Let's conclude this course with a good old dose of misogyny! One of the terrible lessons that movies are telling us in their evolution is that misogyny is no longer cool. What is this nonsense?
Oh, wait. Actually, that's probably a good thing: women are productive and valuable members of society. It's just hard to believe that Ayn Rand is a woman, because she grants them no agency whatsoever. Do you recall the woman who, in the literary version of The Fountainhead, would have been an architect if she weren't woman? Ah, for the good old days, when women were objects of rape and screaming.
Ann Darrow, of course, does not fare much better than Dominique Francon at all. She is a victim of her own beauty, and of whatever nature can throw at her. At the same time, for all of society's homophobia back in the day, the men in these works are decidedly homosocial and, in the case of the love triangle in The Fountainhead, homoerotic.
In King Kong, as directed by Roger Elizabeth Debris ("Whether it's Hamlet, Othello or Lear, Keep it Gay, Keep it Gay, Keep it Gay ...") Jack clearly realises "I guess I love you", because that's what's expected of him. Carl Denham laments that the audiences of the day want romance and dames, but what they really should be wanting is to see men, being manly, and beating things up like the men that they are. Ann is decoration, and little more. The men on the ship deeply resent having to accommodate a woman, but why should that be? They can accept a horribly stereotyped Chinese man, but not a beautiful woman?
In this film, where Carl is given none of the blame for any of the eventualities, Ann is responsible for a heck of a lot of the horrors portrayed: were it not for Ann, the natives (and, of course, we mustn't forget the natives: homophobia, racism and misogyny go hand in hand) would not have (hilariously) boarded the ship and taken her hostage; the good men of the ship would not have had to go to Kong's side of the island, and many of them would not have died horrible deaths, and Kong would never have been taken back to New York and killed by his own fascination for the blonde beauty.
"It wasn't the planes; 'twas beauty killed the beast" is one of the best lines in cinematic history essentially because it makes no sense and is a masterstroke of buck passing. Yes, Ann's very existence is problematic to the denizens of King Kong. Rough and tumble men are the only way to go when adventure is on the menu!
More problematic, not only for the fact that it's the work of a woman, is The Fountainhead. I cannot surely be the only one who finds nothing romantic about rape and find it difficult to understand that this is a sort of badge of pride for Dominique. As a woman who wants to be treated as an object, a piece of property, and as one who wants to deny the world anything that is of beautiful value, it's easy to see why The Fountainhead can be seen as a piece of sado-masochistic literature. I was enjoying the book in a sort of train wreck "this is hilariously wrong" fashion, and I decided that I would share my joy by reading aloud on the train to my friend Ajay. As I got onto the third page of Dominique's speech about the destruction and resulting protection of beauty, I realised that this is a work of seriously messed up fiction, with a hint of elitism that seems ripped straight from the pages of the internet. I suppose that Rand was a prophet, after a fashion.
The thing that rankles about The Fountainhead is that Dominique is clearly supposed to be a man. As Gail thinks, if she were a man, he would have destroyed her. Because she is not, he can happily take her as his wife ... and because they're so alike, Dominique catches herself gleaning some enjoyment from the situation, and this is simply not on! Introducing Roark to the dynamic has a curious effect, because Gail doesn't want to destroy him: he wants seriously to bed him, although not in so many words. Dominique acts as a simple vicarious sexual organ, so that none of that dreaded homosexuality comes into actual play here. I was watching the movie adaptation, and I could not help but marvel at the idyllic scenes of the three of them lying underneath a tree in the countryside. If either of the actors even approached attractiveness (although Gary Cooper was not without his charms), you can bet that there would be all sorts of Objectivist Slash fan videos splashed across the internet of today.
Rand comes to the conclusion that the man who does not compromise himself is the ultimate Man, and that the one who cannot help but bow to the pressure of society is someone whose life is not worth living. For its extra lovey-doveyness, only the film makes the step of removing any sense of the metaphorical from Gail's suicide. In the end, Dominique is merely an observer, an object and a possession, and there is nothing in this world save Howard Roark, outlined against the sky.
