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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2APrenQ:
lazaefair:
bomberqueen17:
lazaefair:
bomberqueen17:
ms-daphne replied to your post “I never did write anything original during November. I got as far as…”
I think it would be an interesting storytelling excercise for like all of hollywood to do this for one year. One solid year of movies being 17% male. You know, as an exercise. A cinematic etude.
Fuck yes.
Like I said, it doesn’t have to like, be a Thing. Nobody’s ever got to mention it. “What do you mean, there’s no men in this film? Chris Hemsworth’s got his shirt off in it for like, five whole minutes! There’s a whole long scene where we watch him work out!” “He dies in the second scene.” “Yes but he’s so important to the emotional arc of the film, you know?”
It’d be neat if they did this with race, too–
“What? There are totally white people in this film. Our Hero and her lithe, feisty-but-submissive Love Interest/Sidekick Boy [who will either later die to fuel her woman-pain OR will be her trophy at the end] go to the exotic, distant Suburbs to meet up with the Mystical Caucasian! Her husband prepares them traditional foods [there’s a beautifully-shot scene where our protagonists struggle to respectfully eat hot dogs suspended in gelatin and unseasoned boiled chicken breasts with no salt, played for laughs] and then imparts plot-crucial Mystical Knowledge to them, whereupon they flee, and the Suburbs are destroyed by the pursuing Big Bad. These characters are never mentioned again except in a desultory flashback where the Hero is given renewed resolve to defeat the Big Bad because of the horrible tragedy of what it did to the Suburbs.”
But what do I know.
That point about the food being played for laughs and exotica…those PoC feels, man.
Movies are slightly better about that specific trope these days, but only because white American people have so thoroughly, comprehensively appropriated non-Western food via foodie/gourmet culture that it’s now viewed as a mark of coolness and sophistication for a white character to nonchalantly consume non-Western food. But still, no actual PoC are necessary for the experience. (I’m thinking the larb scene in Spider-Man: Homecoming.)
Inverting those tropes is an excellent idea, is what I’m saying. I need to keep this in my back pocket for when I get my shit together and start making films.
Yes– we’ve moved on from exotification into appropriation, and while it’s less… openly icky?… it’s just a different flavor of icky.
Listen, one of the ancestral foodstuffs on my family’s yearly Easter table was a, brace yourself, Jell-O based salad with shredded carrots. Lime Jell-O, as I recall. The recipe died with my grandmother but it’s a thing. (We also had that salad with canned mandarin oranges and marshmallows in it, served as a side dish not a dessert, so. My mother did not cook that way, but my grandma sure did.) I’m That Kind of White Ppl! I know it! I gotta own it. I unashamedly ate the hell out of that stuff as a kid. I’d eat it again, I have no goddamn sense, this is my genetic legacy. (If I go somewhere and they have the marshmallow salad I always take some and am always like self, this is not really food, but it doesn’t matter because I am not listening to the lecture I have already eaten the marshmallows. I can’t help it. It’s labeled salad for chrissakes. it’s got coconut shreds in it. candied fruit and shit. a walnut or two for deniability. i can’t control myself. it’s disgusting. god, maybe i can get my sister to make it for christmas. NO)
We need more #ownvoices media, for damn sure, because nobody’s going to undo the weird distorted funhouse-mirror culture that white supremacist media has given us like someone who actually has a different POV. I liked Riz Ahmed’s point about how calling it “diversity” makes it sound like it’s an optional extra condiment, while “representation” is much more accurately a descriptor– trying to make media look more like the world really does, in the hopes of undoing this weird cultural distortion. What I’d love to see is a policy that if you’re telling a story set in a time and a place, you have to then use the actual demographics of that place in your casting. New York City 1935? Look up the nearest census and the city directory; your cast has to be those same percentages. Your crowd scenes? 51% women, 39% African-American, 25% over 40, whatever the real demographics are you have to make that happen. And go from there, see what results. (Sure, sure, you’ve got to understand that a white dude is probably gonna have a white mom, etc., but also think, Black people have Black friends, how weird is it for you to have one sole token Black person who only has white friends??? Own the distortion, there, and think it through.)
But there’s also an important space for straight-up trope inversion to call attention to the damage that’s been done. OK fine, 17% women is the standard average in Hollywood movies? Now we have to do 17% men. See how weird that looks? You can still tell a story, but you’re going to understand that it’s a distorted story. Try it for a while and then go back to your old faves and see them with a new eye.
