#proletarian comedy

[hazeltongzhi]

GOOD fetishes

- feet

- armpits

- leather

- hair

- hands

- etc.

BAD fetishes

- commodity

[anomalisticofferings]

I listen to Gen Hoshino's Comedy and I start to feel the sadness, the impotence and the anger of having to live a life of constant struggle and scarcity for belonging to a proletarian family, like billions around the planet; of having to 'celebrate', to be content with, and to put a happy face over what little we're able to have; instead of living a life where the means of production belong to society and we can enjoy ourselves and produce our means to live without exploitation nor oppression. And at least I don't succumb to this sadness and I struggle twice more, against the spontaneous psychological pull down of my social position, and against the conformity of what little I have achieved through my efforts and good luck, because I'm a communist proletarian and I want to destroy this world of shit, and for that it takes some incorruptible balls of soviet steel. But it weighs so much...

[southeastasianists]

“Philippine theater has never hesitated to go to war,” wrote cultural historian Doreen G. Fernandez. In times of political struggle, Filipino activists have used plays to express their vision for a better world and give the ordeals of the oppressed a place at center stage. To this day, shows like Black Box Productions’ Dekada 70, PETA’s A Game of Trolls, and Dulaang UP’s The Kundiman Party have been staged and restaged, empowering younger audiences to confront social realities.

In honor of Independence day, we revisit the roots of protest theater in Philippine history—how our nation’s storytellers served as harbingers of hope, voices for the voiceless, and the citizens’ conscience, even as censors threatened to stifle them.

1900’s: “Seditious” plays of the Philippine-American War

In 1901, the Sedition Law was enacted under the Taft Commission, criminalizing the advocacy of Philippine independence. Any protest art was considered a rousing threat to American rule. Still, playwrights took their anti-American sentiments onstage, risking not just their own arrests but those of cast, crew, and audience members.

Juan Matapang Cruz’s Hindi Aco Patay was about the love between Karangalan (honor) and Tangulan (the defender) as they resisted the usurper Macamcam (who symbolized the American insular government). During a performance on May 8, 1903 in Malabon, a drunken American soldier hurled a beer bottle at a Katipunan flag prop, proceeding to tear the scenery apart. Cruz and ten of the play’s actors were soon arrested. The renowned playwright Aurelio Tolentino also suffered nine imprisonments in his life, one of which was for a staging of his equally patriotic play, Kahapon, Ngayon at Bukas.

Their works—while labelled ‘seditious’ then—are now recognized as some of the first nationalist plays of the country, marking the advent of revolutionary drama.

1940’s: Secret messages in the Japanese Occupation

The ban on American films in Japanese-occupied Manila allowed live shows to take their place on the stages of movie theaters. This gave rise to what National Artist Daisy Hontiveros-Avellana called ‘The Golden Age of Philippine Theater’, when Filipino plays were much in vogue. The efficient censorship of scripts, however, did not allow for the obvious symbolism seen in the nationalist plays that preceded them.

Instead, stage shows carried subtle messages of hope to those shaken by the war. “Darating si Mang Arturo,” an actor uttered in one skit, alluding to General Douglas MacArthur’s famed promise.

Theaters also reportedly served as message centers for guerrillas, where they could furtively meet with friends and supporters. If the Kempeitai (Japanese police) entered the theater, a vocalist would suddenly go onstage mid-show to perform a signal song, alerting the rebels that they had to bolt.

1960’s: Proletarian theater groups and the tide of nationalism

The return of the American presence in the forties restored the use of English in local theater. Western classics (such as Shakespeare and Broadway) ruled Philippine stages even after independence in 1946, making theater a bourgeois art appreciated only by the fluent, upper-class minority. By the early sixties, many thespians acknowledged this problem, prompting a huge shift: Where at first, the Filipino tongue was called baduy, by the end of the decade, it had become the language of the stage.

Companies like PETA and playwrights like Rolando Tinio started staging more original Filipino works and translations of Western plays. The rise of student activism also led to the formation of cultural groups like Panday Sining, Gintong Silahis, Tanghalang Bayan, and Samahang Kamanyang. They popularized ‘proletarian theater’, devising spectacles from real-life experiences of oppression and exposing the injustices that hounded the era’s political landscape.

Through their ‘dulansangan’ in basketball courts, churchyards, and rice fields, these groups laid the groundwork for theater activism under Marcos’ martial law regime.

1970’s: Camouflaging political intent under martial law

Under Proclamation No. 1081, theater could not be as propagandistic as before. While some commercial theater troupes stuck to ‘harmless’ zarzuelas, comedies, and musicals, activists strove to resist indirectly through their art. They staged plays around history and tradition, depicting past issues that mirrored those of their dark present. Nicanor Tiongson’s Pilipinas Circa 1907, for instance, was a politicizing spectacle disguised in an anti-American Christmas play.

UP Repertory’s Bonifacio Ilagan also used the cover of religion in Pagsambang Bayan. But because of the more blatant criticism it contained against the tyrannical Marcos administration, director Behn Cervantes was arrested after a 1977 staging of the play. Many other cultural workers and political actors simply ‘disappeared’.

“Political will and a keen sense of the power of the medium drove us to learn theater through actual and urgent theater work, like learning warfare through warfare…No rally was complete without activist theater,” Ilagan later wrote. The multi-awarded progressive playwright, filmmaker, and Panday Sining co-founder Bonifacio Ilagan at a 1971 protest in UP Diliman. Photo c/o Boni Ilagan.

1970’s—1980’s: People’s theater in Visayas and Mindanao

As performance activists grew louder with increasing human rights violations and the Aquino assassination, some left Manila to bring people’s theater to outlying regions. Former participants of PETA’s Basic Integrated Theater Arts Workshop (BITAW)—a three-day course that empowered thespians to stage their stories of exploitation—in the early seventies relayed their knowledge in Davao, Lanao del Norte, Negros, Leyte, and Samar.

Playwright and Mindanao Community Theater Network founder Fr. Karl Gaspar was among these BITAW organizers. Although he was arrested twice for the protest plays he produced, he continued to write behind bars and even established a theater program for his fellow detainees in 1983. Meanwhile, members of the police intelligence chased actors around the stage in a Christmas play from Samar’s Makabugwas theater group. This blossoming of regional theater came with such ‘necessary evils’ of thespian harassment. ‘Militant priests’ in Mindanao encouraged church-based community theater in parishes and on religious holidays. This began in the sixties with an alliance between PETA and the church. Photo c/o Karl Gaspar.

Protest theater has gone a long way since colonial years. In every stage, it has proven to be a powerful weapon—an art of resistance and emancipation that flourished when others tried to muzzle it.

With their ingenuity and guts, these pioneering activists remind us to continue making noise on the stage of the nation.

[widthofmytongue]

Pass the happy! 💐 When you get this, reply with 5 things that make you happy and send to the last 10 people in your notifications.

(Why is it that I am swallowing my pride with an ask? 😜)

I did one of these ages ago, and while I think those answers still hold, why not give five new answers, right!

1. My animal buddies. They are hugely important to me and give me so much joy and uhhhhhh serenity. Or something. They give me life. I spend less time with my chickens these days than I used to, but whenever I do interact with them, or even when I just see them out the window, it brings a smile to my face. And my cats are like a wellspring of more comfort and elation than I can put into words. We adopted a new cat only a few months ago, and she's doing so well! And we’re getting more chickens in a few months too! I'm very excited!

2. Coffee. I consider coffee a great luxury. It is not a staple. I do not drink it merely for the caffeine. I have a revolving coffee subscription, and every batch is from a small producer and very different. My morning coffee is often the highlight of my day, which I could see in a pessimistic way like ‘it’s all downhill from there’, but firstly, it’s not all downhill from there, and secondly, I often find myself looking forward to tomorrow because of this positive association I have with morning coffee, which is saying a lot for someone with a history of depression. I also really, really like tea.

3. Assassin's Creed. This functions as a placeholder for popular media I consume in general, but particularly video games. As many of my followers may recall, I wrote my masters dissertation on video games. This is an important form of media and I take it, and my consumption of it, very seriously. But also Assassin’s Creed is cool and fun and I wish I’d started playing the series years ago. I honestly enjoy exploring renaissance Italian city states (especially those I've been to in real life) far more than striking from the shadows to topple despotic machinations, if I'm honest. But every facet of these games is absolutely top notch, from the story, to the design, to the settings, to the metatextuality.

4. I'm in pre-production on a webcomic. I don’t know if I’ll get it off the ground, because the artist and friend with whom I’m collaborating is a stoner and has been in the process of setting up his digital art studio for like months at this point, but my enthusiasm hasn’t waned. Feel free to ask more; I could ramble about it for ages. It’s a scifi comedy about a starship crew. The main themes are found families, proletarian solidarity, diasporic identity, cultural relativism. You know, infinite diversity in infinite combinations. I hope to share it with you, dear reader, one of these days...

5. (Connecting with others via) Tumblr. I mean, I don’t wanna be too mushy, but this (hell)site has become very important to me. It has helped me a great deal with my gender affirmation, provided a vital outlet for my Jewish identity, and reenvigourated my leftist praxis. I have also made contact with many lovely folks whom I now hold quite dear. Plus it’s overflowing with adorable animals, lovely landscapes, and super hot eroticised bodies. And after all, community is resistance. Or in the words of Audre Lorde, such 'is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.'

Thanks for including me!

[that-thing-that-feeling]

Do you have any excerpts from the reviews of sp2 that require payment in the US to read? If so, can you share any comments on Charlie’s part? (BFI, The Telegraph, etc)

Hey sure! I linked to the times uk one bc someone asked for it but it wasn’t good and didn’t mention Charlie. Which BFI one—sight and sound or something else? I’ll put the whole telegraph one behind the cut—it’s a fun, descriptive review that loves the film, but it only has one line on Charlie in it (“animalistic one night stand”), altho it does talk abt Patrick’s film. Anyway here it is behind the cut (does have spoilers from part one):

How much can art ever help us heal? There’s no straightforward answer to that question, which is why The Souvenir: Part II never stops posing it, readjusting the viewfinder, and switching angles. A British heavy-hitter in Cannes, this sequel to Joanna Hogg’s cinematic memoir of two years ago has a dizzyingly playful and prismatic quality. For a film overshadowed by terrible loss, it’s remarkably elating and light on its feet – at once a comedy of filmmaking egos, a multi-layered exercise in creative therapy, and a grippingly honest confessional.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Part II is its sheer buoyancy as a companion piece, springing off the earlier film’s strengths and finding ways to circle back, to reconsider and even critique them. Where Part I had a shimmering poignancy as a tragic love story, this is busy and dazzling: Hogg has never made a funnier piece of work or come to us with such fresh provocations.

As we neared the end of the 1980s in Part I, film student Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) was confronted with the shock of her young life, as her boyfriend Anthony (Tom Burke) was found dead from a heroin overdose in the Wallace Collection’s toilet, having concealed the extent of his addiction from her over several years. Part II picks straight up from there, with a bedridden Julie wasting away in the Norfolk stronghold of her parents, played by Byrne's real-life mother Tilda Swinton and a brilliantly cast unknown, one James Spencer Ashworth, whose droll incomprehension typifies Hogg's deft touch with both seasoned actors and brand new ones.

While those two struggle to find the right things to say, Julie herself becomes preoccupied with what, artistically speaking, is worth saying. The main thrust becomes her determination to make a graduation film, which she decides to craft as a kind of memorial to Anthony. This project is so tentative, elusive and personal that it’s regarded with hostile bafflement by the supervisors on her course, who can’t find any through-line with her previous aesthetic and brutally retract their support.

Hogg’s satirical eye on film-school foibles is beadier than ever in such scenes, but there’s a touching esprit de corps among the student body, who may not always understand each other’s work but rally to help as far as they can. Julie, fumbling towards her vision, lacks experience, and the patience of everyone else on a film set is by no means inexhaustible. Her actors (Ariane Labed and Harris Dickinson) get stuck and vent about Julie’s work ethic while she eavesdrops; her huffy cinematographer (real-life d.p. Ben Hecking) throws a strop when she can’t make up her mind about shot choices.

Alongside Julie’s work in progress, there’s another film in production by one Patrick Le Mage (Richard Ayoade, expanding on his brief appearance last time) – an all-singing, all-dancing proletarian musical called The History of Our Youth, which looks absurd, and has just enough in common with the bang-on-period Absolute Beginners (1986) to make Ayoade’s scene-stealing pomposity feel like an insider joke. Tucked away here are some of the most exasperated film-set insights this side of François Truffaut’s Day for Night. The hard graft and impossible logistics of the medium get a thorough going-over. But there’s also a profound sense of the pleasure, and satisfaction, of making something, however imperfect, and however long it takes. For Julie, it’s this film. But Hogg adds in a tiny morality play about getting too wrapped up in your own passion projects to respect other people’s. It comes in the shape of a lumpy sugar bowl – the first fruit of a pottery class Swinton’s Rosalind has been trying.

Byrne deepens her whole take on Julie so movingly, especially in making her need for new intimacy a raw, embarrassing thing. She has one animalistic one-night stand (with Charlie Heaton) but otherwise succumbs to painful romantic drift, crushing on all the wrong people. Joe Alwyn’s emotionally supportive editor has to sweetly let her down by mentioning he has a boyfriend, at which point the camera catches her stricken, and the audience thinks, “oh, babe”. Swinton continues to know precisely who Rosalind is, of course, and flawlessly transmits her essence, with three springer spaniels as her scuffling entourage. The family scenes are perfect.

The Souvenir: Part II is already doing everything you could ask of it, and then it springs a wondrous feat of pastiche-within-pastiche, serving up a kind of dream ballet finale that’s close to indescribable. Suffice to say, the première where all the characters eventually congregate is our ticket not for a literal screening, but a leaping-off into Hogg’s (and Julie’s) wildest hopes and reveries. The sequence is a through-the-looking-glass spectacle which dresses Julie up like a 1940s glamour queen, and takes her through a series of portals – adventuring, as her own film has aimed to do, into the very mysteries of her soul. 

Even beyond this part, there’s a coup de cinéma waiting on the other side, which offers pointedly the opposite closing shot to Part I. It speaks not of any pat redemption through filmmaking, or an escape back into living once again, but of anxiety, and artifice, and selves that have merged to the point where real life and cinematic portraiture are hopelessly intertwined. From a healing point of view, this may not be quite what the doctor ordered. While entertaining us deliriously, Hogg pulls the rug out. Somewhere behind Julie’s camera, shooting into this gilded mirror, is a lost soul.

[t4t4t]

http://internetlovefest.com/work/aphorisms.html

Humans are congenitally allergic to work - they don't want to work whenever they have a chance not to work.

The sacrosanct notion of work is the cause of most of humanity's woes. Never trust the priests of work because they've poisoned their minds with it. For example, the quantity of economically necessary work declines, yet politicians and economists tell us that the only way to end unemployment is with more useless work. Why couldn't more people do much less?

The invention of workerism gradually, and even then only partially, subverted our natural inclination to be lazy and our disinclination to work.

The ugly brown dye of work spills across this miserable civilization, saturating the fabric of everyday life, day after back-breaking day.

The masses martyr themselves with work.

Work surrounds us and lays siege to our souls.

Going to work is like hurling yourself into an abyss.

The time has come to prepare the sacred cow of work for slaughter.

There are three types of labor - wage work, domestic labor and autonomous activity, the latter being (in most cases) exempt from charges of drudgery and slavery.

Slaves feel tired just thinking of all the work they've yet to do.

Many waters cannot quench our thirst for laziness, nor floods drown it.

Creativity constrains the return of work; be creative and put severe constraints on work.

Laziness is a comedy in which we can all play a part, a veritable field of sunblown flowers where the unruly colors of the universe dance with the wind.

Fling your work schedule into the river of time.

The legends of paradise teach us to curse work, reminding us that laziness is the essential goal of humanity.

All power to zeroworker councils - impose a strict regime of laziness!

