I was not a fan of Mad
Men, and, although “Smells Like Teen Spirit” became a hit
when I was 16, I was not a fan of Nirvana. When it comes to monster
pop culture trends, especially those with the greatest appeal to my
demographic, I find myself frequently being the person watching
everyone else with bewilderment and going, “Sure, it's okay – but
that's it.” Or, “Maybe this really is the greatest thing in the
world. But doesn't anybody have a different opinion?”
I am not, however,
indifferent to The Cultural Conversation; if everybody's talking
about it, and I have even the slightest bit of independent curiosity
about it, I probably want to think about it, talk about it, and maybe
blog about it too. So not only did I watch the finale of Mad Men
last Sunday, and then see Montage of Heck in the theatre on
Wednesday, but I've also been thinking about them, and about they
mythos of America, since then. I was therefore pleased, though not
surprised, to learn that the director of Montage of Heck, Brett
Morgan, majored in something called American Mythology at Hampshire
College before getting his MFA in film.
Don Draper, American
Anti-Heroes, and the Soap Opera Heroine
I started thinking
about American mythology in relation to the ending of Mad Men.
The use of that iconic Coke commercial reminded me of the skin-crawly
things about the show that made me stop watching it after a
two-season trial binge (which happened, I think, around the time
Season 4 was airing): how it takes advantage of the way that
something that would have appeared to the world, at the time, as
innocuous or even positive, now seems, with ironic, knowing
hindsight, at once naive and sinister. In other words, our
relationship to the recent cultural past, in Mad Men, is one
of condescension, disapproval, and envy, which means that the show is
not about the past and what it may have been like to live in it, but
about our relationship to cartoon ideas about the past, which relies
on, and fosters, cartoon ideas about the present.
I've heard a lot about
Jay Gatsby in relation to Don Draper/Dick Whitman, but the series
finale of Mad Men actually called to mind the endings of two
other classics of American literature, one highbrow and one low:
Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady and Margaret Mitchell's
Gone With the Wind (another
work that grapples with the present America's guilty nostalgia for
its past). In the final sequences of both novels, an important
character dies, while the protagonist, after reaching her lowest
point, gets an ambiguous ending. Actually, Don Draper's final story
arc even more closely recalls that of Charlotte Vale (Bette Davis) in
what ought to be an American classic, the film Now, Voyager,
which takes its title from Whitman. In a moment of crisis, Charlotte,
like Don, bolts from the city and seeks help and guidance at a
retreat for the rich called Cascade. In Portrait, Isabel
Archer, after increasing conflict with her husband, the
social-climbing fortune hunter Gilbert Osmond, travels from Rome to
England to see her dying cousin, Ralph, at his familial estate, the
Edenic Gardencourt; after being confronted there by her obsessed
stalker, Caspar Goodwood, who argues that Osmond's cruelty justifies
them running off together, she decides, for reasons not revealed to
the reader, to return to Rome and her awful marriage instead. And in
the movie version of Gone With the Wind, Scarlett, after being
left by Rhett, realizes that going home to Tara will give her the
strength she needs to go on living and think of a way to win him
back.
One of the interesting
ways in which Mad Men alters the Victorian ending is by
killing off the most hated, rather than the most loved, character.
The effect of this was not to punish Betty Draper, but to give her
some unexpected dignity and redemption, in a muted, sardonic way that
kept true to the character's limitations and, thereby, to human
limitations in general. The best way to understand American endings
is by looking at how the shared plot elements transform in these
different works. Don attempts a kind of homecoming when he goes to
see Stephanie, but when he tries to help her, she points out that
he's the one who seems to need help, which he gets, in the end, from
her spiritual retreat; Charlotte goes to Cascade to get help, but
discovers that the best way to help herself is to help a girl who
reminds her of a younger and more helpless version of herself.
Isabel's one sentimental and ethical tie to Rome is her relationship
with a helpless young woman, Osmond's daughter Pansy, whom Osmond has
sequestered in a convent for her disobedience, and whom Isabel has
promised to help. Don has sentimental ties to all three of the women
he calls from California – his daughter, Sally, her mother, his
childlike ex-wife, Betty, and his workplace protegee, Peggy – and
obligations to the first two. Yet Peggy is the only one who wants him
back, suggesting that the workplace is his only real home, just as
his professional life is the area where he's been successful.
