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creativitycache · 4 years ago

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ngl asking for people who self-identify as "antis" is already biasing your results because the term originated from fans being defensive over getting called out (eg the types who sincerely think fandom culture is ""puritan""). fair number of people started to use the term ironically and it might be evening out but overall the post calling for responses on the survey still comes off as something written in bad faith?

I wrote a rather long and involved response and then tumblr ate it. Goshdarn.

Fair warning, this is a hyperfixation and I’m coming off of a migraine so this may not be very cogent. Please read this in the over excited tones of someone infodumping about emulsifiers, with no animosity intended.

So, tl;dr and with a lot fewer links, I’m incredibly interested by your perspective that “anti” originated as a derogatory term.

As far as I am aware, the etymological history of the word “anti” being used pejoratively is coming from some very new debates.

I’m also noting that you had no feedback regarding the content of the questions themselves, which I would be interested in hearing as I am genuinely coming from a place without censure.

The term “anti” actually is a self-descriptor that arose in the Livejournal days, where you’d tag something as “Anti ___” for other like minded people to find. (For example, my cursory google search pulled up 10 Anti Amy Lee communities on LJ).

I’m a self-confessed old. I was back in fandom before Livejournal, aaaall the way back in the Angelfire days. Webrings children! We had webrings! And guest books for you to sign!

I’m going to take a swing for the fences here Anon, so if I’m wrong please let me know, but I’m going to guess you became active as a fan in the past 5-8 years based of your use of the term puritan.

There’s actually a HUGELY new debate in fandom spaces! Previously, it was assumed that:

a) All fandom spaces are created and used by adults only.

b) If you were seeing something, it’s because you dug for it.

These assumptions were predicated upon what spaces fandoms grew in. First you had Star Trek TOS fandom, which grew in 1970s housewives kitchens. They were all friends irl, and everyone was an adult, and you actively had to reach out to other adults to talk about things. (By the way- a woman lost custody of her children in the divorce when her ex husband brought up to the judge she kept a Kirk/Spock zine under her bed. The judge ruled this as obvious signs of moral deficiency. That was in the 80s! Everyone is still alive and the parents are younger than my coworkers!)

Time: 1967-1980s. Is Anti a term? No. Who is the term used by? N/A Is fandom space considered Puritanical? No.

Then, when the internet came about, it was almost exclusively used by adults until The Eternal September. 1993 was the year that changed the internet for good, but even years after that the internet was a majority adult space. Most kids and teens didn’t have unlimited access if their parents even had a home computer in the 90s.

This is the rise of Angelfire, which were fansites all connected to each other in “rings”. You had to hunt for content. If you found something you didn’t like, well, you clicked out and went on with your day because you’d never see it again unless you really dug. This was truly the wild west, tagging did not exist and you could go from fluff to vore in the blink of an eye with nothing warning you before hand. All fannish spaces were marked “here be dragons” and attempts were made to at least adopt the “R/NC-17″ ratings on works to some limited success, depending on webmaster.

Time: 1990-1999. Is Anti a term? No. Who is the term used by? N/A Is fandom space considered Puritanical? No.

In 1999 LiveJournal arose like a leviathan, and here is where the term Anti emerges as a self descriptor. Larger communities began to form, and with them, divisions. Now, you could reach so many fans you could reach a critical mass of them for enough of them to dislike a ship. The phrase “Anti” became a self-used tag, as people tagged their works, communities, and blogs with “anti” (NB: this is at far, far smaller rates than today). Anti was first and foremost a tagging tool used and created by the people who were vehemently against something.

You could find content more easily than in the past, but you still had to put some serious elbow grease into it.

In 2007, Livejournal bans users for art "depicting minors in explicit sexual situations”. The Livejournal community explodes in anger- towards Livejournal staff. The account holders/fans view this as corporate puritanical meddling. The outrage continues as it is revealed these bans were part of a pre-sale operation to SUP Services. SUP Services, upon taking over Livejournal in 2008, proceeds to filter the topics “bisexuality, depression, faeries, girls, boys, and fanfiction”.

The Great LiveJournal Migration begins, as fans leave the site in droves.

Time: 1999-2009. Is Anti a term? Yes. Who is the term used by? People self describing, seeking to create communities based off a dislike of something. Is fandom space considered Puritanical? No.

Where do fans go? Well, in the last decade, they migrated to Tumblr and Twitter (sorry Pillowfort- you gave it a good try!)

What’s different about all of these sites? Individuals are able to create and access content streams. These are hugely impactful in how communities are formed! Because now:

a) finding content is easier

b) finding content you dislike by accident is easier

c) content you dislike requires active curation to avoid

d) truly anonymous outreach is possible and easy (for example, you anon! Isn’t it much easier to go on anon to bring up awkward or sensitive topics? I’m happy you did by the way, and that’s why I keep my anons open. It’s an important contextual tool in the online communications world!)

Now the term Anti gets sprightly. Previously, if you didn’t like content, there was nothing you could really do about it. For example, I, at the tender age of way-too-young, opened up a page of my favorite Star Trek Deep Space 9 fansite and pixel by pixel with all the loading speed of a stoned turtle a very anatomically incorrect orgy appeared.

I backed out.

1. Who could I contact? There was no “message me here” button, no way to summon any mods on Angelfire sites.

2. If I did manage to find a contact button, I would have had to admit I went onto a site that wasn’t designed to keep me safe. I knew this was a site for adults, I knew there wasn’t a way to stop it from showing something. There was no such thing as tags. I knew all of this before going in. So the assumption was, it was on me for looking. (Some may have argued it was on my parents for not supervising me- all I can say is thank GOD no one else was in the living room and my mom was around the corner in the kitchen.)