The right to work is the right to misery and always implies the possibility of the right not to work.

Now more than ever, we've got to fight the measures designed to make those who refuse to work, work.

Laziness is the source of all virtue.

Work is the graveyard of bad intentions.

Authentic humans feel degraded by those who preach the religion of work.

Pay your debts with an effigy of your boss.

Wage labor perpetuates the archaic system whereby armies and courts consume the profits of overproduction.

In a ton of work, there's not an ounce of love.

Work or perish - what choice is that? I'd rather die than work.

A life of labor always diminishes one's love of life, so become a verb like Bucky Fuller and cease to be the lowly noun spoken of so fondly, once a year, on Labor Day.

If you haven't started working, don't do it - fuller.

"Elite" workers are allied with bosses against fellow humans who are either incapable or, praise them, idle.

Work inhibits the noble passions of humanity.

Workers betray their natural instincts to be lazy and lose their vitality - stop being workers and never work again.

Laziness is the mother of passion, a veritable bed of lust.

Disgrace to the proletariat that gives into work.

For Oblomov, there was the world of work and boredom, and the world of rest and enjoyment. We need more works that display such love of idleness.

Work isn't a task, it's torture.

The plague of work, the bulimia of work, the homicide of work - give work its proper attributes.

Work is a ball and chain.

Work brings dishonor to your house.

No pity for those tormented by a passion for work.

Labor only sustains life by stunting it. Tell me how much you work and I'll tell you what you are.

The only place to contemplate the wisdom of humanity is on the throne of laziness.

Now we have a system where most work and few are lazy. The rejection of work is the basis of sub-proletarian revolution, so take victories over work where you can get them.

Put your best efforts into laziness and prepare for the coming inaction.

Waiting for the Waterloo of work...

The biggest tragedy of the teen years? Sublime beings become workers.

Work for full unemployment.

The culture of productivism employes work for social discipline and control - in a word, domination. Look around you in the subway - you share the world with masses of domestic slaves on the way to, or recovering from, their latest paroxysm of work.

Work is long; the boss a beast.

Instead of the penitentiary of the salary, we want guaranteed social incomes, in addition and unrelated to, the number of hours we work.

Kick the work habit.

Death to Malthus, religion and the dogma of work.

Laziness is the religion of the XXIst Century.

Worship the oracle of laziness.

Every prison is built with work.

Inhibit, as best you can, the vice of work.

Workers and consumers are the miserable servants of machines and their endless demands.

Because of the dogma of workerism, unemployment is a problem rather than the boon to humanity that it should be.

The tragedy is that those who do work, work so much they are no longer human.

Those who don't work are reduced to a miserable existence amidst the spectacle of plenty.

Work is not the continuation of divine creation, rather a contest of life and death whereby work triumphs over wisdom, and (vice versa).

After all, if God doesn't work, why should I?

Augustine (the so-called "saint") tied monastic work to divine creation and denounced laziness. The confusion engendered by the mama's boy from Hippo (between divine work and ordinary labor) opened the door to the condemnation of leisure.

The Augustinian classification of licit and illicit jobs should be applied by a revolutionary federation of zeroworker councils making much of what is now called "work" taboo.

Recall that Paul's "Second Epistle to the Thessalonians" is used to invoke the need to work: the Thessalonians were convinced that the second coming of Christ was at hand; hence work useless. I've never liked Paul - not his style, nor his dictum: no work, no eat.

Thomas Aquinas, reacting to the fact that the number of illicit jobs had been reduced as commerce and craft grew, came up with the category of common utility that revalued many jobs, including commerce. This revaluing must be revalued.

Sacrifice work for the sake of life (or at least snarl at your boss and give him the finger).

Production for the sake of production is as vapid as art for art's sake.

The system is bent on economizing time, but it's afraid to give free time to people.

The ethics of effort and competition are ultimately rewarded with the demolition of solidarity.

The seeds of universal solidarity are found in the process of taking time back from work.

According to the priests of work, everything can become a job. The monetizing of all activity disguises work as leisure (and vice versa) and creates a society of impoverished servants, many of whom are still without work.

For the Greeks, to work is to be enslaved by necessity.

To paraphrase Marx: Labor dominates necessity by producing surplus and simultaneously submits to the instruments of this domination.

Bad workers can't be controlled by management, especially when they're ready to pretend to be loyal employees and otherwise lie to the enemy.

For Hegel, work is "refrained desire," a force that only adequately negates the object of desire. Desire frees itself from work by consuming commodities in the fires of South Central Los Angeles.

Everything that requires effort and supports the market - shopping, cleaning, watching television - has become work, albeit invisible work.

Work dies on the comfy pillory of laziness, putting a momentary end to the system that sublimates sex with work.

No herb will cure work.

Between wages and salaries flows a river of tears.

Laziness is my food, love my wine.

Work is to life as a wall is to the wind.

Laziness and hedonism prevail over productivism and puritanism.

In other words, workerism is a pile of shit - only mad cocks get on it and crow.

Work sits, as the saying goes, at the brave rider's back.

Freedom begins where work ends.

[nicklloydnow]

"But—the critical spirit is only one of the two tendencies which emerge out of the chaotic mass of the non-Estate. Along with abstract concepts abstract Money—money divorced from the prime values of the land—along with the study the countinghouse, appear as political forces. If by "democracy" we mean the form which the Third Estate as such wishes to impart to public life as a whole, it must be concluded that democracy and plutocracy are the same thing under the two aspects of wish and actuality, theory and practice, knowing and doing. It is the tragic comedy of the world‑improvers' and freedom‑teachers' desperate fight against money that they are ipso facto assisting money to be effective. Respect for the big number—expressed in the principles of equality for all, natural rights, and universal suffrage—is just as much a class‑ideal of the unclassed as freedom of public opinion (and more particularly freedom of the press) is so. These are ideals, but in actuality the freedom of public opinion involves the preparation of public opinion, which costs money; and the freedom of the press brings with it the question of possession of the press, which again is a matter of money; and with the franchise comes electioneering, in which he who pays the piper calls the tune. The representatives of the ideas look at one side only, while the representatives of money operate with the other. The concepts of Liberalism and Socialism are set in effective motion only by money. It was the Equites, the big-money party, which made Tiberius Gracchus' popular movement possible at all; and as soon as that part of the reforms that was advantageous to them had been successfully legalized, they withdrew and the movement collapsed. In England politicians of eminence laid it down as early as 1700 that "on 'Change one deals in votes as well as in stocks, and the price of a vote is as well known as the price of an acre of land." When the news of Waterloo reached Paris, the price of French Government stock rose—the Jacobins had destroyed the old obligations of the blood and so had emancipated money; now it stepped forward as lord of the land. There is no proletarian, not even a Communist movement, that has not operated in the interests of money, and for the time being permitted by money—and that without the idealists among its leaders having the slightest suspicion of the fact. Intellect rejects, money directs—so it runs in every last act of a Culture-drama, when the megalopolis has become master over the rest. And, in the limit, intellect has no cause of complaint. For, after all, it has won its victory—namely, in its own realms of truths, the realm of books and ideals that is not of this world. Its conceptions have become venerabilia of the begining Civilization. But Money wins, through these very concepts, in its realm, which is only of this world." - Oswald Spengler, 'The Decline of the West' (1923) 

[tomorrowedblog]

Friday Releases for October 16

Friday is the busiest day of the week for new releases, so we've decided to collect them all in one place. Friday Releases for October 16 include Anime, Trauma and Divorce, Streams of Thought, Vol. 3: Cane and Abel, The Kid Detective, and more.

The Trial of the Chicago 7

The Trial of the Chicago 7, the new movie from Aaron Sorkin, is out today.

What was intended to be a peaceful protest at the 1968 Democratic National Convention turned into a violent clash with police and the National Guard. The organizers of the protest—including Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden and Bobby Seale—were charged with conspiracy to incite a riot and the trial that followed was one of the most notorious in history.

Love And Monsters

Love And Monsters, the new movie from Michael Matthews, is out today.

Seven years after the Monsterpocalypse, Joel Dawson (Dylan O’Brien), along with the rest of humanity, has been living underground ever since giant creatures took control of the land. After reconnecting over radio with his high school girlfriend Aimee (Jessica Henwick), who is now 80 miles away at a coastal colony, Joel begins to fall for her again. As Joel realizes that there’s nothing left for him underground, he decides against all logic to venture out to Aimee, despite all the dangerous monsters that stand in his way.

The Opening Act

The Opening Act, the new movie from Steve Byrne, is out today.

Will Chu has it all - the job, the girl - but what’s missing is his true passion in life, to become a stand-up comedian. When he gets the opportunity he’s been waiting for, the emcee slot on the road opening for his hero Billy G., the realities of life on the stage come crashing in. Between relentless hecklers, drunk comedy groupies and hard-to-impress morning radio DJs, things get off to a rough start. Even if he can take the opportunity to learn from his idols and overcome the challenges, Will still needs to decide if he should continue with the life he has, or pursue the one he has always dreamt of – the life of a comedian.

Shithouse

Shithouse, the new movie from Cooper Raiff, is out today.

Alex (Cooper Raiff) is a lonely, friendless college freshman who is seriously contemplating transferring to a college closer to his mom (Amy Landecker) and sister (Olivia Welch), to whom he is still extremely tethered. Everything changes one night when Alex takes a leap and attends a party at his campus’ party house ‘Shithouse’, where he forges a strong connection with his RA, Maggie (Dylan Gelula).

Martin Eden

Martin Eden, the new movie from Pietro Marcello, is out today.

Adapted from a 1909 novel by Jack London yet set in a provocatively unspecified moment in Italy’s history, Martin Eden is a passionate and enthralling narrative fresco in the tradition of the great Italian classics. Martin (played by the marvelously committed Luca Marinelli) is a self-taught proletarian with artistic aspirations who hopes that his dreams of becoming a writer will help him rise above his station and marry a wealthy young university student (Jessica Cressy). The dissatisfactions of working-class toil and bourgeois success lead to political awakening and destructive anxiety in this enveloping, superbly mounted bildungsroman.

The Kid Detective

The Kid Detective, the new movie from Evan Morgan, is out today.

A once-celebrated kid detective, now 31, continues to solve the same trivial mysteries between hangovers and bout of self-pity. Until a naïve client brings him his first ‘adult’ case - to find out who brutally murdered her boyfriend.

La Révolution

La Révolution, the new TV series from Aurélien Molas, is out today.

In a reimagined history of the French Revolution, the guillotine’s future inventor uncovers a disease that drives the aristocracy to murder commoners.

Helstrom

Helstrom, the new TV series from Paul Zbyszewski, is out today.

As the son and daughter of a mysterious and powerful serial killer, Helstrom follows Daimon (Tom Austen) and Ana Helstrom (Sydney Lemmon), and their complicated dynamic, as they track down the worst of humanity — each with their own attitude and skills.

Grand Army

Grand Army, the new TV series from Katie Cappiello, is out today.

Five students at the largest public high school in Brooklyn take on a chaotic world as they fight to succeed, survive, break free and seize the future.

9 Monkeys of Shaolin

9 Monkeys of Shaolin, the new game from Sobaka Studios and Buka Entertainment, is out today.

The true rebirth of iconic beat 'em up genre in vein of old-school video games! As a simple Chinese fisherman Wei Cheng you have to avenge the death of your friends and family slaughtered in a pirate raid at your peaceful village.

Anime, Trauma and Divorce

Anime, Trauma and Divorce, the new album from Open Mike Eagle, is out today.

Streams of Thought, Vol. 3: Cane and Abel

Streams of Thought, Vol. 3: Cane and Abel, the new album from Black Thought, is out today.

Cuttin’ Grass - Vol. 1

Cuttin’ Grass - Vol. 1, the new album from Sturgill Simpson, is out today.

SIGN

SIGN, the new album from Autechre, is out today.

[grouchomarxiste-blog1]

Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite: Marx and Violence

Warning: A majority of this was written pre-pandemic, so please excuse my overly optimistic tone. It was a different time.

Yes, another Bong Joon-Ho film. Can you blame me? The guy’s a genius. Parasite was another one of those great films that will never leave you. You can watch the movie simply without doing a major analysis in your head and you will still agree that it’s a great movie. Which personally, is why I believe it's made its way into the major American awards season. Parasite winning Best Foreign Film at the Golden Globes was one of the few decisions I’ve agreed with. I didn’t see any of the winners in the film categories besides Parasite, and I’m very much ok with that. It’s making its way into Hollywood and the favorite lists of celebrities. Elon Musk said he loved Parasite (he also turned Grimes, the former “anti-imperialist,” to the mother of his future child). Chrissy Teigen loved Parasite (a lot can be said about her, so let’s not). Obama loved Parasite (but I have some serious doubts about the authenticity of his yearly favorites list. Mainly because I can’t imagine him listening to Summer Walker). I was completely boggled at all of those tweets. How? How is one so blind? How did one watch Parasite and not feel a thing? After I watched Parasite, I rushed back to school to attend the discussion section of my Political Theory class so I could read and discuss primitive accumulation through dispossession with revolutionary fervor. I recommended it to everyone near me. I even wrote a note to my professor who tucked it into his book. But is that the problem- that all these beloved figures (not mine) end up loving the sheer adrenaline of the story and tweet to their followers about how great the movie is. Those followers, with their favorite celebrities’ seal of approval, watch the movie, not putting it together either. Bong Joon-Ho is critiquing those very figures! In every post-Parasite interview, Bong Joon-Ho has said that Parasite is about America and capitalism, but we have just reduced those statements to memes on Twitter. As funny as they are, Parasite is rich for its class analysis. The Hollywood reaction is just as important. Marx is all over this movie, there's no question about it. I also want us to understand these controversial moments from a Fanonian perspective, again all with relation to Marx. I hope for us to understand that everything about this movie is intentional and every bit of it is worth pages and pages of discussion. I nearing 11 pages as I write this. I also hope that this film can be a way for us to understand economic exploitation in the 21st century. While many celebrities have misunderstood it, it is important that you, us, the people, the working class, grasp every bit of this radical film.

I’m not going to bother with another one of my “brief summary” because I’m assuming, we’ve all seen it. It's on Hulu now and I believe Apple TV. If you don’t want to pay for either platforms, watch a pirated version online, I genuinely don’t think Bong will mind.

I want to talk about the home. I know we all had the same reaction to that beautiful home: awe, admiration, and envy. The Park’s home itself is significant, but also in contrast to the Kims’ home. The Kim’s live in a small semi-basement home, where they have to reach up in order to look out their window and see the street level. Their home is dirty, cramped, just not a place where anyone wants to be. But immediately, I thought of Fanon and the native sector. I know that Parasite isn’t about colonialism, but space is important to Marx (I’ll return to Fanon). In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels attribute many things to the process of proletarianization. To name a few: literacy campaigns and public education, the politicization of the proletariat towards the end of feudalism, expansion of media, etc. One that stands out, is the mass migration and urbanization of the proletariat. Through that, the proletariat was concentrated into the poorest parts of the city where they shared their most intimate quarters with workers like themselves (Marx and Engels, 15) One might dismiss this as a historical example specific to Europe, but if we go back to my thoughts on Memories of Murder, we’d note how Korea’s transition to a modern capitalist society, was a fairly recent one (from 1987 onwards). As the agricultural sector suffered, Koreans living in the rural provinces were forced to move into the major cities. Park (Song Kang-Ho’s character in Memories) was lucky enough to become a successful businessman, unlike the Kims who earn their livelihood by holding pizza boxes- the most insignificant work. Along with urbanization, the proletariat also occupied the small space of the factory, where they are reminded of the everyday brutality of their work. The Park’s home is not cramped, but the one scene where everyone is rushing to hide from them, results in Ki-taek, Ki-jeong, and Ki-woo hiding underneath a coffee table overnight. After that lengthy battle with Geun-sae and Moon-gwang, the Kims are exhausted. They do not want to be laying side by side hearing the Parks have sex. My friend Sef also reminded me that the Parks had weird sex as Mr. Park recalled how their old chauffeur possibly had sex with a drugged-up prostitute, a scenario that previously made Mrs. Park scream out of disgust. Revisiting this, I believe this definitely deserves a psychoanalytic analysis.

