According to some wide mean streak in American pop criticism--stretching from bourgeois Academy voters all the way to the soured douchebags of the comments sections--gorgeous sexy young girl artists and performers are meant to be just about anything but genuinely subversive. Never challenging to the status quo in any other way but via shrill feminist rally harangues via the old unionizing, negligence exposing, and/or courageously death-fighting avenue, they can be gazed on but not gaze back, not threaten our place of omnipotent safety in the theater/living room. Medusas in Reverse, we may gaze upon their loveliness (or lack of) at our Mulveyan leisure, judging them for their garb, hair, posture, youthfulness, but if they look at us the same way, it turns us instantly to stone. It's the revenge of Lacan's petit a, when one's persona-accruing object of desire turns suddenly and collides into your grasp, too close for comfort.
If you don't know what I mean, here's an example: you're a regular straight dude gazing at some beautiful woman across a crowded room or street, not even thinking consciously, just spreading some proprietary gaze around like a radar, as one does, especially in our televisual hypnosis where we're conditioned to treat pretty girls as if they're onscreen and can't see us back. So there's this one girl you see, and she's way hot, so you're gazing a little more wistfully, as if she was your favorite new actress. Then suddenly she sees you. She stares back at once, unflinching, smiling enigmatically, and starts to walk towards you, slowly but not shyly. Unless you're super confident, a James Bond type, your instinctive reaction is to look away. Before you can stop yourself, you look up, down anywhere but at her. Now you're angry at your sudden flush of shyness, why did you do that, bro? Married or not, who cares, you screw courage to the sticking place and put your game face on, remember the Bogey, and look back up in her direction, now ready for suaveness.
But she's already gone. It's too late. You're a pussy, bro. You know the drill, girls do that shit all the time, calling you out--and you blew it. You had your nanosecond. Turns out she had a gaze of her own... and it operated on a whole different level, judging your chutzpah, your mettle, your readiness to just start making out with a total stranger. And you failed. The screw your courage sticking place thing isn't fast enough, not for NYC, bro. Not for 2015.
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| Anita Pallenberg- Quality carnivoral staring |
Welcome to the New Depression. For the American critic, who is too high up the bourgeois ladder to look down without getting vertigo, this is where it ends. That hate constitutes sufficient ground for the poison pen to write and having writ, move on... In the words of some pompous bourgeois blowhard behind me at Magno Screening Room circa 2003, "how dare that blonde bimbo imply I'm not a feminist?!"
Isn't this the reason so many women don't gaze back? The average male gaze becomes like a prison searchlight, or a buzzing hornet. The woman mustn't seem like it bothers her, that she even notices, like everyone but her is homeless panhandlers, hoping they don't press the point. This gives her power in its way, as she becomes more and more like an onscreen heroine, a babe on a jpeg, an abstract locus of petit a Lacanian desire.
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| Kristen Stewart - one of the lookers |
For some of us it's worth it just being 'someone she can talk to,' and from this vaunted position now we judge her would be lovers as they come stammering past. And when the guy who can meet her gaze head on, and meets her standards moves in, we see up close how it's really done, take notes on the levels three through thirty of that bizarre staring contest you failed so fast. Instead of your stumbling, furious, ham-fisted Scorsese mix of demeaning sex and shrill arguments, she initiates and intricate call-and-retreat-attack from the side style courtship dance worthy of Sun Tzu or Rommel. As long as we don't demand to be the target of that attack, it's quite a show. Most guys can't take the long journey. Some can. They are usually beautiful, cool, or European themselves, film fans, those of us for whom are hot best friend is in ways just a manifestation of our favorite films, meant to be engaged with only on that level, etheral and conspiratorial.
