#whereas robert has probably had sex with a lot more women than men

[lemongrablothbrok]

Hey. Hey fam. You guys. You'll never guess who these two remind me of.

[alexanderwrites]

Thoughts Roundup - Twin Peaks: The Return, Part 10

“Laura Is The One”

After the wild, nuts-to-the-wall freakout that was Part 8, Parts 9 & 10 have returned us to a more conventional mode of storytelling - it should be noted that “conventional” is used here very loosely, and that by episodic TV standards, these episodes are still pretty nuts-to-the-wall. Maybe part 8 pushed its nuts THROUGH the wall whereas 9 & 10 just gently press the nuts up against the wall. Maybe I should drop this analogy altogether and get into what was a slow, ruminative but intensely powerful hour of TV. (Also - I didn’t do a write up last week because i’m stupid and forgot).

. The violence against women in this episode can’t be ignored. It’s right there, front and centre. We start with Horrible, horrible, HORRIBLE Richard Horne being his horrible self and killing (or at least brutally attacking, she seemed to still be breathing) a witness to his earlier hit and run, before we move on to Amanda Seyfried’s Becky, who is viciously attacked by her ALSO HORRIBLE boyfriend. The trifecta is completed when Richard heads to his Grandma’s for a vicious, intrusive robbery. There is commentary on violence towards women here: when Robert Knepper’s Rodney is accidentally swatted in the face by Candie, it leaves a small mark, but no harm is really done. She is beside herself the rest of the scene, wailing and crying and overridden with guilt and fear. She feels genuine sorrow - contrast this with Richard’s nonchalance towards his violence against women and we start to get a look at how disparately different victims of violence are treated. 

The violence on display is as much about our perception of gender roles and their function within narratives as it is about highlighting how HORRIBLE these characters are. Having said that, it would be nice to see more female characters with a little more agency in the foreground. I do wish we had some more diversity when it came to leading women in the show (not to mention the almost non-existence of women of colour in the show) to counter-balance the violence against them. I believe the characters ARE there, but due to the unimaginably huge roster of characters, a lot of them are shuffled to the back. It’s a shame because you know what? I could watch an entire hour of Jane Adams’ Constance. She’s such a charmingly funny and unique character, and every time she turns up I hope she’ll get more than a few lines. Diane is similarly fascinating, but because of the narrative structure (and this and last week’s revelations), she’s being kept at arm’s length. A great character again, but I hope she isn’t absent in future episodes like she was tonight. Luckily we have Janey-E (Naomi Watts is just the greatest of all time and I won’t hear any arguments against it) as a prominent character, and she is a fascinatingly complex one, as she swings from being weirdly performative to achingly sincere. It’s easy to list a whole bunch of other great female characters, but I suppose what I wish is that they were more central to the plot in a positive way. Twin Peaks couldn’t be Twin Peaks without violence. It’s one of the things that the show is fundamentally about, and furthermore, how we react to, or DON’T react to that violence. But I don’t know that we need three scenes of it in one episode to highlight that. Then again, discomfort was probably the intent. We’re meant to feel like something deeply wrong is happening, and if that’s the intention then this episode succeeded. 

. I talked about that more than I expected, so moving on! Nadine got the moment of the night for me when her Silent Drape Runner store was revealed. Get it, girl!! I adore Nadine, the absolute weirdo. I dearly, dearly hope we get more of her over the next 8 episodes. It’s almost impossible to see how she could tie in to the central story which is a shame because she’s one of the most fun people to watch on the show. 

. The scenes with Cooper were a mix of hilarious and tragic, as they tend to be. It is both understandable and unfathomable how Janey-E could find him attractive - on the one hand, the doctor’s scene reveals how scarily in shape he is. No one’s blaming her for checking him out. On the other hand....come on. You’re attracted to the guy who drinks coffee like it’s a sippy cup of ribena? It’s a funny notion, but also a little sad because it makes you realise how starved for warmth and affection she probably is, as anyone would be. Him, too. Their sex scene is initially pretty funny because of Kyle Maclachlan’s fucking expressions (literally). Man, he has proven himself to have adept comic skills this year - as well as pretty much every other acting skill known to the profession. But as they lie together afterwards, it feels poignant again. It’s another reminder of how close yet far away our Coop is, and as much as I want him to find himself, I want Janey-E to be happy and find herself, too. She’s been put through some shit, having unwittingly married a non-human doppelganger manufactured by an evil entity who has escaped from another dimension. That’s a lot for one person. Plus she’s named Janey-E. How unlucky can one person be?

. I sort of liked the stuff with Jim Belushi and Robert Knepper. They give a couple of very intense and solid performances, but the problem for me was that it’s another complex storyline being introduced so deep into the series. If it’s one that lasts a few episodes - fine. But i’d almost like to see their part wrapped up - or advanced dramatically - by next week, mainly because there are more interesting threads the one these two linger on. I want more Doppelcoop. I want the Bookhouse Boys heading to the black lodge. I want more Patrick Fischler rather than the guys he gives orders to. It’s hard to judge from episode to episode which assortment of characters you’ll get, and it’s starting to feel like this series’ logline should’ve adapted an existing catchphrase: “Twin Peaks is like a box of Gormonbozias: You never know what creamed corn nightmare you’re gonna get”. I personally am happy with whatever assortment we get, but getting Belushi and Knepper’s characters is like getting a pretty nice plain milk chocolate when I could be getting a delicious hazelnut deluxe. It’s not bad at all, just...perfectly fine. 

. When it comes to Diane and her relationship with Doppelcoop, i’m utterly intrigued and utterly uninterested in guessing where it’ll go. There will be a million theories floating out there about how and why they’re in contact, but i’d rather just watch the story play out rather than guess ahead. It’s a very cool development though, and Cole’s vision of Laura at the door was completely disarming and haunting. Again, I don’t really want to guess ahead at how Laura will play into the following episodes, but we know she will. That’s enough for me. I’ve been browsing the Twin Peaks reddit lately (I know...I know) and i’ve gotta admit i’m waring very thin from it. Not EVERYTHING is a thing, guys. I’m beginning to think all the fan theories are detracting from the story, when really i’d rather just experience the ride. We can’t outsmart Frost and Lynch and they’ll tell us what they want and in the manner they want to. And anyway, more interesting than a tenuous “it’s all set in another dimension and i have proof!” theory is something that put maybe the biggest smile on my face yet: ALBERT ON A DATE!!! With CONSTANCE!! How utterly delightful. I guess he’s got over his love of Harry Truman, then. 

. I really thought we were going to get Audrey this episode, as we inch closer and closer towards her through her horrible bastard son. Seeing more of Johnny this season has been a surprise, but from what happens to him tonight, not a pleasant one. It is fully heartbreaking watching him try to wriggle out of his restraints to rescue his Mum, and a pretty solid metaphor for so many of the male characters on the show: When a woman is being hurt, the men are impotent to help. For Johnny, it’s understandable that he can’t, the poor guy. But for the other men? It’s not that they can’t, it’s that they won’t. Harry Dean Stanton’s Carl plays a lovely old folk song outside his trailer, looking briefly torn up when he sees a mug go flying through a trailer window, the sound of a furious male voice growling from inside. Does he go and intervene? He doesn’t. And he’s a ‘good guy’, right? I re-watched Blue Velvet again yesterday, and was blown away by how full of shit Jeffery Beaumont’s good-guy image is. Like Carl, when he sees Dorothy’s attack, he doesn’t step in. He just watches. This seems to be a recurring theme with Lynch: those who see violence against women stand by and allow it to happen. And there ARE Carls everywhere, who’d rather say “That’s sad but not my business” than stand up and help. What happens to the Woman who witnesses evil (ie Richard’s hit and run) and tries to report it? She’s destroyed by a Man. God, it’s heartbreaking. The layers of commentary get deeper even as I write this, and I realise things about this episode I hadn’t thought of. I think part 10 is the most troubling and divisive, yet most fiercely critical yet. 

. And then, we get a surprise I truly wasn’t expecting: more of The Log Lady. Maybe the most iconic, important and wise character on the entire show, leading us onwards through the dark night. God bless the log lady, and god bless Catherine Coulson. Every word she speaks is fraught with such pain and feeling, and it’d be a fucking sin for us to not cherish every word of it. I found myself listening to her words just as Hawk does - with eyes almost closed, in utter silence, revering them and their power. At the centre of this Season, underneath it all, the real heroes are Hawk and The Log Lady. It is so nice, so utterly refreshing to have such a pure moment of goodness and beauty, and for it to be between a Woman written with true agency and a Native American Man who has risen to protect his town - two beautiful souls who are stepping in to save the day that the white dudes have repeatedly fucked right up. It’s a gorgeous scene, and it segues into a road house performance that is easily my favourite of the year so far. Rebekah Del Rio’s performance of No Stars (No surprises, it was co-written by David Lynch) is haunting and it feels like a turning point for the series - from here on in, the darkness in the woods around Twin Peaks is out in full force. Perhaps this is why the episode is so aggressive. I left this terrific episode feeling unsettled and troubled - and that’s exactly how we’re supposed to feel. There’s a bad moon rising over Twin Peaks. 

