#anyone enjoying this rapist's works is complicit

[goyangistudios32]

It's time to abandon and ban everything to do with Neil Garbage. Books written by him? Burn every copy. Adaptations of his works? Destroy all of them and make them lost media. Movies where he was involved in the script but wasn't actually a major contributor? Get rid of those, too. Even that one Simpson Treehouse of Horror episode needs to make an entirely new segment that doesn't give any credibility to Neil Garbage.

[isabelpsaroslunnen]

My best friend and I have been watching Star Trek: The Original Series for months, mostly because we're both sometimes busy and can't coordinate, but he does adore Star Trek (it is hard to overstate how much, except with regard to Picard) and even though I'm a TNG kid, I am almost always having a great time with it.

Overall: I love the stage-y Pepto-Bismol meets bisexual flag aesthetic of so much of the show, the actual bisexual vibes of so many characters (unintentionally? allegedly? I guess?), the effects that have aged remarkably well almost as much as the ones that have aged terribly, but are part of its charm, and of course, many of the characters. And I definitely have enjoyed the mixture of cheesy silliness with deeply earnest aspirations towards transcending its own era, even though it falls short (I'm an early modernist; I have a high tolerance for works that are ultimately of their times, but visibly trying to cut through the miasma of their eras' norms).

Anyway, some thoughts on each episode I've seen thus far!

[It's every episode up to "Metamorphosis", so there are a lot.]

1— "Where No Man Has Gone Before" - a pretty solid way to start the experience for me, and I see the religious skepticism has been baked in from very early, even though it's obviously still finding its footing at this point. I actually enjoyed seeing the wobbly character dynamics and world-building as it's figuring itself out.

2— "The Man Trap" - I really enjoyed this one! Despite some fundamental silliness, there's an interesting mix of horror and pathos (I support the salt vampire!).

3— "Charlie X" - a mixture of "oh God, poor Janice" (an impression that will repeat often) and an interesting take on the interaction of power and youthful masculinity. Charlie's outrage at his desires being stymied by literally anything or anyone at any time feels unfortunately timely, as does his petty vindictiveness against ... um, every woman ever, and Kirk's entirely correct lecture about it. I also found something particularly intriguing in the contrast between Charlie's admiration of Kirk's form of masculinity and how viscerally threatened he is by Spock.

4— "The Naked Time" - I adored this episode with zero irony. I particularly loved the revelation that Spock is ashamed of his feelings for Kirk (......) and the guilt he feels over his emotional distance from his mother combined with his understanding of how isolated she must feel in Vulcan culture. But I also laughed through the entire rest of the episode. Just a great time.

5— "The Enemy Within" - oh, hella yikes take on, uh, the inherent need for a good leader to have an anxious, violent, rapist side to his personality kept under control by a fearless, but vacillating and cerebral other side. (The premise seems even more egregious after "The Galileo Seven" makes a whole episode out of the idea that Spock's intellectual discipline and reserve undermine his leadership capabilities unless he behaves in a way that can be seen as fitting into human emotional norms.) I did cackle over the space dog fluffy alien creature and its evil twin, but poor Janice x100 :(

6— "Mudd's Women" - easily the worst episode to date, good God. Quite apart from "I guess sometimes you just have to be complicit in sex trafficking carried out by a lovable scamp who definitely hasn't gotten the post-capitalism newsletter" and the godawful ending, I am baffled by everyone on the Enterprise acting like they've never seen a beautiful woman. None of Mudd's women can hold a candle to Uhura (who I think isn't even in this episode?) and women getting obsessed by eternal beauty and devoting themselves to unappealing men is a tiresome aspect of ST that I wish had stopped here. Or never shown up at all.

7— "What Are Little Girls Made Of" - ah, the iconic phallic stalagmite! Nice to have context. I appreciate how smart and resourceful Kirk ends up being here. I liked Shatner's performance as the Kirk clone (he's actually been good in all the various Evil Kirk performances I've seen thus far), too. But I also really liked Spock's entirely justified annoyance at Kirk using racial slurs to communicate IT'S NOT ME.

8— "Miri" - this one is unfortunately dragged down by Kirk using his femme fatale allure with a girl framed as barely pubescent even if the actress was technically an adult. He's clearly not remotely attracted to her and working to save his crew, but it's still really unpleasant to watch, especially with a very young-looking actress. That said, the disease is creepy as hell, and it's a great McCoy episode. I was pretty fascinated as well by the concept of a drastically protracted childhood where the horror is not being trapped in the body of a child, but of actually remaining a child for enormous lengths of time.

9— "Dagger of the Mind" - this one would have been pretty mediocre, in all honesty, if not for the existence of Helen Noel. Helen is staggeringly beautiful, yes, but she is also better than everyone else in this episode, even my usual fave Spock. I like Kirk a lot and I still don't know what she sees in him.

10— "The Corbomite Maneuver" - it's a fun episode with some very good lines, but a bit like cotton candy.

11— "The Menagerie" - I had heard about this one, but didn't know all the details! The show-within-the-show only slightly strains credulity, and the plot is certainly more compelling than SNW (sorry to SNW fans; I watched a few episodes and it was fine, but too polished and heterosexual to feel like a true prequel to the boundary-pushing Candyland of TOS).

12— "The Conscience of the King" - this one was a bit over-theatrical in the most literal way, but I still really enjoyed it. The episode provides a genuinely fascinating backstory for Kirk, revealing that in his youth, he was a survivor of a terrible atrocity (and from what else we've heard, it seems he was moved elsewhere and became a bullied nerd for awhile before finding his true calling in space). The "real" villain of the episode doesn't really work for me, but doesn't need to, because her villainy is vastly and rightly overshadowed by the atrocity.

13— "Balance of Terror" - I can't describe this episode any other way: it fucking rules. This is maybe my favorite Star Trek episode that I can remember ever seeing. The revelation of the Vulcan-Romulan kinship is super compelling, and the intensity to this episode's take on the frequent Spock vs the Microaggressions subplot feels entirely organic and believable.

14— "Shore Leave" - fine, but rather a letdown after the glory of the previous one. The back rub early in the episode is as hilariously unsubtle as reported, and Spock's emphatic indifference to the sexbot ladies is, hmm, interesting. Otherwise, it is silly, entertaining-enough ST ephemera for me. I like these episodes existing as part of ST as a whole, but also don't feel especially invested in most individual cases of it. And God, Kirk's youthful nemesis Finnegan is so incredibly obnoxious and his little jig motif is so awful that (given "The Naked Time") I'm starting to wonder what gripe Star Trek has with Irish people.

15— "The Galileo Seven" - you know how I said that Spock vs the Microaggressions is a frequent subplot in these episodes? This one is "what if that was just the whole episode?" It's not terrible, but it's not terribly interesting, either, and the implications are pretty gross if you think about them.

16— "The Squire of Gothos" - I guessed the reveal a bit early in this one, but not in a way that made me feel like it was super obvious. The hints were there if you were paying attention, so it was rewarding to figure it out, but not obvious. Spock's speech about intellectual discipline and power really speaks to me right now, by the way.

17— "Arena" - the Gorn finally appear! Or a Gorn, anyway, and it's kind of wild that the 1967 episode's twist is that the real villain is colonialism, not the Gorn at all. Yet in 2020s Star Trek ... well, anyway, it's a good episode despite the incredibly dated monster effects.

18— "Tomorrow is Yesterday" - time travelllllll hell yeah, and it's quite a decent plot.

19— "Court Martial" - this one was tense and interesting, though I don't have much to say about it apart from really liking the lawyers.

20— "The Return of the Archons" - this was actually very effective, quiet terror for me (maybe extra for me as a queer person raised Mormon, lol). I think it also has one of the better instances of Kirk Fries A Machine With Logic.

21— "Space Seed" - an absolutely fascinating villain alongside absolutely dire gender politics. I did like seeing Khan for the first time.

22— "A Taste of Armageddon" - this had a very interesting war game concept, but I don't remember much about the episode beyond the concept tbh. It was fine.

23— "This Side of Paradise" - this one was interesting, especially given the allure of the "paradise" for Spock specifically (also for everyone else, but there's something especially bitter about whatshername's total indifference to his consent, and yet how complicated his feelings end up being about the whole thing). Kirk's fixation on his authority!!!!! in this episode feels unappealing and rather strange, but I didn't think it was really all about authority and The Human Need For Struggle(TM) that ST will keep returning to (don't like that aspect, though!).

24— "The Devil in the Dark" - an excellent episode IMO, including the incredibly dated rock alien special effects. Wouldn't have it any other way! I honestly appreciate how often the reveal in TOS has been that a scary "monster" is just some innocent person from another species getting screwed over by human ignorance and colonizing.

25— "Errand of Mercy" - Kirk is a patronizing asshole in this episode, can't lie, but given that he's being very obviously paralleled with the Klingon officer, it serves a function that's at least interesting. I'd like if that aspect of his personality went somewhere a bit more cohesively, but I'd rather have the episodic yet forwards propulsion of TOS as a whole, so it's okay.

26— "The Alternative Factor" - this has an interesting concept, but I remember thinking that it was forcing a bunch of usually competent people to make some very stupid decisions (though, tangentially, the fact that this is a change from the norm is at least something: I really enjoy that TOS in general avoids my beloathèd "our protagonists are the protagonists of the entire setting and every other character is an NPC who lacks moral vision and competence independent of the protagonists' influence"). I will say that the repetition of the alternate-universe effect is honestly pretty bad even when I'm grading on a 60s curve.

27— "The City on the Edge of Forever" - this is a very compelling, tightly-written episode that does good character work for Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, even if its underlying premise is a bit challenging to buy at points. I always enjoy getting to see McCoy's medical ethos at play, as we do here. Spock's jealousy is also amusingly transparent against all the high drama.

28— "Operation -- Annihilate!" - this is a hilarious title for a pretty good episode, actually. I enjoyed it and especially enjoyed Leonard Nimoy's performance as Spock here. It's not like I ever don't, but it did some substantial heavy lifting.

29— "Amok Time" - so it turns out, the Spock/Kirk fans have not been exaggerating all these years. I didn't think it was likely they had, just given what I've seen this far, but damn. This is a fantastic episode, it's got interesting world-building for Vulcan, it's incredibly homoerotic even by TOS standards, and despite my fondness for Spock and Kirk, goodforher.jpeg with respect to T'Pring. If Vulcan men don't want their childhood brides plotting their deaths, maybe they should legalize divorce! Just a thought.