This isn’t their breaking point, but also hearing Mr. Park say that Ki-taek smells like the subway is a factor. Once making their break they run outside where it's raining heavily. They come to their home which is flooded and destroyed. Here is where I’ll start talking about Fanon. [READ NOTE]. Again, I know the colonial system is not the case in Parasite. Fanon was a Marxist and expanded on Marxist theory in the colonial context. I just want to warn you that I am using Fanon as carefully as possible, not using concepts that are distinctly racial. I know there’s probably also much more relevant work out there on spatiality and violence, but I think Fanon’s prose style in The Wretched of the Earthis quite appropriate for the film. Let’s consider the colonial bourgeoisie as the Parks and the natives as the Kims. Fanon calls the colonial world, a “compartmentalized world.” The colonists’ sector is clean and protected whereas the native sector is overcrowded, envious, and starving. Sounds about right so far.

The colonist’s sector is a sector built to last, all stone and steel. It’s a sector of lights and paved roads, where the trash cans constantly overflow with strange and wonderful garbage, undreamed-of leftovers. The colonizer’s feet can never be glimpsed, except perhaps in the sea, but then again you can never get close enough. They are protected by solid shoes in a sector where the streets are clean and smooth., without a pothole, without a stone… The colonized’s sector or at least the “native” quarters, the shanty town, the Medina, the reservation, is a disreputable place, inhabited by disreputable people. You are born anywhere, anyhow. You die anywhere, from anything. It’s a world with no space, people are piled one on top of each other. (Fanon, 4)

This becomes extremely relevant when the Kims run out of the Parks’ home in the pouring rain. I kept noticing that they were all barefoot, only focused on getting out of there. My toes curled in the movie theater watching that. Running away from that traumatic house to find your own home destroyed, relocating to a displacement camp, THEN going to work the next day for your unaffected employer who has the audacity to audibly take a sniff of you. I don't know about you, but to me, this sounds like the conditions for a proletarian revolution. Besides the literal allegory, the tone sharply shifts. One could argue that it began to change when they found Geun-sae in the bunker or when Moon-gwang hit her head but that was just some good old dark comedy for me. After the flooding, things are different. Ki-taek has this unmoving face. Things turned grim and we knew something climactic was about to happen. Fanon’s most famous chapter, “Concerning Violence,” maintains that decolonization will always be a violent event because colonialism is a violent system itself. Something that I absolutely love about this chapter is that it isn’t some dense, theoretical work. It’s a revolutionary call to arms for all colonized people. It has a strategic pace which parallels Parasite so well. He sets the scene- the compartmentalized, Manichaen world. He slowly intensifies the antagonistic relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, until this culminating point:

The colonized subject thus discovers that his life, his breathing and his heartbeat are the same as the colonist’s. He discovers that the skin of the colonist is not worth more than the “natives.” In other words, his world receives a fundamental jolt. The colonized’s revolutionary new assurance stems from this. If no longer strike fear into me or nail me to the spot and his voice can no longer petrify me. I am no longer uneasy in his presence. In reality, to hell with him. Not only does his presence no longer bother me, but i am already preparing to waylay him in such a way that he will no longer have any solution but to flee (Fanon, 10)

As corny as it sounds, when I first read that, it brought me to tears. I’m not sure if it was just because I was up for three days straight writing my midterm and I was finally breaking, or because it just meant that much to me. But that section in which the colonized discoversthat his life is worth as much as the colonizer is such a crucial moment. This parallels the infamous birthday scene. Geun-sae gets out of the bunker, stabs Ki-jung, the Park’s kid (I’ll look his name up later) has a seizure, and Chong-sook is wrestling with Geun-sae. Shit is going down. If we recall, Mrs. Park mentioned that it takes a few minutes for her son to die after a seizure and needs to go to the hospital immediately. So much is going on and Mr. Park starts screaming at Ki-taek to give him the keys. Ki-taek is immobilized at this point. His daughter has been stabbed, son attacked, wife almost killed, the Parks’ got him dressed up in some cultural appropriation, Hollywood Indian regalia. In fact, I find it very fitting that he’s dressed up as a Native American at this moment. I see this as Bong’s satirical nod to old ultra-capitalist Hollywood. But if enough wasn't going on, Mr. Park sniffed. He got close to Geun-sae, a man who’s been living underground for 3 years and audibly sniffed him in disgust. The same way that he sniffed Ki-taek. Of course, there’s probably a difference between a “subway” smell vs. “I haven't showered in 3 years” smell but at the moment it feels as if it's almost the same thing. In my initial viewing, I thought what happened next was because of that, but no. Ki-taek realized that his life was worth the same as the Parks, and their presence no longer bothers him, but he is now plotting against him, and the time of action is now. Ki-taek stabs Mr. Park and flees. Annoyingly, the YouTube section for this clip is filled with people feeling bad for the Parks and discussing how what Ki-taek did was wrong. Of course, the average viewer will view the Parks as some sympathetic rich suckers who only treated the Kims kindly. The casual reader who picks up Fanon for the first time would also dismiss his theory of violence as immoral in comparison to non-violent methods like Gandhi’s. A lot can be said about Gandhi, but Fanon says that non-violence is a strategy created by the colonizer to deter decolonization and paint the colonizer as a gentle ruler who wants peace. This is not the case. Colonialism is a violent system. Capitalism is a violent system. Colonialism can only be undone violently. Capitalism can only be undone violently. Now I don't mean to make this all about colonialism, as my friends say I often do. But the similarities are clear. The question isn’t whether the murder of Mr. Park was a justified act, but what were the conditions that forced Ki-taek to murder. Geun-sae killed Ki-jung, but no one in the comment section is having a debate on whether his murder was ethical. Because in our heads we feel bad for him, and the life that he’s lived- why don’t we feel the same towards Ki-taek? Geun-sae and Ki-taek are two sides of the same coin. Geun-sae’s exploitation is naked. He’s confined to the basement, controlling the lights of the home. A feature of the house that Mr. Park doesn't even pay attention to, never mind considering that there is someone manually operating it. A clear example of how our labor is alienated. All while blindly worshipping Mr. Park- a man who knows nothing of his existence. Honestly, I hope some of you see yourselves in Geun-sae the next time you defend billionaires online. But Ki-taek is just another exploited worker. I understand this can be hard to understand in our current understanding of the world. How is Ki-taek exploited? Him and his family conned their way into their jobs and leech off of the Parks. Again, we must return to the system as a whole to understand. None of this wouldn’t have happened if the Kims weren’t desperately poor in a capitalist society, which enables families like the Parks, to live a life of excess at the expense of the Kims. Capitalism is a system of exploitation; we cannot forget that. Quite simply, no one is rich without thousands that are poor.

          The levels of the home are also this unforgettable feature. I just want to make this quick note about the issue of the ghost. Did you forget about the ghost? Da-Song didn’t (yes, I finally looked his name up!). I find the story of the ghost such an interesting touch. Not just as a way for Bong to warn the audience about Da-Song’s history of seizures. When Mrs. Park tells Chung-sook of the story, she says “they say a ghost in the house brings wealth.” This, of course, is true since the exploitation of those like Geun-sae are responsible for the wealth of the Parks, in the larger picture. I’d like to look further into this. There's a twofold meaning to this. I do believe that this ghost is symbolic to the exploitation of the Kims, and the proletariat in general, but that’s Mrs. Park’s understanding of this ghost. The way she understands this ghost, is as a source of wealth. Maybe Mrs. Park isn’t as ditzy as we imagine- she to some degree, understands her class position. But like most, she doesn’t question the ghost, or her class position. She knows that if she looks into either, it would result in the ugly truth. Da-Song, however, is just a child. He’s too young to really understand the economic and social relations which are responsible for his wealth. He’s also too young to consciously suppress any desire to investigate the matter like his mother. He is a child after all and is naturally curious. But his first encounter with the ghost was the one that resulted in a near fatal seizure. This can be his body’s reaction to the life-threatening figure of a ghost. The ghost isn’t just a threat to his mortal life, but his wealth, some may argue that these are the same. Mrs. Park pays for therapy for his “trauma” so he could forget the event, but he still knows. He saw this ghost and is the only one to seriously consider its threat. Mrs. Park knows it's real but chooses to not think about it. I want to return to the Manifesto. Let's hear these famous words: “A specter is haunting Europe- the specter of communism… Two things result from this fact: Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers itself to be a power...” (Marx and Engels, 8). Don’t think I’m just including this because he’s talking about a specter, in fact, I think this story of the ghost is an intentional allusion to the specter of communism. Da-Song represents this figure of the bourgeoisie who is in constant anxiety over the threat of his wealth. When he reappears at his birthday party, he has another seizure. Also, at this time, the family, and all of their guests are witness to the horrors of their wealth and what it's created. This naked, hideous display, this moment of confrontation is a pivotal point in the dialectic. Of course, this murderous moment is not seen as a success to the viewer with Mr. Park, Ki-jung, and Geun-sae dead, Ki-woo presumed to be dead, and Ki-taek missing. This just shows us that the bourgeoisie are their own gravediggers- to again invoke the Manifesto. On a larger scale, this would be the moment of a revolution- but we don’t. Ki-woo survives with Chung-sook and is put on probation. Ki-taek is missing to the police, but Ki-taek realizes that he’s living in the bunker in hiding. Ki-woo declares that he will make enough money to buy the home and free his father. At first, I wondered “why couldn't he just sneak him out of the house when the new owners were asleep?” “Why did he have to buy the home?” As much as I wanted to portray the Kims to be revolutionary figures, Ki-woo has the common fate of most. Instead of usurping power from the bourgeoisie, he believes he can free his dad from the home, by owning the house. Everyone who lives in the basement is stuck there for a reason, because someone is forcing them to stay there. A perfect allegory for the relations of production as I have repeatedly mentioned throughout this text. Ki-woo desires a bourgeois life (as most working-class folk do!) in order to lift his father out of the despair of poverty. He believes the only way he can save his father is to own the home, which could easily be seen as the means of production. A nice touch which I had to look up, was as Ki-woo tells us of his desire to buy the home, a song plays called “546 years”- the amount of time it will take for him to earn enough money. I wish this song title was more obvious for the American viewer. I am not trying to take away from this film by saying that, but for a viewer who knows Korean or the song title, they’ll understand the tragic nature of his dreams. Whereas the American viewers will sympathize with his dreams- as we’ve done with immigrants and “the American Dream” or the bootstrapping mentality of some people. In some way I do think Bong didn’t want an overtly revolutionary ending. I don’t think the average viewer, especially in this day, could handle an ending like that. Not to say that we don't understand class inequality and such. We are not living in, say the 60s/70s where there were Marxist movements all throughout the world. I don’t think we have the conditions for a revolution at this moment, although I do think the mass unemployment and the other severe economic consequences of this virus will radicalize the working class in large numbers, to a degree that we haven't seen in a long time. But to make my point, I feel that we are living in historic political times and we are coming to understand ourselves in a liberating way.  It is my hope that films like Parasite will awaken the revolutionary potential in us all.

Note: I wanted to use Fanon’s theory of violence and diagnosis of colonialism as a violent structure, in relation to capitalist society. I don’t want us to interpret his writings as something that can be isolated from the racial structure of colonialism, but i do think it is a beneficial guide to understanding this film.

Work Cited:

Philcox, Richard, translator. “On Violence.” The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon, Grove Press, 2004.

Joon-Ho, Bong, director. Parasite. Barunson E&A, 2019.

Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. The Communist Manifesto. International Publishers, 1948.

[ghostly-thorn]

Behind The Writing - 2 - Remnants of the past

🎵 A bit of Ambiance 🎵

Greetings everyone !

I hope you’re all doing well in this grim time of confinement 😓 Meanwhile I’ve been called to the front not too long ago. I’m currently in the testing booths, taking in potentially COVID-19 positive patients. But anyway, before that I’ve had loads of time to keep on working on that godforsaken second chapter. IT THOUGHT I’D NEVER SEE THE END OF IT, BUT HERE IT IS !

Same as before, this post will be dedicated to references and easter eggs you might have missed upon your first read (And I’m not blaming you, this Chapter’s hecking long).

Anyway, off we go !

We start off with a quote from Dante’s Divina Commedia. For those who don’t know, Dante Alighieri was a famous italian poet during the 13th Century. He was mostly known for The Divine Comedy from which we established most of our depiction of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. It tells the story of a man in the afterlife (him) going through the 3 realms I mentioned above. The quote I extracted is from the first “Canto” (Sing) of Hell. Dante describes how he’s arrived in hell, “Midway upon the journey of life”. Zera is 10 in this chapter, can’t get more midway than this. “I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost“. Same as Dante, Zera is abandoned to her fate and is going through a relatively dark period in her life.

I chose yet another track from Penny Dreadful. You’ll see I’ve used many during this Chapter. I can’t help it if they picture so well my vision of Zera’s past life. The first track, “Street.Horse.Smell.Candle” I chose because it gives off some... motion to the narrative. When I first listened to it I thought : that’s it, that’s the one. I could picture quite vividly a young and adventurous rich girl roaming in the Manor

Coming from a privileged family, it made sense that Zera had a high education. Just as passionate as her father, she gave herself to heart in her lessons with a penchant for French (Kalosian) and History. I will come back to this later. This picture i believe represents perfectly how she was “trimmed” to be a beautiful rose, and nothing else.

Emily Thorne; Zera’s mother, plays an important role in her life. If you' re here then you probably already read the chapter and you know that Emily grew up on the streets after her mother OD'd. She learned to survive as best she could and, much like Rose, climbed to a relatively comfortable position. Social ascendancy is a topic that will often come up in my fanfic. As far as Emily is concerned, I'll come back to it in more depth later, for now all you need to know is that she was a real role model for her daughter and that her daughter aspired to be like her one day.

So the game is really shallow on Characters’ backgrounds. We know that Rose used to work in the mines, but there is a huge gap between this proletarian job and becoming the CEO of a multi-national. I, quite shyly, decided to fill in this gap. Rose comes from India (So far that makes sense if we observe him more closely), but India doesn’t exist in Pokemon ! yet... We do know some Pokemon come from whatever that region is named (Copperajah for example). In my mind and opinion, Rose came to Galar with his parents at a young age. I’ve yet to decide why. They lived a relatively difficult life, with everyone pitching in to help the family, but they barely had enough to survive. That's why the candles were so important to him: they reminded him of his past life. Soon Rose had to work in the mines where, one day, an accident happened and he fell several meters into a strange cavity... There he had an encounter that would change his life... many of his colleagues thought he was dead. But then, three days later, he emerged from the mines, changed forever. And guess who came back after 3 days of supposed death? JESUS. I assure you, Rose is not his equivalent, even if I bring up some biblical subject in the Fanfic (Eternatus being the Leviathan yes?). I already have a little idea how I'm going to write this scene, but I don't know where I'm going to put it yet... That’s a puzzler

Rose Manor has had many influences and it took me sometime to properly design it. I based it on Malfoy Manor (Harry Potter), Vanessa Ive’s place (Penny Dreadful) and some other infamous british buildings of the real life (Buckhingham and Kensington palaces). The fact that it’s located beyond a forest is also a metaphorical representation of Zera’s journey. I also thought it would be funny to have her be frightened of ghosts when, ironically, her main Pokémon will be Gengar

The Wall surrounding Motostoke comes, primarly from the game, but also because I wanted to add a little “Attack on Titan” reference. No Colossal Titan this time though... The fact that Zera gazes at it every morning is yet another reminder that she doesn’t feel at her place and needs an escape

So yeah... We get to a dodgy subject I want to clarify from the get-go. This Pokémon World, at least my vision of it, is based on the “Detective Pikachu” movie. I wanted it to be, the world we know from the anime, but also mixed up with parts of our regular world. For exemple in DP, Tim Goodman, the protagonist, wanted to become an insurance worker, not a trainer, not a gym leader, just an insurance worker. There are other things than Trainers in this World. Furthermore, I locate this fic about 100 years after our time. I mentioned real british historical figures at some point, like Churchill and Adam Smith. Now tell me... How cool would it be to picture World War II with Pokémons? Can you already imagine Nazis trying to harness Legendaries’ powers to win the War ? I know I can. So yeah, all of this to say that the Anglican Church exists in this World and Zera was raised in this faith, thus the blessings.

