The Autobiography of a Soul

Gender, Misogyny, and Body Humour/Horror in the 70s Films of Elaine May

2012-01-16T18:23:00.000-08:00

I had a little Elaine May film festival last week, rewatching Mikey and Nicky and A New Leaf and watching The Heartbreak Kid for the first time. I'd been avoiding The Heartbreak Kid because of its Neil Simon screenplay – a former playwright, I believed the longstanding critical consensus that Simon was a middle-of-the-road comedic playwright, which didn't appeal to me, and gave him a miss. I also have my moments of skepticism about auteur theory and, since I knew May as a writer-director from Mikey and Nicky and a writer-director-performer from A New Leaf, I wasn't certain that she would be able to assert herself over the material as a director alone. In fact, I liked The Heartbreak Kid somewhat more than A New Leaf, though it still has to take second place to her suis generis (although, or because, it's a Cassavetes imitation) masterpiece, Mikey and Nicky. (Regarding what this means to auteur theory, Grodin's account of the filming quoted in the article I linked to above suggests that the director and actors had a great deal of input in what we see onscreen, to the official screenwriter's chagrin.)

I've watched A New Leaf three or four times now, and my problems with it remain: Walter Matthau seems miscast as the main character, an upper-class cad who speaks like a character from Oscar Wilde, occasionally via Joe Orton (as in a line about a hostess's “erotic fixation” with her carpet), although I can't be sure because I've never seen Matthau in anything else. (I may have watched Grumpy Old Men when it came out when I was a teenager.) The movie neither satirizes anything recognizable (what do fortune-hunters mean in the 1970s, and what did fortune-hunters who prey on clumsy, socially inept botanists ever mean?) nor quite succeed in creating its own world. Nevertheless, it has its pleasures (May's physical comedy as the heiress) and points of interest (the Matthau character's repulsion at women and the idea of marriage, and his initially unconscious discovery of a purpose in life as he reluctantly finds himself taking care of his helpless wife), and the subversiveness, suspense, and irony would have been greatly increased if the film hadn't fallen victim to censorship, as Jonathan Rosenbaum recounts in the excellent piece that introduced me to May as a director. (I had previously known her as half of the 50s satirical improvisation-based comedy duo she formed with Mike Nichols, who more famously went on to direct films).

Like A New Leaf, The Heartbreak Kid is a dark comedy about a fastidious man, whose point of view the audience occupies, who is revolted by his wife – here played by May's daughter, Jeannie Berlin – and wants to get rid of her. The deeply uncomfortable moral dilemma on which the plot turns is that the protagonist, Lenny, meets the woman of his dreams on his honeymoon, even as he is discovering all of the things he hates about his new wife. Does he do the morally and socially conventional thing, or seize his chance and ditch his new wife?

Two things render the direction of The Heartbreak Kid masterful: first, May's neutrality with respect to the characters, which nudges the audience's sympathies but leaves a great deal ambiguous as well; and, not unrelatedly, the marvellous performances she gets out of Charles Grodin as Lenny, Berlin as Lila, and Eddie Albert as the father of Lenny's dream girl (played by a breathy, vague young Cybill Shepherd). May encourages identification with Lenny's disgust with his gauche new wife's tics – her insistence on singing along with the radio loudly and tunelessly, her clingy behaviour, her need for reassurance, her gross eating habits (chocolate bars in bed after sex, egg salad all over her face) – while leaving room for us to wonder whether Lila's really that annoying or whether Lenny is a bit of a jerk with an overwhelming case of post-marital jitters. “Bit of a jerk” becomes “enormous jerk” when Lenny ditches Lila, who's ended up with a horrible case of sunburn after refusing to take his advice and use sunscreen, to pursue Shepherd – a coy, sadistic WASP cocktease in half-Temple Drake fashion, who first appears, epiphanically, above Lenny in a halo of sun and fine blonde hair, hovering above him as he lies on the beach, informing him that he's “in her spot” like a bitchy toddler.

The Heartbreak Kid deals more directly and openly with WASP fetish (still going strong, without self-awareness, in Eugenides' The Marriage Plot of last year) than any other film I know. The dream Lenny decides to chase, thrown into relief by his disillusionment with marriage (which is to say, mundane closeness to another human being, perhaps the theme responsible for the choice of "Close to You" as ironic pop commentary), is that of marriage to the blonde WASP bitch goddess and entrance into her exclusive world. It's not just a question, then, of whether or not achieving his life's dream is worth committing the morally vile act of leaving his wife for another woman on their honeymoon (although that's how he sees it, in the speech he gives Lila), but whether this dream, in particular, is worth the cost. It's not, of course, but that doesn't matter. What matters, dramatically, is Lenny's absolute conviction that he knows what he wants now, which overrides ordinary moral concerns, and his determination to get it – which overrides the objections first of the shallow Shepherd, who understandably thinks he's crazy, and then of her overprotective father. He gate-crashes the WASP elite through the sheer force of his belief that that is what he wants to do; never mind that this world is depicted as satirically, and revealed to be as repulsive in its own way, as Lila. In Lenny's eyes it is, and remains, sheer glamour.

I then watched the 2007 Farrelly Brothers critically derided remake of The Heartbreak Kid (or as much as I could get through before I was too bored to go on), which made May and Simon's achievement seem even more remarkable in comparison. For the record, I thought Dumb and Dumber was hilarious when I saw it as a teenager (and a teenage cinephile, though just getting started) and also liked There's Something About Mary when I saw it the year of its release. I don't recall much about the former, but the latter I remember as spectacular humiliation slapstick given a vulgarized shock-comedy update: to win his ideal (WASP) woman, Ben Stiller has to be subjected to an endless series of excruciatingly painful accidents and humiliations (although in the notorious cum-in-hair scene, the ideal is desecrated – or, perhaps, brought down to the adolescent Everyman protagonist's level – by receiving a humiliation of her own).

Another reason I was reluctant to watch the original Heartbreak Kid is that I generally dislike 70s movies, timebound in a decade whose cinematic and sartorial style grates on my optic nerves (including the few I make exceptions for, mainly horror films like Don't Look Now, Carrie and Videodrome). But May's film has a classicism and restraint that makes it seem timeless, unlike the remake, which seems absolutely bound to its era – which says nothing good about American comedy in the first decade of the 21^st century. It's not even the worst of the remake's crimes that the Farrelly Brothers jettison the original's satire of social climbing, although it does render the remake incoherent. The protagonist, now called Eddie, is a 40-year-old bachelor who seems unprepared for the reality of marital life, since he breaks up with women for minor infractions like not sharing his taste for dumb comedy. Whereas the original starts with the Jewish wedding of Lenny and Lila, here we get a bunch of pointless background, including a meet-cute (with a typical gratuitously vulgar twist) where Eddie tries to stop a man from stealing Lila's purse and ends up with a pair of her panties. (The gratuitous vulgarity – designed for instant cheap laughs – continues when Eddie and his dream girl meet cute when she mistakenly thinks he's renting a porn video.)

May leaves it open to the viewer to both sympathize with and feel revolted by both Lenny and Lila. It may be ambiguous whether Lila is really that irritating and disgusting, or whether we're seeing her through Lenny's neurotic viewpoint, but when he leaves her to recuperate from sunburn in the hotel room on their honeymoon while pursuing another woman, there's no way not to sympathize with her. As in Mikey and Nicky, May proves herself a master of creating and sustaining discomfort in the scene where Lenny dumps a shocked and devastated Lila at a restaurant, speechifying at her about the importance of living one's life. May spares the audience none of the excruciation of the outrageous premise. Yet we are never pressured to either condemn or condone Lenny; nor, at the ending, are we decisively guided to think that he'll be either hollowly happy or fittingly unhappy. He's got what he wanted, and if that's what being happy means, he'll be happy – or perhaps “happiness” is immaterial. As he mingles with guests, repeating the meaningless, rote phrases of the unsophisticated Midwestern business elite he's entered (even to a couple of kids he ends up with on the couch at one point), we understand that this world is risibly dull from his New York perspective, as if Hildy Johnson went to live with Bruce in Albany after all, but neither May nor Simon tip us off that his marriage with Shepherd will be either blissful or otherwise. (Despite this comparison of the choice Lenny makes to the choice Hildy doesn't make, I think Jonathan Rosenbaum is incorrect to suggest that Lenny leaves an "overpowering" woman for, presumably, a less threatening one – although he's right that The Graduate must be read this way. I don't think May and Simon suggest at all that Lila is “complicated” or more interesting than Shepherd's character, who is not treated especially unsympathetically, as Lila is not treated especially sympathetically. If Lila is overpowering, it's only in her insistent corporeality, not her personality, which is rather meek when she's not singing. Lenny doesn't leave the right woman for the wrong woman, or vice versa; he leaves a woman for the woman he thinks is the right one – the irony lies not in the fact that she's really the wrong one, but that she's neither right nor wrong. She is also just a woman.)

In the remake, Lila isn't simply gauche and irritating – she's a monster: both stupid and crazy, as well as jobless, with a former coke problem that's left her with a deviated septum that causes liquids to spurt from her nose and scarily aggressive bedroom habits (the cheap homophobia doesn't stop, as everyone from pubescent boys to his new wife in bed accuse Eddie of being a fag, pussy, etc.). Anyone would be within their rights to get an immediate annulment, so why the movie takes time to set Eddie up as overly picky is mysterious. Eddie then falls for a definitely less "overpowering" woman: sporty, laid-back, not-insane Miranda, who, in the movie's sexual subtext, appeals to Eddie because her sexual differentiation is less pronounced. (The movie's adolescent homophobia is due to Eddie's adolescent homophilia: sexually aggressive women make him feel emasculated, whereas what he really wants is a “pal.”) There's no moral dilemma: obviously, Eddie should leave the nightmare and marry the nice girl. But since there's no moral dilemma, there's also no movie – no point to the plot, except as a vastly mean-spirited (to both of the female characters, no matter how negatively or positively portrayed) farce premise. But even describing the movie's plot as choosing a nice, subdued, boyish brunette over a sexual blonde hottie (this version's Lila) gives it too much credit for coherence: Lila is never set up as Eddie's false dream girl; she's just the girl he happens to meet in the street and marry, who happens to be hot and blonde, and then happens to turn out to be crazy.

I gave some consideration to my reaction to the Farrelly Brothers' remake of a classic satire, because I would go to some lengths to defend Frank Tashlin and Jerry Lewis's similarly maligned loose remake of the Preston Sturges classic The Miracle of Morgan's Creek as Rock-A-Bye Baby. Although Tashlin is widely regarded as a satirist by his revisionist cinephile fans, there's no doubt that Sturges's biting satire of small-town mores, including taking aim at single motherhood and premarital sex, is completely jettisoned in the remake's remoulding of the material into a Lewis vehicle, and a great deal is dumbed down and sweetened up – including going to the length of cutesy songs and broad ethnic stereotypes. But Tashlin and Lewis replace Sturges's satire with something equally interesting, employing aspects of Lewis's persona that Tashlin was even more interested in exploring than Lewis in his self-directed films (with the exception of The Ladies Man): a subversive attack on gender essentialism from a male perspective that predated second-wave feminism by five years (if you date that from the publication of The Feminine Mystique). Lewis's character, Clayton Poole, goes to court to prove that he can take care of female infant triplets by himself, arguing not that a father is as good as a mother but that you don't need to be a woman to be a mother – which brings him up against the prejudice of a small town's biological essentialism on the sacred subject of motherhood. What's more, Tashlin and Lewis don't just tailor the material for Lewis's gender-transgressive persona, but offer an intelligent reading of a neglected aspect of the Sturges film: the problems of a widower raising two teenage girls, which is how one of the girls manages to go wild and get pregnant out of wedlock.

In other words, sometimes it's possible for a remake of a classic comedy to stray from its source and offer an apparent dumbing-down that has its own interest. Maybe 50 years from now, the Heartbreak Kid remake will look like a brilliant, subversive take on gender politics and a shrewd exploration of its source's subtext. Right now, however, at least to me, it looks like the best exploration, or exploitation, of whatever comedic persona Ben Stiller has happened in Zoolander, which played on the Jewish movie comedian's tension between narcissism and self-loathing that Stiller inherited from Lewis, specifically in The Ladies Man. But while I liked Zoolander, it's not half of half the movie The Ladies Man is.

I don't object to gross-out comedy in principle, either. During the 90s, up to and including the first American Pie movie, some gross-out comedies had a sweet charm that shone through the body fluid jokes (a type of comedy revived in the enjoyable Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, in combination with the new stoner comedy that took over in the 00s). Although admittedly, as someone who's idea of great movie comedy is Buster Keaton, Jerry Lewis, Tati, and the screwball comedies of the 30s and 40s, the best I can say for any movie comedy of the 90s or 00s is that I didn't hate it. I also didn't hate Meet the Parents, where Owen Wilson stole the movie from Stiller in a performance of daffily winsome charisma reminiscent of the screwball heroines. However, aside from his likeable comedies with Jackie Chan, the case of Owen Wilson proves that no performer has enough eccentric charisma to survive the terrible writing and direction of the standard modern movie comedy – such as the tedious Wedding Crashers. I'm sure I'd be happier with the state of contemporary movie comedy, and the things it gives interesting performers to do, if I could like Wes Anderson, but unfortunately, I find his precious quirkfests at least as unfunny as mainstream gross-out comedy. To be sure, I've only tried The Royal Tenebaums, but from what I've heard it's an accurate sample of what the rest is like. The answer is not quirky indie comedy; the answer is better mainstream comedy.

As someone who's tried, and hasn't always hated, dumb gross-out comedy, I think I've got the cred to say that the obligatory inclusion of crass body humour in mainstream comedy, however necessary it may have seemed to catch up with modern sensibilities, has been detrimental to American movie comedies, which have totally foregone the virtues of subtlety and restraint. In The Heartbreak Kid, May can still get comedic mileage out of the mild exaggeration of traits that provoke disgust in partners, like sloppy eating habits, with the piece de resistance being Berlin's sunburned appearance, covered in blisters and cream. The inclusion of urine, farting, diarrhea, and, since There's Something About Mary, semen jokes hasn't become obligatory yet. And remember this was the 70s, where “restraint” wasn't a trait prized in movies, particularly in the horror genre for which the decade is perhaps most remarkable, where bombast and boundary-transgression flourished in movies like Carrie (which took on menstrual blood), The Exorcist (vomit, snot, and pus), Videodrome (stomach vaginas), and Eraserhead (unidentifiable baby-things).

The 70s was, notably, the decade of horror films based on abject femininity, which, as Kristeva famously argued, blurs the boundaries that separate bodies and categories, as well as the decade of Anglo-American radical feminism. This is the context of May's three 70s films, all of which feature a male protagonist as the primary audience identification figure, although he is a sort of unreliable narrator, whose vile behaviour makes him as repulsive as the female character (or, in Mikey and Nicky, characters) he victimizes. In the two comedies, the female victim is a figure of abjection to whom the male character objects on that basis, and in The Heartbreak Kid, May's combination of classicism and the subject of disgust is faintly reminiscent of the sensibility of Cronenberg in Dead Ringers. Since both deal with abjection and boundary-blurring, a study comparing body humour and body horror would be interesting, and the ur-text might be Jerry Lewis's Nutty Professor, a comedy-horror film that brilliantly examines the unnerving abjection of the Lewis persona, with its source in the unruly body. Female biology is abject by definition, at least from the normative, Apollonian male perspective that Cronenberg deconstructs in Dead Ringers; but the male adolescent body is equally unruly, and the adult male is capable of identifying with it – and the shame associated with it – at any point.

With Mikey and Nicky, May suddenly, violently swerved from comedy, although the film (with its titular allusion to “Mike Nichols”) also seems to be a more direct attempt to grapple with the idea of a friendship so close that it blurs the boundaries of identity than her dark comedies about heterosexual couples. Playing one of the most unpleasant main characters in cinematic history (at least outside the annuls of villain protagonist), Cassavetes gives an uncompromisingly unpleasant performances, all edges and jittery nerves; what May does to him, and gets him to do, in this film may be comparable to the tales of “sadistic” male directors getting performances of arresting self-exposure and emotional rawness from their actresses, from Dreyer and Falconetti in Passion of Joan of Arc to Lynch and Naomi Watts in Mulholland Dr. and Laura Dern in INLAND EMPIRE. Since the paradigm, or myth, here is gendered, it's worth noting that although he's the most aggressive, volatile, and violent of May's unpleasant male main characters, Cassavetes' Nicky is also the most “feminized,” which is to say pathologized: he's an hysterical, paranoid hypochondriac who's obsessed with, and openly terrified by, the idea of his death. And only in this film does May exhibit no sympathy – through performance, context, or otherwise – with the character who is betrayed and victimized by the person closest to them. The viewer may be magnetized and riveted by Nicky, and the question of who first betrayed whom and how may be left ambiguous, but the ending leaves no doubt that the writer-director, at least, thinks he gets what he deserves – however horrifying the actual act of betrayal remains. In other words, it's only in the film where May imagines herself strictly as a man, rather than dividing identification between a male and female character, that she fully indulges her masochism.

Despite this personal loathing for (and adoration of) her main character, May's direction in Mikey and Nicky, as in The Heartbreak Kid, is remarkable for its neutrality: she unflinchingly records the things that are unpleasant (physically, socially, morally) about her characters and their environments and leaves the audience to draw their own conclusions. (This seems to be the main point of continuity with her prior career: many of the Nichols and May sketches damn the characters with speech that's a mixture of the closely observed and the gracefully stylized.) In Mikey and Nicky, May extends the ambiguity of her direction to the writing: just as we don't know who's really responsible for what went wrong between Mikey and Nicky (only that Nicky has got to be a difficult friend to have, between his sadism and his neediness: Peter Falk's Mikey cares for him maternally, as Matthau does May in A New Leaf), we don't know whether the woman Nicky goes to visit in an extraordinarily uncomfortable scene where he has sex with her over her protests while Mikey twiddles his thumbs in the other room is, as Nicky claims, a neurotic whore, or whether she's a sensitive woman whom he's set up by sending his friends to her to try it on with her (or what his motivations might be in that case). “Who betrayed whom” and “who is the victim of whom” operates on every level of the film.

There's also an extraordinary scene where Nicky goes to see his estranged wife and baby before he dies, in which the actress playing his wife (Joyce Van Patten) is broken down by the end of the brief scene – her only appearance in the film – to a point of acute emotion rarely seen in any film. (Apparently May got the film taken away from her, and released in its unfinished state, after shooting almost three times the amount of film taken for Gone With the Wind. While this is clearly insane, and sounds like she would never have finished it if it weren't taken away, performances like these make it seem like it was worth it.) For a moment the viewer is left to wonder if Nicky and his wife don't “really” love each other after all; maybe she's the one he “really” needs, not his girlfriends or male friends, and this sort of primal bond is worth the anguish of their relationship (which, May indicates, includes his physical abuse of her) for both of them.

It's the extraordinarily intense nature of the emotions in the writing and performances that gives this impression – but the psychological conclusions that begin to form in the viewer's mind are swept away when Nicky next goes back to visit his “girl,” with whom he has a similarly intense encounter. While May (or is it just me?) clearly revels in the unapologetic swaggering masculinity that allows Nicky to go from woman to woman, wife to mistress, treat them both appallingly, and have them end up swooning at his feet, there is an emotional truth to this juxtaposition... the emotional truth that there's no such thing as a fixed, stable emotional truth. Like Lenny in The Heartbreak Kid, Nicky doesn't “really” love one woman, and not another; nor is it as simple as saying he “really” loves both... or neither. “Real love” is a sentimental fiction: one that Lenny uses as a justification for his erotic and social ambition. There is no real love, not even in friendship, only bonds of need with fleeting moments of real emotion. That's all love is, and it's nothing to get sentimental about, although it's also the core of our identities: Nicky is his relationships. He's defined by them, and nothing else has any meaning for him, even if what he seems to demand most of all, with a tyrannical disregard for what it costs the other person, is the acknowledgement that he's loved, the only thing that stands between him and his fear of the absolute obliteration of death.

First of 2012! Orwell, Calvino, the Anxiety of Reading, and the Danger of Stories

2012-01-09T19:00:00.000-08:00

After my shameful report on my year in reading, it occurred to me that although I will never read enough to be a top literary blogger, if I'm going to keep a literary blog at all (if only for the amusement of myself and a few friends), I really ought to read a bit more. As a child and adolescent I lived under the pleasant illusion that I was well-read, which was true compared to both the peers and adults with whom I was surrounded; in university I was disturbed to discover that I was better-read than the average English student. But I'm not a serious or “ambitious” reader (to use the adjective I came across in a literary blog the other day) by the standards of the blogosphere, where bloggers posts lists of 30 to a hundred books they've read in a year. This sort of blogging tends does tend to bleed into bragging, like telling the world how many push-ups you can do at a time, an attitude to reading reinforced by the percentage bar on e-books, constantly informing you how much progress you've made (which, incidentally, puts the emphasis on you and your agency rather than, as with old-fashioned checking how many pages remain, on the book). The difficulty, rather than the pleasure, of reading has moved to the forefront of our experience (perhaps our definition) of it, turning it into an onerous duty alternately on behalf of the Self or the Book (both supreme), and God forbid you should take a lot of pleasure in reading, and devote a lot of reflection to what you've read, without reading a lot of books. In our positivist world we have no time for intangibles like quality of experience, only for measurable tangibles.

Orwell and The Overpraise of Books

Publishers have responded to the modern reader's sense that there's too much to read and too little time with series like Penguin's Great Ideas: little, cheap books of classic essays or collections of essays by well-known authors. I impulse-bought several of these in the last couple of years and then wondered when I'd ever get around to them. Now that I've launched my project of reading The Books in My House, however, I'm starting with these, and I've already knocked down one book in 2012: the Orwell collection Books & Cigarettes. The Penguin series is sure to multiply the number of books I read in 2012, though not necessarily the number of pages (or words, if we can no longer go by pages in the era of digital reading).

I have read – probably in Harold Bloom, who is not an admirer of 1984 – that Orwell's real strength as a writer lay in his essays rather than his fiction. I have only the dimmest memories of 1984, which I read in early adolescence (along with Animal Farm, which went right over my head), but I definitely enjoyed this slim collection, many of whose subjects bear on this problem of Modern Reading, starting with the first, title essay, which laments (in 1946) the willingness of the public (including the author) to spend its money on leisure activities like cigarettes, beer, and movies compared to its reluctance to spend it on books. Nevertheless, Orwell is not sentimental (or, in stark contrast to the literary blogger, bragging) in his attitude to books, which he characterizes, “There are books that one reads over and over again, books that become part of the furniture of one's mind and alter one's whole attitude to life, books that one dips into but never reads through, books that one reads at a single setting and forgets a week later....” In the second essay, “Bookshop Memories,” in which Orwell recollects his experiences of working in a second-hand bookshop, he writes, “Seen in the mass, five or ten thousand at a time, books were boring and even slightly sickening, and in the third essay, “Confessions of a Book Reviewer,” where he describes the misery and squalor of the life of this instance of the literary professional (“He might be a poet, a novelist, or a writer of film scripts or radio features, for all literary people are very much alike”), “It is almost impossible to mention books in bulk without grossly overpraising the great majority of them. Until one has had some kind of professional relationship with books one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.”

Misery, squalor, and Sartrean disgust are consistent presences in Orwell's essays, climaxing in the two longer essays that end the collection, one, “How the Poor Die,” describing his experiences in a French hospital in 1929, the other his childhood experiences in a boarding school. The last, longest essay is a tour de force of autobiographical writing, starting from the personal (and traumatic) to take a wider, sociological and psychological view. The result is interestingly Freudian – especially since a quick google search for Orwell and Freud turns up a 1978 Virginia Quarterly Review essay that claims, based on the biographical evidence, that Orwell considered psychoanalysis quackery and exhibited no interest in Freud.

Nevertheless, in “Such, Such Were the Joys” (written by 1947 and published in 1952, according to the note at the end of the essay), Orwell draws what can only be considered psychological conclusions – and fascinating ones – based on his recollection of childhood experiences and his subjective reactions to them, and writes about childhood sexuality (with reference to a group masturbation scandal) in the frank manner that I, at any rate, associate with the influence of Freud on intellectuals in the first half of the 20^th century (and from which I think we've largely retreated). To me, nothing could sound more Freudian than Orwell's interest in the inner life – the alien world – of the child, and his (ultimately scientific) method of approaching it through an honest recounting of his memories, undistorted by sentimentality, moralizing, or projection of adult values.

In fact, Orwell is so unsentimental on the subject of children that he argues (again, based on his experience) that children are not especially loving, and in fact may feel disgust, loathing, and incomprehension towards adults. It makes one wonder – if we do not sentimentalize the child (as Freud didn't, either), why are we concerned about the horrors he suffers due to the values of society and sadism of adults – about the shame and humiliation to which he's senselessly subjected? The only possible answer is that everyone is, at one point, a child; that children are among the class of the powerless and, although the concept is a relatively new one, human beings with rights; and that the experiences of childhood affect the adult one becomes, the society one shapes, and one's treatment of the powerless. The essay also gives the impression that although children are not kinder, more innocent, or more loving than adults, they are morally superior in one respect: they have not yet fully accepted the cruel, ugly, and incoherent values of society. Or rather, they do accept them (children are naturally conformist), but subjectively they know that these values are lies: they are still aware of the conflict between subjective, emotional experience and the consciously unquestionable truth of authority – the basic psychological conflict of childhood in Orwell's essay. Children still know, subjectively, that two and two equal four, whatever they are told; adults are no longer aware that any difference exists at all between truth and lies. (Orwell deals with totalitarian distortion of truth, or destruction of the concept, in the U.S.S.R. and its effect on infatuated leftist European intellectuals, in “The Prevention of Literature,” where he writes, “Freedom of the intellect means the freedom to report what one has seen, heard, and felt, and not to be obliged to fabricate imaginary facts and feelings.”)

Calvino and the Story in Postmodern Fiction

At midnight on January 1^st, 2012, I was in the middle of the final novel fragment in Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, making it both my last read of 2011 and my first read of 2012. It seemed like an excitingly fitting way to transition into a new year, reading the protagonist's recounting of an apocalypse that's resulted from what had appeared to be his fantasy of using the power of his mind to obliterate everything he dislikes in the world around him, starting with the surrounding buildings and ending with... everything. When the feat has been accomplished, strange officials (“the men from Section D”) approach him and congratulate him on ushering in a new era that they will control, whereupon he regrets his work but find he can't undo it. To erase is easier than to create.

For those who don't know (I didn't before I started reading it, though I knew of the title), the conceit of If on a Winter's Night a Traveller is that the protagonist, the Reader (addressed as “you”), tries to read the book you are reading, or one called that and written by Italo Calvino, but gets cut off by a manufacturer's defect, and his efforts to get hold of the rest of the book place a series of apparently, but not actually, related books in his hands, each of which he is also cut off from reading for increasingly absurd reasons, at the same time becoming involved in an international conspiracy to replace the truth in books with tricks and lies. The chapters of If on a Winter's Night, recounting the Reader's adventures and the progress of his romance with the Other Reader, alternate with these beginnings of novels, which are pastiches of various genres, from the crime novel to European rural realism to Japanese quasi-pornography. Not straight pastiches, however, but liberally laden with postmodern strangeness (including those hoary tropes to which Bolano pays tribute, the mirror and the void), as well as a lot of kinky sexuality. The broadest pastiche of all, however, is the plot of “the novel itself,” with its conspiracies, Manichean agents and counteragents, and incidental UFO references.

The term “postmodern playfulness” still gets thrown around a lot, even though it's been thrown around so much that its lost all meaning and, therefore, usefulness as a critical phrase, since although it's true that a certain kind of playfulness, or lighthearted self-reflexivity, characterizes a lot of postmodern fiction, not all postmodern playfulness is alike – in fact, the playfulness of any two postmodern authors is distinctly different. Calvino's self-reflexivity and playfulness in If on a Winter's Night could not, for example, be more different from Bolano's in Nazi Literature in the Americas, although inventiveness and the vignette form are central features of both works (and after “postmodern playfulness,” “inventiveness” is the primary quality that comes to mind in reference to both). Calvino's playfulness is untinged by the sinister or any interest in evil, although like Bolano he is fascinated by violence, and he repeatedly returns to the subject of death. Maybe what I mean is that Bolano's playfulness slightly mitigates his sinister subject matter and tone, the reverse is true of Calvino: one's first impression is of playfulness, which is slightly mitigated by encroachments of the sinister and a sense of dread. In addition, while Bolano's inventiveness closes in on itself and gives the impression of privacy and inscrutability, Calvino's opens out towards the reader, issuing in lucid thematics and metafictional discourses on the nature of reading.

As much as I enjoyed Calvino's reflections on reading, especially as they bear on the odd experiment of the novel, this metafiction, and the plot about truth versus lies in novels (or different kinds of novels), were for me the least interesting parts of the novel. (Naturally, they're the things you'd have to write about if you were writing an academic essay on it.) Leaving the pastiches as the most interesting parts. They are not, in fact, much like the beginnings of novels (even allowing for their postmodern elements); rather, they are complete fictions in their own right, albeit with cliffhanger endings, with thematics and protagonist psychology established more thoroughly than they would be and plot developments occurring faster and thicker than they would in the beginning of any novel. They are, in other words, performances of invention and strangeness – of interest – that could not possibly be sustained for the length of a novel. Even if the writer could keep it up, the reader would become exhausted (and, perhaps partly for that reason, partly due to the lack of a single, sustained plot, I found my attention dimming towards the end of the book, as I did with Nazi Literature). And yet we wish writers could sustain, and readers endure, that level of inventiveness; that reading could always have that intensity, without the dull bits that allow readers to rest between dramatic episodes, without lapses of attention even during the most interesting parts.

Like Orwell, writing in 1946, Calvino, writing in the late 70s, expresses the anxiety of reading that has become so oppressive in our age of information-excess and sentimentality about reading and the book. In the first chapter of If on a Winter's Night, Calvino lists the different types of books that must be considered in making the decision to buy one and not another (or many others). In part:

the Books You've Been Planning To Read for Ages,

the Books You've Been Hunting For Years Without Success,

the Books Dealing With Something You're Working on at the Moment,

the Books You Want To Own So They'll Be Handy Just In Case,

the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer,

the Books You Need To Go With The Other Books On Your Shelves,

the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified.

Unfortunately for the devoted reader, reading takes not only time but effort: for the average reader, the shortest book (coming in, say, at a little under or over a hundred pages) will take at least as much time to read as it takes to watch an average-length movie (around 90 minutes), and much more effort. If on a Winter's Night seems to anticipate the eroding attention span of the digital era – the reader can't get past the beginnings of novels and constantly switches from one novel to another. This accommodation of my roving attention is probably the main thing that allowed me to read it much faster than I'm usually able to read most linear narratives of the same length nowadays. (Calvino's protagonist, on the other hand, is a traditionalist who is quite frustrated by not being able to follow the stories through to the end. I was reminded of the Sesame Street children's book classic, There's a Monster at the End of This Book, in which lovable furry neurotic Grover breaks the fourth wall, or whatever you call it in a book, and addresses the reader, imploring her not to turn the pages, and each time making greater efforts to construct a barricade that will prevent the progress of the story. The conceit of the Calvino is like that, but in reverse. TAMATEOTB was published in 1971; postmodern literature for adults took until the end of the decade to catch up with the experimentation of Sesame Street products in their sophisticated prime.)

Without knowing much of anything about Calvino, I suspect that If on a Winter's Night (published in 1979) is influenced by structuralism, that is, the idea that all narrative works are reducible to certain archetypal structural elements and therefore constitute (as Calvino has one of his numbered readers give voice to in the metafictional commentary of the penultimate chapter) One Story or One Book (as all protagonists are one, the abstract Reader, and all love interests One Woman, the Other Reader, who also turns out to be the Ideal Reader for whom the Writer writes). Not only the overarching plot but also all of the novels-within-the-novel are, whatever other genre they belong to, also love stories, with at least one woman appearing in whom the protagonist has an erotic interest before the fragment ends. This, I assume, reflects Calvino's conviction, conscious or otherwise, that eros is the basic motivation behind narrative. Towards the end, the protagonists become more aggressive and rapey towards their love interests, with the Writer (a character in both the framing plot and the diary fragments that make up one of the chapters) even attempting to assault the Other Reader when she shows up to confront him. This does not quite achieve the effect of universality that structuralism assumes, since it's hard to imagine a work of fiction that more absolutely assumes a male perspective, and I got a little tired of the identical episodes of priapism, although to be fair, the protagonist of the Japanese fiction pastische, On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon, is the only character who actually does get raped – by an older woman.

Not while I was reading, but now, in analyzing, If on a Winter's Night reminds me Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE, which also uses a framing plot (a couple of actors are making a movie whose script is cursed and at the same time becoming embroiled in an affair) to justify a series of vignettes that draw on archetypal scenarios – mainly involving sluttish women and brutish men – that obliquely mirror each other. Lynch is the least playful of postmodernists, veering even further to the horror side of surrealism than Bolano, although that's not to say that he doesn't have a sense of humour (I found many of the vignettes in the first half of Mulholland Dr. hilarious). I always thought that the premise of INLAND EMPIRE was derived from The Ring (whose premise was a lot more interesting to me than either the Japanese or American versions): instead of a cursed video tape, there's a cursed script. Although perhaps this was simply the zeitgeist, since Lynch had earlier explored the creepiness of video tapes in Lost Highway, which came out a year before Ringu.