But now? On Tumblr? On Twitter? In a decade in which tagging is so easy and ubiquitous it’s expected?

Now people who describe themselves as antis start to have actual tools and social conventions to utilize.

Which leads to immediate backlash! Content creators are confused and upset- fandom spaces have been the wild west for decades, and there’s still no sherriff in town. So the immediate go-to argument is that these people who are messaging them are “puritans”.

And that’s actually an interesting argument! A huge factor in shaping the internet’s social mores in the latest decades is cleanliness for stockbrokers. Websites can become toxic to investors and to sales if they contain sexual content. Over time, corporations perfected a mechanism for “cleaning” a site for sale.

Please note there is no personal opinion or judgement in this next list, it is simply a description of corporate strategies you can read during the minute meetings of shareholders for Tumblr, Twitter, Paypal, Venmo, Facebook, Myspace, Yahoo Answers, and Livejournal.

1. Remove sex workers. Ban any sex work of any kind, deplatform, keep any money you may have been holding.

2. Remove pedophilia. This is where the jump begins between content depicting real people vs content depicting fictional characters begins.

3. Remove all sexual image content, including artwork of fictional characters.

4. Remove all sexual content, including written works. If needed, loop back to step 2 as a justification, and claim you do not have the moderators to prevent written works depicting children.

I would like to reiterate these are actual gameplans, so much so that they’ve made their way into business textbooks. (Or at least they did for my Modern Marketing & App Design classes back in the early 2010s. Venmo, of course, wasn’t mentioned, but I did read the shareholder’s speeches when they banned sex workers from the platform so I added them in the list above because it seems they’re following the same pattern.)

So you have two groups who are actively seeking to remove NSFW content from the site.

A) Corporate shareholders

B) People are upset they’re seeing NSFW content they didn’t seek out and squicks them

Now, why does this matter for the debates using the term “puritan” as an insult?

Because the reasons corporate shareholders hate NSFW material is founded in American puritanism. It’s a really interesting conflation of private sector values! And if Wall Street were in another cultural context, it would be a completely different discussion which I find fascinating!

But here’s the rub- that second group? They're not doing this for money. If there are any puritanical drives, it’s personal, not a widespread cohesive ideology driving them. HOWEVER! The section of that group that spent the early 2010s on tumblr did pick up some of the same rhetoric as puritanical talking points (which is an entirely separate discussion involving radfems, 4chan raids, fourth wave feminism, and a huge very nuanced set of influences I would love to talk about at a later time!)

These are largely fans who have “grown up” in the modern sites- no matter how old they actually are, their fandom habits and expectations have been shaped by the algorithms of these modern sites.

Now HERE‘s the fascinating bit that’s new to me! This is the interpretation of the data I’m getting, and so I’m out on a limb but I think this is a valid premise!

The major conflict in fandom at this time is a struggle over personal space online.

Content creators are getting messages telling them to stop, degrading them, following them from platform to platform.

They say “Hey! What gives- we were here first. The cardinal rule of fandom is don’t like, don’t read. Fandom space has always been understood to be adult- it’s been this way for decades! To find our content, you had to come to us! This is our space! This is my space, this is my blog! If you don’t like it, you’re not obligated to look!”

Meanwhile, at the exact same time, antis are saying “Hey! What gives- this content is appearing on my screen! That’s my space! I didn’t agree to this, I don’t like this! I want it to be as far away from me as possible! I will actively drive it away.”

This is a major cultural shift! This is a huge change and a huge source of friction! And I directly credit it to the concept of “content stream” and algorithms driving similar-content to users despite them not wanting it!

Curating your online space used to be much simpler, because there wasn’t much of it! Now with millions of users spread out over a wide age range, all feeding in to the same 4-5 websites, we are seeing people be cramped in a technically limitless space!

Now people feel that they have to go on the offense to defend themselves against content they don’t like, which is predicated upon not only the algorithms of modern websites but ALSO talking points fed from the top down of what is and what is not acceptable on various platforms.

Time: 2010-2020. Is Anti a term? Yes. Who is the term used by? People self describing,and people using it to describe others. Is fandom space considered Puritanical? Depends!

So I, a fandom ancient, a creaky thing of old HTML codes and broken tags, am watching this transformation and am wildly curious for data.

Also...I uh....I can’t believe this is the short version. My ADHD is how you say “buckwild” tonight.

Anyways...um...if anyone has read to the bottom, give me data?

#Asks&Answers #fandom #anti #fandom discourse #gosh I've been on the internet a long time...#started at the 90s now we hear #I still sometimes think about the dudes who were HELLA salty about the eternal september #they talk about it like it was a war...you bring up Usenet and they go #I was THERE Gandalf

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dramyhsturgis · 7 years ago

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On Lestrade, Conan Doyle, and Sherlock

It’s time to revisit this, I think.

In recent trips back through Arthur Conan Doyle's works featuring Sherlock Holmes, I've been thinking of the character trajectories across the stories, especially regarding Holmes's relationship to Lestrade (less celebrated that the brilliant Holmes-Watson partnership, but nonetheless fascinating).

"We All Three Shook Hands" by Sidney Paget, 1902 (L to R: Lestrade, Holmes, and Watson)

My thoughts are based on looking at the novels and short stories in internal chronological order (wherever it can be determined), not publication order.

Holmes

Point the First: Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes is quite capable of being obnoxious in the BBC's Sherlock Cumberbatchian sense. Perhaps one of the worst affronts appears in "The Boscombe Valley Mystery" (set in 1889), in which Holmes plays his "Lestrade's So Stupid That He Wouldn't Understand X" game. The example he chooses, however, 1) is one that Watson doesn't comprehend either and, more to the point, 2) is one predicated on Holmes's own knowledge of Watson's daily grooming habits gained only by the fact he's lived with Watson for years. Of course Lestrade wouldn't reach Holmes's conclusion: he's never lived with Watson, and thus he has no access to that data! The entire exercise is just an excuse for Holmes to show off, not an honest assessment of Lestrade's abilities. Holmes is none too gentle with delivering the insulting conclusion of his reasoning, for that matter, and thus he humiliates Watson. If Lestrade (or Watson) appears to get short-tempered with Holmes now and again, it's not unwarranted.

