Not especially, no: [www.tbook.constantvzw.org] .
Barthes is here talking about written literature, but the case is in some ways even more applicable in film, where a director by definition has to collaborate with a number of other people--actors, directors of photography, screenwriters, to name a few--in order to produce the text. That text clearly cannot be considered the singular result of any one person's vision, control, or intentions.
Knowing Itoi, Suzuki, and friends, I really wouldn't put it past them to take that as a starting model and then emulate it. Good catch.
I dunno, Burke; Grillo-Marxuach's involvement makes me cautiously optimistic.
Well, it's clear the film should at least be able to please the leather & latex crowd.
Apart from the joke (which doesn't even make sense--is Alice referencing a 21st-century product plug in a dystopian future? why? to whom? does she actually remember it?), the connection between the various branded products and the plot (if there is one) isn't there at all in the trailer; instead, it really does just read as thoroughly gratuitous product placement followed by various way-too-busy action set pieces.
I realize these films have a fanbase (and make gangbusters if there have been so damn many of them), and so have redeeming value of some sort, but this sort of shameless pandering to sponsors doesn't exactly make me excited to jump into the series at this point.
I felt the same way when I heard about the premise, but I watched the clips and they're surprisingly nausea-free.
This doesn't pass the smell test.
Well at least the name didn't misleadingly suggest it wouldn't be an ugly little thing. It looks like a death's head with legs and fur.
Much love for including the Rubin diagrams from "Thinking Sex."
Which gave me chills in the best possible way...
Deep, caring, and entirely sexless brotherly love are great things, and they happen all the time--both in the real world, and on film. Sherlock Holmes simply might not be the best place for finding that kind of platonic friendship.
I haven't seen the sequel yet, but the first film clearly took a lot of interest in the spectacle of men's bodies and the fraughtness of Holmes' rather intimate dependency on Watson when it clashed with female interests. Moreover, there's a very sizable body of queer criticism on Doyle's work, and Richie is clearly giving that work some breathing room in his adaptations. Doyle's books have always been pretty queer, so it's kind of odd to expect that a 21st-century adaptation would try to excise or simply ignore that aspect.
To be a bit blunt, I think it's equally naive when people feel the need to make with knee-jerk "no homo" defenses when there's obvious, sustained sexual tension between two male characters, and especially those who are otherwise ostensibly heterosexual (as opposed to Holmes, who is a confirmed bachelor). I'm not saying you suggested this at all, but there are certainly folks who would see the first film, hear someone suggest there's a gay subtext (or overt text), and say, "Stop trying to gay up our action movies!" or "You're putting it in there!" My colleagues and I hear this from students on a very regular basis.
This sort of reading hinges on privileged, heteronormative assumptions for folks who need a clear dividing line between straight-straight-oh-so-straight cultural objects and, well, the gayer sort put out by TLA. The assumption here is that most cultural objects are (or at least probably should be) somehow "pure" of queer insidiousness of one sort or another, and that the world was probably better when men could "just be friends" without having to worry about being mistaken for lovers. While there might be straight-straight-oh-so-straight cultural objects out there, Sherlock Holmes simply isn't one of them.
Richie's films acknowledge that there should be some sort of middle-ground and play space between homosexual panic-y and boringly gay-affirmative (what you call "revisionist") adaptations. In the end, I like to think the ambivalence makes for more interesting movies, and movies which are probably truer to the dynamics of friendships. Platonic ideals aside, friendships can be pretty complicated things whether or not they're between same-sex people, and whether or not those people are having sex (or thinking about having sex) with each other or any number of others.
That's awesome! Was it anything like what she ended up opting for?
I'm not the marrying kind, but I've already told my partner that if I were, our first dance would be to "As the World Falls Down" from the Labyrinth soundtrack.
I'm not the marrying kind, but I've already told my partner that if I were, our first dance would be to "As the World Falls Down" from the Labyrinth soundtrack.
