Monthly Archives: July 2009

Female Creators Roundtable: Jenji Kohan and Weeds

Posted on by
Cerusee and Noah posted, now me.

I’ve been watching Weeds in dvd and just finished season 3. If you don’t know, it’s a comedy/soap opera/crime show about a young widow in a rich suburb who decides to support her kids by selling pot. For the most part I like it. The cast is good and the stories move along, and I like seeing what’s up with suburban life now that people my age have teenagers.

But I’m talking about the series here because of a discussion we had last year about the Bechdel Test, which is this: Think of a movie that shows two women talking to each other about anything that isn’t a man. The point of the test, as I see it, is this: there aren’t a whole lot of such movies. The test acquaints us with a movies ground rule we may not have noticed.

My reflex explanation for the the missing scenes of two-women-just-being-women is that movies get made by men, so it’s chiefly men’s view of things that gets shown. Weeds is a tv show whose writer/executive producer, meaning the person who gets to decide what kind of show it’s going to be, is a woman. And there are a lot of scenes between women talking about all sorts of things. It’s not remarkable at all. So I guess the ground rules have been jerked around a little.
If I had to do a ratio of male to female screentime, I’d guess it was 47/53. The difference is pretty narrow. But the key characters are women and they are more or less in charge of the people around them. The heroine, Nancy (Mary-Louise Parker), bosses her family and drug operation. Her best friend/enemy, Celia (Elizabeth Perkins), is a monstrous bitch and tyrant who gets ousted by husband and daughter. (Perkins does an amazing job. It’s the greatest bitch performance since Bette Davis in All About Eve; better, really, because it’s a lot more varied and detailed.) Nancy’s chief business connection is Heylia (Tonye Patano), who runs a drug operation from her kitchen.
The white guys do a lot of frisking about. There’s an aging frat boy, a Peter Pan, a nebbish, and Nancy’s whiney lameass son. The attitude toward the frat boy (Kevin Nealon) and the Peter Pan (Justin Kirk) is a bit like laddism in Britain, or at least my impression of it. The idea is that men always act like kids, and that is their charm but also why women get to win all the arguments. There’s a black male lead (Romany Malco) who becomes Nancy’s lover, and he’s intelligent, responsible, and competent, but he’s usually getting batted around by circumstances and on the defensive with Nancy or Heylia.  
But Weeds doesn’t go so far as putting a woman in charge of the action. What’s being in charge: minimum, you don’t look like an idiot; even better if you get to make the key smart decisions, tell people what to do, use violence successfully. Nancy gets scenes like that, but they don’t set the tone for her, or at least so far. Nancy is in over her head trying to be a pot dealer; the implication is that she is learning, and is on her way to becoming a rather cold, tough character, but for now she’s usually on the ropes. 
So, without white males on top, it looks like Weeds’ race-sex-ethnicity pecking order is a bit  disheveled. No character has a lock, no group does. The whites dominate the show’s suburban side, the blacks dominate the show’s drug-business side. Heylia gives Nancy a lot of the ignorant-white-girl stuff, the kind of thing you get in a lot of black-white TV scenes, but here with a lot more such scenes. Also, the black characters talk to each other; their side of things gets told. (I don’t know if the version presented of “their side” is authentic or not; it’s mainly about white people.)
At the bottom of the status heap is a skinny Asian man (Maulik Pancholy) who’s there to be a boob and butt and then to get feminized. The black man has sex with Nancy; if the skinny Asian guy looks at her, it’s considered a joke — he’s a pencilneck with a crush. Then it turns out he’s gay. He’s allowed one dignified moment, his statement of his gayness, and then he becomes the latest slender Asian guy on a tv comedy show to be treated like a simpy imitation girl. (It’s quite a pattern: the slender assistant in 30 Rock, the slender assistant in Entourage, and now this guy.)  
When I talk about the show being decentered, having a disheveled pecking order, I want to acknowledge that this side of things may strike me especially hard just because my group, white guys, is not in charge. Anyway, what hits me about the show is just how everyone is scrambling not to sink down the ranks. Nobody has secure footing. There are alliances, shifting rankings, etc. groups get represented by strings of different characters with varying statuses, and individual statuses also bob back and forth over time. (And one of the groups represented is white guys. All of a sudden the white guys in a show are not just individuals, they’re representatives of a group and you look at them to see how white guys come off. For me that’s a switch.)
It’s like watching people’s heads bobbing up and down in a tank. You see who gets pulled down, who gets to keep her mouth in the air. The new race line-up: whites and blacks on top together, the whites’ position more secure but the blacks getting some plums; other races are locked out. supporting players at best, otherwise walk-ons and butts. And women get to talk to each other about business and friendship and all the rest of it. 

more boys vs. girls at san diego comic-con

Posted on by

So I’m no good at doing peppy little wrap-up posts, but I’ve gotta record for posterity my favourite overheard moment of last weekend.

