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denimbex1986 · 9 months

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'Christopher Nolan remains one of the most significant filmmakers of the 21st century. The mere fact that stating this aloud invites a bit of controversy underlines how outsized a footprint the writer-director has left during the first 25 years of his career. Celebrated by some as a formative auteur in the lives of young cineastes, and derided by others as the patron saint of “film bros” who devour hyper-masculine Hollywood spectacle (particularly if it features capes), Nolan’s already built a formidable and debated legacy.

But in the summer of 2023, his impact was crystalized again when Nolan convinced one of the ever increasingly risk-averse Hollywood studios to invest more than $100 million into an R-rated, three-hour, and existentially despairing biopic, and then released it at the height of summer. That the movie opened bigger than most of the year’s alleged blockbusters, and bigger than any Nolan film not starring Batman, is a testament to the mystique this singular storyteller has cultivated with audiences. Only a handful of other directors have developed such a wide following by melding artistic intent with shrewd commercial sensibilities.

But if Oppenheimer is something of a culmination for the last quarter-century of output from the filmmaker, does that mean it’s his best? And where do the other 11 films he’s helmed rank? We have some ideas….

12. Following (1998)

Christopher Nolan’s first film was a production the young talent shot with his wife and producer, Emma Thomas, and their friends on weekends. No one wanted it to conflict with their day jobs. It’s a testament, then, to Nolan’s earliest craft that you could never tell this by watching Following. However, you can definitely recognize this is a first film from a talented if still rough around the edges filmmaker.

Released when Nolan was only 28, the movie is in many ways an experiment in themes and ideas that would color the rest of the writer-director’s filmography. Like most of Nolan’s early output, it’s a neo-noir picture about the self-destructive obsession of a flawed protagonist, who in this case cannot help but pursue his desire to follow strangers home. In a narrative unspooled via nonlinear storytelling, and shot on black-and-white 16mm film stock, we are invited to likewise follow a nameless and unemployed young man (Jeremy Theobald) as he walks behind strangers for fun. The lad’s vaguely Hitchcockian voyeurism becomes his undoing, though, after he is spotted spying on the criminal underworld. Viewed today, it’s not entirely polished, and the narrative strands more knot and jumble than weave and coalesce. Still, the compelling hook of Nolan’s penchant for unconventional structure and unreliable narrators was already in place.

11. Tenet (2020)

Contentiously released during the fall of 2020 at Nolan’s insistence, Tenet positioned itself as a savior of movie houses during the pandemic. This was, in retrospect, a tall order for what is Nolan’s most ambitious action movie, as well as his most remote and exasperatingly opaque. Reappraisals have already begun, with some arguing Tenet was the director attempting to see how far he could lead audiences down the path of esoteric “vibes”—there is the famous line “don’t try to understand it, feel it”—but we’d contend Tenet remains a bridge too far.

With the conventions of modern action cinema intentionally sketched at their thinnest and most utilitarian (John David Washington’s character is simply called “The Protagonist”), Tenet nonetheless presents a dizzyingly complex world and challenging sci-fi idea in which the entropy of objects and even people can be inverted—allowing most things to travel backward in time. Yet the execution is so needlessly obtuse, and the sound design intentionally confounding, that it doesn’t matter if you understand it; the main thing you’re feeling is frustration and annoyance. There are some dazzling action set pieces, and Hoyte van Hoytema’s cinematography and Ludwig Göransson’s score are sumptuous, but even after figuring out just how many Robert Pattinsons are running around at various stages of inversion, the movie remains little more than a stylish puzzle box that’s far too pleased with its configuration.

10. Insomnia (2002)

Very few directors on this side of the millennium have gotten Al Pacino to deliver a restrained and sharp performance that understands some lines can actually be underplayed to marvelous effect. Christopher Nolan is one of them thanks to his icy remake of a Norwegian film of the same name. Another excursion into neo-noir, Insomnia follows in the footsteps of many post-Se7en and Silence of the Lambs Hollywood murder procedurals, casting one movie star as the cop (Pacino) and the other as the killer (Robin Williams).

The cold-blooded cunning of Insomnia comes from the revelation that the killer is no genius, but rather a somewhat pathetic loner with a reptilian brain who, through a grim twist of luck, is able to blackmail his pursuer into becoming his accomplice. In hindsight, the film’s fascination with the duality between hero and villain was a warm-up act for The Dark Knight, but the restrained Insomnia is often more unsettling due to how calmly both actors are asked to essay their characters, with Williams making for an exceptionally soft-spoken demon, and Pacino for a compelling corrupt cop circling the drain. If the film was allowed to better breakaway from the conventions of these types of early 2000s movies, it might’ve been an actual classic instead of an absorbing, if less memorable, star vehicle from an era when studios would let stars appear in such fare.

9. Batman Begins (2005)

The placement of the Batman films on this list will undoubtedly be the most contentious thing for readers, but please understand we all think Batman Begins is a great piece of entertainment, as well as the finest superhero origin story ever produced. Told with what was at the time a shocking amount of gravitas and charm, Batman Begins recognized superhero movies as material worthy of serious cinematic consideration. Such a feat arguably had not been seen since Superman: The Movie (1978). Yet therein lies Batman Begins’ limitations.

While Nolan’s first Batman film is still the best version of any caped origin story, Batman Begins follows to a tee the formula as set down by Dick Donner in ’78. That does not take away from how confidently well-formed this film is, as well as how it offers the still best cinematic interpretation of Bruce Wayne, who is given a poignant dignity in Christian Bale’s sad eyes. Together, the director and star perform their own kind of stage illusion, convincing audiences to take a man dressed up as a Bat seriously. Somehow you buy into the idea that he is a major city’s best hope at an urban renewal. It’s an intriguing idea to turn the Caped Crusader into something of a theatrical political campaign—one whose surrogates include a murderer’s row of acting talent like Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, and Morgan Freeman. It’s also the beginning of a fruitful relationship between Nolan and Caine, the latter of whom appeared in all but one of Nolan’s following nine movies. However, many of those others were better, not least because their third acts did not descend into stock genre trappings.

8. The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

Yes, a case can be made for The Dark Knight Rises being Nolan’s second best Batman film. Often overshadowed by its direct and far superior predecessor, The Dark Knight, Rises is usually written off as the ugly duckling of the trilogy. That’s ridiculous. Told with a sweeping grandeur intentionally evocative of David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago, and prescient in its fear of a demagogue’s ability to turn an American crowd into an angry mob unleashed on the halls of power, this is the type of epic, cinematic storytelling we rarely see anymore. And it looks nothing like any other superhero movie that’s been made before or since.

Beyond its scope remains a film that also raises a still subversive and controversial question in this genre. What if the hero lets go of his pain, and learns to put away the simplistic morality of a mask? Christian Bale gives his best performance as a wounded and broken Bruce Wayne who needs to grow up before he grows old, and also before he is pulverized by one of the most memorable screen villains of the last decade, Tom Hardy’s infinitely quotable Bane. (It’s also genuinely impressive Nolan confidently keeps the Batman costume off-screen for over an hour.) Throw in Anne Hathaway’s slinkiest performance as an underrated Catwoman, as well as some stunning action sequences, and you’re left with the rare thing: a satisfying ending to a superhero story.

7. Dunkirk (2017)

Despite crossing over into the relatively well worn genre of war films, Dunkirk proved to be Nolan’s most experimental project to date. Told with a clockmaker’s precision and blocked with what might be the director’s most painterly compositions, Dunkirk foregoes anything in the way of modern cinematic storytelling, particularly at Hollywood studios, in favor of a stripped down and overtly challenging narrative structure. There are no character names (at least any you’ll remember), scenes of audience-aiding exposition (one of the weaker elements in Nolan’s scripts), or nearly any dialogue at all for that matter.

Instead Nolan relies on a visceral film language to convey all the important information through imagery. If not for its bombastic sound design and Hans Zimmer’s propulsive score, Dunkirk could be a silent movie, albeit a unique one since it’s told on three parallel timelines that converge during the darkest hour of Britain’s war effort in WWII: getting 338,000 soldiers off French shores before the Nazis close in. No other film has quite immersed audiences into the overpowering desperation to survive during war, nor has Nolan ever surpassed the visual poetry of Hardy standing before the burning wreckage of his plane at twilight on a beach, personifying British resolve while caught in the seeming jaws of defeat.

6. The Prestige (2006)

In what might qualify as their first self-reflective film, Chris and his brother Jonathan Nolan liberally adapt Christopher Priest’s The Prestige into a treatise on the sacrifices an artist will undergo in order to master their craft—perfecting the ability to ensnare and enrapture an audience. But like the book, it’s channeled through the enigmatic spectacle of two Victorian illusionists descending into a lifelong rivalry that turns fatal.

As these selfish magicians, Bale and Hugh Jackman do some of their most under-appreciated work, each representing one of the key sides of talent: the artist who wants to be the best in their field, and the showman who wants to be adored by the crowd. Technically, this movie is a period piece, but its urgency and zeal feels timeless. Still, the character it might most sympathize with is a definite relic of its setting, Nicola Tesla, who after watching the film now seems to have always been destined to be played by David Bowie. Tesla was a genius in his time, yet was overshadowed by the capitalistic cunning of men like Thomas Edison. Back then, Edison was called “the Wizard of Menlo Park” (inspiring another Oz-ian figure in fiction), but as realized here, Tesla was the true magician; a man who applied practical science and technology to problems until he created, as one character shudders, “real magic.”

5. Interstellar (2014)

Nolan has never been a director to hide his influences. In fact, he often wears them on his sleeve, such as when Interstellar overtly announces it will try to go beyond the monumental benchmark set by Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. If that movie’s journey ends among the moons of Jupiter, then Interstellar’s galaxy-brained odyssey begins in a wormhole just off Saturn! That’s chutzpah for you. But while Interstellar is no 2001, it is still one of the best sci-fi movies of the past 20 years and almost certainly better than you remember.

Despite the director being rightly criticized for a frequently chilly and cerebral disposition in his films, Interstellar is an aching exception to that rule, with Nolan not-so-subtly grappling with feelings of guilt and regret over leaving his kids at home for extended periods of time. For Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) and his young daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy), this is taken to a cosmic extreme because, in order to save the human species from climate change, Coop and several other scientists travel to another galaxy where time dilation makes decades pass on Earth in the span of a day on the ship.

In terms of scope, it’s Nolan’s biggest film, and yet it is also his most intimate and sentimental—which doesn’t mean it isn’t chilling due to the horror of a parent seeing Foy age into Jessica Chastain in the blink of an eye. The movie’s also fairly wondrous, with the filmmaker and Nobel Prize-winning physicist Kip Thorne correctly hypothesizing what a black hole would look like before the real thing was photographed several years later. This is a sweeping epic that haunts, and this is in large part due to Hans Zimmer’s ecclesiastical, organ-driven score. Zimmer may not have won the Oscar that year, but it’s telling the Academy used Interstellar music for their own 90-year retrospective a few years later.

4. Memento (2000)

The lone independent film with a serious budget in the director’s oeuvre, Memento remains the cool kid answer to the question of what is the best Nolan film. And sure enough, to this day it’s a defining calling card. As the infamous neo-noir thriller “told backwards,” Memento is a marvelous magic trick where Nolan, working from a shorty story by his brother Jonathan, perfected his nonlinear filmmaking with a puzzle box that intrigues and engrosses on every rewatch.

In the film, we meet Leonard (Guy Pearce). Leonard has short-term memory loss, which means he knows no better than the audience why he’s left a note to himself to execute Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) on a crappy concrete floor. Yet as the narrative unspools mostly in reverse, we learn a great deal about Leonard’s disorienting condition, and slowly how he had a hand in crafting his own hell. In some respects, Memento is a stylish showpiece meant mostly to impress and flabbergast the audience through its narrative cleverness. That isn’t a bad thing though when the movie is this stylish and clever. Ironically, it even becomes pretty unforgettable.

3. Inception (2010)

The other sci-fi movie that’s really about moviemaking on the list, Inception has probably entered the status of a classic at this point with its now iconic narrative about chic thieves infiltrating the dreams of wealthy marks. The parallels between the team assembled by Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and the heads of various filmmaking departments are well-known these days, but beyond the film’s meta and intertextual qualities is just a dazzling triumph in imagination and spectacle.

Cobb and his team dress like the most refined members of a James Bond ensemble, yet the actual posh worlds they move through are enticingly knotty, slowly unfurling their complexities like the M.C. Escher stairs the film pointedly duplicates. Stacking dreams atop dreams, and expanding time compressions on each layer, Inception invites audiences to get lost in its labyrinth, even as it wisely never lets go of the audience’s hand while acting as our guide. This paradox of being both convoluted and surprisingly simple may be the secret of Nolan’s appeal, and those two sensibilities are rarely in better harmony than in the one with visions of a rotating hotel hallway and the skyline of Paris folding in on top of itself as Hans Zimmer’s deconstruction of “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” blares.

For some, this is the definitive Nolan film. And that case can definitely be made, yet the film is such a mind game—and the emotional crux between Cobb and his underwritten wife Mal (Marion Cotillard) is such a frosty center—that there are a few more we give the edge to.

2. Oppenheimer (2023)

In many respects, Oppenheimer seems to be the movie Nolan’s entire career has been building toward. Interspersed nonlinear timelines, dreamers attempting to make the visions a reality, and tales about obsessive individuals pursuing an idea until it destroys them are all realized in IMAX photography by Hoyte van Hoytema that is as intimate as it is overpowering. But by removing Nolan’s usual genre and action set-piece flourishes, and instead centering these larger fixations on the tragic story of J. Robert Oppenheimer and his creation of the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer makes Nolan’s muses more visceral and despairing than they’ve ever been before.

The terms “magic trick” and “illusion” come up a lot when discussing Nolan’s filmography, but the horror of Oppenheimer’s work is there is nothing illusory about what he created; it changed the world by (maybe) saving it from a lot more carnage in WWII but it also did so by committing a war atrocity that put us on a path to seemingly inevitable self-annihilation. Oppenheimer realizes this in his head, and the film likewise does so with Nolan blending multiple timelines in the editing like a composer utilizes an orchestra. The effect is an incredibly suspenseful panic attack that never lets go of your nerves in spite of a three-hour running time and settings rarely more grand than men sitting at a table. The ensemble is phenomenal even if (once again) the women don’t get enough to do. Nonetheless, Nolan’s frequent collaborator Cillian Murphy turns in the performance of a lifetime as Oppie, and it’s in service of a film that increasingly appears to be a masterpiece.

1. The Dark Knight (2008)

It’s almost a cliché these days to place The Dark Knight at the top of any list it appears on, and yet the gloomy draw of the superhero film is as irresistible now as it was 15 years ago. Exceeding anything its genre has produced before or after its release, The Dark Knight is a transcendent feat in American moviemaking and one of the finest films produced by the modern studio system.

Ironically, it’s also a film that stands apart for Nolan as well. To date, it’s the only movie on this list told entirely in a chronological order, and one that seems less concerned with the effects of time on an individual as it is with the weight of the future on a greater collective. Indeed, Gotham City has never more convincingly felt like a real place than in this ensemble film about how American institutions crack under pressure (particularly due to the threat of terrorism in the post-9/11 years). Gary Oldman’s copper Jim Gordon and Aaron Eckhart’s district attorney Harvey Dent are as much protagonists as Bale’s tortured vigilante. And how they all react to the existential threat of Heath Ledger’s Joker is exhilarating on each viewing.

Ledger deserved his posthumous Oscar as chaos and nihilism made flesh. He turned a comic book character into one of the greatest portraits of ill-intent in cinema, but everything about this film is firing on all cylinders, from Nolan and cinematographer Wally Pfister pioneering IMAX photography in narrative filmmaking to Michael Caine’s perfectly measured monologue about the nature of evil and societal collapse. This is a movie decidedly of its moment, yet also an achievement that will stand for all time.'

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sacredbodiesca · 1 year

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THAT MOMENT, BREAKING—Apprenticeship to Love: Daily Meditation, Inspirations, and Practices for the Sacred Masculine, October 31 • For the full meditation, practice, & more from tomorrow’s #apprenticeshiptolove chapter please subscribe on Substack or email me at [email protected] and be one of the free “first 1000 early readers.” • Two of tomorrow’s Inspirations… “The moment you think: “Yess, I’m in balance!”, something unexpected happens and… you are out of balance again, hèhè! It happens so often, that it seems to be part of life. It actually shows us that being out of balance is okay! The question is: How are you dealing with ideas, diagnoses, interpretations, judgements that say that you are out of balance?…” (Tim & Marieke, Kundalini Yoga School, Creativity sadhana) “The second obstacle I see men face [in their disconnect between desire and ability] is a real connection to feeling —not just emotion, but the ability to sense their own bodies and environments.” (John Wineland, From the Core) ✨ ✨ ✨ #pathofthesacredmasculine #husbandman #authenticrelationships #love #nervoussystem #devotion #surrender #choosevulnerability #siren #sirensong #nervoussystemtraining #patience #masculine #menshealth #marriage #unconventional #relationships #trust #confidence #safety #awareness #herosjourney #sacredmasculine #menswork #SACREDSEX #presence (at Courtenay, British Columbia) https://www.instagram.com/p/CkWPGalPKqG/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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letswonderspirit · 3 years

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Character design of a spooky skeleton! 🧡💀🎃

#character design #skeleton art #spooky #Halloween #my art #my oc’s #I have only heart eyes for her 🥺💕#what do you think I should name her? cause I was thinking maybe Joel #or John or something unconventional and masculine

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fantasy-anatomy-analyst · 3 years

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(image description: eight sketchbook drawings of characters holding a variety of pride flags, all nude and posed in ways that match some old fine art pieces. The nudity has been censored with cute digital flower stickers. end description.)

Characters:

Dalmar, intersex man. Kouto, nonbinary. Chacha, agender. Parva, nonbinary. Xulic and Kidron, genderqueer. Obeli (or Abuela) Moruga, genderqeer. Olli, demiguy. Sajak, genderqueer.

Genderqueer is kind of my default for "well, biologically and culturally, they already don't have binary sex or gender, so they kinda default to genderqueer." And I know maybe some people will be bothered by that, but it's just part of the worldbuilding I've written around all these non-human and frequently non-mammalian species of people.

The uncensored version is on my Patreon page. I do have one more drawing to add to this series, but since it's four child characters I will not need to worry about adding any censors and keeping the original image only on my patreon, as they will simply be wearing their pride flags as whole outfits.

The previous part of this, my binary trans characters, can be found over here.

detailed character descriptions and explanations of the pose references under the cut

Dalmar Ubora, a black intersex elf man with short black hair. He is holding his arms up as he holds the intersex flag, mimicking the pose of Virgin Mary from Titian's painting "The Assumption of the Virgin". The shading was washed out by the photo, but his belly is still clearly round from pregnancy. Dalmar is an interesting case, in that he was assigned male at birth based on his outward appearance, continues to identify as male throughout his life, but finds during puberty that what was believed to be an undeveloped penis was actually just a non functional body part. Instead, what actually developed to full functionality was his uterus. He still identifies as a straight cis man, and has come to terms with his body. He is married to a medically transitioned trans woman, and he could undergo operations to change his body if he wanted to. Instead, he has embraced his body and even birthed some children who were conceived via sperm donations. This is why I wanted a Mary pose for him, and this painting in particular is about Mary being welcomed into heaven as a blessed holy woman. Dalmar may not be a miraculous holy figure, but there is a reverence in the way he has come to love his body and chosen to bear children, including the surrogate birth of his brother's child.

Kouto Hayashi-Loryck, a slender nonbinary elf with black hair tied into a bun. They are holding the nonbinary flag and standing in the pose of a statue known as "Apollo Belvedere", which is so old no one knows the artist's name. One arm raised, one lowered, legs in the relaxed contrapposto pose. Kouto is an artist and an art model. Apollo is a god of the arts, and regarded as a beautiful and sexual figure. Kouto is bisexual and admittedly a very sexual and flirtatious person. They did settle into a happy marriage though (actually they are Dalmar's in-law and the sperm donor for the aforementioned surrogate birth.) Marriage has not stopped Kouto's flirtations, merely limited their targets to a singular person. It felt right to give him this pose, from a pretty well known portrayal of Apollo. Beauty, art, and sex, all defining traits of Apollo and Kouto alike, all present in a pose where the figure seems to be reaching for something above them.

Chacha Faraji, an agender black elf with short hair. They are facing away from the viewer, seated on a stool that is covered by the draped agender flag. No physical traits that could betray their agab are visible. Chacha is sitting in the pose of Reubens' painting "Venus at the Mirror". The arm closest to the viewer ends at the elbow, while they hold a mirror in front of their face with their one whole arm. Their face is seen reflected, smiling, little wrinkles visible by their eyes. I chose this painting in part because it did allow me to obscure Chacha's agab. They were my first nonbinary character, and I never really settled on an agab. But also, I enjoy putting characters who have unconventional bodies into poses associated with Venus or Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty. Chacha is missing half an arm, they are getting older and it shows in the wrinkles on their face. Chacha is also Aromantic and Asexual, the full queer triple A battery. The mirror pose has become an independence of beauty. "Look but don't touch." Chacha is beautiful, and they do not need to be beautiful for anyone but themself.

Parva Turbatus, a white nonbinary elf with shoulder length curly hair that has been shaved down on the far side of their head. They are holding the nonbinary flag, standing in the slightly closed off pose found in Paul Gariot's painting "Pandora's Box". One hand on their chest, one hand held out to hold the flag. They have top surgery scars on their chest and a c-section scar on their navel, though all of these have unfortunately been hidden by the flower censors. I chose a pandora pose for Parva because they have one of the most intense tragic backstories of any of my characters. Like Pandora opening the box, they have suffered through many things but came out the other side with Hope, and healing.

Xulic Vos and Kidron Engedi, a drow and a lizard person. They are sharing the genderqueer flag. Xulic has long ears and white hair in a braid, with a white monkey-like tail barely visible behind their legs. Kidron looks like a leopard gecko, and their tail is acting as a visual block in fron of Xulic's groin. They are standing together in the central pose of Raphael's "School of Athens" fresco. Xulic is pointing one hand up to the sky, while Kidron holds one hand palm down towards the earth. Xulic's chest is visibly flat, however I have rewritten the drow as a eusocial people, who's biology has made most of the common population infertile and visibly near identical above the waist. Xulic's agab is unknown to anyone but them, and perhaps their reptilian lover Kidron. Both drow and lizard folk have biology and cultures that do not really support a gender binary, so genderqueer suits them both quite well. I chose the School of Athens pose because these characters are scientists in fields that overlap, and they often get into deep discussions on the matter. Xulic is a paleontologist while Kidron is a geologist, and they have another friend (my protagonist) who studies archaeology.

