#Is similar to what happened in the film. I gotta read up on the Jewish interpretation of this movie I kept thinking about that as I watched

[cowchickenbeefpork]

god I need to rewatch the wolf man (1941) again I take breaks while watching films often which is a bad habit I need to break I need to stop treating movies like they’re books this film was fantastic I just finished it and like it’s so fucking good. One of my favorite films. Made me wanna cry. Love the themes of isolation and how no one believed Larry’s illness he was either seen as being ridiculous or being inherently cruel deep down in his heart or even just the mere assertion he was insane and needed to get treatment for psychosis when that was not what he was facing in his struggles. He knew he was harmful to others he knew what was happening to him but no one took his word for it. No one truly believed except the mother of a son who lived and died as a werewolf. To know what is wrong with you and try to isolate, try to ensure everyone else is safe after finally acknowledging that is something you are going through, and for everyone else to never understand it is heartbreaking. He did nothing to deserve this fate. No one truly deserves being treated like this, being neglected like this.

I also kinda interpreted how Larry’s father reacted to his son behaving like this as him knowing that the asylums won’t help, you know? This is a recurring issue in their family, something that has sprung up again and again, family members with the same illness, the same curse. I feel like they have at least tried to institutionalize them before at least once, and realized how horrendous they treated them in it. He doesn’t want his son to go through that, he wants his son to just push through this “delusion” and make it through when he cannot. His father basically has to convince himself that his son can push through if he tries hard enough, because that itself feels like it is the only cure for something like this. He doesn’t want his son to become a husk, he doesn’t know how to help his little boy. His own attempts to help him by trying to make him snap out of it only pushes them further off the edge, leading to his death by the hands of his own father at the end of the film.

[mrsbeef]

THIS IS INCREDIBLY LONG

AND FULL OF EGREGIOUS HYPERBOLE AND GENERALISATIONS. It is my attempt to write a paper on Chinese Communist cinema as a tumblr post so it feels less scary. If you’re interested in this sort of thing then I am concerned for you read on.

Content warning for violence, misogyny, Nazis, antisemitism, seemingly unavoidable gender binarism, sex, Chairman Mao, Hitler, Stalin, and Freud.

Behold the gateway to a bright Communist future!

Anyone heard of visual pleasure in cinema? Specifically the theory that Laura Mulvey was talking about? For anyone who needs context, Laura Mulvey’s theory is based on Freudian psychoanalysis, and it basically states that the spectator identifies with the male hero, and is always in a masculine position compared to the objectified women on screen, and gets a kind of sadistic pleasure from that power. And moreover, she says scenes of women bring the narrative screeching to a halt, because the cheesecake scenes of their fragmented and objectified bodies freeze the action so the audience can have those sweet, sweet phallic fantasies. For the purposes of argument, I’m lumping ‘torture porn’ of the Game of Thrones variety under ‘cheesecake’. Sick, I know, but we’re going to get into some sicker shit later.

Now this theory definitely has some problems, but let’s stick with it for the time being. We can see that parts of it manifest in totalitarian cinema. Let’s take the USSR under Stalin and Germany under Hitler as two examples. There’s a propaganda film from 1936 called The Party Card (партийный билет) where a good Communist party member has her party card stolen, and the audience gets to internally crow over her loss of power. This is most obvious in the scene of the disciplinary hearing, which our heroine Anna has to attend because she allowed someone to steal her card and demonstrated a lack of vigilance. If you look at the way this was filmed, it is so voyeuristic that you can almost sense the director or someone jacking off a bit; imagine all these important mostly male politicos all talking down to this one poor guilty cringing woman. This movie came out just before Stalin started the major purges, and it was intended to caution party members to keep their documents safe from the enemy at all times. And they got the message.

