Macho Women
Poking through the TV stations and saw an ad for yet another show I call gun-dramas. It’s apparently about a team of quirky, brilliant ex-criminals that use their special knowledge of crime to catch other criminals. Kind of a domesticated Dirty Dozen thing, with thirteen episodes a season.
Only this one features not just men, but women – women who look like runway models of course, femmed out to the eyeballs even as they leap over exploding fireballs in high heels, sling lead from firearms, and talk shit like smart-ass adolescents (just like men characters have for some time now).
Not new. Women are regularly featured in almost all the new cop dramas, and they hit the Weaver firing position just like the guys, shout “Freeze!” and seemingly effortlessly throw bad men into walls and attach handcuffs to them in a split second. They also talk about making a bad guy their “bitch,” talk about “scumbags,” engage in righteous bullying of suspect and “perps,” and make wry quips over grisly corpses.
When De was editing Sex & War, we had an exchange of notes over my mention of the film GI Jane, because the film has a bizarre climax.
In this movie – starring Demi Moore, Viggo Mortensen, and Anne Bancroft – Demi Moore’s character, a female naval officer, is given the opportunity to be the sole first woman attending SEAL training. After a predictable series of confrontations with the boyz, and a rough start with the sadistic Mortensen character – who is the senior instructor in this scriptwriter’s SEAL training – Moore’s character reaches the climax of the drama, where she engages in a knock-down-drag-out fight with the Mortensen character, and after getting the best of him, stands bloodied over his prostrate figure and roars, “Suck my dick!”
Weee-heeee-heeeellll! I thought, when I first saw this. That was beyond weird. Weirder still is the follow-on scene, where her classmates welcome her as an honorary male, and she is summarily accepted into the SEAL fraternity as an equal.
There is a surprising degree of consensus that hostility and domination, as opposed to intimacy and physical pleasure, are central to sexual excitement.
— Nancy C.M. Hartsock
Then, the denouement. She goes to combat and proves herself once and for all by killing Arabs.
Some who have a slightly different grasp of what feminism is than I do might call this a “feminist” trend. Women are being shown as men’s equals. An interesting idea, when the men being shown are not the equals of any real, flesh-and-blood men, but that’s another complaint…
There is a school of thought calling itself feminist that celebrates any portrayal of women doing “man-things,” and there is an opposing school of thought that says women doing man-things is emasculating boys and men, because now boyz-n-men can’t do those things that men did that made them men because they were things that women didn’t do.
I would agree with the latter, but only in a very limited way. Masculinity is definitely constructed as being not-like-women.
I disagree with the “feminists” who celebrate macho women, for the reason that Andrea Dworkin explained so eloquently:
A commitment to sexual equality with males is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered.
Macho men are dominators. Macho men are conquest-junkies.
In the real world, real macho men are very, very hard on real women. This doesn’t get turned off, as it does on the cop-dramas, where a macho-man cop becomes a principled defender of women against other male “perps.”
(I would point out that Carole Pateman, writing in The Sexual Contract, explains the “contract” as a woman obeying one man in exchange for him protecting her from all other men.)
Women have always been – in the real world – the conquered, along with colonies and nature.
That some few women have sold their souls and managed to be accepted into the boys’ club has done little to change that.
What’s really going on here is the re-valorization of dominator-masculinity; and the mythology it supports is that these macho types are necessary as a firewall between we – the people of light – and Them, the forces of darkness.
Macho women in the entertainment media are a sop to an audience that has been schooled in the shallow feminism of consumer-culture liberalism (by male directors mostly). That superficial culture has been trained to demand that women who do man-things. What is not questioned is the value or morality of those man things, and what is re-valorized is domination itself.
If feminism is part of a larger movement to end domination, then these fictional macho women are not feminist. Maybe, for some people, that is an IF too far.
DeAnander:
Random thoughts…
The recent Incredibly Awful Movie “RED” featured some good actors who really ought to have known better (or maybe had debts to pay?). Among them Helen Mirren, long a favourite of mine, as a sociopathic assassin. In fact all the “good guys” were sociopaths. It was a very strange, loud, incoherent and fundamentally, disturbingly amoral film. Anyway, she brought a little eccentric “class” to the role of SuperLethalBimbo, but still… guns, guns, guns (plus designer clothing).
Where in Macho Women World do we place Sigourney Weaver’s character (in the endless Aliens franchise)? Xena? Buffy? (actually I have long thought that despite the tedious fight choreography and soap opera elements, the Buffy series incorporated more ‘emotional intelligence’ into its characters and dialogue than many a so-called “serious” flick or novel these days).
Enlightened Sexism has something to say about this…
To what extent is the Macho Women Trend part of the devalorisation of all things female *and* peasanty (you know, like food and cleaning and childbirth farming and all that messy life-oriented stuff) in favour of the warrior caste and the cult of shiny death?
8 March 2011, 1:04 amStan:
I remember the Weaver character in the second (or third?) Alien, as she prepares to destroy one of the aliens, say something to the effect of “you bitch!” Don’t know Xena, but I actually liked Buffy in a campy kind of way (guilty pleasure).
I can never see Helen Mirren without remembering her and Malcolm McDowell, John Gielgud and Peter O’Toole having consented to play in Caligula, a porn flick supported by Penthouse magnate Bob Guccione. I’ve scratched my head about that for decades now. Again, as you say, money talks.