Obeli (or Abuela) Moruga, an elderly goblin with sagging skin and axolotl-like frills on the sides of her head. She grins as she holds the gender queer flag, partly draped over the tall stool she is seated on. Her pose matches that of John Collier's "Priestess of Delphi" painting, which depicts a woman hunched over herself on a stool. Old Obeli Moruga, whose title best translates to "grandmother" is a significant figure in her community, both because of her more practical role as a leader and wise woman, but also because she has gained immortality and become an incarnation of Life Itself, after she was given the offer of such power when she nearly died in the goblin revolution. There are many figures that would suit her. Poses from statues of goddesses, like Athena or Gaia. Perhaps turning away from the theme of greek and roman figures I ended up with for my nonbinary group (dalmar is his own thing) and using the famous painting of Liberty on a battlefield. But now in her old age, all those poses of figures in more active poses, tall and imposing, simply didn't feel right. A wise old woman, hunched on a stool in a pose associated with the idea of an oracle, a priestess, a prophetess, felt much more fitting. (goblin culture does have specific pronouns for leadership, and in the common speech they have decided this translates best to the feminine "she/her")

Olli Moruga, also a goblin with axolotl-like frills, standing with the demiguy flag in his hands. He is in the pose of Michaelangelo's statue of Bacchus, god of wine, merriment, and madness. One hand up as if to salute with a cup, body leaning and perhaps a little unstable. Olli is a gay demiguy, stepping away from the naturally ungendered state of his people to embrace masculinity instead. He is extroverted, loves a good party, and has definitely been a little over his depth with alcohol on many occasions. He knows this is a problem. He used to act rebellious because of it, trying to be cool and aloof, but he has since admitted the truth to himself and now openly seeks help. His trans lover, Zaire (seen in a previous post) has become a great support to him. Even though it may seem odd to use the pose of a god of wine for a character that is trying to overcome an alcohol issue, I still feel like the vibe of Bacchus or Dionysus fits Olli well. He is not only a god of wine, but also of pleasure in general, a concept Olli embraces. Wild joy, perhaps to the point of becoming a little feral, abandoning tradition for personal fulfillment. It is unusual for goblins to embrace a binary gender, even partially. Gendered pronouns do not exist in their tongue, only being used in cases where common speech needs to be used to refer to certain significant figures, such as a leader. It is also unusual for a goblin to take a lover outside their species, since most goblins live in fairly isolated places and all mate together seasonally, depositing their eggs in a communal nursery pool. Olli stands out on purpose.

Lastly, Sajak, an amphibious person with some fish-like features such as their finned ears and a barely visible dorsal fin. They are holding the genderqueer flag as they stand in a commanding pose, one foot on a rock, one arm held out as if pointing to something below them. This pose is taken from the central Poseidon statue in the fountain of Trevi. Their head, arms, and torso are covered in dark tattoos in abstract designs, and they also have a few natural dark stripes along their arms and legs. The obvious connection between Sajak and this statue of Poseidon is that Sajak is a fish person and Poseidon is an ocean god. If I could have thought of a more medical figure, I may have made a different choice in the art reference. Sajak is primarily a doctor, a healer. They are fairly well known and they were an important figure on their home island, though they did leave eventually. Even so, there is a certain vibe to Sajak that suits the image of a powerful and unpredictable oceanic god. They are steady, intelligent, and careful, but they can become fierce when their loved ones are under threat, and the intense focus they show in their work as a doctor can be intimidating to see. There is a feeling of hidden power within Sajak, just as there is in the ocean when it seems calm. Fish folk, whether bipedal and amphibious or fully aquatic, also fit under my category of "non-mammalian people who are just kind of genderqueer by default due to their biology not fitting into a binary".

#figure art #figure drawing #nonbinary #intersex #genderqueer #queer ocs #winks ocs #image description #accessible art #my designs #drow #lizard folk #elves #goblins #merfolk

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4shfur · 3 years

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You asked, so you shall recieve. Here’s my essay on neopronouns. I don’t know if it’s really good I onlyhave my teachers word but oh well.

My essay is an argument in support of neopronouns.

What exactly is a neopronoun? Pronouns, like she/her, he/him, and they/them are terms used to refer to people. Neo- means “new”, or “reborn”. Something that is rising in popularity, and coming back. “Neopronoun” is a term used to describe any set of gender-neutral pronouns that differ from the usual set of she/her, they/them , and he/him. Examples of neopronouns are ze/zir, fey/fem, and xe/xem. Unfortunately, neopronouns get quite a lot of undeserved hate from uninformed people.

Neopronouns aren’t just used in English though. Many languages around the word tend to be gendered, and don’t have any gender neutral pronouns, like they/them. In French, for example, there are only two types of words, feminine and masculine. There aren’t any gender neutral pronouns at all, so people create gender neutral pronouns, like ille/illes, which is a combination of the french pronouns “il” (he), and “elle” (she).

One of the main arguments is that neopronouns are just a “fad” or “trend” that has only come up recently. This is untrue. Neopronouns have been around for over two hundred centuries, actually. In 1789, the gender neutral “ou” pronoun was first recorded in literature, and the singular pronoun “a” was used as well. In 1864, the gender neutral “ze” pronoun was recorded in writing, and many other pronouns, such as “ne”, “heesh”, “er”, “ve”, “en”, “han”, “un”, “le”, “e”, and “ip” were also created, just to name a few. In 1884, thon/thon pronouns were created by American composer C. C. Converse as a combination of the phrase “that one”. And they were included in multiple dictionaries, though they fell into disuse. In 1912, Ella Flag Young created the pronoun set of heer/himer/hiser, probably as a combination of the traditional he/him/his and she/her/hers pronouns. Like thon/thon, hee/himer/hiser pronouns and ze pronouns have been featured in copies of dictionaries before, but have fallen into disuse. Although this is only some of the most prominent occurrences before the 2000’s there have been many more instances of people creating or going by gender neutral pronouns.

The second argument against neopronouns is that they’re “unconventional” and “unnecessary”. Plenty of people tend to ignore one of the most prominent reasons why neopronouns have sprung up again. Neopronouns have commonly been created and/or used by neurodivergent people, who feel a disconnect from the usual three sets of pronouns. People using neopronouns may want to avoid singular they/them being confused with plural they/them. Neopronouns may also express something about their gender and/or sexuality better than the traditional pronouns. Nounself pronouns are also a type of neopronouns. Examples would be bun/bunself, and star/starself. Those pronouns are just as important as abstract neopronouns and should be respected. The way someone expresses their identity is not your duty to police.

Many people argue you can’t just “make up pronouns” and forget that the traditional pronouns, he/him, she/her, and they/them, were also all made up. Originally, the only pronouns used were he/him. She/her pronouns were first used in the twelfth century, and the gender neutral pronouns were still he/him. In 1851, John Stuart Mill complained that there wasn’t a gender neutral pronouns besides he, stating that the use of it was making almost half the population (women) invisible. They/them pronouns were first used in the 17th century, followed soon after by what we know as neopronouns.

Pronouns are like names. Each person feels comfortable with a different name. You wouldn’t insist on calling every girl you met “Jane”, would you? Or every boy you met “Henry”. Pronouns are an important part of someone’s identity, just like names, and it’s important to respect that and use the correct pronouns. Overall, neopronouns are beneficial and beautiful, and deserve none of the hate they get.

Baron, Dennis “Nonbinary Pronouns are Older Than You Think” The Web of Language, October 13th, 2018

https://blogs.illinois.edu/view/25/705317

“Pronouns” UNF - LGBTQ Center

https://www.unf.edu/lgbtqcenter/Pronouns.aspx

“Neopronouns” LGBTA Wiki

https://lgbta.wikia.org/wiki/Neopronouns#Regional_Nominative_Pronouns

“Pronouns” Nonbinary Wiki

https://nonbinary.wiki/wiki/Pronouns#French_neutral_pronouns

#ahhhhhh #please tell me if its good or not #constructive criticism is appreciated #fbjzfbjsbgmsngmd #not wc #zin speaks

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ajedisith · 5 years

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An Equal Relationship

The topic of romance in Little Women has been one of much contention since the novel’s conception. Ironically, decades later I venture on a journey to write about Jo March’s love life when Louisa May Alcott would probably have preferred literally any other topic about the character. But I’ve never viewed the novel or Jo’s story as a “romance,” but more so a story about four sisters with romantic subplots.

Little Women takes place in the mid-19th century amidst the backdrop of a divided America recovering from the harsh realities of the Civil War. Most women’s lives during this period are tied to the home “with little opportunity for outside contact” or most other kinds of experiences. The promise of women’s suffrage and higher education is still on the very distant horizon. Even when they are admitted to colleges, educators fear “their health [is] threatened” if they follow the “intellectual rigors of the male curriculum.” The “Cult of Domesticity” plays a significant role in shaping the lives of women as homemakers and child bearers (Hartman).

Louisa May Alcott’s deeply rooted connection with the Transcendentalist movement and its most prominent thinkers influences Jo March’s relationship with Friedrich Bhaer and how she describes him in the novel. Alcott’s progressive father was consumed by an unorthodox passion to educate his daughters at a time when a woman’s educational opportunities were limited. Her family lived near brilliant Transcendentalist reformers of the day, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne. She received lessons from Ralph Waldo Emerson and frequented Henry David Thoreau’s library to read great works of literature that sparked her interest in writing creative stories to support her family. Her early exposure to progressive ideas about the value of individualism had a significant effect on her writings, including the themes about family and ambition presented in Little Women.

Some speculate that Alcott may have based Friedrich Bhaer off of the Transcendentalist thinkers whose ideas so intimately spoke to her feminist perspective. For example, in the novel Friedrich is described as personable with an ability to attract people with his unique charm. Similarly, although Thoreau’s historical image is that of a hermit, he actually entertained guests, visited friends, and frequented the nearby town. In her journals, Alcott describes her admiration for Thoreau’s philosophies, calling him the “the man who has helped [her] most by his life, his books, his society” (Rogers). Furthermore, Emerson’s kind presence, musical voice, and commanding style of speech during his philosophical lectures captivated audiences. His 1838 speech at the divinity school in Cambridge was a passionate speech about self-reliance and religion (Brewton). Comparatively, Jo’s fascination with Friedrich’s impassioned speech about religion at the symposium is due to his “honest indignation” and “eloquence of truth,” which makes “his broken English musical and his plain face beautiful.” Additionally in the novel, Friedrich is described as having “a sympathetic face” and kind eyes. Alcott derives many of Friedrich’s tenderly masculine traits -- introversion, compassion, soft-spoken charm -- from the very men who were close family friends and who shaped her own philosophical views. Friedrich Bhaer is an unconventional romantic interest just as the men who shaped Alcott’s life were unconventional intellectuals.

Louisa May Alcott believed that most women were marrying for economic reasons. She loved luxury, but “freedom and independence more” (“Alcott”). In Little Women, Mrs. March believes that “[m]oney is a needful and precious thing,” but it isn’t “the first or only prize to strive for.” She would rather see her daughters as “poor men's wives,” if they are happy and content than “queens on thrones, without self-respect and peace.” Alcott herself never married -- perhaps because she could never find anyone who sympathized with her strong feminist ideals -- and the passage emphasizes the notion that marriage for the purpose of economic stability is a restriction and that marriage is not the end all and be all of a woman’s existence. Alcott uses the theme as a backdrop to Jo’s dynamic with wealthy socialite Laurie and penniless intellectual Friedrich. She emphasizes both characters’ social statuses throughout the novel to highlight more important distinctions about their personalities and their distinctive interactions with Jo. Where Jo and Laurie’s friendship represents a connection of two like-minded yet strong-willed young people trying to seek belonging in one another, Jo and Friedrich’s dynamic is one of equals in which Jo is challenged to push her limits and grow intellectually and spiritually.

Jo March is an ambitious, independent, strong-willed tomboy who wants to be a famous writer and seeks a life of deeper meaning than simply conforming to societal traditions of marriage and domesticity. Jo’s most passionate hobby is reading and in many ways it influences her intellectual curiosity about 1860s society. One day, Meg finds her sister “eating apples and crying over the Heir of Redclyffe;” it is Jo’s “favorite refuge.” Additionally, she somehow puts up with her job as Aunt March’s companion because the moment Aunt March is asleep or distracted, she devours “poetry, history, romance, [and] travels like a regular bookworm,” but she has to “leave her paradise” when she is called to do her duties.

Jo’s tomboyish nature and views against love depict her desire for non-conformity because to her conformity is synonymous with a broken family, loneliness, and the denial of her intellectual pursuits. She hates to think that she has to “grow [to] be Miss March, and wear long gowns” because it’s “bad enough to be a girl [...] when [she likes] boy’s games and work and manners.” Her insecurities about womanhood are emphasized when she tells Meg she wishes she could be a child for a long time. She observes that “Margaret [is] fast getting to be a woman and Laurie’s secret [that Meg and John Brooke are in love makes] her dread the separation that surely must come.” Nonetheless, she responds erratically when it becomes evident that John will take Meg away from her family -- she’s incredibly rude to John when he visits Meg, but she’s extremely ecstatic to see the regular ole’ postman. Jo wishes that they would hurry and get married because she’s uncomfortable with the idea that “Meg is not like [her] old self, and [seems] ever so far away from her.” Jo knows how things will eventually turn out, so she wants to make it a brief, sentimental separation for herself, instead of a drawn out, painful one.

Given Jo’s strong views on womanhood and her curiosity about upending social norms, she dreams of intellectual pursuits far removed from what is expected of mid-19th century women. Her ambition is to “do something very splendid,” but her “sharp tongue and restless spirit” are constantly “getting her into scrapes” when she ventures out into the world, removed from the comfort of her homely upbringing. She even admits that “her greatest fault is her temper” and “her greatest ambition is to be a genius.” It is precisely her restlessness that makes her happy and content when she is “doing something to support herself.” Furthermore, although long locks are the tradition for 19th-century women, Jo cuts hers to financially support her family. This illustrates the depth to which she is willing to go for her family in a desperate financial situation, but more importantly it emphasizes her continued disregard of social norms about physicality in favor of what she believes is right.

Jo and Laurie’s dynamic is characterized by childhood and innocence; he illustrates a brotherly figure who compliments her views about non-conformity while she represents the feminine presence he craves in his own life. Interestingly, Laurie admits to Jo quite early in the novel that he feels envious about the sisters’ bond with their mother. The motherless boy’s “solitary, hungry” look in his eyes affects her and she is glad to share her richness of “home and happiness” with him. This forms the foundation of Jo’s strong feminine presence in his life – he looks to her for affection and she responds with compassion. An important distinction between Jo and Laurie’s intellectual values is their contrasting views about education. Jo wishes she can go to college and notes that Laurie doesn’t look like he’ll like it. He agrees that he hates it because it is nothing but “grinding and skylarking” and he would rather enjoy himself in his “own way.” Jo desires a life of meaning to pursue her passions; she is intellectually curious and admires scholarly pursuits, whereas Laurie takes his intellectual opportunities for granted.

Although Jo and Laurie share some similar characteristics, such as their strong wills and quick tempers, they also have strong conflicting personalities. For example, Laurie complains that he feels like he’s living in the shadows of his grandfather's wishes and therefore has little motivation and is too lazy to try anything else. In response, Jo suggests he ‘“sail away on one of [his] own ships, and never [come back] until [he has] tried his own way.” While Laurie does eventually sail away for a time with his grandfather, he also goes to college beforehand to fulfill his grandfather’s dreams, not his own. On the other hand, Jo is rebellious and self-motivated from the beginning. She refuses to simply marry out of convenience and leaves her hometown the moment she realizes there isn’t much left for her there.

Jo wants to keep Laurie close to the family because she sees in him a kindred connection of masculine identity. This is one of the reasons she is constantly trying to match him with her sisters. When it becomes clear that Meg and John will be betrothed, Jo is frustrated because she “hates seeing things get all crisscross [...] when a pull here and snip there would straighten [things] out.” Jo’s reaction highlights her fears about a broken family and loneliness. Her plan to marry Meg to Laurie emphasizes the desire to keep her family together by marrying her sister to a friend, someone nearby who she deems trustworthy and complementary to her association with masculine identity. But, once Jo realizes that Laurie is getting too fond of her, she decides to pack up her things and travel to New York because she doesn’t believe they are suited for one another. Mrs. March is relieved and agrees that they “are too much alike and too fond of freedom,” not to mention their “hot tempers and strong wills,” which would thwart a relationship that needs “infinite patience and forbearance.”

Jo and Laurie’s clashing stubborn personalities are illuminated during the confession scene in which Jo insists she can’t be with Laurie while Laurie continues to badger her. After Jo admits that the main reason she went to New York was to get away from Laurie’s growing sense of attachment, he admits that it only made him love her more. He gave up “everything [she] didn’t like, never complained,” and hoped she would come to love him. Laurie’s confession is similar to that of a guy friend who has a crush on a friend and hopes that he will get her simply by being nice and hopeful. Furthermore, he tells her that if she says she loves the Professor, he will “do something desperate,” as if threatening her will convince her to love him. He then promises Jo that if she loves him, he would be a “perfect saint”; however, Jo rejects him because of fundamental differences in compatibility more so than his lack of saintly characteristics. Laurie continues to implore her to reconsider because “[e]veryone expects it. Grandpa has set his heart [on] you, your people like it, and I can’t get on without you.” It’s selfish that he insists she settle for what others wish for her than what she wishes for herself. If she followed his suggestion, it would negate her character as someone deeply rooted in individualism and upending societal expectations. Jo actually says as much in her response, “It’s selfish of you to keep teasing for what I can’t give you.” Laurie eventually travels to Europe, but not before sulking in his home while playing the piano tempestuously, avoiding Jo, and staring at her from the window with “a tragic face that haunt[s] her dreams.” Laurie’s attraction to Jo is natural, but his behavior after the rejection is self-destructive. He continues to make Jo the sole reason for his happiness. It’s the kind of response that hinders productivity and enjoyment of life, but also makes the other person feel guilty about their decision.

Unlike most of the other men in Jo’s life (of which there are very few as she hasn’t had much experience with men in general), she describes Friedrich’s physicality in greater detail and relays much of it in letters to her family back home. For example, early in their acquaintance, Jo hears him singing in German and notes that has the “kindest eyes [she] ever saw” and a “splendid voice that does one’s ears good,” but there is not a “handsome feature on his face.” Nonetheless she states that she likes him because “he [has] a fine head” and “[looks] like a gentleman,” alluding to her attraction to him being more cerebral than corporeal. When Friedrich advises Jo to study people’s characters to get a better sense about writing fiction, she studies his physicality and how it relates to his character -- she notes that he seems to “turn only his sunny side to the world,” that “time seems to have touched him gently” because of the kindness he bestows upon others, the “pleasant curves” around his mouth are due to his many friendly encounters and laughs with others, and “his eyes [are] never cold.” She thoroughly enjoys checking him out. Jo values character as a “better possession than money, rank, intellect, or beauty.” She ponders that if the qualities of “truth, reverence, and good will” are ‘great’ qualities, then her friend is “not only good, but great.” Her resolve on this matter strengthens every day and she values “his esteem, she [covets] his respect, and [she wants to be] worthy of his friendship.” When Friedrich later visits the March family, Jo notices that “he is dressed nicely and wonders if he is courting someone.” But realization soon follows her curiosity and she “[blushes] so dreadfully” that she “[drops] her ball” and goes after it to “hide her face.” Jo has progressed as a character by this time because the idea of Friedrich courting her does not disgust her as it once would have; instead, it makes her naturally self-conscious and fidgety.

Furthermore, it’s important to note how much of Friedrich’s tender masculinity aligns with Jo’s values about character. When Jo first notices Friedrich in the boarding house, he carries a “heavy hod of coal” all the way up the stairs for the servant girl and leaves with “a kind nod.” Jo likes such things and agrees with her father that such “trifles show character.” He leaves a good first impression on Jo; it also shows sincerity of character because he doesn’t know that she is observing him. At first she is perplexed why people admire Friedrich because he is “neither young nor handsome,” neither “fascinating [nor] brilliant,” and yet he is as attractive as “a genial fire” and people seem to “gather around him as naturally as about a warm hearth.” She concludes that it is his charisma, positivity, and good nature, not the superficiality of his looks or wealth.

Jo is reflective about society’s restrictions on her individualism and Friedrich is a natural companion because he represents the mentor figure who encourages her to think more deeply about her views. Friedrich’s philosophical background compliments Jo’s unique sense of feminist individuality. She greatly admires intellect and is proud to know that he was an “honored Professor in Berlin.” She observes that his “homely, hard-working life” beautifies the “poor language [master’s]” character much more in her eyes because he never speaks of his former esteemed life. Additionally, their shared sense of intellectual curiosity is illustrated during a moment on New Year’s Eve, when he gifts her Shakespeare’s works to study characters. She admits that “she never knew how much there was in Shakespeare before, but then again she never had [someone] to explain it to her.” One interpretation of this small moment is that it illustrates how much Jo has yet to discover about storytelling.

Moreover, she is entranced by Friedrich’s speech at the philosophical symposium as he defends religion and blazes with “honest indignation” and an eloquence that makes his “broken English musical and his plain face beautiful.” As he finishes his speech, she feels as if she has “solid ground under her feet again.” Jo not only agrees with Friedrich’s philosophical views, but is captivated by his delivery as well. It is a moment that coincides with her strong belief in individualism; she too wants to speak at this debate, but instead Friedrich gets the courage to do so and he speaks to her soul. Moreover, Friedrich reveals his strong distaste for sensationalist literature because he believes it sets a poor precedent for young people. Although he has a suspicion that Jo writes in her free time, he doesn’t know that Jo writes sensationalist literature or that she herself is uncomfortable about it. She doesn’t tell anyone about it for a long time. In order to publish her work, she is required to cut her sensationalist writing to one-third its original length. It receives mixed reviews after publication and she is generally jaded by the experience; she regrets not publishing the novel in its entirety. Jo is persuaded by Friedrich’s opinion on sensationalist literature and decides to stop writing pieces for the newspaper in pursuit of more principled stories. Soon after, she discovers that her passions lie with writing literature rooted in realism. There are some who would argue that Friedrich is patronizing here, but Jo also feels the same way and she discovers that she has more to offer the world than outlandish tales with no moral themes precisely through her interaction with him. Her efforts writing such stories are soulless and provide little personal meaning in her life and Friedrich’s strong opinions help her overcome her thankless endeavors.

