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lapsedmodernisti am having really crappy few days. first of all, somebody stole my cell phone and left a couple of bitchy harassing messages on my voicemail, to add insult to injury. so i had to get a new cell phone and spend more money than i have to spend on it. then yesterday this guy accosted me in the subway, and delivered a whole methamphedamined speech about how i should be in his movie that's about the breakdown of a modern family (i guess he fancies himself a dimestore todd solinz, which is not saying much in my book, considering my dislike of the referent in question) symbolized by a retarded youngest son who watches TV all the time but the only button he can press is the MUTE button. so i was like "i am not interested" and he said that it was too bad because i looked like a "genuine reincarnated hippie." what the fuck? what does that even mean?first of all, i have not dressed in any way that could be construed hippie-ish since some misguided fashion choices freshman year of college. true, sometimes i wear long skirts and big jewelry, but that’s a sort of de facto uniform for female anthropologists whereas you are supposed to “signify” with your clothes. but i certainly was not dressed that way yesterday. i had on tight black pants and a coat. my bag is manhattan portage. my hair is not in dreads. i have a “fuck off” look whenever i ride public transportation. so i told him that i had never been so insulted in my whole life, and he fucked off.
then i went to see “frida” with shannon, which annoyed the shit out of me. i mean, it’s this discourse of gender relationships and polygamy that kind of circulates through films about artists or any films that feature *men* that are somehow reified for being outstanding in some capacity, and thus somehow transcending norms. it was the same thing that annoyed me about “ali” and “pollack” where men are philandering emotionally abusive fucks and yet their behavior is somehow redeemed by their status as “complex” which is never defined as a term, and implied in such a way that it can become a blanket excuse. but it is particularly annoying in films that feature women who are themselves portrayed as artists, and are thus not preemptively conceived by the film as flat-out playing the abject second fiddle to the “complicated” man. first of all, i am going to go on my rant about polygamy portrayed in the context of radical movements, whether in art or politics. the reason why i finally decided that polygamy does not work in our society with its diachronic historically established status quo, after a lot of thought, was that it serves men better than it serves women. i am not saying that there are no women who can’t have functional polygamous relationships. but from what i have observed, those relationships are successful when polygamy is their primary agenda or platform. whenever polygamy gets piggybacked as a secondary, derived consequence of some other “liberation ideology,” esp. in historically male-dominated movements, like among beatniks and communists, it serves men better than women. then you get a movie like “frida” where she is married to diego rivera, whose art is all about social issues and the workers, and her art is all about the pain that he puts her through in one way or another. it’s kind of like that old adage that all women think about is the men, and all men think about is themselves, and that’s their common ground. or, to use simone de bouvoir’s thesis, men are the primary universal category, and women are the secondary one. frida spends the whole movie being completely schizophrenically split between being this unconventional woman, which in the movie seems like a performance that she puts on (although i don’t know if that was the director’s choice or a flaw in salma hayek’s acting), and acting out her return of the repressed when she throws hysterical fits (and dishes) after diego, who in a sort of metanarrative she keeps professing to love just the way he is (i.e. he “can’t belong to anybody”), fucks yet another woman. i don’t know if the film tried to portray her as being equally sexually adventerous, but the only other affair we see her have with a man is that with trotsky, which she explicitly constructs as a reaction to rivera’s ongoing infidelities (incidentally that’s the only affair that makes rivera jealous, whereas her flings with women make him bemused/turned on, which gets into a whole other set of problems with the discourse of sexuality between genders), and the rest of her polygamous behavior is limited to a bizarre form, in which she fucks the women that her husband fucks after he is done with them. on top of that, to further contribute to “male global vision/female self-involved vision” dichotomy, when the conflict between her and rivera erupts over her affair with trotsky and his subsequent departure from their house, at his wife’s request, rivera is concerned for trotsky’s safety, whereas she uses it as an example to rub his nose in the fact that *some men* are considerate about the feelings of the women who loves them. again, that sends the message that “man cares about politics” and “woman only cares about romantic issues.”
the movie annoyed me in the same way that “pollack” did where his wife, the abject “woman artist” supports him through his alcoholism and infidelities while channeling her misery into her art. while he paints...well, we all know what jackson pollack painted.
the movie just pissed me off. if they were trying to make a biography about frida, why was so much of it about diego rivera? that implies that she was that largely consituted by him in her life, which totally goes again the portrait they tried to do of her as a rambunctious iconoclast. and why does a “complex man” mean “can’t keep his dick in his pants” while “complex woman” means “hysterical and unstable” (in other words unable to mediate between how she thinks she should be and how she actually is, while constantly constructing both of those identities in relation to the “complex man”).
