MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
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Lovestruck Hero or Creepy Harasser?
By barefooted on Tue, 02/27/2018 - 3:27pm |Two years ago, film critic Sara Stewart sat down to rewatch “Sixteen Candles,” one of her favorite 1980s John Hughes comedies. She was mortified. One scene, played for laughs — the ostensible hero gifting his drunk girlfriend to another boy — seemed like a manual for rape. Stewart wrote a column about the offensive aspects of the movie, and was met with vitriol. Readers accused her of being humorless, of ruining something beloved.
“But if I wrote that column now,” she speculates, “I feel like people might be in agreement with me.”
It's interesting to think about old movies and TV shows in a different light; especially one that's shining as brightly as the new focus on sexual harassment. We're used to doing it when we view anything that uses racial or religious epitaphs, stereotypes, language or just really overt insults - we're appalled - but what about when we're watching a beloved series or rom-com and a woman is demeaned (or worse)?
URL:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/lovestruck-hero-or-creepy-harasser-suddenly-were-seeing-our-favorite-rom-coms-in-a-new-light/2018/02/27/1d3d85d2-06a8-11e8-94e8-e8b8600ade23_story.html?utm_term=.655caba09cbb
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Lots and lots and lots of examples of women being demeaned. Here's dialog from one scene from "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" in which Etta Place (Katharine Ross) takes it on the chin:
Butch Cassidy: Jeesh, all Bolivia can't look like this.
Sundance Kid: How do you know? This might be the garden spot of the whole country. People may travel hundreds of miles just to get to this spot where we're standing now. This might be the Atlantic City, New Jersey of all Bolivia for all you know.
Butch Cassidy: Look, I know a lot more about Bolivia than you know about Atlantic City, New Jersey, I can tell you that!
Sundance Kid: Aha! You do, huh? I was born there, I was born in New Jersey. Was brought up there, so...
Butch Cassidy: You're from the east? I didn't know that.
Sundance Kid: The total tonnage of what you don't know is enough to shatter...
Etta Place: I'm not sure we're accomplishing as much as we'd like here.
Sundance Kid: Listen, your job is to back me up, because you'd starve without me. And you, your job is to shut up!
Butch Cassidy: He'll feel a lot better after he's robbed a couple of banks.
Sundance Kid: Bolivia. Hahahaha...
link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064115/quotes
Remember the old Mary Tyler Moore show, when Lou Grant/Ed Asner would sometimes say to Mary Richards/Mary Tyler Moore "Mary, Mary, Mary...."? Really condescending tone of voice, which could be attributable to boss/employee, and experienced hand vs. less experienced hand, as well as male/female dynamics. And IIRC she was considered something of a feminist icon at the time as a female character in primetime TV who was not defined by her association with a man.
In "All in the Family", Archie Bunker frequently would belittle his wife Edith and daughter Gloria (in fairness, also his son-in-law, the "meathead" Michael Stivik/Rob Reiner, plus people of color, other "white" ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians, religious minorities...)
In the TV show "M*A*S*H", Hawkeye especially would engage in behaviors with the female nurses, meant to charm male audiences, which would be looked at differently today, for sure.
by AmericanDreamer on Tue, 02/27/2018 - 4:11pm
To dial this back a bit, taking examples into the realm of nitpicking may not be productive. It's one of the major pushbacks against the #metoo movement* and it makes sense, so let's not go overboard. There are tons of examples that we can point to over the decades, and you've pointed out several, that are certainly cringe-worthy but may not meet whatever the current understanding is(?) of harassment. To be fair, I thought the same of some of the article's examples. Nonetheless, I think it's a worthwhile consideration.