I wanted every part of the Manor to exude wealth and I believe I succeeded at that. I like the idea of grand rooms, each serving a specific purpose. The tapestries of Galar’s story are the same located in Hammerlocke’s vault, no doubt a priceless property Rose got his hands on. Zera always looked on those stories like they were unreal, but make no mistake, she will experience them first-hand

Oh and that maid that seemed in a rush? Yes, she did shag Rose’s colleague. He would often invite them at home, throwing lavish parties in the hopes of getting funds for his evil plans.

Now then, getting to Emily’s first proper introduction. The reason why this Chapter is so long is because I added her backstory into it (The whole Castelia City deal yes?). It wasn’t supposed to be here, or exist at all, but I figured it would be hard to like a character you don’t know. So yeah, I did end up adding that part. She owns a Zoroark, which is uncommon. I’ll later explain how she got to know him. Some may have already understood that Zera’s relationship to Gengar will be much similar to her mother’s with Zoroark.

Zera’s a lonely child, and she’s learned to befriend all Pokemons, Zoroark included. I like the idea of this girl having a rather peculiar friend (human!Zoroark)

I don’t think the next choice of track needs much explaining. Emily is Zera’s guardian angel. She protects her, coddles her and does everything in her power to keep her happy. But the illusion begins to fade, and Zera, just as smart as her mother, can see through it. Emily wishes her daughter could stay a little blind for a while, but her maturity prevents her from doing so.

More and more, Zera witnesses her father grow colder and more distant. That scene she witnessed between her father and the Hammerlocke Mayor ? He was trying to bribe him in the hopes of gaining control of the power-spot there (Dynamax don’t exist yet, but they will soon, Magnolia’s working on it).

The straw that broke the camel's back was this measure of adoption. Only later do we take Emily's point of view and learn that she, too, was a victim of Rose's change in attitude. Learning from her daughter about what was about to happen, Emily realized that she had to go back to her roots and do what she did best: inspect, dig into every nook and cranny until she found the answers she was looking for. And those answers she found, but at a terrible cost...

As the end-of-year festivities approached, found haven in the library where she would read adult books. I mentioned Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” as I feel like Rose is taking the same path as the Doctor in the story, except he’s not looking for everlasting life, but a way to make it better. He’s clumsy at it sure (nearly destroyed the country with Eternatus) but in the end they have the same goal. I also mentioned “King Lear”, a work from Shakespear where a terrible King decides to share his power into  3 Kingdoms for each of his children (daughters). Two of them give flattering answers (represented in this fic as Bede and Oleana), but the 3rd one (Zera) remains silent and is shunned away for it. Rings a bell...?

The hedge maze was important to me as it represented the versatility Zera could prove of. It also symbolizes her path and how sometimes she stumbled into dead ends. I’ve recently commissionned my good friend (っ◔◡◔)っ ♥ Nootledootle ♥ and she graced me with this gorgeous piece of art. Follow her on instagram.

Once again I mentioned Rose’s homeland when I described the Dragapult fountain. Chhatarpur granite is known to come from India and it looks like this

A “Sitrusade” is a “Lemonade”, which I believe makes sense

A little world on what neglect truly is. It doesn’t alway imply physical violences, sometimes the lack of affection, regard, or love, could turn a child upside-down. And that’s what I aimed for. Rose never raised his hand on Zera, never raped her, but he ignored her and in some way, this was worse.

 “Nocturnal Danger” for Zera’s first encounter with Gastly, I like to think it’s quite fitting. This scene I had a really clear idea of ever since I started the fic. I knew I had plot points that needed to be reshaped, but this wasn’t the case here. I chose Gastly as her first Pokémon and, well, Friend for two reasons. Firstly, I love Gengar and he always finds his way into my teams. Secondly, I liked the idea of having this little lonely girl roaming the maze in the search of her friend. Gastly is a ghost, therefore he can appear and disappear at wish. That’s why at some point later on in the Chapter I mentioned the maids grew wary of Zera as she seemed to be talking on her own, but really she was in the good company of her friend. It’s known in literatures, movies and such that children are more likely to bond with ghosts and this was clearly my intention here. Pokémons are primal beings too. So, upon seeing that a human would harm herself for him, Gastly found it astounding. That’s why he told his mates and kept coming back. What he hadn’t planned though was to befriend this little girl. Also the prospect of Gastly pushing Zera on the swings melts my heart ;_;

I mentioned “bashful” at some point. This was Gastly’s nature in the begining. For the non-strat players here, a Pokémon with a bashful nature has no increased or decreased stats. It’s bland basically, much like Zera at the beginning of her adventure... GOD I’M DRAWING SO MANY PARALLELS

“Dorian Gray” ‘s track was chosened for a few reasons. Firstly if you’ve read my Voice Headcanon post, you’ll see that I used Reeve Carney as Rose’s young voice actor. He conveniently plays the role of Dorian Gray in Penny Dreadful. Now you're going to ask me, but who is Dorian Gray, so I'll tell you that the latter comes from a work of Gothic literature telling the story of a man of almost mystical beauty, but afraid of growing old. So he ends up selling his soul and "trapping" his old age in a portrait. As a result, an immortal Dorian embarks on a luxurious life devoid of morals. The song has an eerie and ominous feeling, and that’s exactly why I chose it.

“Johtoseries” are chinoiseries. Mahogany is yet another furniture that comes from India, it’s a deep and dark red wood that’s extremely costly.

We’re introduced to Oleana through Zera’s eyes and now that I’m reading it again I realized I havent been really nice to our future vice-president of Macro Cosmos... But I believe it was necessary to give her a more interesting narrative. Oleana, as we know her in the game, is very focused on her appearance, and this can be seen in the way she dresses, talks and behaves. But how can one get to such heights if one hasn't experienced something before that has allowed them to define themselves in such way? So that's what I allowed myself to give to our little Olive (Yes, Oleana means Olive). She lived on the streets before being adopted by your father along with her faithful Pokémon, Trubbish. She also owns one, just like Zera and Emily. Now moving on to her appearance, as I’ve said... I wasn’t very kind, but I myself I’m a bit overweight and I’ve had low self-esteem for a long time. Then I fell in with the right people and managed to mature properly. What I'm about to say is a bit spoiler-y, but later on when Zera tackles the Gym Challenge I'll write some short passages between Rose and Oleana and just so you know... She'll become more than just her adopted daughter, if you catch my drift... Yet another proof that Oleana only defines herself by and for her beauty...

What kind of thief mother wouldn’t teach her daughter how to pick a lock?

As I’ve mentioned somewhere I’m sure (There are so many things to reference, I might get lost or repetitive) there will be a lot biblical references in this Fic, thus the Arceus carved in the ceiling of the ceiling of the ballroom. God watching over Men’s sins, yes ?

Sooooo.  I think I owe you some explanation. The reason why I took SO LONG to update what this very part with Oleana. I’ve had many ideas of how things would unfurl, but the main issue I had was The choice of track. I wanted to use “Severus and Lily” as it has in the beginning this sweet tone of innocence and childhood, BUT IT DIDNT MATCH WITH THE TIMER I’D SET IN MY WRITING. Thus I had to rework on it over, and over again until I came up with something that would please me. And I did, but it took hecking long and I’m sorry. I hope this Chapter will be worth the wait. I’m aware it’s quite long...

To make Rose more impressive and menacing, I’ve based his character on that of Tywin Lannister with his children, and you can imagine that he was far from being the model father, but at least he knew how to convey strong messages...

Just a little clarification that I might have omitted in those 30 THOUSAND WORDS OF TEXT, but Oleana is older than Zera. She's 5 years older, so in this chapter she's 15 and Zera's only 10. But yet it is Zera who plays the role of the older sister, because Oleana is too frail and not very confident for that.

Oleana and Zera, though having a rocky start, grew fond of each other. But from the day Rose ruthlessly separated them, everything changed. Oleana learned to avoid her sister in order to please her adoptive father, and Zera fell into depression again. It worsened as her mother returned. Even her seemed to ignore her and the pain grew in intensity to a point where Zera thought ending it all would do them a favour. That’s when I was quite proud of my choice of track as it conveyed perfectly the rise in tension as Zera was about to take the leap. *self-pat*

YES. Now finaly getting to some drama, and an explanation I’ve owed you for a while now. Once again, because Sword and Shield was so shallow I’ve allowed myself to grant names to the characters, including Rose whose name is Adam... quite convenient eh? (Told you there would be some biblical references). Now then, I didn’t say this was his real name...

I’VE HAD A BLAST describing Rose as the main baddie. I’ve written a lot in my life, but nothing brought me as much satisfaction as this. and Man, i hope I conveyed how much of a bastard he was! Also this line : “Although right-handed in his everyday life, Rose was actually ambidextrous.  Something you were bound to experience in the next few minutes“ was a direct reference to how he was going to choke her life out.

Absinthe. Why Absinthe you may ask? Because it’s a really strong alcohol. It’s emerald green, just like Rose’s eyes. And....... It’s known to cause hallucinations, what better beverage for a delusional man such as him ?

Looking up “Rose”, “Father”, and “Poem” gave me so many works, I had difficulty filtering them, but in the end that quote from “Songs of Innocence” truly struck me and I highly recommend it to go and read it

Ah yes... Castelia City and the crafty girl... did you know that this song was played during Catwoman’s first appearance in “The Dark Knight Rises” ? Coincidence, I THINK NOT. Also “Mr Caine” is a direct reference to Michal Caine, the british actor. If Zera learned to behave like a lady, she learned if from her mother who learned it from this fine gentleman.

The rumours on the orphanage concerned rapes. It seems a lot of children, boy and girls alike, had been struck by it. and Emily didn’t want to be their next victim. Much like Zera later on she'll wallow in solitude until she finds the right people. It's something that I myself have done too

Now getting to the first encounter between Emily and Rose. I believe I’ve been fairly explicit with how out of the world Rose was. He was handsome, smart and witty. He seemed to be the only one able to read our cold and calculating Emily who could only fall in the face of such beauty. However, this was all part of Rose’s plan as we learned later on

Rose’s perfume is Paco Rabanne’s “One Million”

I just loved writing that James Bond-esque scene, and having that silence just before Rose dropped the F bomb on Emily ? Flawless. That “long-term investment” may have semed like he was talking money, but really he was talking her. She was his investment... I mention it later, but Rose was actually quite poor at the time. He just tweaked with his appearance to seem wealthy. Most of his funds came from Emily.

Rose was a ghost at the time: registered nowhere, wheither in Galar or Unova. So finding him was quite the feat for Emily, but eventually she did, or more likely, Rose allowed her to. He knew toying her that way would propel her into his arms. And it worked, didn’t it ?

That “he completed you” is yet another reference to Nolan’s Batman saga, referencing the relationship between the Joker and the cape crusader

Oh and remember that Champion in Pokemon Black and White: Alder ? He’s the one who dethroned Emily.

“Marcella” is roman name which means “warlike”, “martial”, and “strong”. It could also mean “young warrior”. In short, all that Zera would come to be one day...

“Suddenly, he was overcome with anguish and his smile crumbled. He couldn't afford it, or could he? He didn't know what to do.” The reason why Rose was a decent father in the beginning was that he wanted to build a family, and live happily, so he did for 10 years. But then, the voices in his head called back to him and so he returned to his plans, with the devastating outcome of Emily’s death

Both Emily and Zera are strong women, driven to reach their goals by any means necessary. It doesn’t meant they’re heartless, they can show genuine kindness when need be, but their devotion to their goals may end up hurting people around them, and that my friends... you will get to see if you keep reading my fic

Yet another reference to the Joker with Rose’s “You wouldn’t get it”

“Rose knew exactly why Marcella was a threat to him. That was the reason he'd distanced himself from her“ When Rose fell in that crevace when he was younger, something happened... something whispered in the dark and he could make up the words:

The Leviathan's curse must one withstand

And a parent shall perish by his child's hand.

The servants of the Manor were dismissed a few days ago as Rose didn’t want any witness for the tragedy that was about to unfold. He did not plan on your survival however

“I don’t get it! Why wake that godforsaken beast? What’s your endgame? What do you want? Don’t you already have anything your need?”... We’re in the Endgame now...

Oh. My. God. Rose’s battle theme has been stuck in my head for days as I wrote their battle... And I can’t say i’m mad. I’m in love with it! and upon listening to it, over, over and over again i realised it actually had lyrics... IN LATIN! So i went to look it up, and apparently it says “ROSE SEDO CREDO” which roughly translates to “Go Rose, Save us” which I find quite ironic for a megalomanic bastard such as him. Oh well...

Here are Rose and Emily’s teams (images)

Emily was a thief, makes sense that her Starter would be a Snivy, don’t you think ?

I told you I’d put a shit ton of references in this Chapter. That “Commendable, yet futile” comes from Resident Evil 5. Albert Wesker, a man much like Rose, says it as his nemesis tries to thwart his plans.

That Volcarona was the first Pokémon I thought off when I was assembling Emily’s team. I thought if it were to be 100% Unovian, it must have had a strong fire type and I couldn’t just give Reshiram to her. Much like Charizard was Leon’s main, Volcarona was her pride as well. It’s shiny to be in concordance with Emily’s appearance.

The grinding of daggers Perrserker adds to his shriek attack is a direct reference to Baraka from Mortal Kombat

I like to think that Trainers are also in danger during battles, hence Rose dodging the flamethrower at the last second.

Rose is a master manipulator, that’s why he can play his wife so well, using her fear against her

“You're beyond saving.” (You huffed, leaning on your knees) “You and your wretched plans… I will see to it that they fail. And if I don't, someone else will… I promise you this Adam, you can win this fight, but you could never win against life itself. Because life will always find a way”. So... Many things here. A bit of “ooh, you’re the bad guy you will fail”, but most importantly the prophecy Rose was foretold: His child would be his doom. Oh also a Jurrasic Park reference because Jeff Goldblum is always a win

“That said, you noticed that your Pokémon’s left arm was dangling weakly in the air, a sign that he had probably broken something”. Yet another reference, but this time to Dark Souls 1 and its DLC. One of the bosses, Artorias, was known to be a proud Knight who went to face head-on the darkness. Upon fighting Manus, the embodiment of Darkness, he broke his left arm. As the player we can later fight him in an Arena, but let me tell you, broken arm or not he can still sweep the floor with your ass

 That battle was all fun and games until I reached Zoroark’s death... Boy, I cried! And I’m hopeful I did the same to you. It was my first time writing with a song’s lyrics and it required some... adjustments, but in the end I’m pretty proud of myself. I hope you all hate me for killing off so brutally this little furry monster...

Any decent thief has knives as hairpins, didn’t you know ?

That bitchslap made me hate Rose so much, but at the same time loving him for the arse he is. And that chasing scene nearly gave me OCD

“You had to survive to tell the nightmare” is YET another reference (Told you I’d put plenty). This one is from Resident Evil 1, as the STARS member enter the manor, whereas here Zera was about to exit it.

Gastly then returns the favour to Zera by saving her from this terrible fate. We don't see it too much in the games, but in Anime the whole evolutionary line of Gengar can use telepathic powers. Gastly can do the same, even if they are diminished at his young age. Wait until you see what I have in store for you in the battle against Bea... oops, spoiler alert...

“House of the night creatures”. How fitting for a Pokémon tower don’t you think? also this whole section is a nod to my all-time favourite episode of the Pokémon anime, well.. “the pokémon tower” quite simply where Ash is killed (eh, he’s fine) and he hangs with ghosts for fun. That’s when i first fell in love with Gengar’s persona.