Point the Second and the More Important: Holmes shows rather compelling character development over the years (and here I'm reminded of the great man/good man point articulated by Lestrade in Sherlock), and it's instructive to watch this unfold through his relationship with Lestrade. [1]

In "The Five Orange Pips" (set in 1887), when Watson asks if their unknown visitor might be a friend of Holmes, Holmes replies: "Except yourself I have none," he answered. "I do not encourage visitors." [2]

Yet in that same year, Holmes's professional familiarity with Lestrade leads him to treat the Inspector not as a guest who requires formal hospitality, but rather as a regular visitor free to consider himself welcome and make himself at home (in "The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor"):

"Good-afternoon, Lestrade! You will find an extra tumbler upon the sideboard, and there are cigars in the box."

In Holmes's letter to Watson in "The Final Problem" (set in 1891), Holmes admits that he has "friends" (plural) who will feel "pain" at his loss.

In "The Adventure of the Empty House" (set in 1894), Holmes identifies Lestrade -- in front of both Holmes's would-be murderer Colonel Sebastian Moran and, for the very first time, Lestrade himself -- as "my friend Lestrade." (He refers to Lestrade as "friend Lestrade" multiple times thereafter.)[3]

By "The Adventure of the Six Napoleons" (set in 1900), Holmes regularly welcomes Lestrade's social visits (above and beyond professional meetings about their joint work on a case) with a drop-by-unannounced intimacy usually reserved for one's closest friends and family.

It was no very unusual thing for Mr. Lestrade, of Scotland Yard, to look in upon us of an evening, and his visits were welcome to Sherlock Holmes, for they enabled him to keep in touch with all that was going on at the police headquarters. In return for the news which Lestrade would bring, Holmes was always ready to listen with attention to the details of any case upon which the detective was engaged, and was able occasionally, without any active interference, to give some hint or suggestion drawn from his own vast knowledge and experience.

On this particular evening, Lestrade had spoken of the weather and the newspapers. Then he had fallen silent, puffing thoughtfully at his cigar. Holmes looked keenly at him.

“Anything remarkable on hand?” he asked. “Oh, no, Mr. Holmes–nothing very particular.” “Then tell me about it.” Lestrade laughed.

In the same story, Holmes even takes pains to consider Lestrade's personal comfort, after he's asked the Inspector to lengthen an already long day by accompanying him on a late-night expedition. Without prompting, Holmes offers food and a nap with easy familiarity:

“You'll dine with us, Lestrade, and then you are welcome to the sofa until it is time for us to start.”

Lestrade

Lestrade is practical throughout -- he bristles at insults and scorns the thought of trusting theorizing over legwork, and yet he proves willing to admit his own mistakes from the very first ("I freely confess that I was of the opinion that Stangerson was concerned in the death of Drebber. This fresh development has shown me that I was completely mistaken..." in A Study in Scarlet, set in 1881) -- but it's clear that the no-nonsense pragmatism of his relations with Holmes grows into genuine warmth and affection over time. Beyond the above examples, there are others.

By the time of The Hound of the Baskervilles (probably set in 1888 or 1889, though possibly as late as 1899 or 1900), Holmes is requesting Lestrade's presence ("He is the best of the professionals, I think, and we may need his assistance," Holmes tells Watson), and Watson can see just how their chemistry has matured:

The London express came roaring into the station, and a small, wiry bulldog of a man had sprung from a first-class carriage. We all three shook hands, and I saw at once from the reverential way in which Lestrade gazed at my companion that he had learned a good deal since the days when they had first worked together. I could well remember the scorn which the theories of the reasoner used then to excite in the practical man.

"The Adventure of the Norwood Builder" (set in 1894 or 1895) shows a friendly competition between Holmes and Lestrade in which each teases and mocks the other when the facts seem to fit his theory. (At one point, Holmes confesses to Watson, "...upon my soul, I believe for once the fellow is on the right track and we are on the wrong.") But Lestrade is "a practical man," as he admits, and when Holmes ultimately reveals the definitive truth with much added (and arguably unnecessary) drama, Lestrade reacts not with hurt pride or wounded ego, but genuine appreciation. (He also immediately gives credit where credit is due, telling the culprit, "You have done your best to get an innocent man hanged. If it wasn't for this gentleman here, I am not sure that you would not have succeeded.") The physical response from the normally reserved Holmes when Lestrade offers his gratitude speaks volumes:

"... I don't mind saying, in the presence of Dr. Watson, that this is the brightest thing that you have done yet, though it is a mystery to me how you did it. You have saved an innocent man's life, and you have prevented a very grave scandal, which would have ruined my reputation in the Force."

Holmes smiled, and clapped Lestrade upon the shoulder.

And then of course there's the justifiably famous exchange in "The Adventure of the Six Napoleons" (set in 1900):

“Well,” said Lestrade, “I’ve seen you handle a good many cases, Mr. Holmes, but I don’t know that I ever knew a more workmanlike one than that. We’re not jealous of you at Scotland Yard. No, sir, we are very proud of you, and if you come down to-morrow, there’s not a man, from the oldest inspector to the youngest constable, who wouldn’t be glad to shake you by the hand.”

“Thank you!” said Holmes. “Thank you!” and as he turned away, it seemed to me that he was more nearly moved by the softer human emotions than I had ever seen him.

