The grammar book for my fourth year class, which is very, very bad in many ways, and is titled Russian in Use: An Interactive Approach to Advanced Communicative Competence, but is more of an interactive approach to utter confusion (thank God the instructor is freaking awesome or I’d be lost), has the phrase, “When you look at the faces of American passersby, you get the impression that they don’t know that they’re rotting away.” Which strikes me as rather creepy.
It has happened again. A group of people planned a gay rights-related march in Russia, and it turned violent. Orthodox clergy, neo-fascists, and old women turned out on the streets, protected by OMON officers, to keep Russia safe from the new blue menace. These four groups are starting to look like Russia’s sex police, on the scene at any outbreak of gayness.
This blog rightly links politics and sex, violence and foreign pressures, but undoubtedly in the wrong way, arguing that the foreign pressures on Russia to clean up its act regarding gay people represent foreign profit interests (though I’m sure those interests will be served, I doubt the organizers were their pawns, willing or not). The coincidental timing of a group of people raising a legitimate issue with Russia’s government does not a grand conspiracy make. And it is not the fault of that group of people that Russia’s officials and police so shamefully acted, physically assaulting those they couldn’t silence, and effectively maintaining an invisible, extralegal, police force by allowing the assaulters to go free. It is these actions, not those of the gay paraders, that will look bad at the G8 summit, and the Russian administration has only itself to blame if these events tarnish their already tarnished reputations.
If any political maneuvering is going on here, I’d look to the unusual configuration of counter-protesters for a clue. Which one of these things is not like the other: babushki, neo-fascists, OMON officers, or the Orthodox clergy? Which group is driven into poverty by the policies of the Russian government, forced to sell their possessions on the street for food money? And which three groups seem to be in line with the policies of the Russian government? Who here, once again, is being blinded to their real suffering and asked to sacrifice themselves, and for what? So that a few gay people stay off Moscow’s streets?
Transformers: The Movie was the best movie Orson Welles ever did. I’m totally serious. Aside from the inclusion of Weird Al in the soundtrack, the music is great – just overdramatic enough. Optimus Prime’s (Peter Cullen) death scene gets me weepy every time. Unicron (Orson Welles) is powerfully creepy in his raw, unstoppable, natural-forceishness. Almost everything about the movie is perfect, from the weirdly religious elements to the surprising sense of cultural relativity to, finally, the lack of any easy good/evil distinctions.
Transformers also looks pretty damn rad, though I’m prepared to be pissed that it looks like some retarded heterosexual coming-of-age love story was tossed in for funsies. I’m so sick of this story: Boy meets girl, they fall in love, girl makes boy a man (but sometimes without having sex), whatever that means, and then, having overcome some horrible obstacle they live happily ever after, close movie with a kiss scene. I’m so sick of it that typing this out almost makes me want to puke. And its not just that every movie is like, “EVERYONE IS STRAIGHT AND WHITE AND FAIRLY RICH BUT NOT TOO RICH AND…”, which is annoying enough. It is that this element in every film is exactly like every other film. There is, really, no variation. And that is bad art, and that is obnoxious. So I’m hoping either this is overblown in the previews or the movie is good enough to overlook the obnoxious plotline that is in every other movie. Because it has a lot to live up to.
Its true. Find me one horror movie that isn’t really about fears that the monolithic, ubiquitous, homogeneous Family is falling apart, dangerously close to falling apart, or threatened by lesbians. If I’ve seen it, I’ll show you how that’s really what its about. Check out 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later, both excellent zombie movies. Also, both excellent examples of what horror movies are Really About.
The plot of 28 Days Later revolves around the life of a guy named Jim after the outbreak of a devastating zombie virus (note, also, how zombie movies always reflect other anxieties of the period in which they were made – previous causes for zombification include radiation and, if you’re willing to stretch the genre, mind control). What’s interesting with respect to good ol’ fashioned family values about this film is that during the course of it, Jim lives in virtually every imaginable living situation – he holes up with a group of failed revolutionaries, rooms with a single man trying to raise his daughter, and lives with a gang-rape-happy militia before finally ending up with just him, a woman, and their sort-of-adopted daughter. Keeping in mind that the logic of films is often, and with horror films almost always, moral, the end is always important – how the film ends will usually reflect, in some sense, how things should be, and how this film says things should be is that society should be structured around our idea of the nuclear family (as a pleasant twist, the family we end up with is interracial). This conclusion is further justified, I think, by the fact that, of the four possible endings included in the DVD, the one that was chosen was the only one including this close-to-model family.
28 Weeks Later picks up where the former film left off: 28 weeks after the outbreak of the virus, the US army has come in to save the day. Having set up a small, supposedly safe, area in which survivors are able to live more comfortably, everything goes bad when an infection breaks out there. The moral structure of this film is different from the first, though – we aren’t shown a model family in the end. Instead, we get as our moral model familial love: Brother and sister survive because they love one-another. The other model we get is one of failure: Their father is the instigator of the renewed zombie infection because his love for his wife and children does not outweigh his cowardice. His failure to uphold the nuclear family model destroys his family and dooms him to zombification and death. (Additionally, what in most films is usually just played, the Oedipus complex, was actually interesting here, in that it was the daughter, not the son, who killed her father in order to end their father-son rivalry.)
