Utilitarian Review 8/22/15

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Jade Degrio and Desirae Embree on choice and agency in the Dollhouse.

Robert Stanley Martin with on-sale dates of comics in early 1946.

Chris Gavaler on the history of superheroes on film.

I wrote a bunch of posts about Quentin Tarantino and related matters:

Robert Rodriguez and diverse casting in Four Rooms.

Don’t whitewash Jackie Brown.

On fatherhood and Kill Bill’s crappy ending.

On why Tarantino shouldn’t make a romantic comedy.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At Pacific Standard I wrote about how actresses used to be thought of as sex workers.

At Playboy I wrote about

trafficking laws and how they hurt sex workers.

the new romance set during the Holocaust and why it and Schindler’s List both suck.

At the Guardian I wrote about American Ultra and how you (yes you!) can be a superspy.

At Splice Today I wrote about:

Mission Impossible, and hating imperialism via hating Tom Cruise.

the Democratic passion for the white working class.

— On the Man From Uncle and nostalgia for the days when other countries mattered.

At the Reader I had a short review of Nicki Bluhm and the Gramblers, a great retro-70s country outfit.
 
Other Links

Jonathan Bernstein on how the party decides on the nominee.

Imani Gandy on Margaret Sanger’s complicated history with racism.

Annie Mok on queerness and Tove Jansson.

Nix 66 on telling off her phone sex client.
 

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Untrue Romance

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Tarantino is a somewhat erratic filmmaker. None of his films are actually bad (save his segment of Four Rooms, maybe) but some are fantastic and some waver around mediocre. It’s not chronological, either; he isn’t a filmmaker who has fallen off (yet, at least.)

There is one fairly common theme to his weaker moments, though, I think. It comes down to the fact that his grasp of men’s genre material is much stronger than his grasp of women’s genre material.

At least for me, all of Tarantino’s weakest filmmaking moments happen when he tries to do romance, or something like soap opera. The Butch/Fabiene romance in Pulp Fiction is treacly and deeply unconvincing; you end up hating both characters, not falling in love with them. Similarly, the soap opera aspects of Kill Bill are a mess. There’s never even a modicum of chemistry between Bill and the Bride; their endless heart to heart at the end of part 2 is tedious rather than heart-wrenching. The Bride’s transformative experience with motherhood is completely unconvincing, and also unquestioned. Django is supposedly built around a passionate romance, but it has no idea how to represent that, or really do anything with it beyond motivating Django to shoot lots of people.

Tarantino is generally very good at undermining, or tinkering with, or examining male genre conventions, whether he’s telling you how good it feels to watch someone cut off an ear, or thinking about what pacifism does to narrative (which is to me one of the most fascinating parts of Pulp Fiction.) But when he deals with traditionally women-oriented genre material, he’s just at sea. The best he can do is to lace his treacle with half-hearted irony. But he’s not passionate enough about the material to savage it or embrace it. He just sort of lets it sit there helplessly, until he can move onto something else. It’s telling, I think, that Tarantino’s great romances are ones that are not quite romances; Jackie Brown and Max, or Vince and Mia.

This isn’t to say that Tarantino is sexist. He sometimes is, I’d say, but he also has a lot of great female characters, who he treats with interest, compassion, and respect. And of course lots of women like his films, just like lots of women like “male” genre work. Compared to many male filmmakers, I’d say that Tarantino is even quite interested in representing a diversity of women on screen (though his casts overall still tip male.) But what he’s not interested in, or attuned to, is women’s genre work. A Quentin Tarantino romantic comedy, in short, would be a very bad idea.

Kill Your Child’s Father

The end of Kill Bill 2 devolves into an interminable gushy, talky mess, which is irritating enough. But what really ruins finish for me is the fact that the Bride ends up by murdering the father of her child. Which is supposed to be a happy ending.

Now, it’s true, Bill is a particularly vicious spousal abuser, who called out his team of assassins to kill his girlfriend and all her nearest and dearest because she decided to leave him. He’s a shit, and totally worthy revenge movie fodder. No objection there.