I loved Prime Suspect, but my shameful weakness has always been who-dunits, and the Brit who-dunits always have the best dialogue.
The theme of sympathetic sociopathy has been creeping ever further and further into the mainstream, with Hannibal Lecter leading the way, for some time now. There is a strange fascination with this notion of a brilliant, amoral character that I believe is a twisted Nietzschean impulse. In some real sense, I believe, the moral philosophy of the West has been – for almost a century and a half now – a struggle between the vestiges of Christian philosophy (inflected heavily by Christen-DOM) and Nietzschean individualism… also contaminated by institutional and popular distortions of the original.
These two tendencies (one rooted in empathetic collectivism and the valorization of the suffering servant, and the other rooted in the individual above mere morality, who is on a Zarathustran self-transcending quest) are crushed together in all this somehow… a vague thought that has itched me for a while.
Artists who are constantly seeking the edge by being edgy (?) are drawn to these sociopathic characters, and stimulation-seeking, hyper-jaded audiences are the other half of an churning reproduction and escalation dynamic. Nietzsche was, after all, a Schopenhauer guy, who prefigured the pomos with the idea that the world is defined by “will and representation.”
Not surprisingly, some self-identified feminists, like Frances Nesbitt Oppel, have taken up apologetics on Nietzsche’s behalf.
Here is Nietzsche from “The Will to Power”:
“[W]oman! One-half of mankind is weak, typically sick, changeable, inconstant… she needs a religion of weakness that glorifies being weak, loving, and being humble as divine: or better, she makes the strong weak–she rules when she succeeds in overcoming the strong… Woman has always conspired with the types of decadence, the priests, against the “powerful”, the “strong”, the men…”
The Enlightened Sexism link is worth a look, readers. I agree with De (that’s a surprise!) that a lot of this supports the notion that sexism is a thing of the past (just look at all those strong female characters – strength defined in traditionally masculine terms, of course).
Anyway, there are some slapdash thoughts.
8 March 2011, 7:58 amKim Sky:
Xena – I rarely own a television, I happened to have one, and a daughter, we became attached to that series.
One day at work, I kind of fought back (verbally) in a way I hadn’t before and realized that I’d been affected by the Xena series. For me, it was the first time I saw a film where the woman was not standing there paralyzed, unable to step one foot and hand her male partner the gun! While he is fighting like mad.
It was an oddly liberating feeling. I also enjoyed the playfulness of the series, broad modified strokes of mythology. They took on issues of female slavery, a few things. Not sure what I’d make of it now.
Yes, woman as man. Man = strength and callousness. I grew up with very large strong men who adopted much of the trappings of macho men. I see them get so hurt when women expect them to come to the rescue, be strong, have no feelings. They’re human beings. Sweet hearts on the inside.
Looking at all of this from the other side, Hele Lee has just completed a documentary called: Macho Like Me
http://macholikeme.com/
Where she impersonates a man for six months and concludes that being a man was not all it was cracked up to be!
8 March 2011, 11:27 amDeAnander:
Passing thought on the hagiography of sociopaths — Ayn Rand’s hero-worship of a serial killer who murdered teen girls… Rand the ideological/emotional spokes person for neoliberalism and finance-libertarianism (as opposed to the agrarian-libertarianism of e.g. H George, Joel Salatin, etc, and whatever other libertarianisms are running around appropriately refusing to be taxonomised).
8 March 2011, 1:44 pmChasm:
Re Stan’s comment, I rarely watch TV — mostly I see clips on the Internet that friends have sent a link to — but my current GF tried to get me interested in her favorite show, Dexter, recently. The show made me physically ill. If you’re not already familiar with it, the eponymous hero is a sociopathic serial killer who works tracking down serial killers (and limits his killing to other serial killers). After watching an episode (the first, I think) with utter repulsion, I was shocked to find that many of my “liberal” friends love the show. From my perspective, that the victims of Dexter are themselves serial killers serves to dehumanize them and allows the audience to play out its own anti-social fantasies without guilt. I’m rather curious as to what the folks here think of this show.
I also became curious, not having watched really any TV in almost 20 years, about the show “Criminal Minds.” It follows a fictional Behavioral Analysis Unit at Quantico as they track down serial killers, pedophiles, and serial rapists (plus an occasional “terrorist,” whatever that is). The show is absurdly unbelievable, of course — most killers are caught in a matter of days or even hours, the current victim is almost always saved at the last minute, the profilers spout out information obviously intended to explain things to the audience (some of which is blatantly false) that would be taken for granted in a real situation, and, of course, even if they are 30 minutes out when they figure out where the bad guy is hanging out, nothing can be done until they personally arrive on the scene to make the arrest themselves (leading in the heavily armored SWAT team while they themselves wear only vests and carry 9mm semiautos). Don’t even get me started on the arsonist episode which must have had every firefighter in the audience rolling on the floor with laughter.
Another interesting bit is the obvious attempts to reach a very wide audience. The trick is to say lots of “liberal” things about how this serial killer, having been horribly abused as a child, “never really had a chance.” In one episode, the boy model “genius” admits that the majority of abusers were NOT abused as children, but somehow the killers they catch inevitably were. Occasionally, they are even a bit gentle during the arrest. Then on the other side, they often take great pleasure in arresting the killers. Or worse.
