#deconstructive interrogation of law

[rotenotes]

Saul Newman - Derrida’s Deconstruction Of Authority

Title: Derrida’s Deconstruction Of Authority Author(s): Saul Newman Date: 2001 Topics: authority critique deconstruction Derrida language post-anarchism post-structuralist Notes: Originally appeared in Philosophy & Social Criticism, vol 27, no 3. Source: Retrieved on September 14, 2009 from www.infoshop.org Saul Newman Derrida’s Deconstruction Of Authority Abstract: This article explores the…

[opstandelse]

Saul Newman - Derrida’s Deconstruction Of Authority

Title: Derrida’s Deconstruction Of Authority Author(s): Saul Newman Date: 2001 Topics: authority critique deconstruction Derrida language post-anarchism post-structuralist Notes: Originally appeared in Philosophy & Social Criticism, vol 27, no 3. Source: Retrieved on September 14, 2009 from www.infoshop.org Saul Newman Derrida’s Deconstruction Of Authority Abstract: This article explores the…

[adeptus-nonsense]

Year 4560. Contact war.

current year 4578. Interview of klokian heavy mechanized frontline support unit 681th divison.

specie: kloakian. Name: Rak’zaer crasl.

I remember the first war we had with the humans clear as day. I think the whole galaxy does. While war isn’t something new to us since the galactic council are well, what they say peace keepers but they work more to keep the status quo between all the species which is a constant struggle of making sure the more malevolant empires dont do anything rash. It’s a constant struggle between border frictions, rebellions and sometimes civil war. safe to say galactic scale politics are a complete mess and sometimes well…let’s just say things can get disturbing.

the first contact war is a great example and one we all learnt from dearly. When the graktukian empire discovered that one of their holy worlds as they call it had been colonized they were not happy at all. Standard procedure would be to contact this new specie and inform them that they had to leave the planet. What we were not aware off was that the empire had taken matter into their own hands and eradicated the settlement using a specialised deconstruction lance, breaking the humans and their buildings down into their molecular structure.

We later heard that they had captured some what they call heretics and after vigorious interrogation they found out that they were a specie called ”homo sapien” or ”human”. With the Grantukian empire being very influential both politically and militairily they somehow managed to get the council to overlook this breach of galactic law due to the humans ”defiling their holy world”. Still think it’s valorkian Dungbeetle behavior.

Especially when they decided to declare a fullblown war with the new ’human’ specie. A war that cost them a bit over sixty planets before a truce were declared. The humans only lost ten, six of which were captured planets they took from the Graktuka.

I was on about three planets the humans invaded, but the planets they were defending? There’s a reason why i have prosthetic leg arm, and three prosthetic organs.

Human space technology is rather primitive by our standards, they’re slow dont have shields and instead rely on thick hull instead off energy based kinetic impact shields. So how did they defeat Top of the line Graktukian destroyer fleets? You see Graktukian ships are not in anyway weak. But most of the ships fleets they they have are categorized as a striker fleet, fast manouverable, small and very dangerous if they got up close because they would drop EMP class K bombs. Their tactic was to get up close shields up and get into middle of the fleet, drop the bombs and move away to get into position to fire their lance weaponry from afar.

what they didn’t expect were that a human railguns completely ignored shields. While their hull wasn’t thin it did not hold up when what was essentially a volley of needle shaped projectiles going close to light speed pierced their hull nearly cutting their ships in half.

I’ve read their reports of that first engagement and the amount of energy generated by the human ships were that of a red giant sun. How they managed to get the literal power of the sun into their primitive ships without causing a black hole is still baffling to me. Their space technology is rather primitive but their energy generation is on a whole other level compared to ours. We guess that those ships have to be simple so that the Miniature star they have onboard dont implode on itself due to overuse. Given their reputation i would assume they learnt that the hard way. And the radiation their miniature star generators acted as a natural form of isolation for energy meaning they were EMP immune unless you managed to get directly in said ship.

When we found out that they essentially destroyed an entire Graktukian striker fleet, the Graktukian high nobolity realized that they needed help. I know there was some very foul play involved to get the council onboard with this but noone has any evidence. Mostly because they were declared heretics and died under a number of incidents. This went on and on. with some big victories for us destroying their main dreadnought fleets utilizing classified weapons managed to siege high value planets.

At this point we were not aware that humans were a predator specie, when we made it onto the planet via translocation beacons because planetfall by conventional means were deemed impossible due to the quite honestly unhealthy amount of surface to air weaponry, which put most fortress worlds seem like a agricultural world.

Even via translocation the initial forces were ambushed and only by sheer coincidence did they manage to set up a very rudimentary ground only when the kinetic shield generators were set up. Even then we lost over 20 000 militairy personell in just 3 weeks. We managed to overwhelm their defences by saturated orbital bombardment. Even then, they managed to ambush and raid numerous of our operation bases.

I deployed on the 4th week on the planet. In all my cycles of service i have never witnessed such chaos, supply lines cut off, ammunitions sabotagued. Once the shield generator broke down and the Shield gen mechanic tried to fix it but we had to request another one because the damn thing was sabotaged, never seen a mechanic that angry and baffled before.

about 8 years of us going back and forwards between occupying system and taking it back both sides were exhausted from war, in total about 300 billion casulties were documented.

It was a bloody war, and i am glad we managed to negotiate a cease fire. fragile as it was. I dont know how i feel about fighting for what effectively was a mistake that the humans had no way of knowing of. I’m just saying alot of things were off about that war and i’m not sure if we were on the rightside in that war. Maybe i’m just growing to be more critical of it all.

interview concluded

[sethshead]

The surge of anti-Semitism is a symptom of the decay of democratic habits, a leading indicator of rising authoritarianism. When anti-Semitism takes hold, conspiracy theory hardens into conventional wisdom, embedding violence in thought and then in deadly action. A society that holds its Jews at arm’s length is likely to be more intent on hunting down scapegoats than addressing underlying defects. Although it is hardly an iron law of history, such societies are prone to decline. England entered a long dark age after expelling its Jews in 1290. Czarist Russia limped toward revolution after the pogroms of the 1880s. If America persists on its current course, it would be the end of the Golden Age not just for the Jews, but for the country that nurtured them.

I also began my undergraduate studies in the late-'90s, just a few short blocks from Columbia University. My memories of the time and place are not so rosy as are Mr. Foer's. I remember a humanities lecture being disrupted by a student revolt because it focused on the Holocaust. This was back when everything was called a "Holocaust" except the actual Holocaust, and unsurprisingly the Holocaust was equated with New York State's prison system. Bad as carceral culture is, it is not the Holocaust. Columbia had its LaRouchists camped forever outside. Friends at CCNY were taught that people like me were fake Jews and responsible for slavery by faculty approved by the likes of Leonard Jeffries. Academia, even then, was a setting where antisemitism retained respectability, provided it was couched in radical enough theory and jargon.

Yes, Jews are the canaries in the coal mine when it comes to liberal backsliding, the first to be othered, antisemitism the first bigotry to be destigmatized. But it has likewise been a very long time since American academia has been committed to the liberal project; longer than I've been alive, I'd reckon. My experience is of an academic humanities and some social sciences mobilized to problematize, deconstruct, and dismantle liberalism; of instructors who had appointed themselves radicalizers and indoctrinators, not critical guides in teaching how to think, how to interrogate all texts.

This conflict between the university's traditional liberal role of hosting reasoned debate among a diversity of ideas, and faculty and students who wish to create intellectual monocultures of goodthink on campus, will ultimately cause the collapse of the Ivory Tower. It has for too long tolerated doctrines intolerant of dissent or argument. The Fourth Estate tried to hold the lines of liberal democracy, until the internet democratized media and the mob went where it could find the maximum bias confirmation, be pointed towards the old classic villains to explain all personal and social failings. Now both demagogical extremes may blame different Jews, but in the end, they both blame Jews for America's problems. And where are our old defenders? Where have they ever been? Have we ever had defenders?

In 1968, when a local New York City public school board tried to fire an almost-entirely Jewish group of teachers, who defended them? The largely Jewish-led union. But unions don't care as much about Jews anymore, not when they're more preoccupied with international events than with the welfare of their members here at home - just ask the Jewish teachers harassed and threatened at Hillcrest and Origin High Schools how vocal their union has been in their defense, and against DOE attempts to whitewash bias incidents.

American Jews sought influence in our liberal environment for our own protection, but that liberalism has required us to cede some influence to those who also know marginalization. At the local level, this has made us again vulnerable.

That said, liberalism is a mixed blessing for Jews. It offers us the opportunity for individual advancement as far as our talents will allow, without having to renounce our Jewish identity. Yet at the same time, Jewish identity isn't really individual, it's grounded in community, in family and public ritual. At heart, ours is a tribal and insular culture. The more we're accepted, the more diffuse our connection to the community becomes; when under disability and persecution, we huddle together and renew our dedication to our people and to the intergenerational transfer that is our future. Whatever happens in America, we will survive - Am Yisrael hai. American liberal democracy, and that of any country that turns on its Jews? About that I'm not so sanguine.

[kylo-wrecked]

@protectmypeople ://

—☾—

The crowns of ancient maples are wet and black under the scratched mauve hull of sky. A sky ruled by the dark moon. The underbrush holds its breath. The wind howls with wolves, and blows through the open window of a stolen 1994 Dodge Ram Van, where the unconscious threat bound to the scaffold of a deconstructed car seat stirs to gold dice clinking on the rearview mirror.

Tang of rubber and pine, stale wax paper. Piles of books and yellowed, mummified gazettes, husks of flora suspended from a wire stabbed and stretched across the foam ceiling. The emptiness and fullness of a stranger's makeshift living space; the foam board and sleeping bag rolled into the shape of a body and folded into the backseat to make room for his.

The way the stranger hunches, his broad yet hollowed shape, he could be an iron fixture built into his vehicle. Only his scleras seem visible, the hard black shells within them, glinting out from the dark like the slightly upturned blades of bowie knives.

Many minutes pass before his mouth moves, and the stranger's voice is a molasses, a low and gentle timbre that drips between great pauses. Yet his interrogation begins without ceremony.

"What was your car doing parked outside this trail for three nights?"

The threat can't answer gagged. Makes muffled sounds the stranger seemingly deciphers.

"I know." The stranger pauses. "You weren't pursuing me. You have no idea who I am. Agent…"

He jimmies the badge. Brown gloves, stained thumbs—"B-E-L-L-A-M-Y. Special Agent Bellamy Blake. Issued in Washington D.C.."—and drops it onto the crease between Blake's thighs.

"What were you doing, Special Agent Blake? You have no jurisdiction here."

'Here' could mean the van or the dark of the woods. By the furor lurking under his stoic face, the stranger refers to something far beyond the laws of man, let alone New England.

"We're interstates." He lifts his head, parting his lips to lap at some potent, arcane power in the stormy air. A long pause. "Between New Hampshire and Massachusetts. An old college friend of yours lives there. The Ren told me. Hm."

His belief is so strong and permeable, this Ren seems to form in the small, cold pit of the van, dangling its hooked arm from the driver’s side window. With a strange, stilted gulp, the stranger sifts through rubbish. His hide-brown fingers pull a map from its contents, point to a speck of green among a topographical lexicon of tiny hand-drawn symbols.

"Mm." The stranger leans to expunge the balled-up t-shirt and tape from the mouth of the threat. His body musky and warm, his waffle shirt somewhat tacky to the touch, ripe with the earth, as if he'd clambered out of a shallow grave. "You have to answer my question now."

[theedgeofredemption]

What to expect after critical race theory

After critical race theory, the discourse might continue to evolve in several directions. Here are a few potential paths:

Intersectionality: Intersectionality, coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, explores how different forms of oppression, such as racism, sexism, classism, etc., intersect and influence each other. It examines the interconnected nature of various social identities and how they shape individuals' experiences.

Decolonial Theory: This theory focuses on challenging colonial structures and ideologies, particularly in the context of post-colonial societies. It critiques the ongoing impacts of colonialism on social, economic, and political systems, and advocates for decolonizing knowledge, institutions, and practices.

Feminist Theory: While critical race theory intersects with feminist theory, there's room for deeper exploration of gender dynamics within racial discourse. Feminist theory examines power imbalances related to gender and advocates for gender equality and the dismantling of patriarchal structures.

Transnationalism: This perspective looks beyond national borders to examine how global processes, such as migration, globalization, and transnational social movements, shape racial dynamics. It explores how racial hierarchies operate on a global scale and how people navigate multiple identities across different contexts.

