Seconded.
I like Powaqqatsi the most. It goes all around the planet, and I prefer the soundtrack (Philip Glass) over the others (Naqoyqatsi is a must too, albeit far more creepy and depressing).
For the record, they’re all portmanteaus of Hopi words:
Koyaanisqatsi – life out of balance
Powaqqatsi – parasitic life (also why I recommend it more)
Naqoyqatsi – life as war
No dialogue. They can be watched by anyone (anyone with a TV). Some of the most powerful images I’ve ever seen on film.

>> Blazing Saddles
et al:
Werewolf?
There wolf…There castle
(Sorry, I want to resist the urge to quote movies, but…I…can’t)

Anyway. Can’t wait to hear Elaina’s response to Buffy.

This is a very productive discussion in many ways, so I want to link it to here and move it henceforth closer tothe front page, ie, under “Film/Cultural Crit Discussion – continued“, where more drop-ins and lurkers are likely to see it in case they want to leap in.

Where should I look to find writings that explore this differance more thoroughly?

Okay, I get this, I think. I can see Stan’s point, and it makes sense. So what do we do, then? Cuz I have to admit, I liked the part where Whitehall explodes and Big Ben falls down. Just as I liked the Matrix, where Neo (male teen hacker-geek superhero) stops the bullets. Yah, I like Trinity’s moves too. But the same logic quoted above makes HER ineligible to save the world. Like Clive Owen’s girlfriend with the handcuffs in Sin City, any strong woman has to be an outsider, tangential to the plot and unable to resolve the central conflict. Even if she is completely self-sufficient, she is always a supporting character. Or a prize, to be won.

This is archetypal, and goes way back, as does patriarchy. So, that being the case, how do we engage with or enjoy any of these stories? Is it like GWTW? But, DAMN! In Hotel Rwanda, it’s Don Cheadle… In Syriana, it’s not only two guys who are the good guys, but two white Americans! Geez!! Was that just about making us white guys feel good about our raised consciousnesses??? (Yeah, I guess it was)

Oh, try “Hop” by Dominique Standaert. Netflix has it. The protagonist is an african kid in Belgium (I think). That’s pretty good, and has a nice old anarchist with bomber with a guilty conscience in it. Really, it’s very good.

But seriously. American cinema paints with a very limited pallette. Do we abandon it, as too far gone? Or do we use it to expose our hidden cultural assumptions, and enjoy the cathartic explosions and anti-establishment mayhem along the way? 12 Monkeys, anyone?

*shakes head*

I’ll have to get back to y’all about that later. I got to go out and hang with some womenfolks.

I have never watched “V” though I plan to, just for the sake of formulating my own critique of it.

Another example, I’m not sure if the same super-model-lady stars in it as the one in V or if I’ve just got my celebrities all jumbled up, of what y’all are talking about is the Resident Evil series- I’ve heard folks praise and praise it ’cause the “hero” is a female who’s particularly bad-ass at killing zombies (and yeah. I have a bad-for-me thing for zombie movies). It’s completely ridiculous. At least the “shero” wears sensible shoes while she’s kicking zombie asses.

Anyways.

Ethan, this simply supports exactly what De was saying. Some forms of myopia reside in social power.

The reason critique is called critique is because it it critical. The reason ideology — a frame of reference shared across a culture that both reproduces and conceals power — is that it is NOT critical. I have no clue what the difference is between “lay feminists” and other “feminists” so for the sake of argument, let’s drop that term for the time being. Camille Paglia calls herslf a feminist, which is like me calling myself a capitalist. Someone calling him- or herself feminist does not constitute a critical analysis or deconstruction. Someone BEING a woman does not add or subtract anything to a critical argument about male power, unless the experience of being a woman is combined with a critical consciousness.

Ideology is about putting the master inside the servant’s head… about the servant internalizing the master’s point of view. The dominant ideology in this society is male-supremacist, and it exiusts in a recursive and inseparable relation with male material power (economic, political, etc).

MOST WOMEN have internalized a phallocentric ideology. It becomes part of getting by in a male dominated society. That women feel an attraction to V or to bodice-rippers or to fashion manipulations or to the fantasy of the perfect wedding does not serve as a counter-critque to what critical theorists have to say about the reproduciton of male power. That includes reproduction in the form of patriarchal cultural conventions… like those represented in V.

Those of us who have taken up the cudgel on gender hereabouts are not talking about “equality.” That is a liberal and legalistic notion. We are talking about actually-existing, structural power…. the kind that makes notions like female chauvinism and reverse racism (very similar, in that these are both assignments of equal-signs bewtween two classes of people who are anything BUT equal) possible.

Critical theory and cultural crit associated with it has to look further than this. One of the difficulties that several of us here (Elaina, De, Audrey, Yolanda, et al) have pointed to is that there are plenty of women out there who are involved in resistance politics, and will even call it like they see it when men interrupt in a meeting… but who still lose their bearings on gender because they haven’t connected the dots on the construction of sexuality and even desire.

Citing these women (hypothetical or real) is not an argument, but an appeal to a kind of phenotypic authority.

V does not have to “attempt” to reproduce patriarchy. It simply has to follow existing conventions that appeal to male writers, producers, and directors. The invisibility of systemic patriarchy inscribed on those conventions, and the commonly held (media-reproduced, white, petit-bougeoise) notion of feminism being synonymous with some semblance of abstract legal “equality,” is the reason even some putative feminists can see, for example, a film like “Sleeping with the Enemy” as “feminist,” when in fact it is distributing a deeply patriarchal message between the lines.

You say. “Given that plot, if Evey’s role had been male and V’s female, I could easily see the same dynamic going, and it points to a question that doesn’t have to do with gender identity…”

But that is precisely the point. These are not reversable roles, given the reality of male power, and to have reversed them would have been so self-conscious it would be ludicrous… as “GI Jane” was, wherein the achievement of equality by the protagonist required her to say to a vanquished foe, “Suck my dick!” and then send her abroad to kill Arabs as proof of her “equality.”

You say that “V instead teaches us that we can use our personal committments to help fuel large-scale social efforts, but effectively destroying the former to acheive the latter.” No, what V “teaches” us is that even the notion of social revolution has been so utterly trivialized that we can still only stomache it as an individual male hero who has the maqsculine will and supreme intelligence to “catalyze” it. His torture of Evie as part of her training is not even the tiniest bit original. This kind of male sado-masochistic bullshit can be found anywhere.A real revolutionary like Vanadana Shiva, who spends her time not hectoring people to kill and die, but to reclaim land and acquire food self-suffiiency is so alien to our public imaginary that no one would htink of making a film about it.

This is a boy’s fantasy. And the hero is not only archetypical, he is a character based on another character… a male who engaged in “revolutionary violence.”

It IS Dick Lit. Consummately.

You say: “I personally think some men are capable of feeling just as offended by anti-feminist acts, etc as any female.” While that may be truein come cases, I find it hard to believe that men can understand what it is to fear (outside of prison) the daily possibility of rape in a plethora of common social situations.

The characterization of some detailed positions on gender here, that have been explicated with patience and rigor, as “cliquish” is an attempt to dismiss that won’t stand. No one is trying to form a clique.

“I know,” you say, “I may be risking the legitimacy of my ‘feminist’ labeling by the above because much of any cliquish identity is embodied by collective, largely unquestioned feelings of ‘offense.’”

Provide one example of this collective, largely unquestioned feeling of offense.