The American hero or
heroine is profoundly alone at the end of his or her story, whether
isolated by errors and others' wrongs or by their own bad behaviour.
Scarlett O'Hara is still, curiously, the only female American
anti-hero of iconic stature. Another way in which the Mad Men
finale inverts the Victorian ending is that rather than going to
a friend at the time of their death, Don travels away from
Betty. The already-famous group therapy session hug combines the
emotional breakdown, and breakthrough, that occurs for Isabel at
Ralph's bedside with Caspar Goodwood's kiss – non-sexual touching
being perhaps as difficult for Don as sexual touching is for Isabel.
Don Draper follows in
the footsteps of Isabel and Scarlett by not having his future
resolved at the end of his story. In this, he differs from all of the
other major characters at the end of Mad Men, who are left in
a place of contentment or at least acceptance, and who at least
believe that they understand their future: Betty will die, reconciled
with her daughter to the best of their ability; Sally will take care
of her mother, which is enough to think about for the moment; Roger
is newly married; Pete is reunited with his wife; Peggy is in a new
relationship and settled in at her new workplace; Joan has started a
business. He also differs from iconic American male protagonists,
like Gatsby and Charles Foster Kane, who are dead before the
narratives that tell their stories begin – or even his anti-hero
peer, Walter White.
We don't know why
Isabel chooses to go back to Rome and her marriage, but it's hard not
to interpret the ending pessimistically: that she may be able to help
Pansy somehow, and that the idea of being Caspar Goodwood's mistress
doesn't appeal to her, don't seem like enough to constitute a bright
future for her. The future looks somewhat brighter for Scarlett,
although obviously not as bright as it would have been if Rhett
hadn't just left her. At the end of Gone With the Wind, we
don't know what's going to happen to Scarlett; at the end of
Portrait, we not only don't know what's going to happen to
Isabel, we don't know what has happened to Isabel: why she
made the choice to return to Rome. And at the end of Mad Men,
we have to infer what has narratively happened to Don from the
juxtaposition of the image of Don meditating with the Coke
commercial, without knowing thematically what it means.
The final image of Don
Draper, meditating and wearing an enigmatic smile, has resonances
with the famous final images of King Vidor's weepie Stella Dallas,
starring Barbara Stanwyck, and Rouben Mamoulian's Queen Christina,
starring Greta Garbo. Both women have lost seemingly everything
important to them and that defines them (a throne and her lover, in
Garbo's case; a marriage and her daughter, in Stanwyck's). (What does
it mean that I keep thinking of narratives with female protagonists
in relation to Don Draper – supposedly a symbol of
turn-of-the-millennium masculinity? Just that the genre of Mad
Men, unlike Breaking Bad, is soap opera?) Garbo, her
masklike face a careful blank (Mamoulian wanted the audience to read
the emotions they wanted to see into it), looks toward the future
with stoicism, grimly “going forward” in Don Draper, and
corporate capitalist, fashion; Stella Dallas, in contrast, smiles,
finding a source of joy unknown to us as she strides alone into a
future that we equally don't know.
From what I've heard and read
about the internet reaction to the finale moments of Mad Men,
a lot of viewers seem to think that the ending is saying, in a
straightforwardly cynical way, that Don's smile seems to signify an
epiphany, even enlightenment, but turns out to “really” be an
idea for how to commodify his experience of connectedness and
wholeness in the form of an ad; using our desperate thirst for higher
meaning, “the real thing,” to sell Coke – and America,
globalization, and capitalism – to the globe. That's the reductive
interpretation, comparable to saying that Isabel goes back to Osmond
because there's a conservative part of her that won't allow her to
divorce, even if she's revolted by the idea of a sham marriage.
There's also the interpretation that no enlightenment, however
sincere, is entirely pure, at least none achievable by ordinary
people; and at the same time, no really powerful popular image can be
entirely cynical, even if its naivety benefits evil.
But isn't that
America – or its mythology? I think Henry James would think so.
