4 May 2005

Volume Two

One month later, I've finally gotten around to setting up "volume two" of the "God's ex-Boyfriend" site. From now on, all new entries in this category will go there.

In the Realms of the Unreal

my rating:

I pity Henry Darger.

I can identify with him a bit as well.

And I even envy him.

Henry Darger is the subject of In the Realms of the Unreal, a documentary whose name is taken from The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, Darger's magnum opus. It's a 15,000-page story with countless painted illustrations about an imaginary war revolving around seven pre-adolescent blonde princesses. No one knew it existed until just before Darger, a reclusive janitor, died.

The film was made by Jessica Yu, who manages to make do with rather limited material. For one thing, there are only three (black and white) photographs of Darger in existence, one of which barely shows his face and another of which is probably 50 years old. Not a lot of footage to get out of that. The novel is a rambling, incoherent story that apparently doesn't make for very good reading aloud. And still illustrations don't work well in a movie. Her main tool for getting around this is to animate the drawings, which she manages to do without losing their character and turning it into a Disney film. She also interviews the few people who sort of new Darger: his landlords, neighbors, the former altar boy at his parish, etc.

How little-known the man was is emphasized early in the movie by the fact that his closest acquaintances can't even agree on how to pronounce his last name, or where he "always" sat in his multiple-times-per-day attendance at Catholic mass: in the front, the back, or the middle.

But you can learn a lot about him from the work he left behind. He had an obvious fascination with pre-adolescent girls. He collected photographs and illustrations of them, which he used for teaching himself to draw. His art was never very sophisticated, and depended heavily on copying and tracing from photos and other illustrations, then painting with watercolor.

On one hand, the girl heroes of his story were naively innocent, resembling standard cutie-pie figures of the early 20th century. On the other hand, these girls were the leaders of a bloody rebellion of Christian slave children against a ruthless, godless enemy power. And on the third hand, they were frequently drawn nude. And usually with penises.

It's unclear what exactly the penises were about. One theory is that Darger - having grown up in an all-male environment, and probably a virgin - didn't really understand male/female anatomy. But he didn't always give the girls dicks, so he may have understood that not every child was equipped like he had been. Another theory is that he saw them as innocent saviors of a sort, so he drew them like baby Jesus was usually painted: with a little sac and dingus.

There's a definite religious theme to it, which is at times typically naive stuff about the virtuous Christians vs. the evil and enslaving godless foreigners. Darger was a compulsive mass-attender. But there's an undercurrent that seems to challenge God, with Darger producing this horribly violent disaster in his fantasy world, as if to demand that God do something about it. The ending of his epic is conflicted, with two versions: one in which the slave child rebellion succeeds with the defeat of the evil general (named after a bully from Darger's youth), and another in which the Vivian girls lose.

Yu provides a fair amount of biographical information about Darger, which is where most of my pity for him comes. He lost a sister and his mother during childbirth, and his father not long after. He grew up institutionalised as "feeble-minded", which certainly didn't help him become a well-adjusted member of society.

My empathy with him comes from the fact that I'm a less-extreme version of him. He spent all of his spare time alone in his apartment; I get out a bit more than that - such as going to see art films like this (by myself) - but there are times I'd be just as happy to stay in. And obviously no one has every really understood his psychology, which I'm sure is true of me as well.

As for my envy.... how could I not envy him? He produced what has to be the longest novel in history, and unquestionably the longest illustrated novel (which is what I consider "my medium"). His apartment was filled with painting after painting, some of them huge. I have a hard time getting anything onto paper. He had levels of discipline that I can only dream of. Granted, it came out of an obessive/compulsive neurological disorder (an after-the fact diagnosis of Asperger's Syndrome has been tossed around the art world since his work was discovered), but he definitely produced more in his lifetime than I ever will.

There's also the issue of fame. I like to think it doesn't matter to me... but it does. I'd really like my work to be seen by more than dozens of people. And the fact that his paintings are now - after his death and discovery of course - selling for tens of thousands of dollars makes me a little jealous. Even when I'm dead, I can't see anything I've created commanding... well, any money. I guess I'm just not freakish enough.