In one episode, a female member of the BAU, who had been shot by an “UnSub” (unknown subject) some several episodes earlier, murders a suspect in cold blood after he is acquitted on a technicality. The Bureau investigates and clears her (surprisingly realistic), but, of course, there is the obligatory scene where her boss, who is pretty sure what happens, tells her “You know that if I had any evidence I’d arrest you on the spot.” Later, she quits while saying “This is not an admission of guilt.”
There are lots of other things, such as the use of a *female* hacker who is supposedly a superhacker (she was hired after hacking the Bureau and getting caught). In nearly every episode, the BAU deliberately break the law by using this hacker to break into everything from personal computers to corporate networks to the government’s own computers — all in the name of expediency — without a warrant. Everyone is awed by her skill, and all the local police departments wish they had someone like her.
But the most ugly and recurring scene is where one of the characters gloats while telling a *suspect* that he is going to go to prison where he will be repeatedly gang raped, or that he’ll be “someone’s bitch.” WTF? After seeing this more than once (and in at least one instance said by a very macho female character), I started watching episodes of other “gun” shows — Law & Order, CSI, and all the various spin-offs and copies. I was pretty horrified to find that this was quite common. Seems a character can’t talk about going to prison these days without mentioning gang rape, AIDS, or torture by guards or other prisoners. Is this now OK? Is that the point of sending people to prison? So they can be gang raped by other criminals?
How did this happen? How long has it been going on? A show in which the hero is a sociopathic serial killer and liberal viewers love it? A dozen police procedurals that regularly boast about prison rape? I’ve also heard about 24, of course, and that Keifer Sutherland tortures *suspects* (not that torturing convicted criminals would be any less repulsive) in every episode. Who is watching these shows?
And the new, “macho” women of these shows — most of them, as far as I can see, pretty much as vicious as the men — where did they come from?
There’s much more, of course. The titillation of viewers who get off on the serial killings. The terrorists always seem to be Middle Eastern, the drug lords, Latin American. It goes on and on.
Has this already been addressed here and I missed it? I thought I was as jaded as possible, but I admit I was shocked beyond belief.
8 March 2011, 10:52 pmDeAnander:
@chasm: we have actually discussed these themes before — the brutalisation of popular entertainment, the Feminised Enemy (and the Enemised Feminine) — and the recurring theme of retributive rape (which alas is considered “funny” even on relatively good-natured shows like Buffy).
It is pretty shocking how sordid and sadistic popular media have become “while we weren’t looking.” I confess I do wonder sometimes whether this might be a deliberate move to desensitise the public in an age when imperial brutality must be ratcheted up to maintain the flow of wealth from periphery to core.
9 March 2011, 12:25 amJames M:
“I do wonder sometimes whether this might be a deliberate move to desensitise the public in an age when imperial brutality must be ratcheted up to maintain the flow of wealth from periphery to core.”
Me too, but I rather more suspect it’s just the natural & expected coarsening and decadence that goes along with the decline of empire. The gallant ideals that supposedly motivated the Empire’s violence have been exposed as fraudulent, & hollowed out of their meaning. (I don’t think anyone, even the most hardcore jingoist, really believes we’re a force for good anymore.) And we’re nihilistically left to feed (as entertainment, as culture) on the nutrition-free husks of what remains in the absence of those former ideals – naked domination, bloodsport, casual cruelty, perverse transgressive thrills. It’s the pitch darkness before some kind of new dawn … I hope.
9 March 2011, 1:21 amJames M:
Just to elaborate on the new nihilism: I think the “freedom and democracy” meme – as a justification for our foreign policy & warmaking – is now officially dead. The Iraq War, plus these Mideast uprisings of late and our hypocritical reactions to them, killed it. The official mouthpieces still spout it, yes, but when I hear justifications for war and other kinds of aggressive foreign policy from the general public lately, I never hear anything about freedom or just cause anymore. It’s strictly openly-racist rationales & unabashed calls to stake our claim on other countries’ resources. It’s like nobody can even be bothered to give a shit anymore for the old “noble” pretenses.
9 March 2011, 1:43 amChasm:
Thanks, De (and James). I try to check in regularly and read whatever’s posted, but I must have missed the stuff on retributive rape. I’ll look around for it. Re the attitudes of Americans, I agree. I’ve been shocked to hear supposedly “liberal” friends admit that they know that the government was up to no good, but that it is necessary for the maintenance of their “standard of living.” They’ve given up the noble pretenses, but they have yet to figure out that the State doesn’t give a hoot about their “standard of living.” Maybe soon?
Actually, I found this so depressing and paralyzing that I finally gave up and left the country about a year ago. I have no plans to return. But I have a lot of Facebook “friends” (most of whom I’ve never met) across the spectrum, so I get a pretty good idea of what Americans are thinking from them. The “Dexter” show really blows my mind, though.
9 March 2011, 1:57 amStan:
I have seen Criminal Minds. Aside from being one of the silliest shows imaginable (for all the reasons you point out, Chas), it features – yet again – serial killers who all seem to be geniuses (this trope is getting worn to a nub, again post-Lecter, only without Harris’ literary skills). There is also always one or two “profound” quotes (occasionally from Ayn Rand, btw) that have little to do with anything except to suggest that the story is “deep.” It’s really a collection of cheap rip-offs of anything that has worked, eclectically squashed together to manipulate audiences that want familiar formulas.
The whole fascination now with forensics and profiling is more than a little disturbing to me. Not just because of the Science Uber Alles notion (CSI, Bones), but because when you see actual profilers interviewed on the “news,” they come across as cliche-spouting flim-flam artists blowing smoke up our collective ass. It’s pseudo-pseudo-science.
