I Saw a 10 Today, Oh Boy

I'd never seen it before, not even when it came out in 1979 (I was twelve at the time, and likely wouldn't have gotten in to see it anyway).

I was pleasantly surprised that the movie contained more than the typical RomCom does today. It concentrated more on the script and making sure the camera shots highlighted what was needed.

Overcome by a fear of growing old, the perpetually intoxicated George is in pursuit of a sad-eyed vision of perfection, a virginal "Other." His crisis is amplified by being constantly spiritually "castrated" during the film, first by his girlfriend Sam, who is also sort of virginal, in a ball-busting sort of way. She is too much for him intellectually, and it helps to spur his quest.

There is a decided contrast between Sam and Jenny. Sam performs music and keeps a classy demeanor, and refers to "making love;" Jenny likes classical music but likes to "fuck" to it. Even Sam's name is sexually ambiguous.

The movie did ring of a morality play: it suggests that the correct thing for George to do is to be with the "good woman" who will be with him, despite that woman being outraged at his gallivanting with naked girls at a party. It suggests that despite Jenny's freedom, she isn't the "kind of girl one should stay with."

It SEEMS pro-woman; Sam is intelligent, Jenny is liberated... but it still reinforces a patriarchal outlook. Sam's anger is supposed to be short-lived, she's supposed to tolerate George's indiscretion and wait for him to come around.

Baudrillard is fun to say

Re: his Chapter 9: "The System of Objects":

Baudrillard definitely knows what he's looking at. I nodded with agreement at the concept that we are driven by advertisement to feel independent and free, to be totally different and unique... by buying what everyone else is buying.

It's maddening, but not unexpected. Everything in nature advertises--an insect is brightly colored to attract females, a lizard has a frill to become larger and more frightening--the only creatures that don't are those whose physiology has evolved solely to help them hide. We as humans are merely more aware of that visual manipulation, and direct it intentionally toward the mind.

I also really got a lot out of Baudrillard's pointing out a simple fact: that we believe that we are ethically correct in making ourselves feel good. Advertisers are gleefully cognizant of this... and redirect this urge to state that buying possessions == feeling good.

Very Marxist when one considers it.

An Ethnography Within Silver Lake

The Observance:

We sit blearily in a local café along Sunset Blvd. It's midmorning. Overhead thumps "Brick House", then "Pick Up The Pieces", "Lady Marmalade", "Shining Star", and "Kung Fu Fighting"... basically someone's pretense that mainstream '70s Jazz/Funk/Motown 101 equals ethnic hipness.

People sit here in pairs or pairs of pairs, carefully arranged to appear not-fully-awakened; a frumpled shabby chic. Classic tattoos of pinup girls peek from beneath the straps of summer dresses. Some people sit alone: women sit with a book, men with a laptop, hipster hat pulled low over a delicately bearded face. Every skin tone is present, from smooth mahogany to gingerbread to porcelain.

Male partners face each other, in rugged shorts and hiking boots, varying in degrees of baldness and beardedness. They are at ease, and smile often. The gay men have powerlifters' arms, the straight men guitarists' biceps.

One couple sits nearby; both are youngish and thin. She wears a mostly-black outfit that is not quite a skirt, not quite shorts, and one can see carefully rendered ink above one breast. Her dog is shaggy and bored, dozing on one of her black go-go-boots. The man wears an intentionally weathered green t-shirt, with a slogan meant to cause confusion so he can appear well-traveled. He has a tattoo too, a tribal line around one forearm. He thinks he is funny, and keeps interjecting quips into their conversation; he never elicits more than a polite laugh from her as she discusses movies, then literature.


The Analysis:

From a Feminist or Romantic perspective, it is difficult to determine dominance in a couple's relationship; except for the one male's attempts to charm his companion, there was an ease and comfortable sense of equality. Gay men enjoy an acceptance particular to this area, more so than perhaps other places in our world.

The tattoos and summer dresses embrace femineity, yet reject any sense of weakness or frailty; any attraction is due as much to confidence as it is to female form. There is very little sense of "Other" in this place, partially because of the lack of domination, partially because of the wide array of ethnicities. There is less "fixed essence of femininity, masculinity, [...] and other social categories" (Barker 217). The heterosexual males here seem more interested than the females in projecting an "identity" as social construct, usually that of the sensitive, knowledgeable urbanite. The women seem merely happy to be alive, to look as good as they do, and to engage in conversation; they are examples of the postmodern world, "composed not of one but of several, sometimes contradictory, identities" (Barker 220).