Equals do not exist in these films and the book. A strong woman can do nothing but bow to a stronger man and, for all of Dominique's subversion, she's just a standard cookie-cutter armholder. What triumph is there for a woman of Olde Hollywood? You'll find that there's very little, but that's okay: after all, Tomorrow is Another Day.
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Saturday, October 27, 2007
Ayn Rand: The Video Game (AKA Bioshock: A Novel by Ayn Rand)
Advance Warning: If you're a video gaming type and you want to play Bioshock, this entry is full of spoilers.
One of the biggest games of 2007 is Bioshock, an examination of Objectivism as applied to society ... and gone horribly wrong!
The story of Andrew Ryan, a passionate man who built his dream city under the sea, whose dreams were threatened by a petty smuggler named Fontaine and a freedom fighter named Atlas, Bioshock adds a science fiction element to Rand's grand plans, sets them under the sea, and suggests that human nature ultimately renders Objectivism a bad idea.
You may not believe that this video game, replete as it is with gene splicing, Little Sisters who act as carrion harvesters, and men in diving suits as their body guards ... but I assure you, it is! I had played and finished the game mere weeks before devouring the movie of The Fountainhead, and was absolutely tickled by Howard Roark's speech. There are banners all throughout Rapture that proclaim "A Man Creates. A Parasite asks 'where's my share?'"
The deal with Rapture, you see, is that its prime is long past: you come to this city a year after most of its inhabitants have died in its vicious civil war. An unnamed fellow forced under the sea by a plane crash, it only takes stepping into Rapture to realise that Ryan's vision has gone horribly wrong: the first event you witness before your bathysphere opens is a man getting killed by a Splicer. A government based on the policy of "every man for himself" has, perhaps unsurprisingly, spawned a society where people kill each other for their own personal gain. The ugliness inside has manifested into murderous anarchy.
Yet it is human nature, not objectivism, that is at fault. For all of his presentation as the game's villain, Andrew Ryan turns out to be quite sympathetic, if paranoid and delusional. The true villain is Atlas, who turns out to have been Fontaine all along. Atlas has been telling you throughout the game to find Ryan and to kill him. When you do meet Ryan, he tells you that you are, in fact, a genetic experiment: in essence, Atlas's slave. Practically shouting "Nobody takes what's mine!" while clasping Patricia Neal (actually, Ryan killed one of his lovers for getting pregnant, and spurned the other because she no longer conformed to his ideal of beauty), Ryan sets Rapture up to self-destruct and, knowing the way you're programmed, commands you to kill him. Except, of course, he's an Objectivist, and he has no passion.
This is the highlight of the game: you have absolutely no control over killing Ryan and, you realise, you've never had any control at all. Even when you're deprogrammed by Tenenbaum, who has realised the moral implications of the genetic work that pleased her so dearly, free will is still an illusion. Atlas/Fontaine makes no bones of letting you know this: you've simply switched masters. While it's clear to the player that Tenenbaum's path is just, the idea that your character is the equivalent of a Banner reader stings. A video game is a good place to explore this idea of free will, because if you don't do what Atlas or Tenenbaum tell you, then the game can't advance - and, indeed, if you don't follow Tenenbaum's orders to cure yourself of the last of your conditioning, you will die.
The only place in the game where you have a real choice is in the treatment of the Little Sisters: you can choose either to harvest them or to save them. If you kill them, you get more currency with which to boost your genetic makeup but, well, you've killed a little girl. If you save them, the results take longer to show but are more satisfactory. Objectivism as an "every man for himself" ideal does not allow room for the idea of a family unit, but the majority of people are not supposed to want to see others die.
As a slave to The Man, to whom should the sweat of your brow belong? The only answer worthy of a human (for Howard Roark, Dominique Francon et al are surely not human): the Little Sisters.
Ayn Rand teaches us that society should be every man for himself, every woman to be raped by every man and to enjoy, even to demand it. Bioshock teaches us that a dream cannot be realised if it belongs to one man alone, because a gangster will totally subvert it. Either that, or that the hunger for power can corrupt even the most innocent of dreams, and that there's no such thing as sole ownership.
Oh yeah, and if you don't believe me, how do you explain the posters littered throughout Rapture proclaiming "H Roark Presents"? You can't! I win.