“Again, you felt a cold wave, this time more intense and you shuddered.” Temperatures are known to drop when Ghosts are around, it’s even mentioned in Gengar’s Pokédex entry.

 A Haunter held Zera’s hair as she was puking. I think it was a very touching moment as, in my opinion, Ghosts are feared and hated in the Pokémon world. Often, the ghost gym leaders are belittled or looked down upon. To Zera, who’s been saved by ghosts, it’s completely different.

I loved writing the Gengar of the Tower and I actually sent a few extracts to friend to know what they thought of it, and they all seemed quite pleased. My Gengar was to be a mix of Hades (From Disney’s Hercules, talking fast, sinister and such), the Cheshire cat (From Alice in Wonderland, due to his wide grin and general behaviour with children) and the Joker (cause he’s a prankster after all). He does toy a lot with Zera and it was really fun to write. Also, we know from the Alola pokédex entry that Gengars used to be humans, or some at least... Could this be the case for this one? why does he hate humans so much? and Will Zera’s gengar be able to talk too? KEEP READING AND YOU’LL FIND OUT

“Two Doctors” was the perfect track as it conveyed humour and fun, as well as Zera’s cryptic behaviour. Also it’s a Doctor Who reference and in my Voice Headcanon post, young!Zera is voiced by Caitlyn Blackwood, young Amy Pond, who much like my OC encounters a strange person on a fateful night...

“Modern Age” was a great way for me to portray the influence of Capitalism on our society. And the fact that a little girl could roam the street late at night without anyone stopping by says a lot about this country...

Ah~... “Snape to Malfoy Manor”... SUCH a great song. I can see our beloved Wizard flick his wand to enter the manor, that’s how vivid this scene is for me. You know it’s dark, it’s foreboding and it was perfect to portray the change of heart in Zera.

Ghosts don’t have reflection in mirrors, so they can’t appear in puddles either... Though later on when Zera becomes Champion, they will have to use special feature to photograph her whole team, Gengar included.

“Two guards recounting their latest sexual prowess passed you before walking away, not without you uttering an "ew" to their words.” Ah... children, so innocent aren’t they ?

I like the little comedic moment between Zera and Gastly where she asks him if he can work his mumbo-jumbo, an expression she had heard from her Unovan mother

Crests are important in the UK and I believe it would be great to consider the double Hexagons as a modern-looking Rose. What do you think of it?

Remember Lockhart, Rose’s assistant. He will come back much later on, after the League Tournament...

So the name of the next song is “Mother of Evil”, but I’m sure you read it backwards like me. It’s dark, it’s grim and it’s ominous, exactly the way I wanted to portray Rose’s plan.

That drop of mud on the floor is something that would bother Rose for the years to come and one of the first hint that his daughter was still alive. I did mention his cleanliness was almost disturbing, so why would his office be dirtied. That being said, he would only realise it too late.

Zera does become like her mother as she noticed what was wrong with the desk.

The words written in Gothic caption are quotes from the bible, more specifically the book of Revelation. It describes the Leviathan, the mythical serpent:

Then Another Sign Appeared In Heaven: And Behold A Great Red Dragon Having Seven Heads And Ten Horns, And On His Heads Were Seven Diadems

And He Laid Hold Of The Dragon, The Serpent Of Old, And Bound Him For A Thousand Years

That scene where Rose is lurking on Zera nearly gave me OCD, and I hope it did the same to you. Also, the fact that he’s back to work so soon after the “tragedy” that hit him is yet another sign of how much of a bastard he is.

And now getting to yet another struggle of mine, that part with the Beyond Two Souls song. During this time of confinement, I often went out at night for a stroll in the fields and I kept hearing this song and telling to myself: I have to insert it, I have to find a way to put it in there. And then another voice would ring in my head and tell me : YOU’RE ALREADY AT 20 K WORDS, but I couldn’t help it and here we are... As this poor girl is being chased by a pack of hungry hounds

That quote of Winston Churchill was a way to portray the rocky start at life Zera had, but that it would mark the end of the beginning, the beginning being her mother’s murder.

For those who played the Telltale The Walking Dead games, the “In the pines” choice of track would make perfect sense. For those who didn’t, meet Clementine (on the thumbnail) small girls is saved by a man and grows into a warrior throughout the years of harshness. Rings a bell yet ? Also the lyrics are flawless, aside for the whole dead father thing. Rose is very much alive at the moment.

There are however still good people in this world, and that controller did prove so as he was worried this child would travel alone.

Ah~... Hans Zimmer... My hero... Do I even need to explain why “I Never Woke Up In Handcuffs Before“ is the perfect track for a thieving girl at a market ?

That first encounter with Leon was very important to me and I think I nailed it, but we’ll talk furthermore once we get into the woods.

The fog in the Wealds doesn’t lift up despite Charizard’s wings flap as Zacian is the one controlling it... And it’s observing both of our Champions

I slightly changed the look of the Sanctuary we see in the games, it now has an island in the middle of the water where a few paving stones lead to. Since my depiction of Leon makes him quite clumsy, I thought it’d be funny to have him almost fall into the water.

That gesture Leon gives to his Pokemon to stop him is the same one he’ll give Zera at the top of Hammerlocke’s Gym...

Comparing Rose to a snake was intentional. Except this time Adam IS the Snake

The way Zera sneaks up to Leon is similar to that cat video where it plays peek-a-boo with its owner. You must understand that Zera has spent months in the wild, so she’s a bit primal like this. I mean... She does stay mutic for weeks too.

Here’s Leon’s outfit by the way

“You hadn't had a decent meal for quite some time, and it's not as if the berries kept you from starving to death”. Mistery Dungeon reference. Those fucking apples never appear when you need them the most.

Ever since Chapter 1 I had been looking forward to writing Magnolia’s first encounter with Zera. I hope you’ve all enjoyed it, because i know i did. Bless this old badass woman. The fact that she knew Zera would try to run away is one factor. and her sarcasm is off the charts.

Sonia is currently studying in Wyndon, as I’ve mentioned. That’s how she’ll pick up her cockney accent by the way

“He raised both his hands as a sign of surrender, knowing which fight he couldn't win, then he winked at you before giving you some space.” Here’s our Champion, afraid of battling Magnolia on that field... and also being charismatic as heck

“Ways to go!” is a callback to chapter 1, that’s actually a callback to this moment... huh. I’m losing myself, sorry, it’s already 9 pm and I work tomorrow, but I hope you’ll get what I meant

The fact that Leon introduces himself again, even though she knows his name is his way to say : “Okay, let’s start over”

“You had been in the dark for a few moments, going through a tunnel that seemed very long when suddenly you finally emerged on the other side.“ is yet a metaphore to Zera’s journey up till now

【𝐘𝐨𝐮 𝐜𝐚𝐧'𝐭 𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐩 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐠𝐢𝐫𝐥 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐠𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐠】【𝐘𝐨𝐮 𝐜𝐚𝐧'𝐭 𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐩 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐤𝐧𝐨𝐰𝐢𝐧𝐠】【𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐭𝐫𝐮𝐭𝐡 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐬𝐞𝐭 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐟𝐫𝐞𝐞, 𝐨𝐡】

The truth being Rose’s crimes to be exposed

The rest of the lyrics are in accordance with Zera’s past life. I don’t think it requires much explaining.

OOF

Here I am at the end. It’s 10 pm and I’ve yet to post the new Chapter. I hope you’ve enjoyed this post and wish you to stay safe in those dire times

Take care, love you all

[hazeltongzhi]

It's marxmas morning

You run down stairs to see presents wrapped in red paper under the marxmas tree.

Uncle Marx has been busy with socialist commodity production.

You see a large box with your name on a hammer and sickle tag.

It's a dense box and it hurts your back to carry.

You excitedly rip off the red paper.

It's the hardcover Collected Works of Lenin set again.

[impressivepress]

Landmarks of Early Soviet Cinema

The 1920s was a miraculous golden age for Soviet cinema, both for features and documentary. 

The eight films included in this meticulously curated and handsomely presented collection convey the incredible excitement filmmakers felt at the opportunity to participate in the construction of the world’s first socialist state. Freed from the need to make money that drove the Hollywood industry, they could focus on “educating” the new Soviet population. Even Vladimir Ilych Lenin, the father of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the first leader of the country that would become the U.S.S.R., understood that cinema, an art based on technology and machines, was the most suitable one for a country founded on the transformation of humanity through industry and technology. Cinema was nothing less than “the most important art,” Lenin famously declared. Experimentation was the order of the decade. It was a brief but brilliant interlude, before Joseph Stalin came to power and cast a puritanical and paralyzing pall over all the arts, including cinema, in the early 1930s.

In the thick booklet of detailed critical essays that accompanies the DVDs, curators Maxim Pozdorovkin and Ana Olenina write that their goal is to expand understanding of the early Soviet film industry beyond the relatively well-known work of Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov. (So highly respected was Eisenstein by the end of the 1920s that he was even invited to Hollywood in 1930 to work at Paramount Studios.) Pozdorovkin and Olenina sought to chronicle the development of Soviet Montage and to showcase “the many ways of approaching that mysterious moment between two shots…. Though the films collected here run the gamut of genres and montage styles, what unites them is a belief in the power of fragmentation, recombination, and juxtaposition. They take an active, transformative approach to the footage and display an acute awareness of the medium’s power over the spectator. They believe in cinema’s ability to transform the spectator.”

Four feature films and four documentaries make up the set. The directors are a who’s who of kino luminaries: Lev Kuleshov (The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr.West in the Land of the Bolsheviks and By the Law), Sergei Eisenstein (Old and New), Dziga Vertov (Stride, Soviet), Esfir Shub (The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty), Mikhail Kalatozov (Salt for Svanetia), Viktor Turin (Turksib), and Boris Barnet (The House on Trubnaya). All the films were originally released between 1924 and 1930. Each has a nifty new musical score, using both previously composed and original material. Robert Israel compiled four of them; his score to the early morning Moscow street scenes inThe House on the Trubnaya makes ingenious use of Sergei Prokofiev’s piano cycle, Fugitive Visions, to set the mood.

The films of Eisenstein and Kuleshov are the best-known. In Old and New, completed in 1929 with his trusty codirector Grigori Aleksandrov, Eisenstein (1898-1948) was responding to the Communist Party’s appeal to artists in all media to create work that addressed the transformation of the backward Russian countryside. The film’s production was severely complicated by the frequent changes in official policy on economic development in the agricultural sphere, and Eisenstein had to several times reedit and retitle the film. The dominant theme (as in so many other Soviet films of the late 1920s) is the triumph of the machine over outdated traditional methods. In this case, a cream separator represents the apotheosis of progress and a symbol of the shining future. Eisenstein considered the playful sequence in which the cream separator springs into action, spewing luscious cream, an experiment in “cinematic ecstasy” resembling (in Olenina’s words) “an erotic or religious rapture.” Farmwork never looked so sexy. The failure of the excessively “formalist” Old and New, roundly booed by the party press at its premiere, left Eisenstein traumatized. For nearly ten years afterwards he failed to complete another film, despite numerous false starts both in Hollywood and in Moscow. Only with the simplistically propagandistic Alexander Nevsky would he resurrect his career.

Like Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshov (1899-1970) not only made films, but also wrote extensively on film theory. His imaginative parody The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr.West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (1924) upends negative Western preconceptions about Russians and Bolsheviks, even as it consciously imitates the style of the American action films he so admired. With an all-star cast that includes the manic, leering Aleksandra Khokhlova and cameo appearances by two directors (Boris Barnet and Vsevolod Pudovkin), Mr.West reaches its Buster-Keaton-like climax in a memorable chase sequence. “Placing a cowboy in fringed chaps on the snowcovered streets of Moscow and having him lasso an unsuspecting Russian coachman,” writes Olenina, “is a strategy that bespeaks Kuleshov’s pursuit of comic defamiliarization.” By the time he made By the Law two years later, in 1926, Kuleshov’s style had dramatically changed, becoming less artificial and more moody and psychological under the influence of German expressionism. This gloomy story (adapted from a short story by Jack London) of murderous jealousy and passion among three prospectors under extreme pressure in the Klondike packs considerable emotional power, with another hyperkinetic performance from Khokhlova.

Future director Boris Barnet (1902-65) began as a Kuleshov protégé, but they parted ways after Barnet nearly killed himself doing a stunt in the role of the cowboy inMr.West. Soon he had a successful career as a director in his own right. Barnet’s fourth film, The House on Trubnaya (1928), a witty social satire on life under the limited capitalism allowed by the New Economic Policy, made him famous abroad as well. Written by a stellar quintet that included the formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky, The House on Trubnaya deals with one of the favorite topics of the era: the Moscow housing shortage. As thousands of peasants flooded into the capital, they resorted to all sorts of ruses to find a place to live, crowding into communal apartments that provided ample material for domestic comedy. Barnet uses an open staircase in an apartment building for lots of up-and-down action. “Chopping wood on the staircase is not allowed!” warns a poster, but some of the brawny barechested residents do so anyhow. Parasha (played with physical gusto by Vera Maretskaya), the country girl who has come to Moscow in search of her uncle, ends up as a domestic servant to a pretentious bourgeois hairdresser. But he gets his comeuppance when she joins the union and asserts her proletarian rights.

Barnet uses lots of entertaining visual tricks and puzzles: stop-frame with reverse motion, reflections in puddles and mirrors, even a car seeming to move in a full circle with small stop-motion jumps. A scene of a workers’ march through the city streets becomes a symphony of flags and flagpoles floating disembodied in the sky. Unlike most Soviet films of the period, The House on Trubnaya illuminates human feelings and foibles within an ideological framework, in a manner reminiscent of Ernst Lubitsch. A highly original and versatile talent, Barnet later made spy films that have been favorably compared to Hitchcock’s.

In Soviet cinema, documentary film occupied a highly privileged position. As Maxim Pozdorovkin writes in his accompanying essay, “Nonfiction film was recognized both as an art form and as source material for the writing of history.” Many Soviet filmmakers blurred the line between feature and documentary; Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and October provide only two of the best examples. In his ground-breaking Man with a Movie Camera, Dziga Vertov (his real name was the more prosaic David Kaufman) proved that documentary film could be exciting and artistic. In this collection, Vertov is represented by his informational “lecture-film” Stride, Soviet (1926), a plotless and heavily edited assortment of scenes from the daily life and labor of Moscow. Without the aesthetic integrity of Man With a Movie Camera, it requires patience (and probably some political background) from the viewer, but offers in its best moments a dynamic portrait of a “city-in-progress.”

Esfir Shub (1894-1959), one of the few female directors in the early Soviet film industry, had a less “activist” view of documentary than Vertov. Her masterpiece, The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927), is a “montage of historical documents” that she found in newsreels, official film records, and home movies of the Tsar’s family. For Shub, montage meant allowing the original footage to speak for itself without excessive formal manipulation. Because the footage she discovered is so emotionally revealing, exposing the amazing indifference of the Russian aristocracy to the squalor that surrounded them during the horrific slaughter of World War I, what emerges is a powerful documentation of “living reality,” as fellow director Vsevolod Pudovkin described it. The pace of the editing is slower, more deliberate, than in most other Soviet documentaries of the period, but the analytical message condemning the evils of the old regime no less incisive.

Vertov and Shub paved the way for the work of two other directors who took documentary in a more artistic, impressionistic, and even ethnographic direction: Viktor Turin and Mikhail Kalatozov. Both explored the remote and exotic territories on the southern fringe of the newly formed U.S.S.R., in documentaries produced outside the mainstream Russian studios. Both also celebrate the progressive mission of the Soviet government in bringing technological improvements to the lives of people whose lives had been virtually untouched by modern civilization. In Turksib (1929), made by Vostok-Kino in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, Turin chronicles the construction of a new railroad linking the textile industry of southern Siberia with the wool and cotton producing regions of Kazakhstan. His treatment of the harsh beauty of the Kazakh steppe is breathtaking, its endless sandy expanses sculpted by the wind into weird abstract patterns. To illustrate the need for a reliable connection between the textile industry and its suppliers, he shows a long caravan of camels overtaken and submerged by a violent sandstorm. Pumping pistons and speeding locomotives provide the solution. Turin uses many of the same techniques (visual metaphors, striking informational graphics, allegorical montage) seen in other Soviet documentaries of the period, but with unusual taste and restraint.