Critical Whiteness Studies: This field interrogates the construction and perpetuation of whiteness as a social category and power structure. It examines how whiteness intersects with other social identities and privileges, and it seeks to deconstruct the norms and assumptions associated with whiteness.

Legal Studies: Given critical race theory's roots in law, further exploration within legal studies could involve examining how laws and legal systems perpetuate or challenge racial inequalities. This could include discussions on racial disparities in policing, incarceration, access to justice, and the impact of legal rulings on marginalized communities.

These directions are not mutually exclusive, and scholars often draw on multiple theoretical frameworks to analyze complex social issues. Additionally, the evolution of critical race theory itself will likely continue as scholars engage with new developments, challenges, and perspectives in the study of race and racism.

Co-opting these issues for self-serving or harmful purposes, such as promoting a discriminatory agenda or exploiting marginalized communities for personal gain would be highly unethical and harmful. Here's how one might hypothetically attempt to do so

Misrepresentation: Misrepresent the goals and principles of social justice movements to advance a different agenda. This could involve distorting the meaning of terms like "equality" and "justice" to promote discriminatory or oppressive policies under the guise of promoting fairness or meritocracy.

Divide and Conquer: Exploit divisions within marginalized communities or between different social justice movements to undermine solidarity and collective action. This could involve pitting marginalized groups against each other or co-opting leaders to advance a divisive agenda that serves the interests of the oppressor.

Tokenism: Tokenize members of marginalized communities by giving them superficial representation or visibility without addressing the underlying power structures or systemic inequalities. This could involve using diversity initiatives or symbolic gestures to create the illusion of progress while maintaining the status quo.

Gaslighting and Discrediting: Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation that seeks to make individuals doubt their own experiences and perceptions. Those seeking to adversely take over social justice issues might engage in gaslighting by denying the existence of oppression or blaming marginalized communities for their own marginalization. They may also discredit activists and scholars by attacking their credibility or spreading misinformation.

Selective Solidarity: Selectively support only those aspects of social justice that align with one's own interests or agenda while ignoring or opposing other forms of oppression. This could involve co-opting language or symbols associated with social justice movements to gain legitimacy or popularity while actively working against the goals of those movements.

[tumblingxelian]

Gosh so much all of this.

Like hell, even without getting into super serious stuff can we deconstruct the idea of "Patrol"? Because if the heroes whole plan is running/swinging around roof tops looking for petty crime to stop then they are wasting resources & time. Even if you take that kind of crime very seriously, the actual chances of running across it are extremely small.

On more serious levels there's the obvious glorification of violence and frequent dehumanization of criminals. Like withhow brutal Batman often is, slamming a muggers face into a wall so hard it creates a blood splatter or casualling torturing people for information.

Please no on start on "That's not the real Batman, mine befriends petty criminals" yeah yeah so does this version, sometimes, when the wind is right and the mood takes him. Brutality is as much a part of Batman's mythos as kindness or hope is and that's at best

Let alone the a recurring "This massive violation of morality, privacy, law is OK because its necessary" which has implications! Its not even that I'm strictly against exploring such ideas either, I'm not a pacifist or intrinsically against characters pushing the envelope when they feel its necessary but what that means, what comes of it, what that says about them matters.

Then there's stuff like, OK so your vigilante wants to tackle stuff like corruption and murder and so on? The police, the government, big corporate groups, all fit within their criteria, but fighting them puts your hero on the side that is breaking the law, How do they handle essentially becoming a rebel, how do they handle tackling a problem that doesn't have a neat easy "Toss-em in a cell" solution?

Hell, can we deconstruct what the prison industrial complex is in some countries, let alone how US-Centric stuff like this tends to be. Or how most super heroes actively collaborate with the police and what that tends to mean, or how they often exist in such a way that they seem to prop up the status quo.

Thematically this can make sense in a setting where the default is "Good" and villainous elements disrupt it, so the duty of those with power is to restore things. But that only works in fantasy, if you apply it to reality then heroes become a functional enabler of often very corrupt or abusive systems over a force to help.

Deconstructing super heroes doesn't even have to be about "Heroes bad actually". Plus you can interrogate what it means to actually slip the bonds of a normal and perceived safe existence. What drives a person to go to these extreme, what lets them operate like this, if they can at all. & if they can how does that work?

There's so much to deconstruct about heroes more interesting than "What if this one powerful guy who was good was evil this time?"

Why is it whenever people "deconstruct" superheroes it's never a criticism of any of the many things actually wrong with the genre? Like there's never any shots taken at the women in refrigerators thing or the total lack of meaningful stakes or the static characters or the bloated, convoluted clusterfuck storytelling or the desperate appealing exclusively to shitlord teenaged boys. Instead every single time it's just "get this... what if Superman were a baby killing rapist? IS YOUR MIND BLOWN YET?! It is so clever because normally he is not that."

[spblawpa]

Drug Offenses and Legal Strategies: A Comprehensive Guide for Criminal Lawyers

Drug crimes require a strategic and subtle approach from criminal lawyers, who steer a complex legal landscape to secure favorable client outcomes. This comprehensive guide delves into the intricacies of drug-related cases and explores unique legal strategies to empower a criminal lawyer in Florida in their defense efforts.

1. Deconstructing Drug Offenses:

Drug-related charges contain a range of crimes, ranging from possession to trafficking and driving under intoxication, each holding separate legal implications. A holistic interpretation of the charges and their potential consequences is the basis for crafting a robust defense strategy.

2. Constitutional Vigilance:

Unraveling the constitutional fabric of the case is paramount. A criminal lawyer meticulously examines search and seizure procedures, probing for any violations of the Fourth Amendment. Successfully questioning the legitimacy of proof compilation can greatly dilute the prosecution's case.

3. Chain of Custody Scrutiny:

A microscopic examination of the chain of custody is indispensable. Lawyers meticulously analyze evidence handling, searching for any irregularities that could doubt the seized materials' reliability. Any breaks in the chain can be strategically exploited in the defense.

4. Harnessing Expert Testimony:

Leveraging expert witnesses, such as forensic chemists or toxicologists, adds a powerful dimension to the defense. Their discernment of the nature and quantity of the substance can be key in introducing reasonable doubt. Expert testimony serves as a formidable tool in challenging the prosecution's evidence.

5. Intent and Knowledge Emphasis:

Interrogating the prosecution's ability to prove intent or knowledge is a strategic pivot. A top criminal lawyer dissects the evidence to determine if the client knowingly possessed or intended to distribute the controlled substance. Creating doubt on these pivotal elements can reshape the trajectory of the case.

6. Exploring Diversion Programs:

Innovative defense extends to advocating for diversion programs and alternative sentencing options like a family lawyer. By emphasizing rehabilitation over punitive measures, the legal experts seek avenues such as drug courts or rehabilitation programs, which are particularly advantageous for non-violent offenders scuffling with substance abuse issues.

7. Strategic Plea Negotiations:

The negotiation process is an art and takes center stage in drug offense cases. Criminal attorneys carefully evaluate the strengths and drawbacks of the case, leveraging this insight to secure favorable plea deals. Reduced charges, minimal sentencing, or count dismissals become apparent through adept negotiation. It is a similar approach that a family lawyer adopts.

8. Crafting Sentencing Mitigation:

A renowned criminal lawyer presents compelling mitigation factors as the case progresses to sentencing. Showcasing the client's guilt, positive societal contributions, or proof of rehabilitation efforts can convince the court's perspective during sentencing, potentially leading to more lenient or tolerant outcomes.

In conclusion, the defense of clients in drug offense cases requires a dynamic and creative approach. Armed with a deep understanding of legal nuances and a strategic mindset, criminal lawyers can navigate the challenges posed by drug-related charges. By weaving together constitutional scrutiny, expert insights, and innovative defense strategies, lawyers can forge a path to success in these intricate legal battles. SPB Law presents the best legal assistance and court representation in diverse criminal cases. The top legal firm is the ultimate destination to hire a reputed criminal and family lawyer in Florida.

[toxicsamruby]

1/2 i think the thing that makes it harder to engage with race in supernatural (at least for me, idk abt white fans) is that at the end of the day, the actors are white. the characters are white. the writers are white. there's no such thing as race-coding the way there is with gender or queerness. like, we talk about how supernatural accidentally gave us some (poor, but doesn't-matter-bc-it's-still-fun) queer rep and we can take that and deconstruct it and project/investigate the inherent

2/2 queerness that main(!) characters have and we can even speculate about [GUNSHOT] and we get something out of it! something good and fun! but engaging with race on supernatural.. like, what is there to get? examining the way poc are treated is just traumatic (again, at least for me), and thinking about people using it as tumblr brain food when it's actually emblematic of white supremacy narratives being upheld and /real/ actors of color constantly being sidelined just. does not sit right with me

i understand what ur coming from and i absolutely didnt mean to say that anybody especially not white fans should take the racism in supernatural lightly or use it as “brain food.” its absolutely a serious matter! but race is present in the text from premise to execution to audience and the fact is that valid readings of the text MUST include a reading of race, white supremacy, and eugenics. no, its not a fun topic to think about, and it’s one that maybe people are scared to address bc they’re worried abt being canceled or whatever, but the fact is that when you engage w deeply racist media such as supernatural you cant in good conscience say Well it bothers me to examine the presence of race in this story so i’m going to focus on analyzing aspects of the text that are more fun for me.

this DOES NOT MEAN that anybody (ESPECIALLY not white people) should take racism lightly. it doesn’t mean they should turn it into an abstract intellectual exercise. it definitely doesn’t mean that white people should feel that they have the same expertise in deconstructing characters and narratives of color as they do in deconstructing female or lgbt characters and narratives. what it DOES mean is that race MUST play a part in how you read the text. people who claim to engage with supernatural on a deeper level (and by that i mean people who regularly read/post meta or talk about “the secret good supernatural in our heads”) MUST ALSO engage with racism. it isn’t enough to say Yeah supernatural is racist but i’m still going to enjoy and consume and create transformative fan content that replicates the racism embedded in supernatural. christianity as the underpinning law of the supernatural universe, monsters as inherently Other and in need of extermination, the consistent sidelining and villainizing of characters of color, these are all things that people need to start interrogating, and interrogation of these things HAS to become a part of mainstream fan culture in the same way interrogation of, for example, dean’s relationship to masculinity and femininity/castiel’s relationship with gayness and authority and free will/sam’s relationship with monstrosity as a function of lgbt coding has become a part of mainstream fan culture.

because the fact is that That is what engaging critically with a racist text MEANS. it doesn’t mean acknowledging that it’s racist as lip service and then moving on. if race is not an active and ongoing part in fan discussion and analysis of the show, then fans are not engaging critically, they are just consuming and excusing a racist text. either you’re actively discussing and pushing against racism in supernatural, or you’re accepting it. and honestly if, for whatever reason, you aren’t comfortable with interrogating the element of race in supernatural and integrating it into your analysis of the show, you really should just not engage with supernatural.

[innuendostudios]

Thoughts on: Criterion's Neo-Noir Collection

I have written up all 26 films* in the Criterion Channel's Neo-Noir Collection.

Legend: rw - rewatch; a movie I had seen before going through the collection dnrw - did not rewatch; if a movie met two criteria (a. I had seen it within the last 18 months, b. I actively dislike it) I wrote it up from memory.

* in September, Brick leaves the Criterion Channel and is replaced in the collection with Michael Mann's Thief. May add it to the list when that happens.

Note: These are very "what was on my mind after watching." No effort has been made to avoid spoilers, nor to make the plot clear for anyone who hasn't seen the movies in question. Decide for yourself if that's interesting to you.

Cotton Comes to Harlem I feel utterly unequipped to asses this movie. This and Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song the following year are regularly cited as the progenitors of the blaxploitation genre. (This is arguably unfair, since both were made by Black men and dealt much more substantively with race than the white-directed films that followed them.) Its heroes are a couple of Black cops who are treated with suspicion both by their white colleagues and by the Black community they're meant to police. I'm not 100% clear on whether they're the good guys? I mean, I think they are. But the community's suspicion of them seems, I dunno... well-founded? They are working for The Man. And there's interesting discussion to the had there - is the the problem that the law is carried out by racists, or is the law itself racist? Can Black cops make anything better? But it feels like the film stacks the deck in Gravedigger and Coffin Ed's favor; the local Black church is run by a conman, the Back-to-Africa movement is, itself, a con, and the local Black Power movement is treated as an obstacle. Black cops really are the only force for justice here. Movie portrays Harlem itself as a warm, thriving, cultured community, but the people that make up that community are disloyal and easily fooled. Felt, to me, like the message was "just because they're cops doesn't mean they don't have Black soul," which, nowadays, we would call copaganda. But, then, do I know what I'm talking about? Do I know how much this played into or off of or against stereotypes from 1970? Was this a radical departure I don't have the context to appreciate? Is there substance I'm too white and too many decades removed to pick up on? Am I wildly overthinking this? I dunno. Seems like everyone involved was having a lot of fun, at least. That bit is contagious.