Note: It's no wonder why Holmes might rely on the tenacious Inspector (in addition to his always-worthy Watson) in a situation that has the potential for real danger, such as in The Hound of the Baskervilles. After all, Lestrade proves time and again willing to confront the villains by himself without backup, including Joseph Stangerson in A Study in Scarlet and James Browner in "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box." For that matter, although he's the slightest man physically in a room of five, Lestrade is the one to bring down the "so powerful and so fierce" Jefferson Hope by "half-strangling" him in A Study in Scarlet. Holmes underscores his trust in the Inspector by calling upon Lestrade once again in "The Adventure of the Empty House," in this case to assist in the capture of the vengeful Colonel Sebastian Moran.

Random Musings Related to ACD Canon and the BBC's Sherlock

According to my calculations (which I'm happy to explain and be corrected upon), there was approximately a fifteen-year spread between ACD's Sherlock Holmes and Inspector Lestrade, with John Watson and Mycroft Holmes in the middle. If you take the ages of the four male leads in Sherlock, there is a fourteen-year spread between the youngest (Benedict Cumberbatch) and the eldest (Rupert Graves), with Martin Freeman and Mark Gatiss in the middle.

Also according to my calculations, at the time of ACD's "The Adventure of the Empty House," Sherlock Holmes was 40, John Watson was 41 and nearing 42, Mycroft Holmes was 47, and Inspector Lestrade was approximately 55. As for BBC's Sherlock, at the time of the filming of the third-series episode "The Empty Hearse," this puts Martin Freeman and Mark Gatiss at the perfect ages, and Benedict Cumberbatch and Rupert Graves equally four-five years younger than their respective characters.

I wonder if the naming of Sherlock's Molly Hooper is a nod to Molly Robertson-Kirk, a.k.a. "Lady Molly of Scotland Yard" (who was, after all, a contemporary of Sherlock Holmes).

I suspect that Sherlock's "Greg Lestrade" wasn't originally intended to be short for "Gregory Lestrade," but rather for "Gregson Lestrade." In this way, Moffat and Gatiss could seamlessly combine Inspectors Lestrade and Gregson, who are identified by ACD's Holmes as, among the Scotland Yard professionals, "the pick of a bad lot. They are both quick and energetic, but conventional — shockingly so." (A Study in Scarlet) This theory may have been Jossed by the Steve Thompson-penned third episode of the second series (in which Lestrade is cut off as he's trying to explain that other D.I.s have consulted Sherlock besides him, and names Gregson as he's interrupted). The full implications of this throwaway mention of Gregson is as yet unclear.

[1] There are other interesting character changes Holmes exhibits, including his evolving thoughts on justice vs. law and means vs. ends, but I'm particularly thinking of his personal, non-Watsonian relationships at present.

[2] It's perhaps worth pointing out that Holmes describes Watson as "not a man with intimate friends" (save, Holmes implies, himself) in The Hound of the Baskervilles.

[3] Interestingly enough, Watson begins referring to Lestrade as "our old friend Lestrade" in works set in 1894 and 1895, including "The Adventure of the Norwood Builder" and "The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans."

#lestrade #sherlock holmes #john watson #g lestrade #greg lestrade #di lestrade #arthur conan doyle #sherlock

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anhed-nia · 8 years ago

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5/3/17: FIRE WALK WITH ME vs PHENOMENA - The Comparative Analysis No One Asked For!

TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME (1992) and PHENOMENA (1985) is a pairing that may not immediately leap to mind, but they have two obvious things in common: They are products of two of the world's best loved genre filmmakers, and they were thought to represent the nadir of each director's career at the time of release. Incidentally, they are also both predicated on a sort of Alice through the looking glass structure, and as such, they may have more to offer as a duet than a cursory consideration would suggest.

When FIRE WALK WITH ME made its debut, after David Lynch’s groundbreaking television series was cancelled, the former suffered a lot from the preciousness with which audiences regarded Twin Peaks. A show fan (as opposed to a Lynch fan) might accept cutesy kookiness but not psychoanalytic abstraction; they might welcome a few good scares, but not constant terror and misery; and importantly, they might enjoy the idea of a cheerleader with a dark side, but sicken when the facts of Laura Palmer's life are laid bare unromantically in all their R-rated glory. Topping all that off with the absence of most of the show's beloved characters and/or actor (many of who expressed bitterness over Lynch more or less abandoning the program in its oft-maligned second season), it is unsurprising that the film met with boos, walkouts and scathing reviews upon release.

After a fashion, FIRE WALK WITH ME enjoyed a favorable reappraisal by its public, but no such forgiveness would come for Dario Argento's PHENOMENA. (At least, not for a while) This grisly fairy tale in which Jennifer Connelly uses her psychic connection with insects, and the aid of Donald Pleasance's wayward helper monkey, to solve a series of murders, was considered by many to be the beginning of the end of Argento's envelope-pushing career. Up to that point, fans delighted in the logistical acrobatics of manic detective stories like PROFONDO ROSSO and TENEBRE, and happily accepted the rather loose story structure of a fever dream like SUSPIRIA in light of its astonishing aesthetic powers. However, even these adventurous viewers had a hard time with PHENOMENA's delirious dialog, its hysterical musical blend opera with speed metal and surf rock, and its entirely preposterous premise. I have yet to come across a piece of critical writing that values this film as more than a collection of extreme examples of Argento's defining characteristics as an artist. With that said, I have preemptively congratulated myself for attempting to say something about it as a story.

