Whether You Like It or Not

My significant other and myself recently purchased a couple of roulette slots for that Groupon thing where you are entered to win a date with Neil Patrick Harris, plus tickets to the recently revived (and recently Tony-winning) stage production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch in New York City. I had heard a little bit about the stage revival and how well it's been received, but with the advent of the whole Groupon thing, I figured it would be an apt moment to discuss some thoughts I've recently had about John Cameron Mitchell's film adaptation from 2001, which is how most people first got to know the character and her story.

At the time of its release, Hedwig was promoted (lauded, by some) as a sympathetic portrayal of a punked-out, glam rock transvestite trying to get revenge on her rockstar ex-boyfriend, who has abandoned her and stolen all of her music after being uncomfortably confronted with the details of Hedwig's botched sex-change surgery. (Possibly somewhat transphobically, the film was also immediately earmarked as a prefab, out-of-the-box successor to the similarly genderbent midnight staple The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and screenings summarily augmented with shadow casts and sing-alongs.)

I've never had a chance to personally experience the original stage production of Hedwig, but the moment for its revival seems apt, mainly because of the way that the climate surrounding gender identity has massively and publicly evolved during the past thirteen years since the film's initial release. If anything, John Cameron Mitchell's Hedwig was characterized originally in the press surrounding the film as a kind of bizarre, fringe gay icon -- meaning, essentially, a gay male icon. The pressing ambiguities of the character's true gender identity are a central focus of the movie, and I guess you could argue it's understandable that the critical dialogue about Hedwig's gender was therefore so reductive, given how pitifully limited the available language at that time truly was. This is also symptomatic of a broader issue, though -- the same one I touched on earlier when I was writing about Mean Girls and other films that demonize femininity, ostensibly to deconstruct or denounce "gender" as an entire ideology.

As a child in East Berlin during the 1960s, Hansel/Hedwig is drawn to rock 'n' roll music as much for its visual aesthetics as for its actual sound. Hansel exists in a drab and confined place, literally and figuratively devoid of color. The allure of glam rock is its frivolity and superficiality -- Hansel interprets its carefree, bubblegum messages about personal freedom and beauty as profound truth, and the irony of his misconstrual sets the stage thematically for everything else the movie is about. Excitement and personal freedom are such elusively hot commodities in Hansel's suffocating, claustrophobic universe that he fails to understand how easily disposable they can be in faraway worlds less constrained. The wrongness of his naive assumptions will be both a tragedy and a salvation for him.

Glam rock is often made fun of for its vapidity, despite the hard core of pop rebellion that seems to characterize its appeal for devotees. Within the context of the film, it becomes a symbolic parallel for the fluid ethereality of being a man, a woman, or anything else in between. Glam is a musical subgenre defined by men dressing and acting "like women" for purposes which often appear obscurely revolutionary, yet dissolve easily into thin air upon impact with virtually any real, solid object. Its meaning and boundaries may appear fixed and even didactic, but in reality they are constantly shifting, and their surface meaning is only shorthand for deeper currents of roiling conflict often too awkward to genuinely be confronted.

To escape from Fascist East Berlin, Hansel must convincingly impersonate a woman and marry an American GI. The choice to transition is not only compulsory, but barely considered in its full dimension at all, especially since it's done out of love. If anything, it's a tidy and relieving solution to the uncomfortable reality of Hansel's relationship with his beloved, Luther. "To be free," Hansel's mother tells him, "You must give up a little part of yourself." To move forward as a "real" person, instead of a "freak" -- a homosexual, something Hansel barely dares to fleetingly imagine himself as -- he must sacrifice not just his penis, but the full gendered aspect of his identity. He must become an entirely different person who is capable of having a heterosexual relationship with the person he loves.

