ooo ooo ooo new books and a movie
By shag carpet bomb • Apr 13th, 2009 • Category: Black Feminist Thought, Books & Book Reviews, Class, Racialization, Research, Too Heavy A Load, Women of Color Feminismwent to see Observe and Report over the weekend, on the strength of Lauren’s (Faux Real Tho) comments about the director’s previous work. I have had The Foot Fist Way on my list of must-sees for awhile…
Meanwhile, I ordered my book for my feminist book reading group last week and it finally arrived. While logged in, I noticed a book on my list was a penny, so I ordered Deborah Gray White’s Too Heavy A Load: Black Women In Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994, which ought to be an excellent read.
I loved White’s Ar’n't I a Woman which was about the constructions of, among other things, black and white femininity under slavery. I’m looking forward to what she has to say about this later era, especially since we had some interesting and sometimes heated discussion of the women’s club and social uplift movements and their relationship to what Higgenbotham calls the “politics of respectability” and what Michael Eric Dyson identifies as a war on the black poor and working class waged by the black middle class.
Off to go read now! Wheee.
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shucks. was the stalker movie any good? “observe and report” great stalker title.
ha. it’s funny how very little attention has been paid to the title. observe and report is what fake bacon do: they observe behavior and then report that behavior/activity to the real bacon.
essentially, this is, whether the director intended it or not (and who cares after The Po Moe eh? :), is the story of the band of brothers ruled by the law of the father who keeps all the good stuff in life for himself: the babes and the guns. except the band of outlaws — outlaw, delusional hyper-masculinity — is at war with official, delusional, hypermasculinity.
i mean gary, you’d love it what with you basic animosity toward men :)
as i wrote to someone late at night, while tired, and still awash in the movie: the rape scene that has angered Teh Feministas is the least of the matter. the entire movie is about the way perverse, contagious, violent masculinity — institutionalized, sanctioned violent masculinity is in battle with upstart, rebel, outlaw, non-official masculinity — all in the service of upholding the fantasy of the madonna/whore complex. gayle rubin’s “traffic in women” comes to mind: men relate to one another only via women who serve to legitimate exchange between men.
i’m trying to write a review but i cannot put my finger on what it is about the character’s basic insanity. i want to say that the director thinks that masculinity is basically delusional, insane, paranoid.
it is fundamentally out of touch with reality. and the main character is certainly that. the kind of strange thing about him is that, the more off the hinge he gets, the more he appears to have some connection to reality. (but upon more viewings, i’m gonna guess that this is an accident… director/studio couldn’t make up its mind)
at any rate, the thing The Feminista critics don’t quite seem to grasp is that the director is portraying Ronnie’s world as only a magnified version of Every Man’s. The keep suggesting that, somehow, the guy has some connection to reality. But he doesn’t. This makes him strangely guileless even though he ends up doing some violent stuff.
The joke about his relation to women is that he has none. He is not responding to what they say and do. He’s completely incapable of recognizing that a woman thinks he’s crazy or gross or dumb. If she’s contemptuous of him, he has no idea. If she’s slowly backing away, trying not to say anything that might disturb him, he never picks up on the cue.
When he’s with his mother, he really has no idea that she’s wasted out of her mind. He’s oblivious to her obvious sexual desire for him — another thing I noticed none of the reviewers I read picked up on.
This also happens with other men. He’s just completely oblivious to any social cues that someone’s picking on him, mocking him, tolerating him, whatever. What he *does* respond to is anger.
Anyway, I will write something up eventually, I’m just too tired and can’t seem to wrap my head around how to describe a character that is obviously delusional but the movie isn’t about his delusions *as* delusions. It isn’t about a Travis Bickle character who is obviously crazy.
Anyway, gotta go because early day at the gym tomorrow.
and i want to add that the basic gist of delusion hyperviolent masculinity and the maddonna/whore complex are mutually constitutive — the instrument-effects of one another.
ok. Zizek. If law of the father is the law, for it to function as the law, the traumatic identity of the law and crime has to be concealed. This movie unconceals that trauma and then re-enacts it.
another thing I’d wanted to point out about the rape scene is the conetmptuous injunction involved. Brandi is completely trashed. she likes to party and party she did. She even knows that this guy wants to sleep with her, nonetheless she downs a handful of tranquilizers (his) and several shots of vodka. She acquired beer goggles and gives him an obvious look. But, again, he is clueless.
