code / feelings / diy
I collected a bunch of these for a party. We watched two; I’m saving the rest for later.
The screen’s first lesbian vampire. Ms. Dracula is drawn to young women and tries to get a big strong psychiatrist to cure her. That subtext is almost text. The tag line was “she gives you that weird feeling!”
I was going to quit making movie lists this month, but I keep them for myself on paper anyway. As long as I post other things too, I don’t mind them being on here.
Titles in bold are things I’m especially glad I watched.
Bold means I’m glad I watched it.
This month’s lists are evidence that my neighbours Casey and Jessica are fond of renting entire series of Hollywood movies. I have also watched with them: all the Die Hard movies, all the Rambo movies, Alien and Predator in preparation for Alien vs. Predator, and probably more.
The fact that I go along for these action movie marathons could probably go in the same category as the facts that I only like to watch sports when international championships are broadcast at 4 in the morning, and that if I don’t see the midnight premier of questionable superhero movies I probably will never watch them. Bland content is a good foil for intense viewing contexts.
In her golden years, my mom suffers from Dementia with Lewy Bodies (think Parkinson’s + Alzheimer’s).
Here we are in the garden. She’s calling me Jim (my father’s name) and thinking she’s having a dream…
I expected this video to make me sad, but I felt happy watching it. I spent a lot of afternoons sitting in gardens with my grandpa in his advancing dementia, and our interactions were often like this. Me guessing what would help him or soothe him, just sitting and telling each other we loved each other with words and pats and hand squeezes. My trying to understand his observations but not really getting it; him trying to understand my observations but not really getting it; both of us trying to be ok with that. I’m happy that sometimes when communication breaks down, it can break down into just inarticulate love.
And I just posted about putting ugly things in context to make them beautiful.
“Professionals tend to define independence in terms of self-care activities such as washing, dressing, toileting, cooking and eating without assistance. Disabled people, however, define independence differently, seeing it as the ability to be in control of and make decisions about one’s life, rather than doing things alone or without help.”
— Michael Oliver quoted by Sunny Taylor in The Right Not To Work: Power and Disability
I looked up Sunaura Taylor after enjoying her discussion with Judith Butler in the movie Examined Life. They talked about walking as it related to disability and gender issues, and about the politics of helping each other and asking for help. At one point they stopped into a thrift store to get a sweater for Sunaura, which was suddenly revealed as a Queer Eye make-over scene such as I have occasionally wished for. Queer shopping with politics intact; it was quite beautiful! I had a little thrill, there in the cinema.
Part of the thrill was seeing the two of them act out an interdependent version of shopping, with Judith helping Sunaura try things on and the store clerk adjusting her usual check out techniques. It was very clear that all of the people benefited from working together, and it was also clear that to accomplish that they had to work outside of usual store policies and etiquette expectations.
I have been finding affirmations of interdependence in a lot of different sources lately, and they really cheer me up. I’m hunting for ways to resist competition and hierarchy without resorting to competitive tactics, and in the meantime it is very encouraging just to watch people cooperate within structures that are set up to facilitate competition. Life affirming.
Taking a different angle on accepting all of us instead of competing to find the winners, here is another quotation from that essay. This is especially for Erin and anyone else who is into working less.
The right not to work is the right not to have your value determined by your productivity as a worker, by your employability or salary… What I mean by the right not to work is perhaps as much a shift in ideology or consciousness as it is a material shift. It is about our relation not only to labor but the significance of performing that labor, and to the idea that only through the performance of wage labor does the human being actually accrue value themselves. It is about cultivating a skeptical attitude regarding the significance of work, which should not be taken at face value as a sign of equality and enfranchisement, but should be analyzed more critically. Even in situations where enforcement of the ADA and government subsidies to corporations lead to the employment of the disabled, who tends to benefit, employers or employees?
One more, because I really like this question:
The minority of the impaired population that does have gainful employment are paid less than their able-bodied counterparts and are fired more often (and these statistics are more egregious for disabled minorities). To ensure that employers are able to squeeze surplus value out of disabled workers, thousands are forced into dead-end and segregated jobs and legally paid below minimum wage (for example, in the case of “sheltered workshops” for those with developmental disabilities). The condescension towards the workers in such environments is severe. Why should working be considered so essential that disabled people are allowed to be taken advantage of, and, moreover, expected to be grateful for such an “opportunity”?
