghetti western genre, so I was interested to check it out. And it was indeed educational. Here’s some things I learned about men, women, and guns.

1. Men sweat. Women take bubble baths. — As you’d expect, men are dirty and stinky like men should be. In fact, Robert Woods, who plays hero Chris Tanner in Gatling Gun, has carefully applied sweat to the middle of the back of all his shirts to show that it is hot and that he sweats, though because he is a hero he does it in a predictable and orderly fashion.

A woman, though, does not sweat. Not even when her dad has just been shot dead in front of her and she’s tied up and forced to ride across the desert in long-sleeves and bustles. Her make-up doesn’t even run.

Therefore, somewhat counter-intuitively, women need to take baths all the time. Bubble baths are ideal because all those bubbles can hide that dashing stranger from the sheriff so the two of you can betray your husband. Alternately, the bubbles can help hide your naughty bits when the sweaty evil minions drown you in the tub.

2. Heroes don’t get shot. Women can’t shoot. — It’s not quite true to say that heroes don’t get shot. They do of course get the occasional flesh wound just to show they can take it. Django (Glenn Saxson) gets tagged a couple of times in Django Shoots First!, and in Gatling Gun Chris Tanner gets a really nasty wound in his hand and has to dig the bullet out because he’s just that tough. Still, in general, it’s kind of amazing how utterly (ahem) impotent guns are against these guys. Tanner even dodges a fusillade from a Gatling gun. That’s some poor shooting there, bad guys.

Women on the other hand don’t even get the privilege of missing the heroes. In Django, the scheming bitch, Jessica Cluster (Evelyn Stewart), steals her sweetie’s gun as she kisses him, and then she tells him he’s a weak, sentimental fool and she hates him, ha ha. He looks suitably castrated, she pulls the trigger…and there’s no ammo. He removed it because he’s smarter than her and only guys know which end of that thing is up anyway. Then he sets her up so another ex-lover kills her. How’s that for castration, bitch?

The same thing (more or less) happens in Gatling Gun…and even to the same actress! This time Evelyn Stewart is Belle Boyd. She keeps a small pistol under her pillow, and after Tanner kills everyone she knows, she (being justifiably upset) prepares to shoot him with said pistol. But! He took the opportunity to take all her ammo while he was having sex with her the previous afternoon — fucking her while fucking her, as it were. “When you sleep with a pistol under your pillow,” he tells her sententiously, “you should be careful who you choose as your bedmate.” Don’t cross dicks with me, sweetie.

You’d think she’d take that amiss, but instead at the end of the film she rides off into the sunset with him. Maybe because humiliation is sexy? Or because he was just that good in bed? Or, more probably, because the two other women in the film got killed, and the hero has to ride off into the sunset with somebody.

3. Misogyny will wipe away all your sins. Class prejudice and race prejudice are bad, and the best way to show they are bad is by associating them with women, because who trusts a women?

In Django, the misogyny-for-a-greater-good is relatively subtle, and even accomplished with a touch of humor. Django’s a down-at-the-heels drifter deadbeat who challenges the big-deal, well-dressed banker Mr. Cluster (Nando Gazzio) for dominance in the town. Jessica, the banker’s wife, is both a money-grubbing, castrating bitch (constantly demeaning her husband) and a snob (she sneers at waitress Lucy (Erika Blanc), provoking a catfight.) Jessica’s greed and desire for luxury map easily onto her upper-class evilness.

The duplicitous effeminacy of the swells is further emphasized at the film’s conclusion, when Django, now wealthy and married to Lucy, swaggers foppishly around the bank he owns. Suddenly, a rough and tumble outsider enters and threatens to do to Django what he did to Cluster. By marrying Lucy and settling down, Django’s been feminized — and now he’s the enemy!

Gatling Gun doesn’t bother with the tongue-in-cheek cutesiness. The evil half-breed Tapas (John Ireland) is in love/lust with Martha Simpson (Claudie Lange). He gives her money, but she still rejects him because she’s an unrepentant racist. Tanner sleeps with her himself to get information out of her. She spills the goods on Tapas…at which point Tanner turns on her, sneering at her for her unfaithfulness and her prejudice. In a final fuck-you, he tells her he himself is a quarter Cherokee. Shortly thereafter she gets killed as punishment for her sins, which include racism and having the temerity to bad-mouth one man to another man even if they hate each other. Whatever color, whatever creed, guys gotta stick together.

4. Look not to exploitation fare for enlightened gender politics. I did kind of know that one already, I’ll admit. Though, to be fair, I don’t know that the treatment of women is really much worse than what you find in most present-day action flicks. The spaghetti westerns are just — for better and/or worse — more honest about it.

Purity Culture With Fangs

Posted on September 16, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

A little bit back I read Dianna E. Anderson’s Damaged Goods, about purity culture in the US. Purity culture is an evangelical movement which promotes sexual abstinence till marriage; sex outside of marriage is seen as sinful, and women who have sex before marriage defile their relationship with God. Purity culture is a subcultural phenomenon, located specifically within evangelical circles. But it’s linked to broader mainstream ideas about women as virgin/whores, who have (or should have) no sexual feelings themselves but are still, somehow, responsible when men desire them. Women are both vapid victims and monstrous seducers, blank slates and inimical destroyers.

