[sarahargo]

Last night I went to a screening of the new documentary, Raiders: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made. The doc follows a group of men who in their youth spent years working on a shot-for-shot remake of the Raiders of the Lost Ark and as adults reunite to complete the one scene they were unable to film as children.  It’s framed as a feel-good story of adults reclaiming their childhood dreams but I left the movie feeling deflated and annoyed. 

The problem is, I’ve seen this story done before. A man with a dream sacrifices everything as his adoring and supportive (never forget that word!) family look on with adoring eyes. Part of the documentary’s tension comes from whether or not one of these men will get fired from his job because he’s taking off too much time to work on the film. His (supportive) wife encourages her husband to risk his lose of income to complete the project. At one point, she tells him she couldn’t imagine being like “those other wives” who would get frustrated by their husband following a dream. 

Perhaps those frustrated women are similar to the mothers of the Raiders remakers, whose lives we learn about over the course of the documentary. These are mothers who endured abusive and alcoholic husbands, divorce, raising children as single parents, and being the sole source of income for their young families. I’m sure these women had to sacrifice many childhood dreams in order to raise their children. These women are the real heroes of this movie and the film never once questions the son’s decision to maybe lose his job after we find out that his mother worked so hard to keep him and his brother in a financially stable home.

Equally insulting is when the pyrotechnic adviser to the reshoot is injured during an unplanned explosion and it is treated as nothing more than a shocking moment. This man was put in mortal danger so that two different men can recapture the glory of their greatest childhood achievement, and the documentary never questions the hubris or selfishness involved in such an action.

My main problem with this documentary is again, that I’ve seen this story told many times before. I’m tired of only ever seeing men in the role of dreamers and I’m tired of society unquestioningly celebrating men for following their youthful passions, destruction and pain be damned! The conclusion is that men are the dreamers while women are the ones who provide the emotional support and that’s a bad lesson to continue propagating. I applaud the creative drive of these men when they were children trying to accomplish a ludicrous but charming goal, but now I want them to take their creative energy and move forward instead of constantly looking back to their childhood. And I want us as a society to stop pretending this is a noble pursuit exclusive to the straight, white male.

[sarahargo]

The not-so-hidden charms of a man who takes his time over every detail...especially once you distract him for just long enough to turn all his attention onto you.

What is Not Yours is Not Yours, Helen Oyeyemi

[sarahargo]

Often her comments were harsher than she intended, meaner. And she wished she could unsay them.

Innocents and Others, Dana Spiotta

[sarahargo]

They were his friends, his first friends, and he understood that friendship was a series of exchanges: of affections, of time, sometimes money, always of information.

A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihar

[sarahargo]

Star Wars

Let me preface this by saying that no new Star Wars movie was going to completely satisfy me, because no new Star Wars movie can replace what it felt like to watch A New Hope for the first time. Failing to rekindle that childhood magic is an impossible task and an unfair way to judge this new film. My dissatisfaction with this film comes largely from the JJ Abrams style of direction and his quick, almost incoherent, movement through the narrative.

The first act of this movie is really great. The set up of all the new characters is fantastic and made me really excited to see what would happen. Then a series of cascading coincidences start to crowd out all the good will the first act built up. I was starting to worry when Han Solo miraculously stumbles on the Falcon minutes after it takes off from Jakku and was outright annoyed when characters like Finn -- who previously had been very well set up! -- are suddenly making impulsive decisions that the movie doesn’t give near enough time to. In the span of two scenes, we have Finn deciding to leave and then deciding to return. But the decisions come so quickly that neither mean anything and might as well have been cut from this movie. Compare that to a New Hope -- a fair comparison because this movie apes so much from that original film-- when Han Solo leaves at the end, he is really gone for a sizable part of the Death Star battle. That makes his return that much more powerful, because the audience has had time to digest his decision. There’s no time for anything in the Force Awakens, which sprints through the last 2/3s of its narrative to get to a derivative space battle scene that does not hold a candle to A New Hope’s attack on the first Death Star, again, because there’s no time between the introduction of the Starkiller base and the Resistance’s assault for me to really care about what is going on.

Who are the First Order? Who are the Resistance? What is the significance of the Republic and why did there planets get blown up? Why are they still building planetoid space stations? Why are the Skywalkers the only Jedi in this universe? Answers to these questions get tossed off at breakneck speeds; so quick that it’s possible to entirely miss that there is even a distinction between the Republic and the Resistance. Maybe that doesn’t matter, but in a film that is set 30 years after the events of Return of the Jedi, we could have used some grounding in how the galaxy has changed in that substantial time period. Instead it feels like everything has stayed the same: the Empire is still kicking around, Leia is still leading a resistance, there’s an emperor, a Skywalker has turned to the Dark Side. Nothing is different and that diminishes both ROTJ and this new movie.