30— "Who Mourns for Adonais" - so this episode relies on "actually, every broadly appropriated cultural detail from an exotic distant land was just given to its people by ancient aliens," only this time, it's targeting Greeks! It does get details about ancient Greek culture and religion very wrong, if anyone was wondering. In any case, I guess Star Trek's weird issues with "ethnic whites" is not only with the Irish, though given that my father's background is specifically Greco-Irish, it feels like a weird personal attack. That aside, while "ancient aliens did it all!!!" was not as much of a thing at the time as now, Greek people were definitely more racialized in the USA then, so the use of the trope here was not as trivial as I think it can "read" to modern audiences, esp in the USA.

Apollo's actor does a good job with some hard dialogue, I will say, but I really wish Carolyn had just been playing along and biding her time rather than obviously being a silly female swayed by flattery of her beauty and delusions of vicarious power. Kirk's speech to her is good, but really dragged down by how bad the writing for her is. I did like Kirk's "actually, I'm a strict monotheist" retort to Apollo, though. I know Kirk's characterization eventually goes down a different route, but given the heavy involvement of Jewish people including Shatner in Star Trek (despite Roddenberry's antisemitism), and the historical use of the Greek and Roman pantheons in the oppression of Jewish communities, Kirk's indignation at the idea of worshipping any other god feels apropos.

31— "The Changeling" - Jim Kirk DESTROYS another implacable machine foe with LOGIC!!!! I can just imagine the YouTube series now. Seriously, though, it's fine and a drastic improvement from the previous episode, and I always enjoy a solid ST:TOS episode while I'm watching it. But it was not exceptional IMO.

32— "Mirror, Mirror" - YESSSSS I TOO GET TO EXPERIENCE THE MIRROR UNIVERSE. I loved this episode, honestly. The Mirror Universe is terrible, but super fun both in concept and execution. I love the competence of the prime universe team in the brief cut to them immediately clocking Mirror Kirk's group as imposters (though I did want more from Mirror Uhura who is just kind of there, though...). I love Mirror Spock being this warped but recognizable version of the character. I love the concept of Mirror Kirk being the perpetrator of war crimes exactly like Kirk's formative trauma back in "The Conscience of the King." I love the evil cutthroat BDSM space Byzantines vibes of the Terran Empire (is there an unimaginably decadent and deadly Byzantine Empire in the history of the Mirror Universe? I hope so. We deserve it after "Who Mourns for Adonais" tbh).

33— "The Apple" - this is a pretty fun one. The protagonists as the sort of serpent of this "Edenic" garden, coupled with the awful god creature is super entertaining, and it works well enough despite the show's erratic approach to religion.

34— "The Doomsday Machine" - damn, the commander in this episode is such an asshole. He's clearly meant to be, though, and his Ahab campaign turning out to not be entirely in vain at least makes it seem like there's a point to spending so much time on him being the worst.

35— "The Catspaw" - by coincidence, my best friend and I ended up watching this not far into November, just a few days after Halloween. About five minutes in, I said to him, "Is it just me, or is that castle clearly just Spirit Halloween?" He delightedly said, "This planet is Spirit Halloween!"

There's a bit of racial essentialism about ALL HUMANS that would be uncomfortable if it were not so patently ridiculous. The idea is that human beings have a basic racial fear of cats that the tiny aliens exploit—yes, "cats" in this episode refers mainly to the human fear of the house cat, aka the most successful and beloved domestic species on Earth, not lions or even cougars. The alien terrorizes the cast by taking the shape of a fluffy black house cat of varying sizes, but never any other kind of cat. This concept is hilarious, just to be clear. I enjoyed every moment. Even a super-large house cat is just even more friend-shaped floof to your basic human, let's be real, so the deadly threat is impossible to take seriously even before the giant house cat is revealed to be an incredibly horny alien lady with illusion powers (this persona is also an illusion, but the horniness is real). But are not all cats at some level horny alien ladies with illusion powers? I feel pretty sure that Star Trek thinks so.

36— "I, Mudd" - and the award for Most Improved Character has got to go to Harry Mudd. My bff and I actually had a great time with this episode, in part because the entire cast seem to be having a great time with it. I especially loved the twist with Uhura seeming to fall to the womanly weakness of desiring eternal beauty and the easy life only for it to be a trick. Mudd is still a sleaze, but a much funner one to watch this time, and we've just started quoting Spock's "He didn't pay the royalties" at random moments. The stereotypical nagging wife is what it is, but I'm grading Mudd episodes on an extra curve.

37— "Metamorphosis" - and at least, we've reached the most recent episode I've seen, so my impressions of this one are much more fresh. Somehow, I had no idea we first met Zefram Cochrane in TOS and not in First Contact. Also, wow, the actors for him and for the Commissioner are really attractive—not quirky 60s attractive, either. Cochrane reminds me vaguely of Henry Cavill and the Commissioner is simply gorgeous despite the blinding color scheme of her costume.

The gender essentialism sure is something at this point, I've got to say, when the characters are blandly agreeing that of course a sentient electric cloud must have a fundamental gender that you can kind of tell by the color scheme. Uh huh, but it is genuinely interesting that Cochrane clearly cares about the cloud and tries to protect her from our heroes until he realizes she loves him, but is so affronted at the idea of the cloud being in love with him and his (very obviously sexualized) communion and companionship with her being part of that.

He projects his revulsion primarily onto Spock (Spock vs the Microaggressions strikes again!), but literally everyone finds his attitude narrow-minded and weird. The feeling is kind of like if you met an idolized long-dead relative only for them to use a homophobic slur you've never even heard of.

The resolution of this little drama comes from the cloud bodysnatching the dying Commissioner, a young woman who longs to be loved by anyone at all after a life of being a loveless career woman. She is, to be clear, a career woman whose job is all about preventing warfare and who is deeply stressed about it, which seems a kind of love to me. But she is mostly framed just as this super abrasive, loveless career woman because it's TOS (and they eventually conclude that any woman could do her job and they'll just find a different one to stop the war).

Anyway, all this results in the somehow-female cloud fusing with what remains of the Commissioner's consciousness, curing her body of some fatal disease. Now that the cloud is fused with an actual (hot) human woman, Cochrane is totally chill with her love for him, and decides he can have a very strange threesome love her after all, and they'll live out these bodies' natural lives together until they both die (since she lost her electric cloud powers of healing and immortality when she bodysnatched the Commissioner, I gather). It feels weird and low-grade shitty on his part, although I like his actor's performance, because it makes it so clear that his aversion was only about appearances.

I think the cloud should have moved onto someone who would appreciate her devotion and restorative powers, like, say, the dying Commissioner lady who actually has this whole speech about how badly she longs to be loved and how she doesn't get why Cochrane is being such a baby about the adoration of a cloud. Look, I'm just saying the cloud could be bi and deserves someone who would appreciate her.

I know this was never going to happen on a nationally syndicated show in 1967, but I think it would make more narrative sense and be much more satisfying! Cochrane would love space adventures 150 years in the future—he was thrilled and excited about the idea of seeing the reality of the Federation and alliances with other species! And the Commissioner would appreciate a cloud girlfriend and immortality so much more than him. Hire me, Paramount.

[anythingstephenking]

The Morally Grey Mile

Strap in for another grim tale. At least men are the ones getting fucked in The Green Mile, amirite ladies? No, still not cool? Ok then.

I suppose it is a disservice to call The Green Mile solely a “grim” tale, but because the core story focuses on an innocent man headed to the electric chair, it is pretty damn grim. If you haven’t read the book you’ve seen the movie but spoilers anyway - the innocent man dies and it sucks for the reader. It’s certainly more complicated than “bad wins” but a real bummer all the same.

Backing up a bit. The Green Mile was King’s first attempt at a serialized story release. In the book’s forward, King tells us it’s story of inception. Through a series of fortuitous events and a conversation with business associates about Charles Dickens, King concocted the idea to release a story in a series of “chapbooks”. Apparently Dickens released some of his stories that way, and they were so fervently popular that a band of dingdongs pushed each other off a dock and drowned while awaiting a shipment of Dickens into Baltimore Harbor. I imagine if the Harry Potter books were released that way I would have ended up in the harbor too. No judgement, zealous Dickens readers, I get it.

Logically, if it worked for 19th century Dickens, it would surely work for 20th century Stephen King, right? 

(cue Mr. Burns fingers). 

A single book released in installments monthly, garnering 3-4x the cost of a single paperback. Good for you SK, good for you. Cause turns out, the constant reader ate it up and bought ‘em like hotcakes.

Cause that’s the thing - this is a really really good story. Not because it’s beautifully written like Cujo or Firestarter or mind-bending like The Dark Tower books, but because it is a real page turner. I credit the format for that - you can tell it was written in a plot-driven, cliffhanger kinda way. In the same way serialized TV (before binging took this joy away) would leave you wanting more week to week, The Green Mile leaves each installment in a way where you can’t imagine not picking up the next one.

Per my contractual agreement with myself, I am required to reach each and every page of this story, but I’m a strange bird and the rest of the world isn’t a weirdo like me. At the end of the day, the narrative structure here really works and I plowed through all 6 installments in a day or so. Those reading in real-time (and not binging like me) waited a month between each publishing, from March through August 1996. There was no dock delivery in Baltimore in 1996 but I imagine if there was, the crowd waiting for each would be large.

So the narrative approach works, but what about the story itself? My analysis comes back slightly muddy but mostly positive despite some hard to swallow flaws.

I can’t claim to know what death row would have been like in 1932, but I’ve watched enough PBS documentaries to know what it’s like now. The group held at Cold Mountain are described as killers, yes. As rapists and wife beaters and arsonists. But they also come across like a rag-tag group of buds that should have their own reality TV show. One of the prisoners, Del, raped and murdered a young girl then accidentally killed a bunch of other people trying to cover his tracks by setting the building on fire. But he’s got this cute, somewhat supernatural mouse named Mr. Jingles that does tricks. Ain’t it cute? Then he fries and literally catches on fire in the electric chair.

I understand the intention of the tale - humanity lives in all of us. Empathy shouldn’t be reserved just for some. Death is final and it comes for all of us. What I struggled with was trying to understand if this was blatant reference to King’s personal stance on the Death Penalty (against it, obvs) or something more subtle. Should we take away that killing is wrong no matter what? Or that there is more nuance at play here?