The thing is, I think I am. I've got ideas for stories that - in my own mind, at least - would blow the roof off. God knows I'm iconoclastic enough that my views are often so far "outside the box" as to question whether or not there's even a box anywhere around to put them in.

But unlike Henry Darger, I don't spend my every waking hour putting my thoughts onto paper (or any other medium). I dabble. When I'm in the mood I might put several hours into something, but I often waste a lot of time doing other things. Like this blog. Or watching TV. Or drinking and not getting much of anything done.

Legal Kiddie Porn

You hear a lot of talk about kiddie porn on the internet. It seems that every legislator on the planet is trying to eradicate it. It's the one category of material that no one on the internet permits; read the terms of service for web hosting services, and if they give specific examples of material they won't permit, child pornography and pirated copyrighted material are the two items always forbidden... but since nearly every music lover in the post-industrial world downloads tunez, it's apparent that only one of those is really universally condemned: kiddie porn.

Except that it's just as obviously not universally condemned. A review of my site logs (as I was just doing) shows that.

Think about it: the reason kiddie porn is such a hot item on law-makers' and law-enforcers' agendas is that it's popular. This isn't just a handful of nutcases with a rare psychosis. Child pornography is something that lots of people out there are looking for. By a wide margin, the single most-hit page on this blog is one in which I prominently mentioned "kiddie porn" (in the context of snuff films, hate crimes, and other targets of recent legislation). That phrase is also the most-common search-engine key showing up in my referrer logs, despite the fact that I've written lots more about a lot of different topics. If I'm getting hundreds of instances of that phrase every month, imagine what Google is getting. And the fact that people are risking prosecution to sell it shows that it's popular enough to be rather profitable.

That raises the question of what this says about our society. The obvious response is that we're heading to hell in a handbasket, we've abandoned morality, etc. I don't buy that.

The modern obession with pornography in general isn't anything new. The only thing that the inventions of photography, motion pictures, video recorders, and the internet, have done over the past century or so, is to make porn easier to produce and distribute. People have always been attracted to images of people in the nude and especially having sex. Any student of art history can tell you that. I see no reason to assume that interest in seeing young people like that is new, either. All you have to do is look at the millennia-old traditions of adult men taking girls in their early teens as wives to confirm that pedophilia - or at least ephebophilia (the attraction to pubescents and adolescents) - has been around for a very long time. Evidently it's a part of human nature.

So what this contemporary hullaballoo over kiddie porn really says about our society is that our society is in conflict with itself. One of the most popular search subjects is also one of the most banned subjects.

I'm not trying to argue that just because it's popular, that makes it right. I understand that spouse-beating and pre-emptive invasions both have long and popular histories, but I'm definitely not advocating either of them. But by the same token, the fact that something's illegal doesn't necessarily make it pernicious, as demonstrated by the prohibition of alcohol in the U.S. in the 1920s, or laws against consensual homosexual activity. You have to look at it objectively, on its own.

The one thing that nearly everyone does agree on regarding child pornography is that abusing children to produce it is wrong. Of course there's some considerable difference opinion about what exactly constitutes "abuse", but there are also some pretty clear "wrong" areas and "right" areas. For example, if a child is physically harmed, that's obviously "wrong". If there are no actual children involved, that seems rather harmless.

After all, we let movie studios use special effects to simulate murder, dangerous stunts, animal abuse, and other things that would be horrible to allow in real life. If a video game showing a virtual soldier blasting the living fuck out of other virtual people isn't a threat to society (the only thing we question is whether children should have access to them), why is a movie showing a virtual 15-year-old masturbating? (I don't mind saying that I personally find the former a lot more disturbing.)

Out of curiosity, I did some research about this. It may surprise you (it surprised me) that the U.S. Supreme Court has said pretty much the same thing, at least as it applies to the question of "obscenity". They ruled that material that was produced without any actual minors - such as illustrations from imagination, or virtual porn - is not "child pornography" and therefore isn't automatically "obscene". (It can still be ruled obscene if it lacks artistic merit and so forth, just like any other sexually explicit material.) Which would be a relief to John Singer Sargent, who painted the accompanying image. On the other hand, other countries have taken the opposite position, and created legal concepts such as an "indecent pseudophotograph of a child", which are outlawed on the grounds that such things would promote child abuse.

