#the newspaper also saying that 'she' was attacked without mercy for her remarks and then sy showing up looking a lot like lion era soyeon

[mst3kproject]

105: The Corpse Vanishes

The Corpse Vanishes carries a couple of interesting distinctions: it's the oldest movie ever featured on MST3K, having been released in 1942 (the second-oldest, if you're interested, is I Accuse my Parents).  It's also, oddly enough, one of the most feminist. The part of this story we see is entirely driven by the decisions of the female reporter, even if she does need rescue at the end.  The film deals with themes like the glass ceiling, the percieved need for women to be young and beautiful in order to be worthy of love, and the media's obsession with what women are wearing and who they're kissing over and above their personal accomplishments.  There's even an otherwise irrelevant male character who exists only to be Pat's love interest!

The movie begins with what's got to be the world's weirdest crime spree: young brides from wealthy families are dropping dead at the altar in the middle of their vows, only for their bodies to be stolen from the hearse hours later!  Reporter Patricia Hunter sees her ticket out of the society pages into real news, and decides to investigate. The trail of clues leads her to the mysterious Dr. Lorenz, who is using hormones extracted from the brides to keep his own wife young and beautiful!  The Lorenzes don't want anybody poking around in their business, so they decide that bride or no, Patricia herself will be their next victim.

There are a number of pieces of blatant nonsense in all this.  The idea that killing brides in the church and then elaborately stealing their corpses is the best way to get young women for this work.  Dr. Lorenz and his wife sleep in coffins for no particular reason and keep a menagerie of deformed assistants, apparently just because that's something mad scientists are supposed to do.  There's a secret passageway that leads right through Pat's room.  The movie insists that orchids are never scented, which just isn't true - many orchids smell of vanilla, and my own collection includes a Golden Elf Cymbidium that smells like lemon pie!

But there are also a lot of things in The Corpse Vanishes that feel like honest-to-gosh social commentary.  For a start, there's the reporters, Patricia and her partner Sandy.  They're the good guys in this story.  We're following Pat as she tries to find a criminal and bring him out into the open, but she is still presented as a remarkably predatory individual, as are her colleagues.  An editor tells Pat that even if the bride dies, “I still want to know what she was wearing.”  When Pat herself hears about another death, she exclaims, “what a story!”  When a woman keels over right in front of him, Sandy declares, “I just got the picture of the month!”  Justice is at best a side effect of what Pat is trying to accomplish.  Mostly she just wants the scoop, and the career advancement she hopes will come with it.

The reason this career advancement has been so hard for her to attain is explicitly presented as sexist.  As the movie begins, Patricia's job is writing for the society pages about weddings and fashion – things that are traditionally considered female spheres – and she's stuck there despite the editor having promised her a promotion.  The people around her seem to think she lacks drive or intelligence, but she proves them wrong over and over.  Sandy scoffs at her, 'you wouldn't know a clue if it bit you', yet when she finds one in the form of the mysterious orchid she follows it up thoroughly: she consults experts, and makes sure she has proof that all the dead brides wore the same flower before she draws anyone else's attention to it.  When she goes to see Dr. Lorenz, claiming to be interested in his horticultural hobby, she uses what she's learned from these people to sound like she knows what she's talking about.  She finds the secret passage Dr. Foster was unable to locate, and explores it despite being terrified of what she might find.

None of this makes Patricia a very complex character, but it does make her feel quite real.  She's ambitious, stubborn, and frequently selfish, and honestly doesn't come across as somebody you'd like if you actually had to deal with her.  She gets a courtesy rarely extended to female characters in movies, in that she is allowed to be the heroine of this story without necessarily having to be a nice person.  Even her name ties into this: Pat was considered a 'mannish' nickname in the forties, and Hunter is exactly what she is, following a lead like a bloodhound and locking onto her target like a wolf.

The fact that we spend the movie with an active, motivated woman is all the more interesting in that Dr. Lorenz' scheme hinges on women being deprived of agency.  His captive brides are placed in comas and kept locked in his basement, utterly at his mercy, so that he may use them for their beauty and then dispose of them.  He takes them, furthermore, from the altar – at the moment when they would pass from the care of their parents into the that of their husbands. They are stolen in the crucial few seconds when they have no real protector.  This can't possibly be practical on Dr. Lorenz' part.  The newspaper interest amply demonstrates that the murders attract attention, and we are shown that at least one of the brides had undercover police at her wedding to try to prevent this.  It is the bride's symbolic defenselessness that interests him.