I really want to focus on thinking about what kind of characters are deemed disposable, too. Who gets to die in the background of the scene and be reduced to at most a “what a shame” moment later, or the tic in the hero’s jaw as she surveys the damage?
Damn skippy I’m killing off the white dude you thought was gonna be the protagonist.
Ahaha I grew up in white suburbs going to white Southern Baptist and Methodist churches in Texas. I know the Jell-O salads very well. Honestly, they’re not much weirder than some of the chewy rice noodle concoctions my folks used to make. I always did enjoy pointing out to my white friends just how weird some “normal” American dishes really are when viewed from outside the culture.
(Aside: are you one of those hot dish people? Texans called them casseroles, but I’ve discovered that apparently the terminology is a point of some contention.)
Your point about diversity as a condiment is so, so well made. I started cringing at the term diversity years ago when it became clear that it was a nicer term for the Other, that it could be achieved by white standards with just a few token minorities and no further. That it was more of a cosmetic look than actual systemic change. And then it got turned into an insult by white conservatives to boot.
And believe me, I cannot wait for the day I get to make media that uses men as disposable set dressing. The movie Lucy is problematic as fuck, but one of the things I enjoyed the most about that script is how the good guy male protagonist was so clearly just there as a love interest and eye candy. ScarJo certainly made the most of that dynamic, and I loved it.
I am a casserole person, not a hot dish person. We just called them casseroles. Both where I come from, which is Deep Northeast, like almost Vermont, and where I am now, which is the boundary of Northeast and Great Lakes. I think “hot dish” is Midwestern, specifically. I mean, if you told me to bring a hot dish to the potluck I’d assume you meant not a cold salad, not a crudité plate, not a dip, and not dessert, but I might bring something like wings or a goulash or something, or I might bring a casserole; it has no meaning here beyond the individual meanings of the words in the phrase. (Is goulash a casserole: Discuss.)
(And, for the record, the Jell-O salad is very distinctly the non-Catholic side of the family. Due more to time of immigration than religion, I think, but I also don’t think the Catholics do the Church Suppers thing quite the same way. Mom has a whole book of recipes from her church circa 1965 and there are definitely Jell-O “salads” in there. But anyway! None of that would be reflected in the work of fiction, which would collapse all of “white people” into a single Exotic ethnicity and then probably cast a pale South Asian with frosted hair tips to play the role. [Fuck I don’t even know how to headcanon a racebent whitewash.])
It’s not my point, it’s Riz Ahmed’s! If you didn’t see his address to the House of Commons, it was fucking phenomenal. He’s such a good speaker, of course– but he’s a great writer, and it was amazing. And it just ties in to what I was thinking– it’s so weird and artificial to have the default be all-white, all-male, all-straight! It’s weird! Realistic representation is something everyone who cares about stories should want, and it’s just plain fuck-stupid that this has become somehow political.
I’m sort of torn up about Lucy, and worse about Ghost in the Shell, because I used to really like ScarJo, but I also– weeaboo confession time– minored in Japanese in college [I innocently thought it would be super-great for my very-provincial little brain from small-town isolated America to expand myself by studying an Asian language and i had literally no clue that White Boy Anime Fanboys was a thing, but oh boy, did I meet them, my first day, and every day, wow] and watched Ghost in the Shell and like, studied it, so I was incredibly fucking offended (for what that’s worth) and couldn’t bring myself to see it. And the trailer of Lucy where she walks up and kills the man for not answering her in English– I was like, it literally does not matter what else happens in this movie, I cannot watch it, so I never did. Alas. It sounds like it was a good time.
That’s sort of what it boils down to for me, though– so much of this is just stupid lazy shit that people co-opt into their stories, and everything would be so much better and more interesting if they just weren’t lazy about it– examine your tropes! Notice your assumptions! I promise you it will improve every single thing you do! Ugh!
Christ I’m gonna spend the rest of the night looking up the specifics of what a casserole is, LOL. Oh specifically, yes, Wikipedia confirms– “hotdish” is North Dakota / Minnesota terminology, specifically, for casserole– specifically meat, frozen veg, a starch, and condensed soup as a binder, prepared in one dish.