The 2007 rape/revenge comedy Teeth cheerfully sends up all those ideas, complete with more castration scenes than you can shake…well, maybe best not to complete that metaphor. The film features Dawn (Jess Wexler), a purity culture devotee, who gives speeches about saving yourself from marriage and wears shirts saying, “Sex Changes Everything!” Nonetheless, she is attracted to new kid Tobey (Hale Appleman) and almost goes all the way with him. When she pulls back, though, Tobey tries to rape her. Which is when she discovers she has teeth in her vagina, and inadvertently chops off his dick.

Dawn is at first traumatized, not least, perhaps, because the rape/revenge so directly encapsulates her own purity culture dogma. Toby was tempted by her and destroyed; misogynist meme fulfilled. As Dawn reads up on vagina dentata, she learns that she’s a dark force to be conquered by some hero; her sexuality isn’t her story, but some other dudes. And sure enough, another guy shows up volunteering to do that conquering. He seduces her with a vibrator and lots of candles, and they have some lovely sex…until he reveals that he bet his buddy he could sleep with her. He tells her this while they’re in flagrante, she gets pissed…and yep, sure enough, off with his dick. Dawn isn’t even horrified at that point, just exasperated. “Some hero,” she mutters as she stomps out, leaving the whimpering, bleeding castrati behind.

Dawn isn’t upset with herself for chopping off this guy’s penis because she realizes it’s not her fault. He’s the idiot who took advantage of her, not the other way around. Rather than a paradigm where she has to resist and resist, and then is culpable if someone forces her, she moves to an ethic of consent. And consent, as that second guy learns, cna be withdrawn any time; when she wants to stop, you better stop. Or else.

Dawn goes on to deliberately seduce and kill her skeevy abusive step-brother, and another random older jerk. Rather than being the thing to be conquered in someone else’s story, she ends up the one doing the conquering, with the guys just a plot point in her self-actualization. You could see this as dehumanizing in some sense; “castrating vagine dentata” isn’t exactly the usual version of a wholesome, healthy career choice or lifestyle. But on the other member, one of the things the movie suggests is that the wholesome, healthy romantic teen comedy narrative is in a lot of ways gross and misogynist. Would you rather be in a John Hughes film where the harassing dipshit who shows off your underwear is seen as haplessly cute? Or is it better to be the heroine of a rape/revenge narrative where you get to cut off that assholes’ balls? Empowerment isn’t the be-all and end-all, but it certainly has its pleasures, not to mention its teeth.

Utilitarian Review 9/12/15

Posted on September 12, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Ng Suat Tong on Daredevil and Bob Dylan.

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

Jimmy Johnson on how Narcos is an imperialist piece of crap.

Cord-Christian Casper on Enid Blyton, Spider-Man, and the illustion of change.

Osvaldo Oyola on an old advertisement and the history of sexism and insularity in gaming

Chris Gavaler on Superman and Leopole and Loeb.

Utilitarians Everywhere

On Quarts I wrote about Playboy’s history with jazz.

On Splice Today I wrote about:

—Muppet violence, and why we don’t care.

—rock, gender, and the bands Novella, Insect Ark, and Sewer Goddess.

—great music I missed in 2014, including Polly A, Cretin, and more.

— Bobby Jindal. the saddest Republican candidate.

Other Links

Yasmin Nair on why Kim Davis doesn’t deserve to be in jail.

Noah Davis on making a living freelancing.

On the ongoing fight for Dyett high school.

Utilitarian Review 9/5/15

Posted on September 5, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

From the archive: Anja Flower illustrates Wallace Stevens’ Earthy Anecdote.

Robert Stanley Martin with on sale dates of comics from the end of 1946.

Charles Bell on Disney eating Star Wars.

Me on R. Crumb and how you can’t satirize racism by exaggerating it.

Chris Gavaler imagines a world in which all superhero movies aren’t the same.

Donovan Grant on Starfire’s supposedly sexy innocence.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Guardian:

—I wrote about hating children and Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left. Good bye, Wes.

—I wrote about the joys of superheroes fighting superheroes.

—I contributed to an article about how hunger strikers in Chicago are trying to keep open Dyett high school.

At the New Republic I wrote about Miss Piggy and how we don’t think about domestic abuse of men.

At Playboy I interviewed erotic author Selena Kitt.

At Splice Today I wrote about Freddie deBoer and why the purity of one’s beliefs maybe doesn’t matter that much.

At Ravishly I talked about the raid on Rentboy.com, and how it shows anti-prostitution laws are based in prejudice.

At Broadly I wrote about She Shreds’ proposed SXSW panel on representations of women musicians.

Other Links

Sarah Nyberg on gamergate’s hate campaign against her. Reposting because said hate campaign has been intensified this week. I know Sarah only slightly, but she is a lovely person, and what is being done to her is evil.