To a man who steals women at the moment they pass from protector to protector, Patricia is a particular threat because she needs no protector.  She is unmarried, but shows no sign of depending on a family member or even a friend – Patricia Hunter does things for herself, by herself, and yet does not make herself vulnerable.  When she is confronted by danger she attempts to protect or defend herself.  Even when she faints, confronted with the sight of murder, she does not scream.  She saves that for the attack in the church, when there is a realistic chance of it summoning help instead of more danger.

In the 1940s, the audience would be likely to agree with Dr. Lorenz that it would be more proper for Patricia to have the protection of a man.  This is probably why the movie ends in her marriage, as she enters the care of Dr. Foster and leaves her predatory career to assume the far more acceptable role of home-maker (note the change of her name from hunter to foster, a nurturer).  Her editor complains about losing her, but one suspects he's relieved not to have to deal with her anymore.  As I observed in the opening paragraph, however, Dr. Foster is a pretty uninteresting character – he serves the very minor plot purpose of driving Patricia to Dr. Lorenz' house, delivers some exposition and afterwards has very little to do.  He is Pat's love interest, and nothing more.  The Corpse Vanishes is always her movie.

The plot of The Corpse Vanishes hinges on the actions of other women, as well.  There is, for example, Pat's friend Peggy, who is asked to pose as a bride in order to trap Dr. Lorenz. Interestingly, Pat convinces her to do it by suggesting it will get Peggy an 'in' to Broadway – Peggy, too, is an ambitious career woman first and foremost.  Nor can we forget Dr. Lorenz' wife, who is referred to only as 'The Countess'.  She seems to be the driving force behind Dr. Lorenz' experiments into eternal youth.  When we first see her, she is bewailing her looks and insisting that she is dying.  Once the youth serum has been administered, the Countess asks, “can you bear to look at me now?” and Dr. Lorenz replies that he will keep her young and beautiful forever.  For his own part, however, he didn't seem particularly upset by her aged appearance. It is, rather, the Countess herself who is convinced in true Atomic Brain style that she is unworthy of love if she is not beautiful, and it is she who obsesses about the beauty of the kidnapped brides.

Patricia herself is unconscious for the climax of the movie, but Dr. Lorenz' end is brought about by a third female character.  This is Fagah the housekeeper, who is also the mother of Lorenz' deformed and mentally handicapped assistants.  When he gets tired of the big one, Angel, pawing at his dead brides, Lorenz kills him.  Later, he abandons the little one, Toby, when the latter is shot.  In revenge, Fagah stabs Lorenz as he prepares to extract the youth serum, and this does far more to save Pat's life than any of Dr. Foster's attempts at heroics, which would otherwise have been just a few minutes too late.

Is any of this intentional?  Is this really a movie about female agency, or just a lot of coincidences?  I'm inclined to think that at least writer Harvey Gates was thinking about womens' place in society, both because of the obvious significance of the names Hunter and Foster and because of one scene in which the script pokes fun at the idea of a woman 'belonging' to a man.  While they prepare for Peggy's fake wedding, the man playing the priest asks if they want the vows to use the word 'cherish' or 'obey'.  Patricia laughs and says since it's a fake ceremony they'll go the old-fashioned way, with 'obey'.  This is the 1940's!  A woman should love her husband, but she needn't do as he says anymore!

I really like this movie, actually.  The goofy plot is amusing, the silent-film-style music is fun, and there's so much of interest to the sociologist in me.  For unriffed viewing, this is one of my favourite MST3K subjects.

[duaneodavila]

A Sensitive Moment

The Nation published a poem by Anders Carlson-Wee called “How To.” Whether it’s a good poem is better decided by others, or perhaps by any reader individually. Whether it’s an insensitive poem, however, is decided for you.