"I'm Andrew Ryan and I'm here to ask you a question:
is a man not entitled to the sweat of his own brow?
No, says the man in Washington. It belongs to the poor.
No, says the man in the Vatican. It belongs to God.
No, says the man in Moscow. It belongs to everyone.
I rejected those answers. Instead, I chose something
different. I chose the impossible. I chose...
RAPTURE.
A city where the artist would not fear the censor. Where
the scientist would not be bound by petty morality. Where
the great would not be constrained by the small. And
with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your
city as well."
One of the biggest games of 2007 is Bioshock, an examination of Objectivism as applied to society ... and gone horribly wrong!
The story of Andrew Ryan, a passionate man who built his dream city under the sea, whose dreams were threatened by a petty smuggler named Fontaine and a freedom fighter named Atlas, Bioshock adds a science fiction element to Rand's grand plans, sets them under the sea, and suggests that human nature ultimately renders Objectivism a bad idea.
You may not believe that this video game, replete as it is with gene splicing, Little Sisters who act as carrion harvesters, and men in diving suits as their body guards ... but I assure you, it is! I had played and finished the game mere weeks before devouring the movie of The Fountainhead, and was absolutely tickled by Howard Roark's speech. There are banners all throughout Rapture that proclaim "A Man Creates. A Parasite asks 'where's my share?'"
The deal with Rapture, you see, is that its prime is long past: you come to this city a year after most of its inhabitants have died in its vicious civil war. An unnamed fellow forced under the sea by a plane crash, it only takes stepping into Rapture to realise that Ryan's vision has gone horribly wrong: the first event you witness before your bathysphere opens is a man getting killed by a Splicer. A government based on the policy of "every man for himself" has, perhaps unsurprisingly, spawned a society where people kill each other for their own personal gain. The ugliness inside has manifested into murderous anarchy.
Yet it is human nature, not objectivism, that is at fault. For all of his presentation as the game's villain, Andrew Ryan turns out to be quite sympathetic, if paranoid and delusional. The true villain is Atlas, who turns out to have been Fontaine all along. Atlas has been telling you throughout the game to find Ryan and to kill him. When you do meet Ryan, he tells you that you are, in fact, a genetic experiment: in essence, Atlas's slave. Practically shouting "Nobody takes what's mine!" while clasping Patricia Neal (actually, Ryan killed one of his lovers for getting pregnant, and spurned the other because she no longer conformed to his ideal of beauty), Ryan sets Rapture up to self-destruct and, knowing the way you're programmed, commands you to kill him. Except, of course, he's an Objectivist, and he has no passion.
This is the highlight of the game: you have absolutely no control over killing Ryan and, you realise, you've never had any control at all. Even when you're deprogrammed by Tenenbaum, who has realised the moral implications of the genetic work that pleased her so dearly, free will is still an illusion. Atlas/Fontaine makes no bones of letting you know this: you've simply switched masters. While it's clear to the player that Tenenbaum's path is just, the idea that your character is the equivalent of a Banner reader stings. A video game is a good place to explore this idea of free will, because if you don't do what Atlas or Tenenbaum tell you, then the game can't advance - and, indeed, if you don't follow Tenenbaum's orders to cure yourself of the last of your conditioning, you will die.
The only place in the game where you have a real choice is in the treatment of the Little Sisters: you can choose either to harvest them or to save them. If you kill them, you get more currency with which to boost your genetic makeup but, well, you've killed a little girl. If you save them, the results take longer to show but are more satisfactory. Objectivism as an "every man for himself" ideal does not allow room for the idea of a family unit, but the majority of people are not supposed to want to see others die.
As a slave to The Man, to whom should the sweat of your brow belong? The only answer worthy of a human (for Howard Roark, Dominique Francon et al are surely not human): the Little Sisters.
Ayn Rand teaches us that society should be every man for himself, every woman to be raped by every man and to enjoy, even to demand it. Bioshock teaches us that a dream cannot be realised if it belongs to one man alone, because a gangster will totally subvert it. Either that, or that the hunger for power can corrupt even the most innocent of dreams, and that there's no such thing as sole ownership.
