A Prayer for the Departed…
October 27, 2006
I saw Marty Scorsese\’s new film, The Departed a couple of weeks ago. It\’s a pretty good film, but something about it has been gnawing on me since I saw it.
A little background: The Departed is a remake of the Hong Kong cop thriller, Infernal Affairs. Both films follow the intersecting paths of two undercover agents. One agent is a cop placed in the confidence of a mob boss. One agent is a mobster planted in the polices by that same mob boss. Neither man knows the other, though both are aware of the other\’s existence. A cat and mouse game follows. Both films have the equivalent of an all-star cast. I prefer the cast of the original, stocked as it is with some of my favorite actors anywhere in the world (Tony Leung and Anthony Wong in particular). I\’m less sanguine about the cast of the remake. I\’ve never warmed to Jack Nicholson or Matt Damon, and Leo Di Caprio is laboring in the shadow of Tony Leung\’s astonishing performance in the original item. But that\’s neither here nor there. If you haven\’t seen the original, you\’ll love the remake. If you have seen it, you\’ll probably like the remake.
If you have an interest in seeing either film, but haven\’t yet, stop reading now.
Still with me? Okay.
Infernal Affairs is a terrific film. The Departed isn\’t as good, but it\’s not bad. It follows the original\’s story pretty faithfully until the end. The end. That\’s where I get hung up. At the end of Infernal Affairs, the Andy Lau character betrays his mob boss and goes over to the cops. To do this, it\’s necessary to wipe his opposite number off the ledger and turn his back on his murder. He gets away with everything (well, not quite, but enough). Andy Lau\’s saturnine face is inscrutable through all of this, and there is a remarkable ambiguity built into this ending. That\’s the ending that most of the world saw. There is an alternate ending made for the mainland Chinese market. The censorship standards in the mainland market require that corrupt government officials be brought to justice in their movies–a convenient fantasy, one must admit, given the rampant corruption known to exist in China\’s ruling Communist party. In that version, Lau\’s character is arrested at the end of the film and hauled off to jail. This is in opposition to the spiritual thematic concerns of the movie, but try telling that to a censor.
Apparently, Americans are subject to the same rigid censorship requirments. The Departed changes the ending even more thoroughly than the ending intended for the mainland Chinese. The remake sets up a situation where someone else in the police department knows the identity of Leo Di Caprio\’s character, and once Leo\’s character is dead and Matt Damon\’s character is seemingly scott free, he shows up and puts a bullet in the brain of Damon\’s character. Evil, then, has been punished. To underline this ending, the camera pans up to the balcony, where a rat scuttles across the railing, as if to say: \”Get it?\” This would be disappointing in any film, but for it to occur in a Scorsese movie is a travesty. There is the suggestion in this turn of plot that not only do the big multinational companies that keep Americans–and by proxy most of the rest of the world–sucking like infants at the teat of bourgeois media hold their audience in even lower regard than the Communist Chinese. And they do it in even more brutal fashion. Let me give you two other examples:
A decade ago, someone got the bright idea of remaking Alfred Hitchcock\’s Dial M For Murder. This film, retitled A Perfect Murder, actually manages to improve on the original item in several important ways and largely sidesteps the shadow of Hitchcock until the ending. In the original, Ray Milland is trapped by his own web of lies and when he realizes that he\’s screwed, the expression on his face is priceless. He\’s hauled away in disgrace to await trial by a jury of his peers. It\’s very satisfying, actually. The remake eschews this kind of \”complexity\” in favor of a gunfight at the end, during which Michael Douglas is killed off and not made to suffer due process or any further humiliation for trying to murder his wife. Justice, in the contemporary, parlance, has been served, but it\’s a hollow kind of vigilante justice. It\’s NOT satisfying. Or at least, not to me. It\’s far too tidy. For a real-life analogue, I offer you the case of Ken Lay and Enron. Not only did Lay\’s untimely death deprive the victims of Enron\’s collapse the redress of justice, it prompted Lay\’s conviction to be set aside.
