Author Archives: Noah Berlatsky

Crumbface

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We’ve had several posts on race this week, so I figured I’d finish up by reprinting this piece from Comixology. I think it’s one of Jeet Heer’s least favorite things I’ve written, if that’s any incentive.
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As cartoonists go, Robert Crumb is quite, quite famous. Still, there’s cartoonist famous and then there’s rock star famous. Which is to say that for all his notoriety and the cultural currency of “Keep on Truckin'”, the Crumb image that has been seen by most people is probably still his iconic 1968 Cheap Thrills album cover for Big Brother and the Holding Company featuring Janis Joplin.

It’s somewhat unfortunate that this is one of Crumb’s defining images. Not that it’s bad. On the contrary, the inventive layout, with images radiating out from a central circle is pleasingly energetic, and the drawing, as always with Crumb, is great. Plus, cute turtle! The only thing is….

Well, it’s kind of racist.

Crumb’s oeuvre not infrequently delves into reprehensible blackface iconography. Sometimes, (as in his Angel McSpade strips) he seems to be trying, at least to some extent, to critique or mock the imagery. In the upper right of the Cheap Thrills drawing, though, he seems to use blackface simply because (a) that’s how Crumb draws black people when he’s drawing cartoons, and (b) racist iconography = funny!

The racist image in question is an illustration of Joplin’s cover version of the famous Gershwin tune from “Porgy and Bess.” The song itself, written by a Jew to capture the sound of African-American spirituals using elements from Ukrainian folk tunes, is one of America’s great cultural mish-mashes. Though its lyrics evoke the happy darky stereotype (“Summertime, and the living is easy…”) its mournful, heartfelt tune suggests a barely suppressed sadness — a weight of hardship hidden for the sake of love beneath a lullaby. My favorite take on the song is probably Sarah Vaughn’s effortlessly heartbreaking rendition. In comparison, Joplin’s hoarse bombastic reading sounds strained and clueless. The rendition is bad enough that it even becomes borderline offensive: almost the very minstrelization of black experience that Gershwin, through a kind of miracle, managed to avoid.

In that sense, Crumb’s image for the song could almost be seen as parody; a vicious sneer at Joplin’s blackface pretensions, caricaturing her as both a wannabe black mammy and as the whining white entitled brat looking to the exploited other for entirely undeserved comfort. As I said, it could almost be seen as that — if Crumb hadn’t thrown in another entirely gratuitous blackface caricature in the bottom center panel, just to show that, you know, he really is exactly that much of a shithead.

Given the grossness of the Cheap Thrills cover, it’s interesting that Crumb has, in the intervening years, gained a reputation as a particularly thoughtful interpreter of the black musical experience. His passion for 1920s-30s blues and jazz records is well known, and he’s done some cover art for blues releases. He’s also written comics focusing on blues history, perhaps the most lauded of which is “Patton” from 1984, a 12-page illustrated biography of legendary delta bluesman Charlie Patton.

“Patton” absolutely eschews blackface caricature. Indeed, it more or less eschews cartooning, opting instead for a more realist style which seems to draw from photo-reference for its portraits of Patton, Son House, Robert Johnson, and others. Walk-on characters, though, are also portrayed as individuals. A black man and woman contemplating buying a phonograph, for example, are humorous not because they’re exaggerated, but because they aren’t; their faces are fixed in ambivalent desire and nervousness as they try to determine whether this, right here, is going to break the bank.

At the same time — it wouldn’t be quite right to say that Crumb dispenses with caricature. He just uses it more subtly. Some of his drawings of women in the strip are impossibly mobile, curving rubberlike to accentuate the more interesting bits:

Crumb’s fascination with the female form is no particular surprise given his oeuvre. Here, though, it’s subsumed within a grander project of fetishization aimed at Patton himself. Crumb’s recounting of the bluesman’s life is matter-of-fact, but there’s little doubt that not just Patton’s musical genius but his shiftless, earthy, sex-and-violence drenched life is a huge source of attraction for the cartoonist. You can see it in the enthusiasm with which Crumb’s pen limns the posterior in that picture above, as well as in the gratuitously R-rated fight scene below:

But I think Crumb’s fascination also comes out in subtler moments. There’s this passage for instance:

“The tin-pan alley blues barely touched the remote rural black people of the Delta region, where the real down-to-earth blues continued to evolve as an intense and eloquent expression of their lives.”