As for our imbalanced couple, the girl seemed more worldly than her companion, merely by being reserved. He was desperate to win her laughter, and seemed to fail on the basis of being too mundane and by not fully participating in the discussion. It is not enough for him to be colorfully presentational; he must attract her mind.



Works Cited:

Barker, Chris. Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice.

The Romantic Comedy

The first chapter in McDonald's book Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre admits to the common (and often deserved) disregard for the romantic comedy, and helps as well, in that it defined it more clearly. Yet the greatest and most favorite movies of our time often include those elements--the development of a couple's relationship, the happy ending--so it isn't merely the genre itself that merits disdain.

The bashing of the "RomCom" will still be a favorite activity of mine... but I think it's not because it includes the factors that it does, but because of the same reason we would bash any other newer movie or piece of literature: the quality isn't there. A work must ascend beyond a repetition of what's been done, and have something more than a cookie-cutter script or a weak catharsis... what fellow student Geghard A. referenced as "assembly-line plots" (a line I wish I'd thought of).

Not planning on citing Derrida much

I don't much hold with Derrida. The concept surrounding this intentionally opaque chapter is to argue that no letter or word has real meaning, since its meaning must be retrieved from its relationship to other words or letters--basically, its meaning is forever deferred; there is no absolute, irreducible core.

While this stampeded through the philosophical, literary and linguistic worlds, I'm not wild about it. To me it uses linguistic horseplay to arrive at a purely theoretical conclusion, let alone through a single language; French. Différance is like difference, see... and it not only isn't a word according to Derrida, it isn't a concept. Derrida's word doesn't have to be a word like other words.

I do appreciate the contribution, in that we shouldn't necessarily consider any word or concept to be absolute, or divinely inspired, or contain any real "truth" within it (in essence arguing against Plato and his concept of the unattainable, non-palpable "idea"). Language is fascinating, and the idea that all words must somehow be connected to all other words makes language a difficult thing to deconstruct. I do like the idea that a concept which is difficult to name or describe is so because there are no words that are closely linked to it in the chain.

Derrida merely strikes me as someone who cleverly kept his career going via expert manipulation of language, and changed his intent at will; by being deliberately inexplicable, he could claim any explanation at all: "There is no simple answer to such a question."

Thoughts: Woman As Other and, um, the Pink Panther

I got a lot out of the Simone de Beauvoir chapter (from Woman As Other). It was especially enlightening to have it point out that, unlike other subjects of oppression, it was not an "event" that occurred to be reversed; it has been an ongoing, nearly hardwired paradigm.

Having watched the Pink Panther scene in class, we were to examine it through a de Beauvoiresque lens.

At first I had some difficulty figuring out how to apply Woman as Other and the concept of master/slave to a scene that appears to be fairly equal; a woman is singing, the audience is appreciative, everybody gets into a casual maraca-shaking conga line.

As we discussed it a bit it becomes more apparent: a nameless woman, the only person wearing all-black and exotic jewelry, singing a song not in English, all contrast and teeth and lipstick. (By way of comparison, all other characters are in non-conflicting pastels and basic colors. Peter Sellers' character is in white, creating a binary opposite. He is also the only person in the room initially paying no attention to her. What does this mean? I have no idea, I'm just throwing thoughts at this blog.)

Fellow student Meagan brought up a great point: the singer makes herself attractive to the audience, but she does so through visual entertainment, not through conversation. She is motion, not mind.

She is nameless... but referring to de Beauvoir's essay, we don't HAVE to know her name. She is the focus of objection. Her sex is all that is important in the context of this hedonistic scene, and the other women in the scene are passive. Also, it seems that a woman performing is compelled to perform with her whole body--something I daresay a man isn't expected to do (a similar scene where a man performs might only require he sing and play guitar... he needn't gyrate or include hand gestures, or even be as sharply dressed and coiffed as she). A man's shape in film seems not as necessary a focus in a Western patriarchal society as a woman's shape.