Isabel Archer makes a mistake when she makes the most important
choice of her life because, in her naivety, she believes she is free
to choose, as the Americans (and aspiring Americans) who chose Coke
believed they were free to choose.
The ending of Mad
Men also poses the question, without giving us the answer: has
Don changed in some way during the course of the show, or, in turning
his epiphany, and the entire 60s revolution, into his most powerful
image of desire yet, is he the same – only more? Portrait
raises this question even more directly by making Isabel make the
same disastrous choice again, but here Don really belongs in
the company of fellow pop American icon Scarlett O'Hara, who is
virtually incapable of change, to the secret pleasure of the reader
or viewer, who finds her exciting, and a suitable wish-fulfilment
identification figure, because of her flaws. Don is somewhat unique,
however, in that he finds some reason to go on that is not external
to him (as Charlotte certainly has a reason in Tina, her
quasi-adopted daughter, and Isabel perhaps to some extent in Pansy),
and that is not simply a reason to survive (like Stella Dallas's, in
her loneliness and poverty), but to be great, and maybe joyous. And
that's his work, meaning both his creative ability and his
professional success. In this he most closely resembles (David O.
Selznick's) Scarlett again, because although winning Rhett back may
give her a project (like working on Coke), it's Tara that gives her
the strength to undertake it, and Tara is nothing more than a symbol
of renewal (Mother Earth, continuity): not Coke, but Om.
Montage of a
Feminist-Postmodern-Punk Marriage
Kurt Cobain is a very
different kind of American icon from Don Draper; and yet, as Montage
of Heck also shows, maybe not so different. Feeling abandoned and
unloved by his divorced, working-class parents as a teenager, Cobain
sought to escape from himself in the very American fashion of
reinventing himself as a rock star. Unlike Don, however, Cobain
couldn't wholeheartedly embrace the American dream in all of its
naive sincerity and absolute inauthenticity. He wanted a happy,
united family, and wanted to rebel against it; he wanted to be a
world-conquering rock star, and wanted to be a civilization-smashing
iconoclast; he loathed conformity and craved acceptance.
At the birth of rock
and roll, there was no conflict between being a world-famous
billionaire and being a great rock musician. But Cobain belonged to a
post-Don Draper generation that had seen everything that looked like
the real thing become commodified, including every attempt to rebel
against the process. He knew that there was no way to matter on a
large scale except by conforming, or at least spawning conformity,
and becoming a corporate tool. Cobain stood out not just in being the
charismatic zeitgeist vehicle that brought punk into the mainstream,
but by being willing to die – not by hedonistic accident, but by
shotgun to the head – to establish his authenticity. In that, he
was more Isabel Archerish even than Don Draper: in one interpretation
that I've always liked, Isabel self-destructively goes back to her
husband so that the marriage she was tricked into will be her own
choice after all; and Cobain, it seems, killed himself to get back
control over a narrative that was being determined by impersonal
cultural forces.
Courtney Love's
relationship to the mainstream and success is every bit as fucked-up
as Cobain's, but very different, too. Her desire for success and
acceptance has always been absolutely naked, and for that reason, the
cool kids of punk (like Kim Gordon), who never questioned their punk
ethos, found and find her embarrassing and disturbing; and yet she's
more punk rock than they'll ever be, louder, angrier, rawer, more
jagged, absolutely incapable of being assimilated into the
mainstream. Or so it seems, but she, too, has engaged in an
ambivalent dance with success. There was a moment in the late 90s,
when, riding the wave of mainstream success that Nirvana had made
possible for alternative acts, she released a perfect pop-rock album
with Hole in Celebrity Skin; got the plastic surgery just
right; successfully launched a Hollywood acting career; and was
dating a nice, stable, talented Hollywood actor. Even Camille Paglia
approved. As Love has said many times since, she could have fulfilled
her dream, then, of being Hollywood Courtney. Did her demons reassert
themselves at that point, or the realization that her dream contained
a large component of bullshit? Punk Courtney and Hollywood Courtney
are each as real as the other – like Professor Kelp and Buddy Love.