That statement may or may not be entirely true (the back and forth between rural and urban was arguably not quite as hard and fast as Crumb makes it out to be.) But the important point is that Crumb is making a distinction between Ma Rainey and Charlie Patton — and Patton is the one who is intense, who is eloquent, and who is “real”. In his appreciation of the form, then, Crumb has bypassed not only Janis Joplin but even Sarah Vaughn and her compatriots to arrive, at last, at the genuinely authentic expression of the blues.

In “Patton”, appreciation is not passive contemplation; it’s more like passion or desire. Crumb, for example, shows two consecutive panels of men appreciating the playing of seminal bluesman Henry Sloan. First Charley Patton looks at Sloan with an intense, almost needy fascination; then W. C. Handy looks at Sloan with a glance that holds more surprise, but no less yearning.

These meaningful stares are complemented a couple of pages later by this panel:

This doesn’t seem to quite be Crumb — his self-caricatures are generally instantly recognizable. But, at the same time, it clearly is Crumb; the white connoisseur who appreciates the “rich cultural heritage” of those African-Americans who (according to Crumb in the next panel) see the “old blues” as “too vivid a reminder…of an oppressive ‘Uncle Tom’ past they’d rather forget about.” Only the white listener can appreciate the lower-class, un-PC genius of the blues, undistracted by a history of oppression which regrettably (if understandably) blinds the music’s most direct heirs.

Of course, as we’ve seen, Crumb himself is responsible for at least one of the most widely disseminated modern examples of vicious Uncle Tom iconography in existence. Given that, it seems fair to wonder whether he isn’t protesting a bit too much here. Are black folks really disdainful of the blues because the music is not as uplifting as gangsta rap? Do they really see blues songs about violence, sex, and drinking as somehow Uncle Tomish? Or, you know, is the music just really old pop culture, and therefore not of particular interest to most people, as is generally the case with very old pop culture?

Perhaps the real question is not why black people don’t love the blues enough, but why Crumb loves it so much. After all, what is he getting from this story of authentic black people carousing and fighting and making great timeless art which only he and a select few like him understand?

It’s not really that difficult a question, obviously. White American culture (and not just American), from Gershwin to Joplin to Vanilla Ice and Madonna (to say nothing of Elvis) has long been obsessed with adopting, miming, parodying, and exploiting black culture. Because they have been oppressed and marginalized, blacks have taken on a kind of totemic value; they and their culture are the ultimate expression of resistance to the man, of purity and heart in the face of a monolithic culture of indifference. Being black is being cool — and through his love of old blues, Crumb can be blacker than Janis Joplin, blacker than Bessie Smith, blacker than non-blues-listening African-Americans — blacker, in other words, than black. On the last page of the story, we see a ghostly Charlie Patton floating above his girlfriend Bertha Lee — and you have to wonder if that’s how Crumb sees himself, an intangible, unseen observer, both watching and inhabiting the long-dead African-Americans he animates and desires. We haven’t, after all, come that far from Cheap Thrills; it’s just that, instead of drawing blackface, Crumb has — circuitously and with less painful racist connotations, but nonetheless — donned it himself.

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Karen Green had a thoughtful comment at Comixology.

In fairness, Noah, the two gratuitously naked and/or nubile women you show in the Patton comic would likely have been gratuitously naked and/or nubile even if they were white woman. As a woman, I’m well aware of how Crumb prefers to depict us!

There’s no excusing the Cheap Thrills cover, however.

I think you’ve touched on something quite insightful, though, in concentrating on WHY Crumb loves the blues–especially to the extent that he loves it. There is clearly the love of the arcane, the elevation of self into a particularly rarefied aficionado. (And I would wager there are just as many African-Americans pursuing that arcane love of the blues as there are whites.) But there’s also a possibility that a man who grew up seeing himself as marginalized and miserable–regardless of how easy his life was in comparison to former slaves–might find something kindred in that music.