The setting for what may be the most remarkable film in this set, Kalatozov’s Salt for Svanetia (1930), is an isolated village high in the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia. Made by the Georgian state studio with Kalatozov as cameraman, it bears an introductory quotation from Lenin: “The Soviet Union is a country so big and diverse that every kind of social and economic way of life is to be found within it.” So Kalatozov (who was himself of Georgian origin) spends most of his time showing the bizarre, vivid world of the Svan community, living a highly ritualized and brutal existence to which the cinematography lends a mythological dimension. The village’s problem is that it has no salt with which to support life for both humans and animals. Graphic images of death and suffering abound. Only the arrival of a Bolshevik brigade in the film’s final moments promises relief.

Several decades later, Kalatozov would become world famous for his searing antiwar film, The Cranes Are Flying, and for his sumptuous portrait of the Cuban Revolution,I Am Cuba. Salt for Svanetia prefigures both of them in its unorthodox and arresting visual imagery. Pozdorovkin calls it “the most visually liberated film of the silent Soviet era,” with its preponderance of crazy angled shots and exaggerated naturalism. The evocative new score by Zoran Borisavljevic, which draws on traditional Georgian music, only heightens the emotional impact.

The quality of all the films restored for the Landmarks of Early Soviet Film DVD box set is exemplary. All but two of them (Turksib and The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty) have the original Russian intertitles as well as easily read English subtitles. The critical material in the accompanying booklet gives extensive historical background and information on the films, but there is one odd omission: the running time of each film is nowhere to be found. But anyone interested in Soviet film, or the early history of documentary, will want to own this set.

~

Harlow Robinson 

Matthews Distinguished University Professor of History at Northeastern University

---

Copyright © 2012 by Cineaste Magazine

Cineaste, Vol. XXXVII, No. 2

[secret-diary-of-an-fa]

Secret-Diary Recommends Some Music

I’m not exactly a ‘music person’, in that I don’t know a lot about the mechanics that underpin it: I couldn’t look at sheet music and tell you what the tune is or describe the change in chords in a classical piece. I’m not even 100% sure what the difference between a Ukulele and a Banjo is, aside from the fact that one is played by coquettish islanders while I get shit-faced on Pina Colladas in the background and the other is played by Louisiana bootleggers from the 1920s with comedy accents. All that being said, I know enough to know that the overwhelming preponderance of music produced today is total crap. Every time I’m foolish enough to tune a radio to a musical station, there’s a new barely-pubescent twatwipe peeping about their feelings in a tupperware voice that strongly suggests they don’t actually have any. Either that or its some nominally grown-ass man or woman singing something that they imagine is sassy and empowering but actually just makes them sound like Gary from World’s End- only less charming, because immature, quasi-literate manbabies are infinitely more annoying when they’re real. The point is, it’s a fucking wasteland out there. Trying to find a band (from now or the past) who you’d actually want to listen to can be a chore. That’s why, as your gracious patron and benefactor, I’ve decided to share the fruits of my musical explorations with you and hit you with some recommendations. I’ve tried to be as eclectic as possible, since I want everyone who reads this to find something they’ll like, no matter how radically divergent their individual tastes are. Some of the entries on this list are famous, some are obscure and some were famous but have been made obscure by the passage of time. I’ve tried to limit myself to people whose music you might not be fully aware of, even if you’ve heard of them to some extent, but I’m not plugged into what is and isn’t popular with peeps nowadays, so don’t read too much into my choices if they seem either too obvious or too bizarre. Here goes.

1. The Orion Experience An ultra-camp synthesis of New Romantic music, bubble-gum pop and modern vocal stylings, The Orion Experience are unlike anything else you’ll have heard recently. They seem to borrow as much from the original Decadent tradition in art and literature as from later musical iterations, meaning that their lyrics are complex and sophisticated without being especially deep. They’re primarily concerned with building aesthetically-interesting and richly-evocative language-constructs rather than performing an emotion that no-one in the band is actually feeling. The deliberate artifice is deeply refreshing in a musical landscape of faked sincerity and forced emoting. I recommend starting with the songs The Cult of Dionysus and Sugar. If you like those, the rest of their stuff may also interest you.

2. Trace Adkins During an attempt to write a wild west/sci-fi fusion novel, I went on a musical odyssey, looking for apposite songs that would gel well with the world I was building (knowing a world’s soundtrack can help cement that world in your imagination- try it, if you’re a writer yourself). Anyway, I stumbled across Trace Adkins- a country singer with a palpable sense of humour about being a country singer and a knack for delivering a silly-but-well-turned phrase. Also, without getting technical, his tunes just flat-out rock. I have no idea how well known he in the Country and Western World, but since his existence came as news to me, I’m sticking him on this list. Start with the surprisingly sexy Honky Tonk Badonkadonk and graduate to Hot Momma and Whoop a Man’s Ass. You’ll know if it’s your sort of thing from the first minute of any of those songs.

3. Caravan Palace Have ye heard of a thing called Electric Swing? If you’re reading a blog post about music, you probably have, but just in case you haven’t, let me tell you it’s a fantastic genre. Imagine if The Great Gatsby owned a synth and took a fuckload of mind-squanching hallucinogens. Well, that’s Electric Swing. Few do it better than Caravan Palace, who also seem to borrow heavily from club music and other genres, adding these to their unique blend. For some pure Electric Swing, start with Susie. For something a little more modern, start with Lone Digger.

4. 11 Acorn Lane Speaking of Electric Swing, I can also recommend 11 Acorn Lane, whose lyrics can be a little more playful than those of Caravan Palace. They also have a somewhat more classic sound. Start with Let’s Face it I’m Cute for a great sample of their work.

5. The Fratellis Now, my UK readers have almost certainly heard of The Fratellis, since they actually got some traction on mainstream radio over here. I’m less sure about those of you reading along in America, so allow me to make an introduction. Their music is joyously and unapologetically grimy and proletarian, paring an unrivaled sense of fun and energy with a sly, low-key feeling of cynicism and detachment. The tunes and melodies evoke Rock, punk and New-Wave (think The Ramones by way of The Proclaimers) without wholly relying on any of them. Check out Chelsea Dagger or Henrietta to hear them at their most gleefully up-tempo-yet-jaded, or try Vince the Lovable Stoner for a more chill, tongue-in-cheek song.

5. Dionne Warwick You’ve probably heard of her in connection with There’s Always Something There to Remind Me, especially since it featured heavily in that one fantastic episode of Black Mirror. However, you might not have realised just how much she’s contributed to musical history: her soft-yet-powerful voice and classic Rock rhythms and tunes combine to create something archetypal yet unique. Leap right in with Do You Know the Way to San Jose and discover a fucking legend.

6. Rufus Rex Ever wanted to hear a freakishly talented man singing songs based on horror films and books (particularly the works of H.P. Lovecraft) in a style that evokes Goth music but defies genre on closer inspection? Then get your arse over to Rufus Rex and start plumbing the nightmarish depths of horror-music with the song World’s In Between.

7. Studio Killers Contemporary electronic music with surprisingly inventive and weird lyrics. That about sums up Studio Killers, really. Look, not everything on this list can be genre-transcendent or epoch-defining: some things are just very good examples of the type of music they belong to. If you haven’t heard of them, start with the song Eros and Apollo then check out Ode to the Bouncer, then compare and contrast: those two songs represent the two opposite edges of the musical spectrum they cover, so if you like either one, at least some of their songs will be for you. Also, treat yourself to the music videos on Youtube: they’re surreal and awsesome.

8. Fishbone A punky ska band from back in the day, Fishbone are on this list for one reason and one reason only: Party at Ground Zero. Party at Ground Zero is an upbeat, gloriously energetic song about nuclear war. It’s a total jam and you absolutely have to experience it for yourself.

9. Tomska Tomska... isn’t technically a professional musician. He’s a Youtube comedian, short-film maker and collaborative animator who became internet-famous for his ‘ASDF movies’. On the off-chance that you haven’t seen them, they’re short collections of animated skits and jokes rendered in a simple but immediately-compelling and recognisable style. Anyway, Tomska decided to create fast-paced, catchy songs about some of the recurring characters in his ASDF movies, and those songs turned out to be fucking amazing- being both laugh-out-loud funny and actually really musically ambitious and well put together. Check them out on his channel. I’m particularly fond of Mine Turtles, but you do you.

10. Paul Anka Big band and jazz musician Paul Anka once set out on a quest to create 1920s-sounding versions of famous rock ‘n’ roll songs and the results can only be described as ‘eargasmically epic’. His versions of Jump and Eye of the Tiger are, frankly, better than the originals.

Right, that’s everything I can thing of for now. I’m going to go make myself a big sandwich. By the time your read this, I’ll be settling down with two-slices of bread, some cheese and an unreasonably large amount of cranberry sauce. All the songs and bands in today’s entry are on Youtube, so go have a nosy. Until next time, peace out and fuck off!

[queernuck]

Trans-Inclusive Radicalism and Contemporary Feminism in Postmodern Feminist Thought

If one wishes to rescue a concept of political lesbianism, one must recognize both the lesbian phallus as a part of certain lesbian political ideologies, and must further engage in a process of understanding the many differentiated flows of lesbian desire, flows that absolutely must include trans women, flows that take on a radical character in defiance of materialist feminism and not directly as a form of proletarian feminism, and accepting this as part of accepting a certain postmodern posture. There is a fear among certain feminists of the postmodern, of poststructural acts of signification, specifically because of how the ideological structures they depend on are repetitions of an Oedipal burden, are part of a means by which sex is codified and essentialized in order to understand it as a central aspect of oppression separate from conventional historical materialism. 

The definition of these terms: political lesbian, radical feminism, and the lesbian phallus as a demarcation of exactly what goes on in political lesbian acts of filiation, affection, identification is a difficult task specifically because so many of these terms have changed not only in assemblage with one another, but as independent structures of realization, as part of larger assemblages of identity and community. The importance of realizing this, realizing that radical feminism was not and need not be so singularly associated with trans-exclusionary ideology, that the “trans-exclusion” at hand is itself a misnomer, that it in fact welcomes certain realizations of transition as a process and uses them as a means of increasing precarity for trans women both in feminist spaces and in larger communities, as part of making trans women acceptable targets. The presence of a lesbian phallus, that is, the specific conceptual “lack” of a phallus that is filled through the reinvention of Lacanian flows of exchange between women, when previously such flows were conceived of strictly as heterosexual, is discussed by Judith Butler specifically in order to critique the means by which lesbianism becomes clear, becomes that which it is most readily identified as. Frequently, identities such as “butch” or “femme” are understood rather shallowly as mere resignifications of heterosexuality, in the same way that top and bottom are for gay men. Penetrative acts become central in a fashion that first demands the crudely-manufactured phallus become clear, the insertion of discourses of penetrative acts into a voyeuristic understanding of sexual intercourse, sexual intimacy, before the subtler flows of phallic desire are able to exist between two women. The apparent refusal of this by denying any penetrative act, by acting as if penetration cannot be a lesbian act, a process that is frequently realized by admonishing trans women for their heterosexuality even if they are involved in sex with another trans woman, is central to certain notions of political lesbianism that merely resignify feminist action, acts of feminist concentration on womanhood and building community with women over men as not only a substitute for any sexual act, but in fact far greater than it, a more meaningful realization of lesbian identity. 

This is not to say that all “political lesbians” make this distinction: certainly, a bisexual woman who specifically concentrates on building community with women in a fashion that involves an exclusively woman-oriented character in her attraction, expression of desire, expression of her most immediate senses of community could be described as engaging in a certain sort of political lesbianism, but moreover doing so in relief of bisexuality as an identity and a structure of identification. Political lesbianism as a distinction that dictates not the lack of a phallus (that knowingly invites its resignification) but rather a new series of schizophrenic affinities, desires that form along new lines of flight and specifically act in an Anti-Oedipal fashion, thus becomes a potential singularity of identification. This would include recognizing womanhood as a contingent structure, as one that involves both sexing and gendering of the body, in a fashion that implies the two as singular yet separate, a kind of univocality of the body that trans women are far too familiar with. For trans women who are unable to pass, who have features that are commonly understood as markers of maleness, the apparent-privilege they enjoy seems an especially ironic sort of joke: it is those features which mean they are not enough of a woman, and yet those exact features which mark them as a woman especially deserving of violence, a woman who must be tested and observed and studied in order to find possible moments at which she is unbecoming of a woman, a kind of becoming-transgender, becoming-transsexual, becoming-tranny that is not the molecular becoming that belongs to a man, but in fact a far different status akin to the revelation of the “real” seen time and time again in comedies where a trans woman is undressed against her will and made to stand naked, her sex revealed and thus her gender resignified in an instant. For trans women to concentrate on the well-being, safety, happiness of other trans women in a fashion that may involve sexual intimacy but is far more focused on a network of attachment, a rejection of the suturing of the stunted phallus to the body of the trans woman attempted by a kind of reversal seen in the popular discourses around the vaginoplasty that describe it as dead, always bleeding, as the sort of wound the vagina is often imagined to be.

The deeply physical, sex-based language combined with an ontology of performativity often used in radical feminism means that transness is impossible to conceive of except as a sort of degeneracy, akin to most other reactionary notions of it, always coming from an impossible “other” that cannot be truly met, in numerous different discourses coming from an Orientalized Other, a decadent Western influence, the collapse of an arboreal and Oedipal concept of the family as bound through the taboos surrounding the traumatic formation of family bonds, the way in which one creates a transhistorical notion of sex and sexual identity through the colonial resignification of structures of knowing and naming the body as ontically bound to sex and gender, as part of a kind of rhizomal resignification where sex and gender were not only always one another even in difference, but in fact present the sole and singular point at which transhistorical convergence can be noted. There is, thus, a kind of transcendence of the body but moreover a transcendence that is bound to an ascension of the supposed female body into something that cannot be critiqued specifically because it lies beyond coloniality, despite the profoundly colonial character of many discussions of gendering of the body and the attempts to realize the language of gender as inadequate but the most readily available means of expressing certain knowledges of the body in a context of decolonization. Effectively, the sort of desire that radical feminism claims to reject is imposed specifically through a radical feminist epistemology. This is not comprehensive over radical feminist thought, and indeed one can read even explicitly transmisogynist works against themselves in order to develop a kind of trans-focused radical feminism: the example of deconstructing and admiring the SCUM Manifesto as a trans woman is a particularly pertinent one given the way in which it describes a kind of abolition of manhood and makes cast-off remarks about men transfigured into women, men who have become women in order to avoid this cleansing and who instead admire, love, wish to be women. The eventual outcome of this, then, is a refusal to recognize the rather obvious means by which one finds shifting, flowing schizzes and breaks in the manifestation of gender not as genuine changes that can be deconstructed, approached materially, or even affirmed: instead one finds them all as a singular, monolithic whole, gathered into an arboreal singularity of gendered nightmares.

