#creators of the drama: wHAT IF WE TOOK THIS SUPER GAY SCENE AND GAVE IT A SUPER WARM COLOR SCHEME TO MAKE IT EVEN MORE ROMANTIC!!1!

[littleeyesofpallas]

The other day i had a kinda drunken rant I went on with a friend that I had wished I could’ve written down.  But today I read an article about the shift in hollywood marketing from star power to IP and character driven power instead: the idea being that an original movie used be able to draw crowds with the basic idea of “your favorite star as <insert role>” but we’ve moved more towards the appeal of familiar franchise names like “from the creator of XYZ.”  But I think this is an interesting place to draw the line because it does go back to that drunken rant.  So, here I go again... this is gonna be lo~ng and boring (and this is the shortest possible version) and without pictures, but god knows i have no idea what i would put to accompany this super tangent-filled tirade, so I guess just buckle up...

(I apologize now for all the weird side subjects that I’m going to name drop but just not take the time here to go in depth with.)

I don’t even remember where my drunken rant with my friend the other night started so my first obstacle is finding a place to even begin with this because it has so many entry points and none of them are any closer to where this all ends than any other so like.... whatever...  Shakespeare.

It’s a super complicated thing but in the first era of professional english theatre  that Shakespeare ushered in (from the mid-late 1500s to early-mid 1600s) there were strong strong associations with theatre and prostitution.  Maybe it was exactly what it sounded like, maybe it was elitist slander against the revolutionary accessibility of the arts to the poor as self debasing, maybe it was the church being really angry about literally everything all the time, maybe it was a little of all of that...  But either way the persisting notion was that a theatre, established or travelling, was a place one could ostensibly go to pay for sex with the troupe’s actors.  of course at the time women weren’t a part of that profession, and while they may have been as much a part of the theater going demographic as anyone else it’s hard to pinpoint how much of the already vaguely defined theatre sex trade they patronized --Point being when we talk about theatres prostituting their actors we’re talking about male theatre goers paying to have sex with male actors, and predominantly those young boys playing female roles.  In most classic academic circles this is either wholly ignored, brushed aside/glossed over, or sloppily chalked up to “homosexuality.”  But there’s a lot more nuance to that... which is part of the big mess of stuff I’m just not getting into here...

But this is where I draw my line of connection to Kabuki theatre.  Kabuki somewhat infamously had similar practices as all-male theatre and as duel industry for theatre and prostitution.  And as a parallel development it seems to make sense... In England and Japan alike, you have a group of people who by nature of their jobs charm people and constantly move from town to town.  Even if a community or government thinks what they’re doing is wrong, by the time they can take notice or do anything to stop them: they charm, they fuck, they leave.  But unlike Shakespearean theatre, kabuki has a slightly more convoluted history of development.

See, Kabuki started with Izumi-no-Okumo, a shinto shrine maid (ironically also in the 1500-1600s cusp, same as shakespeare) and although a lot of her personal history is lost to time you can imagine the basic development here: a shrine maid tells the myths, she tells the myths dramatically and with with character voice, then all that but with props, and costume, and then dividing roles into separate actors, and collecting donations for the shrine as regular practice anyway but hey look people donate more when they’ve come for a story they enjoy... and then oops you’ve invented theatre.  Also on account of this being started with shinto shrine maids, the form naturally took an all female slant.

Whether it started with Okumo herself or not, as theatre became an established form, and a lucrative one at that, non shinto affiliated women quickly seized the chance to make a living outside the bounds of common peasantry, and with the growth of travelling theatre as an industry that same side venture of prostitution developed.  But here’s where it gets interesting...

Due to things that, again I won’t dive into here, the untaxed revenues of prostitution painted a target on the backs of kabuki actresses, and women were eventually outlawed from theatre.  The art form was of course immensely popular however so to keep the gravy train rolling the theatre form continued but now with all young-male casts, to retain the feminine aesthetics of female kabuki.  This did absolutely nothing to stop the rate of prostitution however, so they outlawed it again and replaced the young boys with grown men.  This still didn’t stop the prostitution but there was other stuff going on in Japan at that point and legislative attentions were pulled elsewhere.