And that internal tension is what makes Courtney Love (like Jerry
Lewis) such a great American star. Whereas Cobain seemed to be unable
to live with that tension and conflict, Love made it the subject of
her art, and her life into her art.
To see Love and Cobain
together in their home videos in Montage of Heck is to see Gen
X allegorized in the form of a famous, fucked-up couple who are like
inversions of each other. They've got the kind of playful,
solipsistic soulmate bond that, in rock stars in their mid-20s, you
normally only see between the creative duo in a band: the Lennon and
McCartneys, Morrissey and Marrs, Doherty and Barats. Or yes, okay,
the Lennon and Onos, which is one of the reasons Ono attracted such
hatred: because finding a bond with a fellow artist within a feminist
heterosexual marriage precludes the need for the homosocial bond
that's the traditional basis of culture. And that fucks up our pop
culture. You don't just want the music of The Beatles: you want the
Beatles romping together. Morrissey and Marr flirting
with each other. Doherty and Barat practically having sex on stage
together.
The clips chosen for
the documentary give the impression that Love and Cobain, in a way
that's very 90s postmodern, were incessantly meta about their
relationship and the way it was being mythologized by the public, as
interpreted by the media. They were also, in a way that also strikes
me as very 90s, very my generation, meta about their gender
roles in relation to themselves and to their relationship. This did
not produce harmony, however, but rather struggle within oneself and
with each other. Cobain despises masculinity as traditionally
conceived, but sometimes seems to struggle with conventional
attitudes (“Mommy's loud,” he complains to the infant
Frances at one point; at another, he pretends to punch Love in the
arm and refers to his action as “wife beating,” but he's clearly
actually frustrated with her); Love is openly competitive and
effortlessly assertive, but has a conflicted attitude toward
femininity (she complains about women being mean to her and warns
Kurt about the woman who are going to try to get their claws in him
on tour). (As I learned from rewatching my wedding video at the time
of my divorce, there's nothing like video to capture the small
tensions and aggressions that constantly flare up between friends,
acquaintances, and members of a couple.)
I found myself
recognizing myself in Love, in terms of our relationship to feminism,
again and again. Growing up in the 80s and early 90s, one was
constantly bombarded by the media (which in those days was TV and
magazine articles) with the message that men considered women
inferior and didn't like you to be intelligent or angry; that men
would ignore women when they spoke, or not take you seriously; and
that being female meant to be threatened by objectification, sexual
harassment, and rape. As a person with a healthy ego and a pretty
elastic relationship to gender (learned from David Bowie – a Cobain
favourite), I accordingly cultivated a persona of maximum force and
directness. There were limits to this, since by nature I'm a quiet,
introspective, meek person who likes to read and write and be left
alone. And it was mostly brought to bear in relationships and
intellectual engagement with men, and in the university classroom,
where I usually dominated discussion; and in the street when having
to walk through bad neighborhoods at night. In workplace contexts, on
the other hand, it tended to work against me until I figured out what
I was doing wrong: the constant expression of frustration just reads
as entitlement in situations that call for high levels of patience or
cooperation.
Love's context was punk
rock, and for her that didn't mean cool, as it did for Kim Gordon,
since cool was far beyond her, but the ability to express your
aggression. And not only onstage, but to some extent in your personal
interactions. There's a scene where she and Cobain are getting ready
in the bathroom, their backs to each other, each apparently facing a
mirror, where Love, rambling on with her trademark logomania on her
usual topic of her perception by others, expresses her concern that
she will become the most hated woman in America. Cobain pipes up,
muttering, “You're already the most hated woman in America,” to
which Love responds instantly by halting in mid-hair-tease and
asking, an edge in her voice, “What?”, daring him to repeat
himself. I smiled at that point, because I have done that so many
times in conversations with men – especially in my 20s, as Love is
here. He rephrases himself, placatingly, “You and Roseanne Barr are
tied for the most hated woman in America,” and they move on.
(Hyper-aware of their mythology, both Cobain and Love like to
consider themselves, and each other, in relation to other pop culture
figures of the present and the past. Cobain seems especially fixated
on Axl Rose as his antithetical doppelganger.)