The problem is that Bill raised the Bride’s daughter for four years after he put her in a coma. He appears to have a close, loving relationship with her. He’s the only parent she’s known. The Bride proves in the first act of Kill Bill 1 that she’s happy murdering the parent of a four year old, if that’s the way the sword slices. But this isn’t just any four year old. This is her daughter’s father. The film acknowledges that the four year old daughter of Verneeta is going to be traumatized by her mother’s death. We see Oren-Ishii traumatized by her parents’ death when she’s around four. But somehow, the Bride kills Bill, and little B.B. is totally unfazed. She rides off into the sunset with her mom smiling.

The logic, I guess, is that kids have an automatic overwhelming connection with their mothers that’s way more important than any relationship with their fathers. Which is stupid and untrue and even kind of offensive, to dads and moms alike. Dads are real parents too; women don’t have some sort of mystical parent power.

Obviously, Kill Bill has lots of morally questionable things going on; the mass murder, the severed limbs, etc. etc. But it’s just hard for me to buy the happy ending when it’s predicated on the idea that a four year old doesn’t care that their dad just died.

Whitewashing Jackie Brown

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I rewatched Jackie Brown last night, and googling around afterwards found this piece that argues that Brown is presented as a racial other. The author, Rachael Coates, points out that Pam Grier is associated throughout with blaxploitation music; that she uses AAVE when talking to Samuel Jackson’s Odell, and that the film is fascinated with her appearance, which is lingered on in various long shots. It also notes that the character Brown is based on from the novel is white.

It’s interesting, though, that the essay doesn’t point to the most obvious ways in which the film marks Brown as black — those instances where people in the film comment on the fact that she’s black. Odell tries to play on Max’s sympathy for a 44-year old black woman when he’s trying to get out of paying a deposit on the bond to get her out of prison. The cops who pick Jackie up and threaten her don’t reference her race explicitly, I don’t think, but when they talk about how few options she has, her status as a black woman in definitely hanging there, not quite spoken.

Why are these incidents left out of the discussion of the way that the film presents Jackie as racially Other (or, in less theoryish terms, as black?) The answer seems clear enough; these incidents suggest strongly that it is not the *film* which sees Jackie as racially other — or not just the film. Black people are marked in our society. Ignoring that is not actually ignoring it; it’s making a choice to treat black people as white — as in, say, the most recent Fantastic Four film, where there’s almost nothing in the film to let you know that anyone even knows that Johnny Storm is black.

There’s certainly some virtue in a vision of an egalitarian world. But, by definition, such a world can’t speak to issues of race. Jackie Brown isn’t explicitly about racial oppression, as some of Grier’s blaxploitation classics were. But Jackie’s plight, and her beauty, and her triumph, are all nonetheless recognized by the film as a specifically black plight, a specifically black beauty, and a specifically black triumph.

Pam Grier is a black icon. Were Tarantino to ignore or erase that — if he were to make a movie in which a white person could just as easily play Jackie Brown — would that be some sort of triumph of egalitarianism? Or would, instead, be a kind of cowardice, and even a kind of betrayal? Jackie Brown insists that a poor, middle-aged, defiantly black woman can be a movie star and a hero. As Coates acknowledges, “…the contemporary U.S. film industry rarely produces black women character films with the same sincerity and admiration as Tarantino does for Grier here.” I don’t really understand why you’d want to replace that with yet another film in which the director pretends he can’t see color.

Who’s in the Four Rooms

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The 1995 anthology title Four Rooms is a roundtable; four directors each shot a short film set in the same hotel. Though the movie was critically panned, it’s actually pretty enjoyable; the segments are all enjoyably loopy, and the Robert Rodriguez section is actually laugh out loud funny, with some great slapstick and nice turns by a couple of talented child actors.