He takes her home on his scooter. She’s riding behind, arms around him, squeezing his pecs — a nod to some overly romanticized seen in some typical macho guy gets girl movie. Back at her place, he has to help her off the bike because she’s too trashed to do it on her own. She vomits and immediately is so unaware of having vomited that she is unclear why her mouth tastes like shit.
He reads this as some kind of admission of vulnerability, a flaw, for which he must respond heroically by saying, “I accept you” and then he kisses her. Next, he takes her into the house. Next scene: he’s grinding away on top of her, she’s obviously passed out having puked on herelf again.
He’s oblivious to the vomit.
at this point, the audience was obviously disturbed. There’s was a lot of chatter, some noises of disgust, grumbling. People are either grossed out that this fat loathsome guy is sweating and drooling (yeah, there’s a string of spittle descending which, for me personally, is something I have found sexy in the heat of the moment but couldn’t in that scene obviously) and pounding away while she’s completely unconscious. At the very least, you are disturbed by the thought of puke in the midst of sex. (talk about a taboo!)
Ronnie appears to realize she might have fallen asleep and he says something. Brandi doesn’t move, her eyes don’t open even half way. Her head remains lolling to the side, stuck to the dried vomit on the pillow. She says:
Who told you to stop mother fucker?
Feminists have been outraged that this was a cheap rape joke (majikthese) or some kind of move on the part of the director that ultimately condones date rape (jezebel). Hey, she told him to keep fucking.
But the thing that was funny to me was that this wasn’t a lusty fuck me baby. It wasn’t a plea to keep going because she was going to come. There’s no way you could read her as even conscious when she says it, so how is it even consent?
It was a command, an injunction — and if ronnie is oblivious to almost everything else said to him in this film, if he is incapable of groking social cues — in this scene he is now capable of being both clueless to the contempt (mother fucker) in her voice but fully alert to her demand: get back to work. Which he does, treating her demand as an order from a boss.
what is also interesting is that, for all the talk of rape culture at Majikthese, Jezebel and FEministing, no one mentions the conditions under which the date is made in the first place.
She’s leaving the mall at night, spooked because of the flasher. She hears a noise and it turns out to be ronnie on his security guard golf cart.
She accepts a ride from him because she’s scared. He asks her out on a date. She doesn’t directly say no, just tries to avoid saying anything at all. This guy is a weird motherfucker and it would be impossible for him to hear her no. Fortunately, they come up her car.
He keeps driving. She responds angrily, disturbed that he’s even bothering to play such a stupid game. He tells her that he won’t put the brakes on until she says yes.
So she concedes. It’s almost as if she says, Oh alright, I’ll go out on a date with you motherfucker. The contempt is obvious. Her lack of interest obvious. her agreement is only secured, not so much because she’s afraid of him, but that she’s just annoyed and inconvenienced. She knows he’s so out of touch with reality, he won’t understand her contempt, won’t understand a no. You don’t get the sense, though, that if she says no, he’ll get mad. it’s just that he will continue to inconvenience her until she says yes.
it reminded me of boys on the playground or bus who’d keep tickling you, even though they know they’ve gone too far — or you think they have to know. you don’t get the sense that they’d hurt you, just that their connection to reality is so lacking they can’t seem to hear what your actual response is. it’s surreal.
Anyway, she agrees and then tells him that it’s a date, as long as he doesn’t tell anyone.
She is so unconcerned about what went down, that the night of the date, she’s completely forgotten about it. IOW, she doesn’t spend the following week trying to figure out how to get out of the date, she just completely spaces that she’s even made a date with him to begin with.
But it’s interesting that this, to me, was a kind of crucial scene that could be read as a really important aspect of this rape culture people worry about. Ronnie doesn’t use threats of physical violence to secure a date. He doesn’t seem to be aware that he could be a threat to her at all, nor does he even imagine that she would turn him down because she doesn’t like him. To him, her resistance is just a game, motions that women go through, to be expected. To him, this is what masculinity does: it asks a woman for a date by playing a game where she pretends disinterest, even though she really is interested. He has to threaten to inconvenience her albeit in a playful way. It’s all a game, a ritual that has to be enacted. Because, like i said above, there is something about his complete lack of ability to really grok what anyone is saying to him that you get the sense that whatever he does, it’s almost guileless.