(Your picture was not posted)
lazaefair:
bomberqueen17:
lazaefair:
bomberqueen17:
ms-daphne replied to your post “I never did write anything original during November. I got as far as…”
I think it would be an interesting storytelling excercise for like all of hollywood to do this for one year. One solid year of movies being 17% male. You know, as an exercise. A cinematic etude.
Fuck yes.
Like I said, it doesn’t have to like, be a Thing. Nobody’s ever got to mention it. “What do you mean, there’s no men in this film? Chris Hemsworth’s got his shirt off in it for like, five whole minutes! There’s a whole long scene where we watch him work out!” “He dies in the second scene.” “Yes but he’s so important to the emotional arc of the film, you know?”
It’d be neat if they did this with race, too–
“What? There are totally white people in this film. Our Hero and her lithe, feisty-but-submissive Love Interest/Sidekick Boy [who will either later die to fuel her woman-pain OR will be her trophy at the end] go to the exotic, distant Suburbs to meet up with the Mystical Caucasian! Her husband prepares them traditional foods [there’s a beautifully-shot scene where our protagonists struggle to respectfully eat hot dogs suspended in gelatin and unseasoned boiled chicken breasts with no salt, played for laughs] and then imparts plot-crucial Mystical Knowledge to them, whereupon they flee, and the Suburbs are destroyed by the pursuing Big Bad. These characters are never mentioned again except in a desultory flashback where the Hero is given renewed resolve to defeat the Big Bad because of the horrible tragedy of what it did to the Suburbs.”
But what do I know.
That point about the food being played for laughs and exotica…those PoC feels, man.
Movies are slightly better about that specific trope these days, but only because white American people have so thoroughly, comprehensively appropriated non-Western food via foodie/gourmet culture that it’s now viewed as a mark of coolness and sophistication for a white character to nonchalantly consume non-Western food. But still, no actual PoC are necessary for the experience. (I’m thinking the larb scene in Spider-Man: Homecoming.)
Inverting those tropes is an excellent idea, is what I’m saying. I need to keep this in my back pocket for when I get my shit together and start making films.
Yes– we’ve moved on from exotification into appropriation, and while it’s less… openly icky?… it’s just a different flavor of icky.
Listen, one of the ancestral foodstuffs on my family’s yearly Easter table was a, brace yourself, Jell-O based salad with shredded carrots. Lime Jell-O, as I recall. The recipe died with my grandmother but it’s a thing. (We also had that salad with canned mandarin oranges and marshmallows in it, served as a side dish not a dessert, so. My mother did not cook that way, but my grandma sure did.) I’m That Kind of White Ppl! I know it! I gotta own it. I unashamedly ate the hell out of that stuff as a kid. I’d eat it again, I have no goddamn sense, this is my genetic legacy. (If I go somewhere and they have the marshmallow salad I always take some and am always like self, this is not really food, but it doesn’t matter because I am not listening to the lecture I have already eaten the marshmallows. I can’t help it. It’s labeled salad for chrissakes. it’s got coconut shreds in it. candied fruit and shit. a walnut or two for deniability. i can’t control myself. it’s disgusting. god, maybe i can get my sister to make it for christmas. NO)
We need more #ownvoices media, for damn sure, because nobody’s going to undo the weird distorted funhouse-mirror culture that white supremacist media has given us like someone who actually has a different POV. I liked Riz Ahmed’s point about how calling it “diversity” makes it sound like it’s an optional extra condiment, while “representation” is much more accurately a descriptor– trying to make media look more like the world really does, in the hopes of undoing this weird cultural distortion. What I’d love to see is a policy that if you’re telling a story set in a time and a place, you have to then use the actual demographics of that place in your casting. New York City 1935? Look up the nearest census and the city directory; your cast has to be those same percentages. Your crowd scenes? 51% women, 39% African-American, 25% over 40, whatever the real demographics are you have to make that happen. And go from there, see what results. (Sure, sure, you’ve got to understand that a white dude is probably gonna have a white mom, etc., but also think, Black people have Black friends, how weird is it for you to have one sole token Black person who only has white friends??? Own the distortion, there, and think it through.)
But there’s also an important space for straight-up trope inversion to call attention to the damage that’s been done. OK fine, 17% women is the standard average in Hollywood movies? Now we have to do 17% men. See how weird that looks? You can still tell a story, but you’re going to understand that it’s a distorted story. Try it for a while and then go back to your old faves and see them with a new eye.
