Mad women

In case anyone needed reminding that the foam-flecked wings of Islam and Christianity don’t hold a duopoly on swivel-eyed witlessness, ultra-orthodox Jews in Jerusalem have taken to ripping down advertising posters that contain images of women. Which is an affront to freedom of expression and insulting to women – until you remember that feminists have had plenty to say about the depiction of women by the advertising industry, and quite a few have taken direct action to express it.

Hmm. Similarly confused thoughts come to mind when watching the following:

Now, according to AdRants, the clip has been “banned”, although I’m sure there was never any intention of using it in mainstream media; it will live and/or die on the web, where it exists as much to sell the reputation of the creative team as it does to shift units of denim (rather like Benetton’s latest attempt to foster intercultural harmony). It’s offensive, in the sense that quite a few people will be offended by it, although different elements will offend different people: the implied lesbianism; the implied necrophilia; the buttocks. I suspect, however, that the big problem comes with the pile of dead women, and the clear suggestion that someone is going round killing them for their jeans. The question is whether it’s less or more reprehensible when we know that the killer is a woman; we can hold onto the notion that killing women is A Bad Thing, but this time we can’t really blame it on the patriarchy, can we? As Camille Paglia said – and she’s a woman, so it’s OK –  “There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.” But if there were, she’d almost certainly work in advertising.

It was a pleasure to burn...

Apparently bookshops have for the most part evaded the attention of the looters; and a Waterstones employee was heard quipping that this is a pity, because “if they steal some books they might learn something.” Which did prompt me to throw together a quick reading list that might throw a little light on the situation, and it was looking something like this:

• Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle


• Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation


• Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces


• Abbie Hoffmann, Steal This Book...

...when I noticed the delightful Bidisha pointing out that a TV show made for Amnesty International was made by a team of 11 white men and... er... that’s it. And my boring liberal conscience kicked in, and I wondered whether it really matters, but if it does, are there any books by women and/or people who aren’t Caucasian that might be added to my list?

(Title half-inched from the opening of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Image ramraided from the delectable Photoshoplooter. And while we’re vaguely on the subject, if you think reading matter is sacrosanct, look at this.)

PS: As if someone heard me, Bookmarks has come up with a list. It’s more inclusive than mine, but not that much.

Thou shalt knit kill

An attractive young woman is murdered: the investigation into her death exposes deep corruption among the local power elites, and pushes those tasked with finding her killer into emotional meltdown. I’m talking, of course, about Forbrydelsen, aka The Killing, the Danish TV noir that’s made Fair Isle jumpers almost cool.

But it’s also the basic plot of Twin Peaks: for Nanna Birk Larsen in the boot of a car, read Laura Palmer in a plastic sheet; for Sarah Lund’s obsession for justice, there’s Dale Cooper’s descent into doughnut-fuelled madness. The two shows also share a structure in which each episode represents one day in the investigation. And the inevitable US remake of The Killing transfers the action from Copenhagen to Washington state, the setting for Lynch’s deranged masterpiece.

Talking of remakes, remember State of Play? A journalist played by John Simm (or, if you prefer, Russell Crowe) finds his loyalties torn when Sonia, the researcher/lover of his politician friend David Morrissey (or Ben Affleck), dies in mysterious circumstances, with all fingers pointing to a ruthless conspiracy of government and business interests.

 
State of Play in turn was clearly influenced by the 80s drama Edge of Darkness, in which a policeman, Craven, played by Bob Peck (Mel Gibson in the unnecessary remake) seeks the killer of his activist daughter; the money/power nexus in this case having modish nuclear overtones, which combine with Craven’s own grief and obsession, and ultimately destroy him. The writer’s original intention, to have Craven demonstrate his eco-credentials by turning into a tree, was thwarted in the broadcast version, but is it too fanciful to see this as a precursor to Lynch’s Log Lady?

And, for the real geeks, how about the first season of Steven Bochco’s Murder One, in which the death of 15-year-old party girl Jessica Costello draws unwelcome attention to the activities of too-smooth plutocrat Richard Cross (Stanley Tucci) and ultimately wrecks the marriage of attorney Ted Hoffman (Daniel Benzali)? Like Twin Peaks, Murder One was ultimately stymied by the network’s convinction that viewers didn’t have the intelligence and/or attention span to follow such a complex plot; in common with The Killing, later episodes begin with a plot recap that actually confuses more than it explains.

Several other things unite the five shows. One is the definite sense of place in each one: the rainy, dark glumness of Copenhagen; the lonely claustrophobia of Twin Peaks; London’s grimy bustle; the Yorkshire Moors and their brutal beauty; the nasty gloss of Los Angeles. Partly because of this, the identity of the killer isn’t ultimately the most important thing in any of the stories. Like the inhabitants of David Simon’s Baltimore, or Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, the victims and killers and investigators and avengers are essentially the playthings of their environment.