If Prohibition, the so-called war on drugs, and the utter failure of efforts to get rid of sex in popular entertainment have shown us anything, it's that where there's an interest in something, you can't just legislate it away. If - as with alcohol, drugs, and porn - there are potentials for abuse and for people to get hurt, then the most reasonable course of action is to let them be... with regulation to limit their harmfulness. So why not let the NAMBLA guys draw their naughty pictures, let dirty old men make virtual-school-girl movies, and so forth... and put the hurt of the law on anyone who abuses actual boys or girls?

I'm not saying, "If you can't beat them, give up". I'm saying, "If you can't beat them... maybe you're playing the wrong game."

Birth

my rating:

Birth was a disappointment. It could have been a really great film, but ended up leaving me mostly un-engaged. It's about a widow who - 10 years after the death of her husband, and following the announcement of her new engagement - is approached by a 10-year-old boy who claims to be her late husband. OK, stranger things have happened in movies, but this one just isn't believable... not in the sense that "it couldn't happen", but "it wouldn't happen like this". The characters' reactions are all dictated by the plot, rather than making sense from them as characters.

There was a tempest in a teapot over the fact that Nicole Kidman (the widow) and Cameron Bright (the boy) have a scene in which they share a bathtub. "Child pornography!" some shrieked. "Disgusting!" some spat. "Child abuse!" some wailed. It was none of that. At the risk of spoiling it, here's what happens: Kidman is taking a bath (no nipples or other naughty bits shown or hinted at). Bright walks in, gets undressed (the last full-body shot reveals his undies), and sits at the other end of the tub. Kidman demands an explanation of what he's doing. He replies (rather blandly), "Looking at my wife." End scene. And for the record, both actors wore bathing suits for filming. There's also a scene in which the two kiss on the street. A little more intimate than any kiss I've ever shared with, say, my mom, but it was no more intense than when one of my sisters' friends showed me how to kiss, at about the same age. Furthermore, it was acting; the kid certainly wouldn't traumatized by it.

The kid's lack of passion is symptomatic about why the film didn't really work. I'm not blaming the actor; he was following the script and direction. The widow is appropriately skeptical of the boy's claim to be her husband, but she seems willing to entertain the notion despite the fact that he doesn't behave like the husband would have acted. No, "I'm so happy to see you again, punkin!" and nibbling on her ear, just "Don't marry whatshisname," sitting in the tub with her. And the tests of his authenticity all focus on his knowledge of private facts only the late Sean would know, not the obvious sniff test of "Does he seem like Sean?"

It seems like the movie was intended to leave the audience wondering along with the widow whether the boy is who he claims to be, or what. But in the course of providing the necessary foreshadowing of the answer, it provides the answer rather obviously. It doesn't take too much brain power to connect the dots from A to B to C... to D. There was a little bit of surprise about one aspect of the final proof, but the basis question of "is he or isn't he?" was answered even before he said "I am."

A Series of Unfortunate Jim Carrey Scenes

my rating: Nathan's rating:

It was through a series of unfortunate events that I came to see Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. The movie that Nathan and I had intended to see had been canceled due to a projector failure, and our second choice wasn't going to be showing for another hour. So we went to see ASoUE.

It's not a bad film. It's more like two films - one good, the other abysmal - spliced together. One film was a kind of subtle and dark comedy, about three children whose parents are killed in a suspicious fire, and their struggles to deal with the world on their own. The other film is a Jim Carrey comedy, in which a rubber-faced slapstick screwball actor chews the scenery.

I haven't read (or talked to anyone who has read) any of the Lemony Snicket books, so maybe that wacky stuff was in there. But I suspect it was more a matter of the producers being worried that a story about children surrounded by murders and other unfortunate events would be too "heavy", and the humor derived from the narration too "dry"... so they let Carrey do his moronic overacting schtick every so often.

Those bits actually drew a fair amount of chuckles from the audience. But the chucklers were probably bored in between. I, on the other hand, got tired of Carrey just after seeing the bits from the trailer, in the early scene in which his character meets the kids. The irony is that Carrey plays several different roles over the course of the film, supposeldy giving him a chance to show off the different characters he can do. But they're all just the same generic cartoon character he plays in his screwball comedies... in costume with accents. What makes it especially ironic is that Carrey can play other roles effectively. (I loved Truman and Eternal Sunshine.) But not this one.