The living end of this was the end of Troy, a retelling of the Trojan War. The movie paints Agamemnon, played by Brian Cox, as the film\’s rat-bastard villain. But I\’ll get to that in a moment. The ostensible source for Troy is The Illiad. If you ever read the poem in high school, you would likely have been annoyed at the changes made to the text, but for the most part, it gets things right. You get the wrath of Achilles (\”Sing to me, o\’ Muse of the wrath of Achilles, the man-killer\”) and you get the ultimate tragic scene from the end of the poem where Hector\’s father, Priam, comes to Achilles tent to beg for the body of his mutilated son, Hector). If the filmmakers had had the genius of Homer, they would have ended it there, where Homer himself ended it. Then the film would have been a tragic epic worthy of milennia of stories about the Trojan War. But American audiences demand more. They demand \”resolution\” to even the most meaningless of plot threads. So we get the Trojan Horse. We get Achilles\’s death from an arrow in his heel. And we get Agamemnon\’s death…wait…Agamemnon didn\’t die at Troy. He sailed home with the prophetess, Cassandra, only to be murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra and her lover. Not in this version, though. Here he gets killed for the audience\’s sense of \”justice,\” in which villains are slain at the end of the last reel. Villains can never be seen to prosper. Oh no.
Puh-leeze.
Are American audiences such uncomprehending sheep? Is the only satisfying end for a villain his death, whether from a gunshot, a fall from a high place, or a sword through his chest? How far has drama fallen? And what does this do to our cultural mores? American studio movies are largely junk anymore and it troubles me, not just because I love the artform, but also because I hate the underlying ethical assumptions behind them. But mostly, I hate the idea that audiences are in the grip of a media that has no more regard for their individual judgement than that held by the Communist Chinese. That disturbs me, actually.
Edit: Oddly enough, I\’m not the only one to notice these things. Critic/Film Scholar David Bordwell notices some of the same things. So I\’m not crazy after all…
A Prayer for the Departed…
October 27, 2006
I saw Marty Scorsese\’s new film, The Departed a couple of weeks ago. It\’s a pretty good film, but something about it has been gnawing on me since I saw it.
A little background: The Departed is a remake of the Hong Kong cop thriller, Infernal Affairs. Both films follow the intersecting paths of two undercover agents. One agent is a cop placed in the confidence of a mob boss. One agent is a mobster planted in the polices by that same mob boss. Neither man knows the other, though both are aware of the other\’s existence. A cat and mouse game follows. Both films have the equivalent of an all-star cast. I prefer the cast of the original, stocked as it is with some of my favorite actors anywhere in the world (Tony Leung and Anthony Wong in particular). I\’m less sanguine about the cast of the remake. I\’ve never warmed to Jack Nicholson or Matt Damon, and Leo Di Caprio is laboring in the shadow of Tony Leung\’s astonishing performance in the original item. But that\’s neither here nor there. If you haven\’t seen the original, you\’ll love the remake. If you have seen it, you\’ll probably like the remake.
If you have an interest in seeing either film, but haven\’t yet, stop reading now.
Still with me? Okay.
Infernal Affairs is a terrific film. The Departed isn\’t as good, but it\’s not bad. It follows the original\’s story pretty faithfully until the end. The end. That\’s where I get hung up. At the end of Infernal Affairs, the Andy Lau character betrays his mob boss and goes over to the cops. To do this, it\’s necessary to wipe his opposite number off the ledger and turn his back on his murder. He gets away with everything (well, not quite, but enough). Andy Lau\’s saturnine face is inscrutable through all of this, and there is a remarkable ambiguity built into this ending. That\’s the ending that most of the world saw. There is an alternate ending made for the mainland Chinese market. The censorship standards in the mainland market require that corrupt government officials be brought to justice in their movies–a convenient fantasy, one must admit, given the rampant corruption known to exist in China\’s ruling Communist party. In that version, Lau\’s character is arrested at the end of the film and hauled off to jail. This is in opposition to the spiritual thematic concerns of the movie, but try telling that to a censor.