Friedrich’s version of courting Jo is characterized by level-headed steadiness because he is unaware of her emotional and physical availability. Initially, he is suspicious that Jo and Laurie are more than friends when she wishes to introduce them. That night, he searches about the room “as if in search of something he [can] not find,” but he is still there to see her off at the train station the next morning. Although he likes Jo at this point, he does not act impulsively on his feelings because he is not sure about her feelings or her relationship with Laurie. Moreover, when he visits the March family after he realizes that something is amiss through Jo’s writing, he has a misconception that Jo and Laurie are a couple and “a shadow [passes] across his face” as he looks towards them. Friedrich’s realization is painful but he somehow manages to hide it and behaves amicably towards Jo and her family, which illustrates maturity and self-control. Additionally, he is confused by Jo’s “contradictions of voice, face, and manner” and her “half a dozen different moods” when he tells her that he is moving west. He doesn’t understand if she likes him or not and it’s only when she reveals her feelings that he also confesses he “waited to be sure if [she] was something more than a friend.” Jo confronts him about why he didn’t propose sooner, so he tells her that he thought she was betrothed to her friend, but he also wanted to have enough money to offer her a comfortable living. Friedrich’s courtship of Jo March is slow, steady, cautious, and level-headed. Due to his observant and compassionate nature, he is able to extrapolate Jo’s aversion to romantic pursuits and thus he approaches her mindfully with his own reservations.

Jo’s friendship and eventual romantic dynamic with Friedrich illustrates a relationship of equals in which she is able to fulfill her intellectual ambitions and overcome her fears about love and companionship. Their dynamic is set from their first interaction in which she unconventionally travels to New York alone as an unmarried woman. He then has a suspicion that she writes in her spare time and inspires her growth as a writer of passion instead of profit. Jo is captivated by the intellectual charm of such a man who delivers impassioned philosophical speeches at symposiums, who lives with integrity as a poor scholar in a foreign land, and has a unique charisma that attracts others to his presence. In return, Friedrich doesn’t expect anything to become of their friendship, even when he thinks Jo and Laurie are not a couple or when he’s confused by her contradictory range of emotions after he tells her that he’s leaving New England. And, neither does he feel threatened by her unique sense of ambition at a time when men’s ambitions are taken more seriously. He courts her like a patient and observant gentleman awaiting the final verdict about a woman’s romantic feelings, as if he is afraid to impulsively ruin a dearest friendship.

Friedrich Bhaer is no romantic, but neither is Jo. He is not one for passionate phrases about love, but Jo wouldn’t be impressed by such a companion. He has little wealth, yet Jo has lived her whole life in poverty so she is used to hard work. With the professor, Jo is able to live a life dedicated to her ambitions, where the social constructs of marital life need not necessarily apply, while also conquering her fears about love –that it doesn’t necessarily have to be about an unequal dynamic where the woman succumbs to a meaningless life of pure domesticity. Her dynamic with Friedrich is about being with someone who treats her as his intellectual equal, a kindred connection with someone outside of the loving but splintering family she was afraid to leave many years ago. In other words, it's hard to imagine a free-spirited woman like Jo, who has lived her whole life in the seclusion of her hometown with the safety and security of her family, not being captivated by an intellectually forward-thinking mentor type figure like Friedrich Bhaer. It is fitting that a woman so radical for her day forms a companionship with a charming, progressive intellectual.

Friedrich is Laurie’s foil in both his life experiences and characteristics. Laurie is an extroverted, wealthy socialite who has the privilege of pursuing intellectual interests, but would rather spend his time pursuing other things. He is impulsive and persistent in his pursuit of Jo. On the other hand, Friedrich is the poor scholarly professor in a foreign country who is soft-spoken and charming. He spends his time pursuing intellectual hobbies like attending philosophical symposiums. Both characters represent different aspects of Jo’s personality. Laurie represents her naiveté; he embodies her past and her too comfortable homely life. In contrast, Friedrich represents Jo’s growth into womanhood and a life away from the luxury of her comfortable home where she undergoes a feminist awakening about the kind of writer she can be. Her time with Friedrich also represents the challenges she is forced to confront regarding her own perspectives about the world and how she doesn’t necessarily have to forego love to life a fulfilled life. She can have both her intellectual ambitions and a companion who understands her.

Many have suggested that Laurie is a better companion for Jo. For example, some suggest that Jo and Laurie are good friends, have good chemistry, and know each other well. He wouldn’t constrict Jo’s ambitions, and therefore he would make a good life partner for her. While this is true, having good chemistry doesn’t necessarily translate to a successful romantic partnership. There are many people who we have good chemistry with in our lives, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they would be great life companions. Although they know each other well, Laurie doesn’t completely internalize Jo’s unromantic, stoic personality; he reveals this when he complains that she “won’t give anyone a chance” and “doesn’t show the soft side of [her] character.” He is needy for attention and love while Jo is more of an independent, free-spirited person who wouldn’t be able to provide that kind of love for him. Furthermore, just because he wouldn’t inhibit her ambitions, doesn’t mean that her ambitions wouldn’t be thwarted by marrying him and fulfilling her marital duties in wealthy society.

Another perspective is that Jo would have been better off single because she is a strong, independent woman and Friedrich was simply shoved in so Alcott could fulfill a romantic subplot. Although being single is what Alcott preferred for Jo, it contradicts Jo’s characterization in the novel. Jo is strong-willed, independent, and extremely ambitious and while all these things are great reasons for her to have a fulfilled life without the construct of marriage tying her down, she is also extremely averse to love and marriage because she fears the loneliness that it brings. She’s seen what these institutions do to her family -- they break it apart and it can never be completely repaired again because all of the fragments (the married sisters) are in different places (their married homes). By the end of the novel, Jo’s reality is one of loneliness and isolation -- the very things she feared all along. The inevitable happens. Moreover, Jo is in search of a belonging where she is able to be herself completely, but not feel the burden of societal normativity upon her shoulders. With Friedrich, she gets the best of both worlds -- she is able to pursue her intellectual passions as a writer because he is also passionate about philosophical ideas, they share similar world views about individualism, and she gets to have him as a friend, lover, and companion.

Alcott didn’t focus much on Jo and Friedrich’s dynamic, but she also didn’t focus much on the romantic stories of the other sisters as well. Romance was always going to take a back seat to the strong themes about family and womanhood presented in the novel, but it’s disingenuous to claim that because Alcott was required to pair Jo off with someone at the end, she decided to simply insert Friedrich as a subplot device and thus their relationship is random and forced. Regardless of whether or not one believes that Alcott succeeded in illustrating a believable romantic storyline, she did create a distinct character who compliments the unconventional heroine in many of the subversive ways a unique dynamic like Jo and Friedrich could have been depicted. She addresses Jo’s ambitions, her fears, her indifference to marrying for wealth or power, and her deep sense of intellectual curiosity -- in other words, it’s hard to imagine how such a radical character like Jo (for the times that she represents) could have ended up with anyone other than an intellectual type, someone who could continuously challenge and inspire her (as Friedrich does with her sensationalist writing, which inspires her to find where her passion lies). By introducing Friedrich’s character, Alcott wanted to make a bold statement and subvert societal expectations about what a potential romantic interest could look like. Therefore, it’s quite possible that she spent more time crafting his character. In fact, she seems to have thought about the character quite purposefully and thoughtfully.

Although Alcott didn’t intend for Jo to be paired off at the end of Little Women, it’s unlikely that she would half-heartedly insert a romantic interest in order to fulfill a requirement. By making Friedrich Bhaer a counter stereotypical character, one who subverts conventional stereotypes about masculinity, she was very intentional in the kind of lesson she wanted to impart about social class, intellectualism, unconventional romances, and a relationship founded on equality. Jo’s dynamic with him represents the subversion of societal norms; they are intellectual equals. With Friedrich, she remains an ambitious, impassioned individual with greater clarity about how to focus her passion for writing. On the other hand, Laurie represents Jo’s innocence and comfortable family life. They are two stubborn and alike individuals who seek a belonging in each other – Laurie seeks her feminine presence while Jo wants to live vicariously through Laurie’s masculine energy. Alcott never married, but she created a romantic interest who understood Jo while many others stood by shell shocked. It’s through Friedrich Bhaer that Alcott revealed a part of herself and her ideals.

**A special thanks to @fairychamber for the thought-provoking discussions and review of this piece.**

Sources

“Alcott: Not the ‘Little Woman’ You Thought She Was.” NPR: Morning Edition. 29 Dec. 2009.

Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women. DigiReads Publishing, 2015.

*Azelina. “Louisa May Alcott’s ‘Moods’ and Transcendentalism.” Wordpress. 2012.

Brewton, Vince. “Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882).” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

*Campbell, G. Jacqueline. “Gender & The Civil War.” Essential Civil War Curriculum.

Hartman, W. Dorothy. “Lives of Women.” Conner Prairie.

Rogers, Olivia. “Louisa May Alcott’s Transcendentalism.” Live Ideas Journal. 19 Mar 2019.

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artificialqueens · 5 years

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Not Casual At All: Everybody Get Some (Biadore) - Miss Alyssa Secret

“You’re the only one I can trust not to yell, ‘not today, Satan!’ right before you come,” had been Roy’s explanation when Danny brought it up.

Adore thinks she’s going to have to settle for (admittedly cute) trade, but she’d much rather be having sex with Roy. Luckily, there’s a surprise waiting in her dressing room, followed by an absolutely filthy blowjob in the shower and cuddling.

A/N: Admittedly, I wrote an entire fic to set up a blowjob/mirror sex. Contains very brief Adore/OMC, and Danny’s resulting vulnerability about the situation. -MAS

********

Adore finished out the number flat on her back on the stage, the lucky fan she’d pulled up to make out and grind with cradled between her raised knees. She closed her eyes and took a few seconds to enjoy the applause and shouting, chest heaving as she tried to catch her breath.

The boy on top of her was very politely holding his weight off her torso, and she let him help her up. He’d been fun, flushing dark red when she pushed him down in the chair and straddled his lap but readily groping her chest and crotch once invited. A good kisser as well, something Adore could appreciate, evidenced by the fact that he was now wearing more of her lipstick than she was. She watched as he tried to discreetly adjust his hard on, gathering his wallet and cap from where they’d tumbled when she pulled his shirt off.

Giving him one last kiss, she murmured, “Come see me after?” in his ear, pleased when he bit his lip and nodded.

”That was fucking hot!” she yelled into the mic, evoking another round of wild screams before introducing the next song.

The music started and she lost herself in the song, green hair whipping back and forth. There were just a couple more to go, and then she’d be done for the night. Performing always made her horny, so with luck, the boy would find his way to her as well.

His dark eyes had caught her attention when she scanned the crowd to make her selection. Intensely masculine features, short curls under a hat, he had pushed all of the right buttons. He was slender with a wiry build that she couldn’t wait to feel pinned against a wall, or maybe the couch in her dressing room.

Adore loved finding the beauty in everyone, never settling on one standard of appearance. On the other hand, she was well aware that the boys she’d been finding most attractive resembled a certain someone, although the fans didn’t seem to have picked up on it.

Yet.

Roy himself seemed highly amused when she admitted most of the trade reminded her of him. (“As long as it’s me and not Bianca, I’d be worried if you were fucking clowns.”) She’d much rather be falling into bed, over vanity tables, or against doors with him. Unfortunately, Bianca was booked halfway around the world, and she was stuck pulling boys who were quite attractive and charming, but still poor substitutes. Getting off was fun, but she missed the companionship and post-coital conversation that consisted of more than race-chasing or celebrity worship.

After two encores, she bounced off the stage, buoyed by the audience’s energy. Blotting her face, she grinned when she saw him waiting for her next to a severely unimpressed security guy.

”Wanna party with me?” she winked at him, pulling him by the hand towards the backstage corridor. Once through the doors, she pushed him against the wall and let him grab a handful of her ass.

“Forgot to ask,” she purred, “what’s your name?”

”Uhhhh…” He reddened in embarrassment, and she patiently waited for his upstairs brain to come back online. “Ummm. I’m Ian.”

”Nice to meet you, Ian.” She pressed a thigh between his, feeling his clothed erection against her hip. “Wanna see my dressing room?”

John was lingering at the end of the corridor, and she waved him off as they approached. He shook his head in mock-despair, giving Ian a once-over before walking down the hall twenty feet and casually leaning on the wall, phone in hand.

She pulled him backwards into the dressing room by the belt loops and paused, frowning, when he stopped dead in the doorway, staring.

”Oh fuck me…”

”What?” Adore didn’t think she’d left it that much of a mess, turning around to check.

”Oh.”

”Hey pussyface,” Roy greeted her cheerfully from his seat on the vanity, carryon at his feet. “Who’s your friend?”

“Ohmygod.” Ian’s eyes were wide, and Adore was at a loss for words when he dropped her hand and frankly stared. “Are you…oh shit, you’re Bianca!”

”That’s the last thing my uncle said when-“ He hopped down, hands casually tucked in the pockets of the (yet another) baggy black hoodie.

Adore was still blinking in disbelief, but she was certain she was sober enough that Roy wasn’t a hallucination.

Ian’s head turned back and forth between her and Roy a few times before smiling nervously. “Ummm. I’m sorry, I didn’t…”

”Don’t worry, this was supposed to be a surprise.” Roy stopped just out of arm’s reach from Adore, attention seemingly focused away but she could feel his eyes hot on her.

”Sorry,” she gently squeezed Ian’s elbow. “Rain check?”

”…what? Oh! No problem. I mean yes. Uhhh, I mean not if it’s not okay, because I ummm don’t want to-“

”Breathe.” Roy still looked far too amused, reaching out to take his hand. “Do me a favor? Don’t tell anyone you saw me.”

”Sure. Yes, totally, I will. I mean, I won’t. Won’t!”

”Thank you, my angel. Appreciate it.”

”No absolutely! You two, are you, yeah? Yeah.”

“Cat got your tongue?” Ian looked like he was hanging off of Roy’s every word, and it took everything Adore had not to break out laughing. It figured she would try to pull a Bianca fan.

She saw Ian out with a kiss on the cheek and several photos. As soon as the door closed, she ignored Roy’s protests and lifted him off the ground with her hug, platform boots leaving her nearly a foot taller than his boy self.

“Fuck, what are you doing here?” she murmured into his neck.

”Had a bit of a layover issue, so I got them to reroute me.” Roy tugged her wig gently until she set him back down.

“Layover- B, I’m not even on the right side of Europe!”

He waited while she unzipped her boots and started unpinning her wig.

“I missed you.”

It was just three words, but the kiss that followed destroyed the last of her lipstick. She tried to chase Roy’s lips as he pulled away, but he made a face and took a step back.

“What?”

”You taste like someone else.” The matter of fact tone of voice meant he wasn’t upset, but it also meant Roy wasn’t going to continue kissing her until she did something about it. And since kissing figured rather heavily into her plans for that evening, she definitely needed to take care of the problem.

”Sorry,” she quirked her lips in a half-smile. “I wasn’t-“

He cut her off with a hand to her cheek, and she leaned into it, feeling his fingers nimbly locating the last of the bobby pins holding her wig in place.

”It’s okay, pussyface. I know how it is. I just wanna taste you.”

Adore made quick work of removing the rest of her drag, aware of how Roy’s hands hovered over her body as he “helped” her get undressed.

“Shower?” The adjoining bathroom was small, but it included a shower and she wanted to wash all traces of anyone else off. She didn’t know how long Roy had to stay, and it wouldn’t do to make any more delays.

Roy was already down to his briefs when she got the water running, completely naked when she was done quickly brushing her teeth, and waiting in the shower once Danny wiped Adore off. Danny paused to just watch for a moment as the water ran over the sharp planes of his face tilted under the spray, before Roy slicked back his hair and opened his eyes. Droplets clung to his lashes and he smiled on seeing Danny back to himself again.

“C’mere,” he beckoned, molding their bodies together.

This time, there was no rush, tongues meeting with the barest hint of teeth. Danny used both hands to hold Roy’s head in place as he deepened the kiss, moaning low in his throat when hands found their way to his ass and squeezed roughly. He was most of the way to hard, erection sliding over Roy’s hip and his own pressing against the inside of Danny’s thigh.

”Miss me?”

”Of course, bitch. Don’t be stupid.”

Roy kissed his way across his collarbone, licking droplets of water from the skin. Danny nuzzled his temple, hands sliding down to the small of Roy’s back and toying with the dimples there.

”Long as you don’t replace me with a younger model.” It was clearly meant as a joke, but Danny frowned, unsure if Roy was using it as a cover for a real insecurity.

Better safe than sorry.

”B,” he tilted Roy’s head back enough to negate their height difference, “I could never.”

The teasing smile on Roy’s face slipped into something more serious in contrast to the highly erotic setting.

“Shhhh, I know. I didn’t mean it like that.”

Biting his lower lip, Danny nodded. Some trace of uncertainty must have remained in his admittedly wobbly smile, because Roy backed against the wall out of range of the water, pulling Danny against him again.

“Hey. I promised I’d always be honest with you, remember?“ He blinked a couple of times, eyes gone soft. “And I’m still okay with it. It’s not like you knew I was going to be here.”

“You’re allowed to be weird about me showing up with trade.”

“It’s sex,” Roy continued, squeezing Danny’s hands. “It wouldn’t be fair for me to ask you to wait weeks or months." For me was left unsaid, and Danny wondered if they would ever quite be willing to address that part of their unconventional…something. Not relationship, but not friends with benefits either.

They’d talked about this their first time together, more than either of them was probably comfortable with, and in theory and the vast majority of practice it wasn’t an issue at all. Months later, Adore was back to no-strings fun to satisfy her appetite, but it had taken a bit to be comfortable again. Danny had been more circumspect than usual about hookups on tour, to the point that Courtney and Darienne commented about it in the group chat, asking if Adore was feeling okay because of the apparent dry spell. It wasn’t until Roy left a voicemail (”If you’re not in the mood, that’s one thing. But if you’re not getting laid because of me, that’s not what I want at all. Love you pussyface, be safe, and I’ll see you in a couple weeks.“) that he realized he still worried about it being okay. It wasn’t like the reverse was the case either; as far as Danny knew, Roy wasn’t fucking anyone else, although he always made enough innuendos to satisfy their friends. ("You’re the only one I can trust not to yell, ‘not today, Satan!’ right before you come,” had been Roy’s explanation when Danny brought it up.)

“Yeah. Sorry, just feeling kind of weird about it."

Roy kissed him gently, nudging their noses together. "I get that.”

“Sorry,” Danny curled his lip up in a frown, “didn’t mean to kill the mood.”

“Quit apologizing." There was that hint of Bianca, lurking around the edges. "If it was bothering you, it was important. Now,” he cocked his head to the side, “I’ve got four hours before I have to be back on a plane out of here.”

“Time to go back to my room?”

“Possibly, but I thought you might like to get blown in the shower." Roy’s ability to be conversational about sex was, in Danny’s opinion, one of the hottest things ever.

"Yeah?”

“Yeah." He steered Danny back under the water. "Turn around for me?”

Grabbing the bottle of body wash off the shelf, Roy took his time working it into a lather over Danny’s back, fingers digging into the knotted muscles as he worked in gradually larger circles. He eventually moved his hands around to the front, circling Danny’s waist, Danny’s head falling back onto his shoulder for a messy kiss as he ran slippery fingers teasingly over his nipples. The layer of soap between them provided the perfect amount of slip for him to slide his half-hard cock against Danny’s ass.

“If you want,” Roy’s voice was husky with arousal, lips barely brushing Danny’s ear, “we can change that to shower sex." He punctuated the last word with a harder thrust, cock slipping into the cleft of Danny’s ass and evoking a whole-body shiver.

"Mmmm, not tonight?" The hand Danny had thrown back to anchor Roy against him tightened on his ass. "Unless you wanna get fucked.”

“Not tonight,” he agreed.

”I don’t let other people fuck me,” Danny confessed, feeling as if it were a scandalous thing. Maybe it was, for them.

“I…”

Roy’s hips stilled. With his chin hooked over Danny’s shoulder, it almost seemed like he was staring into the distance until Danny realized what he was looking at.

The shower was directly opposite the full length mirror, and even with the glass door partially fogged, their reflection was clear. If someone took a photo of their faces right then, cheeks pressed together, the pose would be familiar to hundreds of thousands of fans from dozens of selfies. What the mirror captured and the camera seldom did, was the vulnerability in Danny’s eyes, Roy’s tiny smile and arms holding him possessively against his body.

”Okay.”

Slowly, Roy turned them sideways, moving until Danny’s back was pressed against the wall. He dropped to his knees, hands sliding down Danny’s sides and coming to rest on his hips. Then he reached out and pushed the glass door open, providing a view of the mirror unimpeded by steam.

Danny looked down, and Roy shook his head. “Don’t watch me. Watch us.” He jerked his chin towards the mirror, waiting until Danny complied.

They locked eyes in the reflection, Danny’s still soft with uncertainty and Roy’s sleepy in a way that spoke of rumpled sheets and nights filled with the sounds of sex. Very gently, Roy nuzzled Danny’s hip, twining both of their hands together as he did so. He kissed the crest of that same hip, opening his mouth to suck a bruise into the skin before soothing it with his tongue.

Danny’s mouth fell open in a gasp that he couldn’t hear over the rush of falling water, but felt all the same. Roy continued his path downward, tongue drawing a line between the droplets of water clinging to the groove between hip and thigh.

Danny shuddered when he sucked a second love bite into the flesh of his inner thigh, eyes falling closed for a moment before snapping open again.

Still watching each other, Roy mouthed at Danny’s balls, using his tongue to bounce them against his lips and nipping carefully at the skin.

Danny’s head fell back onto the wall with a dull thud, but he didn’t look away.

Roy licked up the underside of the straining erection, squeezing their fingers together as he slipped the flushed head into his mouth. This time, Danny’s moan carried over the shower noise.

He let it slide out of his mouth with a wet pop before leaving open-mouthed kisses down the side of the shaft.

Danny dug his teeth into his lower lip, trying to stay quiet.

Pulling back for a moment, Roy’s lips curved into his bedroom smile, the one that always made Danny hard with the memories it suggested. Then he licked his lips, wrapped them around Danny’s cock, and went down in one smooth motion until the tip nudged the back of his throat.

Danny’s hands clenched convulsively as his hips jerked, trying to go deeper. Roy took a long breath, eyes falling closed, relaxed his jaw, and slipped just a little further down.