I know I’ve gone afield of Macho Women, but the last exchange just enervated me on teevee cop-dramas, which I watch off and on as a kind of ongoing cultural pulse-taking. Law and Order is probably the most popular show in the country, with its share of macho women as cops and DAs btw, and that popularity tells me that it needs to be unpacked again and again to expose the pernicious assumptions that underwrite it. I have seen the Liv character on the Special Victims Unite episodes (where they pursue and prosecute sex crimes, esp rape) actually throw the celebratory “you’ll get raped in prison and that’s justice” bit at “perps.” A woman character who is ‘on the front lines against rape’ embracing sex as violence and revenge (sigh).
[Note, the writers are almost always MEN.]
I wish there was a website with ten good cultural critics on hand that monitored these shows episode by episode and deconstructed them for the public. Left to themselves, these cultural productions are immensely dangerous.
9 March 2011, 2:34 amDeAnander:
The problem with this popcult drivel is that it not only reflects popular taste, it shapes it — not just taste but perception and values. I find that many people — more than we would like to think — have difficulty distinguishing fiction from reality. They know, intellectually speaking, that on TV they are watching actors reciting pre-written scripts with cameras hovering all around them. Yet on some other level — preconscious? subconscious? — they believe that the fiction accurately represents reality or an idealised reality. That cops really talk and act like this — or should. And then, of course, the up-n-coming generations of cops are also watching these shows and will to some extent imitate their favourite characters as they try to act their way into their social role (not perhaps so obviously as to be noticeable, but they will borrow attitudes and memes and patterns learned in childhood in front of the TV).
Many/most airline pilots tend to speak (on radio anyway) with a Southern accent, even if they came from the NE originally. Why? just seems to be part of the subculture of airline piloting. Some theorise that this is due to the media exposure and popularity of Chuck Yeager (who was a hero to a generation of young men yearning to become pilots). Just one example of mass behaviour mimicking an influential celebrity. Some think it has something to do with the location of Air Force training bases (many military bases are located in the Southern States). At any rate, it’s a cultural tic that has become a marker for a profession. Our mass media are working hard to make sadism, empathy-deficiency, callousness and sociopathy cultural tics of the policing profession (as if the job didn’t come with enough tendencies and temptations in that direction to struggle with).
I tend to agree with James M (hi James!) — the decline of empires is marked by the leakage of imperial barbarism and cruelty back into the core. The brain/blood barrier of innocence is broken down, the distance between exploited periphery and coddled core starts to collapse. In the US we can see right now, the liquidation of selected regions *within* the national border (MTR for example, fracking), the reduction of the empire’s own internal territories to exploited periphery for an imploding core. some analysts call this “catabolic collapse”, when an organism starts metabolising its own tissues for lack of external fodder. Opportunistic cannibalism requires a profound cauterisation of the moral sense. Maybe it makes sense that the most fascinating media figures of our time are Hannibal the Cannibal and the endless vampires of media franchise. We are portraying in fiction, thinly disguised, the liquidation and consumption of the poor by the rich, by the industrialised West of the entire biosphere… the drama of our time.
9 March 2011, 3:12 amWinston Warfield:
This discussion raises complex and unexamined issues having to do with the imperial core’s cultural Orientalism in shaping prejudicial and patronizing views towards Arabs and especially Muslim women. “Our” soldier-women, now nearing military equality with men, are, for instance, now allowed to fly helicopters in combat environments, on missions part of whose imperial subtext is to liberate their sisters in Araby (collateral damage anyone?), who are assumed to be so downtrodden they cannot do it themselves and must be saved by female Gary Coopers or John Waynes riding to the rescue. Now, with the Middle East and North Africa exploding in democracy protest, what image is being flung across the world if you watch Aljazeera but Muslim women in headscarves in the forefront of fierce democracy protests, peacefully and resolutely challenging in collective solidarity the most sadistic state security forces. Contrast that with the cartoonish and ludicrous portrayal of macho-ized feminism in “G.I. Jane.” Who could not be moved by the profound courage of one Asmaa Mahfouz, a young Egyptian women, who put together a Youtube video asking her fellow Egyptians all, in eloquently simple and sincere language (it’s worth a listen), to join her in Tahrir Square to protest their endless humiliation and suffering. She knowingly would be confronted by the murderer-torturers of Mubarak’s secret police, always responding to such public calls, and usually outnumbering protesters. Yet this time thousands of protesters showed up, and the fire was lit. Her video played an important part in sparking the Egyptian upheaval and Egyptian women were and are today, in Egypt, integral to the struggle against colonialism. We don’t see these images nor get this on CNN, because it doesn’t fit our Orientalist stereotypes. These are actual women liberating themselves in solidarity with their male brothers, rejecting the sword and calling for equality and peace.
9 March 2011, 6:17 pmvictor:
The most amazing aspect of Law & Order is how Ice-T went so seemlessly from the insane black criminal to the asshole black cop “brand”.
9 March 2011, 8:15 pmChasm:
I did catch the Ayn Rand quotes (there have been a few). Also, wrt the “brilliant” serial killers, another trick is to make is seem as if everyone is in danger all the time from these freaks of nature. I’m just guessing, but I bet if you added up every death from every serial killer in the past few hundred years — known and unknown — it wouldn’t add to more than a couple of months of America’s highway toll. Or maybe a few months of deaths from side effects from properly prescribed medicines.