Apparently, Americans are subject to the same rigid censorship requirments. The Departed changes the ending even more thoroughly than the ending intended for the mainland Chinese. The remake sets up a situation where someone else in the police department knows the identity of Leo Di Caprio\’s character, and once Leo\’s character is dead and Matt Damon\’s character is seemingly scott free, he shows up and puts a bullet in the brain of Damon\’s character. Evil, then, has been punished. To underline this ending, the camera pans up to the balcony, where a rat scuttles across the railing, as if to say: \”Get it?\” This would be disappointing in any film, but for it to occur in a Scorsese movie is a travesty. There is the suggestion in this turn of plot that not only do the big multinational companies that keep Americans–and by proxy most of the rest of the world–sucking like infants at the teat of bourgeois media hold their audience in even lower regard than the Communist Chinese. And they do it in even more brutal fashion. Let me give you two other examples:
A decade ago, someone got the bright idea of remaking Alfred Hitchcock\’s Dial M For Murder. This film, retitled A Perfect Murder, actually manages to improve on the original item in several important ways and largely sidesteps the shadow of Hitchcock until the ending. In the original, Ray Milland is trapped by his own web of lies and when he realizes that he\’s screwed, the expression on his face is priceless. He\’s hauled away in disgrace to await trial by a jury of his peers. It\’s very satisfying, actually. The remake eschews this kind of \”complexity\” in favor of a gunfight at the end, during which Michael Douglas is killed off and not made to suffer due process or any further humiliation for trying to murder his wife. Justice, in the contemporary, parlance, has been served, but it\’s a hollow kind of vigilante justice. It\’s NOT satisfying. Or at least, not to me. It\’s far too tidy. For a real-life analogue, I offer you the case of Ken Lay and Enron. Not only did Lay\’s untimely death deprive the victims of Enron\’s collapse the redress of justice, it prompted Lay\’s conviction to be set aside.
The living end of this was the end of Troy, a retelling of the Trojan War. The movie paints Agamemnon, played by Brian Cox, as the film\’s rat-bastard villain. But I\’ll get to that in a moment. The ostensible source for Troy is The Illiad. If you ever read the poem in high school, you would likely have been annoyed at the changes made to the text, but for the most part, it gets things right. You get the wrath of Achilles (\”Sing to me, o\’ Muse of the wrath of Achilles, the man-killer\”) and you get the ultimate tragic scene from the end of the poem where Hector\’s father, Priam, comes to Achilles tent to beg for the body of his mutilated son, Hector). If the filmmakers had had the genius of Homer, they would have ended it there, where Homer himself ended it. Then the film would have been a tragic epic worthy of milennia of stories about the Trojan War. But American audiences demand more. They demand \”resolution\” to even the most meaningless of plot threads. So we get the Trojan Horse. We get Achilles\’s death from an arrow in his heel. And we get Agamemnon\’s death…wait…Agamemnon didn\’t die at Troy. He sailed home with the prophetess, Cassandra, only to be murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra and her lover. Not in this version, though. Here he gets killed for the audience\’s sense of \”justice,\” in which villains are slain at the end of the last reel. Villains can never be seen to prosper. Oh no.
Puh-leeze.
Are American audiences such uncomprehending sheep? Is the only satisfying end for a villain his death, whether from a gunshot, a fall from a high place, or a sword through his chest? How far has drama fallen? And what does this do to our cultural mores? American studio movies are largely junk anymore and it troubles me, not just because I love the artform, but also because I hate the underlying ethical assumptions behind them. But mostly, I hate the idea that audiences are in the grip of a media that has no more regard for their individual judgement than that held by the Communist Chinese. That disturbs me, actually.
Edit: Oddly enough, I\’m not the only one to notice these things. Critic/Film Scholar David Bordwell notices some of the same things. So I\’m not crazy after all…
Radical thought of the week…
October 26, 2006
I haven’t been blogging much this week. I’ve been in something of a mood (and I’m not going to discuss the underlying reasons at this time). Additionally, I made a big mistake in scheduling an electro appointment this weekend, which is going to play all kinds of havoc with my Halloween. But you don’t want to hear about all of that.
I was reading Ronnie’s blog this evening, as I always do when she posts something new. She claims to be in the minority when it comes to keeping the “T” in GLBT. Her argument is that gay rights are human rights (she’s right). My only concern is that the order of the letters not be taken–as it sometimes is in the GLBT community–as a heirarchy. In any event, it got me to thinking about the whole ball of wax, especially in light of an ongoing conversation I’ve been having with a friend of mine who laments the vanishing butch lesbian into the FtM transexual. I told her that I wondered why the persona of the butch lesbian wasn’t considered to be transgendered behavior in the first place–she’s wondered this too–and Ronnie’s post got me to thinking that homosexuality itself might be considered transgendered behavior of a type, though behavior that doesn’t manifest itself in outward appearances. This will surely piss off my queer friends, but there it is. Right now, the paradigm holds that TGs of whatever stripe are a subset of the larger GLBT spectrum, but what if the opposite is true. What if all gays and lesbians are a subset of a larger TG spectrum?
I should note that I’m not drawing any conclusions here. I’m just thinking out loud. I should also note that, even though I can’t find a reference to it in either Gender Outlaw or My Gender Workbook, this idea may have been originated by Kate Bornstein. But I don’t have a reference, so I could be wrong.
