Alrighty then, I HAD been prepping to do this on a Thai martial arts film, but today something hit me like a ton of bricks. Now I know that Johnnie has already done the queering for I am Legend, so normally I wouldn't even go near it, but I just watched the animated comic sequence on the DvD today, and one of them in particular really stood out.
For those who have NOT seen I am Legend, read the book, AND don't remember Johnnie's synopsis from class, the plot is relatively simple: Viral bioengineering cure for cancer mutates into horrible strain of zombie-vampire disease that sweeps across the world turning those infected into monsters who come out at night to feast on flesh. The movie follows Will Smith's character, Robert Neville, as he survives alone in New York and searches for a cure.
The animated comics, however, follow a series of other 'survivors' for a brief time.
"Shelter" [Warning: Extreeeeemely creepy with some animated gore]
-Written by none other than Orson Scott Card himself, incidentally.
This brief animated comic tells the story of a family in India attempting to seal themselves away while the epidemic ravages the world. One member of this family, the daughter Vastala, sneaks off to meet with her lover, Pritam before the family seals themselves away, against her fathers warnings of course. She ends up getting infected and kills her family before reuniting with a likewise infected Pritam and reveling in their mysterious newfound strength together.
Whats interesting about this story is that neither Pritam nor Vastala ever realize they are infected, and they both kill her family only because they see them as shadowy monsters. Likewise, Vastala's family don't recognize her as well, thinking that they accidentally let a raging monster into their haven.
Whats queer about this? Well, other than everything about the exotic, monstrous "other" dynamic that underlies the movie and comic entire, there's plenty there even in this relatively short sequence. We have a secret rendezvous with a lover, touching on the whole "forbidden love" fountain of queer. Also, one can find a "disowning" inherent in the father refusing to let the daughter into the bunker. Above all, however, the most strikingly queer aspect to 'Shelter' is the duality of the monster perception. When either side of this polarized epidemic views the other, they see hideous monsters, and react immediately with fear and rage. Neither group is truly the mindless evil antagonist, and neither perceive themselves as wrong or monstrous, they don't understand the "other's" perspective in any way shape or form.
Now let's take that idea and apply it to the movie itself. How do the Infected see Robert Neville? The lone creature that stalks the city while they sleep, trapping and killing and taking their family members away from them and then mysteriously disappearing without a trace before the burning light of day is gone and it is safe to look for the food they need to survive. And who's to say its wrong to eat one of those hideous hairy monsters? They seem to need no reason to kill, so why should the Infected go hungry? In this perspective, Robert Neville truly IS a legend. The kind of legend told to children to scare them into behaving, else they be taken during the day.
With that in mind, here's the alternate ending to the movie, the one where he DOESN'T just blow them all up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJHVDsLFTb8
You can really see the accusation of "monster" written all over the mind of the alpha-infected as he looks at Robert.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Blog 8
When a director goes to make a movie, they can go to whatever lengths their heart desires to put across one message or another, but the second the film in question touches an audience's eyes, the interpretation of the content is irrevocably passed on to them. Such is "Reception theory". No matter how much the creators and critics want to believe they have sovereignty over the meaning in films, in the end the only interpretation that matters is, well, everybody's. People can take just about any scenario, read in between the lines, and get a level of personal relevancy and worth out of it. For a long time, thats what gay men and women had to do when their stories were deemed "inappropriate" for the silver screen, taking heterosexually intended stories and themes and picking out moments of their own meaning. Take for example the movie Top Gun. Wow. For anybody willing to look for it, there are more 'moments' between Maverick and Iceman than they could wave a stick at. Hell, even the very last lines of the film are just seething with raw man-love potential meaning.
"Queering" a film, is a bit different from "gaying" (?) it, though the process is the same. Reconstructing a film with Queerocity (dibs) as opposed to just, say, homosexuality, is much more broad in its scope of simply looking for sources of present or potential transgressive tensions within a film. Thats not to say, however, that gay or lesbian readings of movies aren't queer. Far from being exclusive, the very nature of queer meaning in a film is inclusive to all shapes and sizes of transgression to be squeezed out of films. Instead of just reading Top Gun as a the moments between the pilots, It could be more generally queered with all of those moments, plus every other moment that any of those men broke the strict gendered rules on manly behavior, or some such.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Blog 6
"If you aren't part of the Problem, you aren't part of the Solution"
In the category of transgression, one doesn't directly contribute to the bending of the social construct unless actively a transgressor. In order for people to accept something (or at the very least 'tolerate' it), one method of going from the conceptual extreme to a more workable area is by sheer exposure. Reworking the general idea of the "norm" by forcing oneself into it via exposure with a pinch of stubbornness. Aside from simple inclusion into norms, when something shows itself to be either outside accepted norms or without even a way to THINK about it in shortcut terms, then this causes those within the norm to think in new ways and new languages. That is the key to inciting change in peoples minds. People always think they have the world figured out, and they'll always come to the same conclusions unless a radical new perspective shows them that their world of what is what just so happens to be quite a bit narrower than the world that just IS.