And in each of the five narratives, the victim is barely a character in her own right: each woman exists simply to be killed, like a virgin bred for sacrifice. Only Emma Craven (Joanne Whalley), in Edge of Darkness, has a chance to register her own identity before she is gunned down. And yet each one reaches out beyond the grave: Nanna, Sonia and Jessica have each been captured on video, offering significant evidence to those seeking to solve their murders; Emma reappears in ghostly form, like an incestuous Cathy to her father’s brooding Heathcliff; and Laura Palmer reappears in the guise of her doppelganger cousin, Maddy Ferguson. (Apparently, Lynch cast Sheryl Lee as Laura simply because she made a good-looking corpse, but then created the character of Maddy when it turned out she could act as well.)

So, if it’s all been done before, what’s so groundbreaking about The Killing? Must be that jumper after all.

XY Certificate

In The Guardian a few days ago, Hadley Freeman asked why, following Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar triumph last year, no women were nominated in the directing category this time round. The relevance of the question depends on a number of assumptions, not least the auteur theory that holds a film’s director to be the most significant creative force; and also the extent to which the gender of said director informs the finished product. After all, directors such as George Cukor and Douglas Sirk were hugely successful making what were known as “women’s pictures”, while possibly the most famous female director of all time was Leni Riefenstahl, and I’m not sure that I can ascertain the feminist subtext in Triumph of the Will. Freeman does acknowledge that Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker was hardly soft and fluffy in its subject matter, “raising the question whether a woman might be able to win a film award, but she has to make a very masculine film to do so.”

Which in turn raises another question, namely whether subject matter – The Hurt Locker is nominally about war, but I’d argue that it’s really about men – determines the nature of a film any more than the content of the director’s underwear does. Does a film about male soldiers have to be masculine any more than a film about female dancers has to be feminine? Four of the five main roles in Black Swan go to women, but since three of them are in various states of derangement, I’m not sure that Darren Aronofsky’s gift to the sisterhood deserves a thank-you note. Because Black Swan (which I only got round to watching at the weekend, so please excuse any observations that have already been made 700 times elsewhere) isn’t really about women or dancing or madness; it’s ultimately about other films, with a few books thrown in. I counted The Red Shoes, All About Eve, Showgirls, Vertigo, lots of Polanskian paranoia (specifically Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby and The Tenant), Cronenberg’s horrified fascination with the simultaneous potential and frailty of human flesh (Videodrome, The Fly), a glorious old potboiler called A Double Life, in which an actor pretty much invents Method acting while playing Othello, plus Jekyll and Hyde, American Psycho and Roald Dahl’s short story The Swan. And would it be stretching things too much to see in  Vincent Cassel’s encouragement to Natalie Portman to loosen up an echo of the professor’s suggestions to Daphne Zuniga in The Sure Thing (“Have conversations with people whose clothes are not colour-coordinated.”)? OK, maybe it would. Aronofsky even has the chutzpah to wink at his previous movie, The Wrestler (performance, physical injury, ambition, death, the morning after, tights). The Hurt Locker may not have been about what you thought it was meant to be about, but it wasn’t about Kathryn Bigelow’s DVD collection, surely a more prevalent trait of modern male directors even than blowing stuff up.

Of course, if there really is an empirical difference between male- and female-helmed movies, the Academy should consider separate categories for male and female directors. Which sounds like the cheesiest kind of affirmative action, until you remember that they’ve been doing something similar for actors since the beginning.

Flat

Small Boo and I enjoyed a rather pleasant lunch the other day, at a hotel restaurant we’d expected to be at best vaguely competent. Later, I was idly spooooling through the establishment’s website when I came upon the mention of something called “Wine O’Clock”, which would appear to be the phenomenon we oiks might know better as happy hour. It all sounded a bit cheesy, but not bad enough to obliterate the memory of the quite excellent rhubarb and strawberry sfogliatina I’d had a few hours previously. And then: “On Thursdays Wine O’Clock pays tribute to ladies. All ladies receive a 5% discount for every inch of those high heels worn.”

Er... pardon? OK, leave aside the use of “ladies”, which sounds a bit twee to anyone who doesn’t regard “feminist” as a term of abuse. But the heel thing: essentially, they’re offering financial encouragement to women to wear heels as high as possible. Why, for crying out loud? Does an influx of tottering, unstable females automatically make the restaurant a more enjoyable environment for other diners? Does the potential for a spectacular, crashing collapse across a table, or even a more modest and discreet twisted ankle add to the savour of one’s steak or risotto? Who, exactly, benefits from this?