The Halloween Horror Movie Challenge, updated:
October 20:
Circus of Horrors (1960, d. Sidney Hayers)–In which yet ANOTHER crazy plastic surgeon is center stage. What is it about that profession, anyway? This one is doing things on the sly with radical techniques. His patients end up in his circus, and when they try to leave…well, no one gets out alive. This is vivid and colorful, but woefully underwritten. Not bad, but not very credible, either.
October 21:
The Tomb of Ligeia (1965, d. Roger Corman)–The last of Corman’s Poe movies, this one takes the camera and heads out into the English countryside where Corman and company have found some crackerjack locations. This by itself gives the film a different “feel” than the other Poe films, but the rest of the film has a different visual design too. After the wild color experiments of The Masque of the Red Death, this one dials back the color and becomes an exercise in placing bright colors in selected areas of a largely monochromatic frame. It makes for a pleasing formal exercise, and one that builds a large degree of mood, but the whole house of cards is built on a pretty standard screenplay that rehashes most of the previous films in the series. Vincent Price plays Verdan Fell, yet another variant of Roderick Usher haunted by the prospect that his dead wife will some how return from the grave. When he remaries the vivacious Lady Rowena, a woman who bears more than a passing resemblance to the dead Ligeia…well, you get the picture. The real surprise in the film is the performance by Elizabeth Shepherd, who manages to hold the frame against Price, though, admittedly, Price has restrained his usual histrionics to give her more of the film.
October 22:
The Braniac (1961, d. Chano Ureto)–Another Mexican horror movie made with a blender. This one starts with the Spanish (or Mexican) Inquisition executing a warlock (who, naturally) vows vengeance on the descendants of his executioners. Then it becomes an alien movie, in which a monster rides to earth on a comet. But wait–it’s the warlock! In a bad rubber mask! Sucking the brains of his enemies. This one is just ridiculous, made worse by the visible limits of its special effects (not just its monster). Mind you, it’s short and energetic, but good? Not so much.
October 23:
I got nothing.
October 24:
The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953, d. Eugène Lourié)–The prototype for Godzilla and his kin, this Harryhausen effort is a puzzler. The special effects are superb for their day, but somehow manage to seem inferior to the gimcrack effects employed by the Japanese. The relationship this bears to its source material, Ray Bradbury’s “The Foghorn,” is instructive. Bradbury wrote (and still writes) a poetic prose all his own, and imbued his tale of a sea monster falling in love with the call of a foghorn with surprising poignancy. It’s the poetry in the thing. This film misses the poetry. From its blank-faced mock-documentary opening onward, it’s depressingly literal-minded– which is why it doesn’t resonate in the cultural echo chamber the way Godzilla does, in spite of a completely identical mix of elements. The beast here is just a beast, and the human being here are just cardboard cutouts inserted in the frame to give the special effects some scale.
October 24:Cat O’ Nine Tails (1971, d. Dario Argento)–The giallo mystery is a gray area. This subgenre has the structure of a whodunnit, the world view of film noir, and the imagery and mood of a horror movie. Within the subgenre, there is movement between these three impulses. Some of them favor one area at the expense of the others. This one, from one of the giallo’s prime architects, favors the traditional whodunnit, featuring semi-professional detectives rather than amateur sleuths and playing fair with the audience. Not that the movie doesn’t rampage off into odd directions–it does–but it still maintains familiar structures. Argento himself names this as his least favorite of his own movies, but I think he’s wrong. There is a control of the material here that is absent in many (most?) of his films, and an interesting structure that examines the limits of our senses (Karl Malden’s blind protagonist is only the most obvious signifier).
The Play\’s the Thing
October 20, 2006
This week\’s cd for the car is a production of Hamlet. The Shakespeare plays are different from the books I usually listen to on the commute. With most books, there\’s one reader doing all the heavy lifting, creating voices for the characters and the narrator, what have you. The plays are full on productions with an actor for every part. Some of these plays are terrific–King Lear was awesome–some are less so. Hamlet falls into the latter category.