And here’s my weird little take away from this...  it’s not like Kabuki theatre suddenly went from being popular with horny straight men to horny gay men in a seemless and perfectly balanced transition. (and granted japan at the time was a lot more open about their grasp of sexuality compared to now and to the west in general) so presumably a lot of these thirsty theatre goers were just overwhelmingly indiscriminate in their tastes in fucking actors...  But stick a pin in that, we’ve got a tangent to go on!

So around this same time Japan was having kind of a second rennaissance: japan’s high arts culture had first really risen to prominence in the heian period right before the long long descent into the civilwar we all know and lover for all its flashy samurai drama.  When that 400-ish year civil war finally ended and then stabilized under the Tokugawa shogunate in the Edo period, the art scene finally had some room to breathe again, and among many other things ukiyo-e wood block prints saw a huge explosion in popularity.  And part of this tied into Kabuki theatre, as an extremely popular genre of prints were actor portraits and theatre scenes.  Actor portraits in particular are kind of culturally fascinating, because they weren’t simply prints of character illustration, they were frequently labeled with both the character played, the story they featured in, and the name of the actor playing them.  moreover, despite the reverence of classical art historians now, these weren’t fine art at the time; they were mass produced, affordable and disposable.  In major cities, everyone went to see theatre, and everyone bought, kept, and even collected actor portraits.  As theatre seasons and troupes came and went actor portraits came to occupy and kind of cultural value space a lot like American baseball cards in how prestige, rarity, and trading became an entire subculture in and of itself within the sports/theatre community.

Now we see how Japan had created this thriving popular/mass culture, and celebrity culture for itself.  And while the notion of a “parasocial relationship” wouldn’t be formulated and explored until the 1950s-60s in the wake of things like Elvis fever and Beetles mania, that brand of one-sided relationship where you as an audience member form a “relationship” with a celebrity that involves collecting information about their heavily curated persona is exactly what japan stumbled into some 300 years earlier.  And in fact Japanese pop culture would maintain a lineage of parasocial relationships during the intervening years (in a way the deification and worship of the emperor as a god-king was a kind of parasocial relationship in the way a secular monarch doesn’t quite achieve) So it’s no surprise that when Takarazuka Revue opened in the 1910s as a new modern all-female theatre form, it attracted a familiar old brand of horny theatre audience --one that maintained a very nebulous relationship with the now much more stringent notions of gender and its relation to sexuality.

taking this tangent a little further, Japanese pop culture has always shown this interesting, self-aware approach to the parasocial relationship dynamic that western cultures seems to lack.  I remember that when the 1990s put boy bands briefly into the spotlight, the thing that sunk them in the American eye seemed to be this weird sense of betrayal that the boys werent some garage band rags to riches story, and they didnt write their own music, or make their own dance moves, or even sing live at their own concerts.  America seemed to be repulsed by this notion of a manufactured pop hit.  Japan however (and Korea soon to follow) seemed to thrive in this instead; there was no pretense that J-pop idols weren’t manufactured, and in fact they took pride in the rigors of having been hand picked and raised to stardom --of course they were scouted and trained, because the idol could’ve been any of millions but it was them who got picked, it was them who sang the best, performed the best, climbed the charts, and fought to stay there.  Stardom wasn’t an art form, it was a contest, and they were WINNING.

And the manufactured nature of that J-pop idol business model is what gave rise to Hatsune Miku (in fact there were multiple attempts in the 1980s to design and market a wholly fictional pop idol, but if anything they were too ahead of their time and lacked the technology to really sell the idea in its best form) because when your entire product is about making and curating your performers’ public persona, to the extreme level at which them having their own lives actually starts to contradict their stage persona and hurt their marketability... why bother projecting the persona onto a real person?  Why not just cut the human component out all together and just market the persona for what it is?  And for Japan I think that kind of relationship was one that they were culturally always just a few steps away from being ready to accept anyway, so it just took a little persistence.

Then came the anime waifu thing...  Dating sims, and body pillow marriages, etc... and I think the pretty unanimous impulse to turn this into a enormous joke (and lets be real who could blame anyone for that) overlooks what actually happened here: paraosocial relationships in the purest form, with the fleshy middleman removed and with it the lie, not less false but somehow now false yet honest.  A bizarre paradox to be sure...

But now lets back this up...  Kabuki theatre.  Prostitution.  The change from women to young boys to men, and the almost hilarious unflappably bisexual audience who embraced it.  I don’t think it was a component of sexuality as any historians who have looked at that time period bothered to conceive of it.   Because even in an early japanese mass culture scene, the relationship was between the audience and the persona, and not the audience and the actors; The audience was always in love with the characters in their collectible trading prints, with their 15th century waifus, and they paid to have sex with those personas regardless of the bodies or real people involved.