IOW, you don’t get the sense that he is aware that he can use this physical advantage or fear of him in order to extract a date.
also — none of the reviews considered the possibility that the joke was a reference to Knocked Up in which Seth Rogan’s character also misunderstands the woman’s words in the sex scene. In that movie, they are getting it on, he has to stop and fumbles to put on a rubber. He’s screwing it up, stuggling to get it, and she says something like, “Come on, fuck me already!”
He takes her literally and thinks she really means it: just forget the rubber and fuck me.
part of what is funny about the scene in observe and report — and very likely *why* they put it in there — is because it’s one of those filmic references to another film that always makes film junkies laugh because it’s an inside joke people love.
but it is also, as I said, symbolic of the basic lack of connection to reality. In Knocked Up, the Rogan character has some of that going on. But it is ramped up in this movie, the entire premise of it to begin with.
Another thing that just occurred to me that I don’t wamt to forget. In the end, when Ronnie shoots the flasher, something no one picks up on is that he picks up the bloodied, severely wounded flasher and takes him to the police station.
Normally, someone would have called the cops and an ambulance.
But Ronnie drags this wounded, naked-underneath-his-trenchcoat, bloodied guy to the police station — like a cat leaves a mouse on your doorstep.
Thanks for the movie review in the comments thread! I’ll probably wait for this to hit my cable DVR thinger, just because theaters are hard on my legs these days. I am sometimes creeped out by the creative choices that guys like Jody Hill and Judd Apatow make but I think there’s a lot about masculinity — and modern manifestations of various kinds of existential angst, and power relations in flux — in their work that tends to go unexamined because people get all het up about one specific thing and then dismiss the rest as unworthy of discussion.
(Although it’s true that I sometimes wonder how different the running commentary inside my brain would be right now if I had been pissed enough at Hegel to just tell him to fuck right off after that bit about the ethical order in PoS, lol. But ultimately I am much more of the “take what you can use, leave the rest” school about this kind of thing, and if I hadn’t fought my way though Hegel’s offenses I’d be without the better aspects of Foucault and Butler.)
Also mentioned in that post by Lauren iirc was Eastbound & Down, which is still available for a few days on HBO’s ondemand if you have access and may also be online somewhere by now. I caught that recently and fwiw it has a real similar vibe. Parts of it made me laugh my ass off, and parts of it gave me some fresh angles to think about related concepts that don’t often come up in my lived experience as a queer middle-aged woman who basically lives as a ‘net-recluse, heh.
more blah blah
I told someone in an email that I was constantlly reminded of Zizek throughout the movie. I was thinking of his analysis of courtly love: the rituals of courtly love are about elevating Woman to a Thing, to a void: “The place of the Lady-Thing is originally empty: she functions as a kind of ‘black hole’ around which the subject’s desire is structured.”
Usually we think of courtly love as when men place women on a pedestal, make her inaccessible, emptying her of subjectivity.
But the twist is really that Courtly love is a way of endlessly postponing what we think we want. In this case, Zizek says, the courtly lover’s “official desire” is to “sleep with the Lady.” However, in reality, “there is nothing” the courtly lover “fears more than a Lady who might generously yield to this wish.”
What the courtly lover really wants is more postponement, another ordeal to have to master in order to, supposedly, win her love. Thus, you have the rituals of courtly love where the courtly lover is, ultimately, a masochist who places himself in the service of the Lady’s endlessly perverse, arbitrary demands.
Which is why, to me, the way that Brandi is made to respond in the rape scene is actually to punish him, to make him feel small and unworthy, incapable, unmanly, a failure: “Who told you to stop mother fucker?”
To which he responds as if it were an injunction to grind away like a machine, like a man who’d just been told by his boss to “get back to work.” And his actions thereafter, as brief as the shot is, shows someone grinding away joylessly, following an order.
This, of course, is giving Jody Hill a lot of credit. But my view of these things is, it’s just all around us. You soak it up in the culture and so it’s bound to be in the film, conscious or not, seen as a point of feminist subversion or not, Hill’s knowing parody of this perverse, completely detached from reality masculinity — or not.