The diversity in the new cast of this movie is something that deserves a ton of praise. I’m happy that little girls will watch this film and have a hero like Rey to look up to. But it’s sad to know that the actually better films are the Original Trilogy, which have far less commendable gender and racial representation. Maybe this movie justifies its existence by remaking A New Hope with a diverse cast -- what if it was Star Wars, but Luke was a woman? -- but the cynical part of me feels like that’s not enough of a justification to retread this same ground. Give young kids something new, not something old that has been repackaged and tagged with the same logo.

[sarahargo]

It Follows and Nice Guys

I finally got around to watching It Follows this weekend and was exceedingly pleased with the film. It’s not a perfect film, but then again, neither is a movie like Nightmare on Elm Street. What makes a good and lasting horror movie is a solid concept and strong atmosphere, two things that It Follows absolutely nails. The concept - sexually transmitted curse where the victim is followed and eventually killed by a lumbering stalker only they can see - is really scary, especially when paired with the film’s amazing score and direction. The simple concept also opens the movie up for a lot of interpretation. The most obvious is a morality story on STDs, but others have pointed out more convincingly that the movie is about loss of innocence and even death, seeing the “It” as an ever present reminder of our mortality. I personally ascribe to the death interpretation, especially when you look at the excerpts one of the characters reads from Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. Another interesting angle I’ve been mulling over with the movie is how it depicts Nice Guys.

Paul is a quintessential Nice Guy. He has painfully been pinning for Jay since their childhood, and even though he has been implicitly and explicitly rebuffed by Jay, he still clearly has hope that one day she’ll come around. Jay, for her part, only seems to view Paul as her sister’s friend and nothing more. She has her sights set on Hugh, who betrays her by giving her the curse. When Paul learns that the curse is passed by having sex, he immediately offers himself up as Jay’s savior. It’s clear he cares about her, but his sacrifice is also an opportunity for him to be physically closer to Jay. She rejects him however, and instead sleeps with Greg, a neighbor who had a sexual relationship with Jay while they were in high school. Paul acts betrayed by Jay’s decision and mopes around as Jay and Greg becoming closer after their shared experience. And then Greg is killed by the creature.

At this point, Jay seems resigned to her cursed fate. It is implied that she has sex with three strange men. Then she unenthusiastically submits to sex with Paul, although she clearly takes no pleasure from it. He, on the other hand, is excited that his patience is finally being rewarded with a relationship with Jay. The movie ends with the two walking on the sidewalk while holding hands, with an out-of-focus figure slowly following them. One interpretation of the ending is that the distant figure is the “It” and that Paul is in danger. While I do believe that the ending is meant to remind us that Paul and Jay are not completely safe, I don’t see the figure as representing an immediate danger. Rather, it’s a threat that will follow Paul and Jay for the rest of their lives. Meanwhile, Jay is stuck with a boy she never showed a particularly strong interest in, because her other prospects failed her.

The movie seems to punish Jay and reward the awkward love interest who patiently waited for his turn. Jay seeks out men who abuse or abandon her, while Paul waits in the wings to rescue her when she’s at her lowest. But while the movie ends with Paul getting what he wants, the circumstances for his win are so depressing that it doesn’t feel like much of a victory for him. The only way he gets Jay is after she has been thoroughly beatdown and dejected.

Jay has difficult experiences with men, which leads her to pick the convenient and boring relationship with Paul. It’s a dynamic that is common for a lot of women and something that is easy to feel sympathy towards. It also adds a layer of further sorrow to the already somber ending of this really great horror movie.  

[sarahargo]

Whenever the issue of trigger warnings comes up, it always results in fraught, ultimately unproductive conversations that leave everyone who participated feeling drained and annoyed with those who did not and cannot agree with them. That’s not entirely shocking, since we’re talking about some serious issues here. And unfortunately, we’re going to continue talking about these issues, because they are important.

We by no means have solved the issue of gender inequality in this country, not by a long shot. But we have as a society, especially in progressive circles, gotten better at recognizing and understanding the emotional pain of those who experience sexual assault.  In some ways, we’ve become too sensitive to that issue. It’s what contributed to gross misreporting at Rolling Stone over a rape case at UVA and it’s what makes push back against broad trigger warnings difficult. No one wants to tell a rape victim that they’re wrong, knowing the torment and shame most rape victims go through to even be believed or heard. But what works for one person who has experienced trauma should not be accepted as a universal standard for all those who have suffered.

Trigger warnings started as a feminist blog protection for those who experienced rape and have morphed into every imaginable topic of pain. This both devalues the very real and very specific trauma of sexual assault, by putting it on the same level as other more nebulous and common forms of pain, and also encourages people to see themselves as in constant need of protection from their baseline trauma, as in, the trauma we all feel as human beings who have to navigate a difficult existence (life).

I had breast cancer, at an incredibly young age and even though I am healthy now, I still struggle to overcome the anger and fear I have from my experience. Unfortunately for me, young woman tragically struck down by breast cancer is a favorite trope for a lot of writers. The first episode of Fargo season 2 introduces a young woman with breast cancer. When I was watching the episode, I was completely blindsided by this story detail. I had to turn the show off and walk away from it for hours, even days, because it upset me to be confronted with my own reality. But eventually I went back and finished the episode because I was unwilling to let this one traumatic experience dictate the course of my life.

