I finally saw the new Transformers a few days ago. I don’t have much to say about it, other than a couple quick points, and to note that it was really bad (the hetero love story was more intrusive than I had feared, and far worse). Here’s the points:
1. Did it strike anyone else as weird how often human families were portrayed or explicitly mentioned in a film purportedly about robots? The opening scene features the military hero (I don’t even care enough about the film to look up his, or the actor’s, name) talking to his wife and newborn daughter. The acquisition of Bumblebee is portrayed as a family-style coming of age story. During the communications blackout, the secretary of defense frustratedly asks, “you mean I can’t even contact my family?” If I cared more about this film I’d be arguing that the Decepticons were presented more as a threat to The Family than as a threat to humanity (except, perhaps, insofar as the film may not have actually made a distinction between the two). I’m almost surprised the Decepticons weren’t portrayed as effeminate queers obsessed with anal sex in public airport restrooms.
2. Was anyone else disturbed by the fact that the first time we meet the Decepticons (note: The big, bad, scary, evil, destructive Decepticons) it takes place in Afghanistan, as a confrontation between our wonderful military and the aforementioned big, bad, scary, evil, destructive Decepticons (who, maybe, hate freedom), that the surviving military forces were led to a promised phone by an Afganistani child, that in general our military presence there was all but cherished?
3. I was a little disturbed by the ways in which anyone slightly suggestive of politics or bureaucracy was portrayed as a bumbling, self-absorbed fool and the only worthwhile characters were either high school students or members of the US military…
Filed under: Oregon, ethics, family, gay marriage, gay rights, gender, heteronormativity, homosexuality, legislation, same sex marriage, sexuality, transgender
Concerned Oregonians seem to be, well, concerned (warning: Obnoxiously enough, their concerns are only expressed on a pdf, not in the web’s standard html format…) about Oregon’s Senate Bill 2, which creates protections against discrimination based on a person’s sexuality. They claim that “[t]his legislation creates a new “protected class” of persons to be protected from discrimination, defines this new category, authorizes enforcement of its provisions through various state agencies and courts; adds other provisions regarding real estate transactions, religious institutions, schools; and prevents dress codes under most circumstances.”
The bill (also a pdf, but that’s standard for the publication of bills and proposed bills) defines sexual orientation, the basis of the new “protected class”, as “an individual’s actual or perceived heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality or gender identity, regardless of whether the individual’s gender identity, appearance, expression or behavior differs from that traditionally associated with the individual’s sex at birth.” Now, this is a particularly broad “protected class” to claim, as Vision Action America has apparently done in a mass email, that “[i]f we [conservative Christians] fail to submit sufficient signatures, both this bill [Oregon House Bill 2007 (again, a pdf), which grants civil unions to same-sex couples with all the rights, privileges, and benefits granted by marriage, which, by the way, I also oppose, though on a technicality] and a bill to grant special rights, privileges and protections to homosexuals, lesbians, bisexuals, transgendereds and the gender confused, will become law on January 1, 2008.” Note, also, that they fail to mention that the bill in question also protects heterosexuals from denial of jobs or housing, etc.
Concerned Oregonians takes particular issue with the bill’s use of the word ‘perceived’. Now, when I read the bill, I took it to mean that if some straight guy is denied a job because an employer thinks that he is gay, he is just as protected as someone who is actually gay, which seems a reasonable enough clause. Concerned Oregonians reads this in the opposite way, assuming that ‘perceived’ refers to an individual’s own perceptions of his or her own sexuality or gender, and issues the following warning: “There is no provision that there must be any continuity to this stated ‘perceived sexual orientation’ is; that is it may change as often as a person wishes or states it to.” They later claim that this will lead to an absurd case where “a witness in court, under oath denies he is a man capable of rape because on that day, he perceives himself to be female”. Ignoring for a second their backward interpretation of the word ‘perceived’ here, their flat-out denial of the possibility of a woman committing rape is alarming.
I used to subscribe to similar, though more liberally-oriented “action alerts”. I stopped in part because of tactics like this, which I know are used by conservative groups and suspect are also used by liberal groups (I haven’t seriously looked into the claims of liberal action groups mostly because, admittedly, I agree with their goals even if not perhaps their methods), tactics which either include outright lies or subtle manipulations of speeches, legislation, etc. Tactics such as Vision Action America’s exclusion of the bill’s explicit mention of heterosexuality or Concerned Oregonians’ twisting of the word ‘perceived’. These tactics always rely on mobilizing a particular group based on their prejudices and ignorance, on the hope that no one will actually bother to read the bill or speech in question. My advice to anyone who does receive this sort of email, whether you’re conservative or liberal: Read the bill before you decide. It may not be as bad as you think.
Filed under: Family Research Council, family, fisting, gay rights, homosexuality
What? The Gay Man’s Chorus of San Diego sang the national anthem at a Padres game? That’s so disrespectful, like burning the flag. After using it as a glove for fisting. And in front of children, who were invited, as members of families, to the event, no less!
Seriously, though, there is something that bugs me about the Family Research Council’s either taken for granted or carefully planned opposition between family and homosexuality, between “supporters of the family” and “homosexual groups”. As if they are opposed; as if “homosexual groups” threaten “the family” in some way; as if there’s one way that the family is, was, and always has been; as if “the homosexual” (who is simultaneously new and, like the family, as he [because the threatening homosexual is a man, because the sign 'homosexual' always points to anal sex, as in statements about homosexuality as a high risk group, homosexuals that "prey on children", etc.] has always been) cannot have a family, cannot be family. Perhaps more problematic is the way in which this sort of rhetoric legitimates “the family” as always good, as always already (heh) redeemed, as something-more-than-an-institution whose value is never in question. As if abusive families either cannot exist or somehow don’t count as families.
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.
