#maybe we have movies based on novel but i want (a little) to not romantice between dracula and mina

[castlephantom]

What if Konami made the game adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula?

What would be the title of the game?

[airasora]

Oh, absolutely. I meant if someone for example says, like you, that they enjoy the yandere genre or write fic for it or whatever and then turn out to be an actual stalker. Then you can add whatever behaviors they've copied to that specific person's list of red flags (like "they act like so and so character from so and such manga")

And it's the same with creators, I absolutely agree. Unless it's that specific creator engaging in those behaviors, then I'm willing to bet anything that they're horrified someone either used or took inspiration from their work to do actual harm to another person.

It reminds me of one of, if not THE most egregious example. Nabokov wrote Lolita to prove that a sexual predator could be charming and attractive and not a creep in the bushes, and that oftentimes a child that age can have an innocent crush on an adult that is then exploited by said predator. He was a victim of CSA himself, that's why he wrote it. He even specified that the cover of the book should not depict Lolita in any way (no images of little girls) because the story isn't about her; she's an object to the predator.

And now we have on the one hand people creating a whole aesthetic based around Lolita herself and saying stuff like they want a Humbert because they apparently can't tell what this actually is (people, please, you can like and wear her style without using a word used to objectify and demonize a CSA victim), including the heavily sanitized and romanticized 1997 movie, and on the other people claiming that Nabokov himself and anyone who likes the novel MUST be a pedophile *facepalm*

Oh, yes, I simply kept talking in my post, I wasn't disagreeing with you or anything! :D

I 100% agree, Lolita is a great example of both sides of this argument and how people will assume the creator of something is living out a fantasy of theirs. And hell, maybe sometimes that's the case, but that does not mean the creator will go out and actively harm someone, for example.

[bi-bard]

Please Say That You're Joking (Pt.1) - Chuck Shurley Imagine (Supernatural)

Title: Please Say You're Joking (Pt. 1) [You can read part 2 by clicking here!]

Pairing: Chuck Shurley X Winchester!Reader

Requested: Nope

Word Count: 2,930 words

Warning(s): mentions of sex, threats of violence

Summary: (Season 4; Season 11) (Y/n) had a single one-night stand while coping with loss in a not healthy way... if only they had a clue about the weight of their actions.

Author's Note: I was recently going back through some of the "lighter" episodes of Supernatural because I wanted to watch something I could chuckle at. That's where this came from.

This might be the most crackheaded thing I've written in a while.

Also, the amount of things I had to bullshit my way through this is actually ridiculous.

Hey! I did a rewrite of the ending of Supernatural. It took a really long time to complete, so it would mean a lot to me if you check it out. Here’s a link! (it’s on my personal account)

-------------------------------------

Sam, Dean, and I walked into the motel room. We were all confused and slightly scared.

We had gone to a comic book shop to do some work on a case. However, we were then called fans.

Fans of what?

Well, fans of a series of books about our lives.

I was the middle Winchester child. Two years younger than Dean, two years older than Sam. I was beyond confused when I saw some weird, romanticized version of me on the cover of a book.

"This is so weird," I mumbled, plopping onto one of the beds in the room.

Sam jumped onto his laptop and started researching. Dean was holding one of the books, reading through it. I didn't even want to touch it.

"I don't like how he describes (Y/n)," Dean commented. "It's weird. It's like he's in love. Listen to this..."

Dean dramatically clears his throat and starts to read in an even more dramatic voice, "'Even after a hard hunt, (Y/n) could easily be seen as the most beautiful of the siblings. They mimicked the beauty of their mother more than their brothers. There's no bruise or cut that could take the loveliness away from the natural curves of (Y/n)'s face. If only they could see how everyone else would stare-"

"Okay, ew," I muttered, walking to the table. "What'd you find?"

"Well, it seems like Carver Edlund is a pen name," Sam shrugged. "And the fans are intense."

"As in," Dean asked, closing the book and joining the two of us at the table.

"Well," Sam handed me the laptop so Dean and I could look at it, "there's fanfiction. About all of us."

"What's this, 'Sam/Dean'," I asked.

"It's... me and Dean... together."

"They just don't care that we're related," Dean asked. Sam nodded.

"God, this is so weird."

"So, how do we find this guy," I asked.

--time skip--

We managed to find the publisher of the novels and found her house.

"So, you published the 'Supernatural' books," I asked as we walked in.

"Yep," she nodded. "Yeah, gosh. These books... they never really got the attention that they deserved. All anybody wants to read anymore is that romance crap."

"Could not agree with you more," I said. "We're hoping that our article can shine a light on an underappreciated series."

"Yeah, because, you know, if we got a little bit of good press, then maybe we can start publishing again," she replied excitedly.

"No, no, no," Dean immediately shut her down. "I mean, why... why would you want to do that? It's such a complete series with Dean going to hell and all."

"Oh my god, that was one of my favorite ones," she rambled. "Dean was so strong and sad and brave. And Sam... I mean... the best ones are when they cry... like in 'Heart' when Sam had to kill Madison; the first woman since Jessica he'd really loved. When Dean had to call John in 'Home' and ask him for help. Or when (Y/n) went back to the motel room after getting kidnapped and just had to sit in their own head and had to truly process not only the death of their mother but now their father. The mixed feelings were amazing."

"You're a really big fan," I noted. She nodded.

"Gosh, if only real men were that open about their emotions."

"Real men," Dean asked.

"I mean, no offense," she replied. "How often do you cry like that?"

"Well, right now I'm crying on the inside," he muttered.

"Is that supposed to be funny?"

"Lady, this whole thing is funny."

"How am I supposed to know this is legit?"

"Oh, trust me," Dean mumbled. "We're legit."

"Well, I don't want some smart-ass article making fun of my boys," she snapped as she sat in her chair.

"Oh, never," I replied quickly. "We actually are big fans."

"You read the books?"

"Cover to cover," I promised.

"What's the year and model of the car?"

"1967 Chevy Impala," Dean smiled proudly.

"What's May 2nd?"

"That's my- uh... Sam's birthday," Sam replied.

"Sam's score on the LSAT?"

"Umm... 174," Sam said nervously.

"(Y/n)'s first hunt?"

"Vampire in Washington," I answered. "Dean was at the motel sick and (Y/n) almost chopped John's head off when he scared them."

"(Y/n)'s favorite memory that's not related to hunting?"

I smiled, "Helping Sam get ready for a date when he was a teenager because Sam didn't trust what Dean had told him."

"Dean's favorite song?"

"It's a tie," Dean replied. "Between Zep's 'Ramble On' and 'Traveling Riverside Blues.'"

She finally laughed and smiled again, "Okay, okay. What do you wanna know?"

"What's Carver Edlund's real name," Sam asked.

"Oh, no. I can't," she shook her head.

"We just wanna talk to him," Sam continued. "You know, get the 'Supernatural' story in his own words."

"He's very private," she shrugged. "Like Salinger."

"Please," Sam tried again. "Like I said, we're um... big fans."

Sam unbuttoned his shirt enough to show his anti-possession tattoo. Dean pulled his shirt to the side to do the same. I rolled my eyes and yanked the arm of my jacket down and pulled up the sleeve of my t-shirt. I don't wear as many layers as them and I had opted to put the tattoo on my upper arm because I thought it looked nicer.

"Awesome," the lady mumbled before standing up. "Y'know what?"

I looked away as she pulled her pants down.

"I got one too."

"Wow, you are a fan," I slapped Dean's arm. The lady fixed her clothing before grabbing a pen and paper.

"Okay," she said. "His name's Chuck Shurley-"

And I stopped listening after that. I knew that name... why did I know that name... oh... oh no. I'm gonna kill him. We're going to meet this man and I am going to end up killing him.

I followed Sam and Dean as they started walking out of the woman's house.

"Excuse me," she called as we reached the door. We looked back at her. "I'm sorry, but you look exactly like how I picture (Y/n) when I read the books."

I chuckled, "Thanks."

"He describes (Y/n) with so much detail," she smiled. "You could play them in a movie."

"Thank you," I waved as we walked out.

"'You could play them in a movie,'" Dean teased.

"I know who Chuck is," I said, ignoring him.

"What," he asked. I nodded. "How?"

I pointed to get into the car. I got in the back seat and Sam and Dean sat upfront. Dean started driving to the address the lady gave us before I started speaking.

"Okay, when you went to hell, Sam's not the only one who ran off," I explained. "I wasn't gone for four months... just two weeks. In those two weeks, I got involved in a single one-night stand. The name he gave me was Chuck Shurley."

"You screwed the man who wrote books about us," Dean asked, sounding angry.

"Do you think I knew he was writing books based on our lives?"

"He had to have known who you are," Sam added. "This isn't an accident. He has to get visions or something."

"Yeah, I know," I nodded. "He made money off of my name and then screwed me."

"Damn," Dean mumbled. "I missed a hell of a lot."

I rolled my eyes.

--time skip--

I knocked on the door loudly. Sam grabbed my arm, shaking his head at me. The door was opened and I smiled obnoxiously as Chuck. He was in a robe, his boxers, and an old white shirt. He looked tired and like he hadn't had a goodnight's sleep in days.

"Chuck Shurley," Dean asked.

"Chuck Shurley that wrote the Supernatural books," Sam added.

"Nice to meet you," I said. "This is Sam... Dean... and I'm (Y/n)... the ones you've written books about."

Chuck sighed and went to shut the door. I stepped in, stopping it with my foot.

"Listen, I appreciate the enthusiasm, I really do and I remember you," he motioned at me, awkwardly grinning before seeming to shake the memories out of his head. I almost slapped him right then. "But please... go get a life."

"You see," Dean followed me, helping to force our way inside. Sam made sure the door shut behind us. "We have a life... and you're selling books about it."

"Okay, this isn't funny," Chuck mumbled.

"You're right," I said. "We just wanna know how you're doing it?"

"I'm just a writer, I'm not doing anything."

"Then why do you know so much about demons and tulpas and changelings?"

"Is this some kind of 'Misery' thing? Ah, it is, isn't it? It's a 'Misery' thing!"

"No, it's not," I shook my head. "Believe me, we're not fans."

"What do you want then," he asked.

"I'm Sam... and that's Dean and (Y/n)," Sam tried again.

"Those are fictional characters," Chuck yelled. "They aren't real!"

Dean grabbed him and pulled him outside.

"Wait, wait-"

"We aren't kidnapping you, calm down," I rolled my eyes. Dean opened the hidden compartment in the impala's trunk.

"Are those real guns?"

"Yes," I nodded. "And real rock salt, real fake IDs."

Chuck let out a laugh at it, "Well, I gotta hand it to you guys. You really are my number-one fans. That... That's awesome. So, I-I think I've got some poster in the house."

"Chuck, stop," I rolled my eyes, grabbing his arm as he went to walk away.

"Please don't hurt me," he begged.

"How much do you know," Sam asked. "Do you know about the angels? Or Lilith breaking the seals?"

"How do you know about that?"

"Have you not been listening," I asked. "The real question is how do you?"

"Because I wrote it," he explained.

"You kept writing?"

"The books never came out because the publisher went bankrupt," he furrowed his eyebrows.

I stepped back, letting go of his arms.

"Okay, wait a minute," Chuck crossed his arms. "This is some kind of joke, right? Did Phil put you up to this?"

"Oh my god," I muttered, pinching the bridge of my nose. I grabbed his robe. "I'm sorry but I'm really tired. Nice to meet you. I'm (Y/n) Winchester, these are my brothers, Sam and Dean Winchester. You wrote and published books about us, probably knew who I was, and then you still slept with me."

He stared at me in shock.

"What," I asked.

"The last names were never in the books," he mumbled. "I never told anyone about that. I never even wrote that down."

"Then I guess we have a lot to talk about," I let go of his robe.

The three of us followed him inside.

--time skip--

"I got a visit from Cas," Dean explained as he walked in. "I've some important information."

After talking to Chuck and getting a draft of what was supposed to happen, we were all panicking. Dean told us to wait here. Lilith was going to come for Sam and we both thought it'd be harder if there was more than one of us here at all times.

Now, Dean was coming back from seeing Chuck.

"And that important information is...," Sam trailed off.

"He's a prophet of the lord," Dean said, smirking at me.

I shut my eyes, letting my head fall forward.

"Please say you're joking," I mumbled.

"Nope," Dean replied.

Sam looked over at me. He only started chuckling after his brother broke.

Dean was laughing his head off within seconds, "You screwed a prophet!"

"Shut up," I groaned. "I'm gonna kill him!"

"Archangel will kill you."

"I'll happily pay that price," I muttered. "I slept with a prophet."

"At least that means he didn't write himself to sleep with you," Sam tried to comfort me.

"Yeah, God just decided I was supposed to sleep with the guy publishing books about my life," I replied sarcastically. "That makes me feel so much better."

"Come on, it could be worst-"

"Sam, love you, but don't finish that sentence if you even kind of value your life," I muttered.

I was desperate for this conversation to just end.

--time skip--

After all was said and done, and Chuck accidentally helped us chase Lilith away for a while, we gave Chuck a lift back to his place.

I followed him up to his door, offering to look around and make sure that he's safe. He shook his head.

"I have an archangel protecting me," he reminded me. "Can't get any safer than that."

I nodded.

"I'm sorry, by the way," he said. "About us. I didn't recognize you until after... it all... and I didn't say anything because I didn't really know how to explain it. The whole event makes me feel all scummy."

"It's alright," I replied with a chuckle. "It's fine, I promise."

He offered me a nervous smile, "Y'know, in all of my visions, you're the most vivid thing."

With a grin, I leaned over and kissed his cheek gently. I stepped back and headed back toward the impala. I made sure to take note of his nervous and flustered face.

"See you around, Chuck!"

"You... You too," he called after me. I got in the backseat and got comfortable.

"So... screwing the prophet wasn't that bad," Dean asked.

I just rolled my eyes, waving through the window at Chuck as Dean pulled away from the curb. Leave it to a Winchester to end up in a situation like that.

--time skip (season 11)--

Sam and I followed Dean with our guns ready. Dean was following the amulet that he had owned for a long time without even knowing it could show us where God was.

Everyone had been infected by Amara only minutes ago but now it was okay and Dean's amulet was glowing.

"Holy shit," I mumbled, seeing who was walking over to us.

Chuck.

He was supposed to be dead. That's why Kevin's prophet powers had been activated.

"No way," Dean said.

"Hey," Chuck... or God said. "We need to talk."

Despite our understandable hesitation, Chuck reached forward, teleporting all of us back to the bunker. I stepped away from him, slightly overwhelmed.

"(Y/n)," Chuck walked over and tried to grab my arm. I instinctually slapped him. I was nothing but confusion and anger. "I deserved that. Just, please?"

I stepped away again.

From behind Chuck stepped Kevin's ghost. My breath caught in my throat. The poor boy had been through so much shit because of us.

Kevin told us about how we looked stressed and that we should listen to Chuck.

Then, Chuck waved his hand. Kevin turned into a ball of white and blue light before ascending beyond the bunker.

"Where'd he go," I asked.

"Heaven, where he deserves," Chuck promised. I nodded.

I listened to the rant about how Chuck had abandoned us all and how awful things were. Then, the conversation turned to the plan to stop Amara. The boys talked about needing Lucifer and Chuck got incredibly upset. In a fit, he went to leave. I stepped in front of him.

"No," I said bluntly. "Even if you want to avoid the subject of your estranged son, you can't just leave."

"(Y/n)-"

"Sam, Dean," I looked at them. "Give us a minute?"

They both nodded, glaring at Chuck on their way out. I tried to ignore the instincts that were telling me that Chuck was just selfish.

"(Y/n)," Chuck mumbled.

"Just answer my questions," I said. "Then we can discuss what to do with Amara without you storming away recklessly. Okay?"

He nodded.

"Have you been God the whole time," I asked.

He nodded.

"You wrote all of our stories?"

Another nod.

"Did you write that I was going to sleep with you?"

I felt manipulated and angry. I was desperate for an answer. I knew that this could've made me feel like dirt, but I needed to know.

"No," Chuck said. I clenched my jaw, ready to call him a liar. "I told you. I had been pretty much hands-off for a long time. Did I know who were? Absolutely. I'm sorry I lied to you about that. But I didn't plan anything between us. We weren't some divine plan."

I nodded, looking down.

"You know how Dean and Amara are connected," he asked. I nodded, looking back at him. "We're like them."

"And that's not a divine plan-"

"I'm not doing a good job explaining this," Chuck shook his head. "It feels like we're like them. Like there's this bond that just happened as soon as we met."

"You lied to me, for years," I said. "Saying we have some bond isn't gonna fix that."

"I know."

We both fell silent. Slowly, I started laughing. Chuck furrowed his eyebrows, "My only one-night stand... and it was God."

Chuck started laughing with me while I really processed what I had done.

I slowly stopped laughing.

I didn't notice until it was too late that Chuck had slowly gotten closer to me. As soon as his lips brushed mine, I pushed him back. Not hard, but enough to get him to step away.

"No," I mumbled. "Not that, no."

Chuck nodded, "Got it."

"Now," I sighed, "we need to actually plan to stop Amara, and if we need Luci-"

"We don't," he said bluntly. "We can do something else. We don't need him. Okay?"

I nodded. In my gut, I trusted him. Maybe that was me being an idiot but I did trust him. For now at least.

-------------------------------------

Masterlist

What I Write For

Request Guidelines

Musical Prompts

Small Moments With…

When Worlds Collide (Doctor Who Crossover Series) Masterlist

Some Original Characters

folklore/evermore Writing Challenge (and Masterlist)

[summers-pratt]

I was tagged by @rosieposiepie for a fun book ask game!! Thank you for tagging me!!! :D

Bought: I buy so many books oh no I didn't think this through OH ok I just bought Nineteenth Century Women's Fashion, and it is all plates and brief descriptions of the displayed outfits from every year in the 1800s and I am very pumped about it bc I have been getting increasingly sucked into the discourse of accurate period clothing in media, so this is scratching a big itch lol

Borrowed: I don't really borrow books that much, I like having my own copies (my overflowing bookshelves are staring at me contemptuously), I think the last book I borrowed from a friend was in high school. She lent me Carrie, but she also included Flowers in the Attic for whatever reason, and, not knowing anything about it, I read it after I finished Carrie, and boy did 10th grade me not see romanticized incest coming.

Was gifted: The same friend gave me Bunny for my birthday and that was a really fun, really weird story about sorority-adjacent Frankensteinian creations for female pleasure and literary exploration and the relationships and imbalances between the women who make them. Super weird, little fucked up, kinda gay, really fun.

Gave/lent: After I read it, I lent my friend Outlawed, it's about women who couldn't conceive in the Old West and also gay people and gender and a dreamed of utopia for them achieved through robbing banks dressed as men. Be gay do crime cowboy edition.

Finished: I just read The Loved Ones and it was really cool at first, a guy worked at a pet cemetery in LA and then he planned a funeral for his friend, and then it got into people who prepare the people for funerals, and I LOVE weird super specific jobs and funeral planning stories (bc you never see that stuff in media, it always cuts from the death directly to the funeral and it's such a waste! So much happens in that period!) But then, because it was written by a straight white cis man in the 1940s, it got misogynistic and racist and was a relief to be over with.

Started: I just started reading Firestarter bc the new movie came out and I want to read it first and I really really like it so far, it just yeets you right into the story and the little girl sets fires with her mind!! It's so fun!!

5 stars: I read Plain Bad Heroines last year and boy howdy is this a fun book. It follows two related timelines, one at an all girl's boarding school in the early 1900s and one in LA and then the same boarding school in the present day, when they are making a movie about the events in the 1900s. There's supernatural occurrences (it starts normal and based in reality and the spooky stuff creeps in and you learn about it with the characters), there's gay people (literally almost every single character is queer, every main character is queer and it is incredible), there's super fun narration devices (snarky footnotes. Need I say more?), there's illustrations and MAPS (I love a good map in a novel, we need more maps in books). I cant even explain all the cool shit in this book, it is just the most fun book I've read maybe ever, I bought copies for three people for Christmas last year, I can't recommend it enough.

2 stars: I tend to really enjoy the books I read but one book I know I hated the ending for was Son of Rosemary, the sequel to Rosemary's Baby (the book the movie is based off of). At first it was great, a little weird but it's a weird story so whatever, then like the last few pages happen and (spoilers for this very old very unpopular book) it's just the biggest fuckin duex ex machina, literally, except instead of a god yanking the doomed character up out of the situation, she's plunged into hell but OH! JUST KIDDING! IT WAS ALL A FUCKING DREAM! EVEN! THE! FIRST! BOOK! IT'S JUST ALL NEGATED! Oh it made me furious I hated it. There is however a fun anagram that the author proposes and doesn't solve, unlike in the first book, and he encourages the reader to solve it, and I did (faster than he did apparently) after I finished the book in a rage, so that was fun.

Didn't finish: My friend and I each got a Pride and Prejudice book (essentially fanfic, but sold in stores), she got a vampire one and I got SUPPOSEDLY the smutiest P&P book out there, a sequel called Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife, but I could not get through it. It was trying to use the same language and only sometimes succeeding, and was setting up to be like a bodice ripper and all Dramatic (ie actually lowkey problematic), while also rehashing the original book as well as giving thorough backstory to characters when it was unnecessary, all the while trying to also be a sequel. It was just so much and none of it very well done OH and the smut wasn't even that descriptive, it glazed right over everything so it was like reading the scene through foggy glasses rather than seeing it clearly. Big bummer.

I'm tagging @momsopposed2theoccult, @silvermars, and @alittlemoretime and anyone else who wants to yell about books! Thank you @rosieposiepie again, this was so fun!!

[ladybirdwithoutdots]

do you really need to bring shipper wars in the Austen fandom too?

Full offense but people who deny Emma is in love with Mr Knightley and hate on him because they ship her with Harriet, and pretend she should’ve ended up with her, are bullshit.  I’m tired of these posts (including the Harriet stans whom I saw bashing even in some emma/knightley posts when fans of the latter are the first to make cute posts about Harriet too), and honestly, you all just make me feel very negative about Harriet and unable to truly appreciate her scenes with Emma.

Maybe I just don’t care about being a bitch but here’s what an Emma fan who is just tired of the anti Emma/Knightley crap honestly thinks about your nonsense:

Hating on the last Emma adaptation because Emma is in love with Mr Knightley and marries him in the end is as disingenuos and idiotic as hating a Pride and Prejudice adaptation because Darcy and Elizabeth are in love. Le duh!  You can ship him with Bingley and her with Charlotte (or Wickham, if that’s your mood I’m not judging shipping choices here) but if you watch a movie based on an Austen’s book you know what you are getting yourself into, especially when her canon romances tend to be very important plot elements for the protagonists and their character growth. 