Another interesting element to both films is that the overarching cause of the Imminent Demise of the Family is some transgression on the part of humanity at large. This connection isn’t usually made – rather the transgression results in some catastrophe, and the family drama plays out within that catastrophe. Here, especially in 28 Weeks Later, the catastrophe and the breakdown of the family are so connected that in a general sense their cause is either the transgression of pushing scientific research into the (morally!) wrong areas, or the transgression of letting human concern for animals outweigh human concern for humans, depending on how you want to read it.
If I had more energy and less homework, I’d talk about Shaun of the Dead here, but I don’t.
Nabokov has, of course, written more on пошлость than what appears here. He wrote a book on Gogol, where he describes Gogol as a master of пошлость, as the man who took the profane and made it art. I think he’s probably right. But more importantly, to add to my collection (list) of lists, here’s Nabokov’s on пошлость:
“Poshlust,” or in a better transliteration poshlost, has many nuances, and evidently I have not described them clearly enough in my little book on Gogol, if you think one can ask anybody if he is tempted by poshlost. Corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic, and dishonest pseudo-literature—these are obvious examples. Now, if we want to pin down poshlost in contemporary writing, we must look for it in Freudian symbolism, moth-eaten mythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, overconcern with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know. Poshlost speaks in such concepts as “America is no better than Russia” or “We all share in Germany’s guilt.” The flowers of poshlost bloom in such phrases and terms as “the moment of truth,” “charisma,” “existential” (used seriously), “dialogue” (as applied to political talks between nations), and “vocabulary” (as applied to a dauber). Listing in one breath Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Vietnam is seditious poshlost. Belonging to a very select club (which sports one Jewish name—that of the treasurer) is genteel poshlost. Hack reviews are frequently poshlost, but it also lurks in certain highbrow essays. Poshlost calls Mr. Blank a great poet and Mr. Bluff a great novelist. One of poshlost’s favorite breeding places has always been the Art Exhibition; there it is produced by so-called sculptors working with the tools of wreckers, building crankshaft cretins of stainless steel, Zen stereos, polystyrene stinkbirds, objects trouvés in latrines, cannonballs, canned balls. There we admire the gabinetti wall patterns of so-called abstract artists, Freudian surrealism, roric smudges, and Rorschach blots—all of it as corny in its own right as the academic “September Morns” and “Florentine Flowergirls” of half a century ago. The list is long, and, of course, everybody has his bête noire, his black pet, in the series. Mine is that airline ad: the snack served by an obsequious wench to a young couple—she eyeing ecstatically the cucumber canapé, he admiring wistfully the hostess. And, of course, Death in Venice. You see the range.
Note for the future:
So here’s the deal. I got in a lot of women’s studies classes on the one hand, and in a sort of skepticalish sense in a class on Foucault on the other, that he’s (maybe?) got this picture of reality he’s trying to get across in, say, The Order of Things that all of reality is somehow socially constructed, that we somehow collectively construct the stuff we see and study. I’m not sure I buy that, even if that’s the sort of thing that he was trying to do.
But I think it might not be. Maybe Foucault wasn’t so much into telling the truth about the world as he was into showing that a certain way of looking at the world just can’t possibly be true. Here’s my reconstruction:
Modern era: “Man constructs all of his experience WITH HIS MIND! Maybe there’s even Platonic forms!”
Foucault: “Do you even know where you came from? Because here’s the thing: Before you, people thought very differently about things. Isn’t that weird? And after you, they’ll probably think differently about things.”
Modern era: “WTF SRSLY?!”
Foucault: “No, really. And here’s the thing: This whole ‘man constructs all of his experience WITH HIS MIND’ whatnot isn’t only kind of embarrassing. Its also problematic.”
Modern era: “But it sounds so COOL! Also, PLATONIC FORMS!”
Foucault: “No it does sound cool, but if man constructs all of his experience with his mind, and part of man’s experience is man, then doesn’t man construct man WITH HIS MIND?“
Modern era: “OMGWTF BWAAAAAAA!”
Foucault: “Yeah, seriously.”
Did you catch the magic move there? The whole episteme talk that makes it so there can be a way of thinking before the modern era, and a way of thinking after the modern era, is kind of a version of “MAN CONSTRUCTS ALL OF HIS EXPERIENCE WITH HIS MIND!!!” Its using the rules of the Modern era that Foucault is able to pull together his claim that the Modern way of thinking self-destructs, and is therefore, I think he hopes, able to inaugurate a new way of thinking. What he doesn’t seem to be interested in doing there, though, is telling the truth, except insofar as “OMG contradiction!” is a truth. That is, you don’t play using a set of rules you think are flawed if what you want is to get at REAL REALITY. You only play with a set of rules that you think are flawed if you want to make sure the people who like those rules aren’t going to cry foul.
