Author Archives: Noah Berlatsky

A Movie Built on Sand

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This was first posted on Splice Today. I just mentioned it on this really long thread, so thought I’d reproduce it here.
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Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, the argument will go. It’s a derivative, malformed mess, with a plot that manages to be both preposterously ludicrous and tediously predictable. Jake Gyllenhaal is largely wasted as Prince Dastin, a role which requires him to alternate between looking raffishly earnest and earnestly raffish. Gemma Arteton as Princess Tamina does her best Princess Leia impersonation, and succeeds in demonstrating that she can be significantly less sexy than Carrie Fisher even while having a much larger chest. The super-special mystic knife appears to have been purchased from Toys R’Us, and a troop of dark riders have been shamelessly borrowed from the Lord of the Rings films. Except these Dark Riders aren’t called Nazgul. They’re called “Hashashins.” Which, in ancient Persian means, “Assassins who lisp.”

So, okay, it’s true — this is a big, dumb, Hollywood action-adventure vehicle with nothing in its head except things blowing up, swordfights, and pretty actors staring soulfully into each others eyes for a moment before more things blow up.

But you know what? I’m okay with that. Prince of Persia has no lofty ambitions and virtually no pretensions; it isn’t an ironically clever action movie, or a thoughtful action movie, or anything but a breezy summer stunt fest. And within those boundaries, it’s really surprisingly decent. Gyllenhaal has charisma to burn, and he leaps from battle to dashing close-up to battle with winning ease. He has no chemistry with Gemma Arteton, but then, they hardly have any love scenes. And really, even if she is more pert than smoldering, and has not a single line worth reciting — well, let’s just say I’ve been waiting to see more of her ever since her head-turning walk-on in Quantum of Solace. The sword fights are well choreographed, and many of the set pieces are entertaining and creative. One of the highlights is early in the film, when Dastin scales a wall using crossbow bolts fired just ahead of his ascent by his retainers.

Moreover, the writing is surprisingly good, in a workmanlike way. The opening scene explains Prince Dastin’s background (he’s a street urchin adopted by the king) in a burst of action-filled exposition that’s as professionally efficient an origin story as I think I’ve seen on film. The close relationship between the king (Ronald Pickup) and Dastin is only developed in a couple of scenes, but Gyllenhaal sells it; he looks genuinely stricken at his father’s death, and you feel throughout the film that he is motivated by the king’s memory. The dialogue for ostrich-racer, small time thug, and anti-tax activist Sheik Amar (Alfred Molina) is even witty. A heartfelt lament in which Amar declares his determination to keep a close watch on a suicidal ostrich lest she “do something stupid” is, for example, laugh-out-loud funny — and his feeling embrace of said suicidal ostrich is certainly the movie’s romantic high point.

I think my favorite part of the film, though, is the ending. [Warning! Spoilers follow!]

Prince of Persia’s denouement involves the mystical turning back of the clock practically to the film’s beginning, effectively erasing the entire action of the movie. Dastin foils the villain even before his plot can begin, and every meaningful emotional moment of the narrative is ruthlessly disappeared. The king doesn’t die. Dastin’s brothers, both of whom were murdered in his arms at a moment of reconciliation, don’t die either. The honorable black sidekick doesn’t inexplicably sacrifice his life for the stupid lighter-skinned peoples. Sheik Amar doesn’t bow to the remorseless logic of lovable rogues and show an inner nobility. The Princess doesn’t fall in love with Dastin, nor does she sacrifice herself for him and the world (though Dastin gets to court and marry her anyway). In short, nothing happens. You get the happy ending without any of the events leading to it.

Which seems perfectly reasonable. I mean, I liked the king; I don’t want him to get killed. The brothers were fun too; I don’t need to see them offed. And lord knows I really, really don’t want to see the honorable black sidekick do that thing that all the black sidekicks have to do. Why not just wipe it out? It’s all just a fluffy fantasy anyway. It kept me cheerfully entertained for two hours. It wasn’t real, it had nothing to say, it’s over and there are no consequences to speak of. Would that all Hollywood action movies were equally forthright.