I get it’s 2021 and hating all het romance makes some people feel woke and edgy, and I totally get alternative readings and things like that, but out of ALL Austen ships and all her female heroines, Emma is the one female character who doesn’t even need, neither want,  to get married and truly only does that in the end because she is in love.  Emma is the LEAST Austen heroine whose romance you should even question because she honestly only married the guy because of love and no other reason.   Furthermore, unlike most of romances from that time, the guy Emma marries isn’t just some random guy she has met two seconds ago, it actually is her best friend, someone she knows since years and the one person who knows her best and loves her in spite of her flaws. Austen was very forward for her time with their romance, especially given the fact her male love interest actually decides to live with Emma and her father in the end instead of doing what every married man had the right to do at the time (take his wife to his own home where she’d have little to no power). Knightley and Emma are the (original) best friends to lovers relationship. He’s the best friend Emma had loved from the beginning without realizing it. It’s one of the main points of her story and the great irony of the novel that she thinks love isn’t for her, and she had never been in love, but she already is in love with him without realizing it because of their friendship. I’m sorry bro but that had never been Harriet, and it seems hypocritical tbh for some of you to want to give Harriet the story that Mr Knightley has with Emma, all the while hating on him and the romance. Even with the last movie, you have people take quotes de Wilde said about Knightley and Emma (e.g., the one about the movie making you think about ‘the best friend you maybe should have kissed’) out of context to manipulate others into thinking she was talking about Harriet instead (and queer baiting, which would be homophobic)

On one hand, we really do need more stories that put an emphasis on female friendships too and on other relationships that aren’t just the romance. On the other hand, it’s completely useless for writers to try to give us that  (e.g. de Wilde in the last Emma) if everytime two characters care about each other and share screentime together, people claim that relationship (and all scenes that make perfect sense with a normal platonic relationship) must be romance and romance only. It’s almost as if some of you never had a friend and therefore believe that everytime a character cares about another character they must be romantically in love with them. It also makes me believe, more than anything, that romance is the only kind of love that exists or is important for many of you. And if that is the truth, why even bother with fictional friendships then? Why even complain when writers don’t give us that if we are unable to appreciate those relationships as something of equal importance with romance?

I really can’t take people serioustly when they overinflate Harriet and her relationship with Emma all the while they minimize Emma/Knightley’s mutual feelings.  I read people who apparently find it harder to erase Harriet’s baseless crushes on every guy who gives her attention, than erase the actual love story and feelings of the protagonist! Tbh, even if you wanted a gay adaptation of Emma (and not one that is that just for the sake of), it would make much more sense to simply turn Mr Knightley into a female character, therefore still respecting the canon couple and Emma’s character arc, than ship her with Harriet. The latter is a weak alternative and frankly baseless for me because the only things she and Emma have in common is the fact they are both girls and they have an ‘e’ in their name. Full stop. Intellectually, Harriet is no match for Emma and their ranks in society are so apart that their relationship could never ever be equal (and it never was). I don’t want to be harsh but tbh I was never convinced they are actually friends in the novel, and the last movie made it even worse for they emphasized Harriet’s blindness about Emma’s feelings, and how one sided that dynamic is for it’s just Emma who makes an effort to be a friend in the end. Let’s be real here, Harriet doesn’t even know Emma and never really acts as a friend to her, unless your definition of friendship is ‘someone who worships you, and pretends you are the best and right even when you aren’t, as long as they perceive you as a savior who can help them'.  That’s not what being a friend means to me. It speaks volumes to me that the one and only time movie-Harriet actually notices that Emma is a human being with flaws and feelings too is when she gets angry because Emma wants the same guy she wants. I don’t know if Austen’s ‘naive and completely clueless Harriet’ is worse or better than de Wilde’s version but the latter really emphasizes one of the biggest issues of Emma/Harriet even more, to me. As a book Emma fan, before an adaptations fan, I read all kinds of comments about this novel and character but honestly, I never read any real convincing argument why Harriet and Emma should be a couple instead of her and Knightley. Most of what I read boils down to people taking things out of context and/or claims that Harriet is ‘better’ for Emma just because she’s a woman and she agrees with her all the time, while Mr Knightley is the bad guy because he’s older than her (he’s only 37, btw) and criticizes her ( as if Emma doesn’t need someone to criticize her, and her character growth isn’t dependent on precisely that). I get some people wouldn’t like to have someone who is criticizing them but worshiping someone is =/= being their friend or appreciating their real qualities. I also read people point up how much Emma praises Harriet in the book as proof that she’s in love with her, but the same ignore the many instances, especially after Harriet tells her that she loves Mr Knightley, that truly show Emma’s real colors and how much she still considers Harriet her, and especially Mr Knightley’s, inferior to the extent she regrets their friendship and thinks Harriet is ‘uppity’ for thinking Mr Knightley would ruin his reputation to marry someone like her. When I read those arguments it seems, if anything, that people want to have the cake and eat it by saying that Austen’s own story doesn’t matter (and she doesn’t understand her characters’ real feelings) when it comes to the things those people don’t like (eg the fact Knightley is the one Emma is in love with and all the explicit hints about that ), all the while still selectively using some of her writing to support their alternative version of the story. Now with the last movie adaptation, it’s even worse for me. It’s telling that the two scenes people romanticize as pro Emma/Harriet are two phrases/moments that actually emphasize the bad side of their relationship, and why their friendship isn’t good for either of them. The first is the scene when Emma says she ‘wants to keep Harriet for herself’: not only there is nothing romantic about that ( that line is in the book too as well as Knightley’s ‘your infatuation is blinding you’. You are reading a book written in 1800 with modern goggles though, and that alone doesn’t really work) but that phrase should actually make you cringe for it emphasizes how selfish and manipulative Emma is by treating Harriet like her new pet project just because she’s lonely. She doesn’t care about the girl’s feelings for Robert Martin, and what is truly the best for her due to her rank (and how dangerous it actually is for Harriet to not marry and find someone who can offer her protection), even if it’s what she tells herself, she only cares about her own desire to have a new female friend because she lost Mrs Weston and she feels lonely and bored. It’s also true, though, that she is still lying to Mr Knightley too because she does actually want to match Harriet with Mr Elton, that which is obvious in the other scenes, but even that is an expression of Emma’s selfishness and not really a hint of her caring, let alone loving, Harriet as a human at this point. If you read the book, it’s particularly obvious given the fact that Emma isn’t blind about Harriet’s feelings for Robert Martin for she knows that her behavior is bad and the girl actually cares about the guy, but she manipulates her into thinking Mr Elton is better because it’s her choice and she prefers him (until he proposes to her, of course. Then she thinks Mr Elton is trash for being so arrogant to believe someone of his rank could marry her) The second phrase people romanticize is only in the last movie and it’s that annoying ‘I refused Robert Martin because of you’ phrase by Harriet later in the movie. I hate that because, once again, that phrase has nothing ‘romantic’ about it unless you obviously ignore the context and what is actually happening there. Harriet is being passive aggressive with Emma there, gaslighting her and blaming her for the loss of her first suitor BECAUSE HARRIET WANTS MR KNIGHTLEY for herself. Harriet is angry with Emma there because she realizes she loves Mr Knightley TOO and Emma has more chances than her. The most likely sentiment behind that flippant phrase for me is something along the lines of Harriet impulsively telling Emma to move aside and let her have Mr Knightley because she made her lose Robert Martin already. She is trying to make Emma feel guilty, subconsciously or deliberately, but this surely is how Emma herself perceives Harriet’s words too for the poor girl really thinks it makes her a bad person to accept Knightley’s proposal in spite of loving him back. Harriet made her believe she was stealing her man and yet, AND YET, had Harriet been a real friend, to begin with, she should’ve realized Emma’s feelings for him way before she deluded herself into thinking the guy wanted her. But Harriet never cares about Emma’s feelings and even their reconciliation in the end is all, still, about what Emma needs to do for her. Not a word from Harriet about being happy for her friend too. Nothing.

Listen, I really appreciate de Wilde’s attempt to make the Harriet/Emma dynamic better than it is in either the novel or other adaptations, even if it personally doesn’t convince me it’s friendship. But I get it. Like I said at the beginning, it’s important that movies display different kinds of love too beside romance and if you can’t do that with characters like Emma who are the protagonist then when you can even do that? I think it was valid for her and Catton to want to emphasize the fact that Emma, at her core, is truly young and lonely and she doesn’t have friends in the truest sense of the word (Mr Knightley is one, of course, but their point is more about her having a female companion too whom Emma could do more ‘girl’ things she can’t do with her husband or father) but, honestly, I maintain no adaptation ever truly got their relationship right. No one.  Overrating them and pretending that they are best friends forever when there is no substance for that is as incorrect as an interpretation of Austen’s writing as it is treating Harriet as a silly girl Emma barely tolerates. I appreciate the movie shows Emma’s conflict about Harriet when Knightley proposes to her because most of adaptations don’t do that: in the book she really, for a moment, feels so bad for Harriet and feels simultanously happy Mr Knightley loves her but also bad for taking the guy Harriet wants. She is no hero who wants to give up about him to let Harriet have the guy instead, though, but it isn’t like she doesn’t care either. She does and it’s a source of anguish for Emma and part of her character growth that she actually cares and feels empathy for Harriet.

However, if you want Emma to have a real female friend that’s not Harriet and that’s not really the story Austen wrote and the role she gave to Harriet. Like many academics pointed up, like many of Emma’s ‘mirrors’ in the story, Harriet is put there by Austen to emphasize Emma’s immaturity at the beginning and the fact she deliberately doesn’t choose her equals as friends and picks Harriet, instead, as her new pet project because her inferiority makes her easier to manipulate and, like Mr Knightley very eloquently points up, she makes Emma feel superior and more accomplished than she is. Emma doesn’t want to be friends with Jane, for example, because not only she could be more her equal but she actually does see her as superior in the aspects that make Emma the most vulnerable and insecure.

It’s great the movie gave more space to Emma’s relationship with Harriet, and I get that if you want to put the spotlight on female friendship too it’s either Harriet or Mrs Weston but also, let’s not pretend the movie wasn’t focused very much on her romance with Mr Knightley too, perhaps more than other adaptations did. People commend this adaptation for showing his feelings for her more and it’s true, but I will also argue that this movie does emphasize her feelings for him more than adaptations usually do for you really see Emma’s feelings and jealousy towards him before she even realizes her feelings. It’s obvious since their first scene when she’s waiting for him and runs to her piano because she wants to get noticed by him. Her breath constantly hitches when he’s close to her or because of her feelings for him, and she definitely reacts to dancing with him. She may not know her feelings from the start, she might be in her own ‘work in progress’ to figure everything out, but the movie makes it obvious to me that she loves him. If there is any adaptation where you want to be disingenuos about their chemistry and deny their romance, this really isn’t the one tbh. Look, if you want to headcanon Emma as bisexual you’ll find me agreeing with you, but pro LGBT readings and actual representation doesn’t mean, for me, shipping two characters together just because they are the same gender and the writers make them care about each other a bit, or give them screentime. Like I said at the beginning, if I wanted a gay adaptation of Emma I’d rather make Mr Knightley a woman than ship Emma with Harriet or Mrs Weston or Jane. Because regardless their genders, it’s the Knightley character the one Emma loves and wants to be with, and it’s this character who truly represents her best friend and the person who knows her best. It’s Knightley the only one who cares about her well being so much that when she is being the worst version of herself and no one cares, he is the one willing to tell her even if he hates doing that and he feels he’s destroying every chance he has to make her love him back. It’s the Knightley character who ultimately inspires her to be a better person and loves her in spite of her flaws.

[sodalitefully]

Enter freely and of your own will [GNR, Sluff AU]

I know, I know, I've written vampire AUs before… Several times.  But I had to write something about what a nerd Slash is for vampire fiction!  Mostly inspired by interviews Slash gave after gnr covered Sympathy For The Devil for Interview With A Vampire (so any digs at the movie adaptation are based on Slash’s opinion, not mine – I’ve never seen it!).  Occasional mentions of blood and stuff, but not particularly graphic.  This fic is expanding on an AU I originally drew here.

~~~~

In my mind, it all played out like the plot of a paranormal romance novel.  I’ve gotten familiar with those lately, thanks to the collection hidden in the bottom shelves of Slash’s library, buried below the gothic horror classics, the crime thrillers, and about a mountain of nonfiction.  Hell, I could probably write my own!  “Tall blonde unexpectedly falls for rock and roll bad boy with a dark secret,” yeah, the readers would eat that up.  Of course, our love story didn’t really start when the unsuspecting protagonist moved to a new city, or when the leather-clad love interest showed off his supernatural shredding skills.  No, I’d say it started a couple years later, when I found out Slash’s other deep, dark, embarrassing secret.   

It wasn’t a dark and stormy night… but it was a movie night at my place, a tradition for Slash and I.  Whenever we needed a break from the so-called rockstar lifestyle, we’d get together for a night in, smoke some pot and put on a movie. Slash laid back on my couch while I dug through a cabinet packed with VHS tapes and listed off a few options: 

“Let’s see, we have Jurassic Park, Alien, Interview With a Vampire – Uh, sorry, I guess that would be weird huh?”  Slash made a sour face. 

“Ugh.  I hate that movie, it’s such a bad adaptation. Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, seriously?” 

“Wait,” I dropped The Empire Strikes Back and Blazing Saddles onto the growing heap of tapes and sat back on my heels to look at Slash in surprise. "You’ve seen it before?” 

“Uh…” Vampires may not be able to blush but I'd known Slash long enough to tell when he’s flustered.   

“And you’ve read the book?” 

“… Yes?”  I laughed, Slash ducked and hid his face, obviously feeling self-conscious, but I didn’t mean to laugh at him.  It was just… 

I’d assumed that a real-life vampire would roll their eyes at the cliche, over-romanticized movie interpretations of their kind.  Instead, I learned of Slash’s (nearly) indiscriminate love for all things vampire, anything from Carmilla to Buffy The Vampire Slayer.  He was a sucker (hah, get it?) for dripping fangs, swishing capes, even those crazy accents, ever since he was a kid.  And I can’t lie, it was pretty endearing.  I wasn’t in love with him yet, but the more he told me about his obsession, the more warm and tingly I felt, charmed by how genuine he was – Hell, I barely even teased him about it!  Somehow, that conversation felt even more personal than finding out he was a damn vampire.  I was really touched that he felt comfortable sharing his interests with me, that he trusted me with his softer, nerdier, more romantic side.   

I resisted the temptation to press for more details that night, but a month or so later, I caught him in the act!  I remember waking up in the afternoon after crashing at his place so late it was early the night before.  I wandered around his big, spooky house until I found Slash curled up in one of his fancy antique armchairs, his legs dangling over the armrest and a paperback book cradled in his lap.  I couldn’t make out the curlicued script on the cover, but from the captivated look on his face it was a favorite – his eyes were bright as they darted across the page, and his lips curled into a warm, gentle smile. 

I couldn’t stand to disturb him, so I snuck off before he noticed me in the doorway, and headed down the hall to the room he’d transformed into a tiny library – The man had a library in his house; between that and the subtly gothic decor it was hard to believe I never noticed that Slash was playing up the vampire aesthetic, consciously or not!  Anyway, I poked around until I found where he hid his collection of vampire lit, and snatched a few that were, shall we say, not quite as acclaimed as Dracula or even The Vampire Chronicles.  I don’t remember the titles, but there were a couple paperback romances and a horror novel with a badass-looking dude on the cover. 

I had to see what all the fuss was about, you know?  Yeah, this kind of thing wasn’t exactly up my alley, but Slash usually had good taste, so I figured it couldn’t hurt to check it out.  Plus, if it was important to Slash, I wanted to know about it!  And not just the well-known classics either; I wanted the guilty pleasures, I wanted to see what it was that could make Slash smile like that when no one was watching. 

I’ll be honest, it wasn’t bad.  I wasn’t a big reader at the time, but I raced through the horror novel in just two days, and trust me, I barely slept the night in between!  The trashy romance was more enjoyable than I would ever admit; even with all the cliches and melodrama there was something compelling about unraveling the tangled web of forbidden love in a world full of the supernatural. 

At this point, I was very cautiously beginning to entertain the idea that I might see Slash as more than just a buddy and a bandmate.  As friends, were were closer than ever, hardly spent a day apart, and I was beginning to notice things that I hadn’t noticed before.  Things like the way he always smiled at my lame jokes, the way he leaned on my shoulder when he was pretending to be drunk, the way he tossed his hair on stage… And I couldn’t help wondering whether Slash identified more with the heroine or the love interest.  Did he want to be the cool, mysterious vampire lover, or the unsuspecting protagonist who gets drawn into an alluring new world? 

I got my answer a couple months later, in town again after a leg on the road. It was a steaming hot summer day back in L.A., and Slash was dozing on his couch. This wasn’t unusual in and of itself, Slash’s sleep schedule had been fucked for as long as I'd known him. No, what made this instance significant was that I was also on the couch, reclined with my feet over the armrest and Slash draped across my chest. Tales From The Crypt played at a murmur on a brand-new TV set, but I wasn’t paying any attention. 

See, at this point I’d recently learned that, when Slash focused hard enough, he could hear a living person’s blood pulsing in their veins and detect changes in body temperature.  And that had me wondering: Could he tell that my heart beat faster when he leaned against me on stage?  Could he tell that my ears got warm every time he turned a smile my way? 

Could he tell how much I was affected by his weight on top of me?   

He was like a huge cat in my lap, relaxed from head to toe.  If you paid attention, you could tell that he was breathing more slowly that an ordinary human should be and his bare skin was slightly cool.  Other than that he looked completely normal… Except for his teeth.  His mouth was slightly open, allowing his pointed, knife-sharp teeth to scrape against his lower lip. 

To Slash’s chagrin, they weren't gleaming white, perfectly straight fangs; instead they more closely resembled a shark’s jaw, crowded with small flesh-tearing blades.  It was rare to see them exposed, Slash was careful to limit himself to tight-lipped smiles and mumbled dialogue whenever his secret was at risk. Even in private he was self-conscious about it, and I considered myself lucky when he grinned openly in my presence. 

“Hey, Slash?”   

“…Hmm?” Languidly, he shifted until he was looking up at me.  Midafternoon sun leaked through the blinds brightly enough for me to make out a hint of red in his eyes, the other (un)dead giveaway that was usually obscured by his sedately lidded gaze.   

"You know how you said the other day that you have really strong senses? Well... I was wondering what other, uh, non-human traits you have. How true are the myths about vampires, really?” 

“Well… Hm.  My eyes are pretty sensitive to daylight.  And technically I’m nocturnal.  But I don’t have fangs, I don’t really look like a vampire and I don’t have superpowers.” I swear to god, he pouted a little.  "All things considered I didn’t really get any of the cool stuff." 

“No super-strength?  Or mind reading? Can you shapeshift into a bat?” 

“Don’t you think I’d tell you if I could turn into a bat?  At least I don’t have any of those stupid weaknesses, I can be in the sun and eat garlic and whatever.” He paused ponderously. “…You know, I might be immortal, I was around a long time before Tony and Ola took me in.  Guess I’ll find out in a few decades.” 

“That would be pretty cool.” 

“Yeah, maybe." 

“So... do you enthrall your victims?” I prodded, in a spooky, menacing voice belied by my goofy grin. 

Slash snorted a laugh and shook his head at my antics. “No, I can’t do that either.  Well, I don’t know, do you feel enthralled?” 

I laughed awkwardly and counted my blessings when Slash didn't notice that my unspoken answer was an empathetic Yes. 

Slash chuckled with me, then sighed.  “Fuck, I wish vampires like that were real, though…” he confessed softly. 

“Like what?” 

“You know, badass, seductive, awesome powers…” He waved a hand toward a pinup poster on the wall with a corset and fangs, then let his head fall back to my chest.  He mumbled into my shirt, “Is it really so much to ask for a sexy vampire to come and sweep me off my feet?” 

“Slash, I hate to tell you this, but…” I couldn’t make it through the sentence with a straight face. 

He swatted my bicep – pretty hard too, was he sure he didn’t have super-strength? “Fuck you, Duff, you know what I mean." 

And, yeah, dreaming of being wooed by a beautiful, badass, intelligent and darkly mysterious vampire?  Who appeared in my life and changed it forever, who blew me away with his capability and his passion?  Who could captivate me with just a look? 

Yeah. Believe me, I could relate.

~~~~

Happy Halloween! 

[krazyclue]

Italian in Name Only

I am a mixtape of European influences, but the two biggest are Italian and Irish, so it's maybe ironic that I've never been much for family. Not hostile toward it, more like disinterested.

 Italians and the Irish have the reputation of being devoted to their families. If there's nothing quite like a good Catholic upbringing mixed with poverty to convince people to have loads of children, then being middle-class and an only child is the antidote. Never wanted children, never wanted to be part of a family, didn't even really have a notion of them. I just never thought about it.

 Not until lately anyway, and I do not mean in the sense of having children myself. I mean of being suddenly conscious of a growing need to know what my origins are, to see how I somehow fit into the larger concept of a family. When my ancestors arrived in America, what they did once they got here, and how that differs from or mirrors what other families have found. This desire might have something to do with the pandemic and all that time spent alone when the world was shut down—the isolation making me want to reconnect and do so on a deeper level.  

Most of my knowledge of Italy is from the movies, design, and fashion. My understanding of Ireland is even more limited since I spent my only visit there wandering between pubs listening to white guys with 'dreads spinning drum'n'bass. I don't speak any Italian beyond a stray "Ciao, Bella" or "Vaffanculo." I know the second one because English soccer fans used it in a taunting chant whenever they played Italian teams ("Where were you in World War 2? VA-FFAN-CULO!!"). My father spoke fluent Italian when he was a child but forgot most of it in adulthood.  My immediate family is small and spread by time, distance, and some animosity; I know very little about most of the members of my extended one. If I have cultural heritage, it's hard to know what it is.

 I am not at all sure what made me start to think this way. It could have been watching the HBO adaptation of My Brilliant Friend, based on Elena Ferrante's novels. The show is a portrait of two women growing up in 50's Naples. We see their lives against a backdrop of a country coming fitfully to life after the devastation following the Second World War, its progress held back by repressive patriarchy. Grim moments often give way to more ecstatic ones before doubling back again the other way, leading to emotionally vivid set pieces that capture the personal and historical in the same scene. The score by Max Richter alone can induce yearning and seeing the young, very inexperienced cast gradually develop into compelling actors makes the whole experience unforgettable, like the best work of the Italian neorealist cinema.

 But My Brilliant Friend is set in Naples, and my family is from Tuscany. Italy, like the States, is a country of regions that do not always like each other, the north versus the south, and my ancestors would have been culturally different from the show's characters. Still, carried by the show, I find myself more and more drawn to thinking about Italy—I have roots in Germany and France as well, but for some reason, Italy is the country for which I feel the strongest connection. 

 Possibly I am entirely led by my stomach. Early in the pandemic, I started getting into Italian cooking, going carefully through a copy of Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hasan, who you might call the Julia Child of that countries' cuisine. I have a copy of Silver Spoon too, a compendium of real recipes from Italian families, from which I've made a few dishes, and I have my grandmother's pasta maker, and somewhere on an index card her hand-written ravioli recipe. It took all day for her and my grandfather to make that recipe; she stirred the slow simmering meat and prepared the ingredients, and my grandfather painstakingly sealed each ravioli with a fork.

 My German grandfather may have loved his pig's feet and pickled herring, but that obsession thankfully was not passed onto me, nor, as far as I know, to anyone else in my family. I might like a good stout too, even some Irish stew on occasion, but it's Italian food that captures my imagination. I am only beginning to know how each region has shaped that cuisine and the influences that created so many varied dishes. 

 I have not kept up with my family. I hardly know most of them, and outside of my parents and my uncle, I am not in touch with any other relatives. I forget the birthdays of even the closest friends and family; I must mark them on a calendar, or I'll miss the day altogether. My uncle has become something of the family historian and has been sending emails to nearly a dozen family relations. While I do recognize many of the names, there are far more that I do not remember and at least two I only know of by reputation. There are also people I met on that list, only once or twice, and those I saw most often were back when my grandparents were making their famous ravioli to go along with the Thanksgiving turkey, and that was a long time ago now.