Because there’s more happening on the green mile than just murderers dying (no matter how dramatically) in the chair comically nicknamed “ol’ sparky”. We’ve got John Coffey in chains, convicted of raping and murdering two 9 year old girls. JFC. I just can’t.

But he did, and he will die for his crimes. Here’s where the controversy around this novel begins. John Coffey is a large black man with magical powers. Spike Lee specifically calls out King publicly for this “magical negro” trope, which honestly I can’t disagree with. Dick Halloran from The Shining and Mother Abigail from The Stand fall neatly in this bucket as well. But even as I type this I know I am cherry-picking; I’ve read plenty of King stories with mystical beings and they’re mostly white (or more often other worldly). But King’s repeated use of the n-word and other racial slurs in his writing is real cringeworthy. As I move further towards his 21st century writing I keep hoping this will stop. It hasn’t yet, as of 1996. But King and writing about race is an entirely separate post for another day.

Back to The Green Mile; we learn that John Coffey has special healing powers when he cures the head guard, Paul Edgecomb of a UTI by grabbing his crotch. Normally this type of behavior will get ya thrown in the hole, but Paul’s so grateful he lets it slide.

Once we learn of the healing powers of Coffey, it doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to solve the mystery. While getting arrested he cries “I tried to stop it but it was too late.” Everyone involved in the investigation assumes he means he tried to stop himself from murder but couldn’t; anyone with half a brain can deduce that someone else killed the girls; he tried to heal them. He was too late.

We’re set off to learn who really murdered the girls, but this revelation takes a backseat, at least in my mind. For me, the big mystery is; will John Coffey get executed? I’ll be honest, I hadn’t seen this movie, so I didn’t know. The phone the governor used to phone in stays-of-execution was mentioned early, so my Chekhov’s Gun senses lead me to believe it was possible. Why bother if not? Well the phone is mentioned at execution time, only to say it won’t ring. And of course it never really was a question - Coffey is a black man in the south, convicted of murdering two girls in 1932. Of course no one’s coming to save him. It’s sad. Real sad.

We’re given solace in the fact that Coffey claims he’s ready to go - his powers are too much and he’s tired. This is a nonsense cop out that provides relief to all those that understand the truth, allowing them to go on living, loving their wives and kids and casseroles. John Coffey should not have died. The end. 

Things are wrapped up in a bow with the end stories of everyone involved and their timely and untimely deaths. I guess that’s it; life sucks, then you die; death can come for you in any way, without discrimination.

I earmarked what is one of my favorite lines I’ve encountered so far in King’s work.

“We had once again succeeded in destroying what we could not create.”

Executing anyone (murderer or not) takes a toll on most of the prison staff. I just loved this so much on so many levels; they are men without the ability to create life; they are not god; they are mortals stealing mortality. So beautiful.

So, it’s no stretch to call this the brother of Shawshank, but at least we get a female character in Paul Edgecomb’s wife. I don’t remember her name so that’s not great. But she was a woman and she at least was there, so it gets knocked up a few rungs from Shawshank IMHO.

I’d have to say this is one King novel that really perplexed me. I suppose I got into the routine of enjoying typical good-vs-evil tales where the good guys eventually overcome. For me, The Green Mile wasn’t green at all but a wavering shade of grey I still can’t see properly.

(Side note: As I sat down to write this, I thought to myself “I’m not sure what I’ll say about The Green Mile.” Turns out, quite a bit, this is probably one of my longest entries. Who knew?)

8/10

First Line: This happened in 1932, when the state penitentiary was still at Cold Mountain.

Last Line: I know that, but sometimes, oh God, the Green Mile is so long.

Adaptations:

Like it’s brother Shawshank Redemption, I had never seen this movie before. It made it’s run through awards season in 1999, mostly for Michael Clarke Duncan’s portrayal of John Coffey. Who later tragically died of a heart attack with his girlfriend Omarosa (of Trump WH fame) which I didn’t know, but good golly, that is another sad story for another day.

Listen, this is a highly regarded movie that’s on many top lists, so I won’t stab into it too hard. But it is SO LONG.

Frank Darabont got his panties all in a bunch when folks told him a 3 hour running time was too long, claiming that if 2 hours was the correct length of a film that cinema classics like Lawrence of Arabia were invalidated. Well guess what? I’ve seen Lawrence of Arabia, and yes that shit is too. damn. long. As is The Green Mile.

One would think that with 3+ hours of material, the character development would be on point. It’s not really; the prisoners are mostly glossed over (even more so than in the book) as lovable murders. Wild Bill is the exception (overacted by Sam Rockwell), and he serves as the sole real “bad guy”. 

Edgecomb and his other prison guards are painted as saints (again, minus one guard who takes on the “bad guy of the good guys” role). If the book was grey the movie is much more black and white. Tom Hanks for president for sure, the guy is a national treasure. But they were one step away from giving him an actual halo. As someone complicit in the murder of an innocent man, I just can’t declare his character for sainthood. The real Tom Hanks, a million times yes. Paul Edgecomb? Nah.

The movie is fine. I approve of Darabont���s relationship with King and have thoroughly enjoyed their previous collaborations. I was sad to see that he let his film rights to The Long Walk expire last year, picked up by New Line and James Vanderbilt (of Vanderbilt fortune... old money... sigh) who penned Zodiac, which leaves me slightly hopeful but assume it’ll trickle back into development limbo for the remainder of eternity.

I’ve already finished my next read, Desperation and after I slog through the 2.5 hour ABC miniseries (UGH) I will keep trucking. New Year, more pressure placed on myself to plow through the back half of King’s bibliography.

[misterbitches]

here’s what confuses me. we are on a public platform and people are posting things, tagging them, and even just perusing. ostensibly to be heard and get engagement. that’s how the internet works and what it encourages. so when people put something out there especially when they make it localized (? is that a right word) for access, why is the critique or response, even if it’s unfavorable, now a problem? we put it out there and it exists, if someone stumbles upon it why wouldn’t they engage? otherwise, why bother with all this output? i mean not many people read my posts but it’s a good thing for me to have them because what i do write it helps me understand the world better and something mainstream in ways it could be better and what could be done to get away from it. helping understand the context and history of the problems i am seeing on screen in many diff ways. but i do make it seen for a reason. i have drafts or posts privately that are just for me that i don’t think others should see so that means i do not want that engagement and i am closing it off. 

it isn’t like people can’t see it and respond if they so choose  bc this is basically a tacit agreement of having this in public. so if you have an opinion and someone disagrees why would that be hard for you if you are the one who put it out there? we know how this website works and how the web works. do we just want to hear what we agree with or even just know? otherwise i wouldn’t know shit. even with my best friends we try and come to a form of understanding and get on the same page or ask questions. i don’t get upset when they say, “no, because” or introduce a new perspective and this happens with the people i am closest to. so on a public place what else would we get? we allow ourselves to be seen...

i don’t think i have blocked anyone but i know people have blocked me and it has been for probably me being annoying but still fairly innocuous when i reply with a critique or make a joke. you take this risk posting it every time. but i dont want to block people because they could be of value at some point even if i want nothing to do with them. but every time it so happens that i say something even a little off from what this person wants—and it’s generally when i go into things in detail—they shut down from the perception that i am being hateful or accusatory or unfair? even when i try de-escalation tactics or being like “calm down” (not that explicitly) so these seem to be very emotional responses to not hearing exactly what we want and knowing there’s objection when there should be anyway. even if pieces are damn near perfect there’s still something. i find it very hard to believe that there’s intense pain enacted on others for liking “unsavory” things when the “unsavory” is the mainstream and it is necessary to uphold these things and for capital to continue to produce what it does. you’re not different when you accept it into your life either critically or uncritically because that is the norm. so when people are knocking the norms, tropes, whatever it’s like a shock every time and like someone is telling you not to enjoy it. but, again, we put this shit out there and want a response so it cannot be just what we want to hear. i hate that i hate the idea that wanting a  work to be better and seeing shit critically even as a leftist or whatever is oppressive and limiting other ppl when it is in no way the same or even on par with being silenced in general because of the garbage you find in a work. you will still be the minority and it will still be popular so there’s a false sense of superiority put onto others who disagree by the ones who feel “attacked” or like they can’t defend themselves or whatever. and who fucking says? if some random says so like oh well man. you cannot compare it to the real shit these fans do and the massive fanbases they have and the shunning they love to do then feel as if they are priority in feelings.

 they say everyone is sensitive and not able to think about things with nuance but it’s the opposite most times. you aren’t and when someone pops up with it or even says something offhanded cos they dont feel like having a huge discussion that is not the same as pushing others down. there is no majority saying this is wrong and we don’t want it; there’s a majority dedicated to defending it, their choices, and frankly the false sense of even light persecution. especially as adults but in fandom you’re not encouraged to act as a fully fleshed out person for a majority reasons and esp in a fandom that will skew younger. they are reliant on rabid fans or uncritical ones and i have demonstrated that constantly and given quotes etc. we should talk about discourse and what the private owes to the public, what the state owes its viewers, what artists owe the people tuning in. we should talk abou tfreedom of speech forreal and what that means but if we go deep into that you’ll unveil more things you dont’ like how people absolutely rally against this shit and want nothing to do with it. if you don’t want to think about that that is fine but it doesn’t mean others won’t say it.

idk like it may seem insensitive but i dont like the idea that a person pointing out things that are gross or micro or macro agrressive or what the fuck ever is the ruler over the discourse and how people interact with the work when frankly that just isn’t the case in the pattern of the work that people do and utilizing fans and using capital to defend yourself and recreate industry. you may not like to hear that it’s all bullshit but people will say so and it holds not even close to the same weight that the tacit agreement in indulging can sway  us towards not great perceptions. the harm of pointing things out, or being rude, or whatever is not the same as what fans will do to those people and the obfuscation of the real fucking issue. 