Utilitarian Review 12/10/11

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On HU

Our Featured Archive post this week is Anja Flower on queerness and Edward Gorey.

I had a post on love, marriage, and saying goodbye to my father in law.

This week was almost entirely devoted to our Godard roundtable, organized by Caroline Small. The index to all posts so far is here. The roundtable will continue through next week.

At the end of the week I snuck in a post about Ella, Enchanted, the book.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At Splice Today I had a post about avant disco performer Arthur Russell.

Also at Splice, a piece about why it’s okay for eight-year-olds to tell Michelle Bachman she’s an idiot.
 
Other Links

Shannon Smith’s twitter feed is really enjoyable.

Robert Stanley Martin is translating The Divine Comedy and has a new section up.

Alyssa Rosenberg contemplates the incompetent marketing of Marvel and D.C.

And some art inspired by Godard’s Pierrout Le Fou.
 

Cinderella, Feminist, Part 2

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The Godard Roundtable will pick up later today, but I thought I’d sneak this post in since we have a little space.
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Since I wrote my last post on the movie Ella, Enchanted, I reread Gail Carson Levine’s book Ella Enchanted, on which the movie is based.

The book is very different…and I’d say a good bit better. Ella wins the prince over not because she’s spunky, but because she’s smart and funny — and Levine is a good enough writer to endow her creation with actual wit. The love story is a lot more convincing too; the book lets it develop over months rather than over weeks.

The story is also much darker. In the film the obedience is definitely shown to be a curse…but it’s also fun, and funny (Ella grabbing her own tongue when told to hold her tongue; Ella hopping away when told to hop to it.) And sometimes the curse is actually even something like a blessing. Ella is, for example, magically able to obey commands to become a fighter and beat up ogres early in the movie; she’s able to become a talented singer when told to be so.

In contrast, in the book, the curse confers no magical powers. When Ella is sent to finishing school and told to behave like a lady, she just has to do the painful, grinding work of training herself to act like a lady. The book does a much better job of making you feel the oppression of slavery, not as a painful occasional trick, but as an everyday weight on the spirit.

Another difference is that in the film Ella’s father is distant and flighty, but not actively cruel. As a result, a lot of the movie doesn’t really make sense — why doesn’t Ella tell him about her curse, for example? Why does he marry the repulsive Dame Olga? In the book, though, Ella’s father is actually a grasping, cruel man — not completely evil, perhaps, but certainly caring far more for money than for Ella. This is made especially clear in a painful scene in which her father attempts to marry Ella off to a wealthy, older earl. He sees her as a possession; as chattel. And her obedience forces her to be just that.

The political ramifications of this are interesting. In the film, of course, politics is figured in terms of authoritarianism and revolution. The uncle-on-the-throne is evil and racist, and Ella’s obedience makes her sensitive to the need to treat others justly. In the book, though, the king is a good sort, and there’s no sense of widespread injustice. Instead, the injustice is gendered. It’s in the way Ella’s father treats her as a thing, and in the way that her stepmother and stepsisters treat her as a servant doing traditional woman’s work.

Ella’s escape from the curse in the book follows through on the logic. In the film, the prince asks her to marry him and she frees herself, as if becoming his makes her no one else’s. In the book, though, Ella finds the strength to break the curse by refusing the Prince when he says “marry me”. Ella knows that with her curse, others could use her to betray the Prince; an obedient wife would destroy the kingdom. It’s only when she breaks the curse and gains her independence that she can be a good wife — a person, rather than a chattel.

The book, then, is much more sensitive to patriarchy’s specificity; to the way that fathers and husbands are not just loved ones, but potential oppressors. It’s much less interested, though, in class injustices — Ella never extrapolates from her own servitude to wonder about the conditions of other servants, for example. It seems like you can have narratives about authoritarian regimes (like the Hunger Games) or you can have narratives about patriarchy (which I’d argue is the case with Twilight, where Bella is constantly thwarting Edward’s plans for her) but combining the two seems difficult.