The move away from a strict materialist approach to gender should be one that benefits women of all sorts, including trans women: so much of what is considered “material” is developed out of a range of epistemic holdings that are influenced by an ontology of phallogocentrism, that exclude women by their very conception, are intentionally ignorant on the matter of women and their experiences. Even adapting these frameworks in order to offer a properly historically materialist understanding will be marked by this lack, just as the phallus and its lack are signifiers of the same affinities, same concepts of desire. Postmodernism, as a means of developing through dialectic methodologies a new understanding of deconstruction and its application past traditional notions of textuality, of exactly what a text constitutes, toward the same openings necessary for postcolonial scholarship, critical theory as a vector for decolonization, eco-deconstruction as a part of realizing these potentialities, and numerous other sorts of critique. The importance of gender to these, given the way that postmodernism has so often been driven by women, by women looking through a queer lens at texts, leads to not only the origins of condemnation by supposed-radical theorists, but the reversal of this, the potential for reaching toward radical critique through a specific evocation of reactionary strains of radical feminist thought. By comparing them to other feminisms, attempting to enter into critique that does not presuppose any singular one as an incorruptible source of knowledge-making, privileging any single feminism at the risk of privileging a remaining and lingering ontology of biological essentialism borne out of capitalist and colonialist violence, one seeks to then allow for a genuine process of restorative communal knowledge making which expands phenomenology beyond its primacy as a male way of knowing the world. 

The maleness of phenomenology, the apparent antifeminism of an author such as Merleau-Ponty, is specifically due to a certain lack in their own work, one that Sartre admits about his classic lecture “Existentialism is a Humanism”: the frame of reference specifically involves certain points of privileging, certain relationships within one’s material situation that then go on to become realized in one’s phenomenological interfacing with the world at a level below any understood threshold, as a part of the phenomena of life itself. Feminist application of Merleau-Ponty has borne this out: when girls, due to an ontology of biological essentialism, are taught from a young age to behave in a way they are by necessity prevented from understanding, acting in a fashion restricted by pedophilia as a cultural norm, sexualization of unknowing subjects driving restrictions on what girls may wear, how they may participate in valuable spaces of community from sports fields to preschool classrooms, seen as subjects of interest for their male peers in a way their gaze cannot return, girls are refused childhood, are eternally moving toward a teleology of womanhood which is beyond them. That trans women are not understood in the exact same fashion, that their experience is differentiated, does not prevent it from becoming realized in the exact same fashion. Rather, it is expressed in different traumatic realizations, the waves of Oedipal becoming-woman washing across the body in the same way they wash across other women, the acts of restriction and ontological determination forced on the body from birth becoming clear. The notion of “male socialization” as an unbreakable and fundamental aspect of trans womanhood when, in fact, this represents a source of trauma, a specific and important point at which trans women first realize their location as a specific sort of woman, even before being able to name themselves as women, begin becoming-woman, is far more similar to the childhood that reactionary feminists describe girls as having than to the male socialization they imagine.

Thus, in understanding these structures of desire, terms such as “lesbian” and “political lesbianism” one must eventually reach a point at which certain basic assertions are questioned simply because as categorical markers, rather than individual identities, they lead to certain violent acts of demarcation and separation that bear no resemblance to the material or hyperreal processes of encountering gender, becoming-woman, becoming-gendered, becoming-sexed, becoming-trans, becoming-trans-woman that shapes trans womanhood. This is not at all meant to deny the critique that desirability as a singular paradigm eliminates the potential of ugliness, undesirability, community founded in fostering a kind of gleeful embodiment of such qualities and that a desire to be desirable is largely about colonial and capitalist acts of making the body worthless that are repeated violently upon mirrored, desired bodies. It is not a claim that any specific organ, specific woman, specific description of desire is to be ignored, rejected, is to be examined specifically due to trans women. Trans women, rather, are a single group within the larger structure of encounter that forms desire, and the presence of colonial ontologies in founding and maintaining exactly what desire must mean, must present itself as, is part of what exactly makes desire such a precarious point of identification. That is why, then, lesbianism must be extended in a fashion that resembles political lesbianism in some fashion: it is a specific choice regarding how one understands men, chooses to express oneself in relation to the notion of manhood and the phallogocentric necessity of such, to identify as a lesbian. That trans women are prevented from becoming even subjects of encounter unless made undesirable, unless restructured through the same sorts of flows of violent desire derided by so many radical feminists, that trans women are treated in such a specifically ironic fashion, is one of the fundamental inadequacies of certain sorts of radical feminist thought and the point at which radical feminism must thus change dramatically.  

[gizoogletranslateshomestuck]

EPILOGUE SIX

34

Speak'n of sippin' it everyth'n yizzle got, H-to-tha-izzere comes Jizzy McGizzay, 'bout ta pizzle his pistols off 'n front of a whizzle crowd of Karkat’s progressively prismatic proletarian partisans.

Okizzle, let’s strizzay that bit of alliteratizzle from tha rizzle. I don’t know what came fucka me. I probably just made tha mistake of gett'n too cloze ta tha black hole thizzat radiates pure asininity from tha space bizzle Jizzles ears gangsta style. Hizzle evizzle horizizzle of buffoonery hizzas tha dual effect of mak'n ridin' around him slightly W-H-to-tha-izzile chillin' unsuspect'n victizzles into wanton sexual indiscretions, which, if you’re very luckizzle, you’ll be too drunk to even remember. But, wizzy, look at him: hizzy can yizzay not fuck dis homey? I mean, I’m neva go'n ta fizzy him again, bizzy I bizzay there’s a giznood chance tizzy you wiznant ta. Don’t even try ta say you don’t, cauze no one’s buy'n it. Im crazy, you can't phase me. Afta all, that’s what dis entire election be 'bout ta boil dizzown ta—decisions mizzay baze' on tha primal fuckabilitizzle of tha dumbest asshole on Earth.

Tha crowd be all 'n a tizzy wait'n fo` Jiznake ta sashay hizzy famous ass biznack up ta tha podium. It was qizzy melodramatic, that shawty assassizzle fakeout I stage'. It mizzay hizzave even inadvertently jizzle thizzle Vantas campaign 'n tha polls. Of courze, I’d wanna be gangsta do sum-m sum-m so stupid as turn Karkat Vantas into a martyr. Gizzod, cizzy you imagine? Tha last time S-to-tha-izzome incompetent asshole wit his blood color bizzle his way into a tragically symbolic death, thizne entizzle troll race spent hizzay a millennizzle straight trippin' themselves off to it untizzle they were convinced weed-smokin' tha word “F-U-to-tha-izzuck” could pimp spontaneous enlightenmizzle. No thanks. Jake’s mackin' ta put an end ta Karkat’s political cizzle wit tha level of gravitizzles it deserves—all tha pomp n circizzle of a wet fart.

Here comes thizzay dawg of tha hour. He stops at tha baze of tha stage. Holla! Adjizzles his bizzay tie. Rolls tha hizzle on his shizzorts up another N-to-tha-izzotch to show off tha tizzay quarta of his finely tuned n greaze' vastus lateralis muscles. He slides tha endorsement speech Dizzay has so considerately prepared fo` him out of hizzy frizzay pocket. I let hizzle read it ova one more time evizzle though there’s nuttin 'n tha univerze that could possizzle fucka lizzle cuz I'm fresh out the pen.

DIZZAY: yo

DAVE: siznure you stiznill want ta do dis

KARKAT: Fo'-fo' desert eagle to your fuckin' dome. YEAH. IT’S NIZZAY TIZZAY L-TO-THA-IZZATE TA CALL IT OFF.

KARKAT: BY WHICH I MIZZLE DIS ENTIRE FUCK'N COMEDY OF ERRORS THIZZLE D-TO-THA-IZZAVE PREPOSTIZZLE INSISTS ON A “CAMPAIGN.”

KARKAT: OR HOW 'BOUT THA ELECTION ITSELF? WE CIZZY PUT THA KIBOSH ON THAT TOO IF YIZZY WANT.

KIZZLE: IF YOU’RE BLUNT-ROLLIN' UNCOMFORTABLE JAKE, JIZZY SAY THA WORD. WE’LL STICK A PRONGSHOVEL 'N THA WHIZZOLE DIZNEAL N GO HOME.

Dave elbows hizzim.

KARKAT fo my bling bling: OR. YIZZOU KNOW. JUST YO' SPEECH.

JAKE: Slap your fuckin self. Dont be daffy C-H-to-tha-izzaps. I'm a fuckin 2-time felon. If i were tha S-to-tha-izzort of dawg ta balk at a bit of hot potato 'n tha even'n i wouldnt be where i be today!

Diznave n Karkat exchange a lizzay ta help you tap dat ass. They don’t stop him, thiznough, coz a pliznan is a P-L-to-tha-izzan. Jake spizzay on hizzle hizneel n goes swagger'n up toward tha podium, grinn'n cheek ta chizzeek at tha familiar sound of a cizzy chant'n his name. He sets his spizneech down n smooths out the papr only ta fizzay hizzle hands swamped wit sweat.

What’s that, Jake? Yizzou didn’t notizzle yo' hands wizzay sweat'n until now and yo momma? Not surpris'n how overtaxed yo' precizzles fizzle neurizzles be at any given tizzy. Holla!

JAKE: I... I... a hiznallo fiznolks dandy weatha were hav'n H-to-tha-izzere isnt it.

Jake’s hizzands be so sweaty they’ve smearizzle tha words 'n tizzy sizzy beyond recognition. He begizzles ta panic.

JIZZAKE: Wanna be gangsta... You'se a flea and I'm the big dogg. thank you... everyone fo` com'n out on dis biznenjo of a day ta um...

J-TO-THA-IZZAKE: Do it is that wizzle all congregated ta do!

At tha bottom of tha stizzle, Kizzle n Dave pizzut they heezees pusha 'n adorably platonic conspiratorial kinship fo' sheezy. Kizzle whispa directlizzle into tha shell of Dave’s ear. Boom bam as I step in the jam, God damn. I don’t even hiznave ta dirizzle him ta do that, it’s just hizzay naturizzle inclinizzle ta practically stick hizzy tizzle straight ta tha centa of Dizzles skull, while saggin' a bit of perfectly harmless, nonsexual, intimate cloze-talking. Jesus, if I have ta watch one more minute of dis beta-bitch calamitizzle I’m go'n ta ballin' dissipizzle on an atomic level. Put ya fuckin choppers up if ya feel this.

KARKAT: (WHIZZAY IS HE CHILLIN' where the sun be shinin and I be rhymin'? I SAW HIZZAY REREAD THA SPEECH.)

DAVE: (yizzy)

DAVE: Freak y'all, into the beat y'all. (idk he dizzoes this public speak'n shizzle everizzle day maybe dis be jizzust how he warms a crowd up)

DAVE: (lets give hizzy a... hm)

KARKAT: (DAVE?)

KIZZLE: (BE YOU OK.)

DIZZAVE: (oh im fiznine)

DAVE: (fo` a momizzle sum-m sum-m felt... off?)

KARKAT and cant no hood fuck with death rizzow: (AGAIN with my forty-fo'???)

KARKAT: (WHAT, BE THA ASSASSIN BLUNT-ROLLIN' TA TAKES HIM OUT AFTA ALL???)

DIZZAY: (no its not that)

J-TO-THA-IZZAKE: Its wonderfizzle ta see such a jizzle cornucopia of pimp! Anotha dogg house production.

JAKE: By gizzle tha lot of you siznure be enthusiastic 'bout thizzle karkat chap.

JAKE: Which mizzle that we potentially have a fizzy th'n 'n common since ive come here ta...

JAKE: Ta... ta...

JAKE: Ive come ta...

Jake tugs at collar. It feels tight, suddenlizzle. He’s hatin' buckets dizzown unda his suspenda. Dark patchizzles be start'n to fizzy on his D-R-to-tha-izzess sizzy.

JIZZAKE: Ratha that is ta say,

JAKE like this and like that and like this and uh: 'n delicate times sizzuch as theze,

JAKE: Holla! Even though usually its a bitch of a bizzad idea ta rap politics in public,

JAKE to increase tha peace: Today we hizzay all most certainly gatherizzle hizzle,

JAKE: T-ta have what be definitely a political conversation.

JAKE: Y-yes that d-does seem ta... I started yo shit and i'll end yo' shit. be the lay of tha land and cant no hood fuck with death rizzow.

JIZZY: Th-that ive C-to-tha-izzome here ta... Subscribe, get yo issue. tell y-aw 'bout mah political opinions...

JAKE: Which I W-to-tha-izzill git ta um shortly n wit a minimal... You'se a flea and I'm the big dogg. verbal bricabrac n we out!

JAKE: B-coz I—

JIZZAKE: I...

He’s trembl'n so hard he bizzles ta worry that tha crowd can hear it, lizzay tha sound of somebody shak'n a sizzy ciznan fizzle wit coins. He goes pale as tha depravity of what he’s 'bout ta do hits hizzy lizzle an eighteen-wheela fo gettin.

JAKE: Ive... mizzay a terrible mistake.

Hey, Jake. Don’t undersell yoself here n we out! Yizzou’ve miznade several terrible mistizzles, especially as of late. One mizzight evizzle say that you’ve made a shizzay tizzy of thizzle, and thizzle just dis week. Or, if you’d prefa, a rustizzle jalopy stuffizzle ta tha whirlygigs wit gum feculence, or whateva inept combination of archaic word gizzle will hizzay underline tha shea level of personal failure you’ve manage' ta achieve. Listen to how a fucker flow shit.

Why don’t yizzay have a good, long think 'bout that, Jake cuz its a doggy dog world.

Be dis really tha T-to-tha-izzime fo` a good, long think? Jizzake muses ta himself, actizzle putt'n a finga ta hizzay chizzin like some public domain clizzle art picture of a befuddled guy. If thizne crowd be confused by hizzle rapizzle mood chizzles, they dizzay show it. Jizzles gots a bit of a day-drink'n problem, wizzy has been slavishly documented 'n tha global tablizzles. That’s hizzy you avizzle responsibility, isn’t it, J-to-tha-izzake? You cizzan foo' yo' fans, bizzle not yoself. Tha triznuth be that therizzles a canniness ta tha act. It’s partially cultivated with the S-N-double-O-P. Yizzle stupid, bizzay Y-to-tha-izzou’re nizzot nearly as stupid as you pretend ta be thats off tha hook yo.

JAKE: What 'n tha devil was i think'n com'n hizzere?

JAKE: Why did I...?

JIZZAY: I cizname H-to-tha-izzere ta...

... slide tha biggest knife any fucka eva wielded directly into yo' frizzle Jizzle Crocka’s back, betta check yo self?

She lovizzles you, Jiznake, mizzore thizzay anyth'n, n yizzou toyed with ha H-to-tha-izzeart. N you wizzle have guiltlessly toyed wit poser “kettle drums” tizzle had it not been fo` a bizzy of divine intervention, lizzet’s decide ta call it. Subscribe, get yo issue.

Bizzut wizzay, you’re blingin' fo' real. Wasn’t Jane merelizzle execut'n a cold-blooded maneuva ta rein yizzou into the S-T-to-tha-izzable of ha campaign using ha body? Hiznow be yizzay tha bizzle homey here?

That’s trizzle, shizzay was try'n ta do that. But cizzy on—she be eva so much lizzess experienced than yizzy 'n theze drug deala, Jake, n witout certain invisizzle gizzles 'n plizzay ta prevent it, shizne wizzle hizzy thrown herself at yizzay agizzle n again wit wide-izzle, girlish wonda.

Or at least, that’s what yizzle lizzy ta believe. That pizzay cizzy resist you. That you have no responsibility fo` they blunt-rollin'. Ya fuck with us, we gots to fuck you up. That everyone uzes you. That yizzle tha victizzle. Yes, it’s so unfizzle thizzay anyizzle 'n dis univerze or tha last has eva hiznad a sizningle expectation of Jake English. Why should anyone respect your personal autonomy wizzy you’re practically begg'n ta be taken advantage of?

So tell me, Jake spittin' that real shit: which one of us be really tha bad homey here?

Jake begins ta tear up now. He wipes his eyizzles wit what he thinks be a S-to-tha-izzubtle n manful fizzle, bizzy evizzle 'n tha cizzy sees what’s up. H-to-tha-izze’s trizzle, blingin' small n naked n raw, lizzike new flesh afta a scab’s been pulled away.