It was in the women’s bathrooms by the Small Press area, and I was leaving out the door so I have no idea what the women looked like or anything. All I heard was, “I told that costumed guy to ‘beat it, nerd!'”

Let Venus Wear Her Girdle, Damn It (OOCWVG)

Posted on by

In my post about Greg Rucka’s Wonder Woman yesterday, I realized I forgot to sneer adequately at one of the things that most annoyed me in his scripting for WW 196-200. Namely, the gods.

I don’t mind that Rucka turns all his gods into irritating American suburbanites and/or hipsters (Aphrodite as bored housewife; Cupid as stoned California drop-out, etc.) That’s fine; whatever. Some of the dialogue is kind of funny, I guess. I sort of laughed when Ares told Cupid to stop hitting on his great aunt and Cupid says “like that ever stopped anyone in this family from getting game.” I don’t know. I don’t expect a ton from Rucka at this point; I guess I appreciate any indication that he’s trying at all to entertain me rather than educate me or encourage me to fawn over his Amazon paragon.

So, right; updated gods — not especially clever, but par for the course. What really irritates me, though, is the theology. At one point, Ares explains at length to WW that he (Ares) is now more powerful than Zeus, because nobody is scared of the sky but everybody loves war. Putting aside the question of whether Zeus couldn’t somehow piggyback on climate change fears, I just want to say — I am so, so, so sick of the whole “it isn’t the worshippers who get power from the Gods — it’s the Gods who get power from their worshippers” wheeze. It was tired when George Perez dragged it out for his WW series, and after Neil Gaiman picked it up, dusted it off, and then (in his elegantly canny British way) jumped up and down on it for years…well, there wasn’t a whole lot left.

And yet, here’s Rucka, trundling along years later, spouting this crap like it’s actually insightful or meaningful or anything but the tedious ploy of a nonbeliever who wants to have a deity for verisimilitude while pissing on him (or her) too. The logic is patently ridiculous…and as a result it makes the Amazons look like idiots. If they know that their prayers and belief give the Gods power, then, you know, why not think about something else for a while? Why worship a figment of your imagination? Doing so isn’t profound, and it’s certainly not an alternative to man’s world, where everybody is always already worshipping their own immaculate feces. (And, yes, Alan Moore’s worship of his own imagination also irritates me, though at least, unlike Rucka, he actually does have an imagination.)

It seems to me like if you’re going to use gods in a super-hero comic, you can do one of two things. First, you can just treat them as super-heroes, which is more or less what Lee/Kirby did with Thor (at least in all the Thor I’ve read; maybe somewhere they try to build a theology/philosophy to explain the gods, but I mercifully missed that.) Nothing wrong with gods as superheroes; it’s entertaining and goofy and involves people hitting each other with unusual weapons andl/or force blasts, which is what comics are all about.

Or, second, you can actually, you know, have some kind of concept of transcendence and use the gods to explore that. That’s what Marston did in the first WW series. His Aphrodite and Ares are archetypes connected to his ideas about femininity and masculinity and love and war. Aphrodite especially is definitively transcendent; she’s wiser and more powerful than any other character. It makes sense that the Amazons worship her, because she actually seems to know things they don’t.

Of course, the things she “knows” about submission and love and gender roles are things you could disagree with — but Marston believes in them. What’s most irritating about the “gods are there because we believe in them” meme is that it true to some extent — but the truth is vitiated by putting it so clumsily. Yes, fictions do have power, and the power has something to do with belief. But that belief is at least in large part the artist’s belief in his or her own work, and it is created not just through saying, “hey, I believe in that,” but through genius and craftsmanship. Marston’s Aphrodite means something because Marston took the time to make her mean something; she’s transcendent because Marston thought there was transcendence, and thought about how to express that in his work. Rucka’s Ares, on the other hand, just says, “conflict is important,” as if anybody couldn’t have figured that out for themselves. And then he says he’s powerful because people think conflict is important. Just give it up, already. Don’t lecture me on the meaning of existence when you can’t even figure out how to tell a decent comic book story.

Republican senator makes fun of how Southerners talk

Posted on by
Thank you, George Voinovich of Ohio. The party’s on hard times, you want to analyze why, so what do you do? Make fun of how some population group talks:

“They get on TV and go ‘errrr, errrrr,'” he said. “People hear them and say, ‘These people, they’re southerners. The party’s being taken over by southerners. What they hell they got to do with Ohio?'”

Yeah, well, maybe what they’re saying isn’t too good either. Consider that as a source of your problems.
Making fun of how people talk is a great pleasure in life, but it should not be a default reflex. Somebody who makes it into one is probably a jerk.
(Via Benen, original article here.)