...

okay, so, I typed all that out weeks ago and then just left it in my drafts, not even really intending to come back to it.  And now that I’m here, I don’t know that I had a point to this when i went on my drunk rant.  But i guess if there was any kind of a take away from this, it’s that I find that people have a lot of trouble separating personal identity from gender, from performance, from social dynamics... and in western culture, especially within recent history/memory, that’s kind of understandably hard to untangle. But historically people’s sexuality and sense of attraction have basically always been based implicitly on attraction to an idea made manifest in a persona first, and a body to match it only secondarily to that;

Society’s abiding dedication to forcing you into a gendered box, and to box gender into a narrow range of performance, is equitable to screeching fans being “in love” with celebrities they’ve never met and convinced that the steady feed of curated marketed personality traits constitute “knowing” those celebrity strangers.  The idea that the person and the persona are the same is a lie told to sell product.  Gender is just the brand.  You’re the rockstar.  Fuck marketing.

[ryanmeft]

Ryan’s Top Ten Films of 2017

I happen to think 2017 was a particularly fine year for movies. Of course, I also thought that about 2016, and 2015. If I could remember how I felt before that, I’d probably say the same thing about almost every year. The constant refrain that this is the year movies died or that we’ve fallen from some feverishly imagined golden age rolls off me like water off a stone, and I am unmoved.

In the end, though, as decreed in the esoteric conventions of the movie gods, I had to pick ten. And it was a tough choice. As usual, I did not attempt to decide the ten best films. I only highlighted the ten I liked the most.

I numbered it this year, but for the most part you can shuffle these around and it wouldn’t matter. My list encompasses a daring allegorical film, a story about ambition killing humanity, a rare take on the most famous war in history, a meditative haunting, and a movie about a fishman. In every case, they are on here for the same reason: they affected me at a guttural level, made me think, made me feel, perhaps influenced my own work. On with it.

10. mother! Roger Ebert said of Pulp Fiction “I knew it was either one of the year’s best films, or one of the worst.” One of those comes along every now and then, and I cherish them either way, because it’s impossible to be wishy washy about them. Darren Aronofsky’s uncompromising allegory is such a film. Is it a blood ‘n’ guts version of the book of Genesis? A meditation on ancient paganism? A primal scream about the very act of creating something from an artist who never does anything but exactly what he wants? Who knows? Jennifer Lawrence is a lot better utilized in dark roles like this, and Javier Bardem is an obsessed creator every bit as inscrutable as any god. Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer are Adam and Eve, unless they aren’t. I usually say you ought to leave your baggage at the ticket counter when you see a movie, but mother! Absolutely demands you react to it on a visceral level. There’s no way to walk out of this one and be non-committal.

9. The Shape of Water

This is the kind of film that makes me happy I’m not so jaded as to demand some sort of lofty artistic merit (and who decides what art has merit, I might ask?) from every movie I see. You might fairly point out that some of the characters are not the deepest. You might fairly point out that’s it’s heavy on the sappy romance. You might fairly point out that the film isn’t a heavy hitter intellectually. I might fairly point out, in return, that I don’t care. Guillermo Del Toro’s lavish Cold-War-Meets-Creature-Feature-Love-Story, led by a mute Sally Hawkins, is a watery confection that I loved not because it made me think, but because it made me feel. A talent-loaded cast---Richard Jenkins, Michael Stuhlbarg, Octavia Spencer, Michael Shannon and Doug Jones as the creature---fuels a movie I just wanted to sink into like a pool under starlight, and to top it off, it treated sex as something people actually do, rather than simply pantomime.

8. The Meyerowitz Stories: New and Selected

To a creative sort, the sting of a parent who is indifferent to your life’s passions can be withering, but Noah Baumbach flips that. Here, a floaty, disinterested, perhaps somewhat delusional aging sculptor, played by Dustin Hoffman, is immensely dissatisfied with his three children’s desire for a normal life. The movies rarely deal in this, because it’s easier to draw sympathy for a hero when their parent is more viscerally abusive. The children all have their own ways of dealing with this, and they are brought to life with immensely affecting performances from Ben Stiller, Elizabeth Marvel, and…Adam Sandler? Yes, to everyone’s shock, Adam Sandler has one of the best roles of the year. I am less shocked, because I know he can act when he desires it. And act he does, playing the dutiful son who remains to endure his father’s stubbornness while the others attain greater degrees of freedom. What do you do with a parent who demands you desire their approval but will only give it on their terms? You learn to live with it.