Then again, as a film student, it wouldn’t be terribly surprising that he came across Zizek. *shrug*
I tend to disagree with people who say that the film ultimately condones the idea that perverse, detached from reality, insane, pathological, violent masculinity is rewarded.
It appears that way, but the point, I think, was to shock you with that idea, to make you say, “Wait, this can’t be right.”
I wrote this in an email, and I’ll just put it here for ruminating on later:
Hill, in that skateboarder short Lauren linked to (link in post above), was all about satirizing this sort of pathologically violent, detached from reality masculinity. He reveals it to be a ruse — a lie men tell themselves — in which the guy is humiliated in the end. The guy masquerades as this big anarchist who is constantly talking about his angry rebellion from the man. Yet, he is ultimately chicken shit afraid of his boss. The laughter at the end reinforces that reading: you get to laugh with the director about what a fuck up the guy *really* is. Not only do his words seem contradictory to his appearance, to his physical appearance as a failed man, but his own behavior reveals that, when the smallest of opportunities comes along where he can prove himself to be really, seriously at war with ‘the man,’ he ultimately fails.
But this movie mixes it up. It pushes you toward that reading, and then pulls the rug out from underneath you. I saw it as a mockery of the kind of films that have been Seth Rogan vehicles: jackass guy somehow ends up redeeming himself.
In this case, jackass guy never redeems himself. In a way, I thought Hill was satirizing that brand of film these days: where idiot guy redeems himself and become lovable guy who seems to maybe really understand women after all.
Ronnie is at war with sanctioned, official, violent masculinity — the cops — as a kind of leader of outlaw, violent masculinity that claims itself as _superior_ to the cops, capable of doing the real job which the cops can’t do.
what’s the real job? Violently eliminating Ronnie’s Doppelganger — the flasher — and offering his wounded body to the cops.
by the way, jen, sorry to be rude and not reply to what you’d written. that “more blah blah” comment looks as if I rudely replied to you when, what i’d done was reply to my babblings with another babbling, recording the thoughts before i lost them.
i wish i had one of those dvr thingers. can’t be arsed to bother. it’s not that i’m lacking in technical skills, i just… well, there’s so much to do most of the time that, i have an ipod nano R got me for a gift and it’s stillsitting here because i refuse to stop being so lazy and figure out how to use it. it might take all of a half hour but i’m selfish with my time!
hope all is well with you!
Jen –
thanks to clueing me to Eastbound and Down. I noticed HBO was showing another run of it and saw it last night. ha. Haven’t laughed at a sit com in awhile, but there were some knee slappers. And the character — can’t recall the name — was definitely a prototype of a Ronnie Barnhardt. The thing with Ronnie is that you learn he’s got a mental disorder, and you’re starting to think it’s not merely a bipolar disorder, which lots of people I know have. You’re starting to think he’s truly delusional — schizophrenia or something. But the Eastbound and Down character — he has no obvious disorder and, thus, you can’t believe he’d managed to go through life being such an asshole. I mean, the psychobabble tapes he made, something like “You’re out, I’m In,” where he does nothing but swear constantly… it’s surreal. No one would get away with that kind of stuff.Constantly flipping fans the bird, being totally racist. It’s over the top. It can’t be reality.
But he’s got a lot of that same stuff going on as Ronnie, only it’s chastened a bit by very obvious moments when it’s clear that all the assholish behavior, acting as if he’s god’s gift to the world, is a blustering cover for the fact that, inside, he feels like a loser — and felt like a loser even when he was, ostensibly, riding high in his career.
You don’t get any of that with Ronnie. Not one smidge of the notion that Ronnie senses he’s not really the shit at all.
Interesting.
it’s chastened a bit by very obvious moments when it’s clear that all the assholish behavior, acting as if he’s god’s gift to the world, is a blustering cover for the fact that, inside, he feels like a loser — and felt like a loser even when he was, ostensibly, riding high in his career.
That’s what I like about the show — it’s obvious through the season and it makes a great character study. Still haven’t seen O&R yet, but when I do I’ll let you know.
I am sometimes creeped out by the creative choices that guys like Jody Hill and Judd Apatow make but I think there’s a lot about masculinity — and modern manifestations of various kinds of existential angst, and power relations in flux — in their work that tends to go unexamined because people get all het up about one specific thing and then dismiss the rest as unworthy of discussion.
Agreed. All of it.