 Those emails coincide with my awakening interest in my origins. I know a few more names now: my great grandparents Enea and Italia Lorenzetti emigrated here in 1916 and had two sons; my grandmother's dislike for Enea, a man with old-world beliefs who thought women shouldn't drive, my grandfather's brother, who threatened to walk out if Enea told them how to run their business; a rift with the Catholic Church because a priest wouldn't baptize Enea's and Italia's daughter unless they paid him an indulgence, and that the girl died soon after.

I've seen family photos, the people captured in those images ghost-like in those black and white pictures, and since I am such a mongrel, I do not look at all like them. Of course, I'd like to know more, but really, what I want is a better sense of what Italy is and why I feel so drawn toward it, not only the particulars of my one family's experience. I will start getting to know my family, but that is only the beginning of reconnecting, not its conclusion.

As I read and study (and hopefully get to make that first trip to Italy after the pandemic canceled my trip scheduled for last October), I want to know Italy without romanticizing it. You can convince yourself that life is better "over there" when it's probably the same or worse. Okay, maybe better too, possibly much better. But I don't want to become an obsessive Italy fan. Or fall for obvious cliches—about how Italy is a place where people know how to live. Italians are all passionate and stylish, speaking with their hands, operatic and over the top, and all the other hot-blooded Italian tropes. I'm sure there's some truth there as well.

But Italy also had one of the worst Covid-19 outbreaks and still struggles with a government, often in disarray, that cannot impede the dominance of the Camorra clans in Naples. And Italy still hasn't quite overcome the legacy of Mussolini: a far-right movement led by Matteo Salvini remains threateningly close to taking power, a rise aided by racism and xenophobia. I do not want to idealize or unfairly condemn the place, but rather know Italy and its' people for whatever they are, so I can see how it shaped myself and my family. I want to take pictures in the streets, wander without a plan until I got lost and needed one. Maybe discover my operatic personality.

 Coming out of this lockdown, old age not quite here but getting closer, as in just around the corner smoking a cigarette close, with the world isolated from itself, without any family of my own; maybe that is what sparked this need to connect with a sense of place, a sense of family. That's what being "white" can mean—it's when you've become so absorbed into American culture that your ancestry seems like it started around about 1980 (in my case anyway). I used to joke that my cultural heritage was shopping malls and Back to the Future movies at the multiplex.

 I think that has some advantages to being part of a well-defined community or coming from a large extended family. If you have no family, you won't be assigned an identity by what they think you should be. You won't have as many expectations about your choices before you get to choose for yourself.

 The problem is that you also have no sense of history or your heritage or how your small part fits into it the larger story. You are isolated. You can claim America, the nation of immigrants, but you make a claim not knowing where your people came from, and that might be the worst side effect of assimilation: forgetting the past. I've never known much about mine. I regret letting so much time slip before realizing family and heritage are so important. Now I am going to do my best to embrace my past, whatever it may be. 

[aion-rsa]

The Public Enemy Solidified Gang Rule Under James Cagney for 90 Years

https://ift.tt/3vfQifQ

William Wellman’s The Public Enemy (1931) turns 90 this weekend. When the film first came out, a theater in Times Square showed it nonstop, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The movie marks the true beginning of gangster movies as a genre. Mervyn LeRoy’s Little Caesar may have hit theaters first, but The Public Enemy set the pattern, and James Cagney nailed the patter. Not just the street talk either; he also understood its machine gun delivery. His Tommy Powers is just a hoodlum, never a boss. He is a button man at best, even if he insisted his suits have six buttons.

The Public Enemy character wasn’t even as high up the ladder as Paul Sorvino’s caporegime Paul Cicero in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. But Cagney secured the turf Edward G. Robinson’s Rico Bandello took a bullet to claim in Little Caesar, and for the rest of his career Cagney never let it go.

Some would argue genre films began in 1931. Besides mob movies, the year introduced the newspaper picture with Lewis Milestone’s The Front Page and John Cromwell’s Scandal Sheet; Universal Pictures began an unholy run of horror classics via Tod Browning’s Dracula and James Whale’s Frankenstein, with the two turning Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff into household names; and Howard Hawks’ Scarface would land the knockout for the gangster genre, even if it didn’t get released until 1932.

Sadly, the classic “Gangster Film” run only lasted one production season, from 1930 to 1931, and less than 30 films were made during it. Archie Mayo’s The Doorway to Hell started the ball rolling in 1930, when it became a surprise box office hit. It stars Lew Ayres as the top mug, with Cagney as his sidekick. For fans of pre-Code Hollywood, it is highly recommended. It includes a kidnapping scene which results in the death of a kid on the street. Without a speck of blood or any onscreen evidence, it is cinematically shocking in its impact.

Both Little Caesar and The Public Enemy earned their street cred, defying the then-toothless 1930 Motion Picture Production Code, which preceded the Hays Code. After New York censors cut six scenes from The Public Enemy to clear it for release, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) set further guidelines for the proper cinematic depiction of crime.

Public Enemy director Wellman was an expert in multiple genres. He spit out biting satires like Nothing Sacred (1937) and Roxie Hart (1942), and captured gritty, dark realities in The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) and Story of G.I. Joe (1945). He won his only Oscar for A Star Is Born (1937). The Public Enemy is the first example of what would be his trademark: stylish cinematography and clever camera-work. The dark suspense he captures is completely different from the look of German expressionism. It captured the overcast shadows of urban reality and would influence the look of later noir films. His main character would inspire generations of actors.

“That’s just like you, Tom Powers. You’re the meanest boy in town.”

Orson Welles lauded James Cagney as “maybe the greatest actor who ever appeared in front of a camera.” Will Rogers said watching Cagney perform was “like a bunch of firecrackers going off all at once.” The New York City born performer explodes in this movie. Even in black and white, Cagney’s red hair flares through the air like sulfur on a match. It turns out to be a slow burn, which will reach its ultimate climax in 1949’s White Heat. The Public Enemy is loaded with top talent, but you can’t take your eyes off Cagney. Not even for a second. You might miss some tiny detail, like the flash of a grin, a wink, or a barely perceptible glare.

Cagney had a simple rule to acting: All you had to do was to look the other person straight in the eyes and say your lines. “But mean them.” In The Public Enemy, the characters communicate without lines. When Tom and Matt Doyle (Edward Woods) sneak a peek into Larry the Limp’s casket, we understand this is the first time the two young thugs lost someone their own age. The scene barely implies how fortunate they are not to be in that box, but their curiosity is as palpable as the loss of their last shred of innocence.

Cagney was originally cast as Matt, and scenes were shot with him in the role. The parts were switched mid-production, but they didn’t reshoot the flashback scenes, making it look like the pair swapped bodies between 1909 and 1915. It’s a shame because Frankie Darro, who plays the young Matt, made a career out of playing baby face Cagney, and later joined the East Side Kids franchise.

Former “Our Gang” actor Frank Coghlan Jr. took on the role of young Tom. He takes the lashes from his cop father’s belt, backtalking him the whole time. Tom Powers is reprehensible. He never says thank you and doesn’t shake hands. He delights in the violence and sadism. Powers doesn’t go into crime because of poverty; he just can’t be contained. Cagney’s mobster mangles, manhandles, maims and murders, and still needs more room in his inseam. 

Dames, Molls, and Grapefruits

Besides defying the ban on romanticizing criminals, both The Public Enemy and Little Caesar broke sexual codes. There are explicit signs that Rico Bandello represses his sexuality in Caesar. Scenes between him and his friend Joe, and his gunman Otera, thinly veil homoerotic overtones. Public Enemy’s Powers, by contrast, subtly encourages the gay tailor who is openly hitting on him.

There are strong indications Putty Nose (Murray Kinnell) is grooming Tommy and Matt for more than just fenced goods. Look at the way Putty sticks his ass in Powers’ face while he is shooting pool. Putty Nose’s execution at the piano is creepily informed by the unspoken sins between the men. Tommy relishes the kill.

However, Tommy doesn’t relish being manhandled when he’s too drunk to notice. While the gang goes to the mattresses in the movie’s gang war, Tommy is raped by Jane (Mia Marvin), his boss Paddy’s girl. Powers protests the best he can, but the camera angles leave no doubt. Tommy wakes up hungover, horrified, and feeling impotent. Matt, however, has no trouble getting “busy” with his girlfriend Mamie, played by Joan Blondell, in one of the scenes trimmed by the censors.  Blondell, Jean Harlow, and Mae Clarke, who plays Tommy’s girlfriend Kitty, represent a glitzy cross-section of white Roaring Twenties glamour. In the opening credits, when Harlow and Blondell smile at the camera, male audience members of the time blushed.

Harlow was Hollywood’s original “Blonde Bombshell,” starring in the movie that coined the term. Her earthy comic performances would make her a major star at MGM, but she was a dud to critics of The Public Enemy. Hers was the only part which was criticized, and the reviewers were brutal, declaring her voice untrained and her presence boring.

Harlow’s greatest asset had to be contained within the Pre-Code era. Straddled with a wordy part as a slumming society dame, she is directed to slow her lines to counter the quick patter of the rest of the cast. Yet Harlow uses that to her benefit in the film’s best moment of sexual innuendo. While telling Tommy about “the men I’ve known,” she pauses, and appears to be calculating them in her head before she says, “And I’ve known dozens of them.” When an evening alone with Tommy is cut short, Gwen’s exasperation over the coitus interruptus is palpable. Members of the Catholic Legion of Decency probably had to go to confession after viewing the film for slicing.

Most people know The Public Enemy for the famous grapefruit scene where Powers pushes a grapefruit into his girlfriend’s face. “I wish you was a wishing well,” he warns, “so that I could tie a bucket to you and sink ya.” Tommy treats women like property. They are status symbols, the same as clothes or cars. Kitty’s passive-aggressive hints at commitment get on Tom’s nerves. He can only express himself through violence. There are rumors Cagney, who would go on to rough up Virginia Mayo in White Heat and brutalize Doris Day in Love Me or Leave Me, didn’t warn Clarke he was going to use her face as a juicer. According to the autobiography Cagney by Cagney, Clarke’s ex-husband Lew Brice loved the scene so much he watched it a few times a day, timing his entrance into the theater to catch it and leave.

Both actors have said it was staged as a practical joke to see how the film crew would react. It wasn’t meant to make the final cut. Wellman told TCM he added it because he always wanted to do that to his wife. The writer reportedly wrote the scene as a kind of wish-fulfilling fantasy.

The screenplay was written by Harvey F. Thew. It was based on Beer and Blood by John Bright and Kubec Glasmon. The unpublished novel fleshed out press accounts of the bootlegging Northside gang leaders, Charles Dion “Deanie” O’Banion, Earl “Hymie” Weiss, and Louis “Two-Gun” Alterie. Cagney based his Tommy Powers character on O’Banion and Altiere. Edward Woods was doing his take on Weiss. The book reflected the headlines in the Chicago papers, which reported Weiss smashed an omelet into his girlfriend’s face.

Read more

Movies

Al Capone: 9 Actors Who Played the Original Scarface

By Tony Sokol

Movies

Key Largo, Lauren Bacall & The Definitive Post-War Film

By David Crow

The Trouble Squad

The Public Enemy borrowed from the day’s headlines in other ways too. Hymie Weiss was assassinated in October 1926. It was the first reported “machine-gun nest” murder. It is recreated in the killing of Matt Doyle. While shooting the sequence, Cagney ducked real machine gun fire to bring authenticity to the scene. Also taken from real life is the fact that after O’Banion was killed in ‘24, Alterie’s first reaction was to do public battle with the killers. This is similar to Tommy’s final shootout at Schemer Burns’ nightclub headquarters.

Leslie Fenton’s dashing mob captain Nails Nathan (“born Samuel”) flashes the greatest grin in mob movie history. He is based on Samuel “Nails” Morton, a member of O’Banion’s mob. Both “Nails” were driven to their coffins the way it is depicted in The Public Enemy. The real Morton died in a riding accident in 1923, and “Two-Gun” Alterie and some of the other gang members went back to the stables, rented the horse which kicked Nails in the head, and shot the animal. Mario Puzo may have been inspired by this scene when he wrote The Godfather. It is not only tie to the Francis Ford Coppola movie. Oranges have as much vitamin C as grapefruits. Another similarity between the two films is the threat of being kidnapped from the hospital by a rival gang.

The Powers brothers’ relationship vaguely echoes the one between war hero Michael and Sonny Corleone, who believes, as his father does, soldiers were “saps” to risk their lives for strangers. Donald Cook, who played Mike Powers, didn’t pull any punches on the set. In the scene where he knocks Tom into the table before going off to war, he really connects. Wellman told Cook to do it without warning so he could get that look of surprise. Cook broke one of Cagney’s teeth, but Cagney stayed in character and finished the scene.

“It is a wicked business.”

After the stock market crash, get-rich-quick schemes seemed the only way through the Great Depression. The gangster was an acceptable headline hero during Prohibition because the law was unpopular with the press. But after 1929, the gangster became the scapegoat villain. The Public Enemy was the ninth highest grossing film of 1931. But the genre lost its appeal after April of that year, as studios pumped out pale imitations and audiences got tired of the saturation, according to the book Violence and American Cinema, edited by J. David Slocum. Religious and civic groups accused Hollywood of romanticizing crime and glamorizing gangsters.

The Public Enemy opens with a dire warning: Don’t be a gangster. Hoodlums and terrorists of the underworld should not be glamorized. The only MPAA rule the film didn’t break was portraying an alliance between organized crime and politics. The studios passed the films off as cautionary tales which were meant to deflate the gangster’s appeal by ridiculing their false heroism.

Through this hand-wringing, however, Cagney turns false heroics on its head with the comic brilliance of a Mack Sennett short. Stuck without a gun, he robs a gun store armed with nothing but moxie. Powers never rises in the organization. He takes orders and whatever the boss says is a good cut, only asking for more money once from Putty Nose. Unlike Rico, who rose to be boss among bosses, Powers has no power to lose. This is just the first gig he landed since he was a regular “ding ding” driving a streetcar, and it connected with audiences like a sock on the button. They identified with the scrappy killer, and it surprised them.

Even Gwen notices Tommy is “very different, and it isn’t only a difference in manner and outward appearances. It’s a difference in basic character.” Strict Freudians might lay this on his mother (Beryl Mercer), the greatest enabler Cagney will see until White Heat. Ma Powers’ little boy is a budding psychopath knocking off half the North Side, but look at the head on his beer. For audiences at the time, Tom was the smiling, fresh-scrubbed face of evil. He is consistently unsympathetic but likable from the moment he hits the opening credits.

Like Malcom McDowell’s Alex in A Clockwork Orange, he is the fiend’s best friend. Even if it is Tommy’s fault his best pal Matt gets killed. While Cagney spent his career ducking his “you dirty, double-crossing, rat” line from Taxi, the actor wasn’t afraid to play one in Powers. He’s not a rat in the sense he’d snitch on anyone. He’s the last of the pack who sticks it out for his pals when his back is up against the wall.

A Hail of Bullets

Tommy Powers goes by this credo: live fast, die young, and leave a corpse so riddled with bullets, not even his mother can look at his body when he’s done. But then, no one can end a film like Cagney. He’s danced down the White House stairs in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), been rolled across the concrete steps of a city church in The Roaring Twenties (1939), and was blown to kingdom come in White Heat. He gets two death scenes in The Public Enemy, a rain-soaked climax, and a denouement as scary as The Mummy. Tommy only brings one gun to the gang fight, and by the time he hits the pavement, he’s got more holes in him than the city sewage system.

“I ain’t so tough,” Tommy says on his final roll into the gutter. Cagney’s first professional job was in a musical drag act on the Vaudeville circuit, and he called himself a “song and dance man” long after retirement. For The Public Enemy, conductor David Mendoza led the Vitaphone Orchestra through such period hits as “Toot Toot Tootsie (Goodbye),” “Smiles,” and “I Surrender Dear.” But the song “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” is the one which lingers in the memory. Martin Scorsese has cited it as a reason his films are so filled with recognizable music.

Street violence comes with a natural soundtrack. Transistor radios accompany takedowns. Boom boxes blast during shakedowns. Car stereos boost the bass during drive-by shootings. In The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, mobsters feed quarters into a jukebox to cover up sounds of a beating.

In The Godfather, Part II, a street band plays traditional Italian songs while Vito Corleone puts bullets in the neighborhood Black Hand, Don Fanucci. The last thing we hear in the abrupt close to the mob series The Sopranos is a Journey song. The first thing Tommy’s mother does when she hears her boy is coming home from the hospital is drop a needle on a record.

The ending leaves us with two questions: Who killed Tommy, and what’s his brother going to do about it? We figure whoever did the job on Powers was probably a low-level button man from Schemer’s rival outfit. Probably even lower down the ladder than Tommy, and on his way up, until another Tommy comes along. Crime only pays in the movies, Edward G. Robinson often joked.

Mike’s reaction to the bandaged corpse is ambiguous. He’s already shown outward signs of the trauma following the horrors of war. Is he clenching his fists in anguish or anger? Is he broken by the battlefield or marching off in vengeance, a soldier on one last duty? Cook’s exit can go either way.

After 90 years, The Public Enemy is still fresh. It’s aged better than Little Caesar or Scarface. Cagney wouldn’t play a gangster again until 1938, but the image is etched so deeply in the persona, audiences forget the vagaries of villainy Hollywood could spin, and the range of characters Cagney could play. He and the film continue to influence filmmakers, inform culture, and surprise audiences. Tommy Powers was just a mug, but those streets are still his.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

The post The Public Enemy Solidified Gang Rule Under James Cagney for 90 Years appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3xnjfs7

[english-y]

Final Draft

Probably...

Sofhia J. Jaime

J. Doyle

ENGL 1302-70L

2020/09/27

Fan Fiction Writing

     ‘FanFiction’ is defined to be, “Fiction written by a fan of, and featuring characters from, particular TV series, movie, etc.” according to the Oxford languages website while true, fanfiction is much more than that. Fanfiction is the creation of alternate universes, plots, characters, characterizations, and many other aspects of popular books, shows, movies, etc.  these authors rewrite stories or continue them after their final conclusion. With that comes a lot of work, considering the high demand for this type of media. Websites such as AOS, Tumblr, WattPad, FanFiction.net, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and a plethora of other pages that thrive from this form of entertainment. Authors of these works often gain a massive following on their social media as the popularity for this medium grows. Sometimes the final writings are more complex than its original, currently the longest fanfiction in existence have 4,102,217 words and 220 chapter which are still being regularly updated. Yet, most often fan fiction is disregarded and frowned upon by the majority of readers(!). Fanfiction carries a prejudice that unfortunately discredits the author and the work as a whole. Commonly, it is believed to be the work of desperate teens from the ages 13+ who over romanticize book characters, movie characters or people in the public eye. Though this essay I want to explore the reality of this type of writing and how its misrepresentation causes it to be devalued at surface level even though this writing has shown bountiful benefits to aspiring authors.

     In Not All Those Who Wonder are Lost by Cecilia Aragon she found that most authors who write fanfiction felt similarly “Many of the authors we interviewed admitted they started off as poor writers but said they’d improved enough to consider writing professionally.” Three of the authors that I had interviewed planned on authoring their own novels and all three of them have their stories already in the making. In fact, Admin Kim of RightSockJin has her story already written but as a fanfiction she plans on editing it to form it into a cohesive novel of which she would like to publish. Also, Shannon of Kpopfanfictiontrash she is working on her young adult novel with hopes to publish soon.

     “The most recent report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress indicated that 73% of US students in grades 8 and 12 lack proficiency in writing.” Maybe instead of overlooking medium we could use it to help students work on their writing, show them how to develop plot by dissecting a prewritten story and writing it in their own likeness. We could even help students develop a writing style by having them mimic the style of an established author. There is so much we can do to help interest students and interest them in writing but the masses refuse to look passed the surface of fanfiction reading and writing.

      Recently, my friends and I have started a blog where we upload our personal writing. From what I have noticed, my writing has matured substantially. My characterization, vocabulary, problem solving skills, and many other aspects of this creative medium have grown to something I am prouder to show. Even though I do not plan to pursue a career in writing this has given me to confidence I need for general writing, for schoolwork and for jobs I hope to obtain in the future. Growing up I never enjoyed reading or writing, I was insecure about my abilities because I grew up bilingual, which caused some teachers to treat me unfairly  The friends who are writing alongside me do plan on publishing novels, and through this type of writing I have noticed that they were able to polish their skills and develop a writing style. Though, I have noticed that they have not been able to feely talk about their writing because people do not take their writing seriously because it is fanfiction.

     I was able to conduct a survey asking people about their opinions concerning fanfiction. From what I have gathered most people are turned off by what they perceive fanfiction to be.

      Out of all of the people who have taken the survey the majority did enjoy reading. Though I know reading does not necessarily mean reading books, there is a wide variety of writings that are accessible to consumers The most popular types of readings were Book and novels and comics. Which I found interesting considering the fact that those works are typically taken and used as inspiration of fanfiction. Still, most of the people who took the survey have not read and do not want to read fanfiction.

     Seventy percent of the group had not read any fanfiction and had given the media a negative connotation without actually having read though any of the works. When asked about what they had hears about the writings a lot of the times they expressed hearing “not a lot of appropriate things” someone even called it “cringe” and just decided they did not want to give fanfiction a chance.

     My goal is to show the reality of fanfiction to readers and authors who overlook these works of fiction because they bring more benefit to those who consume and create these. I was able to ask a few more established authors on Tumblr, for their background and their opinion of the stigma surrounding this media, their personal opinion, and a little information regarding their positionality. On my Tumblr I direct messages a few of my favorite writers out of the twenty I ask only five answered. Even though the turnout was not the best I was still able to get some really good insight from authors of different backgrounds. I was able to talk to was Shanna of Kpopfanfictiontrash, Sol of jamaisjoons, Traci of cupofteaguk, Admin Kim,  Admin Calico Admin AdMin from rightsockjin and lasty Athena from GoddessAthean on Wattpad.

      First I was able to talk to Shanna from Kpopfanfictiontrash (late 20’s) and comes a Caucasian background. She has been writing for around six years and at the moment she works as a businesswoman. Soon after I talked to Sol admin of the Tumblr jamaisjoons (22yrs) writer that comes from an Indian background, she has been writing for around seven years, but she is currently working as an accountant. I was also able to get in contact with Traci (23yrs) Asian-American fanfiction author with around ten years of experience who writes on the cupofteaguk tumblr blog, she is currently studying Communications in college. Lastly, I got to talk to all of the three writers in the Rightsockjin blog. Admin Kim who is a twenty-one and working as a teacher with a Hispanic/Mexican background, she has been writing for 12 years and lastly Admin Calico (19), who is a full time student working on an English Major who also is from a Hispanic/Mexican background who has had over ten years and Admin AdMin(19) who is a Computer Science major who had been writing for seven years. Lastly, I was able to talk to Athena (19) a Hispanic who writes under the AthenaGodess pseudonym who is also a Computer Science major and has been writing for around four years.