When his eyes opened, what he saw in the mirror was a vision of pure sin.

Danny’s back arched away from the wall, head and elbows braced against it as his hips thrust forward. The muscles in his arms flexed, chest thrown out and nipples hard. His mouth hung open, lips puffy and bitten, brow creased and eyes clenched shut in ecstasy.

Roy pulled back, sucked in another deep breath, sucked harder on the cock in his mouth. He bobbed his head a few times, pre-come slicking his tongue, before gently freeing one hand from Danny’s grip and bringing some relief to the aching need between his legs.

The moan that vibrated around Danny’s cock when his fingers closed around his own throbbing erection evoked a whimper. Danny’s hand flew out to turn the water off before fisting his fingers in wet hair and forcing his eyes open to watch as he fucked Roy’s mouth.

The steady stream of moans from them both mingled with the wet, choked-off sounds of a blowjob, filling the steamy air. Danny’s gaze drifted down to where Roy was jerking himself with rapid strokes, willing back his orgasm.

Roy might not be submissive in the least, but he got off hard on having Danny use his mouth. The stretch of his jaw, the spit-slick shaft gliding over his lips, the weight of the cock on his tongue, all conspired to bring him closer to the edge.

”B,” Danny rasped out, “I wanna see you come.”

That’s all it took. Roy’s eyes rolled back and his jaw fell slack as he arched his back and came, thrusting into his fist.

Orgasm hit Danny like a wave breaking against the shore, rushing up from his cock pulsing cum into Roy’s mouth. His legs buckled, overcome with shakes, and he collapsed back to slide down the wall, cock smearing cum across Roy’s lips and chin. The sight of him still shivering with his climax sent an aftershock of pleasure up Danny’s spine.

There was only the sound of their harsh panting for a few moments, until Roy dragged himself back to reality. Turning his head, he spit his mouthful of cum towards the drain before listing sideways, coming to rest between Danny’s spread knees.

In response, Danny tugged his shoulders with arms that felt impossibly heavy, pulling Roy until his back rested against Danny’s chest.

”B?”

“Mmm?”

”Why’d you spit?”

Roy started to sit up, stopping when Danny’s arms tightened.

”Not mad or whatever, just wondering.”

”You’re smoking too much again,” he frowned.

”Oh. Sorry.”

Roy shrugged one shoulder, head lolling back against Danny’s shoulder.

”B?”

”Yeah?”

”It’s not cause I’ve been with…”

This time Roy did sit up and turn until they were face to face. He paused, hearing what wasn’t being said.

”I know you’re being safe. It really does taste bad, believe me.”

He leaned out to check the time, and groaned.

“What?”

”We should probably finish cleaning up before someone comes looking for you.”

Danny pushed himself to his feet, waiting for Roy to do the same. He turned the water back on, giggling as Roy rinsed his mouth under the spray.

“I should make you eat it next time,” he muttered, rolling his eyes when Danny stuck out his tongue.

They were silent for a few minutes, using the shower for its intended purpose. Roy sacrificed his shirt for them to dry off (“You’re in a place with a shower and didn’t bring a spare towel?” “What, it’s not like you carry one in Bianca’s suitca- oh. Never mind.”) and they made their way back out to the dressing room.

Roy fished out a clean shirt from his carryon, and they collapsed onto the couch.

“Round two or…?” He tried to guess what Danny might need.

Instead, Danny gathered him close, nuzzling Roy’s wet hair.

”Nah. How long till you gotta leave again for the airport?”

”Thirty minutes if I want to get through security and not run for the gate.”

” ‘kay.” Danny sighed. “Just stay like this?”

Roy smiled and brushed a gentle kiss against his lips.

”I can do that.”

-PSA-

In my stories, Danny and Roy only ever have unprotected sexual activities with each other, and even then not all of the time. Danny’s messed around with other people, so they ought to have used protection, but, like in reality, sometimes people forget. That’s not the reason Roy spits (truly doesn’t like the taste), but leaving semen in contact with your mouth does increase the risk of an STI.

#rpdr fanfiction #bianca del rio #adore delano #biadore #smut #not casual at all #missalyssasecret #submission #(love the PSA! -v)#canon compliant

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bluewatsons · 4 years

Text

Carl Laamanen, Preaching in the Darkness: The Night of the Hunter’s Subversion of Patriarchal Christianity and Classical Cinema, 18 J Religion & Film (2014)

Abstract

Upon its release in 1955, The Night of the Hunter did not find favor among audiences or critics, who failed to appreciate Charles Laughton’s vision for the Davis Grubb’s bestselling novel of the same title. While poor marketing certainly played into the film’s colossal collapse at the box office, I believe there is a deeper reason behind the rejection of the film in the 1950s—its portrayal of women and the female voice. In The Night of the Hunter, Miz Cooper (Lillian Gish) ultimately defeats Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum), the corrupt Preacher, through the use of her voice, and by doing so subverts the dominant patriarchal paradigms of American Christianity and classical cinematic form prevalent in the 1950s. The film gives Miz Cooper the power necessary to overcome the corrupt patriarchy embodied by the Preacher by imbuing her with acousmatic abilities (per Michel Chion) and allowing her control over the cinematic apparatus, sonically and visually. By giving Miz Cooper control over the cinematic apparatus, the film radically breaks with the cinematic, societal, and religious status-quo of the 1950s, accounting for the outrage surrounding the film upon its original release. The reaction to The Night of the Hunter illustrates a larger trend among American Christianity during the 1950s, further illuminating our understanding of how the conservative Evangelical Church of the time thought of women in Church leadership and how it responded to critical representation of its tenets in the culture. While the film brilliantly uses film form and sound to subvert the mores of its time, the adverse reception of The Night of the Hunter reveals that American Christianity and classical cinema were active participants in the oppression of women at the time.

The Night of the Hunter (1955) confused and alienated audiences and critics alike upon its release, its dark vision of rural America and religion unsettling moviegoers. Based on the best-selling novel of the same name by Davis Grubb (1953), the film failed at the box office despite its acclaimed source material; this commercial collapse can largely be attributed to questionable marketing and a genre-bending narrative which did not sell well alongside other films of the 1950s.1 Yet, these two factors alone cannot account for the entirety of the vitriol that critics and moral guardians aimed at The Night of the Hunter. For example, a lack of conformity to the cinematic status-quo would hardly seem damning enough to prompt a response like this from Richard Coe: “But worst villain of the lot is Director Laughton, whose cheap taste and apparent contempt for simple people have made this [film] a hideous travesty of the human race.”2 For the film to rise to the level of “a hideous travesty” affecting the entire “human race,” something deeper and darker must have alienated the critics and audiences. Indeed, The Night of the Hunter is unconventional for the cinema of the time, but it also undermines the patriarchal status-quo of 1950s’ fundamentalist Christianity, explicitly depicting the religious corruption and violence of the masculine hierarchy of fundamentalism. Through a masterful use of film form and sound, the film subverts patriarchal paradigms of both classical cinema and fundamentalist Christianity, giving women a voice to stand up against male oppression through its portrayal of Miz Rachel Cooper (Lillian Gish).

Set in rural West Virginia, The Night of the Hunter tells the story of John (Billy Chapin) and Pearl Harper (Sally Jane Bruce) and their flight from the evil Preacher, Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum). As we learn in the inciting incident of the film, John and Pearl’s father, Ben (Peter Graves), steals ten thousand dollars from a bank, hides the money somewhere on his property, and only tells his children about the money’s location. The police apprehend Ben and he is hanged, but not before he meets the Preacher in prison and tells him about the robbery. With this information in hand, the Preacher arrives in town and seduces Ben’s widow, Willa (Shelley Winters), marrying her in an attempt to discover where the money is hidden. Eventually, Harry finds out that the children know the whereabouts of the money, and he sets in motion a chain of events that leads to his murder of Willa, forcing the children to flee from him in terror. John and Pearl take to the river and find refuge with Miz Cooper, a kind woman who takes in orphaned children and supports them. The Preacher tracks them down and the film ends with a showdown between Miz Cooper and Harry, in which Miz Cooper triumphs and ensures the safety of the children.

My analysis of The Night of the Hunter is built upon three levels, each forming a different perspective that will allow a more nuanced and accurate depiction of the film’s break from the historical, theological, and cinematic status- quo. First, I will discuss the historical movements of American Christianity during the 1930s to situate the film’s portrayal of Christian fundamentalism and its attitudes toward women in context. Second, situated in its proper place in history, The Night of the Hunter demonstrates the pitfalls of patriarchal Christianity—as pointed out by feminist theologians during the 1970s and 80s— in its portrayal of Willa and suggests a solution by giving Miz Cooper the power to speak and defeat the Preacher, an embodiment of corrupt, male-dominated Christianity.3 Finally, I will argue that the film is able to effectively subvert classical cinematic form and the fundamentalist Christian patriarchy due to its decision to give Miz Cooper control over the sonic and visual diegetic space of the film, usually the property of men.

Christian Fundamentalism and The Night of the Hunter

Knowledge of fundamentalism and its reaction against modernism and liberalism is essential to understanding The Night of the Hunter’s portrayal of women in the 1930s and American fundamentalism’s attitudes toward women in the 1950s. While Christian institutions have historically barred women from positions of authority, the American tradition offers a notable exception to this practice during the late 1800s and early 1900s. At this time, Christian women in America held a large measure of power in the church, often exercising this power by forming organizations, entering seminary, and participating in church leadership.4 During this period, Lisa Bernal notes that “women in evangelical traditions found significant access to the pulpit ministry,” although this trend would not continue in the decades to follow.5 With the rise of fundamentalism in the 1920s, women’s access to pulpit ministry and power was derailed by a renewed effort to place men in positions of parochial leadership, a facet of the fundamentalist reaction against mainline liberalism.6 Despite their devoted service at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, women in the fundamentalism tradition quickly found themselves under the control of the patriarchy.

Fundamentalism, like any religious movement, is subject to a number of differing, occasionally contradictory definitions. For purposes of this article, I will define Christian fundamentalism “as a distinct movement with a particular mixture of beliefs and concerns” which came into being as a reaction to theological liberalism, and eventually gave rise to certain forms of Evangelicalism in the 1950s.7 While historians and theologians often debate the minutiae of these beliefs, most agree that the beliefs below usually mark Christian fundamentalism:

An intense focus on evangelism as the church's overwhelming priority, the need for a fresh infilling of the Holy Spirit after conversion in order to live a holy and effective Christian life, the imminent, premillenial second coming of Christ, and the divine inspiration and absolute authority of the Bible.8

In addition to these core beliefs, fundamentalists were “bent on combatting Darwinism in the public schools and liberalism in the churches.”9 Fundamentalism thrived throughout the early 1920s, but eventually disappeared from the public eye after the debacle of the 1925 Scopes Trial, where the American Civil Liberty Union’s lawyer, Clarence Darrow, ridiculed William Jennings Bryan and fundamentalism’s position on evolution, tarnishing fundamentalism’s credibility in the process.10 Although distant from the public eye during the 1930s and 40s, fundamentalists were actively forming their own subculture apart from mainline Christianity, complete with very specific opinions on politics and the place of women in the family.

The Night of the Hunter offers a remarkably accurate picture of fundamentalism’s attitude toward America and women in the 1930s through its portrayal of Willa and her older female friend, Icey (Evelyn Varden). Icey constantly badgers Willa, telling her that she needs a husband to help her bring up her children: “No woman is able to raise growing youngsters alone; the Lord meant that job for two.” Being a woman—especially a Christian woman—Willa is not considered fit to raise her children on her own, as the 1930s fundamentalist home was marked by “daily family prayer and Bible reading, patriarchal rule, firm but tender-hearted rearing of children...and a thoroughgoing enforcement of fundamentalist mores.”11 Among the fundamentalist mores that began to surface in the 20s and 30s were a number of restrictions designed to prevent women from serving in Church leadership and keep them in the home.12 For fundamentalism, motherhood and domesticity are the pinnacle of womanhood, yet this veneration carries a darker side, which Karen McCarthy Brown notes: “Women can be idolized only when their sphere of activity is carefully contained and their power scrupulously monitored.”13 Indeed, The Night of the Hunter will demonstrate through Willa’s increasingly distant behavior to her children, that her submission to the patriarchy and its veneration does not make her a better mother, but ironically blinds her to her own children’s struggles against their father, hardly the ideal home promised by the patriarchy.

Part of this fundamentalist idealization of the domestic space can be traced to the fundamentalist desire to remain unspotted from the world and the responsibility it placed upon the family to rear children in order to lead them to salvation. In the 1930s, fundamentalists were stuck between two paradigms: strict separation from the world and radical devotion to trying to save the world.14 In The Night of the Hunter, we see the separatist side in the Preacher’s actions and in his speeches about the evil of the world and worldly desires, while the desire to evangelize is evident in the prayer-tent revival meeting that Harry and Willa conduct shortly after their marriage. Dispensationalism, a newly advanced eschatological paradigm, strongly pointed toward separation as it “taught the apostasy of the major churches of ‘Christendom’ as part of a steady cultural degeneration during the present ‘church age’,”15 and ultimately “promoted a kind of supernaturalism that, for all of its virtues in defending the faith, failed to give the proper attention to the world.”16 Arising from this theological base was a certain Gnosticism, accounting for a “sharp break between the pure heavenly realm and carnal earthly realm.”17 The next link in this chain implicitly condemns women and “the fearsome, mute power of the flesh,” as “fundamentalism will always involve the control of women, for women generally carry the greater burden of human fleshliness.”18 Thus, in the 1930s, fundamentalist theology and thought began to establish a bias against women as sexual, complete beings, which carried on into the Christian climate of the 1950s, when The Night of the Hunter was released.

The Night of the Hunter’s frank depiction of the darker side of patriarchal Christianity elicited outright condemnation from some of America’s moral guardians, before and after the film’s release. Joseph Breen sent the film’s script to the Broadcasting and Film Commission of the National Council of the Churches of Christ,19 and producer Paul Gregory later received “a four-page letter detailing the script’s many offenses against the Christian religion” from “the commission’s West Coast director, George A. Heimrich.”20 Among his suggestions for making the film more appropriate, Heimrich requested that Mitchum’s Preacher be changed so that he could not be strongly identified as a minister.21 Laughton and Gregory ignored these suggestions, which helps explain why the film faced some of the same objections after it was released, with both the Legion of Decency and the Protestant Motion Picture Council encouraging people of faith to bypass the film’s dark vision of Christianity.22 A few film critics exhibit a similar moral outrage against the film, condemning its abundance of violence. Coe channels the Production Code’s fear of images: “The film blunders in picturing [violent scenes] far too graphically, always a danger when pictures substitute for words.”23 Similarly, Will Leonard’s review disdains the film’s treatment of violence: “Seldom has so much ugliness been put into one movie, some of it dragged in for no apparent reason.”24 By pointing to the violence, almost always perpetrated by the Preacher, Coe and Leonard join their voices to the chorus of those decrying the picture of Christianity painted by The Night of the Hunter—a picture that includes, quite graphically, the oppression of women by the dominant power structures of Christian fundamentalism.

For a concrete example of how the film represents women during this time, consider the relationship between Willa and Icey. Early in the film, after Ben Harper has been hanged, Icey converses with Willa, informing her of the proper definition of a family: “No woman is able to raise growing youngsters alone; the Lord meant that job for two.” Willa replies, “Icey, I just don’t want a husband.” Immediately after this exchange, the film cuts to a long shot of a train, black against the setting sun and billowing smoke, as it races across the screen left to right—here comes the Preacher, foreboding music announcing his nefarious intentions. Following a brief snippet of dialogue from Icey—“It’s a man you need in the house, Willa Harper”—is another shot of the train, supported by the same music, but this time charging straight at the camera. Cutting to the train during this conversation suggests three important ideas regarding the role of the patriarch in the film. First, the train and its phallic symbolism are associated with Harry, but given the ominous music and the way the train appears black—even in the night—this power is seen as dark and corrupt. Second, by positioning the first shot of the train after Willa declares her independence, the film shows that she will inevitably be forced by traditional, fundamentalist concepts of the family to accept this evil phallic power into her home. Finally, by combining Icey’s statements with the shots of the train, the film creates a conflation of her stance on proper, patriarchal homemaking with the corrupt religious establishment embodied by Harry Powell. In the character of the Preacher, the film combines numerous fundamentalist traditions, forming a composite caricature that stands in for the totality of oppressive fundamentalism. From its beginning, The Night of the Hunter makes it clear that the values of patriarchal Christianity are complicit in the oppression of women by denying them their independence and creating a society where even other women tell them to submit to the masculine hegemony.

Oppression and Subversion: Willa and Miz Cooper Seen Through Feminist Theology

As feminist theologians would begin to point out in the 1970s and 80s, fundamentalism, whether Catholic or Protestant, is as complicit in the oppression of women as the surrounding society. The Night of the Hunter shows us the damage the patriarchal system does to women through the character of Willa, who is ultimately murdered by the Preacher, himself an embodiment of the masculine Church’s abuse of power. The film offers a striking commentary on two of the main issues feminist theologians would identify as emblematic of patriarchal oppression in the Church: its control over the woman’s voice and her body. In the film, if women are allowed to speak to men in a church setting, they serve a male agenda and are carefully controlled by the patriarchal church hierarchy. Furthermore, Harry, in an impassioned speech on his wedding night, recites a position representative of fundamentalist Christianity’s view on the female body and how its seductive power must be contained. These scenes, imbued with terror, condemn the patriarchal project of fundamentalist Christianity and illustrate how the Church and the Preacher oppress and repress Willa.

In the first of these scenes, Willa and Harry’s wedding night, Willa prepares in the bathroom for the eventual consummation of the marriage; however, when she exits the bathroom, Harry initially refuses to acknowledge her, pretending to be praying. With this act, Harry further cements himself as a holy man who has risen above the temptations of the flesh, enabling him to use his religious rhetoric even more effectively. Eventually, he finishes praying and launches into a sermon on the nature of sex and its role in his version of Christianity. Harry’s statements resound with notions of a masculinized, disembodied Christianity, projecting sin and death upon the woman’s body, in service of his patriarchal agenda of control. For the Preacher, “Marriage...represents a blending of two spirits in the sight of heaven,” while the woman’s body is “the temple of creation and motherhood,” “the flesh of Eve that man since Adam has profaned,” and “meant for begetting children.” In this manner, Harry’s comments are representative of patriarchal, fundamentalist Christianity’ s attitudes toward women. In keeping with fundamentalism’ s devaluing of the physical, Harry sees marriage as solely spiritual, a bastion against the sins of the flesh which have pervaded the world since the Fall. Mary Daly, a prominent feminist theologian, takes issue with this view of the world: “This static, sin-haunted view of human life reflects and perpetuates a negative attitude toward sexuality, matter, and ‘the world.’ In such an atmosphere antifeminism has thrived.”25 Through the Preacher, The Night of the Hunter demonstrates the dangers of this negative view of sex and shows how the patriarchy controls women by subsuming their sexuality within motherhood.

For the Preacher, sex is only to be used for the purposes of reproduction; otherwise it denigrates the female body. While this could be conceivably seen as an elevation of the female and her body, Daly asserts that this mentality is the opposite and that the act of “stressing that the union is primarily for the production and education of offspring” has led to “the tacit assumption that women are not fully human.��26 As Daly argues, fundamentalism sees the institution of marriage as a biological, pragmatic union, rather than one built “upon personalist values and goals.”27 While the Preacher’s rhetoric suggests a rejection of the lust of the flesh, freeing Willa from his sexual desire, this rejection further locks her into his patriarchal system, due to his ability to control her body through his denial of her sexuality. In this scene, the Preacher’s authoritative tone and terse commands force Willa to do as he says, and in an extended medium-close up of Willa, he appears, still in focus, in the background, exerting his control on the shot. Furthermore, he turns off the solitary light in the room, leaving Willa in the dark, dictating the very circumstances of the room and solidifying his power in their relationship. The guise of honor given to Willa imprisons rather than frees, as Brown explains: “In fundamentalism, women are highly honored as mothers, but they are also forbidden the freedom to refuse this elevated role.”28 Given the ability to control a woman’s body—through keeping her pregnant or asserting that her natural physicality is evil—the Christian patriarchy then exercises its power over the woman’s voice, using her words to reinforce the patriarchal hegemony in the Church.

In what might be the film’s most chilling scene, Willa delivers a sermon at a revival meeting that binds her voice to ideas that animate the Christian patriarchy’s view of women as destructive. Throughout the sermon, Harry stands behind her, and his domineering presence indicates the masculine control needed to allow Willa to speak to a congregation that includes men. Additionally, the ubiquity of burning torches, in the foreground and background of the shot, give Willa’s already intense message an air of fire-and-brimstone, creating a hellish backdrop for her condemnation of femininity. According to Willa, she “drove a good man to murder” because she “kept a’hounding him for perfume and clothes and face paint.” The implication is clear: due to Willa’s feminine desires to be beautiful, she, like Eve, led her former husband to sin—it was her fault, her responsibility. Of course, with what the film has shown us about Willa up to this point, we know this is not her true voice, the one that earlier intoned, “I just don’t want a husband.” Here, Willa takes on one of classical Christianity’s favorite images of the woman as seductive Eve betraying Adam, an image used to control women and their sexuality: “[Woman’s creation from Adam’s rib], together with her role as temptress in the story of the Fall, supposedly established beyond all doubt woman's immutable inferiority.”29 Willa’s voice in this scene is manipulated by Harry to serve his patriarchal agenda and his elevation of a masculine Christianity, bereft of feminine symbolism and the temptations of sex.