Hamlet is one of the most complex characters in English literature, a character that at least one critic has described as having a full consciousness independent of the plot in which he finds himself. It\’s also a plum role for actors, given that the play is his and his alone. No one is ever going to steal the play from the lead actor. Consequently, the play depends entirely on the lead performance. Unfortunately, that very complexity makes it a hard part to get right. And when it goes entirely wrong…the results are seldom pretty. Such is the case with the edition I picked up from the library this week. The lead actor, Simon Russell Beale, blunders through everything. Felicia, who car-pools with me two days a week, called the performance an example of overacting 101, in which nuance is completely banished. I got to the \”To be or not to be\” solliloquy, gave up, and popped the thing out of the player. Conscious of the fact that this speach is revered, Beale turns it into speachifying rather than an organic inner monologue to match such others as are found throughout the play. It sticks out like a sore thumb.
This is all a shame. Hamlet\’s a pretty entertaining play if you can step past its reputation. I had an English professor describe it as \”an episode of Columbo\” in Elizabethan drag, and so it is. Plus, you get ghosts, sword fights, revenge, and murder most foul. Great stuff. The play\’s the thing, and this doesn\’t dampen my fondness for it, but the Bard gave way to another Agatha Christie novel none the less.
Feh.
The Halloween Horror Challenge, updated.
October 17:
The Mysterians (1957, d. Ishiro Honda)–Ah, yes…alien invaders ravaged by atomic war demand our women so they can repopulate their race. What would sci fi be without this plotline? Made a couple of years after Gojira, this movie is Ishiro Honda and his collaborators (most notably, composer Akira Ifukube) finding their metier. The movie is chock-a-block full of (mostly convincing) fantasies of destruction, this time in full color and widescreen. The movie does have one of the dippier-looking giant robots, but you can\’t have everything, I suppose. Say…that\’s the great Takashi Shimura as the mentoring scientist, and, boy howdy, he keeps a straight face while uttering silly dialogue. That\’s professionalism for you…
October 18:
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 2 (1986, d. Tobe Hooper)–There\’s a new edition of this out (I haven\’t seen it), so maybe the reassessment of this film can commence. When I first saw it in 1986, I thought it was some kind of masterpiece. Not in the same league as the first \’Chain Saw\’–what is?–but a radically different kind of horror film than what was being made at the time by other filmmakers. Because I am wont to take a philosophical viewpoint, I think of this film as being the quintessential Nietzchean horror movie, in which the \”good guys\”–Dennis Hopper and Caroline Williams–gaze into the abyss only to learn that the abyss gazes also into them. By revisiting Leatherface\’s final chain saw dance from the first film, but by replacing Leatherface with his primary victim, Hooper has turned the films that take their inspiration from TCM completely on their head. The irony of Hooper delivering more than is suggested by the first film\’s \”bad\” reputation is not lost on me.
October 19:The Invisible Man (1933, d. James Whale)–This is one of the funniest horror movies ever made, a visual marvel that pulls the audience\’s leg from the get go to disguise the fact that it\’s deadly serious.
Claude Rains, in his first major role, plays megalomania and tragedy as two sides of the same coin. Meanwhile, the imagery is indelible. This is one of the first films where special effects REALLY become the major attraction (along with King Kong, released the same year). Some of them are still amazing. It\’s a tribute to the skill of James Whale that they don\’t overwhelm the movie. If I have a quibble, it\’s the annoying shrieking of Whale favorite Una O\’Connor, but she\’s even worse in The Bride of Frankenstein, so what the hey…Running total: 21 films. 12 new to me.
The Play\’s the Thing
October 20, 2006
This week\’s cd for the car is a production of Hamlet. The Shakespeare plays are different from the books I usually listen to on the commute. With most books, there\’s one reader doing all the heavy lifting, creating voices for the characters and the narrator, what have you. The plays are full on productions with an actor for every part. Some of these plays are terrific–King Lear was awesome–some are less so. Hamlet falls into the latter category.
Hamlet is one of the most complex characters in English literature, a character that at least one critic has described as having a full consciousness independent of the plot in which he finds himself. It\’s also a plum role for actors, given that the play is his and his alone. No one is ever going to steal the play from the lead actor. Consequently, the play depends entirely on the lead performance. Unfortunately, that very complexity makes it a hard part to get right. And when it goes entirely wrong…the results are seldom pretty. Such is the case with the edition I picked up from the library this week. The lead actor, Simon Russell Beale, blunders through everything. Felicia, who car-pools with me two days a week, called the performance an example of overacting 101, in which nuance is completely banished. I got to the \”To be or not to be\” solliloquy, gave up, and popped the thing out of the player. Conscious of the fact that this speach is revered, Beale turns it into speachifying rather than an organic inner monologue to match such others as are found throughout the play. It sticks out like a sore thumb.