In INLAND EMPIRE, the ur-story is ultimately a cursed Polish folk tale (Eastern Europe being the creepiest, most archaic part of the world according to American movies: see also Val Lewton's Cat People). All other stories are simply “adaptations” of this one, and all share its curse: storytelling is dark magic. Northrop Frye, who attempted in Anatomy of Criticism to identify all of the archetypal structures that make up “literature,” of which every individual story is an iteration, saw folk formulas like nursery rhymes, riddles, and charms as the basic units of literature, representing its basic impulses – a theory I once applied, in a graduate school essay, to The Waste Land. As fascinating as the idea of haunted technology is, the idea of the story as haunted is, for me, even more fascinating. It's the difference between thinking of the image as magic – and dangerous – and the idea of thinking of storytelling and literature that way. Perhaps it appeals to me because we are so used to thinking of books (even fiction, which used to be considered contemptible, with few exceptions – a view of fiction that comes up in Orwell's essays) as “good for us,” which is as much as to say that they're harmless, which is as much as to say that they're ineffectual.

To think of stories as dangerous returns their power to them.

The Anxiety of Reading at the Dawn of 2012

2012-01-01T09:12:00.000-08:00

Tip for Reading this Post: If you scroll down (a little bit more... a little bit more... alllll the way), you'll find lists of books. Those are fun. You might find authors and titles you've never heard of, or feel good that you have.

At least since the publication of Harold Bloom's The Western Canon in 1994, reading has been a source of anxiety in our culture. (Not that I'm blaming Bloom: he was symptom, not cause, though he definitely wasn't a palliative.) The serious reader of the early 21^st century is aware of an ever-expanding canon that includes not only the Western classics (heralding from England, America, France, Germany, and Russia, with Spain represented by Cervantes, Italy by Dante, and Ireland by Joyce) but also “world literature,” genre fiction, children's fiction, young adult fiction, graphic novels. And it's not only adult readers; children are now indoctrinated into this relationship to reading. This year I flipped through a parenting book on how to interest kids in reading that set off a quote from a child, apparently citing it with approval, in which he expressed his sadness at the thought of all the goods books waiting to be read.

All of this is by way of prefacing the fact that I didn't finish many books this year: if you don't count books by friends or e-acquaintances (which I haven't for the sake of limiting this long post), it doesn't even average one per month. I read almost constantly, online, when not at work or writing – online versions of print journal articles, literary or political website articles, columns, blog posts, Wikipedia articles – amounting to hundreds of pages. Mainly, though, it's book reviews and “book chat,” which have replaced all the reading of criticism I did, assigned or for pleasure, as an undergraduate and grad student (and even, for pleasure, in high school). (If I didn't force myself to draw the line at reading books about reading, reading about reading could easily replace reading for me – it already sort of has in the fiction I prefer.)

I've never been a speed-reader: I'm too easily distracted by daydreams or anxieties. Or rather, I have no attention span: I can speed-read a 10-page essay or article (or the internet equivalent), but nothing longer. I identify with the first reader in the final chapter of Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, who claims, “If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to me, or a feeling, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it.” But my identity as a reader was set in childhood and strengthened in adolescence, so that every year I dream of recovering that pleasure in reading that has only occurred in fits and starts in adulthood, and rarely unmixed with pain. The anxiety of reading, as with the wider “100 things before you die” mentality of the early 21^st century, has to do with the outraged recognition of one's mortality: in recent years I have tried to face this squarely, and I know that when I make a new list of the books I want to read before I die (always narrower, then expanding again, then strictly sheared back again), it's the closest I come to communing with the inevitability of my death. (This would also be true, I hasten to add, if I were a gamer making lists of all the video games I want to play before I die.)

To try to prevent myself from constantly buying new books to add to my library of The Unread and distract me from what I'm reading at the moment, my book-related New Year's Resolution is to Read Everything in the House (including my laptop, since I've acquired a handful of e-books) before I'm allowed to buy more books. (I permit the occasional exception if something newly published seems really, really, really exciting, but expect that to happen no more than half a dozen times per year. I've also learned to keep the receipt when it does happen, in case I'm not feeling it.) This will also narrow down the question of what to read next, which will also, I hope, make me less of a fidgety, flighty reader. (I expect none of these methods to work, of course. Devising the method and daydreaming over lists of titles and author names is at least half the fun that reading has become for me. I also identify with Calvino's sixth reader, who says, “The moment that counts most for me is the one that precedes reading. At times a title is enough to kindle in me the desire for a book that does not exist.”)

2011 continued the trend of less and less popular culture filtering through to me. It seems to me that the internet has exacerbated this effect of ageing. Endless reading on the internet has replaced mindless TV watching for me. I know the names, since you can't leave the house, even to work, without hearing about them, or seeing their faces on magazines and books: the Kardashians (still not sure what they are), Snooki (still not sure what it is), Glee, Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, Adele. I couldn't tell you who's singing the songs in the stores, though. Somehow, a few new hipster singers, bands, and shows still filter through to me from younger or hipper friends. In 2011 I found out about of Montreal, Janelle Monae, and The Indelicates, and also bought Florence and the Machine's Ceremonials and Sufjan Stevens's The Age of Adz. None of this especially blew me away except for of Montreal's Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? (2007). I was also the target audience for Lana Del Rey's “Video Games” single, which I discovered through the constant airplay on BBC Radio 6 (which I listen to online), and only learned about the controversy surrounding her “manufactured” image after googling her to find out more about her. I will certainly buy the album when it comes out next month, and certainly blog about the experience. As for TV, I watched Battlestar Galactica and the three seasons of Bored to Death. I effectively no longer watch new movies, Hollywood or indie, since both have disappointed me time and time again. For new movies my average is one per year, and that's going down, because this year I didn't watch any (although I do intend to check out Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method). (Will this be the film to make me climb back on board with Cronenberg after a two-decade hiatus, as Mulholland Dr. did for me with Lynch?)

This year I did discover – after encountering him through mutual Twitter friends – Bruce LaBruce's polymorphous political gay male art porn, and I can recommend Hustler White, The Raspberry Reich, and Otto, or Up with Dead People; I intend to acquire and watch more... after I've read The Books in My House. (The last few years, my desultory film explorations have included Jerry Lewis, Cassavetes, Elaine May, Antonioni, Joseph Cornell, and Maya Deren, all of whom I heartily recommend. I will also report that I still don't “get” Godard, with the exception of A Woman is a Woman, which most Godardites hate, and as much as I love Anna Karina.)

The internet, for me, hasn't so much opened the floodgates of Information as acted as a much-appreciated filter for pop culture. It's a quiet murmur of word-of-mouth, and I don't have to find out more unless I want to. Everything that doesn't reach me by this method is over there on the Other Side of Silence, like the books I've resigned myself to never reading. However, this was also the year that I developed an interest in new fiction for the first time in my life, at 36. It started with reading Bolano's 2666, and has continued through following various literary sites and bibliophiles on Twitter, which has kept me alert to all the new names in world literature with buzz and also awakened my dormant interest in The Other European Modernists (that is, the world of European Modernism beyond Joyce, Proust, and Mann). Previously, I'd only ventured as far as Robert Walser. So even as one world – pop culture – becomes dimmer and more distant for me, I have a new area to try, hopelessly, to keep up with.

What follows is the short list of books I finished reading this year and the short list books I didn't (the latter inspired by a post on Biblioklept), with links to reviews where applicable and mini-reviews otherwise, following by a long list of Books I Have in the House that I intend to read (the other ones I have in the house I have either read or have decided not to read) and a long (but partial) list of Books I Want to Read Before I Die. Happy New Year!

Books I Finished Reading in 2011

Short Books I Finished Reading in 2011:

Hard Times (Dickens)

The Rings of Saturn (Sebald)

If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Calvino)

I'm not a Dickens fan, though I made it through Bleak House at one point and didn't mind Great Expectations. I also didn't mind Hard Times, although it wasn't what I was expecting: instead of an account of difficult economic times which I hoped to relate to the global economic crisis, it was mainly a critique, in the form of broad satire, of rationalistic education. There was some kind of commentary on the plight of the worker in the form a subplot in which an Uncle Tommish factory worker is caught between the evil forces of capitalism and an equally manipulative union, but the relation to present socioeconomic conditions was distant.

I also found myself with nothing to say about Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, although I enjoyed it. An eccentric, erudite author discussing whatever crosses his mind, like a long essay or a series of essays with unusually personal digressions, makes for pleasant reading, but the book didn't strike me on any deeper levels, and little of it has stayed with me. I intend to read Sebald's three other “novels” (if that's what they are), but not for a while.

I greatly enjoyed If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, my last read of 2011, and will be reviewing it soon, probably in the form of a comparison with Nazi Literature in the Americas.

“Filler” Non-Fiction Books I Finished in 2011:

Reality Hunger (David Shields)

Just Kids (Patti Smith)

Every now and then I can't resist picking up a short non-fiction book to read quickly between bouts of fiction-reading, or attempts at fiction-reading, which is more prone to send me down rabbit-holes of daydreaming. I was largely unimpressed with Reality Hunger, which I reviewed here. I largely enjoyed Just Kids, although many things about Patti Smith's memoir of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe left me uneasy. Briefly: despite the modesty of the title and the anecdote it comes from (elderly middle-class onlookers argue about whether the young couple are “artists” or “just kids”), there is no doubt that Smith and, in her account, Mapplethorpe always regarded themselves as Artists (capitalized) and believed that calling was sacred. It's not that I wanted her to have some sense of irony about her practises – there's too much of that around, anyway. But perhaps sometimes she could have used a sense of humour, or the minimum self-awareness to realize how the idea of art as a sacred calling jars against the account of how she and Mapplethorpe achieved success. For instance, she boasts of how, after working part-time at bookstores throughout her early 20s, she got out of that ratrace and never had a conventional job again... when one of Mapplethorpe's rich lovers and patrons gave her busywork cataloguing his collections. Sure, Smith managed to make a living through her art, but only after a period of having her way paid by Mapplethorpe's boyfriends and her own.

Smith likewise sees no irony in Mapplethorpe's social climbing and achievement of middle-class comfort (cut short by his premature death) simultaneously with his personal and artistic exploration of the gay male S/M underworld, although she is ambivalent about both his fascination with high society and his fascination with underground experimentation. I picked up the book with an average hipster's respect for both Smith and Mapplethorpe, based mainly on their reputations rather than deep familiarity with or personal interest in their work. (I knew Smith's better than Mapplethorpe, since I've owned both Horses, on CD, and Easter, on vinyl.) The more I read, the more they seemed not just like hipster heroes but like prototypical hipsters themselves, popularizing the idea of the artist and art as “outside of society” from outside the outsider's experience (or from a dual, conflicting perspective of both insider and outsider in Mapplethorpe's case, but always with the conventional goal of wealth and fame). The memoir worked best for me as a tribute to an important, unusual relationship, founded in mutual aestheticism, and I was moved by Smith's description of her reaction to Mapplethorpe's death. However, even or especially in that final sequence, the lack of any sense of humour or self-awareness creates unintentional comedy at the most serious moments, as when Smith shares this exchange with the dying Mapplethorpe:

“Did art get us, Patti?”

“I don't know, Robert, I don't know.”

I have no doubt that Mapplethorpe was an important late 20^th century artist, and Smith an important link between the European avant garde tradition and the new all-American genre of rock and roll (although perhaps even more important as a charismatic androgynous frontwoman), but her understanding of “art” seems to have never evolved beyond that of a kid (which is to say, a teenager), and it creates shortcomings in self-awareness that prevent this memoir from achieving the status of... well, art.

Biggest Disappointment I Finished Reading in 2011:

The Marriage Plot (Jeffrey Eugenides) Reviewed here

Outstanding Reads of 2011:

The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in Europe (Franco Moretti) Reviewed here

The Savage Detectives (Roberto Bolano) Mentioned everywhere in this blog

Nazi Literature in the Americas (Roberto Bolano) Briefly mentioned at the end here

Books I Didn't Finish Reading in 2011:

Casualties of Distraction:

The Way We Live Now

The Aeneid

Trollope has never been rated highly among Victorian novelists except by eccentric fans and Victorianists, but he got his moment in the sun when someone (publisher or critic, I don't know) got hold of the idea that The Way We Live now served as a satirical commentary on the 2008 recession. As with Hard Times, I was expecting, but didn't get, a description of ordinary people struggling in difficult economic times. A couple of hundred pages in, and the only connection to the recession I could see was a plot about a young man who gets involved in business speculation. I liked the novel well enough, but since it wasn`t on the topic I was expecting, I wasn't in the mood for a Victorian novel of marriage, fortune-making, and publishing-world satire, so I put it aside to return to when I am.

I also enjoyed the first four books of The Aeneid (I even gave it a partial review), but I wasn't in the mood for classical epic poetry, either, so abandoned it, too, for the time being.

Casualties of Frustration:

War and Peace

I bought this volume after getting caught up in the buzz about the new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, but when I finally picked it up and started reading, I was disappointed on two levels: first, I hadn't realized that Tolstoy's masterwork was a soap opera; which I wouldn't mind (I like epic soap operas) except that the prose and dialogue were disconcertingly flat. I don't know if this is a problem of translation or authorial style. I don't remember being put off by the prose and dialogue when I read Anna Karenina in some standard translation (probably Constance Garnett's) years ago, although I had big problems with the novel: namely, the monstrously narcissistic parallel protagonists, Anna and Levin. In any case, I put it down and didn't pick it up again about 300 pages in. Maybe I just wasn't in the right mood, and I'll certainly come back to War and Peace, and give this translation another try.

The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War

Speaking of disbelief, I couldn't believe anyone could make the sage of the eccentric, artistic, suicidal, probably autistic Wittgenstein siblings this boring, but that is exactly what Evelyn's grandson, Alexander Waugh, accomplishes here. There's a strange mixture of overly detailed writing, failing to create a sense of either external or psychological drama, and omission of essential context, especially when it comes to the star, Ludwig Wittgenstein, about whom the writer seems to assume the reader already knows the basic received narrative of his life. I do – I took a graduate course in Wittgenstein that treated him very much like a star, with as much attention to the man as to his work – but I would have liked to read a fresh take, and one that interwove his biography with the other Wittgensteins featured here. I gave up around page 70, and whether or not I finish it depends on if I feel differently when I pick it up again. I still want to buy The House of Wits: An Intimate Portrait of the James Family, which does the same thing for the eccentric, artistic, possibly autistic James siblings, to see if this sort of family biography can be done properly.

Little, Big

I had never heard of this classic of American fantasy before seeing the handsome trade paperback edition, with its cover blurb rave by Harold Bloom. I've been meaning to read more (which is to say, any) genre fiction, so this seemed like the perfect place to begin. However, it's a slow start indeed, and I gave up about thirty pages in, just as we start finding out a bit more about the fantasy premise. I will return to it and give it another go sometime.

Biggest Disappointment I Couldn't Finish Reading of 2011:

1Q84

I bought this in hardcover because of the hype (and beautiful cover design). Before I'd got a hundred pages in, the backlash had started, allowing me, with relief, to exchange it. I've been hearing about Murakami for years and thought this would be the ideal introduction, but even fans admit it's one of his weakest efforts. Due to the author's reputation, even the harshest critiques in the press and blogosphere have been more diplomatic than my own reactions. Forget how interesting the plot or philosophical digressions were or weren't, or whether the description of every female character's breasts were gratuitous; I couldn't get past the prose, which was bad not in the usual, incoherently metaphorical “literary fiction” way but in the amateurish manner of a bestselling thriller. Actually, even most thriller writers know better than to punctuate every line of dialogue with unnecessary physical descriptions of actions like eating and drinking (I remember reading a “How to Write” book aimed at popular fiction writers that sagely warned against this error), or, while writing from character POV, refer to details of characters' expressions that would never, in fact, be noticed in an interpersonal interaction. (For one thing, we spend a lot of our interpersonal interactions not looking at each other, never mind not intently scrutinizing each other for clues to personality and mood, let alone in what appears to be a conscious, lucid manner.)

It's a shame this was my first encounter with Murakami, because I probably won't be back now. This was the novel that was going to decide whether or not to add Murakami to my “to read” list, and unfortunately, it didn't go well. Some authors, however great they may be, have to get booted off that list, with whatever excuse.

Books I Tasted:

The Second Sex

I thought what with the new translation (although naturally there`s already been a backlash against it), it was time to finally tackle this giant work of philosophy that according to my hero, Camille Paglia (and many others), contains all future topics of feminism within it. I dipped into it knowing I wasn't going to read it right away, and the first chapter, a severely abstract treatise on the questionable necessity of the category of gender and the criteria for distinguishing between the genders, complete with zoological and biological examples and explanations, did not disappoint. I'm looking forward to this one.

The Books in My House

I realized in writing these next two lists that they are of no possible use to you, in terms of understanding what point of progress I'm at as a reader, without knowing what I have read. Without that knowledge, these lists look even more eccentric than they actually are (or, for that matter, less, if you think I've read some more obvious choices that I haven't). But that's fine: the only possible interest they could have for you is to introduce you to some titles or authors you might not know. Maybe (probably) you'll read them before I do.

19^th Century Novel:

The Charterhouse of Parma (Stendhal)

Pierre, or, the Ambiguities (Melville)

The Professor (Charlotte Bronte)

No Name (Wilkie Collins)

War and Peace (Tolstoy)

A Sentimental Education (Flaubert)

The Princess Casamassima (Henry James)

20^th Century Novel:

The Book of Disquiet (Pessoa)

*Remembrance of Things Past (Proust)

Ulysses (Joyce)

The Radetsky March (Roth)

Absolom, Absolom! (Faulkner)

The Last Unicorn (Beagle)

Little, Big (Crowley)

The Loser (Bernard)

His Dark Materials (Pullman) (maybe)

Parallel Lives (Nadas)

Short Stories:

*Lady with Lapdog and Other Stories (Chekhov)

*Collected Fictions (Borges)

Poetry:

The Aeneid (Virgil, trans. Robert Fagles)

*Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake (ed. David V. Erdman)

*Leaves of Grass (Whitman)

*Complete Poetry and Prose of Arthur Rimbaud (trans. and ed. Wyatt Mason)

The Road Not Taken: A Selection of Robert Frost`s Poems

Biography and Autobiography:

Confessions of Augustine

The Autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila

Freud's Women (Lisa Appignanesi and John Forrester)

The House of Wittgenstein: A House at War (Alexander Waugh)

*Susan Sontag: Reborn: Journals & Notebooks 1947-1963 (ed. David Rieff)

James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon (Julie Phillips)

Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (Justin Spring)

History and Politics:

The Revolution in America (Burke)

The Rights of Man (Paine)

The Old Regime and the French Revolution (Toqueville)

The Origins of Political Order (Francis Fukuyama)

Philosophy:

The Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle)

The New Science (Vico)

The Varieties of Religious Experience (James)

The Second Sex (Beauvoir)

**Kant: A Very Short Introduction

**Logic: A Very Short Introduction

Theory, Criticism, Essay Collections:

*Essays of Montaigne

Biographica Literaria (Coleridge)

*The Painter of Modern Life (Baudelaire)

*Silly Novels by Lady Novelists (Eliot)

Days of Reading (Proust)

Books and Cigarettes (Orwell)

*The Social History of Art (Hauser)

*On Writing (Borges)

About Looking (Berger)

Gender Trouble (Butler)

Male Impersonators (Simpson)

Regarding the Pain of Others (Sontag)

Other:

The Book of the Courtier (Castiglione)

*I have read portions of these collections, notebooks, or multi-volume works.

**I bought these with the intention of refreshing my memory or getting a firm grasp on the subject, as someone who did a minor in philosophy as an undergraduate many years ago now. It remains to be seen if I'll get around to acting on the excellent intention.

Books I Want to Read Before I Die (Partial and Ever-Shifting)

Pre-19^th Century:

The Canterbury Tales (Chaucer)

Don Quixote (Cervantes)

The Princess of Cleves (Madame de La Fayette)

Gulliver's Travels (Swift)

Tom Jones (Fielding) (maybe)

Tristam Shandy (Sterne) (maybe)

Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (Goethe)

19^th Century Novel:

The Red and the Black (Stendhal)

The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Hugo)

A Harlot High and Low (Balzac)

Dead Souls (Gogol)

Moby Dick (Melville)

Les Miserables (Hugo)

An Evening with M. Teste (Valery)

Imaginary Lives (Schwob)

20^th Century Novel:

The Immoralist (Gide)

The House of Mirth (Wharton)

A Room with a View (Forster)

Kristin Lavransdatter (Undset)

The Magic Mountain (Mann)

Confessions of Zeno (Svevo)

The Counterfeiters (Gide)

The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner)

Light in August (Faulkner)

Auto da Fe (Canetti)

Ferdydurke (Gombrowicz)

The Invention of Morel (Casares)

The Man Without Qualities (Musil)

Doctor Faustus (Mann)

Under the Volcano (Lowry)

The Kingdom of This World (Carpentier)

The Recognitions (Gaddis) (maybe)

Explosion in a Cathedral (Carpentier)

The Confederacy of Dunces (Toole)

Next Episode (Aquin)

Myra Breckenridge (Vidal)

Invisible Cities (Calvino)

Life: A User's Manual (Perec) (maybe)

The Furies (Hobhouse)

Infinite Jest (Wallace) (maybe)

20^th-21^st Century Authors of Interest:

Robert Walser

Thomas Bernard

Peter Nadas

W. G. Sebald

Roberto Bolano

Laszlo Krasznahorkai

Poetry:

Paradise Regained (Milton)
Don Juan (Byron)

Biography and Autobiography:

Apologia Pro Vita Sua (John Henry Newman)

The Naked Civil Servant (Quentin Crisp)

Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell (Deborah Solomon)

The House of Wits: An Intimate Portrait of the James Family (Paul Fisher)

Theory, Criticism, Essay Collections:

A Barthes Reader (ed. Susan Sontag)

Ways of Seeing (Berger)

Philosophy:

The Prince (Machiavelli)

The Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein)

Other:

Shamanism (Eliade)

It's evident from both lists that my reading goals have become modest indeed: only 54 titles in the first, 51 in the second, plus, say, five per author of the ones I listed without giving specific titles, for a total of around 135, ranging in length from around a hundred pages to over a thousand. Generously, I give myself until I'm 50 to clear these, as well as anything new that comes to my attention in that time (generously, I say, although it will mean picking up the pace considerably, or developing some focus). Still, 50 would be young to have your reading conscience clear. That's the dream, now: to get out from under the pile of the clamouring books, to be free and able to read whatever I want to – history, biography, philosophy, anthropology, economics, science fiction. Like when I was an adolescent plucking books from the library shelves based on the curiousity of the moment or eagerly following the footsteps of an idol's reading (in those days it was David Bowie, these days it would be Robert Bolano). It's probably an unrealizable dream. Even if I finish these 200 odd titles, listed or anticipated, in timely fashion, will I be free, or will I have enslaved myself to a new list, rushing in to fill the void? (What about that graphic novels canon, clawing at the corner of my consciousness, demanding attention, even now?)

I have no set list of books that I intend to read in 2012, partly because it would intimidate me, and partly because, among the limited number of books in the house, I want to leave room for whim and mood. But I do want to read Parallel Lives and The Origins of Political Order while they're still hot (I'm missing out on enough hot reading this year by largely restricting myself to the house), so, in my expanded definition, that means in the next six months. I also want to immediately launch on the pile of books I've acquired for novel research, which I will not be blogging about out of a superstitious desire to say nothing about my Big Novel Project. But do remind me, this year, to resist the temptation of Filler Non-Fiction, the potato chips of reading. You think you want it... you think it's gonna be so good... but no, it's just another bag of potato chips.

Bits and Pieces: The Case of Marcel Proust and the Attacking Rats, and, Should We Abolish Literary Research?

2011-12-04T13:53:00.000-08:00

Reflections on Memoir, Autobiography, and Biography

From autobiography of a soul to autobiography: apparently autobiography is much on my mind lately, because I've started writing a memoir. No, I'm not secretly famous and you don't know it, nor do I have an inordinately interesting life. But, I am a writer, and an interesting thing happened to me, so, putting them together, I thought I might have a story to tell – a memoir of a specific aspect of my life, like the addiction memoir or family tragedy memoir or difficult childhood memoir or mental illness memoir. Mine is a prodigy memoir, about how I became a prodigy between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, with a play produced at eighteen that won $10, 000 in awards, without coming from a literary or intellectual or theatrical background of any kind, which set me on the course of a brief career in Canadian theatre so insanely frustrating that I chucked it by age twenty-four. Since then I haven't been able to figure out what to do. I got an MA in English relatively late in life, in my mid-30s, then decided to chuck that course as well given the poor job market for professors. Now, at 36, I'm back to trying to write, and after several attempts at novels, it occurred to me that a memoir was something I could write now, since finding time to do research can be difficult when you're working forty hours per week year-round whenever you can get it.

After writing around 150 pages, I thought my prose was lacking, so I picked up Remembrance of Things Past again. After reading about 50 pages of that, I wrote another memoir scene and discovered that the only thing worse than not writing like Proust is writing exactly like him. Hearteningly, in the introduction to my edition of the original Moncrieff translation, Ingrid Wassenaar writes, “Pastiche was one of the foundations of Proust's wit: he was a great, and cruel, mimic. The problem of separating out his own style from what he absorbed from others was one of his aesthetic dilemmas.” (Apparently Proust wrote a series of pastiches of famous French writers as if commenting on a diamond forgery scandal. I'd love to get my hands on that....) This sort of aesthetic dilemma can be difficult to overcome: Proust started writing A la recherche when he was 38, and worked on it for fourteen years, until his early death. He wrote little, and nothing that's considered of consequence, before that.

Less hearteningly for my project, Wassenaar devotes space to distinguishing between autobiography and Proust's practice in A la recherche, to the detriment of the former. She writes, “While his whole enterprise is to crown subjectivity as the wellspring of creativity, he is careful not to collapse subjectivity in general into his own personality and life history”; however, in the process of making this claim, she informs the reader that Proust was bitchy, spiteful, and got aroused by watching rats attacking each other. Would the novel be less great if Proust had included these characteristics in his self-portrait, or just different? I have to admit that in writing my memoir I've already come up against the dilemma of how unflattering to make my own self-portrayal – partly due to a desire (a need, really) for privacy, should I choose to publish it. A century on, we live in a more permissive age than Proust did, and one that's absorbed Freud, though not without (sometimes abhorred) resistance. I can't write the bildung of my adolescence – the formation of my identity, including my intellectual and aesthetic development – without talking about sexuality. I can't think about it without thinking about sexuality. But how much of myself do I dare expose – and aside from that, how much of it is relevant? Does every psychological quirk contribute to our understanding of a person?

I came across similar problems when writing my biographical plays about Orton and Halliwell and Jane and Paul Bowles – not issues of privacy (my own or others'), since I was using published information (and writing about people who were dead, in the case of Orton and Halliwell) – but issues of what biographical information was relevant. I didn't solve the dilemma satisfactorily in either case: rather, I tended to throw everything I knew from the sources I was using into the dialogue, “just in case” it was psychologically central. Although one thing I learned from writing plays about real people was that everything depends on context, and just because something is true doesn't mean it will give a true representation of the individual in a given context.

As to how important biography is generally, it's true we come to literature to discover ourselves, not biographical information about the writer – and to assume that we “really” want the latter is the basis of the biographical fallacy in literary criticism. But it's too hasty to say that we read even biography primarily to learn about the writer. As a teenager, I (obviously) loved reading biographies of writers, in which I “discovered myself” as much as, or more than, in reading fiction. For one thing, these biographies – and all of the biographies I read were of queer writers: Wilde, Colette, Capote, Orton, Jane Bowles – dealt with the subject of sexuality, which most of the fiction I was reading (with Jean Genet as the major exception) did not. Nowadays homosexuals are more certain about their sexual orientation than anyone else, and often claim to have known they were gay their entire lives. Sexual orientation isn't such a simple matter for many heterosexuals, which is why sexual confusion still characterizes adolescence, and the biographies of these queer writers were essential in helping me understand my own identity through the central (and still taboo, for all of our “permissiveness”) subject of sexuality, which is not similarly problematized in biographies of heterosexual writers.

Biography and autobiography occupy a curious place in literary history. Despite the growing popularity of the memoir and “creative non-fiction,” often positioned by both its critics and its advocates as being “in competition” with the reading and writing of fiction, there are few canonical autobiographies; only the major instances that transformed (and conditioned) our understanding of subjectivity: the Confessions of Augustine and Rousseau, the essays of Montaigne, Newman's account of the development of his religious ideas. And, of course, the novelistic explorations of subjectivity and consciousness by the Modernists, Joyce, Proust, and (in more Expressionist fashion) Kafka; or, beginning earlier, the quasi-autobiographical Bildungsroman proper, from Goethe to Flaubert to Mann to Mishima. As for biography, no matter how well-written, it does not seem to be included in that amorphous category, “literature,” that usually means fiction, poetry, and drama, but sometimes mysteriously includes autobiography as well. Lyric poetry, like the personal essay, often takes the author's inner life as its subject, dynamically recounting and working through a personal crisis. When I studied Donne's Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (from which we get his most famous lines, “No man is an island” and “Do not ask for whom the bell tolls”) in a graduate class, I placed it in the context of the crisis memoir, such as Joan Didion's memoirs of the deaths of her husband and daughter, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights. In the Western tradition, the exploration of subjectivity – of the soul – has two, equally important sources: Christian and humanist. (Also the sources of the novel.)

We read biography and autobiography for many reasons. We may do it because we have had similar experiences, or want to know about an experience we have not had. We may do it because the subject is a fascinating person; or because, in the case of memoir, they are peculiarly insightful about their experiences; or because, in the case of the memoir of a famous person, we want to supplement our knowledge of their lives with their own perspectives. While cults of personality surrounding particular writers can be annoying (see, for example, this snarky LRB blog post about speculation on the manner of Jane Austen's death), there is nothing wrong with going to biography or memoir of artists or performers to learn more about the artistic process and personality. We hear a lot these days about young middle-class people who fetishize the idea of “the artist” rather than committing themselves to producing great art, but that's been going on ever since Baudelaire and Wilde, the original proponents of art for art's sake, decided that being an artist was a way of being in the world, not just something you did (and the idea can be traced back through Romanticism and the Renaissance). If you want to dismiss “neoliberal individualism,” you'll have to sweep away the Renaissance, Romanticism, and Late Romanticism, but I won't be joining you. The current degraded “consumerist youth” form is a small price to pay for the anti-puritanical celebration of “personality” within this long Western tradition. Personally I'm more annoyed with the vulgar popularization of “genius” in recent bestsellers by Harold Bloom, who ought to know better. But I'm utterly seduced by Roberto Bolano's simultaneously critical and celebratory take on the idea of the writer and the cult of personality surrounding the writer-genius in The Savage Detectives and 2666. There is no getting away from the writer-genius now: we must live with her and do the best we can to still write in those conditions.

No, most biographical facts about the writer, whether psychological oddities or their manner of death, don't help us understand the work better, let alone give its "true meaning." But we do live in a culture that believes that great writers, and artists generally, are more interesting than the average person; if not in their external lives, then in their internal ones. If someone can manage to write a biography of a writer that does not make them sound boring (no one has managed this in the case of one of my favourite novelists, Henry James, whose bizarre psychology. ignored by his academic cult, is one of the main sources of my interest in his work), I will happily read about them. I don't think that learning about Proust's sexual interest in rat behaviour has helped me to understand one of the greatest novels yet written any better, but I'm happy to know it, just as I was happy to learn, when forced to read her largely boring letters as a research assistant, that the unmarried, childless Jane Austen liked to make cruel jokes in private about difficult, dangerous births, a common and sacrosanct experience in her time. It's always interesting to gain a new perspective on an artist that complicates the picture we get from their work and the received view of them, or of what a "great artist" is like. Sometimes, such information contributes to making an artist of forbidding reputation seem more mundane, as when I recently learned that Nathanael West had a long-time-bachelor's overweening attachment to his dog. Biographical facts about artists can help dispel the false mystique surrounding art and artists, while building a better, more vital mystique.

Now I've got that line from a Nichols and May sketch in my head: "Too many people think of Adler as a man who made mice neurotic. He was more."

"Much more."

"Much much more."

"Can you move over a little I'm falling off the bench. A great deal more."

The Decline of Liberal Arts Education and The New Aesthetes

Speaking of the poor job market for professors, I read two recent articles on the demise of the university system in the US and the UK, one in the New York Review of Books, one in the London Review of Books. They reminded me of another reason why I decided not to devote the remainder of my life to being an English academic, the NYRB article by lamenting the relegation of teaching to exploited grad students and adjuncts (called “sessionals” in Canada: I taught one course as a sessional before, thankfully, there wasn't enough work for me in the city where I'm presently stuck) while a shrinking minority of tenured and tenure-track professors who are sequestered away doing the research that brings prestige and funds to their schools, the LRB article by seeking to distinguish between universities, where research is conducted, and other types of post-secondary schools, as well as by lamenting the sorts of “publish or perish” conditions that Paglia was complaining about in the early 90s, which preclude serious, long-term, ambitious projects in favour of frequent publication if you ever want to get on a tenure track.

This additional dissuading factor was my inability to believe in “research” in the field of English. I think it's a waste of the academics' lives and a waste of public funds. I agree with Paglia that the only useful scholarship that can still be produced in the liberals arts has to be inter-disciplinary in nature, with an overarching revisionist orientation (the sort of major, ambitious work that publish-or-perish conditions work against). The endless production of feminist, poststructuralist, queer, Marxist, etc. “readings” of canonical works, taught to graduate school-track students as “literary theory,” is a waste of minds that “advances” our understanding of literature about as much as medieval scholasticism advanced Western philosophy. In other words, it's a bunch of eggheads talking to each other in their exclusionary language that most of them don't even understand about things of no interest to anyone else; a dead end comparable to the simultaneous analytical trend in philosophy (although at least that taught me how to analyze an argument). Digging around in one's “specialist” area in a confluence of cultural studies and historicism (writing about literary ephemera produced in the era you cover – Renaissance, Victorian) seems equally pointless to me. I have a certain amount of respect for the scholarly collaborations that produce painstaking new editions of central authors, but the qualities necessary for that sort of work are patience and meticulous attention to detail – there is no exercise of the mind at all.