     I was able to have talk to all of the authors and get their individual opinions of their work, the writings they’ve read, and the perspective about this creative medium. I wanted to know that their work actually meant to them. Traci expressed that she “really [enjoys] writing fan fiction because it’s a form of expression...”. More than fifty percent of the authors mentioned self-expression, this medium is an easy to show the inner turmoil that in the mind of the author. Often, these writers show more vulnerable and intimate part of themselves. Personally, I love to write about my ideal relationship because I have had some really terrible experiences with relationships. Aside from using this as a way to vent her creativity it has helped her with her academic writing. “Allowing myself to write on a daily basis also helps hone in on my writing skills, which can be applied to professional situations or school assignments.”

     I also asked about their opinion on the stereotypes and stigma surrounding fanfiction and how it affects them. Shana gave me an interesting perspective, “I think most stereotypes are rooted in a general lack of understanding. I do write fanfiction based off a musical artist, so my male lead character may contain some of their features and personality traits. I don’t necessarily have to create these aspects myself. Everything else I do. The plot of the story. The side characters and romantic interests. The setting, the world-building. The dialogue and description and everything in between – that exists nowhere but in my own mind. I would also say there’s an equal, but different challenge to writing based off something which already exists. It requires greater research, perception and understanding than simply creating something out of thin air.” Which correlated from my previous research, most people who have not even read fanfiction just refuse to even look into the medium. When I asked specifically about the stigma Sol stated “There [is] an assumption that most fanfic writers are young 12-16-year-olds and while that’s true sometimes, there’s actually a higher percentage of authors who are 18+, especially ranging from 22-30.” Which while there may be young authors the majority according to my studies range higher than eighteen years of age.

     In my own experience and research, I found that authors find solace in their writing. Sometimes these writers come from some unfortunate situations which cause them to look for succor, so they write out their ideal life in these fictions. I went through a trauma with my first boyfriend which caused me to fall into a depression. I began to journal, which lead me to write out scenarios that made me feel better. Even though my writing was not explicitly fanfiction this bit of writing led me to create a fanfiction blog. This, in a way, allowed me to rehabilitate myself out of my slump and get myself to get back to a more positive form of thinking, my writing gave me hope where I before I saw none. Alongside me psyche my writing improved significantly. I started to get better grades in my AP English classes during high school, then my writing for my college classes became something I enjoyed. A subject that I once dreaded became something I looked forward to doing.

     This form of media seems to get less credit than it is worth but in reality, these works can be equally, and sometimes more intricate than their original works. Unfortunately, because it was not written by a credible source the writing is disregarded. Instead of sending negativity to these aspiring authors we should encourage their development with positive engagement and constructive criticism, so they feel encouraged to supplying their audience with their work and so they can continue to develop their skill and style.

Works Cited

Aragon, Cecilia. “Not All Those Who Wonder Are Lost.” MIT Technology Review, vol. 123, no. 1, Jan. 2020, pp. 44–47. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,shib&db=a9h&AN=140364555&site=ehost-live.

 @rightsockjin​ @kpopfanfictrash​ @cupofteaguk​ @jamaisjoons​

[thecostumeplot]

Episode 8: A Very Long Engagement & Parasite

Please consult these Instagram slideshows for accompanying images: A Very Long Engagement Parasite

Both  

Welcome to The Costume Plot.

Jojo

I'm Jojo Siu.

Sarah  

And I’m Sarah Timm. We're professional designers with a passion for costume design and the performing arts. Our podcast does contain spoilers. Accompanying slideshows for each movie are linked in the episode description.

Jojo

We hope you'll join us every other week as we delve into the wonderful world of costume design in The Costume Plot. [music]

Sarah

Hi, welcome.

Jojo  

Welcome! So we just wanted to give a shout out to all of our new listeners this week. Sarah, you want to tell them a little bit about what you did? [laughs]

Sarah  

Yeah, my favorite fashion blog, Go Fug Yourself, who-- I have been following them for literally like, 10 years, at least. I emailed them. And I was like, "I love you. Could you possibly shout us out?" And they did! They were so kind. And we had a huge spike in listeners. So hello, welcome. We are so happy to have you here.

Jojo  

Yeah!

Sarah  

And we hope you like the show. Because we're really excited that you're here. [laughs]

Jojo  

Yes. And we would be nothing without our listeners. So thank you so much for adding to our numbers. And also just getting to know us a little bit better through this podcast. So, welcome.

Sarah  

Yeah. We've had a couple of Instagram DMs from people who are just really excited to have found us, and I... I said this to my friends, I was like, "I feel like we have something really good. And we just need to find our audience." So like, I hope that we're getting close to finding more people, you know?

Jojo  

Yeah, definitely.

Sarah  

And then another thing just at the top, I wanted to... I had this idea this week, and then Jojo was like, "Yeah, that sounds good." I listen to this other podcast, it's-- I mean, it's called Good Christian Fun. Shout out to them. But they do this thing where to incentivize people to give them reviews, they donate $1 for every review they get on iTunes. So we're going to try that.

Jojo  

Yeah.

Sarah  

So if you could leave us a review, that'll also help us grow our audience. And then we're going to donate $1 if you do that, and we're going to pick... we haven't decided which charity yet. But it's it's going to be something related to our subject matter. So like, Dress for Success, which is the one that like helps people find wardrobes for... to find careers. Or maybe Equity Fights AIDS, which is like the Broadway Cares foundation that everybody knows about. So yeah!

Jojo  

Yeah, definitely.

Sarah  

Please review us!

Jojo  

Or, if there's... I was gonna say also, if there's people who have charities related to what we talked about, and have an interest in sending money somewhere, please let us know. We'll consider it. And think about it. So yes, please give us reviews.

Sarah  

Yeah, if there's like a theater costume specific, or even film costume specific charity... I don't know what that would be. But yeah, if there's a good cause, a worthy cause you know of, please send it our way.

Jojo  

Mmhmm. It also just gets us knowing what's out there as well. So, always better.

Sarah  

Yeah, yeah. I mean, a lot of theaters are struggling right now. So like, a good cause is always to donate just to a theater. But I don't-- I don't know if we should single one out because like... we're in California...

Jojo  

There's so many.

Sarah  

Yeah. There's so many, like, how do you pick? Yeah.

Jojo  

Yeah.

Sarah  

I don't know.

Jojo  

Cool. That's so exciting! New year, new things.

Sarah  

New year, new us. [laughs]

Jojo  

I know, in the midst of all the craziness that has happened this week.

Sarah  

Oh, God. Yeah. We hope they we are a little distraction from the craziness... in the world.

Jojo  

Yes. That's what we try to be.

Sarah  

Talking about some pretty dresses. Well, not in the case of my movie this week, but... [both laugh]

Jojo  

I was gonna say, "Mmm... Maybe not!"

Sarah  

So what's theme this week, Jojo?

Jojo  

Yeah, our theme, I'm super excited about. Because Sarah and I decided to do foreign films this week. And this is actually the first time both of us have not seen these movies prior to this week's recording.

Sarah  

Yeah.

Jojo  

So that's also really exciting. Because, you know, we don't always choose movies that we've seen thousands and thousands of times. Of course, it means we watch it at least a couple times before we talk about it on this podcast.

Sarah  

Yeah.

Jojo  

But we are not the experts, just remember that this is because we love talking about these movies. And I'm really excited to be talking about a movie that I've heard a lot of good things about and then finally had the chance to see. So this movie that I'm going to be covering is actually called "A Very Long Engagement." It's a French film, which... I actually do watch quite a few foreign films. I watch a lot of Korean films. And I also watched a lot of... I should say, Korean dramas, not really Korean films. [bl] And then I also watch a lot of Bollywood, but this is one of the few French films that I've gotten to see, and it's the same director who did "Amélie," Jean-Pierre Jeunet. He's actually a self taught director who teamed up with a designer-slash-illustrator named Caro, and they together came up with one of their first projects, "Delicatessen." Which was one of their first full length movies. And it actually won four César Awards, which is basically like the French version of the Academy Awards, which is amazing.

Sarah  

Nice.

Jojo  

Obviously, "Amélie" is another one of his that Americans will probably recognize a little bit more. And then he also did "Casanova," which was a TV movie. So it's, you know, most of his films are not going to be as recognized to an American audience unless you study more art films, because he does have a very art film bend. But just the fact that he's come from kind of this self taught direction is pretty amazing. And then our costume designer is Madeline Fontaine. She's most well known for "Jackie," she was nominated for the Academy Award there, but she also won a César Award for Best Costume Design for "A Very Long Engagement." So that was kind of the claim to fame. A little bit of background about the movie, it is actually set in 1917. The director was really fascinated with World War I and did actually three years of research before he even started filming this movie...

Sarah  

Wow!

Jojo  

...which is pretty amazing. He has a very specific and very quirky perspective, which obviously you see that in "Amélie," but it does carry over a little bit into this movie as well, mostly in the way that the characters kind of interact. And also the way he kind of jumps from place to place in the script, which is also very important and very reminiscent of "Amélie." This is obviously a much darker movie because it's about World War II-- World War I, sorry. And there's a lot of like, violence and gore, and body parts being blown up.

Sarah  

Really?

Jojo  

And he really wanted to depict the war as it would have been, and as he-- as, you know, normal people would have experienced it, as opposed to a more glorified... or, I guess, romanticized version of the war. So, so that was one of the things that he talked about wanting to really emphasize in this movie. And I think the costume designer also reflected that pretty well. The movie itself is actually based on an original novel by Sébastien Japrisot. I'm probably saying that wrong as well. [bl] It received a nomination for Best Art Direction, as well as Best Cinematography at the Oscars. Unfortunately, it didn't win either at the Oscars, but it did win, again, several César Awards in France.

Sarah  

It can be very hard for foreign movies to break through to like, regular Oscars that aren't just Best Foreign Film.

Jojo  

Yes, definitely. And it's interesting too, because there's all these comments from people who love this movie, you know, who all rave about how they should have gotten the Oscar awards, and all these other things. And I'm sure there's a lot of other politics involved with that as well. But yes, beautifully stunning movie, there's a lot of... it's a little hard to follow, I will say. That's kind of one of the things that I think was a disadvantage of this movie. Because, and this is also very characteristic of "Amélie," his movies do tend to be very... non-chronological?

Sarah  

Right.

Jojo  

And nothing is like, in order. And you also aren't really told where-- what time period you're in, what location you're in. It's a series of a lot of flashbacks. And it's more about kind of the idea of memory and sort of whether it's Audrey Tatou's memories, or other characters' memories. You're kind of not really ever sure where you're at in the movie. So that was kind of hard to track when I was trying to do costumes and figuring out like, what scene is this? And when is this happening? I almost wish that I had bought the DVD, because apparently there's an extensive hour and a half long documentary about the entire process, including costumes.

Sarah  

Oh my gosh.

Jojo  

So unfortunately, I won't be able to speak to some of that stuff that's on the documentary, but I've been told to go and just watch that. Because apparently it's pretty extensive. But I will talk about the costumes that I covered for this, just because there are still a lot of really beautiful details that I think we can gather just from costume... you know, sort of fact-finding as you're watching.

Sarah  

Mmhmm.

Jojo  

Before I go into that, I did want to start with a quote from one of the cinematographers because I think especially in film, costume designers do have to work very hand in hand with cinematographers, because it's all about the image. And the cinematographer is kind of like your art-director-boss, for lack of a better term. Obviously, they're the ones that are looking at the whole entire image, the entire big picture visual of the movie. So one of the things Delbonnel, probably also saying that wrong, said in his quote was... "Delbonnel's richly colored images transport the viewer past realism and into what could be called 'cinematic impressionism.'" Sorry, this was something that was said ABOUT his cinematography.

Sarah  

Mm, okay.

Jojo  

"As the film reaches its emotional conclusion, the viewer is left with an unforgettable patchwork of multi-hued memories." So this was from The American Cinematographer, which is an international journal that follows film and digital production techniques. So I thought that was actually a really accurate portrayal. And we'll see this as we go through the costumes... of, you know, what the cinematography did and how the costumes helped reflect that. Let's see... the other thing that I wanted to mention before I get started, because I'm going to be covering a lot of Audrey Tatou's character's costumes, because she is our main character. And she's really the one that we see the most. One of the things that IndieWire actually wrote about her character was that it's one that gives off "sentimentality and intense emotion," and it's a fine balance between the two. So that's definitely something that, you know... as I was looking through this movie, I was able to look at how the costume designer was able to do that. And I think she did a pretty successful job.

Sarah  

Mmhmm.

Jojo  

So the first image we're looking at is actually her in bed. And this is shortly before she's-- obviously, she's heard in the war that her fiancé Manech... so, Audrey Tatou's character's name is Mathilde. And basically the idea is, the story follows her and her fiancé Manech, who has been sent off to war. And he's one of five soldiers who basically tries to get their hand decapacitated--incapacitated, sorry, is the right word--in order to try and prevent... like, to try and escape the torment of war, or the torture of war. However that happens. And it's a series of different stories about how each of them did that. And in the case of her fiancé, he basically lights a cigarette and holds his hand up over the lines and then gets shot in the hand.

Sarah  

Mmm.

Jojo  

So with that, obviously, it's a way for them to try and get home, or get sent home and say, "Okay, this is a war injury." However, it also was a sign of essentially cowardice. So their way of trying to punish them was to basically throw them over the trench lines and leave them on German no man's land, so that the Germans could basically take care of them. So this movie is basically her trying to find any kind of access to Manech, and find him and be reunited with him and find out what's happened to him. So it's a series of her kind of doing this investigative sleuthing by trying to get in contact with all the people that came in contact with her fiancé. So her first outfit is when she is like-- right before she goes to Paris, and that's where she's actually hiring an investigator, she essentially lives out on a farm with her aunt and her uncle. And she also suffers from polio. So like, this character has a lot going on. [laughs]

Sarah  

Yeah.

Jojo  

She was born with polio, or I should say she had polio when she was very little. And so she's got this limp that she's always walking around with. And there's a very long and like, really sad and overly dramatic story about how she and Manech met as children, which I'll go into detail more a little bit later. But with this one, I wanted to focus on just the softness and the quality of the colors, because for this particular costume design in general, not only was the cinematography super tight and really limited in color palette, but the costume design was also very much like that. And so you can kind of see here, she's got a lot of earth tones. Most of the movie, Audrey Tatou is actually in essentially browns, beiges, a lot of kind of sepia tones. So it is very much like a memory.

Sarah  

Mmhmm.

Jojo  

Which is something I really love. And also a color palette that I actually like to use a lot in my own work. So that was already something that was kind of a favorite. The other thing that we've talked about in the past is obviously texture. You can see on her cardigan here, most of her clothing actually features some kind of either vertical stripe, or some kind of really tiny plaid. It's always a very kind of structured look. And the only times that we ever really see her in color are when she goes into flashbacks of her memories with Manech before he went off to war. So obviously a very, very specific direction with color palette.

Sarah  

Yeah.

Jojo  

And you can see here, she's got a lot of-- there's that same corduroy with the wale that we talked about last episode. [bl] Only laughing because we can never figure out the best way to explain what "wale" means. But hopefully if you listened to our "Jingle Jangle" episode, you know a wale is now. [laughs]

Sarah  

Hopefully if you had questions, you've just googled it. [bl]

Jojo  

True.

Sarah  

So... once again, we are professionals but we're not necessarily experts. That's why when I tell people about this podcast, I make sure to stress that it's conversational.

Jojo  

Yes, very much so.

Sarah  

We're... we're not what you should be referring to in your research papers, how about that. [bl]

Jojo  

Yes, maybe one day? I don't know. But I do love that there's such a mixture of different textures here, and everything is always very structured and kind of a geometrical line or pattern. There's not... I shouldn't say there's no florals, but it's mostly in the lace work that you see any of the kind of more organic shapes on her. But for the most part, especially when she goes into Paris, we'll see that she definitely changes kind of the silhouette and textures of what she's wearing. But most of the softness that happens when she's in the farmyard is this kind of softer cardigans, a lot of corduroy, you'll see that in her jackets later on as well. And much softer drape, too. So you can see that the cardigan obviously is a much softer garment in general than say, a blazer, or something that's a little more structured. So when she's at home, it's a much softer silhouette. When she goes into Paris, you'll start seeing that change. So I'll move on to the second look. The second look, this is again, still her at home. And it's her writing letters, basically, to the people to try and find out who has information about her fiancé. Who can get her in contact with, basically, the soldier that was in charge of the five defactos... whatever the right word is.

Sarah  

Is it defectors?

Jojo  

Defectors! Yes, thank you. But yeah, so she's writing letters, basically to the investigator to start this investigation and start figuring out who she needs to get in contact with. But one of the things I love about this outfit is because... this actually does show her in a lot of the blouses that are very characteristic of her character. It's a lot of very sheer cottons. But you can see here, the designer really took the time to like, make sure that the embroidery was there. It sounds like they had a really extensive process. Again, because I didn't watch this documentary... it sounds like a lot of it was handmade, or I assume that a lot of it was handmade, because they wanted this to look like they were really living in rural farmland in France.

Sarah  

Mmhmm.

Jojo  

And you can see that, not only in the kind of handmade embroidery quality that's on her clothing, but even just the fabric itself, everything is very organic. So I did want to mention that about this particular look. Okay, so now we're on the train, she's going to Paris, and she's trying to find-- she's meeting the investigator, basically the detective that she's going to be hiring to find Manech. And it's not as easy to see here. But this movie is... because it's set in 1917, there's a lot of 1920s. Of course, it's set back a little bit. So it's probably more between 1905-1910 in terms of actual fashion trends. She's obviously from a lower-- I don't want to say "low class," but more mid, probably lower-to-middle class, in terms of...

Sarah  

Yeah, she's not a rich lady.

Exactly. And so in terms of her clothing, you do see a lot of repeats, because it was very, very realistic. They wanted this to be a true representation of how people lived in that time during the war. So you'll see this jacket repeated quite a few times throughout the movie. Interestingly enough, she always has some sort of a brown kind of straw hat. There's this one, which is a little bit of a taller brim and almost looks like almost like a top hat.

Hmm.

Jojo  

But it's not quite a top hat, but it's made out of straw. And she also has decorative pieces on it. But she also has another brown straw hat that is more like a cloche. And it has sort of a flipped-up brim in the front and kind of a dovetail in the back. So it's-- I don't know if it was meant to be two hats, or if it's supposed to be one hat that she kind of restyled for different occasions, because that was also done in the 1920s. So I just wanted to focus on that, because it just shows the versatility of these outfit pieces, because she's obviously wearing them for different occasions.

Sarah  

Mmhmm.

Jojo  

But also her focus right now is not to look trendy. She looks nice enough to go into the city. But she's obviously got a much higher priority.

Sarah  

Yeah.

Jojo  

The interesting thing that's-- and I don't know if I have a closer picture of this jacket. I want to say I do. Yeah, so if you look really close, this is a zoomed in picture. And this is that other hat I was talking about. So it's got that front brim that's kind of flipped up, and then the back is actually left down. So very much like cloches from that time. The other thing you'll notice here in this really big close up, is that that jacket is actually made out of corduroy again. So like, I really feel like the designer used corduroy to define this character.

Sarah  

Mmhmm.

Jojo  

That whole idea of that kind of textured rib is very prevalent, and stripe is very prevalent throughout the entire movie.

Sarah  

I love the gloves too.

I know. So many gloves. [laughs] She wears a lot of those kind of lace gloves. It's like this mixture of kind of the hard and the soft, or the delicate.

Yeah.

Jojo  

Which I think defines a lot of that idea of the balance between that sentimentality and that intense emotion that they quoted for her character earlier. I think the costume designer, that was her way of embodying that balance, which I think was really successful. So again, another version of that, or another view of the other hat that she's wearing, but again, it kind of looks like-- it's almost like the brim has changed a little bit. And then obviously, the hat has been pushed back up to the kind of more top hat shape. So again, I'm not sure if this is the same hat or if she just has those two hats that she's wearing between her looks. But again, another really great shot of that corduroy on the jacket. Okay. Oh, and other gloves. This was a big movie for gloves, because the 1920s also, you really wore everything. Like, it was all about wearing all the pieces to go out. You never went out without your gloves and your coat.

Sarah  

Yeah, gloves and hat, too. Like, being in public without a hat was like, "No way." You know?

Jojo  

Mmhmm.

Sarah  

In pretty much every period up until, like, the 60s.

Jojo  

Okay, I'm gonna start with this image first, because-- so Marion Cotillard, who is also a French actress that we know very well in America. She actually plays a very small side character in this movie. But interestingly enough, because there's these five soldiers in this movie, it's not just Audrey Tatou's, you know, love story. There's also these other four soldiers who also have their own kind of love stories. And that's sort of where the side stories kind of branch off. Another reason why this movie is very confusing, because there's just so many characters. But Marion Cotillard is one of the characters who actually is a prostitute in the beginning, and ends up falling in love with one of the other soldiers who gets killed fairly early on. So when she finds out he's killed, of course, she's kind of doing the same thing as Audrey Tatou's character Mathilde, except that she is actually going back and finding revenge on all the characters that have killed her lover.

Sarah  

Ooh.

Jojo  

So she is secretly figuring out who all these people are, and then going around and killing them, kind of starting from the top down.

Sarah  

That's awesome.

Jojo  

So this is one of the scenes where she meets with one of the people that has killed her lover. And she's in this great... it's almost like a long coat from the 1920s. And almost like a riding coat from-- actually probably from more Edwardian era.

Sarah  

Wait, but this isn't the 20s, right? It's World War I.

Jojo  

It's 1917.

Sarah  

Yeah.

Jojo  

So it's like, right before the 20s.

Sarah  

Yeah, so it kind of bleeds into each other.

Jojo  

Exactly. So you'll see a lot of the kind of-- it's like, leading into the 1920s. But like, the-- it's almost like Edward, late Edwardian.

Sarah  

Yeah.

Jojo  

But she's got kind of that... it's not quite a cloche, but the hat is kind of entering the cloche shape, it's starting to fit close around the head. I love that she's got this kind of dead bird on the front of her hat, [laughs] because it's very characteristic of this moment in particular. And the big thing that I thought was really phenomenal about this particular outfit is that she actually... well, one, she's got the black lace gloves. She's kind of-- like, she sort of embodies death right now, which is basically what she's kind of doing. She's the harbinger of death for all these people. But she shows up in this dark tunnel, you know, and she meets this guy who basically sees her from a distance and just sees this silhouette of this woman dressed in black. And she's got these black little round, like, moon specs. Or not moon specs, but they're like brown specs.

Sarah  

Yeah.

Jojo  

And the funny... not "funny." But it's the greatest thing about this is that the specs are actually chained. There's like, chains that actually connect to her belt. And her belt has this little pulley system that basically is linked to this little pistol that sits right at her hip in the beginning. So this is after she has turned the belt to the front.

Sarah  

Cool!

Jojo  

And I caught this, I caught this great screenshot of it because I was like, "I need to show the public how this happened." [bl] Because it just happens so fast. And of course, there's no actual images of this online. But I love that she's basically come up with this huge contraption all on her own of how to connect her glasses. So she-- when she takes off the glasses and pulls on it, it basically pulls the chain and yanks the pistol to fire. And of course, that's how she shoots the guy once he gets within range. [bl] So it's, you know, of course, it's this whole elaborate ruse, and that's the only thing in the scene that you ever see. Again, it's all these short, small scenes that you ever see Marion Cotillard in, and yet she's kind of doing the same thing that Mathilde's character is doing throughout the story, just from opposite sides.

Sarah  

Mmhmm. Wow.