What's at stake in that
exchange? Love is momentarily in denial about how much the public
hates her, and doesn't want to hear the truth just then, from him;
she's also sensitive to the possibility that by repeating the
sentiment, he's supporting it. She has a category of things that men
are not allowed to say to her and ways that they are not allowed to
speak to her without challenge. In later footage, family and friends
sing “Happy Birthday” to Frances on her first birthday, which
seems like a joyous occasion until, the moment the song ends, Cobain
exits the frame and Love shrieks “KURT DON'T LEAVE!” Was he only
able to stick around for the length of the song before he had to get
high? In any case, he's shirking his parental duties, and Love won't
put up with it, telling him that she won't open Frances's present
until he gets back there.
As men and women who'd
grown up exposed to second-wave feminism sloughed off their
traditional gender roles, it didn't produce equality so much as a
new, topsy-turvy imbalance: the spectacle of an openly aggressive
woman bossing around a small, quiet man. And yet the power imbalance
in the public sphere remained the same, with the man having the more successful career. Which means the dynamic is less something new than
the Macbeths archetype. Love is such an important figure not because
she had the most respected career of a woman in rock (that would be
PJ Harvey, who, unlike Love, has never inspired me to buy one of her
albums, because I don't actually care about rock), and not because
she and Cobain had a celebrity “power marriage,” which they
didn't entirely (if you want celebrity marriages where the members of
the couple have equal power, there have always been those, from Liz
and Dick to Brad and Angelina), but because, again, she exhibited the
ambivalence of ambitious women who were trying to achieve equality
with men. Love wasn't content with being separate but equal: unlike
Liz Taylor, Yoko Ono, Angelina Jolie, or Beyonce, she evidently
considered herself to be in direct competition with her husband for
his job of being the greatest rock and roll star in the world. At the
same time, because that role wasn't as easily available to her as it
was to a man, she was tempted to get power the way women have
traditionally had to do it: through association with her husband.
That is where feminism was at in the early 90s (see also the
Clintons).
A curious way in which
we mythologize famous couples, when their personalities or narrative
fit the archetype, is by demonizing one of the members. Surprisingly,
it's not always the woman who's demonized. When a woman is taken up
as a cult figure, often by feminism, like Zelda Fitzgerald, Jane
Bowles, or Sylvia Plath, the husband may be demonized, suspected of
somehow contributing to his wife's struggles with mental illness. On
a larger scale, there's Princess Diana, victimized by her husband and
the shadowy machinations of the Royal Family; or the conspiracy
theories about Kennedy involvement in the death of Marilyn Monroe.
The woman-abuser, wife-murderer, or gaslighter is one gendered Gothic narrative we have at our disposal; its counterpart is the
emasculating bitch-wife, so iconic in Anglo-American culture that you
can just call her The Yoko, although more recently she's been popping
up in cult TV focused on male protagonists through which writers, and
apparently viewers as well, work out their relationship to
traditional masculinity. That is where feminism, which perhaps should
now call “gender relations” (since we're well into getting meta
about masculinity in pop culture), is at in the mid-2010s.
The Cobains weren't The
Osbournes, in part because Love did pursue her own career rather
than being part of her husband's, even as his “boss.” Love and
Cobain also come across in the videos as far too intelligent, funny,
and self-aware to play the parts of termagant and clueless “schlub”
husband. On the other hand, who knows what they would have been like
by the early 2000s, if Cobain and their marriage had survived. Is it
better to die young, with integrity and dignity, or to get a reality
TV show and become an unfathomably rich joke, but evidently enjoy
your family life? Love has continued to cling to punk dignity,
refusing to take the easy way and become the reality TV star she was
obviously meant to be, even though her popularity as a musician
didn't survive the 90s. But is it worth it, in a world in which no
bit of real reality can survive the touch of commerce or media, and
in which “reality” is a TV genre that means “gawking at
freaks”?