I really want to focus on thinking about what kind of characters are deemed disposable, too. Who gets to die in the background of the scene and be reduced to at most a “what a shame” moment later, or the tic in the hero’s jaw as she surveys the damage?
Damn skippy I’m killing off the white dude you thought was gonna be the protagonist.
Ahaha I grew up in white suburbs going to white Southern Baptist and Methodist churches in Texas. I know the Jell-O salads very well. Honestly, they’re not much weirder than some of the chewy rice noodle concoctions my folks used to make. I always did enjoy pointing out to my white friends just how weird some “normal” American dishes really are when viewed from outside the culture.
(Aside: are you one of those hot dish people? Texans called them casseroles, but I’ve discovered that apparently the terminology is a point of some contention.)
Your point about diversity as a condiment is so, so well made. I started cringing at the term diversity years ago when it became clear that it was a nicer term for the Other, that it could be achieved by white standards with just a few token minorities and no further. That it was more of a cosmetic look than actual systemic change. And then it got turned into an insult by white conservatives to boot.
And believe me, I cannot wait for the day I get to make media that uses men as disposable set dressing. The movie Lucy is problematic as fuck, but one of the things I enjoyed the most about that script is how the good guy male protagonist was so clearly just there as a love interest and eye candy. ScarJo certainly made the most of that dynamic, and I loved it.
I am a casserole person, not a hot dish person. We just called them casseroles. Both where I come from, which is Deep Northeast, like almost Vermont, and where I am now, which is the boundary of Northeast and Great Lakes. I think “hot dish” is Midwestern, specifically. I mean, if you told me to bring a hot dish to the potluck I’d assume you meant not a cold salad, not a crudité plate, not a dip, and not dessert, but I might bring something like wings or a goulash or something, or I might bring a casserole; it has no meaning here beyond the individual meanings of the words in the phrase. (Is goulash a casserole: Discuss.)
(And, for the record, the Jell-O salad is very distinctly the non-Catholic side of the family. Due more to time of immigration than religion, I think, but I also don’t think the Catholics do the Church Suppers thing quite the same way. Mom has a whole book of recipes from her church circa 1965 and there are definitely Jell-O “salads” in there. But anyway! None of that would be reflected in the work of fiction, which would collapse all of “white people” into a single Exotic ethnicity and then probably cast a pale South Asian with frosted hair tips to play the role. [Fuck I don’t even know how to headcanon a racebent whitewash.])
It’s not my point, it’s Riz Ahmed’s! If you didn’t see his address to the House of Commons, it was fucking phenomenal. He’s such a good speaker, of course– but he’s a great writer, and it was amazing. And it just ties in to what I was thinking– it’s so weird and artificial to have the default be all-white, all-male, all-straight! It’s weird! Realistic representation is something everyone who cares about stories should want, and it’s just plain fuck-stupid that this has become somehow political.
I’m sort of torn up about Lucy, and worse about Ghost in the Shell, because I used to really like ScarJo, but I also– weeaboo confession time– minored in Japanese in college [I innocently thought it would be super-great for my very-provincial little brain from small-town isolated America to expand myself by studying an Asian language and i had literally no clue that White Boy Anime Fanboys was a thing, but oh boy, did I meet them, my first day, and every day, wow] and watched Ghost in the Shell and like, studied it, so I was incredibly fucking offended (for what that’s worth) and couldn’t bring myself to see it. And the trailer of Lucy where she walks up and kills the man for not answering her in English– I was like, it literally does not matter what else happens in this movie, I cannot watch it, so I never did. Alas. It sounds like it was a good time.
That’s sort of what it boils down to for me, though– so much of this is just stupid lazy shit that people co-opt into their stories, and everything would be so much better and more interesting if they just weren’t lazy about it– examine your tropes! Notice your assumptions! I promise you it will improve every single thing you do! Ugh!
Christ I’m gonna spend the rest of the night looking up the specifics of what a casserole is, LOL. Oh specifically, yes, Wikipedia confirms– “hotdish” is North Dakota / Minnesota terminology, specifically, for casserole– specifically meat, frozen veg, a starch, and condensed soup as a binder, prepared in one dish.
(Your picture was not posted)