Not me. Heterosexual men are supposedly turned into the personification of drooling lust at the sight of a stiletto, but I just don’t get it, and never have. (The same, incidentally, goes for stockings and suspenders.) Give me a flat Courreges boot any day. And I don’t see why women should be applauded for wearing footwear that renders them incapable of running for a bus, when Nicolas Sarkozy is mocked for giving himself a little lift in the shoe department.

On the other hand I suppose it all fits. The cheaper you look, the cheaper your drinks are.

Urban scrawl

It’s a pretty reliable rule of thumb that the worst art tends to provoke the best criticism. Or if not the best criticism, at least the funniest. I have yet to enjoy the charms of Sex And The City 2. It’s all I can do to avoid those shimmering ads that hover on my laptop screen, threatening to burst into squawking life if my cursor brushes too close; since when has checking one’s e-mail required the steady hands of a bomb disposal expert? And yet I have already wallowed in some deliciously vicious reviews of the movie: first, Hadley Freeman in The Guardian; and then, even better, Lindy West in The Stranger. (“‘If I wasn’t rich, I’d definitely just kill myself right away with a knife!’ says everyone in this movie without having to actually say it.”)

In fact, the reviews have been so good (by which I mean they’re aesthetically pleasing in their own right, rather than that they offer a number of stars/thumbs that might make the producers happy) that they’ve now been reviewed themselves, by Liz Jones, of the Daily Mail.

It’s appropriate that such a potentially postmodern task should fall to Ms Jones, because she doesn’t really exist. Or rather, the ‘Liz Jones’ we encounter on the page appears to be a heightened alter ego of the writer, just as ‘Carrie Bradshaw’ is supposedly based on the author of Sex and the City, a sort of Candace Bushnell 2.0. Every escapade and mishap she relates to her readers, from her divorce to her money worries, is at once too preposterous to be believed, and too banal for anyone to bother making it up. Taken as a whole, they present a simulacrum of humanity, a woman who cannot exist in real life, because if she did she would have been murdered years ago, just for being so bloody annoying. Indeed, when a shotgun was fired at her house last year, many observers pondered that she might have brought it on herself; whether because she depicted her Exmoor neighbours as toothless junkies, or because she concocted the whole episode, an ambiguous smudging of gonzo journalism and rural melodrama, Cold Comfort Farm rewritten by Hunter S Thompson and Jayson Blair.

So, what does ‘Liz’ have to say? Well, her first objection is to Freeman’s remark that the film made her “want to be sick in my mouth”. Intriguingly, this phrase was removed when the Guardian article was republished in, uh, the Daily Mail; as was the reference to “women with higher expectations of movies about women than a compendium of cliches from the Daily Mail”. You see, for ‘Liz’, this isn’t really about whether the reviewers were right or wrong about the film being good or bad. This is about the sisterhood; or at least a very precise slice of the sisterhood, apparently the only sector of society that you’re allowed to criticise these days, “the middle-aged, affluent white woman”. Like, say, Liz Jones. That’s Liz without the quotation marks of course, because Liz is affluent, paid a six-figure sum to grace the minds of Mail readers with the benefit of her wisdom; whereas ‘Liz’ is on the verge of bankruptcy, relying on the generosity of her readers to pay her bills.

Implicitly, of course, Mail readers are also middle-aged, affluent white women, or aspire to being so; the crossover between Mail readership and SATC fandom is pretty obvious. But here’s where it gets confusing. ‘Liz’ praises the movie as being something around which women like her can unite and celebrate, exuberantly and without inhibition, enjoying their own empowerment; she tells us that when she attended, “Samantha’s ‘Lawrence of my *****’ joke got the loudest screams of the night.”

Now, this threw me. It was quite possible that Samantha’s joke was the funniest of all time, and entirely deserving of such collective ululation. But because of those Whitehousian asterisks, I had no bloody idea, and was forced to Google for the un-starred version. And do you know what the missing word was? How bad can it get? The word is – more sensitive readers might prefer to look away now:

labia

Er... right. So while middle-aged, affluent white female Mail readers and writers, both real and fictional, should feel free to celebrate the ditzy materialism of the SATC franchise, they must be protected from any reference to the geography of their own bodies, lest, perhaps, such language makes them sick in their mouths. West’s contemplation of the same area (“What is the lubrication level of Samantha Jones's 52-year-old vagina?”) is so profane as to be beyond the protection even of those doughty asterisks.