“But in these days the glow is dying. What will be in the darkness that remains?”

[sailormiyoung89]

I’m really looking forward to this read through because I bought the books a few years ago and then never ended up opening them. It was the end of Spring- beginning of Summer and there was a LOT of garden work to be done outside. Therefore I ended up listening to Roy Dotrice and his…interesting at times voices :D I also kind of ‘yada yada-d’ the first two books as I have watched the show and I knew that it had begun as very loyal to the books. So it should be interesting to see if I pick up more on a reread now that I can actually take my time reading through. One thing I will say though is talking about asoiaf makes me very uncomfortable. Which probably sounds weird but from my perspective, the fandom is so intelligent, I feel like I have nothing to add and am just blabbering on. So please bear with me to an extent and excuse me when I inevitably say some really dumb things.

The way I will be writing this up is I will be reading a chapter and writing a mini chapter review and then I’ll continue. Rather than reading a clump of chapters, forgetting details from ones I read closer to the start and writing one review on several chapters.  

Do keep in mind that I HAVE ‘read’ the books once and am up to date on the TV show so I can’t promise first time book readers that I won’t discuss spoilers.

I’ll put everything else under the cut! :D

 Prologue:

I found Waymar Royce a pretty interesting character. He’s arrogant and standoffish and a poor commander but not unintelligent which tends to accompany those kinds of characters. He was quick to point out that if the wall was weeping then it wouldn’t be cold enough to kill them. It was also interesting to see that George established so early on the ways that those in power can really screw over those underneath them.

One thing that I was wondering that didn’t make a lot of sense to me is that George doesn’t really call them ‘white walkers’ as much as he does ‘others’ and I was wondering why D&D changed it for the show? Calling them ‘white walkers’ just causes more confusion with ‘wights’ and George chose to call them Others because of the idea of ‘the great other’ and changing their name loses some of that.

 Bran I:

Bran was a great character to open up the series proper. As he’s so young and it’s his first time going with Ned to execute a deserter, we can gain a lot more exposition through Bran without it feeling very artificial.

Also, Robb is quick where Jon is fast? Maybe I’m being dense but is there a difference between being fast and quick?

Also, I feel like Theon wasn’t this awful in the show. Kicking around the head of the deserter and his quickness to kill the direwolves…so far book Theon is MUCH more unpleasant.  Also maybe I’m reading too much into this but is the one that Theon tried to kill Grey Wind? Robb hands baby Grey Wind and another of the pups to Bran to hold and it’s one of those that Theon tries to take from Bran and kill.

*edit I reread it and it’s probably Summer. I thought Robb was letting Bran hold Grey Wind but he just told him to pet him.

Also, let’s talk for a minute about the aging up of the characters in the TV show. I can understand why they did so for Dany; after all watching a 13 year old have sex with an adult on TV would be completely unacceptable. Not to mention they probably couldn’t film a sex scene with a teenage actor even if they wanted to. But I don’t understand why they made Jon and Robb the same age as Theon. With Theon being a good bit older than the other two lads, Robb and Jon obviously have a lot more in common and are much closer. Theon isn’t so much the outsider and the prisoner of war whereas you do get a bit more of that in the book. Making them all the same age in the show made them kind of interchangeable at the start; three lads of the same age growing up in the same family unit who’re probably friends. You certainly don’t get the sense that there’s much dislike between Jon and Theon.

Also one part towards the end of the chapter really stuck out to me.

‘“Can’t you hear it?”

Bran could hear the wind….but Jon was listening to something else.’

Jon then dismounts from his horse and find Ghost. What I found interesting was that we later find out that Ghost makes no noise. And it’s something that Jon can hear that Bran and the others cannot. Therefore I think that even in this first encounter with the wolves, Jon has ALREADY unlocked his connection with Ghost.

Catelyn I:

I love Caitlyn. On my first read-through, my favourite chapters were Cat, Sans and Cerseis’.

One thing I found interesting is when Ned tells Cat that ‘the man died well’, which is the same as what Robb said in the previous chapter, setting up the first parallel between Robb and his father. However in the previous chapter, Jon immediately disagrees with the notion that the deserter died ‘well’ or ‘bravely’ which is a notion that Bran seems to side with. And as our POV character for that chapter, we’re set up to side with Bran. So I certainly found that fascinating.

I also found it very interesting how early in the books the isle of faces is established as a place in Westeros in the South which also has weirwoods. Given the significance of the Isle of faces to most R+L=J theories and the significance of the weirwoods in future books it’s veeeeery interesting how quickly it was brought up as being a thing.  

It’s also quiet interesting how this is the second time we’ve seen Ned now and he’s very different in Catelyn’s eyes than he was in Bran’s. In Bran’s POV chapter we see Lord Stark of Winterfell whereas in this chapter he comes across pretty introverted and we really get a sense of him being a ‘quiet wolf’. The Stark and Lannister feud is also established very quickly when Ned describes the queen’s (whom he doesn’t refer to be name or title) family as an ‘infestation’. It’s also pretty funny how he goes on to say that no living man has seen an Other the chapter after he executed the deserter. I’m sure most people caught that particular piece of irony but I still found it amusing nonetheless.

Daenerys I:

I don’t really have a lot to say about this chapter to be honest. It’s a good chapter. I find Viserys and Dany to be an interesting parallel to Robb and Jon in the previous chapter. Viserys and Robb are both heads/future heads of their families. Both boys have these expectations of people. Robb insisting that the deserter died bravely, Viserys choosing to believe that Ilyrio is loyal to him and that he will retake the iron throne. They both have to project power and certainty. Whereas their younger siblings both see through that. Jon knows that Will was terrified. Deaneries hears what they are called in the streets, she mistrusts Illyria.

And this is going to sound weird considering that he literally ends the chapter saying that he would allow the entire khalasar to rape his sister, but a part of me also feels really awful for the life of fear and terror and running that Viserys would have experienced as a child. Not excusing his actions by any stretch but I do empathise with what he went through.

Another detail which I’m sure most people picked up on but I’m going to point out anyway is the golden collars and how Drogo is described as being so rich that all his slaves wear them and Daenerys is also given a golden collar and called a princess.

Also this chapter set up and name dropped SO MUCH. Stannis, the lord of light, Tyrells, Greyjoys, Unsullied, Elia Martell. I’m sure there are more that I missed but I think this is probably the chapter so far with the most setup, which is really interesting when you consider that Dany’s storyline is the most removed from the main story.

Eddard I:

While Daenery’s I was the chapter with the most set up, Eddard I is definitely the chapter with the most exposition so far. In this chapter we learn about Robert’s Rebellion, the Greyjoy Rebellion and how Theon came to be Eddard’s ward. It also hints at R+L=J and we’re also introduced to the crypts of Winterfell.

I never really paid much attention to the descriptions of weapons before but they’ve really grabbed my attention on this reread. In Bran I, we’re given a description of Ice and it’s described as being as wide as Robb and taller. Taller than a teenage boy. I don’t think we were given Robb’s height but he HAS to be at least 5’5. And yet despite the strength it must take to wield Ice, Ned can hardly even lift Robert’s warhammer. Which really says more about Robert’s strength than anything else George might have written.

Jon I:

Acrobatic Tyrion. Is this the dumbest thing that George has ever written? And it has NO plot significance. Unless Winds is released and we hear that Tyrion has been refining his abilities all this time and does a back flip onto a flying dragon or some shit.

Also, I have 0 time for entitled, whiny, bratty Jon. He is so mean about Myrcella. (I may or not be 10000% on the side of ‘protect all these small children in this asshole universe so I will always object when they’re treated horribly, particularly the really young kids). And I KNOW it’s supposed to highlight that highborn ladies are not the kind of women he’s into. And I KNOW he’s probably projecting his feelings about his relationship with Sansa onto Myrcella. But fuck you Jon Snow. You are so fucking whiny. You have absolutely 0 appreciation for how good your life is. As Catelyn is well aware, most men don’t bring their bastards home with them and raise them along with their other children. You have it really good compare to most others born in your position. And I can’t help but compare him to Dany who is brought up by her abusive brother constantly on the run. She had a much, much shitty childhood than Jon. And yet SHE doesn’t complain. The closest we get is towards the end when she tells her brother that she wants to go home….yeah so far I don’t like Jon very much at ALL.

Although I did find it interesting that his role model was Daeron Targaryen. Apart from the obvious Targ connection, Daeron was a terrible conqueror.

Moving on to his discussion with Tyrion at the very end of the chapter and George’s establishment of Tywin’s belief that Tyrion is the son of Aerys.

‘“You are your mother’s trueborn son of Lannister.”