Both FWWM and PHENEMONA tell a little-girl-lost tale, in which the girls are specifically lost in a world of intimate violence and betrayal, with supernatural overtones. Their similarities are cosmetic, too: The mountain town of Twin Peaks, where prom queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) lives and dies, is bathed in a searing white light by day as if to parody the pretended purity and simplicity of its people. A similarly blinding daylight bleaches the eerie environs of the Swiss Alps where a movie star has sent his beautiful daughter, Jennifer Corvino (Jennifer Connelly), to a fancy boarding school. By night, an evil darkness seeps out of the pines surrounding both settings, laying cover for libidinous young men and bloodthirsty murderers. Our schoolgirl heroines have to battle the mundane evils of ignorant adults and predatory peers, as well as real monsters disguised as loving fathers.

Although FIRE WALK WITH ME is a prequel to Twin Peaks, Laura Palmer is already in deep trouble at the beginning of the movie. Because she is the most popular girl in the world, seeming to have it all, no one in a position to help thinks to wonder about her erratic behavior, nocturnal flights from home, and often-transparent misery. With nobody watching out for her, Laura's fate is determined by the men in her life: her boyfriend Bobby, who is more a rabid dog than a person; her secret lover James, who lacks the humility to imagine anything more important than his shallow puppy love; and Jacques, the owner of a bar on the wild Canadian border, who feeds Laura's cocaine addiction and her compulsion to endanger and degrade herself. As per the unfortunate cliche, Laura's relationships are patterned after her relationship with her father, who in this case is essentially the devil.

Jennifer Corvino is also haunted by the specter of her father, who has a huge impact on her life, even though he never materializes. When she arrives at the elite Richard Wagner Academy for Girls, she is burdened with the stigma of having a rich, famous, and desirable daddy. Her social life basically has two facets, which her new roommate Sophie demonstrates succinctly: Jennifer is either subject to other people's sexual obsession with her father, or subject to their sadism and jealousy of her supposedly desirable station in life. When Jennifer reveals that she knows movie star Paul Corvino, Sophie mindlessly assails her with a lustful rant about his body, and an invasive question about whether she has fucked him yet, before Jennifer patiently explains that he is her father. It's hard to completely blame Sophie for her behavior, since Jennifer has brought armloads of pinups of her dad to decorate their dorm--a strange way for a person to relate to a parent. The oedipal vibe of this scene is underlined by a weird comic touch in which Jennifer, hungry from her long journey, eats a jar of baby food left behind by Sophie's family. Throughout the film, the infantilized Jennifer pines for the father who has abandoned her for a foreign film shoot, longing for his protection from even less caring adults.

Where Jennifer's character is colored by this subtle form of romance with her father, Laura's life is ruined by the very real affair that her father (Ray Wise) carries on with her during the twilight fugue states shared by both of them. Her repressed awareness of this ongoing trauma bubbles up to her consciousness in the form of hallucinatory visions of a demonic older man called Bob (Frank Silva) who has been raping her since childhood. Laura sees Bob lurking in her bedroom, blames him for pages torn out of her secret diary, and believes he that he intends to fully possess her and thereby incarnate himself as her. Laura has only one real friend in the world, who she can't possible tell about Bob: innocent Donna Hayward (played here by Moira Kelly rather than Lara Flynn Boyle, to pretty much universal dismay). Donna loves Laura with the kind of unconditional love that easily blooms when a person doesn't really know anything about the object of their affection. Donna's naivete is so total that Laura must shield her not only from the story of Bob, but from her crippling drug addiction and forays into prostitution. Inevitably, Donna martyrs herself on the cross of their friendship, attempting to prove her devotion by borrowing some of Laura's sluttier clothes, getting wasted and almost screwing a young tough in the middle of Jacque's bar. The harrowing sequence concludes with Laura, who has been perfectly evil to Donna all night in an attempt to scare her off, giving vent to a shattering scream at the sight of her friend being molested. Still, she is unable to experience or express actual love, screeching at her best friend, "DON'T YOU EVER WEAR MY STUFF!"

Donna's love for Laura is only as deep as her maturity allows, and FIRE WALK WITH ME and Twin Peaks frequently touch on the way in which teenage relationships are exactly as passionate as they are shallow. PHENOMENA takes this a step further, describing the corrosive, sadistic social environment that stereotypically sprouts up between girls. After Jennifer tells the heartbreaking story of her philandering mother walking out on the family on Christmas (which, apropos nothing, bears a curious similarity to Phoebe Cates' dead santa story from GREMLINS), Sophie says, as if she hadn't heard a word, that she's glad Jennifer has arrived because she gets so lonely at night. Throughout their entire conversation, in fact, Jennifer's dialog and Sophie's dialog never seem to quite match up, as if they were in two separate movies. This makes for an acute description of the way in which young women readily perform the drama of being best friends forever, while not really acknowledging each other as individuals, or even liking each other very much. Shortly hereafter, Sophie absconds with Jennifer's black and gold Armani pullover (all of the apparel in this film is provided by Armani, which contributes excellently to the film's slick, icy look) to rendezvous with her boyfriend along the shadowy treeline. She brags about knowing the daughter of a celebrity and stealing her clothes, but when she realizes that her boyfriend is now interested in Jennifer, she changes her tune. "She wears her hair like mine," Sophie boasts, as if she were the influencer, and then cattily divulges that Jennifer sleepwalks, and must be crazy. PHENOMENA being essentially a slasher movie, Sophie isn't long for this world, but Jennifer responds to her gruesome murder with a spirit of vengeance for her supposed friend. Jennifer’s sweetness is offset by her stuck-up peers, and PHENOMENA boasts the mother of all mean girl sequences, a psychotic update of CARRIE's "plug it up" scene in which Jennifer's classmates attack her for believing she can speak to bugs. A fabulous swirling tracking shot gathers a growing gang of girls around Jennifer, as they taunt her with insect noises which transform into a chant: “WE WORSHIP YOU! WE WORSHIP YOU!” Naturally, Jennifer's insect friends descend on the school, threatening to crash through the windows as she declares messianically, "I love you. I love you all." Of course, the grownups at the academy are partially to blame for the atmosphere around Jennifer. This revelation about her powers came to light because, guided by the psychic voice of a firefly, Jennifer discovered one of the missing Sophie's gloves, which contained a helpful maggot. This is another one of the film's great and powerful scenes: Jennifer, cherubic in a white nightgown and dwarfed by the cold luminous cube of her dorm, glides across the pitch-black lawn as if in slow motion--while, in stark contradiction to this dreamy image, the soundtrack blasts a scathing speed metal anthem. It's a fascinating aesthetic device that Argento will employ again later in the film, accompanying slow, quite action with crushing, thrashy music. In any case, when Jennifer naively admits that a maggot told her about Sophie's murder, the domineering headmistress (the astonishing-looking Dalila Di Lazzaro, who is no Alida Valli but she gets the job done) calls the men in the white coats. Jennifer is subject to a number of humiliating experiments and tests to evaluate her mental health ("Do you take anything? Like, do you understand...DRUGS?"), on which she storms out. Where Laura Palmer is almost totally alone in the world due to her perceived perfection, Jennifer Corvino is alienated by constant scrutiny.