Jojo  

So yes, I didn't talk about her costumes, which I'm a little sad about, but most of her stuff is very over-elaborate. It's very much height of the 1915 era, because she is a prostitute, so she's getting a lot of these kind of hand-me-down clothes. But from, you know, wealthy men who are paying her.

Sarah  

Mmm.

Jojo  

So she is very, very well dressed. And it's not until kind of the end of the movie when they finally capture her, after she's killed all these people and left bodies in her wake, that she finally goes back into a dowdier look, to match in the same sort of sepia tones that Mathilde is.

Sarah  

Mmhmm.

Jojo  

Okay. So again, like I mentioned before, really the only time that we see Mathilde's character in color is when she's in these flashbacks with Manech. And even in this one, I wanted to focus a little bit more on kind of the softness and the texture of how the designer really created this character. Everything about Mathilde is very, very homespun, and very homely. And it kind of makes us think more, like, French countryside, as opposed to height of Parisian fashion.

Sarah  

Right.

Jojo  

And they did a really good job of really foiling her with Marion Cotillard's character by doing that. So I just wanted to-- again, most of these costumes are just things that I really enjoyed looking at. [bl]

Sarah  

Yeah, that's fine!

Jojo  

Because also, it was a lot of sweater cardigans that I was like, "I just-- I want to own that, and I want to own that." [bl]

Sarah  

[sing-song] We love cardigaaans.

Jojo  

But yeah, so I love the texture on this and how subtle the colors are, and then kind of, you know, contrasting that with... even Manech is very, you know, I mean, he's obviously dressed very rural class. But just the soft tweed-ness of his jacket, as opposed to sort of this done-up coat, which he wouldn't have been in anyways. But the softness of both of them in this scene really complement each other very well. And it's really, really lovely. There's a lot of film critics who actually compare this movie to "The Notebook" and, like, you can't compare it because it's so much more beautiful! Because like basically, it's kind of like those first ten minutes of "Up."

Sarah  

Oh, God! [laughs]

Jojo  

Basically you see their whole entire, you know, love story within maybe 15 minutes,

Sarah  

And you're like, "Is this a children's movie?! I'm crying!" [bl] Yeah, that.

Jojo  

So this movie, within the first... I mean, this isn't even in the first 15 minutes. This is probably like halfway through, or maybe a third of the way through the movie. But she goes into this flashback, and there's this huge bell tower. And actually, she always goes up to a lighthouse that's in her countryside hometown, to basically look out for if he ever comes back. But this scene in particular-- because they walked to the bell tower quite a bit when they were children. So it's her flashback of him carrying her up the stairs of this bell tower because she's got polio...

Sarah  

Aww.

Jojo  

...on his back! [laughs] It's just them going up to have this romantic moment in privacy with this bell tower.

Sarah  

How sweet.

Jojo  

So yes, really, really tragic, but also really beautifully... beautiful visuals for this movie. So most of these I pulled just because I wanted to continue tracking through all the unity of costumes that I think this costume designer has done really beautifully. So again, going back to that idea of the stripe on her. This is kind of when she's starting to get closer to finding Manech, she's starting to put together hints and clues from all the people that she's now come in contact with. And also, I just I thought this was interesting, because the entire movie, she's looking for this man named Célestin Poux. And that sounds like a horrible last name, but it's spelled P-O-U-X.

[laughs]

And I was like, "I guess that's how you say it." But she ends up finding him finally, which is this guy here with this giant handlebar mustache. And he's basically the guy that... from what I remember, again, this was a very confusing movie with many, many characters. But Célestin is basically the man who kind of like, found Manech and basically kind of passed him on, and was sort of the last one to see him before he disappeared. So he is kind of helping her, when they finally find him, to find out what really happened with Manech. Because there's a lot of back and forth, you're not really sure if he's alive, you don't know if he's died. You want to hope that he is, and then you know, you get something that happens that... maybe he isn't. So there's a lot of back and forth with this movie. It's a very emotional roller coaster, let's just say that. But I love that he's in this kind of light pink. And then she's in this, you know, it's still the same color palette of the sepia with her. But now that she's got some hope, she's let her hair down. Because the other thing in this movie is that she always has her hair kind of braided up. Sort of in, like, the Princess Leia braids.

Sarah  

Yeah.

Jojo  

Which also makes her look very kind of youthful and a little more countryside, as opposed to this more, for lack of a better term, "let loose," like-- I feel like she's now got hope, she's got a little bit more of a better outlook on whether or not Manech is actually alive. And I think this is sort of where she starts having her turning point of like, "I'm going to find him." So I wanted to do a couple of the shots of her as a child, because I thought the-- I loved the childrenswear in this movie, I really do feel like it is not talked about enough. And we haven't really touched on childrenswear either.

Sarah  

Yeah, we haven't.

Jojo  

But I think the costume designer did a really beautiful job. I love that this dress is actually buttoned in the back, I think that was also pretty common in the 19-- you know, early 1900s. And again, it's that same kind of gingham that we still see in her older clothes, that we tie in with her childrenswear. I also do love that in that previous scene where she's starting to have hope, again, is when she returns to the one braid. And I thought that it was interesting that that's what she also wore as a child.

Sarah  

Mmhmm.

Jojo  

So it's kind of this idea of like, "Okay, I'm returning to youth, I believe that he's alive, I have a little more hope," and it's returning to this youthfulness. Same thing with the next outfit I chose for the children. So this is actually not even a real memory from her childhood with him. This was when she first meets him and he invites her to the lighthouse. And so this is her as a child imagining that this is what's going to happen when she gets to the lighthouse. Because there's this whole made-up moment in her head where like, she basically gets to the top of lighthouse and then almost falls over the side. And he grabs her up and does this whole romantic gesture, and this is sort of what happens after he's saved her from falling over the edge.

Sarah  

Aww.

Jojo  

So none of this really happens, it's just in her memory. But I love that the costume designer has still put her in this very romantic color, which also gets carried over later, in the next look where we see her lying on the cliff side. And this is after Manech has basically made his proposal to her. So it's that same idea of that same-- you know, even though that particular memory didn't happen, that feeling of the happiness that she felt in that memory is reflected in her clothing, color-wise and also silhouette-wise.

Sarah  

Yeah.

Jojo  

So I thought that was really, really lovely. And again, showing how much color psychology can really affect not just the character, but also the audience watching it. Because I think this movie was very much more about the emotions that it was evoking as opposed to the historical... even though there was a lot of historical accuracy. It was less about the historical depiction in terms of chronology, as opposed to the actual emotion of what was happening between these two. Okay, so a couple of the side characters, and I'm going to kind of...

Sarah  

Jodie Foster?!

Jojo  

I know, right? [laughs]

Sarah  

She speaks French?

Jojo  

Yeah, apparently. And actually, she speaks French pretty well in this movie.

Sarah  

Wow!

Jojo  

So she is yet another side character. So she actually is married to one of the other soldiers that was in this group of cowards... defectors. And she has five children with this soldier. And he basically has this whole idea that if he has a sixth child, the military will allow him to go home. Because if you have six children, it's too many children for you to take care of, too many mouths to feed, whatever. So we can't have you in war when so many people are relying on you. So he basically comes up with this idea for his best friend--who is also a soldier in this small group--to sleep with his wife so that she can have this sixth child, because he is actually barren.

Sarah  

Ohh.

Jojo  

So then there's this whole side story where she basically falls in love with the best friend. And so she's like, also hearing about him, because he ends up also dying in the war. So a lot of this is very much like-- she hears all these stories of all these other soldiers around Manech. And then you kind of see glimpses and small snippets of what happens to the women around the war. So in that sense, I feel like, you know, even if you're not looking at the costumes, just the sheer amount of what you're seeing is like... you really are seeing the war from every side, from a very realistic perspective. Of not just the people in the war, and the soldiers that were experiencing such trauma--and all this PTSD from the war--but also the women surrounding them that were trying to support them, or wait for them to come home, or... you know, all the other stuff.

Sarah  

I actually read a book called "The Nightingale" recently that's literally about that. It's about two French sisters during World War II. And it really is just like... I realized that so many war stories focus on the loss of life and the horrible experiences that the men have, which are all very...

Jojo  

Yeah.

Sarah  

...of course, relevant and horrible and tragic. But like, the women are fighting their own war back at home, basically.

Jojo  

Absolutely. So this, of course, is Jodie Foster. You know, this is kind of towards the latter half of the movie where Mathilde has finally discovered who this woman is and gotten in contact with her, because she knows she's related to one of the soldiers. And so this woman basically--or Jodie Foster basically--writes her a letter explaining what happened from her perspective, and how she heard about the death of her husband, and the death of her lover. So one of the things I wanted to point out for this particular character is that, you know, she's basically a single mother now, of essentially five children. I don't think they ever actually ended up having a sixth. But just the sheer softness and kind of broken-down quality of her silhouette, and you know, just the clothing that she's wearing. We first see her in a market, like an open marketplace. So then in this particular look, I love that it's this kind of really soft and almost very delicate lace cardigan that she's wearing over top of this. Let's see if I can zoom in. It's basically like a Swiss dot cream blouse. But everything is kind of this sheer, and sort of very vulnerable. And even the neckline is very vulnerable. It's very low, it's very open.

Sarah  

Yeah.

Jojo  

So I think that was something that I thought the costume designer did really well for her character.

Sarah  

I love big, open, holey knits.

Jojo  

Yeah. [laughs]

Sarah  

I love 'em. I love a knit!

Jojo  

Especially when you can really see the pattern.

Sarah  

Yeah!

Jojo  

Like, you can see the lace on this one. Because sometimes, especially from far away, even if something is really delicate and kind of lacy, you don't always see the detail.

Sarah  

Mmhmm.

Jojo  

But I do love that about that. Okay, so for this one, this is one of the first memories where basically it's like the first night that they sleep together. So this is Mathilde and Manech. And I love that the costume designer here has thrown in such a subtle-- again, she's in a stripe, but he's also in a stripe, and they're varying different widths of stripes. But the fact that they kind of match together and that they're in this scene together... not only does it just show their class and their character and who they are, but it also just ties them together very well. And I do also love that the costume designer has continued to use this idea of this very subtle kind of romantic red... in a much more muted color palette, of course. But that you're always seeing some sort of love, or some sort of representation of love, in all of Mathilde's character. Or, sorry, in all of her costumes, and all of her clothes. I do also love that you get to see sort of the more "undressed" of the early 1900's, because I think sometimes... I don't want to say we all assume that everyone wears, like, a full three-piece suit or a two-piece suit. But I love seeing kind of the more dressed-down, like... what is everyone else wearing? What is the everyday look? What are the clothing pieces that are underneath all of the vests jackets, all the other accoutrements, I guess. And also, you know...

Sarah  

I think that's important. Like, a lot of costume history is studying fashion plates, and what was trendy, but it's also important to study, like, what were real people wearing?

Jojo  

Yes.

Sarah  

And like, what was practical at the time, you know.

Jojo  

Yeah, I mean, and when you are dressing a character, you're thinking about what they're wearing underneath, because it is also about like, "Okay, well, when I put on clothes, I don't just suddenly show up in a suit, I have to put on all the layers underneath it."

Sarah  

Mmhmm.

Jojo  

You know, what goes under a suit? I have an undershirt, I have a button up shirt underneath that, then I have the vest, then I have, you know-- or in this case, the suspenders, which... we've talked about this before, but I also just love a really good worn suspender. So...

Sarah  

Oh yes. [laughs]

Jojo  

...both of these clothes just look so lived in. And it really... it just gives you a lot of insight about these characters that, you know, they're not people that are looking for the trendiest, cleanest things and the sleekest outfit. They've lived in these clothes for a long time. And you know, right now, the important thing for them is that they're together, not that they have the most fashionable outfit.

Sarah  

Mmhmm.

Jojo  

So yeah, you can definitely-- I feel like sometimes costumes can evoke a feeling as opposed to just telling you what is practical, or what people are actually wearing. And I really loved this shot for that reason.

Sarah  

It's beautiful.

Jojo  

Yeah. Okay. So obviously the final shot of the movie... and huge spoiler, she finds Manech. [laughs]

Sarah  

Yaaaay!

Jojo  

And of course, there's this very bittersweet moment at the end, because he actually has lost his memory.

Sarah  

Ohh.

Jojo  

And one of the things the director has talked about too, is that he wanted to focus on this very real part of the war, that many war heroes--even if they made it back--would have memory loss. Would not even remember the people that they left behind. Which is also just a huge, tragic part of the war. But I love that in this final moment when she comes to see him-- because she finally finds out that he is still alive. So of course everyone in the audience is raving because they're like, "Yes! She finally found him after this incredibly long journey of going through everyone else," and then she comes and finds out that he has amnesia and that he probably won't remember her. And yes, the fact that he is just alive is of course, you know, the happiest thing that she could ever imagine. And so she comes to him in this beautiful cream-- like, it almost looks like an 1900s short coat? I'm not quite sure what the actual garment name is. But it's very traditional. Like, she's got the blouse on underneath that's in sort of a white lace, which I'll show in a couple seconds, the close up of that. And then she's got this pleated kind of 19... probably 1907 skirt. And it's got like, really small pleat tucks in it, which she also uses a lot--the costume designer uses a lot--in a lot of her skirts. And again, to kind of  harken back to the corduroy, that idea of the stripe, she always has some kind of stripe somewhere. And then the coat itself is actually also a cream corduroy.

Sarah  

Really?

Jojo  

So again, this idea of carrying corduroy throughout her costume for the entire movie, I think was really, really well done by the costume designer. And again, such a subtle detail that you would never notice unless you were really looking close, and stopping and starting this movie like I did. But I love that she used that subtle detail to give her that character. The other thing that I wanted to focus on talking about for this particular outfit is that because this is her first time essentially reunioning with... I don't even know if that's a word. [laughs]

Sarah  

Reuniting?

Jojo  

Reuniting, thank you!

Sarah  

I like "reunioning," though, that's fun.

Jojo  

I totally just made up that word. But she basically... this is her first time reuniting with Manech. And so even though he doesn't remember her, it's her chance to show up in this almost bridal gown? Almost as if like, this is their wedding. Like, even if he doesn't remember her. She has hoped now that he's alive after this long time. And so she comes presenting herself to him in this very... I don't want to say "virginal," but it's almost like she's basically kept herself pure for him.

Sarah  

Right.

Jojo  

So I love that she switched to this color, because this is really the only time you ever see her in such a bright array of white. Because obviously she has, you know, cream colored blouses that she wears and pairs with other things. But this is the only time you ever see her pretty much head to toe in white. So just the close up of this.

Sarah  

Ooh!

Jojo  

So yeah, you can kind of see here, it's really subtle, but it's a really small wale corduroy all over her coat. And then she's got this really lovely kind of delicate lace underneath. So I love that that last moment is that... such a huge visual marker of of her kind of reuniting with him, and essentially is their wedding without really being a wedding.

Sarah  

Right.

Jojo  

So... so yeah, that was my take of all the costumes in this movie. Again, I didn't focus too much on the men in this one, mostly because it was a lot of soldiers' wear, and I think that... I don't want to say that that's not important. There's a whole 'nother podcast that can be done about...

Sarah  

Sure.

Jojo  

...you know, costumes in military, because it is so extensive in terms of all the things you need to know to understand the uniforms. The ranking, the hierarchy of what happens in military uniforms.

Sarah  

It's a lot of work, like...

Jojo  

So much.

Sarah  

...that's so much research that you have to do, to even know...

Jojo  

Yeah.

Sarah  

...like, what any specific character should be wearing.

Jojo  

Yes, absolutely. Well, and the fact that you know, when you're in-- when you're doing any war movie, it's a lot of distressing.

Sarah  

Yes.

Jojo  

So we talked about distressing last time, the level of distress on these these military costumes, like... I can't even imagine. It must have taken so long. Like, this was I think they said this was a $4.5 billion budget or something like that?

Sarah  

Did you say "billion," with a B?

Jojo  

Yes.

Sarah  

What?! [bl]

Jojo  

I was like...

Sarah  

I don't think so. Maybe euros?

Jojo  

Maybe, I don't know. I mean, it was done... like, I think he contacted Warner Brothers about it.

Sarah  

No one does billion-dollar budgets.

Jojo  

It was just something so incredibly crazy that I was like... I mean with this movie, though, because like, they spent half of the budget just building the entire French Parisian metropolitan scene.

Sarah  

Oh, gosh.

So it's like, it did require quite a lot of money. I don't know if it was in the billions. I'll have to go back and check on that. [Post-episode fact check: the budget of the movie was $51.2 million.] But yeah, I was like, "Oh my gosh, the sheer amount of just things to make this movie is insane."

Yeah.

Jojo  

But yes, I will say one quick thing about the military, all of the scenes in the war. The cinematographer really... you can kind of see there's almost like... so the rest of the movie is kind of in this sepia tone, but most of the war scenes are, you know-- it's sort of a mix of sepia tone. And then all of the costumes--or sorry, all of the military uniforms--are blue, because it's the French Army, but it's this really beautiful almost, like, cornflower blue.

Sarah  

Ooh.

Jojo  

I don't know how to describe that. But I think you know what I'm talking about, Sarah.

Sarah  

Yeah.

Jojo  

But it's this really beautiful kind of muted blue. That's in contrast with all the brown and earth tones that are around it. So yeah, visually, super stunning movie. I cannot say enough about the production value of this movie, because it was really well done. Like I said, the only thing that was a little hard to follow was just the amount, sheer amount, of characters.

Sarah  

Mmhmm.

Jojo  

But yeah, beautiful movie, beautiful costumes. And also just... Audrey Tatou is just a really beautiful actress.

Sarah  

She's lovely.

Jojo  

And also like, Jodie Foster and Marion Cotillard. They picked some really big names for this movie. So...

Sarah  

Yeah.

Jojo  

...so yes, if you get a chance to watch it, it's sort of one of those underrated movies. It's not really talked about a lot, but it's really well done.

Sarah  

Love it. Great job.

Thanks!

You're welcome.

Jojo  

I'm excited to hear about your movie.

Sarah  

Me too. Can we take a quick break, 'cause I gotta pee. [short musical sting]

Okay, so I was blown away by this movie.

Jojo  

I still need to see it. So excited.

Sarah  

So this is... I'm covering "Parasite," in case you didn't read the title of the episode. [laughs] It's a Korean film by director Bong Joon Ho. It was released in 2019. And it kind of, you know, made a huge splash when it came out. I'm sure everybody's heard of it. It won Best Picture, right? I'm pretty sure.

Jojo  

I think so. Yeah.

Sarah  

Which is a huge deal for a movie in the language other than English.

Jojo  

Yeah!

Sarah  

And it's... I went into it not knowing, like, anything about it. I knew that it was a commentary on like, wealth inequality and class. And that's about it. So I recommend, I mean, if you haven't seen it, I recommend watching it. I am going to spoil some of it. But I'm going to not-- I'm not going to spoil the very end, I decided. just like, you know, "Murder on the Orient Express," I didn't tell you who done it. So I'm not going to tell you what happens.

Jojo  

Mmhmm.

Sarah  

I'm just gonna tell you the lead up. So yeah, the costumes are designed by... I'm so sorry. These are Korean names. I'm gonna do my best. Okay. Choi Se-yeon designed the costumes. I don't know if that is a man or woman, so I'm gonna say "they." Because I couldn't really find any information on them. They don't have, like, a website. And I googled the name Se-yeon and it's unisex. I was like, "well, that's helpful." [bl]

Jojo  

Yeah, sounds about right.

Sarah  

And I couldn't find any interviews with this person, either, about the costumes. I found interviews with Bong Joon Ho about the production design and the costumes kind of together. But this designer has also done other Bong Joon Ho movies, like "Okja," and then just like a bunch of other Korean films.

Jojo  

That's usually how it goes, I think, with with Asian directors, though.

Sarah  

Yeah.

Jojo  

They sort of have their team especially Korean--like, from Korea--directors.

Sarah  

Yeah.

Jojo  

They'll work with their team from Korea. So...

Sarah  

That makes sense.

Jojo  

...that's probably why we don't get a lot of news in the press about them.

Sarah  

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And it's about the movie as a whole, I think. I think they're not really all that fussed about featuring, you know... they're a team and it's a unit. So it's about the movie.

Jojo  

Yeah, yeah.

Sarah  

Yeah. So this movie came about, I found this really interesting-- Bong Joon Ho said that actors had been asking him to write a play.

Jojo  

Ooh, interesting.

Sarah  

And so he originally conceived of this as a play. And he said, "The stage is a limited space. I was trying to come up with a story that I can tell with just two homes, one poor and one rich." So that makes sense, it doesn't have a lot of... like, they don't go a lot of places other than just their houses.

Jojo  

Mmhmm.

Sarah  

And he described himself as "Very fascinated with the sense of infiltration. When I was in college, I worked as a tutor for a very rich family. And I got this sense that I was spying on the private lives of complete strangers." So that's kind of like where the conception came from. So broadly, sort of, the story is about two families, one rich and one poor. And the poor family basically infiltrates the rich people's home, and it starts with the son. He gets a job tutoring the daughter of the rich family. And then they're like--the rich family's like--"Oh, we need an art tutor for our son." And so he gets his sister in there, but they do it by lying about like, their credentials, they make up college degrees, and they pretend like they're not related to each other. And then they eventually get the dad in as the driver, and then the mom in as the housekeeper, and they get the other people who are working there fired.

Jojo  

Woooow.

Sarah  

And they lie their way into employment basically, because they're super poor, and desperate, and struggling, and they need the money. So they basically con their way into taking these rich people's money, which, like... I had no idea this movie was about that. [laughs] It's so good.

Jojo  

Yeah.

Sarah  

So yeah, the themes of the movie include wealth disparity, social inequality and imperialism. Like a lot of countries, especially right now, South Korea has a really big gap between the wealthy and the poor. Like in America, you know, it's like the gap just keeps getting bigger. They have really high rates of unemployment. So at the beginning of the movie, the poor family, the Kims, are all unemployed. And then the imperialism and colonialism theme kind of comes in when... because the rich family's son Da-song is obsessed with Indians. American Indians, Native Americans.

Jojo  

Mmm, okay.

Sarah  

So he has like, a teepee. And he plays with all these replicas of Indian stuff. And Bong says, "The Native Americans have a very complicated and long, deep history. But in this family, that story is reduced to a young boy's hobby and decoration. That's what happens in our current time, the context and meaning behind these actual things only exists as the surface level thing." So I thought that was really interesting, too.

Jojo  

Yeah.

Sarah  

And then the other thing I loved from this interview, that has nothing to do with costumes, or the theme of the movie, is that they built all of these sets from scratch...

Jojo  

Yeah.

Sarah  

...including the apartment--and about 16 other facades--in a water tank, so that they could flood them. Because there's a flood scene where like, the water is up to here in their apartment. And so the whole thing was built on a soundstage with a water tank. And I was like, "What!"

Jojo  

Whaaat!

Sarah  

Expensive.

Jojo  

There's so much that I learn about, like, how movies are made behind the scenes when I'm doing these... you know, research.

Sarah  

I know.

Jojo  

Or when I'm... sorry, I can't talk today. When I'm doing research for these.

Sarah  

Yeah.

Jojo  

And it's like, it's incredible how much you learn about just the process. And like, why films need and require so much money. [laughs]

Sarah  

Yeah! Yeah, yeah. And they built the rich people's mansion too, which is like, so nice looking. Okay, onto the costumes. Okay. So the Kim family, which is our poor family, they're stuck in this sub-basement level apartment. And the coloring and design of the frame... you can tell that Bong Joon Ho is like, really particular and exact. And he works with his team to come up with something very-- like, it really evokes the feeling that he's going for.