“Am I?” The dwarf replied, sardonic. “Do tell my lord father. My mother died birthing me, and he’s never been sure.”’

I’ve honestly never been a fan of the ‘____ is a secret Targ’ theories. But it’s certainly interesting.

Catelyn II:

I know that a lot of people hate Cat for her treatment of Jon. I am not in that camp. Of course I don’t think that it’s fair but given the world they live in, where bastards can be such a big problem in terms of succession rights, it’s understandable that she feels very threatened by this bastard child who is brought into the family, is of age with their firstborn and is treated equally to the other children (in her eyes). Catelyn is a smart, pragmatic woman. She is as well educated as other highborn. She knows about the Blackfyres. So rather than seeing him as a kid, she sees him as a threat to the lives and futures of her own children. It’s nothing personal against Jon himself. And in that situation, I don’t think there are many mothers who WOULDN’T treat him with hostility. If there’s anyone to blame for Catelyn’s treatment of Jon in this environment, it’s Ned. I definitely think that Ned should have trusted his wife with the truth. I know it’s a risky secret to entrust people with but he should have trusted Cat.

On another note, how fucking big are Luwin’s sleeves?!

“Luwin was always tucking things into those sleeves and producing other things from them: books, messages, strange artifacts, toys for the children”.

I’m just imagining that he’s put Hermione’s undetectable extension charm on his robes.

[artiswear]

Louise Bourgeois Show Notes

·         Born: December 25, 1911, Paris, France

·         Died: May 31, 2010, Manhattan, New York City, NY

 ·         Follow up after our podcast with Nestor Zarragoitia, who talked about a secret door in a stair case piece by an artist named Louise Bourgeois - who is a very famous artist and an icon of feminist success in the arts

o   Most people know her giant spider statues, which are usually public works, but tower above the viewer and the leg count isn’t always accurate.  These giant spiders are one of the pieces of modern art Vanessa gets asked about regularly.

o   Has a lot in common with Louise Nevelson, in that she was born early in the 19th century, was an immigrant to the USA, and didn’t gain fame until later in her life.          this artist deals with sex and female sexuality, the squeamish and super young may wish to avert their ears.  Sorry. WE promise all artists aren’t perverts, it’s just the vast majority.

o   Born in Paris to a middle class family (Irony that last name is Bourgeois-means middle class roughly-what middle class is, because Vanessa isn’t sure it exists anymore.) who restored medieval and renaissance tapestries and made a good living at it.

 ·         Like Pablo Picasso learning to paint and draw from his artist father, Bourgeois learns to draw and think about art spatially from helping her parents reconstruct these tapestries.  She said she mostly drew arms and legs, and that this visual understanding of dismemberment came to influence her later art.

 ·         Louise’s (I would keep calling her Bourgeois, but this is a clumsy word for the American mouth, just like we murder the heck out of Louise.) father was a huge influence on her work. She didn’t talk about this influence much later in life, and denied his role at first.

o   Women with Daddy issues is kinda an art school cliché. So is women making art about their daddy issues. It can be done well, but isn’t always.

o   Her father wanted a son, and named her Louise after his Louis because of his disappointment at having a daughter.  Though he later had a son, Louise actually became his favorite child.

·         He didn’t always get along with her father and had a violent temper, which shades some of the art work. He also either hired his mistress as Louise’s tutor, or started sleeping with Louise’s tutor...I’m not real sure on this… but either way his mistress was living with the family and he had no qualms about the fact he was done sleeping with Louise’s mother.  This fragrant disregard for social norms upset Louise a great deal and alienated her at a young age from their father. It also began her mental exploration of the roles men and women serve as sexual beings and how other’s sex can affect our idea of intercourse.

·         she also cites a fantasy that children have of dismembering their parents, particularly the one of the opposite sex. (Do people? Really? Idk. I didn’t as a kid.) This does play into Jung’s idea that to mature as an adult you have to (Symbolically) kill your parents.

o   her father and her do eventually develop a healthy relationship where they see each other more as equals and he ends up living with her in America. This in Vanessa’s mind shows how the role your parents play matures as you do. There is this point in your life where you see a living parent as a human being and gain enough life experience to sympathize with their foibles and mistakes, even if you struggle with acceptance. This may be some of the playing Louise does in her artworks, as it is easier to look back on these times with criticism and understanding.

o   Another thing to think of is the role of the father, especially to someone born in 1910, as the first person to define a woman’s sexuality and demonstrate the power of the patriarchy on that sexuality. THis is another time, where the man was seen as the head of the family and his indiscretions normally ignored, whereas female sexuality was a closeted thing that was even widely believed to be non-existent (See the Stuff You Missed In History Class on Boston Marriages). So as the first male who exists in your life, the father at this time takes a rigid role in how the female defines herself and if she is allowed to exist in the public as a person with her own autonomy.                   For example, he denounces and refuses to pay for her education at the Sorbonne because he hates “modern art” in an attempt to force her into a more acceptable female role. While parents still do this, the issue would have probably been less pronounced if she were male (She did continue at the Sorbonne, working as a translator for English speaking students in exchange for paid tuition), and he did help fund her opening a print business next to his after she graduated.

·         In 1938, while working in a print shop, an art historian named Robert Goldwater walked in, and according to Louise  "In between talks about surrealism and the latest trends, we got married."

·         Louise sales with Goldwater to the USA shortly after her marriage and towards the end of her life felt she needed to be defined as an American artist, because she lives the majority of her life as an American and her work matures and is influenced by the free American spirit.

·         Like Nevelson, Louise doesn’t thrive during the 40’s or 50’s. Her work has far more to do with Surrealism than the super manly Ab Ex movement that goes on in NYC under Peggy Guggenheim and Clement Greenburg’s curatorial gaze. She shows during this time, but is not taken as seriously as this infamous “boys club”, and even her obit has to include a paragraph of unnecessary gushing about how prominent these famous dudes were...which annoyed Vanessa, if only because they obscured more than they helped and that only needs to be pointed out so much.

·         Louise’s husband does pass in the 1970’s while in his 60’s, and was a prominent art historian, but she remained both wistful and critical of him. THey had a good marriage, but she found his academics dull.

·         In the 1940’s and 1950’s she adopts one child and gives birth to two. This results in a sculpture series in Balsa wood, which could be constructed without waking up sleeping children. This also stops her career for a decade, and is a common theme with many female artists...especially from this time...the financial, social issues, and time needed to raise children is so demanding it is hard to get a show, let alone have free time to spend as you like… so the story of a lot of women artists picks up after they either abandon their children, or reach a stable point in their lives where they no longer have to put a family before their own sanity or well being. Vanessa says this with a good deal of criticism, because even today a lot of men are allowed their “Dreams” while women struggle in the background, forced into a role of nurturing even if they don’t want it. Vanessa cant’ think of an instance where a male creative “Stopped making art to raise a family.” Please send her exceptions.

 ·         1950, property of the Moma.

           From Bourgeois’ Obit: Then, in 1966, the critic Lucy Lippard, who, like so many New Yorkers, had known her effectively as Goldwater's appendage, saw her work, was astonished by it, and included it in a show she was organizing called Eccentric Abstraction, at the Fischbach Gallery.

 ·         Installation view

 ·         Cumul, 1968.

 ·         Destruction of the Father, 1974

 ·         NO EXIT 1991 (Covered in NEZ Podcast)

·         Cell VII 1991

 ·         Maman

           "She was my best friend. Like a spider, my mother was a weaver... spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother." - about her spiders, called Maman, French for Mother...so they were about mothers and the process of making art

[lodelss]

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | January 2020 |  10 minutes (2,378 words)

It’s taken two years for #MeToo to wake up France, but at least it did. The country appears to finally see the men it has created, which is more than can be said of North America, trapped in the cancel culture stage, calling out everyone except itself. That lack of self-awareness is easy to miss, though. There’s a lot of wokeness floating around these parts — we even have a “woke” princess, although Meghan Markle’s self-appointed royal defection alone could never really loosen the monarchy’s grip on Britain. And for all the hand-wringing by Hollywood stars over diversity, there is once again an established structure above them that resists the change they represent, one that inevitably rears its head in heavily white male awards seasons. France appears to know this now, but only because it was told so by a woman it nearly destroyed.

“I’m really angry, but the issue isn’t so much me, how I survive this or not,” French actress Adèle Haenel told Mediapart in November. “I want to talk about an abuse which is unfortunately commonplace, and attack the system of silence and collusion behind it which makes it possible.” The 31-year-old Portrait of a Lady on Fire star was talking about her alleged abuse from the ages of 12 to 15 at the hands of her first film director, Christophe Ruggia, who was in his 30s at the time. In a follow-up sit-down interview with the same site, Haenel emphasized that she wasn’t canceling anyone; this wasn’t about censoring individuals, but about calling attention to an entrenched society-wide ill and the culture that upholds it. It was this depersonalization that seemed to free up France to reflect, something still largely missing from U.S. conversations — from #MeToo to inclusivity in entertainment to royal affairs — that are all rooted in a foundational hierarchy the entire population is complicit in preserving. “When we come up against the control of the patriarchy,” explained Haenel, “we talk about it as though it were from the outside, whereas it’s from the inside.”