Meanwhile, in Nazi Germany (a horrible phrase, I know), the propaganda film Hitlerjunge Quex (1933) was casting the Nazis in a positive light by contrasting their bodily vigour and healthy lifestyles with the exaggerated degeneracy of the German Communists. Scenes of Communists drinking, smoking, gambling and canoodling with loose (probably Jewish) women were meant to make the collective monocle of German society pop off, at a time when the disenfranchised working class was still warming to the whole Nazi thing. And of course it’s loose Jewish women who are used to make this point; women with all the icky sex bits, so when you’re revolted by them you have your masculine spectatorial power reinforced (and on some level it can start to make you feel kind of okay with these women getting hurt or killed). Nazi ideology was pretty open about its misogyny; pure Aryan women gotta produce them master race babies yo. And arguably fascism begins with gender hierarchy (if you believe some authors). So the film makes sure to have a nice pure, sexless blonde girl (the kind Klaus Theweleit calls “the White woman”, as opposed to the Jewy Jezebel “Red woman”) for a contrast.

If you look at it this way, these examples of totalitarian cinema seem to be using structures of visual pleasure to produce a kind of revulsion mixed with sexual arousal, so that the audience will orient themselves properly towards the correct ideology, whatever that happens to be at the time. Karsten Witte argues that Nazi cinema goes a step further by trying to bleed the visual pleasure out of film so that the audience is left in perpetual frustration-- good for breeding violence, maybe. He’s specifically talking about revues, the Busby Berkeley-type ones with the kicking legs and crazy stage setups. Apparently Nazis were capable of making even that shit unexciting by making all the choreography monotonous and lifeless, and filming a huge wide shot to show the whole stage and some of the seats; it’s like ZE CAMERA VILL NEVER MOVE DOWNSTAGE ON PAIN OF DEATH.

Anyway, in all this discussion, doesn’t it seem like something’s missing from Mulvey’s theory? A couple things, actually. Why so binary? Why so essentialist and ahistorical? What happens to this theory outside of the West? Isn’t this theory based in capitalism? What about class differences? Where is the female spectator/the female hero?* This is my big problem with anything that has Freud’s name on it, but I’ll keep my personal loathing out of this post as far as possible. So far, all anyone’s been talking about with this visual pleasure thing is looking at sexy girls. 

So let’s try taking this visual pleasure thing and transplanting it to somewhere really different: COMMUNIST CHINA IN THE 60′S. Think about it! You’ve got a communist political system and collectivist culture, different standards and signifiers of beauty, and radically different forms of gender expression mixed up with class struggle, thanks to a government that officially came out and said “men and women are the same”. Of course that was complete bullshit in practice, but it was the ideal, and movies are all about ideal. Chinese Communist propaganda movies were good for teaching women how to be good socialists. And in contrast with stuff like Party Card, revolutionary Chinese films had a lot of female characters who were actually heroic. They were revolutionary soldiers and workers and peasant militiawomen, and they were ideal models for real women to emulate. This naturally means that revolutionary films were being made with a mixed gender audience in mind, and not just to appeal to a certain gender demographic. Of course in traditional Confucian culture women’s social position was lower than dirt (not accounting for class difference), but all that was supposed to be over now. Now women can be heroic revolutionaries too! They too can approach the sublime ideal of the hypermasculine, vigorous Communist fighter who makes history with his own hands! Not actually reach, though. Only approach. See, this view of gender equality took hypermasculinity as the standard everyone was meant to aspire to. So anything ‘feminine’-- like long hair, bright colours, or sentimentality-- became icky gross and bourgeois. Nobody wants to be a woman, ewww. Revolutionary films offered women and girls a way to fantasise about being that hero in a kind of utopia where family/marital obligations and culturally ingrained sexism didn’t exist, unlike irl. With women and men supposedly being equal (on men’s terms), there also was less room for overt titillating sexiness on the cinema screen, and audiences could derive strong visual pleasure based on class differentials rather than sexual ones (more on this later). Sexiness did sort of find its way back in sometimes, though. And not just through subversive watching either.