That is the "pinging under the hood", the sound of something not quite fitting, that odd never before heard noise that causes the "driver" to stop driving for a moment and actually check to see whats going on, to see if their system isn't working anymore to work within the narrow world.
The human animal is a creature of shortcuts. It goes about living in a world as narrow as it can make and still get by. In the world of survival as the ultimate goal, its actually quite the advantage, being able to quickly make decisions and come to conclusions about the world at large, without having to take all of the staggeringly huge amount of information out there all at once. Unfortunately, in a world where living solely for survival is no longer all there is, where self-actualization and communal-harmony are possible, these heuristics fall short of being helpful. It is hard, however to know what heuristics are harmful and which are innocuous. Figuring that if you knock on a melon and it makes a certain sound will tell you if its ripe or not isn't going to hurt anybody, except maybe the poor bruised honeydew. However, when our shortcut has us thinking implicitly about sex in terms of dominant masculine concepts, then we're into a whole other game. It's unfortunate, really, but something as simple as having two gender concepts has one set of people being consistently demeaned in our very terms of thought. In this scenario, the cookie cutter not only truncates personality from both concepts, but consistently limits the terms for one of the two to even be properly UNDERSTOOD, let alone allowed its whole self.
Another part of the reading really had me thinking. In order to fix the problems inherent in our system of norms, should we as transgressors fight for inclusion into the system or fight the very function of NEEDING inclusion in the first place. One involves more immediate rewards and at least a language capable of bridging understanding gaps, but ends up just treating a symptom instead of curing the ill. The latter of the two involves a much more radical revolution of thought and action on many levels all at once, getting at the cause of the problems but being supremely difficult due to a lack of the consistent communication required for a smooth social transition. Personally, I believe that the first of the two is more realistically feasible in a society that requires that level of communication for change to occur, despite my recognizing the latter as being ultimately a preferable goal. I think we have to coddle our society into understanding our ultimate goal by at first using terms it understands, without undermining ourselves by confusing one another, and then using that progress as a stepping stone to bludgeoning the system of norms with its own rattle.
In the category of transgression, one doesn't directly contribute to the bending of the social construct unless actively a transgressor. In order for people to accept something (or at the very least 'tolerate' it), one method of going from the conceptual extreme to a more workable area is by sheer exposure. Reworking the general idea of the "norm" by forcing oneself into it via exposure with a pinch of stubbornness. Aside from simple inclusion into norms, when something shows itself to be either outside accepted norms or without even a way to THINK about it in shortcut terms, then this causes those within the norm to think in new ways and new languages. That is the key to inciting change in peoples minds. People always think they have the world figured out, and they'll always come to the same conclusions unless a radical new perspective shows them that their world of what is what just so happens to be quite a bit narrower than the world that just IS.
That is the "pinging under the hood", the sound of something not quite fitting, that odd never before heard noise that causes the "driver" to stop driving for a moment and actually check to see whats going on, to see if their system isn't working anymore to work within the narrow world.
The human animal is a creature of shortcuts. It goes about living in a world as narrow as it can make and still get by. In the world of survival as the ultimate goal, its actually quite the advantage, being able to quickly make decisions and come to conclusions about the world at large, without having to take all of the staggeringly huge amount of information out there all at once. Unfortunately, in a world where living solely for survival is no longer all there is, where self-actualization and communal-harmony are possible, these heuristics fall short of being helpful. It is hard, however to know what heuristics are harmful and which are innocuous. Figuring that if you knock on a melon and it makes a certain sound will tell you if its ripe or not isn't going to hurt anybody, except maybe the poor bruised honeydew. However, when our shortcut has us thinking implicitly about sex in terms of dominant masculine concepts, then we're into a whole other game. It's unfortunate, really, but something as simple as having two gender concepts has one set of people being consistently demeaned in our very terms of thought. In this scenario, the cookie cutter not only truncates personality from both concepts, but consistently limits the terms for one of the two to even be properly UNDERSTOOD, let alone allowed its whole self.
Another part of the reading really had me thinking. In order to fix the problems inherent in our system of norms, should we as transgressors fight for inclusion into the system or fight the very function of NEEDING inclusion in the first place. One involves more immediate rewards and at least a language capable of bridging understanding gaps, but ends up just treating a symptom instead of curing the ill. The latter of the two involves a much more radical revolution of thought and action on many levels all at once, getting at the cause of the problems but being supremely difficult due to a lack of the consistent communication required for a smooth social transition. Personally, I believe that the first of the two is more realistically feasible in a society that requires that level of communication for change to occur, despite my recognizing the latter as being ultimately a preferable goal. I think we have to coddle our society into understanding our ultimate goal by at first using terms it understands, without undermining ourselves by confusing one another, and then using that progress as a stepping stone to bludgeoning the system of norms with its own rattle.
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