I'm searching around for a decent basic gender studies article for a unit I am doing in Freshman Comp, so my weekend has been filled with reading and trying to evaluate comprehension level and how well the article will confront the inevitable student objection: "It's JUST a (movie, tv show, advertisement, etc)" which basically implies that any sort of critical thought, much less critique, about an artifact of mass media is somehow trivial and humorless and taking things too seriously.
It's doubly hard to confront when it comes from a male student, who already may have it in his head that feminism (or the female professor he's talking to who just happens to be a feminist) is a grim, humorless thing designed to punish men and deprive the world of every crumb of fun.
I found a nice article comparing Adorno and Fiske. A quickie recap in case you're not hip to this proverbial trip. Adorno was one of a group of Germans who fled his home country during World War Two. It's not hard to imagine the connection he has, the awareness he learned firsthand, how Hitler and the Nazis had such control over the 'mass' media. (It was not complete control, of course: the movie All Quiet on the Western Front was still screened in Germany, just with vociferous interruptions, including in at least one noticeable instance, the release of mice in the movie theater. But you could argue this supports the idea: if you have to stoop to rodentia, you're trying quite obviously and tangibly to control the media.). Adorno believes in the Culture Industry, that it's not a 'mass' media at all: you and I have no real ability to create the culture. Even if we aspire to do that by, say, becoming a filmmaker or an author, we'll have to face a number of gatekeepers who will limit or diminish our ability to do so: the Hollywood mogul will tell us that our movie won't make box office, and therefore goes unfunded, the editor who tells us that it's not right for 'the market' right now.
When it comes to gender, the mass media is insidious and penetrates into just about all aspects of life. I recently got a prescription for my progestin refilled: they swapped out my (previous) generic for a brand name. The previous pill was yellow: this one is pink. Pink. Really? I need to have gender color in my hormones? Does this make it more effective somehow? (It even has a flowery sounding name!)
My period tracking app has pink flowers all over it (I searched for an app that wasn't swaddled in pink and/or flowers and failed abjectly) because, as we all know, the most FEMININE thing a woman can do is menstruate. Logging my PMS symptoms using kawaii faces and cutesy images seems almost to diminish the stuff, or at least try to make the least fun thing about my gender 'fun'! (Hint: it does not succeed). If I could code and program these things, I'd make an app that had little robots instead. Sure, they could be cute, why not?
Adorno argues that there is no escape from the system, that anything, even a deliberate rejection of the main message is still, in a sense, acknowledging the main message. So the punks with their deliberate DIY style, anti-pretty message, were defining themselves against the mass media message: couldn't, in a sense, have existed without 80s culture.
(The irony is, punk has become ludicrously commodified: just go to Hot Topic and consume and conform....to an anti-consumer, anti-capitalist subculture?)
So I'm knee deep in pondering when I look over at my clock and say, OH, I should get going. Because, you see, I got my magazine subscription yesterday. Which itself is fraught with feminist baggage--how the women in the workout features are less 'fit' than 'cachectic' and have perfect hair and makeup and are even SMILING as they work out--compared to the grunty, sweaty shredded male counterpart.
And I could try to wiggle my way out of this and say OH I like it for the recipes, or the women's health issues features, but I have to admit, what caught my eye this month was a feature on makeup and I wanted to put down my heavy gender theory stuff to go to the drugstore and see if they did, in fact, have a nice pale-green pearlescent creme eyeshadow.
Adorno would be facepalming, but then, I think, he'd sagely nod and say, yes, conformity. No one escapes.
Sunday, June 23, 2013
Thursday, June 20, 2013
there's a mountain here not coming to mohammad
So, the newest edition of the Transformers comic came out and as usual it's full of potboilery melodrama. That's not a judgment statement, or rather, it is if you understand how much I love Victorian potboilery melodrama. Which may, now that I think of it, be informing the dissatisfaction that prompted this post.
Because the response (the people I watch on twitter, tumblr and plurk are predominantly female, but I don't want to make a gender statement about this) is overwhelmingly of the 'ZOMG MY FEELS' variety, judgments on how cute a character is, and how devastated they'll be if a character dies.
What strikes me about these responses is twofold. First, the generic, almost compulsory behavior of it, and second, the way they foreground the reader's emotional response.