And oddly, all of it makes the film dizzyingly erotic instead of cluttered or messy--I think it has a lot to do with the lighting. All the beautiful shit flying around reminds me of the scene in Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles where there are moths and butterflies flying around in everyone's petticoats so that the women all look like like their bottom halves are bell jar terrariums. It's also so strongly focused on female desire--again, a lot like Labyrinth--that it seems like a strong contender for the canon of inadvertently feminist genre films.
Legend is shockingly good, and I'm embarrassed to say I didn't watch it until last year. It's very 80's fantasy in the same visual style as Labyrinth, but with so much glitter. Tom Cruise is indeed completely inoffensive, and Tim Curry is easily the most intimidating, amazing villain.
This was playing on repeat on my flight today. It looked, meh, okay. Has the pilot officially aired yet?
The problem here, as with a lot of the examples from Gail Simone's Women in Refrigerators is that the forms of trauma visited on female characters in comics are much more specifically gendered than those visited upon male super heroes. The question is not who "who has it worse?/who gets traumatized more often?" but rather "who has it bad/gets traumatized in very specific ways by virtue of their gender or sexuality?"
Miscarriage is not just like any other traumatic event; it is not something that "could happen to anyone." Miscarriage is a form of trauma which happens specifically to women. Traumatic events aren't commensurate with each other by virtue of their resulting in a traumatic responses--particularities still matter, especially since the question of what is experienced as traumatic in the first place is not culturally neutral. Hysteria and hysterical responses to trauma have been problematically gendered from the start, and they still are in House of M.
Writers' attempt here (or the most palpable effect, anyway) was most definitely not to increase cultural awareness of miscarriage as a form of trauma needing psychiatric attention in some instances. At the level of character, House of M failed to make Wanda sympathetic because she suffered the loss of her children--Wanda miscarries, kills a few of her teammates, and quickly thereafter rewrites reality so that her recently genocidal father is in charge of the world.
Tellingly, most retcons since the original story ran have been geared towards recovering Wanda's image, probably because later writers realize how much of a problem House of M set up since a good portion of the Marvel Universe blames Wanda for "No More Mutants." Let's not forget that several characters advocated for killing Wanda outright after Disassembled, and responses since House of M have been just as chilly. The text--and especially characters' reactions--make it very hard to forgive Wanda for what happened on the basis of her having suffered a traumatic event, even though you're right that she did indeed suffer trauma. These same backflips and retcons went into exonerating Jean Grey of the havoc wreaked by the Phoenix force (or by both of them in concert, depending on who you're reading). In any event, I do not see how House of M and its immediate fallout could be read as a sympathetic (much less delicately handled) depiction of miscarriage as trauma, as you seem to imply above.
What troubles me is that this trope (woman suffers trauma, loses grip on reality, bad shit happens to other people, people blame her for what happened in the fallout despite the fact of her being traumatized) dovetails with a long tradition of literary representations of women. Gilbert and Gubar's The Mad-Woman in the Attic does a great job detailing how pernicious a trope this is. Elaine Showalter's work is also helpful, as are responses to Freud's Dora, work on the dark underbelly of the Enlightenment, and so on.
Also, beginning a comment in which you disagree with another poster's reading by questioning whether or not they have even read the text in question can sound extremely condescending. That might not be the best way to get someone to respond to you.
Miscarriage is not just like any other traumatic event; it is not something that "could happen to anyone." Miscarriage is a form of trauma which happens specifically to women. Traumatic events aren't commensurate with each other by virtue of their resulting in a traumatic responses--particularities still matter, especially since the question of what is experienced as traumatic in the first place is not culturally neutral. Hysteria and hysterical responses to trauma have been problematically gendered from the start, and they still are in House of M.
Writers' attempt here (or the most palpable effect, anyway) was most definitely not to increase cultural awareness of miscarriage as a form of trauma needing psychiatric attention in some instances. At the level of character, House of M failed to make Wanda sympathetic because she suffered the loss of her children--Wanda miscarries, kills a few of her teammates, and quickly thereafter rewrites reality so that her recently genocidal father is in charge of the world.