That possible sense of kinship is what makes the Cheap Thrills cover all the more distasteful. Like Al Jolson in blackface gleefully reading the Yiddish paper The Forvert in the film “Wonder Bar,” it’s as if Crumb has embraced that black experience but still wants to prove that he exists apart from it–a particularly unpleasant wink at the audience.

And I responded:

I’d agree that it’s hard to tease Crumb’s misogyny out from his racism. My point here isn’t that he’s racist rather than misogynist, but that his fetishization of women bleeds over and inflects his fetishization of Patton. (Through his emphasis on Patton’s sexuality, through the use of significant glances sexualizing the blues, etc.) I think you could argue that it goes the other way as well, though (that is, the fetishization of blackness as earthiness inflects his misogyny.)

Art doesn’t belong to anyone; there’s absolutely nothing wrong with white people being into blues. There is, as you say, though, something unpleasant in the way Crumb seems to want to set himself up as more in tune with “authentic” blackness than some black people — especially given his really unfortunate history with racist caricature.

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This is a belated entry in our roundtable on R. Crumb and Race.

Music For Middle-Brow Snobs: My Heart Was Trampled on the Street

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A country weepers mix. Download My Heart Was Trampled on the Street.

1. Twenty Years and Two Husband Ago — Lee Ann Womack
2. The Chill of An Early Fall — George Strait
3. Promises — Randy Travis
4. That’s the Way Love Goes — Lefty Frizzell
5. I Never Go Around Mirros — Willie Nelson
6. Half AS Much — Patsy Cline
7. I Don’t Hear You — Buck Owens
8. It’s All In My Mind — George Jones
9. These Two — Tammy Wynette
10. You Don’t Have Far to Go — Merle Haggard
11. The Richest Fool Alive — Patty Loveless
12. My Heart Was Trampled on the Street — The Louvin Brothers
13. Heartbreak Avenue — Don Gibson
14. That’s What Lonesome Is — Jean Shepard
15. A World So Full of Love — Faron Young
16. The Little Things — Dolly Parton
17. The Long Black Limousine — Wynn Stewart
18. I Just Can’t Let You Say Goodbye — Porter Wagoner
19. It Won’t Be Long (And I’ll Be Hating You) — Johnny Paycheck
20. Fifteen Years Ago — Conway Twitty

Sundown Towns

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As a belated acknowledgement of Martin Luther King day, I thought I’d reprint this piece. It first appeared in (I think) 2007 in The Chicago Reader.
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A couple years ago the city’s One Book, One Chicago program encouraged Chicagoans to read Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Those that did encountered a familiar portrait of American racism, which, as we all know, was a problem mostly in the south, mostly in the past, and mostly perpetrated by poor, uneducated white folk. The novel’s hero, Atticus Finch, is a respected white attorney in a small Georgia town who defends a black man falsely accused of rape. At the end we’re assured that most people are pretty nice once you get to know them, and left with a vague sense that the world will keep on getting more and more enlightened as long as high school students continue to read high-minded novels like this one.

As a corrective to this lyrical vision of race relations, the city should consider endorsing Sundown Towns, a new study by James Loewen, author of the best-selling Lies My Teacher Told Me, that methodically upends many of white America’s preconceived notions about race.

Sundown towns were incorporated areas that banned African-Americans from living in them, or even from staying overnight. Often, a sundown town would hang a sign or signs at the city limits declaring, “Nigger, Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on You in ________.” African-Americans who were on the city streets after dark might be harassed, beaten, or worse. Even black people on public transportation weren’t safe: whites in Pana, Illinois, are reported to have fired gunshots at African-American Pullman porters as trains passed through town.

Sundown towns aren’t exactly unknown in popular culture; William Burroughs, Maya Angelou, and Tennessee Williams all mention them. But Loewen’s book is the first systematic exploration of the phenomenon, and while the existence of such towns isn’t a shock, virtually everything else he’s found out might be. Sundown towns, he discovered, were located mostly in the west and midwest, not the south. They came into being relatively recently, mostly between 1890 and 1930, but some as late as the 1950s–and Loewen was able to confirm the existence of towns that threatened African-Americans after dark as recently as 2002. Anna, Illinois, population 5,136, is likely still a sundown town, says Loewen. It reported just 89 African-Americans in the 2000 census, most of them probably residents of the state mental hospital. Elwood, Indiana, which has zero African-American residents, an annual Klan parade, and a vicious reputation, almost surely is.

