[spoilers for nope (2022) ahead]
it’s been a couple days since we saw Nope and Oh My God I Cannot Stop Thinking About Jean Jacket. it’s a ufo. it’s an alien. it’s a force of nature. it’s an animal. a wild animal. a hungry, territorial, untameable predator. it’s a spectacle. an object of attention, obsession. an exploited show pony. a must-see event. with its gigantic screen-shaped eye it in itself IS a horror movie, a theater of billowing, constricting curtains and played back screams. it’s the viewed. it’s the Viewers. it’s the lens of the camera watching, capturing the image, of a black man on a horse. it’s an eye. it’s a mouth. it’s both, good god, it’s both. it ravenously consumes all who looks upon it and all it looks upon in return. it’s the perfect kind of movie monster that we as an audience are so horrified to look at, but the monster, in so many ways, is also us. it’s just us. we’re looking at a reflection, and it startles us, scares us. just like lucky at the beginning of the movie.
and it’s just fantastic.
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Happy Queer Media Monday!
Today: I Dream In Another Language (2017)
I watched this movie a few weeks ago, and it STUCK.
(Don Evaristo and Don Isauro just before their first interview to record Zikril together.)
I Dream in Another Language is a Mexican magic realism movie about the death of a culture. It documents the efforts of a linguist trying to save the (fictional) language Zikril, spoken only by three old indigenous people. When one of them dies, the studies come to a halt, as the other two, Don Evaristo and Don Isauro, have not spoken to each other in over fifty years and categorically refuse to have anything to do with each other. As he looks further into this, the linguist discovers that the real reason for this feud is their past relationship and an awful lot of internalized homophobia.
Zkril is an artificial language, created specially for this movie out of respect for the people who still speak the endangered and disappearing languages today. The fact that it has seemingly magic powers, and that its speakers appear to be living on after their death, clearly puts the story into the magic realism genre.
This is NOT a happy movie. The internalized homophobia part is no joke, and the main theme of course is the loss of a language, and the culture that comes with it.
But it damn sure is leaving an emotional impact.
I strongly suggest that everyone who is even vaguely interested in this subject read up about languages and language conservation. The Wikipedia page of this movie is as a good place to start as any, since there are related articles linked in the references list. I also would like to thank @celluloidrainbow for bringing this film to my attention.
Queer Media Monday is an action I started to talk about some important and/or interesting parts of our queer heritage, that people, especially young people who are only just beginning to discover the wealth of stories out there, should be aware of. Please feel free to join in on the fun and make your own posts about things you personally find important!
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listen. listen. hear me out.
trans zelda and trans link (of course), HOWEVER (long speculation and gender worldbuilding/headcanon follows):
link, afab and genderfluid. as a child, shrimply does not Care about gender. does not cross her mind (homeschooled and fucks around in the woods too much for it to be relevant to his life). But when they pull the sword, suddenly there's all this attention on them and guess what? The Hero Of Legend is a boy, and so Link must be a boy, always. He doesn't really mind at first, because it isn't like he cared anyways, but it eventually becomes stifling as he realizes that he, as The Hero, is expected to perform a certain kind of masculinity (and only ever perform that kind of masculinity).
zelda, amab and trans, she/her. grows up as aware of gender roles as a child can be (given that those roles are tied to the monarchical power structure that she's born into). Sees that her mother is 1) the one with the divine heritage and 2) I'm going to assume favorite parent since I dislike Rhoam intensely. Is like, yeah sure I'd like to be a girl, sounds neat! Rhoam et al. are like but your roles...no...be a boy... And then her mom dies when she's like 6 and everybody's like well shit The Princess Of Legend is a girl, and Zelda is an only child, so now we will choose to see you as a girl. And at first Zelda doesn't mind because she thought being a girl was neat anyways, but then it becomes stifling as she realizes that she, as The Princess, is expected to perform a certain kind of femininity (and only ever perform that kind of femininity).
I just think it's incredibly interesting how gender can play into the themes of destiny/expectations/personhood/choice/self discovery if you operate off of the assumption that the botw/totk universe has an (even slightly) different system of gender. because most societies do in one way or another. FOR EXAMPLE:
- link starts dressing more fluidly and expressing themself more after he wakes up post amnesia, moving away from rigid, stoic masculinity of pre-calamity
- zelda cuts her hair post botw. she cuts her hair. oh my fucking god! she cuts her goddamn hair! she is louder and more outspoken, and she leans into being a scientist. and she cut her hair!!! because she IS a girl, but not the one that her father wanted her to be.
- and on the topic of how this influences the rhoam-zelda dynamic: you could read an element of rhoam projecting onto zelda (and zelda very much perceiving this) "well, if only you had been 'BORN' a girl, maybe your powers would work sooner" or "well you wanted to be a girl, so why do you complain about the kind of girl that you must be for the good of the kingdom (read: the kind of girl I want you to be)"
- THUS. INTENSE ZELDA LINK BONDING (romantic or platonic doesn't matter) VIS A VIS BEING TRANS AND THE WAY EXPECTATIONS SHAPED THE WAY THEY WERE PERCIEVED AND THE WAY THEY PERCIEVE THEMSELVES. CAN I GET AN AMEN.
- also, last little note - because I'm assuming (as much as one can) that the kingdom of central Hyrule is to some degree imperialistic and subjugating other regions in the country pre-calamity - other societies in hyrule could have gender systems that differ from that of Central Hyrule (and this is sort of present in canon but. you know. in the way that canon is the way it is. well.). ERGO. none of the Champions have to be in line with the central hyrulean concept of a cisgender person. I rest my case.
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