Game of Thrones and
the Obligations of Writers of Fictional Violence
Besides the Mad Man
finale, the other thing that happened in TV – which makes up about
85% of The Cultural Conversation in any given week (with 10% devoted
to Stuff That Happened on the Internet and 5% to news stories
involving celebrities) – was, of course, the latest Game of
Thrones rape scene. I don't follow GOT, because I can't
imagine anything worse than its combination of static talking heads
scenes, grim, grisly, sexualized violence, and tits. However, as with
my other two subjects for this week, that won't stop me from weighing
in. I've only got three more posts to go after this; I'm giving up
this blog to focus on writing a novel after I turn 40 at the end of
August. One is going to be on Northrop Frye's Anatomy of
Criticism, which I've almost finished re-reading; one on my
feelings about feminism (not to be confused with my feelings about
gender equality); and a final one on the forms my reading has taken
in my 39th year.
This subject makes a
good introduction to some of the issues I'll be talking about in the
feminism post. Having listened to podcasters on the subject and read
several articles on the internet, I want to weigh in from a
perspective that I haven't heard represented: a woman who's written
in the same genre as Game of Thrones. I'm not talking about
sword and sorcery fantasy, although I've seen articles defending the
scene based on Martin's deconstruction of the “heroics” of the
genre, or whatever. (That shows a bit of a short view of literary
history, since the preeminent canonical fantasy epic, The Faerie
Queene, is full of the rape and torture of women – for which
see Fiedler and Paglia.) No, the genre I'm talking about is pulp, the
pop culture continuation of medieval romance (in the sense of
“fantasy”). It's the basic underlying genre of pretty much all
popular novels, TV drama, superhero comics, daytime soaps, and such
movie genres as film noir and horror, and it's characterized by a
fascination with sex, violence, and their intermingling, as well as
such moods, emotions, or states as “suffering” and “angst.”
Thanks to Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, we have come to
refer to its pessimism (a lowbrow form of the sublime of tragedy)
using terms like “comic book darkness,” a mood that strongly
informs cult TV.
I myself was writing a
fan fiction soap opera parody, but it was in the mode of pulp, which
is exactly the same whether it's coming from the imagination of TV,
novel, or internet writers. What I found is that following my Muse
where it took me while writing a sexually explicit soap opera meant
conjuring up a series of increasingly horrible scenarios of intimate
abuse, violence, or exploitation. None of which, incidentally, were
meant to be titillating, although a lot of other scenes in the story
were. Notably, doing really horrible things to the people closest to
you is also the basis of Greek tragedy, and in the case of Oedipus
Rex, the most iconic of all the Greek tragedies, the crime is
sexual; which, as an educated sort of person, I was thinking about in
writing my silly, but dark, soap parody.
One of the arguments
that critics of the GOT scene have made is that if you're
going to put rape in a story, you should treat it sensitively and
responsibly and not just use it exploitatively, for shock value. To
which the counter response has been that the show is full of horrible
violence perpetrated against multiple characters, male and female –
beheading, stabbing, torture, castration. So why should this topic
receive special treatment? And if you're going to get upset about
this fictional act, why not get upset about all of the others?
Now, I think that a
writer is aware of when they are writing something primarily to
entertain, whatever the work's actual status as a work of art (as if
that's something that's objective and unchanging across all
contexts). Writing to entertain doesn't preclude writing to
challenge, including writing with the hope that your audience will be
shocked, upset, and disturbed. But the sensitive and thoughtful
writer who is writing to entertain will pause before using a subject
that's a real-life problem, and highly emotional for many people, as
fodder for their project of shocking and disturbing in a way that
entertains. Such a writer will want to treat those subjects in a
way that, without ceasing to be shocking and entertaining, is thoughtful
and sensitive, and has consequences for the characters.
So, for example, the
penultimate shock-scene in my story was a climactic act of intimate
partner violence within a relationship between two men that had been
characterized by quasi-consensual rough sex. The result for the
characters was that the victim ended the relationship, which was
never even temporarily resumed, despite the continued existence of
strong feelings. The final shock scene was an act of rape perpetrated
on a woman by a man (the worst villain in the story, a sadistic
madman), which I used to illustrate that acquaintance rape doesn't
have to be violent and can even involve incidental arousal.
Subsequent chapters dealt with her emotional healing, confusion, and
anger, without making her final story arc entirely about her rape. (A
complex and ambiguous character, like every character in the story
except, for the most part, the hero and the rapist-villain, she was something of a stalker and sociopath, so her arc had to deal
with those things too.)