now it’s no longer about the problems in itself but the way people are receptive to the way others respond when they have a problem with the very real and prominent problem. now there’s no interest in engagement or even seeing people who may have more to say to it. if we think constantly about defending our right to like a work then the work takes ona life of its own and it latches on to your emotions even more it’s so fucking silly bc it’s like....this shit isnt for us anyway and if it’s gonna be here we should make it better and talk about it but it’s not about that it’s not about the rapes it’s not about the culture it’s about personal feelings which is why it becomes about how we talk about it as if things that ever skew to the left or focus on liberation would ever be the most popular. since when did saying this is fucking bullshit, this shit sucks, this real “crime” means nothing because it’s just entertainment yet you must find ways to defend your right to see that entertainment. it makes no sense no one is talking about that we’re talking about the ins-and-outs of storytelling and the toxicity and nature of these REAL PROBLEMS THAT ARE PROBLEMS SINCERE PROBLEMS as in there is no negotiation in wrong or right because it is wrong in every sense it’s what you do with that wrongness and what the fuck you want to say. it’s not about what i say about them being fucking shitty about the way they say it. dont focus on the way i dislike it focus on what the fuck im saying man bc this shit is disingenuous and it COMPLETELY eclipses the issues and attitudes and it lets these fucking idiots off the fucking hook for making straight up garbage like not even in a sociopolitical way just thoughtless drivel sometimes. like most times i dont even hate the villains in these shows or the men who are o dark and fucked up but we still got to like them it’s literally like “no nigga like why r u here tho?” what do u fucking add. you’re dead space and they let us know it’s dead space by saying “oh man isn’t life SOOOO complex dont think about it just think about him being a nice rapist okay guys even tho we are gong to do NOTHING ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to establish fucking any of that” 

this is what people said for tharntype and it’s what they say about fucking everything whether it’s about gay shit or not. good example is the star wars fans with that guy and that girl or wahtever in that stupid racist franchise. just clamoring to make sure we know you’re good and that you’re okay for thinking that way when no one says you aren’t. but if something is presented then expect to get a fucking response especially abut what it is about at its fucking core. enough of the bullshit about misunderstanding and acknowledge it’s about your comfort in your interests and not having that questioned or antagonized in a way that may implicate you are a bit complicit but fucking all of us are as consumers. you arent hurt for having an opinion that seems to not go with the flow but is certainly part of the status quo. the world relies relies on harm, in a way it is reliant on rape, and that permeates through us and always takes precedent. additionally, again, this shit is mad patriarchal so it does a disservice to us as well as women cos it’s like. no man that’s born out of misogyny actually. what can we do? well, dont rely on the state. but if you dont rely on the state then will you make real money? not the money we’re talking here with the genre in itself. to me that means they dont have an interest in showing different types of lives they have a majority interest in showing “attractive” “conventional” men kissing and making bank.

[nevertrustamanwho]

Do you think there are some creators, actors, and media that should be 100% avoided? For example, are there some movies that are too problematic and shouldn't be watched or enjoyed (like exploitation/gore/slasher films, old movies with racist depictions)? Is it wrong to watch content by actors or directors who have said or done something awful (anything from making an offensive joke to committing assault, rape, or murder)? This could extend to musicians, authors, artists, anyone. Thoughts?

This is an issue I’ve struggled with for a long time, as a fan of David Bowie and a lot of other male musicians of the 70s who are rapists and pedophiles (slept with 14/15 year old fans). I’ve never really come up with a definitive answer, and so I tend to take it on a case by case basis. 

I think music and books can be easily avoided because it tends to be mainly from one person, so there is an easy line to draw there: have they done something awful, if yes, avoid. But films and tv involve a lot of people, some of which would not have been complicit in the actions of the creators, so you have to consider whether you watching or liking something is based on the one creator or based on the actions of many. For example, do you like a film because of its director, or because of a combination of the actors, the script, the cinematography, etc? And then make your decision from there. That being said, I’m sure there are some films which are so offensive or exploitative they become irredeemable.

It also depends on the reason you are avoiding the content, is it because you don’t want to contribute financially to someone who is shitty, or because of moral/solidarity reasons, or both? I think its also about making sure you don’t hero worship, especially for content that is very old or creators who have died. For example, old hollywood films are a favorite of mine, but I don’t worship or idolize any of the male actors because they were primarily abusive and sexist. I really enjoy Bill Murray comedies, but I know he is abusive and has done some awful things to his partners in the past, so I don’t praise him or his work, but rather focus on other aspects of his films that I like. I also try not to contribute to any hero worship that other people have, particularly online.

I think its also a very personal choice. I can easily make decisions about who to avoid (e.g. Picasso, Leto, Polanski, Allen, etc) based on how much I like or dislike their work before finding out about their actions. But it can be hard to cut out creative works from your life if you have had a profound connection to them before you discover how horrible the creators are. This kind of thing requires patience and a lot of reflection to understand why you can avoid some things, but don’t want to avoid others. No one is perfect, but we can try to do the right thing as much as possible. And it’s good your asking this question, keep asking it. Ask people you know to see what they think, and always ask for examples because it helps to have context to these kinds of things.

I welcome followers’ thoughts on this.

[titleknown]

Relating to my thoughts on the opposite end of the see-saw, and thinking about this post which, if there’s no further context I’m missing, is quite frankly horrifying, it's hard to enjoy things now or give creators the benefit of the doubt, because I've seen and heard of so many people who we've just let victimize because of wanting to give the benefit of the doubt

And that's how we let pedos and rapists get away. Because we care more about preserving these "great talents" than about their victims. And we view them through such rose-tinted-glasses. And nothing feels safe anymore.

We need escape but, even when it’s not denial and nobody’s organizing enough in the face of the “normal” people on fucking Facebook and at fancy Washington dinners who are ruining the world, the creators who help us escape are just feeding into that same complicity if we let them, do nothing and let them hurt people.

I feel like I’m in a dying, hopeless world, where happiness is denial. We need a refuge, but it feels like there's no escape, from the complicity killing everything. I don't want to live in a world with no future. No future but corporate fiefdoms with cryptocurrency scrip and a dead; burning planet.

I'm crying now. I just feel so... Hopeless.

Because of everyone who’s so fucking complicit that they let people hurt others for fear of killing the golden goose. Not just in here, but in the world.

And that’s why I rant and rave about it, because I’m so fucking useless in every way at saving anyone. At helping anything.

I’m too disorganized and lazy to politically do anything substantial, too much of a coward for direct action, I’m too loud and obnoxious to really stop predators, I’m too shit at sensory processing to even help my sick-with-MS dad do the home improvement work that’s so important to him, too autistic to get even a retail job, and even the artists who are better than me and the writers who are more consistent still don’t make enough to live on; and as Kurt Vonnegut said art doesn’t do shit to change things, so what fucking chance do I have there.

I just... I’m angry at complicity, I’m angry that people stand by while the people I care about are hurt and destroyed, I’m angry at there being no fucking hope left in the world.

I just want to live in a world where I don’t have to be afraid anymore.

[opalescentegg]

 I’m Easter-drunk and I wanna talk about medieval marriage conventions.