Laura has just one, tragically ineffectual source of aid--generically, forces from the Black Lodge. The backwards-speaking Man From Another Place (Michael J. Anderson) seems to try to warn her and Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) of her fate, but he speaks only in poetic code. Cooper himself tries and fails to advise her through her dreams, and Laura also receives strange messages from one of her Meals On Wheels recipients. Mrs. Chalfont (Frances Bay) and her grandson, a mute junior magician who hides behind a disturbing pagan mask, try to intervene with Laura, but only manage to terrorize her further. Ordinary sources of support are absent or utterly corrupt, including Laura's mother (the inimitable Grace Zabriskie), who exists in a state of fragile, attenuated silence, unable to confront what she must know is happening between her husband and her daughter. Although Sarah Palmer also receives visions from the Black Lodge, she retreats from them in terror and resigns herself to her circumstances. She even accepts an obviously drugged libation from her husband before bedtime, when the trouble begins.

The great power of FIRE WALK WITH ME, and also Twin Peaks, is that Laura's father is not pure evil. Leland Palmer is given profound depth by Ray Wise, with his limitlessly expressive face, and unpredictable vacillation between warmth and violence. We simultaneously pity and fear him: He truly loves his daughter, urgently consoling her when they are confronted by the One-Armed Man (Al Strobel) in traffic, and making a tearful bedside appearance that amounts to a tacit admission of guilt. He evinces a genuine desire to be close to his daughter, which is unfortunately inseparable from his desire to be with her as a man. Leland is much more than a good guy by day, and a bad guy when possessed by an evil spirit; he caught in the unbridgeable schism that yawns between the aspirational ego-self, and the id, the self taken over by trauma and pathology. Within David Lynch's supernatural fable is a completely authentic story about mental illness and incest that strikes all the right psychological chords.

While Jennifer's father never becomes more than an idea, she does attract a separate father figure in the course her search for Sophie's killer, who may in fact be a serial killer. Donald Pleasance plays paraplegic forensic entomologist Dr. John McGregor, who happened to have been close friends with a previous victim. Jennifer meets him after one of her somnambulistic excursions, when she is led away from the scene of a near-gang rape by McGregor’s chimpanzee Inga. McGregor, who apparently has a way with teenage girls, quickly determines that Jennifer has a special connection to insects--specifically, he notes that a certain beetle in his care is trying to get it on with her: "You're arousing him, and he's doing his best to arouse you." While McGregor is meant to be charming, and never does anything explicitly inappropriate, his role in the story contributes to a feeling that Jennifer can never escape a certain freudian pattern, whether she is being accused of having sex with her father, actually pining for her father, or being eroticized by the nearest father figure in her life.

PHENOMENA takes much stranger strides in examining the maternal archetype in this saga--most often enacted by some form of wicked stepmother. By now we have been introduced to the idea of Jennifer's deadbeat mom, and the angry, jealous-seeming headmistress who tries to have Jennifer committed, but there is a third figure in play who the audience may have counted out at the beginning of the movie. Dario Argento's erstwhile creative and romantic partner Daria Nicolodi (from whom he separated the year of this film's release--and whatever it means, Argento cast his daughter Fiore, from another partnership, as the first victim) plays Frau Bruckner, an employee at the school who seems pretty dismissible at first. She suddenly becomes relevant toward the last act when McGregor is murdered by the mysterious killer. Seemingly sympathetic, Bruckner invites Jennifer to spend the night at her home--but once they're there, the helpful older woman becomes strange and threatening. Noticing a profusion of shrouded mirrors in the house, Jennifer prompts her hostess to deliver a disturbing monologue about her "sick" son, the product of a rape whom she considers a burden and a constant torment. "These things can happen in a woman's life," Bruckner observes darkly. Indeed, even a normal pregnancy is something that happens to a woman, something she cannot share with her husband nor her children. The child is under no natural obligation to empathize with the trials of motherhood, and inevitably, and a mother has little control over the person her child will become. This can be pretty bad news for the mother, but from the child's point of view, if you are primarily identified as something that has happened to your mother, then what can you possibly expect from her?