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| Rot in Hell, "Harry" |
1. THE REDEMPTION OF THE PLATONIC PAIR BOND: MY BEST FRIEND'S WEDDING (1997):
You can still find mainstream badass women characters that average critics love but don't recognize for their genius, any more than they do Kristen Stewart (until she was lionized by the French). Julia Roberts is brilliant in My Best Friend's Wedding and people revere her, but they tend not to be film theorists or critics, maybe for no other reason than her popularity. But her a character in this film is so unique to these films we can only watch in awe, her two best friends are men, one an aesthete gay editor (Rupert Everett) and the other hunky blank slate sports writer (Dilbert McDevitt). In the end the film partially heals the rift created by Harry Met Sally's betrayal and proves a best friend of the opposite gender one never hooks up with (either anymore or ever) is not only possible, it's better than actual carnal love and connection, at least for a certain kind of person, a true writer in the sense that sex and procreation are never as important as honing one's craft. In The Leopard, Burt Lancaster says "marriage is six months of fire and forty years of ashes," but the platonic soul matehood of Roberts with Everett or Mulroney is more like forty years of smoldering coal, continual, giving enough heat to move around the room freely, but with a sweater.
And today we have subversive outside-the-box geniuses unafraid to tap into their own personal hells, the bi-polar melancholia, drug addiction, abusive past, and above all unveil the willingness to sit there, in make-up, furs and write large upon our screens such reverse Medusa gazing as Hollywood not seen since the era of screwball comedy. They are like a relatively young version of Gloria Swanson, continually shedding her Norma Desmond reptilian build up, rather than letting it accrue and become the ascendent ego. It's terrifying to men for they realize just how much damage their gaze inflicts.
For startled bourgeois critics such self-assured brazenness better have a British or French accent attached, or be over 40 and playing a villain. If she's one of ours then she's just being uppity, trying to glorify that which mothers would willingly ween from the line. If these dangerous women try to find the poetry that is there in the abyss, they become a threat to safety-first PC nanny state who keep miles away from said abyss. The Europeans aren't as threatened. They know that just because it's destructive and pointless doesn't mean it's not brave, beautiful and poetic. Only occasionally are there critics in the American press and mommy blogs who can locate and analyze the dark chthonic core of feminine power and celebrate its destructive Kali currents rather than moping like some Fordian Irish scrubwoman.
These brave girls have come amongst us nonetheless, and they're setting up a whole non-Mulveyan approach to gazing. These Reverse Medusae don't get the kind of open praise as the 'little sisters" (Jennifer Lawrence), or old school Hollywood knock outs (Scarlett Johansson)-- the ones who fit inside established persona categories, who talk the walk and wow the interviewers and generally play the game, the kind your parents want you to marry when you bring them home over Christmas (as opposed to locking up the liquor cabinet and shooting you baleful looks). But to swap the genders, in which category do you think Brando or James Dean would have fallen in the early 50s? Hey STELLA (1), they would scare the shit out of your parents, simultaneously generous and miserly, girly and manly, fey and churlish. Mercurial, dangerous, alive, smelling terrible but wondrously pheremonal. These bad girls and reckless boys were all over the 70s, and the drive-in, but where are they now? We need them! Mom, go to bed and let the bad kids come over.
That's okay, it's her trip. But her red carpet moments at the Oscar ceremony for Girl Interrupted (1999) is interesting because such crazy is usually only celebrated in men (Jack Nicholson in Cuckoo's Nest, De Niro in Raging Bull). The only way American actresses can cut loose and show their fiery goddess of chthonic psychosexual power is if its contextualized and contained in the psych ward, or meets death at the end. Angelina Jolie could win an Oscar and terrify the Academy by bringing her eerie brother as a date to the Oscars (above, left), and the world could gather around them in awe, acknowledging their otherworldliness without the kind of awkwardly judgmental refusal to notice any difference between them and everyone else so common to today's fascistic PC mindset. The bourgeois were 'safe' in applauding her, loving this growling lion behind bars but ready to shoot it if it ever escaped.
French publications like Cahiers du Cinema, meanwhile, once our tastemakers pointing out what amongst our perceived B-movie dross was gold, are becoming more bourgeois, busy praising small proletariat struggle films (for the children of the rich love to see themselves seeing films about the struggles of the poor) that will never even pick up subtitles let alone U.S. distributors (rather than have them praise Ants in your Plants of 2009 as the height of auteurship). And so our White Elephants stampede towards Oscar gold, renting space on the dwindling art house screens for a week to be eligible, pushing the real art, the dangerous art, off in just the same way their editorial champions were pushed off their mastheads. Only a few Europeans like Lars Von Trier, Olivier Assayas, Refn, and Gaspar Noe seem to be still trying to unearth the weird undiscovered worms beneath unturned rocks, but they get very hung up on sex and violence, both to please producers and to get shocked write-ups. If the critics feel something, even if it's just shock and trauma, at least they felt something.