* * *

Barely a week into the new year, two of the most celebrated members of the most prestigious institution in the U.K. turned their backs on it. On January 8, the Sussex Instagram account dropped a shot of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle with 195 words that defied centuries of British tradition. “After many months of reflection and internal discussions, we have chosen to make a transition this year in starting to carve out a progressive new role within this institution,” it read. “We intend to step back as ‘senior’ members of the Royal Family and work to become financially independent.” The announcement, which also stated the couple plans to split its time between the U.K. and North America, came not long after the airing of an emotional ITV documentary in which Markle admitted, “I never thought that this would be easy, but I thought it would be fair.” Anyone who watched her say that, who saw the same defeat in her face that they saw in Princess Diana’s decades prior, who saw Harry’s frustration at the thought that it could all happen again, who saw the royal family barely ripple in response to Prince Andrew’s association with a registered sex offender, would not only understand this separation, but expect nothing less. How else to exercise your opposition to a patriarchal empire than to forsake its number one emblem?

But the media took it personally — it was a door slammed and shut tight in the face of their badgering, which had become as much of a presence as the royals themselves, a constant reminder of British society’s supplication at the feet of an outdated overlord. Piers Morgan expressed his preference for the old prince, the fratty drunk who cosplayed a Nazi, amid reports that Madame Tussaud’s had swiftly relocated the royal couple’s wax figures from its esteemed collection. The local response reeked of personal injury, as though the duo had turned its nose up at the greatest gift the country had to offer, rather than what they actually did: kicked off a long-awaited internal confrontation with the colonial inheritance of a populace that insists on running on its fumes. As Afua Hirsch, author of Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging, told NPR, “Instead of taking this as an opportunity for introspection as to what is it about the upper strata of British society that is hostile for a person of color like Meghan Markle, what we’re seeing now is the British media just lashing out again and blaming everyone except themselves.” “Everyone” being “non-aristocratic, non-white interlopers,” which is to say, the people who actually populate Britain. 

If Prince Harry is the future, Prince William is the past, and it’s fitting that he not only presides over the kingdom (or will, one day) but its version of the Oscars. The day before his brother’s adios, the BAFTAs announced that for the seventh year in a row, no women were nominated for best director, and in addition, all 20 of the acting nominees were white. In an internal letter, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts’ chief executive Amanda Berry and film committee chair Marc Samuelson called the lack of diversity “frustrating and deeply disappointing,” as though it were entirely out of their hands. Yet the 8,000-member committee is chaired by Pippa Harris, who cofounded a production company with Sam Mendes nearly two decades ago, which may explain why 1917, the war epic Mendes directed and coproduced with Harris, was the only nominee for both best film and best British film. This sort of insularity may be unspoken but it is not inactive, it has repercussions for which films are funded and how they are marketed and ultimately rewarded. 

“BAFTA can’t tell the studios and the production companies who they should hire and whose stories should get told,” Samuelson told Variety, deflecting the blame. But the academy’s site claims it discovers and nurtures new talent and has a mission that includes diversity and inclusion, so why does its most recent Breakthrough Brits list appear to be three quarters white? As former BAFTA winner Steve McQueen observed, there were plenty of British women and people of color who did exceptional work in film this year — in movies like In Fabric, The Souvenir, Queen & Slim, and Us — and were nonetheless overlooked, implying a more deeply ingrained exclusion, the sort that permeates British society beyond its film industry and keeps the country from actually perceiving non-white, non-male stories as legitimate art. Snubbed Harriet star Cynthia Erivo confessed to Extra TV that she actually turned down an invitation to sing at the BAFTAs, evoking Markle’s absences from a growing number of royal engagements. “It felt like it was calling on me as an entertainer,” Erivo said, “as opposed to a person who was a part of the world of film.”

Awards as a whole are representative of industry-wide limitations, which, as ever, are tied to the dominance of a particular group in the larger society. The Oscars, dating back to the ’20s and established to garner positive publicity for Hollywood (while extinguishing its unions), seem to persist in the belief that that is tied to white male supremacy. I probably don’t have to tell you the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences just elected another middle-aged white man as its head (David Rubin) and has a member base that is 84 percent white and 68 percent male. And that’s an improvement after April Reign’s viral 2016 #OscarsSoWhite outcry. “It’s not about saying who is snubbed and who should have been nominated,” Reign told The Huffington Post at the time, “it’s about opening the discussion more on how the decisions were made, who was cast and who tells the story behind the camera.” And yet the response, as always, has been tokenism — one black nominee here, an Asian one there, a one-for-one reaction to cancel culture which provides momentary relief but no real evolution. The individual successes of Moonlight and Black Panther and BlacKkKlansman and even Parasite, not to mention Spike Lee being named the first ever black Cannes jury head, can’t ultimately undo more than 100 years of white male paternalism. The Oscar nominations this year, dominated by four movies that are very pale and very violent — Joker, 1917, The Irishman, and Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood — encapsulate the real soul of Hollywood and the society in which it was forged. It is no mistake that, as The Atlantic outlined, the ceremony neglects “domestic narratives, and stories told by women and people of color.” Harvey Weinstein, who turned awards campaigning into a brutalist art form while allegedly brutalizing women behind the scenes, may no longer be the Oscars’ figurehead, but his imprint endures.

À propos, Les Misérables, a gritty drama about a bunch of men facing off with a bunch of other men (oh, and some boys too) in a poor neighborhood in Paris, was the French submission to this year’s Oscars instead of Haenel’s critically preferred film, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a lush period romance about two women in love. It was that film’s director, Céline Sciamma, for whom Haenel returned to acting in 2007 with White Lilies (and with whom she had a romance off-camera) years after her experience with Ruggia drove her from the industry. Though she opened up to Sciamma about being sexually abused, Haenel didn’t go public until she was firmly established with two Césars (the French Academy Award equivalent) to bolster her legitimacy — she knew that otherwise society, French and otherwise, sides with men. “Even if it is difficult to fight against the balance of power set out from early adolescence, and against the man-woman relationship of dominance, the social balance of power has been inversed,” Haenel told Mediapart in November. “I am today socially powerful, whereas [Ruggia] has simply become diminished.” This was a crucial but deemphasised aspect of the shift in America which took place after a slew of A-list white actresses — women who were held up by society and thus listened to — accused Weinstein of abuse, a shift which did not take place after a slew of lesser known women, many of them women of color, accused Bill Cosby. (That the latter is black no doubt also played into the country’s lingering racist belief that all black men are latent criminals, so obviously he was a predator, right?) With none of these longstanding prejudices addressed, however, they risk being repeated, as the system which permitted these men to abuse their power prevails.

“What do we all have as collective responsibility for that to happen. That’s what we’re talking about,” Haenel said in her sit-down interview. “Monsters don’t exist. It’s our society, it’s us, it’s our friends, it’s our fathers. We’re not here to eliminate them, we’re here to change them.” This approach is in direct opposition to how #MeToo has been unraveling in the U.S., where names of accused men — Woody Allen, Michael Jackson, Matt Lauer, R. Kelly, Louis C.K., Weinstein — loom so large on the marquees that they conveniently block out reality: that they were shaped by America, a place that gives golden handshakes to abusers, barely takes them to trial for their alleged actions, and sometimes even cheers them on. It’s not that women here have not been saying the same thing as Haenel, it just seems to be that their message is lost in the cacophony of proliferating high-profile cases themselves. Haenel’s resonance sources from not only the relative anomaly of a French woman of her stature making such claims, but also the fact that she is so much more famous than her alleged perpetrator and that her age at the time makes it a clear instance of abuse. Perhaps it also has to do with her disclosure coming amidst the ongoing yellow vests movement, which has primed France’s citizens to call for all manner of accountability.  

Haenel’s alleged abuser has since been charged with sexual aggression against a minor, though she initially refused to go through the justice system, which she saw as part of a deeper systemic bias that resulted in her abuse. UniFrance, which promotes French films internationally, has openly backed the actress and is in the process of creating a charter to protect actors, and, in a historic move, the French Society of Film Directors dropped Ruggia, its former copresident. Meanwhile, Gabriel Matzneff is also being investigated following the publication of a memoir by Vanessa Springora in which the publishing head describes her teen sexual encounters with the then-50-something-year-old French writer who has always been open about his affinity for underage girls and boys. And the same country that supported Roman Polanski in the aftermath of child sexual assault allegations several years ago is now protesting him in the wake of Haenel’s disclosure. As she said when asked about the Oscar-winning filmmaker on Mediapart, “the debate around Polanski is not limited to Polanski and his monstrosity, but implicates the whole of society.” The French media calls Haenel’s #MeToo story a turning point, one which highlights not the individual — even she expressed regret that it fell on one man — but on a society which believes victimization is in any way excusable. 