Things escalate quickly with the obviously bad-news Bruckner, leading to a chase that includes one of the gnarliest images ever to grace a screen: Jennifer, in her chic white-on-white uniform, plunges into a basement dungeon brimming with a stew of putrifying human remains. Jennifer struggles to tread water in this rancid soup as Bruckner taunts her; nearby, an interloping detective is chained to a wall, and uses Jennifer's diversion to break free and attack Bruckner with his chains chain. Jennifer flees the scene, and finds herself in the room of Bruckner's little boy. Foolishly, she sympathizes with him, perhaps as one abandoned and stigmatized child to another, and tells him that he is finally free of his evil mother. When she removes the shroud from a mirror, the child flies into a rage, revealing himself to be indescribably deformed and equally violent. He chases Jennifer out to a lake and onto a motorboat, in a scene curiously reminiscent of the end of FRIDAY THE 13TH. She summons a swarm of insects that skeletonize the boy, and makes her way to shore, only to be confronted by Bruckner. The madwoman confesses to murdering McGregor and others in order to hide her son's taste for schoolgirl blood, and nearly decapitates Jennifer with a piece of sheet metal--before she is attacked by Inga, the monkey, in a climactic battle that defies description, even by the standards of a movie that already stretches the definition of “over the top”. Then, as Wikipedia eloquently puts it, "With the ordeal over, Jennifer and the chimp embrace."

Even detractors of PHENOMENA will usually admit that its high camp is extremely entertaining. FIRE WALK WITH ME, on the other hand, has hardly a shred of humor, unlike the frequently kitschy and nostalgic Twin Peaks, making it a constant stream of wrenching terror and sadness. Laura's appalling fate is sealed by a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy: She is being raped by her father, which produces in her a suicidal self-loathing, which leads her down a path of dangerous prostitution, and then when her father discovers this activity, he does away with her. Although FWWM is much easier to identify as a work of art, its finale has problems that are not dissimilar to PHENOMENA, and I personally find it less easy to like. Half-possessed by Bob, Leland drags Laura and another young sex worker off to a disused train car. There, he savagely brutalizes both women in an aria of sadism, punctuated by hysterical confessions from Leland and Bob about their collaborative, lifelong victimization of Leland's child. It is hard to watch, and even harder to look away. This is all well and good, but then, as if Lynch had painted himself into a corner, something utterly untrue to the world of the film takes place. Referencing a gaudy religious painting in Laura's bedroom, an actual angel appears to her as her soul leaves her body and is relegated to the Black Lodge for eternity. If it is meant to be a hallucination, this is a lousy place for it, since Twin Peaks features literal ethereal figures all the time. If it is meant to be taken literally, and I believe it is, an angel is a lousy choice, since the Black Lodge is dominated by a distinctly non-Christian ideology, usually with Native American overtones. There is a single reference to a guardian angel in an especially terrible piece of the second season of Twin Peaks, but I would refuse to accept that as a reasonable excuse for this. Just to pour some salt in the wound, the angel is accompanied by opera music, marking a jarring aesthetic departure from the entire rest of the film and the show, which is characterized as much by Angelo Badalamenti's jazz score as anything else. Lynch could at least have cast Julee Cruise as the angel to help keep us in the mood, but no such luck. This interruption makes it hard to stay focused on the film's concluding image of Laura weeping in terror and relief, under Dale Cooper's benevolent gaze, in the Black Lodge. Oh well; fortunately, the rest of the film is so forceful that its resonance survives this gaffe.

Before I cut myself off, I would just like to make one further remark about FIRE WALK WITH ME. It is a serious shame that people remember Laura Palmer better than they remember the actress Sheryl Lee. Even fans who can easily name Lara Flynn Boyle and Sherilyn Fenn have a hard time calling Laura Palmer anything other than Laura Palmer. I'm not entirely sure what accounts for this, other than that the Laura Palmer character is so exciting to people that she has become more important as an archetype, than as a work of art executed by a skilled performer. It's completely unfair to Sheryl Lee, who gives us a performance that I wouldn't even want to live through myself. The woman has to cry throughout the entire film, which seems exhausting to say the least, but it's not a simple matter of emoting; she makes it so raw that it's terrifying to watch. Lee takes a simple line like "Who was that man? Do you know him?", and delivers it with the blistering urgency of a woman mounting the gallows. There is a lot to love about the formal composition of FWWM, but the truth is that without this actress's torturous commitment to making Laura Palmer psychologically correct, the whole structure might come crashing down. Everyone whose life has been touched by Twin Peaks, even those of us who relate more to the iconic Donna and Audrey, owe Sheryl Lee more thanks than we have given her.

#blogtober #sheryl lee #jennifer connelly #phenomena #creepers #david lynch #dario argento #twin peaks #fire walk with me #laura palmer #black lodge #daria nicolodi #donald pleasance

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toomanysinks · 6 years ago

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Foxconn is killing a second $9B factory

Foxconn is even more aggressively cutting back its growth ambitions around the world than we previously thought. In addition to the news yesterday that Foxconn intends to scale back its plans for a $10 billion factory in Wisconsin, leaving that state in something of a lurch, we have now learned that the Taiwanese company intends to scale back a $9 billion factory in Guangzhou, according to the Nikkei Asian Review citing internal documents. It lists trade war fears and a macro slowdown as the cause.

We talked about the lessons for economic development yesterday, but there is another angle around manufacturing flexibility that is critical to understanding this news.

A few weeks ago, I interviewed Dave Evans, who is building a startup called Fictiv, which is a “a contract manufacturer that doesn’t own any machines.” He thinks about manufacturing “more like cloud computing” where you can “scale up and down production as you would with AWS or a load-balancing server.”

In a world filled with fast-moving political eddies and fickle consumer demand, Evans ardently advocates for manufacturing flexibility. “No one is talking about how to build a supply chain that is agile enough to deal with different geopolitical climates,” he said. In today’s world, “supply chain planning is years or sometimes decades out” and yet, “if I look at policy or governments, or nascent trade agreements, that tends to be on quarters.”