*I'd love some other way of referencing the acknowledgment of sexual harassment and the far more dangerous assaults.
by barefooted on Tue, 02/27/2018 - 4:59pm
Yes, good points. There is a difference between demeaning comments vs. sexual assault. Obviously both can constitute sexual harassment. And there are gray areas with both where reasonable people can disagree on whether a line has been crossed that should not be crossed.
by AmericanDreamer on Tue, 02/27/2018 - 5:05pm
For one, we watch flicks often to see outrageous, unjustifiable behavior. Think of Fight Club or Heathers or Animal House or Bonnie & Clyde or Blue Velvet... And is there historical treatment of women as being in some subclass, a kind of utilitarian sex slave role, occasionally flipped? oh yeah, Dangerous Liaisons, based on an 18th Century novel. Cause of course it wasn't until recently that women could own property, vote, and most importantly, sue the fuck out of someone (not that women are always in the position financially or socially to sue - though if you were Queen, you could have someone beheaded - as it appears one of my very distant relatives was).
A good chunk of movies have gratuitous rape or totally exploitive sex - often with a thin veneer of condemning or empowering, reasons why I got jaded with Almodovar and Lars von Trier over time, while Kusturica is as primitive in ways as you might expect from the Balkans. (Sam Peckinpah is different - he knows you want to see it, packages it, ties it in with his violent image of earth, grinds your nose in it). But hey, these are movie movies, not sitcoms. But still, everyone knows Romeo & Juliet is about boffing a 13-year-old, Shakespeare or not, while The Taming of the Shrew aka 10 Things I Hate About You is totally sexist, exactly the kind of trading a girl as a sexual conquest as this article notes. How do we justify? Or are we like that?
Somehow I think the imagery of Blue Velvet is useful about now - beneath this saccharine sweet suburban veneer of corny jokes and cute 50s-like crushes, there's this sick gnawing of primal insects and more primal lust and violence. And after Geoffrey has had his taste of this underworld, he pulls himself out, like Orpheus returned from hell, and anchors himself again in this cheesy world - he's seen too much. I'm much inclined to hit fast forward at the moment, though I'm afraid my remote's not working quite right. We'll see.
by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 02/27/2018 - 5:51pm
I don't think the article was meant as an attempt to make people stop watching anything, rather to simply view things in a different light. If I missed that as the intent, then I disagree. The eye glasses analogy is a good one.
You mention many examples of movies that are "movie movies, not sitcoms", and there really is a difference. Your offerings are all over the place; which is cool but not necessarily on point. I haven't thought of Blue Velvet in forever (it's Jeffrey, by the way), though David Lynch has always struck me as a bit over zealous. But it was great fun to see that mentioned alongside Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, The Fight Club ... and Animal House. Awesome!
I don't hit fast forward. I still enjoy and laugh at Archie Bunker as a stereotypical everything-that's-bad-about-us buffoon and even get a kick out of Jack Benny reruns. What does that say about me? I'd like to think it means that I can still appreciate what it meant to live in a time that's different then the one I live in now. The important point, I guess, is to understand the difference.
by barefooted on Wed, 02/28/2018 - 3:02am
I wasn't really insinuating the article stated this or that - I just have some feeling that we got caught looking at Playboy, and now we're going to be punished by being forced to... read medical journals. And somehow I mean that for both sexes - even though we're rather programmed as a species for girl-ogling. It's kind of like the ethnic jokes I have trouble telling anymore - simply because you need *some* downtrodden ethnic or religious or whatever person to be the pawn in the scheme, not that you dislike or are prejudiced against them, and it doesn't tell as well or tickle our inner "I shouldn't be doing this..." when you use "two Venutians walk into a bar" (unless of course it's some dirty cosmos traveller bit). Like, what will happen to those tawdry light romance/rape fantasy books that women used to buy by the dozens - or more precisely, where does this type of energy and interest go when it's locked down in one direction. I imagine it became less fun once it was pointed out incessantly that these books are un-PC and somehow self-demeaning.
I guess the quandary for women is so much of the time they're part of the audience but also the butt of the joke or object of studied abuse, and it requires a dichotomy to disassociate from the obvious conclusion, "oh, this is about someone like me" and still maintain a feeling of entertainment. I'm not sure how we do that, or at least how women do that - for me, I'll always be able to feed my inner pig...within reason, of course. It was a fairly big deal when they stopped showing cigarettes in movies, even though now some 30(?) years later, lack of public smoking at least in the US is catching up. But once we start weeding out these uncomfortable unfair situations out of our daily no-brainer sitcoms, what is it that will engage our attention? because one of the dark secrets about smoking is that it was always about killing time - such as sitting in a bar for hours ain't that amusing by itself, but the drag on the butt helps bide the time, whereas scoffing a drink that frequently would call for a rather unsustainable for most level of drunkenness. Extend that to whatever other long, drawn-out tedious event.... [me, I use coffee for much the same thing]. In terms of our relationships and poking fun at our daily existence, once we start dismissing all our stereotypes and well-trodden abusive jokes, will we really have enough left to sustain us?