Across 110th Street And here's the other side of the "race film" equation. Another movie set in Harlem with a Black cop pulled between the police, the criminals, and the public, but this time the film is made by white people. I like it both more and less. Pro: this time the difficult position of Black cop who's treated with suspicion by both white cops and Black Harlemites is interrogated. Con: the Black cop has basically no personality other than "honest cop." Pro: the racism of the police force is explicit and systemic, as opposed to comically ineffectual. Con: the movie is shaped around a racist white cop who beats the shit out of Black people but slowly forms a bond with his Black partner. Pro: the Black criminal at the heart of the movie talks openly about how the white world has stacked the deck against him, and he's soulful and relateable. Con: so of course he dies in the end, because the only way privileged people know to sympathetize with minorities is to make them tragic (see also: The Boys in the Band, Philadelphia, and Brokeback Mountain for gay men). Additional con: this time Harlem is portrayed as a hellhole. Barely any of the community is even seen. At least the shot at the end, where the criminal realizes he's going to die and throws the bag of money off a roof and into a playground so the Black kids can pick it up before the cops reclaim it was powerful. But overall... yech. Cotton Comes to Harlem felt like it wasn't for me; this feels like it was 100% for me and I respect it less for that.

The Long Goodbye (rw) The shaggiest dog. Like much Altman, more compelling than good, but very compelling. Raymond Chandler's story is now set in the 1970's, but Philip Marlowe is the same Philip Marlowe of the 1930's. I get the sense there was always something inherently sad about Marlowe. Classic noir always portrayed its detectives as strong-willed men living on the border between the straightlaced world and its seedy underbelly, crossing back and forth freely but belonging to neither. But Chandler stresses the loneliness of it - or, at least, the people who've adapted Chandler do. Marlowe is a decent man in an indecent world, sorting things out, refusing to profit from misery, but unable to set anything truly right. Being a man out of step is here literalized by putting him forty years from the era where he belongs. His hardboiled internal monologue is now the incessant mutterings of the weird guy across the street who never stops smoking. Like I said: compelling! Kael's observation was spot on: everyone in the movie knows more about the mystery than he does, but he's the only one who cares. The mystery is pretty threadbare - Marlowe doesn't detect so much as end up in places and have people explain things to him. But I've seen it two or three times now, and it does linger.

Chinatown (rw) I confess I've always been impressed by Chinatown more than I've liked it. Its story structure is impeccable, its atmosphere is gorgeous, its noirish fatalism is raw and real, its deconstruction of the noir hero is well-observed, and it's full of clever detective tricks (the pocket watches, the tail light, the ruler). I've just never connected with it. Maybe it's a little too perfectly crafted. (I feel similar about Miller's Crossing.) And I've always been ambivalent about the ending. In Towne's original ending, Evelyn shoots Noah Cross dead and get arrested, and neither she nor Jake can tell the truth of why she did it, so she goes to jail for murder and her daughter is in the wind. Polansky proposed the ending that exists now, where Evelyn just dies, Cross wins, and Jake walks away devastated. It communicates the same thing: Jake's attempt to get smart and play all the sides off each other instead of just helping Evelyn escape blows up in his face at the expense of the woman he cares about and any sense of real justice. And it does this more dramatically and efficiently than Towne's original ending. But it also treats Evelyn as narratively disposable, and hands the daughter over to the man who raped Evelyn and murdered her husband. It makes the women suffer more to punch up the ending. But can I honestly say that Towne's ending is the better one? It is thematically equal, dramatically inferior, but would distract me less. Not sure what the calculus comes out to there. Maybe there should be a third option. Anyway! A perfect little contraption. Belongs under a glass dome.

Night Moves (rw) Ah yeah, the good shit. This is my quintessential 70's noir. This is three movies in a row about detectives. Thing is, the classic era wasn't as chockablock with hardboiled detectives as we think; most of those movies starred criminals, cops, and boring dudes seduced to the darkness by a pair of legs. Gumshoes just left the strongest impressions. (The genre is said to begin with Maltese Falcon and end with Touch of Evil, after all.) So when the post-Code 70's decided to pick the genre back up while picking it apart, it makes sense that they went for the 'tecs first. The Long Goodbye dragged the 30's detective into the 70's, and Chinatown went back to the 30's with a 70's sensibility. But Night Moves was about detecting in the Watergate era, and how that changed the archetype. Harry Moseby is the detective so obsessed with finding the truth that he might just ruin his life looking for it, like the straight story will somehow fix everything that's broken, like it'll bring back a murdered teenager and repair his marriage and give him a reason to forgive the woman who fucked him just to distract him from some smuggling. When he's got time to kill, he takes out a little, magnetic chess set and recreates a famous old game, where three knight moves (get it?) would have led to a beautiful checkmate had the player just seen it. He keeps going, self-destructing, because he can't stand the idea that the perfect move is there if he can just find it. And, no matter how much we see it destroy him, we, the audience, want him to keep going; we expect a satisfying resolution to the mystery. That's what we need from a detective picture; one character flat-out compares Harry to Sam Spade. But what if the truth is just... Watergate? Just some prick ruining things for selfish reasons? Nothing grand, nothing satisfying. Nothing could be more noir, or more neo-, than that.

Farewell, My Lovely Sometimes the only thing that makes a noir neo- is that it's in color and all the blood, tits, and racism from the books they're based on get put back in. This second stab at Chandler is competant but not much more than that. Mitchum works as Philip Marlowe, but Chandler's dialogue feels off here, like lines that worked on the page don't work aloud, even though they did when Bogie said them. I'll chalk it up to workmanlike but uninspired direction. (Dang this looks bland so soon after Chinatown.) Moose Malloy is a great character, and perfectly cast. (Wasn't sure at first, but it's true.) Some other interesting cats show up and vanish - the tough brothel madam based on Brenda Allen comes to mind, though she's treated with oddly more disdain than most of the other hoods and is dispatched quicker. In general, the more overt racism and misogyny doesn't seem to do anything except make the movie "edgier" than earlier attempts at the same material, and it reads kinda try-hard. But it mostly holds together. *shrug*

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (dnrw) Didn't care for this at all. Can't tell if the script was treated as a jumping-off point or if the dialogue is 100% improvised, but it just drags on forever and is never that interesting. Keeps treating us to scenes from the strip club like they're the opera scenes in Amadeus, and, whatever, I don't expect burlesque to be Mozart, but Cosmo keeps saying they're an artful, classy joint, and I keep waiting for the show to be more than cheap, lazy camp. How do you make gratuitious nudity boring? Mind you, none of this is bad as a rule - I love digressions and can enjoy good sleaze, and it's clear the filmmakers care about what they're making. They just did not sell it in a way I wanted to buy. Can't remember what edit I watched; I hope it was the 135 minute one, because I cannot imagine there being a longer edit out there.

The American Friend (dnrw) It's weird that this is Patricia Highsmith, right? That Dennis Hopper is playing Tom Ripley? In a cowboy hat? I gather that Minghella's version wasn't true to the source, but I do love that movie, and this is a long, long way from that. This Mr. Ripley isn't even particularly talented! Anyway, this has one really great sequence, where a regular guy has been coerced by crooks into murdering someone on a train platform, and, when the moment comes to shoot, he doesn't. And what follows is a prolonged sequence of an amateur trying to surreptitiously tail a guy across a train station and onto another train, and all the while you're not sure... is he going to do it? is he going to chicken out? is he going to do it so badly he gets caught? It's hard not to put yourself in the protagonist's shoes, wondering how you would handle the situation, whether you could do it, whether you could act on impulse before your conscience could catch up with you. It drags on a long while and this time it's a good thing. Didn't much like the rest of the movie, it's shapeless and often kind of corny, and the central plot hook is contrived. (It's also very weird that this is the only Wim Wenders I've seen.) But, hey, I got one excellent sequence, not gonna complain.

The Big Sleep Unlike the 1946 film, I can follow the plot of this Big Sleep. But, also unlike the 1946 version, this one isn't any damn fun. Mitchum is back as Marlowe (this is three Marlowes in five years, btw), and this time it's set in the 70's and in England, for some reason. I don't find this offensive, but neither do I see what it accomplishes? Most of the cast is still American. (Hi Jimmy!) Still holds together, but even less well than Farewell, My Lovely. But I do find it interesting that the neo-noir era keeps returning to Chandler while it's pretty much left Hammet behind (inasmuch as someone whose genes are spread wide through the whole genre can be left behind). Spade and the Continental Op, straightshooting tough guys who come out on top in the end, seem antiquated in the (post-)modern era. But Marlowe's goodness being out of sync with the world around him only seems more poignant the further you take him from his own time. Nowadays you can really only do Hammett as pastiche, but I sense that you could still play Chandler straight.

Eyes of Laura Mars The most De Palma movie I've seen not made by De Palma, complete with POV shots, paranormal hoodoo, and fixation with sex, death, and whether images of such are art or exploitation (or both). Laura Mars takes photographs of naked women in violent tableux, and has gotten quite famous doing so, but is it damaging to women? The movie has more than a superficial engagement with this topic, but only slightly more than superficial. Kept imagining a movie that is about 30% less serial killer story and 30% more art conversations. (But, then, I have an art degree and have never murdered anyone, so.) Like, museums are full of Biblical paintings full of nude women and slaughter, sometimes both at once, and they're called masterpieces. Most all of them were painted by men on commission from other men. Now Laura Mars makes similar images in modern trappings, and has models made of flesh and blood rather than paint, and it's scandalous? Why is it only controversial once women are getting paid for it? On the other hand, is this just the master's tools? Is she subverting or challenging the male gaze, or just profiting off of it? Or is a woman profiting off of it, itself, a subversion? Is it subversive enough to account for how it commodifies female bodies? These questions are pretty clearly relevant to the movie itself, and the movies in general, especially after the fall of the Hays Code when people were really unrestrained with the blood and boobies. And, heck, the lead is played by the star of Bonnie and Clyde! All this is to say: I wish the movie were as interested in these questions as I am. What's there is a mildly diverting B-picture. There's one great bit where Laura's seeing through the killer's eyes (that's the hook, she gets visions from the murderer's POV; no, this is never explained) and he's RIGHT BEHIND HER, so there's a chase where she charges across an empty room only able to see her own fleeing self from ten feet behind. That was pretty great! And her first kiss with the detective (because you could see a mile away that the detective and the woman he's supposed to protect are gonna fall in love) is immediately followed by the two freaking out about how nonsensical it is for them to fall in love with each other, because she's literally mourning multiple deaths and he's being wildly unprofessional, and then they go back to making out. That bit was great, too. The rest... enh.

The Onion Field What starts off as a seemingly not-that-noirish cops-vs-crooks procedural turns into an agonizingly protracted look at the legal system, with the ultimate argument that the very idea of the law ever resulting in justice is a lie. Hoo! I have to say, I'm impressed. There's a scene where a lawyer - whom I'm not sure is even named, he's like the seventh of thirteen we've met - literally quits the law over how long this court case about two guys shooting a cop has taken. He says the cop who was murdered has been forgotten, his partner has never gotten to move on because the case has lasted eight years, nothing has been accomplished, and they should let the two criminals walk and jail all the judges and lawyers instead. It's awesome! The script is loaded with digressions and unnecessary details, just the way I like it. Can't say I'm impressed with the execution. Nothing is wrong, exactly, but the performances all seem a tad melodramatic or a tad uninspired. Camerawork is, again, purely functional. It's no masterpiece. But that second half worked for me. (And it's Ted Danson's first movie! He did great.)