Humans suck at math — especially statistics. When I watched that second plane hit almost a decade ago, I felt real terror. But not for my own life. I understood that the odds of being killed in a terrorist attack were vanishingly small (for an American anyway). Personally, I’m going to die from kidney failure, if I’m not killed by an errant driver. But I felt terror for the millions, literally, who would die, most likely in Asia and Africa (though maybe in South America as well), as a result of that attack, and a great fear for the loss of civil liberties and the unleashing of so many other negative and destructive forces in and outside of America. (Actually, plenty of people — especially people of color — are dying inside the U.S. as well thanks to 9/11.) But everyone of my friends was terrified of the “terrorists.” And though I knew it would happen, I watched in horror as Bush’s popularity soared to 90%. Next thing I know my “liberal” sister is explaining to me why we *have to* attack Afghanistan in order to protect her daughter from “the terrorists.”
All these cop shows work to keep people thinking that blue collar crime is the problem, and that it is rampant. And the serial-killer-on-every-block theme plays into that, I think.
What got me interested in Criminal Minds was that Mandy Pantinkin had quit the show after the first two seasons because he was upset about the amount of violence it showed. I’d started watching the more recent shows, in which Joe Mantegna is the primary profiler, so I went back and watched the first two seasons. And I discovered that Pantinkin’s character, Jason Gideon, is a real bastard. I thought he might be more likable than Mantegna’s Rossi, but I was very wrong. Gideon is a total prick.
I agree with several of the comments above. In fact, recently I’d been thinking a lot about the whole bullshit argument about whether television reflects social norms or affects them. It should be bleeding obvious that it does both. It is a feedback loop. I think these shows up the violence to attract viewers. The viewers show up and become gradually inured. Then they demand more kinks, and the shows up the ante again. Just as post-1980s-MTV it appears impossible to make a popular show (or movie) without rapid cuts, apparently you can’t make a gun show without macho women, rape-revenge fantasies, violation of civil rights and liberties, etc. What amazes me is how boring these shows have become! *They are all the same show!* It’s the same story over and over again, with the same stereotyped characters. The range isn’t increasing, it’s decreasing.
Since I’ve been revisiting TV over the past couple of months, I’ve started watching another show: McHale’s Navy. I used to love that show as a kid (it was in reruns — I’m not *that* old). Switching from Criminal Minds to McHale’s Navy is mind boggling. Although it’s a show about war (admittedly, a comedy), no one ever dies in McHale’s Navy. There is the occasional sunk Japanese submarine or an aircraft shot down, but they are shown from a distance and you never actually see anyone die. I’m not saying it’s a good show, though the slapstick is sometimes hilarious — Tim Conway was a genius, and Joe Flynn had his moments — but the difference in values is amazing.
And I agree with De that the line between fiction and reality is very blurred, and not just for some people. The *whole point* of going to see a movie (or watching a TV show) is to *forget* that these are actors and there are cameras around. I *want* to project myself into the movie/show and suspend disbelief (which is one reason I find the stupidity of many of these shows so annoying — not even I can suspend that much disbelief) — that’s what makes it fun. But when you do that, on some level the show *is* real to you, and that can be dangerous. I’m the kind of guy who writes emails to Noam Chomsky accusing him of being too right wing, and I doubt there are many people on Earth more anti-TV or aware of its effects, but I still found myself thinking, Gee, maybe I *should* have joined the FBI back when I had the chance… and this even after gagging at the stupidity of the scripts!
Good news: I’ve been telling people for years that if they want to change the world, the first step is to turn off the TV permanently. No excuses. After a year away, any intelligent person returning will suddenly find that all is revealed. Just a couple days ago I got an email from a young friend, who, unbeknownst to me, had stopped for six months. He wrote, “You were right Charles. After about 6 months without cable, I started to realize that TV has to be the greatest mind numbing garbage the human mind has ever been subjected to. I watch it now, the like 5 min of horrible brainwashing content followed by 15 min of soul sucking advertising and it’s basically unbearable.” After 25 years of suggesting this course of action to dozens if not hundreds of people, I finally got one!
10 March 2011, 4:00 amCurt:
I am getting the idea that a Feralscholar approach to movies or TV shows is that they should show life the way it is and also show the way that it could (should) be.
10 March 2011, 12:31 pmFor example the movie would start out showing a very rich Farmasutical CEO plotting like JR Euwing to make even more billions by cheating society. But in the course of an evening while returning from the broadway play, A Christmas Carole, he is kidnapped and disappears. WE then see he working in a Chinese coal mine during the last 30 seconds of the episode. The next episode shows who kidnapped JR and why. It shows how they came up with the money and other resources including expertise to be able to carry out the kiddnapping. The third episode would show just exactly how they manajed to get JR in to the Chinese coal mine. The fourth through the sixth episode will like Prison Break show JR plotting his escape and his return to power. The seventh episode will show his plans collapse.
Of course some factions in FS may claim that this is just another variation of the revenge rape fantasy. I agree. It is a variation, a legitimate variation. The program that I have just described is small compared to what program could be done if I had control of HBOs budget. If that were the case I could set up a program in whiich hundreds if not thousands of JRs and their close collaborators could disappear in to Chinese coal mines. It would be Grimm Poetic justice. It would not be torture. Unless someone wants to accuse the Chinese Government of the torture of its coal miners. Perhaps some might think that it is unfair that these JRs get sent to a life of hard labor with out a trial, or a bread crumb trail back. To that I can only say Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.