Meanwhile, in America, we just don't get deluges of German Expressionists fleeing the Fatherland to Hollywood any more, bringing women like Marlene Dietrich and Garbo to school us in the return gaze, in seeing both herself seeing you and seeing what she sees, which is not you anymore but the other chump ticket buyers out in the rows. There was nothing sexual in the love of a Garbo widow, transcending even the giant mommy aspect (her silver screen projected face as large as mom's was when you were a suckling child), it was oceanic, tapping into those things and encompassing them and expanding outwards into a kind trans-behavioral oceanic state of aesthetic arrest that includes even her gaze. Now that Laura Mulvey's theory of the sadistic gaze, treated more or less as gospel in academia, pre-empts and denies that relationship, the female gaze has come under fire too. The Femme Fatale is criticized as a male design, and the result has been a case of feminists trying to slap the masculine gaze from out of her eyes and face like a crazy person batting at mosquitos and gnats only she can see.
LANA DEL REY: 60s AMERICA'S SWEET 16mm SUICIDE NOTE
Lana Del Rey's made a string of great sad sexy videos that seemed to prove the ghosts of early 60s Los Angeles suicides are the only thing of substance left in America, and then only because they were shot on Super 8 and 16mm home movie stock. But the negative feedback her schtick received, even from third wave feminist pundits, back in the early days, was quite alarming. It wasn't exactly new (she would fit right in any David Lynch or Don Draper nightmare) but she tapped a nerve, was gorgeous yet strange, with those lips that hovered between seeming real and seeming collagen-ish; a dazzling body and great cascading beehive-ready hair and a never say no policy to drugs, alcohol and bad boys that sent our American Puritan minds racing. She was just doing whatever drugs the bad boys have, getting into cars with strangers, and engaging in all sorts of twisted scenes with hot black guys and middle-aged bikers, much to our masochistic fury. The privilege over-brainwashed by PC Communist infiltrator liberal arts faculty-brainwashed feminists found themselves angry over the most mundane inconsistencies in her origin story. She used to be named Lizzy Grant and have curly hair and sing bubblegum pop or something, like that was new to her. The Jungian mythos and psychomythological natural law-honoring of Paglia feminists like myself were genuinely enthralled by her ability to zero in on the dark dream anima of the American culture dreamscape consciousness, as if she was a succubus from space who'd lived many lives and been soaking up America's broadcast radio, TV and dream transmissions as she flew closer and closer from the colds of space.
In short, if the naysayers had gone in for Jung or even modernism then they'd know their their indignant anger was the correct aesthetic response, the same one response solicited by the girl who stares back and causes us to blush instinctively, look away, and feel like a loser. The anger is correct it's the not realizing Von Sternberg / Bunuel masochism is the purist cinematic experience and how to achieve it that's the problem. Those videos sting like a slap in the face. The blush of jealousy and protective anger, it all coheres from seemingly nowhere deep inside us. We can storm off and call our lawyers, or our sponsors, or write bad blog posts about it, or use the pain, the humiliation, as a kind of reset button that liberates the soul from the bondage of freedom, that taps into a primordial Stockholm syndrome, to savor the sting and realize all at once that masochistic cinema is the purest form, of cinema, the type where not possessing or controlling the seen stimuli that so affects our emotions is a liberation rather than an agony fought against.
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| She's got Argento's OPERA eyes... |
ROSE McGOWAN'S COUNTER-TERRORIST AESTHETIC
Trained as we are by today's multiplex cinema now to once again slough off actresses and characters into various boxes (sullen daughter, good girl princess, All-American heimliches dumbmadchen, materialistic villain, traumatized victim / avenging angel, etc.) we feel bewildered when a woman actress or character attempts to step outside those boxes, to encompass them all within a single scene and then transcend them not after third act sulking montages, but within the same bedroom conversation. And if she's young and pretty and worst of all, one of our own, an American, then we reach for out pitchforks and torches on instinct. Even we who consider ourselves feminists of the Paglia school feel slightly like we let Rose McGowan down when we see her looking like a gray alien gollum or neopagan pin-cushion (above) in her music video. Where did we go wrong, as mothers?