Body Heat (rw) Let's say up front that this is a handsomely-made movie. Probably the best looking thing on the list since Night Moves. Nothing I've seen better captures the swelter of an East Coast heatwave, or the lusty feeling of being too hot to bang and going at it regardless. Kathleen Turner sells the hell out of a femme fatale. There are a lot of good lines and good performances (Ted Danson is back and having the time of his life). I want to get all that out of the way, because this is a movie heavily modeled after Double Indemnity, and I wanted to discuss its merits before I get into why inviting that comparison doesn't help the movie out. In a lot of ways, it's the same rules as the Robert Mitchum Marlowe movies - do Double Indemnity but amp up the sex and violence. And, to a degree it works. (At least, the sex does, dunno that Double Indemnity was crying out for explosions.) But the plot is amped as well, and gets downright silly. Yeah, Mrs. Dietrichson seduces Walter Neff so he'll off her husband, but Neff clocks that pretty early and goes along with it anyway. Everything beyond that is two people keeping too big a secret and slowly turning on each other. But here? For the twists to work Matty has to be, from frame one, playing four-dimensional chess on the order of Senator Palpatine, and its about as plausible. (Exactly how did she know, after she rebuffed Ned, he would figure out her local bar and go looking for her at the exact hour she was there?) It's already kind of weird to be using the spider woman trope in 1981, but to make her MORE sexually conniving and mercenary than she was in the 40's is... not great. As lurid trash, it's pretty fun for a while, but some noir stuff can't just be updated, it needs to be subverted or it doesn't justify its existence.

Blow Out Brian De Palma has two categories of movie: he's got his mainstream, director-for-hire fare, where his voice is either reigned in or indulged in isolated sequences that don't always jive with the rest fo the film, and then there's his Brian De Palma movies. My mistake, it seems, is having seen several for-hires from throughout his career - The Untouchables (fine enough), Carlito's Way (ditto, but less), Mission: Impossible (enh) - but had only seen De Palma-ass movies from his late period (Femme Fatale and The Black Dahlia, both of which I think are garbage). All this to say: Blow Out was my first classic-era De Palma, and holy fucking shit dudes. This was (with caveats) my absolute and entire jam. I said I could enjoy good sleaze, and this is good friggin' sleaze. (Though far short of De Palma at his sleaziest, mercifully.) The splitscreens, the diopter shots, the canted angles, how does he make so many shlocky things work?! John Travolta's sound tech goes out to get fresh wind fx for the movie he's working on, and we get this wonderful sequence of visuals following sounds as he turns his attention and his microphone to various noises - a couple on a walk, a frog, an owl, a buzzing street lamp. Later, as he listens back to the footage, the same sequence plays again, but this time from his POV; we're seeing his memory as guided by the same sequence of sounds, now recreated with different shots, as he moves his pencil in the air mimicking the microphone. When he mixes and edits sounds, we hear the literal soundtrack of the movie we are watching get mixed and edited by the person on screen. And as he tries to unravel a murder mystery, he uses what's at hand: magnetic tape, flatbed editors, an animation camera to turn still photos from the crime scene into a film and sync it with the audio he recorded; it's forensics using only the tools of the editing room. As someone who's spent some time in college editing rooms, this is a hoot and a half. Loses a bit of steam as it goes on and the film nerd stuff gives way to a more traditional thriller, but rallies for a sound-tech-centered final setpiece, which steadily builds to such madcap heights you can feel the air thinning, before oddly cutting its own tension and then trying to build it back up again. It doesn't work as well the second time. But then, that shot right after the climax? Damn. Conflicted on how the movie treats the female lead. I get why feminist film theorists are so divided on De Palma. His stuff is full of things feminists (rightly) criticize, full of women getting naked when they're not getting stabbed, but he also clearly finds women fascinating and has them do empowered and unexpected things, and there are many feminist reads of his movies. Call it a mixed bag. But even when he's doing tropey shit, he explores the tropes in unexpected ways. Definitely the best movie so far that I hadn't already seen.

Cutter's Way (rw) Alex Cutter is pitched to us as an obnoxious-but-sympathetic son of a bitch, and, you know, two out of three ain't bad. Watched this during my 2020 neo-noir kick and considered skipping it this time because I really didn't enjoy it. Found it a little more compelling this go around, while being reminded of why my feelings were room temp before. Thematically, I'm onboard: it's about a guy, Cutter, getting it in his head that he's found a murderer and needs to bring him to justice, and his friend, Bone, who intermittently helps him because he feels bad that Cutter lost his arm, leg, and eye in Nam and he also feels guilty for being in love with Cutter's wife. The question of whether the guy they're trying to bring down actually did it is intentionally undefined, and arguably unimportant; they've got personal reasons to see this through. Postmodern and noirish, fixated with the inability to ever fully know the truth of anything, but starring people so broken by society that they're desperate for certainty. (Pretty obvious parallels to Vietnam.) Cutter's a drunk and kind of an asshole, but understandably so. Bone's shiftlessness is the other response to a lack of meaning in the world, to the point where making a decision, any decision, feels like character growth, even if it's maybe killing a guy whose guilt is entirely theoretical. So, yeah, I'm down with all of this! A- in outline form. It's just that Cutter is so uninterestingly unpleasant and no one else on screen is compelling enough to make up for it. His drunken windups are tedious and his sanctimonious speeches about what the war was like are, well, true and accurate but also obviously manipulative. It's two hours with two miserable people, and I think Cutter's constant chatter is supposed to be the comic relief but it's a little too accurate to drunken rambling, which isn't funny if you're not also drunk. He's just tedious, irritating, and periodically racist. Pass.

Blood Simple (rw) I'm pretty cool on the Coens - there are things I've liked, even loved, in every Coen film I've seen, but I always come away dissatisfied. For a while, I kept going to their movies because I was sure eventually I'd love one without qualification. No Country for Old Men came close, the first two acts being master classes in sustained tension. But then the third act is all about denying closure: the protagonist is murdered offscreen, the villain's motives are never explained, and it ends with an existentialist speech about the unfathomable cruelty of the world. And it just doesn't land for me. The archness of the Coen's dialogue, the fussiness of their set design, the kinda-intimate, kinda-awkward, kinda-funny closeness of the camera's singles, it cannot sell me on a devastating meditation about meaninglessness. It's only ever sold me on the Coens' own cleverness. And that archness, that distancing, has typified every one of their movies I've come close to loving. Which is a long-ass preamble to saying, holy heck, I was not prepared for their very first movie to be the one I'd been looking for! I watched it last year and it remains true on rewatch: Blood Simple works like gangbusters. It's kind of Double Indemnity (again) but played as a comedy of errors, minus the comedy: two people romantically involved feeling their trust unravel after a murder. And I think the first thing that works for me is that utter lack of comedy. It's loaded with the Coens' trademark ironies - mostly dramatic in this case - but it's all played straight. Unlike the usual lead/femme fatale relationship, where distrust brews as the movie goes on, the audience knows the two main characters can trust each other. There are no secret duplicitous motives waiting to be revealed. The audience also know why they don't trust each other. (And it's all communicated wordlessly, btw: a character enters a scene and we know, based on the information that character has, how it looks to them and what suspicions it would arouse, even as we know the truth of it). The second thing that works is, weirdly, that the characters aren't very interesting?! Ray and Abby have almost no characterization. Outside of a general likability, they are blank slates. This is a weakness in most films, but, given the agonizingly long, wordless sequences where they dispose of bodies or hide from gunfire, you're left thinking not "what will Ray/Abby do in this scenario," because Ray and Abby are relatively elemental and undefined, but "what would I do in this scenario?" Which creates an exquisite tension but also, weirdly, creates more empathy than I feel for the Coens' usual cast of personalities. It's supposed to work the other way around! Truly enjoyable throughout but absolutely wonderful in the suspenseful-as-hell climax. Good shit right here.

Body Double The thing about erotic thrillers is everything that matters is in the name. Is it thrilling? Is it erotic? Good; all else is secondary. De Palma set out to make the most lurid, voyeuristic, horny, violent, shocking, steamy movie he could come up with, and its success was not strictly dependent on the lead's acting ability or the verisimilitude of the plot. But what are we, the modern audience, to make of it once 37 years have passed and, by today's standards, the eroticism is quite tame and the twists are no longer shocking? Then we're left with a nonsensical riff on Vertigo, a specularization of women that is very hard to justify, and lead actor made of pulped wood. De Palma's obsessions don't cohere into anything more this time; the bits stolen from Hitchcock aren't repurposed to new ends, it really is just Hitch with more tits and less brains. (I mean, I still haven't seen Vertigo, but I feel 100% confident in that statement.) The diopter shots and rear-projections this time look cheap (literally so, apparently; this had 1/3 the budget of Blow Out). There are some mildly interesting setpieces, but nothing compared to Travolta's auditory reconstructions or car chase where he tries to tail a subway train from street level even if it means driving through a frickin parade like an inverted French Connection, goddamn Blow Out was a good movie! Anyway. Melanie Griffith seems to be having fun, at least. I guess I had a little as well, but it was, at best, diverting, and a real letdown.

The Hit Surprised by how much I enjoyed this one. Terrance Stamp flips on the mob and spends ten years living a life of ease in Spain, waiting for the day they find and kill him. Movie kicks off when they do find him, and what follows is a ramshackle road movie as John Hurt and a young Tim Roth attempt to drive him to Paris so they can shoot him in front of his old boss. Stamp is magnetic. He's spent a decade reading philosophy and seems utterly prepared for death, so he spends the trip humming, philosophizing, and being friendly with his captors when he's not winding them up. It remains unclear to the end whether the discord he sews between Roth and Hurt is part of some larger plan of escape or just for shits and giggles. There's also a decent amount of plot for a movie that's not terribly plot-driven - just about every part of the kidnapping has tiny hitches the kidnappers aren't prepared for, and each has film-long repercussions, drawing the cops closer and somehow sticking Laura del Sol in their backseat. The ongoing questions are when Stamp will die, whether del Sol will die, and whether Roth will be able to pull the trigger. In the end, it's actually a meditation on ethics and mortality, but in a quiet and often funny way. It's not going to go down as one of my new favs, but it was a nice way to spend a couple hours.

Trouble in Mind (dnrw) I fucking hated this movie. It's been many months since I watched it, do I remember what I hated most? Was it the bit where a couple of country bumpkins who've come to the city walk into a diner and Mr. Bumpkin clocks that the one Black guy in the back as obviously a criminal despite never having seen him before? Was it the part where Kris Kristofferson won't stop hounding Mrs. Bumpkin no matter how many times she demands to be left alone, and it's played as romantic because obviously he knows what she needs better than she does? Or is it the part where Mr. Bumpkin reluctantly takes a job from the Obvious Criminal (who is, in fact, a criminal, and the only named Black character in the movie if I remember correctly, draw your own conclusions) and, within a week, has become a full-blown hood, which is exemplified by a lot, like, a lot of queer-coding? The answer to all three questions is yes. It's also fucking boring. Even out-of-drag Divine's performance as the villain can't save it.

Manhunter 'sfine? I've still never seen Silence of the Lambs, nor any of the Hopkins Lecter movies, nor, indeed, any full episode of the show. So the unheimlich others get seeing Brian Cox play Hannibal didn't come into play. Cox does a good job with him, but he's barely there. Shame, cuz he's the most interesting part of the movie. Honestly, there's a lot of interesting stuff that's barely there. Will Graham being a guy who gets into the heads of serial killers is explored well enough, and Mann knows how to direct a police procedural such that it's both contemplative and propulsive. But all the other themes it points at? Will's fear that he understands murderers a little too well? Hannibal trying to nudge him towards becoming one? Whatever dance Hannibal and Tooth Fairy are doing? What Tooth Fairy's deal is, anyway? (Why does he wear fake teeth and bite things? Why is he fixated on the red dragon? Does the bit where he says "Francis is gone forever" mean he has DID?) None of it goes anywhere or amounts to anything. I mean, it's certainly more interesting with this stuff than without, but it has that feel of a book that's been pared of its interesting bits to fit the runtime (or, alternately, pulp that's been sloppily elevated). I still haven't made my mind up on Mann's cold, precise camera work, but at least it gives me something to look at. It's fine! This is fine.