Rejected, Hansel -- now Hedwig, having appropriated his mother's name for immigration purposes -- soon finds herself divorced and barely sustaining herself in a rurally isolated part of the U.S. scarcely better than the dingy Berlin apartment she recently escaped (though at least her new environment is a little more warmly lit). Only at this moment does the decision to live as a woman become a source of empowerment and dedicated act of will, albeit a perhaps incomplete or misdirected one.

It becomes easy to see, at this point, how Hedwig's character has become so rudely lumped in with some particularly odious stereotypes about gay male identity vs. transgender identity. The viewer is tricked into interpreting Hedwig as a gay man who has been manipulated into becoming a woman, and must now gradually rediscover his "true" identity as a man. In fact, however, the wholeness of this character is far more complicated, as will be revealed. Hedwig wants to find her "other half," which romantic preconceptions dictate must be another person, lost somewhere in the undiscovered vastness of the world around her. Until that person can be located, however, Hedwig must languish listlessly, unable to commit to a definition of herself for fear that the one she chooses will be inadequate -- that, like her body, her identity itself might solidify into something permanently broken and misshapen, incapable of interlocking correctly with its predestined counterpart.

Driven by conflicting urges to both rebel against and avoid the pervasiveness of these conclusions, Hedwig retreates into the hyperglamour of an invented vision of womanhood which she herself has created out of whole cloth, and whose power is specifically its abstract alienness. It's a stage persona worn 24/7. It affirms, mocks, and transcends the existence of Hedwig herself. Hansel no longer exists and Hedwig is a conveniently sculpted figment, and those two facts are all that this person understands any longer about herself. Rather than fold and break, she does what an artist does: she surrenders herself completely to the performance of this paradox, to both her liberation and detriment.

Eventually, through Tommy, Hedwig discovers an apparent opportunity to rebuild the lost parts of herself in someone else, with whom it will then be possible for her to merge. Hedwig and Tommy are both avatars, compartments housing incomplete parts of the same larger being. Only when the promise of reconstitution is thwarted does the anaesthetic power of the illusion dissipate, and the pain of Hedwig's deeper schizm begin to be really felt.

The strength of Hedwig, despite myriad imperfections, is its foresight and willful ambiguity. At the end of the film, though much of Hedwig's inner and outer conflict has been resolved, the oft-teased question of her "real" gender remains persistently obscure, possibly because it's a question that can't be answered in words that yet exist, and that answer in and of itself constitutes its own resolution.

It's impossible for me to watch this movie now without noticing how much my own ideas about what I wanted to look like as a teenager, and what I wanted my physical appearance to convey and represent, came from Hedwig. I'm still completely transfixed by the red glitter-infused lipstick and eyeshadow she wears during the opening sequences. I watched this film for the first time the same year I read Kate Bornstein's Gender Outlaw and the same year I first watched Female Trouble, and this became a really important combination of influences for me as I started to grow up.

"You Still Can't Sit With Us" (Mean Girls Extended Edition)

So I figured I might as well pop back around and do the second half of the post I started like a million years ago about Mean Girls, now that several weeks have passed, and nobody is Googling it anymore. I have a person problem with not wanting to write about things that are topically relevant, so this should be way more comfortable for me now, I'm guessing.

So toward the end of Mean Girls, there's a scene where Tina Fey stands at the front of a gym full of female students, Betty Buckley style, and delivers a series of regurgitated culture-of-female-aggression critiques about how adolescent women are backstabbing, two-faced, and manipulative, and the solutions to their (our) problems is to start banding together and supporting each other more instead of being so flaky. Lots of these points are probably salient, but the way they're presented within the larger context of the narrative made me really think about the way female gender identity specifically is often presented in media like this.