* * *

“It’s possible for society to act differently,” Haenel said. “It’s better for everyone, firstly for the victims but even for the torturers to look themselves in the face. That’s what being human is. It’s not about crushing people and trying to gain power, it’s about questioning yourself and accepting the multi-dimensional side of what a human being is. That’s how we build high society.” Up until this point we have been primarily concerned with identifying the bad seeds and having them punished and even removed, without really wrestling with the environment in which they have grown — doing that means facing ourselves as well. We name names and call out institutions — like Hollywood awards and the British royal family — and then what? What remains is the same system that produced these individuals, these same individuals simply establishing new institutions with the same foundations. Identifying what’s wrong doesn’t tell us what’s right. It wasn’t until Haenel was introduced to a filmmaking crew that was entirely female, that listened to her and supported her, that she could identify not just what shouldn’t be, but what should. “What society do we want?” she asked. “It’s about that too.”

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

[loycereiber]

Can I Be Denied a Job Because of Bankruptcy?

If you have a job, need to file bankruptcy, and are worried about getting fired because of it, you probably shouldn’t be. The U.S. Bankruptcy Code prevents employers from firing you just because you have filed for bankruptcy. However, if you are a job seeker, need to file bankruptcy, and are worried about being denied a job, you might have cause for concern.

It May Depend on Your Employer

Under the current state of the law, a private employer can deny you a job if you are currently in or have filed for bankruptcy, whereas a public employer cannot. Section 525(a) of the Bankruptcy Code provides:

a governmental unit may not . . . deny employment to, terminate the employment of, or discriminate with respect to employment against, a person that is or has been a debtor under this title [Title 11] or a bankrupt or a debtor under the Bankruptcy Act.

Notice that section 525(a) applies only to public employers. The behavior of private employers is governed by section 525(b), which prohibits discrimination based on bankruptcy, but does not contain the language of 525(a), which addresses denying employment to a debtor based on a bankruptcy filing. The bankruptcy code has this to say about discrimination by private employers:

No private employer may terminate the employment of, or discriminate with respect to employment against, an individual who is or has been a debtor under this title, a debtor or bankrupt under the Bankruptcy Act, or an individual associated with such debtor or bankrupt

Private Employers Denying a Job Based on Bankruptcy

Although a plain reading of 525(b) would seem to prevent denial of employment by private employers based on bankruptcy, the case law actually trends in the opposite direction. The great majority of cases have held that private employers are not subject to liability under Section 525(b) for a denial of employment. See Rea v. Federated Investors, 627 F.3d 937 (3d Cir. 2010)

In Re Uplinger

In a recent case out of Virginia, In Re Uplinger, a Chapter 7 debtor alleged that the U.S. Department of Immigration discriminated against her in job interviews because of her bankruptcy filing. In dismissing the case, the court noted that the debtor, Ms. Uplinger, had not applied for employment with the U.S. Department of Immigration, but rather with a government contractor known as U.S. Investigation Services. The court found that U.S. Investigation Services did not qualify as a public employer and therefore section 525(a)of the bankruptcy code did not apply.

The Court can find no support for the application of Section 525(a) to a governmental unit where the applicant applied for a job with a government contractor.

Instead, the court found that section 525(b) applied and that U.S. Investigation Services was a private employer permitted to deny Ms. Uplinger employment based on her bankruptcy filing. While it wasn’t clear from the record that Ms. Uplinger was denied a job solely because of her bankruptcy filing, representatives from U.S. Investigation Services did download a copy of her credit report prior to interviewing her.

Practical Considerations on Bankruptcy and Jobs

While this article places a spotlight on bankruptcy, as a practical matter, an employer’s hiring or firing decision will be based on numerous factors. Although employers may review a candidate’s credit score or financial history during a screening process, it is important to remember that other factors such as experience, education and personal demeanor will also play a large part in getting a job.

Just because an employer has the right to deny you a job because of a bankruptcy does not mean that an employer will deny you a job because of bankruptcy. While the bankruptcy code’s uniform prohibition on termination due to bankruptcy provides greater protection to those who are already employed, it can be difficult to prove that a firing was motivated by bankruptcy if there are other documented issues, such as a poor attendance record.

The bottom line is that the importance of bankruptcy to a potential employer will hinge on the type of job you’re seeking as well as the substance of your resume. A bankruptcy may be more important to an employer who is hiring you in a fiduciary role than it is to someone who is hiring you into a retail or service industry position.

Free Consultation with a Utah Bankruptcy Lawyer

If you have a bankruptcy question, or need to file a bankruptcy case, call Ascent Law now at (801) 676-5506. Attorneys in our office have a lot of experience and want to help you with your case. We can help you now. Come in or call in for your free initial consultation.

Ascent Law LLC8833 S. Redwood Road, Suite CWest Jordan, Utah 84088 United StatesTelephone: (801) 676-5506

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Source: http://www.ascentlawfirm.com/can-i-be-denied-a-job-because-of-bankruptcy/

[wordacrosstime]

Emma, from book to stage

[Emma, by Jane Austen. First published December 1815. Current editions include: publisher Wordsworth Classics, January 2000, introduction by Nicola Bradbury: ISBN 9781853260285]

In an early Brexit skirmish the Duke of Wellington thrashed upstart Frenchman Napoleon Bonaparte at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.  On the other hand, Jane Austen fans remember 1815 solely for the publication of Emma, one of her best loved novels.  But no railway station for Jane.

‘I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like’ wrote Jane Austen before doing just that with Emma Woodhouse, a self-centred, controlling relentless matchmaker, who nevertheless turned out to be rather nice.  Emma is the story of her attempts to impose matrimony on Mr Knightley, Mr Elton, Miss Smith, Miss Fairfax, Mr Martin, Mr Churchill and many others, while casually insulting Miss Bates and Mrs Bates, who fortunately had no male offspring.

Weighing in at a massive 158,046 words, twice the size of a Graham Greene novel, with readers facing an 11-hour read, it’s not an easy job to rewrite it as a 16,000 word 2-hour play.  Taking a work of art from one medium to another takes a lot of skill (and luck).  Playwright Eliza Wyatt looked at how excellent writing can work for film with a title known previously for tv - Absolutely Fabulous [http://wordacrosstime.tumblr.com/post/146962278084/ab-fab-the-movie] - which incidentally she describes (as Emma is often described) as a comedy of manners.

A daring and highly original rewrite of Emma for the stage has been made by the playwright Non Vaughan-Thomas in a riotously successful UK tour by DOT Productions over summer and autumn 2017.  The transition takes plenty of risks along the way, just as Jane Austen did in creating a new way of approaching the novel in the 18/19th Century before her early death in 1817 at the age of 42.

Non Vaughan-Thomas has extensive stage and tv acting experience and playing Lady Bracknell probably helped a lot in rewriting Emma - which is certainly a comedy, if a long one.  Looking at the two forms, novel and play, there is perhaps one central problem to overcome and several technical facets of the two media to consider.

The central item is obviously that reading a novel is solitary, and can be taken at the reader’s own pace. The reader can also go back and forward to check what happened and will.  The writer has control over who tells the story: through the eyes of one or several characters, or from above, the so-called ‘omniscient‘ narrator who sees everything.  The writer also can create ‘characters’, living human beings fully described, dressed, lit and looked at from all angles.

Tv and film have huge advantages in translating novels by choice of shots and editing.  Both media can take the point of view of a character, or of the overall, using close ups, long and medium shots, selecting the characters and what is seen of them in a shot, and controlling the sequence in which shots are seen.  Radio - often described as a visual medium - has particular advantages: it can be listened to anywhere and the appearance of locations and characters is entirely created in the listener’s imagination.

Theatre is a very different medium from the novel, and one theory of playwriting is that in theatre there is no such thing as character. What we see as a person is only words on a page.  Novels can define a ‘character’ in all aspects and the written word is consumed directly by the reader.  With plays the written word is only an intermediate point, not shown to the audience.  The illusion of ‘character’, the theory says, is given entirely by a human being being present, the actor who says the words and moves, thus giving the ‘character’ life. A consequence is that there is no ‘what a character should do’ or not: the ‘character’ is what it says or does, no matter how ‘inconsistent’ that may be.

It is also said that theatre only happens once.  The audience affects the actors and vice versa, and no two performances are the same, whereas a book is repeatable - with differences certainly in the reader’s location and mood, but apart from that constant.

In DOT Productions’ 2017 Emma tour, the writer Non Vaughan-Thomas and director Michelle Shortland make the decision to emphasise the comedy of the original and take it towards vaudeville, revue, pantomime, music hall [if this was The Guardian one could add, dictionary at the ready - Commedia dell'arte], but with a relaxed though present leash to keep it within Jane Austen’s slightly stern territory.