The biggest revelation of Loewen’s book, however, is not the location or continued existence of sundown towns, but their number. When he started his research he thought he would find about 50 towns in the U.S. with a history of sundown practices. But after conducting on-site interviews, he was able to confirm the existence of 145 in Illinois alone. Based on census data and statistical analysis (all carefully detailed in the book) Loewen believes that by 1970, when such towns were most common, there were more than 470 in Illinois. This means that a majority of towns in Illinois may well have been sundown towns. Statistics like these eventually led Loewen to the broader conclusion that when a state, a suburb, or a neighborhood is all white, then it is probably all white on purpose.

At first, this may seem ludicrous. When Loewen asked white interview subjects about small, all-white towns nearby, they would often suggest that African-Americans didn’t live in them because nobody in their right mind would want to live in them. Moreover, the association of African-Americans with cities is so strong that black people take it for granted as well; when I saw Aaron McGruder speak a couple years ago he scoffed at the idea of a black person living in the WB’s Smallville.

Yet Loewen shows conclusively that the historic concentration of African-Americans in cities was a matter of discrimination, not choice. Before 1890 blacks were not particularly urbanized. Shortly thereafter, however, during a period historians refer to as the nadir of American race relations, racism in the United States became much more vicious. The Klan made a triumphant nationwide resurgence; segregation and disenfranchisement solidified in the south. In the north blacks and other minorities, like the Chinese, were forced out of rural areas and small towns. The result was a phenomenon Loewen calls the Great Retreat, in which African-Americans fled to the cities and wound up concentrated in ghettos. This process was well under way when the better-known Great Migration of the teens and 20s spurred the unprecedented resettlement of blacks from the south to the north.

Sundown towns were generally restricted to the north and west, but sundown suburbs were a well-documented nationwide phenomenon. Redlining, steering, and restrictive covenants were standard in communities like the Levittowns of the 50s. Though they’re now less prevalent, not to mention illegal, such practices are still employed surreptitiously; Loewen reports incidents of steering in suburban Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, as recent as 2002. Violence against black home owners and their children has also been persistent, probably peaking during the 1980s.

The relative dearth of blacks in the suburbs–especially the wealthier ones–is often attributed to class. Statistically, blacks are poorer than whites. But Loewen argues that their exclusion from the suburbs is one of the causes of their relative poverty, not one of the effects. Until 1968 the Federal Housing Authority refused to underwrite homes built in communities that included African-Americans. Thus, African-Americans were excluded after World War II from what Loewen credits as “Americans’ surest route to wealth accumulation, federally subsidized home ownership.”

Black poverty isn’t usually blamed on the policies of white suburban home owners; instead, professors and pundits point to the excesses of the welfare system, or the failures of the welfare system, or the enduring impact of slavery on the black family, or what have you. All these explanations focus on how African-Americans live. Loewen’s book suggests, however, that if you want to understand racism in this society you must look at how, and especially where, African-Americans do not live. It isn’t what black people do but what whites do to exclude them that results in inequality. Whites won’t warehouse kids in crappy schools if the kids being warehoused are their own, they don’t want to fund massive police crackdowns if they themselves are likely to be caught in the dragnet, they don’t want to ignore fundamental flood preparedness if their homes are likely to be inundated.

Loewen does discuss some ways African-Americans can change discriminatory policies–by buying homes in mostly white communities, for example, or by supporting legislation to give federal fair-housing policies some teeth. Overall, though, Sundown Towns is not especially empowering: in Loewen’s narrative African-Americans tend to figure as victims rather than heroes.

This is largely a function of his topic. In many ways the history of racism in the north is less hopeful than that of the south. Twice the south has been the site of utopian social experiments, during Reconstruction and the civil rights era. Neither movement was wholly successful, but during both periods African-Americans were able to make important social changes because of their connections to white society. After the Civil War, African-American links with white Republicans, both north and south, gave them a voice in southern government. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was effective because African-American dollars were important to white business owners.