Oh yeah, and if you don't believe me, how do you explain the posters littered throughout Rapture proclaiming "H Roark Presents"? You can't! I win.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
External Memory
In the epic final class for Cinematic Modernism, Melissa brought up the issue of people's memories failing thanks to our modern age. It all seems a bit "science fictiony" (and yes, this is not a real adjective ... but a man can dream; I'm the Howard Roark of wordtology), but it also seems kind of counter to what movies are telling us: memory is important. Yes, certainly, I've spoken about memory before, but this is about its representation and manifestation.
Narratively speaking, memory is a giant commodity. To lose it is a gigantic tragedy. Away From Her, on the screens at this very moment, is the story of a woman who suffering from an illness that is robbing her of her memory. She gets sent away to live in a care facility, and has to live without her husband for a month to acclimatise. When her husband comes to visit her one month later, she has not only forgotten who he is but has attached herself to another man. Cue streams of tears; my friend was crying just at the summary alone.
We have all witnessed (or heard about second hand, if you're being less honest with yourself) amnesia on soap operas. In fact, Alexis on Ugly Betty is even now struggling with retrograde amnesia and, for a nice change, has forgotten only the last two years of her life: you know, the years where she faked her own death and plotted revenge on her father for his rejecting her desire to have a sex change (she used to be Alex). It's the only case I can think of where memory loss has been presented as fortuitous.
It's perhaps not a surprise that a natural, existing phenomenon, in this case memory loss, has been harnessed by fiction as something that can be controlled. In the manga Fruits Basket, there is a doctor who can erase memories. He is forced by the patriarch of his clan to erase the memory of his own fiancée in one chapter; in another, he has to erase the memory of the mother of a curséd son. Of course, the doctor and the son retain their own memories; these are hugely traumatic and tear jerking stories because the loss is paradoxically shared.
Ghost in the Shell, the Japanophile's home for confusing pop psychology, suggests that if one can retain their memory then they have retained their humanity, even if they have become more man than machine. It works the other way, too: implanted memories in Blade Runner make people question their own reality.
If we want to get all contemporary on the issue, and maybe even to something you serious folks have actually seen, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind looks at the propriety of memories: if you have your memories of someone erased, are you not technically stealing from that other person? In the process of losing these memories, Jim Carrey realises their importance and significance, and desperately wants to hold onto at least some of them. Certainly, there was pain in there, but the point of a memory is that you own it. To shed a memory is to shed some of our humanity.
Melissa was talking about how we're not learning things anymore; we're not bothering to do so, because of this age of instant gratification. It's not so much that we're not learning anything, as much as we're externalising our memories - which means more that we're sharing them than actually owning them. External memory isn't a propertarian regime. This is a concept that I learned about from the movie Innocence, but it's an actual concept that I can apply to our real lives.
External memory manifests itself in many ways: Youtube, Wikipedia, and even in the form of cities. The concept is that rather than bothering to commit something to memory, you can simply look it up. Rather than describe the idea of Away From Her to you, I could have simply linked you to the trailer to communicate it.
Rather than choosing to retain something in our minds, we think "hey, I can just look that up at any time, why should I bother to keep it on board?". Of course, this is not always practical, as xkcd will tell us:
Yeah. Not a great idea. It's not like we should discourage watching, say, Who Framed Roger Rabbit to jog our memories, and to renovate our existing memories. It's also part of why we respond so poorly to extreme changes: if our memory is one thing and what we're witnessing is another, the lack of an overlap can be extremely distressing. It's just like going to the site of the Valhalla and seeing an office building. While the changes happening at Greater Union George Street are probably for the best, they are still a sort of murder: the places where I have seen things can exist now only in memory.
As to a city being a memory: we don't have to remember a city, surely, because it's there. If we wanted to remember it, we could go there. Yet Berlin and the Moscow seen in Man With A Movie Camera patently no longer exist. An author like Terry Pratchett might tell you that lands and cities and buildings have memories, but a city can't tell you what it used to be; it can only tell you what it is now. If a city is a living organism, it's one that passively accepts whatever befalls it. We can lock a moment in time with a camera, but it's not going to be as personal as the one that exists in our mind.