Mona Lisa (rw) Gave this one another shot. Bob Hoskins is wonderful as a hood out of his depth in classy places, quick to anger but just as quick to let anger go (the opening sequence where he's screaming on his ex-wife's doorstep, hurling trash cans at her house, and one minute later thrilled to see his old car, is pretty nice). And Cathy Tyson's working girl is a subtler kind of fascinating, exuding a mixture of coldness and kindness. It's just... this is ultimately a story about how heartbreaking it is when the girl you like is gay, right? It's Weezer's Pink Triangle: The Movie. It's not homophobic, exactly - Simone isn't demonized for being a lesbian - but it's still, like, "man, this straight white guy's pain is so much more interesting than the Black queer sex worker's." And when he's yelling "you woulda done it!" at the end, I can't tell if we're supposed to agree with him. Seems pretty clear that she wouldn'ta done it, at least not without there being some reveal about her character that doesn't happen, but I don't think the ending works if we don't agree with him, so... I'm like 70% sure the movie does Simone dirty there. For the first half, their growing relationship feels genuine and natural, and, honestly, the story being about a real bond that unfortunately means different things to each party could work if it didn't end with a gun and a sock in the jaw. Shape feels jagged as well; what feels like the end of the second act or so turns out to be the climax. And some of the symbolism is... well, ok, Simone gives George money to buy more appropriate clothes for hanging out in high end hotels, and he gets a tan leather jacket and a Hawaiian shirt, and their first proper bonding moment is when she takes him out for actual clothes. For the rest of the movie he is rocking double-breasted suits (not sure I agree with the striped tie, but it was the eighties, whaddya gonna do?). Then, in the second half, she sends him off looking for her old streetwalker friend, and now he looks completely out of place in the strip clubs and bordellos. So far so good. But then they have this run-in where her old pimp pulls a knife and cuts George's arm, so, with his nice shirt torn and it not safe going home (I guess?) he starts wearing the Hawaiian shirt again. So around the time he's starting to realize he doesn't really belong in Simone's world or the lowlife world he came from anymore, he's running around with the classy double-breasted suit jacket over the garish Hawaiian shirt, and, yeah, bit on the nose guys. Anyway, it has good bits, I just feel like a movie that asks me to feel for the guy punching a gay, Black woman in the face needs to work harder to earn it. Bit of wasted talent.

The Bedroom Window Starts well. Man starts an affair with his boss' wife, their first night together she witnesses an attempted murder from his window, she worries going to the police will reveal the affair to her husband, so the man reports her testimony to the cops claiming he's the one who saw it. Young Isabelle Huppert is the perfect woman for a guy to risk his career on a crush over, and Young Steve Guttenberg is the perfect balance of affability and amorality. And it flows great - picks just the right media to res. So then he's talking to the cops, telling them what she told him, and they ask questions he forgot to ask her - was the perp's jacket a blazer or a windbreaker? - and he has to guess. Then he gets called into the police lineup, and one guy matches her description really well, but is it just because he's wearing his red hair the way she described it? He can't be sure, doesn't finger any of them. He finds out the cops were pretty certain about one of the guys, so he follows the one he thinks it was around, looking for more evidence, and another girl is attacked right outside a bar he knows the redhead was at. Now he's certain! But he shows the boss' wife the guy and she's not certain, and she reminds him they don't even know if the guy he followed is the same guy the police suspected! And as he feeds more evidence to the cops, he has to lie more, because he can't exactly say he was tailing the guy around the city. So, I'm all in now. Maybe it's because I'd so recently rewatched Night Moves and Cutter's Way, but this seems like another story about uncertainty. He's really certain about the guy because it fits narratively, and we, the audience, feel the same. But he's not actually a witness, he doesn't have actual evidence, he's fitting bits and pieces together like a conspiracy theorist. He's fixating on what he wants to be true. Sign me up! But then it turns out he's 100% correct about who the killer is but his lies are found out and now the cops think he's the killer and I realize, oh, no, this movie isn't nearly as smart as I thought it was. Egg on my face! What transpires for the remaining half of the runtime is goofy as hell, and someone with shlockier sensibilities could have made a meal of it, but Hanson, despite being a Corman protege, takes this silliness seriously in the all wrong ways. Next!

Homicide (rw? I think I saw most of this on TV one time) Homicide centers around the conflicted loyalties of a Jewish cop. It opens with the Jewish cop and his white gentile partner taking over a case with a Black perp from some Black FBI agents. The media is making a big thing about the racial implications of the mostly white cops chasing down a Black man in a Black neighborhood. And inside of 15 minutes the FBI agent is calling the lead a k*ke and the gentile cop is calling the FBI agent a f****t and there's all kinds of invective for Black people. The film is announcing its intentions out the gate: this movie is about race. But the issue here is David Mamet doesn't care about race as anything other than a dramatic device. He's the Ubisoft of filmmakers, having no coherent perspective on social issues but expecting accolades for even bringing them up. Mamet is Jewish (though lead actor Joe Mantegna definitely is not) but what is his position on the Jewish diaspora? The whole deal is Mantegna gets stuck with a petty homicide case instead of the big one they just pinched from the Feds, where a Jewish candy shop owner gets shot in what looks like a stickup. Her family tries to appeal to his Jewishness to get him to take the case seriously, and, after giving them the brush-off for a long time, finally starts following through out of guilt, finding bits and pieces of what may or may not be a conspiracy, with Zionist gun runners and underground neo-Nazis. But, again: all of these are just dramatic devices. Mantegna's Jewishness (those words will never not sound ridiculous together) has always been a liability for him as a cop (we are told, not shown), and taking the case seriously is a reclamation of identity. The Jews he finds community with sold tommyguns to revolutionaries during the founding of Israel. These Jews end up blackmailing him to get a document from the evidence room. So: what is the film's position on placing stock in one's Jewish identity? What is its position on Israel? What is its opinion on Palestine? Because all three come up! And the answer is: Mamet doesn't care. You can read it a lot of different ways. Someone with more context and more patience than me could probably deduce what the de facto message is, the way Chris Franklin deduced the de facto message of Far Cry V despite the game's efforts not to have one, but I'm not going to. Mantegna's attempt to reconnect with his Jewishness gets his partner killed, gets the guy he was supposed to bring in alive shot dead, gets him possibly permanent injuries, gets him on camera blowing up a store that's a front for white nationalists, and all for nothing because the "clues" he found (pretty much exclusively by coincidence) were unconnected nothings. The problem is either his Jewishness, or his lifelong failure to connect with his Jewishness until late in life. Mamet doesn't give a shit. (Like, Mamet canonically doesn't give a shit: he is on record saying social context is meaningless, characters only exist to serve the plot, and there are no deeper meanings in fiction.) Mamet's ping-pong dialogue is fun, as always, and there are some neat ideas and characters, but it's all in service of a big nothing that needed to be a something to work.

Swoon So much I could talk about, let's keep it to the most interesting bits. Hommes Fatales: a thing about classic noir that it was fascinated by the marginal but had to keep it in the margins. Liberated women, queer-coded killers, Black jazz players, broke thieves; they were the main event, they were what audiences wanted to see, they were what made the movies fun. But the ending always had to reassert straightlaced straight, white, middle-class male society as unshakeable. White supremacist capitalist patriarchy demanded, both ideologically and via the Hays Code, that anyone outside these norms be punished, reformed, or dead by the movie's end. The only way to make them the heroes was to play their deaths for tragedy. It is unsurprising that neo-noir would take the queer-coded villains and make them the protagonists. Implicature: This is the story of Leopold and Loeb, murderers famous for being queer, and what's interesting is how the queerness in the first half exists entirely outside of language. Like, it's kind of amazing for a movie from 1992 to be this gay - we watch Nathan and Dickie kiss, undress, masturbate, fuck; hell, they wear wedding rings when they're alone together. But it's never verbalized. Sex is referred to as "your reward" or "what you wanted" or "best time." Dickie says he's going to have "the girls over," and it turns out "the girls" are a bunch of drag queens, but this is never acknowledged. Nathan at one point lists off a bunch of famous men - Oscar Wild, E.M. Forster, Frederick the Great - but, though the commonality between them is obvious (they were all gay), it's left the the audience to recognize it. When their queerness is finally verbalized in the second half, it's first in the language of pathology - a psychiatrist describing their "perversions" and "misuse" of their "organs" before the court, which has to be cleared of women because it's so inappropriate - and then with slurs from the man who murders Dickie in jail (a murder which is written off with no investigation because the victim is a gay prisoner instead of a L&L's victim, a child of a wealthy family). I don't know if I'd have noticed this if I hadn't read Chip Delany describing his experience as a gay man in the 50's existing almost entirely outside of language, the only language at the time being that of heteronormativity. Murder as Love Story: L&L exchange sex as payment for the other commiting crimes; it's foreplay. Their statements to the police where they disagree over who's to blame is a lover's quarrel. Their sentencing is a marriage. Nathan performs his own funeral rites over Dickie's body after he dies on the operating table. They are, in their way, together til death did they part. This is the relationship they can have. That it does all this without romanticizing the murder itself or valorizing L&L as humans is frankly incredible.

Suture (rw) The pitch: at the funeral for his father, wealthy Vincent Towers meets his long lost half brother Clay Arlington. It is implied Clay is a child from out of wedlock, possibly an affair; no one knows Vincent has a half-brother but him and Clay. Vincent invites Clay out to his fancy-ass home in Arizona. Thing is, Vincent is suspected (correctly) by the police of having murdered his father, and, due to a striking family resemblence, he's brought Clay to his home to fake his own death. He finagles Clay into wearing his clothes and driving his car, and then blows the car up and flees the state, leaving the cops to think him dead. Thing is, Clay survives, but with amnesia. The doctors tell him he's Vincent, and he has no reason to disagree. Any discrepancy in the way he looks is dismissed as the result of reconstructive surgery after the explosion. So Clay Arlington resumes Vincent Towers' life, without knowing Clay Arlington even exists. The twist: Clay and Vincent are both white, but Vincent is played by Michael Harris, a white actor, and Clay is played by Dennis Haysbert, a Black actor. "Ian, if there's just the two of them, how do you know it's not Harris playing a Black character?" Glad you asked! It is most explicitly obvious during a scene where Vincent/Clay's surgeon-cum-girlfriend essentially bringing up phrenology to explain how Vincent/Clay couldn't possibly have murdered his father, describing straight hair, thin lips, and a Greco-Roman nose Haysbert very clearly doesn't have. But, let's be honest: we knew well beforehand that the rich-as-fuck asshole living in a huge, modern house and living it up in Arizona high society was white. Though Clay is, canonically, white, he lives an poor and underprivileged life common to Black men in America. Though the film's title officially refers to the many stitches holding Vincent/Clay's face together after the accident, "suture" is a film theory term, referring to the way a film audience gets wrapped up - sutured - in the world of the movie, choosing to forget the outside world and pretend the story is real. The usage is ironic, because the audience cannot be sutured in; we cannot, and are not expected to, suspend our disbelief that Clay is white. We are deliberately distanced. Consequently this is a movie to be thought about, not to to be felt. It has the shape of a Hitchcockian thriller but it can't evoke the emotions of one. You can see the scaffolding - "ah, yes, this is the part of a thriller where one man hides while another stalks him with a gun, clever." I feel ill-suited to comment on what the filmmakers are saying about race. I could venture a guess about the ending, where the psychiatrist, the only one who knows the truth about Clay, says he can never truly be happy living the lie of being Vincent Towers, while we see photographs of Clay/Vincent seemingly living an extremely happy life: society says white men simply belong at the top more than Black men do, but, if the roles could be reversed, the latter would slot in seamlessly. Maybe??? Of all the movies in this collection, this is the one I'd most want to read an essay on (followed by Swoon).

The Last Seduction (dnrw) No, no, no, I am not rewataching this piece of shit movie.