Team America: Satire without Comedy

my rating: Nathan's rating:

I went into Team America: World Police afraid that I was about to sit through a bunch of stoopid adolescent "shock" gags of the sort that South Park is infamous for. By the time it was over, I was wishing for more of them, because there was so little else there.

The movie consists of maybe half a dozen funny ideas, each with the potential for some laughs. But that's not enough to fill a feature film, so there's a lot of padding in which nothing interesting happens. The characters and plot plod through the clichés they're trying to satirise (in effect, making this just another bad action flick, but done with marionettes), boring me to the point that when the funny bits came along, all they got was a chuckle.

Then there's more predictable stuff happening, then the same joke comes along again, and this time it doesn't even get the chuckle. By the time the martial arts scene in which the puppets freeze in mid-air (suspended by their strings) and spin around, you've been waiting so long for it, it's not even funny. Doing the movie classic-Thunderbirds style, with marionettes is a fun idea. But it's not enough to turn all the dull, clichéd scenes into satire. They're just dull, clichéd scenes featuring wooden actors.

I was also prepared for the possibility of being offended... not by the "adult" material, but from the political jokes, which were promised to be scathing and aimed at figures across the political spectrum. I must have missed most of them. OK, so there's the worse-than-the-disease Rambo-mentality American military intervention on the one side (pretty obvious stuff), and the pawns-of-terrorists liberal celebrities on the other (stretched so far that it fails to be funny, because it bears no resemblance to anything we've seen). Yes, Kim Jong Il features prominently in it, but to be satire, you need to take actual characteristics and exaggerate them, not just take a standard megalomaniacle villain, and put a real person's name on it. The trailer promises to make George W. Bush and John Kerry very mad, but aside from W. pretending to be offended by the sex scene, I can't see why they would be; neither of them is even mentioned, let alone satirised.

The fact that so many prominent public figures were parodied doesn't make it satire, either. It became pretty clear pretty quickly that this was just a chance for the producers to titter as they ridiculed (and eventually killed) lots of famous people. Likewise, there's a song (one of the writers longs to write Broadway musicals) that exists only to whine about how the writer didn't like the movie Pearl Harbor. A movie that relentlessly ridicules popular entertainers for making political statements comes across as particularly lame coming from... a couple of popular entertainers.

The movie isn't without it's good points. There are genuinely funny bits sprinkled throughout it, and even the frat-boy-level humor of the puppet sex scene or the theme song with all the "fuck yeahs" in it were amusing. But if the movie has no serious point to make, and all you've got in the humor department are those half-dozen ideas, then it would have been better off as a non-stop half-hour laff riot instead of two hours of snores punctuated by snickers.

Christopher Reeve, Superman

It's a rude awakening when the wake-up timer on your clock radio turns it on just in time for the announcer to tell you that one of your heroes has died. Christopher Reeve died yesterday, of heart failure.

I wrote an entry about Reeve last year, which expresses much of what I thought of the man and why. What it boils down to is the fact that, despite spending the last decade of his life as the physical antithesis of Superman, he even moreso typified the character of Superman: good-natured, courageous, altruistic, and unwilling to accept defeat. He continued to pursue his Lois Lane (directing and acting) and he never gave up the fight against his Lex Luthor (paralysis... not just his own, but that of any spinal cord injury sufferer).

I wrote earlier: In the first movie, Jor-El (played by Brando) said to his son, "They can be a great people, Kal-El; they wish to be. They only lack the light to show the way. For this reason, above all, their capacity for good, I have sent them you, my only son." Who knew that he was really talking about Christopher Reeve?

Friday Night Lights - Pathological Football

my rating: Nathan's rating:

I went to a high school that didn't have any athletic programs, and after seeing Friday Night Lights, I thanks the gods that I was able to get an education in a place that was free of that sort of thing. The movie is (mostly) a welcome deviation from the standard Hollywood "sports movie" formula in which a team or player triumphs over adversity to make it to the championships and so on.

Instead it portrays academic athletics (in this case high school football) as the focus of dysfunctional communities. This isn't the story of a high school and a town that have lost sight of the true spirit of football; this is the story of a community and its citizens who have been twisted into horrible people by football.