[and yes, Jeffrey, though I always figured Lynch wanted it to sound pretentious like Heineken instead of PBR, maybe the Joffrey Ballet]
PPS - Quinn Norton discovers it's rather hard to be totally edgy and totally cool but PC at the same time. Good luck in this Brave New World. I'm not talking about hyper-feminist safe rooms - I'm talking about freako-bondage-alt lifestyles somehow being both affirming and respectful to others but way beyond our usual modest titillating sexuality - and still hold down a job at NY Times or other mag.
by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 02/28/2018 - 3:32am
Oh, good freaking lord. Now you have me feeling like a total hypocrite because when I was (much) younger I loved "romance novels". I consumed them. While way too young to totally understand the male/female dynamic in an adult way, they gave me a glimpse into a world of tough, sinewy men and beautiful, willowy women. Weirdly, perhaps, I never thought of the women being demeaned or harassed ... the ones I preferred depicted the women as strong enough to "challenge" the man's strength and eventually (key word) "bring him to his knees" - I don't recall harassment - but I was young and it was long ago. Maybe that's the point. I can't say how women feel when and if they read such things today, but speaking for myself my eye glasses likely wouldn't have a strong enough prescription.
Your reading Playboy vs. medical journals point is apt. So is most of the rest of what you said; until you started in on the smoking/drinking thing. I get that you're making a point, but I'm not sure where that one lands. Ending smoking in movies, TV shows, ads, etc. is one thing - ending sexual harassment, abuse, exploitation or worse not only isn't the same, ending it won't - and can't - happen. Not telling you anything, just pointing it out.
PPS response: not sure she's your best example.
by barefooted on Wed, 02/28/2018 - 4:24am
I don't think it's hypocritical. What a man or woman fantasizes about, be it romance or sex or masturbation, is often not what they want in reality. I'm not totally sure why that disconnect exists but I'm pretty sure the disconnect exists in a majority of cases. I don't think that's quite the same as what PP is talking about.
by ocean-kat on Wed, 02/28/2018 - 6:02am
I'd guess most fantasies don't rise to the complexity of a sitcom episode or feature film, but if I thought it might help that actually come through, I'm sure I could concoct a number of plot twists and walk-on roles. Maybe when VR/AR hits mainstream and we're all doing Total Recall-like hidden worlds....
by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 02/28/2018 - 8:35am
You might consider that perfectly reasonable opinion the next time you bring up Sanders' writings on the subject.
However, Republican voters and oppo-researchers won't likely care about the subtle differences, eh?
by barefooted on Wed, 02/28/2018 - 4:44pm
I'm not sure what you're saying here. I've never claimed Sanders did or wants to do any of the things he wrote about in his published sex based articles. All I've claimed is that those sex based articles would be extremely damaging to him if he was the democratic presidential candidate in the general election.
I'll also point out that I only brought up Sanders sex based articles when Hal asked me specifically why I think Sanders would have been a bad presidential candidate and likely would have lost. And then only after he badgered me when I avoided answering the question several times and mocked me for not answering. So in the end he got exactly what he wanted.
by ocean-kat on Wed, 02/28/2018 - 6:12pm
You're absolutely right, and I apologize for my bumbling attempt at humor.
by barefooted on Thu, 03/01/2018 - 2:13am
No worries. I think I'm overly sensitive on the subject. I didn't like bringing up the articles. I didn't want to do it. Throughout the primary I never brought up the subject. I hate doing the republicans work for them. I felt I was pushed into posting on it by Hal's relentless criticism of Hillary and aggressive questioning of me. Part of me feels bad for bringing it up and criticizing me for it is justified. It made me uncomfortable but that doesn't mean I won't do it again if I'm pushed so hard I feel I need to to push back.
by ocean-kat on Thu, 03/01/2018 - 2:38am
You have no reason to feel bad about bringing them up - you certainly weren't the first in the public sphere, nor the last. Politics is an ugly business, and having to discuss ugly things can make good people feel a bit tarnished even if they're simply stating fact. Note that "good people" is the operative part of the above sentence, as I was referring to you.