As poetry editors, we hold ourselves responsible for the ways in which the work we select is received. We made a serious mistake by choosing to publish the poem “How-To.”  We are sorry for the pain we have caused to the many communities affected by this poem. We recognize that we must now earn your trust back.  Some of our readers have asked what we were thinking. When we read the poem we took it as a profane, over-the-top attack on the ways in which members of many groups are asked, or required, to perform the work of marginalization. We can no longer read the poem in that way.

After its publication, the editors were attacked for publishing such an “ableist” poem. It includes the word “crippled,” which is unmentionable in polite company. And like all people told they’re insensitive, the editors admitted guilty and repented, throwing themselves on the mercy of the mob. The mob, however, was not feeling particularly merciful.

At some point, all of us in the literary community must DEMAND that white editors resign. It’s time to STEP DOWN and hand over the positions of power. We don’t have to wait for them to fuck up. The fact that they hold these positions is fuck up enough.

This came from Fresno State’s Randa Jarrar. What “white editors” have to do with a putative “ableist” poem is unclear, but then, that could be my inability to see connections that are clear to pedagogues. Whether Jarrar is on the committee to tell us what poems are allowed is also unclear, as the membership is either a huge secret or changes with such speed that they can never make up a bronze plaque for their extraordinary service to humanity.

I might question Jarrar’s demand for “white editors” to resign, but I can’t without creating an internal conflict, Being white, being male, being privileged, the challenge itself is outrageous, no less the substance of the challenge.

I learned this early on, when a young female lawyer twitted something kinda inaccurate, to which I twitted a reply. The reaction was neither to agree nor disagree with my twit, but that I was a misogynist for question a woman. I, being a fool, pointed out that I was questioning a lawyer, regardless of gender. Protip: Never reply with reason to an ad hominem attack, as it only proves you’re sexism.

After Maggie Haberman wrote her NY Times op-ed about getting off twitter, my old pal Kevin O’Keefe wrote a post about it, arguing that the problem wasn’t twitter but the way Haberman was using it. Just so it’s clear for the thinking challenged, Kevin has a blog. Maggie writes for the NY Times. In the scheme of who had the bigger soap box, Maggie kicks Kevin’s butt.

And yet, a law librarian at Western State College of Law, Scott Frey, went after Kevin for the outrage.

This post strikes me as (1) mansplaining and (2) “blaming the victim.” By (1), I mean that I doubt you’re saying anything that (Pulitzer Prize winning reporter) Maggie Haberman doesn’t already know about Twitter. Also, I doubt that you’re a better judge of whether Haberman is or isn’t using Twitter well than she is. And by (2), I refer specifically to the concluding remark that she’s brought the bad parts of Twitter upon herself. Really?

There are two paradigms within which to assess this. In the first, person challenges the contentions of another person who published words in major newspaper. In the second, white cis-hetero-normative male undermines the lives experience of oppressed, yet superior, female survivor.

And Frey pursued the battle for a couple more comments, because no ally to the cause, clad in his white armour, should be complicit. Even thought Frey might be white, might be male, might be short of victim points for the purpose of winning the three-legged race, he can at least call out the outrage perpetrated by Kevin so that the trauma didn’t infest anyone else. Or, more likely, to educate him on how to be “better person,” because better people are woke people.

Can anyone be sufficiently sensitive to write a poem that is simultaneously meaningful and yet offended no maginalized person? Beats me. Will female lawyers win argument, maybe even cases, because questioning them, or, god forbid, ruling against them, is proof of misogyny?

Is the problem white editors, lacking Jarrar’s sensitivity to things Jarrar decides to be sensitive too?

Some will eventually come to realize that there is no pleasing, no accommodating, no amount of trying to be so very sensitive that you don’t come off looking like Scott Frey. The next realization is that we can’t change out skin color, aren’t really inclined to change our gender and, well, kinda like being our toxic selves. And unless you plan to shut up and serve the woker good in contrition for wrongs they may have suffered, even if not at your hand, you’re kinda left without many options.

So, write whatever you want in a poem. If someone doesn’t like it, tough nuggies.

Roses are red. Violets are blue. I’m no poet like Fubar, And I just don’t give a damn. Neither should you.

A Sensitive Moment republished via Simple Justice