The question is how I
knew to treat intimate partner violence and rape differently from
other kinds of violence, in a story that features such acts of
violence as: attempted murder of a baby (twice); two murders (one
extremely gruesome) and two notable accidental deaths; a good old
melodrama shove down a staircase; and arson (twice). And those are
just the parts I plotted. (I had two collaborators, and one of
them was as “dark” as I was; the other one mainly ran around
hooking characters up.) And the answer is that feminism has raised
awareness of, and demanded sensitivity toward, those types of
violence.
All of which means that
I agree with both sides: I do think that writers should treat
sensitive subjects with sensitivity; yet I also think that we should
use furors like this as an opportunity to ask why only certain
representations of violence deserve sensitive treatment, and usually
only those in which female characters are the victims; while
elsewhere, the sadism of the writer and viewer can run rampant. We
should ask ourselves why so much of our entertainment (and, taking
the long historical view, our art) is so violent, and whether we
should embrace the reign of the unconscious in fiction or choose less
violent fictions.
The reaction of
self-declared feminist critic Kate Kulzick on The Televerse,
one of my favourite podcasts (I listen to it even though I don't watch 95% of the shows they cover and have never watched 80% of them), is instructive of the weird
compartmentalization going on with this topic, because after
expressing her anger at and disappointment with the GOT scene,
she went on to express excitement over David Lynch's return to the
Twin Peaks revival. I love David Lynch and the first season of
Twin Peaks, but if ever there were a show that used violence
against women for no purpose except shock value, that was it. I think
particularly of the scene in which the villainous thug Leo advances on his kneeling and cowering wife while swinging a bar of soap in a
sock, which was the most shocking thing I'd ever seen on TV as a
15-year-old. (As a superhero comics reader, I'd seen more violent
images, including a couple of murders of men that stayed with me for
the rest of my life.) Nor was that scene ever meaningfully followed
up on. And the horrendously violent scene in which Laura Palmer's
murderer is revealed in Season 2 was so gratuitous, disgusting, and
silly that I not only never wanted to see Twin Peaks again –
I never wanted to see anything by David Lynch again. (He didn't fully
regain my trust until Mulholland Dr, a decade later.)
Lynch is a
writer-director who knowingly trades in shock imagery, yet one seldom
gets the sense that Lynch's intention is to entertain (except in the
episodes of surreal humour that drain off some of the constant
dread). At its best, such “meta” violence has the result of
making the audience pause and question our relationship to violence,
imaginative and real, while violence in entertainment has the precise
opposite effect; yet it shouldn't be surprising that offence and rage
is one possible reaction to such deliberately crafted extreme
imagery. Since violence is a staple of entertainment, as it is of
life and the imagination, I would in fact, as a viewer/fan, like to
see more examples of it being treated as a thing with consequences in
fiction, simply because it's an opportunity to deepen the characters
and world.
However, violence
doesn't show up in writing because writers want to portray “real”
issues in sensitive ways, but because the imagination is violent, and
a huge amount of what art (not only narrative but also visual) and
entertainment does is imagine scenarios of violence and suffering,
inspiring pity and fear. (I have now, in case you didn't notice,
switched to using “art” in the broader, more inclusive sense of
all cultural artifacts with which a significant segment of the public
has strong engagement.) We should have strong reactions to
these images that permeate our culture, and those reactions are bound
to be emotional and confused, because the life/art boundary is
confusing, or art couldn't inspire these reactions, or in other
words, be art. But I think it's the duty of critics and feminists
(and I count myself as both) to not just express emotion and have
reactions, but also be critical about our reactions, and get clear
about what is confusing and what is going to remain confused.
And let's also keep in
mind that internet outrage, a type of mob emotion, is every bit as
base a source of pleasure as an exploitative graphic scene. To give a foretaste of the Northrop Frye post (can you wait??), here's one of many great sentences from Anatomy of Criticism: "At play [e.g., in art or sports], mob emotions are boiled in an open pot, so to speak; in the lynching mob they are in a sealed furnace of what Blake would call moral virtue." The internet is somewhere between play and a lynching mob.
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