But as with all great modern art that's the point. Terrorism's point is to spread anxiety and paranoia, maybe when a hot woman uglies herself into a kind of abject Molloch style alien she's just reacting to the beauty and youth industrial complex that's kept her and her sisters in anxiety and paranoia, to the point they torture their face with collagen and Botox late into the night until they emerge at dawn like Universal pre-code Jack Pierce abominations. Maybe there's something deeper than narcissism and fear at work behind this overthinking and second guessing and overpainting, a kind of counterespionage CIA counter-move, a throwing a Perseus mirror shield laser back against the Vogue-Revlon gaze, freezing it with horror, paranoia, creeping dread. After all, indigenous tribal societies use masks to personify ancient ambivalent archetypal forces in order to diffuse and incorporate their power into their society, which otherwise might suffer at said forces' hands.
And the CIA comparison is not made on a whim: One can think having so many attractive girls in high ranking CIA spots on TV shows like Homeland represents just a Hollywood nod to feminism or that we want to see pretty girls whenever possible, but if you see a documentary, like the one on HBO, you realize it's the truth -- these women are brilliant and brave and better at connecting the dots of seemingly unrelated events and movements into a serpentine whole than men or even less attractive women. Beauty and charisma are keys to success not only in any field that relies on winning people to your side, whipping up deep loyalty out nothing more than a warm smile. Acting and spying are really more or less the same, drawing on the same skills. Beauty is as valuable to a spy as a photographic memory or crack shot marksmanship. Only an American would think that's somehow 'cheating.'
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| Sleeping with the enemy of my enemy on the enemy's command |
But aren't, as Hitchcock's movies point out, spies not only actresses but whores, only the difference being they are stealing secrets instead of earning money for their pimp/CIA handler? Forced to sleep with the bad guy to get information, evidence, cash, the part, even if it means losing the respect of Cary Grant, if she pretend she's in love with someone long enough, and well enough, so that even she starts to believe it, isn't that the same as falling in love for real? It's the kind of thing that can drive a girl mad, and when the slimy misogynist spiders who run free all over the web find themselves posting your every nude shot in every corner of the world and then hating you for your image's power over them, their inability to get a girl like you in real life, then you've become a symbol of everything wrong with the world. They feel you owe them something, stalkers and paparazzi become indistinguishable. Now the spy comparisons get too close for comfort, and the terrorism of celebrity begins. Wherever you go people stare or demand to be stand next to you for a selfie. If you refuse they hate you forever. The only sane response is to go mad, seek solace from your personal assistant/bodyguard, act in weird ways that are a turn-off to the average People Magazine reader. Shave your head in a bid to turn them all off or turn around and come onto them, flash your bush at every turn, until they run when they see you coming. There's that old koan about the beautiful woman who wanted to become a Buddhist monk but they wouldn't let her because she was too beautiful for the rest of them to focus, so she took a hot iron to her face and was admitted.
They say don't seek enlightenment unless you do so as one whose hair is on fire would seek a pool of water. And if you've never been on fire then what good are you, o uncooked roast, o churlish banal carcass that for wont of heat doth rot and bloat with banal surmise, but impaled on spit and turned on flame to sizzle doth a kingly feast to make?
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| Hail Stewart! |
A César for Kristen...
In European film, it's clear that the performance of sexy feminism is more alive and less bourgeois, less dour and militant, and you can still smoke and dance in the cafe, prostitution is far less stigmatized, and May-December romances accepted without Puritanical staring. Women are proud, assertive without being bitchy. Just compare the self-possession of Isabelle Huppert vs. say, Susan Sarandon, or Geena Davis vs. Isabelle Adjani. And this is not to say they are great actresses, just that what Davis and Sarandon were fighting for in Thelma and Louise is a birthright to European actresses. And we trust the European about our American filmmakers and actors way more than we trust our own. What one of our dangerous women really needs for America to recognize her brilliance is a Cannes jury award or a Cesar. For now that Kristen Stewart won a Cesar for Clouds of Sils Maria she can suddenly begin to earn the awed respect me and a scattered few always felt she was due.