Since neither of us wants to further discuss Sanders on this thread, I'll leave it there.
by barefooted on Thu, 03/01/2018 - 2:45am
Wasn't trying to imply "hypocrite" - more "conflicted" or "evolving/devolving" ("edgy + retro/devolved") or perhaps just "different tastes for different moments"
Re: Quinn Norton, I don't think I wanted a "good" example - I wanted a messy example, as most are, kind of an old primitive Net News vs modern Javascript/CSS websites.
Except for smoking, which is a very simplified example vs the can of worms we're digging into. Some seem to think yhis new desired sexual behavior/male-female interplay is just a few rules and all woll be okay, but especially when many of those rules collide with human behavior and conflicted emotions, well, don't expect it to be as easy as "No Smoking Permitted". [I'm a bit dissapointed in Monica's foray into this - suddenly after all these years she discovers she was on the wrong end of power? Well, to some extent, *he* the most powerful man on earth was the one trapped - couldn't leave the building without a social security detail even. I had figured they both did what they wanted to do, bending office rules (but not practice) a bit, and had the misfortune to have it caught up in politics. But now it has to slide into the latest framing...
by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 02/28/2018 - 8:29am
Didn't at all mean that you were trying to imply it, just that your mention of the reading material and its relevance made me sorta go ACK!
As with any "ism", it won't go away. Best we can hope for is a better understanding that is built upon by future generations, but I fear it will simply be the usual ebb and flow that accompanies humanity. Then again, in the larger sense, is that necessarily a bad thing?
Monica. Sigh. This isn't her first foray (as she mentions), but it certainly has the whiff of current cultural opportunism. Not badly written overall - but more a puff piece than anything else. Vanity Fair loves those.
by barefooted on Wed, 02/28/2018 - 4:37pm
I don't know if you would agree, or meant to imply as much, but I believe boredom is underrated as a contributing causal factor in stuff people do, both public decisions made by public people and in ordinary everyday life.
When it comes to public decisions made by public people, it would sound flaky for analysts and pundit types to talk about this. If you doubt that, imagine the reaction if, say, Fareed Zakaria were to talk about the role of boredom in influencing why an individual did something on a CNN Sunday talking heads show (it's a measure of what an outlier Trump is that talking about, or speculating about, how boredom may have played a role in why he tweeted something or did something might not sound flaky. Here again he is the exception that proves the rule.). Such a comment would not pass the unspoken respectability test for what pundits say.
I don't think that is solely because it would be difficult to determine whether boredom was a factor in why public person X did Y. Two of the unspoken norms of public affairs commentary are that a) it is about serious business, and b) public people are serious people who are not influenced by boredom to act as they do.
One of these days, someone will write a fascinating (or then again, it might be boring) book or find another way of demonstrating the role of boredom in all manner of fateful decisions that have influenced the course of human history and/or ordinary everyday human affairs. Or maybe it's already been written or produced and I missed class the day it came out.
by AmericanDreamer on Wed, 02/28/2018 - 1:16pm
I post pseudonym so I don't have to worry (so much) about repercussions over contrary opinions.
People do a lot to avoid boredom.
by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 02/28/2018 - 2:03pm
One of the reasons I do so as well.
by AmericanDreamer on Wed, 02/28/2018 - 2:16pm
and now we're going to be punished by being forced to... read medical journals.
No you're not. So long as we have freedom of speech.
You aren't talking anything new to me after 50 some art history courses and then looking at millions of works of art produced over many eras in many environments over several millenia.
"They" have these sayings like what's old is new again, or **** is the new black or I know it when I see it.
