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.