(Because no one saw that drunk history reblog and decided to ask me, “Hey, Opal, what are your views on the weirder parts of medieval marriage?”  I’ll try not to misspell too many things---no promises. SO!  Medieval marriage.  Just how fucked up was it?? Very fucked up, of course.  But for the purposes of this....discussion, I’ll be focusing primarily on the conventions found in medieval England.  Why England?   Well, for starters, it has an incredible history of legal documentation.  Seriously, the legal courts (from local shire courts all the way up to the royal courts) recorded damn near everything, and for the longest time too!  I know that many medieval kingdoms saw themselves as the stewards of the Roman legal (and sometimes cultural) tradition, but in medieval England that anctually worked out okay (if you allow the inclusion of the Anglo-Saxon wittan, which eventually became the modern jury, but I’m getting ahead of myself).  Also, England was the only place where FEUDALISM ACTUALLY WORKED.  Seriously!  Everywhere else it was given plenty of lip-service but, well---in France you ended up with a few centuries of “local” counts that held more power than the fucking king; then there was the Holy Roman Empire (famously not holy, not Roman, and not and Empire, to paraphrase both Voltaire and one of my favorite university professors---it was also, generally speaking, a hot mess, even on a good day); and Spain (seven fucking centuries of Reconquista does not a stable feudal society make, so sorry); and Italy.....look, the city-states are awesome, but are also about as un-feudal as it gets, so they basically don’t count for anything outside of their economic, and occasionally Crusade-oriented, bubble. Alright, to be fair, most of that last bit had nothing to do with anything----I just really needed to get some of that off my chest. But the documentation thing is actually germane to this topic. First and foremost is the fact that the “terms” of marriage were pretty sketchy for a long, long, long time.  One particular complaint that crops up again and again in English shire court rolls has to do with just how married different parties in a couple saw themselves.  A lot of this had to do with the language of marriage vows, as well as how marriages were “performed” back before the.....oh, let’s say thirteenth century.   For a long while, marriages were considered legitimate if both parties spoke some church-approved vows to one another, and did so with full sincerity and fear of God, etc., etc.   The problem there was that which words were church-approved was not always clear.  Oh, sure, someone might have the general gist of them, but not the particulars---and since most of the peasantry during the Middle Ages was illiterate, it’s not like they could just write it down for later.  Also, the “approved” words tended to change when new popes, bishops, etc. were elected, and it often took a while for information about changes to vow templates (among other things) to trickle down.   There was also a more pragmatic element to all of this.  Namely, although churchmen certainly hoped that young lovers would seek out a church for the legitimization of their union, they were more than aware of the fact that some people either did not have that option (the nearest church being, perhaps, too far away) or would find themselves too swept up in passion to seek out the nearest house of God.  That’s part of why the church-approved vows existed in the first place---the idea was that, in the absence of either the clergy or community witnesses of good standing, a couple could still make a vow before God and therefore legitimize a marriage (though it always helped if they sought out a priest afterwards, to really legitimize it; but, especially in the early Middle Ages, that wasn’t strictly necessary). This is where is gets weird.  Also rape-y.  So...consider yourself warned, I guess. First of all: THOSE VOWS. There was a lot of confusion regarding vows (part of why the church started insisting that all marriages take place inside a church, with clergy present---less easy to fuck it all up that way).  It wasn’t unusual for a man to sort of half-vow to stay with a woman, then for them to consummate the relationship, then for the man to insist that they were not actually married while the woman (citing what she thought was a true vow) insisted they were.  Interestingly, this could be brought before the court as a case of rape, seeing as how complete, explicit consent in a sexual act was not necessarily given by both parties----and, believe it or not, the medieval church was DEEPLY concerned with consent; despite any and all social and economic disparities, a marriage was supposed to be (ideally) a union between two equal souls, and that equality meant that both parties had to agree to said union by their own free will, lest they commit the grave sin of bearing false witness before God Himself (not to say that the parties could not be cajoled, coerced, or threatened into “consent” beforehand, only that no one could actually be dragged to the altar, wailing and weeping, without any clergyman worth his salt immediately declaring the pending union void due to lack of consent---no matter what Hollywood might show you.) The point is that the woman (or, occasionally, the man, because that did happen too) could sue for marriage.  This was somewhat more of a concern for women, as it concerned their “virginity” or “virtue.”  If a woman had been married and was widowed, chances were that she inherited some property from her late husband, and so could levy that on Ye Olde Marriage Market.  The prospects for completely unmarried girls and women were more tenuous. Look.  For this next part, you need to STOP THINKING LIKE A MODERN PERSON.  It sucks, I know, but you must understand how medieval people thought. The short version is that: virginity was an economic commodity.   That’s how both men and women thought of it.  So, if a peasant girl with little in the way of a dowry, and who had never been married before (and therefore had no inheritance from a deceased husband) was looking to marry, her “virginity” was the best bargaining chip she had.   Therefore, if some strapping beau had made what SHE considered vows of marriage before fucking her into the heath, she’d likely feel quite justified in dragging him to the local shire court and suing for marriage----because he had unambiguously “compromised her virtue,” and done so under false pretenses: grounds for a rape accusation, if ever there was one. And, oh, sweet children, it gets worse. I have seen comments on this here Tumblr claiming that medieval women who were victims of rape would be forced to marry their rapists. This is.......not untrue.  I cannot and will not say that such things did not happen (especially if a child resulted of that forced coupling; depending on whose medical treatises you read, conception was sometimes viewed as occurring only if both parties involved had orgasms, the idea being that women released an “essence” at the moment of climax the same way men did----the upshot is that a few learned men, I hope, at least tried to make sex actually pleasurable for their wives; the downside is that pregnancy via rape could be cited as “evidence” that a female victim “””enjoyed,””” and was complicit in, her own assault.)  However.  Things get.....interesting, if not a little uncomfortable, when the situation is turned on its head. You see, women did marry their rapists.  But some of them did it willingly----hell, some of them did it forcefully.  This is where the “virginity” thing really comes into play.  Because if a girl or woman who had successfully “defended her chastity” for all her life suddenly found herself on the receiving end of a sexual assault-----well, it wasn’t unusual for her to drag her attacker before the court and sue for marriage.  But why the fuck would she want to?????  I get it, trust me.  Still, you must remember what I said about virginity earlier.   For a peasant girl, her “virginity” was her only bargaining chip in the marriage market; a rape meant that bargaining chip was gone; sometimes things could be smoothed over by a hefty payment of money and/or livestock to the girl’s father/male guardian to “make up” for the loss of virtue and (by extension) family honor, but this was of course not always possible; and so the only way to maintain honor (and, therefore, economic security, and even economic viability in the marriage market, should her husband pass away) was to marry the rapist.  Oh, and DON’T THINK for even a SECOND that there weren’t ladies literally hauling their assaulters into the courtroom and, basically, telling them to LIE IN THE BED THEY FUCKING MADE.   Look.  Just.  NEVER think that medieval women, even the poorest and least of the lot, didn’t have power.  It was a fucking shitty kind of power, but damn if they didn’t exploit it wherever they could. Case in point: when a rapist wasn’t really a rapist. Soooo, now you’ve heard of medieval women suing her rapist for marriage in order to preserve her social and economic standing!  Well, guess what? Sometimes both of them faked it~!! Yeah.....this is where it gets super fucked up. Because sometimes a girl loved a boy.  But her father didn’t like that boy, probably for economic reasons, and forbade her from consenting to marry him (because the father  was aware of those prickly couples-only church vows, etc, etc.)  So how’s a girl to get around this predicament?   Why, by being “carried off” ( “rape” coming from an older word meaning “forceful seizure”) by some man (the lover) and his cohorts (his friends, there to watch his back and basically make sure no one comes to kill him after witnessing his “abduction” of the maiden, if anyone witnessed it at all).  Then they spend a few days hanging out in the woods before the daughter comes home to her father and says something to the effect of: “Oh, wow, yeah, so this guy, he just grabs me right out of the fields and carries me off the the woods, while I’m kicking and screaming of course, and forces himself on me right there, totally against my will, but the good news is that he’s completely willing to marry me to like make amends or whatever, and oh by the way it just happens to be that guy I’m really into but that you totally hate, what’s a girl to do ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ” BUT.  Because the woman could call it a rape, and even be backed up by witnesses (the lover’s friends----I know it seems weird, but in the Middle Ages witnesses (fuck, personal references) were basically the only currency outside of the gold florin that mattered worth a damn), she could “sue” for marriage, and end up marrying the man she’d wanted all along, no doubt to the consternation of her father. ................Yeah, the Middle Ages were pretty fucked up.

[enchantedzuyorker]

Setting Fire to Social Justice

Call-out culture refers to the tendency among progressives, radicals, activists, and community organizers to publicly name instances or patterns of oppressive behaviour and language use by others. People can be called out for statements and actions that are sexist, racist, ableist, and the list goes on. Because call-outs tend to be public, they can enable a particularly armchair and academic brand of activism: one in which the act of calling out is seen as an end in itself.

What makes call-out culture so toxic is not necessarily its frequency so much as the nature and performance of the call-out itself. Especially in online venues like Twitter and Facebook, calling someone out isn’t just a private interaction between two individuals: it’s a public performance where people can demonstrate their wit or how pure their politics are. Indeed, sometimes it can feel like the performance itself is more significant than the content of the call- out. This is why “calling in” has been proposed as an alternative to calling out: calling in means speaking privately with an individual who has done some wrong, in order to address the behaviour without making a spectacle of the address itself.

In the context of call-out culture, it is easy to forget that the individual we are calling out is a human being, and that different human beings in different social locations will be receptive to different strategies for learning and growing. For instance, most call-outs I have witnessed immediately render anyone who has committed a perceived wrong as an outsider to the community. One action becomes a reason to pass judgment on someone’s entire being, as if there is no difference between a community member or friend and a random stranger walking down the street (who is of course also someone’s friend). Call-out culture can end up mirroring what the prison industrial complex teaches us about crime and punishment: to banish and dispose of individuals rather than to engage with them as people with complicated stories and histories.

It isn’t an exaggeration to say that there is a mild totalitarian undercurrent not just in call-out culture but also in how progressive communities police and define the bounds of who’s in and who’s out. More often than not, this boundary is constructed through the use of appropriate language and terminology – a language and terminology that are forever shifting and almost impossible to keep up with. In such a context, it is impossible not to fail at least some of the time. And what happens when someone has mastered proficiency in languages of accountability and then learned to justify all of their actions by falling back on that language? How do we hold people to account who are experts at using anti-oppressive language to justify oppressive behaviour? We don’t have a word to describe this kind of perverse exercise of power, despite the fact that it occurs on an almost daily basis in progressive circles. Perhaps we could call it Anti-Oppressiveness.

Humour often plays a role in call-out culture and by drawing attention to this I am not saying that wit has no place in undermining oppression; humour can be one of the most useful tools available to oppressed people. But when people are reduced to their identities of privilege (as white, cisgender, male, etc.) and mocked as such, it means we’re treating each other as if our individual social locations stand in for the total systems those parts of our identities represent. Individuals become synonymous with systems of oppression, and this can turn systemic analysis into moral judgment. Too often, when it comes to being called out, narrow definitions of a person’s identity count for everything.

No matter the wrong we are naming, there are ways to call people out that do not reduce individuals to agents of social advantage. There are ways of calling people out that are compassionate and creative, and that recognize the whole individual instead of viewing them simply as representations of the systems from which they benefit. Paying attention to these other contexts will mean refusing to unleash all of our very real trauma onto the psyches of those we imagine to only represent the systems that oppress us. Given the nature of online social networks, call-outs are not going away any time soon. But reminding ourselves of what a call-out is meant to accomplish will go a long way toward creating the kinds of substantial, material changes in people’s behaviour – and in community dynamics – that we envision and need.

How do you begin to say, “I think we’ve been going about this all wrong?” Howdo you get out of a dead-end without going in reverse? It seems like in the last fifteen years, rape has gone from being an issue that was only talked about by feminists and downplayed in other radical communities, to one of the most commonly addressed forms of oppression. Part of this change might be owed to the hard work of feminist and queer activists, another part to the spread of anarchism, with its heavy emphasis on both class and gender politics, and another part to the antiglobalization movement, which brought together many previously separated single issues.

Despite all the changes in fifteen years, its just as common to hear the sentiment that rape is still tacitly permitted in radical communities or that the issues of gender and patriarchy are minimized, even though in most activist or anarchist conferences and distros I know about, rape culture and patriarchy have been among the most talked about topics, and it wasn’t just talk. In the communities I have been a part of there have been cases of accused rapists or abusers being kicked out and survivors being supported, along with plenty of feminist activities, events, and actions.

All the same, every year I meet more people who have stories of communities torn apart by accusations of rape or abuse, both by the shock and trauma of the original harm, and then by the way people have responded and positioned themselves. One option is to blame a passive majority that toe the line, giving lip service to the new politically correct doctrine, without living up to their ideals. In some cases I think that is exactly what happened. But even when there is full community support, it still often goes wrong.

After years of thinking about this problem, learning about other people’s experiences, and witnessing accountability processes from the margins and from the center, I strongly believe that the model we have for understanding and responding to rape is deeply flawed. For a long time I have heard criticisms of this model, but on the one hand I never found a detailed explanation of these criticisms and on the other I was trained to assume that anyone criticizing the model was an apologist for rape, going on the defensive because their own patriarchal attitudes were being called out. After personally meeting a number of critical people who were themselves longtime feminists and survivors, I started to seriously question my assumptions.

Since then, I have come to the conclusion that the way we understand and deal with rape is all wrong and it often causes more harm than good. But many of the features of the current model were sensible responses to the Left that didn’t give a damn about rape and patriarchy. Maybe the biggest fault of the model, and the activists who developed it, is that even though they rejected the more obvious patriarchal attitudes of the traditional Left, they unconsciously included a mentality of puritanism and law and order that patriarchal society trains us in. I don’t want to go back to a complicit silence on these issues. For that reason, I want to balance every criticism I make of the current model with suggestion for a better way to understand and deal with rape.