There's a sort of competitiveness, a 'first!' in fan culture. The first response to a post, the first response post to a comment. It's just how it is. And every Wednesday (for comics) or Friday (for the tv show in my canon), people flood social media with their response.
It's curious to note the importance of individuality in this (which seems sort of ironically contradictory, considering how generic and samey the responses are): people have to make their own plurk, their own tweet, their own post, instead of commenting on another's.
The generic nature of the responses is also interesting (yet strangely tedious). There's no serious analysis of plot or character or world: discussion is all surface and emotional. There's not even any serious analysis of the emotional response--the 'feels' have taken over. Part of me wonders, but can only speculate, if this is a sign of a growing inarticulacy about emotional state or is it unnecessary to go beyond feels and reaction .gif.
I'm one of the people who don't like 'feels'. It's too generic for me, some sort of shorthand for 'physically powerful emotional response' which I get, but I just..I prefer nuance, I prefer complexity. My 'feels' may be different from your 'feels' and the same generic label elides that, making responses entirely bland. I'd love a 'this made me angry, this made me sad, this made me worry' which I could compare with my own, learn new things, engage in a discussion (why did that make you mad?) but 'glass case of emotion' doesn't....really open that door for me. There is no way to engage, no way to interact on anything beyond a surface level.
The second part is the foregrounding of the reader's emotional response. If a text hits their 'feels' it is judged as good. And it seems many fans stop at 'feels'. Not only do they not discuss their own emotional response beyond that, but discussion afterwards seems to focus only on potential future emotional issues.
NOW, I think I need to state this at least at some point. I am not fandom policing. And I don't, honestly, imagine these responses are that much different than those Victorian readers of serialized fiction. That emotional response, after all, is what's going to make them plunk down coin of the realm for the next issue, right? But I admit I find the parade aspect of it, the nonrelational aspect of it, to be interesting.
But I admit to dissatisfaction, because it's not, it's never been, the kind of discussion I want to have in fandom and with fandom. I want to talk about gender issues, worldbuilding issues, political issues, character issues. I want to talk about, well, anything OTHER than my emotional response.
Of course, because I am a child of the Academy. Feels don't have a place in your senior thesis or dissertation.
I guess...what I really want, what is at the root of my frustration with the ZOMG FEELSstorm, is that there is no place for the kind of discussion I do want to have. There's no cool-down let's talk about X going on. I could, of course (and have) write conference papers about it, but those are to strangers, most of whom are unfamiliar with the canon, and don't have the referential points of contact to really *discuss* back, to make me think or challenge my conclusions.
Which is what I want, it's what I enjoy. I don't enjoy, I can't enjoy a response that is, well, so thoughtless, so emotional.
I know, I know, write it yourself. I just would like to hear OTHER people's takes on the issues, other people's ideas, for a change.
Because the response (the people I watch on twitter, tumblr and plurk are predominantly female, but I don't want to make a gender statement about this) is overwhelmingly of the 'ZOMG MY FEELS' variety, judgments on how cute a character is, and how devastated they'll be if a character dies.
What strikes me about these responses is twofold. First, the generic, almost compulsory behavior of it, and second, the way they foreground the reader's emotional response.
There's a sort of competitiveness, a 'first!' in fan culture. The first response to a post, the first response post to a comment. It's just how it is. And every Wednesday (for comics) or Friday (for the tv show in my canon), people flood social media with their response.
It's curious to note the importance of individuality in this (which seems sort of ironically contradictory, considering how generic and samey the responses are): people have to make their own plurk, their own tweet, their own post, instead of commenting on another's.
The generic nature of the responses is also interesting (yet strangely tedious). There's no serious analysis of plot or character or world: discussion is all surface and emotional. There's not even any serious analysis of the emotional response--the 'feels' have taken over. Part of me wonders, but can only speculate, if this is a sign of a growing inarticulacy about emotional state or is it unnecessary to go beyond feels and reaction .gif.