There is always a generation gap. I have been thinking lately hard it must have been for most Greatest Generation to deal with the late 60's youthquake. They and their Lawrence Welk were always the enemy to me, now I see what it must have been like. Most of them adjusted quite quickly to wearing comfortable clothes in public and hearing rock n'roll on the elevator, kind of amazing that. (#MAGA is not so much a return cycle as a last gasp of 1950's Greatest Generation.)
They'll always be cigarettes in some movies, they'll just be smoked by historical characters and they might not be called movies anymore, they might be archeological virtual reality sites.
Do you realize how much you're putting yourself in a political frame? I think what you are freaking out about is that the Overton window of what being a liberal Democrat culturally is pulling away from you. So what? It's just politics with two big tent parties and you don't fit in one well. Welcome to the Independent club, not news to me nor someone like Maiello. Truth be told, political correctness has always bothered me, the old version, too, just don't like it, neither does most of my family, come to think of it, must be a Wisconsin thing.
They call it political correctness because it's political. Not art.Not culture. Political.
On
Sheesh is she a horrible writer! I really wasted some time looking at her links. Context blahblahblah, whatever context you put her in, her work sucks, mho. There's no communication there, just blather. Whether The Grey Lady's decision was because the lady decided she wanted to stick to her grey brand (which would mean political correctness as defined by elite culture at large) or whether it was because of critical judgment, I think she made a wise choice.
by artappraiser on Wed, 02/28/2018 - 3:28pm
He heh heh - "Freak Out" - that's Zappa, no? It's like watching the 60's develop if you've already watched the 60's develop, or for you, familiar with thousands of years of art. The Hals of the world will spend their greying years wearing Dior & managing money market funds and seeing how productive their 3rd World work teams are this month, or giving 3 hour speeches about nothing to the wall like Castro. "I saw the best minds if my generation..."
BTW - Norton's no exception - many of the new writers thrust upon us are no grand thing. The content machine demands content, but not necessarily *good* content. Likes can be manyfactured as needed, much like Bitcoins. Come to think of it, why do we need both - isn't that our trading currency already?
Your adoring Lawrence Welk fan
by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 03/01/2018 - 12:15am
Bubbles are underrated.
by barefooted on Thu, 03/01/2018 - 3:37am
Your first sentence is how I took it as well--not suggesting that people not watch particular kinds of depictions of gender relations, or a hope that producers stop depicting them, just ruminating on how mores change and we look at the same depictions differently as a result.
Goodness gracious, how sterile art would be if it did not reflect humanity in its reality and complexity.
by AmericanDreamer on Wed, 02/28/2018 - 10:02am
Good observation IMO. I believe popular entertainment can affect culture as they reflect upon it. Movies are scripted to create female heroes and thereby empower females and show them a better way, black heroes are produced to empower black children, etc. It is not about gender relations but rather about mano a mano or some such crap, but here is the final big scene in a well loved movie that shows a good guy with a gun handling the universal life problem of bullying. Lots of impressionable young boys, some no doubt who were very troubled, saw who the hero of that scene was and how he became one. Every American boy is expected to be a hero.
by A Guy Called LULU on Wed, 02/28/2018 - 11:14am
Yes, I played Mean Girls and Fatal Attraction and Girl Interrupted and Show Girls to my daughters when young so they would have proper role models. Yhank God they now have some heroes in life. Oops, gotta run - Stepford Wives remake is playing on TV - still haven't seen it.
by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 03/01/2018 - 12:19am
I hope you made them watch Carrie before they went to the prom so they knew what to do if people were picking on them.
by ocean-kat on Thu, 03/01/2018 - 12:33am
Oh that was in pre-school in case they hit those "changes in life" early. Helped with their religious upbringing as well.
And don't think "make" we discuss these decisions as a family to make sure all concur.
by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 03/01/2018 - 12:39am
Yeah Missy, just think:
LUCY, YOU HAVE SOME SPLAININ TO DO!
hahahahah
I love 30's movies, when I am in the mood.
But Carole Lombard might be spanked on the behind; everyone in the scene giggles.
John Adams had a wife who would write to him everyday:
DO NOT FORGET THE WOMEN!
Well....A hundred and fifty years later, Women got the vote.
Progress and not perfection, as they say.
by Richard Day on Thu, 03/01/2018 - 1:20pm