Perhaps that’s because, when you do combine the two, it starts to seem much more difficult for our heroine to win? You can take public authoritarianism seriously or you can take private authoritarianism seriously, but both at once is maybe just a little too much reality for a fairy tale.
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This is part of an occasional series on empowerment.

Love, Marriage, and Eulogies

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This first ran on Splice Today.
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My father-in-law died a little while back, and we drove the 10 hours to Appalachia for the funeral. He’d had brain cancer for about a year, and was unable to stand up or to recognize his daughter for months, so it wasn’t a surprise.

What was a surprise was that my mother-in-law asked me to deliver the eulogy. You might think she asked because I knew Fred well. And you’d be wrong. Fred wasn’t an especially easy person to know, and in the 10 years I’d been married to his daughter, we certainly hadn’t become close. I think he liked me well enough—my wife did me the favor of dating some real losers while she was in college (the guy who urinated in the salad bar at Denny’s is especially memorable), so I had a low bar to clear in impressing the in-laws. I probably did know the single most important thing about him, which is that he loved his grandson, my son, more than anything in the world. But even so, I was an odd choice for the eulogy, at least if what you wanted was someone who had a lot to say about the deceased.

So why me? Well, it’s not a mystery or anything. My wife’s family is a fairly taciturn lot; I, on the other hand, write for a living, and have to some extent inherited the irritating public pushiness of my Semitic ancestors. They picked me to do it because they figured I’d be willing. And maybe because they thought I could get through it without crying. And because I’m family.

They were right; I was willing, and I figured I could probably make it through without crying, and I’m family. So I parked my Jewish butt up at the front of the little Baptist church (which Fred would never have been caught in alive) and listened to the preachers sing the bluegrass songs that Fred loved, and make carneyesque demands that we all join the congregation, which he would have hated. And then I gave the eulogy, mostly composed of stories my wife and her mom had told me. I talked about how he would let our son drive the truck when he was two years old. He’d sit on Fred’s lap, and Fred would let him steer. And my wife and I would say, “Gah! Don’t do that!” And he’d completely ignore us. Which was one of his talents.

Of course, that story about the truck isn’t just my father-in-law’s anecdote; it’s my anecdote too. So while in one sense it’s true that I didn’t know him all that well, in another, I did know him because we shared the same stories and loved the same people. Or, to put it another way, I am married to his daughter.

Which is a thing about marriage that I think people tend to downplay. Marriage is often advertised as an expression of love between two people. Which it is, partly. But the expression of love is much less about declarations of devotion and much more about being part of each other’s lives. That’s why the gay marriage debate has rightly focused on topics like visitation rights in hospitals; marriage is much less about having kids, or having sex, or being in love than it is about being there. In a lot of ways, at least in my experience, it’s not love that leads to marriage so much as the other way around. It’s your life together that makes your love.

And in this case that love is my father-in-law. When my wife and I got married, he took a bunch of photos and cut my head off in every one, as if in some muted protest. When my son was born at home, he came up to help clean, and while my wife and I collapsed in the bedroom, he picked the newborn up and held onto him for hours, despite the desperate efforts of my mother-in-law to pry her grandson free. He was part of my life. One of the gifts my marriage gave me was the chance to tell him goodbye.

Utilitarian Review 2/3/11

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On HU

This week’s featured archive post, Richard Cook looks at portrayals of East Asians in comics covers.

James Romberger on Fantagraphics new Alex Toth collection.

I talk about superheroes, the good, the powerful, and Ben Saunders’ book Do The Gods Wear Capes?

Tom Crippen curates another gallery of work by illustrator and cartoonist Bob Binks.

We highlight some comments by Monika Bartyzel on Bella, Buffy, Katniss, femininity and feminism.

I talk about feminism, love, and obedience in the film Ella, Enchanted.

Erica Friedman on the sublimely pretentious gittery of food manga.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I talk about the new film Shame, and why porn is less offensive than male angst.

At Splice I explain why I may vote for Mitt Romney in the Republican primary.