They also solve the unspoken problem with Emma which men without tin helmets keep quiet about. And they certainly wouldn’t dream of mentioning the word misandrist (keep the dictionary handy).  Simply put, men whisper furtively that there is nothing in Jane Austen for men.  Women, who as women know and men in search of peace agree, know far better than men what is good for men, and say that this is nonsense.  It's a tricky area, as, according to The Sun, men mainly like football, women with big breasts, eating, sleeping, beer, sex.  Jane Austen isn't strong on dimensions and low on diversity.  There is no fisting in her novels, and the only muffs Emma encounters are two-handers for cold nights.  Frankly, saying ‘Jane Austen’ clears the room of men.  This clever production puts that right.

The key to making a well-scripted novel adaptation for the stage lies more than normally with excellent actors, and this production gets that emphatically right.  Taking them in alphabetical order:

Andrew Lindfield delivers three completely different characterisations with the skill that a background in Conor McPherson’s The Weir, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest and HE Bates’s The Mating Game might suggest.  His George Knightley is the very model of a decent English gentleman, his farmer Robert Martin a lively caricature of a bucolic straw-chewer that might get him pelted with turnips by the massed ranks of the National Farmers Union Annual Conference, and a gloriously naughty Frank Churchill winking at ladies of a certain age - all ages in fact - in the audience with evidently welcomed lechery, a linkage not previously realised between Benny Hill and Fanny.

A conversation overheard in the back row of the theatre during the interval compliments the cast on their superb diction and vocal throw.  Reading a book, (with glasses or audiobook if sight is a difficulty), there is no problem seeing or hearing the words.  Muffled quiet speech by actors damages the point of sale for a theatre audience, the last link from book to ear. A frequent criticism of current actors is not being able to make out their words in theatres; that they are now only trained for tv and film. Nothing could be less true for this clearly-spoken cast.

Actors often say that they aim for the back of the gods [the back row of the highest balcony], and have been doing so at eg the Theatre Royal Drury Lane since 1660 or in its present form as London’s largest theatre [2,196 capacity and four balconies] since 1812 - just before Emma.  Actors train to speak carefully to avoid popping and clicking when recording for drama broadcast on radio [and no biscuits or dairy on the day of recording: their mouths are fairly near the specialist microphones, which hear dry throats], and the slightly different technique for tv and film boom microphones. They must be able to use body- or head-mounted radio microphones on stage for live stadium work while avoiding collisions and clothes noise. They must be able to speak for the stage.

Clear speech without microphones to the back of the theatre is sometimes called projection, but projection also means delivering the character fully alongside it: by the skill of excellent actors such as the cast in this production.  It is a crucial strand in converting the solitary experience of the book reader to the customer sitting anywhere in a theatre,  Without that, it's just noise.

Sarita Plowman trained at London's ALRA, the Central School of Speech and Drama, and won the Lilian Baylis Award. Like the rest of the cast she is widely experienced in stage work and the projection that carries her characters beyond the back row.  Her remarkable Lady Macbeth at The Attic in Stratford-Upon-Avon was widely acclaimed. In Emma she gives a fetching and sweet-hearted Harriet Smith, a dignified Mrs Weston, a brief but engaging Isabella Knightley and a very very funny glorious Jane Fairfax.  She brings understanding, nuance and delight in the mischief and roundedness of Jane Austen's writing to each of her characters: stylish, subtle and (where needed) supercharged characters.

Ciara Power is an expert Emma, catching all that not-exactly-lovable character's moods from bitchiness to vulnerability in a marvellous and frequently tender performance which also solves the problem of a novel’s narrative voice. Ciara Power’s Emma does Emma as well as narrating the action from Emma’s point of view.  It’s a clever script device which needs an excellent actor to separate and blend the two roles for the audience, which Ciara Power does with élan.  A Mountview and Royal Academy of Music graduate she has no trouble hitting (very amusingly) a high note at the play’s start and continues with verve throughout. Stylish, gentle, robust, all as suits Emma’s moods.

Leigh Stevenson brings the experience of leading roles in NewsRevue to Mr Woodhouse, Mrs Bates, Mr Elton, Mrs Elton, Mr Cole and an Old Woman, augmented by his superb work in Northanger Abbey, Crazy for You, Scrooge, Holby, East Enders and a voice with the carrying power of a (refined) regimental sergeant major.  Brilliant stuff with a particularly funny Mrs Bates and crotchety Mr Woodhouse. His Mrs Elton is sister under the skin to Lady Bracknell, and Lady Honoria Dedlock in Dickens who vibrates small objects from a distance with the power of her presence.  These fabulous characterisations take class to deliver: Leigh Stevenson has it with impishness and wit.

Non Vaughan-Thomas, what a hero. As well as writing the script with help from Jane Austen she also acts and narrates throughout. The only item lacking in this display of talent is circus skills. Still, there’s always a new version of Elektra: Clytemnestra on trapeze, one to ponder. NV-T uses Serle (housekeeper, neutral to the action in the book) as the overall viewpoint from the novel, and Emma as a from-her-own-viewpoint narrator, neatly translating literary device to live action. It’s clever writing from an expert. NV-T delivers a tart, sly, funny narrator, interspersed with live dusting, deftly slipping into Mrs Cole, Miss Bates, John Knightley (with moustache).  Tour de force.  

Director Michelle Shortland makes the wheels turn effortlessly with great placing of the actors through all the scenes - and scene changes which are done live by the actors with short bursts of song to indicate the breaks.  Her background includes directing The Importance of Being Earnest, a play of equal complexity but with the huge advantage of being written as a play and without the monstrous regiment of fanatical Jane Austen fans complete with savage umbrellas to take offence (on the offensive) at perceived sacrilege. Her survival is due to the excellence of interpretation and presentation of Emma as a comedy in tune with Jane Austen’s remarkably clever writing.

In analysing at how a novel can transmute to a completely different medium we’ve looked at two performances of Emma by the same company picked from a UK tour over July to September 2017 at 30+ venues mainly to the South and East. These have included theatres and a small number of open air venues. To be fair we selected one of each: outside at Canada Park at Canary Wharf in London, and inside a modern purpose-built theatre in Brentwood [an attractive town in Essex].

The Canada Park outside stadium is grass about the size of a football pitch with the stage at a goal end, under the flight path of London City Airport and next to a main road. These are the worst conditions for taking a novel to a play - a reader can always wear earplugs given the same outside noise. The weather is dry and it’s an evening show. Canary Wharf management provides mats for sitting on the grass [there are no seats], filming of the action and screens and speakers across the park for those seated away from the stage. The actors use radio mics [microphones].  Surprisingly - and credit to the skill of the actors, and pilots who maybe stop the lavatories flushing over the stadium - it works perfectly and the play comes across at full force.  Also people drink, have picnics. Unusually, more arrive as the play continues [audiences squatting on the ground sometimes leave in pain].

The other performance is in an enclosed theatre.  The actors can throw away the radio mics and use their voices and the direct relationship with the audience to pull out all the stops.

In clinical terms, this combination of excellent rewriting to suit a quite different medium and expert well-directed imaginative actors who can get their voices direct to a large audience delivers Jane Austen with maximum efficiency proving that it can be done, and can be done superbly.

But who cares about analysis?  It’s funny, compelling and beautifully done - a damned fine show.

Ciara Power as Emma Woodhouse [Left]; Sarita Plowman as Harriet Smith [Right] [with feather] (c) DOT Productions 2017

John Park

wordsacrosstime

21 September 2017

[annajamesjournalist-blog]

Can thrillers really be feminist?

For The Pool

There is a dead woman. She is bloodied and battered. She’s probably naked, she’s almost definitely beautiful. A ruggedly handsome detective with a dark past stands over her and shakes his head at the sadness of it all. A steely look enters his eyes as he resolves to avenge this horrible waste of female flesh.

The above may read as sarcasm, but it’s an all too familiar opening for the crime genre. All stats seem to show that thrillers are overwhelmingly read by women and yet we still have to regularly negotiate the uncomfortable or downright problematic treatment of women and women’s bodies. But, increasingly, people are saying enough is enough. The team adapting Robert Galbraith/JK Rowling’s Cormoran Strike books for TV have recently publicly criticised the “voyeuristic level of violence against women” in TV dramas. And, when it comes to books, there is an increasingly noisy collection of female characters wielding axes, cocktails and secrets, and an ever-deepening pool of writers questioning whether there’s another way to explore our darkest fears without having to sacrifice any feminist principles.

There’s still a strangely intense fascination with women who write crime and thrillers; still regular thinkpieces, even documentaries, where women writing about violence are treated a little like dogs walking on their hind legs. It smacks uncomfortably close to the rather Victorian belief that women couldn’t be surgeons because of their constitutions, as if dealing with blood coming out your vagina once a month would make you more, rather than less, squeamish. And, despite this, more and more male writers are writing under genderless or even outright female names. Author Martyn Waites describes the books he writes as himself as “more complex, more metaphorical, the kind of things things I like in writing” whereas (although it’s unclear if these are Waites or the journalist's words) when he writes as Tania Carver, the books are “simpler” and “more mainstream”.