I'm one of the people who don't like 'feels'. It's too generic for me, some sort of shorthand for 'physically powerful emotional response' which I get, but I just..I prefer nuance, I prefer complexity. My 'feels' may be different from your 'feels' and the same generic label elides that, making responses entirely bland. I'd love a 'this made me angry, this made me sad, this made me worry' which I could compare with my own, learn new things, engage in a discussion (why did that make you mad?) but 'glass case of emotion' doesn't....really open that door for me. There is no way to engage, no way to interact on anything beyond a surface level.
The second part is the foregrounding of the reader's emotional response. If a text hits their 'feels' it is judged as good. And it seems many fans stop at 'feels'. Not only do they not discuss their own emotional response beyond that, but discussion afterwards seems to focus only on potential future emotional issues.
NOW, I think I need to state this at least at some point. I am not fandom policing. And I don't, honestly, imagine these responses are that much different than those Victorian readers of serialized fiction. That emotional response, after all, is what's going to make them plunk down coin of the realm for the next issue, right? But I admit I find the parade aspect of it, the nonrelational aspect of it, to be interesting.
But I admit to dissatisfaction, because it's not, it's never been, the kind of discussion I want to have in fandom and with fandom. I want to talk about gender issues, worldbuilding issues, political issues, character issues. I want to talk about, well, anything OTHER than my emotional response.
Of course, because I am a child of the Academy. Feels don't have a place in your senior thesis or dissertation.
I guess...what I really want, what is at the root of my frustration with the ZOMG FEELSstorm, is that there is no place for the kind of discussion I do want to have. There's no cool-down let's talk about X going on. I could, of course (and have) write conference papers about it, but those are to strangers, most of whom are unfamiliar with the canon, and don't have the referential points of contact to really *discuss* back, to make me think or challenge my conclusions.
Which is what I want, it's what I enjoy. I don't enjoy, I can't enjoy a response that is, well, so thoughtless, so emotional.
I know, I know, write it yourself. I just would like to hear OTHER people's takes on the issues, other people's ideas, for a change.
Wednesday, June 12, 2013
Id-policing
I was witness, last night, to a spectacularly incendiary blow up, courtesy of the Social Justice Warriors.
Social Justice is a movement that in theory I agree: pointing out privilege and biases in mass media, hoping to make the invisible visible and give the silenced a voice. I agree with all of these things.
I can't, however, agree with the methods I see them employ in fandom circles: bullying, namecalling, shaming.
Let's just use last night's blow up as an example. One person posted that she felt bad for being judged for liking a certain trope in fanfiction (noncon) and a particular, dysfunctional relationship. (There's been a lot of hostile back and forth about Megatron and Starscream in TF Prime). I'll talk about that in a moment.
Her housemate (so you can imagine the full awkward of this, right?) posted about ten minutes later, the title of her post being 'BULLSHIT'. That set the tone for the content that followed, which basically said that anyone who liked that trope was supporting rape culture and were, and I quote ' ignorant idiots who never learned to, refuse to, or can't think critically about things'.
On an interpersonal note, calling someone an 'ignorant idiot' does not exactly open doors and minds for critical discussion. Honestly, if someone called me an ignorant idiot, I would not be willing to engage in debate, civil or not, with said person, because it's clear that THEY are not open for debate and I have no great love for futility. When you call someone a name like that, it means you are closed against them, have already judged them.
Now, my stance is, and has always been, that yes, there are some tropes I find disturbing, distasteful or that I cannot read. And I wish I lived in a world where they weren't the go-to tropes of narratology. But I don't. This is the world I live in, these are the tropes that surround us. We see rape sexualized, glamorized and sold to us as sexy everywhere. Yet this movement, I suppose knowing that it can't target the real promoters of these tropes, so it goes after the young, the vulnerable, the weak, those beginning writers, beginning fan creators, and making them feel shamed.
I want to go a little deeper here than my usual 'shaming hurts and is not okay'. Let's consider the operation of shame psychologically. Shaming is someone taking the Superego voice to tell you that your Id is bad.
The id is a cellar of desires, that sort of defy morality. Some of the id's impulses are good: without the id, we could not feel pleasure, we could not enjoy the guilty thrill of playing hooky, or the pleasure of a massage. The Pleasure Principle is rooted in the id.
