Author Archives: Tom Crippen

The Phelps Essay About Dr. Seuss and Maurice Sendak

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I had an Update here, but it got too long so now it’s another post.

Now back to the old post.

Noah criticized it here. Over at The Comics Journal I posted this:


I read the Don Phelps essay and had a lot of trouble with the writing. Sentence by sentence, I just couldn’t understand what he was saying. Can anybody here try a plain-English summary?


Uland and Mike Hunter say they’re looking into it. In the meantime, Noah has taken a shot at the essay’s first two paragraphs. Here’s the orig’s opener:

The governing, underlying charm of “quaintness,” I suspect, lies in the stable universe the word suggests a manifest willingness to abide, albeit in some obscure nook or oddly shaped frame — to which another widely disdained word, “cozy,” may be applicable. “Quaintness” suggests a residence that is stable, even static; it suggests, too, a heritage of peacefully disposed experience. 



Noah’s translation of the opener:

“Quaintness” is charming because it suggests a stable universe — even though that universe may be odd or obscure.  “Quaintness” is also attractive because it refers to a peaceful heritage or tradition. 

Orig’s second paragraph:

How often does one encounter the word today? Much less, with (even gently) approving overtones. “Outdated,” “folksy,” slightly moldy? Disdain for, impatience with, a sort of strangeness that is noncompetitive and nonaggressive. Even in the field of children’s art and literature. Take two leading names in this country: Dr. Seuss (aka Theodore Giesel) and Maurice Sendak.

Noah’s translation of second paragraph:

Today the word “quaintness” is usually taken as a negative.  This is because people disdain strangeness which is noncompetitive or nonagressive.  Quaintness is even disparaged in the work of Dr. Seuss and Maurice Sendak.  [That last bit is my best guess; the prose actually seems to be saying that Seuss and Sendak dislike the use of the word “quaintness” — but I can’t believe that’s what he means.  I think instead he’s trying to say that quaintness is denigrated, and that as a result it makes people dislike even the work of Seuss and Sendak.]

Does anyone have any more? Note: an explanation of “strangeness that is noncompetitive and nonaggressive” would go a long way toward helping me get this. 

What We’re Saying About the Bechdel Test

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UPDATE: Ed Howard points out I’m wrong about The Women. Or he says he thinks I’m probably wrong, and I have to say I agree. Norma Shearer talked with her kid about the pony or something.


Now the original post:

I talked about the rule and posted the cartoon here. A few people commented, so here I’m recapping what I think they said and explaining myself where I need explaining.


To start out, maybe we can all agree that “rule” is not the correct word here. A rule tells you what you can’t do (as in, don’t see that film). A test is different. It’s a perception clarifier, a way of flushing out objective reality; what you do about that reality is then up to you.  And it’s as a test, not a rule, that all of us here use the Bechdel principle, to the extent we do use it. Bechdel’s cartoon was called “The Test,” but it was about (and for) women who wanted to get as far away from male society as they could.

Ok, in Comments:

Aaron White points us to a post where he applies the test to some favorite movies. He gives L’Eclisse (The Eclipse) as a Bechdel winner: “Women discuss playing the stock market, living in Africa, ‘What shall we do tonight?'” I haven’t seen it, but that sounds like the idea.

Noah gives examples of sexist films that would pass the rule and of nonsexist films that wouldn’t. 


The commenters all agree that the movie audience is not overwhelmingly male. 

Miriam says: “it is startling, once you know the rule, to realize how many movies fail it. & how virtually no movies would fail the test if it were about men.”  I’d say that hits it on the head. The test isn’t so much a way of finding sexist or nonsexist movies. It’s a reality check for telling us where we stand, which is in front of a cineplex in a male-dominated society.

As for male movie audiences … I think the subject was accidentally brought into play by a phrase in my post.  I said Sunset Boulevard was made by men and aimed at an audience “at least as male as not.” The phrase means that the audience for Sunset Boulevard would not be majority female, which I think is a fair guess (though only a guess) for that movie. And the sentence doesn’t say the audience’s gender mix is what lies behind the problem. I list a few factors: writer, director, audience mix. But maybe it struck people as saying audience mix was the trump card, the key factor.

Miriam offers this:

i think any given movie is “a male product” only insofar as we live in a “male” (ie sexist, where men are the norm & women are a special case) culture. but maybe that is what you were saying.


I think I disagree. All movies are part of the same society, and the society is male dominated, but not all movies are equally male dominated. I’d say the relevant factors can balance out differently for one film or another, with the obvious examples being romantic comedies vs. buddy action films. But the most powerful factors all point the same way, so the balancing out tends to favor men. 