I hope that it is good enough for prime time.
DeAnander:
I like Curt’s TV show… it reminds me how often I have wished I had the budget and connections to create broadcast media, or at least movies on DVD and for download.
I always wanted to create a 4 or 5 season drama/comedy with a real story arc (not just a timeless episodic sitcom), based on the lives of bike messengers and farmers-marketers in a big city like SF or Seattle. The core characters would all be altermondialistas of various flavours; and “normal” people would be incidental characters, outside the heart of the script and storyline (as opposed to the mainstream media in which altermondialistas are only present in the script to be mocked, sometimes gently and sometimes meanly).
I would call out themes from Solnit, of human co-operation and ingenuity in demanding conditions. Peak Oil and climate change would be on my characters’ minds, and they would be talking about it a lot — for example, if any of them were considering whether to have children or not. Few of them would own a car. They would be concerned with food quality and access to healthy food, trying to afford housing, maybe trying to start a community garden. They would struggle with their relationship to the medical system, sometimes needing its services but skeptical of its ideologies.
Important dialogue would take place in public spaces like buses, BART trains and stations, libraries. One or more characters might even be (gasp!) homeless. One or more would be working braindead jobs in retail. Most of them would be shopping at thrift stores. They would argue amongst room-mates about buying stuff cheaply at slave-labour chain stores like Wal*Mart. At least one or two would be smartasses with a strong ironic grasp of gender politics; others might be more naif or focussed on other things. Many of them would read a lot, and footage of their apartments or houses would show lots of books (have you ever noticed how book-free most characters’ houses are in mainstream TV?). When they discussed prostitution, rape, other infringements of women’s autonomy, it would not be as an uneasy or titillating joke. Race and gender would be seriously mixed up in all the characters and their interactions.
They would mock, with wry Russian humour, the advertising bullshit saturating the surrounding culture. They would mock the hollow pretence of democracy occupying the ‘political pages’ and openly deride the “news” in the mainstream (corporate-owned) press; they would routinely discuss news stories from foreign news bureaux, acquired online. The importance of the Internet for communication and “news from outside” would often be reflected in their conversation. But there might be one or two of them who refuse to “get wired”, and the tension between Internet functionality and dependence on technology would be discussed. No one would wear identifiable designer clothing (unless it came from a thrift store); and no identifiable brand names would ever appear on camera (unless there was a point to be made about corporate crime).
I’d get Joss Whedon to work on the script and concept, also the creative crew from Dead Like Me
The bike messengers would add an element of physical daring and outdoor action shots, w/o a lot of violence. If violence was incorporated into a plot it would be taken seriously, with the consequences on all sides explored *and picked up later in the story arc* to emphasise that consequences don’t just go away in one neat little 50 minute format.
I think such a show could be witty, funny, dramatic, engaging — could command a cult following, could become a cultural phenomenon. Even people from the mainstream audience could become fascinated by it (as they are by “insider shows” about cops and doctors). Only thing is… no advertiser would sponsor it. So it would never be broadcast; but it could be released as teasers on youtube and downloads via bittorrent.
If I were a multigadzillionaire this is one thing I would do with my money — unleash a hot creative team on a media project like this, which would carry many important messages (like DNA) packaged in a really interesting and engaging story-line with sympathetic characters and a whole different, non-formula presentation. It would defy the conventions — no formula jumpcuts, no formula violence, no formula scripting, no formula casting. Nothing about it would match the standardised parameters for modern TV drama; it would be simply different, and that alone might grab eyeballs and minds. And maybe — just maybe — some teenage viewers would start imagining themselves as nonviolent urban farmer heroes instead of sadistic cop heroes.
I can dream, can’t I?
10 March 2011, 2:34 pmStan:
!!!!! Yeah.
10 March 2011, 6:00 pmCurt:
I could even add some charachters to your project. A married couple in their 40s who own and operate a chain of thrift stores through a “non profit” corprate charity that they incorperated in the state of Deleware for 250 US Dollars.
10 March 2011, 6:20 pmThey live in an expensive home located in an expensive suburb. Most of thier employees earn a dollar or two above above minimum wage. Their store managers and accountants might make an average wage.
In their defense one might say that they do not treat their employees any worse than other retailers. It might be said that they cheat becasue other retailers are actually paying for their inventory where as the thrift store survives on donations that people give thinking that they are helping a good cause. Well our yuppie thrift store owning couple might say, look the money does go to a good cause it creates jobs for all of our employess in this large metropolitan area. Yes we live well from it too but we are only skimming half off the top that a normal capiltalist entrapranuer would take.
I too think that violence should be dealt with in a realistic manner. Showing how the effects of violence echo through history is very important. Then a story can also show what events occur before violence is used. For example it can show JR E. trying to get permission to open pit mine in Guatemala and his deciet about the environmental impact of the mine does not fly through the Guatemalen legeslature he hires some people to have a key local Senator carjacked. It could also show the Seattle police busting in to the house of one of the shows regular charachters because A. They were not immunizing their children. B.) They were home schooling their children with no state oversight C.)They were growing their own pot for pain relief. D.) They had European attitudes towards nudity which upset people in the Seattle Social Welfare Department.