The id's desires get created in the culture that the person is raised in. Thus, in Imperial China, there was the Golden Lotus fetish for women with bound feet. Their ids eroticized the mutilated feet. Ours does not. (Honestly, I find those pictures horrific). Our ids have been shaped in a world with a host of conflicted and contradictory messages (just one example: women are supposed to dress to be 'attractive' and 'sexy' and enjoy the art of self-adornment as a pleasure, but if they get harassed or assaulted, well, obviously, 'they were asking for it'.) That means that the images the id throws up to us are often, well...complex.
And noncon, rape, well, wow, that's a loaded gun. Notice how often rape is invoked in mass media about female characters--in the movie Dredd, both female characters were associated with rape--Ma had been raped and cut, Anderson was subject to an on-screen rape fantasy. The Sword and Sorceress collections I loved as a teen were rife with 'rape and revenge' stories--all written by women, of course! Did the 'revenge' redeem the rape scene? Or was it a way to have the cake and eat it too--write an eroticized rape scene and then erase the complications through the revenge? (The complication not being the issue of consent, but rather the issue of the eroticization, and the weight of the aftermath on sexuality--the revenge was magically going to 'heal' her psychological drama).
Because, I'll point out, that in our culture, heck, I'd say in any culture I can think of, power is 'sexy'. Power is eroticized, and the power/powerless relationship has a certain fascination, as extremes of power spectra we find ourselves inhabiting every day. Those women writing those rape-and-revenge fantasies knew it: they were, in our day of secondwave feminism, powerless, and writing the stories, however tropey, was some sort of fantasy of power. The late 70s early 80s were filled with science fiction by women that explored female only or female on top worlds--fantasies of power, yes?
There's a lot of talk about whether or not writing or reading noncon supports or promotes 'rape culture'. I've wondered this myself, honestly, with the prevalence of the rape is love trope, which is predicated on male lust being simply uncontrollable and thus the sexual violation becomes narratively 'justified' and in fact 'acceptable'. (I find the idea that sexual desire would drive anyone to violate another's integrity to be repugnant, but then again, countries embracing Sharia Law do not agree with me--to them a woman should wear a burqa because the males are literally that incapable of controlling their desire just as much as it is about controlling women--it's a deft 'control by wanting to protect you' move that we'd recognize as manipulative in the microcosm.)
Oh, oops, digression. The thing is, our id throws up dark things at times. It's often the things we fear the most that draw the strongest response: serial killers, death, the undead/inhuman/no longer human, powerlessness. Vampires have been eroticizing nonconsensual powerless sex since Polidori brought them into British literature. Fiction has always provided a safe place to get those things out on the page, to wrestle with them, like St George and his dragon.
Or rather like Spenser's Redcrosse Knight and the dragon that vomits books.
The issue is, that shaming is an attempt to control someone's id. You only need to look at the Victorian era, or the Catholic sex scandals to realize that shaming and guilting the id....kind of backfires? Making someone feel bad because they enjoy fantasies of powerlessness or power does not change their fantasies. In fact, it fuels them, because the id's desires grow in the dark.
So, of course, what if we do think that these fantasies are unhealthy, and they promote a culture that normalizes and validates a culture where people are made to feel unsafe and vulnerable at every moment? I'd start with, well, not making the person who has those fantasies feel unsafe and vulnerable by attacking them, but that's, I hope, common sense. Beyond that, I'd ask them about the fantasy, what it means to them, what it is to them, WHY they like it, and what appeals to them. Ask. ASK. Give them credit for having a brain. If they've never thought of it before, you might just start them thinking. But if they have, their answers--gasp--might make you think that their liking for the trope is quite different than you think.
Social Justice is a movement that in theory I agree: pointing out privilege and biases in mass media, hoping to make the invisible visible and give the silenced a voice. I agree with all of these things.
I can't, however, agree with the methods I see them employ in fandom circles: bullying, namecalling, shaming.
Let's just use last night's blow up as an example. One person posted that she felt bad for being judged for liking a certain trope in fanfiction (noncon) and a particular, dysfunctional relationship. (There's been a lot of hostile back and forth about Megatron and Starscream in TF Prime). I'll talk about that in a moment.
Her housemate (so you can imagine the full awkward of this, right?) posted about ten minutes later, the title of her post being 'BULLSHIT'. That set the tone for the content that followed, which basically said that anyone who liked that trope was supporting rape culture and were, and I quote ' ignorant idiots who never learned to, refuse to, or can't think critically about things'.