You have town leaders who tell the coach that the team is going to win, period. You have teachers who let students slide through classes without learning anything because it'll give the team a good player for a couple years. You have former players whose lives since graduation are so empty that they have nothing to live for but to live vicariously through their children. You have neighbors who put "for sale" signs in the coach's yard when they lose a game. You have parents who'll risk their child's health and safety to let him play.

It's not "town spirit"... it's more like a town haunting. Scene after scene of abuse... psychological, physical, mental... and the people who are supposed to be looking out for the well-being of these kids - their parents, their educators, their coaches - are the ones fucking them up.

Unfortunately, the script changes direction near the end and undercuts everything it was trying to say before that. It's not quite a textbook Hollywood ending, but it's full of plays pulled from the sports-movie playbook, even the "play it for the gipper" scene. At the end it almost tries to tell the audience that these poor abused boys are going to be alright, even though we'd already seen what abuse-perpetuating wrecks other former athletes turned out to be.

It also can't decide whether to present the coach as a victim of the town's obsession (they turn against him when he doesn't give the wins they want), as part of the problem himself (telling his players to "be perfect" and blaming them personally for their every shortcoming), or as an inspiration for the players (in a final locker-room speech in which he suddenly shows a hint of perspective about the game).

But at least it raised the questions in the first 3/4 of the movie, with enough disturbing scenes that the thin papering-over of the ending doesn't completely wipe them from memory.

I know it's possible to play sports in school and to get good things out of it. I've had friends who've done that, and they were glad they did. But it's always seemed to me that they enjoyed in spite of the athletics system, not because of it.

If someone wants to make a movie about athletes overcoming great odds to be victorious, how about one about some high school students who say "to hell" with school spirit, community support, family expectations, and the win-at-any-cost mentality of academic athletics, and learn how to have fun and enrich their lives by playing games together?

A Dirty Shame - Been There, Done That

my rating:

I have a magnet on my refrigerator that reads "It's only kinky the first time". It's supposed to be a come-on, a line to coax somebody into doing something they think is too weird for them. But my boyfriend Andy read it differently, as a lament: yeah, "it" will be kinky the first time you do it, but from then on, it'll just be sex. Which is fine and wonderful... but nothing special.

A Dirty Shame is a story about (among other things) sex messiah Ray Ray and his apostles, who are trying to discover a new sex act that no one has ever done. Yeah, they have exuberant and abnormal sex lives, but it's all been done... and for those who get their thrills from kinkiness (i.e. novelty), that's not enough.

Unfortunately, the movie also depends on novelty to shock the audience... and at least in my case, it failed. There were parts of the movie where - perhaps satirising educational movies - they stopped to introduce characters, tell us what their sexual fetish was, and explain what that meant. "Hi, we're bears. That means we're big and hairy and homosexual. This is our younger friend; he's a cub. An otter is someone who..." This isn't a direct quote (it wasn't quite that staged and talky), but it's pretty close.

OK, so the idea of "bears" might be new to some people, but to me it's about as eye-opening as the idea of "stock brokers" (people who buy and sell shares of companies for a living). Even the few fetishes I hadn't heard of before weren't exactly shocking; OK, so there are people who like to leave unflushed turds behind in public restrooms. {shrug} Waters swears that everything in the movie is an actual erotic fetish. Um, sure. Why not? Do people really doubt the existence of, say, autoerotic asphyxiation? I'm pretty sure I've seen that on ER or NYPD Blue. And movies like American Pie and the whole modern gross-out genre have raised the bar for offensiveness.

The same kind of been-there-done-that feeling starts cropping up the fourth or fifth time someone gets hit on the head and is transformed from a prude into a pervert or back again, or the fourth or fifth time that one of the designated prudes stops to rail against some perversion, or the fourth or fifth time that Ray Ray shouts "Let's go sexin'!" like some kind of freak from Reefer Madness... but without the humorous irony of the filmmaker actually taking it seriously.