E.) They were accused of reading open source material produced by the military industrial complex in the area and sharing their thoughts on this material with Russian Think thanks so they were to be deported to Russia (or Iran perhaps). F.) They were making their children work 6 hours a day making wood carvings and social services decided that the parents were unfit.
You could also show the build up to violence in other ways. A large corperation will build a powerline that will force a group of community gardners out of thier gardens with little compensation. The Gardners use all legal means to stop the taking of thier lands so when the Bulldozers come to bulldoze their gardens they fill bottles with bleach and ammonia and throw them at the workers and the security guards sent to protect them. Or the boss of one of the courier companies runs it in to the ground becasue he has a gambeling problem and steals from the company and all of the workers pay checks bounce and one of the workers does not have very good self control and he murders the boss while the boss is out on bail awaiting trial. I wonder if the writer of this episode would write the story in such a way that the murderer gets caught or never gets caught or gets cuaght but has the charges droped on a technicality so that he can be murdered by Dexter. Or this idea that may not seem realalistic now but may in the future. There is a strike at the Boeing Factory and the Police charge the strikers with their Billy Clubs at which point the strikers take out hidden baseball bats and fight back against the police. This episode could be a real tear jerker as it could show that there are people on each side who are in the same family, cousins, maybe even brothers and or sisters. I guess the moral of all this would be that the roots of violence reach down to greed, unfairness, deciet and even stupidity.
Michael H:
(First-time poster — greetings all!)
Stan and De, have you read Jerry Mander’s “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television”? If it has been discussed here already, I apologize, but I think it is relevant here.
One of Mander’s points is that the medium of television is itself corrupted, and corrupts whatever message the programing tries to get across. For example, cooperative behavior does not make for ‘good’ TV, whereas conflict and general smart-aleckiness sells better. The key is that watching television is fundamentally boring (thousands of people, sitting in darkened rooms, staring at light, as Mander puts it), so that the experience must be spiced up with frequent changes in camera angles, laugh tracks, etc. Otherwise people wouldn’t sit through the shows long enough to watch the commercials, which is the point of it all in the end.
Another point Mander makes is that the statement “the medium is the message” is not a joke, and the final message present in every TV show is “sit, watch, be passive, do nothing”. Simply changing who controls the programming will not make television good for society, though I agree it is hard to see how it could possibly be worse.
Mander also points out that people think of TV shows as being real in a sense — the example he used is of fathers thinking “what would Archie Bunker do in this situation?”
11 March 2011, 11:29 amCharles:
There is a strange fascination with this notion of a brilliant, amoral character that I believe is a twisted Nietzschean impulse.
^^^^
11 March 2011, 4:53 pmProbably wouldn’t have to twist it.
Curt:
Michael, I think that there are some pretty perceptive points made in your post. But what would that guy Mander say about documentaries like The Secrets of Oz, or about good movies like Hair, or Death and the Maiden, or Fiddler on the Roof, or 101 Dalmations, or Tootsie? Should these stories only appear in book form?
11 March 2011, 6:01 pmsam:
Well, women can be sadistic dominators all they want. But there’s still one only men are, uh, manly enough to do; drink…eh, Dr. Pepper?
http://www.facebook.com/DrPepper?v=app_109099632498120
Clearly this is an attempt to cater to men who want to lose weight, but feel too “unmanly” buying diet food. If you want to be truly stupefied, check out the television commercial.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/food/article-1359710/Dr-Pepper-launches-manly-low-calorie-drink-Rambo-style-advert.html
Oh dear.
13 March 2011, 2:32 pmMichael H:
Hi Curt,
Mander did make a distinction between film and television. Because a film audience is mostly captive, movies have a bit more leeway to be ‘boring’, whearas since television audiences are one click away they must be kept constantly entertained. Further, movie-viewing tends to be more of a planned, social occasion than is TV; part of the experience often includes discussion after the conclusion of the film (I believe Mander’s book was written before VCRs were very common and so the continued validity of this last point might be questionable).
My opinion on documentaries is somewhat ambivalent. They are a great way to get a message out to an audience that would not have the time or patience to read at length about a topic. But they must compress much information into short time spans, and often (due to the limitations of the medium) reduce complex issues into black-and-white.
One other problem with documentaries is that the film medium feeds information at a set pace. The viewer cannot stop to reflect and critique the points being made.
14 March 2011, 7:36 amCurt:
Thank you Michael
14 March 2011, 10:48 amJames L:
Basically you want a 21st century version of Tales Of The City. Which was pretty successful, so its not an altogether unrealistic hope.
14 March 2011, 8:34 pmStan:
Journalism And Democracy In A Dead Culture: An interview with Robert Jensen
16 March 2011, 6:54 pmRobert Karaffa:
Cuz we dont have culture, we have marketing.
16 March 2011, 8:04 pmStan:
Bingo.
16 March 2011, 8:17 pmm.c.:
De,
The Airline Pilot accent is from Tom Wolfe’s, The Right Stuff? Besides Chuck Yeager, there is Howard Hughes(who grew up in Texas), and maybe the general archetype of John Wayne.
Former military aviator/pilots in politics: John McCain, Rick Perry, Donald Rumsfeld(Cheney’s boss in the 1970′s), Bush Jr., Bush Sr., Gerald Ford, Barry Goldwater. Joseph Kennedy Jr., George McGovern.
18 March 2011, 12:08 pmkathy:
Forget Joss Whedon, De. His latest show (now canceled)– Doll’s House– is a fantasy about sex-trafficking. The women “volunteer” to have their brains emptied and put into a computer chip for seven years. During this time they are implanted with new chips designed for the desires of every new client. In between they loll about like zombies.
amazing discussion. I have more to respond to.