On an interpersonal note, calling someone an 'ignorant idiot' does not exactly open doors and minds for critical discussion. Honestly, if someone called me an ignorant idiot, I would not be willing to engage in debate, civil or not, with said person, because it's clear that THEY are not open for debate and I have no great love for futility. When you call someone a name like that, it means you are closed against them, have already judged them.
Now, my stance is, and has always been, that yes, there are some tropes I find disturbing, distasteful or that I cannot read. And I wish I lived in a world where they weren't the go-to tropes of narratology. But I don't. This is the world I live in, these are the tropes that surround us. We see rape sexualized, glamorized and sold to us as sexy everywhere. Yet this movement, I suppose knowing that it can't target the real promoters of these tropes, so it goes after the young, the vulnerable, the weak, those beginning writers, beginning fan creators, and making them feel shamed.
I want to go a little deeper here than my usual 'shaming hurts and is not okay'. Let's consider the operation of shame psychologically. Shaming is someone taking the Superego voice to tell you that your Id is bad.
The id is a cellar of desires, that sort of defy morality. Some of the id's impulses are good: without the id, we could not feel pleasure, we could not enjoy the guilty thrill of playing hooky, or the pleasure of a massage. The Pleasure Principle is rooted in the id.
The id's desires get created in the culture that the person is raised in. Thus, in Imperial China, there was the Golden Lotus fetish for women with bound feet. Their ids eroticized the mutilated feet. Ours does not. (Honestly, I find those pictures horrific). Our ids have been shaped in a world with a host of conflicted and contradictory messages (just one example: women are supposed to dress to be 'attractive' and 'sexy' and enjoy the art of self-adornment as a pleasure, but if they get harassed or assaulted, well, obviously, 'they were asking for it'.) That means that the images the id throws up to us are often, well...complex.
And noncon, rape, well, wow, that's a loaded gun. Notice how often rape is invoked in mass media about female characters--in the movie Dredd, both female characters were associated with rape--Ma had been raped and cut, Anderson was subject to an on-screen rape fantasy. The Sword and Sorceress collections I loved as a teen were rife with 'rape and revenge' stories--all written by women, of course! Did the 'revenge' redeem the rape scene? Or was it a way to have the cake and eat it too--write an eroticized rape scene and then erase the complications through the revenge? (The complication not being the issue of consent, but rather the issue of the eroticization, and the weight of the aftermath on sexuality--the revenge was magically going to 'heal' her psychological drama).
Because, I'll point out, that in our culture, heck, I'd say in any culture I can think of, power is 'sexy'. Power is eroticized, and the power/powerless relationship has a certain fascination, as extremes of power spectra we find ourselves inhabiting every day. Those women writing those rape-and-revenge fantasies knew it: they were, in our day of secondwave feminism, powerless, and writing the stories, however tropey, was some sort of fantasy of power. The late 70s early 80s were filled with science fiction by women that explored female only or female on top worlds--fantasies of power, yes?
There's a lot of talk about whether or not writing or reading noncon supports or promotes 'rape culture'. I've wondered this myself, honestly, with the prevalence of the rape is love trope, which is predicated on male lust being simply uncontrollable and thus the sexual violation becomes narratively 'justified' and in fact 'acceptable'. (I find the idea that sexual desire would drive anyone to violate another's integrity to be repugnant, but then again, countries embracing Sharia Law do not agree with me--to them a woman should wear a burqa because the males are literally that incapable of controlling their desire just as much as it is about controlling women--it's a deft 'control by wanting to protect you' move that we'd recognize as manipulative in the microcosm.)
Oh, oops, digression. The thing is, our id throws up dark things at times. It's often the things we fear the most that draw the strongest response: serial killers, death, the undead/inhuman/no longer human, powerlessness. Vampires have been eroticizing nonconsensual powerless sex since Polidori brought them into British literature. Fiction has always provided a safe place to get those things out on the page, to wrestle with them, like St George and his dragon.
Or rather like Spenser's Redcrosse Knight and the dragon that vomits books.