Jojo  

Mmhmm.

Sarah  

Because the way that it's shot, and how crowded it is, you can see this first picture of them in the bathroom. Like, the frame is so crowded, and everything is very dirty looking, and it looks really damp. And they always are very sweaty when they're in their house. And since sub-basement level apartments flood a lot apparently, in monsoon season and stuff, they're always full of mold. And like, it looks like that, you know?

Yeah.

You can feel the desperation, I think. So then... so you have these-- here are the two siblings, their names are... The son is named Ki-woo, and the daughter's named Ki-jung. Jung? Ki-jung. [bl]

Jojo  

Just smile and nod.

Sarah  

I'm sorry. Ahh... you would think, as a lover of k-pop, I would have gotten better at Korean names, but I have not.

Jojo  

[laughs]

Sarah  

Yeah, so you can see they are wearing loungewear. Lots of times in their house, they're wearing short sleeves and shorts because it seems like it's hot and sweaty and sticky in their house.

Jojo  

Mmhmm.

Sarah  

And then, this character sweeps in. This is Min. And he sweeps in and gives him the idea. He's like, "Oh, I was this tutor for this family. But you should-- I'm not going to do it anymore. So you should do it." And he is like, such a contrast to Ki-woo because he has this very smart blazer on. And his pants are also kind of cropped at the ankle, you know, really trendy looking. And you can tell, like, Ki-woo was like, "I'm a loser." Like, you can tell that he thinks of himself as a loser, and then Min comes in and he has this thing to aspire to, basically.

Jojo  

Okay.

Sarah  

And then so when Ki-woo goes for his job interview with the rich family, then he basically wears exactly what Min was wearing, which is a blazer and nice pants. But he does keep this, he has this button up shirt that is just like, collarless. It's not a mandarin collar, because I think mandarins stand up further up your neck.

Jojo  

Yeah.

Sarah  

I think it's just collarless. That's how we say it. That's how I say it. [laughs]

Jojo  

Is it like a henley? It's hard to tell.

Sarah  

Here, I'll zoom in. It's a button up.

Jojo  

Okay.

Sarah  

It just doesn't have a collar. Which I thought was interesting.

Jojo  

Interesting.

Sarah  

So next I'm going to talk about Ki-jung. Gosh darn it. I didn't write down how to pronounce that one. Jung? J-U-N-G.

Jojo  

I find it ironic I chose the French movie and you chose the Korean movie. [bl]

Sarah  

So, it's because... it's so we could have a pronunciation adventure on both of our parts. [laughs]

Jojo  

Yep!

Sarah  

So I love this picture of her. She's really smart, and kind of just, like, doesn't give a crap. And this is her in an internet cafe forging him a certificate from school. And she's smoking a cigarette indoors at an internet cafe. And she just does not give a crap.

Jojo  

NBD.

Sarah  

Yeah. I love-- I LOVE her. She was great. Oh, and I was gonna say, like...this movie has costumes in it, obviously, because all movies do, but I'm kind of just going to talk broadly about the characters, because the specific things they wear are not necessarily as important as just the feeling that they give, because it's contemporary.

Jojo  

Yeah. Right.

Sarah  

So... it's clothes, you know. So this is Mrs. Park. And she is very Western... fashion-y. Like, her clothes look like they come from American stores, or maybe European stores. And that was intentional. Like, she even she gives Ki-woo the name Kevin, and she wants everybody to have American names. And then she says multiple times, she talks about ordering stuff from the US and how that means that it's really good. So she clearly aspires to this sort of American ideal of wealthiness. And you can kind of tell in this, this white outfit that we meet her in. White... I think, to me, a pure white outfit definitely connotes wealth, because white is so hard to keep clean.

Jojo  

Mmhmm.

Sarah  

So it's almost like this luxury thing where you're like, "Well, I can afford to wear all white in my house because I'm not doing any housework," you know.

Jojo  

Right.

Sarah  

Yeah. And then this is her housekeeper, who they get fired. And I pulled this that has-- this shot that has both of them in it, so that we can see what she looks like later on when she loses her job. But we'll get to that.

Jojo  

Ooh. [laughs]

Sarah  

Yeah. She looks very different later. So this is also Mrs. Park and they call her "Madam" the whole time, which is interesting.

Jojo  

Mmhmm.

Sarah  

And I like this outfit. It's kind of-- sort of like, oh, it's kind of brown. It looked green to me earlier. Kind of greeny-brown, like...

Jojo  

Almost like a greenish-gray though.

Sarah  

Yeah. It's like a gingham check. And I think that this looks very 60s. It looks kind of Jackie O to me.

Yeah.

Here's a shot of the full body. So it's like a little matching set. So cute.

Jojo  

Yeah, very Chanel.

Sarah  

Yeah, Chanel! Maybe it is, I don't know. I couldn't find any interviews, so I don't know specifics. [bl]

Jojo  

"I have no information." [bl]

Sarah  

And then I grabbed this shot of her in her jeans. And you can't really see in this screenshot, but it looked to me, when I was watching the movie, like they had sparkles. Maybe on the back pocket. So this is her dressing to go camping. And it's so funny to me that like, even when she's going into the wilderness, she's wearing very expensive jeans, probably, you know.

Jojo  

[laughs]

Sarah  

And it kind of gave me-- it kind of reminded me of how Marie Antoinette used to dress up as a peasant for fun. You know, like a rich person putting on clothes that look like a poor person, almost, but they're not, 'cause they're very expensive versions of it.

Jojo  

And it's still like, looks like it's well put together.

Sarah  

Yeah, it looks-- the textiles look high quality, you know.

Jojo  

Right.

Sarah  

She probably ordered them from J.Crew or whatever.

Jojo  

Right.

Sarah  

And then also, you can see in these screenshots, just as a direct contrast to the shots of the Kim family in their home, the Park family in their home. It's like a palace. Like, there's-- the frame is empty, kind of, for a lot of the shots. And it just shows you how much space they have, versus the poor people having no space.

Jojo  

Right.

Sarah  

And they're like, living on top of each other. And then in this scene, she's carrying a full Birkin bag. Which... if our listeners don't know, a Birkin bag is a specific purse made by Hermès. And it is a purse that you have to join a waitlist to buy. And it's going to run you at least, like, $40,000. [laughs]

Jojo  

Yep.

Sarah  

Which is insane.

It doesn't even look like you could carry very much in there either.

I know, it's just... it's JUST a purse. [bl] I'm pretty sure this is a Birkin. Yeah, that strap across the front is Birkin-y.

Jojo  

And the scarves on the handles, too.

Sarah  

Oh yeah. Hermès scarves are a thing. Yeah, you're right. It's basically just a status symbol. And it's just-- it's like, another, you know, example of her aspiring to this... basically, rich white lady aesthetic. And this is just her at the grocery store.

Jojo  

Mmhmm.

Sarah  

She just took her Birkin bag to the grocery store. [laughs] What's next? Oh...

Jojo  

And also, you're wearing that blazer and those pants to the grocery store too.

Sarah  

I know. And I mean... behind her is Mr. Kim, the dad of the poor family, and he is basically like her...

Jojo  

Like, gofer? [laughs]

Sarah  

Yeah, like he's pushing the cart, he bags the groceries, he drives her home. Like, she might as well not even be there. [laughs] But...

Jojo  

Yeah.

Sarah  

So... and then the last Park family thing I have... I didn't really talk about the dad, but the dad kind of fits into the same aesthetic as her. He wears a lot of business wear suits, sort of American-y looking, these are their pajamas. And in the interview, the one specific costume thing that I could find that Bong Joon Ho talked about was their pajamas. Because apparently in Korea, it's not super common to have pajamas that are different from your regular loungewear. So like, around the house, most people would wear just like, you know, sweats and soft shirts and whatever. Loungewear. And then they would sleep in that too. But rich people have pajamas.

Jojo  

Ahh.

Sarah  

So the fact that they have these silky L.L. Bean-looking pajamas is just another way to see their status.

Jojo  

Yeah.

Sarah  

As Richie Rich, rich, rich people. So let's talk a little bit more about the Kim family. This is them in their apartment. And you can see, just like I said, the crowdedness of the frame. They're all wearing loungewear, you know, soft... like, he's wearing--the son is wearing--basketball shorts, they've got sweats on. And the contrast of them in their own house versus when they get these jobs at the Park family house is pretty stark. So this is Mrs. Kim. And she's you know, she's very clean. I think she even gets her hair cut in the middle of the movie. She's wearing her most elegant ensemble, you know, and then here's her that same day at home eating dinner. She looks very sweaty.

Jojo  

Mmm. Yeah.

Sarah  

And hot.

Jojo  

Yep.

Sarah  

You can tell, there's some movies where you're like, "Oh, every time they they cut the makeup artist was like spritzing them with that fake sweat stuff," you know?

Jojo  

Mmhmm. Like the glycerin?

Sarah  

Yeah. [bl] Just got to look really, really damp. And you can see also that the lighting is so different. The lighting in their apartment is greener, it gives you that sort of under the sea, moldy feeling.

Jojo  

Mmhmm.

Sarah  

And then the the rich people house is like, not that.

Jojo  

Yeah.

Sarah  

It's much warmer. And then here's Ki-jung. She's... she's laughing at me every time I try. [bl] This is her...

Jojo  

It's a good effort though!

Sarah  

I'm trying! I didn't want to just...

Jojo  

I know.

Sarah  

...do the American thing and be like, [pronouncing hard "R"] "Mrs. Park." [bl] 'Cause I know that's not right. But this her before the son-- the rich son's birthday party. And this is... this comes right after their apartment gets flooded. So they have this really traumatic night where they have to... so... I'll explain a little more of the plot. The Park family goes camping. And so the Kim family comes in and are basically just like hanging out in the house, because they're not there.

Jojo  

Mmhmm.

Sarah  

Having, like... they're drinking, eating a bunch of food, making a mess. And then the rich family comes home before they're supposed to, so they have to hide. And it's a very stressful scene, and so they escape and it's pouring rain. And then they get home and their apartment is flooding. And there's a scene... I pulled it here. She's sitting on the toilet of their house, in the bathroom, surrounded by flood water, and the sewer is backing up. So like, the toilet is spraying brown... liquid.

Jojo  

Ohhh.

Sarah  

Yeah.

Jojo  

Gross.

Sarah  

So she did this, and then they had to sleep in a shelter. And then she has to come to the rich people's house the next day and look like this, and pretend like nothing happened. And it's just like, so... heart-wrenching.

Jojo  

Yeah.

Sarah  

And upsetting. And also what upset me is there's a scene where Mrs. Park is talking about how the rain was such a blessing, because it like, got rid of the pollution from the sky. And she's just so oblivious. Like, the whole theme is that she's oblivious, and spoiler alert, there are people living in her basement. There's a guy living in the basement of her house and she doesn't even know. It's the housekeeper's husband.

Jojo  

Oh my gosh.

Sarah  

So here-- there she is. So this is them. This is her after she gets fired. So remember how I was like, "Here she is before she gets fired"?

Jojo  

Yeah.

Sarah  

This is her after. So it's like, he's really illustrating the line between destitution and getting by. And the husband, her husband, is hiding in this house because he's hiding from debt collectors because he's so far in debt.

Jojo  

Yeah.

Sarah  

So.

Jojo  

So much. So much happening.

Sarah  

This movie is... so good. So then here's them at the birthday party. We just have to pretend everything's fine. So this is her dress that she chooses. And I love it because she really blends in. This is the shot of the party. And she looks like she belongs there, you know, she not sticking out. She doesn't look, like, poor. And she just has to like pretend everything's fine. It's this chiffon... floral print. I think it's really pretty.

Jojo  

Ooh, yeah.

Sarah  

Very feminine.

Jojo  

Gorgeous.

Sarah  

Yeah, very different from everything else she's worn up until this point. The... toilet... oh, I think the last picture I have is just the-- this is Mrs. Park in her closet. Oh, does she have more than one Birkin? Look at that.

Jojo  

Oh my gosh. Yes, she does.

Sarah  

She has three!

Jojo  

One in every color.

Sarah  

She has red, brown, and black. Oh, God.

Jojo  

That's crazy.

Sarah  

I grabbed this shot because the size of this closet is basically like the size of the entire apartment, the Kim's entire apartment. And it's just like another way of illustrating, like, how much space these rich people have and how oblivious they are to the fact that the people who are in their house every day are struggling so, so profoundly.

Jojo  

Yeah.

Sarah  

Okay, is that it? Yeah. So I'm not going to tell you what happens at the end, you guys will have to watch it. It's on Hulu. The twist came out of nowhere. I had no idea that it was going where it was going.

Jojo  

Wait, it's free on Hulu?

Sarah  

It's on Hulu, if you have Hulu.

Jojo  

Oh, I do have Hulu.

Sarah  

You should watch it!

Jojo  

I have to watch this movie!

Sarah  

Yes! Yeah, like I said, I was blown away by it. And at first I was watching it and I was like, "Uh-oh, this isn't like a costume movie. What am I gonna talk about?" You know?

Jojo  

Yeah.

Sarah  

But contemporary movies, you-- it allows you to kind of just like talk about the themes, and how the costumes help illustrate the theme. So I really think the contrast between the scenes in the Kim's apartment and the Park's house are so... they're really good. I don't know how to say it. Like...

Jojo  

I think that's-- it's an inevitable part of costume designing, is that you do have to understand, not just the factual research that comes along with designing a costume for someone. But it's also understanding the emotion. I mean, and I think that that kind of happened with the French movie, too. It's like it was very much more about the emotions that you're kind of feeling when you see those costumes, as opposed to how accurate. I mean, like, yes, the accuracy was still there in terms of what they would have worn and, you know, in your case, what what your characters are wearing. Like, obviously, these are all very realistic people.

Sarah  

Mmhmm.

Jojo  

But I think the fine art of being a costume designer also takes into account, how are these pieces--and how is this outfit--going to evoke the idea of the feeling that the director is going for? Which-- that's the harder part, I think, of costume design, is learning how to design for an abstract idea or a concept.

Sarah  

Right.

Jojo  

As opposed to, "I need this literal cardigan," or "I need these literal pants," or "this specific hat."

Sarah  

Yeah.

Jojo  

Sometimes it's harder to kind of conceptualize that in an abstract form and figure out how to still do that with costumes.

Sarah  

Yeah.

Jojo  

Whether that's through color or texture, or, you know, that kind of thing, or even just interacting with other costumes.

Sarah  

Yeah, I think a good way to do that is to ask yourself, "Why is this character wearing what they're wearing?" And kind of start there.

Jojo  

Mmhmm. Yeah.

Sarah  

Also, like, we talk about color a lot. But it's important to know what color does and which colors represent what emotion, subconsciously. I think once you have that sort of foundation of knowledge, it's easier to think about those abstract things. And how...

Jojo  

Yeah, definitely.

Sarah  

...how clothes can be interpreted in certain ways.

Jojo  

It goes back to psychology a lot too, I think psychology is a huge factor in costume designing, because a lot of what we wear, even if we don't think about it, that comes from a psychological reaction to how we've looked at clothes, or how we've appreciated clothes before. So... it's definitely important.

Sarah  

And how we see ourselves, as well.

Jojo  

Yeah.

Sarah  

How you want to be seen and how you see yourself is a huge part of how you dress the way you dress, you know? Which is...

Jojo  

Yeah.

Sarah  

...like in "Parasite," it's very clear, because when they go to these rich peoples' house, they know they need to present themselves as these people that they basically, like, invented. They invent their credentials.

Jojo  

Right, right.

Sarah  

They pretend like they have all these years of experience and all these contacts. And so in order to to look that part, they need to wear the right clothes.

Jojo  

Yeah.

Sarah  

Because, like, rich people... it goes back to the obliviousness of the rich family. They see a nice outfit, and they hear, "Oh, I have this degree in Art Psychology," or whatever BS that the daughter is coming up with. And they're like, "That sounds great!" And they're fooled, basically, by...

Jojo  

Yeah. Right.

Sarah  

...by the facade.

Jojo  

It's... I mean, it says a lot about our culture too, because I think even in America, the people that are the most cynical or the most suspicious are the people that have endured that hardship, and have been tricked before, and that are desperate. Because we've seen what that looks like. You know, I feel like it's-- I don't want to say all wealthy people are not smart or intelligent, or that all not-wealthy people are super smart or cynical. You know, obviously, there's nuances in all of humanity. But I feel like, you know, people that have to work for that and have gone through the hardship of being tricked or cheated, kind of understand from a different perspective than people who have had things handed to them, that have never had to deal with that hardship.

Sarah  

Yes.

Jojo  

So yeah, it makes a big difference.

Sarah  

Yeah, it's a really different life to not ever have to worry about, like, when your next meal is going to be, or whether you'll have a house next month, you know.

Yeah. Yeah. So crazy.

That got heavy at the end there. [laughs]

Jojo  

I know! Well, it's interesting, too, because it's coming at an appropriate time, because that's what's true nation right now.

Sarah  

It's true! Yeah. So in summary, we should eat the rich.

Jojo  

Everything is timed, it's such a coincidental, and maybe not so coincidental...

Sarah  

Well, yeah, I mean, you know, Bong Joon Ho made this movie not that long ago. And it's, you know, it was only a couple years ago. So it's very relevant.

Jojo  

Yeah. And it's already been happening in Korea. So I'm...

Sarah  

Yeah.

Jojo  

I'm sure-- it's a very universal message, which I think is why so many people flocked to this movie so quickly.

Sarah  

Yes. And it's very smartly done too. Like, it-- it has layers to it that you don't immediately realize upon first watch that you kinda have to think about.

Jojo  

Yeah, absolutely.

Sarah  

I loved it. Ten out of ten. Perfect movie. [bl]

Jojo  

I love it. Cool. So that wraps up our foreign film theme of the day.

Sarah  

Yeah!

Jojo  

I'm super excited. Thanks for sharing about that movie. I'm looking forward to seeing it now.

Sarah  

You're so welcome.

Jojo  

And I'm glad to know that it's on Hulu. Unfortunately, my movie is not for free right now.

Sarah  

Aww.

Jojo  

But but you can rent it for very cheap on Amazon Prime.

Sarah  

That's a pretty good deal. That's-- we like that.

Jojo  

Yeah, it's like three bucks to rent it.

Sarah  

Oh, that's not bad at all. Yeah.

Jojo  

All right.

Sarah  

Okay.

Jojo  

That concludes our episode for today. I'm Jojo.

Sarah  

I'm Sarah. Thanks so much for joining us. We hope you enjoyed.

Jojo  

Yeah.

Sarah  

Please interact with us on social media. Our handles are going to be in the outro. Once again, hi to everybody who's new and we hope you like it.

Jojo  

Yeah. Thanks for joining us.

Sarah  

Yeah.

Both  

Bye!

[OUTRO]

Jojo

Thank you for listening to The Costume Plot! You can follow us on Twitter and Instagram at @thecostumeplot. If you have a question, comment, or movie suggestion you can email us at thecostumeplot@gmail.com.

Sarah

Our theme music is by Jesse Timm, and our artwork is by Jojo Siu. Please rate and review us wherever you listen to your podcasts.

[chiseler]

The Chiseler Interviews Jonathan Rosenbaum

The Chiseler’s Daniel Riccuito discusses pre-Code talkies, noir and leftist politics with one of America’s leading film critics.

DR: We share a common enthusiasm for early talkies. Do you have any favorite actors, writers or storylines relating to the period’s ethnic, often radically left-wing, politics? I'm thinking of the way that, say, The Mayor of Hell suddenly busts into a long Yiddish monologue. Or movies like Counsellor at Law and Street Scene present hard Left ideas through characters with Jewish, Eastern European backgrounds.

JR: Both Counsellor at Law and Street Scene are plays by Elmer Rice (1892-1967) that Rice himself adapted, and both are terrific films with very good directors (William Wyler and King Vidor, respectively). It's too bad that Rice's plays aren't revived more often today, although a few years ago, the TimeLine theater company in Chicago put on a fantastic, neo-Wellesian production of The Adding Machine. I also had the privilege of knowing Rice's two children with actress Betty Field, John and Judy, who attended the same boarding school in Vermont, both of whom I remember quite fondly.

Although it isn't as politically subversive as the Rice plays, the delightful Jewel Robbery (William Dieterle, 1932) is still a more radical comedy in its treatment of class and sex — specifically, the sexual lure of being robbed as another way of being sexually possessed and enjoyed — than Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise, released a little later the same year. There's also something prophetic about the use of charm, good manners, and marihuana joints to lure the cops away from crime and criminals — another form of sensual appeal, in contrast to the more ethereal romanticism preached by the Lubitsch film, which might be said to value style over content and suggestion over spelling things out. For that matter, even a conservative director like Cecil B. De Mille does amazing things with class and sexual tensions in his melodrama Dynamite (1929) — which deserves to be cherished today at least as much as his subsequent Madame Satan — undoubtedly assisted by at least one Communist (John Howard Lawson) among his screenwriters. Especially in Dynamite, proletarian interests and biases are honored and rewarded at least as much as luxuries and privileges. The convoluted plot may be absurdly contrived, but by getting an heiress (Kay Johnson) married to a coal miner (Charles Bickford) awaiting execution for a crime he didn't commit, the movie gives us archetypes so dialectically opposed that any sexual congress between them virtually guarantees an explosive climax as promised by the title, and De Mille in fact delivers several.

DR: I once compared Elmer Rice's words in the play Counsellor at Law to the final screenplay. There were very definite cuts to his radical (colloquial) language. Bebe Daniels’ character would have put her heart into a (sadly) excised line about police brutality. Rice demonstrated enormous sensitivity to the way everyday people felt and spoke. Do you have a favorite writer — especially where sassy dialogue is concerned?

JR: I wish I did, but that's beyond my range of expertise. However, one name that sparkles for me is Donald Ogden Stewart. He's only one of the four credited screenwriters on Harry d'Abbadie d'Arrast's exquisite Laughter (1930) — for me the only early talkie that measures up to F. Scott Fitzgerald in sophistication — along with Herman Mankiewicz and d'Arrast himself, but I like to think that he's the crucial figure.

Donald Ogden Stewart

DR: Oh, I love Laughter! You're making me want to see everything Donald Ogden Stewart ever wrote. You mentioned Harry d'Abbadie d'Arrast and Herman Mankiewicz. Could you expand on your interest in either or both of them? Your answer needn't focus on any particular period.

JR: I've been trying for some time to investigate d'Arrast's work, but it's been almost impossible because of all the lost films (apparently Service for Ladies, Serenade, The Magnificent Flirt, and Dry Martini) and/or unavailable films (It Happened in Spain and The Three Cornered Hat). Pierre Rissient, who knew him, denied the rumors about him being antisemitic and argued that he had a lot to do with Hallelujah, I'm a Bum because of all the work he did on preproduction. The other films that he worked on which I've seen —Wings, A Gentleman of Paris, Raffles, and Topaz--all testify to his special qualities.