I can’t really speak for Nazi Germany or the USSR as those aren’t my specialities, but Chinese political culture seemed particularly receptive to the bleeding together of aesthetics and ideology. Ban Wang calls it “aestheticised politics”; it’s essentially a totalitarian wet dream. They can get inside your head and reorient your tastes and desires so that everything that is ideologically correct seems beautiful and everything that’s taboo is ugly. Imagine that the government could influence what you think is sexy :O (I mean, it probably does in some way already, but that’s off topic) The aesthetics of the revolutionary film could concentrate the spectators’ visual pleasure in a way that benefits the state. You can accomplish this with visual cues, camera tricks, etc. And so the Chinese government may have indirectly produced a generation of young men (and likely some women) who enjoyed beating off furiously to female guerrilla fighters in shorts.

Case in point: the 1971 filmed revolutionary ballet The Red Detachment of Women (《红色娘子军》). It’s well known for causing a flood of jizz sexual awakening for a good many young men in the Cultural Revolution. It was part of a canon of ‘model theatre’ works made for the purpose of exemplifying proper socialist aesthetics, in accordance with Mao’s weirdly well-formed ideas about exactly what those should look like. Plot-wise it’s a pretty standard revolutionary fable: peasant girl meets manly Communist Party official, evil and somewhat effeminate landlord is vanquished. Gotta love those gender dynamics getting mapped onto class antagonisms. But this is a ballet. Ballet is an inherently sensual art form, even if you take away all the tutus and rewrite all the romance scenes. And now that sensuality in ballet gets to blend with the martiality of the revolution! Excellent example: the classic pas de deux in romance scenes has now been repurposed (with added kung fu flavour!) for fight scenes! Can you say SEXY COMMUNISM???

It’s also an art form that relies on dance and music to appeal strongly to the emotions. So when they show us wonderful scenes of the army and the villagers getting along, we’re supposed to feel a warm fuzzy feeling of togetherness with our comrades. When they show us a heroic character being physically punished or martyred, we’re supposed to burn with class hatred, and maybe even get flashbacks to similar abuse we endured at the hands of the enemy. Maybe you might even be so full of rage you might form a mob with your friends and go yank the town ‘capitalist’ out of his home and beat him up. And when we see the inevitable triumph of Communist ideology, we’re supposed to overflow with excitement and hope about the future that we can build for ourselves! All this represents the pleasure people were intended to get out of watching these shows, and all the outcomes are very positive as far as the state is concerned. Noteworthy is that hardly ever are we as spectators put in a position of power over any heroic central female character. That’s not where the pleasure comes from. There is a scene where the peasant-turned-soldier Qionghua is reprimanded for seeking personal revenge, but it isn’t wank material; it’s just a stepping stone to her political maturation. She, like us in the audience, needs to learn that the collective comes first.

All this is well and good, but the famously prudish** Communist ideology also kind of shoots itself in the foot by using the ballet form. It necessitates form-fitting costumes, hence the famous shorts worn by the women soldiers.The moves they perform don’t help either. And neither does the camera, which moves through the complete depth of the stage and lets us get closer to the sweet leg-kicking action than we ever could in a theatre. Also the costuming contains little callbacks to traditional Chinese notions of sexy: check out Qionghua’s red suit (it ain’t just for Communism anymore), and the army uniforms themselves (crossdressing a la Mulan was considered hot). It’s been said that ballet takes place in a secret fourth dimension of the imagination, and some people’s imaginations*** were very fired up. There’s a reason performance stills from Red Detachment were so popular.

Basically the point here is that Chinese revolutionary films had a way different relationship to gender and politics than Western films. Maybe they were both just as illusory. But maybe there’s also something to be said for chasing your own fake fantasy as opposed to just being stuck being somebody else’s?****

* I’m using ‘female hero’ here because whenever these film people say ‘heroine’ they usually mean female romantic lead, and I am talking about something completely different.