Brick (rw) Here's my weird contention: Brick is in color and in widescreen, but, besides that? There's nothing neo- about this noir. There's no swearing except "hell." (I always thought Tug said "goddamn" at one point but, no, he's calling The Pin "gothed-up.") There's a lot of discussion of sex, but always through implication, and the only deleted scene is the one that removed ambiguity about what Brendan and Laura get up to after kissing. There's nothing postmodern or subversive - yes, the hook is it's set in high school, but the big twist is that it takes this very seriously. It mines it for jokes, yes, but the drama is authentic. In fact, making the gumshoe a high school student, his jadedness an obvious front, still too young to be as hard as he tries to be, just makes the drama hit harder. Sam Spade if Sam Spade were allowed to cry. I've always found it an interesting counterpoint to The Good German, a movie that fastidiously mimics the aesthetics of classic noir - down to even using period-appropriate sound recording - but is wholly neo- in construction. Brick could get approved by the Hays Code. Its vibe, its plot about a detective playing a bunch of criminals against each other, even its slang ("bulls," "yegg," "flopped") are all taken directly from Hammett. It's not even stealing from noir, it's stealing from what noir stole from! It's a perfect curtain call for the collection: the final film is both the most contemporary and the most classic. It's also - but for the strong case you could make for Night Moves - the best movie on the list. It's even more appropriate for me, personally: this was where it all started for me and noir. I saw this in theaters when it came out and loved it. It was probably my favorite movie for some time. It gave me a taste for pulpy crime movies which I only, years later, realized were neo-noir. This is why I looked into Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang and In Bruges. I've seen it more times than any film on this list, by a factor of at least 3. It's why I will always adore Rian Johnson and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. It's the best-looking half-million-dollar movie I've ever seen. (Indie filmmakers, take fucking notes.) I even did a script analysis of this, and, yes, it follows the formula, but so tightly and with so much style. Did you notice that he says several of the sequence tensions out loud? ("I just want to find her." "Show of hands.") I notice new things each time I see it - this time it was how "brushing Brendan's hair out of his face" is Em's move, making him look more like he does in the flashback, and how Laura does the same to him as she's seducing him, in the moment when he misses Em the hardest. It isn't perfect. It's recreated noir so faithfully that the Innocent Girl dies, the Femme Fatale uses intimacy as a weapon, and none of the women ever appear in a scene together. 1940's gender politics maybe don't need to be revisited. They say be critical of the media you love, and it applies here most of all: it is a real criticism of something I love immensely.

[mc-critical]

Who do you prefer between Daye Hatun and Afife Hatun and why? I am more keen on the development of Afife Hatun throughout the series, her bond with Suleyman, his sisters and, later, even Hurrem was different from that of Daye Hatun who seemed for attached to Hafsa. That's not to say I do not like Daye but Afife brought more nuance and her death was so sad and memorable, with the members of the dynasty at her side showing their respect.

I'm sorta on the fence on this one. Initially, I also preferred Afife Hatun to Daye by a big amount, especially because I didn't like S01 Daye then (as highlighted by this pretty outdated post), but now that Daye has grown on me quite a lot on rewatch, but I still love Afife as much as I used to... I can't decide. I would honestly say I like both equally currently - I appreciate what both had to offer for the show.

Afife and Daye are essentially different executions of the same concept. Both of their characters were centered on their loyalties and where they lied and their arcs were about the possible shifting of these loyalties for what they perceive as the right thing to do. And both were handled very well, I can't say which one is better than the other, they're just... different. I don't think one offered more nuance than the other, either, it's just that their nuances were present on different areas.

Daye's attachment was far more personal and while she had other warm relationships with SS and Nigar, the person she clearly loved the most was Valide. She was the only person Daye was so tremendously devoted to and she never fully got out of that loyalty: even in her turn arounds she was loyal to Valide deep down and only did these things to protect Valide from herself more than anything else. She considered the assassination attempt in the forest and the harem riot as going a step too far and while they were actions out of her usual comfort zone of pure obedience, they aren't really complete switching of gears. Stopping these things caused Daye to show her moral compass, but her first thought by doing that was always what was beneficial for Valide. For Daye, going against her own orders would be beneficial for Valide, if the consequences were about to become too grave, and if she didn't understand it then, one day she would. (that's why she understood when Valide gave the harem to Gülşah instead) That goes for Daye realizing that Hürrem was innocent in the whole Leo diary drama and Daye giving Hürrem a signal when Valide was going to interrogate her on it and SS was sectetly listening 4 episodes later as well. There would be no point for Valide to interrogate further an innocent person. It would only create needless conflict for Valide herself first and foremost. The only time where Daye seemingly broke that loyalty was not telling anyone earlier about the Nigar affair, the final nail of the coffin of Daye's development. Her cutting ties with everything that related her with the harem, along with the death of her most beloved person, showing perhaps her true and final stepping out of loyalty ended Daye's arc in a more personal and heartwrenching manner. The moment she actually stepped out of her loyalty, she couldn't rest and it's what broke her forever. It's unfortunate that she ended this way and it may look like some contrived suicide, because "Yılmaz Şahin's preferred way of killing secondary women characters (тм)", and that's there, of course, but it still was a suitable end the writing was building up to. What I would have wanted more of Daye that was present in Afife's character, is perhaps more scenes with other characters that weren't Valide and Hürrem. We got a plenty, but they were never enough, especially given the reveal of Daye's warmer core. I know her soft side is set as more of a contrast to her tough exterior, but it would have been nice, especially in S01. While I love S01 Daye more now, sometimes her tough exterior was all she was and while that worked, it didn't exactly endear me to her character.

Afife, on the other hand, didn't prioritize personal attachments, as seen the most by her first appearances. Afife was never as loyal to anyone or anything; definetly not to such a personal degree as Daye - the law and tradition in the harem are more where her loyalties lied. She was led to believe that there was chaos and unrest in the harem because of Hürrem, which is the reason she acted against her through Firuze, she is as rash as she can be because of law and tradition and she doesn't tolerate acting against law and tradition, no matter who dares to do it. But what's more powerful than her devotion to tradition is not really loyalty, but love: seeing Hürrem be loyal to, but by extension, love SS in ways she never imagined, brought her to see her in a better light. But just like Daye, that's as far as it goes. She gained some warmer attachment towards her, mostly because she means so much to SS, but loyalty to her was also loyalty to the dynasty. She never picked a particular side in her entire run as a character: as you said, she respected everyone, as per their positions in the hierarchy and tradition required. Her loyalty to tradition never ever wavered, not even as an end to her arc and that also showed in respecting everyone so much. Even her sacrifice for Hürrem she would be able to do for everyone, I believe, even though Hürrem was her most fleshed-out relationship. (that doesn't lower the impact of her death, of course.) She was the link of the dynasty, the one everyone could turn to if they wanted something, so we had Afife's softer, more personal nature go more along with her strict loyalty to tradition. What upsets me about her, though, is that after a while it felt like they didn't have all that much to do with her left, aside from everyone giving her orders, her standing there bowing down or talking respectfully to everyone and detecting trouble in the castle. She especially didn't have much to do in the already fully packed S04, so her death screamed more inevitability and "cleaning up around in order to begin focusing on the more intense conflicts of the season". It was still pretty moving and logical for her and it was sad to see her go, but I wish she got more of an arc and material to work with in the series, because she was great. (something that Daye had in spades in S02B, but then again, that was more of a character deconstruction and you can't really have that with Afife when the full picture becomes clear.) More interaction between her and everyone she respected so much would be welcome. I lowkey wanted for her and Ebusuud Efendi to have a plot-line together in S03B, but I don't know how it's gonna happen and that's my silly headcanons more than anything. 😅

So yeah, I love them all the same, I really do, both enriched the show in remarkable ways and it was awesome having them.

[msclaritea]

https://moviemanifesto.com/2021/12/the-power-of-the-dog-west-for-success.html?s=09

"A man in a black hat riding a horse. A woman with a flower in her hair serving a meal. A sprawling ranch, a glinting sunset, a bottle of booze. These are the artifacts of the Western, one of cinema’s oldest and most durable genres. They are also, in the hands of Jane Campion, raw clay to be modeled and molded, reshaped into new forms both beautiful and angular. The Power of the Dog, Campion’s first feature in a dozen years and arguably the best work of her long, too-infrequent career, treats the Western much like the carcass that one of its characters encounters on his dusty travels; it picks its bones clean and then assembles the harvest into a rich, tantalizing story of cruelty, desire, and retribution. It doesn’t so much upend the form’s conventions as weaponize them to reimagine a new kind of movie altogether.

Campion is hardly the first filmmaker to interrogate the complicated history and inherent stereotypes lurking beneath the familiar tales of cowboys and Indians; it’s been nearly three decades since Clint Eastwood deconstructed his own mythos in Unforgiven, and ever since (not to mention before), countless artists have breathed new, investigative life into that same classic carcass. But The Power of the Dog is especially notable for how it wields the twin powers of absence and suggestion. There are no bloody shootouts (nary a gun is even fired), but the threat of incipient violence still looms over its Montana setting like a storm cloud. There is no sex—an offscreen marriage generates no more visible ardor than a few chaste kisses on the cheek—but the screen nevertheless seethes with unconsummated longing. And there is no tin-starred sheriff maintaining law and order, but crime is still very much afoot.

The prime suspect for any potential wrongdoing is plainly Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch, magnificent), a garrulous, hotheaded cowpoke who runs a vast ranch with his more reserved brother, George (Jesse Plemons). Cumberbatch is British, while Campion hails from New Zealand (where shooting took place), but together they conspire to depict Phil as the embodiment of a distinctly American masculinity: rugged, yes, but also learned and slippery. He is both an aristocrat and a slob, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Yale (he majored in classics) who favors salty talk and poor hygiene. Cumberbatch, in a performance of fearsome charisma and smoldering sensuality, doesn’t play the character as a contradiction but as a man entirely at ease with his own supremacy, regardless of venue. A gifted conversationalist with the social gravity of a black hole, Phil is always both the most attractive and the most repellent man in the room, magnetizing others with his allure and endangering them with his menace.

Throw a dinner party in this one-horse town, and the only thing worse than having Phil skip it is having him show up....!"

[redantsunderneath]

On Analysis Part 1 - Hermeneutics and Configurative reading (the “what” part)

“Without turning, the pharmacist answered that he liked books like The Metamorphosis, Bartleby, A Simple Heart, A Christmas Carol. And then he said that he was reading Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. Leaving aside the fact that A Simple Heart and A Christmas Carol were stories, not books, there was something revelatory about the taste of this bookish young pharmacist, who ... clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecouchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze a path into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.” ― Roberto Bolano, 2666

Much of the background for this post in particular comes from Paul Fry’s Yale lecture course about the theory of literature.  This is a great starting course for interpretation and textual analysis and, yes, film and TV shows are text.

In futzing around with this stuff, what am I doing?  Less charitably, what do I think I’m even trying to do, here? Many feel that applying theory to art and entertainment is as pretentious as the kind of art or entertainment that encourages it. It’s understandable.  Many examples of analysis are garbage and even people capable of good work get going in the wrong direction due to fixations or prejudices they aren’t even aware of and get swept away by the mudslide of enthusiasm into the pit of overreach. That’s part of the process. But this stuff has an actual philosophical grounding, so let’s start by looking at the stories history of trying to figure out “texts.”

Ideas about the purpose of art, what it means to be an author, and how it is best to create go back to the beginning of philosophy but (outside of some notable examples) there is precious little consideration of the reception of art and certainly not a feeling that it was a legitimate field of study until more recently. The Greeks figured the mind would just know how to grok it because what it was getting at was automatically universal and understanding was effortless to the tune mind. But the idea that textual analysis should be taken seriously began with the literal texts of the Torah (Rabbinical scholarship) and then the Bible, but mostly in closed circles.

Hermeneutics as we know it began as a discipline with the Protestant Reformation since the Bible was now available to be read.  Sooooo, have you read it? It’s not the most obvious or coherent text.  Reading it makes several things clear about it: 1. It is messy and self contradictory; 2. A literal reading is not possible for an honest mind and isn’t advisable in any event; 3. It is extremely powerful and mysterious in a way that makes you want to understand, your reach exceeding your grasp. This is like what I wrote about Inland Empire - it captures something in a messy, unresolvable package that probably can’t be contained in something clear and smooth. This interpretive science spread to law and philosophy for reasons similar to it’s roots in text based religion - there was an imperative to understand what was meant by words.

Hans-Georg Gadamer is the first to explicitly bring to bear a theory of how we approach works.  He was a student of Martin Heidegger, who saw the engagement with “the thing itself” as a cyclic process that was constructive of meaning, where we strive to learn from encounters and use that to inform our next encounter.  Gadamer applied this specifically to how we read a text (for him, this means philosophical text) and process it.  Specifically he strove to, by virtue of repeated reading and rumination which is informed by prior readings (on large and small scales, even going back and forth in a sentence), “align the horizons” of the author and the reader.  The goal of this process is to arrive at (external to the text) truth, which was for him the goal of the enterprise of writing and reading to begin with.  This is necessary because the author and reader both carry different preconceptions to the enterprise (really all material and cultural influences on thinking) that must be resolved.