In the north, however, connections between black and white communities were, as Loewen reports, deliberately severed. It’s no accident that Martin Luther King Jr. encountered a harsher reception in Chicago than in Atlanta. Nor is it an accident that black leaders in the north tended to be isolationist. James Baldwin’s famous question, “Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?,” could only have been asked by a northerner.

Loewen points out that whites who live in sundown towns see no African-Americans and thus tend to believe they have no race problems. Similarly, the north itself, where whites and blacks have historically been more separate, has long been able to convince itself that racism is somebody else’s sin. But 50 years after the Brown decision, separate is still not equal. Illinois was the land of Lincoln, it was a supporter of the Union, and it’s now the home of the nation’s only African-American senator. But it’s also heir to a brutal and ongoing tradition of racism and segregation. All our problems wouldn’t be solved if every person in Chicago read this book, of course. But it wouldn’t be a bad place to start.

Ghost World

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Creators haunt their creations, more as ghosts than as intentions.

For example, in 24 there are no ghosts and no intentions. The creators are rigidly outside the action, which runs blithely away under its own power, like a watch dropped in a field. The clock counting down is the guarantor of autonomy, the uninterrupted, self-contained material of narrative. Every time Jack Bauer is given fifteen minutes to reach the drop off point, you can hear the gentle high-concept whisper of the argument from design erasing itself. Cliff-hangers, hackneyed betrayals, and feebly ironic reversals — the gears grind to assure you that the only god lubricating the machine is the absence of a god. Bauer never meets his maker, because the main thing the maker has made is his own unmaking. The ticking time bomb blows the roof firmly onto the world.

Fanny Hill’s world, on the other hand, is laced with holes:

A spirit of curiosity, far from sudden, since I do not know when I was without it, prompted me, without any particular suspicion, or other drift or view, to see what they were, and examine their persons and behaviour. The partition of our rooms was one of those moveable ones that, when taken down, serv’d occasionally to lay them into one, for the conveniency of a large company; and now, my nicest search could not shew me the shadow of a peep-hole, a circumstance which probably had not escap’d the review of the parties on the other side, whom much it stood upon not to be deceived in it; but at length I observed a paper patch of the same colour as the wainscot, which I took to conceal some flaw: but then it was so high, that I was obliged to stand upon a chair to reach it, which I did as softly as possibly, and, with a point of a bodkin, soon pierc’d it. And now, applying my eye close, I commanded the room perfectly, and could see my two young sparks romping and pulling one another about, entirely, to my imagination, in frolic and innocent play.

Who is observing the room to see whom in innocent play? What spirit (of curiosity?) possesses Fanny to look in each convenient flaw? Fanny is writing her epistles to a nameless madam, but there is always an echo in her voice; a sign that her person and behavior are observed and offered through some shadowed peep-hole. The imagined frolic is commanded, and the command is itself part of the pleasure.

D.H. Lawrence’s short story “The Border Line” is also porous. The outside seeps through the world’s borders.

The afternoon grew colder and colder. Philip shivered in bed under the great bolster.

“But it’s a murderous cold! It’s murdering me!” he said.

She did not mind it. She sat abstracted, remote from him, her spirit going out into the frozen evening. A very powerful flow seemed to envelop her in another reality. It was Alan calling to her, holding her. And the hold seemed to grow stronger every hour.

“The Border Line” is a story of a love triangle; Katherine Farquhar married Alan, “unyielding and haughty,” and then, after he died, she married Philip, who “caressed her senses and soothed her.” But Alan, manly and unyielding, is so manly and unyielding that even death doesn’t make him yield, and he comes back for Katherine, like a command or a vow that can’t be unspoken. Katherine is only too happy to become his again; Philip is a puny, soft thing, while Alan from beyond the grave is a dream of potency. The world cracks open, and into it Lawrence inserts his rigid avatar, flushed with power. but bitter cold.

Philip lifted feeble hands, and put them round Katherine’s neck, moaning faintly. Silent, bareheaded, Alan came over to the bed and loosened the sick man’s hands from his wife’s neck, and put them down on the sick man’s own breast.