19 March 2011, 9:39 pmDeAnander:
Doll’s House sounds pretty awful, but the plot as you describe it has one redeeming aspect: it doesn’t pretend that women enjoy prostitution. It seems to science-fictionise the very real issue of dissociation (women “checking out” their awareness and personality for the duration of the use of their bodies by the punter). But it also sounds like nasty voyeur-fare for male viewers. A shame, as some of Whedon’s commentary on sexism (in Buffy for example) was pretty sharp. In Firefly he tried romanticising prostitution, one the weaknesses of that otherwise highly entertaining and well-written story; I dunno what he was up to with Doll’s House and am not sure I could sit through it to find out… ta for the warning
20 March 2011, 10:09 amSusan/catlady:
In William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel “Neuromancer,” the character Molly describes a past job working as a “meat puppet”: “…’cause once they plant the cut-out chip, it seems like free money. Wake up sore, sometimes, but that’s it. Renting the goods, is all . Your aren’t in, when it’s all happening. House has software for whatever a customer wants to pay for…”
Course, Molly was working as a meat puppet to earn money for implants that would make her into a razorgirl, a cyber-Samurai who wears black leather and kicks ass.
Another girl-punk ass-kicker super-hacker in popular media these days is The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Three books about rape revenge, with disturbingly graphic and brutal revenge scenes.
20 March 2011, 3:07 pmDeAnander:
Gibson however noted that (in his fictional universe) the meat-puppet cutout was not perfect. Unsettling whiffs of memory from the dissociated episodes came back to haunt the puppet’s waking life. Gibson’s take on gender is interesting — some very strong convincing female characters, but at the same time a kind of fetishisation of their very strength (particularly Molly, whose sexual relationship with Case (the protagonist) is described more in voyeuristic external-POV terms than with any emotional depth. I think Neal Stephenson may have done a better job of giving female characters some space and depth in his narrative…
20 March 2011, 5:44 pmSusan/catlady:
Yup, I omitted Molly’s waking experience, discovering the house is taking advantage of her mods for snuff scenes.
My favorite sci-fi female characters are Cirocco Jones and Gaby Plauget in John Varley’s “Titan” trilogy.
20 March 2011, 6:01 pmJules:
The machoization of strong women has been on my mind for some time. I had served in the 82nd Airborne in Afghanistan as an infantryman under the pretense that I would be freeing women from oppressive religious dogma and advancing our culture and values. In the beginning I had no problem accepting that notion, being young and believing in simplistic ideas of liberation vs. tyranny.
But like so many other things that I had believed before, war and a closer study of capitalism helped to peel away some of the illusion.
Such notions as strength, courage, and selfless service. Core Values in the Army, embodied by every soldier serving in combat. Sacred cows, really.
The Army’s strict equal opportunity (E.O) measures and leadership audits still fail to ensure the fair treatment of women and colored soldiers within the ranks, because all who served know that there is a deep misogynistic culture rooted within the military. Most especially in Infantry units, where your hard pressed to find a man who sees a woman soldier as his equal.
This exacerbated under the stress of wartime where their is a cultural divide between soldiers who go out on missions and patrols, stationed in far reaching outposts, and those who live within the high walls of large FOB’s. No longer are woman only female, they becomes POGs (persons other than grunts), and FOBBITs- term for those having the luxury of eating hamburgurs and pizza everyday in Bagram or Kandahar.
So it’s actually quite often that you see women volunteering for more dangerous positions, at least while I was there. One woman I knew won the silver star for dragging some of my buddies who had been wounded in an ambush, into a ditch where she could apply first aid.
Although her actions were no doubt courageous, and our platoon was forever grateful to her. Her achievement was marred by the fact that our command needed to do something to divert the attention away from their mistakes.
Not only were soldiers seriously wounded, but we had inflicted lots of damage to private property. So, to divert the attention away from the obvious facts, they created a media buzz around her. She was the first woman since WW2 to win the silver star, and she appeared on Opera.
As the months passed, she was regarded amongst the men in the unit as command’s hero-because she saved their asses too.
But another interesting incident to flip my notions of strength, courage, etc. Was watching the so called helpless and subjugated women of Afghanistan running through our fire and ordinance to provide water and ammunition to our enemies in the most debilitating attack on my unit during the entire deployment. An entire platoon in armored humvees bogged down and nearly all killed until another unit of support troops or POGs were able to arrive with more firepower.
Since my time in the war I have never thought the same about Alpha male types, women, classical values, and gender roles.
21 March 2011, 7:40 amm.c.:
Gerald Ford was a Preflight School instructor, not a aviator or pilot. I remember he served on a aircraft carrier and in error made a connection. Joe Kennedy Jr. never was formally in politics but his family & younger brothers played up the fact that he died in the war for political gain to no end.
The Crazy Cowboy pilot in Dr. Strangelove(played by Slim Pickens) is probably in the minds of most American Men(even the grunts in the field who hope in a tight spot if the radio works that an A-10 or Chopper will come to their aid). I’m less concerned about the Crazy Cowboy than the Mad Scientist who’s never been in a gradeschool fight on the school bus, much less served in the military and think a No-Fly Zone in Libya is like a video game. Where’s his skin in the game?
21 March 2011, 8:51 pm