And also at Splice I review the 70s Korean psych rock classic Now, by Kim Jung Mi.

 
Other Links

Excerpts from Marc Singer’s new book on Grant Morrison.

Eleanor Barkhorn on how Twilight finally lost her.

Tucker Stone blogs through TCJ #38.

And more Tucker, this time with high quality industry snark.
 
 

Cinderella, Feminist

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We’ve been having an interesting discussion over the past week or so about Twilight, the Hunger Games, and the place of empowerment in feminism. Specifically, does a feminist heroine need to be empowered and in control of her own life? Or is the experience of disempowerment — including passivity (or selflessness) and irrationality (or emotional sensitivity) — valuable in itself? Or to put it another way, is feminism’s goal to integrate women into the male world on equal terms, or is it’s goal to change the world in accordance with female experiences?

The 2004 film Ella, Enchanted has an interesting take on these questions. Based on a (better than either Twilight or the Hunger Games) book by Gail Levine, the movie is a reworking of the Cinderella legend. Ella (Anne Hathaway) is as an infant visited by her incompetent fairy godmother Lucinda (Vivica Fox). The godmother gives Ella the gift of obedience.

As Ella’s mother instantly recognizes, and as Ella herself learns as she grows older, the gift is not really a gift, but a curse. Ella has to do everything anyone tells her to do. If her mother tells her to practice her music lessons, she has to practice her music lessons. If she’s told to shovel cake into her mouth, she shovels cake into her mouth. More painfully, after her mother dies and Ella’s evil stepsister discovers her secret, she is forced to perform a series of ever-more-terrible tasks — giving away the broach her mother handed her on her death bed; stealing from a store; and finally, insulting her best friend and telling her she will never see her again.

The film, in other words, is one long treatise about the dangers of disempowerment; the traditionally female virtue of obedience is presented as a kind of fierce and unrelenting slavery. The film, in this sense, is clearly, and strongly, in favor of empowerment — not least in the way in which it takes pains to demonstrate that, while Ella is controlled by her curse, she is not defined by it. Whenever she can, Ella thinks her way around her obedience — when an antagonist tells her “bite me!”, young Ella obliges instantly; older and told to gather bouquets for her stepsisters, she smirkingly collects poison ivy. Moreover, it is not Ella’s obedience, but her feisty independence and her refusal to be charmed by his beauty or rank which attracts the romantic lead, Prince Charmont (Hugh Dancy.)

And yet…is it so clear that Ella is not what she is because of her obedience? The narrator at one point says that Ella’s gift is actually what gave her strength of mind — it is the ordeal of having to obey everyone all the time that made her so determined to think for herself. Even more telling, one of the ways in which Ella has most conspicuously thought for herself is in her political views. She doesn’t like the prince because his uncle’s government has been systematically enslaving other races — ogres, giants, and elves. Ella makes the link quite explicit for the viewer in a discussion with the prince (who is not in on her secret.) After seeing some giants being forced to work in the fields, Ella tells him: “No one should be forced to do anything they don’t want to. Take it from somebody who knows.”

The dichotomy here between obedience-as-a-curse (slavery) and obedience-as-a-gift (source of wisdom and character) can perhaps be traced to the fairy tale source material. As I said, this is a retelling of Cinderella, and a retelling in a feminist vein. The original tale is about a woman being saved by marriage and love; the new tale wants to be a story of an independent woman. At many moments, you can see the fissures. For example, the climactic scene involves a (quite entertainingly silly) battle with a horde of ninja-knights. Prince Charmont battles ferociously — and so, too, does Ella, who has not previously shown any particular capacity for battle (except in one scene where someone ordered her to fight skillfully, that is.) Diagetically, there’s no reason for her to be able to defeat trained warriors; it’s just thrown in to make her look empowered and equal. As such, it comes across (for all its obvious goofiness) as almost condescending. You want empowerment; okay, we don’t really believe in it, but we figure you’re easily satisfied. Here you go.