Flexibility is ultimately about resilience. Faster adaptation allows companies to increase profits and reliability. “If you are going to build a robust business that lasts, then you need to have robust supply chains,” Evans said. You “don’t want to be a company that is a ping-pong based on the mood of Trump’s tweets.”

A huge part of what Fictiv is attempting to do as a startup is to offer that flexibility as a service. According to its website, the company has produced more than 3 million parts and can have turnaround times in some cases as short as a day. As I pointed out yesterday, it is these part ecosystems that often prove the biggest barrier to (re)launching manufacturing back in the United States.

Manufacturing flexibility is something that Chinese factories have prioritized for years. As an email correspondent with knowledge of these supply chains for large consumer companies discussed with me, China’s biggest strength may not be the ecosystem that has developed around Shenzhen and in Guangzhou, but actually the ability to scale up and down manufacturing by tens of thousands of workers in a week.

Foxconn, perhaps more than any manufacturer, has learned the importance of that skill. Its very survival is predicated on its ability to quickly adjust — at a scale of hundreds of millions of units — to the changing needs of its partners. When the economics of its plants don’t make sense, they shut them down, immediately. That may not be a positive for Wisconsin, but it is the competitive edge that America has lost over the years against much more flexible international competitors.

How can you compete and also invest long-term?

Tokyo’s Shibuya station is both a major rail hub and a huge commercial center, owned by the Tokyu Corporation, a private rail company.

Competition is a key value of capitalism. The more competitors there are, the more that prices can drop and the more surplus value that consumers can pick up. That’s why why we try to avoid giving any one company too much sway over its market.

The challenge though is that competition also forces companies to fight each other for small wins, rather than carefully placing investments for the long term. If survival or even just profitability depends on precise revenues this quarter, then dollars will flow to marketing to juice sales rather than to R&D to invest in the future.

This is the great irony of competition. Too much of it and you get stagnation, while monopolies can counter-intuitively offer huge incentives for innovation. There is a reason that Google and Microsoft today, Xerox a generation ago, and Bell Labs even further back produced some of the most fundamental research in technology in the past century — durable, monopolistic revenue and a long-term view all cascade together.

So it was interesting reading through this Financial Times long read about the success and failures of privatizing different train systems around the world. The basic line is that Japan has managed to privatize its rail while maintaining great customer satisfaction, while the UK has stagnated with ever higher fares and diminished service since it sold off public rail. Switzerland in contrast has robust service and a completely nationalized rail.

Why the difference?

There are a couple of keys to Switzerland’s and Japan’s success. First, they think in systems, which means they understand that even as rail companies, they are not just limited to “rail.” For instance, Japan’s rail companies are also major real estate developers and landlords. The more people who choose rail, the more consumers who might shop at the malls erected around large train stations. There is a unity here that comes from ownership.

But monopolies are still monopolies — why not just cut service and bleed profits out of the system? The answer is that Japan’s rail companies own the underlying tracks themselves, and thus are ultimately dependent on the long-term vitality of specific routes. From the article:

“Our railway has relatively attractive residential areas along it. We want to make sure it’s a good place for young people to keep choosing it as a place to live,” says Fumiaki Shiroishi, director of the railway division at Tokyu, which serves some of Tokyo’s most popular western suburbs. “Even if we can’t expect an increase in overall population there will be winners and losers among the railways. People gather where it’s convenient. There are places where the population will increase 30 per cent and places where it will decline 70 per cent.”

There is indeed competition, but of a more long-term variety. These companies understand that their ultimate worth isn’t just having a reliable timetable, but having such quality service over many years that people make permanent life decisions based on that performance. It’s also key that the rail companies will eventually recoup their investments due to the stability of their business environment.

To me, these debates over long-term investment are central to the challenges facing many startups today. Competition is keen. You build a scooter company, and suddenly there are a whole crop of challengers in the blink of an eye. Capturing value is the key to building a startup, but how do you capture value if you don’t even know you will exist in six months?

Particularly as Silicon Valley enters industries such as health care, education, construction and others, where huge investments in product development and research will be critical to success, taming the downsides to competition will be necessary for returns to multiply.

TechCrunch is experimenting with new content forms. This is a rough draft of something new – provide your feedback directly to the author (Danny at [email protected]) if you like or hate something here.

Share your feedback on your startup’s attorney

My colleague Eric Eldon and I are reaching out to startup founders and execs about their experiences with their attorneys. Our goal is to identify the leading lights of the industry and help spark discussions around best practices. If you have an attorney you thought did a fantastic job for your startup, let us know using this short Google Forms survey and also spread the word. We will share the results and more in the coming weeks.

What’s Next

More work on societal resilience

I’m reading a Korean novel called The Human Jungle by Cho Chongnae that places a multi-national cast of characters in China’s economy. It’s been a great read a quarter of the way in.

This newsletter is written with the assistance of Arman Tabatabai from New York

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/31/foxconn-is-killing-a-second-9b-factory/

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fmservers · 6 years ago

Text

Foxconn is killing a second $9B factory

We talked about the lessons for economic development yesterday, but there is another angle around manufacturing flexibility that is critical to understanding this news.

How can you compete and also invest long-term?

Tokyo’s Shibuya station is both a major rail hub and a huge commercial center, owned by the Tokyu Corporation, a private rail company.

Why the difference?

Share your feedback on your startup’s attorney

What’s Next

More work on societal resilience

I’m reading a Korean novel called The Human Jungle by Cho Chongnae that places a multi-national cast of characters in China’s economy. It’s been a great read a quarter of the way in.

This newsletter is written with the assistance of Arman Tabatabai from New York

Via Danny Crichton https://techcrunch.com

#TechCrunch

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bitchycrusadecat-blog · 7 years ago

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Up To €350 Bonus! Play Game Of Thrones Slot At Mr Green

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