The issue is, that shaming is an attempt to control someone's id. You only need to look at the Victorian era, or the Catholic sex scandals to realize that shaming and guilting the id....kind of backfires? Making someone feel bad because they enjoy fantasies of powerlessness or power does not change their fantasies. In fact, it fuels them, because the id's desires grow in the dark.
So, of course, what if we do think that these fantasies are unhealthy, and they promote a culture that normalizes and validates a culture where people are made to feel unsafe and vulnerable at every moment? I'd start with, well, not making the person who has those fantasies feel unsafe and vulnerable by attacking them, but that's, I hope, common sense. Beyond that, I'd ask them about the fantasy, what it means to them, what it is to them, WHY they like it, and what appeals to them. Ask. ASK. Give them credit for having a brain. If they've never thought of it before, you might just start them thinking. But if they have, their answers--gasp--might make you think that their liking for the trope is quite different than you think.
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
On Zombies and Capitalism?
So I read World War Z on the train ride home on Sunday, and my reaction got me thinking.
Because of course I got the book because I saw the trailer for the movie. The trailer, I admit, has moments of absolutely stunning visuals, mostly the masses of rushing undead, almost like a tsunami, and absolutely, absolutely inhuman.
Intercut of course with scenes involving Brad Pitt. Which, well, my interest was like a flicking strobe light. OH INTERESTING oh Brad Pitt. OH INTERESTING oh look one man fighting to save his family yawn that's totally done to death.
As is not news to anyone who's read Brooks's novel, the novel is MUCH different and absolutely fantastic. The whole point of the novel, the whole point of the novel's structure, really, is that there is NO one monumental hero, one person who has all the pieces (other than the invisible collator of the documents), who has been everywhere and done everything. It's a book determined to assert humanity in all its forms--the hateful creator of the fake drug Phalanx, the nerdy otaku who finds he has to confront the world outside himself on its own terms rather than his own, the K9 officer, the Chinese nuclear submarine crew, people from all over the world, everyone telling their story, creating a history. The reason it's set up as historiography is the WHOLE DAMN POINT.
But the trailer looks like it's just your typical action movie 'man brings his family some place safe while he goes to fight for them' which is so conservative, so 1950s and dismissive and OH YEAH can I mention it primatizes WHITE MALE AMERICANs as heros? That whooshing sound is the movie sailing past the point Brooks was trying to make and straight for what it hopes is a huge pile of 'we know our demographic is white American men' money.
And clearly I'm angry, lol. Now, honestly, I am not sure how the book's entirety could be translated to film. (But surely at least some of it could? American film viewers are more sophisticated than Hollywood seems to credit us--we can understand interesting narrative structure like in Angelheart or Memento or even Fight Club). (I'd add that for so many years Transformers insisted people wouldn't read a story that didn't have humans in them 'to relate to' and I can gleefully chortle, looking at the successes of RID and MTMTE that AHAAH WOW that was wrong.)
But what I'm wrestling with is why I'm torqued off about this. Because I'm very vocal about The Walking Dead and the people who pooh-pooh the TV series because it's not exactly like the comics. I wonder what would be the point of watching the show if it was just...the comic, which is already a half-visual medium? I thought the neat things happen when you lay them side to side, and see the changes done to, say, the Governor or Michonne, and figure them out, what they add to the narrative they inhabit. Or the differences in V for Vendetta--how the ending is so tight and closed and heavy handed in the movie, but not the graphic novel. (And let's think of the trainwreck of Watchmen, which attempted to be close to the comics and...was pretty incomprehensible to outsiders?)
But here I am getting all Comic Book Guy about the fact the movie seems to be not at all like the book.
I think...I think what it is is that the differences seem so money-driven and so creatively bankrupt. I don't like some of the Walking Dead changes, but at least I have some reason to have faith that they're going somewhere interesting, that it's not a money grab. (Partly because any tv show has to be in it for the long haul and makes money through advertisers--movies can bait and switch you for your ticket price and two hours). Yes, AMC has a history of TV series that panders to the white male demographic (but a fandom that regularly bashes any female character means the women in fandom sure are contributing to that and that's...something else I need to figure out), but I find myself emotionally engaged with the characters in the show, just as much, because they do break type. Rick was 'dad trying to save his family' and....look what's happening to that, right?