ED Hirsch had a lifelong feud with Gadamer over this, whipping out Emanuel Kant to deny that his method was ethically sound.  He believed that to engage in this activity otherizes and instrumentalizes the author and robs them of them being a person saying something that has their meaning, whether it is true or false.  We need to get what they are laying down so we can judge the ideas as to whether they are correct or not.  It may be this is because he wasn’t that sympathetic a reader - he’s kind of a piece of work - and maybe his thheory was an excuse to act like John McLaughlin.  He goes on to have a hell of a career fucking up the US school system

But it’s Wolfgang Iser that comes in with the one neat trick which removes (or at least makes irrelevant) the knowability problem, circumvents the otherizing problem, and makes everything applicable to any text (e.g. art, literature) by bringing in phenomenology, specifically Edmund Husserl’s “constitution” of the world by consciousness. It makes perfect sense to bring phenomenology into interpretive theory as phenomenology had a head start as a field and is concerned with something homologous - we only have access to our experience of <the world/the text> and need to grapple with how we derive <reality/meaning> from it.  Husserl said we constitute reality from the world using our sensory/cognitive apparatus, influenced by many contingencies (experiential, cultural, sensorial, etc) but that’s what reality is and It doesn’t exist to us unbracketed. Iser said we configure meaning from the text using our sensory/cognitive apparatus, influenced by many contingencies (experiential, cultural, sensorial, etc) but that’s what meaning is and It doesn’t exist to us unbracketed.  Reality and meaning are constructed on these contingencies, and intersubjective agreement is not assured.

To Iser, we create a virtual space (his phrase) where we operate processes on the text to generate a model what the text is saying, and this process has many inputs based on our dataset external to the text (not all of which is good data) as well as built in filters and mapping legends based on our deeper preconceptions (which may be misconceptions or “good enough” approximations).  Most if this goes on without any effort whatsoever, like the identification of a dog on the street.  But some of it is a learned process - watch an adult who has never read comics try to read one.  These inputs, filters, and routers can animate an idea of the author in the construct, informing our understanding based on all sorts of data we happen to know and assumptions about how certain things work.

This is reader response theory, that meaning is generated in the mind by interaction with the text and not by the text, though Stanley Fish didn’t accent the “in the mind part” and name the phenomenon until years later. Note that Gadamer is largely prescriptive and Hirsch is entirely prescriptive while Iser is predominantly descriptive.  He’s saying “this is how you were doing it all along,” but by being aware of the process, we can gain function.

For those keeping score:   1. Gadamer, after Heidegger’s cyclic process at constructing an understanding of the thing itself, centers on a point between the author and reader and prioritizes universal truth. 2. Hirsch, after Kant’s ethical stand on non instrumentalization, centers on hearing what the author is saying and prioritizes the judging the ideas. 3. Iser, after Husserl’s constituted reality, centers on configuring a multi-input sense of the text within a virtual (mental) space and prioritizes meaning.

Everything after basically comes out of Iser and is mostly restatement with focusing/excluding of elements.  The 20th century mindset, from the logical positivists to Bohr’s view that looking for reality underlying the wave form was pointless, had a serious case of God (real meaning, ground reality) is dead.  W.K. Wimsatt and M. C. Beardsley’s intentional fallacy, an attempt to caution interpreters to steer clear of considering what the god-author meant, begat death of the author which attempted to take the author entirely out of the equation - it was less likely you’d ever understand the if you focused on that!  To me, this is corrective to trends at the time and not good praxis -  it excludes natural patterns of reading in which the author is configured, rejects potentially pertinent data, and limits some things one can get out of the text.

Meanwhile formalism/new criticism (these will be discussed later in a how section) focused on just what was going on in the text with as few inputs as possible, psychoanalytics and historicism looked to interrogate the inputs/filters to the sense making process, postmodernism/deconstruction attacked those inputs/filters making process questioning whether meaning was not just contingent but a complete illusion, and critical studies became obsessed with specific strands of oppression and hegemony as foundational filters that screw up the inputs.   But the general Iser model seems to be the grandfather of everything after.  

Reader intersubjectivity is an area of concern.  In the best world, the creation of art is in part an attempt to find the universal within the specific, something that resonates and speaks to people.  A very formative series of David Milch lectures (to me at least) proffer that if you find a scene, idea, whatever, that is very compelling to you, your job is to figure out what in it is “fanciful” (an association specific to you) and how to find and bring out the universal elements. But people’s experiences are different and there be many ideas of what a piece of art means without there being a dominant one. So the building of models within each mind leaves a lot to consider as the final filtered input is never quite the same. There is a lot of hair on this dog (genres engender text expectations that an author can subvert by confusing the filter, conflicting input can serve a purpose, the form of a guided experience can be a kind of meaning, on and on ad nauseum)

The ultimate question, you might ask, is why we need to do this at all.  I mean, I understood Snow White perfectly fine as a kid.  There’s no “gap” that needs to be leaped.  The meaning of the movie is evident enough on some level without vivisecting it.  The Long answer to what we gain from looking under Snow’s skirt is the next episode.  The short is: 1. You are doing it anyway.  That Snow White thing, you were doing thhat to Snow White you just weren’t conscious of the process.

2. It’s fun. The process only puts a tool of enjoyment in your arsenal.  You don’t have to use it all the time.

3. You’ll see stuff you like in new ways.  The way Star Wars works is really interesting!

4. It may give dimensions to movies that are flawed or bad, and you might wind up liking them.  Again, more to love.

5. It is sometimes necessary to get to a full (or any) appreciation of some complicated works as the most frustrating and resistant stuff to engage with is sometimes the most incredible. 

6. It reinforces your involvement in something you like.  It makes you more connected and more hungry, like any good exercise.

7. You can become more aware of what those preconceptions and biases are, which might give you insights in other areas of your life.

[alliepretends]

Child Superheroes: A Rant

Fair Warning: This is me being an asshole.

We are asked to suspend our disbelief on a lot of elements of superhero comics that are objectively wrong. To name just the ones that spring to mind for me: vigilantism, excessive uses of force (often against petty criminals), revolving prison doors that make it look like a prison justice is system is too lax instead of too harsh, billionaires held up as heroes without really having their wealth interrogated, and child heroes. Now, for some of these, there is space to deconstruct them within the text and so comics not addressing them is a problem. Like billionaires, it would be relatively easy to dismantle the wealth of Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark (how many times has Oliver Queen lost his money?). Others, however, are baked into the foundations of the text. Like vigilantism, which is an essential part of the mythology of superheroes. Child superheroes fall into the latter category for a bunch of reasons both within the text and in the commercial reality of comics. Superhero universes, particularly Marvel and DC, are designed to be accessible to readers of all ages. Sure an individual titles or runs may be aimed at older audiences, but the overarching universe is supposed to be welcoming to kids as young as 13 (sometimes even younger). Having characters that are those ages around for those readers to relate to is important to serve those audiences. So these kinds characters aren’t going anywhere. From an in-text standpoint, child superheroes are part of the first generations of heroes. You can’t go back in time and make Dick Grayson not a minor when he became Robin (New 52 tried and he was still a teenager). Nor can you go back and make Peter Parker not a high schooler when he started out (if anything Marvel has tried to do the opposite, dragging him back to high school in almost every adaptation). 

Having child superheroes baked into the DNA of the superhero comic means fans just broadly protesting the idea of child heroes is founded in a willful ignorance of the structure of comics. Worse still, characters within the text trying to object to child superheroes end up looking hypocritical at best and stupid at worst. (Marvel’s current Outlawed event is almost leveraging this now. There is no doubt in my mind that Kamala’s law will continue to be broadly presented as a bad law crafted by controlling, naive, or even evil adults.)  It just isn’t a useful path.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t interesting conversations to be had. We can discuss why so much children’s entertainment looks at the idea of children in peril. And there’s tons of room for nuance within comics. I like to compare Bruce Wayne and Charles Xavier here. Bruce has lots of failings as a parent and mentor, but one thing he almost never does is make his children feel as if him caring about them is conditional on their participation in his vigilantism. If anything, he frequently discourages them from participating. In fact, part of the reason he adopted Cass was to help show her that his love for her wasn’t conditional. Conversely, for the original X-Men, even their presence in Charles’s home appeared to be conditional on their participation in his superhero team. This wide gulf in how Bruce and Xavier approach making children into superheroes provides tons of opportunity to discuss how those children are being treated, if not the fact of their superheroism.

tl;dr: Objecting to child superheroes on the basis of them being child heroes, both in the text and as fans, is the same as objecting to Batman being a vigilante. Technically right, but not particularly useful.

[thelastyetfabolousmidwestmadman]

Detective Conan Deconstruction/Plot Twists/Subversion's

Howdy!

I've been thinking a lot because I haven't slept or been made sensible enough to see reality through rational means of comprehension.

For a black and white series of tales such as Gosho Aoyama's DCMKverse I can sure think of a multitude of ways to turn it grey. So many dark, bloody possibilities, such a endless plethora of grief, angst, and schadenfreude, of voided bowels and lost innocence, so many terrifying ideas yet so little time...

Anyway, to summarize the contents of all that verbal diarrhea, my mind has created a vast orchestra of sinister ideas that I can't put them all in one or more stories. Some of them I'll use later, some of them I will not. I guess my main inspiration for this stream of consciousness that shouts madly into the abyss of the World Wide Web, is the idea that some intrepid, curious wanderer may come across my inane rantings and be inspired to write their own atrocities.

Or maybe it will the stoke the wondrous imagination of a writer who is more of a sick fuck then I am, (:

There are five areas that can be twisted into something cruel. They contain the following:

Cases

Heists

Romance

Character Flaws

Black Organization

Get it on!

Case’s

Suspect Gets The Last Laugh- Killer is revealed but manages to poison the victim with Ricin or something more subtle allowing the target to die a couple days later. Simple enough.

More Then One Killer- The killer is caught! However a quick look back at the scene reveals he wasn’t alone and he ain’t spilling the beans.

Hannibal Lector Wannabe- A killer decides to fuck with our beloved Teen Detectives by playing a game of manipulation and horror while he threatens their loved ones into continuing.

Escaping Through Statute Of Limitations- When Our Teen Detectives decide to give their customary breaking speech,

Killer Gets Out Of It, Now After Detectives- The killer proves much too clever and sees through our casts tricks. Maybe he begin’s to notice Conan’s con and swears revenge out of his ego.

Loved Ones Hurt In The Crossfire- They were too quick for Conan’s soccer ball, Heiji’s sword, Kogoro’s Judo, or Division One’s reflexes. The bullets, blades, bludgeons. and Pelvic Thrusts couldn’t be avoided and the innocent were hurt before they could be saved.

It’s Too Much All At Once- When the cast see a suspect state his intention to kill himself, especially in the early episodes, the cast would dare them to do it, thinking it is a bluff. It isn’t.

All For Naught- Going down a dark rabbit hole isn’t worth it, if a killer turns out to have escaped or has been dead for a long time.

Big Troll- There was no murder or kidnapping, they just wanted to humiliate them.

Green Mistake- Not all detectives succeed at once. Sometimes they make mistakes... Okay just here me out here. I sincerely doubt that all those amateur detectives despite their talent have a perfect track record in solving cases or even not getting a innocent person hurt. Just look at Heiji’s, Kogoro’s, and Sera’s early (or in Kogoro’s case many) mistakes. It’s statistically impossible to get it right all the time.

Victim Is Worse- Conan and the gang successfully prevent a client from being murdered. The criminal screams at them, telling them how evil he was, and how this was mistake. When they learn of the clients sick actions, they understand why.

Romance

Waiting For Someone Who Is No Longer There- Lets think about the situation between Shinichi and Ran for a sec. if your like me you come to a unfortunate realization that was also in the OVA “Stranger In 10 Years.” Shinichi may never get back to the way he was. Maybe there is no antidote. What if he disappears in that time? And I don’t mean move on, I mean dies without anyone knowing. Ran now has to deal with both a missing Shinichi and a vanished Conan. Yet, throughout her whole life Ran holds out hope, waiting for them. Waiting for Shinichi to call. She refuses to fall in love with someone else and becomes obsessed with finding them... Until in her old age, she dies.

The Sleeping Sleuth Sleeps Around- Okay just listen to my reasoning here for a sec. I know many of you are probably sharpening their knives in the comments but let’s really think about this for a sec. This is the same Kogoro who smacked the butt of one of the Black Bunnies, and repeatedly motorboats whatever young woman he comes across. I doubt if Eri is okay with that. Plus, alcoholism and nymphomania is not a winning combination. He could easily make a mistake while in his delirium.