The Night of the Hunter must demonstrate the logical end of Willa’s complicity in the patriarchal oppression, concluding with her death at the hands of the Preacher. By constructing Willa as the embodiment of the traditional fundamentalist woman, the film encourages us to read her death as the natural end of her complicity; for women to reverse the oppression of the patriarchal Church, the old, traditional image of the woman must die and be replaced with a new image of femininity. Daly echoes this call to action: “Women who have a consciousness of the problem...have the responsibility of changing the image of woman by raising up their own image, giving an example to others, especially to the young.”30 At this moment in the film, Willa has finally discovered the Preacher’s true nature and tries to talk him out of his maniacal mission—she uses her voice to speak the truth, but this effort is too late. In her moment of resistance, Willa still upholds traditional stereotypes of the Christian woman as docile and subservient to her husband, even as Harry attacks her with a knife. At this moment, Willa takes the traditional role to its extreme, acquiescing to her husband’s judgment by not attempting to fight back, ultimately sacrificing herself to his wishes. Although Willa maintains this traditional stereotype, the film also uses her as a subversive device: her sacrifice is both an indictment of the patriarchal system as well as a necessary step in the narrative of subversion offered by the film. With her death, the film announces its intention to cast aside the traditional image of the fundamentalist female in favor of something different. In Miz Cooper, The Night of the Hunter fashions a new image of woman

for Christianity. She controls her voice and her body, recognizes the physicality and sexuality of women as essential to their being, and removes her voice from the control of the patriarchal hegemony. Leo Braudy does not see the film in this progressive of a light, suggesting “the process of the film is basically from Mitchum to Gish, from morbid antisexuality to reasonable and moral antisexuality.”31 Y et, Miz Cooper does not share the Preacher’ s abhorrence for sex or affection; when Ruby (Gloria Castillo) tells her that she has been sneaking off to be with boys, Miz Cooper responds with compassion, validating Ruby’s desire for love expressed through sexuality. Additionally, Miz Cooper seems quite aware of the physicality inherent in being a human in the world and glorifies that state as proper and good, not evil and non-spiritual. For example, she is in touch with the earth, growing vegetables and raising chickens, which she sells in town and uses to feed the children she takes care of at her house. To be certain, the cinema of the time had its share of similarly minded characters, both men and women, but The Night of the Hunter renders its power relationships in explicitly gendered terms. Therefore, Miz Cooper exhibits a more nuanced understanding of the world than the Preacher by disregarding the dichotomous categories of good/bad, spiritual/physical, and men/women, and as such she transcends the traditional conception of a Christian woman provided by fundamentalism.

The film situates Miz Cooper as an authority through her words and her control of the cinematic form, visually and sonically, to give her maximum impact.32 She is particularly critical of the Preacher and her ability to speak in this fashion equates with Bernal’s description of the potential of the female voice in Christianity: “As the speech of the ‘Other’ or the ‘outsider,’ feminist theological speech critiques the idolatrous pretensions of those who manipulate the live- giving force of language.”33 The Preacher often manipulates the people and spaces around him through his smooth language and command of religious rhetoric, which “points to a central idea implicit in The Night of the Hunter: power belongs to the one who controls the story.”34 This idea is not just implicit in The Night of the Hunter, but in many classical Hollywood films with one major difference—in The Night of the Hunter, the woman controls the story. In this sense, the film gives the pulpit to Miz Cooper, framing its story with her and giving her voice the power to transcend the diegetic space of the film, creating a scenario which forms a new vision of the woman’s role in Christianity and Hollywood. By viewing the opening and closing of the film, as well as the climactic showdown between Miz Cooper and the Preacher, through feminist film theory and film sound theory, I will argue that Miz Cooper exerts control over the diegesis and subverts classical Hollywood film form and patriarchal fundamentalism.

Stealing the Spotlight: Miz Cooper’s Subversion of Classical Cinema

Feminist film theory in the realm of the visual has long been shaped by Laura Mulvey’s discussion of the male gaze, in which “the male protagonist is free to command the stage, a stage of spatial illusion in which he articulates the look and creates the action.”35 The Night of the Hunter occasionally plays with the male gaze, but it also positions Miz Cooper’s diegetic and formal power at the sonic level, perhaps a less noticeable, yet equally powerful subversion of masculine control. For theorists such as Kaja Silverman and Amy Lawrence, the patriarchal system is expressed just as forcefully through the sound editing of classical cinema as it is through the male gaze of the camera. Silverman sees continuity sound editing as “working to identify even the embodied male voice with the attributes of the cinematic apparatus, but always situating the female voice within a hyperbolically diegetic context.”36 Within this diegetic prison, then, Lawrence postulates that “the text forces [women] to speak,” leading to a situation where “attempts to stop her from speaking rupture classical conventions of representation...and expose the way patriarchy uses language, image, sound, and narrative to construct and contain ‘woman’.”37 The terror that Lawrence describes when women start speaking in classical Hollywood film mirrors the Christian patriarchy’s fear of allowing a woman to speak from the pulpit as an ordained minister. Along with its treatment of the woman’s voice, the film differentiated itself visually from other films of that era, standing out even more.

Upon The Night of the Hunter’s release, many critics pointed at Laughton’s direction and the film’s style as the primary problems with the film. The film’s artistic creativity was often seen as confusing and unnecessary, prompting John Beaufort to call it “a grim but self-consciously artificial moving picture” in contrast to “Davis Grubb’s grimly brilliant suspense novel.”38 Bosley Crowther, in the New York Times, first compliments the film on its acting and sense of place before criticizing Laughton’s decisions at the end of the film, suggesting that the film veers into “abstraction” which “is handled with obvious pretense.”39 In a piece a few days later, Crowther further comments on Laughton’s direction, praising him for some scenes, but he again questions Laughton’s direction in the second part of the film: “Mr. Laughton gets way out in left field when he tries to make his film grotesque and weird...[he] drifts away into realms that are ‘arty.’ The last part is sheer pretense.”40 In a similar fashion to Crowther, William Zinsser enjoyed the film, yet also asserted that “sometimes Laughton gets too arty for his own good but The Night of the Hunter has so much imagination that we can forgive its excesses.”41 Most critics were not so quick to forgive Laughton’s excesses and instead found the film superficial. For Couchman, the film’s “spiritual battle...finds its deepest expression within the visual scheme of the film,” and he is not surprised that “so many reviewers” could not “penetrate the deeper meanings conveyed by [Laughton’s] techniques.”42 The visual and aural work together to deliver religious significance, as The Night of the Hunter gives Miz Cooper control of the diegetic world sonically and visually from the onset of the film, a radical inversion of common Hollywood practice at the time.43

The film opens with a scene that can only be called bizarre: Miz Cooper’s head appears in the starry sky, addressing a group of children, whose heads later appear in the sky, as she sets the stage for the ensuing narrative. More importantly, her voice quickly becomes a voice-over, accompanying an aerial shot of the Ohio countryside. Here, Miz Cooper becomes, by virtue of her voice being heard without being connected to her body, what Michel Chion terms an acousmétre—“a special being, a kind of talking and acting shadow.”44 In the hierarchy of Chion’s acousmétres, Miz Cooper falls into the category of the “already visualized acousmétre,” her voice identified with her body; thus, she does not have the “ubiquity, panopticism, omniscience, and omnipotence” of the complete acousmétre, who has not been visually identified.45 However, “in the dark regions of the acousmatic field” Miz Cooper “can acquire by contagion some of the powers of the complete acousmétre.”46 The film gives Miz Cooper access, in some form, to the complete acousmétre’s powers, despite having already visualized her within the opening seconds of the film, through its construction of the opening and concluding sequences and her showdown with the Preacher.

The Night of the Hunter explicitly gives Miz Cooper sonic and visual authority from the opening scene. She begins the narrative by reflecting on the Sermon on the Mount—preaching, as it were—to the audience as she stares out from space. She is centered in the frame with a medium shot that fills the center of the frame, the dominant presence in these opening shots. Then, while Miz Cooper is telling us to “beware of false prophets,” the film cuts away from her to a succession of three aerial shots, each one getting closer to the ground. By conflating her voice with the aerial perspective, the film positions her as all- seeing and all-knowing, as if she is directing the camera to view the scene, where some young boys find the Preacher’s most recent victim. Miz Cooper’s voice- over resumes and the camera returns to the aerial perspective, although this time, with each successive cut, it moves closer to Harry Powell driving down the road. The voice-over ends with her declaring, “And by their fruits, ye shall know them”—a second later, the film cuts to a medium shot of the Preacher in the car. Due to Miz Cooper’s acousmatic voice guiding our perception and the diegesis, we know that Harry is a bearer of bad fruit, because Miz Cooper, through the voice-over, has been situated as the arbiter of the story space.

Just as her presence and voice open the film, Miz Cooper closes the film, confirming her authority through her relationship to the camera. It is of particular import in The Night of the Hunter that Miz Cooper exerts her authority over both the visual and sonic elements of cinematic form because, as Mary Ann Doane notes, both the voice and body can been seen as sites of patriarchal oppression of women; therefore, only subverting one or the other would not actually be a subversion of the patriarchal order.47 The film concludes at Christmas, and after all the gifts have been exchanged, the children exit the scene and we are left with Miz Cooper, who delivers these lines about children: “They abide and they endure.” What is significant about this moment is not what she says, but how she says it—looking straight into the camera. Miz Cooper knows she is the storyteller, and she announces the conclusion of her story by blatantly disregarding the patriarchal conventions of classical cinematic form by directly addressing her audience. Earlier in the film, she also exhibits the power to directly address the audience, when she takes the children into town and stops at the general store. Here, as the store owner talks to her about Jon and Pearl, the camera suddenly cuts to a close-up of her face as she proclaims, “I’m a strong tree with branches for many birds.” While she is not looking directly at the camera, at least not in the same manner as the closing scene, this statement seems oddly out of context in the conversation, and the forcefulness of Miz Cooper’s tone suggests an addressto the audience or even to the fundamentalist order doubting her ability to raise five children on her own.

Miz Cooper’s visual power is further evident in the scene just prior to the final showdown between her and the Preacher. Here, the Preacher ar rives at her home to claim Jon and Pearl, spouting religious rhetoric as he tries to convince Miz Cooper to let him take the children. As they converse—Miz Cooper at the top of the porch stairs and the Preacher at the bottom—the camera frames them both in such a way as to suggest the ineffectuality of the male gaze. Of this series of conventional shot/countershots, Couchman correctly notes that the film gives power to Miz Cooper by framing the Preacher from a high angle matching Miz Cooper’s perspective; however, the countershots of Miz Cooper are straight angle shots rather than, as Couchman suggests, low angle shots and they do not correlate with Harry’s gaze.48 The Preacher is in her gaze, but she is not in his; her control over the visual economy prevents the camera from conforming to the conventional mirroring of perspectives this sequence would normally entail, ultimately confirming the film’s “transfer of power from Preacher to Miz Cooper.”49

Immediately following this exchange is the climactic battle of Miz Cooper and the Preacher, staged at night—a battle of competing voices for who will get the final word in the film’s story. The Preacher sits in the dark and shadows and begins to sing “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms,” his trademark song throughout the film, which Miz Cooper eventually matches by singing the counter-melody of the chorus. Two important things transpire during this rather chillingly beautiful duet between the two which require deeper analysis: one on a theological level, the other on the cinematic level. In what Braudy calls the film’s move “from a violent Old Testament religion to a calming New Testament religion,”50 Miz Cooper responds to the Preacher’s chorus “by adding the word—that is, to say, the Word—that Harry Powell has left out: ‘Leaning on Jesus’.”51 As Daly mentions, “In the New Testament it is significant that the statements which reflect the antifeminism of the times are never those of Christ,” as Jesus is often considered radically subversive in his views on women in the intensely patriarchal system of the ancient Middle East.52 Thus, by invoking the name of Jesus, Miz Cooper appeals to a subversive figure for the power to speak against the current oppression engendered by patriarchal Christianity in the form of the Preacher.

Confirming Miz Cooper’s theology, the visual and sonic elements of the scene grant her superiority over the Preacher as they both begin to sing. Speaking of this moment, Couchman eloquently describes the shift in power: “When Rachel's voice enters, Preacher's dwindles to accompaniment. Miz Cooper has appropriated his song and thereby reduced his power.”53 Indeed, her voice takes precedence in the audio mix, even when the camera moves back outside to focus on the Preacher, highlighting Miz Cooper’s control over the sonic elements of this scene. Likewise, the shift in the acousmatic elements of the duet situates Miz Cooper in a position of power and ubiquity. The scene begins with Harry’s acousmatic voice, then as Miz Cooper starts singing, the camera cuts back outside to Harry and her voice becomes acousmatic, hauntingly filling the off-screen space. The next shot is a two-shot of Miz Cooper and Harry: she is in the shadows in the left foreground, completely black, only the movements of her lips visible; he is in the background, centered, yet illuminated by the outside lamp. As they both end singing on screen, it would appear that their battle has ended in a stalemate with neither Miz Cooper nor the Preacher in control of the acousmatic voice and the power it affords. However, the final shot of the duet reveals an inversion of power, as Miz Cooper comfortably sits in the darkness, refusing to let Harry take control of the night—she has not only assumed authority over his song, but also his time of day.

The Night of the Hunter’s subversive project persists in the conclusion of this scene, where Miz Cooper defeats the Preacher physically after she has beaten him vocally. As she watches the children in the kitchen, waiting for Harry to enter the house, Miz Cooper once again tells a story about Jesus, comparing the Preacher to King Herod and his maniacal quest to find and kill the baby Jesus. Here, Miz Cooper is investing the current events with religious significance, intimating that, no matter how terrible the world can be, love and goodness, as embodied by her, have a chance to win. Glimpsing the Preacher’s shadow on the wall, Miz Cooper commands the children to run and hide as she raises the shotgun, prepared to fire at any instant—and fire she does, reducing the Preacher to a screeching animal of a man who flees from the house to take shelter in the barn, the animals’ abode. While Miz Cooper dispatches the Preacher through use of a gun, a typically masculine symbol; her voice laid the groundwork for the victory. The film reflects this reading of the power of the female voice, as Miz Cooper defeats the Preacher so soundly that he does not utter another word for the remainder of the film, rendered silent by the voice of a woman.

The Night of the Hunter openly flouts a number of cinematic conventions connected to the male control of the diegetic space, giving the film a subversive quality unusual for its time. Furthermore, The Night of the Hunter subverts fundamentalist Christianity, an institution rarely criticized by mainstream film of the time. The film illuminates the darker side of the fundamentalist patriarchy through the Preacher, a composite of the various masculine abuses of power that mar the history of fundamentalism and demonstrates the destructive effect of fundamentalist conceptions of gender and womanhood through its depiction of Willa. By not allowing women the authority to preach or control their own bodies, the male fundamentalist hierarchy forces women like Willa to submit to the control of men. The Night of the Hunter highlights the power of the woman in the sphere of religion and her importance in resisting evil through Miz Cooper. She proclaims the Word without a man standing over her shoulder; in fact, the film posits that this might be just what the men fear. Yet, The Night of the Hunter does not only undermine the patriarchal institution of fundamentalist Christianity, it also launches an assault on the classical Hollywood convention of masculine control over the cinematic apparatus. Miz Cooper, through framing the story and addressing the audience directly with her gaze and her voice, controls both the apparatus and the diegesis, leaving no doubt as to her eventual triumph over the Preacher. Utilizing sound in a fascinating manner, The Night of the Hunter provides a compelling picture of the power of the female voice to resist and subvert the patriarchy, a film well ahead of its time.

Notes

1 Jeffrey Couchman, The Night of the Hunter: A Biography of a Film (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2009), 195-209.

2 Richard Coe, “Real Villain is the Director,” The Washington Post and Times Herald, October 14, 1955, 32.

3 These theologians are, of course, far from the first to levy these critiques against masculine Christianity, but I chose this particular time period because it lines up with a larger discourse about feminism in the surrounding society. For a discussion of early Christian feminists in America, see Margaret Lamberts Bendroth, Fundamentalism & Gender, 1875 to the Present, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 33-41.

4 In the late 1800s, as Bendroth points out, “feminine piety was something revivalists could almost take for granted” and Christian women at that time “gained social power for themselves by pointing out the moral irresponsibility of middle-class men.” For more information, see Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender, 13-30; and George M. Marsden, Religion and American Culture (Orlando: Harcourt Brace, 1990), 112-15.

5 Lisa V. Bernal, “Deviant Speech: Women Preachers and Christian Anathema,” ARC 31 (2003): 134.

6 Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender, 19-24; Marsden, Religion and American Culture, 182- 84.

7 Joel A. Carpenter, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 6. Additionally, I am choosing to view fundamentalism as a somewhat cohesive movement for the purposes of this article, leaving aside some of the denominational squabbles that splintered fundamentalism since its beginning.

8 Ibid. See also Jon R. Stone and George M. Marsden for further definition of fundamentalism (52; Religion 182-84).

9 Jon R. Stone, On the Boundaries of American Evangelicalism: The Postwar Evangelical Coalition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), 54. For more information on fundamentalism’s fight against evolution, see George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 168-170.

10 The Scopes Trial pitted the State of Tennessee against John T. Scopes, a public school teacher, who had taught evolution to his class. William Jennings Bryan represented Tennessee, who ultimately won the case, but not before Darrow and the ACLU thoroughly devastated the fundamentalist position. For a longer treatment, see Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 184-89; and Stone, On the Boundaries, 64-66.

11 Carpenter, Revive Us Again, 61.

12 Randall Balmer, Blessed Assurance: A History of Evangelicalism in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), 79, and Carpenter, Revive Us Again, 68.

13 Karen McCarthy Brown, “Fundamentalism and the Control of Women,” in Fundamentalism and Gender, ed. John Stratton Hawley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 181.

14 George M. Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991), 66-68.

15 Ibid, 67.

16 Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), 132.

17 Stone, On the Boundaries, 55.

18 Brown, “Fundamentalism and the Control of Women,” 176.

19 The National Council of the Churches of Christ (NCC) was an ecumenical movement, associated with liberalism by more conservative evangelical Christians in the 1950s. See Stone, On the Boundaries, 124-25. Surprisingly, even the mainline denominations with their embrace of newer ideas and equality had problems with The Night of the Hunter and its treatment of Christianity.

20 Couchman, The Night of the Hunter, 169.

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid, 204.

23 Coe, “Real Villain,” 32.

24 Will Leonard, “Horrors! They Laugh at Film Full of Terror,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Oct. 21, 1955, B10.

25 Mary Daly, The Church and the Second Sex (New York: Harper Colophon, 1975), 186.

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid, 187.

28 Brown, “Fundamentalism and the Control of Women,” 181.

29 Daly, The Church and the Second Sex, 76.

30 Ibid, 177.

31 Leo Braudy, The World in a Frame: What We See in Films (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1976), 234.

32 The fact that Lillian Gish plays Miz Cooper only adds to the subversive qualities of her voice. Gish, well-known for starring in numerous silent films, had only appeared in six films since her first “talkie,” One Romantic Night (1930), and she had been absent from film for almost a decade (minus a brief appearance in Portrait of Jennie (1948)) before The Night of the Hunter. See Charles Affron, Lillian Gish: Her Legend, Her Life (New York: Scribner, 2001), 317-318. In The Night of the Hunter, the prevalence of Gish’s voice and her toughness directly contrasts many of her earlier and more well-known silent film roles, adding an extra dimension to Miz Cooper’s subversive abilities.

33 Bernal, “Deviant Speech,” 140.

34 Couchman, The Night of the Hunter, 142.

35 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema,” in Film Theory & Criticism (7th ed.), eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 717.

36 Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988), 45.

37 Amy Lawrence, Echo and Narcissus: Women’s Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 10 and 32.

38 John Beaufort, “‘The Night of the Hunter’ Presented at the Astor,” Christian Science Monitor, October 20, 1955, 11.

39 Bosley Crowther, “Screen: Bogeyman Plus,” New York Times, September 30, 1955, 23.

40 Bosley Crowther, “Directorial Ambition,” New York Times, October 2, 1955, X1.

41 William Zinsser, “The Night of the Hunter,” New York Herald Tribune, September 30, 1955, quoted in Simon Callow, The Night of the Hunter (London: BFI, 2000), 53.

42 Couchman, The Night of the Hunter, 204.

43 In the case of The Night of the Hunter, I believe that contemporary film theory not only helps explain a small portion of the initial consternation caused by the film but, more importantly, gives us unique insight into how the film constructs and illuminates the power relationship between Miz Cooper and the Preacher.

44 Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 21.

45 Ibid, 21 and 24. 46 Ibid, 21.

47 Mary Ann Doane, “The Voice in Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space,” in Film Theory & Criticism (7th ed.), eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 329-30.

48 Couchman, The Night of the Hunter, 143.

49 Ibid.

50 Braudy, The World in a Frame, 234.

51 Couchman, The Night of the Hunter, 167.

52 Daly, The Church and the Second Sex, 79. Also, see Elizabeth Fiorenza In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 105-59.

53 Couchman, The Night of the Hunter, 168.

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Noll, Mark. The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994.

Silverman, Kaja. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.

Stone, Jon R. On the Boundaries of American Evangelicalism: The Postwar Evangelical Coalition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999.

The Night of the Hunter. Directed by Charles Laughton. 1955. New York City, NY: The Criterion Collection, 2010. Blu-ray.

#movies #film #cinema #the night of the hunter #charles laughton #religion #narrative #evangelicalism #christianity #classical cinema #feminist theology #art #1950s #patriarchy #subversion

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hell-yeahfilm · 2 years

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PANDORA'S RAZOR

In Home: Interstellar (2015), 20-something Meriel Hope exposed the galaxywide corruption that enabled a bloody ambush aboard the starship Princess10 years before, which left her, her sister Elizabeth, and other children orphaned and traumatized. Now, in the year 2188, both sisters have found some semblance of peace on a rural planet called Haven. Meriel and her partner, John, are loving parents to her stepdaughters, Sandy and Becky. But then the powers that be—including the government of the United Nations of Earth—launch a media campaign to discredit Meriel, including a faked video of her retracting her accusations. The footage triggers Meriel’s painful flashbacks of her experience on the Princessbut also reignites her determination to set the record straight. Meanwhile, tensions run high between Haven’s farmers and newly arrived space refugees. When several people with scarred stomachs are found dead, Meriel immediately suspects that the camp has been infiltrated by the Archers—a quasi-religious group loyal to the Archtrope, who rules from a Vatican-styled palace on the planet Calliope. While Meriel, John, and the girls explore the glittering space station LeHavre, the Archers and their collaborators launch their final attempt to silence Meriel. The fictional universe that Strong has created for this series feels impressively real; the author has clearly put a lot of work into developing its many facets, from its seedy bars to its spirituality to its fictional historical figures. Indeed, readers may sometimes feel overloaded with worldbuilding information—although a glossary is included. Many of these futuristic elements are fun, but Strong also effectively tackles serious topics, such as media bias and bodily autonomy. There are gory moments, which are rare but memorable, and they’ll stick with readers. Additionally, in a genre full of brooding teen protagonists, Meriel is a refreshingly adult heroine, and John, a doting father to his daughters and supportive partner, stands out for his unconventional masculinity.

from Kirkus Reviews https://ift.tt/3sememS

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khalilhumam · 3 years

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Trinidadian comedian uses humour to say gender-based violence isn't funny

New Post has been published on http://khalilhumam.com/trinidadian-comedian-uses-humour-to-say-gender-based-violence-isnt-funny/

Trinidadian comedian uses humour to say gender-based violence isn't funny

‘It is important to [see] women as equals, worthy of respect’

Rhea-Simone Auguste, better known as the comedian Simmy De Trini. Photograph courtesy Auguste, used with permission. Photo credit: Mark Lyndersay for www.causeaneffect.co

Trinidad and Tobago, which has been grappling with increasing cases of gender-based violence and femicide, is still reeling over the murder of teenager Ashanti Riley, who was stabbed to death after being abducted by the driver of a private hire (PH) taxi on November 29. Since then, online discussion has been rife over the tendency to victim-blame and put the onus on women to protect themselves, as opposed to focusing on changing the culture and socialisation of men. One comedian decided to start pushing for that shift to happen in a rather unconventional way. On Facebook, Rhea-Simone Auguste, better known as Simmy De Trini, has published a series of scenarios, presented in local parlance, that play as reverse sexual harassment. The impact of this unexpected role reversal has emphasised the absurdity of what women are made to endure in the hyper-masculine Caribbean culture. Via WhatsApp, Simmy chatted with Global Voices about the gravity of gender-based violence and why she believes that humour is a good way to jump-start productive public discussion on the issue. Janine Mendes-Franco (JMF): Was this series inspired by the most recent spate of femicides or is this a theme you have been mulling over for a while now?