Great piece on the mismanagement of Cooper’s Union (and how college presidents screw everyone else.)

C.T. May on how Ramesh Ponnuru is overconfident about Trump.

Katherine Cross on Ashley Madison and making up women for men.

Voices from the Archive: Crumb, Racism, Satire, and Hyperbole

Posted on September 1, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

This is from our R. Crumb and Race Roundtable, in a long back and forth in comments with Jeet Heer and others. I thought it was a good summation of why I don’t think Crumb’s approach to race works, so I thought I’d repost it here.
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Jeet, I think I’m going to stop insulting you. It’s fun, but I think there are pretty interesting issues here, and I’d rather focus on those at least for the moment (maybe I’ll get back to the troll-battle if you take another swing at me!)

Okay, so first, the Joplin cover. It is possible to see it as a sneer at Joplin. The problem is, it’s equally possible to see it as Domingos says — as a nostalgic use of blackface caricature that is intended not to undermine Joplin, but to humorously confirm her “black” roots. That it’s the second, not the first, is strongly suggested to me by the fact that he uses another blackface caricature elsewhere on the page.

Be that as it may — part of the issue here comes down to this:

“Crumb’s blackface images take a once-pervasive-but-now-taboo style and not only revives it, but intensifies it to the point that it becomes uncomfortable.”

First, it’s worth questioning how taboo blackface caricature was in 60s. Surely it was taboo in some of the circles Crumb moved in. I bet it was not taboo in many communities, however. As Jeet says, overt racism was still widely accepted in many places in the ’60s. I bet there were many people throughout the U.S. who wouldn’t even have blinked at Crumb’s drawing. (And, indeed, I don’t believe that cover caused any particular controversy. It’s widely considered one of the greatest album covers of all time, but I haven’t seen any reports of anger or protests over the imagery at the time — which there should have been if Crumb was actually violating taboos.)

More importantly, it’s worth pointing out that on the Joplin cover, the blackface caricatures are not intensified in any way that I can see. Is Crumb’s drawing more reprehensible than McCay’s Imp? Than Eisner’s Ebony White? It doesn’t seem so to me. In fact, it’s not clear to me that even Angelfood McSpade is more intensely racist than McCay’s mute, animalistic Jungle Imp. I mean, the Imp is really, really, really racist.

And I think that shows up a real problem with Crumb’s method of trying to deal with racist imagery. Racism is not realistic. It’s not something that is grounded at all in any kind of actual fact. As a result, there is no reductio ad absurdum of racist iconography. Racism does not have a point to which you can intensify it and make it ridiculous. Crumb isn’t going to be more intense than the Holocaust. He’s not going to be more intense than generations of slavery. It’s really not clear that he can even be more intense than Winsor McCay’s Imp. Racism and racist imagery— these are not things you can parody just by exaggerating them. They’re extremely exaggerated already, and always eager to be more so. You make it more exaggerated, you just make it more racist. You don’t undercut it.

In that sense, racists who have embraced some of Crumb’s imagery aren’t confused; they’re not stupidly getting it wrong. They’re reacting instead to a failure of his art. Even when his intentions are definitely anti-racist, he hasn’t thought through the issue of racism, or the use of racist iconography, sufficiently for him to communicate those intentions effectively. He isn’t smart about the way racism, or racist imagery works. As a result, he often duplicates the thing that he is (arguably) attempting to critique.

I think it is instructive to look at writers like Faulkner or Crane, or someone like Spike Lee or Aaron McGruder, all of whom confront racism not by intensifying it, but rather by really carefully thinking through how racist tropes work, and demonstrating not only how they diverge from reality, but also how they *affect* and distort reality. There’s a lot of work and thought and genius in dealing effectively with those issues, and I’m not saying I love all those artists all the time, or even that they’re all always anti-racist (Faulkner was avowedly racist at times). But they all seem just a ton more thoughtful, and a ton more committed to understanding how race works, than Crumb does. To me, Crumb (on the most charitable reading) really seems to just hope that throwing unpleasant racial iconography at the wall will somehow be a critique of that iconography.

So, to your historical argument — I don’t think there’s ever been a point in American history where reproducing racist iconography was either especially brave or especially likely to contribute to anti-racism. Crumb’s satire (when it is satire) is neither subtle nor thoughtful…and as a result, his motives and intentions really do come into question. If he’s not willing to think through these issues, why the attraction to the racist iconography in the first place? Does he really want to talk about racism? Or does he just want to reproduce the iconography because he likes it? The way he obsesses over the authenticity of black people in his blues biographies, for example, just makes those questions more pointed. He’s clearly got a fascination with the black culture of the early 20th century — but that can sometimes bleed into a fetishization and even a nostalgia for the oppression of black people.

So…yes, intentions matter. But avowed intentions aren’t the only intentions, and execution matters a lot too. It just seems to me that Crumb’s relationship to racism is a lot more complicated than you’re acknowledging.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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