This is all a shame. Hamlet\’s a pretty entertaining play if you can step past its reputation. I had an English professor describe it as \”an episode of Columbo\” in Elizabethan drag, and so it is. Plus, you get ghosts, sword fights, revenge, and murder most foul. Great stuff. The play\’s the thing, and this doesn\’t dampen my fondness for it, but the Bard gave way to another Agatha Christie novel none the less.
Feh.
The Halloween Horror Challenge, updated.
October 17:
The Mysterians (1957, d. Ishiro Honda)–Ah, yes…alien invaders ravaged by atomic war demand our women so they can repopulate their race. What would sci fi be without this plotline? Made a couple of years after Gojira, this movie is Ishiro Honda and his collaborators (most notably, composer Akira Ifukube) finding their metier. The movie is chock-a-block full of (mostly convincing) fantasies of destruction, this time in full color and widescreen. The movie does have one of the dippier-looking giant robots, but you can\’t have everything, I suppose. Say…that\’s the great Takashi Shimura as the mentoring scientist, and, boy howdy, he keeps a straight face while uttering silly dialogue. That\’s professionalism for you…
October 18:
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 2 (1986, d. Tobe Hooper)–There\’s a new edition of this out (I haven\’t seen it), so maybe the reassessment of this film can commence. When I first saw it in 1986, I thought it was some kind of masterpiece. Not in the same league as the first \’Chain Saw\’–what is?–but a radically different kind of horror film than what was being made at the time by other filmmakers. Because I am wont to take a philosophical viewpoint, I think of this film as being the quintessential Nietzchean horror movie, in which the \”good guys\”–Dennis Hopper and Caroline Williams–gaze into the abyss only to learn that the abyss gazes also into them. By revisiting Leatherface\’s final chain saw dance from the first film, but by replacing Leatherface with his primary victim, Hooper has turned the films that take their inspiration from TCM completely on their head. The irony of Hooper delivering more than is suggested by the first film\’s \”bad\” reputation is not lost on me.
October 19:The Invisible Man (1933, d. James Whale)–This is one of the funniest horror movies ever made, a visual marvel that pulls the audience\’s leg from the get go to disguise the fact that it\’s deadly serious.
Claude Rains, in his first major role, plays megalomania and tragedy as two sides of the same coin. Meanwhile, the imagery is indelible. This is one of the first films where special effects REALLY become the major attraction (along with King Kong, released the same year). Some of them are still amazing. It\’s a tribute to the skill of James Whale that they don\’t overwhelm the movie. If I have a quibble, it\’s the annoying shrieking of Whale favorite Una O\’Connor, but she\’s even worse in The Bride of Frankenstein, so what the hey…Running total: 21 films. 12 new to me.
“Because one admires it intensely…”
October 17, 2006
Ronnie continues to have a crisis of faith on her blog. I meant to comment there, but 360 is having a glitch right now and won’t let me reply. So I’ll throw this open to discussion. If you don’t want to follow the link, here’s the salient part of her post:
And maybe it has. On the drive there, none of that old familiar nervousness was around. I was just a person going to a bar to have fun with friends. (Friends who are friends no matter what I’m wearing. The best kind of friends.) So, then I asked myself, “Self, why did you go through all the trouble of dressing up like this if it doesn’t matter what you look like?”
That smart ass Self didn’t have an answer. The bitch.
I will say this: the transformation wasn’t nearly as dramatic as I had hoped it would be. I haven’t lost nearly as much weight as I thought, and it showed. In my face. And I think that reflects in this “why bother” attitude.
What is being a crossdresser all about? Looking good? Acting feminine, or at least an interpretation of feminininininity? Having fun? Shocking people? Those were the questions I had hoped to answer during the exile. But, apparently, I’m back at square one.”
For some reason, this all made me think of Oscar Wilde.
Bear with me for a second: Setting aside my own gender dysphoria–if in fact that’s what it is–I prefer the female form to the male form and I prefer the way our culture decorates the female form. This is purely a matter of aesthetics. There are some lofty theories about this. One of the most famous was penned by the great English artist, William Hogarth, who wrote a book called The Analysis of Beauty in 1753. Hogarth suggested that curved lines are beautiful, while angular lines are dynamic, but not beautiful. He applied this theory to all categories of beauty in art and in nature and makes a compelling argument. The fact that the female form is more curved than the male form was not lost on Hogarth, nor is it lost on anyone who has ever studied the differences as a means of crossing gender lines. The act of transforming the appearance of the dynamic, angular male form into the beautiful, curved female form is as much an artistic act as it is a psychological one.