All of this is not to say that I consider only the most ambitious scholarship worthwhile. I am also a devotee of the critical essay – of criticism, not theory. My friend George Toles has been producing such essays on literature and film throughout his academic career, and although they are more academic than the early 20^th century Anglo-American critical tradition I admire (Wilson, McCarthy, Hardwick, Esslin, Bentley, Trilling, Sontag), they are superior in quality of writing, in independence of thought (valuing the Paterian impression), and in close, loving attention to the object than the vast majority of academic criticism. There is always room for more well-written close readings of both canonical and relatively unknown figures by erudite, insightful critics who believe in the art of the essay; such essays are works of literature in their own right, and bring both pleasure and instruction to readers who love the arts under consideration.

Restricting myself to commenting on English, the subject I studied, I'll give my radical idea of what the priorities of an English professor should be. Teaching, including the teaching of undergraduates (now relegated to grad students and sessionals), should be the first priority – about 80 per cent of the job description. The NYRB article claims (based on studies, I presume) that a liberal arts education still provides students with a greater ability to write and reason than new, more pragmatic programs like business. (And English students are notorious for complaining about education students in this regard – tragically.) Presumably, being able to write and reason will ultimately help a person in any career, but these abilities should also be valued in their own right, as the primary purpose of post-secondary education – of becoming an educated adult individual. English professors should impart these abilities to students along with an appreciation of English-language literature (I think the degree should actually be in Literature, and include language requirements at the undergrad level as well as world literature in translation, but that's another reform) – which are not separate aims. Undergraduates do not need to be taught “critical thinking” via the application of critical theory to the literary canon. They need to be taught how to enjoy reading, which the vast majority of them do not, and so leave university with poor writing and reasoning skills, which will never improve since they have not learned how to enjoy difficult extracurricular reading. The goal of undergraduate education in English (whether it is a major or a requirement) should be exposure to great, difficult works, discussion of their content and formal qualities, and instruction in formulating reasoned critical arguments about them (the simple adoption and support of a position based on textual evidence).

The Anglo literary canon is an education all by its lonely, parochial self, from which the instructor can branch out into discussion of specific historical context, major historical events, and the history of ideas. Educating young people in this way – creating citizens, the traditional function of the university that has all but been lost – should be the prime role of the English professor. How, then, to measure the “productivity” of professors in order to judge who should get better positions? Perhaps instead of publishing articles, they could submit chapter drafts of ongoing major works, or research progress reports? Major works (including biographies) and critical essays – I see no reason for English professors to write anything else. (Among major works of 20^th century English or aesthetic theory – works that do, in fact, count as “literary theory,” though not as schools or applications of it – I would include Hauser's The Social History of Art, Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, Cavell's The Claim of Reason, and Paglia's Sexual Personae.) Ambition, which is necessary for real contributions to scholarship and thought within a discipline, is what should be rewarded, not business-model “productivity.” In their spare time, professors should not be whipping up spurious articles that'll make a splash at conferences in order to gain a reputation and pad their resumes, but reading, both within and outside of their “specialization.”

English literature is not science. English literature is a tiny portion of world literature, albeit one with an outsized influence. But the possibilities for useful, significant research are not endless. Frye thought that criticism should be the study and theorization of what literature is and how it works, but no one has taken him up on this, although a group of kids online have extended the project of the Anatomy to include popular culture (in the universities, the territory of cultural and media studies) in the marvellous ongoing open collaboration TV Tropes, which is spontaneous scholarship for pleasure. Meanwhile criticism, abandoned by the universities and, for whatever reason, no longer supported by Anglo-American conditions in journalism, has also moved online – in literary blogs like this one (as well as high-profile ones) and “zines” by former students like The New Inquiry, recently featured in The New York Times. Here ex-English students informed by their love of great critics from the era of the public intellectual, like Wilson and Sontag, can practice their influence free of the constrictions of publication in academic journals, while also being influenced by the new, pop culture-friendly mood that the cultural studies approach has spread through academia, though the pressure, I think, is from outside of the academy.

I think literary scholarship would be better served by a publication ban on professors for the first ten years of their career, so they could concentrate on teaching, reading, and developing their thought instead. The only dignified, culturally significant role that an English professor can serve is as an instructor teaching students to write, reason, and enjoy reading. To think, in the unique way that a humanities education can supply, that an education in science or mathematics cannot. And the emphasis on writing (learned, in part, through continuous exposure to good writing) is crucial here, and should be kept central; an education in history or philosophy cannot supply this component of learning how to think either. (These are the reasons that my philosophy professors and, once, a physics professor I took a theory of physics course from, nearly fainted in gratitude when they received my papers. Every academic discipline values the writing skills that English students learn more than English does.) If, in addition to teaching students, English professors also happen to be good critics (which requires being a good writer, but more, a good reader), or original thinkers, or to produce ambitious works of scholarship, more power to them; but the function that makes English departments necessary is the classroom encounter, not research.

Viewed from another perspective, as Frye arrogantly asserted, far from literary scholarship being dried up, the project of literary criticism hasn't even begun yet. The study of English literature has never been properly intellectualized, and imported French theory didn't accomplish that, either. The building blocks of the discipline haven't even been identified – that was what Frye attempted in the Anatomy. But the rebuilding of literary criticism from the ground up to turn it into a genuinely productive field of study can't be accomplished in a publish-or-perish environment where endless applications of French and feminist (or now “gender,” but arguably still feminist) theory are de rigueur, and where professors are now turning their attention to pop culture, including popular literature, in a desperate effort to engage students who are increasingly, bizarrely, stuck in a mire of reading YA fiction well into their 20s (and beyond). Which to me only shows that many students are attracted to English as a subject for reasons that have nothing to do with a love of literature, and succeed in it for reasons having nothing to do with an advanced understanding of it. (It may, in fact, be much easier to grasp the fundamentals of “literary theory” than to achieve an advanced understanding of literature. Certainly, the cleverer students think it's a lot cooler; and certainly, professors work harder at instilling the former than the latter.)

Personally, I'd rather write an unread literary blog and read the Anglo-American critics of the 1930s-60s, where treasures of insight still await.

Two Reviews: Eugenides and Bolano

2011-11-12T20:49:00.000-08:00

The Marriage Plot and the Soap Opera Plot

With The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides moves into the self-reflexive mode of late 20th/early 21^st century novelists who write books about readers. My favourite contemporary fiction writer, Roberto Bolano, started this game with his two big novels, The Savage Detectives and 2666. It was one of the things that enabled me to read those books when I had all but given up on contemporary fiction. To read about readers is, for a reader, a guilty pleasure. The Marriage Plot starts with the sentence, “To start with, look at all the books,” referring to the library of the heroine, Madeleine Hanna, an English major about to graduate from Brown University. I ate up that sentence, and the rest of the talk of books, greedily, and sped through the 400-page novel in a mere week (a weekend off and odd moments on weekdays). That's much faster than I ever read a novel these days, including Bolano's. Instead I tend to start reading five other books while intermittently going back to the big one until it's finished.

As this (originally literary) blog records, Bolano made literature, and the novel in particular, seem like an event to me again, and it was with this borrowed excitement that I read the new Eugenides, after his last novel, Middlesex, won the Pulitzer, and now that he was explicitly taking on the question of whether the social novel (that is, what we usually mean when we say “the novel”: the modern British novel, practised in American only by Henry James and his admirer, Edith Wharton) can still be written now that marriage, having lost its economic centrality during the 20^th century, has lost its symbolic potency. It is the question of an English major, which I am (Wikipedia doesn't say what Eugenides' undergrad major was at Brown); in fact, a version of the question played a role in the Film Studies Ph.D. research proposal I drew up for a funding agency before I decided not to pursue further studies. I was talking about the impact of the depletion of marriage's symbolic potency on the dramatic structure and content of the studio-era Hollywood comedy, but it was the same ballpark, and so it was with somewhat of an academic interest that I devoured The Marriage Plot.

That doesn't mean I liked it. Before The Marriage Plot, I'd read one novel each from the all-male triad of American novelists who've garnered the attention of critics and the reading public for their attempts to revive the tradition of the big fat 19^th century realist novel, to salvage it from accusations of being “middlebrow” from critics and writers who believe postmodernism killed it some time ago, and to make it relevant to a public who, unlike its 19^th century one, has various electronic entertainments vying for its attention. I read The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen (born 1959); The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon (born 1963); and Eugenides' debut, The Virgin Suicides (Eugenides was born in 1960). The three form a generation, much like Mailer (1923), Capote (1924), Vidal (1925); or Fitzgerald (1869), Faulkner (1897), and Hemingway (1899). American male novelists who capture the public imagination seem to come in threes; America hasn't produced a female novelist who's done so on a comparable scale since Toni Morrison (born 1931), who belongs roughly to the same generation as British doyenne of the novel, A. S. Byatt (1936). In Canada, we've got Margaret Atwood (1939). Women novelists of renown come in ones.

I read The Corrections in the only undergraduate course I took that featured any contemporary fiction. (There were others, but I avoided them, thinking I could read contemporary literature on my own; but I wasn't moved to.) I was excited by the prospect of reading a “19^th century novel” that was, at last, about me and the people I knew. Of finally seeing my own life, my own world, set in fiction – in great fiction. But The Corrections faded for me. Eventually I realized why I had trouble with contemporary realist fiction: I was schooled as a novel-reader in 19^th century fiction, meaning that “reading,” for me, was about metaphorically identifying with characters and metaphorically applying their social situations to my own life. Contemporary realist fiction, on the other hand, demanded that I ask whether the novelist was accurately portraying contemporary life. And of course, the novelist could only come up short. (Here I'm unlike many readers: I know one English professor, anyway, who loves the 19^th century realist novel as much as I do and thinks Franzen's a worthy heir of it. So my metaphorical method must not be how everyone experiences the 19^th century novel; or they're able to switch reading modes more easily than I am.) When Franzen's Freedom was released, I knew I had no wish to read about the troubles of an affluent middle-class marriage. These people were not the kind of people I wanted to know more about or be; their choices were not my choices. (I am neither affluent nor married.)

As for the other two, The Virgin Suicides was a sort of poetic novella and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay a novel about recent American history. I thought the latter, which won the Pulitzer, was a lame soap opera, but I liked the former. The Virgin Suicides at least dealt with the topic of obsession, unusual for an American realist writer, though it fell just short of convincing me that the author was obsessed. It seemed too much like an English major's postmodernist essay on Victorian ideas about female sexuality (hysteria, green sickness, claustrophobia, narcissism) transposed into fiction that was dutifully feverish and hallucinatory. Nevertheless, the very fact that Eugenides was willing to do the politically incorrect thing of portraying adolescent female sexuality as morbid, and portraying adolescent males as voyeuristically fascinated with this negative “feminine mystique” was intriguing and promising. However, I threw out Eugenides' follow-up, Middlesex (another Pulitzer winner), after reading about ten pages, despite my excitement over its hermaphrodite protagonist. (Gender identity was the zeitgeist: I had just written a play with a transsexual main character.) I didn't like the voice of the protagonist, which was strangely lacking in colour, and the flashback to the 1920s seemed like pure kitsch. Therefore I was relieved to see William Deresiewicz, in his New York Times review of The Marriage Plot, spend a paragraph demolishing Middlesex, despite that novel's reputation.

In the same review, Deresiewicz suggests that The Marriage Plot is a better novel than Middlesex because it returns to Eugenides' theme in The Virgin Suicides of “the drama of coming of age.” This line of thought, however, leads him to an ominous conclusion: “Among the major male writers of his generation – he was born in 1960, the year after Jonathan Franzen and two years before David Foster Wallace – becoming an adult is possible to imagine happening, at best, at excruciating cost, and often not at all. Which makes them pretty representative.” (DFW, whom I've never read, throws a monkey wrench in my notion of triads of male novelists, even as Deresiewicz confirms my sense that we think of male novelists in groups, separate from female novelists, and as generations. Got no idea what it means, but it seems to be true.) The novel has been responsible for its own demise: I wrote earlier on this blog about the theory of Marxist critic Franco Moretti that the Bildungsroman (which is to say, coming-of-age novel), a glorious product of bourgeois capitalism, put all of its dramatic weight and artistic energy on the side of youth and becoming rather than maturity and being, although the latter was its goal. But now we can't even pretend that we're reaching for the latter, which casts a great shadow of anxiety over the former. Coming of age is the whole drama; after, nothing of interest can happen.

But this seems particularly true of the Anglo-American world, which is obsessed with youth and at the same time anxiously aware of the need to mature (or achieve), so it's instructive to compare Bolano's coming-of-age novel, The Savage Detectives, with its framing story of a teenage poet's sexual and literary adventures, to The Marriage Plot. Whether you prefer Bolano's Romantic vagabonds on a postmodern quest for an obscure experimental poet or Eugenides' young Americans on a post-graduation quest for their identities (or neither) may be a matter of personal taste. For me, despite his palpable naivety, Bolano's 17-year-old poet seems more adult than Eugenides' early 20s characters because he's less “responsible.” In the world Eugenides depicts, being a vagabond means not washing your sheets on a weekly basis (Madeleine's one suitor, the manic-depressive Leonard) or dabbling in tending to the homeless dying in India (Leonard's rival, author avatar Mitchell).

For one thing, the young poets of The Savage Detectives are living their own interior and exterior lives, even on parental premises, in a way that reminded me of what being a teenager in the late 20^th century was actually like. It struck me as deeply telling that during the dramatic crisis of The Marriage Plot, in which the heroine must choose between her suitors (one of whom she's recently married), she is surrounded by her parents, who articulate and arbitrate her options. In the 19^th century novel, parents have no impact on the heroine's romantic decisions: that's the point. Elizabeth Bennet and Dorothea Brooke must live with their parents until they marry (there's no testing of the waters of independence in university), but in their early 20s they are already far beyond consulting their parents on any matters touching their interior lives or their intentions for their future (except, in Elizabeth's case, to have her father formally excuse her from marrying a man they both loathe). Dorothea makes the wrong choice of partner, but there's no sense that her father could have advised her better.

Conceived under the influence of Protestant notions of private conscience – and consciousness – the 19^th century heroine is young, naive, and often mistaken (her mistakes make up the drama of the novel of marriage), but she is an adult and an individual who consults only her own desires and ideas. If she does fall under the sway of adult persuasion (as in Austen's last novel), that too is a mistake of youth (although the argument of Persuasion is that for a young person to not sufficiently know her own mind is a lesser error than knowing it too well). Now, although officially they have no say in whom we marry, parents are too much with us. There is no hint of the pathological, suffocating parental protectiveness that destroys the girls in The Virgin Suicides in The Marriage Plot, but there is still too much interfering parental presence for these supposed adults, and the heroine in particular, to seem adult.

Deresiewicz also notes the failure of Madeleine as a heroine. He calls her “reactive,” which seems a kind, or vague, way of saying what I noticed: that every male character in the novel is more interesting – quirkier, more colourful, with more ideas and more interests – than she is. Both Mitchell and Leonard are on spiritual quests of sorts, Leonard's supplied by his manic-depression (the mental illness presently known as “bipolar disorder”: the novel begins in 1982.) Mitchell's post-graduation spiritual crisis seems modelled on Levin's in Anna Karenina, Leonard's vocation as a biologist on Lydgate's in Middlemarch, but Eugenides does not come up to Tolstoy or Eliot, the writers who touched the heights of the 19^th century social novel. For a few moments, while Leonard's tedious job as a research fellow performing dull tasks with yeast closes in on him on one side, his mental illness on the other, Eugenides reminded me of Dreiser in the factory scenes of An American Tragedy, as Clyde is pushed towards his fatal affair with Roberta; while the India scenes with Mitchell made me wonder if this was what reading The Razor's Edge is like.

Eugenides' failure with Madeleine is a disappointment not only because she's a main character (and the centre of a love triangle) or because I'm a female reader hoping to identify with the heroine of a love story, but because the heroines of the 19^th century novel were its chief glory. They are exceptional women, one and all, for one reason or another, and their male authors are in love with them (Richardson with Clarissa, Tolstoy with Anna, James with Isabel) while their female authors admire them (Austen with Elizabeth, Eliot with Dorothea). Austen and Eliot also invented heroines to criticize, and perhaps Eugenides thinks that WASP princess Madeleine, with her Katharine Hepburn cheekbones (as we're informed early on), is in the vein of rich, handsome, and clever Emma Woodhouse or haughty, narcissistic, pampered Gwendolen Harleth (Madeleine is reading Daniel Deronda on a train late in the novel). Unfortunately, Eugenides doesn't criticize her. Unlike other types of social novel, the novel of marriage requires a female protagonist. A Balzac or Dickens Bildungsroman might focus on a male protagonist who sets out in the world to make his fortune in order to win the woman of his desires (and the fortune of his desires). But the marriage plot turns on the heroine's choice among suitors. Thinking he's writing this type of novel, Eugenides must enter the consciousness of a heroine who essentially serves the role of Daisy Buchanan or Estella Havisham, and there's no there there. Madeleine is an erotic ideal for whom, at bottom, Eugenides (like Mitchell) appears to have contempt. She is complacency personified.

Eugenides hasn't written a novel of marriage, though: he's written a love triangle story, which has never gone out of fashion, and which can be found at every cultural level. The greatest love triangle story of them all is, of course, Gone With the Wind. The Portrait of a Lady is a sudsy love triangle novel with a tragic existential marriage plot superimposed on it, and in which the heroine isn't in love with either option (Goodwood or Osmond). She is, however, powerfully drawn to both of them, and the reader believes either could psychologically obliterate her. Madeleine doesn't seem especially drawn to either Leonard (after her discovery of his mental illness draws them back together) or Mitchell. The most that can be said is that she's sexually attracted to Leonard and not sexually attracted to Mitchell. That's all we've got to go on in the early 21^st century: who we're sexually attracted to, and God forbid they should have to take lithium and put on weight.

The thing about the love triangle plot is that the triangle has to be resolved. In From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, Molly Haskell rather deliciously compared the suspense during this part of the plot to a whodunnit. The suspense tends to operate regardless of whether you have any strong emotional attachment to the characters or not, and so it did for me. SPOILERS AHOY.

First Leonard disappears from Madeleine's life in a Stella Dallas-type move: the life of the WASP princess must not be beclouded by the inconvenience of marriage to a manic-depressive! Madeleine is complicit in this, and knows it. It's like when Gwendolen allows her odious aristocratic husband, Grandcourt, to die by drowning, except that this husband has jumped in the water for her (it actually looked like he was going to pull an Anna Karenina by subway for a second), Titanic-style.

Then, as at the end of The Portrait of a Lady, the marriage hangs in the balance, and the heroine may decide to turn to her ever-waiting backup suitor. There should be a death at this point, as there is in Portrait of a Lady and Gone With the Wind, where the deaths of the most loveable characters, Ralph and Melanie, lend gravity to the great interior emotional crisis of the heroine: James and (Margaret) Mitchell had the novelistic instincts for this, but Eugenides isn't in their class either. For a while, all the passages Eugenides devotes to Mitchell's new (intellectually and aesthetically sound, the surprised reader learns) interest in Quakerism makes it seem like Madeleine and Mitchell might settle for an asexual New Age quietism. This is actually quite an interesting possibility for anyone who's read Lionel Trilling's essay on the rejection of modernity in Austen's Mansfield Park, which I assume Eugenides has (Mitchell as Fanny, Madeleine as Edmund, and Leonard as Mary Crawford).

Instead, however, Mitchell draws on his Jamesian reserves of renunciation and erases himself from Madeleine's life, just like Leonard. Does anyone really want this woman after all? (I didn't think so.) The neatly thematic, meta-fictional, spectacularly unmoving speech in which he states that Madeleine has “more important things to do with her life” than get married rings hollow: if this is supposed to be feminism, it's too little too late considering that we were told early on that Madeleine is not as intelligent as her two male suitors (this is what she thinks, and Eugenides never proves otherwise) and Eugenides has spent the novel demonstrating that she's not as interesting. Mitchell and Leonard had important plans, although they've failed at them (Leonard perhaps temporarily): to become a saint and a scientific luminary, respectively. No offence to Victorianists (I nearly became an English academic myself, and might be one now if the job market was better), but what exactly is so important about becoming one, and why couldn't it be combined with marriage?

While true to the feminist era, the insight that Madeleine does not have to marry either man (that Mitchell is the one who's been framing her options this way) has been done before, and better: in the romantic comedy Broadcast News (1987), with a love triangle formed by Holly Hunter, William Hurt, and Albert Brooks. Hurt plays the Daisy Buchanan figure for Hunter, which at least permits her to be interesting (she's also believably dedicated to her work), although probable author avatar Brooks as the “smart, sexless friend” steals the show (as Mitchell does The Marriage Plot, at least for me). No, we can't write the marriage plot anymore, now that marriage is not the necessary end goal of a woman's (or man's) life. The love triangle can always be written, but it's not easy to make it transcend soap opera, and it should perhaps be left to writers whose work has got some kind of archetypal pop energy, like Stephenie Meyer. How love and romantic relationships can be serious subjects for fiction now, and how one can write a traditional realist novel without them, are good questions, but Eugenides has not provided the answers in The Marriage Plot.

Fascinating Fascism Redux: Nazi Literature in the Americas

Of course, Bolano's work, especially The Savage Detectives, is full of love and relationships, but they are just experiences among others. Nazi Literature in the Americas is one of the strangest works of literature I've ever read: all of the inscrutable privacy and inventive weirdness of Jane Bowles's Two Serious Ladies combined with a fascination with evil out of the 19^th century decadents. Not one review – professional, blog, or customer – I've read on the net even comes close to plausibly accounting for what Bolano is doing in this fauxcyclopedia series of vignettes. The best explanation I've heard is a friend who suggested it was a depository for ideas that were too weird to make into novels. And Bolano's novels are pretty weird.

Nazi Literature in the Americas is not a satire of right-wing lunacy or the banality of evil (although there's plenty of lunacy, banality, and evil on display). “Irony” seems applicable in that you can't tell the author's attitude towards anything he's writing about, although the source and purpose of this irony is obscure. The only thing that rises above the irony is the ideal of art, and in the (relatively) long final section, in which Bolano appears as a character, he seems to take the idea of the serial killer as artistic visionary and prophet seriously. How seriously the reader can take this is another question.

Luckily, Bolano never fully commits to the idea (or any other), keeping things enigmatic. His collection of desperate outsiders and fringe figures, united only by their obsession with writing and their various connections with fascism, is bizarre enough to illuminate certain facets of early 21^st century reality beyond the reach of the social novel. Everywhere I look now, I see the Bolanoesque: Anders Breivik, the Tea Party, and especially outsider artist Royal Robertson, schizophrenic African-American sign painter turned misogynous prophet of a sci-fi apocalypse (Blake meets American junk culture) when his wife of twenty years left him and took their children. (I found out about him through Sufjan Stevens's hipster indie electro album, The Age of Adz.)

The early 20^th century was Kafkaesque. We thought that was scary. The early 21^st century is Bolanoesque. Now you can be scared.

The Future of the Novel (Besides Movie Adaptations)

It seems odd that American authors should be trying to revive the European social novel, a non-native form whose only successful American practitioners were James and Wharton. In 2011, I feel less like the novel is dead than I have during my lifetime, with Murakami's 1Q84 following upon 2666: as long as epic ambition and formal experimentation are found in our world novelists (and those novelists have enough popular appeal to be read outside their own countries and languages) the novel lives as much as it did in the day of Tolstoy and George Eliot or Proust and Joyce.

If I see anything worth “saving” of the 19^th century social novel, it's the realist character; for me, the exploration of psychology and human nature remain primary reasons to read and write. But I cannot give a flying saucer of milk about the contemporary heteronormative white middle class. The novel has to press forward, press further: there are no further insights to be mined here. We know too much for that now. Even those of us who, like me, are white, heteronormativish, and raised middle class. I want to read novels that know more than I do about humans who are alive now, not less.

I wasn't surprised to learn that the movie rights to The Marriage Plot have already been sold. As I read the (entertaining) section where Leonard goes on a manic gambling spree on his honeymoon, all I could do was wonder what the movie version would be like, because it was already written like the big dramatic section in a glossy entertainment, maybe directed by Scorsese (I guess I'm thinking of Casino). In other words, it was there for dramatic pleasure, for spectacle of a sort, not truth-to-character (or truth to his mental illness). The novel's dialogue, too, was taken from movies, not life (or even books): a mixture of screenplay-bland and, occasionally, stageplay-clever, but always ringing false. But put it in a movie (an average, naturalist Hollywood movie) and it'll all sound fine, because that's how people talk in them.

A final thing I noticed about the novel that seemed to speak to the difficulty of writing realism now was the absence of strong emotion at crucial dramatic points. Eugenides's informal rhetoric (like Bolano, he even uses exclamation points in the prose, which seems more out-of-place in the absence of other experimentation) can't allow for it. The climax of the 19^th century novel tends to deal in some kind of great epiphany or catharsis, whether it's Dorothea Brooke's extension of empathy to the Lydgates or the deathbed scene with Ralph and Isabel. But all emotional climaxes are muted here: “realism” now means quiet and small. (Only if a character has a manic episode do we get some good old-fashioned melodrama. He even wears a cape, like a proper entertaining crazy person.) It's impossible to feel much when Leonard abandons Madeleine, when the author won't go into her feelings about it in any depth; or when Mitchell renounces Madeleine, when he's so philosophical about it.

But the example that really stands out is the climax of Mitchell's episode working in Mother Theresa's hospice. Mitchell finally gets up his nerve to give a sick old man a bath, and gets to see the massive, disgusting tumour on his genitals. After that he's out of there like a bat out of hell. I'm still not sure what to make of this episode. Are we supposed to identify with Mitchell's failure of idealism, faced with brute physical fact? It's the sort of thing about which one might lazily say, “I couldn't deal with it either.” Much like Madeleine's inability to deal with her boyfriend's mental illness. But that doesn't necessarily make it “real.” I know people in happy long-term relationships and marriages who are bipolar or schizophrenic (surely everybody does nowadays?), and although I can imagine feeling sympathy for a character who does not feel they can cope with having a mentally ill partner, the author would have to work a little harder to make me feel that, rather than taking it for the normal and obvious reaction.

I don't mean to single out Eugenides for these faults: they seem endemic to our present expectations of realist writing. The contemporary personal style is casual and unemotive, and we believe we are selfish, with no hope of overcoming it. These things constitute “realism” for us. There's a certain masochistic satisfaction in admitting that the average person could never deal with anything a bit difficult. No, we just throw up our hands and run off. No wonder we're not the marrying kind anymore. This opinion of ourselves isn't true (nor does it have to be to be “realism,” a convention): I don't think the average person is more selfish now than they've ever been, based on seeing what people around me do all the time when tragedy strikes in the course of life, as it regularly does. But I can't cope with these low expectations of literary characters. Reading the 19^th century novel is a moral experience: characters either rise to the occasion, morally; or if they don't, that is their tragedy. “Yeah, I'd do the same thing” is no replacement, as part of the reading experience, for “I hope/fear I would do the same thing.” In fact the former is not what I understand as “the reading experience” (or experience of drama, since "I fear I would do the same thing" is the emotion of tragedy) at all.

The Monstrous Masculine and the Rise of the Pop Psychopath

2011-09-27T18:27:00.000-07:00

I've spent the last few weeks, in addition to working around the clock, working on a post about gender and androgyny inspired by my Kids in the Hall nostalgia trip. It occurred to me, however, that I should wait to finish it until I've finally read Judith Butler's Gender Trouble (which I just purchased as an e-book) and Mark Simpson's Male Impersonators (apparently going up as an e-book soon). Who knows, I might even get a publishable article out of all this research.

So instead I'll return to the topic that was originally going to be my next substantial post: the emergence of the male psychopath as a pop culture figure. Even though the topic gets heavily into gender, too.

In my previous substantial post, I suggested that pop feminism has validated, even valourized, female anger, originally as an expression of radicalized anger at the situation of women (directed against men), later, vaguely, as non-traditional gender expression. The assumption underlying the latter vindication of female anger is that female anger is culturally demonized. Although male anger is considered appropriate gender expression, however, that has not made it less demonized. On the contrary, it's the strong association in popular culture between men, anger, and violence that constitutes its demonization. If we want to examine negative gender stereotypes, there is nothing comparable among representations of women (not even the femme fatale of film noir) to the psychopath, who in the popular imagination is overwhelmingly male. And this applies to the most famous examples from life as well as from cinema; although here I won't be trying to tackle the former or the relationship between the two, which is far too ambitious for a blog post. Like many of my posts, in fact, this will consist of preliminary notes for a topic that would require massive research.

Precursors to the Psycho

Few would debate that the psychopath craze in movies was started with Norman Bates in Psycho (1960); however, his immediate precursors stretch back into the 1950s. We can attribute part of this shift in the perception of masculinity (like so many others), of course, to Marlon Brando's Stanley Kowalski, who burst onto movie screens in 1951 in Kazan's film of Streetcar Named Desire. Brando's Kowalski was a more primal, immediate, visceral version of masculinity; a fantasy of working-class masculinity that was received as more "realistic"; and characterized by a propensity for animalistic violence which, coupled with a wounded emotionalism, suggested mental instability. Sexy mental instability, of course; sexy because dangerous.

In the 1940s, movie masculinity still wore a suit, no matter how seedy that suit might be in film noir. As everyone knows, American film underwent a considerable darkening in the 1940s compared to the previous decade. However, it also went inward: both the 40s woman's film and film noir (which appeared to influence each other and produce hybrids from Mildred Pierce to Gilda) focused on the fractured interior life of female or male protagonist, respectively, and the emotions on display were hysteria and anxiety, regardless of gender. This Expressionistic investigation of neuroses was influenced by the belated American reception of Freud, which, however, wouldn't fully blossom in American cinema until the next decade.

As innumerable film commentators have noted, this focus of noir constituted a deconstruction of American masculinity, proving it ridden by doubt and fear, as well as "feminine" hysteria and anxiety. However, in the 40s there was still no strong association between masculinity and psychopathic violence. The noir protagonist is often a murderer, but passive nonetheless, like Tom Neal in Detour, so dissociated from his own aggression (which instead is foisted overwhelmingly onto the most aggressive of all femme fatales, Ann Savage's Vera) that he manages to murder twice "by accident." When he is associated with glamourous, tough guy violence, like Bogart in The Big Sleep, he is unmistakably heroic. Instances of full-blown psychopathy, as opposed to neurosis, remain the preserve of the villain, who in type is still the European or Europeanesque dandy-villain of 19th century theatre and literature (from Balin Munson in Gilda to Uncle Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt).

Interestingly, two of the earliest instances of the psychopath as villain protagonist or the "heroic psychopath" occur in 1950s literature written by women. Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley appeared in 1955, the same year that Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories was published. (The pertinent O'Connor story, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," was first published in 1953, according to Wikipedia.) O'Connor's Misfit, a nihilistic, religiously inspired roadside killer who believes that his lifestyle choice is the only logically consistent fulfillment of his agnosticism (if I've correctly paraphrased his, and his author's, tortured and tortuous reasoning), along with Highsmith's Ripley, personality thief and occasional killer of ambiguous sexuality, are surely the first iconic psychopaths per se. In France, however, the country that legitimized (and gave the name to) film noir, we can find a killer representing post-religious modern absurdism in a manner comparable to O'Connor's Misfit all the way back in 1942, with Camus's Meursault; who, however, seems to be more in the tradition of Kafka's protagonist-victims of obscure determinism, but with a new violence.

1955 also marked the original publication of Lolita in Paris, to be followed in 1958 by its publication in America, where it instantly became a bestseller, again according to Wikipedia. Although Humbert isn't exactly a psychopath, and certainly not a serial killer, the appearance and American reception of Lolita signaled a growing popular fascination with criminal protagonists and taboo sexual subjects. A film version of Lolita had to wait until 1962, when Psycho had already cleared the ground for taboo popular cinema subjects, with new levels of onscreen violence and sexual suggestiveness (not to mention their conflation in the shower scene), completing a process that had begun with Streetcar in 1951. Arguably the contemporary cinematic equivalent to Lolita was Kazan's Baby Doll (1956), with a screenplay by Tennessee Williams (naturally), adapted from one of his one-acts.

Throughout the 50s, Hollywood kept pace with American literature in its growing interest in psychopathology, criminal psychology, and violence. Even before Streetcar made it to the screen, there was Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place (1950), which did for the Bogart persona (established only half a dozen years earlier with Hawks's To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep) what Rear Window and Vertigo would do for the Stewart persona at the end of the same decade. Bogart's pointedly named Dix Steele is prone to rages, mood swings, and violence that the film treats as pathological and problematic. Ray would go on to deconstruct male anger and violence again in Bigger Than Life (1956), in which James Mason is a benign, mild-mannered 50s patriarch who becomes a filicidal megalomaniac when he's prescribed cortisone.

Most famously from the perspective of popular culture, Ray also directed James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955). The psychiatric orientation of the film is evident from its basis in a 1944 book, Rebel Without a Cause: The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath by Robert M. Lindner (which I found out just this moment on Wikipedia). To me it comes as news that there was such concern about the clash of generations already in the early 40s, two decades prior to "60s youth culture"; and that it was already being expressed, through psychoanalytic language, as concerns about "psychopathy" and delinquency. To me this strongly suggests that the pathologization and criminalization of masculinity were at least in part a creation of American Freudianism, which was already well underway in the 40s; although obviously this thesis would require much more research (or perhaps readers can direct me to works on this topic). Under this analysis, or psychoanalytic lens, in any case, masculinity (as well as youth) appears as a social problem, well in advance of second-wave feminism.