then i went to see “frida” with shannon, which annoyed the shit out of me. i mean, it’s this discourse of gender relationships and polygamy that kind of circulates through films about artists or any films that feature *men* that are somehow reified for being outstanding in some capacity, and thus somehow transcending norms. it was the same thing that annoyed me about “ali” and “pollack” where men are philandering emotionally abusive fucks and yet their behavior is somehow redeemed by their status as “complex” which is never defined as a term, and implied in such a way that it can become a blanket excuse. but it is particularly annoying in films that feature women who are themselves portrayed as artists, and are thus not preemptively conceived by the film as flat-out playing the abject second fiddle to the “complicated” man. first of all, i am going to go on my rant about polygamy portrayed in the context of radical movements, whether in art or politics. the reason why i finally decided that polygamy does not work in our society with its diachronic historically established status quo, after a lot of thought, was that it serves men better than it serves women. i am not saying that there are no women who can’t have functional polygamous relationships. but from what i have observed, those relationships are successful when polygamy is their primary agenda or platform. whenever polygamy gets piggybacked as a secondary, derived consequence of some other “liberation ideology,” esp. in historically male-dominated movements, like among beatniks and communists, it serves men better than women. then you get a movie like “frida” where she is married to diego rivera, whose art is all about social issues and the workers, and her art is all about the pain that he puts her through in one way or another. it’s kind of like that old adage that all women think about is the men, and all men think about is themselves, and that’s their common ground. or, to use simone de bouvoir’s thesis, men are the primary universal category, and women are the secondary one. frida spends the whole movie being completely schizophrenically split between being this unconventional woman, which in the movie seems like a performance that she puts on (although i don’t know if that was the director’s choice or a flaw in salma hayek’s acting), and acting out her return of the repressed when she throws hysterical fits (and dishes) after diego, who in a sort of metanarrative she keeps professing to love just the way he is (i.e. he “can’t belong to anybody”), fucks yet another woman. i don’t know if the film tried to portray her as being equally sexually adventerous, but the only other affair we see her have with a man is that with trotsky, which she explicitly constructs as a reaction to rivera’s ongoing infidelities (incidentally that’s the only affair that makes rivera jealous, whereas her flings with women make him bemused/turned on, which gets into a whole other set of problems with the discourse of sexuality between genders), and the rest of her polygamous behavior is limited to a bizarre form, in which she fucks the women that her husband fucks after he is done with them. on top of that, to further contribute to “male global vision/female self-involved vision” dichotomy, when the conflict between her and rivera erupts over her affair with trotsky and his subsequent departure from their house, at his wife’s request, rivera is concerned for trotsky’s safety, whereas she uses it as an example to rub his nose in the fact that *some men* are considerate about the feelings of the women who loves them. again, that sends the message that “man cares about politics” and “woman only cares about romantic issues.”
the movie annoyed me in the same way that “pollack” did where his wife, the abject “woman artist” supports him through his alcoholism and infidelities while channeling her misery into her art. while he paints...well, we all know what jackson pollack painted.
the movie just pissed me off. if they were trying to make a biography about frida, why was so much of it about diego rivera? that implies that she was that largely consituted by him in her life, which totally goes again the portrait they tried to do of her as a rambunctious iconoclast. and why does a “complex man” mean “can’t keep his dick in his pants” while “complex woman” means “hysterical and unstable” (in other words unable to mediate between how she thinks she should be and how she actually is, while constantly constructing both of those identities in relation to the “complex man”).
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Date: 2002-11-25 02:46 pm (UTC)The whole asshold-but-genius trope has me tired, tired, tired. But what has me even tireder are the long-suffering-muses. THere wouldn't be any more Pollacks if we could eliminate their hangover-remedying partners. Then Pollack would have died when he should have, before producing any more vomit-inducing works than absolutely necessary. I'm sick of seeing some pallid lady sitting up late under some yellow lamp darning/staring into space/drinking alone/reading listlessly and then dropping the book absentmindedly into her lamp and staring out the window at the bleakness. I've had enough!!! My personal least-favorite is the mirror scene, when she inevitably contemplates her (ravaged yet composed) visage and thus the wasted years. If there weren't so much heavy-handed symbolism involved, if it were just violence without the "genius" part, it would be all right. But those gratuitous long shots from a (smudged) car window, of snow-covered plains or long stretches of empty highway... those should be illegal. And rocking chairs, and yellow lamps, and the woman sitting on the porch wearing something fuzzy as the car comes drunkenly hurtling onto the lawn. Illegal.
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