When I was in a mutually abusive relationship, one in which both of us were doing things we should not have done, without being directly aware of it, that resulted in causing serious psychological harm to the other person, I learned some interesting things about the label of “survivor.” It represents a power that is at odds with the process of healing. If I was called out for abuse, I became a morally contemptible person. But if I were also a survivor, I suddenly deserved sympathy and support. None of this depended on the facts of the situation, on how we actually hurt each other. In fact, no one else knew of the details, and even the two of us could not agree on them. The only thing that mattered was to make an accusation. And as the activist model quickly taught us, it was not enough to say, “You hurt me.” We had to name a specific crime. “Abuse.” “Assault.” “Rape.” A name from a very specific list of names that enjoy a special power. Not unlike a criminal code.

I did not want to create an excuse for how I hurt someone I loved. I wanted to understand how I was able to hurt that person without being aware of it at the time. But I had to turn my pain and anger with the other person into accusations according to a specific language, or I would become a pariah and undergo a much greater harm than the self-destruction of this one relationship. The fact that I come from an abusive family could also win me additional points. Everyone, even those who do not admit it, know that within this system having suffered abuse in your past grants you a sort of legitimacy, even an excuse for harming someone else. But I don’t want an excuse. I want to get better, and I want to live without perpetuating patriarchy. I sure as hell don’t want to talk about painful stories from my past with people who are not unconditionally sympathetic towards me, as the only way to win their sympathy and become a human in their eyes.

As for the other person, I don’t know what was going on in their head, but I do know that they were able to deny ever harming me, violating my consent, violating my autonomy, and lying to me, by making the accusation of abuse. The label of “survivor” protected them from accountability. It also enabled them to make demands of me, all of which I met, even though some of those demands were harmful to me and other people. Because I had not chosen to make my accusation publicly, I had much less power to protect myself in this situation.

And as for the so-called community, those who were good friends supported me. Some of them questioned me and made sure I was going through a process of self-criticism. Those who were not friends or who held grudges against me tried to exclude me, including one person who had previously been called out for abuse. In other words, the accusation of abuse was used as an opportunity for power plays within our so-called community.

For all its claims about giving importance to feelings, the activist model is coded with total apathy. The only way to get the ball of community accountability rolling is to accuse someone of committing a specific crime. The role of our most trusted friends in questioning our responses, our impulses, and even our own experiences is invaluable. This form of questioning is in fact one of the most precious things that friendship offers. No one is infallible and we can only learn and grow by being questioned. A good friend is one who can question your behavior in a difficult time without ever withdrawing their support for you. The idea that “the survivor is always right” creates individualistic expectations for the healing process. A survivor as much as a perpetrator needs to be in charge of their own healing process, but those who support them cannot be muted and expected to help them fulfill their every wish. This is a obvious in the case of someone who has harmed someone else it should also be clear in the case of someone who has been harmed. We need each other to heal. But the others in a healing process cannot be muted bodies. They must be communicative and critical bodies.

The term “perpetrator” should set off alarm bells right away. The current model uses not only the vocabulary but also the grammar of the criminal justice system, which is a patriarchal institution through and through. This makes perfect sense: law and order is one of the most deeply rooted elements of the American psyche, and more immediately, many feminist activists have one foot in radical communities and another foot in NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations). The lack of a critique of these NGOs only makes it more certain that they will train us in institutional modes of thinking.

The current method is not only repulsive for its puritanism and its similarity to the Christian notions of the elect and the damned; it is also a contradiction of queer, feminist, and anarchist understandings of patriarchy. If everyone or most people are capable of causing harm, being abusive, or even of raping someone (according to the activist definition which can include not recognizing lack of consent, unlike the traditional definition which focuses on violent rape), then it makes no sense to morally stigmatize those people as though they were especially bad or dangerous. The point we are trying to make is not that the relatively few people who are called out for abuse or even for rape are especially evil, but that the entire culture supports such power dynamics, to the extent that these forms of harm are common. By taking a self-righteous, “tough on crime” stance, everyone else can make themselves seem like the good guys. But there can’t be good guys without bad guys. This is the same patriarchal narrative of villain, victim, and savior, though in the latter role, instead of the boyfriend or police officer, we now have the community. The term “survivor,” on the other hand, continues to recreate the victimization of the standard term, “victim,” that it was designed to replace.

One reason for calling someone a “survivor” is to focus on their process of overcoming the rape, even though it defines them perpetually in relation to it. The other reason is to spread awareness of how many thousands of people, predominately women, queer, and trans people, are injured or killed every year by patriarchal violence. This is an important point to make. However, given the way that rape has been redefined in activist circles, and the extension of the term “survivor” to people who suffer any form of abuse, the vast majority of things that constitute rape or abuse do not have the slightest possibility of ending someone’s life. This term blurs very different forms of violence.

Hopefully, the reader is thinking that an action does not need to be potentially lethal to constitute a very real form of harm. I absolutely agree. But if that’s the case, why do we need to make it sound like it does in order to take it seriously? Why connect all forms of harm to life-threatening harm instead of communicating that all forms of harm are serious?

As for these crimes, their definitions have changed considerably, but they still remain categories of criminality that must meet the requirements of a certain definition to justify a certain punishment. The activist model has been most radical by removing the figure of the judge and allowing the person harmed to judge for themselves. However, the judge role has not been abolished, simply transferred to the survivor, and secondarily to the people who manage the accountability process. The act of judging still takes place, because we are still dealing with punishment for a crime, even if it is never called that.

The patriarchal definition of rape has been abandoned in favor of a new understanding that defines rape as sex without consent, with whole workshops and pamphlets dedicated to the question of consent. Consent must be affirmative rather than the absence of a negative, it is cancelled by intoxication, intimidation, or persistence, it should be verbal and explicit between people who don’t know each other as well, and it can be withdrawn at any time. The experience of a survivor can never be questioned, or to put it another way an accusation of rape is always true. A similar formulation that sums up this definition is, “assault is when I feel assaulted.”

I don’t want to distinguish rape from other forms of harm without talking about how to address all instances of harm appropriately. One solution that does not require us to judge which form of harm is more important, but also does not pretend they are all the same, would have two parts. The first part is to finally acknowledge the importance of feelings, by taking action when someone says “I have been hurt,” and not waiting until someone makes an accusation of a specific crime, such as abuse or rape. Because we are responding to the fact of harm and not the violation of an unwritten law, we do not need to look for someone to blame. The important thing is that someone is hurting, and they need support. Only if they discover that they cannot get better unless they go through some form of mediation with the other person or unless they gain space and distance from them, does that other person need to be brought into it. The other person does not need to be stigmatized, and the power plays involved in the labels of perpetrator and survivor are avoided.

The second part changes the emphasis from defining violations of consent to focusing on how to prevent them from happening again. Every act of harm can be looked at with the following question in mind: “What would have been necessary to prevent this from happening.” This question needs to be asked by the person who was harmed, by their social circle, and if possible by the person who caused the harm.

The social circle is most likely to be able to answer this question when the harm relates to long-term relationships or shared social spaces. They might realize that if they had been more attentive or better prepared they would have seen the signs of an abusive relationship, expressed their concern, and offered help. Or they might realize that, in a concert hall they commonly use, there are a number of things they can all do to make it clear that groping and harassing is not acceptable. But in some situations they can only offer help after the fact. They cannot be in every bedroom or on every dark street to prevent forms of gender violence or intimate violence that happen there.

In the case of the person who caused the harm, the biggest factor is whether they are emotionally present to ask themselves this question. If they can ask, “what could I have done to not have hurt this person,” they have taken the most important step to identifying their own patriarchal conditioning, and to healing from unresolved past trauma if that’s an issue. If they are emotionally present to the harm they have caused, they deserve support. Those closest to the person they hurt may rightfully be angry and not want anything to do with them, but there should be other people wiling to play this role. The person they have hurt deserves distance, if they want it, but except in extreme cases it does no good to stigmatize or expel them in a permanent way.

If they can ask themselves this question honestly, and especially if their peers can question them in this process, they may discover that they have done nothing wrong, or that they could not have known their actions would have been harmful. Sometimes, relationships simply hurt, and it is not necessary to find someone to blame, though this is often the tendency, justified or not. The fact that some relationships are extremely hurtful but also totally innocent is another reason why it is dangerous to lump all forms of harm together, presupposing them all to be the result of an act of abuse for which someone is responsible.

If their friends are both critical and sympathetic, they are most likely to be able to recognize when they did something wrong, and together with their friends, they are the ones in the best position to know how to change their behavior so they don’t cause similar harm in the future. If their friends have good contact with the person who was hurt (or that person’s friends), they are more likely to take the situation seriously and not let the person who caused the harm off the hook with a band-aid solution. This new definition is a response to the patriarchal definition, which excuses the most common forms of rape (rape by acquaintances, rape of someone unable to give consent, rape in which someone does not clearly say “no”). It is a response to a patriarchal culture that was always making excuses for rape or blaming the victim.

The old definition and the old culture are abhorrent. But the new definition and the practice around it do not work. We need to change these without going back to the patriarchal norm. In fact, we haven’t fully left the patriarchal norm behind us. Saying “assault is when I feel assaulted” is only a new way to determine when the crime of assault has been committed, keeping the focus on the transgression of the assaulter, then we still have the mentality of the criminal justice system, but without the concept of justice or balance. At the other extreme, there are people who act inexcusably and are totally unable to admit it. Simply put, if someone hurts another person and they are not emotionally present in the aftermath, simply put, it is impossible to take their feelings into consideration. You can’t save someone who doesn’t want help. In such a case, the person hurt and their social circle need to do what is best for themselves, both to heal and to protect themselves from a person they have no guarantee will treat them well in the future. Maybe they will decide to shame that person, frighten them, beat them up, or kick them out of town. Although kicking them out of town brings the greatest peace of mind, it should be thought of as a last resort, because it passes off the problem on the next community where the expelled person goes. Because it is a relatively easy measure it is also easy to use disproportionately. Rather than finding a solution that avoids future conflict, it is better to seek a conflictive solution. This also forces people to face the consequences of their own righteous anger which can be a learning process.

Finally, the most important question comes from the person who was hurt. The victimistic mentality of our culture, along with the expectation that everyone is out to blame the victim, make it politically incorrect to insist the person who has been hurt ask themselves, “what would have made it possible to avoid this?” but such an attitude is necessary to overcoming the victim mentality and feeling empowered again. It is helpful for everyone who lives in a patriarchal world where we will probably encounter more people who try to harm us. Its not about blaming ourselves for what happened, but about getting stronger and more able to defend ourselves in the future.