Another fact about Europe is sex itself, in which standards are far more relaxed. People want to snog, they snog. They don't wait for a Mr. or Mrs. Right they feel they're owed, promised in a weird way by years of televisual, cinematic, and magazine conditioning. The Europeans on the prowl with us in the 90s-00s would hook up with nearly anyone at the end of the night if they wanted, feeling neither pride nor shame on the next morning's walk home. But there's more to the difference than just that, for in losing the unrealistic ideals so critical to American conspicuous consumption, they become less hypnotized, less locked in a state of Lacanian loop-de-loop, where the pressure to enjoy all but squelches actual enjoyment in the cradle. There's not a lot of commercials in Europe, what there are are generally more clever, existential and risque, less shrill and clanging, as a result, maybe, the women aren't as broken down by the staggering sexism that comes from the constant consumerist barrage. For the rest of us, partying with them, it's like a huge relief. Isn't this how partying should always be? But when they leave, the artifice and torpor move back in.
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| If she was a guy, she'd be dubbed the new De Niro |
The French have mapped out a route through our cinema's past like a museum guide trying to unravel the opaque and meaningless tangle of a Pollack drip or bland squares of a Rothko to an incredulous Indiana tourist. Now that we're on our own, we have only the Academy and they only see the biggest, loudest white elephants in the room, never the true termites... anymore. The last voice we had in the States who could point out the shit we missed, Pauline Kael, is gone. Without her, would we even have noticed Bonnie and Clyde or Taxi Driver? Maybe not. She would have loved Kristen Stewart, and loved Asia Argento's Scarlet Diva. I think.
This leaves our own brilliant, uncowed young American actresses in a weird spot though, and it behooves them to go to Europe to seek the recognition they warrant. For here appearance and position is more important than we like to admit. If you put a relatively hot young broad in a debate with a stodgy older man from Harvard or wherever, like Norman Mailer, and the broad is more than holding her own, calling him out on his bullshit, that old man is going to blow his top in ways a European man just wouldn't (of course this is all a sweeping generalization). Part of this I think comes from homogenization of culture -- the mixture of different languages all over Europe keeps everyone guessing and leads to a kind of unspoken Euro of mores that's unbound by the past or religious dogma. It floats constantly on the cutting edge of thinking and social connection.
In the States, we expect the Ruby Tuesdays in White Plains to be the same as the one in Toledo. Appearances are measured up to, fit into, the excess cut away. We travel to faraway lands just to find the McDonalds and breathe a heavy sigh. So if we can't rely on the basic maxim that someone with, say, glasses and a doctorate, who is a man, white, straight and over 60, is more intelligent and worldly than a cute blonde in a tight sweater chewing gum, then we can rely on nothing. Europeans would just be amused, but American professors froth at the mouth and spasm on the floor in rage when their dictums are challenged. Poor professor Plum! He paid all this tuition to Oz for him to make him a genius, but all that happened was the Wizard convinced him he didn't need the kernel of madness and right-brained intuition that outsider artists have at the expense of training, because that glint can't be taught and therefore can't be measured or monetized so must in academia be devalued. All we need to be a real museum-ready artist is a grant, an endowment, a write-up in Artforum. If we're not going for the grants and endowments then we're either mere 'entertainers' or outsiders, either we get a three picture deal or a prescription to Lithium, either way, the madness that creates genius stops through lack of oxygen. The diploma is awarded... the ship sinks... the gun goes Poof.
Smoke through This: COURTNEY LOVE
And either way all the reckless energy the hussy young girl genius pours into her career is suddenly sidestepped when she has a kid. That's the moment when I get mad and the drink-counting mothers relax. When a great insane hot mess skirting the lip of brilliance thinks she can put that all on hold to become a mom, eat healthy and quit her vices, and then come back and be the same badass thing, then I have to turn my back on them. If they can bounce back, and still be a badass, that's fine - but I will have to discover them anew. Yet this I know is my problem, I don't badmouth them in the press, except to lament that, in away, their procreation is just as fatal to their genius as a double-barreled shotgun or a Guggenheim fellowship.