As in the real world, male gender identity in Mean Girls pretty much doesn't exist. Though the egotism and stupidity of male characters is occasionally lampooned, the actively predatory characters are all women. The movie is concerned only with the action of being female. The female characters are actively female; the male characters are neutral. In fact, one of the things I didn't like about Mean Girls, from a purely formal perspective, was how dramatically unsatisfying the neutrality of the male characters was. Aaron, for example -- the movie's dumb jock love interest, who constantly waffles back and forth between Cady and her Satanic arch nemesis Regina -- was a really, really boring character. This wasn't just unsatisfying -- it became, at a certain point, problematic. I kept waiting for the movie to take Aaron to task for shifting his alliances so casually, but he just stayed bland and innocuous throughout the whole movie, despite how inherently provocative his character arc was.

Mean Girls acts like it's interested in destroying the concept of constructed, "false" gender. It sees young women's performance of femininity as a shallow way of volleying for social power and distinction, not as a "real" expression of anything. Through its condemnatory dissection of female culture, Mean Girls seemed to be suggesting that traditional gender expression is a dangerous and ugly thing, and that the way women act, think, and see the world as a result of being socialized as women, is the best example of how horrible traditional gender identification can be. This is something that a lot of movies, books, and TV shows are guilty of, even (and sometimes especially) when they are made for a female audience. The concept of "female culture" is almost exclusively negative, something to be feared and avoided, or at least approached with caution (or occasionally, in more affectionate treatments, to be laughed at). When it's not horrible or farcical, it's usually because the "culture" the film or TV show describes is highly non-traditional, or is the result of some sort of self-conscious reclamation.

I'm not suggesting the passive aggressive posturing that Mean Girls depicts isn't real, or that it shouldn't be examined or critiqued. What I am suggesting, though, is that explorations of these problems are almost never as multi-faceted as they deserve to be. Because they're not more comprehensive, more studied, or more sincere, they almost always reveal things they didn't mean to reveal, and unintentionally obscure other facets of their subject matter that could have easily been treated with more resonance and insight.

"You Can't Sit With Us"

Wednesday was the ten-year anniversary of the Tina Fey-scripted movie Mean Girls, a film I had heard a lot about, but never actually saw. Though I had long acknowledged it as a significant gap in my viewing history, I never really understood how hugely important this movie is to other people until I went online Wednesday morning. My social media feeds were inundated, both by film nerds and by plain, regular folk. This was clearly a milestone that people really cared about, far more so than I would have ever expected.

I’ve been watching a lot of coming-of-age movies lately about female characters in high school, and although I hadn’t quite gotten around to Mean Girls yet, it had been nestled snugly in my Netflix queue for probably about three weeks prior to viewing. I can’t exactly say why I’ve been hitting this subgenre so hard lately. I’m at an enduring personal crossroads lately, the exact nature and dimensions of which seem constantly in the process of reshaping themselves. Seemingly frivolous movies like Mean Girls, about the formative struggle between personal and social identity, are unsettling, but also, strangely, bolstering. The fucked upness, doubt, hypocrisy and unfairness of the world are acknowledged with inflated accuracy. Growth and maturity are illustrated as awkward and painful processes. But in the end, reassuringly, everything works out just fine.

Having finally seen Mean Girls in its entirety, I guess I can understand its appeal. It’s is part of a lineage of films that dissect the hypocrisies of social existence for young women on the verge of becoming adults. These films purport to describe only a narrow segment of the population, but like most things supposedly relevant only to “female” interests, they are often eerie and penetrating snapshots of the cultural moment. No film summarizes the surrealistic nihilism of Gen-Xers as comprehensively as Heathers, and what juxtaposition could more poetically define the attitudes of the late ‘90s than the plucky, cartoonish opulence of Clueless contrasted against the Pure Moods-infused, revenge-fantasy nightmare universe of The Craft?

Mean Girls’ most direct antecedent is probably Heathers, but while Heathers uses female social cliques much more casually as a microcosm of a vaster and more profound dysfunctional social landscape, Mean Girls is concerned more directly with dissecting ways that women interact with each other. If Mean Girls is a mascot for its generation along the same lines as its older relatives, it’s both flawed and prescient. It blames women too readily for problems it recognizes as endemic without really exploring their sources.