The tension between Cinderella and Ella is perhaps most apparent, though, at the film’s emotional climax. Prince Charmont’s evil uncle Edgar (Cary Elwes) finds out Ella’s secret and orders her to stab the Prince through the heart at the moment when he asks her to marry him. Despite desperate attempts to escape, Ella has no choice — and as he asks her, she raises the knife. But…a miracle occurs. The strength of her true love releases her from her curse, and she lets the knife drop to the floor as she weeps in relief.

The movie makes some effort to suggest that the breaking of the curse is the result of Ella’s will-power, rather than of true love per se. But…well, come on, now. It’s true love. And even if you insist that it’s true-love-providing-incentive-for-will-power, you’ve still got some explaining to do. After all, as I mentioned, obedience made Ella break off her friendship with her closest friend whom she had known for years. Why wasn’t her love for that friend enough to break the command, while the love for some guy she’d known about a week was? However it’s parsed, heterosexual romantic love, and, indeed, the offer of marriage, is what breaks the spell. Which makes it hard to shake off the sense that the reason Ella is no longer under compulsion to all the world is because she’s under compulsion to one man in particular. And, indeed, Ella at the film’s end is not her own person, but a bride. Her signature achievement is not becoming a lawyer (like her elf friend) or ruling a kingdom (like Charmont. Instead, it’s marrying the king, and influencing him through her love to be a better man and a better ruler.

It would be possible to see these tensions as a sign of the film’s failure to shake off the Cinderella’s stories gushy romance of disempowerment; Ella is more empowered than Cinderella, but she’s not truly empowered.

I think, though, you could also see the ambiguity as a potentially more thoughtful conclusion. When the film goes for empowerment-for-empowerment’s sake in essentially male terms — beating up ninjas — it seems crass and stupid. It’s at its best when it reaches for an empowerment that learns from, rather than entirely rejecting, the Cinderella story. That fairy tale, after all, is about both the injustice of slavery and the beauty of love. Both of those insights, it seems to me, come out of distinctively female experience, and so it makes sense that Ella, Enchanted build its feminism — not perfectly, but still with some conviction and heart — on both.

 


Gratuitous Harry Clarke illustration, because Harry Clarke is bad ass.

Monika Bartyzel on Bella, Buffy, Katniss, and Femininity

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I linked this article by Monika Bartyzel last week. Monika showed up in comments here and has had a bunch of interesting thoughts. I thought I’d highlight some of them here.

This is Monika’s first comment.

I was quite surprised to see the responses to your piece. They seemed to decide that you have some sort of antiquated view of men and women, rather than note that the piece is speaking in stereotypical generalities. I thought you brought up an interesting and important alternative to consider.

I’m sick of the arguments against Bella because I’ve yet to see one that doesn’t try to morph the facts to fit the argument. Any agency or personality that Bella has is removed before arguments fly against her. Likewise, any blemishes sported by characters like Katniss or Buffy are dulled. The tough girls are coded in perfect terms, and Bella is made into the perfect loser. Essentially, they’re perfect because all faults can be forgiven by the overall package. People hate the romance and Meyer’s writing, so she doesn’t receive the same privilege.

Even in Amber’s piece, the similarities between K and Bella are obvious. If we boil all of this YA entertainment into checklist points, the girls are not all that different. No amount of bad writing, Mormon values, or indignation changes that.

What I thought was fascinating about Bella was that as much as the book journey was about Edward, it ultimately became about her. I completely disagree with: “Contra Berlatsky, it is laughable to read Bella’s desire for Edward as secondary to her desire to be a vampire—if Edward died, would Bella want to become undead? I think not.” She most definitely would. In fact, some might argue that Edward’s appeal is infinitely enhanced by how much his world helps Bella find her identity. The confused human klutz becomes the calm, impressively controlled vampire. Humanity was a banana peel that always kept her off-kilter.

I think there is a certain.. allergy to femininity because of its implications. Classic definitions of femininity certainly have their place, but I think many of us see that as problematic because of how those notions are fostered by the suffocating media presence around us. It is hard, if not impossible, to signify “natural” moments of femininity because of how much shlock girls get taught from an early age. I often see women act in ways that clash with their own personal ideologies, but are right in-line with the plentiful stereotypical characterizations we’re fed.