Which brings me back to Oscar Wilde. At the end of his preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde opines that, “All art is quite useless.” I suspect that Ronnie is discovering this, and that it forms part of her disappointment. There is no practical use to getting all dolled up for a night out if the core experience isn’t much changed either way, is there? But Wilde goes further: “The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.”
The Halloween Horror Challenge, Updated.
October 16:
The Black Pit of Dr. M (1959, d. Fernando Méndez)–Once again, the phrase “mash-up” comes immediately to mind. I’m beginning to think of these Mexican horror movies as “Cuisinart movies.” Take a dozen disparate plot elements, stick them in a blender, press “puree.” While there is a “Dr. M” in this movie, there is no Black Pit–blame the American distributors for the title. The Twilight Zone-y plot finds a pair of doctors making a deal to communicate with each other from beyond the grave, the one to let the other know if there’s a way back to this mortal coil. There is, but it’s convoluted, involving ghosts, mad science, a madhouse, a deformed plastic surgery victim, a murder, an execution, and a grave. How these films pack so much into 80 minute running times is a thing to see…
Running total: 18 films. 12 new to me.
Weekend thoughts…
October 16, 2006
A few months ago, I wrote that electrolysis was no more painful than the laser. Apparently, I was premature in that assessment. Yesterday’s session hurt like nobody’s business. The area we’ve moved into is extremely sensitive, and while I shouldn’t have been surprised–it’s the area of my neck that suffers the most from shaving, too–I was. The length of the session–the equivalent of six hours–may have been the limit of my pain tolerance. My skin was not as hydrated as it has been in past sessions, either, which also contributed. The change of the weather has done a number on my skin this year, and I’ve been carrying a tube of lip balm for the last week or so. Nothing to be done for it, I guess, because I’m already drinking as much water as my kidneys will take.
Anyway, I’ve got 13 hours down and we’re still on the neck. I don’t expect to touch my face proper until sometime next year, but they may surprise me. Fortunately, I’m patient, and my progress projects out about how I expected. My beard, after all, is much heavier than average, covering a very large area. The area on my neck I’m having cleared is about twice the size of the area on my cheeks and chin, so I expected this part of the program to take a while. It doesn’t help that my electrologists have to be careful about where they apply pressure, lest they put me in the equivalent of a sleeper hold. Hopefully, things will begin to go faster once they get to the area under my chin, away from arteries and nerve clusters, rather than around the circumference of my neck.
I’ve been taking pictures of my progress thus far and plan to continue. Eventually, I’ll make a flash movie showing the progression, but that’s a project for the future.
I’m probably going to take another break from movies tonight to watch football. Tonight, the hapless Arizona Cardinals play the Chicago Bears. ESPN will have Arizona’s rookie quaterback, Matt Leinart, wired for sound, so viewers will have the pleasure of hearing what it sounds like to be flattened by an eighteen wheeler from the point of view of the victim. I hope they caution parents about the potential carnage–I’d hate for impressionable young football players to be scarred for life. Heh.
Halloween Horror Challenge update:
October 12:
Pray (2005, d. Yuichi Sato)–Another Asian ghost movie, and not a very good one. The plot starts out as a crime thriller, in which a pair of enterprising young kidnappers abduct a young girl, only to discover that the girl they intended to abduct has been dead for a year to the day. So who did they abduct? From there, the story twists itself around into an insoluble Gordian knot, and no amount of intended “ah ha!” moments can unravel it. A jigsaw puzzle with a couple of pieces from another puzzle included to screw things up.
October 13:
The Witch’s Mirror (1962, d. Chano Ureta)–At the end of this Mexican horror mash-up, the police inspector declares, “Human eyes have never seen the likes of this!” He’s wrong, of course, because everything in this movie is…ahem…”borrowed” from other sources. The movie starts like an Eye-talian gothic of the period, mutates into Eyes Without a Face (natch), then into The Hands of Orlock, then into The Beast With Five Fingers, and then back into an Eye-talian gothic. Original, this is not. It is, however, hugely entertaining.
October 14:
The Haunted Palace (1963, d. Roger Corman)–One of Corman’s best “Poe” movies, though it’s “Poe” in name only. Based on H. P. Lovecraft, this includes a bunch of the paraphernalia of the Mythos, and STILL manages to feel like the rest of Corman’s Poe films. Vincent Price is terrific, and Debra Paget is completely yummy to look at. The title sequences for Corman’s Poe films were terrific, by the way–easily as evocative as the James Bond titles–and this has one of the best scores of all of Corman’s films. Paul Verhoeven swiped the title sequence of this film for The 4th Man, though that’s neither here nor there.