On the plus side, it does address some re-emerging, (and rapidly mutating) ideas about what being a woman even means – especially the idea that gender is essentially a put-on, and that its only lifeblood is constant and rigid self-enforcement. Although it passes the Bechdel test with flying colors, it's not really a Feminist movie. Its ruthless takedown of women is perhaps, at its heart, really intended as a takedown of binaries – and more importantly, of the possibility of losing oneself in the performance of them.

TO BE CONTINUED!...tomorrow, probably.

Corporate Sleaze

So I woke up this morning to discover this article on my Google + feed regarding recent events concerning Hobby Lobby that you may have vaguely heard about, just as I had sort of vaguely heard about them prior to this morning.

Basically what’s happening is that Hobby Lobby is getting ready to waste people’s tax money on a Supreme Court case intended to determine whether or not their company should be allowed to decline coverage for birth control to its employees on “sincere moral grounds” or some bullshit, I’m too cranky right now to go back and reference the actual language.

I won’t dwell overly-long on this because the problems with this court case even happening seem obvious to me, but it does tie in with what I’ve been trying to talk about generally in the last few posts I’ve done, and I’m going to try to explain why it is that current events such as this are relevant to things like my post about J.D. Salinger from a few weeks ago, or the way a person like Woody Allen, and other people who like and support him, have been allowed to speak and behave in public regarding the very serious criminal sexual allegations made against him.

On a larger-than-just-individual scale, the Hobby Lobby court case is about deciding who controls cultural narrative. Narrative is something we think of as being important only in a fictional environment, and that narratives created in the real world are something that only affect individuals, or relationships between individuals. But narrative affects everything, and its ramifications in real life are as immediate and significant as in fiction.

The Vice article talks a lot in the second half about corporate personhood, a ludicrous legal concept which has already been thoroughly lampooned by many people cleverer than myself (the documentary The Corporation is one example). The idea of the narrative that’s being created here is that it makes sense for “a person,” i.e. the ostensibly personlike entity that is Hobby Lobby, to be able to express its opinion about birth control because as a “person,” it should have “freedom of expression.”

A lot of misogynistic violence occurs because of bad narratives. The bad narrative that the Supreme Court is considering about Hobby Lobby is racist and culturally bigoted beyond mere misogyny, but what ties it together most importantly with the individual human examples above is that it’s being discussed in terms of “personal expression” and “perspective,” as if these things are always equal. What’s really happening is that Hobby Lobby is expressing the desire to cause measurable harm to people, in the form of a brutal invasion into their private lives, and its opponents are expressing the desire not to be invaded and brutalized in this way. By entertaining the arguments of the corporation, the Supreme Court is treating these two expressions of “individual perspective” as if they are wholly equivalent and worthy of equal consideration.

If you talk about people having “different perspectives” or emphasize interpretive ambiguities, you are siding with the person or entity with the greatest ability to brutalize or oppress the other. You’re pretending that developing a narrative always starts from square one, when in reality, it’s a complex that is built slowly over time, like a military unit.

Manifesto

So after reviewing my post about Salinger from a few weeks ago, I've been trying to think about what specific ideas are really motivating me to do a blog like this in the first place. The central, binding theology is still vague to me and I don't know if I could really articulate exactly what the common threads are that seem to be pulling together into something I want to pursue.

I don't want to do a Feminist blog in the regular sense because I don't honestly feel like my views are driven only by Feminist theory. For many years I was not a Feminist at all, and although I identify as one now, my real reason for wanting to hone my skills as a writer, and a human being, in this particular way is that I have such a personal lack of resolution about the subject.

I am a cisgendered female raised mainly by cisgendered females, and for a long time, due partly to my rocky relationships with the other women in my life, I felt really enraged and alienated by the entire concept of femininity. The idea now of trying to explore and absorb Feminist theory is just beginning to make some sense, and it's been a tumultuous shift. Rather than apologizing for my perspective, what I want to do is use this blog to explore the ideas I'm encountering as they're happening to me in real time. My posts will conflict a lot and will be extremely vulnerable to criticism, which is the only reason why I think the project is really worth doing in the first place.

