#kit writes: Inverse Function | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

innuendostudios · 7 years ago

Video

youtube

After four months of work, my video essay Bringing Back What’s Stolen: Fury Road and the Avenging Feminine is online. A nearly hour-long dive into the cinematic language of feminine violence in action and horror films. You can also watch this playlist of all 8 parts if you don’t want to click through manually. I will share a supercut of the whole thing as soon as I deal with a copyright block.

This was a crapload of work so, please, if you want more like it, consider backing me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

Mad Max Fury Road has three principal characters: Imperator Furiosa, Immortan Joe, Max Rockatansky; protagonist, antagonist, deuteragonist (it’s a word).

Each character is introduced from behind, as a body first and then, later, as a person.

We meet Max at a remove, practically a silhouette. Wrapped in cloth and buried in wild hair, it takes several moments before we glimpse human skin. Almost immediately, he’s disappearing into his V8 Interceptor, and it’s not until his pursuers roll his car that we get a shot of his face, covered in sand and a matted beard.

Max is a person who has abandoned all markers of his humanity to live alone in the desert. His obscured face makes it easier to relate to him as a feral animal than as a man, and that’s the life he’s chosen; living like an animal insulates him from danger and buries his guilt and trauma. Throughout the first chunk of the film, Max’s face is remains obscured, first by the beard, then a gag, then a muzzle. We get only one unobstructed shot of his face, and it’s framed by the bars of a cage. The protections he built around himself, the war boys have stripped him of, and replaced with chains; humanity is no longer something forsaken, it's something denied.

It’s not until 45 minutes into the movie, having escaped Joe and formed a tenuous alliance with Furiosa and the wives, that he starts to look to the audience like a recognizable human.

We meet Furiosa in the opposite fashion. Where Max was a wide shot of a silhouette that is all cloth and hair, Furiosa is an extreme close-up of brightly-lit human skin. She carries Joe’s brand, and she has her hair cut short, which implies everything we just saw Max go through, she has gone through as well. They’re both prisoners. [“I was taken… stolen.”]

Where Max is invisible inside his car, we follow Furiosa inside the war rig. Max is like a hermit crab receding into its shell only to have it pried off, where Furiosa has complete mastery of her vehicle (it even has her missing arm drawn on the driver’s side door, as though the war rig were an extension of her body). Clear windows, her face unobstructed, the greasepaint on her forehead making her eyes - the windows to the soul - pop, making her expression more readable.

Everything Max takes the first act to become, she is from her first scene. The time between her introduction and getting a good look at her face is just over two minutes.

Joe’s introduction is the sick inversion of the others’, closer and fleshier than Furiosa’s yet more alien than Max’s. Where Furiosa’s skin humanizes her, Joe’s tumorous body does the reverse. Where Max has his layers of protection stripped from him, Joe is kitted up with armor and finery. Where Max struggles to make his face visible and Furiosa’s expressions are accentuated, the distance between Joe’s introduction and seeing his face uncovered is the entire movie; we only see Joe unmasked when half his face has been torn off. And three minutes later the credits are rolling.

What makes these characters accessible has been distorted to make Joe a grotesque. (I don’t have room to get into the troubling ways Fury Road uses atypical bodies as a shorthand for inhumanity, so I’ve written a small, additional essay, link in the down there part, or at the end.)

So here we have it, from the opening shots: protagonist, antagonist, deuteragonist; human, inhuman, half-human.

The things I’m describing are filmic techniques for creating or denying audience empathy. Humans relate to other humans, and filmmakers employ dozens of tricks to portray inhumans as human and thereby relatable, and portray humans as inhuman to make the otherwise. By this rubric, empathy with Max is built, empathy with Joe is denied, and empathy with Furiosa is simply expected.

The female action star being the one for whom empathy is most freely given is by no means unprecedented, but it’s not the norm. In the tradition of Blow Shit Up movies, the “relatable action heroine” is often approximated, approached asymptotically, but rarely depicted. Some don’t seem to believe she exists. Yet, here she is.

Furiosa is our white whale.

If, in a rom-com, the Thing What Solves Your Problem is love, in an action movie, The Thing What Solves Your Problem is violence. Something is wrong with the world, and the plot is structured around amassing the strength, tactics, or allies necessary to smash your problem until it goes away. That’s how things get fixed. And the idea of punching the world back into shape is deeply tied up in our notions of manliness.

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of archetypal action protagonists, from the Everyman Against the World to the Hulking Brute to the Dapper G-man to the Stoic Killing Machine, and, while occasionally cast with women, they are all, by default, men. There’s maybe no other genre more deeply associated with masculinity.

The longstanding assumption is that women complicate violent movies the way we used to say they complicate sea voyages. The movies are manly, the audience is male, and a male audience will not identify with a female character as a matter of course. This assumption goes into the writing, the casting, the filming, the editing, and the marketing. Demographics do bear out that violent movie audiences are, primarily, men, but this assumption existed before we tracked demographics. So, then: if we’ve been making the movies for men, and marketing them to men, should we really be surprised if it’s mostly men who end up seeing them?

For a variety of reasons, action filmmakers can’t just make movies without women in them: a) there are still at least a few women in the audience, and their money spends just as well as a man’s, so best not to completely alienate them, b) they’d rather not get yelled at too much by feminists, c) sleeping with beautiful women is part of the power fantasy a lot of male action heroes are supposed to cater to, and d) absent any women, the fixation with the male physique might read as just a wee bit gay, and we can’t have that, apparently.

So if women in action movies are unavoidable, perhaps the audience’s sympathies, if not freely given, can be earned. For this purpose, action filmmakers have invented a handful of female archetypes.

Between these six women, we can chart the cinematic language of feminine violence as it is most commonly codified. I’ll stress that they are not the sum total of womanly presence in violent movies, but, if you’re a fan of violent film, you’ve probably been in a room with them dozens of times and never been formally introduced.

Each has something to teach us about how men are expected to relate to a woman in a violent context. Let us discuss each in her own turn, and, with each, how Fury Road’s avoidance, subversion, or rejection of these expectations are key to what the film is about.

Let’s get y’all acquainted.

The Innocent: Helplessness

There is a beat common in action movies called The Kick The Dog Moment. Kicking a dog is how screenwriters signal to the audience just how bad the bad guy is, because only a monster would harm something so precious, so loyal, so helpless as a dog.

An even more common beat for exposing a villain’s evil nature is the Strike The Woman Moment, or the Grope The Woman Moment, or the Shoot The Woman Moment.

This is the role of The Innocent: precious, loyal, helpless, and serving the same narrative function as a puppy. Her proximity to violence spurs the plot forward, and reveals things about violent men, but the story’s never really about her. It’s about the men. She’s there to get threatened by men, to get kidnapped by men, to get killed by men. Also, she’s there to get rescued by men, or, failing that, to be avenged by men. The Kick The Dog Moment isn’t about the dog, it’s about the villain. The dog is a device.

The Innocent is not wholly incapable of enacting violence herself. She will, on occasion, fight back against her captors, which serves to communicate to the audience that she’s feisty; but it rarely accomplishes anything. Occasionally, during the falling action, she is granted an act of symbolic violence, sometimes even landing the final blow on the villain, but this is only after the dramatic tension surrounding the villain has resolved.

The Innocent is an onlooker to violence, she is often the site of violence, and though she is sometimes allowed to perform violence in an honorary capacity, she’s not a full participant. She is a symbol of what is good and worth protecting, and what is good is innately peaceful. Violence is a burden that violence is used to spare her from. It is the solemn duty of men. She can only enter this domain as a victim.

She is, by far, the most common female action movie archetype. There’s even a variant I call The False Innocent - the woman who plays off people’s assumption that women are powerless in order to kick their asses. You know, what if that 90-pound, doe-eyed waif being threatened by the big strong men is secretly the toughest person in the room? (Joss Whedon is, shall we say, fond of this one.) This serves as a direct rebuke to the assumptions baked into The Innocent, but it says something about how pervasive the archetype is that you can build an entire second archetype around everyone assuming all women are Innocents.

In Fury Road, as soon as our protagonist and deuteragonist meet, it is made clear that Furiosa can hold her own in a fight with only one arm. This scene serves the same function as the Thor-Iron Man-Captain America fight in The Avengers: “Hey, these folks are pretty evenly-matched. Wouldn’t it be cool if they were on the same side?” And Furiosa’s not the only woman who can fight: Later, we meet fearsome warrior tribe The Vuvalini.

So where we normally see a divide between violent men and passive women, here we have a split between multi-gendered warriors, and people who don’t fight - in this case, the wives.

And not being a warrior doesn’t ipso facto make the wives useless, unlike some damsels who, growing up, made you or possibly your older sister yell “DO SOMETHING WOMAN” at the TV. People who can’t throw a punch can still throw you a weapon, they can pull your enemies off you, they can keep ammo away from your enemy’s gun. They can reload a rifle, they can stop a bullet from being fired. They can make you a new ally. Even when people try to turn them into helpless prisoners, as happens to so many women in so many movies, they don’t have to submit; they can surrender and then help you board the enemy’s caravan, or, even taken captive and held at gunpoint, they can still help you take down the Big Bad.

In isolation, any one of these could be just another “feisty damsel” or “false innocent” moment, but, in their totality, they start to imply that the reason the wives aren’t fighters like Furiosa is the same reason they don’t drive the war rig: They don’t know how, because they’ve been kept in a safe. There is nothing innate about the difference between a warrior and a non-warrior, and certainly nothing gendered; just training.

If the usual framing is active, violent men protecting or possessing passive, innocent women, no one in this movie is passive. No one. Even if you aren’t shooting the gun yourself, there are still ways to contribute. You don’t have to sit around waiting to be rescued, there’s work to do.

It’s important to recognize that the wives are never rescued by anyone; not Max, not even Furiosa. [“they begged her to go” clip.] Violence may still be the way things get done in an action movie, but it’s not synonymous with agency. They set the plot in motion. This whole thing is their plan. It’s not a rescue, it’s an escape.

The Vasquez: Masculinity

Meet The Vasquez, the masculine woman, named after Janette Goldstein’s character in Aliens because all the other words I could think of carried the wrong connotations. (Also, Goldstein? Really?) The Vasquez is rough, she’s tough, she’s hard-drinking, she’s foul-mouthed, she’s gun-savvy, she’s sexually aggressive, and, most importantly, she’s one of the guys. If the most common coding is that men are violent and women are passive, and the action screenwriter assumes a male audience won’t like their female character because they can’t stand to think violence could ever be feminine, the obvious solution? Make the lady man up. If she resembles a man, she can be fashioned into any number of existing male archetypes, from military grunt to double agent to assassin.

Her closest male counterpoint is The Hardbody, a staple of the 80’s action milieu. In a hardbody movie, we either meet a man who’s a pillar of masculine strength, or we watch an ostensibly regular guy spend the movie becoming one. Similarly, The Vasquez is sometimes introduced fully-formed, but, more often than not, we watch her emerge from the body of a traditionally feminine woman. And where a Hardbody’s training montage shows what is soft becoming hard, The Vasquez shows what is feminine becoming masculine. [G.I. Jane clip on not menstruating.]

In either gender, we can call this process “ruggedization,” and it’s not only physical. As a character acclimates to violence, there is often a change in presentation. Most especially with a woman, ruggedization may not be the gaining of muscle but the shedding of feminine signifiers. Note how Ripley, over the course of three movies, goes from having all the hair to a lot of the hair to none of the hair, thereby resembling all the men in the movie, as she becomes more of an action heroine. Note how, as Thelma goes from neurotic housewife to a woman who robs liquor stores and holds up policemen, we see her go from frilly white dresses to denim to dirty sleeveless tops. Note the scene where Louise sits down at a truck stop, takes off every piece of jewelry she owns, and trades them for a man’s cowboy hat.

Also, in correlation with becoming violent, there tends to be, call it a shift in patterns of speech: [“suck my dick” montage].

The Vasquez maintains the association between powerlessness and womanness codified by The Innocent because, as the woman sheds her weakness, she also sheds her womanness; the two are treated as the same thing. Violence stays masculine; women get violent when they become honorary men.

Fury Road‘s trick is to take its plurality of female characters and scatter them across the entire gender spectrum. In terms of presentation, you’ve got the highly feminine wives, the traditionally masculine garb of the Vuvalini, and Furiosa somewhere in between. The film subverts the spectrum further by softly rejecting the notion that a person occupies any single position along it. Toast is very feminine and also knows her way around guns; the Vuvalini are a leather-wearing, pants-sporting biker gang, and also are The Many Mothers, who care about feminine-coded things like cooperation, empathy, gardening. Masculinity and femininity are not an either/or. Many traits exist, in varying proportions, in all people.

Traditional femininity is valorized in our male heroes as well. Traits like healing, softness, deference to superior skill, self-sacrifice, these things are treated as inherently valuable irrespective of one’s gender, and absolutely mission critical to their success in battle. Basically every time a man does something that Human Embodiment of Toxic Masculinity Joe would disallow, it helps them win. This goes a long way towards elevating femininity, but also breaking up the male-female dichotomy, allowing anyone to possess any trait from anywhere along the spectrum and still be strong.

The fact that Joe does treat gender as an either/or, that he does not foster community nor empathy with his followers, that he only maintains loyalty by imposing a Norse-inspired death cult that leads his war boys into reckless behavior and crumbles instantly if it’s ever challenged, these things are liabilities.

Men and women are at their strongest not at their most masculine - at their most like Joe - but when they are free to be as masculine and as feminine as the situation requires of them. What’s wrong with Joe isn’t masculinity - masculine signifiers abound on both sides of the fight - it’s a malignant masculinity that rejects all but the most extreme of one end of the spectrum. This narrowness is what gets Joe killed.

The Dominatrix: Sexuality

The sensual murderess, ass-kicking in catsuits, high heels, and chokers. The ostentatious fusion of the two greatest spectacles: Sex & Death, Pleasure & Pain, Eros & Thanatos. If you want to leave behind the idea that the only way to be violent is to be manly and you worry your straight male audience will revolt, consider writing someone every straight male is already familiar with.

Consider The Dominatrix.

(Note that I am using the term “dominatrix” a little loosely here. In real life, there is a distinction between highly sexualized violence and actual BDSM iconography. How do I know? Mind your own business.)

The Dominatrix is a violent - often hyperviolent - character who is still, unmistakably, a woman. I mean, say what you want about Bayonetta, she’s not mannish. Most men are at least passingly familiar with what a dominatrix is, so it’s not a far leap to refashion a woman’s bedroom violence into action movie violence. But she comes with some baggage.

The femininity she displays is specifically the subset of femininity most appealing to men. She’s not a nurturer, not a healer, not soft, and rarely cooperative. Her womanliness begins and ends with sexuality. And sexiness creates its own context. There may be loose justification for why she’s dressed the way she is: you know, she can’t wear armor like a normal person because she needs to leap around - gymnastics being another familiar image of female physical excellence, and an excuse to whiz the camera around her body. But much of the time we don’t even get that much. The movie holds no pretense: She’s dressed that way because the audience likes it.

The thinking here seems to be that if straight men consider violence the domain of men, and, therefore, a violent woman an affront to their masculinity, they’ll willingly take a blow to their male ego provided their heterosexual ego is, to speak indelicately, getting stroked. For what does a dominatrix do? Strike, dominate, and degrade, yes, but for their partner’s own pleasure. It’s, at least in part, a performance; there’s a reason your dalliance with a domme is called “a scene.”

The dominatrix-as-action-heroine turns violence into a kind of elaborate pole dance, inoffensive to a man because it’s for him, a woman trafficking in male signifiers made acceptable because she does it sexylike.

Of all the characters we’re talking about, The Dominatrix demands the least empathy of the male audience. An action movie offers a power fantasy; James Bond is supposed to be a character men want to be. Men don’t want to be Barb Wire. Men are supposed to look at Barb Wire, not walk a mile in her pumps. The Dominatrix is most commonly a villain or an antihero. Perhaps it should come as no surprise: Bad Girls aren’t Good Guys.

Now, this is a bit of a subjective statement, but Fury Road doesn’t sexualize its women.

Let me paint you a picture: A man lives for some indeterminate length of time at the very bottom of a rigid social hierarchy wherein only the man at the top has access to beautiful women. Prior to that he lived for years alone in the desert. We don’t know how long it’s been since he’s even spoken to a woman. After a thrilling escape, he, alone, happens upon the five women deemed by that society the most beautiful and fertile, the “prized breeders,” clad in white, cutting off their chastity belts, and spraying each other with a hose.

This is how Max meets the wives. Most Hollywood directors would shoot this scene like a wet t-shirt contest.

Man Of Social Caste That Would Never See A Beautiful Woman Naked Stumbles Upon One Or More Bathing Out Of Doors has been shot hundreds of times. This is every hot springs episode of every anime ever drawn. Movie peeping is the essence of the filmic experience, because a man watching a woman bathe is doing the same thing you are doing as an audience member: looking at naked people who can’t see you. The way you traditionally shoot this scene is to lean in to the voyeurism. If there’s going to be bathing and then a fight, why not sexy bathing and sexy fighting?

In Fury Road, Max lusts only for one thing. Water.

During this scene, Furiosa is fully-clothed, and look at how she’s framed. Now look at the shots favored for the wives: long shots and tight close-ups. As in: their breasts and hips are either filmed at a distance or cropped out of frame.

I don’t want to overstate things. That framing is not enforced, merely favored. And there’s no denying these women are, by conventional standards, beautiful - I mean, for fuck’s sake, Zoe Kravitz is in this movie. I’m not, like, kinkshaming you if you do find this scene erotic. But it seems to me that effort is being expended to downplay the obvious potential for eroticism. A chastity belt coming off could easily signal sexual availability. [Men in Tights clip] But this one has teeth. To I’m thinking, “I would want that off me, too.” I feel I am being asked to walk in the wives’ shoes.

If what you need to feel OK with a woman holding a gun is some hint that she’s doing it to turn you on, Fury Road won’t give you that. If you want to see women as sexy bodies before you consider seeing them as humans, Fury Road won’t give you that, either. That’s how Joe sees them, and they left that perspective behind before frame one, and make one thing clear in their very first line of dialogue: [“We’re not going back.”]

The Mama Bear: Motherhood

A common action movie character is the man who’s love interest is kidnapped and/or murdered, and he is spurred into violence so that he can rescue her and/or punish everyone responsible. Swap the man for a mother and the love interest for her child and you’ve got The Mama Bear, the woman who will stop at nothing to protect her cub, a la Jodie Foster in Panic Room or Jodie Foster in Flightplan, or, occasionally, the woman who avenges another member of her nuclear family, a la Jodie Foster in The Brave One. (Jodie’s got a thing that works for her.)

Believe it or not, most men, growing up, had moms, and it’s a cultural narrative that children feel safe under their mother’s protection. So The Mama Bear is a violent woman who is, once again, both feminine and familiar. She’s the ideal of what we’d want our mom to be if something bad happened to us.

By nature or circumstance, The Mama Bear is a single mother, either recently divorced, recently widowed, or possessing a husband who is simply someplace else. (And if he shows up he tends to get his ass handed to him.) Occasionally she’s just single, or even a surrogate whose motherly instinct kicks in upon contact with an orphan. In all these cases, she springs into action without a lot of assistance from men. You can read this as an independent woman who does not require men to help her, or you can read it as a woman who acts, not because she’s suited to the task, but because there are no men to do it for her. Most are a little bit of both.

But this is a strong character who’s not only allowed to be feminine, she is strong because she’s a woman. She has entered the domain of men with her femininity intact. This is not to say that motherhood and womanhood should be so closely tied in our cultural consciousness, simply to acknowledge that, at this moment in time, they are. Mothers are thought of as women whom we not only accept but demand strength from.

But, if she’s our idea of what a mother should be, then our point of identification isn’t necessarily her, but, at least in part, the moppets. Because what warm-blooded mammal can look at the quivering lips of children in danger and not root for anyone trying to save them? The Mama Bear, often enough, gets a kind of collateral empathy, the spillover of our concern for her kids.

She is, also, in contrast with The Dominatrix, almost completely without fail, sexless, another consequence of having dead or absent husbands. She doesn’t have sex, kiss, or even flirt, because, naturally, our ideal mother would never make us think about her banging anyone. That, the assumption seems to go, is the price for our respect.

Between one obvious pregnancy, the wives’ escape to ��the green place of many mothers,” and the words they left scrawled in their cell, motherhood is a central theme in Fury Road. The symbology of motherhood is all over fiction written by men. You know the “women and children first” trope in disaster movies? That’s not just chivalry. It’s also men preserving the mechanisms by which they pass on their genes. [Up In The Air: “Because you can’t have babies.”]

Immortan Joe is kind of the ad absurdum of this thinking, having literally turned motherhood into a commodity-producing industry. Outside of Furiosa’s relative privilege and a few unnamed proles, the only women in Joe’s hierarchy are babymakers and dairy cows. The wives’ escape is, at least in part, about providing a better life for them and their children, where bodies and babies are not property.

What’s absent in all this is any actual children. Save for some nameless warboy youths at the beginning and end - some of whom, for all we know, may have been born to the wives - children are not party to the action. There are no wee ones with their eyes welling up to get you caring about their moms by proxy. The wives and the Vuvalini may all carry the title of “mother,” but it’s abstracted. What’s at issue isn’t children but the idea of motherhood, or, more accurately, the right to motherhood, celebrated on its own terms and for its own sake, not as a service to men. And, by focusing more on pregnancy than child-rearing, motherhood is not quite so divorced from sex.

Motherhood and strength coexist in the characters, but the one does not derive from the other. Motherhood is not correlated with fighting ability. The wives’ rebellion is about the rights of their babies no more than it’s about their own rights to not be things.

The Final Girl: Specialness

[“Do you like scary movies?”]

OK, this one… is a lot.

A gaggle of young folks - usually horny teens - is terrorized by a monster - usually a man in a mask - who represents a kind of pure, unwavering evil and kills with a bladed weapon. One by one, every character is picked off or incapacitated until there’s only one left, a young woman who, in spite of her terror, finds the strength to fight back, and, often enough kill the killer. If you’re not familiar with the slasher movies of the 70’s and 80’s, you might not even know, at first, who of the initial posse is supposed to be the protagonist, but if you’re a fan, you’ll recognize her instantly: Responsible, resourceful, and pure, she is The Final Girl.

The slasher is an interesting case, because, breaking with the traditions we’ve established, it’s an entire genre where a presumably male audience isn’t expected to accept a violent woman, by the end of the film they are expected to be screaming for her to pick up the chainsaw and kill the fuck out of the bad guy.

Because The Final Girl is special, damn it.

What sets her apart? Well, a lot of it is to do with what The Final Girl symbolizes and how it contrasts with the symbology of the killer. Of all the characters, she is the most suited to survive and combat the villain, which is why she outlives her friends. We can start with the most obvious difference: [“She’s a virgin”].

Virginity means a lot of things in the movies. Purity: If the killer represents all we consider evil about the world, the antidote to that is someone who is, metaphorically, “unsullied.” Youth: If sex is considered a rite of passage into adulthood, then a virgin is, in some ways, still a child, and we’ve already discussed how relating to a child is considered a smaller ask than relating to an adult woman. Desirability: As a society, we haven’t fully escaped the puritanical narrative of “bringing a virgin to the altar,” at least not in our movie symbolism, and codifying a woman as “untainted goods” invites the male audience to, well, crush on her. There also tends to be this subtext of sexual violation to the murders, which lends the whole thing a Chaucerian concern for preserving a young woman’s maidenhead.

There are other ways The Final Girl, even if not explicitly a virgin, is virginal. She doesn’t drink, or, if she does, she’s a lightweight. She doesn’t smoke pot, or, if she does, she’s inexperienced. She doesn’t flirt, or, if she does, she’s comparatively demure. She’s also usually a bit brighter than her friends: The one who first senses something is wrong, the one who makes a plan of action, the one who figures out the killer’s identity. She may not be “one of the guys,” but she’s “not like other girls.”

This emerges slowly over the course of the film. The more characters die, the more The Final Girl appears to individuate from the rest. It is the ways in which they are not like her that get the other girls killed. They’re too dim, too horny, too oblivious. The empathy you build for The Final Girl - in part by having every other potential point of empathy systematically removed - you are not asked to extend to the other girls. You empathize with a woman, not with women. If she is special, they are unspecial. Their deaths are scary, but titillating. You’re not expected to root for them the way you root for her. You’re here to watch them die.

Then there’s the killer himself. In the early going, the camera is more closely aligned with him than any of his victims, often showing the murders literally through his eyes. It’s only as The Final Girl grows more active in the story - and, eventually, becomes violent - that we gradually come to see the killer from the victim’s perspective.

Each slasher villain is a snapshot of what society thought an image of evil incarnate would look like at that time. The things they have in common are telling.

The killer is almost always a man - Friday the 13th Part I notwithstanding - but is commonly, by societal standards, an insufficient man: Physically deformed (The Hills Have Eyes), gender-nonconforming (Psycho), or just really, really hating sex (Jason X). This is often blamed on being too close with his mommy. Meanwhile, The Final Girl’s disinterest in the activities of other women makes her a little tomboyish, and it’s really common for her to have a boy’s name: Stevie, Marti, Terry, Stretch, Ripley, Taylor, Sidney. Couple this with her tendency to kill the villain with his own intimate, penetrating weapon - and I’m not going to go down the rabbit hole of phallic imagery in slasher movies because, frankly, I think most writers make too much of it, but it’s there - and you can read The Final Girl’s assault on the killer as becoming a better man than him.

We still haven’t escaped the fixation with violence and masculinity. This isn’t to say The Final Girl is another Vasquez - even if she is ruggedized, it’s not by forsaking femininity. Instead, the distinctions between masculinity and femininity are more permeable; the killer kills what is feminine, and then fails to kill what is, in some ways, less feminine than himself. And that failure leads to the reversal of who commits violence against whom.

Fury Road borrows a lot of imagery from horror films, most especially in imagining Joe as huge, misshapen, and masc’d. But Joe’s monstrosity is not a lack but an overabundance of masculinity, by no means the ideal male body but a body that idealizes maleness. If masculinity is a performance then he’s Kenneth fuckin’ Branagh. He hides his welts under fake abs, war medals, and - ahem - whiteness, and hangs a gear from a muscle car from highly symbolic places. [It’s drivin’ me nuts!] And he’s defeated not by appropriation of these signifiers but by rejection of everything they stand for.

But if the core of The Final Girl is a specialness that does not extend to other characters, can we talk about how not one person on Furiosa’s side of the battle is special? Not a one of them.

If we wanted to argue Furiosa is “not like other girls,” which other girls would we even be referring to? The femmes in white or the granny biker gang? The elderly matron, the full-bodied milk mothers, or the suffering proles? Furiosa has commonalities and differences with all of them. They all have commonalities and differences with each other. There is no “normal” from which to deviate. Even within a single type, there is variation: the wives alone have the leader, the nurturer, the weird one, the scared one, and the tough one (or: Gobo, Mokey, Wembley, Boober, and Red). No one is interchangeable.

At the same time, no one is special. The war rig is chock full of redundancies: Multiple people who can drive, multiple people who can shoot, multiple people who can fix what’s broken. Which is, again, necessary, because there’s too much to do not to have backup. [“I’m going to need you to drive the rig.”]

We don’t know a lot about Joe’s society, but we can infer it’s a caste system that stratifies everyone by specialness, here defined by their usefulness to Joe. At the bottom are possessions: wives, blood bags, and milk producers. Above them are the masses, and then the war boys, who believe they will be awaited in Valhalla if they perform their duties well. Next is Furiosa as a leader in Joe’s army, and then Joe’s immediate family, and, finally, Joe himself, singular and all-powerful. [“He grabs the sun.”]

Furiosa’s alliance counters this verticality with a lateral power structure - I mean, it’s literally the difference between a tower and a convoy - where specialness is not a prerequisite to rights, privilege, or empathy. A cooperative, where no one is fungible or disposable, and on one is special or elite. People form interdependencies with each other of their own free will, and may leave at any time if they wish. No one earns a place in society, or the empathy of the audience, by proving themselves unique. It is simply assumed that everyone is deserving of both.

Also, remember when I said this scene mostly kept the camera away from the wives’ breasts and hips? Here’s one of the only exceptions: [not a virgin clip]

The Rape Revenger: Suffering

I’m going to spare you the explicit footage in this section.

The rape revenge film is the subtext of the slasher movie made literal, the kick-the-dog moment if it took up an entire reel, what would happen if The Mama Bear fought as passionately for herself as for her kids. A number of men target a particularly vulnerable woman - usually isolated, sometimes even deaf or mute - and rape her. And then, one by one, they meet their fate at the hands of The Rape Revenger.

Most commonly, The Rape Revenger and the victim are the same person, though, sometimes, she is avenging a loved one, or even a member of her immediate community. (Yes, among other things, Alien is a movie about rape. The rape is metaphorical.) Her often sadistic killing spree is female-against-male in response to the most quintessentially male-against-female act of violence, and not only is the male viewer supposed to find this violence acceptable, he is supposed to find it righteous. He is supposed to clamor for the deaths of the transgressors. In these films, there is no retribution too cruel for a rapist.

The genre was most popular around the same time as the slasher, and carries much of the same coding: There’s the same lurid fascination with female bodies as objects of beauty and sites of extreme pain, the same earning of sympathy over the course of an entire movie rather than it being assumed, and the same implication that men are the source of a violence that women can become imbued with by being the victims of it.

The biggest difference is just how much the woman suffers in these movies. She suffers a lot.

There’s no collective of dipshit teens to spread the violence across; everything the villains do, they do to one woman. The genre banks hard on the idea that one can’t help caring for a person as one watches her go through hell. Often, what makes the villains monstrous isn’t their cruelty but that they lack this compassion, that they hardly even notice the pain they’re causing. To them, sexual violence is rarely even about the woman, but jockeying for status with one another. It’s performative, men proving they’re alphas. And the movies treat this apathy towards female suffering as among the most heinous acts a man can commit.

If your heart does not go out to a woman in pain, you are implicated in her suffering.

Not that the male-fronted rape revenge film doesn’t exist, but this is another of the rare violent genres where the protagonist is a woman by default. It is deeply rooted in the (at least, presumed) experience of being a woman. And, for all the genre’s trashiness and exploitation - and they are very trashy, and very exploitative, and usually written by men - the most ambitious of them point fingers not just at the male villains but at masculinity itself.

So if a rape revenge film is seen as a workable way to get a male audience member to not only align with a violent woman but against the worst aspects of maleness itself, the question is: Does the woman have to be nude, filthy, beaten, and degraded for him to get there?

Fury Road assumes otherwise. Female suffering is conspicuously absent from the movie.

Make no mistake, the wives have all been raped by Joe. That’s why he kept them. At least two are pregnant with his children. But there are no scenes of them inside the cell, no flashbacks, no tearful descriptions of what was done to them. Even over the course of a very violent movie, it is surprisingly merciful when it comes to violence inflicted on women: When Angharad dies, the camera doesn’t show it [“she went under the wheels”]; when Organic performs an emergency C-section on her body, the camera tilts away; a scene where Joe leaves her and Miss Giddy in the swamp to be eaten by crows was wisely cut from the film. Even the worst beatings Furiosa suffers are not dwelt upon.

It is crucial that the only person we see suffer Joe’s indignities is Max.

Male-on-male violence carries neither the social baggage of what real-life domestic violence usually looks like nor the grindhouse edginess of watching women get hurt. It’s allowed to just be violence. We see Max stripped of his autonomy, his car and his blood put into service in somebody else’s war. We see him captured, sheared, and branded, and then we’re shown Furiosa, with all evidence of the same, and it’s clear whatever empathy we’ve built for him in the safe space of male-on-male violence, we owe to her. We’re never asked to pity the wives, and we’re never given a cheap thrill at the sight of their suffering. We’re asked to respect them, and to take them at their word. We’ve seen their cell, their pregnant bellies, the scars on Angharad’s face. We don’t need to see them suffer to know it happened.

Cruelty is the hack writer’s shorthand for evil. That’s what all those Kick the Dog moments are for. But a man can be evil without being cruel. [Cheedo scene, “he was kind.”] Joe withholds plentiful resources to keep his subjects in line. He keeps young men as battle fodder for his wars. He keeps slaves for blood and breeding. Would it matter if, in person, he was sweet, gentle, soft? The system he’s built to benefit himself is inherently cruel. The wives don’t write “you treated us like shit” on the walls when they escape, they write “we are not things.” We don’t need to see, or even know, how Joe treated them to know he’s a tyrant.

The Avenging Feminine

Before the comments fill up with taxonomical debates over whether this or that character truly fits the definition of a Mama Bear, the way folks still argue over what is or isn’t a MacGuffin, let me disclaim: The study of tropes is the study of patterns. The Mama Bear is not a character, she’s what a host of different characters all have in common with each other. We note a trend, and we give the trend a name so it can be discussed. Not every character will have all the traits we associate with the pattern; arguably most won’t. But the reason we give the pattern a name is because, if there’s a trend, it must be serving a purpose. The assumption is that men won’t like the image of a woman with a gun. The purpose of the trope is to say, “It’s OK, this time, because she’s a mom.” And it’s a lot less relevant that Charlie Baltimore doesn’t perfectly fit the definition of a Mama Bear because she’s also kind of a Vasquez than that her motherhood serves that same purpose.

The assumption is men will accept that any male character, no matter how soft, if stripped to his essence, will become violent, but, with women, they need to be convinced. These are six different ways of contending with that assumption. Though, you will, I hope, have noticed, that almost every woman I’ve discussed here has been white. This is because, if filmmakers assume a male audience needs to be convinced that a woman will become violent, a countervailing assumption is that a white audience doesn’t need to be convinced that a person of color will. POC have their own set of tropes to contend with, tropes that have far less influence on the action movie as a whole, because violent Black women are even rarer than violent white ones. Because the codification of movie violence is deeply informed by the presumed whims of straight white men.

It’s an open question whether many straight white men actually need these reassurances to enjoy a violent film, though it’s clear a lot have come to expect them.

Action movie violence isn’t just violence, it’s power, and power in the hands of the disadvantaged is very threatening to those with privilege. Fury Road’s very interested in the flow of power. In it, women may possess violence, but lacking it does not make them helpless. It does not insist that masculinity is the only way to wield power and vilifies those who do. It refuses to objectify its female characters but doesn’t strip them of all sexuality in the process. It valorizes motherhood without pretending what makes a woman powerful is her ability to provide men with babies. It offers many models of femininity without treating any one as more normal or valid than the others. And it engages the way women suffer under patriarchy without using that suffering as cheap pathos or easy thrills.

In short, the assumption baked into all the tropes we’ve discussed, that violence - power - is the domain of men that women can only enter in exceptional cases is flatly ignored. Feminine presence in this masculine space is not treated as a transgression, men who would consider it one are personified in the villain, and no attempt is made to soothe the male ego at the sight of women holding guns and crossbows.

This alone would make a movie remarkable. But I don’t think we can stake a movie’s greatness on what it doesn’t do, so, if you’ll permit me, I’ll get to the goddamn point.

No matter how many women are in it, the core of an action movie is about solving your problems with violence. That an appropriate show of force will put things right again. Fury Road is no different in this respect. And, in our society, this is understood to be the male power fantasy, one that has been enforced by thousands of repetitions. So what, then, does it mean to portray a woman living out that fantasy? Does her presence decouple the association between violence and manliness, or is living out a male power fantasy a kind of drag? Is performing that fantasy performing masculinity? Is every action heroine, in a functional sense, a Vasquez? Is the action film too thoroughly encoded male to be reclaimed?

Can movie violence ever truly be feminine?

I don’t think I, or any single movie, can answer that question. However, if you said, “Let’s just assume the answer is ‘yes’ and imagine what that movie would look like,” you might imagine Fury Road. And I’m going to explain why without using the phrase “Deleuzian corporeality.” Let’s talk about the two bags.

When Max lets Furiosa and the wives into the war rig, he does not yet trust them, so, for safety, he collects all the weapons in the cab and puts them in a bag that he keeps with him. A satchel full of Chekhov’s guns, and you will see every one of them fired. Later, after Angharad’s death, the wives take stock of its contents. [“anti-seed” clip]

When the wives stay the night with the Vuvalini, a woman called The Keeper of the Seeds has this exchange with The Dag: [bag of seeds clip]. She shows this to The Dag after a conversation about murder: [“thought you girls were above all that”]. And here’s what the bag means to her: [“there was no need to snap anybody then”]. This bag symbolizes an idealized vision of the past, when the savagery of the post-apocalypse wasn’t necessary. When peace was, at least, possible. This is the bag that is pointedly taken with them when they go to overthrow Joe’s society, being the only place around that could actually sustain plant life and abundance.

So there you have it, a bag of seed and a bag of anti-seed, one full of weapons from the Citadel and one full of sprouts from the Green Place of Many Mothers, one representing the toxic masculine warmongering directly implicated in the fall of civilization, and one representing a potential rebirth of society spearheaded by a pack of moms and highly symbolic pregnancies. Fury Road ain’t good because it’s subtle.

So, yeah, Joe fights to maintain the savagery of the post-apocalypse, because it’s where he’s amassed his power, and the Vuvalini fight to bring and end to it. That’s the difference between toxic masculinity and egalitarian feminism, right? Women represent peace, so we should put them in charge, and a little blood must be shed along the way. That is a reading fully supported by the text. And you might well respond, “Hey, most every action movie insists that The Good Guys’ violence is justified and will lead to peace and only The Bad Guys’ violence leads to continuing violence. There’s nothing particularly subversive about that.” And you’d be right.

But let me give a different reading.

Joe’s power derives from controlling the water supply and arable land and, thereby, agriculture. His power dissolves if someone else can provide his people with resources. So a bag of seeds can represent a feminine rebirth, or it can represent liberation at the hands of women from the existing power structure. Not an end to violence, but an end to unjust violence. Not an end to scarcity, but an end to false scarcity. And end to subjugation. And end to autocracy. Violence as a tilling of the soil, destructive of what was but generative for what will be.

It’s not about “violence good” vs. “violence bad,” but “what is your violence in service of?” I don’t think anyone’s under the impression that violence will not exist in their new world, because, in Fury Road, violence is often justified. As in the real world, people rarely earn their freedom without getting a little bit rowdy.

It’s about who gets to wield violence and to what end. Is your violence about consolidating power or distributing it? Is it possessive or protective? Does it enforce a vertical power structure or a lateral one? This is why I feel saying women represent peace is too simplistic. This is where I feel the movie crosses from ignoring the “violence = masculinity, peace = femininity” coding at the root of so many female characters to countering it:

Furiosa was born to a clan of warrior women, kidnapped, enslaved, and put into service of a warlord. And the wives she fights to liberate have been kept in a cell to keep them from revolting against their captor. Violence - power - is not a thing Joe possess that women learn, or absorb through contact. It’s something he’s expended considerable effort to keep them from. Something he controls their access to the same way he controls the water.

Violence is something he stole from them.

In Fury Road, violence is egalitarian, and any imbalance between who is its owner it and who is subject to it is an unnatural state imposed from without. Joe, patriarchy itself, forces women into subservient roles to dissuade them from reclaiming what is theirs by rights. Violence is human, the vicarious thrill of watching violence is human, and empathy with those who enact violence in service of a righteous cause is human. The idea that any of these things are male is a product of men - warlords, movie producers, audiences - overly-invested in a narrative, because the narrative benefits them.

I would like to dub Furiosa The Avenging Feminine, a new trope: The woman who takes back what’s hers. The woman who fights because it’s her right to fight and against men who tell her it’s not. The woman who makes no affordances to men in the audience and implicates them in her struggle if they don’t like it. The woman who fights to bring the same freedom to other women. I would like to dub this a new archetype, because I think it’s one the action film sorely needs, and I selfishly want another Fury Road. That’s what I would like to do, but wishing doesn’t make it so.

I can, if I try, point to a few characters who have some of the necessary qualities, but it’s not enough to make a pattern. Tropes aren’t tropes just because I say they are. The Avenging Feminine remains, not unprecedented, but all too rare.

Fury Road cannot, on its own, reclaim the action movie… but all it takes to make a trend is volume. If people keep asking, “What if the answer to this question is ‘yes?’” and keep imagining what that movie would look like, maybe folks can get their heads around the idea that violence is not masculine by nature, only by custom.

And, with enough time, enough guns, enough cars, enough explosions, customs can change.

#video essay #Mad Max Fury Road #feminism #film #action movies

141 notes · View notes

developeragent · 7 years ago

Text

Voice (AI driven) ? gift for teachers and learners?