Philip unfurled his lips and showed his teeth in a ghastly grin of death….But Alan drew her away, drew her to the other bed, in the silent passion of a husband come back from a very long journey.

Philip is dead. Katherine is drawn away into Alan’s arms,embraced by her dead lover and, symbolically, surely dead as well. Lawrence’s journey and story are done, and at the end of them is power and death, or power as death. Alan’s mastery, descending from on high, is so total that nothing can survive it.

Yuichi Yokoyama’s Garden is not so much open to mastery as a mastery of openness. Inexplicably bizarre-looking characters wander through a seemingly endless landscape littered with the detritus of an ambiguous modernity. Rivers team with office furniture; two-tone mountains rise from the landscape; cameras project everyone’s face onto walls and waterfalls. The seemingly endless stream of people utter repetitive, unanswerable questions: “Why are these things floating in the river?” “Maybe there is someone inside?” “Perhaps it’s a fake city (a dummy)?” It’s “Waiting for Godot” as a combination of Disneyland and Flatland, a geometric theme park with opaque laws. The off-kilter panel shapes combine with the off-kilter views and unusual perspectives so that you, like the characters, often don’t know where you are. Instead of the lines turning into landscapes, the unreadable landscapes resolve back into lines, the mark of Yokoyama’s bewildering hands. The characters wander between his fingers, clockwork ants scrambling through clockwork digits. He’s too big to be seen, but that unassimilable presence is everywhere. We can’t know what he means because he’s the question of meaning itself.

Utilitarian Review 1/15/12

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On HU

Our featured archive post for the week is Bert Stabler on abject feminist performance art.

I and others had a conversation about Dan Clowes, knowledge, and power in Ghost World.

Caroline Small talked about high and heavy concepts in art and comics.

I talked about sound effects in Tiny Titans.

Erica Friedman discussed the Arab shounen manga Gold Ring.

We had several posts on the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo: Kinukitty; Monika Bartyzel; Eric Berlatsky.

Ben Crossland explains Islamic finance.

Sean Michael Robinson discussed Mizuki’s Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths.

Robert Stanley Martin on the history and legacy of TCJ.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At Splice Today I review music from saharan cellphones.

Also at Splice I argue that Rick Perry is not a strategic genius.
 
Other Links

Derik Badman on Deborah Turbeville.

The Atlantic on Linda Lovelace.

The Devil Inside makes a bunch of money.

Tim Hodler on gag cartoons and conceptual art.

Vom Marlowe talks about her contribution to the Wallace Stevens roundtable.

James Romberger interviews Sammy Harkham.

Dan Nadel on conceptual art.

Eric Berlatsky on Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

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I only occasionally get my brother to write for HU. I did manage to annoy him sufficiently to get him to post two lengthy comments, though, so I thought I’d reproduce them here (with a few edits for coherenece.)

Eric started out with a response to my comment that the film Girl with the Dragon Tattoo “strongly suggests that [Lisbeth would] be healthier/happier/normalized if Mikael followed through and did save her.” To which Eric says:

Sure…and if my aunt had balls—

Just the opposite, I think, it suggests that Mikael can’t follow through and save her, because such salvation isn’t possible in those terms. Sure, “if” he saved her, she’d be saved…but he can’t, so she won’t be…

In general, I’m not sure where you get this notion that the film “strongly suggests” that she’ll be normalized if he sticks it out. Where? Are there other examples of damaged women being saved by older sensitive men? Lisbeth being saved by her previous ward? Hardly…eventually, circumstances intervene and she has to fend for herself…which is to say, there is no such thing as permanent salvation. In the serial killings? No sensitive man saves the daughter/rape victim. Rather, her SISTER saves her (and her sensitive uncle ignores her in her hour of need–suggesting perhaps that men, even sensitive men, can’t really be trusted)…and then she forges an independent life by herself. And who clears the way for her to return to “life” as herself?—Not a man, but Lisbeth, who kills the serial killer, etc.