Movies I’m especially glad I watched are in bold. Well, movie. Comic Book Confidential was ok, and maybe would have been exciting if more of it was new to me. Encounters at the End of the World was fine, but didn’t blow my mind. My Winnipeg had moments, but not enough.
Movies I’m especially glad I watched are in bold.
I noticed there is a website compiling Bechdel ratings for movies. Anyone can add to it. I am surprised how many reactions I have to the existence of this unassuming website.
I need to organize more time to hang out naked with my friends. I love it so much. In the summer, there is usually night swimming and maybe this year I’ll go to our local nudie lake with it’s one hilariously small dock. But what about winter? What about now? I don’t think there is a women’s bath or anything in this town. I need to organize some nudeness at home. Anybody want to come over and take expressive naked photos? Give me a call.
Movies I’m glad I watched are in bold. I wish I could put Brand Upon The Brain! and Ali: Fear Eats The Soul in ultra black.
These days, I’m making it a point to watch movies that inspire or support me rather than only entertain me, and the numbers are already up both for gender inclusion and for personal enjoyment. Despite feeling self-conscious about the flaky sound of this project, I recommend it.
A lot of people blog about the Bechdel Test for movies (a film passes if two women talk to each other about something other than a man), but I’ve had a hard time finding lists of movies that pass or fail.
I watch movies that fail, but last year I kept track to be aware of the basic gender decency of my media consumption. (I count lots of things. I am surprised how far away from gender equity I get if I don’t make a conscious effort to read women authors and listen to music by women. This is also a stirring game with race, sexuality, languages…) Since I had a list, I thought I’d post it online.
Titles in bold are films I’m glad I watched.
I watched 83 movies in 2008 and less than a third had women talking to each other. In 2009 I should keep track of women directors and really shock myself.
More old drafts that have been sitting in the archives, more quotations from The Monster Show .
p.200-1
[Tod] Browning spent a lot of time at the ballpark and racetrack in the early thirties, and veteran Hollywood writer Budd Schulberg (author of The Disenchanted and What Makes Sammy Run? ??) had a memory of another Browning pastime. “The marathon dance was in vogue then and we went a few times to the Santa Monica Pier to watch the young unemployed zombies drag themselves around the floor in a slow motion dance macabre,” Schulberg wrote in his 1981 memoir ??Moving Pictures. “Even more appalling than the victims on the dance floor were the regulars, affluent sadists in the same front-row seats every night, cheering on their favorites who kept fainting and occasionally throwing up from exhaustion. One of the most dedicated of the regulars was Tod Browning, who never missed a night and who got that same manic gleam in his eyes as when he was directing Freaks.”
p.292
The rediscovery and rehabilitation of Freaks became almost a cause celebre in the film journals beginning in the early sixties. Once considered crass and tasteless, the film was now “compassionate” and “sensitive.” In a way, the appreciation of Freaks became a politically correct means to indulge a morbid curiosity about thalidomide deformities, while still being able to feel self-righteous and progressive.
In the spirit of spitting things out rather than polishing them forever and driving myself crazy, I’m going through my archives and publishing drafts.
A couple of years ago I was reading a lot about horror and monsters. At some point I saved quotations from The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror.
p.186, regarding WWI vets.
The Frankenstein pictures continued to be a cultural dumping ground for the processed images of men blown to pieces, and the shell-shocked fantasy of fitting them back together again.
That was the first idea I ever heard about horror as a mirror of culture, from a Chuck Palahniuk interview. It doesn’t make me want to watch horror movies, particularly. But this next movie is something I would like to see.
p.205-6
For his unnerving final sequence— completely irrational, but nonetheless a devastating moral statement— [Abel] Gance recruited actual members of the Union des Gueules Cassées, and created a nightmarish montage of all the ruined faces that had been haunting the world’s cinemas for the past fifteen years in the guise of “horror entertainment.” The actual men are nameless, but they could easily be the living models for the masks worn by Lon Chaney, Boris Karloff, Lionel Atwill, and others. As a conscious antiwar statement, J’Accuse is superior; as an unintentional revelation of horror’s major subtext in the twenties and thirties, it is breathtaking.