I came across this while checking out the new blog posts. I’m not a huge fan of hate crime legislation, but really, does this:
Defines “hate crime” as a violent act causing death or bodily injury because of the actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or disability of the victim.
Or this:
Amends the federal criminal code to impose criminal penalties for causing (or attempting to cause) bodily injury to any person using fire, a firearm, or any explosive or incendiary device because of the actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability of such person.
Sound like the same thing as this:
A bill now before Congress (H.R. 1592 / S. 1105) would criminalize negative comments concerning homosexuality, such as calling the practice of homosexuality a sin from the pulpit, a hate crime punishable by a hefty fine and time in prison. This dangerous legislation would take away our freedom of speech and our freedom of religion.
I thought I hated Kant before. But now I’ve picked up a copy of The Metaphysics of Morals (which, by the way, has all these weird numbers all over it – there are page numbers, section numbers, paragraphish numbers – it’s very weird). Now I hate Kant more. Here’s why:
1. OMG WTF with the Awake magazine-like titles? “In a State of Nature Something External Can Actually Be Mine or Yours but Only Provisionally”? Really?
2. Stupid questions: “What is money?”, “What is a book?” (the answer literally opens with “A book is a writing…” and is quickly followed with another JW-ish title: “Unauthorized Publishing of Books Is Forbidden as a Matter of Right”. Kant should so work for the RIAA)
3. “Section III: On Rights to Persons Akin to Rights to Things”, which details all the ways, despite Kant’s dictum that a person should never be treated as a thing, that we can treat persons like things. I knew I would love this section once he started talking about sex, which is at the very beginning: “Sexual union is the reciprocal use that one human being makes of the sexual organs and capacities of another. This is either a natural use (by which procreation of a being of the same kind is possible) or an unnatural use, and unnatural use takes place either with a person of the same sex or with an animal of a nonhuman species.”
Filed under: Hitchcock, authenticity, film, heteronormativity, romantic comedies, sexuality
In films, there’s such a thing as spatial causation. Maybe ’spatial transference’ is a better term. Regardless, the ’spatial’ part stays, and is really just a metaphor anyway. Here’s how it works.
In a film, in a sense, there is a sort of secondary ’space’ whose ‘geography’ is made up of certain types of culturally important characteristics, placed, according to a film’s, and culture’s, logic, more or less close to one-another. So, instead of Canada butting up against the United States, you might have the unwed mother adjacent to the serial killer or something. These pseudo-spatial ‘locations’ can be read from the film through subtle causations, transferences of meaning, and odd shadings that just don’t make sense unless something is rubbing off onto something in an adjacent location.
Here’s my example, riffed off a reading I did a while back of North by Northwest (1959). The film’s spaces are divided primarily into the authentic, which is where every recoupable character ends up by the end of the film, and the inauthentic, which is where nearly every character starts out. Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), the film’s love interest, begins the film as a spy, Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) begins as a dashing bachelor, and Phillip Vandamm (James Mason) and Leonard (Martin Landau) are the villains, involved in some sort of never-quite-explained espionage and, I argue, a sexual relationship. What I want to argue is that Leonard, Vandamm, Thornhill, and Kendall all begin much closer to one-another than is let on.
One scene in the film is the key to my argument: When Vandamm and Thornhill first meet there is a series of cuts which show Vandamm, more or less, checking Thornhill out and Thornhill becoming more and more uncomfortable. Having seen exactly this look a few times in my life, its something I’m quickly led to read as a sexual advance, and one involving recognition at that. Vandamm’s recognition of Thornhill here as someone to some degree like himself opens up the map of this film’s normative territory, and it is aggressively sexual.
Vandamm recognizes Thornhill as “like himself” because they both occupy the space of the sexually inauthentic (where the sexually authentic is a space in which only the heterosexual married couple can reside), and it is this recognition (note, the film is all about recognitions and misrecognitions) that sets in motion the rest of the film. What Vandamm recognizes is the geography of the space of inauthenticity in the film and both his and Thornhill’s positions in it.
So here’s the map: Vandamm and Leonard, gay men, are at the center of the field of inauthenticity, and they live their lives entirely within its space. Kendall, for her abuse of her sexuality for espionage, is also well within its space. And Thornhill, due both to his playboy lifestyle and his uncomfortably Freudian relationship with his mother occupies its periphery. He can move about in the space of the authentic, but as soon as he is mistaken for a spy, which can only occur because he is already so close to the space of the inauthentic, he is forced into that other, darker space. And everything in the film happens because of this arrangement.
One caveat, though: Never trust Hitchcock. This film is funny, and one of the reasons I suspect its humor works is because it plays on then-existing cultural beliefs in a way that makes them look ridiculous.