DR: Hallelujah, I'm a Bum makes me think of Ben Hecht, naturally, but also of Hecht's friend and sometimes co-writer Maxwell Bodenheim who wrote Naked on Roller Skates, one of my favorite books, loaded with 1930s slang.  A weird mix of pulp fiction and experimentalism. We touched on radical leftism and ethnicity earlier... How do you account for full-on communist films like Our Daily Bread getting made in Hollywood? Or what about the social justice films out of Warner Bros., like Wild Boys of the Road, which features little Sidney Miller hurling "Chazzer!" at a cop. I'm sometimes astounded by the open radicalism one finds in early Sound-era films. I even went digging through the Warner archives hoping to find evidence that senior execs might have harbored radical left dreams and discovered an early script of Heroes for Sale, which compared Richard Barthelmess' character to Jesus Christ — after making him a brick-throwing, cop-fighting member of the I.W.W.!

JR: We have to remember that Communist values were very close to being a mainstream position during much of the 30s. I've long maintained, for instance, that Faulkner's Light in August is a Communist novel, simply because Faulkner, for all his eccentricity and conservatism, was part of the mainstream during the Depression. Our national amnesia tends to factor this out of our history, just as (to cite a more trivial but more recent example) America's love for Jerry Lewis throughout most of the 50s, which enabled him to make two or three pictures a year, is not only forgotten but illogically replaced by the so-called (and mostly imaginary) love of the French, as if this were the reason why Lewis could make so many movies in the U.S. and why Sailor Beware made a lot more money than either Singin' in the Rain or On the Waterfront.

I'm a novice when it comes to Ben Hecht — apart from having read Adina Hoffman's excellent recent critical biography of him — because both his cynicism and his contempt for Hollywood are automatic turn-offs for me. But Bodenheim is clearly, at least for me, a Topic For Further Research.

DR: Speaking of leftism in 1930s Hollywood, what connections do you draw between that period and the emergence of noir, in which the old ebullience of the radical left seems to have soured into (a more realistic?) nihilism and anger. Maybe I'm projecting there. In any event, do you find it useful, or perhaps even inevitable, to make connections between pre-Code and noir? I can't help noticing how many forties and fifties films wind up in sewers, industrial parks and abandoned factories, which all feel like inhuman representations of capitalism. Try and Get Me AKA The Sound of Fury is famously based on Jo Pagano's The Condemned, a book coming out of a hard-left perspective. Or do you find other, less political connections between these periods interesting?

JR: I don't find noir more "realistic" than 30s leftism. Au contraire, I find its defeatism and expressionism far more comforting. Closure, no matter how grim or grimy, is always more comforting than ellipsis and suspension — trajectories into possible futures. I think the popularity of noir today has a lot to do with a doom-laden death wish, a desire to escape any sense of responsibility for a future that seems helpfully hopeless — an attitude that "blossoms," decadently, into the Godfather trilogy, where corruption is seen as "tragically" (that is to say, satisfyingly) inevitable. Once the future becomes foreclosed, we're all left off the hook, n'est pas?

DR: Well said, Jonathan. I hereby spare you my own personal dialectic, which ricochets between radical left politics (love, solidarity, hope) and totalizing disgust with human kind. In fact, I only mention that particular tension as a way of pointing out that my last question spoke to broad tendencies. Ever see Chicago Calling? One of Dan Duryea's finest moments! It seems to me that the film, along with the best "dark" post-WWII cinema, not all of it "noir" per se, manages to ricochet that way. Do you have any favorites from the period? If so, what draws you there?

JR: I haven't yet seen either Chicago Calling or Guilty Bystander (another early and obscure noir I just heard about), both of which I'm currently downloading. (Stay tuned...)

Otherwise, noir is too vast a subject for me to comment on at any length just now, except to recommend James Naremore's (for me) definitive book on the subject, More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts.

DR: What do you think of Felix Feist’s work?

JR: Based on what I've seen, I'm not a fan.

(Here, we break so that Jonathan Rosenbaum can watch Chicago Calling)

JR: Now that I've watched Chicago Calling, I can't help but reflect that noir and neorealism, contemporary film movements, may actually be opposite sides of the same coin. (Isn't Open City a noir, and The Sound of Fury an alternate version of The Bicycle Thief?) The key traits that they have in common are "postwar" and "originating in Europe," but the key difference that should be acknowledged at the outset is that "noir" in this country wasn't perceived as such when the films that we now identify as "noir" first appeared. Even in France it had a literary connotation because it was a name derived from a book publisher. So it's a way of reinventing and reinterpreting the past, whereas Italian neorealism was perceived as such from the get-go. It also was fundamentally humanist whereas noir was closer to nihilism and cynicism, and its tendency towards political defeatism obviously has a lot to do with its contemporary appeal — absolving us of any responsibility for the messes we live in.

Chicago Calling is closer to neorealism than it is to noir because of its exciting use of natural locations and its focus on working-class characters. Yet as a hard luck story it seems so overdetermined that at times it becomes metaphysical, which places it closer to noir. Dan Duryea is an actor that we mostly associate with noir and metaphysics, so it's refreshing to find him for once in a neorealistic and physical landscape.

DR: I'm interested in your idea that noir veers into the metaphysical realm. Since we started our conversation in the 1930s, which seem grounded in physical reality, I wonder if you have any thoughts on the evolution of noir, its underlying and perhaps unconscious motives. I vaguely recall a film critic whose name escapes me saying "After the war we needed shadows to hide in."

JR: I'd like to ask that film critic why we need to hide. In my experience, some of the same people who love noir also supported and even celebrated both of the Gulf wars and didn't mind at all if the U.S. was torturing a lot of innocent people as long as the innocent people wasn't them — all of which suggests to me a pretty good reason for wanting to hide. But surely defeating the Nazis — unlike some of the brutalities that arise from capitalism-- isn't a very plausible reason for hiding.

DR: I think it was a Hiroshima reference, not sure.

JR: That makes sense. Even though Truman gave no indication of wanting to hide.

DR: Has the Chicago film scene had any influence on you?

JR: For starters, I perceive New York as a separate country — Manhattan as an island — and Chicago as part of the U.S. I also consider New York and Los Angeles (a company town) as provincial in much the same way that my home town in Alabama is provincial: i.e., if something hasn't happened there, it hasn't happened. Whereas Chicago knows that it isn't the center of the universe. And its film scene is decidedly less competitive and turf-conscious, which I find refreshing. There isn't the same cut-throat atmosphere here nor any of the New York or Hollywood arrogance and rudeness.

DR: I've asked you questions that assume connections between aesthetics and politics. I get the sense that you lean "left". But given that political shorthand can be confusing, I'll try being as concrete as possible: your analysis of fascist aesthetics in Star Wars moved me as a critique cutting across the grain of America's image of itself as a liberating force in the world. What are your politics?

JR: Star Wars fosters the idea of a bloodless genocidal massacre, which is part of what made both Gulf wars so popular in this country — seeing war as a video game.

I'm basically a Bernie Sanders socialist who would be happy with an Elizabeth Warren presidency, and I'm also a pacifist. DR: Do your politics relate in substantive ways to your early movie-going experiences? I heard that your father owned a movie theater. I'm also thinking of the distinctions you draw among the various American movie scenes. Was the physical landscape you grew up in an influence on your aesthetic and political values?

JR: My politics were probably affected more by my almost eight years of living in Europe (Paris and London) than by my first sixteen years of living in Alabama. My paternal grandfather owned a small chain of movie theaters, and my father worked for him until the chain was sold in 1960, at which point he became an English professor. He was never a cinephile, but the fact that he'd wanted to be a writer clearly influenced my becoming one.

Growing up in a house designed for my parents by Frank Lloyd Wright also undoubtedly affected my aesthetics, but not my politics, which were formed in part by my 60s involvements in the civil rights and antiwar movements.

As for my view of America's role in the world, I think we tend to be handicapped in our good intentions by the delusion that only three kinds of people exist —Americans, anti-Americans, and prospective Americans — which means that we tend to exclude most of humanity from the playing field.

This interview was conducted via email.

[cbk1000]

I'm going to have to respectfully disagree about Outlander. I've read the books and watch the show, multiple times (only 8 books, not 10). I've missed some of your discussion I think, but Jamie isn't rapey or anything in the books. The most you could say is he's a product of his time in regards to a woman's place, but he mostly gets over that in the first book. And they only spend part of one book apart really. And the later books talk much more about possible consequences, (1/5)

trueromantic1 said:but so far much more is about not being able to change history, at least not the big things. The books occasionally talk about how they might change little things, and that in the long run it might have an impact, but mostly so far it’s taken the stance that the big things are sort of fixed in time. And there are actually multiple other time travelers. As someone who has both read them and watched the show (and who enjoys both) I’d be happy to discuss them more with you and your other (2/5)

interested followers (since like I said I haven’t read your whole discussion, but it sounds like you both are getting your info from people who aren’t totally up on both mediums, but I could be wrong). Also, Gabaldon doesn’t say they aren’t romance. She’s called them romance herself. I didn’t read them back when she first started though, so maybe it was different back then. (Seriously not trying to be rude or disrespectful, just sounds like you have incorrect or incomplete info.) (3/5)

And I’m not saying there isn’t rape or attempted rape, because there definitely is in many of the books, though usually only once, except for when Black Jack Randall is involved (and I hate the “but it’s historically accurate” stuff as well). And obviously if a person doesn’t like them, they don’t. I’m not hating on anyone who dislikes the books/movies. Just offering a different opinion. And there isn’t as much (4/5)

rape as I’ve seen lots of people say. I’m honestly not sure why Claire annoys some people, but again, we all like different things. Why don’t you like Gabaldon? I admit I don’t pay much attention to author drama, so long as I enjoy the book. (5/5)

Admittedly, I’ve not read much of the first book (and I’ve only seen the first season of the show), so I’m debating with limited tools based on secondhand reviews and comments from my sister (whose opinion I trust). Anyone else who wants to jump in on either side is welcome.

It seems to me that the books are very problematic in that Jamie might be a ‘product of his time’, but the books were written by a modern woman with a modern audience in mind (and the main character herself, while not living in a perfect world, still comes from a post-suffrage era). The narrative, then, ought to be able to handle his archaic attitude toward women without romanticizing it, which from what I have read, it doesn’t do. In his time period, a man may not have been able to legally rape his wife, and even in Claire’s timeline, it might not yet have been a criminal act, but it is in Diana Galbadon’s, and I don’t think modern readers can be expected to divest themselves of those ideals so that they can consider Jamie a sexy romantic hero. (What I am referring to, if this isn’t clear, is that he essentially tells her he gets to have sex with her whenever he wants, whether SHE wants to or not. Which may have been legally acceptable at the time, but it’s not to modern day readers.)

So far as my comment about whatever Gabaldon wants to think, the books are in fact romance–she has a sort of shitty attitude toward the romance genre. She seems, from comments she’s made, to consider herself above the genre (because, of course, real writers don’t write romance novels) in the same way that Nicholas Sparks considers himself a ‘writer of Greek tragedies’, not a romance author.

But my main issue really with her is that she made an excessively shitty blog post about how fanfiction is comparable to white slavery because you are taking her characters and using them for your own (often sick ‘slash’ pairing) purposes. She also compared it to a hypothetical scenario in which a middle-aged neighbor writes graphic, erotic fiction about her 21-year-old daughter and sends it to her (her point being that it’s not illegal, but it is creepy as fuck). She really strikes me as a colossal asshole, and in my opinion, she relies way too much on rape as a plot device (there are several attempted rapes in the first season of the show and a couple of actual rapes, and I’ve heard this is vastly toned down from the books).

All this, though, as I’ve said, comes from my having watched the first season of the show, and the bits and pieces I’ve read of the first book, in combination with commentary from my sister and others who have read farther than I have. Again, anyone more knowledgeable is welcome to step in and add to the discussion.

And, honestly, from everything I have read and personally seen, I do not agree with you, but thank you for messaging me with a different perspective; it helps to open a dialogue, which is never a bad thing.   

[bluephoenixdruidicprincess]

Fifty Shades Darker Movie Review

This past weekend I subjected myself to experiencing the movie, 50 Shades Darker and all I have to say about this movie in a generic sense was, “I was really, REALLY bored.” Here I was thinking there was no way I would ever experience a movie that had me more bored than Transformers 3, but then came along 50 Shades Darker. I was so bored that I finished my large popcorn and drink by the first 40 minutes of this movie (I’m a compulsive eater when I’m bored). And then I was like, “Shit. What do I do now? I can’t get up and get a refill. I hate when other people get up in front of me to leave and come back. I can’t do that. Then I’d be a hypocrite.” I had not choice but to revel in my boredness.

This will contain spoilers for the 50 Shades franchise, both movies and books. These are my honest opinions. If you don’t want to hear an opinion that may be different from your own, you may not want to read this. This is going to be a critical review. It’s going to be negative and I apologize for you hardcore Fifty Shades fans. I’m not telling you how to think. I’m telling you what I think. If you send me any rude comments or messages, I will 100% ignore you.

I never imagined that a movie about an erotica novel could leave me so bored but here it is. Now granted, 50 Shades Darker is not my favorite book in the franchise. Hell, the 50 Shades series is nowhere close to making my Top 10 Favorite Book Series. It doesn’t even come close to making my Top 10 Favorite Romance Series. 50 Shades Darker, as a book, has structural issues that were unfortunately copied right off the paper and put into the movie. Ana annoys me a lot in this book and the pacing is just all over the place. I had a really hard time getting through this book when I first read it. It was like actual work trying to read this book. My constructive criticism thoughts on this movie were that they kept a lot from the books they could’ve left out and left out parts they should’ve kept in. 

The Raunchy Bits…Let’s Get This Part Over With

I expected sex scenes in this franchise. I have read the books. I know what the books are about. I was expecting this. However, I was expecting a little more with what they did in the first movie. In the first movie, the scenes were filmed in a way where you were kind of perceiving the sex from the point-of-view of Ana which I think worked. That approach was not taken in this movie. Let me put it into perspective for you. If sitcoms were allowed to have sex scenes, what we saw in this movie is how they would be filmed. All of the sex scenes were filmed in a way that was “straight on”, there were no creative shots. These scenes felt very fan-servicey and objectifying. It was very disappointing. Also, the sex scenes were pretty much the brunt of this movie. Any of kind of emotional scene was just simply a plot device to get the characters to their next sex scene. It wasn’t that I was uncomfortable with these sex scenes, it was that I was insanely bored with them. I didn’t think you could make a BDSM sex scene boring but this movie proves you can. The true tragedy is that you could’ve cut these sex scenes out of the movie and it wouldn’t have made a difference. It still would’ve been a boring movie but you would’ve been bored for a less amount of time. I think the soundtrack was more stimulating than these scenes.

Bad Chemistry Makes For A Bad Movie…No Matter What Director You Have

We also had to suffer through two hours of bad chemistry much like the first movie. To the average viewer, you might see it as their chemistry has improved. I disagree. I think their chemistry is still bad; they’re just more familiar with each other now. However, I can’t say the movie is bad based purely on the chemistry, though. The script writer also wasn’t doing these actors any favors. The script lacked personality. The first movie’s script attempted to incorporate a certain amount of humor and wit that was completely absent in this movie. It just felt like everyone’s lines were very generic and obvious. Like I said, no personality. It’s really hard for me to take a story seriously when the leading guy says this girl is different from all of the others when I haven’t seen anything to support that. Ana, as a character is pretty boring and I really don’t see how she was different from any of his other submissives. But Christian also didn’t escape the boring train, either. Jamie Dornan still is giving him absolutely no personality whereas Dakota Johnson at least attempts to give Ana some sort of spark. I legitimately laughed when Mia is telling Ana that she should get Christian a sense of humor for his birthday. Someone should also get him a personality. Even the supporting characters were written extremely stale. They were quite forgettable and underutilized. When they popped up, I actually had to remind myself who they were. Now, I’m not saying the dialogue in the book is much better. That dialogue is pretty stale as well but they have a couple of recurring jokes that I think could’ve helped with this movie. For instance, in the movie, Mrs. Robinson is barely mentioned but in the book, she’s someone who’s constantly mentioned. Ana has a huge problem with her and I just don’t think it was shown in the movie. The movie could’ve done much better with the ambivalence of Mrs. Robinson if she was mentioned more on a casual basis with Christian and Ana as she is in the books. In the movie, I had to keep on reminding myself on who this woman is. People who have not read the books, I think would’ve been very confused about her and who she is to Christian. Another little side joke they could’ve incorporated was Ana telling Christian to go see his psychologist whenever she disobeys him and to “stow his twitching palm.” It’s little scenes like that that could fill in some of the chemistry gaps. They could’ve taken a couple sex scenes out and incorporated more of those other plot lines. It’s all comes down to what I said earlier, the movie kept scenes they could’ve left out and took stuff out that they should’ve kept in.

One Ridiculous Moment That Made Me Laugh

The movie wasn’t all bad. It did make me laugh at one particular moment but unfortunately, it’s one of those things where you’re not supposed to laugh. Christian’s helicopter has crashed. And by the way, I think the movie would’ve done better to just not show the helicopter crash. It would’ve been more impactful if they hadn’t. But Christian’s helicopter has crashed and they’re all in his penthouse watching the news waiting to hear if he’s been found or not. The news reports he’s been found and the next second, he’s walking through the elevator into the penthouse. It was so ridiculous, I couldn’t help but to laugh at it. He also had blood smeared over his face so I’m guessing he walked back from the Seattle forest too. And he looked damned good for someone who was just in a helicopter crash and apparently walked all the way back to Seattle. It was just REALLY funny to me. I got a stink-eye from the people who were sitting next to me but I didn’t care. What a horrible decision for production to make.

That’s about all I have to really say. I only wanted to touch on the things that I felt made it a bad movie as far as movies go. I really don’t have too much to say on this movie. I thought it was really boring. I would probably give this movie a D-. Maybe like 61%. And considering this movie has a 9% on Rotten Tomatoes, I think I’m being rather merciful. The chemistry was bad, the script was bad, the pacing was weird, too much emphasis was placed on the actual act of sex instead of what it symbolizes in their relationship. But I also can’t blame this completely on the producers. A large part of this movie’s problem is the source material as well. It’s a very hard book series to adapt in an acceptable manner. I am not a huge fan of the books. I think the books send a very bad message. And I’m not talking about having a BDSM relationship. I’m talking about Christian’s stalker-like tendencies and Ana’s willingness to overlook it. Her complete lack of self when she’s not with Christian is troubling. The books also romanticize the idea of a girl being able to get a man to change for them. Whereas I do believe people can change, I don’t believe you can change a person’s core beliefs. The traits that make that person who they are. And mark my words, that is exactly what is happening here and I find it very unrealistic and problematic for women who might be romanticizing this sort of behavior. This movie would’ve been better served to focus on the emotional bits instead of the sexual bits of the source material. There are some great romantic bits in the source material that make the books bearable and I wish the movie could have focused more on that. Even though I ragged on it, it was not entirely a horrible movie. I don’t necessarily regret watching it; nor do I have any desire to see it again, though.

That’s all I have for you. I’m sorry that this was so negative. I just really don’t think this movie worked. Remember, these are my opinions. Opinions are never right or wrong. I’m not telling you what to think. I’m telling you what I think. Feel free to enjoy it as you see fit. I’m just telling you I didn’t enjoy it. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it. Do you agree? Do you disagree? May be you found enjoyment in it that I didn’t? I’d love to hear how you enjoyed it so maybe if I watch the movie again I might be able to find that same enjoyment. 

[hermanwatts]

Sensor Sweep: Antiheroes, Theodore Sturgeon, A. E. van Vogt, Dreadstar

Popular Culture (Adam Lane Smith): Much has been made about the oft-lamented shift from Hero to Antihero and the modern obsession with romanticizing evil. Most frequently, I’ve heard this complaint directed at modern western media’s fixation on selecting one unyielding human trash fire after another as every main character. There’s a reason modern book sales and movie sales are struggling. To understand the shift over the last hundred years of stories and main characters, one must understand the cultural environments and the mental aspects at play, particularly attachment formation and its impact on society.

  Writing (Rawle Nyanzi): With every passing day, it seems that global pop culture disappoints us more. Classic franchises are vandalized into self-parodies to “modernize” them, creative talent increasingly treats fandoms as the enemy, and geek-oriented media champion the intimidation and silencing of creatives who don’t toe a very particular ideological line. The Pulp Mindset is not a book on how to make millions with one simple trick. It is not a book about gaming Amazon’s ever-changing algorithm. It is a book about having the right mentality for storytelling.

Hugo Awards (Dark Herald): This years Hugos went so far beneath my radar I didn’t know they had happened. I think we have finally reached the point where a Hugo Award is actually damaging to an author’s reputation. Certainly, no one who loves Science Fiction will want to buy a book with the words Hugo Award winner on the cover. As you may know by now. George R.R. Martin hosted the 2020 Hugo Awards and he was apparently too old to be Woke.

Fiction (DMR Books): Now I don’t have to wait six months to release my collection! Necromancy in Nilztiria will be available in next month, and the cover illustration (which you can see to the left) is based upon “A Twisted Branch of Yggdrasil.” In this tale, the Norseman Hrolfgar and the Atlantean Deltor have been drawn through the labyrinths of time and space to the world of Nilztiria by a sorceress, who commands them to slay her enemy, Xaarxool the Necromancer. But as you can see this is no easy task, for Xaarxool has giant skeletons to defend him.

Fiction (Marzaat): Like most critics, he regards Sturgeon’s supreme strength as characterization. Sturgeon was allegedly good at seeing the cruelty behind civilization and the ways “conventional morality” (supposedly Sturgeon distinguished that from “fundamental ethical systems”) created anxieties and phobias hence some of his horror stories like “Bianca’s Hands”). Stableford contends Sturgeon never was onboard with John W. Campbell’s enthusiasm for science and technology. He suggests that Sturgeon’s “Killdozer!”, with its bulldozer under the control of a hostile alien force, is a hostile metaphor for that enthusiasm.

Fiction (Wasteland & Sky): Much credit should go author and editor Richard Paolinelli for all the work he has done in the Planetary Anthology series. After Superversive Press shuttered it looked unlikely that the project would ever be completed and was destined to be a what-if, but not only has Tuscany Bay released more volumes than Superversive did (and next month will have re-released all of Superversive’s old volumes), it has also carried the project into a whole new medium. That would be into the burgeoning audio book world.

History (Jon Mollison): The pre-history of the Americas is a true dark age – a time of great uncertainty and filled with mysteries for which we may never have solutions.  The most basic of these, who was the first to arrive, remains shrouded in conflicting narratives and contradictory evidence provided by scattered and controversial archaeology sites. The question assumes the Bering Straits Theory is the only one that holds water.  A rather sizable assumption given the dearth of evidence.  And the possible explanation lies in the stone-age sailing ship piloted by Thor Heyerdahl.

Dragon Awards (Dragoncon): In this three-part series, past Dragon Award recipients talk about their award-winning novels and their Dragon Awards experience. During this time, nothing provides a better escape from the world than diving into the pages of a Dragon Award winning novel. The Dragon Awards, launched in 2016 in tandem with Dragon Con’s 30th anniversary, allows readers, writers, publishers, and editors a way to recognize excellence in all things Science Fiction and Fantasy. These Awards are by the fans, for the fans, and are a chance to reward those who have made real contributions to SF, books, games, comics, and media.

Cinema (Other Master Cylinder): John Saxon was born Carmine Orrico in Brooklyn, the first child of Antonio and Anna Orrico. His mother was born in Caserta, a small city near Naples in Italy. There’s some confusion about John’s age, partly due to his fiddling’ of the dates for his first contract. “I was born on August 5, 1936. Many have it wrong because I made myself a year older to get a Universal contract at the start. If I had been younger it wouldn’t have worked.”