7. Spider-Man: Homecoming

I’m a sucker for Spider-Man. Really, all you have to do to get me to like a Spider-Man movie is to make a halfway decent one. This one may not have been the all-time classic Spider-Man 2 was, but it gave me a relatable Peter Parker, a cast of affecting friends for him, Michael Keaton as the best on screen Spidey villain since Doc Ock, and plenty of Spider-action. I’m going to be honest with you: I think that’s all I need. If you need more, though consider that the MCU formula, which, critics have rightly said is liberally applied to almost all characters, actually works for Spider-Man. Having this excitable super-powered teenager crack jokes about everything to paper over his insecurities and refuse to take his powers or the world he’s a part of all that seriously, only to learn a harsh lesson about how much that life can cost him, fits not just the character but the John Hughes-esque High School setting perfectly. After Tobey Maguire got Peter Parker right and Andrew Garfield nailed his alter-ego, Tom Holland and director Jon Watts are the first pairing to land both halves. The fact that it is such a near-perfect invocation of my favorite comic superhero didn’t affect my review (I still stand by my judge-a-movie-based-on-the-movie mantra), but it did help land the film on this list. Because it’s my damn list and I’ll do as I please.

6. Call Me by Your Name

It’s impossible to shoot a movie in the environs of rural Italy and not make it look gorgeous, it seems. You just point the camera. Setting a gripping story with compelling characters against this backdrop is a challenge, one that Luca Guadagnino accomplishes. He weaves a languid tale of idle academics in a beautiful place, and normally that would be anathema to me, as I’m not a big fan of stories featuring well-off people who live in paradise. Something about this one, however, grabbed me, and it isn’t just Timothee Chalamet’s career-making performance. I think it is the lack of forced drama. 17-year-old Elio may be the main emotional attraction, but where lesser romances take the easy way out, with histrionics and unrealistic contrivances, Guadagnino creates people, people who are capable of coming to peace with their situations and recognizing that life may not always turn out the way you want, but that there’s a large gap between “fairy tale” and “nightmare”. It isn’t a “gay movie”, but a movie about two people who happen to fall in love. It is erotic in the broadest sense of the word.

5. In This Corner of the World

To the casual moviegoer, it may seem that a war movie without any war in it should be reclassified. Certainly, it once seemed that way to me. I’ve learned better, and Sunao Katabuchi’s film centering around one young woman trying to have something like a normal life while Japan is in the midst of World War II took me by surprise. Whereas Saving Private Ryan or Grave of the Fireflies might hit you in the gut by displaying the most horrible effects of war in graphic detail, ITCOTW takes a different approach. Warships wait languidly in the harbor of an otherwise peaceful town. Rations run low and ordinary people must make sacrifices. Life goes on surrounded by only indirect reminders of pain, and I was hit by a revelation that seemed obvious in hindsight: most citizens were as unaware of the extent of their government’s ambitions as we are, and were at best distant collateral in the pursuit of empire. In one of the most indelible scenes of the year, the residents witness a massive flash of energy come from from far over the mountains, and after a second we realize with a start that it must have been Hiroshima. Then they go about their day.

4. Detroit

Here we have the most egregious Best Picture slight since Inside Llewyn Davis. In 1967, police staged a raid on a party for black veterans, which touched off a riot during which several black men ended up dead at the hands of the police. Kathryn Bigelow takes on this material and decides the audience must be spared no discomfort or disgust in seeing the terror unfold. A row of black men are lined up against a wall and interrogated, including being terrorized by a sadistic game wherein one is taken into another room and pretend-murdered to scare the others. Two white women at the hotel are swept up, their crime to have been spending time with black men. The movie is anchored by a horrifying performance by Will Poulter as a beat cop so vehemently bigoted that even his white superiors hate him, and a sadness-inducing one by John Boyega as a black security guard who knows that even a hundred years after emancipation he must cower and grovel before authoritative whites to maybe, possible, if he’s lucky prevent black deaths. It is as harrowing and nerve-wracking a depiction of systematic violent racism as I’ve seen. If I may get a bit snippy for the moment, it is worth nothing that in a world where well-meaning voices decry both an alleged lack of films about black culture and a definite deficiency of women directors, this movie, despite a wide release, bombed at the box office. Reality is hard to face, but some people don’t have a choice.