Poster boy for "psychopathy"?

Dean's iconic performance linked Brando's new masculinity directly to the problematized and pathologized emergent youth culture (indirectly, Brando's Streetcar performance anticipated rock 'n' roll, on which the new youth culture would center). A year later, the bizarre late Joan Crawford vehicle Autumn Leaves anticipated the exploitation direction Hitchcock would take with Psycho: Cliff Robertson's character, like Norman Bates, is ambiguously neurotic or psychopath, whose violence and infantile neediness (both directed towards a martyred Crawford) exaggerated the two poles of Brando's Kowalski, as his relationship with Crawford exaggerated the steamy domestic abuse undercurrent of Streetcar. (Director Robert Aldrich was no stranger to pulpy exploitation: his 1955 Kiss Me Deadly brought misogynous asshole detective Mike Hammer to the screen, and his 1962 Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? did the same for female psychopathy, in fine Grand Guignol form.)

Mommy's masochism is a great big sponge, soaking up baby's anger.

The 60s, or the Classic Psychopath

It was Psycho, however, that canonized the psychopath of the popular imagination. From now on, "psychopath" primarily meant "murderer," and American fascination with the murderer as a pop culture figure (with a special fondness for the serial killer, and as opposed to murder, as something that an ordinary Joe like the hardboiled/noir protagonist might stumble into) became overt. Capote's In Cold Blood (1966) gave the topic the sheen of legitimacy of serious literature. In the meantime, the juvenile delinquent gained a stronger association with violence in Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr. Sloane, where the clash of generations is represented in no uncertain terms with the Grand Guignol coup de theatre of the unstable title character's spontaneous onstage murder of an elderly paterfamilias. Orton's debut was inspired by Harold Pinter's late 50s plays featuring menacing male intruders, and Pinter's screenplay for Joseph Losey's The Servant (1963), with a superbly menacing performance by Dirk Bogarde (alternating identities between gentleman's gentleman servant and lower-class low-life as Catherine Deneuve would alternate between icy upper-class prude and whore in Bunuel's Belle de Jour four years later), managed to beat Orton to bringing the "thug" back to his homoerotic origins in Williams's working-class Kowalski. Although as Morrissey's early 80s appropriation of James Dean proved, the juvenile delinquent or thug and his violence were implicitly homoerotic all along.

All masters love to be dominated.

Despite being a demonized version of masculinity, viewed as erratic, violence-prone, and criminal-tending, the psychopath was always vaguely queer, from his appeal as a vehicle for transgressive self-portraiture for female, but not "feminine," writers like O'Connor and (the lesbian) Highsmith, to the rumoured bisexuality of Dean (and his Martin-and-Lewisesque tender relationship with Sal Mineo's gay-coded character in Rebel), to Norman Bates's Mommy-dependency and cross-dressing (and portrayal by a homosexual actor), to Capote's legendary ambivalent identification with "sensitive" murderer Perry Smith. "Psychopathic masculinity" was associated not only with violence but also with queerness. The new, openly emotional masculinity to which Williams and Brando had given birth was in a perpetual identity crisis; and it was this, not male power or dominance, that prompted its violence. The new masculinity was more male (more sexualized, more violent) but also more female (more emotional, more "unstable"... and more pathologized).

Unruly Boys, Who Will Not Grow Up/Unruly Girls, Who Will Not Settle Down: the 70s

The apotheosis of the juvenile delinquent genre was Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971), in this case taking almost a decade to bring a controversial novel to the screen. Malcolm McDowell's iconic portrayal of Alex was bizarrely gender-bending despite its outrageous phallicism and misogyny (in my casual image search for this post, I found an image of a woman dressed up as Alex, alone among my psychopaths), and the psychiatric probing of and prohibitions against rebellious masculinity as a violence in itself is overt in book and film.

A nice, clean-cut boy

By the 70s, possibly as a result of radical feminism and/or popular backlash against it, portrayals of troubled female puberty and adolescence (other than as the j.d.'s sidekick) and female rage finally appeared with The Exorcist (1971) and Carrie (1976), and to make up for the lag in their appearance, they were several times more visceral (the former arguably the definition of "horror-porn," to use a term I got from Leslie Fiedler) than most portrayals of male psychopathy. I'm not sure if it was Camille Paglia or some other feminist theorist (or more than one) who pointed out that this is because of the direct link, in the cultural imagination, between femaleness and (voracious) nature. (An association that would be philosophically explored in many of Cronenberg's 70s exploitation films, as well as his "mature" work of the late 80s onward.)

Estrogen rage, and other side-effects

After taking the juvenile delinquent genre to its logical, operatic/bombastic conclusion with Clockwork Orange, Kubrick did the same with the male psychopath horror film with The Shining (1981). I assume I'm not the first to wonder if Orange and The Shining are counter-feminist bookends to the decade of radical feminism: the first literally reveling in misogyny (quite exhilaratingly, even for a female viewer, or at least this one), the second, the violent rage of the paterfamilias against prescribed domesticity. Although The Shining arguably accomplished, or enshrined, the cultural demonization of Daddy almost to the same degree that Psycho did for Mommy. Maybe along with Sylvia Plath. If the second-wave feminist movement was an influence on the horror movies of the 70s (which it surely was), it's in a variety of complex, contradictory ways.

The 80s to the Millennium

After the popular art film peaks of Taxi Driver (1976) and The Shining (1981), the male psychopath disappeared from pop culture for most of the 80s, with the exception of the slasher film genre that Psycho is credited with spawning. Perhaps filmmakers had to think of new twists, which started at the end of the decade with a couple of popular female psychopath films, Fatal Attraction (1987) and Misery (1990). Feminists cried "backlash" over the former, which represented the professional woman as a murderous stalker, desperately jealous of the domesticity she's denied herself; but maybe it's the modern horror film that's got an animus against domesticity. Remember, Daddy in The Shining has to get put down, too. Maybe the male and the feminist/phallic woman represent equal threats to a domestic unit imagined as being presided over by a sacred female guardian (not woman, but mother). (And not Norman's Mother, either.) In any case, Fatal Attraction was a last hurrah for the sacred nuclear family in the throwback-to-50s 80s, before everyone stopped caring in the 90s. Misery, meanwhile, has its roots in the Grand Guignol female horror tradition of Baby Jane rather than in Psycho. In fact, Kathy Bates's torment of an invalid (although male in this - post-feminist? - case) makes it a Baby Jane homage. Please allow me to pay homage to Mark Simpson's statement, "The feminist is Ms Whiplash" (found in context here), by suggesting that rather, the feminist is the woman breaking your ankles with a sledgehammer. At least in the male imagination (and legitimately enough).

A year later, the male psychopath experienced a giant resurgence with the film version of Silence of the Lambs and the publication of Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho. When you thought there couldn't be any more controversy over representations of sex and violence, Ellis managed it, and there was no movie version until 2000. Ellis's novel took aim at the sociopathy of yuppies and consumer culture, in other words looking backwards to the 80s, but the movie appeared at a different cultural moment and became a harbinger of the narcissistic, determinedy single masculinity of the metrosexual 2000s: Simpson namechecks it in the Salon.com article, "Meet the Metrosexual," that brought this figure (or rather, theory of contemporary masculinity) to American attention.

Metrosexual? Are you looking at me?

But Patrick Bateman was nowhere near as popular or iconic as Anthony Hopkins's hammy Hannibal Lecter (or differently, Britishly hammy, since Christian Bale is pretty damn hammy, Methodly hammy, in American Psycho). Lecter (especially in Ridley Scott's awful, arty-bombastic sequel) is something of a retrograde psychopath to set against the thoroughly up-to-date, anal-retentive psychopathy of Bateman: Lecter is the European dandy-villain, albeit with a grisly little habit. Yet Lecter's awesome powers of ass-kicking, combined with his old-fashioned appreciation of manners, somehow made him into the first psychopath to be not just sympathetic but a positive hero. A sort of hero antagonist in the first movie, he became an unambiguous hero in the popular imagination, presumably the reason for making him one in the sequel, which seemed (like the Psycho sequels, in fact) to essentially be fan fiction.

Psychofetish

Lecter paved the way for the serial killer as sympathetic protagonist, even a sort of superhero, which was realized in the Dexter TV series, debuting in 2003.* There have been plenty of true crime and popular psychology books devoted to serial killers throughout the 80s and 90s, and I've read a few, and Dexter is portrayed far less as a sociopath (except for those urges to kill) than as an autistic person, alienated from social norms, including relationships. I would have to do some research to be sure, but my impression is that the popular fascination with real-life psychopaths or sociopaths surged in the 80s, whereas by the 90s autism presented the new challenge to our ability to conceptualize rare mental states that estrange the common notion of what it means to be human. On the other hand, if 80s yuppie consumers seemed a bit like benumbed sociopaths, carefully observing surface norms with Darwinian competitiveness surging underneath, maybe by the turn of the century autism was a better metaphor for an over-mediated pervading sense of numbness and unreality. Although how that differs from Meursault's sense of numbness and unreality circa 1942, I'm not too sure.

If on the one hand Lecter paved the way for the psychopath-as-superhero, he also paved the way for the superhero-as-psychopath, namely Lisbeth Salander. As a tattoo-updated version of the retrograde militant virtuous women of puritan imagination (for which see Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel), Lisbeth, as rape victim, is justified in doing absolutely anything she wants to: no amount of degradation or torture she inflicts on the villains can remotely soil her moral credentials. She is, therefore, the perfect action heroine or hero, which it took Larsson's apparently limitlessly masochistic (and sadistic) imagination to produce.

Homage a l'Orange

Lisbeth Salander doesn't quite fit the schemata of the male psychopath, although she may represent a fulfillment of the fantasy represented by Hannibal Lecter impossible for a male character, because rape, in the prurient puritan imagination of which the "rape culture" strain of feminism is simply a particularly pathological manifestation, is a crime worse than murder, morally justifying any retributive actions by the victim (at least in representation). And these retributive actions, like Lecter's acts of torture and murder in Hannibal (2001), are simply ways for the average viewer or reader to vicariously indulge in the guilty, pornographic pleasures of sadism and righteousness simultaneously.

Incidentally, I say all of this without having read Larsson's Millennium Trilogy; my impression of the series is based on Tim Parks's New York Review of Books article "The Moralist," which I read in the light of Fiedler's theory of the rape theme in English literature in Love and Death in the American Novel. I may yet read the series, and may enjoy it even if I'm right about it. After all, as Paglia pointed out, art and literature are full of sadism and perversion, often disguised as moralism, as in Spenser's Faerie Queene (which introduced the rape theme, according to Fiedler). (That I have read.)

I'm considering reading the series despite my experience of being disappointed by popular literature (as well as "literary fiction") because I can't get away from the weird similarities (which I've mentioned on this blog before) between Larsson's life and writing and the life and writing of Roberto Bolano, the millennial darling of the same literati who turn up their noses at Larsson and Lisbeth. Larsson was born in 1954 and died in 2004, aged 50; his bestselling trilogy was published posthumously, starting in 2005. Bolano was born in 1953 and died in 2003, aged 50; his epic masterwork, 2666, was published in 2004. Larsson fought as a journalist against right-wing groups in Sweden, and his anti-right wing crusade informs his trilogy; Bolano gives a bizarre account of imaginary right-wing zealots and crackpots in Nazi Literature in the Americas (1996; English translation 2008), which I have nearly finished reading and will review when I have. (Its dark fascination with violence and sadism has, I'm sure, coloured this post, which I conceived before I started reading it.) While for the average North American, Nazism seems like a curious, antiquarian interest, just over a decade in, the new millennium has seen the rise to mainstream influence of the extreme right-wing Tea Party in the United States and the fascism-inspired mass killings of Anders Breivik in Norway. Suddenly, right-wing "fringe characters" are of urgent interest to us all once again.

In fact, when I read the August 15 Newsweek article on Michele Bachmann, "The Queen of Rage" (the one with the notorious so-called "crazy eyes" photo), I was struck by a quote that the writer featured from one of her sympathizers, Donna Fouts, 73: "Well, I'm sick of all them other politicians that tell me what to do with my life. Something about her tells me to follow her." I could hear the very intonations, as well as the reasoning, of O'Connor's Grandmother in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," and thought, here we are back in 1955, with the socially and politically alienated responding to religious "rage"... while over in Norway, Anders "The Misfit" Breivik is going to make us all good people by putting a gun to our heads (and firing).

2666? 2011 feels pretty apocalyptic to me.

In addition to his fascination with Nazis, Bolano was also fascinated with serial killers, which is thematically prominent in 2066. Like Larsson, Bolano was a fan of crime and detective fiction who managed to transform it into something else: something with broader popular appeal, in Larsson's case, and something with greater critical appeal, in Bolano's. Bolano manages to give us serial killer fiction without a serial killer; the identity and motivations of the killer (or more likely, killers) remains mysterious despite several suggested "solutions." Instead of focusing on the killer, Bolano focuses on the crimes: the endless catalogue of forensically described dead bodies of raped, mutilated, and tortured women. The murders had a real-life model, and Bolano's portrayal of them is both feminist and misogynous: there's no attempt to hide, rather there is probably an attempt to evoke, a serial killer-like fetishism about these forensic descriptions and this exhaustive cataloguing, like Dexter's neat and orderly, fetishistic/ritualistic murder scenes on a grand scale (Dexter is, professionally, a forensic specialist).

The fastidious psychopath, for a hand sanitizer era

Conclusion: The Reign of Rage

So here's where we're at in 2011 in terms of the psychopath in popular culture: a widely-acknowledged postmodern masterpiece (heavily informed by pulp and crime fiction) about serial killings with no killer, whose decadent art involves testing the limits of the writer and reader's tolerance for sadism; and the popular sensation of a psychopathic vigilante heroine who, thanks to retrograde attitudes to female sexuality that feminists have helped to keep in place when they should have been fighting them, is permitted through a double standard moral loophole to indulge the furthest extremes of the reader's sadism. Some of us may prefer plot momentum and cartoonishy charismatic characters, while others prefer literary experimentation and flourishes of the bizarre and erudite; beyond that, I think the fans of Bolano and Larsson are getting something suspiciously similar out of the authors' consciously millennial posthumous works. Namely, the underrated literary joys of vicarious sadism, disgust, and horror, especially as a reaction to millennial anxiety about where the hell the human race and is going (and has recently been).

All of the foregoing raises the question: why did the psychopath emerge as a pop culture figure, and will he ever go away? His appearance long predates second-wave feminism, reminding us that masculinity is not only a problem for feminism, and femaleness not alone in presenting a challenge to self-appointed guardians of society and culture. Gaining momentum during the 50s, he seems to have anticipated the cultural revolution of the 60s, which Paglia associated with "Dionysian energy," initially bringing a new surge of humanist optimism but ending in violence (much like the French Revolution). The 60s closed with the Manson Murders and Altamont. But the threat of violence was already there in the juvenile delinquent of the 1950s, who turned into the psychopath of popular imagination in 1960, at the start of the decade. In addition to Norman Bates, and with a direct relationship to 60s counterculture, there's Jerry in Albee's The Zoo Story, a visionary Village psychopath; the play was written in 1958 and first produced in the US in 1960. An acknowledgment of the energy of violence, and the violence of energy, was a part of the 60s (and the counterculture's hostility to bourgeois decorum and complacency) the whole way along.

But although the psychopath may have been a harbinger of the 60s cultural shift, he also long predated it (all the way back to the 40s, at least in psychiatric literature) and survived it. The sexual revolution was never just about "free love" and an increase of civil liberties regarding the private lives of individuals; it was also about a shattering of bourgeois decorum through an upsurge of sex and violence. Looking back on some of the classic movies of the 70s I mentioned above, the 70s would appear to be the decade of rage, and not just for women. One might also think of punk rock in the same decade. In the 80s, conservatism and decorum gained some ground again; while in the movies, hyper-masculine action heroes kept American free from Communism. Suddenly masculine violence was patriotic, rather than a threat to social stability. But the overall trend was still towards greater and greater social permissiveness, and especially permissiveness of representation. By the 90s, Rambo had been replaced as American hero by Hannibal the Cannibal, the first time the European dandy-villain was ever put in that service, and it was because he could kick ass better than anyone else. With Lisbeth Salander, we show no signs of backing away from that representational trend. I mean, in The Passion of the Christ (2004) even Jesus had to be represented as the greatest ass-kicker of them all, as logic-defyingly proved by his ability to survive the ass-kicking of all-time (including death!).

When I started this post I thought I might be able to discover a link between feminist misandry and the male psychopath figure of popular imagination, but it does not appear to be the case. Rather, feminist vilification of masculinity per se (men as rapists and abusers; violence as the essence of masculinity) seems to co-exist with a wider cultural perception of masculinity as a threat. Again, this suggests: not just femaleness (as feminism would have it), but masculinity are a threat to the status quo. To think that all of these years, I considered ways to modify the argument that Psycho is misogynous, and it never occurred to me to wonder if it was misandrous. (I also forgot to mention Cape Fear, Scorsese's 1991 bombastic remake of a 50s Robert Mitchell film in which a convicted rapist wreaks similar, but far worse, havoc on a nuclear family than Close in Fatal Attraction; or the 1955 noir classic Night of the Hunter, in which Mitchum plays a vile Southern preacher and widow-killer who is both a kindred of the Misfit and nearly his symbolic opposite, given his defeat by a virtuous version of the Grandmother, which O'Connor could never have conceived. Scorsese's cartoon violent male villains are counterparts to the psychopath-as-superhero: superheroic in power, they are nevertheless finally defeatable. The Coen Brothers seem to have picked up where Scorsese left off with this. Are films like Gangs of New York, which I saw, and No Country for Old Men, which I didn't bother to see or read because I figured it would be more of the same, critiques of the mythos of male violence... or additions to it... or misandrist epics? Or all three?)

(Incidentally, Cape Fear earned a photograph in Mark Simpson's blog post on misandry in popular culture, prompted by a tip by Quiet Riot Girl. You can find the post, which reproduces his 2002 review of a book on the topic, here, and below, tons of discussion, including my mild expression of initial skepticism towards the idea.)

By 2011 we love psychopaths more than ever before; in fact, they are our superheroes. Having accepted the tenets of moral relativism, the only morality we believe in when it comes to fictional characters is badassery, which is backed up by kickassery. I don't say that this is necessarily a bad (or worse) thing, or productive or reflective of actual increases in violence (private or political, on the streets or across the globe), nihilism, despair, or moral coarseness. Its fictive representation, however, is, at least, very non-Victorian. The violence, the sex, and the nihilism. (The despair is pretty Victorian though; as for levels of moral coarseness, I can't speculate.)

It's hard to know where the pop psychopath can go after Lecter and Dexter (a show I stopped watching after a few seasons because it turned out that I only had so much sympathy to spare for the moral dilemmas of a serial killer); but then, it was hard to know where he could go after Norman Bates, and really no one has ever surpassed the feat of Hitchcock and Perkins in making the first true pop psychopath always already lovable. But where masculinity studies might go is figuring out the precise nature of the threat that the masculinity embodied by "the psychopath" posed, and poses, to the status quo. (Unless it's already done that and I don't know about it.) God knows we've spent enough time and spilled enough ink and characters over the "feminine threat." What about the monstrous masculine?

Not So Original

In the internet era, you've barely had time to congratulate yourself on a clever concept before you've discovered that, of course, someone has already thought of it. So far I`ve only glanced at this blog post, "What We Talked About At ISA: The Monstrous Masculine: War Rape, Race/Gender, and the Figure of the Rapacious African Warrior," from the site The Disorder of Things, but it looks excellent, and far, far more politically informed than my modest little pop culture tour, though it also calls for further research. I can't even tell if the approach is feminist, or part of masculinity studies, or gender studies, or what. Clearly, cultural studies (or is it called international studies now, or is that different?) has moved far beyond my meager version of feminism, as vanguardish as that was in 1991. (Wait, I'll find out that "the monstrous masculine" dates from, like, 1994.) However, if it's new to me, it may be new to someone who stumbles on this post, and it`s the first encouraging sign I've seen in what might be called contemporary "feminism," or might be better called post-feminist theory. (Bet that concept dates from 1972.)

(For a different example, I offer Quiet Riot Girl's intriguing post "Against Feminisms," and she may object to "post-feminist theory" in the comments if she wishes.)

Oh well, I'm not a cutting-edge theorist (in case you were deceived), just a blogger and a reader (and a film buff). So I'll leave you with instructions to puzzle over whose 1970s badass makeover was better, Robert De Niro's or Olivia Newton-John's:

*I feel like it was Jonathan Rosenbaum who gave me the idea that Lecter is a superhero, but in looking over his negative analysis of the popular and critical hoo-hah surrounding the film, the frankly titled "The Ill and the Sick," I can only find references to Lecter as as a religious figure, so perhaps "superhero" was my own gloss on his analysis.

Whip v. Cane: Kink and Spectacle in Wyler's 'Jezebel'

2011-08-21T00:51:00.000-07:00

The strengths of William Wyler's Jezebel do not lie in its screenplay, based on a stage melodrama by Owen Davis (a Pulitzer Prize winner, I just learned on Wikipedia). However, the stage origins of the film do become a strength: many of the film's most memorable scenes (including the one that's lived on in cinematic legend, the Olympus Ball scene) turn on rituals, and Bette Davis's disruptive relationship to them. There is an awareness of space and bodies within it, and what the characters are doing and how they interact is far more important than what they're saying. It's a film full of what creaky old theatre parlance calls business, as well as the use of significant props. Through these props the kinky sadomasochistic subtext of this coolly classical Hollywood film is revealed.

From the beginning, the play/screenplay anticipates the sexually/dramatically charged Olympus Ball scene, in which Davis scandalizes antebellum southern society by appearing in a dress fit for a prostitute. Davis makes a fine theatrical entrance, late for her own engagement party in horsey clothes. Inappropriately – and masculinely – dressed, Davis announces that she's been busy breaking a horse that's been giving her trouble, and to underline the point, she's first seen holding a whip. The terms of her relationship with her fiance (an infuriatingly stoic, stiff, and self-righteous Henry Fonda, auditioning for his role as Stanwyck's whipping boy in The Lady Eve) are set: who's going to break whom is an issue that needs to get dealt with before they can marry. Although absent from the scene, Fonda has already made his own, passive-aggressive move – by his absence. What's more important: an engagement party (the feminine realm) or a bank meeting in which progressive young Fonda is trying to convince the fuddy duddies to act to prevent a new outbreak of deadly Yellow Fever? Rationally, we have to side with Fonda – and on the surface, the film asks us to. But of course we know this untouchable moral position is a dirty move, and emotionally, we side with Davis.

From there, they just keep upping the ante. Characteristically, Davis decides to deal with the problem directly, by barging in where she's not supposed to go: she marches into the back of the bank, where ladies are not allowed, and interrupts the meeting. Her “frivolous” purpose is to get Fonda to go with her to her dress fitting for the ball. We know, of course, that if he concedes to this request, he will be completely emasculated – especially if he concedes to her in front of a roomful of men. This is his punishment for humiliating her (and it is a genuine humiliation) by not showing up at their engagement party. Like her, he pretends that all is well, but when one of the men (older and wiser) suggests that a round of physical abuse is just the thing to improve their relationship on every level, even the “progressive” Fonda is tempted.

The scene of Davis's fitting is beautifully bizarre, another tribute to Owen Davis's instinct for stage spectacle if it came from him: Davis, in bloomers and undershirt, is trapped from the waist down in a cage-like petticoat hoop, through which we can see her sitting on a high stool while she tries on gowns. Because this is Bette Davis, her upper body – especially the arms and hands – moves incessantly, restlessly, emphasizing her enforced stillness. Make no mistake, this is not only a metaphor for Julie Marsden's entrapment by propriety, against which her ultimately sexual energy rebels: it's also kinky pornography. Wyler can get away with showing a woman in a state of undress because of the old-fashioned setting and full covering of her undergarments – but they're what make the whole thing so kinky.

It's here that Julie impulsively selects the red dress, as it goes by her (it's been ordered by some “scandalous” woman, a high-class prostitute, no doubt), as Pres's punishment for not conceding to her at the bank. She knows she can't possibly get away with it, and probably doesn't seriously intend to wear it. But the move that tips things over into tragedy – within the terms of melodrama – is Pres's. When he's finished at the bank, he goes to see her and see her dress, as promised. However, he's denied entry. Deciding it's time to deal with Julie properly, he, too, makes an impulsive decision – grabbing a cane on his way up the stairs to her bedroom. There's a great moment where her sympathetic aunt, watching, is horrified and moves to intervene, but she's held back by Julie's other guardian, her disapproving uncle. He's quite right: these two have to work it out for themselves, by whatever means necessary.

Before the moment of truth arrives, however, we're treated to what, to my mind, is the film's greatest set-piece (or at least, it's most overlooked one, overshadowed by the famous Olympus Ball set-piece), one that fascinated me as a young viewer. I went through a Bette Davis obsession between the ages of twelve and fourteen, and during those years and for a couple of years afterwards I watched Jezebel – my favourite Davis film besides All About Eve – dozens of times. Although I'd been finding out about the history of Hollywood from library books, I didn't know about the good movie rental stores in my city at the time, so what I got to see was limited to what I could tape off of TV (half a dozen classic Davis movies and a couple of Garbo ones). Much more than the literature I was reading, the handful of studio-era Hollywood films I endlessly rewatched during this period served as my induction into the mysteries of what one might inadequately, on all counts, call “normative” adult psychology and opposite-sex relationships. (I mean, it wasn't like Naked Lunch or Our Lady of the Flowers or The Trial were going to give me much help there. Or even Colette, since I was never going to be a perfectly handsome, vain, spoiled young man obsessed with a middle-aged courtesan.)

The long, silent movie-like scene that comes between Pres's decision to use the cane and its consequences fascinated me more than any other scene in the film in my original viewings. Once again, Davis is “in her underwear” – once again, fascinating underwear (a lacy, beribboned, semi-transparent dressing gown). She is lounging in a chair next to her bed, doing her needlework, her hair – another point of fetishistic fascination, knotted in little bows – being attended to by her Negro servant. The picture of upper-class feminine luxury, indolence, and “Christian” industry. But what fascinated me most was the psychological game that she plays.

Having made her move by denying Fonda entrance, she knows how he will react – and she is prepared for it. She is going to torture him by making him wait; as a woman in a conservative society, even one as restless as she is, she knows how to practice patience. (This is another scene of female waiting, which I described in a previous post with reference to another forbidden female bedroom.) The scene is as blisteringly brilliant as it is, however, due not only to the kinky premise, but to Wyler and Davis's execution.

The scene could only be conceived by a theatrical intelligence: we do not see Pres for its duration, but only hear him, through the door, while watching Julie's actions and reactions. He starts out sugar-sweet, appealing to her to let him in so they can make up. As soon as she hears him, Davis's servant instinctively moves to let him in, but Davis (always brilliant with her gestures and expressions) stops her by seizing her arm – behind her, while her eyes, looking at the door, in front of her, glaze over and glare. The maid doesn't understand: like the child-viewer I was, the caricatured “darkie” can't comprehend the destructive and self-destructive games that adults play.

I remember the very first time I (formally) met the critic George Toles, who arranged for us to be introduced after he saw, and admired, my play Live With It. I was eighteen and he was about fifty. We met at A&W and, although I can't remember what I ate (a Teen Burger and vanilla milkshake were my usual fare), I do recall that George was eating fries dipped in gravy while we avidly discussed Bette Davis films. (Or that, or the conversation, could have been the second time we met, in the same place.) I don't know what he was doing (perhaps having an innocent conversation), but I was sussing him out – I had heard that he was a professor of English, theatre, and film, and while this impressed me very much, I had to know that he had good taste before I granted him my esteem. And for me at the time, with my limited range of reference, “good taste” meant honouring Bette Davis. Luckily, George was fluent in Davis films, and we got into a spirited argument about the infamous scene in The Little Foxes where Davis wills her invalid husband to die after he has an attack and falls down the staircase behind her, unable to reach his heart medicine. I was gleefully into the sadism of the scene, whereas George told me what he found remarkable about it was Davis's visible, valiant fighting of every human impulse in her to prevent her from going to his aid.

And that is one, primary thing that makes Davis so compelling on film: her visible, hysterical conflict as she perversely acts in opposition to her own needs, desires, and best impulses. Here, we watch as she responds calmly to Pres's growing insistence and, finally, naked anger (after she gives another turn of the screw by turning the lock), floating around the room, pretending to take her time as she prepares herself to receive him. (Who's she performing for? Not for her – gawking – servant; not for Pres, who can't see her, although in one sense for him; not for the audience, whom she cares about as little as Pres. It's all for herself.) She rises, straightens her dressing gown, and wanders over to her dresser, where – in another strange, archaic (and masochism-tinged) ritual, she picks up a large hairbrush and smacks herself on each cheek with the wooden back, also aggressively pinching her cheeks to add colour. (Ladies don't use rouge.) All the while, she knows she's safe from his rage – after all, he's in a position of impotence, and in dramaturgical terms, his words are just meaningless sound in accompaniment to her actions. But all of this is mere provocation, coyness elevated to a fine, sadomasochistic art: she's winding him up as a sexual game, the deep level on which the scene works.

The game, however, is fated to go awry. She finally opens the door, making a flirtatious remark about the indecency of pounding on a ladies' bedroom door – and then she sees the cane. Wyler makes a point of it: a shot of the cane, a shot of her reaction. As usual with Davis, it's a thinking reaction. Importantly, Pres doesn't notice her noticing; in fact, as soon as she lets him into the room, he forgets about the cane, leaving it just inside the door. He would like to forget about everything that's passed between them, even what just happened. But he doesn't get it. There is no going back from the cane. The implication that he would beat her is unforgivable; he's playing outside the rules.

And perhaps, just as he wasn't “really” planning to use the cane, so she wasn't “really” planning to use the dress – by showing it to him as her choice. But once she sees the cane, the die is cast. Now she will have to use her weapon, even though the consequences will be for her, not him: first, by humiliating her in front of the entire community; second, by ending their relationship, which, since she loves him, is the last thing she wants to do.

Jezebel is one of those films – about the battle of the sexes – that I assume must be entirely different viewing experiences depending on whether you're a woman or a man, even though presumably most viewers can sympathize and identify somewhat with both perspectives in it. Wyler, certainly, appears to understand what it means for Julie to be threatened with abuse in response to her unruly behaviour. After all, she may have metaphorically been holding the whip hand with Pres, but she never threatened to use a whip on him. And although on the one hand, these props – the whip and the cane – are metaphors for the kinky aspect of their sexually charged battle of wills – the cane, and abuse, here, is also literal. And not just literal (and literal abuse, not BDSM), but also symbolic of something that may even be more offensive than the use of violence: the implication that he wants to control her behaviour as a woman. This is Wyler's version of so-called “patriarchy,” in which men will decide the limits of female behaviour, and punish their transgressions, as an act of psychological violence that will be enforced with physical violence if necessary.

But the film's psychology is a lot more complex than that. It's important that even the female viewer never entirely loses sympathy with Pres's behaviour, no matter how unsympathetic it becomes, or knows what one would do in his place. (It's a film full of unsympathetic behaviour by both principals.) Until the Olympus Ball scene, Julie has brazened her way through society's opposition; but here, with all of society staring at her, positioned in direct violation of its precepts, she gives in to shame and can't go through with it. But Pres, as stubborn as she is, forces her to see through the consequences of her willfulness and keeps her a prisoner at the ball: if she wants to make a spectacle of herself, she will have to experience what being a spectacle means.

For him, the relationship is over before he even takes her to the ball, as soon as he sees she's determined to go through with wearing the dress. Once he's fulfilled and more than fulfilled his duty as her escort, he then has the temerity to dump her – at her doorstep. What ensues – again, gestures and facial expressions – also had an enormous impact on me as a teenage viewer. He tells her it's over and she pretends to accept it graciously, smiling and offering her hand; but when he takes it, her other hand whips out and slaps his face viciously, whereupon she gives him one of her classic Bette Davis glares, never more powerful than in this film where she and Wyler emphasize her physical and psychological fragility. I was fascinated by this sadistic undercutting of social pretence; by Julie's refusal to assume the moral high ground or conceal the ugly hostility of their parting. She can't refuse herself her revenge, even though, again, it's Pyrrhic.

The second act of Jezebel deals with Julie's attempts at redemption after she realizes she has really driven Pres away for good. In the film's “official” morality, Julie is a quasi-sympathetic bitch who goes too far and alienates her man, which teaches her a lesson and sets her on a rocky road to becoming a genuine “good woman.” The film – or anyway, the screenplay – is a textbook example of the “having it both ways” morality of classic Hollywood: on the one hand, the audience gets to enjoy Julie's shocking behaviour and sadism; on the other hand, we pretend it's all in the service of her moral redemption.

But there are many scenes to enjoy in the second half, too. For me the scene in which Julie essentially throws herself at Pres in the virginal white dress he wanted her to wear – kneeling before him – without knowing that he's married, is not one of them. Similar in its emotional dynamics to the climactic onstage scene of De Palma's Carrie, the Olympus Ball scene is nearly unbearable viewing for a female viewer, but in that scene, at least, Julie is made abject – by her society, by Pres – whereas in the kneeling scene, she humiliates herself (both deliberately and inadvertently). And for my teenage self, at least, that was far worse, since she couldn't conceive anything worse than throwing yourself at a man and being rejected. (Which is why the ball scene in Pride and Prejudice where Darcy refuses to dance with Elizabeth was such a feminist revelation for me.) George Toles has argued this point with me as well, and perhaps Davis herself thought that Julie was simply humbling her pride in this scene – but perhaps Davis, as an actress or persona, is incapable of doing that “correctly,” in a way that would be moving rather than painful to watch; or perhaps we, as viewers, are incapable of wanting to see her that way.