One notable aspect of the Rodriguez segment (“The Misbehavers”) is that none of the characters is white. Tim Roth the bellhop is a prominent figure in all the segments, and he’s still there — but the family in the room is composed of Antonio Banderas as the father, Tamlyn Tomita as the Wife, and two children (played by Lana McKissack and Danny Verduzco). And yes, I think that’s the only mixed Hispanic/Asian family I’ve ever seen on film. Even the corpse in the bed is played by Robert Rodriguez’s sister, Patricia Vonne.

The rest of the segments aren’t especially racially homogenous by Hollywood standards; the opening coven-of-witches one is all white, I believe, but Jessica Beals (who is African-American) is the only person besides Roth to appear in two segments, and Paul Calderon (also African-American) shows up in Tarantino’s closing scene. Still, except for Rodriguez’s section, white people predominate.

The fact that the film is an anthology roundtable, and the fact that one of the films is so different in its approach to race, shows with unusual clarity that representation isn’t an accident, or a random function of hiring the best actors — especially since Rodriguez’s segment is pretty clearly the most inspired of the collection. Casting diverse actors is a choice — and casting white actors is a choice. Rodriguez’s room is one in which whiteness is not the default. If only white people can get into the other’s hotels, that’s because, to one degree or another, they’ve closed their doors.

Celluloid Superheroes: the First Hundred Years

The 2015 bombardment of superhero films is over. It was a relatively light year, just Avengers 2, Ant-Man, and the franchise-flopping Fantastic Four. But Warner Bros. and Marvel Entertainment have twenty superhero films in various states of production, all of them due in theaters by 2020.

Back in 1978 superheroes were so rare in Hollywood, the first Superman included the subtitle The Movie. So you may think of costumed do-gooders as relatively recent invaders of the silver screen, but they leaped to theaters long before landing in comics. 2016 promises Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, Captain America 3, and X-Men: Apocalypse, but 1916 saw three rounds too.
 

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In Arthur Stringer’s The Iron Claw, Creighton Hale plays “an easy going idiot” working as a millionaire’s personal secretary by day, but at night he dons the guise of the mysterious Laughing Mask. By the end, he’s wooed his boss’s daughter and thwarted the nefarious Iron Claw.

Francis Ford joined Hale as the similarly clad Sphinx in The Purple Mask, only this time the masked hero has a masked anti-heroine to woo too, Grace Cunard’s lady thief and so-called Queen of the Apaches, the first celluloid superheroine. She leaves her purple mask as a calling card.

But the first most influential superhero film award goes to Louis Feuillade’ Judex—a partial reversal of The Iron Claw since Judex begins as a vengeance-seeking blackmailer disguised as a personal secretary before falling for his boss’s daughter. I like to show my class the original unmasking scene, Yvette Andréyor creeping into the hero’s batcave of a bedroom and discovering his make-up kit. Nowhere nearly as dramatic as the Phantom of the Opera unmasking, but shot a decade earlier.

My favorite superhero silent film, the 1927 classic The Russian Affair, won Best Picture in 2011.
 

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That’s because it exists only in the opening sequence of director Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist. But the invented film shows how popular masked heroes were in the early 20th century. The Russian Affair—as well as glimpses of its equally pretend sequel, The German Affair—features the fictional silent star George Valentin in tuxedo, top hat, and domino mask—the quintessential costume of the pre-comic book superhero. Raffles, Tarzan, Robin Hood, Night Wind, Gray Seal, Lone Wolf, they all transformed themselves into silent superheroes, most unheard now. Except for Zorro, which The Artist inserts into Valentin’s fictional filmography, replacing the very real Douglas Fairbanks.
 

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Judex had barely exited American theaters before Fairbanks was skimming issues of All-Story for his own pulp hero to adapt. A year later, the Judex-inspired Zorro was an international icon. Hazanavicius even reshoots the best action sequence, dressing The Artist’s Jean Dujardin in Fairbanks’ Zorro wardrobe. The Mark of Zorro didn’t win Best Picture in 1920 only because the Academy Awards didn’t exist for another decade.