I know that some zealous defenders of the present model will make the accusation that I am blaming the victim, so I want to say this again: it’s about preventing future rapes and abuse, not blaming ourselves if we have been raped or abused. The current model basically suggests that people play the role of victims and wait for society or the community to save them. Many of us think this is bullshit. Talking with friends of mine who have been raped and looking back at my own history of being abused, I know that we grew stronger in certain ways, and this is because we took responsibility for our own health and safety.

In some cases, the person who was hurt will find that if they had recognized certain patterns of dependence or jealousy, if they had had more self-esteem, or they had asserted themselves, they could have avoided being harmed. Unless they insist on retaining a puritan morality this is not to say that it was their fault. It is a simple recognizing of how they need to grow in order to be safer and stronger in a dangerous world. This method focuses not on blame, but on making things better.

Sometimes, however, the person will come to the honest conclusion, “there was nothing I could have done (except staying home / having a gun / having a bodyguard).” This answer marks the most extreme form of harm. Someone has suffered a form of violence that they could not have avoided because of the lengths the aggressor went to in order to override their will. Even shouting “No!” would not have been enough. It is a form of harm that cannot be prevented at an individual level and therefore it will continue to be reproduced until there is a profound social revolution, if that ever happens.

If we have to define rape, it seems more consistent with a radical analysis of patriarchy to define rape as sex against someone’s will. Because will is what we want taken into the realm of action, this idea of rape does not make the potential victim dependent on the good behavior of the potential rapist. It is our own responsibility to depress our will. Focusing on expressing and enacting our will directly strengthens ourselves as individuals and our struggles against rape and all other forms of domination.

If rape is all sex without affirmative consent, then it is the potential rapist, and not the potential victim, who retains the power over the sexual encounter. They have the responsibility to make sure the other person gives consent. If it is the sole responsibility of one person to receive consent from another person, then we are saying that person is more powerful then the other, without proposing how to change those power dynamics.

Additionally, if a rape can happen accidentally, simply because this responsible person, the one expected to play the part of the perfect gentleman, is inattentive or insensitive, or drunk, or oblivious to things like body language that can negate verbal consent, or from another culture with a different body language, then we’re not necessarily dealing with a generalized relationship of social power, because not everyone who rapes under this definition believes they have a right to the other person’s body.

Rape needs to be understood as a very specific form of harm. We can’t encourage the naive ideal of a harm-free world. People will always hurt each other, and it is impossible to learn how not to hurt others without also making mistakes. As far as harm goes, we need to be more understanding than judgmental. But we can and must encourage the ideal of a world without rape, because rape is the result of a patriarchal society teaching its members that men and other more powerful people have a right to the bodies of women and other less powerful people. Without this social idea, there is no rape. What’s more, rape culture, understood in this way, lies at least partially at the heart of slavery, property, and work, at the roots of the State, capitalism, and authority.

This is a dividing line between one kind of violence and all the other forms of abuse. It’s not to say that the other forms of harm are less serious or less important. It is a recognition that the other forms of harm can be dealt with using less extreme measures. A person or group of people who would leave someone no escape can only be dealt with through exclusion and violence. Then it becomes a matter of pure self-defense. In all the other cases, there is a possibility for mutual growth and healing. Sympathetic or supportive questioning can play a key role in responses to abuse. If we accept rape as a more extreme form of violence that the person could not have reasonably avoided, they need the unquestioning support and love of their friends.

We need to educate ourselves how systematically patriarchy has silenced those who talk about being raped through suspicion, disbelief, or counter accusations. But we also need to be aware that there have been a small number of cases in which accusations of rape have not been true. No liberating practice should ever require us to surrender our own critical judgement and demand that we follow a course of action we are not allowed to question. Being falsely accused of rape or being accused in a non-transparent way is a heavily traumatizing experience. It is a far less common occurrence than valid accusations of rape that the accused person denies, but we should never have to opt for one kind of harm in order to avoid another.

If it is true that rapists exist in our circles, it is also true that pathological liars exist in our circles. There has been at least one city where such a person made a rape accusation to discredit another activist. People who care about fighting patriarchy will not suspect someone of being a pathological liar every time they are unsure about a rape accusation. If you are close to someone for long enough, you will inevitably find out if they are a fundamentally dishonest person (or if they are like the rest of us, sometimes truthful, sometimes less so).

Therefore, someone’s close acquaintances, if they care about the struggle against rape culture, will never accuse them of lying if they say they’ve been raped. But often accusations spread by rumors and reach people who do not personally know the accuser and the accused. The culture of anonymous communication through rumors and the internet often create a harmful situation in which it is impossible to talk about accountability or about the truth of what happened in a distant situation.

Anarchists and other activists also have many enemies who have proven themselves capable of atrocities in the course of repression. A fake rape accusation is nothing to them. A police infiltrator in Canada used the story of being a survivor of an abusive relationship to avoid questions about her past and win the trust of anarchists she would later set up for prison sentences. Elsewhere, a member of an authoritarian socialist group made an accusation against several rival anarchists, one of whom, it turned out, was not even in town on the night in question. Some false accusations of rape are totally innocent. Sometimes a person begins to relive a previous traumatic experience while in a physically intimate space with another person, and it is not always easy or possible to distinguish between the one experience and the other. A person can begin to relive a rape while they are having consensual sex. It is definitely not the one person’s fault for having a normal reaction to trauma, but it is also not necessarily the other person’s fault that the trauma was triggered.

A mutual and dynamic definition of consent as active communication instead of passive negation would help reduce triggers being mislabeled as rape. If potential triggers are discussed before the sexual exchange and the responsibility for communicating needs and desires around disassociation is in the hands of the person who disassociated then consent is part of an active sexual practice instead of just being an imperfect safety net. If someone checks out during sex, and they know they check out during sex, it is their responsibility to explain what that looks like and what they would like the other person to do when it happens. We live in a society where many people are assaulted, raped or have traumatic experiences at some point in their lives. Triggers are different for everyone. The expectation that ones partner should always be attuned enough to know when one is disassociating, within a societal context that does not teach us about the effects of rape, much less their intimate emotive and psychological consequences — is unrealistic.

Consent is empowering as an active tool, it should not be approached as a static obligation. Still, the fact remains that not all rape accusation can be categorized as miscommunication, some are in fact malicious.

There is a difficult contradiction between the fact that patriarchy covers up rape, and the fact that there will be some false, unjustified, or even malicious rape accusations in activist communities. The best option is not to go with statistical probability and treat every accusation as valid, because a false accusation can tear apart an entire community make people apathetic or skeptical towards future accountability processes. It is far better to educate ourselves, to be aware of the prevalence of rape, to recognize common patterns of abusive behavior, to learn how to respond in a sensitive and supportive way, and also to recognize that there are some exceptions to the rules, and many more situations that are complex and defy definition.

The typical proposal for responding to rape, the community accountability process, is based on a transparent lie. There are no activist communities, only the desire for communities, or the convenient fiction of communities. A community is a material web that binds people together, for better and for worse, in interdependence. If its members move away every couple years because the next pace seems cooler, it is not a community. If it is easier to kick someone out than to go through a difficult series of conversations with them, it is not a community. Among the societies that had real communities, exile was the most extreme sanction possible, tantamount to killing them. On many levels, losing the community and all the relationships it involved was the same as dying. Let’s not kid ourselves: we don’t have communities. In many accountability processes, the so-called community has done as much harm, or acted as selfishly, as the perpetrator. Giving such a fictitious, self-interested group the power and authority of judge, jury, and executioner is a recipe for disaster.

What we have are groups of friends and circles of acquaintances. We should not expect to be able to deal with rape or abuse in a way that does not generate conflict between or among these different groups and circles. There will probably be no consensus, but we should not think of conflict as a bad thing. Every rape is different, every person is different, and every situation will require a different solution. By trying to come up with a constant mechanism for dealing with rape, we are thinking like the criminal justice system. It is better to admit that we have no catch-all answer to such a difficult problem. We only have our own desire to make things better, aided by the knowledge we share. The point is not to build up a structure that becomes perfect and unquestionable, but to build up experience that allows us to remain flexible but effective.

The many failings in the current model have burned out one generation after another in just a few short years, setting the stage for the next generation of zealous activists to take their ideals to the extreme, denouncing anyone who questions them as apologists, and unaware how many times this same dynamic has played out before because the very model functions to expel the unorthodox, making it impossible to learn from mistakes. One such mistake has been the reproduction of a concept similar to the penal sentence of the criminal justice system. If the people in charge of the accountability process decide that someone must be expelled, or forced to go to counseling, or whatever else, everyone in the so-called community is forced to recognize that decision. Those who are not are accused of supporting rape culture. A judge has a police force to back up his decision. The accountability process has to use accusations and emotional blackmail.

But the entire premise that everyone has to agree on the resolution is flawed. The two or more people directly involved in the problem may likely have different needs, even if they are both sincerely focused on their own healing. The friends of the person who has been hurt might be disgusted, and they might decide to beat the other person up. Other people in the broader social circle might feel a critical sympathy with the person who hurt someone else, and decide to support them. Both of these impulses are correct. Getting beaten up as a result of your actions, and receiving support, simply demonstrate the complex reactions we generate. This is the real world, and facing its complexity can help us heal.

The impulse of the activist model is to expel the perpetrator, or to force them to go through a specific process. Either of these paths rest on the assumption that the community mechanism holds absolute right, and they both require that everyone complies with the decision and recognize its legitimacy. This is authoritarianism. This is the criminal justice system, recreated. This is patriarchy, still alive in our hearts.

What we need is a new set of compass points, and no new models. We need to identify and overcome the mentalities of puritanism and law and order. We need to recognize the complexity of individuals and of interpersonal relationships. To avoid a formulaic morality, we need to avoid the formula of labels and mass categories. Rather than speaking of rapists, perpetrators, and survivors, we need to talk abut specific acts and specific limitations, recognizing that everyone changes, and that most people are capable of hurting and being hurt, and also of growing, healing, and learning how to not hurt people, or not be victimized, in the future. We also need to make the critical distinction between the forms of harm that can be avoided as we get smarter and stronger, and the kinds that require a collective self-defense.

The suggestions I have made offer no easy answers, and no perfect categories. They demand flexibility, compassion, intelligence, bravery, and patience. How could we expect to confront patriarchy with anything less?