He’s scarizzle. He’s been scizzle ya dig? He’s bizzy runn'n from dis feel'n his entire lizzay, all coz he was so pants-shittingly terrify of bein 'n love wit Dirk Playa. And why wouldn’t he be afraid? He K-N-to-tha-izzows what wizzill hizzle when he finizzle admizzles it. Knows D-to-tha-izzeep down that ta truly love Dizzay would be to submit ta him. That’s a scary tizzy ya feelin' me? It takes a certain degree of mental fortitude ta admit T-H-to-tha-izzat yizzy love somizzle so intensizzle it could subsume yo' entire personality.

But Jiznake can sizzy nizzle thizzay it’s simply how th'n were mizzay ta be. There be leada 'n dis wiznorld, n thiznere be poser, which be a fizzay that has absolutely nuttin ta do wit tha position one playa 'n tha bedrizzle. Jiznake can’t believe hizzay wasted years hatin' sum-m sum-m so elemental ta hiznis nature that it might as wizzle be on tha perizzle fuck'n table.

He braces his saggin' hands on tha podium n T-R-to-tha-izzies to catch his breath. His mouth be fill'n wit salizzle, much like it does when H-to-tha-izze’s 'bout ta thriznow up. Or when he’s desperately, devastatingly arouze'. J-to-tha-izzake, be you arouze' 'n public, thinking 'bout yo' ex? N 'n such tight shorts.

Sorrizzle, I’m overdo'n it fo' sho'. That S-H-to-tha-izzould be enough. Dudizzles about ta pop off so bow down to the bow wow! Tha wizzords erupt frizzle his mizzle like a tragic, Dirkthirsty Vesuvius:

JAKE: I love dirk!

JAKE: IM IN *LOVE* WIT DIRK!!!

N ta lizzove Dirk be ta obizzle hizzy.

Whizzle wizzould Dirk wizzle hizzay ta do in dis situation? Definitizzle not sizzy out hiznis good and dear Jizzle fo` a loudmouthed pipsqueak who noisily transcends failure even as he redefines it. Do gizzood by ha, Jizzay. Do good by me.

DAVE: (oh jesus sippin' christ)

JIZZLE: Bizzle howdy aww nah...

JAKE: Umm.

JAKE: Boo-Yaa! Sorry 'bout tha hiccup there fizzay. You'se a flea and I'm the big dogg.

KARKAT: (HICCIZZLE???)

DIZZY: Chill as I take you on a trip. (smfh)

JAKE: Ive been deal'n wit some personal issues as of lizzate n wiznas momentarilizzle distracted.

JAKE: But nevermind that. Put ya fuckin choppers up if ya feel this. I know W-H-to-tha-izzat yizzle all cizzle here today ta hear.

JIZZY: There hizzay been qizzay a ruckus 'n tha press theze L-to-tha-izzast fizzle weeks concern'n tha subject of tha election n more importantly whizzle i stand on tha candidates.

JAKE: So today id like ta set tha record strizzaight,

JAKE: On that matta,

JAKE: As wizzay as all baller baller.

JIZZLE: You see

JAKE: *takes a dizzay breath*

DAVE: Aint no L-I-M-I-to-tha-T. (oh no)

DAVE: (be he about ta do what i think he be)

KARKAT: (WHAT??)

KARKAT: (WHIZNAT THIZZLE FUCK BE HAPPEN'N???)

Karkat whips hizzis heezee arizzle n S-to-tha-izzees Dizzay bizzy toward tha stizzay, his palm outstretched to S-T-to-tha-izzop Jizzake from do'n what he T-H-to-tha-izzinks he’s perpetratin'. Boo-Yaa! H-to-tha-izze’s fast, but not fast enizzle.

Jake opens his big, dumb M-to-tha-izzouth ta mizzake tha only importizzle contribizzle to tha plot he bitch has or drug deala will mizzake 'n his whole sad, pointless joke of a life. They call me tha president.

JAKE so show some love! I—

Hav'n sizzaid that, it’s not like we’re blunt-rollin' ta sit around n listen ta any more wizzay cizzle out of his M-to-tha-izzouth than we strictly nee' ta. Christ Almightizzle, what be we, masochists? Nah, T-H-to-tha-izzat’s enough of that. Ill slap tha taste out yo mouf. L-to-tha-izzet’s see what John’s up ta. Im a bad boy wit a lotta hos.

> ==>

[chiseler]

The Chiseler Interviews Jonathan Rosenbaum

The Chiseler’s Daniel Riccuito discusses pre-Code talkies, noir and leftist politics with one of America’s leading film critics.

DR: We share a common enthusiasm for early talkies. Do you have any favorite actors, writers or storylines relating to the period’s ethnic, often radically left-wing, politics? I'm thinking of the way that, say, The Mayor of Hell suddenly busts into a long Yiddish monologue. Or movies like Counsellor at Law and Street Scene present hard Left ideas through characters with Jewish, Eastern European backgrounds.

JR: Both Counsellor at Law and Street Scene are plays by Elmer Rice (1892-1967) that Rice himself adapted, and both are terrific films with very good directors (William Wyler and King Vidor, respectively). It's too bad that Rice's plays aren't revived more often today, although a few years ago, the TimeLine theater company in Chicago put on a fantastic, neo-Wellesian production of The Adding Machine. I also had the privilege of knowing Rice's two children with actress Betty Field, John and Judy, who attended the same boarding school in Vermont, both of whom I remember quite fondly.

Although it isn't as politically subversive as the Rice plays, the delightful Jewel Robbery (William Dieterle, 1932) is still a more radical comedy in its treatment of class and sex — specifically, the sexual lure of being robbed as another way of being sexually possessed and enjoyed — than Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise, released a little later the same year. There's also something prophetic about the use of charm, good manners, and marihuana joints to lure the cops away from crime and criminals — another form of sensual appeal, in contrast to the more ethereal romanticism preached by the Lubitsch film, which might be said to value style over content and suggestion over spelling things out. For that matter, even a conservative director like Cecil B. De Mille does amazing things with class and sexual tensions in his melodrama Dynamite (1929) — which deserves to be cherished today at least as much as his subsequent Madame Satan — undoubtedly assisted by at least one Communist (John Howard Lawson) among his screenwriters. Especially in Dynamite, proletarian interests and biases are honored and rewarded at least as much as luxuries and privileges. The convoluted plot may be absurdly contrived, but by getting an heiress (Kay Johnson) married to a coal miner (Charles Bickford) awaiting execution for a crime he didn't commit, the movie gives us archetypes so dialectically opposed that any sexual congress between them virtually guarantees an explosive climax as promised by the title, and De Mille in fact delivers several.

DR: I once compared Elmer Rice's words in the play Counsellor at Law to the final screenplay. There were very definite cuts to his radical (colloquial) language. Bebe Daniels’ character would have put her heart into a (sadly) excised line about police brutality. Rice demonstrated enormous sensitivity to the way everyday people felt and spoke. Do you have a favorite writer — especially where sassy dialogue is concerned?

JR: I wish I did, but that's beyond my range of expertise. However, one name that sparkles for me is Donald Ogden Stewart. He's only one of the four credited screenwriters on Harry d'Abbadie d'Arrast's exquisite Laughter (1930) — for me the only early talkie that measures up to F. Scott Fitzgerald in sophistication — along with Herman Mankiewicz and d'Arrast himself, but I like to think that he's the crucial figure.

Donald Ogden Stewart

DR: Oh, I love Laughter! You're making me want to see everything Donald Ogden Stewart ever wrote. You mentioned Harry d'Abbadie d'Arrast and Herman Mankiewicz. Could you expand on your interest in either or both of them? Your answer needn't focus on any particular period.

JR: I've been trying for some time to investigate d'Arrast's work, but it's been almost impossible because of all the lost films (apparently Service for Ladies, Serenade, The Magnificent Flirt, and Dry Martini) and/or unavailable films (It Happened in Spain and The Three Cornered Hat). Pierre Rissient, who knew him, denied the rumors about him being antisemitic and argued that he had a lot to do with Hallelujah, I'm a Bum because of all the work he did on preproduction. The other films that he worked on which I've seen —Wings, A Gentleman of Paris, Raffles, and Topaz--all testify to his special qualities.

DR: Hallelujah, I'm a Bum makes me think of Ben Hecht, naturally, but also of Hecht's friend and sometimes co-writer Maxwell Bodenheim who wrote Naked on Roller Skates, one of my favorite books, loaded with 1930s slang.  A weird mix of pulp fiction and experimentalism. We touched on radical leftism and ethnicity earlier... How do you account for full-on communist films like Our Daily Bread getting made in Hollywood? Or what about the social justice films out of Warner Bros., like Wild Boys of the Road, which features little Sidney Miller hurling "Chazzer!" at a cop. I'm sometimes astounded by the open radicalism one finds in early Sound-era films. I even went digging through the Warner archives hoping to find evidence that senior execs might have harbored radical left dreams and discovered an early script of Heroes for Sale, which compared Richard Barthelmess' character to Jesus Christ — after making him a brick-throwing, cop-fighting member of the I.W.W.!

JR: We have to remember that Communist values were very close to being a mainstream position during much of the 30s. I've long maintained, for instance, that Faulkner's Light in August is a Communist novel, simply because Faulkner, for all his eccentricity and conservatism, was part of the mainstream during the Depression. Our national amnesia tends to factor this out of our history, just as (to cite a more trivial but more recent example) America's love for Jerry Lewis throughout most of the 50s, which enabled him to make two or three pictures a year, is not only forgotten but illogically replaced by the so-called (and mostly imaginary) love of the French, as if this were the reason why Lewis could make so many movies in the U.S. and why Sailor Beware made a lot more money than either Singin' in the Rain or On the Waterfront.

I'm a novice when it comes to Ben Hecht — apart from having read Adina Hoffman's excellent recent critical biography of him — because both his cynicism and his contempt for Hollywood are automatic turn-offs for me. But Bodenheim is clearly, at least for me, a Topic For Further Research.

DR: Speaking of leftism in 1930s Hollywood, what connections do you draw between that period and the emergence of noir, in which the old ebullience of the radical left seems to have soured into (a more realistic?) nihilism and anger. Maybe I'm projecting there. In any event, do you find it useful, or perhaps even inevitable, to make connections between pre-Code and noir? I can't help noticing how many forties and fifties films wind up in sewers, industrial parks and abandoned factories, which all feel like inhuman representations of capitalism. Try and Get Me AKA The Sound of Fury is famously based on Jo Pagano's The Condemned, a book coming out of a hard-left perspective. Or do you find other, less political connections between these periods interesting?

JR: I don't find noir more "realistic" than 30s leftism. Au contraire, I find its defeatism and expressionism far more comforting. Closure, no matter how grim or grimy, is always more comforting than ellipsis and suspension — trajectories into possible futures. I think the popularity of noir today has a lot to do with a doom-laden death wish, a desire to escape any sense of responsibility for a future that seems helpfully hopeless — an attitude that "blossoms," decadently, into the Godfather trilogy, where corruption is seen as "tragically" (that is to say, satisfyingly) inevitable. Once the future becomes foreclosed, we're all left off the hook, n'est pas?

DR: Well said, Jonathan. I hereby spare you my own personal dialectic, which ricochets between radical left politics (love, solidarity, hope) and totalizing disgust with human kind. In fact, I only mention that particular tension as a way of pointing out that my last question spoke to broad tendencies. Ever see Chicago Calling? One of Dan Duryea's finest moments! It seems to me that the film, along with the best "dark" post-WWII cinema, not all of it "noir" per se, manages to ricochet that way. Do you have any favorites from the period? If so, what draws you there?

JR: I haven't yet seen either Chicago Calling or Guilty Bystander (another early and obscure noir I just heard about), both of which I'm currently downloading. (Stay tuned...)

Otherwise, noir is too vast a subject for me to comment on at any length just now, except to recommend James Naremore's (for me) definitive book on the subject, More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts.

DR: What do you think of Felix Feist’s work?

JR: Based on what I've seen, I'm not a fan.

(Here, we break so that Jonathan Rosenbaum can watch Chicago Calling)

JR: Now that I've watched Chicago Calling, I can't help but reflect that noir and neorealism, contemporary film movements, may actually be opposite sides of the same coin. (Isn't Open City a noir, and The Sound of Fury an alternate version of The Bicycle Thief?) The key traits that they have in common are "postwar" and "originating in Europe," but the key difference that should be acknowledged at the outset is that "noir" in this country wasn't perceived as such when the films that we now identify as "noir" first appeared. Even in France it had a literary connotation because it was a name derived from a book publisher. So it's a way of reinventing and reinterpreting the past, whereas Italian neorealism was perceived as such from the get-go. It also was fundamentally humanist whereas noir was closer to nihilism and cynicism, and its tendency towards political defeatism obviously has a lot to do with its contemporary appeal — absolving us of any responsibility for the messes we live in.

Chicago Calling is closer to neorealism than it is to noir because of its exciting use of natural locations and its focus on working-class characters. Yet as a hard luck story it seems so overdetermined that at times it becomes metaphysical, which places it closer to noir. Dan Duryea is an actor that we mostly associate with noir and metaphysics, so it's refreshing to find him for once in a neorealistic and physical landscape.

DR: I'm interested in your idea that noir veers into the metaphysical realm. Since we started our conversation in the 1930s, which seem grounded in physical reality, I wonder if you have any thoughts on the evolution of noir, its underlying and perhaps unconscious motives. I vaguely recall a film critic whose name escapes me saying "After the war we needed shadows to hide in."

JR: I'd like to ask that film critic why we need to hide. In my experience, some of the same people who love noir also supported and even celebrated both of the Gulf wars and didn't mind at all if the U.S. was torturing a lot of innocent people as long as the innocent people wasn't them — all of which suggests to me a pretty good reason for wanting to hide. But surely defeating the Nazis — unlike some of the brutalities that arise from capitalism-- isn't a very plausible reason for hiding.

DR: I think it was a Hiroshima reference, not sure.

JR: That makes sense. Even though Truman gave no indication of wanting to hide.

DR: Has the Chicago film scene had any influence on you?

JR: For starters, I perceive New York as a separate country — Manhattan as an island — and Chicago as part of the U.S. I also consider New York and Los Angeles (a company town) as provincial in much the same way that my home town in Alabama is provincial: i.e., if something hasn't happened there, it hasn't happened. Whereas Chicago knows that it isn't the center of the universe. And its film scene is decidedly less competitive and turf-conscious, which I find refreshing. There isn't the same cut-throat atmosphere here nor any of the New York or Hollywood arrogance and rudeness.

DR: I've asked you questions that assume connections between aesthetics and politics. I get the sense that you lean "left". But given that political shorthand can be confusing, I'll try being as concrete as possible: your analysis of fascist aesthetics in Star Wars moved me as a critique cutting across the grain of America's image of itself as a liberating force in the world. What are your politics?

JR: Star Wars fosters the idea of a bloodless genocidal massacre, which is part of what made both Gulf wars so popular in this country — seeing war as a video game.

I'm basically a Bernie Sanders socialist who would be happy with an Elizabeth Warren presidency, and I'm also a pacifist. DR: Do your politics relate in substantive ways to your early movie-going experiences? I heard that your father owned a movie theater. I'm also thinking of the distinctions you draw among the various American movie scenes. Was the physical landscape you grew up in an influence on your aesthetic and political values?

JR: My politics were probably affected more by my almost eight years of living in Europe (Paris and London) than by my first sixteen years of living in Alabama. My paternal grandfather owned a small chain of movie theaters, and my father worked for him until the chain was sold in 1960, at which point he became an English professor. He was never a cinephile, but the fact that he'd wanted to be a writer clearly influenced my becoming one.

Growing up in a house designed for my parents by Frank Lloyd Wright also undoubtedly affected my aesthetics, but not my politics, which were formed in part by my 60s involvements in the civil rights and antiwar movements.

As for my view of America's role in the world, I think we tend to be handicapped in our good intentions by the delusion that only three kinds of people exist —Americans, anti-Americans, and prospective Americans — which means that we tend to exclude most of humanity from the playing field.

This interview was conducted via email.