** Sexy is fine only when we get to decide what you like.

*** In quite a few cases this would mean ‘genitals’.

**** This has to be the most unfocused piece of shit I’ve ever written.

[officialvalbarnes]

December Favorites 2016

Wow. This is it. I can’t believe December is over and 2017 is here. 2017 IS A THING GUYS. I remember when 2017 was looked at as something that was super far away and would be a time where we would live like the Jetsons. We still don’t live like the Jetsons. Talk about a total let down. Who remembers that show?! I used to watch it all the time on Boomerang. But seriously guys, where has time gone honestly?! I hope that you all had an amazing Christmas and have a Happy New Year! I’m excited about all things in store for the blog and me personally in 2017. I have a feeling it’s going to be a super, awesome year!

Today, I’m going to be sharing my December Favorites 2016 with you guys. I know it’s kind of late. Well, not kind of late it’s just late. I was contemplating on whether I was going to do one or not because I wasn’t sure if I had enough stuff to share with you guys. December has just been a busy month for me. Honestly from October till about...now like early/mid-January, I’ve been busy. As I mentioned in my last post, I recently got a puppy. Between her, school work, school extracurriculars (I’m heavily involved in school clubs), etc life has been super cray cray lately. I decided that I still wanted to share my December Favorites with you guys. As usual, these are the things I really liked more than other things in December.

Favorite Food of the Month

1. La Croix Curate Muré Pepino (Blackberry and Cucumber) Sparkling Water

Now I know you are probably thinking, “Valencia, why in the heck are you drinking a COLD drink during the WINTER?” I honestly have nothing to say but BABY I LIKE IT (Enrique Iglesias anyone?)

Those who know me know that if I’m in the mood for a cold drink regardless of the time of year, I will order it without any regrets whatsoever. #DontHateMeCanYouAintMe. You guys should already know that I’m always in the mood for a sparkling beverage. Haha! I recently came across this drink at the grocery store and I was intrigued by it because I would have never thought of combining these two things. Blackberry and Cucumber? Like why? For some reason, it just works and I don’t question it anymore. I definitely recommend trying it because it’s SO good!

2. Sunbutter Cookies

I actually made these cookies and gave them out as presents to some people this past Christmas. They were a hit! They are simple to make and taste very similar to peanut butter cookies but obviously without the peanut butter. You guys HAVE to make these cookies. Nuff said.

3. Bigelow Decaffeinated Green Tea

I’ve been drinking this tea a whole lot this month to help me with my allergies. I’ve talked about the regular green tea from Bigelow on the blog before, but this time I got the decaf one. I got the decaf one so that if I want to drink a cup before I go to bed, I’m not up all night because of caffeine in green tea you know? I notice that sometimes when I drink regular green tea before bed, I can’t seem to go to sleep immediately. It takes me a hot minute to ease into it. Is it just me that experiences this? Hopefully, someone understands where I’m coming from or this just turned a little awk. Anyway, you gotta try this green tea. If you love green tea, try this because you’ll love this. If you never had green tea, try this. If you don’t like green tea, well....still try it because not all green tea is created equal. I’ve tasted some not so good green tea. When I had the real, good stuff I loved it.

4. Almond Breeze Unsweetened Vanilla Almond Coconut Milk Blend

This is my go-to milk, especially for baking. We were attached at the hip this holiday season. You could say we are BFFs. I just really love this blend. I live a low sugar lifestyle, so this milk blend hits the spot since it is unsweetened. This is such a great milk substitute for those who are dairy-free like me. My food allergies prevent me from having many things, but I’m happy that this is one of the things I can have without having to have Benadryl in my back pocket. Haha, but seriously. #FoodAllergyProbz.