Tellingly, most retcons since the original story ran have been geared towards recovering Wanda's image, probably because later writers realize how much of a problem House of M set up since a good portion of the Marvel Universe blames Wanda for "No More Mutants." Let's not forget that several characters advocated for killing Wanda outright after Disassembled, and responses since House of M have been just as chilly. The text--and especially characters' reactions--make it very hard to forgive Wanda for what happened on the basis of her having suffered a traumatic event, even though you're right that she did indeed suffer trauma. These same backflips and retcons went into exonerating Jean Grey of the havoc wreaked by the Phoenix force (or by both of them in concert, depending on who you're reading). In any event, I do not see how House of M and its immediate fallout could be read as a sympathetic (much less delicately handled) depiction of miscarriage as trauma, as you seem to imply above.
What troubles me is that this trope (woman suffers trauma, loses grip on reality, bad shit happens to other people, people blame her for what happened in the fallout despite the fact of her being traumatized) dovetails with a long tradition of literary representations of women. Gilbert and Gubar's The Mad-Woman in the Attic does a great job detailing how pernicious a trope this is. Elaine Showalter's work is also helpful, as are responses to Freud's Dora, work on the dark underbelly of the Enlightenment, and so on.
Also, beginning a comment in which you disagree with another poster's reading by questioning whether or not they have even read the text in question can sound extremely condescending. That might not be the best way to get someone to respond to you.
Yes, and the chief example of self-abnegation in the Catholic context is the Virgin Mary--especially when we're talking about an icon involved with creative energies, as we are with Phoenix. Hence Phoenix/Dark Phoenix binary is all about the Madonna/Whore binary, as I said in my original post.
Moreover, if we're talking post-Enlightenment, the gender ideal is actually very different: Emile is meant to be a self-made man; Sophie is supposed to educated only insofar as it benefits her ability to (selflessly) help Emile. Self-abnegation and selflessness are very much female-coded ideals.
Moreover, if we're talking post-Enlightenment, the gender ideal is actually very different: Emile is meant to be a self-made man; Sophie is supposed to educated only insofar as it benefits her ability to (selflessly) help Emile. Self-abnegation and selflessness are very much female-coded ideals.
Sorry, I wasn't being very clear, and that probably did sound like a fairly glib remark.
To clarify, what's problematic isn't that an inability to wield absolute power in the MU is coded as female--you've pointed out several instances in which it isn't explicitly so--and summarily does wacky shit in the Marvel Universe by nature of its being coded as such. The problem is that in at least two of those examples--Wanda and Jean--the reasons given for absolute power going awry are clearly gendered. So, these both fit into a long, long pattern of representation in which femininity is figured as opposed to reason, and female power (especially female desire) is pathologized as uncontrollable, insatiable, or just generally a problem.
So, Wanda is a by-the-nineteenth-century-book hysteric; the reason she can't control her power is because she has a nervous breakdown following a miscarriage. Notably, even when wacky hijinx do ensue, she's not really in control of them--they're all just an effort to please her brother. So, not only is her reason for going crazy gendered, she's not even in control of how her going crazy ends up having repercussions for others. As depicted in the video above, one of the House of M ideas was that everyone gets what they want; Wanda's desires are beside the point--she just wants to please others.
For Jean, it's mostly just about how she just CAN'T HANDLE SO MUCH DESIRE. It's all well and good when the Phoenix force is about creation and superhappyfuntimes solving aliens' problems, but the instant the Phoenix discovers desire, shit goes horribly wrong. Again, the model is self-abnegation = good, desire (especially frustrated desire) = bad. That seems pretty gendered to me..