Simmy De Trini (SDT): As a survivor of both domestic violence and rape, I have been vocal over the last few years about the injustice women face and the inability of our current system to protect women from harm or worse, murder. The “reverse harassment” posts were not planned. I just got fed up of saying the same things so I switched it up and just started doing sarcastic posts about the situation.

JMF: Each of your instalments has attracted hundreds of likes, comments and shares. What kind of discussion did you want to get going?

SDT: When I realised the first post started gaining traction, the others were done with the hope of sparking discussions about the harassment women experience and the kind of attitudes we encounter that we need men to revisit and review in themselves and their friends.

JMF: Some people seem to be missing the point though.

SDT: The people who did not get it were in the minority and did not have an impact on me continuing. I felt like more people understood where I was coming from so I did not hesitate to keep sharing the posts.

JMF: How disturbing is it to you that most women can identify with some measure of what you speak about in these scenarios?

SDT: Very disturbing but not surprising. In conversations with friends, I have heard so many women talk about these situations with men that I already knew many others would have similar experiences and stories.

JMF: Tell us about your journey to becoming a comedian. Your brand of humour always seems to address serious issues by presenting truths in non-threatening ways. Why is this important to you, and as a woman in what remains a macho society, do you feel a responsibility to provoke thought to a greater degree than a male comedian might?

SDT: I started doing stand-up in 2017, as a creative outlet to help me cope and explore topics that had affected or impacted my life. I have some superficial stuff mixed in but try to explore aspects of mental health and domestic violence prevention and abuse when I can. I don't think much about it in terms of a responsibility but hope my messages sink in for those who can relate.

JMF: How do you tap into this ability to place yourself in the midst of an issue, yet find a way to witness the injustice through laughter?

SDT: I really don't overthink things. If something is going on that I want to talk about, I just do it spur of the moment and from my perspective.

JMF: Is there a difference between Simmy the Trini and Rhea-Simone? How do you draw the line?

SDT: Huge difference. Simmy is a stage name and a different personality. Simmy is loud and funny and all about the public life. Rhea-Simone [is] who I am as a person. I am a loner and like to be in quiet spaces where I can hear my own thoughts. People are usually surprised when they meet me and realise that Simmy can be “turned off,” and that I am mostly serious and able to speak on a range of topics that are not necessarily funny, but hold importance. That's why aside from comedy, I have been trying to do more public speaking and motivational speaking engagements because I enjoy talking to people in different settings.

JMF: You’re the mother of two boys. How is your work teaching them to change what seems to be a pervasive objectification of women in Trinidad and Tobago?

SDT: My sons are being raised to respect and value women. The women around me and by extension them are usually strong, vocal and from different walks of life. It is important to me that they grow up seeing women as equals and worthy of respect.

JMF: What do you want this series to accomplish?

SDT: More dialogue about what we have come to accept as the norm — but in reality is a degradation and devaluing of women — leading to these instances of violence, abuse, harassment or murder.

JMF: How do you think we can begin to solve the problem of gender-based violence?

SDT: Just as there is a sexual offenders registry, we need to have a domestic violence registry for repeat offenders. If you check the background of some of the men who end up murdering a woman in a domestic violence scenario, they sometimes have a clear history and pattern and it was escalating. Counselling for both victims and abusers is necessary to help people with anger management and conflict resolution techniques and strategies. Education is important too. I would love to see a full campaign in the public space that shows a no tolerance aspect for abuse and violence against women.

JMF: What role has social media played when it comes to sharing and promoting your work?

SDT: Facebook, in particular, has been important as it has allowed me to grow a following for my work and opened doors for me to get more work not just as a comedian but as a self-employed journalist and content creator.

JMF: Who have been your greatest influences?

SDT: My mom. My sons. Professionally, as a writer, I was trained by and worked with [journalists] Keith Smith, Deborah John and Angela Martin. In terms of comedy, Wanda Sykes — and I hope to work with her one day.

JMF: Imagine you’re doing a show and your audience is only men. What would you say to them, all jokes aside?

SDT: Women are important to the very fabric of our society. You stand to benefit when you see our value, our contributions and our worth.

< p class='gv-rss-footer'>Written by Janine Mendes-Franco

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sacredbodiesca · 3 years

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THANK YOU Yesterday was an exceptional day. The six-month masculine training I started on Monday with John Wineland kicked into gear on Day Three as I went for the bonus "heart" meditation (after the extended Ego Eradicator that's our basic daily practice this week). Wow - that opened me up in big ways. Apparently, it dialled me into something useful for one of my clients. That's his eye in the pic. Here’s the comment he posted online after our session (ps. I never know where these 15-minute "Office Hours" checkins will take us). "Doing the inner work today with the help of Hans @sacredbodiesca flipped the script on how I’m interpreting and engaging with the feminine and therefore almost every facet of my life. What was intended as a 15 minute check-in turned into 2 hours of deep insight, relief, and a renewed sense of motivation in my direction and practices. "It’s amazing what a single conversation can do when it is shared with those that have done the work we are now going through, it’s like talking to your future self. With so many avenues to healing I think men can be intimated by the idea of seeing a therapist. It seems to come with the assumption that results won’t be seen for weeks, months, years, decades, and to be fair I’ve been doing my internal work almost daily for the last 10 years so yeah, it’s a commitment. "But it’s so much more about trying out these unconventional avenues to find out who we connect with and who shares in our experiences. GO FIND THOSE WHO HAVE BEEN THROUGH THE SHIT YOU ARE NOW GOING THROUGH! Don’t think you need to commit to somebody who doesn’t see you or isn’t even trying. We have so little time on this planet to force a connection for the sake of healing because your doctor wrote a prescription. I can say with certainty that once you start diving deep into your own shit you’ll start noticing things about yourself that you never realized could even exist, and you’ll be living it in your own being as to be undeniable and without the need for others to validate you for it. Enjoy life and love yourself fully just as you are right now and you’ll have taken the first step in the work." What he said. Wow. Thank you. 🙏 (at Sacredbodies.ca) https://www.instagram.com/p/CMkZKccDK77/?igshid=119ounwcij490

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jimmys-tangerine · 7 years

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IV. Ne pleur pas

22 February 1972, Melbourne, Australia

It didn’t take long for Billy to fall in love with Caroline. Less than twelve hours, in fact. And it didn’t make much effort. When the concert ended, he had seen her slowly drink herself into a strange, sexual obscurity. Maybe it was her laughing—she would shake with her whole body then ebb inward to return to her catlike nature, her eyes turning down and her lips curving cleverly. Maybe it was the way she spoke—with unfounded authority and a foreign lilt. She wasn’t even a coquette or a temptress, she just was an inevitable object of affection.

And Billy wasn’t alone.

Men pulled on her skirt and tried to make her laugh, or tried to make her smile—at least. They wanted to see the crooked overlap of her bottom two teeth and hear the cascading cackle that entered your body via the ear and somehow wound up tickling your toes. And the man and the boy and the journalist within Billy fought when Caroline slipped down onto the couch beside the one man who she might actually love back.

He was the one who tucked the champagne pink flower behind her pointed ear, dragging his fingers through the unruly tufts of orange hair that fell from her braid. And he was also one of the four men in the world Billy would most like to interview.

Jimmy Page wore a pinstripe blazer with patches of beige suede on the lapels. Beneath his coat he wore a light blue button-up tucked into denim bell-bottoms. He was quite the fashionable man, Billy noted alongside the comment in his notebook that read: “Page’s signature beard shaven by early morning of 21 February.”

Caroline was reading a book with her head on Jimmy’s shoulder as John Bonham called her name, asking for a treat. Billy had taken careful observations of her role in the band; she wasn’t entirely a groupie, she seemed more vital to the band’s functions than providing sexual relief. Billy knew there was an ulterior motive to her stay, aside from Jimmy’s quite obvious infatuation with her.

Billy had sworn he would never publicly shed light on the band’s myriad vices and sinful behavior. He only watched from afar as Caroline fashioned a straight line of blow between the breasts of a popular groupie Billy couldn’t remember the name of.

Why is she the one who’s always called over for cocaine? Billy asked himself.

“You’re only here because of her, you know,” a voice announced from behind Billy, ripping him out of his scrutiny. Jimmy Page, dark and brooding as ever, stood just inches from him with a glass of brandy in his pale, ringed hand.

“I know,” Billy assured. He swallowed loudly—sure his eyes were wide like saucers. He had questions to ask—questions upon questions upon questions, but he couldn’t find the words within him to ask. The only thing that could leave his mouth were clipped grunts of simple communication.

“But if you keep watching her so closely, she’ll get rid of you,” Jimmy added as he took a sip from his glass. Billy admired how Jimmy could handle his liquor so proficiently; Billy couldn’t down a sip of that stuff without a wince.

“What do you mean?”

“Ever been to a big museum? Where they house a lot of important art—think the Louvre, or the Tate, or the MET?”

Billy hesitated, messily remembering his tour of the Louvre when he visited France as a boy. “Sure.”

“And when you’re at these places there are necessary sightings. You know, you have to see the Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, The Oxbow, The Death of Socrates, The Water Lily Pond, Weeping Woman, et cetera… Yeah?”

“Sure.”

“But these big pieces… If you sit there staring like a half-wit and leaning in too close to the big pieces, one of the guards will give you a gentle shove backward or tell you to get a move on?”

“Alright.”

“Well, with her,” Jimmy tilted the rim of his glass toward Caroline as she burrowed her head into a pillow while she laughed at something Bonzo had said. “It’s the same principle. You sit their staring with a slack jaw and moon-eyes, fervently scribbling notes and sketches, silent and uncanny… Someone’s going to tell you to get a move on. It might be me, it might be Mister Peter Grant; it will most likely be her, actually.”

“I—”

“You don’t need to excuse yourself or apologize. I get staring at her—if anyone does, it’s me,” Jimmy followed with a light chuckle. “But I’m just letting you know. If you want to stick around, don’t be so obvious.”

Billy nodded quickly, several tufts of his bangs dancing along with the swift shake.

“And Caroline told me you asked her something,” Jimmy looked downward, summoning a memory. “Ah, that you asked, ‘From where do you believe Led Zeppelin derives their greatest source of inspiration?’”

“I was interested in her answer, as I imagined from a groupie’s point of view it would be—”

“She’s not going to give you the right answer because she’s humble,” Jimmy laughed. He leaned in several inches closer to Billy, though his eyes were locked upon Caroline. “I guess I could give you the answer most would give—the standard. Women, love, sex, homesickness, childhood, death, travel, drugs, power, money… The works. But perhaps seeing it yourself would make more sense…” Jimmy urged. His temple nodded in the direction of Caroline; Billy pulled his eyes from the formidable green glance beneath Jimmy’s unkempt bangs.

Caroline stood on a velvet ottoman, with one leg swinging like a pendulum as she tried to balance herself. She was bent at odd angles, yet it was painfully graceful. She looked like a constellation.

“Jimmy, let’s pick out this evening’s attire!” She exclaimed from across the room, making eye contact with him. Jimmy snipped all ties of conversation from him to the journalist and made way for Caroline with a bright smile on his mouth. Billy understood a bit better.

“Well I’m wearing an ivory dress, Jimmy!”

Jimmy pinched the bridge of his nose as he looked down at Caroline, who sat inside of his opened and emptied suitcase. “And?”

“We need contrast! I insist upon the black shirt.”

“Why do we need contrast?”

“Because we’re going as a pair, are we not? I agreed to attend the press party as your date, now you must follow a few rules.”

Jimmy rolled his eyes and balled up the red shirt he had in his hands. He threw it into the opened closet of his shared hotel room. Caroline gasped and lunged for it, folding it neatly in her lap and scolding him with a glance and a few words: “I like this shirt. Why do you like dressing in wrinkled clothes? Why would you wrinkle this lovely shirt?”

Jimmy rolled his eyes. “I’ll wear the black shirt with the white pants.”

“Which white pants?” She tested him.

“The flared, taffeta pants.”

“Perfect.”

“Now go put on your dress,” Jimmy said as he pulled Caroline out of the suitcase. “And I’ll put on my outfit.”

Jimmy was in the process of unbuttoning his shirt when he heard the sound of a body collapsing on the one of two full-size beds in the room. He turned around to see Caroline tucked into a fetal position on the bed that belonged to him.

“How did you know that one was mine?” Jimmy asked as he shrugged the sleeves of his shirt off of his shoulders and threw the shirt onto the ground.

“I smelled your Pantene shampoo on your pillow,” she said as she tilted her nose into the plushy wall of his pillow. Jimmy’s thin torso was soon covered by the black shirt Caroline had selected for him. Once the buttons of his shirt were done, he reached for the buckle of the belt on his jeans.

“Protect your modesty, Jimmy!” Caroline shouted, covering her eyes with her fingers. Jimmy laughed loudly, throwing his belt to the floor with a silvery clang. He hadn’t thought of Caroline’s reaction to him changing; with all the women that had seen him entirely naked after his success in the music industry, he didn’t really hold any qualms about nudity.

Caroline peaked out of the gaps between her fingers as Jimmy pulled the jeans off of his long legs. She was absolutely awed by the completion of his thinness; his legs were nearly toothpicks. Yet, a masculine definition echoed in every outlined muscle. Caroline could not look away from the awkward and unconventional beauty of Jimmy’s legs.

He presented himself in his new outfit with an auditory fanfare. Caroline pealed away her eyes and immediately clapped her hands, excited by Jimmy’s innately chic appearance. Perhaps it had to do with his narrow form, or with the black-and-white polarity of his raven hair and ivory skin.

As Jimmy picked up his previous outfit from the floor, Caroline caught a glance his chest which was exposed by several undone buttons. There suddenly seemed to be a very murky serenity in the room—quietness, secrecy, and darkness. Caroline stretched her arms upward as she stretched in the bed. The alluring scent of Jimmy—some obscure cologne, fire, and books—was warmer than any blanket. Caroline grew tired.

After glancing at the old pocket-watch on his bedside table, Jimmy looked at Caroline with words of urgency on his tongue. But upon seeing her fluttering eyelids and resting lips, he placed the words elsewhere. And he just stood there, darkly looming like a shadow, memorizing the serenity that laced her every feature.

Had he not been subconsciously leaning and stepping toward the bed, Caroline would not have met his hand when she reached for it. But she did, and caught onto his palm like a baby would. Her hand slowly slipped from his tiredly, but he caught it with a hook of his fingers. He soon formed a tighter grip on her small hand. And perhaps it was the quietness, the secrecy, or the darkness of the room that made her stealthily tug his hand toward her sleeping form; either way, she was not sure.

She turned with the yank and he soon crashed onto the small bed beside her—feet dangling off the end. He had been forcibly wound in a ball during his one night in Melbourne, and he wasn’t looking forward to doing it again tonight. But at that moment he had never been so gracious for a bed so achingly small. For between the close sides of the bed, Jimmy’s arm caged Caroline’s torso, his knees knocked against hers, his chest served as a pillow to her freckled cheek, and her bare toes climbed into the wide ankle opening of his pants.

Jimmy held in a sigh; he was instantly worried a single breath could fracture the delicacy of the situation. He had longed for something as little as an embrace from Caroline for an unimaginable length of time, that which only felt extended by the relationship with women he normally assumed.

Impossibly fragile was the green-eyed glance she gave him, though long-lasting. He would have kissed her if he had not so feared losing the closeness. Kissed her very slowly too—the way teenagers do after their third date. Jimmy was at a loss of all power, all will, all capacity; especially was he so vulnerable when she laid her fingers on his jaw and cheek—her touch as light as the landing of a butterfly. Amusedly her fingers drummed against his cheek lightly—possibly mockingly.

Jimmy had had enough, he thought. Though this defiance was fronted with a cowardly submissiveness; he could not overrule her. So he compromised, and very slowly placed a kiss on her soft hairline. He held his lips against her skin for a while—until she returned his cautious kiss with a peck on the chin then turned away. His skin burned as she turned her back to him to sleep.

Both Jimmy and Caroline were kicked off of the bed. Jimmy, the heavier sleeper, merely groaned when his bottom his the floor. Caroline—on the other hand—instantly lashed out and yelped.

“Dégage!” Caroline shouted from the floor.

“You two are pushing it,” Robert spoke sternly.

“What?” Jimmy asked groggily from the floor.

“You’re lucky it’s me who walked in,” Robert shook his head as he walked toward his wardrobe. He yanked open the doors and confronted a colorful rack of clothing. Caroline absent-mindedly noticed how Robert hung up all of his clothes for the two-day stay in Melbourne, while Jimmy kept it all in his suitcases.

“Il est quelle heure?”

“It’s eight,” Robert responded bluntly. All who traveled with Caroline had picked up a very rudimentary level of French.

“Merde!” Caroline shot up. She had thirty minutes to get showered, dressed, and have her makeup done. Before sprinting out of the room, she grabbed Jimmy’s forearm and shook him awake. “Jimmy, you only have thirty minutes to do your hair!” She exclaimed.

Jimmy instantly stood and ran into the bathroom. Jimmy’s hair was a delicate issue.

As per usual, Caroline’s bedroom was beside that of Jimmy. She shared it with several groupies, and they were all crowded around the horizontal mirror hanging above the sink in the bathroom when Caroline walked in.

“Je dois me doucher,” Caroline hurriedly told Margaux, her one roommate that was also French. Margaux stayed put—hovering over the sink penciling on a fifth coat of emerald eyeliner. “Allez-vous en!” She screamed, pointing toward the door.

The bathroom eventually cleared; the women relocated to either Jimmy and Robert’s room or the skinny mirror between the hotel room’s two windows. As they left, Caroline watched them with a fragmented thought. They all wore gossamer garb and did their make up lavishly; they were covered in jewels given to them by now-distant men. Margaux always wore an amulet around her neck that Jimmy had given her for her sixteenth birthday, it was made of alexandrite—a stone as kaleidoscopic as her eyes. Caroline felt a nudge of jealousy—not toward the necklace, but toward the undeniable glamour of these women. Caroline wished she exuded opulence as those girls did.

Caroline washed her body and hair quickly so she would have several minutes to melt beneath the boiling water that poured out of the shower head. She left herself just a few moments to curl in a ball on the floor of the shower, letting the skin of her fingers and feet wrinkle like a prune.

When Caroline got out of the shower, she wrapped her hair in one of the hotel towels and wrapped her body in the lavender towel she always brought with her. When she stepped out of the bathroom, she shockingly discovered Jimmy sitting at the end of the unmade bed.

“How did you do your hair so quickly?” Caroline asked as she walked across the room. Jimmy watched her closely as she sparkled with every step. She was so there, so easy, so taunting—and yet, she could not be touched.

Jimmy cleared his throat in order to speak. “It was obedient today.”

Caroline chuckled as she slipped on the enormous robe the hotel provided. Once it was securely wrapped around her, the lavender towel beneath it dropped in a pool around her small feet. She walked back toward the bathroom with the robe forming a train behind her. Before opening the door to the bathroom, she stopped and turned to Jimmy.

“Want to blow-dry my hair while I put on my make up?” She asked him with an excited smile. Jimmy’s eyes widened before he enthusiastically nodded, warming at the idea of being able to hold that red silk in his unworthy hands.

Familiar with a blowdryer, Jimmy set up the appliance as she began applying a sheer layer of foundation to her freckled, olive skin. Jimmy carefully removed the towel from her hair and grinned at the wet vermillion mess he had exposed. As he turned on the blowdryer, Caroline handed him her brush.

He worked slowly through her hair, relishing in the soft and flowery scent that flew his way with every blow of hair. Minutely, he urged forward until his toes barely touched her heels. He couldn’t tell whether her discreet and minuscule movements backward—toward him—was just her way of getting a better angle of herself in the mirror or was her consciously trying to get closer to him. Jimmy’s heart buzzed and spun in his ribcage quickly. When his fingers delicately brushed then stayed on Caroline’s neck—just along the gentle climb of her carotid artery, Jimmy swore she leant into his touch.

Jimmy then realized he’d been too focused on his fragile ministrations to look in the mirror at her. His eyes met the glass—a natural pinkish blush bloomed on her cheeks and slightly on her neck; her eyes were closed.

Like studying the results of a tricky science experiment, Jimmy slid his fingers downwards ever so slowly. He watched the small space of chest the robe exposed rise and fall quickly as his fingers moved. It was truly amazing watching her respond to his touch, and it ignited a furious fire in his every organ… Especially one. Never before had his pants grown so quickly and so easily tight.

When Jimmy flipped the switch of the blowdryer off, her eyes opened. And he knew by the look in her wet eyes that he was not alone in this hole-and-corner devotion, this furtive worship, this afire allegiance and heated curiosity. She looked away into the drain of the sink beneath her before Jimmy could further realize she liked looking at and talking to him as much as he did her; but he caught her nonetheless.

While opening his mouth to speak he decided a better use for his lips. His head lowered and met the side of her neck; he breathed her ensnaring scent through his nose and only laid his lips upon her delicate skin. In all the time that Jimmy had known women—the quiet sighs of women, their soft skin, their ripe lips—he had never been so enamored. And the core of his adoration was not lust but something so much stronger; a tug toward salvation. Caroline wasn’t a pair of legs to lay between whenever his frustration built or whenever he was drunk and aroused by nearly everything—she was another half to meet and complete. An unfinished circle. Something to love and fill and hold and trust and speak to and kiss and cry with.