So perhaps it’s not so much a matter of hating the feminine, but mistrusting it, and finding it problematic in today’s social environment. But it’s still something we need to consider.

Also: It’d be interesting to talk about how strength fires up forgiveness. The stronger a heroine is, no matter how well or poorly she’s written, the more likely we are to forgive problematic aspects that surround her. Most Buffy fans seem to all-out deny the darker side of Buffy’s world (stalker boyfriends, forgiveness of killers, etc). With Katniss, we get a strong heroine who is literally kept out of a hearing about her life while literally watching her skin melt off, who has no choice about where and how to live, is pressured into having children she doesn’t feel comfortable having, is in a romance that still doesn’t inspire her to say “love”. She seems to never be in control of herself. If no one watched/read either Buffy or Hunger Games, it’d be easy to turn off the populace by the same methods used to turn Bella into a complete fool.

btw: I’ve got to thank you for that 2009 piece, which I hadn’t seen before. I had completely forgotten about the hideous storyline that condemned Buffy’s strength and made Riley morally superior with his blood-prostitute ways. (Much like the other Xander gem when killing a frat-massacring Anya would make Buffy cruel, but trying to help Angel made her foolish and selfish.) I imagine that I find it easy to see Buffy’s weaknesses and Bella’s strengths for this very reason.

And here’s a follow up.

I agree about Buffy. Perhaps for a little while in the beginning she was allowed to revel in her strength, but there was so much condemnation in that show. Since Xander most often lobbed the bullshit condemnation, I just funneled my hatred into him rather than the show. He seemed to act like some sort of condescending moral compass that always emotionally beat her down with flawed, self-serving opinions. There IS one moment where Buffy really flourished in her strength though – Prophecy Girl when she killed the Master. After she was resuscitated, she seemed downright gleeful about her role as a slayer. Unfortunately, the beginning of Season 2 took that all away and re-coded her as being severely emotionally damaged by the whole thing.

Funny, I was just going to type about Katniss’ failure to feel much of anything except loyalty/protectiveness and aggravation/anger … but that once again makes her more like Bella. She just gets “better” reasons to feel it, whereas Bella’s are much more realistic to people today.

I think it’s said in the book, but it’s definitely in the movie that Bella tells Edward she wants to marry him because of how she finally feels like herself. “This wasn’t a choice between you and Jacob. It was between who I should be and who I am. I’ve always felt out of step. Like literally stumbling through my life. I’ve never felt normal, because I’m not normal, and I don’t wanna be. I’ve had to face death and loss and pain in your world, but I’ve also never felt stronger, like more real, more myself, because it’s my world too. It’s where I belong.” And then she specifically says it’s not just about him. It’s just that these points get muddled in the Edward lust.

Yes, I think Bella is attracted to that familial life, but I think that the audience is even more. Twilight might be ridiculous and in some ways problematic, but it fills holes. If your familial life is traumatic or nonexistant, you can go into the books feel the warmth of the family. If you have relationship problems, you can get swept up in the love. More than anything, the Saga speaks to the dissatisfaction and emptiness in life, or most distinctly, offers a really defined sense of reliability. The Cullens are honest and reliable without condemnations about how people live their lives; they love their family no matter what crazy choices they (Edward, Alice, etc) might make. I think that probably appeals to the readership just as much as the romance. (I know that to be true for some friends of mine who like the series.) Of course, it also means exacerbating expectations of love to inhuman forms.

And yes, there is a real problem with how loathed Bella is. If she was just immediately dismissed as problematic with a list of reasons and that was the end of the story, fine. She is far from an ideal heroine. However, the vehemence against her is strange, and not at all in line with how she’s presented in either the books or the films. I think that’s partly due to people taking up the argument from other’s opinions and not reading for themselves, and maybe some of it is the anger towards Meyer’s style making any positive point irrelevant? I don’t know…