Much better, for me, is the scene where Julie is pushed to a point of desperation akin to madness when she's faced with having to play hostess to Pres's northern wifey, and indulges in some of her worst behaviour yet. She takes herself off to the back porch of the manor house, overlooking the Negro shacks, and suffers the little slave children to come unto her, leading them in song. When Pres's wife looks askance on this wild scene, Julie informs her, batting her eyelashes more aggressively than you would think possible, that it's a quaint “southern custom,” and also announces that she wore her white dress “'cause I'm bein' baptized!” Amy the northern wifey may be all for progress (including a marriage based on modern “equal partnership” rather than sizzling one-upmanship), but there's something about a white woman in a white dress mingling with the Negro slaves that appals her delicate puritan sensitivity. I wouldn't go as far as this blogger, who thinks that the threatened caning stands in for the violence of slavery, but I do think that Julie's “lowering herself” to mingle with the slaves makes a symbolic equivalence between her and their abject pariah status – and, with it, innocence. She tried to exalt herself by demeaning herself when she knelt in front of Pres, but here she actually accomplishes it, even if only the viewer recognizes it. (And even if the slaves – like her maid – are merely uncomprehending props in her complicated, sophisticated, grown-up “white person” games.)

I will confess that I'm not unaffected by the “redemption porn” that Wyler and Davis so beautifully accomplish at the end of the film, especially since the final bartering exchange – for Pres's unconscious, half-dead body! – between Amy and Julie contains Jamesian elements of ambiguity as to just how selfless Julie is being. Wyler turns Davis into a soft-focus waif, wearing herself to death in Pres's service, a single-minded somnambulist in a sweaty, ragged black gown that's been dragged through a swamp (with fabulous puffy spotted sleeves I've never forgotten). (Davis, I recall, once said that Orry-Kelly's gown designs did half her acting for her in another Wyler film, The Little Foxes; here, the same designer's gowns are, at least, brilliant collaborators with her.) The wasted beauty Wyler finds in Davis in these final scenes, surpassing the prettiness she achieved in earlier scenes and never managed to repeat in another film, is a distinctly Hollywood (glamourous, erotic) version of “spiritual beauty,” but I can't deny its effectiveness in its own terms.

But Julie's real redemption takes place in the film's subtext: the scene where Pres collapses from Yellow Fever in a crowded bar, where all of the men (now truly revealed as emasculated cowards) stand back from him except for the doctor (who, incidentally, is the one who recommended the caning) makes a symbolic equivalence between this infected, infectious pariah and the “contamination” of unconfined female sexuality symbolized by Julie's red dress in the Olympus Ball scene. Including the fact that Julie is shunned in a feminine “society” space, by the “good,” “pure” women who fear her contamination (and who lead their men in that respect), while Pres is shunned by a roomful of men.

Other than the – disturbing – “Raise Some Rufus” singalong scene, my favourite scene from the second part of the film also answers the Olympus Ball scene. (The film not only leads up to it by echoing it in advance, but keeps on “answering” it – digesting it – afterwards.) Julie has made herself a pariah a second time over by trying to manipulate Pres and his former rival for her, Buck, into a duel, but accidentally getting Buck's naive young man-about-town protege involved instead of Pres. In the end, Buck is killed or lets himself be killed. This melodrama subplot is a manipulation that forces Julie into a technical villain position, in a way that feels rather artificial and a betrayal of her more interesting qualities. At the same time, however, it also echoes the dynamics of the Olympus Ball scene, since Buck's protege is being rash and headstrong and Buck intends to “tutorially” make him see through the consequences of it – although in the end he can't go through with what that would mean.

Now everyone – even her supportive aunt – in Julie's household turns against her in a wall of self-righteous moral outrage. The time-honoured dramaturgical result, of course, is to make Julie seem morally sympathetic, even though she's in a morally inexcusable position for the first time. The only thing worse than a villain is the villainy of group moral outrage. And when Yellow Fever means that they can't march out of Julie's house en masse as they wished, it's the group's turn to get a comeuppance. They return to the house with grumpy bad grace and forced humbleness – while Julie exhibits perfect good grace and the grace (almost in the elevated Christian sense) of genuine humility and southern hospitality – in bowing before them, welcoming them back in. Which also shows that Davis can “do” humility – when it's actual humility, not humiliation posing as humility. Once again, the scene – drawing on the film's stage origins and the southern setting – pivots around ritual and formal manners. Julie draws on the Magdelene side of her casting as whore and on her similarly demonized southern background, disappearing into a social tradition of humility: she is not humiliated (and humiliates no one) in this scene because her visibility is diminished rather than heightened.

One thing I can agree about with the blogger's slavery subtext theory (marvellous blog title, by the way: I Hate the New Yorker): I think the film's sadomasochistic thematic undercurrent (not just the cane) probably refers to the suppressed subject of slavery. In which even, perhaps (and now I'm warming to the theory), women – the abject, the uppity – are metaphorically equivalent to slaves. But then, so is the abject, disease-ridden, backwards, unreformable south: it, too, is the demonized/romanticized Other. At any rate, the transformation of the master/slave conception of the world into BDSM kink at the interpersonal level (which in turn serves as a metaphor for the former) also shows up in one of the most overtly kinky mainstream English-language films ever made, Losey's The Servant. Which will surely turn up as a subject in a future post.

How the Wall of Sound Came Down: Indie, Hip Hop, and Musical Equality

2011-08-14T21:08:00.000-07:00

When I was writing my posts on the death/defence of the hipster, in my research on the hipster background I learned that hip hop and punk both sprang up during the 70s in New York, and started to ponder and speculate about this. The issue of race and music that forms part of the (Anglo world) hipster “debate” (if you can call it that, because it largely consists of suspiciously hipsterish magazines, from Canadian Adbusters to New York Magazine to the slightly more balanced, or just more ironic, British Pigeons & Peacocks, hyperbolically attacking hipsters) was what originally inspired me to make a post about the hipster phenomenon. Because happening concurrently with the hipster's rising profile were frequent press attacks on indie music for the crime of being too white (notably by the – of course – white New Yorker critic, Sasha Frere-Jones); and then Christian Lander sealed the deal by starting a blog-to-books in which “white people” was used as a euphemism for “hipster.”

Like Frere-Jones, I wondered how we'd reached this impasse in popular music/culture, and I went about answering the question by tracing the origins of indie music back to punk, since the indie scene was one of the sources of the hipster, and it was hip hop and indie that stopped talking to each other (until recent developments). I came up with the tentative hypothesis that hip hop and punk didn't need to talk to each other, because they were parallel developments. I didn't bother posting about this, though, because it would require a lot of research into the history of popular music that I didn't have the time for.

Conveniently, however, the BBC has done that research for me, and put it into an entertaining documentary, Once Upon a Time in New York: The Birth of Hip Hop, Disco and Punk, which I only just found out about by pure accident on Twitter. The narrative of the doc is very much like the one I pieced together from my casual online research and previous sketchy understanding of the trajectory of pop music/culture history, although it also filled in details I was unaware of, particularly about the origins of hip hop.

First, there was The Velvet Underground, whom Warhol brought to attention. (Warhol provides the transition from studio-era Hollywood glamour to the new music-based popular culture of youth, fashion, and rock. Oh yeah and drugs, drugs, and drugs.) Then came The New Yorks Dolls, who inspired the CBGB bands. At the same time, disco was invented (apparently by white, though not WASP, DJs) and benefited from the new atmosphere of gay rights and visibility – and pre-AIDS hedonism – after the Stonewall riots. This culminated in the rarefied, elitist, decadent ongoing party of Studio 54. But while the beautiful people partied it up at Studio 54, over in the economically deprived South Bronx, disco turned into hip hop. It was then transported over to the arty (white) scene of the CBGB bands via graffiti artists – which the New York art world (notably Warhol, again) took up. Which led to the first popular rap song, Blondie's “Rapture,” by a CBGB art band-turned-disco.

To summarize: the New York gay scene contributed to both art punk (the Warhol drag queens) and disco. Disco led to hip hop. Hip hop culture then influenced the New York art scene (as pre-Stonewall gays previously had). But it was art punk and hip hop that were the "parallel" movements, as Chris Stein of Blondie put in so many words his reaction to being introduced to the hip hop scene, which he saw as being similarly "destructivist/reconstructionist". One was largely the creation of students/artists who were inspired by the outsider inclusiveness and permissiveness of New York, as exemplified by the Warhol Factory scene and the Dolls. One was the creation of the economically deprived, trying to find a creative solution to the injustice, hardship, and violence of their lives, and a positive outlet for their rage and frustration.

The most obvious thing that punk and hip hop had in common was this rage and frustration, although this was more evident in UK punk and in the hardcore, political American scene (which the BBC doc doesn't deal with) than in the art-punk bands (and the doc didn't include Iggy and the Stooges, I guess because they weren't New York-based). From what I glimpsed in the doc, the early hip hop of Zulu Nation also had a positive social message very different from either the angry, punk-like political hip hop of Public Enemy or the gangster chic that would ensue. (Please be aware, my knowledge of hip hop is scanty indeed.) What punk and hip hop also had in common, though, was their disaffection from an increasingly commercialized music industry that rewarded polished musical virtuosity. As David Johansen boasts in the doc, “We single-handedly lowered the standards of an entire industry.”

In my potentially racially insensitive/uninformed unposted ramblings about the origins of the hip hop/indie divide, I speculated that we conceive of black and white musician “artistry” in different terms. To sweepingly generalize about it, black musicians are considered artists as musicians (and dancers). White musicians are, in contrast, considered artists as artists; since punk, musicianship is a decidedly secondary concern, at best, and in some versions, musicianship and “authenticity” exist in inverse ratio. Black musicians make music that is art; art-punk and post-punk musicians make art that happens to be music.

I further speculated that this was because the original art-punk musicians (The VU through the CBGB bands) drew on an avant-garde European tradition, whereas Africa-American musicians drew on their own tradition, in which artistic expression was primarily in terms of music and dance (and in which an avant-garde could appear in the course of the development of a music genre, as happened to jazz... which inspired such precursors of art punk as Captain Beefheart). My guess about the art-punk tradition, at any rate, was supported by comments in the documentary, such as Chris Frantz's of The Talking Heads: “We thought of ourselves as artists who happened to be musicians as well.” Interestingly, this perception of oneself as artist as something prior to, or in addition to, musician, could coincide with being an accomplished musician, as in the case of David Byrne or John Cale. Just as Picasso “knew how to draw,” so the art-punk musician could be an anti-virtuoso in approach despite being musically knowledgeable and gifted. And what “being an artist” seems to mean here is having a conceptual, cerebral approach to music-making; even if in some cases (like Patti Smith) this was combined with a love of the instinctiveness, immediacy, and animal magnetism of rock and roll. Occasionally, black performers, such as Grace Jones, have adopted this cerebral/conceptual approach. But it's been rare enough that when Janelle Monae recently did it, it seemed revolutionary, especially in a pop music landscape in which “what is black” and “what is white” had become so rigidly defined.

When white critics or fans complain that rock music, as indie, has become “too white,” they need to take into account that rock was always white. By definition, it was a white interpretation of R&B. With punk, which was anti-rock, “rock music” started all over again; a violent, critical break with the past comparable to Modernism in the Western high art tradition. Or to some kind of popular music Reformation. Early punk/art rock had all kinds of R&B, jazz, and funk influences (found in bands/artists from Beefheart to Iggy to The Clash to The Talking Heads). But the reason we're in a “post-rock” era now is that punk rejected rock and hip hop, like its parent, disco, never had anything to do with rock.

Rock was white people inventing a form by appropriating black music. Punk was white people making their own music. (We of course don't like to think of white people making “their own” anything, for fear of immediately arriving in white supremacist territory. But I'm going to let that sentence stand as a neutral observation.) In individual cases, the bands comprising this broad “movement” had black music influences, but unlike rock, it wasn't by definition a white interpretation of a black musical form. And once the punk ethos was in full swing, there was no reason anymore for white musicians to appropriate black music. Punk and hip hop could respect each other, but they had very little to take from each other: they were both anti-corporate rock and radio pop; they both expressed the anger and aggression of outsiders of one sort or another and revelled in anti-bourgeois “urban realism.”

“Indie” was simply what post-punk came to be called. It has been defined in a lot of ways, some of them contradictory: it's the trad-rock set-up of singer, guitarist, bassist, drummer (e.g. The Smiths, the Britpop bands, The Libertines, The Strokes); or it's the post-rock group that rejects that set-up or its traditional sound (e.g. later Radiohead, Arcade Fire, Grizzly Bear, Dirty Projectors). Either way it's often associated with the “twee” sensibility of the sensitive, cerebral, elitist college students that listen to and often create it (even though Morrissey and Marr, the creative duo behind seminal indie band The Smiths, who were precursors of the twee “genre,” were never college students). Even in non-twee instances, like Nirvana, with its hardcore punk and art-punk (Pixies) influence, “sensitivity” was cultivated as a virtue, and “passivity” perceived as the net result. Indie and hip hop broke into the mainstream at the same moment – the early 90s – and the lines were firmly drawn: college students (perceived as white) listened to white boys whine; everybody else (perceived as black or “the wrong kind of white person,” with credit to Christian Lander) listened to rappers brag. Who knows what people who were neither white nor black listened to, because apparently nobody cared: the legacy of rock was going to be fought over in these terms. Sometimes the issue got a bit confused, since Eminem did quite a bit of whining, while Morrissey – though no one seemed to notice – did quite a lot of bragging. (The first time I heard “I decree today that life is simply taking and not giving / England is mine, and it owes me a living,” it took my breath away with its arrogance.) (For that matter, Morrissey can make “I've never had no one ever” or “I am the son and the heir / Of nothing in particular” sound like brags.) But this didn't stop the generalizations, of course.

Since black musicians and white musicians each had their own thing to do now, it's hardly surprising that indie got more and more “white.” It was made by white guys whose reference points were white guys (punk and art-rock musicians), whose concerns were white guy concerns. (And when critics talk about indie music in general terms, they're always talking about guys. Partly because a “white guy” is more demonized, in liberal contrast to a black guy, than a white woman would be, and partly because, as I argued in my second hipsters post, the “decline” of the white guy is of greater symbolic importance to Western culture than whatever's happening with white girls. Especially to white leftist critics and commentators.) Likewise, hip-hop artists (also with exceptions, notably the eclectic Outkast) were mainly interested in other hip-hop musicians and a rich, thriving tradition. And yet ironically, as I argued in my original hipsters post, even as this pop cultural divide rose to greater and greater prominence in guilty white liberal reflections on the rising popularity of indie, in the same decade, the 2000s, more and more efforts were being made to bridge the gap from both sides of the hip hop/indie divide. And the audience coming of age now is one for whom both-sides collaborations like Gorillaz were seminal.

By the end of the 2000s, hip hop and indie were so well-defined, and had attained such a level of cultural influence (indie for the hipsters, hip hop for “everybody else”), that they were forced to take notice of each other and consider whether mutual influence would be rejuvenating. This is something to celebrate, and not just because it would end “musical segregation.” Arguably, there was never any reason to fear that the segregation of “black” and “white” musical styles would lead to segregation of audiences (and hence music dividing rather than bringing together white and black youth), since overwhelmingly, white kids wanted to listen to black music – even if it sold even more when it could speak directly to their white lower-middle-class suburban concerns, as Eminem did. It's something to celebrate because these two healthily-developed, separate traditions, which both originated Once Upon a Time in New York, now have plenty to say to and learn from each other, precisely because they've developed separately for so long and reflect different cultural experiences and approaches to art and music. And because both could be accused of losing their “soul” in the process of this segregation: hip hop by going pop and mainstream (and therefore blanding out), indie by getting further and further from the R&B origins of rock (and therefore blanding out).

Hence Beyonce (although R&B pop, not hip hop), in a July interview in Dazed and Confused, turns the white liberal perception of indie upside down by proclaiming indie-rock concerts “just so soulful.” I don't think you have to be an indie snob (and I'm not; the only Grizzly Bear song I've heard is the one Donald Glover rapped over) to question whether it would be advisable for Beyonce to make an experimental album (although I would like more hit singles like “Crazy in Love” and less like “Single Ladies,” Beyonce, if you're reading and taking notes). But at least theoretically, the creative situation for both black and white popular musicians is far more favourable now than it was at the birth of rock and roll. Nobody needs to appropriate from, conform to, or imitate anybody, because there are two well-developed, visible traditions with large, influential audiences and roots in two different approaches to art and music, and with – in their most interesting expressions – a joint commitment to experimentation that looks beyond the rock tradition, mainstream pop, or even the conventional song. That they're curious about each other, from both a creative and a cultural perspective, is only natural.

And for the first time, there's a “white tradition” that's there for black artists (like Monae, with her Ziggy nods) to claim as part of their musical heritage. Any white liberal commentators wanna whine about that? Instead of looking back with longing on the days when only white musicians could have success playing black music, and comparing that to "integration" (or "miscegenation," as Frere-Jones saucily preferred), we should appreciate the present situation, when black and white musicians can come together and influence each other as creative and commercial equals.

“I've Got Two Herberts in Front of My Heebert”: Jerry Lewis's Kinky Imagination, Freud's Phallic Mother, and Metrosexual Gangsters

2011-08-07T10:41:00.000-07:00

In The Ladies Man (1961), Jerry Lewis got as close as he'd ever allow himself to get to being a conventional handsome leading man. Even when he later split himself up into abysmal nerd and swinging lady killer in The Nutty Professor (1963), he had to make up for it by giving Buddy Love an ugly personality (resulting, naturally, in Misaimed Fandom). In Lewis's first proper solo vehicle, Rock-A-Bye Baby (1958) (The Delicate Delinquent, which sounds like a Morrissey song title*, had been intended as a Martin and Lewis vehicle, but they split up), director Frank Tashlin put great ingenuity behind making the now over-30 “juvenile” into a viable romantic lead, but the Lewis persona was still gawky-geeky. As the title, with its double meaning, suggests, The Ladies Man wanted to propose Lewis as a rival to his ex-partner's screen persona, even while he took back the audacious suggestion at the same time. It was a double bind: on the one hand, the Martin “half” of the act was even more necessary to Lewis (psychologically, and in terms of his image in the public mind) than Martin himself, so he had to incorporate it into his own, diametrically opposite persona; on the other hand, the incorporation couldn't be too successful, or he'd cease to be “Jerry Lewis.” You can't be the spastic, infantile/adolescent comic and also the handsome straight man. Though Lewis made this impossible attempt more than once, and in more than one way.

To create this new persona, Lewis – who claimed that the films he made as auteur were attempts to recapture the glamour of the studio-era Hollywood films he adored in his youth, which were already a thing of the past in the early 60s – drew not only on Martin but on two of his screen idols: Cary Grant and Gene Kelly. Grant still had a certain association with Martin: in their TV spots, and presumably in their nightclub act, Martin sometimes did a Grant impersonation, underlining their physical resemblance. So to make the glamourous Grant persona more amenable to the nerdy Lewis one, Lewis specifically drew on Grant's performance as a bespectacled absent-minded professor in Bringing Up Baby. (It's important to note that part of the audacity of presenting himself as a sex symbol for Lewis was, doubtless, the problematic idea of the Jewish man as Hollywood sex symbol. Lewis's frienemy Tony Curtis had managed it, but hadn't presented himself as nearly as “ethnic” as Lewis, who had catapulted the Borscht Belt comedic tradition into a post-vaudeville age.)

Gene Kelly, on the other hand, was all Lewis's. As a remnant of the bygone vaudeville age (in Oedipal emulation of his vaudevillian father, whom Lewis hero-worshiped as he did Martin), Lewis knew all the basics of entertainment, including dance; in fact, his pal Sammy Davis Jr. honoured him with the epithet “the great white faker.” But his identification with Gene Kelly went beyond his skills and pretensions as a dancer. In fact, it's when he's not dancing that Lewis is most Kelly-like, the most physical physical comedian of them all, as Kelly was the most physical screen dancer. Despite having greater balletic and avant-garde dance aspirations (or pretensions, as Astaire-favouring critics have it) than his rival for greatest screen dancer, Kelly had a working-class onscreen persona and, unlike the top hat-and-tailed Astaire, favoured form-fitting clothing that revealed his stocky athletic build, necessary for his athletic, earthy performance as a dancer. (Astaire, in Paglia's fanciful comparison of him to Byron's poetry, glides over the surfaces of furniture indoors. In contrast, Kelly's most memorable dance routines – in Cover Girl, An American in Paris, Singin' in the Rain – take place in the streets.) And that admiration he courted for his body as an artist was part and parcel with the narcissism of which he's also been accused, and with which Lewis could also identify – or more precisely, he could identity with the Kelly persona's incongruous combination of narcissism and populism.

The Ladies Man is a dreamlike, surreal homage to studio-era Hollywood glamour and fantasy, set in a lifesize dollhouse of Lewis-the-auteur's devising, in which a vast array of pretty, candy-coloured women, all aspiring performers, hover in hive-like cells. It's the old Don Juan-in-the-harem gag, with the catch that Herbert Heebert isn't the wolf in sheep's clothing... he's the eunuch in eunuch's clothing. Women-as-dolls are this girl-boy's favourite, forbidden playthings; as living, emotional, sexual creatures, they're his worst nightmare. Yet it's a nightmare that Herbert – and Lewis – feels compelled to confront.

The Bringing Up Baby tribute plays out in a recurring gag involving Herbert Heebert's attempts to care for an unseen, ferocious, malleable, Schroedinger's cat named Baby, who's revealed (but not necessarily “finally”) as a lion in the film's punchline. Baby is behind one forbidden door, which Herbert is forced to breach in order to fulfil his duties to his protector, the fleshy, benevolent-but-strict opera diva who owns the place. Behind that door, the hunk of raw meat that Herbert arduously delivers as an obscene offering is reduced to bone in a cartoon instant. The other forbidden door is basically the same as the first, leading to a liminal space of transformation which, like Baby's room, is associated with a deadly, devouring femaleness. This second door belongs to a Miss Cartilage, and Herbert is repeatedly warned not to enter it – which of course he must, out of the same Pandoran/moron curiousity that gets him into trouble throughout. But never quite this much trouble.

What ensues when he does is a sequence justly admired by the handful of cineastes brave enough to admit the obvious – that The Ladies Man isn't a dopey/campy/kitschy entertainment but an infinitely strange art film. In this Forbidden Room or White Room sequence, Lewis reimagines two key moments of classical Hollywood fantasy: the film-within-the-film from Singin' in the Rain, which pairs Kelly with Cyd Charisse; and the exploration of Rebecca's bedroom in Rebecca. The Broadway Melody sequence in Singin' in the Rain is an audaciously long (and, to Kelly's detractors, self-indulgent) interruption of the narrative by what's essentially another film, and one which includes a lengthy fantasy sequence within it. In this story, a nerded-up Kelly (in glasses and hat with the brim dorkily turned up) is a rube arrived in New York from the country, who meets up with tall, leggy femme fatale Charisse, a gangster's moll. She denudes him of his illusions by plucking off his glasses and using her endless, muscular leg as a hatstand for the silly hat while he's on his knees in front of her. The poor boy goes into the raptures of an abstract balletic fantasy involving an unbelievable length of white silk fluttering in a wind machine, but is eventually snapped back to reality, in which the helmet-haired, hard-hearted dame prefers to stay where the money is. But all-American can-do optimist that he is, he's only momentarily crushed before he remembers the true passion she's distracted him from, the only truth that matters: that he's gotta dance (gotta entertain, gotta feel the joy and energy of the rhythm).

In Rebecca, the mousy, anonymous “second Mrs. de Winter” enters a mansion haunted by a feminine presence that makes her feel overwhelmed and inadequate. Like Herbert, the gauche, naive young woman does everything wrong, including breaking a precious object belonging to “the lady of the house.” And like Max de Winter, Herbert has been traumatized by the memory of a woman who sexually betrayed him, which makes him emotionally inaccessible. Unlike the heroine of Rebecca, Herbert is aided by a kindly housekeeper/secretary (in the form of frequent collaborator Kathleen Freeman; when an elderly Lewis said that female comedians weren't funny, he'd apparently forgotten the comedy partner with whom he had the most chemistry post-Martin), whereas the second Mrs. de Winter is undermined by her sadistic housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, who remains fiercely, quasi-erotically in thrall to her late mistress. The mystery of Manderley collects in the charged atmosphere of Rebecca's bedroom, kept as a shrine by Mrs. Danvers, to which the second Mrs. de W's curiousity finally, masochistically leads her. Hitchcock's rendering of this haunted, erotic space is memorably gorgeous: seemingly endless, full of light and transparent, aerated feminine fabrics that only accentuate the mesmeric stillness.

To these influences Lewis, I think, adds a third: one of his own previous films. The six solo Lewis films directed by Tashlin, beginning with Rock-A-Bye Baby in 1958 and ending with The Disorderly Orderly in 1964, constituted the second great artistic collaboration of Lewis's career. Historians of the Tashlin-Lewis collaboration have suggested both that Lewis learned how to direct from Tashlin and that Lewis's role in the Tashlin films may have been more collaborative than normal for a star. Accordingly, it's not easy to know who came up with the ideas in the Tashlin-Lewis films; what's certain is that Lewis used, transformed, and developed them in his own films, as though those existed in a creative continuum with his work with Tashlin (which, however, has a distinctly different flavour than the auteur Lewis films). The all-white room in The Ladies Man, against which Miss Cartilage appears in contrasting black, seems to be an evolution of a gag at the beginning of Rock-A-Bye Baby in which Lewis causes a cloud of soot to invade and soil the all-white living room of an elderly woman. (There's a more obvious evolution of this gag as a gag in the scene where Lewis approaches the tough-guy gangster he previously reduced to a nervous wreck with his hands covered in oil, perhaps from Buddy Love's hair, while the latter is wearing a white suit.)

Even more, however, the Forbidden Room sequence seems to draw on the most remarkable scene from the first film Lewis made with Tashlin, the 1955 Martin and Lewis vehicle Artists and Models: Shirley MacLaine's staircase serenade of Lewis with “My Innamorata.” Ballet-trained MacLaine handles the physicality of the scene nimbly, and her movements as she tries to entice, lure, hypnotize, block, and tackle Lewis reminded me on first viewing of some kind of stick-insect or spider. The Freudian plot of her romantic trajectory with Lewis involves his reconciling his adolescent erotic fantasy of the comic book dominatrix The Bat Lady, for which, unbeknownst to him, MacLaine served as the artist's model (the artist in question is her female roommate, but that's another blog post) with a flesh-and-blood woman, of which he remains terrified.

Lewis seemed to merge these ideas into the singular creation, Miss Cartilage, part-spider, part-bat, and all dominatrix. She's introduced by lowering herself from the ceiling, hanging upside down, dressed all in black... including the hood over her face, that covers her eyes and almost her nose but reveals the morgue-white skin of the lower half of her face and her blood-red lips. Wait – what's mummification/asphyxiation kink doing in a Jerry Lewis comedy? We won't see anything like this again in a Hollywood family movie until the Tobey Maguire Spiderman (remember that kissing scene?).

But the fact is that The Ladies Man is a spectacularly kinky film, beginning with our hero's name, Herbert Herbert Heebert, which is surely a reference to Humbert Humbert: after causing a scandal in the UK and France, Lolita was published in America in 1958 and became an instant bestseller. Lewis is Humbert-the-pervert, but he's also Lolita, which is what seemed to happen to the (cutesified) Lewis persona when it was put on film, culminating in The Delicate Delinquent, where – I'm not kidding – he plays a directionless young man who's “taken in hand” by a police officer (the role Martin was supposed to play) who stalks him to his apartment and invites him over to dinner. All in the interest of straightening out misguided youth, of course. Lewis, now in his mid-thirties, makes his infantilization so literal in The Ladies Man that he ends up in a highchair being fed by Kathleen Freeman in a scene so bizarre and outrageous that I nearly died laughing the first half-dozen times I saw it. (And that, in case you ever wondered, is the nature of Lewis comedy: it's not always that it's funny.)

Oddly enough, Herbert isn't obliterated by his encounter with the Spider Lady, played by Sylvia Lewis (no relation, Lewis clarifies in the commentary), who powerfully evokes Charisse in Singin' in the Rain although costumed quite differently. On the contrary, facing up to her – even if it mainly involves getting chased around the room – causes Herbert to “man up” for the only time in the film, even if that involves dancing with her to big band music in a snazzy suit. Like a sped-up version of Kelly's transformation from nerd to balletic lover in the Broadway Melody sequence; although, as in Cinderfella, Lewis is both the prince and the fairy tale maiden in this scenario. Somehow or other, these two – Herbert and Miss Cartilage – although opposites, are twins. After removing her mask, she hands it to him like he ought to know what to do with it, or like she's passing the torch, and this sexually charged bit of material is what he's left holding after he leaves the room, to show him that he didn't dream it all. As for Miss C, after their dance she retires to her bed and stretches out felinely behind the transparent curtain. They've hardly touched (and note how Lewis manhandles her head in the image above like it's an alien object), and indeed, one of her myriad fetishes appears to be not-touching (which makes another point of connection with the black hands-and-white suit gag). In other words, the female self-pleasuring of waiting and fantasizing. Suspended in gaffa, as Kate Bush put it. She'll be waiting for him in her all-white lair, when he's ready, if he ever is. (Would you be?)

The Ladies Man is Lewis's self-castrating homage to female power and the feminine (ironic, then, that – like a male version of Bette Davis in Jezebel – he was never handsomer than in this film), and Miss Cartilage is a to-the-letter phallic mother, enshrined in a taboo psychological space: both holy (surrounded by white) and demonic (covered in black). Whatever his offscreen sexual preferences, onscreen Lewis is queer in persona and, in The Ladies Man, in imagination and sensibility. But queer fantasies can tell us a lot about heterosexual male fantasies too, when it comes to women. (Here's a fun list of phallic mothers from popular culture, in which the Freudian concept is explained as “not a woman with a penis, but a woman with the symbolic power of a potent male.”)

The Miss Cartilage sequence is The Ladies Man in miniature: at once a fantasy and a nightmare of being absorbed by femininity. Lewis's relationship to both femininity and masculinity is staggeringly ambivalent; which one can take as either cause or effect of his “queerness,” as you like; at any rate, it's the content of it. The exact nature of the fantasy here, as in many of the Ladies Man sequences, is so obscurely private as to be opaque; but that's exactly what makes The Ladies Man as fascinating as any recognized “art film,” despite Lewis's old school vaudeville/classical Hollywood commitment to entertainment and spectacle. It belongs not only to the history of surrealist comedy, with Tati, Tex Avery, Tashlin, and the Fleischer Brothers, to name a few, but to the history of surrealist/erotic filmmaking, with Deren and Lynch (and at moments, Hitchcock). The most Lynchian moment, for me, is when Herbert encounters a Southern Belle whose accent is so thick as to be incomprehensible: it's a vaudeville joke, but in the context of The Ladies Man it's a comment on the fearful alienness of femininity. It may be one of Lewis's surrealist sound experiments, and reminds me of Lynch's backwards-talking dream dwarf. (What Lynch and Lewis have in common in particular, besides their assumption of a seriously "off" boy-next-door persona, is their perception/assertion of a continuity between the unconscious, fantasy, and the essence of glamourous studio-era Hollywood cinema, product of the Dream Factory.)

Another example of such surrealist filmmaking is Cocteau's Orphee, in which Maria Casares is a superb phallic mother, and dangerous Dark Muse to the poet, as Miss Cartilage perhaps was to Lewis.

Herbert Herbert may have sacrificed his Heebert to gain entrance to the darkly magical all-female space of The Ladies Man (at least he's got two Herberts in case he loses one), but to survive within in it proves he's a bigger man than the Hollywood macho male with whom he's also in ambivalent, opposites-attracting relation: the other person he dances with in The Ladies Man is George Raft, playing himself. Lewis loves psychological redundancy, and Raft's double within the film is the gangster played by Buddy Lester. (Criss cross: Raft, in the film, is a real person who played fictional gangsters; Lester plays a fictional real gangster.) In what's probably the objectively funniest sequence of the film – and Lewis's career – we watch in trepidation for the tough guy to demolish the sissy – instead of which, in torturous slow motion, the opposite happens. Lewis's hysterical nervousness communicates itself to proper males and causes them to unravel, while Lewis, who's used to the chaos, remains “in control.” But if I can be Mark Simpsonist about this: the cause of the scene's hilarity is its deconstruction of masculine male vanity. Lester's gangster (in a concept brilliantly realized by Lester) is paralyzed with horror by Lewis's ministrations because if his tough guy image is a hair – or thread – out of place, he can't function. As in The Nutty Professor – Lewis's other colour, and queer, auteur masterpiece – Lewis anticipates Simpson's concept of metrosexuality, due to his sharp understanding of masculinity – based, in part, on his own “feminine” alienation from it.

*Oh wait, it is: "Sweet and Tender Hooligan."

That Old Black Magic: The Female Artist as Witch

2011-08-05T18:45:00.000-07:00

This post is going to finally give you what you've been waiting for: a glimpse into how my mind actually works when it comes to art and gender. Ready?