Favorite Book of the Month

5. Holding Up the Universe by Jennifer Niven

I haven’t really had the time to just sit down and read a book like I’ve been wanting to do. If you read my last post, I briefly talked about me getting a puppy. I got a puppy as an early birthday present from my mom and I’m super excited about her. Anyway, during Christmas break I was able to have a little bit more time to do some reading. I started to read the book Holding Up the Universe by Jennifer Niven. I’ve been reading it on my Kindle and so far I’ve been liking it. Fingers crossed that I can actually finish this book before I post my January Favorites so I can give you guys my full opinion on the book.

6. The Community Table: Recipes & Stories from the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan & Beyond

I’ve always loved being surrounded by and learning about different people from different backgrounds and different walks of life. That’s just me. I feel like I get that from my mom because she grew up in a diverse community and had friends from different backgrounds. You learn so much about other cultures. I actually find it very fascinating. My cookbook collection definitely represents my fondness of learning about different cultures. I have books from Chinese cooking, kid-friendly and clean eating to vegetarianism as well as food allergen-friendly. I received this book as a birthday gift from my mom and I was excited about getting it. It has classic recipes like Challah, Latkes, etc in the book and it also has a variety of recipes for all types of eaters. Whether you are a pescatarian, you eat meat, you are meatless or whatever, you’ll find some recipes to make. This book has such a great selection of recipes that are great for family gatherings and celebrations. You should definitely check this book out.

Favorite Fashion of the Month

7. Cozy Socks

I got some cozy socks from Old Navy and they are the best thing ever. They are thebomb.com. I get cold really easily especially during the winter so I wear the cozy socks to bed, even though they somehow end up not on my feet by the time I wake up in the morning. Then when I try to find them, I can’t or it takes a good amount of time. Yeaaah. Does that happen to anyone else? No? Just me? Great.

Favorite TV of the Month

8. Star on FOX

It’s created by the same guy who did Empire, Lee Daniels, and it’s about three girls forming a music group in Atlanta. I wasn’t sure if I was going to like this show since it’s a musical and I’m not one to gravitate towards musical tv shows, but it’s actually not a bad show. It’s pretty good actually. It has Lenny Kravitz and Queen Latifah in it. I’ve had the pleasure of working with Ms. Queen Latifah on a project before and she’s such a down to earth person. If you are into musical tv shows, you might want to check out this show. It comes on Wednesdays I believe at 9PM on Fox.

Favorite Movie of the Month

9. Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them

I’ve never really been into the whole “Harry Potter world” stuff. Not really my thing. However, when I saw the commercials for Fantastic Beasts I was intrigued and I didn’t expect to be (my recent trip to Harry Potter World probably sold me on going to see this movie). If you didn’t know, Fantastic Beasts is set 70 years before Harry Potter. I was surprised that I liked this movie. The CGI of this movie is SO good and so is the filming style of the movie! I’m not gonna lie, the movie was a little slow at first. BUT I know that it went very slow because they were trying to set up the story line and I appreciated that. Once they were done setting up the story and the pacing of the movie picked up, I really liked the movie.

Favorite Music of the Month

10. Hallejuah by Pentatonix

I have three words for you. OH MY GOODNESS. Pentatonix’s rendition of Hallejuah is absolutely beautiful and just amazing. As a group, their vocals work so well together and I’m just really impressed by their work. I heard this song on the radio and have had it on repeat since then. I also saw their holiday special they had on NBC and I thought that it was good. If you haven’t listened to this song, you just have to and also watch the music video. I love the simplicity of the video. It allows you to just focus on the talent. From Avi’s bass to Kevin’s beatboxing. You just have to check out the song and the group in general.

Those were my December Favorites 2016. I hope you all enjoyed my December Favorites 2016. If you did, be sure to give this post a like and subscribe to join the Vegaholics fam. It’s a pretty good time here. What were some of your faves from December? Also, do you have any New Years resolutions? Tell me in the comments below. I hope that you guys are having a great day & I’ll see you in my next post. Bye :)

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