The issue at the heart of the Salinger post is the issue of narrative. Whatever literature may exist about "narrative" in relationships between human beings, or in gender relationships specifically, I'm not familiar with. But what was meaningful to me about Salinger was that a lot of people apologize for him, and that the reason for those apologies appears to be reverence for Salinger's ability to create narrative. To his defenders, Salinger wasn't sexually exploitative, or even careless -- he was "obsessed with purity" or "haunted by the specter of lost innocence," and his projection of those values onto the women he interacted with means more than whatever actually happened between them as people.

This is also true of Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, et al. These men represent something conceptually important to people because they have the ability to create narratives, and the narratives transcend collaborative reality.

Narrative can be an extremely powerful weapon, and although it's important in all histories of oppression, I think it has particular importance with relation to gender discrimination, because instead of one giant historical narrative, there are a million small narratives happening every day which support the larger narrative of gendered inferiority. The narrative of gender is hypertextual, mysterious. Sometimes it is very alluring.

All Her Kings In the Back Row

I was recently the last person ever, anywhere on the entire face of the earth, to read J.D. Salinger's Catcher In the Rye. Doing this was part of a half-baked project I'm working on right now to try and become a better person or something, and the subset of that project which involves Catcher In the Rye is "reading all of the important books," which is just an excuse, mainly, to turn book-reading into an outlet for personal urges I have which would otherwise probably be channeled into non-productive activities like crying, chainsmoking, and being an alcoholic. By reading books instead, I at least have some conversational topics to use the next time I have to be around actual human beings, even though broodingly smoking cigarettes would probably make me look cooler and feel intellectually smarter overall than talking about books would.

So like all other people on planet earth, my conclusion after reading Catcher In the Rye was that it's a pretty good book, that it probably deserves to be on all the high school reading lists and everything, does not deserve to be banned for having the word "fuck" in it, etc. However, as an aside to "reading all the important books," I have been also looking up stuff on the Internet on my work computer during the day about these books' authors, so that I can Understand Their Sociocultural Context More Thoroughly. So I started looking up stuff last week about J.D. Salinger, mostly because I vaguely remembered somebody did a documentary about him a few years ago, and the results of my idle and bored Googling were shocking, or I guess maybe just annoying and frustrating depending on how much you actually care.

The first thing I started looking for were reviews of the documentary, which is just called Salinger, and although a few reviews were basically positive (or at least rational and straightforward) I started noticing a lot people speaking in a very specific, evasive tone, with a lot of similarly-phrased complaints. The documentary, according to these people, was not only boring, it was also cheap and exploitative, and -- often as a final aside -- it was "nasty," "shameless," or otherwise mean-spirited toward its subject.

None of these reviewers seemed like they wanted to elaborate on what about the film was so line-crossing, so I Googled further, and quickly discovered the problem everyone was having is that that large portions of this documentary are about Salinger's romantic relationships, which were almost exclusively with very young women, many of whom were still underage when Salinger first started approaching them.

What struck me about the tone of these reviewers' dismissals was that they didn't try to actually defend Salinger or rebut the claims of the film, they just seemed affronted that anybody would want to talk about such embarrassing details of his life, or consider them relevant. The most disturbing thing about this attitude is that it was familiar to me from being a movie nerd, and listening to people talk about Roman Polanski a few years ago when he was being extradited. Polanski got into trouble a few decades ago for drugging a thirteen-year-old fashion model with Quaaludes and raping her during a photo shoot, but a surprising number of people will get really offended by the mere suggestion that Polanski (who confessed to the crime, but successfully avoided prison by fleeing the United States and never returning) should do any time, or be otherwise punished in any way for having done such a horrible, fucked-up thing.