To clarify, what's problematic isn't that an inability to wield absolute power in the MU is coded as female--you've pointed out several instances in which it isn't explicitly so--and summarily does wacky shit in the Marvel Universe by nature of its being coded as such. The problem is that in at least two of those examples--Wanda and Jean--the reasons given for absolute power going awry are clearly gendered. So, these both fit into a long, long pattern of representation in which femininity is figured as opposed to reason, and female power (especially female desire) is pathologized as uncontrollable, insatiable, or just generally a problem.
So, Wanda is a by-the-nineteenth-century-book hysteric; the reason she can't control her power is because she has a nervous breakdown following a miscarriage. Notably, even when wacky hijinx do ensue, she's not really in control of them--they're all just an effort to please her brother. So, not only is her reason for going crazy gendered, she's not even in control of how her going crazy ends up having repercussions for others. As depicted in the video above, one of the House of M ideas was that everyone gets what they want; Wanda's desires are beside the point--she just wants to please others.
For Jean, it's mostly just about how she just CAN'T HANDLE SO MUCH DESIRE. It's all well and good when the Phoenix force is about creation and superhappyfuntimes solving aliens' problems, but the instant the Phoenix discovers desire, shit goes horribly wrong. Again, the model is self-abnegation = good, desire (especially frustrated desire) = bad. That seems pretty gendered to me..
Oh gods, the whole run from Chuck Austen was basically an extended "how not to write gender/sexuality in comics" lesson. Austen made Polaris textbook hysterical and pitted her against a Mary Sue he admitted was based on his own wife/mother (yes, both of them). Havok leaves Polaris for Mary Sue and is absolved of all guilt because, well, he just loves Mary Sue so much, dontchaknow. It's mind-numbing writing.
Austen then pitched a fit in interviews when fans objected to his gender politics and such scenes as Angel flying off with Husk, who drops her clothes onto her family members so that she and her then-beau can have sex in the sky over their family farm while everyone looks on. This was during a story arc that clearly ripped off of Romeo & Juliet, but not in a good way. For his last act, he pisses all over Morrison's excellent run (which was ongoing at the same time), by confusing blatantly obvious plot points so that he can make the story all about Mary Sue's son or something.
If its gender and sexual politics weren't so reprehensible then Austen's run would qualify for so-bad-it's-good, but instead it's just the facepalm nadir of the last decade of X-Men comics (which are already inconsistent at best). The good news is that things have (inconsistently) gotten better since then, and there are a number of runs you should consider picking up if you have any lingering love for the characters.
Austen then pitched a fit in interviews when fans objected to his gender politics and such scenes as Angel flying off with Husk, who drops her clothes onto her family members so that she and her then-beau can have sex in the sky over their family farm while everyone looks on. This was during a story arc that clearly ripped off of Romeo & Juliet, but not in a good way. For his last act, he pisses all over Morrison's excellent run (which was ongoing at the same time), by confusing blatantly obvious plot points so that he can make the story all about Mary Sue's son or something.
If its gender and sexual politics weren't so reprehensible then Austen's run would qualify for so-bad-it's-good, but instead it's just the facepalm nadir of the last decade of X-Men comics (which are already inconsistent at best). The good news is that things have (inconsistently) gotten better since then, and there are a number of runs you should consider picking up if you have any lingering love for the characters.
I have renewed respect for Chris Claremont, but I also think it's a little too easy to give him the White Knight Award. Yes, he's had a sustained investment in creating multi-dimensional female characters, but he's also made some frequent gaffes on that front too--namely, all the Phoenix nonsense, which made for great storytelling but ultimately rested on a Madonna/Whore complex sustained by the notion that women can't really handle power. That is the iconic X-Men story. Bad taste in mouth.
Granted, making a female character the main focus of a comic book for several years was still relatively progressive by late 70's/early 80's comic standards, and it seems like later efforts by Claremont (and others) have made an honest go at dealing with the implications.
Granted, making a female character the main focus of a comic book for several years was still relatively progressive by late 70's/early 80's comic standards, and it seems like later efforts by Claremont (and others) have made an honest go at dealing with the implications.