Finding examples of bullshit

Posted on by

Because it was my love. She couldn’t decide that. It was my love.

That’s how I remember a key line from Adaptation, the movie by Charlie Kaufman. The movie’s second half is a point-by-point parody of a typical modern-day Hollywood popcorn film, with beats and pivots and so on. There’s the fake plot breakthru (the villainess says she’d like to have dinner with Jesus or John Lennon, so now the heroes know she’s a big liar and that she’s up to something), the race against time, the quiet heartfelt moment before the big action climax. During the quiet heartfelt moment, the dopey brother tells the smart brother (the arc is about two brothers who must be reconciled) that in high school, sure, he had a crush on that hot girl even though she made fun of him, that he kept loving her even after he caught her and her friends laughing about him and what an idiot he was. Why? And then the line given above, a really fine pastiche of a dopey Hollywood pseudo-profound gnomic utterance. 
I would have thought that was a perfect example of bullshit, as the word is used in H. G. Frankfurt’s “On Bullshit.” I mean a supposed statement that actually says nothing. This kind of bullshit is to statement what a slug (by which I mean a round, blank disc, not a garden slug) is to a coin. The slug does nothing that a coin is supposed to do except feel like a coin. Someone who isn’t paying attention will put it in his pocket and believe he has a coin there. But it’s all a fraud. The same with a sentence of bullshit: You hear it, and it feels just like something has been said. A lie, on the other hand, does say something, but something untrue.
I’ve been looking for examples of bullshit, finding them, and then having them squirt away from me. When you go down a few layers, there’s always some specific lie hidden away. It’s just that the lies have to do with heady matters that don’t get looked at directly most of the time.
For example, “Because it was my love. She couldn’t decide that. It was my love.” Compare that with the following:
So, this momentary ego approval was not as great as the feeling of loving her! As long as I was loving her, I felt so happy. But when she loved me, there were only moments of happiness when she gave me approval. … Her loving me was a momentary pleasure that needed constant showing and proving on her part, while my loving her was a constant happiness, as long as I was loving her
I concluded that my happiness equated to my loving! If I could increase my loving, then I could increase my happiness!  *
The speaker is a man discussing the great change in outlook he underwent during his 40s. I think a lot of people would agree with what he said. I haven’t read the book in question, just glanced at a couple of pages, but I gather that the speaker goes on to draw many sweeping, straight-line conclusions from this discovery. They may be right or wrong, I have no idea. But his starting point would strike many people as correct: not just that it’s better to love than to be loved, better as in morally desirable, but that you get more out of loving than being loved. There’s more return.
With that point established, the Charlie Kaufman line looks a bit different. All of a sudden I can see how it might actually mean something — something highly debatable, not to say false (that the benefits accrued from loving have nothing to do with the person being loved, with whether they return the love or treat you decently, and so on), but something that can be turned into a statement.
Thinking about it, there’s another heady claim that the line could be based on: the idea that everything about you is somehow your property and that the key thing is to make sure no one else ever has a say in its disposition. That sounds a bit Ayn Rand-ish, but Hollywood goes in for a debased form of self-actualization that could also give rise to a claim like that, at least if a screenwriter was desperate enough.  
* From Happiness Is Free and It’s Easier than You Think by Hale Dwoskin and Lester Levenson. Achmed, a cafe rat I know, pressed the book on me, he said sheepishly.

Good example

Posted on by

Lawrence, a very well-read cafe rat I sometimes bump into, was pouring scorn on the way Republicans pretend that Joe Biden’s run-off-at-the-mouth tendencies are proof that Sarah Palin isn’t stupid. Lawrence said Biden could talk for an hour on any given political/policy topic and make sense, whereas Palin would fall apart 10 seconds after her sound bites ran out. Good point!

The problem with Biden isn’t that he’s ignorant or muddleheaded, it’s that his mouth goes way too fast. Occasionally he’ll get some matters of fact garbled, like someone committing a spoonerism even though he knows where the syllables are supposed to go. More often he says something that’s simply impolitic. Michael Kinsley likes to say most “gaffes” are statements that are true but politically inconvenient. If someone asks you what magazines you read and you reply, in effect, “Uh, all of them?” that is not a gaffe. But if someone asks you what you, as vice president of the United States, think of the situation with Russia and you say:

The reality is the Russians are where they are. They have a shrinking population base, they have a withering economy, they have a banking sector and structure that is not likely to be able to withstand the next 15 years, they’re in a situation where the world is changing before them and they’re clinging to something in the past that is not sustainable.

… that would be a gaffe. But as a lucid, straight-from-the-shoulder overview of an economic-political situation it’s not bad. At least he knows about population bases and banking structures and stuff. I like that in a political leader.
(Via Sullivan, with Biden interview here.)