Way back in the day, Paglia's sexual personae taught me how to leap across centuries and cultural contexts in a single bound, as in her comparison of the bust of Nefertiti and Bowie in his “android phase.” What I liked about this tendency to yoke together the disparate with violence was that it enabled me to perceive, or assert, affinities between my two areas of interest (in common with many thoughtful teens of my generation and since): high culture and pop culture. Which can otherwise be rather difficult to compare. How could I measure which had the “greater” impact on me as a teenager – Hamlet, or Hatful of Hollow? Pride and Prejudice, or Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars?

In any case, Paglia instilled in me a lifelong tendency to think of artists in groups of “personae,” although my personae weren't as sexy as hers. I've got one main cluster, which I can separate out into male and female examples; today, I'll be giving some of the female examples. I think of this main grouping as “fey” artists, male or female, with some peripheral overlap with Paglia's “Mercurius androgyne.” These artists are also usually “minor,” or at least for niche tastes; they may also be miniaturists, like Robert Walser.

Maya Deren and Jane Bowles: Entangled Twins

Although I'm not sure how well my first example today, early American experimental filmmaker Maya Deren, fits this category. She's certainly obscure/niche, and a miniaturist in the sense that she only made short films. But as a persona, Deren was too richly sensual to be “fey”; a sensual intellectual. Her first and best-known film, Meshes of the Afternoon, reveals her deep entanglement in what even now, in our “metrosexual era,” can only be called a specifically female narcissism: not mere physical vanity but dreamy psychological self-absorption.

Deren eerily reproduces herself in this film in a way that distinctly reminds me of one of my favourite paintings, Memories, by the Symbolist Khnopff.

A heavy, humid, hauntingly “maternal” atmosphere hangs over Khnopff's painting, as it does over Deren's film. Deren herself, with that abundant curly hair, seems physically as well as psychologically in the same Pre-Raphaelite mode as Khnopff's model (his sister, if I recall from Sexual Personae) and the most famous example, Rossetti's late Muse, Jane Morris.

I'm hardly the only blogger to think in terms of “sexual personae,” and others have noted Deren's similarity to another British icon, both physically and as an artist: Kate Bush.

Certainly, Bush has that same sensual/intellectual combination, and her lyrics frequently obliquely explore a certain freaky, convoluted female sexual psychology in which narcissism plays a large role, as in the rather terrifying “Get Out of My House,” in which male sexuality is figured as a kind of invasive poltergeist (and, oh yeah, an abject donkey). Bush, whose lyrics often align sexuality with occult powers (think of the Cathy-ghost in “Wuthering Heights,” where it's male sexuality that's shunning and cold), also likes to take on the role of “witch,” perhaps as a metaphor for demonized femininity; another point in common with Deren, who became fascinated with Haitian Vodoun, to which she was introduced by dancer, choreographer, and dance anthropologist Katherine Dunham.

Deren, however, was not British, but an American of Jewish Eastern European origins (born in the Ukraine). On the evening I finally familiarized myself with Deren (after hearing about her for ages in connection with Lynch and especially Mulholland Dr.), I did a little dreamy, persona-based googling. (In the early 90s, Paglia recommended browsing library shelves to spark unexpected associations, which I'd already been doing as a teenager anyway; the internet facilitates this creative methodology to an exceptional degree.) Based on nothing more than their hair, their Jewishness, their limited output, and their cult status, I made a connection between Deren and American writer Jane Bowles, and was surprised (“spooked” might be a better word) when I googled their Wikipedia entries to learn that they were born in the same year, just a couple of months apart: Deren on April 29, 1917; Bowles on February 22, 1917.

Deren and Bowles had much more in common, too. They were both denizens of New York in their main period of artistic activity, the 1940s (did they ever meet?): in fact, just now I learned, on a closer look at the entries, that Bowles's only novel, Two Serious Ladies, was published in 1943, the same year that Deren made her first completed film (co-directed with her husband, Alexander Hammid), Meshes of the Afternoon. They were both drawn to the “exotic,” Deren travelling to Haiti, Bowles travelling with her husband to Mexico and Central America before settling with him in Tangier. Deren became infatuated with Voudon; Bowles with the Berber woman Cherifa.

It seems to be a “thing” for female cult artists to develop strange myths surrounding their lives and deaths. Anyway, it certainly happened to Deren and Bowles. The documentary In the Mirror of Maya Deren gives an account, mainly from a seemingly 60s-addled commentator, of the rumours that Deren's early death (at 44) was related to her dabbling in Voudon. Commentators who knew her towards the end also suggest that it was due to her vast, volatile creative energy, responsible for many stormy rages, which had turned poisonous due to her frustration at not getting enough funding to continue making the films she wanted to. (Among the official reasons given was malnutrition.)

Bowles also died young, at 58, in a sanitorium in Spain. She may have outlived Deren, but only to suffer, since in 1957 (four years before Deren's death), she had a stroke (official reason: alcohol) that severely incapacitated her to the end of her life. In the hotbed of expatriate gossip and rumour in Tangier, however, the story spread that her declining health was due to Cherifa's native witchcraft – also supposedly responsible for Bowles's obsession with the woman. Throughout her life, many who knew her (and her fans in her lifetime included John Ashbery, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, and Christopher Isherwood, who supposedly based Sally Bowles on her in part) believed that her to some charismatic, to others (notably an unimpressed Gore Vidal) insufferably neurotic personality was the result of her thwarted creativity, a life of extended, tormented writer's block.

That Voodoo That You Do So Well

Deren's Eastern European and Greenwich Village connections (and the hair, again!) wafted me along to my next association: the heroines of producer Val Lewton's 1940s B-horror/noirs, especially Simone Simon in Cat People (1942, directed by Jacques Tourneur) and the iconic Jean Brooks (of the Pulp Fiction hair) in The Seventh Victim (1943, directed by Mark Robson).

Lewton, also of Jewish Ukrainian origins, was a pulp fiction writer who found his metier making classy horror films on a low budget for RKO. In Cat People, French Simon plays Irena Dubrovna, from Serbia. (In a Hollywood film, the French are “exotic” enough for anything, and one Eastern European country as good as another.) Irena is trying to Americanize (by pathologically attaching herself to bland all-American boy Oliver Reed, played by Kent Smith, every bit as wooden as he sounds), and get away from a past that includes idol-worship, witchcraft... and the ability to turn into a panther. The “horror” of the film is female sexuality: Irena appears frigid (returning us to the terrain of “Get Out of My House”), but her “panther self” seems a metaphor for the voracious female sexual appetite, which she's afraid to unleash. There's a distinct thematic connection to Dreyer's great melodrama about witchcraft, Day of Wrath (1943 again!), in which female sexuality turns out to have the power to telepathically kill.

(Yet Dreyer, like Lewton, stays on its side.)

The Seventh Victim, set in Greenwich Village, deals openly with the topic of suicide: the heroine, Jacqueline, is a decadent sensation-seeker who can't decide if she wants death as the final sensation or if she's just world-weary; but she's as terrified of it as she is drawn to it. She gets mixed up with a Satanic cult who want to force her to die, and tries to get away from it. (Doh! Just realized that this was the main source for a one-woman theatre piece I wrote and performed in which I played two women who might be one woman with a split personality: one is convinced that a sinister cult wants to put her in a snuff film; the other is trying to persuade her filmmaker-boyfriend to make one in which she stars. My favourite line from it, towards the end, was: “I want them to say, 'She only did it for the attention.'”) In the end, however, she goes back to her Village apartment and hangs herself. The whole thing eerily anticipates the Manson murders and their connection (through director Polanski, husband of victim Sharon Tate) with Rosemary's Baby.

Lewton also produced an RKO film... about Voudon. I Walked With a Zombie (1943) is set on the Caribbean Island of Saint Sebastian (probably because Lewton, or someone involved, liked the decadent reference to the homoerotic imagery of the suffering saint; here, however, put in service of representing the legacy of African slavery). The film also draws on the actual Voudon origins of North America's favourite millennial monster, and features a “gone native” female doctor who believes she can be possessed by a Voudon god and deliver curses, as Deren apparently did.

Recent shout-outs to Deren in a variety of media include the video for Janelle Monae's “Tightrope” (2010), set in an imaginary asylum for artists in which, a bit of text informs us at the start, “Dancing has long been forbidden for its subversive effects on the residents and its tendency to lead to illegal magical practices,” and Bruce LaBruce's queer zombie movie, Otto; or, Up with Dead People (2008), where the filmmaker-within-the-film Medea Yarn is obviously loosely modelled on Deren.

Fragments of Bowles and Deren

Janelle Monae also has some of that Bride of Frankensteinesque Bowlesian hair (and androgyny) going on:

The cover of her debut album, The ArchAndroid, however, seems to draw specifically on the cover of Sexual Personae, which no doubt Monae has read, since it includes Paglia's android-Bowie/Nefertiti comparison. For Paglia, the head-heavy Nefertiti represents a new, nature-rejecting image of woman as aspiring, soaring intellect; for Monae, claiming this right for women seems to mean embracing an android persona that (although, ironically, object-like) repels attempts to turn her into a sex object.

During a long period (between 15, when I read Millicent Dillon's biography, and 23 or so) when I was rather obsessed with Jane Bowles, I found still other correspondences, such as Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby (obviously an alien, especially in the bar scene where she's wearing that extraordinary metallic dress with the bits of ribbon floating around her face like translucent antennae) and Jennifer Jones in Love Letters.

Jones has no association with witchcraft that I know of, but the two films in which she starred that were directed by William Dieterle, Letters and Portrait of Jennie, have an eerie, Gothic/Expressionist feel suited to Jones's fey, earthy/ethereal, high-strung, almost somnambulistically narcissistic persona as nothing ever would be again. In Portrait of Jennie, she plays a ghost who ages in quantum leaps, and gives the most convincing portrayal by an adult actress of a child I've ever seen. In Love Letters (with a screenplay by... wait for it... AYN RAND), she's, basically, a Platonic Idea, who can't psychologically negotiate the reality of her own or male sexuality, despite being as avidly, felinely sensual as ever. I suspect that Hitchcock took notes for Vertigo watching Portrait of Jennie and for Marnie watching Love Letters. The critic David Thomson, who's usually grievously wrong about everything, was almost right when he said that Jones would have been suited to play James's Isabel Archer; if he'd said Milly Theale, I would have forgiven him everything.

More Tragi-Farcical Courtship Rituals

The last play I ever had produced was called Non Sequitur, about the marriage of Jane and Paul Bowles, which I subtitled “A Screwball Comedy with Consequences” because I couldn't figure out how to focus it until I made the Bringing Up Baby connection. (I also had in mind Paglia on As You Like It in Sexual Personae.) The first act was produced at the 1999 Toronto Fringe Festival, and NOW magazine made it a top pick; it was self-contained enough that no one noticed the second act missing. The play focused, scene by scene, on various more or less malicious games the couple played to negotiate their complex relationship, and my own favourite, which recurred as a motif, was the one in which Paul pretended to be a parrot that Jane would have to send to his cage when, due to her coaxing, he got out of control (or in others words, got his queer on and “freaked out” – an idea brilliantly, bravely realized by straight actor Ross McMillan in the workshop production; Ross also played a note-perfect Orton in the original production of Live With It). The wonderful poster (sadly, no longer up on the internet) for the Toronto production seized on this image, portraying a tiny Paul brooding (Cary Grant Thinker style) in a bird cage, on which Jane leans languidly – sort of like I Dream of Jeannie with a gender role reversal. I thought it was a great image, but for many years I was in deep denial that I had really portrayed such an overpowering woman, when I thought I was portraying my idea of an equal marriage (except for the part where Paul is forced to put Jane in her cage – the asylum – at the end).

Nevertheless when the actress who played Jane in the Toronto production, Sarah Neville, repeated to me with worry a critic's opinion that she was “too relentless” as Jane, I reassured her, “It's Jane Bowles. That's not possible.”

Shirley MacLaine, Preying Ingenue

A sort of postscript: the freakiest, feyest performance I've ever seen a woman give is the young Shirley MacLaine in Tashlin's Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis vehicle, Artists and Models, which may still be the queerest movie ever made, harnessing all of the gender-bending potential of the Martin and Lewis partnership in the service of a bisexual utopic subtext. In all other Martin and Lewis films (generally regarded as vastly inferior), Lewis is the queerest object on display, a homely Boylita who, for 50s (straight) America, was secretly the ultimate twink to an even greater degree than Justin Bieber is now, to judge from the surprising fact that he, not Martin, is the sex object of the films. But here the genuine ingenue MacLaine beats eternal ingenue Lewis at his own game by being, as I recall Mark Simpson and I observed together in a discussion of this, a better boy than he is, providing a rare example of the androgynous (though voluptuous) girl being more charismatic than the androgynous boy. And when she serenades him on a staircase by bellowing “My Innamorta” at him as he tries frantically to get away, she's like some kind of contortionist stick-insect, and textually, he's an adolescent boy scared of the faster-maturing adolescent girl, while, subtextually, he's a queer man fleeing the female preying mantis who's trying to devour him because he's asking for it by being such a tasty little morsel. (If there's any difference. Lewis would, of course, perfect this persona and scenario in his masterpiece, The Ladies Man. But more on that in a later post.) But they're reverse mirror images of each other, and their bizarre courtship ritual is, of course, symbolic of heterosexual relations even into adulthood, according to some analyses. Which is what makes male homosexuality a continuity with male heterosexuality.

MacLaine isn't exactly a witch, but her freaky-kooky persona at this early stage of her career lets you see where the later, New Age advocate MacLaine came from, and almost makes up for it.

Interim Post: Marlene Dietrich, Hard Woman

2011-07-13T08:18:00.000-07:00

Over at Quiet Riot Girl's blog, a bunch of girls (by which I do not mean to indicate that we're secretly all gay men) have been discussing the persona of the female intellectual. Is the Butch Dyke/Macho Hag the only persona such women can assume?

One of the most fascinating documents I came across early in my YouTube use was this screen test for The Blue Angel. Aesthetic feminist that I am (or feminist aesthete, with the aestheticism leading the feminism), I immediately sent it off in triumph (in a link in an e-mail) to my friend George Toles, the film professor/critic. It was a big fat "take that" moment in which I offered it as proof that Sternberg did not "create" Dietrich, as the S/D Svengali myth goes. On the contrary, it shows what Dietrich had to offer to interest Sternberg. (George was not persuaded, but that's his loss. I suppose he's used to "feminist triumphalist" moments in Mulvey-dominated film theory and has to find a way to fight back.)

In any case, what I adore about this clip is the way that Dietrich employs instant schizoid shifts between satirical saccharine sweetness (crooning the dumb ditty "You're the cream in my coffee" in English while fluttering her eyelashes crazily), castrating harridan (when the piano player can't perform to her satisfaction), and the gentle, embarrassed woman briefly glimpsed at the end, who seems to be apologizing to the pianist for going as far as she did in the performance (including a bit of physical abuse). Which is the "real" Dietrich? Bisexual, real-life cross-dressing Dietrich (with Hepburn, she blazed the way for American women to wear trousers, or so the myth goes anyway), pal of Hemingway, was a swaggering Macho Dyke who never lost her sexual glamour. Certainly, however, it was the "power" she displays in this performance that must have set her apart from other actresses for (famous cinematic masochist) Sternberg (besides the cheekbones): her willingness to access such fierceness that no one but a masochist could find it a turn-on.

Speaking of schizoid, once as a teenager I had to give a spectacular performance for my drama class because I'd skipped almost all the classes and ignored the assignments and needed to get all of my marks at once. So I came up with a long performance where I played three women, one piece seguing into the next. (Had to memorize it in, I think, two days.)

One was Bette Davis launching ferociously into Leslie Howard in Of Human Bondage (her speech when she finds out he doesn't desire her anymore). I did what I hoped was a pitch-perfect imitation of her hysterical screech at the end, which had made such an impression on me: "Because you're such a mugamugaMUG!"

One was (Vivien Leigh's) Blanche DuBois in Streetcar, describing falling in love at sixteen, and the disastrous consequences. (She finds out the Antinous she rather homoerotically loved is gay, and her disgusted reaction drives him to suicide.)

One was Zuleika Dobson. As a twist, I chose the speech where Zuleika subjugates herself to her fantasized image of the only Oxford undergraduate who is not madly in love with her. Narcissus kneeling!

My idea, you see, was to capture all of the inflections of female power and female abjection. With abjection being the more interesting risk.

Towards (Against?) a Lesbiography

2011-07-10T22:23:00.000-07:00

Recently, while browsing the literary essays and criticism section of a bookstore, I was thrown for a loop by the subtitle of a new book, This is Not the End of the Book, which consists of a conversation between Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carriere on digital and book culture. I'm not sure that it actually is the subtitle, rather than just a graphic embellishment on the cover that the publisher thought would enhance its prestige-marketing, but in any case, it reads: “Two Great Men Discuss Our Digital Future.”

I mean, seriously? In 2011, we're casually throwing around the term “great men,” like everybody knows what that means (and wants a piece of it)? Who better to discuss a matter of such serious cultural weight than Great Men? Who else is going to tell us anything worth listening to on the subject, in “this twittering world,” as another indubitable Great Man, T. S. Eliot, presciently put it in the 1940s?

I blame Harold Bloom. Back in 1999, the popularity of Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human proved that, despite the combined efforts of academic feminists and deconstructionists, there was a huge cultural hunger, at the populist level, for the concept of the Great Man, as some kind of figure of millennial reassurance. That book was a lot of fun, I'm not going to lie, but Bloom's Wildean hyperbole also felt finally oppressive (as Wildean tongue-in-cheek exaggeration-for-provocation never is, but no one ever accused Bloom of having a light touch), and nearly made me nauseated with the Bard (I had to remind myself I was only nauseated with Bloom). He might as well have called the book Saint Shakespeare... except that the titular suggestion that Shakespeare is, well, GOD (or better than God, who only invented human vessels, while Shakespeare invented our subjectivity: he's not God, he's SHAKESPEARE) left mere canonization in the dust. It didn't even seem to help that I knew where Bloom was coming from, and what he was trying to achieve: that he was using Shakespeare as a synecdoche for the power of literature itself, in reaction against attacks on that power, and on the concept of subjectivity, from “literary theory.” Well, except that Bloom himself often seemed to lose sight of this aim and take his own Bardolatry literally. And certainly, the average reader who bought the book to be educated about Shakespeare was taking it literally.

Quiet Riot Girl, with whom I've been forming a relationship on Twitter and here on my blog that inspires me to nominate us, in our quiet moments (except that there haven't been any quiet moments), as the Doherty and Barat of Internet Discourse (can't get away from those Great Men of History...), recently directed me to David Halperin's Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography, in explanation of her concept of “Fagiography” and its critique in her recently free-download-published debut novel, Foucault's Daughter. (Or I assume FD is critiquing it; but you`ll have to wait for the review, when I've finished reading.) I haven't read Saint Foucault, but I gather that it marks the moment when, after Judy Garland's death kicked off the gay rights movement by inspiring Stonewall, gay male culture lost its historical allegiance to Mom (celebrated in the form of opera divas, Golden Age Hollywood actresses, and other female performers of gargantuan personality and presence) and started chasing after the ghost of Dad instead. In doing so, however, rather than pioneering it may have simply joined in the chorus celebrating/mourning those Great Men of History, which has, after all, been a homoerotic theme since Milton's “Lycidas.” In an effort to prove that gay men were exactly like straight men, flamboyance and fabulousness had to be shoved in the closet (or, worse, relegated to reality TV shows); machismo was the order of the day. Even if this machismo was limply, hilariously, intellectual. (Or is that the worst kind?)

In the Room the Women Come and Go...

And where does this leave women? In 2011, when most of the feminist battles have been won, where are our Great Women, and what are they talking about, in ways that, apparently, cannot reassure us? And where is our Lesbiography? I never wrote or published my Saint Foucault (or Saint Morrissey), but I did spend the summer I was seventeen continually writing a 50-or-so-page fan letter to Camille Paglia that, luckily for her and me, I could never complete to my satisfaction, because, well, it was my autobiography: Sexual Personae caused me to rethink the entire history of my personal development (through the prism – or prison – of gender identity and sexuality). (I've often thought that if I had completed and sent that letter I might have ended up as Paglia's partner – instead of the mostly-straight, usually single woman I am now – and she would have eventually ditched me and our baby to join the entourage of a Brazilian pop star, as dotty as Dietrich shedding her heels to trek through the desert after Gary Cooper's legionnaire at the end of Morocco).

Speaking of women and deserts, I return to my theme of the strange lack of comment in the generally ecstatic reviews of Bolano's The Savage Detectives on its feminism, which you'd think would be a theme to inspire the liberal intelligentsia. TSD is a boy's-club novel to end all boy's-club novels, focused on the homosocial, Doherty-and-Barat relationship between the two founders of an obscure, outsider, failed poetry movement, based on Bolano and his best friend. And yet these overgrown boys go chasing after an even more obscure, self-erasing female poet who's disappeared into the desert, in what to all intents and purposes is a sort of pilgrimage. Why? What's up with this? Is it a comment on the historical erasure of women, women's art, women's contributions to culture, women's voices? Why does the erased woman stand for poetry, or the possibility (or the impossibility) of poetry? She's not the Muse: she's the Master. Not a saint, though: a prophet, of the fantastic misogyny exhaustively recorded (and participated in?) in 2666. Of all the crimes Bolano could choose to represent the decadence of the West in the early 21^st century, and the negative legacy of the 20^th century, he chooses misogyny.

I Just Stand Around and Shoot Into the Blue

Female intellectuals talking to, or about, female intellectuals, remains a rare thing. If women (even Great Women) get together and talk, we expect they're going to talk about women. Or men. Certainly not make pronouncements on topics of general cultural interest and importance. And certainly not deify each other. (Paglia never wrote that book on Madonna, either. Although I think we can all be grateful for that. I just hope she never writes the one on Saint Palin.) So that in the annuls of female intellectuals (not feminists) writing about women (pre-Paglia, whose chapter on Emily Dickinson remains extraordinary), Elizabeth Hardwick's essay on Hedda Gabler (the character) stands out for me, even though, as a female intellectual, Hardwick takes offence at Hedda's (at Hedda's; she treats her like a real person, a historical Great Woman, not Ibsen's creation) narrow pettiness (rather than, as I did in my Hedda essay, taking glee in it as the most outrageously, unapologetically, unsentimentally amoral female character in the annuls of literature). (“I'm burning your child, Ejlert Lovborg. Yours and Thea Elvsted's child.” How I've longed to say those lines in performance; right up there with “I have more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in / Imagination to give them shape / Or time to act them in.”)

(I had a real epiphany about that play when I learned, in some book on Ibsen, that in early drafts Hedda, rather than being a creature of motiveless malignity, was given the sympathetic motivation of genuinely trying to help her husband by destroying Lovborg. By the time of the final draft – and this is the originality of Hedda Gabler, Hedda Gabler, and Ibsen – the very concept of that is a joke that sends Hedda into fits of mordant hilarity. Ibsen was the most murderous feminist of them all.)

(Incidentally, I find this excellent, brief review of Antony and Cleopatra by a female blogger very Hardwickian. The Hardwicks of today, they're blogging, aren't they?)

Oh, there's been plenty of feminist hagiography, don't get me wrong. With a few chosen saints, of which Sylvia Plath (forever fixed in the cultural consciousness crushed under the boot of her deified/demonized Nazi Daddy) is so prominent that I found myself grateful for the sacrilege of James Maker's line “A sonnet from a sociopath / I annihilated Sylvia Plath” from “Born That Way.” (Or maybe I just got the mordant giggle-fits at the idea of rhyming “sociopath” with “Sylvia Plath.”)

The thing is, if I did write that book on Paglia, it would hardly be appropriately titled Saint Paglia. If there is to be a Lesbiography, I would want it to take a perspective that's not idolatrous, but iconoclastic. We don't need to celebrate any more Great Men, or sentimentalize our feminist martyrs. We need not new heroes (or heroines), but a new perspective.

If I call myself “gynocentric” (at which Quiet Riot Girl recently – rightly – took umbrage) it's in relation to a cultural context where it's still expected that the intellectual-oriented woman will also be male-oriented. And don't get me wrong, I like the intelligent conversation of men and always have. I don't exclude anyone from intellectual discourse based on gender. But I'm no more likely to want to talk ideas with a man than with a woman (or vice versa). Despite this, I have not escaped the sense of being "honoured" by having male intellectuals bestow their interest upon me, as though my credibility in my own eyes somehow depended upon it, or was enhanced by it.

Remembering that high school English teacher (rumoured to be gay, although I hardly knew what that was despite Reading All About it in Orton's published diaries) with whom I had antagonistic chemistry because he would not take me seriously (to be fair, I was demanding acknowledgement that I was a genius; then I proved that I might be, but he still wanted me to prove that I could impress him in the context of a high school English assignment, which I did once), who gave me Shaw's Pygmalion to read, which I fancifully half- interpreted as a comment on our relationship, and I thought, "No, you will not be my Henry Higgins. Even though, or because, that is exactly what I want." I was not falling into that paradigm. I would go it alone, lonely, without the male mentor. I would go it alone, lonely, without the artist boyfriend, seeking a Muse.

I certainly went it alone.

That incident made its way, in a way, into Live With It. (The Pygmalion fantasy, accepted, and turned into nightmare.)

This in preface to a post on a few of my favourite, mysterious female artists.

The Gaze in the New Metrosexual Order, and Some Aggressive Notes on "Passivity"

2011-07-08T17:32:00.000-07:00

As anyone with a cursory knowledge of Film Studies, knows, the theories of Laura Mulvey have been pervasive in that field since her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” appeared in 1975. There is almost nowhere you can go, if you want to read academic film criticism, without encountering Mulvey's gaze. Mulvey's “gaze theory” can be (and usually is) summarized by saying that classical Hollywood cinema placed the spectator in the subject position of the male protagonist, while female characters were (this is what Wikipedia says; it's been a while since I read Mulvey's essay) “coded with 'to-be-looked-at-ness.'” (Um, you really couldn't think of a better way to say that? Okay, moving on.)

Now, off the top of my head, I can think of about a thousand exceptions to this. Actually I can think of a whole genre it ignores: the woman's film. Screwball comedy, too, can hardly be said to require viewer identification with the male lead, and, in the case of some screwball comedies, such as Preston Sturges's The Lady Eve, said identification would be rather painful, and certainly would not place the identifier in the “powerful” role. In his essay challenging Mulvey's gaze, “Mother Calls the Shots: Hitchcock's Female Gaze” (you can find it in the House Made of Light collection), George Toles makes a similar point about Norman Bates in Psycho, who may, like the camera, spend a lot of time gazing at Marion in states of undress, but with whom identification is hardly comfortable for the male viewer, and who is ultimately himself subject to the monitoring, censoring gaze of Mother.

Is this man, shown here blurring into his dead mother, really the poster boy for the “powerful” “male gaze”?

But Mulvey's influence on feminism and media analysis has extended beyond her original theory, and in popular use now generally alludes to the inescapable fact that visual media, from movies to ads, are overwhelmingly created by men and assume a male viewer: they are designed by and for “the male gaze.” As she often does, Camille Paglia largely accepted this tenet of feminist theory but gave it a neutral spin. For Paglia, men have created more art because they are in possession of this harsh, demanding “male gaze,” which is also the aestheticizing (or “Apollonian”) gaze, which Paglia finds in its purest form in gay male culture. But this line of thinking is also where she departs from standard feminist theory: because she notes that the peak of Western visual art, the Italian Renaissance, homoerotically worshipped the male form. This it took from its classical Greek influence, but after the Renaissance, the male nude is suppressed in Western art. While accepting the idea that women usually are the subjects (can I say that, or does it always have to be “objects”?) of the male gaze in art, pornography, and advertising, Paglia challenged the idea that to be the object of the gaze is to be “passive,” by using the example of gay male pornography: do we really believe that the subjects of gay porn are “passive” “victims of the gaze”? Instead, she took the desire to look at women as a tribute to female sexual glamour, and argued that women like looking at women, too, for instance in their consumption of fashion magazines (meaning straight women, although her lesbian perspective probably pointed her to that insight), which, in her view, was not simply a sign of their enslavement to male ideals of beauty. (Anyway – again – in the fashion industry those have traditionally largely been gay male ideals of female beauty.)

Why hello Marlon Brando, the original metrosexual! I once showed this photo to Mark Simpson and commented that you can't tell whether he's just committed rape or been raped. He seems to have enjoyed it, in any case. You want to tell me if this sex object is “passive” or “active”? Gore Vidal, in his essay on his friendship with Williams, suggests that Brando's Kowalski was the first time that women were put in the cultural position of being allowed to exhibit their lust for men as sex objects – which, of course, they were permitted to do thanks to Williams's expression of his gay male lust. And so the gay male gaze paved the way for the female gaze.

Objectification and Identification in Narrative Art

It's not gaze theory that I want to directly challenge here, though, but rather the notion of “objectification.” As a female writer who has written male characters as often as she's written female characters, it's occurred to me to wonder: can you actually separate objectification from identification in the process of writing? In that same essay Vidal recounts Williams's claim that he couldn't write a short story (I'm sure it applied to plays as well) unless he was sexually attracted to at least one of the characters. I know what he meant, and though I've written plays where this was not, or less, the case, it was a lot tougher to get motivated. For some writers, at least (maybe those in the decadent mode, as per Paglia's theory of decadence), the line between fantasy and art is fine indeed. And maybe that's never more true of the female writer than at the acute point of (uninitiated) adolescent libido. Anyway, I've often thought that the psychology behind my award-winning play Live With It, about 60s gay playwright Joe Orton, was comparable to the Bronte sisters' in their Byron fanfic. In fact I was so aware of it that I had to make a conscious effort to “make” that play art by forcing myself to be less attracted to my male protagonist (who, in an additional psychological twist, was just a narcissistic fantasy of my insufferably female teenage self as a gay male “bad boy” anyway).

But if for some male and some female writers, sex plays an important role in literary composition (and one can obviously include filmmakers too), the question is whether this results in something called “objectification.” Because my identification with Orton was murderously (so to speak) intense; though no more intense (and actually perhaps less) than my identification with the Halliwell character, to whom I was not attracted.

But the greater portion of my evidence comes from my experience as a reader and viewer, that is, as a critical theorist (since I cannot perform these roles without analysis, whether simultaneous or retrospective). In Love and Death in the America Novel, Leslie Fiedler argued that the puritan strain in British culture led to an obsessive focus on rape in the British novel, most spectacularly in the first great “realist” novel, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa. One result of this puritan tendency to take imperilled virtue as its subject was the temporary phenomenon of male writers creating female protagonists, which culminated in the psychologically sex-crossing Henry James, and has never become popular again. Well, at least until Steig Larrson performed his immensely popular modern spin, with virtue and rape still as much at stake as ever (and still as much of a mask for prurience), as Tim Parks's New York Review of Books article, “The Moralist,” makes clear. The male author in this strain both identifies with and objectifies his heroine, views her as subject and object. The “rape line” reemerges in cinema with Hitchcock and continues with Polanski and Lynch. There's a grim culmination in Rosemary's Baby, in which a director has rarely more closely identified with a heroine (or forced an audience into closer identification), and yet still subjects her to his rape fantasy. (I wonder if I've already mentioned on this blog the irony that Roman Polanski may understand women better than any other film director. And I'm not the only woman I know who thinks this.)

I suppose what I am trying to say is that a heterosexual (or whatever Henry James was) artist's relationship to his or her opposite-sex main character is, or can be, immensely complex, comprising both identification and attraction, and, in result, sadism and masochism; not to mention the psychological implications of sex-crossing identification. And in the reader's response, too, identification and objectification also often co-exist.

I'll give the unlikely example of a couple of songs by the punk band Mindless Self Indulgence, “Shut Me Up” and “Faggot.” In them, the male singer assumes the persona of an apparent masochist, begging for someone of indeterminate gender – it would be equally perverse whether it was a woman or a man – to, well, shut him up, or call him (make him?) a faggot. The assumption of masochism by a hardcore performer gives these songs a real frisson for me, but I couldn't tell you whether it's sadistic or masochistic in nature: if I'm enjoying the abjection of the male persona or identifying with it. (The male listener's choices are even more limited: he can identify and be queer, or enjoy and be queer. The hardcore phenomenon of MSI and its relationship to queerness is something far beyond my understanding! The only “hardcore” I understand is the Pulp album.)

(Actually, come to think of it, the assumption of masochism and invocation of a shadowy abstract figure to perform sadistic acts on one just reminded me of John Donne's Holy Sonnet XIV. Backing away fast.)

From this (very) brief discussion of narrative art, it should be clear that “objectification” is not simply a visual, but a mental act: not just a way of looking at someone, but a way of seeing them.

Objectification in Visual Art and the Metrosexual Subversion

The question becomes different when we move from narrative or narrative-visual to visual art. The feminist concern, as I understand it (in its most reasonable form, that is), is that cinema and mass media, including advertising, inherited the tradition of the female nude in fine art (a permanently discredited meme within fine art since Picasso's Demoisells d'Avignon) and pervaded the culture with sexualized images of women to such a degree that young men were being insidiously “educated” to believe that all women were “objects” with no human agency or subjectivity. In its less reasonable form, this feminist concern becomes the concept of “rape culture,” in which this objectification of women (including pornography as well) creates an environment in which rape is more likely to occur. (Never mind that rape is as old as, well, sex. Or crime. Or may most often happen to minors, in situations having nothing to do with media portrayal of women. Or in situations of social and political upheaval, such as war, along with other terrible crimes against men, women, and children; again, with zero relation to the media.)

Obviously, I'm not too interested in the “rape culture” argument, but I am interested in what gives it whatever emotional credence it has. For many men and women have now become so pervaded with the feminist meme, without even studying feminist theory (and without any necessary feminist interest or allegiance), that it's often now taken for granted that a) to be photographed in a sexualized manner is to be “objectified” and b) that this inevitably makes one passive.

