Boys from Brazil (1978) in 5 frames

 

 

 

 

director: Franklin J. Schaffner

A corporeal portrait

"In stature he was rather too tall, his voice was rather toneless, and there were shortcomings in his diction. He didn't even want to shave off his mustache because of a naive vanity. But all this was forgotten when he came out on the stage."

This is the way Meyerhold remembers Stanislavsky on stage.The two canonized Russian theatre makers shared much more than the theatre historians let us be aware of. Even if they are constantly presented as highly masculine, dictatorial, oppositional, always in conflict, contradicting each other and part of a mandatory Oedipal plot (where Stanislavsky is the corrupt father, while Meyerhold plays the rebellious and ungrateful son), there is a certain love and respect that they share, a sweet homoeroticism and emasculation in their fruitful exchange. There is so much material for a campy history of Russian theatre!

photo via

a play on abortion

This Soviet poster warns that illegal abortions could kill and that those who participate in these abortions would be prosecuted

Dr. E. B. Demidovich wrote a play called "Trial of Sexual Depravity" in 1925 with the purpose to educate the Soviet public on various medical issues, one of them being abortion. Some lines from the play:

Prosecutor: Do you understand that a fetus is a future human being, that in it life has already begun, that you have killed a future person, a citizen who might have been useful for society?

Accused: I was sorry that I had to have an abortion. After all it was of my own blood. I wanted a little child, but my husband was not happy, he began to despise me. I was so upset: what would have happened if my husband had stopped loving me? My life would have been finished.

Prosecutor: Did you realize that each person belongs not only to himself, but to society, that a person does not have the right to injure himself in any way that might decrease his capacity for work, that abortion often leads to disease and to a work disability?

Accused: No, I didn't know that. I thought that my body was my property, that I could do with it what I wanted and that my fetus belonged only to me.

And it sounds so contemporary!

photo via russophilia

about appearances

Brian Taylor reminds the reader  in one of the notes in Responding to Men in Crisis that "Foucault’s later view was that the notion of a deep meaning behind appearances is an important mythic construction in modern power/knowledge".

We should remember this every time comments go like: "these are just words"; "words can do no harm"; "working class people put no meaning in what they are saying; there is something deeper behind those words" or the classic "first appearances are deceptive". I start to think that the whole idea of modernism is attached to this concept: there is always something more to be discovered behind what one perceives.

Abby Sunderland: the icon of risky imperialism

I also followed the Abby Sunderland case, the 16 year old American, lost and found in the Indian Ocean. The whole obsession with setting records and exploration of the whole world in a sort of neo-colonial quest were highly disturbing in the whole case.
Sungold from Kittywampus writes a thoughtful article called "The Perils of Abby Sunderland: The Problem Isn’t Lax Parenting, It’s the Romance of Risk".

Setting records is addressed in these terms: 

"the desire to set records – to push one’s body beyond its healthy boundaries – to embrace risk just for its own sake. Sailing solo around the globe makes as much sense to me as playing chicken with a train, or drag racing on the freeway.
But drag racing and playing chicken are the desperate sports of poor kids. Setting records is the province of the privileged. The assumption is that no effort will be spared in trying to save you, if your boat runs awry.
Every time an extreme athlete runs into trouble, massive resources are deployed to rescue him or her. Clueless skiers go into the Sierra backcountry and get stranded in a blizzard. Mountain climbers underestimate the danger of avalanche. Solo pilots fly into oblivion. The “resources” deployed aren’t just financial; human beings often risk their own necks in hopes of saving a life.
Just to underscore how much this is a function of privilege: In the last several days, tens of thousands of children have died of preventable disease: malnutrition, dysentery, malaria, typhus, etc. ad nauseam. How many could be saved with the money spent on rescuing people (children and adults) who – from a place of tremendous economic privilege – challenge themselves to break records, or simply assume that they will be “safe” in the wild because their lives have always been safe?"

Setting records is closely related to another element of this dramatic case: the desire to explore. Young Westerners are on a quest of self-discovery where the world is their oyster and their discursive tool is imperialism. You can find them all over Eastern Europe in a constant search to re-confirm their white middle-class neo-colonial privilege. Do global tourism and adventure still function as a form of knowledge? Sungold doesn't think so and we are in the same boat on this one:  

"Once upon a time, parts of the globe were untouched by human exploration. Perhaps the urge to explore was extraordinarily adaptive a few million years ago – even a century ago. Today? We’d be wise to ask when exploration and adventure truly serve human knowledge, and when they’re only yoked to ego."

With the minor adjustment that I don't see how human exploration was ever a necessity, besides imposing capitalism in remote parts of  the Western world and fulfilling the pathological narcissism of the Western male. Now young American women continue the pattern of imperialism and get lost at the ocean. But there is always someone to save them and they continue their trip to success while journalists write heart-warming stories about courageous young ladies...


photo via 

Health for the Americas: Cleanliness Brings Health (1945)

This is the very last movie directed by Walt Disney. If you were wondering what is the reason for global inequalities now you have an answer: cleanliness. Because in the capitalist understanding only the individual can be responsible for personal unhappiness. All other markers of oppression (racism, classism, heteronormativity, patriarchy and their explosive combination) dissapear in a process that this cartoon engages just in order to reproduce oppression and to erase all the signs of its production. The Western viewers are reassured that their consciousness is clean and they have nothing to do with the poor people's misery: it is only their own own choice to stay unclean.

Effeminism

I was re-watching the brilliant documentary "The Celluloid Closet" (1995) and one character got my attention: the sissy. How he was constructed by Hollywood as "the funny gay guy" and adopted by gay men as the only way to perform gayness, how all gay men were constructed as effeminate and how there was a constant move away from that place. What I remembered from my readings was how the effeminate man was immediately diagnosed as homosexual by the clinical discourse and practice for decades and how the sissy is the main way to play gay and get instant laughs in theatre nowadays. Performing femininity as male brings hate and mockery together with the immediate homophobic connection with a bodily mapped gayness. This is the place where the male hysteric stands nowadays through his confusion of masculinity and femininity. Is it so impossible nowadays to acknowledge the sissy as equally human and not as a hated caricature? It makes me sick to my stomach to see all these macho actors performing the sissy for sure laughs on stage (and they start early with it, I remember this high school theatre festival in Brasov, Romania where playing the sissy was the main way to produce comic effects. These guys were 15-16 and the adults in the jury/public were laughing hard and applauding their openly homophobic humor. Such a nice unity/continuity…)


At the "Creating Change 2010: 40 Years After Stonewall" conference there was an interesting panel called "40 Years After Stonewall: A Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Activist Timeline," with Jim Fouratt, Roger Goodman, Carmen Vasquez, Ellen Ensig-Brodsky, Phil Johnson. Feministing wrote about it here. The debates brought the sissy back into discussion. Jim Fouratt was saying: "We're all fags at the end of the day to the homophobes. But in our own community there's this demonizing of the sissy, the effeminate male", while Roger Goodman remembered " The effeminist movement - It was men in the 1970s who took feminism on as our politic. We called gay men on their shit. Effeminism is gay men whose fundamental politics is feminism. And that we're not afraid to feel the feminine in us and express that." These new re-discoveries of the effeminate male and the critique/action against the huge discrimination that he faces today at a transnational level are crucial. Join the effeminist movement right now! It will change your life!

Photo from here