I do not think that having cancer is the same thing as being raped, but the glut of trigger warnings would allow me to live in that world if I chose to. It’s a tempting choice, because obviously it’s easier to avoid your pain than confront it. If someone had given me a trigger warning for cancer before I watched Fargo, I would have not wanted to watch it. I would have removed myself from the situation, which would be great for my short-term emotional health, but horrible for my long-term coping strategies. Broad trigger warnings disincentivize people from confronting their discomfort and ultimately from dealing with their issues.

There are so many other legitimate issues to raise about these warnings. Who gets to decide what is a trigger? How do you share triggers without accidentally outing someone’s traumatic past to a whole classroom? How do you stop trigger warnings for becoming an easy way to avoid anything that makes you uncomfortable? That’s my real worry about trigger warnings; that they have devolved into a new version of escapism. We can’t eradicate rape so instead we try to nobly protect those who have experienced it. That’s a fine, if impossible goal. The difference between trigger warnings for rape and a Duke student not wanting to read Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home are clear if you have a certain set of politics, but the mechanics of both actions are indistinguishable. Much in the way that conservation and feminist values combined in the 80s to combat pornography, those same groups are coming together in another unhappy marriage where one side legitimately has the best interest of women and other marginalized people in mind, but the end result is still a conservative and shielded view of the world.

[sarahargo]

Tomorrowland

What do you get when you create a society of the world’s best scientists, artists, and thinkers free from politics and bureaucracy? Jetpacks!! At least that’s what the newest Disney film, Tomorrowland, suggests. A world populated by our best and brightest produces technology that looks cool but ultimately fails at improving humanity’s lot in any substantial way except by making it slightly easier to move around. In that way, the tech fantasy of Tomorrowland is indistinct from the tech present of Silicon Valley; both provide sleek looking products that distract us from their uselessness by being incredibly fun. Sadly, I don’t think Tomorrowland was adding a clever dig against Silicon Valley when it introduced the jetpack; this movie definitely buys into the idea of technological advancement only needing to create an ill-defined sense of inspiration to be worthwhile. That’s never clearer then when a character blames the defunding of NASA on a lack of ideas. Nevermind the incredible complexities of justifying billions and trillions of dollars to go to Mars while people back in America increasingly slide into greater inequalities. That’s too complex for a kid’s movie! Just slap a message about dreams and dreamers and be done with it.

This movie suggests that it’s easier to be negative than positive, something I wholly agree with. That’s a good message to send to young kids, especially in today’s world, and I applaud Tomorrowland from unflinchingly having a character filled with an endless hope. Unfortunately, the movie never pushes past the dream stage. If it’s easy to believe everything is awful, then it’s equally easy to have dreams but never push to make them a reality. Without effort and a willingness to accept an endless stream of failure, you eventually backslide into “everything is awful.” Tomorrowland is like coming of political age during the 2008 Barack Obama campaign. Your world is filled with Hope signs and the belief that change is really coming, somehow. Then the somehow arrives and you’re unable to accept the pain and compromises that come with actual progress. Tomorrowland runs the same risk of being a movie about grand idealism that fails to prepare its young audience for the sacrifices that will actually be required of them. Maybe that’s too much for a kid’s movie, but maybe that line of thinking is why we continue to have these unending waves of generational idealistic burnout.

[sarahargo]

Guessing your feelings is like charming a cobra with a stethoscope, another boyfriend told me once. Meaning what? Meaning a few things, I think -- that pain turned me venomous, that diagnosing me required a specialized kind of enchantment, that I flaunted feelings and withheld their origins at once.

The Empathy Exams, Leslie Jamison

[sarahargo]

(and let all plan young ladies be warned against the dangerous encouragement given them by Society to confide in their want of beauty)

George Eliot, Middlemarch

[sarahargo]

A man is seldom ashamed of feeling that he cannot love a woman so well when he sees a certain greatness in her: nature having intended greatness for men.

George Eliot, Middlemarch

[sarahargo]

Society never made the preposterous demand that a man should think as much about his own qualifications for making a charming girl happy as he thinks of hers for making himself happy.

George Eliot, Middlemarch

[sarahargo]

But selfish people always think their own discomfort of more importance than anything else in the world.

George Eliot, Middlemarch

[sarahargo]

A book may not tell us exactly how to live our own lives, but our own lives can teach us how to read a book.

Rebecca Mead, My Life in Middlemarch

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The remote worship of a woman throned out of their reaches plays a great part in men's lives.

George Eliot, Middlemarch

[sarahargo]

Our passions do not live apart in locked chambers, but, dressed in their small wardrobe of notions, bring their provisions to a common table and mess together, feeding out of the common store according to their appetite.

George Eliot, Middlemarch

[sarahargo]

She was ashamed of being irritated from some cause she could not define even to herself; for though she had no intention of being untruthful, her reply had not touched the real hurt within her.

George Eliot, Middlemarch