Shinichi’s Toxic Jealousy- Once again bear with me on this. I don’t think either Shinichi (or Kogoro for that matter) are evil. They have flaws just like any other person. However, Shinichi can be sort of a dick with it comes to how territorial he is with Ran. Just look at Eisuke. Unlike most of the perverts who are after her, Eisuke is a genuinely nice guy and Shinichi treats him like garbage. That got me thinking... Maybe Shinichi’s claims about wanting Ran to be happy aren’t entirely true. A part of him knows what he’s doing is wrong but a selfish side can’t. What if Shinichi’s jealousy starts to hurt Ran severely? Again it have to be written well so Shinichi doesn’t come off like a unrepentant dick but I think there’s something there.

Character Flaws

Hot Headedness Get You Or Others Killed- This idea concerns Heiji mostly. A rather temperamental fellow isn’t he? Always rushing into danger without thinking or having trouble with guile... Ain’t that a losing combination innit? I wonder how many criminals can take advantage of that eh? How easy it would be to trick Heiji to go into a trap if Kazuha is threatened, how simple it would be to switch a blunted blade with a sharpened one, how effortless it would be to get important information, how utterly painless it would be to manipulate him... Well I’ll leave you lovely sick bastards to come up with more.

Dysfunction Junction- Let’s talk about the Mouri’s. They’re... Not healthy to say the least. With Kogoro’s gambling/drinking/man-whoring problem barely touched upon, as well as his abuse of Conan along with Eri’s absenteeism I can say that’s a huge target for blackmailers, debt collectors, and Count Of Monte Crisco wannabes.

Conan The Gremlin- Y’know for such a seemingly innocent little boy, he sure gets into a lot of trouble don’t he? Murders keep happening around him like a curse, and that animal tranquilizer can’t be healthy for Sonoko and Kogoro... Plus people could find out who he truly is and... Well it would probably be really messy wouldn’t it?

Incompetence From The Police- In all seriousness, let’s think about this for a second. You have a overburdened police dealing with a intense rise in the murder rate, illicit narcotic consumption, and terrorism... But before we can get any further let’s talk about real life Japanese criminal procedure. In Japan you can be held for 21 days in a tiny dark cell without due process or access to a lawyer. Your are also being interrogated with the police officers using abusive tactics such as telling you how ashamed your family would be, something that can’t happen in a culture based on Confucian values. You confess but take it back only to find that you’re basically fucked since Japan has a 99% conviction rate regardless of innocence. If your a drug addict, you are literally considered nonhuman by the public at large and due to the Reaganite standards treatment isn’t a option. If your on death row, you are never told when your going to die and even if innocent is unlikely to get out. Stressed at the rising crime rate, the police refuse to investigate any suspicious death and just like in Osaka (yes this actually happened) will simply not add to the police statistics. If your a police officer what are you to do? Just a few years ago there was so little crime and now your stressed to the bone. You’re largely conservative and full of pride so you won’t admit that you must change tactics. This quick jump to conclusions and borderline incompetence can be seen in so many episodes of Detective Conan that’s it’s a wonder that more people haven’t been wrongfully convicted or got away with it... Or perhaps they have.

Black Organization

Government Corruption- Given how much sway the BO has, it got me thinking. What if everything wrong with the Japanese Government is because the BO IS the government. Something sorta akin to how the Russian Mob are basically government officials. So many possibilities other then the usual blackmail, assassinations, and bombings. Electoral fraud, jury tampering, manufacturing consent, subtle revisions of the law to encroach on democratic rights such as those the Third Way, and Neoconservatives did in the west. So many more subtle yet intriguing ways to go about this! Perhaps the BO serves as a lobbying for other more savory companies that proudly align with them such as legalizing gambling or deregulating protections.

Caught!- The BO discovers Conan’s true identity. Hell follows.

Heists

Heist Bombing- Some madman or maybe the MK organization decides to bomb the Kid Heist. Lots of people die, are traumatized and have to deal with the aftermath. I’ll leave the rest up to you guys.

Crazy Fans- Self explanatory until you really think about it. If Kaito Kid is real in this universe, how toxic is the fandom? How many of them have pedophilic undertones with the beloved Kid Killer? What if a stalker discovers Kaito’s real identity and goes psychotic? Riots could happen! So many possibilities! Doesn’t have to dark like in my sick mind, can be played for laughs.

One last thing, because of how long this took to write, a certain beloved detective’s birthday is here.

So HAPPY BIRTHDAY SHIN-CHAN!!!

[kalinara]

You know what I loved best about Shadowhunters?

It is the first time I’ve seen anyone tackle the idea of a deconstructive adaptation outside of fanfiction.

The Mortal Instruments novels were pretty popular as I recall.  They sold well, built up a pretty passionate fanbase, and even got a movie that I never actually saw.  I think I read maybe the first one, and it wasn’t really to my taste, but I didn’t think it was terrible.  It just had a lot of the common flaws that I see in a lot of YA books.  

And generally, when you get an adaptation, it doesn’t tend to touch on these problematic elements.  Or if it does, it kind of sidles away from them.  The Twilight movies, for example, show us a couple of POC as vampires, even though technically according to the books, all vampires get paler with age.  But at the same time, neither movies nor books really address the inherent racist dynamic between the vampires and the werewolves.  And so on.

Shadowhunters is different.

When I watch Shadowhunters as an adaptation, I get the sense that a lot of the people involved genuinely do love the Mortal Instruments as a series, but that they’re not willing to overlook the problematic elements.  They want to explore them instead.

And they did.  Starting with the Clave.  Because, at least from what I recall, there’s not a whole lot TO the Clave in the books.  I mean, it’s there.  Sort of.  But our main trio (Jace, Alec, and Izzy) seem to be primarily fighting demons on their own.  They’re literally children.  I think Alec is the oldest at what, seventeen?  And while they’re meant to protect Downworlders and only kill demons, there’s a certain level of probably unconscious superiority.  I mean obviously they don’t support Valentine, the villain who wants to genocide all the downworlders.  But the elements are still there.  Our heroes have angel blood, our heroes are special, and their authority is righteous.

I’m not trying to attack Ms. Clare with this, because I think this kind of thing is very very common in YA books in general.  But I love what Shadowhunters did with this set up.

First, Shadowhunters did away with the idea of Jace, Alec, and Izzy as lone child soldiers against demons.  The Clave exists, and it’s very visible.  The Institute is bustling, filled with all sorts of background personnel.  Something is always happening.  Things are always being monitored.  There are missions happening that our characters aren’t necessarily involved in.  This does create a bit of narrative awkwardness in the first season, when the show tended to cleave more loyally to the books.  (Alec’s role as de facto leader of the Institute early on in particular seems to wax and wane in terms of level of authority.).  But it smooths itself out early on.  And it makes more sense: fighting demons is pretty important.  Not a matter to be left to three teenagers alone.

The show both ages up our characters, which makes certain romantic plots a lot less creepy, and actually addresses the idea that these people have been essentially soldiers from childhood, and that there is a LOT of institutionalized racism and superiority, along with militant duty, that gets drilled into these people from birth.  We get to see the kind of environment that builds a Valentine, and how even generally rational adults like Luke and Jocelyn might have gotten caught up in his fanatic ideology.  It takes the throwaway comments and superiority displayed by the protagonists in the book and extrapolates where that came from.

I remember reading somewhere that Ms. Clare was really unhappy with Alec’s actions early on in season one, when he was in support of Meliorn being taken to the City of Bones for interrogation (torture).    And I can understand that.  I’m sure Ms. Clare has a very clear idea in her mind about who Alexander Lightwood is.  And her Alec Lightwood would never agree to take a man to be tortured.

But I think that, in terms of the show, it was important to show Alec like that.  Because we needed to see exactly how ingrained this ideology actually is.  Jace is the brooding rebel.  Izzy is the bleeding heart half in love with Meliorn already.  Alec is the responsible one, the dutiful one who shoulders the burdens.  Which means, he’s the character most likely (at this point in the story) to swallow his conscience and misgivings and do what he thinks he’s supposed to do.

It’s an ugly moment, but it provides us with a focal point for his eventual growth.  Alec’s multi-season plot, of overcoming both overt and unconscious personal racism, to tackling the problems of the Clave itself, is one of my favorite parts of the series.  And it had to start somewhere.

One of the touches that initially made me uncomfortable, but now I rather like, is how most of the Shadowhunters are white, while most of the Downworlders are POC.  There are exceptions on both sides (the Penhallows, Luke-pre-Werewolfing, Iris Rouse), but that’s the general gist.  And at first, I thought this was a really bad thing.  Until I realized that the show actually was making a point.

Because the racism against Downworlders is fantastic racism.   And all too often, fantastic racism becomes an excuse to use real world narrative tropes meant for poc and apply them to white people.  And look, I like X-Men as much as anyone, but this isn’t our story.  (And there are very few things that annoy me more than when we see fantasy racism applied in ways that lead to POC being racist against white people: see the anti-alien senator during one season of Supergirl who just happened to be Latina.)

Even though it’s still a little uncomfortable that most of the people with “angel blood” are white and most of the people with “demon blood” are not, it does mean that we’re basically returning the focus of the fantastic racism back where it should be: on the POC victims.

Most of the Downworlders we see on the show are good people.  They’re trying to live their lives the best they can.  And the Clave uses the actions of a few bad apples (many of whom have some significant provocation!) to justify a draconian rule over all of them.

The parallels are hard to miss, and the show doesn’t actually try to miss them.  I always think particularly of the episode in season 2, where the Clave starts to chip Downworlders in response to a serial killer targeting Shadowhunters.  It’s heavy handed, sure, but it hits hard when Maia talks about real world racism and how the Shadowhunters are supposed to be better than that.  It’s another episode where a main character is complicit in the institutional racism, and that gets called out too.

It’s not perfect, of course.  And I think Jace, in particular, ends up getting off scott free for things that he really shouldn’t.  (For example, kidnapping the werewolf girl and bringing her to Valentine makes him literally guilty of her murder under the law.)  But it’s something.

Another improvement from the books is in Alec and Magnus’s relationship.  For one thing, they’re a side couple in the books, given a handful of scenes here and there, but very much in the shadow of Clary and Jace’s drama.  Their plots have some seriously uncomfortable elements: the age difference, the way Magnus presses Alec to come out, Alec’s paranoia over Magnus’s sexuality and past experience, Alec’s plotting with Camille to remove Magnus’s immortality.  It’s a mess.

Now whether or not it’s a worse mess than Clary and Jace’s nonsense.  You got me.  But it wasn’t fun.

But even with the problems, Magnus and Alec meant something to a lot of fans.  And I think the show really delivers on that front.  Magnus and Alec go from being a side couple with a handful of scenes, to in many ways, being the pillar of the series.  The age difference is less of an issue (I mean, Magnus is still many times Alec’s age, but Alec is actually an adult in this version).  The biphobia is gone, and while Alec is occasionally intimidated by the difference in their experiences, it never turns into a critique of Magnus. 

Their conflicts and obstacles are much more compelling.  Alec’s initial coming out story was triumphant and the best part of season 1 to me.  The fact that Magnus is a Downworlder, and Alec is a Shadowhunter, with all that entails isn’t forgotten.  The romance, and Alec’s plot of overcoming his racism, are deeply intertwined.  And Magnus isn’t a bit part in the story either.  His plot, especially with regard to his self-identity and relationship to his magic, is just as important, if not more so, by the last season.

The weakest part of the series for me was when they were more faithful to the books, but I thought the show did a good job of refocusing later season events on Clary rather than Jace.  One of the things that annoyed me about book and the early part of the series is that, as soon as we had Jace’s (not) parentage reveal, he seemed to end up with 90% of the focus in any of the family drama.  Clary discovers her long lost father is a genocidal maniac, but Jace was raised by the man so it gets more focus.  The dynamic between Jace and Jonathan had a lot more focus in the books too.  Sometimes it seemed like the story forgot that Clary also had a family stake in more than just her mother.  So I was really happy when the show started digging into Clary’s identity as a Morgenstern, and went the route of linking her to Jonathan.  (Even if I could definitely do without incestuous overtones.)  Jace, as a character, tends to work better when he isn’t the center focus, in my opinion.  Or at least when the focus is shared, and he gets to react and take part in other characters’ plotlines.

You’ll occasionally see this sort of deconstruction in fanfiction (when it’s not a joyous celebration of unlikely characters banging - not that there’s anything wrong with that), but rarely to this extent, and certainly never with this kind of budget.  The idea of a “Shadowhunters style deconstruction” is a really interesting thought exercise to apply to all sorts of media that has both enjoyable and problematic elements.