The Bechdel Rule

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Alison Bechdel’s watch-or-not test for movies came up here. Now experience the rule itself! (Courtesy of Comics Should Be Good!) Well, everything but the righthand edge of the rule; Blogger is stumping me here.

The rule itself: A movie has to have at least two women, they have to talk to each other, and they have to talk to each other about something besides a man. The Liz Wallace being thanked in panel 1 is the friend of Bechdel’s who came up with the rule.
UPDATE:  The cartoon is now a long way down screen. Some thoughts occurred to me.
First off, if you haven’t, read Noah on Dick and Fanny.
Second, here are some movies that flunk the Bechdel test: Sunset Boulevard, The Candidate, Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, Dr. Strangelove (anything by Kubrick, I guess), It Happened One Night, possibly The Women, and any film based on the works of Gilbert and Sullivan. Plus a bunch of others. In Bechdel’s cartoon (still way below) you’ll see that she proposed the test so she could screen out big ’80s blockbusters about rampaging male destruction. It’ll do that, of course, but only along with a lot of other stuff. As a movie-selection tool, the test’s only value is this: it’s a compass pointing away from male-dominated society.
Personally, I’m not trying to get away from such films. What I like about the Bechdel rule is that it’s a quick, on-the-spot demonstration that yes, Hollywood product is male dominated. The movies don’t have to be about manly men doing dangerous things; you can make a movie about career, vanity, and self-deception, a movie with a fantastic part for a woman (all right, I’m talking about Sunset Boulevard), and it’s still going to be written and made by men and aiming at an audience that is at least as male as not. It will be male product, and that fact will show in many ways, a basic one being that the women won’t have much to do that doesn’t involve men.  In real life women talk to each other about all sorts of stuff, in movies they don’t, and what happens in between is the movie industry.
In my opening list I threw in Gilbert and Sullivan, so we’re not talking just about movies. I’d guess that a majority of all mediums’ entertainment products would be ruled out under the test — a guess only.

Dopey-sounding good will

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A favorite new example:

And don’t worry if you know nothing about lesbians — a few hours with Mo and friends, and you’ll be ready to tattoo a labyris between your shoulder blades.

From a review of Alison Bechdel’s new collection, Essential Dykes to Watch Out For.

Leonard Nimoy Fact

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Leonard Nimoy was an alcoholic. It started back when he played Spock and continued for two decades. Then, after he stopped drinking, he somehow wrote an entire autobiography without mentioning his 20 years of being a drunk. Then, five years after the autobiography, he decided to reveal his secret on a Star Trek promotional video, Mind Meld. 


In the end, the fullest print account I’ve come across of Leonard Nimoy’s drunk period is in William Shatner’s autobiography (Up Till Now, 2008), where a few pages are handed over to Nimoy for a long quote getting the episode down for the record.

The Nimoy drunk period: 1968 – 1989.
(Nimoy names the end date, but the start date is an estimate based on this quote: “I started drinking regularly, ritually, during the second or third year of our series.” The third season began shooting in spring 1968.) 

Media Log: Jews and Asians on tv, plus anti-Italian bigotry in Bennett Cerf

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Noah and Miriam were talking about how Jews and Asian men have been desexed by US media.  I can think of 2 US-Asian tv characters who are basically treated as girls: Alex Baldwin’s flunky in 30 Rock and Jeremy Piven’s flunky in Entourage. Right now I’m watching old dvds of Bonanza, the 60s western, and the Chinese character wears an apron and cooks. So three’s a trend, I guess.

Jewish men were desexed by being treated as nerds and pasty little neurosis victims, but they never got the final indignity of being girl-ized. Then Woody Allen came along and Jewish men could tell themselves that being Jewish was in itself attractive, at least in men.

I guess you could say that, because they started from so far outside the European tribe, Jews and Asians had to give up more dignity in return for assimilation.

Or possibly that Jewish/Asian men have assimilated into the US by means of high-skilled/high-income professions, and that newcomers who get high-paying jobs have to give up some manly dignity so that everyone else can feel better. So, by this theory, Italians could keep their virility because their incomes wouldn’t be remarkably high. And of course virility was turned into a marker of their lower status, a brute trait. I remember an ancient Bennett Cerf joke about Mike and Tony and how Mike was consoling Tony after the death of his young wife. “In-na year, you meeta nice girl. In-na year half, you engaged. Two years, you marry and –” Tony (indignant): “Two-a years! Two-a years! Whadda I do tonight?“


More Facts

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  • William Shatner played Alexander the Great in a pilot that co-starred Adam West and John Cassavetes.
  • Yul Brinner would literally kick Shatner in the ass in between scenes when they were filming The Brothers Karamazov.
  • A photo caption in Shatner’s autobiography misspells his daughter’s name.
(From Up Till Now: The Autobiography by William Shatner with David Fisher)