Some things we like to watch, and some things...
Antichrist is upsetting. I saw the film at Chicago’s Gene Siskel Film Center on Tuesday night. As of writing this, Thursday morning, I still grit my teeth whenever one of the many gruesome scenes plays out again in my mind. I’ve been watching movies for a long time, and not a few of them have featured graphic sex and violence. It’s rare, but it sometimes happens that someone as thoroughly media-inured as myself can be messed up, even slightly traumatized, by watching a movie. The profound disgust and anxiety brought on by Antichrist is not, however, enough for me to stop appreciating the film on a cinematic level. As much as it upset me, I have already made plans to see the film again.
Full House is terrible. As talented as the cast was, the jokes are irredeemable. The show aimed for an audience of eight-year-olds and hit them square in their tiny little foreheads. Over the seasons, Bob Sagat withered from a comic who was clearly slumming (but having fun) into a defeated, abused animal. The whole cast looks so bored by the show’s end that every episode is one long, cruel joke. Knowing now what will eventually happen to the actresses who played Michelle (whose now-terrifying double subjectivity makes her character a kind of reverse Dead Ringers) adds alternating layers of disdain and pity to what is supposed to be lighthearted entertainment. But what do I do while I fold my laundry on a Sunday morning? I watch Full House.
Joss Whedon is a feminist! His shows feature complicated female characters as the protagonists!
No, Joss Whedon is a misogynist! He revels in torturing and degrading women!
Feminist! By giving female characters the opportunity to suffer like male characters, he makes the audience identify with women!
Misogynist! His female characters are hyper-sexualized objects of the male viewer’s gaze!
Whedon is sex-positive and allows his female characters to express sexual desire without punishing them!
Whedon blah blah blah…
This could go on for a while. Googling “Joss Whedon feminist” brings up more than 50,000 results. The Geek Feminism Wiki lists several articles debating the issue, including interviews with Whedon in which he explicitly self-identifies as a feminist, and even that listing is grossly incomplete. By far, feminism is the principal discourse in the global overthinking of Whedon’s TV shows, and Whedon is the major contemporary pop cultural focus for the debate on feminism in narrative television. This makes sense, as his series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dollhouse (and to a much lesser degree, Firefly) address feminism in their basic premises in a way that no other show on television has.
Strange, then, that the most persistent issue in regards to Whedon’s feminism is its authenticity.
The battle over the manatee rages on!
South Park and Family Guy don’t get along. In 2006, the two-part South Park episode “Cartoon Wars” characterized the writers of Family Guy as an a tank full of manatees randomly manipulating beach balls to generate the show’s scripts. Cartman (who is often depicted as a comedy writer) voices his (and according to the commentary track, the show’s) complaint thus:
“I am nothing like Family Guy! When I make jokes they are inherent to a story! Deep situational and emotional jokes based on what is relevant and has a point, not just one random interchangable joke after another!” —Eric Cartman, “Cartoon Wars I,” South Park
Family Guy made no immediate response, but this season produced the episode “Spies Reminiscent of Us,” which featured a dig at South Park’s argument.
Big wheel keeps détournin'...
[Please welcome frequent guest writer André Callot - now a formal contributor! With his own username and everything!]
Détournement is a stand-in for a noble revolutionary guerilla war. On one side, the forces of “the spectacle,” or capitalism: all of the power of constructed media language, the entire culture of representation and every image you’ve ever seen in your life. On the other side, the artist: a valiant resistance fighter, cursed with the knowledge that he alone must take the enemy’s ammunition and use it against them. By reshaping the palace of the commercial image into something ugly, something political, détournement takes the power away from the autonomous image and returns it to the people. All very romantic and sexy and French.
Speaking of pornography, there is a kind of combat at work in porn, too (and not just in the really good kind). The two sides of the conceptual battle in porn are similar to the ones I just mentioned: the performers/creators who do it for money or fame or what have you, and the “sex artists” who do it because it is their creative passion. As with “the spectacle,” pornography defaults to the system of power associated with capitalism, against which the few serious auteurs struggle.
A struggle between artists and capitalism? Yes, I guess I am talking about television. Specifically, the intersection of television, Situationist art and porn: the porn parody.