Because, in Mailworld, in ‘Liz’world, those middle-aged, affluent white women are only worthy of support and protection if they stick to the curriculum, which is about liking nice clothes and shoes and cocktails and worrying about whether celebrities are too fat, or too thin, or too old, or whether the celebrities’ clothes and shoes are nice enough, and whether they’ve consumed too many cocktails. Girl Powah! But woe betide any middle-aged, affluent white woman who steps over the line. Radio 4’s Fi Glover, for example, who ‘Liz’ damns for introducing a segment on an Afghan version of Pop Idol. The unnamed “snooty blonde American academic” who announced the death of romantic comedy on BBC2. Any middle-aged, affluent white woman who might choose to attend “the highbrow Hay Festival”. Words such as “academic” and “highbrow” are of course raw, dripping meat to the Mail faithful, especially when applied to women; stockings should be sheer, not blue. ‘Liz’ has “a PhD in the box set” of the original SATC TV series, and that’s all the cleverness any girl needs. (Although of course, if a university were to put the study of SATC on the curriculum, that would be a Mickey Mouse degree, and dumbing down, and probably political correctness gone mad. Do try to keep up.)

This is squalid misogyny, moronic self-loathing masquerading as sisterhood. But, before you reach for your shotgun and pepper the Jones letterbox, wait a moment. It’s not Liz talking, it’s ‘Liz’, the Carrie Bradshaw of the Mail, a character as ironically vile and idiotic as Alf Garnett or the bigots inhabiting the Randy Newman songbook. Liz herself crouches within, a metacritical Sheela Na Gig, poking and provoking us, flashing her labia at Hadley Freeman and the editor of the Daily Mail and vomiting in Lindy West’s mouth and Carrie Bradshaw’s and her own and ours.

PS: More thoughts on SATC from Mark Kermode on 5Live (in the last half-hour), Anna Carey in the Irish Times and, from a few years back, Sarah Churchwell (the blonde academic herself) in the Spectator, and just now a response to ‘Jones’ in her blog.

PPS: And a final few words from Sathnam Sanghera in The Times (after he deals with a particularly violent Alicia Keys gig).

A little princess

A few days ago, I found myself on the Tube, sitting next to a group of three women and a little girl. Now, it’s obviously unfair to make assumptions about people’s sexuality based purely on their appearances, and God knows I’ve been misdiagnosed on many occasions (something to do my tendency to pout at moments of disappointment) but I’d already guessed the adults were lesbians before I clocked that one of them was wearing a “WHAT WOULD XENA DO?” t-shirt. Subsequent eavesdropping revealed that the little girl was the daughter of one of the women.

At one point, the girl asked: “What colour are my eyes?”

Her mother said: “Your eyes are green.”

“Why?” replied the little girl, not unreasonably.

“It depends on what colour your two mummies’ eyes are.”

Hang on a minute. Now, I’ve got no problem with kids being brought up in any combination of parent/carer scenarios: one daddy; two mummies; three daddies, a granny and a sword-swallower; as long as the child is loved and nurtured and protected, it’s really none of my business or anyone else’s. And in a broader sense, people should be entitled to define themselves however they bloody well want, and live by that definition. Unfortunately, biology occasionally intervenes.

Take the story of Caster Semanya, the South African runner whose gender has become a matter of international controversy. Semanya is a woman, in the sense that she was brought up as a woman, and identifies herself as female. Under normal circumstances, that should be the end of it. Unfortunately, she has chosen to take part in top-level athletics, and as such her biological identity - the configuration of her sexual organs, the nature of her chromosomes - also becomes a matter of public interest, in a way that it wouldn’t if she’d decided to be an accountant or a bus driver. The fact that she appears to possess testicles does not mean that she’s not a woman in a social sense, but it does make rather a nonsense of the idea of having separate events for male and female runners if she continues to compete as a female. In biological terms, she’s intersex, or a hermaphrodite, or a person with androgen insensitivity syndrome.

Then there’s Thomas Beatie, the man who had a baby. He’s a man, because he chose to undergo reassignment surgery and live as a man, and no-one else can or should deny him that right. However, he was, is and always will be a biological woman. The fact that he elected to keep his uterus and ovaries after surgery is beside the point; even if he’d had them removed, his biological identity would still be female.

Which brings me back to the little girl on the train. Presumably she’s being brought up by two women, and she calls them her mummies, and they are her mummies, because they love her and care for her, and she loves them back and that’s all lovely. But in biological terms, there’s a father somewhere in the equation, a man who provided his sperm to facilitate her conception. And part of the back story of her green eyes is down to that man. To tell her it’s because of her two mummies is wishful thinking, a nonsense, a lie.