Last year, Terrence Rafferty wrote a piece for The Atlantic called “Women Are Writing The Best Crime Novels”. The title of the article is deceptively positive and, among his praise for specific books, the piece is full of frustrating, patronising assumptions about female writers and readers. Even though it’s male writers choosing to write under female pseudonyms, apparently it’s “a bunch of very crafty girls” sneaking in, redefining the genre. On the subject of recent megahits like The Girl On The Train, Rafferty goes on to explain that “writers of the current school tend to favour a volatile mixture of higher-pitched first-person tones: hectoring, accusatory, self-justifying, a little desperate. Reading these tricky 21st-century thrillers can be like scrolling through an especially heated comments thread on a web site of wandering unaware into a Twitter feud”. Leaving aside that the horrors of comment threads or Twitter trolls are distinctly male-dominated, the language used here shows that, even very loosely masquerading as praise, there’s a deep discomfort with the way women have changed the crime and thriller market.

But, as with many things, peel away the layer of men making things weird (#notallmen) and you have a lot of women (and some men) getting on with actually interrogating what writing a feminist thriller really means. Erin Kelly’s latest book, He Said/She Said, revolves around a Ched Evans-esque rape trial, after a couple see what appears to be a sexual assault during an eclipse at a festival. The book grew from the idea of a crime taking place during an eclipse, not the desire to write a feminist thriller, but as Kelly says, “It must be feminist, because I’m getting emails from Men’s Rights Activists telling me that I’m a rabid man-hater.”

Kelly’s book explores sexual assault head-on; it’s at times a difficult book to read, but it shows that thrillers can tackle these things without slipping into gratuitous descriptions of violence against women. “The best thrillers don’t deny the female condition, but hit the sweet spot between exploiting real-life victims for cheap thrills and turning a novel into a morality play. I agonised over using an allegation of rape as a plot device,” Kelly says. “More so than I ever have when writing a murder. But for every sensitive, thoughtful examination of rape in fiction there are literally thousands of raped and murdered and mutilated women whose victimhood is little more than a plot device. I knew I was treading on eggshells, but I walked with incredible care. I researched this book more thoroughly than anything else I’ve ever written.”

Ruth Kenley-Letts, the executive producer for Strike, said “great efforts had been taken to treat the crimes against female victims with sensitivity on screen” and it’s something book editors are increasingly sensitive too as well. “It’s a tough one,” Sam Eades, a commissioning editor at Orion, says. “It’s important for fiction to reflect the society we live in – and violence against women happens to those we love and care abou – but that’s not to say I wouldn’t love to read a thriller that explored the world how it could be, not just as it is now.” Alison Hennessey, a commissioning editor for crime at Bloomsbury, has issued a blanket ban on books that start with the rape or murder or a woman being investigated by a male detective: “There are enough of these books out there already, and enough violence in the world, frankly, that I’m not interested in contributing more to that unless the book was doing something to explore why this happens.”

I can’t help but think of the people who defend the level of sexual violence in Game Of Thrones by saying it’s historically realistic, or that’s just what would have happened in a society like that, even though it’s a society where there is also magic and dragons. Art in whatever form is important because it lets us explore how we feel and react to the real world, and yet it is fiction – it does not have to do or be anything. But if fiction is where we explore life, thrillers are where we explore fear. They arguably don’t work if they’re not tense, uncomfortable reads. I had to stop reading He Said/She Said at several points to calm down, and I worked myself up into a righteous fury reading Little Deaths by Emma Flint – but at what was going on in the story, not because of the way the writer was handling it. “I don’t know a single woman who has never been made to feel threatened or afraid,” Flint says. “Our real-life experience gives an extra frisson of terror to reading about a woman being followed home, a woman who has a stranger sit next to her in an otherwise empty train carriage. We are used to being afraid that we will become victims.”

So, it’s not that these subjects shouldn’t be tackled in thrillers (as Kelly says, “I read this shit on my phone every day – not to explore it is just another kind of silencing”) – it’s how to skirt a very delicate line without tipping into gratuitous and exploitative presentations. How do you write a book about people doing awful misogynistic things without writing an awful misogynistic book? There’s no easy checklist of how to make a thriller feminist, and everyone has their own definition of what that means. But, as Kelly says: “I think any novel that makes the reader think seriously about the fact that women still cannot move through the world with the same ease as men can be read as feminist. Sometimes the authorial intent to write a feminist novel is clear, but with crime fiction it’s more of a Trojan horse. Big Little Lies arguably got more women examining their prejudices about domestic abuse than a Guardian editorial.”

Here are a few of our favourite feminist thrillers to try:

THE POWER BY NAOMI ALDERMAN It would be impossible to not mention the book that won this year’s Baileys Prize. A tense, blistering, darkly humorous look at what might happen if women suddenly became the physically stronger sex. It’s impossible to read it without interrogating your own perspective on gender.

LITTLE DEATHS BY EMMA FLINT A startlingly insightful, intelligent read about the way society closes its walls against women who are not what they are asked to be and the way the patriarchy is terrified by the women it cannot control, and how far it will go to reassert that control.

HE SAID/SHE SAID BY ERIN KELLY A pageturner that tackles sexual assault head-on. When a couple witness what seems to be a rape during an eclipse, they get embroiled in a court case and the lives of the two people affected. It always puts plot and character first, but isn’t afraid to interrogate how we decide who we believe and who to trust.

PULL ME UNDER BY KELLY LUCE Coming out next month, this scratches at the edge of the genre, as there is no trail of bodies or plot twists. Instead, it’s a tight, intense portrait of one woman’s psychological state as she tries to leave behind the legacy of a horrifying act she committed as a 12-year-old. A sharp literary read about guilt and anger.

OUT BY NATSUO KIRINO From one extreme to the other, this shocking, violent crime novel follows four female friends working together in a factory who band together to try and cover up the murder by one of them of their abusive husband, and things escalate from there. One for readers who like their biting feminist commentary with some dismemberment.

THE WOMAN WHO RAN BY SAM BAKER While it’s a little awkward to mention a book by the co-founder of the site, a list of feminist thriller recommendations would be incompletely without this modern take of Anne Brontë’s The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall. Not quite a retelling, but playing with Brontë’s themes of gossip, broken relationships and carving out your own identity.

[lodelss]

Menace Too Society

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | January 2020 |  10 minutes (2,378 words)

It’s taken two years for #MeToo to wake up France, but at least it did. The country appears to finally see the men it has created, which is more than can be said of North America, trapped in the cancel culture stage, calling out everyone except itself. That lack of self-awareness is easy to miss, though. There’s a lot of wokeness floating around these parts — we even have a “woke” princess, although Meghan Markle’s self-appointed royal defection alone could never really loosen the monarchy’s grip on Britain. And for all the hand-wringing by Hollywood stars over diversity, there is once again an established structure above them that resists the change they represent, one that inevitably rears its head in heavily white male awards seasons. France appears to know this now, but only because it was told so by a woman it nearly destroyed.

“I’m really angry, but the issue isn’t so much me, how I survive this or not,” French actress Adèle Haenel told Mediapart in November. “I want to talk about an abuse which is unfortunately commonplace, and attack the system of silence and collusion behind it which makes it possible.” The 31-year-old Portrait of a Lady on Fire star was talking about her alleged abuse from the ages of 12 to 15 at the hands of her first film director, Christophe Ruggia, who was in his 30s at the time. In a follow-up sit-down interview with the same site, Haenel emphasized that she wasn’t canceling anyone; this wasn’t about censoring individuals, but about calling attention to an entrenched society-wide ill and the culture that upholds it. It was this depersonalization that seemed to free up France to reflect, something still largely missing from U.S. conversations — from #MeToo to inclusivity in entertainment to royal affairs — that are all rooted in a foundational hierarchy the entire population is complicit in preserving. “When we come up against the control of the patriarchy,” explained Haenel, “we talk about it as though it were from the outside, whereas it’s from the inside.”

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Barely a week into the new year, two of the most celebrated members of the most prestigious institution in the U.K. turned their backs on it. On January 8, the Sussex Instagram account dropped a shot of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle with 195 words that defied centuries of British tradition. “After many months of reflection and internal discussions, we have chosen to make a transition this year in starting to carve out a progressive new role within this institution,” it read. “We intend to step back as ‘senior’ members of the Royal Family and work to become financially independent.” The announcement, which also stated the couple plans to split its time between the U.K. and North America, came not long after the airing of an emotional ITV documentary in which Markle admitted, “I never thought that this would be easy, but I thought it would be fair.” Anyone who watched her say that, who saw the same defeat in her face that they saw in Princess Diana’s decades prior, who saw Harry’s frustration at the thought that it could all happen again, who saw the royal family barely ripple in response to Prince Andrew’s association with a registered sex offender, would not only understand this separation, but expect nothing less. How else to exercise your opposition to a patriarchal empire than to forsake its number one emblem?