Certainly, this sort of thinking is behind the subversiveness of Mark Simpson's theory of “metrosexuality” and the yummy Sporno evidence he's produced in support of it. I can't remember if Mark has ever said in so many words that men are now more often the objects of the gaze in advertising than women are, but I do believe that that's Quiet Riot Girl's interpretation of metrosexuality. (If I'm wrong she can correct me for the record in the comments!) Yet this consequence of metrosexuality has been met with disbelief, scorn, and defensiveness by the media because, for one reason, of the implications that feminist gaze theory has bequeathed us: with disbelief based on the idea that men can't be objectified because masculinity is inherently “active” (and Mark's concentration on sports is crucial here); with defensiveness based on the idea that being the object of the gaze is to be made passive (and why would men want that?).

In her post on Mark Simpson's analysis of Rafael Nadal's Armani ad, "Why Can't A Woman Be More Like A Man?," Quiet Riot Girl quotes from Mark's dwelling on the flirtiness and tartiness of the delectable image, and wonders why it has more of a “charge” for her than a similar ad run simultaneously by the company, featuring a female model. Well, I would suggest that it's because the image of Nadal subverts our expectations of masculinity by deliberately exhibiting passivity and flirty invitation, which is all the more piquant because he possesses a traditionally masculine, hunky physique, as well as his athletic rep. In much the way Paglia has described the perversity of some of Michelangelo's sculpture that erotically renders hunky males passive, languid, or masochistic. (Sorry, I gave away my most recent copy of Sexual Personae when I was drunk, otherwise I'd give the exact quote here, because it's good. And by good I mean hot.)

The other reason metrosexuality has caused a scandal is that to make yourself the object of the gaze means potentially (or really, at least in the public imagination, inevitably) making yourself the object of the male gaze. For men to be comfortable being the object of the gaze means getting over their homosexual panic, not only "abstractly," by choosing to be "passive," but directly, by desiring the desire of men. Which is what “metrosexuality” is all about. What Mark, if I recall correctly, hasn't emphasized as much is that it also means that other kind of homosexual panic, being comfortable as the (“passive”) object of the female gaze.

...Men Sick of Looking at Naked Women?

Unfortunately for feminist theory (and those of us who've unconsciously imbibed it, for our own female or male self-interested purposes), the active/passive binary just doesn't hold up. Of course women aren't uniformly “passive” or men uniformly “active” (whatever that could possibly mean), and of course every sexy photograph does not make the subject of the photograph “passive” (whatever that could possibly mean). However, these ideas of “activeness” and “passivity,” attached to ideas of “masculinity” and “femininity,” are there to be played with in the sophisticated sexual theatre of image-creation.

I've had the opportunity to occasionally peruse softcore gay male magazine porn (academic/aesthetic interest only, you perverts; it's not what I “use”), and, in my opinion anyway, it's exponentially more effective as a turn-on for my female purposes than any comparable porn I've seen created by straight women for straight women. And if I analyze it, it's because the models in those magazines, despite having rather blandly handsome faces and chiseled bodies that aren't my usual type, are engaged in flagrant displays of “feminine” passivity (sensual offerings of the body, especially buttocks) that are far beyond what I'm used to seeing from my academic perusal of straight male softcore magazine porn. In other words, these men are working hard at being passive. Which I find interesting, because you'd think with the reputation of gay men for being horny, all they'd need – as straight men claim to – is a naked body, no seduction or semiotic foreplay required.

Metrosexuality isn't the whole story of the Noughties. Even if metrosexuality was on the rise in advertising, the “objectification” of women in the media didn't go away, as feminists and conservatives (the same unlikely bedfellows as ever) clamoured about the “pornification” of culture. Since I always like a bit of Great Woman history, I'm going to go ahead and follow Simpson in putting the blame for this squarely on Madonna. In the early 90s, Paglia claimed that her favourite pop star crush had single-handedly “corrected” second-wave feminism by showing that female sexual glamour meant power, not passivity or victimization. With the Paglian insights (of the essay collections Sex, Art, and American Culture and Vamps and Tramps) intertwining with other aspects of media feminism, the result was a generation or so of young women, including young women pop stars, who seemed to think that the road to “empowerment” (that awful catch-all empty Feminism Lite meme) was paved with self-exploitation. If sex was power, and women could dress however they wanted to on feminist principle, ergo, women ought to flaunt whatever they've got (or acquired through surgery); and as long as they were doing it on their own prerogative, or at least for self-interested purposes (like getting fame and money, the bottom-line capitalist justification), they stayed firmly on top even if they were crawling on their knees and licking the dirty floor.

If you think I'm going to draw some awkwardly backtracking feminist-lite sentimental conclusion from this, like how maybe the concept of modesty had its merits, you've obviously never read me or spoken to me before. I prefer Mark's conclusion, in his Out take on the Paglia v. Gaga showdown (Two Great Women determine The Future of Sex!), that pornification via the post-feminist self-objectified female body has simply led to a cultural dead end: “[Gaga]'s post-the now boringly compulsorily 'sexy' world that Madonna helped usher in, bullwhip in hand, which is now as burned-out as that 'Bad Romance' skeleton.” Or in a word (his word), she's “postsexual,” as are we all now.

In confirmation, I recently saw a YouTube video (one of my favourite sources of sociological hard evidence) of Janelle Monae's Letterman performance of “Tightrope” in which a presumably male commenter celebrated the novelty of a female pop singer with “clothes and talent.” (Here's the vid, but I can't find the comment now. If you want proof, or proof that I'm on crack, you can look through them all if you want!) And it's true that it seems like the choices for the female in pop, thanks, ultimately, to Madonna, are now between Gaga's postsexual exposed labia and Monae's buttoned-up androgyny.

Morrissey's on board with my Great Woman History here too (and with great minds like Paglia, Simpson, Morrissey, and me on the case, how can one go astray?). I recall reading an interview in which he commented at the time that Madonna had erased the already historically academic line between pop music and prostitution. Of course, he was one to talk.

The Western tradition of homoerotic iconography reaches new heights of subtle suggestiveness in pop music's most sustained coy tease.

Who's Calling the Shots? (Fun with Guns)

As I suggested above, passivity and activity in relation to masculinity and femininity are not fixed, essential qualities, but roles to be played, and played with (whether you want to come at that from a Butlerian or Paglian perspective). Nor is the “sex object” of a photographic image fixedly passive, or, in Paglia's reversal of the binary, active or “powerful” either. Any image that aspires to be iconic, at least, is a collision site of both previous iconic images and our inherited cultural understanding of what and how images mean. And this is true whether the primary auteur of the image is the photographer or the photographic subject, in a given case (or it may be a collaboration).

In order to talk about objectification and passivity in sexual imagery meaningfully, we have to carefully, and without an agenda, examine individual images. Academic feminism is tops at careful examination but tends to fall down on the “lack of agenda” front.

It might also help to know the background of how the image was created. So I'll tell a little story. When I was an 18-year-old playwriting prodigy facing the opportunity of my first front page Arts section newspaper photograph, I wanted to make an impact. (And it's a good thing I made the most of it, because it would also be my last such photograph.) This is because I held in my mind a gallery of iconic writer photographs that had determined what it meant to be “a writer” for me, from Oscar Wilde's scandalous long-haired dandy series, to Colette's sensational Claudine “schoolgirl” series, to Capote's seductive pixie-boy dust-jacket photo for his debut novel, to Orton's Christine Keeler take-off. In other words, I thought it was my pleasurable duty to make people upset, with sex the easiest way to accomplish this. But as pop tarts from Britney to Ke$ha have demonstrated with their bland “compulsory” sexiness, it's not quite as easy as it looks. It does require a bit of thought.

When the adult male photographer and assistant showed up for the shoot on the set of the small indie theatre where Live With It was first performed, my greeting to them was, “You can do whatever you want with me.” (Passivity? Not always so passive.) In fact, however, I was the one who suggested that we use a pair of handcuffs, a prop from the play (not S&M at all, perverts; those were mofo existential handcuffs), which I put on and posed curled up on a bed, another prop (the scene of Orton's gory murder). I can't remember who suggested the bed, but I would have been game due to the reclining Capote precedent.

See, I wanted a sexy image of myself because, who doesn't, but I also wanted a sensational image, and since this was the early 90s, and we'd already been through Madonna, there already wasn't much left to do with a sexy image of a woman that would be sensational. I had read Paglia by the time of this photo, and I took her point that Madonna had demonstrated that for a woman to be sexy was to be powerful. So what was the only taboo left surrounding representations of women in the still-p.c. early 90s feminist environment? (You cannot imagine now the media flack that Paglia got. Maybe Quiet Riot Girl can. And yet fellow liberals still tell me that the conservative perspective is dominant in the media.) Obviously: female masochism.

Honestly, I came up with all this in 3.5 seconds; that image was the coalescence of all of my thoughts about women, feminism, sex, and the role of the writer (which like many of my generation, I had started to confuse with the role of the pop star: the writer and pop star as “poor man's” versions of each other) up to that point. Female masochism – to make the cheeky suggestion that women were not so powerful after all – was the most confrontational, aggressive, active thing I could do in what would otherwise be a blandly passive sexual representation of myself.

...although I may have fallen a little short of my iconic/iconoclastic intentions, considering the only response I ever got to that photo was that it made me look fat. (Trufacts.)

I don't have the original of that photo (I do of another, earlier Free Press photo, in which I presented myself as an underage smoker in a purple suede miniskirt... the cigarette did inspire reader complaints), or a scanner to reproduce it, or the faded and tattered newspaper reproduction, if I still have an intact copy of it anywhere. But, since I take the least photographic opportunity (I only wish I had more) to perform a minute twist on the “active” and “passive,” here's a Halloween snap from about ten years later (I'm supposed to be Emma Peel):

It would be just too obvious for me to assume that “powerful” dominatrix female role (notoriously a male fetish, anyway) by pointing the gun at you. (Yeah, that's a toy gun at my jaw there. It's not a professional image, sue me.) I thought that the flippant suicidal suggestion was much more subversive, and much more aggressive. (A line of thought that would culminate in a ten-minute one-woman performance I gave at the National Theatre School about three years later, in which I took inspiration from Jarvis Cocker's – on record! – troubled pornography “obsession” at the time of This is Hardcore. ) I mean, if a woman's death-wish is a turn-on for you (and you are otherwise normal), that is not going to be a comfortable feeling. (And so Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman and I discussed when coming up with our improv-based performance, Where Are You Going?, which we privately subtitled “A Clown Piece About Rape.” We agreed that we wanted to be sexy – who doesn't – but in the most uncomfortable way for the audience possible.)

On the other hand – as a man – James Maker makes the dominatrix iconography (phallic symbol fetish gun and heels) of the photo below really work for him. I can't know Mr. Maker's intentions here, if he recalls them himself – and I prefer not to ask, because I'd rather imagine that, like me in my Free Press photos, his primary motivation was simply to rile up anyone who cares to get riled. But there's definitely something more psychologically complicated going on in this photo than the typical metrosexual melting submission or good-natured gaze-courting. To me it reads as a literalization of the look/don't look nature of the female relationship (with the aggressive component underlined) to the male gaze (or male sexuality generally) of which men have been heard to complain. Or maybe I'm just thinking of the back cover photo on the original Blizzard edition of Live With It, in which (still 18) I tried my hardest to look like Garbo (in tribute to Bowie's Hunky Dory cover) and posed with cigarette in languid hand... with a stop sign propped up behind me (the legend "STOP" clearly legible). (It made my publisher giggle. Once again, I aimed at the sublime and achieved the ridiculous.)

Regardless, you want to get shot through the heart by this pretty face, don't you?

I also feel like there's some channeling of Diana Rigg's aforementioned 60s pop feminist twist on the dominatrix, Mrs. Peel:

Put her in trad-dominatrix costume in order to make her a typical sex object, however, and her cool disdain at this farcical charade (I believe it was my friend Donna who told me to look at the way she's looking at that snake) is evident.

Woman v. snake!!! The primal conflict. Now that's a look.

Temporary Conclusions: Another Look

To summarize in the terms of some of the questions raised in Quiet Riot Girl's fascinating series of posts on metrosexuality and the gaze:

Are women the primary objects of the gaze anymore? No.

Are “metrosexual” men enjoying the gaze that the puritan strain of feminism told women was tantamount to rape? It would appear to be so.

Is there a female gaze? If you mean are women looking at men as sex objects, yes, obviously. If you believe Vidal, Williams and Brando started it all in the 50s; the male rock star continued it (as Paglia has pointed out); and in the 90s and Noughties, most women (certainly the ordinary, mainstream pop-listening, masculine men-dating young women I knew) were looking not at Armani ads, but at shirtless six-pack-flaunting rappers – who, for some reason, no one has ever claimed for metrosexuality. (Is this because black men have always been – whether in fact or in white perception – more comfortable with displays of their sexuality than the pre-metro buttoned-up white male? Or because no white critic dared to question the machismo of what Kevin Barnes called, in song, "a black male domination spasm"?) (It's a little more complicated than that, since Barnes is talking about, or in the person of, his alter ego, a Tiresian MTFTM, if I've got that right, black transsexual. But you know what they mean.)

But the most interesting question to me, as the foregoing should have made clear, is whether to be what we call a “sex object” inevitably involves passivity. What I attempted to demonstrate above is that although the concept of passivity plays an important role in the theatre of sex and sexuality, passivity itself isn't always passive. Take a good look at what you're looking at. There may be much more going on than you think. Oh, and remember to enjoy it while you're at it, too.

If you can. The boyfriend who took this picture told me it freaked the hell out of him.

Of course, you don't have to date me.

A Defense of the Hipster

2011-06-19T23:17:00.000-07:00

I nearly aborted Part 2 of my hipster post, but after chatting with loyal reader Elly, I'm thinking that I need to give a bit of explanation of why I'm sympathetic to the hipster

It seems to me that hipsters are mainly hated for the following reasons (not including their own self-hatred, which is uninteresting university-indoctrinated white liberal guilt and familiar bourgeois self-loathing):

Their elitism (they're better than you, smarter than you, have better taste than you, and are “above” consumerism); this also ties in with the perception that the hipster is white (middle-class and privileged – with or without a trust fund)
Their combination of loose affiliation with multiple subcultures and, in apparent contradiction, rampant consumerism (i.e. they have no strong counter-culture position or beliefs, but they're wearing the fashions of previous movements, and in some cases spending a lot of money on them)

The first reason I'm sympathetic to the hipster is that I have never had any problem with superficiality. Allow me to explain. When I was in high school, lo many years ago (the late 80s/early 90s), I first attempted to find my identity by joining the “alternative” scene (which, incidentally, you weren't supposed to call that, since they didn't like “labels,” which even at the time I thought was hilariously self-important). Its comforts were many. First, these people seemed cool, and I wanted to learn how to be cool. Second, they had a uniform (all black), making the agonizing decision of what to wear (since anything you wore had a social meaning and consequences) easy. Third, there was security in numbers. It meant I'd be accepted by a group.

Pretty soon, I realized the essential hypocrisy of “rebel” subcultures: we were supposed to be “different,” but there were strict rules about what you could and couldn't wear, listen to, like, and think. Notably, you couldn't wear colours and couldn't have any fun because then you wouldn't seem angsty and depressed. I was probably clinically depressed at the time, but I thought that never joking and laughing was probably the worst way you could react to it: presumably, the point was to stop being depressed, not to stay depressed.

So, I broke free of that group of friends and went on a new identity construction quest. Having been introduced by them to thrift-store shopping, I went on a giddy spree of buying whatever looked interesting to me, including things they wouldn't like and that would also serve to protest preppie blandness. This largely involved colourful floral old ladies' blouses and clashing peasant skirts. I retained a couple of alternative signifiers, so my basic allegiance would still be clear: black tights (all-year-round), black skinny jeans (because I could never go back to blue denim and retain my self-respect, although sometimes I'd wear my dad's bell-bottom blue jeans from the 70s, with giant holes in the knees, over ripped black tights), and the pale face/red lipstick/black eyeliner combo. Otherwise, though, my colourful thrift-store fashion aesthetic ended up looking a lot like the rummage-sale aesthetic of early Morrissey (not an influence, since pre-internet, in Canada, my only “visuals” for The Smiths were occasional nostalgia photos in the NME). (Of which we got one copy per month in the downtown mall Coles.) I interspersed it with early 70s discoveries from my parents' storage closet: psychedelic minidresses, pinstripe suits (to play Thin White Duke), square metal-framed Lennon sunglasses.

This, I'm pretty sure, was one of the beginnings of hipsterism: “arty” high school students coming out of the alternative scene and rejecting the fashion and music that was marketed to them, but also the “rules” of specific subcultures, in favour of a fun thrift-store aesthetic that naturally emphasized retro fashion. Soon I became friends with a large group of similarly-inclined kids, most of us lower-middle-class in an upper-middle-class school, who represented many of the various strains of subculture influence that would later get lumped together as “hipster” taste, such as hippie-beatnik and hippie-environmentalist/multiculturalist. Most of us liked to express ourselves creatively through our fashion choices (and tended to use either thrift stores or, if we had a bit more money, such as by getting jobs, independent boutiques) and almost all the members of the core group were involved in the arts (poets, playwrights, actors, singers, dancers). There was some crossover in music tastes (and anyone who liked things that were uncool, like metal, had to be either tutored or keep it to themselves), but more discrepancy of the “my bands are better than yours” kind. (Another important point in common: most of us read books. On purpose.) But differences in taste were well-tolerated. As long as you didn't have mainstream tastes, you were obviously a bit “off” (you might, for example, be severely medicated, or insufficiently medicated), and you were unconcerned about the high school Holy Grail of “popularity,” you were accepted. Later I learned that in many cases these kids were extremely insecure and, before finding this loose alliance, had in fact been worried about popularity and been victims of cruelty. I didn't know it at the time, because I really wasn't insecure in the least. Not, anyway, about my high school social status. You had two choices, basically: you could either continue to suffer it out on the fringes of the “popular crowd,” or you could kiss them goodbye and join a group where the worst you'd get was some mild teasing for having redneck music tastes.

Within our group (from my own perspective there were about half a dozen core “members,” including my two closest friends, plus about half a dozen others), I'm pretty sure I was the one most concerned about what was “cool.” In fact I distinctly remember the day I saw the Spin “Cool Issue” (back when Spin was still an alternative music magazine) and had the epiphany: “Yes! That's what I want to be! Not popular – cool!” I didn't take their advice on what was cool, except when I already agreed with it (e.g., The Ramones). I did take their advice on not taking their advice but rather figuring out this mysterious, elusive thing, so closely associated with rock for so long, on my own. Cool, of course, meant original above all. You couldn't copy it, and there was no sure way to achieve it. That meant if you hit it right, you were some kind of genius; in a way that may be evident only to you, since no one else might be cool enough to appreciate your cool. Which made it even better, because you didn't have to rely on others for affirmation (except in your own mind, where their congenital inability to appreciate you made you feel smugger).

And I did value originality. So that when Nirvana hit in '91 and suddenly friends who'd previously exhibited the “creative” retro thrift-store aesthetic were dressing in drab plaid and slouching around literally overnight, I was disappointed to discover that they were just trendy after all. Of course to the external eye the thrift-store aesthetic of “not looking like anyone else” probably looked like just as much of a uniform, and that's certainly what it became: the hipster look. I saw it happen, as trendy boutiques in the arts areas of our city bought up the “coolest” retro items from the general thrift stores in order to sell them at jacked-up prices, presumably to solvent young urban professionals. I refused to shop in those places (with the occasional exception, naturally) not only because I couldn't afford them but also because buying thrift-store clothes at expensive prices ruined the principle. So did having the choice of what was cool made for you, rather than determining it yourself.

As the pickings got slimmer (now I'm picturing this as an indie movie, with a recurring scene of the girl on a thrift-store hunt, at first tentatively, guided by cooler friends; then enthusiastically, on her own; and then forlornly, the treasures gone), and the choice retro items were snatched up, I had to get more creative. One day all I could find that was unusual was a lace shirt, yellowed with age. I thought, “But dare I? I'd be violating every last punk principle.” And then I had another of those epiphanies. I took it home, cut off the sleeves, and wore it as a punk statement on femininity that was also a punk subversion of punk. A few months later, I saw Courtney Love on a magazine cover for the first time, in her baby doll gear. Around this time I started to get obsessed with the idea that simply by following my instincts, I could predict fashion, and believed, probably delusionally, that I was seeing the “trends” I “started” everywhere in the media. Mark Greif's snark in his NYMag attack on the hipster, “The hipster is a savant at picking up the tiny changes of rapidly cycling consumer distinction,” would have been taken as a compliment by me, although it may give the hipster too much credit: what's really characteristic of the hipster is not that she's able to predict trends, but that she's obsessed with being able to do so.

But I had excellent historical and philosophical justifications for this obsession, so read on.

Hipsters and the Gay Male Subculture

One of the reasons I was the member of my group most overtly concerned with fashion and “coolness” was that I had done my research into gay male culture. It started, as it does for many hipsters, with an obsession with David Bowie when I discovered The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars by complete accident. (I was 13; my grandparents bought a new second-hand car and gave the abandoned 8-track collection to me; I had also inherited a record player with 8-track; these contingencies converged to provide the soundtrack that literally enabled me to survive puberty.) Even before that, though, I'd discovered Oscar Wilde, also by complete accident (I saw a photograph of the early dandy Wilde in an unreadable New York Review of Books article on Richard Ellmann's biography of Wilde, which I did read). (Wilde wore a hat and a cape. How cool was that?) I read a bio of Bowie and researched his influences, particularly Andy Warhol. When Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae appeared, I got over the media portrayal of her as an anti-feminist when I looked in the index and saw that it included both Wilde and Bowie – and at the time, it was radical for a work of scholarship to incorporate pop culture references, which is exactly what I was looking for: someone to bring together the traditional arts and pop culture, my two branches of interest, which I'd never seen as separate. All of this took place for me between the ages of 13, when I discovered Wilde, and 17, when I read SP.

While I was parading around my high school in sloppy, clown-coloured retro thrift-store clothes, listening to indie music (mostly The Smiths), reading teenage hipster literature (Kafka, Naked Lunch, On the Road), and writing plays (one of which would be produced when I was 18 and win a national award), I thought of myself all the while as a Wildean aesthete. I appreciated fashion, knew its history (Cecil Beaton was among my idols), thought that the “authenticity” prized by other counterculture elements was a preposterous pose, and enjoyed tweaking these elements by emphasizing my superficiality. And, in line with another frequent accusation against hipsters – that they're more interested in cultivating the artist persona than in making art – I definitely thought that this was the way an artist should be. Artists should be colourful, eccentric, playful provocateurs. And, if possible, sexy. As a teenager, the main way in which I got interested in writers was through their photographs: Wilde, Colette, Truman Capote, Jane Bowles, Joe Orton – they all knew how to pose (which made an obvious point of connection between the writer and the pop star in my mind). The artist, I believed, should be a poseur. And they should never assume the drab pose of self-important seriousness: that was bland and middle class. The artist was trickster and imp. Obviously, I did take my writing seriously (although, significantly, my subject was still the artist), and I was surprised when in my first major interview with a local newspaper I was described as having “the pose of the writer.” The same arts critic, anyway, decided that I delivered the goods when he reviewed my play, but I didn't understand how my appearance (let alone my vocabulary) was setting me up with something extra to prove in the first place. Of course I had the pose of the writer – that's one of the things, besides good writing, that I believed a writer had to deliver!

The playwriting career, obviously, didn't take. And by my early twenties I had learned to admire writing and writers for reasons other than their subversiveness or sexiness. By my mid-20s I'd stopped wearing thrift-store clothes, even though my clothing budget wasn't any bigger, because I thought it was undignified, although I couldn't bear to adopt the standard university student costume of hoodie, blue jeans, and ponytail. My elitism was unwavering, though mild, and if in high school I'd consciously defined myself against Gap and other brand-name preppies, in university I more casually defined myself against the prevalent Canadian prairies aesthetic. Without a clothing budget, I bought clothes as little as possible, but now and then I did need a new pair of pants, and wasn't surprised when the only other girls I saw in the same ones were Asians (easily the most fashion-conscious university students in my city to this day, when they've far outstripped me at my advanced age).

What does surprise me is that in all of the media coverage of the hipster, no one seems to have noticed how much this sociological group has borrowed from what used to be the gay male subculture. That subculture seems to have lost a lot of its coherence and influence, whether it's because of the LGBT bid for mainstream respectability or because, as my friend Mark Simpson suggested in a piece of writing he let me read, the older generation of gay bohemia that survived into the 80s was decimated by AIDS. Paglia talked it up a lot as one of her main influences: the 20^th century subculture that adopted the dandy persona from Wilde; that developed taste into a fine art; whose impassioned interest in art and beauty was reflected in career choices such as fashion design, stage and costume design, interior decorating, and, at the lower end of the economic spectrum, window decorating (like pre-fame Warhol) and hairdressing; and which was famous for predicting trends with their taste (e.g. Japanese art and interior design). It was this trend-predicting “savant” ability of the gay bohemian that made him so useful to pop stars who acted as conduits between the avant-garde and popular culture, like Bowie in the 70s and Madonna in the 80s.

Greif calls the hipster “that person, overlapping with the intentional dropout or the unintentionally declassed individual – the neo-bohemian, the vegan or bicyclist or skatepunk, the would-be blue-collar or postracial twentysomething, the starving artist or graduate student – who in fact aligns himself both with rebel subculture and with the dominant class, and thus opens up a poisonous conduit between the two” (which is just bewildering, since Greif has a Yale Ph.D., and therefore was at one point a graduate student: is he really delusional enough to believe that his academic Marxism protects him from “alignment with the dominant class,” or is it like the literary theory loophole where all text is subject to ultimate indeterminacy except the text you're reading now that's telling you this?). But only recently, the gay man was that person, and liberals (well, anyway, Sontag and Paglia) considered his role of conduit as being of vital cultural importance – despite the fact that this 20^th century subculture produced aesthetes and commercial artists rather than, for the most part, major fine artists (the only exceptions I can think of are Warhol, Bacon, and maybe Mapplethorpe). Which is exactly how Greif dismisses the hipster: because they're not producers, they must be consumers (there's no other role you can serve in life, and that magic word, “consumer,” obliterates all credibility with no possibility of appeal); and to the extent that they do produce, it's not “major art,” but rather artisan art (tattoos and T-shirts).

Hipsterism and the Post-Feminist Male

But even as gay bohemia, although perhaps still existing in some pockets, had lost its vital influence, its traits were spreading throughout a much larger minority of heterosexual youth – right down to their humour, snark, which (especially in its highly-developed online form) is gay male bitchery and liberal-baiting* as practised by gender-bending, bi-curious heterosexuals, many of whom had their lives changed at some point by reading Judith Butler in a Gender Studies course and/or picking up a copy of Sexual Personae. This post-gender, post-sexuality hipster is, most importantly, post-feminist: one of the main sources of the twee movement in hipster art that Greif identifies is Smiths-era Morrissey (whom Greif doesn't mention), who surprised me in early interviews (which I read late, on the internet) by mentioning 70s feminist theorists, to which I believe he was introduced by his performance artist friend Linder, as an influence on his rejection of rock machismo. If the hipsters didn't have Morrissey, they had an undergrad women's studies, gender studies, or queer studies course, or a girlfriend (or boyfriend) who took one or several of these. (And yes, there are gay hipsters – lots of lesbian ones, or maybe those are just the ones I know – since “hipster” in the broad sense just means a certain kind of youth culture, including youth from the LGBT community.)

Because “hipster,” at least in one of its meanings, refers to a large, loose affiliation of youth subcultures whose subculture affiliations are also loose (or they couldn't be part of the “hipster” melting pot), there's a tension within it, which I detected even within my small high school group of arty kids, between fashion-conscious superficiality (the trait held in common with the gay male bohemian) and punk/hippie authenticity. And if you want to deconstruct the hipster – which apparently everyone does – you can declare this an “aporia” (another magic word, but only English students care) that renders the entire project incoherent. The hipster is not only (arguably) the first youth culture figure to have her counterculture tastes marketed back to her instantly, in order to transform the rebel into an obedient consumer; she's also the first youth culture figure to be subjected to Cultural Studies-style pseudo-sociological analysis, which is apparently the exact same thing as Reefer Madness-style pseudo-sociological conservative analysis, except practiced by leftists... with Yale Ph.Ds. Or by hipsters themselves, graduate school dropouts who funneled their Cultural Studies-style education into more lucrative careers as satire bloggers. (What was SWPL but the nailing of a trend... the hipster trend?)

In the early 90s, Paglia called for several things from de-ethnicized middle-class youth, and the university student in particular: to reclaim their aestheticism from p.c. academe, recognizing that taste is elitist, something that can be cultivated but not taught**; and to learn something about life outside the university by getting menial jobs and having some experience of being poor. Well, hipsters did that. And the process got kicked into high gear after the recession made it obvious that a humanities degree was not, for most, a ticket to the middle class, but rather a one-way ticket to a career in retail, where, incidentally, full-time jobs were also scarce. Hence the two great contradictory meanings of the hipster: on the one hand, he's despised for his symbolic privilege (white, male, middle class, highly educated); on the other hand, he's despised for symbolizing the defeat of that privilege (he lacks any socio-economic power: he's not middle class, he's not working class, he's not anything, he's just ridiculous).

And make no mistake, it's the male hipster who's the symbolic point of contention: turn-of-the-millennium, cerebral, deliberately eschewing masculinity (metrosexuality arrived right on schedule to give the twee persona more of an urban, cosmopolitan touch for those who wanted it), he looks to everyone, himself most of all, a helluva lot like Wells's Eloi, and there's not a thing he can do about it.

As for the stigma on people in their 20s or 30s continuing to get financial assistance from their parents, that one's just plain baffling: since there is no such thing in 21^st century Western culture as the extended family (at least not for white people) or the middle-class private income, what exactly are young people supposed to do if they are not interested in immediately starting a lucrative career and focusing their energy on advancement? Is that really what we want all youth to do? And I know plenty of young “hipster” workaholics, but they have careers as things like hairdressers, chefs, or retail managers, all of which I assume Greif would scorn. Some of them work several jobs and live with their parents. I can't tell you why: maybe so they can be better consumers, or maybe because many people in their early 20s aren't emotionally ready to leave their families. Which makes another damned-if-you-do-or-don't: hipsters can't both be mega-consumers (one criticism) and slackers (another criticism), unless all of their parents are paying for everything... and they're not.

If we all agreed to define the hipster as “that young person, student, or ex-student who professes vaguely counterculture tastes and sentiments while doing nothing but mega-consuming corporate-marketed trends on their parents' dime,” I would readily agree to jump on the condemnation bandwagon, although I still wouldn't get excited about it. (Why? Because some of these people at least look cool and have good taste, and the world needs more of that. The ones that look like idiots I could do without, but they at least provide entertainment.) But that is not every young person, student, or ex-student who professes vaguely counterculture tastes and sentiments. In fact, I don't know anyone who meets this description. But then, I don't live in a major metropolitan centre.

From Camp to Kitsch

What the hipster represents to me, in line with the role they've taken over from the gay bohemian, is one major strain of the turn-of-the-millennium aestheticization of reality. I remember the moment when I realized that youth counterculture had taken over camp: when I saw Ghost World (2001) in my mid-twenties, and recognized that the young people who were extending the retro/thrift aesthetic of my teenage years had developed a particular aesthetic attitude to the world that strongly resembled Sontag's classic definition of “camp” (poisonous, and deadly hip, New York conduit as she was between the gay counterculture and the trendy liberal intelligentsia). The middle-class teenage “counterculture rebels” of Ghost World were attempting to reclaim kitsch – including the politically- charged kitsch of pre-p.c. racial stereotyping – as camp: as something of aesthetic/humourous value. As something cool. I have to admit that I was a little disturbed that the word “camp” never appeared in the film; and disturbed again when a similar issue comes up in the second episode of The Burg, and again, no mention of “camp” appears. (“Retro,” yes; “camp,” no.) Are hipsters really so ignorant of the gay subculture they so closely resemble, and to which they owe so much philosophically? There's a vague allusion to camp in the second Burg episode, when the hipsters' new roommate, the yupster Ryan (he has a job on Wall Street and naive enthusiasm for the “creativity” of hipster culture), seeing a decorating trend of such potential gay iconography as a Russ Meyer poster and an absence of signifiers of traditional masculinity (such as other posters of sexy women), asks one of them if they're gay, to his consternation – even though the less uptight Ryan thinks it would be cool or even “hot.” So maybe the male hipster (in some versions) did have to dissociate himself from homosexuality, considering that to the outside observer, it's hard to tell the difference between his taste and gay taste.

The Middle Class, Now Purely Symbolic

Lest we add the “appropriation” of gay culture to the list of the hipster's sins, however, it's important to note that Wilde appropriated the dandy for gay culture (after Walter Pater's Studies in the History of the Renaissance permanently associated the aesthete with male homosexuality).*** It was Baudelaire who appropriated the dandy as the ideal persona for the avant-garde artist, because of his aristocratic disdain for the bourgeoisie; even though this disdain was now purely symbolic, with no basis in real socio-economic power: the bourgeois was in, the aristocrat was out. Much like the situation of the hipster now, according to its critics: the de-ethnicized bourgeois is out, the ethnicities he has historically oppressed are in. For the symbolic disdain of the dandy, which refused to bend to mass taste (the origins of kitsch), substitute the symbolic knowingness of the hipster. And with Baudelaire's appropriation of the dandy's symbolic elitism for the existential stance of the modern artist came the separation of the practice of art from the cultivation of the artist persona: for the first time, being an artist meant pissing off the bourgeoisie not only with your art but with the way you looked and acted. There had been many artists like this before (and the Romantics really dug it); but now it was a programme. By the time Wilde took it up, he thought the best way to piss off the bourgeoisie was to make that the main duty of the artist, of much greater importance than creating major artworks (which he managed to do almost by accident, and only once or twice). And to this day, it seems like the best way to piss off as many people as possible is to assume the pose of an elitist artist, or “artistic type,” which artists themselves seem reluctant to do, maybe because that persona (and their cultural influence) was taken over by the rock star. Well, nowadays everyone has learned how to be their own rock star, on Facebook or walking down the street. Except now it's not the conservatives getting riled up: it's the liberals and leftists, for whom “consumerism” is the only issue of the day, to the point where the once-trenchant critique is becoming meaningless. Conservatives are too busy worrying about youth developments that have little overlap with hipster culture, like teen pregnancy and single motherhood. Liberals, it seems to me, are a little bit too distracted by fashion on this one.