She suddenly began to rile; she lashed quietly with a cry. But Jimmy kept her pinned as his hips met the small of her back. She felt his forearms encircle her waist and his lips ascend to the small, warm space of skin behind her ear. There his lips met her skin with a kiss. The sensation of his breath against the shell of her ear caused a first tear to meet the slope of her cheekbone.

It was wrong. Not only was it forbidden in the context of her job, but seeing her recent decline in health—it was wrong for him. He had to stop, she knew. She had to stop, she knew too. It could not go on. But his embrace was warmer than anyone’s she had ever encountered, and the rigidness pressed against her tailbone made her insides heat like an oven.

Her fragile hands shakily met the tops of his that lay on her abdomen. He instantly parted his fingers and pulled hers into a reversed hand-hold. His mouth hovered over her ear before it dropped onto her cheek, kissing away saline tears.

“Ne pleure pas,” he spoke quietly. His words only engendered a steady flow of tears; his effort set aflame her heart. He spoke French for her; he loved her. She knew he loved her.

Caroline shook—her body racking between a laugh and a sob.

“Ne pleure pas,” he repeated.

“Don’t you dare speak French to me,” she laughed as tears left her eyes. She looked at him and saw him smile endearingly. Most of Jimmy’s smiles were top-layer; he found something humorous or joyful and he smiled for it, but beneath it loomed other emotions. Never was it just a smile. But this was… just a smile.

Turned around partially now, her fingers left his hand and made delicate sashays up his wrist. Her short and bare fingernails dipped slightly beneath the hem of his shirt upon which she had so fervently insisted he wear. And Jimmy—inches above—watched her like he was watching a baby come to understand touch for the first time. He watched her fingers moved slowly through the screen of her long, wet lashes.

Jimmy bundled up Caroline tighter in his arms, and she laid her head against his chest. A tear still rolled down his flushed cheek when she looked up at him. He didn’t think he’d ever seen something so beautiful before in his life.

And neither did she. So she met his kiss when his head quickly lowered and instantly sunk her fingers into his wild hair. With one arm still around her back, Caroline felt Jimmy’s other arm wrap around her lower torso. And it was not slow—it was gripping and warm and wet.

Jimmy tasted like… she didn’t have a word for it. But he would hold her head straight so her mouth fell open and just kiss her repeatedly, endlessly, lovingly. Sometimes they were fast, and he’d breathe a hot breath quickly then tilt his head so he met her from another angle. Sometimes they were slow, and his tongue would meet hers; he’d just dive in so deeply she was sure he’d leave her lips bright and blooming like red carnations in June.

The rest of his body worked against her like a tidal wave meets a spiked rock. He rocked against her without restraint; she loved it. He spread her knees with his so her robe fell open and let some of him in; she loved it. His arms—when available—constantly moved to touch her and move her and hold her against him tightly; she loved it.

“Jimmy!” A feminine and familiar voice erupted from the bedroom. Caroline instantly repelled, rejected, revolted. She used the palm of her hand to wipe a smudged tear from her cheek then slammed her hands onto his chest, pushing him away.

“Imbécile!” She yelped and left the bathroom. She was immediately met with Margaux’s face.

“Pourquoi le garde pour toi? Tu ne dorme encore pas avec lui!” She whispered harshly at Caroline, who ignored her and slipped around her to snatch up her dress and shoes.

“Caroline!” Jimmy shouted after her. By the time he tried to get by Margaux, she was gone.

Taking Caroline as a date seemed no longer possible, especially seeing he couldn’t find her prior to being forced to go to the press party. However when he walked in—disoriented and quiet—he saw her across the floor of dancing people. Her dewy skin glittered and hands fumbled absentmindedly with the straw of some drink; she wore that little ivory dress and he swore to himself the damned nymph would be in for it.

Caroline refused to look up when she heard the crowd of groupies she was squished between wake up at the sight of the inevitable guests—the band. She refused to meet his eye, to say his name, to acknowledge his presence. She had no choice to reject him completely. Her blood drew a watch around her wrist—she had so little time left. She could not hurt him.

Meanwhile Jimmy pulled a roadie to the side—a fellow named Tomas—and ordered him to call the hotel they were staying in and rent out another bedroom. A suite—he preferred. Only the best for her.

“For what purpose, might I ask, Mr. Page?” Tomas asked before leaving to reach a telephone.

Jimmy looked around the room—at the fluttering groupies that seemed to eat Caroline like a hungry mass. “There’s quite a lot of ladies here tonight, and I’d not like to share them with Robert… You know?” Tomas smirked and shook his head in the way men do. He left to ring the hotel.

Caroline was taking the remaining sip of her vodka tonic when she heard: “You’re the loveliest one here.”

She turned her head to see Billy. He smiled boyishly and held a beer in his hand. A smile finally nudged at Caroline’s mouth—a shy one, but a smile nonetheless. “Thank you Billy.”

“How are you?” He asked her. She looked at him with wide eyes.

“Ask a more interesting question,” she said quietly. However small and ashamed she felt, she could never fall to boredom.

“Okay,” he laughed awkwardly. “What are you drinking?”

She smiled, looking into her drink. “Now that it’s all gone—nothing. Could you get me another?” She held her empty glass out for him.

Hesitantly, he took it. “What should I get you?”

She shrugged. “Surprise me.”

Bewildered by her fantastic ambiguity, he trod proudly toward the bar—glad to be getting a drink for such a pretty lady. When the bottom of his glass met the table and he opened his mouth to call for the bartender with a virile tone and agenda, he was stopped.

“Get her a French Blonde,” a wonderfully familiar voice spoke lowly. In spite of how much he wanted to hear this voice normally—he did not want to hear it at this moment.

“Wh—” Billy turned his head to see Jimmy page holding up his hand for the bartender. The bartender was preparing several mixed drinks prior to seeing Jimmy, but he left them all where they were to attend to Jimmy.

“How can I help you, sir?” The man asked; his teeth were white and shining with his gripping smile.

Jimmy looked at Billy, who raised his eyebrows in confused shock. “A French Blonde, please,” Billy hastily answered.

“Anything for you, sir?” The bartender looked to Jimmy again, but Jimmy ignored the man and turned to Billy.

“I need you to ask Caroline something for me,” Jimmy leant in, lowering his forehead so his bangs drew curtains over his eyes.

Billy held up the French Blonde as he made his way back to Caroline. Impressed by his smart taste, she raised her eyebrows approvingly.

“Un choix judicieux,” she said quietly.

Billy cleared his throat, ready to begin asking the questions Jimmy had assigned. “Caroline, I was wondering…”

“Yes?” She looked up from a long sip of her French Blonde.

“Because you told me to ask a more interesting question,” he clarified. “Do you love anyone?”

“Sure, I do.”

“And who is worthy of such affection?”

“My mother, my sisters, my father, and my brother.”

“No one else?”

Caroline squinted her eyes analytically. She briefly glanced upward to see if Jimmy was watching her from some strange angle, but she saw his lovely mane of ebony curls turned against her, where he spoke to several domineering men. “No.”

“What do you think of all the girls hanging around Zeppelin? Do they ever annoy you? Do you like them?”

“I respect other people’s choices because they’re not mine. They can do what they wish with their time and their bodies. I’ll do what I wish.”

“Have you made friends with any of them?”

“I’m not very good at making friends.”

“You’re friends with Jimmy, aren’t you?”

She then downed her drink and headed out to the dance floor. She was drunk enough. Booming from the massive amplifiers was The Rolling Stones’ Who’s Been Sleeping Here? and Caroline was ready to dance—a hobby she typically didn’t partake in, but something told her to tonight. So she danced and danced and danced—wrapping herself in the warm crowd of those wild groupies, and pretending that everything in her life would work itself out.

“She hardly answered any of your questions!” Jimmy exclaimed, running an angry hand through a handful of dark curls.

“Well—you know her! She’s very shifty and… sly!” Billy argued.

“This is true,” Jimmy stopped pacing. “But you failed, regardless.”

“I’m sorry, Mister Page. But…” he looked out into the crowd. She was hard to miss—glittering like the moon in a galaxy of complete darkness. The Beach Boys now played; she moved like the ocean. “Listen, why don’t you go ask her yourself? She’s out there, she’s dancing alone… Go talk to her! If she really needs to talk to you, she will. If she won’t, then it’s not time and, therefore, it’s not even worth sending me out there.”

Jimmy’s brandy was on the counter and he was gone. Billy couldn’t tell whether he regretted his words.

Joni Mitchell played now—Cactus Tree. Caroline wanted to sit on the floor with her knees to her chest so she could cry furtively. She missed warmth. She missed him already. Though she was soon met by a tender embrace. An embrace that could part a crowd—which it did.

Jimmy latched an arm around her slender waist. Her fighting was in vain—not only was he besetting, but as were her feelings. Jimmy laid his chin upon the top of her head; she pressed her cheek against the opened buttons of his black shirt.

She could feel his heartbeat—in spite of the footsteps and the shouts and the music. She could hear it like it was her own heart beating. And she thought—momentarily—about Jimmy. And how good he was to her, and how he had become her best friend, and how she was slowly slipping into him and she didn’t ever want to leave. Caroline turned her head and pressed her lips against the concavity between his collarbones. She kept her mouth there, breathing in the scent of his skin.

“Can you come with me to the hotel?” Jimmy asked once his lips touched her ear through her thick hair. She did not respond. So he continued: “Caroline, please.”

With a fast glance, she looked up at him. Then she looked around them. Most were distracted with their own controversies and wrongdoings to take notice of the forbidden activity going on between Caroline and Jimmy. She nodded against his chest and reached for his hand. Once he developed a steady hold on her, he began to move toward the exit of the press party venue.

Once outside, things were relatively quiet. Or at least comparatively so—in cities usually everything teemed with some dimension of life at all hours. But in Sydney, walking away from the clubhouse as two mere figures walking hand in hand, against one another—they were a part of something much quieter.

“J’ai tombé amoureux de toi,” Jimmy tried.

“Je suis tombée amoureuse de toi,” Caroline corrected and admitted—though not to his knowledge. She took his hand and spun around beneath his arm—until she was standing properly in front of him and walking backwards. “Mais, I like your attempt.”

“Et tu es ma meilleure amie.”

Caroline stopped and smiled. “You’re my best friend too.”

Jimmy smiled a whole smile again—where there was nothing else beneath it.

Hand-in-hand, they kept walking along the sidewalk. Jimmy would try and sneak kisses against her temple and her hairline, and maybe on her neck and lips, but she would inch away and just pull him onward. Eventually they came across a bar, and Jimmy watched as Caroline tilted her head upward; neon lights illuminated every sharp and gentle curve of her face. She dragged him into the bar. Being so late at night, it wasn’t terribly crowded—though there were no seats at the bar. Caroline had other plans, however, and she dragged Jimmy to one of the shadowy booths in the back before anyone could recognize him.

Jimmy first extended his hands across the table, palms open. She grasped them hesitantly, smiling once her skin touched his. She brought his hands to her lips and kissed his knuckles. The hands provided a place where she was not too deep nor too shallow. His knuckles were not his lips, though she wasn’t not kissing him.

“Caroline—”

A waiter came over to the darkened booth with a pad of paper. “What can I get you?”

“Two glasses of your house red,” Caroline ordered for Jimmy.

Not being able to recognize Jimmy Page in the long shadows cast by the booth’s chairs, he scribbled down the order and was off.

“Why’d you order my drink?” Jimmy asked with a smile. He could not stop smiling. Everything she said, everything he said, everything she did, everything he did—all in this moment made him genuinely happy.

“You ordered my drink at the party,” she said with lowered eyes.

“You knew that was me?” Jimmy chuckled.

“Like Billy could order that,” she rolled his eyes. He soon was up as she laughed and Caroline watched him scale the table. He slid in beside her, letting a hand move behind her back and hook her hip. He tugged her toward her and she crashed into him, laughing fervently.

“I’m so in love with you,” he spoke brightly, with a glorious light in his eyes. For that he earned a kiss. He tried to hold it but she slipped away. “And all I want to do is touch you, and talk to you, and kiss you.”

Another kiss. “You know, everyone thinks of you as this… shady enigma. Yet, you couldn’t be less of this—it seems,” she said and he kissed her again. She sighed into it briefly, igniting a quiet fire in his heart and loins.

“Really?”

“You’re just this… romantic cornball.”

“Romantic cornball?” Jimmy laughed loudly. She latched a finger around the ball of his jaw and pulled him in. Her mouth was open this time—warm and welcoming. The quiet sounds she made only worsened Jimmy’s southward condition. Soon he was sure she’d have to say something about the stiffness against her leg as she slowly draped herself across him. He couldn’t even be ashamed at the ease this came to him—everything she did made him hard.

“Yes,” she whispered, pressing her lips against the underside of his jaw.

“How’s that?” He asked but she was on him again—latched on. When one of her hands moved to sit on his knee he knew he was done for. A quick breath left Jimmy’s mouth and he eagerly moved his hips so she felt him. They didn’t even realize the waiter bringing the wine.

“That easy, huh?” She asked, quietly acknowledging his arousal.

“This is what you do to me,” he muttered. She shook her head and laughed. Then she reached for her wine and drank slowly—Jimmy watched like a suitor watches an available princess. “God, I love you.”

“Did you ever finish that book I gave you?” She asked and he took a sip of wine. She watched him drink—watched him like a mistress watches her king.

“The Lady of the Shroud?” He clarified. She nodded.

“I did,” he grinned.

“Well, what did you think?”

#jimmy page #jimmy page fanfiction #jimmy page fanfic #jimmy page fan fic #jimmy page fan fiction #led zeppelin #led zeppelin fanfiction #fanfiction #robert plant #john paul jones #john bonham #classic rock

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filmsandtheirreels-blog · 6 years

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My Top 10 Favourite Films I Can Think of Right Now

Hey my name is Daniel and welcome to my blog I guess. In this Blog, I will be looking at my love for film, the history of film, essays about film and other things that interest me. For my first piece, I thought I’d let you know me by telling you about my favourite films. As any cinema fan knows it is really hard to think of a cohesive list of favourite films so they are kind of random pics of my favourites. None of these are in order and there are definitely ones that I left out, hope you enjoy.

10: The Scifi

Sci-fi has always been one of my favourite genre’s. From watching Jurrasic Park and Star Wars as a kid to films like Bladerunner when I got older. Sci-fi is great because it comments on today by looking to our future. This could be like Toxic Masculinity in Ex Machina and the concept of identity in Bladerunner, to even shows like Black Mirror. However, the film I will be looking at is Dennis Villeneuve’s Arrival.

Arrival is a film that follows Louise Banks, a linguist trying to figure out why Aliens arrived on our planet by speaking with two of them. The film teaches important lessons about empathy and the importance of communication. The film speaks of how empathy and language are linked. It is a brilliantly shot sci-fi with an intelligent story structure. Also one of the first films I ever wrote a paper on (The first was Get Out but that was not the only part of the essay).

9. The Aesthetic

In this category, we are going to look at the purely aesthetic. The films that look simply amazing. The films that understand the visual aspect of filmmaking. It could be the symmetry of The Grand Budapest Hotel or the colours of Hero but for my number 9, and I swear I am not playing favourites here, is Blade Runner 2049.

Director of Photography Roger Deakins is a master behind the camera. It is no wonder the man won the 2018 Oscar for cinematography. Every still you can find of 2049 deserves to be hung up in a gallery it is such an incredible feat in cinematography.

8: The Animation

Whenever I look back at my favourite animations it is always the ones that teach an important lesson, like The Iron Giant, Mulan or The Secret of Nimh. Yet, there is always one animation I go back to, with memories of sitting on the couch with my granny and watching it. That film is An American Tail.

An American Tail tells the story of a young immigrant mouse cut off from his family once they reach the shores of America as he tries to find his way back to them. The film teaches important lessons about acceptance and family. It never speaks down to its audience and handles its subject matter in a very mature way. This is no surprise as it was directed by none other than Don Bluth a man known for directing animation with important messages. If you grew up in a house without this film I definitely recommend you seek it out.

8: The Horror

I always believe that a good horror film should always leave the viewer with an insane sense of dread. You should never feel comfortable while watching a horror. You should always feel unease an discomfort. To be fair these past few years have given us some excellent horror film like Get Out, The VVitch, It Comes at Night, IT Follows, IT, and more recently Hereditary. If I am going to pick my favourite horror film I am going to have to go back to a film that still freaks me out today (granted I still have not seen Suspiria) is The Shining.

The Shining is still and will always be a film that I am deathly afraid of. The entire film makes me feel unsettled and with Jack Nickolson's performance making me feel uneasy all throughout. If you have not seen it yet I would highly recommend it as it still can shake you to the core today. Just don’t go into room 237.

7: The Romance

Whenever I look for a romance film I always look at the unconventional, Blue Valentine, La La Land, When Harry Met Sally and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I prefer the stories that either don’t end happy, have a weird beginning or just go completely out of the genre. That is why my favourite Romance film is The Shape of Water.

The Shape of Water tells the story of love and loss as Eliza (Sally Hawkins) falls for an amphibian man in the government facility where she works. The film is just simply beautiful in its delivery, striking and sweet. It tugs at your heartstrings every single step of the way. With an incredibly raw performance from Sally Hawkins and Guillermo Del Toro’s incredible direction. I loved this film so much I even bought the art book.

6: All The Laughs

Sometimes you need a film to tickle your funny bone. However, that is very hard to do with Adam Sandler films churned out way too often and very mediocre comedies littering the box office. That being said there are definitely amazing comedies auteurs out there. People who understand how to use film and comedy together. You need to look no further than Edgar Wright. Edgar Wright understands how comedy works in this medium. He uses every asset to enhance the gags in his films. His cornetto trilogy is a testament to that which is why my number 6 is Shaun of The Dead

Shaun of The Dead is still one of the funniest comedies of the 21st century using every kind of filming technique to make the audience laugh. Every transition, every line and even music ques makes you burst out with laughter. All you really have to look at is the Bar fight scene see what I am talking about. I always go back to this if ever I am in need of a really good laugh.

5: All about those talking heads

While film is a visual medium dialogue is just as important. I am always a sucker for incredibly witty dialogue, especially considering I’m studying film in college to be a scriptwriter. Whether it be the snarkiness of Aaron Sorkin or the sharpness of Quentin Tarantino. However, the film I am going to pick is Whiplash by Damien Chazelle.

While this film is great for so many other reasons the dialogue in it is just outstanding. With JK Simons hurling unrelenting abuse at Miles Teller, you feel like you are on that drum stool with him. It does a good job of invoking terror through words. Everything Simons says, you reflect back on yourself and I think that is why it is an amazing script.

4: The Weird Yet Wonderful

Ok so The Shape of Water could have totally also gone into this category but I saved this spot for another Gullermo Del Toro project Pan’s Labyrinth.

Pan’s Labyrinth is such a unique, fascinating and horrifying film that how could it not be one of your favourites. With amazing monster designs and incredible lore. Pan’s Labyrinth is such an incredible dark fantasy that I am surprised there isn’t more like it.

3: The small yet courageous

One thing that I love in cinema is when a small film has a big idea. It is like how Being John Malkovich was a small enough film but with a huge premise. Whenever I look at this I always turn my eye to the indie scene and there is always one film that keeps on sticking out to me. Coherence.

Coherence is about a simple dinner party until a meteor flies overhead. Honestly, I really do not want to say more about it as it is a film you kind of just have to see for yourself.

2: The Action

Everyone has an action film that they adore. A film with high octane adrenalin and incredible feats and stunts. I always enjoyed the action films that know how to use the camera to complement the action on the screen. That is why my pick is Mad Max: Fury Road.

could it have been anything else? Fury Road is honest to god best action film of all time. With incredible stunts and amazing characters like Furiosa. The film is just mad and so much fun which is something that action should be. It knows how to do the tone of the action as well.e most bad action just bombards your senses with shaky cam and rooftop races. With Fury Road, it knows when to slow down, it knows how to slow down and speed up and it knows how to focus on the action.

1: The Classics

Now I feel like I need to look at the Classics. Films that changed were so influential that they still stand the test of time today. There are so many options, from the frightening Psycho to the triumphant Spartacus. However, for my pick, I am honestly going to have to go with Casablanca.

This film tells of an ex-freedom fighter who owns a gin bar in Casablanca in the early days of World War II when an old love comes to his bar asking for his help to get her famed rebel husband to America. The film was ballsy for its time speaking about serious issues that were happening in the world and being respective about it. It has some of the most quotable lines in history and was incredibly smart in its delivery.

Well, there you have it. A list of films that I like. While there are so many other favourite films of mine, these are the only ones I could of at the moment. Hope you enjoyed it and you will enjoy my blog.

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how2to18 · 6 years

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THE FIRST TIME I came across Taylor Mac’s work I was wandering around on YouTube, caught off guard by a video I haven’t been able to stop watching since. Theater and performance artist Mac, whose marathon show A 24-Decade History of Popular Music is coming to The Theatre at Ace Hotel in Los Angeles, March 15–24, was covering an old Neil Diamond song I hadn’t heard in decades — a top-40 hit from my preteen years. I was surprised that I still knew all the words. I was even more surprised to see this old chestnut covered so compellingly by a drag queen. Well, a sort of a drag queen. Most surprising was my realization that I had never really heard this song until now.

Covering Diamond’s 1971 hit “I Am… I Said,” Mac — who uses judy (lowercase) not as a name but as a gender pronoun — is dressed in a bell-sleeved white shift draped in a sheer outer layer of white gauze. The wig is blond with long loose curls. The hat is a fuzzy white fascinator, oversized and adorned with tendrils of cascading glitter. The makeup is white mime face paint with sequins glued around the eyes, and overdrawn red lips. The result is a decidedly tilted femininity, and though judy likes to say “comparison is violence,” metaphor is the only way I know to explain. Mac’s costumes — originally self-designed, and currently made by the artist Machine Dazzle — are less pageant drag than glitter impersonating a fountain impersonating every nightclub diva who ever stepped onto a dim lit stage.

In the video Mac performed at Joe’s Pub in New York City, a guest of trans chanteuse Justin Vivian Bond’s (Mx. Justin Vivian’s gender pronoun is v) always sold out alt-cabaret shows. I’ve nurtured an artist crush on Bond ever since seeing v for the first time in John Cameron Mitchell’s film Shortbus; I’ve long been following Bond online, and in some of v’s performances both at Joe’s Pub and on tour. In Shortbus, v’s character is the tall, wry mistress of a sex club who entertains the revelers with a nearly apocalyptic style of belting. That performance hurled me back to my youngest self, sitting cross-legged in front of the TV, leaning into the weekly Judy Garland Show, which ran for just a couple of years when I was only four or five years old. That’s where this sensibility begins in a girl like me from the working-class regions of what was then industrial Chicago, and who came of age too lesbian for straight punk culture and too high femme and gay-friendly for radical lesbian culture. I’m not always sure if any category more precise than queer, or possibly Gaga’s little monsters, will ever do, but I have always been attracted to camp excess and maximalist democracy.