Now, of course, I'm getting all fretful about a movie *trailer* and god knows I could be eating my words, but...even so, then the question becomes why would Hollywood try to market the movie that way? (And I saw the trailer when I saw Iron Man 3 AND Star Trek so they're clearly aiming at sci fi nerd types and geez, dude, we're not all white males!).
In the end, I just hope that the movie at least makes people run out and read the book. If it does that, and they do get to read an amazing book out of it, that can't be a bad thing.
Because of course I got the book because I saw the trailer for the movie. The trailer, I admit, has moments of absolutely stunning visuals, mostly the masses of rushing undead, almost like a tsunami, and absolutely, absolutely inhuman.
Intercut of course with scenes involving Brad Pitt. Which, well, my interest was like a flicking strobe light. OH INTERESTING oh Brad Pitt. OH INTERESTING oh look one man fighting to save his family yawn that's totally done to death.
As is not news to anyone who's read Brooks's novel, the novel is MUCH different and absolutely fantastic. The whole point of the novel, the whole point of the novel's structure, really, is that there is NO one monumental hero, one person who has all the pieces (other than the invisible collator of the documents), who has been everywhere and done everything. It's a book determined to assert humanity in all its forms--the hateful creator of the fake drug Phalanx, the nerdy otaku who finds he has to confront the world outside himself on its own terms rather than his own, the K9 officer, the Chinese nuclear submarine crew, people from all over the world, everyone telling their story, creating a history. The reason it's set up as historiography is the WHOLE DAMN POINT.
But the trailer looks like it's just your typical action movie 'man brings his family some place safe while he goes to fight for them' which is so conservative, so 1950s and dismissive and OH YEAH can I mention it primatizes WHITE MALE AMERICANs as heros? That whooshing sound is the movie sailing past the point Brooks was trying to make and straight for what it hopes is a huge pile of 'we know our demographic is white American men' money.
And clearly I'm angry, lol. Now, honestly, I am not sure how the book's entirety could be translated to film. (But surely at least some of it could? American film viewers are more sophisticated than Hollywood seems to credit us--we can understand interesting narrative structure like in Angelheart or Memento or even Fight Club). (I'd add that for so many years Transformers insisted people wouldn't read a story that didn't have humans in them 'to relate to' and I can gleefully chortle, looking at the successes of RID and MTMTE that AHAAH WOW that was wrong.)
But what I'm wrestling with is why I'm torqued off about this. Because I'm very vocal about The Walking Dead and the people who pooh-pooh the TV series because it's not exactly like the comics. I wonder what would be the point of watching the show if it was just...the comic, which is already a half-visual medium? I thought the neat things happen when you lay them side to side, and see the changes done to, say, the Governor or Michonne, and figure them out, what they add to the narrative they inhabit. Or the differences in V for Vendetta--how the ending is so tight and closed and heavy handed in the movie, but not the graphic novel. (And let's think of the trainwreck of Watchmen, which attempted to be close to the comics and...was pretty incomprehensible to outsiders?)
But here I am getting all Comic Book Guy about the fact the movie seems to be not at all like the book.
I think...I think what it is is that the differences seem so money-driven and so creatively bankrupt. I don't like some of the Walking Dead changes, but at least I have some reason to have faith that they're going somewhere interesting, that it's not a money grab. (Partly because any tv show has to be in it for the long haul and makes money through advertisers--movies can bait and switch you for your ticket price and two hours). Yes, AMC has a history of TV series that panders to the white male demographic (but a fandom that regularly bashes any female character means the women in fandom sure are contributing to that and that's...something else I need to figure out), but I find myself emotionally engaged with the characters in the show, just as much, because they do break type. Rick was 'dad trying to save his family' and....look what's happening to that, right?
Now, of course, I'm getting all fretful about a movie *trailer* and god knows I could be eating my words, but...even so, then the question becomes why would Hollywood try to market the movie that way? (And I saw the trailer when I saw Iron Man 3 AND Star Trek so they're clearly aiming at sci fi nerd types and geez, dude, we're not all white males!).
In the end, I just hope that the movie at least makes people run out and read the book. If it does that, and they do get to read an amazing book out of it, that can't be a bad thing.
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