[preserving-ferretbrain]

Revenge is... Awesome, Actually

by Sonia Mitchell

Thursday, 26 February 2009

Sonia reviews the film Revengers Tragedy.~

I was as surprised as anyone would be when a film I’d never heard of went straight onto my list of best films ever, particularly given that it features Christopher Ecclestone soliloquising to a skull that isn’t Yorick’s, Eddie Izzard being out-camped by Marc Warren and a soundtrack by Chumbawumba. Perhaps these reasons contributed to the film’s lack of fame, or perhaps fate is just very unfair. Because Revengers Tragedy is amazing. The film pretty much spoils itself with the title, but if you don’t want to know the details don’t read on. (The proverb the film opens with also gives a few hints as to the direction it might be going in - ‘Let the man who seeks revenge remember to dig two graves’)

Based on Thomas Middleton’s Renaissance play, Alex Cox’s film transports the story to near-future Liverpool. The majority of the dialogue is Middleton’s, though interspersed with gloriously anachronistic lines (‘we got ourselves a fuckin’ Cockney here boys’) and a fair amount of swearing. The story has been streamlined a tad, and dialogue altered accordingly, but you’d have to know the original play a fair bit better than I do in order to see the join. Frank Cottrell Boyce (writer of Millions) wrote the screenplay for the adaptation, and it’s a good one. Unfortunately the trailer did the film something of a disservice in that it was mostly visual and the few lines it did feature were ones in modern English, leaving the viewer with no idea the film uses predominantly Renaissance language. Presumably this left a few people quite surprised when they got to the cinema, while others who might have liked that sort of thing gave it a miss. Personally, in 2002 I was too distracted by LOTR: The Two Towers to notice an obscure British film starring a guy who wasn’t yet tipped to star in Doctor Who, but I’m very pleased to have rectified this.

Ecclestone is Vindici, a man seeking revenge. His wife was poisoned on their wedding day by Derek Jacobi’s Duke after she refused to sleep with him. Years have passed, in which time she’s become the aforementioned skull and Vindici has presumably been seriously stewing a long way away. Now, however, he’s ready for his revenge, and the film begins with him striding into Liverpool, shaving his head as he walks. When faced by a group of yobs he beats the shit out of them without a word, because you Do Not Mess with Vindici.

Star of the Duke’s team is Eddie Izzard, as heir Lussurioso. He and his gang of glammed and punked up brothers are decadence personified – chauffeured everywhere, partying hard and never doubting they can have any woman they choose. Lussurioso is looking for a disreputable man to secure him a particular woman, and Vindici is conveniently available. Somewhat unfortunately for Lussurioso the woman he’s after is Vindici’s sister Castiza, and his attitude towards her gets him spot number two on Vindici’s vendetta list.

At under two hours the film is fairly quickly paced, with the two main threads being Vindici’s plot to to get the most violent revenge he can, and the scheming of the Duke’s various sons to get the title for themselves. The interaction between Ecclestone and Izzard is the high point, both performances being perfectly judged. However the gaggle of brothers are a fantastic counterpoint to Vindici’s bitter wit, using the visual aspects of their performances to get laughs not in the original text. The genuinely ludicrous clothing helps, but Marc Warren in particular shows a gift for physical comedy I hadn’t suspected. His glam and camp Supervacuo is crafty at times, but his dim oblivion to what’s going on throughout the play results in some fantastically misjudged behaviour and is responsible for a lot of the laugh out loud moments. Justin Salinger’s somewhat brighter (and rather handsome) Ambitioso tends to scheme with him, and their double act mirrors the more grown-up Vindici and Lussurioso.

The film is highly stylised, contrasting beautifully with the four hundred year old dialogue. The use of CCTV footage, television reporting and an extremely good soundtrack all add to the exceptional atmosphere of awesomeness, and the story itself seems well fitted within such a setting. As the flier that came with the dvd says, ‘comparisons have been made with Baz Lurhmann’s Romeo and Juliet - both inevitable and unfortunate.’ There are surface similarities, but this is about adults, not youth. This is an angry, bitter film, and a lot of the humour is in slightly uneasy laughter. Vincini veers from anger and grief to a sinisterly manic happiness, and part of the skill in Ecclestone’s perfomance is that he takes us part-way along the path of laughing with him before leaving us as he goes into the obviously manic and not at all funny. The grey area between the two states is the interesting part. Is it funny that he sings a brushing-your-teeth song while coating the skull’s teeth with poison? What about singing the same song the next day as he brushes his own teeth, cheerful after having murdered the Duke?

Alongside the manic, however, is the genuinely moving. When he asks of the skull ‘does every proud and self-affecting dame camphor her face for this?[...] Who now bids twenty pounds a night?’ his speech is bitter and almost heartbreaking, as he ponders on the difference between the skull and the woman it once was. Derek Jacobi’s soliloquy as he reflects on his own misdeeds accompanied by flashback footage is also an affecting one. Only six lines long, it’s a rare glimpse beneath the public persona, addressed straight to the camera. I can’t decide if we’re supposed to see regret, repentance or distaste (and I think the impenetrability is deliberate – it’s a confession conscious of its audience, and he holds something back that we only find out later) but there’s certainly a gravity to the scene.

I’ve also spent a while trying to work out how this film treats women, and I’m still not altogether sure. To tamper with a winning formula, I present the Dystopia Rape Watch.

Women raped while alive: 1

Women raped post-mortum: 1 (prior to film’s main timeline)

Women who commit suicide after being raped: Supposedly 1, though there are questions raised.

Women who retain chastity despite being desired by powerful man: 1

Rapists who die horribly: 2

Potential rapists who die horribly: 1

Women who are complicit in helping above men die horribly: 1 (in a departure from the play, Castiza helps Vindici get his revenge)

Women tempted to sell their daughters to rich men: 1

Women who enjoy sex: 1

Women who enjoy incestuous sex: 1

Men who get soliloquies: At least 2

Women who get soliloquies: 0 that I can think of

No gold star, but the powerlessness of women is a theme rather than something that feels exploitative. The sacredness with which society views purity is contrasted with the corrupt powers that take whatever they like, and neither side comes away well. The supreme reverence of chastity comes from the Duke’s rival Antonio, who speaks over his dead wife’s body praising her for apparently committing suicide after being raped. This is sinister rather than something the film condones, and the fact that everyone agrees with him and the public leave a massive carpet of flowers and toys - Princess Diana style - isn’t something that sits comfortably. Rather, it highlights how broken that society is, and it’s telling that when Vindici wants the Duke’s body to be discovered he leaves it amongst the flowers of the shrine.

In this corrupted society Castiza’s position is vulnerable, and she relies to some extent on her brothers for safety, especially after her mother’s betrayal. However she has more lines and more power that she had in the original play, and actually becomes one of the revengers. She also has obvious intentions to kill Lussurioso herself with no help from Vindici, although ultimately circumstances prevent her and he’s the one who gets to revenge her honour.

I’m inclined to give the film’s issues a bye in the knowledge that the text was written four centuries ago. There’s a lot of misogyny from the characters and the society they live in, but I don’t think the film itself is inexcusably so. Castiza may be the only positive female role, but she is an important character who is active rather than passive. She’s also allowed to spit – the film doesn’t present her as an idealised lady but a young woman with opinions, agency and a sense of humour who happens to be trapped in dystopia. I think this is one of those occasions when departing from the original text is absolutely the right decision.

My only real problem is with the title. The lack of apostrophe is annoying me. Perhaps its absence is a refusal to state whether there’s one revenger or many, but I could live without the ambiguity in order to have the world as it should be. That aside, I thoroughly recommend the film whether or not you’ve heard of the play. It’s awesome.

Themes:

Fantasy Rape Watch

,

TV & Movies

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Wardog

at 09:49 on 2009-02-26Oh my God, I have to see this! *runs around in circles squealing with pure glee*

I love the fact that renaissance rape watch is ultimately renaissance soliloquy watch :)

To be honest, I rarely have problems with these kind of issues in historical plays... otherwise you might as well by Charlotte McBride crying over the fate of Elizabethan bears.

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Sonia Mitchell

at 12:02 on 2009-02-26

To be honest, I rarely have problems with these kind of issues in historical plays

I wouldn't bother much with a straight adaptation, but given that this departs from the text in places and uses its visuals to suggest a lot that isn't in the script I figured it might be interesting to pick through it a little. The film's very much a modern product rather than a historical one, and given what it had to work with I felt it actually did a pretty good job.

But I didn't mean to start crying about the bears :-)

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Wardog

at 14:28 on 2009-02-26Yikes, I didn't actually mean to level that as a criticism either at you or at your review. It's always interesting to pick at the issues and I think it was sensible to address them, especially since, as you say, it sounds like a self-consciously "modern" adaption (despite the Renassaince language). I think I should have used "one" instead of "you" in that sentence, and I certainly didn't mean to suggest you were crying over bears :)

It was a more a general point, actually, aimed nowhere in particular (not even at bears) - in that I have often encountered people who react badly to 'misogyny' in historical documents, in the sense that they won't attribute merit because it's anti-woman or anti-semetic or something.

Partially this is just on my mind because I've been reading a lot of Trollope :)

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Sonia Mitchell

at 20:51 on 2009-02-26I got that, don't worry :-) I was just wondering myself about the productivity of putting that bit in (And I think 'crying over bears' is a phrase I could myself using quite a bit. It's just so apt. Tilting at windmills and crying over bears...)

I have often encountered people who react badly to 'misogyny' in historical documents, in the sense that they won't attribute merit because it's anti-woman or anti-semetic or something

Yeah, it's tricky, and I think sometimes it is difficult to get over. I was iffy about Ezra Pound's work for quite a while after finding out about his views so I won't throw stones too much, but I do agree with you.

I think examining values

is

important, but as you said the problem lies in linking that with the merit of the work. I'm interested in Marxist takes on texts but I'm not going to throw my toys out of the pram because only the high characters get the blank verse speeches in pretty much any Ren drama.

I guess

The Tempest

is an extreme example of critics seeing only issues. I've only ever been taught it from a post-colonial angle (though in fairness it's not a favourite of mine so I haven't sought out wider criticism) whereas most of the other Shakespeare I've been formally taught has been from a more general angle which then touches on others. But that's anecdotal so proves nothing :-)

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Sonia Mitchell

at 20:52 on 2009-02-26That didn't look like such a long comment in the little box..