Some reviewers are saying that the only reason you might not love this movie is if you're easily offended. The other possible reason is that you're not easily offended... because then you might be amused from time to time, but still disappointed. Back in the "golden (shower) age" of John Waters' movie-making back in the 1970's, he filmed things that no one had ever filmed before, and it gaves his films a real edge. To be fair, there are probably a few never-been-filmed (outside of porn) things here as well, especially around the, er, climax (and just maybe the "new sex act" they came up with really is never-been-done). It's still somewhat fun - even the same old Tuesday night missionary position sex can be entertaining - but overall, A Dirty Shame just... isn't kinky any more.

Sky Captain and Yesterday's World of Tomorrow

my rating: Nathan's rating:

Nathan got the two of us into an advance screening of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, starring Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow. (Actually Nathan kept referring to it as an "Angelina Jolie movie", and I had to point out to him that she had only a supporting role.) It was pretty much what I expected, which is to say that it was pretty good.

The film is a tidy bundle of influences and contradictions... and it wears them on its sleeve. Like Raiders of the Lost Ark, it aims to recapture the spirit of a bygone era of moviemaking, specifically adventure serials circa 1940. Sky Captain adds a heavy dose of pulp science fiction and comic book heroics, taking advantage of the ability of modern cinema to actually deliver the "special effects" that only prose and illustrations could achieve 65 years ago. Giant robots, ray guns, amphibious fighter craft, and other staples of wide-eyed SF come to life.

The greatest irony of the film is that it uses digital rendering to create the imagery of a pre-computer era. The actors were filmed (or should we start saying "recorded"?) on a blank soundstage, with all of the environments created and added digitally. Since about the only thing that digital imaging can't animate convincingly is human actors, they get the best of both worlds that way. Filmmaker Kerry Conran wanted to produce this in black and white, but apparently the studio talked him into a subdued, almost sepia-toned look, which works pretty effectively.

Once upon a time this film would have knocked the audience on its collective ass, with its action sequences and cinematography. But it failed to bowl me over, because... yeah, I know you can render anything on a computer, so I'm really not that impressed that you can render _____. And the acting was just a little too authentic to the genre and period it was evoking, with two-dimensional lead characters like the rogue hero and the meddlesome heroine, and supporting characters like the resourceful assistant, the old colleague/flame, and the old friend/native guide. Indiana Jones, by contrast, was a more rounded, more interesting character.

It's no summer blockbuster, but summer's over, and in terms of fun entertainment, it beats the pants off any movie released in the last month.

Paparazzi: Hollywood Propaganda

my rating: Nathan's rating:

Paparazzi is a fascinating psychological study... of a psychosis peculiar to Hollywood and other bastions of "celebrity". It is a peek inside the delusional mind of Tinseltown, where tabloid photographers are not merely bottom-feeders catering to an audience that loves to tear down actors as quickly as it adores them. (Which, for the record, is my opinion of them.)

No, in this version of reality, paparazzi are first-class slimeballs who take joy in causing pain and suffering. No dirty trick is too low or too devious. They deliberately provoke assaults from wholesome celebrities, in order to file lucractive suits against them... and still go after their prey relentlessly, despite their winnings. They don't care who gets hurt by their actions (not even the wholesome leading man's loving wife and young son) as long as it provides them with good photos. You want to know how evil they are? One of them got barred from being a lawyer.

My gods, this film was horrible. I've seen Cold-War-era propaganda movies whose Commies were more sympathetic and believable than these Bad Guys. And while the Good Guy of the film strays over the line when he fights back, in the grand Hollywood tradition of vigilante heroes that's more like a pat on the back for him, showing just how far an ordinary, unpretentious, salt-of-the-earth movie star will go when his family is harmed. This is Death Wish gone Hollywood, an obvious piece of propaganda from folks in the movie industry who want us to feel sorry for them.

On some level I do feel sorry for actors or anyone else who has to put up with the tabloid media. I think that whole industry is disgusting, and I don't participate in it. But it's a monster that Hollywood created, and continues to feed, so my sympathy is for their poor judgment, not for their supposed innocent victimisation.

But the bottom line isn't whether I agree with the point of view of the producers. Blatant propaganda makes for poor entertainment, and that's what this is.

(The writer has no previous credits, and the director is producer Mel Gibson's former hair stylist. Gibson has a cameo in it, and the lead character feels like it's based on him and a role he would've played himself if he were young enough. So I'm going to file this turd as one of Gibson's.)