The 1928 Alias Jimmie Valentine was going to be a silent adaptation of O. Henry’s gentleman thief tale, but MGM called the stars back to record the studio’s first talkie instead. Fairbanks’s 1929 Three Musketeers sequel included his spoken prologue, but his talking Taming of the Shrew flopped later that year, as did his final Private Life of Don Juan. Hazanavicius’s gives his alter ego a tap-dancing afterlife, a superpower not in Fairbanks’ repertoire, so the real Fairbanks was replaced by a new breed of action heroes, some of them actual supermen.
 

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Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller took his last gold medal in 1928, Buster Crabbe in 1932. Both went on to play Tarzan. I watched Weissmuller on my aunts’ TV, one of those crate-sized machines that flickered as the cathode ray tubes heated. I’m thankful my aunts didn’t keep the battle scenes I doodled on scrap paper, all those blowdart-blowing savages gunned down by white hunters. All Hollywood sandpits, I surmised, were seven feet deep, designed to swallow everything but a victim’s groping fingers.

MGM did the same to Fairbanks and every other ex-star unable to adapt.Not that the superhero sound era was an easy transition for Hollywood either. MGM only started their talking Tarzan franchise because they had the footage.
 

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Trader Horn, the first big budget film shot on location, was a disaster. The production team returned from Africa with scene after scene of inaudible dialogue, a star infected with malaria, and the suitcases of crew members devoured by crocodiles and trampled by rhinos. They also had miles of jungle footage, way more than could ever fit into a single movie. Trader Horn came and went in 1931, but to capitalize on all that location shooting they’d already paid for, MGM rolled out Tarzan the Ape Man the following year. It was a cheap hit that spawned five low-budget sequels that returned Burroughs’ superman to the pop culture spotlight.

After Christopher Reeve retired his cape following 1987’s catastrophic Superman IV, Tim Burton rebounded with Batman, but otherwise the 90s are a 1930s reboot. Warren Beatty in Dick Tracy. Billy Zane in The Phantom. Alec Baldwin in The Shadow. It’s hard to remember a time when the Marvel pantheon wasn’t pounding box offices, but Hollywood once preferred retro-heroes. Disney’s The Rocketeer sported 30s curves, even though the character debuted in comics in 1982. That’s why Jim Carey threw on a yellow zoot suit along with the 1987 The Mask comic book. When Sam Raimi of later Spider-Man fame couldn’t get the rights to the Shadow, he cast Liam Neeson as a modern master-of-disguise instead. Darkman isn’t any good, but it does show how much comic book superheroes were a mutation of their pulp predecessors, an evolutionary process repeated in film.

It took a couple of decades, but the double flop of Seth Rogen’s 2011 The Green Hornet and Disney’s 2013 Lone Ranger and Tonto may have finally closed the theater doors on the 1930s. According to that math, are Warner Bros. and Marvel Entertainment being over optimistic with their 2020 projections? If the 30s are finally over, how long can DC’s early 40s and Marvel’s early 60s continue to last?

Utilitarian Review 8/14/15

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News

Moviepilot was excited to find out from me that Wonder Woman will bring about the kinky patriarchal utopia.

On HU
We took a break this week…and may well take off next week too, depending on if anyone decides to write! Everyone’s on vacation for the summer I guess; so we’ll see. We’ll be back at some point though!
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At The New Republic I wrote about Electronic Fetal Monitoring, and how it doesn’t work.

At Pacific Standard I wrote about how the Golden Age of Television is built on snobbery.

At the Guardian I wrote about the Fantastic Four and why superhero origin movies are a problem.

At Playboy I wrote about why, if Superman cared about humanity, he would fight mosquitoes.

At Quartz I wrote about Ricki and the Flash and moms who rock.

At Splice Today I

—explained that Trump is an ineffectual demagogue.

ranked all the Mission Impossible films.

—wrote about Jason Isbell, country radio, and the most authentic country music.
 
Other Links

Mistress Matisse on Amnesty’s decriminalization policy.

Released emails about the mess at UIC re: Salaita and other issues.

Nice piece on Donald Trump’s mess of a campaign.