Actually, insofar as any saving is done in the film, it’s by Lisbeth….both of herself and of Craig. She extricates herself from the abuse with the counsellor/parole guy and from whatever abuse was going on with her dad. She saves Craig from de rigeur serial killer and from Craig’s economic/journalistic enemy. She even has “normalized” herself to a great degree (got herself a job, leading an independent life, etc.). It’s only if you’re willing to read bisexuality, tattoos, etc. as abnormal that you can say that she isn’t a normal functioning member of society (I’m not willing to do that, for the record). In fact, she is the most competent, effective, efficient figure you’re going to find. If anything, she’s a “Mary Sue”–men (and women) want her, and women (and men) want to be like her (nobody wants to undergo what she does…but everyone would like to be able to react to such trauma with such resources, force, efficiency, resiliency, etc). She (at times, anyway) may feel like she needs to be saved….but the film doesn’t really give that indication. She’ll save herself (and does), thanks very much.

Maybe your claim is that’s it’s also a fantasy for older men to be saved by (and still sleep with) such figures? But more often isn’t being saved by a woman somewhat emasculating? Even in 2012?

Or maybe the only male fantasy being fulfilled in the film is the one revolving around younger attractive women being willing to have sex with (or throwing themselves at) older, less attractive men (though Craig is a sex symbol in his own right, right?).

I agree that the sex fantasy is a real and sexist one…but the notion that the movie suggests that Lisbeth needs saving by a man (or that such salvation is likely/possible) is much more tenuous—in fact, largely nonexistent.

And a second post here.

I think the movie’s fairly confused, basically. The book (as I understand it) is more complex on these issues and the movie tries to follow the book’s plot for the most part, without having the wherewithal to get us inside the possible complexity of Lisbeth’s (or Mikael’s) mind. Even basic things are unclear. Like when she set dad on fire…Was this an act of “madness” (as she at one point implies), or was it an act of self-defense and perfectly justified (as I think much of the movie implies).

I’m not trying to make this movie some kind of ideal treatment of women’s rights, consciousness, and liberation—I’m just pointing out that the claim that was made (that it’s a fantasy of man saving woman and curing her of homosexuality) doesn’t make sense in terms of what actually happens in the film.

I would also say that pointing out that something is a trope, “successful career woman unhappy in love” doesn’t tell you much…since those tropes can be played in a variety of ways.

Such a trope can mean, “Being successful at work will make you unhappy in love, ergo you should forego your career, and allow men to control the public sphere”–

Or

the same trope can be played to blame a sexist/patriarchal society for putting too much of a burden on women… That is, it’s society that makes happiness both at work and at home a near impossibility for women…so society should change.

Admittedly, you see the latter far less in popular culture, but the same basic narrative can tell very different ideological stories.

I would say in “GWTDT”–there are lots of tropes, but what exactly they “mean” isn’t particularly consistent…as the movie itself isn’t consistent. Sometimes it’s empowering to women, sometimes exploitive.

Lisbeth’s “unhappiness in love” is clearly not because she’s a successful career woman, but because she’s been abused by men (including her own father) her whole life and is emotionally damaged. So…it’s not her public sphere efficiency that fucks up her private life….it’s men who fuck up her private life, from beginning (dad) to end (Mikael). It’s not Broadcast News (a much better movie, btw). The narratives of the two movies are far from identical up to the final shift…so the comparison doesn’t really work in any significant way. We might say that GWTDT gives the illusion that men have ultimate power over women…but we could also say that the film shows a very powerful woman capable of overcoming all of that patriarchal social hegemony. That is, it’s somewhat contradictory.[…]

Again, I don’t want to be the “defending GWTDT guy”— I actually don’t think it’s all that great, or liberating, or whatever…. It’s just not quite so clearly about the “guy saving girl” narrative that you (were) claim(ing). Now it seems that the claim is different?

My understanding is that in the books, the relationship between the two continues to be vexed, and that Lisbeth has a number of sexual encounters with both men and women, retaining her bisexuality. I don’t know enough about these to suggest whether or not the reader is meant to see her return to women as a symptom of her “failure” with Mikael, or whether she simply continues to be bisexual, as she always was, but it’s an interesting question. Of course, it tells us basically nothing about the meaning of the film.