I was wandering through a maze of internet links, looking for more Justin Vivian, when I stumbled into my first turning point moment of Taylor Mac, which was this circa 2009 “I Am… I Said” video. Whatever my particular and ever-shifting queer parentheses, I’d been waiting for Taylor Mac for such a long time.

“My gender is performer,” Mac has said in more than one interview, and in saying so claims a tradition born of adoration and remaking, a path many artists will comprehend. But why judy? The attempt to use such a resonant name as a pronoun is both revelatory and awkward for anyone willing to try. Does the use of pronouns that are not generalities dismiss the collectivizing purpose of pronouns? Who then is a judy, a joni, an aretha, a bruno, a beyonce, and even (oh no) a lower-case kardashian?

One of this year’s MacArthur fellows, Obie Award winner, and Pulitzer Prize finalist, and creator of the multidisciplinary, site-specific extravaganza The Lily’s Revenge, as well as the author of the plays Hir, The Walk Across America for Mother Earth, and others, Taylor Mac is described as “Ziggy Stardust meets Tiny Tim.” Mac is all about repurposing what we’ve been given, and has explained that judy chose “judy” because neither he nor she seemed right. For a gender identity Mac names “performer,” judy does make sense. Though I am probably more of a joni than a judy (I’m pretty sure I became a writer after the thousandth time I listened to Joni Mitchell’s song “Hejira”) my own first awareness of a creative energy beyond my immediate world was awakened when I was that little girl obsessed with late-career skinny and hepped-up Judy Garland — from Television City Hollywood, Here’s Judy — and then again, later, with some of the same resonances in her daughter Liza, something so frenetically female, smiling but deeply in need, all phrasing and flittering hands — language created for me in Garland’s sharp enunciation of on Shish-ka-bob and breast of squab we will feast in her version of the standard “Chicago,” wearing a scooped sequined top and a long black mermaid skirt.

Gay and trans kids of a certain age, in love with the original Judy, are not the only ones who saw their future bodies in Garland’s glittery phrasing and Liza Minnelli’s lacey camisoles and green fingernails, alcoholism and all. Together the two of them (along with the strange bedfellow contrast of Joni) are probably the reason the smashing masculine apocalypse of punk never drew me as it did nearly everyone else of my time and place. It wasn’t until later, in the fully lived gender blur of artists like lesbian theater collaborators Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw and others associated with the WOW Café Theatre in New York, along with Mx. Justin Vivian Bond and Taylor Mac, that I found, with tearful and jittery relief, the kind of queer art-making this sort of sensibility would grow up to pursue.

Mac’s judy-ness is evident in the Joe’s Pub clip, judy as both pronoun and performance frame. What we call femininity and masculinity are kinds of traditions, like literary genres, deemed sacred because they are handed down, but more so just a matter of affinity, with tremendous room for invention between the binary poles. Mac fills this space with abstract and assemblage art makeovers that include glitter heels, found object collage wigs, balloon dresses, and so much more. The Commedia dell’arte meets drag queen costuming of Mac’s work is physical ridiculousness, playful archetype, anarchic improvisation, adding up to what is both an elaborate theatrical masking and excruciatingly expressive vulnerability.

In a 2017 Howlround interview with P. Carl, Mac said: “On stage the drag isn’t a costume but something I’m exposing about myself; it’s what I look like on the inside.” What comes across is an intimate cracking that is not about femaleness or maleness or even just queerness, but rather contains the skewed breath and teetering balance of human life resisting received scripts. Mac covers the Neil Diamond song, honoring the pathos of a pop ballad about loneliness, but at the same time creating a paean to being an aberrant American seeking radical community.

“I Am… I Said” is a prelude to the work judy is presenting now, the 24-hour durational performance of A 24-Decade History of Popular Music — performed the first time in Brooklyn in a single day, then later in four six-hour segments in San Francisco and Melbourne. (Mac’s company will present the work in four six-hour shows in L.A. in March, and then in June, in Philadelphia, they will present the show in two 12-hour performances.) The last time I checked Mac’s “I Am… I Said” video has 14,000 views — and only about 100 of them are mine. The video is an arresting performance that does not repeat in the current 24-hour show, or at least did not when I saw it. Mac memorized over 300 songs for the 24-decade project, and is still adding more to the list, and has prepared at least 50 more than they are able to use, even with 24 hours to fill. Still, the video is an example of the sort of show audiences can expect in Los Angeles — and one of those fleeting performance passages captured on the web that in any other era would have been known only to the ones in the room where it happened.

Taylor Mac is not your mother’s Neil Diamond. Mac’s pauses and articulations are singular, but layered with indirect references to Judy Garland–style hand movements, shrugs, and conversational interjections, as well as the exaggerated and crass stock character movement of Commedia dell’arte. Diamond’s line about sunny and fine L.A. as carried by Mac’s lighter vocal is casual and bright, but then judy shrugs a little, a sad discomfort coming through, the discomfort of the displacement that sits at the center of the original, but also the queer discomfort that permeates all of Mac’s popular music covers. This queer discomfort immediately hurls the song far beyond the personal. Even within the relative comforts of white gay life today — an awareness Mac does not avoid in the work overall — this discomfort contains a long queer history.

By the time we get to the “I am” chorus we are already deep into classic LGBTQ I am what I am territory. Then, in the verse about the frog who dreams of becoming a king, Mac’s face inverts cinematically from sadness to a smile both sweet and bitter, silent picture facial transitions worthy of The Passion of Joan of Arc. Next judy pokes at the words a bit. In Mac’s story of the frog who becomes a king it’s not just the names but the pronouns that change. But is this the right story? After the hat and wig come off — “It’s not performance art. I just was hot” — the masked revelation reveals another unmasking, and this is where the work is truly subversive. Mac’s unconventional-even-for-drag oeuvre is not at all just an expression of the jittery and singular brilliance of certain iconic American song artists. The work is a critique and rebuilding of the world that both created and killed the likes Judy Garland, as well as generations of Friends of Dorothy. At the end of the song Mac holds up one finger, asking us to wait for it, and then we get another adaptation. “Did you ever read about the king who dreamed of being a frog?”

The performance ends with a knowing nod to the audience, and yes, we absolutely do know then that this is not merely homage, certainly not nostalgia, and never for a moment merely entertainment. The king who dreams of being a frog is a citizen of the universe on the other side of the mirror. This radical faerie view looks back from where beauty, power, community, and art are turned on its head, as we hear in every note of tension and lyric ambiguity in the very last words of the song — “Oh no.”

The king who dreams of being a frog, flips hierarchical power and the-people-are-the-power. The Broadway musical versus performance art on a proscenium stage. The heteronormative narrative versus the recast queered normative. Rehearsed and scripted perfection versus anarchic improvisation, because, as we hear at least once every performance chapter, “perfection is for assholes.” A passive seated theater experience versus what Mac describes as “the art is in the room.”

I saw all four six-hour performances of A 24-Decade History of Popular Music in San Francisco in September 2017, two Friday nights and two Sunday afternoons at the old Curran Theatre on the edge of the Tenderloin, where after the night shows let out the drag queens just done performing in the nearby bars still crowd the diner booths, as in Tenderloin days of yore. I sat (or stood, or wandered to-and-from, for one whole hour wearing a blindfold) in the far-left corner of the first row. My seat was in a limited-view cranny, my usual sort of hideout when I go to the theater alone, so I was left undisturbed more so than most in the front of the house, perhaps less than Mac wants the audience to be — the fact that I wished to hold on to my peculiarities is exactly the sort of human tendency endurance theater means to provoke. Still, even in my part-invisible corner, I was very provoked. I traveled from Chicago to San Francisco just to see this work, and I stayed for 10 days so I could attend every performance. This was my academic job sabbatical adventure and I expected to be glad I went, but I didn’t foresee how profoundly the experience would overthrow me.

In the stage light Taylor Mac possesses the quality of lush mirage, in that the space judy inhabits cannot be categorized, captured, or even fully described. Comparison is violence (I know, I know, joni says) because if one thing can be another then nothing can be its true queer self. Still, I want to fall back on metaphor to describe a queen at least seven feet tall in those spangle heels, a barrel decoupaged with sequined snakes, and a wig made out of wine corks. The show is a new kind of beauty, a vulnerable communion, excess, fear-and-chaos, a reappropriation and a reversal — “More, More, More,” as Mac shouts out in the video trailer for the San Francisco performances. Taylor Mac is like … Taylor Mac is … Taylor Mac might as well be … That I can’t come up with the ends to these sentences proves Mac’s point.

One thing I can say for certain is that Taylor Mac and the 24-Decade History is not a romance narrative, or a tragic narrative, or any kind of narrative. The goal is to flip-flop the message of centuries of popular music in which “the oppressor is forgiven but the outsider is vilified,” and in doing so may be the anti-narrative that resides inside us all, the unconventional beauty that breaks all the other beauties, which is how Mac’s work broke me, in ways that leave me nothing but impatient to build myself anew. Taylor Mac wears beauty spangled across the face. No comparison here; I mean this literally. Mac’s drag makeup is half-spattered, sometimes half-smeared across the forehead and cheeks, but I don’t mean to say judy is a hot mess, because this is a beautifully intentional snub of conventional beauty. If you say beauty is sparkle then fine, judy will give you sparkle, gobs and gobs of sparkle, will choke you with sparkle and then will sparkle even more until the beauty that emerges kills all the other beauty and you will never see beauty the same way again.

Taylor Mac’s endurance performance of this new beauty rerouted my brain and short-circuited my filters and even led me, in my late middle age, to come home and dye my Hollywood-blond hair lavender. Before, I possessed a zone I could always back into, a passive space of critical pause where I could retreat for collapse or respite, able to let anything pass and easily laugh at any ideological discontent. That zone is now closed for renovation. After my return, the first time my spouse Linnea and I went to the opera in Chicago, a big old-fashioned spectacle production in a huge old-world opera hall, every problematic and unquestioned representation (none of which I had failed to notice in the past, but which I had been able to watch through a protective buffer) now made me sputter and want to offer drag-inspired notes. Linnea said: “So that show ruined you for everything, right?” It has. Now I want drag kings and queens wearing installation art to revise every Orientalist opera, kitchen sink drama, and talk show. This is a separatist impulse I suppose, not unlike the dreams of the lesbians I used to know who loved the all-women’s music festivals and for weeks after they came home didn’t want to resume wearing shirts. The feeling wears off over time, that much I recall, but the understanding of what it means to breathe queerly in queer-organized spaces never leaves you.

Thoughts of lesbian music festival spaces are not too far out of sync, even if comparison really is violence, as Mac describes this show as Radical Faerie Realness, and the radical faeries, with their anti-assimilationist tenets, counterculture spirituality, Utilikilts, and solstice gatherings have always seemed to me the most radical lesbian-like aspect of gay-male culture. In the San Francisco trailer, Mac begins with this line: “We are making a 24-decade history of popular music. It is a radical faerie realness ritual sacrifice.” I might have heard this line incorrectly when watching the trailer on repeat, in the weeks before I saw the show. I thought judy said this: Radical Faerie Realness. (Pause. New word.) Sacrifice! I heard the final word as a frightening, yet thrilling, verb command. How I heard it at the show was as a part of a compound descriptive noun, the show itself the sacrifice. Either reading works. The audience becomes part of a sacrificial rite, changed by the mental and emotional breakdown we undergo after the endurance of many hours of challenging participatory performance and exploding drag bombardment. The sacrifice is of our assumptions about both the way we will talk about the American story, and about the way an afternoon or evening at the theater will transpire.

The woman from Massachusetts who sat next to me at all four shows — our whole row in fact was there for all four shows, though the seats around us kept turning over — was seeing the 24-Decade History for the second time. I am envious that she attended the first iteration in Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Warehouse in 2016, the only time (Mac is adamant on this point) that the show will be done in a single, performer-immolating, 24-hour performance. I will never forgive myself for not figuring out how to be there too. My row-mate’s partner loved the experience so much she came back this time as part of the show, one of Mac’s Dandy Minions who serve as the genderqueer chorus and crew, slant-beauty clown-angels who fill in all the gaps, from passing out eye masks for our sightless hour the year braille was invented, and ping pong balls for the Civil War sequence, to distributing soup in the Depression-era song breadline sequence, to helping women audience members up on the stage in the lesbian tailgating segment (in San Francisco this was all self-defined lesbians and one self-described straight woman dressed as a clitoris). Yes, even the lesbians are celebrated in these 24 decades, and how often does that happen in any decade? To commemorate Judy Garland’s funeral, the Dandy Minions carry one of their comrades overhead through the audience. During the 1970s era the Minions hold up protest signs with email addresses of politicians in Michigan, encouraging us to rally against the politicians’ role in the continuing water crisis. They argue with the Puritans and dance with the visiting burlesque revue. My row-mate’s beloved was one of those who stripped bare the first night and dashed through the audience naked, one of several nudey babies running free through crowds. In the balcony, some of the audience members stripped off their clothes and joined in.

This show is, on the surface, an hour-by-hour revue, one decade per hour beginning in 1776, of songs that were popular in some sector of American life. Sometimes the songs are familiar, but often they are not. The chapters are less about music than about America itself, a decade-by-decade reversal of the lens, a reenvisioning of country’s making from the point of view of the frog, not the king. Mac creates broad and sometimes hysterical narratives around each period, always with the intention of flipping the lens away from “the heteronormative narrative” and reframing the American story from the lesbian, the dandy, the female, the person of color, or any other outsider’s point of view — vilifying the oppressor, honoring the outsider — always wearing Machine Dazzle’s astonishing costume art, some of my favorites a typewriter bodice, a barbed-wire skirt, a wig made from 3-D glasses, a vulva dress. As the epic begins Mac emerges from backstage in a curly Mylar pom-pom wig and a dress that appears to made out of shiny plastic rainbow flags with a spider-web back piece constructed of metal pipes. It’s 24 hours from here to democracy, and here’s where we begin, singing “Amazing Grace.” We are gorgeous wretches, all of us and our minions, so lost, but on our way to be found.

Two days and 10 decades later and Taylor Mac has worn 10 of these costume constructions, not yet even half of the full gallery. By the close of this 10th decade judy strips down, underpants the only costume remaining — notably theatrical briefs that pick up the spotlight, though the change happens in visible shadow. Machine Dazzle, who calls his costume creations visual sculpture, is also the performer’s dresser, sometimes patting and straightening the accessories before the next song, sometimes closing out the transition with a long kiss on the lips. Machine is another of many stage characters we (the audience, the community, the people of this planet all in the middle of by now) have come to love, in that way one loves family members we’ve just met, yet who seem to have been in our lives for, well, decades. Machine towers in even higher heels and a feather headpiece, while Taylor (at 10 hours in we must be on a first name basis) steps into another sequin and object collage. Not gowns, but installations; judy does not so much dress as effloresce.

I said Mac’s underpants are theatrical, but that’s not the right word, not in this ur-theatrical space. Theatricality is core to the experience of Taylor Mac’s 24-decade musical history of everything and a re-seeing of beauty as well, both drag beauty and people-power beauty. Performance is the tool, but not the point. What I have under-named theatrical is really simply, well, dazzle, pure embodiment, Leonard Cohen’s crack of light that keeps us alive. (Another for our pronoun list. Which of us is a leonard?) That Taylor Mac’s underpants take us deeper into who we are as humans is no accident. Every time judy strips down we are naked too, exposed and earnest, ready to live differently, with no clue what that means but oh so willing to learn. How do we get to this vulnerability and what does this revelation of flesh have to do with democracy?

Earlier in this day-two performance, “Chapter 2, 1836-1896,” the show opens with a boxing ring on stage, where we soon find Stephen Foster and Walt Whitman sparring for the title of Father of Popular song. An audience member stands in for Foster while Mac, as both Whitman and fight commentator, begins in a puffy layered paper hoop dress. Mac belts out the Foster songs and recites rolling and riveting passages of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Beyond, we-the-people (in the house), the ones who’ve already sacrificed one of our own to the boxing ring onstage, are told to join in by shouting Captain, My Captain in support of Whitman, and Doo Da Doo Da to help out Foster, though in this crowd, of course, Walt is the winner. Whitman’s long lines are the embodied and democratic ties that bind in this motley crowd of glitter-beard bears, nuzzling lesbians, decked-out genderqueers, hugging progressives, and the few regular theatergoers among us who had season tickets from the presenter wondering aloud if they’d ever seen judy on TV. (Mac has since that time, after winning the MacArthur, been featured on programs such as the PBS NewsHour, but then, most likely, they had not seen judy on TV.)

Some hours of the show are meditative but this one is delirium, and alters us through the questions asked. Do we acknowledge the racist language embedded in songs that were once performed in blackface? Is this still our formative infrastructure? What will we give up to fix the imbalances? Are we guided by a poet who was one with both the lilacs and the captains? What of our deep cultural underpinnings have we allowed to make and unmake us as Americans? Where are queer alliances clear, such as in the lush love of Whitman’s long song-like lines, and when, such as in Foster’s still relevant protest song “Hard Times Come Again No More,” do we decide to sing along?

Such is the collective experience of Americanness that we undergo during these 24 decades. We sing and then we don’t. We boo and we praise and we throw objects handed us by the Dandy Minions, as Mac sings through, sometimes with commentary, sometimes with a long-armed Liza-with-a-z flourish. We battle it out alongside judy, but who can really wrestle wearing a dress made of a collage of potato chip bags, glossy male-magazine nudes, chess pieces glued to a fabric table cloth, a fabric flower wig, and a green-glitter derby hat? Mac’s nearly naked form, three hours later, is the dramatic progression of all this artful garb, though judy will certainly dress again. The body revealed is queerness itself, here bald and shadowy, but beneath the stage light appearing to be dipped in gold. This queerness is constantly shape-shifting but always aches to be both the seer and the seen.

“I am not trying to teach the audience about history,” Mac said, in a panel discussion at HERE Arts Center, a New York City–based off-off-Broadway presenting house, broadcast online at Howlround TV in January 2017. “I’m trying to unearth something that’s been buried or dismissed or that they’ve forgotten about, or that someone else has buried for them, or that they bury themselves. So, I go hunting for who’s that dandy in the Yankee Doodle Dandy song.”

Through all these dandy searches, and song deconstructions, and so much more, Mac just keeps changing clothing sculptures, singing gorgeously, and queering pretty much anything judy can find to queer. The show is part reconstituted history but also part rambling memoir fragments, part serial storytelling, part drag catwalk, part Project Runway unconventional materials challenge. It’s about democracy because the performer doesn’t own the experience and can’t even fully control what happens: the art is in the room and we are here too, lining up for soup, or donning borrowed drag slips and dresses, or bouncing a gigantic red-white-and-blue penis-shaped beach ball around the ornate Broadway touring auditorium, or rushing the stage to sit with the other lesbians or the other gay bears or the other cis straight men or the other butches. Or we are blindfolded and feeding grapes to strangers, or moving from the front row to the balcony, or from the balcony to the front row, because, in the redistribution of wealth and racial justice parts of the show, we are acting out what America does, and what it might mean to do the opposite. In the process, we are able to inhabit a different America — an embodied, joyful, sexual, justice-loving, truth-saying, art-making, resource-sharing America where our actual beauty is no joke — and we do so for hours and hours and hours on end, enough time for the sequins to really sink in.

All this is why I will never be the same, but also, I blame the take-back-from-Ted-Nugent appropriation prom on the last night, the feel of the sequins under my hands when I danced with the person who touched my arm when Mac asked us to dance with someone of the same gender. Were we the same gender? I shrugged and took them at their word. I had, in the hour before, helped their date back up into the seat just above mine, so we already felt close. We were dancing in order to reappropriate Ted Nugent’s effeminate-men bashing song, “Snakeskin Cowboy.” Mac slows down the song and we queer it up with our same gender or genderqueer dancing and what we’re doing, Mac tells us, is holding our own auditorium-wide gay junior prom. In the P. Carl interview Mac said the prom is “about trying to inspire you to rebel against an obstinate sense of self. So, I’m saying to the audience in those moments, ‘You think you’re this way, now when I ask you to participate, how does that challenge you to think of yourself as a slightly different person?’”

Exactly. I am not a person who dances with strangers wearing heavy cologne and a scratchy sequined gold jacket; nor am I a person who keeps dancing until I feel the drop of that physical wall that we humans keep between us, and necessarily so, as who wants to be so open and loving to everyone we pass on any day, in any city, right? (Oh, but maybe that’s another assumption that has to go. I was worried about hugging a stranger, without finding out even those first few little things that lead people to care about each other, but ended up feeling little bit close, a little bit tender.)

Neither am I accustomed to being passed along by a glittery, half-intimate stranger to yet another stranger, my partner ditching our dance in one of those old movie “do you mind if I cut in” moves, especially when now the new stranger is a cute backstage techy wearing false eyelashes and whose arms and neck are softer than I remember skin being on anyone ever, and who so sweetly smiles at me and says “thank you” when the song is over. I think I am a woman who would never slow dance with a stranger. I imagine doing other more naked things with strangers all the time, but never dream of the too-private space of slow dancing. Yet, here I am, inside this breathtaking public intimacy, a different person than I was an hour before, and meanwhile fuck you Ted Nugent and the gun you rode in on. We made a much more beautiful dress and headpiece out of all you considered trash, and we can’t even see your ugly from here.

In the HERE panel Mac said “artistic expression is a kind of citizenry.” Citizenry is about building and tending to the home, creating and sustaining a geography we all want to live in. In the kingdom of the king who dreams of being frog, and then becomes one, I will reach out to you, blindfolded. Do you feel my fingers on your face? Good. Let’s just stay here for a while and touch each other’s beauty.

Image by Teddy Wolff.

Barrie Jean Borich is the author of Body Geographic, winner of a Lambda Literary Award in memoir, My Lesbian Husband, recipient of a Stonewall Book Award in nonfiction, and, most recently, Apocalypse, Darling. She’s an associate professor at DePaul University in Chicago where she edits Slag Glass City, a journal of urban essay arts.

The post The King Who Dreamed of Being a Frog: Taylor Mac’s Heretical American History in Song appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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