There are two different directions I feel like going with this. The more obvious one is to point out how deeply and pervasively these readings are connected with male privilege, and the idea that it's acceptable, and sometimes even necessary, for men to use women as props (blow-up dolls, punching bags, security blankets) in their own personal narratives without asking permission, or providing any justification. It resonates on deeper levels as well, though, and what really lit my fuse about the Salinger instance is that it taps into some culturally virulent ideas about the nature of creative identity, specifically for men, and how female objects of desire are expected to factor into that.

Viewed from this perspective, Catcher In the Rye takes on a particular cast, especially because of how iconic it is. The carousel images in the book's climactic scene, and a lot of other cues leading up to them, are basically a tableau of female purity and innocence -- they symbolize the entire redemption of the central character, and the world he exists inside of -- and Salinger's own preoccupation with female purity and innocence are constantly and blithely evoked in Salinger's readings of his relationship choices, as if it's some grand and poignant ideal which most men simply lack the integrity and fortitude to aspire to.

Godard once famously claimed that "the history of film is the history of boys photographing girls," and in other media as well, the relationship between male artists and female muses has been romanticized to the point of total, repetitive nausea. In movies, these relationships have been hamfistedly depicted so many times, they have recently given birth to a new derogatory Feminist archetype, the Manic Pixie Dreamgirl. As well, in Salinger's case, idealistic readings about the deification of purity and innocence (aside from being condescending and deflective) ignore the obvious reality that Salinger himself was a highly controlling, paranoid, and emotionally impulsive man, and while that doesn't make him a bad artist -- it doesn't even (necessarily) make him a "bad person," whatever that is -- ignoring the significance of those personality traits in this case is dismissive and misogynistic.

The height of objectification is to make a person into a vessel for ideas they can't control. Sexual or otherwise.

Clean & Creamy

I've been pretty bored lately and the only thing I really know how to do is blog, so I'm starting a new blog. Enjoy.

The main, tentative theme of the blog is Movies That Have Women In Them, but there may be occasional divergences into other territories and subjects i.e. Books That Have Women In Them, or Movies That Have Only Men In Them. Or cognitive science. Or pretty much whatever I want.

In the spirit of the blog being about whatever I want, my first post is about soap commercials. One of the first things I bought when I first moved into my own apartment was a bar of Camay Soap from the 99 cent store, and Camay Soap commercials from the '70s are the reason why.

I don't really have a lot to say about the first commercial except to observe how blatantly pornographic it is. Like the first commercial, the second one treats the soap lather like sort of a cum substitute, but the characters' sexual rapport is so guileless and heartfelt that it just makes you want to sit on the couch and watch Golden Age porno for 9 hours while snuggling. This is literally my favorite commercial of all time. The only thing I hate about it is that it's a soap commercial, and not the teaser intro to the world's most adorable 40-minute hardcore sequence.

Disturbingly, commercials for Ivory from the same period have a skin-crawly, Aryan obsession with women being "pure" and "healthy." They also express a weird, misanthropic perspective on women wanting to be more than just averagely attractive, and seem balefully preoccupied with the idea that women might ever try to do anything outside the watchful and approving gaze of males.

I'm trying to find this other one I saw a long time ago where the girl's boyfriend tells her she looks beautiful and she corrects him and says, "No, I look healthy," but I can't find that one, sorry.

I guess you could argue that the Ivory commercials are progressive because they de-emphasize physical beauty in a culture where women are constantly being told they need to look beautiful to have value etc, but they aren't really about women being empowered so much as they're about women hunkering down into socially proscribed roles and avoiding any attempt to be distinctive because they don't want to make anybody else uncomfortable by drawing attention to themselves. But that's just my interpretation.

In conclusion, I leave you with this intensely moving and well-edited Dove commercial from about five years ago, which likewise invokes the darkest and most perverse malingerings of a world obsessed with the degradation and dehumanization of females in order to get you to buy soap.

The soap will probably also make you feel very creamy.