Finally (I hope):

“It’s a reiteration that romance with a man is something she needs (as a woman) to be normal/happy/fulfilled, but can’t have.”

You’re free to read it that way, I guess, but since so much of the film revolves around the wrongs done to women by men–and especially the wrongs done to Lisbeth by men—and even the sins of omission made by otherwise nice guys—I think the notion that the story says: “All will be cured by the presence of a penis,” is far too simplistic. There may be currents of this in the film, but there are also strong countercurrents, which makes the film more interesting in this regard than you suggest (though not so interesting, really, as a murder mystery/serial killer story). The villains are all men here, and the male “protagonists/heroes” are basically impotent and accomplish nothing of value (Craig and Christopher Plummer). Only Lisbeth is an effective agent. Craig’s only real effective move is asking her for help. Plummer’s only effective move is asking Craig for his…and only because it leads to Lisbeth.

Perhaps all of the “feminist” elements come from the book’s plot and all of the “sexist” elements come from Hollywood, but I doubt it. My guess is that the book is similarly vexed and contradictory.[…]

Monika Bartyzel on the Hollywoodization of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

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Sometime commenter on HU Monika Bartyzel had an thoughtful post about the softening and sexualizing of Lisbeth Salander in the Hollywood version of “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” I talked to her a little about it on email, and she kindly agreed to let me publish her further reflections. So here they are:

I appreciate the book. As you’ve already seen with Twilight, I can read around certain issues if I find something compelling or interesting. I so completely appreciate his [Stieg Larsson’s] intent and the path he takes that any literary questions of value/etc are irrelevant to me. The only thing that did really weigh on me was supposed to – it was hard work to read about repeated abuse to one woman, but I think it was entirely necessary to make the environment palpable, especially to those who would deny it…while also noting that even with just a sliver of what Lisbeth experiences, the audience sees it as too much. It adds weight.

As for similar problems – do you mean in her characterization or the film? Yes, the film is dense and not structured in the usual way (again, I don’t mind that). As for her – it’s similar yet very different. It basically boils down to privilege and how stories are filtered. Larsson saw a rape and wrote from the vantage of being emotionally impacted by the continual violence against women that he saw. Fincher is coming from sexy Hollywood of flash and lust.

So through Larsson and on the page, Lisbeth’s vulnerability is more about the men than about her (though her body is slight). She has things happen to her that she can’t control, so she reacts in an entirely different way to the world than we do. For her, in the book, she feels like she’s given a lot to Mikael and has deep feelings for him (love? No idea. She cares for him, but there’s no base of comparison). So when he walks off with his long-time paramour, she’s hurt and writes him off. But she wasn’t womanized. She wasn’t a romantic fool. There was never a moment of dual intimacy. To her, she’s sharing a lot; to him, she’s cold, aloof, and fascinating, but not warm. It’s a look at her struggle to find the balance between who she became due to her terrible life, and the human feelings and impulses she has. Some say that it’s ludicrous that she’d even like Mikael, but it’s not. He’s the second kind man in her life, the first who isn’t a father figure. He isn’t a misogynist, he’s smart, fit, and comes to her in a place of warmth and kindness that immediately gets under her skin because no men have this obvious, inherent respect for her.

Fincher takes the vulnerability of a girl whose legal and human rights are continually ignored and thrusts her into a two-part personality of the soft girl who just wants to be loved and the hard girl who will kill if she’s crossed. So to him, her sneers are sexy, rather than sad or unfortunate. He makes her obviously romantically interested in Mikael. He makes her share dark secrets and openly trust him. He makes her the emotional hero and
Mikael the man who broke her again. He takes away the context around Lisbeth so to understand her, you fill in the blanks, and since she’s been infused with more classic Hollywood portrayals, the blanks are filled in with assumptions that defeat the purpose. The biggie for me: In the book she’s attacked by drunk guys and her computer is broken. No one helps her and it helps to set up how men continually try to prey on her. In the film, it’s just a thief, and she’s just a tough ass-kicker. It glamourizes it at the expense of the painful truth.

You can read Kinukittys’ discussion of the film here. Richard Cook’s take on the book is here.