Review (George Kelly): The 9th book in the Harry Dresden series features Dresden in a desperate quest to clear his vampire brother, Thomas, from a cunning plot by powerful Magical Interests. Harry Dresden, professional Wizard and Private Investigator for the City of Chicago, grew up an orphan. His upbringing included a lot of physical and mental abuse which explains his taciturn disposition.

Comic Books (Totally Epic): Finally! After 3400 pages of Epic Illustrated, we’ve (that is, I) have finally arrived at the first thing published by Epic Comics! Er, or, rather not, because first we’re doing Marvel Graphic Novel #3, Dreadstar. I mean, I kinda have to, because it bridges the story started in Epic Illustrated and The Price (over at Eclipse) and the Dreadstar series proper.

Fiction (Amatopia): I’m three-quarters through The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons–sequel to Hyperion and book 2 in the 4 book Hyperion Cantos series–and I can’t stop singing these books’ praises. I think so far I’ve convinced over ten people to give Hyperion a shot. It has been a long time since I’ve found a novel or series that has engrossed me to this degree, particularly a sci-fi novel.

Fiction & RPG (The Other Side): Over the last couple of years, I have been on a quest to find and read all the Raven books by “Richard Kirk” who was, in reality, the pen name of authors Angus Wells and Robert Holdstock.  Both wrote Book 1 and then they alternated with Wells on Books 3 and 5 and Holdstock on Books 2 and 4. The story is one that is simple, but close to many FRP gamers. Raven wants to kill Karl Ir Donwayne. How is going to do that? Well, they need to Skull of Quez to appease this ruler to get to Donwayne.

Review (Rough Edges): The Digest Enthusiast, Book Twelve – Richard Krauss, ed. Interviews

Tony Gleeson (Fantastic, Amazing Science Fiction, Mike Shayne, Personal Crimes).

John Shirley (Weirdbook, Fantastic, The Crow, Constantine, Wetbones).

Games (25 Years Later): From the very beginning, you are made readily aware of not only the stakes but the epicness of the tale at the heart of Darksiders. The tale I speak of is at first set in modern-day Earth, and you take up the role of War, one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, who finds himself in our realm in the midst of a battle between Heaven and Hell. This is where Darksiders gives us a taste of War’s power before stripping it all away when he is killed during the battle. After War’s demise, he is brought in front of the Charred Council, where the blame of the apocalyptic events is placed squarely on his shoulders.

Pulp Fiction (DMR Books): The story starts in the “author as ghostwriter” conceit, as was the fashion of the time ever since its popularisation by Edgar Rice Burroughs in his Sword and Planet tales, and indeed utilised by Merritt himself in other stories such as The Moon Pool. So ubiquitous is this method of acclimatising the reader to tales of death-defying derring-do, it almost lulls the reader into a false sense of security – that this adventure will be just another ripping yarn, good for the mental exercise, but could safely be put down after reading.

RPG (Black Gate): Getting into Conan 2d20, for the casual gamer, or for the merely curious, demands a fair amount of cognitive load. This is because, I believe, the system is so innovative — and those innovations are precisely what makes this a Conan game. I have encountered many anecdotes of gamers and consumers gleefully obtaining this gorgeous hardcover tome (or PDF), riffling through it, saying, “Huh?” then setting it aside with a “Sorry, not for me, but the art is pretty, and this still makes a good resource.” adventures, the pandemic hit, and these two players weren’t interested in online play.

RPG (Silver Key): Ideas are a dime a dozen. It’s all about execution. The title of the post should speak for itself, but a little context. Heard on the intranets recently… “Gary Gygax ripped off Dave Arneson! Dave is D&D’s true creator!” My response: Horse shit. Ideas are like a@#$holes. We’ve all got one, and most stink. I can sit here in the calm quiet of my living room and fire off a dozen. “Weight loss app.” “Online mentoring program for pediatricians.” “Telehealth scheduling interface.” “Dying Earth role-playing game.”

Comic Books (Bleeding Cool): Sylvian Runberg writes: “When I was offered to do an adaptation of Conan, I was immediately thrilled, and for several reasons.     The first is that this character was a part of my childhood, especially with the comics drawn by John Buscema and obviously the film with Arnold Scharwzenegger. But the second, and maybe the most important reason, is Patrice Louinet, one of the worldwide best specialist of Robert E. Howard, who could advise us during the making of this adaptation, offered me the possibility to discover an another Conan from the one I had in mind from this childhood, a more complex character living in a more complex world, even if we’re still talking about fantasy, magic spells, epic adventures and monsters.

T.V. (Dark Worlds Quarterly): In 1982, Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Cimmerian was brought to the big screen in a film featuring Arnold Schwartzenegger. The success of Conan the Barbarian spawned a plethora of bad Sword & Sorcery films (including Conan sequels). I will make no comment on those films here but state none was better than average and most were far below the worst of the Ray Harryhausen’s classics. Until 1999’s The Thirteenth Warrior I can’t think of a post-Conan film of a heroic fantasy of any real interest. Since the release of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Fantasy films have been experienceing another renaissance.

Tolkien (The Wert Zone): The Hugo Awards are the premier awards for science fiction and fantasy literature, first given out in 1953 and every year since 1955. One of the more interesting mysteries of the award is that J.R.R. Tolkien, widely regarded as the most prominent fantasy author of the 20th Century, was never given one despite being eligible on multiple occasions.

Science Fiction (Fantasy Literature): This collection of nine short stories, novelettes and novellas originally appeared in hardcover form in 1952, from the publisher Pelligrini & Cudahy, and sold for $3.50. By the time my edition came out, the Berkley Medallion paperback from 1963, with another wonderfully abstract/Surrealist cover by the great Richard Powers, the cover price had dropped to 50 cents but the number of stories in the collection had been reduced to seven. Missing were the novelettes “Vault of the Beast,” from the Aug. ’40 ASF, and “Heir Unapparent,” from that same magazine’s June ’45 issue.

RPG (Grognardia): I bought Mörk Borg solely because of its physical characteristics. A local friend of mine raved about it months ago and then, while perusing Free League’s website recently, I caught a glimpse of it in all its lurid glory. I was so intrigued by its bright yellow cover and black, white, and red artwork that I ordered a copy and anxiously awaited its arrival. I was not disappointed when it appeared at last: the 96-page A5 book is sturdy and well-made, like so many European RPG books these days. Most of the paper in the book has a satin finish, but its last section, presenting an introductory adventure, has a rough, natural feel to it.

Fiction (Adventures Fantastic): Today, July 24, is the birthday of John D. MacDonald (1916-1986). MacDonald wrote for the pulps and transitioned to paperbacks when the pulps died. (I wish someone would collect all his science fiction.) For today’s birthday post, I want to look at One Monday We Killed Them All. Dwight McAran beat a girl to death and went to prison for it. He’s about to get out. Dwight is Fenn Hillyer’s brother-in-law. Fenn is a cop. They don’t get along.

Sensor Sweep: Antiheroes, Theodore Sturgeon, A. E. van Vogt, Dreadstar published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/

[rheyareads]

I think too much and now I need to write about it….

Okay before we begin what will likely be a short novel filled with random ideas and thoughts, I need to tell you all, dear readers, that I have typed, deleted and re-typed what was going to be my beginning sentence 4 times now because every variation I read had some grammatical error that I was self-editing and tried to fix to please my graduate professors who would likely throw up at the ridiculously long run-on sentence I have now typed out. So, with that being said – please be warned, this will be riddled with grammatical inaccuracies and likely contain an exuberant amount of split infinitives and dangling participles designed to take you on an emotional journey rather than please your concise, well thought out, hearts.

I turn 30 this year.

I’d like to point out that while I might physically turn 30, I don’t know that I’ll mentally turn 30. The idea is a bit too complex for me to fully comprehend as there are some days it feels like I’m still 22, bumbling around like Taylor Swift thinking everything will be alright if I just keep dancing around like an idiot.

I’ve done a lot of self-reflection over the last couple of months and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m not very happy with my life. Now, I know what you’re thinking – GASP – Kayla, say it isn’t true! You’re so positive! I can’t fathom you’d ever speak negatively about yourself, your looks, your life, your status, your direction, etc. etc.  – I know. I’m as shocked as you. But all kidding aside, I’ve struggled with depression and anxiety for as long as I can remember and the unhappiness I’m describing goes deeper than anything I think I’ve experienced before and its left me with this emptiness that I am struggling to move past. In the past year, I left my job and totally switched career paths, thus leaving behind the very thing I spent the better part of 9 years working towards as an adult, went from living alone, away from my friends and family to living with a roommate and mere minutes away from friends and family, and lost the best parental figure I’ve ever known to a brutal battle with cancer.

And while there have been wonderful things that have happened throughout my life and this past year, I feel like I am starting over with absolutely no direction. I’ve given a lot of thought lately about what I want to be remembered for, what I want my legacy to say when I’m gone, and usually I become so confused and overwhelmed I take out my phone and ignore the question by playing a game.

I think what’s tripped me up the most is wondering how many people in my life know my true, authentic self (and subsequently – what IS my true authentic self). I know how I WISH to be portrayed to others, but I’m not always aware of how others perceive me to be and I think that information is important when questioning the type of impact you have. I have a nagging suspicion my love of literature has led me to romanticize ideas and build up expectations for others that aren’t always realistic to how people interact with one another. As a result, I’m left disappointed in the relationships I have, always feeling like I don’t get back what I give to people. But the more I think about it, the more I wonder, what DO I give to others? Do I have an impact at all? Do I offer anything besides surface level friendship and self-deprecating and often distracting humor?

 A while ago, I asked a close friend of mine to tell me what they think matters most to me and their answers honestly stunned me. They weren’t necessarily wrong ( I think they said something like, friends and family, music, helping people – which are all true things) but it surprised me that it differed so much from how I would describe myself as a person and what I value most ( for example, the thing I value most is my work ethic and being viewed as someone who contributes and betters whatever it is I work on; I value passion and drive and gravitate towards other who are similar, I appreciate creativity and creative outlets of all kinds and prefer simple things like dinner with friends, movie nights in and reading to outlandish adventures or outings at bars because I like the intimacy they give; I’m emotional to a fault and sometimes have to backtrack because I let emotions cloud my judgement in important situations— that’s how I would describe myself). While it’s unfair of me to assume someone should just KNOW all of that, it still bothered me that the answer I was given wasn’t anywhere close to my own perception of who I am.

I think I’ve thought a lot about this more recently because my Aunt passed away and I saw what an incredible legacy and lasting impact she’s left on not only me, but every person she ever knew. She was without a doubt the most confident and unapologetically authentic woman I’ve ever known and there was no question that everyone who knew her saw her for who she was, through and through.

I think one reason I worry that people don’t have a real sense of who I am is because I choose which parts of me to let people see. I’m a social chameleon, capable of adapting to the crowd that I’m in order to fit in, so it’s sometimes hard for me to even decipher who I truly want to be versus who I think I need to be in order to gain acceptance. I am someone who doesn’t shy away from explaining past traumatic experiences or how I’m feeling (hello, facebook, my old frienddddd) but I also don’t typically elaborate on the true depth of those emotions for the sake of others.

For example, if someone asks me how I’m doing, I don’t typically give them the full truth of the answer because I know that the truth would likely make them uncomfortable and they’d be unsure of what to do. Additionally, most people who ask how you are don’t really want you to be honest, they just want you to know they made an attempt to connect and then move on with their day. Now, that may sound harsh, but it’s inherently true. We don’t ask “how ya doing” to have someone respond with “actually, I’m horrible and let me tell you why” – we ask because it’s socially expected for us to ask, and we hope the person reciprocates with the same and we move on to a short, surface level empty conversation before diving back into our phones/work/kids/etc.

So, in an effort to be more transparent and to get some things off my chest and into the universe somewhere, I thought it might help if I wrote out some of the complexities of my unhappiness to try and start figuring out where to move forward to change that. I think the transparency will help people learn a little more about the person I actually am, rather than just who I choose to show people. Maybe that will change opinions about me, maybe it won’t. I’ve decided to start using my blog for this because well… it’s a blog. More than that, I find writing out my thoughts and feelings therapeutic, but I think it’s important that I share that with others too in order to take it a step further. Maybe my thoughts can help inspire/encourage/motivate others, or maybe they can just help shed light on why I’m the specific brand of weird that I am.

Most importantly, I think we always wait to reflect on our relationships until a person is gone and I don’t want to do that. I want people to know how I feel about them, how their friendship/mentorship/love has changed me, for better or worse, before it’s too late to tell them. I also want to be able to change the depth of my relationships before it gets to be too late for me. And, in some aspect, I truly do believe in the idea that feelings are truly felt until they’re expressed to someone else and I think a lot of the reason I feel so unhappy with the trajectory of my life is that I’ve bottled a lot of this up and haven’t shared it with anyone in it’s entirety. Enter the internet….

With that being said, I’m long winded so I certainly can’t post it all in one sitting (well… I could…but the likelihood of anyone reading through it all is slim to none…. Unless you’re a past co-worker who wants to turn me in – HEYYYOOOO – bad joke…long story…maybe you’ll learn the tale late). So for now, I’ll leave you with the idea that sparked this whole project of mine.

As I mentioned hours ago, I turn 30 this year.

With that, I’d like to do 30 things in my 30th year. I think this will help give me focus and direction as I explore why it is I’m so miserable, and hopefully will help me, as they say, “find myself”. So here is my list:

1.       Do something that scares me (posting this nonsense might count as this – TBD)

2.       Volunteer somewhere

3.       Spend more time with my nieces/nephews

4.       Make a concerted effort to be more financially responsible

5.       Make an even more concerted effort to eat healthier and avoid early death from organ failure.

6.       Actually use the gym membership I pay for.

7.       Travel outside the country (or plan a trip to do that – see  number 4)

8.       Make an honest effort to go on a date with someone I don’t actually know.

9.       Try a little harder at my appearance (i.e. style my hair, maybe wear makeup)

10.   Get a dog

11.   Visit my friends who live out of state

12.   Go to NYC and see another broadway show

13.   Sing in some type of performance-based thing (musical/choir etc.)

14.   Explore my spirituality and faith and grow closer to God.

15.   Read my Bible more

16.   Say no more often and find balance in my work and life

17.   Plan and organize things ahead of time rather than flying by the seat of my pants

18.   Help someone with something even if I don’t want to

19.   Forgive people for things I’m holding on too

20.   Call or text my friends more to see how they’re doing rather than just to complain about things

21.   Be more attentive during conversations and live in the moment

22.   Spend less time on my phone

23.   Read ALL THE BOOKS (or at least 50)

24.   Write more often – feelings, fiction, prose, doesn’t matter – just do it

25.   Pay off a student loan

26.   Learn how to do something new

27.   Be nicer to my family even if it’s super hard

28.   Buy less things and invest in more experiences

29.   Take more pictures with people

30. Be more positive and talk about myself with less negativity.

So there you go folks, that’s my list. I’m also open to suggestions if there are other things people think I should add. I’m all for ideas!

So this is the start of my journey. If you’ve read this, thanks, friend – I appreciate that you care enough! I don’t know what will come next, but I’m hoping it will be interesting enough that you’ll stick around.

As I think about what comes next, I need to say this – I am fully aware that I am a very privileged person in many avenues and as a result I think I sometimes down play the impact that certain things have had on my life. As a counselor I’ve been trained to connect to the emotions rooted in a persons experience and can often find the deeper meaning buried in something seemingly small to others, but I struggle immensely with connecting to my own. At any rate, I’m going to attempt to do so by being brutally honest about the things that plague me most in my never ending thought parade in my head. There is a large chance that while I will not name names of people who are involved, there is a strong likelihood that you may know who I’m referring to, or be the person I’m referring to. It’s not my intent to degrade, demean or demonize (alliteration for the wiiiiin) anyone with these posts. This is about ME. No one else. Also, let’s remember there are two perspectives to every situation and I am likely just as much at fault as anyone.

I just want that disclaimer out there for anyone who may read things later on and become frustrated. If you find yourself frustrated, please just talk to me. Connecting is more or less what this whole thing is about.

With that, I leave you all until next time (whenever I decide that will be).

from WordPress https://rheyareads.wordpress.com/2019/02/14/i-think-too-much-and-now-i-need-to-write-about-it/

[cynthiajayusa]

Screen Queens: Cuddle Content You Can Count On

Tap that Grindr cuddle buddy of yours – Valentine’s Day month is officially here, and it’s time for some Netflix and chill. Or HBO and chill. Or Blu-ray and chill. Whatever your media of choice, here’s a peek into some films and TV shows you can use to lure your lover du jour into “watching a movie.”

Mosaic, HBO

Steven Soderbergh, hetero creator of things gays want to see, like Channing Tatum stripper movies and Michael Douglas and his as-portrayed-by-Matt-Damon boytoy in Behind the Candelabra, also knows you’ve been wondering where the hell Sharon Stone has been. Sure, the actress who introduced me to lady parts thanks to Basic Instinct went brunette for 2013’s Rob Epstein- and Jeffrey Friedman-directed eponymous Deep Throat-centered feature Lovelace, as in porn star Linda Lovelace, and more recently had a brief stint as a film agent in Golden Globe winner James Franco’s The Disaster Artist, but Stone’s mesmeric presence has been sorely lacking from screens of all types. But Soderbergh’s limited six-episode tube run of Mosaic, a twisty crime procedural filtered through the filmmaker’s famous iridescent blue and mustard yellow hues, is just the canvas for Stone to paint with every dramatic shade contained within her successful socialite character, Olivia Lake, a world-famous children’s book author who, on the surface, has the TV version of what a very lonely woman needs: a picturesque compound in the ski town of Summit, Utah, and a gay confidante, who is, as if Soderbergh is trying to out-gay himself once again, played by Paul Reubens, aka Pee-wee Herman. And then there’s Mudbound star Garrett Hedlund, who portrays Joel, a budding artist Olivia offers to mentor by giving him a place to live at her lodge because a) it’s convenient b) he’s hot and young, and she wants to feel both again. Stone still gets too-little screen time, and the series eventually dissolves into a patience-testing and ultimately frustrating game of whodunit – if you like closure, this isn’t the series for you – but when it comes to casting eye candy and beloved gay childhood idols, at least Steven Soderbergh was looking out for you.

Battle of the Sexes, Blu-ray/DVD

During a time when women are asserting their power, bringing the glass-ceiling-shattering victory of lesbian tennis trailblazer Billie Jean King over chauvinist Bobby Riggs to today’s still-gender-unequal world makes total sense. A #TIMESUP icon before #TIMESUP was a hashtag, King (played by an emotionally rich and captivating Emma Stone) harnessed immense anti-establishment defiance, campaigning for anti-gender discrimination law Title IX and, the next year in 1973, crushing Riggs (Steve Carell) during their iconic, televised match – a win for King, and an even bigger win for women’s rights, female athletes and queer acceptance. The match was coined the “Battle of the Sexes.” Also, a great name for a film, as Little Miss Sunshine filmmaking-duo Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton realized – especially when Battle of the Sexes coincidentally encapsulates the gender wars of the 2016 presidential election. But here’s the great thing: Faris and Dayton have also made one of the queerest films of 2017. Fully acknowledging that King’s stifled relationship with a woman, hairdresser-turned-lover Marilyn Barnett (Andrea Riseborough), weighed heavily on her, it’s also evident that their intensely sensual relationship was a crucial personal victory for King, as she’d come to see her own body as more than just a tennis-playing machine. “Billie Jean King: In Her Own Words,” wherein King reflects on her social justice work, her Riggs-winning strategy and her forecast for gender equity, stands out among a modest set of special features.

End of the F***ing World, Netflix

Boy meets girl, boy wants to savagely kill girl. Yes, welcome to the weirdly swoon-worthy romanticism of End of the F***ing World, Netflix’s bingeable Wes Anderson-meets-Bonnie and Clyde series based on Charles Forsman’s graphic novel in which two teenage runaways flee their wrecked home lives and neglectful parents for greener pastures and the occasional bludgeoning. Impressively played by 22-year-old Alex Lawther, star of the new IFC Film Freak Show (based on James St. James’ novel and starring as gender non-conforming alongside Bette Midler and Laverne Cox), James is a 17-year-old self-proclaimed psychopath whose greatest childhood thrill involved knifing cats and hamsters. And now he’s out for blood again – human blood. Enter Alyssa (an icy-but-empathetic turn from Jessica Barden), his amusingly acerbic schoolmate. Has he found the one? Throughout the show’s charmingly breezy, venturesome and beautifully scored eight episodes – during which James has an unexpected urinal experience with an older man that has Alyssa questioning his sexuality, and a pair of everyday lesbian cops try to track them down – his plans for Alyssa unthread as their romantic and deadly kindred-spirit bond see them through to the show’s bitter, bloody good, you’re-gonna-cry end.

Mother!, Blu-ray/DVD

Behold every last glorious strand of Jennifer Lawrence’s constantly transforming hair – silky waves! French braids! – as Darren Aronofsky’s dark allegorical descent into Trumpland and man’s ravaging of Mother Nature takes you to new crazy places. Just try looking away from the director’s maddening and mysterious follow up to Black Swan as a grippingly freaked J. Law wanders her home in the same lost manner I imagine our own president does every day in his, trying to understand what’s up with the fact that her artist husband (Javier Bardem) has opened their door to strangers who are maybe, probably – OK, definitely – up to no good. Those strangers are ominously portrayed by Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer, and if you need another reason to squirm through this messy rabbit hole of doom and gloom and insane plot points, it’s to watch a sketchy Pfeiffer steal scenes as the vaguely titled character “Woman” (J. Law is, you guessed it, the eponymous “Mother”). Inhabiting the role of horny housewife with a delicious mean streak, Pfeiffer sets her scenes on fire as the film blazes a dreary path of political commentary that sometimes feels like an art student’s final project gone awry. Aronofsky’s commitment to the absurd and chaotic is certainly, at the very least, commendable. But guys, that hair…

The Breakfast Club, The Criterion Collection, Blu-ray

John Hughes’ quintessential coming-of-age classic, The Breakfast Club, is as timeless as the misfit archetypes the late filmmaker sought to explore and subvert when he wrote and directed one of teen-hood’s greatest artistic depictions. Simply put, few filmmakers are as synonymous with the ’80s as Hughes. Within the depths of his everyday characters – in The Breakfast Club, specifically, that includes Andrew Clark (Emilio Estevez), Brian Johnson (Anthony Michael Hall), John Bender (Judd Nelson), Claire Standish (Molly Ringwald) and Allison Reynolds (Ally Sheedy) – we could see ourselves, or the people we once were (the writer-director’s Duckie in Pretty in Pink was an early queer idol). The empathy-engendering, zeitgeist-capturing The Breakfast Club encouraged generations of fronting schoolkids – and, perhaps, the adults they eventually became – to let their true colors show. Criterion Collection’s new Blu-ray release respectfully offers the film’s most comprehensive set yet, delivering on all levels: a superb 4K restoration, along with new sit-downs featuring Sheedy and Ringwald, who acknowledges Hughes for being an early supporter of nonconformist leading ladies.

source https://hotspotsmagazine.com/2018/02/07/screen-queens-cuddle-content-you-can-count-on/ from Hot Spots Magazine http://hotspotsmagazin.blogspot.com/2018/02/screen-queens-cuddle-content-you-can.html