No wonder these great ladies feel dying is the only way the true measure of their genius might be noticed. And no wonder Courtney Love went from such acclaim (19941's Live Through This winning the Voice Pazz and Jop Poll) to rumors that Kurt wrote the songs, not her (and guitarist Eric Erlandson) as if that mattered, to tour-killing tales of being unreliable and constantly wasted on stage, barely getting through an EP worth of songs, to mommy-horrifying tales of smoking while pregnant or while holding Frances Bean. None of which, as with Lana Del Rey's former identity as Lizzy Grant, would be anything negative normally, or even commented on by critics if they hadn't already felt that 'no blonde trollop sexpot phony's gonna tell me I'm not a feminist" resentment.
Well, those critics are all irrelevant dinosaurs now, booted onto e-books like everyone else, but Hole and Love have aged well, endured, with wit, moxy and snarl. "Boys on the Radio" and "Malibu" seem to me wedded inseparably to the aching, giddy emptiness and spiritual and romantic hunger at the core of LA party life. And Miss Love is still going, more or less for her own amusement, her latest single, "Miss Narcissist" suggests she's becoming something like a druid priestess conjured up to deflate LA celebrity's withering, all-the-air-sucking ego; in simpler terms and in my opinion she's far more brilliant than Madonna, but with brilliance comes misunderstanding and fear, especially when it comes from the wild guitar and ravenous eyes of a hell on heels babe like Love, one who's survived more highs and lows than most of us will see in ten lifetimes, and is neither unduly proud nor ashamed of her battle scars --like all else to the artist, it's just grist. We're so sexist as a society though we figured with a child in hand and her alleged Svengali Kurt gone, she'd be washed up. We were fuckin' wrong. Even after her badass bassist OD-ed, she kept going, even when Kurt killed himself days before Live Through This dropped, she kept going. I love her ad in the classified ad for a bassist replacement for Pfaff (as per Wiki):
"[I want] someone who can play ok, and stand in front of 30,000 people, take off her shirt and have 'fuck you' written on her tits. If you're not afraid of me and you're not afraid to fucking say it, send a letter. No more pussies, no more fake girls, I want a whore from hell."
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Still, we didn't need Love's daughter to remind us rock and roll suicide isn't rock and roll though, like a Rolling Stone last year or so seemed to think. Like peaking at your presents before Xmas, suicide throws the spectacle off. God might not even be ready for your arrival. You'd have to wait in the lobby 'til your room was ready. In all fairness to Frances, she dresses pretty cool and with Courtney makes the coolest familial couple on the carpet (up left) since Angelina and her brother at that 1997 Oscars (way up left).
I guess I wouldn't be as existentially sardonic about suicide if I lost a parent to it, instead of losing mine to Christian Science. So it doesn't affect my respect for her (Frances, we all know where that name came from) just confirms once again Rolling Stone has lost any trace of its old fangs, and is now too busy chasing around after newborn viral hashtags and trying not to lose their last few dentist office subscriptions at the same time, and failing at both. RIP.
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| Asia Argento (Scarlet Diva) - "too young to lose it" |
THE KEYHOLE MIRROR: ASIA ARGENTO
A very unique and raw analysis of what it means to be young, gifted and constantly mauled as an Italian film starlet while roaming through daytime press junkets and financing meetings, photo shoots and hotel room film pitches, and having it be no big deal to smoke while pregnant (and burn herself with the lit end on purpose) really unnerved some critics over here. If you read the average Amazon comment it's of the bent that 'Asia's like totally hot but I couldn't get turned on by it,' like the film was a tease advertising softcore sex and delivering self-mutilation and nervous K-hole breakdowns instead. It's like dude that's the point! That's the only way Europe can sneak art down middle America's throats, on the Trojan horse of sex! Art House cinema as we know it got big in the US in the late 1950s only by promising "European" and "Art" film meant the kind of frank openness about sex and nudity our own puritanical censorship had kept from us for decades. A single nude shot or dirty word could create lines around the block. But eventually they didn't need it, because the art had taken hold. Subtitles had a Pavlovian association with lack of censorship, which allowed for more imports, allowing art to take root. And with it, strong women. The amount of backbone in an actress like Kate Winslet, Helen Mirren or Kierra Knightley in England or Isabelle Huppert and Adjani, Beatrice Dalle, or Sophie Marceau in France vs. that of, say, Sandra Bullock, Julianne Moore, Drew Barrymore, or Jodie Foster is as different as that between a tiger and a house cat. Both are still cool, sleek, stylish, but who could more believably devour you? Who would you rather have on your side in a fight?