3. Kedi

Would I have loved this as much if the focus were on dogs, not cats? Probably not. I am firmly in the cats-r-gud camp, and might even be said to be in the pocket of the powerful pro-kitty lobby. Thing is, I also wouldn’t have loved this movie so much if it were just about cats. Ceyda Torun’s documentary ostensibly about Istanbul street cats is really about life in one of the world’s most ancient cities. The feline stars of the film are simply catalysts for drawing that life into the open. Each of them have a distinct personality and some distinct humans to fit with. My favorite is the one who is absolutely loyal to his shopkeeper human, and also absolutely loyal to his other shopkeeper human. Shot using inventive techniques to capture the lives of the cats when they go out-of-bounds, and infused with a haunting Kira Fontana score and mesmerizing beauty courtesy of cinematographers Alp Korfali and Charlie Wupperman, you need not have a cat to love it, but you do require a heart. These people, all among the “common” working classes of Turkey, commit what will, for the sadly xenophobic world we currently live in, be a mortal sin: they force you to admit everyone, everywhere, is just human. Even the furry ones.

2. A Ghost Story

The most common thing I hear when I bring this one up is “Oh, the bedsheet one!” It makes me remember a time when I could casually write off such a film by reducing it to its most unusual element. Actually seeing the film makes me glad those days are gone. David Lowery’s haunting (pun definitely intended) meditation on life, loss, time, memory, holding on and letting go is not a film you watch if you want everything explained to you, or even want things that can be explained. Like the unfairly-maligned Cloud Atlas, it pokes gently at the mysteries of life and death and love by encouraging the audience to draw their own conclusions. We’re never quite sure of where we are in time and space, or how one scene relates to another, which is the point. As I’ve gotten older, one of the only things I’ve learned to do well is appreciate time not only as it relates to my immediate life, but as a sort of web that everyone experiences differently. I suspect such a mentality will be needed before one can really draw the marrow from this film. Once you do that, though, you’ll be treated to something that will stay in your mind, always.

1. Lucky

From Inside Llewyn Davis to Locke to Fruitvale Station, I’m always going to be a sucker for well-done films about various people just living life, mostly free from the conventions of pumped-up drama. That’s not to say I don’t like drama, but the films that make me reflect on the ordinary, real world are almost always going to end up higher in my esteem at the end-of-year roll call. Such is the case here. Lucky is not about anything. If you’re looking for some anchor for a plot, there isn’t one. Played by the great Harry Dean Stanton in the last performance released during his lifetime, Lucky is a 90-year-old man who is dying. He doesn’t have a disease. He isn’t injured. He’s just old. He’s an avowed atheist. He’s a bar stool philosopher. He’s kind of a prick. These things are not plot. They are just aspects of a man who, after nine decades on earth, has picked up many aspects, not a one of which feels like something a real person wouldn’t acquire. That’s the beauty of John Carroll Lynch’s film: you’re not going to find Lucky doing anything a man like him would be unlikely to do for the sake of cheap entertainment.

So what does happen? He lives in a dusty old town without much in it and watches game shows. He does crosswords. He eats at the diner and drinks at the bar that hasn’t banned him. He goes to a child’s birthday party at one point, sure, but where I was fearful the film would veer off into contrivance, it instead gave me one of the most beautifully natural scenes of the year. Lucky does have a struggle, and it is to face the (admit it) horrible truth that, even if you do everything right and don’t get sick and don’t get broken and live a good life, you still have to die. No one who was familiar with him didn’t feel the loss of Mr. Stanton, but what a film for him to go out on. What a film. Some films almost made the cut, so here are my honorable mentions, in alphabetical order. Most of these movies, if going by the anachronistic system humans seem to prefer, would also have gotten 3 1/2-to-4 star “official ratings”. In the end, though, there could be only one. Er, ten. There could be only ten. Beatriz at Dinner Darkest Hour I, Tonya It Comes at Night Lady Bird The Lost City of Z Mudbound Phantom Thread The Greatest Showman Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri