#hyperrealism into my life... I am a hot mess

[arthurjude]

March 2019 (21 months post-op)

[boglog]

Soooo I'm gna get mauled here but tumblr's unquestioning praise of Killing Eve as a progressive, prestige show about womanhood and sexuality is... looking like a problem to me.

This is not to shame people who watch the show or even to guilt people out of enjoying it, especially seeing as I've done both, (unabashedly admiring Phoebe Waller Bridge's distinctly quirky humour and Fiona Shaw's deliveries). This is to say, though, that the Killing Eve franchise is something to think more critically about before we give it more praise, more money. We can be critical of media we like, not limit activism to media criticism and not feel that media criticism in some way robs us of something. In my opinion.

[tw for discussions on sex, rape, pedophilia, violence, death, q slur]

[[more]] <---more --!>

Firstly the generation-wide age gap: Eve's original portrayal in the book is 24, exactly two years Villanelle's senior so the only logical excuse for it be added in the adaptation was bc the crew were desperate for big name actors. And while I love Sandra Oh, it was not worth it to create bizarre sexual tension between a forty year old and a twenty year old. This isn't even the first time Jodie Comer was the on-screen love interest to a middle aged person (see also Dr Foster), which is doubly messed up. Ideally replace Oh with an actor Comer's peer or replace Comer w someone Oh's age. It's not that hard.

Second, the age gap is exasperated by Villanelle's "mental age" which is far below twenty. Honestly the fact that both these problems were added into the adaptation by female actor/writer Phoebe Waller-Bridge makes me wna scream. Book!Villanelle was appropriately mature enough—emotionally, psychologically, intellectually—to warrant her high-ranking status as an assassin. Her behaviour, while still devoid of empathy, manages to be a believable portrayal of an upper-class 20 yr o behaving like a thirty year-old. Phoebe Waller-Bridge (and co)'s reinterpretation has Villanelle being a hyperfeminine, materialist, petty teenager that slowly spirals into impulsive outbursts and a scene where she's crawling around a suburb in a onesie. How do we reconcile Villanelle's lust and her love of violence with this childish persona? How is Eve's attraction to her justified? How do ppl think that's hot? It's comedic shock value flirting with homophobia, pedophilia, and the Born Sexy Yesterday trope. Not to mention the violent little girl trope. Despite all of Luke Jennings' flaws, he at least did not do That and my God is the bar low.

Both book and show heavily overplay Villanelle's sexual promiscuity to the point of being voyeuristic. Villanelle's sociopathy is largely an excuse for her violence, sex life, and lack of empathy to be over-the-top, even comedic, especially in the show adaptation. Villanelle's only true human connection is her infatuation with her language teacher, Anna. Which, rather than explore the show's pedophilic undertones, only serves to justify it via backstory.

The show does handle this way worse though: through Anna's dialogue, we're assured that the attraction was mutual ("She seduced me.") and that they've had sex. Which at the time would be when Oxana (Oksana) was in her late teens as she was still a high school student under Anna's tutelage. In the show, Villanelle murders Anna's husband partially out of revenge and possibly bc she took Anna's joke too literally. Book!Villanelle meanwhile castrates Anna's rapist. The former attempts to draw parallels between Eve and Anna, Nico and Anna's husband, treating the story like a melodramatic Shakespearean love triangle while once more reminding us of Villanelle's immature social skills. Which, again, serves to justify age gap lust. Meanwhile, the book attempts to question Villanelle's warped attempts at human connection via vignettes of violent shock value, it's marginally better than the adaptation but in the overall scheme of things I'm not sure Jennings makes enough commentary on violence against women to warrant this.

Finally sexuality in the franchise is a big question mark. Eve and Villanelle's attraction to each other is explained simply by obsession and lust intermingled with violence. Villanelle and Anna's relationship devolves into much the same in the show. Eve and Nico have a relatively stable yet dispassionate relationship meanwhile Bill is implied to be bisexual with an open marriage, though this is never seen and he's murdered shortly after this confession. A Chinese politician has a hospital fetish and, in the book, a right-wing fascist has a kin/kink for Eva Braun which leads us to a highly disturbing transphobic scene involving an exploding dildo. Notably, Villanelle's on/off frenemy romance with Lara (who is... you know... her age) in the book is cut and replaced Nadia, whom she basically kills as soon as possible.

The relationship between Oxana and Lara is explored more in the book (and it's post-season 1 sequel) though ultimately, Lara dies and Villanelle can't feel remorse let alone love. Both book and show have Villanelle hooking up with various people but the book goes into painstaking detail about her sexual promiscuity being motivated by her desire to manipulate peole. Clearly, Jennings shows that Villanelle's sex life includes all genders yet with little regard for her intimacy and level of attraction for anyone. She is "bisexual" (or "lesbian") only insofar as actual physical sex is concerned. Emotionally, she is attracted to no one. Which let me just say is a capital y Yikes.

And the cherry on top of course is that the show is getting accused of queerbating due to the heavy marketing a nd WLW undertones despite Sandra Oh's denial of any romance btwn her and Jodie Comer's character. 🙄

All of these play heavily into existing homophobic stereotypes. The predatory lesbian. The hypersexual bisexual. The manipulative, hedonistic, childish, lustful qu**rs, who, having foresaken family values to screw anything and everything, are not emotionally mature enough to be first class citizens. From watching the show and reading the book, the writers play with these "dark" themes with little introspection to how these relate historically to LGBT politics, how their use of sociopathy and age gaps has political and sociological significance. There's little real deconstruction or reflection on gender, sexuality, violence etc to be considered satirical and these aspects are largely thrown in for entertainment's sake.

Jennings and Waller-Bridge have both, respectively, made attempts at thematic critiques of wealth and gender. Neither of which in my opinion saw its theme through enough to be satirical. There's something to be said about how PWB converted Jennings' anti-materialist subtext into "empowering" aspects of literally weaponised feminity (i.e. all of Villanelle's weapons are high-end women's products) almost as a critique of cultural dismissal of femininity and it's association with materialism. PWB seemed to want to create a comedic, empoweringly gendered, spy movie but this theme of weaponised femininity nose dives at Villanelle's immaturity not to mention its superficiality. Weaponised femininity directed at whom? The show seems much more fascinated with Villanelle herself than the fact that she's employed by The Twelve, which obscures the importance of who Villanelle is killing, who Villanelle exerts weaponised feminity against and why. Not to mention the concept of the feral, empowered or weaponised woman has always been positively attributed to white women, which to make a long story short is not new or progressive or empowering.

I'm not too puritanical to understand the use of taboo themes in satire. This is not satire. KE's appeal seems to be the sexualisation of its deuteragonists at the expense of nuanced conversations about sex, violence, and gender. PWB was way more fixated on comedy than I think she should have been, and both creators rely most on shock value than anything else in how they construct what they believe be the most entertaining and well-structured narrative. There's little evidence that they regard the responsibility they have in portraying bisexual women in positions of power, in age gap relationships or as violent characters in a political espionage thriller. This is not satire this is a very eclectic comedy with clumsy homophobic caricatures at best.

Lastly, there are essays on why leftist fixation on "representation" is a symptom of our digital hyperreality and at best will never truly address material problems faced by real people. Big ass metas on tumblr is not necessarily activism and as I'm sure you know the revolution will not be televised. But should show runners and co be rewarded for so called groundbreaking dark comedy that in fact seems to support harmful stereotypes? And goddamnit am I tired of people unironically romanticising Villanelle and Eve. Thank you for listening to my TEDtalk.

[true-halloween-tales]

2017: #13-VACATION FROM HELL, PART 3: THE GREAT ESCAPE

I was not surfing over hot lava, but my vacation from Hell continued.  The date was Sunday, July 9th, 1989, and I was sitting in a Greyhound bus in Reno, Nevada close to 8 pm.  The bus continued on its journey to San Francisco, and we were rapidly approaching the California border!  It was looking like we would make it to California with no more mishaps!  The trip then became rather exciting as we crossed into California.  The bus began slowly ascending up a mountain road in the darkness.  My ears started popping, and the oxygen started to feel thinner.  The dark mountainous highway was lit up by an endless sea of headlights.  We stopped at Truckee but could see little since the darkness devoured the view.  I stared at the dark California highway as we progressed down from the mountains and west: Alta, Auburn, Sacramento, and Vallejo.  The bus soon rolled into the San Francisco Greyhound station at 2 am, and then I rolled out of the bus, with quarts of quarters I won in Reno jingling in my pockets.  

The San Francisco Greyhound station appeared to be clean but was covered with a thin layer of grease everywhere.  I found a pay phone and a Yellow Pages, so my phone calls to motels and hotels commenced.  There were no vacancies anywhere in San Francisco!  I used most of the quarters I won in Reno during the hour I called.  One friendly motel told me that there were vacancies at the Strip Motel, but in order to stay there I would have to strip… Most motels could not be reached at such a late hour, so I decided to try in a few hours after dawn... That meant waiting in the bus station overnight with my luggage…

Fu Man Chew and I claimed a well-worn wooden bench.  Sleeping was truly a nightmarish experience, but the thin layer of grease kept us sticking to the bench so we did not fall off.  Even better, there was a witch-like lady who haunted the bus station.  She could be heard wailing in the distance, and her main preoccupation was loudly complaining to herself (see 2017: #2-WITCHES).  Occasionally a uniformed man would patrol the bus station attempting to drive her away from her bench.  She yelled and called him a Nazi.  After he finished belligerently berating her, he wandered in our direction.  I remembered Monty Python’s training on How Not to Be Seen, and I slowly compacted my body on the shadowy bench.  Luckily, the vigilant Nazi did not approach our bench.  This scenario reoccurred frequently, and the whole night just gave me a dull persistent headache and about six minutes of sleep (see 2015: #4-THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT).

At dawn the purifying rays of sunlight seemed to melt some of the animistic grime from the area like it was a dissipating ghostly ectoplasm.  Me and my headache staggered to the pay phone that previously ate my riches from Reno.  My calls for lodgings resumed as I once again consulted the trusty Yellow Pages.  I finally found a hotel in Chinatown that could take us at 8 am.  Things had continued to improve!  It sure seemed that whatever curse which was dooming this vacation was surely over...  But, I was so terribly wrong about thinking that.  The bull, the car flipping upside down, stuck at the Bates-Medusa sisters motel, and even being stranded in the desert: these experiences were happy joys compared to the horror that was to come…

Shortly before 8 am we delightfully departed the bus station and entered a taxi.  The driver had a tumbleweed of frizzy hair and vaguely resembled a doubly-disheveled Steven Wright clone with gritty glasses.  He provided us with the reason why there were no vacancies last night: the San Francisco Marathon was this morning.  This marathon was starting now, and traffic was rerouted in San Francisco, drivers were confused, and he was confused what route he would take.  As we sped to our hotel, we passed through an intersection at the base of a super-steep hill.  I was sitting on the left side in the back seat, and I sleepily gazed out of the left side window to see a car coming down the steep hill at a fast speed!  It went through the red light – and hurtled directly towards our taxi!  It was a green four door car with a driver who was long-haired, blonde, professional, female, and close to 40 years old.  It only seemed to be one second after it went through the red light that the car was three inches from our car – and speeding at least at 40 mph!  Bang!!!  A moment of hyperrealism then occurred, a minute of one’s life that seems to go in slow motion…

The green car crashed into the left side of the taxi with so much force that our taxi was lifted on its two right wheels... Another flip over?  For a long second the car teetered on two wheels and almost flipped over, but it fell back down.  Boom!  A large portable stereo in the back seat hit Fu Man Chew and myself in the ribs a few times violently during this crash.  We felt like we had bruised ribs.  I started laughing at the absurdity of yet another accident.  But then Steven Wright jumped out of the taxi and staggered erratically, nearly falling over.  His arm was bleeding profusely at a fast pace.  The blood came spurting out with force, streaming rapidly all over the street.  He was in shock.  I looked over at the green car to assess if there was a greater emergency than Steven Wright bleeding to death all over the streets of San Francisco.  Ms. Carcrasher in the nearby green car was hysterical and crying with her windshield now cracked down the middle with her head a minor bloody mess.  The blood flow for her head was not anything like Steven Wright’s Niagara Falls of blood gushing which was spraying all over the street.  I hopped out of the taxi and ran over to Steven Wright.  I really produced my same white handkerchief that I tied on the car antennae when trapped in the desert a few days previously (see 2017: #12-VACATION FROM HELL, PART 2: STRANDED IN THE DESERT).  I provided emergency first aid and tied the handkerchief tightly over his badly bleeding arm and sat him down.  Soon an ambulance was in sight, and Fu Man Chew and I removed our luggage from the smashed up taxi, mainly ignoring the inconvenience of yet another accident.  The taxi company sent another taxi, for free, that took us to our hotel.  We laughed in the second taxi, and the driver looked at us like we were utterly unhinged, for laughing about a car accident.  

Arriving in San Francisco’s Chinatown, we made our way to the Obrero Hotel on Stockton Street.  It was known for its oxtail soup, and I do not think bulls were involved.  It was managed by a short, silver-haired, black turtlenecked lady named Bambi, but I do not think any deer were involved either.  We logically avoided the oxtails like the plague.  We then started visiting locations in San Francisco as far from those oxtails as possible.  People were so very friendly!  I was offered $300 to sell my dayglo painted, winged Mercury hat with Krang from Dimension X on top.  I still have that hat, still not sold.  We went to the Presidio and saw the James Bond film, License to Kill (see 2017: #4-SPIES).  We devoured burgers and shakes at the 1950’s themed Mel's Drive In.  We saw the Golden Gate Bridge and viewed Alcatraz through timed binoculars for pay.  We wandered through Golden Gate Park including the wondrous Japanese Tea Garden.  The California Academy of Sciences planetarium thrilled us with an astonishing laser show.  San Francisco was fun even though our ribs hurt horribly.

I walked all over San Francisco by myself, from Divisadero Street, Haight Street, Castro Street, and through North Beach.  I tried to take the BART public transportation train system, but I could not understand how to get through the automated station.  I succeeded in setting off an alarm in the empty station, and I barted away.  I walked on the beach at sunset on Ocean Beach and looked at the violent, cold, and wavy Pacific Ocean.  I had to touch the ocean, and I saw in the sand lots of strange clear gelatin.  I picked up a stick and investigated the dozen square feet of unknown clear gelatin.  Was there some sort of spill from a boat?  But due to the wind, I kept dropping the stick in the gelatin and picking it up.  Soon my hands went numb and I realized that the clear gelatin were scores of mushy, formless jellyfish washing up in the cold water.  After sensation returned and I survived attack of the jellyfish, I wandered across town into the City Lights bookstore and bought the last Sigmund Freud book to complete my collection.  I was rung up at the register by the business owner, Beatnik poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti.  I wonder what he would have said knowing I would be in touch with Allen Ginsberg two years later (see 2012: #2-THE HOWLING POET).  But the most exciting moment occurred when we went looking for the fan club address for the mysterious music group, The Residents.

While we suffered in that Bates-Medusa motel room in the mountains, we frequently listened to the Heaven? and Hell! cds by The Residents.  In 1989 there were very few cds released.  With the cds was a slip of paper with the fan club and a business address for the band.  Was it a record store?  That was my hope, to find a San Francisco equivalent of Wax Trax, an independent music store that ran the fan club.  The business address on Grove Street had a bust of a famous music composer in the window with large spiders painted all over it.  We then went looking for the fan club address, and we lost hope when we ended up on a residential street with a steep hill.  We found the address, but it was a home.  There was a driveway with what looked like a Mercedes, but it definitely appeared to be the wrong place.  I decided to ring the bell to ask if anyone knew of a nearby music shop since I thought I had the wrong address.  

A man with mesmerizing black curly hair answered the door wearing a Ralph Records t-shirt (see 2016: #3-BLOODY MESMERISM).  That was the record company for The Residents.  I explained to him our story including the car accidents, and he let us in.  He was watching a football game, and I somehow instantly knew that he was not one of the secretive band members.  He led us to the basement where I soon saw enormous stacks of records.  He had to take his dog outside, and he told us to shop around.  So we picked out a cd or two, a poster, but mainly observed this strange place.  There was postal equipment here; this was a primary location for Ralph Records.  Original Residents poster artwork was laid out revealing some of their iconic images to be collages.  I looked up at one point and saw images of four faces squished on a photocopy machine, most likely the faces of the unknown band members.  We left quite happy, and I saw the curly haired football watcher at two of the band’s performances in future years.  

We needed to spend an extra day in Frisco before returning to Rapid City, South Dakota.  We hoped to return to Rapid City on the day KITT would be fixed.  So we went to a theatre on Market Street that showed old science fiction films all day.  The theatre was packed with quite the cast of characters.  The audience was loud and fun.  Fu Man Chew felt as if he had descended into the “armpit of humanity.”  And to be fair, I am sure there were odors.  In between movies, a man brought onto the stage a ridiculous lottery wheel and he commenced the Ten-o-Win.  All patrons of the theatre were given tiny tickets when they bought anything at the theatre.  These tickets had numbers for the Ten-o-Win.  He spun the wheel three times, and you could win free popcorn or money: $1 up to $10.  People were dancin’ in the aisles if they won!  It was quite festive and reminded me of when I went to the Woods Theatre in downtown Chicago and enjoyed similar happy times watching Fred Williamson flicks.

The next day we departed San Francisco on a Greyhound bus to Rapid City, South Dakota.  The journey would last forty hours, with one change late at night to a non-Greyhound bus.  The only problem was that we ran out money.  This only problem proved to be a big problem.  There were no more quarters in my pockets from Reno.  As the bus stopped for lunch, we barely could buy anything and watched glutinous monstrous children eat an entire McDonalds into nothing but dust.  Fu Man Chew turned red and hated the world from hunger.  I Zenned out, and we arrived in Rapid City at 2 am.  This time the bus station was just closing, so we had to wait outside in an adjacent park with our luggage.  We were hungry.  We literally had a total of 38 cents.  It was getting cold out.  So I made the logical decision to pitch pennies in the dark and we succeeded in losing most of them.  Sleeping on the park bench resulted in being covered in a cool morning dew and shivering.  

The bus station opened, and I waited there with our luggage.  Meanwhile, Fu Man Chew visited the local insurance office, and he cashed out for the third time his emergency cash policy.  Soon we had a motel room, and we scampered off like famished ghoulish fiends to the nearest McDonalds to glut ourselves after not eating for two days.  It was a demonic gorging of monumental proportions.  We then smiled and slowly sauntered back to the motel room.  It is not wise to glut oneself on McDonalds-anything after not eating for a few days.  As we walked our digestive systems started echoing out horrendous sounds.  It was only a matter of a minute before we were running back to the motel because a tsunami of diarrhea was about to hit Rapid City!  The motel was a few blocks away down the highway, and I recall having to hold my bursting backside as I ran down the street in a dignified gait, dripping with cold sweat.  I flew into the motel room a minute before Fu Man Chew.  Shortly later, I was drained and collapsed in a chair.  Fu Man Chew exited the bathroom white as a ghost, and then there was a knock on the door.  It was a sheriff.  He handed Fu Man Chew documents and rapidly vanished.  Had we committed some sort of feces malfeasance?  We soon discovered that there were indeed legal problems – the vacation from Hell continued!

Van Heusen was the used car salesman in Rapid City who had rented us a rotten red car that completely died in Evanston, Wyoming.  He legally demanded mucho monies from Fu Man Chew for leaving the car in Evanston.  He was insisting that a boot be put on KITT so we could not leave Rapid City until he received loads of cash.  We soon saw a lawyer resembling John Goodman in Rapid City.  He explained that Van Heusen, who incidentally resembled Paul Lynde from Hollywood Squares, was a known used car salesman con man.  Van Heusen owned six car lots with hundreds of cars for rent, yet he rented us his worst car; it was a set up!  While Goodman worked on our case, his wife took us to an American Indian museum.  She recommended that we go to the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology before we leave the area because of a dinosaur dig we could join.  We finally picked up KITT, but there was a problem.  One of Van Heusen’s dreaded dictums remained that we could not leave the state until he was paid.  Goodman recommended that we not get stopped by the police while fleeing South Dakota.  The Great Escape then commenced!

The next morning we sped away from Rapid City very discreetly, carefully, and quietly.  Outside of town we coincidentally approached the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, so we visited it.  We parked and I approached students to ask about the dinosaur dig.  They looked at me in fear and ran away!  No one would answer our questions, there was major weirdness, and everyone went inside, some staring out the windows at us and KITT.  What was going on?  We left quite puzzled, and later I found out the reason for this mystery.  The dinosaur dig was for the Tyrannosaurus rex known as Sue which is now located in Chicago’s Field Museum (see 2017: #7-TENTACLES).  There was a FBI raid on the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology campus the previous day in which all involved in the excavation were arrested for digging up a dinosaur and stealing it from Indian property (see 2010: #3-CURSE OF THE TYRANNOSAURUS REX).  The students thought we were the FBI!  We zoomed out of there and through South Dakota.  It was surreal as we drove towards a huge blood red harvest moon near the horizon.  We crossed the South Dakota border at nightfall.  We escaped!  We quickly headed back to Illinois the next day through Minnesota and Wisconsin, arriving in Chicago in the evening.  Fu Man Chew was feeling fatigued by the difficulties and legal issues from this vacation from Hell and soon returned to Florida.  As for me, I started planning my next vacation, and maybe it could be a bit more wild…

Pandora’s Box is now closing – and its hinges sound horrible.  They’re breaking.  It will reopen only one more time.  In eleven months on October 1, 2018, the first of the thirteen final Halloween Tales will be released.  Next year we shall examine such topics as great horror film actors and supervillains (see 2018: #1-GREAT HORROR FILM ACTORS and 2018: #12-SUPERVILLAINS).  And I almost forgot!  Goodman said that Van Heusen had to travel to Evanston to drive the red car back to Rapid City.  So Van Heusen was the one who must have found that enormous, nasty, horrible, terrible piece of skin that fell off my foot in the desert since it was on the back seat.  He probably added wheels and a stick shift to it and rented it.  Happy Halloween!