*Hipster humour is a strange phenomenon. It's unusual for youth culture to be associated with a specific (or any) type of humour; we don't hear about punk humour or hippie humour. Or, if you want to suggest hipsterism as an art movement (which no one does, yet they somehow, like Greif, end up doing it anyway, if only to argue against it), it's not usual to associate those with humour either; Dadaism is the only exception I can think of. Fuelled by white liberal guilt and bourgeois self-loathing, hipster humour has paradoxically converted these things into a self-deprecation that's reminiscent of ethnic humour. That may form another source of frustration for the hipster's critics: if you come to youth with the expectation of punk rage or hippie love, and instead get snark, you are liable to perceive, humourlessly, as dispassion what is in fact a way of looking at the world from a viewpoint not only of aestheticism but of absurdism. (The humourless hipster, on the other hand, is just a fashion victim, like any other.)

**The hipster critic would reply to this that hipster taste is taught, and that's the point: it's taught at university, and its main signifying function is that you've been to university. Cutting class-based argument that this is, it's extremely attractive; unfortunately, it's not borne out by my experience. I picked up my hipster (or indie) taste in high school, and many of the “hipster youth” I know have never been anywhere near a university. If they ever plan to do so, it's not necessarily in the humanities. While it's true that some late-blooming hipsters only learn indie taste in university, it's sure not from their classes (mandatory listening to OK Computer or Funeral or viewing of HBO dramas is not part of the core humanities curriculum, at least not yet); as in high school, it's from their peers. The middle class, ranging from lower to upper, is currently faced with a choice: declass yourself by aligning yourself with elitist taste, or declass yourself by aligning yourself with populist taste. Either way, it's not your class (parental or personal income) that decides your taste, but your taste that decides your (symbolic) class.

***Thus associated, "aesthete," like "hipster" (damningly associated with the white middle class) became uniformly a term of abuse, from which only a few brave souls have tried to rescue it. I'm one. I called myself an "aesthete" and defended aestheticism as often as possible throughout university, which didn't affect my marks (disappointing my pretensions to intellectual martyrdom), but did get me into plenty of arguments with the professors who liked me best. Obviously, "aesthete" is no longer a term of abuse for its association with homosexuality, but for the implication that values exist that are independent of social constructs or materialist reductions.

Beyond the Pale: The Rising Profile/Declining Relevance of the Hipster

2011-06-04T09:29:00.000-07:00

It would appear that the hipster is officially dead. This is how I know:

In the mid-00s, hipster awareness hits the masses. Or at least, the small portion of the masses with hipsterish tendencies. In 2006 a creative team from Williamsburg, Brooklyn produces the web sitcom The Burg about Williamsburg hipsters, with the tagline, “Who Says Gentrification Isn't Funny?” Although I only found out about that show a few days ago, I'm fairly sure that 2006 is the same year I start using the word, in such sentences as, “Oh my God, I'm SUCH a hipster.” I probably started using it in theatre school in Montreal, but when I returned to Regina, Saskatchewan, in the Canadian prairies, in 2007 – so, hardly a major metropolitan centre – it was in use in hipsterish circles. I have no idea where I first heard it, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't in an article or on TV. It's much like that other amorphous, all-purpose term that was tossed around in the 00s and with which “hipster” has developed much overlap, “metrosexual,” except I know I did discover that term in an article. (From 2002: Mark Simpson's "Meet the Metrosexual." Mark has taken the occasion of the start of new decade to review the metrosexual's influential 00s trajectory in the just-released collection Metrosexy.) Like metrosexual, it was one of those terms where you instantly recognized the phenomenon (probably with a giggle) and understood its application even though you couldn't define it in less than 5000 words. Also rather like that all-important but all-subjective/all-contextual distinction of the online era, nerd vs. geek, which was gaining currency at the same time.
In October 2007, New Yorker popular music critic Sasha Frere-Jones bashes indie in the article “A Paler Shade of White” for being, you guessed it, too white, apparently unaware of the Unfortunate Implications, whereby you can't stereotype white people (i.e., mainly guys: they have no balls, rhythm, or “vigour”), however fair game they may be, without stereotyping black people (again, mainly guys: figure it out). Indie fans such as myself feel butthurt, but are also pretty quick to accept that they're bland, boring, and, of course, secretly deeply racist. And this despite the fact that Frere-Jones's thesis is reflecting perception more than reality, since during the 00s, there's been more indie/hip-hop collaboration and crossover than ever, what with the efforts of Danger Mouse and the critical and popular success of Damon Albarn's Gorillaz and M.I.A.'s art school hip-hop. Perhaps the British don't count.
In January 2008, Christian Lander creates his Stuff White People Like blog, a sort of rewrite of Theory of the Leisure Class as satire, but less snarky, and it instantly becomes a phenomenon, with a book deal. People love it, hate it, or love/hate it. It's widely recognized in the blogosphere that Lander is not talking about “white people” per se but rather hipsters. More Unfortunate Implications ensue, and the Great Cultural Divide between elitist hipster culture, middle class and apparently exclusively white, and white trash culture (e.g. reality TV), enjoyed by “the wrong kind of white people,” as Lander puts it, and all of their ethnic working-class friends, becomes apparent. No one knows what black people think about the uncool implication that if they have hipster taste it “makes them white,” which is what this tortuous form of white liberal guilt has resulted in by contorting itself into pretzely shape. Even though white people have been praying that having “black taste” (i.e., appropriating hip-hop culture) will make them black for, like, over a decade. Hipsters appear to be the only white people left who realize that they are hopelessly white, no matter how many ethnic foods they try.
Catching on to this trend rather late, in July 2008, and making up for it with hysteria, hipster magazine Adbusters declares hipsters the dead end of Western civilization. The article attracts a crapload of comments, most of them telling Adbusters to chill out. Adbusters might have avoided the uproar by specifying that they were describing the wrong kind of hipster – the kind who reads Vice. (First I'd heard of it. Is it like Mad magazine was in the 50s, or something? I mean, it sounds like the Futurists fighting the Dadaists, or some shit.) It becomes apparent that hipster self-loathing is an unprecedented intensification of the self-loathing that Marxist sociologist and art critic Arnold Hauser dryly identified as uniquely and bizarrely characteristic of the bourgeoisie, hence giving rise to the avant-garde (i.e. the ultimate roots of counter-culture and thus hipsterism). Obviously if Arnold were alive now he'd have a satirical faux-sociological blog instead of, like, massive tomes that I still haven't read all the way through.
Around this time, the hipster debt to indie makes me nostalgic for my youth, so I start wearing skinny jeans for the first time since I was 16. Luckily, as a recent graduate with an MA in English, I'm so poor that I'm thin enough to more-or-less get away with it for the first time since I was 16. At some point I also sport an ironic mullet, but grow afraid that no one in my city, where the wrong kind of white people are barely recovering from the non-ironic mullet, will realize that it's ironic, even though a co-worker at the bookstore drops a Karen O reference. I manage to resist every other hipster fashion movement because, frankly, they're as hideous as the hip-hop clothes. Trucker hats? Ironic vintage tees? (Funny for five minutes.) 80s sweaters – again? Designer nerd glasses? (Okay, if I'm honest, I would get those if I could afford a nice pair.) Neckerchiefs? You do know you look like a complete tool, right? Also, I'm in my mid-30s now, which puts me just outside the upper range of the hipster demographic, so I've got to watch it.
A little later, I go to browse in an HMV outlet and notice a table of books (since I work in a bookstore, I've always got my eye out for any undercutting by non-bookstores) whose theme appears to be counter-culture and which includes some of the subversive, underground books I read as a young teenager, which one found out about from word of mouth or researching David Bowie – notably Naked Lunch. When I next see my 20-year-old hipster sister, I share with her my shockhorror, declaring, “They've got a marketing table of hipster literature at HMV!!!!” But where was Story of the Eye? I mean, if Naked Lunch is no longer beyond the pale, what is? And what are the kids going to read now to shake up their middle-class sensibilities, now that The Man is selling the horror-porn milestones of counter-culture to them (and not Lou Reed's Man, either)? No wonder hipster youth is commonly characterized as jaded.
In the summer of 2009, the unthinkable happens: Jay Z attends a Grizzly Bear concert, then blogs that he hopes indie will “push hip-hop.” Indie music critics rejoice, since there's nothing to make something okay for white people like black people acceptance, and also because this seems to be a move in the direction of even more indie/hip-hop integration. Jay Z was apparently dragged to the concert by Solange Knowles, a high-profile black hipster – which, as we know, according to the definition of hipster made explicit by Lander, should be logically impossible. After all, if there's no such thing as an intellectual (assuming: hipster=faux intellectual), since intellectualism is always only class snobbery in disguise (you mean someone went to grad school and got indoctrinated with p.c. theory?), and, according to the guilty white liberal mind, black people can never be guilty of class snobbery, not even if they're middle class and over-educated like their white hipster brethren, ergo, black people can't be hipsters. Unfortunately for Lander et. al., it appears that hipsterism, rather than hip-hop, is the up-and-coming youth movement, and young black hipsters (born circa the mid-80s) are getting in people's faces about it. Another example: comedian Donald Glover, writer for 30 Rock (never seen it: too hip for me), actor on Community (just the right amount of wrong hipness: seen it, like it), member of web college humour sketch troupe Derrick Comedy (seen it on YouTube, funny), and nerdcore rapper under the name Childish Gambino (from his 2010 mixtapes: “Ima make my street cred stack up / I mean I'm rapping over Grizzly Bear, what the fuck?”).
And then, in spring 2010, indie critics expire with joy when Janelle Monae releases The ArchAndroid (I'm not kidding: the NME review actually made reference to Jay Z's blog remark), an uncategorizable hybrid album that embraces the entire history of 20^th century black American music while also overtly laying claim to the European avant-garde conceptual approach for popular music by black musicians. Suddenly, hipster recycling of the past (which has also, simultaneously, characterized underground hip-hop and dance) isn't dead-end, unoriginal pilfering but scintillating eclecticism. Whatever: as a YouTuber put it, at last, a female pop star with clothes and talent. If this is the future of post-rock, I can handle it.
Which brings us to summer of 2011. First, a few days ago I found myself using the term “hipster” in a positive sense for the first time ever. A hipster that I became friendly with over Doctor Who (note the hipster-geek overlap; also, in North America, the right kind of British pop culture is always hip) while working in the warehouse of my bookstore (note the hipster working class cred) – he works in the affiliated coffee shop, and we met when he'd take the garbage out through the back – told me he had a new job as a chef in a new restaurant. I asked him if it was a hipster joint. He said he thought it was going to be. And I said that in that case, I'd have to come and check it out. Note (because I have to spell it out) that this exchange took place without irony. It might have been the same day I observed in a memo from a publisher that “hipster” is now a literary marketing category, apparently identifying a strain of “literary fiction” that people actually read; not, obviously, because it's good, but because it's hip (mainly by guys: Palahniuk, Chabon, Franzen... is this the first time marketing has told the strict truth?). (No Logo – remember that? – author Naomi Klein was thrown in as the token chick.)

COMING UP: In Part II of this post-mortem, I ask, “Who Was the Hipster?” (Unsurprisingly, NYMag already declared this death in the fall of 2010, but hey, even in the online/global era, trends take a while to reach Regina from New York. Anyway, my definition of “hipster,” and most people's, is probably a bit broader than the one they use in, excuse me, New York.)

(I googled “Who Was the Hipster” to find out whether to capitalize the “was.”)

An Idle List for a Summer's Day: Best Albums 2000-2009

2011-05-21T14:31:00.000-07:00

Out of all of my hardly original “perennial student hipster” interests – literature, film, TV, music – I feel least qualified to talk about music. Luckily, you don't need any qualifications to write a blog post. Unqualification is relative, of course, and I suppose I feel this way about popular music because although it's possible, in a blogging context, to imagine you're turning people on to interesting little-known films or shows or coming up with original theories about literature, everyone in the blogosphere knows about music, and everyone knows more than you do. (Not to mention that the most ignored blogger runs a high risk of having strangers scream at them about facts or opinions when popular music occurs as a topic.) In the context of online culture it can sometimes feel like everyone's a musician or, if not, at least a music nerd. Being neither, I've come to defensively define myself as “a casual music fan.” I've stopped even trying to keep up, which in the online era is impossible. But that's precisely why, when I idly jotted down a list of “best” albums of 2000-2009 today, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the 2000s look like a good decade for popular music in immediate retrospect. Not bothering to keep up means I come to the hot bands an average of 5-10 years late, and so it can seem at any given moment that hardly anything is going on in music at all. On the contrary, great music from interesting artists keeps happening.

It's just not true that the only things that happened in the decade were Lady Gaga and Arcade Fire.

There's also the problem that, from a distance, all hipster bands look more or less the same. (Who the fun are Fleet Foxes, and why should I care?) In the present moment it always seems like there are too many good bands to get into, and none of them good enough to make it worthwhile. That's why you have to wait for one great song to get to you, however it does – whether through a friend's mix CD or recommendation or through the increasingly uncanny wide-casting demographic-targeted playlists (bringing together Justin Bieber and of Montreal, for example) in your retail workplace. Even then, it can take a long time to get through. I can't even remember how or where I heard my first of Montreal song, “Wraith Pinned to the Mist and Other Games,” but I instantly loved it. However, the prospect of getting into what seemed like a generically esoteric hipster band, however catchy their tunes, was too exhausting. It must have been a whole five years later that I heard my second of Montreal song, “Suffer for Fashion,” and only then did I check out Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, desperate for “new” music as I was. The beauty is, of course, that there is time. For some, the arrival of the global consumer/internet culture 21^st century has meant developing a denser pop culture filter than ever in order to avoid being overwhelmed by “choices” that can sometimes seem like screaming demands. (Like that kid pull-quoted – apparently approvingly – in a parenting book on how to get kids to read who expressed his anxiety over all of the great books out there waiting to be read, which made him “feel sorry” for them!)

I've also always been pretty recalcitrant when it comes to music hype. I was there for Nirvana (I was 16, in fact), and I sat it out. I did get into Hole, although it took ten years, because early Courtney Love had the same dress sense as me at 17 and had also read Sexual Personae. I loved The Bends, couldn't care less about anything else that Radiohead did, and I did try. Indifferent to The Strokes, much as I like the singles. Indifferent to Arcade Fire, pretty as it all is. I couldn't tell you much of anything about the objective quality of these bands' albums, and unlike Rolling Stone, I'm not going to try. If anything should be allowed to still be entirely subjective, it ought to be popular music. You know, unless it's crap.

So here's my idle list (with very subjective annotations) of 10 best/favourite/whatever albums/CDs/whatever from 2000-2009, which, ignorant and subjective though it may be, at least cheers me up with its indication of the health of hipster pop:

Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? (of Montreal)

Combining the literate art geekiness of Talking Heads, the jingle-pop sensibilities and weird high-pitched delivery (combined with literate art geekiness) of Sparks circa Kimono My House, the tweeness of Marc Bolan (or maybe even Ronald Firbank, even though Barnes's primary literary reference point is the pretty different Georges Bataille), and the Smiths-patented juxtaposition of upbeat pop with wittily depressing (and literate) subject matter, Kevin Barnes is one fascinating fucked-up dude. According to reviews, this is of Montreal's darkest album, documenting Barnes's (temporary, as it turned out) separation from his wife. “I spent the winter on the verge of a total breakdown while living in Norway / I felt the darkness of the black metal bands” Barnes warbles in the opening lines of a song called “A Sentence of Sorts in Kongsvinger” that goes on to cover the territory of Hopkins's Dark Sonnets with fewer Victorian frills and more postmodern understatement. “And through many sleepless nights / I lay praying to a saint that nobody had heard of.” Of course, Barnes has become alienated from his wife, not God, but that's what makes it modern, you know. Ah love, let us be true to one another, etc..

Like Morrissey and David Byrne, Barnes often adopts a naive persona in his lyrics, and one as unique to him and difficult to define in words as theirs. As a nervous breakdown set to catchy psychedelic electronic pop, Hissing Fauna could also be compared to The Associates' Sulk. But the music isn't nearly as moody, and the lyrics aren't easy to catch (or else it's my sucky speakers), so I've got to admit it's the endlessly catchy sonic soundscape that's drawn me into this one, with lyrical rewards to come.

Nux Vomica (The Veils)

And here we have the fascinating Finn Andrews, with psychosexual problems fully able to compete with Barnes's and a powerful sandpaper screech that he can also use as a warm croon. This is the band's second album, and so obviously a masterpiece that its third was bound to disappoint (and did). Whether he's following in the great tradition of UK songwriters who adopt the female perspective (see also Paul McCartney and Jarvis Cocker) in the sparkly, sprightly “Advice for Young Mothers to Be” or evoking his misgivings about sexual maturity in Blakean fashion on the epic “Not Yet” (“I love my little velvet bed / I never want to leave it anymore”), Andrews delivers lyrics as good as anyone's, but it's as a collection of great songs that the album truly impresses.

The Marshall Mathers LP (Eminem)

A rare “decade-defining” album that I actually got into at the time of its release, perhaps because it was even harder to avoid than Nevermind – and also because, devil's advocate that I am, I had to give this “homophobic misogynist” a chance. Which I did after encountering the singles “The Real Slim Shady” and “Stan” on the radio (getting driven around by my father, since I never play Top 40 radio myself). The first made me laugh, the second made me cry, and both shocked me with a level of literary craft I sure never thought I'd hear on mainstream North American radio. I got into this album at the same time as Live Through This (the latter belatedly), blasting them in my undergrad dorm room, and maybe it was the tail-end of my marriage breakup that put me in the perfect frame of mind for cathartic rage of such proportions. For Em, it was lucky he got out a masterpiece on the second (major studio) album, before fame, and maybe critical hype, messed him up in the bad, talent-obliterating way.

Up the Bracket/The Libertines (The Libertines)

In the digital era the album is really losing its definition, except in the case of masterpieces that clearly stand out from the rest of the band/artist's oeuvre. I ripped these two CDs onto my media player and I couldn't tell you which songs are from which, so I have to list them as a single entity. I surely don't need to rehearse The Libertines' lore here; it's enough to say that if The Smiths, in the 80s, offered a sped-up, homoerotic version of The Beatles' breakup for a new generation, The Libertines gave us one for postmodern times: even faster, even more homoerotic, and even more dramatic. They were also the only band of the decade to have all the elements that characterize a great pop band the way The Smiths did: catchy songs, interesting personalities, entertaining interviews, a vision that the kids cared about (even if those kids were pushing thirty, like me), and a distinct style (rather than looking like one of those kids themselves). I revisit each of these tunes with an unfading joy – the perfect pop tunes with the raw punk delivery that Doherty and Barat opportunistically nicked from The Strokes (but with more desperation and humour) or the achingly lovely, bare-bones melancholic ballads.

Gorillaz/Demon Days (Gorillaz)

Great as Blur was, with their catchy and occasionally gorgeous pop, pretty boy frontman Damon Albarn was overshadowed in the Britpop wars by Jarvis Cocker – more interesting, more charismatic, and a more consistent lyricist who was willing besides to take up Morrissey's mantle as generational spokesperson. Well, overshadowed for me, anyway, when I caught up with Britpop a decade late. So it was to everyone's surprise (or maybe just mine) when Albarn emerged post-Blur and post-Britpop as an adventurous, trend-setting musician's musician, mainly with Gorillaz, but also with The Good, the Bad & the Queen. On the first two Gorillaz albums Albarn came up with a brilliant concept that introduced a lucky new generation to smarter, cooler music that was, however, more than mature and eclectic enough to interest his older fans. And he's still got to have the best pop sensibilities of any musician since Paul McCartney. (And if you “hate Paul McCartney,” you can just shut up, you poseur snob, and clean your ears out.)

We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank (Modest Mouse)

Another contribution (after Kevin Barnes, Finn Andrews, Eminem, and perhaps Pete Doherty) to the male hysteria genre that must have characterized the decade, or at least the indie music by male musicians in it that interested me. Again: perfect pop. This time: with a heavy, almost hardcore edge (as on Nux Vomica, but to totally different effect). Isaac Brock screams himself hoarse about I'm-not-sure-what, but I believe his angst, and enjoy it thanks to the structural clarity of the songs (Johnny Marr's contribution?), which never lose their catchiness no matter how hard, loud, and dark the sound gets. It's odd, I think of myself as a lyrics person, but in all of my favourites choices for the 2000s, except maybe The Marshall Mathers LP, lyrics (to which in most cases I've paid little attention) take a back-seat to the overall sound of the album. Now, if only I had a critical vocabulary for that.

Timespirit of the Times (Jan and Steve)

Shenanigans by two brilliant unknown Canadian musicians who know everyone. This is what happens when a couple of young music nerds get together and make an album as a friendship project. There's a McCartney here, bringing the pop sensibilities, and a Lennon, bringing the monkey wrench (he may throw one at me in thanks for that description), though I can't remember which is which. There's a lot of self-indulgence, and a lot of in-jokery, but the spirit of fun is infectious. It would have been worth the full album price, if it had ever been sold at one, for featuring a song with the most bizarre and complicated pop hook of all time. It took me a full day to figure out how hum it, after which their friend, Donna Linklater of The Billie Hollies, congratulated me. I don't know how you can even get your hands on this anymore, and I think I've lost my promo copy, but maybe Donna does. It's a gem.

Fox Confessor Brings the Flood (Neko Case)
Lungs (Florence + the Machine)
Back to Black (Amy Winehouse)

Why have I left all of the female indie artists for my final three spots? It seems so unfeminist of me. Maybe pop is just one of those things where being sexually intrigued by the artist helps (YOU THINK?); at least for female fans, since men have traditionally preferred to identify with frontmen/male songwriters. Anyway, I don't know much or have a lot to say about Neko Case, Florence Welch, or Amy Winehouse, only that I agree with the critical consensus that these are three great albums of the decade (and that I'm hoping Winehouse has more great, or even good, albums in her). (I can wait a long time. I'm still waiting for a solo masterpiece from Courtney Love.) They all have great voices (whether bringing it to folk-country, pop-punk, or Motown-blues), and they all have great hair. Case is a notoriously esoteric lyricist, and for me, anyway, the emotive high points of Fox Confessor coincide with relative clarity, where the lyricism of the music and the lyricism of the, uh, lyrics, work together: as on “Maybe Sparrow” and “Hold On, Hold On.” “I leave the party at 3 a.m. / Alone, thank God,” sings Case in the latter song, which appears to be a fairly original tribute to the emotions of being a single girl, in the form of a love song to the devil. I'm not sure that I'm sure I know what she's talking about, but I'm pretty sure I've felt this way anyway.

Honourable mentions: The Good, the Bad & the Queen; The Sunlandic Twins (of Montreal); Arular (M.I.A.); Smooth Sailing and How (Paul Linklater); Fantasies (Metric)

So that's my casual music fan's overview of the 2000s. Which begs the question: RECS?

EDIT: After a small amount of internet investigation I've discovered that Barnes sold "Wraith Pinned to the Mist" to be used in some steakhouse TV commercial. So however I came to hear it (which I still can't remember, though it wasn't on TV), that's WHY I came to hear it. Which means I owe my total discovery of this delightful band to capitalism. Which means that Barnes was correct in his Stereogum rant against the concept of "selling out" when he got backlash for the commercial. How do you get people to notice you? Capitalism. Because not everyone's a musician/music nerd who's going to dig around for obscure gems among the piles of brilliant avant-garde bands out there. Talent is in no short supply; what's in short supply is exposure to interesting things in the mainstream. But, should capitalism introduce the right person to something interesting for a change, they will take note. It's all about the platform.

The Sexual Politics of Sunset Boulevard

2011-05-09T22:20:00.000-07:00

As a corollary of my Lynch kick, I watched Sunset Boulevard last night for the first time since I was a teenager. Wilder's celebrated film is a Lynch favourite, invoked in both Muholland Dr. and INLAND EMPIRE, where Norma Desmond's pet monkey and Joe's early quip, "They'll love it in Pomona," contribute to the Asian street girl's absurdist speech about her friend while Laura Dern expires from a screwdriver stabbing. I had remembered the movie as one I never wanted to watch again, although I may have tried it a second time in my early 20s, the most intensive period of my cinephilia. Watching it last night, though, I felt like I'd taken a Proustian shortcut straight back to the emotions of that first teenage viewing, and then I knew why this film that was widely regarded as a Hollywood masterpiece had never been a favourite of mine.

It has little to do with the flaws I perceived on this viewing: Wilder's occasional overkill with the voice-over narration, which often intrudes on Swanson's performance by stating the obvious; and Swanson's overacting and/or Wilder's misconceived direction in the final mad scene. The latter may have made Norma Desmond a camp icon, but it now feels dated and borders on the risible (I still cried). No, what makes the film such painful viewing is that Wilder has created an unlikely doomed, hopeless love story. One of the characteristic features of the screwball comedy (and it goes back to Jane Austen) is the author's unanalyzable skill in making us believe that the romantic couple are meant to be together despite their conflict and wildly different personalities. In ways even more unanalyzable, Wilder does this with Norma and Joe, but somehow in the context of tragic satire instead of romantic comedy.

Why this is painful has little to do with feminist objections that, except when Wilder's forcing her to look or act grotesque, Swanson is an attractive 50-year-old, while Holden, clearly 30, is given the green light to lust after a 22-year-old who's engaged to another man. On top of the age difference, Wilder loads on another reversal of cultural expectations about gender by having Norma keep Joe; and of course the insuperable barrier to any happiness an audience might imagine for them is Norma's madness.

And yet, somehow they're perfect for each other - which is the real reason that their affair is doomed. The typical noir hero, Joe is weak, passive, fatalistic, quasi-suicidal. You just don't believe that he really wants to escape Norma and try to have a normal life where he'd have to support himself and make his way in the cold world (shades of Oedipus?). You don't believe his lust for bland Betty (the source of the heroine's name in Mulholland Dr.?), even though she's set up to be a perfect "healthy partner" for him: a female version of himself, in fact, a clever aspiring writer who lacks the self-belief to write her story without him, as he lacks the self-belief to break away from Norma. You don't believe it in part because Joe doesn't seem to have a spark of virility within him, and also because the viewer can't help but notice that Norma is so much more fascinating than Betty. Her tragedy, her eccentricity, even her narcissism have a grandeur that pulls in Joe as it does the viewer. She's still big; it's life that got small.

Like Edgar G. Ulmer in Detour, then, Wilder creates the perfect doomed noir couple, a twisted version of the ideally suited (although mutually destructive) screwball couple: not an "average Joe" and a seductive femme fatale at all, but an effectively suicidal man and woman drawn together in co-dependency by their worst traits, where the man's conscious resistance is matched by his unconscious accord. There are shades of Wings of the Dove in this story, where Merton Densher is torn between a fascinatingly tragic heroine for whom he feels no conscious physical attraction and the woman he apparently really wants to be with. James amps up the tension by making the latter the obvious femme fatale, fascinating in her own right, sexy, and manipulative; but in the end it's the same story: the noir protagonist doesn't want the sexy woman, so Densher finds a reason to reject Kate and suicidally devote himself to the memory of Milly (with a touch of Jamesian necrophilia). There's little sense in Wings, though, that Densher is "meant to be" with either woman; like all James protagonists, he's meant to be alone. Wilder, on the other hand (like Lynch), is an old-fashioned Hollywood romantic underneath it all. (Norma Desmond - c'est Wilder!)

There are shades of Vertigo, too, in the way that Norma takes over Joe and tries to transform him into her musty, mothball-smelling idea of silent-era glamour: buying him new suits and letting his car get taken away to increase his dependency on her but also because she wants to ride around with him in her own wheels and relive the past. And so there should be a parallel: like Norma, Scottie Ferguson is perma-frozen in the past due to a trauma he can't overcome. (Critics have pointed out that Marnie is the film where the late Hitchcock protagonist finally asserts his virility and gets the girl. True enough, but he only does so by literally imprisoning her and committing rape, and when she agrees to stay with him at the end, after he helps her overcome her childhood trauma, it's hardly an ideal romantic ending: she tells him she prefers him to her only alternative, jail. I would compare the place of Marnie in the Hitchcock oeuvre to The Golden Bowl in James's: James scholars have noted that after several novels of romantic renunciation, in this one, the pure James heroine at last asserts her will and gets her man. Yes indeed, but at the cost of romantic maneuvering that includes "sacrificing" her friend/rival Charlotte to a fate worse than death in the wilderness of America and, a more terrible deed, "sacrificing" her father by separating him from herself. Can innocence compromise itself this much under the Jamesian moral microscope and remain innocent? The ending, too, is ominous, with Maggie reclaiming her husband, who smoothly denies all her fears, at the probable cost of living a life of lies; the greatest sacrifice of all in late James, where the worst fate a character can suffer is being denied the truth.)

The 1950s is remembered as a time in Hollywood when female grotesques were put on parade, from Norma Desmond and Margo Channing to Vivien Leigh's Blanche DuBois (all in two years: 1950 to 1951). Perhaps this was not so much in response to the ageing of the great female stars of the 20s and 30s as it was to the passing of Old Hollywood itself. But looking back, all is not (quite) as misogynous as it seems. Let's remember that Gary Merrill's Bill is devoted to Margo, who's less well-preserved as a 40-year-old than Norma is as a 50-year-old. And we know why, because Davis - never a beauty in Hollywood terms and ageing badly - is, well, Davis: the epitome of glamour, too dignified to ever be anyone's grotesque (except, of course, her own), and larger-than-life. A few years later, in Autumn Leaves, Joan Crawford, fully fifty, is paired with a younger man (33-year-old Cliff Robertson, who looks younger, and acts younger still) who's part-Anthony Perkins neurotic, part-Marlon Brando brute... part male version of Carroll Baker in Baby Doll (also 1956!). Their kinky sadomasochistic relationship produces some distressingly steamy bedroom scenes.

There's even a moment like this in Sunset Boulevard, although if you blink you'll miss it: after Norma and Joe consummate their affair on New Year's Eve (he rushes to her side when he finds out about her suicide attempt, nearly knocking over poor Betty on his way out), Wilder cuts to the morning after, with Joe not-so-subtly diving into her pool, looking darned active and refreshed. Coming out of the water, Holden, who's looked mopey and hangdog for most of the film even in his expensive new threads, reveals a surprisingly Adonis-like chest. Wilder briefly, weirdly, lets the audience occupy a lustful female perspective as we get a glimpse of what he's got to offer Norma.

And let's not forget Douglas Sirk's blockbuster soaps, Magnificent Obsession and All That Heaven Allows, both of which pair young stud Rock Hudson with older woman Jane Wyman. What happened to Wyman, anyway? At one point she looked like this:

By the time she starred in the Sirk films with Hudson, although she's not even 40, with her lacquered poodle cut, pearls, and prim manner, you could easily believe she's 50 (which is what I assumed before looking up her date of birth on Wikipedia). At any rate, only All That Heaven Allows makes an issue of the May-December romance, and as in All About Eve, it's an issue for Wyman (and her middle-class milieu), not Hudson (and his bohemian woodsman Thoreau-reading intellectuals). (I ain't kidding.)

It's true that more often than not, age is an issue in classical Hollywood films with an older woman/younger man pairing, as it is not in all of the 50s films that paired the ageing Golden Age male stars like Grant, Stewart, and Bogart with lovely new faces like Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, and Eva Marie Saint. Trying to find recent examples of older woman/younger man pairings in Hollywood film, however, makes you wonder if all that feminism accomplished was to not allow female fears of ageing (and losing one's desirability) to be a subject for movies. Nowadays actresses past 40 like Jennifer Aniston and Nicole Kidman dubiously benefit from advances in plastic surgery, Botex, and a media whipped by feminism into denying (despite what the culture continues to think) that a woman's age matters and try their best to be tight-faced, boob-jobbed, dyed-blonde versions of their 20-year-old selves, only slightly ending up looking like mutants. They're photographed as much as ever, but I don't think anyone watches their movies, where, if they were paired with a younger man, it wouldn't be very remarkable, since we're engaged with them in a mutual delusion, worse than anything suffered by Norma Desmond, that 40 looks the same as 20.

Maybe the last Hollywood portrayal of a "sexy older woman" was Susan Sarandon in Bull Durham, after which maybe feminists and everyone else thought they'd won the fight and it never needed to be proven again. But that may have also been the last moment when an actress who started out as a sex symbol was allowed to look like she was ageing. Now female sexual viability past 40 has to look like it's 20 (at least in the movies), and agreeing that older woman can be attractive means denying that there's any difference in appearance between a 20-year-old and a 40-year-old, in a fiendish conspiracy between feminism, Botox, and the media. In retrospect, 1950s Hollywood, where it was admitted, albeit rarely, that an attractive young man might fall in love with an older woman - because she's Bette/Davis Margo Channing, or because he's kinky, or because (like Rock Hudson) he just feels like it - is looking better than ever. Without any Botox.