So maybe the reason we choose to forget things, not to retain them, is because we fear their change. Memory is a tough thing to fight, and it looks like society is waging a war on it. Perhaps we should pay attention to what the literature tells us: memories shape us, they are what we are ... and, as Muriel would tell you, there's no stopping progress.
Narratively speaking, memory is a giant commodity. To lose it is a gigantic tragedy. Away From Her, on the screens at this very moment, is the story of a woman who suffering from an illness that is robbing her of her memory. She gets sent away to live in a care facility, and has to live without her husband for a month to acclimatise. When her husband comes to visit her one month later, she has not only forgotten who he is but has attached herself to another man. Cue streams of tears; my friend was crying just at the summary alone.
We have all witnessed (or heard about second hand, if you're being less honest with yourself) amnesia on soap operas. In fact, Alexis on Ugly Betty is even now struggling with retrograde amnesia and, for a nice change, has forgotten only the last two years of her life: you know, the years where she faked her own death and plotted revenge on her father for his rejecting her desire to have a sex change (she used to be Alex). It's the only case I can think of where memory loss has been presented as fortuitous.
It's perhaps not a surprise that a natural, existing phenomenon, in this case memory loss, has been harnessed by fiction as something that can be controlled. In the manga Fruits Basket, there is a doctor who can erase memories. He is forced by the patriarch of his clan to erase the memory of his own fiancée in one chapter; in another, he has to erase the memory of the mother of a curséd son. Of course, the doctor and the son retain their own memories; these are hugely traumatic and tear jerking stories because the loss is paradoxically shared.
Ghost in the Shell, the Japanophile's home for confusing pop psychology, suggests that if one can retain their memory then they have retained their humanity, even if they have become more man than machine. It works the other way, too: implanted memories in Blade Runner make people question their own reality.
If we want to get all contemporary on the issue, and maybe even to something you serious folks have actually seen, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind looks at the propriety of memories: if you have your memories of someone erased, are you not technically stealing from that other person? In the process of losing these memories, Jim Carrey realises their importance and significance, and desperately wants to hold onto at least some of them. Certainly, there was pain in there, but the point of a memory is that you own it. To shed a memory is to shed some of our humanity.
Melissa was talking about how we're not learning things anymore; we're not bothering to do so, because of this age of instant gratification. It's not so much that we're not learning anything, as much as we're externalising our memories - which means more that we're sharing them than actually owning them. External memory isn't a propertarian regime. This is a concept that I learned about from the movie Innocence, but it's an actual concept that I can apply to our real lives.
External memory manifests itself in many ways: Youtube, Wikipedia, and even in the form of cities. The concept is that rather than bothering to commit something to memory, you can simply look it up. Rather than describe the idea of Away From Her to you, I could have simply linked you to the trailer to communicate it.
Rather than choosing to retain something in our minds, we think "hey, I can just look that up at any time, why should I bother to keep it on board?". Of course, this is not always practical, as xkcd will tell us:
Yeah. Not a great idea. It's not like we should discourage watching, say, Who Framed Roger Rabbit to jog our memories, and to renovate our existing memories. It's also part of why we respond so poorly to extreme changes: if our memory is one thing and what we're witnessing is another, the lack of an overlap can be extremely distressing. It's just like going to the site of the Valhalla and seeing an office building. While the changes happening at Greater Union George Street are probably for the best, they are still a sort of murder: the places where I have seen things can exist now only in memory.
As to a city being a memory: we don't have to remember a city, surely, because it's there. If we wanted to remember it, we could go there. Yet Berlin and the Moscow seen in Man With A Movie Camera patently no longer exist. An author like Terry Pratchett might tell you that lands and cities and buildings have memories, but a city can't tell you what it used to be; it can only tell you what it is now. If a city is a living organism, it's one that passively accepts whatever befalls it. We can lock a moment in time with a camera, but it's not going to be as personal as the one that exists in our mind.
So maybe the reason we choose to forget things, not to retain them, is because we fear their change. Memory is a tough thing to fight, and it looks like society is waging a war on it. Perhaps we should pay attention to what the literature tells us: memories shape us, they are what we are ... and, as Muriel would tell you, there's no stopping progress.
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