October 15:
Ab-Normal Beauty (2005, d. Oxide Pang)–Having seen several of the Pang Brothers’ movies now, I’m convinced that, were they to found an ad agency, they would thrive. Their films have that slick, but empty sheen of a car commercial. They got away with it on The Eye, but here, they can’t seem to get beyond the photographic image in a way that makes it talk. This is particularly troubling because the film takes repulsive photographic images as its major theme, one compromised by the presentation. Am I the only one who thinks that casting real-life twin sisters Race and Roseanne Wong as unrelated lesbian lovers is borderline creepy?
Matango: The Attack of the Mushroom People (1964, d. Ishiro Honda)–An old favorite, one with particular relevance to me, given that I’m dangerously allergic to mushrooms. What’s a little anaphalaxis between friends, eh?
Because one cannot live on blood alone…
The Notorious Bettie Page (2005, d. Mary Harron) A stock biopic of pin-up Bettie Page. The choice to film in black and white and color is better than you might expect, particularly during a montage of some of Bettie’s more colorful magazine covers, but the movie doesn’t delve deeply into either the woman herself, or the curious means by which she became a cultural icon. The reason to see this film is Gretchen Mol, who manages to inhabit Bettie Page to the point where she actually captures Page’s quality of not appearing naked even when nude. This is difficult enough in still photography and practically impossible in moving pictures. More than that, Mol captures the twinkle in Bettie’s eyes, a twinkle that has kept Bettie in the popular imagination long after the flowers of other sex goddesses have faded. Bettie is the eternal bad/good girl of the sexual imagination. That Mol inhabits this persona so completely is no small achievement.
Chi, Chi, Chi…Ah, Ah, Ah….
October 13, 2006
Happy Friday the 13th, everyone. Is there anything better than a Friday the 13th in October? Maybe if you\’re a triskaidekaphobe. Heh…I\’ve been waiting all month to use that word in a blog entry.
For the record…I don\’t plan to watch any of the Friday the 13th films this evening. For one, I think they\’re all steaming piles of shit. For another, Felicia and I finally have a night off together and she doesn\’t much care for most horror movies.
Halloween horror updates to resume after this weekend…
Chi, Chi, Chi…Ah, Ah, Ah….
October 13, 2006
Happy Friday the 13th, everyone. Is there anything better than a Friday the 13th in October? Maybe if you\’re a triskaidekaphobe. Heh…I\’ve been waiting all month to use that word in a blog entry.
For the record…I don\’t plan to watch any of the Friday the 13th films this evening. For one, I think they\’re all steaming piles of shit. For another, Felicia and I finally have a night off together and she doesn\’t much care for most horror movies.
Halloween horror updates to resume after this weekend…
More horror movies…
October 12, 2006
October 10:
Seconds (1966, d. John Frankenheimer)–A film that questions the integrity of identity, this movie is so expertly shot by the great James Wong Howe, and so disorienting in its design, that I felt my own identity coming unhitched by the end of the film. The story follows an unhappy schlub who’s given the opportunity to shrug off his mundane, unhappy life and start over as a new man–in this case, as Rock Hudson. But his new life is no more satisfying. There is an underlying paranoia in this film that builds up a terrific head of steam. The surgical sequences suggest that the influence of Eyes Without a Face was very broad very quickly. This is one of the few films that matches the glacial chilliness of Franju while raiding his images. A keeper, this one.
October 11:
The Heirloom (2005, d. Leste Chen)–The avalanche of Asian ghost movies continues unabated. This one, a Taiwanese entry, is a creditable haunted house story that follows a very traditional gothic formula of a bad place newly inhabited, slowly revealing its secrets. These sorts of movies rise and fall on mood and style rather than plot, and this one has mood and style to burn. The image of a hanged family that starts things and the images that derive from it are indelible and carry the movie through its more absurd plot points. It’s not a great movie, but it’s a joy to look at, a marvel of film craft if not film writing. Each frame is lovely, like an heirloom miniature, if you will. (note: Prospective viewers should avoid reading the opening text scroll: it robs the movie of most of its mysteries. Turn off the subtitles if you must).
Running total: 12 films. 8 new to me.