?Voice? is one of Mary Meeker?s top five internet trends. Voice could be a game changer in interface behaviour, like keyboards, mice, joysticks and touch, but what impact could it have in learning?Voice recognition, driven by leaps in AI, allows personalised voice recognition, even tonal and emotional recognition, and it is hands-free. It?s also low cost, requiring a microphone & speaker, and chimes with the rise of the Internet of Things. The three big barriers to adoption are accuracy, latency and social awkwardness. Recognition and response must be accurate and fast. Failures and slow speeds turn users off. The good news is that we?ve punched through the 90% accuracy barrier and moving fast. At 95-99% (not easy) the show really is on the road. Already, the number of smartphone users using voice went over 60% in 2015 and that number is rising as the technology gets better and habits change. The uses, ranked, are; 1) General information (30%), 2) Personal assistant (27%), 3) Local information (22%), 4) Fun and entertainment (21%). An astonishing 1 in 5 searches on mobile in US (Android) are now by voice. But there are problems Meeker doesn?t mention. Sure we can speak (150 wpm) faster than we can type (40 wpm) but we can also read faster than we can hear. There?s also the huge embarrassment hurdle of speaking to non-humans in public spaces. She herself sees the initial impact in hands free environments ? home (43%), car (36%), on the move (19%), at work (3%). This is when avoiding typing & menus, speed and convenience really matter. But in many other contexts, silence may remain golden.AI driven voiceWith Siri and Amazon Echo we see early signs of its power. Viv is coming and a slew of innovations in AI have improved its efficacy. Jeff Bezos thinks that AI will underpin tech for the foreseeable future. He goes further and thinks we currently understate its potential impact. Of course AI is not one thing, it is many very different things and voice recognition is just one of its many stunning applications. Sci-fi films have been showing us voice activated worlds for decades ? it is now a reality. Natural language voice recognition, with the help of machine learning, has accelerated in just the last few years to become a mainstream consumer product.EchoAmazon?s Echo is a home-based, voice activated personal assistant, a competitor to Siri, using a platform called Alexa. Alexa has two software development kits; a voice service and a skills kit. As a customer, you get a weekly email telling you about these new skills (>1000). This is a big push with over 1000 Amazon staff and tons of folk doing 3rd party apps. It will play your music from Spotify, using just voice commands, even from the far side of the room when music is playing (clever), handle Google Calendar, read audiobooks, deliver news, sports results, weather, order a pizza, get a cab on Uber and control lights, switches, thermostats and so on. It is a frictionless interface to the ?Internet of Things?. (An interesting tangent for voice activation is its use by those who are disabled.)Above all, as a cloud-based AI service, on tap, learns fast and is always adapting to your speech, vocabulary and preferences. It becomes, in effect, a personal assistant that learns, not only about you but as an agent which also learns from aggregated data. This is where it gets interesting.Echo as teacherSpoken versus written wordBehind this shift from text to voice is an interesting debate. One could argue that it could push us towards more authentic, and I would argue, balanced, form of education and learning. Typing will always be an awkward interface. It is difficult to learn, error prone and requires physical input devices. Reading is another skill that takes years to master. The spoken word is a skill we do not have to learn. We are grammatical geniuses aged three. Speech is primary and normal, reading and writing relatively recent adjuncts. So, when it comes to learning, speech recognition (output) and voice (input), gives us frictionless dialogue. It could stimulate a return to more Socratic forms of teaching and learning.This may result in significant improvements in teaching and learning, both of which have, arguably, been over-colonised by ?text?. Schooling, in all of its manifestations, has become ever more obsessed by text and there is a good argument for rebalancing the system away from an endless series of written tasks, essays and dissertations towards more efficient, meaningful and relevant teaching and learning. It may also help redress the balance between the academic and vocational.The blackboard has a lot to not answer for. At that moment, teachers turned their backs on dialogue and conversation with learners and began to lecture, mediating their teaching with text, it can be even worse with text-laden PowerPoint. The teacher?s voice started to get lost. Nowhere was this more evident than in HE, where the blackboard reinforced and deeply embedded the ?lecture?. To this day, especially in maths and sciences, ?lecturers?, (a job title that uniquely identifies the profession?s problem), turned their back to learners and started writing. I, and millions of others, have endured the ?three huge blackboard? method of teaching. It is the opposite of teaching, it is writing. You may as well have emailed it to me.The essay as assessment has now descended into a game where students know that they will not get feedback for days, even weeks (often a grade with a few skimpy comments). So they share, plagiarise, buy essays and in exams, memorise them, so that critical thinking is abandoned in favour of regurgitation. This is not to argue for the abandonment of writing, or essays, just less dependence on this one-size-fits-all form of assessment.In schooling we also had the drift towards text-based subjects. Latin is the most surreal example, a dead language, no longer spoken, no longer even written, taught for no other reason than the fact that it got embedded in the curriculum. What a waste. Shakespeare, largely taught off the page, killing it stone dead for many who should have been excited by its searing effect when spoken on the stage. The obsession with ?maths?, in slavish adherence to PISA, which was never their intention, is also made easier by its essentially written nature.We have a system that teaches to the text and the tests of the text. Almost everything we test is in the form of the written word. Oral and social skills count for little in education. Practical skills are shoved below stairs and we send our kids off in lock-step to universities where the process is extended for year after year, often an inefficient and expensive paper trail that results in a huge paper IOU for the student and state.In my lifetime I have seen HE morph into a global paper farm, with exponential growth of Journals and text output, matched only by the inverse growth in readers. Research is falsely equated with paper output, where the paper is the end-in-itself. Teaching is often side-lined as this paper mill becomes the dominant goal.In the professions, and especially in institutions, I have witnessed bureaucratic systems whose function is often to simply to produce ?reports?. These are invariably overwritten, skimmed, then often binned. Report writing, plans and rhetoric are so often substitutes for action. Nowhere is this more apparent in the report than invariably conclude that ?more research is needed in??. Reports beget reports.In a way I think the historic, educational obsession with long-form text has been saved by the internet, where writing returned to a broader set of forms. Young people have taken to writing like demons, in txts, messages, posts, Tweets and blogs. There has been a renaissance of writing, reflecting a wide set of forms of communication, supplemented by images and video.So how will voice manifest itself in learning?Voice and learningGoogle is great but we still largely write our requests. This is partly because it is quicker than speech. However, as speech recognition gets better, it will become quicker and easier to simply ask verbally. As Amazon Echo, Siri and other services take many of us into the Internet of Things, in our homes, cars and other places, we will want voice to trigger events, get help, find answers and arrange our lives. Dialogue with smart people on any topic is often a powerful form of learning. They challenge, probe, contradict. This type of collaborative learning may come into its own with speech and dialogue. There is also the sense in which some topics benefit from the lack of images and writing. It allows the imagination to construct personal imagery and links to what is being heard.The car is now a room, somewhere you can learn? The home is now networked, a place you can learn. Your mobile is voice ready, a place where you can learn. In some of these environments, having your hands free is essential (driving) and useful (home). How to tasks, like cooking, repairing things and finding things out make sense.Frictionless learningAdaptive learning, intelligent tutoring, chatbots? all of these are with us now. This form of technology enhanced teaching can be further enhanced with voice recognition and feedback. One can see how AI, adaptive, tutoring software could turn this, first into a homework support tool, then a tutoring tool, through to the delivery of more sophisticated learning. It has the advantage of being able to both push and pull learning. I like this idea of encouraging habitual learning, the delivery of short questions, quizzes and spaced practice, via voice on the echo, in a personalised sequence. In the privacy of your own home, this takes away the public embarrassment factor.Voice moves us one step closer to frictionless, anywhere, anytime learning. Places other than institutions and classrooms become learning spaces. The classroom and lecture hall were never the places where the majority of learning took place. Context matters and as learning becomes a utility, like water, we ill be able to call upon it at any time and see learning as habitual and informal, not timetabled and formal.Conclusion I am not denigrating the written word. It matters. What matters more is a rebalance in education towards knowledge and skills that are not wholly text-based, but recognise that speech is as important, sometimes more important, and that skills also matter. Imagine a world where the only response to a request or problem is? I?ll write that up. That?s a problem. Education in its current form is not the solution to that problem but part of the problem itself. from Dragplus http://ift.tt/2GL4Hr4

#Dragplus

0 notes