But the media took it personally — it was a door slammed and shut tight in the face of their badgering, which had become as much of a presence as the royals themselves, a constant reminder of British society’s supplication at the feet of an outdated overlord. Piers Morgan expressed his preference for the old prince, the fratty drunk who cosplayed a Nazi, amid reports that Madame Tussaud’s had swiftly relocated the royal couple’s wax figures from its esteemed collection. The local response reeked of personal injury, as though the duo had turned its nose up at the greatest gift the country had to offer, rather than what they actually did: kicked off a long-awaited internal confrontation with the colonial inheritance of a populace that insists on running on its fumes. As Afua Hirsch, author of Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging, told NPR, “Instead of taking this as an opportunity for introspection as to what is it about the upper strata of British society that is hostile for a person of color like Meghan Markle, what we’re seeing now is the British media just lashing out again and blaming everyone except themselves.” “Everyone” being “non-aristocratic, non-white interlopers,” which is to say, the people who actually populate Britain. 

If Prince Harry is the future, Prince William is the past, and it’s fitting that he not only presides over the kingdom (or will, one day) but its version of the Oscars. The day before his brother’s adios, the BAFTAs announced that for the seventh year in a row, no women were nominated for best director, and in addition, all 20 of the acting nominees were white. In an internal letter, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts’ chief executive Amanda Berry and film committee chair Marc Samuelson called the lack of diversity “frustrating and deeply disappointing,” as though it were entirely out of their hands. Yet the 8,000-member committee is chaired by Pippa Harris, who cofounded a production company with Sam Mendes nearly two decades ago, which may explain why 1917, the war epic Mendes directed and coproduced with Harris, was the only nominee for both best film and best British film. This sort of insularity may be unspoken but it is not inactive, it has repercussions for which films are funded and how they are marketed and ultimately rewarded. 

“BAFTA can’t tell the studios and the production companies who they should hire and whose stories should get told,” Samuelson told Variety, deflecting the blame. But the academy’s site claims it discovers and nurtures new talent and has a mission that includes diversity and inclusion, so why does its most recent Breakthrough Brits list appear to be three quarters white? As former BAFTA winner Steve McQueen observed, there were plenty of British women and people of color who did exceptional work in film this year — in movies like In Fabric, The Souvenir, Queen & Slim, and Us — and were nonetheless overlooked, implying a more deeply ingrained exclusion, the sort that permeates British society beyond its film industry and keeps the country from actually perceiving non-white, non-male stories as legitimate art. Snubbed Harriet star Cynthia Erivo confessed to Extra TV that she actually turned down an invitation to sing at the BAFTAs, evoking Markle’s absences from a growing number of royal engagements. “It felt like it was calling on me as an entertainer,” Erivo said, “as opposed to a person who was a part of the world of film.”

Awards as a whole are representative of industry-wide limitations, which, as ever, are tied to the dominance of a particular group in the larger society. The Oscars, dating back to the ’20s and established to garner positive publicity for Hollywood (while extinguishing its unions), seem to persist in the belief that that is tied to white male supremacy. I probably don’t have to tell you the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences just elected another middle-aged white man as its head (David Rubin) and has a member base that is 84 percent white and 68 percent male. And that’s an improvement after April Reign’s viral 2016 #OscarsSoWhite outcry. “It’s not about saying who is snubbed and who should have been nominated,” Reign told The Huffington Post at the time, “it’s about opening the discussion more on how the decisions were made, who was cast and who tells the story behind the camera.” And yet the response, as always, has been tokenism — one black nominee here, an Asian one there, a one-for-one reaction to cancel culture which provides momentary relief but no real evolution. The individual successes of Moonlight and Black Panther and BlacKkKlansman and even Parasite, not to mention Spike Lee being named the first ever black Cannes jury head, can’t ultimately undo more than 100 years of white male paternalism. The Oscar nominations this year, dominated by four movies that are very pale and very violent — Joker, 1917, The Irishman, and Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood — encapsulate the real soul of Hollywood and the society in which it was forged. It is no mistake that, as The Atlantic outlined, the ceremony neglects “domestic narratives, and stories told by women and people of color.” Harvey Weinstein, who turned awards campaigning into a brutalist art form while allegedly brutalizing women behind the scenes, may no longer be the Oscars’ figurehead, but his imprint endures.

À propos, Les Misérables, a gritty drama about a bunch of men facing off with a bunch of other men (oh, and some boys too) in a poor neighborhood in Paris, was the French submission to this year’s Oscars instead of Haenel’s critically preferred film, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a lush period romance about two women in love. It was that film’s director, Céline Sciamma, for whom Haenel returned to acting in 2007 with White Lilies (and with whom she had a romance off-camera) years after her experience with Ruggia drove her from the industry. Though she opened up to Sciamma about being sexually abused, Haenel didn’t go public until she was firmly established with two Césars (the French Academy Award equivalent) to bolster her legitimacy — she knew that otherwise society, French and otherwise, sides with men. “Even if it is difficult to fight against the balance of power set out from early adolescence, and against the man-woman relationship of dominance, the social balance of power has been inversed,” Haenel told Mediapart in November. “I am today socially powerful, whereas [Ruggia] has simply become diminished.” This was a crucial but deemphasised aspect of the shift in America which took place after a slew of A-list white actresses — women who were held up by society and thus listened to — accused Weinstein of abuse, a shift which did not take place after a slew of lesser known women, many of them women of color, accused Bill Cosby. (That the latter is black no doubt also played into the country’s lingering racist belief that all black men are latent criminals, so obviously he was a predator, right?) With none of these longstanding prejudices addressed, however, they risk being repeated, as the system which permitted these men to abuse their power prevails.

“What do we all have as collective responsibility for that to happen. That’s what we’re talking about,” Haenel said in her sit-down interview. “Monsters don’t exist. It’s our society, it’s us, it’s our friends, it’s our fathers. We’re not here to eliminate them, we’re here to change them.” This approach is in direct opposition to how #MeToo has been unraveling in the U.S., where names of accused men — Woody Allen, Michael Jackson, Matt Lauer, R. Kelly, Louis C.K., Weinstein — loom so large on the marquees that they conveniently block out reality: that they were shaped by America, a place that gives golden handshakes to abusers, barely takes them to trial for their alleged actions, and sometimes even cheers them on. It’s not that women here have not been saying the same thing as Haenel, it just seems to be that their message is lost in the cacophony of proliferating high-profile cases themselves. Haenel’s resonance sources from not only the relative anomaly of a French woman of her stature making such claims, but also the fact that she is so much more famous than her alleged perpetrator and that her age at the time makes it a clear instance of abuse. Perhaps it also has to do with her disclosure coming amidst the ongoing yellow vests movement, which has primed France’s citizens to call for all manner of accountability.  

Haenel’s alleged abuser has since been charged with sexual aggression against a minor, though she initially refused to go through the justice system, which she saw as part of a deeper systemic bias that resulted in her abuse. UniFrance, which promotes French films internationally, has openly backed the actress and is in the process of creating a charter to protect actors, and, in a historic move, the French Society of Film Directors dropped Ruggia, its former copresident. Meanwhile, Gabriel Matzneff is also being investigated following the publication of a memoir by Vanessa Springora in which the publishing head describes her teen sexual encounters with the then-50-something-year-old French writer who has always been open about his affinity for underage girls and boys. And the same country that supported Roman Polanski in the aftermath of child sexual assault allegations several years ago is now protesting him in the wake of Haenel’s disclosure. As she said when asked about the Oscar-winning filmmaker on Mediapart, “the debate around Polanski is not limited to Polanski and his monstrosity, but implicates the whole of society.” The French media calls Haenel’s #MeToo story a turning point, one which highlights not the individual — even she expressed regret that it fell on one man — but on a society which believes victimization is in any way excusable. 

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“It’s possible for society to act differently,” Haenel said. “It’s better for everyone, firstly for the victims but even for the torturers to look themselves in the face. That’s what being human is. It’s not about crushing people and trying to gain power, it’s about questioning yourself and accepting the multi-dimensional side of what a human being is. That’s how we build high society.” Up until this point we have been primarily concerned with identifying the bad seeds and having them punished and even removed, without really wrestling with the environment in which they have grown — doing that means facing ourselves as well. We name names and call out institutions — like Hollywood awards and the British royal family — and then what? What remains is the same system that produced these individuals, these same individuals simply establishing new institutions with the same foundations. Identifying what’s wrong doesn’t tell us what’s right. It wasn’t until Haenel was introduced to a filmmaking crew that was entirely female, that listened to her and supported her, that she could identify not just what shouldn’t be, but what should. “What society do we want?” she asked. “It’s about that too.”

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Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

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