I've got theories: I recently saw a Hammer film DVD extra where an old writer or someone was remembering the way Britain and American censorship of the time was vastly different - the Americans would object to the nudity and sex, the British to the violence and gore. A very telling difference tying into my theory, as exposited in Acidemic #6, that sex is to the French what guns are to Americans, and vice versa. And there's that old Dietrich quote "In Europe, sex is a fact. In America, it is an obsession." And there's no doubt it's much easier to get a gun in this country than to hook up at a party. And vice versa. Always vice versa. But in one, guns and violence, women have a much less pronounced part. The more liberal views on sex in Europe ensure that it plays quite a larger and more healthily complex sophisticated yet accessible and straightforward part there, and in its way, so does prostitution. We see them crop regularly, for example, in French New Wave films, but less in a tawdry Taxi Driver manner and more in a just two casual people hooking up sort of way. It's still no kind of a life, but for a lonely dude and a cash hungry Parisian of the same approximate age and class, what's the harm?
At least it's regulated to an extent and therefore less overrun by sleazy gangsters, and the ones playing pimp are French anyway, little guys who just get funnier the harder they try to be menacing... Meeeow!
Then again, that impression comes just from films, not France itself, which I have never visited. What do I know about the actual reality of Europe or even America? Nothing, thank god. From what I have seen, it's a real mess.
xxoo
All the Usual Vices: THE RUNAWAYS
Choose Death: Revisiting Twilight's Junky Delerium
Bella's Big Bounce: TWILIGHT: BREAKING DAWN PART II
Metatextual Exorcist's Assistance: CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA, MAPS TO THE STARS
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Choose Death: Revisiting Twilight's Junky Delerium
Bella's Big Bounce: TWILIGHT: BREAKING DAWN PART II
Metatextual Exorcist's Assistance: CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA, MAPS TO THE STARS
Enhancement of Anguish: Godard's VIVRE SA VIE (1963) on Blu-ray
Le reyon bleu de Deneuve: REPULSION
CinemArchetype 6: The Intimidating Nymph
She even breaks: CIAO! MANHATTAN
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Happy 100 Years of Frances Farmer
NOTES:Le reyon bleu de Deneuve: REPULSION
CinemArchetype 6: The Intimidating Nymph
She even breaks: CIAO! MANHATTAN
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Happy 100 Years of Frances Farmer
1. Hey STELLA: Do you imagine they would dare show such a complicated monster as Stanley Kowalski in today's draconian PC environment? He'd either have to be an irredeemable brute who's every gesture is amped up with ominous music cues and lewd looks (so there's no possible way we can like him), the particulars of the rape spread out in ugly rutting and sadistic sexual violence and intensity (instead of just showing a shattered mirror), or they'd cut it out altogether, block it out of the screenplay. And now, going back and watching Dean's three film roles, it's hard to understand sometimes what the fuss was about. He seems to mince a lot in Rebel -- to stop the action so he can play with little toys or befriend Sal Mineo. He doesn't make a lot of sense - he mumbles - one minute he's cool and playing chicken the next he's trying to rat the whole gang out to cops even though his parents don't want him to (they're not squealers). "Just once I want to do something right!" Yeah give me a break. In New Grenada we have just one law, a kid who squeals on another kid is a dead kid." Calling in the cops is about as smart in this instance as not making a more sober effort to hook up with Carroll Baker in GIANT. I mean there is literally nothing hotter than Baker in GIANT, yet he'd rather mope after Liz Taylor who by then has got silver hair. But no one doubts Dean's a genius, because he died young and never got fat and confused like Brando. Nowadays, I'm shocked to learn, kids have no idea who he is, or even Marilyn Monroe.